A terrible list

This is a pretty terrible list. I'd say at least half of it is self aggrandizing bullshit. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/18/fifty-literary-life-robert-mccrum

I can't even go into details because my head hurts too much.

Cullen graduated yesterday from UMBC with a degree in bioinformatics and computational analysis, a very new field. His ceremony was very nice, with an inspiring speech from his school president.

Then we went to lunch and to pick up our new glasses, which we ordered a week or so ago. Mine are progressive lenses, which so far I loathe and are giving me a pain like an ice pick in my head. Either I adjust soon or I'm going to get new lenses.

Let's fire the writing staff

You may have heard the rumor that the entire writing staff of the Walking Dead has been fired and the showrunner is planning to hire a couple of freelancers and write the whole thing himself. What does this mean? Can it be done? Didn't Aaron Sorkin already do this? Kay has all the answers. A must read if you're interested in television writing.

http://seriocity.blogspot.com/2010/12/walking-alone.html

Excellent writing tips

This article is about non fiction writing but it certainly applies to fiction as well.

http://chronicle.com/article/10-Tips-on-How-to-Write-Less/124268/

The author has common sense suggestions that don't occur to lots of people. I especially like what he has to say about not writing at the last minute.

I used to write my columns on Thursday night so they'd be ready for Friday morning but I feel quite a bit less stressed now that I try and do 100 - 200 words Monday through Thursday. If I aim for 100 I usually hit 200, which is nice.

In other news I was at Petco today with Mal and Cullen. We saw this super tough looking dude who was cradling a tiny little Min Pin puppy. It was so cute!

Who do I write like?

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

This is using an excerpt from the story I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo.

Great Post re Sei Shonagon

Tiger Beatdown has an awesome post about Sei Shonagon and women's writing. So much to love here!

http://tigerbeatdown.com/2010/06/04/what-we-read-when-we-dont-read-the-internet-presents-how-sei-shonagon-invented-your-tumblr/#more-1168

The Student Attacks the Teacher

This story was all over my Twitter feed today. I'm not ashamed to say it made me cry. I'm not the only one, several people I follow said the same thing, that it made them cry.

http://deadspin.com/5482198/my-roger-ebert-story

Respect to the author. It must have been very difficult to write.

In which someone is surprised

I sent a query letter to an agent at the beginning of 2008 then went to work on another project. I know you're supposed to query widely but I get easily confused and wanted to do one person at a time. A couple of months later I got a request for a partial, which turned into a request for a full, which I sent in August of 2008. Then nothing. I sent a couple of status checks, the first after six months I think, maybe the second after a year, and never got a response.

My boss who is a New York Times bestselling author, said that much time without an answer is a no and another agent said something similar. I was planning to query again, more widely, once things settle down a bit. I have enough anxiety over buying this house (did I mention we found mold on the ceiling yesterday when we took Chris to look at it?) and doing NaNoWriMo (still need 6000 words to finish) without adding the stress of querying.

Imagine my surprise when I got a response to my query. I really didn't expect anything after all this time. The agent said they were conflicted over my manuscript. They liked quite a lot of it but in the end weren't passionate enough about it to think they could do it justice. A very nice rejection and now I can move on without feeling vaguely guilty that there's still a full out there that someone might want.

Sometimes closure really is all it's cracked up to be.

New project

Trying to start a new project that doesn't want to start. I've tried three different beginnings so far and none of them are what I want. This is something that came to me while I was getting my CT scan the other day. Maybe it's not ready to start yet.

I wanted to start something today with the goal of finishing it by November first. It's good timing since I finished rewriting the vamp script about a week ago. Part of the problem might be that I have like FIVE ideas right now that are all sort of fermenting. And I still have a couple of rewrites to do.

Chris went back to New York and Cam comes home on Tuesday. It will be nice having him back. The rats will be delirious with joy. We fed them a quarter of a sugar baby watermelon today and they went nuts. Good old nutrition.

More about zombies (Can you ever get too much?)

In honor of my project for script frenzy, which is about a teenager trained to be a zombie hunter, I present a post from Meg Cabot's blog called Teenage Zombies. I was particularly struck by this advice:

The other problem with the movie is that the music is kind of dopey and the special effects aren’t that scary and everyone is always like, “Wait, we have to go back.”

Why does everyone always say that? There’s no reason to go back. Really. Ever. Just drive forward.

That fantastic advice doesn't just work for films, or zombie hunting, or fleeing from zombies; it's also perfect writing advice. Don't ever hit the back space. Don't go back and delete anything you've written. Don't think you're just going to edit one thing and then go on. Instead write a note to yourself about what you think is wrong and go on from there. I've actually written as many as 11 thousand words and decided they weren't working for me, written a note like @@this books should really start here@@ and forged on with whatever direction seems better.

