Just going through now and putting in italics (underscores, anyway) where they were stripped out by the ruthlessness of clearing out my screwed up formatting.

I need to remember that MSWord gets DARN PERSNICKETY on me when I write longer than about sixty thousand words, and even more persnicketty when switching a document back and forth betwixt Open Office. Maybe copy-paste is my friend, and also stars or some crap like that which can be search-replaced at the end, not that I ever remember how wild cards work without going to look it up on-line.

I can't possibly finish my underscoring search tonight. Eyes, crossing.

G'night.

Quite literally. And figuratively. If I don't finish tonight, it will be only because of this stupid earache making me go to bed early.

Not much left now. Would be done if I hadn't rewritten the last third of the book a second time, but it was mushy. Would be done by now, part the second, if I hadn't caught Ze Dread Earache. Would be done by now, part the third, if I had figured out how to rewrite the book about a month earlier. So, really, there's no one thing.

I was a bit daunted to jump back in tonight. The papers, the notes, the arrows, they are too much. So I took a picture of them:



Click through, if you dare. There are Notes.

Once I captured their soul on film, the notes became much less intimidating, and I dove in and fixed some problems in my last scene written, and starting porting over the last 5k of the book, plus connective tissue--basically, Chapter 40 on. I also hung a lantern on some boats. Literally--well, sort of--this isn't writer jargon. I went back in the book and noted the detail that there were lanterns on some boats. Because it came up that there would need to be.

I'M THAT CLOSE. And the scent of victory is making me a little crazy. Obvi.

This thread on this entry of sartorias's journal...

Just reminded me to articulate something I've been feeling lately.

( gets a little dull and navel-gazey. MORE dull and navel-gazey. )

What with starting a pretty diligent writing habit pretty much concurrent with the onset of puberty, that's... a lot of years of practice. It's not all been to the good, I'm sure; I resisted instruction at many points, for a while feeling that if I couldn't get it by intuition, it wasn't worth getting. Maybe five years ago, I started to diligently suss out techniques and to consider my craft. To the point that, you know, I couldn't look at a piece without book-reporting it, per sartorias's entry linked above. I also, for a while, couldn't look at anyone else's work without book-reporting it--critiquing it on the fly, and thinking, "That's not how I'd do it!"

Various folks assured me that this can (and does) go away, and it has. In fact, I can turn off book-report-head at will, most days; that's why I could enjoy Twilight, frex. And turning it off is how I get that energetic first draft down on paper, and theoretically, turn it back on to examine structure and character and rising action and all the rest and attempt to make sure I've written a satisfying story.

Lately, though, I've not had to think as hard about things, even in the rewrite. I can do more and more of it intuitively. Every leap forward is a leap backward. There was a joy in learning the craft, of course, but there is far more joy in having long, immersive moments of writing by intuition.

To the point where my general feeling is "Oh, THANK GOD."

Anyway. Just wanted to document that. I'm sure I'll forget all about this moment in a few years.

And you?

I sat down with an open novel file and my new Touch last night. Download app, write paragraph. Download app, write paragraph. Right now, I'm sticking with free apps until I figure out what is actually worth purchasing.

The problem struck when I realized No, I really, really, really need an end goal for the last third of the novel. Like. A structure. A plot. A map. I know I had this realization before, but I was kind of writing it all out and planning to go back and structure then, but I am mired. So I can't do that. To move forward, I have to go backward. And basically rewrite this section all over. Not bigly, but somely... Just, need to make sure events happen in the right order, threads don't get lost.

Anyway, as I was settling down with my Brainstormin' Paper, I got mugged by a short story: "Five Rules and One Exception for Commuting to the Underworld."

So I stayed up until 2 AM working on that. And I have absolutely no plot for it, but it is delightful to write. And short. So maybe it can survive without a plot. Or just be literary.

I want to finish this book. Maybe tonight.

I just Twittered that I had one more scene to add to the book, but I don't quite know what to do with said scene. Then I hit on the brill idea of considering a scene goal.

