One good reason to keep writing rejection & acceptance stats: if you're diligent about updating them (as I usually am), it's a great reminder to get in there and resubmit. To whit: I jumped into my stats page today to do some updating, and decided to find new markets while I was there... and since both were taking email subs at that time, I managed to send the stories out within a half hour of opening up Dreamweaver.
It's nice to realize you have a system, even if it's through no fault of your own.
The one thing I wish I were tracking more carefully is the "which market has story x been to?" stat. I have a spreadsheet, but it gets updated with much less diligence than the webpage, and I don't actually love how the spreadsheet works. The spreadsheet was an upgrade from the paper notebook, actually, so things are better, but what it comes down to is that I have to track information in two places to make it work. So, when I find myself wondering, "Did I already submit 'Sun's East' to Aeon?" I can either rely on the imperfectly updated spreadsheet or do a quick search 'n' scan of my stats archive.
So. As with so many problems, once articulated, I have a better handle on said problem. And yep, the real problem is dual information tracking, so asking for submissions tracking software suggestions as I was planning to do would be pointless. The second real problem is that spreadsheets don't cut it. What I really need is a sweet little relational database that tracks that one extra variable in a way that's not cumbersome. Hm. Sounds like a good way to get in some extra cat-waxing to me...
Bopping along on The Bitter Road. I know that this draft I'm working on is the right thing for the book, but I'm not sure if I'm throwing good words after bad.
Michael A. Stackpole's podcast, The Secrets is juicily rife with good writing tips. (I was actually going to rate the various writing podcasts I've been delving into over the last few months--I'd even written the entry out--but I lost the entry when my computer got shirty with me. Suffice it to say, Stackpole's is my favorite of the on-going 'casts, only slightly outflanked by Toby Buckell's Getting Past Joe Blow Neopro, which have my undying love because they address my current slate of problems, while Stackpole addresses people at a variety of levels.
Anyway, I segued into talking about Stackpole's podcasts because he has a pretty good theory--that writing a novel is the single best thing you can do to become a novelist. Starting numerous novels helps nothing. Rewriting chapter one over and over helps nothing. Only by writing complete drafts do you get to learn all the pieces, all the steps. And I realized that, yup, writing Bitter for a fourth time is the right thing to do. In part. I'd ultimately be better off writing a new novel and learning from that process, though it's not (I think) a dire mistake to finish up with what I envision for Bitter.
Now, writing Bitter a fifth time before finishing a new novel would probably be career suicide. Because five times would turn into six, and six into seven... and that would be it--me and my evergreen novel. At some point (some point very near to here), I have to let Bitter go and send it out. If it comes back, I'll tuck it away and let it sleep for a while... that's my pledge to it: it doesn't get messed with again on spec after this until at least two more books get written. Maybe four.
It's interesting to be at this point. It'd be more interesting if I were done with the Brook rewrite, but, still, it's interesting.
In other news, I remembered 23 words in the Word Memory portion of Brain Age this morning. That totally rocked.
Two rejections today, no acceptances.
I already wrote this entry once, but I apparently failed to save it. Anyway, it was me wondering if it was worthwhile to send these stories out yet again--do they have what it takes?--and me deciding that yes, it was ultimately worthwhile. It was a very dramatic entry. I'm sad it's gone.
But it is, and I don't know how to recreate it. *weeps*
My big plans for the long Memorial Day weekend--besides putting in the dock and trying out my new swimsuit--are to read Anne Bishop's Sebastian and to spend twelve hours writing over the three day weekend, eight of which must be spent on The Bitter Road.
Really. Just those plans. And I have six anise gumdrop-colored Buddhas to witness my vow.
Anyone else with big plans?
I promise, if I ever figure out how to write through trouble, I will write a book (or at least a post) on it.
Something blew up at work today, and I don't know how to do anything right now except pace mentally. I thought I'd be able to write, but I just end up with fingers flexing over the keyboard--flexing, flexing, flexing, and nothing goes.
I really resent that dayjob interferes with nightjob. Especially since I'm very good about not letting nightjob interefere with dayjob. You'd think the two jobs could have mutual respect. But I guess there's the whole "my dayjob is my livelihood" thing, and it's just being a big jerk about it.
