My thought as I prowled the stacks today in search of an untranslation of Sophocles' Antigone was that I love working for a major academic library--because when I get a wild hare to know something arcane, bang, zoom, I can learn something arcane by my next coffee break, and without relying on the internets. My Google-fu is not such that I could easily find a double-text version of Antigone last night, with Ancient Greek and an English translation side-by-side, but I knew that, with patience, I could have it in my hot little hands ASAP.* I was right.
I spent last evening taking notes from a book of tickets and invitations from the Regency era; tomorrow I'll take notes from a book on street-life in the early 1800's in London. I'm getting ready to write (or finish) a Regency, methinks. But I'm always getting ready to write a lot of things... I have a book on ice ages I need to finish, and a heckuva lot of Roman era stuff and nonsense.
My Google-fu may lack, but my library-fu is pretty damn good. And I'm not even an expert there, either.
* Apparently, one of the librarians asked some kids if they thought they were expert web researchers, and they all said yes. Apparently, this is Generation Y. This Gen Xer would have suggested yours truly is at best a high ranking amateur web researcher, but that the good shit is not on the web yet anyway. I exhibited no surprise to the anecdote, and wondered why the librarian thought she was not an expert--the fault is not with her Boolean capabilities, but with what there is to surf. If the site exists, I can probably find it. Not every site exists; or if it does, it's probably not any good.
...that natural short story writers thrive on constant movement; submission, rejection, submission, rejection, submission, rejection, submission, acceptance. Next story. That is why they get so antsy when magazines have long response times.
That would make natural novelists pleased that they can go months at a time before considering the tidal beat of submission, rejection, submission...
Of course, before I even finished the first sentence, I knew this whole theory was bull. Sure, one may have a natural inclination for how much one wants to hear from editors, but it would simply be luck of the draw if it turned out to match one's natural writing talent. Like handedness and eye dominance--there are poor archers out there who are right-handed and left-eye dominant.
Ok, erase everything I just said.
I posit that one can never be truly content with one's writing career. But that's as it should be; otherwise, would one bother to keep trying?
One thing I've decided I don't like about writing novels is that I don't feel as productive. You can't write double-digit numbers of novels in a year, eh? You can short stories. You could probably write triple digits if you were crazy.
I suspect I just need to rewrite my paradigm on productivity, but that sounds like more work than it's worth.
One adventure from reading about kitten heels in the last book I read was searching for them on the internet, so I could be more knowledgeable about my gender's fashion trends... This was by far the best of the Google hits on the subject. It doesn't tell you what kitten heels are, but I really enjoyed reading the email exchange between a novelist and her translator.
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman by Elizabeth Buchan (50) [mainstream]
From the title, I was definitely expecting something more... poppish. More chick litish. Funnier.
Once I'd gotten over my misconceptions, it was a really nice book. It was pleasant to read about someone who has the baser emotions and yet manages to rise above them, though there was a part of me who kept wondering where, exactly, the line is to be drawn between not being a doormat and becoming a shrieking harpy, and likewise, the line between being graceful and becoming a doormat. I'm not sure modern women know. I think the last woman who knew might very well have been Jane Austen.
Hm.
PS Happy Thanksgiving!!
Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia McKillip (49) [fantasy]
I discovered McKillip at the age of thirteen and pined for the next several-many years that her catalog wasn't bigger. I loved The Forgotten Beasts of Eld then, and really, really loved The Changeling Sea later on... but since The Changeling Sea, I've been tremendously difficult to please. I didn't particularly get anything out of The Book of Atrix Wolfe or Ombria in Shadow, and I recently cast aside The Tower at Stony Wood for not engaging me (and for not being comprehensible).
And I know it's not McKillip's fault, not entirely. I no longer have the time and patience to be a thorough and careful reader; I read now for entertainment and escape--which I did then, too, but I had time back then--the time of childhood, when you can read a book in a day because you have a day. The few times I've taken a day to read a book since the age of twenty-two have been stolen days--sick days, mainly, when being ill is a luxury because no one gets mad that you aren't making dinner or cleaning the cat-litter.