But not tonight. No, today, we squared away Chapter 35 and most of Chapter 36, and wrote a whole new scene and a couple of scenelets and moved a whole bunch of stuff around. Unfortunately, the end of the book is feeling a bit disjointed to me, and I think I'm going to have to chart out the action and see if it rises enough, or whatever it's supposed to do.

And, in fact, if it doesn't rise enough, I'm probably going to have to add some more to the book. I mean, I'm not sure what, but I suspect that there are enough mysteries lying fallow for book 2 that I could waken a few of those.

Ugh.

Have I ever told you that one of my "other duties as assigned" at my day job has been space planning for the past three years? It started with reorganizing the mail area, and morphed from there. Every time we add new staff, I start measuring things, then hop onto Visio and draw up a new plan. Thus, we have managed to improve workflow and fit three additional people into about a thousand less square feet, or something ridiculous like that. (That's not even one of my insane hyperboles.) This has actually been a rewarding bit of my job, and considering I have no training in it other than having rearranged my childhood bedroom about eight times a year, a little bit amazing--I didn't actually know I had spatial organization skills.

Anyway, the point is, whenever I get down to the end of a new space plan, I always end up with what I call a "mushy area." Where my ideas haven't quite coalesced, and my brain is going to have to go through a number of REM cycles before I figure out how to actually make the last section fit together better. It almost always comes down to a mushy area, too, unless I'm working on just four desks or something small.

I'm really hoping the end of my book is just a temporary mushy area, right now, and that I'll be able to get all the furniture in place soon. Like. Tomorrow. Wednesday at the latest.

But, I'm almost there. Mushy or not, here I come.

Unplugged: The Web's Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 2008 Download


Is it always shameless self-promotion if the robot is that cute?

Here, let me promote the whole darn TOC:

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I'm am all tuckered out from gardening really really hard all weekend. We had reached the point of annoying the neighbors; plus, there came a point about two weeks ago where I was utterly losing my mind between dayjob work and the novel rewrite, and came home and spent an hour digging out an overgrown flower bed and putting in some new plants, and immediately started to feel better about life. So. Gardening.

( Garden madness. )

Oh, and in the meantime, while googling to try and figure out what the not-prickly-pear is called, I learned about Giant Hogweed, a plant that outdoes poison ivy itself in terms of noxiousness and seeping sore-causingness. Uhm. *shudder*

I am so-very-close to finishing my rewrite. I have a couple more concrete things to do, and then I need to go through and make sure I didn't lose my narrative voice during my edits, drop in some more jokes (or at least, put in some where I took others out), and so forth.

But one note from my agent in particular has been giving me some grief. To the point where I had almost sorta decided to ignore it, if I couldn't figure it out. And that was "to show more of a sense of awe and wonder" during my main character's early explorations of the underworld.

Well. How in heck do you show more of a sense of awe and wonder? I mean, I went through the draft a second time, putting in character reactions.

Like so:

"It was amazing."

"I was hornswoggled! ABSOLUTELY hornswoggled!"

"OMG! WTF! BBQ! ELEVENTY!"

And then went back to "It was amazing." And decided to come back to it later.

The usual tactic (think of when you've experienced awe and wonder; extrapolate) only semi-applies. I mean--okay, I remember standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and thinking, "I can no longer tell which way is up." I was staggeringly overwhelmed there for a good 5 minutes. But I've got a character who needs to be thinking and doing, not standing there. I suppose I could put a little of that in.

But the other problem is--when do we experience awe and wonder on that kind of scale? On the scale of "Holy f*ck, are those jeweled apples?" Awe and wonder, for me, goes hand in hand with being overwhelmed and vertiginous (Grand Canyon), dazed (Brighton Pavilion, maybe?), and repulsed/annoyed/horrified (THAT DID NOT JUST HAPPEN, where "that" = appalling personal behavior). Awe and wonder are, in fact, pretty far outside of my personal repertoire, and I can literally only think of the examples I just cited.

