Strange Ink

A Month of Letters

2012-02-01T09:30:00.000-06:00

I love getting real, proper mail. Letters and packages that just show up, as if by magic, and there they are, tangible proof that someone was thinking about you. It's kind of glorious.

I also love sending cards and letters and things in the post, even though I am a very absentminded sort of pen pal. I love selecting cards or stationery, the right color of ink, wax and seals and stamps - all the little rituals of communication.

And of course I understand that there are other ways to communicate - email, text, phone, twitter, blog - that are easier, less expensive, more instantaneous, than letters sent in the mail. And really, what matters is the communication, not the format. But still, I love real physical letters in the mailbox.

So this month, I am participating in (wonderfully talented writer) Mary Robinette Kowal's beautiful idea, A Month of Letters. Every day that there is mail this month, I will send something to someone. I think it will be a little bit magic.

"my prayers are the prayers of earth's own clumsily striving"

2012-01-30T12:06:00.000-06:00

It was in high school, when I stopped saying prayers, and started saying poems. Not that I gave up my religion, or my faith, but that I began asking questions. I began choosing to believe what I did based on my own desire to connect with the numinous, not simply because my parents piled us all in the car to go to church every Sunday.

And about the time I really began to think about what it meant to believe, to have faith, is about the time that I began to really dislike the idea of praying using the memorized prayers of my childhood. I didn't need to think about the words, they were just there. That didn't seem like prayer to me - I wanted to think. But at the same time, there were times that I wanted more of a focus for my thinking than simply talking to God. So I used poems.

I had my favorites, ones which spoke to my need to rejoice, to ask questions, to search for beauty, or to find support. But there were others, that I would read, and then stop and read again with intent. Some were overtly religious, but often they weren't. They were just ways to pause, to reflect, and to feel connected to something larger and more glorious than I was.

I was reminded of this last night when I read this blog from Amanda Palmer, where she talks about Rocky Horror being a kind of church. It's a metaphor that struck me as exactly right. Not just because of the ritual aspect of both (special clothing, singing, unison responses from those in attendance, and I'm stopping this list now because I can't tell if I sound like an academic or a heretic.) but that I think art is like what church ought to be.

I think art, the experience of it, stretches us outside of ourselves. It makes us dance, and rejoice, and ask questions. It makes us weep. It makes us feel connected, even if we don't know to what, or to whom. Art can show us that there is more than this moment, this now, but that by whatever we deem holy, we need to live in this moment, this now. Art helps us build our own churches, carefully, around the strange shapes of our souls.

And I don't say that because I think that church no longer does those things, or to mock people who believe, who have faith. But I say that because I am a person who sometimes has to read poetry, in order to pray.

Ordinary magic

2012-01-29T11:00:00.000-06:00

It's easy to recognize magic when it comes with words and wands, with smoke and mirrors, with a spotlight shown on an illusion so marvelous you stop looking for how the trick gets done. It's a glorious thing, when something happens and it's so large that you cannot help but stop and wonder. We need magic like that, that's flashy and obvious.

But there are also the smaller magics: a friend who really listens, a letter in the post on a day when hearing "I love you" matters, a hand extended in welcome or comfort. Things that are quiet, and real, and no less magical for that.

When the darkness has robbed you of all of your sight

2012-01-24T15:51:00.000-06:00

Yesterday on twitter, my friend Joe asked people to share their Mulder Score - a number from zero to twenty, calculated by whether you believed in any of the following ten things: Horoscopes, Auras, Ghosts, Telekensis, Telepathy, Fortune-Telling, Bigfoot, Nessie, UFOs, Souls. You got two points for definite belief, one for maybe, and zero for things you didn't believe in. (It got hashtagged as #mulderscore for any of you who want to read back through the feed.)

I scored six: belief in souls and ghosts, and maybe-belief in telepathy and fortune-telling (if we define fortune telling broadly as any divinatory practice.) And honestly, the fact that my number wasn't higher makes me a little sad.

Not that I want to be gullible (though there are some, I am sure, that would look at that small list of beliefs and tell me I am), but that I wish there were more things I could believe in. I remember believing in Nessie and Bigfoot (hell, I remember believing in the Bun-biter Snakes my Dad told me lived in the overgrown section of our backyard.) I tried very hard to set things on fire using only the power of my brain. I was certain there were unicorns, and elves, and fairies, and wizards. There were so many wonders that seemed possible.

I appreciate logic and reason and knowledge, and I am grateful for modern science and technology. But I long for wonders, for the miraculous, for the bright flash of magic.

A miscellany of reasons

2012-01-22T12:11:00.000-06:00

We could start with the obvious reasons why you should apply to Clarion. Every year, there are six of them, and every year they are the faculty. Six professional writers, all talented, all respected in the field. Often, they are also award winners and best-sellers. You will work with each of them, both in the workshop room, and one on one. Sometimes in the common room at 2 am when you are still reading for ~~the next day's~~ that morning's critiques. Some of them will become your friends and mentors. They will give you the respect of taking you, and your writing, seriously.

Here are another six reasons: six weeks. Six weeks in which you can make your writing your absolute priority. Is it hard to step away from the life you've known for that long of a time? Yes. Emotionally and financially, it is a sacrifice. But - and please forgive my bluntness - if you think that the life of a writer is not full of emotional and financial sacrifices, you are wrong. Even if you cannot go now, it is worth saving and planning for.

Here are eighteen reasons - yourself, and your classmates. You will meet amazing, wonderful, challenging people. Some of these people will become part of your chosen family. Some you will do crazy and impossible projects with - I am writing a ballet with one of my Clarionmates right now. Let me assure that this is something that had never crossed my mind to do before I went to Clarion.

And that is the other thing, the beginning of the less-obvious reasons that you should attend - you will learn so much about yourself. Perhaps one of the things that you will learn is that you are not a writer, or not someone who wants to write professionally, or at least not then. Believe me when I say that is a good thing to learn, and better to learn it in six weeks than in six months, or six years. But perhaps you will learn that you are. I did, when I was there.

Clarion is a difficult experience, sometimes. It gets called "boot camp for writers" and I think the description is apt. It can also be a trial by fire, and many other clichés. It will, in all likelihood, change the way you write, and change the way you think about writing. I applied four years ago, and applying was one of the scariest things I had ever done, until I attended.

I've written a post like this every year since I attended. I still look back and say that going to Clarion was the single best thing I have ever done for myself as a writer, and one of the best things that I've done for myself, full stop. If you want to write, I highly encourage you to apply.

Turn a bunny (or a camel, or a goat) into a story critique

2012-01-19T12:34:00.000-06:00

Every so often, I am reminded that my friends are really cool people, people who do marvelous wonderful things, who make the world better in all sorts of intangible ways. And once a year, for the past few years, I have been reminded that my friend Pat Rothfuss does something really cool that helps make the world better in a very tangible way. He runs the Worldbuilders fundraiser, a massive fundraising effort to benefit Heifer International.

Worldbuilders is really great - if you donate through that page, you get entered to win all sorts of really great books and other literary swag. Some of these things are signed, or rare, or both. Auctions are another part of the fundraiser, and this year, I donated a critique, that is being auctioned off even now. The specific details, and the link to bid are over at Pat's blog, but the short version is I'll critique a short story, or the opening chunk of a novel, up to 10,000 words. It would make me really happy to see this help raise a lot of money for Heifer, so please bid and bid generously, and tell your writerly friends.

And if a critique isn't what you need, you should definitely check out the other things you can win, and make a donation.

Oh, and Pat is totally exaggerating. The SUV was barely on fire when I pulled it off of him.

[write this when you know what the hell you are doing]

2012-01-13T10:25:00.000-06:00

I make notes to myself as I write. I write by hand, in notebooks, only on the right-hand side (recto, if we are going to be scrupulously correct) of the page. The verso side I leave as a blank canvas. Sometimes it remains that way. Other times, it gets covered in scribbles and post-it notes, all of the marginalia of creation.

These notes range from a good song for a particular character or scene, or a reminder to check details before the finished draft, or notes to myself to add more detail. Sometimes they are silly - I found one last night that read, "No, you cannot title a chapter "Panic (On the Streets of London)"" (It would have made me so happy to do so, but completely inappropriate for an alt-history set in the 16th century. Even if there is an earthquake, and the associated fires, and thus, panic, on the streets of London, in that chapter.)

But sometimes the marginal notes are more philosophical in nature. This usually happens when the writing isn't going well, or is frustrating. I mean, I don't leave myself notes that read "this scene is awesome!" Last night, I came across one that read "write this when you know what the hell you are doing."

It wasn't exactly the most uplifting thing to read, to be honest. The reason I was reading over my marginal notes was because - after a few days of false starts, of writing scenes only to cross them out the next day, of the book's stubborn refusal to let me write forward - I had realized I was writing in the wrong direction. I typed up all my pages, printed them out, backtracked to the last part that I knew was right. And realized that a minor plot thread needed to be yanked out - it was an interesting story that was in the wrong book - and that I really, really needed a new character and subplot to go with, to balance out the structure of the book. And that the new character would be important enough that I couldn't just write forward as if he had always been there, I needed to go back and rewrite, a thing I hate doing, because that loss of forward momentum can be enough to let the doubts creep in.

Write this when you know what the hell you are doing.

I do, sort of. I know enough of what I am doing to know, at least for now, what needs to be fixed. To trust myself to fix on revision the things I don't know now. To listen honestly to the feedback that I will get on the drafts of this book when I send it out to my readers.

But I also don't know what I am doing. This book is something different than anything I've written before, so it has new challenges. Some I was aware of going in, and others I've discovered along the way. I often feel like I don't know what I am doing, and I hate that. I hate not feeling competent - it makes me feel small inside, too small to write a book that feels so large in my head.

And the truth is, I can't wait. I can't wait because if I wait to write something until I think I know what I am doing, I will write very little, and most of what I write will be pale copies of what I've done before. Because the only way to get better is to keep writing, and, as Theodore Roethke wrote, to learn by going where I have to go.

No really. Tell me what's wrong with my story

2012-01-10T08:58:00.001-06:00

In my last post, I mentioned sending a draft of a story off to beta readers, and being full of gratitude for their pointing out a flaw in the story that had never occurred to me. In the comments, Ali asked if there was a certain specific question that I always asked of my beta readers, some kind of feedback that I always wanted. The answer was long enough, I thought, for its own post.

Which is odd, considering that I could easily answer the question, "No." No, there isn't one single question that I always ask my beta readers, other than the implied, "tell me where this sucks." But she wanted to know about how to get useful critical feedback, and that is a longer answer.

The most important thing about beta readers is that they are people you can trust to tell you where you are going wrong in your story, and to tell you that in a way that is useful to you as you go about revising and fixing it. If everyone you give your drafts to always says "Oh my God, this is amazing. Publish it now so it can will all the Hugos," well, I hate to break it to you, but you need new betas.

But beyond that, you should ask the questions you want to have answered. If, as you are rereading your draft, you notice that the opening is weak, or you're not sure if the ending is earned, or if the murder in the second act is adequately set up, ask your readers to pay attention to those things. If you're writing outside of your comfort zone - a genre you've never written in, or a character of a gender or race or sexuality different to your own - ask your readers to comment on those things. If you know you wanted your story to address a particular theme, ask if it did.

Have different readers for different types of stories - don't ask someone unfamiliar with the tropes of romance to read your satire of romantic tropes. When I'm working on a novel-length project, I always ask friends who aren't writers to beta read for me, because I want the reactions of people who are going to read like readers - like what I hope most of the people who read the final product will be.

Don't waste your beta readers' time. It's one thing to send out a story and say, "I've looked at this over and over and I know something is wrong with it and I don't know what that is, please help," and another to fling an unread hot mess of a draft at people and expect them to do your work for you. Make your story (or chapter or novel) as good as you can before asking people to seek out its flaws. Tell them thank you when they get back to you, even if it turns out their feedback is not immediately useful. Especially tell them thank you if they have critiqued a novel-length project for you. Don't be afraid to ask questions if you don't understand why they gave the feedback they did. Don't expect to be graded on your effort - beta readers act in the service of the story, not your ego. Don't feel that you have to take all of the suggestions given to you - often enough, they will be directly contradictory, and then you quite literally can't - but do consider each of them seriously, and remember that you write in the service of the story, not your ego.

Don't be surprised if you get answers to questions you never asked, and those were the most helpful of all.

Our strange taxonomies of ourselves

2012-01-07T09:33:00.000-06:00

The story that I felt most insecure about writing was "Sweet Sixteen." Not because it was gut-wrenchingly personal, or because I expected it to cause controversy, or anything as interesting as that. No, I was worried about writing it because - never mind all of the chemistry and genetics and microbiology I took in college - I was convinced I didn't know enough about science to write science fiction. I know, I know it is wrong, but part of my brain still thinks that a story must have computers or robots or faster than light space travel in order for people to call it science fiction, and that wasn't what I was writing, nor was it what I ever had any desire to write. Hence, I wasn't a science fiction writer. (This is truth: the first question I asked my beta readers for this story to answer was, "Am I writing science fiction?")

And it is true, that when ideas spark in my brain, I do not often have the desire to explore them in an SFnal fashion. But that does not mean I am not, and cannot be, a science fiction writer.

I recently sent a draft of a new story off to beta readers. It was a story I had wrestled through three drafts already, each wildly variant to the one which came before. It was giving me such frustration that I hit "send" immediately upon typing "ends," which is something I never do (I almost always let the story sit for a day, and give it one more quick polish), but I couldn't bear to look at it any more.

Then something else happened, that has never before happened to a story of mine. The reactions that came back were identical: I had written the first third of a story, and then stopped.

As soon as I read those responses, I felt the chains of panic around my brain loosen. Yes. Yes. This was exactly right. This was why I had such a difficult time writing. And after reading their other suggestions, I knew what happened next, and what happened after that. So why had I stopped writing? Well, I had written about 1600 words, and most of my short fiction falls within the 1500-1900 word range. So I had this low-grade feeling that things needed to end, and I mistook the end of a scene for the end of a story.

If you write, you're very often asked to put labels on yourself and on your writing. You need to know enough about what you've written to know what kind of market to send it to, how to pitch your story, how to categorize yourself in a bio. And I don't think there's anything wrong with self-assessment when it helps you feel confident in what you do well, and be aware of what parts of your writing you should focus on improving.

The problem comes when those labels turn into boxes that you write yourself into, their sides barriers that keep you pressed into one shape, walls high enough that you can't see ideas over them. I don't want to write stories that are easily put into boxes, even if the boxes are my own.

Eligible works, 2011

2012-01-04T09:48:00.001-06:00

Hugo and Nebula nominations are open, so now begins that time of year when thou mayest behold writers, artists, and other parties making lists of works eligible for consideration. I like these lists: years are long and my brain is sometimes not the best at remembering all of the amazing things I have read and seen in the past year. So here I am, making a list.

Here is the fine print: Only members of SFWA can nominate for the Nebulas (nominations close 15 Feb.). Anyone can nominate for the Hugos, but to do so, you must either have been a member of the 2011 WorldCon, or purchase a membership to the 2012 WorldCon before 31 Jan. A supporting membership, which allows you to nominate and then to vote, is $50. This is, I know, not a trivial sum. However, in the past - and I see no reason it would be different this year - that will also give you access to the Hugo Voters pack, which generally includes almost all of the nominated works, including the Best Novel nominees. So you don't get your money back, exactly, but you do get value for it.

If it is available online, I have linked to the work. I have also listed the venue the story appeared in, and the editor. Stories do not just happen. If you liked something I wrote, and especially if you liked it enough to consider nominating it, I respectfully request that you also consider nominating the people and places that helped make those stories happen.

Short Stories:

"The Speaking Bone" in Apex, edited by Catherynne M. Valente

"Choose Your Own Adventure," in Fantasy Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams (this story was selected for Rich Horton's Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2012)

"Sweet Sixteen," in Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams

"The Calendar of Saints," in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, edited by Scott H. Andrews

I am also eligible for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and I am in my second and final year of eligibility for that award.

This also seems like a good time to say thank you: thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read my words. It means so very much to me.

"The Least of the Deathly Arts"

2012-01-03T09:44:00.000-06:00

I started writing "The Least of the Deathly Arts" in August of 2008. It was the story I workshopped during week 6 of Clarion.

It didn't have an ending when I workshopped it. I was tired, I was under deadline, and I didn't have the faintest clue how the thing should finish. So I just sort of stopped writing, and turned it in. (Er, sorry fellow Clarionites.)

It actually looks very different now, slightly more than three years later, than it did then. It turned out, as you see, that figuring out the ending was the key to all the bits in the middle.

I have such a love for this story. I loved writing it at Clarion. I loved doing all the research: funeral customs! medieval academic treatises on vampires! exsanguination! poetry! I love Noir, and I'm beginning to think she might have more stories for me to tell.

And I particularly love that it appears in Subterranean, which has long been one of my favorite publishers.

So here is the story, and I hope you love it, too.

No apologies

2012-01-02T09:58:00.000-06:00

I was taking a break from writing last night, and posted a link on twitter to The Black Hours, a medieval manuscript that is in my current novel-in-progress. Someone responded that the manuscript seemed like a very Kat sort of a thing, that what I was writing sounded like a very Kat sort of a book. Concerned that the character-restrictions of twitter would make what was absolute sincerity on my part seem like snark, I agreed, and then said that I didn't really see the point of writing something if it wasn't a very me sort of a thing to write.

The timing was interesting, or perhaps serendipitous, as I had just read this post from Nova Ren Suma, talking about how 2012 was going to be a year where she wrote solely for herself, and made no apologies for doing so - to be the writer who she is, rather than the writer that anyone else thinks she ought to be.

It's a powerful statement, and one that echoes a lot of the New Year's goals that I've read in the past couple of days. I think there are a lot of us who want to write our stories, and more, to not feel as if we ought to apologize for doing so.

Writing is hard, and it doesn't come with promises. One sale is not a guarantee of the next. No one owes it to us to like our stories, our books, or even to read them. We hear all the time what readers or editors do or don't want (sometimes these things are the same, just to make the craziness complete). We hear more specifically what people do or don't like about our work. (Trust me, even if you try to avoid reviews, people will send them to you. Even the critical ones. Especially the critical ones.) Well-meaning people will suggest what they feel are easier kinds of books to write, guaranteed best-sellers, the one change you should have made to that last thing you published that would have made it perfect. Well-meaning people will tell you these things until you want to curl up in an ink-stained puddle and cry into your manuscript.

But there are no promises. There are no guarantees, no magic words or perfect plots. And writing is hard. Writing is hard, and sometimes the only thing you can do is write your own story. Even if all you've heard is that "King Arthur, Sparkly Zombie" is the most overdone concept in the history of literature. Even if it's in Anglo-Saxon alliterative prose, and everyone has told you you'd be a runaway success if you only wrote accessible stories. Even if it's in first person pov, and your lead is a woman, and everyone knows those don't sell. Writing is hard, and what is the point of doing it, if not to tell your story?

Write your own story. And apologize to no one for doing so.

Turning years, turning pages, making wishes

2011-12-31T08:58:00.000-06:00

I wish you joy.

I wish you people to celebrate your successes, and to hold you when you cry.

