someone who understands me!

From ellen_kushner, a fabulous website on the topic of long hair. And by “long,” I mean that my own hair (down to about my hips) is maybe on the short side for what she’s talking about. It’s a great site overall, with very common-sense advice for many types of hair (not just long straight Caucasian hair like mine), but what I love it for is this page, with various possibilities only marginally more complicated than my usual braid, and more interesting to boot.

Much of the long-hair advice is stuff I’ve been doing anyway — I don’t wash my hair every day (I don’t need to), I wear it in a braid (though not up) almost all the time, I don’t use a blow-dryer or curling iron or coloring products or anything else of the sort. I’ll probably try some of the other tips, though, especially since they’re generally in the vein of less maintenance rather than more. My hair is long enough already for my taste, but I wouldn’t mind making it even healthier for its length.

Icon needed.

My eternal gratitude to whoever can make me an LJ icon showing Inigo Montoya with the text “I hate waiting.” (Preferably him on the cliff, around about the point where he says that.)

Edit: And we have a winner! Thanks to greek_amazon.

more photos

I still haven’t sorted through my India pictures enough to post them (Bad Swan! No biscuit! Or whatever one feeds swans as treats), but it occurred to me I did have scanned-in copies of a few shots from the last photoset I took on film, during my 2002 trip to Japan. The scanning means their size and quality is not the best, but I put them up anyway for you to enjoy.

technical question re: websites

Is there any convenient way to do a mass-redirect on various URLs? Basically, I want to simplify the directory structure of my site, such that everything which used to be swantower.com/marie/X becomes swantower.com/X. But people may have bookmarked particular links, and I’d like them to be automatically redirected when they try the old URL. What I don’t know is whether there’s any simple method for achieving this. Help?

link roundup

Little-known fact: March 8th is celebrated in some countries (like the country of my office) as The Feast of Cleaning Up Your Browser Bar.

Con or Bust auction — this closes on the 13th. Bidding for a signed set of Onyx Court books is up to $25 $30, and the money goes toward helping fans of color get to cons they might not otherwise make.

Sirens conference update — I failed to post this in time for the chat on Saturday, but more info on getting involved in programming. Remember, despite the word “conference,” you don’t have to be an academic to participate.

Reproductive Justice linkspam — I hadn’t heard of this organization before, but basically they’re a group that looks past the abortion debate (which has a tendency to dominate the conversation in the U.S.) to broader issues of pregnancy, sexual violence, disability, transsexualism, immigration, economics, and pretty much anything else that affects the ability of women to decide what to do with themselves and their bodies. There are some really heartbreaking stories in there (like the one about confiscating an immigrant woman’s child on the grounds that her lack of English made her unfit to be a mother in the U.S.), and lots of opportunities to take action.

Ignoring people you don’t trust — an interesting look at how the sources of statistical information and analysis can, or should, affect the way you receive that information. On the one hand, the studies claiming smoking reduces risk of Alzheimer’s were mostly written by people affiliated with the tobacco industry; on the other hand, the earliest work documenting a connection between smoking and lung cancer was published by Nazis. So it isn’t a simple question.

A flowchart of where the Google Books Settlement could go from here — a simplified flowchart. Boggle at its complexity.

Johari Window — more than a meme, less than a psych study; click through to choose how you would describe me.

Alice in Wonderland

Spoilery thoughts will go behind the cut, but the exterior thought is this: that Tim Burton, working from a base of freaking ALICE IN WONDERLAND, has done a better job with the notion of “strong-minded female protagonist does protagonisty things, up to and including saving people and kicking ass” than most directors who set out to tell a story about a Strong Woman Kicking Ass.

The movie has flaws, but this aspect pleased me quite a bit.

Now, on to the spoilers.

I feel like a dork.

See, okay — I’ve known for a while that it would greatly simplify my record-keeping if I had a dedicated credit card for business-related purchases. And what with these research trips to London, a decent number of those purchases are made overseas. And, well, the terms this card offers for such things are actually pretty good.

So I’ve just applied for a <snooty tone> Harvard Alumni credit card. </snooty tone>

I mocked kniedzw for getting one; now I’m eating my words. But I’m still going to feel like a giant dork the first hundred times I whip it out to pay for anything.

