1. DW/LJ-verse, let me pick your brains about long term writer's block and what it is and if anyone ever gets over it. Because right now, I'm in a bit of a panic that I will never write again. It's been weeks, maybe months, since I sat down and worked on a project. It's like the mere act of typing has gotten harder for me to do. The words don't flow from me anymore. Heck, they don't really even come when I try to grind them out word by word onto a page or a screen.

I'm blocked up. Well and truly and I don't know how to get out of it. Anyone else ever gone through this? How did you get out of it?

Because right now I really am afraid that I've lost the one ability that I've always valued in myself and that's scary.


2. Dog bless sara and the very first fontmas in which she explains how to use Google Web Fonts really easily in your DW layouts simply by pasting a url into a box. IT'S LIKE MAGIC, Y'ALL. Which solves my problem of finding a layout that I liked a lot but didn't care for Impact as a font. I really wish that they'd get a new default font for new layouts because the Summertime layouts are pretty. And the one I'm using actually has a nice color combo. But damn, Impact is one ugly damn font to use. It's like using popsicle sticks to frame the work of a great artist. It just sort of ruins the whole thing. But that's my opinion and I'm not a pro or even an amateur when it comes to designing things. I just play around on colourlovers a lot and pretend I know things.

So, I had a thought while I was singing a cat themed version of "Can't Buy Me Love" to my cat, as you do.

Maybe one of my problems with writing lately isn't so much "oh god, is my work important enough to be worth writing at all", but that I've got some deeper things to think about.

Actually, let me rewind. Before the part where I belted out a Beatles tune at one of my pets, my mental health took an uptick. ( Cut for talk of my mental health and meds and brain stuff and depression/anxiety and brief mention of suicidal ideation. )

So...

All this contemplation has lead me to ask some questions and think of some things.

First, is that I think my writing is stymied by the conflict between wanting to really pour myself into my writing, to really own it and turn it into my writing and the belief that I and my experiences and who I am are not worthy of being in a story much less a story that other people will ever see. That's a mix of depression, I think, and good old fashioned self consciousness.

Second, I think I haven't answered some fundamental questions. One being, "Why do I love what I love? Why am I drawn to write certain things?"

For example: I love paranormal romance stories about sexy angels and their tempestuous, somewhat unhealthy relationships with supernaturally powered women? But why do I love it. Why do I love it enough to want to write my own story of that sort? What is about angels, the supernatural, strong women who kick ass that I love? Or vampires or aliens or whatever?

I mean, what is it that I think is so damn cool, so fucking awesome that I'd want someone to sit down and enjoy said type of novel?

Or for that matter, the speculative genre as a whole. Why fantasy fiction or any kind of SF/F? Also, romance, what do I really love about it? What is about telepathy that I like as a feature of some stories or the "stoic, seemingly heartless and cold person falls in love with someone their complete opposite who brings them out of their shell" trope in romance?

I'm still working on that bit, but it seems to me that maybe there's a lot to be mined there. Not just for my own fun, sport, and edification - but also as part of my writing.

I mean (for example) - if I just really fucking love space ships because I think anything that goes "pffwooooomfffffffff" in a big fiery ball and then goes into outer space is just the bee's knees, then focusing on the big fireballs and the power and wonderment of that much fuel and combustibility being harnessed to launch a multi-ton piece of aeronautics into the black abyss of space without blowing the shit out of everything in a ten mile radius is something I should focus on. Because it's what I'm excited about it. It's something that can be a theme in my work, something that I can bring to the table that maybe I see or think about in a way that's new or surprising to others.

So that's my thought for today. And my excuse for an update. May it serve you well and in good health.


TL;DR: Mental health is getting better. It's important to think about why you write stuff and also to sing to cats. But especially the bit about the cats. No great writer ever succeeded without first singing a beloved popular rock song to a cat. Though I might not advise singing "Mrs. Robinson" to a lion or anything. They're universally known to hate folk-rock. It's Queen or nothing for the mighty king of the beasts. THIS IS A COMPLETELY TRUE FACT. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP AT ALL.

1. Not precisely writing related, but it struck some very writer-y thoughts in me: denise explains about Technical debt and the making of payments on it.

The thing that impressed me most about this post is that not only did I understand it, but I was very interested in a topic that otherwise bores me to tears. Also, I always wondered what happened to old software and the like. Apparently there's a term and an entire process for it: End of Life. Although I wonder what happens when somebody is using a computer or program that's gone past it's End of Life, and if there are lots of instances of this, especially in areas where the most up-to-date technologies are not made available.

