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on boston & tori

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

My feet hurt. But I am not particularly surprised by this considering I wandered around Boston most of the day yesterday and I desperately need new sandals because my old ones, while comfortable, are sort of falling apart and I think they’ve forgotten about a little thing called arch support.

Wandering around Boston reminded me that I don’t particularly miss living there, especially in the summer. I actually prefer Boston buried under winter slush to sweltering in that concrete-flavored heat.

We were in town for the day to see Tori Amos at the WhateverBankIt’sNamedAfterNow Pavilion, but we went in early and walked around and went to see Julie & Julia. I thought it was delightful, even beyond being a 2+ hour air conditioned respite from the weather. It’s a tad too long and made me desperately hungry, but overall I thought it was marvelous. I commented to the boy that it was fun to see a movie that felt like a romantic comedy but was about already established relationships and the romantic stuff wasn’t the core of the film. I can’t think of anything to compare it to, really, but I very much enjoyed it. A great deal of it is about writing, too. Recommended, but do yourself a favor and eat fist. I was crazy hungry afterward.

(After the movie we went to dinner, of course. Good, but not enough butter.)

We were pretty much melting by concert time, but Tori was all kinds of wonderful as usual. This was our sixth show, and we had better seats than we’ve ever had (17th row, dead center) and oddly most of the row in front of us was empty. The show was great, the encore was amazing and really, other than some nitpicky qualms about the setlist (we’d seen a fair deal of the same songs on the last tour and had been hoping for a bit more variety – setlist, for those wot care) and the thermal discomfort it was marvelous. Tori is simply stellar live. All the stuff from the new album was gorgeous. I’m running out of adjectives, but you likely get my point. Really, it’s difficult to write anything other than OMGILOVETORI and things about rocking socks. Not that I was wearing socks, but if I had been they would have been rocked.

Now I have that post-Tori depression where I rather desperately want to see her play again as soon as possible. And my feet hurt.

In other, less foot-hurting news: I spent a large portion of the weekend (and part of the wandering around in Bostonian hot yesterday) bouncing novel revision ideas off the boy and I think I’ve come up with a good handful of ideas worth pursuing. So I’m very pleased about that and I’m going to try to spend some time today and tomorrow outlining & organizing & letting the ideas simmer some more, and hopefully before long I’ll have a nicely seasoned revision stew to eat, or write. Analogies getting away from me again, tricksy things.

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on uncertainties and crystal balls

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I finally updated WordPress (thanks Paul!) and now the shiny new interface is freaking me out. I am easily distracted by shiny things.

This has been rather a crazy week, and I’m kind of surprised it’s Thursday already. Lots going on in the great literary agent search but nothing I can really talk about yet.

(There should be So You Think You Can Dance for agents. I have nowhere to go with that thought that doesn’t end up someplace weird involving sequins and spandex, so maybe I just want an option for call-in agent voting. And a panel of judges to critique everything for me. Wouldn’t that be great, for every decision you ever had to make to be able to consult a panel of experts that would give you advice and pithy remarks and scream a lot when something exciting happens? I’m going to close this parenthetical before it gets out of hand. )

Anyway, everything at the moment is kind of uncertain and I’m still playing the waiting game, though I do have a sort of vague time line now. I really don’t know which way things will go from here, but it should be somewhere interesting.

I think this is the point where I would ask longingly for a crystal ball, were it not for the fact that I could easily walk down the street and purchase one if I wanted to. I’m not very good at scrying of any sort, though.

I could get one for decorative purposes, though. They are pretty. And I do have that weakness for shiny objects. This one was sitting in the window of a shop on Essex Street.

crystal ball

I think I’ll stick with my tarot cards for now. Queens are being painted at the moment, in deserts and oceans and mountains and night gardens. They should be finished sometime next week.

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birthday

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Today is my birthday.

I have been working on a birthday present for myself, and for sharing. It officially starts on Friday, but it is being unwrapped today to be more festive.

flax-golden tales is an experiment in words and pictures.

For awhile now, the idea of doing short stories based on images has been percolating around in my brain. Something akin to Chris Van Allsburg’s brilliant The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, only with slightly longer tales.

But I didn’t know what kind of images I wanted to use.

