Category: writing

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writing year in review

2010: Year in Review

Writing

Since one of my major projects for the year was writing, I want to cover that first. And it’s exciting, because I finally got to put my big girl writer pants on this summer! I’m now officially an associate member of the SFWA, which was a giant personal accomplishment for me, to go with getting my first story published at a pro rate.

Written This Year

Novels: I started work on two novels and am still having a hard time figuring out which to work on first. Which is fine, since I haven’t had a lot of time or attention span for working on something long anyway. I also got about a third of the way in to a second draft of one of my old NaNos, but let it fall by the wayside in favor of Throne of Nightmares

This year I also completed three separate drafts of Throne of Nightmares, which Isaac and Sin were good enough to critique. I also have started sending out queries for Throne of Nightmares, which is exciting and terrifying at the same time. We’ll see if I have any luck there…

Shorter stuff:
Written total: 8 short stories, 1 novelette, 1 novella
Finalized: 5 short stories, 1 novelette
Consigned to the Trunk of Awfulness, never to emerge again: 1 short story

Publishing
Queries Sent: 48
Rejections Received: 38
Most rejections received: Transportation at 14

Published this year: The Book of Autumn in Beneath Ceaseless Skies issue #49.
Slated for next year: Transportation in Anotherealm in September, The Falling Star in the New Fairytales Anthology by Aurora Wolf which should be coming out in early 2011.

So I feel that generally, I did a good job with writing this year! I’m hoping to do as well next year, though I think my productivity will be lower since I won’t have half a year off of school this time around.

Blogging

This, I didn’t do so well at. Total, I did 165 entries this year, which is okay I guess… averages about one every three days or so. But I was trying for every other day. Up until about September I did all right (we shall not speak of April… my excuse is wedding prep!) but after that my productivity just tanked. I honestly don’t think next year will be much better thanks to that grad school thing. In the grand scheme of things, if I have to choose between writing a blog post and writing on a story, the story is bound to win.

Everything Else!

2010 was a massive, crazy year for me. And mostly filled with good instead of bad, so I can’t complain at all.

The Good

1. I got married! (I have many photos, by the way…) That was exciting, and involved some wonderful cake and a lot of British people wandering around in Colorado and feeling faintly bemused. Married life has, honestly, not been much different from unmarried life considering Mike and I had been living together for five years before the wedding. But it was still an incredibly important milestone in our relationship and I couldn’t be happier.

2. I started grad school! I’ve still got my doubts, worries, and uncertainties, but I survived my first semester, and I think I survived it fairly well. Of one of my classes, the less said of it the better, but the other – sedimentary petrology – I did really well in. I even got the highest score in the class on my sandstone practical, as far as I can tell. I haven’t started my research yet, but I read two articles a week and am slowly coming up to speed on the Bighorn Basin.

3. I survived to my 30th birthday! And then I got very drunk.

4. I’ve managed to get myself back into good enough shape to start kung fu back up. I’m incredibly excited about that. I’ve learned the entirety of the sze sze chuen suong ta now, and I’ve gotten deep into ching men chuen. I feel like that’s extremely good for only three months back.

5. I got an Exxon-Mobil research grant, so I’ll be able to spend a month or so up in the Bighorn Basin next summer. That’ll hopefully give me a good start to my research. Once I figure out what my topic is.

6. Got my first short story published at a professional rate! Yes, I know that I already mentioned this, but it’s so exciting I think it’s worth mentioning again.

7. I rescued a cat and helped find her a new home. I got to cat sit for her at the beginning of December, and she’s thriving. Crazy, but thriving.

8. I got to go to TAM for the third year in a row and hang out with all of my friends – and got hugged by DJ Grothe (omg Squee). I also was able to go to MileHi Con for the first time in years, even if only for a day. I was very excited about that and had a blast. And, of course, capped that day with getting to go to a Not-Quite-a-W00tstock.

