A Writer's Paradise

Rutting with Wolves

Here's what I sent to mah husband yesterday. I got comics in return this morning.

Happy Valentine's Day! Or Happy Lupercalia. Whatever floats your boat.

I wrote some this morning and then did yoga. Considering I went back to bed for twenty minutes when my tummy hurt from my breakfast, I did well.

Day One...

I promise, this isn't going to become a daily word-count blog. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and maybe my content isn't any more scintillating than that, either, but we're just not going there. I don't have the patience.

But it should be noted that I did manage to:

• wake up right at 6AM and did not snooze
  
• wake stepdaughter and make her breakfast (okay, I microwaved some French toast sticks, but I did put the syrup out, too)
  
• consume half a muffin
  
• watch the weather
  
• unload the dishwasher, load it, take out the garbage, sweep the floor, wash the undishwasherable stuff, wipe the counters, take out some of the recycling, and refill the sugar bowl
  
• make tea
  
• start writing by 7AM
  
• stop writing at 8
  
• spend 24 minutes on an exercise cycle at the gym ("small hills" program)
  
• catch the 9:40 bus and get to work 8 minutes early
  

In short, I did the morning exactly the way I'm supposed to, but too often fail to.

I did, however, write only 319 words. But they were good words, and I'd rather have 319 good words than 714 bad ones. (714 should be my daily goal to attain 5,000 words a week. But mostly, I figure that if I'm writing for an hour on a weekday, the triumph there is so large that I cannot get fussed, and can just catch up on the weekend.)

At the gym, I also read a chapter of Austenland by Shannon Hale, which I'm SERIOUSLY ENJOYING. Shannon Hale, you are a goddess.

(I can normally read more than a chapter on the elliptical. However, I learned that reading on a recumbent exercise bike makes me a little seasick.)

Whopping Wordcount!

I decided that in lieu of content, I will tell you that I wrote 343 words in 43 minutes, and I sweated for every one of them.

I find, writing my memoirs is a pleasant alternative to needlework, and no one bothers me with questions about silk embroideries if I scratch diligently at my vellums.

I have the voice. I have the character. FINALLY.

*pause*

449 words in 51 minutes! I may yet hit 500 tonight!

That was loads less sweat, those last 106 words.

Houston, we have Beginning!

Trying Times

I am trying to make a very reasonable list of things to do this week.

I'm stuck between having only one thing on the list and having two-hundred and fifty.

I think this may be part of my problem.

I have a theory, that if I make a list with one thing on it, and then when it is done, make a list with another thing on it, I may accomplish something. But that seems rather silly. Because why would you need a list with only one thing on it? And "you" here means "me" and "silly" here means a word that hasn't been invented yet for "ridiculous beyond human comprehension."

Okay, so. The list:

1. Send out "The Girl-Prince"

I'll let you know how it goes...

Writing Year in Review

Published this year:

"Huntswoman." Aoife's Kiss. (March 2007) (reprint)

"The Roman and the Regency." Quantum Kiss. (January 2007)

Sold this year:

"Almanac for the Alien Invaders" to Asimov's

"Sun's East, Moon's West" to Electric Velocipede

Total submissions this year: a mere 25, but I'll be up to 27 by year's end, at least--maybe 30.

Upcoming publications (next year): stories in Asimov's and The Field Guide to Surreal Botany.

Goals this year? Of course! But let's talk about that later.

Finished short stories:
"Lawncare in the Afterlife"
"The Girl-Prince"

Looking back, did you write more than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?

I made a really good start. I got really side-tracked pretty early on, however. A distinct lack of focus, and then school.

My favorite story this year (of my own):

Of the two I wrote? Uh, sure. "The Girl-Prince." But you know, it's probably one of my favorites, period.

My best story this year:
Most fun story:
Hardest story to write:

Yeah. "The Girl-Prince." This is a very simple meme when you only complete 2 stories.

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
Yes, it's a risk to not have a plan that you can stick to. I took the risk of slacking this year, I think, and the risk of lack of focus. Yes, I learned from it--I learn you don't have much to show at the end of it.

Do you have any goals for the New Year?
Yea verily. The goal is to FOCUS.

Last Year's Review, Part I
Last Year's Review, Part II

Well, gee.

I sat down to write my paper at some point this afternoon--which I am a bit over half-way through with, and it's not due until Wednesday, so go me--and in spite of dinner, a couple eps of Gilmore Girls, and some Scrabulous moves, I also managed to finally clean up chapters 1 and 2 of The Bitter Road. That included rewriting a scene from my tertiary character's point of view, and finally, finally, finally making some damn sense out of the chronology and the first scene of chapter 2.

Now, if only this clarity of thought had occurred to me months ago... Honestly, I think maybe I have to thank this assignment. Working on logical, organized data seems to have a soothing affect on my brain.

I'm sending (have sent, actually) my synopsis and query blurb for The Bitter Road to the Excelsior writing group for critique this week, so hopefully I'll get some good feedback on that as I swing on into full rewrite mode. I've committed myself to 50 hours of rewriting this month. It works out pretty well if I stick at all to my schedule. Hahahahaha.

Fifty hours might actually be overkill if everything from here on in goes as smoothly as 1 & 2 did. Though I've done 1 & 2 about eight times now, and the rest of the book has only been gone over twice, if that. And huge chunks of stock characters and situations have to come right out and go directly to the junk drawer. Which means a goodly portion of what I'm about to do will have to be real writing, not rewriting.

Also, I had a good conversation with my friend Marc at a party this weekend about my assassins story. He was all for it, and set my brain a rumbling down the corridors of assassin guilds and whatnot... at some point, I will have to pick his brain for honest-to-god assassination techniques. Because they just don't make books on that. Do they? You know, I should probably check...

Writing Binge

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

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

That would be really, really nice.

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

It's all part of the process, baby.

First Blood

I have finally, finally, FINALLY (maybe finally) wrangled the first chapter of Some Novel About Conquest (By Right of Conquest, but maybe also The Human Conquest, and wow does novel-titling suck in a way that short story-titling does not) into a first chapter like form. I may be speaking too soon, as I have another scene to write, but my ducks may at last be in a row.

Maybe.

Probably.

But that's officially first blood. Victory.

In other news, I saw V for Vendetta last night, and it ate my brain in the best way. Mostly because there's finally something out there that uses the themes from The Phantom of the Opera in a way that actually works for me. The Phantom and Christine were about music, but... maybe I don't appreciate enough about opera to think that he was offering her something better than what she could have had with Raoul. Perhaps this is because she ultimately never really seemed to appreciate Art, and because she did choose Raoul in the end? Dunno. But V and Evey, well, that's a whole different thing. Freedom from fear is perhaps the single most powerful concept in modern life--to me, anyway. To anyone who's ever been significantly afraid.

I may have to write a whole book about the freedom from fear, some day.

But not today. Today I'm writing about sacrifice and altruism and abandoning honor to save humanity. Fun times.

The Epiphany That Will Save Me Much Hair Pulling

I must write (stories, novels) sequentially. This is known. This is true. It is how I think.

Only, on the way home today, I started whining to myself about something I need to edit and rewrite. I did not want to work on the second part. Because nothing really needs to be rewritten in the second part right now, basically, but it does need line edits and things like that. The boring stuff. The stuff that I can do anytime, but will just slow down my momentum.

"What I really want to work on is that part where the big thing happens," I said.

(Yes, I talk to myself in the car.)

(It's okay because I don't answer back.)

And it occurred to me: just because I write the damn things in order does not mean they have to be rewritten in order.

Angels then burst through the clouds singing "Ode to Joy." That's how big this epiphany was.

Okay, I'm going off to rewrite now.

Rewriting, Critique, On and On

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Utterly Heinous Truth

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

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

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

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

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

I really miss staying up past 10:30.

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

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

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

*bleak sigh*

That Old Stalled Novel Problem; Or, Beating a(n) (Un)Dead Horse

Tonight, I'm brainstorming ways to restart this stalled novel (The Tarot Book). Suggestions will be listened to most eagerly, if you have any to make...

What I've come up with so far:

1) do a few exercises with a workbook
2) make a collage
3) give money to a charity for each week I don't make wordcount (just like Toby Buckell, and no, I don't have a link)
4) tear hair out & run screaming around....
5) just suck it up and do it, fer god's sake

See, the problem I have is that I don't actually know what happens next. I have my great idea, I have the ending... and I've written the beginning... and I know some of the stepping stones along the way, but not all of them by far. Writing my way through it is an option, but I think it will lead to a muddle. And since I don't know what is happening now or next, I have pretty much just... stopped.

I need a subplot.

I probably also need a second viewpoint character.

I've tried freewriting/brainstorming/drawing little maps of character relationships. I'm still not sure what happens next. Perhaps I could try writing nonsequentially... except that I'm pretty sure you should have at least a vague idea of what happens in between. After all, the reason I don't write nonsequentially isn't because it doesn't sound like a good idea--it's because I'm not always sure what happens next.