Beyond that, I've been cultivating unflappability, skepticism, and satirical calm for so long, I'm sort of afraid I lost my ability to feel awe along the way--am I supposed to feel it more than I do? Do I know how to properly express this stuff? And--the other side of it--having had to feign enthusiasm for a myriad of mundanities throughout my life (the "you pooped in the potty!" variety, I guess; sure, it causes awe once, but you have to cheer about it for like MONTHS), I'm not really sure what I'm feeling when I wax effusive about things anymore.

So, obviously, I'm of no help to myself anymore...

I did re-read most of Karl Iglesias's Writing for Emotional Impact, but the paragraphs on wonder and awe were kinda skimpy, and the wonder he talks most about is the "I wonder why the character how the character will get out of the forest of jeweled apples" variety. It's not an SF book, and it's not a novelist's book. And it's certainly not a book to address my specific problems. It's done a bunch of other stuff for me, so I can't complain.

So... now we go to Google. And two hits in particular were very good for me:

1) HP Lovecraft's Notes on Writing Weird Fiction:

Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to over come, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel. This marvel must be treated very impressively and deliberately - with a careful emotional "build-up" - else it will seem flat and unconvincing...

In relation to the central wonder, the characters should shew the same overwhelming emotion which similar characters would shew toward such a wonder in real life. Never have a wonder taken for granted. Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy.

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing.

Okay. So, maybe I wasn't totally off with my correlations with my personal experiences. I need to relate the character's wonder to the character's mood. To completely distill Lovecraft's thought to its most literal, journeyman-minded, writing-as-a-craft essence. Also, the "careful realism" thing rings true to me...

2) And... NOT a note on writing, but a bio entry on a woman who works with the aesthetics of astronomical images, that I think works very well when you consider writing is a similar kind of interpretation:

She considers the methods astronomers use to translate the telescope's data into aesthetically pleasing scenes that communicate with non-scientists and ultimately argues that the images rely on the visual language of Romantic landscapes to convey a sense of wonder and awe as well as propose the possibility of conquering another frontier.

I read that, and started scribbling notes. Wonder needs to open up possibilities. A-duh.

And then, everything clicked into place. And by everything, I mean a bunch of other things entirely.

And it was good. For now.

I met Leah Bobet (cristalia at Worldcon back in 2004, right? With me so far? And I was overwhelmed by her awesome then, and I've been frequently overwhelmed by her awesome since.

Today, she got herself a book agent*, and that's just freaking awesome, too.

I think it's weird when people tell other people to go congratulate someone they've never heard of, so don't do that, but I am telling you that if you haven't heard of her--and here, I'm probably not talking to my writer-friends (since most of them have known her better and longer than they've known me, for sure), but my other friends, the ones who like to read, and more specifically, the ones who like to read what I like to read, because her short fiction is good, and you should be as ready for her book as I am so we can talk about it some day, and perhaps give it to each other as a Christmas gift.

( * )

And for good reason.

I'm killing this (excising it from my book). It's not a darling, in spite of being a poop joke.

I was having a hard time with certain book logistics, but fortunately, a super-obvious alternate appeared to me on the drive home, and I do not need to go any further with this.

( Cut, cut, cut. )

Because, while we all know that going on an adventure and taking an unneeded laxative is definitely problematic, it does not necessarily increase dramatic tension.

Phew, glad I solved that.

That also may be the shortest time a scenelet has lived in this book.

Also, I should probably not write during my lunch hour, if that's what happens.

Actually, the title is a lie. There are no other puns.

Things which have been saving my soul lately: My husband. We just had a long(ish) conversation about "novels are haaaard." Of course, what I was unable to convey is that it's not hard, it's just difficult.

Do you know what I mean? No, you probably don't, since my brain is wired funny on this topic. "Hard" is like, well, things where the learning curve is prohibitive. Where I'm not given all the information and making the leaps is problematic. Like my ninth-grade geometry class, where the teacher didn't actually understand geometry, let alone how to teach it, and I didn't realize that I could cheat and solve the problems algebraically and reverse engineer the learning of geometry. Where the super-difficult stuff was (somehow) intuitive for me, but the basic concepts left me in the dust, so that when I took the state proofs test, I got a 0 out of 4 on the basic question and a 4 out of 4 on the impossible question. Geometry is HARD (all caps). Reading Robert Graves is Hard (speaking of funny-wired brains) (one cap). Reading Tartuffe in French is hard (no caps, as long as one has a dictionary, but good luck getting all the jokes). That's my scale of hardness.