9. Made it back to the UK for Christmas this year, after skipping last year so we could save up for the wedding. It was really nice to get to see everyone, and have our (mostly) annual walk along the beach in Brighton.

The Bad

1. The furnace springs immediately to mind, since it also only just happened. While it’s only a thing, and it didn’t kill or harm anyone, the harm that it’s done to our bank account still has me reeling. I also realized that if it had gone up before we headed to the UK, we wouldn’t have made it this year. So a thing falling apart in and of itself isn’t that big of a deal, it’s the stress that it puts our household under that makes it bad.

2. In the same vein, getting the news that the car is going to fall apart soon and really isn’t worth repairing was rough. On the good side, it’s still running, even if it sounds so awful you feel like you should have a bag over your head when you drive it somewhere. But we know the day is coming, and now our money that was reserved for the car is gone, thanks to the furnace.

3. The class that shall not be named in grad school made the last three weeks of the semester a living hell during which I didn’t even get to see my husband for more than a few hours a week. This is probably for the best, since if I had seen him I likely would have started screaming at him for no good reason, just because of the stress.

4. Being completely unable to find an internship for next summer. This was a major blow to my self-esteem, particularly since everyone assured me I had a rock-solid resume. Maybe I just suck that much at the interview part of the process. Of course, this also adds to the financial distress, since it means I won’t be earning nearly as much in the summer of 2011 as I should. But what can you do… we’ll survive.

So… twice as much good as bad. That’s always an excellent sign! Hopefully 2011 will be even better. A little less woe in the finance department would be nice.

Categories
science fiction writing

The Mid-vacation Post

So far, it’s been a nice visit to the UK, which is really no surprise to anyone. Christmas and Boxing Day were big family get togethers, which I enjoyed and only got a little drunk for. My jet lag problem is still present this year, though I think not nearly as obnoxious as it’s been in years past. I’ve had to take naps on a couple of days, and have had a little bit of insomnia, but not to the point that I’ve been up at 3 in the morning and completely unable to sleep like I have been in other years.

The weather in the UK has been just fine as far as I’m concerned. There’s been a lot of do about the temperature being below zero C, but I went for an hour and a half walk in it on Christmas morning while everyone else was at mass, and it was perfectly fine other than my ears getting cold since I forgot my hat back in the US. I think the bigger problem is just that the cold temperatures means the ice doesn’t melt, and I guess this part of the UK doesn’t know the wonders of car-destroying mag chloride the way we do in Colorado. I did have to avoid some terrifying icy sidewalks during my walk, to be sure. But other than that, it hasn’s been any kind of Snowmageddon. Yesterday when we got back from London (around 2200) it was actually raining fairly heavily, so that’s hopefully a sign that it’s getting a bit warmer and the ice will go away. We ended up taking a cab from the train station at Wokingham, since the line west of it was shut down and the rain was nasty enough we didn’t feel like waiting for the bus, or walking home once we caught said bus.

Speaking of Snowmageddon, we landed all right, but Heathrow has still apparently not gotten its shit together. Once we landed we had to park somewhere in the back of beyond for a good twenty minutes because there was nowhere for our plane to go, and then moved to a slightly less far away parking spot so that we could take buses to the terminal. Immigration was fast, but then we spent a stupid amount of time waiting for our luggage. I was also insanely thirsty the entire time, and there was nowhere to get anything to drink, though I could have apparently bought a SIM card from a vending machine if I wanted to. Maybe you can suck on those like mints. Anyway, our flight landed not long after 0900, and we didn’t get our luggage collected and get out of there until after 1100. There was also a frightening graveyard of lost and unclaimed baggage taking up one entire section of the claim, which did not inspire confidence.

