back to the recs

In the vein of “writing-related program activites,” I’m trying to catch up with my book recs. I’ve read a bunch of good things lately, so I’m going to try to post one each day this week. May not succeed, but hey, it’s a goal.

Today’s rec, therefore, is Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi. Fun and funny military SF. The short form of the rec is, I picked the book up to read five pages and see what I thought of it, and a few hours later I’d finished the whole thing. Which is very nearly the best recommendation I can give any book.

the full-time writerly life: daily edition

So, time management.

With conventional office jobs and the like, your time is structured for you. Bosses expect you to show up at a certain time and stay until a certain time, or at least to do X hours per week. Some full-time writers, I know, treat their self-employment the same way — but as I said elsewhere re: “dressing for work,” I suspect that many of them used to be in office jobs. My employment has generally been irregular; classes provided scattered points of fixity in my schedule, but the rest of my work (reading, papers, grading) was built around deadlines, so I tended to do it whenever, so long as I got it done in time.

Which is my lead-in to saying: what will I do with myself all day?

I said in my last F-TWL post that one thing I won’t apologize for is my hours. I only got my alarm clock plugged in last night — I needed a power strip in the bedroom; it isn’t just that I couldn’t be bothered — and I may start using it again, so I can regularly wake up at 11. (Otherwise there’s the occasional day when apparently my body decides it needs to keep me unconscious until after noon. On the one hand, maybe it’s right to do so, but on the other . . . even I think that’s a little ridiculous.) I wake up swiftly, in terms of being able to get out of bed, but I’m not good for much right after that. Takes a while for my brain to warm up. So my routine after getting out of bed involves spending an hour or so checking e-mail, reading blogs, etc. Which isn’t as much of a time-waster as it sounds; true, the Internets are full of procrastination, but this is my best route to random information I wouldn’t think to go looking for. Last night yhlee sent me off into the wilds of Wikipedia, reading about ocular heterochromia. This is on the list of “not to be apologized for”: I’m feeding my brain.

So while I’m not going to pin things to precise blocks of time, the general pattern is wake up, spend an hour dinking around, have lunch. After that, it’s more fluid. I figure my afternoons will be for some combination of domestic duties and writing-related program activities. Sometimes I’m in a mood to knock off a bunch of business e-mails or update my website or read for research or send out short stories. Sometimes I’m in a mood to organize a closet or go to the grocery store or sew curtains. Whatever I’m motivated for, that’s what I’ll do, unless there’s something else on a pressing deadline. Because really, that’s the great virtue of a flexible schedule: you don’t necessarily have to make yourself do something you just have no will for today. (Eventually you may have to. But I’ve learned to trust myself that I will generally grow the motivation in time; ergo, I am better off not pushing it unless I have to.)

Around about 5 p.m., I start thinking about the end of kniedzw‘s work day. If I got up early to drive him to work, I consequently have to go pick him up again; otherwise, I’m waiting for him to show up. I’m treating this as a distinct block of time because one thing I would like to start doing is cook; I feel like I don’t have much excuse beyond lack of enthusiasm and practice for making meals that involve actual preparation. So I can be doing anything that’s compatible with cooking dinner. (Do I expect myself to make a real meal every day? No. Baby steps, here. If I’m making “turn the following raw components into food” meals twice a week to start with, that will be substantial progress.)

In the evening, it’s more kick-back-and-relax time. Reading and/or watching of things, probably, though I’m looking into starting up some martial arts class, that would presumably fall in here. But in general, activities that don’t involve me closing my office door and ignoring kniedzw. He objects if I do that too much.

And then there’s late at night, which is when I will get the writing done. (So yes, the basic “work” part of my workday comes at the end.) If I feel inspired to tackle it in the afternoon, then by all means, bring on the keyboard; but if I haven’t done it earlier, this is the one really scheduled thing in my day. Because if I’m not putting words down on a regular basis, then I ain’t really a writer, am I?

I have more to say on my writing expectations for a given day, but I think that will fit better into the macro edition of my schedule. I’m posting about these things mostly for my own benefit, really, to work through them in my own mind and have a record of my plan, but I figure at least a few of you might find it helpful.

It’s raining right now.

