It's no question that I lack focus. I lack it, lack it, lack it.
Stick with me, that becomes important later.
In conversation with Julie the other day, I realized--I might not actually be ready for real novels yet. Not full-length, 90,000-word novels. Follow my logic.
My early writing efforts aside (those halcyon days of junior high and high school, and even late elementary school, when I used latch-key kid-dom to my advantage by writing solidly for hours a day), since I have buckled down for the Serious Writing (ie, mid-2003 and on), I've been writing longer and longer pieces. I started out with 2,000-4,000 word short stories. I even experimented with flash (even published something only 187 words long). But slowly, I started writing longer and longer works. My last few short stories have all been novelettes, technically, with one or two exceptions where I squeaked by into short story territory by a couple hundred words. It's not something that keeps me up at night, in spite of the few markets for things like the 15k-word monstrosity that is "The Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443." Not a few of my stories have been rejected in part because of their length, or because I'm trying to fit too much into too few words. All of this has made it clear to me that I need to move on to novels. I have some big ideas. Pretending they aren't big is silly and wastes everyone's time.
But the jump between 15k and 90k is pretty damn huge. Especially since I've never done 90k before. That's right. My only completed novel (completed as an adult, anyway) to date is a 60k YA novel.
I have dallied with rewriting that first novel, but too often it becomes clear to me that the thing is deeply, deeply flawed, and I don't yet have the objectivity to gut it completely and start afresh. Plus, as much as I'd learn while rewriting it, I'd learn far more finishing a new novel. Hence the now epic number of begun-but-not-finished novels in my drawer. I have 50k of a Regency romance done, 20k of another, 30k of an urban fantasy based off of "Dead Languages," 25k of a crazed second world fantasy, 10-30k of about six different versions of the same science fiction novel.... More than that, even, but I really don't want to go looking.
Did I mention I lack focus? "Lack it, lack it, lack it."
Thing is, I'm chock full of ideas. Full to the rim. I start on one project, and other ideas swarm to the surface, trying to take me down. Like giant mansquitos. (Yeah, I said mansquitos. Look it up.)
But I read an article just this week! Focus on two priorities, one month at a time. And I read this other article! About weekly reviews of progress and goals and everything. And I think, wow, if I can apply these two methods for just a few months, I'll probably get somewhere I need to be, and soon. And maybe, along the way, I'll learn the fine art of focus.
So, I'm hauling out the calendar and writing down some goals, and I promise that I will faithfully report back here on a weekly basis.
I'm going to start on Monday, though I'm unofficially starting today. This weekend is a jump-start, a quick kick-off, a sprint out of the starting gate. On Monday I'll see where I am, set the goals for the week, and the following Monday, I'll report in. And I will do this for each subsequent Monday until April 10th (which is my birthday. And for my birthday, I've promised myself a novel). And if it works great, I'll be continuing, and if it doesn't, I'll be trying the next thing, but either way, I'll have a stack of MS pages at the end.
Anyway, that's what's going down over here. Stay tuned. If you dare. I don't promise there won't be mansquitos.
You can tell it's been far too long since I've actually written. I opened up my works-in-progress file and sort of hovered over it, eagerly, wondering what to poke at first.
Yay!
There's nothing like assigned work (i.e., this paper I have due on Wednesday for school) to make the urge to write fiction nigh unto overwhelming.
So, everytime I finish a page of school work, I get to reward myself with writing fiction for half an hour! Isn't that tidy?
And a little scary how the work of fiction writing has become my reward. But that's probably how it should be...
A wise manager once said to me: "Management is like white water river rafting. You may get into the boat thinking that the real goal is the calm pool at the end of the course, but you'd be a fool."
And I have to say, every time I don't apply that to writing management, I am indeed a fool.
In other words, I have spent yet another hour trying to figure out a way to manage my writing time, to make some solid, concrete goals for myself that I can actually fill, and at the end of it, I wondered, "Who am I kidding? If I stick with this method for a month, I'll be damned lucky."
But now that I remembered that pithy bit of managerial advice, I have realized that the calm pool in this scenario is the idea that I'll ever be easily sitting down to write with the same placid determination, day in and day out.
Other people might.
I can't.
Finding writing time and using it wisely is definitely a class four river for me.
Some days, class five.
I have to accept that for me, it's going to take daily self-coaching and self-management, and if I can stick with some writing method for a week, that's going to have to be good enough. Clearly, I am a problem employee for myself. But I've got potential, and I can be brought along. My other work is worth the effort.
Right?
Right!
Why, I asked myself, do I keep doing wonderful work at figuring out plot-turns and such in the car on the way home--even managing to record this information, so it's not lost--and then, when I get home, I can't seem to write it all down?
Because I'm not a transcriptionist. Apparently, the part of writing that I like best is the part where I figure out what happens next. And if I do that, and have the story all set, I am reluctant to simply transcribe it from my brain to the Word document.
Oh.
I write to figure out what happens next.
Coupled with a recent revelation that I kinda sorta enjoy rewriting, I have come up with this order of preference for writing process events:
1) figuring out what happens next
this is clearly the most fun. Except when it's not
2) working out major revisions
because it means we're done soon. And somehow it makes me feel clever
3) writing itself--the physical act
surprisingly unsatisfying when not coupled with number 1. I think that there may be a way around this, though
4) just about everything else, except number 5
5) diagnosing the story for revision
figuring out what is wrong is so much harder than figuring out how to fix what's wrong
So. Yeah. I guess knowing this helps me. Somehow.
I am slowly stalling on my Tarot Book (word-count keeps coming up short), but today I think I know why: no villains in the piece. I'm working on it. In fact, I am devoting my Sunday to Villainy, the Brainstorming Thereof.
The problem is, see, that when with confronted with outright sociopathic behavior in real life, I strive to get the villain out of my life as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Or I recast them in my head. Or... something too well-adjusted to work well in a novel. This is one of the perils of being a happy person, I guess. Not enough focus on outright villainy. (No, really, I've taken you into account already Jason, now shut up.)
In the meantime, I have one rejection and one "we're putting this on Eric Flint's desk, so be patient. Really patient. We mean it." I was rather amused by the latter, and a bit buoyed by it, which was good, because the former was the not-bouying kind of rejection.
I started writing the Tarot Book when I was thirteen or so. For certain values of "started" and "writing" and "Tarot Book." I began with a map and a handful poems, I never thought I was writing a book, and back then it was called "Arcana: A Journey." I have the original text that interwove the poetry, typed out on my first writing machine (half typewriter, half primitive word processor), in a folder, where I dare not glance at it until I get much further along--like say third rewrite along--on the Tarot Book in its present incarnation.
