Severe profanity lies ahead: consider yourself duly warned.


For the past two months I've been working on two things: finishing the collection for Lethe Press, and working on the synopsis for my novel. There were several anthologies I'd wanted to write stories for, but I set those aside, considering that 1) I have a contract for the collection and therefore that comes first, and 2) I really, really feel the need to write this novel - even if it never gets an agent or sells, it's not an option to not do it.

That all changed this morning, when I opened up my bill from PSE&G (my local utility company), and found a bill for $1407.41. Yes, you read that right. No, I didn't not build a nuclear reactor in my living room. Evidently the building super hasn't let the meter readers into the building since October of last year, because he's either dead or his legs are broke or maybe he's simply too damn lazy to come to the building once a month and unlock the basement door. So, evidently PSE&G must have issued a court order or threatened to shut all utilites off, because the meter reader finally got into the building last June, and lo and behold: the actual reading of the meters vs. the estimates we tenants were being charged for was VASTLY GODDAMN HIGHER.

I can't pay this off by the 16th, which is when the bill is due, so I'm going to have to make payments of at least 25% of the total bill every month. Fine, except I also have to figure that in addition to sending PSE&G $300 a month, I have to send them the money that covers what I normally use in utilities every month, otherwise the bill will just keep ballooning, and never get paid off in full. So, I'm looking at payments of about $600 a month at least through the end of the year. [::insert Jesus Christ's name in vain right fucking here::]

So, this changes things. I'm going to keep to my schedule with the novel and collection stories, but starting next week, I'm pulling out my very large resevoir of unfinished stories, and start working on finishing them. I've always considered writing to be a second job, one that I have to dedicate a very specific number of hours to every night. Well, it looks like thanks to that cocksmoking lazy motherfucker of a super, I'm going to have to assign myself a third job, and start devoting at least an hour every morning to working on stories. Not that my sudden need for a cool grand ensures I'll magically start getting stories placed (or get stories placed at markets that pay in advance), but still. I have to do what's within my power to do, and this is it. Oh, and severely cutting back on as many expenses as I'm able to, such as, well, food. No more book and magazine buying for the time being, too. No more going to cafes and writing for a couple of hours with a $3.00 iced coffee. No more iTunes downloads or Netflix. It's too late for me to cancel my Readercon plans (and frankly, I don't want to), but plans to attend Steamcon in Seattle while I'm home will have to be reduced to a single daytrip, if even that. And: no AC for the summer, no matter how fucking hot it gets. I don't have a choice anymore. I can sit in my underwear in my ant-filled office and drip buckets of sweat as I feverishly type out what I hope will someday sell for five cents a word - but will, in all likelihood, not sell at all, because no one reads a goddamn word I write.

That's fine, though. Fuck misery. I can take it.

So, a few of the changes I've been planning on since the beginning of the year...

1) I'll have no internet access at home by the end of July, when my two-year contract with Verizon comes to an end. I'm not going to renew or extend it - it's simply too much money and too much of a time suck to justify paying as much as I do. Besides, I can access the internet and check email on my phone now, so I don't see the need for continuing to double my bill with duplicative services. Is duplicative a word? Well, it is now.

2) In light of that, I've stopped blogging on Livejournal, and will keep it open only to comment on other blogs. I'm going to start blogging here again, probably just once or twice a week for now. I'm also "leaving" Livejournal because I feel the need to have less of my public life on display - since I have little to blog about save for the occasional post about the misery of my living conditions, I don't see the need to continue there. I only ever meant for it to be my Clarion journal, and it can go back to being that.

3) And that leads me to the decision to delete my Twitter and Facebook accounts, which I did last week. I originally joined Facebook to connect with a close acquaintance, someone who is not a writer, and with my sister and her family. I didn't anticipate that so many writers would connect with me, and that subsequently the same posts I saw at Livejournal would show up in Facebook, and that most of the people I connected with through Twitter would have their tweets reposted on Facebook- it got to be a case of sensory overload, with virtually every aspect of my online life being about writing first/personal life second, and I grew frustrated with reading the same posts and information multiple times by multiple people in multiple locations. Over the past couple of months, I've noticed when I go home in the evening to write, I feel so saturated and overwhelmed by All Things Writing, that I simply have no desire to work on my own projects. So, I felt the best way to correct the balance was to remove myself, since obviously I can't ask people to stop blogging about writing (I wouldn't want to). Yes, most writers are far more balanced than I am, and can spend all their time talking about writing with various people in the industry and have no problem pounding out a couple thousand words every day to boot: I can't. Honestly, I suspect few people will even know I'm gone.

