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.
This week at dayjob was insane. Let's just say, my boss suggested maybe I take on a lot. To which I said, "But it never seems like a lot until everything comes due all at once." What can I say? I hate being bored.
I am trying out a new lifestyle in which I go to bed before midnight, get up when I'm supposed to, and stay up. It is very strange. I'm either getting too much sleep or just the right amount. How do you know if you're getting too much sleep? No clue. But I think it might have something to do with why I'm waking up at odd times in the early morning going, "Do I get up now or what? Oh. No. Okay." And then I go back to sleep. So, either it's too much sleep or I'm just adjusting to the bizarre land of getting 1-2 hours of sleep nightly before 12 and my body is going "but usually, you have to get up now after six hours, hey, wait, oh, okay."
I absolutely have to start taking my laptop to work again. I need my lunch hours for writing. Three hours a day is my optimal amount of writing time (while working). One hour before work is all I can manage. One hour after work also seems to be all that is manageable. So, the next place to find time is that hour in the middle of work. Only thing is, the laptop is heavy and my shoulder objects, so I'm beginning to consider alternative methods for doing this. I could: leave my laptop at work except on weekends (not likely); write at a computer center on campus and use my thumbdrive for insta-transport (meh); write at my desk (hahaha, no one would respect that).
Husband and stepling are out of town right now--not together, interestingly enough--and I've been on my own since Thursday morning at 4:30. (Now, there is a story about not enough sleep to counteract the too much.) Last night I made paneer masala and naan for myself. I ate the leftovers tonight. I have also purchased some havarti with dill and some smoked turkey, so there will be grilled sandwiches tomorrow (plus asparagus-white cheddar soup). Heavens. But, the point of mentioning my abandonment is not to revel in the culinary glee that is mine, but rather to inform you all of Mad Writing Experiment #384: The Three-Story Weekend.
Oh, yes.
I'm crazy.
Today at lunch I outlined a simple weekend schedule in which I will finish three short stories.
(pauses to let the laughter die down)
It helps to have the house to myself, and no obligations but the ones I choose. I'm planning to work in the herb garden a bit, and maybe to put away some laundry, but otherwise, I am going to write and it will rock.
I have not fully decided on my three stories, but I know which one I'm working on tonight: "The Girl-Prince."
Here's the first line:
Once upon a future time, in a spindle-tower held high by antigravity and the will of engineers, a woman slept, a poisoned trap for the princes of the galaxy.
I'm trying my damnedest to keep this one under 5,000 words. So, not only is it a race against time, but it's a race of concept against word-paste. Which probably only makes sense in my head, but you know. Sometimes you start writing, and suddenly, it's taken a thousand words to say what really should have only taken a hundred.
Or maybe that just happens to me.
OH! Also, Deb Coates has a blog. Check it out.
I should get a new category: "what I've been doing other than updating this blog."
Today that stuff consisted of going to see John Scalzi's reading in Novi, gardening, dining with my in-laws for my husband's birthday, and writing.
For the past few days, it's been a lot of work (day job work) and a little bit of writing. Also, about seven episodes of House. Somehow that happened, too. All in a row. But that was nominally time spent with my husband.
What an odious, odious time-suck life is.
Anyway, I have a potential new way of focusing my energy that doesn't involve an ice-chip.
(I read a little bit of How to Stay Alive in the Woods every day. Today, I learned that you can start a fire by polishing and smoothing an ice-chip to act as a sort of magnifying glass. YEAH, RIGHT.)
I'll discuss that tomorrow. The day after that, I'll talk about frustration again.
In the meantime, no editorial rumblings from any which way. According to my Duotrope response tracker, I should have heard something from Nowa Fantastyka, Forgotten Worlds and Baen's Universe some time ago. I think my IRCs expired with Nowa; I've heard that Forgotten Worlds has forgotten they exist (sort of. Rumors are flying on the Rumor Mill); and we all know that Baen's has been in good communication with me, much to my nail-chewed delight.
So. There.
Well, if my husband takes pity on me and writes me a script, I might not have to hand transfer all my entries to WordPress. As is, I have far exceeded Movable Type's piddly export script's memory limitations with my verbosity--and my undeleted spam-pings from back in the day.
Only 868 more to go. Or 869, once I post this.
