Author Archives: Eugie Foster

Holiday update

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Feasting: Check. Vegetarian roast beast, garlic mashed potatoes, mushroom and onion gravy, pumpkin cheesecake, chocolate silk pie, and fresh-baked sugar cookies. Mmmm.

Shopping : Check-ish. Although not much got accomplished. We braved the crowds, which weren’t as insane as they could have been. But we did very little purchasing. More like browsing for ideas.

Decorating: Check. There’s still much to do, but we got the main tree up and decorated, the mantle wreath ditto, the entertainment center ditto, and the stairs. Still to do: Hobkin’s tree and area, my “birthday” tree decorating, and various counter-top tableaux.

Skunk Trauma : Check. Apparently abandoning the small fuzzwit for several hours for two days in a row was too much for his sense of safety and security. He was skittish and anxious all day yesterday, a state not alleviated one iota by the judicious use of the vacuum cleaner (to clean up the dusting of faux evergreen nettles littering the carpet from our holiday decorating efforts). He huddled under his hutch in terror, and then when we were able to coax him out, he clung to me with a dedicated tenacity for the rest of the night. He’s currently curled up peacefully in my lap, exuding an aura of “all is well.” But I think that means we can’t go out today.


Writing Stuff

Um, well, I certainly intended to get some writing done this weekend, but my intentions went astray. There’s still a chance of me getting some words on the page, or maybe some editing accomplished, but I wouldn’t bet on it if I were a gambling type.

My Tangent reviews of Sci-Fiction stories “All of Us Can Almost . . . ” by Carol Emshwiller and “Super 8” by Terry Bisson have been published. Rah.

In slightly worrisome news, I still have yet to hear from John Frost of IROSF after a query regarding my “Sub-Genre Spotlight: Cyberpunk” article, which, if they follow their new publication schedule, is due to go up tomorrow. Certainly there’s a holiday lag to be expected, but it’s due up tomorrow and I have not yet seen a contract. Hmm.

Holiday Wishes meme

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Guidelines:

Step 1:
– Make a post (public, friendslocked, filtered…whatever you’re comfortable with) to your LJ. The post should contain your list of 10 holiday wishes. The wishes can be anything at all, from simple and fandom-related (“I’d love a Snape/Hermione icon that’s just for me”) to medium (“I wish for _____ on DVD”) to really big (“All I want for Christmas is a new car/computer/house/TV.”) The important thing is, make sure these wishes are things you really, truly want.

– If you wish for real life things (not fics or icons), make sure you include some sort of contact info in your post, whether it’s your address or just your email address where Santa (or one of his elves) could get in touch with you.

– Also, make sure you post some version of these guidelines in your LJ so that the holiday joy will spread.

Step two:
– Surf around your friendslist (or friendsfriends, or just random journals) to see who has posted their list. And now here’s the important part:

– If you see a wish you can grant, and it’s in your heart to do so, make someone’s wish come true. Sometimes someone’s trash is another’s treasure, and if you have a leather jacket you don’t want or a gift certificate you won’t use–or even know where you could get someone’s dream purebred Basset Hound for free–do it.

You needn’t spend money on these wishes unless you want to. The point isn’t to put people out, it’s to provide everyone a chance to be someone else’s holiday elf–to spread the joy. Gifts can be made anonymously or not–it’s your call.

There are no rules with this project, no guarantees, and no strings attached. Just…wish, and it might come true. Give, and you might receive. And you’ll have the joy of knowing you made someone’s holiday special.

All I Want for Christmas is:

1. Food, comfort, and/or best of all, a loving family for all the needy critters at the Atlanta Humane Society or any animal shelter near you. Adopt a fuzzy/scaled/feathered companion to love, or donate food, supplies, and toys to a shelter.

2. A donation to one of my favorite charities: The Humane Society, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, The American Civil Liberties Union, or Amnesty International.

3. A poem written by you, especially for me.

4. A picture painted, drawn, or photoshopped by you, for me.

5. If you’re not a vegetarian, give it a try for a week. If you are one, make a vegetarian meal for one of your non-vegetarian friends.

6. Send me a little-known book or story you loved as a child.

7. Read something from my published bibliography and send me a review of it. (If I like the review, I might blurb it and post it on my website.)

8. Buy my chapbook: Ascendancy of Blood and give it to the vampire/goth/fairy tale lover on your holiday list.

9. An “Unfortunate Animal” from the Unfortunate Animal of the Month Club.

10. Stuff: any of the myriad material goods a la my Amazon.com wish list.

Happy Thanksgiving

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While I’m not big into turkey, being a vegetarian and all, I have much to be thankful for and it’s good to have a day dedicated to remembering that.

