You know, there was once a point where I thought I had markets under control. I thought I knew what I liked to submit to, and that was all fine and good.
But everytime I think something boneheaded like that, I always discover how wrong I was.
I supposed, the actual solution is to stop thinking I know anything. But still. I may not know much, but it's not *nothing* that I know. And with "not nothing" under my belt, I move directly into delusions of grandeur. Or at least, delusions of competence.
Anyway, you should probably know about LJ's marketfinder, if you don't already.
Last night, in plane delay hell (which was actually plane delay purgatory, not unlike an episode of Lost but not as sexy), I pulled out the old laptop and rattled off a few hundred words here and there of several different stories: "≥," "Gesundheit, Nantucket" and sumotherstuff I'm blocking out right now. Couldn't concentrate on novels in that place and time. Must be all concentratey now that I'm back.
Tomorrow I'm going to take a good hard look at what it would take to be back on track with the Tarot Book, and go from there. All things considered, I want to be shopping novels before spring is over. Or rather, Shopping Novel, if it comes to that. The Bitter Road rewrite, in other words. I also want to be in the place where I'm rewriting a novel by the time TBR goes out.
There was a period of time in which I was quite disciplined about writing-finishing-rewriting short stories. I think I could get there with novels. The only thing holding me back is myself.
*sigh* Still my own worst enemy.
Oh, yes. One rejection from Strange Horizons. Further and also: got paid for The Field Guide to Surreal Botany. When and if the latest "Huntswoman" reprint payment comes through, I will have made an even $600 writing in the last three years. Ah. The Glamour.
Greetings from Portland. I'm blogging from a cafe that has a delicious breakfast biscuit torte, good chai, and free wireless.
I'm here visiting my friend from college, Stephanie, and her husband and cats. A good time is being had by all (including the cats. Jake slept on my foot today). However, the real world has intervened in the fun--Steph had to go teach today.
So, I walked the six blocks down to St. Johns' downtown in search of a warm place to sit and a wireless connection. Having found both, I am here to tell you that I managed to finish "Lawncare in the Afterlife" shortly before leaving for the airport on Wednesday... It's a chunky 6000 words, even after trying and trying to rein it in at 4000 or even 5000. I can probably cut ten percent, if I'm lucky. We'll see.
Nonetheless, that's my first finished short story in 2007.
I'm way way way way behind on my novel. Tarot Book, though hast forsaken me. Or I hast forsaken thee, which is more it. I'm planning to dig in and work on it in for the next hour, and see where that takes me. I've done a lot of the hard brainwork while on this vacation, but as we all know, brainwork doesn't look like progress.
Added to that, it's hard to take the time you need to write while you are living in other people's spaces. Sure, I have a room of one's own and I have even had a few large chunks of time, now and then, but there's a certain lack of settledness and consistency that makes it difficult for me to perform. I suspect some people are not meant to be vacation writers. And by some people, I mean me...
(8) Freedom's Gate by Naomi Kritzer [fantasy]
A compelling beginning, and it wasn't all setup or anything! This trilogy really read like one long, complete book, in some ways, but was otherwise perfectly trilogy-like in others.
The setting is an alternate Central Asia, post-Alexandrian conquest, where a variety of cultures clash over freedom and religion. There's magic--djinn magic, as it were, real Arabian-nights-genies kind of stuff, with flying palanquins even--but there are consequences to the magic, and it's all brilliantly done. I love the world, the characters are humanly flawed and real, and I devoured book one like it was chocolate.
(9)Freedom's Apprentice by Naomi Kritzer [fantasy]
A middle book without middle book problems. The natural endpoint of book one forces the events in book two, which in turn forces the events in book three! Genius! There's not much to add without delving into the plot--though suffice it to say, it's a ripping yarn, with no dull moments that I could discern.
(10)Freedom's Sister by Naomi Kritzer [fantasy]
A satisfying ending. The third book delves into some (necessary) narrator switches that I wasn't really *happy* about, but understood the need for. As it was, I did grow to enjoy the look through the secondary character's eyes at the events of the first two books, and thought that the author did an excellent job making the POV switches work to serve the story on deeper levels. Ultimately, I cried over the ending, and that hasn't happened in quite some time.
(11)The Cartoon History of the Modern World by Larry Gonnick [er... graphic "novel"?]
I got hooked on Gonnick back in college, when one of my textbooks was The Cartoon Guide to Linguistics. I really liked the History of the Universe, and waited forEVER to get volume 3. This new thing was pretty good--as I said to Steph when she asked: "It has some history I might argue with, and some history I wouldn't argue with; it's a good review of the history I do know, and a good beginning point for the history I never knew." And that about sums it up. It has a view of the American Revolution that was shockingly unbiased--it was like reading about a different war altogether. Granted, I never really did care for American history, but I don't remember ever being quite so exposed to the British viewpoint.
