Pategonia

Partially by accident, partially by design, I am surrounded by author friends. My good friend Rachel's third book has been spotted in the wild - if you haven't already, you can pick up The Spirit Thief and the next two books in the series at major bookstores now.

My neighbor across the street is a very nice, sweet old lady, who wrote and published her memoirs of her incredible life in With A Song In My Heart.

So it was no surprise to me that, during the course of a brief in-our-respective-garages-coming-home-from-shopping conversation, she mentioned that she would be going on vacation someplace warmer this next week. She and her late husband were frequent travelers throughout South America during their younger years.

"Where?" I asked.

"Patagonia," she said.

I blanked out. I am still rather embarrassed that I had forgotten quite where in the world Patagonia is and later had to look it up on Wikipedia. I'm still more embarrassed that, for a brief moment, I thought it was a country and not a region.

Well, she's right. You probably can't get much warmer than the tip of South America in the cold of the Northern Hemisphere's winter!

Life suddenly gets busy again

For over a year, I was a mere housewife, with no more responsibility to deal with than writing a couple thousand words a day and then coming home and cooking dinner.

That ended when I suddenly landed a "dream job" - only it's not what many people would call a dream job, but it is what I really wanted to do all along (besides be a writer and/or work for NASA.) I'm now a network technician for a small IT company, and my days are busy busy busy with unfortunately no more morning writing sessions.

Add to this the fact that my beloved Wuffi, my Acer Aspire One netbook, developed a sudden allergy to Windows. Multiple attempts to resuscitate it failed, and although it is happily swimming along with an Ubuntu Linux Netbook installation, I'm certain it's living on borrowed time. And the software I use to write on with, yWriter, is still fairly buggy in its Linux environment, making actual writing nearly impossible.

So! New job means less time to write. Dead netbook means nothing to write on outside my main PC, which is fine but which also entails all the distractions of home.

My writing hasn't completely ground to a halt, but I'm finding myself facing days where writing 100-200 words is a challenge.

Things will change soon, though. Since I have a job again, I have disposable income of my own again as well. A new laptop will be mine in short order! And no mere netbook this time. While it was nice to stuff a laptop into my purse, I'll take a large, fully featured 17" monitor this next go round.

Additionally, for my job, I had to upgrade my phone. All those query letters sent out with my old phone number... *sigh* Oh well, all the more reason to start hammering out new query letters with my NEW telephone number on them! My new phone also has a qwerty keyboard on it, so when I'm incredibly bored I can pop off those 100-200 words.

Maybe.

Out of the Blue

Suddenly I find myself employed again.

Fortunately, it is absolutely nothing related to writing, and I have the afternoons off to go and write in Barnes & Noble. (Yay part time!) In fact, after being active in the mornings, I actually want to go write, since I'm not actually wasting time on the internet or anything during the day.

Then I just have to make myself come home and fire off some queries and I've met my checklist for the day.

I'm glad I did my writing away from home, because there was a nicely worded rejection in my inbox. So it goes.

Sometime, an agent will fall in love with me. Until then, I'll keep querying - and keep writing.

Friends with books out!

I realized this morning that not one, but two of my dear friends have books out and for sale! These are the friends I made before I started writing. It's rare to know one published author just from your circle of acquaintances, but I know two.

First off, Rachel's The Spirit Thief is out and available for purchase at your local bookstore. I snagged my copy directly off the B&N shelf (and then politely informed the folks up at the front counter that she was a local author and deserved a big display up near the front.)

But wait, Crystal Watanabe's Yum Yum Bento Box has been out for quite some time! She writes the blog Adventures in Bento Making. Crystal and I met through the video game FFXI, where she is known as Pikko (and more recently, Bentotto.)

Hopefully, one of these days I can add my own book to that list, and my circle of non-writing friends will have three published authors.

Nerd nerd nerd NERD ALERT

I may have mentioned it before, but I wasn't always going to be a writer.

When I was growing up, I vacillated between becoming a professional author, becoming a professional musician, and becoming a scientist at NASA.

