I'm an auditory sort of person. Not only do I test as auditory (over visual or kinesthetic) on the tests that test for this sort of thing, but also, I prefer listening to lectures over any other form of learning opportunity, for example. My particular version of being auditory has benefits--I remember most things I hear--and problems--I literally can't spare the concentration to listen to things when I'm concentrating on visual or kinesthetic tasks (I couldn't, for example, have music on the radio while I was learning to drive; and then, once I'd learned how to drive, I couldn't listen to music with lyrics for a good four or five years). I will occasionally even remember things I've seen as my internal narrator is describing the visual scene for me--and oh yeah, I do have an internal narrator, and s/he's always talking.
I've developed a shortcut with reading that I know not all auditory people have. My friend Joe, frex, has to "hear" every word he reads before he has fully "read" it, which makes reading painfully slow for him. But fortunately, my internal narrator is a really fast talker, I guess, or I've got enough visual mojo to just internalize the symbols on the page without having to sound them out as words first, or... whatever.
(The whole business of reading is fascinating to me, and it just gets weirder the more I learn... how did our little monkey brains manage to "turn on" the reading ability 10,000 years ago with so little trouble, I wonder? What prepared us for information transmission through symbolism? Sure, language itself is symbologically driven--you say "dog" and you and I both have a little mental icon of "dog" in our brains that don't necessarily match, but allow us to converse about dogs... and with so many more people being visually oriented than auditory/kinesthetic, maybe reading is an obvious outgrowth of spoken language? Oh, I don't know. My inner anthropologist is having a hard time pumping the inner linguist for information here--the inner linguist is rather puny and undereducated.)
Anyway, I know that whatever I do during reading is not the same as being visually oriented. When I read a comic book, for example, I have a very hard time "reading" the pictures along with the text. In fact, as I read along, I find that I miss, oh, everything that happens in the pictures, and I get very confused.
So, yes. Not a visual person. Not surprisingly, I'm not a very visual writer. My stories tend to "talking heads in space" moments. It's something I try to work on, but frankly, yes, dialogue and internal moments comprise what I write about naturally. Moments of inspiration tend to revolve around a snatch of dialogue or a moment of feeling... I rarely get visual inspiration.
Cue latest writing thing--which is actually an old writing thing. I was 12 or 13 when I absconded with my mom's tarot cards and started writing stories about them. I just dug the file out of my cabinet the other day, and whoo boy are they bad. Not just juvenilia bad, either, but "young writer being pretentious" bad... I worked on the material for four or five years, right on through to age 16/17, which is when I thought I knew what I was doing. I (rightfully) abandoned this project some time ago, though I did occasionally harbor delusions that I could rewrite some version of it, and draw my own version of the Rider-Waite deck, too, and make it sort of a web-thing, where I'd write a 500-1,000 word story and draw a picture every week for 78 weeks. (And I still might do that, if other publishing options don't pan out on this.)
To my knowledge, the tarot card book was literally the only time I'd ever had visual stimulus to write from. When I bumped into the tarot card book in some dark recess of my mind the other day, I realized that I had this collection of richly detailed, jewel-tone-colored visual images of scenes in my head--versions of the Rider-Waite deck, but better. I'd never be able to draw them (let alone color them) to match the pictures in my head, but I'd be able to write based off of them. And the sheer fact that they are there is such a novelty that I can't resist.
So, that's what I'm working on right now. I'm getting back to The Bitter Road, too, but (as I'm constantly reminding myself) I have the luxury of doing whatever I want right now. Discipline for the sake of discipline--well, I've proven that I can do that. Right now, I'm going to enjoy the novelty of having visual ideas.
Negativity is probably the worst trap for a writer (...not that it's so great for humans in general). Not only is it counterproductive, but negativity is catching... Making it an easy trap to fall into.
Take today, for example. I had a pretty good day. I spent time with various members of my family--mother, husband, stepdaughter--running errands, doing stuff. This evening, we all got cold at my stepdaughter's softball game, but she got a hit and batted in a run at the end, so it all ended on a nice note. We had dinner. We watched an excellent episode of House. I had planned an evening of writing, and I came upstairs to discharge my duty--and after a quick tour of the available blogs and such...
