Long Vacation

I just returned from eight days of vacation. However, due to various circumstances (birthdays, other parties, etc) tonight if the first moment I've really had to catch my breath.

While I was on the beach at the Toronto Islands, I had a fabulous idea for a book. Or at least I thought I did. When I sat down to sketch it out, there really wasn't enough substance in there for a full length novel. It was, at best, a category romance in terms of length and story. Not that that's a bad thing, necessarily, but I've never even thought of writing a category romance before. Probably because I've always preferred a longer story, a big fat historical I could spend a few days drowning in, or an even longer epic fantasy that would take me a week to devour. (I am a voracious reader, and shorter books are over too soon!)

I may or may not write it. I don't think I'll make it a priority. I have too many other projects I should be working on. The characters voices are so clear in my head, however, that at this rate I may not have a choice!

Exciting news!

I was accepted to the MIT program at UGA for next fall. I haven't been a student in almost ten years, so it will be an interesting transition.

For me as a writer, this is delightful news. I have always built and maintained my own websites, but now I'll have the technical know-how to design them from the bottom up. (Well, I will in two years.) My office is happy about it as well, since having a properly trained web designer in addition to a technical writer will look good to clients.

Will this mean less time for writing? Yes and no. Other things are going to be cut first - I'll be scaling back my video game addiction, to start, and we'll be having quite fewer home cooked meals that I spend an hour crafting. I still want to dedicate as much time to writing as my writing needs.

My husband is in the process of submitting proposals for a nonfiction book, and for the first time he is beginning to understand the sort of effort that goes into just writing query letters and working up the courage to try.

This is why I write

I finished reading The Land of Painted Caves and I can't remember having such an emotional, visceral reaction to the events in a book in many years. These are characters whom I have been friends with since I was thirteen (I can't think of any better way to describe Ayla and Jondalar - they are old friends) and about two thirds of the way through this last book I felt as though I had been punched in the gut.

This is why I am a writer. I want to be the one to cause someone to gasp aloud when they reach a plot twist. I want someone to feel an emotional impact so deep and gut-wrenching it gives them a tummyache. (Okay, maybe not that, but I've certainly felt queasy all evening now.)

I will be sad to see Jondalar and Ayla go, but their adventure has concluded after thirty four years, and I'm glad they got the send-off they deserved.

Great idea taken

I had a brilliant idea a while ago. I could write a nonfiction book on MMO guild management. It's a hobby I'm quite familiar with, and I had never seen anything like it in bookstores. Turns out I was beaten to the punch by a self-pubbed author whose entire text is available for free on Scribd. Back to fiction for me! Instead of doing Script Frenzy, I'll be doing a mini-NaNoWriMo for myself to finish out the YA story I've been working on for a while now. I've been getting about 1500 words done a day at work (I love my job) so I should finish the approximately 40,000 words without much problem.

Good writing trumps all

Over the last few months, a surprising fandom has formed for the latest My Little Pony series. The TV show, which is headed by the venerable Lauren Faust, has gained a following among young men aged 15-30. They formed on the notorious website 4chan, which is most known for its spinoff group of hacktivists Anonymous, and were more or less wrestled off the website by angry moderators for flooding the site with captioned pony pictures.

They call themselves "bronies" and have fled to a new home, ponychan.net, where they are free to spread the pony love.

I admit, I was skeptical about the new MLP series. I have made the mistake of re-watching 80s cartoons and learning how horrible the animation and storytelling was. But I figured that hey, why not, it's a Lauren Faust series.

I was frankly surprised. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a testament to the importance of solid characterization and good writing. Good writing trumps everything - genre, intended audience, animation, even generational and gender prejudices. The characters are unique, genuine, and believeable, and each offers a positive role model. A major overriding theme of the show is to embrace your own natural talents, rather than try too hard to be good at things you're not really suited for. To that end, there are tomboy ponies, fashionista ponies, bookworm ponies, at least two small businesswoman ponies, and a pony who loves to party whose sole job seems to be catering and coordinating parties for other ponies.

