Going quiet for a few weeks

I mean, this is a pretty quiet blog to begin with, but still.

I was chatting with a coworker this week about blogs and business. Afterwards I was kinda like, Y'know, I'm not really even sure what I'm doing with that blog of mine.

Originally this was intended to be a personal sort of Public Object, a daily writing log where I could track the progress of the former Manuscript. After I met my original goal (111 days, which is to say a semester, of steady work on a novel) I dropped off to occasionally posting updates and snippets. In July of last year I removed all of my original daily log posts, leaving the blog a bit barren. About a week later, I went on a seven-month hiatus due to various personal circumstances (including limited computer access from mid-October until after New Year's).

And, well, now I'm back. And I'd like to post things. But I haven't really got a goal or a gimmick here.

So I'm going to have a think (and maybe even a post or two) about blogging and where it belongs for me. The blog's almost definitely going to have a makeover, and while it won't be disappearing, it might take a backseat and once again become a place where I offer brief updates and the occasional snippet. In the meantime, you can find me:

- on on deviantART (I post only rarely, but I do quite a bit of reading and commenting on others' works) and
- on Tumblr (which I am also trying to figure out what I'm doing with, because it's so cool but also a horrible massive timesink)

Process and worldbuilding

As of April 1st, I've blown past my personal deadline for my VP submission! I figure this is reason enough for another ramble about process.

My intent, with this story, was to rework my process so that (a) the story would be structurally sound before I started diving into scenes, and (b) I could actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

This is how my process was supposed to work:
1) Draft an outline and a few early scenes, to get a sense of the characters and plot structure.
2) Fix the plot structure before doing any more work in-scene.

2.5) Get a strong sense of character personalities/arcs.

3) Figure out what worldbuilding needs to be done and take the time for what is ABSOLUTE NECESSITY for the submission.
4) Redraft and polish the early scenes/outline for submission.
5) Do more worldbuilding in the interim.

This is how my process actually worked:
1) Draft an outline and a few early scenes, to get a sense of where everything is going to fall apart.
2) Start fixing the narrator's character arc.
3) Realize the narrator's character arc is entirely dependent on another character's political views, which are in turn dependent on the most significant and time-consuming chunk of worldbuilding.
4) Spend approximately 15,000 words and three weeks trying to work through said worldbuilding.
5) Emerge with a vague sense that the worldbuilding is only marginally tenable, but at least knowing how it's going to fuel the story, and dive into the non-narrator's political views as March 31st (and the cheaper application fee) flies past.
6) Become utterly enamored of a short story idea about said non-narrator, which APPEARS to need far less worldbuilding -- oh, but wait, that's a first draft and I'd have to start over from Step 1.


So. Yeah.

The good news is, working from an outline seems to have the effect I was looking for -- it helps me figure out snags before I'm neck-deep in scenes. The plot is much more coherent this time around (although it helps that I had a good idea of the overall structure to begin with, where, for my last story, I was flailing around among a dozen alternatives), and I've already picked out and started to remedy the biggest structural weakness.

The bad news is, worldbuilding.

A brief list of some of the topics I need to research and reinvent in order to make this story work:
- Political theory/philosophy (so as to build the working ideology of a relatively stable repressive pseudo-democracy that operates on a theory of innate and unequal intelligence)
- Descriptive politics/political science (so as to figure out a working mechanism of the above government)
- Economic...everything (to figure out whether a repressive pseudo-democracy could exist alongside what so far appears to be a relatively capitalistic system)
- The history of (among other things) the car, the airplane, the phone, the computer, and the Internet (to see if it's feasible to have tablets with instant messaging, but phones unconnected to wifi; car dashboards with their own Siri and internet access; and no sign of airplanes anywhere)
- Agriculture/environmental science (because most of the world is a wasteland and I have no idea how these people have enough to eat)

Now, on the one hand, this IS a fantasy, and so I get a teeeensy bit of hand-waving leeway for the latter two questions. On the other hand, the actual ~fantasy magic~ is not in any way incorporated into the everyday life (or even present!) for of 99% of the world's inhabitants, and I can't really say "Demons destroy all the airplanes" and "the Lowells invented ultra-productive agriculture that doesn't require any space at all, and they synced up wifi to everything except the phones, oh and this was all in the two years where they were inventing a super-secret protection against the evil demon things too".

So: Research.

I've rambled elsewhere about my struggles with research, but I'll rehash a bit here. Essentially: research is work for me. Hard work, because it's time-intensive, it involves only minimal writing, and the answers to my questions are often frustratingly elusive or ensconced in technical jargon from a discipline I'm unfamiliar with. My 'writing fix' -- the enjoyment that makes writing worthwhile for me -- only really happens when I'm putting words on the page, and when I'm researching, I'm usually not writing. Worldbuilding requires writing, but it's of a 'going in circles, patching up holes, finding inconsistencies, and deleting the untenable half of that idea' sort. And...I'm simply not very efficient at all of this. I don't know if there's a way to BE efficient at research when (as above) the research I need amounts to 'a ground-level beginner's understanding of this entire discipline as well as some fairly advanced knowledge of recent theories on specific subject X'.

On the plus side, you don't have to learn the beginner's ground level of a subject more than once. And, by and large, these are subjects that will be useful to me in other stories and other worlds.

One answer to this MIGHT be 'start worldbuilding before you start writing and before you put yourself on a deadline'. Which...is a thing I'm planning on trying, for a Super Sekrit Project that may or may not happen if I ever get this story done. But it's difficult for me, because I'm a very results-focused person, so I don't like to wander around reading up on this and that when I don't know what plot/character element it's going to be used for, if at all.

Anyway. I'm still chugging away at my submission, and keeping my fingers crossed that it'll be done before the final deadline. But I'm not sure, at this point, that I'll be satisfied enough with my draft to submit it to anywhere professional.



