I sometimes leave myself little notes like this, and forget I have done so. Who is this me who writes these stupid notes and expects me to fix this shit later? Now I have to abandon the new scene I was planning and write some dialogue that does not suck. […]
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… 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 I have elderflower nectar
As of an hour ago, I have five stories out on submission. This is a new high water mark for me. (Two of them are reprint submissions, but still.) I also had the jawdropping realization this week that I have a personal theme. All of my novels, and many of my short stories, are about pairs of magicians, one mentoring the other. In trying to trace back the origins of this very persistent meme in my own life, I came back to the Vasilissa story. This story has been interpreted by Clarissa Pinkola Estes as a story about women’s intuition, as Wikipedia reminds me; I remember reading Estes at the direction of my therapist, when I was in university, and thinking that she basically took a whole pile of interesting old stories about women and said that they were about intuition, which galled me a bit, since I don’t possess much of that thing. To me, this story feels like it’s about power. Not necessarily feminine power, either, not in some essentialist way: we’re talking about flaming-eyed skulls, people. Clear, burning sight. Baba Yaga, the elderly witch who lives in the forest, teaches Vasilissa, the young seeker, how to wield […]
Enduro: night lap
Progress: one new scene, four chapters of revision Pretty things: elderflower presse; Hermes scarves; I think it has a title! Horrible things: a froth of saliva; violence against doctors; terrible lies Soundtrack: Elias, Two Hours Traffic, Luke Doucet Sustenance: dark coffee laced with rum, the rest of the salted chocolate Fetishes: tonight I made use of my writing hat, my special rock, my grizzly bear coffee mug, AND my favourite t-shirt with the antlers on it. Next step: another new scene. I don’t actually think I am done yet, despite the hour. It’s a rare night that I can stay up working right into the small hours, and I don’t intend to waste this one. […]
Enduro
My husband is riding a 3-day, 235k mountain bike race this weekend. To prepare for it, he’s ridden several 6-hour days and one 24-hour relay race in addition to his regular riding and workout program. He and the other racers have a team to transport their belongings, cook their breakfasts and dinners, and give them massages at the end of the day. His nutrition consists of a staggering array of bars, protein mixes and electrolyte tabs. I’m trying to finish Draft 2 of the Not-a-werewolf book, which is now back to being untitled. To prepare for it… well, I suppose I wrote Draft 1, and my million words of suck, and a bunch of other stuff that didn’t suck as much. My support team this weekend consists of two cats, the guy who brought my organic food box, and the internets. My nutrition consists of leftover lasagna, arugula salad, coffee, and salted chocolate (ie, much better than the final round of Draft 1, during which I mainly forgot to eat and ended up with a really awful gutshot kind of feeling.) I am ready for this. I am. I am ready to have it out of my brain, because it […]
Novel Marathon, aka Using Up My Leftover Vac Days
Day 1 word count: ~3000 (all pure genius, of course… at least at the moment… they will probably be magically transformed into straw overnight) Number of hours at the keyboard: 11 Number of hours not at the keyboard: 2 (but the dishes are clean, damn it, even the ones the cats eat from) Cups of coffee: 3 Showers, baths or other hygienic activities: 0 Number of songs on playlist with “battle” or “war” in the title: 24 Number of times I had to look up the hierarchy of ranks in the Red Army (because I can never remember rank hierarchies even though I was in the army myself): 4 Number of ibuprofens: 1 (probably related to number of chin-ups on Tuesday: 0, actually, but not for lack of trying) Number of minor characters for whom I substituted the word “name” instead of naming them on the spot, due to forgetting list of Russian names when I left for the coffee shop: 5 Number of times protagonist lost consciousness: 0, although he did go to sleep during someone else’s POV scene (this metric is here to keep me on track, folks–I used to love to sneak out of scenes by knocking […]
In which it seems I am writing another novel
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. (a) I always end up writing a new novel shortly before the current one is done, and (b) I think I have a Law of Conservation of Creativity, by which I mean that once I’ve made up something I like, I tend to want to spend more time with it. Regarding point (a), I see this as a psychological prophylactic against attachment to my work. So long as the new new novel is the Shiny Thing, the recently-completed novel can be kicked about and hacked apart and rejected without any personal suffering. Or maybe it’s the other way around–maybe I just get tired of a novel by the time I finish it, and my creative mind’s impatient to start on the next thing. The problem with the Not-a-Werewolf book is that I began it during the period of mental depletion that followed the end of the Dickensian Fantasy. I dicked around with that book for a full year before I really got down to business on it. I don’t know whether to count this toward its clock, or not. If I begin the clock with the current draft, it’s been just over a year […]