Sherri Blossoms

(Had to change the title from 4 to 9. Who knew an Ice Age 4 was actually coming? Did anybody watch 3?)

I never did find my camera cord, so I guess I’ll never get those ice storm pictures uploaded. I’m sure I put the cord somewhere that made sense at the time, but only my other personality knows where it is.

I’ll go on record as saying this is the strangest winter I can remember. Normally here in Oklahoma we have a couple of little snows a year, with one big, bad winter storm every two or three years. Ice, snow, power outages, the whole shebang. Any accumulation melts within a day or two, at the most a week, and many times I can remember wearing shorts one week and earmuffs the next. We don’t have extended periods of deep cold. My pear trees try to bud a couple of times every winter, it can get that warm.

This season we’ve had a blizzard with record snow totals followed by a cold snap that kept the snow around for weeks, an ice storm with record ice accumulation and another record snowfall on top of that, with a bunch of little snows in between. I’m seriously thinking of investing in a snow shovel. Yesterday I bought a chainsaw so I could cut up all the limbs that fell off the trees, and if it will ever stop snowing I will do that. Lingering snow makes me nervous. I’m used to the landscape looking a certain way, so those few weeks when the snow just stayed gave me a constant, vague feeling of suspicion.

People like to say, “I thought the globe was supposed to be getting warmer, yuk yuk.” Well of course if the global average temperature is raised or lowered it will cause weather patterns to shift, and that means different weather, not necessarily warmer all the time. I don’t know if global warming is real or not, and frankly, I’ve stopped caring. I live as simply and consume as little as I can, and that’s all I can do.

Not sure I’ve ever been this ready for spring. Geez.

[Reading over this, it seems like all these paragraphs should be in a different order, but I don't care enough to change it. Read them in any order you like.]

Maybe it’s a good thing I haven’t snagged a publisher yet. It’s an accepted fact that publishing is changing in ways we can’t foresee. It’s possible that when the dust settles the Kindle will be law and physical books will be a novelty item. Of course the dust may not settle for years, maybe decades. We are in transition, for sure.

I don’t want to wait till the dust settles completely, but I would like to debut in a more stable marketplace than we have now. My goal for a long time has been to sign with one of the big sff publishers, like Tor (whose parent MacMillan just had a tussle with Amazon), DAW, Baen, etc. in book form, with electronic publishing secondary. I think this is still a viable goal, but in a few years it may be the other way around. Some of these little eBook publishers like Damnation Books/Eternal Press may emerge as the brass ring eventually.

But really, there’s no reason for me to speculate because I can’t control how or when I get published. All I can control is the book I’m writing right now and let the rest take care of itself.

Don’t know if any of you noticed, but I haven’t been interacting online much. I’m bored with all my usual things, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, plus there has been an unusual development in my psyche, whereby the need/desire to write outweighs the distraction factor of the Internet. I’m still keeping up with what everybody’s doing, but it’s more out of habit. Probably twenty times in the past few days, I’ve typed out a whole comment and decided not to share, because I didn’t want to be distracted by the ensuing discussion. What an antisocial a-hole I am!

Nah, not antisocial. I find myself wanting to email people instead of commenting with a mass of other people. I’m tired of the Internet with its constant barrage of other people’s opinions. I’d rather be discussing things with folks one-on-one. This blog is a comfortable space for me, with a small circle of commentators, but then I’m forcing y’all to come here, and that’s not fair.

Besides, I’m getting tired of the whole blogging scene. I’ve added very few new blogs in the past two years to replace the ones that folded, and my circle is shrinking. I’m in a rut. A rut I’ve seen before, no doubt, but a rut nonetheless. Anybody know what the next big thing is going to be? Because I’m ready to jump on it.

I’m not hiding and I’m not mad and nothing bad is going on in my life. I’m happy to get emails and comments and tweets from you, and I’m sure this isn’t my final post. I’ll still be around on Facebook, too, but I might stop announcing what I had for breakfast. Just slowing down on the info overload.

It’s like Narnia in my neighborhood. An (expected) inch of ice and 8 (surprise) inches of snow combined with a low, white cloud cover… I am warm and cozy with Mr. Tumnus and the Beavers (husband and kids) so I’m sure the White Witch will pass right by. Some were not so lucky, like my brother and his wife who have been without power (and therefore heat) for two days. They finally made the treacherous drive to a friend’s house where there is heat, so I am glad for that. When I find the camera cable I’ll post some pics.

About a week ago I mentioned I would start editing my work in progress, going through it the way I would someone else’s. Well I finished that pass, making notes about what goes where, what needed clarification, missing motivation and leaps of logic.Then yesterday I accepted all the changes, unified the formatting, and moved all the in-doc notes to the margin.

I’ve found it’s really helpful to look at this from an editor’s perspective. It lessens the judgement of the work, clears away all that muddy self-doubt and makes decisions easier.

I have a little more to do in this step, but so far I’m on schedule. Barring mental fatigue I’ll get this formatting/cleaning step done by Feb 1, and the next step is implementing all the changes I’ve noted. This could take a couple of weeks, but I’m pumped to be nearing the end.

It’s starting to look like a real manuscript. Frickin’ awesome.

I don’t have anything important to say today, but I feel compelled to post. That’s how it is with me; there is no planning, no future posting as some of my more industrious friends may use. There is only the moment. Only the now.

So right now I’m happy to be 39 and happy that I’ll be 40 soon. That sounds so frickin’ old, and sometimes it feels old, like after I’ve been to the park, where sk8rs also hang. Or chill, or whatever they say now. Little did I know at 16 that I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass what the kids say when I was 39. I also had no idea that at 39 I would consider 16-year-olds the dumbest creatures on the planet, and for safety’s sake should be locked in a small room until they turn 18. Having this perspective now makes me wonder what baby boomers think of my demographic.

