Updates from Germany

 Hello! It's been a minute, eh?

About 2 months ago, the EU added the US to its "safe" zone, then Germany opened their border to tourists from the US (previously, it was open only to people with an urgent need). So I got my plane tickets for August 1 and spent all of July sorting and packing basically everything I own.

Now I'm in Berlin, subletting a furnished room from a Croatian woman. I live really close to the Grunewald park, which is a great place to get some exercise when it's not raining. I went there yesterday by train (it's only 2 stops, but it's a good 40-minute walk to get there, and I wanted to maximize my park-time) and "hiked" (Berlin is a very flat city) 3.6 miles in a little under an hour and a half. I had a refreshing Apfelschorle (apple juice mixed with mineral water), a pizza, and an absolutely delicious melon salad at a beer garden by the train station. The salad had cucumbers marinated in some sort of peppery dressing, chunks of watermelon, and a heap of feta on top. The flavor and texture contrasts were amazing, and I complimented the chef on my way out.

I've finally had some time to write, since I'm just about settled in now. I've had to get a few things, like sheets, pantry stock, and plants, but I haven't had to spend half the day taking the bus or subway to a store and back in about a week. I went to one store to get a printer (they had back to school specials) and carried it in its box on the bus, then down the street and up a zillion stairs. Then it wouldn't connect to the WiFi for a reason I couldn't make heads or tails of (and it was in English), so I had to go buy a printer cable the next day, because of course they don't come in the box anymore. I decided to go to a different electronics store and left with a 3-Euro printer cable and a 15-Euro rice cooker. This is basically how I've ended up spending way too much money in the last 3 weeks.

At least groceries are cheap. I'm still managing to spend a bunch of money on groceries, even though a lot of things cost about half what they do in the US. A 250-g can of store-brand chickpeas cost 39 (Euro)cents! I have 7 in my cupboard. (I used one of them already.)

The way people are handling covid over here is so much different than in the US. You can't go into any businesses or get onto public transit without a medical-grade mask. (No cute cloth masks here!) You see people walking down the street with a mask around their forearm so they have it ready when they need it. It's the latest in pandemic fashion! When I went to see The Green Knight in the theater, I had to show my vaccination certificate to get in, and I was obligated to fill out my contact info when I bought my ticket online. One thing this theater did was block off the seats around you(r party) when you reserved your seat(s), so nobody from unrelated groups was next to each other. They didn't require you to wear your mask during the show, but I did (except when I drank my soda), and so did the other woman in my row.

The movie was trippy as fuck, and I kept getting distracted by the German subtitles and thinking how I would have used different words to give it the same "feel" as the sometimes-lyrical English, which didn't help at all.

I'm making the I-hope-final edits on my indulgent NaNoWriMo project, which is a retelling of the Germanic Siegfried legend from the women's perspectives, and I hope to start querying that by the end of this month. I'm also working on a nonfiction book on linguistics in SFF (for writers), whose sample chapter I need to finish and whose proposal outline I need to make shinier. The last project I queried got no bites, so I'm setting it aside for now and will rework it in the future. I think it's a good story; either the writing itself or the query wasn't landing.

So, that's it for now. You can also follow my YouTube channel and/or support my Patreon (payments currently on hold until I get my tax situation and work permit sorted).

Award eligibility post

The monthly column I've been writing at tor.com since June is, I believe, eligible for the Best Related Work Hugo award. If you haven't read any of them, here is the archive.

I have no fiction published this year.

*dusts off blog*

Has it really been 2.5 years since I last updated? The academic life has been pretty overwhelming, especially because I decided I wanted to get 2 MAs in 3 years, which resulted in my taking 4 graduate level classes a semester for a year while teaching. Needless to say, I haven't had much in the way of time to write since I started school.

My short story "Debridement" was finally published around September 2018 - that's the one my last post was about. It's in the anthology Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and JJ Pionke. That was my VP17 application piece, and it finally found a home.

Since I last updated, I've actually been to Dresden and seen the opera house - it's definitely quite the piece of architecture. When I eventually have time again, I should update my "where to go in Germany" stuff, since I can add a handful of places now.

I'm in my last semester of grad school (FINALLY) and writing my MA thesis on a very specific group of verbs in German. Once it's finished and approved and all that, I'll work on a summary for non-linguists and share it with the like 2 people reading this (ha). As long as that doesn't violate some sort of academic publishing thing, I guess. I'll ask my advisor.

