Category Archives: Writing

Motivations

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Anxiety

≈ 2 Comments

The dog is watching me pack. Every time I stop moving, she tries to climb into my lap. She has an opinion about what is happening, and it is very low. Her worried look would be charming if it wasn’t so very worried.

In un-related frustration, writing about a character who knows the future in the same book as a character who has various angelic abilities is somewhat maddening. I’m halfway through and continually stumped by the “well, wouldn’t she know that?” and the “couldn’t she handle that?” type questions. But I’m bringing my iPad keyboard with me because even at my current rate of eking out a few sentences at a time, I really love Nat and I don’t want to leave her behind for ten whole days.

Akira is cautious. Sylvie is a planner. But Natalya is orderly. And having her order messed up is stressing her out. In the sense that all the characters I write are really just parts of me, I’m pretty clearly working out my anxiety issues on paper. (Um, pixels.) But that said, there’s something about what’s happening with Natalya right now — in my head, anyway, if not quite in the pixels yet — that is just plain fun. A long time ago, I had a bumper sticker on my car, selected by R, that read “Not another learning experience!” Nat is having learning experiences and she doesn’t like it. But they’re good for her and she’ll wind up better off in the long run, so it’s okay, and meanwhile, I get to feel both sympathetic and amused.

I’ve already planned out Grace’s story (more or less) so I know it’s not going to have anything to do with anxiety. Grace is not the anxious-type. But eventually I’m going to give an HEA to a character who has full-fledged panic attacks. Maybe I’ll write…oh, no, I won’t. I was going to say that I’d write the first agoraphobic romance, but I’ve actually seen one before. It’s erotica, and I haven’t read it, but for fellow agoraphobes, Escorted, by Claire Kent features an agoraphobic hero. (I think, anyway.)

Moving on, back to the packing. Or maybe back to eking out another sentence or two. It would be convenient for me to be able to post my latest chapter to fictionpress tonight, so that it’s easily accessible from my iPad tomorrow. Hmm, good motivation.

Menus

02 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by in Fanfiction, Randomness

≈ 8 Comments

Long story, but I posted a bad link on fanfic.net and it’s going to take me a while to fix it and post a better one there. So in the meantime, just in case: Menus at the New York Public Library (This is an incredibly fun site to browse if you’re interested in food and history.)

I’m having far too entertaining a time writing Doctor Who fanfiction. I suppose it’s good that I’m enjoying writing in any way, shape, or form, and I should just be happy about that. But it does mean that I ought to start looking for a serious job. If what I need to write needs to be free, then I need to also figure out some way to eat. In three months, R finishes school and both of us are set free. In my case, for the first time in decades, my job doesn’t need to be boundaried by his school being my first and foremost responsibility. In his case, the future awaits. Whee. Sort of. Change is always both exciting and scary, and this sort of change is about the biggest there is. I think it’ll be … interesting … for both of us. Also, I think I’ll pour myself another glass of wine before thinking any more about it.

Random other note: Amanda Palmer’s TED talk? Crazy beautiful. Also scary. I am not that brave. Just…not.

Edit: It amuses me that I used “free” to mean both without cost and without responsibility. They’re both different and yet not.

The Rational Harry Potter

21 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Fanfiction

≈ 8 Comments

If you like Harry Potter and if you also like science, then you absolutely must read this: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

It is brilliant. No, really — incredibly, amazingly, scarily brilliant. It takes some of the history and most of the world of the Harry Potter series (the settings, the politics, the wizarding war) and gives them a twist, resulting in a totally different story. It’s Harry Potter as if Ender Wiggins from Ender’s Game was the hero.

It is also incredibly funny. I laughed out loud, literally, more than once and a couple times so hard there were tears in my eyes. It’s over 500,000 words long so a serious investment of time, but worth every single minute. It’s the best thing I’ve read in…I don’t know how long.

A little tiny sample:

“I… see,” Professor McGonagall said. “And if, perhaps, you were to discover the entrance to Salazar Slytherin’s legendary Chamber of Secrets, an entrance that you and you alone could open…”

“I would close the entrance and report to you at once so that a team of experienced magical archaeologists could be assembled,” Harry said promptly. “Then I would open up the entrance again and they would go in very carefully to make sure that there was nothing dangerous. I might go in later to look around, or if they needed me to open up something else, but it would be after the area had been declared clear and they had photographs of how everything looked before people started tromping around their priceless historical site.”

Professor McGonagall sat there with her mouth open, staring at him like he’d just turned into a cat.

“It’s obvious if you’re not a Gryffindor,” Harry said kindly.”

Yes, it’s a Ravenclaw version of Harry. He calculates the odds, he thinks ahead, he uses reason and Bayesian probability and …  really, you should just go read it right now, because it is that good. No, even better than that. Really.

Implicit memory

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Personal, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Have you ever tried to teach someone else to tie their shoelaces?

Tying shoelaces isn’t hard. Until you explain it. And then the whole thing falls apart. I never managed to teach R to tie his shoes. In fact, what happened was pretty much that I lost the ability to tie my own. He finally fumbled his way through figuring it out himself when he was about ten or so, and meanwhile I haven’t tried to tie a shoelace in about a decade.

