I didn’t really get a chance to announce this sale, as it happened all of a few days ago, but my latest article with Strange Horizons has gone live — “That Fairy-Tale Feel: A Folkloric Approach to Meredith Ann Pierce’s The Darkangel.” If it sounds familiar, yes, that is my paper from ICFA this spring. Warning: spoilers for the book, as tends to happen in critical articles of this sort.
Just ran the second session of “A Conspiracy of Cartographers” in Memento, wherein I merrily threw out everything I didn’t like about the merfolk and kept the bits I did like. This made me happy. High Seas Adventure! Or in this case, Underseas Adventure! Then I came upstairs and found that Talebones wants to buy “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?,” which I’d really, really been crossing my fingers for. It’s my second sale to them, and one of those submissions where I had a gut feeling that this was the place to send it. So, all in all, a very good evening.
My braid is fluffier than usual. As of bedtime last night, my rag curls had gone limp enough that I decided to forgo my usual habit of sticking my head into the shower to wet them down. Today my hair is mostly flat, but clings stubbornly to hints of fluffiness. It’s kind of weird.
For those who were asking yesterday, my dress came from Ravenswood Leather; specifically, it’s the Saberist Dress. I originally went to their site looking for a bodice (having decided, when Morwen walked out of the last High Court, that her next costume would be Adventurer!Morwen), but got sidetracked by the dress. The Kitsune is rather correct in saying that I have a writing career to support my costuming habit. But I highly recommend Ravenswood; they custom-cut the items to your measurements, and I was able to specify over the phone to them exactly how I wanted my dress to look. What’s more, their usual delivery time is about four weeks, but when I told them I would need it four weeks from when I ordered it, they sent it to me in about a week and a half. So they’re good people.
Gaming — oof. Three characters in three days. I love Sess just for being a low-maintenance character, compared to the two days of high costuming that followed. Getting to play the High Lord of Scathach was awesome, though I do wish the evening game had been longer, so I could have had more time to do things with her. (I wish even more that I’d gotten to flex her phenomenal badass-ness in the dragon fight, but alas, I was pulled out for a completely unrelated scene at the same time.) And then, of course, there was Morwen, who desperately wanted to Kill Something and never got the chance. But, as has always been the case with her, I was able to tell myself that whatever she did, she’d look good while she did it. ^_^
And now I’ve got just over a day to get my brain back in gear for my own game. As much as I’m loving Memento, man, there’s a part of me that’s looking forward to the day when it will stop eating my head.
I’m beginning to think I should impose a moratorium on my reading of Dorothy Dunnett’s novels. Some authors I can read and be inspired; she makes me despair for my ability to write at all. On every level I can think of, she induces a feeling of abject inferiority: her dialogue, her descriptions, her characters and her plotting . . . and hell, that’s just re-reading bits of The Game of Kings, also known as HER FIRST BLOODY NOVEL. I like Doppelganger and all, but it just doesn’t compare, and I know it.
It doesn’t even solve the problem to write some manner of fiction very different from hers. A first-person urban fantasy would sound odd indeed if written in her style, but that doesn’t quite let me shake the inescapable awareness that the awesomeness quotient of any given sentence isn’t up to snuff.
Sigh. I should go read some crappy fiction to get my spirits back up — but that wouldn’t be nearly so enjoyable in its own right, of course.
I enjoyed my first Readercon, though it’s the first time in a while I’ve gone to an sf/f con and not been on the programming, so I felt vaguely like I was slacking. That’s what I get for registering so late. Got to talk to some interesting people, though, and to learn some valuable lessons:
(1) Walking around the book room with a copy of Silverlock in one’s hands is a fantastic way to start conversations with total strangers. Everybody has their favorite bit. (Mine is the alliterative Norse rendition of the Battle of the Alamo.) And I am not, in fact, the only person convinced the book was written Just For Me.
(2) I do just fine picking up folksongs I’ve never heard before; in fact, sometimes I can predict the rhymes in advance, which is fun. If, however, I wish to attempt singing something I know, even for the purposes of a brief demonstration, I should take the time needed to coax my sense of pitch into providing me with the notes I need. Rushing this process will result in me sounding like I have no sense of pitch at all.
(3) Hanging out with fairy-tale-oriented friends and then going to the talk on quantum mechanics is either a recipe for brain meltdown or the Best Idea Ever. Or possibly both.
