A Writer's Paradise

Laid Waste

All Retreaters have reported in as arrived home safely, I think, either explictly or implicitly. I have been laid low (or laid waste, I'm not sure) by the evil cold that was incubating at the retreat; hopefully most everyone else avoided the plague. (I think I've taken Julie W. down with me.)

Between catching up with schoolwork and work-work and home, I haven't written anything. Of course.

If I can't figure out not only on how to stay on this horse but also how to pasture him in my household, something is going to have to give.

Retreat Works!

In spite of being sort of dehydrated and post-drinks angsty ("Am I really supposed to be drinking Heart Attacks, at my age?"), I will confirm that there's nothing better than a little time away to refocus your writing. Or at least, my writing.

I got a good start on two new shorter things I wanted to try, and even though I didn't work on any novels, that's okay, because I've really been overthinking school and underthinking writing. I'm hoping that with school becoming less about communicating with seven different people at once and more about just focusing in on my own work, I'll have a lot more mental energy. (The group work for my class is done. I just have presentations and papers from now on, all by my blessed self. Thank god.)

And I started reworking "The Girl-Prince," as I mentioned, though it's slow going because I'm at the stage where I don't even know what I wrote or meant in some places, and that's always a weird point to be in. In some ways, it's good because I can be objective enough to say "That doesn't make sense!" But I'm still too close, and assume, "Well, I must have had a good reason, am I SURE it doesn't make sense?"

Anyway. I think we're heading off to brunch soon.

Day Three of Retreat

Steve has arrived!

I am hoping that this will signal the beginning of Actual Writing for me, instead of Not Really Writing.

I did start working on the rewrite of "The Girl-Prince" based on the critiques that my writing group gave me. I'm mostly just working through the minor details ("How tall is the stickyfoam?") but I'm also contemplating something radical like cutting out one or two thousand words. Just. Cutting them out.

But I'll try that after the minor details are ironed out, just in case I wreck everything.

Uh, no, that wasn't a sale, that was an ETA

Sorry if anyone was confused about my entry about "Almanac." That's not a new sale, that's a publication date announcement.

So, while I'm here correcting that error, let's talk timetables!

Feb 2004 - I write an outline for a novel about aliens conquering us, Roman fashion. Complete with triumphs.

Somewhen 2004 - I write a "short story" instead

Somewhen later 2004 - my writing group says, "Dude, that's a novel." JJA says no thanks. Others, too. I reconsider.

2004-2006 - I don't write the novel, but I start it a lot.

October 8, 2006 - I finish a short story draft of "what went before" By Right of Conquest, and name it "An Almanac for the Alien Invaders"

October 2006 - Julie Winningham reads it, marks it up...

November 2006 - I rewrite, and send it to F&SF. Rejection.

December 10, 2006 - I send the story to Asimov's.

March 15, 2006 - I stop myself from querying.

April 1, 2006 - I stop myself from querying.

April 12, 2006 - Email from Sheila Williams. She likes the story, but not the tense it's written in. Would I be willing to rewrite?

April 13, 2006 - I comb through my verbs, and send on to Sheila.

April 16, 2006 - Email from Sheila accepting the story. I run around the internet screaming "Look at me, look at me!"

July 24, 2006 - Get the galleys on the story.

July 30, 2006 - Elizabeth Shack reads the galleys after me, and finds two dropped words and is my total hero. I send them back.

August 2007 - I get paid.

October 2007 - I get asked for a bio, so the item can go to press in May/April 2008.

March 2008 - I start haunting bookstores...

Even if you don't count the first inspiration of the story, or even the first efforts at writing it in 2004, it's still a long time between December 2006 and May/April 2008.

The three p's of writing: Pen, Patience, Persistence. Today's lesson illustrates patience.

Goals.

Well, here I am at the retreat. No one is here yet, except Julie who arrived with me, and she's still asleep.

I suppose I'd better get some goals scrounged up for this event, instead of just staring at the lake and drinking tea.

