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Well, one of many reasons, but I think this one is close to being the main one.

I'm a private drafter. I go crazy-secretive when I'm first-drafting something, otherwise it does NOT get finished. I know this about myself, about my process. The very act of admitting I'm working on something new, let alone if I give specifics of any sort, makes me less inclined to finish it.

There are about a thousand reasons for this? Up to and including that if I were any good about talking or writing about my work, I'd have a different sort of job than "novelist."

But anyway. Whatever it is in my brain that makes privacy in the first-draft stage not only preferable but necessary, helps me let go of things once other people see them. I can allow the reader their 50%. Because I'm done. I stop engaging with the work.

Re-engaging enough to rewrite something is just... ugh. Rolling the mountain up the hill. If the thing is particularly broken, I can muster the willpower. But I'm terrible with tweaks. Terrible.

It doesn't help that I don't know if I can do anything to make this book better. Worse, quite possibly. But I'm not so sure about better. I'm a little afraid I made it worse in the last draft, as it is. In parts--other parts, yeah, it's better.

Anyway. This has been another episode of Writer Despair. If you have enjoyed this episode, or think you can solve my problem, by all means, share it in the comments.

In the meantime, I'll be buckling down.

Had crazy editing dreams all night long.

Here's a hilarious thing I wrote a few months ago:

"I tend to feel a little let down at the end of a first draft, because it feels like the whole thing was waaaaay too easy.

Need to remind myself that REVISIONS bring TEARS and GRUNTS, and it's okay to be a happy first-drafter, 'cause lord knows, I suffer enough on the rewrites."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. See? I know me so well!

Also, yesterday was my version of this:

I know why people give up. I know why people fear success. I know why people with buckets of talent don't finish stories (or drawings or songs or whatever). I know why people with finished stories (or whatevers) don't submit them to gatekeepers, to critiquers, to audiences, to the scrutiny of the impartial, disinterested, and unsympathetic.

But fear is the mind killer, etc.

Husband came through my office. "What are you doing?" he asked. I was flipping through my editorial notes semi-despairingly.

"Crying," I said.

"Really?!"

"On the inside."

"I don't know why you'd do things that make you cry on the inside," he said.

I didn't even think about it. I just said, "It's what makes me awesome."

See? Look at that. From self-doubt to cocky self-assurance in point two seconds.

He left to go feed the guinea pigs. My grin faded. I looked at my manuscript, at the multi-hued notes from my editor. She uses track changes, and we have three different colors going on this round of edits, which I think means she's read it three times, maybe? A minute ago, I was whining on the inside, thinking about all the details she's poked at, all the work of mine she's pointed out as unnecessary scaffolding, all the word choices she's doubted. Three minutes ago, I was thinking, "She's got no faith in this book anymore, I bet she read this and wondered why she bought it the whole time, why she invested so much in me..."

Then, the conversation with my husband.

It's what makes me awesome.

I'm like that, you know: Slough of Despair one minute, the Heights of Self-Congratulatory Asshattery the next. I swear, though, most of the time, I'm pretty even-tempered and I don't buy into the tortured artist schtick at all. And yet, here I am, even-tempered, practical, pragmatic me, and I do that valley-to-mountain run in record time when I'm in the throes.

I'm not sure this is living the dream. I'm happiest when I'm drafting, second-happiest when I'm my own editor, sifting through word choice and whatnot. I can't stand the scrutiny of others, not because I have some great faith in my talent/craft/skill/art and think I'm above editing or some crap, but because it makes me feel stupid when I don't see my work with perfect objectivity, and I hate feeling stupid.

But on the other hand, the chance to do this for a living, the opportunity to write something that resonates perfectly with another brain somewhere halfway around the planet, to keep some other soul sane for the few hours it takes to read and re-read my work? That's what I want as much as I want to just write first drafts for the rest of my life.

And so, the process: I do it. It's the only way to make the book good enough to get to the people who need to read it. The self-doubt: I fight it. It's not sexy. The crying: I keep internal, and mock myself for it. I don't need more mucus in my life, and honestly, I didn't cry when I face-planted in the Badlands two miles into a hike and sprained the hell out of my ankle and scraped myself up, so why would I cry now? The self-congratulatory rear-end milliner's art: I strive to reach it. Because the asshat is a necessary piece of my armor in the fight against myself, to keep me from giving up, which I would really like to do right now--maybe go write some unpublishable poetry or something for a good year or five.