My god. The things I don't know about the structure and pacing of a novel could fill a book all by itself. It just wouldn't be a very good book, and it certainly wouldn't be a novel.

Hm.

Maybe number 6 on the above list should be: "Shut self in dark room until self has talked it out." Because honestly, that's all I can really see working at this point.

In the meantime, I've started another short story. Because even though I swore off short stories a few months ago, having completed one and sold another since then, I'm all, "Oh, short stories, I was just joshin'! I still loves you!"

*sigh*

Oh, and FYI, Interzone is open to email submissions for the month of May, which is a boon to those of us in the US who don't really even understand IRCs.

Just a little encouragement goes a long way.

Just a little encouragement goes a long way. I suspect most women know this already from their experiences in the dating pool--I certainly do not reflect fondly on those few guys who thought that a polite conversation was practically an agreement to suck the toejam off their feet at some later date (and I wasn't even a particularly pretty girl and I ran into those guys)... but that was college, and things are different there.

Anyway. A little encouragement does go a long way. I spent some days (okay, weeks in some cases) dragging my feet on resubmitting some short stories, but I get one encouraging near-buy (that may yet turn into a purchase) from a magazine and I am Wonder Submitter! The most energetic short story schlepper around! Well, sort of. I did get off my ass, though, and that's the important thing.

And, as it happens, I passes my 60th submission using Duotrope, and my 171st total submission. I'll refrain from giving you any other significant statistics in light of that near-sale that may still happen.

Noted: I still have some problems.

I don't know where to send "Sticks and Bones." Just--don't know. It's a quiet piece. I love much of it. It's so geekly. I have chiseled off and resanded that beginning and then done it all over again, but I still don't know if it's fast enough out of the gate. I think--I probably shouldn't write time travel again, at least, not in short stories. I have done three or possibly more time travel pieces and they've all been hard to place. (Two have sold, and this is the third; I think there's at least one more in the trunk.)

I need to rewrite "The Library Seed." I mean, I know how to do it, I'm ready to excise even more useless filler. Unfortunately, that will be the BILLIONTH and FIRST rewrite on this story, and I wonder if I haven't killed it already. And it's been to hardly any markets--partially because there've been some slow markets, partially because I keep rewriting it.

I am in doubt about "Sun's East." I used to think it was a weird and wonderful story. Now I don't know. I may have made it too schmoopie at the ending. I sent it to a weird and wonderful market. I hope it works.

And I have huge doubts about "Lawncare." Can you really write an atmospheric piece about... mowing the lawn? It probably needs to be shorter. It probably needs an "atmospheric piece" editing pass, whatever the heck that would entail. I really wanted to send it out this week (or at least this month), but I'm not sure I have anything here but a trunk story right now. This may require meditation.

Nonetheless--here I am, encouraged beyond all imagining.

I fear for you, world.

Things not to talk about

Not going to talk about:

-the story I'm writing. Talking about the story I'm writing might suck away its life-force.

-the story I'm rewriting. Talking about why I'm rewriting it could somehow jinx it.

-the comment spam I'm drowning in. Because I don't want to think about moving to Wordpress and the hassle that will be entailed.

-how late I am with my Senior Thesis--that which follows up my essays about my first three years of writing. Because I'm very late.

-how aimless this blog has become. I don't really have a blogging platform, you know? Perhaps I should get one.

This is the way my post-its read

Things I Need to Do Every Day

15 minutes research
15 minutes file/clean
15 minutes (plus resets) on Tarot Book
15 minutes other writing
15 minutes jotting, plotting, daydreaming, freewriting

Things I Need to Do Every Week

Things I Need to Finish

and the most recent fortune cookie:

"With a little more hard work, your creativity takes you to great heights."

I'll take that. After all, it's just a little hard work.

Writing, Re-engaging with

Last night, in plane delay hell (which was actually plane delay purgatory, not unlike an episode of Lost but not as sexy), I pulled out the old laptop and rattled off a few hundred words here and there of several different stories: "≥," "Gesundheit, Nantucket" and sumotherstuff I'm blocking out right now. Couldn't concentrate on novels in that place and time. Must be all concentratey now that I'm back.

Tomorrow I'm going to take a good hard look at what it would take to be back on track with the Tarot Book, and go from there. All things considered, I want to be shopping novels before spring is over. Or rather, Shopping Novel, if it comes to that. The Bitter Road rewrite, in other words. I also want to be in the place where I'm rewriting a novel by the time TBR goes out.

There was a period of time in which I was quite disciplined about writing-finishing-rewriting short stories. I think I could get there with novels. The only thing holding me back is myself.

*sigh* Still my own worst enemy.

Oh, yes. One rejection from Strange Horizons. Further and also: got paid for The Field Guide to Surreal Botany. When and if the latest "Huntswoman" reprint payment comes through, I will have made an even $600 writing in the last three years. Ah. The Glamour.

Interference

Two days--Friday and Saturday--I didn't make goal. Saturday I did at least set down about a hundred words of the Tarot Book and 200 of a short story that makes me giggle, it's so insane.

So, tonight, I figure I've got three hours to make it all come together. And even if it doesn't happen, I'll at least have written for three hours, which will indubitably improve my happiness... right?

One of the reasons I took Friday (and is also the reason behind most of Saturday) off is that I went to see my aunt for late Christmas celebrations and general visiting purposes as well. Among the many joys of the visit (venison lasagna being a highlight) was the chance to look over my great-uncle's reports as a gunner for the Air Force during WWII... they're pretty amazing. Terse, but powerful for all of that. He flew 53 missions altogether.

I also scored a formal family portrait taken mid-WWII, with the aforementioned great-uncle in his uniform, my grandfather standing next to him (Gramps in his late 30s), my namesake standing on the end in a sharp pin-striped suit, the various other great-aunts and -uncles flanking Gramps and the great-uncle and my great-grandparents. It's a really nice picture from a branch of the family that never really seemed to care about taking nice pictures. And my great-uncle looks a heckuva lot like Matthew Macfadyen, which is just... weird. I'm used to thinking that my grandfather was the handsomest guy in his family, but now I'm not so sure. :) And the funny thing is, I sort of named the character in the Tarot Book after him (his real name, not his nickname).

My aunt is talking about she and I going up to visit said great-uncle and pick his brain a bit about his life and his family... he's our last direct link to that family, as he's the last one of the people in this portrait still alive. There's something a bit melancholy in that.

On to the writing. No time for the melancholy to interfere.

Ridiculous Fun

I had a ridiculously good time writing tonight. I couldn't even really tell you why. It wasn't flow. It wasn't that I adore what I wrote (I like it okay, but adore would be a bit much.) It wasn't even that the words were coming at exactly the right rate (not too fast to be crap, not to slow to make hate). No. Really. I just don't know.

Or maybe I do...

Maybe because everything was going *exactly the way I wanted*.

I'm bossy like that.

Here's the thing.

...if I had realized how easy it now was to get 1,000 words down every night, I probably would have gotten off of back onto my ass a long time ago.

Sure, a lot of it is probably the public accountability at novel_in_90, but at least some of it is the fact that I've been ready to write this book for a while now.

Actually... there are probably many factors at play here.

-Yes, I'm mentally ready to write this book. By which I mean, I've thought my thoughts about it for many years now, and have reached that critical mass point where I probably won't run out of ideas before the whole thing starts moving under its own power. This is not something I knew books needed until I finished one and made about six other false starts with things that hadn't fully incubated. Is this something I'm going to have to do always? No idea. Hope not. But it's apparently what I need to do now.

-The aforementioned public accountability. Will probably keep the butt in the chair for several days after the despair sets in.

-My new planner. I got the perfect planner that has the days written out in just the way I like them. It was a long hunt that I did not think would ever bear fruit. But there's something about keeping track of the goals in a way that cannot disappear off my desktop or get folded over or closed that really helps.

-It's a damn huge relief not to be rewriting short stories with 25 rejections. (Not that I have anything with 25 rejections. If I did, I'd have a lot more total rejections, y'know?)

-It's a damn huge relief not to be writing short stories, where every word counts triple and there is no space for fun tangents.

-I no longer fear writing an imperfect draft. (Because...)

-I no longer fear rewriting.

It's like the perfect storm...

Words...

I managed another 1,000-plus words today, and that was a small miracle because I really didn't know *why* they were going to get thrown to the lions, I just knew it needed to happen. But it turns out, Ordeal by Lion sounds perfectly plausible when you think about it, and beyond that... well... let's let Ree tell it:

"There is a simple ordeal that we use to see if people are telling the heart's truth," the Queen said. "Tomorrow, you may each beard a lion and we will all learn who is right and who is ensorceled."