It’s also worth noting that I didn’t get to sit next to Mike for most of the flight, since the television for his seat was broken, and they moved him to the only empty seat on the airplane so he had something to do. I mostly used the flight to catch up on movies… I watched Toy Story 3, which I thought was very good and don’t feel at all ashamed about sniffling through. I also watched The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The funny thing is, when Mike and I met up after landing and were talking about the movies we watched, we could each name two of them and it took us forever to remember which one the third was. For both of us, it was that movie. Which I think pretty much says all you need to know about how utterly unremarkable it was as a film.

Yesterday Mike and I went in to London. I paid a quick visit to Harrod’s – the store was insanely busy, but everyone apparently just desperately wanted to buy perfume. After we got out of that section of the store it was just fine, and we were in and out in less than twenty minutes. After that we met up with Sam and Rick, and spent the rest of the day taking up space in a pub and playing board games. The game we started off with was Ticket to Ride, which was a lot of fun and I’m going to have to pick up a copy once my checking account stops crying about the furnace.

Oh yes, translation for any UK readers: by furnace, I mean boiler. Even though it has nothing to do with boiling water. I do not in fact own any sort of smelting equipment. This announcement brought to you by Mike’s parents, who found that particular vocabulary mix-up very entertaining.

The Doctor Who Christmas special was pretty good, I think. I wouldn’t place it higher than the first Christmas Invasion, or even the Runaway Bride, but I definitely liked it better than the silly episode with the space Titanic, or the one from two years ago that was kind of about the cyberman and all it really had going was a lovely steampunkish Victorian setting. I’d say this one was as close at Doctor Who’s really gotten to just out and out producing a fable, and while it had the normal plot holes that you could drive a truck through, it at least had a lot more life in it than the last couple of episodes I’ve seen. (Which were, for the record, Victory of the Daleks and The Adventures of Spitty Timothy Dalton as the Most Underused Rassilon Imageinable [not its actual title].) Really, considering that I feel like the entire episode was based around someone saying, “I’ve got this awesome mental image of a shark flying through the air, pulling a rickshaw… let’s combine that with Christmas!” the end result was surprisingly coherent and fun. It’s also convinced me to give Matt Smith another chance as the Doctor… considering my first exposure to him was the underwhelmingly written turd of a Dalek episode from his season, he really needed something to recommend him.

I think a some point I may have to devote a post to how I feel about the way the Daleks have been used in recent episodes. It won’t be a very nice post.

Today Mike and I are headed off to Brighton to see Sam and Dan and Rhi and hopefully Captain Stu, so that’s exciting. It’s hard to believe we’re already at the midpoint of our trip, though this one’s a few days shorter than trips we’ve taken in the past, since Mike ran out of vacation. Something to do with a wedding.

Also, Anotherealm has now published its 2011 lineup. Transportation will be the September offering – I’m really excited about that!

Categories
geology grad school writing

Emerging From Under My Rock

So, where have I been since Thanksgiving? The easy yet melodramatic answer is: in a black pit of horrible despair. Really, I just mean that I was working on an intensely awful end of semester group project, which I was having to spend over twenty hours a week on. With the other end of semester goings-on, it meant that I spent several weeks where I didn’t get to see my friends and barely got to see my husband while he was awake. There was other awful drama connected with it that I’d rather not go in to now; let’s just say that I’m glad I survived it without ending up in jail.

Thankfully, that’s all done with now! WOO! I survived my first semester of grad school. I have been assured by many friends that grad school is normally not quite this horrible, so I’m going to try not to worry too much about next semester.

The last thing I did in the semester was actually write a paper for sedimentary petrology. That was actually a lot of phone, particularly when compared to the soul-destroying awfulness of the group project. I enjoyed spending time with my thin sections, and it also means I’ve got a new round of photo micrographs to share! The ooid grainstone micrographs are cooler looking than the lithic arenite, though I think the diagenetic history of the lithic arenite is more interesting. But that’s because sandstones tend to be a diagenetic nightmare.
Lithic arenite photo micrographs
Ooid grainstone photo micrographs

Now that school’s done with until January, I’m hoping I can manage to get some writing done. I’ll also be in England from December 23-January 1, since Mike and I are going to see his family. There’s a lot to look forward to this vacation.