(P.S. If any of you have book/article suggestions re: the research subjects above, I'm eternally in your debt. The political/economic sciences are broader and less easily-defined fields than the history of ancient Rome, and I'm not even sure where to start. At the moment I've got a brief primer on political philosophy that is maybe a little too fond of Enlightenment-through-Victorian-era Upper-Crust Dude Philosophers, and more than a little light on more recent theories. I've got an eye on Hannah Arendt for totalitarian theory, but I picked up Origins of Totalitarianism a few months ago and dropped it because it was pretty intimidating.)

Reading to Think: Hope and Horror (The Medium)

This is a thing I was doing on Tumblr for awhile, only now I can't be bothered to go on Tumblr because it sucks up huge chunks of my life. Essentially, it's odd thoughts about books from the perspective of a wannabe author-lit theory lover-avid reader-sf fan.

The book: The Medium by M.R. Graham


A brief summary, pulled from the series website:
Lenny is good at teaching physics. He is good at fixing things, making friends, and not attracting attention. He is good at being a medium, helping spirits pass beyond the Veil. But as a vampire incapable of violence, he has always been a bit of a joke.

All it takes is a drink in a hotel bar, a stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time, to run him afoul of Sebastian Duran, a lunatic who controls other people’s minds better than he can control his own. Torn away from everything he knows, trapped and starved and under constant mental assault, Lenny’s best hope is Kim Reed, a wizard tasked with bringing down Duran. Kim cannot believe that Lenny is evil, but neither can she hide him, and while she battles for his freedom, Lenny is forced to confront his own potential for monstrosity.


I am a huuuuge fan of M.R. Graham, because (a) she has this INCREDIBLE eye for detail that makes her fantasy worlds real and immersive, and (b) she self-publishes (which means she is her own agent, editor, cover artist, marketer, and goodness knows what else, unless she hires someone out of her own pocket) and I am generally in awe of anyone who can produce a nuanced and polished work while doing the work of entire departments. If this post piques your interest, I'd encourage you to give her books a try (and review them so she gets more exposure!).

Anyway: On to the vampires.

(no major plot spoilers below, but includes a discussion of the book's major characters)

Narratives

So I've just returned from a much-needed trip to my alma mater and a weekend of fabulous recitals*. A ten-hour round trip gave me lots of time to think about life, writing, and potential blog posts. I thought about travel and the writing process, then decided that a self-absorbed post about my brain and my life would be more fun for me to write. :P

I'm a person who makes a deliberate effort to live an interesting life. This is partly because I'm also a person who likes adventure stories and thinks in narratives (so, a fulfilling life for me is one that produces adventures) and partly just because it's not that hard. I have a formula: Figure out what you find interesting, figure out a way to incorporate a little bit of it into your life, and then TALK IT UP because the key to the story's in the telling. And enjoy the misadventures that happen despite your best efforts, because they're the most interesting of all.

This weekend's interesting story: college trip. My college is fairly small and chock full of wonderful people, so walking around campus with my face was a bit like wearing a sign that said "FREE HUGS IF YOU KNOW MY NAME" (or: hugs for existing!). This was the conversation that cropped up every time someone tackled me:

"Hi! Hi! How are you?"
"Boring!"
"But you went to England!"
"WENT now I am back and my life is boring. Also I'm applying for the Peace Corps."
"Wow that is interesting TELL ME ABOUT IT"

And we would go on to have a very interesting discussion about our respective lives or about who's seen who naked. After half a day of these I was beginning to feel vaguely like a fraud. Oh my goodness, I thought, distressed. I spent three whole years convincing people I was interesting and now they're brainwashed into it!

And then, uh, I took a second look at that thought.

I mentioned above that I tend to think in narrative. Let me clarify that a little bit. I frame my experience the same way I frame the stories I write -- not as Plots with a beginning, middle, and end, but as the interaction of flawed but essentially valuable people moving toward a complicated and temporary conclusion. (This is a nice summary of why I have trouble plotting and finishing stories, by the by.)

This is a useful way for me to understand other people, but there's a problem in that I am always in the middle of my own Narrative**. So when I'm in a phase that doesn't strike me as particularly interesting (for instance: copy-pasting, filing, and house-sitting while waiting for my diploma and whittling away at various applications) I start to think of my life as not very interesting.

Until, that is, people who've known me for three years are interested in my life. Because they're probably the best people to judge. They've seen me doing awesome things and also locking myself in my room with a book for six hours because TOO MUCH STRESS CANNOT HANDLE, which is about the closest I come to a breakdown.

There's a thing I learned at college that I tend to forget at inconvenient moments: We don't shape our lives around Truth or Reality. We shape our lives around what we perceive as true and real, and every day we choose what we believe to be True. I mean, not in a ridiculous way -- obviously, you can't take a green pillow and call it red, and now the pillow is red. But you can say, "That pillow belongs on the couch," because the pillow is your favorite and you sit on the couch all the time, and you can say, "That pillow does not belong on the couch," because it's neon orange and clashes horribly with the couch, which is a sort of dull yellow. Neither of these statements is inherently more True than the other, but in choosing one and acting on it, you make it your truth.

So the upshot of this rather long-winded post is that I need to stop telling people that my life is boring, and also that the entirety of Potsdam needs to come live in my house to give me hugs and occasionally whack me on the head.


-

*This remark is in no way influenced by the fact that I was taken to a delicious and fancy dinner by the performers' families. They're wonderful people as well as excellent musicians ;)
**I've used the word 'narrative' for this way of thinking for years, but I've just finished Redshirts by John Scalzi, and now I can't stop thinking about that Narrative and it's making my brain hurt. (Also I will never be able to watch a long-running TV series again.)

Having (finally) finished A Dance with Dragons...

Here is my fantasy casting for the court of Westeros at the end of the series:

(Spoilers abound, so have a cut.)

Travel photos

So I'm wanting to keep this blog alive, as best I can! My goal is to post at least once a week.

I'm not just going to ramble on about my writing - that would get tedious awfully fast. I have a decent storehouse of fun stories from my three months abroad, as well as some photos. Here's a sampling of the latter:

The village of Dolgellau, Wales.

Calton Hill, Edinburgh.