And the fight against myself?

It's what makes me awesome.

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I've been thinking about this a lot lately, what with the stepdaughter graduating in just three years, and some epic Seasonal Affective Disorder in our home. Surely, there must be someplace less dark and cold.

Five things I love about Saline/Ann Arbor/SE Michigan/Michigan:

1) Knowing people. Being able to six degrees everyone I meet (or more likely 2 degrees). I grew up in a town where I was a stranger. I knew the people I saw every day and that was about it. Seems like it takes about 15 years for someone with my affability factor to get to that point, to being a true resident, to see acquaintances and friends in the grocery store or at a restaurant. Every year that passes, I feel more like this is where I live, and am not just guesting.

2) Cultural opportunities. People like to complain about Ann Arbor because it's not quite as cool as Madison or the big city where they last lived, but I've spent my time in Podunkia, and TRUST ME, there are plenty of good cultural opportunities around here. I grew up in a place with a similar number of opportunities, so it seems Good and Right to me, even if it's not like a 10/10 score. Here, I've lived here through two Royal Shakespeare Company residencies, for example, and there's always Handel's Messiah at the holidays, and there is a clunky, endearing natural history museum in town; a random, eclectic art museum; an archaeological museum; a (smallish) planetarium... No, the planetarium does not compare to Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill, but It Works. And if I need MORE, it's not hard to drive towards Detroit and see more.

3) History. I have a history with this state. My great-great-great-grandparents are buried in this state (somewhere), and I know exactly where about half my great-great-grandparents are buried. My grandfather was born in a lumber camp in Kalkaska. And that's all just my ancestors, and a small portion of it. For myself, I've lived in Sault Ste. Marie as well as several locations around the lower peninsula. I've also lived in a state without a familial connection. It didn't bother me to live in North Carolina and not feel like I had any connection to anything--I'm fully convinced my family is too insular--but at the same time, I do enjoy the connection to the past--the hundred-year-old lake house that belongs to my husband and his family, the nearly two-hundred-year-old institution where I work. Perhaps because I moved so much when I was a kid, I like finding a connection to where I am. I don't know. But I like it.

4) 50% of the environment: the summer and the fall, the trees and the heat, the greenery and the thunderstorms. The first snowfall. The August night-bugs. The cool nights. The stars at the lake. The lake! The lakeS! The rivers! The sunsets. Bird-watching. Forest walks. Beaver dams. Mushroom walks. The notion that I could find food in the forest, if I had to, or grow it, if I had to.

5) Midwesterners. I don't know if I really LIKE Midwestern culture, or if it's just that I understand it, but having grown up in a location where I didn't know if people liked me or hated me, it is reassuring to be amongst folks where I do know, where I know how to read the subtextual cues around me.

Five things I hate:

1) Winter. January-February, the endless slog through the slush, the darkness, the dirt, the hassle of commuting, the endlessness, the cold, the constant pressure of having to think through your wardrobe so you don't die or lose an appendage or get chilblains or frostbite or just get the shakes. Dry skin in winter. Dry nose in winter. Taking baths or showers just to warm up...

2) Mosquitos. Enough said.

3) Detroit Despair. The crumbling of a city, the crumbling of the automotive industry, the economic collapse that's ongoing around my little haven of Ann Arbor... BLEAH.

4) Secret Racism. I could write post after post about this, but race relations are so much more screwed up in the north than anyone wants to admit or discuss. In North Carolina, you can't hide from racism. You can't pretend it doesn't exist. As a white person, you have to confront yourself and your privilege and your prejudices and decide if you really are an ally or... not. Up here, a lot of white people like to believe they aren't racist, but they've never (or rarely) had to confront any of their own assumptions or issues, and when they finally do, they frequently fall down on the job.

5) Island of Unreality. The prejudice the rest of the state has against Ann Arbor sometimes shocks me. We're "not living in the real world." We're "full of freaks." We're... whatever. It's occasionally brutal to run smack into the wall of the rest of the state's prejudices. This is nothing against Ann Arbor, but it is something I hold against Michigan.

