Day by Day – Page 8 – Aphotic Ink

Sic transit gloria

It’s been… odd. Not bad. I have missed travelling in the sense of being somewhere else; I always do. I wish teleportation was a thing; I wish the logistics of being able to leave were not so difficult, and there was more time. (I always wish there was more time.)

But I wish there’d been more time to be in transit, too; while the logistics of being able to travel are a pain (time off! pet care! packing!) the logistics of actually travelling are inevitably relaxing. There’s a fluidity to being able to drop someone a line, decide you can do dinner, know that since you’re in transit you don’t need to be home yet and can drive for a while or stop for a while or just wander. In the UK or the US it feels constantly interesting to me; in Canada it’s more like a larger subtler version of browsing a bookstore. There’s something fascinating about watching the world unscroll outside the window, and seeing the pattern of paint-flaked brick or peach-toned highway (seriously! There were great swathes of both highway and sidewalk that had a distinctly pinkish hue) or trees silhouetted black against the sky repeat itself until you start to get a sense of place. Not recognizing it, but relaxing into it enough that you could begin to describe it.

I didn’t take pictures, this trip. When it comes to the scenery, I am okay with that; I will remember it, and think about it, and pick out pieces. I wish I’d taken a few more of people, but I hope and trust there’ll be other times.

(Also, I got fifteen assorted pieces read for the Hugo voting. So that’s quantifiable.)

Turning in, given how soon the alarm is going off. May all the roads you go down be kind ones.

Tuesday

It’s been a bit hectic recently and the notes I was getting ready for a couple of posts aren’t in finished shape, and I can’t pull them together tonight. I’ve actually got some pretty awesome news, and want to post about it in a day or so, but right now I’m pretty sure I’d make a terrible botch of it.

That said: I aten’t ded! And will be back, hopefully after some sleep helps.

Oh, write.

So in the last week I got bitten by the writing bug again, which – combined with waking up before 6 a.m. every morning – has resulted in several thousand words. This is not great, compared to what I’ve done in the past, but it is certainly one hell of an improvement.

I’ve missed this “have to get it down!” feeling. I’m not sure if it’s been absent due to stress or weather or what, but I’m really glad it’s back.

Winging it

I am currently somewhere between 30 and 40 thousand feet in the air, and twenty minutes away from landing in Vancouver.

Quick highlights: I have a brand new laptop bag. Breakfast was lovely. I am about a sixth of the way through HOUSE OF LEAVES. The flights have been decent so far, although I wish I’d remembered to pack a snack bar or something to cut down on the amount of airplane food (a purely budgetary concern).

(If I’d been flying with Air Canada instead of WestJet, I could have switched to a flight an hour earlier. Would not have made a huge difference, but after several trips with delays, I find I’ve developed a fondness for longer connections. But either way, it worked out.)

Ten minutes from touchdown, now. We’re going down into the clouds.

Approaching transit

My laptop bag doesn’t quite fit my laptop, so there’ve been some relatively last-minute packing adjustments. There may be more tomorrow morning, although if there aren’t it will still be fine.

I’m waffling over what books to bring. I like magazines for airports – they’re very thin, and the length of articles and stories handle interruption well – but I’m not sure about the books, or about whether to bring physical ones rather than electronic ones.

I’ll sort it all out, I suppose. And my plane takes off in twelve hours and change. 🙂

Possibly useful information

Most people I know know the things I’m about to say, but I don’t know most people. And since I’ve mentioned a few of these things to people over the last week and they seemed to find it useful, I figured this was not a bad time to mention it.

The Hugos

The Hugo Awards are awards for excellence in fantasy and science fiction. They’re awarded every year, and they’re not a juried award. Everyone who has a Worldcon membership for last year, the current year, or the year to come can nominate works for the ballot. Everyone who has a Worldcon membership for the current year can vote on the final ballet.

I’m not saying voting is trivial; the cheapest membership is $50 this year, and it’ll go up at the end of the month, and that’s in American dollars. (In recent years, the Hugos have provided a content pack that contains samples or full copies of the nominated works, which helps take some of the sting out of the outlay.)

Submission Grinder

So I was talking to someone at a party and she mentioned that she wrote very short fiction, about a hundred words, but “no-one would publish that”. After I was done blinking, I told her about the Submission Grinder.

