1. What did you do in 2006 that you'd never done before?
Hm. Saw Mt. Rushmore, and a geyser, and buffalo up-close-and-personal.
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Did I make some?
*blinks*
Oh, GOD, I did, and I so didn't keep them.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
I have a new niece!
4. Did anyone close to you die?
Unless I'm being horribly, callously forgetful, no.
5. What countries did you visit?
None. Didn't even make it to Canada.
6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?
Plenty of things. An agent. A book contract. Eligibility for SFWA membership. Greater amounts of sanity. Winning lottery tickets. New bookshelves.
7. What date from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Hm. None are jumping out. Some good friends got married, but that's not so much "etched" as "lightly imprinted." Seriously. I have to strain to remember my own wedding date.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Finishing the stories I finished. It was like running with broken legs for some reason. Oh, and driving half-way across the country with my mother and stepdaughter. Some things at work that I don't want to talk about because I'm on vacation.
9. What was your biggest failure?
I will call 2006 the Year I Finished Almost Nothing I Started, Except at Work, Where I Kicked Ass.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing terribly serious, but I did have a fluish thing for a week in October.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
Probably my wool scarf.
12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My husband. Every year he gets wiser and cooler.
14. Where did most of your money go?
Into our joint account--for food and mortgages and all the upkeep and whatnot.
15. What events did you get really, really, really excited about?
ConFusion, J & B's wedding... Scrubs airing in syndication. Yeah, not the most exciting year ever...
16. What song will always remind you of 2006?
"Fighting for My Love" by Nil Lara, maybe?
17. Compared to this time last year, you are
Happier or sadder? probably a little sadder, but I hope it's temporary
Older or wiser? wiser, though I don't feel wiser
Thinner or fatter? same
Richer or poorer? same
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
More meditation, more time outdoors in the sun, more swimming at the lake, more finding small adventures, more writing.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Hating work, sleeping late.
20. How did you spend Christmas?
Quietly... with Dann's family.
21. Did you fall in love in 2006?
Heh. Dann and I celebrated being together ten years this winter... Fun times.
22. What was your favorite TV program?
Scrubs.
23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Uh, no...
24. What was the best book you read?
Hm... some really good ones this year. I really loved Truthteller's Tale by Sharon Shinn, Terrier by Tamora Pierce, Elizabeth and Mary by Jane Dunn...
25. What was your greatest musical discovery or rediscovery?
Nil Lara; Jim's Big Ego; Medieval Babes (or however you spell it).
26. What did you want and get?
A video iPod! And a good tenth anniversary.
27. What did you want and not get?
Maid service. More time in the day.
28. What were your favorite films of this year?
Of the few I saw in the theater... Marie Antoinette did not disappoint, but it was a bit... frail? Like, I had a hard time connecting with it. But it was SOOO pretty.
29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 31. My husband made tacos and we had ice cream cake. I don't really remember any of the rest of the day, sadly.
30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Bigger, better bookshelves.
No, seriously.
31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?
Accessorize, Lady. I have branched into scarves, and wearing more earrings more regularly...
32. What kept you sane?
Julie. Dann. The Four. Dave Klecha, remarkably (for as little as I see him). Lunches with Jason. Communiques from some Milford folks (Jane and Vaughan) (Jane, I owe you email...).
33. What political issue stirred you the most?
I tried not to let them stir me...
34. Whom did you miss?
Mainly Steph.
35. Who was the best new person you met?
Did I actually meet anyone new this year? Anyone who was a repeat performer in my life, I mean? Oh, yes, at work. I love all the people I hired this year (in a totally cool platonic boss-like way). They're very good at their jobs, and they've made my life easier.
36. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006.
It's all about perspective.
Published this year: 2 stories, but one made it twice...