It seemed to depend a lot on my teachers. In elementary school, it was NASA all the way. I was a junior volunteer for the National Science Center in in Augusta (before it moved to Port Royal). By 7th grade, when it became apparent I was no ordinary bookworm, it had tilted strongly over to the literary bent. Ms. Jenkins, my 8th grade lit teacher, encouraged me by sending me to the library on Fridays to write (since I had tested past the SRA reading kits the rest of my classmates were still slogging through.) I completed my first sci-fi story then, as middle school was also the time I discovered Asimov and Heinlein.

By the time I reached high school, however, it became apparent I was also a fairly talented musician. I could play trumpet and violin, and sing. I was a true Renaissance woman.

But the fine arts school I attended also had a rigorous academic curriculum, and Mr. Manly, who was my physics and chemistry teacher, reignited my love for science.

I was accepted to GA Tech. I almost went, but my father was a Bulldawgs fan, so I found myself going to UGA instead to please him. It turned out to be the correct decision.

So I started out a physics major. A series of unfortunate events, bad advice, and bad choices on my part in my freshman year taught me that as much as I loved science, my dream of working for NASA was not to be. (Someday I shall defeat you, integral calculus!) By my second semester I had changed my major to ethnomusicology, but it was too late - the School of Music rejected me. I was too rusty on trumpet and violin, and I kept getting a cold for my vocal auditions.

Although I loved science, I was bad at the math. Although I loved music, I had waited too long.

That left the English department. Home sweet Park Hall home. I was able to slack off and write about anything I wanted in many classes, and I learned the valuable skill of writing about things I didn't want to write about - often on a tight deadline. There were no auditions, and since I'd scraped out a D in Honors Calculus II, I didn't have to take any more evil math classes, ever. (Now that I'm eying graduate school, I did have to study for the math portion of the GRE, but that wasn't so bad.)

The most wonderful thing about writing is that I can channel my love for science and art into my stories. Most of my characters are artists or scientists or musicians. And it's okay - it turns out I'm better at writing about science and art than I am doing it myself.

That humbling feeling of losing a bet

Long long ago, during one of the many frantic and fun parties hosted at our old house M.I., my friend Rachel Aaron and I made a bet.

We were both pretty toasted so I'm not sure she even remembers, but it was an agreement of two English majors graduating in the class of '02 to see who would get published first.

We both got distracted by real life - we both got sucked into MMORPGs, we both got married, and she started a family (in my case I have no excuses, just a cat.) It's been almost 8 years since that party back in Maison Ikkoku.

Well, as of September 28th, Rachel will have officially won the bet.

http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Thief-Legend-Eli-Monpress/dp/0316069051

Her first book, The Spirit Thief, will be available for sale. I've got the first chapter that my friend Laura picked up at Dragon*Con for me, and I can't wait to read the whole thing.

Congrats Rachel! And now... Um. What exactly do I owe you again?

Okay, now let's talk about fanfiction

I believe that fanfiction is a healthy outlet.

I believe that, when a new author joins a fanfiction community that has more experienced writers in it, they can get valuable feedback to improve their writing.

I do not believe fanfiction should ever be done for profit. It is, at its core, a derivative work, and should never be anything other than free.

I believe fanfiction authors should respect the wishes of the author of the original content. If an author says "No fanfiction" then there should be no fanfiction. If an author says "Go for it" then go for it. (Personally, if anyone ever wrote any fanfiction of my work, I'd be immensely flattered, but I probably wouldn't read it if it was a series in progress.)

I believe that you can learn to write by writing fanfiction, but only if you do it with a full slew of beta readers and accept constructive criticism. The only way to learn to write well, of course, is to write and keep writing and write some more.

Someone once said, "Draw 5,000 pictures, then you will know how to draw." Writing is the same. Write 5,000 stories, and then you will know how to write.

It doesn't really matter if it's fanfiction or if it's original works - good writing only comes from practice.

The Magic D20

I have a lot of projects that I work on at any given time. There's the writing, of course, which occupies a good chunk of my free time (as it should.) I have one novel being queried out, another halfway done, and five more that are in some stage of outlining or completion. They range from a YA with romantic elements to a spicy paranormal erotic, but most of them are the sweet steam punk romances I started out with. (And then there's the fanfiction, but lets not talk about that particular guilty pleasure.)

