BossTweed, Agent of A.N.T.E.L.O.P.E.

CHANGE OF ADDRESS
Henceforth I can be found at

jtglover.

I've met great people here, had some really good discussions, but I'm ready to move on. This journal started as something of a lark, and I had a lot of fun with it, but increasingly it doesn't feel like me, or what I want my journal to be. Library & Information Science-related humor and musings are fun when you're in school, but they aren't what this journal has been about for some time now. While I am certainly a librarian, I don't want my journal and personal life to revolve around libraries. A fresh start is what I need, and so a fresh start I shall have.

Most of you have noticed the ever-increasing amount of writing matters in this journal and the steady evaporation of things not related to writing, fiction, fantasy, science fiction, etc. The new journal will serve a number of purposes, but it will continue the current trend of writing-relatedness. While there will be day-to-day life there, and whatever interesting random stuff I find, it will be primarily more of the same. If you're tired of word counts and narrative conflict, this is a point at which you can conveniently get off the ride! Thanks for reading.

Better to burn out...
The last couple days have been cursed with a multitude of little chores to do. Yesterday was sadly a no-writing-at-all day, but today I managed to get back on the board. Muscles were a little rusty after several days since I'd been intensively writing, rewriting, or editing, but I managed to get a little of the heavy lifting done. Barely 500 new words, but that included the re-purposing of one story's opening to serve as another's. The change seems to be working out all right thus far.

I outline my short stories. Don't know how many writers do that, but I try to think through the structure and narrative conflicts as thoroughly as possible. By doing so, I hope to avoid quite as much hand-wringing later in the process... Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but as always I like to have some sort of map to see where I'm going.

Current Mood: sleepy

"Community Schummunity! By gum, I just need a typewriter."
This morning I awoke to a series of thought-inducing, linky posts by

matociquala. The first one of them was about how writers get started writing, what leads to creation, and so on. She followed this up with a great post about how she got started, which was a real pleasure to read. It's inspirational to see how her career as a writer took off so quickly. Not that anyone can expect that (and there sure are those "I submitted for 20 years before I sold my first story!" folks), but it's nice to see that people succeed.

One of the things she linked to was an old Usenet post by Lawrence Watt-Evans about why people should not talk about writing, but should instead write. Not get advice from each other, but just put the words down. I have decidedly mixed feelings about his advice, not least because I think a sense of community really helps me work more seriously. LiveJournal is filled with a wide, wide variety of folks, but it's inspiring to me to see the journals and day-to-day progress of writers whose work I respect. Not to say that friending them somehow makes me more 1337!!!111ZORS!!1 or anything to that effect, but just the sense that I'm here doing my thing every day, and they (The Pros) are sitting where they sit and doing their thing... somehow makes it easier. These journal help me stay in motion.

If you've never read them, Heinlein's Rules are stars to steer by. I posted them on the wall above my PC.

Current Mood: pensive

Story-Level Planning
Today I sat in a dark, quiet place and read over a horror story I wrote six weeks ago. I'm glad I let it sit. After a close reading I decided to cut one scene, alter another, and insert two more. Some elements will come forward and others will fade away. Had I not let the story sit, it would have focused on a slight, not horribly well-planned supernatural element. As it is, that's going to fade back into a maybe-yes, maybe-no sort of thing, and it will be replaced by a psychological element that wasn't there in the first draft.

That was my goal for the day, so I was quite happy when I'd completed it. Afterward I worked on my super-long-gestating story (first mentioned 7/28). It stalled out last week and I tried to figure out why. The problem seems to lie mostly with how tightly I'd plotted in advance, and about how later scenes did not grow organically -- even if they grew logically -- from the first scene. The original concept isn't going to work per se, at least for now, but the scene I wrote first has potential. We'll see where it goes, but I've got some ideas that could make for fun writing.

Current Mood: sleepy

These Dreams
The days are gone when I obsessively recorded my dreams and tried to remember them, but sometimes they slip through into waking life. For the last two nights I have been visited by some of the most amazingly vivid dreams I've had in a while. The two nights definitely illustrate the flip side of this kind of dreaming.

