A Writer's Paradise

Shinies

A brand new issue of Lenox Avenue.

Go. See the shinies. They're calling to you.

(The anniversary issue includes work by Paul Tremblay, Steve Nagy, James Dorr,
Mary Madewell, Daliso Chaponda, and artists Keith Thompson and Lindsey Carr. The cover art this month is stunning; I have imagined five different explanations as to who the woman is and what she's doing. My favorite today is that she's an incarnation of Hester Prynne. It's the A and the red. Of course, that's not who she is at all...)

Be a statistic, make some science, free Cameron!

I think the most interesting question is if you know any farmers.

Yesterday and Today

Well, yesterday's entry went on and on a bit, didn't it? That's ok, it was the 500th, and it's nice to mark the occasion with a big self-indulgent ramble.

Some tangential thoughts from rereading that entry... regarding the line about firecrackers, and if I don't get the firecracker again, someone else will. I read a quote I rather like somewhere (no, I couldn't even begin to guess where):

If someone else can write the book you are going to write, let them.

Of course, the problem with following that dictum is that you have to know how to apply it to your own work without self-doubt. It can't be an excuse. It must be used as a lathe.

But I'll get back to you on that one.

And, Paula said some interesting things in the comments about extruding Playdoh versus writing with firecrackers, and well, I need to cogitate on that for a bit. I'll get back to you on that one, too.

And Megan asked me (essentially) "What is this thing you call worldbuilding?" And we had the beginnings of a discussion about expositioning/inpositioning beyond worldbuilding. I'll get back to you on that one, also! We need to talk more about it, first.

And that mostly covers yesterday....

For today... well, it's been a good day. Every once in a while, you read something that simply grazes your brain--the bullet doesn't penetrate, and you don't get damaged, but you do get a big shock to the system from something totally tangential. pollyc over on LiveJournal reported in detail on a WisCon panel I was unable to attend (I did beg her to take good notes, and she did follow through!). The panel was "Common Neopro Mistakes" (neopro being a fancy word for the writer with just one or three pro sales, though I think it applies largely to my genre ghetto).

I read the section on confidence in voice, and realized that a lot of the things I'd been fighting in at least three stories I'm writing are outpourings of their natural voice. And, just like that, the bullet grazed my brain and I was able to solve the plot dilemma of at least one story in a hot second. I dashed off an email to myself and tried not to tapdance.

The reason it connected? Because one critiquer, just one, once complimented me on my voice in a particular story on the OWW (it was Katrina Kidder, and the story was "The Library Seed," if anyone's dying to know), and because it was a compliment, I remembered it. And somehow, everything fell into place. Voila. Epiphany.

When I opened "The Library Seed" tonight, I realized I am on draft fifteen. Draft fifteen. Granted, the iterations are not all that distinct from one draft to another, so I picked an early one, a mid-point one (the one I sent to the OWW) and a late one (since getting the crits), and started picking out the best, most voicey parts of each, and man, I'm only on page three, but I think it's going to work. I've been trying to say too much, and use too many words while doing it... when I think the voice speaks for itself.

That's the best/worst part of today. "They" say voice can't be taught (though, I tend to wonder if it isn't best taught in the trenches of writing in-character RPG diaries--I always thought those had taught me character, but I've come to realize, no, not so much--but I bet they did teach me voice). I don't want to cop out and agree that voice can't be taught, but at the same time, it does prohibit me from using some common lexicon to explain what sort of revelation I had today. (Maybe if I really tried, but I'm uncomfortably full after my tea and brownie at Write Club and tired to boot.)

Trios

Something about Stephen King's Dark Tower books amazes me: all the worlds are interconnected.

I definitely do not see all the landscapes of my mind as interconnected. Sure, there's a crossroads in me, but I don't see how the time travelers in "Reparations" (and the unpublished {and, unfinished, truth be told} sequel, "Reclamation") could possibly ever hang out with, say, the "Huntswoman."

Of course, drawing from my corpus of published works makes this much harder to argue; "Huntswoman" takes place in mythic space and time, and while I think "Reparations" is also mythic, it has much more of the real world in it (being anchored in a historical event and an actual country). (I don't want to get into an argument with myself about world-building (how even historical writers do world-building--Sherwood Smith has some good things to say about the ways in which romance writers and fantasy writers both do serious world-building--for example). For one thing, I'm too tired to argue with myself, but also, I think even my highly bipartisan mentalities are in accord on this one. )

And maybe it's not fair to argue using short stories, when King uses novels, mostly. Short stories come up like mushrooms for some people, and maybe expecting their mushrooms to be related to their, er, oak trees?--isn't fair.