"One Million Years B.F.E.: Diary of an Anthropologist in Exile." The Town Drunk. (November 16, 2006)"Dead Languages." Farthing. (September 2006)
"One Million Years B.F.E.: Diary of an Anthropologist in Exile." Escape Pod. (February 2006)
Accepted this year: 6 stories
Two "One Million Years B.F.E."; "Dead Languages" (formerly "Bound by Spells"); an entry in The Field Guide to Surreal Botany; "The Roman and the Regency"; a reprint of "Huntswoman"
Total submissions this year: 40 (made the last one about three minutes ago) 41; Postscripts would like to see "The Library Seed" (thanks for the tip, Vaughan!)
Other notable moments this year: honorable mention in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror
Upcoming publications: stories in Quantum Kiss, Aoife's Kiss (sensing a theme?), and The Field Guide to Surreal Botany.
Goals this year? No short story writing goals; my efforts are meant to be directed towards the novels right now. As for publishing goals, everything in my inventory will circulate until it finds a home or dies trying.
Finished Fugitives of Chaos by John C. Wright (78) [fantasy] yesterday (two days ago?) and am in the middle of a analysis of Old English poetry and Firethorn. Chances are slim that I'll finish either or both before the first stroke of 2007, and if I do, I'll update this post.
So. Seventy-eight books this year! A moral victory, that.
I read 21 works of non-fiction (mostly in the history/sociology/anthropology category (9 books) and writing (5 books) and self-help (3)).
The rest were fiction:
10 science fiction
5 mainstream
22 fantasy novels
15 romances (most of them Regency)
4 mysteries
1 horror
And only three books were re-reads. I think.
I read several new-to-me fiction authors this year (including John C. Wright, Mindy Klasky, Shannon Hale, Dawn Cook, Robert Parker, James Patrick Kelly, Joe Haldeman and Maria V. Snyder), as well as reading through the backlogs of authors I already knew (Suzanne Enoch, Jo Beverley, Sharon Shinn).
The reason I'm excited about having exceeded 50 books this year is because that's about the point you have to get to where they start to blur together in a pleasant way. A bad book doesn't become a blot on the memory of an entire month, but rather, you have a vague, fond memory of "all the books I read this year." It gives the good a better opportunity to outweigh the bad, to some extent. And no, I have no idea if that makes sense to anyone but me.
My reading goals for 2007 are pretty simple: read everything that's currently in a wicker holding basket under my bed. That's probably a good 40 books right there. My second goal: read everything I have out on interlibrary loan currently (I've got about four books, and a bit over two weeks). My third goal: read everything anyone has loaned me (most notably, Hardwired). My fourth goal: read (or skim) everything I currently have checked out from the library where I work.
If I make it into any of the books on my To-Read Shelf, I'll be shocked... But this is doable, perhaps, if I make it to one hundred books next year.
Scalzi's post today on rejection is good as far as it goes, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the vast majority of newbie writers who ask something like that are looking for another answer... particuarly, short story spec fic writers.
The quest for understanding rejection ate up a good portion of my brain time in my first year of submitting. I've written about it plenty. Here's a selection of rejectomancy faves from yours truly:
But not a one of these--nor any of the many entries about rejection that I didn't link to--talk stats. (Surprisingly. I really thought I talk about that kind of stuff more.)
First, there's my Stats Page, of course... which seems to bear out a statistic that was randomly told to me by a pro author I surveyed in my first year of submitting: ten percent, said she. "At or about ten percent."
Now for me, that's "I get monetized acceptances for about ten percent of my submissions"--not "I have a ten percent pro success rate." (And I have a 1% pro (SFWA-level pro) acceptance rate, I just realized. Somewhat less than that now, actually.)
And really, that's just me. So few people keep real statistics on this stuff that it's hard to know.
So the next question should be, am I an average baby-neopro? Not having come from publishing (nameless pro who, in my first year, told me she just hadn't ever really gotten a rejection), not having written a story a week (Jay Lake), and not being one of those people who rarely/never solicits for work (Scalzi), I can say with certainty I'm not ABOVE average. And I would argue that I'm not too terribly far below average, either, though I'm not sure where we draw these lines. When I look to people who seem just a little ahead of me in the race, both in terms of success and time spent on the track, I feel like I'm mostly on pace. Maybe a little slow, but still in the race.
