The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler (5) [literary mainstream?]
I resisted this book. I resisted it a lot, right up until I realized that Karen Joy Fowler was Karen Joy Fowler, and that maybe, just maybe, I'd give a refugee from my genre a chance to woo me on a subject I'm a stickler for. I've read a few of the Jane Austen sequels floating around, and have not really enjoyed any of them--so much so that I'm not even willing to try Joan Aiken's sequelae, and I love Joan Aiken. Of course, this isn't a sequel, it's metafiction, but I didn't really know that until I was reading it.
And... it just worked, on so many levels. It works as chick-lit or whatever you want to call it, it works as a romance, it works as fiction, it works as homage to Austen, it works as critical analysis (lite) of Austen, it works as spec fic, almost! Not quite. But almost. Perhaps I mean that it works as an introduction to spec fic, as a bridge book. It also works as a sociologic study.
It just plain works.
Fowler understands Austen, and she understands people who love Austen. She understands geeks, too, of a variety of sorts. She's also great at busting the played-out tropes. She gives us an older woman/younger man scenario that doesn't play out as though the author is being sensational or bizarre or just stupid, and she gives us a Lesbian character who acts like a person, not a cartoon or a caricature. It was all terribly refreshing. I could have stood it if the book went on another hundred pages, frankly, and I think my review could go on another hundred pages, because I haven't talked about all the light homages to Austen and the comedic genius of the character of Bernadette... or any of the rest of it.
This book is jampacked with the good stuff, and I'm done gushing now. Really.
Rejection 101, on "Sun's East," which was temporarily retitled to try Realm of Fantasy again. It got a better reception this time; a Yellow Form of Promise from the new slusher: a marked improvement from the Blue Form of Death. I am naturally disappointed, not because it was the last pro market available to me on this story, but because for every market that rejected it with a "not quite our thing, try Realms," I foolishly got my hopes up.
And... does anyone know what's up with Storypilot? It's been down all day, perhaps longer. That makes it hard for me to plan my turnip-assault on the semi-pros. I of course also use Ralan's site too, but I like to check both.
If there's a gun on the mantle in the first act, it has to be fired by the third act. And if there's a squid on the mantlepiece, ditto.
"In other words, a plot element should be deployed in a timely fashion and with proper dramatic emphasis." -- Bruce Sterling's Workshop Lexicon
And, in a short story, practically every element needs to be a plot element at some point. Which is why the dog and the little brother in scene one have to go.
Just a little note to myself for when I get around to revising this story, which is finally, finally, finally what "Gesundheit, Nantucket" has revealed itself to be.
I came up with the title a long time ago (well, a couple of years, anyway; it's not that long in writer-time, when you consider I got the first nugget of The Bitter Road when I was sixteen or so, and I don't think that's unusual), and I've been trying to hammer a variety of stories into the title... stories that have never managed to be fully written, either... ever since.
With the title of "Gesundheit, Nantucket" I also got a feeling. Just a feeling. Not a mental picture, not a plot, not a setting, not a snatch of dialogue, not a darn single thing other than the feeling you get when you have nostalgia for a place you've never been. I tried to make the story happen by setting it in places I've had nostalgia for without having been there: the moors in Yorkshire, Maine, Nantucket itself. Botched, botched, botched.
So, I gave up. I suspected if I ever wrote the story, it would be a case of I'd have the story written and then I'd know it.
And yep, that's pretty much what happened. Okay, half-written. I started writing a story about a girl who wants to spend her summer visiting rural Michigan in 1976--"I want to make soft-serve ice-cream cones and watch a parade. I want to wave sparklers and watch fireworks and wear blue eyeshadow," she tells her parents.
Because, of course, me being me, the girl doesn't live anywhere rural, and she doesn't live anywhen near the U.S. Bicentennial.
And, I had about half the story written before Jake (Jake? How do my male characters always end up being named Jake or Phil?) showed up, wanting to go to Nantucket for the Bicentennial, bearing that same emotion of nostalgia for a place he's never been. He tells the main character (poor girl doesn't have a name!): "I love the idea of it. Island life. Everything is blue or the color of sand. Ghosts of dead whalers walk cobblestone streets."
Of course.
So. I'm pleased. The story is turning out sort of lovely. Because, it turns out, I have nostalgia for rural Michigan in 1976, even though I was only a year old when I experienced it the first time. So, it's enough like having nostalgia for a place you've never been to make the story work: the girl has the nostalgia for a place I can only go in my imagination, for all that I was physically present at a Bicentennial parade once upon a time... so it works. And another character has the same emotion for a place I currently have that feeling for. So it works there, too. I am, you may be able to guess, extremely happy about this. It's not often when disparate pieces come together without forcing them.
