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The comments and digressions of a struggling science fiction novelist. One who is admittedly not living in an unheated garret, has a nice family, good job, and absolutely no reason not to write.

Mild Content Warning:

I don't intend this to be a political journal, but because I am what I am, there will be occasional flashes of conservative opinion. Take them with a grain of salt, a slice of lime, and feel free to argue with me. Just keep it family-friendly.
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Jun. 30th, 2009 @ 01:18 pm Agent Quest
It's like harumancy. Staring into brief emails, trying to understand the will of the gods in commas and apostrophes and the space between words.

I got an email from Agent #2--I had withdrawn my ms from his queue when I was dealing with Agent #1--saying he had partially read Wind out of Twilight  before he got the withdrawal message. He asked me to re-submit when I was ready again and promised a faster response time than he advertises on his website.

I'm going to take that as a good sign . . .
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Jun. 26th, 2009 @ 07:39 pm Re-writes Redux
I have declared war on sentence fragments.  I got tired of  page after page of nagging prompts from MS Word, finally realizing that I was relying too much on them to create dramatic effect. So now I am looking for green squiggly lines and trying to write my way out of them. It's like the time I trained myself out of using "he was beginning to" type of verb construction.

It keeps the horrible realization that it's almost July, and I'm barely one-quarter of the way through the re-write that's supposed to be done in 2 weeks, away from the front of my mind :P
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Jun. 24th, 2009 @ 08:36 am Armadillocon
Has anyone been to Armadillocon? Or wants to go?

It seems a smaller (and affordable!), but well-attended con, with more of an emphasis on books than other media. It also has a writer's workshop with some interesting instructors: http://www.fact.org/dillo/writers/index.htm

I'm thinking about going if no conflicts bubble up in my life.



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Jun. 9th, 2009 @ 08:19 am Somewhere in Eastern Afghanistan
He's somewhere in eastern Afghanistan now.

Or maybe not--after all, the army trademarked "hurry up and wait". He could just as easily be sitting on the tarmac in an airfield in Germany or Kyrgyzstan, desperately searching for wifi, his laptop in his lap, his M249 next to him. Or sleeping. In the days I was able to spend with him before he left, I watched in awe as he slept anywhere and in any position, waking up within a few minutes of when he was supposed to.

It was interesting meeting the other families. Young wives who knew exactly how the army worked and what went best in a care package, another mother who understood when I said it was just like the first day of kindergarten, NCOs with multiple tours who were calm and relaxed.

I restrained myself from embarrassing him in front of his squad, although the temptation was great. I did give in once, when I met his platoon sergeant,  who understood perfectly how important it was that  young soldiers KEEP IN CONTACT WITH THEIR MOTHERS . Any letter to him complaining of neglect would be taken seriously.

Soldier boy was practically dying by my side. It was wonderful.

Ah well. Time to put together my first care package, consisting of all the things he left behind in the rental car :)
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May. 9th, 2009 @ 03:29 am The laws of Hollywood
Went to see the new Star Trek yesterday, in the company of new and old friends, and I can give it a "pretty good, worth paying full price".  I will say that J J Abrams showed a tinge of genius here, because despite plot holes that an ancient Greek god could stroll through and not muss his perfectly coiffed head and a certain character who slowed the story to a crawl each time he appeared, Abrams recognized what it is that keeps Star Trek  vital, and it's not the fan boys. It's fanfiction. And the women who write it. (all right, all right, I know guys read fanfiction. And write it. But the people who started the whole show were women. And they were Trekkies)

I hope Abrams makes buckets of money, 'cause the non-canonical plot line around a certain character was straight out the dramatic imaginations of adolescent girls everywhere. As someone who appreciates that sort of story, all I can say is, "buckets. Buckets!" Adolescent boys have been kings of the cinema for too many years.

I'm fooling myself. the movie will make buckets, but Hollywood won't be able to figure out why, and the adolescent boys who make the movies will say, "Huh, it was the underpants. More Rigellian slave girls, stat!"
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Mar. 12th, 2009 @ 01:27 pm A marvelous way to cheer up
After getting a great rejection from one agent, ie, if I fix certain problems, she'll look at it again, my mood was swinging back and forth: She liked it! . . .  clumsy passages mixed with brilliant . . . imaginative . . . the ending sucked . . .