Now, I'm well aware that the world is rife with exceptions--for years, Yoon Ha Lee sold only to F&SF, for example, which is one of the toughest nuts to crack, and yet, was the only nut she cracked--but I'm not talking about the exceptional cases. I'm talking people like me, the ones who came in a bit blind and have only what they read on the InterTubes to guide them.
All those caveats in mind, I submit my current theory: "At or around ten percent." And I'm sticking to it. I tend to think that the quality of that ten percent goes up as you improve and get some name recognition, but if you're neither a breakaway pop star nor seriously deluded about your ability and/or professionalism, I suspect you'd not be far off from a ten percent success rate.
Late-breaking rejection from Writers of the Future, this time with actual statistics on what being a quarterfinalist means! I've only been wondering since, oh, forever. (It means top 10-15%. Which means I get rejected from WOTF like I get rejected from nearly every other market.) There was an additional hand-scrawled exhortation to "Send more!" which was new, but maybe not preciously unique.
I've been living a quiet life of no desperation this week, planning my attack on a novel in January. Time to start living that life I've always imagined, and that life is one of novels. Basically, it's a "time to do this thing, now" moment, and with a little strategy, I may even be able to follow through on that.
In addition, having duly noticed and then backed away from a half dozen internet slapfights which are on subjects that I really don't think need to be discussed with this vociferousness, I have decided that I don't want to live front and center of the blogosphere after all. I'm keeping this journal for myself and the few faithful--not to entrance the masses. This was an important thing for me to figure out... eight hundred entries into it.
Two rejections this week, one from Cicada, one from Strange Horizons. The Cicada one was startlingly fast, so I didn't know how to take that, except in the spirit of, "Well, at least there was little time wasted." As for SH, one out of three editors liked it, and Jed voiced an opinion that I think is actually a valid critique that, if fixed, might indeed make the story stronger--so I'll go from there.
My plan today is to get both of the rejected stories back out, though finding e-sub places that aren't closed that are in the top 10% of my sub-list for each of the stories might be a challenge... And to at least write the query letter for an apparently lost sub... and to write at least a chapter of something. I have a couple somethings in mind, but I'm about to go downstairs and do chores for a few hours, and see what that gets me... some nice, empty-thought hard work to do brain work in is always good. And if that doesn't work, I'll go for a walk.
Well, it's not called that, but it should be.
At some point shortly after reading A Wrinkle in Time, I was thumbing through the bottom-shelf living-room books (the bigger books, most with glossy pictures; most of my early biological education came from here, as the core of the collection was my mother's nursing textbooks, but there were other subjects) when I came across Cosmos. I'd missed the chance to see it on TV, being too young, but Mom had purchased the book. Flipping through, I saw in the margins a picture labeled "hypercube, or tesseract" or some such.
Just like A Wrinkle in Time, I thought. I stole away with the book and I don't think it has returned to Mom's shelf once since. I read it three times, cover to cover, before I started high school, and when I went to college, I blithely ignored my mother's name written on the flyleaf. And the same copy resides on my shelf still. As beloved as any fiction book from my early childhood--but this was the one that made it possible to dream in a way that felt real.
That's an amazingly important thing for a burgeoning science fiction writer.
If there's any fault in that book, it's that it makes the science so accessible that I harbored dreams of becoming an astrophysicist throughout junior high. Alas, but I have little talent for math (which became abundantly clear before 8th grade was over).
So, I did the next best thing: I took as many basic astronomy classes as I could in college, and planned to someday write something that conveys the sense of wonder I felt while looking through a telescope at the rings of Saturn. If I ever acheive that writing goal, I'll know who to thank.
I think I must legitimately consider the month since Thanksgiving a vacation, because I haven't written much of anything beyond about a thousand words of fic. Plus, at night I've been dreaming about the day job (which is either the insult or the injury, I'm not sure which), so I think, possibly I've been a smidge stressed. And it's craptacular that the stress would mean that writing time has been paying the piper, but that is indeed what it means right here and now.