I am only talking about first drafts here. If you're doing a rewrite you're probably going to need to stop and go back from time to time. But I find that even when I'm doing my rewrite I need to forge ahead to a degree. I can bogged down just doing the first reading of my first draft and start trying to fix things. I really need to read the whole thing through while making notes then tackle it and whip it into shape.

Fantastic day

I got up this morning and had a headache, which makes about eight days for this particular headache. We're switching my medicine for the intracranial hypertension and I'm kind of hoping that I'll get used to it and my headache will go away. If it doesn't I'll have to go back to my old regime, which is playing holy hell with my blood sugar.

I find that when I have a headache I usually feel better if I can move around, get some exercise, stretch my shoulders and neck so I did, worked out until I felt better. Then I sat down and worked on this first draft I've been working on forever, really almost a year, and finally, praise Jesus, finished it. That's an incredible relief. It's an awful mess and I may not do anything further with it but for now I'm happy it's finished.

I've been listening to Mika today; a great choice for fun, happy music that's easy to work out to. Then I got caught up on one of my email accounts. Now I'm getting caught up on Battlestar Galactica. Good times.

Truer words were never spoken

http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=140

These are the questions I ask my teenager

Cullen, who is only going to be a teenager for a short time as he is turning 19 this week, doesn't always get normal mother of teenager questions from me. Sure I ask him where he's going and when he's coming home when he goes out, just like I tell him where I'm going and when I'm coming back when I go out, because it's the polite thing to do, but the really hard questions are entirely different. Take these that I just asked him:

How many are in a cohort?

Do you think if you had enough cohorts of German Shepherd Dogs they could take a raptor in a fight?

And yes, if you've read the Gabriel book the whole dog against raptor theme is repeated, but in a new and different way. There aren't any raptors in this new book. The bit I'm writing is more the sort of desperate fantasy planning you might do when you're completely overwhelmed and out of real world options. While you're engaged in planning to run off to raptor land with your cohorts of dogs your underbrain is figuring out a viable option that doesn't involve chicken concestors.

Going to be at Comic Con?

Neil is signing and selling 100 of his black t-shirts to raise money for the CBLDF. The entry before this one has more details.

I've just picked up another weekly column so I am busier than ever. It's for an automotive site and the first one was about awful commutes and crazy things you see on them.

Then I had to run up to Baltimore to see my optho-neurologist and there was a tractor trailer that had burned up that slowed traffic for miles. Then on the way home a car accident and a bus that may have been on fire. A fire truck was behind it doing something so maybe. Three incidents in the space of like four miles. Bizarre.

When I was a very small boy

There are a lot of ticks out this season. I went to the doctor on Thursday and Chris ran around in the woods, climbing over fallen trees and trudging through the swamp muck and got two ticks. He's gotten one earlier after doing some yard work for a friend so total was three in one day. Which is you know, more than the entire family has gotten in the preceding ten years...

A couple of people have written to ask what I'm writing now. I started a project that was inspired by this ad:

http://baltimore.craigslist.org/pet/698260586.html

I'm about six thousand words into it and things are happening, like a little girl stole the dog, but I've been unsure where I'm going with it and not entirely sure the story was ready to be told but then a couple of minutes ago I figured out the most important thing so hopefully it will work.

Cam went to Alaska on Monday, via Georgia, which I don't quite understand as it's kind of in the opposite direction. He called on Wednesday because he was bored but yesterday he went salmon fishing so hopefully he's having a good time.

Chris im'ed this video to me. It's weirdly like a dream I was having when he sent it, which makes it even stranger.

More apt than I thought

I posted a comment to this thread at Miss Snark's earlier today. I was responding to someone who said that it's cruel of Miss Snark to get our publishing hopes up when 98% of us can't even write a query letter, which of course means we haven't a hope in hell of writing a decent book.

I talked about the importance of being a beginner and compared the whole process to learning to ride a bike. Yes we fall off at first but we eventually get the hang of it.

I thought about this off and on for the rest of the day and decided it was an even better example than I thought because even when I was an accomplished bike rider, riding my bike across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco State U a couple times a week, I still managed to do something stupid enough to give me a concussion and quite a lot of torn ligaments in my arm. (I bent the handlebars with my arm when I fell)

And of course we've all seen published writers do the same kind of thing, that godawful sequel to Rosemary's Baby that Ira Levine wrote comes to mind. No matter how accomplished you are you can still take a nasty spill and look like an idiot in front of anyone who happens to notice.