So in between happiness at the compliments and despair at the thought of going back and reworking this problem child--it's like an unwashed and insolent adolescent that isn't happy at home, but refuses to leave--I found the antidote. A movie called Jodhaa Akbar. An Indian movie about a 16th-century Mughal emperor and his romance with his Hindu bride. it was three and a half hours of spectacle, jewelry, soap opera, war elephants, and marvelous music.

Much to my delight, I've found plenty of clips of the best musical scenes on youtube. The Domestic Teenager has decided that I've turned into a fangirl, but at least, as she graciously tells me, not a *rabid* fangirl.

Well, maybe just a little rabid. Here's a sample: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF6l32b_r24

The setting is that the emperor, after hearing complaints from the Ulema, (a council of Islamic scholars) about the heresy of allowing Hindu worship within the walls of Agra, hears an unknown woman's voice singing a hymn to Krishna . . .
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Mar. 6th, 2009 @ 04:11 pm And the moron of the year award goes to . . .
Bogwitch64's posts on the importance of being careful in your queries impels me to this admission--two days ago, I sent out a query with the wrong agent's name in the greeting . . .

And in the secret resort in the Catskills where agents and editors lurk and drink gallons of mojitos, my name will be bandied about with much laughter and my career as a writer will be ended before it ever began.

bah
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Feb. 2nd, 2009 @ 08:57 am And another one . . .
A form rejection from Kristin Nelson Agency--but they only wanted a letter, no samples or synopsis, so I considered them a long-shot.

I really wish the order of encouragement-rejection were reversed. Although, when I think about it, it's bringing me down quite gently :)
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Jan. 29th, 2009 @ 09:39 am And almost as fast . . .
A "thanks, but no thanks" from the Rappaport Agency. Which I though was rather gracious of them, the standard seems to be "if we don't answer, we're not interested."

I went ahead and withdrew my submission from the one agent who asks for the full ms on  the initial contact, but I've left the others alone--they were all queries or partials, so I'm fairly sure they don't breach the two-week exclusive Laurie McLean is asking for.

Anyway, off at lunchtime to get the ms printed out. It's definitely time to invest in a good network printer.
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Jan. 28th, 2009 @ 03:59 pm That was fast . . .
I finally got the courage to send out queries over the lunch hour to my short list of agents, and got a response within hours asking for the full ms and a two-week exclusive (from a real agency--larsen-pomada)

blink. blink.

I'm sitting here, wrestling with hardware errors in a tape loader and wondering what just happened.
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Jan. 6th, 2009 @ 11:58 am Time to do backups
LiveJournal has apparently cut 20 of 28 employees, most of whom were product managers and engineers.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5124184/the-russian-bear-slashes-a-social-network

Off-site backups are in order.
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Dec. 10th, 2008 @ 04:05 pm New trends in advertising
I must have missed something in modern society--for the first time I noticed  the use of cute human children  to sell cat food and kitty litter. The first example wasn't so bad, an adorable moppet holding a surly cat, you could see the message was "feed me, or the kid gets it." Humorous, actually works on me, or would if I weren't dedicated to providing the cheapest chow possible for my idiot fur children.

The second was odder still--a bag of kitty litter decorated with a small child wearing kitty-cat face paint. All I can say to young parents is, *please*, m&ms and singing potty chairs were good enough for you, they're good enough for your children as well . . .

Yes, you're right, I'm avoiding an unpleasant task at work :)
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Dec. 9th, 2008 @ 03:23 pm It takes a communications specialist . . .
From a member of our community who shall remain nameless:

"I do not mean that we will plan how to reorganize IT . . . but rather that we will plan how to structure a multi-part discussion about how to reorganize IT"
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Nov. 29th, 2008 @ 07:23 pm Bored teenagers and the internet
Has it been that long since I posted?  Well, here's something that had me in stitches. As you read on, those of you who went to Denvention and met the Domestic Teenager, yes, this is how that shy, sweet girl speaks when a proper target presents itself. As to who the target is, well, I forgot to hide her skype address when I configured her account, and friendly people all over the world now want to talk to her.