It's been a few weeks since

sunnydecho and I visited John K. King Books, the "largest used and rare bookstore in Michigan." I mentioned it here, but not in detail, and the trip is... well, not haunting me, but maybe I'm haunting the bookstore a little, in my mind.

Given how much I absolutely adore a good used bookstore... If this place were less than an hour away (and not on highways I find somewhat stressful), I could see hitting the place up once a month. I used to go weekly to Nice Price Books in Durham, especially when they opened up next to our Chinese restaurant. (Oh, man, the hours I spent there... And at Ravenna's...) I mean, half the reason I came to the University of Michigan was because of (pre-corporate) Borders and The Dawn Treader. The first time I visited Powell's, I almost didn't get out with my life...

Anyway, preaching to the choir, probably. John K. King's Books, the main part of it, anyway, is in an old glove factory in Detroit.

( Image heavy tour behind the cut )

Having been mildly thwarted in my plan to order up a furnace today--who closes their office at 10 to 4?!--I thought I'd share this brief interlude I had while driving home from the lake this weekend.

My preferred route to the cottage--and I think we each have our own, everyone in the family--involves driving through a nowhere town called Hickory Corners, down West Hickory Road from the Gilmore Car Museum. Lest you think proximity to the car museum makes Hickory Corners a thriving metropolis--let me disabuse of that notion very quickly. There is a gas station. I can't even remember if it's out of business or not. (I think it's in business. It might have been out briefly.) There is a four-way stop. And there are some abandoned storefronts.

I had the brief, mad notion of what it would be like to buy one of the abandoned storefronts and open a bookstore and private lending library. Combo, of course. Wherein the residents of Hickory Corners could borrow books at will, and non-residents could pay a fee to join, and anyone who happened buy could also just buy any of the books. Like, if Powell's had a rental service as well.

It's an endeavor designed not to make money, of course; it's a public service, a way to house a lot of books in a place without a lot of books. You'd be a curiosity, a place people might stop on the way to the car museum--or not. But, it's just--I had a vision, a life I'll never live, delivered to me in a flash while I drove past the abandoned storefront. It'd be so very quiet in my store/library. I could get a lot of writing done.

Rationality usually takes hold whenever I think of moving someplace rural in Michigan, however; I am not meant for rurality. I'd go stir-crazy in four days. And arguing politics would be a nightmare. And let's not even get into what the diversity situation is like in no-town Michigan.

There was a period of time where I felt equally competent in writing and drawing. Back in about the seventh grade. I wrote and drew instinctively--I got completely lost when perspective was explained to me in art class, for example, but I could turn out a credible drawing of any random old thing I set my mind to, and maybe I was even better at drawing than I was at writing at that point. My social studies teacher "forgot" to give back my extra credit drawings of various African animals we did when we studied Africa; I saw them in her room the next year, on the bulletin boards, when the new seventh graders did that unit.

But the drawing was an also-ran, something I did because I could, but not with any intention to be an artist, because the ideas just weren't there, the way they were with writing. I illustrated my world-bibles slightly, and drew stuff that caused my mother to blink at me and say, "There's a lot going on in your head, isn't there?" --but no, I wasn't going to use the skill.

I took an art class a few years ago--well, I guess more than ten, since I'm pretty sure it was when I still lived in Ypsi--and I was saddened by how much my skills had deteriorated in the drawing-free years of college. I never got back to where I was, though I look at those drawings now and think, "Yeah, you weren't terrible by a long shot." Ten years on, and extreme dedication to writing for the last seven of them--well, there're still things I'm trying to get a handle on in fiction-writing-land, and I foresee the possibility of skill jumps therein yet ahead of me--but it is extremely mystifying, almost physically painful to recognize how incompetent I now am at drawing.

Part of it is a study of contrasts between two skills I used to possess in similar levels. Part of it is definitely that I know how much skill I've lost. And part of it is, to be honest, that I haven't had to struggle with writing in a long time. Sounds like I'm tooting my own horn, but I'm talking simple competence, the ease of creating something passable/credible, not how close I'm approaching genius or art or anything.

