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.)

You didn’t *really* need that sleep schedule, did you?

I was about ready to head off to bed at 3 a.m. last night (my usual time, for those not aware).

By the time I actually got there, it was nearly 5.

The reason? I was working on revising “And Blow Them at the Moon” last night, which requires at least two pieces of heavy lifting, completely replacing a pair of scenes. The first one was like pulling teeth, and I’m not sure what percentage of that was the difficulty of the scene, what percentage was me just not committing my brain to the task. But I finished it. And then, of all things, a Facebook application handed me some motivation: I was very close to regenerating enough stamina in this little monster-killing thing to go kill monsters one more time before going to bed, so I told myself that while I waited for that to be ready, I would poke at the second scene.

Then it was nearly 5 a.m. and I’d replaced both scenes.

And I think, more than anything, this is what I love about being a full-time writer. They say, and it’s true, that you can’t wait for the muse to strike if you want to have a career (full-time or otherwise) — but sometimes it does strike. When it does, having the freedom to say, “eh, I can just sleep in tomorrow” is a glorious thing. There was a point at which I knew I could kill monsters and go to bed, but I didn’t want to; I wanted to keep writing Magrat doing something very brave and rather stupid, and so I did. (Whoever knew Facebook could be good for productivity?)

Of course, that meant I slept until 1 p.m. today — which is still only eight hours, but some of them are at a time even I don’t consider to be reasonable for sleeping. So now I go eat something (god, I haven’t had food since about 9:30 last night), and trundle through the requisite 50 pages of my page proofs for Star, and then probably read more about the Underground.

And hope I can go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.

Now if only this meant *I* had more time.

Hmmmm.

I think I may push the start date of the Victorian book from 1870 to 1884, or thereabouts.

It all has to do with the Underground. Blackfriars station opened May 1870, and that was originally going to be the impending threat at the heart of this book. (Because of what it means for the Onyx Hall.) But I’m thinking that I may instead want to center the story around the completion of what became the Circle Line, when they connected Aldgate and Mansion House — partly because of the Cannon Street station (which might look significant to those who remember their Onyx Hall geography), and partly because it is a circle: an iron ring around and through the palace. That seems significant to me, even if it goes around a heck of a lot more than just the City of London.

Fortunately, this doesn’t mean huge changes elsewhere in the story — not like it would if I moved, say, Ashes by fourteen years. Some social differences, yes, but the politics in this one are going to be much more internal to the cast, which means I can transplant them around the later Victorian period without too much trouble. (I hope.)

Now if only pushing it back fourteen years meant I got some extra time on my end.

more auctioning

The Carl Brandon Society is sponsoring a fundraiser to help people of color attend Wiscon, a well-respected feminist SF convention. I’m auctioning off a signed set of the first two Onyx Court novels. There are a lot more goodies on offer; details about how to offer, browse, bid, donate, or request assistance here.

ankle update

Surgery at the end of March, after ICFA (which means I can swim in the pool there, yay!) Between now and then, I make friends with Mr. Brace, who is my best guard against sudden catastrophic ankle failure.

Not that I think such a thing is likely to happen — but you really, really don’t want to be proven wrong about something like that.

Sadly, I must also swear off kumite (sparring) between now and my recovery, since it occurred to me that probably falls under the umbrella of “basketball and other activities involving sudden changes of motion, especially lateral ones” that I was told would be hazardous. Since I’m supposed to wait until twelve weeks after surgery to do those things (I can go back to karate after eight), that means I won’t be sparring again until mid-June at the earliest.

Well, at least my kata will get really good.

woot!

It doesn’t have the right ending, I don’t think, but right now I don’t care, because I’ve completed “The Wives of Paris” — three days after I came up with the idea.

Mind you, this doesn’t actually reduce the list of Stories What Need Finishing, but I’ll take it anyway. Especially because this, in conjunction with “Two Pretenders,” is the second short story this month, which I haven’t done since <checks the records> June 2006. Sure, they’re both pretty slim — 2900 words and 1800 words, respectively — but it’s a nice feeling of accomplishment anyway.

And as it’s taken me far too long to compose this post, I think that’s a sign my brain has shut down, and I should go to bed. Where I shall sleep the sleep of the virtuous.

I *know* there’s at least one more.

Who in Greek mythology, besides Paris and Oedipus, was prophecied to cause trouble and therefore abandoned on a mountainside? (Or otherwise disposed of in a way that was intended to prevent the prophecy from coming true.)

I’m sure there’s at least one more, but my knowledge of mythology has sadly declined from its heyday.

ETA: hmmm, it deleted my first edit. I was going to say, Romulus and Remus appear to fit the bill, but I welcome other suggestions.

Two links make an insufficient post

1) If you’re interested in Sirens (where I’ll be a Guest of Honor this fall), they’ve put up a post about programming, to give you a sense of how it works. The approach is along the lines of an academic conference, but you don’t have to be an academic; they actively want a good mix of people — readers, writers, critics, librarians, etc.

2) Should have put this one up before, but better late than never: Help the Project. Charity auction for the Virginia Avenue Project, “a free afterschool arts and academics program” that mentors kids in a disadvantaged neighborhood. Like many such programs, they’re hurting for funding right now, and in danger of closing down. Auction ends March 1st; details here.

Visiting the twentieth century

. . . it has been a remarkably long time since I printed out and mailed a short story somewhere.

Partly this is because I’ve put so few stories into submission the last two years. (And of that half-dozen, three have sold to the first place I sent them. Another sold on Try #2.) But it’s also because so few markets these days insist on paper submissions. They’ve mostly either gone digital, or gone away. Which phrasing makes it seem like I think there’s a connection; I don’t. But all the new markets I can think of take electronic submissions. And bit by bit, the paper places slip further down my priority list.

Yeah, I’m part of that generation. Make me walk to the post office, and odds improve that I’ll try somebody else first. There’s other places that pay as well, don’t require printouts and envelopes and paper clips and stamps, and frequently respond faster to boot. And by such means does the new crop of writers drift away from the old guard of magazines.

Son of a *bitch*.

I find myself reluctant to post about this, as I have several friends right now dealing with medical complaints of a much more serious nature. But I also know those friends would tell me that their difficulties do not mean I should somehow be happy about my own, and I’m going to have to bring this up sooner or later. So:

I’m having ankle surgery.

Again.

Details within.