Friday, June 22, 2007

Things that bring me up when I'm down

  1. Shiny new laptops. Or shiny refurbished laptops. Whatever. I should have caved a long time ago. Not only is this going to help the writing, now I won't have to print chapters posted on my critique group, read them and mark them up promptly, then have to wait days to find enough computer time to type up the notes and line edits. I can do it all on the laptop in the kitchen, while I'm waiting for this or that boy to finish his math. Sweet! Also, paper-free.
  2. Only having three chapters left to go to finish the WIP, and these are the three chapters I know exactly what to say since they've been in my head since the beginning. My only fear: there is a big emotional moment coming up, and I have a tendency to go all Marti Noxon on the emotional moments. I'll probably just let it all go full drama mode (frankly, it's fun to write, all over the top, you know?) and then dial it back in on the second pass.
  3. My husband saying that when I reach THE END the whole family should go out and celebrate, because it's a big milestone. I've heard so many horror stories lately of writers with spouses who don't support the time-suck which is writing (or the time-suck which is homeschooling), that he would just volunteer this is frankly very, very cool.
  4. Andaz Apna Apna, a Bollywood movie I've watched about a hundred times now. It's hard not to feel uplifted, what with all the singing and dancing and bizarre comedy bits. (Nothing on YouTube except a few of the comedy scenes, which won't make sense as they don't have subtitles, so you'll have to take my word on this).
  5. A certain 6-year-old who filled my office window with flowers from the clover in our yard, poking the little stems through the screen (he seems to have gotten a disproportionate amount of Irish blood in him; he loves his ma).
On an unrelated note, I just bought a book based solely on the cover. Well, I read the description and I've read enough of Jay Lake's short fic to know I like his style, but to be frankly honest, I knew I'd be buying this as soon as I saw the cover:




Tuesday, June 19, 2007

A sort of survivors guilt, I suppose...

As a solution to various problems you may encounter upon the way, let me suggest this: Make Good Art. It's very simple. But it seems to work.
Life fallen apart? Make good art. True love ran off with the milkman? Make good art. Bank foreclosing? Make good art. - Neil Gaiman
To which I'll add: "A third of your department laid off with no warning because the Filipinos are cheaper? Make good art."

*Sigh.* Rough night. Well, at least it wasn't me making anyone cry at the department meeting this time. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to finish the novel, listen to some Nick Drake, and have some wine. Maybe not in that order.

Friday, June 15, 2007

In Which I Cave In

I hate making major purchases. Hate it. I cried the day we bought our Subaru, and the negotiations for buying that TV were extensive (spread out over several months, but in the end I got built-in bookshelves in trade. Plus it helps that Quin's bonus check was enough to cover the TV he wanted and the new fridge that I was pushing for. Our electric bill has taken a noticeable drop since we got the new fridge, confirming my suspicion that the other one only looked like it was shut most of the time).

Not that I'm particularly frugal; my book spending borders on the out of control. But that's just ten or twenty dollars at a time. Spending hundreds of dollars all at once... I guess I'm always paranoid that some major disaster will befall us and I'll desperately wish I'd held onto that money. Or something. This isn't rational, I know.

All of this is just to say that I made another big purchase today, and the very worst kind, the kind that is something just for me and not the family. I bought myself a laptop. It's a refurbished Dell with no bells or whistles of any kind, as cheap as I could go and still get tech support (which is why I didn't pick anything up on eBay, although I could've gone cheaper there). I haven't actually gotten it yet; perhaps when it's here I'll be all excited and not low-level nauseous that I just dropped a load of cash all at once. I've been debating buying one for more than a year now. The last week's worth of writing time spent copy-typing from notebooks kind of clinched it for me. I think it would behoove me to find a more efficient way of doing this. Now I'm very fond of writing longhand, I'm not sure if I can be creative the same way with a keyboard (and that worry is fueling the nausea, I'm sure), but now that the homeschooling is taking more time than before, my writing time is feeling the pinch. So I pooled my quarterly bonus and some of my overtime money and took the plunge.

*sigh*

At any rate, I have four chapters left to go on the WIP plus some things I need to go back and add in earlier chapters. I've had this problem with integrating the two parts of the story, and there needs to be more conflict and foreshadowing earlier on. After much stewing I think I know what I need to do now. I'm on track for my July 6 deadline, then I'll let this whole thing sit for Harry Potter Month before giving it one last hard edit and then it's off on the query-go-round.

I've never submitted to agents before. I think that nausea just slid up a notch...

Monday, June 11, 2007

It probably doesn't mean anything...

But The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which usually only takes ten days to get a rejection back from, held onto "Blood and Ink" for more than a month. And the rejection is from Mr. Gordon Van Gelder, not the Slush God.

Yes, it probably means nothing. Still, I like that feeling like maybe, just maybe, I got a little closer. And now I have a story free for this quarter's Writers of the Future (I was beginning to think I'd have to give it a miss; I don't feel short story brilliance in me at the moment, plus the deadline falls before my self-imposed novel deadline).

