Dickensian Fantasy

In which I show off a book cover

2012-01-25T20:28:00.002-05:00

Look! It has my name on it.

In which my shoddy work habits are revealed

2012-01-21T22:59:00.002-05:00

I sometimes leave myself little notes like this, and forget I have done so. Who is this me who writes these stupid notes and expects me to fix this shit later?

Now I have to abandon the new scene I was planning and write some dialogue that does not suck.

In which there is counting

2011-12-18T19:59:00.004-05:00

It's the end of the year, almost. I shouldn't be writing this post, because there are a few things still to come in before the real year-end, but I find myself at the computer just now with an urge to do it, and I can always update you guys again later, right?

EDIT: within 24 hours of the original version of this post, I received both a rejection and an acceptance, which are now included in the data below!

Number of new stories published: 1
Number of podcasts published: 1
Number of stories subbed: 6 (new record!)
Rejections: 8
New sales to pro markets: 1
Reprint sales: 2 (1 podcast, 1 anthology)
Fastest response: Clarkesworld (less than 1 day)
Slowest response: Tor.com (still pending, subbed in July 2010)
Most rejected story: 6 and counting
Rejections due to closed markets or cancelled publications: 3 (bad luck year in that regard)
Milestones: joined SFWA

In which I will be anthologized!

2011-12-13T18:52:00.002-05:00

Brit Mandelo has made the official announcement of the table of contents for Beyond Binary here, and I'm in it! This looks like such an awesome collection of stories:

"Sea of Cortez" by Sandra McDonald
"Eye of the Storm" by Kelley Eskridge
"Fisherman" by Nalo Hopkinson
"Pirate Solutions" by Katie Sparrow
"'A Wild and a Wicked Youth'" by Ellen Kushner
"Prosperine When it Sizzles" by Tansy Rayner Roberts
"The Fairy Cony-Catcher" by Delia Sherman
"Palimpsest" by Catherynne M. Valente
"Another Coming" by Sonya Taaffe
"Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot" by Claire Humphrey
"The Ghost Party" by Richard Larson
"Bonehouse" by Keffy R. M. Kehrli
"Sex with Ghosts" by Sarah Kanning
"Spoiling Veena" by Keyan Bowes
"The Metamorphosis Bud" by Liu Wen Zhuang
"Schrodinger's Pussy" by Terra LeMay

Beyond Binary will be coming out in May from Lethe Press.

In which I have a new story

2011-10-23T21:04:00.003-04:00

It's tentatively called "The Root of the Root" and it has been in the world for almost an hour now while I dicked around with poetry books until I decided not to call it any of the things I'd been thinking about. It may change again before I call it done.

Pretty things: Solveig's cardigan; a puppy; a whole lot of cats, all of whom are based on actual cats I know (because you can do that with cats, although it's kind of inappropriate to do it with people)

Horrible things: carbonaceous sputum; 24-hour WalMart; sad unused baby shower presents

Soundtrack: Olinka's "Puss in Boots" mixtape; Fleetwood Mac, of all the damned things; Fever Ray

Sustenance: Aleve and gunpowder tea.

Fetishes: decade-old Lululemon hoodie. I've worn it so much that the cuffs have torn. There is nothing else in my closet so comforting.

This story is a happy story. It is also a story written by me, so the happy takes a while to kick in. I will look forward to seeing if it sells quicker or slower than my less-happy stories.

In which I digress for a moment to talk about food

2011-09-20T07:43:00.002-04:00

Since I'm a fiction writer, not a food writer, someone else is welcome to this idea: "How a Thin Person Eats". It would be kind of a diet book, but instead of focusing on how heavy people lose weight, it would focus on how lighter people maintain their lighter weight.

I have my doubts about the current thinking around weight. There's a lot of judging and shame around fatness, which I hate. I don't think everyone should have to be thin. I would like people to feel good about themselves at whatever size they're at, and choose their foods and exercises based on what they love.

For people who have fat they want to shed, I think there's too much focus on restrictive, uncomfortable diets that might get results in the short term but are horribly hard to translate into long-term habits.

I am a thin person, and my body composition is very healthy (plenty of muscle, sturdy bones). I have never dieted or restricted my food choices. Depending on what you believe about diet science, this could mean I have a wickedly high metabolism, or I get tons of exercise, or it could mean I have accidentally hit on a sustainable diet which doesn't lead to weight gain.

So I wonder--how do other thin people eat? What are the habits we share which are healthy and could be adopted by someone who wants to become sustainably thinner?

In which there is a podcast!

2011-09-06T20:40:00.001-04:00

The mellifluous Julia Rios reads my story "Who in Mortal Chains" at PodCastle.

I've never been recorded before. Let me just say: it rocks.

In which I cannot hear my new Handsome Furs due to the air show

2011-09-04T14:57:00.003-04:00

It's even worse than a balloon party around here: I have to sit, stiffly cringing, awaiting a horribly loud noise, which I know beyond a doubt is coming, only I don't know when. And every time it does, it's going to make me flinch visibly, spill coffee, and overuse italics.

Also, the cats. They don't have italics, or coffee, but they have the visible flinching.

In which the bell tolls

2011-09-04T10:20:00.003-04:00

It actually does. Not for me, I assume. It's somewhere up the block, and it's probably one of those knife-sharpening people, rare these days but still to be found on occasion here in Little Portugal.

Sunday morning, cloudy. Wasps in the rose briars and butterflies in the tall grass. Neighbours strolling to the laundromat. Silence in my part of town.

My friends, it is a good day to write.

In which it's always better on holiday

2011-08-23T22:35:00.005-04:00

I saw this destroyer in Boston, on a precious day off following a business trip. I was impressed with how much depth it has below the waterline. You can only see this depth in drydock, or if you're a good diver.

On my return I discovered that two of the magazines to which I've submitted are undergoing editorial changes. Catherynne M. Valente is stepping down from Apex, and Ann VanderMeer will no longer be editing Weird Tales.

These situations aren't identical: as far as I can tell, Valente is stepping down to give herself more time to write, which is laudable, while VanderMeer has been let go by Marvin Kaye, who has bought the magazine with the intention of editing it himself.

I am not a prolific writer, and when I have something to sell, I want to place it with a market where it's a really good fit, both for the audience and for the editor. I chose to submit to Apex because I love Valente's writing, and to Weird Tales because I love VanderMeer's editorial taste. My good impression of VanderMeer was further borne out by a fantastic note she sent me on my first submission--she didn't buy it, but she not only encouraged me to submit again, she also gave me helpful suggestions on who else might buy the story in question, and even offered to give more if those didn't pan out. That is a rare and amazing level of consideration, and it made me all the more eager to sell her something great.

Similarly, I love selling to Strange Horizons: my stories are in humbling company there, but also my experiences with Jed Hartman and Karen Meisner have been wonderful.

With both Apex and Weird Tales, I've read the magazines only since the current editors took over. I don't know if I'll continue to read them or submit to them under new management--but I find Valente's vote of confidence in her successor a lot more reassuring than the strange takeover situation at Weird Tales.

I don't have very many stories to sell, and I want to sell them to people who I think have something to offer me in my development as a writer. I have little clout here--fiction is very much a buyer's market--but I will be considering over the next week or so whether I want to withdraw my story from consideration at Weird Tales. I hope Marvin Kaye has something confidence-inspiring to say about his editorial directions for the magazine... but whether he does or not, I know I'll be submitting to Ann VanderMeer again, wherever she lands.

In which I play with Babelfish

2011-08-01T20:41:00.003-04:00

Here's a paragraph from the middle of the story I'm working on. I used Babelfish to translate it into Mandarin and back again. ...It was a bit clearer in the original.

"The new cat, the starting, strolls by to smell the decision in mine face. His student opened in the shadow width. He invested his nose to me, and his whisker has itched my cheek."

Here's something from the first scene:

"In the air, contains the fat wool one kind of sickness warm smell or the cotton material: I imagined a rug merchant to try from any clean 50 year stain once was jewelry bright kilim."

In slightly less random news, I am officially a member of SFWA, as of today. Also, I recently sold a story to PodCastle, and this will be my first audio publication.

In which it is Story Day!

2011-07-18T20:44:00.002-04:00

My latest work: "Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot".

I had a lot of trepidation about this story, and I'm so glad the wonderful editors at Strange Horizons gave it a home.

My high school actually did perform this play with an all-female cast. I can't remember who they were, sadly--and none of them were Ginevra--but they did a wonderful and very memorable job. Ladies, if any of you ever happen to read this, thanks for absolutely laying waste to my little teenage mind, in the best possible way.

In which I wonder where the last month has gone

2011-07-09T20:57:00.003-04:00

On submissions, some of it. You see, I've decided to sell some poems.

I wrote them, after all. I'm a writer--a professional writer, even, technically. Ergo the things I write should be good for something other than sitting in files.

We'll see if the poetry markets agree.

Also, on productive things such as my bike race, and a fair bit of work-work, and also on less productive but mandatory awesomeness such as Pride.

What hasn't really been happening, though, is Words On Page. I wouldn't say I've ever had that thing called writers' block, but it does occasionally occur that I just don't really do it. Or I do some, but not enough, or I do a lot, but nothing good. June was one of those months.

July, luckily for me, is proving better so far. Today's excellent work: hauling "Houdini" back on track, by main force and the application of some Elvis Costello.

This story will probably have nothing to do with Houdini by the time it's done, but it will have to do with a woman I saw weeping on the downtown 6 between Bleecker Street and Astor Place, and with Puss in Boots, and with a pair of Wehrmachts.

In which there is new Ideomancer

2011-06-01T20:16:00.002-04:00

Right here!

This month's issue includes a story that I found unusually fascinating: "Chrestomathy", by Anatoly Belilovsky. I like all of what we publish, but this story is right up my personal alley, as it is about Pushkin and duels and lost writings, the dissemination of thoughts and the way history's shaped by their thinkers.

Enjoy!

In which I am in metaphorical boot camp

2011-05-15T20:47:00.004-04:00

It's not as sweaty as Real Boot Camp. Also, no tear gas, which makes it a hell of a lot less boot-campy. (Yes, that is the voice of experience speaking.) However, it is a relatively short time period to get myself into fighting form, and therefore it merits the comparison.

I'm always telling myself that I think with my feet (or with my fists, depending on how angry I am...) and so at some point in winter, I decided I'd kick off the summer season with two charity races: a 5k running relay and a 25k mountainbike race. Because of the wet, snowy spring, training commenced a bit late, and then I had to throw a few business trips into the mix, and so I'm here in mid May, feeling like a bear just rolled out of the cave, lumbering around trying to get my blood flowing.

Also, all of my short stories are turning into novels. I just had two really nice rejections in which editors encouraged me to send more stuff, and I have no stuff to send.

Fortunately, there's a cure... it's not an accident that I'm in two writing groups.

The common thread of all of the above is that I hate embarrassing myself by failing to live up to my own word. I give myself a goal? Whatever. I give you my goal? I'm going to cross the finish line if I have to do it on bare rims and bleeding stumps.

