Surrey, again

SiWC is being fantastic and fantastically dense as always. I am going to need a couple of days after it’s all over to digest, but at least I knew to arrange for them.

The online presentations are interesting. I get the sense that they’re going a little faster than usual – I can’t quite keep up with some of the presentations, and need to leave a little bit of space blank to fill in a word or two in my notes later. On the plus side, everything’s recorded and available that way for a month, so there’ll be time to do that. I’m on the fence about the chat – some people use it to comment on what’s going on, some people use it for tangents that I find really distracting – but really, it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t have an in-person equivalent so I suppose I can just set it aside.

Dan Wells did a presentation on psychological horror that is making me want to dig up my notes from Hallier Ephron’s 2018 presentation on things that are creepy. The first is “what if you can’t trust yourself” and the second is “when things might not be okay but you still have room to hope that they are”, and I feel like there’s something to dig into at the intersection. Something about when hope is lying to yourself.

A bit scattered because I’m still waking up; have more thoughts but am going to focus on getting ready to interact with people and learn things.

Heading into autumn.

It’s been a bit of a long week (really, there is nothing like cats for being able to cause a sudden bolt to the emergency vet; he’s fine, bless and damn his furry little butt), but I had a really lovely day today. Think I finally figured out what I need to do to get the framing on a story working, and then got to go out. I don’t get out a lot, and I’m really glad I got to see people.

It looks like I’m going to be teaching again in the winter semester. I’m looking forward to that, and hopefully I’ll manage it a bit better the second time around; there was a bit of a learning curve last time and I think that slowed me done.

I’m going to try to focus on finishing edits for the rest of the year, rather than starting new stories. Surrey’s coming up next month, and there’s something specific I want to have ready for that, so that at least provides some structure to the pile.

After WorldCon

It’s been a busy time.

I have another novella drafted (that sound you hear in the background is the sound of me despairing of finishing anything before winter; the drafting went fairly quickly, but the revisions generally don’t, and right now I mostly have a lot of things that need revision). I also went to WorldCon, which was what WorldCons usually are; full of people I did not have enough time to catch up with (some of them have been making their own ribbons!), possessed of fascinating panels with conflicting scheduling, and generally a happy experience. I collected many signatures and made it to the Hugos.

My sleep schedule still hasn’t quite steadied. I expect it will over the next week, and then I will spend the first few weeks back home getting up at 5 a.m. or so. (Yes, I am hoping this works out as writing time.)

There’s an effort being made to create a Hugo for games–you can read about it at www.gameshugo.com–and I’m really hoping that that succeeds. Possibly more thoughts on that later; for now, this was the fifth and final day of the con and I can’t do more than mutter vaguely about “Powered by the Apocalypse”-this and “Choice of Games“-that and “the decision to not give the player character the option to ask about weird and surreal details in Kentucky Route Zero is a subtle but powerfully-effective way to suggest that the strangeness of the setting is normalized to some degree!”-other.

Alright. That’s enough for now.

Catching up, perpetually

I have recovered from April! Unfortunately, we’re over halfway through May, so.

The combination of “fiscal year end” and “end of term” was interesting. I really enjoyed the chance to teach, and from the (safely anonymized) student comments I didn’t do too badly?  I’d like to do it again (although as a part-time professor, I won’t get the chance until winter).

I’m currently looking for stories to recommend for a slightly updated version of the course. I’m largely trying to keep it to prose, and looking to the Hugos and Nebulas as a filter, but it’s still going to be a bit of work.

I went to TCAF this weekend past! It was honestly fantastic, and I had a great time. Came back with a few more books than I was expecting, but it was a great weekend, and the trip each way gave me a lot of time to read. I’m hoping to get some reviews up.

On a personal note, I just handed in my comments on the page proofs of a story that should be coming out later this year, and I’m generally feeling pleased with that.

Someone left the clock running. (It might have been me.)

Greyscale head-and-shoulders illustration of a woman with glasses in a space jumpsuit.
Seriously, isn’t it lovely? Belters unite.

First off, you may note that my avatar has changed; it is currently an illustration by Claudia Cangini in the vein of the After The War RPG, which will be debuting on KickStarter in a few weeks–on November 12–at which point I’ll be able to share the story I wrote for it.

October was a one-convention, one-conference, one-vacation month in the middle of crunch time, which means the time off was lovely but also extremely dense. Coming back to work has been a bit of a shock, but I think I’m catching up on things again.

A final note: I went to the Surrey International Writers’ Conference and would love to go again; I have not taken notes like that since university, and I feel like my brain is still digesting quite a bit. It was lovely to see people (I finally met Cat Rambo in person!), it struck me as an incredibly well-planned conference, and there was karaoke.

CWW 2018 – final update

ETA: and today we learn that I messed up on post scheduling, for which I am very sorry.

2079 words this week, and a story revised. This brings my total for the Write-A-Thon to 8640 words, and three stories revised.

I am so very grateful to all of you for contributing, and patiently looking at my not-very-interesting updates. I think things are slowing down now a little, and I’ve got a few more things I want to talk about; for the moment, however, I’m going to do some final tidying on stories, and continue revisions, and work out what I can do for contributor’s thank-you’s for next year.

 

CWW 2018 week 5 update

Things have been frustratingly busy, but: 1991 words! This is really encouraging, especially given everything else that seems determined to happen this week. Thank each and every one of you so very much for contributing, or for reading this.

My work on story revision is going slowly, simply because there is just a lot to revise, but I think I should be on track to have it done at the end of next week.

(Again, if you’d like to sponsor before this years Write-A-Thon is over: my profile is here, and the webpage is pretty easy to navigate if you’d like to sponsor someone else. Other people have neat prizes!)

CWW update 2018 week 4

Afraid I’m pretty sick this week – vicious cold going around and it got me.

Still, 1232 words done this week. Nearly done one complete plotline for my current project!

Also, a shout-out to Asha Bardon and Shannon Fay, who helped me figure out something pretty critical about a story I’ve been struggling with. Wanted to write a more in-depth post about expectations and story formats, but this week has been mad busy. Will try and get to it later, but in the meantime, wanted to thank them before even more time slipped away.

CWW 2018 week 3 update

It’s been a very busy week, but a productive one. I wanted to take a minute to say thank you so much to people sponsoring–me or the other writers, honestly, it’s a really lovely feeling.

1077 words this week! It’s still morning, but I’m planning on outlining this evening if I get time, and I’m not going to count an outline towards my wordcount. If I do get any prose done, I’ll just roll it forward into next week.

I also completed my second story revision, so that’s two out of three done, which does give me a little breathing room. I’ve got three weeks to revise the last one, so I may try working on the novelette that I handwrote a draft of in May. (I increased the wordcount in the story by 192, but I figure I’ll just keep revision wordcount changes separate from everything else.)

In other news, the last week’s heat wave is finally breaking. I look forward to going outside and breathing without feeling like I’m trying to iron a soaking wet T-shirt.

(Again, if you’d like to sponsor: my profile is here, and the webpage is pretty easy to navigate if you’d like to sponsor someone else.)