"Forgive me, Your Majesty," Sir Garet said. "But this sounds like a rather dangerous way of solving the problem--if indeed it solves anything. Trial by ordeal was outlawed in the Kingdom of Oestria long ago--"

"And yet the Kingdom of Oestria no longer exists," the Queen said. She reached to pet the black cat thoughtfully. "Don't worry, Sir Knight; we feed the lions well beforehand."

Garet bowed stiffly. Kadri took this opportunity to drop yet another curtsy. "If your steward could direct us to a place to sleep for the night--?"

"There's floorspace in the hall," the Queen said, and then ordered someone to bring us food. I was too hungry to consider running away at that point.

Not certain about a lot of things, as I write--I don't like the name "Oestria" for the kingdom, for starters--but I do enjoy the notion of having an Ordeal by Lion.

In other words, I'm working on the Strength card tomorrow. I'm trying to balance between a literalist interpretation of certain cards' pictures and a symbolic interpretation of all cards, and still tell a story. It's a challenge...

In other news, rejection from Lone Star Stories today. I am semi-officially pulling this story for rewrite. I think I lost something in the last draft. Something rather important.

And, oh, yes, I realized that the novel_in_90 community isn't trying to get to 90k words, they're trying to get to 67,500. So, in other words, I'm fine with my current plan and pace. In fact, with 11,689 written and 78,000 as a goal, I can write 771 a day for the next 86 days and be just fine with both my goals. Though, my personal goal is still 78k in 78.

Progress. Actual progress!

The Tarot Book has passed 10,000 words, and I wrote 5,000 of them this week--which is technically short of my goal of writing 1,000 words a day, but that's why we didn't start at 0--I'm 3k ahead this way, see!?

Anyway, I'm just happy to have done something more than I've been doing. And not having that something to have been a deep and painful struggle. There was some struggle, don't get me wrong, but there's more room to screw up in a novel than in a short story, and that's just a bit liberating.

I have written just a smidge out of order, so far. Basically, as things occurred to me. I'm already afraid of some big choice I've made--the amnesia thing, for starters--and at what point the reveal comes in... but then I tell myself: it's not about the amnesia being part of the reveal. It's about deliberately trying to suppress parts of yourself and then having to quest to get those parts back. Soul retrieval, as the shamans call it. So. I hope that will be clear to me as I write. Already, this book threatens to spill out of my headspace.

I joined the novel_in_90 community on LJ, even though it occurs to me that, you know, I only planned on this novel being 78,000 words long (1,000 words or so for each tarot card, plus this is nominally YA). I'm thinking that when March 21st gets here and I have 78,000 words--or something near/around then) I'll just have to keep going with something else, but in the meantime, it's too good of an opportunity to pass up. There's nothing quite like public accountability.

Now, to get in that hour of editing The Bitter Road I've also set as a weekly goal, and maybe 15 minutes of filing, and I'll feel pretty accomplished!

Writing Year in Review, Part Two

I realized I'd done the publishing side, but not the actual, y'know, productivity side. Borrowing a few meme-like questions from Julie Winningham, I'll take anyone who dares to care on a tour of 2006.

Finished stories:
"Unanswered Letters" (about 4k)
"Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443" (about 15k)
"Rampion in the Belltower" (about 8k)
"Almanac for the Alien Invaders" (about 6k)

Looking back, did you write more than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?

Annnnd... that's it. That's all I finished, the whole year.

Suddenly, some things make sense to me now--frustration-wise, treading-water wise. I wrote a fair amount. But almost none of it was towards the completion, of, well, anything. Four stories? Is a disastrously tiny amount of completed work. And I'm not near done on much of anything else, least of all the novels I was scattershotting and the short stories I was rewriting.

Hm.

I probably wrote about 75% of the words that I would have predicted. It's just surprising that about that I wrote "THE END" about 20 times less than I should've.

My favorite story this year (of my own):

Oh, I love "Wedding Dress." I wrote it for me because it was fun. I mean, I wrote the other three stories for me, too, but this, this... is a screwball comedy of manners set in the far distant future. I can't even begin to guess who else on earth this story would be for but for me.

My best story this year:
Probably "Rampion in the Belltower," but y'know, I'm really not a good judge of "best" in this sort of thing.

Most fun story:
Definitely "Wedding."

Hardest story to write:
All of them?

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
If only "not finishing" was a risk... I mean it is, but not in a good way. Anyway, yes. I did. I wrote solely for my own pleasure. Not that I'd know how to write to a market anyway, but seriously, I look at the four stories I finished and I think, "Yep, those were for me to love, and I have no idea if anyone will want to publish them, evar." I learned that I like doing that...

I'm not saying that I've conformed to some other plan in other years, but I have held myself back from writing Regency-esque, 15k, probably unsellable things...

Do you have any goals for the New Year?
Besides finishing things... get back to writing in a daze. I wrote "Huntswoman" and "Reparations" each in a semi-fugue state. I do not think it is coincidental that they are two of my best works. These were two of the few times where things just unfolded in front of me without any real conscious thought. I like those times best.

Vacation

I think I must legitimately consider the month since Thanksgiving a vacation, because I haven't written much of anything beyond about a thousand words of fic. Plus, at night I've been dreaming about the day job (which is either the insult or the injury, I'm not sure which), so I think, possibly I've been a smidge stressed. And it's craptacular that the stress would mean that writing time has been paying the piper, but that is indeed what it means right here and now.

My accomplishment is that I keep sending the stories out, and for now, that's accomplishment enough. Frankly, I think I'm going to have to learn how to hit things in an effort to get out the stress, but rumor has it that Mr. Haskell is installing a heavy bag in the basement, and I can wait 'til then. If he'll teach me how to hit things, that is... Alternatively, I could practice screaming in an empty house.

The sad thing is, I don't even think it's work that's stressing me--it's a myriad of other things--it's just that work is the tangible and actually somewhat safe thing to dream about. They aren't work stress dreams, they're just dreams that I'm doing work at work. And though it's boring as hell, it's long been a subconscious safety net of mine. I stuffed tacos practically sixteen hours a day one summer, between actual work and sleeping, and it was better than the alternative.

Anyway. I hope to have something writerly to say for myself in the near future. And if I ever figure out how to keep day jobs from affecting writing, I'll be sure to let you know.

Write Club: Resurrection?

Julie and I are going to attempt a Write Club meeting on Monday night. Already, the inherent problem in this is clear: I probably only have battery power for a couple hours at best. So, I plan to bring a notebook and have at the long-handery for part of it.

But in the meantime, it becomes clear to me that in order to resurrect WC properly, I'm really going to have to invest in a new battery. Given that it's now time to fish or cut bait on renewing my laptop's warranty, too (has it been three years already??) (and I think I'll fish, thankyew), that's going to be a hefty chunkage of change sunk into an already out-of-date machine. But at least if I'm buying a battery for a device that is warrantied, that makes some sense...

...I think...

I probably should talk to the local computer nerd (read: Mr. Haskell) about this.

I am in a pretty good situation, as I have a reliable desktop on top of a (thus far) reliable laptop, and I have backups for my backups, seeing as I have very excellent server space in a couple of locations. (Short of a nuclear attack, my work is going nowhere. Assuming I perform my Sunday backup as planned. Which I'm about to do. Also, in a post-nuclear landscape, I probably won't be worried so much about my writing, but may in fact be more focused on the mundanity of survival.)

Anyway. This meandering nattering was mostly to help me think it out... and to invite you, my dear fellow local writers, to consider joining our Write Club, should it ever be properly resurrected.

Reviewing the To-Do List

Behind the extended entry tag (not available in LJ), I'm putting the to-do list I made during Writer's Retreat... an exercise in truth-telling, I guess.

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. sent it out Tuesday
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. I think I did. Then I sent it out. Now I wonder if I did it right. Oh, well
6. Cut 500 words from "Rampion." Sadly, I added about 500 words to it, to fix everything else. *shrug*
7. Work one hour on "Out of Medicine Hat" (which is not the title) Worked about 30 minutes before realizing I don't know where to take this story.
8. Work one hour on Tarot book. Nope.
9. Write a sample blog entry on modern scifi shows for application to blogging job. Did not apply. Not sure it was a bad thing.
10. Write a Christmas-related drabble for a thingie I've been invited to submit to. (Yay, invitations!) Wrote one. Hated it. Did not submit. I just don't have one hundred word ideas.
11. Work one hour on Heroes of the Cold Island. Done, and done. Have worked many more than one hour since.
12. Cut another 500 words from "Rampion." See number 6.
13. Work one hour on "greater than or equal to" Urgh.
14. Transcribe my current batch of notes (on slips of paper and in emails). Well-begun is half-done, but it's not done, and that's that.
15. Work one hour on the Midsummer book. No
16. Rewrite Brook book for one hour. I forgot I gave myself permission to do this. Sad...
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. This was done in some ways... between number 11 and number 18.
18. Work with Dave on the spring workshop planning.
19. Change "Rampion" to 3rd person POV.

