Well, it’s done. Weasel Boy is in Draft Zero form–the messy, stuff-sticking-out draft that happens before I set a book aside for a little while and then go back to revise and polish it into a workable first draft. It needs serious padding and I can insert flashbacks now that I have the whole structure out onto the page–which is good, since I’ve got a Really Tight Word Limit on this one.
I feel strangely vindicated. I haven’t exactly wrestled with this book, but the explosions in my personal life while writing it have made it difficult to concentrate. So I feel like I achieved a victory over my own life, in some ways.
Now I’m going to go buy lettuce to celebrate, because the kids want buffalo burgers tonight.
Jeez. How lame is my life when I celebrate with produce? You’d think a writer would have a couple margaritas or something.
It rained a little last night, thank God. I don’t feel right unless there’s rain once in a while. It’s one of the two things I don’t like about the summer–no rain, and sweating. I hate sweating.
Well, most of the time.
What I do like about summer is that people generally seem happier. And the kids are definitely happier. I like the smell of fresh-cut grass, and I like seeing the trees dancing every time the wind breathes.
I do not, however, like living in a neighborhood where people take the Glorious Fourth as an excuse to blow sh!t up every night from the 28th of June to the 7th of July. WTF is wrong with people? It’s enough to make one wish for a monsoon from the 3rd to the 5th. If only because all the cats and dogs in the neighborhood are twitching with shell shock.
No, Weasel Boy isn’t done yet. I’m on the last scene, the cemetery scene. When I finish I’ll have a rough draft–what Caitlin Kittredge calls a Draft Zero. I’ll celebrate with baking bagels or something. Or sourdough bread, since I left the starter out all night. Might as well.
Last but not least, on this most random of Thursdays, I’ll give you two theme songs. The first is Dante Valentine’s theme song, the one I listened to whenever I really needed to get inside her head. It’s also, in an odd way, the song I’ve heard at important points since high school. Each time I realize that it’s also my theme. Hey, baby, there ain’t no easy way out–truer words, my friend, were never spoken. Unless it was Katherine Hepburn noting that life is hard–after all, it kills you.
And for the other half to the coin (well, I’m a Gemini, what do you expect? I’m of two minds about everything, and both of those minds are of two minds), this was playing last Saturday when I drove into work. Did you ever get a perfect playlist while driving? Like, everything on the radio just lines up and you’re almost sad to reach your destination?
Like that. This song came on, and I was singing along, banging the steering wheel, when I realized, shoot, this could be my theme song too!
I’ve talked before about how sooner or later, everything becomes grist for the creative mill. It becomes a knee-jerk reaction. Something will happen and most of You will be freaking out, or dealing with it. But there will be that one little sliver of You, the writing sliver, which will sit up and go, “Holy crap! This is awesome material! So this is what it feels like! Gotta remember that–how would I describe it?”
It’s not precisely a bad thing, but there have been times when I wished very hard to shut off that part of myself. It never happens, and later I’m always grateful, because I was paying attention, and I have the memory. Filtered maybe through the lens of the language I’d use to describe the event, which isn’t the event itself–the map is not the territory, but I’ll take it. It’s preferable to living an unexamined life full of quiet desperation.
And now that I’ve mangled two or three famous quotations, it’s time for my civil adieu. Be gentle with yourself today, dear Reader. There is lucidity in the air, and sometimes a little clarity is a dangerous thing.
So yesterday I fell from grace. I got Duras’s Wartime Writings for me…and Clash of the Titans for the kids. Standing there in the store, I felt a wash of nostalgia so deep and huge it was a wonder I didn’t drown, and I showed the UnSullen One the DVD as he came around the corner.
“OhmiGod.” His eyes got really, really big. “I remember that movie.”
When a 32-year-old urban fantasy mom and a skateboarding teen both get misty-eyed over the same movie, you know you have Cinema Gold, my dears.
I brought it home, of course, and the kids were entranced. “It looks kind of fake,” the Princess said.
“That’s because they didn’t have CGI,” I replied.
“CGI?”
“Computer Generated…” I lose my train of thought, staring at Maggie Smith as Thetis and imagining Miss McGonagall sorting Zeus right out. “…stuff.”
“That would be CGS,” the Muffin chimes in, between cracks about Ursula Andress.
Of course the UnSullen One has to get involved. “Is that like CRS, only on the screen?”
Jeez. Welcome to my life.
Weasel Boy is going down. I’ve got two and a half scenes to finish and I’ll have a rough draft. Gods willing, that will happen today. *stretches, jogs in place*
One of the best things about not working retail or office space is missing the “blue Mondays”. Mondays are still an adjustment, since it’s back to just me and the usual complement of kids, all guests and the Muffin gone for the first time in a couple days. Plus I never get even half of the cleaning I want done, done.
Mondays aren’t bad days. They’re just changeful, like the moon they’re named for. Of course, change is the way you know you’re still breathing, and breathing is good.
Breathing is very, very good.
It was over ninety degrees (to the tune of 100 on Saturday) this past weekend, and sticky-sultry-hot. I live up here in the grand Pacific Northwest because the weather doesn’t often make me want to peel off my skin and sit around in my bones, like in that Shel Silverstein poem. But we did have thunder yesterday evening. Ever since we lived for a little while in Wyoming I’ve loved thunderstorms.