I realized something as I was pondering my advanced age and wisdom. Most of the wisdom I have, I’ve gained over the past, say, five years. From the time I was born, I went through crap, more crap, still more crap, then BOOM, I’m 30-something and starting to process all that crap. Right? I think most people are that way. We’re young and dumb, and then some time after our brains are physically fully developed (I’ve read this doesn’t happen till our mid-twenties) we start to gain real wisdom.

I went to Wikipedia and looked up life expectancy through the years. They say that at the beginning of the previous century, the life expectancy was only 30-45, and in medieval Britain it was only 20-30! So I thought, “Man, if I lived a few hundred years ago, I’d be just about dead by now. I’d be ancient. The wise old lady of my village.”

Have you noticed how as a society we’re becoming more and more enlightened through the decades? That’s why! We all live long enough to at least have a chance to gain a whole lot of wisdom.

Of course then I wondered if our brains just developed faster back in the days when 30 was old. Experience shapes the brain, right? And if a whole lotta life experience was packed in to a shorter time, maybe 30 was the equivelant to 80 now. That probably was the case to an extent, but I believe we’ve outpaced that. What I think is, people were running around with their undeveloped brains being queens and knights and raising babies and working the land.

That’s what I think.

Sarah commented on the previous post, “I think your editing plan sounds very sensible. I did a total of four passes through my novel, and with each one I felt able to work at a deeper level, as the easier bits were corrected or smoothed out.”

I think I’ll end up with about four passes, too. In this first pass, I’m treating my manuscript like someone else’s, making notes and tracking changes, going through really quickly. World-building notes are going on a piece of paper, and scene-specific notes are going in the margin of the document.

This quick one, then another to implement notes I made in the first. I think that will be the hardest and take the longest.

On another pass I’ll work on dialogue and tightening up, spell checking and all that good stuff, then I’ll send it to betas. And of course there’ll be a pass after that to implement those changes.

And I plan to do that in a month. I figure if I don’t dally on the easier stages I can devote about 20 days to the second stage, the major re-writing. That’s twice as long as authors for Eternal Press (my old editing job) were given to implement changes…but of course mine needs about 3 times the work, and that doesn’t allow for getting burned out. Or for feeling like your uterus is going to explode, which I have found today can seriously curtail your butt-in-chair time.

On schedule so far. Cross your fingers for me.

Oh, and if anyone knows Spanish, I’ve got some questions for you.

I’ll begin with a call to prayer. My regular readers are familiar with the Darcs, a husband and wife team who have been tireless supporters of me, my blog, and my writing for a couple of years now. Darcknyt and Darc’sFalcon have brought me many blessings, and I’ll always be grateful for their friendship. I won’t go into detail, but recession-related unemployment has made things hard on them. They still have a home for now. I wish there were something I could do, but of course I don’t have any jobs to offer. All I can do is send a message to the universe that these people need help and trust that work will come in time. I’d appreciate your taking a moment to do the same.

~~~

After finishing the first draft of my WIP, I took a couple of days off to allow a migraine to run its course, as well as to fulfill a critique commitment. Ian’s got a unique spin on the vampire novel and a good story to go along with it. His writing seems so effortless it makes me jealous, but I can’t wait until he snags a publishing contract. This may be the right book at the right time to do just that.

~~~

So now that I’m feeling healthy and free, I’ll start edits on my WIP. I have been using yWriter on this last push to the end, which is based on individual scenes–great for moving big chunks around during organization stages, and then for crafting the scenes themselves. I’ve had trouble with this program in the past because of this chunky quality, but for some reason it was just what I needed for this book.

However, now that I’m finished with the scenes I need to read the book as a whole, and for that I’ve imported it to MS Word, my standard and the industry standard, though that is relaxing. I’ll make a single-shot pass, making notes and correcting typos, re-writing easy stuff as I go through and detailing the hard stuff for the next pass. My biggest trap is indecisiveness, so I’ve vowed to go with my gut on the hard decisions and not over-analyze. Another vow I’ve made is to look at the whole process through a fun lens, rather than fulfilling a duty. Duty crushes my creativity.

Hope you have a lovely weekend.

Okay. Yesterday saw a milestone, and some of you witnessed it on Facebook: I finished my work in progress. Now, this may not seem like a very big deal to some people, and it may not be a very big deal to me later, but right now, yeah. It’s huge. Do you know what a struggle this book has been? Later on, when I’m talking about how I learned to be a writer, I’ll cite the two years I worked on this book. I’ll tell how I almost succumbed to the self-doubt; how I learned what real writer’s block is; how I injured my hand and almost gave up the writing biz altogether. I knew it was going to be hard when I started because of the subject matter, but I didn’t know how it would feel to be in the middle of it, and when other things started to pile on, well… You get the idea.

I’m not completely finished yet; I still have to edit the damn thing. I’ve had a few people ask me if I would now do the expected thing and let it sit for a few weeks before tackling the edit. I feel very strongly that this wisdom doesn’t apply here. I have prospects waiting for this manuscript, for one. For another, I took long breaks during the process, and I haven’t read the first half of the novel since I started this last push to the end. I’m motivated and excited; I know what it’s like to not be those things and if they leave again I’ll take a break, but I don’t want to waste them while they’re here.

So I have a long way to go. I still have to make some hard decisions, and I’m still not entirely confident in my abilities. However, the editing has always been easier for me than the actual writing. And I’ll have it done by the end of February, this I vow.

I can’t freakin’ believe it.