Now, if only I hadn't put a dog and a brother in the first scene.
Because there's no way for either of them to fire, and I have to take them out now.
My only other sorrow is that this story came along now. Because right now, I'm supposed to be finishing "Wedding Dress Tea Parties" and if I weren't doing that, I'd be rewriting The Bitter Road.
Snookered by the muse once again.
Oh, well, at least there's forward motion somewhere. Woe unto me if I ever write not on-spec, though.
I've always had this mental picture of how having a baby is going to make the writing time go kaput. I manage to write plenty now in tandem with the parenting role I have, but the fact is, the darling stepdaughter spends half of her time with her mother, and the half of the time she spends with us is not a 24/7 job of attentiveness anymore. She's eleven (today, in fact!). Most of the daily maintenance is self-maintenance at this point, and she's been sleeping through the night for years. Further, my husband has been on point with her for most of our relationship, though my stepdaughter and I grew closer as her father and I became more committed, and I consider my wedding vows to be, by extension, a vow to her as well.
Which is why I'm overseeing her birthday sleepover tonight while he has high-tailed it for the casino. Yes. I absolutely knew he was an epic misanthrope with social anxiety that triples around parties when I married him.
And tonight is everything I fear about those first few years of child-rearing (except no one is demanding that I produce food directly from my body). I've got to check on the situation regularly and when volume levels get too high, which means, about every fifteen to twenty-five minutes.
Okay, so that's NOTHING like raising a child. But it is a valuable sneak preview of the interrupt driven writing life.
Right now I'm handling it by doing small bits. Writing brief scenes on a variety of projects that have been lingering in the mind for a few weeks. And that's working out okay today, but I'm very aware that this is not my usual writing mode. When I go, I go; I go under for at least an hour, if not three, and I totally lose the flow if I get interrupted.
I have no pithy answers to this problem, and no, I'm not at all sure it's going to work out for the best. Pangloss can come take care of my babies while I write.
I do have a pithy way of restating the problem, however:
O what freedoms we shall grieve
When first we practice to conceive.
Excuse me. I must go make certain that the screaming I hear is happy screaming, not the kind related to blood.
One of the books I am in the middle of is Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Bookclub. I am enjoying it immensely; Fowler writes at the intersection of science fiction and Jane Austen, which is a street corner I've been known to stroll from time to time. Innocently, of course, officer. The description of vampire LARPers obfuscating at a con to the consternation of a dog breeder wearing a "dog is my co-pilot" button had me in stitches. I ended up relating the whole scene to the LARPer who sits next to me at work. She's resolved to read it immediately. I'm going to be so sad when it ends.
I'm also in the middle of Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass, at the suggestion of queenoftheskies in the Plotting Fiction community. I've eased off the writing books of late, since I've certainly reached the point where it seems like they're not telling me anything new.
I'm enjoying this book, however, mostly because Mr. Maass's predictive powers have astonished me. There's an exercise where he asks you to write down your top three favorite novels of all time--and then in the following paragraphs, says, "Oh, you probably picked a classic and a children's book; you read most of them as formative experiences, and none of them are less than ten years old."
I picked The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley (pre/sequel to a Newberry winner, i.e., kid's book); The Beacon at Alexandria (perhaps the book I've read and reread the most since 1987); and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (duh).
Then I kept reading. I don't care if I don't get a single writing tip out of this book, it was just damn cool to have the magician pick my ten of hearts out of the deck.
As for endings, the senior staff of The Michigan Daily published their last hurrah of the year before turning over editorial duties to the new crowd. It's my understanding that the seniors still work on the paper, and are there to guide the new folk through the process until graduation in April. I could be really wrong about that, though: maybe the whole thing was really just a ploy to write this headline: Students Like Sex: Especially in the Graduate Library.
When I walked into my beautiful, 86-year-old building with it's marble-lined halls and frescoed walls, my eye was caught by the stack of Dailys sitting on the book return kiosk. I immediately noticed the headline. I immediately burst out laughing, and took a copy in to share with the office.
Now, I spend my fair share of time taking mental pot-shots at the copyediting of the Daily; I figure the place where kindness comes into play is not in foregoing judgment, but rather in foregoing the writing of the kind of letters to the editors which take public pot-shots at the copyediting. Today, I revoked at least the last three months of mental pot-shots, in part because of the humor of the headline, but in greater part for the correct use of the word commove. Even though they spelled "aisle" as "isle."
As endings go, this one was pretty happy.
...and the reasons why.
1) A reading blog entry.
Mostly because I haven't finished any books lately. I am in the middle of... twelve.
2) An entry explaining why I read twelve books at one time.