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

My foreign language addiction

So I've mentioned before that I have this little addiction to learning new foreign languages. Now there's a limit to how far one can go with no one else to talk to in that language, so I usually pick up a sense of the mechanics and a feel for the pronunciation and then move on to the next one. I have at one point or another studied Spanish, German, Latin, Japanese, French, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic. I'm not remotely fluent in anything (one could make a pretty convincing argument against my fluency in English on same days), and my phobia against talking to anyone I don't already know pretty much limits my chances of ever practicing any of this in conversation. But I do like to read things in foreign languages, and the internet is great for finding stuff not in English. (I've read novels in Spanish and in German, although it's been so long since I've used my German I don't think I could do it now).

Mostly I do this because I find language tapes more diverting than TV shows when I'm treading the mill (a necessary but tedious 30 minutes I try to get in every day). The Pimsleur series in particular is excellent; it's all oral so you don't need to be holding a phrase book at the same time or anything, and rather than being a listen and repeat the phrase type thing, you have to come up with responses on your own to questions in the language you're learning. It really taxes the memory; a challenging kind of fun. The problem for me was that they only go up to 10 lessons in most languages (hence my mere smattering of Swedish and Norwegian). About a month ago when I was choosing which language to do next, I decided I wanted to really delve into one of the languages Pimsleur had more than 10 lessons in, and I wanted it to be something really challenging.

It came down to a coin toss between Japanese and Mandarin Chinese (I have tons of movies in these two languages, and it would be fun to understand them without the subtitles. Sadly, Cantonese is one of the languages Pimsleur only does 10 lessons in. I have more Catonese than Mandarin movies). Well, Mandarin won. This certainly has served its purpose as far as treading the mill goes; I've quit finding excuses not to do it because I look forward to the Chinese lessons. But the problem was as I've mentioned above, I largely use my foreign language skills to read, and this is strictly an oral program. Plus, Chinese? Well, I don't need to tell you their writing system is a bit of an intellectual Mount Everest. Luckily, it's my kind of rock climbing. I went out and got myself a book on Chinese writing and a monster stack of index cards.

And actually this plays into my whole being an example to my sons thing. Seeing mom learn something which is quite challenging for her by drilling flash cards is a much better motivator than just promising it really helps to learn that way. Aidan is learning Latin with flash cards pretty much on his own. I only go over them with him once when he gets his new words to make sure he's pronouncing it all correctly and then he drills them on his own while I drill mine.

I only recognize about 100 words so far (pretty good for a month's effort, though). It's enough so I can page through some of my books that have Chinese in them and pick out characters here and there I know. Then I found the coolest thing on YouTube: Wilber Pan karoake. (Wilber Pan is another one of those acts I saw on IMF, fell in love, and then had to buy his stuff from some guy in Hong Kong on eBay because it's not available here. Honestly, IMF is evil). Not only does this video have the written Chinese to match what he's singing (in Mandarin, not Cantonese, since he's from Taiwan) (actually he's from West Virginia, but that's not important now), they light up as he sings them. It's like the world's coolest teaching tool.

But my favorite video of his doesn't have the karoake feature. Which is a shame. But it does have subtitles, and it does feature Wilber Pan in a sort of kung fu epic pastiche. Cool.


Tuesday, June 05, 2007

My May book report

OK, my house is back in order (I would post pics, but to be honest it doesn't look any different. When the shelves are finished and the doors are on, I'll post a pic), I'm all caught up on critiquing I've been dreadfully negligent with (sort of, there's that stack of short stories for the Backspace contest I haven't even started on yet), and I only worked 19 hours this weekend instead of 21 or 22, so I'm feeling pretty good! I finished up working early enough on Sunday to take the boys to see Pirates of the Caribbean. I liked the second one better than the first; I now like the third better than the second. There's no way to craft an ending that will satisfy everyone, of course, but I have to say this ending satisfied me very, very much. I particularly appreciate the care they took to give every character a nice ending, whether it be Admiral Norrington or the characters I refer to as the Pirate Rosencratz and Guildenstern and the British Navy Rosencratz and Guildenstern (if they have actual names, I don't know them, but I bet you know who I mean).

My only complaint: I could have had a little more Chow-Yun Fat. On the upside, I got a new toy yesterday which should meet all my Chow-Yun Fat needs:

(There was also a specific image in that movie that is nearly exactly something that happens in my novel. Gave me quite a chill. I could probably describe mine better. Well, that's always true. Still, very cool movie.)

At any rate, I have this monthly book wrap-up to write, then that stack of short stories to read, then it's back to the novel. It's been tough finding time to write these last three weeks; homeschooling a fourth grader and a first grader is a lot more work than homeschooling a third grader and a kindergartner was. We're working together as a family to find a way of doing things that still gives me time to write, because apparently I get a bit shrewish when I'm not writing. (I wonder, if I say "shrew" is that going to up my "Kiss me Kate spanking scene" hits? Probably not as much as putting "Kiss me Kate spanking scene" in here. Well, lately my biggest source of activity has been the "Which Avatar character are you?" quiz and not spanking. But I digress).

