Before I go any further, one last book:
THC by Kathryn Hinds (58) [fantasy]
Work-in-progress...
I don't think I'll finish another book this year.
--------
Number of books read: 58 59 (2 37s!)
(which means, slightly more than one a week. Someday, I'll tell myself that a book a week is an acceptable number, but not this year.)
Breakdown by genre:
Young Adult/Children's: 11
Fantasy: 18
SF: 5
Romance: 9
Non-fiction: 12
Mainstream/classics/literary: 4
(Non-fiction this year included: history, historical analysis, essays on feminism, pop-culture, lit crit, biography, and similar)
I felt that this year actually represented, proportionally speaking, my interests. For a change.
The List of 2005:
Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey (1)
Household Gods by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove (2)
Sin and Sensibility by Suzanne Enoch (3)
Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton (4)
Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce (5)
The Wolf Hunt by Gillian Bradshaw (6)
An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews (7)
Tales of the Beau-Monde by Sahara Kelly (8)
The Wastelands by Stephen King (9)
So Worthy My Love by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (10)
Wizard and Glass by Stephen King (11)
Adriana by Catherine Moorehouse (12)
Peace-Weavers and Shield-Maidens: Women in Early English Society by Kathleen Herbert (13)
Arrow's Flight by Mercedes Lackey (14)
Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within by Dennis Palumbo (15)
Arrow's Fall by Mercedes Lackey (16)
The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley (17)
Carthage Ascendant by Mary Gentle (18)
The Wild Machines by Mary Gentle (19)
Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King (20)
Secrets of the Night by Jo Beverly (21)
Song of Susannah by Stephen King (22)
Major Problems in American Women's History edited by Mary Beth Norton (23)
Wolf Wing by Tanith Lee (24)
Something Wicked by Jo Beverly (25)
Sarah, Plain and Tall (26) and Skylark (27) by Patricia MacLachlan
The Dark Tower by Stephen King (28)
Sunshine by Robin McKinley (29)
Planet Simpson by Chris Turner (30)
My Life So Far by Jane Fonda (31)
LM by E.S. (32)
Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (33)
The Sword and the Mind translated by Hiroaki Sato (34)
Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature by Elizabeth Hardwick (35)
TN by MKL (36)
Red as Blood by Tanith Lee (37)
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory McGuire (37)
Across the Nightingale Floor by Liam Hearn (38)
Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce (39)
The Brontė Myth by Lucasta Miller (40)
Jane Austen by Carol Shields (41)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (42)
St. Raven by Jo Beverly (43)
Restoree by Anne McCaffrey (44)
An Arranged Marriage by Jo Beverley (45)
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (46)
Flirting with Danger by Suzanne Enoch (47)
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Human Behavior by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson (48)
Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia McKillip (49)
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman by Elizabeth Buchan (50)
Favour of Your Company: Tickets and Invitations to London Event sand Places of Interest, c. 1750-c.1850 by Victoria Moger (51)
Caleb's Story by Patricia MacLachlan (52)
The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld (53)
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (54)
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson (55)
Time Travelers Strictly Cash by Spider Robinson (56)
Pretties by Scott Westerfeld (57)
THC by Kathryn Hinds (58)
Pretties by Scott Westerfeld (57) [young adult]
I can't quite tell if this book actually suffered from middle-book-itis or if there was another syndrome at fault; it certainly didn't feel as fresh and bubbly as Uglies, though it was well-paced and engaging and enjoyable. So, if Pretties was a middle-book-itis sufferer, it still managed to live a rich, full life.
I do have to say, these two books have garnered the most attention from people around me. I don't quite know why, but more people have read the back cover copy of these books and said, "I think I'll be on the look-out for this!" than is usual for me and my reading tastes. Don't know why. Good job, marketing department? I mean, my sixty-some-year-old aunt (who spends her time working on boiled wool projects) and my eighteen-year-old work-study student (majoring in accounting) both had the same reaction, and several people on the age and interest spectrum in between have, too.
*waves at you all from behind a stack of new books*
I'm taking a few days off of writing from necessity. Hope all is well and happy and warm.
Time Travelers Strictly Cash by Spider Robinson (56) re-read [science fiction]
This book has more than just Callahan stories in it, and I've only really thoroughly read the non-Callahan stuff once. I hate to admit it, but it's true; this time, even, I just skimmed.