And further explaining why that makes it okay for me to be in the middle of twelve writing projects at one time. But seriously. Who has time for that kind of rampant self-justification?
3) A joke entry entitled: "The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Midwestern Female Writers Named Merrie"
But I am going to write that some day. (The obvious joke here is that procrastination is one of my habits, but... it's too obvious.)
5) A rant about assassins in fantasy literature.
Well, you know, Limyaael did it first, and I haven't yet had a chance to make up my own list of rantable features.
6) Whining about how cold it is in my office
Because the heat is down because heating oil prices are up, and whining about it isn't going to make anyone who reads this any happier.
7) How I fixed a major logic problem in The Bitter Road while sitting on the john today.
Because that's more information than you probably wanted, and compounding it will win me no friends.
8) How much I enjoy bathroom humor.
See item 7.
9) Which is a better word: acrapolypse or crapocalypse?
See items 7,8.
10) The New Secret Cabal of Ohio Writers
And how they're keeping the Michigan writers down. But I won't write that because I'm afraid of their ninjas.
Some imp compelled me to set up a journal intended for outtakes and deleted scenes, and today, a smaller but more persistent imp compelled me to actually write an entry which offers the outlines of a plan for said DVD extras journal. The journal is actually on LiveJournal, under merriehaskell
In other news, links round-up!
I wasn't going to link to Paul Graham's essay How to Do What You Love until I found myself quoting it to someone at work today. But I do have to quibble, and LOUDLY with this statement:
Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.
I so beg to differ. I've never analyzed Conrad for fun, mind you, but Graham seems to be using Conrad as a synechdoche for all Dead White Writers, and I happen to get a really large kick out of analyzing Dead White Writers and I have no aspirations to get into teaching English at the college level because academic poltics seem like a fool's errand to me. I've considered teaching English at the high school level (for like, two and a half seconds, because I'm not a masochist), and I suspect that there are not a few people who actually do teach English at a variety of levels who would analyze gender and identity in a wide variety of Old Novels You've Never Heard Of on the backs of napkins in bars, just as mathematicians occasionally do with maths, regardless of tenure-track positions being on the line. In fact, I know there are. They're called lecturers. (Well, they are at my university.)
Don't make me whip out the "Pagan Undercurrents in Tess of the d'Urbervilles" paper I wrote for fun over summer vacation to prove it to you. Just don't.
Okay?
Okay.
Other than a few such quibbles, however, it's a good essay.
Toby has been on a link-pimping roll lately: he's had shout-outs to Guidevines for Writers (a writing wiki) and to Soi Dog's Why Writing Won't Make You Rich (Probably), for starters.
And thanks to keeping close tabs on my del.icio.us writing inbox, I've discovered Free Range Librarian's "Being Able to Write", which it now seems everyone earth is linking to. I don't think the FRL's said anything I'd argue with. Certainly nothing inflammatory like people don't write about gender and identity in the works of Joseph Conrad for fun.
Sheesh.
In a fit of cleaning this evening, I uncovered my Old English flashcards. I went for a tour.
I particularly love the words that seemed made for poetry. "Lamp" was leohtfæt (light vat). "Farmer" was ierþling (earthling). I suppose I love them because they make sense and are formed out of basic words we still use. It's like cracking a code that you were raised to know intuitively--at least, if you're a native speaker of English. I don't get the same thrill from Latinate words at all.
Now, I've spent a half an hour composing the next paragraph of this entry, which was pretty much a bunch of half-linguistically-literate speculation on why it is that I would like Anglo-Saxon rooted words over Latin-rooted ones. I also spent some time perusing Wordcraft by Stephen Pollington (and noticing that he doesn't translate farmer into ierþing at all, but rather gebur). Since I believe I had a story to rewrite, I'm going to get back to that. I'll debate the cultural relevance of the roots of my native tongue another day.
I'll leave you with a link:
Old English Bird Names.
You never know when it might come in handy.
Late night in the Con Suite. There are mesh-covered scroti parading past. I ask Dave what his writing goals for the year are.
They don't sound dissimilar to mine, though they're better articulated. Two rough drafts. Yes. Sounds very similar.
Goals are good. Keeping them flexible is the hard part, though. Flexible without breaking, that is. Too many times my self-imposed deadlines have gone past and I've given up the goal. Somehow I get trapped by their passing. I think it's because I don't adjust them before their date has come and gone.
Goals have to be written in pencil. But they still have to be real. I don't even know how to handle this anymore--I need to see all of the goals at once, and still be able to see just one of them at a time. Elizabeth is studying time management... I have to break the goals into smaller pieces, she says. But in doing that, it's so much easier to goof a small goal, and then multiple small goals. The domino effect. This plan doesn't allow me to do that big push at the end, like it's college again and I'm writing my term paper. It's an effective tool when it has to be. You can't build it into your planning, though.
