standing on a star unstable

Public Domain Curator at Anthology Builder

Okay, Nancy Fulda announced this yesterday, so I will share it here now, too: I'm the new (and first) Public Domain Curator for Anthology Builder.

I've loved Anthology Builder since the moment I first heard of the concept, and have been happily shuttling my stories over there in exchange for the glee of building custom anthologies (and, of course, for my share of the 10%(ish) author royalties that get split amongst each anthology's authors).

I'll be selecting public domain works to include on the site, and building anthologies, and generally having a good old time over there. And if there's an older story you've been hoping to find on the site, do let me know--I suspect Nancy will build me a suggestion form some day, but until then, I still have email and whatnot.

Have I finally found a hobby?

On a more mundane plane, I got my birthday present from my husband last night, which is a pretty sweet little photo scanner that also does negative and slide scanning. So, all my pre-digital photographic adventures will be coming to a Flickr account near you... slowly, of course. I scanned three strips o' negative last night, and only uploaded three pictures of Poitiers. I'm... pondering color correction and things like that. From a less useful angle, I'm also pondering the interesting textures from film that seem missing from digital--am I crazy? Am I sane? Who knows. And finally, I'm pondering the awesomeness that will be the uploading of all my college photography efforts. Oh, my secret artsyfartsyness, you will soon be revealed to all.

The question after THAT, of course, is... what if I did make my own dark room and develop my own negatives again? I could (theoretically) avoid the expenses of paper and enlargers by skipping that and just developing film to scan, and thus live in some crazy hybrid film/digital world. I'm not sure what the value would be, but I do keep saying that I need a hobby. This would actually be less expensive than replacing my film SLRs with digital, and I could explore that texture stuff I've been pondering. And plus... Ansel Adams wrote a whole damn book about negatives. There's something there. ;)

Novel rewrite

I'm having some very circular thoughts. There is a tiny but important piece of story logic that is missing from my novel, and my agent has offered suggestions--good ones--to nudge me into the right direction, and she's certainly right that I need to address it, but my brain is just running full-tilt around the mulberry bush and never finding the damn weasel.

If this were my dayjob, I'd send Outlook invites to a meeting and make people brainstorm with me on large pieces of paper.

Are writers allowed to do that?

Actually, I sort of think I need to ask iuliamentis and vidensadastra to read the book and then get them very drunk and see what comes out of them. Unfortunately, they're not coming to Penguicon. Hrm. I may be jaunting off to Chicago sooner than I thought... Of course, the workshop is coming fast, and maybe I can pick the workshoppers' brains hard while I'm there.

The rest of the rewrite, I can handle easily. Most of it is very minor stuff that I have figured out how to solve with a sentence dropped in here, a paragraph there. There is one largeish (10,000 words) section that needs a thorough rewrite, pretty much ground up. But not bad, overall.

Agent hunt

I'm supposed to be done with agent hunting, right? And I technically am. Except that, while my first three queries yielded me an offer of representation--they also yielded two rejections. And hey, my response to my first rejection was to send out six more queries! And I've since gotten two rejections, and two requests for partials. And one of the partial requests came in the snail, and I have to snail back my regrets letter. And who knows what the last two responses will be? Anyway. I'm not done, in other words.

When I am fully, finally done--is there anyone out there agent-hunting (or about to be) who would find it useful for me to perform a post-mortem on the hunt? Or is that just... annoying?

Being Erica

Am I the only person watching this show? I really love it. I know it's already aired in Canada, and it's being aired on the semi-obscure Soap Network in the US, but for serious, it's a good show, it passes the Bechdel test all over the place, and to me, it reads like an excellent take down of chick lit. You have a quirky heroine who actually accepts that her choices have led her to where she is, and instead of Bridget Jonesing her way through life, tries to come to terms with her past, owns and apologizes for her mistakes, and otherwise recognizes that one's 30s are actually a pretty good time to grow the hell up. (Not that I don't love Bridget Jones; I'm just very weary of all that has come after it. Bigly weary.) Plus, there's a time travel component. Which is always going to sell me.