Two friendly goofballs whom I met off the Appian Way in Rome, one of whom I named Anklebiter and the other White Bear. There's a story in how we crossed paths.

One of the mosaic floors in the Baths of Neptune, in ancient Ostia Antica. I went on a scavenger hunt for mosaics and frescoes in Rome, because I was running out of ideas for my novel. It was great fun. :D

The pictures are crap quality, because my camera was having an adventure separate from my person for the majority of the trips. /sigh. (It was my fault.) But I figure they'll hold the fort until I have time to write a longer post.

Further on Viable Paradise, and putting The Manuscript away

So. After nearly two and a half years of research, drafting, backwriting, rewriting, drafting, and workshopping, I've decided to put The Manuscript away. Maybe for good.

It's terrifying, because for the last two years I've been working on virtually nothing else. But the fact is, all those hours of research amounted to only about a third of what the novel needs, and despite revision after revision since around a year ago, the novel was still a structural mess. When I started, I absolutely did not have the skill either to flesh out a fully-developed world closely based on real civilizations or to build approximately six interlocking plot arcs into a coherent narrative. The Manuscript shows this.

I think it still has promise if I'm willing to put several more years into it, but I don't think that several years on one novel are what I need as a writer. I've learned a ton about my process by working on it, I had an awesome experience workshopping it in my supervision course at school, and it's given me confidence that I can, eventually, develop into a Real Professional Writer. But there's only so much to be learned from sludging through the revision bog.

-

So, now what?

I've got another story that's been sitting on the back burner for quite some time now. I drafted a very confused version of it around March 2013, decided confused was about as good as it was going to get at that point, and consigned it to the depths of my file folder. Remembered it a couple of months ago and started toying with the ideas.

I originally wanted it to be a short story, but it would like to be awkward novella length. I'm going to see if I can wrangle it into a novel. It's deeply disturbing and kind of verges on the horror genre. It would be the first of a number of stories set in the same universe.

I've got a (structurally coherent!) outline and the first two scenes drafted. It's going to be my submission to Viable Paradise. Once I finish drafting the submission (I think the first five scenes will fit) I'm going to throw it up on Google Drive and see if I can bribe a few writerly friends to look it over for me. (I would wink at the people I've marked out as targets, but I don't know if any of them are following the blog just now.) Once I've got some realistic feedback, I'll write my cover letter and send it in -- at the moment trying to write a cover letter feels like diving into an abyss of inadequacy, mostly because I have no idea what anyone will think of this new story.

I think I've written the paragraph that will hook the instructors, though. I think that reading this story has destroyed my sense of reasonable human behavior in a novel, because it's kind of a scary paragraph.

Viable Paradise XVIII: Life

Why hello there. It's been a while, hasn't it? Let me brush the dust off.

A whole lot and a very little has happened over the last...er, seven months. I went to England. I finished my degree. I turned my part-time summer job into a full-time gig, at least for this year. I started looking into applying for the Peace Corps.

Writing? Yeah, that happened too. I've been plugging away at The Manuscript, which has been simultaneously getting more unwieldy, turning more story-shaped, and losing steam.

Not that I've been losing interest -- but I've settled into it. Y'know, feed the monster its tidbit for the day and wander off to other things. I think that's how I would characterize my writing in general since October or so -- a thing to chip away at every day or so without too much attention or concern. It's definitely taken the backseat to Life Things.

Which, well, is that bad? To a certain extent it was necessary -- gotta finish the degree, get some steady work to pay for groceries, start planning for the future, etc. etc. etc. But I don't think I realized the extent to which it had happened until the last week or two.

Last weekend, I discovered Viable Paradise. It's a week-long workshop on Martha's Vineyard, which is not an unreasonable distance from where I live (or an unreasonable amount of time to take off work). The submission requirement is (a) short stor(y/ies), novella, or novel portion of up to 8,000 words -- the first three scenes of The Manuscript happen to clock in at about 7,800. I jumped for it.

But then, this week, I started really doing my research to write a cover letter. And, well...I'm thinking this workshop might be just a wee bit out of my depth. The vast majority of students seem to have some sort of publishing experience, to be -- if not exactly settled into their career -- at least headed somewhere with it. Me? I've barely started. I haven't sent out stories to publishers. What I know about the industry is all theory. I'm almost positive I'd be the youngest person in the room.

Which, well, that's not necessarily a dealbreaker if I can show that I'm knowledgeable and have caliber -- but it got me thinking.

What do I want, as a writer? What would I be looking for if I went to Viable Paradise?

There are the straightforward things, the stuff everyone wants: Craft advice. Tips and tricks about the professional/marketing side of things. Validation.

But specific to me? Well, what's the next step for me as a writer? It occurs to me that 'MOAR WORKSHOP MORE LEARNING MORE CLASSES' is probably not the end answer. I've sort of come to the point where my first goals have been met. B.A.? Check. See if you can write a novel? Check -- I know I'm capable of finishing The Manuscript, although I've still got a long way to go.

The next obvious step is to get to know the market. Draw up some short stories. Start sending them around. See if I can at least garner some personalized rejections. That's a matter of work and practice on my part, not something a high-level program like VP is going to help me with -- if anything, it's something I should have accomplished before I apply.

So here's my plan: Still give the VP application a try, because why not. I can always try again another year if they don't think I'm ready. Draft a cover letter, fix up the outline of The Manuscript (the last one dates from before some significant plot changes), and give the first three scenes a good polish. Then: SET THE MANUSCRIPT ASIDE and start working on some smaller stuff. Start applying what I've learned from The Manuscript and from my workshop classes, and start submitting.

Also, start keeping up my online presence. Again. The Internet is not a thing I'm consistent about.

Eulogy

Note: My grandmother passed away around the middle of the day today. I had orginally wanted to find a quote to post on my Facebook page, but couldn't find something that fit. Posted here because it's a bit more personal & accessible than my dA account. Haven't edited yet, but I want to post it before I go to bed - will clean it up a bit & add the text/note after I get some sleep. Tbh I'd rather talk politics or the weather than hear any condolences -- this is intended as a tribute, please please please do not read it as anything but a tribute -- but I'm posting it for the public to comment on, so I'm resigned to people expressing their support regardless (please please please, ask me about recent legislature or something instead).