I've read almost everything I brought with me--I have half an academic treatise on Old English left to get through and I do have The Pirates of Venus if I can bring myself to be interested in that... but in the meantime, tomorrow we got to Powell's, so I'll soon be back in entertaining reads!
Utter silence from the Lands Beyond the Transom. That's fine. I'm on vacation, so I couldn't do much with any communication from the Great Beyond.
(I am in Los Angeles. Which is a great town for stories, I think. Even if I wouldn't want to live here. In fact, I'm quite sure that living here would take the magic right out of it, for me.)
I have used the downtime during my vacation (my mom has had to work two of the five days I've been here) to work really hard on plotting the Tarot Book so I can stop stuttering along like a stalling plane. I am, I admit, using a novel-writing workbook, and doing the exercises (more or less). It's working--it's stimulating the story centers in my brain--and reminding me that, yes, the story is all *there*, I just have to stir the soup to find the wild rice at the bottom. (I made wild rice soup yesterday. Obviously.)
I have also taken the opportunity to limit my internet activities, and thus, have read two and a half books. Which totally rocks. I was all worried that I'd brought too many books, but now I'm afraid I didn't bring enough. Naomi Kritzer's Freedom's Whatever (the Dead Rivers Trilogy) series is rocking my socks. I love the setting, I love the struggles with loyalty, I love that things are not *easy* but in a believable way. The books deal with freeing slaves in a version of the ancient world. And they've got djinn. And steppes and nomads. And I'm really digging them.
And in the final spate of writing activity around here, I am 7/8ths done with "Lawncare in the Afterlife." We will see if that last 1/8th comes to me today. I need a big finish, because, well, I've managed to write 2,000 words about mowing the lawn. Though, I think it's in an interesting way.
Okay, I'm off. Today I have a long list of chores to do for my mother, and I need to call the airport shuttle so I can, y'know, go to the airport tomorrow.
A day early, I present to you this fortnight's reading report.
(5) Dark Moon Defender by Sharon Shinn [fantasy]
Much less place-holder middle than the last book in the series; this was the Gathering Allies episode, perhaps? Anyway, we learned more about the Lirrens. I was entertained by Justin, though not particularly pleased with the blatant secret-based plot. Yes, I know... it wasn't miscommunication, and yeah, I suppose there were some valid reasons for the lovers to withold information, but still. A smidge irksome.
Also irksome: in Mystic and Rider, it seemed that Kira and Donnal were lovers. In Kira's book, it was made clear that they never had been, and it was no foregone conclusion that they were going to *become* lovers. Here we are in book three... and we're back to lovers. It's not like these are simple assumptions on the part of the non-Kira, non-Donnal characters. I'm a mite perplexed.
(6) Cell by Stephen King [horror]
Ooooh, cell-phone zombies. Apocalyptic nightmare.
Ooooh, the pay off wasn't as good as the pitch. For some reason. I don't know. Maybe I was hoping for something with the emotional resonance of Lisey's Story, which, well, no. Anyway. A good book to pass the time, but this one isn't a monument to King's genius.
(7) Magic Study by Maria V. Snyder [fantasy]
Sequel to Poison Study. A good read... I could have stood some further development of Valek, but I suppose there wasn't really room. What was there was good, and it didn't suffer (entirely) from Middle Book Syndrome. (There were some things that were clearly set-up: Cahill, mainly.) Very enjoyable, not ridiculously deep, but not entirely fluff, either. Yelena is an energetic and engaging, ruthlessly practical character.
And in the morning,
I rise, I face the sunrise,
And sit down at my writing desk
And--
*bleak sigh that turns into a yawn*
Okay, maybe I'll go try exercising for half an hour... then breakfast, shower and *then* writing. Maybe *that* is the formula.
*gaping yawn*
I am slowly stalling on my Tarot Book (word-count keeps coming up short), but today I think I know why: no villains in the piece. I'm working on it. In fact, I am devoting my Sunday to Villainy, the Brainstorming Thereof.
The problem is, see, that when with confronted with outright sociopathic behavior in real life, I strive to get the villain out of my life as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Or I recast them in my head. Or... something too well-adjusted to work well in a novel. This is one of the perils of being a happy person, I guess. Not enough focus on outright villainy. (No, really, I've taken you into account already Jason, now shut up.)
In the meantime, I have one rejection and one "we're putting this on Eric Flint's desk, so be patient. Really patient. We mean it." I was rather amused by the latter, and a bit buoyed by it, which was good, because the former was the not-bouying kind of rejection.
....and I didn't write beyond a few hundred words today.
