Tag Archives: writing

First Full Day

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So, today in class, MN gave us his pep/fear talk. “There are 50,0000 people writing novels every year. You don’t have to worry about 48,000 of them. You need to give up any ego you have, and do what it takes to be in the 2,000 who actually publish. And sometimes that means your breakout novel is NOT the book you really want to write. But it’s the one that can sell.”

– He had us read a 9-page synopsis and 1-page writing sample from a real author who was beyond help (author’s name withheld).
– He had us pretend to be editors at Knopf and pick it apart, giving it a yay-or-nay and telling why
– He had each of us give a practice pitch: Name, Title, Genre, Comps, Credentials (what you’ve published, or if you have experience that relates to the subject matter), Log Line (Short description). Pitch (Jacket Blurb Nutshell).

Then he picked it apart. Half of us were asked for new titles and more definition, almost all of us were told to define our genre better (many of these ppl walked in saying “I write literary fiction” and left with instructions to get comfortable with their stories really being mainstream, commercial, fantasy, women’s fic, etc.

He liked my concept, but agreed that I need plot help (well, I knew that).

He suggested strongly that I embrace the chick-lit aspects of my idea, and make it quirky, and not fight the funny.

And he asked for a longer title.

Attached is what I came up with after class, when Michelle and I went to the Round Table in the Marina, got Pizza and Beer, and went to work.

It uses most of the elements I wanted, though I think I’m going to have to toss the 70’s part, and set it all in the future, but keeps the elements I most loved.

And he said Universal Blend should be my book of short stories.

And I agree.

Leave me a comment with your email address if you want to see my pitch :) You must be able to read word doc or docx files.

Tired, tired, tired

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Arrived SFO yesterday.
Walked to Hyde St. to get muni pass. They were closed.

Brunched with Clay, at Mama’s on Washington Square, where we both had the French Toast sampler, and we split a side of bacon and a side of home fries.

Hung out in the park talking, until a scary old guy decided that 62 degrees was just too damned warm for pants, and dropped trou in the middle of the park.

Bought truffles and salt water taffy for bus money.
Ended up taking cab.

Came back to hotel.
Called Fort Mason to find out where Meet and Greet was … meeting.
Found out venue had changed.

Wandered to Cioppinos on the wharf.
Had Aglio e Olio & lovely chardonnay while meeting and greeting.
Workshop leader reminds me of a fuzzier, warmer, more literary Brent Spiner.

No, really, he does.

Am tired, but looking forward to tomorrow.
Expect this will be most informative.

Pink Ink.

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I should be blogging about the sexy pink fountain pen that I bought from RichardINK, but I’m so tired, and have written so many words today for work and in my novel, and such, that I’m going to just crash.

However, I will note that among the ink cartridges he sent with the pen was a pink one that I cannot wait to try, and the weight of the pen is really satisfyingly solid without being uncomfortably heavy.

And on that note, I’m going to bed. Yay, bed.

Welcome to the Word Lounge – [LONG]

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It’s no secret that I’ve been having an issue with my office. When we first moved here, and I was still doing loans, the calming tranquility of walls the color of green tea appealed to me. I had lots of power outlets for my nifty business machines. It was good.

But over the last couple years, really since quitting BigFinancialCompany, I’ve not been able to find the ‘zone’ in my office. It’s not that I dislike the colors, or anything, I’m just not at home there. This is demonstrated that the beautiful calendar my mother gave me at Christmas, from an artist local to La Paz, BCS, Mexico, was still on MARCH as of yesterday.

It was further brought home when my friend Deb walked up there with me for a house tour on Saturday, and said, “Well, no wonder you can’t write here. This doesn’t feel like you.”

We walked down the hall to the room we’d designated the Library, but that we’ve never quite used enough, even though it’s the kind of room that beckons. (Does that make sense?) I don’t know if it’s the geography of the house, the fact that it has huge windows overlooking the side street, or what, but whenever we walk into that room, we tend to find a reason to stay. It helps, I think, that our old denim couch is up there. Further proof of the power of this room: when we moved the denim set upstairs, we had no problem getting the love seat into Fuzzy’s office, but he and his friend D could not manage to wrangle the couch into the library. They measured and found out it was four inches larger than the door, in every angle.