Admittedly, part of the reason I was writing the book-thing when I was thirteen was because it was license to swipe Mom's tarot cards. That's even the deck that's sitting on my desk right now, to the right of the computer. (The fractious Medieval Scrapini Tarot sits on the left.)
Anyway, I had been Quite Stuck on this book for the last few days, which was okay since Life was interrupting (as life does). But today I resolved that I'd find a way to send a man through the door with a gun (as writers do when things get boring). Of course, in this medievalesque society, there aren't guns. Maybe blunderbusses, but no, not even those. (Weird. I almost wrote "thoughs" instead of "those." That's a new one.)
I took Donald Maas's Breakout Novel Workbook to work today intending to force some inspiration and brainstorm a turning point if it killed me, but before I even pulled the book out of my bag, I realized exactly what the proper next turning point is--how and where I needed to raise the stakes. It was blindingly obvious once I thought of it, in fact. So, I scribbled down some notes and came home.
And then I pulled out Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, which just so happened to be the other thing I swiped from my mom all those (eighteen! man I'm old!) years ago for the sake of "Arcana" and started reading up on wands.
I stumbled across this sentence: "Surprise, wonder, enchantment, trouble, and fear." And I thought: "That exactly describes being thirteen." (It also describes the Two of Wands, FYI.) When I think back to the planning stages of "Arcana" and reading the Pollack books and swiping Mom's cards to write, nightly, with one of them stuck upright above the number keys of my keyboard, and all the little moments of beauty (and enchantment and trouble and fear) where I thought "This! This I can use in the story"--from the first time I put on silk longjohns on a cold winter's night and noted the decadent feel of the fabric on my legs, to the night I bunked down before the woodstove with my dog at my aunt's house, to the moment I stepped out of a hotel room into a wall of orange fog (orange from the sodalights in the parking lot), to the first time I noticed cloud cover so low I felt like I could reach up and touch it... Every moment was fodder for the brain cows.
I've decided to write this book six or seven times since then--including the once grand ambition where I thought I'd draw my own tarot card and write the accompanying story-piece about it and put them up on the web weekly or daily or some mad thing--and each time, the characters aged with me. But when I sat down to the computer on January 1st this year, I knew that the character was thirteen, and that the story was really for me, that old me, that me from when I was thirteen, and that is, indeed, how this book became YA--or returned to YA.
My main goal at this point (besides finishing the book) is to scrape away my veneers of calmness and wisdom and jadedness and ironicality and skepticism to get to the grain of the thirteen-year-old girl I once was... where everything is "surprise, wonder, enchantment, trouble, and fear." And write the truest book I can.
I am slowly creating order out of chaos. Slowly. Insert typographical indications of slowness here (extra spaces are nice).
This is part and parcel of my usual cat-waxing: I get to a stalled point in a story and tell myself little fables. "I can't write in here because it's too cluttered." "If I give my brain time off by filing, I'll make that plot break-through." These are all lies, of course. I managed to write for 17 straight days in this clutter (and maybe that's why my brain stalled), and I've filed myself into two new papercuts with no plot developments.
I look from shelf of library items checked out to sheaf of notes to be transcribed to the rather paltry, not-updated-last-night word-count on my novel to the short story I have to finish by January 31st or I'll not be able to look myself in the mirror.
I wonder: how in Hades' gravy did I manage to get so fragmented in my interests? I have so many hobbies that I forget I have them. Today I stumbled across my oil paints, cross-stitch and photography books. About a month ago, I resolved to get rid of my fabrics and notions and extraneous trims so that my clutter would at least no longer support the illusion that I intend to ever sew again.
Of course, I had more time for all of that before I decided to write like I meant it.
Tonight, the cats will just have to get stubbly. I need to write.
It's happy Note Transcription Day for me... when I pile all the scraps of paper and assemble all the emails I've sent to myself and put the notes into the stories they pertain to. More or less.
Some notes don't have stories. They're just research notes. Those notes go here--the theory being that when and if I need to look something up, my blog has a handy search function, and who knows, maybe someone else wants or needs to know this stuff.
*
Mackinac Island: the Grand Hotel.
-has sky-blue tiles on the verandah ceilings so that bats won't nest up there
-has 1 doctor, year 'round
-JJ Astor never went to Mackinac Island
-you can visit the stables at the Grand Hotel for free. But that's about the only part.
Miss Snark has a very unsnarky post today that everyone who's even a little bit frustrated with the game should read.
I write because I have to. Publishing, validation, the rest of it--is a bonus, and the trek to acquire these things is the moral equivalent of tilting at windmills. (If I were writing to pay the bills, it would be a different story--in fact, I'd not be writing stories at all.)
...I should finish up thirteen different novels just about simultaneously.
Today I notecarded Heroes of the Cold Island, which I'm so delighted by in premise that I couldn't not keep poking at it. Whereas, I'm utterly stalled by certain other books, being at their "hard parts"--i.e., the muddle that is the middle.
Ugh.
I'm going to make a new running start at Arcana (or whatever it's going to be called) somewhat soon, and I have two point five short stories clamoring for attention, one of which may be doable in 4,000 words or less. (I know. I've made such rash claims before.) The one point five comes in because I have three-fourths of two perfectly good short stories set in identical twin universes, and once I commit to one story, the other one will shrivel up and die. It's complicated. I someday hope to explain everything about it. In a way that won't bore everyone to tears.
The other story--the 4k or less one--is called "Greater Than or Equal Two," actually uses the line "Cool math guys were the worst" and came to me while I was thinking about emotional intelligence, parenting, and the SATS. It's basically American Pie with social politics. I have no idea how I'm going to pull it off.
I am having a damned hard time nailing myself down to any one project, and I'm having an even harder time feeling guilty about it. Score one for the home team, I guess.
Tonight, my brain is all distracted by the shiny medieval fighting women book--more to the point, I got terribly distracted by the Merovingians. And the Carlovingians, which is a cooler (well, rarer) version of Carolingians. (Cooler for my purposes.) I have a cunning plan, you see...
I'd actually wonder if something were wrong with me, given my lack of settle down and work on one project-ness, but for the fact that I've never once had trouble buckling down to a real deadline, and I can't think of how my scattershot approach would be detrimental if I were able to write more than just an hour or two a day.
Tomorrow, I need to remember to take my stuff to work and get some lunchtime writing in. Something about lugging the laptop in doesn't seem too compelling, so maybe I just need to drag in a research book and some note cards, and get a few things off my desk. As it is, the Writing Cat can't find a place to sit in order to press his little body up against the warmth of the laptop, and it's not like he gives up... far from it. He'll knock everything off the desk before he gives up.