Just... couldn't. Didn't. Something. This is the dark side of stunt-writing, my friends. The dark side of that, and wanting to have some weekend, and making Moroccan Chicken Pie and blueberry strudel, and having a brief morose period brought on by inappropriate Googling, and watching Rome with my pal so she could escape Superbowl.
Word on the street, though, is that this stunt-writing project looks kinda viable, and it will be added in to the rotation soon. Hey, I have almost a quarter of a novel done that I didn't have done before, so it's not like it hurts.
I headed to bed at 3:30. End of scene. End of sanity. MS is only 17,000 words. My wordcount slowed terribly as I once more got caught in the research trap, and deleted some stuff that no longer worked.
Mr. Haskell, who is cheerleading this whole thing rather in the manner of Sarge from Gomer Pyle, is not happy about the deletions. "You cannot delete! You cannot edit! You are to be writing!"
I'd probably not be past 20k without deletions, though, and honestly. There was just no place those two scenes *fit* in the MS anymore. They referenced things that did not happen in ways that were impossible to adapt.
It's 10. I'm up, I'm tired, and I snoozed the last hour, ricocheting from dreams about the novel to dreams about writing it to dreams about Aeon Flux infiltrating a vampire mansion. Rough night.
But day two was much harder than day one. I've only accomplished about 5,000 words today, bringing the project total up to 15k.
I'd say that just possibly I care slightly too much about the project to write gonzo fast. I do occasionally correct errors, and pause to think the next step through, and today I had to pause to research clothing. Like, did Ancient Romans have buttonholes and cotton. (Ancient Romans *did* have cotton, but it was a luxury like silk!) And how did Regency underpants get fastened? (With adjustable tapes in the back--for the men. As far as I can discern, Regency ladies did not wear the underpants.)
I also had to pause to take a nap, to quiet my unhappy tummy, and to eat shepherd's pie... dinner somehow took two hours, beyond the napping and tummying. So that was a substantial chunk of time out.
The good news is, with the nap in me, I can probably keep working for three more hours. I have no idea if I can scrape together more than three thousand words in the next three hours, but hey. I'm not unhappy with my progress, regardless of the stated goal. It's 15,000 more words of novel than I had thirty-six hours ago.
With a solid 7 hours of sleep in, I should feel more lively, but I think I'm coming down with a cold. I hope the tea-pounding helps.
I'm not quite sure where the last hour went. I was awake at 9. My husband started investigating my iPod to see why it didn't start playing beautiful music this morning at 8:30 (as requested), and suddenly we were watching "White and Nerdy" and looking at my Montana photos, and somehow that took 45 minutes. So, I didn't even get a shower in... I am doing that great filthy-writer-in-jammies all day thing that has always been my dream. Or something. I mean, not that genre writers do this. I'm talking about those mainstream folks.
It's probably time to confess that I'm working on the novel-length version of The Roman and the Regency... I didn't want to jinx it before, when I thought I might cut out and start something else if this didn't flow. But it's flowing. I actually like what I'm writing, which is a good sign (for me) for a first draft.
My other option was to write the alien conquest novel that has been simmering for years now--I believe I wrote a 10 or 20k draft of the first bits and thought it was a short story almost four years ago, and was shopping it as such until my writing group forced me to re-evaluate. So, it's ready to be written... and has been... I didn't want to waste my great concept on my first novel skills, so I've held off. But I think after the Tarot Book and revising The Bitter Road and puttying up the holes in R&R, I'll be ready to try for alien conquest.
It was mostly a matter (I think I mentioned in my first post) of deciding what novel it would better to have as a 50k draft in the end. And it's much easier to flesh out a time-travel Regency from 50k than something that must needs be twice that long.
And honestly, those were the only two books I could sit down and write madly on for a weekend and not have to stop and grow plot for (like I've already had to do with the Tarot Book).
I attribute this to the fact that I notecarded them both at one point. I notecarded R&R on my honeymoon--so three years ago--and I notecarded the conquest story longer ago than that. (In fact, that was my first foray into notecarding.) For both of them, I used a combination of Holly Lisle's fast plotting and the Marshall Plan, which I will detail later if there is any interest (or I get bored and need a topic).
No, I don't think this is necessary, and I'm not working from my notecards at all; but it did help shape the plot in my mind, and I have a good sense of the turning points that I don't know that I would have otherwise. Something for me to consider, as I create my process.
Beyond that, I had written short story treatments of both of the ideas, though in totally different fashions. I wrote the short story "The Roman and the Regency" and it was only when I was cutting it down to fit into a short story that I realized I had a novel on my hands (later I notecarded); and for the alien conquest story, I knew I had to know exactly how the aliens invaded, even though I was starting the story a year after the aliens arrived--so I picked a secondary character and told her, uh, origin story as a short, and that's "Almanac for the Alien Invaders." It made me exceedingly happy to have it done and thought out; I hope it sells and all, but it did an important job if it doesn't.