Things I am thankful for:
1. My husband, Matthew. He is my best friend, the love of my life, and my soul mate. He can make me laugh, a gift I cherish more and more in this scary world, and he holds me when I cry. His sense of whimsy delights me, and his intellect thrills me. He completes me in every way. He is my shelter, my harbor, and my sanctuary.
2. Hobkin, for all the love and trust the little fuzzwit warms my life with every day. And the cuteness. Mustn’t forget the cuteness.
3. Family. Something I have not been able to be thankful for for a very large chunk of my existence–so long I’d almost forgotten how comforting it is to be able to have people who love me as a daughter and sister. I’m thankful for the reminder and the reality.
4. My friends: near, far, offline and on.
5. That my health, as crappy as it is, isn’t worse, as it could so easily be. I can dance, hear the music which is my husband’s laughter, see the adorable fuzzy beastie frisking at my feet, and hold them both close. Not everyone is that fortunate. And I am thankful that I can afford the medicines that keep me (mostly) well.
6. That I have the ability to compose creations of prose that I believe in and that others believe in (and that they want to pay me for). While my storytelling and literary skills are far below many people’s whose work I admire, I am improving year by year.
7. My beautiful home where I may run around in panda slippers and nothing else, and it’s all good.
8. That I am not hungry or cold.
9. That I believe in and love myself, a state hard won.
10. That I have the freedom to chase my bliss, even if I don’t exercise that freedom all the time.

Meditating on Fluffiness

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At the suggestion of dude_the, I have been meditating upon fluffiness in hopes of lifting my doldrums. A self-help book about the merits of fluffitude meditation would make oodles of bucks.

So yep, I am soothed by thoughts of fluff and fuzz and soft, warm fur. Fluffiness gives my psyche peace.

Spent much of last night snuggled on the couch with Hobkin playing the role of “stuffed skunk,” only stepping out of character to make the occasional snuffy-cooing noises and twitch his paws. Matthew took a picture:

I’m still feeling rather dubious on the emotional equilibrium front, but it’s hard to feel too weepy with Hobkin curled up in my lap.



Writing Stuff:

My princess fantasy story fulfilled one of the writing challenges my DC2K group had going, and I’m backed up on Critters, so I subbed it to my DC2K group for critique. Ann Crispin saw it (DC2K is composed of the members of her 2000 writers workshop at Dragon*Con, and Ann periodically pops in to catch up with us) and she’s sending me a critique for it! Definitely an unexpected honor and treat. Also incentive to post stories there more often!

Write a review of this week’s Sci-Fiction story for Tangent and emailed it to ye ole editor.

Received: 26-day “no” with invite to send more from Pedestal, and 90-day ditto “no” and ditto invite to send more from Story Station. Sigh. I could really use a nice, perky sale.

Word count: 700
Forging ahead on the SF story. The caffeine gods heed my pleas. All hail the caffeine gods. My writing productivity really shades my overall outlook on life. Completing a decent chunk of writing–both quantity- and quality-wise–makes me feel like a day has been worthwhile, whereas spinning my gears and/or writing crap demoralizes me.

Club 100 for Writers
16/100

500/day
4

Episode II and Doldrums

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Watched Attack of the Clones last night. The shininess continues. I still like the Imax version better. Through judicious cutting, there was much less Anakin-whining in it. Despite the myriad flaws in writing, directing, and acting, the Star Wars movies are stunningly beautiful.

I’m in a blue funk. Not sure if it’s the weather, general disequilibrium, or I’m stressed–probably all of the above. I feel like bursting into tears for no reason, and I’m supremely unmotivated. All I want to do is curl up on the couch with Matthew and Hobkin. From both experience and faint memories of abnormal psychology texts at university, I know this will pass. Odds are it will pass soon. But right now, I feel relentlessly melancholy. Been self-medicating with huge quantities of caffeine and Sudafed (because my sinuses continue to be fubared and I find the stimulant in Sudafed pretty damn potent), which seems to keep me functional. But I’m paying a high price in abbreviated attention span, sniffles, and twitches.

Stupid brain.



Writing Stuff:

Continuing to dwell on writing productivity and the mechanisms of creativity (and letting the dormant psychologist in me out for an airing). Came across this 2002 article by Stephen Krashen, “Optimal Levels of Writing Management: A Re-Analysis of Boice (1983),” (regarding Boice’s “Contingency management in writing and the appearance of creative ideas: Implications for the treatment of writing blocks.”) What I found of particular interest is that both Boice’s original study and Krashen’s re-analysis conclude that writing begets creativity, not the other way around. Krashen has even quantified it to “three-quarters of a creative idea per page.”

