I’m so tired. No silly GIFs today. I’m not up to it.

It has been a weird, strange, and sad month for many reasons but for this most of all: I woke the morning of the 16th, flush from a great night out with the writing group, to find my little guy, Grayson, had died. That’s him, below. Handsome fellow, wasn’t he? He’d given no indication that was sick or suffering, perfectly normal. He even came that night and cuddled in my neck, purring madly, as he always did. The shock of it — his cold limbs, the silence he left in — I’m not used to that.

I’d had him since he was a kitten, and his claim to fame was that he was picked by the dog because out of his litter he was the only one that didn’t freak out at being brought nose to nose to his soon-to-be bigger, toothier sister. He was laid back, affectionate, and vocal. A lean athlete, self-taught mouser in a house of placid pets. Would come when you called him, would shoo when needed to be shooed. A gentleman cat, and gone too soon.

This blog has seen too much of that, these last years.

Greyson (2006-2013)

So I’m feeling hollow, scraped out, and muddling through what I can do when I can do it. I had a great day with the writing group yesterday where we set up an all-afternoon writing playdate, then hit the local favorite for drinks and food, then Star Trek. It was good. Needed. I transferred notes on a brewing novel into it’s own dedicated book and mind-mapped the plot elements of a short story I’ve been toying with. Editing progresses, and while I expect to make some progress in these last two weeks of my contract (our group was extended by two weeks, filling out the remainder of May), the bulk of the work will get done in the three weeks of June before the trip to Vancouver. Hard editing date, as I may have mentioned, is June 25th. It will be beta-ready or bust.

I was also fortunate to be accepted as a slush reader for Daily Science Fiction magazine. It’s been a slow ramp up from the minimum per day to a steady 4 or more in a sitting. It’s only been a week now, but I’m learning a lot. And it’s been good having something to concentrate on besides my own projects.

Today’s the last day of the three-day holiday in Cananda, Victoria Day. If you are setting off fireworks, be careful, though in my neck of the woods the expected rain has settled in to douse those hopes.

Looking forward to June. Very much.

In the meantime, I work, I write, I edit. It’s all I can do, really, besides wait for the sun to come out.

The merry month of May is on us and I’m not sure where I’ve put April. Embarrassing, really. I know I just had it with me a moment ago. And I had such plans for it, too.

Well, that’s not true. April hasn’t been a big goose egg. Edits on STAR DOOR are progressing from biggest to smallest problems, to be followed up with line edits thereafter. I spent a great and pleasant chunk of time doing my homework for Cat Rambo’s Editing 101 class and got to try my hand at shorter work in her Flash Fiction workshop. Did some critiquing, too, and applied for a slush reader position. (Fingers crossed!)

More importantly, Rambo’s classes have given me a push I didn’t know I needed. I’m still chewing on it, and trying a few things.

In the meantime, I suppose I will have to figure out May. I have two weeks left on my contract (unless something nifty happens) and then I will be in this weird, middle period between working and … VANCOUVER!

After years of what-ifs and maybes, I’ve bought a ticket that will take me out of northern Ontario and off to the West Coast for a week of relaxation and not-your-typical-tourist adventures with Michael. I will see the sea and wiggle my toes in the sand. I will chase gourmet food trucks, stuff myself on sushi. I will cross gorges, ascend tree bridges.

I haven’t had a vacation in … well, god, years. I’ve been away, but to workshops and conventions. While they are awesome, they are not relaxing; I usually come back exhausted, mind-racing and flatly irritated at the imposition of a day job.

This will be a rest. This will be a replenishment.

This will be fun.

Once I get back, I’ll have to decide on some things, figure other things out. Until then, I’ll have a couple of weeks at the day job and then a couple of weeks after before I fly out. It’s a great deadline to run to, have STAR DOOR ready for Betas, send it off before I go.

I like the sound of that. A lot.

Week Four (Now with bonus weekend!)

The big writing takeaway from last week is that I structured my novel!

*crickets*

No, seriously. Super big deal. I write entirely in scenes and the whole notion of knowing how the scenes will be grouped into chapters is something I leave to the end-stages and, prior to the current work, I’ve only actually done once before. It’s a big picture decision, and when I’m writing I can only think and write from scene to scene to scene. If I try to think in terms of chapters instead of scenes, my brain goes clunk.  (I did write one early and very-very-trunked novel out of sequence and let me tell you it was a mess and it was very hard to kill the darlings, as they were. Perhaps it would be less hard now, but I suspect not.)

After re-writing the middle section of the WIP, I decided against further major rewrites. I ended up added 10K to the word count which was not the direction I wanted. I decided that the other story problems are small enough that they can be tackled in situ. What was still eluding me, until last Monday, was the structure that would help me make those decisions.

