Haunted Mirror

I like picking out titles from stories I'm working on. It's not just a gimmick that makes me feel clever (no doubt leaving everyone confused and uninterested: my specialty) but it helps me pick out the writing that conveys the essence of the story in a short bit.

Can you guess anything from today's quote? I'd think so, but I'm not sure.


As for the new project, I have 5 *blinking* pages. Handwritten, with a half-page really.
I really don't know how to write anymore, or I started too soon on this one. I don't know what's wrong with me...

After a month of being stopped on World Domination 101 revision, a little judicial reading seems to have stewed up the right conditions for Idea to spring forth.

It's funny how exposure isn't enough--there has to be that letting-it-sit period. At least for me. This time it felt especially slow since I wanted to have a monthly pace, of tackling aspects thoroughly and getting it done quick as I could.
I get that feeling right now, anyway, of needing the right intersection of input to get the right vantage on it. Queen's Play resurrected my thoughts on the culture-conflict lacking in Outlander, and introduced to me the fact that what I'd thought about on that wasn't in the manuscript.

Who knows? Maybe I wouldn't have been able to write this story I'm working on now the right way if I hadn't heard the song Unwinding Cable Car.
This train of thought often gives me philosophical heebie-jeebies, but I accept it.

Got anything particular in your soundtrack to writing now?

So me and my siblings recreated a matinee of Star Wars today. I think it was only my third time seeing it, and the first in a long time, maybe 6 years, because while I remember the story just fine, and even dialogue, I didn't really remember the details at all. Lots of the memory is what I've heard and recalled imperfectly, I'm sure.

Anyway. It was cool to see it with new genre-savvy eyes.
And Han Solo?
Well, I'd remembered he was cool, but...
don't mind my speechlessness over here.

I got a rejection for a poem and sent it right out again. I'm holding up that side of this VP bargain! What next? I don't know. I should be revising...


Oh, and I finished the Wild Cards book PNH sent me. That's apparently due out this year. It was very fun, and had that head-long zigzag feel of a collaborative novel where different people are taking on the plot.
Boy do I have so much work to do...

The wind was blowing so hard today it whistled against the mouth of the hose for a moment when I was out watering and turned a corner. The forecast is for icy rain. Fuuuuuun.


To think how recently I was where the sun burned hot...

Since the beginning of the year I've polished off a few stories that had been lurking, just waiting for a finish. (Not polished draft--just finished off initially.)
~The Komodos story in which I take on Murphy's Law of Combat and a Regency Rake character while Evil Overlords are not steroetypical. Also, alternative history in which my dubious ancestors made a dynasty in Australia.

"This," said Marshal Draken, gazing at his cuff, "is an exercise in futility."

~The Scar story, which was percolating in my mind, not half-written like ^. It features Caucasians with an Arab/Islamic culture, assassins serving the principality, and scarification. Also, an immortal whose EYES go unmentioned, but his hair...he's a barber who never cuts his hair. Oh was that a spoiler? Well, you probably will never see it anyway. It's the kind of thing that I know, even as I start it, will be kept under wraps for my own good.

Two weeks after Antiel died a letter came to Miyari about his assassin legacy.

~Jujitsu. Creatively titled, this story is about a punk teen (2nd POV narrator!) whose loyalty to his mysteriously high-stakes dojo wins out over...I don't want to spoil this one with too many specifics. It'll be great to post in making fun of myself eventually. Another I ought to keep under wraps.

        Someone always sweeps up this curb, but they leave a line-up of your cigarette butts on the edge, side by side.

And it's got twins!
Forge Forever...

I have a lot of the books I need to put together the mapping of Jord (Tentatively)'s quest, though man, massive amounts of ground to go over here. Jord (T) treks gradually from Maine to Alaska, stopping for an apprenticeship with a genuinely mad magician in the great lakes area. But see, this is alternate history, so I have to REALLY know where I'm talking about. The alternative history I'm having a bit of trouble on. Who knew that Tulsans didn't care about speculative racial mapping of the Caucasoid peoples? I'm going to have to get inventive about this research I believe.

