Another Opportunity to Get My Message Out

Once again, I'm going to be on the radio. I did it last year and it was really fun, even though what I was reading was silly, silly, silly. This year, I think I'll mix my soundbed carefully and practice a lot. I haven't read in public in a while, and I'm feeling out of practice.

It would be even better if, by the time I read, I can tell people that the novel is due to be published....

The Days Simply Fly By

In October, I announced to people that I was definitively NOT participating in National Novel Writing Month. And then, at the beginning of the November, I found myself with some unaccustomed time on my hands and an idea that was just sitting there in my brain waiting to be written. I wrote nearly a quarter of my novel in three days.

I was 60% done by the end of the first week, and then things hit a snag. I had no time, I had more projects in the real world than I could reasonably complete, and besides, I wasn't participating. Why should I worry about things like plot trajectories and word counts if I'm not participating?

But then, just after Thanksgiving, guilt caught up with me. November 26th and I'm still stuck with the same 35k words I'd had for the past two weeks, and not a word more to show for it. I knew that, given my logorrhea, I could certainly produce the requisite 15k words, but would I? After all, I wasn't even participating.

I guess it says a certain something about my character that, given the writing successes that I've had this November, I decided that I wanted to go ahead and finish. The effort sapped my health (okay, that may have been cold season and my proximity to a 5-year-old) and I ended up, at the end of things, in bed for an entire day, but I did finish.

And now, I don't even know how I feel about it. Happy? Not really. More like, not embarrassed that I gave up in the middle of things. Proud? Again, not so much. The first year, I was proud just that I had finished, despite the fact that what I had at the end of the process wasn't usuable. This year, I realized that my novel was not even close to coherent until the last 10k words, which means that to make it usable and readable, I have to pare away several weeks' worth of work and do several weeks more, and that's just writing. Being proud of my effort at this stage is akin to being my age and being proud that one can use the potty like a big girl.

So I guess that my feeling right now is really just relief. Once again, I haven't embarrassed myself. I have been a good example for other people I know who are struggling and who may or may not have finished. I have the beginnings of something workable and ideas for a great many other things that are possibilities. The whole exercise is not a loss, and I do have to say that the ultra-competitive side of me really loves knowing that I'm one of only a handful of people who enter every year who actually finishes. It does make me feel that I am, indeed, a writer after all and not one of those people who thinks that any boob can sit down and crank out a book.

Much Ado About Much

I haven't updated much because at this point I am working a full-time job, raising two children, writing a novel, keeping chickens and keeping up three other blogs about the whole mess. I've been...distracted.

First, the Santa Cruz chapter of Nanowrimo made the local paper. You can read the article, complete with an interview with yours truly here.

Second, just because I'm writing a novel doesn't mean that I'm brain dead. One of the inevitable effects of writing a novel is that I end up with more story ideas than I can possibly manage. I currently have three or four, and they end up falling out of my ears. Here's one of the ways I ensure that I have story ideas that work: I don't write them down right away. The good ones are the ones that stay with me over several days or weeks, popping up in my psyche and demanding my attention. By the time I get around to writing them, they're much more powerful.

Third, just because you're done writing doesn't mean that you're done. A few months ago I went through an orgy of submissions. I do this every once in a while, sending out dozens of copies of work to dozens of markets hoping that something will stick somewhere. As of right now, I have one essay sold, a short story on an anthology's short list and a novel that might be delighting an agent as we speak. Call me a mercenary, but I'm doing this for money too.

I'm two-thirds done with this year's Nanovel, and I'm confident that in a year or so, it'll be just about ready for people to look at. But I'm just as confident that in the meantime, other little seeds I've planted will have sprouted and flowered.

Break Taken

Tuesday last, I woke sick as the proverbial dog. I stayed home from work and mostly slept, but did manage to get a few words down, seeing how it was the beginning of the month and all. Wednesday, more of the same, but I must say that I was feeling the pressure to get better, as my boss was leaving for three weeks and Thursday would be her last day. Thursday I dragged myself into the office, did a few ineffectual things, and then wrote some more when I got home. Friday, I worked from home and did a little writing in between emails.

What this all adds up to is that by the 4th, I was 40% of the way through Nano.

This, despite the fact that I have still not officially committed myself.

Which means that the fact that I was so sick on Saturday and Sunday that I did literally nothing but sleep and zone out in front of some DVDs makes me feel not one whit guilty.

No guilt. None whatsoever.

Okay. Maybe a little.