I've been thinking about frustration a lot lately. Writing frustration in particular (though last night, after failing at three separate computerly tasks in a row, I was frustrated with everything). I was going down a pretty frustrated road here before the whole Asimov's thing. I don't think it would be hard to get back to that road, either.
Some day, I may even get my thoughts together enough to write something meaningful about that. But in the meantime--what techniques would y'all offer the frustrated among us, to stay focused and persistent in the face of rejection?
More like side-grading, I guess. To WordPress.
The time has come for the change. But will I change the blog or will the blog change me?
...
..
Right. Anyway, if things get really wonky 'round these parts, you'll know why. Bear with me.
I have an infestation of spam comments, which I've mentioned a couple times lately. This is the worst it has ever been--usually, I get an extra hundred comments, notice it, run out and burn all the moth tents delete them and close the affected entries to comments and call it a day.
This week, I got about 800 extra comments.
There's absolutely no question--the move to Wordpress has gone from "someday" to "someday soon" to "actually, a smidge urgent."
Obviously, my old method isn't working, and the intervening method I came up with (close down two old entries to comments for every one I write) isn't going to stop that flood, either. I'm using an ancient version of MovableType, too, I might add; I didn't like the single author feature of the upgrade, in spite of the fact that I've not had guest authors in ages.
We must have better hygiene around here, and soon. The time is not optimal, but it never will be*. I just don't quite know how I'll find the patience to do this.
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.
There has been a full-scale site redesign for merriehaskell.com. The journal part has largely been left intact, but that won't last long due to the fact that Movable Type Version Old that I've been using forever is a comment spam nursery, plus parts of it got hacked and disabled while I was on vacation. For good or ill, I'll be moving to Wordpress, as my hosting service actually, y'know, supports it. I think.
But that's later. When I feel full of boundless web-creative energy.
The site redesign is late in coming as I deleted my first attempt (worse, I deleted it in attempting to archive the old site). In that debacle, I also deleted my first attempt at my Junior Year Abroad essay (accompanies the Freshman Writer and Sophomore Writer essays). So, the new essay is up (about four months late), and not as good as it probably was the first time. It's also (in my opinion) not as good as the first two essays, but that's because I've definitely hit a more tenuous point in my career where I have little advice for my past self. 20-20 hindsight isn't much good if you're still stuck in a fog. But maybe I'll take notes this year and see if I can't get something great ready for next April.
Additionally, in a strange fit of what might be considered vanity, I started an index of where to find my fiction for free on-line. It seemed potentially useful above and beyond the bibliographies, plus has things broken out by genre and sub-genre.
And beyond that, the beginnings of my Montana trip pictures are up, though if I get the rest of them up it will be a miracle, as the site is giving me fits when I try to upload files.
I had a couple of dandy things to blog about yesterday and the day before, but access to my website was intermittent if not nonexistent. And when I decided to roll out my new site design, similar problems intervened.
I've got a beautiful blue bowl full of blueberries--the blues don't match, but they do complement each other. It helps that the interior of the bowl is cream-colored. It wouldn't be as pretty if it were blue on blue.... I thought I would be eating them more slowly than I am, but I'm gobbling them six or eight at a time.
Oh, and I just finished watching the movie The Love Letter with Kate Capshaw and Tom Selleck... I thought I'd read the book within the last five years, but I guess not (it doesn't appear anywhere in the blog). I remembered it quite well--the movie followed the plot rather stringently. I also remember not really liking the book all that well, but the movie was pretty, and the characters were more likeable for having likeable actors portray them. Altogether an unusual event, for me to like a movie better than a book, so I thought I'd note it.
I'm very nearly finished on my "Wedding Dress Tea Parties" rewrite. As it happens, I don't technically have to add anything else new, but I think there is maybe a two-paragraph scenelet that might help smooth things along. But after that, it's all smoothing, so that the worldbuilding makes sense from beginning to end, esp. now that I've got it totally worked out. I'm now up past 16,000 words, but I adore this novelette so much that I don't think my love would die were it to become a novella.
It's interesting to me that I'm all right with being in love with my story. It goes against my objectivizin' heart, and I've been burned fairly badly by loving stories that probably don't deserve it. Nonetheless, here I am, in love again...
Site redesign goes live v. soon now. After that, the next project is switching out Movable Type for Wordpress. I'm still weighing the pros and cons of that, but I'm pretty sure WP is going to win in the short term. If I back the whole thing up properly and WP sucks, I can just go back, right? Right.
And also, the blueberries are gone now.