Someday I'll write again.

The MySpace has music on it, BTW! http://www.myspace.com/greymantlepoets and you're done.

Today I'm working on a stupid little non-speculative story in which a Japanese girl impersonates an emo-boy to get into a band.
    It has no literary merit, and very little plot. I just had to write it.

I'm already doing good on my goals for the year though. I've been working on the PoV sludge after the first few scenes in World Domination 101 both yesterday and today. Next week I tackle actual structure there, condensing the action somewhat.


I didn't manage to post Epochs of 2007    so I need to do that now.

~  fantasy book club at the local library!
~  discover SF/F convention in Tulsa, volunteer
~ invited to writer's group, join      (though I haven't found any of them on LJ yet)
~ accepted to VIABLE PARADISE where I get enough encouragement all the critiques settle in to work through my system

I have a feeling it was a great launching year for my career. I also:
-- Put up a website
-- Sent out my first submission ever
-- Sent it out another place when it was rejected
-- Entered another in a contest
-- Got over a desire to not read more fantasy for a long, long time

I am hugely grateful for all these things coming together.
I did not see anything come together for sales, but my ground-work laying went to another level.

So I'm at 56000 words in Vol. 4. I've been creeping for the last 5000, but it's more than I realized.

I think there's still more story than I'm allowing, too, so that's half the uphill work.

Once more into the breach!

~For the end and for freedom!~



Today, interspersed with Useful Things, I read Blade Dancer. The title made me pick it up despite my immediate rejection of titles so cool they must be gimmicky or too popular for me. I enjoyed it a lot. Though I have a feeling it was twaddle.
It was all the overused elements I have a weakness for, I guess.
I mean really, it features a bicultural big-talking jock who goes in over her head at a battle school of sorts for assassins with a motley crew of other halfs that bond and become better than the individuals they are despite themselves.
Gah.
It was a day well spent.

And speaking of battle school:


I returned Castle Cant, to ignore. I still have Enola Holmes and Across the Nightengale Floor for a good old college try. Name of the Wind I will get to again. Someday.
But I've been crossing books off the library shelf-list quite a bit lately.

I need to start on my purchased books shelf pretty soon.
For now, survival.
Tomorrow ought to be calmer.
The aged next-door-auntie should be going home, as electric has been restored to all the people we've been helping support in the crisis, I've got packages off, I only need major sewing done and...well.
The list is still long.

But I'm here!

[BTW: eBear's laudable lyric-quoting post titles got it started, but mine are mostly quotes from the day's writing, as a sort of earmarker for me.]

Uq, it's nice to not have to type everything after writing it. At the same time, my pacing's off. I bummed around today.

Well, except for a Hospice Care Volunteering Training hour. We'll finish in  few weeks, but meantime, I've scored major information on death and people dealing with dying.

Which is a pretty big deal; fantasy deals with deaths all the time, and I'm going to milk this for all it's worth.



Here, a One Sentence Review on Neverending Story:

The script-writers picked a good cut-off point, but Ende reminded me of his Momo-self in the Other Half; and PS I love Atreyu.

I haven't written since yesterday morning.

I think I need a break. ^_^

The wordcount, by the way, was a spare 50150. I wrote two pages, after doing a few extra the days before; work started, see.
However, if you count up all the other volumes with it I have:
          197157
words of manuscript since...I'm too lazy to check. I think Mayish. Is that too recent?
    Agh. Checking... [long involved shuffle to the end of my bed] in a failed attempt to find documentation.

Well, I have a LJ about Vol. 3 at the end of March.
    Sort of amusing quote from it:

Funny, I was looking at the crosspurposes chart from Bob&Jenny a few days ago (never knowing where we're going, nothing--I didn't even know I was almost at the end) and it's so innacurate to what's on the page it's funny. But it helped me know the depth of everyone's spats. Even if they ended up looking drastically different. Score one for some pre-writing! I'm still picking out a fossil, unhibited by the graph of string over the dig's ground.