So. Yes? Am I the only one watching?

Thanks to pollyc, gwynnega, ktsparrow, fiction_theory, tinaconnelly, sartorias and stillnotbored, I managed to get together a query letter that has, apparently, done at least part of its job at least once. An agent emailed me to ask for a partial last night.

I'm stoked, obviously, and for the obvious reasons, because as far as I've yet to go, it means I've come far already. And because, as I said, it means the query works okay. It could probably be better. But it's at least good enough to get the door wedged open enough so that the actual book can do some of the talking. Which is kind of important.

(I was pretty worried that I'd only be able to write "gaugh" queries and that my work would remain unseen forever.)

So. One hurdle cleared. Onward. Thanks again, folks.

I'm tired, in a sort of dizzy way, which is probably because of the many stupid things I did today, like drinking Diet Pepsi after 7pm and not eating at all until about 4pm (except for three dried cherries) (which is something I have NOT done in years) and taking a super-long nap between 1 and 4. I also took two of the cats to the vet today, but that was loads earlier. Verdict: Mordred has gained a pound and a half. The other three cats have each lost half a pound this year. (whispering) I think I know where their pounds went.

Mordred, the big stupid baby, peed himself in the carrier. *sigh* Still, less stressful than Merlin removing several of his claws in frantic attempts to escape. I think, maybe we should consider a cloth carrier for Merlin. Definitely not for Pee-paws.

Anyway, I'm not in the mood to read, and certainly not to write, so I will inflict you with reports on my recent media consumptions.

First, Bones had a circus episode in which Booth and Brennan went undercover as a knife-throwing duo who called each other Wanda and Buck for half the episode, and then switched to being Russians. It was like crackfic. The very next episode was Hockey!Booth, and all I could think was tell me dsudis knows about this. I haven't seen much of Bones this year because of our epic DVR/satellite failures, but I must also say, fake-OC-Ryan-lab-assistant makes me happy. And he plays hockey with Booth. I hope he becomes the Zak replacement.

Second, I watched the recent Wuthering Heights on Masterpiece... Oh, hey! This actually hasn't been released in the UK yet. Must be the first recent adaptation that hasn't been. Anyway, I've only read the book once, and it was years ago, but I thought that the adaptation did an excellent job sorting it all out. The framing story tenant-dude is gone, but that's absolutely no matter.

Everyone in the cast looked terribly familiar, but when I went through IMDB, I couldn't see why, except in two or three cases.

Heathcliff was well-characterized; I never saw why Cathy loved him in the book, but I could see it here. The actor who played him, Tom Hardy, looked grotesque and unattractive as Old Heathcliff, but as hopeful young Heathcliff, he actually sort of appealed to me. Impressive. And he was rough and rude and just as evil-yet-attractive as Heathcliff should be, and managed to be horrible and yet comprehensible and occasionally even sympathetic. (Sort of.) And Cathy and Catherine, and indeed, all the female characters, I thought, were very well=played, and well-written. Including Isabella, who has come across as a cipher in other productions, and maybe also the book.

Third: Dear Lost: I love you. Let us never fight again.

Fourth: Blades of Glory. Dann and I laughed stupid amounts. You did your job. But the universe/production companies involved need to stop forcing Will Ferrel's torso on me. It's not funny anymore. I keep just trying to figure out why he has an indentation on his right side, too high to be an appendectomy scar, and being vaguely annoyed that it's this joke again.

Finally, in terms of other media consumption, I've been listening to the audiobook of Breaking Dawn, since I kept being unable to open the book. And... it's not nearly as horrible as I've been led to believe from the hysteria. And yet, it's not... good. The foreshadowing and authorial intrusion is terribly heavy-handed. How can one, in good conscience, have your main character reassure the romantic rival that "this may all seem bad now, but I bet it's going to turn out good, and this is all happening for a reason--just stick around!" --almost literally what's said. Yikes.

