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.014 – April.

Before I launch into the recap of first quarter of relative failure I wanted to share the link to a short write up that Sierra Houk did about the Wrong Opinions About Movies Podcast that I am lucky enough to be on with my friend Matthew Bowers and my writing partner Alli Martin.  It’s great fun for me to be able to discuss movies with my friends on the internet, but it’s even more fun if other people get in on the conversation.  Today we recorded our Titanic episode and in the coming months we’ll be doing a whole slew of Batman episodes with special guests in preparation for The Dark Knight Rises.  If you like movies and wrong opinions give us a listen!

So, back to March!

Words: 5,776

Flubs: That is a depressing number and I know it.  I would feel bad about it, but most everyone I know also had a bad March, word-wise.  Divided we blunder, together we procrastinate!  March was a rough month in general mentally, which isn’t an excuse, but it is part of the problem.  And now that I’ve rooted out where I am I can start to rebuild and get back to the important things.  The writing things.

Looking back at my Impossible 2012 Plan, this month I have failed at: completing Volunteer Vampires, finishing the rough of my parts of of The Steampunk, and submitting a second poem for publication.  I haven’t started a second short story either, but I’ve decided I need to try and be less ADD  about everything that directly affects the rest of my life.   We’ll see how that goes.

I will continue to be ADD in the day to day, though, lest you’re concerned I’ll stop derailing conversations with ridiculous non sequiturs.  Worry not!

Follow Throughs: But I DID start the second round edit of my friend’s manuscript and submit a poem for publication.  In case you missed my yelping when I got the news, that poem was accepted!  I will have a steampunk themed poem in the fall issue of a small online poetry zine–which I will link back to when it goes up–and I am very excited about it.  The non-writing people around me don’t understand my excitement, because it’s not “really being published”, but I don’t expect them to.  My writing friends understand and I feel personally like it’s a good start and a small victory in the war with myself, so I’m excited.  I wrote a poem!  People didn’t hate it!  I now need to carry that ego boost into a forward momentum and see what other things I can churn out that people won’t hate.

Words to date: 24,411

And onward to April!

I am going to finish the draft of Volunteer Vampires THIS WEEK, even if it kills me.  Alli knows where to submit it for me posthumously if I do die.  Barring that unfortunate possibility I am also going to write at least two more chapters of The Steampunk and edit half of my friend’s manuscript.

I can do this.  Deep breaths.  One railway tie at a time.  Or at least, that’s what I imagine my good luck hard work charm telling me.   

 

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.011 – To know absolutely nothing is certainly human.

Australia!  I don’t know very much about it!

Back in February a local writing friend sent me a link for a steampunk story call.  The woman who is editing the anthology wants stories from the Victorian period set in almost any place but England or the States.  She has a specific list of location wishes.  We’re not in any way obligated to fulfill those wishes, she just wanted to point out areas which aren’t typically covered by people writing in the steampunk genre.  I took a gander at the list and decided that it would be fun to set something in Australia and it would give me cause to do some reading and learn more about the area in general.

My basic starting premise was to deal with a young woman who had been born into one of the native groups (my reading suggests different attitudes towards whether using the term aboriginal is currently culturally correct) and then had been ‘rescued’ by some of the European settlers and raised by them.  The story itself was to pick up when she learns some of the truths about who she is exactly and denounces her white family to leave and find her true home.  (Ostensibly to touch on the idea that no home is really ‘true’, because I saw Garden State one too many times or something.)  Over all the story would be kind of an adventure and she’d pick up a lady sidekick who she may or may not develop feelings for.   Anyway, I felt like all of this would be a good way to break down the themes of colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality.

The problem I continue to run into is that I really know very, very little about Australia, and while I’ve done some reading, it’s hard for me to get a good feel of the place during that period.  I think it’s simply that I haven’t been steeped in it throughout my life the way I’ve been steeped in period work from the US, Canada, the UK, France, and even Japan, so it’s just not as comfortable.  Also, as a denizen of the internet, I’m extremely wary of committing the very issues I’m trying to write about.  I don’t want to fetishize her native background and I don’t want to be too disparaging about either the native peoples or the European settlers.  I feel a bit like I’ve taken my usual old tightrope and moved it from the skyscrapers over New York to Niagra Falls and the change in view below is throwing off my comfort in performing the feat.

So the question becomes, do I get an Australian tutor to teach me about their perspective on the issues of the time period, or do I simply give in to my fears and change the setting?  I know I could come up with something interesting set in Germany, say, that wouldn’t leave me with this many uncertainties.  But then, it might not cover the themes I want to cover.  It certainly couldn’t cover them in the same way.  (Unless there were Roma in Germany at the time.  Although, that wouldn’t have as much to do with colonialism in particular.)