I foolishly left the laptop on over night, and came back to find everything reset to Cat Standard Lappiness. Which is to say--the most random settings possible. I can't believe he sleeps on my keyboard. He's a little warmth hog, that's what he is--tonight I caught him running out of my stepdaughter's room, and I'm sure he magically pried her door open to get in there and cuddle next to her. But the lure of a warm laptop and a desk lamp were too much, and he came to visit... Now he's chewing on the corner of my file card box and purring with his mouth open. How gauche.
There was a period of time where I would read any and all writing advice and find a huge percentage of it useful. Now I feel like it's late autumn, just before the snow is about to fall, and I'm the last squirrel in before the storm, trying to bury one last acorn before hibernation.
So, today my writing advice quest took me past the web pages of Kate Elliott, who wrote Jaran (and many other books, but Jaran is a long-time favorite). Kate's even got a page of writerly advice.
I also cruised past Matthew Stibbe's site (and finally added it to my blogroll) and liked the post I just linked to rather well. Different kind of writing, but the advice is still killer.
So, anyway. Two today--that's all you get!
7:45 PM
Okay, so my goal tonight is to write an entire four-thousand word story. I have right now a handful of vague notions and images: "vampire planet"--vampire describing attributes of the planet, not a planet inhabited by; "the Greek ships wait and Troy is gone forever"; gender divisions and alien plagues. I'm aiming for a brand of space opera that pays (in my mind) a sort of homage to early Anne McCaffrey, plus or minus a Tanith Lee sensibility. Can it be done? We'll see.
I have spent about fifteen minutes tonight (plus some time earlier in the day) selecting an appropriate moon in our solar system as a setting--initially, the setting was going to be Neptune, but I decided to find a more reasonably terraformable world given the plot going through my head.
I have "Possum Kingdom" on infinite loop on my iPod.
I set my timer for fifteen minutes (and it took me four minutes to write this, so it's really 7:49).
8:04
70 words. I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out where to start the story, and naming the character. I have the opening paragraph, though. And I'm hungry. I have some more things to think out, now that I have some initial steps, so I'm going to make dinner, scarf it down, and return.
8:34
Done eating. Back at it.
8:47
230 words. We're not off Earth yet.
9:05
429 words. Still on Earth. Farewell parties go on too long. I'm sure I (and the protagonist) aren't the only ones who think that.
Snippet:
[Her neice's] eyes panned down Heather's body, and stopped at the hem of Heather's skirt. "You have big knees, Aunt Heather."Heather raised an eyebrow. "Thank you, Jillian. You are an observant girl, and very truthful."
Jillian shrugged. "I know." She wandered away to play with her cousins.
Heather shook her head and set aside her wine. "And to think, we used to blame the patriarchy for body image problems."
9:29
630 words. ALMOST off the damn planet.
9:55
722 words. Got stuck on global birth rates for a moment. Have decided that there are between one and sixty million people at play in this story. Head is spinning.
10:21
794 words. But the last seventy were super-important world-building mojo. And we're at the spaceport.
11:01
1,246. Still standing in the spaceport, arguing. I think I'm only writing filler right now. I'm cutting it.
Most of the process was automated. A computer checked Heather's identification, and requested the name of her most recent terrestrial male ancestor."Philip Sydney," Heather typed.
"Philip Sydney's Diaspora Number?"
"140-603-2573-410."
The screen flashed twice and a message popped up: "Wait for official."
"Wait for official what?" Heather asked.
"You too?" asked the woman at the next kiosk.
Heather peered at the other woman's screen and saw the same message. "I guess so."
"Ridiculous amount of trouble to go to, if they're going to eat us."
"I wonder why that's the most prevalent rumor."
"A basic human fear, being eaten," the woman said wryly. "I blame it on the fact that they encourage mothers to eat our placentas."
Heather quirked an eyebrow. "You have an icky sense of humor," she said. "I like it."
The woman held out her hand. "Anna Park."
"Heather Korovin."
Before their handshake was complete, an official came over. She started with Anna, briskly stepping up to her screen. She tapped and gestured until a family tree appeared on the screen. The official said, "A woman has already reported in with your ancestor."
"Really?" Anna frowned. "Who?" The official said a name, but Anna shook her head. "I don't know that name."
"Sometimes family groups argue, split up, move away, lose contact. I can't guess what happened, but your family's quota has been filled. You're free to go."
Anna stepped back, face ashen and shocked. "But--"
"Please, ma'am. I'm very busy. You're free to go."
The official had moved to Heather's screen and was scrolling through her family tree. In a half-daze of hope, Heather asked, "Am I free to go, too?"
"No." The official looked up. "Philip Sydney wasn't your only male ancestor to emigrate."
"No? He was my grandfather."
"Your grandmother's father also emigrated. He has no genetic representative listed."
"My grandmother's father died in the plagues!"
The official sighed. "That was probably a stepfather. Family connections are strange, memories are tenuous, secrets run deep. The Diaspora was eighty years ago! I see it all the time."
"All the time?" Heather asked. She was angry, but she didn't know what to fight about, so she decided to take offense to the official's cavalier attitude. "You've only been taking people in for two days."
"It feels like a lot longer," the official said.
Heather swore.
Anna stepped forward. "I'll go in her place."
"Not allowed," the official said.
"Then I want to see my relative, the one who already filled the quota."
"Good luck finding her," said the official. "Ms. Korovin? I've selected your ancestor. Take the print-out and follow the instructions and you're ready to go on."
"Thanks," Heather said bitterly.
"Welcome," the official said without a trace of irony, and moved away.
Anna darted back to her kiosk and stared at the screen. She pulled out her e-pad and scrawled furiously for a moment. Heather took the promised print-out.
"It was nice meeting you," Heather said.
"Yeah. I'm going with you," Anna said.
"Uh...
So, yeah, I wasted some time on that, but that is novelesque scenery and Anna doesn't fit into this short story.
So. Back down to 797 words.
11:30
I'm on a better track. 1,022 words. Probably not breaking 4,000 tonight though. I'm quitting at midnight. I have made it to space, but I'm not quite sure what to do now that I'm there.
Midnight
1,312 words. I'm not enamored of my progress, but on the whole, I've done much worse with even greater expectations. I'm so far from done, though... Hopefully, not more than three thousand words from done, yet. I remember when I used to know how to write short stories. What was that like?