If this were an epic piece of fanfiction, people would love it. There are callbacks and callbacks and callbacks to the previous books. And there is absolutely no new ground being broken, not in any meaningful way: I mean, there *is* the midichlorian move, when Carlisle starts counting everyone's chromosomes (humans have 23 pairs, vamps have... Oh, whatever. It's stupid). Anyway, the reason I say it's like fic is because there's lots of wedging things in to fit previous canon, and very little going on that makes this feel like it is its own book. Oh, Jacqueline Carey, you were so right when you said it's dangerous to give fans what they think they want.

That said, I think the backlash has been unduly harsh. No one reacted this badly when God Emperor of Dune came out. And I couldn't even get a hundred pages through that.

Hey, I think the caffeine wore off. I can go to bed. Yay!

I'm terrible sleepsity right now, but I must post my ConFusion schedule (ConFusion: http://www.stilyagi.org/cons/confusion.html), where I anticipate meeting catrambo and buying jimhines some sort of beverage to say, "Thanks for being The Awesome Guy on the Internets Who Gives Me Hope for Humanity." And such things of that nature.

I will also be there with the usual suspects... the splash_the_cat, the daveamongus, the vidensadastra, the iuliamentis, of course (three of these come with the hotel room!), and hope to see the becoming-usual steve_buchheit, jeffreyab... and many more! (Is this a tappu year? I will find out shortly!)

My panels this year:

Smut and Nothing but Smut 10:00 PM Friday Dennison III
David Rozian, Kelley Armstrong, Anne Harris, Merrie Haskell, and Violette Malan
A discussion of sex scenes in genre fiction and whether they have any redeeming literary value or are they just inserted for prurient interest to sell the book.
I'm not afraid of this one. I have... Opinions.

The Short Story 12:00 PM Saturday Salon E
Cat Rambo, William Jones, Merrie Haskell, Jim Hines [M], and Steve Buchheit
The best of these are an art form unto themselves. Where can we find them? How has the electronic age affected them? Selling short stories -- aimed at telling people how to submit short stories, how to get started and keep it up.
Can do this one in my sleep at this point, which is fortunate, because I'm going to need sleep.

Paranormal Romance: Meet the New Boss 3:00 PM Saturday Salon H
Kelley Armstrong, Melody Barker, Merrie Haskell [M], Steven Harper Piziks
Meet the New Boss about love, vampires and werewolves is the new economic engine of the genre. Where did it come from? Who writes it? Who reads it?
I'm glad I'm moderating, because the sudden appearance of Kelley Armstrong has sort of awed me. Shockingly, I'm much less opinionated in front of persons with more experience and authority than me. However, if you have any advice--or better, questions--about Paranormal Romance, comment with them! I'll attempt to write a semi-decent panel report in return.

Gadgetering 12:00 PM Sunday Dennison I/II
Cory Doctorow, David Rozian, Merrie Haskell, Philip Edward Kaldon and Freon
Creating gadgets in SCIENCE fiction
I'm not sure why SCIENCE is all capitalized like that? But I'm not sure that this is a *hard* topic? Just writers saying, "Well, I do thus and such?" and "Boy howdy, I like Q." Am I underthinking this? Why am I the only woman? Am I doing gadgets wrong in my fiction? Am I undergadgety to be on this panel, or am I overgadgety for my gender? I'll let you know next week, I guess.

Anyway, I'll be around. Comment if you want to meet up. Pop me an email if you want my cell number. (mythos (at) merrie haskell (dot) com)

Did I ever tell you guys about the time Dann and I drove through Death Valley, and I was so paranoid about shriveling up into Folger's crystals without realizing it that I drank like a gallon of water before we got halfway into the valley, and I had to make Dann stop and let me pee by the side of the road?