I became so depressed I seriously considered not writing--at all tonight, and heck, maybe not even ever again. I won't link to what I read, and I won't rehash any of it, but suffice it to say, there are a couple of people who aren't happy being writers out there today... and by the time I got around to reading the short fiction reviews at IROSF (usually a serious pleasure of mine, since the reviewer is very honest and I think I learn a lot from reading her reviews), I was Not Going To Bother Ever Again. (Largely because Lois Tilton happened to review "an amusing retro-future comedy of manners" that seemed a little too much like my own amusing retro-future comedy of manners.)
About two minutes into the negativity dance, it was interrupted by my stepdaughter coming in to wish me goodnight--yay for the way kids work at breaking state for those around them, even if half the time it's not a state you want broken. And I remembered, gee, I'd been planning on and for this evening's writing all day. I had a whole scene worked out for a piece I'm mentally referring to as my Jewel-Toned World... How did a potential similarity between someone else's story and my own (a similarity that I'm only guessing at from a review, a similarity that is limited to a worldbuilding tactic that I know already that I didn't invent or come up with first, and a similarity I have noted previous times with other stories and which has not prevented me from selling said stories, anyway) get me down so quickly?
Well, it wasn't the similarity, really. It was that I'd already fallen into the negativity trap, pulled in by the gravity of someone else's really bad day, and suddenly, the similarity seemed like the death knell of my writing career.
Now, it only took about a tenth of a second to see my behavior for what it was--and in writing a whole blog entry about it, I'm certainly making a mountain out of a molehill. It's easy (for me) to spot the source of the bad feelings in this case and turn them aside, for whatever reason--perhaps because the trigger was so fresh in my mind. But there are so many other times that I don't spot the source, don't shrug it off in whatever fashion I can, and end up wallowing in the pit of despair for an evening or four... instead of writing.
I've seen evidence before, and I'm sure I'll see it again--and I know that at least a couple of people out there would agree with me: it can be very dangerous for writers to read the blogs of other writers.
There. That was the description--I have no idea of the prescription. I mean, I'm not going to stop reading other writers' blogs. The best thing I can think of to do is to try not to infect others with my own nihilistic despair, on those occasions when I have it. There are ways and ways of being depressed on your public journal, and some of them are much less harmful to your readers and to yourself than others... so, I guess that's my pledge. *shrug* That is all.
If I tell myself that I'm not writing on this project, then I won't scare it away. So I'm not writing on this project, which happens to be one of those projects I devised when I was 12 or 14 or something, and even at the time I knew it was a potentially bad idea, yet somehow, here I am, writing things nearly against my will. It's like spilling an overfilled pitcher of lemonade while trying to walk to the picnic table: the lemonade just WON'T go into the cups I picked out right now.
Honestly, part of me started doing this as a freewriting excercise, and bam, suddenly it became the thing I had decided to never write. (It's not that terrible of an idea, actually, it's just... well, it's a 12-year-old's idea! On the other hand, it wasn't working (probably) all these years because I was trying to write it for adults, even when I was 12. And now I think I'm just writing it for me, specifically, my inner 12-year-old, and it's working. It's sort of creepy.)
So anyway. I'm having fun. And I'm thinking I might get back to The Bitter Road this weekend, using this Other Thing as a guidepost.
Oh, and a book.
God Save the Child by Robert B. Parker (27) [mystery]
Susan! Yay, Susan.
This was the book where I realized Spenser never tells the reader his first name. I want to smack him a little for this. But Spenser also really hooked me with this book, when Susan asks him if he's a catcher in the rye, and he sort of doesn't say no. Their relationship really works for me. Thing that works less well: the endless sartorial detail. It doesn't make me miss the 70s in the slightest, and I can't wait to get to some books that don't mention platform shoes.
And, oh, yes, a 160-odd day rejection from Cicada with a nice handwritten note saying that they're all bought up on fantasy, but try us again sometime. Good deal. Onward.
I'll note that at the end of this month, a quarter of the year will have fled, and I will have read over 25 books. I might just be on track for 100 books this year. Of course, I've now just jinxed it...