Thursday night I had a dream of an Eastern-styled white dragon (not unlike Haku in Spirited Away) cavorting on the waves of a giant lake that was overflowing a damn. It was absolutely beautiful and more moving than anything I've dreamed in... a long time. It flew up to the clouds and pretended to be a puffy cotton ball cloud, and then it flew back down to the water and turned into a giant otter, cavorting in the waves. When I awoke, I had the most wonderfully uplifted feeling I've had in some time. I ordinarily don't dream about fantastic creatures, and seeing that dragon flying got my day off to a good start.

Friday night I had the most horrible dream about

ethylwelt. She was infected by some sort of sickness and gradually coming to look like the little girl zombie from Night of the Living Dead. The doctors kept working to save her, but it never worked, and she just got sicker and sicker. Temperature kept dropping, skin more mottled, and she knew what was happening. It was the worst feeling to watch her sickening, and I have rarely been more happy to wake up and see her sleeping there beside me, oblivious of the whole thing.

Oddly enough, this was probably spurred by an episode of Becker I saw yesterday morning. Sometimes if the morning is going well and I'm not in a huge hurry, I'll watch an episode of Frasier followed by an episode of Becker. Before seeing it in this time slot, I'd never even heard of the show, and I've come to find I rather enjoy it. I think it demonstrates a bit of Ted Danson's range, and for that reason if no other, I like it. (On a related note, until a month or so ago, I'd never really watched Frasier. I love it! But that's a post for another day...)

Anyway, yesterday's episode dealt with 9/11 aftereffects in a subtle, unexpected way. It was the single best 9/11 "show" that I've seen. Not overly schmaltzy, not overly jingoistic, not overly anything. At the end of the show I was struck all over again by the horror of the attacks, and of how New Yorkers have suffered. Most of all, I was struck by how horrible it is to lose someone you love, especially when you don't get to say goodbye.

Current Mood: thinky

Geeking out over Dust Jacket Covers!
Can I tell you how excited I am at the moment? How very, very excited? My job apps are done for the week, I'm taking a writing break until Sunday, I'm going to spend tonight reading Fun Fantasy Books, and I just bought me some new Brodarts! There are few pleasures in my life that have quite equaled the application of new dust jacket covers.

Arts & Crafts are enjoyable to me, but I am no expert at any of them. Painting, sculpting, woodworking, etc., all are great, but Brodarting a book combines a number of pleasures for me that can't quite be beat. I get to preserve books that I own. I get to make books I own look prettier. I get to work in a very limited way with paper products, with results that are usually quite attractive. I get to re-familiarize myself with books that have been sitting on my shelf waiting for my attentions. I could do them all this afternoon, but I'm spreading the pleasure out over the next couple days, just because it feels soooooo good. :) The books I'll be Brodarting include:

Clive Barker's The Damnation Game
Clive Barker's Everville
Caitlin R. Kiernan's To Charles Fort, with Love
Thomas Ligotti's Grimscribe
Jeff Long's The Descent
Peter Straub's Mr. X

...and I've already done two Thieves' World omnibus editions: Sanctuary and Cross-Currents.

Yay!

Current Mood: geeky

Stories Flopping About Like Dead Fishies
Right now I have stories sitting around in various stages of completion. Two are done in rough draft and want editing. The others... well, I'm having trouble. I'd say "it's time to recharge my batteries," but I'm not sure if that's it. On the other hand, I've been alternately editing or writing daily - 1-2,000 words - for weeks now. There was one day last week where nothing would come at all, and yesterday and today nothing has really taken off, but otherwise it's been constant. I'm planning to start editing one of those two completed stories this Sunday, so perhaps I'll just take off until then, or mess around with some completely new stuff and see what happens.

( Oh, Current Reading )

EXTRA:

Want to read about a writer's contract being broken? Books allowed to go out of print without being informed? Not hearing about it until she was scheduled to do a reading and the store couldn't get in any of her books? Then read

greygirlbeast's latest post.

Current Mood: calm

Whoo! I Need a Cigarette.
Today sent out for the first time the recently-oft-mentioned novelette. Afterward I tried to get going on my current piece and just didn't have any oomph. I messed around for a while with something that could conceivably become an SF story (dropships, capital ships, and interplanetary conflict, oh my!)... or that could just be filed with the other stories that never were. Every time I send something out in the mail, I always have this weird combination of jitters and mopiness. It was also a small milestone of sorts, as it was the 20th time I've submitted anything since I started "writing seriously," as they say. Right now I have five stories floating around out there.