Then there are all the other projects that come with being a housewife, which range from the normal daily chores involved in keeping a house with four adults in it, to wild and crazy projects like refinishing a 1940s desk. (Let me just say, chemical paint remover is some seriously vile and nasty stuff.) Then there are my video games, which take up too much time. (Nothing wastes an evening like The Sims!)

In order to motivate myself, I have a list of 20 things in a spreadsheet. And a special D20.. For those not familiar with tabletop gaming, a D20 is a 20 sided dice. Mine is a pearly purple. It was the first thing I bought when I came to college that I still possess.

I roll the magic D20 dice, check on my spreadsheet, and do what it says I can - or have - to do. Even numbered items are fun things. Odd numbered items are work. So while #12 is "read a chapter of someone else's book" #13 is "Make a blog post."

If one of my books come up, I have to do at least 500 words, or some serious planning in it in yWriter. The net effect is an output of around 2000 words a day . . . just not all in the same story.

I'm only allowed to do stuff once a day, so near the end, I end up rolling the dice many times in a row. #14 just came up, so unfortunately, it's time for me to go work on that 1940s desk some more.

What I read, Part 3

I have a roster of webcomics I go through regularly.

On Mondays and Thursdays, I check out The Seraph Inn to see if Sara Ellerton has posted another few pages of The Phoenix Requiem.

Monday through Friday, I hop on over to Wapsi Square for the webcomic equivalent of paranormal chick lit.

Then I pop over to Real Life, which is still funny after many years. I've since abandoned all of its video game webcomicy cohorts from years ago since they started to read like newspaper funnies - i.e. not funny at all.

Well, except for Penny Arcade, which isn't a daily. It's there MWF for me. However, the real treat isn't necessarily the comic there, it's the commentary. Tycho never ceases to provide pithy verbiage relevant to the topic of the day.

MWF also brings a new page of Candi, which is probably the most accurate "college slice of life" comic for undergrads. Its graduate school partner is PhD. Although I haven't gone to graduate school yet, I'm married to a doctor (and dated him during the 8 years he was in his doctorate program), and he can vouch for the authenticity of the latter.

Fey Winds only updates on occasional Tuesdays. It provides "farcical fantasy" to match the more serious fantasy of The Dreamland Chronicles, which is there most Mondays-Fridays. However, the Scott Christian Sava has managed to get his project turned into a movie (an amazing feat, even if he already was in the industry) and the updates have occasionally drizzled down to MWF in the last few months.

Rounding it off is the Monday-Sunday - yes, seven days a week - heretical viewpoint on religion that is Sinfest. Its polar opposite in art (aside from being in black and white) but its kindred spirit, XKCD, is there MWF.

The webcomics I read range from stick figures to beautiful CGI renders in full color. Some of the art is great, like Sara Ellerton's beautiful paintings (if I ever have any spare cash, I'm commissioning artwork from her). Some of it is cartoony, some of it doesn't even try.

What do they all have in common?

Superb writing. Of course. The best webcomics endure because of the writing, not because of the art.

What I read, Part 2

Another large staple of my literary diet is manga and Japanese light novels. (I watch anime too, but reading subtitles doesn't count.) The sources range from beautifully polished translations put out by Tokyopop and other publishing companies, to very rough, raw translations of unlicensed works put out on places like Baka Tsuki. Nothing gives me a happier thrill than learning my favorite light novels have been licensed for release in the US, because it means I'll 1. get a better story out of it 2. have a nice copy to keep on my bookshelf forever and ever and 2. have an excuse to reread the story.

Two good examples are The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and The Twelve Kingdoms. (Oh heck yeah, the fourth book was just released, time to go snag that!)

Light novels have no exact equivalent in Western publishing. I supposed they could be described as YA, but there is a length restriction to them (around 40,000 words a book), and a serialized expectation, that doesn't quite fit that category. Imagine all the depth and breadth of Harry Potter, but broken down into 200 page chunks, and released in 20 volumes. Zero no Tsukaima (unlicensed in the US, unfortunately) is approaching its 20th volume in Japan.