I've managed to work out the human society part of this story pretty well. The aliens are eluding me, however. I need to do some fundamental brainstorming before I run at this again. If the world were just and good, I'd be able to work before going to the library tomorrow, but the world is not just and good, and I need more sleep than that.
Mad props to the Tech for Writers podcast, the first episode of which managed to totally change the way I think about the software side of novel-crafting and give me some great information on suspended animation.
Pamela Templin reviewed a great many novel-creators in her podcast, and yWriter was the one that leapt out at me as fitting best with my style. I had looked at it briefly while peering at Sonar (submission tracking software), but never was lured by it until after spending countless frustrated hours trying to make Microsoft Word do my bidding. (I was writing using the outline function, which was fine(ish) right up until I moved some folders around. Then all my outline links broke, and I wept. WEPT.)
My two tiny complaints so far with yWriter are: the wordcount update doesn't aggregate as often or as quickly as I'd like, and you can't underline--I think because you use text files.
The WONDER of the program is the built-in storyboard feature and... drumroll... a "find problem words" feature. Yes. I really can track the number of times I wrote "watercress" (two) in my novel. Plus... free. FREE. It far outweighs the underlining issue, and overall, less underlining? Not so bad. I need to rely on it less, anyway.
Bubbly.
Here are the other entries I brainstormed for A Field Guide to Surreal Botany after I made my first submission, so certain was I that I'd be rejected quickly. I call it a happy day all around that they took my entry and I didn't have to think any of these through.
Enough of that... tosses brainstormy post-it note.
The usual speedy rejection from JJA at F&SF. For now, I'm going to call that one time I broke through to GGV a fluke. The fact that I did it once is a pleasant novelty only. Probably my best published story to date didn't make it to GGV, and if that's my best and yet not to their taste, there's nothing gained by worrying about it. I'll keep subbing there because it's what I do, but I must remember to smother expectations before they go out the door.
*
Rewrites? Driving me a little mad. I have made a flawed story. I don't know how to unflaw it. I think I may've told the wrong story from the wrong perspective. I think I'll just have to bull on through, write to editorial order, and hope that it works out in the end. If it doesn't, I know how to write the other story. If it does work out, the other story can be the sequel.
If only running around screaming helped.
As I slowly become better at rewriting--and it's slowly, I promise--it comes to feel more natural. I no longer stare at the page and mutter, "Well, this is all wrong. What do I do?" and then do a search-and-execute on -ly words for lack of anything constructive to do. I actually have a grasp on things like "This conversation is boring. I shall add tension." Only, half-conscious-like. I don't know how to explain it, but I know that I'm doing it. And that's cool.
Of course, now that I'm ready to sit down and rewrite "Rampion in the Belltower," and am also feeling momentarily okay about my rewriting skills, I can't find the paper copy I marked up a while back, nor can I find my notes, and I really don't want to proceed without either even though that's probably the exact right thing to do.
The other things is, it's 11:45, and I'm tired, because I got up early (some might say on time) this morning and had a nice breakfast (I made muffins, and had half a grapefruit on top of it; if I'd remembered to make tea, it would have been the perfect breakfast).
The goal is actually to get up earlier even than today, have the nice breakfast, go for a walk for a half an hour, then get to a coffee shop in town and have tea while I write for an hour before work. That would mean getting up at the ungodly hour of 7AM however, and I have no idea how I'm going to do that without going to bed an hour ago.
Clearly, this plan requires time travel.
Laziness was my day's work. I slept later than I intended (I got up at 7:30, wandered around the house, couldn't find anything compelling to do, and went back to bed), coming fully awake at 10:30. I read Princess Academy until Dann woke up (sometime later), and wandered downstairs to watch television and eat not-lunch until it was nap-time again. Got back up at 4:30, went to dinner, came back....
At 7:30 I prepared to prepare to write. I set an alarm for 15 minutes later, and filed papers. When it went off, I set another 15-minute alarm for cleaning my office. It's very nearly bearable in here now. Another 15 minutes for checking internets. Then I opened "Wedding Dress Tea Parties" and poked at the rewrite. The final scene is much, much better. Good? I don't know. It's so much better than it was that it seems good, but at the same time, it was so hard to end, I don't think it is good, after all. These characters just don't know how to shut up. And they want to be schmoopy, and I can't let them.
Then, back to the extended grind of rewriting the beginning. I hit the right note with the new opening scenes, yes, but now there is the first dinner, and I am balking. There's a bit of exposition that I'm trying to make more friendly. Elizabeth Bear and her circle call what I'm trying to do inpositioning, which sounds so much like "impositioning" when you say it out loud that I think that these two things must be kissing cousins: do it wrong, and it's an imposition on your readers, and far worse than what a lump of exposition would have done.
Naturally, after my second snack run downstairs, the telly lured me in and I had to watch two episodes of Spaced, which has so many geekly in-jokes that it feels like a show my friends would make just to entertain us.
Now I'm back upstairs and full of cheese popcorn... I'm back to avoiding the WDTPfinal.doc file and wondering if it will be a hugely bad thing to write something completely different tonight. I've got another couple hours before the sleepies kick in, and I'm in a weird mood. And weird moods make for some pretty interesting fiction, I've found. Plus, the moon is up and I'm a bit melancholy. Time to be all that I can be, or something like that...
And I'm about to take some of it, by handing my wireless card over to my husband (I really don't know what I'm going to do come the day I have a laptop with built-in wireless)...
Matthew Stibbe's How to Concentrate on Writing, found via Mr. Shetterly.
After my little blogtantrum yesterday, I did manage to pound out 1,300 words, which, surprisingly, didn't complete the story. However the main crisis is over--I think--though I'm having a bit of a tangle with the "but I haven't shown my heroine being competent!"--and I'm feeling a bit bad about that, which is maybe why the last bit is reluctant to be written.
I woke up this morning thinking of new titles for the story formerly known as "Bound by Spells." So far, they aren't any better... "A friend, a foe, a gift, a beau, a journey go" was bouncing in my head with it, and I was wondering if I could make some subset of that work, but that would mean adding a few sentences into the story to explain it. Ideally, I should be able to derive a title from the story I have.
Dangit.
10 AM
Ho-hum. Here I am, trying to write the last scene of a novelette I promised to have done three days ago for the inaugural meeting of our new writing group. They have the first 11,000 words already, I just need to send them the last 2,000. I was certain I'd be able to write two little scenes over the weekend, but somehow... it proved impossible. I struggled to get the penultimate scene written, and I think it's not terrible, but I lost the voice of the piece somewhere in there. I need to read more Jane Austen in prep for the rewrite.
