For the past couple of years I've been peeking at the membership page every now and then, checking my publications, sighing heavily and clicking away. I suspect many do that...

At any rate, I finally received (yes, a bit late in the year) a copy of my contract for "The Four Hundred Thousand", and on a whim I checked the membership page again. I was pleasantly shocked to see that Subterranean has finally been added to the list of qualifying short fiction venues for membership. This also means that I've gone from having no qualifying sales to two - for "400k" and "Take Your Daughters to Work".

So now I'm wondering if I should start the application process for an associate membership (well, I'll start it at the end of the year, when I have Christmas money), or if I should hold out for that one qualifying professional sale that'll make me an Active. I have to say I'm leaning towards waiting for that last sale, rather than plunging right in as an Associate. I honestly don't know if it will make that much difference in how people treat me (I'm thinking of the forums, not face-to-face), but then again, it might.

If anyone who reads this blog has any thoughts/advice, please let me know. I'm open to any and all suggestions at this point. Well, almost all suggestions. :P

Labels: SFWA

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I did something stupid the past couple of days. I started reading a massive amount of journals and blogs by both professional and neopro writers. I try to stay away from most writers/writing-related blogs, because all it does is depress me deeply, but every now and then I get caught up in some kind of masochistic feedback loop, and I can't stop reading them until I'm so depressed that it's all I can do to keep from erasing every single file on my hard drive. Because: I invariably start comparing myself to these bright and shiny young things, and I fall so short of the mark, it's laughable. I feel like there's this huge party going on, with dancing and glitter and everyone writing brilliant things and falling in love with each others words, and with each other as well; and I'm stuck in the locked room next door, alone with my stack of crappy manuscripts, listening to everyone laughing as I desperately try to figure out why I can't figure out how to get in the next room.

In other news, the revision of my mundane-sf story has left it too long for the Interzone issue, so it'll have to find another home. Great. Just fucking great.

Labels: "the ruins of love"

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I'll spend this weekend same as the last - light on the noveling, heavy on synopsis (part two), and continuing to wrestle something publishable out of my mundane-sf story. It's very, very important that I finish the story, almost moreso than the novel. I know that sounds insane, but I tend to abandon story projects at the last minute, blow off submission deadlines with the idea that it doesn't matter, it wasn't like an invite or anything... That's just a very bad way of thinking about stories, and I need to work on correcting it. I don't need to sell as many stories as Jay Lake - but when I commit to a market and an idea, I need to commit all the way.

Below is another excerpt. FYI, the protagonist's name is Sylvia, but her nickname is Silver, and it's what she goes by for a number of reasons - one which is made clear in the first few paragraphs of the novel. I know it sounds very sooper-precious violet-eyed Mary Sueish, but I chose the name for a reason. There are certain medical and bonding properties - as well as mythological/religious ones - to the metal that I think accurately reflect the female protagonist. When silver is used as a weapon, it's for a specific reason. :)

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Against the opposite wall, rows of armoires leaned like oversized tombstones. I made my way around tables and throne-like chairs to the largest, a beast of coiled columns and leering satyrs thrusting out of ropes of ivy and leaves. I touched one pointed face, running my fingers over chin, grin and horns--and whipped it back, rubbing my hand against my shorts. For one wild second I'd had the impression that the little face was nuzzling my fingertip, pressing up against my skin. Backing away, I walked down the length of the building, past row after row of vanities, to the steps leading to the third floor. My reflection moved with me in each mirror I passed, and in all the other mirrors scattered over the floor. As I turned my head, some of them turned more slowly, others quicker.

"Keep your shit together," I whispered. Some of them whispered with me. Others did not. I stared down the end of the row to the stairs, ignoring them all. A small legion of Silver's followed, all meeting at the end of the row, converging into a single, unnerved woman. I grasped the splintered handrail, and stared up. More sunlight, and the glint of polished mahogany under a high-beamed ceiling. Again, I climbed the stair in slow motion, as though crawling up into earth. Dust filled my nose and lungs, settled over my face like flakes of pyroclastic snow. I reached the top, and peered over the landing, mouth open in awe.

