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/

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.

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.

But a few things are making me turn my attention back toward writing a bit.  Firstly, Context is coming up in a couple months.  I haven’t registered yet, but there are a couple of new writing workshops that look interesting so I expect I’ll be going again this year. Always a good time, and always good at refreshing my interest in my works-in-progress.

Secondly, I’ve discovered the wonderful world of podcasts, and the one that’s kept me going on my hour-long daily commute to work is Adventures in SciFi Publishing. It’s great to hear interviews with authors and editors both known and relatively unknown (at least to me), and to hear about their take on the publishing industry as well as the writing process.

Thirdly, Twitter has become surprisingly motivational as I’ve begun to follow the tweets of various published writers and their daily thoughts and activities. Seeing people post about writing is wonderful; whether it’s their word count or their time spent at the computer or their frustration at revising, just seeing it being posted and talked about is something I’ve been enjoying. It makes me want to be doing it too.

Tweaked the blog tonight, updating some links and tidying up the page hierarchy a bit. Now running out of brain cells to rub together since it’s after midnight, and I have usually turned into a pumpkin by now, so off I go.

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.

Alas, my old partner, a blue Acer One, finally bit the dust. After my previous post where I thought loading up a new OS had fixed the problem, it proceeded to lock up twice on me. So really, it still works, but it’s unreliable at best. The last thing I want to deal with is writing on a computer that could lock up and lose my work at any time. I don’t consciously hit “save” often enough for that.

The bad news is, what I thought was Windows 7 preloaded on this fine little netbook actually turned out to be Windows 7 Starter. The word “starter” apparently means removing half the features of Windows 7, including changing your desktop image, theme colors, and sounds. Really? Changing the desktop is an advanced feature? Or is this just Microsoft’s bitchy attempt to annoy you enough to shell out an extra $80 for the full package?

Weak sauce. If I find enough other features I will use on Win7, I might upgrade, but as of now, it’s just one more reason to think poorly of Microsoft.

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.

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?

A link from the Science Fiction Writers of America via Facebook led me here,which in turn led me to look into it further, bringing me to a related discussion prompt from Anne Rice on Amazon.  And I also browsed some of the self-published books available for Kindle. There are definitely some out there of the dubious quality I feared I would find. These are fairly easy to spot, however, when you read the descriptions provided by the authors. In fact, as I browsed, I could almost always tell a self-published book by a) the price (often over $5) and b) the description, which would either read like an outline of the entire plot, or would take great pains to describe what the reader will experience, the themes present in the book, or how it could be compared to Star Wars/Lord of the Rings/<insert timeless classic here>.

Not all the self-published Kindle books looked like this, and I expect anyone who can present a professional-looking blurb and a reasonable price probably has a much greater chance of being purchased/read by someone who isn’t related to them. Another issue I ran into was that most authors didn’t mention the length of the work for sale, so I didn’t know if my $2.99 was going to buy me a 5k-word short story or a 100k-word novel. But I don’t own a Kindle, so maybe that’s obvious to some people by looking at the file size or something.

I have to admit, I find it tempting.  Not for my novels, but for shorter things, the things I have trouble finding an appropriate magazine market for, or that 15k-word sci-fi novella that’s almost finished (where the hell am I going to sell a novella?)   Not as a means of income, but as a place to put something I wrote that is public enough that someone browsing Amazon might actually run across it, risk their dollar on it, and read it.

But then comes my fear of the self-publishing stigma, and of one day having to tell a prospective big-house publisher that I have a story “for sale on Amazon for Kindle” and getting that look…the one that says “Ahh, so you couldn’t sell your story to anyone and so you SELF-PUBLISHED it. Guess you’re not the author we thought you were…”

Irrational fear, or not?  Is this the too-easy way to see one’s work for sale as a real “book”, or the future of publishing come upon us?

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.

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 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.