This afternoon I worked on another job app, did some chores, and made dinner. I think tonight we are going to go sit somewhere and read. I've been writing afternoons and evenings, and I am in need of a little break.

Current Mood: sleepy

Story Length Thinking
When I was working on my novel last year I was thinking of novels, so the ideas I had tended to be more or less novel-length ideas. Last winter and early this spring I was writing and thinking about short stories (3-5,000 words), so that's the length everything seemed to come out. Lately my stories have been longer, either "long stories" or "novelettes," depending on whose definitions you are using (8-12,000 words). That seems to be about the length that most of my new ideas work out to be, once all is said and done. My current story is at 4,000 words after doing 2,000 today, and likely is going to wind up around 10-12,000 once the rough draft is done.

I'll be curious to see if this is just a phase, this passing through successive periods of different formal lengths. I'm hoping it means I'm getting a feel for all of them and will ultimately have a better grasp of what length will be appropriate for which type of story when they come to me in future.

Current Mood: creative

The Sadness of Reading Ray Bradbury
Lately I've been reading The October Country, a collection of early Ray Bradbury short stories. Many of them are good, and I remember reading and enjoying a few in anthologies as a boy. The problem for me in reading them now is that they are too good, and have had such a dramatic effect on writers of speculative fiction. Pick up a copy of Professional FantaHorrorZine X and it contains at least one or two stories cast in molds he created or epitomized in mid-century American fiction.

It's the Casablanca problem: though a masterpiece, it's very difficult, when seeing it for the first time, to feel as if you are seeing it for the first time. Every word and scene and quirk of style has been copied a hundred times since it first came out, and you've seen them all. I read "Uncle Einar" and can't help but think of a YA version I read in a Greenberg/Waugh anthology. I read "The Jar," and I can't help but think of a thematic variant that ran in an early issue of Cemetery Dance.

If there is no Greek word for the envy of the nostalgia of others, I'm sure a German critic invented it. I want to read Bradbury and thrum with excitement, the way I did when I first read The Sheltering Sky, or Threshold, or The Anvil of Ice. It's not his fault or the fault of his stories that I don't. I think probably the biggest problem is that I didn't encounter Bradbury at the right time. The lifelong affection that so many authors bear for him is indicative of his quality and effect at a certain time in their lives. William P. Simmons's words on the subject are representative of this -- the sense that his fiction inspires awe -- and they make me wish very much that I could have the appreciation that he so clearly does. I remember some of that sense of awe from my childhood, but now when I read his older stories, the primary feeling I have is sadness.

Current Mood: melancholy

Researching and the Abnormal Life
When I stop to think about it, my entire life has been about research and studying. From Roman historical texts to Egyptian grammar books to studies of classification theory, the day-to-day material of my life has always had something to do with research. While I try to keep my life in perspective, there are some times when it can escape my mind that my daily grind is not like that of many 9-to-5 folks. And then there are the times it is strikingly obvious...

When was the last time you researched the judging of meat goats? Everyone looks stuff up on the Internet, at the library, or wherever, but one of the joys of research for creative writing is that it will usually take you outside the bounds of 95% of daily life. Even if the research ultimately winds up cut from the story, you know that it's there and can use it if you have to. I never before had a reason to look up the body parts of a goat, but now I have some idea about them! Similar queries in past have informed me of the gross anatomy of the tupelo... or the refractive capabilities of quartz... or the origin of the ghillie suit.

My professional passion for reference librarianship allows me to engage in much the same thing -- answering whatever obscure or boring question a patron brings to the desk. For that reason, among others, I love it. It's still a different thing, though, than having a good justification for researching whatever strange fact you decide is important for the dream you're weaving in your mind. I think of it occasionally as a sort of selective feeding and growth of a crystalline structure, or (when I'm more honest and less idealizing) a dense, asymmetrical cobweb. My knowledge doesn't increase consistently from writing, but in irregular hops and jumps. I know nothing of the foliage of Delaware, but was at one point able to discuss in some detail the flora of Arkansas... because one of my characters was wandering through the forests of post-apocalyptic Arkansas.