Anyway. This wasn't supposed to be a rant about life, it was supposed to be a discussion of why I wanted to love Alphabet of Thorn and just couldn't, quite.
It felt slow, and sometimes that's nice. I could understand wanting to savor the language or the growing relationships between the characters, but I couldn't actually savor these things. I was impatient to find out the secrets and impatient to have things change. I enjoyed the last few chapters of the book immensely, though I felt like those were the chapters that I should have met much earlier on... the whole book felt like a lot of waiting. I can't get too upset about it, either, since most McKillip books I've read follow this pattern; but somehow in the past I've enjoyed the waiting more.
Part of the disappointment might also have come (I suppose) from wanting more about the library in it. The library was an interesting setting, but there was no real Librariness to it the way I like. I was expecting an anthem. I didn't get it.
I am only (counts on fingers) five days behind on wordcount, which is hardly anything, and yet... it is everything.
I'm not really willing to push it, since for the first time in four frickin' months, I am excited about my short stories again, and actually want to rewrite them. Even "Sticks and Bones." So. I think I'm gonna. If, over Thanksgiving, I make up the word count that I lose tonight and tomorrow, and the wordcount I've already lost, that's great. If I don't, I'm not going to cry. I'm on track to write the whole novel before the end of January either way, and THAT is great also. So. There. And, I'm excited about rewriting Brook's book, SO THERE. In other words, I have my motivation back. My mojo, if you will. Booyah.
I'm at least as cool as the Cylons. I have a plan.
---
The other thing that MUST be noted is that I'm not giving up on NaNo. I am merely not focusing on it for a couple of days. I am, in essence, passing the buck: finishing NaNo is Future Mer's problem. Current Mer is not going to let it be a problem today.
In case you are one of the few who would care but hasn't heard, SCIFICTION is going away at the end of this year. There is probably a slightly larger group who hasn't heard but would care: there is an opportunity to write a tribute essay (or paragraph) to one of the stories that has appeared in the magazine over the years.
As soon as I heard about this, I had an ode to Elizabeth Bear's "This Tragic Glass" all written out in my head; when all of this is over, I may yet write that ode. But someone else has dibs on that story, so I chose Severna Park's "The Three Unknowns." I hope to write something over Thanksgiving.
They're hoping to get over three hundred people involved in this--so there's plenty of room. It would be lovely if every story was represented. If you are shilly-shallying because you don't think you've got the cred or the whatever... well, stop.
And to think, the way I mourned the passing of Lenox Avenue was by putting a lampshade on my head drinking a toast. This idea is much better.
The cat has been sleeping on my keyboard. There is a tuft of cat hair stuck under the backspace key.
Why does he think this is a good idea? The computer isn't even left on to be temptingly warm for him.
***
I've been having something of an identity crisis recently about why I blog. I'm not someone who generates great dialogue, in general, about writing and the world. I struggle, and I do it publicly. I also bite my tongue a lot, which probably undercuts the potential for dialogue. It's a choice...
Recent goings-on in the writerly community have reminded me that it doesn't matter what you say, someone's going to take it the wrong way. Or even possibly something that someone else says is going to be held against you. Or... well, you know. Expand infinitely on that theme.
There's no value in a sanitized blog, and there's no safety in it either--except the safety of not having any readers.
So. Why do I blog again?
Anna asked me, some time ago, in response to one of these entries...
...can you expand on what you mean by your natural inclination of talent bending away from short stories? Do you think there's a length that you naturally write to? If so, what made you think that? Or is it, rather, that the narrative, plot and resolution elements required in short stories are not something that comes easily to you?
None of the above.
If there were a length that I naturally write to, I've yet to find it.
I don't think, for me, that I have a native understanding of short stories versus novels. I have to work at finding the ending to anything I write, and I have to work at the plot, and the narrative, and the structure, and the resolution. Incedentally, I also have to work at beginnings, and not a few other items, such as characterization.
The only thing I don't have to work at is the idea. Or rather, The Idea. The Idea always comes sweeping in and I know I have to explore it. And very rarely, The Idea is something I can fully explore in 2,000 or 5,000 words--and quite often it is something that should probably get 80,000 or 100,000.
