Convention time again!

It’s that time of year again: the Context Convention! I’ll probably only attend one writing workshop this year, mostly because I can’t justify spending the money when my actual writing output has been so minimal for the past year. I can listen and learn all I like, but if I don’t actually apply the knowledge, what’s the point?

As the Author GoH, LE Modesitt, is unable to make it due to a family emergency, John Scalzi is filling in as a special guest on some panels on Saturday. I’m attending Friday for a workshop but if I can swing it I’d love to go Saturday as well.

If not…I will attempt at the very least to write some words down this weekend. In a story, not a blog.

Convention website below — come one, come all!

http://www.contextsf.org/

 

Blog Update: New Theme

Yes, I’ve gone and done it. I changed my blog’s layout/theme/look.

I’m also pondering a new slant to the blog in terms of content, along the theme of Words and Numbers. Because I’ve done a lot less writing lately, and my daytime alter-ego (as a mild-mannered marketing analyst) takes up a lot of my time and energy…so I might as well blog about that too, right?

Not that campaign forecasting and nifty data graphs are nearly as interesting as writing stuff…well okay, I admit it, I do find them interesting. I am a geek, after all, as well as a writer. And thus, sometimes running a well-crafted SQL query is just as satisfying to me as completing a 5,000-word short story. (Sometimes.)

I’ll ponder this for a bit. In the meantime, here’s a nifty bit of marketing directed by Rob Zombie. From a writing point of view, it’s well-done, and from a marketing creative point of view it’s damn clever. Since I don’t work for them I can’t speak to the effectiveness of the campaign from a revenue perspective, but let’s just say that it’s the only commercial that has EVER IN MY LIFE made me want to go out and buy laundry detergent. Ever.

 

Nighttime Rambling

Tweaked a couple sentences on a short story and now consider it publishable. Then realized that since it’s back story for the vampire novel, it ends up being a pretty typical vampire situation with not a lot of unique stuff in it. So format is great, but content not really salable. Oh well.

Moved on to write a couple quick paragraphs in another short story, a seasonal stand-alone.  Paused to look up autumn flowers, end up reading about persimmons for fifteen minutes. Obviously too tired to be productive anymore. Alas.

Still enjoying Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing podcast.  My commute was especially long today, so I’m catching up.

Enough rambling; off to bed.

 

Getting the Groove Back

So I’m trying to get back into the writing groove.  It’s not easy.  I’ve been working the day job a lot.  My husband’s been working his day job even more, which means maintaining regular household things like grocery shopping and laundry and such falls more on my shoulders.  And then there’s Mr. Baby, who will be turning 6 months old this weekend, and his insatiable need for attention.  Not that he doesn’t deserve it, the cute little stinker.

 

New Partner in Crime

I have a new partner in crime, and its name is Toshiba.

Actually, it’s a Toshiba Mini NB300 netbook, the coppery color of metallic chocolate, with a shiny silver keyboard and textured stripes on the outer case. Screen is 10.1″, battery life is …hmm, apparently I don’t have a tilde on this keyboard… battery life is about 11 hours, and the keys are spaced far enough apart that even my big hands can type by touch with fewer mistakes.

 

Reimage and Refocus

Testing out the newly reimaged laptop on the back porch (which my husband was kind enough to deal with after a nasty virus attack.) Very nice. Have to admit that Ubuntu is pretty slick, and now that I’ve played around with it and am starting to get comfortable, I don’t think I’ll miss Windows much. At least, not the Windows XP I had on here before…Windows 7 is pretty nice, which I have on my PC, but not necessarily worth buying for the netbook that I really only use for word processing and blog updates.

Not sure where to focus on for my writing, now that I’m looking at getting back into it. Maybe keep working on the girls. I’m so far out of the submissions game, I don’t even remember what I had ready short-story-wise, or where I was considering sending it. I do sometimes think how it would be if I stayed home and wrote full time – dedicated parts of the day/week to blogging, market research, story submissions and other administrative tasks, and of course, writing. But I do like my job, and I also like the company of co-workers, which I wouldn’t have. So I just keep thinking, maybe someday if the time is right, if the opportunity is there. I’ve been successful in life so far with a balance of letting things happen and making things happen; it just seems to be a matter of knowing which is right at a given moment.

And of course, in the lazy summer evenings, sitting on my back porch with my cats and listening to the calls of blue jays and cardinals…it’s definitely easier to let things happen. And I’m okay with that.

