So, what do you do with 62 sequential pics of a cat head-butting its owner?
Today I thought some thoughts. They were totally the best thoughts ever!
I also wrote some words. They were the best words ever!
Finally, I wrote some blog. It was the best blog ever!*
*None of this is true.
So, I brushed aside the six books on Anglo-Saxon cluttering my desk (and wondered why I think I need six, but I got them all at different stages of my life, and frankly, I *do* need them all, should I ever attempt to translate "Baby Got Back" into Old English, which frankly is my life's silliest and lowest ambition, but is on the ambition list nonetheless).
And I found beneath a book on organizing one's office--overdue, too, so I need to finish it this weekend.
Anyway, it's not that my office is disorganized, it's that there's too much stuff in one little room, and I don't think there's any hope for it. I've filled the empty corner behind my desk with stuff I don't need to see more than once a year. I've hung all the pictures and strings of paper stars and electrified dragonflies that were taking up surface space, and I think the office is cosier and cooler for it. I've organized and labeled my drawers. I have tidy stacks, and everything is more or less filed. Books overflow the bookshelves, but they are ON the bookshelves. All accoutrements of my hobbies are squared away, hidden in places where I will never find them again. I groomed my too-read magazine pile to something manageable at some point in the past...
All in all, it may in fact be too organized, because on top of all of this, I still don't have a clue what I'm doing in here.
So, back to that organization book.
The first thing the book wants me to do is to come up with an organizational vision. Maybe that's what I'm missing.
Question 1: What are the three most important purposes of my work?
Uhm, okay.
1. Provide myself a creative outlet.
2. To write for publication.
3. To sell what I write.
Is that what they mean? Because. That's not really what the three most important purposes really are. It's more like:
1. Save my sanity.
2. Save my soul.
3. Share the love.
But I don't see how you get an organizational vision out of that.
Hm. Onward.
Okay, I went through the rest of the questions, and haven't had much better luck there. Let's look at the to-do list.
Assess the types and amounts of information that come into and go out of your office.
Information flow. NOW you're talking my language.
Well, almost *all* of the vital information flow (market info, submissions, critiques) is through the computer. Like, all but a very few old school places that only take paper subs and mail paper contracts. So it seems like organization of my office means less than the organization of my paper, in those terms.
There are a few kinds of information that come in the old fashioned way. Books from the library. Reference books. Uhm. Things I put on notecards.
Okay. I can't tell you if that's enough assessment or not.
Sort the information and documents you currently have into categories for reference and action.
*stares blankly around*
Bollocks to that. I have two piles left. Just two. And they're the two I can't sort anywhere.
Draft a system for prioritizing tasks and managing workflow.
Well, I *have* that system already. It's the sticking to it I have a hard time with.
Okay, I'm skipping to the chapter on procrastination. But later. After my shower. I mean, I've put *that* off as long as possible. It's four in the afternoon!
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
...who opens her email in the morning while chanting in her head: "Big money, no whammies, BIG MONEY, NO WHAMMIES, STOP!!!" ?
Yes, I thought so, too.
(The idea is that if I get to STOP just as my email screen pops to life, I will definitely be okay and not have any rejections, only acceptance letters, in the box.)
(So far, it's worked. I've only gotten rejections when I don't remember to chant.)
Monday is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. (Here is Jo Walton's initial post.)
No, really.
It's so easy!
Tonight, in the name of webscab solidarity, I'm going to put some stories online.
Tomorrow, I'll tell everyone where to look.
Now, you!
Revving the Creative Engines
Top Ten Writing Tips to Help You Write More (Angela Booth)
These range from invigoration tactics ("pay attention to images") to small daily tactics ("make writing the first thing you do every day") to the big strategies ("set wildly improbable goals").
Fifteen Craft Exercises for Writers
I think, no question, I'm going to do some of these. And make up some exercises of my own, too. Would anyone else be interested in writing to random challenges, maybe on a monthly basis?
Mulling this over
Transracial writing for the sincere (Nisi Shawl)
A few random theories before breakfast
The Girl Cooties Theory of Literature
Ursula K. LeGuin, for example, doesn't have girl cooties, even when she writes a novella as classically romantic in its deep structure as Forgiveness Day. Connie Willis, on the other hand, has to bring in the Blitz and the Black Death just to keep the girl cooties from crawling out of the gutter margins of her novels and taking over the whole enterprise.
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.
The Snowflake Method for Designing a Novel
If you think fanfic writers don't know some serious shit, you can just leave through the back door
Useful information for writers (destina)
This is mainly just another link roundup.
Writing to deadline (musesfool)
Riffing off the notion that writing for a ficathon is like writing to a contract.