In the first grade--my mom would be happy to tell you this story--I brought home astonishing levels of praise from the art teacher, and a picture of a shoe. I didn't understand the fuss. I'd just drawn what I'd seen. But it was, yes indeed, a picture of a shoe, a very good shoe for a six-year-old. I'd drawn the stitching on the edges and the eyelets and all of it, the texture of the leather. I remember thinking, during the praise, that I'd simply had an unfair advantage over the other students: I'd been sitting closest to the shoe. I know, of course--though I probably didn't figure it out until I was 15 or something--that it was sort of an astonishing drawing, though I recall looking at it when I was 8, and thinking contemptuously of that particular drawing for being somewhat wobbly-lined.

My husband and I are taking a drawing class. Our current assignment is drawing a shoe.

It is nowhere near as good as my six-year-old self's shoe.

I'm so annoyed with myself for losing that casual competence I once possessed. I'm struggling to draw paper bags. I have forgotten how to see, let alone to draw what I see.

I am resolved to keep drawing, once the class is over, but as usual, I lack for ideas. But, it doesn't take that many ideas to keep the skills up--I knew that once. And the point here is to have a hobby, not produce something to sell or whatever. Do I need ideas, when I can just keep drawing paper bags and shoes?

My brain fills up with story ideas from all of this, of course. There's something clearly in here about magic and magicians. Lost skills, lost magic. I could work with this...

I woke up to a huge puddle of water in the kitchen. Dishwasher fail. While mopping that up, the cleaners came in--at 8, about 2.5 hours early. I'd been planning to call to cancel them anyway, between my sore throat keeping me home, and my stepdaughter being home, and my mom being here until her dentist appointment. Too many people to clean around!

*facepalm*

*ouch, my throat*

The... good?... news is that Kali, the alarm cat, managed to let me know something was wrong in the kitchen before I came down. Now, mind you, I thought she just hadn't been fed, but as it turns out, she had, and she was just Very Concerned about the puddle of water. It's hard to tell the difference between Unexpected Water and Didn't Get Fed, as they involve very similar methods of alarm (there's some sitting on your chest like death, and staring into your face, and then leaping ahead of you when you get up to go somewhere, but I think the death-sitting is subtly different in each case). Her Smoke! Alarm! and Thunderstorm! Coming! are sufficiently different, however, so as not to get confusing. You are left without a doubt when something is burning, whether that's the neighbor's whole house or just toast in your own.

Sore throat, really? Bah. Tomorrow, while not the WORST possible day for a cold, is pretty darn bad, with the house cleaners coming, and the stepdaughter home, and I'm supposed to take my car into the shop and order a birthday cake for my aunt. It'd be $50 to cancel the cleaners, and I've already delayed the car taking in two days because I clean forgot on Monday.

It's almost as annoying as the random buggy weirdness popping up on my new computer. Random--totally random!--songs won't transfer to my iPod, claiming the computer is not authorized. Attempt to authorize, and you get scolded that you're already authorized, idiot! Little things like that. Carbonite doesn't want to download, and it alternatly blames its own servers, a firewall, and the internet connection. Stupid stuff.

In completely other news, I bought two kinds of treeless paper from the same company at Target yesterday. I have, of ourse, misplaced the bands that had any details about the origins of the paper, but one claimed to be made of banana leaves (perfectly comprehensible), and one claimed to be made of... stone. Now, in looking it up, paper made entirely from minerals may have as much environmental impact in the long run as paper made from trees, but it is interesting stuff. Slightly stretchy, extremely heavy, and cool to the touch. Hard to start a tear on, but once the tear has begun, tears extremely straight. Fascinating stuff.

The banana paper is less interesting only because it's pretty much like recycled paper. However, it is more like the old kind of recycled paper, a little rough, a little toothy. I had three notebooks of the stuff when I was in junior high/high school, and I adored them. I was sincerely bummed when recycled paper started acheiving the same quality as new paper.

Both the banana paper and the stone paper take ball-point ink extremely well; it feels like writing with gel ink. And gel ink, I think I started using because it felt like writing on the old-style recycled paper with ballpoint ink.

So anyway.