Speaking of flora, I need to get back to a dark, frozen swamp, where Our Hero is busy being berated by an irritated minotaur who would like nothing better than to send him off to be boiled. She can't do that, of course, because the logistics of mustering a new division for the Dark Lord's Army just won't allow it. If only all minotaurs were so sensible.

Current Mood: busy

Internet Barbecue Sauce
Recently I was preparing a pork loin roast and decided on the spur of the moment to baste it with BBQ while roasting. Alas, there was none to be found, so I went searching for a recipe online. I found one somewhere (about.com?) that proved tasty and so I have it here for your enjoyment. It wasn't the best I've ever tasted, but I thought it was better than most of the major-brand sauces.

( here's the recipe )

(And of course what would a daily post be without The Daily Writing Report? The short version is that I finished the first draft of the last long piece I've had hanging around. As of this moment, everything I've started is either complete in rough draft, in revision, or circulating at various magazines. It's a good feeling.)

HOW Many Years Did That Short Story Take?
A few years back I came up with a premise for a fantasy story that I thought would be both fresh and interesting. Along with said premise came an opening line that would rank as one of my better openings, as far as obvious hooks go. I've tried to write this story several times, never getting more than a few hundred or a thousand words in, but I've resolved to take a whack another at it. This time I think it's going to fly, and I think it's going to fly because I have finally envisioned it with conflict.

Too many of my early stories lacked substantial conflict, even in an indirect or subtle way, and this was one of the things that crippled them. Lately I've been spending my third and fourth drafts of stories analyzing them explicitly from an "elements of story" perspective, seeing how to best meet the traditional needs of well-told stories. It doesn't seem to help me to focus on those elements while writing the first draft, but I do think a bit about them when outlining. Last night, for instance, when I was thinking through the scenes for this long-gestating fantasy story, I was thinking about how to show the main conflicts from the first paragraph or so. We'll see whether it works or not, but I have some ideas about both the primary conflict and related tensions that I think will make for tight plotting.

Current Mood: busy

The 6th Draft Is Always the Hardest
Yesterday I edited for many long hours whacking, finessing, expanding, and smoothing. At the end of it all, the aforementioned sword & sorcery story was put into a near-final version. Now it sits and waits. I'm going to give it another day or two to leave my mind a little bit and then give it a final read-through to make sure there aren't any glaring (or non-glaring) problems what need fixin'. After that, it's out the door to try to find a home at one of the pro markets.

Some people are of the opinion that one should start with the low-end markets and work your way up once you've got a few credits under your belt, but I've always felt that if I can get paid for my fiction, I should do that. Not to say there aren't some markets that pay very little or only copies where I wouldn't be happy to appear! It just seems like the right thing to do.

I have never forgotten an author's comment in an interview I read a long time back. It was something to the effect that if you never submit to the big guns, you're never going to know when you're ready. This was followed up with an anecdote about how this author ran into an editor from a pro mag and was shocked to learn that said editor would have been happy to publish some of the author's previous work, had he been given the opportunity to review it.

Current Mood: tired

But How Do Real Writers Do It?
Last night I abandoned a gathering at Cafe Blauhaus after a mere 1.5 hours... in order to get back to work on the story I'm currently editing. I felt guilty and a bit sad to be doing so, especially since we were all having such a nice time enjoying the breeze on the porch. On the other hand, all the while we were merrily chattering I was thinking about this characterization problem or that slightly misworded descriptive passage. Not to say I'm not always thinking about a dozen things at any given time, but the story was like a bass drum at the back of my mind. Picture said mind as the set of MTV Unplugged, with LL Cool J doing his acoustic version of "Mama Said Knock You Out," and you may get an idea of what I mean.

My greatest challenge as a writer (?) is the difficulty of picking out my own flaws, or easily reconceptualizing a story in another form. I would like to think that I'm getting better. I've cobbled together a rubric for editing that seems to be helping. Story by story, I can see more clearly those elements that are inherently unworkable, or which call for editing, so progress is being made. What I would like to think is that my inner sense for structure, characterization, etc., is improving in such a way that I am writing more effectively from the start. In this way, I am (I hope) catching problems or discrepancies before they can become entrenched in my vision of the story.

