A Writer's Paradise

Rewriting, Critique, On and On

Lessee. Tonight at Write Club, I got a great critique from Julie on "The Girl-Prince" (the theme was "trust your writing, you don't need to tell us *everything* up front," I think). I also managed to finish "The Library Seed" rewrite that had been brewing. Major success! I got the story down to under 5,000 words (4800, to be precise), down from the 6k bloat of the post-Milford rewrite.

So, I'll send that out tomorrow, and if I manage to get up and work on tGP, perhaps that can go off tomorrow, too. (Hardly a definite thing, mind you, but Julie's crit suggested mainly slashing and cutting and tightening, which are all easier than the stuff I was doing to tLS.) If I don't send it tomorrow, see, it doesn't go until July 10th or so--I'm on vacation next week.

In case anyone is interested... Here's the current status.

"The Lonesome Dark" @ Baen's Universe c. 149 days
"Rampion in the Belltower" @ OSC IGMS c. 76 days
"Sun's East" @ Electric Veloc. c. 73 days
"The Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443" @ Asimov's c. 62 days
"Sticks and Bones" @ Interzone c. 57 days
"Lawncare in the Afterlife" @ Strange Horizons c. 44 days
"The Library Seed" @ WOTF c. -1 days

plus some reprints (2 "Huntswoman" to foreign markets, 1 "Dead Languages" to Escape Pod, plus one thing I am about to withdraw ("Souls on a String"), plus one thing I'm about to finish ("The Girl-Prince").

Nine. NINE THINGS. So few. *is sad*

Contracts and Gardens

I got the contract from Asimov's today. Er. Friday, actually. At that point, we learned that Asimov's publisher also puts out the word games magazine my husband is so fond of, because he though the envelope had something to do with that.

I spent the rest of the day on house tasks:

• picking out paint for the dining room
  
• weeding the herb garden
  
• taking down a wasp nest that had inconveniently grown up inside the bird feeder (yes, I felt bad on two fronts: that it had been so long since we fed the birds, and also, killing a whole family of anything, even wasps, feels evil)
  
• watching home improvement shows on HGTV
  
• feeding the guinea pigs while Mr. Haskell cleaned the cage

What I learned:

• my husband prefers darker greens over lighter greens, even on dining room walls
  
• I'm no fonder of weeding than I ever was
  
• I might be more interested in Jainism than I previously expected, but I am also no more interested in getting stung than I was before. A dilemma. (The bird feeder is in a highly trafficked area of the yard.)
  
• We definitely have more house than we need, at the moment. What we have lets us get away with clutter in a big way.
  
• Two guinea pigs are better than one. Never ever keep social animals in isolation. Duh.

5,000 Hits

I'm looking for a market for a short story (as one does), and it occurs to me that I haven't tried this particular story at Writers of the Future.

And it also occurs to me--I might have breezed past the eligibility requirements for WotF without realizing it. Rule four clearly states:

The Contest is open only to those who have not had professionally published a novel or short novel, or more than one novelette, or more than three short stories, in any medium. Professional publication is deemed to be payment, and at least 5,000 copies, or 5,000 hits.

Hm... 5,000 hits, huh?

Okay, I've got Strange Horizons and Asimov's under my belt now. No real questions there. But I have to wonder about Escape Pod, which has thousands of subscribers. I'm guessing that notion of copies/hits don't fall under the podcasting model? And also podcasting != publication?

It struck me just enough to cause a moment of concern, nonetheless. I suspect it won't be terribly long before podcasts claw their way out of the hole of disregard where webzines used to dwell. Until then, I'm okay with it--because for right now, it works to my advantage.

It has lately come to my attention that certain folks look down on WotF. Certain hidebound, exclusionary types, as far as I can tell. As I believe that the contest has nothing to do with Scientology other than L. Ron Hubbard had something to do with both, I have no problem with WotF. Winning the contest would be an awesome nose-thumbing opportunity. I'm actually kinda glad I have time left to submit there.

New Resolution

I've been thinking that I need to enforce some rejection goals for myself. And that it's no bad thing to do this publicly. I was thinking to call this project "20 or 200" (actually, I was initially going to call it "60 or 600", but that's ridiculous)--as in, no giving up on a short story until it has 20 rejections, no giving up on finding an agent until a particular MS has 200.

Hm.

Or maybe "30 or 300."

Or maybe I'm going to have to accept my numbers aren't going to be the image of symmetry. ("25 or 200")

Anyway, since I'm not doing this entirely for myself--I mean, I have a pretty good case of stick-it-out-itis, though it does falter--but rather, I'm trying also to model persistence. I wonder what else would be helpful? Samples or quotes from rejection letters? Scanned rejection letters with funny comments (ones that won't burn any bridges, of course)?