Regardless... there are fences between my internal realities, and the walls do not tend to grow thin. I don't think there are secret doors, even, and if there were, I don't think there's a Roland of Gilead to open them. And maybe that's the problem: I write characters who can't see beyond the edges of their world. I don't know how. It would bug me if they could, anyway, so I'm sure it's all to the best.

I do have characters who could stumble into another world, mind you, but the thing is, the other world is already part and parcel of who they are. The Spellbinder book, which is about a quarter written, would not be a story of any particular interest if it was really just about a girl who stays at home and lives a miserable life with her miserable parents. The fact that she goes somewhere else and learns to live another way and comes back and has to resume a miserable life with her miserable parents is not even the draw--I could just send her to summer camp. The fact that she goes to another world, where there is magic, where she lives five years in one night, and has to come back and live a miserable life with her miserable parents and face the consequences of being ten years older than she looks and believing in magic that doesn't work in our world--that's the draw.

If she could get to any world in my pantheon of worlds, though, it wouldn't be the same. Even if a minor character in her world could visit any world in my pantheon of worlds, it would poke a drastic hole in how I view that world, and I simply could not abide it.

At best, I can admit that all roads lead to Mer. That's not the same, though. A character isn't going to get in through me and make it out the other door. I'm just too mean to let that happen. I was thinking for a while that I could write a meta-version of Stephen King's Dark Tower Integration Craziness; I could write about a group of characters in search of their creator or some such silliness (I really could; I have it about half worked out in my head). But what I would end up doing is creating nine new characters and nine new worlds, all of which would bleed into the one main world... and that's a far cry from managing to let the Huntswoman meet the time travelers.

Maybe it's different if you just talk about books.

But I doubt it.

Nevertheless. I titled this entry "trios" because I've noticed that I do tend to think about stories in groups of three. (Or multiples of three, depending; that "nine new characters/nine new worlds" riff up above isn't the result of a random numbers-grab.) I could see the people in "Huntswoman" finding a way through to "Sun's East, Moon's West," and likewise, heading off to see the folks in "Rampion in the Belltower" (which isn't even written yet).

And I've known there is a story called "Twelve Falling Leaves" in me, and I know that there is a related story (but not a sequel) called "The Year Wife" and I recently discovered (just yesterday) that the third story in that trio is called "The Luck Book." And there are a few trios in my head that are wandering around with one member missing, but I tend to believe that they'll find their third eventually; so far, it seems to always happen.

Ok, so. Knowing all of that doesn't really do anything for me, except that I sort of know that it'll take me three times as long to run out of stories as one might predict.

Not that I predict I'll run out of stories, not before I die. Teresa Nielsen Hayden said at WorldCon last year (in the panel "Tough Love for New Writers") that it does happen: writers run out of ideas. On any given day, I'm juggling ten ideas, and that number has never gone up or down since I was a kid and in my childhood writing prime. Mrissa once asked us to guess how many ideas she had in her that could become books if she just could sit down tomorrow, and I don't remember the final answer, but there were more than fifty, I think. I have fifty, but it's probably twenty, and those are just the ones I wouldn't have to think overmuch on. Probably twenty more short stories.

Which begs the question that I hear writers get a lot, though no one's ever asked me: where do you get your ideas from? And I think most people answer that as honestly as they can with what they believe the question to be... "The newspaper, the gossip I overhear at the store, the stories my grandmother used to tell"--whatever. But that's not how I'd answer the question. I'd say, I get my ideas from a firecracker. I get a small, loud, flashy explosion: a snippet of dialogue occurs to me, and the whole story lives in it--or, a title, or an image, or whatever--just waiting to be unpacked. Unpacking is the hard part. Getting the firecrackers never is. I get probably two firecrackers a day, on an average day. I have the "Titles" file to prove it. Currently, there are 48 stories in that file, and those are just the ones I have titles for. I have a "Scraps" folder that is far too crammed, and a stack of notebooks a foot high with other snippets written down. And those are just the firecrackers I've captured in a rudimentary form; I probably don't capture even a quarter of my firecrackers in a meaningful way. If they're that good, I'll get them again. Or someone else will. In either a pair or a trio--that doesn't matter. I've never quite been able to really worry about the firecrackers.