Manga, or Japanese comic books, tend to find more distributors in the US than their novel counterparts. I couldn't possibly list all the series I read, but the three I'm collecting these days are the shoujo (girls comic) series Ouran High School Host Club, Gakuen Alice, and Skip Beat. No mere comics for children, shoujo series deal with some very adult issues that would earn a serious R rating in the US - sex, drugs, sometimes rock and roll, but more likely teen pregnancy, homosexuality, incest, rape, death - the list goes on.

Sailor Moon was the classic shoujo introduced in the US during the late eighties and nineties, but even that show had to be severely stripped, chopped, and edited (even going so far as to change a lesbian couple over to "cousins" to avoid offending the tender English speaking girl's parent's sensibilities.)

But! The Sailor Moon manga was not censored at all, and you can still pick up some copies from bookstores if you know where to look.

What I read, Part 1

I was a bookworm growing up. There was no more favorite place for me than curled up on a beanbag chair in the library, or sneakily reading with a flashlight in my bedroom late at night.

I've gotten pickier over the years - when I was a teenager I'd read anything that had a science fiction or fantasy tag on it - but I still voraciously consume books, either ones I buy myself or ones I borrow off friends (who buy different authors from me.)

My best friend, having moved back in with us for her senior year in vet school, brought along three fresh book cases. I discovered a handful of my books on there, which I have taken back, but a treasure trove of books from authors I hadn't heard of as well.

I used to have a set book budget of $50 every month. When I quit my job, my book budget went away (this is why you do not quit your day job!) but I'll still pinch and scrounge and save up for books from the following authors:

• Terry Pratchett
• Teresa Medeiros
• Mary Balogh

I'm never disappointed with anything they write, so it's a good investment for me. And I can reread and reread and reread and still enjoy it.

I still try to make a little time to read books on a daily basis, although I make sure to space it out from my writing to avoid losing my own voice by trying to imitate the author of whatever it was I just read.

So today's read, borrowed from my best friend's bookshelf, is Lynn Kirkland's Dreams of Stardust.

I read other things besides books. I follow a ton of blogs, read webcomics, and read and post frantically on several forums. But those are topics for another day.

Return of the Room Mates

My husband and I purchased our first house last January. We've lived alone in happy, post-first-house bliss for about six months. We walked around in our underwear without worrying, we did unmentionable things in the living room and the kitchen, and we generally acted like we owned the place. Which we did.

My best friend, who is a vet student at the local university, reached the breaking point at her fraternity and desperately wanted to move out. She is claiming one of our bedrooms. Additionally, a dear friend (and previous room mate of ours) is moving back from a study abroad in Japan. She is claiming the other empty room, and they'll be sharing a bathroom.

It's going to be a shock going from having our own home all the time to having people around again. We've lived with both our room mates before, and love them both dearly like sisters, but this will be their first time sharing a space, and I'm hoping that all goes well.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, not much. I continue to plug along on Book #2 - it's at about 30,000 words now and many plot elements that were hazy have solidified - but now I'm grateful that this "career change" will allow me to stay home most of the day, and act as a sort of mother to my friends. Both will be under very stressful senior years, and they need someone to help take care of them. It's not much harder to cook for 3-4 people than it is for two, once you account for volume.

On the upside, my best friend has a far more extensive collection of books than I do (three tall bookshelves of romance novels alone!) and I'll be pillaging it for the next year for sure. Maybe someday, one of my books will grace her shelves as well.

The dying screams of an aging computer

A few weeks ago, my fuzzy little cat-child Weaver decided to leap onto my desk, directly onto a freshly made giant mug of hot tea. The tea spilled all over the computer desk, the computer, the wall behind the computer, a video game controller, and my external hard drive. Fortunately, the only permanently destroyed piece of electronics was the controller, but the computer itself has been on the fritz on and off ever since.

What started with some skips and freezes eventually cascaded into blue screens of death. I'm no slouch when it comes to computers (having worked in IT for several years), and while I managed to stem the flow of blood from the motherboard by doing a clean installation of Windows 7, I've been having a hard time with the card readers.

I keep all my writing on an 8 gig SDHC card. This allows me to transfer it back and forth from my desktop computer to my laptop (a tiny little Acer Aspire netbook) instantly.