Well. Hm.

Thing is, I could make to-do lists every day, and every single day, I'll do three things on it and then get distracted. It's just how I work. Is there an alternative to to-do lists??

Productivity? (Question Mark Firmly In Place)

I'm fighting a nicely nasty bout of Probably Strep, and I'm not really doing much but lying very still and trying not to swallow.

Last night, however, I did manage--in the course of theoretically opening up any file I could find and poking at it--to open up "Sticks and Bones" and tumble my way into a rewrite that I had been dreading for the best part of a year since March 2005. (Am in awe of my procrastinatory ability. Plus my time dilation ability to equate 1.5 years with 9ish months.)

And I did manage to read another book.

The Devil's Heiress by Jo Beverley (66) [romance]

I don't think there's any point in trying to claim any longer that I'm not a real romance reader. My favorite authors have won me over so entirely that I don't have an ounce of breath for denials anymore.

To be certain, I've become a much choosier reader of romances, and at this point, I've gone into highly selective mode. But am I any different now with fantasy? I certainly will not read any old crappy fantasy anymore. The main difference was that a crappy fantasy was just as good to me as a pretty okay fantasy during the height of my fantasy reading, whereas a crappy romance didn't really satisfy anything.

But I suspect age has as much to do with it as anything. I was a non-selective fantasy reader from about age 11 'til 18. I read anything that looked even remotely readable. I didn't come to romance in any real way until much later, when I'd already learned to be selective.

So.

It's something of a personal revelation, I guess. Never mind! Carry on. The Devil's Heiress was quite good, satisfied me just right... Though sometimes I feel as though Beverley is juggling her Rogues and going, "Egads. Look how many of them I made!"

Before September Ends...

Okay. October starts tomorrow. And dayjob-work might finally be settling back down a bit--if not tomorrow, exactly, it'll be settling well by mid-October (right around the time two dear friends get married).

I only point this out because it seems to me that it would be a good time to finally get back on track with some things. Like my novels.

This week, after attacking my newest story head on and failing, I decided to sneak in the back way. Without explanation, does that even make sense to anyone else? No, probably not, but this is one of those stories that I can't talk about before it's done.

I will say this--it's a deeply provocative title. It may be a provocative story. All in all, it's provoking me to write it...

Status Check

'Kay. This entry is for me more than you, but you're free to sing along.

Mr. Klecha and I are up to no good. Watch this space for details.

I have not done any research in a while. I should probably remedy that.

I wrote about half a villainelle the other day. This marks the first time in an extremely long time that I've felt even the remotest edge of an urge to write poetry. And of course, it was the easy half...

I cut about 1,200 words out of my draft of "Wedding Dress Tea Parties" for a variety of reasons. In part to get to the main action quicker. In part to get it down to novelette-length from novella-length. These were good reasons.

Somewhat related to the last paragraph: I find my stories trending longer and longer lately, and for good reasons--I have more ideas to convey, more story to tell, more character to develop. This is part of what I mean when I say that maybe short stories (i.e., under 7,500 words) may not be my natural length. Unfortunately, I can't prove that 100,000 words is my natural length, either. Right now, I seem to be most comfortable in novelette territory. Which is a ridiculous territory to hang out in from a career standpoint; these lengths are hard to sell.

Still no word from Interzone on the story that was held over for the second then third reading. I choose to read this as a good sign, overall, but am also prepping myself for disappointment. Not prepping enough, I just realized, though: I haven't picked my next market yet. I have to do that. It's the best way to prepare for rejection.

One other market has been holding a story of mine for a while longer than promised (and longer than estimated). I am more in the "it's probably lost" mentality for that one.

Am working on a rewrite for Ideomancer. Managed to use the phrase "stay calm" six times in two pages. Have come so close to tearing up the story and stomping it into little pieces and starting over from scratch... yes, playing the role of "worst enemy" tonight will be... Mer Haskell!

Regarding the politics of shelving a book which contains your name but not your work: does that go on the ego shelf?

Because there's no room on my ego shelf for it. Because right now, the ego shelf about two centimeters of space between a box of incense and a stack of travel sized foreign language dictionaries (topped by a stuffed snail). The ego shelf, in fact, holds a copy of the Darker than Tin... chapbook anthology (which was my payment for "Heretic's Day Out") and a CD of flashquake vol. 4, no. 1. I should take a picture. "World's Smallest Ego Shelf."

August, and then September

I hereby absolve August of any wrong-doing. We shall call it the month of refilling, and place no blame for the fact that almost nothing got written, absolutely nothing got finished, and I failed to perform in the slushbomb.

September's going to have to do double-duty, then. I have a short story to rewrite, a novella whose beginning needs a fix, and another short story to finish. And since I've only sub'd 25 times this year--I need to double that, though if I don't have the stories to sub and the editor's don't respond back in a timely fashion, there's almost no way to increase that. But there's simply no question: more submissions enables more sales.

The problem is not in coming up with ideas--and this month's underperformance aside--nor is it a problem to come up with the will and motivation to sit down and write, it's finding the TIME. I just can't write any faster than about 600 words in an hour, and I frequently write slower. And I rewrite even slower than that.

And I really need/want to get cracking and get another novel written. I still don't think I can fix Brook without another novel, maybe two, under my belt... the problem is, there is a tumult in my head, and I don't know how to listen for single voices exactly.

*thud,* as they say

Done: "The Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443," complete at 15,000ish words.

My first novelette. It's probably too much opera, not enough space (in fact, it's not space opera at all, in spite of early assessments.) It is intended to be a comedy of manners crossed with a screwball comedy, but I don't know how well I did.

But it's done.

It's been a rocky road. (Mmmm. Rocky road. Ice cream.) I wrote the first two thirds of it a while ago, and have been chipping away at it for some months years. Okay, a year and a half. Maybe two (man, I love having a log). I had some worldbuilding problems, really. I had to talk them over with my friend and best sounding board, Julie, two or three times, and she helped me see my way through this society.

I came up with the very basic core of the idea long before the spam got to me. I got the idea, in fact, in high school, when colleges were spamming me with their brochures. I'd begun reading Regency romances around that time as well (I started with Marion Chesney's very light, very bubbly Regencies), and the two notions crashed in my head. "My god," I wondered. "What if this is how you went about finding boyfriends?" I wrote the sentence: "Courtship like college brochures" in the little notebook I carried everywhere at the time, and then sat on it until... September of '04.

Anyway. *thud* So mote it be.

Why are the last 3 scenes always the hardest?

Ta-Done

Finished 8,000-word short story, "Rampion in the Belltower."

Let the dancing commence!

Love is stronger than justice...

Bopping along on The Bitter Road. I know that this draft I'm working on is the right thing for the book, but I'm not sure if I'm throwing good words after bad.

Michael A. Stackpole's podcast, The Secrets is juicily rife with good writing tips. (I was actually going to rate the various writing podcasts I've been delving into over the last few months--I'd even written the entry out--but I lost the entry when my computer got shirty with me. Suffice it to say, Stackpole's is my favorite of the on-going 'casts, only slightly outflanked by Toby Buckell's Getting Past Joe Blow Neopro, which have my undying love because they address my current slate of problems, while Stackpole addresses people at a variety of levels.

Anyway, I segued into talking about Stackpole's podcasts because he has a pretty good theory--that writing a novel is the single best thing you can do to become a novelist. Starting numerous novels helps nothing. Rewriting chapter one over and over helps nothing. Only by writing complete drafts do you get to learn all the pieces, all the steps. And I realized that, yup, writing Bitter for a fourth time is the right thing to do. In part. I'd ultimately be better off writing a new novel and learning from that process, though it's not (I think) a dire mistake to finish up with what I envision for Bitter.

Now, writing Bitter a fifth time before finishing a new novel would probably be career suicide. Because five times would turn into six, and six into seven... and that would be it--me and my evergreen novel. At some point (some point very near to here), I have to let Bitter go and send it out. If it comes back, I'll tuck it away and let it sleep for a while... that's my pledge to it: it doesn't get messed with again on spec after this until at least two more books get written. Maybe four.

It's interesting to be at this point. It'd be more interesting if I were done with the Brook rewrite, but, still, it's interesting.

In other news, I remembered 23 words in the Word Memory portion of Brain Age this morning. That totally rocked.

Virtue

Okay, so I'm not actually the Queen of Virtue and Goodness, which was what I was going to claim. I haven't done a goals/outcomes report in ever, and I can't actually bring myself to, because it would be so pointless. Getting sick certainly throws a sabot into the loom, yannow? And they're such good excuses, those loom-cluttering sabots, even when they are thrown by oneself.

So, that means I am the Queen of Self-Sabotage... a little. I get to be maybe Princess of Virtue just for fifteen minutes, because I managed to kick all my inventory back out the door in honor of May Day. And I'm working like the devil on another short story so I can someday have an inventory again. I've known the end of this particular story for ages, so it's time to get it a tie and a sportcoat and start sending it out on job interviews!