Pre-rejectomancy

When my right palm itches, I think "Oh, I'll receive money from writing soon--as long as I don't scratch it." (This is a varation on a rather old superstition.)

When my left palm itches, I think, "Oh, I'll send out a story soon." (ie, get a rejection letter. This stems from the previous superstition--I've made the right hand the receiving hand and the left the giving hand, and I'm not sure that's right.)

When I put a shirt on inside out last week, I thought, "That's supposed to be good luck. I'll make sure to get the story out the door today." I didn't. It was a bad day, and I had no chance to do a final read-through, nor could I get the printer to work. However, I believe the version of the inside-out article of clothing superstition I was most familiar with said that it was more effective if you never noticed yourself that what you wore was inside out... Two days later, I wore a shirt wrong-side out for four hours before Julie pointed it out to me on the way to lunch. I did manage to send out two stories that day.

Superstition: the refuge I flee to when rational processes just don't seem to elicit results.

(I blame most of this on obsessive rereadings of The Luck Book by Maria Leach when I was a child. I also spent many years lifting my feet whenever I rode over railroad tracks. This stopped being feasible when I started driving.)

The Fun Stuff

Pursuant to "the fun stuff theory of rewriting," I have lately decided to comb finished manuscripts* and make certain that there is at least one fun thing per page.

Someday, I hope to make it to two fun things per page, but I'm still a baby-writer in so many ways...

Now, defining "a fun thing" is as subjective as it gets, and I'm going to have to go with my intuition at this point. For the moment, I tend to think that jokes and particularly good turns of phrase or highly tense moments are fun.... Naturally, your mileage may vary.

* "finished" should here be taken to mean "plausibly finished." I'm at the point where I don't believe anything is ever truly finished until it's published, and even then, I'm not 100% sure--I'm just sure I have to stop writing on it then or go insane.

Book: Sunshine

Sunshine by Robin McKinley (29) (re-read) [fantasy]

It was interesting to re-read this book (as it is interesting to re-read most, if not all, McKinley books). The first time, I read for the relationship between Sunshine and Constantine--I mean, when you start out with two characters chained to a wall and one of them is supposed to eat the other one, it's rather hard not to be interested in how they deal with each other from that point onward. This time, though, I found myself picking up on the details, admiring the world-building, and generally enjoying myself--and being a smidge frustrated with the relationship between Sunshine and Constantine, when it turns out that I'm *now* much more interested in Mel.

Mel is the reason fans are clamoring for a sequel, I think. I mean, that door is wide open; I didn't quite realize it the first time, but I was doing a much better job of paying attention to details the second time.

McKinley just keeps getting better and better. Part of that is that she's getting better as a writer--and part of it is that I'm getting better as a reader. Go figure.

Interaction Programming

My schedule for Interaction is pretty cool. Panel with the GOH!

Radical Retellings: of Fairytale, of Well Known Fantasies, of Other Genres
Friday 5:00pm
Andy Duncan (M), Gregory Frost, Merrie Haskell, Christine Mains, Jane Yolen

Is the only way to make fantasy interesting these days to retell and rework it?

The "Evil Stepmother" Archetype (0.5 hrs) Monday 12:30pm

Merrie Haskell (M)

Do second marriages ever work in Fantasy? Where does the archetype of the evil stepmother come from and who perpetuates it -- first wives/mothers, unhappy children, or a patriarchal society?

Book: The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower by Stephen King (28) [fantasy]

This is the end.

I read the first two Dark Tower books in 1989, when I hadn't even started high school. Now I'm thirty, I've read the first two Dark Tower books between five and seven times and all the rest once or twice, and I'm done.

I'm torn in my perceptions. Overall, I'm pleased. Emotionally drained, but emotionally satisfied as well. Ka comes full-circle. Everything begins again. I understand the choice to start at the beginning, since it's, well, something I would do. It's gives hope. I can spin out the possibilities from this ending. I'm good with that.

My complaints, in fact, are so nit-picky that I'm not even going to go over them here. Someday, when I have free-time dripping from the tips of my fingers (hm), maybe I'll write my analysis of the use of POV in these books. I doubt it. I'm more like to analyze something more fun, first. So, someday, when I've had many months of the dripping free-time, perhaps I will vent my spleen on the subject. Until then... well, if you haven't read these books yet, and if for any reason you've been refusing to read Stephen King, and if you're making do for fantasy with, oh, say, Robert Jordan because you've read everything else--stop. Put that down. Try this on for a while. It's well worth the time and tears. And, oh, yes, the tears. I sobbed for several chapters, never doubt it.