Like, actual water falling from the sky.

. . . I now live in a place where this is an event worthy of comment.

In other words, winter is coming — but not George R. R. Martin oh my god the Others are going to come over the Wall and kill everybody winter; just Bay Area “okay, time for the year’s precipitation” winter. I’m living in wet season/dry season territory now, and this is the first rain I’ve seen since moving here.

In totally unrelated news, Monster House is kind of an awesome movie.

the full-time writerly life, pt. 1

So, I am technically a full-time writer now.

I say “technically” because I need to get in touch with some folks back at IU and handle the wrap-up for my master’s there. But the only thing paying me any money these days is writing, so that’s the only actual job I have. Ergo, I need to figure out how to structure my life to make this thing work.

And because we live in the twenty-first century, the Age of the Internet, of course I’m going to blog all about it.

Expect more of these posts. I’m not sure how many, or how often; I have at least three I want to make, of which this is the first. Before I talk about structure, I want to talk about Things I Won’t Apologize For.

A while back, I posted on SF Novelists about “Writing as Work” — about the reasons why it’s hard to view this as an actual job. The corollary there is that I feel this stupid impulse to apologize for some of the things I do, because they don’t fit the standard model of what work ought to be like. I think it’s fair to say that the first thing I need to do is jettison that impulse, and accept the fact that this is my job, and this is how it goes.

So:

1. I won’t apologize for the hours I keep. You know what? My brain turns on real good at about 10 p.m., and depending on how I’m feeling, keeps rolling until about 3 a.m. Not just in terms of creativity; heck, I have evidence my hand-eye coordination is better then, too. But it’s the creativity and discipline that matters here. There is no point in trying to fight that, not when I don’t have to. So yes: on days when I decide I don’t need the car and therefore don’t drive kniedzw to work, or all the time once we get our transportation sorted out, I sleep in until 11 a.m. or so. I refuse to feel like that’s lazy. It’s just me getting a good night’s sleep after a hard night’s work.

2. I won’t apologize for reading, or anything else that feeds my brain. In fact, when I’m done with this post, I’m probably going to go downstairs and curl up with Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s A Companion to Wolves. Because that? Is work. It gets me thinking about the story I want to write, and it keeps me aware of what’s going on in my field. If I read nonfiction, same deal. Even TV and movie-watching, in moderation, fit this bill. As long as I’m being mentally active about it, not just a mindless slug — as long as I’m turning it around and applying it to the words I produce — it’s a necessary part of the job. Not me slacking off.

3. I won’t apologize for “being lame.” By this I mean something very specific. It happens less at the moment, because I haven’t really launched Project Get A Social Life yet, but this happened all the time in Boston and Bloomington: it’s Friday or Saturday night, and I have the option to go do something social, but I decide to stay home and write. Sometimes because I have a deadline I have to meet — but sometimes just because I feel like it. I have a story I want to be writing. And then I feel like I should apologize because there’s something wrong with wanting to work. You know what? There isn’t. I have a job I love. And if it’s on a roll, I’m glad to hop on board, even if it means passing up something “more fun.”

Those are all the ones I can think of at the moment, but there may be more. In fact, I welcome additions in comments. From writer-friends especially, but frankly, any of you who find yourselves in a non-traditional relationship with your working schedule. What kinds of things do you not apologize for?

grrrr

Judging by my progress so far tonight, I have not yet found the hole that noveling buried my story mojo in.

That, or having to consult Panlexicon, the OED, or a Latin dictionary — worse case scenario, all three — every sentence or so is killing my forward progress.

Probably both.

I should just write the damn story and worry about the language later, but I hear blood vessels rupturing in all the prose-stylist writers of my acquaintance, at the thought that these two things are separable. Really, I should just write the damn story and give up on the stylistic experiment I’m trying to carry out . . . but where’s the fun in that?