So:
(1) Cross those finish lines.
(2) New story for June.
(3) New chapter for June.
(4) The kicker: final draft of Hour of the Hag by my birthday. I am not going to start another year without a novel to market. This is my Jesus year, my Byron year, the year by which all kinds of the world's heroes have already made their mark and then died, and since apparently I won't be growing out of my ego any time soon, I'm at least going to get that Goddamned book in the mail.

In which I take a time-out

2011-04-12T00:36:00.002-04:00

...from writing, in order to do this. I built wheels!

Early signs of genius !!!

2011-04-06T22:35:00.003-04:00

Our writing group had the wonderful idea of sharing a bit of our juvenilia tomorrow, so I've just spent an hour going through the files I kept of my pre-teen stories. Which are extensive. And--shocker!--awful.

Picture, if you will, reams of three-ring notebook paper, solid-blocked with paragraphless blue ballpoint, script veering crazily through the three different handwriting styles I was trying on for size. Doodles on every available margin (UFOs, birds, eyes, hearts, coffins, and my name paired with the surname of a guy from my sixth grade class).

This manuscript is my first novel, The Five Realms, begun when I was eleven. It features twelve different protagonists, none of whom know each other until they're thrown together on a massive world-saving quest. I wrote everyone's origin story and most of the introductions, and then I skipped straight to the (tragic) ending. (I figured the part in the middle would be easy to fill in later, since it mainly consisted of the cast riding around killing monsters.)

Since I'm a masochist... have some sample prose!

The hero's love interest:

"Her eyes were brown, glimmering with unshed tears, and the set of her red-lipped mouth was full of desperate courage as if it was a last stand. Her dark gold hair was whipped around her face by the wind of war."

The villain's first victim:

"He was utterly sizzled. His flesh had melted to the stones of the street and couldn't be scraped off. The body had to be left on the street until it disintegrated."

And this adjectival bit of cliche bingo:

"It was sunset on the Plains of Akhna, and the blood-red rays of the dying orb lit the barren land with a fiery light. The Company rode across the wasteland at great speed, forming a fierce picture: twelve terrible figures, armed to the teeth, galloping over the flat plain like a wind through grass. Then one broke away from the rest, spurring his tired horse to greater speed, desperate to reach some unknown goal..."

Oh, and I didn't know how to spell quite as well as I thought I did--poor Cheif Preist!

The Fantasy of Being Published

2011-03-27T18:03:00.002-04:00

A while back I read a memorable piece by Kate Harding on the fantasy of being thin. Harding is a fat acceptance blogger who writes movingly, in this post, about how much time she spent believing that being thin would mean "becoming an entirely different person – one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has".

This is how I was feeling about being a professional writer. Where one draws that line is actually kind of unimportant--does it start with your first sale? First pro sale? SFWA membership? Agent? Novel contract? Not all of those things have happened for me yet, but I'm very aware today that some of them have, and that I have not yet magically become an entirely different person.

I am still a person who talks too much and then feels dumb about it. I still don't have great boundaries. I'm secretive about some things and I overshare others. I read blogs instead of working; I work instead of calling my family; I call my family instead of cleaning the catbox. I am vain. I spend a lot of money on clothes and not as much as I'd like on charity. I want to be eco-friendly and then I forget my reusable coffee cup when I go to Starbucks. I want to be admired and then I swear like a pirate in front of my superiors. I want to be healthy and then I eat potato chips and Irish coffee for lunch.

And I want, more than anything, every day, to receive another letter telling me that I have been found worthy. And each time this happens, I am overjoyed for an hour or an evening, but I am still myself, and I still have to wash my socks and attend that marketing meeting and buy butter and tampons.

What does this all have to do with the cute cat picture, you may ask. That is Arnold, who had to be put down a few days ago due to advanced kidney disease.

I was not there. I was on a business trip. My husband was with him, and called me from the vet, and after he hung up I sat there in tears in a brewpub in Manhattan, knowing that he had the harder task, and still wishing I could be there, instead of coming home days later to an emptier house.

Today's that day, in my house, without my cat for the first time in sixteen years. And I think what would make it better would be selling a story today. And I know this is a fantasy, and that when I sell my next story, I will still be a person with only one cat.

What will really make the difference is nothing anyone else can do. What will really make it better, the only thing that will really make it better, is the conversion of this, my memory, my emotion, into story. I am still, only, and always, a person who does that thing.

Auto Show, clairification style

2011-03-13T23:28:00.003-04:00

One of my fellow writers (Nicole, that was you, right?) says my novel is like a low-budget film: the settings are few, small and usually indoor, and the characters keep returning to the same places.

In true low-budget film style, one of these settings is a car. When Gavin is in his car, the scenery going by could be pure stock footage.

The car itself, on the other hand, is a vitally important set-piece and I need to be able to describe it accurately and richly. Thus: the Auto Show.

At the Auto Show, people let writers in to look at cars that are worth more than houses. The car in question is a Bentley Mulsanne. Two nice women let me inside the ropes to take pictures of it!

I now know the colour, sheen, specs and even the smell of a Bentley. I cannot share the smell with you here, but as for the rest:

I was not, unfortunately, allowed to sit in it. Or touch it. I also did not have the balls to ask the Bentley staff how this car would react if it was hit by the corpse of a Canada goose falling from approximately fifty feet up; or whether the windshield would crack if a small enamelled [SPOILER ALERT] fish exploded beside it.

I did discover, incidentally, that the Auto Show staff were uniformly polite and considerate toward those of their patrons who walk with a cane.

In which I have structure

2011-03-10T14:04:00.004-05:00

This, my friends, is Hour of the Hag. Each sticky is a scene. Notes in black are what currently happens in the scene; notes in pink are things I have to change or add. Pink stickies are scenes to add. Blue for Maksim's POV, green for Lissa, white for Nick, and yellow for poor orphaned Jonathan who really shouldn't have his own POV scene, since there's only one of it.

I'm surprised by how even the scene distribution is. I am unsurprised by how much more I have to do before I can call this thing done. This sticky-map is for the transition from draft 2 to draft 3 and final. I don't have much sense of how long it will actually take--weeks rather than months, but other than that, it depends on how much I wallow. I have three vac days to kick it off. Hard burn to April--I'd like to get it in the post to agents by May.

Oh, and behind the sticky-map, that thing is a pillow with a carrot on it.

March issue of Ideomancer!

2011-03-02T22:15:00.002-05:00

...is here for you to enjoy.

Other awesome things in the pillow book of March:

One has unused vacation days and a plan to spend them writing in coffee shops.

One has tickets to an all-girl fight card.

One's arms are bruised by kettlebells.

One's neighbour, who is a cat, leaves the house after the long winter shut in, and greets one from the doorstep.

In which I... er... it's NSFW

2011-02-20T18:11:00.002-05:00

So I'm writing my first sex scene.

This is me we're talking about, so it's definitely a necessary, character-driven sex scene--my people are acting according to their natures and this is what must happen. I didn't intend to set it up this way, but it's what they would do, so it will be done.

And... this is me we're talking about, so it's between my two gay magicians. And one of them is a person in a wheelchair.

I'll say this: the research is interesting.

In which we receive zombies

2011-02-13T21:06:00.001-05:00

Dozens of them, in fact. Hundreds. More zombies than I can easily describe.

Why? Because I asked my brain to supply the solution to a writing problem. I asked it to give me the solution in the form of a dream. This strategy has actually worked, in the past, now and then.

This time? Well, I am not writing a book about zombies, so this answer was not exactly what I was looking for.

They did, however, explode quite satisfyingly when I shot them with my crossbow.

In which I have elderflower nectar

2011-02-06T19:56:00.005-05:00

As of an hour ago, I have five stories out on submission. This is a new high water mark for me.

(Two of them are reprint submissions, but still.)

I also had the jawdropping realization this week that I have a personal theme. All of my novels, and many of my short stories, are about pairs of magicians, one mentoring the other.

In trying to trace back the origins of this very persistent meme in my own life, I came back to the Vasilissa story. This story has been interpreted by Clarissa Pinkola Estes as a story about women's intuition, as Wikipedia reminds me; I remember reading Estes at the direction of my therapist, when I was in university, and thinking that she basically took a whole pile of interesting old stories about women and said that they were about intuition, which galled me a bit, since I don't possess much of that thing.

To me, this story feels like it's about power. Not necessarily feminine power, either, not in some essentialist way: we're talking about flaming-eyed skulls, people. Clear, burning sight.

Baba Yaga, the elderly witch who lives in the forest, teaches Vasilissa, the young seeker, how to wield power, in the form of the flaming skull. Vasilissa wields it against her enemies (it burns her wicked stepfamily to death). Instead of going power-mad, Vasilissa moves to the city to become a weaver. She gets really good at it and impresses the czar's son, who then marries her. Another reason I like the story: it's sometimes called Vasilissa the Beautiful, but her beauty is not a plot point at all. She is brave, intelligent, fair, wise, and hard-working. She makes her own way.

But she doesn't make it alone. She has help from her mother, in the form of a magical doll. And this help, in turn, allows her to make it through Baba Yaga's tests until Baba Yaga deems her worthy of receiving the skull. The prickliness of this relationship fascinates me. Vasilissa somehow sees, in a dangerous and somewhat hostile witch, the promise of an education, and a powerful future for herself.

And apparently this idea has taken root in me more than almost any other. Five novels, five pairs of magicians. I'm including my childhood novel here, because I wrote it when I was barely a person yet, and still, already, this was what I wanted to talk about.

In that first book, which I wrote at fourteen, the two magicians were romantically involved. Totally inappropriately, I might add--she was sixteen and he was twenty-five, and I only made him twenty-five on paper... he was really thirty in my mind. (I think it reflected the fact that my animus, my intellect, was pretty mature for my age but my girl-self was woefully...not.)

The second novel was never finished. The older magician was a monk, and the younger one a sort of feral child-warrior. No romantic relationship (good) but way too much of a parental relationship, which made the whole thing kind of boring to write, for a kid trying to grow up.

By the third book, I'd figured out that the young woman/older man combination was a huge red herring for my potential readers. I didn't want to tell a story about daddy issues. I wanted to tell a story about a mentor relationship. So I made my magicians gay men, and gave them each outside love interests.

Fourth book: the magicians are stepsisters. This is the explicit Vasilissa book, so it was way more important to have the characters be women. I was also starting to figure out that this was a theme--not consciously, not totally, not yet.

Fifth book: the magicians are gay again, and former lovers. The younger one's just figured out that his life is a wreck, and turns to the older one for guidance, only to discover he's part of the problem. I think the mentor relationship is getting more complex now: it's not only about the power that can be learned, but about the damage that can be done by someone who doesn't take his own influence seriously enough.

So now that I've teased out this theme--and I'm truly embarrassed that it took me five books to notice--I've got to wonder: why is this my story?

And did it set me up to find, in my own life, the excellent mentors I've had?

In which I discuss my career to date

2011-01-10T21:45:00.003-05:00

This is my second year of eligibility for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (awarded to writers who are in the first two years of their careers, dating from their first professional sale). I am fairly unlikely to be nominated, since my career to date has been somewhat sparse. I can, however, hope that eligibility in itself will drive a few more people to read the work of mine that is available online, and maybe remember my name next time they see it (likely in Strange Horizons in spring).