The Decoy Princess by Dawn Cook (25) [fantasy]
I honestly thought this was chick-lit-Luna-esque fantasy when I decided to read it... and I guess it was, to some extent... I suppose it says good things about Luna's methodology that I can no longer tell what's supposed to be crossover romance/fantasy and what's just fantasy (I can still sniff out a plain romance, though... there's definitely no fantasy in those). Anyway, it had a bit more depth than I was expecting, and I rather enjoyed the unexpected bit with the "players."
My only beef was when I approached what should have been the end of the book and it so clearly became not-the-end. "Why?" I sighed. "Why can't I find a nice stand-alone book to bring home to mom? Why does everybloodybook have a bloody sequel?" Some books need sequels, to be sure. But not half by far.
One of the things I rather liked about romance novels all these years was that you could reliably count on the story being over once true love has won the day, but even that's no longer the case. (And I'm not talking Malloreanesque series following the love stories everyone in the family, I'm talking romantic partners getting a chapter two. While that's an interesting thing to think about, it's really not what motivates my romance novel reading.)
Anyway, I liked this well enough to go pick up Cook's truth series. Plus, Cook (common as it is) is my mother's maiden name, so yaknow, there's always a little extra love for the Cooks of the world.
Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon by Piers D. Mitchell (26) [non-fiction]
God bless archaeologists. This book is the work of an osteoarchaeologist who was having a hard time with his "palaeopathological research on crusader period excavations... there was very little relevant historical work with which to compare [his] findings. In order to properly interpret the signs of a weapon injury or disease on a crusader skeleton a sound knowledge of contemporary history and medical practice is immensely helpful." So, his motives are pure, eh?
There's really good stuff in this book, including a chapter on torture, and there's a lot on the evolution and development of Western hospitals. If you're writing anything at all related to the Crusades or the general time period, this is a must. This book is directly relevant to at least three projects I'm working on, probably more, and I have really enjoyed reading this. I honestly can't tell what the technical level of the book is, however, because I've been reading archaeological papers for years now, but I think it's pretty accessible. And the bibliography is lovely and lootable. An enthusiastic thumbs up.
Sometimes I fear I shall never have a small idea again.
But it beats the alternative.
----------------
By small, I mean "something I can start and finish in one night/day/lunch period." Like "Reparations" or "Shotgun" or "One Million Years." On the other hand, that's just the sprinter in me whining because the marathoner hasn't been fully developed yet.
The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker (23) [mystery]
The first book in the series, and my second Spenser book. I'm not altogether certain if this Spenser is as likeable as Robert Urich-Spenser or later-novel Spenser. Maybe he needs Hawk and Susan. Sorta like Lord Peter Whimsey being all cooler for his valet and Harriet Vane. I had a hard time emotionally engaging with Spenser in this book, but I've promised to make a good go of this series, and so I shall.
An Invitation to Sin by Suzanne Enoch (24) [romance]
Shades of the Malloreans! Maybe it's because there's a brother named Charlemagne, and that's at least as eccentric as a brother named Beowulf. Maybe because there's a domineering patriarch-brother (not Charlemagne, alas). Maybe because it's part of a linked series about brothers & sisters, and there are interfering aunts. I don't know. But if I hadn't known I was reading Enoch, I could have sworn it was Beverley. Regardless, this was still Enoch and still a delight.
Excluding the anthology that still seems to be available, the first three markets that I sold to are no more. Well, actually, I just remembered that no money changed hands for AstoundingTales.com, because I was a freshman writer then and wasn't sure what I was getting into. Regardless, Kenoma is gone entirely, whence came my first check, and Fortean Bureau is no more, though the site is up for now. (I hope it's up forever. I'd be willing to provide hosting to that end, in fact.)
There is definitely a part of me that's pleased no one can ever easily read "Her Kaleidoscope Eyes" again. It was really rough, in spite of being the best I could do at the time. Someday I'll put it up in the Trunk, but I'm actually more fond of what's in the trunk already. "Charmed Lives" needs a polish, and might be worth shopping as an audible reprint. It's definitely one of my stories that works better when read aloud. But this is all short-story navel gazing as far as you're concerned.
I'll really miss Fortean Bureau, though, for its consistent goodness and weirdness.
Apologies if you aren't reading this through an RSS feed and keep showing up here and noticing there's nothing new. I think I'm going through one of those periodic "but I haven't anything to saaaaay" moments that strike all but the really good bloggers, who manage to have something to say even when they don't want to, without manufacturing entries exactly like this one wherein they complain about their lack of bloggery ambition or what have you.