But first, the edit letter:

I have reached peace with my edit letter. I have read it four times, and I finally see how little work there actually is in it. It seems like a lot? But the concepts are broad, and the bits that need to be tweaked are actually quite minor.

I will be measuring my editing time down to the second, including my "thinking about it" time. Because I know how fast I write, and I know how fast I edit when I direct the editing. But I don't know how fast I do anything else. So, back to my magic calendar, my stop-watch, and all of that. Starting tonight, after I finish cleaning up my office. It's a physical ritual, the Clearing of the Office, before one can embark on a new stage of the project. I don't have much left to do--the big stuff has been sorted. Maybe an hour of that work, before I can move on...

The weekend...

I had a bit of a weekend planned. Head out to the lake Friday afternoon. Go see my stepdaughter's horse show at the end of camp. Spend Saturday with

joytulip and her son, Xavier, who come to Michigan every summer; then have

daveamongus and

tappu's kids over to swim with Xavier.

Then, I realized Mary Robinette Kowal was in town (what's "in town" for Michigan? Anywhere within a hundred miles, basically), recording at Brilliance in Grand Haven. So, I extended the invite to her to hang at the cottage Friday night, and I'd take her to the airport on Saturday before

joytulip arrived. It'd be a crowded weekend, but so worth it, and when she took me up on the offer, I was excited to have a writing buddy for an evening and part of a day. Mary was wrapping up her edit letter for Glamour and Glass, and I was still trying not to hyperventilate every time I looked at mine for ~~The Herbalist's Apprentice~~ ~~The Princess Curse~~ the book with the herbs and the Underworld. It was really helpful to examine her process--I'm pretty sure I had a breakthrough during it--even though I was ostensibly working on "Currer Bell Comes to America."

After a leisurely Saturday morning and lunch, I took Mary to the airport, came back, and had a nap, waiting for

joytulip and Xavier--and then got the news that Mary's flights were delayed. Selfishly delighted, we invited her back to the cottage. My father-in-law went to get her, while I greeted Tami and X. Full house! Every bedroom taken! The cottage is the most fun that way.

Mary managed to finish her edits that evening, after a dinner under the animal heads at Sam's Joint, while the rest of us took a boat ride. After Xavier and my in-laws went to bed, Mary, Tami and I drank my brother-in-law's gin (sorry, Barry!) with tonic and lime on the porch until the wee hours. A very nice conversation, about language and literature.

In the morning, I got up way too early (relatively) to hit up the store for brats and buns and chips and things before the West Michigan Klechas showed. There was eating, then swimming... then departures. Dave and Tarri took Mary up to the airport on their way home, and I took a nap before heading back to get my stepdaughter from her mom's, and taking us home.

One of those weekends that lasts a week, the kind you need every once in a while just to remind yourself how much living you can fit between breaths.

Let's play a game. Let's call it Title Brainstorming!

Like my foreauthors before me, if you come up with THE title that pleases the publisher enough to go on the cover of the book--or at least, the title that my editor and I call it for a period of longer than five minutes, because if there's one thing I've learned, there are no guarantees on this titling thing--I will send you a copy of the book once it's published. (Signed and personalized if you like.) (And I'll probably acknowledge you in the comments, unless it's too late in the game before the title gets finalized.)

The book started life as The Herbalist's Apprentice. It has been referred to betwixt the editor and me as The Princess Curse. Those are the starting points.

If you haven't read it (and that's most of you), it's set in a made-up region of Romania that I wedged in next to Maramures and Transylvania, in 1489. Reveka, the main character, is an irreverent herbalist's apprentice who decides to break the curse on Sylvania--the curse being that Prince Vasile's 12 daughters wake up every morning exhausted and with holes in their shoes. Everyone who has attempted to break the curse ends up either cursed with death-like sleep or disappears. The local Lord of the Underworld (a zmeu) becomes an important character. To say much more would be spoilery, but suffice it to say, there's a Persephone/Hades sort of situation in the latter half of the book. Herbs, sleep, lies, vows, souls, the water of life, the water of death, the underworld, dragons (zmeu), princesses, cow-herding side-kicks, dancing, shoes, plum blossoms...

The book is Middle Grade, and the title would need to appeal to kids between the ages of, oh, 9-12ish.