This isn't a terribly unique idea. Rejection Collection is way ahead of me on this one, but not in a good or positive way. And I remember stumbling across a website with a collection of form rejections from every place this particular author had tried--but not much commentary or discussion.

I just know that when I was going through the five stages of grief every time I got an SASE back in the mail, I would have cried from happiness to find some insightful commentary on rejection. I go through periods of information-voraciousness now and again, and the early days of submitting stories was one of them. I never could find enough info on rejection--what was normal? What was to be concerned about? Are they trying to make me cry?

So. Yeah. Look for that.

The Strangeness of Falling Out of Love

I'm writing a story I thought I'd love to write. I started it at some point, and then an anthology came along for which it would be perfect--which, I'll note, I was not asked to join, and to which the editor responded to my query, "Yeah, okay, I'm expecting something in that vein already, but send it along since you're working on it."

This weekend, I kicked myself in the 'tocks to really get going on it, and I've got about 2000 words, need only 1000 more. But there's no spark. No life. I'm deeply unexcited about my setting, suddenly; I think, "This would work so much better as fantasy instead of alternate history."

Self-sabotage or the beginnings of wisdom?

Now, consider this:

I've set some goals for myself this summer. Not written in stone--more written on whiteboard. Anyway, one of them goes like this: go through the anthology listings on Ralan's and see if I have anything written or anything well-begun that fits the guidelines. I found eight stories for six projects.

There is, of course, no way I'm going to write 8 stories this summer. Not while working on a novel, too.

So, I have some room to be picky.

So, should I just pick myself right off this market?

Probably. I'd have to add 1,000 words to meet the minimum for the market. And I don't really have 1,000 words of story. And I don't want to submit a sub-par story.

And YET: I know when the anthology comes out, I'm going to kick myself if I didn't submit even a sub-par story.

So, yeah. I know what I'm probably going to do: finish out the 1000 words, and then work very strenuously with the rewrite. I won't lose much time, I'll be able to say I tried, and if it gets accepted, fantastic. And if it doesn't? I scrap the whole thing as historical, and put it into play as fantasy. It would go great as a subplot in the Tarot Book.

And I'll hope this works better than falling out of love but staying together for the kids.

Rewriting: The Picture Book Method

Maureen at work (harpist, possessor of long red-blonde hair that belongs in a Celtic tale, and otherwise cool chick) pointed out a site that lets you play with images from the Bayeux tapestry* and make a story.

Since I'd been rewriting "The Girl-Prince" and sort of failing at the beginning, I thought, "Hey, let's see what happens in Picture Book Mode." Beginnings are my particular demon. They get considerably less demonic in Picture Book Mode, I am happy to report.

Now, I share with you. It's not precisely the wording I'll use, but it's close.

Beyond helping me turn a page-long beginning into a paragraph, I now have a lovely teaser for "The Girl-Prince." Not that one needs teasers for short stories, but I have one, and it's cool.

I hope it's clear in the last picture that the thing that's not a woman is a rocket. I used the image of a cooker and a castle and stacked them. I was sufficiently convinced that it could stand in for a spaceship. I hope you are, too.

*The emailing/saving function didn't work quite as planned, but I have ways beyond their kenning to save my work. Mainly--print-screen and judicious application of Photoshop.

Finished

I finished "The Girl-Prince" last night.

I was explaining to Julie at lunch today how, when I started the story, and it seemed well-begun at about 750 words, that I assumed it would top out around 3k, 4.5k max. HAHAHAHA. Apparently, in my new lexicon, well-begun means "10% done." Oy. Yes. The story did indeed expand to 7,500 words by the end.

It also turned from a fable to a dungeon crawl, and I'm still not at all sure how I feel about that. My main concern is this: dungeon crawls are fun. Is this fun? Do I even know how to write such things? In looking over my initial notes for the story, I don't see how it could have been other than a dungeon crawl--my initial notes were the story opening and then a list of obstacles: stickyfoam, net guns, non-Newtonian fluids, laser fields... yah. Okay. I wasn't fooling anyone except myself.

As usual.

Also, I have no clue if I have managed to satisfy my inner feminist with this story. I was going for a paradoxical situation, where the girl raised to be super-heteronormative kicks off the shackles of the patriarchy and does what needs doing. But in a very simple, unconflicted way. I'm unconvinced at the moment. We'll see what the rewrite holds.

But anyway. Yay, story!

On to the next one!

The Utterly Heinous Truth

1) "The Girl-Prince" was supposed to be done last week. And then I gave myself Sunday. And then Monday. And now it's like, what, Thursday? And I've finally, finally reached the ending. Reached it. But not gotten through it.

Seriously, I wasn't goofing off at all, except maybe one night. I wrote seriously at this story, and with diligence. It still took me nearly two weeks to lay down 6k (of this story; I did manage a few days of novel in there, which you know probably didn't help this story get done).