If you have a girl under the age of 12 you can get away with watching this show with her, and she will probably enjoy it and you will be shockingly delighted at how good it is. If you don't have a girl under the age of 12 handy, then watch the episodes on YouTube, alone, if you are afraid of anyone seeing it.

As a female anime fan I brazingly watched it in the living room on YouTube, much to the consternation of my husband. I also went and bought ponies for the first time in twenty years.

Thanks, Hasbro, for bringing on Lauren Faust. Good writing really does transcend all.

Busy bee

It's a good thing I snagged that new laptop when I did, because my faithful old desktop system is on the fritz. Poor thing. It's had a hard life.

My day job is in an IT support company, so when my computer at home breaks, I know how bad the issue is and usually I know what to do about it. Well, the issue on this desktop is severe IRQ interrupts, an issue I had with it on its original Vista install about three years ago. That was actually the major reason I downgraded it back to XP and only re-upgraded it back when Windows 7 beta and RC came out.

So there's a few things I'll be doing to it, but if they don't fix it, the only solution is a whole system rebuild. And at that point, I might as well just buy a new DIY kit and start from scratch. Reinstalling Windows is always the last resort, but for XP systems the best practice was to do a clean rebuild every six months, and for Vista it was once a year. It's been about a year and a half for the Windows 7 install on my desktop. Perhaps that'll be the benchmark for 7 installs.

DIY kits are the cheapest option for getting a brand new system, but they are not for the faint of heart. Even I've only applied thermal paste to a processor heat sink a few times in my life. On the other hand, it will be excellent practice - I've been putting off the A+ exam for a while now because I've been scared of the practical. The practical entails being handed a table of parts and being asked to build a computer. Well, if I can do it at home with a DIY kit, surely I can handle for a test. Right?

DIY kits also don't come with an OS. My copy of Windows 7 was purchased independent of the hardware, and my licensed copy of XP is sitting there collecting dust, so I can drop 7 on this theoretical new system and plop XP onto the old dying system and use it as a media center computer.

What does this have to do with writing? Not much, except that computers are a writer's primary tools these days. When they start messing up, I start counting myself lucky that everything is safely stored in Dropbox.

Official RWA Member

I paid my dues and I'm now an official member of RWA. I'm still debating whether to go to the GWA chaper or the online fantasy/sci-fi/paranormal chapter. Both provide benefits, and while I'd like to go to the in-person meetings, the GWA meetings are quite a bit of a drive for me. It might be doable once a month, however. I'll investigate a bit more.

So I finally ended up getting a laptop. It's not a latest and greatest by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a killer deal and Office Depot offered me a special 4 year warranty, including accidental damage and one free battery replacement, for the price of a three year warranty. Now, since I know most laptops last three years maximum, and the 4th year of coverage is usually the same price as the first three combined, this is a fantastic deal. Couldn't pass it up.

For those who aren't tech savvy, my advice is to always get the maximum warranty you can when purchasing laptops. For desktop systems, the repair process is usually much faster and less expensive. For example, replacing a fan in a desktop takes 5 minutes and costs $15 in parts and labor at most shops. Replacing a fan in a laptop costs closer to $150 - $75 for the part alone, and then an hour's worth of labor.

You can skimp out on warranties on desktops if you're not afraid to plunge into computer guts - PC repair isn't difficult. I haven't had a warranty on a desktop since 1999 (at which point I became an unfortunate victim of capacitor plague in 2003, but the system would have been out of warranty anyway.) But for laptops, those warranties are worth their weight in gold. Laptop repairs are time consuming and frustrating and beyond the scope of the average home user. I've done them before, and I'd rather avoid doing them ever again.

I once had a Compaq laptop that died 4 times in two and a half years due to a poorly designed power jack, prompting the "no lemon" warranty to kick in. I got a replacement with no questions asked. My husband had three laptops replaced under that policy - and he repurchased the warranty on the replacement laptop for another 3 years, giving him essentially a new laptop for $300 each round.

The new laptop is a low-end HP, with similar specs to my 3 year old desktop system. But it's all I really need to run yWriter and Dropbox. And that's all I need to write.