My accomplishment is that I keep sending the stories out, and for now, that's accomplishment enough. Frankly, I think I'm going to have to learn how to hit things in an effort to get out the stress, but rumor has it that Mr. Haskell is installing a heavy bag in the basement, and I can wait 'til then. If he'll teach me how to hit things, that is... Alternatively, I could practice screaming in an empty house.
The sad thing is, I don't even think it's work that's stressing me--it's a myriad of other things--it's just that work is the tangible and actually somewhat safe thing to dream about. They aren't work stress dreams, they're just dreams that I'm doing work at work. And though it's boring as hell, it's long been a subconscious safety net of mine. I stuffed tacos practically sixteen hours a day one summer, between actual work and sleeping, and it was better than the alternative.
Anyway. I hope to have something writerly to say for myself in the near future. And if I ever figure out how to keep day jobs from affecting writing, I'll be sure to let you know.
Orphans of Chaos by John C. Wright (76) [fantasy]
I already said some things here, and didn't feel very differently by the time I got to the end, which was abrupt in the fashion of books that seem to have been chopped in half. So, I ILL'd book 2 ASAP, being unable to wait to purchase the paperback, and being too poor to purchase the hardcover. (I'll eventually buy the paperback, to have the complete set.)
I was describing the book to Julie the other day and we decided Wright is a brilliant sort of feminist commentator. (Whether he is or not? We do not know.) A character that is likened to a Barbie doll, who's also a shapeshifter who's been adapting her shape to please men, being built from the ground up by a patriarch to want to please men... we got a lot of mileage out of the discussion.
Eager to see book two....
Trickster's Queen by Tamora Pierce (77) [young adult]
Well, it's not often that I read a Tamora Pierce and go "eh." I think the last time it happened was in the Daine series. I just never really connected with the character, let alone the story; the love interest got interesting only near the end, the catalyst-god never got interesting at all, and overall, I kept waiting for things to happen. The action was rarely face level (if that term makes sense). It was a lot of watching the main character pat down her spy network. And a lot of watching various secondary character's be in awe of the deviousness of the main character.
Ambitious, I guess, but Beka Cooper and her action-oriented Piercian siblings are much more to my liking.
Well, that's 77 books for the year so far, and I might make it to 80 (I also might not). Huzzah the me.
Oh, dear. I'm going to have to make some queries, soon. If I'm lucky, there will be the "oh, our rejection got lost in the mail" sorts of answers, instead of, "Submission? What submission?"
I hate querying far more than I hate getting rejections.
I'm being late for Write Club to jot this down, but I had to...
...since I just noticed that Tangent reviewed Farthing #4. Paul Abbamondi sayeth of my story, "Dead Languages":
There's something special about a vampire story where the vampires, even the fear of them, isn't a factor in the adventure. Instead, we have Lillian who's a real hoot and capable of holding her own when it comes down to action. The dialogue is fun and engaging, and the humor right on, reminiscent of the perfect first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Well recommended.
"Well recommended" is my favorite word-phrase-thingummie today. And this in a day when I noticed the beauty of both "cloudburst" and "crestfallen."
Cool.
Julie and I are going to attempt a Write Club meeting on Monday night. Already, the inherent problem in this is clear: I probably only have battery power for a couple hours at best. So, I plan to bring a notebook and have at the long-handery for part of it.
But in the meantime, it becomes clear to me that in order to resurrect WC properly, I'm really going to have to invest in a new battery. Given that it's now time to fish or cut bait on renewing my laptop's warranty, too (has it been three years already??) (and I think I'll fish, thankyew), that's going to be a hefty chunkage of change sunk into an already out-of-date machine. But at least if I'm buying a battery for a device that is warrantied, that makes some sense...
...I think...
I probably should talk to the local computer nerd (read: Mr. Haskell) about this.
