Category Archives: Blog

My reproductive organs hate me. And it seems that my wingstubs are throwing in with them. It’s a mutiny. Waiting for their demands, which I suspect will involve chocolate. Ow.

In doing some Tangent work last night, I went into my Access database. The table I store reviewer information in was getting unwieldy to eyeball, so I wanted to write a few SQL queries so I could snag the information I needed at a glance. Here’s the thing, I’ve had over a decade’s worth of experience coding SQL on a mainframe at my ex-day job, and not just simple selects either, but batch inserts, updates, and complex joins. I considered myself to be quite proficient with SQL, not DBA proficient, but if it involved data manipulation and a database, I was pretty confident I could do it. But last night, I found myself having to go into the help menu to remember how to do a simple SQL select.

Damn.

I’ve only been out of work for a year. That’s some fast brain spoilage, that is.

   

Writing Stuff

Received:
A status update from my Fantasist Enterprises editor letting me know that the Modern Magic anthology has a street date of April 25th (hey, that’s also my and fosteronfilm‘s anniversary!) and Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy is slated for a late summer or early fall release. Shiny.

New Words:
500 on “A Thread of Silk”

So I decided my antag is indeed going to meet my protag on the road after all. It’s going to require some rewrite tweaks of an earlier scene, but I can’t think of another way of keeping this from turning into a sprawling epic.

And so the stage is set for the bad guy and the good girl to collide, yo.

I discovered that it’s very hard to find detailed information on Heian horsemanship techniques, despite cavalry being such a salient part of their military tactics. I saw pictures of saddles from that era, but nothing that tells the specifics of their riding style. I have, however, learned a lot more about Heian Era clothing, weaponry, and etiquette. Yay?

5,401 / 7,500 (72.0%)

Club 100 For Writers
      5

500/day
      13

As continuation of the Jane Austen kick I’m on, I watched Bride & Prejudice, thanks to an unexpected television fortuity (it popped up on cable). I hadn’t realized it was going to be a Bollywood production. So, yeah, there were Hindi costumes and singing and dancing.

Overall, I liked the singing and dancing–the singing less than the dancing–and I found the insight into Indian culture with their attitudes towards arranged marriages interesting. But it was . . . odd. I’m not sure if my Midwestern American film sensibilities are quite ready for Bollywood does Jane Austen.

   

Writing Stuff

New Words:
500 on “A Thread of Silk” with some editing/rewriting.

Ran into a bit of awkwardness, plot-wise, and I’m mulling how to handle it. It comes down to the old LARP dilemma. I need to incorporate travel into the story because my protag is journeying from point A to point B. But:
– There’s no other purpose for the traveling bit other than to get her to point B, which makes it ungodly dull.
– As problematic as it is, there’s no getting around my protag being at point A and needing to get to point B. I can’t bring antag. and protag. together anywhere but at point B.
– I could make the journey interesting, but that would require adding an extraneous scene (possibly several), and I’m trying to keep this story tight.
– Another reason to avoid a traveling scene is that my protag is riding a horse. Not only will I exhaust my limited knowledge of Heian Era Japanese horsemanship in the first few paragraphs, but I’ll inevitably give the horse a personality if my protag spends any amount of “onscreen” time with her mount–since horses have them, and I can’t imagine anyone sitting on a horse without chatting to and otherwise interacting with it. But I don’t want to create another character to worry about. As is, I got annoyed with the servants in the opening scene, and they had an important raison d’être. At my first opportunity, I dumped them.

Hrmph.

4,904 / 7,500 (65.4%)

Club 100 For Writers
      4

500/day
      12

I was flipping through the recent issue of the SFWA Bulletin and an article caught my eye. Normally, as one might expect from a publication put out by the SFWA, it’s chock full of marketing and technique articles and trade info that SF writers (and other writers too, I suspect) would find of benefit in the biz. But also, because science is often of interest to science fiction writers, there are occasional non-writerly blurbs touching upon a wide range of things scientific.

This one, titled “Chemical Accumulation in Polar Bears Raise Concerns,” is about how flame retardant chemicals–polybrominated diphenyls (PBDEs) and Hexabromocyclododecane (HBCDs)–carried to the Arctic by wind and tide are affecting polar bears via the whole apex predator, concentration of toxins in fatty tissue thing. Apparently, they’re suffering some serious health effects like hermaphroditism, weakened immune systems, higher cub mortality rates, decreased brain functions, and altered bone strength.

I’m always concerned about wildlife (and animals in general), and I’ve got a special place in my heart for polar bears, as most people do. I mean, how can you not love something as cute, fluffy, and deadly as a polar bear? They’re fuzzy dichotomies. Their plight is very sad, and quite a worrisome measure of the state of pollution on the planet.

But my first mental image was of flame retardant polar bears swatting aside guys with flame throwers.

   

Writing Stuff
Apex Digest is having a subscription push. As Jason Sizemore sez in his blog:

“IF I can get 50 new Apex subscribers by March 16th (my birthday), I will increase the writer pay rate to 1.5 cents per word. This includes renewals to current expiring subscriptions.”

With five days left to go, they still need eighteen. So if you were thinking about subscribing to this fine publication, now would be an excellent time. Not only would you get four issues a year of this fantastic ‘zine full of superb fiction from the likes of jenwrites, reudaly, and myself, as well as articles and interviews, but you’d be helping to put more money into the pockets of future contributors. And, if that wasn’t incentive enough, there’s only five more copies of issue #4 with my story “Oranges, Lemons, and Thou Beside Me” in stock. Subscribe already!