 

Is Self-Publishing Still a Bad Word?

I’ve always bought into the idea that self-publishing is for people who can’t make it as real writers. That is, they self-publish because they can’t get any real publishing houses to accept their work, so they’ve decided to do it themselves so they can call themselves a “published” author. The vanity-press. The ego-stroking commitment that leaves you with eighteen boxes of your very own published novel sitting in your garage, while you try in vain to sell copies to local bookstores, at related conventions or fairs, and finally, in the deepest desperation, out of the trunk of your car at busy intersections around town.

I’m exaggerating, of course. And with the advent of print-on-demand publishing, self-publishers have been saved some of the expense and storage-space requirements, although the careful editing and sales marketing still fell entirely on the shoulders of the author. But now, with the advent of the e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, are the penalties of self-publishing really as harsh? Or is there actually some advantage to getting your name and your work out before the public eye at a reasonable price for them to take a risk on…say, $2-3/book?

 

One Small Step for a Turkey

Progress for the day: 300 words and a pot of turkey miso soup.

Our household has started working toward a new goal in earnest: cooking instead of eating out. This coincides nicely with the weekend that I decided to roast a whole turkey, providing easy-to-use leftovers and meal ideas. So this week: Thanksgiving-stype turkey dinner, turkey divan, and turkey soup. And I still have leftover turkey to freeze, along with four cups of turkey stock for future use.

This requires more planning, however. Wednesday through Friday I have other activities in the evening, so I don’t have as much time to cook before we faint from hunger in the after-work hours. And more cooking means less writing time. Yet I still managed 300 words on a short fantasy story I thought up a week or two ago. And a blog post.

So now, the soup goes in the fridge and I call it a fairly productive day, especially for a Monday.

 

The Idea Box

I currently have, among my works-in-progress, several novels. A couple of them aren’t even just novels; each instead is the tip of an epic, convoluted, series-length tale which may or may not already have the far-off ending worked out to poetic perfection in my head.

For some reason, small-scale stories don’t work well for me. I’m long-winded, for one thing. For another thing, I write slowly, so I have lots of time to come up with more and more ideas before I type “The End”, and these ideas blow the story up bigger and bigger like so many puffs of air in a balloon.

As a result, I end up working with the same characters, the same world, the same (convoluted) plots and subplots for months on end, desperately trying to get to The End and call Draft 1 Finished. Sometimes I get stuck. Sometimes I put it down for too long and have trouble getting back into it, even though I’m ready to keep working toward The End. So to get back into the writing groove, I want to write something a little lighter, a little shorter. And if I don’t have anything handy to work on, I pull out the Idea Box.

My Idea Box isn’t actually a box; it’s a folder. Well, two folders, now that I’ve gotten myself more organized; two hanging file folders labeled “Fantasy Ideas” and “Sci-Fi Ideas”, with newspaper articles and torn-out notebook pages and scribbled-on napkins tucked away into them.  It’s a way to collect the random new story ideas that come to me, and put them someplace where I can pick them up and rifle through them whenever I need something new to work on.

If you’re a writer, I hope you have an Idea Box.  How do you keep yours?  Digitized on your computer?  In a journal?  Scrapbook-style? (I’ve never been able to get into scrapbooking, although I appreciate other people’s work in the field.)

If you don’t have an Idea Box of your own, maybe you can use a random plot generator to start one.  Or use it to brainstorm some new ideas if your Idea Box needs a refresher. I think mine does…excuse me… *click click*

 

I’ll be Revising for Christmas…

Tonight I revised and added to the sci-fi novella that takes place in my unwritten Epic Sci-Fi Tale’s universe.  The main change was an idea I came up with months ago, to add small intro bits to each section, like journal entries and recorded conversations etc.  I can’t decide if it enhances the story, or if it confuses things.  (This is where the critique group comes in handy, I think.)  Finished word count is around 15,000, so it added about a thousand words.

I thought about tackling the alternate-ending I thought up for this story, but it’s really more of an alternate-middle, and therefore involves removing and rewriting a pretty substantial chunk to see where the character goes when he makes that alternate decision.  And seeing as this is the first writing I’ve done since early November, I thought I’d try something a little less intimidating.

Brings a little calm to the busy season. And as always, my new year’s resolution: write more, submit more, and therefore be more awesome in a writerly way.