Speaking of editing, nearby is a printout with a blue pen lying next to it, calling out my name...

Current Mood: thinky

A Pleasant Trip to the Zoo
Today

ethylwelt and I went to the Woodland Park Zoo. First time for her, first time for me in a long time. When and if they get around to radical elective surgeries of the metamorphosing kind, I've decided I want:

1) A scaled-down version of an elephant's trunk.
2) A bushy beard like a macaque's.
3) Usefully webbed extremities, like those of an otter combined with a flying squirrel.
4) A prehensile tail.
5) Sticky, tree frog-like toes.

Then I will not only be better than all animals, I will BE all animals. Cat Man will have nothing on me.

Current Mood: lethargic

It Is To Laugh
Today is going to be "hot" for the PNW. We're not experiencing anything like the rest of the country (yet), so I'm grateful for that and sympathetic to my friends in actually hot places. In any case, it was with an immodest amount of amusement that I noticed that the scene I'll be editing today takes place in a desert. At least I will be in the proper frame of mind to portray my characters' experience at being stuck in a sweltering enclosed space.

Current Mood: calm

I am in LOVE! LOVE, I tell you!
I have found Miss Snark!. The other day I read a quote from her and thought "huh, sounds interesting." Today while waking up enough to get started on the morning's job apps, I decided to check her out more fully. I am so very, very glad I did. She is stiletto-heeled! She is unrelenting! She is... snarky.

Ms. Snark is the nom de blog of an NYC literary agent who has much to say about writing, queries, publishing, etc. She appears to have come standard from the factory (or designed for herself) a Built-In Shock-Resistant Shit Detector of impressive proportions. I guess that's what one gets from years in The Biz, and from reading crappy submissions, but it's still a delight to read. I'm nowhere even in the vicinity of completing a novel, but I'll be spending a bit of time perusing her Snarkives when the time comes.

ETA:

miss_snark, for those so inclined. (Thanks, Mr. Llama!)

---------------------------------------

Speaking of writing, I've been editing the last couple days... It's a bit daunting to have three long pieces sitting around waiting to be edited. This is partially because of, well, the challenge, but part of it is the fear that, however good they might be, it's tough to market longer stories. Not impossible if they're good, but it seems like plenty of markets cap it around 5-6K. Hmph. In any case, it's gone from 10,527 words Monday to 10,143 today, and I'm just over a quarter of the way through. At this rate I'll wind up hacking ~15%, which is fine by me. The revision is a pleasure, truth be told, as it's a sword & sorcery story that I actually like. So often I'm not especially fond of my stories while revising, and only afterward do I come round to liking them again.

Current Mood: productive

Blurbs, Sub-Blurbs, and the Blurbs of Paradise
I was reading a post from

barbarienne about blurbs in need of red pens, so I decided to go hunting blurb-stuff online and found this post about the necessity of blurbs from an editor-turned-agent. An interesting read! I tend to look for blurbs from authors I enjoy reading, and should I ever be so successful as to publish a first novel, I'd love to have blurbs from some of them. On the other hand, I don't know how comfortable I would be with approaching authors I don't know and seeking out blurbs which I could then put in query letters, be they to agents or publishers.

I've heard stories of Now Published Authors X or Y who sent copies of their first novels off to writers they admired, apparently in hopes of getting blurbs, useful attention, or some sort of publication assistance. When I look at most authors' sites, they almost universally say they won't look at others' manuscripts for legal reasons. I don't know if that's just an easy way to weed out whackos and people they haven't met in person, or if it tends to be a hard and fast rule, but it's something that would make me think twice. Of course, if authors aren't in the habit of reading other authors' books, then how do all those blurbs get there, hmmmm?

----------------------------

All irrelevant, of course, until I've made some progress with the short fiction. The last few days have been quite productive, all 2,000-word days. Soon I'll be done and will have four stories ready for editing. Upon reflection, I've realized that two of them are, if not the same, then very, very similar stories. You could say that the main character in Story B is the protagonist from Story A, just in drag and making one crucially different choice at a certain point in the story.

Current Mood: thinky

Arrr, Matey!

You Are A Pirate!

What Type Of Swashbuckler Are You?
brought to you by Maddog Varuka & Dawg Brown

Current Mood: amused