Category: Day by Day

Personal details; life, time management, work, cats, and sleep.

Fortnight’s passing.

First, I’m very pleased to announce that the Kickstarter for After the War will be launching on November 12, and I’ll be able to share my story “Interview with Cortesa Singh” then! I’ve had a chance to read some of the other stories that will be published, as well, and I think it’s a really fantastic collection in a great setting.

Second, it’s been a bit. We’ve been getting into crunch time, and last weekend was mostly spent recovering, and this weekend I was planning to post an update but we lost power for nearly thirty hours (along with much of the city), so plans were kind of knocked for a loop.

I really do want to give a huge shout-out to the Journalling for Creativity with Fran Wilde class that Cat Rambo orchestrated; it was fantastically helpful in terms of a way to get some things organized, and I’ve managed to figure out a couple of sticking points as a result. I’d really recommend it if you get the chance (and please remember that Cat Rambo’s classes have three scholarships each).

(Finally, I’m done with my rabies vaccines. So that’s nice.)

 

A week, interrupted.

I got less than I hoped to get done this week. Early Tuesday morning, a bat got into our room and would not leave, despite the windows being wide open and a couple of humans waving it hopefully towards those windows with the removed window screens. So after ten or fifteen minutes of that, we trapped it in a laundry basket and evicted it from the house.

I came into contact with it while we were doing this.

I have always thought that bats were cute. I still think that bats are cute, but I have picked up, from several members of the health care community, that I should also treat them as if they are flying pieces of raw chicken infested with herpes.

So I started getting my course of rabies shots on Friday. It is (unsurprisingly) a considerably rougher course of treatment than the annual flu shot, and I lost most of Friday to running around and then sleeping, most of Saturday to sleeping and being lightly out of it, and Sunday morning to sleeping. I’m a little worried about how hard the next shot will hit me on Monday, since the work crunch is starting, but I suppose I can cope with that tomorrow

Finally, September.

So, “Late Night at the Low Road Diner” got a review in Apex Magazine’s “Words for Thought” column on Friday, and I spent most of that day and several hours so far in September grinning like a fool.

(The woman who wrote “In the End, It Always Turns Out the Same” and “Final Girl Theory” said nice things about my story. I squeaked.)

On a weather level, it’s been a hectic summer–the multiple tornado warnings were probably my ‘favourite’ part–and despite the fact that the long weekend has reverted to the kind of weather where stepping outside feels like trying to breathe a wet towel, it seems to be starting to break. I’m looking forward to rain, some grey days, and the option to open the windows at night without being unable to sleep because of the heat.

I finished a novelette draft, and gotten some decent feedback that I want to mull over in the back of my head for a few days before I start trying to write them. I’m also trying to figure out what work I should bring to my Blue Pencil session at SIWC in October. Unfortunately, crunch time at work is starting in a week and is expected to last into October, so I’m going to be low on time for the next little while.

Catching up.

Okay. Time for a quick recap.

It’s been a week and a weekend since “Late Night at the Low Road Diner” got published, and I am still really pleased about it.

I should have another short piece coming out soon, set in the After the War universe–details soon! I’m very pleased to have been invited to write for the setting, and I hope you enjoy it when it comes out.

Crit group was yesterday. I am very lucky to have my crit group; they are a thoughtful, well-informed group who manage to articulate a lot about expectations and pacing and emotional weight and signalling, and even when it’s not my story getting critted it is honestly so good to be able to hear everyone else’s thoughts.

Consider that my writerly advice, rather than going on about adverbs. Find people who can give you good critique and treasure them. I find it’s too easy to be looking at your story and seeing what you meant to put in there rather than what’s actually on the page, otherwise. (Admittedly, I once wrote a story about a couple of fictional characters come to life and completely forgot to mention anywhere in the story that that was what they were. So I’m particularly prone to blind spots. Also I once wrote a story that I forgot to mention was about fictional characters coming to life, so you may want to take any advice I offer with a grain of salt.)

Also yesterday, I finished handwriting the edits to a 13,500 word story, and am now typing them up. I’m suspecting I will need to give it another editing pass, and it’s going to end up in the nearly completely unsellable length of 15-16K words, but it will be done.