Novels aren't hard, by this definition. Not anymore, anyway, praise be. My first novel was HARD. My first novel was like figuring out the importance of f-stops and ISO in the first week of photography class.

This novel isn't hard. This novel is like hand-tinting a perfectly exposed print. I have to do it right, and it takes a lot of concentration and precision and a good eye for color and the right tools and some patience and about 45 minutes (which is 40 minutes longer than anyone else is going to spend post-enlarger on their print for this week's critique).

Only. It's like hand-tinting a book of prints.

Which, you know. Time-wise? Concentration-wise? Is hard. But it's not really on the Mer Haskell scale of hardness, when it comes down to it.

Things which have been saving my soul lately, part the second: Karl Iglesias.

I read Writing for Emotional Impact a while back, but honestly, it's a journeyman writer's book, and most of it went over my head. I knew it was good, but a lot of it seemed irrelevant. But on Friday, I got it into my head that this book would save me a great deal of trouble. And probably had the character stuff in it that I've been looking for, to the depth that I needed it. Like a beacon in my brain (or something) the memory of this book returned.

Well, it's not stocked at any of the local stores of course, and it's not at my library, so I was a bit vexed. I was pretty sure I needed it, like, a week ago. (Which is true.) I wondered if the author had posted any snippets or essays on-line, and when I found his website, I hit the jackpot: e-book of Writing for Emotional Impact, cheaper than the book, in a useful format.

Angels sang.

I read through a few chapters of the book that night, furiously scribbling notes, solidifying helpful things like my freakin' theme ("Can compassion change the world?") and good character moments that I needed to hit. Between that and my giant Post-It calendar? I'm feeling pretty good.

And this, in spite of two power outages. (Thank goodness for my diligent daily back ups; they aren't fancy--I email my nightly changes to my Gmail account from my Exchange account, save daily to my thumbdrive, my netbook and my laptop--but they are effective enough.)

Back to the hand coloring.

The bad news is, I'm totally freakin' distracted from it, now.

About 20 minutes ago, the doorbell rang three times in rapid succession. CREEPY. I was suddenly sad that I've taken a "no guns in the house" stance all these years. (I'm not sad at the moment, though. I'm too impulsive for gun ownership, or at least, not cool-headed enough. I *am* sadder I don't have a baseball bat handy, though. And some skills to use it, if necessary, but mostly, a bat looks intimidating, whereas in the dark, I'm not sure anyone could see a gun.)

So then, after panicking slightly and running around to make sure all the doors were locked, I came back to peer out the window. I hesitated a while, until I saw some movement in the driveway, then worked up my nerve to open the door and say in the lowest voice that I can project, "Who's out there?" And three kids, about 15ish, ran off like bats out of hell, screaming and laughing and swearing.

And I really wanted to shoot them, until it really occurred to me that they were kids. At least, shoot over their heads.

See why I shouldn't have a gun?

(Note, this is not the entry for US 2nd amendment arguments. You aren't going to change anyone's mind, no matter how that mind is made up, regardless of your steaming rhetoric, in either direction. I promise.)

Now, here's the writer lesson, the "now I know how that feels" lesson. I had a seriously knee-jerk fight reaction to a scare. That was interesting. And while I didn't actually exert myself physically, I feel like I ran about a mile, maybe two, and then stopped to lift very heavy weights. My left shoulder, the one that used to ache but hasn't since I started living a healthier life? ACHES. My wrists ache. My neck aches.

I do not do adrenaline well.

Ouch. There goes my head. Now it aches, too.

Also? Boys of the world? You do not actually a) impress girls with this shit; b) you definitely don't impress girls who aren't home with this shit; and c) batshit stepmothers might just shoot you, if they are foolish enough to own guns. It can't possibly be worth it.