I can also goggle at some of the other people who are eligible this year. Rachel Manija Brown, who wrote the wonderful memoir All the Fishes Come Home to Roost. Nicole Kornher-Stace, whose story "The Raccoon's Daughter" came out a week before mine in Fantasy Magazine and completely overshadowed it, in the best possible way. Amal El-Mohtar, who gave a very lovely and memorable poetry reading while standing on someone's hotel-room bed at Readercon.

Also, my fellow Viable Paradise students. From my year, Tiffani Angus and Christian Klaver. From other years, George Galuschak, Ferrett Steinmetz, and possibly other people I haven't happened across yet. Obviously the workshop has been a great jumping-off point for many of our careers.

Looking at my work as a professional activity is not new to me, but looking at myself as part of a group of professionals is very new. Looking at my work as part of a public body of professional writing is also very new. Sometimes it surprises me when I get a reminder that people are actually reading me.

Case in point: I was reading Rich Horton's annual summaries to see how Ideomancer fared (well, in fact: he liked one of my favourites, Ilan Lerman's "Saint Stephen Street"). I then discovered that he also mentioned me (the story I had there was "Who in Mortal Chains").

There you have it: proof positive that I exist! I am not just whispering into a soup can attached to a long string stretching away down a very dark alley!

If you are reading this, or any other word from my hand, know that I love you.

You spend your nights in the city, sleep away the afternoons

2010-12-23T19:39:00.004-05:00

I'm jumping the gun on this a bit, but... my year in writing correspondence:

Number of stories published: 1 (vs 1 in '09)
Number of stories subbed: 4 (vs 5 in '09)
Rejections: 7 (vs 8 in '09)
Sales to pro markets: 1 (vs 2 in '09)
Fastest response: 2 days (rejection from Clarkesworld)
Slowest response: Tor.com (still pending, subbed in July)
Most rejected story: 3 and counting
Most accepted story: bought on third shot (one of last year's sales was bought on the first shot)

Since I do still have 2 stories on sub right now, and the number of data points in my stats is very small, this year's percentages could still change fairly dramatically in terms of stories sold vs unsold.

The important thing for myself to note, though, is that I am still horribly fucking unproductive.

I am like those smokers who tell everyone on earth that they're quitting, in the hopes that they'll embarrass themselves into actually doing it. You! Bear witness! I am going to be less unproductive in 2011.

Just another pair of boat shoes walking away from the harbour

2010-12-22T20:35:00.002-05:00

I have lost my speaking voice, and this may be some of the reason I've written so many words this week.

I am endeavouring to bring it back with a finger of Bowmore, since spoons of honey have not worked, and I am out of lemons. (Yum! Scotch for medicinal purposes!)

I continue to be utterly seduced by Bane-Day, leaving poor Compass to swing, for the moment. The task at hand is never the most attractive, for some reason; it's the sidelines, the long shots, that draw me.

And I engage in every kind of magical thinking. If I listen to this song. If I perform these exercises. If I am a good enough girl. If I am a bad enough woman. If I guess at all of the strictures of the hidden universe, she, and he, and you, will buy my work.

This kind of thunder breaks walls and windowpanes

2010-12-21T20:24:00.002-05:00

I think--only hindsight will prove me right or wrong--I think I am in the middle of one of my good times.

It's a bit hard to see from ground level, but I seem to be hammering out an awful lot of words lately, and feeling rather good about them. And by "rather good" I mean "ten feet tall and covered in gold dust", to quote Elizabeth Bear, who knows much better than I what it is to be a talented writer at the peak of her powers with an extra booster-shot of brain chemistry.

Recent progress:

Sold "Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot"

Completed "In the Scent Garden of the Rochester Conservatory" (which may be renamed with a quote from "Faustine")

Rewrote "A Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia"
Rewrote and subbed "Weathermakers"

Still on sub from a while ago: "Haunts of the School for Duellists"

Tinkered with Hour of the Hag opening chapters (this book needs another 10,000 words and it will be ready to query)

Reached chapter 5 of Compass of Chicago (this book needs about 20 more chapters, but since I've only been working on it since October-ish, I am on track to finish it in one year as planned)

Replotted Bane-Day and rewrote the first chapter (this book has way too many words already, and needs to be winnowed, threshed, and whatever other chaff-removing words you might know)

To be maximally productive, I think I ought to screw down the focus and hold off on Bane-Day until Hour of the Hag is actually in the post to agents. But it's so damned interesting. It is also an excellent sandbox for the thing I'm trying to do on the fly with Compass of Chicago: the alchemical combination of structure and character. Bane-Day was all character-driven, and the characters were blind, drunk and way too numerous, which left me with no idea what would happen at any given time. I felt my way through the dark rooms with them. Compass is character-driven also, but it was born with a plot, which needs to be revealed at appropriate times. I believe that in stripping Bane-Day to its skeleton, I'm going to understand how to build Compass from the ground up, with fewer false starts.

That, or I'm bullshitting myself so that I can justify spending time with that world again.

A new thing

2010-12-12T02:54:00.002-05:00

It has no name yet, but it is itself, and it is good. And I have been up all night making it and now I am tired.

First line: "If you ever read this, you'll tell me what grew over the arbor was ivy, not wisteria."

Pretty things: a scent garden, a sundial, a guest book, a pocket square.

Horrible things: a gold cross, a froth of sputum, chicken fried rice.

Ongoing themes in my current work: queer girls in high school, and the forgetting of enormous things.

Every other living thing in my house has gone to bed. My neighbours, on the other side of the plaster and lath, have turned down their music, but they are still laughing, and this is the sound that will lull me to sleep.

Pillow book of awesome

2010-12-11T12:38:00.002-05:00

One spends the morning dancing in the kitchen, singing along with Aimee Mann and Wolf Parade. One fries an egg, and lays it on toast with kimchee.

One's colleagues laugh at one's jokes.

One tastes a beer so perfectly brewed that it causes hop vines to bloom in one's mouth.

One attends a rock show.

One sells a story.

new Ideomancer, and some musings

2010-12-02T21:19:00.003-05:00

First: Ideomancer's December issue is up, and it includes, as always, wonderful stories, poems, and reviews (including my review of Sarah Court, a book which I think you should read, unless you are my mother, in which case it is much too dark for you.)

Second: I am actually writing right now, but my husband and cat are watching Pingu, which is distracting. (Watching the cat watch the show is even more distracting than the show itself. He would eat Pingu if he could.)

Third: awesome word counts this month. Revised "A Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia," and am almost finished "Gardens for the Blind" (which is about to have a new title, since I discovered Janet Frame wrote a story by that name). Also about to finish Chapter 4 of Compass of Chicago. It helps that the weather's gone dark, colder than I like for running, and I'm not travelling again until after Christmas, and I have all these pent-up words.

Just haven't earned it yet, baby

2010-11-21T19:12:00.002-05:00

I have three stories on sub right now, which is the most I've ever had out at one time. In fact, these three stories represent the sum total of my short fiction inventory. My efforts to become more prolific have been... about as successful as my efforts to get a driver's license.

I gave up trying to get a driver's license. I won't give up trying to be prolific; it's too much fun, and also, if I screw it up, no pedestrians' lives will be at risk.

I suppose I hope that while I'm low on the quantity axis, I'm proportionately high on the quality one. I have a low sample size with which to judge, but for what it's worth, my stats are pretty good (all sales pro so far; few rejections per story; when rejected, always personal and inviting me to submit again). This is, of course, whistling in the dark... I haven't made a sale in a year, and I'm frittering away my momentum, especially if none of my three hopefuls make the cut.

They are lovely little things, in my opinion. And I must make more of them.

Ideomancer is looking for editors

2010-11-16T08:12:00.002-05:00

This is what I've been doing with my spare time for a while now. It's fun, challenging, and very educational for writers, and of course, a great team of people.

Wanted!

Ideomancer is looking for two new junior editors for fiction only. Slush wrangler wannabes should be VERY familiar with our magazine and know the styles of fiction we publish. Our guidelines state: Ideomancer publishes speculative fiction and poetry that explores the edges of ideas; stories that subvert, refute and push the limits. We want unique pieces from authors willing to explore non-traditional narratives and take chances with tone, structure and execution, balance ideas and character, emotion and ruthlessness. We also have an eye for more traditional tales told with excellence.

We are especially interested in non-traditional formats, hyperfiction, and work that explores the boundaries not just of its situation but of the internet-as-page.

In addition to reading slush weekly (usually fewer than eight stories per week), you may be asked to work with a writer to help polish his/her work. Editors also help out with publicity and funding initiatives.

The position will require a 30-day commitment during an open reading period, at the end of which either of us (you or me) can opt out if we don't feel we're a good fit.

Please contact us via publisher at ideomancer.com by Sunday, November 21, 2010 if you are interested in giving us a try. Tell us why you are interested in slushing for us in particular, and remember that our current editors' work is not eligible for publication in Ideomancer, nor is this a paying position. We all do this gig out of love.

Red horseman passing

2010-10-13T23:15:00.003-04:00

Recently Completed:

Draft 2 of Hour of the Hag (still too short and missing something)
Minor rewrite of "Bleaker Collegiate"
Final draft of "Weathermakers" (yeah!)

Now in progress:
Oracle of the Dashboard (definitely needs a new title now that Stephen appended the word "Light" to it... Meatloaf is not the association I'm going for, here)... so, for now: Compass of Chicago
"Alias Someone Older" (a sequel, of sorts, to "Natural Disasters")
"Railway Guns of the Northern Rockies"

Three other half-stories await my attention when I'm next in the mood; I can see, though, that I am not likely to be in the right mood for a while.

I'm honestly in a mood, period. I'll be lucky if I make it through the next month without breaking any glassware. Why? Dunno. But if I'm coming over, bring out the plastic cups.

Enduro: night lap

2010-09-19T01:04:00.003-04:00

Progress: one new scene, four chapters of revision

Pretty things: elderflower presse; Hermes scarves; I think it has a title!

Horrible things: a froth of saliva; violence against doctors; terrible lies

Soundtrack: Elias, Two Hours Traffic, Luke Doucet

Sustenance: dark coffee laced with rum, the rest of the salted chocolate

Fetishes: tonight I made use of my writing hat, my special rock, my grizzly bear coffee mug, AND my favourite t-shirt with the antlers on it.

Next step: another new scene. I don't actually think I am done yet, despite the hour. It's a rare night that I can stay up working right into the small hours, and I don't intend to waste this one.

Enduro

2010-09-18T23:18:00.002-04:00

My husband is riding a 3-day, 235k mountain bike race this weekend. To prepare for it, he's ridden several 6-hour days and one 24-hour relay race in addition to his regular riding and workout program. He and the other racers have a team to transport their belongings, cook their breakfasts and dinners, and give them massages at the end of the day. His nutrition consists of a staggering array of bars, protein mixes and electrolyte tabs.