--

When my father told me that my grandmother was dead, I did not cry. We are not criers, my family: but my father had been perilously close often over the last few weeks. I nodded, asked a few quiet questions about funeral procedures, and turned back to my laptop.

(This was on Saturday. Her deadline had been shortened on Tuesday, from two to six months to two to five days.)

Intermittently, during the empty spaces that dotted the week before her death, I had listened to the saddest music I knew, trying to find the right quote for the way I loved her, the way I would miss her. I kept wondering, Am I going to cry now? On Tuesday night, I felt a hollowness at the back of my throat and a warmth behind my eyes, but no tears came to crystallize the kitchen lamp and banish the weight in my gut. I am a writer: loss comes not in emotive expression but in the empty spaces that no words can express.


--

A week before Saturday, my grandmother read my writing for the first time in years -- perhaps the first time ever. I emailed my father a number of my stories so he could show her while he was in Kentucky. My father called and told me that he thought she'd read one, my final assignment for my fiction class the year before; he said he could hear her laugh while she read it. Later she texted me: [Text.]

She was always proud of her grandchildren, by virtue of their existence as her grandchildren. I have never seen a smile so generous or so genuine at good news from family, and even at twenty-one I have met many generous and genuine people.

That was the last thing I heard from her.

--

Three weeks before, my father brought and with my two siblings me to visit her in Kentucky. We left home at four in the afternoon and so arrived in the early hours of the morning, but my grandmother was awake. She was too thin. I leaned over her bed near the living room window and hugged her, careful not to touch her left leg, trying not to be alarmed or upset. My father asked about the shades across one window -- didn't she want to see her birds at the feeder? -- and my grandmother answered that the morning sun woke her too early.

For the first time since my mid-teens, I was kept awake that night by an urge to capture a particular image into words. I wrote a poem about the songbirds' cousin, caged by tubes, and knew it was cliche, and knew that it wasn't true to her spirit, and knew that nothing else could capture the visceral fragility of her bones in my arms.

--

The in-home care my father had hired was doing an excellent job. The hospice medical care was not. My father is a manager. When I was younger I cringed in embarrassment at his stubborn insistence on excellent service (What is this? Put me on the phone with your boss) but now I felt fiercely proud, because this was my grandmother and he was making absolute certain that she would get the best care.

(The next weekend, at my siblings' graduation, my aunt would mention that he called her and yelled. He replied that he was ranting, not yelling. I informed them that this sounded eerily like a conversation I might have with my own brother.)

My father made sure to get the life story of each and every person who came to care for my grandmother, "because they should be like family," he said, and because he wanted to be sure they would give good care. My interactions were more sporadic: the travel and experiences and dreams of one (her year in Alaska, my semester in England; my degree as a creative writer, her desire to go into diesel engineering); another's new puppies; the Spongebob scrubs and bibliophilia of a third. They cleaned and cooked excellent food. The last person to stay with my grandmother had left her sun room a mess: grass seed and birdseed spilled, mouse droppings all over. My sister and I cleaned.

At first, my grandmother slept a lot. It was hard for me to tell whether she wanted company or silence, and I was cagey, uncertain which words were safe and which perilous. The last afternoon, while my father was discussing improved care with hospice, I sat in a chair in the living room for lunch. The nurse, my grandmother's favorite, promptly ordered me onto the seat beside the bed. "Sit up here and talk to your Grandma," she told me.

So here was the thing I had secretly been dreading; but I was at once intimidated and comforted by the nurse's brisk cheerfulness, and so I hesitantly took the seat. The nurse had made stew and cornbread, and this was a few minutes' occupation. I said the food was very good -- I said this often, as I always did when we came south -- and then, because my grandmother was looking at me with her honest, delighted smile, I said everything that came to mind. I told her about college and my friends back home. I passed a message from one friend, whom she ordered to visit.

(Two weeks before that Saturday in July, because my friend was up for a road trip, we made plans to visit at the beginning of August.)

The anxiety slipped away from me as we spoke, because she was still the same woman, with her straightforward answers to complicated questions and affectionate stories about people I'd never met. A hardness began to settle in my gut, because of the reality of her and because I'd already gotten used to her thinness.

I decided I would visit at least once more before the summer was out, since I would probably be in England when she passed, and left a note for the nurses to add me on Facebook. So you can show her pictures of England, I wrote, the same way she said Six months when asked how long it would take her leg to heal.

--

I had taken to carrying the afghan my grandmother had made for me around everywhere I went. My Grandma made it for my thirteenth birthday. It is yellow with peach, lavender, and pastel green stripes. She wrote on a note when she gave it to me: Note. I kept the note in a jewelry box when I was younger, in a folder with other memorabilia when I grew old enough to accumulate such things.


It was something of an in-joke in the family that I took the afghan wherever I traveled -- and I did, as if this possession made with love could carry family wherever I went and perhaps absorb a bit of the places I visited. Usually, when I was home, it sat on my bed at one of two houses. It was loosely crocheted and a bit too small to be comfortable to curl up in. But now it went with me from house to house, from room to room. It was born of a superstitious urge, not to preserve her life, but to remind some invisible watcher that I was thinking of her and cared.

--

My grandmother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in October of 2011. I think I knew when I first heard -- that this was the beginning of a slow downslide, that there would be no recovery or that recovery would be a few years' brief gift -- but I chose not to think about it. No point in worrying about a future I could not predict or control.

My great-uncle had passed away that February. 2011 was a difficult year for me, but I was troubled more by the future I was falling into than the spectre of a generation passing.

--

The summer of 2010, at my request, my father took us to visit family across the south. By blood I have two aunts, one uncle, and three first cousins, but my father has more cousins than I can count. I wanted to see this elusive extended family before I left my immediate family for college.