Oh, yeah, my husband put on pants about ten minutes later and went downstairs to get a glass of water.

Idiot teenage boys are in no danger there... Of course, having been one, he maybe takes it less seriously.

ETA: Of course, now he tells me he said to call the cops, but of course, I was too busy looking for a bat to hear him.

sarah_prineas has an essay up about living the dream. She means the writerly dream, of course, but you can extrapolate, if you wish.

If you're reading on, go. Read it. What follows here is a response. It ultimately says the same thing, which is: "keep writing." I'm less about avoiding goat entrails, but it's good advice.

I figure, there have been at least three phases of the dreaming, as I've experienced it.

The Childish Dream

Phase one was the Childish Dream. Much like the Underpants Gnomes, I had an idea of where I was, and where I wanted to be. The middle step was a big question mark, of course:



Because that's how childish dreams are. I'd even venture to say that in the phase of Childish Dreams, you're lucky if you know step 2 exists. I had a well-visited fantasy about running into Madeleine L'Engle at the world's biggest bookstore, which my aunt and uncle occasionally discussed taking me to, but never actually did. (In fact, I still haven't been to Toronto, in spite of having worn a Toronto t-shirt for probably 1/10th of my life in junior high. But I've never been to Daytona Beach either, and had a similarly well-worn t-shirt for there as well. Paris, at least, I made it to.)

I knew enough about phase one to collect underpants (I practiced writing), and spent lot of time fantasizing about step two (Madeleine L'Engle would introduce me to her editor, obvi, when I told her how much I loved her work and how I was a writer too, when we met, at the world's largest bookstore). Step three, where I wrote all the time and was a bestseller and children wrote me letters saying how much they loved me? I think the closest I got to really imagining that was in one of the later Little Women books, possibly Jo's Boys, where Jo March Baer is hanging around home, trying to get a little writing done amidst the chaos of running a school, and someone knocks at the door, and oh, noes! It is her adoring public, come to gawk at the writer and interrupt her day!

Step three would be living the dream, all right! And it's actually--but for the fact that Jo March was fictional, and you're not going to live in the 19th century--probably not too unrealistic a picture of life, is it? I never thought the step three life would be like, well, Castle.



Not that I'd mind if it were.

The Dream Deferred

Phase two, for me, was the sudden and abrupt belief that the dream was so far-fetched that it was useless to pursue. Suddenly, instead of the cheeriness of the Underwear Gnomes, you have the Crushing Reality of Parental/Societal Expectations. I'm sure anyone who's even thought for two seconds about going into the arts has had this conversation with an authority figure:

authority figure: It's nice you have this interest. But what will you do to make a living?
the dreamer: I'm, uhm, going to Do Art.
authority figure: Perhaps you should get a teaching certificate. Then you will have the summers off to waste, I mean, spend on your art, and yet will pull in a real paycheck/not be living in my basement/not get on welfare.

In addition to that, you begin to be aware of just how long the step of step two is, and while it's still a big question mark in many ways, you can't see how you'd possibly get from step one to step three. So, you back off from the dream, demote it to hobby status if you're lucky, or abandon it altogether if you're not.

During my deferment time, I wrote complex roleplaying game scenarios for my friends, and in the games I played, wrote complex character diaries. I told myself it was valuable practice for the future. Later, when I had to spend about three years unlearning all of my bad habits, I cursed it. But it did keep my writing fingers limber, and while I was not, actually, learning great things about character and viewpoint and plotting, at least all my writing skills weren't atrophying.

I do not honestly know what it takes to get out of this phase. I only know what it took me to get out of it--and that was my then-boyfriend, now-husband saying, "Look, if you're unhappy because you're not a writer, my suggestion is write." He said it differently, I'm sure, but the tone was clear: I wasn't allowed to whine on his watch. Not when there was something I could do about it.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love my husband, and how good he is for me? I'm not sure either of us would be a good match for most people on earth, but this definitely works for us.