I'm trying to finish Draft 2 of the Not-a-werewolf book, which is now back to being untitled. To prepare for it... well, I suppose I wrote Draft 1, and my million words of suck, and a bunch of other stuff that didn't suck as much. My support team this weekend consists of two cats, the guy who brought my organic food box, and the internets. My nutrition consists of leftover lasagna, arugula salad, coffee, and salted chocolate (ie, much better than the final round of Draft 1, during which I mainly forgot to eat and ended up with a really awful gutshot kind of feeling.)

I am ready for this. I am. I am ready to have it out of my brain, because it feels like the time I accidentally ate a glass shard and it got stuck in my mouth, and it took me hours to work it back out, and I kept pricking my tongue on it. Only nastier.

Sometimes I truly wonder why I think the world needs this book. And then I think no one but me will ever really get the payload of black awfulness that it carries. And that is for the best.

In which I remember: today is Labour Day

2010-09-06T12:05:00.002-04:00

On Queen Street, the marchers sing "Solidarity Forever" as they pass through the rain.

I drink coffee and warm my bare feet upon the stomach of my cat.

Autumn's upon us, and I must waste no more time.

Release Chirpy Helium

2010-09-05T15:29:00.003-04:00

...is now my favourite anagram of my own name, which is rather difficult to rearrange satisfactorily. (A close tie is "cheerily hales impure".)

I am releasing chirpy helium by making an incredibly fey dance mix and playing it at top volume: everything from Felix Da Housecat to Lady Gaga to You Say Party! We Say Die!. The bubbliness of this dance mix is designed to offset a grey cold day, fighter jets screaming over to the airshow, frightened cats under the bed, and the intolerable bleakness of my damned book.

It's Draft 2 Central at my house today, and as much as I love my creation, it's a scary and sad creation, to which I have not been kind. (Maybe it needs a bride.) As often happens to me, what began as an attempt at light fiction has (d)evolved into a book about family damage, loss, violence and suicide. (Mom: you won't want to read this one, ever.)

Simultaneous to all this horror, of course, is a voluptuous knuckle-cracking excitement: I made this, and I'm making it better, and eventually, I shall make you read it.

Tell me, brother, don't you understand--we're all working for the Pharaoh

2010-08-13T21:08:00.002-04:00

I have two free hours.

Go!

And really, the words are there; but they're scabbed over a bit, or dried out, or atrophied. My eyes blur and run. I've been looking at screens fifteen hours a day this week. My shoulder aches. This cannot be allowed to matter.

Drive the body, my sergeant used to say. And I say: Drive the soul.

Another State of the Nation post

2010-07-25T12:25:00.002-04:00

It's my birthday today. Last night, in between drinking boatloads of Death in the Afternoon*, I told my friends about a plan I made ten years ago. I planned to save enough money to pay myself a year's salary for a writing sabbatical. I figured that at my rate of savings I'd have enough by the time I was 35.

Here I am, 35, and that money is actually in the bank. It's not a year's salary at my current pay grade, but it would be enough to feed me and cover the vet bills.

And I've discovered that in fact I'm not going to take the sabbatical.

Why not? The pieces are in place. I've started selling stuff, I have a finished novel manuscript to shop, and I'm partway through another, with a publisher already expressing interest in that one. This would be a perfect time to break.

Why not?

Because my job wouldn't be there when I got back; and I've discovered I love it, and I'm conservative about giving away things I love. I think that's the only reason, though.

I'm a lucky, lucky person. This is the kind of choice many writers don't ever get to make. And I'm celebrating my luck today by... you guessed it.... writing. And listening to Kate Bush.

*Hemingway's concoction: absinthe and champagne. Yeah, it was a party.

In lieu of talking about Readercon yet...

2010-07-14T22:07:00.004-04:00

...I was thinking about this story today: "Swan Song" by Joanne Merriam. I read it quite a while ago, and the fact that I'm still thinking about it is a testament to its power. So: go read it. (Except for you, Mom, because it's sad.)

I'm going to post tons about Readercon, really, I just haven't got my head around it yet. It was one of those things where each day felt like a week. At one point I laughed so hard that my face twitched uncontrollably for a half-hour afterward; at another point Andrea Hairston made me cry. I met so many people I'd only encountered in print or online before; I reconnected with some of my awesome Viable Paradise classmates and instructors; and I came away with a reading list many pages long.

Definitely going back.

Public Appearance

2010-07-04T10:52:00.002-04:00

I'm going to Readercon. And I'm reading!

Along with 6 of my fellow Viable Paradise attendees, I will be reading at 11 a.m. on Sunday the 11th. I've chosen an excerpt from my recently-completed novel The Russian Witch (formerly Cossack's Witch, formerly the Not-a-Werewolf Book).

While this will not be my first reading, it will be my first in many years, and my first since I started selling my work again. I am petrified, of course; especially since I am not at all used to reading to an audience of sober people. I used to read a fair bit in university, and I got laughs and cheers, but those people were all hammered.

If you're going to be in Boston next weekend, please come--sober or not; see me blush, sputter and quaver my way through a bit of my work; and know that as I do, I'll be picturing you naked.

Oh, Canada

2010-06-26T18:32:00.003-04:00

It's extremely surreal to sit here at my computer, three kilometres from downtown, and look at pictures of police cars burning. At Queen and Spadina.

Between this and the earthquake, it's been a week of disturbance.

And, as always, the literal upheaval is mirrored by another sort, in my mind, where a tectonic shift opens rifts in the landscape and shows me a new face of my earth. And I think about Operation Mincemeat and Schwerer Gustav and tiny china horses, and from this thought comes something springing, bright and spiny, through the broken soil.

Epic Rejection

2010-06-23T21:43:00.002-04:00

The rejection from Apex was concise and polite, and ended with an encouraging invitation to submit more work. In short, the kind of rejection I usually receive. So what made it epic?

Maybe the fact that while I read it, there was an earthquake.

Friend in need

2010-06-09T19:10:00.001-04:00

Alyssa Smith, one of my fellow slush readers at Ideomancer, has just lost her home to a fire.

Rose Fox has the story and a donation account set up here. If you're reading this, especially if you know Alyssa, please consider donating and/or boosting the signal.

Ideomancer June Issue

2010-06-01T20:10:00.003-04:00

Ideomancer's June issue is up today. It includes, as always, reviews, poetry, and brilliant stories.

"Saint Stephen Street" by Ilan Lerman is a quietly devastating look at a world slipping away. Lon Prater's "The Atrocities of King George" adds vampires to a historical moment and comes up with an answer wholly different from the amusing mashups we've recently seen. Megan Arkenberg's "The Copperroof War" untangles the threads of a court intrigue starting from its violent end.

Read, enjoy, and spread the word.

State of the Clairification Nation

2010-05-16T16:02:00.003-04:00

I've been rather delinquent since finishing the Not-a-Werewolf Book, which still doesn't have a real title. I've had that horrible impotent feeling: I want to write, and I don't want substitutes, but when I sit down to make words, they just don't feel exciting.

This does not stop me from making words. I don't do writer's block. I do, however, crave like a drug the ultimate exultation of making words that are really good.

Hence my excitement today: finally getting somewhere excellent with "Railway Guns of the Northern Rockies", which has been kicking around my brain for a few months. I am going to love this story.

Other stories in progress:

"Forty-Nine Days in the Intermediate States, with Extracts from the Great Liberation by Hearing": needs attention, but it makes me sad to work on it. I think I'll get back to it next month.

"Rush Lane": Almost done, and shaping up nicely now that I know what the hell it's actually about.

"Seven Postcards from the Garden of Earthly Delights": About to be razed to the ground and rebuilt from scratch with the same floor plan yet a totally different architectural style.

"Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia": Advances on this story have been made, but mainly in my mind, which does not count. I need to polish it properly, and soon.

Oracle of the Dashboard: on Chapter Three, which, now that I think of it, is not bad for a novel I only started writing in March. (Will soon require a trip to the Bentley dealership, as Gavin spends so much time in his car that I have run out of ways to avoid describing it in proper detail.)

And that, my friends, is a bit too long for a works-in-progress list. By contrast, my completed inventory consists of only two saleable stories. Which, yeah, I need to sell.

I met a MRI tech recently who says volunteers are always needed for imaging studies. I would truly love to see what my brain looks like when it's fully at work. I'm convinced there's something different going on, when the work is really sublime--something that would be objectively visible if you could just look with the right eyes.

In which I get sentimental over Heathrow

2010-05-02T10:32:00.003-04:00

I began this morning reading an excerpt in Harper's from Alain de Botton's new book, A Week at the Airport, written about his stint as Heathrow's poet laureate. I remember the concept making news at the time, and thinking how delighted I would be if I landed in a country and discovered that even its airport had its own poet.

The book, if this section is anything to go by, will delight me just as much, and move me, too.

I travel frequently and I find it such a strange intersection of pampering and deprivation. I can provide myself with a stack of magazines and an iPod playlist, my powder compact and Kiehl's lip balm and a glass of wine, but I am powerless to reach my husband and my cats.

I once sat in the departure lounge at LAX talking to my father on my cell phone and hearing the news that he'd had a hospital bed moved into the living room. I knew he wanted to die at home; I hadn't known, until then, that it would be before the end of the month.

Since I am a very privileged person, I could at least get myself a packet of kleenex and a Starbucks coffee, and I could chat with my boss, who told me that on my return I could take time out of the office to help care for my dad.

This privilege helped immensely, but could not change the fact that right then, I was still on the other side of the continent and my flight had been delayed. I felt simultaneously powerless and blessed beyond deserving.

So today I read this, from de Botton, about being greeted at arrivals, and it undid me a bit:

"Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never have had the strength to make it this far)."

Where they've got all hell for a basement

2010-04-27T22:24:00.003-04:00

I've been away. Out west, near where I used to work when I was younger.

There's a much longer post I will write about that, later. For now, I'm here to remind myself, and tell you, about the sound of mountains.

I spent a day skiing at Sunshine, near Banff. It's an aptly named resort, high and bright. The season's ending, the snow is butter-heavy and incredibly fast, and each day the sun steams off a bit more of the base.

I followed my husband into one of the back bowls. The run hadn't been closed yet, but it was posted as an avalanche zone, so we were the only people on it. Away from the hum of the lift motors, alone on the steep, I stopped and stood, and watched my husband carve away.

I panted in the thin air. My lungs the only movement in the whole broken vista. No hiss of wind or bird-wing or runners on snow.

So I held my breath, and heard perfect silence.

In which I am no longer purely decorative

2010-04-08T21:23:00.003-04:00

Yes, functionality has begun to return, and with it, all my most obnoxious tendencies, I'm sure. For all I know, the difference is invisible on my exterior, but it makes all the difference from within: it is now worth getting up in the morning again, as I begin to believe I'll feel something of interest in my day.

On the weekend I wrote something that didn't suck. It's not done yet, and it doesn't have a title, but it has a person in a place with a problem. And the place is the World Electronic Music Festival of 2002 or thereabouts. It begins with this:

"Severyn sent Rose down among the weather-makers."

In which I am expensive and pretentious

2010-03-30T23:06:00.003-04:00

...according to my boss, who saw me eating sushi for lunch again. I asked him what on earth one was supposed to eat for lunch--ham and cheese? (Most likely with my eyebrow raised.) And thus, another delightful epithet to add to my little collection (which, in case it is not obvious, consists of insults that actually bolster my self-opinion).