It’s obvious, I know, but not all parts of the writing process are obvious to the newbie when in the midst of all that laboring. I can’t make the hard choices if I don’t have criteria to help make the decision. So, duh, figure out your criteria.

So I opened a spreadsheet. I listed every scene by name, POV character, and word count, made the briefest of summaries, and numbered them in the order they appeared in Scrivener. I highlighted the ones from the major POV and from the minor POV, totaled them. Then I started experimenting, grouping together nearby scenes with the goal for a wallop to end the chapter on. After a few chapters, a pattern emerged, which made further decisions simpler. I moved up several of the minor POV characters scenes that had been unbalanced after the rewrite, and even got to play around with a chapter at the 3/4 mark that reverses the pattern that had been established. After a good think and a great deal of messing around, I was staring at the whole of my novel for the first time ever.

I reordered the scenes in Scrivener to match the new order I’d decided on and then compared the numbers. I appear to have a sweet spot of around 5,000-6,000 words per chapter, with scenes checking in at their lowest 1,000 words and highest generally around 3,000. So when the whopper scene at 5,000 words pops out at me, I knew I wanted to go back and cut. (It’s also one of the new scenes, so I am betting it’s pretty inflated.) Out of my 14 chapters, two are well into the double digits and two are past that chapter sweet spot by an uncomfortable margin. These are the ones I’m gunning for first. Looking to cut out stage directions, clarify, all that good stuff, but also to take out non-essential action that is decorative or is clearly me thinking out loud what the logical steps are to get from A to B. Those can go, either be transformed into quirky and very brief exposition or removed whole cloth. If the latter, they go into new sub-documents — one for every chapter — that can be plundered as necessary for the coolest bits which might find a home in saggy parts, which are really evident now after trying to come up with the one sentence to summarize it. If I can’t do it, it means the scene either has to go or get some juice added to it to make it worth keeping.

I have never come to the editing process in as mercenary a way as I do now. Or with as strong a sense of delight.

I like it. Better, it’s working.

Beyond that, Ad Astra happened! I bought books! I wall-flowered! Shocker! But not entirely! Double shocker! Bloggity bits about that forthcoming.

Week Three — Whee!

So next weekend is Ad Astra and me and a buddy from our writing group are heading down straight away Friday after work and then zoom-zoom-zoom, three days of writerly, literary, SF/F goodness awaits us. No dallying on the Sunday, though, as I have to be back in time for Cat Rambo’s second class in her Editing 101 series.

Which means I have to do my homework this weekend on top of everything else. (Which is cool — course is neat so far.)

Last weekend was not bad: got a chance to read a story from a VPer who needed a quick crit, started what might be a flash piece but has likely been done to death a million times before, continued to noodle on a bunch of half-formed projects and took a look over March in general — how I did, how it felt, how I can do it better. The WIP wasn’t entirely unloved, but I waffled on whether or not I should expand or contract certain bits and in the end decided it was time to start getting these scenes into chapters. I’ve picked a rough target for word count for each chapter, which is going to help guide some of my edits.

Should I make the end of April my go to for a Beta-eyeball ready draft? I think I just might.

Also, nearly finished with THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO SCIENCE FICTION (James/Mendlesohn). My reading, in general, has fallen by the wayside these last weeks. Going to switch around a few habits to see if that helps.

And TIRED. This 5:00 am alarm is getting tougher.

From My Ear(worm) to Yours

I’m not sure what the purpose is for random scraps of music to so fully etched themselves into the lizard brain, but it happens. A lot. When something gets stuck in my head, is it the latest song stuck on repeat on the local radio station? (Radio? What’s radio?) A jingle from television? (Nope. Cord cutter.)

1. The Scarecrow’s If I Only Had a Brain. I usually hum this one. Often. People give me a look when they recognize it.
2. The theme song from Batman: The Animated Series. (The superior Batman of all film versions ever made, IMNSHO.)
3. The intro song to Disney’s Robin Hood. Whistled, of course. (I must have listened to that album a hundred times as a kid. The love song, too, gets stuck.)
4. The song What’ll I Do, burned into my brain from a British television show Birds of a Feather, though it’s been sung by the greats.
5. The theme from I Dream Of Genie even though I have never watched an episode of that show in my life, ever.
6. The theme from the 1960 psychedelic Spider-man cartoon show, which I watched the crap out of, believe you me.

 

Runners up include the theme from The Addams Family, various Christmas carols (programmed thoroughly thanks to yearly, week-long, dump all the kids in school in the gymnasium and have them sing carols from an endless series of overheads), songs featured on the Muppet Show, Monty Python songs, and various video game soundtracks (looking at you Zelda, and you Final Fantasy).

What tunes get stuck in your ears? What do you do about them?