Okay. Time to get to work. I struggled over the scene finish line last night around 1AM, and knew I'd hav to leave the rest of this for today.
10:30 AM
Hm. CSS style sheets, while frustrating at first, prove to be very useful once you overcome the learning curve. Why, the new site design--
AH, CRAP! I'm supposed to be writing.
11 AM
"Lydia was awakened early by pangs of conscience."
Hm. Is there a better way to say this? She's had a restless night, driven by dreams of guilt. Granted, it's all unearned guilt, really, and I don't want to overplay or overwrite this...
I'll think on it and check Bloglines.
11:30 AM
I want a lemon poppyseed muffin, but Stepdaughter ate the last one. Actually, she half-ate it. She ate the top off. Dammit.
*our not-so-heroine prowls the kitchen, then goes over to the table*
*looks at file*
I've written one sentence of the last scene.
*heads over to the couch to sulk and watch Wimbledon*
11:45 AM
"I don't even like tennis."
*gets up*
*wanders back to computer*
*announces* "I am not getting up from this computer until I write 400 words!"
12 PM
Oof. I wish I hadn't promised that. I'm hungry. Why can't I just get going and write this? Is that I'm scared I don't know enough about horse jumping? She doesn't even have to jump on-screen. You forget, the agoraphobia attack interrupts this.
Or am I scared that I lost the voice of the piece?
Or am I just hungry?
I know. I'll fire up Movable Type. I didn't say that they had to be 400 words of the story.
My writing group is never going to forgive me.
I've been thinking about why I haven't been writing short stories lately. It's not for lack of trying--I bust out those files and stare at them, even type furiously for a while, before putting them gently back to bed.
And there's been sort of a perfect storm effect of figuring out what's going on. First, in listening to Stackpole's podcasts, I was introduced to the concept of a story going stale. That is, you start a short story, put it down, and when you come back, you're no longer able to finish it. Stackpole theorizes that your writing level may have changed in the interim, and that's certainly a pretty good theory, but I wonder if there isn't more to it. I mean, I don't know what the more is, but I do think there's something beyond skill jumps involved.
Then, I got the OWW newsletter and Kelly Link had written a piece for it challenging the workshop members to move beyond competent writing into astonishing writing. I know exactly what she's saying--from a slusher's point-of-view--but as a writer, I don't know how to move to astonishing. I know it once I've done it, of course, but I rarely know if a story is going to be astonishing until I start it. And sometimes not until I finish it.
Sometimes, though, I wonder if the reason I can't finish some stories is because I know they aren't the cream of my crop.
My begun-but-not-finished folder on my laptop is ginormous. I have three in-progress folders: Brainstorming, Writing, and Rewriting.
Rewriting is a graveyard of three and a half stories. These are stories where I know the concept is good, and not much else. These are the stories with a sincere lack of voice, which is why they linger, unsent. The half story is one that I know is REALLY, REALLY good in concept--so good that I wrote a flash version of it that I'm shopping, but so far, no one is biting. And I know why--because I don't have a voice or a real plot for it. With flash you can get away with having only one story element. But not always. I'm sort of waiting for a full slate of rejections before going back to the drawing board on that one, because it's alternate history and that takes so much research it hurts. And there's one story in rewriting that I almost have a voice for in there, but I lack the confidence to figure out how to apply it. I think I need another character, but I don't know. I wouldn't mind a sign from god on that one. The other two, I should probably scrap altogether, but just in case I figure them out, there they are.
"Brainstorming" is everything for which I scribbled down a few paragraphs and don't really know where to go from here. Fourteen stories there. It's a huge mess. I don't even know what to say about them, except have I mentioned how much easier novels are than short stories? Not in every regard, of course, but with a novel, you can keep throwing the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, but with a short story, you have to know what sticks from the get-go. You can't just maunder on for 25,000 words and hope that the story finds itself. So I guess things end up in this folder when I can't determine what's going to stick.
And finally, the "Writing" folder. "25 objects," Windows tells me. They are all things that I poke with sticks from time to time. (Maybe that's my problems. Stories prefer you poke them with fingers-on-the-keyboard, not sticks. Maybe.) The problems I run into in the Writing folder are legion, and all I can really say is that sometimes you just know a story has gone off. Stale, even, one might say, if one were Michael A. Stackpole.
It was very freeing when I had the realization that I didn't have to shop every story I finished. That I could just let some things molder in mediocrity and never see the light of day. It goes against the advice of persistence, but I think, for the most part, it's not the worst realization to have... for one thing, it gives you permission to write badly, if you were someone who needed such a thing.
At the same time I gave myself the "don't have to shop every story I finish" rule, I stopped writing stories that I knew I wasn't going to shop, and maybe that's where things went astray for me and my in-progress folders grew to staggering proportions and nothing got finished.
I don't actually know, though.
I do know: I either need some really good writing rules, or I need to let go of rules altogether. I'm leaning towards the latter, since whenever I make rules, I find that I've done it just so I have something to flout.
Yep. I'm a rebel, all right. Breaking all my own rules.
So, I'm sitting here staring at these anthology guidelines and cursing under my breath because I can't remember why I saved them. I don't write macabre. A whole roomful of British writers accused me of being Disney-level twee in my writing just 10 months ago. What the hell was I thinking in terms of "I can do macabre humor?"
I wrack them brains (to the tune of "Dem Bones," which was taught to me by the seventh grade chorus teacher who used to flip us off and use racial slurs to refer to all of us, black kids and white... new meaning to equal treatment, I guess. It is heavenly to realize I forgot her name). There's so much clutter in there! On break today, I worked on some outlining for the Spellbinder book, which will not be called that because everyone and their mother has used the term spellbinder it seems... and that's cluttering up the thought processes, like an ottoman placed right in the foyer. I keep tripping over it, Dick van Dyke style. It's a macabre piece, the Spellbinder books. Someone is forced to drink lye. But that's not funny...
I open some random files, and find something macabre. The story fragment of the ogre who eats his wife's internal organs. But it's not funny. I start funnifying it, and it seems to be taking it well. There's no pain because I didn't know what to do with the story anyway. I was very pleased with the opening fragment and had worked it out as a literary quest fantasy in my head, but then I read Leah's "Girl with the Heart of Stone" and decided against it. I was having a hard time making it gel, anyway. No loss.
The funny might be working here. My narrator has taken to addressing the reader as though they were her grandchildren--that's what I think of with this story, a knitting woman with a tight gray perm sitting in her rocker and getting a bit excited with her story, particularly the earthy bits. A combination of my grandmother talking about Jesus and my one great-aunt who's into earthy bits. I'm managing to feel both blasphemous and irreverant just describing that.