May was a banner month for reading with 13 books. Sadly, many of these were either new buys or from the library, so it didn't really take that To Be Read number down much. Actually, since I put everything on Library Thing and labeled my TBR stack, that number went up (apparently I'd missed some things on my first tally). It now stands at 273.

Now the largest reason the homeschooling is more work these days is that first grade is a big change from kindergarten. The other big change is that Aidan moved from grammar stage to logic stage in the trivium (which is how we homeschool, classical style refers to the trivium. For the wildly curious, here's an essay on what that means from the woman who wrote the book which I've been using rather loosely as a guide). Part of that is that he's added logic into his course load (he loves it, but if you know Aidan that's not in the least surprising). Another part of that is he is learning to work more independently. I now give him a list of assignments on Monday that he has to have finished by Friday and he decides when he does what. Which has led to some very long Fridays, but it's an important skill to learn. The other big change is that his literature-based history program now has him reading chapter books and short novels rather than picture books.

Which of course means I have to read those books as well. As a student I had an uncanny ability to pretend to have read a book I hadn't (I got an A on my Robinson Crusoe test and paper in college without ever getting past page 30, and that was sans Cliff Notes or ever seeing the movie version. It pays to stay awake in class). I don't think I can fake it as well as a teacher. Plus, there's the whole setting a good example thing.

So three of the books I read were for history: The Door in the Wall by Marguerite De Angeli (dull, dull, dull! Strangely enough, Aidan liked this one better than I did), The Trumpeter of Krakow by Eric P. Kelly (I quite liked this one. Bonus points for trusting us on "Philosopher's Stone". Am I the only one who resents that American Harry Potter is "Sorcerer's Stone", as if Americans cringe at the word philospher?), and Beowulf: A New Telling by Robert Nye, which I also quite liked (not as well as the Seamus Heaney, but that one would be a bit much for a 9-year-old. He'll be reading it in high school for sure).

Four of the books I read were from the library. Two were Robert Zubrin books I read for Mars research for the novel: Entering Space and First Landing (technically a novel, but in actuality the more helpful of the two for my purposes). I also have been toying with the idea of writing a YA novel next (keyword: toying). To that end, I've been combing YA book lists and putting stacks of them on hold at the library. Most I only really skim through. I'm trying to get a general sense of content, length, and that. They are overwhelming fantasy; what I'm toying with would be straight-up sci-fi. I haven't had much luck finding current sci-fi YA. I did find YA steampunk which I liked enough to read all the way through: Airborn and Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel (the one is the sequel to the other). If you like airships and ornithopters and steam power, I highly recommend them. As with all YA, it's not just for kids.

The last Hellblazer finally turned up from my Christmas batch: Reasons to be Cheerful. Perhaps it was just reading it on its own after reading all the others back to back, but it felt very disjointed. It didn't really have a beginning, and it definitely didn't have an ending.

I got books for Mothers Day as well: Hellboy: Wake the Devil (Hellboy is one of my favorite comic book movies; the source material is of course quite good as well), and John Scalzi's trilogy Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony. A very satisfying read. He gets compared to Heinlein a lot; I think he's better than Heinlein. Scalzi's women actually act like real women, just for starters. (This is a long-running argument in my house, Heinlein's women. I do give him points for trying, but I don't really like his women characters).

That just leaves the book I read first in May: Virtual Light by William Gibson. That was the third time I've read it. It's my favorite Gibson novel so far. I have a few I've not read yet, and those I'm tackling next.

You know, after I finish the novel. I'm knocking that deadline back a week. I expect to be finished by July 6. This will give me one more homeschool vacation week to get things done but will still have me done before all the Harry Potter things start coming out (there was a trailer before Pirates that had more scenes than the one I'd already seen. I'm beginning to suspect that my favorite Harry Potter book is about to become my favorite Harry Potter movie).

Friday, June 01, 2007

At the expense of seeming like I spend too much time on You Tube...

Look, I was a die-hard MTV fan back in my teen years. You know, back when they used to play music videos. These days, I'm just grateful that my favorite band has so many Brazilian fans who post crappy copies of their videos on You Tube or I'd never see any of it. (Music videos are basically advertising for records, yes? So why don't more bands put them up on their websites? You know, like OK GO does.)

Now, it would not be the weirdest thing I've ever seen on You Tube to see 20-year-old concert footage of my favorite band cut to a John Lennon song (at the very least, it loses out to the scenes from The Matrix cut to "Lifelines". Most a-ha songs don't really mesh with The Matrix; that one really doesn't). Imagine my surprise, that's not John Lennon singing! How is it possible that an a-ha cover of a John Lennon song exists, and I don't have it?

Just one way: it's part of an Amnesty International compiliation which won't be out until June 25 (which just happens to be someone's birthday; however, I don't think this is on his wish list).




(Look, my house is still in disarray as that quick finishing of the bookcases that was supposed to be done in one day still isn't finished. My computer is all-but-inaccessible. Perhaps next week I can write a blog that takes more than five minutes. Like my May book report, for instance. Soon. Soon.)