My writing is going fine. It's the blogging I can't summon anything up for. That inner voice which criticizes every word that flows from my fingers has decided that fiction is okay, but that she just can't get behind blogging anymore. "That's too mundane," scoffs the voice. Or, "That's hardly an original thought." I have started and discarded no less than six journal entries in the past three days. Oh, and my laptop ate one in which I rate writing podcasts, but I'm going to attempt to reconstruct that one.
But other than that, I'm fine, and going strong. I had a big revelation about The Bitter Road that I needed to have, which may've been the reason I was dragging my heels to dive back into the rewrite. The MS is a very sleek 50k right now, and at the rate I've been revising (and revisioning), it was going to stay about that. But the recent revelation suggests to me that it's going to need about 15k to grow a subplot, and the fact that I have room for that is delightful. I'm really quite pleased. Even if this book gets passed on by all 85 potential agents on my list and never finds a publisher, I will be happy to have written it, and happier still that I managed to make it as good as I could. And that's the whole point of this exercise, isn't it? To be happy. The name-on-spine is a mitzvah, and the money is a joke, so happiness durn well better play into it.
Apologies if you aren't reading this through an RSS feed and keep showing up here and noticing there's nothing new. I think I'm going through one of those periodic "but I haven't anything to saaaaay" moments that strike all but the really good bloggers, who manage to have something to say even when they don't want to, without manufacturing entries exactly like this one wherein they complain about their lack of bloggery ambition or what have you.
It's not that I lack ambition, it's (I think) that I'm just reaching one of those points where I must internalize a bunch of things before I can reach (re)gurgitation mode again. It's not that I lack things to say, even. I have a list of entries to write. Just no feeling that they need to be written.
Back in the day (early college), when I used to be able to read French literature with relative ease and little dictionary use and no pondering tenses (pause while blogger sighs longingly for Proficiency Lost), I took a readings course of French memoirs and journals. Whenever I go into privacy mode, I think of that class, and André Gide, whose diaries written for publication avoid mentioning the illness and death of his beloved.
(When I go into privacy mode, I also think also of blocks of sunlight on the hypnotoad patterned carpet of our classroom floor and that weird mental state that one gets in to listen intently to someone not speaking your own language. I can't overconcentrate on something like that--neither a hypnotically patterned carpet nor a language I'm not fluent in. I get more sense out of a spate of French if I listen to it out of the corner of my ear, which afterwards I tend to remember in English. Likewise, I couldn't tell you what the pattern of that carpet really was, but I know that I had to look at it out of the corner of my eye to deal with it, and I remember the nausea it inspired quite vividly.)
Anyway. There are just some things you can't publish and own simultaneously. There are things I would put into a story that I wouldn't write in my blog, because then I have the distance of fiction to hide behind--I don't own them in quite the same way as if I said, "This is my life." Those tend to be the intense things (like Gide's love's death), I suppose, but sometimes they're boring little life-lessons, and I think it's the latter that I've got right now.
So, blogging content will be sadly limited to the mundane link here and there and the books I read for a while. I don't think I'm going to post much writing process even, because that's where some of my boring little life-lessons are coming from right now. I'll try to update thrice weekly at least, but no guarantees on days. If you're not reading this through an RSS feed, you may be in for a rough time.
Well, I managed to drag that out into a lengthy little entry, didn't I? For all that I had nowt to say.
...And also, I have dishpan hands even though the dishwashing liquid in question promised me soothing moisture.
Or maybe dishpan hands are something other than the stiff feeling you get after too much soap and water?
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Mike Brotherton is trying to get funding for an astronomy workshop for writers. He needs your writerly help, which you might give by taking a survey.
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Nominate the best in technology writing of 2005 at digitalculture.org. They're looking for technology writing that's "engagingly written for a mass audience... Preference will be given to narrative features and profiles, 'Big Think' op-eds that make sense, investigative journalism, sharp art and design criticism, intelligent policy analysis, and heartfelt personal essays."
I've read numerous blog entries and other things this year that I think apply, and I've already made my nomination!
Blog entries do take time. I can read my blog list on breaks at work--a half an hour (two 15-minute breaks) works just fine for must-read blogs, and actually, usually gets me through the whole of it unless people are being unexpectedly loquacious... but between time issues and privacy issues, I don't blog during my dayjob--unless I can slip in a three-minute entry during one of the aforementioned breaks.