I trip over another ottoman in my head. This time it's the short story I was mulling on the way home from work--the one about the librarian in space who's investigating information crimes and gets a cat and is about to return to her very strict space colony peers because her educational time is up. It occurred to me that the reason I couldn't finish that one is because I didn't know how to end it. But maybe zany is the way to go. This whole story was the meshing of two three four disparate ideas: 1) information crime investigators, 2) librarians in space, 3) cataloguing a cat as realia, and making her kittens part of the set (it's definitely a library geek joke) and 4) an experimental society where your peers select your spouse. Yes, indeed, how did I think that could be anything but zany? Apparently, I've acheived the transcendent state of constantly daydreaming in screwball comedy format.
In the middle of this, I realize what I thought was macabre enough to turn funny, and it was related to the fact that I saw two dead bodies last winter--suicides off my usual parking structure. I stopped parking there. It seemed sort of curse-like. After the second time, I was disturbed enough to become flippant about it ("It's raining men"). NO, I'm not turning that into a story, but that is in fact what I was thinking about when I bookmarked those anthology guidelines.
I'll go back to the crazy rocking grandma telling us the story about the ogre for now. It has a sociopathic mill-arsonist, too. See? Macabre. And a cat with ringworm. Humor. Okay, wait. That's not funny. A talking cat with ringworm. Funnier.
Okay, back to the writing.
I'm an auditory sort of person. Not only do I test as auditory (over visual or kinesthetic) on the tests that test for this sort of thing, but also, I prefer listening to lectures over any other form of learning opportunity, for example. My particular version of being auditory has benefits--I remember most things I hear--and problems--I literally can't spare the concentration to listen to things when I'm concentrating on visual or kinesthetic tasks (I couldn't, for example, have music on the radio while I was learning to drive; and then, once I'd learned how to drive, I couldn't listen to music with lyrics for a good four or five years). I will occasionally even remember things I've seen as my internal narrator is describing the visual scene for me--and oh yeah, I do have an internal narrator, and s/he's always talking.
I've developed a shortcut with reading that I know not all auditory people have. My friend Joe, frex, has to "hear" every word he reads before he has fully "read" it, which makes reading painfully slow for him. But fortunately, my internal narrator is a really fast talker, I guess, or I've got enough visual mojo to just internalize the symbols on the page without having to sound them out as words first, or... whatever.
(The whole business of reading is fascinating to me, and it just gets weirder the more I learn... how did our little monkey brains manage to "turn on" the reading ability 10,000 years ago with so little trouble, I wonder? What prepared us for information transmission through symbolism? Sure, language itself is symbologically driven--you say "dog" and you and I both have a little mental icon of "dog" in our brains that don't necessarily match, but allow us to converse about dogs... and with so many more people being visually oriented than auditory/kinesthetic, maybe reading is an obvious outgrowth of spoken language? Oh, I don't know. My inner anthropologist is having a hard time pumping the inner linguist for information here--the inner linguist is rather puny and undereducated.)
Anyway, I know that whatever I do during reading is not the same as being visually oriented. When I read a comic book, for example, I have a very hard time "reading" the pictures along with the text. In fact, as I read along, I find that I miss, oh, everything that happens in the pictures, and I get very confused.
So, yes. Not a visual person. Not surprisingly, I'm not a very visual writer. My stories tend to "talking heads in space" moments. It's something I try to work on, but frankly, yes, dialogue and internal moments comprise what I write about naturally. Moments of inspiration tend to revolve around a snatch of dialogue or a moment of feeling... I rarely get visual inspiration.
Cue latest writing thing--which is actually an old writing thing. I was 12 or 13 when I absconded with my mom's tarot cards and started writing stories about them. I just dug the file out of my cabinet the other day, and whoo boy are they bad. Not just juvenilia bad, either, but "young writer being pretentious" bad... I worked on the material for four or five years, right on through to age 16/17, which is when I thought I knew what I was doing. I (rightfully) abandoned this project some time ago, though I did occasionally harbor delusions that I could rewrite some version of it, and draw my own version of the Rider-Waite deck, too, and make it sort of a web-thing, where I'd write a 500-1,000 word story and draw a picture every week for 78 weeks. (And I still might do that, if other publishing options don't pan out on this.)
To my knowledge, the tarot card book was literally the only time I'd ever had visual stimulus to write from. When I bumped into the tarot card book in some dark recess of my mind the other day, I realized that I had this collection of richly detailed, jewel-tone-colored visual images of scenes in my head--versions of the Rider-Waite deck, but better. I'd never be able to draw them (let alone color them) to match the pictures in my head, but I'd be able to write based off of them. And the sheer fact that they are there is such a novelty that I can't resist.
So, that's what I'm working on right now. I'm getting back to The Bitter Road, too, but (as I'm constantly reminding myself) I have the luxury of doing whatever I want right now. Discipline for the sake of discipline--well, I've proven that I can do that. Right now, I'm going to enjoy the novelty of having visual ideas.
Negativity is probably the worst trap for a writer (...not that it's so great for humans in general). Not only is it counterproductive, but negativity is catching... Making it an easy trap to fall into.
Take today, for example. I had a pretty good day. I spent time with various members of my family--mother, husband, stepdaughter--running errands, doing stuff. This evening, we all got cold at my stepdaughter's softball game, but she got a hit and batted in a run at the end, so it all ended on a nice note. We had dinner. We watched an excellent episode of House. I had planned an evening of writing, and I came upstairs to discharge my duty--and after a quick tour of the available blogs and such...
I became so depressed I seriously considered not writing--at all tonight, and heck, maybe not even ever again. I won't link to what I read, and I won't rehash any of it, but suffice it to say, there are a couple of people who aren't happy being writers out there today... and by the time I got around to reading the short fiction reviews at IROSF (usually a serious pleasure of mine, since the reviewer is very honest and I think I learn a lot from reading her reviews), I was Not Going To Bother Ever Again. (Largely because Lois Tilton happened to review "an amusing retro-future comedy of manners" that seemed a little too much like my own amusing retro-future comedy of manners.)
About two minutes into the negativity dance, it was interrupted by my stepdaughter coming in to wish me goodnight--yay for the way kids work at breaking state for those around them, even if half the time it's not a state you want broken. And I remembered, gee, I'd been planning on and for this evening's writing all day. I had a whole scene worked out for a piece I'm mentally referring to as my Jewel-Toned World... How did a potential similarity between someone else's story and my own (a similarity that I'm only guessing at from a review, a similarity that is limited to a worldbuilding tactic that I know already that I didn't invent or come up with first, and a similarity I have noted previous times with other stories and which has not prevented me from selling said stories, anyway) get me down so quickly?