As for the Callahan stuff, it's all still good and readable, even a bit more readable than the first batch of stories--more reliably science fictional, which is part of the good in it. The in-jokes in this volume's time travel story were less opaque than when I read them as a kid, but weren't any funnier since I still haven't ready any Phillip Jose Farmer books--they're hard to find, you know? I think I went looking for them a few times in the days before Amazon.com.
The noticeable difference between the stories in this book and the stories in the first Callahan collection is that Jake becomes an active and proactive character. In book one, he's a first-person narrator on the scale of Nick in Gatsby--always the observer, never the actor. Jake almost grows a smidge Mary Sue-ish through this set of stories, he becomes so darn proactive. I always thought he was too passive early on... there could be more balance. (Not enough Doc Webster in this book!)
I've swung right on into the next one, which was always my favorite. I realized, halfway through the first story, that it takes place after Lady Slings the Booze, which, somewhere along the way, I got rid of, I think in a small snit of over-feministism. Which was a violation of my book-getting-rid-of policy--if you think you ever might want to read a book again, you absolutely can't get rid of it. Shame on me.
One of my favorite things about reading blogs is that occasionally, you just accidentally find something you've long wanted to find but have given up looking for.
Have you ever read Susan Cooper's Seaward? I read it probably six or ten times in my early teens, and it was one of those books I kept by my bed and read the best parts to soothe myself to sleep for a while. There's a part of a poem quoted in it--and the poem just totally cuts off, interrupted by plot. It's about selkies and a struggle between semi-Celtic gods... good stuff.
The whole poem, "The Shortest Day," is on the web! I found it because Jed was reporting on the Solstice; I honestly don't know how long it would have been before I went looking for it again (probably the next time I re-read the book). I know I looked once, back when the Web was young; I searched Yahoo, I think, for the words "beseeching fires" because that's the part that sticks in my head ("they burned beseeching fires").
Anyway. Happy Solstice.
While reading for research (and my own general education, even though it's a book I've read twice now for school, but now I'm finally reading it for what I want to get out of it), I dipped into Keith H. Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. (I would pause to explain how I'm combining certain Apache linguistic habits with early Celtic war habits to make a space-faring race of assassins in the far future, but I don't want to bore you.)
The Apache apparently know more about trusting the reader than any writer I've ever met. Witness:
"Western Apaches regard spoken conversation as a form of 'voluntary cooperation'... in which all participants are entitled to displays of 'respect'... Such considerations may influence Apache speech in a multitude of ways, but none is more basic than the courtesy speakers display by refraining from 'speaking too much'... Although the effects of this injunction are most clearly evident in the spare verbal style employed by Apache storytellers, people from Cibecue insist that all forms of narration benefit from its application. And the reasons, they explain, are simple enough.
"A person who speaks too much--someone who describes too busily, who supplies too many details, who repeats and qualifies too many times--presumes without warrant on the right of hearers to build freely and creatively on the speaker's own depictions. With too many words, such a speaker acts to 'smother'... his or her audience by seemingly to say, arrogantly and coercively, 'I demand that you see everything that happened, how it happened, and why it happened, exactly as I do.' In other words, persons who speak too much insult the imaginative capabilities of other people."
The explanation goes on a bit more, and wraps with: "An effective narrator takes steps to 'open up thinking,' thereby encouraging his or her listeners to 'travel in their minds'" (Basso 85).
(The ellipses largely occurred where I chose not to render for the Web the Apache words that appeared in the text.)
She had me at the word "archaeology."
Of course, my little geek niche isn't a fair way to judge a hook, but I bet she had the rest of you by "Mars" at the latest.
And if archaeology and Mars aren't enough, Severna Park gives us (in no particular order): academic infighting, smarmy-lusty ship captains, twelve flavors of protein supplements, the first extraterrestrial McDonald's, exile, betrayal, revenge, forgeries, middens, obelisks and Alpha Centauri.
And she gives us wonderful bits about archaeology that point to both the truth and inherent humor of the profession, like:
"On Earth, the first things Althea would have looked for were the town dump and the cemetery. The wealth of civilizations eventually ended up in one place or the other."
"The Three Unknowns" hits so many of my brain-buttons on what makes for good story that reading it for the first time was like mainlining chocolate espresso beans. The fact that SCI FICTION managed to find these chocolate espresso beans and share them regularly still amazes me. I will miss the weekly jolt.
Link to the SCI FiCTION tribute page.
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson (55) (re-read n+at least 5) [science friction]
I read this book to death in my early teens. The puns! The empathy! Hard to put down, it were. I remember gleefully buying my now worn-out paperback copy in 1991--an epic moment, since I'd checked the book out of the library more times than I could remember.