And a good blog entry takes time--about 30 minutes. Even a less-good blog entry takes the time to think up a handful of links or a pithy short topic.
So blogging--one more thing for which I have to get focused, to form a plan of action.
The Strange Horizons Reader's Choice Poll is up. Vote for me... or don't... or vote for Peg (or Peg and me), or Leah (or Leah and me), or Ms. Williams (or Liz and me), or Ms. Burgis (or Stephanie and me) or Ms. Burgis' husband (hi, Patrick) (or Patrick and me)... or whomever (and me). There. Was that subliminal enough? (There was a lot of great stuff (and me) in Strange Horizons last year, and I really have barely touched the surface of it. And did I mention I had a story there, too? It was Huntswoman, just in case you forgot.)
Since I'm not competing in, oh, most of the categories on said reader's poll, I don't mind pointing out a few of my favorite links in said non-competing categories. I loved Marie Brennan's "Bull-Leaping in Bronze Age Crete"; Yoon Ha Lee's "The Dangerous Duckling: Images of Beauty and Illusion in The Perilous Gard"; and David M. Higgins's "The Western Genre Fled Across the Desert, and Stephen King Followed", among others.
And there was a lot of good poetry this year. I feel a bit guilty naming favorites here, but I do have to give the shout-out to Peg Duthie, in part because the poem in question is awesome, and in part 'cause she's Peg.
Alright, it's too hard to choose anything else to highlight. I'm going to stop there.
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Other links of note:
Ian Creasey updated the Milford website. I realized I really should write up something about my adventures at a British workshop or something.
A coworker pointed out archive.org to me--very cool.
Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels has a LOT to say about bad romance covers. (link courtesy my dear Julie Winningham)
Julie also pointed out to me what she termed A Librarian Smackdown....
AND Julie pointed out to me a review of one of my favorite books. Cofax's Review of Beacon at Alexandria. My one and only point of contention with the review is where it points out that the love story seems inadequate to the rest of the book (my paraphrase); I agree in part, because writing satisfying love stories does seem to be Bradshaw's weakness. (I've read everything she's published. I state this with a reader's authority.) However, I love Beacon so much (and it's also the best of her romantic relationships, IMnotsohumbleO) that I do have to defend it (lightly) by saying that since sex/marriage is the central trauma that spurs Charis/Chariton to leave home (she basically refuses to marry Festinus because of his cruelty, and part of his cruelty inlcudes a rather abusive getting-to-second-base with her, beyond what he does to her father's slaves), I totally buy it that Charis will romantically idealize Alaric--a man who at first seems cruel but later proves kind, a man who rescues her, a man who respects her, a man who seems completely non-threatening to Charis (one can almost see Sebastianus being up for having Chariton in bed; Alaric, on the other hand, possesses an unswerving heterosexuality).
Oh, it all works in my head. I swear.
And finally... I heart my president. No, not that president. The one who defends the future of books, not the one who wants to know which books you're reading.
And finally, from my aunt, the Age Guage, which is interesting because I honestly couldn't remember how old I was when some of those things happened.
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Late-breaking news: just queried to find that I'd gotten a rejection on "Subletter of my Subletter." I'm tentatively retiring that story due to the fact that it keeps getting rejected with the same message about the speculative element, over and over. I think it could be a good/saleable story with a solid rewrite (including an A plot), but I'm not entirely sure it's worth it, regardless. There are bigger and better fish to fry. It might be a nice scene in a really weird novel someday.
I had a giant revelation today while walking from the photocopier to the bathroom at work today--one of those giant revelations where you say, "Self, that is the perfect thing to put in the writing blog tonight." And then, once you've flushed the toilet, you realize you've also flushed away the brilliant thought that was going to rocket you into the next level of the blogosphere.
So instead, I'm just going to throw a handful of links at you, tell you that I may have sold another story (pending some critical rewrites), and promise not to tell you about the dream I had last night where I was an inflatable nanny who floated near the ceiling around the house and shared with children and adults alike the true meaning of... something. I don't know, my alarm went off before I figured out what that something was, but I did have vivid flashbacks to the floating and my superfly navy blue pantsuit a lot during the day.
Oh, yes, the links:
...and the reasons why.
1) A reading blog entry.
Mostly because I haven't finished any books lately. I am in the middle of... twelve.
2) An entry explaining why I read twelve books at one time.