My father spent part of his childhood in Michigan, and my grandmother lived in small but relatively developed Somerset, but my family is rooted in Leslie County, Appalachia. It's a rough country. Its people take pride in common sense, independence, and family loyalty. They say all European-Americans are immigrants, and I suppose it's true, but somewhere along the six generations buried in a tiny cemetery in Leslie County, enough Appalachia got into our blood for me to recognize home when I encountered it: the soft green mountains against the blue sky, the dropped 'g's and euphemisms my father still falls into when talking to family, the plain, straightforward speak, and the honest delight to see a long-lost splinter of the far-flung family.

We spent a few days at my Grandma's, a few at my aunt's in Tennessee, a few at my uncle's in North Carolina. On the day we went to Leslie County, we stopped for lunch at a town perched between two hills. The main street was only a handful of buildings long, empty enough that I thought it was just a waystation between more populous areas until my father and grandmother indicated otherwise; I remember being deeply confused by the lack of citizens or houses, but looking back I assume the houses were set further back -- hollows between the hills.

(Later, after lunch, my father would carefully navigate the hillside hairpins to our cousins' house and explain how his own father would make him sick, he went around the curves so fast. He would explain about hollows and kudzu. I assumed kudzu was a strange Southern word like the hollow-holler, an oddly spelled idiom with a straightforward etymology. It was such an established part of the landscape that I was surprised to find it was, in fact, an invasive weed from Japan.)

While we were eating lunch, my grandmother pointed up the hill and told us that the best friend of her childhood used to live up there. Storytelling, like Southern accents and good food and long car rides, was a staple of family visits: A mere hour's visit is an insult to the host, and stories fill up the time and catch up on years of news in a diverting way. I was used to stories about my grandmother's youth, about the grandfather I never knew, about the Cherokee princess said to have married my great-great-grandfather, who turned her back on her people and was never again permitted to speak her own name. These stories wove themselves into the fabric of my personal history, of half-imagined places and times I could never experience.

Adults of my father's generation often grew impatient with my grandmother, because she was hard of hearing and didn't answer questions in ways they found useful. I was annoyed by their impatience, by their suggestions that perhaps she was a bit slow sometimes; clearly they did not understand her properly. She was my Grandma, and she had a beautiful wisdom born of common sense and years' experience. I loved her stories, the earnest and intent way she spoke to me of her youth and advised me to do what I loved, to take care of my body, to keep money in savings and a second name on my bank account.

I don't think I could see the house on the hill: maybe I was at the wrong angle to see out the restaurant window, or maybe she wasn't talking about a real house but its echo, the memory of a building that had long since been torn down. I don't remember. I remember realizing that I hadn't known my Grandma grew up in this very town. I tried to picture the school she attended with that best friend I didn't know, but all I could see was the Subway, commercially and stiflingly identical to every other Subway I had ever been to.

(When I asked about the funeral procedures, my father mentioned in passing that a man would give a eulogy. It seems strange to me that this man probably has more true stories to tell about my grandmother's life than I do.)

--

I do not cry for the same reason I do not write autobiographically: because the dark currents in me elude control, defy expression, slide sideways in a mercurial dance rather than risk being understood. I am a writer, and I am reticent by nature, and I am a proud and stubborn daughter of Appalachia. Sobs do not lurk in my chest waiting to be released; tears can be ripped out of me, but they come not from grief, but from frustration that I am expected to offer a response I do not own. I cannot express my most intimate feelings in a foreign medium.

But grief demands an outlet, my grandmother's memory a tithe, and here I offer what I have.

Happy 4th & updates

To any and all Americans: Happy Fireworks Day!

I am still alive, as it happens, and the novel is still kicking. I am about 10k into a second draft with an actual, real, honest (maybe not alive but still an) outline. It is helping muchly.

I have a great big long to-do list of things that must be completed before travels at the end of summer, but I do have a certain amount of free time on my hands. (Always assuming I don't waste hours researching bizarre and impossible details like how Ancient Roman ships docked...) I think I might try to do a weekly blog post type deal? And maybe see what I can do about the fact that this isn't a blog of interest for anyone anyway. People reading might make it worth writing, yanno.

Also: Hid all the posts from when this was a daily log back in October '11-December '12. I don't really like having all the random snippets up for the public eye, and anyway, they're not interesting enough to be worth the clutter.

Sorry-in-the-Vale meets Potsdam, NY

Well hello there. Pardon me while I wipe the dust off this blog. I have a couple of posts upcoming - an update and some other things. This is something else.

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So Sarah Rees Brennan is hosting a contest for an ARC of her upcoming book, Untold. One of the categories for this contest is to take a picture of yourself reading Unspoken in a weird place.

Naturally I translated this to “PHOTOSHOOT ALL OVER POTSDAM!” and recruited two lovely friends (Debbie Scharbach and Maria Gonzalez, they are wonderful!) to take pictures of me. So here is a tour of my much-beloved college town with the premise, “How many parallels can I possibly find between Potsdam, NY and Sorry-in-the-Vale?”


Attempting to mimic the cover at the gates of Bayside Cemetery.





Old Snell Hall is a part of Clarkson College. It is a very creepy, most probably haunted old building DESPERATELY in need of rennovation. It’s not *quite* a Gothic manor, but I think it does almost as good a job as the old Sisson mansions, which are now frat houses – I didn’t know how to find them or get into them.

The Sissons are one of the old families of Potsdam – along with the Clarksons, the Snells, and probably some other names that adorn the buildings of the local colleges. There are lots of stories about their nefarious schemes to keep money in the family and the bizarre things they did in their mansions. One of the popular legends is that they have tunnels connecting their mansions under all of town, and some of these tunnels are blocked off from the current owners until the last living Sisson dies.
In lieu of a proper Sisson mansion picture, have a ghost story here: The Sisson Haunted Mansion. True story: Three of my sorority sisters got a tour of this house. It has at least one secret staircase.


Inside Old Snell.





They went over the wooden bridge over the Sorrier River, stands of bright red wolfberries waving at them from the bank.
“The Sorrier River?” Jared asked when he saw the sign by the bridge.
“It’s haunted,” Kami said with some pride.
– p. 102. Taken by the Racquette River, which is not haunted (by bells or otherwise).





