Tag Archives: writer life

August 30, 2015 · 4:35 pm

WIP notes

OMG, the current work in progress is a complete pantser frolic. Or at least as pantser as I can get these days. While I have a rough outline sketched out on paper and a length limit in mind (which means I’m watching word count as a part of my pacing), the rest of it—characterization, names, settings—is completely freeform and random except for occasional notes scribbled down when traveling. I don’t know if it’s because this particular story demands this style or if I just needed a break from the tight structure of Netwalk’s Children. Either option is possible.

I don’t even have a solid name for this story yet. It started out as Welcome to Klone Lane, and then part of it became Welcome to the Mudhole Gathering, and now it’s operating under the working title of Klone’s Folly. I wrote part of it as first person, part as third, and spent a day rewriting the third to put it back into first. Originally the setting was going to be pretty much mundane with intrusions from the supernatural, but now it’s in a world where the presence of elementals and cryptids are accepted…and where such beings might be an ill-kept national defense secret. How does it work? I dunno yet. Right now the back brain wants to go on an absolute, total romp of a story and I’m cruising along for the ride.

I needed this. To be honest, I have some stories planned that are just this sort of thing—a total pantser rip—and others, like Children, where I’m working with complex themes and structure.

So I’m having fun with the adventures of Reeni Dutta, special education teacher on the run from a possessive blood-sucking elemental ex-husband and his coterie, tutoring an unruly group of cryptid kids who may be getting trained to be weapons in a mysterious war of mages—and aren’t what they seem, either. I call it Jane Eyre meets Frankenstein’s Monster.

But oh, the rewrite and beta reading is gonna be tough.

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August 24, 2015 · 4:01 pm

So it was a Worldcon

And it almost didn’t happen for me. See, the horse has been having health issues, and given the expense of the beast, if it looked like I needed to stay home to take care of her, well…as late as the Friday before the con, it was questionable because she was showing signs of colic. That subsided with no incident, fortunately, though the original attack of what we thought was founder/laminitis kept on bothering her. But it wasn’t quite what I thought was founder/laminitis, things didn’t look right…but she was in good spirits so we decided to go. Plus I had Sergeant-at-Arms commitments for con staff, so I needed to figure out what was what so that I could ensure coverage should I not be able to go. Which didn’t happen, fortunately. But.

Well. There’s been a bit of fire around Enterprise of late. Nothing particularly close when we left, except for a wee bit of fire north of town, along the route we were taking. Going to Spokane was all right, though, even with all the smoke. The first day was a bit of a challenge, though, simply because I was using both a walker and a peg leg to get around and keep the pressure off of the sprained ankle. It didn’t take me long to bag the peg leg and stick with the walker. I could put my knee on it, crouch down like a ski racer, and actually make some decent time around the Convention Center doing that, and the walker also provided me with a solid rest for my main Stuff Bag.

Then I discovered that walkers seem to render me invisible at parties. The first night’s party was a wee bit distressing when I figured that out. I usually like to socialize, but between the awkwardness and the invisibility, it certainly Wasn’t Fun. Nonetheless, I got back to the hotel at a reasonable hour, because I had the WSFS Business Meeting to do logistics for as Sergeant-at-Arms. I recruited some helpful friends, and between them we got things up and rolling for four morning meetings.

The gig was enlightening, and I have to say that WSFS Business Meetings are conducted with much more wit, humor, and grace than I’ve encountered either in teacher union meetings (including OEA Representative Assembly) or Democratic Party Central Committee gatherings (both state and county). Much of that was due to the good humor and grace of Kevin Standlee, who’s hands down the best chair I’ve ever had to work with. But a lot of that was also due to the hard work put in by the committee overall to prepare for the meeting, again including Kevin and his wife Lisa as well as far too many others that I can’t name for memory reasons or other stuff. But there were a lot of other good folks helping to coordinate logistics, including CART transcription technology and ASL signing along with the regular PowerPoint agenda slides.

Still, the attitude of the attendees (in spite of the urgency felt to deal with Hugo nomination issues) also made a huge difference. Many of these folks are fans of long standing and remember a LOT about processes. But that doesn’t mean people couldn’t have fun. This was the first time I’ve had someone pass out a Meeting Bingo card with the names of frequent speakers on the card to fill out (before the meeting) and announce Bingos as the frequent speakers spoke. On the third day, one particular fan created a filk (sf folk song) to sum up his position, and sang it to the crowd. That was another first.