Well, it wasn't the similarity, really. It was that I'd already fallen into the negativity trap, pulled in by the gravity of someone else's really bad day, and suddenly, the similarity seemed like the death knell of my writing career.
Now, it only took about a tenth of a second to see my behavior for what it was--and in writing a whole blog entry about it, I'm certainly making a mountain out of a molehill. It's easy (for me) to spot the source of the bad feelings in this case and turn them aside, for whatever reason--perhaps because the trigger was so fresh in my mind. But there are so many other times that I don't spot the source, don't shrug it off in whatever fashion I can, and end up wallowing in the pit of despair for an evening or four... instead of writing.
I've seen evidence before, and I'm sure I'll see it again--and I know that at least a couple of people out there would agree with me: it can be very dangerous for writers to read the blogs of other writers.
There. That was the description--I have no idea of the prescription. I mean, I'm not going to stop reading other writers' blogs. The best thing I can think of to do is to try not to infect others with my own nihilistic despair, on those occasions when I have it. There are ways and ways of being depressed on your public journal, and some of them are much less harmful to your readers and to yourself than others... so, I guess that's my pledge. *shrug* That is all.
Sometimes I fear I shall never have a small idea again.
But it beats the alternative.
----------------
By small, I mean "something I can start and finish in one night/day/lunch period." Like "Reparations" or "Shotgun" or "One Million Years." On the other hand, that's just the sprinter in me whining because the marathoner hasn't been fully developed yet.
If only there were some natural way for the brain to say, "This, this is what you shoudl focus your efforts on right now." I'm so often interested in so many things all at once, that I don't even know where to begin when I sit down at the computer at night. Do I work on my invisibility-cloaks-and-princesses story or my Anglo-Saxon exiles story or are they the same story? Is it time to figure out "The Neptune Ships Wait"--and is it an homage to Greek tragedy or to Edgar Rice Burroughs or to both (well, I know it's an homage to ERB, but is it also an homage to Greek tragedy?).
And what about all those perfectly worthy stories I've half-written but lost the steam for somehow, and now can't finish because everything else looks shinier? I need to learn how to keep eye contact with a story until it's fully seduced, I really do!
And what about those stories I've written, and that have failed to find acceptances in the marketplace in 2 years, and now I have the perfect way to fix them? Yes, I figured out how to salvage "June Mothers Stay Late," I really did, and it makes so much more sense as post-ecoterrorist fiction, and for which I've developed the mantra "any sufficiently advanced form of magic is indistinguishable from high tech."
Or... shouldn't I be working on that novel rewrite that was going along quite well right up until I got sick, but now I've used "sick" so many times as an excuse for not going back to it that I don't even know how?
There's just too much going on, and too many things at too many stages. I've NO idea how to settle down. And sure, the easy answer is "get back to the novel" but I'm really afraid to abandon the short story I've been poking at. Only half of this dilemma is me being my own worst enemy. The other half is just me being too awesomely creative to be stopped.
(Self-ego stroking is the name of the game now that I'm old. You've been warned.)
Jenn Reese posts her take on the stages of writerliness.
I concur on the stages, but not necessarily the order. Vera Nazarian in the comments comes up with a few additions and subtractions that seem more like my experiences, but even then... I'm definitely going through this process my way.
Tobias Buckell talks about the intricacies of the Neopro stage in his complete audio version of "Getting Past Being Joe Blow Neopro" at Spoken Alexandria. I am sad that I don't have this in a written format--my reading retention is much higher than my listening retention, unless I'm taking notes--but on the other hand, I've listened through all of these podcasts twice now, and will probably go a third time. Repetition never hurts, and they lend themselves well (individually) to the shortness of my commute, and it never hurts to be thinking strategically when you're not awake enough to be making plots in your head. Er, right?
Again, I disagree with some of Toby's ordering--he suggests that Neopros need to step up their research, innovation, invention and such--which is one of those things that... well, let's put it this way, research and innovation are the least of my problems right now. There will doubtless be a time in my career where I'll need to do that, but the time (I don't think) is now. She says, with great hubris. I should probably just shut my trap...
About the originality thing: it is good advice. It was probably the second most noticeable thing about delving into the slush piles for Lenox Ave. last year: people aren't so original. I think about fifty percent of the stories I passed up to the managing editors were passed up because--all other flaws aside--the stories were not cliché-infested. Though. Craft is an incredibly big component: if you can't write your way out of a paper bag, then no, I didn't pass the original stuff up. Highly original concepts worked out in unreadable English read like the rantings of a crazy person.
The stages of writerliness probably can't be worked out to universal satisfaction because everyone brushes up against publication at a different point. The Neopro writings seems super-valid to me because they all address that period that some people hit where they've sold a few pro stories but then can't break pro again right away. That's a highly specific point in a person's career, and one that doesn't come to everyone. And they probably especially hit home because that's my career point: neopro.
Additionally, personalities vary: in the beginning, I was incredibly diligent about making all my submission packets perfect, from the handwriting on the SASE to the placement of the envelope and paperclip (I always put the lip of the SASE around the manuscript so that the gum doesn't moisten in transit and seal the envelope before it arrives in the slush pile. Why? I read it somewhere. I'm not even sure it makes sense. But I do it). Lately, I've found that, oh, I haven't read the guidelines carefully and there was a change, or I've forgotten what day it was and jumped the gun on a reading period, or when sending a rewrite, have forgotten to put the item in proper MS format. It's not that I think these things don't matter, it's that I somehow got tangled up along the way with thinking I knew how to do things, so... I could stop paying attention, or something. This is a common step for me in almost any of learning process. I'd like it to not be so, but it's there, and I hope no one else has it.
Anyway. I could stay here all day debating this, but that wouldn't get the writing done. My EV0L Justice awaits. (That's what it says on my white board: today I have to deal with my villain.)
Based on information gathered from April 2003 until November 2004, I average about 700 words of new material in an hour, assuming there are not extremely lengthy pauses while I search for "what happens next?" by staring off into space or going on a research safari.
Given that the rewriting of The Bitter Road is going slightly faster than that, and given how much work I think I need to do, I have given myself 72 hours spread out over two weeks to finish this project and get it out the door.
We'll see how that works.