Bayside Cemetery is a gorgeous, old riverside cemetery that contains the mausoleums of most of those old families I mentioned before.





Potsdam, like Sorry-in-the-Vale, has its very own sandstone. It is red and called Potsdam sandstone. I find this vastly less interesting than Cotswold sandstone, whether you consider it the color of honey or of pee.





Obligatory hole in which a person might be buried alive. This picture was taken by Samantha Fay on an oboe studio hike (Mt Arab for those who know the area). I was DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED to have neither a camera nor Unspoken when we came across this hole and demanded that somebody take a picture for me.

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That’s it for the parallels, but here are some other fun pictures we took:




Believe it or not, this is a roof. The Crane School of Music is built into a hill and most of it is underground.




Cassie’s Harp – a wind harp dedicated to a student who died before finishing her degree. A beautiful spot, and haunting when the wind makes the harp sing.




I have no idea why this is not behind the construction fence.

Fun things!

Over the weekend, I hit 50,000 words and an ending. Now I get to go back and restructure the novel so that there is the appropriate amount of story between beginning & ending. Exciting but bewildering, because it does not at all end where I thought it would. This "book" appears to be the trilogy that I had originally wanted to AVOID (because honestly, wouldn't it be nice to be able to read a book and have it be a stand-alone now and again?)

On another note, I'm sick. YAAAAY BRONCHITIS. Since I'm a resident student and have no doctor up here, and since our student health isn't super reliable about respiratory stuff, I had a two-hour wait in the afterhours clinic for a ten-minute appointment. I brought some Neil Gaiman with me to read, but there was a radio playing, so I couldn't concentrate. And I have this thing where I find offices/places-of-business weirdly inspiring to write? I dunno. Anyway, I started scribbling on the back of an envelope because it was what I had at hand, and I felt very writer-y about it. Have a snippet:

"How are you?"

The pause of someone deciding whether or not to admit how shitty he feels, and then Rinehart answered, "I'm all right."

"No, you're not," Sophie said matter-of-factly. "You're miserable. Why do we say that, anyway, how-are-you-i'm-all-right, when nobody cares if you're all right and you don't want them to know you're not?"

The next pause was the sort that always followed Sophie's being honest. "It's nice to know you're concerned," Rhinehart said at last, tartly.

"I didn't say I wasn't concerned." Sophie swung herself up onto a fallen trunk and sat by the roots, heels kicking. "When people say 'nobody cares,' they mean 'everybody-doesn't-care.' I'm not part of everybody, so I'm not part of nobody when nobody really means everybody-doesn't."

"I see." Rinehart's lips quirked up - despite his best efforts, Sophie was sure. "And if you're not part of everybody-doesn't, what are you part of?"

"Well, everybody-not, of course. But everybody-not isn't a thing you're part of -- either you're everybody-not, or you aren't. It's a title, not a group."

Rinehart was silent so long Sophie almost started to worry he was having a true sourpuss day. Then he said, "I can't imagine how you must confound your teachers at school."

"I am a very smart individual," Sophie quoted, "who consistently fails to apply my talents to the proper avenues of study."

Sophie is a very smart, very weird, and slightly obnoxious girl. She happens to be able to see fairies, but this is not what makes her smart, or weird, or obnoxious. She also happens to not give a shit about whether people understand her 90% of the time, and it is beautiful. She's going to have her turn in the spotlight whenever I finish Ker's story.

Quick update

Words: 32,490 and counting. I'm supposed to be at 100 pages (approx. 50k with this font size) in two weeks.

So this book. I 100% intended it to be a standalone, because I didn't want to be tied to the first world I ever worked in (given that I am sure my writing will improve MASSIVELY over the first few years I'm writing). And then I started plotting and realized I had too much material for one book - it needs to be two, at least. And now I'm realizing that the world I've invented is simply too large to be explored fully in one story (or set of stories). Originally, the story was going to gallivant about from the city of Quorina to at least two or three other cultures. Now it's looking like the entire first novel is likely to take place in Quorina. This makes me sad, because it is SO MUCH FUN to explore the fruits of my worldbuilding.

So I suppose I will have to write some short stories or novellas or whatnot in addition to this. Who am I kidding? I would love to write an entire novel about a child growing up in Elatxaia.

I need to get back to my writing. I want to get another 2 pages written in the next hour. Here, have some snippets I had to excise:

She could see now that Keranos’ fists were clenched; his perpetual scowl had deepened, if possible.

“If you two could postpone this argument until we’re in the sewer,” Luxinus added, crouching down on the floor and pulling some sort of grass blade out of a container, “that would be excellent. You’re raising your voices again.” He stuck his arm through the grate hole and wiggled the grass blade back and forth.

“You’re not the only one ever used,” Keranos said to Eritsena, and if his voice was softer, it was twice as vicious. “Do not say, northerner, just because you – because you…” He trailed off, his face twisting. Then he spat something in an unfamiliar language and snapped, “Your words are not good.”

Luxinus paused in his magic and blinked at Keranos, apparently befuddled by the comment. The sentiment was so familiar to Eritsena that she nearly laughed. She controlled herself before the prickly northerner could take offense, and said, “They’re his words, not mine.” She jabbed a thumb at Luxinus. “I only speak Imperial because it’s what most people understand. It has all the wrong words for all the wrong things.”

-

She took a few moments to slip into a clean dress and neaten her mussed hair. She did not bring a lamp with her to the garden. The halls of her childhood home were as familiar to her as the soles of her sandals, and anyway there seemed to be a great deal of moonlight tonight; she could see grey, shifting shadows on the corridor walls.

She realized that the spirit was still with her when she reached the garden. Scent hit her strongly as soon as she stepped through the doorway: flower and leaf, marble and dirt, sweat and skin and the overpowering perfume used to cover such odors. The garden was shaded in deep greens and greys, and its beauty in this altered state nearly took her breath away.

Oh hi I exist.

Hello, lovely people!