But overall, my job was more about making certain that people with disabilities had physical access to following the meeting and being able to comment, making certain that we had a table set up for members to sign in and pick up agendas, and on one day to alert the convention center crew that we needed to have a divider removed between two rooms. Simple little stuff that nonetheless makes meetings work. I’m pleased with the job my team and I did, and proud that we had a lot of people happy with our work. Between all my volunteer gigs and ten years of middle school teaching, I can wrangle people pretty well, especially when given a good support team.

Besides that, I spent some time at the NIWA table promoting books, and meeting up with friends. My ankle definitely slowed me down just because wrangling the walker was still tiring. After a morning’s meeting I wasn’t that eager to bounce out and socialize/self-promote, which meant Worldcon was much more mellow than I had planned. Which was okay, I guess. I wish I’d been able to contact more people I knew–I saw some folks in passing that I would have liked to have spent more time with, but couldn’t for various reasons.

The Hugo Awards themselves were anti-climatic. I decided it would be better to watch on the big screen in Guinan’s Place (a bar setup in the convention center) than in the auditorium itself, especially since that meant I could get a drink or two. The Campbell Award kind of signaled to me that the hard-line anti-puppy vote was in full force, and that became even more evident when No Award was issued in the editor categories.

For the record, I did not vote a complete No Puppy slate. I read all the works. Didn’t mean I completed them, mind you. Too many of the short story competitors made me want to reach for a red pen to do edits and the novelette/novella categories were the same. I didn’t like the results for the editors because with a couple of exceptions, all those folks are solid pros who got caught up in something they had nothing to do with. Additionally, I’m a bit jaundiced about the claims of 40/50-something white men (yes, yes, I know they’re not the only ones but they’re the most visible) that they’re not being recognized. It’s a power play for recognition, and it has succeeded to a small degree. No, I don’t think they will push out people of color or of non-cisnormal sexuality. That boat has sailed. Those groups rightfully have a place at the table and rightfully so, in my opinion. It’s the only just thing.

But. My sense is that the demographic that will get pushed out by these Puppies happens to be mine, quite frankly, because middle-aged white men throwing temper tantrums about their perceived lack of recognition end up dominating the slice which we share. Many older women who’ve deferred writing because of family responsibilities and day jobs end up discovering that they’re not cute enough, edgy enough, or connected enough due to past and current family responsibilities. When faced with a question of fairness, most of us tend to take the stance that “hey, it’s only fair that these discriminated groups have representation.” I believe that, because it’s right. Period. What I don’t like is the feeling that I’m being marginalized, though, because I’m a white woman over 50–and I’ve seen enough ageism in the employment market to recognize it in other settings. It’s annoying as hell to deal with.

The last day turned out to be more hectic than I anticipated. The little fire in the Wenaha-Tuscannon Wilderness that laid down nothing more than smoke on our way to the con blew up on Thursday night, leading to the evacuation of the small town of Troy on the Grande Ronde River and Level 2 evacuation alerts along the road we would have taken home. And then I saw that the barn was on a Level 1 alert due to the Falls Creek Fire up Hurricane Creek. Between that and a report that Mocha was still sore, I had to leave the con at noon on Sunday and rush back to Enterprise. We got here, I was able to talk to the barn owner about the situation (better than I thought, though she had to evacuate horses from the other fire).

And…Mocha looked crippled as heck. I picked up the offending hoof, started to pick it out…and got a spurt of white-brown fluid oozing from by her toe. Abscess. Hopefully it’s just a simple abscess which has been plaguing her over the past few months and not subacute founder. It actually explains her quick apparent recovery and relapse. There are ways it could be bad…but we’ll see. I’ll know in an hour.

So that was a Worldcon. Fun in many ways, opportunities missed in others, but…I did a good job at what I was supposed to do and that’s huge. Not able to promote my writing as much as I could have wanted, but these days I’m not always sure that’s a doable proposition. And I did have fun, plus came home with a select choice of books. Don’t know if there’s another one in my future, but one can always hope.

(Hint: buy books, buy books, buy books….)

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August 18, 2015 · 5:36 pm

Of Wind, and Grass, and Fire….

