why is there no fire? why aren't there the makings of one?

 cherry crow children, journal, writing life  No Responses »
May 132013
 
The Unstrung Harp – Drafting; text and image from Edward Gorey's "The Unstrung Harp", icon created by me

On Saturday I decided I had No More Time. So while the pterosaur did his diligent best to look after Squawk and ensure she didn't try to feed tooooo often, I sat myself down in front of the laptop and deathmarched the cherry crow children story.

I sat down at 10am. There were breaks (Squawk did require feeding, after all, and bathing and putting to bed, and a couple of times my brain required ten minutes to whinge/vent/whine/tantrum/daze out), but by and large it was me and the desk/couch and the laptop and my ipod and the sheer force of my will.

I wrote the ending at 1am. It hurt. I have no actual idea, even today, what is on the page. I can't bear to look. I simply emailed my publisher the attachment accompanied by the sentence: "I have literally not checked the Scrivener export to make sure it's not gibberish."

Because professional is how I roll. Clearly.1

Yesterday and today, I've been, in the words of Gorey, conscious, but very little more.

Turns out, part of the problem I was having with this story was that I was trying to cram what turned out to be 21,000 words of story into only 12,000 words. (The fact that what I considered to be the inciting incident kept happening at the 7,000 mark should perhaps have been my first clue. When I couldn't collapse that 7,000 down into anything leaner than 2,000? Another clue.)

The other part of the problem, of course, was trying to write around a baby. Who just happened to roll her 3-month and 4-month growth spurts in together, with a head-cold2 in the middle of it all for shits and giggles. Did you know the 4 month growth spurt is renowned for making parents want to walk in front of oncoming traffic? Neither did I. I swear it's like the faeries passed by one night and swapped the baby for a changeling. The effing happiest changeling in the world, who only wants to gaze adoringly at people and make them laugh, but SHE WILL NOT SLEEP. EVER. AGAIN.

If you'll excuse me, I'm afraid I need to collapse now. And then start work on the next story.

  1. In my defense, I would ordinarily hide from the manuscript for at least a week, before doing a final edit, and then maybe even hiding it for another week before handing it in. However, I'm on a tight deadline, and I have my publisher's permission to misbehave just this once. [↩]
  2. A head cold may not sound like much of a problem. But in the shit I never knew department, turns out babies are obligate nose breathers. And if their little nose is too congested to breathe through, not only can they not breathe, they can't feed. Or sleep. They can, however, cry. [↩]

ideas breed on ideas

 ideas breed on ideas  cherry crow children, journal  2 Responses »
May 022013
 
image courtesy of xkcd.com (http://xkcd.com/470/)

GUYS, (I THINK) I KNOW HOW TO GET TO THE END OF THIS STORY.

I am so relieved. I was beginning to wonder if I didn't have a workable idea at all. Turns out it was simply a case of exhaustion and time poverty. Getting a break on that front has given me the valuable thinking time I needed to get some ideas breeding.1

Now I just need to actually churn the words out (and therein discover precisely how much I still don't know), and hope the story passes muster.

  1. Which is not to say Squawk is sleeping any better. She's not. It's just that during the days she's currently being babysat by her Nanna so I can focus on wordcraft. [↩]

only how many months late?

 only how many months late?  cherry crow children, journal, writing life  No Responses »
Apr 302013
 
Sesame Street Martians (phone)

GUYS, I KNOW THE END OF THIS STORY.

(This story being the cherry crow children).1

Now I just have to get there. I don't actually know that bit. Yet.

  1. I'm scared to stop and count how many words I've written, thrown out, dragged back in, rewritten, edited, revised, and just generally stared at. Least efficient process ever. [↩]

some days losing is winning

 cherry crow children, writing life  Comments Off
Sep 052012
 

This weekend just past I threw what little clothes that still fit me into a suitcase, remembered my ugg boots, and skedaddled off to Lake Mulwala for a writing retreat. In a move that will haunt me for the rest of my living memory, I forgot my camera. Luckily, others didn't.

The lake is actually a dammed-up river, complete with a vista of drowned trees lifting their death-spindled limbs above the water. It's home to a healthy fish population: I never saw any, but late at night when the water was still I heard them, quick and thick and heavy through the air and straight back into the water. It's also home to quite an array of bird life, including pelicans, ducks, cormorants, seagulls, sulphur-crested cockatoos, the tiniest of chittering, swooping swallows,1 and a lone black swan who knew that humans bore bread.

In between contemplating that view (and eating, and chatting, and napping), I worked on the cherry crow children story, and I managed to wring sufficient words out of my brain to call the weekend successful in terms of progress … but I've now also spent all of yesterday and today mulling over where the story's going and what I learnt about Haverny Wood through writing those words, and I think it's time to ditch them all and start a new draft. Truly, counting words is one of the worst, or at least most meaningless, ways of measuring progress on a story. It's just that, often, it's all there is.

