Lilith Saintcrow

With the Selkie yesterday. A bigger post is forthcoming, but you can find a short one at the Midnight Hour. We even visited a shipwreck.

In short, a grand time was had by all. And that’s all until Monday,when I get back to work.

I forgot to mention that I went to the Kim Harrison signing out at the Beaverton Powell’s Tuesday night. Kim was a scream, as usual–she’s always so funny and so kind. I took some pictures for her (sorry if they didn’t turn out well, but I always tried to snap at least two on the theory that one of them might be decent.) Afterward we got a chance to go out for dinner/dessert before poor Kim turned into a pumpkin and had to be taken home to bed. She was on East Coast time and a signing schedule to boot, and if that doesn’t exhaust you NOTHING will. There are few things as all-out draining as signings.

Today it’s sunny and my brain is still oatmeal. There’s some kind of book sale I’m due to go to with the Selkie, I think. I’m sure I’ll find something loverly, I always do at book sales. Right now I am drinking coffee and trying to make my cortex function.

It just ain’t happening. I think I need a little more time for the rubber-band snap after yesterday’s massive expenditure of energy. Not only did the Sullen One have a test, but the Princess was having trouble with math and the Little Prince was just plain having trouble with boundaries. (BTW, Martian Moon Crab, your gift of books was laid on the Princess’s altar. Her Royal Highness accepted the offering with many distinctly un-royal squeals of delight. Sometimes my darling is almost catlike.) The DHM was incommunicado most of the day, so I had to deliver the news that I had finished another mitosis (read: book) late in the evening after he came back from bashing-heads-in-skirts (aka: kendo.) He applauded, and grinned, because he knows it won’t be long before another one yanks itself free of my wrinkly little brain.

So. Book 5, rough draft, done. Sunshiney day outside. Head feels like a steam-cleaned peach pit. Body recovering due to massive amounts of mineral water and judicious applications of caffeine. Why does it physically hurt so much to finish a book? Is it the tension I hold while I’m racing for the finish line? Is it that I just don’t take care of myself when the writing gets hot? Is it something else–the physical body mirroring a big psychic effort?

Am I just whining and complaining? That’s most likely.

So I will devote today to pouring stuff back into my head so we reach my accustomed level of pressure to drive this machine. I think I can afford one little day off. I’ve been a good girl. Finished the rough draft and haven’t collapsed into the flu. Something must be working right.

Uh. I can’t even write a decent blog entry. Going to go refill my head.

See you later, alligator.

Now don’t get excited, because it’s nowhere near the end. But the mountain has been climbed, the Great River has been forded, we are past the point of no return and on the downhill slope.

In other words, the rough draft, senor, she is feeneeshed. 92K+ of Valentine deliciousness, the wrap-up to the five-book series, and the rough draft is done.

Last lines:

…all Hell will break loose.
That’s a promise I’ll have no trouble keeping.

There’s one more scene to Frankenstein in and it needs some serious clarity and continuity editin’, but it’s done. The baby is born and the corpus is out. It’s time to slap it, swaddle it, feed it until it gets big enough to walk on its own, and send the damn thing to the editor.

On a slightly-weird note, we’re watching the 1991 Dark Shadows revival and one of the characters was just playing with a Thoth tarot deck. The only thing weirder than seeing it was immediately placing it from the design on the back of the cards.

And the triple-plus weird is this: the kids LOVE Dark Shadows. They can’t get enough of the black and white series. It’s just their speed, between the overacting and the spooky music.

I am feeling rather like a vegetable at the moment. Staring at a show done in 80’s hangover fashion and hairstyle sounds like a fab idea. Along with poking at the latest Economist and maybe prodding at that Orhan Pamuk I just bought. Tomorrow I’ll get back to work.

Tonight I’m going to be a veggie, and if I wasn’t so bloody tired I would take a serious crack at that bottle of wine my agent sent for celebration. It isn’t every day one finishes a five-book series and breaks down crying at the thought of saying goodbye to those characters one’s been breathing with all this time.

I feel drained but clean. This long road is over. I did it. I’m not sure if it’s any good, mind you, but it’s done. I did it.

Tis a far, far finer thing to have done, no matter how well or ill one has done it, than never to have attempted doing at all.

Someone said that, I think. I dunno. My brain hath been turned to oatmeal.

In a good way.

I am so close to the end of this book. So close. And things keep happening–no, not in the book, only the things that are supposed to happen, happen in there. Out here in the Writer’s World (notice how I avoid the word real) things keep happening to keep me away from the laptop.

Yesterday I was in a state by 5PM. Cranky, tapping at the keyboard, one thing after another, I was finally crowbar’d out of the house and went for sushi and pasta salad at Nature’s up the road. As soon as some brown rice and seaweed hit my stomach my blood sugar started to go up, and I realized I hadn’t eaten in forever. No wonder I was cranky.

After dinner, my mood rising by the second, I popped over into Borders. Yes, I know. I work in a small indie bookstore. I reserve the right to go into Borders if I feel like it, and right then I felt like the smell of paper and dust.

I have since discovered Orhan Pamuk. Cute, in a Nabokovian intellectual type of way; I picked up Snow and started paging through it in the coffee shop there. (Kiwi. Quiet. I am still faithful, I don’t drink the coffee there.) I finally ended up bringing it home and ordering more from the library. I’m going on a Pamuk jag. I can’t help myself.

Sometimes I wish I wrote more lit fic instead of urban fantasy/paranormal romance. No matter how often I defend my genre (or the genre I most often write in, if we’re being precise) I still sometimes have little tickles of wishing I could write something more…well, literary. It was John D. MacDonald or Stephen King (I think MacDonald writing the foreword to some Stephen King short stories) who said writers read anything with two feelings: grinning contempt or grinding envy. I’m not quite there yet, but I do sink into a good book, where I am dissuaded from “looking under the hood” by the sheer story or good craft, nary a hitch to impede my enjoyment…

…and I think, oh, you bastard, at the author. Affectionately, of course.

It’s been a year for good books. (And it’s only March.) There was Clare Clark’s The Nature of Monsters (the ending was a bit of a copout, but I didn’t mind) and a lovely translation of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, A Farewell to Arms (depressing), and Vive le Revolution.

But I am sinking away from my point. Sometimes I wish I wrote more serious, “literary” stuff. I feel a little bit like an intellectual plebeian, eating my Cheetos and wiping my fingers on my nose. It’s hard not to feel like that when the publishing world kind of treats urban fantasy or romance like an embarrassing nouveau riche cousin–yes, she’s got all the money, but does she have to be so gauche? Readers and writers alike are slightly patronized. Yes, urban fantasy’s hot and romance is a billion-dollar biz. But it’s not, you know, literary.

Or so society tries to tell us. Society says it goes like this: If it’s High Art, it’s important. If it’s Low Art, it makes money. Really good High Art made by minorities or women is labeled Low Art and given the additional stigma of being “not serious.” Low Art made by dead (or almost-dead) white guys turns into High Art. (Just look at Andy Warhol. He’s the boss, applesauce.) And Low Art, of course, only makes money about fifteen percent of the time. If it’s Low Art and makes money, it’s a sellout.

*sigh* Now that I’ve completely depressed myself and made some hideously simplistic (and thus arguable) statements, I’m going to bow out. I have writing to do. The kids are watching FLCL, courtesy of Crab Caution, and if I really buckle down and sit here, I think I just might finish this book today and get back to sanity sometime soon.

Wish me luck.

But apparently not since the 60s.

Ugh. Now I feel all dirty. Do you suppose a fanatically right-wing cross-dresser was behind this one too?