It's not that I lack ambition, it's (I think) that I'm just reaching one of those points where I must internalize a bunch of things before I can reach (re)gurgitation mode again. It's not that I lack things to say, even. I have a list of entries to write. Just no feeling that they need to be written.
Back in the day (early college), when I used to be able to read French literature with relative ease and little dictionary use and no pondering tenses (pause while blogger sighs longingly for Proficiency Lost), I took a readings course of French memoirs and journals. Whenever I go into privacy mode, I think of that class, and André Gide, whose diaries written for publication avoid mentioning the illness and death of his beloved.
(When I go into privacy mode, I also think also of blocks of sunlight on the hypnotoad patterned carpet of our classroom floor and that weird mental state that one gets in to listen intently to someone not speaking your own language. I can't overconcentrate on something like that--neither a hypnotically patterned carpet nor a language I'm not fluent in. I get more sense out of a spate of French if I listen to it out of the corner of my ear, which afterwards I tend to remember in English. Likewise, I couldn't tell you what the pattern of that carpet really was, but I know that I had to look at it out of the corner of my eye to deal with it, and I remember the nausea it inspired quite vividly.)
Anyway. There are just some things you can't publish and own simultaneously. There are things I would put into a story that I wouldn't write in my blog, because then I have the distance of fiction to hide behind--I don't own them in quite the same way as if I said, "This is my life." Those tend to be the intense things (like Gide's love's death), I suppose, but sometimes they're boring little life-lessons, and I think it's the latter that I've got right now.
So, blogging content will be sadly limited to the mundane link here and there and the books I read for a while. I don't think I'm going to post much writing process even, because that's where some of my boring little life-lessons are coming from right now. I'll try to update thrice weekly at least, but no guarantees on days. If you're not reading this through an RSS feed, you may be in for a rough time.
Well, I managed to drag that out into a lengthy little entry, didn't I? For all that I had nowt to say.
If only there were some natural way for the brain to say, "This, this is what you shoudl focus your efforts on right now." I'm so often interested in so many things all at once, that I don't even know where to begin when I sit down at the computer at night. Do I work on my invisibility-cloaks-and-princesses story or my Anglo-Saxon exiles story or are they the same story? Is it time to figure out "The Neptune Ships Wait"--and is it an homage to Greek tragedy or to Edgar Rice Burroughs or to both (well, I know it's an homage to ERB, but is it also an homage to Greek tragedy?).
And what about all those perfectly worthy stories I've half-written but lost the steam for somehow, and now can't finish because everything else looks shinier? I need to learn how to keep eye contact with a story until it's fully seduced, I really do!
And what about those stories I've written, and that have failed to find acceptances in the marketplace in 2 years, and now I have the perfect way to fix them? Yes, I figured out how to salvage "June Mothers Stay Late," I really did, and it makes so much more sense as post-ecoterrorist fiction, and for which I've developed the mantra "any sufficiently advanced form of magic is indistinguishable from high tech."
Or... shouldn't I be working on that novel rewrite that was going along quite well right up until I got sick, but now I've used "sick" so many times as an excuse for not going back to it that I don't even know how?
There's just too much going on, and too many things at too many stages. I've NO idea how to settle down. And sure, the easy answer is "get back to the novel" but I'm really afraid to abandon the short story I've been poking at. Only half of this dilemma is me being my own worst enemy. The other half is just me being too awesomely creative to be stopped.
(Self-ego stroking is the name of the game now that I'm old. You've been warned.)
I turned 31 yesterday. *hums a happy little tune that indicates that turning 31 is jes' fine* My husband bought me an ice-cream cake from Baskin Robbins, which might seem a bit twee, but it was because of "31 flavors," which made it adorkably cute.
I'm woefully behind on writing work. And blogging. And housecleaning. And much of that is because I segued right from a bad bout of flu with a long recovery into a weekend of familial obligations, and in between picked up a nasty Farscape addiction.