I lacked the same amount of time I always lack. So I'm beginning to wonder if I lack the brain capacity to write a story any faster. I dunno. Might be time to call Write Club back to order, and/or to sacrifice some of my sleep budget? Except I was nudging my sleep budget by 30-45 minutes a night early this week, and ended up taking a two-hour doze on the couch one morning, straight through water aerobics.

Now. One thing is, my new exercise regime definitely sucks serious time out of the budget. Of this, no question. I knew this all along, which is why I kept not exercising. I just finally reached the tipping point where my health--and the health of my future child (no, not pregnant, but hoping to be sometime in the next five years)--has become ascendant. This has not led to a reduction in writing, but rather a more focused effort because I know the time I have available to write is reduced.

At the same time, I feel like all my life consists of is getting the kid up, hygiene, food, exercise, work, food, and writing. I don't feel like I've seen enough of my husband since Memorial Day. Fortunately I can read and socialize on my lunch (half-)hour, so I'm not a total mess, but still.

I really miss staying up past 10:30.

Anyway, the utterly heinous truth is, as disciplined as I've been, I've not seen so much pay-off that it feels worth it.

2) Taking out my wireless card means I am terribly behind in my blog-reading. In what time I do have to read, I skim mercilessly. I am missing a lot. This both stinks and is wonderful. I absolutely couldn't be doing what I'm doing if I didn't cut back on internet.

And the second utterly heinous truth is: the internet is one clear and obvious place in my life where I can cut out time and effort.

*bleak sigh*

Books

The most recent spate of books:

(22) The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver [mainstream]

(23) Medicus by Ruth Downie [historical fiction]

(24) The Ghost Brigads by John Scalzi [SF]

(25) The Way of the Cheetah by Lynn Viehl [nonfiction, writing]

Impressions after the jump.

The Post-Birthday World has echoes of Sliding Doors and could be considered a work about alternate universes or time-streams. Mostly, it read alternately like an experiment in defending cheating on your SO (cheat first, or you'll get cheated on), an apology for why it's okay to make risky decisions or less moral choices in your life (at one point, the protagonist says, "I learned I wasn't a saint" or something like that), and an exploration of narrative choice. Not that it wasn't enjoyable at times--it was--but I found some of the character's maddeningly cruel or annoying or... whatever.

Medicus: well, I'm just a sucker for Roman doctors, okay? You can blame Gillian Bradshaw for that. I didn't get totally sucked in with this as though it were a Bradshaw novel, but this was Plenty Good, and I enjoyed it.

The Ghost Brigades: I started arguing with Scalzi in my head about some of the details of consciousness transferral, but by the time I was getting good and ranty about it, the pace took off at the speed of light, and I was too busy flipping pages and reading as fast as I could to care anymore. So. I hope you weren't looking for a good dissection. This book, I felt, read a lot faster than 90k, incidentally.

The Way of the Cheetah: this is an ebook. I bought it--yes, I did--and printed it out, and then I read a lot of it during my leisure time in the mornings, leaving it out where my husband could read parts of it. He pointed out that the section on editing wasn't very well edited (he meant copy-editing). In spite of that, it has some good exercises that I look forward to doing, and had a really important message to writers about not caring what other writers are doing/saying/eating for lunch. It only stands in the way of your own work. And how..

I'll take this over a flying car (for now)

So, after complaining to my husband about how writing at my desk while using my laptop makes my wrists hurt, we debated about the most effective method to eliminate this trouble.

We considered an additional keyboard that would plug into my laptop. Problem: where do you put the desktop's keyboard, then?

We considered a splitter. Problem: Really, they don't make that kind of splitter. We think.

We considered unplugging the keyboard from my desktop and plugging it into my laptop. Problem: Pain In The Butt. Also, we'd need a female PS/2 to male USB converter.

Then, in a moment of brilliance, my husband remembered Synergy, which plays to our local strengths (all our computers are networked), and... is free.

The only drawback is that I have to keep my wireless card in my laptop to make it work, but after a week of having it out, maybe I can recognize that a little self-discipline goes a long way here. I've had one of my most productive weeks on record since getting a wireless card, basically.

That's SAD, by the way, and I'm fully aware of exactly how sad.

I haven't finished the story I said I was going to finish, but not for lack of going pell-mell at it with all my heart. I can probably finish it tonight, if I manage to keep its demonic tendancy to grow in check. (It's a slender 2186 words at the moment. With discipline, I should be able to tell the rest of the story in very few more words. Sure. It could balloon to 6k. But I'm trying to be more concise.)

I have also managed an extremely creditable amount of work on my novel, too. I am definitely in the honeymoon stage with it; I can't picture running out of plot or not knowing what comes next. Yes, I know it can't last. But it sure doesn't hurt that I've been working on this book on one level or another for the past, what, five years? I hatched the premise sometime before that, I think, but since then, I've written two related short stories (of varying degrees of success) and have made running starts at this novel three or four times. And I've outlined it twice. If anything, I have too much material, but to pad is human; to cut is divine.