I didn’t get as much written on “The Last Wendy” as I wanted to while on this trip, but “Double Woman Dreamer” got unexpectedly resurrected from the dust-bin of story ideas (courtesy of one room-mate), and now I’ve got a notion for something calling itself “Schroedinger’s Crone” (courtesy of the other room-mate and Lesson Number Three). Cons always make ideas breed like flies in my head. Most of them are flashes in the pan, briefly shiny and forgotten before the con’s over, but usually there’s at least one keeper.
I’d prefer a keeper, though, which doesn’t involve someone e-mailing me a reading list in Lakota folklore, or self-lessons in quantum mechanics.
My god, is it that time already? I came home from lunch today to find a box on my doorstep, full of Advance Reader Copies of Warrior and Witch. Book ain’t coming out for three months, but apparently the ARCs are already in circulation. I shall have to think of something to do with them.
Then, about five minutes later, the doorbell rang. Found a box waiting on the porch, and in it — EEEEEE!!!!!! My costume for the second Concordia game is here. I cannot wait for that game. To hell with the plot; I just want to show off the pretty. ^_^
In other news, since I’m now registered and everything, I should mention that I’m going to be at Readercon next weekend. At present I’m not on the program (having decided way too late to go), but I’m going to e-mail them and volunteer to fill any holes they might find themselves with. Regardless, come say hi to me if you’re there.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to announce the latest development in my writing career: I have sold two more books to the Hachette Book Group (formerly Warner Books).
Yay!
What two books are these, I hear you ask?
Search me.
<g> The deal is open-ended: two novels, title and content of said novels to be determined later. I have ideas for what I’d like to do, but none of that is settled yet. The contracts, however, are drawn up and on their way to me, so it’s official. I’ll make further announcements when I know just what I’m going to be writing.
The server’s getting hammered, but it’s fun.
Untitled Sequel to the De-Titled Urban Fantasy
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2,024 / 120,000
(0.0%) |
I’m way behind on the plan for this thing, but hey, I wrote tonight. Good for me. I think I’m at the stage where I need to pat myself on the back for that, and not beat myself up for the prior slacking.
Problem was that I just didn’t know how much I should be letting them talk about in this first scene. Problem was solved by letting Kim talk politics. Problem with that is that Kim’s apparently itching to become a rabid activist, about half a novel too soon. Must alter calculations accordingly.
Once again, we have a demonstration of the maxim that one should think, not twice, but seven or eight times, before deciding not to send a particular story to a particular market. It is the editor’s job to reject it, not yours; certainly you should not send it if it’s explicitly against their guidelines (your dragon-and-unicorn story to Analog, frex), but if you just think it’s a matter of taste, send it anyway. Case in point: the story I wasn’t sure was even worth submitting anywhere (“Selection,” the second-person thingy, for those who critiqued it) got past the slush reader at F&SF and garnered a nice alas-o-gram from GVG.
So I guess it doesn’t suck half so much as I had feared. Cool. ^_^
Does anyone in the Bloomington area know of a good dermatologist I could go to for scar treatment? I’d even be willing to drive to Indy, if that’s what it took, but Bloomington would be better, since it’ll take quite a few visits.
A power surge took out half our networking equipment yesterday, so if you’re awaiting a response to any e-mails, etc, be advised that I probably won’t have access again until tomorrow at the earliest.
“The Moon and the Son”
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1,495 /
1,495 (100.0%) |
Even shorter than I thought it might be, which is both good (it means I was able to finish it today, despite stalling out Thursday and doing nothing Friday) and bad (it’s really more the skeleton of the story than the story itself). But hey, it’s done, and first drafts are allowed to suck. I think I wanted to be writing something else, but nothing suggested itself, and I wasn’t about to start something new with only a day to complete it.
So. Four short stories in four weeks; good for me. “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe,” “Waiting for Beauty,” “Degrees of Heresy,” and “The Moon and the Son.” (Hmmm — maybe “A Heretic by Degrees,” instead. Still not settled on a title for that one.) I realized, looking back at my records, that I needed this challenge more than I thought; in the fourteen months or so prior to starting it, I’d written a whopping three stories. (Marketable things; I’m not counting two very brief bits written for games.) Sure, there was a novel in there, but what about the months that weren’t spent on the novel? What about the days when I could write both at once? Three stories is beyond pathetic.