Too many years ago I wrote a review of Norman Maclean’s Of Young Men and Fire, about the deaths of fourteen firefighters in Mann Gulch in 1949, using the title above. I was experimenting with a particular voice, thinking about trying to break into creative nature writing. That little review is one of the pieces I kinda like, more of a mood piece reacting to the work rather than an out-and-out review where I mused on the likelihood that those of us going out to the woods could get caught in a similar situation.

And then the thing hit the street on July 5th 1994. The day before fourteen firefighters on the South Canyon fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado died in similar circumstances as the firefighters in Mann Gulch. The timing rocked me back a wee bit, but I guess it only had a meaning for me as we went camping through another dry, hot summer with high fire danger.

Time passed. We got too busy to do a lot of camping, and started focusing on other things. Woodland fire was a concern but only as it affected specific events, plus we went through several cool summers.

Now we’re back in a long, hot, dry summer. We’ve moved back to a rural community where fires can affect our lives not just by air quality but whether we can go out to the woods to harvest firewood, where we travel, and possibly even where the horse lives. We notice things like how green the grasses are under the trees and how many little burn scars by the interstate are new since the last time we drove through.

We survey the horizons, and pay attention to wind patterns and cloud formations in the hope that lightning will bring rain. Most of all, we think about the autumn rains to come.

But the rains are still at least six weeks out. That’s a long time when the world around you is a tinderbox.

Six weeks or more of thinking about wind, and grass, and fire.

Hopefully thinking is all I’ll have to do about it.

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August 12, 2015 · 1:26 pm

A preview of coming attractions

So while I’ve been moving and rearranging the life, and not at all keeping up with my ambitious publication schedule, there’s been a lot of other things happening in my writing world. If everything plays out correctly I should have at least three big projects hitting this fall, possibly four depending on rewrites and drafting times. And short stories. I need to keep writing short stories.

Project #1—Netwalk’s Children.

Finally. It’s done and in edits. The third book of the Netwalk Sequence is my most challenging one yet, because it’s the turning point of the series. The point of view is beginning the shift from Melanie to her daughter Bess. There’s major revelations about the real nature of the mysterious machine known as the Gizmo which the Corporate Courts were created to restrain and guard. There’s also some examinations of multi-generational family dynamics, the nature of digitally uploaded personalities, and a lot of hints about the revelations to come in the final book of the series, Netwalking Space. That doesn’t mean I won’t write a few more things in the Netwalk world—there’s still a set of The Disruption Chronicles to finish and publish as an omnibus. But Space will finish out my primary vision for the Netwalk Sequence. I’ll probably start work on it next spring with a goal of getting it out in time for Christmas 2016.

Netwalk’s Children should be out in October or November, in time for Orycon.

Project # 2—Pledges of Honor

Originally, I sold this work to a small press publisher. Stuff happened, and I got the rights back. Pledges is my high fantasy with a setting based on the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century interior Pacific Northwest instead of medieval Europe, about the transition of a young woman into a God. Well, that’s the series arc but not necessarily a book arc. The series and the books beyond Pledges are still in development. I’m wrestling with anti-colonialism themes in this one and Pledges barely touches those because its POV character is an outsider who turns out to be an insider. Let’s just say that the basic motivation of this story was the question, “What happens if colonial exiles united with the people they were supposed to colonize to overthrow the original, corrupt colonial empire?” A difficult subject and one I want to do right, because I want my colonial exiles to be the ones who get assimilated. Flipping of the tables, one might say. And I’m operating from the assumption that a society that has moved into its colonial conquest days is eventually going to fall.

Pledges has gone through a number of edits, so I just need to fix breadcrumbs hinting at later developments in the series plus make a final pass through it. I’m hoping to have it out for Christmas 2015. I have a kernel for the second book left over from an internship with Nalo Hopkinson, but boy does it ever need work. Nonetheless, I’ve got some ideas and will be talking more about this series once I get more pieces of it together.

