Two promos I’m in this month!

I’ve been a bit cagey on here, and not really said that I’ve published a book under a pen name because I’m nominally trying to keep my real name and my pen name separate for now, for work reasons BUT you can get my book for free until December 20th through one of these promotions and I’ll tell you it’s the one with the beautiful purple cover with three girls. And if you do by some chance download my book, if you leave a review, I’ll love you forever.

YA Series Starters

There are NINETY-ONE free books in one promo and forty in the other and something for everyone I think. I won’t lie, many are not up to my very high standards of writing, but the thing about indie books is they often will have characters and subjects you can’t find in traditional publishing, and if one matches the thing you really want but don’t find too often, then the quality of writing is not as important. So there are quite a lot of f/f stories, including teen lesbians fighting aliens, and also an autistic main character who kills demons.

Action girls, adventures and friendships

Um, is there anything more up my alley than that title?

 

Anne Lamott on lighthouses

You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

Anne Lamott
Bird by Bird

Flailing at a blank page

There is something fundamentally wrong with the book writing process. You go from finishing a book, which is at it’s most book-like stage, where you are worrying about commas and word choice, to starting a book, and you’re still thinking of commas and word choice, but you have this big blank page to flail around with and you need to be thinking in a completely different manner than you have been for the last 6 months.

I need a reset button.

Stalled Again

If you’re trying to get through a maze and you come to a dead end, you go back and look for the first wrong turn you took, you don’t stand there pressing your body into a hedge trying to will the pathway to appear. –Martha Wells on Plot Stalls

The Difference between Procrastinating and Waiting

It’s taken me this long, 10+ years since I started writing again, to mostly be able to tell the difference between procrastinating and waiting.

Procrastinating is when I have something to write, but it feels too hard, or I’m being lazy, or I just can’t get started (because writing is scary, yo!).

Waiting is when things need time to come together in my mind, thought A colliding with thought T; the idea for a scene that’s not quite right yet because I’m looking at it wrong or because it’s default, it’s boring, it needs to be turned on its head or twisted 30 or 125 degrees before it’s right for what I’m working on; or it’s something I’ve got wrong and until I figure out what it is and go back and fix it, I can’t go forward.

The things I do when I’m procrastinating look very, very similar to what I’m doing when I’m waiting, but the internal feeling is very different. If I’m procrastinating there’s an edge of irritation, of impatience, directed at myself, that I’m not writing and I should be writing. It might take a bit for me to notice, acknowledge and act on it, but it’s there.

When I’m waiting, I have to wait. I can’t rush it. I can’t force it. I can coax it, by feeding the garden inside me where my writing comes from, by reading fiction and non-fiction and watching TV (sometimes really great fiction and TV, sometimes really bad fiction and TV), exercising, hanging out with friends. Whatever fills the well.

Sometimes I still get it wrong. Sometimes I’m procrastinating when I think I’m waiting, and vice versa. But slightly more often than not, I’m finally figuring it out.

777 Challenge

I’ve just been tagged by Alison Cherry to do the 777 Challenge. The rules: post seven sentences of your work, start on page seven, seven lines down. The following is from my inspired by the Byzantine Empire meets 1910s suffrage NYC meets bio-based technology science fantasy that may or may not be YA:

My grin felt like it would break my face. “We won!” I shouted at him and his face did crack, his mouth and eyes open wide, his usually unflappable bay mare jigging under him. I allowed myself to believe it was surprised amazement but a cold worm of worry turned over in my stomach. “I told you,” I crowed, “I told you I could win.”

“What have you done?” He shouldered into me and seized Red Nettle’s reins, pulling cruelly at his mouth to halt him, and that more than anything brought home to me the depth of his horror. Magister Peres did not abuse his horses. Ever.

I’m tagging Casey Blair, Tam MacNeil and Shawn Anderson, but only if they want to play.

Random Excerpt from my WIP

Just because. (Or because I’m procrastinating.)

With a Shield, a person could not be augmented without their knowledge and consent; parents told their children stories about the poor unfortunates in Zyxx who didn’t control their own Shields and the wretched victims in the Land of Those that Speak, where they didn’t have Shields at all. Children whispered stories of the wild blending of animal, plant and human there or the cruel augmentations the stronger forced on the weaker.

The idea of not having my Shield was very disturbing.

Also, I’m on Tumblr now at The Fourth Gorgon.

Viable Paradise — Things I Wish I’d Known

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything new here AND it’s almost time for the new VP class so I thought I’d mention a few things I wish I’d known beforehand: 

The topic of the one-on-one sessions are completely up to you. You can take the opportunity to ask for specific feedback on your submission or you can ask anything at all (within the bounds of polite behavior). I wish I’d gone in a little more prepared, but my sessions were still awesome (probably due to the quality of the instructors, not my tongue-tied, shy questions). They are there to help you improve your writing. 

You can ask the staff anything (even if it seems slightly beyond the bounds of polite behavior). If you’re having trouble adjusting, let them know. If you unexpectedly get your period (or whatever the manly equivalent is) they will go out and buy you supplies and it will be no big deal. They are there to help. They are also writers and attendees of previous VPs and know lots of things.