Other things:

I love my Senator. Mark Udall, I mean. Bennet, well, the best I can still say for him is that at least he isn’t Ken Buck.

Tron: Legacy was a fun movie. Don’t bother seeing it in 3D, in case you’re one of those people that actually likes the 3D thing. It’s great in 2D, and I have it on good authority that the 3D really doesn’t add anything. If you want something deep, it’s not the movie for you, but if you want lightcycles and Jeff Bridges being stoner!God, it’s a great time.

My parents gave me a Galaxy S as my early (and only) Christmas present. I am deeply in love with my amazing phone, and am greatly enjoying the fact that I no longer have the most pathetic phone out of all of my friends.

There is now a Jack’n’Grill by my house. We went there yesterday and the food is fantastic. It’s also huge. We didn’t realize until we got there that it was the home of the seven pound breakfast burrito once featured on Man vs. Food. The rest of the food is in keeping with that. You can’t get a burger that’s smaller than 10 ounces. But it’s 10 ounces of pure awesome, that’s for sure.

Yesterday Kat came up to hang out. During the afternoon we worked on some writerly stuff. The end result is that I sent out five query letters to agents. I am both excited and terrified about this. I hope the rejection callouses that I’ve built up over the last nine months with my short stories will help me in this process.

Categories
writing

Coming Soon to an Internet Near You!

Exciting times! I’ve signed two contracts in the last week, so I’ll have two short stories in print (of the real or digital variety) soon!

Transportation has found a home with Anotherealm. I’ll know when it’ll be appearing around Christmas, when they put up their new lineup.

The Falling Star will be appearing in Aurora Wolf’s New Fairy Tales Anthology. I don’t have an exact date on that either, though the publisher wants the anthology in print before Christmas. I’ll post as soon as there’s a firm date or when the anthology is available for purchase.

The long-suffering Isaac has finished his second go-through of Throne of Nightmares so my goal is to give it one last polish and start querying agents before the new year. Wish me luck!

Categories
writing

I’m Getting Better… I Think I’ll Go For a Walk.

Realms of Fantasy LIVES!

Time to fire up my printer and get a story sent out to them, then. WOO!

Categories
geology petm writing

Curse you, passive voice!

I’ve been reading a lot of scientific papers lately; I’m in two classes, and I’m trying to get in a sufficient amount of reading on topic before my research starts up. Easier said than done… for the most part, scientific papers tend to knock me out, even if I’m not tired when I start reading. And it’s not a fatigue issue, anyway; if I’m reading something that I’m interested in, it doesn’t matter how tired I am. I’ll stay up until four in the morning just because I need to read One More Page.

I think papers just knock me out because, for the most part, they’re badly written. There’s a lot of jargon, but that’s unavoidable in a specialized field. I think the bigger problem tends to be writing style. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that most scientists aren’t like me (writing fiction as a masochistic hobby) or my friend Evan (who has a BA in English). When I took my “writing in the geosciences” undergrad course – which I wasn’t terribly impressed by – most of the other students were just miserable about being there, because they hated writing so much.

Actually disliking the process of writing is not going to help when it comes to producing a coherent, interesting paper. I suppose the more the writer feels like he or she is fighting with the English language, the more the reader will feel like it, too.

There are a lot of things that make scientific papers a giant slog to read. I think one of the major ones is the ubiquitous use of passive voice. In prose, passive voice is the kiss of death. It’s something to be avoided entirely or used only sparingly, because it tends to interfere with the reader’s ability to connect with the action.

Of course, scientific articles aren’t fiction. Most of the time.

But the thing is, a lot of people who write scientific papers tend to use passive voice. I think it’s because it makes them sound somehow more impartial – one of the big uses of passive is to remove the doer from a sentence. “A simulation was run” as opposed to “we ran a simulation.” I can understand that desire, but it makes it damn hard to read and stay interested, particularly when it sounds like the methods section is just kind of running itself without any sort of human intervention.