How did I ever last in the wild?

I have nothing at all to report from the front. I am vacationing someplace far behind the lines right now. No writing is required until my (figurative) stitches come out, and so I am lounging around my clean house, julienning vegetables and watching Queer as Folk. (When I am not working at my actual job, of course, which does not give extra vac days to recover from the brain-fever of novel-completion.)

For Olinka: the Final Chapter Playlist. I thought about annotating these a bit, since some of them are there for abstruse creative reasons; then I decided instead just to let you wonder.

"Go Into the Water" - Dethklok
"The Gem" - Priestess
"Pharaoh" - Richard Thompson
"Real Thing" - Cypress Hill and Pearl Jam
"Kryptonite" - Three Doors Down
"Sing a Little Hymn" - Two Hours Traffic
"Tonight, Tonight" - Smashing Pumpkins
"Coax Me" - Sloan
"Like I've Never Been Gone" - Robert Plant
"Houston" - REM
"Pretty Little Ditty" - Red Hot Chili Peppers
"The Mess We're In" - PJ Harvey & Thom Yorke
"Boadicea" - Enya
"Don't Tread On Me" - Metallica
"Bombs Away" - Luke Doucet and the White Falcon
"Chelsea Hotel #2" - Leonard Cohen
"Who By Fire" - Leonard Cohen
"The Wedding List" - Kate Bush
"Natural Disaster" - Joel Plaskett

... and yes, every other living creature in the house DID want to kill me before it was over.

In which I am abject

2010-03-27T18:30:00.004-04:00

I have not eaten and I cannot be bothered to eat. My eyes ache, and I cannot be bothered to take out my lenses. I almost didn't bother to shower, but the pleasure I take in scented soaps is a pleasure that rarely fails me.

I cannot even say I haven't been working. I have been. It just hasn't been enough, and it hasn't opened the trapdoor in the upper reaches of my brain.

I'm addicted to a drug of my own making. And once in a very great while, I cannot supply it for myself, and so I walk around craving, and nothing else suffices.

All of which is to say: the post-novel burnout hasn't gone away yet. One of these days I'm going to wake up with an original thought in my head, and I'm going to put more than a few words in a row again, and it's going to be absolutely wonderful... and until then, I'm going to ghost around the house and eat stale crackers for lunch and listen to Wilco all day.

Kids: just say no to writing.

Story Day: "Who in Mortal Chains" at Strange Horizons

2010-03-08T18:25:00.002-05:00

"Who in Mortal Chains" is live today at Strange Horizons.

This story marks the first appearance of Gus Hillyard. She is violent, undisciplined and very old, and she's a hell of a lot of fun to write. I hope she's as much fun to read... although "fun" is probably not the right word for something this bleak.

Gus also appears in the novel I've just finished writing... the novel that is still kicking my brain's ass, and making me do idiot things like try to pay for my lunch with American money. I hope this aftereffect diminishes quickly, because I have writing days booked later this week, and I would like to finish the next Gus story, so that those of you who enjoy it may have another treat (and those of you who don't may begin avoiding me at cocktail parties).

Ideomancer March issue!

2010-03-02T20:59:00.004-05:00

Ideomancer has a new issue, and a new design, which I think is even cooler than before. Stories, poetry and reviews; writers we found first; and a new feature called "Atlas of the Imagination".

Also, if you want to wear your heart on your sleeve (or on your boobs, like me?), we have t-shirts and things! (Admittedly, this may not be the best ever product shot. What can I say--my modeling career consisted of a single church fashion show, when I was thirteen. Hey... you may not be able to see my face, but I'm smiling with great enthusiasm!)

The Met, the Plaza, Assouline and Andrew Kaufman

2010-02-28T18:42:00.005-05:00

In New York last week, I went to the Met, where one cannot photograph the art, but can photograph the blossoms and the ceiling.

It was mainly a business trip, but when one has been doing the same job as long as I have, business and pleasure become irretrievably mingled. I visited my friend Helen at the Assouline bookstore in the Plaza Hotel, which is one of those places where culture and myth and aspiration and art all collide in alchemical perfection. We had a glass of wine and talked about A.S. Byatt and watched the carriages on the southern edge of Central Park. I wanted to buy an ostrich egg, or a bronze bust.

When I came home, I went to hear Andrew Kaufman interviewed about his second novel, The Waterproof Bible. We're friends; I've had the pleasure of hearing about this novel before; but it's quite different now that the novel is an object, a thing that exists on its own independent of Andrew's creative mind or the kind of conversation that happens between writers.

One thing that struck me is that Andrew now knows the theme of this novel, in a way that I don't think he did when he began it. I might be projecting; I know I certainly had no idea what the theme of Cossack's Kin would be when I began it. I don't think that way, and I don't think many of my writer friends think that way. Anyway--that's a post for another day. The important thing is that Andrew was funny and awesome, and his book is funny and awesome, and you should go read it.

After the Deathmarch

2010-02-15T11:46:00.003-05:00

This is the third time I've finished a novel.

The first one, you'll never see... I was fourteen when I finished it, and it was full of horrors. I had recently watched Romancing the Stone and I remember loving the opening scene in which the writer finishes a book and pours herself a celebratory drink. Since my parents weren't drinkers and I was a kid, all I could find to drink was a decade-old bottle of cheap cherry brandy from the cooking cupboard. It was vile, and perfect.

The second novel is the Dickensian Fantasy for which this blog is named. It's not finished any more--it's back in the shop for a major adjustment--but the night I completed it was a momentous one. I finished late on a Saturday evening, and two very kind friends took me out for a burger, and after they went to bed I spent at least two hours wandering the city alone and wide-eyed.

The third, the just-completed Cossack's Kin, was a bit of a grind at the end--I found myself getting mired in the difficult emotional territory my characters inhabited, and by the time I wrote the last words, I was thoroughly glad to see the ass-end of it. My husband and I ordered Thai food at midnight and fell asleep watching Mobile Suit Gundam.

The common threads of these experiences: I usually seem to finish in the late evening, because I can't stand to leave the end for the next day when I know I'm close. I find I get so wound up that I don't eat, which is counterproductive, as I lose focus and get unhappy when my blood sugar is low; but just try getting me to behave like a sensible adult when I'm in the middle of a key scene.

The fun thing, though, which I'm remembering today: I always have the next project waiting in the wings, and I start to work on it right away. It's symbolic--the finished novel is no longer the favoured child. It's going to make its way in the world now, while I turn my attention to its younger sibling.

In this case, it's Oracle of the Dashboard, and I spent yesterday buying its working music (Wilco, Aimee Mann, Neko Case) and replenishing all the calories I didn't take in earlier in the week. Today I've got fresh coffee and Bosc pears and three kinds of cheese, and I plan to make a beginning.

Novel Deathmarch, Day V: which is the last day

2010-02-13T22:51:00.002-05:00

Number of words: ~5000.

Distance to finish line: Nothing. That's right. Toodle-oo, bitches! All done!

Favourite sentence: "Maksim watched the bright light dawning over the aerodrome, and sat very still until the flight was called."

Why it's my favourite: because it's the LAST one, damn it.

Total length of book: ~60,000 words. Short-ish, especially compared to the last one. It will probably get a bit longer with revisions.

Number of hours at the keyboard today: 13

Ibuprofens: 2

Coffees: 2

Sustenance: bread.

Workouts: climbing last night, and I was so shattered that my hands couldn't hold my water bottle. Even an hour later they couldn't hold my beer. Fortunately they were recovered by today, enough to be able to type.

Pretty things: being done.

Maybe later I'll wank about this some more, post my final chapter playlist and expose all the stupid workings of my recalcitrant brain, but for now, I'm so damned tired. And hungry. And... thirsty :)

Novel Deathmarch, Day IV

2010-02-13T12:11:00.002-05:00

Number of words Thursday: 5000

Favourite sentence: "She wasn't my girlfriend," Gus said, hanging on to the doorframe.

Pretty things: Stella's hair, jasmine, church windows

Horrible things: a hot plate mounded with melted plastic and scorched food

Distance from finish line: ~10,000 words?

Cups of coffee: 3

End-of-day rewards: dinner at Czehoski, but I was too keyed up to eat much

Last night's dream: a day which began with a full-colour premonition that I was going to lose my eye to shrapnel from a bomb blast. The day included multiple bomb scares, each one causing me to wonder if my premonition was about to come true. It ended with a walk past a swimming pool which contained an enormous unexploded shell, which was clearly about to explode and obviously, finally, take out my eye. Fortunately, this finally gave me enough of a jolt to wake me up.

Grateful feelings: your husband listens while you discuss, at great length, the scenes you've written that day; your writer friend texts you a reminder to turn off your internet connection and get cracking.

Novel Marathon, Day III

2010-02-09T20:52:00.002-05:00

Number of words last Friday: 2500

Favourite sentence: "They'd even started to fight like sisters."

Pretty things: alstromeria, a bowl of pomegranates

Horrible things: pepper spray

Distance from finish line: not quite sure, but at least it's not 20,000 words any more

Cups of coffee: 2

Workouts: 1/2 hour of curls, pushups, and not-quite-chinups

End-of-day rewards: Beast, at the Horseshoe, and it was indeed rewarding.

Sinking feelings: once again you've walked into your own drama, and all the lovely distractions in the world won't help you get to the end of it. Nothing for it but to put on that song that always makes you shudder, and think about the year of the dragonfly.

Grateful feelings: your husband comes home from work and washes the dishes so that you can keep working. That's love. Thanks, babe.

Novel Marathon, Day II

2010-02-05T08:58:00.003-05:00

Number of words yesterday: 5500

Favourite sentence: "In the hour of the hag, she woke."

Pretty things: a froth of blossoming vines; a former lover in South Africa; aubergines

Horrible things: thumb + exacto blade; a mummified baby found in a mass grave in Greenland

Contribution by Famous & Important Canadian Writer encountered in coffee shop: "green plastic Easter grass"

Contribution I made to Famous Writer's short story, in exchange: correct spellings of "transcendent" and "its"

Distance from finish line: still 20,000 words (it's a moving target)

Cups of coffee: 3

Workouts: 0 (boo--lazy)

End-of-day rewards: Zombieland, Rueda, new Clutch album, cocoa-chili pasta with sweet potatoes, zucchini, corn, tomatoes, leeks and toasted pepitas (because my genius burns through carbs like nobody's business)

Today's Agenda:

Chin-ups, push-ups and curls (1/2 hour)
Water plants (10 min)
6000 words (12 hours)

In which I am out of inventory

2010-01-26T20:24:00.002-05:00

State of the Clairification Nation:

--Not-a-Werewolf, now with new working title The Cossack's Kin: ~20,000 words to completion

--Dickensian Fantasy: in pieces on the floor (almost literally, but the sticky-notes were getting a lot of cat hair stuck to them, so I picked them up and put them in a stack instead)

--Stories sold in 2009: 2

--Stories on submission: 1

--Stories undergoing revision: 1

--Stories nowhere near complete: 4

--Stories put on hold pending alchemical transformation into brilliant Nascent Novel: 2

...which means I have nothing at all ready to send out to people. *!* faster, faster, faster!