Laptop Shopping

I'm running into a wall with my laptop shopping. I have a relatively low budget of $800, which has to include the 3-4 year warranty. I don't need a huge hard drive, but I want a fast one (7200 RPM minimum.) I want a large screen, but I'm more concerned with having a good resolution than having a 17" behemoth to lug around. I want at least 4 gigabytes of RAM and ideally Windows 7 64 bit. (There's no point havinga 64 bit processor, which they are almost entirely these days, but running a 32 bit OS.) I'd like a discrete graphics chip, but I don't have the cash to shell out for a true gaming laptop.

I'm also a brand snob. I won't touch an Acer (since my poor little Aspire One died after only a year and a half), a Lenovo, a Dell (*shudder*), Fujitsu, or a Gateway. (Some of this is irrational opinion as an IT professional - I've had too many Dells die before their product life cycle ended.) That leaves me with a choice of Asus, HP, and Toshiba.

I also refuse to get a recertified laptop. I'm all over that with desktops where I can muck around with the innards when things burn out, but I've done laptop repairs before and I'd rather not deal with it if I can get it covered under a warranty 4 years out.

I don't think my demands are unreasonable. The programs I use aren't exactly cutting edge - yWriter could run on a thin client, and I play a nine year old MMORPG.

But so far, I haven't had any luck.

The Big Plunge

Wrote a check for $110, sending it off to Romance Writer's of America. Hopefully in a week or two I'll be an official member.

Now, to start saving up for the conference...

Updates at work

I feel uncomfortable writing at my office, even when I have permission (due to "downtime" and the nature of our business.) Mostly its the subject matter - romance novels are not exactly work safe. But there's also my need for solitude during writing.

I never had trouble writing essays in class, or on standardized tests, possibly because everyone else is engrossed in their work. But fiction is different. When I'm involved in my writing, I don't want anyone else to see it until I'm ready for them to see it. The process of writing for me is a messy one - drafts, scripts, and sections and chapters are all a muddle until I'm done. I don't mind someone looking after I'm finished (indeed, I want to share it with the universe) but not until I'm ready.

I have my own desk and wide open internet access at my office (giving me access to my drop box), but not my writing software. I am not allowed to use my own laptop without permission, not that I have a working laptop at the moment.

So I am going to have to get in the habit of writing the moment I get home, since it won't happen any other time.

No laptop

I have been awfully quiet.

As I mentioned preciously, my precious netbook developed a sudden and total allergy to Windows sometime in October. (Seriously - all attempts to reinstall XP resulted in blue screens of death.) Rather than discard the perfectly serviceable hardware, I loaded it up with Ubuntu Linux.

Many of my writing programs worked on it - with a little massaging. Dropbox installed without any major issues. yWriter5 took a bit more work and learning some sudo commands, but after an hour or two it was running, although with critical bugs. As I changed from scene to scene, the "scene description" window would shrink to the point where it was unreadable.

But the final nail in the coffin was the discovery that Happy Koala Elf Timesink Fantasy would not play on the machine, because the emulators require more robust hardware. Horrors!

After much painful deliberation, I opted to give it to my husband's 10 year old niece for Christmas. She was thrilled, as she had been nagging her parents for a netbook just like mine for years. Hopefully she won't break it in the first month. (I left Linux running on it for two weeks straight to be sure that it wasn't going to go belly up the day after she received it.)

This means I'm on the prowl for a new laptop. I want something with a significantly larger screen this time, and Windows 7. The netbook is nice because I could chuck it in my purse, but I'm getting spoiled by the 19" monitor at home.

Speaking of monitors, I plan on picking up a second one from a friend. My video card can handle two at a time, and having a second monitor means I can leave my writing stuff up all the time while still doing other things on the first one. I plan to use it as a motivational tool.

New year's resolution: Finish Book #2. Start sending out hard copy query letters. Channel the output I wasted on Christmas fanfiction (22K short story in a month, hitting 4K words one day) into novel writing.

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.