standing on a star unstable

With the recent pet drama and various additional stresses, I've not been getting much done in Writing World.

( Let's rewrite that sentence with the word *anything*. )

So, since I'm thinking about taking a trip to Romania (perhaps with, perhaps not with my Romanian cousin)--and in part because I feel this urge to see the place where the Romanian fairy tales come from--I've been thinking about other visits I've made to the places where my culture's fairy tales came from. I was trying to parse the places I've been that felt magical/not-magical, when I realized, no, that's not what I was trying to get at (though that's part of it). I more meant to be talking about the places where you could see the fairy tale happening.

The Loire Valley, for example... the fairy tales are so thick there, you trip over them on the way to the next chateau. The light itself seems to create more stories. (I always thought Ever After did a tremendous job of capturing the light of the valley.) The whole area reeks of Perrault. The forest of Paimpont, likewise, stinks of The Lais of Marie de France, and I kept thinking we were going to run into Bisclavret any second as we wandered the forest that is almost certainly Brocéliande.

What I think I'm working through, though, is not how place informs story. I know it does, of course, but that's not what I'm getting at. I was thinking more how story informs place. In learning French in junior high and high school, I was attracted to Mont St. Michel because of the dragon story associated with it. But I never became a dedicated francophile the way I was an anglophile because I did not care for the literature that was presented to me in French class. Camus? Ionesco? Sartre? Not exactly fairy tale makers, you know? I enjoyed Moliere, but let's be honest, he's difficult for a beginning French student, and we didn't get to him until too late. Cyrano de Bergerac won my heart to France a little tiny smidge. But The Phantom of the Opera, in spite of the story, is actually a slog of a book in any language. (Or so it seemed when I was 13.)

I only ever read Marie de France and Perrault in translation (Marie in college, Perrault as kids do, as bedtime stories), but they were the ones that woke in my brain when I traveled to France, that helped me connect to the country in a way that I could not connect otherwise. Paris was a bit of a cipher to me--I don't like cities anyway--and the only parts I loved (as is usual with me and cities) were my times inside museums and cathedrals. But nothing I'd ever read and loved took place in Paris, either.

Compare this to Britain, where a thousand things I've read and loved take place--even simulacrums of Britain--like fake Wales in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, for example--well, I felt immediately like I'd opened a magic box when I set foot in Britain. So what if Sherwood Forest isn't much of a forest? There's Glastonbury Tor, Stonehenge, and the tiny little moat around the Mayor's House in Winchester. You can read so much of the landscape as something special, when you're steeped in the fairy tales and the literature of a place.

So, Romania next. I'm light on the literature there, but have been heavy on the fairy tales for the past two years. Let's hope the finances work out!

Merrie Haskell emerged quietly onto the Author Bio scene with a simple link to her website: http://www.merriehaskell.com. She often felt unable to compete with other bios due to her extreme lack of interesting secondary occupations, having begun a humble career as a library paraprofessional at the age of 20 and otherwise not having deviated from that course, in spite of many dull promotions and arguments about fair use in document delivery and electronic reserves settings. It was not until years later that Merrie's Author Bio exploded with quirkily presented mundanities, such as facts about Merrie's ancestry ("descendant of lumberjacks and midwives") and tallying her cat-ownership in pounds, not number of felines (47 pounds of cat, as it happens). Merrie Haskell has yet to win any awards for her Author Bios, but we feel it is merely a matter of time. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Nature, and Strange Horizons.

I love the book I'm writing now. It's all spring sunshine and verdant fields sprouting.

I need to remember this love for when the Great Bookwinter comes, and we are grinding down extraneous prepositions to make flapjacks and burning twists of adverbs in the woodstove. For when we must make do, and not make happy.

I wish we could preserve happiness--just stuff it in a sterilized jar and pressure cook the hell out of it, then put it on a shelf to guard against the day when there's only the dry toast of the spirit to eat.

Or... well. Maybe we can. Maybe we do. Maybe that's what this post is.

1) We made it to the gym this morning. The orthotics performed admirably. However, I have a lot of joint pain in the Dread Arthritic Ankle. We are going to work on the arthritis next. Glucosamine or whatever. Building up muscle. Whatever it is you do.