And further explaining why that makes it okay for me to be in the middle of twelve writing projects at one time. But seriously. Who has time for that kind of rampant self-justification?
3) A joke entry entitled: "The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Midwestern Female Writers Named Merrie"
But I am going to write that some day. (The obvious joke here is that procrastination is one of my habits, but... it's too obvious.)
5) A rant about assassins in fantasy literature.
Well, you know, Limyaael did it first, and I haven't yet had a chance to make up my own list of rantable features.
6) Whining about how cold it is in my office
Because the heat is down because heating oil prices are up, and whining about it isn't going to make anyone who reads this any happier.
7) How I fixed a major logic problem in The Bitter Road while sitting on the john today.
Because that's more information than you probably wanted, and compounding it will win me no friends.
8) How much I enjoy bathroom humor.
See item 7.
9) Which is a better word: acrapolypse or crapocalypse?
See items 7,8.
10) The New Secret Cabal of Ohio Writers
And how they're keeping the Michigan writers down. But I won't write that because I'm afraid of their ninjas.
Some imp compelled me to set up a journal intended for outtakes and deleted scenes, and today, a smaller but more persistent imp compelled me to actually write an entry which offers the outlines of a plan for said DVD extras journal. The journal is actually on LiveJournal, under merriehaskell
In other news, links round-up!
I wasn't going to link to Paul Graham's essay How to Do What You Love until I found myself quoting it to someone at work today. But I do have to quibble, and LOUDLY with this statement:
Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.
I so beg to differ. I've never analyzed Conrad for fun, mind you, but Graham seems to be using Conrad as a synechdoche for all Dead White Writers, and I happen to get a really large kick out of analyzing Dead White Writers and I have no aspirations to get into teaching English at the college level because academic poltics seem like a fool's errand to me. I've considered teaching English at the high school level (for like, two and a half seconds, because I'm not a masochist), and I suspect that there are not a few people who actually do teach English at a variety of levels who would analyze gender and identity in a wide variety of Old Novels You've Never Heard Of on the backs of napkins in bars, just as mathematicians occasionally do with maths, regardless of tenure-track positions being on the line. In fact, I know there are. They're called lecturers. (Well, they are at my university.)
Don't make me whip out the "Pagan Undercurrents in Tess of the d'Urbervilles" paper I wrote for fun over summer vacation to prove it to you. Just don't.
Okay?
Okay.
Other than a few such quibbles, however, it's a good essay.
Toby has been on a link-pimping roll lately: he's had shout-outs to Guidevines for Writers (a writing wiki) and to Soi Dog's Why Writing Won't Make You Rich (Probably), for starters.
And thanks to keeping close tabs on my del.icio.us writing inbox, I've discovered Free Range Librarian's "Being Able to Write", which it now seems everyone earth is linking to. I don't think the FRL's said anything I'd argue with. Certainly nothing inflammatory like people don't write about gender and identity in the works of Joseph Conrad for fun.
Sheesh.
...I mean, you don't really care how many words I rewrote on the novel, do you? Other than it means I'm closer to the end, I don't really care...
...I remind you all that This Very Blog can be read via LiveJournal on the merrie_haskell feed.
As for those 14 of you ostensibly reading this via LiveJournal (who already knew that bit about the feed), my dollop of content is that I opened up what I thought would be a rejection last night and it was a message saying, "Hold tight, we're still thinking about it!" Which means there's still a 50% chance of a rejection, from my perspective, which is exactly the same as how I perceived the chances when I first submitted the story... but it's like it's even more of a 50% chance.
Which all goes to show you that there's no point in doing math in regards to writing.
Oh! While I'm here. Do you have a blog I should be reading? I suspect not--here's my list of who and what I read regularly (plus there's who I've got friended on LJ)--but I thought I'd ask in case I'm missing someone. Pimp yourself in the comments if I'm missing you. Er. Please.
Administratively speaking, there is a LJ feed available for this blog. Seek ye out the syndicated merrie_haskell. This supersedes writers_paradis, which I did not set up--I don't know who did, and they'd abandoned it by the time I discovered it... In any case, I was never fond of the name, nosir.
I don't know how to make it pretty yet, but when I do, look out.
I'm off for a command family performance this weekend (well, that's mostly accurate). Fourth of July... never used to be anyhting other than fireworks and wearing red, white and blue for me, but it seems like it, as with all other holidays, grows more complicated every year.