Connecting the dots to find your writing flaws (synecdochic)
Really good meta.
Three-Point Characterization (Rachael Sabotini)
Very interesting theory about characterization, and speaks to points in books where I scratch my head and ask the author aloud, "Really?" I think the reader draws the three points pretty early on with a character and has a version of the character in their head by page, oh... 30? 50? 10? I don't know. I really need to think about this one some more.
How to Write a Sex Scene
Advice from a slasher.
For the rest of my writing links, there is, as always my del.icio.us.
Someone--my mother or perhaps a character in a book--once told me that if you catch twelve falling leaves in an autumn afternoon, you will have good luck throughout the entire next year: one leaf for each month. I think, if it was indeed my mother who told me this, it was an attempt to get me to exercise.
(I've always thought this would be a great motif (or perhaps even a trope) for a story, but have never been quite certain as to which story it goes with. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, I know exactly how to do it, but by morning, the plot has always been lost.)
Over the years, I have amended this rule of luck somewhat; twelve falling leaves in one autumn, and the more you catch by luck, the better. Not that many years ago, a leaf blew down off a tree and landed right in my hand. I pinned the leaf to my bulletin board at work, figuring that kind of chance was enough luck for an entire year. Perhaps it was.
In any case, I haven't spent an autumn afternoon chasing leaves in years--though something tells me I'll be doing it this autumn with my stepdaughter, because this is definitely the kind of luck you make for yourself. My waiting for leaves to fall into my hands is a lazy way of doing things. I'm on a campaign (unbeknownst to anyone else until now) to become a better person, and one of the things my better self would be is an active creator of her own luck, just like I used to be.
But I bring all of this up, not to make promises or to announce my campaign of betterment (it's going to be a private thing, for the most part) or to convince you that I even believe in luck as anything beyond chance and probability (because, mostly, I believe in me; it's just sometimes it's easier to believe in me when I'm reminded to by things which appear to be luck), but because I ran into two leaves this week.
On my walk into the library the other morning, a leaf blew down and caressed my face. Literally. It stroked itself down one cheek, across my chin, then up the other cheek before blowing off past my right ear.
How lovely, I thought. Dendrophile that I am, it seemed like a message of love from a tree.
Today, a leaf blew into my hand while I sat outside on my break.
Regardless, I had already decided that it's going to be a very good year. But it's nice to have this sort of confirmation.
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.
I've been tweaking-and-tweaking the website so that the navbar displays properly in IE (which it does not do for me on any computer I've tried thus far). CURSE YE, STYLESHEETS. This is why I'm not really a web designer. Lack of fluency in the ever-changing world of things ending in TML.
I'm am cold. Winter is here, for my purposes: the time when I'm only really warm in our house if steeping in a tub of hot water or bundled under six blankets while wearing wool socks and flannel jammies.
I have begun the Christmas shopping. I am holding myself to a very strict $10-ish dollar limit for the extended list (i.e., non-family and/or I wasn't the official witness at your wedding) for which I am the sole giver (joint gifts go higher). This is an attempt to introduce sanity into Christmas. I am trying to come up with a thoughtful addendum to the low-priced gifts, like a wacky poem or perhaps a picture I've taken. We'll see.
I am also trying to figure out good gifts for my mom, who is now a travelling nurse and can't really be given *things* right now, no matter how lovely or perfect. Consumables (in terms of food) aren't even a particularly good idea--I was wondering if there was anything cool like an organic fruit of the month club until I ran into the sickening thought of her having to change her address with them every three months. No way. I know that other traveling nurses have told her to eschew boxes and to pack everything in tote bags, but, well, I'm not giving her fifty tote bags. It just wouldn't be any fun. I have a few ideas, though...
Writer Liz Williams noted that she just completed certification in herbal studies, and a light went on--of course! One could learn about these things from more than just books! Which is not to say I don't love my shelf of herbals, but having someone actually point things out in the field or show me the way to do things would be lovely. Well, I googled, and there's a place not ten miles away that runs a herbalist certification program, and also does nice-looking weekend classes--so I wouldn't have to just jump right into an expensive program without getting my feet wet. (Not that expensive, actually, just more expensive than I want.)
My husband, of course, asked what I'd *do* with such a certification... somehow, the answer "write about it" doesn't ever make him jump for joy. I can't see myself attempting to become an herbal consultant of any sort (unless it would be to plant herb gardens for my family--my mom wants a Medicine Wheel herb garden in her next house), but I already grow a fairly extensive herb garden, and it'd be nice to get some real use out of it. Even if it's just making sage shampoo or something. (I've been trying to make my own shampoo, on and off, since I was seventeen years old. Now I might be able to make some *good* shampoo!)