When the tea spilled, several events happened in a rapid sequence. I yanked out the external hard drive, ran to the kitchen for paper towels, and tried to keep the mess from getting into the inner workings of the computer case. The latter effort succeeded, but the act of tearing out the USB external caused me to actually pull out the little black plastic stub that is enclosed in the USB port itself. This means that port is now completely dead and has a tendency to short out the rest of the ports on the front of the PC.

I believe I've got everything working, and under control again. I hope so. The netbook is unable to handle anything that requires more memory than Open Office or Google Chrome!

The time has perhaps come for me to replace the desktop. I will probably build my own to save money, but it's a pity - this computer is only two and a half years old.

Nothing lasts forever.

A thousand words a day

An easy, manageable goal.

That's a thousand words of new fiction text; not including any revisions, queries, or any of the other business that comes along with writing books and short stories. And of course, not including any blog or forum posts!

It doesn't sound like much, especially for a NaNoWriMo veteran like myself. But it adds up fast if you stay committed.

1,000 words a day is 365,000 words a year - or four full length novels with 45K in change for short stories.

I have a whiteboard above my desk, and every morning, I write the total goal word count. Today's goal was to hit 18,000 words on Book #2. So I sat on the couch, with the cat curled up next to me, and after a while I checked and I was at 18133. Spiffy keen!

Getting to know the characters

I'm dealing with a few new characters I had to invent for the sake of progressing the plot. They're a little thin right now, but I'll flesh them out later.

Usually, I start with a real person I know. A friend, an old professor, someone I met once at a convention and never spoke to again . . . all fair game. That's just for physical looks though. If every character were based on how I envision people looking, they'd be too pretty. Real people aren't perfect.

Then I'll tailor them to fit the role the character is fulfilling. For example, the character of Huliol in Book #2 is meant to look a bit like my high school's valedictorian. She's quiet, thoughtful, nice - a marked contrast to the volatile and temperamental Vazeria. But she's also naive, a romantic, and an optimist.

What drives her? What is her goal in life? Where did she come from? All these things will tell themselves to me as I'm writing her parts in the story - eventually. They may take a while to unfold. She is a secondary character, after all.

I don't think I really get to know her until the first draft of this book is done. Then as I'm revising, I'll change her dialogue around until I have her voice firmly in place.

It's the way with all the characters in my stories. I have to get to know them as I write them. If I try to do the D&D "build a character" route, it will force them into stereotypes. And that's the last thing I want.

Fast Typer, Fast writer?

Something I've known for a while is that I am a faster than average typist. I think it was tested at 60 WPS last time I went through an employment agency, but I'm capable of short bursts closer to 70 or so (provided I don't make typos.)

I chalk it up to learning how to really type during my later teenage years in Compuserve's chat rooms. In the early heydays of the Internet, back when chat rooms were the only thing to do (before the advent of FB, Farmville, and every flavor of MMO imaginable), they were remarkably crowded, and sometimes they'd be completely full and you couldn't even enter your favorite room.

As a result, if you wanted to maintain a conversation, you had to 1. read very fast and 2. type very fast. If you were a laggard, your conversation would end up scrolled up too fast for anyone to bother trying to chat with you.

Now I'm able to touch-type with the "floating" style, and I even use most of the appropriate fingers for hitting keys (right-hand pinky being a stark exception; it curls up when I type. I don't know why.) I also read fast, especially juicy fiction from a favorite author. I can knock out a paperback novel in a few uninterrupted hours.

But typing quickly is not the same thing as writing quickly, or so I thought. During the chat 'n challenges with the Divas, in 20 minutes I'm able to crank out 500-700 words, while others are only putting out 100-200. I think this is a reflection primarily of my typing speed. But it's also a reflection of my writing speed. I have the scene planned out in my mind well before I start writing it, even if I'm not sure of the specifics. And if something is terrible, I can always change it later. Some writers simply prefer to get it "right" on the first go round. So they write slower, but they have to do less revising later on.

There's no "proper" way to write, so long as the final result is high quality. But it's a bit of an ego boost to have high short term numerical output, at least!

Best laid plans . . .

An annual treat for me for the last half a dozen years has been ACEN in Chicago. I've done a lot of things on the fanfiction circuit at that convention, from the fanfic panel to running a writing workshop with the late Kristine Batey. In the last few years I've switched to running the FFXI panel, since Square Enix pretends that the midwest does not exist when planning their fan festivals.