So--is that the next step? Ridiculously small goals, like a hundred words a day--so that when you've been a total idiot, and work has been awful, and you've had a fight with every single living creature in the house except the fish, you can still sit down and bang out the goal in the time between brushing your teethh and washing your face? And when you've been much less of an idiot and work is good and you've been easy to get along with, you can bang out ten or twenty times a hundred words?
I don't even know.
I also don't really know where the voice came from in this entry. It's most assuredly not my voice. Voice can be a jail, too, just like a goal, and I think I couldn't have written this entry in my usual journaling voice.
Something to consider on my drive to work tomorrow.
ConFusion was the perfect counterpoint to last year's WorldCon in Glasgow-- intimate, laden with familiar faces, and light on distracting, non-stop programming. A relaxing convention, all told.
Scalzi's reading was hilarious. There were fart jokes. And fart noises. And I'll be buying The Android's Dream, oh, yes, I will.
Tobias Buckell's reading was fantastic. I've started reading Crystal Rain, the first third of which is/will be posted up under "Excerpts." In addition, there are DVDesque outtakes and commentaries (or coming soon in some cases; the official launch date is not yet here, in fact).
Beyond that, my roommates were, as always, great good fun; the amaretto sours were delicious; and the dessert reception was fantastic. I spent more time prowling the parties than before, and in some cases the parties prowled us--the roving pirate party was making people walk the plank randomly.
All things considered, a must-do convention for me for some years to come.
It's sort of been rejectomancy week fortnight around these parts, with Rejection 100 and The Rejection That Happened Twice. Allow me to perform a trifecta.
...Meanwhile, back at my day job, I was checking in books. It happens, in a library. You work there long enough, and you're bound to circulate something. Anyway, I checked in a book and was intrigued enough by the title to browse through it. (Not intrigued enough to remember the name, but that's a different story.)
It was a book on entrepreneurship. And I flipped to a part that said something to the effect of:
---
In the meantime, I'm off for ConFusion tomorrow. I hope to at least wave at Toby with more words than I used last time, and otherwise, hang with Elizabeth and Julie and Julie and some multi-generational Klechas. Panels? Okay. I might attend a panel or two, even. And, as always, stalk Scalzi. Though I'd like it noted for the record, I am not the one who invented the Stalk Scalzi game. And also, it's not a very good game, since he always posts his con schedule on his website. And they print where he'll be in the program guide.
So, much like rejection, Scalzi is inevitable. The only thing you can change about Scalzi is your attitude.
*waits*
Okay. Yes, that was the lamest callback ever. I'm sorry. I'm trying to write this and pack at the same time.
...I mean, you don't really care how many words I rewrote on the novel, do you? Other than it means I'm closer to the end, I don't really care...
...I remind you all that This Very Blog can be read via LiveJournal on the merrie_haskell feed.
As for those 14 of you ostensibly reading this via LiveJournal (who already knew that bit about the feed), my dollop of content is that I opened up what I thought would be a rejection last night and it was a message saying, "Hold tight, we're still thinking about it!" Which means there's still a 50% chance of a rejection, from my perspective, which is exactly the same as how I perceived the chances when I first submitted the story... but it's like it's even more of a 50% chance.
Which all goes to show you that there's no point in doing math in regards to writing.
Oh! While I'm here. Do you have a blog I should be reading? I suspect not--here's my list of who and what I read regularly (plus there's who I've got friended on LJ)--but I thought I'd ask in case I'm missing someone. Pimp yourself in the comments if I'm missing you. Er. Please.
Rejection 100 just came in from Fortean Bureau!
I just wanted to say thanks to the rejecting community at large. I couldn't have done it without the help of slush readers all over the world. Special gratitude to John Joseph Adams, whose rejections have always been most timely, and to Karen Meisner, whose rejections have always been extremely helpful. And thanks to Ellen Datlow, who liked but never loved a single one of my stories; those rejections always made me laugh. And of course, thanks to Jeremy Tolbert, who provided rejection 100 (and my first semi-pro sale, too).