I wish that you are challenged in your convictions, and so have the chance to learn what they truly are, and to learn who you truly are as well.

I wish that you will make something - a poem, a pie, a sweater, a song - something only you can make. It won't be perfect, but I believe creation is our way of fighting entropy, and 2011 was a year of things falling apart for too many of us. Let us help the center to hold.

I wish that you feel truly understood.

I wish that you try something that scares you, something you think you aren't good enough to do, something that you have always wanted to learn, or to learn to be. Working without a net is scary, but it is how we become.

I wish that you are able to shed one of the layers of skin that you have been longing to cast off, to forgive an old wrong, to let a wound scar over.

I wish you material comforts - food, shelter, warmth, light - and I wish you the particular comforts of your own soul.

I wish you moments of transcendence, of compassion, of hope.

I wish that at the end of this coming year, when you look back, you are proud of who you are and of what you've done.

I wish you love.

One more new beginning

2011-12-28T17:28:00.000-06:00

I don't normally get very excited about New Year's Eve. I like a sparkly party and champagne as much as the next girl, and I've thrown NYE parties in the past, but it's one of those occasions I am perfectly happy to mark in flannel pajamas with a cup of hot chocolate, rather than out with the riotous crowds. Besides, after spending basically my entire life in academia, I believe the new year begins in September.

But I got to the end of this fall semester, and I was burnt out. On teaching, on writing, on very nearly everything. This was Not Good, as I have twice as many teaching obligations next semester, and my writing obligations are (thankfully) increasing. And I love the teaching, and the writing (especially the writing), but I was just so very tired. So tired I didn't even know what to do to get myself out of being tired.

When I went home for Christmas this year, I decided to use the time to regroup, and to actually relax. To work differently than I usually do when I am on vacation (laugh at that phrase all you want, but welcome to the life of a working writer), and to think about how I worked, and what was really important to me, and how much of what I was working on was focused toward that. To think about how much of my life was focused toward that, and how I might rearrange things.

So I'm giving myself a new beginning, here at the turn of the year. Not resolutions, but a new way of looking at things.

Dancing and sitting with happiness

2011-12-16T10:37:00.000-06:00

I am delighted and honored and - honestly - a bit overwhelmed that "Choose Your Own Adventure" has been chosen to appear in The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2012, edited by Rich Horton.

I found out earlier this week, and did the ritual dance of joy in my office. Today, I saw the official Table of Contents, and I pretty much had to sit down. The other stories are so good, and the people who wrote them are people whose fiction I turn to for inspiration. It's an amazing thing, to be included in such company.

In case you were wondering

2011-12-14T15:02:00.000-06:00

It is the end of the year, and, as such, many places are putting together Best of lists, or Top Ten articles, or other such things that talk about what they enjoyed in the previous twelve months.

I have a passing fondness for lists myself - there are three within easy reach on my desk, even now - and so I have put together a list of my favorite books from the past year.

But! you must go over to Fantasy Matters to read it. (I know, I know, there's always a catch.)

Good night and thank you, whomever

2011-12-11T18:45:00.000-06:00

I have been an appallingly bad blogger of late. The worst part is, when I click through my list of blogs I follow, and I have sadness because they haven't updated, and then I have guilt, because neither have I. And I have good reasons - I am writing two books, a novella, a short story, and a ballet! And tomorrow I will get 45 final papers to grade! And also, it is two weeks until Christmas! Apparently, I use exclamation points when I am full of terror!

This is the point where my head explodes and/ or I search for consolation in the egg nog. Choose your own adventure.

In the spirit of five things make a post, then...

1. I have absolutely no plan to see this movie, but the version of "Is Your Love Strong Enough?" from the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack is amazing.

2. Writing is full of preoccupations. Current ones: the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Arthuriana, bad boys, and time.

3. "The Least of the Deathly Arts" will be in the Winter '12 issue of Subterranean. I am so excited. I am also incredibly excited for "Seeräuber," by Maria Dahvana Headley, also in that issue. It rocks. You will love it.

4. Yesterday, I met a man dressed in a Santa suit who encouraged me towards a greater understanding and appreciation of the truth in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. In other news, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Rudolph R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

5. Goonies never say die.

On being a writer

2011-12-01T09:19:00.000-06:00

My students know that I write. So even though I don't teach any creative writing courses, there are usually a handful of students from each class every semester who come and talk to me because they want to be writers.

There are, I tell them, lots of ways of being a writer. There is writing that you do solely for yourself, or writing that you do because you want others to see it. You write because you want to see your name in print, or because you want to get paid. There is writing that is a hobby, and writing that is a career. Sometimes these categories combine. I tell them there is nothing inherently better or worse about any of these ways of writing, they are just different to each other.

Usually, though, when a student comes to see me about writing, it is because she wants to write for publication, with the stated or implied hope of it being a career, and the often implied hope of seven-figure book deals, lunches with King and dinners with Rowling. I try to give a reality check - I mention median first novel advances and that professional short story rates are five cents a word. I talk about people I know with multiple books on the shelf who still can't afford to be full-time writers. This information almost never makes a difference, and I'm glad, even though I think it should be part of the calculus. I don't think there's anything wrong with being attracted to a profession because you think you will be blindingly successful in it - you might be. Better to dream.

So I talk about rejection letters and submissions guidelines and daily page counts and rejection letters and query letters and letters you have to send to markets that forget to pay you and that time that I cut 20,000 words because they were the wrong words and critique groups and beta readers and that year I couldn't sell anything and rejection letters. I tell them that I love writing, even on the days that I hate it. That even though it is work, it is a job, there is nothing I would rather being doing. I think I must speak that last bit louder than the rest, because they walk out of my office bright eyed and shiny, and I see them clutching notebooks, and typing madly on laptops before class.

I hope they succeed. And by succeed, I mean get what they need out of the experience of writing, whether they only think of themselves as writers for a semester, or whether they go on to a career of millions of copies sold.

But I think the next time someone asks what it is like to be a writer, I am going to point them at this post of Nova Ren Suma's, where she says "I'm a writer first, and then a person." It's a fantastic post for reasons more than simply that phrase, but that description really spoke to me. Because I think that to continue - especially if you are writing for someone other than yourself, if you are writing for publication, if you are writing with an eye to being a better writer, you must learn to be a writer first, and then a person.

You must learn that you cannot wait around for inspiration to show up, but must find it, whether by being open to ideas or by refusing to get up from your desk until you have 250 new words. You must learn that strange double self, of having an ego large enough to sit down at the notebook and pick up the pen in the first place, yet still able to sublimate itself in pursuit of the best story. You must learn how to have deadlines in lieu of a social life, and how to keep working even on the days the rejections make you weep.

You must learn to pare away everything, until all you have left is that core of what's most important, and then build your life outward from that. Then, you will be a writer.

Because fairy godmothers are real

2011-11-28T12:44:00.000-06:00

It is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole to say that without Terri Windling, I would not be a writer.

I'll start with the obvious - she helped create and edit Bordertown. She has, with Ellen Datlow, edited a number of volumes of excellent, fairy-tale inflected, short fiction. Her own novel, The Wood Wife, is one I have turned to again and again, when I needed thoughtful magic. So her work has, in a number of ways, shaped my literary DNA.

But she also gave refuge and sanctuary to my soul. She took me on as a reviewer for the Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts, and she and Midori Snyder were unfailingly kind and encouraging to me while I was there. I needed that place - a place to feel that these stories that l loved were important, and mattered, and that it was okay to think seriously about them. I felt part of a community there.

And it was there, on the reference pages of the Endicott website, that I first discovered how to apply to Clarion, and when I said that I was going to, Terri wished me well. Even now, I cannot write what it meant to me, to have someone whose work I so admired, someone who I looked up to in that fashion, say good luck, and you can do this thing. It gave me courage, and strength.

We still haven't met in person, but Terri Windling is my fairy godmother, and someone I love deeply.

Right now, Terri has had to deal with a number of ongoing legal and health issues. She needs help. Here, at Magick 4 Terri, is a place you can do that. It's an auction full of beautiful and fantastical things.

Thank you.

One more star, to hang in the heavens

2011-11-22T19:31:00.001-06:00

If you had told me yesterday that I would cry at the news of Anne McCaffrey's death, I would have been surprised.

I read her, of course. Didn't we all? It seems to me that anyone in my generation who read any science fiction or fantasy read Anne McCaffrey. And some of her books I truly loved - I read Dragonsong quite literally to pieces, and loved the rest of the Harper Hall trilogy, as well. Menolly is still on my list of favorite heroines. And I have a particular fondness for Black Horses for the King, which lives on the shelf of my comfort books downstairs.

I read her, I loved her, but I outgrew her. Sometimes we do - we cannot always take the pieces of our childhood with us into adulthood. It does not mean they meant any less to us, then.

But the world has been hard, lately, and cold. Still, as the news of McCaffrey's death spread tonight, I watched as all of us who read her mourned, and shared their memories of what they loved best. In the sadness of the loss, the world became a little smaller, a little more connected. And so I cried, because I didn't realize until now that not only had Anne McCaffrey given us stories, she had given us each other as well, one more tremendous gift in the wake of her passing.

So thank you, Anne McCaffrey. Thank you. The harpers will always sing your name.

This is dedicated to the one I

2011-11-19T10:52:00.000-06:00

The other day on twitter, someone asked if I had a specific person in mind when I wrote, someone to whom I was writing. He had written something for his son, and having that audience in his head helped him.

I started to answer with a "No, absolutely not. That's the sort of thing that would paralyze me." and then realized the reason behind my answer was actually a good deal more complicated, so I'm giving it here.

So let's step back in time to the summer of 2008, when I was at Clarion. It's probably no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers. He was also my week 4 instructor. And the way Clarion works is that the instructors run the critique sessions of the stories that get workshopped that week, and then also have a one-on-one conference with the writers. So, you know, no big deal, only someone whose writing I thought was brilliant going to be reading and picking apart something I wrote, and then meeting with me in person to tell me exactly what he thought. No pressure, right?

Let me just say that if I ever take up a career in burglary, the first thing I am stealing is the copy of my week 4 story out of the Clarion archives. It is, perhaps, the worst thing I have ever written. And it is that level of disaster because I focused on the audience, and forgot about the thing I had come there to do: tell a story.

Thankfully, Neil is as kind as he is talented, so when it came time for our conference, instead of rehashing the horribleness of what I had written, he said, "I watched you during the critique, so I know you know what's wrong with the story. Let's talk about your writing, instead. Tea?"

And so we had tea, and talked, and one of the things we talked about was fear. Fear that people would think things about me, because of what I had written. That they would judge me. The fear that made me focus on the audience, and not on the story. The fear that would suffocate any talent that I had, unless I told it to go fuck itself, and wrote what I needed to write.

I'd like to tell you that happened all at once, that I am always and ever brave whenever I sit down and open a notebook. But it's hard - my grandmother reads everything I publish, you guys. I have scenes that I hide from, things it takes me multiple drafts to get the emotion right in, because it hurts, it makes me sick to my stomach to put those things on paper. I still can't write a sex scene without blushing, even when I don't remind myself that one of my regular readers is a Jesuit.

And I am always aware that I am not writing solely for myself. If I were, I would not be seeking publication. I want people to read what I write. Sometimes, I even know what people will be reading it - I have had editors ask for stories, and I have, on occasion, written things as gifts. But that is an awareness I push aside when I am writing, because I need to fill my head with story until there is no longer any room for fear.

A meditation on the nature of time

2011-11-18T09:56:00.000-06:00

I finished Stephen King's 11/22/63 last night. This isn't meant to be a review of it (though I liked it, very much, and while it seems odd to say the words "cross-over appeal" about someone who has as many readers as King does, I do think this is a book that can be read and loved by people who don't normally gravitate toward his writing.) Rather, I want to talk about the way the book handled the problem of time.

As you might expect from a book that has a date for a title, time is a huge presence in 11/22/63. It is not quite a character, but it is the monster in the closet, the shadow at morning striding behind you, and at evening rising to meet you. And for most of the book, time moves at what seems an achingly slow pace. Oh, not that the pace of the book is slow - it isn't (unless you compare it with the careen of Under the Dome), but time cannot seem to move normally when history stands in front of it. Jake has to get to 1963 by way of 1958, and the ticking clock of the past echos louder and louder as we read towards the unanswered question. That tick tock becomes amplified almost unbearably when we arrive in late November of 1963, and King's text begins counting down the days. Trust me when I say that six numbers can make you shudder.

And yes, what King is interested in doing is exploring the idea of time travel, not alternate history, so I give away nothing (or at least nothing more than the fact that portal to the past opens in 1958 does) by saying that the titular date arrives very near to the end of the book. After Jake Epping has learned, time and again, that the past is obdurate. After entire flocks of butterflies have flapped their wings. It might seem obvious in a novel about time travel, but in 11/22/63 time is a force that cannot be ignored. I would say that it is the organizing force of the story, but then, isn't it always, when we begin with "Once upon a time" and end with "happily ever after?"

One of my favorite television shows is about a time-traveling mad man in a box, and one of the most quoted lines of this season was that "time can be rewritten." On my desk right now is Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. I am writing an alternate history and wrestling in my own way with obduracies of time. Plot is made of people, you see, and while changing history can be accomplished with a sweep of my pen, the people inside it are surprisingly resistant to being altered for all that they've been dead for 400 years now. And they keep trying to put the pieces of history that I have broken back together.

Time is a thread, a layer, a piece of a coordinate in spacetime. Time is a bubble on the side of a multiverse. Time is the crack of a bullet, the flutter of wings, the inexorable ticking of a clock creeping in its petty pace. It is the beginning and end, and all of the pieces in between, no matter how often they are rewritten. It is all we have, and it is never long enough.

First

2011-11-15T09:56:00.000-06:00

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It seems I am hopelessly naive. I thought these words actually meant something.

Standing on someone else's soapbox

2011-11-09T09:31:00.000-06:00

I sent out my first query letter (the letter that a writer sends to an agent, looking for representation) at the end of 2009. As I was getting ready to do so, I did what any sensible person does - I consulted the internet.

Oh, not just for research on which agents might be a good fit for me, and what a query letter was, and how one wrote a synopsis without descent into madness and despair, but also for some sort of clue as to how I might survive the process - the process of being a new writer who was querying, and writing other things, and trying to figure out the business, and all the assorted angst and wankery (wankstery?) that goes with it.

Reader, I found The Rejectionist. She was, at the time, an agent's assistant. But she didn't just write about the rejectionist part of things. She wrote about books and feminism and fashion and discovering who you are and the perils of nostalgia. And she wrote about them in a smart, snarky, insightful way that I loved. It became one of my favorite blogs, and it still is.

So I am so excited to tell you that I am guest-blogging for The Rejectionist today, as part of Feminist Speculative Fiction Week. I hope you enjoy it.

Frailty, thy name is

2011-11-07T09:45:00.000-06:00

I was faffing about on twitter the other day, as one does when one is between scenes and needs a break, and I saw that an online writing group was getting ready to have a public chat. While it's not a group I participate in, it's a fairly large one, and they often have guest visits from professionals. The topic? How to Write Flawed Heroines.

My first thought was, oh, they're not really doing this, are they? (Actually, that's a lie. My first thought was a great deal shorter and more profane.) And then the chat started, and I started to see things get retweeted, and the first two posts I saw were that heroines in particular needed to have noticeable imperfections and that women readers will forgive an arrogantly perfect male hero just about anything if he's hot enough.

This isn't the first time I've been grumpy on this subject. And I should point out that the title and the subject of the chat wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest if it had been something like "How to Write Imperfect People" or "How to Write Characters With Depth" or "How to Write Characters Who Actually Resemble Real, Flawed, Human Beings." Because let's face it. None of us are perfect. It's one of those inherent-in-being-a-person commonalities. And writing perfect characters is boring, and bad writing, and - I've taught Milton enough to know - makes for boring reading.

But what I don't understand is the insistence that female characters need to be more flawed, or the perception that a male character can be a hot alpha hero who has all the skills, lets everyone know he knows best, and makes sexytimes with all the ladies and women readers will love him, but if the hero is a heroine who does these things that then she's a pushy bitch and a slut.

And it really pisses me off that a writers' group would decide that teaching people how to write acceptably weak women is a better use of its time than teaching people how to write interesting, believable, complex characters. And maybe it did - maybe someone pointed out that heros should be flawed as well, or that readers read to find strong women, as well as weak ones - and the discussion changed. I hope it did.

Because I don't believe it's true that the only way to write a believable female character is to emphasize her flaws, any more than I would believe that's the only way to write a believable male character. We can, and we should, write better.

Reflections on the turning of the year

2011-11-04T13:36:00.000-05:00

So here is the obligatory post-Convention write-up post. Though I'm never sure why these things are obligatory - to remember what happened, perhaps? I am as likely to forget the enormous hug by my collective Clarion class as I am to forget the early morning phone call from my most excellent pet-sitter, saying the police were in the yard because the insurance company forgot (!) to tow the hurricane-smashed PugBug as I am to forget being chatted up with my excellent friend Maria Dahvana Headley by the Jagermeister Spokesstrippers as I am to forget opening weeping while Neil Gaiman read "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" or gasping with laughter as Nalo Hopkinson read from her forthcoming YA novel, The Chaos.

That was pretty much my World Fantasy Convention. I saw the people I loved, never for long enough. I met new friends, and heard some excellent stories (I strongly prefer to go to readings over panels, as I love being read to.) I had dinner with my agency, and realized how very lucky I am to be part of such a terrific and talented collective of people. Throughout the weekend, I felt like a professional writer, not just in my own eyes, but in those of others.

And while I was gone, the seasons shifted. The last gasps of summer well and truly became fall, with pieces of winter sneaking through. These are the days of the dead, of saints and souls and turnings of the year. Endings and beginnings, and I cannot settle back in. I feel stretched too thin, and I cannot say why. Not lost, because I know where it is I need to be going, but off-kilter.

I cannot say if the two things are related, if I am still disoriented from travel, from flinging myself at a place and people and dreams, or if it is simply the time of year, which has always felt like a haunted one for me. Or if it is simply that, like the time of year, there is so much that is almost ready to happen, and I need to lay the ghosts before I can reap the harvest.

Where to find me

2011-10-24T11:58:00.000-05:00

This weekend I will be at World Fantasy Con, in San Diego. If you are going to be there, and would like to find me I am:

Having a solo reading! Friday 11:30 am, in Pacific 6/7. I will probably be reading "The Speaking Bone," which was published in Apex earlier this year.

Reading as part of the Fantasy Magazine group reading. Saturday 3-4 pm, in one of the hotel suites (tbd). There are some really great writers who are participating in this one, so I'm quite excited for it. I'll be reading an excerpt from "Choose Your Own Adventure."

I will also be wandering about most days (except for Sunday, when I leave, lo, very early), attending readings and panels and BarCon. If you see me (I am a tall and redheaded person, so fairly easy to spot) feel free to say hello.

Would you like to hear something strange?

2011-10-22T15:03:00.000-05:00

I love pretty much everything about October. The cooler weather, and the way that lends itself to cooking soups and stews. The smell of the leaves and the slant of the light. The reds and golds and ochers. Pumpkins and apples and cider.