And then I was looking through my friend Carey’s photographs, and something clicked. She finds marvelous things with her camera, capturing images brimming with story.

Carey granted me permission to use her photos, so I started writing these tiny stories and stole an appropriate title from a Shel Silverstein poem I have always loved.

And thus, flax-golden tales is born. Please wish it (and me!) many happy returns.

Each Friday, starting on July 10th, I will post a photograph of Carey’s with an accompanying ten-sentence story.

Stories will be posted here on the blog, collected on their own page, here, and cross-posted to the flaxgolden community on dreamwidth. (Thanks to someone absolutely lovely, there is now an LJ-feed over here.)

I’ve had a lot of fun planning this, and I hope it will continue to be a lot of fun both to write & read as it goes along. Comments, questions, concerns & birthday wishes welcome!

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
— Invitation, by Shel Silverstein

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randomness for the 29th day of june

Monday, June 29th, 2009

I finished the pages for the tarot deck today. They’re over here on LJ and in the tarot minors gallery on phantomwise.com. I have the sketches for the knights finished but I likely won’t start painting them until next week.

I am working on the aforementioned unexpected YA novel idea and it’s going pretty well. I think I want to do a relatively fast first draft over the next couple of months and see where it wants to go.

Query-wise I am playing the waiting game, and I seem to be getting better at it. Or better at distracting myself by baking cookies and drinking lots of wine.

I can’t believe it’s almost July.

That’s about it. Apropos of nothing, here is a photo I took on Saturday as we were driving off into the sunset.

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attempting to be zen

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

The past week or so has been all up & down in various ways. More rejections, more requests. And lots and lots of rain. Strangely, the up & down makes it easier to be zen about the whole querying process, and I’m trying to just go with the flow and be patient about the whole thing.

I have plenty to distract myself with. Paintings to paint, carrot ginger soup to make, kittens that need tummy rubs. I forget sometimes that I feel better when I keep myself busy, and that it’s a very good way to keep my brain from being neurotic.

Oddly, though, the writing part of my brain does not seem content with my work-in-progress of choice, piecing together my subterranean library. I’ve accomplished a lot as far as reworking the structure and the plot and I know what the shape of it is and what needs to be cut, what needs to be rewritten and what needs to be added.

And yet, my brain doesn’t want to write it.

My brain, tricksy thing that it is, wants to write something entirely different. I ignored it for awhile, but over the last couple of days I’ve been allowing myself to play in this new novel and I’m rather enjoying myself. It’s different than anything I’ve done before. It’s linear! It’s YA! It’s not fantasy! It’s speculative, in a way that feels fantastical, but it’s not a straight-up fantasy.

It’s coming together fairly quickly, too, so I think I’ll play here for awhile before returning to the other, more complicated, non-linear place. Maybe it’s just all about karmic lessons in going with the flow and not trying to over-plan things.

So yeah, that’s the current state of the nation. Spending the end of this rainy, rainy June playing things by ear and attempting to be zen. And I’m working on a super secret project that will be announced in July for my birthday, too.

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on rejections & muffins & crosswalks

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Within a matter of ten hours both of the full manuscripts I had out with agents were rejected. That was not a fun ten hours. Granted, I was asleep for most of the hours in between, but still.

The first rejection was extremely nice, personalized, and gave me no reason to think there’s anything concretely wrong with the novel, just that it wasn’t this particular agent’s cup of tea. Which is fine, it’s a weird sort of novel.

The second rejection was a form letter. That one kind of stung a bit.

So I made banana chocolate chip muffins. I’ve never actually made them before, but I make banana muffins fairly frequently and saw the banana + chocolate chip thing mentioned somewhere recently and gave it a try. They came out wonderfully, and I am very pleased.

Then I sent out five more query letters. And put a fair amount of Malibu coconut rum in my Pepsi Throwback.

So yeah, I’m disappointed but I know that this whole process is slow and complicated and I’m trying to be zen about it. I think getting an immediate positive reaction made this hurt a bit more than it might have otherwise, but at least it was comparatively quick.

Then the boy and I went for a walk, because the sun had finally come out after it had rained for days. I had my camera in my bag so I took some photos.