Thanks also to (in the order they first rejected me):
(email)
Katherine A. Patterson
Debi Orton
Robbie Matthews
Phil Adams
Jeremy Tolbert
Peter Padraic O'Sullivan
B. Rosenberger
Amber van Dyk
Rebecca Shelley
Susan Marie Groppi
Gabe Chouinard
Megan Powell
Robin L. Weston
Meagan Church
Gene Stewart
Jennifer Michaels
Gill Marshall
Lon Prater
Vestal Review Editorial Team
Brett Alexander Savory
Michael Kelly
Stephanie Ann Johanson
Christopher East
Matthew Kressel
Jeremiah Sturgill
Stephen Eeley
"The Editors"
(paper)
John Joseph Adams
Gerald Fleming
Marianne Carus
Ellen Datlow
"Judy, Contest Administrator"
The Fiction Editors of On Spec
The Blue Form of Death (i.e., Carina Gonzalez)
"Rachel, Contest Administrator"
Christopher M. Cevasco
Gordon Van Gelder
Sheila Williams
"The Editors"
Stanley Schmidt
Your timely rejections meant that I was free to submit the stories elsewhere, and in some cases, sell them. Thanks to you, dear rejectors, my story did not sit in limbo until I was forced to withdraw it. You actually sent me a letter! And I still have it!
Thanks also to the slushers who slushed anonymously, and either signed their bosses' names or passed me up to their managing editors; in some cases, I don't even know your names. I'd offer to buy you all a drink, but man, there's like, a hundred of you. Woe unto me if you took me up on the offer. But I will bake you a pie. If you come to Michigan. In August. Which is raspberry season. Because I only make raspberry pies.
Think on it!
I was supposed to be about halfway through my redraft of The Bitter Road today. Maybe a third, if I were to be realistic. Instead, I'm about halfway through the first chapter.
Granted, "Chapter One" is now about the size of five of my old chapters, and I've drastically reduced the first three chapters because I was suffering from a big bad case of badbeginningitis, but.
Also granted, the beginning was the part that needed the most work. It took forever to get off Bleak Mountain. It took forever for the character relationships to gel. It took forever for everything, in fact...
It was interesting, because when I started getting my first crits back, I realized I'd made a serious mis-step in regards to this book: I couldn't hold it all in my head at one time. Not while I was writing it, certainly. Since then, I think I've spent a lot of time working on that particular skill, even if it was just brain time. I certainly haven't finished any other novels since I finished this one--I've begun not a few of them, and even gotten halfway through a couple. So it wasn't by practice that I learned this skill. Not exactly. I've been trying to figure out how I did it, or even really if I did it. I could be seriously deluding myself.
So, mostly, I've been working the thing over almost entirely. The first scene is now Brook alone with her mother. The second scene is now the King's dream. And so on. No more time-jumping to sync up POVs. This only seemed to bother one of my beta readers, but it bothered me when I was doing it, so I decided to stop. The whole thing rests more now in the tone of the Kestrel parts. Brook feels older. I lost the voice that was writing the Brook parts, and mostly to that I can only say good riddance--the voice was inconsistent and too childish, and might have been interesting in a short story, but it couldn't anchor a novel. Or at least, it shouldn't have.
Now. The thing is, all these changes are all concessions to what I thought I might need to do in the first place. At the time, the Brook voice was the best voice I could write, and I wasn't able to give it up in the rewrites, which put me at a serious disadvantage for editing the book into something I could be truly proud of. In the time since then, I've learned something about voice--not everything, by any stretch--but right now, I think voice might be one of my strengths. (Eventually, I'll get better at everything else, and voice will fall dead last again, but for now...)
And I guess that's my first real lesson in writing in the year twenty-ought-six. In the early days, I balked at rewriting, because I couldn't see any benefit in it. At one point, rewriting just seemed to be a death knell, because all I could do was write my original voice out of the equation. Rewriting for me meant correcting awkward sentences.
Later, I began to understand structure and flow, and saw how rewriting worked for those things. Sometimes you can't see structure until the work is complete; if you can't see it, you can't fix it. So, I saw that rewriting worked for that--but even then, rewriting only meant "move this scene earlier, extend that scene."
And, somewhere along the way, I had critiquers who managed to give me hints about extraneous characters and character goals, and I began to see that rewriting could be used pretty well to make the character's journey more meaningful. So, rewriting began to also mean "take this character out, make this character's actions more consistent with her goal."
And here I am, finally able to see that I can actually learn enough from draft to draft to be able to trust that maybe, just maybe, there's more to this rewriting biz than I first thought.
It may look remedial, but it feels like progress.
I was trying to explain the concept of "Sticks and Bones" (which was based on item 1 from my Time Travel Vacation Spots entry) to Dann and ask him for thoughts on why the story might not be working.
He had some thoughts on that, all right, but his big question was "What's with you and the time travel?"
It's a good question. What is with me and the time travel? Of my published short stories, 1 in 4 concerns time travel. Out of my completed, unpublished short stories and in my WIPs alike, it's similar--no less than 1 in 5. I don't think I lean on any other device as heavily.