I also particularly love Hallowe'en. I love dressing up, and scary stories, and really, every part of the celebration. Including the music. I always make a playlist, and I generally ask Twitter to help. I got some great suggestions this year, some of which didn't make it on here because they didn't quite fit the mood, but I'm holding them in reserve.

Here it is:

1. Danse Macabre - Béla Fleck (with Ben Sollee)
2. Every Day is Halloween - Ministry
3. Heads Will Roll - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4.People are Strange - The Doors
5. Buffy Main Title Theme - The Breeders
6. Peek-A-Boo - Siouxsie and the Banshees
7.Transylvanian Concubine - Rasputina
8. Living Dead Girl - Rob Zombie
9. Bela Lugosi's Dead - Nouvelle Vague
10. This is Halloween - The Citizens of Halloweentown
11. The Killing Moon - Echo and the Bunnymen
12. Nemesis - Shriekback
13. Dead Man's Party - Oingo Boingo
14. Zombie Jamboree - Rockapella
15. Monster Mash - Bobby "Boris" Pickett
16. In the Hall of the Mountain King - Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
17. A Forest - Bat for Lashes
18. Ramalama (Bang Bang) Róisín Murphy
19. L'il Red Riding Hood - Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
20. Walk Like a Zombie - HorrorPops
21. Time Warp - The Rocky Horror Show Original Cast
22. Bad Moon Rising - Thea Gilmore
23. Werewolves of London - Warren Zevon
24. Thriller - Michael Jackson

If you have a favorite that I left off, please feel free to leave it in the comments. I'm always looking for more creepy music.

Still alive, still writing

2011-10-19T20:02:00.000-05:00

I'm at one of those weird places where I'm very busy, lots of things are happening, and yet I have very little to write about here. I'm working on a number of writing projects, and teaching my course, and getting excited for World Fantasy next weekend. And things are happening, but nothing I can really talk about in a concrete way, and blog posts full of "I've got a secret" aren't really that fun.

There is, of course, the option of the blog that isn't a personal update, but that requires the time and the brain and the words to write it. And my time and brain and words have all been going to other things recently, with more or less degree of success. So I'm semi-hoping that this post will do what posts of this nature so often do, and give me such wonderful things to blog about that I'll make myself find the time, and so there will be a post apologizing for lack of posting followed by lots of writing, but I have my doubts.

So. I'm alive. I'm writing. I'm busy. Things are generally good, and I hope they are for you as well.

We are our medium

2011-10-13T17:33:00.000-05:00

This post is a response to two other posts I read today. This one, by Cat Valente, which - to vastly oversimplify an elegant post - wishes we talked about the content of books, rather than the medium by which we read them, and this one by Paul Jessup, which longs for the days when writers talked about writing as art, rather than as business.

Here's the thing. Writing has always been a business. That Anglo-Saxon bard, chanting out Grendel's destruction of Hrothgar's men in thumping alliterative verse? Did so in exchange for a place by the fire, food on his plate, mead in his mug. Dante and Chaucer had wealthy patrons. Shakespeare didn't just write the plays that were performed at Blackfriars Theatre, he was co-holder of the lease on the building (a building he helped dismantle and move when cost of the original location proved too great.) Now, am I trying to say that Will and Kit Marlowe or Ben Jonson never talked about dramatic structure or whether a clown ought to speak in blank verse when they had drinks at the Mermaid? Absolutely not. But I do think they discussed how those drinks were getting paid for, and thus, the business and economics of writing.

And for nearly as long as writing has been a business, there have been innovations in the way it was done. The switch from oral to written story-telling. The move from books being completely handcrafted and thus available only to the very wealthiest to moveable type printing. And yes, ebooks and podcasts. All of these things - and more - had effects. Even if not on the way stories got told, they had effects on who had access to them, on who bore the costs of their creation, of who had the ability to create.

And Cat is absolutely right to say that the thing that matters most in all of this is the story. She and Paul are both right to say that the reason we become writers is because we love stories and want to tell them. I agree with this absolutely. But I also think that once we start writing for publication, things become not so simple.

If I just wanted to think of myself as a writer, I could write stories for myself. I could polish them until they were perfect, and care not at all about what the market looked like or if they would ever sell or if anyone would ever read them. But once I start writing for publication - whether publication on my own blog, or through some form (paper or electronic) of self-publishing, or publishing professionally, I am no longer simply writing for the art of it. I am writing in order to get something back. That something may be money, or fame, or simply someone else reading it and thinking of me as a writer, but it is something. So let's not be disingenuous here and say we only care about the art. It may be the thing we care most about, we may be willing to make less money and reach a smaller audience in order to have more artistic freedom, but we are engaged in the business of writing, as well as the art of telling stories.

And when people outside of our immediate world of people who tell stories and get paid to do so get a chance to ask us questions, they are going to want us to respond to things like ebooks, and the fact that award-winning professional magazines are only available on the internet and for download and are never available in print format. They're going to want to ask us questions like why we trunk a story rather than self-publishing, or why we self-published our backlist, or why a publisher can't have an e-version of a long-awaited sequel available for download the day after the author presses send on an MS. Hell, I've seen writers complain about ebook pricing, and formatting errors, and say they won't buy something if they can't buy it for their ereader, so how can we be grumpy when fans do the same thing? We can say the only thing that matters is a good story, and I do believe it is the thing that matters most, but this other stuff - well, I understand why people want to talk about it.

This doesn't mean that I don't believe there's space for discussion of stories, and the books that have made us who were are, and the things that have inspired us, that have made us want to be better writers. And yes, I would absolutely rather discuss someone's novel, rather than the format in which it was first published - reading The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making will make me a better writer. Knowing that Cat first published it as a serial novel on her blog won't. I've made plans when at World Fantasy at the end of the month to get together in the bar and talk about the contents of Little, Big, not about the fact that Crowley is going to be recording an audiobook of it. We should talk about our stories - they are the best part of us. We should want to make them the most important part of the discussion. But I don't think it serves us or anyone well to pretend there was once some halcyon age where talking about our stories was all we ever did.

It is not now as it hath been of yore

2011-10-11T16:39:00.000-05:00

It was one of those runs. One of those runs where your body reminds you that you are, lo, very far from being a teenager. Where every ache manifests itself, just out of harmony with all the others. Where you ask yourself why exactly you are out doing this, and wouldn't it be nicer just to go home and put on sweats, and hang out with the dog.

I could lie to myself, and say that I am running because I am a writer who does not wish to be writer-shaped. I could lie and say I am doing this for my health, and because I rather like chocolate and triple cream brie, and something must be done to counteract their effects. Those things wouldn't even fully be lies. But they wouldn't be the important truth, the truth that keeps me running, even though the real reason may well be the biggest lie of all.

I didn't realize it at the time, but my competitive fencing career ending in an ice-slicked parking lot in Edina, Minnesota in December of 2002. A woman in a black Ford Explorer pulled out of a parking spot without looking, hit me, and sent me flying. I landed on my right hip, cracking, as I discovered later, the cartilage. Surgery wasn't an option. I had already qualified for Nationals, so I trained through it, with the help of an orthopedic surgeon used to dealing with high-level athletes.

Nationals was a disaster, but my hip held up. Unfortunately, once I got back, and we stopped spending all that energy fighting entropy, entropy won, and the rest of me fell apart. My next two tournaments, I brought home a dislocated shoulder and a torn hamstring. It was time, we all agreed, to be done.

Except I didn't want to be. I fenced again as a refuge from the horrid end of my marriage and as I was writing the first draft of my first book and the final draft of my dissertation, and training kept life and soul together through all of those things. I still don't want to be done. I've found a club here to train with. It's the shoulder, even though that was the least of the injuries at the time, that gives me the most problems. (And please, I love you guys, and you are awesome people, but trust that I have good doctors, good physical therapists - including a sister who is one - and that I have tried just about everything to put it back together again, and please do not give me helpful suggestions about what might work.)

But I'm not ready to say never. I'm not ready to put away my equipment, and say I'll never compete again. So I run, not just to get into less-writer-shaped shape, but to help get back into competitive shape. I run, and then I come home, and put on sweats, and hang out with the dog. And pick up my pen, and sometimes my sword.

"The Calendar of Saints"

2011-10-06T19:53:00.000-05:00

I am extremely excited to tell you that I have a new short story out, "The Calendar of Saints," in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I am very pleased to be in such a great magazine, and incredibly grateful to Editor-in Chief Scott Andrews, not least because he said it reminded him of one of Ellen Kushner's Riverside stories, which is on the short list of nicest things anyone has ever said about my writing.

"The Calendar of Saints" was an unusual story for me. I wrote the first draft in the late winter or early spring (they blend together to a rather appalling extent in Minnesota). It was the first time I tried experimenting with structure, and it was about twice the length of what I normally wrote. I knew it had issues when I finished it, but I wasn't sure what, and I sent it to my beta readers. They were very helpful, and after I read all their comments, I trunked the story.

I had no idea how to fix what they said was wrong. I knew they were right, but I couldn't make the changes.

Then, earlier this year, out of the blue, I woke up, and I knew how to fix it. I made the changes, and knew I wanted to send it to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. And lo, I did. Scott asked for a rewrite, and this was my first time doing that, but he bought the revised story. And his editorial work was fabulous - he was a keen-eyed reader who was willing to talk to me to help me get the best story I could write.

I am really proud of this story. I hope you like it.

The heart and stomach of a king

2011-10-02T12:53:00.000-05:00

Because of the new book I'm working on, I'm doing a lot of research into various sixteenth century people and places. One of these people is Elizabeth I of England.

Elizabeth, you may recall from her sobriquet, "The Virgin Queen," famously remained unmarried throughout her life and her reign. This was remarkable for a couple of reasons. The smaller reason is, after the dissolution of the monasteries as part of the Henrician reforms, marriage was the only option for women. There was no other career path, even for a woman born to royalty. The second was that, for a woman born to royalty, participation in the marriage game was expected. Weddings were how treaties were sealed, the promise of a betrothal was an expected part of political negotiations (and those promised betrothals were often undone as negotiations fell apart). Women were pawns in a very real game of thrones.

Not only that, even though Elizabeth had literally been given the education of a prince and was a staggeringly intelligent woman, no one, including her advisors, thought she was capable of ruling a country. At the beginning of her reign, her ambassadors and staff would bring messages to her privy council, rather than to her, when the information was "too great a burden for a woman." Parliament petitioned her multiple times to take a husband, who could better deal with the great tasks, and then to show her greatest love for her country by producing heirs and shoring up the succession.

At eight years old, the woman later called "the greatest catch in all her parish" told a childhood friend she had no wish ever to marry. Considering her father's marital disasters - which included the judicial murder of Elizabeth's mother - it is not hard to see why. But for twenty years after taking the throne, Elizabeth played the marriage game. She agreed to be courted by most of the crowned heads of Europe, and used her potential marriage as a negotiating tool. It was a game she played with consummate skill.

Yet so far, every single book I have read at one point or another, dismisses the intelligence and cunning Elizabeth used throughout those twenty years of almost-promises and says she was simply "acting like a woman." You know, changing her mind, being fickle, and enjoying watching the boys fight over her.

Oh, sure. Some of the books sometimes go back and say, "hey, that was pretty strategic of her, she really was her father's daughter" but no one - and mind you, these are modern biographies - seems to be able to sustain the notion that maybe, just maybe, Elizabeth was thinking with her head and not her loins. It's a puzzle to me, and it's especially a puzzle when the book presents Elizabeth as an otherwise intelligent and politically savvy person.

I don't know if it's that we're so conditioned to believe a princess must have a prince that people are trying to rewrite political maneuvering as romance (no matter that the prince is her dead sister's husband or a boy half her age with known sadistic tendencies and a weeping ulcer on his face), or if people are still underestimating Elizabeth and refusing to believe that she knew what she would be giving up by marrying - that she would go from being the most powerful person in the country to being a broodmare - and so they cannot imagine that she spent twenty years outsmarting the crowned (male) heads of Europe, and then another 400 outsmarting historians.

She said once that though she had "the body but of a weak and feeble woman, I have the heart and stomach of a king." I think she had the heart and brain of a queen, as well.

Everything and nothing

2011-10-01T20:05:00.001-05:00

I feel like I'm living in the land of Almost and Not Quite right now. It's a place where all the streets are paved with uncertainty, and the stoplights flash in code. So many pieces of things are almost ready to happen. Almost, but not quite, and so I can't talk about them.

I don't even like to think about them, because there's so much flux, I don't have the foundation to make a decision. So instead, I make all the decisions, and let my thoughts trace down all the paths, and then my brain races like it's on a hamster wheel, and let me tell you what, that's a very uncomfortable feeling.

But some things I can share: I am working on a new book. I am kind of embarrassingly excited about it. The elevator pitch right now is "it's like a female-driven version of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell set in the sixteenth century." The exciting part - research. For example: Catherine de Medici had seven stuffed crocodiles hanging from her ceiling. (My brother pointed out that this would be a great deal more impressive if said ceiling-crocodiles were live.) This has to go in the book. The not-exciting part - maps. I am so bad at maps, and this book is really going to need them.

Also! I will definitely be at World Fantasy this month. It was in serious doubt for a while (my dog has had serious medical bills a couple of times this year, and then there was the whole "the hurricane smashed my car with a tree" problem.) But due to a very generous gift of a plane ticket, I will get to go. I am incredibly grateful. And if you're going to be there, I hope you'll say hi.

Also also! Perhaps you know that my friend Megan and I are writing a ballet together. (If you do not know this, and wish further information, you can find it here. This entry describes the current state of things.) We had a planning meeting today, and talked about some of the next steps. One of which is where I block out a fencing sequence that is translatable into dance. I am excited, terrified, and doubting my sanity, which is probably the perfect frame of mind to be working in.

Pushing pause

2011-09-25T21:31:00.000-05:00

"I'm so busy, I don't have time to breathe." How many of us have said or thought that? I know I do, quite often.

There are a lot of things in my life that are uncertain right now. Uncertainty and lack of control are not my favorite feelings, but many of my uncertainties are because of things I cannot control, or even affect. My response to this is to focus more on the things I can control, which sounds very healthy, until I sit back and realize that one of the few things I can control is my writing.

To put it more clearly, my coping strategy is to work. A lot.

This is, of course, a healthier coping strategy than drinking to excess, or trying various and sundry mind-altering substances, or sleeping with inappropriate people. But overwork still has consequences. The obvious ones are things like being sleep deprived and thus fuzzy brained and short tempered. But there are more subtle ones as well - I lose touch with my family and friends. I get tunnel vision. I forget to breathe - respirare - to take in spirit, to be inspired.

I spent time doing that this weekend. I worked, yes. But a dear friend was in town, and I spent time catching up with her - eating full meals and having long conversations, walking on the beach. I met another friend in person for the first time. She's also a writer, so some of the talk was business-related, but much wasn't.

And then I had time before my train, so I walked through the city. I watched dogs, and listened to conversations in four languages I recognized and two I didn't. I danced on a sidewalk with a man I did not know, and he gave me a rose, and never asked for my name.

I felt happy, and peaceful. I breathed, and was inspired.

Let's talk about sex

2011-09-21T09:32:00.000-05:00

Apparently I'm a good deal more grumpy about this than twitter has characters for. There is a book out promising to break the silence on teenage girls and promiscuity. Based on the product description, and it's promised interviews with "self-selected loose girls" there's not much silence left on this particular topic to break, as this is one more in the line of "WOE! The girls are all having the sex and acting like sluts and the nation will fall because of these sex-having girls!" books.

Woe.

Look, I don't want anyone having sex before they are ready for it, and I get that for a lot of people "teenage sex" is a lazy short hand for "too early sex." And I might disagree with a book that tried to speak in absolute terms about when people were and were not ready to have sex, but so long as that book spoke about *people* having sex too early - you know, boy people as well as girl people - I could respect it. But I have absolutely no respect for the argument that a teenage girl who has sex is destroying her life (or undervalues herself or is desperate for love or is a slut) whereas a teenage boy who has sex is totally cool, and is engaging in a normal and age appropriate rite of passage, or is a stud.

Do I think there are some problems with the interactions between women and sex in our culture? Sure. Like, oh, I don't know, the idea that if you sleep with a guy on the first date you're a whore, but if you don't put out on the third - I mean at least a blow job, am I right? - you're frigid. The idea that if a woman ever wears anything that any man ever might be turned on by, or has a drink in a bar, or is alone with a man, that's she's giving up her right to say no to his sexual advances. The idea that if a woman has ever had sex voluntarily before, and she is raped, a jury will be told she's a slut. The idea that women don't actually like or want the sexual act in and of itself, but will use it and their bodies to manipulate men into doing things for them. That any woman, no matter what her age, who has casual sex is a slut with self esteem issues. These are the ideas about sex that are bad, and problematic, and that cause huge issues in society when it comes to sex.

These are the dirty secrets we should be talking about.

But Kat, you say, you are being disingenuous. These are issues about adult women and sex, not about teenage gir.. oh, fine, teenagers and sex. You're missing the point. They're just too young.

Well, leaving aside the issue that attitudes towards women and sex do not emerge from the void when women turn 18 or 21 or whatever age society has decided it can safely say they are adult sexual beings, high school covers a wide age - and development - range. I started high school when I was 13, and there were 19 year olds in my graduating class. That's a range from people who can just barely get into movies with swearing and people who can die for their country in the armed services. So even if we were to be beyond reductive and say the only thing that mattered in whether or not someone was ready to be having sex was their age, that's a lot of years to consider. I'm willing to guess that while many if not most people would feel 13 is too young, that many if not most people would think 19 is okay. (And no, just for the record, I do not feel there is a magic age at which everyone is ready for sex.)

If we're going to break silences around sex, let's please speak loudly about things that matter, rather than trying - yet again - to shame women for their choices.

Dramatic license

2011-09-20T18:48:00.000-05:00

So here's a bit of information that will probably come as no surprise to anyone reading this blog (er, except for the person who recently arrived here because she or he was curious about which people are in Hell. I am perhaps not the best resource for that.): I digress. I do that a lot.

Anyway. That bit of information? I'm a writer. Not yet full time, though because my day job is in academia, there's a lot of writing involved in that, and also many days where I can Be a Writer all day.

So let me tell you about how my day goes. I wake up, take the dog out and other associated morning chores, and head to the computer. Sometimes I start writing, sometimes I do the first round of internet triage for the day. If it is like to be above 75 that day, these activities are cut short so I can go run.

Wildly exciting so far, yes?

Then I do more chores that involve sitting at the desk and writing - blog posts here or at any of the other places I blog on the web. I read whatever books I am reading for research purposes. Sometimes I break for lunch. Then I head back to the computer and write. If it's not wicked hot, I run in the afternoon. There are further breaks for animal chores. I eat dinner. I read. I write. I write some more. I faff about on the internet. I write. I go to bed.

So I get why a television show like Castle - ostensively about a writer - pretty much never shows him doing writerly things. Charming and attractive as Nathan Fillion is, no one would watch him sit at a desk all day. I get why they only show the sexy parts of the writing life - book release parties and signings. And these things can be fun and exciting enough for television, even without exaggeration. Though this has not yet happened to me, I have seen multiple friends get asked to sign parts of people's bodies, for example.