But mostly, I also kind of realized that this technical debt which is such an obstacle for programmers is kind of what a lot of fiction writers I know rely on in order to be able to edit a work meaningfully. As denise explains it:

it's a common truism that code you yourself wrote six months ago is as impenetrable as code written by a complete stranger, and you have to spend a great deal of time puzzling out what the heck you were thinking back then. (Code that is brilliant, flawless, and crystal clear when you write it slowly morphs into idiotic, bug-ridden, and clear as mud over time. This is a well-known process. I suspect pixies in the source code repository, working their anti-magic while nobody's looking.)

The same thing is true (at least for me and lots of folks I know) about writing. The manuscript that you wrote six months ago will become less comprehensible and obvious to you as time goes by. What seemed flawless becomes riddles with typos and sentences that make no sense and all sorts of errors.

For me at least, this has to happen or I can't even spellcheck with any degree of accuracy. When I know what I intended to say, my brain has this way of filling that in instead of letting me see that I've completely skewered the word or phrase on the page such that nobody else would ever be able to comprehend it.

More than that, when I know what I intended a scene to feel like that and when I'm still able to recall that I thought an exchange between characters was quite funny or a scene was quite sad because I felt it as I was writing, I can't judge whether I accomplished my goal. When those feelings and memories fade as I move on to other projects, I get a better estimation of what I've written.

Thus, I have to come at the manuscript as though I'm someone who knows nothing about it, who doesn't have that bright, clear image of a character in mind to fill in the gaps where the writing doesn't create a three-dimensional person, who doesn't know what that sentence was supposed to say before I typo'ed the hell out of it and put words in the most confusing order you can in the English language.

I suppose it's just sort of odd to see someone bemoaning the very process that I rely on to help me make a piece of writing clear and enjoyable.

---

I'm also sort of wondering if this is true:

There's a thing about old feminists. By the time a feminist gets old, she has heard the people around her, people she depends on and people she cares about and just all the damn people, tell her she's wrong about everything a million billion jillion times... And to get anything done at all, you are forced to learn to ignore the vast floods of people telling you that you're wrong.

And when your old feminist does something wrong - which she will do sometime - and people come along and see it and go "Holy crap woman! Can you even hear what is coming out of your mouth?! Please reconsider your terrible statements! You are so hideously wrong!" she's going to ignore it. She may not even hear it. Because when 99% of all the people telling you that you are wrong are full of shit, you tune them all out. And maybe 1% of the time that results in you acting like an embarrassment in public. But if you spend all your time carefully evaluating each message of wrongness to catch that valuable 1%, really entertaining the possibility that this time you really are wrong, letting it in emotionally: you will drown beneath the 99%, and no one will ever hear from you again.

- vito_excalibur, con and on anon.

I'm going to leave aside that a) I don't think "old" is necessarily appropriate here because I've seen people who are relatively young who exhibit this after a while and not just with feminism and b) not all feminists identify as women -- there plenty of, say, genderqueer, binary, or otherwise not woman-identifying feminists out there and they, too, can fall prey to this.

That said, the Oblivious Feminist Cycle described here seems like it might be very true. I've seen it a lot. Those who once were all about truth and justice turn around and become much like the folks they were once protesting against.

So, I ask, how do you think activists (of any stripe) can prevent this while still dealing with the hate they get in such a way that they can guard their spaces and their well being without dismissing other marginalized people?

Basically how does one avoid the Oblivious Activist Cycle? Or can you? Is it inevitable?

Now that I've done my defending of NaNoWriMo, I wanted to make sure I noted something.

NaNoWriMo is a wonderful thing, and this is not an anti-NaNo post. If anything this is a post from a long time NaNo fan and participant to those NaNo writers who may, like me, be seeking professional publication some time in the future.

If you're not one of those people, roll on by. Because this does not apply to you, and may you write like no one has written before.

( For the people who ARE doing NaNoWriMo and seeking professional publication. )

If you'll remember way back in this post, I asked about writing software for a Mac computer, and got a fair amount of very helpful responses.

Scrivener was a very popular software recommended to me, so I decided to do the 30 day trial.

( Review of Scrivener for Mac, cut for those who don't care about software and for images that are sort of large (screenshots). )

I'm alive and I can emerge from my hidey-hole of Must Finishdom where I've been hiding since mid-April in my never-say-die effort to get this draft done with so I can move on to other projects. And finally, I am done! Wooo!

The first draft of Soul Machines (the Vampire Novel o' Doom) is now officially complete. It's overdue and overweight, but at least it's OVER!