There was more to it, of course (there always is). I had dropped out of college for financial reasons, and had pretty low self-esteem about being a drop-out, even though it wasn't my fault. I was working a too-stressful job, and I was too scared that I'd never find one as good to leave it. And when you're scared and low on self-esteem, it's just not a good time to start a writing career.

Determination

But eventually--and not without plenty of support from my then-boyfriend, now-husband--I did give up that job, and went back to school. I spent the fortnight before returning up north, at the river with my mom and aunt and my best friend from my earlier stint at college, canoeing and getting sunburned and reading the Vorkosigan series for the first time. At one point, we went a-wandering around Mackinac City, and I found a small notebook with a (bastardized) Thoreau quote on it:



It's actually:

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

But I guess they couldn't fit that on a notebook.

I picked that notebook up, even though I knew it was not-quite-Thoreau, and pretty much spent the next three years with it propped right beside my computer, staring me down. I wouldn't say it got me through school, or made me start writing the day after graduation, or caused me to do my first NaNo, or to send my first story out, but it didn't hurt.

Phase three of dreaming a dream is to admit that you have a dream, then to put your head down and start walking towards it. It's finally learning what is involved in step two. I can't deny that it has been a six-year education, starting with learning proper manuscript format and ending with being able to read Sarah's entry and understand every last thing she mentions in it. And I have more to learn, in spite of the fact that I'm up on book contracts and what kind of money "success" really means.

I note every milestone, and I've certainly traveled through the Slough of Despair. But at some point, I moved from phase three to phase four, without even realizing it.

Living with your dream

See, somewhen very early, I realized: I was actually living my dream. Because the dream isn't all about the profit. The dream is about collecting underpants. And the underpants here is the writing.

Sure, I'd like to be in the enviable position of choosing whether or not to quit my day job and so forth, because that is "the dream" as it has been preached to us. But that's actually not my dream. My next dream is getting that letter that says I helped someone survive adolescence, in the same way all my favorite writers helped me to survive mine.

For now, though, every achievement, every sale or review, is just another brick in the house that I'm already building. That first, post-novel-sale year that I really, really, really hope is coming soon? Is probably not going to be that much different than this year right here: "Head down. Write lots."

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to scoop the litter boxes. I smell poop.

Oh, yes. The dream. It is good.

Cutting a bit that goes nowhere and does nothing in my book. I'm not even sure what my original subtext was, and it seems that any character illustration I'd be doing with it doesn't help much. Plus, I'm shoe-horning my Romanian folk-tale research in.

So, guess what, little bit? You gotta go! I'll immortalize you here in LJ, though.

( Reveka and Frumos, the first meeting in the forest. )

Listened to this week's Writing Excuses this morning. Brandon Sanderson mentioned that the only piece of writing advice given by a well-respected agent that he's tossed out summarily is the advice "you want to train yourself how to get it right on the first try." Sanderson is (wisely) a proponent of revising and second drafts. Most writers I know are.

But I disagreed with Sanderson right off.

Now, this was remembered advice, spoken impromptu on a podcast, so the fact that I'm about to pick nits with the wording is very much a, uhm, whatsit. A strawman? I'm just setting up the argument the way I want so I can go "BOO! Ya ain't nothing but moldy straw!" (Isn't that what a strawman argument is?)

Because I think, "Yes. It's about training yourself to get it right on the first try. Because if you don't enter the training, faithfully, and with the dedication of a triathlete, you will lose your freaking mind."

You, in this case, being me.

Mostly, that's because I'm slogging through this rewrite, trying to figure out the motivations of secondary characters and things like that--things I probably should have known when I was in the outlining stage. Today, I think I just figured out the purpose of the Underworld. It's not like the Underworld isn't the second most important thing in the book, and the impetus for the whole plot. It's not like the King of the Underworld isn't the antagonist. It's not like the last third of the book takes place in the Underworld.

These are things that make writing much easier, you! (You--still meaning me.) You don't have to go back and layer in all the meaning if you know these things from the beginning, you! You should probably get that right the first time, next time, you.

