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.