Project #3—Do It Right in Space: Bess and Alex (working title)

This is going to be an omnibus release incorporating two already published novelettes and a novella I’ve still got to put up about Bess and Alex from the Netwalk Sequence. Tranquility Freeriders earned me a Writers of the Future SemiFinalist nomination but it’s not found a lot of love since. In any case, it’s about ambitious interns who figure out how to use skis for emergency evacuations on the Moon. Originally I wrote it for a Heinlein Society contest, then decided I didn’t like the contest constraints and sent it to WotF instead. Too High to Fall was a Finalist in a Story Builder contest and came out in Shelter of Daylight a few years ago, and is a space station mystery centered around a surprisingly stealthed dead skimmer near space station DIR 1. Of Archangels and Fuzzy Green Mascots was developed in a James Gunn short story online course I took a few years ago. It earned an Honorable Mention in WotF but didn’t find much love when I tried to sell it, so I’ve expanded it into a longer work to fit into this omnibus. It’s another space station mystery dealing with sabotage and the Gizmo.

Should be a Christmas 2015 release. Archangels is out on Amazon as a Kindle Unlimited short, and I’ll be running a freebie on it around Sasquan time.

Possible Project # 4—Klone Lane/Klone’s Folly

This is supposed to be a fun little romp of a novella—my Jane Eyre meets Frankenstein in the contemporary interior Pacific Northwest. Reeni grabs at a job as a tutor in an isolated mountain compound to get away from an abusive ex-husband. But she finds out that not only is her ex Karl not human, but neither are her students. Still in early drafts, so I don’t know how far I’ll get with it. I may not get it done before 2016, depending on what happens with the other projects.

Possible Project #5–And other stuff.

I also plan to write more short stories on spec as well to specific anthologies—have two of those prospects that I need to develop right now. I’m also branching out into creative nonfiction and am trying to write those essays as well.

So. Lots going on.

Project #6– Newsletter announcement

I will be releasing my first newsletter in a few days. I don’t plan to spam folks so you should be getting posts about 3-6 times a year, depending on my convention and release schedules. Besides cool pix and stuff that won’t show up on either Facebook or the blog, I’ll be doing a giveaway directly from the newsletter. Stay tuned for further details.

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August 11, 2015 · 6:28 pm

Adventures in self-publishing

So today was designated as Make Chapbook for Worldcon today. I’d gone out of my way to make sure that the paper cutter came with me but I needed that for bookmarks, not chapbooks…and I realized that the long-arm stapler still lives in the garage in Portland and I’m up here in Enterprise. ARRGH. I called a local print shop, and they had one handy.

But. I had to format the chapbook first, and…well, while I had written instructions on how to transform it from Scrivener to Word, I’d left out a few formatting steps. And it had been eight months since I’ve last done this. Fortunately, I could refer back to the first chapbook I produced, both in Scrivener and in Word, and between the two I finally got everything put together. The cover ended up being easier than I thought.

The one thing I hadn’t counted on was how thick the chapbook was. It didn’t help that when I tried to use the print shop stapler, I inadvertently was trying to staple two chapbooks. Still, I came home, carefully rolled the back page, and used my heavy-duty stapler to do the job. Success!

The books are now stacked under a pile of heavy books to flatten them out. One reason I made them was so that I would have something light to carry around Worldcon for sale, trade, or giveaway. And the story?

Why this one, of course:cover

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July 29, 2015 · 1:04 pm

Writing and the New Life

It’s taken me a while, but I’m finally setting into a work process here in Enterprise. The biggest challenge is finding the time I need to write while doing the other stuff we want to do. I finally had to reach the place where I realized that some of those other activities were more time-dependent than the writing. Writing can go anywhere (unless I’m editing a novel, and then that’s a bit more complex) and be done anytime in this new life where I’m not beating my brains trying to solve kid learning problems.

It also helps to have a nice office setup. The smallest bedroom in this house is my office (and when I say small, I mean small by US standards. A queen mattress effectively takes up the whole room). Still, I’ve managed to set up a computer desk area where the desktop lives with a side desk working area, a vertical filing cabinet, a second desk for editing/hand work/jewelry design, a couple of supply storage cubbies, and four bookshelves. Once I got the office set up, the brain cleared out and I could write.

Timing is a bigger challenge. Some activities such as fishing or woodcutting are time-dependent. But I’ve figured out other ways to handle them. Woodcutting is an excellent writing opportunity. Right now we have to get up and hustle out to the woods early in the morning due to fire restrictions which require that all chainsaws shut down at 1 pm (otherwise known as “hoot owl” logging). We leave the house to drive about twenty miles to where our permit lets us cut. The ideal is to have a location scouted out where we can cut several loads worth according to Forest Service restrictions—dead trees, can’t be any green needles, no ponderosa pine live or dead, no whitebark pine (but we’re not cutting at that altitude). That means we’re cutting lodgepole and red fir mostly, with the occasional prized tamarack (Western larch).