I am also the Queen of Ill-fitting Metaphors, in case it wasn't abundantly clear.

Stories. Too many of 'em.

Being sick has created a small writing backlog in my brain. Well. What's a backlog to a library clerk, right? After all, one of my very first jobs at the library was slogging through ten years of unloved SuDocs publications. (Actually, this SuDocs link is better. It more fully illustrates the weirdness.)

Except... I've no real plan for how to deal with the backlog. I'm still just sick enough to make it seem counterproductive to sit up half the night writing. It doesn't help that I'm feeling a smidge overwhelmed at work right now due to a staff shortage, too, and I can't find my memory key, and I have at least one story that's in dire need of something, and I have to query on two more, and I have at least three websites that need some serious work--either total overhauls or ground floor creation. Add in the sick, and... there you have it. And my computer is still making weird hissing noises. So I'm backing things up nightly, waiting-just-waiting for the seemingly inevitable crash, even though I think there's probably just a hair or a feather stuck in the fan.

*pant* Stress.

So, yes, a plan would be good. A plan would identify the problems and would indicate that--solutions or not--I have a handle on things. But I can't get it together to make a plan, either, because I have one of those things looming in the near future that make planning seem futile and impossible. (One of those things being a very packed weekend and week, when my nephew and his parents come to town. About which I'm delighted, but pretending it's not adding to my stress would be pointless.)

I need one of those BIG planners that lets you chart out each half-hour of your life. Not because it would solve anything, but because it would provide me with the illusion that it could solve things--just long enough to make a plan, and maybe, just maybe, get a little writing done.

Yep.

I'm still my own worst enemy.

It's the second Sunday of the sequence.

And my goals for the fortnight were:

* finish rewrite of The Bitter Road
* agent list for TBR
* re-attempt ending for "Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443"
* begin rewrite on "Sun's East"
* finish and return 2 research books

No, I didn't manage to finish The Bitter Road. Significant progress was made. I took a vacation day, and I worked pretty hard on the weekends. (Not so hard during the weeks, or at least, not as hard as I could.) I think I'm past the hardest part of the rewrite, though. Well, for now I think that.

Did get the preliminary work done on an agents list, however.

Didn't touch "Wedding Dress." Did start a new story, plus discovered that writing during lunch is definitely a possibility. Of the nine days I was at work in the last two weeks, for a full five of them I managed to do significant writing on breaks.

I got the beginning of "Sun's East" write, finally. We'll see how the rest goes. I'm not yet certain if I should resub as a short story or see how it likes being a novel. Though I'm thinking, screw how it likes being a novel! I don't have time for more novels.

Read two research books, but haven't written up the one. Am hoping to do more multi-book posts, fewer single-book posts. Am also hoping to start writing up my reactions to articles I read on occasion. That's neither here nor there.

Goals for next fortnight:

• finish TBR draft 4 & copyedit
  
• finish a short story
  
• two research books

Preliminary goals for April:

* get gamma reader opinions on Bitter Road
* Zelazny entry for Sekrit Project
* Bujold entry for Sekrit Project
* work on agent list for Sekrit Project
* check in with Julie on Sekrit Project
* finish up "Sun's East" and "WDTP/2443"
* pitch letter for Sekrit Project
* check in with Julie on Sekrit Project
* submit queries on Bitter Road
* submit queries on Sekrit Project
* official novel break: short stories only this month

Preliminary Goals for rest of year:

* rewrite Regency
* finish another novel
* finish six short stories that I'm proud of

Things Continue, In Spite of Me

I'm halfway through a new short story just by writing on my lunch hours at work. Won't be able to write at work tomorrow--have promised to eat lunch with a former co-worker and friend.

For someone who once swore that she was not likely to make any lasting friendships at work, she sure has. But I think that's one of those things I swore in my first year of work--which was an interesting, atypical and otherwise depressing year. I was 20, fresh dropped-out of college, still living with my college friends, and my social group was made up of ex-dormmates and gaming buddies. The group I started working with was close-knit and had parties at each others' houses seemingly every weekend. (It was probably once a month.) I had no room in my life or my mind for them. Now I really see the value in socializing with one's workmates, and since then I've maintained work friendships with people I met ten years ago. But I think that sort of happens when a job becomes a career. Even if it's just a day-career.

(Day-job seems inaccurate, at times. I like day-career.)

Back to Brook, then on to bed.

And now for our goals...

Ok. So, fortnightly goals it is. Of the goals I set for the week of Feb. 26 (and extended into the week of March 5th):

* re-attempt ending for "Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443"
* notecard Bound by Spells (partially done)
* rewrite two chapters of Bitter Road
* Zelazny entry for Sekrit Project
* take notes on Breakout Novel and return to library
* take notes from last Baux book and return to library
* work on query letter for Bitter Road

Not half bad. I didn't actually manage to write the reworked ending for "WDTP/2443" but I'm pleased with what I dreamed up, and will be working on it as a reward for finishing up The Bitter Road, which is coming along famously for all that I did no writing on Saturday of this week.

I think I'll put off the Sekrit Project entirely until TBR is with gamma readers.

I've decided that the reason "Sun's East" doesn't work as well as it could is because I start the story too far before the action. (Well, DUH, right?) Mainly because I was afraid I'd lose the voice. One criticism I got from the Realms of Fantasy slush reader was that there were too many disparate fairy tale elements, and I'm down with that, but not in the way he probably thinks... I think there are too many random and unexplained fairy tale elements. There's more to being a miller's daughter and a dragon slayer, I realized on Friday, while talking through the problem on the drive home. (Yep. I talk to myself in the car. I am definitely crazy, but since I'm mostly harmless...)

And that fear of losing voice is a big one of mine. If I'm going to do well with voice, I nail it on the first draft, and any futzing thereafter tends to ruin the voice very quickly. Which is probably where I got my fear of rewriting--I've actually known this about my writing for years, maybe since I hit puberty, which is when I decided that I wasn't a rewriter, and truthfully, didn't attempt to rewrite anything, not really, until, oh, 2003. I'm just now learning how to make rewriting work for me, and it's been an uphill struggle all the way.

So anyway, I think I've figured out how to fix "Sun's East," and I'll be working on that as my reward story for the next couple weeks.

On to the new goals.

Goals for fortnight from March 12-March 26:

* finish rewrite of The Bitter Road
* agent list for TBR
* re-attempt ending for "Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443"
* begin rewrite on "Sun's East"
* finish and return 2 research books

Preliminary goals for end of March-beginning of April:

* copyedit heck out of Bitter Road
* get gamma reader opinions on Bitter Road
* Zelazny entry for Sekrit Project
* Bujold entry for Sekrit Project
* work on agent list for Sekrit Project
* check in with Julie on Sekrit Project
* finish up "Sun's East" and "WDTP/2443"

Preliminary Goals for mid-April:

* pitch letter for Sekrit Project
* check in with Julie on Sekrit Project
* submit queries on Bitter Road

Preliminary Goals for end of April:

* submit queries on Sekrit Project
* official novel break: short stories only this month

Preliminary Goals for rest of year:

* rewrite Regency
* finish another novel
* finish six short stories that I'm proud of

Fortnightly Goals

It occurs to me that I live on a fortnightly schedule. My stepdaughter lives with us for a weekend and a week, then goes to school on Friday morning and then she doesn't come back until the following Friday evening, and the week with her starts again. See? Fortnightly. My work habits change significantly depending on whether she's there or not.

And naturally, my goals-tending fluctuates wildly depending on what kind of week it is.

So why am I keeping a weekly goal schedule?

Well, the answer now is: I no longer am.

Introducing... fortnightly goals.

I'm sure there's an important lesson in this about not trying to make square pegs fit into round holes, and about making goals work with your schedule instead of trying to make your schedule work with your goals.

But that lesson will be left as an exercise for the reader. Or, rather, I will not belabor the point.

Lovely Dinner, Seven Thousand Words and Still Going

Been a busy weekend around here, writing-wise. I am doing my best--buckling down on The Bitter Road and finally like how it's coming together. When I stall, I take a five minute stretch break, and then try again. If I'm still stalled, I give myself permission to write something else for half an hour, or work on redesigning the merriehaskell.com main page. Then back to it. This method seems to be working pretty well.

I had a small break with Julie. We ate Indian food and watched a few hours of Prison Break so J. could be all caught up. Now I taste of cardamom and have the thrilling option of eating leftovers for breakfast. Or maybe tomorrow's dinner.

Am considering dragging the laptop to work for lunch-writing this week. I will do my goals reporting on Monday... maybe Wednesday... things have gone a bit off the rails. I wrote seven thousand words yesterday, probably another three thousand today, so I'm okay with off the rails.