The stories hold up pretty dandily, though I'm older and wiser and a little more cynical about bars as a second home than I was before I reached the legal drinking age. Doesn't matter, though; when I read these stories, I was thirteen again, and reveling in the folksy optimism of the whole experiment.
So, yeah. If you haven't heard of it, Callahan's is a magical bar on Long Island, tended by an Irish-alien barkeep, where you go, drink your drink, walk up to a chalk line and make a toast to the deepest pain in your soul, throw your glass into the fireplace, and then pour out your troubles to the regulars, who are likewise trying to heal their psychic scars by paying for them in cold hard karma. Typically, the first-person narration of Jake, who is a reg'lar guy, only kicks in when the toaster is a special case--a science fictional case, like a psychic or a time traveler or a precog's wife.
In between, everyone puns a lot.
And, since it's a collection of short stories and not a novel, it's easy to dive in and dive out. You know, if you're one of those people who can't commit to a whole novel. I'm looking at you, Joe.
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (54) [young adult]
Much more than The Secret Hour, this book hit all the right notes for me and was a good, satisfying read. It tackles some big issues in some good ways, though I'm not altogether certain of how I feel about the perpetuation of the "pretty = stupid" stereotype underpinning to the plot. There's a big bad evil society of secret agent doctors that turn you pretty with plastic surgery and then scrape off important parts of your brain at the same time.
In spite of that, the rest of the themes are fantastic--there's a lot of stuff about friendship and betrayal that I liked, and I wouldn't have expected them at all--and there were nice observations about our own society's perceptions of beauty. The pretties (who are the opposite of the titular uglies) are of a prettiness based on averaging and symmetry, and the moment when the main character sees a magazine from our time (the story is far-future) and looks at one of our models is one of my favorites.
I crafted another to-do list this afternoon that I will doubtless give up on half-way through. But the point is that I do keep to them for a while, right?
Right?
The first and most important thing is to follow through on something I committed to do--which is the SCIFICTION tribute.
Then, I can beat my head against the wall in new and more creative ways about my current novel, the past novels and the short stories that haven't been sold.
Yay! Now that is planning.
I am was having a darned hard time figuring out the characters in a project I'm trying to outline. I couldn't quite nail character motivations, even though I intellectually understood them. "X is in love with Y," I would mutter while scribbling things down. "But then what does X do?" And then I would sit and stare at the paper.
And I forgot a fundamental piece of why I started writing in the first place... I mean really writing, when I started doing it every single day when I was eleven. I started writing because I had all these emotions I didn't know what to do with. I know more of what to do with my emotions these days, I think, and that's where I got a little bit lost.
Today I realized I couldn't figure out what X would do about Y because I wasn't in love with Y myself.
So, I realized I needed to shift Y a bit--shift the character until he had a few characteristics I could fall in love with--and now I'm immediately, viscerally certain of what X is going to do now.
I hate learning something I already knew--but I guess it beats not ever remembering, eh?
Thank goodness Stephanie Burgis knows what's going on. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't know about half the reviews I've gotten because our two (separate) January Strange Horizons short stories have been thematically linked in people's minds or something. It appears that if someone mentions "Huntswoman" in one breath, Stephanie's "In the Tower" has been mentioned in the previous one.
Case in point, Rich Horton's 2005 Strange Horizons Review Wrap-up.
Thanks, Stephanie, for knowing what's going on in your own career! :)
Of the bedroom that I share with my husband, there is a bit of space that's his, and a bit that's mine, and a lot more that's community property. Somehow, I managed to spend four hours cleaning up a 6'x2' bit of real estate that includes my dresser and under my half of the bed.
There was a lot of dust.
I found:
-a CD I thought I'd lost and already replaced on iTunes
-six books, loaned to me variously by my friends Mary Lou, Julie and Jason
-a manuscript of my first Regency that I mean to edit earlier this year
-some books I knew I had, but was fuzzy on the location, including Liz Williams' Banner of Souls
-six candles I forgot I owned
-two bottles of linen spray I forgot I owned
-a diamond nail file I forgot I owned
-a CD case I thought I'd left in my old car
-a CD Dann owns that I'd wanted to rip to my computer that I'd never seen before, I swear
-my raincoat liner
-a whole box of Nag Champa incense, and a box of lavender incense as well
-16 pens
-and three pages of notes to myself about stories. Some of them even make sense.