They were, in fact, about to tell me there was no way the couch would fit into that room when suddenly, miraculously, it just did.

I should have seen it as a sign, I guess.

So anyway, Deb and I sat on the couch up there, and she said, “This is where you need to write,” which is true. I love that room. We’d chosen our original offices based on having spaces of roughly equal size, but the reality is, I work from home. I need more space. I need big surfaces spread before me like blank paper. And I need bold colors.

Fuzzy and I talked about it, and he agreed we’d make it happen. Before bed on Friday, he’d made me a diagram with visio even printed cut-outs of all the furniture pieces, so that we could figure out how this could work.

It helps, I think, that I’ve needed to replace my desk for a while. The keyboard tray broke in shipping four years ago, and we’d used spit and twine to make it work, but several months ago it broke completely, crashing down on my foot. (MDF + Bare Feet = OWOWOWOWOWOW!) In retrospect, that was probably a sign as well. The desk is no longer made, the fittings for any tray can only be attached to the struts, and no tray we could find was the right size. The desk is taller than most, and too tall to use a laptop on top of for any length of time.

I was pretty sure we would have to wait to replace my desk til after my conference, but we went looking at desks so I could find some I liked and begin a budget plan, and then we walked into Staples, and they had this corner desk that I liked. I liked it so much that I walked away from the blue glass and steel desk I’d been eyeing, sat down in the pink typing chair near it, and said, “I like this.”

I looked at the price, and it said $99. I thought, “Oh, that’s probably just for this section,” as most such desks are sold in parts – one price for the desk, another for the return or hutch – but no, that was for the whole thing. And it got better – it was on sale for $89, and then there was $10 off on the website, and then I had a coupon for another $10.

We went home to think about it. Because I wanted to make sure. And because it was bigger than we’d planned, but Fuzzy moved the couch into it’s new position, and used empty boxes to show me how the space would work. “You won’t be able to get three people on the sofa,” he said.

When the hell do I NEED three people on the couch in my writing room?

I went online to check the dimensions again, and found out that the desk came in CHERRY as well as the maple we’d seen. Now, while my original desk was beach-glass-green and powder-coated steel, the supports for the desk were warm copper cherry, and my cabinet and rolling file are also copper cherry. This was a lighter cherry, but much closer in tone than maple. I called the store, and Connie said she didn’t have it in cherry, but she’d find out who did, then sent us to Cedar Hill. The Arlington store is about six miles from our house in one direction. Cedar Hill is about eight in another direction – we go there often – not too bad.

I managed to convince the sales person to give me the Internet-only discount, and we got my new desk for $69.

I came home and had to finish a project, and Fuzzy went upstairs and built it for me. (I bribed him with a cheeseburger, but still). He had a work issue come up, and at one point he was under the desk tightening screws and talking to a client, “I’m not the best person to help with this, and I’m sort of under a piece of furniture right now…”

Today, he’ll drop an ethernet port into the room for my desktop machine, though that has a wifi card in it as well, so it’s not urgent or anything. And I’ll start moving stuff over.

After all this, you’re probably wondering why the title of this is “Welcome to the Word Lounge.” It’s because I told Fuzzy he was not allowed to refer to my new space as an office. “I don’t want it tainted by BUSINESS,” I said. “It’s a creative space.”

“Okay,” he said, “It’s your ABODE OF WRITEYNESS.”

“Possibly,” I said, laughing, the way one does at four AM. “Or, I might call it, the Word Lounge.”

Pictures will be taken when everything’s all set up.

A Difficult Day

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All day Tuesday I felt as if I were trying to move through viscous liquid, both physically and mentally. Greenish glowy viscous liquid. Sort of like aloe gel but without the skin soothing effect.

Of course, in reality I was just tired and a little crabby, and not in the mood to work, and yet, I finished everything I’d planned to do, and managed to enjoy an afternoon of dark skies and rumbling thunder punctuated by the odd flash of lightning and softened by a steady, soaking rain.

We may or may not get more rain today, but even if we don’t I think I’m in a better mental place than I was all week.

I wrote another chapter of a fanfic today, and I’ve worked out some issues with the NOVEL so I know how to fix them, and just need to work diligently so I can have lots of time for personal writing this week and weekend.

Sometimes, the difficult days are the most rewarding.