But you know what we do not sign? The dust jackets of our hardcovers. Seriously. Ever. Primarily because they fall off and get lost. Also, because many are designed out of a material that does not take ink. This is not a hard thing to discover.

And I'm not really sure why on a show that takes such dramatic license with, oh, everything, (a book where the author wrote the ending three months ago is not out being signed either, guys) that this detail bothers me as it does except, really? You have a writers' room, none of whom has ever gone to a book signing? The Devil is in the details, guys. You would think the staff of a procedural would know that.

35

2011-09-14T20:43:00.000-05:00

Today is my birthday. I am, as Dante was, before he headed off on a three-epic tour, midway through life's journey.

So maybe that's why I'm feeling introspective. I've felt weird about this birthday for a couple of months now. Not because I feel old, or uncomfortable about my age. I'm happy with my life - the way it looks, the things I've accomplished. I have regrets, but I don't think I'd want to live the kind of life where I didn't.

It turns out, as birthdays go, this was a good one. The people I love called and emailed and visited and tweeted and posted and sent cards and gifts and love. I felt connected, and blessed. Contracts came in the mail, for a short story that's going in an anthology that I am thrilled to be part of. This was not a surprise, as the check arrived a few days ago, but I liked receiving a tangible symbol of what I want from my life on a day where I was thinking about my life, and what it looked like. I taught a class, on a subject I loved, and had great conversations with my students. And as the day turns over, I will be writing.

So that is the shape of my life today. And I no longer feel weird about this day. I feel grateful for it. Thank you for sharing it with me.

The sound of the story

2011-09-13T11:07:00.000-05:00

Earlier this year, I got to be part of something amazing. One of my stories, "A Life in Fictions," was part of Symphony Space's Selected Shorts series. The program was called "Magical Realism: The World of Marvelous Stories with Neil Gaiman."

I was so flabbergastedly honored to be a part of that event, and I have many wonderful memories of that evening. But one of my best memories was listening to the talented actress Marin Ireland perform "A Life in Fictions." She was so good - she sounded exactly like I heard the story in my head, and honestly, if there is even an audiobook made of my work and I have any say in who the reader is, she will be at the top of my list.

So I am extremely happy to say that the show will be broadcast, one month from today, 13 October. Selected Shorts is splitting the four stories into two performances, and "A Life in Fictions" will be part of the show entitled "Love in Real Life." This will include the performance of Neil Gaiman's "The Thing About Cassandra," which honestly gave me chills when I heard it. Neil talks a bit about the program, and when you can hear the other two stories, here.

I hope you'll listen.

Does Bonetti's defense exist, and is it fitting, given the rocky terrain

2011-09-12T10:07:00.000-05:00

This weekend I was working on an article about fencing, and partially about how fencing in real life differs from fencing on page or stage. I asked if writers had any questions they particularly wanted answered, and I was surprised by how many people wanted to know how to avoid making mistakes when they wrote about it.

Ask questions. Do research.

This is, of course, as true for anything you want to write about that you don't have personal knowledge of, as it is for fencing. If you don't know, ask. And if you don't know what you don't know, say that, too.

You are a writer. It is your job to know how to tell a story, and all the bits and pieces that go with that. It is not your job to know how to parry a fleche - unless you are writing a story that features swordplay at the level where that sort of attack is likely.

The first thing to do is decide what level of expert advice your story needs. If you're writing something where the hero is being pursued through an old and creepy manor house, and he grabs a rusting decorative sword off the wall and swings about wildly with it to defend himself, well, you probably don't need that much. No one reading your work is going to expect anything beyond "the pointy end goes in the other guy." But if your hero has been a competitive fencer for most of her life, and was really good at the sport, you'll need to know not only the difference between a beat attack and a remise, but how spending time in the sport has changed her way of thinking.

Online research is a great place to start. And it may even point you in the direction of people you can ask questions of, or ask to read your manuscript and check the technical details.

And yes, Rocco Bonetti was a real fencing master. It is historically probable that he would have given fencing instruction to someone who referenced "sword" 437 times in his literary canon: William Shakespeare.

"But I have that within which passes show"

2011-09-07T12:22:00.000-05:00

I am not my characters. Even the ones that contain large pieces of me, even the ones where I write as "I" rather than from some degree of literary distance. We are different, they and I. I have not lived their lives, and in most cases, I would not want to.

In some cases, I do not like my characters. I understand them, I know what they want, how to write them, but I would not, if given the option, bring them to life and have them over for dinner. With some of my characters, there is a very real chance I would not survive that experience. Some of them say things I do not believe, or behave in ways I find morally abhorrent.

Except. Like Prospero, these things of darkness, I acknowledge mine. I wrote them. They live because of me. And I write what I do because I want it to have an effect on readers. They will think certain things about me because of what I write.

Still, it's a tricksy thing, to try to divine an author from her writings. Maybe what you think you know about a writer is wrong. It is, for example, possible for a writer who is not a serial killer - and has no desire to be one - to write a compelling and terrifying murderer, or for an asexual person to write a truly hot sex scene. We are, after all, writing fiction, and if we cannot imagine people outside of ourselves and the worlds they contain, well, we are in the wrong job. The text is the key to understanding the text, but it is not the hidden cypher needed to unencrypt the author's psyche.

But on occasion, a piece of an author's life will show up, and it will alter the way we see the author's work. Reading "The Wife of Bath's Tale," with the reformed rapist knight as hero, is a different experience when Cecily Champaign's deed of release, releasing Chaucer from "all manner of actions such as they relate to my rape or any other thing or cause" (omnimodas acciones tam de raptu meo tam de aliqua alia tam de causa), is taken into consideration. This document changes my relationship to Chaucer, much as my certainty that Spenser would have hated Irish, Catholic, female me, changes my ability to come to The Faerie Queene with open heart.

What we know about artists changes our relationship to their art. The degree to how it does, and in what way it effects us will vary, from person to person, and from one piece of art to the next. We are not our creations, but they are very much ours.

Survivable first drafts

2011-09-06T20:19:00.000-05:00

I was recently asked some questions about writing first drafts. Ah, first drafts, what with their delights and terrors, their agonies and ecstasies, their hard-bracketed reminders to [insert plot] or [perhaps a monster?] or [ffs, make this sound like actual dialogue]. But first drafts, are supposed to be shitty, right? We've talked about this before - the draft zero is just about getting enough stuff down on the page that you can go back and figure out what the story is really about, and then clean it up and make it shiny.

But how much is enough? What is the difference between survivably bad first draft, and one so catastrophically horrid that you are unable to continue writing?

Well, like just about every part of the craft of writing, this is going to be one of those answers that varies from writer to writer, and even from project to project. The short answer is, a first draft is too bad when the holes in it are either so big or so annoying that you are unable to continue writing. For example, I actually can't leave hard brackets to fill in later. I will write a fake title, or a bad scene, or rubbish dialogue that's the bare minimum of good enough to move the plot forward, and then tag it to fix, but I am unable to write the next scene if all I have is [she does not get eaten by eels at this time.] I need to know at least a little bit of how things happen, not just what things happen, in order to figure out what comes next. But I know plenty of writers for whom brackets are a fine placeholder.

Do I stop to research when I draft? Well, I love research. Love it, love it, love it. (When I wrote my dissertation, it took three years. The entire first year was wholly given over to research.) But my love of research means a lot of the things I like writing about are things I've been looking into on my own for years. So sometimes I have enough knowledge in the corners of my brain to just write, but other times I don't. When I don't, I research before I write, because I want to have a good idea of all the possibilities in a topic before writing with it. Knowing what I'm working with gives me a bigger page to write on.

Do I let myself care about things like sentence level craft? The thing is, I have the ability to construct a competent (generally readable and grammatically correct, if not quite lapidary Jamesian prose) sentence without having to think about it. In the places where I goof that, whether through mistyping or carelessness, I figure I'll catch it on the revision. And if I don't, that's what a copy edit is for. (This is also why I specifically tell my beta readers not to read for things like spelling and grammar. I would rather they tell me that a paragraph doesn't advance the plot, instead of telling me there's a comma splice in the middle of it.)

But if it's sentence level craft that concerns word choice, or character voice, things change. This tends to be one of those things I don't notice as much at the beginning of a draft, when I'm still getting my feet under me. But by the end, when I know the characters, and know the voice of the story, and of the world, then I do notice, and it does stop me. I need to get it reasonably close to right before I can move on.

Which brings me to the most important of the questions I was asked - is ignoring any of these things a recipe for failure? I'll respond by asking again: can you continue writing if you ignore them? "You" is the important word in that sentence, because your writing process doesn't need to look like my writing process to be a success. Some writers excel at turning of the internal editor, some perfect every sentence before committing it to the page, even in the first draft. Most fall somewhere in between the two. A finished draft, no matter how ugly, is not a failure.

An elaboration

2011-09-02T08:55:00.000-05:00

Discussion continues over this year's response to the Hugo Awards. I think this is a good thing, especially when it is done in a thoughtful and incisive manner. But since I'm being used as a pull quote in the debate, I thought I would elaborate a bit on my thoughts on criticism and awards.

First, I want to be clear that I'm not taking back what I wrote - I do believe that ex post facto criticism of the winners as winners is the most unhelpful response to the Hugo Awards. (Or indeed any awards.) Complaining about other people's choices once the votes are in changes nothing.

Now, if you're complaining for the sake of complaining, well, you've picked your poison and I wish you joy of it. But if you're complaining for the sake of the awards, or the genre, there are other, more effective, ways to do things.

Because - and here's the elaboration - I don't think that the awards are or ought to be immune from criticism, and I certainly don't think works of literature (and for "works of literature" please include any of the other categories and forms of media) in the field are or ought to be immune from criticism. Vigorous discussion of whether certain categories should exist, or whether they should be better defined, helps the field by asking it to think seriously about what should be rewarded. Well-articulated discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of published works - both those nominated for awards and those that aren't - helps the field define what it values.

The Hugos, as they stand, are a popular vote for "best." The pool of voters varies from year to year, is self-selecting, and required only to pay a membership fee. "Best" is undefined - it can mean "sold the most copies" or "got the best reviews" or "was written by my favorite author" or "represents the direction I think the field should be going in" or "well, it's better than the rest of this crap." I don't think a popular vote on best is ever going to make everyone happy, and I think that's fine. I don't think best can be objectively defined, nor do I think it is possible (or a good idea) to set a minimum standard for education in the field for voters.

But I do think we come closer to seeing what is worth rewarding if people feel free to engage critically with the field. I think we ought to publicly speak about the strengths and weaknesses of what we are reading. I think it's good, and important, to point out when a book gets its research wrong, or is racist, or has no women characters, or no women characters who aren't there for the hero to have sex with. Even, and maybe especially, when these sorts of things happen in books that are big in the field. Because if we can't point out our own flaws, who will believe us when we sing our own praises? More important, if we can't point out our own flaws, how will we ever become better?

REM was right. It did, actually, start with an earthquake

2011-08-30T15:03:00.000-05:00

It has been a week. First there was an earthquake! Not a big one, as these things go, but it went on long enough to knock down some books, a painting, and a sword, make me feel vaguely seasick, and seriously freak out my cat. My darling pug snored through it. I lived just outside of Seattle for ten years, never had an earthquake. But here...

Two days later, at 2:30 in the morning, my smoke detectors malfunctioned. Not in a "change the battery and you fix this" fashion. No, in a "they're wired into the house, and I don't know if they're also carbon monoxide detectors, and I don't have a direct line for my landlords, and also one of them is in my horror movie basement" fashion. Cats do not like being stuffed into a sack and evacuated. Sam I Am really wanted to ride the fire truck. The fire department was awesome, and extremely kind. And eventually, the landlords fixed the system so it stopped spontaneously going off. Also, I have all their phone numbers now. (I've lived here over a year.)

Then Hurricane Irene came. And dropped a tree on my car. All things considered, I got off lightly. Part of my town flooded. Most of the houses near me had trees on them. I have insurance, and I have a rental car now. Still, stressful. And exhausting.

Also, I did my undergrad at the University of Miami. We had hurricanes a couple of times. I don't remember ever losing a day of classes to a storm. First day of classes at Stony Brook was canceled yesterday.

It has been a week.

The relentless pursuit of perfection

2011-08-23T20:51:00.000-05:00

One of my college fencing coaches - a man whose picture I am fairly certain is in the dictionary next to "dissolute" - used to tell me I needed to have a beer before I came to train. He would say this during the lessons when he didn't, in moments of great frustration, tell me I needed a good fuck before I came to train.

See, I like to get things right. Not just right, but perfect. And I want to be perfect the first time, and I get extremely frustrated and short tempered.

An extremely frustrated and short tempered woman with a sword is not a safe person to be around. Neither, it seems, is an extremely frustrated and short tempered woman with a pen.

This lack of patience with myself makes it very hard to for me to write any fiction longer than a short story. Short stories are fine - I tend to write very short ones, and very nearly all of the ones that have been successful have been written in a kind of white heat. I sit at the notebook, and start writing, and basically only come up for air long enough to take the dog out until I am done. When I am writing a short story, I can outwrite the voice of my internal editor.

I cannot write a novel that fast. So there are days - and yes, I am having one right now, though I say that out of honesty, and not out of some desire for a bunch of reassurance that I will get through this - where all I can see are the flaws. My system of magic doesn't quite have the logic built into it yet. One of my characters is still more a set of characteristics than a person. The voice slips on occasion, and too many scenes are white roomed.

The reason I don't want reassurance is that I do know how to get through this. I have a list, and I write down the things that need fixing. My notebook is stuck all about with post-its. I am a good enough writer to see these things and know how to fix them. I am a professional enough writer to have a kick ass team of beta readers who will help me whip this into shape when I have a draft. I have an incredibly insightful agent, who even now has a set of some of these early pages.

I give great revision.

But I still want to be perfect the first time.

Today is not that day

2011-08-21T15:17:00.000-05:00

Last night at WorldCon, the winners of the Hugo and Campbell awards were announced. Congratulations to all the winners!

This morning, the complaining began. "Why didn't X win?" "How could Y even have been on the ballot?" "Author/ story/ film Z is so overrated. People must be idiots if that's what they vote for."

My response to this is: did you nominate? Did you vote? If not, kindly shut up.

I nominated, and voted. Like anything that involves voting, in some cases I am utterly delighted with the results, and in some cases, the winners differ from my choices. But I had my say, and I think it does little to no good to complain about any of it now.

But if you hated the results, if you feel they are a travesty, or a joke, or nothing but a popularity contest, or whatever has made you so grumpy that you do nothing but complain for paragraph after paragraph (yes, I've seen this. No, I'm not linking to it. The sad thing is, examples aren't hard to find) well, for fuck's sake, nominate and vote next year.

Anyone can nominate, anyone can vote. Yes, you need to have a supporting membership in that year's WorldCon, and yes, that costs money. The past few years, it's been at $50. I understand that isn't pocket change, but you also get the Hugo Voters' pack of the nominated material, which includes all the nominated novels. (You can also nominate and vote in the Locus awards for free.)

Let me say that again: Anyone. You don't need to be a writer, an editor, an agent, a critic, a publisher, a superfan. Just, you know, have read a work in a category.

If you're really upset about past results, advocate for different ones. When you read or watch something you find worthy of being nominated, say so. Say so loudly. Write a blog post, or comment on a book review, or just tweet something during the nomination period. If you don't know if something is eligible, ask the person who wrote it. Trust me - that person will know.

No day is an appropriate day to try and cast tarnish on the shiny rocketship trophies. But seriously, if you couldn't even bother to vote, today is really not that day.

Back to school

2011-08-18T11:29:00.000-05:00

Last year, I posted the syllabi for my fall courses. People seemed to enjoy this activity, so I am doing it again. Due to a scheduling issue, I have only one class this fall, and the spring semester will be my heavy one. The course is full already, has had a waiting list for months, and is only available at Stony Brook. (I don't teach any online courses, as that's not part of the terms of my postdoc. I would if someone wanted to pay me to do so, however.)

This fall's course is The Fantastic as Place. As you might guess from the name, it focuses on the role of setting in works of the fantastic. Here's the booklist:

Welcome to Bordertown, edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner (selections, not all of it)
War for the Oaks, Emma Bull
Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J. K. Rowling
Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez
The City and the City, China Miéville
The Magicians, Lev Grossman

Yes, that is in the order we'll be reading them. It's pretty close to the booklist for last fall. I added Bordertown, because I would have used it if it had been out last year, and War for the Oaks makes a great companion to it. Locke & Key is on there because after I taught some of Sandman in a different course last fall, I learned that only about 10% of my students had ever read a comic/ graphic novel, and I wanted to include one. (Also, because it's completely great.)

I dropped The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe because, even though I liked teaching it, our discussions were about many things, but not so much Narnia as setting. This meant that I also couldn't keep Laura Miller's brilliant The Magician's Book in the course. I love it (and highly recommend it), and the students loved it, but I can't assume people have read the Narnia books, so I can't teach it this time.

I'm looking forward to teaching the course. And I'll give extra credit to anyone who gets me a Stony Brook Quidditch t-shirt.

Birds, snakes, and aeroplanes

2011-08-16T19:11:00.000-05:00

I say all the time that I write to know what happens next. It's true - the reason outlining doesn't work for me is that if I know how the story ends, I have no interest whatsoever in writing my way towards it.

This is not without its occasional frustrations, such as writing to the end of a scene and then realizing I have no clue what happens next: Exit, pursued by a bear? Enter, chewed by velociraptor? Rocks fall, everyone dies?

It's a mystery.

The frustrations, however, are outweighed by those brief moments of perfection, where the gears in my head click into place, and I know that I have found the exact piece the story wanted.

Eureka, baby.

Some people are going to the special Hell

2011-08-15T14:48:00.000-05:00

I've been writing seriously (and in my own personal definition, that means with an eye to publishing and making money for my writing) for three years now. At one point in that three year time, after I had made my first two sales, I sold nothing for a year.

It was awful. I doubted myself. I doubted my choices. I wondered if my small success had been a fluke.

But at the same time, I was lucky. A year, even a sucky one, isn't that long in the grand scheme of things. I had a network of friends who supported me, who talked me down from the bad days, and who, most relevantly to the current discussion at hand, knew things about the writing business.

But not everyone knows things about writing as a business. I think it's probably safe to say that most beginning writers don't. They see that people in the field now each other, and instead of thinking that - like in any job - writers know their colleagues, they see it as a closed-door club, where one needs to know the password to get inside. They see ads promising publication without having to pay an agent, and don't realize that that's simply how business is done. Writing is their dream, and they'll do whatever they think is necessary to achieve it.

There are people out there who will take advantage of this. People like Publish America, who are right now promising to - for a fee, of course - show your book to JK Rowling next week, while their delegation is in her hometown. They will even ask her to tell you what she thinks of your writing. (I linked on twitter. I'm not linking again.)

This is evil. It is a fraud, and it is cruel.

I am not normally a litigious person, but I hope Rowling accios her legal team and has them perform a variety of legal spells on Publish America. (Because I am positive she knows nothing about this plan, and that the only thing that will happen to any manuscripts that even get near her is that they will be recycled.)