I initially started watching the show with the intention of rewarding myself with an episode after every finished chapter of The Bitter Road. But then, I watched all of season 1 while sick, and I've barely been able to restrict myself to 2 eps a night since then. Tonight I will institute a 3:1:1 ratio--for every three hours of writing/editing and one hour of research I put in, I may watch 1 episode of Farscape. Additionally, I may break for an episode if I finish a chapter or a research book. That's the carrot. I'm still not sure what the stick will be, other than handing over my wireless internet card to my husband.
But yes. I'm 31. It's time to get disciplined! In addition to my 3:1:1 ratio (which is probably expressed totally wrong, but I'm not mathy), I am instituting a weekend ergonomic solution that will increase my productivity and my house and garden's cleanliness and keep me from staying a sedentary lump during writing times in my office. My solution? 45 minutes of writing topped by 15 minutes of cleaning/gardening. Email checks no more than every four hours. (Once more, this may require husbandly interventions with the wireless card.)
Why? Well, because one of my biggest problems with Sitting Down to Write is that if I think there's a remote possibility that I might get interrupted to do some chore or, well, anything, I tend not to write. I sit down and head straight to the internet because I've put up the mental block that writing would be pointless anyway because I'm not going to be able to work uninterrupted for four hours. This is utterly ridiculous, of course. I think the best thing to do is to aim for mandatory and scheduled interruptions. During the dayjob, I tend to work best if I start a small project or project segment about an hour before a meeting, so that I know I'll have to quit. I'm much more focused during such hours, knowing there's a deadline. And I feel better when I have days filled with these little mini-units of work because I don't sit endlessly in the same position at the computer.
I could be Very Wrong about all of this, of course, and it won't work without the cooperation of my household... but I bet my husband will be glad I don't whinge about the innnnnnterrrupttttiiiiooonnns, as long as I can convince him that 4-8 15-minute work-units will be more effective than 1 or 2 straight hours of housework or gardening. Granted, we've used the Flylady 15-minute cleans to get housework done before, but not quite like this.
Ancient Medicine: From Sorcery to Stone Age by Michael Woods and Mary B. Woods (19) [kid's non-fiction]
Well, this wasn't quite the book I was expecting when I ordered it in on interlibrary loan, but hey, it still had some good info--fantastic info for kids, with solid allusions to how good archaeological and historical conclusions are drawn. I found it to be a good starting point on my ancient medical research. It got me interested in Roman public health and Cloacina, goddess of sewers, for instance.
Meet Me at Midnight by Suzanne Enoch (20) [romance]
Eh. Not my favorite of Enoch's work. A solid effort, of course, and a reviewer on Amazon did point out a very favorable thing about the book: there's not one stupid misunderstanding between hero and heroine in the whole book. That does indeed make it nicer. Actually, Enoch never seems to go for the misunderstanding plot. (I pause to ponder if this is really true. Yep, I think it's really true.) I adore her for that as well as her other skills, even if this one doesn't leap onto my favorites list.
Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent's Eye edited by Katharine Sands (21) [non-fiction]
It had the information I was looking for. It did not otherwise stun and excite me. Perhaps because I can find most of the rest of the insights revealed therein by reading Miss Snark and other agent blogs. The format of the book was essays from agents alternating with samples alternating with interviews with agents. If there weren't a Loquacious Community of Blogging Agents, this would be a find. As a well-read reader of the LCoBA, it was merely okay.
Burn by James Patrick Kelly (22) [science fiction]
I read it because it's Hugo nominated (as a novella, not a novel, but hey, it's in book format so here it is on the book-blog). I really liked it. I don't know what the rest of the novella field holds, but this will be tough to beat. Kelly had me at "Trancendentalist space colony." The execution didn't 100% live up to the excitement generated by the initial concept, but really, what could? I really admired Kelly's willingness to dig in with the simple-life details. The descriptions of apple trees were evocative of my own humble roots. Weird, yes? That I'd so get a kick out of apple trees in science fiction? Yes, but I do.
Oh, yes, I have a journal! Right. All is not Farscape and "getting better." (Though I am getting better. I'm mostly better, except for that early morning coughing thing. I realized I was better enough to start writing again several days, but I all the writing I did this week was on breaks at work. I blame this on a combination of weak will and Ben Browder.)
Rejection from Aeon, but they did let me in on the "secret handshake" that means I can sub electronically to them. That part didn't suck.