Quick update since I haven't been around lately. My first draft/first-chapter revision is OFFICIALLY my project for my capstone course at college. I am SUPER EXCITED for this largely because it means this novel will have to stop acting like a constipated lump in the back of my head. I have 17,073 words and counting. :D

Anywho, have a nice long snippet from a scene that went VERY QUICKLY AWRY and is being scrapped and completely rewritten. Actually I'm not sure how I feel about even this part, but at least it's not all plot-awkward and Totally Not Following The Purpose Of The Scene.

“Ladies, meet Eritsena Kingsbrother of Senxal. She’s from Elatxaia, and a princess on her father’s side.”

Clotea, the slave who had handed Eritsena sandals, advanced with a jar of oil and a metal tool that reminded Eritsena of a small scythe. Never having quite understood Quorian bathing practices, Eritsena had always brought her own supplies to the bathhouse and used them as she best saw fit, to the occasional dismay of proprietors; now, she held very, very still in the hopes that the slave woman was not about to murder her.

Meanwhile, the aristocrats broke out into another series of exclamations at Anticia’s introduction. “How exotic!” one woman, Eritsena’s age, beamed. There had been a brief flash of dismay on her face, one Eritsena had not missed, before she noticed that her compatriots were smiling. “What brings you this far south, Eritsena?”

“Travel,” Eritsena answered cautiously. “My people often travel the world in their early twenties. It’s said to bring wisdom.”

Clotea had poured the oil over Eritsena’s left shoulder. Now she began to scrape it away with the scythelike tool. The woman who had spoken before remarked, “How strange! I’ve never seen an Elatxaian before.”

“It’s unlikely you’d see a woman,” Eritsena allowed. “Few of us come this far south.” In recent years, more and more women were restricting their years of wandering to Elatxaia itself. With Quorian ideals seeping outward to the fringes of the Empire, fewer and fewer territories were interested in entertaining a horsewoman or a female messenger. The road was more dangerous for a lone woman than it once had been, as well. “It may be they were dressed as locals, if you saw one – our dress isn’t really…seasonal in this weather.”

“Charming,” the older woman said. She was squinting shortsightedly at Eritsena’s torso. “But you have children, I see, or your stomach says so. Surely they miss their mother?”

Eritsena felt a slow, dark flush creeping up her neck and into her cheekbones. She wished, fervently, that she were stranded on a rock in the ocean, being picked at by vultures; it would have been less excruciating. “I was very young when my son was born. He didn’t survive.” It was a half-truth made mostly by omission, but it was more than she wanted these strangers to know.

Several of the aristocrats made apologetic noises, but the older woman clucked her tongue and looked away, as if Eritsena had killed a child simply by being away from home. A brief silence fell, into which Eritsena clearly heard the younger woman whisper to another, “She hardly has an accent! Do you think she’s really…”

Oh, and if I seem not to exist, this novel is why. So I guess I'll see y'all sometime in March when I have break.

Here, have a snippet.

Instead of doing my proper novel-writing today I did some ventwork. It's a beginning which could possibly be a novel if the story decided to behave. It's about a snarky psychic named Melanie Shefford and Brian, her ex-fiance. This is how it starts:

I didn’t go to work on Friday. I spent the morning curled up next to the window with a cup of tea and a book. The tea was chammomile, which is good for the stomach and the nerves, and which I occasionally forget to despise. I was wearing my warmest sweater and fuzzy slippers and a blanket around my shoulders. The blanket was for comfort, mostly.

When I didn’t turn up to work and I didn’t answer my phone, which was dead, again, Brian showed up to check on me. Either he predicted my response or he was really worried, because he poked his head around the door before I could answer his knock. “Mel, you really can’t just skip –” he began when he saw me, then took another look and stopped. “What – ”

“I’m fine.” I tugged the blanket tighter around my shoulders. “Kettle’s on the stove if you want tea.”

“Are you sick? Why didn’t you call in?”

“Phone’s dead. Can’t find it,” I lied. “I’m not sick.”

“It’s not like you to just…not show up.”

“Felt like being spontaneous.”

He gave my very settled position a very pointed look. “You know Carl’s the sort of guy who’ll get you fired for spontaneity. He’s being nice because we’re worried. You’ve been different since – ”

He stopped, bit his tongue as if he’d almost spit poison. I wished he’d just say the goddamn word. Dancing around a thing, refusing to take it head-on, you have to judge it by its shadow – and the shadow’s always been a hell of a lot bigger for me than the thing I’m scared of.

“We all want you to be okay and to take your time to be okay,” Brian resumed, trying and failing not to sound like a TV commercial for counseling. “But you gotta call us and let us know if you’re not coming in. Use the neighbor’s phone or something. Carl would definitely fire you if you gave him a heart attack.”

I had nothing to say to that. Silence fell, awkward enough that Brian checked his phone to give his eyes something to do. On a bad impulse I asked, “How long have you got till he expects you back?”

“Depends on how you’re feeling.”

“Tell him I tripped down the stairs and had a concussion and you had to take me to the hospital.”

That startled a laugh out of him, like a flash flood crashing over a desert. He went to make himself some tea.

I've stuck the two of them in a situation which may or may not be melodramatic, but which is terrible for them both. I love Melanie more but I think I feel worse for Brian, who's actually a geniunely nice guy.

Why, hello there, blog.

Haven't posted in a while. I've been writing - I've just been recording my progress offline, so I haven't seen much reason to post.

I think instead of the daily this-is-how-much-I-did post (I've more or less been tracking by week anyway) I'm just going to post a teaser every Friday. When I actually have words, that is.

Anyway, I had two things to note that entertained me but probably aren't interesting enough to entertain anyone else.

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First, I've taken to mindsplatting on Notepad in an attempt to straighten out my nonexistent plot. It's sort of like talking to myself on electric paper. Here are some gems:

- "bahahahaha maybe Order is getting tired of how Orderly things are in the real world because Chaos is off babysitting. THIS IDEA MAKES ME TOO HAPPY."