So when the heat broke late last night it felt like a blessing, and it’s going to be a warm but not unlivable day today.
Look at that, I’ve just chatted about the weather. How banal can I get? Let’s go a little deeper.
This weekend I finished Absolute War by Chris Bellamy, a study of Soviet Russia in WWII. And I also finished Vircondelet’s Duras, a bio of Marguerite Duras, one of my favorite authors.
I like Duras’s work, for some ungodly reason. I don’t know why. Everyone always reads The Lover first, because of the movie, but I actually read Summer Rain back when I was living up in Seattle and working for yet another bookstore. After that I started reading every Duras I could get my hands on. The Sailor From Gibraltar and The Ravishing of Lol Stein are also perennial favorites. But I rarely recommend her to people for a number of reasons.
One is because of the translation. She wrote in French, and any time you get a translation of ANYTHING it’s hit or miss. (Like the *flinch* Fagles translation of the Odyssey. I really, really prefer the Fitzgerald.) For some languages, like French, translations are easier for me to read because I can make a shoddy guess at the turn of phrase the writer is originally going for. On others…well, I’m at the mercy of the translator in a way I don’t exactly enjoy as a reader.
Another reason I don’t recommend Duras to people is because she feels so excruciatingly personal to me. There’s a certain hypersensitive, doomed fraught-ness (that’s not even a word, but you get the idea) running through her work I can, if not identify with, then at least imagine. For some reason she’s very successful at putting me in her character’s shoes, even over a language barrier.
The last reason is because her books deal with a sort of interior motion a lot of American readers don’t traditionally like. They break a lot of fictional “rules” in ways the vast majority of the reading public I’ve waited on and recommended to (as a bookstore employee) just don’t enjoy or understand. It’s like my taste for peanut butter curry, or peanut butter and dill pickles. I know there are other people who enjoy this sort of thing, but it’s not something I can recommend without knowing you.
Vircondelet’s bio of her was…interesting. I much prefer Adler’s, but I understand that Vircondelet was trying to take a bath in the experience of this woman, this author. I can respect that. It was a bit of a slog in places, just because I don’t like that style of biography. But all in all, well done.
Bellamy’s book was incredibly enjoyable. No, it’s never enjoyable to read about war, but when you’ve read about a subject like the Eastern Front in either World War, where there’s not a terrible lot of archival sources for one side available to researchers, you get a kind of static picture of the whole thing. You know pieces are missing. But then, when someone gets access to the closed archives (as Bellamy did before Putin re-closed them, plus ca change…) and has a fair degree of talent for writing coherent, clear text…Well. Things become very interesting, and the picture becomes dynamic. One begins to see the interplay of moving forces instead of just a picture of rubble.
So it’s been a good book week, all things considered. Next I have a couple things I have to read for possible cover quotes, which is an enjoyable part of an author’s job. I’m always stunned to be asked for cover quotes. I rarely think anyone will care about my opinion of such-and-such.
Which partly accounts for the weird tone of my blog some days, dear Reader. Part of writing daily in this space is a certain feeling of shouting into the wind, in a good way. It feels very intimate, as if I’m writing this just for myself. The tension between that and the fact that it’s public space and there are boundaries between it and my private life, is a source of creative fuel some days.
Other days I just ramble on about nothing, and close with a civil adieu. Which is, I suspect, what this Monday post has turned out to be.
So. Happy Monday, dear Reader. May it be breathable. Because, you know, the alternative really doesn’t bear thinking about.
Welcome to another Friday writing post, my dears. Before we go further, I’d like to point you toward this post by Jeaniene Frost, about money. She demystifies a lot of it.
Look, it does take a couple years to get paid at this line of work. I was talking to the guy who’s going to reshingle our roof last week, and telling him that when one writes, one gets an advance one has to make do with until the royalties come in. IF they come in, and IF the book earns itself out to repay the publisher for the advance, and IF the book keeps selling, and IF you can wait six months between royalty checks which may or may not be worth a piddle in a rainstorm, as my grandpapa used to say. (About the rainstorm, not the royalties.)
A lot of writers get a rude shock when they realize just how infrequently this career is economically stable or viable. There’s no health insurance, no safety net, Dog willing and the creek don’t rise.
I don’t particularly like this state of affairs, but there’s nothing to be done for it. I write as much as I do largely because the Muffin has a Day Job and I am home with the kids all day, every day. Writing is my method of financially contributing, mostly because I can’t earn enough to even pay for daycare nowadays. (Don’t get me started, that’s another rant.)
Which is partly why I view writing the way I do–as a hack. The art to it is solely to please myself.
The latter error bothers me the most. I can’t count how many books I’ve read, YA and others, that make homelessness “romantic”. Or that gloss over the danger of it. Or the fact that when you are on the fringe, everything has a price and nothing is free. I get a little buggy when I read something that to my mind glorifies street life. The streets are hard. Nobody ends up there because they’re well-adjusted or special. If you’re going to write about street life, please don’t think it’s glamorous or fun or “edgy”.