God knows, if I don't get that right the first time from now on, I'm probably going to have a conniption.

So, IMHO, (I told the iPod), Reknowned Agent is SO RIGHT.

Of course, by the time I'd gotten done with this argument in my head, Sanderson pointed out exactly what I just said, but in his own words, and more eloquently.

But I never said I was a solitary genius.

I have:

1) Become relatively adept at using Minnow's tiny keyboard, to the point that when I tried to check my mail on Dann's laptop, my fingers couldn't adequately reach to all the keys the first time I typed my password. I am slightly concerned about going home to the desktop tomorrow, but I guess if I'm back to laptop usage as my main writing computer, that's no real hardship--I'm more likely to get out to the coffeeshop some weekends, this way.

Mostly, I'd just like to be fluent with both keyboards, all the time. I have this vision that someday I'll be able to come home with my Great Ideas, and when I start dinner, I'll sit down at the dining room table in between frying things. I'll let you know how that goes.

2) Gone for a run. I did 5 of 7 60-second jogs/90 second walks in the Couch to 5K running plan. Naturally, I'd like to have done 7 of 7, but I decided that I'd give myself a chance to get up to speed before cracking any whips. The goal is to get two more in of at least 5/7 in the next week. Weds or Thurs, and Sat or Sun. We shall see. The wind was just perfect off the lake for the first/last chunks of my run, drying all my sweat before it appeared. I didn't start sweating noticeably until I went inside. Running would be a hell of a lot easier if it was always like this.

3) Added 2000 words of necessary material to my novel. Connective tissue, explanatory tissue, character development, tension-building stuff. Booyah.

I know that at least half of what has made this novel work is that I didn't shy away from writing longer works for a while, as unsaleable as they are. This novel, frex, developed out of a 12k word story. At the same time, I know that simply finishing loads of short stories helped me with the comprehension of overall story structure. And I'm sure that all my false starts to the six other novels I've written helped me, too, in spite of the fact that they were not completed. But. The single biggest thing that contributed to finishing this novel was the threat of library school that I held over my head. I could be content being a librarian. But I wouldn't be content like I am right now--even now, book half-rewritten, unpublished...

It's the difference between marrying a good guy and the right guy for you, I suspect.

4) Did a jack tonne of more research for this book. Every time I think I'm getting somewhere, I scratch something and uncover a billion more things I didn't know or think to know about 1489 Romania. Like, it didn't really hit me until recently that jannissaries were relevant to this setting. Ah, DUH. So, last night, read up on devshirme and figured out that, no, that doesn't play a huge role in the book, but it's a factor--in the culture, and in at least one character's background.

5) Stuck to Phase 1 of the South Beach Rewrite Your Eating Life Plan. Being at the lake and NOT eating cheetos, ice cream, cookies and red licorice at whim? BLASPHEMY. But I did it. Just eating like a normal person at the lake is hard--actually, maybe harder, in some ways, because you don't have the diet to fall back on. But we're about an hour from leaving, and I haven't even opened the bag of Twizzlers sitting on the counter. The hardest part was not getting any potato at dinner, and not getting chips with lunch. But I lived to tell about it. That would make tomorrow one week in on my low-glycemic index carbs and no refined anything effort, and I could already tell by Friday that some of my pants were fitting looser. Lunch today was Brussels sprouts and buffalo burger, which I rather enjoyed. About three days ago, I thought I might kill for a piece of fruit. Today--eh. We'll see what I think at the end of the week. Interestingly, the dairy at this phase has not set off my lactose intolerance...

I have an offer from Nature to buy "Fine-tuning the Universe," and a contract in hand, and that means... my third pro sale.

Well, at least the gaps between them are getting shorter...

When I started thinking about this endeavor, back in my twenties, sometime around 2002, SFWA eligibility seemed impossible and yet so simple. Surely, getting the first pro acceptance must be hard. But equally sure, getting the second and third must be easy. Momentum, eh? It's a thing. Or so I hear.

Or, not so much.