This makes me furious. Especially because I can see how this plays out. If you don't know how the business part of being a writer works, you might think that writers - especially someone who has sold as many books as Rowling - are the ones with the power. You might think that she might quite happily sit around reading slush and looking for books to pass on to her publisher. You might think $49 isn't so much, when it's a shot at everything you've ever wanted.

This isn't how it works. Publish America are behaving like Dementors.

Forget your perfect offering

2011-08-08T13:14:00.000-05:00

If there was any piece of writing advice that I'd like to stab through the throat with my pen, it is "write what you know." Not least because I believe that the vast majority of novels about middle-aged humanities professors having affairs with their grad students and getting divorced (not necessarily in that order) can be directly traced back to this adage.

I don't mean a responsible writer shouldn't do research or rely on a list of experts to help make sure that she knows what she is talking about, and conveys that knowledge in a manner useful to her reader. Research is a necessary part of good writing. Otherwise you have a reader who knows that vampires don't walk around in daylight wondering why the ones in your book can, and putting the book down when you don't provide a compelling explanation.

But too often, "write what you know" makes us cowards. We know what will sell, so we write to that instead of the book that lives in our secret heart. We know our strengths as writers, so we hide behind those, and never push ourselves to try new things. We know how putting certain truths in our work will make our parents, our friends, our lovers look at us, and so we don't write those, because we know that writing something else will be easier, and cleaner. We know what is safe to write, and we write that.

We write what we know when we want to be perfect, and I don't think perfection is what art is about. I think art is about truth.

I am not a good writer when I write safely. I'm an educated one - an advanced degree in Literature means I have plenty of practice thinking about the pieces that go into a story. I can give you theme and archetype, blood, love, and rhetoric, all wrapped up in a tidy bit of literary allusion. I'm good enough at language and the manipulation of words to turn a pithy - or pretty - phrase. I can paint the surface of the page with sparkle and shine. It's beautiful, but it's false at it's heart. At best, what I make when I do this will be mediocre.

I don't want to be mediocre. I would rather be a spectacular failure than be safe.

I was reading an interview with Amanda Palmer today, and in it (while talking about twitter) she says, "share things that make you uncomfortable." It's that piece of advice that I would replace "write what you know" with. Because I've found that when you acknowledge the existence of that discomfort - poke around in it a bit and think about why you don't want to write that scene, or that character, or that story - what comes out is better art.

When I say this, I don't mean uncomfortable in terms of shock value. I mean it in terms of truth. I mean it in the way that if you think people will judge you, that they will look at you funny, or like you less, or wonder if you're a creep or a pervert or a weirdo or or or, for putting something in your art, then maybe that is exactly the thing your art needs.

I'm not going to lie, and say that's easy or fun, or that there haven't been times I've handed something in and thought "Dear God, I hope my Mom never reads that." And I don't succeed at being honest in my work all the time - possibly the most devastating critique I ever received was a single line: "Dear Kat, you know you have to write [redacted] if you want this to mean anything." It was devastating because I had known. I just wasn't brave enough to put it in that draft. And it was so obviously the missing piece of story.

So don't be satisfied to write what you know. Share what makes you uncomfortable. Write what terrifies you.

Write what's true.

Blue eyed dressed for every situation

2011-08-04T13:06:00.000-05:00

Could we please have a moratorium on calling the things we like guilty pleasures? What we eat, what we read, what we watch, what we listen to - why can't we just say we like them?

My name is Kat Howard and I have a serious fondness for 80s synth pop.

I mean, I get that a woman cannot live on Reeses Peanut Butter Cups alone (no matter how many times I have tried, during finals and deadlines), and maybe there is art that is somehow the functional equivalent of the Reeses. But what I don't get is why I should have to apologize for liking it.

What I think it boils down to is image. But you know what? I'm much more impressed by the professor of Shakespeare who thinks that "Bad Romance" is a damn catchy tune than the one who insists that he doesn't listen to popular music because it simply has no artistic relevance. I'm also willing to lay money down that the former is a better and more imaginative scholar than the latter.

Because you know what? There is nothing wrong with a song that makes you want to get up and dance, or a book that guarantees you a happily ever after. It takes talent to create those things, and there's no guilt in enjoying them. Even if - maybe especially if - the rest of your life is serious business.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go perform the Safety Dance.

Crowd-sourcing the whole of human knowledge

2011-08-03T09:57:00.000-05:00

Oh, wondrous messages from the internet! Well, not exactly like that. I do love the spam that I get that wants to help strengthen my sword. I always want to reply, "No, thank you. I already have one. It's very nice." (Visconti grip, German point. And yes, after hot-gluing myself to a blade while trying to act as my own armorer, I buy them prewired.)

Sorry. I digress.

Sometimes the internet is wondrous, though. I started a short story the other night, and as I was writing, lines from "The Cruel Sister" kept running through my head. I know the ballad reasonably well (enough to know it's also "The Bonny Swans" and "The Twa Sisters" and Child 10), but I asked twitter for other versions.

And people were amazing: they recommended versions I knew and loved, versions I'd forgotten I owned, and versions I'd never heard or heard of. One person recommended the English Folk Dance and Song Society Archives. This morning, @TheEFDSS got in touch with me on twitter - the person in their marketing department who runs their twitter feed had put together and collected a search for me, for all versions in their archives! And promised to put me in touch with a librarian if that wasn't enough.

Wondrous.

So thank you @NaBean and @MaginifKat and @AnassaRH and @9andhennepin and @tembrooke and @TheEFDSS (and also everyone who passed my question along, whose names have been hidden from me by twitter). You lot are amazing. I will write you the best short story inspired by "The Cruel Sister" that I can.

That's not why I'm here

2011-08-01T10:40:00.000-05:00

There's a post making the rounds today, that argues that writing a blog is a waste of time for fiction writers because (to paraphrase) even though blogging may help you meet other writers, network, and improve your craft, it will not help you sell books.

Author bloggers, she suggests, blog only as a means of self-promotion, but because they have tunnel vision and only blog about writing, they appeal only to other writers, and so do not reach an outside audience, sell no books because of their blog entries articulating the pain and terror of the revision process and on and on, until the internet becomes like unto a cat, devouring its own tail, and the world ends.

(I may have exaggerated for dramatic license at some point in that last paragraph.)

I have, you may have guessed, some thoughts on this. My first is that if you, as a fiction writer (the rules are different for nonfiction writers, who often have to demonstrate having an audience for their topic before they can get a contract) are doing anything social media related for the purpose of increasing sales, you are doing it wrong. And your readers and followers and friends can probably tell and are probably unfriending and unfollowing you so they can go read someone else.

You know what can help increase sales? A good story. If you write rubbish, the most snazzily designed and managed author platform (ugh) in the world isn't going to help you increase your sales or reach your target market or whatever the catchphrase is that we savvy writers on social media are supposed to use.

So if we're not watching the zeros on the royalty checks increase with every page view, why should writers blog? Well, I think "should" is the wrong word. And I can't speak to why other writers do so, but I do it because it gives me a way of connecting with people, or to a conversation. Do I talk about writing a lot? Well, yes. That is because what I do - a lot - is write. I have the following project files open - a novel, a book-length nonfiction project, a short story, an academic article, and a ballet. I am writing for two other websites right now. I am in the research process on a nonacademic article, and another novel (or possibly short series of novels.) That is, yea verily, a lot of writing. During the academic year, I teach literature, so, you know, more writing.

Does that mean I only want to talk to writers? No, of course not. Does that mean I am limiting my blog audience from all the people in the world to the people who are interested in writing? Probably. But since recent search stats have shown that people who have found my blog have been looking for werewolves in New Hampshire, noseless Greek mathematicians, and the most beautiful girls in the world, I'm not too concerned.

Why I don't tithe my draft to the writing gods

2011-07-28T12:48:00.000-05:00

I talk a lot about writing process here. My writing process, to be exact, as this is my blog, and if I were to start talking about someone else's writing process that would probably be both factually inaccurate, and a little creepy. ("What are you doing, Kat?" "Oh, nothing. Just watching you while you write.")

So usually what I talk about are the things that work for me. Today, I'm going to talk about a thing that doesn't, and the reason that I'm going to do that is because the book I am going to talk about has become ubiquitous. I've seen it mentioned by a lot of people, in glowing and laudatory terms, given such high praise that I wondered, briefly, if I was the one with the flaw because I didn't work that way.

Let me be really clear. I haven't read the book I am going to talk about. This is not a book review. The book I've seen mentioned is The 10% Solution, by Ken Rand. From what I have gathered from seeing people discuss this book, Rand advocates trimming the ten percent of prose that is unnecessary from all of your drafts. His book, as far as I can tell, is a more detailed version of the "rule" that the length of your second draft should be your first draft minus ten percent.

Now, I absolutely agree that one should avoid unnecessary prose. Sometimes you get to the end of the draft and realize that you have included information that you, as the author, needed to write, but that is not useful to your reader, or that distracts from your story. Sometimes your sentence level prose can benefit from tightening. If there were a writing book titled Delete Unnecessary Words, I would totally blurb it.

But I have never in my life wound up with a second draft that has been shorter than my first. My flaw as a writer is not the tendency to give too much information to the reader, but to give too little. The length of my second draft is usually my first draft plus twenty-five percent. If I were to cut ten percent from a first draft just because everyone else was doing it, I wouldn't have a draft, I'd have an outline. (Which is another thing that doesn't work as part of my process, just in case you were wondering.)

The purpose of this is not to disparage Rand's book, or the people who feel that using has helped them become better writers. I am in favor of anything that helps someone become a better writer.

But I want people to remember that writing is not a one-size-fits-all sort of activity. It's good to try new things, especially if you haven't been happy with how the writing has been going. But just because you find a popular solution unworkable, doesn't mean you're doing it wrong.

The awful calculus of grief

2011-07-25T14:39:00.000-05:00

On Friday, there was a terrorist attack in Norway. The official death toll has been revised downwards as I write this, but the authorities are still searching for victims, so I am not going to list numbers. Needless to say, even one would have been too many.

I remember watching as the news hit the internet - as the number of dead went higher and higher, as the news came in that the majority of the victims were children, as people posted and reposted pleas for donated blood and unlocked data networks. It was awful, and numbing in its awfulness. We are not, I do not think, equipped to process tragedy on such a scale. People mourned, and expressed solidarity, did the best they could to connect and comfort.

Then on Saturday, a different tragedy. The singer, Amy Winehouse, found dead. She was only 27, but had been known for her struggles with addiction almost as much as for her astounding talent, and so the tragedy was seasoned with the feeling of inevitability. We had known this was coming, even though we hoped it wouldn't. Again, people mourned.

Most people. The internet being the internet, people began behaving like asses. The milder expressed sorrow that the death of a troubled pop star received more attention than the deaths of those lost to terror only the day before. Perhaps they were only chastising the media, and not the mourners. But there were others who said that Winehouse's death was earned, was something she deserved, and so shouldn't be mourned. Who said the people grieving the loss of a talent were doing something wrong by not also - or instead - grieving people who had no choice in their death, who did not deserve to die. There were people who said they were proud that they refused to grieve for a woman's death.

I do not understand this.

I do not understand those who feel proud to say that a death has no meaning, and who would judge the grief of those to whom that loss matters. I do not understand those who would say that only one sorrow at a time is worthy of notice, who seem to feel equipped to weigh and measure grief, to put it on a scale and a timer. Who would seem to suggest that grief over death can somehow be divided by whether or not that death was deserved, and have already set up their scales of judgment. Who fail to understand that sorrow and mourning are complex, and nuanced, and are not an on/off switch. I do not understand them, and they break my heart.

The most beautiful girl in the world

2011-07-21T20:29:00.000-05:00

Here is a thing: Not every hyper-competent female character is a Mary Sue.

Not even if the hyper-competent female character is also physically attractive.

Not even if the hyper-competent and physically attractive female character is in a book written by a female author.

Not even if the hyper-competent and physically attractive female character is in a book written in first person pov by a female author.

In news that may come as a shock to some of you, writers are human beings. We make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are in our writing, and sometimes those mistakes we make in our writing involve our characters. We love them, and so we tell you - the reader - about how they made the honor roll and got the lead in the school play, and not about the time they snuck out, got drunk, and came home coated in vomit and sporting an embarrassing tattoo. When that happens, that's a failure of characterization on the part of the writer.

But sometimes, the character is hyper-competent. Characterization can fail here, too - a woman who has never before seen a sword or been in a military environment who picks up a broadsword or rapier and is the best knight in the land? Completely unbelievable. But this is equally unbelievable when the character who does this is a man. Even if his name is Galahad. A someone who trained - and seriously - with a sword for many years, I can assure you that gender is no inherent guarantee of skill. Unearned competence is writerly failure - earned competence, even in the extreme, is not.

Let me repeat - earned competence is not a sign of a Mary Sue, even if that competence causes someone to be the best person in the story (or in the world of the story) at Thing X. Even if she's a cute competent woman, with a cute girl- or boyfriend, who is also competent and desirable in the world of the story. (Is there a problem if everyone, including vowed celibates, eunuchs, people in committed relationships, and people of noncompatible sexual orientations spend the entire book trying to tap that? Probably.)

Why am I wearing my rant pants on this? Well, partially because as a red-headed woman with central heterochromia and skill with a sword I am an actual person who can check off a fair amount of boxes on the Mary Sue test. And yes, I'm mildly annoyed about this. I am a character, dammit, not just a collection of characteristics. (Rant for another day: a character who is a survivor of sexual violence or abuse gets a tick box on the Mary Sue check list? What the fuck is wrong with people?)

But mainly, it's because I see this idea more and more - particularly in relation to point of view characters in urban fantasy, but not solely there (I can't be the only one who has seen references to Hermione as being Rowling's Mary Sue, can I? And no, she's not: earned competence, people. Hermione studies her ass off.), the idea that any time a woman writer writes a woman character who is really good at something, who is the hero of her own story, that character gets dismissed as being simply a Mary Sue. It's as if the idea that there might be competent women out there is harder to believe in than dragons or AI.

A writer can fail in characterization in a lot of ways. But writing a smart woman, who's really good at what she does? That's not failure. That's something to aspire to.

"Sweet Sixteen"

2011-07-19T12:23:00.000-05:00

I don't really think of myself as a science fiction writer. I don't think of myself as not one, specifically, but that type of story usually isn't one my brain turns to.

But when I sold "Choose Your Own Adventure" to John Joseph Adams at Fantasy Magazine, he said, "you know, if you ever write science fiction, you should send me a story for Lightspeed." I had been playing with the idea of writing sf, and his comment was enough to make my brain open up to the possibility of a story, and I wrote "Sweet Sixteen." John bought it for Lightspeed, and it's out today.

I hope you like it.

Night and sky

2011-07-18T21:33:00.000-05:00

Petrichor. Velvet blue sky, exploded with candleflicker sparks of fireflies. The air slicks across your skin like wet silk, and the voice cries out again.

The voice that echoed through your head, drawing you out of the safety of walls, of lights, of familiar places. A haunting, or a temptation, and does the name for it even matter, because here you are, in the aftermath of the storm, searching your way through the destruction.

A voice, and the return of thunder. Burnt ozone of lightning-struck air, and a copper-electric taste in your mouth, and you walk anyway. Past the comfort of landscaped lawns and paved roads. Into a place where everything is not quite, is slantwise and canted, where ghosts of possibilities raise the hair on your skin and crawl across your flesh.

A call, and an answer, and you shed your skin, and follow the storm.

So come out of your cave walking on your hands

2011-07-17T11:18:00.000-05:00

Since I've been working my way through common questions recently, I thought I'd try to give my answer to another. (As with any of these, my answer is my answer. Based on my experience, and part of what works for me, and keeps me, if not sane exactly, able to counterfeit it well enough. There are lots of ways to become a writer and please don't think that if what works for you contradicts what works for me that you're doing it wrong.)

So. How do you know when a story is ready to be sent out on submission? I get this one a lot, often in some version of "how can I make sure this story will sell?" I'm going to combine the oracular answer to the former with the more practical answer to the latter.

A story is ready to go out on submission when it is the best story you can write at that moment in time. Unless an editor sees enough potential in the story to ask for a rewrite, you only get one chance per market per story. So revise your story before you send it out. Give it to your writers' group, your beta readers, your friend who respects your work enough to tell you where the flaws are. Remember that revision does not just mean correcting spelling errors, although of course it includes that as well. Then think about your story - do you still see places where it doesn't work? If so, hang on to the story until you can fix them.

Does this mean that I expect you to write and rewrite until your story is perfect? No. Your story will never be perfect. And writing, like every other skill, has a learning curve - you will get better the more you do it. But unless you want to spend your entire career polishing the same piece of prose, there comes a time when you say this is the best I can make it right now, and you put it out in the world.

How can you guarantee your story will sell? You can't. Sorry. But there are some things you can do to make the submissions process less intimidating and less fraught. First, before you start sending your story out, familiarize yourself with the short fiction market. Learn what markets buy what type of fiction - no matter how good your hard SF story is, a magazine that specializes in epic fantasy is not going to buy it - and what they pay. Before you start submitting, decide what pay and prestige scale you are willing to accept for your work - pro only? semipro if the magazine gets reviewed or if the stories are often included in year's best volumes? token so long as you see your name in print? nothing if it's in a venue you really love? a venue you despise, but they pay lots and lots of money? - and stick to that decision. Stick to that decision even in the face of rejection letters.

Read the submissions guidelines for each market. Follow them. To the letter. The only thing that should stand out is the quality of your writing. If the submissions guidelines go beyond "please submit a .doc file in standard manuscript format," read those, too - if an editor is telling you that lusty pirate stories are a hard sell for her, take that seriously. Then go to your list of markets, and start out with your dream market, because it is not your job to reject your own work.

And realize the likeliest outcome is still rejection. Markets receive hundreds of stories a month, and tend to buy in the single digits. Your story may be good, and still get rejected if it was not to the editor's taste. Your story may be salable, and still get rejected - I have sold rejected stories. Many writers have. It doesn't mean that we sold to bad or second rate markets, it just means editors are people too, and like people, they have varying tastes.

And yes, the submission process can be nerve-wracking - I still get sick to my stomach every time I press "send." And yes, rejection sucks. It sucks every time, and on some days worse than others. Sending your work out takes guts, and I'm proud of each and every one of us who does it.

The universe (which others call the to be read list)

2011-07-12T09:59:00.000-05:00

A couple days ago, I mentioned on twitter that there was a new Kelly Link short story available. And there is! (It's part of a spectacular YA issue of Subterranean Online, edited by Gwenda Bond.) I said that anyone who hadn't read Link's short fiction really ought to do so.

This comment was apparently a stressful one, as I received a response from someone who said he was already struggling with Neil Gaiman's advice to read the entire field (SF, the respondent added, was a pretty big field) and here I was, adding someone else to the reading list. My response, I said, was too big to condense to 140 character bits, so I promised a blog.

So, if you're going to be a writer, do you need to read your entire field?