Writing Software Q (and at least one A) [PC Users]

Does anyone have any experience with Liquid Story Binder?

It looks like it has a lot in common with my current software, yWriter.

yWriter has the advantage of being free. It definitely works better for me than an endless stack of MS Word files, either unlinked or linked through the Outline mode. There is the EXTREMELY awesome word-count feature (where the thing tells you how many times you used each word; once you scroll past "The" and "I" and "said," it's fantastic and useful).

Disadvantages: text-based files means that there's no spellcheck, no proper way to underline, no changing your font to Courier. I worry about printing out the final product--I'm almost certainly going to have to move the whole thing into Word to get the proper formatting, and I'm going to have to hunt down every instance of *asterisks* to convert to underlined (in order to indicate italics, of course) when I print it out.

Also, the story outliner is in a very tiny box. I would say "uselessly tiny."

It seems to have fewer bells and whistles than Binder, but I'm not sure if I need them or if they'd just end up distracting me. Would be nice to be able to put photo-references and what not right in the file, of course. But not necessary. I suppose, if it could contain all my research too, it would be a true wonder.

Trying it is free for 30 days. The only catch with that is that I'm not going to finish a novel in 30 days, and am I going to be happy about offloading my work in 30 days if it's not worth (to me) the $45?

Here's the Plan

I have been kind of absent here lately, as you no doubt well know.

First, there was the perfect storm of evil cold + jury duty, which I mentioned.

Then, I was reluctant to keep adding entries when I thought I was going to have to hand convert them all over to Wordpress. (Silly, but true.) But now my husband thinks he can mess around with SQL for me and save me a hell of a lot of trouble. MY HERO. (It's stuff I should probably know, but, eh. I know other things.)

Then I handed my wireless card over to my husband with the admonishment not to give it to me before 10PM on any night (and only on request), and my productivity shot through the roof.

So. My new rule is: during the week, internet only at work until after 10. And that means lunchtime ruminations on ye old blog for the forseeable future. Expect more (better?) brevity in future. Especially since I am cutting my lunch hour to a half hour so I can come to work later to accommodate my exercise class and my new (more distant) parking spot.

I'm performing a lot of experiments this summer, not just in parking and exercise and internet usage. I'm attempting to write a story a week (the Jay Lake method). Based on my efforts so far, this is turning out to be 300-500 words a night, and I am expecting to make a big push on the weekends to finish the pieces. In addition, I am working on the novel regularly (not the Tarot Book, but I don't think I'm going to say which book, since whenever I talk about the novels I'm writing I seem to curse them. No, none of my experiments this summer are going to involve decreasing magical thinking).

My reasons for the short story push vary, from the mundane to the meta:
1) I want/need more stories in circulation.
2) I want to write all the short stories that I've got in my front burner folder, thus clearing the mental front burner for novels.
3) They are good ideas and deserve to be completed.
4) The feeling I get from finishing is almost as good as the feeling I get when I publish something. So why not aim for the feeling I can control? Particularly when the feeling I can control is a prerequisite for the feeling I can't?
5) I want to know if I can do it.
6) I need to STOP rewriting stories between submissions. Like now. No. Like last year sometime.

At some point it occurred to me that perhaps my experimentation was tending towards the "out of control" side of things, but really, I'm remembering that I'm just like this in the summer. Around about March, I start getting enough sunlight, and everything just gets a hell of a lot easier. EVERYTHING. From getting up in the morning to solving problems to just plain doing things. Procrastination is my watchword all winter, but in the summer, I do things.

I am beginning to wonder exactly how to harness this knowledge to avoid the winter doldrums. I mean, I already have done a few things (we have full-spectrum lamps in the house, and all that; and my work schedule has shifted from 8 am to 5pm (go to work in the dark, come home in the dark) to 10 am to 7 pm (only one leg in the dark), and that was an awesome boost to my health and well-being. But.

*sigh*

Well, in six more years, we can consider moving someplace sunnier. Until then, I'm guessing a sun lamp is the next step.

Anyway. The other key to my current productivity plans is my continually evolving "talking to myself" with the voice recorder on my commute. I always get my best ideas when I'm moving--walking or driving. Rather than try to write at red lights and on straight-aways, this seems a much safer option. I have managed to noodle through problems of story that have been stumping me for years because I wasn't having any luck with the brainwork part of writing.

Mostly, I just turn on the recorder, pick a story from the front burner and start listing plot options.

And it's totally awesome.

And later, when I'm like, "Hey, what was that thing?" I just dial up the recording. Since I record onto my iPod, it's super-easy, because I already take my iPod everywhere. Just like the pod creature Apple wants me to be.

So, in short, I am awesome, and my writing is awesome. How are you?