Well, I actually have a self-diagnosis for what is with me and time travel, speaking from a psychological point of view. And that is simply that I don't actually live in the present. Every time I visit my extended family, I feel like I step ten or twenty years into the past. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents when I was a kid, and I think I slipped decades behind the rest of the world when I did that. And in the rest of the moments of my life, particularly in books, I was always going back to the Middle Ages or stepping forward to the future... any future. In short, I think I was set up. There was no way to get around being a speculative fiction writer. And when I write about time travel, I'm just adding another layer of thinking to the experience.
I say all this because I just finished rewriting "Unanswered Letters" and think I may go ahead and submit it after all, even though when I finished it almost a year ago, I thought it should just get trunked. (It felt very mediocre at the time, but I think that was self-doubt talking.) I also started writing a story (that doesn't seem to have a title) about the summer of 1976 starring many people from the future, and I began to wonder if, indeed, I have a problem.
Just send me on to Time Travel Writers Anonymous.
FYI, postcards cost 15 cents to mail in 1989. It was relevant for "Unanswered Letters."
I am chalking up my last two days' lack of writing discipline to a combination of a virus, the weather, violin recitals, and car karma.
Virus: One lymph node under my chin aches when I turn my head. One tonsil is swollen. I'm ignoring it all and hoping it goes away.
Weather: It's January in Michigan, and I cleaned my car today in just a sweatshirt and pants. (And shoes and socks. It's still January in Michigan, even if it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit.)
Violin recital: It only threw my schedule off last night by about an hour, but apparently it was a crucial hour.
Car karma: Got a new car. It's been eating up more brain cycles than it should. I can't really put the owner's manual on my reading list, can I? Even though it's 416 pages and I read it cover-to-cover?
None of these things explain how I just spent the last couple hours watching Prison Break and The O.C.. I will not be adding any mid-season replacements to my TiVo... that way lies madness.
Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan (4) [young adult]
There is a gigantic fantasy element to this story, since it's set in a town where your kindergarten teacher can discern if you are gay or straight and helps socialize you (happily) accordingly, and at the high school, the football captain is also the homecoming (drag) queen. It's a beautiful dream, however, and I liked sharing that dream.
Callahan's Secret by Spider Robinson (3) [science fiction]
I admit, I still love the puns.
I'd ask you if it makes me a bad person, but I sincerely don't want your opinion on that subject.
Cheapskate Monthly Money Makeover by Mary E. Hunt (2) [self-help]
As with most self-help books, there's a pile of preaching that the author feels they have to say before getting to the actual help. I think everything in here is covered better in the first half of Smart Women Finish Rich. This read like remedial personal finance for women--but since there are women who need remedial personal fiancial educations, it serves its purpose. It just wasn't something I needed to read. Fortunately, I got it from the library and returned it on time, so there was no financial outlay, and I speed-read pretty well at this book's writing level, so it was only an hour of my time.
If time travel ever really came to be, I'm quite certain that I wouldn't want it to exist in a way where you could just do any old interfering thing you liked. There'd have to be restrictions--not on par with the Prime Directive, because that's just dumb--but something to keep people's agendas (agendae?) from including things like "Go back in time and assassinate Hitler," or "Go back in time and be my own grandpa." Maybe I just want the strictures to be against Science Fiction time travel clichés. I don't even know.
But, assuming that all my strictures are in place, here are my Top Ten Time Travel Vacation Spots:
Number One:
Travel forward in time and dig up my own skull. Keep on desk while writing.
Number Two:
Travel backward in time and witness the Battle of Badon. Interview the victors. Try not to ask anyone: "Are you the real King Arthur?"
Number Three:
Travel backward in time and witness myself as a four-year-old girl cleaning the couch pillows with Windex.
Watch out... here come some nerdly nerdulence.
Number Four:
Travel backward in time and be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Number Five:
Travel backward in time and watch the first performance of Romeo and Juliet.
Number Six:
Travel forward in time and check out a few of the good books that will be written after I'm dead. Check on The Song of Ice and Fire series for kicks. Also, download all future Dar Williams albums to my iPod.
Number Seven:
Travel backward in time and spend a day with each of my grandparents in their youth. Great-grandparents, too, if I have time. And my own parents, while I'm being greedy.
Number Eight:
Travel backward in time and spend a day with my mother's father, just because I can.
Number Nine:
To lighten the mood: travel backward in time and witness myself falling out of my husband's apartment, back before we were even dating--or thinking about dating. (Or thinking about thinking about dating.)
Number Ten:
Travel back in time and see some megafauna.
Of course, now that I've made my list, I realize that there've been gross oversights like tea with Miss Austen and tromping the moors with the Brontë sisters, or giving my grandchildren a terrible fright. But... oh, well. Perhaps another time. Haha, temporal pun. Quick, everyone, take this up as a meme and we'll avoid thinking about that.