Novel Marathon, aka Using Up My Leftover Vac Days

2010-01-21T21:15:00.002-05:00

Day 1 word count: ~3000 (all pure genius, of course... at least at the moment... they will probably be magically transformed into straw overnight)

Number of hours at the keyboard: 11

Number of hours not at the keyboard: 2 (but the dishes are clean, damn it, even the ones the cats eat from)

Cups of coffee: 3

Showers, baths or other hygienic activities: 0

Number of songs on playlist with "battle" or "war" in the title: 24

Number of times I had to look up the hierarchy of ranks in the Red Army (because I can never remember rank hierarchies even though I was in the army myself): 4

Number of ibuprofens: 1 (probably related to number of chin-ups on Tuesday: 0, actually, but not for lack of trying)

Number of minor characters for whom I substituted the word "name" instead of naming them on the spot, due to forgetting list of Russian names when I left for the coffee shop: 5

Number of times protagonist lost consciousness: 0, although he did go to sleep during someone else's POV scene (this metric is here to keep me on track, folks--I used to love to sneak out of scenes by knocking out the POV character)

Number of times I checked my day-career email: 0 (for once!)

Number of cups of delicious David's Amaretto Rooibos: 2. And now, to make another. G'night!

Novel Deathmarch

2010-01-17T18:12:00.002-05:00

Coming soon to Casa Clairification. Thursday, in fact.

Today does not count as part of the Deathmarch because it was really more of a Household Stuff day. Also a Day of Roasted Vegetables. What am I doing roasting vegetables when I have a Novel Deathmarch in the works?

...um. Good question. I'm going now.

In which it seems I am writing another novel

2010-01-11T20:55:00.002-05:00

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. (a) I always end up writing a new novel shortly before the current one is done, and (b) I think I have a Law of Conservation of Creativity, by which I mean that once I've made up something I like, I tend to want to spend more time with it.

Regarding point (a), I see this as a psychological prophylactic against attachment to my work. So long as the new new novel is the Shiny Thing, the recently-completed novel can be kicked about and hacked apart and rejected without any personal suffering. Or maybe it's the other way around--maybe I just get tired of a novel by the time I finish it, and my creative mind's impatient to start on the next thing.

The problem with the Not-a-Werewolf book is that I began it during the period of mental depletion that followed the end of the Dickensian Fantasy. I dicked around with that book for a full year before I really got down to business on it. I don't know whether to count this toward its clock, or not.

If I begin the clock with the current draft, it's been just over a year for the Not-a-Werewolf book.

Since the characters and world-building are already relatively stable for the Nascent Book, I hope I can get the clock down a bit further--though I am not going to truly begin it until I finish Not-a-Werewolf (for which I have scheduled a February Deathmarch).

Nascent Book shall now be known as Talking Fish Book, I think.

And also, dear self, it is way, way past time you gave the Not-a-Werewolf book a proper title.

The awesomeness of other people

2010-01-09T16:26:00.001-05:00

I read this story before the holidays and I keep thinking about it: "Beautiful White Bodies", by Alice Sola Kim. Links: part 1, part 2.

It's political, it's personal, and it doesn't oversimplify. I enjoyed it a lot.

My new favourite thing...

2009-12-29T20:19:00.001-05:00

...apart from writing, of course... is answering questions about my work.

Also: if I can make myself work ten more days like yesterday, I shall be finished the Not-a-Werewolf book right on time.

Viable Paradise 2010 about to open for applications

2009-12-28T10:50:00.002-05:00

In 2008 I attended Viable Paradise, a week-long speculative fiction workshop held on Martha's Vineyard.

It was the smartest thing I've ever done for my writing career. When I applied I was already past the million-word mark, but I had only a few sales under my belt (all a decade ago, too), and a completed novel but no agent. I knew I wanted to write short fiction again, but I hadn't begun to do so. The instructors of Viable Paradise gave me the tools to take my next steps with confidence, without wasted effort, and with a new sense of excitement and dedication.

When I applied for the workshop, my father was dying. I don't remember whether I talked it over with him; what I do remember is the understanding that came to me with his passing:

Time's short.

I know some writers who are content to be hobbyists, to write for an audience of their spouses or to stuff their completed manuscripts in a desk drawer.

I'm not one of them. I need my work to be read. And I needed professionals in the field to help me quit wasting time and start writing my best work, submitting it to pro markets, and getting it accepted.

I also needed contact with a community of my peers. My fellow students turned out to be a truly inspiring and supportive bunch. We have a wide range of styles and forms, but we all share
an intensity of purpose.

It's been just over a year since I attended. In that time, I've made my first two professional short fiction sales; I've joined the Ideomancer team as a slush reader; I've written two-thirds of my second novel, and three other stories that I believe are ready to sell.

Every one of these steps was made easier and quicker by the things I learned at the workshop. So: a huge thank-you to Elizabeth Bear, Debra Doyle, Steven Gould, James MacDonald, Laura Mixon, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and John Scalzi.

And to aspiring applicants: look at that list of instructors. Those people are awesome. You, too, could learn from them, talk literature with them, have a drink with them, have another drink with them, find yourself singing folk songs you don't know very well, and come home with spectacularly scarred knuckles!

Red Letter Day: The Tongue of Bees

2009-12-21T21:35:00.004-05:00

"The Tongue of Bees" is now up at Fantasy Magazine.

Read, share, enjoy. I thank you for your interest.

Progress Report

2009-12-19T15:31:00.002-05:00

As the year draws to a close, I am, as always, disappointed with how far I've fallen short of the goals I set for myself. I wanted to write a short story for every month in 2009. Even counting the 2008 stories I revised, I only came up with half that; nor am I quite finished the Not-a-Werewolf book.

I did, however, write some things of which I am very proud.

Sold:
"The Tongue of Bees"
"Who in Mortal Chains"

On submission:
"The Oracle of the Dashboard"
"The Compass of Chicago"
"The Duellist, After Her Prime"

Final revisions:
"A Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia"

In progress:
"Rush Lane"
"Seven Postcards from the Garden of Earthly Delights"
"Book of the Dead"

Broken:
"King of Bramble Heights"
"Bleaker Collegiate"

Next things to write:
#3 in the Gus series
#3 in the Gore series

State of the Little Novel:
2/3 complete, aiming for February

State of the Big Novel:
In pieces all over the floor... almost literally. This novel needs a chirurgeon.

State of the Novelist:
...in need of another cup of coffee.

Red-letter day yesterday. I got a cheque in the mail. I am in a fortunate position--I have a day job which covers my living expenses, so I am free to spend this cheque on something symbolic.

Because it is the cheque for "Who in Mortal Chains," in which one woman cannot defend herself and another cannot quite control herself, I am going to donate it to the Shape Your Life project. (I may also buy myself a pint of Hop Addict, or something similarly great and bitter.)

it's alive!

2009-12-18T19:53:00.003-05:00

My website is up.

My thanks to the lovely & talented Kristin Craig Lai: may your future be rich with delicious tea!

In which it turns out this photograph is a metaphor

2009-12-14T20:16:00.003-05:00

Because I miss green things already: have a leaf. This particular leaf is a grape leaf from my back yard.

We don't know what we're doing with grapes. We inherited them from the previous owners of our house, an elderly Portuguese couple. These vines are likely older than we are.

Some years our grape yield is more than we can handle; one year my mother-in-law made jelly from them. This year, I don't know what we did differently, but all we had were leaves.

I have writing years like that. Years where I can see that the vines of my mind are still hardy, but they bear no fruit. Sometimes it's because I let them run wild earlier, and they only need time to recover their sap. Sometimes, it's because I cut them back, harshly, all but the ragged dark trunk.

This year, I am knee deep in the crush, and well on my way to a strong vintage.

In which everything's coming up Humphrey

2009-12-07T19:09:00.003-05:00

...although I do wish I had a more euphonious surname. I think it's already too late to give myself one, however; it was too late the moment I signed my first contract.

My website is ready, and will go live as soon as my webmaster has a free moment (currently, he is doing double duty as saladmaster, soon to be followed by workoutmaster). My web designer is a marvel of creativity and patience, and deserves some really nice tea.

I continue to be amazed and humbled by the kindness, professionalism and enthusiasm shown by the people in my communities: the SF community, the bookselling community in general, and the community of my friends. My life makes me so excited sometimes that all I can think of doing is running around, picking up heavy things, or hauling myself up walls.

In which I get profitably lost

2009-11-14T18:16:00.002-05:00

As often happens at the end of a business trip, I had a few hours of grace. I checked out of my hotel, got coffee, and began walking.

I thought I was going to a market mentioned in my guidebook; I didn't find the market, but I found a wide waste of tracks and warehouses, broken glass and razor wire. I went alone through vacant lots and beneath bridges, in the heat of the midday sun.

It was exactly the thing I needed for my story.

Writing the present

2009-10-25T18:16:00.003-04:00

I've found, over the years, that I cannot usually write about things as they happen, except in an unvarnished journal. The things I collect must mature, or compost, or maybe age like cheese, in order to be useful to me.

As I grow older, though, I find this less true--maybe because I'm not experiencing as many brand-new things, or maybe because the things that are new are not wholly new the way they were when I was very young. For example, I went climbing on Thursday for the first time, and although I had never climbed before, I still had a frame of reference: I've tried new sports before, I've joined new gyms, I've climbed to high places, and I've fallen off stuff, so combining those experiences didn't feel shockingly strange.

What I'm actually writing about now--in a story that has no title yet--is Chicago. I've been there a dozen times, or so, almost always in autumn; I know the colour of the sunshine and the breadth of the streets, and I've owned these memories long enough that there's something I need to say about this place.

The new thing, the thing I only experienced recently, is the feeling of being still young, instead of young. It's the feeling of early August, when you see the first yellow leaf on your way home from the cottage, and you know that although you have a good month of summer yet, you can see autumn on the horizon, and you know that beyond autumn there's winter.

Youth, on the other hand, is June: peak heat, fresh greenery, and days so long you can't believe the sun will ever leave you.

I've seen the horizon now, and what's past it. I know none of this will last. I am unable to forget these things.

But I'm still young, so I run up the hill past the milky red trees, and fill my lungs with smoky air, and I feel in myself as much power as I've ever had. My prime is upon me, and it will be for years yet. And this will be the meat of the story.

Jim Carroll: 1949 - 2009

2009-09-14T22:23:00.003-04:00

I began reading Jim Carroll as a teenager in the late eighties. My father saved me a newspaper clipping about Carroll's life and poetry. I don't know how my father knew that I, good daughter, would adore Carroll, bad son; but he did, and I did.

I read Jim Carroll all the way through the long year of my growing up: from boot camp to my dorm room to my boyfriend's squalid flat to the wakeful hours of my nightshift summer. I saw him read, once, in Toronto. I remember, for some reason, these lines in particular:

"The positions we use when making love
Determine the next day's weather"

That's from "Sick Bird" in Void of Course.