Well, here's the thing. Scholars like to argue about the date of Beowulf, but I believe that we're saying it's an eighth century poem right now. Which means the field of speculative fiction in English has existed for a little more than 1200 years. Even if, like the Cumaean Sibyl, you possessed as many years as grains of sand, you could never read the entire field. Because not only is it already full of 1200 years of literature, people keep writing in it! (Seriously. There were 430 Hugo-nominated short stories this year alone. That doesn't mean published. That means those were the ones people thought were good enough to put on a Hugo ballot. The field is growing.)

So no, you don't need to read your entire field. You will never write anything if you try. But I don't think that Neil meant read the entire field (or the version of this he told us at Clarion, which was "read everything!"). I think what he meant was pay attention to it. Educate yourself as to what the field looks like today - who is selling lots of copies, who is getting good reviews, who is included on best of lists and is long- and short-listed for awards. Read those things.

Know the history of your field - what were the major texts and authors? Which of those still have an impact? Read those as well. Then, read outside of your field (this is where "read everything" comes into play) because otherwise you'll get tunnel vision. Know the weaknesses in your own writing, and read to correct those. If you want to write a certain kind of book, or one that has specific elements in it, read to find out how other people have handled those elements - both well, and poorly (because it is useful not only to have goals that you are writing towards but ideas that you are writing against).

If this sounds like you will be reading constantly, well, you will. And you should, as a writer - you learn to write by writing, yes, but you also learn to write by reading and by thinking about what you have read, by pulling the skin off the stories to see how their skeletons articulate. Reading is part of your job. You will also probably read books that you dislike, and this is also good, because you will learn exactly what it is about those books that bothers you, and you will also learn that just because you dislike something does not mean it is a bad book.

And you will also learn to let go. There will be books you never read, names and titles that slide through your consciousness because time is finite, days when you are better served by rereading the book that made you want to be a writer in the first place than picking up the new LOLCatPunk! anthology. Because while you should read everything, you do not need to read everything.

Really, the truest definition of a novel

2011-07-10T17:06:00.000-05:00

In case you have somehow missed my weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth on the subject, I am finishing up revisions for The Sword Between. And the process has been this sort of exhausting emotional whiplash, penduluming between, "Hey, that's pretty good." and "Oh, dear God, I wrote what?!"

At the same time, I have been getting the opening of the next book into some sort of organized shape, which has triggered an emotional roller coaster of similar patterns: "I love this story! I love these characters! This is so much fun to write!" and then five minutes later "Oh, Kat, why did you ever think this was a good idea? What a cliché! How very overdone, and oh, look, you've managed to make necromancy boring. Good show indeed!"

I usually read something not mine as a mental palate cleanser between the two projects - I don't want the voice from one to contaminate the other, and I need to reboot my brain. Today, I picked up the Tenth Anniversary Edition of American Gods, and read this bit in Neil's Introduction:

"I finished it, eventually, and I handed it in, taking a certain amount of comfort in the old saying that a novel can best be defined as a long piece of prose with something wrong with it, and I was fairly sure that I'd written one of those."

I feel much better.

Pen and Ink

2011-07-09T11:25:00.000-05:00

I talk a lot here about my process of writing. Partially because I'm still early career, and so I'm still figuring out exactly what my process is (or at least what it is right now), and partially as a way of sharing those experiences with other people starting out in the field - writing can feel less lonely when you have proof that you're not the only one who can get multiple rejection letters in a week, or who has days where it seems like the only words you write are the wrong ones. And usually when I talk about process, I talk about how I survive those things, and then pick up my pen the next day.

But since it has been a question very frequently asked of late, today I am going to talk about the fact that when I say "pick up my pen the next day" I mean that literally.

Yes, gentle reader, I write by hand. Preferably onto a moleskine notebook (soft cover, largest size, unlined) very nearly always with a fountain pen (I have a couple of different kinds, and since I have minuscule handwriting, fine nib.) I write my first drafts by hand - even of my dissertation and my other academic writing. When it comes time to revise, I print out a copy, and make my revisions by hand.

Why, in this age of technological ease and the wonder of Scrivener do I do this? I do it for the only reason a writer ought to adhere to any part of her process: this is what works best for me.

Writing by hand helps me think - I hear the characters' voices better, and I have a better feel for the shape of the story. I cannot explain why this is, I only know that it is true. In fact, the very few (seriously, count on one hand and have fingers left over few) times I have ever drafted onto the computer have been stories or scenes that I knew I'd back down from writing if I thought about them too much in the initial draft.

I use a fountain pen generally because I like the feel of the physical act of writing with one, and because I have a weird thing about using particular colors of ink for particular projects. Fountain pens offer the greatest variety of colors (I particularly love J. Herbin ink) and when I'm using a regular pen I like the Sakura gelly rolls for the same reasons - I like the feel of writing with it, and there's a good range of colors.

First drafts (what I tend to call draft zero) go in notebooks, and only on one side of the page - I leave the opposite blank in case I need to insert text, or so I have a place to stick the post its on which I write notes to myself about things I need to think about or change when I revise. The writing doesn't go into the computer until I have a complete draft (short story) or until I've changed enough of what I've written that I need to reorganize and check in with my story before I can move forward (usually about 1/3 of the way into the zero draft of a novel). Then I revise on the print outs.

Usually when I talk about handwriting, I get the "wouldn't it be easier to just do it on the computer the first time?" question, quickly followed by "how do you save your data?" Well, no, it wouldn't be easier, not for me, to compose on the computer. I've tried, particularly after the shoulder injury that meant choosing between my fencing career and my writing one. And the transfer between notebook and computer also serves as my first edit, so I'm not really adding an extra step for myself. As for saving data, well, yes, if my house catches on fire before I get the story out of the notebook and into the computer, then I have some problems. But otherwise, it's pretty safe.

And I'll close like I always do: my process is mine. It works for me. If it didn't, I would change it, because the how I write is much less important than the actually getting the words on the page.

And they know you at the MAC store

2011-07-08T14:47:00.000-05:00

The sweat and blood work of the revision is finished. Aside from killing a porch light, I also drained the ink from an entire pen (I handwrite, so finished means all the words are on paper. It does not mean all the words are in my computer. This is fine, because the typing will give me the last-pass check on how the new emotional beats read.), and used an entire pack of post-it flags, plus assorted others of varying size. We won't discuss how much coffee I consumed, but will just agree like civilized people to call the amount "a lot."

I finished very early this morning, so technically, I have written today. But really, post-sleep, it is a day off. I went to the Asian grocery to replenish my stock of o-chazuke. (After Megan introduced me to this at Clarion, I have forever associated it with "things I eat when I write too much.") I went to the MAC store, and bought lipstick, and assorted face sparkles. I enjoy face sparkles a great deal. Later, I will meet a friend for ice cream. Possibly I will spend too much time faffing about on the internets. I will read books that I did not write.

And yes, I still need to do the typing, and there are other deadlines on the horizon, so tomorrow will be back to work, but for right now, I am mush-brained, and happy.

That was known as Camelot

2011-07-06T13:21:00.000-05:00

If I had to pick just one story, just one great, enormous, archetypal story to submerse myself in, it would probably be that of King Arthur. Still, there are so very many versions of the King Arthur story, it seems a little disingenuous to call that "a" story. Still, story, story group, whatever you want to call it, it is my favorite.

So I was thrilled to get the chance to write about one of my best beloved bits of Arthuriana - T.H. White's The Once and Future King - for the Interstitial Arts Foundation's rolling anthology, Interfictions 0. I was even more thrilled when I saw the illustration that had been commissioned to go with the essay, a mind-blowingly gorgeous piece by M.W. Kaluta. So please go! Look! And when you're done drooling over the art, feel free to read my essay, too.

Won't you please please

2011-07-05T09:58:00.000-05:00

This weekend, someone who was planning on buying Stories wrote to me on twitter asking which format - hardcover or e-reader - to buy it in. He wanted to support my writing, and so he wanted to buy the version that would benefit me most.

In my head, my reaction was "Oh, lovely twitter man! You have now said nice things about my writing twice in one day. You are already supporting me!" But what I said was, "Either!"

Look, I know why he was asking. I've seen them too - the posts that seem to be popping up with increasing regularity on how to support writers whose work you like. And I'm not completely naive: I know that royalties can and often do vary across formats. I know that when and where the book is bought can matter, in terms of best seller lists. I've given the stern "I don't care if you don't want to read the whole series until it's done - if you don't buy book one there might never be a book three" lecture to my friends. I'm not going to pretend to false modesty here: I would love to make enough money from my writing that being a writer can be my only job. I would love to be on the best seller lists. These are goals I am writing towards.

It is not the responsibility of the people who read my writing to get me there.

They don't owe me anything. I owe them. I owe them my best writing, to make them want to pick up whatever I've written and read it in the first place. I owe them stories that will make them want to keep turning pages. I owe them my gratitude, because they have given their time and their money to something I have created.

What they definitely don't owe me is some attempt to navigate some arcane hierarchy of "buy this in this format at this type of store on this date and on this date only and then review it in these places as soon as possible or omg WOE will be unto me." Buying a book shouldn't be like taking the One Ring to Mordor.

So if you want to help me?

Don't steal what I've written. Physical copy or e-version. Just don't. Thank you.

Buy the book (or the story, or the magazine, or the podcast, or whatever form things come out in) if you can afford to. In whatever format you prefer. If you can't afford to buy, check out a copy from the library. Libraries are awesome. Borrow the book from a friend.

If you really like it, tell people. Tell your friend that also likes to read what you like. Take 140 characters and tell twitter. If you really, really like it, take the time to review it on your blog, or wherever else you put stuff on the internet. Don't worry about when, or where, or how. Because what you are doing by telling people is giving me a gift, and that is a lovely thing, kind and generous. I will love you if you do any of these things. I will love you even if you don't, because you took the time to read my story. Because you saw value in something I had created, and decided it was worth your support.

Thank you.

Look elsewhere

2011-07-01T13:02:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's revisions were exhausting. So difficult my body aches nearly as much as my heart, and I'm not quite sure if I'd rather have a hot bath or ice cream to recover. But they are finished, and there are pages for today.

And rather than nattering on about that, I will direct you instead over to Sharp and Fine, where I talk a little bit about what it is like to write a story that people will dance to.

A day in the life

2011-06-29T10:13:00.000-05:00

The last time I was working simultaneously on multiple large writing projects at once was when I was finishing my dissertation and drafting the novel that eventually became The Sword Between. And by simultaneously, I mean working on both projects every day so that my brain had to toggle back and forth between the two. It was easier then.

Partially because the writing styles were so different. Writing academic nonfiction is like writing speculative fiction only in that the component parts for both are words, and I say that as someone whose academic interests have always overlapped heavily with her creative ones. So switching from arguments and footnotes and translating dead languages in the morning to characters and fight scenes and, okay, sometimes translating dead languages again, in the evening was a pretty clear mental switch. Sure, there were frustrations - I sometimes felt like I might never finish anything, and would simply write and write into some verbal event horizon, but I coped with that by writing a lot of flash fiction. (If you want to read it, it's all on this blog. Search "free fiction.") The power of typing *ENDS* got me through a lot.

It also helped that writing the dissertation was my day job. None of the things I am actively writing (versus doing research on) right now are part of my day job. Yet even though classes are not in session, I spent about two hours yesterday dealing with day job things. Summer vacation simply means not teaching. It does not mean not working.

So this is the part of the learning to be a writer process where I learn to work on multiple creative projects at once. It's tricky. I made my page count on my revision yesterday (this is the thing I work on first, because it has the most pressing deadline), but it was work. Not so much because I was working on any terribly difficult scenes (I should hit the worst of those this weekend), but because writing is a job. And like any job, sometimes your brain would rather go walk on the beach than sit at the desk. And even at the desk, it would rather play Plants vs. Zombies than figure out the emotional beats for the secondary character.

And the work for the day isn't done when the page count is made. Because there's the rewrite on the next book, or the next scene for the ballet I am writing with my wonderful friend, Megan. And I cannot just let them sit off to the side, neglected, because then I will lose the thread of the story, or stop being able to suspend my own disbelief in the speculative elements, or the nasty voice of doubt inside my head will grow to loud to be drowned out by my own excitement about doing something new and different.

Maybe this sounds like I'm complaining. I'm not. Yes, the work is hard, and sometimes frustrating. But I am lucky - I am doing work I love, on projects I love, with people I love. I will say it again: I am lucky.

But I talk here a lot about how writing is awesome and wonderful, and how excited I am that this is the thing I am doing. All of that is still true, and it hasn't changed, and I hope it doesn't. But sometimes I feel like I am painting a disingenuous picture, that by not talking about the days where my job as a writer really feels like a job, by only celebrating the acceptances and not mentioning that I still get rejection letters (just last week, in fact), by not talking about the days where I am full of doubt, that I'm not actually being honest.

And I say these things now not because I'm trolling for hugs, or pats on the back, or remarks in the comments about how awesome I am, but just as a reminder that I am a working writer. I'm at the beginning of my career, and so there's still a learning curve. I'm still figuring things out. And this is what that looks like.

Progress report

2011-06-27T15:54:00.000-05:00

Status of the revision: on schedule
Casualties so far: one porch light
Amount of coffee consumed: no more than normal

I spent the first two days of this revision going very carefully through all of the notes on my manuscript, both the ones my agent gave me, and the ones I generated in response to the things I needed to think about. I printed out and marked up the manuscript, and also wrote about three pages worth of things that needed to be altered as I revised. Then I counted pages, and divided by days before my deadline, and made myself a schedule.

It's a schedule that's designed to 1. not kill me, and 2. get me finished before the deadline. Partially, this is for practical reasons - I handwrite my edits, like I do everything else, so I'll need to type once I'm finished. But also this is for "life happens" reasons. I woke up Saturday morning with mild food poisoning, and then found out that a family dog had died in her sleep the night before. These are not things that make it easier to write. I really hope not to need to take time off for sad reasons again, but I also want to have room to take time off for fun reasons - to see friends, or walk on the beach, or do something lovely to clear my head and refresh my soul.

It's also a schedule that gives me time to think. Just because I know I have to fix [redacted] doesn't mean I know how. And once I figure out how, well, then there's actually translating that on to the page. Which sometimes means reblocking a fight scene, which explains the porch light casualty reference above. I killed it with my sword. Writing is hardcore and merciless.

*****

Speaking of writing, paying to attend writers' workshops can be hardcore and merciless, too. Clarion is currently holding its Write-a-thon, designed to help fund the workshop. The more funding it gets, the easier it will be for writers to afford to go. I am not participating (due to not being able to figure out how to make my deadlines match up in any reasonable way with the timing of the Write-a-thon, and saying, "well, I'll be writing a lot" to potential sponsors seemed very nebulous to me), but at least two of my classmates are, Ferrett Steinmetz, and Keffy Kehrli. So you could sponsor them, or any of the other participating writers, and if you did, I would think you were awesome.

Glamour and poise

2011-06-23T14:25:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, I met with my agent, and got some great feedback and revision notes for The Sword Between. I'm really excited about working through them and making my manuscript all shiny and gorgeous. (Well, you know me. It's more like upping the weird and the bodycount rather than making with the shiny, but it's the same sort of thing, right?)

So I bought lo, many post-it notes (SO. MANY. 3M should sponsor my writing, that's how many.) and pens of exciting colors of ink, and also highlighters in shades other than annoying neon yellow and orange. (The colors, they burn us when we touch them.) And now I am in the process of making notes and highlighting pages and scribbling on post-its and sticking them on things.

Things, which apparently include me.

I went outside to get my new running shoes from the UPS guy, and he laughed so hard he nearly fell down the stairs. Stuck to my rear was a post-it reading "Think about your monsters!"

Believe me, I am.

The sound of things

2011-06-19T16:16:00.000-05:00

And lo! It is time for Revision 2.0. Or something like that. I always start out with Draft Zero, and the the combined stress of counting plus nomenclature, plus, y'know actually doing the writing short circuits my brain when it comes time to name any of the subsequent iterations.

But things are progressing very well (says the woman about to engage in the writerly equivalent of a cold reboot). I have a better working title - Flawed Magic. New characters! An actual setting!

And the fun part of revision is the reworking of the playlist. So here's what I'm writing to now:

"Cruel" - Tori Amos
"Is Your Love Strong Enough" - Bryan Ferry
"In My Veins" - Andrew Belle (feat. Erin McCarley)
"Keep the Streets Empty for Me" - Fever Ray
"Never Fall Out" - Peter Murphy
"Cosmic Love" - Florence + the Machine
"Lily" - Kate Bush
"Ooh Child" - Beth Orton
"Paradise Circus" - Massive Attack (feat. Hope Sandoval. Gui Boratto remix)
"Set the Fire to the Third Bar" - Snow Patrol (feat. Martha Wainwright)
"Slave to Love" - Bryan Ferry
"Civilian" - Wye Oak
"Make This Go On Forever" - Snow Patrol
"Any Other World" - Mika
"The Prince and Old Lady Shade" - Peter Murphy
"Mercy Street" - Fever Ray
"My Body is a Cage" - Peter Gabriel
"Sweet Surrender" - Sarah McLachlan (Live)
"St. Teresa" - Joan Osborne
"Song to the Siren" - Bryan Ferry
"Poison & Wine" - The Civil Wars

And yes, this is probably pretty final. All the main characters have theme songs, as does the book. And no, I'm not telling you which those are.

An open letter to a creep

2011-06-15T14:16:00.000-05:00

Dear Sir:

Perhaps you meant to be clever and insouciant, to show me your lighthearted fun side, by pulling up next to me in your truck and beginning our acquaintance with a proposal of marriage. And while I do not have much experience in the proposing-to of ladies myself, I would have thought that a response of "No, thank you" and a return to cleaning up after the dog would have been an adequate damper on any passion.

But perhaps you have a fetish for redheaded ladies carrying bags of canine excrement, because you continued your pursuit by driving after me, and suggesting that, in lieu of marriage, I might like to engage in a variety of carnal pursuits with you. As I was not interested in any of those activities, I declined to reply.

Confident of your own charisma and charm, you continued to pursue my small dog and myself in your vehicle, shouting speculation about my sexual preferences, enthusiasms, and proclivities. I am not quite sure why you were so hostile to my suggestion that I might call the authorities and describe to them your so-charming behavior, but I remain grateful that the presence of a phone in my pocket ended our far too lengthy conversation.

I devoutly hope never to see you again,

Kat

Plucking out the heart of the mystery

2011-06-14T10:50:00.000-05:00

When I started this blog, I wrote a fair amount of book reviews here. Partially, this is because it was a pretty easy way to generate content. I'm always reading, always thinking about books, so putting my thoughts into semi-coherent form and slapping them up on screen was a natural thing to do. But it's also because I like books, and I like helping people find new things to read.

I had a policy about book reviews, too: If I didn't like the book, I didn't review it. Not for any inimical reason - I wasn't afraid that a well-reasoned and articulate negative review would ruin my chances to find an agent or be published. Nor was I trying to spare the feelings of my writer-friends, or build up some kind of trade off, where they would feel obligated to review my stuff positively one day, since I had already done them that favor.