Some of them *almost* make sense, like "Arabella, not James, or 'virgin' queen" which I believe refers to some historical or almost-historical happening that I can't for the life of me recall. I think it was about one of the potential successors to Elizabeth I, but I'm still not sure why I wrote it down like this. Thoughts?
And the "Fifteen things about Me and Books" meme, seen everywhere.
(glances at the calendar)
So, I've pretty much got it down pat on when-to-query. And that's "when I feel comfortable."
But when to re-query?
Keeping in mind that I tend to think of thirty days as a magical sort of number for querying--whatever the response time is advertised, plus thirty days (or sometimes a multiple of thirty days, depending on the length of the advertised RT)... I'm still not sure.
Thirty days from my original query?
Thirty days from the response to the query?
Thirty days from the date they said they thought they'd have a decision in the response to the query?
I don't like the last one. Not in this case, anyway.
Though there's this sneaky bolus of weird brain subroutines--offshoots of inherited martyrdom and passive-aggressiveness, I've no doubt--that suggest if they've lost the submission again, they'll buy it out of guilt. This bolus is about as functional as the reptilian hind-brain when going about one's life, because no one buys stories out of guilt. Er, they better not, or I'll give up all hope, right now.
Mostly because I just don't know enough people in the business well enough to guilt them.
(wonders who might read this and not get it as "humor")
(figures that the chances of making Fandom Wank are still pretty slim, no matter how unfunny I am she is)
(just now realizes that she's talking about herself in the third person in these little asides)
(also wonders who will realize that the quotes around humor are meant to be ironic, not just silly grammar)
(wonders who else agrees that ironic is the over-used word of our time but over-uses it anyway)
(wonders if over-used is really hyphenated)
I have a sticky on my desktop delineating some up-coming deadlines. I thought I'd share them with you, and then be snarky about how likely I am to meet them. This is sort of like talking about myself behind my back, but hey, at least I won't be doing it in the third person.
-SCIFI.com tribute 12/20/05
This I will do. Probably on the 19th, knowing me. In the meantime, I'm aiming for the 10th.
-She's Such a Geek submission 1/15/06
I actually have a topic. I'm just not sure if I have 3,000 words of topic.
-Polyphony 6 open 12/15-01/31
Do I even have anything I can submit? "Send us your magic realism, surrealism, literary stories with a genre sensibility, and other hard-to-classify stories with strong literary values, compelling characters, engaging tone and unique voice." Hrm. The only literary thing I've written since college has already been sold, frankly. Hah. Maybe that's a sign...
-The Town Drunk opens for subs on 01/02/06.
Brit Marschalk is a fellow Lenox Ave alum, and she/they're looking for lighthearted spec fic to boot! I've been waiting for a market like this.
...and there are some other deadlines that I'm frankly less convinced I'm going to have anything to do with at the bottom of the sticky, because it's going to take me forever to prepare anything for the ones at the top.
Hm. That was actually much less snark than I'd intended. My apologies. In other news, I should tell you that my father-in-law seems to think "snarky" is a hilarious word that I made up and uses it back at me all the time. Oh, but the Urban Dictionary begs to differ.
And I (mostly) trust the Urban Dictionary, ever since they so kindly defined the term bubblegoose for me. And why "bubblegoose?" Because the eponymous bubblegoose song by Wyclef Jean showed up in rotation on my iPod and since then I have not been able to stop listening to it*. Talk about embarrassing. Except we weren't talking about embarrassing, so I really don't know why I brought it up.
*(no, I don't know everything that's on my iPod; half the music is random stuff I ripped from my husband's collection, and that's the half the fun of the shuffle play)
Hugemongous congratulations to Daveamongus! Yes, Dave Klecha, the big brother of one of my three psychic brain twins (er, triplets?) (who shall remain nameless to protect them from the shame of being my psychic brain twin (quadruplet?))... er, anyway, Dave has sold a story to Scalzi's issue of Subterranean Mag's special SF cliché issue.
This is fantastic on so many levels--first sale being one of them!--but also because Dave finished this story at writer's retreat. I knew we were being more productive than it appeared.
I feel like I just moved a very small mountain. At last, everything complete that I haven't given up on (and that I could find a market for) is back out the door. And it only took two evenings of concerted effort. And that was just for 7 stories.
Oh, yes! This is why we do it in dribs and drabs children. It is too hard to do it all at once. Let this be a lesson to me.
I consider that I'm starting my New Year's Resolutions a month early--and that resolution is to get back on the horse about being attentive, diligent and persistent in regards to short story submissions.