It stands at 186,513 words (by Open Office's account), but I think I should get points because I finished it on vacation with a case of swimmer's ear so bad that the doctor gave me darvocet for the pain and two different kinds of ear drops.

Yeah, that's hardcore.

So I'm going to enjoy a couple days of relaxing and letting my brain blank out before I a) start a new job and b) start a new project.

Oh, and if you've been wondering why I've been absent from the world for a while, it's because I've been finishing a novel, taking an epic road trip home to Tennessee (guess what, we arrived just in time for the flooding in my home town of Jackson - an hour and a half outside Nashville) and then flying to Florida and then getting a new job (which I start on the 20th) and generally being busy.

Now, once my life finally reaches cruising altitude again, I can get back to work on whatever is next. Which I think is either the Untitled Steampunk Extravaganza or the Hell!Romance thing or maybe finishing up the nanoproject, Bound for Canaan. IDK. It all depends.

For now, I'm going to get some victory sleep.

fashionista_35 sums up and says better than I ever could every thing I think about the whole "writing rules" meme going around.

As far as I'm concerned (and I said this an entry or two back), there is only one writing rule: WRITE. That's it.

I feel about writing the way The Fat Nutritionist does about eating, I suppose. I think any advice or assistance or comments on writing have to start with the premise (and I appropriate from her here): Write. Stuff you like. As much as you want.

Which, for both eating and writing, are radical premises. If you're a writer or a person who pays attention to any health news, you know the world is full of people who want to tell you what to do. Who tell you these things as though you're a complete idiot who can't be trusted on their own to eat or write properly.

And while both writers and eaters (ie, everyone who eats food) may need guidance, especially when complex issues get in the way, either health problems or a desire to get published. That's fine. And lots of us have had our internal compasses turned discombobulated or destroyed by concern-trolling and bad advice and authority figures (parents, teachers, mentors) who meant well but thought that we couldn't be trusted on our own to know good from bad and right from wrong. And sometimes to reverse that damage, you do need some guidance.

But remember, there's just one rule: WRITE. Everyone thing else is an opinion or suggestion or strategy or somebody's best educated guess. You take what works, you leave the rest.

This is, coincidentally, why there are some agents and editors I have come to love dearly on their blogs. Like agent Holly Root who says wonderful things concerning do's and don'ts that people hand out to writers when it comes to querying and agents. This, especially:

So here's what you can take away from the bajillion bytes on the subject: Write the best book you can, then the best query you can. Submit written materials to agents. The worst they can say is no so don't worry about fine-tuning that to the nanometer, just look for the right ballpark (i.e., alive, still in the business). Then press send.

That's it.

Take the rest as it comes. And never, ever let any of the voices on the internet, no matter how helpful or authoritative they aim (or claim) to be, take away from your ability to hear your own unique authorial voice.

The power of an agent talking to writers (in general and specifically) as though they are adults completely capable of being trusted to do a good job and don't need condescension is mindblowing. I want to draw hearts around these agents, and I'm sad sometimes when they don't rep the kind of books I write. 'cause damn, these are the kind of people that keep me psyched about the idea of getting published and getting to work with such cool folk.

And then there are some agents who's advice seems to come with the premise: "Look, I know you (ie, writers) are idiots and I spend my days drowning in your idiocy so I'm gonna tell you what to do because you can't be trusted to know on your own."
I'd name names, because yeah, I have some very specific people in mind who like to dole out this kind of advice and these are agents who I've noticed don't seem to be very happy in their professional lives (I don't know or care about their personal ones). But honestly? I don't want that kind of drama.

Suffice it to say, I'm here to sing the praises and spread the gospel of The One Rule. Because there is just one: WRITE. Stuff you like. As much as you want.

Don't worry, I still do that writing thing, too.

I've been thinking a lot about prose-level mechanics and how they affect whether a story comes across vividly to a reader.

For instance, you can describe a scene in which a character gets her keys, opens a door and walks through it - but you can show that in several different ways.

Finding her keys after searching her purse for them them, she unlocked the door and went through.

Or

She fumbled for her keys and found them in her purse. She unlocked the door and went through it.

Or

She went through the door after searching for her keys in her purse to unlock it.


Each sentence describes the same sequence of events, but they're different. They feel different to me. They feel like they have a different sense of speed and rhythym and timing, as though some are closer to the present than others even though they're all, technically, in past tense.

The first sentence feels like we're sort of rewinding and getting a quick "last time on..." sort of summary, the second one feels like it is happening right this second, and the third feels in between the other two as far as timing, but it doesn't feel as immediate.