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y

As some of you may know, my first Nanovel, Mitos del Pueblo, garnered first place for novel at the 2004 East of Eden Writer's Conference. That was a wonderful perk and a great feeling, but it wasn't the end of that particular novel's journey. In fact, it turned out to be little more than a bump on the Road to Publication, which it's still barrelling down with no signs of ever coming to rest.

But I did write about that process, and the resulting essay "Putting the Suck in Success" was accepted by Rambler magazine for publication.

Well, it's a start.

Oh, Naughty Me

It's been months and months since my last post, and here it is the 3rd and I haven't said word one about Nanowrimo.

Honestly, there are two reasons for that:

1. I haven't had time. Since I last posted to this blog, I have been a writing and submitting f3wl, so it's not as though I've been entirely idle. Partially, but not entirely.

2. I still have not committed to actually *doing* Nano this year. Having said that, I must confess that as of last night, my word count is over 13,000. No, it wasn't a typo, it is the third day and I'm already a quarter of the way to completion. But the thing is this: I know that I can do it. You know that I can do it. It's just that I also have many, many other things I have to do this month, and therefore I don't want to begin by oversubscribing myself.

Although we all know, don't we, that I'm incapable of *under*subscribing myself.

The New Project

I've been busy. I've written a couple of short stories and done a flurry of submitting - nothing yet. It's a little discouraging, but I'm not sure what to do.

I've come up with the plot of the next novel/play. When I wrote "Leif the Buddhist Viking," it was originally conceived as a play, but I had gotten the advice to write it as a novel first. It worked well as a novel, but I'm still committed to turning it into a play.

This new work is similar in that it occurs to me as a play, but I should novelize it first. The working title is "Trinity of Days," and it's about the three days that Mary spends between the time Christ is crucified and the time that he is resurrected. The themes are before and after, the Holy Trinity (which, interestingly enough, has no room for her), the stages of grief, and women and middle age. It's a lot to work into one play, but that's one of the things I like about the form. It's elastic.

I've been talking to The Pirate's parents, who are chock full of Biblical knowledge. They're giving me a ton of information - so much so that it's getting hard to decide what to include and what to leave out. I'd like to make the action of the play something that can be staged in a variety of ways. Contemporary, period, etc. We'll see.

I'm happy to have something to work from. Sometimes the ideas come thick and fast, and sometimes not at all. It's always nice to have something.

In the Virtual Bank Line

I was at work helping out with some software testing. For some reason, our software worked just fine on stationary systems, but on a laptop when you switched between one screen and another, it would consistently crash. I was getting very frustrated because this is one of those fields where I know enough to recognize a problem and not enough to fix it.

While at work, the woman who was my roommate was giving me grief. I had just bought a new phone and answering machine and had left myself a note about some expenses on top of it in my bedroom. She called me to discuss the expenses with me, which meant that she had been in my room going through my stuff. I told her that I'd talk to her about it later, but that I would be gone for the weekend. I was going to my other house. Upon finding out that I had another house, she got all bent out of shape because she felt, as my roommate, a certain entitlement to anything that was mine. Whatever.

I left work and headed to my other house. My other house was on a spit of land that was only accessible during low tide. The spit of land had trees on it, and my house was an inn in those trees. To get there I had to wait until low tide and pick my way through the rocks and then along a path into the woods. To outsiders, the house itself was only visible (but not accessible) during high tide, but to the creatures who lived there, it was just the inn.

The creatures who lived there were elves, fairies, trolls, fauns, brownies and all manner of magical creatures. My place was the only building in the whole area, and the only place where there was alway a meal cooking. The minute I walked in the door, I heard nothing but complaints from all sides. The fairies were ripe, and they were into the kind of trouble that only adolescents can get into.

See, here's the thing: a fairy is the larval form of an elf. To be specific two fairies form every elf. All fairies are twins - one good, one evil. The evil aren't so much "evil" as "mischievous." They can take any shape (because fairies are not a species, just a phase) just like elves can take any shape. There are short, troll-like elves, elves with goat's legs, human-looking elves, etc. The fairies all fly (though not all with wings) although they lose that ability when they become elves. They spend the first several years of their lives in this state of fairiness, flitting about and cavorting and learning about things by getting into things. If you have a good fairy attach itself to you, you're very lucky because they're helpful and kind and good-hearted. If you have an evil fairy, you're in for years of bad luck. You can tell when it's time for the fairies to go from larva to adult when the good ones are competent and kind and the bad ones have made enemies out of just about everybody.