Also, I should shower.

Some news...

Looks likely that the April/May issue of Asimov's will see "Almanac for the Alien Invaders" in it.

*glee*

Advancing to the Rear, Quickly

Writer's Retreat, Autumnal Version, is coming up soon. As in, tomorrow. I'm so not ready... I told myself I had time, but I so don't. Tomorrow might be a small nightmare of logistics. Or a large one. Because tomorrow, I have to drive to Detroit for class, meet quickly with my group, give a presentation, drive back, go to work, make sure I eat somewhere in there... Then a full day of work crammed into five hours... then drive off into the sunset with my girl Julie. Directly into the sunset. Fortunately, it should be late enough not to blind me.

And sometime between now and then, I need to finish my handout for the presentation, pack clothes, pack writing gear, make sure I have any school stuff I need for the weekend packed (still have to do homework on the weekends, even if it's just in short stints), and for once in my life, not forget my toothbrush or socks. (I always forget one of those.)

Plus, go to the store.

Plus, do laundry.

Which is quite a list that I'm sure none of you cared about.

But anyway, we will shortly be partying like writers alone in the woods. Okay, so that's not so much a metaphor as literal truth. (And as usual, sounds like a horror story.) And by we, I mean, Elizabeth Shack, Dave Klecha, Steve Buchheit, Julie Winningham, Dave's sister Lou, our other friend Julie, and Dave's friend Jay. And me.

Books, and School

I managed to read three books this month, but hey, I'm in school and I'm reading articles like it's going out of style. I should have 3-4 school books to report by the end of the term, so there's that. But still, that means I'm on track to read about 60 books this year, maybe 70 if I'm lucky. That's punk-level reading, man!

Today, however, I read two chapters of one of my school books while sitting outside in the 80 degree autumnal weather. I also burned up the last of the stray wood in our chimenea, so I killed two birds with one stone. Three, really; I wanted to spend time outside in the 80 degree weather! This is so not October 21st. Well, it is October 21st, actually, and I like it, because it's how my brain thinks October 21st should be, thanks to growing up in North Carolina. But I have been in Michigan ten years now (uhm... okay... more like fourteen), and my brain is a little hesitant. It's looking at the trees and going, "Those aren't right. Those are supposed to be like flaming jewels!" But the leaves are not doing that thing, they're doing the thing where they get paler and paler and then go brown or drop off. Just like in North Carolina.

The grass is emerald green still, greener than spring, even--and the only thing that's right is the blazing blue October sky. I may be enjoying global warming in small doses (sitting outside of an afternoon and reading a book and activating all my good Vitamin D!) but things are really just not right around here.

Ahem.

The good news about school is that the period of group work is almost done; soon, I won't have to coordinate with 5 other people, and won't feel the burning pressure to not let my group down, either. It'll just be me and my schedule and my preferences for working quickly near the last minute. (I'm not quite such a procrastinator that I work up to the last second, but I like to keep it pretty close...) That should cut substantially into my fretting time.

Since September 12, I've read:

(43) V for Vendetta by Steve Moore [SF]

Yes, okay, I read the novelization of the film from the graphic novel. I'm a schmuck. But there were lots of elements from the graphic novel added back in that made this novelization a hybrid bridging the two things together. I mostly read it to tide myself over until I had a chance to nab the graphic novel or see the film again. Though, I will say, I almost feel like there was some sort of foul play afoot--why did they pick someone with the last name Moore to write the novelization? Were they trying to fool anybody?

(44) Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler [chick lit]

Just finished this, in about a day. There's much to like, and much to be confused about... it's like literary chick lit with pretensions and low production values. Worth the read, but I'm never going to like any chick lit heroines other than Bridget herself, am I?