Anyway, anyone still here? Hi.

Story sale!

My short story "Debridement" will be published in the anthology Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke.

It'll be out around September 2017, I'm told. You can preorder here.

"Debridement" was my Viable Paradise application piece, and I'm thrilled it's finally found a home. It's a magical realism-ish story about a WW1 surgeon in Dresden, with a hell of an opening line. I hope you love it as much as I do.

2015 in review

2015 hasn't been terribly eventful.

I ran another Shatterdome Atlanta, which happened and people had fun. I went to my brother-in-law's wedding on Orcas Island, which took literally all day to get to from here (we had a 7 am flight and landed in Seattle at 1:30 pm and rented a car and drove 2 hours to the ferry, waited another hour + for the boat, then took the half-hour ferry to the island, and then had to drive to the other side of the island to the location, so we arrived around 9:30 pm, which felt like midnight to us, after a really long day.)

I started taking Russian at UNC. It's an interesting language, with a few bits of grammatical WTFery for speakers of Germanic languages (which includes English). A friend said I shouldn't learn it because it's too hard, but I said "pfff" and am doing it anyway. I got an A in 101, and I expect to get one in 102 as well. Going to the class eats 10-12 hours a week, plus another 4-5 of homework. I live half an hour from campus, but I use free parking that's not exactly close to campus, so I take a bus from there.

As to the goals I mentioned in last year's review... I accomplished two and a half. I ran a 5k (36:15), successfully chaired a convention, and made a small dent in my reading backlog. I have not sold a story (not for lack of trying...37 submissions, 37 rejections), and the novel is not in anything resembling a shoppable state (which is entirely my fault; I started learning Russian, which eats up a lot of time.) I'm working on it over winter break, but I still don't think I'll get it ready before classes start again.

I taught some German this year; after May, there was a lot of summer travel, so my whole 3 students and I said we'd reconvene toward fall. And there wasn't enough interest to make a class, so no class.

I read more. I even read books that were published this year! Naomi Novik's Uprooted, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy, and Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown. I liked the first one a lot, the second one a lot, and the third one OK.

For 2016, I'm going to keep trying to sell these stories, keep finishing this damned novel, and start figuring out the next one.

Time marches on

(it's a pun. laugh.)

Right, then. I have the physical certificate for the teaching course in hand, so I am all official on this thing. Woot! I'm teaching my third class at the language school, and it seems to be going well.

My sister had a baby about a month ago, so I have a niece. I crocheted a blanket for her, and it worked out well. My sister texted me a picture of the baby on the blanket.

I have a short story that I'm thinking of self-publishing. I can export it as an epub in five minutes with Scrivener, but I need a cover and all that. I'm also thinking of making some copies at kinkos and selling a print version at cons I go to. It's 5000 words, so it would be folded letter-size.

But I'll deal with that later. Right now I'm supposed to be finishing the revisions on this novel (the one that expands "Something There Is"). My original goal was this Friday, but I have 10 chapters left, and that's looking highly unlikely. Next Friday, then. And then it's off to beta readers. Yay.

Shatterdome Atlanta 2: Jaeger Boogaloo will be happening in three months (oh god).

After I finish novel revisions, I'm working on a secret project (secret because I don't want to talk about it too publicly in case nothing comes of it; a lot of you probably already know what I'm talking about anyway) and con planning, and when I have spare brain cycles, figuring out what the next novel I'm writing is about AND working on the synopsis & query letter and researching agents for the current one.

But that's a ways off yet, so I'm not thinking about it too hard at the moment.

2014 in review

It's been quite a year, and not even for writing!

In February, I went to Mannheim, Germany, for a little over 2 weeks for a practicum in my German-teaching-certificate program, then I visited a friend in Stuttgart, and we went to see Hertha play VfB (and win).

March saw my first personal rejection for a story. April saw two sick cats, one of whom we lost in August.

In May, I successfully chaired a convention, and we're doing it again in 2015, this time with more staff huzzah.

I spent the last two weeks-ish of June in Berlin, then watched Germany win the World Cup. After that, it was building armor for DragonCon and having a cat die.

I started teaching German at a local language school in mid-September, and I'm cramming to finish the last module I need to get my certificate by Feb 1. (I have until April 1.)