When I don’t have a sprained ankle, my primary job in the woodcutting endeavor is helping load the pickup. DH does all the chainsaw work, so my secondary job is to be around in case of problems. Granted, the most I could do is administer first aid, then haul him into the truck and drive as fast as I dared for help because there’s no cell service in the woods, but that’s the way things go. It helps that he’s experienced and careful.

While he’s cutting up wood, then, I have time to sit somewhere with notepad and pen to scribble out work. Between dust and sawdust I don’t really want to haul the laptop out to the woods, and this way I don’t have to worry about charging. I’ve found that the pickup tailgate makes a nice workplace, along with assorted dead logs on the side of the ridge (usually the forbidden ponderosa pine).

I’ve completed planning on one story, revisions on another, and cranked out the rough draft of an essay while doing this. The breaks to load the truck end up falling in the right sequence to keep the creative juices flowing, and the occasional interruptions to look at wildlife such as the fledgling Northern Goshawks near our first multiple load site turn out to be quick breaks.

Happy sigh.

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June 1, 2015 · 8:32 pm

We can haz interwebs niow

As of today, we now have Real Internet in Enterprise. Not hotspot, not coffee shop, but our very own Real Stuff. It involved stringing cable from a dish mounted on the house and all, but…yeah. Hello, we’re back.

It’s been a busy month here, without a lot of writing. We pretty much finished cleaning up the house in Portland for son and roommate, and now have lots of boxes to move. Meanwhile, up here in Enterprise, we’ve been painting and organizing, and are now starting to get somewhere. The house feels like home, even with loads of boxes around.

Writing hasn’t really been getting done, not until the past two mornings where I’ve dashed off 800-1000 words. I think I needed processing time and down time because the back-and-forth nonstop hustle in Portland and Enterprise was getting to me. But Miscon, and then friends coming to visit kind of gave us a break.

Dealing with Mocha has also been an ongoing challenge. She aggressively did not like the change and spent a good four weeks fighting it. Between not eating and pacing, she lost weight and condition. We had to modify Portland travel plans to come back and work with her, putting on a blanket and holding her with a rope at her manger so she’d eat her hay. While there were pigs on the place that distressed her, there’s been enough deliberate crossings-of-boundaries attempts to tell me that scared and frightened horse was now angry horse. So it’s been a long, slow progress of reestablishing training basics. Lots of groundwork–nothing fancy or showy, just lots of walk, whoa, back, pay attention to me, focus, yield, respect my space type of things. And all of it went to pieces around the pigs, who are penned next to the arena.

It all came to a head over the past week. First, Mocha was resistant with the new farrier. She’d start slipping into the old relaxed mode, and then he’d do something different and that would get her all tensed up again and resistant. A couple of times, he just reached under her neck and hugged her into him. He’s a big cowboy type, certified and works with a vet clinic. At last he thumped her in the belly. After that, I put a chain over her nose and between the two, she stood. The barn owner suggested that maybe the big line of sprinklers was bothering her so we made a pilgrimage to the sprinklers and she got a good look at the world.

She was a much quieter horse after that.

But. The next day, she pitched a huge hissy fit at the hitching rail. Now this rail is solid, a hollow iron rail set into concrete posts. I tied her up at a safe short length. She wanted to eat grass, and set about fighting the rope and trying to stretch it out. When she couldn’t do that, she started pawing and stomping at the mats, then leveraging herself around. She couldn’t whack the rail with her right hip like she really likes to do, and I wasn’t set up for this fight. She got poked in the butt with an apple picker a couple of times when she wouldn’t listen to the cue to move over. She would stand when being handled, but if I went out of sight to get something, she pitched a fit. What she needed was a long session of being tied until she remembered her training to stand quietly, but for whatever reason, that day wasn’t it. So I waited until we had a few moments of relative quiet, discussed the situation with the barn owner via text, and got clearance for what needed to happen.