I bring this up because I read an article in Geology over the weekend that didn’t hammer the reader with passive sentences, and it was a treat to read. I was tired, and it didn’t knock me out. I was interested. I felt engaged by the writing. Now, I can’t really say too much about the subject itself, since it deals with climate modeling and that’s not something I personally do. But the writing was definitely a step above most of the other articles I’ve read lately.

Go check it out for yourself, if you have Geoscience World subscription: CO2-driven ocean circulation changes as an amplifier of Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum hydrate destabilization (Lunt et al)

It’s a sad statement on the writing in this field when article that doesn’t make me fall asleep at my desk warrants an excited blog post.

Categories
writing

Fan Number One

This is the funny thing about the story I just had published, particularly that it ended up being my proverbial toe-dip into the deep end of writing for profit: I really hated The Book of Autumn when I first wrote it. I quite literally wrote it because it was stuck in my head, like a ping pong ball lodged in a water pipe, and the only way for me to be able to write a story that I actually wanted to write was to get TBoA out on paper first. It started out as about 5K words of rushed, shitty prose with no story arc to speak of, which I stuck in my backpack and did my best to ignore for the next year while I spent my limited undergrad free time on stories that I actually, you know, liked. But the story refused to go away, and I eventually gave in and typed it up, adding and correcting and smoothing along the way. At which point I read it over and decided that I still hated that story, because it just wouldn’t cooperate with me.

I ended up sending the story off to my dear friend Isaac (who was my Bridesman at my wedding, incidentally) and whined at him, “I hate this story, it doesn’t work, what the hell is wrong with it.” And Isaac, superhero that he is, figured out a lot of the fixes I needed to make to transform TBoA into something readable and interesting that I actually started liking, just a little. Isaac also, it should be noted, came up with the title for the story. Because once it was cleaned up and ready to be sent out into the big, scary world of the slush pile, I realized that “Story I Hate” was probably not a suitable title.

At the time I sent TBoA to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, it was still the something of the unloved child out of the three stories I was attempting to find homes for. (It should be noted that the other two are, at this time, still homeless.) Scott e-mailed me and asked me if I could fix up the story’s ending, because it didn’t quite work for him. I gave it my best shot, and in the process, it was like something snapped into focus. I made some little tweak, and BAM. I didn’t hate the story any more, or resent it for being difficult. In fact, I really, really loved it.

Which I think really goes to show the sort of super powers a good editor has.

I think one of my biggest failings as a writer right now is that when something in one of my stories doesn’t quite work, I can’t figure out why – if I notice at all. I’ve gotten a lot of rejections in the recent past that read something like, “This is a great story, but something just doesn’t quite work for me.” While I take the compliment for what it is, it also makes me a little crazy, because if someone could just tell me why something doesn’t work, I could fix it. I understand that most editors are way too busy to spend time on a story that’s got even a little something broken in it, and I certainly don’t expect one to when he or she is wading through a pile of unsolicited stories. But that’s why I’m starting to sound just a little fangirlish about Scott – he took the time, he gave me a chance, and he used his magical editor powers to point out the last element that needed to be tweaked into place to turn my story into something I could truly love.

Oh, and then he gave me money for it.

If there is a Scott Andrews fan club, I would like to join it. If not, maybe I should just start one myself.

Categories
cats writing

I’m wearing my big girl writer pants now!

I’m super excited today, for a couple reasons. One is that it looks like I might have landed a little freelance writing work to supplement my income going in to grad school, so I’m all wound up and nervous about that. But even more so, I’ve published my first ever short story in a pro market! WOO!