And this, at the end of Forced Entries: "...red to green...stop to go. Walk. Wait."

As I write this I'm aware these lines, stripped of context, might not sound to you the way they do to me. I can't unread them. They changed me. He changed me.

Sale!

2009-09-11T19:37:00.002-04:00

Yes, my temperamental heroine Gus Hillyard of "Who in Mortal Chains" will make her debut in Strange Horizons in the new year.

(Since very few people read this journal, I shall confess here that when I read the acceptance letter, I cried out loud like a little child. No one was home but the cats. I got cat fur stuck to my face. It had been an amazingly awful day up to that point; and then it was something else.)

This story, which I thought weaker than its predecessors, made the cut; goes to show that I'm not the best judge of my own work, I suppose.

For the first time since I began this project, I have more than one completed story in the kitty, as well: I'm going to be in SFWA by Christmas, at this rate. And I've given myself a deadline to finish the somewhat related Not-a-Werewolf book, so that I'll have something to show the agents who will doubtless come calling ;) Good Lord, but I must work faster!

Accepted for publication:
"The Tongue of Bees"
"Who in Mortal Chains"

To submit:
"The Duellist, After Her Prime"
"The Oracle of the Dashboard"

First drafts complete but in need of more work:
"Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All Female Production of Waiting for Godot"
"A Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia"

First drafts in progress:
"The King of Bramble Heights"
"Forty-Nine Days in the Intermediate States, with Extracts from the Great Liberation by Hearing"
"Seven Postcards from the Garden of Earthly Delights"
"Rush Lane"

Novel progress:
Not-a-Werewolf: Chapter 6 almost done
Dickensian Fantasy: Chapter 11 of Draft 4 (6 more chapters to go)

Perhaps I should seek out someone to flog me when I begin to tire. It's a great life if you don't weaken...

In which I break radio silence

2009-08-23T14:59:00.002-04:00

Back-to-back trips have the salutary effect of frustrating my writing desire enough that on my return, I am more than ready to solve the problems I planted on my departure. To wit: the backstory of the not-a-werewolf; the timing of the magician's history in the Dickensian Fantasy rewrite; the presence (or not) of Augusta in Toronto.

Back-to-back trips also furnish me with so many opportunities for pleasure, not the least of which was yesterday's exploration of Boston. I had a half-pint at a pub which opened in 1765; I photographed architecture; I coveted, but did not buy, a number of wonderful pairs of boots.

And early in the morning I ran, up the mall on Commonwealth Ave, through the Public Gardens, and around the Common. When I am in doubt about the quality or direction of my craft, I must remind myself of this: half of my writing is done with my feet.

honest author bio

2009-07-11T20:17:00.002-04:00

I came across this a long time ago and found it completely hilarious.

The bios of many authors seem to follow a certain pattern. They include quirky job histories that show what a unique character the author is (rag picker, hand model, mule trainer, UFC commentator). They include references to the author's long-suffering spouse, and usually numerous cats.

I, clairification, have a long-suffering spouse and currently two cats, and my job history does include some quirkiness (reservist in the Canadian Forces; tree-planter; night manager at a fast-food drive-thru; portrait photographer). However, none of this really, to my mind, encapsulates who I am as an author.

Herewith, the first instalment of the Honest Author Bio of yours truly:

clairification always wanted to be a boy, until she discovered that boys are expected to play T-ball.

Or:

clairification has failed her driving test four times. She still does not hold a license. When her husband wishes to leave the car parked illegally, clairification will not accept the keys, and until he returns, she will walk about nervously, pretending the car belongs to someone else.

2009-07-11T11:17:00.001-04:00

A storm has beaten all the petals from the roses, and still wrings water from the clouds. I'm indoors, and I'm finally alone.

The list of things to accomplish this weekend is a grand one, but as usual, I'll be content so long as I have a few hours in my worlds. The rest is silence (and laundry, and avoiding the telephone).

In which I am a superhero named Galvan

2009-07-06T19:35:00.003-04:00

...fighting the forces of parental oversight with my friends Mercuria, Skew, Quiksilver, Spectaculo, and Princess Kicking-Ass. Much wine was consumed, once the parental oversight was vanquished.

Yes, we're in our thirties and even forties, and we still can't get drunk in front of the fam.

In important writing news, however...

Accepted for publication:
"The Tongue of Bees"

On submission:
"Who in Mortal Chains"

To submit:
"The Duellist, After Her Prime"

First drafts complete but in need of more work:
"Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All Female Production of Waiting for Godot"
"A Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia"
"The Oracle of the Dashboard"

First drafts in progress:
"The King of Bramble Heights"
"Forty-Nine Days in the Intermediate States, with Extracts from the Great Liberation by Hearing"
"Seven Postcards from the Garden of Earthly Delights"
"Rush Lane"

Novel progress:
Not-a-Werewolf: still on Chapter 5
Dickensian Fantasy: Chapter 11 of Draft 4 (6 more chapters to go)

Vexed questions of the day:
Which thing to finish next? And will someone order my pizza for me?

In which I succumb to temptation and relate a dream

2009-06-26T22:44:00.003-04:00

I know, I know... I've been told before that no one finds dreams interesting. But since I'm the only one here:

I was paddling a dragon-boat with Elizabeth Bear. We went around a lagoon for a while and then braved an open channel, where we capsized, but quickly recovered. When we returned to the dock, we adjourned to a barracks, where we did pushups with a number of other people. A skinny, pale man with no legs was doing handstand-pushups, with amazing balance. A young, dark, bearded man instructed me on a better placement for my hands when doing tricep-pushups.

Finally I was resting and I said to Bear, "All this exercise is great, but this doesn't seem like a regular gym; what are we here for, anyway?"

She said, "Viking school!"

I am, as you can see, immensely charmed with the idea of Viking school, and would like to begin my instruction post-haste.

More from the pillow-book

2009-06-22T17:53:00.002-04:00

Silences: the many kinds thereof.

The silence that follows an awkward pronouncement.

The silence that follows love.

The silence of the city when all the power is out.

The silence of the country when the weather is still.

The silence under water.

The silence between stars.

The silence of a lover injured.

The silence of a child asleep.

The silence that follows a great gun.

In which the night is sweet

2009-06-01T22:55:00.003-04:00

It is, you know. Sweet and spicy and warmer than the day was. My cat won't come inside.

I will be meeting with my writing group in a couple of weeks. So that I don't show up pantsless, I need to take an inventory:

Short stories accepted for publication:
"The Tongue of Bees"

On submission:
"The Duellist, After Her Prime"

First drafts complete:
"Who in Mortal Chains"

Back to the drawing board:
"Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All Female Production of Waiting for Godot"

First drafts in progress:
"A Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia"
"The King of Bramble Heights"
"Forty-Nine Days in the Intermediate States, with Extracts from the Great Liberation by Hearing"
The talking fish story
"Seven Postcards from the Garden of Earthly Delights"
"Rush Lane"

Novel progress:
Not-a-Werewolf: halfway through Chapter 5 of what I believe is partial draft 10
Dickensian Fantasy: Chapter 10 of Draft 4 (7 more chapters to go)

If only I felt more like writing. At the moment, after a rather grueling week of looking at the books of others, I only feel like masticating potato chips in front of some Criminal Minds.

In other excellent news, though, I will shortly begin reading slush for Ideomancer.

Ways of reading

2009-05-14T20:35:00.005-04:00

In conversation with a colleague today I stumbled upon a new way of looking at a problem I've been pondering for a while now: the hierarchy we ascribe to different genres. It's not a constant hierarchy, but it's a pernicious one in my opinion, since I write one of the less respected ones. I'm sure it's a very arguable hierarchy, but the specifics are less important than the overall shape.

I'm finding myself more and more of the opinion that the way we read is what separates "difficult" from "easy" work. It goes back to my earlier thoughts on metacognition: whether we read aurally or visually is surely a factor. Where's the attraction of genre fiction if you're just hearing a story in your head, told blandly, one word at a time? On the other hand, if you're right there with Reacher as he crushes someone's windpipe with his bare hands or something, it's a bit of a thrill--but you can do this much more easily when your brain is gulping down entire sentences or paragraphs and converting them into experience.

Where I find the greatest fulfilment, of course, is in speculative writing that also lives up to a high literary standard: innovative forms, strong word choices, and above all, a commitment to truth: never taking the easy way out, never letting the conventions do the work for you, always exposing truth about the writer's world and the way we all live; at the same time, offering a pipeline to the world of archetypes, and painting everything in vivid colours. It feels more true to me than kitchen-sink fiction. I do have a kitchen sink in my home, but I also have a threshold and a basement and a skylight. And I have a self who walks in her sleep, and I have a lover, and I have friends of other species. All these are served very well with metaphors of wonder.

Decemberists, and sleepwalking

2009-05-09T20:31:00.003-04:00

The Decemberists are my obsession du jour, and fortunately one that my husband does not find unspeakably annoying (unlike, say, Joanna Newsom). I've been inhabiting their world for several months now; as I often do with musical obsessions, buying as many albums at once as I can find, and putting them all on random rotation.

Why mention it? Because, like Kate Bush and Tori Amos, the Decemberists have become essential to this particular phase of my work, in some inarticulate way. I must have them. I think they're eminently suitable music for any fantasy writer, in fact.

I'm not likely to forget it, but I note it here because I like to chart these things; at some time in the future I'll look back on this period and want to recapture a mood or a thought, and I'll have the musical key ready.

And now for the sleepwalking portion of the post; it is related to writing only tangentially, because when I woke up, I found myself at my computer.

Fortunately, I had not actually messed with anything much; I'd apparently read an email from the Viable Paradise group, and that was all. I am now going to back up everything, everything, yet again, because the idea that I might wander down and accidentally delete something makes me very, very anxious.

I don't have much of a history of sleepwalking; I have had night terrors before, but not often; and this was the first time I had both.

I suppose it's well timed, since I am about to write a chapter in the Not-a-Werewolf Book in which the protagonist experiences night terrors of her own, and now I have fresh memories of it--in case the ones from a few years ago had gone stale, or something. Sigh. Occasionally the suffering-for-one's-art thing becomes a bit literal.

The place which is many places

2009-04-30T20:21:00.004-04:00

I lived in this house the summer I grew up. This house stands beside railroad tracks, not far from the downtown of a small city which is laid out like a European town, with a plaza at the very centre. When I lived there, this house was shabbier, and the deep hollow of the yard was filled with lilacs.

Part of me has never left this city. It makes appearances even now, disguised as cities of my imagination; in my stories, the square is broader, but a diner still serves breakfast on one edge of it, and a fountain still plays, and people busk there, and people come to watch an eclipse.

Last weekend I visited this city, and in a solitary half-hour I walked a circuit of my old houses, and took pictures of them as they are today. I believe this house here is the only one of which I have no pictures from before. I wanted it that way, at the time, because I was unhappy there. Now I wonder when this house will have its turn in my imagined city, and who will live there, and whether she will walk home as I did, in the early morning, tired eyes set against the dew-bright grasses beside the tracks.