Let me know if you want more information, and please play long and hard!

Well, it isn't much of a return. I could do a great deal of reading and a little bit of commenting on my ipod--and did. And it's not like I don't work with easy access to the internet 5 days out of 7 at, well, work.

But still, at some point (Wednesday) I relinquished my borrowed wireless adapter to its rightful owner (my stepdaughter), and only bought my own adapter Sunday, and bulled my husband for the router key tonight. In internet years, that's a long time!

Dear new wireless adapter: I shall use you for. Well. Not good, precisely.

In other news, something crawled into a small space somewhere in our utility room and died. I made three fruitless forays into the stench to search for the dead thing, wearing plastic grocery bags as gloves, a bandana over my nose and mouth, and a smear of toothpaste on my upper lip. I brandished a can of Febreeze in one hand, as well, which ended up just making a death-and-peaches sort of smell in the end, to which I think perhaps Just Death might have been preferable.

MAYbe. It's hard to say. I normally hate the chemically scents of that sort of thing (I have learned, since buying the can four years ago). It is hard to say which scent was worth. The chemicals killed a lot of the death smell, but not enough.

I would like to understand why some odors linger in the nose, such that everything smells like a recurrence of that later. My cat's paws. My husband's breath after fish and chips. Seriously--it must be psychosomatic, mustn't it?

I have nothing handy or interesting to say about Inception, other than to marvel at how many people I have talked to decided that there was a definitive black and white ending to the movie, when I rather thought it was left to Viewer's Choice, a little like Rhett walking into the fog at the end of Gone with the Wind.

Also, it was fun to see it with two fifteen-year-old girls half in love with Leonardo diCaprio from having watched Romeo + Juliet this year in English class. "You know he's my age, right?" I asked. "Also when I was your age, he was on a sitcom and he was annoying."

Indifferent shrugs to this, squees of excitement when he showed up on the screen. Such things matter to children, not to serious fans.

We all talk about our jobs--obliquely at times, clearly at others--but too often we have no clue what we all do every day. What do you do? In more than a three sentence summary, with as little unexplained jargon as possible.

( What I do at my dayjob. )

Failed to put my 2011 parking tag in the window of my car. Ticket! Oh, fickle fiscal years that begin for me right after a long holiday... About every three years, I get stung.

Add to this a blister from my new shoes (interestingly placed on the side of my foot), my missing 32G thumb drive (it has to be SOMEwhere, doesn't it?), the horrid heat, the freckles popping up on my nose, and the complete discombobulation that is moving from one computer to another, and my life seems like a mass of petty annoyances.

But, for serious, I'll take petty any day over the big ones.

Now. If you were a 32G thumb drive, where would you be? Keeping in mind I've already cleaned out my purse and my desk, and had even gone so far as to reopen the cases on my CPUs in case I dropped it inside one of them whilst playing computer-transfer-hijinx. (I'd been using the thumb drive to transfer files, yes, I know it's inefficient, but it was only to have taken me six or so transfers, so it's not that inefficient.) At some point, Dann sat down at my computer to try and get the drivers for my old wireless card to work (they cannot), and thereafter--poof, no drive. He has not seen it.

It HAS to be here. Unless it has become a TARDIS, it has to be here.

The other ridiculous thing is that I didn't have Word for the new computer for about a week, and even though I did some writing on my netbook this weekend, I was actually beginning to experience some sort of unpleasant writing withdrawal.

***

Time passes. Husbands walk by. One makes complaints about the whereabouts of thumbdrives. I am mocked for not lifting up enough papers when, lo and behold, papers are lifted, and a thumbdrive appears.

Oy.

Still, beats a tragedy.

The days tick away with little writing to show for them, for I am without deadline. My brain percolates with the upcoming first drafts and with the future re-writes, while I consume, consume, consume. All of the Big Bang Theory on DVD, loads of Daria, the last bit of House, the newest of the new Doctor Who, half a dozen books on the Middle Ages (which I delve into and out of like a drinking bird), and whatever "sample!" floats across my Kindle, disappoints, and gets deleted... or excites and gets bought, but not read.