I was supposed to have gotten on the road two hours ago, but my brain refused to comply with this notion, and we both slept. Until it started giving me one of my old recurring dreams about wandering around a parking structure. It's weird, but, in these dreams, I'm never looking for a car. Just... wandering around the parking structure, like we're 80s teens at a mall. Creepy.
Allow me to introduce a split in the writing category:
writing progress, and
writing process
Progress will be how much I've written. Process will be how I got there. If I ever find myself bored again, I will go back and try to index previous entries accordingly.
That information, btw, would be categorized under blogging, for lack of a better term, though technically, it should be something like "blogging administration."
But there is such a thing as picking too many nits.
Anyway, in honor of Monday, I bring you a return of the Weekly Update, below.
Last week (the last two weeks, really), I worked feverishly on outlining By Right of Conquest. I also finished "Sticks and Bones" and sent it out... aaaand, just today, got the rejection from JJA.
This week, I plan to begin writing BRC--my schedule is 5,000 words a week--and assemble all my notes for The Bitter Road. I have much variety in my received notes on that book: some people liked it, some people didn't. Some people think it just needs a polish, some people think it needs major overhaulage. At the moment, I side with the major overhaulage camp.
Sad to say, I may have to consider The Bitter Road a lost cause, as is. It may very well need to be rewritten from scratch, without reference to the original manuscript, and with a singular eye towards following a logical chain of events with regards to the plot, and also controlling tone and character throughout. You know, like a book should be written. Like I'm trying to do with the new one. But we'll see. My work on the fourth draft will be dogged, persistent and low-key. I'm hoping it will be one of those happy moments when I realize "hey, I'm done!" instead of a big roller-coaster ride of fraught and overwroughtness.
I mean, that's what the current book is for.
This week, I also plan to make serious headway on at least one short story. It would be lovely to finish one--but not until after my 5k.
Alas and alack, LJ is frotzed!
I was overdue for making an update here, anyway.
One thing regarding email I wanted to alert everyone to... I have applied the generalized spam filters to my merrie at umich account, and that means all published email addresses for me (all of them funnel there) with the one exception of mythos (dot) logos {at} gmail... so if you send me mail and think "Gee, that was inflammatory enough to earn a response" and you don't get one, it's probably not you, nor me, but that my service provider thinks you're trying to hawk me the Vixagra. So, try the mythos.logos address if I seem unresponsive.
The other option is that I de-forward all the other pub'd email addresses and learn how to check more than two inboxes a day... but while I'm a geek, I'm not sure I possess that level of dedication.
Alas, but the comment spam is getting stupid around here. I've been closing off comments for particular entries as they get spammed, and I'm still doing that, but I believe I will add to my "weekly update" ritual the closing of the previous week's comments.
Implementing MT Blacklist might be the smarter solution in the long-run, but something about the plug-in really turned me off. I just can't remember what. Maybe the workload?
I asked a couple people if they wanted to guest blog while I'm gone on vacation, but I mostly got confused stares.
And, it's not like I have a high number of readers right now, and most of them know me personally, and won't stop reading because I go on vacation for two weeks.
And I might be able to update now and again from Scotland...
But I'd still like to not have a blank slate while I'm gone. I'm still thinking.
I've given up on writing an entertaining blog.
I've given up on writing an informative blog. (That is, full of information people might want.)
Mostly, I've got an accurate blog.
The Ancient Greeks had a word for my predicament. We still use it in the modern day, albeit spelled slightly different: "Alas"
It's a good word.
I've been trying to argue with Marissa that I'm not fen. And as I get bogged down in my self-justifications, I fail. My argument right now boils down to "I'm not fen, because the plural of fan is fans." Very convincing, no?
But I don't consider myself fannish, because I'm interested in everything. Not one particular show or author or genre, just everything. Though I've recently (and hopefully temporarily) narrowed my focus.
Right now I'm interested in other writers. To the point that I spend all my free moments searching out writer-blogs, looking for the ones that hit home. My regular writing reads, which used to just be Julie, Lisa, Marissa and Elizabeth Bear, are no longer enough. I crave commentary on the process. Every process.
I've read John Hansen on-and-off for a while, but now I've systemically gone over his archives, reading about each and every rejection and laughing because I've gotten those same rejections and had those same reactions... enthusing when he makes a sale.
On top of John Hansen, my search for a good read has taken me to:
I hope this ends soon.