The number one critique I get in rejections seems to support this. I get a lot of "this should be a novel" or nitpicks that suggest to me that if I'd taken more space to explore The Idea, people would have gotten the point.
So. That's all I really mean. I have no more ability to write a novel than I do to write a short story--probably a bit less, since I've been practicing short stories much more than I've practiced novels.
In a related but separate issue--a year ago, when I was getting beta reads in The Bitter Road, I realized I couldn't hold a whole novel in my head. Which is why I've held off on rewriting The Bitter Road. But the other day, I sat down with the manuscript, and suddenly, all the little problems I'd been having with the book just sort of magically sorted themselves out in my head, and I realized I can hold a whole book in my head now. I don't know if it came through because I'd been trying (with other novels) (and practice makes perfect), or if it came through because I'd given up (on this one, just until it made sense again) and let myself learn to write novels more organically with the other projects I've been working on, or what.
But I remember agonizing over the structure of my point of view shifts in TBR. And how this HAD to happen before that, and just, all of this bullshit, and now I can see that there are so many better, more creative ways to do what I want to do, and I don't need to be such a stickler for an outline that wasn't even working anyway. And, suddenly, I'm excited about The Bitter Road again, and all is good.
It was a very weird, very freeing moment when I sat down and started reoutlining the whole thing. It flows much better. It's more real and it's less stilted, and this time, I don't think it will make me cry in frustration.
At best, all I can do is wonder what the hell was wrong with me last year?
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Human Behavior by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson (48) [non-fiction]
Really interesting take on animal behavior, with insightful observations that pushed all the right buttons for me as a science fiction writer--I study animals in part to make good aliens. I have my own theories on consciousness and social hierarchies that I'm using to explore the aliens in By Right of Conquest...
I have just enough training in animal behavior to be dangerous, I'm sure (ie, one college class). Of course, it was the animals I studied in that class (primates) that made me doubt some of the claims Grandin makes (specifically, the ones about primates), and which in turn caused me to call into question many of the other claims Grandin makes throughout the book. But I'll bet she hasn't worked with primates half as much as she has with cattle, so maybe I'll give her a pass when she claims things like proto-humans, like all primates, didn't hunt in groups until they learned to do so from wolves... it's a bit of a romantic view (that dogs and humans both domesticated each other), but the evidence she cites is in direct contradiction to certain documented chimpanzee behaviors. She also says that proto-humans (like all primates) don't form same-sex and non-kin friendships... I think bonobos and baboons arguably contradict that as well.
Anyway. The book should probably be required reading for pet owners present and future, and it certainly has a place in my heart for making me think more deeply about animal consciousness--and consciousness in general.
Flirting with Danger by Suzanne Enoch (47) [romance]
SE's first adventure in contemporary fiction... I laughed in all the right places, didn't want to put it down, and was sad when it ended. Good stuff.
The basic plot is that art thief captures the attention of victim/billionaire. I can't see any way that this could be anything other than fun in Enoch's hand.
My favorite part, though, was the author's note detailing why she'd tried contemporary romance after 11 historicals and x number of Regencies. First, the note itself was funny; second, that means I'm woefully under-read in Enoch's work, which is actually a Really Good Thing, as it means Much Pleasure Awaits Me.
Somewhere, beneath a pile of comment spam, I am kicking. Alive and kicking, even.
My new job makes me happier, but I think it also takes up more brain space. At the same time, it makes me more creative; I have more ideas than I can jot down in the course of a day. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed in many regards.
The other night, I was so overwhelmed in fact, that I took out a bunch of markers and started marking up a big sheet of paper with all the themes, phrases and motifs that keep jumping at me--or onto me--or into my work--or around the edges of it. In ten minutes of hurried scribbling, I identified the major themes of what I like to write about (healing, war, dreams, beauty, virtue and silence are the words in caps). It was a weird experience; it didn't get me very far that day, but I think it helped something. I may try this again on a more specific level, trying to identify words and concepts that relate to what I'm working on presently. I guess it's not unlike brainstorming plus, whatsit, thought bubbling? I remember some teacher wanted us to do thought bubbling once, but I got sick that day. I think on purpose. Now I wish I'd paid attention...
Anyway, that's me. How are you?