I have a superiorly disregarding mind. It can block out plotting like a two-year-old blocks out the Dreaded Word "No".

Still true.

I'm pretty happy about this.
I even like the yellow of the image here, I'm that genial.

So, a few more chapters and I'll have won "Red's Finish The Year's Gargantuan Project Month-or-So".

You will be notified.

Some things I learned today:

~5 gallons of water is heavy. Almost too heavy for me to carry.
~It it impossible to stay cold carrying that much water, no matter how frozen the hose is.
~I really like dancing...like, to Irish reels. Step-dancing.

I pretty much choreographed an All New! folk dance for my story yesterday: the first time since I was on my choreographing kick at 14ish. I did it on paper, but used Lego blocks to try out the logistics of it, and I think it would work out.
I also think it will probably need to be cut, that scene of dancing. Because it was wicked boring to type up, except for the stuff going on in between.

I was at 46774 words yesterday afternoon.
This morning I wrote half the quota of pages, maybe, and last night I wrote a few extra. I think I'll be done tonight with NaNo, but not with the novel. Almost for both, though!

I have to talk about The Neverending Story soon. And read a few more books.

5579 / 50000 words. 11% done!
This is not going well.

Just sayin'.

Random Red's Life Fact:
My younger 3 sibs are doing geneology for history right now. Today my mom got us back to the ancestor on her side that came over from Europe/UK, and one of the other lines was on PEI at one point. (Nova Scotia is home to many slightly distant cousins; PEI is just a little cooler.) She also had an aunt corroborate a suspicion our German Catholic Grandfather Brinkman was Jewish. See, apparently the real Germans are Brinkmann. My mum's suspicions were more along the lines of Semitic noses, certain family traits, and the fact that a German Catholic was likely to be hiding something.
If you ever read my timed-out supers novel, this bit of history in my family comes up in an unexpected place. ^_^ I love writing.

Since I've been working at a Pumpkin Festival on a bonafide farm doing instruction sorts of things how about a random Thanksgiving fact?
Fact being defined losely in terms of Internet reality.

The Native Americans originated strawberry shortcake, as a way to enliven cornmeal. They mashed strawberries in the flour, I think with something to soak the grain in for softening. No doubt, like with salt and popcorn, the European propensity to season improved on the original.
The Japanese aren't the only ones to blatantly steal and make their own.

1812 / 50000 words. 4% done!

The pretty metre thingamabob iss no workk. Well, well, well.
Like the Nano site during after-work hours for the US.
But Zokutou's code ought NOT to be making a bar too big to fit in one line of my journal, or show the progress on the far side of the thermometer. Don't ask me how THAT happened.

The point: I almost reached one day's wordcount in two days. Today I might have reached almost two, in a less-close-almost sort of a way. I should have known this week would be a bit of a dead loss, but I don't like to believe that coffee and extensive [obsessive] preparation don't defeat the laws of physics as correlated to earth-relative time.

Or the inertia of not writing more than a few pages every few days in three weeks.

As of this morning, a warped Words Behind: 4188

Currently: Now I am a jolly 2722 words behind. With a little extra uncounted yet towards the positive side of things.

From now on, I promise you, LJ cuts about NanoNonsense. Today, I subject the masses.

I finished the fourth of five volumes in my epic today. This brings the book up to approx. 143,000 words. Yes. I told you it was an epic. It is not a series, to spawn two/four/six more books, mercifully: it is a series contained in one book, almost.
        Yes. That is still too blasted long to query until I've got three NYTimes Bestsellers on my resume. *sigh*
I'm so excited to have come this far, though and be ready to start the last leg...when I have time, in November. ^_^

In the other room, by brother is reworking the production on our song of the Roads poems by Tolkien as I have demanded. Merely in the interest of higher art, which he understands. Our younger siblings are kicked outside to play, not just by us, but by the lovely doomed sunshine of the day.