Earlier today, in a supreme effort of catwaxing, I tallied up all the shows we have on TiVo's season pass, calculated how many hours of each one I watch in a year, and divided by 52. It comes out to 5.3 hours of television a week. (And doesn't count movies, or the 15 minutes of weather/local news I catch on mornings when I get up with my stepdaughter.) I think we can officially cross off Time Lost Through Television as a big villain to writing.
Which means all eyes are on the internet.
Managed to write longhand at lunch. It was interesting and fabulous, simultaneously. Infatabulous. No, that's no good--sounds too much like someone in the royal house of Spain.
Am at the dining room table again, assuming cold or discomfort don't drive me to my office. Interesting times down here--there's one cat alternately hiding out in the chimenea in the corner and eating straws from the broom. Funny thing is, someone at work was just saying that their cats been eating broom straws obsessively. I was pretty sure I'd never had an animal do that. I was mistaken.
Rejection on "Unanswered Letters." It seems to make editors unhappy. Uneasy, almost, but not in any good way. I'll probably shelve it. There's a difference between good persistence and bad persistence. A foolish persistency is the hobgoblin of little minds? I don't know. I didn't think the story was good enough to submit the first time I wrote it; I shelved it immediately, and I'm still not quite sure what caused me to pull it out, tack on a new ending and send it around. Boredom, I guess. A desire to increase inventory.
Things I want to blog about soon:
If none of those grab ya, I'll take requests.
I have been beating my head against the wall as to writing processes for the past innumerable months. Three years now, mebbe? Anyway. I've read books. I've tried notions. I've read web pages. I've adopted methods. I may have finally almost sort of found a process that I like, a process which is neither fish nor fowl.
My first big push was to notecard scenes--all the scenes I had to include in a book. But it left me flailing in regards to connective tissue, and though one would think that writing from notecards in this manner would make it easier to write non-sequentially, it did not work that way for me.
So, then I turned my attention to outlining--straight outlining--in one file, and writing in another--and no notecards. And then I felt restrained in a way that notecards hadn't, and once again incapable of writing non-sequentially.
Why the big push to write non-sequentially, you may wonder? I don't really know. I know some writers have an inclination for it and some don't, but frankly, there are times when I just don't want to write an X scene, where X equals sex or fighting or description or something I have to research, but I'm ready to move on and get to the next bit, where my energy can be expended on a subject for which I still have momentum. Or, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and want to slot something that happens Later into the story. It just seems convenient to me, to have that option, and now that I've been puttering with my new method for a few months, I think that I can say with some authority that I need to write 80% sequentially and 20% non-sequentially. If that makes any sense, I'm glad.
Anyway, my current method still uses notecards, but not in a restrictive way--more, something occurs to me, and I scribble it down on a notecard. This seems to be working much, much better for me than writing things down in notebooks. I'm not sure why, other than I can spread the notecards out and make piles and reorder them and stick them into other projects if I need to.
Then, I put the notecards in order, and use them to swirl up an outline, using the outline feature in MS Word, no less. I really, really hated the clunkiness of the feature at first but now I rely on it; it's so easy to jump back and forth between looking at the novel as a whole or in parts, just with a click of a button. And I never have to remember file names! It's sort of a cludgy hypertext way of writing novels.
Add to this the occasional option to go off onto a big sheet of paper, where I scribble out everyone's names and start drawing connecting lines--jagged ones for antagonistic relationships, swoopy ones for friendships, with arrows to show the flows of affection or hatred... they're like family trees of emotion... or I can start drawing the path of the story, if that suits me.
No single one of these methods worked for me. But all together, they are beginning to work for me. I'll be interested to re-read this entry again in a year or two, to see how the process has changed yet again. I'm sure it will change.
And I have a power cord.
Well, all right then.
The end is in sight for two stories right now; I had a breakthrough on "Breakfast at Antigone's" and I think I can muddle my way through "Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443." Then... well, that's the question--what then? I've made myself a promise that I will let things rest before submitting them to editors anymore; but I'm not sure about the period of time it should rest before heading out to, say, the Online Writing Workshop. I have learned that my work tends to need rest, any way you look at it, whether it's enforced rest from it languishing in slush piles so that I get to rethinking it after five rejections, or voluntary rest in that I shelve it for a period of time. --Well, I think I just answered my own question in writing it--rest comes while on the Workshop simply because it takes a while to get five critiques.
Oh, what a ridiculous thing to twitter on about.
Anyway. I got words this morning, and right now, I intend to have more.
I learned some small piece of how to make rewriting fun. I find that, for me, it involves eels. Which is to say, word-choice.
"The gravelly voice of an old man" is now "a voice worn to gravel by time and malice." I'm not sure the second one is better, but it's definitely more fun. For me.
How eels also enter into it: I have a tendency to blush. I also flush when I'm angry. Hot cheeks are a part of my life. I feel my emotions on display often before people react to them. Describing this appropriately when my characters undergo it is difficult. Today, I came up with "cheeks felt hot enough to fry an eel."
Again, not better. But definitely more fun.
WisCon
I went, I saw, I made as little of a fool of myself as I possibly could.
No one gave me a triumph when I came home, but it's ok. Maybe next time.
Progress
Have not written anything since the last time I posted here that I had written something. That's a long time.
Process
But I'm revising my process and that's good. It might be brain time, after all. I hear some writers have it.
Slush
Lenox Avenue is reading for a themed issue: Mechanical Oddities. Send those stories along, a'ight?
OWW
So far, my new resolve to do one crit a week has been adhered to. It's been a week. I've done one crit.
TV
So addicted to reruns of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I didn't watch the first time they were on, largely in favor of Babylon 5. I'm in the 5th season. Most individual episodes feel deeply flawed. The overall arch is not as detailed or as compelling as other shows I've loved. But the gestalt is working for me all the same.
My Favorite Authors
Robin McKinley was GOH at WisCon. She was very beautiful and self-deprecating. Some people seem annoyed by the self-deprecating thing, but frankly, after sitting next to Ellen Klages at a panel, it makes perfect, perfect sense. There's always someone out there who makes you feel blown away, a merest twit, just by being their normal self. It's a fact. (And I do hope Ellen took my bumptiousness as the hero-worship it was, and not actual bumptiousness.)
Bully for Me
I sold "Star and Galaxy" to Between Kisses.
I feel like I just jumped through a hole in space-time and it's the 90s again, and now the pudgy kid from Stand by Me that grew up all sexy is staring at me, very confused-like.
Stephanie Burgis posits: what if rewriting were fun?
The world has opened up.
And I did not not just make a Sliders reference to describe that feeling.