In November I went to World Fantasy Con, met a lot of new people, and saw a bunch of my VP17 classmates. I won NaNoWriMo with a rewrite of my current novel (which I intend to finish a draft I can give to people to read by March 1).

This month involved a lot of baking, planning my next German class (German 2, starting next Tuesday), and visiting my family in Maryland. And crocheting a blanket for my sister's baby, which I finished just in time for her shower.

I didn't read nearly as much fiction as I wanted to, partly because I was either planning a convention, building armor, or reading about the theory of foreign language instruction in German.

For 2015, I want to sell a short story (at least one, preferably more than one; I only have 3 at the moment), get the novel to a state where I can shop it to agents, teach, successfully chair another convention, and run a 5k. I want to make a dent in my to-read backlog (much of which is electronic, thankfully).

I wish you all a happy new year and einen guten Rutsch.

NaNoWriMo follow-up

Since I blogged that I was going to revise my novel during the November NaNo period, I figure I should say something about how it went.

I got 50,000 words (51,600 or something, actually). I hit the target before Thanksgiving, which was good, because I had company that whole weekend and had minimal time to write. Some may call it cheating a bit, because I was revising; however, I had to rewrite a LOT of scenes, and I threw out a lot of what I had and basically changed the last half of it entirely. So only kind of like cheating.

It was very difficult, and I had to skip a lot of things I usually do (or needed to do, like make lesson plans). I have not yet finished it; I've had a hard time getting momentum to get back into it. I wrote the last scene, yes, but there are a lot of things I need to go back and fill in (interludes of fake documentation, letters, that sort of thing; a lot of description and emotions, especially in the second half/final third), which I will likely do in January, once it's had a little time to sit, and when I've done a bit more research into official documentation.

The next couple weeks I'm devoting to finishing the final module of my teaching-German course, and I'll take the last exam the first two weeks(ish) of January (the school is closed from 12/24-1/6). Assuming I pass, I'll get a nice shiny certificate by spring. Hooray. I also need to make lesson plans and find resource materials for my German 2 class starting in a few weeks. (I need to have enough ready so I don't have to do it while spending 2 hours a day on an exam.)

Once I get back to making a Finished First Draft of the novel, I probably won't dive in as much as I did during NaNo. I would like to get it to a state where I can send it to beta readers by February 15, but that's a target, and we'll see how it goes. I have to give myself a deadline, because otherwise I'll put it off indefinitely.

So that's the state of The Novel (which needs a title, and I am rubbish at titles, so lord knows what it'll ever end up being called). I have a couple short pieces out on submission at the moment, and a piece of experimental flash I want to revise before sending back out. If I make a sale, I promise I'll tell you all here ;)

NaNoWriMo

After a chat on twitter with my VP classmate Shannon Rampe and VP 18 alum Victoria Sandbrook, we all decided to be NaNo Rebels together and revise existing novels in November.

I haven't touched mine since either December (when I wrote an ending of sorts) or March (when I got to the ending in my critique group). I've been focusing on finishing my German teaching certificate this year, and I almost have (one module left!).

I'm re-reading it so I know what actually exists, and then I'll start on the revision and expansion process tomorrow. Its current word count is 51k, and there are a lot of things that need to be fleshed out, like descriptions and emotions and that sort of thing.

We'll see what happens and how far I get in the revision process in one month. If you're participating, feel free to add me as a writing buddy. My profile is here.

*dusts off blog*

It's been a while, hasn't it? I've been busy, and I've barely had time to read anything, either.

I finished the 4th (of 8) module in this German-teaching course and took the exam. Passed, somehow. I was really unconfident about it. So now I get to start module 5, which I intend to have finished (including the exam) before I go to Berlin in June, which gives me just under 2 months. If I buckle down, that should be more than doable. If I spend 2 months on each, I'll be done by the new year. (It's slow going because the course materials are all in German.)

I'm writing a short story, and I have 3 out on submission right now. If any of them get takers, I'll let you all know as soon as I'm allowed to.

We've had too much excitement with the cats recently. We had to take Mylene to the vet school for hospitalization. She doesn't have cancer, but she does have IBS, so we have to find food that she'll eat that is a novel protein. She decides every few days that she doesn't want the food she was eating perfectly fine until then, which is rather frustrating.

I've started jogging recently, since my elliptical broke in a way I'm not sure I can fix. (The axle on the flywheel needs to be greased, and I'm not sure we can access it.) It's mostly walking quickly alternating with jogging as far as I can, which isn't very far at the moment, but I'm getting better.

I kind of burned out on the anime you should watch thing, but I might get back to it. I still have a dozen titles written on a scrap of paper, plus the most recent couple seasons to talk about. But, you know, other things are higher priority right now, like finishing the German-teaching course before March.

Right. So. Time to go jogging, then work some more on this short story, and in the afternoon start in on Erweiterungsbaustein 5: Prinzipien des Fremdsprachenerwerbs.

Happy new year!

2013 was the year I realized I'd probably never get a job in pharmacy again, since I've been out of practice for a long time. But I was okay with that, because I also realized that I'd followed a mercenary tendency when I went into the field, rather than doing the thing I loved, which is German.

So I signed up for a distance learning course in teaching German as a foreign language.

I worked my last ConTemporal, but I apparently wasn't smart enough to swear off con-running forever, because I'm now co-chairing Shatterdome Atlanta, which is happening May 31.

I went to Viable Paradise, where I met a lot of awesome writers, whom I miss a lot. It's a difficult experience to talk about, because if I say "it was this awesome transformative experience" that isn't very satisfactory.

Writing: I revised my VP application piece and submitted it to a magazine. I submitted my Thursday story twice. I submitted another short story, which I may work on some more after I finish the short I'm working on (started Monday, so it counts for 2013).

I finished a very rough draft of a novel expanding the events of "Something There Is." It's more like a really detailed outline, and it's about 51000 words. By the end of revisions, I'd like it to be around 75000. At least.

For 2014, I intend to finish, revise, and submit the piece I'm working on currently; take the rough draft of the novel to a point where I won't be embarrassed to show it to people outside my writing group; and resubmit pieces that were rejected. That's what you do.

I have a fair amount of travel coming up this year, which will affect my writing time. In February, I'm going to Mannheim, Germany, for about 2 weeks to do a hospitation practicum (where I observe teachers teaching and get acquainted with course materials; I really hope it's not 100% me sitting around; I guarantee I'll fall asleep). When that's over, I'm going to visit a friend in Stuttgart and see Hertha BSC play VfB Stuttgart. It won't be quite the same experience as seeing Hertha play at home in the Olympic Stadium, but it should still be awesome. And I'll have a day to see Stuttgart, where I've never been before.

I'll be going to Atlanta for Shatterdome the last weekend in May.

Mid-June, I'll be in Berlin for a family vacation with the in-laws. We've been planning this for a while, and it's finally happening.

I might go to ConGregate in Winston-Salem for the day, and I'm already planning to go to IllogiCon for the day (oh hey that's next weekend...) so I can get Mary Robinette Kowal to sign my copy of Without a Summer.

I'll be in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend along with 60,000 other nerds.

Then there's the obligatory winter holiday travel, which is always interesting.

So, that's my year in review and year in planning. May 2014 be kind to everyone.

Friday things and a grammar rant

I currently have two short stories out on submission, and I'm working on revising a third, which I'd like to get out by Thanksgiving, possibly. This is highly unusual, because I don't generally write short fiction. Also, it's distracting me from finishing my current novel in progress, so I want to get it out of the way.

People who don't understand the difference between forms of to be as linking verbs, as past continuous, and as passive voice need to learn their grammar again. "was" does not mean "OMG PASSIVE VOICE! DELETE! DELETE!" I've run into people pontificating about the perils of the passive and how "was" is a terrible verb recently who clearly have no idea what they're talking about, so here's a little help.

For example, "The sky was a beautiful, brilliant blue the morning the world ended" does not contain passive voice, despite the presence of "was." It connects the sky (subject) to a predicate adjective (blue). Not passive! Yay!

"I was sitting at the table, drinking coffee and reading the paper, when the world ended" also does not contain passive voice. This is an example of the past continuous (aka past progressive), which indicates two things that happen simultaneously or one that is interrupted by the other. Not passive! Yay!

"When the world was invaded, billions of people were killed" is passive voice! Twice! Yay! If you can follow the verb with "by zombies" or "by aliens" or "by a swarm of killer bees" and have it make sense, then you have passive voice. Otherwise, you have either a linking verb or past progressive.

The world was invaded by aliens == makes sense == passive voice.

The sky was a beautiful blue by aliens == wtf? == not passive voice.

I was sitting at the table by aliens == wtf? == not passive voice.

This has been your grammar rant of the day.

Viable Paradise 17

It is extraordinarily difficult to encapsulate what happened during my week on Martha's Vineyard. I can give you a list of all the events that occurred, but it is insufficient to convey the emotional aspects. One of my classmates is working on a day by day series starting here, and I'm not going to go into quite as much detail as he is.

The listy, here's what happened part
Actually getting to Martha's Vineyard is an ordeal. For me it involved a flight on a 4-across plane up to Boston (2 hours), then a ride down to the ferry station at Woods Hole with the delightful Julia Rios, who I hadn't had much chance to talk with in a few years, (~1.75 hours), grabbing a sandwich while waiting for the ferry, the long water voyage (45 mins) for which the curing of scurvy would be required, and a ride over to the inn. I left my house around 7:15 am and got to the Inn around 3:30 pm (after a brief stop for groceries). I unpacked, settled in, and socialized until dinner/orientation.

The rest of the week followed a pattern: Monday through Wednesday we had group critique sessions from 9-10:30, lecture from 10:30 to noon, and an optional lunch session. Monday and Tuesday we had afternoon lecture/collegium from 1:30-4:15, followed by one-on-one sessions, then dinner at 6:30. Wednesday we had free after morning lecture, to give us time to work on our writing assignments. Thursday and Friday had no group critiques or one-on-ones, just lectures and collegia. All day. In uncomfortable chairs. Tuesday night was a round robin reading of a Shakespeare play, during which I got to play with my outrageous French accent.

The Monday evening excursion to see the bioluminescent jellyfish was worth it. There was another Friday night, when Bear walked around to all the rooms and said, "Jellyfish walk." Take the jellyfish walk.

There's a highly optional 6:30 am walk with Uncle Jim, which I was never awake for. Actually, technically, nothing is mandatory: we're all adults, and we can make our own decisions. At the same time, though, you paid your money and made the journey; skipping all the lectures is a complete waste of your time. (Only Mandatory Fun is mandatory.)

Because I finished my reading for Wednesday's critique session during the break before my one-on-one, I was able to hammer out my first draft of the writing assignment late Tuesday. That meant I had Wednesday afternoon mostly free (I needed to revise, after all), so I took a walk with staff member Pippin down to Methodist Munchkinland (technically the MV Methodist Camp something) while my classmates worked. I didn't want to bother them by being bored and talky, so I took my energy elsewhere. (I did feel really weird about writing such a short story that I was done so early, like I needed to make it longer. And now, for my sins, I have to revise it and make it longer.) I scouted what was still open in town, and after an excursion for dinner, I joined in the revision and a critique swap (until midnight, when I decided I was DONE and needed liquor).

The less boring part
One of the stories I was given to critique in my group was hard for me to read, because it hit close to home. And I started crying giving feedback in the circle. (The descriptions of losing a pet were very accurate and effective. One of my comments on the paper was "ugly sobbing.") I suppose that was a bonding experience for us...

The level of feedback from the students was good, especially by Wednesday, when we'd been through a couple rounds and learned more of what to look for. The instructors' feedback, both in group and one-on-ones, was helpful. One thing I kept reminding myself (and everyone else) when we expressed doubt that our writing was any good was that the instructors have no reason to inflate our egos by lying to us and telling us we're better writers than we are. We got in; there is some element in our writing that is not-quite-there-yet in a way that the instructors can teach us to fix.

The emotional part
Being at VP is a strange experience. You have your peers (classmates) and the instructors. But it's not really set up as strata, where the instructors dispense wisdom from on high. They're approachable. They'll answer your questions about submitting to markets, about what was discussed in lectures or critiques that day, about books in general, and everything else. Yes, many of them had their own normal work to do, but if they were in the common areas, they were game for socializing.

You spend a whole week thinking and talking about books and stories and writing, with side conversations about getting to know each other, current events (the day we got a government again was nice), fangirling the hell out of Pacific Rim (maybe that was just us), and just anything and everything. You have to read 40,000 words (max) and give critique on them. There is a kind of bonding that occurs through adversity, and another through proximity. VP gives both.