- "SFDKLGHSDOF;IHEWO;FN THIS IS SUCH A NONSENSICAL CONCEPT
screw it. i'm just going to write and let these two do whatever the eff they want.
BUT THEN I HAVE NO PLOT SDOLFHSOHFSKBFSKDJFBS."

- "BAHAHA I JUST CONTRADICTED MYSELF"

- "he's doing it because I DECLARE A BOUNDARY SUCH AS THIS ONE TO BE TOO BLACK-AND-WHITE FOR MY UNIVERSE."

- "WHAT IF WE ARE ALL DISTRACTED BITS AND PIECES OF ONE GIANT MIND WAAAAAAAAHHHHH"

I like to pretend I'm sane and rational when I talk to other people, but really I get a kick out of yelling at myself incoherently.

In all seriousness, though, this method is super helpful in that it helps my freewriting technique - so I can spit out words without thinking too hard/getting distracted from the content by the words I use (writer/editor's rule-of-thumb: big concept issues take precedence over word-level/prose issues in early drafts). This is something I've been struggling with for the last couple of months. I've been trying so hard to make my writing coherent to people NOT inside my head (always a worthwhile goal, of course) that I kept getting blocked and wasn't able to just WRITE anymore. Which is a huge issue when I'm only on the first draft.

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The second thing is that I was wandering around Tv Tropes and made some entertaining discoveries. In general, I'm not a fan of black-and-white dualities: Good vs. Evil, Light vs. Dark, Order vs. Chaos, etc. I think it's silly for something to be utterly In The Right and something else to be utterly In The Wrong, partly because it removes the opportunity for narrative tension (what if the good guy does something Wrong?), partly because it ignores characterization, partly because it simply isn't true to life. My story in particular is a subversion of the Order Versus Chaos trope. (Not going into detail, partly because that's what the story's for, partly because I haven't hashed out the details yet. I'm not yet 100% sure whether it's a subverson, inversion, or aversion.)

That said, I love love love complimentary/foil characters. My main duo is pretty much Red Oni, Blue Oni played straight. I started laughing at myself when I realized this, because my notes-to-self contain a lot of yelling about how NO DUALITY SHOULD GO UNCHALLENGED. I don't really know why I love character dualities so much when World Order dualities drive me nuts, but I'm hoping it doesn't result in a weakness in characterization once the story's actually written.


Speaking of. I should probably get back to that. The writing thing. /random babble

Thoughts on process and confidence

I've been taking my writing a lot more seriously lately.

Originally, I started this blog with a sort of experimental tone. What would happen if I tried to write a novel? Was I capable of devoting the time? Over the last year, I've succeeded in cementing my schedule so that I have the time to write, even if it costs me other things. I've started to take it as a given that I'm going to finish this book, and that it's going to be enough of a gem for me to send to agents. I'm not entirely certain when this change took place.

On the one hand, it's a good thing, because it means I'm developing the discipline and confidence that I need as a writer. On the other...well. Since I started drafting, I've spent a horrifying amount of time staring at a blank Word document in utter panic, thinking, Oh my God I have to think of Perfect Words where are they why are they not in my brain. That was why I started hand-writing.

The thing is, I like writing longhand. It's more permanent, so I'm forced to think my words out before I commit them to paper; it's slower, so I have the time to think out my next sentence while I'm writing the current one; and, as long as I take my time and write neatly, I can take an aesthetic pleasure from the form of the words that counteracts the automatic, cringing Oh my God it isn't perfect. The fact that it's a bit slower to read as well as to write keeps me focused on the sentence-level instead of the plot-level (serious plot-level thoughts need to happen in plotting-time and revision-time, not while I draft). It also helps that I know I have to type it eventually, so this is nothing more than a draft.

Unfortunately, I am also writing at half speed.

I've been bouncing back and forth for the last few days, and I've finally decided to write the entire draft on paper. (I have an entire journal I set aside for drafting anyway, when I wasn't sure what my process would be.) While this will make for much prettier words and a much less intimidated me, it also means I'll have to take a lot more time out of my day to work. (Thank goodness notebooks are more portable than computers.)

For now, I'm going to keep track of my progress by word count - 1000 words a day, 5 days a week - instead of by time spent. Keeping my word goal the same as if I were typing for 2 hours a day runs the risk of burnout/constant-falling-behind, but I really don't want to take twice as long to get this thing drafted. In the meantime, some reminders to keep me from going nuts:

1. It took JK Rowling 5 years to write the first Harry Potter book (although of course she was plotting a whole series). None of my favorite authors were published before their late 20s/early 30s. I HAVE TIME my goodness.
2. I can always, always, always rewrite sections...but if I do nothing but rewrite, I'll never finish.
3. There's a good chance, as is the case for any writer, that I'll never gain anything but my own enjoyment by writing. If that's the case, I better take the opportunity to actually enjoy it.

Things to remember

Because I've been stressing waaaaay too much lately:

"If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for there will always be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

"Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time....

"[D]o not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

"Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself....

"And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."

--"Desiderata", Max Ehrmann, c. 1920

Two things of note

1. Going back to gauging by hours spent instead of word count...pretty sure I'm not gonna hit 50k in the next two and a half weeks, and it's stressing me out so I can't write.

2. I think I may have two books here. I've had a suspicion for a long while, but I was just outlining and realized I have two potential story arcs/climax points. I'm not 100% sure I have enough material to make two solid story arcs, but there's enough background that I feel like I need the space. Wheeeeeeeeee.

a brief commercial break

HELLO I AM CURRENTLY IN LOVE WITH ERITSENA'S HALF-BROTHER'S COUNCIL. LIKE CRAZY WITCH LADY AND CHARMING ASSHOLE BASEBORN COUSIN YES. THEY ARE TOO AWESOME AND I JUST WANT TO WRITE A STORY ABOUT THEM.

also I'm just going to do nothing but write until NaNo starts because gah I don't even know what this story is about even though I've detailed every moment of the main characters' lives dear god why


OK sorry random emoting had to go somewhere. We now return to your regularly scheduled program...daily post will be up at bedtime.