I’ve noticed this tendency myself, that I might have the start of a story with no real direction or theme in mind, but as I write, ideas and inspiration start coalescing. It’s much less likely for these creative nuggets to plop in my lap when I’m not actively engaged in writing, and if I get stuck and stop writing, I tend to stay stuck unless I force myself to address the page and just hammer on through. I haven’t gone so far as to count how many times inspiration hits per outputted page, though. I’m not exactly sure how I’d go about doing that, and I suspect it would not be beneficial to maintaining flow.

I wonder if creativity works like that with other creative endeavors like painting, sculpting, and musical composition.

Received a care package from Nathan at Scrybe Press: my royalty check, Hobgoblin Boots by Tansy Rayner Roberts, Bounty’s Stepchild by Justin Stanchfield, and the new matte cover version of Ascendancy of Blood. My library of chapbooks continues to grow.

Just in case communications went awry, I queried John Frost, the editor of IROSF to see what the status is on the paperwork for my Cyberpunk article.

No word from Brutarian on a query, which makes me think both my submission and my query have fallen victim to the editor’s notoriously overzealous spam blocker. Also no word from Talebones on two queries. Their server has been rife with “issues” involving email and their forum registration. I have a sinking suspicion that none of my queries got through, and that my submission has been lost in the great beyond. Dammit. Talebones is switching to a new server. I’ll fire off another query as soon as I hear that they’ve migrated to their new platform.

Word count: 500 Again, barely. And I’m reasonably certain they all suck goat toes. Worse, it was 500 words across three different stories so I haven’t accomplished any sort of meaningful chunk out of anything.

Club 100 for Writers
15/100

500/day
3

Episodes VI and I

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Watched both Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace yesterday. Probably going to round out the week with Attack of the Clones. Shiny. Yup.



Writing Stuff:

My “Sub-Genre Spotlight: Cyberpunk” article is due to go up next Monday at IROSF (assuming they follow their new publication schedule of “last Monday of the month”), but I have yet to receive edits to approve. Or a contract for that matter. Wonder if I should I be concerned?

Did two editorial passes–one for the fantasy piece and one for the slipstream piece.
Word count: 500. Barely.

Club 100 for Writers
14/100

500/day
2

Red-eyed Eugie

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Hungry skunk. Sleepy me. No sleep for she-who-chops-the-veggies. Fed skunk. Awake now. Blah.

Went to see The Winter’s Tale at the Shakespeare Tavern last night. They did an excellent job of this quirky and occasionally bizarre play. I’d forgotten the details of it since it’s been years since I last saw it, and it’s never been one of my favorites. But the folks at the tavern did a fabulous job.

Also on a Star Wars binge. Watched Episode IV on Friday, V yesterday, and going to watch Return of the Jedi today. Maybe The Phantom Menace too.

After a nap . . .


Writing stuff:

Re-read the Cricket rejection, because once I got past “we regret” the first time, not much else sank it. Discovered my editor also included the name of the artist who they’re having illustrate “Razi and the Sunbird” for their February ’05 issue: Elbrite Brown.

I’m totally jazzed. This guy won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award (which is an American Library Association award like the Caldecott and the Newbery) in ’04 for My Family Plays Music. I’m sorely tempted to head out to Barnes & Noble to get a peek inside this book. I’m having an ALA award winner illustrating my story!

I’m also beginning to jones for another sale. *twitch*

Blah

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Feeling decidedly blah today. No reason, just out of sorts, I guess.

So this isn’t a total downer of a post, here’s a couple closeups of Hobkin. Sleeping, of course:


Writing Stuff:

Received a 136-day pleasant personal rejection from Cricket that nevertheless took the wind out of my sails. The editor was complimentary: “It is well written (from you, how could it not be?) but . . .” It stings worse getting rejected from a place I’ve sold to in the past. Apparently they bought something similar for Spider recently. Now I have to try to find another market that might be interested in a 1700-word re-telling of the Chinese creation myth. My editor did comment that my middle-grade novel is “still getting additional reads” there. I hope that’s a good thing. At least it means it’s still under consideration.

Mailed out the next Cricket story in my submissions-in-waiting queue.

Morning Time Warp and It’s All About Goals

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There are no fewer than eight clocks in our downstairs area: bedroom clock-radio, bathroom shower clock-radio, stove, coffee-maker, microwave, computer, VCR, and kitchen counter. None of them, NONE of them display the same time. The discrepancy varies from one minute to eight from the bathroom to the computer. Normally, I wouldn’t think eight minutes is that big of a deal. It is, however, the difference between ambling out to the garage at a leisurely pace and cruising to work like a sane person, and screeching like a chipmunk out of purgatory down the driveway and careening up 400 at breakneck speed to arrive eight minutes late. It doesn’t help matters that the clock in my car is several minutes faster than the fastest of the house clocks. Glah.