Today was a little like that. I was so ready to be Alberta Clipperized that on my way to the car, I had to stop and take off some of my layers so I could breathe. I was sweating too much under my neck warmer and ear warmer and hood and down and wool and everything.

And I was so worried that I was underprepared....

Rampion in the Belltower is now up as a podcast over at Dunesteef! After dreams of being chased by evil robots all night, it was refreshing to revisit medieval zombies--mostly because they aren't on-screen too much. Phew.

---

Also, I totally failed to reflect on how 2008 was a great year for me, writing-wise, because I increased my flexibility so much. Here are my favorite lessons of the year. Feel free to embrace or ignore them as you find it helpful.

1) When critiquing, a big dose of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is always advisable. i.e., never tell a writer they're doing it wrong if the wrongness works, or does not hinder the rest of the story. <--also applies to own work.

2) Kill all your precious rule-darlings. And everyone else's.

3) It's perfectly okay to switch person if it will get the story finished and out of you. (See #2) (This is how I'm going to rewrite Brook's book, without going insane--someday.)

4) It's not just about giving yourself permission to write badly. It's also about giving yourself permission to write well. To do rolling revisions if you want. To produce a semi-perfect first draft because rewriting kills you.

5) Your procedure can change with the month, week or day, if it needs to. If today you need the lamp on your right on, and the lamp on your left off, turn the lamps on or off, and write. Tomorrow, you can have the lamps how you want, too. Even if it's both off. Likewise, "I have to write at least a thousand words a day" is great for a week, but next week, maybe it needs to be a hundred.

6) If it's not hard, that doesn't mean you're writing crap, just like when it's hard, it doesn't mean you're writing crap. The hardness has no correlation to the crapness for you, thus far.

I feel like there was more, but those are the big ones that come up when I think about this year. Huge break-throughs, each one of them.

Scary that that's what constitutes a break-through for me, hm?

...because I wanted to say something about mindfulness.

I used to be so observant of the world. I think it was a kind of mindfulness, to be so very aware of everything around me. The nuanced beauty of the way the light hit the branches of a tree or the scent of honeysuckle or... Now I'm always so busy, and have been for ten, fifteen years. But it's slowly coming back to me.

I find myself moving more deliberately. Stopping to notice the way streetlamps cast umbrellas of pouring light down on the parking lot in the fog. Stopping to watch the sparkles of the ice on my car. There are more pauses lately. I'm not as enamored of the world as I was when I was fifteen, and I'm not as impressed by temporary beauty. I don't feel things as strongly as I did then; there just aren't the hormones racing through my body like there were then, and I'm not fighting so strongly for an identity. I kind of hope pregnancy is as fraught as its promised to be, because I miss that. Just for a little while, I want to be so in love with the world I can't think straight anymore. (ETA: NOT PREGNANT.)

I used to think, before puberty, that maybe I didn't feel emotions properly. I so rarely got upset about things. I think that was combination of many factors--and perhaps I didn't feel emotions properly. It's not like childhood was easy for me. But is it easy for anyone? My familial culture, which is a distillation of Prussian, Swiss and Dutch attitudes run through the immigrant-farmer wringer, is that we become more calm and determined in the face of adversity. I've spent a lot of time being calm.

But puberty hit, and even as calm as I was, I wrote these journals full of raptures about the roses or pansies or catmint I saw on the walk home from the bus-stop, or the noise of the frogs on the pond or in the trees, or the quality of the starlight outside my window. I still notice these things, and I'm noticing them more, but I don't feel them like I did.

It's different because none of it is for the first time, anymore; and these temporary beauties, fleeting as they are, are things I know will come again. It's hard to go home and write pages about them.

But still, I'm noticing things more again. I'm trying not to constantly hate winter, for example; I'm trying to notice the temperature variation between 7 degrees and 22, and notice the way it feels when ice chunks plop onto my face versus snow bullets spraying into my eyes... And not think so much about the drive, and how much I hate it.