No, it was because life is short, and when I'm reading solely for pleasure, if I don't like a book, I don't finish it. And if I don't finish something, I don't believe I'm qualified to shout on the internet, or anywhere else, about how bad it is. This is a personal blog, not a book blog, so I wasn't going to make myself finish a book I wasn't enjoying just so I could then write a review to say how much I didn't enjoy it.

I don't do reviews as much here anymore, because generally, if I like a book, I can say so in 140 characters or less on Twitter, and since the purpose of the reviews I was writing was to tell people about books I liked, well, there are more of you hanging out over there, and that means I can tell more people about the books that I think are great.

So why, then, am I nattering on about all this now? Well, because I am reviewing in a more professional capacity over at Fantasy Matters. And because people have been wondering what a good review ought to do.

I think it's a good discussion to have. I generally use reviews as tools to help me decide whether or not I'm going to buy a book. But also, I use them to see what the conversation is around a certain kind of literature, or to see what's new in the field, or to find new authors, or... hmmm. I seem to use them more than I thought I did.

But the place where I don't use reviews is thinking about the state of the field as a whole - what are the ideas with which we are engaging? how are we succeeding and failing? how can we push ourselves and each other as writers to be better? how can we make the stories that we tell mean more?

And maybe that isn't the kind of thing a review is designed to do. And it's hard to talk about the ways that a book that we love fails, because we don't want to give the impression that it was a bad book. It can be almost as hard to talk about the ways that books we dislike succeed, especially if we dislike them for reasons unrelated to quality of writing. (I'll be a coward, and use Heart of Darkness as an example - a book that I think is brilliantly written, should absolutely be read and taught, and yet I hate the experience of reading it.)

But I want my field to take itself seriously enough to examine its imperfections. As a writer, I would rather (as much as it may sting to read something other than OMG BEST THING I EVER READ EVAR!!1!) see a thoughtful review that truly engages with the flawed text I have written (and we all know that the book is never really done, the writing never perfect) than something that falsely proclaims genius in a surplus of glowing adjectives.

So I'm challenging myself to become a better reviewer - to really push on and examine my own reactions to the books I read and talk about, to ask myself the hard questions and to honestly articulate those answers. And if you have examples of critics and reviewers you think I ought to read, I'd love it if you'd drop their names in the comments for me.

Hurting the ones you love

2011-06-09T09:19:00.000-05:00

I have my favorite stories. Favorite ones to read, and favorite kinds of ones to write. Writerly preoccupations, literary kinks, bright copper kettles and warm wooly mittens. There are things I am always going to find fascinating, new favorites that will get added to the list, old preoccupations that will fall away when I have finally said what I needed to say about them.

These things are fun (for values of fun that include "compulsion" and "agony") for me to write about - there is a need I have, to tell these kinds of stories about these kinds of things. The problem comes, for me as a writer, instead of just a person with a consuming interest, is when I love one of these favorite things too much.

The problem is that characters can't be both perfect and real, and a story in which nothing new happens is not particularly interesting to read. The problem is, when I love something or someone, I don't want to look for the places that aren't perfect, and to write about them, I need to. When I love a story, or a character, I don't want to do violence to it, to cause pain, to write the sadder and better ending.

But that's the thing. Sometimes perfection and happy endings are lies, and it's my job as a writer to tell a kind of truth. It's more important for me to tell the story, and to tell it right, than to maintain that false image of perfection in my head.

The PhD and the Sparkly Vampire Books

2011-06-02T14:35:00.000-05:00

Apparently, there's some discussion going on about whether or not professors of literature (of which I am one) should read the Twilight books.

And really, there's the potential for so much wtfery in even thinking about why that's an issue or how to address that, I'm not sure where to begin. But (as you can tell from the fact that I am here, writing this blog post), I'll try.

I am a literature professor. Should I read Twilight? Well, first, let's realize that this isn't actually about the Twilight books as such. It's about the idea of someone who is supposed to be an intellectual example standing up in front of a classroom and calling something - about which he admits he has no personal knowledge - crap. Or, excuse me, "low forms of literature." Let me here and now promulgate the radical idea that if you're going to call something crap, you ought to have some basis for doing so other than "lots of other people say it is." I mean, maybe it was just in my program, but I thought part of earning a PhD was learning how to form your own scholarly opinions.

It is my considered intellectual opinion that low forms of literature are crap. Do I need to read Twilight? Well, again. Here's the thing. If you haven't read it, how do you know it is a low form of literature? Because it is about vampires? But see: Dracula. Because it has werewolves? But see: Bisclaveret. Because it is popular? But see: the sales figures of any number of the classics of the literary canon. Because it was written by a woman? But see: A list of names I am not even going to begin because I would never be able to quit typing.

But I don't wanna. Fine. Then don't. Because for most classes that are currently taught in the lit departments at universities, there's no reason why Twilight ought to be added to your reading in the field. I work on modern speculative fiction, I teach course in the area, and so yes, I've read them. But if I were only teaching as a medievalist, or a Victorianist, or a specialist in early American poetry, there would be no reason. Unless, of course, every time I needed a shorthand for "fiction that is crap," I referenced Twilight.

Intellectual snobbery is perfidious and foul, and has no place in the classroom. Our job when we stand there is to open minds, not close our own.

Fantasy Matters

2011-06-01T09:09:00.000-05:00

In November of 2007, I co-organized a conference. My partners in crime were two of the most excellent people it has ever been my pleasure to work with, Jennifer Miller and Lindsay Craig. It was called Fantasy Matters, and was held at the University of Minnesota.

Helping to organize a conference is one of those quixotic and mad activities that you decide to do because you do not realize how much work it actually is. (This is where I take off all my hats, and salute anyone who has ever served on a ConCom. You lot are my heros.) But somehow - through luck, and hard work, and did I mention the amazingness of Jen and Lindsay? - we pulled it off. Our keynote speakers were Neil Gaiman and Jack Zipes. Other writers in attendance included Nnedi Okorafor, Jim Hines, David Anthony Durham, Theodora Goss, Caitlin Kittredge, Jackie Kessler, and Patrick Rothfuss, all of whom are fabulous. Scholars came from as far away as Turkey. It was an extraordinary experience.

Our goal in organizing the conference was to create a space where everyone who loved fantasy literature (defined as broadly as possible - so for these purposes, assume a scifi video game is fantasy literature) could come together and talk about what they loved, and why that thing they loved was important - to make, to think critically about, to enjoy. I can't speak for any of the other attendees, but the conversations I had that weekend are still informing my academic work today. And I would not have begun seriously writing creatively without that conference.

Since we had such a positive experience, we immediately made plans to host another conference. And then the economy exploded. Grad students (which we all were at the time) were told to finish their dissertations quick, fast, and in a hurry before their funding ran out. The university no longer had money to offer for conferences like ours. And then the realities of the job market meant that the three of us were living and working in three separate states.

But we still believe that fantasy matters, and that there should be a place where we can all talk about why and how it does. So we turned the conference into a website, Fantasy-Matters.com. (Those of you who know my history with technology will be very glad to see that Adam Miller has joined this endeavour in the role of Internet and Tech Support Genius.) We'll be bringing in a number of fabulous staff writers, whose columns I cannot wait to share with you. I hope you'll stop by.

In memoriam

2011-05-30T09:36:00.000-05:00

One of the people who has had a profound and lasting impact on my life is someone I have never met. In one of the extant letters of hers, she signed her name as Jehanne, and she was burned at the stake as a heretic 580 years ago today in a square in Rouen. Better known as Joan of Arc, she was nineteen years old when she was martyred.

Not, of course, that "martyred" is the word we are supposed to use to describe what happened to her. When the Church finally got around to canonizing Joan in 1920, (the process nearly being derailed a number of times, including by a rather vigorous advocatus diaboli who was rather concerned over whether Joan's squire might have seen her naked breasts when he was arming her, or treating the wounds she suffered in battle) she was entered into the calendar of saints as "virgin" not as "martyr" (the only two paths to sainthood for women.)

It was the Church, you see, that burned her.

Joan has been my favorite saint for as long as I can remember. Brave, articulate, and fierce, she was a girl with a sword who got things done - the kind of girl I wanted to be. But her story was one I knew so well that the details ran together. Then, at the beginning of my career in legal academia, I wrote an article called "Lex and the City" (pseudonymously as Gil Grantmore, and yes, for those of you bored completists out there, I'm sure you can find it on the internet) about the first amendment right to freedom of speech inherent in personal dress. It was then I discovered that the heresy that Joan had been burned for was wearing men's clothing.

Seriously. After a trial that went on for months, wherein Joan was assaulted, poisoned, threatened with more explicit torture, was forced - illegally - to act as her own advocate while being questioned by upwards of 50 members of the Church hierarchy at once, the only heresy they could find her guilty of was that of wearing pants. I didn't realize it at the time, but my dissertation was born in that moment.

Once I began researching her more seriously, spending months, and then years reading the transcripts of all of her trials - The Trial of Condemnation, the Trial of Rehabilitation (which cleared her of all charges, twenty-three years too late), and the Trial of Canonization - I became more and more impressed with her bravery and grace. And I understood, more and more, why this young women - articulate, intelligent, a girl with a sword who got things done - struck such terror in those in power.

So much terror that when the English captured her, the French abandoned her to death, rather than paying a ransom, such as was commonly done for prisoners of war of her status. So much terror that, aside from housing her in a men's military prison, rather than in a women's ecclesiastical one, her interrogators, theoretically men of the Church, asked her if she might lose her powers if she lost her virginity. Rape was a weapon, even then. So much terror that they burned her alive.

If you want to read more about her, I highly recommend Joan of Arc: Her Story by Regine Pernoud, one of the greats of Jehannine scholarship. Or George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. All of the best lines truly are hers.

The fine art of rejectomancy

2011-05-27T15:33:00.000-05:00

We say it all the time. I've said it, many times here on this blog: if you're going to be a writer, you need to learn how to deal with rejection. Here's why: it happens to all of us. I don't think there is a writer anywhere who has never gotten a rejection letter.

Even after you start selling things, you still get rejection letters. My Clarionmate, Ferrett, who has enough professional sales in his bibliography to be a SFWA member, blogs today about his 29-minute rejection letter. One day, both the first and last emails in my inbox were rejections. Even people with multiple books on the shelf have to deal with contract options that aren't picked up, proposals that are passed on, short stories that are "good, but not right for us." Rejection happens. To all of us. At all stages of our careers. (Okay, maybe if your career goes JK Rowling-style supernova you don't get rejection letters anymore. Maybe.)

But if you read carefully (as carefully as you read submission guidelines, thereby doing what you can to minimize your chance of rejection), you'll notice I said "deal with" not "like." Find a coping strategy that gets you through someone saying no. And then have a back up plan.

Because one day, you're going to get that one rejection letter too many. Or too quickly. Or after too long. Or when thirty-nine other things have already gone wrong that day. Or it will be for your favorite story, the one you feel might be your best work, and editor after editor says "this is beautiful, but not for us" and you just want to break down and cry, and beg, and say "How about I pay you to publish it?"

Have a back up plan, so the frustration stays in your head, and off of your blog. So that you don't actually hit "send" on that scathingly worded reply to the editor. So that you keep writing.

Writing's full of tough choices, innit?

2011-05-23T10:28:00.000-05:00

This post started as a response to a comment left on yesterday's post, where I was going to agree that knowing that the book is about (as opposed to what happens in the book) is a map through the second draft. And then I started thinking about how very much I agree with that idea, and also, the specific ways in which I agree with that idea (said vigorous agreement cemented by a realization about a piece of the current book in progress.)

Stories, especially novel-length ones, are full of choices. Some of them, the ones my characters make, I want to be visible. I want the reader to see my character stand at the crossroads, throw the bones, read the entrails, and decide. I want the reader to feel the agony of a choice when there is no good option, only a variety of less bad ones. If I don't make those choices visible, with actual consequences, the story seems to be on rails, with the eventual outcome predestined from the beginning. Those, I can usually make up as I go along. (I know, I know. The magic, let me show you it.)

But there are other, more difficult choices, ones I want to keep hidden so that they seem as if they were always part of the book. These, I can't fully make until I know what the book is about.

For example, I have a friend who, whenever we talk about my writing says, "Did [spoiler] actually have to happen to [Redacted]?" Then she says, "I know, I know. It did. But I liked [Redacted] and I wished [alternate possibility]." And I make a sad face, and agree with her, and say, "I'm sorry, I couldn't do anything else."

Of course, I am a liar.

Plot-wise, I could have done something else. Or fixed things. Both could have been made to feel fully integrated with the other events of the book. No miracles, no deus, with or without machina, would have been required. But I would have been telling a different story then. Not just in terms of plot, but in terms of what the story meant.

Knowing who the villain is, and why he or she is villainous, knowing who gets out alive, and who gets out unscathed, knowing the right ending - the haunting one, not the happy one - these are things I don't know until I know what the book is about. Knowing what the book is about gives me the foundation I need to make the hard choices - to do the things that will break the hearts of my readers, or cause people to wonder what exactly goes on in that head of mine, that this is the sort of thing that I write. It gives me the ability to keep those things hidden, to make it seem as if of course those things needed to happen, the signs were all there, even if it hurt to read them.

If I don't know what the story is about, then I get tempted to listen to the weeping of my beta readers, who wonder why I'm so mean to them, and to my characters. I get tempted to make people happy - because who doesn't like happy people - rather than telling the right story. My job is to tell the right story, and I write until I know what it is.

And let yourself let go

2011-05-22T16:04:00.000-05:00

Writing a novel is hard. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever done so (or if you have, and this is a surprise to you, please do not tell me of the ease with which your prose lept upon the page. My poor, fragile ego will not stand it.). I like a good challenge, me, so I like to throw additional difficulties into the process.

I'm currently - if you are a very generous person - revising. Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird talks about the need to write a shitty first draft. Let me tell you: I got that one right. Basically, I threw tens of thousands of words at a notebook and checked to see what would stick. Characters changed their names, their professions, died, and resurrected. (In at least one instance, I didn't notice that I'd brought someone back from the dead until I reread the draft.) And those aren't even the biggest changes I'm making.

Because I write by my headlights, because I believe that outlines are Satan's traps for the unwary, I don't know what is going to happen in the book until I need it to happen. And I'm fine with that generally, because plot is the last thing I care about in a book. What happens? Meh. But to whom does it happen? and what does it mean that it did? Those, those things I care about.

For me, the "to whom does it happen?" is the question that begins the book. I need a character I care enough about to begin writing. "What does it mean that it did?" - the thematic question - is the question that organizes the book, that is the reason why I am writing it. Unfortunately, I sometimes (as in this case) need to get to the end of a draft and have the general idea of what happened, before I can find the thematic and emotional through lines that carry the story.

The problem is, without that thematic through line, without some idea of why I am writing this book, what the larger purpose of the story is (and yes, I know that sounds like such an English professory sort of thing to say, but I am an English professor, and one who knows what kind of story she wants to read, and what kind of a story she wants to write) it is very easy for me to stop writing. It's easy to feel like the book isn't working. Because it isn't, not yet. I'm writing without having all the pieces.

For me, right now, that's the hardest part - to keep writing, without all the pieces. To trust myself enough to know that I am leaving a breadcrumb trail and that the ravens won't eat all of them before I find my way back. To let the shitty first draft be a map - one that marks the edge of the world, and says "Here there be dragons" but has compass rose and key all the same.

And your chicks for free

2011-05-20T16:07:00.000-05:00

"I want," said the student sitting across the desk from me, "to write books that will sell. How do I do that?"

Honestly, I was kerflummoxed by the question. (Avoid writing books in which the words kerflummoxed and fisticuffs appear. Make sure your prose is not in shimmering alexandrines.) I read a wide variety of books, in a wide variety of genres, in styles ranging from the transparent to the baroque. Many of them are books I love. All the ones I've finished are books I like, and I try to buy books if at all possible, because, as someone who hopes to receive money from writing books one day, I like to support the people who are writing them now. Which is a long and involved way of saying that my first response wanted to be "All sorts of books sell." (Write a good one.)

But I was pretty sure what I was being asked wasn't "How do I write a book that will cause an agent to agree to represent me, and an editor to buy they book, and then various people, many of whom I have never met, to exchange money for the work of my brain?" (Write. Revise. Don't give up when it's hard.) I was pretty sure I was being asked "How do I write books that are going to become huge bestsellers, causing me to accrue wealth beyond my wildest dreams and to become the subject of the lust of attractive people?" (Elevator pitch: Attractive vampire with a conscience joins Navy SEAL anti-terrorism team. Finds true love.)

Dude. I do not know. Sacrifice a goat at the dark of the moon? Run around your writing desk thrice widdershins, cursing the Oxford comma all the while?

All sorts of books sell, and as far as I can tell, there isn't a magic formula to predict what is going to sell eleventy billion copies and what is going to get quietly remaindered. Harry Potter got double digit rejection letters, guys. No one knows.

And even if there were a magic formula (take three parts peril, mix with two parts romance, add one dash strangeness and stir), even if I knew it, I wouldn't share. Not because I'm selfish, and don't want to see other people succeed. I want everyone who decides to be brave enough to create something to succeed. But because I think a variety of creation is good. I think looking out and seeing shelves full of different stories is amazing.

I don't remember exactly what I said, but I wish it had been this: "Writing is hard, and it's a profession in which there are no guarantees. Write the thing that only you can write, and put enough of yourself in that book to make the writing of it mean something to you, so on the days that are hard you have a reason to keep going, and on the days that go well, you have a reason to celebrate." I don't know if that will be a book that will sell, but it will be a book worth writing.

What I want to do on my summer vacation

2011-05-15T16:14:00.000-05:00

The grading will be done tomorrow, which means I'll have my grades calculated and in to the registrar by Tuesday. And thus, the semester will end. Summer vacation, hurrah!

Unlike the halcyon days of my youth, where summer vacation meant reading, the scent of sunscreen, reading, slumber parties with friends, reading, swim practice outside, and reading, summer vacation right now just means I don't have to work my day job.

I have a lot of plans for this summer, and most of them revolve around some kind of writing work. (Though I really am looking forward to at least pretending like I will catch up on my reading.) I have a lot of projects. And I'm thrilled about that - I haven't said yes to anything I'm not excited about. But there are a lot of projects.

So my goal this summer is to learn to work smarter. Because right now I am really good at the "get up in the morning and work all day until you are so exhausted you have to sleep, with occasional breaks to feed myself and the fuzzy residents of the house" plan. Lather, rinse, repeat, until the day comes (usually about once every seven to ten days) where my brain is so burnt out it stops functioning, and I get no work done, and I am racked with guilt at my failure.

Yeah, not really a long-term sustainable plan. For a number of reasons. So I need to learn how to take down time, at least once a day, and have it actually be guilt-free down time. I need to learn how to schedule my days in a manner that keeps me busy, but not exhausted. And I need to find a way of doing these things that I like, that feels organic with how I function, because if it feels forced, I'll never stick to it.

A moment of celebration

2011-05-13T15:17:00.000-05:00

The grading is going well so far - the thing I've loved best about this semester's Chaucer class is that they've taken the coursework so seriously. Not every class does, and it's a treat to watch a group of people enthusiastically try to wrap their brains around something. And the semester-long theme of Chaucer and modernity has made for some really smart, outside of the traditional scholarly box, final papers. They couldn't have given me a better present.