Labels: "the ruins of love"

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This weekend I fleshed out the first third of the novel with a very detailed outline, and much to my relief, it didn't suck. That is to say, I can now confirm that I have a pretty solid novel on my hands - or will have, when it's finished. I managed to de-emphasize the erotica and flesh out (heh) the supernatural elements and (more important) the developing relationship between the two protagonists. In doing so, however, I'm beginning to see that the end result will not have enough sex to be considered a traditional erotic novel (like Michael Hemmingson's fiction), and it won't have enough gore/spooky stuff to be considered a traditional horror novel (like the novels pubbed by Leisure). What I'll have is a literary horror novel, probably something that would sell better if it's marketed as mainstream fiction with a "touch" of horror - more along the lines of The Society of S or The Historian.

I'll return to regular writing this week, then once again reserve the weekend for outlining part two of what will be three sections total, and on editing my one remaining short story "assignment" for the year, for the mundane-SF issue of Interzone. The story is due by October 31, so I have plenty of time. It's just difficult for me to switch back and forth between projects. Honestly, I have no idea how other writers do this - especially since it seems to take me as much time and mental/emotional effort to write a story as a novel. Make me wonder how my writing would fare if I had enough money to pursue it full-time, with no day job. Something tells me my output wouldn't be that much more prodigious. Shit, who am I kidding? I'd just watch more TV, and wear my pajamas a LOT more. :D

Labels: "the ruins of love"

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This weekend I won't be writing anything except a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline of the novel, as I'm now at the point where I'm just sort of floating along without any direction. I don't want to get halfway through the ms only to realize that I have to go back and insert some new thread or character that's integral to the main plot. Granted, that may happen anyway, but at least a proper outline should give me a better idea of what I need each chapter to do, how each chapter should push the narrative forward. So the wordcount above will be static for several days, but no biggie. I can make it up later. Better to write well, than write quickly. :)

One thing that's come out of my ms so far is rather surprising: I've written a couple of explicit erotic scenes, which I hadn't intended to do. I don't know if I'll keep them for the final draft, but if I do, then that means I can't pitch this novel as horror anymore, but as erotica. Horror readers may tolerate a fair amount of sex in their novels, but erotica is usually explicit beyond what is considered "tolerable" for literary and genre fiction. Once the first draft is finished, I'll have to decide whether the erotic scenes make the novel better as a whole, or if they should be cut. The bad part about marketing the novel as erotica is that I can think of only one agent in the business who represents erotica writers, and she's already rejected my writing (rejection by way of simply never responding to the manuscript her associate passed on to her, after said associate rejected me - it's been over a year, and she hasn't responded to my polite query, so I assume it was tossed in the trash).

It also means that in addition to being agentless, the ms will also have only a couple of legitimate print publishers that I can send it to. (No, I will never have any novel of mine e-published.) Understand, I don't have a problem with writing an erotica novel - much of my fiction has a lot of sex in it, and my erotica tends to be a bit dark and fantastical, so there's potential for reader crossover as I move from one genre to another. But it'll just make it harder for the novel to find a home. Which kind of sucks. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. I should probably stop thinking about it and just keep writing the damn thing. :/

Labels: "the ruins of love", erotica

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And here's a small sample from the first chapter. Nothing too complex or weird, just some descriptive language that will probably have to be cut in the final draft. :P

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And not long after the mountains slipped away, telephone lines crowned the high blue skies, racing me through towns too small for names. I tasted it in the air, dry and sweet. Ellensburg drew near. The freeway lowered, lowered, and the foothills of the Cascades melted down to flat plains as though sung by rocky strata sirens into dark pockets of the sleeping earth. Orchards and fields spread out beyond blacktopped lanes, not flashing by quick but flowing in slow vegetable rivers of undulating green.