That's all the news that's fit to print. I mean that literally--I just had to erase a whole rant about the email program I'm forced to use at work. It was definitely not fit to print.

Stalled

I'm stalled. On the actual keyboarding part of writing, that is. I have been outlining and notecarding up a storm, and I don't feel a particular lack of creative juice. Freewriting, I've been able to do, even, but I'm getting mired in that sincere lack of forward motion when I open up a "real" file.

Usually what this says to me is that a change of venue and a damn good to-do list are in order. Now... Change of venue is the hard part. I'm at the dining room table right now--an accident, because I thought I needed to be close to my scones last night while they were baking--and I can already see that this will be acceptable for a while, assuming my husband stays asleep and I don't hear from my stepdaughter for a few hours (probable on both counts--Dann, when he sleeps, sleeps With Intent, and K. is at school). But when tonight rolls around, it will not be so cool, and further, it won't last all that long, I bet.

Coffee shops are out of the question, by the way. Too loud to suit my current purposes. And usually only fun when you're there with a group.

Essentially, I need Writer's Retreat. I'm so not ready to plan and execute one, however, and there's no way I'd get the time off work to do the extra day.

Ok, time to stop complaining and get busy on the dining room table.

Haha.

Goals, Redux

It was actually helpful to me when I set down my writing goals for the upcoming week and evaluated how I did on the past week's goals. It also made for some boring blogging, which is why I stopped. But... what's one day a week? I guess, if you find it as boring as I think you do, consider this your warning not to stop by on Sundays.

I'll at least bless you all with a cut-tag.

Goals for the week of February 19th:

* attempt final rewrite of problematic scene and resubmit to editor (I apologize for my coyness on this one, but it's an ongoing negotiation, so coy I shall be)
* attempt ending for "Wedding Dress Tea Parties of 2443"
* read 30 synopses on Miss Snark
* synopsis for Bitter Road (jumped the gun on that one, done by midnight last night)
* notecard Bound by Spells
* rewrite two chapters of Bitter Road
* Zelazny entry for Sekrit Project
* take notes on Breakout Novel and return to library
* take notes from last Baux book and return to library
* notecard, chart or SOMETHING "Alloy" and "Gesundheit"

Preliminary Goals for week of Feb 26:

* Bujold entry for Sekrit Project
* rewrite two chapters of Bitter Road
* work on query letter for Bitter Road

Preliminary Goals for week of March 5th:

* rewrite two chapters of Bitter Road
* work on agent list for Bitter Road
* pitch letter for Sekrit Project
* work on agent list for Sekrit Project
* check in with Julie on Sekrit Project

Preliminary Goals for week of March 12th:

* rewrite final chapters of Bitter Road
* copyedit heck out of Bitter Road
* get gamma reader opinions on Bitter Road
* check in with Julie on Sekrit Project

Preliminary Goals for week of March 19th:

* submit queries on Bitter Road
* check in with Julie on Sekrit Project

Preliminary Goals for week of March 26th:

* submit queries on Sekrit Project

Preliminary Goals for April:

* official novel break: short stories only this month

Preliminary Goals for rest of year:

* rewrite Regency
* finish Bound by Spells
* finish six short stories

I lost the fight, but at least I was only fighting myself.

I was supposed to be about halfway through my redraft of The Bitter Road today. Maybe a third, if I were to be realistic. Instead, I'm about halfway through the first chapter.

Granted, "Chapter One" is now about the size of five of my old chapters, and I've drastically reduced the first three chapters because I was suffering from a big bad case of badbeginningitis, but.

Also granted, the beginning was the part that needed the most work. It took forever to get off Bleak Mountain. It took forever for the character relationships to gel. It took forever for everything, in fact...

It was interesting, because when I started getting my first crits back, I realized I'd made a serious mis-step in regards to this book: I couldn't hold it all in my head at one time. Not while I was writing it, certainly. Since then, I think I've spent a lot of time working on that particular skill, even if it was just brain time. I certainly haven't finished any other novels since I finished this one--I've begun not a few of them, and even gotten halfway through a couple. So it wasn't by practice that I learned this skill. Not exactly. I've been trying to figure out how I did it, or even really if I did it. I could be seriously deluding myself.

So, mostly, I've been working the thing over almost entirely. The first scene is now Brook alone with her mother. The second scene is now the King's dream. And so on. No more time-jumping to sync up POVs. This only seemed to bother one of my beta readers, but it bothered me when I was doing it, so I decided to stop. The whole thing rests more now in the tone of the Kestrel parts. Brook feels older. I lost the voice that was writing the Brook parts, and mostly to that I can only say good riddance--the voice was inconsistent and too childish, and might have been interesting in a short story, but it couldn't anchor a novel. Or at least, it shouldn't have.

Now. The thing is, all these changes are all concessions to what I thought I might need to do in the first place. At the time, the Brook voice was the best voice I could write, and I wasn't able to give it up in the rewrites, which put me at a serious disadvantage for editing the book into something I could be truly proud of. In the time since then, I've learned something about voice--not everything, by any stretch--but right now, I think voice might be one of my strengths. (Eventually, I'll get better at everything else, and voice will fall dead last again, but for now...)

And I guess that's my first real lesson in writing in the year twenty-ought-six. In the early days, I balked at rewriting, because I couldn't see any benefit in it. At one point, rewriting just seemed to be a death knell, because all I could do was write my original voice out of the equation. Rewriting for me meant correcting awkward sentences.

Later, I began to understand structure and flow, and saw how rewriting worked for those things. Sometimes you can't see structure until the work is complete; if you can't see it, you can't fix it. So, I saw that rewriting worked for that--but even then, rewriting only meant "move this scene earlier, extend that scene."

And, somewhere along the way, I had critiquers who managed to give me hints about extraneous characters and character goals, and I began to see that rewriting could be used pretty well to make the character's journey more meaningful. So, rewriting began to also mean "take this character out, make this character's actions more consistent with her goal."

And here I am, finally able to see that I can actually learn enough from draft to draft to be able to trust that maybe, just maybe, there's more to this rewriting biz than I first thought.

It may look remedial, but it feels like progress.

Another To-Do List

I crafted another to-do list this afternoon that I will doubtless give up on half-way through. But the point is that I do keep to them for a while, right?

Right?

The first and most important thing is to follow through on something I committed to do--which is the SCIFICTION tribute.

Then, I can beat my head against the wall in new and more creative ways about my current novel, the past novels and the short stories that haven't been sold.

Yay! Now that is planning.

Deadlines

I have a sticky on my desktop delineating some up-coming deadlines. I thought I'd share them with you, and then be snarky about how likely I am to meet them. This is sort of like talking about myself behind my back, but hey, at least I won't be doing it in the third person.

-SCIFI.com tribute 12/20/05

This I will do. Probably on the 19th, knowing me. In the meantime, I'm aiming for the 10th.

-She's Such a Geek submission 1/15/06

I actually have a topic. I'm just not sure if I have 3,000 words of topic.

-Polyphony 6 open 12/15-01/31

Do I even have anything I can submit? "Send us your magic realism, surrealism, literary stories with a genre sensibility, and other hard-to-classify stories with strong literary values, compelling characters, engaging tone and unique voice." Hrm. The only literary thing I've written since college has already been sold, frankly. Hah. Maybe that's a sign...

-The Town Drunk opens for subs on 01/02/06.

Brit Marschalk is a fellow Lenox Ave alum, and she/they're looking for lighthearted spec fic to boot! I've been waiting for a market like this.

...and there are some other deadlines that I'm frankly less convinced I'm going to have anything to do with at the bottom of the sticky, because it's going to take me forever to prepare anything for the ones at the top.

Hm. That was actually much less snark than I'd intended. My apologies. In other news, I should tell you that my father-in-law seems to think "snarky" is a hilarious word that I made up and uses it back at me all the time. Oh, but the Urban Dictionary begs to differ.

And I (mostly) trust the Urban Dictionary, ever since they so kindly defined the term bubblegoose for me. And why "bubblegoose?" Because the eponymous bubblegoose song by Wyclef Jean showed up in rotation on my iPod and since then I have not been able to stop listening to it*. Talk about embarrassing. Except we weren't talking about embarrassing, so I really don't know why I brought it up.

*(no, I don't know everything that's on my iPod; half the music is random stuff I ripped from my husband's collection, and that's the half the fun of the shuffle play)

Productivity

Managed to rewrite "Sun's East" for the umpteenth time. It's tighter. It's better. I probably screwed up the beginning. Either way, I'm shipping it out the door again tomorrow.

Prior to that, I worked on "The Library Seed" for exactly one hour, then went and had a small (teeny, like 20 minutes) nap until Merlin the Cat headbutted me awake and back to my office. I'm still not happy with this story. I had some big revelation about it today at work, too, that I didn't write down, and I'm a bit miffed on that as well.

The problem is, I put a war in "The Library Seed" and I don't know what to do with that war. It's not causing enough of the right kind of conflict.