We have to query the story before we can send it in, so this worrying might all be for not if she doesn’t except the query, but that just makes me want to choose the right mixture of setting and issues all the more.

Anyone out there want to give some informal history lessons?

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.010 – March

Oh hello.  I half expect this thing to be gone when I can’t get back to it for more than a week.  Which is silly, considering it took about four years for that stupid Angelfire site with my college poetry on it to finally disappear.  (I lost the password.  It was pretty harrowing there for a while, guys.)  Anyway, half of March has happened, and that’s rude.  While January and February seemed to have blasted by March is practically limping along.  It feels like it might never end.  On one hand, that gives me so much time to write!  On the other hand, it’s just rubbing in how much writing I haven’t done.  But first thing’s first, back to…

February.

Words: 8,627.  Yes, merely a measly eight and a half thousand.  A backslide that might never end.

Flubs: In looking at the things I wanted to have done through the end of February I have not: a) finished a draft of Volunteer Vampires, b) let alone have one polished enough to submit somewhere, and c) have not made it halfway through the rough of my half of the Steampunk novel.  And that’s all incredibly depressing.  I can’t feel too bad about Volunteer Vampires though, because I’ve definitely sorted out where I’m going with it and just need to sit down and put one word after another on it.

Follow Throughs: I HAVE, however, written one poem for the express purpose of submitting it to an online poetry zine and have gone about polishing another one up so I can either submit it to a magazine or enter a contest with it.  I know, contests are what people with talent and faith in themselves do, but I am knee deep in faking it until I make it over here, so I might as well go for broke.  I’ve also started another short story for a call requesting lesbian steampunk fiction set in places other than England and the States.  We’ll see if I can settle on where that’s going and get it suitably polished.  It seemed relevant to my interests at the very least.

Words To Date: 18,133

March:

I received the second draft of a friend’s novel manuscript in the mail today.  I spent a good number of hours last year reading through her rough asking questions and making suggestions.  This one I got hard copy so I can mark it up to my little heart’s content.  I’m excited to be doing it, but I know I’m going to have to be more strict about what I do with my time through April and May so that I can get it all done.

In the meantime, the rest of March needs to be set aside for some serious word churning.  By ‘the rest of March’ I clearly mean ‘after the 18th when the Boyfriend is back at his home because he’s horrible for productivity’, but it doesn’t sound as snappy.  I’ll have twelve days to submit that poem and finish rough drafts of two short stories.  I feel kind of terrible for putting the Steampunk on hold, because I was chomping at the bit to get a final outline of it and it’s all I really want to write most of the time.  My one consolation there is that my co-writer is also busy writing other things, so I’m not really holding her up.

Now if only I could stop feeling like I was holding myself up.

4

.009 – Beginnings.

It’s four days into March and I have yet to recap February properly.  I didn’t want this year to feel like it was slipping away, but I guess I don’t really have control over some of that.  And what do I do when I lose control of things?  Ignore them!  So here, instead of my plans for the rest of March, are some responses to an exercise a friend put to an online writing community I’m a part of.

Working from Thanks, But This Isn’t For Us: A (Sort Of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing Is Being Rejected by Jessica Page Morrell, she suggested that we write several openings to stories that we didn’t have any intention of completing and that were outside our typical choices of genre.  I chose three genres I have no current interest in writing in, decided to set them all in the field pictured below, and had at it.  Because I don’t intend on trying to publish any of them I wanted to place them here.  Feel free to comment or crit on any of the snippets, and as a bonus, see if you can guess which one was my favorite.

Image

Period Romance.
The landscape of the countryside was slipping away and blurring into one continuous bleeding red field before Cady felt calm enough to open the letter she’d been gripping tightly since she left home.  It had been cowardly of James to not come see her in person, but she supposed that there was wisdom in an absent goodbye as well.  After all, neither of them could be certain that she wouldn’t take to London and her aunt’s teachings, and if she did she wasn’t likely to want to return and be a farmer’s wife.  Although, in books there was often a romantic wistfulness associated with working the land.  Still, she knew the realities.

She turned the envelope over finally and slid one gloved finger under the sloppy seal he’d used to fasten it.  Several crumpled red poppies fell out into her lap.  The letter itself simply said: If you don’t already know what these mean, you should soon.  I will give you anything.  Don’t forget.

. . .
Murder Mystery.
Ingles found summer murders to be tedious.  Even his lightest linen jacket was too warm for the sun that beat down the open fields in the middle of July.  The sweat on the back of his neck was distracting.  The clashing green and red of the poppies waving mildly in the warm breeze was distracting.  The way the local inspector would not simply stop talking about decency and morals and the way god fearing people should and should not act was distracting.  About the only thing that Ingles didn’t find distracting about the scene of the crime was the corpse, which had apparently had the decency to be killed by a blunt object to the temple in a tidy way without causing a fuss.