(45) Farthing by Jo Walton [alt history]

Finished this last week, and it's amazing. Walton really knows what she's doing. Chilling, horrifying, and bleak, yet with just enough hope and lighter touches to keep the reader from going under completely. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically British manor house murder mystery... in a Britain that negotiated a peace with Hitler in the early 40s. Things are bad on the European Continent, but Britain has been a little beacon of hope for Jews and others that the Reich considers undesirable... until there's a sudden, V for Vendetta-ish slide into fascism (it was interesting to have experienced the two so close together).

What's great about this book, however, is not the chilling world-building--though that's good, don't get me wrong--but I really, really love the relationship between the married couple at the center. It's so exactly right. On the surface, the main character is a silly woman, but underneath, she's got reservoirs of compassion and strength that just make her astonishing, but also real. While reading it, I wasn't quite certain if her husband loves her as much as she loves him, but I've decided, for my own comfort, that he does... In any case, the two viewpoint characters are sympathetic in a way that I don't think I've experienced for a long time in recent fiction (outside of maybe a Robin McKinley novel). I've always liked Walton's work, but now I think I love it.

Did someone say blog??

I guess they must have.

Life keeps standing in my way. I have 547 unread entries on Bloglines, and I'm just managing to keep up with my most favorite reads. I'm filtering heavily on LJ. Email? As in, to answer? Only the stuff that can't wait until I get a break.

Basically, what we have here is a DayJobCrazy situation. Plus a SchoolIsMoreWorkThanIThought situation. And if I want to get any writing done, that means that the interwebs come dead last. Which is good; it means I know where my priorities are. I are not Scalzi; the interwebs do not making me money.

Since I have nothing on my official agenda for this weekend--except painting the dining room that doesn't want to get painted--I am going to set myself an intensive schedule of novel writing, prep for my writing group, and school work. I'm trying to decide which to do first, and for how long. The problem is school, see; I have too much guilt if I don't finish, and there doesn't seem to be any *way* to finish.

Well, at least I do manage to write. Right? Right.

Rejections Aplenty, aka, the Summer of Death

Lessee... in the past month, I've gotten the brush off from Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and today, Baen's Universe. They've all been so-close-yet-so-far.

And now, I must take those brush-offs, brush myself off, and get going on sending that stuff back out... I'll just close my eyes and think of Asimov's, I guess.

Basically, that means of all the stuff I knew or suspected (rightly) had made it out of slush this summer, there's one that hasn't been rejected yet (at Intergalactic Medicine Show).

All apropos of nothing, but I'm usually more glad than less glad in later years when I'm trying to remember how I was feeling about the whole process at certain points.

The Powers Process

I am about to attempt the Tim Powers Plotting Process.

This after I sat down with fourteen colors of Sharpie marker and did a kind of mind-map thing:

It's not done, but it got down the basics. I sort of understand the larger issues of plot and theme to this project. What project? This project:

Yes. The icon says: "It's a post-apocalyptic far-future medieval assassins story," which is true and just about all that I'll say about it.

Anyway, that's where I'm going.

I may emerge unscathed.

Writing Binge

I've been on a bit of a binge of late, which is fine (great, even grand, actually), and I'm sure thanks is due in no small part to my out-of-town journey to Context 20 and hearing Tim Powers and others talk about process. There's a good combination in getting shaken out of your rut with travel and thinking about process.

So, that's going to be my challenge to my buds at Writer's Retreat this fall--I want to have some good chats about process. Hopefully a couple of them will be up for it. Maybe that way, I can sustain my binge on through the end of December.

That would be really, really nice.

I find myself afraid to talk about any of it much more than that. I've been running into the problem that as soon as I admit I'm working on a project, I get stalled on a project. This is not a good habit. So, I think... I'll just go forth with my vague answer when people say, "What are you working on?" (answer: "Stuff.") Or maybe I'll tell them about things that are done. "I just finished a..." and tell them about something I finished a while back. The word "just" isn't even a lie. I have to be done with something for quite a while before I realize it's done.

It's all part of the process, baby.

Half-diligent, but no more than that.