Fun Stuff

Stephanie Burgis made a list of "Fun Stuff in Novels."

How about you guys? What are your personal fun lists? The rules are: they have to really be what you think is fun, not what seems cool/impressive or what other people would like.

And her list included balls, banter, duels, disguises, cross-dressing and dangerous magic. I laughed when I read that, because, well, it's quite close to mine.

My turn.

I'm considering this a short list, for now. I think a "Cool Shit in Novels" list might be good, too. Some things aren't fun, but they are cool.

Books: Sarah, Plain and Tall and Skylark

Sarah, Plain and Tall (26) and Skylark (27) by Patricia MacLachlan [children's]

I wasn't sure if I was going to like these, which is why I never read them until K. and I were looking for something for our trip. I guess I'd thought these were Laura Ingalls Wilder knockoffs, like so many things set on the frontier seem to be? But there is a deft hand at play in these books; each sentence counts, each image is meaningful, and the prairie is almost an alternate reality to Wilder's world, one which felt less real but more like a place I'd want to live. (Of course, I believe the setting is a few decades later than Wilder's, so you know, maybe things were a little easier? Hm. Somehow I doubt it. The omnipresent feeling of work pressing down on the reader pervades Wilder's; that feeling is nearly absent in MacLachlan's.)

Either way, I am 100% behind stories about good stepmothers, and I fully support lyrical writing that manages to evoke the numinous in spartan settings. I'm looking forward to the next books in the series.

Oh, heavens

I'm back from Mackinac. I just realized I didn't really put up the "going away" sign around here. Likewise, I didn't put a vacation message on my email, which was also an oops.

Anyway. I do so very much love Mackinac. It was wonderful sharing some of my favorite bits with K. It was also very different to be shepherding a kid around a place you love, because there are some favorite bits you just don't get to do when you're taking care of someone else. (Or vacationing with a group.) (Also, some children are very demanding about their beauty sleep, and just don't get why sharing a room with a writer means that they should have to hear clackety-clacks or see a computer light past 9:30 PM. This meant that very little writing got done this trip.)

This is, ultimately, why I will always want to vacation alone from time to time. Sometimes, you need to go steep in a culture or a place (or both), and having someone from home really makes the steeping less effective. It's a trade off, though, isn't it? I didn't get lonely on this trip, not once. I do tend to get quite lonely when I'm vacationing by myself.

Anyway, time to write and time to steep aside, there was still plenty of time for things to compost while I was gone. The mind is feeling particularly rich, and ready to go. I hope I can get enough of the pieces down in the next day or two that I don't lose track.

Unbook: Dimwit's Dictionary

Something that won't make the booklist, because I couldn't bring myself to read over 5,000 clichés: The Dimwit's Dictionary. You can download the Dimwit's Dictionary, in fact, but that version is no more superior than the paperback one I checked out of the library; it's not as if you can run your writing through a program highlights all your cliché moments and let you decide to keep or excise them.

(Note to the programmers with time on their hands... if you ever want a way to make very little money but to earn the gratitude of a thousand writers, you would build the above-mentioned program. Additionally, you would build a program that counts overused words in a piece of writing--the algorithm would have to exclude overused words that are invisible, like "said" and the usual suite of pronouns and the like. End sidebar.)

Nevertheless, it's interesting to met that such a book exists--that someone was so bugged by cliché that they wrote a whole book. For my own use... At best, my browse-through will make me more aware of times I use cliché--at worst, nothing will change.

Too bad it didn't list characters who scream "Noooooo!" when someone dies. But, even if it did, George Lucas wouldn't have read it. Just a thought.

Daydream

One of my recurring daydreams is of spending a year on an island--particularly, Mackinac Island, which is located at the straits between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. Mackinac has no cars and is expensive as hell, but it captured my imagination when I was a child through daytrips with my family (too expensive to stay over), stories from my mom's summer working there, and a number of books about the island.

Two years ago, we honeymooned there. It was amazing to watch the town slowly decompress after the last ferry of daytrippers left in the evening. We ate on the terrace of a restaurant, and when the smell and noise of the crowds died away and the smell and noise of the island itself returned, I knew that my imagined island sojourn wasn't simply wishful thinking. The place has a magic that speaks to me. It's not unlike my trips to Glastonbury and the Tor, and the shape of the island is actually not unlike the shape of a tor, so perhaps there is something to it...

In any case, my stepdaughter and I are going up to the island for a Girlscout weekend, and while I'm trepidatious (I'm missing more work than I can afford to miss, and it's a long trip, and well, what exactly is the Girlscout angle going to demand of me?), I'm extremely excited as well. Time with K. is good, of course, and I hope I can share some of my love of the place with her--this is important, since I feel like my mom passed the sense of the place to me--but most of all, I get to spend two nights on the island. Very, very cool.

Obligatory plug: read the The Loon Feather. Iola Fuller won a Hopwood Award for it, which is the undergraduate award for writing granted by my college, and though I never had my act together enough to apply for the Hopwood, it was definitely something that attracted me to my school in the first place. My mom had a copy that she let me read to shreds when I was growing up, but it was the one book she took a stand on and wouldn't let me borrow permanently when I left home.

Productivity

Managed to rewrite "Sun's East" for the umpteenth time. It's tighter. It's better. I probably screwed up the beginning. Either way, I'm shipping it out the door again tomorrow.

Prior to that, I worked on "The Library Seed" for exactly one hour, then went and had a small (teeny, like 20 minutes) nap until Merlin the Cat headbutted me awake and back to my office. I'm still not happy with this story. I had some big revelation about it today at work, too, that I didn't write down, and I'm a bit miffed on that as well.

The problem is, I put a war in "The Library Seed" and I don't know what to do with that war. It's not causing enough of the right kind of conflict.

I did some very slapdash research for my sketchy, sketchy King Arthur story idea.

I did market research for about thirty minutes. I hadn't really been keeping up with things, esp. not anthologies. Not that I needed to, apparently. What in hell would I write for... Spicy Slipstream Stories? 'Cause, I really don't have anything already written. No, really. I don't.

I slushed. Hm. It was a semi-imperfect cross-section of slush--some good, some mediocre, etc.--I got a story that actually offended me in today's slush. I mean, not in an out and out offended "I'm going to complain to someone" way, but something that felt so written for shock value, with not even a sentence of redeeming quality, that when I found myself groaning out loud in despair over faux pas number three, I just gave up. That was an experience, let me tell you. It quite overshadowed anything else I might have had to say about slushing today.

And now, to bed. I'm 22 minutes into my second wedding anniversary, and thinking it's good that I'm writing this now, since tomorrow night I'll be eating Chinese food and giving gifts that have to do with cotton. Yeppers. Cotton. Who knew paper would be the easiest anniversary?

Mrph.

Whoever said you can't organize clutter, you can only clear it, was right. I've looked around this office twenty times, trying to figure out how to start organizing the remaining clutter, and frankly, there's no place to put it, no way to organize it, it just has to go.

Now. Once I figure out how to apply that lesson to writing, I will. Though, as far as writing is concerned, clutter seems to be the order of the day.

Random thoughts attacked me during the day (as they tend to do).

The scent of boxwoods is very distinctive. I wish I could describe it other than "green"--for it is not the green of cedar or grass or pine or any of the other greens I know. For me, boxwood scent evokes memories of being a little girl and heading up the front walk of an elderly lady neighbor's house, the seemingly impoverished kin of a wealthy robber baron of yesteryear. For all I know, the impoverishment was merely a combination of stubbornness, frugality and a pack rat mentality, and maybe even the robber baron uncle or cousin was a neighborhood fiction...

There are few places as mysterious as a hundred-fifty year old library. Hidden doors, caves under the steps, plaster bumps in the walls, secret windows, narrow marble staircases... I could write about my library (and I do consider the Grad to still be my library, in spite of my three-year allegiance to another) in a dozen stories and not tell half the mysteries I've seen in just ten years.

I'll stop there. There's writing, after all.

Book: Something Wicked

Something Wicked by Jo Beverley (25) [romance]

I've really grown to love the Mallorean series, and I have to admit, it was somewhat against my will. I've never been particularly fond of threaded character series--this minor character becomes a major character in another book, and on and on--largely because if I identify with a character, I don't want them to become relegated to second string later on! Things are a bit different in the romance genre, and allowances must be made--threaded characters seem to be thick on the ground. I both mind it less in romance (after all, once the story is done, the story is done for romance characters) and mind it much, much more (hints that my happily ever afters aren't happy? Or, even worse, they're so gooey happy that they're insufferable bores?).

But, anyway. Slowly, I'm learning who to trust in romance. I've never enjoyed the genre for its own sake (I don't think). It's similar to how I feel about mysteries and Westerns and horror--similar, and yet different. I don't get a thrill from reading a mystery, from going down the path of exploration, gathering clues with the narrator as we go. The payoff gives me no chills, no sense of deep satisfaction that we've put the world aright again. Likewise, I get no rewards from going through the motions in a romance.

A good mystery for me is one with a main character so compelling, so personally identifiable, that I can't look away. Stephanie Barron's Jane Austen mysteries, for example--I buy them all. Because the heroine is Jane Austen, and because I want to see what Barron will do with her this time. I'm not 100% satisfied with the characterization of Jane in those book, but I am always 100% interested.

My tolerance for romances is significantly greater. While there is only one mystery series I follow, and a few more that I'm at least familiar with, I've found many romance authors that I like and not a few that I trust (authorially speaking, on both "like" and "trust.")

All of this is a very long-winded way of saying, I've come to trust Jo Beverley over the last few books of hers that I've read, and that's always a good thing.

Something Mechanical

I am doing something rote. Something mechanical. Something very... inside the box.

Because I think I need to.

I have traditionally had a hard time with plot. Not because I can't think of things that happen to my characters (though that's part of it), but often because I can't sometimes think of *how* things should happen to my characters, how the chain of consequence occurs.

I don't think that's a failing in me as a writer, either; I think that's a full-on, true-life blindspot. I sometimes have to look at life events over and over and over to figure out how they happened, and sometimes I never do come up with a satisfactory explanation. I might even go so far as to venture that this is why I majored in a subject very invested in arguing about proximal causes and the like. I ask why because I don't know why.

That can be a hardship for a writer, that not knowing why. Why is the villian motivated to do evil, why are there five seasons, not four, why do dogs talk but not cats... Every damn thing comes with a why, it seems. And plot is the ultimate why for me. So, we go on a quest. Why?

I had been reading books on structure and getting frustrated, because structure is not actually plot. Boy, did that take a long time to figure out. I mean, it makes sense to me now, and it probably makes sense to everyone else, and frankly, I even used to know it on an intellectual level... but actually believing structure wasn't plot, that was a hard thing. Anyway, it wasn't because I didn't understand structure, it was because I didn't understand plot.

(Sidebar: the classic example--

Story: "The king died. Then, the queen died."
Plot: "The king died; then, the queen died of grief.")

Anyway, I was having a devil of a time making things work. The stories that I had written that felt the most successful were typically rewritten fairy tales, where I understood the plot well enough to graft something new and good onto it. Realizing that led to a slowly-dawning realization of how to fix things.

I was in need of a template.

Not to write from. Heavens no. Not an equation to slip my variables into to create the story, like a game of Mad Libs. But a template to apply to a story so that I could see the plot. So far, I've only used it on stories I can't quite rewrite without help, but it's been good, oh, so good.

(Now, insert here a paragraph of self-flagellation about how I feel like a no-talent hack for having to do this Bisquick version of writing. I've been paid for my biscuits! I shouldn't ever resort to a box mix for making biscuits! Ok, self-flagellation deferred for the moment. Now, carry on.)

I'd seen some templates that hadn't quite worked for me. Particularly:

1 a character,
2 in a situation,
3 with a problem,
4 tries to solve her problem,
5 and fails (and tries and fails and tries and fails, repeat as necessary)
6 until the climax of the story, when she makes a final attempt (which can succeed or fail) after which
7 the result is validated

But it was too jargony, I think. I mean, I got it, but I didn't get it. Plus, I read this big detraction that sent me into overthink mode.

I once more, desperately, and for the fourth time, went to comb the writing shelves of the library, hoping to find the golden book that explained everything to me.

It just so happens, the book I found does have a largely yellow (goldenrod) cover. But that's totally a coincidence. I don't claim that this template is perfect, but I do claim that it provided a template that speaks to me. And I guess, since that's what I was looking for, and not a template that speaks to everyone, I succeeded.