Okay, done multi-tasking here... breakfast is done. I must write. After I turn on the thing on my iPod that keeps the music all at the same volume. Grr.
Seems imperative that I need to look away from the screen more often. I just had a little bit of the dizzies there for a moment. So I changed into my jammies, and resolved also to stop doing so much research. Right now I have 31 separate tabs open in Firefox, and have only made a 100-word gain in the past half-hour. But! But! Centurions! I must know everything about centurions!
I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to make it to 10,000 words tonight as I am rapidly approaching that point where, if I were a Sim, I'd fall asleep standing up in a puddle of my own piss. Sort of. I am a bit more awake than that because of all the tea, but I've also reached the point where I can't actually ingest any more liquid, and the kidneys haven't kept up with the intake.
But, really, this is all going quite well for now. Except for the dizzy-sleepy-tea-tummy parts.
Total words: 5613. I'm 10% done with the weekend's goals, and half-way to being done for tonight.
I'm only on my second mug of tea, since I curdled my original second mug. I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing in terms of snack foods. Maybe I just need gum. I wish there were a way to chew and chew and chew without getting full--that wasn't gum. Beef jerky is as close as I've ever come, but you do get full of that eventually. In any case, no beef jerky in the house. Durn.
50,000 words this weekend... or bust.
My husband said this morning, "Frazzled, sleep-deprived, pushing-herself Mer is so funny. This is going to be the best weekend ever."
With the aid of my nissan thermos-mugs, I have two mugs of tea ready to go, a sleeve of digestive biscuits, the playlist on the iPod going, and Jane Austen the action figure watching over me. Onward.
Stunt-writing: it's not just for NaNoWriMo anymore.
I've actually wanted to do a three-day novel challenge for a while now, but I never seem to find out about them until after the fact. And it's no fun to go it alone. So, I won't: I am as ready to write a novel in three days as I'll ever be.
Not that I'll write a novel in three days, by anything other than the most technical definitions--if I'm lucky and smart and don't trip over my own feet. But I have chosen a project that lends well to later padding out with subplotting, so I hope to have a beginning, a middle, and an end on paper by Sunday night, and hopefully, 50,000 words to go with them. (If not 50, then 40.) I'll fill in the rest at a later date (say, this summer, after the Tarot Book is drafted and The Bitter Road is rewritten).
No, it probably doesn't look like a good idea from the outside. My husband thinks it's impossible, in fact (in a loving way. Mostly he said, "So, by my calculations, you'll get about three hours of sleep in a fifty hour period. Uh..." I am touched that he knows my hourly word-rate so well). (And I've only ever written 10,000 words in a day once before, and here I'm calling upon myself to double that two days in a row.)
Probably the most interesting thing about this (to me) has been choosing my project. On a given day, I touch on three to six of my novel concepts in my mental perigrinations--and they're hardly ever the same six novels (though usually one or two stays at the forefront for weeks at a time, and my whole Journey as a Writer (TM) appears to be keeping things at the forefront long enough to finish something). So there's quite a merry-go-round in my head. In a given week, I may have thought of plot points or characters or a world-building detail for up to thirty-odd different novels. And that doesn't even include short stories.
(Do you see why I need so many notecards, now? Because I write almost each of these thoughts down. I used to write them all in notebooks and transcribe them into computer files or onto notecards every few months, depending; now I just write directly to notecard unless I forgot my notecard holder, at which point any scrap of paper will do, and it's not actually that much more efficient, but I fool myself that it is.)
I have a little mental game about this Door of Revolving Plots, and the game itself varies. Sometimes I feel rich in thought, too rich, perhaps, and wonder when I'll ever get the time and gumption to sit down and convert all these notecards into actual stories. Other times, I feel poor in thought, and wonder how I think any one of these things would actually make a decent novel. Either way, I remain convinced I am doing something wrong, and the extremes of both games involve sitting down and making a list of every book in my head at the moment, ranked according to how complete the plot is in my head, or how close I am to finishing them, or to starting them, or whatever. I played the game today (I felt poor), and could only come up with thirty-seven books. I've since thought of a dozen I forgot at lunchtime.
REGARDLESS. Making a list of all my possible options for this weekend's madness was fruitful, because I did come up with two options, I think. I like both very well, but I think I'll go with the shorter one, because 50,000 words is much closer to 80,000 than 100,000, and the goal at the end of this weekend is to be closer to finished with something than closer to the middle of yet another project.
Anyway. That's where I'll be this weekend. I won't probably post any journal entries about it except word counts, because journal entries take time.