I am in a pretty good situation, as I have a reliable desktop on top of a (thus far) reliable laptop, and I have backups for my backups, seeing as I have very excellent server space in a couple of locations. (Short of a nuclear attack, my work is going nowhere. Assuming I perform my Sunday backup as planned. Which I'm about to do. Also, in a post-nuclear landscape, I probably won't be worried so much about my writing, but may in fact be more focused on the mundanity of survival.)
Anyway. This meandering nattering was mostly to help me think it out... and to invite you, my dear fellow local writers, to consider joining our Write Club, should it ever be properly resurrected.
Hm. Water flowing on Mars... You know, just before it evaporates.
So. When will we find wormsign?
First, an excerpt from Orphans of Chaos which just struck me, back-handed, right across the mouth. Because I'm a good sucker for scientific fantasy:
"Well," she said, "I will see if you can be taken up to the Chapel tomorrow. You do not have the energy relationship in the moral direction a person devoted to his God normally manifests. Your relational structures are extensional rather than intentional, and form nodes going into two time-directions, but not toward eternity. This type of atrophy is typical of atheists and agnostics..."
Of course. Worshipping God as perceived by a fourth-dimensional being... Excellent.
This book is like Nine Princes in Amber meets The Five Children and It. With a dash of Sade. But only a dash. Rather more spanking than one thinks one shall find in Nesbit or Zelazny.
In other news, a page of practically Zen koans about writing: Fifty Writing Tools: Quick List. Via Slithytove.
And on Kiki's blog, an entry about writer's blockage versus writer's block that says rather more to me than it should. (My main complaint about my blockage? "I'm too damn old to be this pathetic.")
I'm behind on emails; the day-to-day urgencies are mostly kept up with, but there are a few actual correspondances that I feel bad about neglecting so that I can stare at the empty screens a bit longer and wonder why psychic paper hasn't been invented yet.
I'm not blocked, per se; I can write bits and pieces of lots of things. Can't sustain effort on anything, though, and certainly can't finish anything.
I've even gone so far as to try and change media--writing longhand in a notebook over typing on the laptop--and that has elicited further failures. Every where I turn, I find inspiration and no way to apply persperation. I am the opposite of blocked, at least in the traditional sense.
The only thing I can think of is to apply my creative energies to an unwriterly sort of creation--perhaps some soap-stone carving or some book-making or some drawing, but none of that seems any good to me either. (Well, maybe the drawing. I only thought of it as I typed the other stuff.) What I wouldn't give for easy and free darkroom time again...
So, as I stare around my office, looking for the key to distracting myself just enough so that some writing slips in, I notice: 1) a tarot deck, and think, yeah, I could do some readings until something comes up and 2) a copy of Water Witch on my shelf... the book by Cynthia Felice and Connie Willis. I read the library copy to virtual tatters (maybe. Maybe I only read it three times.) in the late eighties, and at some point in the last two-ish years, scored a used copy for m'self. Looking up and seeing it there was like, "Oh! Hello. I totally forgot you moved in, old friend."
One of those weird moments that probably don't strike anyone else as weird...
Man, am I stumped. Stagnantly stumped.
*headdesk*
Hungry for a Month illustrates an interesting experiment: what's it like to eat on a dollar a day for a month? My main thought while reading this was: hope he doesn't get scurvy.
I'd like to think I could eat a richer and more varied diet on $1 a day... but not by much. I'd eat more lentils, for certain; and there's gotta be a way to incorporate more fresh foods (beyond iceberg lettuce, anyway; maybe beet greens? On the other hand, if the experiment is to eat as though one is poor and eating on $1 a day, would a poorer person spend the gas to seek out beet greens?). Anyway, it made me think, and I think that was the point.
The sad fact is, it costs more money to eat healthily than it should. And to eat responsibly is another story altogether. Check out the 100-mile diet to see what I mean... not so long ago it would have been unthinkable to have the majority of your food come from 1,500 miles away, and now it's the norm for Americans, and it may get much worse very quickly, now that China wishes to be the produce supplier for the whole world.