In which I have absolutely nothing of my own to say

2009-04-28T20:57:00.001-04:00

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

They say whiskey'll kill you, but I don't think it will

2009-04-23T21:28:00.003-04:00

--Bob Dylan, "Nettie Moore"

It's proving to be a very appropriate soundtrack to my story revisions. Gus, for her own special reasons, loved the sixties and has never stopped listening to Dylan.

Although I'm sure any of my major characters can be read as me-analogues, I wonder if this love of Dylan makes Gus a bit of an analogue of my dad? Not as he was, but as he might have been, unwed, unbred, wandering in the hills with his camera-lenses slung over his shoulder and his bad haircut like the guy in No Country for Old Men.

Gus is a rolling stone, no two ways about that; and she wants peace more than almost anything.

While my dad was very much for peace, I don't think I ever figured out whether he believed it was possible. I suppose that is key. Gus, for her part, knows it's not possible, and that is her cross.

Peer feedback reviews

2009-04-20T21:13:00.002-04:00

...in the form of Submit! (my writing group). I have been given the duct-tape to fix the broken story. I have also been given a great deal of homemade pizza, chewy brownies and berry pie. I proceeded to burn it all off in nervous tension while I read the conclusion to the broken story: twisting my hair, swinging my foot, drawing little triangles on the table with my fingertip and chewing the skin off my lower lip.

This tension comes from the distance between this story and a thing which really happened: a distance apparently not enough to allow me to read it with complete equanimity.

Other stories, I've been able to read to the group without flinching, because those stories were less new and because I knew they were good. This one was still wet, and not good yet, and it felt quite a bit like something private and nasty: a dental examination, perhaps, or the scrutiny of a hostile lover. This despite the fact that my group consists of the most mature, supportive, talented people for whom I could possibly wish.

Hah... my problem is that they're all rather too good for me, I suspect. Established and intelligent people who manage to write brilliant things while raising children and conducting admirable careers. While I, held together with safety-pins, imperfectly powdered, and not quite sober, attempt to distract them with pyrotechnics as I discover too late that my fly is undone.

Progress Report

2009-04-16T21:44:00.001-04:00

Because I was feeling as if I had not made much, until I began listing it all to the in-laws, and discovered that although I haven't finished much this month, I have been seeding all kinds of things.

Short stories accepted for publication:
"The Tongue of Bees"

On submission:
"The Duellist, After Her Prime"

First drafts complete:
"Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All Female Production of Waiting for Godot"
The violence story, which really needs a title

First drafts in progress:
"A Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia"
"The King of Bramble Heights"
"Forty-Nine Days in the Intermediate States, with Extracts from the Great Liberation by Hearing"
The talking fish story
"Seven Postcards from the Garden of Earthly Delights"

Of course, I've already fallen down on my commitment to write a story a month this year; but if I were to actually, you know, finish some more of the ones I've started, I wouldn't be far off. In terms of word count this is possible. In terms of emotional commitment, I don't know... word for word, they're harder than novels, although finishing a short story doesn't give me that full-brain smackdown that finishing the Dickensian Fantasy did.

And now: I have very extravagantly gone and bought the second season of Criminal Minds and I am going to watch more than one episode, while eating popcorn.

By Grand Central Station I sat down and pulled out my camera...

2009-04-09T22:06:00.002-04:00

...no weeping whatsoever. A passerby mumbled "That'll be a beautiful shot."

I was well-dressed, I had dined on the company and I'd been flogging my brain all day, so that it felt loose now and light. I dropped my colleagues at their hotel and walked to mine, through this luminescent fog, deliciously cool.

Manhattan in spring is always a few weeks ahead of Toronto, and so my visits there are touched with wonder and disbelief. (They have forsythias already?) And in between meetings I buy coffee and walk on Fifth Ave because that's the part I know best, and I greet the library even if I don't have time to go inside, and I photograph the buds on trees and the stately shop-windows.

And I come home through turbulence and we bank down close over the lake and I see my own city, a smaller jewel. And everyone on the plane is a famous actor or a model. And I call my husband from the ferry; and he is glad.

And through the following week at the office, I stealthily add to my aluminum notebook all the thoughts and thoughts and thoughts. If only I were immortal or could forget the press of time.

My anxiety

2009-03-12T23:13:00.002-04:00

...suggests that something has the potential to go Horribly Wrong before my story sees the public, and so I have told barely anyone (my husband and my mom, and of course, you, my invisible audience).

I believe this dates from a Formative Event in my past: when I was fifteen I wrote a fantasy novel. It was atrocious, but no more so than many things written by adults. A publishing house expressed an interest and I had my very first business lunch with two wonderful editors.

They declared bankruptcy not a week later.

I'm sure it wasn't as simple as all that, but being fifteen, I felt like some kind of leper of doom. This feeling was dispelled when the editors recommended to me another house (who rejected me kindly, and did not declare bankruptcy, restoring my faith in my own smallness).

Why do I tell this story? Possibly to illustrate to myself the fact that I've always had a magical-thinking thing going on when it comes to my writing. Although I believe--strike that, I know--that I'm good, I feel that I also need omens, gods, runes, cards on my side; that anything that occurs around my writing is Fated and Strange; and that on days when I have something on submission, any number of rituals may affect the outcome.

Yeah. Nuts.

Apparently even when I have a perfectly nice acceptance note in my inbox I am not immune to this particular anxiety.

So, tomorrow, as I prepare to send off a different story for its first outing, I will be wearing my new red shoes and my silver thumb-ring, and I will offer the Friday toast of the Royal Navy: "A willing soul and sea room!"

And until then, I give you a cat and a bottle of absinthe.

Sold!

2009-03-10T18:52:00.001-04:00

ToB: first professional sale of my fantasy-writing career.

Red letter day!

Discipline and submission; and an extract from my pillow-book

2009-02-26T22:49:00.005-05:00

ToB is back out on the market. I love people who accept electronic submissions--no messing about with stamps and things (particularly challenging for Canadians submitting to US markets).

You would think letter-writing would be an attractive pastime for a writer; and it once was for me, back when I was fifteen and possessed a fountain pen and a great deal of sealing wax. I suppose sealing wax is not technically forbidden on literary submissions, but I cannot imagine it would do me many favours, even in SF/F.

Since I am (a) not fifteen any longer and (b) neurotic, letter-writing is right up there with pizza-ordering and expense-filing in my mental list of Wretched Things. Email-writing, on the other hand, I find relatively painless. Tonight's submission email was a bit more painful than usual, but only because my arms are so fatigued from a killer workout.

I have been very pleased with my ability to submit, of late; apparently my discipline has improved, although I don't know the cause. Work, workouts, mastery? Welcome, anyway.

And now, since I am thinking of it: the pillow-book needs an entry or two.

Wretched things:

They say it will snow again this weekend.
There is cat-vomit upon my copy of Middlesex.
A man on the streetcar touched my buttock.
I have never been to England.
My favourite boots are ruined by salt.

Things that give a feeling of grace:

My husband's hair is a hundred kinds of red.
I have seen the albino squirrel in Trinity Bellwoods.
On Lisgar Street, there is a garden behind a high gate.
One cannot have too many cufflinks.

In which I am rejected: once again, kindly

2009-02-24T22:14:00.002-05:00

"ToB" has come back to me. As with this story's first outing, the polite and friendly editor has taken the time to write a personal note. In this case, he praised the style, and criticized the length and the finale. Like the first editor to have seen this story, he invited me to submit other work.

I call that a pretty solid sophomore outing for this story.

"Fail better," I say to myself. Except I'm not actually sure there is a better type of rejection than this--one step up the ladder lies acceptance.

(If only this wasn't my best work! It quite outshines the other stories I've written since. I guess that's where the "fail better" will have to come in.)

Still on our backs closer than a shirt

2009-02-22T21:10:00.002-05:00

Violence: complete. 4800 words. I don't know the real title yet.

This story felt the way I imagine it feels when shrapnel, long buried in your flesh, works its way to the surface.

It is not for nothing I have lived through this long day

2009-02-07T18:53:00.003-05:00

The Godot story is complete, at last. It's not very long: 3300 words. I said to my husband that it's probably completely unsaleable, but as usual with these things, I wouldn't have been happy if I had tried to leave it unfinished.

I might still re-draft it; I shall need some readers, but I'm rather afraid it will only be intelligible to readers of Beckett, in which case I will be correct about the lack of commercial potential.

It did do that thing in my brain, though.

Monthly Progress Report

2009-02-01T21:57:00.003-05:00

I suppose it is not exactly monthly, but it has been a month since the last one, give or take. In that month I have done a fair bit of work, notwithstanding a Hardware Fail and a great deal of other claims upon my time.

novels
Not-a-Werewolf: 19,000 to date.
Dickensian Fantasy, Draft 4: 26,000 to date. Yeah, I started on it. I don't get real credit for all of those words, though, because a lot of them are cannibalized from Draft 3.

stories in progress
Godot: 2100, and only about 250 of them suck, which is a great improvement.
Book of the Dead: 1200, all genius. Though this is a very difficult and dicey story for a number of reasons.
Violence: 990, some of which were just transcribed from the handwritten draft, others of which were added yesterday.
Talking Fish: no progress.

stories completed since VP
Pie: ready to submit, need to pick a market.
Belladonna: on submission.

The discerning reader will note that despite all of this verbiage, I did not actually complete any stories in either December or January, although I did manage to touch up the Pie Story to the point of being ready for submission.

I owe myself two past-due stories now, plus the one on deck for February. Fortunately, I have enough open tabs that I might actually be able to achieve this. Possibly also fortunately, I do not have very much money, and might take a vacation at home this month, where my expenditures will be limited to the occasional fancy coffee.

Saturdays, Bob Dylan, ashes

2009-01-31T15:16:00.003-05:00

Bob Dylan was Saturday music. Often we had chores to do; I remember shoveling out the fireplace on an April day, working on a poem in my head, with "Tangled Up in Blue" coming from the living room.

Things like that lay the groundwork for all the creative work you're going to do later. You just don't know it. You might try to plan it differently, if you knew; but there's no way to predict what will be the triggers, what will lay down the pathways in your brain. You don't even find out until much later, when you hear a song and you recognize something and it hands you the missing piece to a story.

This is part of my father's legacy to me: a childhood of music, and embedded in it, a library of sensory details and emotional states.

Rejection!

2009-01-24T16:55:00.002-05:00

I get such nice rejections. This one was a personal note telling me that my story, although not right for their publication, was beautifully done, and inviting me to submit others.

Apart from acceptances of course, this is the best kind of letter to receive. (Even better than the ones from my grandmother containing money, in fact.) It gives me confidence that this story (which I myself also thought was beautifully done) will find a home in the near future, and it encourages me to continue with my other stories, one of which will surely find favour with the editor in question. I cannot imagine a kinder thing to do for a beginning writer. Thanks, editor!

I am possibly anomalous among writers in that even form rejections are a pleasure for me to receive. Firstly, they relieve the anxiety that stems from having a piece on submission, if only for the few days it will take me to put it back in the mail to someone else. More importantly, though, they're tangible evidence that I am taking steps in this, my profession. Real, businesslike steps. I've learned so much from my many failures in my other profession that I've stopped seeing them as anything other than steps on the path to success.