I shall now proceed to avoid being cranky about school. It's going to be tough, though. I feel like I'm doing too much work and having too little to show for it. And school is where I feel like I'm only being half-diligent, in spite of doing too much work. Basically because every time I turn around, I recognize a piece of the homework I've forgotten about. (Let me tell you, one unified syllabus is everyone's friend.)

The good news is that it's Banned Books Week, and while I'm cranky about banned books, I'm desperately happy to finally (in six more years) be able to join the ranks of the people who are right on the front lines of the fight against banned books (and all sorts of other things). Seriously. How much do I love the ALA? Theeeeeeeeeeeees much.

Okay, Context 20! My con reports generally go into LJ, because, well, that's how they've always been done. But I will share with you all some of the things I learned at the Tim Powers "How to Plot a Novel" seminar and the "Writing Great Openings" workshop with Tim Waggoner. (Workshop is a slight misnomer, but it's not entirely wrong, either.)

Powers employs a range of techniques to get a novel plotted--and he plots down everything before he writes. First, he spends some time freewriting in a stream-of-consciousness way. He insists that this must be done tangibly, so that when you go off the rails, you can scroll up and figure out where.

He calls this the placing of imaginary bets--he employs a (bad) theory of winning at craps, in which you stand at the sidelines of a craps table and bet $10,000 of imaginary money before you start gambling for real. Writing, he says, is like that. When you're plotting in these early stages, it doesn't have to be for real. It's all imaginary bets.

When he has his imaginary bets all laid out, he starts paring them down. Then he puts the bets that stay on note-cards, and lays them all out and starts arranging them to his satisfaction. And THEN he gets a big old calendar out and writes down all the events that happen, in chronological order... and THEN he goes through and highlights which things happen on-stage in the novel, to differentiate them from all the things that happen but are only referred to.

And he also told us lots of little twists and tricks to get you through all these stages, but that's the framework.

I think I'm gonna try it.

Tim Waggoner suggested, before we started anything else, that we all check out the book called Writing for Emotional Impact by Karl Iglesias. I have ordered it on interlibrary loan, for I am poor, what with the school.

Waggoner gave a much better explanation for the "scene and sequel" technique than any I've read--perhaps it was the visuals. And he made some provocative suggestions for fixing our beginnings--there were people in the audience, like me, who have the problem where the story starts 1/3 of the way into the story. He had an example from his own work, where he needed a 750-word story, but had something much longer. He tried just cutting off the first 11 pages--and it *worked*. Slightly horrified by this--he nevertheless was not totally unhappy, since he sold the story...

The final thing I'll share from his talk was his solution for dealing with how some of us (us being baby writers, I guess) too often save the best stuff for the end. His suggestion? Write the story from the ending on. He didn't mean in flashbacks or write the ending first--he meant, skip the part where you're getting to the cool ending, write the cool ending, and then tell us what happens *next*.

It's a pretty good theory, for a start.

Of course, with school nipping at my heels, plus a con, I've only been half-diligent about writing--and not even a bit diligent about circulating short stories. Tomorrow, I need to send out "The Girl-Prince" again. So. I will. And I'm thinking about just chopping the first half of "Lawncare in the Afterlife"--since I can't make it any worse, and that way, there's a hell of a lot less to rewrite.

So. That's life, as I know it.

Memery

Back from Context 20. More on that later.

For now, I leave you with a vaguely troubling book meme.

From gwynnega on Livejournal:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those you own but haven't read yet.

After the cut.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary in French, no less
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice* more than several times, actually
Jane Eyre* more than more than several times
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair (I'm on page 2 or something. I'll get there.)
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales Well, most of it. And some of it in Middle English.
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world*
The Fountainhead
Foucault's pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The once and future king
The Grapes of Wrath And all Steinbeck. He scarred me with The Red Pony.
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno
The satanic verses
Sense and Sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo's nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables I tried when I was 11. That might have been a bit young.
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The Prince
The sound and the fury (No, but I should. I love me some Faulkner.)
Angela's ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers