Right here! This month’s issue includes a story that I found unusually fascinating: “Chrestomathy”, by Anatoly Belilovsky. I like all of what we publish, but this story is right up my personal alley, as it is about Pushkin and duels and lost writings, the dissemination of thoughts and the way history’s shaped by their thinkers. Enjoy! […]
In which I am in metaphorical boot camp
It’s not as sweaty as Real Boot Camp. Also, no tear gas, which makes it a hell of a lot less boot-campy. (Yes, that is the voice of experience speaking.) However, it is a relatively short time period to get myself into fighting form, and therefore it merits the comparison. I’m always telling myself that I think with my feet (or with my fists, depending on how angry I am…) and so at some point in winter, I decided I’d kick off the summer season with two charity races: a 5k running relay and a 25k mountainbike race. Because of the wet, snowy spring, training commenced a bit late, and then I had to throw a few business trips into the mix, and so I’m here in mid May, feeling like a bear just rolled out of the cave, lumbering around trying to get my blood flowing. Also, all of my short stories are turning into novels. I just had two really nice rejections in which editors encouraged me to send more stuff, and I have no stuff to send. Fortunately, there’s a cure… it’s not an accident that I’m in two writing groups. The common thread of all of […]
In which I take a time-out
…from writing, in order to do this. I built wheels! […]
Early signs of genius !!!
Our writing group had the wonderful idea of sharing a bit of our juvenilia tomorrow, so I’ve just spent an hour going through the files I kept of my pre-teen stories. Which are extensive. And–shocker!–awful. Picture, if you will, reams of three-ring notebook paper, solid-blocked with paragraphless blue ballpoint, script veering crazily through the three different handwriting styles I was trying on for size. Doodles on every available margin (UFOs, birds, eyes, hearts, coffins, and my name paired with the surname of a guy from my sixth grade class). This manuscript is my first novel, The Five Realms, begun when I was eleven. It features twelve different protagonists, none of whom know each other until they’re thrown together on a massive world-saving quest. I wrote everyone’s origin story and most of the introductions, and then I skipped straight to the (tragic) ending. (I figured the part in the middle would be easy to fill in later, since it mainly consisted of the cast riding around killing monsters.) Since I’m a masochist… have some sample prose! The hero’s love interest: “Her eyes were brown, glimmering with unshed tears, and the set of her red-lipped mouth was full of desperate courage as […]
The Fantasy of Being Published
A while back I read a memorable piece by Kate Harding on the fantasy of being thin. Harding is a fat acceptance blogger who writes movingly, in this post, about how much time she spent believing that being thin would mean “becoming an entirely different person – one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has”. This is how I was feeling about being a professional writer. Where one draws that line is actually kind of unimportant–does it start with your first sale? First pro sale? SFWA membership? Agent? Novel contract? Not all of those things have happened for me yet, but I’m very aware today that some of them have, and that I have not yet magically become an entirely different person. I am still a person who talks too much and then feels dumb about it. I still don’t have great boundaries. I’m secretive about some things and I overshare others. I read blogs instead of working; I work instead of calling my family; I call my family instead of cleaning the catbox. I am vain. I spend a lot of money on clothes and not as much as I’d like on charity. I […]
Auto Show, clairification style
One of my fellow writers (Nicole, that was you, right?) says my novel is like a low-budget film: the settings are few, small and usually indoor, and the characters keep returning to the same places. In true low-budget film style, one of these settings is a car. When the protagonist is in his car, the scenery going by could be pure stock footage. The car itself, on the other hand, is a vitally important set-piece and I need to be able to describe it accurately and richly. Thus: the Auto Show. At the Auto Show, people let writers in to look at cars that are worth more than houses. The car in the picture is a Bentley Mulsanne. Two nice women let me inside the ropes to take pictures of it! I now know the colour, sheen, specs and even the smell of this car. I cannot share the smell with you here, but as for the rest: I was not, unfortunately, allowed to sit in it. Or touch it. I did discover, incidentally, that the Auto Show staff were uniformly polite and considerate toward those of their patrons who walk with a cane. […]
In which I have structure
This, my friends, is Hour of the Hag. Each sticky is a scene. Notes in black are what currently happens in the scene; notes in pink are things I have to change or add. Pink stickies are scenes to add. Blue for Maksim’s POV, green for Lissa, white for Nick, and yellow for poor orphaned Jonathan who really shouldn’t have his own POV scene, since there’s only one of it. I’m surprised by how even the scene distribution is. I am unsurprised by how much more I have to do before I can call this thing done. This sticky-map is for the transition from draft 2 to draft 3 and final. I don’t have much sense of how long it will actually take–weeks rather than months, but other than that, it depends on how much I wallow. I have three vac days to kick it off. Hard burn to April–I’d like to get it in the post to agents by May. Oh, and behind the sticky-map, that thing is a pillow with a carrot on it. […]
March issue of Ideomancer!
…is here for you to enjoy. Other awesome things in the pillow book of March: One has unused vacation days and a plan to spend them writing in coffee shops. One has tickets to an all-girl fight card. One’s arms are bruised by kettlebells. One’s neighbour, who is a cat, leaves the house after the long winter shut in, and greets one from the doorstep. […]
In which I… er… it’s NSFW
So I’m writing my first sex scene. This is me we’re talking about, so it’s definitely a necessary, character-driven sex scene–my people are acting according to their natures and this is what must happen. I didn’t intend to set it up this way, but it’s what they would do, so it will be done. And… this is me we’re talking about, so it’s between my two gay magicians. And one of them is a person in a wheelchair. I’ll say this: the research is interesting. […]
In which we receive zombies
Dozens of them, in fact. Hundreds. More zombies than I can easily describe. Why? Because I asked my brain to supply the solution to a writing problem. I asked it to give me the solution in the form of a dream. This strategy has actually worked, in the past, now and then. This time? Well, I am not writing a book about zombies, so this answer was not exactly what I was looking for. They did, however, explode quite satisfyingly when I shot them with my crossbow. […]