Coming up for air

Hey, look at that, I have a blog. Hello, poor neglected blog.

I haven’t had a chance to read or post the last couple of weeks. Busy, busy, busy, with a side of busy. I hope you’ve all been up to incredibly exciting things that I’m going to feel bad for having missed.

As for me, my main accomplishment amid all the crazy that’s been keeping me away is that I finished a new short story, “The Girl Who Welcomed Death to Svalgearyen.” I’d wield the productivity stick in celebration, but I’m much too tired and headachy.

More conversations with my brain

Oh, brain, must we have the same conversation with every first draft?

ME: Ok, brain, let’s get to work.

BRAIN: No.

ME: What’s your problem this time?

BRAIN: You can’t do this.

ME: Why not?

BRAIN: Because you suck.

ME: That attitude is helping no one.

BRAIN: And the attitude that you don’t suck isn’t helping your solitaire score.

ME: Way to focus on what’s important, you lazy piece of–

BRAIN: Face it, you don’t know how to write anymore. All your character has to do is walk from point A to point B, but you don’t know how the hell to describe it. You don’t even have a clue where you’re going with this story.

ME: You said that with the last story, yet we got through the first draft and saw how wrong you were.

BRAIN: That was an exception.

ME: And the story before that…

BRAIN: Another exception.

ME: And the one before that…

BRAIN: That was–hey, look, something shiny!

In other words, the current WIP has been far more a slog than it should be. But as always, I plow through regardless. I think I might even be able to finish the first draft this week. But still, stupid brain.

My Writing Soundtrack Revisited

In a previous entry, I babbled about listening to music while writing and how I usually stick to two general playlists, cleverly named Writing Music 1 and Writing Music 2.

“Demon Dreams” was one of the rare stories where I started writing to a very specific playlist–and subsequently found it difficult to work on the first draft without it. As an experiment, I put on one of my general writing playlists partway through the first draft. My brain rebelled. It just folded its arms, shook its head, and went “Nope, I’m not working under these conditions.” So I put the original playlist on, and voila! My brain went to work without complaint.

By the time I had finished the second draft and was starting the editing/revision phase, though, things changed. Suddenly the original playlist was a distraction and conversations with my brain went something like this:

ME: Um, brain? You want to help me out here?

BRAIN: Shhh! I’m listening to the pretty music.

So I switched to one of my general writing playlists, and this time it worked. My brain got down to business.

On Sunday I started writing a new short story inspired by the town of Longyearbyen, part of Norway’s Svalbard Islands. I went with my usual routine of putting on one of my general writing playlists and sitting down with my AlphaSmart to get to work on the first draft. But as I started to settle into the story’s voice, barely a few hundred words in, I realized that the music was all wrong for the setting and the whimsical, slightly fairy tale-ish feel I was going for. From there, the math went something like this: pondering my musical options + a brief discussion of Norwegian folktales with AsYouKnowBob over dinner = light bulb going off

I was writing a story based on a Norwegian town, so how about a Norwegian composer? It just so happened that I had an excellent recording of Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes playing music by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg at the composer’s home, Troldhaugen, and on the composer’s Model B Steinway piano dating from 1892. So I put it on after dinner, and ta da! It worked. I don’t know if I’ll continue writing to that particular recording (I unfortunately haven’t been able to work on the story much since Sunday), but it certainly helped put my brain in a place that gave me a good start.

Two Publication Updates & Some Writerly Silliness

1) My story "God’s Gift to Women" is now up on Daily Science Fiction’s website for your reading pleasure/critical dismemberment. It’s flash length, so it’s a quick read. In other words, if you haven’t read it already, what’s the holdup?

2) Over the weekend I got a look at the TOC for Wilde Stories 2011: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, which puts me in some rather fine company:

"Love Will Tear us Apart" by Alaya Dawn Johnson
"Map of Seventeen" by Chris Barzak
"How to Make Friends in Seventh Grade" by Nick Poniatowski
"Mortis Persona" by Barbara A. Barnett
"Mysterium Tremendum" by Laird Barron
"Oneirica" by Hal Duncan
"Lifeblood" by Jeffrey Ricker
"Waiting for the Phone to Ring" by Richard Bowes
"Blazon" by Peter Dubé
"All the Shadows" by Joel Lane
"The Noise" by Richard Larson
"How to Make a Clown" by Jeremy C. Shipp
"Beach Blanket Spaceship" by Sandra McDonald
"Hothouse Flowers: or The Discreet Boys of Dr. Barnabas" by Chaz Brenchley

Of the short stories I’ve read over the past year, Alaya Dawn Johnson’s "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was one of my absolute favorites, so getting to appear alongside it adds an extra dollop of awesome to the awesome sauce that was being included in this book in the first place.

3) As I’ve mentioned before, my muse is a surly plumber named Jim Bob. A friend recently posted a link to this comic, which makes Jim Bob look like quite the charmer in comparison. (potentially NSFW, especially if you go poking around the rest of the website)

Four Things Make an Undercaffeinated Post

1) After another once over and some fine-tuning on Saturday, I was able to declare “Demon Dreams” ready for other people to actually look at. It even slimmed down to a mere 6,500 words.

