mystics and madmen

Finished and turned in my post-colonial theory paper this afternoon. Yesterday morning I had two pages out of 7-9; last night I had 6 and a half; today before lunch I finished it, at seven point five pages. Clearly I should take more English classes, or write more papers about steampunk stories with lesbians in them, or something.

This leaves me with two physics finals, one of which I have to complete before noon on Monday and one of which I have to complete between Tuesday and Thursday of next week.

Hence, tonight I decided it was time for a writing night. And since I got past 5,000 words on Whisper-Trail, methinks it's time for an Official Progress Bar.



I have been overcoming inertia by burning plot as quickly as I can. I'm not sure what will happen when I run out of the things I know. Probably I will make more stuff up. In the meantime, it's possible that this novel actually has tension, and forward motion, and so on. (Weeeird.) Of course it's also a) total fluff, b) FILLED WITH DRAMA, and c) probably far too late to catch the YA urban-fantasy/paranormal-romance boat. But those things may be unavoidable.

Also, actually making progress on a new novel feels good enough that I don't really care that it's terrible. I have pages! Lots of pages! So I'm a winner.

This entry originally posted at Dreamwidth. See comments there.

For posterity:

The first time I made cake-inna-mug in the microwave, I altered this recipe.

But my alteration called for applesauce, and when Kate and I went over to the campus center tonight, they were out of applesauce.

So, new variant!

3 tbsp + 1 heaping tsp flour
3 tbsp sugar
1/8 tsp baking powder
1/16 tsp xanthan gum
2 tbsp rice milk
2 tbsp oil
1 spoonful jam (we had strawberry)
vanilla, cinnamon, etc. to taste

Put in all dry ingredients, stir, add wet ingredients and stir again, making sure to break up all the lumps. Microwave for about 2 minutes, 15 seconds. Devour.

Lighter than the previous iteration, still just as tasty.

This entry originally posted at Dreamwidth. See comments there.

...and I revised the bits of Whisper-Trail I have so far, and now the way forward is more clear. I still don't know where it's going but there are a few more scenes I can write before I run out of illumination, and that might be enough. To get me going at least. So--good news.

(Maybe part of it was just realizing what the problem was. Now I can set a time and say to myself "You've done enough, you get some time to write." I mean, we'll see how well it works out, but. Success at least for today.)

This entry originally posted at Dreamwidth. See comments there.

1. I...am maybe realizing that I am actually going to England this summer. WHO KNEW?
1.1. There were prospective students around this weekend, and I met some geeky theatrical queer-and-allies ones who were awesome--at some point my summer plans came up and I think describing it to them (with plenty of flail) solidified my knowledge that yes, this is real. Possibly because they were complete strangers fifteen minutes before?
1.2. It looks like it's completely plausible for me to go and stay in Cambridge (England, not MA) for a few days and use the Conway-More letters that their archives hold.

2. Classes end at Mount Holyoke a week from today. What is this madness?

3. I keep not Sitting Down And Writing. I have figured out that this is maybe because I always feel like there's some homework thing that I ought to be doing. So I can't block out a half-hour and open a word processor and turn off my wifi and write, because I'd keep feeling guilty about Not Doing Productive Things. (Writing novels is clearly not Productive. Because no one grades me on writing novels, and I'm not paying fifty thousand dollars a year to write novels, and anyway novels take a long time to write and they're hard and stressful along with being amazing, so it's easy to say "well I'll do that tomorrow".) If I'm just faffing about on the Internet, on the other hand, there's every chance that in five minutes I'll close the browser window and do some physics homework. (Occasionally I even do.) Which, because I am at a point in a couple of projects where I need to overcome inertia of this-is-terrible and there's-no-plot, means I end up not writing at all.
3.5. This is annoying.

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There is a tumblr full of Diana Wynne Jones memorials and I started writing this as a submission, and then it turned into a post.

I discovered Diana Wynne Jones with Year of the Griffin. It's a sequel, so it seems an odd starting place, but it worked well for me. When you're a kid, adults assume that you aren't as smart as they are just because you're younger. They look down on you, they use smaller words when they're talking to you, they pat you on the head--physically or metaphorically. When you're a bookish kid who has a big vocabulary and a fierce imagination, this can result in...difficulties.