I had the same experience with teaching him to drive, aka failing to teach him to drive. The more I thought about how to shift smoothly from one gear to the next, the more I couldn’t remember how to do it myself. I finally made my dad give him a lesson and Chris an explanation of what was happening, and he worked the skill out on his own.

I think the same thing is happening to my writing ability. I read a story last night that I wrote a year ago. I remember writing it. It took me about an hour. I didn’t agonize, I didn’t think. I just had an idea and I wrote it. I never revised it or even edited it. It’s a darn good little story (although if you’ve never seen Eureka you won’t get the context.)

All the reading about writing, learning about writing, thinking about writing, that I’ve been doing is just making it harder to write. Sure, I understand filter words and point-of-view now, I see repetitions and cliches — but I used to just be able to tell a damn story and everything I’m learning about writing is getting in the way of *that*.

Writing was an implicit memory skill for me. I need to stop paying attention to how I’m doing it and just get back to doing it.

ThinkGeek contest

08 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Ghosts, Personal, Randomness

≈ 4 Comments

So, Kathy from Kindle-aholic and Stellar Four, posted links to a ThinkGeek donation contest this morning. (Yes, I know that line was link-insane — sorry about that!) If you’re willing to give ThinkGeek your email address, you can pick a classroom at DonorsChoose.org. to possibly get a donation.

I’m pretty sure that ThinkGeek is donating $1000 no matter what, so it’s not as if giving them your address has any intrinsic advantage to the outcome — someone’s getting that money — but I picked a classroom anyway, Mrs. DeVille’s ESL elementary in Seattle. If you’re willing to let ThinkGeek have an address, her number is 1627207291, if you’d like to vote for her, too.

Why did I pick her? Um, mostly, because I looked for a Seattle ESL teacher thinking I might find a classroom taught by a friend, and then found this one and really liked her name. Well, or had sympathy for her name, anyway. I wonder how many Cruella jokes she’s heard in her life? And yet she’s listed as a “Mrs.” which probably means that she changed her name, so I wonder what it was originally? Was changing it a hard decision or an easy one? Yep, questions like this are the kinds of thing I can ponder for hours. Anyway, it’s a minor thing, but it only takes a minute to vote, and she, poor teacher, posted her request in November and is almost out of time, with the entire amount to go. And a printer is really a pretty nice thing to have.

I can’t decide whether this is mean of me or not. If you’re from the northern US and in the midst of a major blizzard, you probably want to stop reading now. But I rearranged my bedroom and this is now the view from my bed.

It makes me think that possibly I should be working a little harder toward finding a job that would let me stay in Florida. I’ve mostly been thinking that when R graduates from high school, I’d head off to someplace where I’m more employable. But I should stop taking my palm tree for granted.

On February 7th, Ghosts reached a milestone on Amazon — 100 reviews. I don’t know why 100 is any different than 99, really, but it was somehow a thrilling moment in a pretty rocky week. Onward, upward, back to Time!

Tactical mistake

29 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

I made a huge mistake last week. Time was going well. I knew what was supposed to happen and it was happening on plan.

Why, why, why did I go back to the beginning?

Actually I do know the answer. I finally figured out how Nat’s gift works, and it’s pretty cool. It’s way more fun and interesting than it was in the beginning and it even has a touch of plausibility. I’ve been stuck all along on how it would be possible to see the future and not have the future be pre-determined. If you know what’s going to happen, doesn’t that imply that what’s going to happen is fixed? I don’t like determinism, I don’t believe in it, but a logical proof of precognition would seem to require it. But I finally managed to wrap my brain around a way that Natalya could have foresight without violating the uncertainty principle, and even managed to bring in a nice use of the observer affect. Yay, physics.

So I went back to the beginning to fix the early references to her gift.

Gah. So much easier said than done. One little tiny change and yep, I’ve spent the past five days revising Chapter 1 for the … I don’t know how many-ith time.

I really wanted to have this book written and ready for beta readers by the first week of February. Instead I might have the first chapter finalized. I keep telling myself that as long as I persist, I will get there in the end. In the long run, persistence is what matters. And it’ll be a better book because of all this. But I am seriously missing writing fan fiction where if something didn’t work, a new episode would change everything anyway.

So many stories, so little time

06 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by in A Gift of Time, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

I hit a point where I had to stop and think for a while in my writing today. I’m at an important scene, where the characters are emotional but also revealing for the first time the heart of the conflict between them, and I don’t want it to wind up hokey. It’s one of those times when the scene is so clear in my head that it’s not creating, more transcribing, except I’m not getting it right. And it has to be right.

So I take a break. I decide to nap for an hour. Sometimes naps are just pretend sleep, where I’m closing my eyes in order to better imagine my world and sometimes they become real sleep, but either way, it’s a Sunday afternoon and I need a chance to think a little.

Think a little about Natalya, that is.