. . .
Literary Fiction.
The poppy fields were offensive to Asa.  He claimed to think that they were beautiful flowers, and he could ramble for nearly half an hour in his deep, rusty voice about the curvature of the hill the fields rested on and those hills surrounding it, but it never sounded quite genuine.  It was almost as if the primary beauty of it all–the bright redness of the flowers nestled amongst their green stalks under a blue sky holding a fierce yellow sun–was the most offensive thing about it.  It wasn’t beauty for the sake of beauty anymore, it was beauty in remembrance of the war.  Even in those days he was old, and could remember the time before the war.  He claimed that there were other bits of beauty that would have been more appropriate.

“Crooked smiles,” he’d say after several minutes of quiet.  “Why does no one share a crooked smile around a cigarette in remembrance?  It’s surely what the soldiers would have wanted.”

5

.007 – All the experiences.

As I mentioned in the video post from yesterday, I was in jury duty last week.  It was my first time showing up for a summons–I was called twice for my home county while I was here for school and both times my mother had me pardoned–so I didn’t know what to expect.  I certainly didn’t expect to actually be placed on a jury.  The entire week was a surreal blur to me.  I was there, and I was paying attention, but it hardly feels like any of it actually happened now that I’m removed from it.

That happens to me a lot.  I’ll finally realize an event that I was either hoping for or biting my nails over and in the end the replay is merely a car crash.  I mean to say, I almost blank out and don’t remember any of it at all.  I found it very true to my own experience every time a person on the witness stand mis-remembered something or amended a statement.  I do that every day, it’s just that most people don’t have enough invested in the proceedings to call me on it or even care.

I like to say that I want to have all of the experiences, by which I mean I would like to do as many things as possible in as many places with as many people as possible and be able to chronicle them somehow.  I want to be able to tally them up at the end of my life and say ‘look at all these things that I’ve done’.  (Yes, in this scenario I AM still quoting The Killers in 60 years.  Don’t be too harsh on old me, it could easily have been Bright Eyes.)  And even before that point, I’d like to be able to call on things that I’ve learned and apply that knowledge elsewhere.  That’s the best way to play this game, right?  Observe and conquer?

Of course, the flip side to having good experiences is having bad ones.  Every time I complain about something that I perceive as having gone wrong the boyfriend is there to remind me that I did want to have all the experiences and that whatever it was was certainly an experience. Not that I’m generally very forgiving of that point of view in the moment, but he’s right.  Don’t tell him I said that.

Being a lawyer, as far as I could tell in my seat as Juror #4, is two parts fifth grade science project and three parts community theater.  They have to present you with the facts in a biased way and highlight only those things they want you to see.  There are often bar graphs.  They have to wrangle the story and they have to try and drag it about to the place they want it to end. Their very diction is designed to make you feel a certain way and fill in other people’s experiences with your own background.  I must say that it wasn’t lost on me that I essentially do the same thing, it’s just that no one critiques me in real time and no one has to pay me a large sum of cash if I achieve the desired effect.  It would be nice if they did, and god willing one day, but you know what I mean.

In practical application all of those experiences help me write more well-rounded characters as well as becoming more well-rounded myself, but I think my hunger ties in deeper than that.  I think real life can teach you structures that reading cannot.  Some people are carefully rehearsed.  Some chaos is merely the final resolution of a long chain of carefully placed events.  And most importantly, not everyone’s story is important to the centralized plot.  Real life unfolds in a way that writing can’t, because of a need for specificity, but that doesn’t mean that incorporating some of those threads can’t make a textbook plot feel like it has more at stake.  I do like a little chaos and a lot of strings in reserve, as I’m sure my writing partner can tell you.

At the end of the day, even though I feel like I want to have all of the experiences, I know that rationally I can’t and shouldn’t.  There is not enough money in the world to make me exchange coming home at the end of the day with a clear conscience and crawling into bed to watch anime until I pass out, or dither about with a poem’s structure until I can’t keep my eyes open, for being in that witness stand come morning.  Perhaps the game should merely be to have just enough experiences to be able to infer the ones you don’t want to have.  Not that I can control that either, but regardless of which side of the counsel I find myself on, I pledge to myself that I will keep my eyes open.  I never do know when knowledge will come in handy.