Oh, and I also deleted my MySpace account. That whole site is a hot mess, and the type of people who friended me - well, never mind. Some things are better left unsaid.

I've spent the last couple of weeks plotting out the rest of my year (and about a half a year into the next). I've been working on finishing up some stories that I'll send out to various anthologies (like Clockwork Phoenix III) when they open to submissions in late fall - they're all stories that I'll probably run through a couple of edits before I send them out, but for now, they're finished, and so I'm setting them aside.

June and July will be finishing up the manuscript for the Lethe Press collection. I've been given a word count limit of 65-70,000, so I've been picking things out of my inventory and figuring out what I have left to write. As it stands, I'll have nine pieces total for the book: 6 are already finished at a total of 38,937 words. So I have one novella and two short stories to write in the next two months to round everything out. I'll post a word count bar here once a week, not because I think everyone is just so damn interested, heh, but more for myself. What can I say? I like the routine and I like little word count bars.



So, yeah, I'm only 59% finished, but I can easily write the remaining 26,000 words in two months - 500 words a day is no problem.

Labels: story collection uno

For the past week, I've been mapping out the work I need to do for the rest of the year. Suddenly, I have a lot on my plate - or rather, I should say that I have the same amount on my plate as before, but a good portion of it is no longer on-spec but a deliverable. The manuscript for the Lethe Press collection is due December 1: half of the ms will be reprints, and the rest will be "original to the collection". I'd already decided to attempt (once again) to write a novel this year - it's pretty imperative that I do this, as I honestly don't think I'll ever have any kind of career as a writer until I have a novel published - and I DO want a full-fledged career, not some perpetual shadow-existence on the periphery of everything. (For those offended by this, understand that I'm not trying to slight short fiction writing careers - I'm saying I don't have the levels of sheer genius and talent required to make it on short fiction first or alone. I am no Kelly Link/Jay Lake/Mary Robinette Kowal/Ted Chiang - few writers are, and that's just the way it is.)

So, the rest of the year will be spent working on the short stories and novella due for the collection, and writing an approx. 120k novel. (I've also got a few short stories to finish for specific anthologies - those will be worked on throughout the year as the due dates approach.) To be honest, I'd really been looking forward to working on the three novellas I've set in the same Lovecraftian world as "Take Your Daughters" and "Her Deepness", but I don't think there's currently a market for them, so they'll be put on hold. The collection and novel have to come first. I'll probably put up little weekly progress bars and the like, with an occasional excerpt.

Later on in the year I'm going to change the website around. As much as I love the design, it's time for something new. And the very outdated "excerpt" page will be turned into "Free Fiction" with PDF's of stories, including a hilariously bad horror story from my freshman year in college (which I rediscovered a couple of years ago in a box of old papers). Podcasting stories will have to wait until I have the money for a microphone - and maybe an apartment that doesn't constantly sound like it's about to fall down around my ears. Besides, I can't imagine finishing a podcast without screaming "OMG SPIDERS - WHAT IS THAT SQUIRREL DOING - ANTS ANTS ANTS!!" Yes, podcasting should wait. :)

Labels: novel, novellas, story collection uno

This deserved its own post: Lethe Press will be publishing my first collection of short stories and novellas in 2010. Steve Berman pitched the idea of a collection to me, but my initial reaction was that it might be a bit too early in my career to do something like that. Then I sat down with a list of all my work, including stories in submission and a few that are still being written, and realized that a collection that focused on my horror/dark fantasy erotica would be an excellent idea. By the end of the year, I'll have enough stories for a full manuscript, and still have plenty of fiction left over for a collection of mainstream (i.e., non-erotic) genre maybe a couple of years from now, when I have some actual name recognition from horror and fantasy readers (i.e., when I get a novel or two published).