I am drained and nerve-sparking today (as if you couldn’t tell) so I’m just going to close with one piece of observation/advice. Please, for the love of God, if you want to write, learn your possessives and contractions.
Like it’s is short for it is, and its is a possessive–”belonging to it”. Along with they’re and their, this is the thing that made me chuck a manuscript in the “reject” pile quickest when I was reading slush. I still see it sometimes, especially in blog posts, and it makes me cringe and make that “GUHNAAH!” sound each time.
This is such a basic rule, it gets overlooked a lot. I wish it wasn’t.
And now, dear Reader, having spastically gone all over the board, I take my leave, preparatory to taking some ibuprofen and stretching to kill this headache. Wish me luck.
Screaming that you have to be finished “OMG TODAY NOW NOW NOW WTFBBQLLAMA WHY ARE YOU SITTING THERE WHEN I NEED TO BE FINISHED?!!!?!!!1!” is not guaranteed to make me do what you want.
As a matter of fact, it is guaranteed to make me dig in my heels and refuse to do anything. Especially when I have kids to take on a shopping expedition and dinner to make as well as a tonne of housework to be done.
Stop it. I refuse. I’ve GOT to get this stuff done, I’ve been working nonstop for the last month. I just finished those revisions. Go away.
Quit sitting in my head and making little quivering noises. That doesn’t help.
*time passes*
OH OKAY. FINE. I’ll bloody well drop everything and write one scene. ONE. You got that? Just one.
No love,
Me
PS: I fully realize I’m doomed. Try not to cheer and do a victory lap.
Yep, that’s right. Night Shift, book one in the Jill Kismet series, is officially released today! (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s) I am so very, very excited to announce Jill’s official debut.
Here’s the blurb:
Not everyone can take on the things that go bump in the night.
Not everyone tries.
But Jill Kismet is not just anyone.
She’s a Hunter, trained by the best - and in over her head.
Welcome to the night shift…
I don’t think it’s possible to put into words how excited I am.
Also debuting officially today is the Hotter Than Hell anthology, edited by Kim Harrison and chock-full of great stories by luminaries like Keri Arthur, Marjorie Liu, and L.A. Banks. Why, Yours Truly even has a little story in there too, titled Brother’s Keeper and starring your favorite Nichtvren, Selene and Nikolai. Those of you who like that dynamic duo, just hold on a little longer. I’ve got great news to announce about them, but I just can’t do it yet.
Last but not least, you guys are way, way smarter than I am. Yesterday’s Weirdsville post is indeed the result of a viral marketing campaign for Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books–or more precisely, the HBO series made of those books. I got lots and lots of comments and emails telling me so.
I initially did think it might be my sister’s nutty stalker, so I didn’t spend the effort on it I might otherwise have. I feel like an idiot–it was the Teen who found out exactly what it was for me, and only because I finally mentioned to him the sort of strange stuff I’ve been getting in the mail. (It says something for the weirdness quotient in our household that I’ll just put mail like that in a Ziploc and file it somewhere with a shrug and a raised eyebrow, doesn’t it.)
Still, my dears, it’s a shame to let a good viral go to waste, and I was delighted by this one (once I actually figured it out.) So, there may be more Weirdsville in the future. *rubs hands together with evil glee* The Teen and his friend Squeaker are ALL OVER the idea.
Though it IS weird, the cats suddenly wanting to be in at night. Really weird…
So back in May, near my birthday, I got a card with what appeared to be weird squiggles on it. Looked to be Sumerian, but no dictionary I had access to would make it make sense. So I immediately figured, “Huh. Could be my sister’s stalker. He’s enough of a moron to send actual physical mail as well as electronic hate mail.” and put it in a Ziploc baggie for the next time the moron tried to contact me. The postmark was a Stamps.com number, which isn’t entirely out of the question if you really want to try to cover your tracks.
Couple of weeks ago a plastic bubble-envelope with the same postmark shows up. This time it’s a test tube.
It’s something called TruBlood.
Now I can take a joke just like everybody else. But then there’s the phone calls that started at the end of May when the card showed up. From an unlisted number that seems oddly familiar. When I pick up there’s no answer, just the sound of someone breathing. And it’s the oddest thing, but Squeaker mentioned seeing someone messing around near the tree at the bottom of our yard a couple nights ago, at about one AM. The tree where I hung that mirror.
Hey, it seemed like a reasonable thing to do at the time. I don’t write what I write because I’m NORMAL.
The trouble is, Squeaker swears he saw someone crouching up in the tree. Right before they disappeared.
Of course, the thing to do when any weirdness strikes is to take to the Interwebs. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.
I found Bloodcopy.com. Apparently I’m not the only one.
Now, some of you may have already guessed that I’m no stranger to weirdness. I’ve sent an email to the Bloodcopy guys to try and start figuring this out. (Like HOW THE HELL someone got my BLOODY ADDRESS, no pun intended, because I don’t give that out to JUST ANYONE.) But there are Other Ways of Finding Out, one of which I’m going to try tonight. It’s waning moon, which isn’t the best for this sort of work…but I didn’t get my stripes by letting a little thing like that get in the way.