2) Next up on the short story writing front is a story inspired by this article: Why dying is forbidden in the Arctic

3) On the non-writing front, it was a fun concert-going weekend. For both Christmas and his birthday, I got AsYouKnowBob tickets for concerts that happened to fall right on top of one another. Saturday night we saw Vienna Teng and Alex Wong at World Cafe Live in Philly. The concert was awesome. Not so awesome was me turning into a dorktastic fangirl when getting them to sign a songbook afterwards. And Sunday night we saw Randy Newman, which was a lot of fun, though I could have done without the guy behind me wanting to sing along (badly) with everything. I paid to hear the guy on the stage, dude, not you.

4) I need more coffee. Stat.

The Writerly Update: The Wee Beastie Edition

A month and a half after I started the damn thing, and the de-crapified second draft of my novel-prequel-ish short story (now titled Demon Dreams) is finally done. The wee beastie beefed up to 6,700 words in the second draft. That’s what a hearty diet of more detail and description will do for one’s fictional figure. Now I just need to give the beastie a final go over, and then it’s into the critiquing pile while I start something else.

I’ll be doing The Never-Ending Odyssey (aka TNEO) again this summer, so it’s that weird time of year where I have to wait several months after finishing a story to get critiques on it. (Well, I’ll probably throw the story at my lovely local group, the Awesome Ladies of Awesomeness, for our next meeting, but I’ll wait until I have the TNEO crits as well before making any major revisions.) Being forced to wait is probably a good thing for me. Even though I take forever to write stories sometimes (or maybe because I take forever to write them), I tend toward impatience, wanting to get them out the door in speedy fashion as soon as they’re done. So it’s probably healthy for me to have to sit on a few of them for a spell and see how they age.

And speaking of TNEO, I get to take on the roll of moderator this year, which I’m sure will keep me super busy on top of all the critiquing and writing to be done for it. But I’m looking forward to it.

Upcoming Publication: “God’s Gift to Women”

My story “God’s Gift to Women” will be coming out with Daily Science Fiction on March 7. Want to receive the story in your inbox that morning? Then get yourself subscribed to DSF. It’s free, and you’ll receive lots of other fun fiction on a daily basis to boot. Sure, you could wait a week until they post it on their website, but why delay your readerly gratification? (or your readerly condemnation as the case may be)

The Writerly Update: In which I feel a draft

Turns out I was incorrect in stating that the first draft of my current short story was 6,800. There were about 400 words worth of notes I had forgotten to remove from the file, so it was actually 6,400–still about where I predicted it would be, though.

Getting rid of that pesky Procrastination Fairy didn’t go as smoothly as I thought it would, but eventually the little bugger was dispensed with. I’m sure she’ll zombify and pull her antics again, but in the meantime, the second draft has been progressing nicely. I think I might have even come up with a non-sucktastic title.

I kind of love second drafts. The second draft is when I get to go back and discover that my first draft wasn’t nearly as crappy as I thought it was. I have a tendency to want things to be the perfect the first time, which is something I have to let go of with first drafts. Otherwise they’d either never get finished, or I’d suffocate all the spontaneity and discovery that makes writing so fun in the first place. Yet recently, I’ve found myself getting antsy in first drafts because I wasn’t including enough setting or sensory detail. Working on the second draft of this story reminded me of two things I had forgotten (probably because I haven’t been cranking out short stories as much as I used to): 1) it’s easier for me to include the appropriate setting and detail when there’s a plot there to hang it on, and 2) I have far more fun doing it that way, I think because I have a better idea of what will be relevant, what can help reveal story and character, and what will work within the pacing. In some ways it’s like fitting the proper pieces into a puzzle to make a picture. And I love puzzles.

The Writerly Update: In which the Procrastination Fairy is sent to swim with the fishes

Urgh. I did so well cranking out the first draft of this short story, but then the Procrastination Fairy came along and waved her wand at me before I could get started on the second draft. I’ve taken a hit out on the stupid fairy so I can get some second draftage done this weekend.

I fear for my lack of a title on this story. My experience with titles has generally been this: if a title doesn’t pop into my head while writing the first draft, I end up having a hell of a time coming up with one that doesn’t suck big hairy balls of suck.

On the positive side of writing-related things, I did an hour writing exercise a few hours ago and cranked out a 1K draft of a flash piece. I’m not sure if it’s something I’ll polish up for submission, though, as I’m not sure where I’d send it. Is there an appropriate publication for an unabashedly liberal-leaning flash piece about a gay Jewish superhero who saves the day only to be accused of being an illegal alien because he’s from another planet?

The Writerly Update: Diary of a Word Count Psychic

And as of last night, the crappy first draft of a new short story is done! Early on in the draft, I predicted this one was going to push past the 6K mark. And it did. Crappy first draft has clocked in at 6,800 words. I am so proud of my eerily accurate word count predictions.

Now on to the second draft de-crapification process!