Being sick has created a small writing backlog in my brain. Well. What's a backlog to a library clerk, right? After all, one of my very first jobs at the library was slogging through ten years of unloved SuDocs publications. (Actually, this SuDocs link is better. It more fully illustrates the weirdness.)
Except... I've no real plan for how to deal with the backlog. I'm still just sick enough to make it seem counterproductive to sit up half the night writing. It doesn't help that I'm feeling a smidge overwhelmed at work right now due to a staff shortage, too, and I can't find my memory key, and I have at least one story that's in dire need of something, and I have to query on two more, and I have at least three websites that need some serious work--either total overhauls or ground floor creation. Add in the sick, and... there you have it. And my computer is still making weird hissing noises. So I'm backing things up nightly, waiting-just-waiting for the seemingly inevitable crash, even though I think there's probably just a hair or a feather stuck in the fan.
*pant* Stress.
So, yes, a plan would be good. A plan would identify the problems and would indicate that--solutions or not--I have a handle on things. But I can't get it together to make a plan, either, because I have one of those things looming in the near future that make planning seem futile and impossible. (One of those things being a very packed weekend and week, when my nephew and his parents come to town. About which I'm delighted, but pretending it's not adding to my stress would be pointless.)
I need one of those BIG planners that lets you chart out each half-hour of your life. Not because it would solve anything, but because it would provide me with the illusion that it could solve things--just long enough to make a plan, and maybe, just maybe, get a little writing done.
Yep.
I'm still my own worst enemy.
Well, this is just one more port of call on a lifetime cruise of ridiculousness. I'm trying to dye my hair--which is one of those rites of beauty for which you either pay through the nose or through the dignity. Today I chose to lose the dignity--I'm saving $74.02 by not going to a salon (plus tip).
I was tempted by a new product (washes out in 8-12 shampoos! no mixing! just apply a colourful mousse!), lulled by the price and the promise of little fuss. Of course, "little fuss" always means "more fuss than you'd like" when it comes to hair dye. Once--perhaps 9 years ago to the day, because I seem to remember that this dyeing thing overtakes me frequently with the approach of my birthday--I managed to turn my then-new boyfriend's cat a bit pink on one shoulder blade, because it's hard to control the drips and because that cat was young and curious about anything you did in the bathroom. Then, yes, you guessed it: plop. White cat with gray spots becomes white cat with gray and Russet Harvest spots.
So, what happened today that tops dyeing a cat? Technically, nothing. I just went to the closet and got an old towel, per the instructions--a towel that is older than my stepdaughter, and which dried me after exactly one-third of the showers I took in my freshman and sophomore years of college, because it was one of the three towels I received as high school graduation gifts from an aunt. Then I draped it over my shoulders. Off of which it promptly slid. I tried closing the towel at my throat with hair clips, the way it seems my hair dresser does. I think she has better clips, though, because two seconds after I got the plastic gloves on and covered them in purple mousse, the clips popped off and the towel slid to the floor again. I ended up dyeing commando while standing atop the towel.
After the dye-mousse was applied--I built it up into a towering purple beehive that looks a lot like I'm in a Sci-Fi Original--I hoisted the towel onto my shoulders again and went in search of something more secure than hairclips. I found--not the big-ass safety pin I was hoping for--but my junior marshall pin.
Do all high schools have this tradition? That the top ten members of the junior class attend senior graduation and hand out programs and wear big sashes? Not that I did that--junior marshalls in my year were completely honorary, because there were no seniors ahead of us, it being a brand-new high school. Instead of a sash and a tour of duty in a sweltering stadium, I just got this fancy pin that looks like I got wounded in some academic battle: from a big purple ribbon is suspended a bronzeish medallion emblazoned the Lamp of Scholarship.
In any case, once I caught sight of myself in the mirror with my teal towel thrown over my shoulders like a cape, my big eggplant head and my matching purple medal, I knew I had to blog about it. And take a picture.
Not that pictures do it justice.
I've been a sickly thing. No writing... no writing about writing...
I did manage to sell a story while in my sick bed (mostly by lying still and letting the editors think about it): The Town Drunk has agreed to carry the "reprint" of "One Million Years B.F.E.: Diary of an Anthropologist in Exile". I am quite pleased.