There were three at the inn who were ready - a male trollish fairy, a male faunish fairy and a female humanish fairy. When I got in, everyone was screaming because the faun and the girl had ridden ponies into the drawing room and were causing a general ruckus. I came downstairs and told them that if they would put the ponies in the stable where they belonged, I would get their boxes and give them something delicious to eat. That's the trick. Fairies don't eat. It would just never occur to them. To the good ones, food preparation is a skill to learn, and to the evil ones food is another trick to play (spoiling the cheese, putting mice in the flour, etc). The minute a fairy eats a mouthful of food, the transformation begins. They turn into something that resembles a doll - hard and lifeless, but colorful. You must put the evil fairy and the good fairy together in a special wooden box that's pierced all over with holes, and put the box in the sea. In the morning, an elf will have come out of the box like a bird from an egg, and grown to its right size.

I had all six fairies lined up in front of me and had given them each a slice of bread. They hadn't even swallowed the first mouthful when they fell over, cold and brittle. I was just gathering them up and sorting them into their boxes when the dream ended.

The Cost of Productivity

This weekend, I missed an event I had really been looking forward to. My friend Cliff had invited a bunch of us up to his place to watch a movie and hang out, and I had promised to make it.

In the meantime, half of the family has had the same creeping crud that's going around. The Pirate has a rattling cough, and the Baby Goddess has a perpetually runny nose and no energy. This means that I spend my time doing a very few things: working, taking care of someone who is not me, sleeping or editing. I've been utterly heads-down on my editing such that although I had announced my inability to complete Nanoedmo this year, it's the 13th and I've got something in the neighborhood of 27 hours under my belt. I've done some re-writing, some re-arranging, some cutting and a lot of reading out loud.

Saturday I spent the day running around, and got home late in the afternoon and started my editing. I didn't even remember my date at Cliff's house until this evening, and when I remembered it I broke down in tears. My harp needs a new low A string, I need to work out more and I owe about fifty thousand people phone calls or emails. And none of those things is probably going to happen before I finish this draft of my novel.

Will my friends forgive me? I'm sure they will. It's not like they've never done it. Can I forgive myself? I don't know. I've trained myself to think that I'm a superwoman and can do everything, but that's not true. What it's come down to is this: I'm angry at myself for focusing so completely on the priorities I set myself. It's stupid, I know, but there it is.

In the Virtual Bank Line

I am with a scouting mission of five. We've tracked signals to a particular small planet, but we can't decode the signals or tell who they're aimed at.

We land in an area composed mainly of swamps (a class N planet). There appears to be no animal life more evolved than small plants, and there is one structure. It's a three-story house-looking structure covered over with something resembling white ivy and caulking. My particular mission is to find and disable to signal's source. Three will find the person/persons manning this signaling station, the last is the radio who keeps communication with our ship, parked on the other side of the sun from this planet in synchronous orbit (SOP - it keeps our troop carrier hidden until we need them).

I've discovered that the signal source is organic - it's the white webbing that covers the house. It's like an organic web of signal processing and accelerating synapses grown over an artificial structure. By following the whole down to its root, I can knock out the signal. This is why our scans found nothing - it's another organic structure in the middle of a wealth of organic structures.

In the meantime our people have discovered the man stationed here. There is only one, since there is no machinery to maintain. We have found out from whom he is getting his information, but we don't know for whom his broadcasts are specifically intentioned. The fact that it's a broadcast rather than a beamed signal is disturbing. The man gets away, and our troop carrier follows him.

He's gone to an inhabited class M planet, and since his propulsion system is superior to ours, he gets there long before we do. By the time we get there and locate his signal again, he has already constructed a wooden building and begun the process of growing the communication web over it. The tendrils are still young and small, though, so their signal is too weak to leave the planet's atmosphere. However, our scans show that thousands of his troops are in the vicinity.

My advance team of five goes to the planet to find him. Three are out doing recon, radio is with me, and I'm at the structure scraping the new communication lines off the building. We look out over a grassy field next to the house. It's the size of five or six football fields, covered in picnic blankets and umbrellas where the inhabitants of the area are having a public festival. They are getting up onto a stage at one end and taking turns singing for the crowd. Beyond them, in the very tall grass, we can make out the soldiers from the other side. They are just sitting there, waiting for us.