Moving on to other topics... Anarkey posted a link to The Mumpsimus Rules for Writing, which entertained:
If you write about the weather, use as many adjectives as you can, or else your nouns will wilt and become adverbs.
Also found at Anarkey's: Justine Larbalestier's They're just techniques, people! takes a strong defense against "common wisdom" writing tricks. I'm glad someone that other people listen to has said it. No one was getting the hint about adverbs while I shrieked it to myself while driving down the highway...
And a companion piece to that, Stephen Brust's Advice to Aspiring Writers--which is, of course, ADVICE, not gospel, but some of it's good, some of it's great, and some is hilarious.
And a blog I love says farewell: Rome Historian--one of the historians who works on the HBO show Rome. Apparently, the filming is over, and so is the blogging. *sheds a bitter tear*
And at the other end of the spectrum from Rome Historian, Left Behind at the Fishbowl is the blog of a frustrated computer lab monitor at my alma mater. I tend to think that spreading this about devalues my diploma, but the idiocies are too hilarious for me to care.
And finally, esmeraldus-neo asks us to participate in a meme for science:
What is the speed of meme? People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it organic?Most memes, I'd wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. . .
For my talk at the MLA, I'd prefer being able to quantify this triumphalism with hard numbers. . . Here's what I need you to do:
1. Write a post linking to this one in which you explain the experiment. (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)
2. Ask your readers to do the same. Beg them. Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances. Imply I'm one of them. (Do whatever you have to. If that fails, try whatever it takes.)
3. Ping Techorati.While you do that, a script I've written will track this meme (via Technorati) across the internet in 10 minute intervals. It will record the number of links to this post, register their authority and create a database the very size of which will cause my poor processor to fall tumbling, in flames, down a steep cliff.
I've decided to report on books fortnightly instead of immediately upon reading.
I only have two to report for now (I'm theese close to finishing Orphans of Chaos, but nope, not yet).
Seducing Sir Oliver by Nicole Byrd (74) [romance]
Picked it up on a whim at the library. I think this book signals the trend of said library's romance selector being a secret romance-hater or a romance-nothinger ("I don't hate you. I nothing you."), because rarely do I stumble across anything other than middling romance in that collection. I wanted to like the book (based on the premise) a lot more than I did. Sexy scientist heroes are hard to write, though, especially in a Regency setting...
Terrier: Beka Cooper 1 by Tamora Pierce (75) [young adult]
It's no secret that Tamora Pierce was a touchstone author in my childhood. I probably wouldn't have liked this book when I was on the prowl for women-knight stories immediately after reading Alanna (the dislike would have come from the distinct lack of chivalry), and there was certainly a period of my life where I would have been frustrated to be reading about George Cooper's ancestors instead of George Cooper, but I'm pleased to say I'm (cough) mature enough to appreciate the subject of this book. Enjoyed the heck out of it, in fact.
This book is essentially a police procedural in a fantasy medieval world, and it works as such. I think it would work just fine if you were knew to Tortall, in fact, though the in-jokes work best if you're familiar with the whole shebang.
The good news (for me) was that it takes place while Tortall is free from the various magical animals that feel somewhat jump-the-sharky to me in previous Tortallian outings (magic purple-eyed cats being the exception to that; magic purple-eyed cats got me when I was eleven, and they are reserved a certain place in my heart forever). I rather liked seeing Tortall when women knights were about, pre-Alanna, and seeing the social trends that led to the end of lady knights (separate bathing facilities, for example).
I read it quickly and happily, and am eagerly awaiting the further adventures of Beka and the Rogue.
Huzzah! I never thought I'd find a place to sell "The Roman and the Regency" once Arabella folded up, but then a new romantic speculative fiction paying market appeared, Quantum Kiss, and I thought, "Perfect. Let's give it a try."
So, my story of a time-traveling Roman visiting Regency Bath finally has a home, I have a fourth sale for submissions made this year, and in spite of the cold rain and black ice outside, Friday is shaping up a-okay.
Hm. That was a fast response, too; I just sent that puppy off on Monday.
*dances*