I don’t feel up to Jay Lake’s standard of a short story every week, without fail, but then again, the man also wrote a novel at a speed that makes even The Vengeance of Trees, my seven-week novel, look lazy. On the other hand, I can do better than three stories a year. I think I might try keeping to a standard of one a month. I can manage that, right? I think that if I just sit down with Peter Pan for a while, I can write “The Last Wendy,” and then I really want to come up with a Changing Sea short story for Clash of Steel‘s pirate issue. (Certain individuals I know might want to take note of that, too.) We’ll see if I can manage it, but really, I ought to be able to.
Now, however, I shall take a break, and try not to start mentally revising something already.
“Kerfuffle” is such a great word.
I’ve said before that my usual mode of feminism is to wander blithely about doing whatever it is I feel like doing, happily oblivious to factors that are supposed to be oppressing me into not doing said thing. I won’t claim it’s the best mode in the world, but it works for me.
So apparently one of the things I’ve been oblivious to is a perception that F&SF (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for those not eyeball-deep in the field’s jargon) is unfriendly to women writers and/or readers. As in, they publish substantially more men than women (a verifiable statistical fact), and perhaps publish fiction of a more “masculine” type (an evaluation that’s being vigorously debated in many places). This all came to my attention through a pair of posts by Charlie Finlay.
The chain goes thusly: Fewer women send stories to F&SF than men. Fewer women are published in F&SF than men. (Side tangent on the chain: this may mean fewer women read F&SF than men.) This creates a perception that F&SF is not friendly to women. Therefore, fewer women send stories to F&SF than men.
Watch it go round and round.
Charlie’s suggestion to fix this is to schedule a day (August 18th) for a hundred women to send stories to F&SF. I haven’t waded through the morass of responses to his suggestion, but I did make a comment I decided I wanted to elaborate here, namely, that I have no particular interest in participating. Why? Because I send to F&SF all the time anyway. I have no fewer than thirty-four rejection half-sheets from them (some from JJA, some from GVG), and I’m expecting my thirty-fifth any day now. Some women may have given up on subbing there due to a perception that they aren’t welcome, but I’m not one of them. I could send in a story that day, but I don’t really see that it would constitute much of a message.
I’d be more interested if the campaign was to get a hundred women who have given up on sending stories there, or who never tried at all, to send something in. Reportedly both John and Gordon have said they would like to publish more women, but they don’t get enough subs from them. Provided they’re telling the truth (and I’m happy to grant them the benefit of that doubt), then we don’t need to be sending a message to F&SF. We need to be sending a message to the women who are avoiding it. (And, perhaps, F&SF needs to send out a message of its own — but that isn’t in my control.) Bombarding F&SF, not with women as a blanket category, but with voices they haven’t been hearing, strikes me as a more meaningful response to the situation.
One way or another, once “Selection” comes home, I’ll be polishing something up and adding to their slush pile once again. If I’ve felt unwelcome there (i.e. those thirty-four rejections), I’ve attributed it to my lack of writing skill, not my gender.
Not a good idea to put off starting my fourth story until Thursday. It’s going to be a stretch, getting this one done in time.
And what is the story, you may ask? Is it “Kingspeaker,” as I said it might be? Or “The Unquiet Grave”? Or even, perhaps, “The Last Wendy,” which made a raid on my attention recently?
“The Moon and the Son”
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611 /
4,000 (15.3%) |
Of course not. That would make far too much sense.
Another low estimate for length; who knows if it’ll be at all accurate. I hope so, what with the late start and all. Not to mention that I’m going to have “Hijo de la Luna” on repeat the whole time; for the sake of me having any liking for that song by the time I’m done, I hope this doesn’t take long.
And then maybe I’ll write “The Last Wendy.” Not on a one-week deadline, mind you, especially as I have to read Peter Pan and let it compost first, but soon after. And maybe “Kingspeaker.” And “The Unquiet Grave.” Just because they got mugged by a baby-stealing celestial object doesn’t mean they don’t deserve some love, too.
I’m sure three-quarters of the people reading this journal have already caught at least some of the hoopla over these books, but I finally got around to reading Naomi Novik’s elegant alternate Napoleonic novel His Majesty’s Dragon. Short form: think Patrick O’Brian, but on dragon-back. My recommendation for it (and its subsequent series) is up on my site.