Can anybody recommend a translation of Beowulf that sounds as much like the original as possible? I don’t want accessibility here; I want the linguistic knack I had back when I was translating pages of Old Norse every week, for making my English flow in different patterns. But my Norse is too rusty, and this is supposed to be Anglo-Saxon anyway. Any Anglo-Saxon text would work, I suppose; I just keep turning to Beowulf because it’s the only one I know.

three kinds of fanfic

So I’m trying to feed my brain for a story I want to write, that requires me to be jazzed up for gritty pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon goodness. Ergo, one thing I’m doing is watching lots of adaptations of Beowulf. And it occurs to me: thanks, perhaps, to the nature of the poem (which cannot be ported into cinema without changes; it would make a terrible film as written), the films I’ve seen have all taken distinct liberties with the text. As a result, I find that I can, without much hesitation, classify all three* of them as different varieties of Beowulf fanfic.

In order of release:

1. The 13th Warrior — Crossover fic. It’s Beowulf meets ibn Fadlan! Crichton apparently read the journal of an Arab traveler who met some Norsemen on the Volga river, and decided to use that as his connection point for splicing the Arab into the Beowulf story. Which probably looked utterly nonsensical to the many people out there who have no idea who ibn Fadlan was, and thought they were chucking an Arab in just for laughs. (Incidentally, the alteration of Grendel came about from Crichton imagining a relic population of Neandertals living into more modern times. I think Eaters of the Dead may be my favorite book of his, actually.)

2. Beowulf and Grendel — Sympathy for the devil, or whatever formal name it may have among fanfic writers. Grendel attacks Heorot because Hrothgar killed Grendel-Dad back when Grendel was a kid. Grendel-Dad was killed because, well, he took Hrothgar’s fish — I think that’s what Hrothgar said near the end of the film — and anyway, he’s a troll, a big hairy lug who can’t really speak, so that’s all the justification anybody needs. This story also sticks in an utterly non-canonical character, the prophetess Selma, for the purposes of illuminating its chosen theme. (Which would be annoying as hell if she didn’t get such good dialogue.)

3. Beowulf (the Zemeckis/Avary/Gaiman one) — Textual interrogation. This is the kind of story where the fanficcers screenwriters looked at the original and started asking questions. Why does Grendel attack Heorot, but not hurt Hrothgar? Why does Beowulf bring back no evidence of having killed Grendel’s mother? Why does the narrative then leapfrog over decades and end with some random dragon? Then they invented their own reasons to plug what, from the viewpoint of modern fiction, look like narrative holes.

For the record, I think The 13th Warrior still stands as my favorite, but oddly — and in direct contravention of general opinion, I think — Beowulf and Grendel comes second. They filmed in Iceland, which I think claims the Oscar for Best Supporting Landmass**, and they do a good job with the muddy, shabby nature of even kingly life back then. More importantly, it’s got the kind of smart-ass lines I like in my Norse/Anglo-Saxon/whatever epics — delivered in a veritable Babel of accents, I might add, ranging from Selma’s American to Beowulf’s Scottish and on from there. The Zemeckis Beowulf, sadly, just didn’t engage me, despite the surge of glee I felt when Gaiman described their desired aesthetic as being “a kind of Dark Ages Trainspotting, full of mead and blood and madness.” I never warmed to the motion-capture CGI or felt it justified its usage, and the rampant*** phallic imagery got to be a bit much.

Time to go read the poem, I think, and try to poke this story idea into becoming an actual story. I need to figure out who dies at the beginning; without that, I don’t have much to go on.

* “Three” because I’m not including the science-fictional Beowulf movie with Christopher Lambert. I saw it years ago, and all I remember is that it was terrible enough that I don’t want to see it again.

** First awarded to New Zealand for The Lord of the Rings.

*** Yes, I chose that word on purpose.

I guess I won’t throw this one back in

Anyone desiring a reason to say “awwww, squish” should be aware that today is my first wedding anniversary. One year in, and kniedzw and I have not had cause to kill, divorce, or run away from each other. We’re off to a good start.

. . . seriously, he’s just as wonderful a person as he was before I married him. Which is all I think I can really ask for.

close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and honorable mentions

I have not yet achieved my ambition of getting a story into a year’s best anthology, but “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” received an Honorable Mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. It also got a nod in one of the introductions, during the discussion of On Spec. I had my fingers crossed for this one, I must admit; I love all my children equally, blah blah blah, but “Nine Sketches” is one of my favorites.