The main characters in Year of the Griffin are in college, by my younger self's standards basically grown-up, but nearly all the adults talk down to them anyway. This creates...problems. But their desire to learn and their friendships allow them to keep growing, circumvent the adults, and solve some (okay, most) of the problems the adults think are unsolvable.

Finally, I had found characters with whom I had complete sympathy.

Better yet, this Diana Wynne Jones person had written lots of books! In each one, the plot was complicated and difficult to predict, and in each one I added new words to my vocabulary--in a very natural way, by encountering unfamiliar words when reading and garnering what context I could to figure out what they meant. They were clever and funny and magical and wise, books I could reread over and over. Some of them were books that I could tell I didn't quite understand yet, but that was okay; I had the other ones, and maybe eventually I could read them again and they'd make sense. (I get Crown of Dalemark now, but I am pretty sure I still don't understand Fire and Hemlock.)

And--well--I don't know what else to say. I said some of it last year. At least part of A Returning Power is responding to her work, and I'm sure bits of other stories I've written owe quite a lot to her too. To a certain extent? I don't think I'll ever stop saying things about Diana Wynne Jones.

This entry originally posted at Dreamwidth. See comments there.

I get to go to London this summer! For five weeks! And do research in the British Library and go to the theater and the Pride parade and try not to get trampled by the Olympics and and and everything.

Whiiiich is all to say, they emailed me today and told me I have funding.

This almost but not entirely makes up for the four-day farce that me trying refill my asthma medication has become. And I mean that will probably resolve in the next day or so, whereas I am GOING TO BE IN LONDON THIS SUMMER.

...despite all my capslocking and exclamation points I'm not sure it has sunk fully in yet. Um. But. London. A different continent. Adventures. Research. Amazingness. What. Cannot even.

This entry originally posted at Dreamwidth. See comments there.

Get struck by inspiration during physics class--to adapt an idea that, you remember vaguely, you tried out once before. Surreptitiously scribble notes amongst your equations. Treasure the idea's flavor in your mind. Move to your writing notebook; draft the first few paragraphs and pour out a few more thoughts.

Type up those paragraphs and those notes. Decide to dig through your old files and find the original version of the story, now that your new version is down in electrons. Not remembering any of the original names of the characters makes this more difficult, especially because younger-you usually named files after the main character. Find a file from a couple of years ago saying "there was that idea I had a while ago, I should write it again better!" about the same idea. The other file must be in there somewhere--

Dig further. Eventually become reduced to searching your documents folder for bland key words such as "lake" and "forest". Realize that one of the things you skimmed earlier actually was the original story in question, almost utterly unrecognizable. The file name says "v2".

Go dig up the first version. Read it. Ponder the fact that the new story idea is almost completely different than the original one, down to focusing on a different character entirely with different magical powers, but they are still the same story. In some weird way.

Carry on with your new idea. It may be the same one, but it's all shiny and fresh and it sparkles when you hold it into the light.

(This may become three linked novellas. Not completely sure, but it may. There are three sisters, and they each distinctly have their own story--although at the moment the one that's caught hold of my brain is the youngest's story. The earlier version was about the middle sister, and if I ever get that far that story may stay vaguely the same, but we'll see.)

This entry originally posted at Dreamwidth. See comments there.

( Books et cetera )

I've been having a pretty sleepy spring break. I wrote a scene and a half of a play and I revised a short story, also I wrote a kind-of-prologue for a novel that doesn't actually have a plot. Sent a story or two out and a few more queries. I am having vague tickles of ideas; we'll see if any of them go anywhere.

Don't Wanna go back the day after tomorrow. Especially because I'm getting my second quantum midterm next week and the week after that is tech week for Midsummer...but, well, onwards. It will be nice to have structured Things To Do again. (I might get to go to some bits of ConBust next weekend but we'll see; Midsummer is eating my life.)

This entry originally posted at Dreamwidth. See comments there.

Wrote this up a bit ago, posting since a couple of people said it would be interesting to read. I've only ever read slush for Ideomancer, but based on that and my experience with submitting stories and reading other writers' anecdotes of submitting stories, these are all pretty general. Proportions of form/personal rejections vary with market, of course; a site like Duotrope can give you an idea of that ratio.

Rejectomancy is very tempting as a writer. "What did they mean?" and "did they like it?" and "did they hate it?" "do they hate me?"