But I still wasn't near enough to see the town, and only one building rose visible and free above the low lay of the land, far off in the fields. ANTIQUES FRUIT STAND, proclaimed red block letters across the whitewashed front of a barn as large as a hanger. I felt the engine's whine lower a notch before I knew my foot was rising from the pedal. Smooth freeway gave way to pebbled dirt, and after ten minutes of bumpy maneuvering down a single-lane road, I parked the car outside the stand in a cloud of grey dust. Silence pummeled me into a temporary immobility. As the engine ticked down in the heat, I watched tall stalks of corn sway in the distance, and wisps of clouds drift across a pale blue sky. This was the middle of nowhere. I stared out the front window, mesmerized with the image of me stepping out of the car only to fall up into the air, tumble and float away into the vast silence. Even in the stifling heat, I shivered.

Labels: "the ruins of love"

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I'm still sort of feeling my way around the story. I've been writing out of sequence, bits and pieces of things that will go into different parts of the novel, trying to figure out where everything is headed. I've been doing this because 1) it's how I tend to write anything, and 2) because I had a sense something was off.

Last night I realized that something is indeed off - my plans to switch back and forth between the POV of two main characters just isn't working. What I do best is very tight one person POV, and usually that's of a female protagonist. This is especially true of my more erotic fiction, and over the course of the past couple of days, most of my struggling has been with the POV of the main male character in the story. So, I decided that he needs to go. Not as in, cut him out completely, but as in tell the entire novel from the female protag's perspective. I think this will make for a far more emotionally powerful story in the long run, and I suspect a much smaller wordcount - which is good, because I think shorter is usually better for first-time novelists. Unless you're a sooper-genius with gobs of talent, which I'm not, in which case you can write whatever length you please.

Still not posting any excerpts yet. Believe me, you're not missing out on anything. :)

Labels: "the ruins of love"

Yep, there's the start of the novel, in all its eensy glory. It's a bit more than I thought I'd write - there was a moment last night, right after the first 800 words, when I sat in my chair for a good hour, without a single clue as to what to write next. I thought, ok, well, that was a fluke - guess I'll never be able to write another novel again, so time for Solitaire! And then at some point I realized my fingers were moving over the keyboard, and they weren't just typing crazy stuff like all work and no play makes Homer… Yeah, so. I've no doubt that there will be many more moments of blind panic, but that's what makes novel writing so much fun - the panic and the pants-wetting!

I'm not posting an excerpt yet, because I'm still tinkering with characters and setting - a lot of what I wrote will be edited tonight, although it won't be major rewriting. I just want to reword a few things. I'm not thinking about the fact that everything I'm working on now may be thrown out in a later draft. That's kind of par for the course. I think I should also start separate character documents, with vital statistics on the protagonists and supporting cast. And: I'm going to start going back over my Clarion notes, specifically over what Michael Swanwick and Nancy Kress had to say about plotting and the structure of character conflicts/arcs. I know it seems a bit odd to be doing this after I've started writing, rather than before. However, it wasn't until I wrote last night's little bit that I had any real sense of how much more there might be to the novel than what I'd initially imagined. But after writing just a few paragraphs, I was "oh, it's also about that - of course". In other words: this is still a novel about unfulfilled love between straight women and gay men, but now it's also a novel about taking the place of the other, of usurping, of the young generation battling the prior one, of power struggles between innocence and experience. In other words, it's about mothers versus daughters. lol.

Now that I think about it, I think that hour of "doing nothing" was where my subconscious was moving from "the story is about this" to "the story is about this and this and layers of this". Sometimes it takes a while to take the new possibilities in, to incorporate them into your body and mind. That's why I can't truly be upset or chide myself for "spacing out" or panicking over supposedly nothing. It's like the death throws of the old thought processes, as new ones take control.

Labels: "the ruins of love"