The template goes like this:

1 Something happens to someone
2 And she comes up with a goal.
3 She devises a plan
4 And forces try to stop her
5 But she forges on, because there's a lot at stake.
6 Just when things get as bad as they can get, she learns an important lesson.
7 And when she's offered the final prize, she either accepts or refuses it
8 And in so doing, fulfills a need.

And my GOODNESS does that work so much better for me than the rubbish about succeeding and failing. Very few things I've done in my life have I looked at through the rather distorting prism of "this is a success, this is a failure," so no wonder I couldn't apply it to simple things like "a woman who's innards got et by an ogre tries to find a new set of organs." Because, seriously. How do you succeed or fail at this? If she gets a new set of organs, who pays the prices? So, how can that be a success?

I mean, I just don't write stories with win conditions, I guess, and I don't live a life that has win conditions, either, in spite of the jocular contests of will that my husband and I share.

And that's probably the biggest lesson I can share... if everyone has different ideas of success and failure (for example, I would feel I failed at life if I stopped learning, so that's probably why the second model fits me so well), then everyone is going to have a different way of looking at stories.

There. The end.

(The book in question is How to Tell a Story by Peter Ruble and Gary Provost, and I don't doubt that I'll post a review of it someday, when I finish it. If I finish it. It's sort of done it's job for me.)

Write Club Report

In between the bouts of giggles from my compatriots, I managed to read a few chapters of A Dream at Midsummer (my Regency romance based on A Midsummer Night's Dream). Last night, I started in the middle of what I'd written and couldn't get myself to stop reading and go to bed until well after midnight. I often forget how clever I can be just moments after I write something; something two years old can often strike me as quite good and surprising (though just as often, it can strike me as quite bad, so I'm not being entirely vain here).

Anyway, 50,000 words in, and the love spells haven't even been cast.

I think I've some trimming to do.

But that's not the revelation, not by far; the revelation was: "it's much better than I remember it being, and well worth finishing."

So, anyway, I read some of that tonight. Not surprisingly, the first chapter has to be redone completely (this being a common theme in my writing life--my beginnings suck). More of a mystery is the nearly claustrophobic POV. I need at least one other POV character, a tertiary one, and I need to expand the role of the secondary POV character. No question about it. Things are a little too filtered through the main character's perceptions right now.

I also rewrote (again) most of "The Library Seed" (I'm on page 17 out of 21 or something like that), and failed to rewrite any of "Sun's East." But both of those need to be redone and back out the door Very Soon Now. I only have four stories out at the moment, and two of them are probably dead at their markets.

Other than that, though, I feel I'm pretty strongly on the track of learning how to do this book thing. I'm not getting a whole lot of short story sized story ideas anymore, if I ever did to begin with (a few editors have had some opinions on the subject before).

Tomorrow, I'm going to talk about my grail book of revisions, if I remember. I'm writing it here to jog my memory, though I don't often go back and check my previous day's entry, so who knows.

Book: Wolf Wing

Wolf Wing by Tanith Lee (24) [YA fantasy]

The final(?) volume in the Claidi Journals, which have proved to be weird and wonderful in the way that only Tanith Lee can really pull off. This last one felt a little spare of actual doings; we spent a lot of time traveling to seemingly no purpose, which is technically not true, but, somehow...

Anyway, it was nice to see Claidi finally revealed as the true agent of her own life (that's not much of a spoiler, really) rather than the puppet of other people, but I'm slightly dismayed by how long (four books!) it took for Claidi to realize that. I suppose it's good and proper for her to develop, and it's not like Claidi was never proactive, or anything. I don't know.

I still like Venn better than Argul, in that Venn is a flawed character and Argul is not. The Venn bits were the ones that really came alive for me in this book; his last scene with Dengwi really made me cheer. "Look, he's finally figured something out!"

Anyway. It's a good series, and I'll try to get my stepdaughter to read them at some point.

Grace

I am not gliding gracefully into summer. Instead, I am being dragged backward into it, sweating and screaming.

I drank what seemed to be about seven liters of water yesterday. That seemed excessive. Every time I looked down, I was holding an empty glass or water bottle.

Thank goodness I decided to install a ceiling fan in my office, or I might not write again until winter.

Worn...

I'm worn out with gardening and mentally arguing with everyone I've ever known (and not a few people I haven't known, actually). Apparently, I'm at some sort of mental threshold. Or else going crazy. But I think more people who see me regularly would be expressing concern at this point.