It's been far too long since I've indulged in a writers' retreat. Writing can be such an isolating and time-hungry activity — so much so that of late I've taken to spending my Saturdays in a local cafe with some writing friends, in an attempt to combine socialising with productivity. A retreat gives me not only time and space away from the pressures of the dayjob world, new and interesting scenery2 to jog the braincells but also, most important of all, a chance to hang out with people who know what it's like to pound away at the craft of writing simply for the sake of it.

That sort of understanding and camaraderie is priceless and refreshing. Especially since the first person I spoke to on returning home to Melbourne3 summarily dismissed my writing as a hobby in which I indulged "sporadically" in order to "get some alone time". I think I will never cease to be amazed at how much people like jumping to simple, single-reason explanations that let them label and judge others.

  1. I've never seen swallows before — I didn't realise how very tiny they were! [↩]
  2. In this case the scenery was superbly awesome with a twist of melancholy/eerie [↩]
  3. Not the pterosaur, for those quick-jumping minds! [↩]

Let me 'splain — No. There is too much. Let me sum up.

 briskwater mare, cherry crow children, first they came, journal, writing life  4 Responses »
Aug 262012
 

Back in June, I guest-posted over at David McDonald's blog, on the topic of silence:

It’s something I’ve heard at almost every point of wanting and trying to build a writing career: you have to be active on the internet.

…But it comes at a cost. There’s the inevitable time pressure, yes, but then there’s also the noise.

At that time, I was trying very hard to balance my internet time. Not to restrict it, as such, but to make sure I was getting a good signal to noise ratio and — more importantly, for me — make sure I didn't feel guilty for not paying attention when I needed the time apart.

And then I promptly fell off the internet altogether.

I've been reading all my usual streams, and very occasionally tweeting when the mood took me, but mostly I haven't been blogging because, well, Life.

The biggest but simplest attention-occupier has been, of course, my TPP collection deadline. I swore to myself when I was writing Shadow Bound that never again would I sell something I hadn't already written. Now, even at the time, I knew this for an empty promise, but still. The very first thing I did was sell a four-story collection having only written one of them. Er, yeah. The first story of the three I owed, "The Briskwater Mare", came with great difficulty. Much, much difficulty. I wrote 40,000 words of false start before I finally found the story (which ended up being 11,000 words long), and it took me a good two months more than I'd budgeted (and I'd budgeted a lot of slack and generous leeway, because I know my process). Oops.

Luckily, it has, even in draft form, received the stamp of approval for going in to the collection, so now I only owe two more stories. I'm currently working on "The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood" and, er, guess what? Yeah, it's coming with difficulty. So much for hoping the rest of the stories would just pour on out of me, eh? Oh well. I shall valiantly take comfort in the idea that stories which come with great difficulty are because I'm opening a vein or otherwise pushing at the boundaries of my comfort zone. Or something.

I've also, at the editor's request, written a story for an upcoming issue of ASIM. It was perhaps foolish of me to say yes, given I was already stressing over my TPP deadlines, but, well, see above re empty promises and you can extrapolate that to "I'll sell anything I can, and we all know it, right?" Unlike "The Briskwater Mare", this story came without too much trouble, although worryingly it was a rather angry story, instead of the light or humorous or even just sardonic story I was thinking I'd write. Luckily for me, the editor loved it anyway, and all that remained was to edit it (an easy enough task) and come up with a title (a task so fiendish and horrid it had no less than four people staring blankly at walls and blinking at each other, at a complete loss, for months on end). We threw so many suggestions back and forth at each other, all of them plausible and all of them workable but none of them perfect, that I was genuinely beginning to wonder whether I could send a story to print as "Untitled", or some other such meta commentary. But in the end, through gratuitous/desperate wiki'ing of large-scale abstract concepts, a title was found, and it was perfect.

The story shall be called "First They Came…", and it's going to appear in ASIM issue #55, which is due out … well, now-ish, I think.

That's most of the writing/publication news out of the way. There were also other reasons for my silence, most recently due to the Melbourne International Film Festival, during which I decided to see ten films despite a) my deadlines b) my insufficient energy levels and c) Melbourne raining on me every time I left the house.

One I can most heartily recommend is Ernest & Celestine, a charming little story about a mouse who doesn't want to be a dentist and a bear who wants to be a musician. It's just the perfect amount of whimsy and heart-warming, and don't be fooled by the narrative simplicity: there's a very rich world thought out in this one, and although it's never over-explained or harped upon, there's social commentary on the topic of prejudice, ignorance, bigotry and the value we place on various professions.

And speaking of kids, my other, biggest news (which I've oh-so-cleverly buried at the bottom of a very long post where no one will see it) is that I'm going to have one of my own.

It's due around New Years, we decided not to find out the gender until it learnt of the concept of daylight, and the grandmothers-to-be are both beyond excited and into downright agitation.

New Interview: Galactic Chat

 briskwater mare, first they came, writing life  Comments Off
May 262012
 

Hola!

I am lifting my head from the morass of editing this one story I never want to see again1 and drafting this other story I don't want to have to write2 to tell those who find such things interesting that there's a new interview of me up online.