I would like (fingers crossed, kiss the sky) to finish two short stories, like, now, and they're ones I talk about all the time so I'm not even going to bother to name names, and I have no freakin' clue how to finish either one of them. I think for the one that's fun and space opera-ish, I need to find the deeper meaning, but I've written myself into a corner and now I'm stuck. As for the one that's creepy and fairy tale-ish, there is more corner writing, and I don't know how to move my characters around the board now without it devolving into standard quest fantasy, which is SO not how this story is meant to go. They need to go to the land of the giants to obtain some peppercorns. There's a tailor, a weaver, a sorcerer and a farmer's son, and I am absolutely lost in this story, LOST I tell you.
I am all beginning and almost no middle. I am also Jack's anticlimactic slash-dab ending.
Gr.
The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld (53) [YA fantasy]
A delightful book in many ways, though I was bothered by some rather nitpicky things like... the word "tridecalogism," which I would take to mean 30-letter word, not 13-letter word... perhaps "triskaidekalogism," but of course it isn't thirteen letters... anyway, yes, I realize it could be considered an in-character mistake, except the kid who thought it up is at least twice as smart as me anyway. Also, "polymath" doesn't mean anything about math, which Westerfeld points out on his website, and yet--the word is linked with mathematical ability throughout the entire book.
But other than this sort of minor ranting and raving, the book revolves around a really neat premise. A premise far neater than it actually plays out in the book, actually, with one or two exceptions. Given my chance to wander a frozen world for an hour every night, I'd be far nosier and exploratory than any of the main characters seem to be--of course, Plot is coming to get them, so they don't have a lot of time.
Piled on top of this, there is some solid characterization, especially in light of the superpowers of the main characters. I think I'd be about as crazy as Melissa with her mindreading ability. She acted abominably at times, and I could totally understand why.
I'm not sure I'll seek out the sequel soon though; one of the things I look for in YAs is the subtle, layered nuance of character, as per McKinley, McKillip, Sherwood Smith, and I didn't see as much of that in this book as I would have liked. I didn't fall in love with any of the characters, basically; Dess... Dess grew on me, but it took some time, and only when she got down and geeky did the like really well up within me. Jess was a little too daylight, a little too 11:59 for me, to quote the other characters.
A list of rejections, that is.
This has been the banner year for "almost good enough, but not quite." What a wonderful sheaf of rejections I have! Far better than any other year! Everyone likes what I write, they just don't like it enough! Everyone is fairly certain my stories will find a good home! Just not with them!
I feel like I am consistently the second cutest puppy at the pound.
The good news is, it's a no-kill shelter.
***
I am holding on to no less than three good stories in the hopes that I will wake up with a brainstorm and they will be great stories once the brainstorm has passed. This, of course, is one of the biggest lies one can tell oneself, but I'm telling it to myself every morning.
The thing is, I believe I know the problems in 2 of the 3 cases--wordiness. I think I could cut 10% out of each story and they would be lean and mean and much more saleable. Only, I can't find that 10% to cut. I managed to cut... 2%. I have print-outs of the MS, so I just need to go through with a red pen this weekend (read: tomorrow), and send the things out on Monday, but I've been saying that for at least three weeks now.
I have fallen into one of the deadly writerly traps, and that is the trap of sitting on one's inventory.
I sort of want to make a tritely cute list of the Seven Deadly Writer Sins now, but I'm not sure I can come up with seven, and if I did come up with seven, would they be conclusive?
But. Nevertheless, I will try. It's too early to go to bed, anyway.
1) The deadliest writer sin is the Wannabe sin. "I could be a writer if I just had time." (Oh, yes? What makes you think I have the time?) "I was very good at writing in high school/fifth grade/in utero." (Lovely, but what have you written since?)
2) Then we have the Buttinchair sin. One is a steady writer when one sits down. But that happens once a month at best. (Little known fact: this sin is actually not one of willpower but of having had the magnets in one's ass installed backwards. A writer's chair, as we all know, has special magnets in the seat. So does the writer's ass. Sometimes we get the installation backwards. Repolarization is possible, but every day you spend improperly polarized is a sin. Remember that.)
3) The sin of Inventory-Sitting is what I'm currently experiencing. I have good stories, but I'm not circulating them because I have the inane fear that I will burn a good market on a good story, get rejected and then have no place else to send the story in case I somehow manage to perform the right magical incantation to turn said story into a GREAT story. This is a huge steaming pile of bullshit, and even my cats are mad at me about this.