But that's not the thing I'm talking about in the title of this post.

When I got back from Clarion, I had two big writerly goals. One was to successfully finish and defend my dissertation (sure, it's not speculative fiction, but it was speculative theology, and it was book length. Besides, what self-respecting geek doesn't want to be the Doctor?) I did that a year later, in 2009. The other, was to take my week 5 story, what Geoff Ryman told me was a novel I had tried to cram into 2500 words, and actually turn it into a novel. And have that be the novel I successfully queried agents with.

I am so, so happy to tell you that I am now represented by Joe Monti. (And yes, that is the exciting personal development that I was secrety about in the last post.)

I wish I could hug all of you right now.

I write these apologies for me, really

2011-05-10T13:57:00.000-05:00

I hate not blogging regularly. I like talking to you guys. It's fun. We have good conversations. So I really try not to let too many days go by without a post.

But the thing is, it's that time of the semester. The end. Where the students are all freaking out because they have to write their final papers, and I am buying up the local supply of coffee and chocolatey desserts because I am going to have to grade them.

And I have some exciting news - an interview and an essay that will be online soon! a web project that will launch next month! an incredibly exciting development that I will tell you about as soon as I can! - but nothing I can be specific about, and I don't want to write Kat Howard and the Blog of Secrets.

So hello. I'm here. Not dead. Things are good. And I'll be back with a brain no crazier than usual when I've finished grading 125K words on Chaucer.

Letter to a young writer

2011-05-04T15:48:00.000-05:00

Shimmer Magazine, which publishes lovely short fiction, and has a great blog, has a "Letter to a Young Writer" post up today. I really like the post, and as you might be able to guess from the title of this entry, have decided to steal the idea, and use it for my own.

Although it is weird, just a bit, to write this. There were so many years where I didn't write at all, not fiction anyway, certain that being a writer really wasn't a possibility for me. So I'm not sure at what age I am writing to myself at. Though who knows - perhaps through some TARDIS-like magic, this message got to my past self at exactly the moment I needed it to.

***

Dear younger Kat, who wasn't yet called Kat, except in her secret heart.

You were very young when you first started writing stories, and it was easy for you then. It was easy, and you got praise and recognition for it. Those are things you will always want, though, thankfully, there will come a point where you will no longer let their lack stop you from trying.

For a while, writing will continue to be easy. You will win Young Authors' contests, and essay competitions, and the English Scholarship to your high school. You will become so used to this, people telling you that you have a talent for writing will no longer surprise you. You will also stop thinking of writing as a talent you have, you will just think of it as something you are supposed to be good at. Winning an award will feel like the thing you are expected to do, and any result other than winning will feel like abject failure.

This is bad, because you are going to fail a lot. I mean, really a lot. You will never publish anything in your high school literary magazine. You will try, every year, with the maximum number of poems and short stories. And every year, they will all be returned to you. Your teachers will tell you you should submit something, and ask why you didn't, and you will smile, and say thank you, and say "Maybe I will next year."

You will never publish anything in your college literary magazine, either. And this is the place where you do stop trying, because you will get a note, scrawled across the top of a page: "No one wants to read this kind of thing." You believe it, because it is obviously true.

You try to write again in law school. You are told you are wasting your time, and so you slide the project into a drawer. But then your academic writing will start to win awards. This will help you make the decision to leave the law for literature. This will be one of the smarter goodbyes you ever say in your life.

You will find friends, and fairy godmothers, and people who believe in you enough that you will begin to believe in yourself again. You will pick up your pen, and stories will come out of it. You will get in to Clarion, and while you are there, you will begin to suspect that people do, indeed, want to read the kind of thing you write. You will also decide that no one is ever going to stop you from writing again.

You will write. You will publish. You will sell enough stories to qualify as a professional in the eyes of your peers.

And one night, you will be standing in line for the bathroom in a theatre on Broadway, where you've just heard a story of yours be read. A woman will walk up to you, her face wet, tears still in her eyes. She will give you a hug, and say, "Thank you," and walk away.

Pick up your pen. You are writing for her, too.

Love,

Kat

Writing in the shadows

2011-05-02T08:42:00.000-05:00

"Your Grandma is worried about you," Mom said.

"Why?"

"Well, she read "The Speaking Bone," and it really disturbed her. She just wanted to be sure you were okay."

It's not the first time someone in my family has expressed concern over what I write. Or had pieces that I thought were maybe a hair on the dark or weird side be described as disturbing, or as horror. And I get that my authorial intent stops being important the moment I give the story to someone else.

"I'm fine. Tell Grandma thanks, and I'm sorry I worried her."

"Why do you write stuff like that, anyway?"

Why do I write stuff like that, anyway? Well, for the most part, because that's the kind of story I like. I go through occasional binges on romance novels - witty banter, hot sex, and a guaranteed happy ending is my literary recipe for stress relief. (I'll even skip the hot sex if the banter is hot too, as well as very witty, which is probably more personal of a revelation than I mean it to be, but we can have that discussion another time.)

Ahem.

My point is, I don't generally read for the happy ending, and I don't write for it, either. I like to write about the moments when something strange happens. My favorite kind of character is someone who is interestingly broken, and who wants to put herself and her life back together. My literary kinks require bad things to happen in my writing. My purpose in writing isn't to give my grandmother nightmares, but it also isn't to hand out a fuzzy blanket and a cup of tea with each story.

I want what I've written to stick in your head. And if it lives in the shadows and the dark places, well, I'm fine with that. Even darkness needs a home. Even shadows tell a story.

Symphony Space

2011-04-28T12:52:00.000-05:00

Last night's Selected Shorts event was amazing. Extraordinary. Magic.

Marin Ireland, the actress who read (and it seems to wrong to say read, because she did so much more - performed? illuminated?) "A Life in Fictions" was utterly perfect. What she did was make the story on stage sound like the one in my head. It was a kind of magic. I am so impressed by her talent. (Another particularly brilliant kind of magic happened during the reading of Neil Gaiman's "The Thing About Cassandra." Subscribe to the Selected Shorts podcast now, because you are not going to want to miss hearing that. Wow.)

And I met so many wonderful people, who were kind enough to say hello to me, and to offer kind words about my story. If that was you, thank you.

My Mom was there, and it was such a thrill to get to introduce her to some of the people I love, and for her to be able to see something I was so honored to be a part of.

The baking time for art, and the cost of the ingredients

2011-04-25T11:47:00.000-05:00

The first really big writing project I ever undertook was my dissertation. When I transitioned from being in serious research mode to actually writing the thing, I gave myself the goal of writing half a page on it, every day. This is slightly more than it sounds like, because footnotes, quotations, and citations didn't count here. So really, it was half a page of my own analysis, every day. A good day, a day so good I would allow myself to stop writing if I wanted to, was a full page. About 300 words of my own. Maybe that doesn't seem like a lot, but if I had written every single word right the first time, I could have finished in about five months.

When I started writing fiction, I made 300 words a day my daily goal. (Well, approximately. One notebook page, based on the size of my pages and of my handwriting, is about 300 words. So technically, my goal was one page a day.) Again maybe that doesn't seem like a lot. And really, it isn't. But if you write 300 words a day, every day, then you've written 109,500 words in a year. Manuscript length for the kind of fiction I normally write is about 100K words. So 300 words a day is a book a year. You can even take 31 and 2/3 days off - be sick, take a vacation, write 300 of the wrong words one day - and still write a book a year.

And if you know what you want to write, the physical act of writing 300 words doesn't take very long at all. Well, so long as you get all the words down in the correct order. And you never have to go back and cut any words. And all the characters show up for work every day. And there aren't any holes in your plot that you need to go back and fix. And. And. And.

There, of course, is the difficulty. And the reason that once I realized I want to try to make writing fiction my career, why my daily page count is a lot more than one page a day. Well, that and the fact that I like to eat. And live in a house that has heat, and light, and water, and the internet. Right now, I sell short stories. I am not at a place in my career when the money comes before the work - no advances - and sometimes, I do the work, and I don't get paid. Not because I'm selling stories to sketchy markets or anything like that, but not everything I write sells. Sometimes I have to trunk a story. But let's say I were to sell every word that I wrote. 300 words a day x $0.05 per word (professional rates) = $15/ day. $5475 a year. That does not keep me in a house with light and heat and water and food.

Oh, and for those who were wondering, that's actually pretty close to the median first novel advance.

So, like most artists, I work at a day job, too. I'm pretty lucky here - I like my day job, and it's close to what I do with my writing, and I only need to work one other job. When I write, I work on multiple projects at once, in the hopes of increasing the amount of money I can bring in with my writing.

But really, the above calculus - 300 words a day = a book a year = $15 dollars a day - is why I get grumpy with people sometimes. With people who think that art ought to take a certain amount of time to make, or else it isn't art. With people who think that because what I do is fun, or creative, or because I've chosen to do it, that I don't deserve to be paid for my work. That because I can, if I choose, do the work for my job as a writer from home, or in my pajamas, that my time isn't valuable, or that because I love it, it isn't a job.

Gaiman, Borges, and, er, me

2011-04-22T20:15:00.000-05:00

You guys! Remember when I wrote about signing Very Excellent and Wonderful contracts?

They were for this!

Seriously, I think I forgot how to breathe when I got the email telling me. My story. In such company. Read by a real actor. In a theatre on Broadway. This is so many of my dreams coming true all at once that my hands are shaking as I type this.

I will be there, and I am bringing my Mom as my date, because I can hold her hand and cry from happiness.

A thing I thought would never happen

2011-04-19T17:45:00.000-05:00

I can tell you where and when the story began. It began at WorldCon, in Montreal, in 2009, as I listened to Cat Valente read her wonderful short story, "A Buyer's Guide to Maps of Antarctica."

(Go read it. It's extraordinary. I'll still be here when you're done.)

It was the structure I fell most in love with. The way the story was told in maps. I wanted to do something like that, too. So I needed a structure, something I could use to organize the story. Well, nineteen days after I got back from WorldCon, I defended my dissertation. The short version of which is, it was on the performative aspects of holiness in women's religious writing. Saints. I could use images of saints the way Cat used maps.

And so began "The Calendar of Saints."

The problem was, I had all these things I wanted the story to do, and it collapsed under the weight of my desires. I wasn't a good enough writer yet to be subtle, and I wasn't confident enough to make the changes I needed to in order to have a story, instead of an agenda. I finished it, because that is what I do, sent it to beta readers, realized they were right, and I didn't know how to fix what was wrong, and put it away. For over a year.

Then about three months ago, I sat bolt upright in bed one morning, and knew how to fix it. And now I am incredibly happy to tell you that I sold "The Calendar of Saints" to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I am really proud of this story, not just for the work it took me to get it here, but because it's about things that really, really matter to me, like truth, and faith. And fencing.

Oh, and for those who are interested in this sort of trivia, this is the first story I've sold that is long enough that I could have used it to apply to Clarion. 3500 words, which, for me, is like an epic.

I hate myself for loving you

2011-04-18T11:51:00.000-05:00

Okay, so now that we've established that people of all sorts (including women) love reading fiction of all sorts (including epic fantasy), can we talk about how loving something does not mean we have to be blind to its faults?

I mean, I get that this is an awkward thing to bring up. We talk about how the geeks have inherited the earth, but we still get called fanboys. We feel grumpy because "our" books and authors don't get the big reviews, or nominated for the big awards. When we write a book about Unicorn Sparkle Zombies it's dismissed as derivative genre fluff, but when some refugee from the litfic camp wants to have a little fun, and writes about Unicorn Sparkle Zombies, they get a huge marketing campaign and a book tour, and praised for their blistering metaphorical examination of society, even though they had obviously never read anything about Unicorn Sparkle Zombies ever, and everyone knows Unicorn Sparkle Zombies burst into flame when they smell roses, they don't live in gardens, and by all the unholy elder gods, do some research, please!

Ahem.

Or something like that.

My point is, we know our genre in all of its permutations gets picked on. We all of us have always been the kid sitting alone at the lunch table. So we don't like to shine light in the dark corners or ask where that funny smell is coming from because it feels like everyone else is doing that for us already, and we're tired, so tired, of just trying to be taken seriously.

But I love my genre, and I love the people who write in it. And I think we can do better.

I love epic fantasy. I always have. I started reading it because I read fast, and I didn't want to run out of things to read before the next trip to the library, so a big enormous doorstop of a book was exactly my kind of thing. Even better if there was a multibook series. But can anyone tell me any work of epic fantasy where the main character is a woman? (Seriously, can you? I might like to read it.)

Okay, so maybe not the main character. But how about a work where the women are actual characters that do things, that aren't just there to be the sex object, or love interest, or object of the quest, or the evil, seducing sorceress? There are some, if we broaden things that much, but not many. And certainly not equal to the amount of epic fantasy novels where there just aren't any female characters at all. (Note to writers: you have not actually created a female character if you've just slapped a woman's name on a body.)

And I wish I could say that this phenomenon was just some kind of manifestation of Sturgeon's Law, that there are real, active, women characters - sometimes even two or three! - in the good books. But I can't tell you how many times I've picked up the latest highly praised and award-nominated great new thing, and found that it's the old boys' club, all over again.

But, but... it's epic fantasy, you say. With you know, wars and medieval settings. Women weren't in wars! They barely existed in the medieval period! I'm just following the history. People say this, you know.

For those of you who say that, I have three words. Joan. Of. Arc.

Her life is the arc of the fantasy epic - nobody from nowhere who becomes the chosen savior of her people. With War! And History! A magic sword, even! (No, really.) (Joan was, until the nineteenth century, the most documented person in history.)

And it isn't just Joan. Women did things in the medieval era and before, up to and including fighting in wars, and leading their countries. Sure, not every woman did, but not every man did, either. Sure, a woman who did was exceptional, but we don't write about people who aren't - the person who has a normal life, to who nothing ever happens, who never even hears of anything out of the ordinary? - we don't tell their story.

Moreover, you are writing fantasy. If you are trying to tell me you can imagine a wizard, but cannot conceive that a woman might be one, maybe the problem isn't with the source material. Maybe the problem is with you.

Women read epic fantasy. We love it. It would be nice if our genre loved us back.

Boy fiction

2011-04-15T15:34:00.000-05:00

Some of you may have heard about a new television show, "Game of Thrones?" I think some guy named George R. R. Martin wrote the book it is based on, but I can't be sure, because, apparently, that book is "boy fiction," and I've never been a boy.

No. Seriously. Read the New York Times review of the show. That's what it says. (I'm not linking due, not to paywall issues, as I like writers getting paid, but due to finding any review that manages to mention nary a scene, nor name even one character, doesn't deserve the name "review" in my book.)

And yes, I ranted about the idiocy of the review on twitter this morning, as have any number of other women who read and write fantasy.

But the thing that keeps bothering me is that term, "boy fiction." It bothers me beyond the obvious idiocies that we've all heard - "girls don't read comics" "men don't read, period" - because the idea that what people do, wear, read, enjoy, even the color they paint their toenails is still being used as some kind of shorthand for gender is kind of disgusting. As is the idea that things can, or should, only be enjoyed or experienced by one gender.

There is no such thing as "boy fiction." We talk about "chick lit," but that's a marketing category, not moral law. Gender and genre are not the same word.

A serious lack of umbrella drinks

2011-04-13T21:29:00.000-05:00

So Spring Break is officially next week. However, since most of my students chose the "write a paper" option over the "present in class" option, I didn't need to hold class tomorrow, and so I cancelled it. Which means that theoretically, today was my first day of Spring Break.

In case you wanted to know what a vacation day looks like for me:

Up at 6:30 with Sam I Am, who can no longer sleep through the night, after last month's illness. I was actually so exhausted I physically hurt, so after we came back in, I stumbled back to bed for another hour, and slept in.

Morning internet triage. This was pretty exciting, because I got Very Excellent and Wonderful contracts, and also story notes from an editor. Signed contracts. Responded to editor. Filed email responses for Internet Project launching this summer.

Had appointment. Ran errands, some writing related.

Lunch at the computer, while doing fun internet things (email with friends, faffing about on twitter. You know, fun.)

Graded one-third of the Chaucer projects. This included eating one of the Chaucer-themed cupcakes my students backed, so that was pretty great. Also printed out Chaucer project essays that came in late and via email (bad!) (and also had a colossal fight with my printer, which was unable to tell that it had paper in it. Fixed printer.) and answered student questions about the next assignment, and next fall's class.

Fed animals, and did associated animal chores.

Sanity break - read blogs, and other fun internet things.

Cooked dinner, fed me.

Gchat meeting with the excellent Megan Kurashige, with whom I am collaborating on a project I find both terrifying and exciting.

Final tweaks on a blog post for a friend's new site that's going up tomorrow.

Took an actual break, and watched last night's episode of The Good Wife. I love this show.

Typed about 2000 words from the notebook into the computer, editing as I typed.

Wrote this blog post.

It is now 16 hours after my day began. And I'm about to pick up my pen and make my word count.

The dark backwards and abysm of time

2011-04-12T18:27:00.000-05:00

When I first started writing, the most useful thing for me about being in a workshop or in a group of regular beta readers was receiving feedback on my own work. Not because I'm some sort of mad egomaniac who believes the world and all that is in it was made for her convenience, but because of where my skill level was when it came to evaluating my own work.

I mean, I knew if something I wrote really, really sucked, in the sort of "burn it before it spreads" way, but otherwise, no clue. All through Clarion, for example, I honestly did not know if my fellow writers would praise my story to the heavens and suggest I be given the Campbell immediately and by divine fiat, or if they would tell me to pack up my pens and go home. So listening to people tell me where and how my story was broken, or, if not broken, where it could be polished, tightened, and generally made better, was incredibly valuable for me. At that point, listening to what other people thought was the most helpful thing I could do for myself as a writer.

Somewhere along the line, in the past two and a half years, that's changed. I still have beta readers, and I still rely on them for nearly everything I write. I am still utterly grateful every time someone takes time out of their life to help me with my stories. But at this point, I can almost always identify the weak spots in my own work. I can't always fix them on my own, but I can ask for a focused critique.

Now, the thing that is most helpful for me is reading someone else's work. (NB: Dear people of the internets. I love you, lo, very. This is, however, not an open invitation to send me your work to read. I wish that I had that sort of free time, however, the sad reality is that I do not.) Beta reading for someone else, or looking back at a book or story that I've read before, and pulling it apart to see how the pieces fit, that's where I learn now. That's where I get my ideas for what I can do, and what I might try, and where I might aspire in the future.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I have a student doing a creatively focused independent study this semester, and I'm helping a small group of students that I've taught this year put together their own writers' group. And I just keep being reminded that while writing is (unless you are collaborating) an individual and generally solitary activity, being a writer is not something that is done in a vacuum. We do need voices other than ours in our heads, even if the speeches change.

Why we revise

2011-04-09T19:36:00.000-05:00

From Draft Zero:

"I hope you learned something," Stasia said.

From the ~~revision draft~~ rewrite:

"I hope you learned enough to make that," Stasia gestured in the direction of Smith's now-stilled body, "worth it.

"Also, wipe your mouth. You still have his blood on your lips."