Back when I threw my shoulder into novels and gave up on short stories--last June, so about a year ago--I had pretty much figured that I was going to have to sell a novel to become eligible to join SFWA. Any short stories I've written since then, I've written for funsies. (Granted, submitting them isn't so much fun, but I have a near-Pavlovian response to typing "The End" anymore. I start salivating in order to lick the envelope.) And in writing for funsies, I have the highest acceptance rate of my career.

Anyway, it's not like I thought (much past the first few months, anyway) that SFWA was the end-all, be-all of this shindig. It was just... that's how you knew you were There.

Interestingly, I'd pretty much decided earlier this year, for good or for ill, that I was as Here as I'm going to get. I decided I couldn't really call myself a Neopro anymore, if only because of the passage of time, and not so much due to credentials. But a funny thing happened on the way to accepting that I might never be more than a name one occasionally saw in the table of contents (I had even painted myself into the scenario where I was That Convention Panelist who talks about writing Scads o' Things You've Never Heard Of): I kept writing.

I think I mentioned pretty recently how much patience figures into this writing career thing... like how long it was between first draft and publication for one particular story (five years). That, I would call specific patience, and is not applicable to the story of this story. (I finished "Fine-tuning the Universe" in mid-April. I sent it out. It is now accepted, twenty-four days later. This is no Scalzian thirteen minutes, but at least I don't have whiplash.) But general patience is also very important.

My general patience is what allowed me to stop firing so many blanks with my short stories. I realized that being in it for the long haul meant that I could continue to be Nobody in Particular at conventions (as long as I kept writing), that I could write novels and not worry about the gratification short stories provide--yes, even rejections provide a kind of gratification--(as long as I kept writing), that I could accept that my career seems to have a long fuse that may very well never ignite anything (as long as I kept writing).

Anyway, lessons learned: it doesn't come fast to most of us. It always looks like it's happening faster for other people. And momentum is a tricky thing.

Why, dearest book, do you wrong me so?

You share intimate glances with my subconscious when I'm on the bus; little bits of you flirt coyly when I am furthest from paper, hinting at the passionate affair I know you carry on with my brain when I'm not looking. But when my conscious mind turns to you, it receives nothing in return.

Do you not realize, book, that the subconscious and I, we are the same person? I am Cyrano and Christian. We are united in one. You do not have to worry, dear book, that some unfortunate choice is being put before you. You can love me, book. Without reservation.

*sniffles*

Book.

---

In other words, I'm having a little bit of trouble with the rewrite. But, we'll see what turning off the internet does. And maybe also my conscious mind?

Home from the workshop, and busted. I got more than adequate sleep every night but I'm still tired. Of course, in spite of the fact that it may not seem true, I do test as an introvert, and the experience was pretty intense in that regard--even though (I think) I stayed very rational and pragmatic and did not take the burden of everyone's good time on my shoulders or anything silly like that. My little introvert brain was taxed nonetheless.

Right now, I seem to have the ability to comb through sheets of manuscript pages and pull out the ones with marks. Seriously. That's all I got. Oh, and I can pet the cat, too.

*pulls out MS pages with Red Markings On Them*

*peers*

steve_buchheit is apparently from some elvish race. He writes in runes.

Anyway, back to our story of Workshop Recovery.

I was making time a little too well on the drive home, so I decided to stop at the Leila Arboretum. I've been looking for a labyrinth to walk for a few years, but only recently discovered the World-Wide Labyrinth Locator--which tells me that there are something like 38 labyrinths within a reasonable drive of my house, and at least three that are as close as the nearest Whole Foods. And yet, I've still not managed to get out to one since discovering this pertinent set of facts. But! The Leila Arboretum has a labyrinth, so I walked it.

I was at low ebb after I dropped Amy and Larry off at the airport. There's something about any big event that, once it has passed, sort of glumifies me for a bit. So, the labyrinth was an attempt to de-glum, and it largely worked. I was back in reasonable spirits by the time I hit the highway.

And, of course, now I'm home, and I'm staring at this novel rewrite and wondering where to start.

Back to sorting MS pages... And petting the cat.