Edited for userpic change: Because really, if I’m going to do the snooty tone, I need the image to go with it.

changing modes . . . now.

I wish I had a switch I could flip in my brain, that would let me transition cleanly and quickly from thinking about one story to thinking about another.

Because I was working happily on game prep for tonight when something came along and knocked my brain onto another track entirely, and now I can’t get it back. It’s hard enough, gear-switching from the nineteenth century American West to nineteenth-century London; now I’ve got Option C distracting me, too, and it’s completely unrelated to everything else.

It’s potentially a good distraction, mind you. But still very inconvenient. If only I could turn it on and off at will.

street date!

Yes, it’s odd that I usually get this first from Amazon — but it looks like the publication date for A Star Shall Fall will be August 31st. (The day before my birthday!) For those who have been champing at the bit to get this one, at least now you know when to expect it.

a (stupid) epiphany on start dates

April 1st is my start date for the Victorian book. Only not really, because it’s freaking April 1st, and I’ll just have had ankle surgery, so it might be more like April 2nd or 3rd. But anyway, I’m starting in April, and I’ve had this fixed in my head for a while.

But this is kind of a stressful thing. Will I be ready to start by April? I have a sense of who Eleanor is, but not what her circumstances will be at the beginning of the novel, nor how exactly she got there, nor what happened to the guy whose name may or may not be Jonathan. I don’t know what Dead Rick owes, nor who he owes it to. I kind of know where I’m aiming for with the end of the book, but that’s more than a hundred thousand words away, and what if this turns out like the comet book where I start writing and then figure out some of it’s wrong so I have to backtrack only then I’ve wasted that time and okay the reason I’m starting in April (instead of the usual May) is to give myself time to waste if I have to . . .

Why do I have to wait until April?

Well, because in April it’ll start being a thousand words a day, rain or shine, and if I write the scenes I already have in my head (one definite, one semi-definite, one rather vague), then that’s three scenes not queued up to get me going once I start. Except that I stopped and thought about it, and realized that’s stupid. I figure things out by writing them; I know this.

So today I wrote the prologue. (Actually I wrote the prologue back in 2007, when I thought I’d be doing this book before Ashes, but having written two intervening novels since then, I scrapped it and started fresh.) Some time this week I may write Eleanor’s first scene, or Dead Rick’s. And it may be partial and I may come back later to change things; hell, I may decide that Dead Rick is not in fact the right character for this book, which is one of the things I’ve been uncertain about. I may move Eleanor to a different part of London and kill her mother (or unkill her, since that’s another detail currently in limbo) and change my mind six times about what’s up with the daughter of the family Eleanor works for. But whatever I do, I’ll be better off poking at it now, casually, experimentally, without the pressure April will bring, because that vastly ups the odds that between now and then I’ll find the answers to some of the questions that are presently unanswered.

And the point is to get the words on the page. This isn’t NaNoWriMo, where it’s cheating to have some of your wordage done early. As long as I finish the thing by deadline, it doesn’t matter if I do it a thousand words a day or ten thousand words in a two-day binge and then nothing for a week.

So I’ve started writing the Victorian book. It isn’t April yet, but that’s okay. I have 857 words, and it’s a good start.

today’s mental writing exercise

This is totally cat-vacuuming — it’s unproductive speculation on something that probably won’t ever happen, and even if it did, I certainly wouldn’t be involved — but I started it on my walk to and from the post office, to keep myself occupied, and it’s an interesting exercise in thinking about story structure. Spoilers for the video game Dragon Age: Origins follow below the cut.

How would you go about making DA:O into a movie?

This is how you know writing is right for you.

I finished the page proofs for A Star Shall Fall today, then went out to dinner with a friend, then came home and decided to do something fun this evening.

So I wrote 740 words on Sekrit Projekt FY, which is entirely silly and possibly a waste of my time.

Hey, it’s what I wanted to do. And that’s how I know I’m in the right line of work.

no more Ms. Nice Writer

I’ve gotten decidedly snippier with the queries I send to magazines when they’ve held my story for an unreasonably long time. These aren’t your everyday queries — “hey, Strange Horizons, you say to nudge you after 70 days, so I’m politely nudging” — this is the “hey you’ve had it for a year and I queried and you said you’d gone on hiatus (would have been nice if you told anyone that) but you’d have a response for me Real Soon Now but it’s been another three months since then” kind of query.