I'm only concretely planning to hit up ConFusion this year; WorldCon is a distinct possibility, in part because my husband has close friends in L.A. (my close friends have fled, or will have fled, for more northerly climates). And that is it. That's all I'm planning or half-planning.
Last year, I went a little Con-Crazy, and that's when I began to see that con programming is usually just a variation on the theme; and while there are people to meet and friendships to solidify, I tend to get overwhelmed by the whole thing and get a little shy, thereby vastly reducing the social opportunites which seem to be the raison d'etre of a convention. ConFusion is just the right size to really settle in at the bar and start waving at people you only internet-know--eventually you're talking to those people; the con is small enough that everyone looks like a friend by the end.
In other scheduling news...
I visited my mother at my aunt's house this weekend; I wisely took along a stack of notecards and one research book, knowing I'd probably not even crack open my laptop. (I had a memory key along just in case I cracked open someone else's laptop, but I didn't even do that.) In the few short hours I spent taking notes on women and ancient myth, I realized I totally want to write a pirate Regency romance, I figured out my assassin story, and I set myself a detailed writing schedule for the next two months, which, if adhered to, will set me well upon my way to reaching some of my bigger writing goals.
And on the drive home, I decided that Occam's Wet/Dry Electric Shaver is something with which--if I don't write a story about and no one invents it in the meantime--I will doubtless regale two Julies and one Elizabeth over amaretto sours at the hotel bar during ConFusion.
Forewarned is forearmed.
Go figure. I got rejection number 99 twice.
Well, not really.
See, this is all because I decided at some point that it didn't matter to me, statistically speaking, if a story didn't sell because it was rejected or because I withdrew it from the market. It's all the same thing in the wash: "we didn't like your story enough to publish it," or "we didn't like your story enough to tell you we didn't like it. Nor will we respond to your queries." And there were those iffy areas like OMG, hard-drive crash, all submissions lost, resubmit!--is that a withdrawal? No. Is it a rejection? No. So really, I haven't got 99 rejections--I've got probably 85 rejections and 14 Other Things.
Like today. I think a withdrawal that someone rejects definitely should be classified as "Other Thing."
The happy news in all of this, of course--is that it's the story I just sold to Escape Pod. So, the rejection letter mostly just evoked peals of laughter from me.
*sigh*
Tobias Buckell has a post about rejection vs. sale statistics, with many of the solid numbers I had only guessed at three years ago. I was a writing statistics stalker when I started out; I wanted to know if what I was doing was screaming into the void, or if it was effective and necessary.
I started keeping a rejection/acceptance log because I wanted some other stats-obsessed writer in the future to find it and say, "Ah..." The only other folks I knew who publicly logged the info I wanted in an easy-to-read format were Jon Hansen and Leah Bobet.
(When I met Leah for the first time, I started bouncing up and down. "I read your stats page!!" I shrieked with all the Aspergian wackiness of fen deep in a narrowly focused obsession. She looked very puzzled at first, then laughed and said kindly, "Oh, that. Yeah. I have a thing." Oh-ho, Leah, it's not *you* who has a thing. My thing is so thingish it's clearly a psychosis.)
Anyway, me and my thing, we bugged a few other writers and got some more stats. Mris, in particular, sent me a few years worth of stats, which I brooded over a bit, and I think I got Elizabeth Bear to give me a "1 in 10" guesstimate on what she thought was the professional batting average.
Later, while plugging away at my stats page with pointless doggedness, I would add red racing stripes in order to give the page a little Feng Shui. (I thought that since I devoted so much energy to updating that page, that a little positive energy focused there would push things along.) Sure enough, after I put the red and black fish on the page, I made my first real sales.
Okay, enough about me being crazy...
My point is, the page is a good marker for my attitude about writing. When my turn-around times are low, you can see that I'm striding along in a no self-doubt phase. When my turn-around times are high, it means I've started doubting myself in a spectacular manner--i.e., I'm submitting my fiction the hard way, as defined by Michael Canfield. At the height of my lightning turn-around times, I sold more fiction than at the depths of slow turn-around. It's quite simple, really.
And, in a random aside... there was a part of me as a newbie writer that wondered if being candid about my numerous rejections would make some editor who stumbled across my page think I was somehow a loser unworthy of being published and make a snap decision about my stories. (This was a very early suspicion. I am now quite certain that this is not how editors work.) And then, one day, I commented on a blog entry of a particularly talented agent, who clicked through to my site and then complimented me on my turn-around times. That's fairly random--and it's not like I got an agent out of it!--but it did make me realize something pretty fundamental about the whole submissions game: persistence is at least a third of professionalism. (The other two thirds are: politeness and following the guidelines. Or so I believe. That makes me some sort of Trinitarian doesn't it?)