Hm. No moral lesson here. That's just what's going on.

Seriously, after reading about matociquala's caving adventure and watching a documentary on the Darien Gap and spending much of yesterday watching North & South and cleaning, I'm feeling a bit wanderlusty, which is at distinct odds with the weather, which makes me feel stayinsidey.

So, a meme, stolen from vincam, originating somewhere in the vicinity of autopope, customized by me.

* Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer:
Eleven, I think. Before that, I think I thought about it? But at 11, I really knew that was what I wanted.

( and so on. )

Let's revisit that bad boy in ten years' time, let's say...

( Mr. Rochester is supposed to be UGLY. My textual evidence: let me show you it. )

And yet, Hollywood (okay, the BBC, really) persists in portraying Mr. Rochester with the hottest hotties that hotted. Like Toby Stephens.

( Toby. Who also happens to be Dame Maggie Smith's son. I don't know how being Professor McGonnigal's son makes someone hotter, but it *does*. )
Also, don't you think Toby should totally play Damian Lewis's brother sometime?

Actually, I lied. Hollywood does an okay job at not finding the hottest hotties that hotted for the rest of the Rochesters. But they have yet to find anyone actually ugly for the role. I think Orson Welles comes closest:

( Orson Welles. )

The forehead is so right! And he's not... chiselly. The way Toby is. And his eyes are skeery.

I disapproved of moon-faced Ciaran Hinds in this role, though I'm looking at the pics and thinking: you-gly.

( I mean, seriously, especially compared to the hotness that is Ciaran Hinds as Caesar and Wentworth. )

And John Hurt is far too blond. And let us not speak of Timothy Dalton. He was up there way past Toby Stephens in the classically handsome land, though not personally to my taste.

So I started to really think: what DID Rochester look like? ( John C. Reilly? )

Nah. I probably only think that because of Orson Welles.

Mr. Rochester was Charlotte Bront;ë's weird mish-mash of (certainly) her youthful fantasies based on Lord Byron and (probably) the married man she fell in love with while at school in Brussels, Constantin Heger (also, her teacher). The physical descriptions of Heger and Rochester are pretty much a match, and Heger didn't mind reducing Charlotte to tears in the course of teaching her, which, okay, somehow fits with Rochester in my mind.

( Heger )

So. Rochester is basically built like a wrestler, or... something. And looks like Heger. Ish. So....

( This is what I'm thinking. )

Yes, that's professional wrestler Hunter Hearst Helmsley.

I am SO going to literary hell.

Not that I'm cranky, I'm just making it because I just sorta realized I am going to have to lock down my talky mouth about writing this book, just like the last one, because that's apparently how I function: I am a totally batshit insane superstitious crazy pants who can't talk about books while she's writing them or she kills them dead.

Other than that, I'm shockingly happy and optimistic, and it might have had something to do with the election. I've given myself until Inauguration Day to bask. So. Seventy-five more days of unfettered awesome!

Yes, this is silly and naive. I know it is. But a few years ago, I realized I had lost my capacity to daydream silly, wonderful, awesome futures for myself. That I was always, always, always preparing myself for disappointment. And at some point, I realized that was a very sucky way to live, and gave myself permission to daydream again.

What's life without some wild optimism now and again?

It's a life I don't want, is what it is.

So, I'm embracing my giddiness and enjoying myself for a while. For the next seventy-five days, I'm also going to be Totally Positive that I'm going to sell a novel next year, too, and, and, oh, all the other things that I daydream about that I don't necessarily want to tell the world, up to and including the alternate future where I get a classic car and start solving supernatural crimes with splash_the_cat, iuliamentis and dsudis on a weekly basis. It's fun.

January 21st is soon enough for a reality check.

Or the 22nd, anyway. I bet January 21st will be pretty kick-ass, actually.