Project for this weekend: synchronize all the clocks in the house.



Writing Stuff:

A graduate student is doing his master’s thesis in Behavioral Psychology on writing productivity and looking for volunteer subjects through Critters. That, paired with my Club 100 efforts has made me take a closer look at my writing goals. (It has also piqued my latent psychology researcher interests.) Anyway, Club 100 has shown me that 1K/day was not a good goal for me at this point because I couldn’t meet it consistently, and the dejection I felt about slacking off made it harder for me to approach each new writing session with a sense of purpose and accomplishment. 100/day is much more manageable. Of course, I haven’t hit my 100th-day goal, but I’m finding 100/day not to be arduous, and it has really helped me pull out of a few writing bumps. If I get stuck, I barrel through a hundred words. If I’m still stuck after that, I quit for the day. The next day, I hammer out another hundred. After a few days of this, I find I’m past the scene I was stuck on, and back into flow. I read over the methodology for this psych. study and it got me thinking about what my goals actually were with regard to productivity. I’m mulling over setting myself a goal of 10K words/month. That’s pretty close to what I’ve managed these last few years, with a slight push to challenge me.

Going to try to implement that as a secondary goal in tandem with my Club 100 efforts. That’s five-hundred words a day, giving myself weekends to catch up and/or rest. If I get stuck, I’ll go back to one-hundred with a pat on the back for managing that many, and if I do significantly more than five-hundred, well maybe I’ll treat myself to an ice cream cone at the end of the week or something.

In other writing news, my story didn’t make it into this batch of Critters manuscripts. This wouldn’t be a biggie, except this is a two-weeker. Dangit.

New words: 1000
And my princess fantasy is done! At zero draft in any case. It’s hovering right at novelette length. Did an editing pass on it and cut out a couple hundred words here and there. It needs several more passes before I hand it off to Matthew to first reader, but I’m thrilled to betsy to have finished another story.

Club 100 for Writers
13/100

# of Sequential Days Achieving 500/day
1

Paranoid parents and Observation of “Have a Party with your Bear” Day

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Left home a little earlier this morning because I knew I needed to stop at a gas station for a fill up. Pulled up to the stop sign that marks the end of my subdivision, and I saw a queue of three cars sitting there. I figured they were waiting to go, which is what people normally do when they’re at a stop sign, but to my bewilderment (and thankfully before I pulled in behind them), the last one began to back up. It backed all the way down the road. The second car then proceeded to also back up. I thought, “Oh, the first car broke down and they’re trying to get around it.” No, once the second car cleared, the first one backed down the road too. They all drove back into the subdivision.

Huh?

But okay, after watching this baffling hullabaloo I made my way to the stop sign and turned. Waiting to merge onto the main road, I saw that traffic had paused for a school bus making a pickup, and in the backed-up string of cars was no fewer than five yellow buses. Apparently I hit the exact time for school bus central. And then I wondered, are parents in my subdivision driving their kids to the bus stop which is at most, a block away, and then waiting in their cars until their children are safely picked up? My subdivision is tiny–only thirty-two houses down two roads that both end in cul-de-sacs–and located in a nice, safe, relatively affluent, area. Yet parents don’t feel it’s safe for their children to wait for the bus?

In less mind-boggling news, yesterday was official “Have a Party with Your Bear” Day. When I came home, it was to find most of the bear denizens of our home waiting with excitement and anticipation for their party:

How could a person with any compassion disappoint those furry faces? So Matthew and I had tortellini for dinner with pie for dessert, and then we put on Monsters Inc., which we thought a fitting presentation in observation of Have a Party with Your Bear Day. The feature was met with general approval and praise by the bears.



Writing Stuff:

Received 2nd and 3rd quarter royalty statements from Scrybe Press for sales of Ascendancy of Blood. Thank you to everyone who’s bought it, and remember, it makes a great stocking stuffer for the holidays!

Wrote a review for Tangent of this week’s Sci-Fiction offering and emailed it to my editor. It was a very short story this week, a change from the novelettes and novellas that Sci-Fiction has been publishing of late.

Also, I saw a new market had sprung up, Aeon. They only accept electronic submission from their “List” of professional writers with track records (they take snail mail submission from others), so I fired off an email to their editors asking whether I qualified to be on their “List.” Yes, apparently I do. Always happy to save money on postage.

New words: 500
Working on the Princess fantasy now. I think I’m actually close to finishing. Through my Club 100 efforts I’ve managed to keep plugging away at this one, and now I find myself past the climax and coasting toward the denouement. Coolness. It’s cresting at 6K word processor count. I’m really going to have to work to keep this one under novelette length.

Club 100 for Writers
12/100