This year, the convention was considered a no-go because I quit my job to become a housewife/writer/stay-at-home-layabout, and my share of our tax refund went to 10 glorious days in the Bay Area. Well worth the trade-off to me.

Now, my husband, wonderful, talented, funny, creative, and above all, employed, moves in anime circles but strictly in the non-fiction writing sense of them. He gets invited to conventions as a guest in order to add a shiny Dr. to the guest list (great for colleges who need to have guest professors to add some legitimacy to their tiny parties.) This is why I was schmoozing in the green room at Dragon*Con last year, and that was when I made my vow that someday I was going to be the invited guest, not him.

Well, he's done it again. There's a possibility of him being invited to ACEN as a last minute VIP guest. If he goes, I go, since we'll probably drive. And here I planned on having May as a nice, predictable free month, in which to finish up my rough draft of book #2.

I'm still not sure whether I should be angry or happy.

My virus scan is an inverse alarm clock

It's three in the morning, and I've just finished the rough draft of a short story that's been kicking around my head these last few days. I'm only stopping because AVG has started running, telling me I've stayed up too late again.

Sometimes I'll do that. I'll write the story in my head, and then sit down, and spill it out from start to finish in one marathon session. It's rough; I'll probably change half of it during revision, but it's finished.

Long ago, the only thing that would produce such a profusion of writing would have been a paper due at 8AM the next day. Now I have no excuse, other than the muses have decided to visit me. (Perhaps appropriate, considering this particular story is set during Minoan and Mycenaean Greece.)

I love my friends

The wedding this weekend was beautiful, and we managed to avoid any confrontations with Certain People, who were gracious enough to ignore us (about all we wanted.) We had a lovely dinner, saw many old friends, and perhaps partook of too much excellent Wolf Mountain Vineyards wine. (Thank you, after dinner coffee bar.)

It was not a storybook wedding. It was raining, and later on, it was thunderstorming too. But the view from the vineyard was still spectacular, with misty mountains in the distance, and an impressive atmosphere during the reception.

The couple, Erin and Jon, switched up their vows to give the ceremony a great punch line: "Erin, you may now kiss your husband."

That line is so getting borrowed for a story someday.

Music

I need to have music in order to write.

Well, I don't so much need it, as I vastly prefer it. My musical tastes have changed much over the many years since I was forced to sit through my sister Carol's endless repetitions of Billy Idol albums, ranging from obsession over classical music to local indie stuff to where I am now: eclectic, ecumenical, and synthesized. I love music the way I love books - there are some artists I return to over and over again, but I am delighted by a good book or a good song even if it's outside of the bounds of my comfort zone.

The classical opening of DJ Tiësto's "Forever Today" forced me to stop writing and simply listen. Waves of a lush artificial orchestral drowned out my thoughts. I think I could cut it out of the greater song (which is firmly trance) and put it on an endless loop and never grow tired of it. There is a track from the video game Final Fantasy Tactics that is much the same; a room mate once left "Apoplexy" on loop all day, and not one of us complained because it is simply that fascinating.

That is where music and books differ. Music that is especially compelling can go on endlessly and we don't mind (for a time.) But when a story is finished, it is finished, often for months or years until a reader remembers just how amazing it was and wants to experience it all over again. No one finishes a book and jumps right back to the beginning for another re-read immediately afterward unless they're cramming for a test.

When I'm writing, I need to have a soundtrack. When I'm reading, I don't. I like to read in silence, just me and the book, the author's voice weaving a narrative thread through my mind. At that point, music becomes a distraction, not an aid.

Writing through the good and the bad

Husband said something upsetting to me this morning. We had one of our Not-Fights, in which I cry and in which he sits there and feels wretched because he made me cry, and within 15 minutes we're apologizing to each other and coming up with a solution to the issue. (The issue was whether he would go to a friend's wedding this weekend, since Certain People were going to be there that he cannot stand. The compromise? A tersely worded message from me to Certain People to be civil this weekend, for the sake of our friend.)