Which happened the next day. I came prepared. Made sure the space was set up safely, then…tied Mocha and let her blow up. She pawed with both fores, tried to kick the post once, slammed her shoulder into the rail, screamed, and just threw a tantrum. But a very slow, careful, deliberate tantrum. That’s the thing. She never lost her head the whole time she fought that hitching rail. Never did anything to throw herself, kept her movements careful and calculated, never pulled back on the rope, just thrust her head down but very carefully not under the rail. Pushed things enough to search out possible weaknesses but not enough to hurt herself. Classic example of a trained horse having a complete and total meltdown.

Every time she calmed down slightly I’d go over and rub her head, feed her a treat, then walk away to see if she would start fighting and fussing again. I didn’t just want her to stand tied, I wanted her to stand tied when I was out of sight for a long period of time. It’s not safe otherwise and I foresee the need for her to stand tied to a horse trailer in the future. But there was more to it than that. This was one of the first lessons she was taught in her home barn. She needed to remember this fundamental lesson and grasp that even though we had changed locations long-term, the basic rules still held. I had come to realize that until she grasped that concept, we were going to have problems.

At last she quieted and I could see the change in attitude. So I put a long heavy lunge line on her and let her graze for a while, then walked her out to the sprinklers.

Things changed after that blowout. Since then, she’s been more relaxed. I can walk to the car and she’ll look for me but not fret. We’ve had several good encounters with the pigs. She’s still tense and looky in that corner, but today she startled them at one point and she realized she’d made them move and that changed her attitude. She’s had a massage treatment that she clearly enjoyed. She remembers more of her old routines though I’m still getting passive resistance at times–I’m going to be working on reinstalling manners in her for a while, it seems.

But at least things are on track. I’ve more thoughts about the move, but stuff is going to be happening for the next few days. We’ll see how it all shakes out.

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May 6, 2015 · 9:23 am

Briefly emerging from internet semi-silence

Looks like my intermittent internet presence will continue until after Miscon, folks. Not that anyone in particular is missing me, I’m sure, but still…

No pix yet because I am not quite adventurous enough to try uploading some pix to the big computer with anything more than a personal hotspot, and etc, etc, etc. Nonetheless, we’re in the moving process and getting things figured out, worked in, and all that good stuff. Projections now are for chaos for the next few months as we work through painting at the Enterprise house, hauling the remainder of stuff to Enterprise, and etc, etc, etc. My current high-speed access is at a coffee shop where my phone doesn’t work (the joys of Bowlby Stone).

But. Good stuff is happening all around. We have successfully made three trips with horse trailer, two with furniture, one with horse, and today we embark on the monthly entertainment of hauling horse hay. Horse hauled well but she is currently in a huge snit because she doesn’t like living in an outside pen with pigs and stallions around, she doesn’t like being alone in a stall by herself, and she’s pacing and just ticked off at the world in general. Still–her feet look better than ever, she’s holding her weight and looking hard and fit in spite of the pacing, she is playing in the creek, and she’s back to normal under saddle. She’s also eating and drinking. And I’m riding my sweet mare at the foot of the Wallowas. Stunning views.

Painting is proceeding slower than we anticipated, but it’s still going along. I’ve made contact with the local Handcrafters Guild and plan to have a booth at their Christmas bazaar the first weekend in December. I’m also getting on the local school substitute list. I have placed books in the local independent bookstore, the Bookloft. Hopefully I’ll be a reader when the monthly Fishtrap readings start up in the fall. Making writer, teacher, and artisan connections slowly, starting on horseperson connections as well.

Netwalk’s Children is also progressing slowly but surely. The slow pace of the writing is helping me figure out some plot twists, which is good.

We’re also discovering some cool new places around here. The Lostine Tavern would not be out of place in Portland or Seattle, and IMO (but not hubby’s) it beats the pants off of McMenamin’s. Locally grown beef, one of the best gluten-free buns I’ve eaten, great fries, local brews…not to be missed. Speaking of local brews, if you’re quaffing a Terminal Gravity, then that’s brewed about a half mile from the house.

So connection and communication is intermittent right now. If you’ve got the phone number, though, feel free to text or call.

And now I’m going back to wrestling with ACX and approving the Alien Savvy audiobook.

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April 22, 2015 · 11:24 pm

It’s been a crazy April

Um. Yeah. So let’s see. Hubby retired. I am madly scribbling on the rough draft of Netwalk’s Children, sandwiched in between snarking about Sad/Rabid Puppies, dealing with moving shit, packing, packing, packing, and oh, did I mention packing? And other stuff.

