La Vie Boheme

Strange Horizons update

I got some indepth edits on my story this morning. According to Jed Hartman, the editor I've been working with, publication is schedule for two weeks from now. It's amazing the things he'd like for me to change, some really nitpicky wording things. But at the same time, most of them have me slapping my forehead, going, "Why didn't I catch that?"

The answer, of course, is because I'm not an editor.

"Writing is an adventure. To

"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."

--Winston Churchill

Romance, me?

Worked on rewriting "The Girl Behind the Counter" tonight, and decided to try adding (eep) a love scene. I don't know how explicit it will turn out to be, but either way, it's a first for me. It's a little scary.

Progress!

I rewrote the first half of "The Girl Behind the Counter" today, and I think I've got a handle on where it needs to change now. I'm hoping to finish it tomorrow and send it off this week. Go me!

I HAVE to start keeping

I HAVE to start keeping a notebook next to my bed. And carrying one with me. Twice now I've had story ideas, brilliant ones I thought. Once was at Julie's birthday party, the other came to me in the middle of the night a few nights ago. Neither time I wrote them down. Now they're both gone. The one that woke me up in the middle of the night wasn't even spec fic, but mainstream. Grar. I need something new to work on. All this editing and revising is killing me.

Not that I'm getting much of it done.

The new kitten's cute though.

Well, the good news is,

Well, the good news is, I have my laptop back, FINALLY.

The bad news is, class ends this week, so this week is pretty much shot as far as writing goes. Writing papers. Several of them. I WILL spend the two weeks between semesters writing. I will. Stop laughing.

WTF?

The more I think about this quote from Phillip Pullman, the more it irks me.

"Fantasy and fiction in general is failing to do what it might be doing," he was reported as saying in The Guardian.

"It has unlimited potential to explore all sorts of metaphysical and moral questions, but it is not doing that.

"You can't leave morality out unless your work is so stupid and trivial, and so worthless that no-one would want to read it anyway."

Okay, first of all, His Dark Materials wasn't good enough to warrant all that pretentiousness. Second of all -- what the fuck? I admit, I have literary aspirations beyond "just" being a genre writer. I believe that Pullman has a point when he says that fantasy has that unlimited potential to explore metaphysical questions. I'm all for that. But that is not the SOLE REASON for writing, or reading, anything.

When my novels start getting published, if I start sounding like Pullman, all of you have permission to find me and smack me.

Progress!

I finished editing Chapter 4 of The Host today, and I'll be passing out the prelude and first four chapters tonight at our first real Minions meeting. I am getting a serious case of stage fright here. I'm suddenly sure that all 37 pages of what I'm handing out are absolute crap. Geh.

Darn

Missed the first anniversary of this thing. I can't believe I've been writing here for a year. Wow. Still no computer. Lots of papers due for class. Very little writing time. Feh.

Ungh!

I was reading Julie's writing journal (specifically this post), where she talked about how her characters don't take off in weird directions without her. Oddly, only my roleplaying characters seem to run off helter-skelter and do things I hadn't wanted them to do. (Jake, I'm looking in your direction, you headstrong bitch. I miss you, wake up again sometime, will ya?) My novel characters are normally well-behaved, but it seems like there comes a moment where they either wake up and start living and walking around my head on their own, or they just lie there, no matter how much electricity I blast into the cobbled-together corpse. ;)

(And yes, when that happens, I've been known to cackle maniacally and crow, "It's alive! It's aliiiiiive!")

I'm happy to report that the characters for novel #2 are starting to move sluggishly around my head going "Ungh! Friend!"

I'm still computerless, essentially, and it's making me a little nutty. I'm itching to get back to work on The Host. I've been working on the second novel (Geh, need a real title for it, Real Soon Now) on paper, character sketches, plot ideas, questions, backgrounds, but it's not the same. I'm restless.