Gaugh.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (31) [non-fiction]
Admittedly, I was looking for the next Guns, Germs and Steel. Suffice it to say, this book doesn't explain everything--but that would be asking for truth in advertising, I guess--nor even most things. It covers sumo wrestling, school cheating, drug dealing and real estate, plus there's a semi-comforting bit on how over-parenting is a big waste of everyone's time. While I was entertained and maybe a little bit educated, much of it was a bit too facile, and I was looking for more depth.
One rejection of the "we're not open to submissions at this time, please check [utterly illegible] for calls for stories" sort. Hm. Such things are not indicated in their guidelines, so I really don't know.
Which is alright*, since I was ambivalent about subbing there anyway.
* I defend the use of "alright" since "altogether" is the same composition and has long been accepted as a viable composition for "all together." So. There's my snarky, defensive two cents on that one.
So, I'm sitting here staring at these anthology guidelines and cursing under my breath because I can't remember why I saved them. I don't write macabre. A whole roomful of British writers accused me of being Disney-level twee in my writing just 10 months ago. What the hell was I thinking in terms of "I can do macabre humor?"
I wrack them brains (to the tune of "Dem Bones," which was taught to me by the seventh grade chorus teacher who used to flip us off and use racial slurs to refer to all of us, black kids and white... new meaning to equal treatment, I guess. It is heavenly to realize I forgot her name). There's so much clutter in there! On break today, I worked on some outlining for the Spellbinder book, which will not be called that because everyone and their mother has used the term spellbinder it seems... and that's cluttering up the thought processes, like an ottoman placed right in the foyer. I keep tripping over it, Dick van Dyke style. It's a macabre piece, the Spellbinder books. Someone is forced to drink lye. But that's not funny...
I open some random files, and find something macabre. The story fragment of the ogre who eats his wife's internal organs. But it's not funny. I start funnifying it, and it seems to be taking it well. There's no pain because I didn't know what to do with the story anyway. I was very pleased with the opening fragment and had worked it out as a literary quest fantasy in my head, but then I read Leah's "Girl with the Heart of Stone" and decided against it. I was having a hard time making it gel, anyway. No loss.
The funny might be working here. My narrator has taken to addressing the reader as though they were her grandchildren--that's what I think of with this story, a knitting woman with a tight gray perm sitting in her rocker and getting a bit excited with her story, particularly the earthy bits. A combination of my grandmother talking about Jesus and my one great-aunt who's into earthy bits. I'm managing to feel both blasphemous and irreverant just describing that.
I trip over another ottoman in my head. This time it's the short story I was mulling on the way home from work--the one about the librarian in space who's investigating information crimes and gets a cat and is about to return to her very strict space colony peers because her educational time is up. It occurred to me that the reason I couldn't finish that one is because I didn't know how to end it. But maybe zany is the way to go. This whole story was the meshing of two three four disparate ideas: 1) information crime investigators, 2) librarians in space, 3) cataloguing a cat as realia, and making her kittens part of the set (it's definitely a library geek joke) and 4) an experimental society where your peers select your spouse. Yes, indeed, how did I think that could be anything but zany? Apparently, I've acheived the transcendent state of constantly daydreaming in screwball comedy format.
In the middle of this, I realize what I thought was macabre enough to turn funny, and it was related to the fact that I saw two dead bodies last winter--suicides off my usual parking structure. I stopped parking there. It seemed sort of curse-like. After the second time, I was disturbed enough to become flippant about it ("It's raining men"). NO, I'm not turning that into a story, but that is in fact what I was thinking about when I bookmarked those anthology guidelines.
I'll go back to the crazy rocking grandma telling us the story about the ogre for now. It has a sociopathic mill-arsonist, too. See? Macabre. And a cat with ringworm. Humor. Okay, wait. That's not funny. A talking cat with ringworm. Funnier.
Okay, back to the writing.
The Queen of Attolia (29) and The King of Attolia (30) by Megan Whalen Turner [fantasy]
I believe these are marketed as YA, but I find the political intrigue to be complex enough to want to class them elsewhere--no looking down the nose at YA, but I think these books deserve a wider audience.