I'm going to make myself write this afternoon, despite this. I actually sometimes write better when I'm emotionally distraught. When my father passed away in 2004, I spilled out about 10,000 words over the course of three days. I won't be writing any happy scenes, but that's okay because the section I've been brooding over these last few days is sinister, with villains. It needs me to be cranky to get the mood right.

I am, however, going to do this writing holed up over in Barnes & Noble with a Frappucino.

Realistic Expectations

The querying process has begun today.

I'll probably get a dozen rejections, but that's the way this industry works. I haven't written The Great American Novel, I wrote a romance novel. I wrote a book I wanted to write, in the style of the books I like to read, and I can only hope that other people who like the sort of books I like to read might like to read mine too.

(That said, in another lifetime on the Internet - and a completely different user name - I wrote a lot of fanfiction stories, and those had a large readership. Many comments from those I admired and respected in those circles were very positive. Some were critical about minor things; usually for good reasons, sometimes for bad. I would have hoped that if I was going about the entire process of writing completely wrong that someone would have told me by now. )

I don't want to win awards for my writing. I'm still content with my 7th grade language arts achievement trophy. No Pulitzers for steam punk.

I don't want to get a ridiculously large advance for a book. I think it would jinx the process. I'd also get walloped with taxes next year all at once.

I don't want to be famous, or eFamous, or a household name. I don't want to be on Oprah.

What I want to do is get a book published, and have people who read the same sort of books I like to read say, "Oh, Catherine Blakeney? Yes, she's one of my favorite authors." That would be worth more to me than all the riches, fame, and accolades I could possibly earn writing in any other genre.

That reminds me: Susan Kearney? Teresa Medeiros? Mary Balogh? You're my favorite authors. Thank you.

If I actually do get a book published, maybe I'll tell Mrs. Slusher at Davidson Fine Arts about it too. She'll be tickled pink.

Newbie writer's homework

I've been building a database of agents.

Well, more like a spreadsheet, but still.

I made sure to check their websites, and discovered a few were not what I thought they were. Deleted. I don't want to waste my time, and they don't want me to waste theirs.

Each one has her own submission quirks, so I'm going to be careful to keep track of who requested what. See, my column with that section? And dates and email address and that sort of thing.

Even if every single agent rejects me, I want to make sure I didn't make a stupid mistake, like misspelling a name, or completely missing the genre they wanted.

Book #1 is still off at the beta readers. I haven't seen either of them online, which means they're either too busy to read it, or couldn't put it down. One can only hope it's the latter!

Mental Writing

I do my writing in my head, when I'm just waking up.

I once had an entire short story (fanfiction, unfortunately) play out in such a way in my mind, as if I was watching a movie in my head. I woke up, and wrote for four hours straight, until I petered out near the end - I had woken up by the time I reached that point.

So this morning, I'm snuggled under the covers with my cat sleeping on my head, kneading my hair, and I'm trying to imagine the next scenes in my current book. Trying to figure out what I need to do with the characters, what elements are missing. I decided to add in a scene with my villains, since they would otherwise not appear until the second half of the book. I decided to add another male character - a buddy, if you will. Truckers have buddies, right? Well, since much of the concept of one of the organizations in the story is "space truckers" they need to have all things trucker-esque. Including buddies.

I also need to return some books to the library. ACC Library was very nice and sent me an email reminder that I needed to return them.

Butt In Chair

I don't like to write when I'm sick.

I guess I should force myself, but when I'm coming down with something - like today, as my temperature has crept up to the 100 mark until I took some Excedrin to kill the approaching fever. I took a nap, I drank some EmergenC, and now I'm sitting at An Imperfect Destiny wondering why my muses have deserted me.

I'll make myself do it in dribbles, I think. A hundred words, then take a break for some hot cocoa. A hundred words, then go mess around in Farmville. A hundred words, and go play on Discover Blogs. A hundred words, and read a chapter in someone else's book.

A hundred words at a time, twenty times, until I've hit my goal for the day.

Ugh.

The iPad

I spent a lovely afternoon with my friend Andrea, who is a Macophile. I'm a PC girl myself; I have been ever since I was a junior volunteer at the National Science Center and learned to navigate Windows 3.X. So it is with a slight bias that I view all of the Mac offerings.