That's what I'm trying to get at. In my own work, I find that there is a need to balance immediacy with summary. One thing I get frustrated with while reading is when a writer describes every little action in the immediate, especially if it's in first person narration.

Because to me, first person narration should feel as if you sat the character down in a room with a tape recorder and asked them to tell you a really great story. But when people tell stories in that fashion, they leave out a lot of the little stuff.

For instance, "I went through the door and then stepped into the room. I took off my coat and turned around and put it on the coat rack that was by the door. Then I turned around again and walked across the room and sat in a chair." Because I think in a more natural sense that would read as, "I came in, shucked my coat off, and plopped down in a chair."

So sometimes you need that summary feeling prose.

Other times you need that very immediate prose. Because saying "so we kicked and hit and then I won the fight" isn't as vivid as describing the pain of getting kicked in the teeth or trading blows.

So lately I've been wondering about how writers find that balance, and if it's something that other people notice. Because the more I read, the more I notice that the same plots, hell, the same stories can be told in different ways on a prose-level and it will definitely affect my enjoyment.

I'm also wondering if the differences between closely related genres comes down to things as simple as prose. I saw a documentary on IFC about sex in the movies and there was a director who said, "The difference between a movie with sex in it and pornography is lighting and production values."

And that struck me as being a very wise statement, and one a writer can apply to their work.

I often wonder if the difference between books being put in one category or another comes down not to the plot or the settings or the characters - but the prose. I think of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife. On it's face, it's SF/F, but it has been regarded and treated in a very literary manner. And I wonder if it really does come down to the fact that it reads like a literary genre novel not an SF/F novel.

I also wonder if when people speak of a novel being a "difficult" or "easy" read, are they really talking about a difficult plot or are they speaking about prose that confuses or bores or moves the story around like a car with bad shocks? Is the difference between a book that people breeze through and a book that stumps them just in the way sentences are constructed?

I'm interested to hear what people have to say about this. What do they think some of the prose-level characteristics of genres are, if they think it really is just the difference in lighting and production values that separates one genre from another.

I just discovered that I started Invisible!Book about twenty pages early, and that it should start around the middle of chapter two. Luckily, I discovered this 6,000 words in rather than 30,000 words in like I did with Soul Machines. I'd be writing faster, but, my computer is in it's death throes. *sigh*

I want to write faster, because I feel like I'm failing right now in all aspects of this and I really don't want to fail.

But enough about me, have some links:

Conventions and Writing, or Schmoozing 101 by Mary Robinette Kowal - a good guide for networking and interacting for writers at conventions. Since one of my biggest New Year's Resolutions is to network with writing and publishing folk and not just on LJ or the interwebs, this is really useful stuff. Especially since I've never been to a convention, ever. (Thanks to the ever-awesome ecmyers for the link via Twitter).

Alien Water World found. Kind of awesome science stuff. I'd never heard of ice-seven, but now I just have to use it in a story somewhere because it just too awesome. I didn't realize there were different types of ice to begin with, but apparently there are many ice phases, even up to an Ice XV. Wow, they keep making ice like Saw sequels.

OnNYTurf.com Subway Map. A very useful tool that I can't believe I'm just now discovering, but it's actually better than Google Maps for getting places. I mention it because those of you who write about NYC but don't live here might find it useful if you need to plot a character's travel route through the Big Apple. It plots the route for you, so you can see what landmarks your character might pass.

Because Friday is for nothing if not walking around the internet picking up shiny things.

John Scalzi talks about his short fiction rates and author Catherynne M. Valente replies by discussing her short fiction rates. Definitely a good couple of posts about rates, the market, and making a living in this business.

Justine Musk talks about writing like a bad girl in Part One and Part Two of her "Why You Need To Write Like a Bad Girl".

My favorite line of the two posts: "Because bad girls get to go everywhere." That my friends, is one excellent statement.

raecarson has an interesting discussion going about YA and what it is. I, of course, have strong feelings on the matter. But mostly, I just want YA to continue being a genre that under-18 readers can turn to for awesome books that are for them. Like I said in comments there. If there's ever a time in your life when you need really awesome books - it's when you're a kid.

And just for fun, The worst SF movies of the decade (also by John Scalzi). I pretty much agree with all his choices, though I'm wondering why none of the made-for-TV movies that SciFi (sorry, SyFy) puts out are on that list. Any "bad movie" compilation that does not include Mansquito is incomplete if you ask me.