So pretty please, go to Beneath Ceaseless Skies and check out my story, The Book of Autumn. Go now. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

If you liked it (and I hope you did!) please consider supporting Beneath Ceaseless Skies, since the editor (Scott) is an incredible human being who gives sad little newbs like me a chance. Actually, please consider supporting BCS even if you think my story was total crap and you’re now about to flounce off in a huff. Because then Scott could presumably use the funds to find stories less lame than mine. So either way, we all win, right?

I’ve been pretty much exploding into random bouts of joyful squealing since I signed the contract for the story at the end of June. I just didn’t talk about it all that much (on the internets at least) because I wasn’t entirely sure when it would be published. And the last time I sold a story, which was to a token payment market, I ran around and told the world how gleeful I was, and then everybody wanted to know when my story would be published so they could join in the celebration. And it got kind of embarrassing after a while to admit that, well, I didn’t actually know, but I totally swear I wasn’t hallucinating it or anything.

And this morning, as soon as I saw that it was online and all official-like, I went and bought my affiliate membership in the SFWA, because (1) it let me check off one of the smaller ticky boxes on “nerdy shit I want to accomplish before I die” and (2) I just can’t resist the fun of being able to claim that John Scalzi is my professional overlord, and least kind of sort of. Though of course the real reason is that the SFWA is an incredibly important organization that hauls a lot of water for its members, and it’s a good place to go if you’re interested in writing science fiction and/or fantasy, and maybe some day making a career of it.

Of course, there is no such thing as perfection, particularly not in connection with something as messy as life. Just to keep me from floating off like a little glee-filled balloon, this morning Loki (the cute but stupid cat) decided to eat an enormous rubber band. So I’ve been following him around the house all day in anticipation of him gracing the carpet with rubber-band-filled kitty vomit. I did talk to my vet and he said for now, that’s all I can really do… hope that it comes out of one end or the other and doesn’t get stuck in between. So please keep your fingers crossed for me on this one. I’d really rather Loki not hoover up my new earnings with a vet bill, but what can I say. He’s a helper like that.

Categories
writing

Jim C. Hines looks at first novel statistics

As someone that would one day like to wear the big-girl published author pants, I found Jim Hines’ survey results fairly interesting. Particularly the way he takes a Mythbusters-esque approach to looking at certain “common widsom” about getting published – like that you have to have an in, or the way to do it is to write short fiction1.

And of course, something that makes my inner science fair judge smile – he has a section at the end on sources of error/survey flaws. Awesome work, Mr. Hines!

Overall, I found it very interesting and I’d encourage anyone who’s wanting to become a published author of novels to take a look. It’s obviously not definitive, but there’s a lot of food for thought when you get the hint that just maybe the people who are telling you to self-publish are pushing you in a unhelpful direction. Or that it’s okay if you don’t get published before you’re 30. As someone set to hit 30 this year, that last one makes me feel a whole lot better.

1 – My reaction: “You mean I don’t have to write short stories? WOOHOOOOOO!” Mostly because I’m terrible at short stories. Other than the extremely rare ideas I come up with that a small enough for the format, trying to write short form fiction just fills me with seething frustration.

Categories
writing

A quick writing note

My blog entries are probably going to be a bit scarcer than normal over the next two weeks. I’m in a small writing group with three friends, and we’re doing a challenge: write a 15K word story in 14 days. So a lot of my writing time and energy is going to be taken up doing that. It’s something of a poor man’s NaNoWriMo for people who can’t commit to a whole month of frantic (and twice as intense) writing.

I actually have a lot of love in my heart for NaNo. I participated in it for four years in a row and got two completed rough novels, a half finished mess that still has a lot of potential, and an absolute embarrassment that ought to be set on fire before it can escape my hard drive and hurt people. I just haven’t been able to do NaNo since going back to university, thanks to lack of time. And that hiatus will be going for at least a couple more years, since I’ll be in grad school. Oh well, perhaps some day I’ll get back in to the swing.

Either way, I’m expecting this challenge to be a lot of fun. The last couple of months I’ve been doing nothing but intense rewrites, so having an excuse to write some new stuff is a welcome change.