Viable Paradise is a liminal place. It's a temporary establishment on a place reached by a journey (across water!). The students are in a transition from good writers to professional writers. Lots of symbolism in liminality.

What I learned
I learned a lot of ways to be a more deliberate writer. I write subconsciously, so all the cool things like thematic ties and symbolism that people picked up on in my story weren't there by any deliberate act of mine. The subconscious is pretty cool, though, and it does things you don't even notice. But I'd like to be more deliberate in my work, so that will help.

I learned that I'm a better writer than I think I am. I learned that there are some types of lyrical prose that don't make me want to stab my eyeballs out, even if I'm not following the story at all. I learned that I can write outside my usual comfort zone.

I learned things I already sort of knew but at a higher level and with better explanations behind them. I had a few "OH THAT RIGHT" moments while frantically scribbling notes.

This was the right workshop at the right time for me. I'm glad I applied, and I'm glad I met everyone. Miss you already!

Exciting news!

The Hugo book review scheduled for today has been preempted until tomorrow because of this news: I am going to be a student at Viable Paradise XVII.

I have 3 friends who are alums, and I've heard so many wonderful things about it. I can't wait. I've already got roommates and a ride from Boston.

In other news, I resigned as literature track director of ConTemporal last night, after the con.

In-Progress Friday

Reading: The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd. I'm a little over halfway finished this book, and I'm really enjoying it. Part of the fun is that it was published in 1997, so the reader (I) can see what became of some of the decisions made (or not yet made) at the time of its writing.

My copy of Without a Summer came yesterday, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Writing: Untitled novel expanding the events of "Something There Is."

Doing: A couple friends started a Renaissance Faire outside Chapel Hill, and I'm volunteering this weekend.

Promoting: Another pair of friends is currently running an indiegogo campaign for the Geek Field Guide, in which they'll travel around and take pictures or video of places and activities (like rock climbing), which can be used for reference or building textures in video games, etc. It's pretty cool, so go check it out. Drop them some dough if you can.

On Saying No

Yesterday on twitter, I came across this article, which purports to be about the pros and cons of "being agreeable and saying yes." Except there's just one little paragraph about the perils (being overextended), and the rest of it is about why you should always say yes, even if you're already overextended.

If you will pardon my French, bullshit.

Saying no is a valid response. Looking at how many things you've already agreed to do and how many other things are going on in your life (like maintaining relationships, raising a child, working a 9-5 job to keep food on the table, illnesses, etc) and knowing that you just can't do everything is an important skill. You have to protect yourself.

I also wonder how much of the scutwork of housekeeping and childraising falls to Salesses' wife while he overextends himself, and who has, he believes, his best interests in mind when she tells him to say no, but does he consider her feelings? Does he consider that maybe she's overextended because of his foolish insistence on saying yes? Not in this particular text.

He generalizes his personal experiences to everyone. Because a few times he got some good opportunities by always saying yes, everyone should always say yes. First off, not everyone gets invitations to write things for people. Most of us just have to write our stuff and send it off to magazines or agents or editors and hope they like it enough to buy it. Once you've established yourself somewhat, that's when the invitations to write for anthologies come in.

Second off, not everyone has the privilege he does. Not everyone has a wife who is willing to pick up the slack when he can't do his share of the housework because he's too busy. (I assume; he doesn't go into detail, and I refuse to give the Good MRA Project any pageviews to read his other writing.) Women still perform the majority of household chores, even if they work outside the home and the male partner does "some" housework. (Here are some numbers.)

In our society, women are taught to always be agreeable, always say yes, and if we have to say no, to do it with a smile and as gently as possible. Women who say no are bitches, disagreeable, cold. Articles like Salesses' perpetuate this particular thread of misogyny. (Before you react, no, he's not addressing women specifically, but we do make up half the population.)

I had a job once where I could literally not say no to anything, because my (female) bosses would guilt trip me until I agreed, or tell me what a horrible, disagreeable person I was because I'd already made plans with someone else for Friday night and it's Thursday, and you can't just drop new work in someone's lap like that. Or because I had strep throat and was too sick to go to work, let alone drive two hours each way for a monthly conference, which made me disagreeable and not a team player. It was a seriously toxic situation, which was fortunately only a one-year contract position.

Saying no is valid. Saying no when you know you're too busy, too sick, or just don't have enough interest in it is valid. It is self-protection.