I did some very slapdash research for my sketchy, sketchy King Arthur story idea.

I did market research for about thirty minutes. I hadn't really been keeping up with things, esp. not anthologies. Not that I needed to, apparently. What in hell would I write for... Spicy Slipstream Stories? 'Cause, I really don't have anything already written. No, really. I don't.

I slushed. Hm. It was a semi-imperfect cross-section of slush--some good, some mediocre, etc.--I got a story that actually offended me in today's slush. I mean, not in an out and out offended "I'm going to complain to someone" way, but something that felt so written for shock value, with not even a sentence of redeeming quality, that when I found myself groaning out loud in despair over faux pas number three, I just gave up. That was an experience, let me tell you. It quite overshadowed anything else I might have had to say about slushing today.

And now, to bed. I'm 22 minutes into my second wedding anniversary, and thinking it's good that I'm writing this now, since tomorrow night I'll be eating Chinese food and giving gifts that have to do with cotton. Yeppers. Cotton. Who knew paper would be the easiest anniversary?

Write Club Report

In between the bouts of giggles from my compatriots, I managed to read a few chapters of A Dream at Midsummer (my Regency romance based on A Midsummer Night's Dream). Last night, I started in the middle of what I'd written and couldn't get myself to stop reading and go to bed until well after midnight. I often forget how clever I can be just moments after I write something; something two years old can often strike me as quite good and surprising (though just as often, it can strike me as quite bad, so I'm not being entirely vain here).

Anyway, 50,000 words in, and the love spells haven't even been cast.

I think I've some trimming to do.

But that's not the revelation, not by far; the revelation was: "it's much better than I remember it being, and well worth finishing."

So, anyway, I read some of that tonight. Not surprisingly, the first chapter has to be redone completely (this being a common theme in my writing life--my beginnings suck). More of a mystery is the nearly claustrophobic POV. I need at least one other POV character, a tertiary one, and I need to expand the role of the secondary POV character. No question about it. Things are a little too filtered through the main character's perceptions right now.

I also rewrote (again) most of "The Library Seed" (I'm on page 17 out of 21 or something like that), and failed to rewrite any of "Sun's East." But both of those need to be redone and back out the door Very Soon Now. I only have four stories out at the moment, and two of them are probably dead at their markets.

Other than that, though, I feel I'm pretty strongly on the track of learning how to do this book thing. I'm not getting a whole lot of short story sized story ideas anymore, if I ever did to begin with (a few editors have had some opinions on the subject before).

Tomorrow, I'm going to talk about my grail book of revisions, if I remember. I'm writing it here to jog my memory, though I don't often go back and check my previous day's entry, so who knows.

Smattergories

Good progress has been made via this whole "going with the natural flow of my disjointedness" theory.

In two days, I:

• rewrote 5 pages of The Novel that Will Not Be Named
• wrote 2 new pages on The Other Novel that Will Not Be Named
• wrote probably a page and a half of a random scene from By Right of Conquest (talk about a book that I'm writing non-sequentially. What I fear most right now is trying to put that book in order. Maybe if I printed it out...)
• probably another page of randomness
• and the night is still somewhat young, though I'm getting over a cold, and it's less young than it first appeared.

In any case, with nearly 10 pages at 250 words a page, that's 2,500 words (combining written and rewritten), and that's not half bad. If I weren't still struggling with the moral implications of leaving a half dozen unfinished short stories unfinished, I might be writing even more; my current dilemma is whether or not I keep trying to write short stories in the face of what are becoming some intensely interesting novels.

Plus, I need to do draft four of The Bitter Road. You know, if I could quite figure out what it is that I want that book to say in the end. That's something that I think I thought I knew, and now I'm no longer sure. I'm frankly also not certain that it's entertaining enough. In any part. Things that entertain me as a reader are stories of adversity and learning, frequently combined. I spent so much time doing things in that book that entertained me while writing it, that I'm not sure... of a lot of things. Something more to ponder in the shower of mornings, while I gear up for the rewrite.

But. Otherwise. This scattering of attentions, which results in a smattering of progress in a variety of projects... well, when it starts feeling like I'm truly going nowhere, I'll worry. Until then, I'll convince myself that I feel like I'm going somewhere, and leave it at that.

Brief Thoughts

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.

Dab Update

About 500 words on "Three Peppercorns"--if that is indeed the name of this story, and of that, I am not at all certain. I basically got the tailor to the weaver's house. The sorcerer and the farmer are still stuck at the spice merchant's. And yes, it does amuse me to give out random bits of meaningless information.

*sighs and stares at the mailbox*

Yeah. No mail.

I'd say, "Let's talk statistics. Percentages, even." I even wrote most of a journal entry about statistics and percentages (even), but ran out of time and didn't post it. I've not had the desire to repost it (it lurks in my email, message 179 of 246, and holy crap, how did it get up to 246 again so soon?).

Here's my current guess about statistics and percentages: no writer is satisfied. If they were, they'd stop writing. And if they stopped writing, they would no longer be a writer. Thus, no writer is satisfied.

Actually, that's rather a lot more flip and less useful than I meant to be. So I think that I'll submit it as a hypothesis, and test it out for a few years. Is there such a thing as a writer--any artist--who is satisfied that his vision matches his output? That her sales ratio is exactly as she wished? That his quantitative output measures his ambition?

Of course, I could be misusing the word "satisfied" here.

And so it goes...

I've got 12 minutes until I go pick up our China Gate order on the way home from work (Szechuan Beef for me, General Tso's Chicken for Dann).

Last night I hammered out a new beginning for "The Lonesome Dark." Something evocative yet coherent. Man, that's a tall order. I had evocative before, and now I've got coherent, and I still need to find the middle ground. The good news is, the 200 words I have now work much better than the 200 words I had before--every word counts now. The images are sharper. But there's still a missing element, and I have to sniff around looking for that tonight.

I did have a wonderful image (thanks to the politically incorrect but frequently hysterically funny morning show Dann hooked me on eight years ago--eight years, no wonder I can't give it up... I don't think I have a single other habit that's lasted eight whole years--Drew & Mike) of a man in Jamaica giving ultralight airplane rides to tourists... There's a man in Jamaica that my main character knows through the Interface (the main piece of technology which is the SFnal heart of the story) who envies the opportunity the character has. This will generate more dialogue about the central theme of the story, and remind me of the contrasts between civilization and wildness, and that's good.

But I have to figure out how to fit that in, as well, and make it interesting enough for there to be a callback to him later. But he's important, this man; somehow, he's going to articulate my theme better than any other character, and I have to get him to help me.

I have a feeling this will pad the story by almost a thousand words. Something I'm not superhappy about, but Strange Horizons already rejected this one, and they're the ones who'd be less interested in an over-4,500-word story. So, actually, there's really no reason to be less pleased about an additional thousand words--so, never mind. But I think the story will be better. Help it stand out. It's rather too bad that I didn't figure this out earlier, before this story had been to half the major markets. But at least there's the other half, and the many excellent semi-pros as well.

Ok, that's twelve minutes.

Update

walls painted: 2.5
chapters written: 1

But the night is young.

Oh, and--
itchy palms today: 1
times today that I believed this means I will sell a story by the end of the week: 1
previous times a palm has itched, I've believed the story thing, and have gotten nothing: 14

Behind in the Rent

The reading rent, that is. Haven't managed to read more than 20 pages in the last week. I suspect that will change in the next couple of days, since I'll be on a plane and then house-guesting with my brother- and sister-in-law and the nephew. (I suppose I'd get my anglophile license revoked if I called him a nevvy, no matter what my intentions.)

I'm doing that thing where I pick up four or five books consecutively over the course of a week and read the first chapter and then forget to pick them back up. It says more about my state of mind than my reading material, I swear. Usually. My plan for this weekend is to get in one non-fiction book, one re-read (The Blue Sword shall be packed!) and to finish another book. I think I could finally get back to the Ash series if I tried. I suppose a short story collection wouldn't hurt anyone, either.

I'm supposed to bring my laptop, so as to write, but I am suddenly hit by this brainstorm imagining of the near future, in which I do not bring my laptop and concentrate on the reading instead. If I did that, I would inevitably be struck by an enormous brainstorm of greatness and have no easy way to record it. If I bring the laptop, I will ensure that doesn't happen. Ah, the horns of a lemming.

I did restart "Breakfast at Antigone's" today. Shakespeare showed up at the start, and that made all the difference. Byron tried to show up first before, and he was not helping things. I dig the characterization I've started for Nina, as well, which is cool, because I feel like I've managed to spin enough plates to make this look good. Let's just see if I can keep them spinning throughout.