I have a blister, and I'm in the middle of four books. Maybe more. That's reading, I mean; I'm in the middle of writing a number of books who are darting around like gnats and refuse to be counted.

And the short stories are getting anxious.

No slushing of late--nothing in my slushbox. I did crit a story on OWW, so I'm adhering to my 1 crit a week goal. Ideally, I'd like to, you know--actually put a story up there sometime again.

Goals, goals, goals.

Smattergories

Good progress has been made via this whole "going with the natural flow of my disjointedness" theory.

In two days, I:

• rewrote 5 pages of The Novel that Will Not Be Named
• wrote 2 new pages on The Other Novel that Will Not Be Named
• wrote probably a page and a half of a random scene from By Right of Conquest (talk about a book that I'm writing non-sequentially. What I fear most right now is trying to put that book in order. Maybe if I printed it out...)
• probably another page of randomness
• and the night is still somewhat young, though I'm getting over a cold, and it's less young than it first appeared.

In any case, with nearly 10 pages at 250 words a page, that's 2,500 words (combining written and rewritten), and that's not half bad. If I weren't still struggling with the moral implications of leaving a half dozen unfinished short stories unfinished, I might be writing even more; my current dilemma is whether or not I keep trying to write short stories in the face of what are becoming some intensely interesting novels.

Plus, I need to do draft four of The Bitter Road. You know, if I could quite figure out what it is that I want that book to say in the end. That's something that I think I thought I knew, and now I'm no longer sure. I'm frankly also not certain that it's entertaining enough. In any part. Things that entertain me as a reader are stories of adversity and learning, frequently combined. I spent so much time doing things in that book that entertained me while writing it, that I'm not sure... of a lot of things. Something more to ponder in the shower of mornings, while I gear up for the rewrite.

But. Otherwise. This scattering of attentions, which results in a smattering of progress in a variety of projects... well, when it starts feeling like I'm truly going nowhere, I'll worry. Until then, I'll convince myself that I feel like I'm going somewhere, and leave it at that.

Eels and Old Men

I learned some small piece of how to make rewriting fun. I find that, for me, it involves eels. Which is to say, word-choice.

"The gravelly voice of an old man" is now "a voice worn to gravel by time and malice." I'm not sure the second one is better, but it's definitely more fun. For me.

How eels also enter into it: I have a tendency to blush. I also flush when I'm angry. Hot cheeks are a part of my life. I feel my emotions on display often before people react to them. Describing this appropriately when my characters undergo it is difficult. Today, I came up with "cheeks felt hot enough to fry an eel."

Again, not better. But definitely more fun.

Panels

Interaction says they'll have me on a couple panels. One with Jane Yolen, no less, the GOH herself. Color me squee.

One is on rewriting fairy tales and one is on... get ready for the shock... the archetype of the evil stepmother. There we go. (Nods virtuously.) Pigeonholed for life on evil stepmother panels. At least, until I publish something else.

I suppose, to do that, I'd need to write. And to write, I'd need to stop coughing. Bleah, this is a mean bug that's snuck into my lungs...

Brief Thoughts

WisCon

I went, I saw, I made as little of a fool of myself as I possibly could.

No one gave me a triumph when I came home, but it's ok. Maybe next time.

Progress

Have not written anything since the last time I posted here that I had written something. That's a long time.

Process

But I'm revising my process and that's good. It might be brain time, after all. I hear some writers have it.

Slush

Lenox Avenue is reading for a themed issue: Mechanical Oddities. Send those stories along, a'ight?

OWW

So far, my new resolve to do one crit a week has been adhered to. It's been a week. I've done one crit.

TV

So addicted to reruns of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I didn't watch the first time they were on, largely in favor of Babylon 5. I'm in the 5th season. Most individual episodes feel deeply flawed. The overall arch is not as detailed or as compelling as other shows I've loved. But the gestalt is working for me all the same.

My Favorite Authors

Robin McKinley was GOH at WisCon. She was very beautiful and self-deprecating. Some people seem annoyed by the self-deprecating thing, but frankly, after sitting next to Ellen Klages at a panel, it makes perfect, perfect sense. There's always someone out there who makes you feel blown away, a merest twit, just by being their normal self. It's a fact. (And I do hope Ellen took my bumptiousness as the hero-worship it was, and not actual bumptiousness.)

Bully for Me

I sold "Star and Galaxy" to Between Kisses.