(It’s actually my second HM, though. “Shadows’ Bride” got one a couple of years ago — and I can’t remember if I mentioned this, but Pseudopod has picked up audio rights for it, so you’ll get a chance to hear it some day.)

Thanks to jimhines for letting me know I could search the HM list through Amazon, rather than having to get off my duff and go to the bookstore already. Yes, the post-novel ennui+cold continues, and I am a lazy slug.

And congrats to everyone else who got a nod! Share your good news here.

best spam header evar

According to one “Redepenning Chiver,” he (or she? or it?) has a message for me re: “Crime-fighting cat now trying therapy.”

. . . anybody inspired to turn that into a story has my blessing.

a heads-up for my friends back in the midwest

Indiana is currently polling close enough that it could, in fact, flip blue this year — helped along by the fact that McCain apparently is not operating any campaign offices there. So if you’re accustomed to thinking you live in a red state and your Democratic vote would make no difference, think again. Register, vote, get other people to do the same.

Round two

Question the fourth: What’s your daily/weekly routine like now out in the Land of Sunshine and Magic?

Answer the fourth: I don’t really have one yet. I despise living among boxes, so the last four weeks have been spent alternating between a madness of unpacking and a madness of novel-finishing, with no particular structure. (Interspersed with the occasional bit of flopping on the couch to watch Supernatural with kurayami_hime and kniedzw.)

I do, however, intend to get into more of a regular routine, and in fact I have a series of posts planned on that exact topic. So stay tuned for adventures in the life of I’m A Full-Time Writer Now.

***

Question the fifth: What are you doing to keep your idea inputs levels where you want them?

Answer the fifth: I assume this means, how do I keep feeding my mind so it will come up with ideas? At the moment, I lack sufficient brain to process much in the way of non-fiction, so I’ve just been catching up on a variety of novels and TV shows — feeding the mind with fiction. But that’s because I’ve been way overworked for a few months now; once I’ve regenerated a few grey cells, I’m planning on resuming a practice I had a few years ago, wherein I tried to read some of the nonfiction accumulated on my shelves. I may, for example, go on a kick of reading about ancient China, because there’s a series of short stories I’d like to write that requires research in that direction. Or, y’know, that book over there about the Mongols, just because I don’t know much about them. Or whatever.

But yes — if I want to get much out of my brain, I am going to have to be careful to keep feeding it. Grad school used to take care of that for me, but I haven’t been in classes for two years now; it’ll be up to me to keep the food supply going.

***

Question the sixth: Will you be writing any more books in the world of Warrior and Witch?

Answer the sixth: You know, one of these days I’ll do the smart thing and post the answer to this question on my website. I’m kind of afraid to know how many times I’ve answered it in e-mail.

So here it is in a blog post: I’m not currently planning to, no. Yes, there’s the question of the younger generation, and the Cousins, and Mirei and Eclipse (though I rather feel like where that one’s going is obvious), but none of that is a conflict. It’s just consequences to the work the characters have already completed, and that does not an exciting book make. If I come up with a conflict that excites me? Sure. My publisher would have been happy for me to do a third book two years ago, and I don’t imagine it would be terribly difficult to convince them to take one later on — not so long as the first two keep selling. But I finished the story I was telling; I’d have to come up with a new one before I’d sign on for another installment.

The closest thing I have to an idea is much smaller and more personal, and it keeps stubbornly resisting my attempts to make it grow enough plot to be a worthwhile book. But if such a book ever happens, the likeliest scenario is that it will take place about ten years later, and it will be about Indera. I think she’s up in Kalistyi somewhere, under another name, doing something else entirely with her life — not sure what — and I know she would run into whatever Amas/Hoseki is calling herself by then. Because if there’s one question I want answered, as the author, it’s what would happen when Indera comes face-to-face with her. (And, I suppose, how Indera has come to terms with herself. Or failed to do so. Whichever.)

Or maybe I could make it be a short story, though it’s hard to imagine writing it in a fashion that doesn’t require the reader to be familiar with the novels. Anyway. The idea sits in the back of my head, and if one day it jumps up and starts waving its arms, it’ll get written. But poking it with a stick isn’t getting it anywhere, so I leave it alone.

