And Off It Goes

My Viable Paradise application is gone. I emailed the e-copies just now and earlier this morning I mailed out the paper copies.

Let the anxiety commence! *grin*

Of course, this process can’t be entirely without its snafus. Canada is on the cusp of a postal strike, so I ponied up for expedited delivery. Should be across the border before any picket signs go up. It also means that I have an American tracking number, so I can stalk the package much the same way I do my Amazon.ca orders. And I had a devil of a time trying to get the full name, Martha’s Vineyard Science Fiction Association, onto the US money order. Hope what I have works. At least the dollar is par!

But whatever else, it’s gone. Up, up and away. Crossing my fingers, though whatever the answer is, it won’t stop me from writing. Speaking of which, I should get back to it.

Nearly Ready

I have all the hard copies printed, my cover letter signed and stapled. (Yeah, a two-pager. *sigh* But unavoidable.) Tomorrow I will hit the post office to get a money order and the envelope, and on Tuesday I mail my Viable Paradise application off and send the e-copy that night.

Of course there are rumors of a Postal Strike, which would be perfect timing, but I will FedEx this thing if I have to.

Many, many, huge double-rainbow thanks to Sylvie and Julia who took another pass at the stories that had already gone through the critique group. Without them, numerous critical errors would have passed through. Em-dash, anyone?

Also, smart quotes ARE THE DEVIL.

Interface

Playing around with the very OmnWriter-esque interface that WordPress now offers. I like, but you have to supply your own background music, so instead of calming and unidentifiable ambient music I have the Buffy Musical playing. Sarah Michelle Gellar is singing her melancholy “Going Through The Motions” song right now. Oops, we’ve segued to bunnies as the root of all evil. I need to re-watch that series. It’s been years. And I am jonesing for some Joss. (I’m pretty sure that’s a bonafide medical condition.)

In the meantime, brief updatery:

I finished the revisions and line-edits for both of the short stories I was working on. The new one has gone out to the writing group. The older one has been sent to a pair of eyes … which reminds me, I think someone else said they wanted a look-see. *fires off email*

Boy, do I have to glue my arse down to the chair when I am editing! Everything else is so damn SHINY. (See? Needs me some Joss.) But the last few days I powered through and found I could comfortably line edit about 2,500 words a night before going right stir-crazy.

It’s almost like, and I don’t want to jinx it here, that I am getting used to my day-shift. I’m trying to have leftovers on hand so when I come home I just sit down at the computer and work until around 7:00 pm or so and then go off and do whatever else. Last night, for example, I finished off the story edits and then watched the latest episode of A Game of Thrones and devoured the end of Deathless by Catherynne Valente.

It was a good night. A good couple of nights. I could get used to this.

The revision and edits for the new short story were less intensive than for the older story I wrote, what, a year ago? Maybe two? I reread it, made notes, and then rewrote it. The story went from 4,700 words to 5,900 words, which was totally in the wrong direction. After the line edit I got it back down, but only to 5,000 words. I hope the other sets of eyeballs can give me some advice on where else I can cut.

I am between projects at the moment. After throwing myself into the short story writing and edits, I feel disconnected from the actual WIP, Blood of Wolves. And I still have to get the package for Viable Paradise ready. The deadline looms!

And the verdict for the immersive writing window chez WordPress? Meh. I like my bits and pieces.

Tool Set

I’ve put aside the edits on the novel to throw myself whole-heartedly into edits on several short stories. The reason is a good one — I’m firming up my submission to Viable Paradise. I need a cover letter and a sample of up to 8,000 words, which in my case will be two short stories. I have the letter ready (and vetted through my writing group) but the stories were a trickier thing. My most polished stories are not available to submit, so I’ve gotten to work on my next most-ready stories. And wrote another story last week, as the urge presented itself.

And I was feeling pretty guilt about this, to a point. There is a deadline involved for the Viable Paradise application, so I can’t lollygag, but it’s a terrific excuse for avoiding the WIP. And frankly editing isn’t something that I’m terribly well practiced at. Normally my editing is confined to trying to fix the typos and diffuse any Sentence Bombs (a term affectionally coined by my writing group). And if there are things that the group points out that are weak/doesn’t make sense, I ponder, repair, and spit polish.

For the two pieces I’m working on now, one was critiqued by the group last year and left to lie fallow a while and the other was the story I just wrote last week.

For the first one, I re-read the comments from the group and then read through my copy, making notes. Once done, I realized that I would be making a lot of changes. The prose itself was choppy and addled and I decided that the most efficient way to do the job was to rewrite it paragraph by paragraph. So I split the Scrivener field in two, had the original draft on the left and a clean document on the right. Going by my notes, I started writing again, copy and pasting what could be saved from the old story into the new document and added what I needed. I’ve ended up adding 1,000 more words (Boo!) but I know that I will be cutting more from the second half of the story. Still, I’m really happy with the result so far, and I hope to have it finished tomorrow night. Then back out to the group for another quick critique.

For the second, the newly written one, I printed it out and went through it, changing some sentences and making notes. I ended up shuffling some of the dialogue around and tweaking the description to better suit the theme. I know this is going to sound really stupid, but this is a really new concept to me. Normally I dump it out on to the page and I have a hard time conceiving of it as being anything other than what it is intrinsically, which is why my earlier edits were often very superficial until the stories ended up being critiqued. But lately I’ve had a better sense of the component parts, how they interact and what other options I had at my disposal.