And while you’re at it, think about buying something pretty from the Apex Art Store, and by “pretty,” I mean scary-freaky:

New Words:
2000 on “A Thread of Silk.” This should actually be 2.5K but I chopped out 500 words when I realized a dialogue scene was all exposition and info dump. Replaced it with a big exploding magic scene. Much nicer.

Yep, my original estimate is blown tail-over-nose out of the water. “What happened?” you may ask. What happened is I realized I needed a transition scene before I could get the protag off after the bad guy by herself, ’cause otherwise her motivation was pretty spurious, reeking of plot device. Also I saw that my “speculative” hadn’t made a proper appearance and I needed to get it rolling.

Then there were horses.

Bumping my word estimate by another 3K. And I wonder if that should be another 4K, or more . . . My bitty I’ll-just-rattle-this-off-in-3000-words Japanese historical/heroic fantasy is turning into an epic. Must. Regain. Control.

4,500 / 7,500 (60.0%)

Club 100 For Writers
      3

500/day
      11

I have this nagging feeling that I’ve forgotten to do something. It’s vague and unsettling. I keep checking my calendar and Things to Do list, and while I’ve certainly got plenty on my plate that needs my attention, I keep thinking I’m missing something. If any of y’all are waiting on something from me, you might want to drop me a line.

Also, Yahoo accounts keep bouncing my emails back with a “Permanent Failure: Other address status” error. That’s not good. I’ve got several Tangent reviewers who have yahoo.com addresses. Hope they fix that soon.

   

Writing Stuff
After I saw jaylake‘s submission counts post, I became curious about my own (after I finished being slack-jawed at his numbers). Total number of submissions isn’t one of the things I tracked in my various marketing spreadsheets–of which I have many–but it’s a fairly easy formula to tack on to everything else. So I did a bit of fiddling in Excel and discovered that currently I’ve made 689 story submissions since I started writing seriously in 2000. That number includes 77 sales, 548 rejections, and 54 submissions currently out (there’s a bunch of reprints in that figure), with the remainder being markets that folded before responding, a few withdrawals, and other oddball cases.

I think I’m going to throw a party when I hit 1000 submissions, and another really big party when (if) I hit 100 sales.

New Words:
1400 on the new Japanese fantasy now tentatively titled “A Thread of Silk.” I’m thinking this might be longer than the 3-4K I initially figured since I just completed the first scene. It’s admittedly a key and important scene, but it went significantly longer than I’d expected. This one’s fight-heavy; I don’t do a lot of pitched combat scenes and I’d forgotten how much space they can take up.

1,869 / 4,500 (41.5%)

Received:
Word from my agent that the editor I’m waiting on rewrite notes from dropped him a line letting him know that the reason we haven’t heard back is ’cause she’s currently swamped working on a couple novels, but that she’ll get me stuff next week. Whew. I was beginning to get scared she’d changed her mind.

So now I need to finish this Japanese fantasy and my Aberrant Dreams story rewrite before next week. I can do that.

Club 100 For Writers
      1
I skipped several days in there while doing research and lost count anyway, so I’ll just start over again. Sigh.

500/day
      9

sara1221 swung by yesterday to crash for the night as she scouts new apartment locales in the area. Had a lovely time gabbing with her. We meant to watch The Brothers Grimm, but we all got to talking so much that it never came about.

   

Writing Stuff
Spent a ridiculously large chunk of time trying to map out the Taira family tree from Heian Era Japan. And I only wanted the first few generations even. I did eventually manage to untangle it and extract what I needed, and in the process I learned a lot of Heian culture, socioeconomics, and geopolitics, which yay, I’m glad to know, but I also feel like I’ve way over-researched what I’m expecting to be a 3-4K story.

My brain is full.

The weekend was manic, but I accomplished much. My Things to Do list is now of manageable size–it’s still large, but I no longer feel so overwhelmed–and the house is cleaner (spurred about by the arrival of sara1221 later today). I even found a skein of yarn, which is sort of like finding candy–the kind of candy you can’t eat but that you can crochet with.

fosteronfilm convinced me to try Radio Yahoo. He likes how you can customize your own station by rating the songs it selects for you based upon some initial preference selections. I’m finding it distracting. I keep being pulled out of whatever I’m doing whenever there’s a song change to rank it. And also, since I’m using the free version, it pops up with commercials every few songs–the same commercials, about three of them, over and over again. I’m thinking I’ll probably go back to playing MP3s on my computer.

Wallace & Gromit won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature! Yay! Although I wish they’d decrease the number of hokey skits the presenters do at the award ceremony so the winners could have more than ten seconds to give their acceptance speeches. It seems rude to shoo them off stage, especially when they’re supplanted by the likes of Ben Stiller doing an exceptionally lame green screen gag.

   

Writing Stuff
While I greatly enjoy what I do for Tangent, there are times when being Tangent‘s managing editor is also incredibly aggravating. I find myself wondering whether I’d be better off with the extra time to focus on my writing.* I guess that’s why there are so many editors who end up doffing their editorial hats in lieu of their writing careers.

Do people view editors who are also writers differently than plain-jane “I just write” writers? I can’t help but think of, say, Gardner Dozois as an editor first and foremost, even though he’s no longer the editor of Asimov’s**. With my myriad editorial hats, I find myself wondering if my readers (those dozen or so of you wonderful and discriminating people out there) see me as primarily an editor with writerly aspirations or a writer who has a proclivity for editing.

Yep, labels leave me blinking in the dust. I should quit trying to tangle with them.

---

*Any of you Tangent reviewers who just went twitchy, don’t read more into this than a desire to vent some steam. My Tangent hat remains jammed on my head. Also, lemme make it absolutely clear that none of y’all are in any way contributories to my current pressure build-up.
**Not, mind you, that I have the hubris to liken my endeavors to Gardner Dozois’s prodigious accomplishments.