1. "Not right for us" has approximately fifty meanings. No one can tell which one is applicable except the person sending the letter.
2. Getting a response either more quickly or more slowly than the estimated time online...well, mostly means nothing. Except "I need time later in the week for this other stuff" or "ohgod finals slush will have to wait" or "I traded a piece of slush with someone, and theirs came in later but I'm doing slush now so I may as well get it done" or something else unrelated to the submitted piece in question.
(2a. Exception: if it's over the stated response time, you may query.)
3. A personalized rejection and a rewrite request can be structured and worded similarly, but they are not the same thing.
(3a. Usually, if a personalized rejection letter lists one downside of a story, that is not the only reason that they aren't taking it. That just happens to be the most obvious reason they aren't taking it. If that was the only reason, they'd ask you to rewrite and resubmit.)
(3b. If I read and responded to the same story twice, say in two different months, I would
i) give it the same class of response (pass up, rewrite, rejection) and
ii) if rejecting it, probably give a different reason each time, depending on what was jumping out at me that day/week/month.)
4. Each story really is considered on its own merits.
4a. Names do sometimes ring bells--probably not for bigger markets that have huge slush piles, but at Ideomancer sometimes they do--sometimes I happen to get several stories from the same person. But it dissociates from their prior stories, it's just "oh, that name looks familiar". Maaaaybe "oh, I remember her last submission was really close". I used to get all flinchy about submitting, 'what if they don't like it and then they hate me'--that doesn't happen. (Possibly I'll frown at your con badge because your name is familiar and I can't remember why.)
4b. Publishing credits in a cover letter don't do much for me as a slush reader. It's nice, sometimes, but the story is what we're considering. I have loved stories with bare-bones cover letters, and been meh about stories that came in with impressive publishing credits in the cover letter.
5. Personal preference can never completely be avoided, but slush readers do try to get their brains out of the way of the story.

These transfer to not freaking out when I submit stories, and have partially but not entirely transferred to not freaking out about submitting a novel query to agents. There's stuff to be learned from slush-reading about the actual work with words of writing, too, but most of that doesn't fit neatly into lists.

This entry originally posted at Dreamwidth. See comments there.

On we march toward spring break. Only a week of classes left! I've got a paper and a set or so of physics homework left, but I'm getting awfully close.

Some other things I ought to do:
- buy tickets for spring break transit
- revise that short story, argh (or could do over spring break, no real deadline)
- start poking at the idea I got recently for a play

Tonight we have the first full run of Midsummer since the read-through at the beginning. Should be excellent, especially since I missed most of the Act I run on Thursday evening due to running off to Northampton... where I finally, finally got to see They Might Be Giants live.

I was introduced to TMBG approximately seven years ago, at MITY Creative Writing. Our teachers, Mike and Kevin, would blast "Birdhouse In Your Soul" and "Why Does The Sun Shine" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" while we did writing exercises. They'd round us up into poetry circles, put on some TMBG, and then dance around while we frantically composed stanzas. It was a revelation: music didn't just have to be goopy love songs! Add to that the fact that MITY was the first real community I had offline, of people who were the same kind of people that I was, of writers and creative types and dreamers, and--well. I was gone.

Ever since then, I have wanted to attend a concert of theirs. But every time they went on tour--they'd be in Minnesota, but a friend would have her birthday party the same day, and she'd guilt me into going to it instead of going to see TMBG. Fine, okay, I'd grumble. Or sometimes, after I came to college, they'd be in Minnesota while I was in Massachusetts, or in Massachusetts when I was in Minnesota (pretty sure that one happened my first year at MHC). Something always came up, one way or another.

And then I was on the bus in Northampton a few weeks ago, and saw that the Calvin Theater was advertising a concert by They Might Be Giants.

...I bought a ticket. And it doesn't matter that I forgot to tell my stage manager I had a conflict, so I had to run out right after my first half-scene of rehearsal and catch a late bus and miss all of Jonathan Coulton's opening act, because I got to sing along to "Ana Ng" played live. It doesn't matter that I missed the last bus back to MHC and had to call a cab, because I stayed for both encores and in the second one they played "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)". It doesn't matter that I ended up not seeing anyone I know, because the crowd in that darkened room was full of people like me.

(I still wish that all my MITY friends could have been there. Someday. Maybe another seven years--because I know we'll still be friends then.)

This entry originally posted at Dreamwidth. See comments there.