I never used my laptop during the sessions but it was still important to have. I took handwritten notes and two of my classmates recorded the sessions and made them available to the rest of the class. Two years later I still go back and listen to them, but it would have been great to have my own–especially of the group critique sessions, where a certain person with the initials PNH speaks at the speed of light. Just saying. YMMV.

It’s ok to ask the instructors if you can follow up with them after VP is over. I am terrible at this. I’m still kicking myself for not following up with Uncle Jim.

I brought an eye mask and ear plugs and I used them. I could have brought the whole pack of earplugs and shared them with people who didn’t. They were crucial for me to get to sleep.

Everyone is telling you not to go in sleep deprived: DON’T GO IN SLEEP DEPRIVED.

And don’t forget to have fun.

ETA suggestions from the VP community: Get a flu shot! If traveling from overseas get a travel health insurance policy to cover you.

State of the Writer

Hello! I haven’t been around here much.

I was struggling with my WIP that I’ve been working on, on and off for the last two years. I have a full plot arc for the main characters but the subplot involving a third character just hasn’t been gelling into anything. A few weeks ago, Tam challenged me to write a short story with a writing prompt of strange place names and I wrote the big climax for my WIP in a fit of inspiration. I thought maybe that would get the rest of it going too, but instead I wrote the short story, which turned out to be a chapter of a book I wrote the opening chapter for two years ago.

Since then I haven’t been able to stop writing the shiny new YA biopunk* science fantasy thingy that I started. Words have been coming like they haven’t been coming for months. 1000, 2000 even 3000 at a time, when I’ve been lucky to get 100 lately.

*Apparently this is a thing, but it’s not the thing I mean. I’m thinking more how Kameron Hurley talks about her God’s War books as bugpunk.

I think I’ve been working on the wrong thing. Or the shiny new project has been sitting in the back of my brain for long enough that I’m ready to write it. And the WIP, which I made a lot of progress on before grinding to a halt (like my first car, which leaked oil like a severed artery until it ran out, seized up and blew smoke all over the highway) needs to sit in the back of my brain.

I just hope it’s not for another two years, but I begin to detect a pattern. Two years here, two years there. I fight against it. I don’t want to be a slow writer. I don’t want to wait and flounder around wondering what I should be writing and not writing, which makes my unhappy and cranky. On the other hand, I love the feeling of flow, of the knowing what should be next, without having to strain so much for it. My subconscious has obviously been doing the work while I went about life.

And this one feels different (what a joke, each novel I’ve written or attempted to write has felt different), like it’s less of a rough draft than it usually is, with more of the details there. With maybe, dare I say it? slightly better writing than I usually have at this point in the process.

Everyone says don’t compare yourself to other writers. It’s hard not to when it seems publishing is speeding up exponentially and writers are writing two books (or four) a year (though not necessarily publishing them). But I’d have to say don’t compare yourself to yourself either. Just because the last book was hard doesn’t mean this one will be. Just because the last book was easy doesn’t mean this one will be. And maybe I was reaching too far beyond my capabilities with that WIP and I have to wait to grow into it (which isn’t a bad thing). Sherwood Smith told me once she is still waiting to grow into a story she wants to write and she’s been writing for decades.

Meanwhile, I’ll just chant my litany of other writers who have said they are slow: Franny Billingsley, Libba Bray, or um, that’s the end of my list. Who else has said they’re slow?

And a question: Anyone have a favorite scene from a book or movie where one character threatened another? It’s for the shiny WIP. I’m trying to figure out how I want a scene to go.

Kitchen Sink Links

Foz Meadows being brilliant. This is the best explanation of the difference between male and female narratives I’ve seen.

In het-male-oriented action stories where the hero gets the girl, his manly efforts at saving the day serve as the narrative justification for the romantic outcome: he has done X, therefore he wins the lady. But because the story is all about the hero’s wants and needs, we’re very rarely shown why the lady likes X beyond a sort of implied, innate correlation:obviously ladies like X – or at least, this particularlady does, because otherwise, she wouldn’t be in the story. Her emotional complicity is a given, because the story doesn’t care about how she arrives at (from the hero’s standpoint) the correct decision; only that he gets his reward for performing X. In het-female-oriented romance stories, the resolution of conflict between hero and heroine serves as the narrative justification for the romantic outcome: he has done Y and she has done Z, therefore they win each other. The story is aboutboth their wants and needs, and while there’s often a stronger emotional focus on the heroine, the why of the hero’s attraction is still deemed important.

Go read the rest. The brilliance continues. I wish I could be so smart. Seeing is Understanding. This post by Blair MacGregor creeped me out and I thought I knew a thing or two about creepy men after working with domestic violence victims (their word not mine) for the district attorney’s office.

“No, I don’t,” I blurted out, and described how that man knew precisely where the lines of “inappropriate” behavior were drawn, and had spent the last couple of years nudging those lines whenever he came across a woman he considered “available.”  I mentioned he’d been called out for failing to heed polite turn-downs, that he got offended when the turn-down became less polite.  I mentioned how women who weren’t even the focus of his attention breathed a sigh of relief when he left the room.

You probably already read Libba Bray’s post On Writing Despair. If not, bookmark it for when you need it. If my dentist projected these videos of Hypnotic Wind-powered Kinetic Sculptures by Anthony Howe on the ceiling I would be a much happier patient. via thisiscolossal.com