What I utterly failed to do was to get chapter one of BRoC in shape for the WisCon writing workshop. I may have to send them a short story. Of course, I don't have any shorts that I can stand that haven't already been workshopped with the OWW... I feel pretty happy about those stories, and plus, they're already snugly tucked away with editors, and it makes me nearly crazy to try to rewrite stuff that's out malingering in a slushpile. I do have one more day, though I also have to pack, do a few chores and attend Harn. And I really should go spend my soon-to-expire 50% off thingies and buy new underthings. My lunchtime tomorrow may get seriously busy. And Harn may be be multi-tastic.

The only other news is no news. I was expecting a bounce from F&SF today. I suspect tomorrow. And no, I've stopped hoping for the best with regard to getting out of slushpiles. I spent a long time learning how not to get my hopes up, and sort of clenching whenever I got the mail. Then I realized I was living a joyless existence in which I never once allowed myself to dream of the big time. And a couple of times, I did let my hopes get up a smidge too far... so now I've settled on quiet resolve in actuality, and daydreams in the abstract. It seems to work a little better that way. In any case, I neither dread nor welcome my trip to the mailbox tomorrow out of hand.

We were on a break...

Well, I am. Officially, that is. It was meant to be a break of two days, but last night ended up being part of the break as well, and heck, I may be gunning for another day of break tonight.

Either way, the break won't continue past this weekend. I have half of an itch to do something tonight, but with only half an itch...

Yeah. Home sick. I think I'll read. The cats don't want me to go get my juice refill, but I may have to insist.

We Now Return to Actual Progress

Did another rewrite of "The Lonesome Dark" and sent it off to my faithful correspondent in Northern California (Catherine, for those of you playing at home, who's going to earn pride-of-place in the acknowledgements section the first time I have one, even if she doesn't read that particular work).

By morning, I had rethought a lot of the stuff I put into "LD" last night, and Catherine, interestingly, had much the same reaction. So. Maybe the things that need to be fixed in this story can't be fixed, and oh, yay, I wrote myself into a corner yet again.

On the other hand, I threw down another section of "Thaw" last night, and was somewhat pleased by it.

I've been discussing something related to this (how writing and rewriting can be separate processes) with my friend Joe, who is a musician... we're trying to map our arts onto each other, for some reason, and I think it's because we're both People Who Don't Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. I argue that writing is composition and rewriting is performance. Joe isn't sure. We're going to discuss it in person. But for now, I'm pretty convinced of my metaphor.

Variety Pack

I'm reading Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within. I'm sort of dipping in here and there and letting platitudes and questions wash over me ("Are you rushing the endings because you're afraid inspiration will leave before you finish?") and thinking about them. It's helping kill what ails me. Or, uh, cure what ails me. Whichever.

I"m also reading, concurrently, a book on the climatic change at the end of the age of dinosaurs and a couple books on ice ages in general, and I'm doing it for pleasure, not for the value of researching for "Thaw." "Thaw," indeed, proceeds on apace.

Thanks to the folks at the workshop, I'm rewriting "The Library Seed" with some very clear notions in mind. And some notions on how to be more clear, as well. I feel like this story is one where I'm hunched down in the Bushes of Conspiracy and plotting with the Abstract Muse, whispering loudly, "Ok, just this once, we're going to try to be clear about what's going on." It might be working. What really kicks me right where I live is the fact that the people critting me are good at this. I'm starting to worry about the quality of my critiques.

I'm also about ready to rewrite "Sticks and Bones." I have had a few dozen ideas for improvement, including adding another character... but I just got a good crit from Stella that made me think that subtracting is the true path to glory here. Tightening, anyway. I'll take another week or so to think on that, since I'd like to finish "Thaw" and I have my goals for BROC I'd like to hit this week, though I think my overall structural insecurities are ruining my plan to write non-sequentially.

Crazy dreams about acceptances last night. That almost assures a rejection, doesn't it?

Write Club Report

In attendance at the new Borders café were Julie, Eric and myself. The new seating arrangements are not optimal. We may have to return to B&N.

As for work... I got all the snippets of BROC together and put them in one file and it came out to about 10k, which means that I've actually managed to be about half as productive as I hoped, which is still twice as productive as I feared. 10k is one-tenth done, after all. Uh, maybe. If I'm not actually just writing two books bam-bam with no stopping in between.

I suppose it's problematic that I could be writing one 100,000 word book, or maybe two books totalling 180,000 words, and that I really just don't know. I have no idea how to explain this right now... but, it's like this: I know the ending of "the first book" (nebulous concept that it is--is it really a book or a convenient 90-100k-word resting place?). I know some of the things that happen in the second book--about half the things, as it happens. I think I may just keep on writing when I get to the end, right on into the next book, without even really noticing. So.... Yeah, ok, I can't explain it. I knew that sentences ago. Sheesh.

Ok, so--once I finished doing that I needed something else, and turned over to "Thaw" and wrote the opening scenes of that. They went very nicely. I think it might be an epic. That was a nice realization, after wondering how to write one in 5k since first reading the guidelines to >Twenty Epics. I doubt "Thaw" can be finished in time, but it was very pleasurable to figure out how I could rise to the challenge--none of my other ideas were quite doing it for me.

Yes, so. Progress. None this evening--I was at Harn.

Write Club Report

Good productivity last night. I wrote about half a scene with Cora and Baxter, somewhere around the middle of the book--it came out to around 800 words, and it does all these things, like explain how Baxter's mind works and how Cora actually feels about Zikor. It rails against the Overwhelming Healing Penis* theory and does double duty with symbolism and little jokes... It was very satisfying, it was not written sequentially, and it was a major triumph for me. By Right of Conquest may actually come into being.

I also, for a break, dove over to an epistolic time travel story I started some time back. It now has an ending. I may need to (no, definitely do need to) go back and fit it with something resembling a point of climax. I can't quite decide what to call it. "An Archive of Unanswered Letters Found under the Floorboards of a House Slated for Demolition in 2032 in Portland, Oregon" is just too long and not interesting enough. I think there are parts of that title I can use, but... I'll have to think on it.

But, hey, progress.

*The Overwhelming Healing Penis: when a character is suddenly brought to tears and has a catharsis and all the psychological ills of the character are healed instantly by having sex; usually a female character gets over previous instances of sexual assault or abuse by having sex with a sensitive male character--whose apparent power center is a magical healing penis.

Progress Report

Less than half of the progress of regular beer!

Yeah... well.

• "Alloy of Optimism" : +1,000 words--and a plan!
  
• Peppercorn thing : no movement. And March 21st draws ever closer. Ah, well, it's probably not an epic, anyway.
  
• By Right of Conquest : +1,000 words, non-sequentially produced
  
• "Thaw" : got a couple books on ice ages--research!
  
• "Tertio Millennio Adveniente" : started, researched, finished, rewritten and sent out, all this week. However, complete at 700 words means...
  

...even if I rewrote it once, I'm still not at 5k this week, and certainly not at 5k for BRC. Such is life. I was sick, and Lost was new. We had snow and ice and rain and bitter cold and warm fog in seven days. It was Valentine's Day and cat-vet day this week. Such is life.

The Third Millennium Draws Near

Random short story mugging while trying to take a bath and read a book about the Black Plague. I think I need to finish reading the book before I can finish the short story, but in this case, it's one of those stories that's pre-written in my head. I know the whole thing, I just have to fill in the details.

It helps that it's not a story, except in a technical sense; it's a bit of "found story"--an alternate universe as uncovered by a brief bit of primary source material in an anthology. I've titled the story "Tertio Millennio Adveniente" for now, but I'm not keen on that... It seems to be holding around 444 words, as well. That's rather small. Rather smaller than I thought once I'd laid most of it out, even.

Huh.

Write Club Report

Could not get into writing at Write Club for all the tea in China. I blame it on the change in locations--our usual café is undergoing renovations, and we have been cast adrift upon the sea. Or, actually--we've removed to the Barnes & Noble down the road from our usual Borders. The food is better, but the atmosphere less homey. The music was stultifyingly loud. The tables were too high, or perhaps the chairs were too low, and I had to sit on my balled-up coat.

I did manage to outline and narrow my focus on "Peppercorn" or whatever that story is going to be called. I also managed to really, finally refocus my thinking on "Alloy of Optimism"--apparently it's a screwball comedy of manners. Ohhhh... well, no wonder I didn't know what to do next. Laying out the disparate plot elements and characters caused Julie and Lou to point out the Connie Willisishness of the thing, kind of an "Even the Queen" atmosphere. I had thought it was a much more serious story than that, but then I reread it and no, it's really not.

I came home and generated a whopping 223 words, but they were the right 223 words. I think. The story can be funny with so many disparate plot elements, and it's possible to do funny and meaningful together. Right? Right. "Even the Queen."

The first two sentences of "Alloy of Optimism" are behind the cut, for your brief amusement.

"There is nothing like a family gathering on a festive occasion to showcase the eccentricities of the filial bonds therein. To think otherwise is to invite ridicule by wiser and more pessimistic minds."

Categories

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