I don't talk much about my health in this forum, but I'm chronically ill. I have hypothyroidism and two kinds of migraines (typical and variant). If I don't get enough sleep over a period of time, I get a migraine and am not functional until it goes away. If I'm lucky, it's a typical migraine and a triptan makes it go away. If I'm unlucky, it's the abdominal variant, which I just have to ride out. Either way, I spend the rest of the day in post-migraine fog. Through experience, I've learned that I can be two hours low for three days before I get the early warning signs that I need to get to bed early. (Which is why I missed the post-Hugo fun at WorldCon last year. I'd hit that wall. Now I know that I should plan sleep accordingly, because post-Hugo fun looked awesome.) [And my migraines are also linked to minor perturbations in thyroid hormone balance. Fun!]

If I took Salesses' advice and always said yes, I wouldn't be getting enough sleep to function*, and I'd spend half my time sick. Which is counterproductive, don't you think? If I were Salesses, I would generalize my experience based on my health and say that people should always say no.

But I'm not him, so I'll say that every person gets to decide for him- or herself which new projects or tasks they want to say yes to and which they want to say no to. They get to base that on whatever criteria they feel are most important. Every writer gets to decide whether the invitation to write a story for an anthology is worth it, whether the call for submissions that just opened up and they have a great story that isn't more than a line on a card at the moment is worth dropping other things, potentially at the risk of missing a deadline. They know what's best for their careers and their personal lives.

No one else gets to decide for you. You can be disagreeable. You can do the things you need to do to maintain. Like they say, put your own air mask on before helping others. Tell the people who think you always have to say yes to take a hike.


*well, no one's beating down my door with anthology invitations and column proposals, but if they were and I were as overextended as Salesses.

Hi again!

I didn't quite realize it had been since mid-January that I last posted. Oops.

I successfully wrote a 3500-word story from an outline, but I haven't heard back on its submission yet.

I started outlining a novel, using the same Mary Way as above, based on the events surrounding "Something There Is," and I've got 30-odd scenes notecarded (in Scrivener, not on real paper), plus a few backstory vignettes. There are things I still need to work out, like what happens with the characters who sort of disappear halfway through, but hey. Outlining and planning. I feel like I should add more detail into the scene cards. One benefit of Scrivener is that I'm not limited to a 3x4" piece of paper.

Which may mean I end up splitting some of the scenes into multiple scenes, but that's probably good?

I've been reading stuff, some in German, some in English, some fiction, some non. Planning means research! I may or may not end up writing up reviews for the blog. We'll see.

Ben and I have embarked on a housecleaning mission. We're spending one afternoon a month focusing on one room (or one part of a room) in the house. We *might* get through the whole house by the end of the year, and no, we don't have 12 rooms. We just have a lot of stuff accumulated in chaotic stacks. And half a dozen old computers. But I can actually reach my bookshelves again, and I rearranged them so they're no longer double-stacked, and I made the not-SF side somewhat more organized, though it's still fairly chaotic and not alphabetized. I shoved some books I still have from college together, because they were from the same class, for example. I can find things, anyway, and that's the important part.

The SF side is mostly alphabetized, and series are in chronological order. Except the oversize or hardback books that don't fit on the paperback shelf; they're separate. But I know where to look.

I have many boxes of old photos that I should really scan, but that will be a lot of effort. And the computer that supports the scanner I have (which only runs on OS 9) is 8 years old, and Photoshop Elements likes to crash because it eats up all the RAM. And also there are like thousands of pictures. And old family photos in albums. I should scan those, though, so they don't completely fade. It'll take months, probably.

Experiments in outlining

I'm the type of writer who is variously known as a "discovery writer" or a "pantser." I get an idea, usually a beginning, middle, and end, then start writing.

This isn't necessarily bad for a short story, since it's much harder to write yourself into a corner in 5000 words than in 50,000 or more. It's a really bad plan for a novel, though. (I've learned this the hard way.)

So when I read the Writing Excuses transcript Brainstorming with Mary and the supplemental material, I thought I'd give that a shot, since it explains an actual process with examples. I'm not very good at learning without examples, so when someone says, "Outline your story!" I balk because I don't know how. All I remember is mandatory paper outlines for high school English.