The really sad part is, I’m betting half the short story writers reading this post just thought, “I wonder if she’s talking about Market X,” where Market X could be one of a number of different ‘zines. I’ve actually sent out more than one of these queries lately. Which is a really depressing statement on the lack of professional behavior to be found in some corners of our field. I know that precious few editors out there actually do this as a job, and I cut very large amounts of slack for that; a market pretty much has to have a regular response time above six months before I’ll consider them “slow,” and all too often I let a year go by before I actually get annoyed. But when you do things like putting your magazine or anthology on hiatus without informing the people in your slush pile (or even announcing it anywhere other people might see), or ignoring polite queries for months on end, or continually promising results you don’t deliver . . . eventually, I do lose patience.

And it’s started to show up in those late-stage queries. I’m not rude — at least, I try not to be — but I’m less forgiving. I’ve been burned a little too much lately by editors jerking me around to cut anyone endless slack anymore. I’m confident enough in myself now to say I have better things to do than waste my time on this kind of crap.

Not confident enough that I haven’t second- and third-guessed my decision to post this, but hey. I haven’t named names, and I think we do need to occasionally remind ourselves that not everything is reasonable. When I start having to specify what year a story got submitted in, things have gone too far.

There are reasons for this.

So I’ve been kicking myself lately about how few short stories I have in circulation. At my high point, Back In The Day, I think I had eighteen out at once — something like that, anyway. Enough that they were almost never all really out at once, because of the logistics of shuffling them around the first- and second-tier markets while accounting for what had already been where and what was closed right now and how long they took to respond. And certainly it is true that the drop owes a lot to a drop in how many short stories I’m producing. (You can’t sell what you haven’t written.)

But I was reminded, when looking at the file I use to log my submissions, that there’s another cause, one worthy of celebrating instead of bemoaning.

Since the beginning of 2008, I’ve put seven stories into circulation, and of those seven, four have sold to the first or second market I sent them to.

Three of the four — the ones that sold on their first try — were more or less written for the markets in question (two for Clockwork Phoenix and one for Running with the Pack). So they never even started on my usual list of places to submit, which includes markets like F&SF that I keep trying because hey why not even though I don’t actually expect they’re going to buy it. Still, the point holds true: over time, I’ve started selling stories faster. Which is exactly what one hopes for. I’ve become a better writer, with better credits to my name, and better judgment as to what I should send where. Result? My submissions queue gets shorter because things stay in it for much less time.

I bring this up because we often have metrics for success (whether it’s “success” in the sense of things not entirely within our control, like sales, or in the sense of goalposts of our own efforts), but sometimes they don’t measure what we think they do. The number of stories I’m sending around is partly a gauge of how much work I’ve been doing, but not precisely; I could be working my butt off and have only two stories out there. (I think this is more or less the state of jaylake, actually.) Likewise, I wrote only four things in 2008 — but two of them were novels, so that’s hardly a light year. So before I shake a reprimanding finger at myself, I need to think about what the numbers actually mean.

Having said that — back to the metrics of “pages of page proofs proofed,” and “pages of research book read,” and maybe “revision of short story” so that I can get something else out onto the market to hopefully sell really fast.

next research question: Irish in London

I’m reading the relevant chapter of Robert Winder’s Bloody Foreigners now, but I’d love to have a book that looks more specifically at the circumstances of the Irish in London during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Any suggestions?

small favors, gratitude for

As it happens, last night’s revision on “And Blow Them at the Moon” (the replacement of two scenes) resulted in a net gain of about 800 words, for a total of 8800. Which is, strangely enough, a relief. If it had been 8200 or something, I would have been moving heaven and earth to try and chip out the overage so I could send it to markets that take things up to 8K. But at this point, it’s a lost cause. Cutting that much would hurt the story. So I can relax and concentrate on making sure it’s the best story it can be for the markets that take 9K and more.

. . . which isn’t very many. But look on the bright side: if I do manage to sell it, my odds of award nomination go up substantially, by the simple math of there being many fewer novelettes out there!

(Hey, I can hope.)