2) I've been keeping closer track of my writing time. I am not pleased by the truth--I seem to average about 10 hours a week. Even weeks where I push harder against resistance still seem to hover around the average (last week, I managed 12 hours). Now, this IS counting ONLY writing time, and not throat-clearing time. So I wonder if that has something to do with it. Hm. I also started tracking the barriers to writing--not only the barrier, but what it represents, what other need it most likely fulfills, or what bad trait it caters to. I lost a huge chunk of time to Duotrope annoyance last week. Another chunk to watching American Idol with Kayla. So, annoyance, family time, distraction... I lose a reasonable amount of time to LJ posts I don't end up making. That's therapeutic time.

Bleah.

3) Speaking of Duotrope, the answer was courteous but not helpful. I'm going to quote most of it, rather than report it. So, after the nice greeting and beginning, it gets to the meat:

Our system of following submission patterns really has nothing to do with the assumption of honestly or dishonesty.

It truly is about following patterns and determining norms.

We realize that our system currently will discount highly successfully authors, but let's be frank, a high level of success in this industry is not average by any means. Congratulations on your success!

We have considered the verficiation of sales model in the past, but discounted it due to (1) not having the time or resources to fact-check every acceptance reported and (2) because it wouldn't prevent people from failing to report rejections, which is the biggest problem we face.

Followed by pleasant closing.

I still really don't get how discounting above average people means you even have any idea what true averages are, and it was as I suspected, it's all because some people don't report rejections, or are believed not to report them, though seriously, if you don't report rejections, wouldn't you be more of a 100% success rate kind of person, and not 30%? Who under-reports just to get to 30%? What kind of marker of success is that, that you'd manipulate your own data to be able to say, "I broke 30% on Duotrope?"

Doesn't make sense.

Anyway, I guess I won't be overly trusting of their data, and I'll for sure be ignoring whatever nonsense it spouts to me in the control panel. Of course, the control panel now says: "Congratulations! Your overall acceptance ratio is higher than the average for users who have submitted to the same markets." So--they are still not counting my data and they're just not openly admitting it? Or they changed the way they do things (raised the rate to 40%?) without telling me in the email?

This is so beyond even a First World Problem. I go quiet now.

4) Today, Ben-at-work said that he was going "gymly," meaning going to the gym. But then we posited that Gymly is actually Gimli's brother who works out really a lot.

Yeah, that was the walk to my car. Time well spent.

5) I'm frustrated by things beyond my ability to influence. Life as usual. Carry on.

I have a handwarmer/cat steeping/sleeping underneath the halogen lamp, a glass of ice, and a two-liter of Diet Coke by my desk. I have a list of notes, a strong outline, and a reasonable sense of where I would flee to if I burned down a house and tried to murder my husband in 1834.

This book is gonna END.

Things that are ridiculously disheartening--

From my control panel in Duotrope:

Pending responses for last 12 months: 4 (Subscribe to a RSS feed Special RSS Feed of your Pending Submissions) BETA
Submissions sent last 12 months: 14
Submissions sent this month: 3
Acceptance ratio for the past 12 months: 30.77 %
Note: Your acceptance-rejection ratio is significantly higher than the average for users who have submitted to the same markets. Please report all your rejections as well as your acceptances. Your submission reports will be discounted by the system until your submission patterns fall within normal limits.

WTF?

I've not under-reported a single rejection or submission.

I understand wanting to filter out bad data, but c'mon. I'm hardly burning up the world here with my 30% success rate, and while it is flukey, there are other legit folks who have 30% years, I'm quite certain.

I'm gonna have to write a ranty message to the Duotrope folks, I'm afraid, because I really don't need to be chastised for the truth. It's a great service. I donate to it, even.

What kind of message is that, anyway? That there's a level of success that's believable, but anything more than that, you're not a real writer? Uhm...

Look, I sold two stories last year--one new one to a great market, one reprint to a great reprint market. But this is hardly the stuff of pathological lies. For my troubles, I got 10 rejections and a dead market (and one pending response), and yes, that is a pretty fantastic rate of return, but I also made a whopping $260 on that, so come on. It's not like I'm faking acceptances from the New Yorker while secretly filing all my rejections in Peru--or insert your own strangely difficult to render politician sex scandal joke here--, and it's certainly not like I'm not reporting my rejections. There are some stories I have sold on the first time out. There are many more that I have never sold. The data backs all of that up.