Which brings me around to the WIP. This edit is a big edit. Huge. And I don’t really know how to edit — not substantively. Truthfully, I’m still terrified of the whole thing. It’s so big and what if I screw it up and can’t put it back together again like a giant Humpty Dumpty cracked at the base of the wall and oh god I’ve just laid the biggest egg EVAR and I should never write again —

*cough* Ahem. Sorry.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. So that’s why I think I flocked so eagerly to these short stories. I can hold it all in my head and the finish line is within easy reach. Once I get the Viable Paradise application out the door, and that new story out to market, it’s back to the WIP edit. Hopefully with a few new tools in the belt.

Meanwhile, here is my new latest treasure: Deathless by Catherynne Valente. Isn’t she lovely?

Why I Don’t Need More Books, and other Vicious Lies

Confession time: If you leave me alone in the mall with a $100 burning a hole in my pocket and nothing pressing to buy, I guarantee you I will leave having spent the entirety of it on books save for just enough to hit the food court before leaving. I don’t buy make-up, or many movies/albums, and I only buy clothes as needed (though I have developed a wee fetish for bags that is becoming alarming). This meant that at times I had as many books to-read as I had already read in the house, and moving them can become quite challenging.

Recognizing this pattern, I started getting very strict with myself. I purged a lot of my old to-read books, keeping the ones I’d paid full price for verses most of the ones I’d picked up second-hand. These went back to the same store and I gave the resulting store credit away. Since then I usually replenish the collection at conventions, where I limit myself to four or five books. This has kept the pile manageable and I was making progress.

Until now. My glut of non-fiction reading, mostly entirely fed by the library, has backlogged the system. Here’s what I still have to look forward to:

Novels:
Dreamsongs, Volumes 1 & 2, By George R. R. Martin
Deathless by Catherynne Valente
Kushiel’s Chosen by Jaqueline Carey
Darkborn by Alison Sinclair
Julian Comstock: A Story of the 21st Century by Robert Charles Wilsom
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
The Collected Stories or Roger Zelazny, Volumes 1-6, by Roger Zelazny
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay
An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe
Armageddon Rag by George R. R. Martin
The City and The City by China Mieville
Tempestuous by Lesley Livingston
Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Miller
Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder
Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

Non-Fiction:
What it is We Do When We Read Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid
Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn
Booklife by Jeff Vandermeer

Anthologies:
The Year’s Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois
The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 15th Annual Collection edited by Ellen Datlow and Teri Windling
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 20th Annual Collection edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant
Wolf Men edited by Stephen Jones
Steampunk edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer
The Secret History of Science Fiction edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
Warriors edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

E-Books:
The Mirador by Sarah Monette
Corambis by Sarah Monette
Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson
Paradise War by Stephen Lawhead
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

And that doesn’t include some classics I’ve downloaded for the various formats, including Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, Sherlock Holmes, Anne of Green Gables, and so on.

Nor does it include a stash of historical novels that I picked up at a used book store. They live in my bedroom and are my back-up, back-up, books, to be counted on when I was raided after the apocalypse by knife-wielding, leather jacketed SF readers that steal all my other books to fill the Last Library on Free Earth. Or, when I really want to switch gears. But anywho…

Apologies for not linking them all back to Amazon, but that’s a lot of books! (And they will get linked in the Bookshelf page eventually.) I have a shelf devoted to just new books and I giggle like a school girl when I spy them all. I can honestly say I am excited about each one of them. Uber geeky excited. Sort of embarrassing, really. There’s isn’t any more room on the to-read shelf. Like a goldfish, the collection has expanded to the size of its tank, so no more until I’ve caught up!

No more. Even though Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss is out already, and George R. R. Martin’s latest Song of Ice and Fire book, A Dance With Dragons, is coming this summer. And I already cheated by buying Deathless by Valente now…erk. Um. Yeah.

I gotta get reading.

*grin*

Diurnal Conversion

Work has flipped me upside down again. I’m on my third day of dayshift, once again replacing a co-worker that has gone on unexpected leave. Getting up at 6:00 am is a bit of a trick, but hey, won’t it be nice to be able to have my evenings free? I won’t miss out on events with my friends, I can easily stop by the store after work. And dinners! I can make proper meals again. I won’t be so bad. I am a morning person after all.

Ah, such rose-colored glasses.

Three day shifts out of ten down, the same length of time I worked the last rime I substituted. And just like last time, I’m feeling pretty wrecked. Wonky sleep and eating schedules have re-wonkified. I’m hungry at all hours and desperately sleepy. The cats gave adjusted to this worse than I have, becoming both ravenous and smothering.

Worse still, my motivation and energy levels for working on anything writing related is very limited. I did get some work done on my Viable Paradise application letter yesterday and I’d meant tonight to work on the edits for a short story. Instead I’m going to bed, hoping to mitigate my much interrupted sleep from last night. (I’m looking at you, cat, Mr. It’s-Been-2-Hours-You-Awake-Yet??? *blink purr*)

I don’t think dayshift will stick. My office and me are at our best in the morning. I am so tired and there are too many social distractions.

Blarg. Night. Will write MOAR. Soonz. Zzzzz.

My Short Story, “Pearl”, is Live!

Ridiculously excited to write this, but here goes: my short story, “Pearl”, is live today over at Allegory magazine’s May issue.

It’s my very first sale. I’ll try not over-Tweet, over-Facebook, over-freakout the news.

In a strange life-coincidence, I’ve ended up with today off so I’ll be celebrating with a lovely steak dinner and a bit of Doctor Who. (Actually, the Doctor Who part has already been had. Loved it! But I think I need to re-watch River Song’s first appearance back in new Who Season Four. She’s quickly becoming one of my all-time favorite Who Companions.)

And firming up my application for Viable Paradise.

More to come. Promise!

In the meantime, enjoy a picture of the Ninja Kitty using Peach Kitty’s arse for a cushion. (She doesn’t mind!)