We make our way into the crowd. We've done this before. We talk to the people in charge, telling them that we're just here to purchase supplies, that we don't want to interfere with them in any way. These people are friendly and offer to share their picnic with us. This works to our advantage. Our troops work their way into the crowd, keeping one eye on the soldiers in the tall grass off to one side. In case of attack, our soldiers will be able to rush to one side, keeping the civilians out of the line of fire.

The waiting is the worst part. We sit there for hours, trying to be friendly and interact with the people on this planet, wondering why the enemy is just sitting there. We have the advantage at the beginning of the battle, since several hundred yards separate us and our weapons are all either pulse or projectile, good at longer distances. Their weapons are also based on that white organic goo and are only good at close range, but are more deadly since the white goo sticks and then sends tendrils under the armor. We don't want to rush into a trap, but the waiting is tense.

My job is done. I get into my short-range ship to head back to the troop carrier where I can analyze the white goop and its communication tendrils. As I am leaving the planet's atmosphere, I encounter something else disconcerting. There are single soldiers in individual carriers - hundreds of them - scattered in high orbit. Their carriers are like space bicycles - good only for carrying one person to and from a craft in orbit. They carry only a couple of hours' worth of oxygen and can't hold any cargo at all. The most a person would be able to carry is the gear they were wearing and perhaps a hand weapon.

These troops aren't in a formation. They can't be waiting to be called to the surface - they're too scattered. They can't be waiting to intercept anything coming from the planet - they're not armed. As I pass them (they don't appear to notice my small craft) they are making noises and gestures amongst themselves that indicate that they are a suicide squad. They are there to perform one mission that will take them out along with their target. I just don't know what their target is. Capturing any of them is no good. That soldier would be dead before I got him/her on my ship.

As I head back to my ship, I wonder whether there is a plan of attack that is so subtle and insidious that we're not seeing it, or whether these are the last, desperate moves of this particular enemy. I don't know how the overall battle is going. I'm not privy to that. I only know that I'm still alive, my people are still alive, and that we've been victorious through more than one battle. What I've seen so far - the broadcast signals, the low-tech weapons, the scattered attacks, all look like desperation.

I don't know what this war is for.

Things Sighted, My First Day's Editing

Yesterday, on my way to the grocery store, I was behind a truck that had the following painted on a board attached to its camper shell: "His MOMMY (the Virgin Mother) called him Ye-SHU-ah <-Hebrew. The English translation is Jesus.

I desperately wanted to talk to this person, but it's just not feasible in a car. Oh well.

I spent about an hour editing last night. Got the first 30-ish pages done. Took out many little awkwardnesses, added a little bit. I realized that I refered several times to events that I never went on to include, and I really should include them in order to make the whole thing a little more believable. I know, it's comedy, but still.

Hopefully, I can get another couple of hours in tonight. I know that I should be spending an hour and 40 minutes a day, but that's a tall order in one shot. Perhaps I should be getting up early and spending some time on this. Wow. You know I'm desperate when I propose getting up early.

National Novel Editing Month

Tomorrow begins National Novel Editing Month. I've got my novel all set to go, I've committed to showing up to public events.

I haven't gotten as much done as I'd like to have, but I couldn't tell you why. After the whole let down with the agents, I just lost momentum. I'm sure it happens to other people all the time, but that's cold comfort. I know that I should just stay on the horse, ride it out and keep working, but it's hard. I'm pretty unmotivated by the whole thing.

I need to dust a few things off and shove them the hell out of the house. The only thing that makes it all worthwhile is that I do have stuff out there, on people's desks.

I've bought the new "Writers' Market Guide to Literary Agents," and from what they're saying, I'm on the right track. It's just such a goddamn LONG track.

New Year, New Goals

We're nearly at the end of the first week of the New Year, and there's no time like the present for looking at what we mean to accomplish this year in terms of writing.

In my last post (done nearly a month ago now), I outlined some of the goals I had. Which of them have I accomplished?

I have bought the new Writers' Market and a postal scale.
I have submitted Ressurection to one market.
I have begun the Aurelia Mudlark novel.
I have started sketching my first short for the year.

I'm now up to six out of eleven agent rejections, so we'll see where that goes. I have submitted my novel to another contest, and we'll also see what comes of that.

It's good to be a writer. I love the process of sitting down and creating something that moves people. But if you want to be a writer for a living, you can't stop there. You have to take off the creative hat and put on the business hat at some point. I found that I need to devote at least 25% of my time to the business part of things, or it's just not worth it. I need to make copies, put together packages, look up markets, attend conferences, etc.

I think this year is going to be my year.