I’ve also finished my travel arrangements for Scintillation and the Surrey International Writer’s Conference, so October is going to be a very full month, but at least one that’s well organized.

Taking stock

I may need to add another line to my side-tracker; I’ve got two pieces where someone’s indicated that they’re interested in publishing them, but it feels premature to mark them as acceptances since I haven’t gotten a contract yet. At the same time, they’re not really out in the “out and seeking responses” way that pieces that haven’t gotten a response are (and let’s be honest, that is the state a story spends most time in when it is out in the world).

I’ll probably leave it as is for now. Just a note for something to keep in mind going forward, I guess.

Another boatload of library holds for the Hugos came in, so I suspect that’s going to be a lot of my free time month, and I’m going to start entering my votes on the ballet. I’m hoping to organize my free time better this month, and actually get to a slightly weird writing project as well as the more typical ones I’m planning.

Writing is easy. Rewriting…

Rewriting is being a bit more difficult.

In addition to the trouble I’ve been having with editing the novel, my rewrites of the novelette that my handwritten draft turned into have been really hard to get into. It’s been a little better this long weekend, but it’s still taking longer than I thought. I’m not entirely sure that the way I’ve rearranged the story is a good one, but I know I’ll be able to better figure that out once it’s actually complete.

On the plus side, I actually did finish the edits for a short story and send them back, so I’m pleased about that. I did spend what might be a ridiculously long time trying to find a substitute for one particular word, and I’m still not sure I made the right decision, but at least the edits are done.

In a perfect, world, with unlimited time (and possibly without the need for sleep) I would spend another few hours on it at least, but unfortunately I only have so much time, and I need to figure out where I get the best returns on spending it.

Pen and ink.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been handwriting a story draft. I began because it was convenient to handwrite it at the time – I am very fond of my pens and notebooks, so one of each is generally to hand, and I wasn’t in the same room as a computer – and I continued because… well, I still had the pen and notebook handy, and I was curious.

First, it’s much easier to not get distracted while handwriting. I usually still have my phone with me, but when there isn’t an open browser window or a notification sitting in the corner of my eye, it does get easier to concentrate.

Second, it’s much slower – I can type easily twice as fast as I write, probably more. On the plus side, this means that I’m much less likely to feel like I’m adrift as I sit and stare at a blank page, because I am still writing out the words that I’ve composed in my head after I’ve composed them. On the downside, once I warm up, I cannot quite keep up with writing down everything I am coming up with, and that’s frustrating. I’m seriously considering looking into learning shorthand.

Also, I suspect this is a possible side-effect of it being slower: I’m coming up with more ideas of how to expand the story as I’m writing it, possibly just because I am spending more time thinking about any one particular moment in the story, and that gives me space to muse on what it could branch out into being.

It’s interesting. There’s a climactic scene and the dénouement left, and then I’ll have my first fully handwritten draft in years complete.

(Tangentially: this is also an incredibly effective way to use up fountain pen ink, even if you aren’t prone to fiddling with your pen and accidentally blotting yourself as I am. I’m not sure my 2ml sample of Astorquiza Rot will last until the end of the story.)

Learning curve

I’ve started editing a novel-length manuscript this month, and no lie, it’s a little overwhelming. A lot of my usual editing involves summaries and outlines and lists that fit on (at most) a double-page notebook spread, and I’m struggling a little to adapt that process–which is ultimately the kind of thing you can take in in a single glance–to this. Still, I feel like I’m making progress.

(I’m not actually sure the end result will be anything more than a trunk novel, but I’m hoping that even if that’s the case, I learn something about how to actually get it a work of this length done. Even if I decide novels aren’t for me, it’ll probably be useful to know.)

 

 

Well, it’s been busy.

I’m trying to get up early in the mornings so that I can write before work, and it’s starting to take, although it’s still a little rough. A lot of what I’ve been doing lately is going through older pieces that were never finished and deciding whether there’s enough there to make them worth polishing. It’s a little exhausting, but I’m making progress.

The weather seems to have broken early; we’ve had maple syrup weather for at least a week, which is nice.

I’m tired a lot. I’m hoping it’s a temporary thing.