I used to work with a cook that swore that humming a few bars of Born in the USA would dislodge any song and for me it’s worked — though not sure if that doesn’t follow the ‘this rock keeps tigers away’ trick.

Don’t click those links! SAVE YOURSELF!

Amazon Gobbles GoodReads

The news broke on Twitter yesterday, setting the stream on fire for about an hour or so. It does ring of the insidious — that they control a small share (for now) of the buying and publishing of books, the undeniably central place to sell books, and now a very popular place to talk about books. It smacks of the way corporate media has gobbled up the entirety of its ecology and the problems we are starting to see as a result (see CBS, CNet and review troubles as just the tippy-tip and most recently visible bit of that big ol’iceberg).

There are worries (understandable of course) about how Amazon will handle GoodReads despite the current declared intentions of independent operation (especially considering how they yanked book cover images last year). Will the user experience be impacted? Ruined? It’s an attempt by Amazon to improve on its often snake-pit of a review system, GoodReads isn’t often that better and can be plagued by the same gaming activities that ruin the Amazon reviews.

It occurred to me yesterday that the purchase should not overly effect me. I am a casual user of GoodReads. It’s handy to have a place where all my books that I’ve read and want to read are listed, and I like being able to update my progress about the books I’m reading now. I’m still pretty gun shy about all things message boards, so while I am aware of the subset of reader communities in GoodReads, I’d don’t use them.

What GoodReads does provide me is a place to see and interact with people about what they’re reading.

And I think that’s what Amazon is after.

I don’t find any books via Amazon’s recommendation lists. Not a one. And their algorithms are on the fritz lately — emails to me once featured SF/F titles (which is what I buy) but now have that mass-market stamp, based solely on my gender instead of my years of Amazon buying habits. Boo. Even then, the previously targeted emails were blanket coverage and inferior to the book blogs and magazines that I follow which can offer more critical or nuanced coverage.

But I do find out about books on GoodReads, and not just in SF/F but other genres and non-fiction that I would never hear about otherwise. And my friends’ reactions to those books do influence me a great deal. I can chart back purchases or library loans I’ve made to seeing these books being read by my friends, and liking them.

That’s what Amazon wants. I don’t even think it’s a simple matter of data mining, grab-n-go. I think they want to pull that curated discoverability community directly into the Amazon experience. How that will get done? Couldn’t tell ya. Amazon can’t go in gun’s blazing looking to carve up the acquisition — the user base will revolt and a competitor site will erupt. They have to go very slowly. But if suddenly a new feature on the Amazon website allows you to connect your GoodReads account and see what your friends are reading and saying about books that might be of more interest to you than those random lists that appear on their website now, don’t be surprised.

You can only be surprised if GoodReads remains untouched and 100% independent, but I think you’d have a hard time finding anyone to make that bet with.

Week Two — New Rhythm

My body has adjusted to the new schedule so I’m not waking up an hour, or more, for my 5:00 am wake-up call. Which means I’m rested and generally high energy during the day. Even better, I’m not tapped out at the end of the day and I have made it to the computer.

WiP particulars: finished the final add-on scene that caps off the new material needed. Next up is going through the following chunk. I’ve pulled those POV chapters out of the whole so I can re-read them all together and prepare my action plan for next week.

Other writing news? Signed up and had the first class in Cat Rambo’s Editing 101 course. She had a special offer for last minute signups and gods know I need all the help with editing I can get. I considered it a late birthday present to myself. What really sold it, though? I follow Cat on Tumblr, and she’s cool, but the reading she gave at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto last year blew me away. There were a bunch of really strong readings over the course of the Con, but hers was the standout. My brain did happy things listening to her reading, so I want to learn from her. (I have homework, too!)

Speaking of my brain, it’s gone into overdrive while I’m at work. While the muse/boys in the basement aren’t thinking about the WIP, they sure have been taking the smallest things and offering up tantalizing nuggets. I may spend part of the weekend just playing with what they’ve offered up — a couple of which are things I can do with disconnected ideas needing that something more to make them usable. So, thanks brain!

Brain firing on all cylinders is probably a result of mainlining Odyssey SF/F podcasts while at work. I do data entry, and I need to drown out co-workers. (Music doesn’t work — I can write to music, but I can’t read, type and listen to music and maintain the speed and accuracy required for the job. Music supersedes the the rhythm of the work.)

Anywho, that’s it! Hanging in there. And looking forward to Ad Astra in two weeks! Booyah!

PS: Apologies to RSS users out there. I just posted (and back-dated) my last three writing-related Tumblr posts. They should get some love here, too, I think. I always feel like I’m cheating on WordPress by playing over on Tumblr and have considered forsaking WordPress entirely but I don’t think I have access to the same analytics as I do here. Not that it’s necessary now but in future, one hopes, it will be.