I have been semi-social, even. Though I owe

splash_the_cat a night on the town to see A-Team, and mebbe an evening's coze. Having one's best bud give birth leads one to think nostalgically of Anne of Green Gables--or well, it makes me think of it. I feel compelled to bring her raspberry cordials and whatnot. Of course, she hates anything raspberry flavored except raspberries themselves, so it's not going to be that. But my point is, I feel the necessity of The Visit. Maybe it's because she's scarce on the internet and not working in the building next door? But I feel like old-fashioned social conventions that surpass mere Hanging Out are in play. I wish I could explain it better, but that would require thinking about it more, and really, I have stuff to do, and when I run out of stuff, I have Visits to make.

Anyway, semi-sociality involved journeying off to Eastern Market and John King Books (s'posedly, the largest used bookstore in the midwest) with

sunnydecho. Eastern Market is a farmer's market in Detroit that's been held on the same location since 1891 (though the progenitor market dates from fifty years or more prior to that). One forgets, sometimes, how long Detroit has been settled by Europeans. Again, "one" means "me." In any case, in all the years I've lived in Southeastern Michigan, I never made it to Eastern Market, and didn't even know what it was, exactly. I tell you though--when you go to it, you have a hard time believing Detroit is bleeding. Well. Driving there and back, you can believe it...

The bookstore is four stories, and, well. Powell's in Portland is certainly bigger, or seems it, but it isn't more curious. King Books is located in an old glove factory, and when one goes down the aisles, one must pull the cord to turn the lights on and off oneself. It reeks of books. It is generally unheated (no problem on the sweltering day we were there), and contains "warming stations" in the stairwells for chilled shoppers in the winter. And it has--well, not everything, but a lot. I found the Childcraft Encyclopedia I grew up reading at my cousin's house--not a complete set, so I didn't feel bad taking only the "Fables and Legends" volume (vol. 2) that I read over and over as a kid. I was shocked to open it up and see some terribly racist drawings inside--I'd blanked those out completely--so it'll be... an experience... to read through the stories I only half remember. I know there was another volume I re-read often, and I think it was volume 1, but that was gone.

Work has been slower, but veered into anxiety-producing nightmare territory for a little bit, before veering back. We are in the process of replacing our furnace. We are learning how to live with a cleaning service (it's not as easy as it looks). I bought a new computer, and after a failed attempt to install my wireless card myself (I figured out the mechanical bits rather handily, but my card was so old as to be entirely decrepit, though I swear I've only had the card a couple years), let Dann figure it out. (He figured it out by installing a different wireless device altogether. Oh.) Anyway, the file moving cha-cha slowed things down a bit, and I haven't yet managed to install Office. Mom is coming tomorrow; a friend of ours from North Carolina whose mother lives in Grosse Pointe is coming into town to spend some time with us Friday, and then it's off to the lake with diabetic cat and super-perky guinea pigs in tow.

In other words, life. Busytimes.

I wish there were a way to grab all of one sort of tag from across one's friendslist.

In other words, I have finally moved on to watching the new season of Doctor Who, and want to know why I should be bonding with Eleven.

Because I'm not bonding. But it seriously took me about eight episodes to bond with Ten (though I stopped wailing about wanting Nine back somewhere around the third ep). And by the end, I loved Ten as much as I loved Nine (if not much more, but hey). I'm hoping that happens here, too...

Anyway, if you feel passionately about Eleven (either direction), and want me to understand why, if you drop me a comment with your Who tags, I'll loff you forever. Or at least a good long while.

(Not-so-confidential to this years' Hastings Point Workshoppers...)

I keep getting the critique that my main character, Dru, (in Prince(ss)) is a little bit boring. Funny--but kinda boring anyway.

Here are the notes I wrote up about Dru before I started the book:

Hero) Dru (Drustan). Prince of Serilda. A "coaster." Does well with his tutors to avoid getting into trouble, but kind of boring. Desires to please everyone, to make everyone calm and happy. He wants to appease and gratify the whole world. At every turn, this motive should be doubted. He will go through with this stupid idea of his mother's and lie to her to keep her happy. He must learn that lying to keep people happy is a cheater's way. He doesn't want to be King because being King is a hard job, and he doesn't want to decide the path of the whole kingdom. He will eventually bring about the end of the monarchy and set forth a constitution with an electoral government. It will not be the easy path, however, nor the cheater's way.