Anyway. That's mostly the story of me and my statistics. I keep the page out of habit, now, but I think it's a good habit. And I figure that any year where I break .100 is a winning year.
Me or my Muse?
Right now, I'm going to suggest a metaphor--that the Muse is responsible for shinies, and I'm the one responsible for finishing what she starts.
I have to declare victory for the Muse. At this point, I'm the poor king who locks his daughters in their bedroom every night and wakes up to find that they've all danced their slippers through, but can't figure out how they're doing it. Now, for king, imagine me, and for the twelve dancing princesses, imagine my stories.
I need a wily old soldier to hide under one of their beds at night.
By the way, there's a hellish lot of impropriety*/** in letting a man stay with them all night, isn't there? And the king does it over and over in that story. Given everything I just read in Battle Cries and Lullabies (where the author argues that female soldiers were hardly the rarity that everyone always seems to think), I'm seeing the outlines of a story...
And that, you see, is how it happens every time.
Me: 0. Muse: 246.
----
* Okay, so they pay lip service to propriety. He sleeps in an adjoining room or something. But the door is open.
** Sure, I'm probably working off a Victorian sort of morality, but one did strive to keep one's political bribes brides virginal in a fairly high percentage of our history... proven fertility or proven virginity being the two extremes in what makes for a good wife. Anyway, I think, were I to write this story, which I'm not going to do today, I might give it a nice Victorian setting. Because the dresses were fantastic--and the morality unambiguous, at least in the prescriptive sense.
Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present by Linda Grant De Pauw (1) [non-fiction]
First book of the New Year!
I plucked this book off the library shelf some months ago, and it was overdue-book-guilt that finally spurred me to read through it and take down the notes for my various warrior women and camp follower stories.
In general--some very good information. There was a particular reliance on secondary source material that agitated me--"Where does this particularly odd bit of info come from?" I'd think to myself, then flip to the notes and see that it came from something written in 1943 with no indication of where the original info might have come into the picture. I never realized I'd turned into a research snob until now... But the good news is, I have totally looted the bibliography, and I can go read all of those books next.
I spent more time reading the early stuff--ie, before modern warfare--and taking detailed notes there; I read very quickly past the later stuff, especially the American Civil War (though I did slow down over the black women section, since that stuff is less widely known and therefore more interesting) and WWII and Vietnam. The section on WWI was illuminating but brief, and the section on the Israeli army was fascinating. For the rest of it, I'm particuarly interested by the camp follower stuff; in my Unitarian jihad story (a story about Unitarians going on Crusade long before the Unitarian jihad jokes circled the internet widely), a camp follower figures prominently.
All in all, it's a very good survey book for women and warfare. It goes back to Jebel Sahaba, in point of fact... it belabors the question of "what is warfare?" for the context of the book, while it is pretty succinct on the question of "what is a woman?" (answer: anyone who self-identifies as a woman). The book was a little light on some questions that I consider material when talking about women and warfare, and that's the stuff that usually shows up in the archaeological record--like, the question of what women are doing when attacked: if they are not facing the attackers--are they simply running away, or is it more that they are trying to protect children? Though, to be fair, the book says it's not focused on so-called primitive warfare, and those questions come up more (not exclusively, just more) in that context.
From a technical standpoint, there are some copyediting snafus (the spelling of "Jebel Sahaba" is up for debate, but calling it "Jebl Sababa" and "Gebel Sababa" on the same page is a bit much)... perhaps snafus of typesetting, too (a needlessly-hyphenated word at the beginning of a sentence, as though it was going to wrap, and then didn't). I'm not sure why I go all nitpicky on copy-editing sometimes and not others, but this one really bugged me.
I think the next book on warfare I'll read should be Ray Kelly's Warless Societies and the Origins of War.
Well, holee crap!
23 hours and 58 minutes into 2006 and I managed to equal my short story sales run of 2005.
Ok, I'll take that!
Er, anyway, I sold "One Million Years BFE" to Escape Pod.
Totally, totally awesome. Sometime in the next 2-4 months, someone will read my story aloud and put it on a podcast.
*dances*
Any real review of writing this year would probably turn to whining; there's a bit of woe-is-me in this year, and the part I'm responsible for... well, I didn't write as much or as hard or as focusedly as I wanted to. I have lots of excuses, and mostly no good reasons. Wipe it away! Last year is last year!
This year--I'm gonna write some short stories! I'm gonna write some books! I'm gonna read some books! It's going to be a great year!
No, seriously. Those are my resolutions.
Happy New Year!