Anyway. I'm writing a short story from an outline right now. It's maybe a little easier, since I already have guidelines for each scene, and I can still discover things while I'm writing. The first draft is kind of rough (duh), but this will mainly need tuning of the word choice and style kind, as opposed to fixing the plot. Probably. Which is a little different, and I like it.

After this, I guess it's time to outline a novel. I have one in mind, even.

The story you want to write vs the story you can write

I like space opera. I don't care if it isn't fashionable to do so, because it's not "rigorous" or because it's all tropey or whatever other reasons people say space opera sucks. (That was the first google hit for that phrase.)

I love Bujold's Vorkosigan series. I love Cherryh's Alliance-Union and atevi series. I want to write stories in universes as big as those, with characters people remember and care about.

But I don't have the skill yet. I have 160,000 or so words in two related space-opera-with-mercenaries novels (one's a completed first draft, the other is around 68k on the 0.5th draft). I intend to finish making book two into a completed first draft, then going over book one for continuity changes and "oh hey I should mention...", but I don't know if I want to keep poking at them.

What I can write, apparently, because I can sell it, is historical fantasy that borders on magical realism. U8: Alexanderplatz (1989) is a story about the end of the Cold War with ghost trains in the ghost stations of Berlin. "Something There Is," coming out in the anthology Substitution Cipher in December, is about the early days of the Cold War, with a teenaged girl who can hear the voice of Berlin.

(I have a vague idea about making "Something" into a novel, going on after the end of it, but I don't know. It needs to cook more, I think.)

It's a hard realization to have, that the thing you really want to do isn't something you're very good at. Though, to be honest, writing historical fantasy set in Germany is something I also really like, and it lets me use half my college degree.

This isn't the first time I've had this realization. I dropped out of chemistry grad school, because I a) wasn't very good at it, and b) discovered that lab chemistry wasn't what I actually wanted to do with my life. So I went to pharmacy school, which I liked better. Apparently what I want to do is write, but that's not making me any income, so I'm back on the hunt for a job in my field. (20 applications in a week, and not a single bite. This economy, I tell you...)

So, for now, I'll write the stories I can, which happen to also be ones I want to write, or I wouldn't be inspired by them, and let the universe-spanning space opera wait. Hopefully not forever.

I need more consistency

I'm not very good at blogging regularly. That's probably because it takes effort to put a thoughtful post together, about a book or movie or a meta topic, and I'm just not very up for that lately. I seem to be more in the "say something random on twitter" mindset lately.

That, and there just isn't all that much going on right now. I still have a good-sized stack of books to review. I'm still making progress on writing. That's about it.

Oh, and I'm helping run a new convention, which eats part of my life (but not much, because I'm just a track director).

My gardenias are flowering, and they smell really good. If I can figure out how, I want to try rooting some cuttings so I can have more. It'd be a ton of effort, but we could replace the ugly bushes next to the front stairs with gardenias. A ton of effort; the bushes are 12 years old and have massive taproots. But the gardenias would smell much prettier when we open the window.

Oddly, I'm not much of a gardener. I like puttering around a bit and having fresh herbs, but I hate weeding and maintenance. Which is kind of a problem.

I went to Animazement on Saturday. I hadn't gone in 2 or 3 years, mainly because I didn't want to spend money to be allowed to go in and spend money. But they had Ichiro Itano, one of the animators and directors of Macross (who invented the Itano Circus), and I wanted to see him. So I went, paid my money, got DVD liner notes signed and heard a great panel with amusing stories (and one fanboy who posed his question in Japanese). I didn't spend much in the dealers room. I only got a tai chi sword (which I need for my class, and was cheaper than ordering one online) and a little figurine. Ben got a bunch of stuff, including some Macross art to get signed.

Last night, Ben and I went to see the Carolina Railhawks play the LA Galaxy in a cup tournament. It was pretty fun, and much nicer than the last Railhawks game we went to that got thunderstormed-out. The Railhawks won, surprisingly, though LAG didn't send most of their first string. It's such a fun atmosphere, though the lack of vegetarian food for dinner at their concession is disappointing. (We planned ahead and stopped at Taco Bell. They didn't put my bean burrito on the order at all. So I had a smoothie, a pretzel, and ice cream for dinner :/ Moral of the story: always check your drive-thru order before you leave.)

I don't promise that I'll get any better at blogging regularly, though I need to get reviews up. One a week will get me into July, anyway...