We hauled a load of furniture to Enterprise with the horse trailer. Outside of one scary moment when someone cut in front of me in Portland with a heavy trailer behind (and oh yeah, having to adjust things out of the driveway because we’d overloaded), it was uneventful. Slow, long, but uneventful. I had one chivalrous fella ask me if things were all right when we stopped to check fluids and such at Hermiston rest area before heading over Cabbage Hill–nope, just SOP stuff for newbie trailer drivers used to nursing along older vehicles. But the truck pulled a heavy-laden trailer over the Blues just fine (I was considering the irony of retracing ancestral steps except that’s right, the ancestors came in on the Applegate Trail and didn’t go anywhere near the Blues. Fools.).

Then back to PDX, coping with a sole bruise on Mocha’s problematic left fore, and packing, packing, packing, and did I mention packing? We have a good chunk of the house packed up and the son is getting antsy about the rest of it. Eh. I’m at the stage where I’ll abandon stuff rather than haul it. The joy of being a retired teacher is that you replicate this stage of packing every year at the end of the school year, so I’m kind of jaded at this point about this stage of packing. It is The Stage That Goes On Forever. And Ever. And Ever. I can remember years when I succumbed to the frantic urge to Throw Shit In Boxes, and the regrets three months later. Nope. Not going there, at least with the boxes I pack. Won’t say anything about the hubby..;-)

After killing ourselves with packing, we headed down to our friend who lives near Astoria, to spend four days chasing razor clams at low tide. We had new clam guns and boy howdy, were we ever gonna use ’em. So. After the drive down, we got a routine going. Prep the night before, hubby and I fixed breakfast and coffee, friend drove to the beach, we got our limit of clams, stop by Freddie’s for a little shopping, back home to clean clams (guys) and write like mad on the book (me). Over the course of four days of digging we came close to getting ten pounds of clam meat, the guys decided to keep lots of data on the harvest so that’s why I’ve got the numbers. I collected a lot of sand dollars and am thinking about ways to use undrilled freshwater pearls, broken stone beads, and other stuff for crafty sorts of things. Done right, well….

The way this clam stuff is going, I may have more material for a steampunk/rococoa/steamfunk/deargodsomethingweirdwestevenifIdon’thavealabel from the Astoria exposure. It’s very early in the creation but I recognize that something is getting tweaked on the creative end.

Meanwhile, I’m cranking away on Netwalk’s Children. Dear God, I was right to dread writing this book. It’s hopelessly complex, but yet very fun to put the rough bones together. I just don’t know if it will be together by Worldcon…which…sigh.

Worldcon.

I can haz a Worldcon job. I do have a Worldcon job. I am the Sergeant-At Arms for the World Science Fiction Business Meeting at Sasquan. Starting next week, I’m gonna be looking for friendly warm bodies to help me make sure that the actual mechanics of running the Worldcon Business Meeting (Kevin Standlee, please forgive me, I’m learning all the formal terms) flow smoothly.  It will require an ability to show up at a morning meeting. I’d like to have enough people to rotate through several days of meetings so that no one person gets tied down to showing up every day unless they want to.

My priorities:

1.) Protect the integrity of the voting floor while

2.) Doing my best to facilitate the process while

3.) respecting the individuals involved.

This means dropping agendas. This means respecting process, and respecting people that you don’t agree with. This means keeping in mind that we all love speculative fiction but that we come from different perspectives, and short of overtly, nasty, godawful ugly shit, it’s–well, it’s politics. It’s making sausage. It’s compromise, and it sucks and I know a number of my friends on Facebook and all will sneer at me for being this way. But goddamn it, I’ve been the single issue politico; I’ve done the purity dance, and while that side is needed…I’m not the grrrl for the mad dog run any more. That’s for a young person to do. My job to find the middle path, to forge the agreements, to contribute to and support the process. That’s what you do as an elder, and that’s the path I’m approaching.

So.

I will need people to run mics, check credentials, and possibly help with crowd management. Patience, tolerance, and a balanced perspective with a sense of humor will be paramount. I won’t ask people to do something I wouldn’t do myself. If you have experience with the Oregon Country Fair or music festivals…then yeah, drop me a line here.  A Pratchett perspective is welcomed.