This one is a little different, being an audio interview for the Galactic Chat podcast, so you actually get to hear my voice. I'm a little nervous about this aspect of it, because I absolutely loathe the sound of my own voice on playback. Does anyone else ever suffer from this dissonance? I swear I don't sound as plummy in real life as I always end up sounding on playback. Or at least, I don't think I do, but who knows?

Anyway! The interview is live, and we touch on the Binding books, and my collection for the Twelve Planets series, among other things, and I had a whole heap of fun conducting the interview, so head on over for a listen!

  1. This is completely normal and an encouraging sign that the process is all working out as expected. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself. [↩]
  2. Again. Normal. [↩]

so much for regular blogging

 first they came, journal  Comments Off
Apr 052012
 

So how dull do deadlines make my blog, huh? The answer is, apparently, very.

The past month has seen me squirrelling every spare minute into writing a commissioned short (which I intended to be a touch on the melancholy side of light-hearted, but which actually turned out to be … angry). The pace I set myself to get it done was somewhat faster than normal, because I was worried about it eating into my writing-for-TPP time, so it's been a pretty gruelling month, and I've been frothing at the mouth with envy for those who don't have time-gobbling dayjobs. Yeah, I know, we've all been there, if we're not all still there.

Sometimes I can't help but think Plan B1 is a trap.

Things may2 continue to be dull around these parts for a while to come, since the deadlines are by no means satisfied and my own personal neuroses brought on by needing BUFFERS whenever I start to consider numbers as targets require feeding in the face of the deadlines. I'm more active (if barely) on Twitter, which lets me dip in and out as it suits me.

  1. namely: making sure you can pay the rent [↩]
  2. or may not. Hopefully may not. But I can't promise. [↩]

the host is rushing 'twixt night and day

 away come away  2 Responses »
Feb 262012
 

And … draft.

Sorta. It's been a long time since I've written anything so amazingly chaotic, that changed so much during the writing that now, at the end (and I use the word end rather loosely, because the last 7+ scenes are in fact simply a 2,000 word note to myself for when I run across them in the next revision), I can quite literally and confidently say: I have no idea what I've just written.

It's not a book. Yet. It is currently 135,000 words of … exploration?

It started out as a novel about faeries. It seems, actually, to be about biological discrimination, mental wellbeing and normalcy, and to have not a single faerie after all.

Huh. Would you look at that.

330k words and still the woman is silent. Characters!

 away come away, hummingbird key, writing life  Comments Off
Feb 162012
 

Today's walk home brought me rain (and therefore a fetching dampened-rat hairstyle), and the opening and closing lines of a new novel. Which are perfect.

(Which is not to say they won't change, although I do have a feeling they'll only be edited for precision/word choice, but more to say that it opens and closes the main character's arc and gives me that arc all in two simple sentences.)

Sigh.

I guess this is how I know I really must be close to finishing the faerie novel, no matter how otherwise it might seem. And it really doesn't feel anywhere near finished since I realised yesterday that, 105k words in, my main character still hasn't chased anything for herself yet. Er, oops?

So yesterday I had to forego wordcount in order to trawl through the manuscript for all her POV scenes. And tonight I am going to trawl the internet and rack my brain for narrative structures dealing with conspiracy plots and accidental heroes and storylines where a veritable stuffstorm explodes on an unsuspecting person.

Any suggestions?

i can't help but count the seconds ticking by

 away come away, briskwater mare, journal, writing life  Comments Off
Feb 042012
 
tactilicdeb

Time is proving more elusive than usual, of late. This is possibly (shh, don't tell anyone) due to being a smidge over-committed. On pretty much all fronts.

There's the personal deadline for the zero draft of the faerie novel, which is fast approaching (and the recalcitrant thing shows no signs of approaching its narrative end any time within that deadline). Of course, being self-imposed, that's a little flexible — but I'm loathe to mess with it, because I need to be able to stamp =30= on something approximating a draft of this thing and let it collapse under its own weight and sort itself out in a drawer for a while. It's well past time.

Then there's the bunch of short stories, most longer than short and one (hopefully) just normal short, that I've committed to writing. Those deadlines are not flexible — and, I admit, it bothers me that I don't have any words against any of these stories yet. (Well, I have a collection of notes against one of them. I did have 10,000 words on that one, but that was me feeling my way. In the wrong direction, as it turned out. C'est la writing process, eh?)

Still. I trust my process (or I'm resolutely telling myself I do), if not that I'll have time to dedicate to it.

On top of that there's the Kindle links, which I am still getting to but so inch-by-inch that it breaks my heart. I've managed to pretty up the page some, and I've just yesterday included a form so that now people can submit their own links.

This sort of workload and over-commitment is always dangerous, for me. I'm far too inclined as it is to spend my weekends on words, and when I feel I have no leeway it's too easy to forget that I need time away from the words in order to be able to work with them.

Luckily, life is compensating by throwing social engagements my way, whether I want them or not. It's almost like it's summer, and normal people don't catch cancer by venturing outdoors at this time of year. Crazy!

 Older Entries