4

.004

This week I got two Valentine’s cards in the mail.  They were lovely and thoughtful and a great reminder that Singles Awareness Day is just nine short days away!  Of course, when I mentioned this elsewhere I got fussed at for calling it Singles Awareness Day, because I’m not single.  Single or not though, the older I get the sillier I feel about most gift and Other People Awareness holidays.  Not because I dislike people or gifts, but because I like people and gifts so much that I start to resent the added pressure of having to produce gifts and feelings on demand when I already happily do those things year round.  It’s kind of like how sometimes you realize that you’re breathing and then it becomes harder to actually regulate your breath.  You always end up breathing heavier or longer or shorter than you usually do because you’re suddenly self-conscious about the way your body operates.  And that, my friends, is silly.

In general I shy away from writing about love in favor of tackling anger or confusion or fear, but one of the writing groups I’m a part of challenged its members to write a bit about it this month.  It’s prompted a lot of thoughts and very few actual plot ideas.  It’s been a frustrating experience, but in my most uncharitable moments that’s kind of how I feel about the subject anyway.

My feelings about love aren’t nearly as complicated as my feelings about hope, but they’re still a little to the left of the way that I was taught to feel about love as a child.  Love is hard work.  It’s easy for me to type those four words, but as I sit here trying to pull together a poem or short bit of prose about how love is hard work I find myself stumbling over all the heavy handedness and obviousness of the initial thought.  The closest I’ve come is this paragraph.

Love, Joanie had found, was often rather dull.  It was full of the trivial and mundane occurrences of daily life multiplied by the amount of people you felt love for.  It lived in an entirely different place than passion and curiosity and all of the things that poets would tell you that love actually was.  In reality, Joanie felt that love merely hid within those things, dressing itself up as something desirable in the same way that Sal wore bright jewelry.  It was the reason that Joanie wouldn’t tell Sal that she loved her.  The term was simply inadequate for the way that she was sometimes caught off guard by just how much affection and devotion she could feel for one person.  She didn’t ever share these thoughts, so she couldn’t really blame Sal for the hurt that was harboured over Joanie not returning her affection.

It’s still heavy handed and obvious, but at least it gives me something more concrete to work with.

I have been dreadful at treating writing like a second job for the last month.  I really need to work on that.

12

.003

Oh, February, is that you?  I didn’t see you standing there.  As you’ve probably noted, intelligent scamp that you are, things around here are a bit of a mess at the moment.  Please make yourself comfortable on the couch while I tidy up.  Have a biscuit?

January
The plan for January was less impossible than the plan for the coming months, since I didn’t even sit down and outline my yearly goals until about the fifteenth or so.  In January I wanted merely to complete a draft of the short story I’m working on and then start in earnest on the novel that I’m writing with my compatriot (Coming Soon!).

Words: 9,461

Flubs:
I did not get a rough draft of Volunteer Vampires completed.  I got hung up in the science of it, which I think I need to just stop doing for right now.  It’s already mad and impossible that there are vampires in space in the 19th century, I’m probably just wasting time worrying over whether they could locate the source of a message being beamed from deep space.  I know that my novel co-writer likes to tinker out the science and make sure it’s technically possible, but I also know that scifi doesn’t always need that information.  Hell, I just re-watched Ghost in the Shell last night, and while they spend a lot of time hemming and hawing over what a ‘person’ is, they spend absolutely no time talking about how it’s possible for the Major’s camouflage to work the way it does or how androids work.  They’re just accepted parts of the world.  I think I’m at the stage where I need to accept things and move on with the story.  If it’s really important that they pinpoint where a sound is coming from I can work on it in edits.

I also did not get more than a chapter into the Steampunk novel we’re working on.  We’ve been talking about it for years now and trying to get all the pieces in the right places and I’ve been itchy to just write things for months.  I need to get on that so I can have better, more accomplished news at the beginning of next month.

Follow throughs:
However, we did get a good, solid outline down.  And even though there are still a few niggling questions, I at least feel like I know enough about what’s happening between our characters and where they are in the first half of the book that I can just sit down and start to get it out.  That’s a good feeling.

I also wrote a silly poem and tinkered about with, not only other bits of the Steampunk, but the Big Damn Existential Science Fiction Novel, which is the third novel length thing in the stall at the moment.  So many ideas, so little execution.  But well, that’s what I’m out to cure this year.

Words To Date: 9,461

February
The plan for February is to hit the ground running, catch up with January, and then execute the following:
Have a completed draft of Volunteer Vampires done and sent to my betas. Make sure that by the end of the month it’s ready to submit to the anthology I’m assuming is happening.  *fingers crossed*

Have a rough draft of half of the Steampunk novel.

Write a poem to submit…somewhere.  I’ll need to go through that issue of Poets & Writers I bought and look at different markets.  I fully admit that poetry is not a part of the industry I usually keep an eye on. And it’s all just kind of a silly bet with myself, really.  We’ll see where that goes.

So, that’s that.  Should be easy enough, provided I just sit down and do it.  If ChairToBum glue was a thing, I would look into buying stock for it.

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