The collection will include all of my published erotica and some original stories, including a steampunk novella titled "The Electric Lash", set in an alternate Pacific Northwest of the late 1800's. I've already been promised a blurb by one of my favorite writers, and I have an inkling of who might be designing the cover, which rocks. Everything's coming up Milhouse! :D

Labels: story collection uno

I've sold a horror novella to Subterranean Magazine - "Her Deepness", a 20k Lovecraftian-industrial story set in an alternative Patagonia (think the Russian city of Magnitogorsk, only engulfing most of Chile and Argentina) will be published online sometime this year. (FYI, it's the same world as "Take Your Daughters to Work".) I have three other novellas I'm going to be writing this year in this world, all of them making a kind of fix-up novel when read together. I have no idea if they'll be published as well, but I've enjoyed writing them, so I'm going to keep at it.

I have some other news regarding various projects, and some new plans for this website, but those will be in separate posts.

Labels: lovecraftian, sales

Time to laugh...

Final Drafts Finished:

This Year:
1. The Foraging (flash)
2. The Engine of Desire (short story)
3. Pureland (short story)
4. Ghost Girl (non-fiction essay)
5. Vermeer Blue (micro-story)
6. Blackberry Sweet (novella, complete rewrite from flash story)

Last Year:
1. Disambiguation (rewrite of poem)
2. Silver Night Train (rewrite of poem)
3. The God of Suburbia (rewrite of poem)
4. Crepusculum (flash)
5. Queen (novelette)
6. Horses (novelette)
7. Shang Hai (novelette)
8. Her Deepness (novelette, completely rewritten from short story)

Obviously, this year was an even bigger disaster than last year - even though I wrote twice as many words, about two-thirds of all of my projects started this year were abandoned or set aside, including a novella that started shambling its way into novel territory when it hit the 40,000 mark. Why couldn't I finish most of what I started? Real world problems of sinking finances and execrable living conditions aside, I think it's a combination of poor work habits and some psychological blocks I seem to experience as I get into the middle part of any project. I won't go into detail here about those blocks (I think they deserve a separate post), but I will say that I need to seriously address those issues and the work habits, if I ever want to become a writer (which I am NOT). Next year will need to be dedicated to Getting Shit Done - otherwise, there's no reason for me to do this at all. Writers, after all, write complete stories, not just first paragraphs.

Submitted/Rejected

As I've said before, I don't keep track of rejections as a number to memorize and repeat, I only keep note of critical advice given to me by editors, and requests to see more material in the future. I racked up the submissions and consequently rejections, most by markets that sent out form responses with no invitation to submit again. On the one hand, it was rather discouraging, to say the least. On the other hand, this was the first year I had items continually in submission - there was never a week in the entire year where I didn't have something sent out.

Sold:

This Year:
1. "The Foraging", to the charity anthology Jack Haringa Must Die!
2. "The Engine of Desire, to the anthology Unspeakable Horror: Writings from the Closet
3. "The Unattainable", reprint to Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 8
4. "Take Your Daughters to Work", reprint to Apex Magazine
5. "Horses", to Postscripts Magazine (which will become a quarterly anthology)
6. "Vermeer Blue" to Thaumatrope

Previous Year:
1. "Brimstone Orange" (as a reprint to PseudoPod)
2. "The Unattainable" (to Cowboy Lover: Erotic Stories of the Wild West)
3. "The Four Hundred Thousand" (to Subterranean Online, Fall 2007)
4. "Horses" (to Nation of Ash) - this story was withdrawn because anthology lost its publisher, and it became painfully obvious that this was never going to happen (there's a lot of backstory here, but I'm not going to make it public)

I had two more sales this year than last, but in the end, it did nothing to advance my writing career - half of the sales were to markets that most people haven't heard of, or markets that existed only as single entities (i.e. one-time anthologies), and none of my stories were reviewed. Until I become published in well-known science fiction/fantasy markets (horror and erotica markets, I have found, simply don't count), the number of sales I have won't make any difference whatsoever.