What's the writing world really about if even my tiny modicum of success is considered a fabulistic outlier?

How could I forget about lying to myself as a mode to get work done?? How??? It's so useful!

Today I sat down at 8PM, and set my timer for 15 minutes. I said, "Self, you only have to do this for 15 minutes. Then you can stop."

When the timer went off 15 minutes later, I turned it off. Two hours later, I hugged my stepdaughter goodnight. At some point, I did let a cat into the room to sleep under the halogen light. In between, I wrote.

At 10:30, I had almost 3000 words done, and blasted through a really hard chapter. The climax of the book is at hand, and the end is fast a-coming. (Again. This is the book that I got to 82,664 words, stopped, went back to about 60,000 words, and plunged forward again, plus reorganized the first four chapters. Today I'm at 83,484. Not only has the retrograde planet gone direct, it's past the point it went retrograde.)

Win.

The new Scrubs has really grown on me, and it's in large part due to the character of Cole, who I thought I hated at first, but then does stuff like this:



(play from 1:58 to about 2:30. Just about the best 32 seconds of my week, at one point.)

Oh, it's still problematic--what's with replacing all your diverse cast with skinny blonde chicks?--but once they got Braff hustled off to retirement, it got loads better. Strangely enough.

It's not the same show, but. Re-see above clip!

-Where did I put that page of notes on Victorian madness and insane asylums? REALLY. It's been days since I started looking for it.

-Is it necessary to point out random connections when I talk to people on the phone? "Hey, my name is Merrie, too!" or (today, on the phone with an ILL staff member at Northern Illinois University) "Do you know rarelylynne? Because I do!"

-Am I overdrying my skin by taking too hot showers, or is it okay because I used that stinky, oily body scrub from Aveda that was in my Christmas stocking?

-Don't put that stinky, oily body rub in your Christmas stocking next year.

-Possibly also, stuffing your own stocking isn't really that fun, but I don't want to miss out on the cool Sharpies I buy for everyone else. Conundrum!

-Here's a page of notes on what constitutes a "proper English education": dress, conversational subjects, musical instruments, singing, dancing, speaking French. Possibly also: needlework, the getting up of fine linen and ironing. In addition to that, Jane Eyre was able to teach history, geography, and the use of a globe, plus grammar and writing. On my notescrap, I have also written "maybe arithmetic" but I don't know where I got that from. Most of the rest of the information came from Understanding Jane Eyre: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources and Historical Documents. Which I need to check out from the library again. Because I did not take adequate enough notes on insane asylums.

-The Herbalist's Apprentice, as a spoken phrase, is occasionally too easy to trip over. You have to jump in, and elide the sibilants or die trying.

-I am rereading some of Anne McCaffrey's romances with a more critical eye to the gender politics. And I wanted to wash myself. And I was actually doing the re-reading in the bathtub, so you see how bad that is. (FOR EXAMPLE: "He clipped one warm, strong-fingered hand under my elbow, and I have never been omre conscious of a square inch of my own flesh than that moment. As if he sensed my reaction, he removed his hand and gave me a quick searching look. 'It's a cup of coffee, Miss Dunn, not an invitation to rape!'" UHM, DUDE, DID YOU JUST CASUALLY BRING UP RAPE (as in you-and-me-time) WHILE TRYING TO INVITE ME FOR COFFEE? This conversation is OVER.)

-On the other hand, I thought this book was just lovely when I was younger, and thus I have faith that The Kids These Days are going to come through the Twilight-era just fine.

-I *seriously* could not love Cougar Town and Community more. Cougar Town *is* Scrubs, reborn without daydreams and internal monologue. The cast interactions have gelled so fantastically that it reads like a sitcom that's been on the air for years. Community is a bit more self-aware and absurd, but it's very emotionally truthful. Between those two shows and Castle, I could get by with watching only shows that start with the letter C, if I had to. (But I would be sad to miss Tabatha's Salon Takeover, which is mine and Kayla's new thing, because we love competent women who make people cry.)

-HEY! I just found my old collection of fortune cookies. (My current ones are: "Adventure can be real happiness" and "Use your instincts now." My old collection includes "Education is the movement from darkness to light." (I wrote beneath that one: "So is phototropism."))