Good stuff. I love what Turner does with Gen in Queen; King is good, but as the end drew near it felt nothing like the end. It reads like the first half of a longer novel, or perhaps the first book in a much longer series. I dearly hope the next book is The Thief of Attolia and covers (spoiler: highlight the next line) Costis's training as said thief.
My writer brain turned on for a few scenes--mostly when the motivations of some of the characters seemed muddled, and there were a lot of setbacks for no very good or obvious reason. I didn't get as much sense of Costis as I was hoping for. He's no Irene or Eddis, or even Ornon, able to hold his own with Eugenides. But that's the only time writer-brain clicked on, and otherwise, I was able to snuggle in and enjoy the fun.
My writing is going fine. It's the blogging I can't summon anything up for. That inner voice which criticizes every word that flows from my fingers has decided that fiction is okay, but that she just can't get behind blogging anymore. "That's too mundane," scoffs the voice. Or, "That's hardly an original thought." I have started and discarded no less than six journal entries in the past three days. Oh, and my laptop ate one in which I rate writing podcasts, but I'm going to attempt to reconstruct that one.
But other than that, I'm fine, and going strong. I had a big revelation about The Bitter Road that I needed to have, which may've been the reason I was dragging my heels to dive back into the rewrite. The MS is a very sleek 50k right now, and at the rate I've been revising (and revisioning), it was going to stay about that. But the recent revelation suggests to me that it's going to need about 15k to grow a subplot, and the fact that I have room for that is delightful. I'm really quite pleased. Even if this book gets passed on by all 85 potential agents on my list and never finds a publisher, I will be happy to have written it, and happier still that I managed to make it as good as I could. And that's the whole point of this exercise, isn't it? To be happy. The name-on-spine is a mitzvah, and the money is a joke, so happiness durn well better play into it.
A very quick rejection of meaningless courtesy on "Souls."
I was kind of hoping they'd keep it a while so I didn't have to find another market. And so I didn't have to have the "throw in the towel on this one?" internal debate. It's a story that was as good as I could make it when I wrote it; it's a story that I can't write better right now. Is it as good as my vision? No.
But really, those answers being what they are, I should keep submitting it.
So. Onward.
Just when I was thinking, "Oh, noes! LiveJournal is teh broken!" because I couldn't get it to load after two tries in ten minutes, it occurred to me that a small LJ blackout would add 20 minutes minimum to writing time tonight.
Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate my journal-reading time... maybe purchase that egg-timer I've been thinking about buying.
I'm just sitting down to write right now because I was out celebrating my husband's 33rd birthday. Thirty-three is a magical number, as I'm sure you all know; not only is it the hobbit coming-of-age, but it's the number of minutes it takes for the Cylons to find you.
The latter is certainly more appropriate marker of meaning to suit Mr. Haskell's personality, though I'm sure he finds both references impossibly geeky.
Also, I maybe won at Birthday this year, at least in the Gift-giving category: as a tribute to Mr. Haskell's love of all things Green Lantern, I got him... wait for it... a green lantern. It's a lamp in the shape of a Chinese take-out box--green, of course. It's utterly ridiculous, and it made him laugh pretty good, so I win.
Okay, so I'm not actually the Queen of Virtue and Goodness, which was what I was going to claim. I haven't done a goals/outcomes report in ever, and I can't actually bring myself to, because it would be so pointless. Getting sick certainly throws a sabot into the loom, yannow? And they're such good excuses, those loom-cluttering sabots, even when they are thrown by oneself.
So, that means I am the Queen of Self-Sabotage... a little. I get to be maybe Princess of Virtue just for fifteen minutes, because I managed to kick all my inventory back out the door in honor of May Day. And I'm working like the devil on another short story so I can someday have an inventory again. I've known the end of this particular story for ages, so it's time to get it a tie and a sportcoat and start sending it out on job interviews!
I am also the Queen of Ill-fitting Metaphors, in case it wasn't abundantly clear.
Misery by Stephen King (28) [horror]
I believe it was the_red_shoes who mentioned that this is a book about writing as much as it is a horror story, and boy howdy is it. I read this one in a big gulp today, and have spent much of the evening sucking the marrow from its bones.
I--hm. I don't even know how to talk about this book. But it definitely is about writing, and it's honest about it, even with the backdrop of psychokiller and amputation and faux romance heroines.