Oh, yeah. I meant to do that. Make him boring, I mean.

Now, what I wonder is: how do you make a boring character interesting?

I tried to solve this by making the other characters as interesting as possible, and the situation, dialogue, etc. interesting, fast-paced, well-drawn.

( The other character sketches. )

The critiquers who've seen the book (all or in part) do seem to feel that the rest makes up for the boring main character, but I wonder.

I also sort of wonder: how would you make a boring dude interesting for the purposes of fiction? And I don't mean, "Make him interesting." I mean, take a boring person and actually make it fascinating, to wonder what's going to happen next?

I may very well be writing beyond my skill level, in this.

But slightly modified, since I only have a few stories in circulation these days.

Short stories!

Stories currently out to market for first time: 1
3rd time: 1
10th time: 1
11th time: 1
18th time: 1

Stories sold on the first submission: 3
2nd sub: 3
3rd sub: 4

6th sub: 2
7th sub: 1
8th sub: 3

20th sub: 1

I haven't had a thud in a while, so I decided to report on it. "Currer Bell Comes to America," complete today at 5765 words. It is unabashedly YA, alternate universe, and totally one of those sorts of pet stories where you get to ride around on your hobby horse like an idiot, showing everyone all the weird theories you cherish--in this case, things about the Brontës, Amelia Earhart, and the Bermuda Triangle.

Rightfully, I should probably retitle it "Currer and Acton Bell Come to America" because well, Anne is still alive (just one of the many reasons this is AU) because I posit that if Patrick Brontë had died around the same time as Emily, and Anne had been just a leeetle less sick, something interesting might have happened. More interesting than Anne dying of tuberculosis in Scarborough, anyway.

I am growing to believe that Novels Spawn Short Stories. I tend to get these little nuggets, these also-ran ideas that deserve some attention but don't fit in the novel at all. I got to know Persephone too well during ~~The Herbalist's Apprentice~~ The Princess Curse, so I wrote her a story, "Five Rules for Commuting to the Underworld" (forthcoming from Strange Horizons, if you missed that). Also, "Five Rules" is rather adult; Curse is not. After Curse I reworked Jane Eyre with time travelers--not so much in a ...and Zombies kind of way, more a secret history kind of way.

Anyway, I've always intended to write at least one novel about the Brontës. I actually intended to write the "What happened to Anne at Thorpe Green?" book, with one part mystery and one part romance, but it literally hurts too much to write that while heading towards her inevitable young death from tuberculosis. Charlotte, well. She died young, but she had some requited love, some happiness, and some success. Anne just got the shaft. And she wasn't fiercely shouting "Fuck you" to the world as she died, like Emily, so her death always kicks me in the gut a little harder than anyone else's in that family. Plus, I don't think she got to write her masterpiece, like the other two did. I sincerely believe she was scaling up to something truly great.

So yeah. I guess I wrote this instead. Maybe I'll still do an Anne book. It might have to be an alternate history, or maybe I'm going to have to confront my fears about too-early death--dunno. But for now, I have a story that I loved writing and that I almost certainly am not going to be able to sell. (Not that I won't try.)

I stole this from

aliettedb:

The Rules of the Game Are:

Bold the women by whom you own books
Italicize those by whom you’ve read something of (short stories count).
*Star those you don’t recognize
Unmarked are those whose work you have not read

( Read more... )

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Mer

Merrie Haskell (it's dot com!)

May 2024

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standing on a star unstable

I am the same, and the same name still I keep.

Recent Entries

Okay. Why Editing Makes Me Crazy.

Pursuant to my pep-talk yesterday...

I know why people give up

Writer's Block: No place like home

dwelling in the bookstore of my mind

lives unlived

Taking Competence for Granted

fuel to the fire

Go home, throat. Go home.

a weekend, or something like

Help me name the book!

Return of the Internets!

Meme: So what do you ACTUALLY do for a living?

Honestly? I'll take the minor annoyances.

Refilling the Well, or whatever.

Randomly

Beyond my skill level

Stole the idea from Cat Rambo

Thud.

Women Writers of SF