Writing on Hotel Paper

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Sometime in the next few weeks I’ll be booking my flight and hotel room for my trip to San Francisco in August. As such, I’ve been skimming hotel websites reading about their amenities. I don’t really care if there are walk in bathtubs or not, as I don’t need an accessible room, but wifi is a must, and a free breakfast is useful. I’m looking for a hotel in or near the Marina district, and I found one I think will do, but not sure yet.

I’m looking forward to this trip for the actual conference as much as I’m looking forward to it just for a change of scenery. I do some of my best writing on hotel paper, or in places other than my own home. Something about being “away” just makes the creative juices flow.

I just wish I could be away and still have my dogs. I can sleep fine without Fuzzy if I have to, but sleeping without the comforting weight of a small dog on the covers in front of me is really odd.

Infected

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I had to ask one of the BBtL people who Scott Sigler was, and then, I forgot to bookmark any of the sites mentioned where I could read about the recent (by which I mean over the last couple years) of authors using podcasting to share their work, as a means of attracting an agent.

If I had the courage, and the technical skills, I’d do it. As it is, I’m serializing one of the threads of my novel over at Pink Nighties, and using one of the fragments as a jumping off point for a contribution to a friend-of-a-friends’ coffee culture book. A friend of mine who is also a writer adopted the term “prepublished,” and I like that idea a LOT.

Writing has come a long way from people using spiral notebooks and cheap pens, and spending endless hours holed up in garrets or garages a la Josephine March in Little Women. There are scary rumors of the publishing industry going to pot, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Rather, I think it’s evolving to include new media, and that’s a good thing. Anything that allows us to share stories is a plus.

But back to Scott Sigler. He’s an author who’s been podcasting his fiction. He’s amazingly cool, and pretty talented, and if you like horror and sci-fi you should check out his first hardcover work, Infected, which is available at your local bookseller, as well as Amazon.

Not sure you want to risk the money? Check out the book’s promotional trailer, below (linked from YouTube):

2:33

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I have to be up in roughly four and a half hours and I can’t sleep. I’m not awake enough to write, but a late afternoon nap made me too tired to go to bed at midnight, which is when Fuzzy came down from his office.

So why not blog.

April has been a good month to me so far. I got into the Algonkian workshop, got a part in this season of the fan-created podcast drama Buffy: Between the Lines, and ordered a new laptop because neither my MacBook nor my Vaio are robust enough for daily use, and, except for printing postage or doing the taxes (currently in process), I pretty much just use the desktop machine to store stuff.

Actually, today (well Tuesday, as it’s no longer “today” really) was a red-letter day. Why? Because I found out my computer had shipped, and is likely to be here on Thursday, my new business cards arrived, I managed to write an article I didn’t want to write before bed so I don’t have to stress about being up to do it tomorrow, I got paid (money is always good), I received shipping confirmation on Wil Wheaton‘s latest book, and I found out a flash-fic I wrote in ten minutes a few weeks ago, and submitted to Everyday Fiction is being published, though I don’t know when.

And to make things perfect, as I write this there is gentle thunder, distant lightning and light rain. It’s the kind of weather that makes me want to stay up all night and write.

But my teacup is almost empty and I’d better go to bed, after all.

Procrastination

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Unless cleaning the kitchen, and paying for my registration for the conference I posted about earlier counts, I’ve been singularly unproductive today, writing a little, reading a lot, cuddling Fuzzy and the dogs, and catching up on sleep.

We did manage to leave the house (once the car was returned to us with working A/C – a MUST in this climate (it cost $1620 to repair.)) for a lovely dinner at Hanasho where I managed not to drip soy sauce into my cleavage – barely.

I’m caught up on work. Laundry day is usually Sunday. The housecleaner will deal with vacuuming and such. But one task I still haven’t managed is to do the taxes – I who usually do them on February first, cannot seem to drag myself up to my office (the computer where TurboTax lives) and actually plug in numbers.

It’s not so much that I think we’re going to owe, because even as a full-time 1099’d writer I’m showing a loss on paper, as that I hate my current array of office furniture so much that my office doesn’t feel welcoming or pleasant, it feels like a prison.

I hate that feeling.

And so, here I sit, blogging and chattering via email about a script proposal, instead of doing anything remotely useful.

Oh, the laziness of me.