I go back to work after four days off tomorrow. I needed them. But writing is on the back-burner again as of tomorrow.

The smell of wild grapes. Walking across pine needles. Acorns half the size of their caps, especially  when that means tiny, tiny, tiny. The world can be so good.

My good news: hit the climax sequence of Vol. 4, which is energizing
My bad news: spidey sweatshirt left at friends' dorm *cries, mourns, schemes*

Snippet for the Tuesday it has been:

Jess is a 'super' who gets kicked out of supers' school for not wearing an identity bracelet. She's at her first day in public school ...

I bought stuff to pack today. We shall see how my luggage feels about it some other day. For now, I'm a bit more secure. A bit.

I've started "Women Who Run with Wolves" as my literature-ralated non-fiction. It's quite extraordinary.
    With my latest project (Aolon of the 5 volumes--at p.103 for Vol 4 w00t!) I deliberately thought about how my heroines were going to be alike and dissimilar. The main thread they have is this "Wild Woman" image. They are intuitive, but unabashed. Hirloa is a rather wide-eyed, random girl--her sister is quiet and domestic, but she has a wit and responsibility that is not precisely submissively childish. They are the two mothers of the heroines and heroes to follow.
The heroes aren't exactly the opposing repressed machisimo blunderbusses either. They are all in places of spiritual leadership (except Notable Exceptions who are just not there yet), they are all either artistic, or edging on it.

It will be intriguing to see what there is in this book to help me refine upon the characterization for this.

I don't know if it's a mistake to so engineer that they are all musicians or artists or sophistocates of some sort. I do know it's because I enjoy the company of such people that when I turn to secondary functions I tend to do too much artsy flourishes.

Today's Book Report:
The Game of Kings: And my woeful inadequacy, despite a very good tour of the unrelieved suspense landscape, is revealed. I really did try, with Shaim, this afternoon. But just as he didn't lose a toe in an odd river accident when he wasn't even paying attention, I just didn't see any point for those people to keep him locked up in a dungeon. My writing--episodic? I think so.
This is a tour-de-force of the essential backstory being withheld to great prolongued anguish and interest effect.
Lymond is one of the Trickster figures we all love so much--one of the more desperate I've encountered yet, or at least in the consciousness of the book--and he's rather obnoxious. He has a quote for everything, and all of them mean nothing to me. If I were either illiterate or able to spot more than half of them I wouldn't be so put out. Let it suffice that once I've done with an anthology of references to Surprised By Joy (C. S. Lewis' autobiography) I know what comes next.
But I enjoyed it quite a bit. Despite everything.
I'm, I believe, learning to not quibble with the flaws of other writers, to great support of my peace of mind. If only I'd catch them in what I do before turning it over to other people...

I finished Wildwood Dancing--I really think that if it weren't for the cover I might not have gotten past the first third. I don't know why I didn't feel the magic of it quite as soon as I did Daughter of the Forest. Maybe because I HAD to read it, coming down on the last due-date.
I don't think it stood out as much. Being a more collaged retelling might have a lot to do with it. That I'm not all that enthralled with Transylvania OR snowy winters (snowy winters in Japan, or in New England, or really wherever I like--but it all seemed a tad generic, not just the setting). But I enjoyed it pretty well.
 There were twists to the end that were great, and I

I hit page 99 of Vol. 4 of Aolon. I ought to be half done at this point. This is dubious. I am however revealing Shaim's little thing with disappearing magic, as I'd forgotten about it in the interest of working out some semblance of a plot. Still no success with that, but we've done a full pan on the scenery. *bleargh.* I don't know why I always get to a point where I have to say, "You're allowed to get to the point any time now"...I think I have a faulty concept of "the middle" of a book.

~Next afternoon:~

I finished Un Lun Dun, too. ^_^ I think it definitely got better once I realized the heroine was the one I liked. And it's inventive and fun. On the scale (size-wize) of HP, the postmodern child of The Phantom Tollbooth thematically, and in the likeness of Hitchhiker's Guide for humor-sense.