4) Another sitting sin: the sin of Sitting with One's Thumb Up One's Arse. This can manifest in several ways, such as not taking a crit and rewriting a story. Right now, I manifest this sin in that I have a great workshop function available to me, and I've utterly failed to make use of it as much as I should. Why? I can't think of why, except that maybe I'm...
5) Afraid to Take a Criticism. This sin occurs most when we have a little too much invested in a story, I think. We don't want to hear the bad things because it destroys our illusions that we've written a perfect story. At least, I think that's how this one comes about...
6) Taking a Rejection Personally. A sin that is a little too easy when it seems like an editor has deliberately misread one's story, but it's a pointless failing. I don't actually think I've overindulged in this sin lately... lately.
7) Wasting Time Writing About Writing Instead of Writing. Actually, this probably isn't a huge sin, but since it's what I'm doing right now, I thought I'd spell it out for you all. Thus--an abrupt ending to my entry. Cheerio!
Caleb's Story by Patricia MacLachlan (52) [children's]
Audiobook. Glenn Close's narration is terribly sweet, and I think she creates a deeper sense of love than even MacLachlan was aware she was building, if her interview at the end of the audiobook is any way to judge. The book is a story about forgiveness, essentially; I'm not altogether certain if it was realistic in that regard, but sometimes realism doesn't supply the necessary catharsis. All in all, a lovely capper to a lovely trilogy.
***
As you can see, I have hit just past the half-way point of my 2005 reading goal. Nothing to be proud of here... at the same time, I'm glad I didn't give in and read only 20 books or whatever might have happened if I *had* given in. Oh, well--no use in bemoaning any of it. It is what it is.
Right now, I find that I crave biography. We'll see where that takes us for the rest of the month.
I have been beating my head against the wall as to writing processes for the past innumerable months. Three years now, mebbe? Anyway. I've read books. I've tried notions. I've read web pages. I've adopted methods. I may have finally almost sort of found a process that I like, a process which is neither fish nor fowl.
My first big push was to notecard scenes--all the scenes I had to include in a book. But it left me flailing in regards to connective tissue, and though one would think that writing from notecards in this manner would make it easier to write non-sequentially, it did not work that way for me.
So, then I turned my attention to outlining--straight outlining--in one file, and writing in another--and no notecards. And then I felt restrained in a way that notecards hadn't, and once again incapable of writing non-sequentially.
Why the big push to write non-sequentially, you may wonder? I don't really know. I know some writers have an inclination for it and some don't, but frankly, there are times when I just don't want to write an X scene, where X equals sex or fighting or description or something I have to research, but I'm ready to move on and get to the next bit, where my energy can be expended on a subject for which I still have momentum. Or, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and want to slot something that happens Later into the story. It just seems convenient to me, to have that option, and now that I've been puttering with my new method for a few months, I think that I can say with some authority that I need to write 80% sequentially and 20% non-sequentially. If that makes any sense, I'm glad.
Anyway, my current method still uses notecards, but not in a restrictive way--more, something occurs to me, and I scribble it down on a notecard. This seems to be working much, much better for me than writing things down in notebooks. I'm not sure why, other than I can spread the notecards out and make piles and reorder them and stick them into other projects if I need to.
Then, I put the notecards in order, and use them to swirl up an outline, using the outline feature in MS Word, no less. I really, really hated the clunkiness of the feature at first but now I rely on it; it's so easy to jump back and forth between looking at the novel as a whole or in parts, just with a click of a button. And I never have to remember file names! It's sort of a cludgy hypertext way of writing novels.
Add to this the occasional option to go off onto a big sheet of paper, where I scribble out everyone's names and start drawing connecting lines--jagged ones for antagonistic relationships, swoopy ones for friendships, with arrows to show the flows of affection or hatred... they're like family trees of emotion... or I can start drawing the path of the story, if that suits me.
No single one of these methods worked for me. But all together, they are beginning to work for me. I'll be interested to re-read this entry again in a year or two, to see how the process has changed yet again. I'm sure it will change.
Favour of Your Company: Tickets and Invitations to London Event sand Places of Interest, c. 1750-c.1850 by Victoria Moger (51) [non-fiction]
Pure research. I was mostly reading this to see the tickets and invitations to lend a more authentic air to my Regencies, but guess what!? The notes were packed with concise, important information--like the exact location of Vauxhall Gardens and the way that Almacks' subscription balls worked. Fantastic!