-And THAT is a picture of the Bronte parsonage in snow. *grab* Need that for my Jane Elliott collage.

-I purchased STORY by Robert McKee on audible.com, and started listening to it today. And promptly turned it off, after screaming obscenities at it. Mr. McKee says that because we are all horrible, cynical people with eroded values who live and breathe by the code of relativism, that there has been an erosion of story. We can't get good stories from Hollywood because we don't have the morals to appreciate story. We can't tell good stories because we can't impart the values that people need to know.

WHAT??

Did I mention I was SCREAMING obscenities at my radio after this? Because, between Unitarian Universalism, anthropology, and a particular preference for the protection of civil liberties, I am, yes, deeply relativist in my moral world view. Cultural relativism, mainly--as long as it doesn't impede on individual human rights. Informed consent, mutual consent, and consent in general--as long as there's that, people should be allowed do what they need to do, and I should not be allowed to stop them. To me, that is the core of my value system, and my ethics system. (I think library-ness comes in there, too--the ALA Code of Ethics comes in there, too; I haven't worked in libraries for 15 years without that stuff seeping in.)

I promise you, my being what I believe to be a reasonable human being does NOT impede my ability to deal in story. Either to hear it or to tell it.

Whatthehell.

-Anger aside, I am going to a) start cleaning the basement tomorrow; b) buy a new heat register at the hardware store so we can stop baking our plants on the plant stand; c) schedule a massage.

-And d) finish finishing my damn book

-I got more and more anxious while thinking about going back to my new doctor, the one who was so terribly dismissive of my heel pain, and on top of that, when I asked to have a pelvic exam, basically said, "Why would you want one of those?" Like, dude. You're a doctor. AREN'T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE TELLING ME TO GET ONE? And also, she didn't care about any of my other bloodwork, even though my good cholesterol is too low, and other things. All she cared about was my vitamin D. So anyway, I got a recommendation from the fabulous redmomoko, and I'm going to go see her doctor. But not until May. Because that's how far out they're scheduling her. WHATEVER. NEW DOCTOR, YAY. Old doctor? NOT A GOCTOR! (tip of the hat to porphyrin and mrissa and Robin, there.)

Ah, the passage of time. There is no simple meme that can cover a decade, at least, not a personal one. Because, seriously, when you're talking about a decade that spans such important years as age 24-34, how do you sum that up in "What song reminds you most of your mid-twenties to your mid-thirties?"

Eh.

In the past decade, I have lost one parent and both maternal grandparents; gone back to college, and graduated; gotten married; written three books & started a writing career; quit my job to go back to college; gotten two other jobs; moved house; become a home-owner; traveled to some foreign countries; attended my first science fiction conventions; started and quit graduate school; driven halfway across the country and back; watched my stepdaughter grow from a saucy four-year-old into a saucy fourteen-year-old; visited something like 20 new states; learned at least one new language (well, for to read in, anyway); &c. I suspect some decades are not quite as jam-packed with such explicit changes, but I would be surprised that my list would be any shorter or less varied in 2019 as it is in 2009.

However. I have been writing online journal entries in one format or another since 1999, so I do, in fact, have a decade's worth of blog posts to look back on. The online archive prior to 2002/2003 is spotty; most of that stuff is happily offline. (And, having gone and looked at those early 1999-2000 entries, I'm really, really glad they aren't widely available.)

Anyway. My very first online entry began like this:

I used to write diaries, as a child, as though I were writing for an avidly interested public. As a teenager, I wrote things that to this day I would blush if anyone else read. (And often, upon rereading, I blush anyway.)

It was titled "The Alpha Entry" and I have apparently lost the metadata for it. But the entry clearly states that I am 25 in it, and there is a later entry nominating December for "The Worst Month of the Year 2000."

So, let's do it, shall we? The Retrospective Decade Journal Meme, as far back as you can go. Take either the first sentence or the most compelling paragraph from each month of each year of the decade (or whatever mix works best) and slap it down with the date. Comment on each entry--if you wish--or don't.

This is going to get long, and I'm probably going to spread it out over a couple of days

( 2000 )

( 2001 )

( 2002 )

( 2003 )