Somehow I wound up, half imagining, half dreaming, Grace and Rachel. What are they doing in Seattle? How do they know each other? Did they even meet when Rachel was in Tassamara? Grace wasn’t at the diner that night. And wait, shouldn’t Rachel be in San Francisco with her mother?

But no, they’re walking along a waterfront in Seattle. It’s not Pike’s Place market, but it’s someplace I know. There’s maybe a fish hatchery? A canal? I know it’s familiar. The grass slopes down to a sidewalk and there’s concrete and people and they’re talking. Poor Rachel. She wanted a fresh start, but her D.C. neat perfection is an awkward fit in Seattle. Her clothes are wrong, her style is wrong. And she’s at a school with boys, which is completely scary and strange. No one’s mean to her, but it’s like she’s invisible. She might as well not exist. She can’t ask her mom for help because she begged to go to public school. She can’t tell her mom how unhappy she really is.

Oh, I just realized. Dillon sent Grace.

Huh. I wonder how?

I wonder why?

And mostly, I really, really wonder how Rachel and Grace wound up being the story in my head when I’m supposed to be thinking about Natalya and Colin?!

(Grace, incidentally, decides that they need to pick the girl whose style Rachel most likes and hire her. Not as a friend, because that would be awkward and creepy, but as a style consultant. Shopping ensues. I think Grace likes shopping. I have never shopped at anything other than a thrift store in Seattle in my life, so it just might be that Rachel’s style consultant/future friend is a thrift store kind of shopper. That would sure be a change for Rachel.)

But what the heck are they doing in Seattle?

An hour past the end of my scheduled nap time, so it’s time to get back to Nat and Colin. Or maybe start thinking about dinner. But it occurs to me that writing a story set in Seattle makes visiting Seattle a tax deduction, as long as I do some research.

Why Grace, though? Why not Akira? Well, no, she’d be useless. She’s not good at making friends herself and she doesn’t care about clothes much. And Sylvie…yep, equally useless. My subconscious got it right.

The Super Secret, Super Fun Project

25 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Self-publishing, Writing

≈ 15 Comments

Dear Carol and Judy,

After the two of you commented on my one-year-anniversary post, I decided that I wanted to make you something for Christmas.

If you lived near me, I would have baked you Christmas cookies. I make really good cookies.  I’ve got a long list of holiday favorites — thumbprint cookies, molasses cookies, nut roll, cupcake cookies — but my specialty is sugar cookies, the kind where you roll out the dough and sprinkle the top with colored sugar. I’ve made them almost every year since I was twelve or so. Even in the days before I knew how to cook, when my sauces separated and my rice stuck together like flannel pjs in midwinter, my sugar cookies were lovely. But I don’t think they’d make it to New Zealand intact and I don’t have the faintest idea where you live, Judy, but I’m pretty sure it’s not down the street.

So no cookies. Instead, I  wrote you a story. (Or finished it anyway.) I thought I’d just post it here and that would be fun, but it got sort of long for that. Then I thought I’d make it a downloadable file, but that turns out to be complicated. You can’t actually post a file to be downloaded at a blogger site, so I would have needed to get a real website. I was debating what to do–new website? email? dropbox?–when I remembered this summer, at my geekgirl presentation, describing Amazon as the biggest bake sale in the world.

Amazon. Bake sale. Sugar cookies. Christmas stories.

Voilá.

A Christmas present for the two of you. Free on Amazon for the next three days (December 26th through 28th), two days in reserve so in case you miss it, we can schedule a free day for when you can get it.

I hope it makes you smile.

Arsenic research

19 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in Writing

≈ Comments Off on Arsenic research

I think it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll write a historical anytime soon. It seems like the kind of thing that would make someone like me become completely obsessed. I can picture myself spending a month researching the proper types of silverware for a throwaway line in a single scene. That said, I stumbled across a reference to Scheele’s Green today and thought, wow, I wonder how I could use that?

Scheele’s Green was a pigment used in wallpaper in the 1700 and early 1800s, and it contained arsenic. In a damp climate, a mold could grow on the wallpaper and release toxic arsenic gas into the air. It’s a really creepy idea. One modern study says that the gas wouldn’t have been strong enough to actually kill people, but still, what a fun plot twist for a Regency murder mystery.

A Gift of Time update

11 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Self-publishing, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

I finally figured out how to solve a nagging problem with A Gift of Time today. Yay! Only, boo-hiss, it would mean, yet again, going back to the beginning and rewriting. So far with this book, I’ve written the first 5000 words about ten times. Over and over again, I write the first 5000 words. The thought of going back one more time — ugh. It just doesn’t inspire me.

On the other hand, it’s a fix for a thing that’s been bothering me about the beginning for weeks. And at least I don’t keep solving the same problem. First was a character problem, next came a point of view problem, this is a plot problem. It’s like different layers every time.

I think, for the moment, I’m not going to make the fix. I’m going to keep it in reserve for when I actually have a completed first draft. After all, it’s NaNoWriMo and if I’m going to make 50,000 words by the end of the month (not yet impossible, although definitely not looking terribly likely), I need to stop revising and get on with it. Excellent plan. So good I’m going to start right this very minute!