Netwalk’s Children, alas, is at the stage where I’m just throwing things at the page. I’m at the 3/4ths point, and almost at the final cataclysmic blowup. Three POVs are almost too many for this book; I may drop a POV for fifty pages and with the pacing of this book…everything is happening in a very short period of time. Lots and lots of stuff unfolding. I’m not satisfied with the structure, which means I may go back and rip things to pieces. Except I don’t have the time and luxury to do that because I’m moving stuff. Except I need to do it. ARRRGH. Maybe I’ll have a better perspective when I do the scene tracker, except that’s going to be

And then I keep thinking about Astoria, and the maybe steampunk book. Way back when I was writing the River story for Alma, I had something Columbia River-themed in mind. I just haven’t figured it out yet. I suspect the South Willamette Valley/Southern Oregon story (Bearing Witness) will come first, and then I’ll be able to write about the Columbia. Years ago, I wrote some lovely stuff when interning for a few months with Nalo Hopkinson. I can’t use that world because, well, stupid contract shit. But pieces of the writing still haunt me, especially the singing of the sails and the trip upriver.

I can’t write ocean stuff because, well, body’s pretty much issued the ultimatum that I’m a landlubber. But there’s a pretty strong and intriguing theme brewing there. Just not sure where it’s leading me yet.

And I find it ironic that maybe I finally find the freedom to write about the Willamette Valley after committing once again to the Wallowas. Though the Columbia could well insert itself into the mix first. We shall see. Several worlds out there stirring and roiling as I wind up the Netwalk Sequence.

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March 26, 2015 · 8:40 am

Muddling through everything (writing process)

I’ve hit the 45k word mark on Netwalk’s Children and am well and truly in the infamous “muddle in the middle.” Even with the extensive plotting and prewriting prep, I’m writing pages and pages which feel like overwriting, blathering, and flailing around trying to find the right words. It’s a temptation to go back and rewrite, but discipline and experience tell me no, it’s time to keep pushing on through. By now I realize that this muddle to some extent is a necessary tactic, because I have expository information which needs to get transmitted at some point, and it’s only after the whole book is written that I’ll be able to prune it in an effective manner, extend it into actual scenes, take scenes out, and so on.

Having the outline, the scene tracker, and the scribbled notes helps, though. Because of the moving and life upheaval which is Immanent. Any. Day. Now, I engaged in the extensive plotting practice. It’s more elaborate than anything else I’ve done, and it’s a learning process.

So here’s what I’ve learned about doing the more detailed planning in advance so far:

Lesson # 1. Ambush plot developments still happen. But it’s easier to integrate them into the story flow with a means of tracking scenes and plot developments, especially if you can go back to notes to find exactly when foreshadowing breadcrumbs need to be inserted.

Lesson #2. The actual writing is where you find the holes in your prewriting/plotting. It’s all well and good to say in your outline that “Bess will do x, y, and z,” until you actually write that scene and discover that “y” doesn’t fit with the character interactions within that scene.

Lesson #3. Prewriting/plotting helps you the writer focus on the deeper elements of your story. I’m finding more brainspace to think about how my characters interact with daily elements in their world because I’m not worried about where they are going/what they are doing.

Lesson #4. All that said, prewriting/plotting doesn’t get rid of the need for rewrites and editing. It just provides a means for me to move past the tough parts and notice what I’ll have to go back and rewrite, while not stewing about “what do I do next?” I think it will prove to be a better tool for faster editing and rewriting, which is a very good thing.

Basically, I’m operating from the point of view of getting the words down fast, and focusing on book completion rather than perfection the first time through. Doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about what I’m writing, because I do. While my current daily goal is 1500-3000 words a day, I’m not blithely dashing those words off in an hour or two (except for the coffeeshop morning write with a friend, and that writing is usually scripted/choreographed).

It’s an interesting process. We’ll see what happens in revisions. I’ve completely dropped one icky subplot because the characters didn’t like it (whew, that was a tough one to contemplate creating). A second major subplot is on its way out the door because I really don’t need it for character development across the series arc and I can see where continuing with it will only lead me down the wrong story trails. I’ve gone off the charted path in some arcs because, well, it just works better.

It’s an adventure, for sure.

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