Published:

This Year:
1. "The Foraging" (in Jack Haringa Must Die!)
2. "Teslated Salishan Evergreen" (in A Field Guide to Surreal Botany)
3. "Take Your Daughters to Work" (reprint, online at Apex Magazine)
4. "The Engine of Desire (in Unspeakable Horror: Writings from the Closet)

Previous Year:
1. "Take Your Daughter to Work" (in Subterranean Magazine #6)
2. "Jetsam" (in Sybil's Garage #4)
3. "The Unattainable" (Cowboy Lover: Erotic Stories of the Wild West)
4. "Brimstone Orange" (reprint, podcast on PseudoPod)
5. "The Four Hundred Thousand" (in Subterranean Online, Fall 2007)

I can't control this aspect of the business in any way whatsoever, so there's no real goal here. Things get moved in and out of publishing schedules all the time (and sometimes markets fold or disappear), so I can't say I want "X" things published next year. I know for certain that at least two stories will be published next year - perhaps there'll be more, but I can't be sure. I just have to make sure I'm continually writing and submitting stories in the hope that I'll continue to be published.

Professional Advancement:

This is going to be a section where I dump any and all achievements that I feel will contribute to my becoming a professional writer, as opposed to a wannabe. Please note that this is a list that applies only to me, only to my career, and to no other writer. Everyone has their own list of what they want to achieve with/through writing, so everyone else's mileage will vary. My list includes not just getting an agent and a novel published, but other things both large and small - some more immediate goals include: getting into SFWA, having my fiction reviewed (by a legitimate source like The Fix or in a genre market), participating on a panel at a convention, getting into a writing group. Larger, more "glamorous" goals like award nominations or being asked to attend/teach at professional workshops are not on my list. I've come to accept the fact that my writing doesn't really excite or enthuse readers and other writers in general, so certain goals will always be unattainable. But that's fine - the point of having these goals is so that I don't spend year after year always treading water, just working on stories and dreaming about things, rather than actively achieving them.

Ha. On that note, 2008 was definitely a year of treading water. I achieved almost nothing that I could consider a solid advancement toward becoming a professional writer. I still don't have enough eligible sales for SFWA active membership; I was denied entrance to three RL and two online writing groups (all five groups gave the same reason, amusingly enough); my requests to speak on panels at two conferences were refused (due to lack of publishing credits and the fact that, in both cases, the organizers had never heard of me); and I received no reviews of any of my published stories, as well as no awards or nominations of any kind. So, yes, this has been a very disappointing year, but only in terms of morale - in the long run, it doesn't affect my writing. In fact, I think this year has made it painfully clear how I need to change things - things that are within my power to change - that I think are holding me back from achieving a number of my goals. I'll post more about this separately, probably some time next week.

Not all is humiliating doom and gloom, though. I did get an Honorable Mention by Ellen Datlow in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008 for "Take Your Daughters to Work" - that's something. I participated in two small readings - a Halloween-themed event at a small bar in NYC, and the "Dangerous Flora" reading at KGB for A Field Guide to Surreal Botany. And I participated in the first of what will hopefully become a yearly private writing workshop, with a number of people whom I hold in very high esteem, not just as writers but as friends.

Raymond Chandler's Law:

It takes writing a million words of shit before you acquire enough skills to become a professional writer - or so the saying goes. Supposedly attributed to Raymond Chandler - I've never been able to find the exact quote or positive proof that he said it. But I like it. I've come to interpret it as this: you should expect to write about a million words before you really find your voice, your "groove", and begin to write publishable fiction on a regular basis. I think for me this is an accurate assessment.

In 2007 I wrote about 88,000 words, including the abandoned draft of a novel (an average of about 241 words a day, ha ha!), and about 28,000 words (78 words a day average - ::facepalm::) the year before - laughably miniscule amounts, considering what I'm capable of doing. In 2008, I wrote almost the same amount: 88,176 words. D'OH! This year, I'd like to double that amount- around 180,000 words, or about 500 words a day. That's a large enough amount to write my novel and finish several of the novellas and novelettes I have in inventory. I just need to sit my ass in my chair, turn off the fucking TV, and write.

To date, I've written about 721,000 words, of which 65,424 - 9.07% of all I've written - have been sold and published. I'd like to see that percentage creep up to over 10% next year. We'll see.

Labels: stats

I missed being on Hour of the Wolf because of this.

I'm assuming that, because I was a no-show, I'll now never be invited to be on the show in any capacity whatsoever. Living in this apartment has cost me more than just rent. Well, everyone gets the life they deserve. For whatever reasons, this is my life, so I must deserve it.

Labels: reading