I lost my light before we got home but I got a few lovely shots, some of which are now up on my Flickr photostream (this one of the top of a damp tomb in the cemetery is particularly nice, as well as this door knocker that I covet) including this one of the push to cross button while we were waiting for the light to change at a crosswalk. Yes I did push it before I took the photo.

It strikes me now, with photos and rejections and muffins and tea all jumbled together in my brain, that this is precisely where I am with the novel. I’m at the crosswalk. I’ve pushed the button. I’ve sent out my queries and polished my manuscript and now it’s just a matter of waiting for the light to change.

I just have to trust that it will change, indeed, and I can preoccupy myself with photos and muffins and tea and creative things in the meantime.

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out of one story, into another

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

I am attempting to be patient while I wait to hear back on manuscripts out with agents. Emphasis on attempt. I polished my nails! They’re now a lovely grey violet and harder to bite.

So, while I try to be zen like my iGoogle TeaHouse Fox, I am attempting to ease my brain out of the story that is now out in the world and back to the one that is sitting in bits and pieces in Scrivener.

It’s easier than I had expected, shifting gears from one story into another. I re-read everything I had written so far for this one, took some notes, scribbled down snatches of dialogue and ideas for scenes. It has more shape than I’d thought it did, which I think is helpful. But I’d say the draft is only half done. It’s about 55k at the moment, most of that done for NaNoWriMo ’08 and a large percentage of that needs massive overhaul.

I like being back at this stage of the game. Figuring things out, putting pieces together. It’s more exploratory. More of an adventure.

Things that are helping take my head out of the circus and into my cat-infested subterranean library include:

Sia’s album Colour the Small One, which I listened to a lot while I was originally writing. Especially the “Breathe Me” remixes. The circus doesn’t have a particular album that it feels like, but the library feels like this.

This painting that I stumbled upon by accident, looking for something else. A Place of Her Own, by James C. Christensen:

And I keep finding quotes that resonate for this one, which is unusual for me:

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.

- Eugene O’Neill

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

- Virginia Woolf

It’s like going back to a familiar country after a long absence. Should be an interesting place to spend the next few months. Hoping to have a full draft by the end of the summer. We’ll see where things go from here…

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queries

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

One of the cards in my tarot reading from last week was about approaching literary agents. That card was the Eight of Wands, and in the spread it was reversed so the wands looked like the wands were comets headed skywards. Anya and I both thought it was a “get on with it already!” kind of card, and so I decided to start sending out query letters a bit earlier than I’d planned.

I’ve had my query letter ready for awhile now, I finally came up with a decent synopsis (it’s hard to synopsize something that’s non-linear) and the manuscript has been polished to a high shine. I’ve done my research, I’m ready to move on to the querying stage of the game.

I was going to start sending queries out at the end of the week or so, and instead I tried to start sending them yesterday.

That didn’t work.

I kept encountering formatting snafus and little problem after little problem, so I abandoned the idea of the Monday querying and instead got myself super-organized. Went over my manuscript again, proofread all my letters, basically got everything ready to go today, because Tuesdays are Zeus’s day. Or something.

Anyway, I sent my first batch of queries out at 10am this morning.

I had a request for a partial manuscript & synopsis and another for a full in about half an hour.

Two hours later I got another request for a full.

I thought this process was supposed to be slow? I really didn’t expect such quick responses. I am surprised and giddy and nervous and excited and I keep making high-pitched noises that frighten the cats.

So, yeah, we’ll see what happens from here. Eep.

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busy busy

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Yesterday I finally wrote my synopsis, the boy edited all my grammar, and now I only have a handful of editing notes to address and queries to personalize and then I’ll be all ready to send this crazy novel out into the world. Scary, but exciting.

Also yesterday I made eggplant parmesan and we went for a walk and I got a handful of nice photos in the almost-sunset light.

Oh, and I ordered a laser printer. Because I need one. And the cats need more electronics to sit on.

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happy towel day!

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Trapped the wonderful land of editing and synopsizing, but I know where my towel is.

Since I am busy being a hoopy frood and trying to condense a non-linear narrative into a cohesive synopsis, here, watch Maru with the Big Box, because it is possibly the best thing ever:

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