So, that's the news for today... I'm still trying to settle down and write a new novel, but it keeps not happening. If anything, I get flashes on how to fix the old novel. Meanwhile, every short story I touch bloats up to novella-length at the drop of a hat. I used to be so very good at slighting plot and sticking to a decent word-count. (I used to think my natural story length was about 3,000-4,000 words! Because that's how they all came out! Now, 8,000 is a short piece for me. And it makes things much harder to sell.) One good thing: if I just stick with writing "short stories," I'll be naturally writing novels instead in about three years.
I realized last night that if Julie sits next to me, my wireless card can't get signal. So, I got up this morning to quickly Cruz Teh Blogs while she's upstairs sawing logs. When she appears, I will go offline and write like the wind.
No, really!
I even have a to-do list! And without further to-do...
1. Mention "blood death" by name in "Rampion in the Belltower."
2. Last brushup of "Almanac for the Alien Invaders" before sending to F&SF on Monday.
3. Foreshadow the ending of "Souls on a String" an eensy bit.
4. Find "Souls" a new market.
5. In "Sticks and Bones," make Rachel a bug, not a feature.
6. Cut 500 words from "Rampion."
7. Work one hour on "Out of Medicine Hat" (which is not the title)
8. Work one hour on Tarot book.
9. Write a sample blog entry on modern scifi shows for application to blogging job.
10. Write a Christmas-related drabble for a thingie I've been invited to submit to. (Yay, invitations!)
11. Work one hour on Heroes of the Cold Island.
12. Cut another 500 words from "Rampion."
13. Work one hour on "greater than or equal to"
14. Transcribe my current batch of notes (on slips of paper and in emails).
15. Work one hour on the Midsummer book.
16. Rewrite Brook book for one hour.
17. Figure out which of my one-hour novel experiments most likely would make me want to keep writing for the next three months so I have a new novel for the spring workshop.
18. Work with Dave on the spring workshop planning.
19. Change "Rampion" to 3rd person POV.
And that's just for today.
Okay, maybe it's for the whole weekend...
So, sometime between testing my new site redesign of several months ago and, uh, now, Explorer and the site stopped getting along.
I know it worked when I first designed it.
But right now, it looks like my sidebar dives down to parallelitize itself with the bottom bar.
My face is so eggy and red right now...
Not surprisingly, I keep a title file. Just in case.
Because:
Sometimes a title comes blustering in at the same time that a story does, and that's all kinds of good.
Sometimes a story shows up, and the title comes skulking in a few pages in, late but still in good time.
Sometimes the story shows up with the wrong title, but you can't break them up because well, what kind of jack-ass breaks up a couple on purpose, even though they're so clearly not right for each other?
And sometimes the story shows up, doesn't have a title, and then a tri-state manhunt has to be organized just to find something so that the story doesn't have to go to the Van Gelder Cotillion without a date.
But far more often, the title shows up, and the story is missing in action, and the storyless titles need to go where someone will love them.
Last week I came up with "The Law of Unanticipated Nepots." Which I like a lot. But the story that made the title is an anecdote from Real Life, and just not storyable.
And I've been trying to shoehorn a story into "Gesundheit, Nantucket" for... three or four half-drafts now. With no success, I might add. (It's migrated from roman à clef to Charlotte Brontë scholars duking it out in Haworth to time travel. It's just not happening.)
I've had a recent success from the title file... the story for "Almanac for the Alien Invaders" finally showed up. Triumph! But for all of that, there's still nothing for "The Golden Trout of Vaudeville" (one of those titles that was on the tip of my tongue when I woke from a nap) or "The Gat of Ivory" (I just don't have sufficient Mafia-pantheon of gods fuel in the pun-drive to make that work).
And of the great titles I've found in spam, only "The Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443" ever really managed to become a story. (A story I love, as it happens, but I'm no longer certain that the original inspiration should actually remain the title.) Not so much luck with the provocative "Starka, Under a Fence" or the totally awesome "Watts Egotist Colony, Solstice Oncoming."
And yet, as I've sat here and typed about how dead-end some of those titles are, I have a little spark here and there that makes me think there could be something, if I sat with it all a bit longer... the golden trout of Vaudeville certainly has some legs to it. Story-legs, of course. Though a trout with legs could certainly tap-dance...
Hm...
New site design has been delayed by weak geek-fu, and rolling six ones on my "implement new site" effort. I quite literally wrote over the new site with the old one while attempting to back up the old one.
I salvaged three pages. It will take some time to turn them back into 15/20 pages, as I'd done some heavy editing.
I'm going to put the internet away now, and muse on how lucky I am that it wasn't a novel that I lost.