The Submission Grinder is an online tool where you can keep a record of your writing and the places you have submitted it to. It lets you search for markets by genre, rate of pay, simsum or reprint policy, award nomination… you get the idea. It’s free.

There is also Duotrope. My understanding is that it provides a substantially similar service, but is not free.

Writer Beware

When you sell something, you will get a contract. If you are uneasy about that contract, if you don’t understand something, if you’re not 100% clear on copyright, if (as I did) you completely misread a phrase and are trying to figure out what the hell it means, you can go look at Writer Beware.

(You can even email them to ask questions. I did.)

Adjectives

I hear that every writing advice blog post has to have something about adjectives in it, and this is heavily about writing, so I thought I would mention them. That’s all.

Whither and weather.

I’m going to BC for almost a week. BC is relatively warm, relatively hard to get to (the trip involves a puddle-jumper), and possesses the currently-very-cherished-by-me quality of not being Ontario in February.

The weather isn’t currently as bad as some Februarys (how does one pluralize that?), but in the next ten hours we’re supposed to get 5 to 10 cm of snow and ice, and then freezing rain all morning. This is actually pretty good for sidewalks before they’re plowed; if there’s a cushion of compressible stuff under the ice crust from the freezing rain, and the crust isn’t too thick, you can punch through the crust and embed your feet in the snow and ice pellets to reduce the odds of slipping.

The fact that this is my definition of “pretty good” is part of why I’m going to BC. The part I’m visiting gets a fair deal of rain (although I’ve mostly missed it when I’m there), but so little snow that it’s hardly worth mentioning.

It’s also the first time in a long time I’ve gone on a vacation and it hasn’t been to go somewhere. I’m a bit unnerved by the lack of schedule, but mostly I’m just hoping that I don’t end up worrying so much over what to do that I end up stressing during my time there.

License

It’s a neat word; it’s inarguably a noun, but it covers both the actual object (my driver’s license! Which I now have!) and the quality of being permitted to do something. People have license to speak freely, to buy the books that suit them, to travel to other cities.

I would have expected it to share a root with censure, since that sounds similar and means pretty much the opposite, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t.

Getting my driver’s license was much more frustrating that I’d hoped. For Reasons, I needed documentation that wasn’t on the website, so I had to go home to get it and come back. That is roughly a 25-minute drive, and as may be inferred from the fact that I was there to get a driver’s license, I could not simply drive home and then back.

But I got it, in the end.

So! License achieved. Now all I need to learn to do is drive.

The open road.

I’m going for my driver’s test tomorrow. (This will not get me a full driver’s license, but it will get me a first-level license; what we call a G1. It will allow me to drive a car in certain circumstances with a fully qualified driver in the passenger seat. We have graduated licensing in Ontario, you see.)

I’m nervous. It’s strictly a paper test, so this is not the road-test-what-if-I-hit-something fear. (Do people worry about that? A lot?) It’s more the fact that you currently need to pay $150 to take the test, and I am really really hoping I do not need to do that more than once.

(I had a G1 driver’s license for a while, but I let it lapse. Back then it only cost $100 to take the test.)

The idea of driving makes me nervous, since in my experience it is the activity that most often causes otherwise reasonably restrained people to start yelling at other people (even if said people can’t hear them). This clearly means it’s a dangerous and fraught activity that should be approached with extreme caution, right?

But I’d like to be able to drive, both because it’s useful and because it’d allow me a lot more freedom of movement. So here’s hoping the first step doesn’t need to be taken more than once.

2016 has not been kind.

David G. Hartwell has died. He was an editor of great note.

I was at a panel where he was speaking last year. It was actually just back on the first of November, at the 2015 CanCon. It was a panel on reviews; how they should be done, what they are for.

I have notes. Most of them are fragmentary, and paraphrase what was actually said, but they are hopeful.

a note to look at Greg Cox’s advice on how to review the samurai vampire novel

“an ability to review the work by its standards”

“the generosity of spirit to love the book by its own lights”

“convincing, intelligent, favourable reviews of unknown authors” (my notes say that one is a quote)

I am more upset than I would have expected to find myself.

People who knew him better than I are talking over at Making Light. I find I don’t have much I feel I could add.