I'm reading UnLunDun by China Mieville. After announcing to my mom it just didn't get me, but I was reading it for my own good, he lets Hemi (Cockney half-ghost boy) come back onstage and well... *is a goner*
That's a way he can get me. Deeba (heroine at large) is snappy in a fun way, but Zanna (purported messianic figure du jour [spelling that wrong, so no apostrophe for me]) is dry, and there's only two of them in a great wide world of concerned grownthings.
Hemi, you restored my faith. Many half-ghast blown kisses.

I'm spending the week avoiding sunburn as we do vacation sorts of things. I believe the touch of color on my forearms is due to reading. No kidding--outside when I thought I was shaded and it was plenty late in the day. Who's the fairest one of all? The lady who manages to conquer the sun's evil rays to maintain that healthy red-head pallor!

I now have too many books on my shelf. But for writing I've been focusing on the Aolon story (black market established--trouble to come) and the Regency Underground book I've put off reading is awesome and also timely. I'm mostly thinking about revision on my short stories. No drive to write any right now, so blanketing the market in a few weeks/months sounds about right...

I have this story I really want to tell--I like what I have of it so far--but I don't have a real story to deal with the inbetween of the moments I've invisioned and the characters I've built. And my other stories are also too free-form to give that energy there.
 Alas.

Meanwhile, one of my best friends is dealing with being a woman of color on a primarily white campus, when she's NOT African American or African, but half Jamaican who grew up in a  white community. Being stared at. Having a weird name. Dealing with "diversity" as a buzzword in every talk for orientation, and crap that means she's the one everybody thinks they're talking about, when she comes from a much more similar background to the SoCal majority than a fellow blond that's also a Texan.

My life is So. Hard.

But it's hard, in a different realm of hard, to reread something you wrote, that you LIKE, and not be able to move forward with it.

Weakness Reveal of the Week: on YouTube I get caught by the Final Fantasy amvs to songs I like both because of the drama-intense grimbattleglam of it all and because of the Japanese features of the characters.
But mostly the Japanese faces and their expressions. 'Cause see, that one guy is my Japanese type--and yes, I have different types in my two home cultures. But this kid, I'm telling you, his expressions are spot on...Yes, even that one. Only maybe not so pretty.

I'm pretty psyched to be hooked up with the Oklahoma SF Writers group, and to find it's essentially the same people who ran the con. Also, to be considered a valuable contribution, because I spent a lot of time working instead of being bored and lonely--very nice. This by the Highly Published lady of the bunch, who judges all the Writers of the Future submissions, too.

I am currently reading: The Corinthian (Georgette Heyer), Un Lun Dun (China Mieville), and reading aloud The Silver Chair (C. S. Lewis), Fellowship of the Ring (JRR), and Emma. I have been tempted but withstood Marillier's Wildwood Dancing and Nancy Springer's detective gal book at the library today.

Volunteered for the city library's Ren Faire (pirate themed), and not panicked about travel arrangements for getting to the Viable Paradise workshop. Tragically, not working out the details... but it looks like I'll have money. Which is the biggie. Right? Also, typing Vol. 4, reviewing Vol. 3's mushy parts, and casting votes for race at tolkien_realm's sorting.

I think I won't kill myself for only two pages of Sedition in real ink-work

My icon honors the anti-racism etc. week of blogging. A post maybe later.

I posted a bit of recent writing (rare for me to do) on UrbanFantasyFan. To see part of what I'm working on This Very Second (sort of) you can go to that post and check it out.
 Shaim is progressing pretty well. No rivers, but we're approaching the Underground. I just remembered I headed myself off with the appearance of one Love Interest...but that's fine. Writing sometimes does that.

In other news, I made a playlist from some of the CDs I've copied to my computer (ostensibly, in preparation for being away from home for a month) and it ended up being a folk-heavy melange that does quite nicely with the randomizer. I might be able to do one of those I-Tunes meme things. Now I just have to find one.

Jade? I know you have that stuff at your fingertips...