As you can see, she can handle herself :)

( Domestic Teenager vs the Spammer )

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Sep. 8th, 2008 @ 10:16 am Mother Nature is a malignant old harridan
I have a raging case of contact dermatitis after weeding yesterday. It's spread up my neck and onto my face, and I look as though I'm suffering from some nasty, medieval disease, such as scrofula or leprosy.

I hope I don't have to do any desktop support today, or people will be running away, screaming, "Unclean, unclean."
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Sep. 1st, 2008 @ 12:40 pm Measure twice, cut once
Measure twice, cut once.
Measure twice, cut once,
MEASURE TWICE CUT . . . four times.

Argghh. New doorframe. Old, good quality bifold door. Half an inch difference total, that somehow, between workspace and garage turned into half an inch per side, per panel. After retrofitting the hardware, it hangs straight and beautiful . . . and with long, dark, noticeable--in a jump out and give Norm Abram conniptions sort of way--gaps.

I have its replacement taking up space in the minivan, but I simply can't face it today.
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Aug. 24th, 2008 @ 10:23 am This is not my metier, part 3
Still wrestling with the dreaded query letter. One of the issues I took with me to Denvention was how the heck do I grab someone's attention long enough to get them into my story? Fortunately, this seems to be a popular struggle, so there were many panels on how to catch an agent's eye.

Most of them left me fairly frustrated, especially when the message is that you have only a few words to catch the agent's fleeting and jaded eye--and what's recommended is "John Grisham meets the X-Files"

The best I can think up is "M. J. Engh meets Andre Norton" or more precisely, "Wheel of the Winds" meets "Year of the Unicorn."

Old school, and obscure. Get me Stephanie Meyer, stat!

And speaking of Stephanie Meyer, I started Twilight a while ago and put it down as a pallid, teenaged soap opera. It's only just occurred to me that my own title, "A Wind out of Twilight" might be considered a deliberate attempt at a ripoff.

Urk. Problem is, Twilight is exactly the word I want. Nothing else I've tried has exactly the right connotations.

cal
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Jul. 30th, 2008 @ 02:15 pm It finally happened . . .
The dreaded invitation from AARP. My fiftieth is in a few days, and they know, they know . . .

I'd weep that I'm too young for this, but for the third time this week, I've had to look up syntax that I should know by now. But it's not that my mind is leaking furiously, it's just that nothing gets swapped out of long-term storage any more to make room for new stuff. The lyrics for Gilligan's Island remain safe and can be summoned at a moment's notice. How to do my job--lost the moment I turn my attention away from it :P

cal
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Jul. 19th, 2008 @ 08:13 am those little moments of joy
Met with my writers group last night at a local, well-attended bookstore with many witnesses.

One of them is a man who expressed curiosity about the romance genre, so I brought him a copy of The Spymaster's Lady by Joanna Bourne--a well-written exemplar of the genre, complete with a cover of a waxed and buff male model-type stripping off his ruffled shirt.

It disappeared into his book bag in a blur of speed that put to shame the Flash. Do you think he'll read it in the darkest night, the blinds drawn tightly, the dog locked in another room? I snickered about that for the rest of the night.

What's ironic, of course, is that the traditional romance cover--the naked chests, the bosoms popping out, the legs writhing all over the place--is actually the tame stuff nowadays, and in my experience, means Actual Plot and reasonably engaging writing rather than the cheap dreck that passes today . . . mmpphh jlasdkfjlsdkj . . .

okay, rant about the low standards in romance writing wrestled to the floor and gagged. It may escape another day, though, stand warned :)

cal
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Jul. 16th, 2008 @ 08:59 am odd moment of self-revelation
One of my defining characteristics (and I have many . . .) is that I loathe having my picture taken. I flee at the sight of a camera, and should anyone pin me down forcibly to take one, my face assumes the expression of someone facing a firing squad--and not with nobility, either.

So I think I know why. My face is highly asymmetrical. When I look into the mirror, I see one thing. When I look at my image in a photo, it's reversed. Alien, odd, distorted. Just plain wrong. And people tell me it "looks just like me."

That much reality I can't take.

cal
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