I own an iPod. It is not the favorite MP3 player I have ever owned. That went to a tiny generic $50 player in 2000 that was the size of a big pack of gum and ran off any size SD flash drive. Unfortunately, it was so tiny, it was lost on one of UGA's buses one day. I've mourned its loss ever since, and I consider the iPod and various other MP3 players I've owned to be inadequate substitutes. I'm slowly reconciling myself with iTunes, but I get miffed whenever I want to buy a song and I get told that it's not available for sale in my region. (It's as if they want me to pirate sometimes! Even when I try to be good.)

I have never owned any Mac product bigger than my iPod. My cell phone is an ancient Motorola V276 that I will use until it disintegrates. I'm too poor for Mac laptops and I instead have an Acer Aspire One netbook that cost me $250 last year.

So when I went to visit Andrea, and see her shiny new gadget, of which she is so immensely proud, I was prepared to Not Be Impressed In The Least. Much to my surprise, the iPad has some fairly respectable shinies to it. The most amazing thing is the nonexistent load times for movies from Netflix, and television programs. Beautiful HD resolution shows are beamed into the iPad faster than it takes Firefox to even load the website at Hulu on my PC. No lag, no stuttering.

As wonderful as this is, I can't think of it as justification for me to buy one - I rarely watch television or movies, preferring to consume my entertainment from the written word.

In that regard, the iPad is also quite nice. The eBook format used is clean. I could almost see myself reading a whole book start to finish using it. I still like the weight of an actual volume in my hand, and the smell of decaying wood pulp in the library, but I'm old fashioned.

What killed the iPad for me was the typing. Trying to type on the electrostatic keyboard felt awkward and unnatural. For a touch-typist like me, who is used to writing things into the computer while looking at the place they were originally written down, it was a bit humbling to be slowed down so much and being forced to actually look at the keypad. Andrea pointed out that it is compatible with any wireless Bluetooth keyboard, but if the idea is to replace my netbook, I shouldn't have to carry around a separate keyboard just to type comfortably.

My verdict: If you have a terrible cable company like Comcast or Dish Network, and you wish to ditch them while at the same time you want to watch TV shows and movies any time you like, on demand, in perfect HD resolution, then grab an iPad. Even if you're not usually a Macophile, you will love it to pieces.

But if you're not a visual medium person (like me), and you just want a portable laptop that you can write on (or play FFXI or WoW or Farmville on, since the iPad can't do any of those), then stick with a cheap netbook.

Today's Work

The MadCap Writer, Catherine Blakeney, has arrived! You may shower me with flower petals and book contracts now. (In a dream universe, book contracts would be hand delivered by hunky UPS men who then offer to mow the lawn.)

Today has been devoted mostly to Internet housekeeping - I have a functional website, but no links to content, so I've been fixing that. I now have a Twitter, and a Facebook page, and of course, this brand new blog.

I considered installing a word press directly on my website, but my URL is being hosted under another URL's directory (for my personal website) and I wasn't sure of the logistics of it all. Plus, I've already used more than my fair share of CMS databases, well beyond what I was allotted, and Maia Host (who has been wonderful!) has said nothing. I don't want to press my luck.

So, an external blog it is.

What is the point of this blog?

Well, I have a pretty heavy online identity already, under a nickname, that has a lot of this content on its own. I'm trying to separate myself from that online identity, and out of all my friends under that nickname, only one is also a writer. (Love you Rachel!) Rather than bore all my non-writer friends with the nuts and bolts of this crazy career change of mine, I've opted to keep things tidy. Those that care about what I'm doing may keep up with me here. Those that don't care don't have to bother.

Goals for today:

• Compiled list of ten agents to query: Done!
• Query letter composed: Done! Husband approved. Now this ages for a week before anyone sees it.
• Create online presence: Done!
• 2000 words on Book 2: . . . I'll get back to you on that
• Revision of Book 1: I'm going to add another scene near the end, I believe. I'm also way too "tell-ey" and not enough "show-ey" in the entire third half of the book, so there's still some revision to be done.
• Reading assignment: Another chunk of "Idiot's Guide to Getting Published" out of the way. Hey, it can't hurt. And as much as the blogs from the agent friends and editor friends have helped me so far, I still have a ton of stuff to learn!