***

Go here to ask me more!

Round one

I figure I’ll answer questions in batches of three or so, to keep the posts from being stupidly long.

***

Question the first: How easy/difficult was it to score arrange “special” tours when you were on your research trip in England? Did you have to get a letter from your publisher, or was, “I’m writing a novel!” sufficient?

Answer the first: Pretty easy. I think I got a slightly sniffy reaction from one woman I e-mailed — in the vein of “we’re really quite busy, you know” — but that was just the go-between; the woman who ended up giving me that tour was fantastic. Mostly people are very glad to help. After all, you’re expressing an interest in a topic they’ve decided to devote either their careers or their volunteer time to; they like geeking out about it with somebody.

I’ve only once been asked to bring proof of writerliness, and that was for the library and archives at the Globe Theatre. They set up the appointment no problem, but I had to bring a letter from my publisher to show at the security desk.

***

Question the second: What is your absolute favorite thing about being a writer, and what is your absolute least favorite thing about it?

Answer the second: Favorite is probably how I’m always doing something new. I was talking with my brother about this last month; my whole life, I’ve never found myself doing the same thing for more than about three or four months at a stretch. I’ve been in school, with new classes every semester, or I’ve worked at summer jobs, which by their nature are limited, or I’ve been writing novels, which generally take me about the same length of time. (Sure, I’m still sitting at the computer typing words, but it’s different characters and settings and plots; there’s substantial variety.) I have to go back to high school to find the last time I did the same tasks on the same topics for even so long as nine months consecutively.

Least favorite is probably the solitude. This is fundamentally about me spending long hours with my keyboard and monitor, which sucks in certain ways. I think that’s why a part of me thinks it would be fun to work in TV or movies; I’d still write, but it would be social. Downside: I’d have to deal with other people. The truth is that I’m often a solitary person; it’s just that this job can feed that tendency too strongly, and I have to guard against that. (In fact, if I can kick this bug out of my system, the plan is to use this weekend to launch Project Get A Social Life.)

***

Question the third: If you could redo one thing about your career, what would it be?

Answer the third: . . . nothing?

Seriously, the answers that leap to mind are not in my control. It would be cheating to say “be a NYT-bestselling debut novelist!” Because even if I had a redo, I couldn’t be assured of making that happen. In fact, my sales might well be worse; Doppelganger earned out its advance handily, and has done well enough that my publisher reissued it, which is not the general fate of first novels. I’ll keep that result, thanks.

So I have to look for mistakes I know hurt me, and there just aren’t any bad enough to merit erasure. I’m glad the first novel I submitted wasn’t the first one I sold, because it wasn’t nearly as strong as it could be, but the act of submitting it wasn’t a bad idea; it got my feet in the water and earned me some personalized rejections. Etc. There’s only one thing I’ve done so far that I seriously regretted, but it’s worked out okay in the end, so even that I wouldn’t change. (Sorry, not sharing what it was, for personal and professional reasons. I know, that’s kind of cheating on this whole “answer a question” thing.)

I don’t think I’ve had a perfect run so far, but it’s good enough that I don’t feel an overwhelming desire to redo any of it.

***

If you’d like to ask a question, head on over here.

post-novel blech

I sent off a draft of In Ashes Lie to my editor yesterday, and within a few hours had succumbed to the bug I think I’ve been fighting off for a few days. I strongly suspect a connection.

So today is a day of being the laziest lump I can manage to be. (Which is harder than you might think, unless you have my sense of guilt masquerading as a work ethic.) Ergo, I will recruit help from you, the internets, and hop on a meme while I’m at it:

Ask me a question!

Writing-related or not, though I won’t, of course, give spoilers for unpublished work. Comments are screened; I’ll answer the questions in later posts. Ask away, and we’ll see if I can marshal enough brain cells to give coherent replies.

In the meantime, I’m going to go contemplate eating a waffle, and find a book to collapse with.

today’s random internet research question

I don’t suppose any of you out there happen to know the kinds of phrases used in the seventeenth century when one was about to chug an alcoholic beverage? “Bottoms up,” which is the phrase I wanted to use, is very twentieth-century, and “cheers” is also way more recent.