Challenge Worth Watching

Dean Wesley Smith is starting a new challenge tomorrow, to write ten novels in a hundred days. That's pretty radical even for Dean, but if anyone can do it in this day and age, he can. :)

He's blogging about it as he goes, and the posts will eventually be collected into a book. (Assuming he succeeds.)

The challenge starts tomorrow, and the introductory post is up today.

Excerpt:

This is a book about the process of writing ten novels in one hundred days. Yup, that simple and that crazy.

This book will take its original shape in blogs on my website and I hope to add a bunch more to the book in the final form once the one hundred days are complete. But the origin will be on my blog as the one hundred days goes along.

And as I write this introduction, I have no idea at the outcome, if I will be able to write ten novels or not. I am writing this introduction the night before the first day. This is a challenge for me, one that actually worries me as I start into it.

But if you are actually reading this introduction in a book, you know I managed to do it.

So I hope you get the sense, as you read this, of the fun and the pressure of this challenge. I have no idea what books I will be writing. I will think about what the first book might be tomorrow, on the first day. I have done no outlines or any prep work beyond trying to get some business projects done and out of the way.

During the one hundred days, I have at least one trip planned, a full week of a workshop to teach, my birthday, a marathon to run, and Thanksgiving holidays. And I work a lot of hours each week as the CFO of WMG Publishing, plus teach online workshops. And I exercise at least three hours a day on top of that.

In other words, I am going to do this with my real life going on.

Working On Your To-Do List?

I found a great web site that helps you work on your to-do list, plus encourages you to build and maintain good habits and get over bad habits. Thanks to Jim Hines for the link a couple of days ago.

The site is called Habitica, and it's a gamification site. What that means is that it takes something in your life -- in this case, getting stuff done and building good habits -- and turns it into a game. Habitica has the form of a fantasy roleplaying game.

When you create an account, which is free, you become a character in the land of Habitica. You're a first level Warrior with basically no gear. The first step is to set up some things you want to do (or want to stop doing) in a fairly intuitive (sorta -- there is a learning curve, but there's also a very thorough wiki) Tasks page. I have a combination of personal and work tasks on mine, ranging from Write 1000 Words, to Walk 1000 Steps, to Eat a Piece of Fruit, to Call Mom, to Read a Chapter of a Writing Book. I have Eat Junk Food as a negative; if I do that, I click on the Junk Food button and my character takes some damage. :/ I haven't done that yet, but I suppose I will at some point.

You set up each task with a frequency (every day, week or month; three times a week, or just to keep tabs but with no set goal) and estimate about how hard the task is. You can set up a larger task with an internal checklist, so if your task is cleaning the kitchen, it could have a checklist that includes Load the Dishwasher, Clean the Stove, Wipe Down the Counters, and Put Away Leftovers. It's really very flexible once you get the hang of it, and the wiki is great help.

As you do tasks, you click to check them off, and the system gives you experience points and gold pieces for each one. Sometimes (after you hit Level 3) you get an item drop. You accumulate experience points and make levels. When you hit Level 10, you can change professions if you want and become a Mage, a Rogue or a Healer. You also get some skills, which are like special abilities, or spells if you're a Mage or a Healer. I haven't gotten there yet (I'm currently Level 4) but it looks like fun.

There are also guilds you can join. I joined The Wordsmiths, a writers' guild, and The Renaissance Man, which despite the sexism of its name, seems like an interesting guild with a broad base of interests.

Guilds can set Challenges, too. A Challenge is a collection of Tasks, usually around a theme and with a deadline. You click to join the Challenge, and the Tasks are added to your Task page. Usually there's some kind of a prize in gems at the end for a random person who worked on the Challenge. Gems are another (rarer) form of currency in the game; there are things you can only buy with gems. I don't have any yet.

You can also form a party. A party is a smaller group than a Guild, and Parties do quests together. I started a party all by myself, since I wanted to try the baby quest (I'm battling some rabid dust bunnies right now :D ) and didn't know anybody on the site. There are two kinds of quests, the Boss Battle quest and the Collection quest. The Dust Bunny quest is a boss battle quest, with some unknown (to me, at least) number of dust bunnies to be defeated. Every time I check off a task, I do some amount of damage to the current dust bunny I'm fighting. When you've killed them all, you win the quest, yay. If you're playing a collection quest, as you check off tasks, there's a chance you'll get an item drop that's a quest item. When your party has collected enough of each type of item, you've won the quest, yay. The whole party gets a reward when the quest is done.

As you accumulate gold, you can buy gear for your character. You also get some gear for checking in to the site a certain number of times. I have a cool set of Bardic Robes (which increase my Perception stat) that I got for checking in the second day I played. I also have a helm, a sword and a shield. Different pieces of gear increase different stats, and you can buy better gear as you move up. Your stats are taken into account as you "fight." For example, having a better weapon gives you more strength, so you do more damage to whatever you're fighting each time you check off a task.

Basically, if you're a gamer geek, this is an awesome way to motivate yourself to get stuff done. I've been amazingly productive the last couple of days. I even called to make a dentist appointment O_O which I'd usually have put off for weeks. [hides under keyboard] I'm sure some of the enthusiasm will wear off soon, but I'm hoping most of it lasts. :)

I highly recommend trying Habitica if you're at all into gaming. If you do, drop a note here and we can get together and go questing. :D

Angie

Fleeing Into November

So, October sucked and I'm very glad it's over.

About a week and a half into the month, my gastroparesis flared up, and off to the ER we went. This is bad enough -- having your stomach working at turning itself inside-out with enough determination as to require intravenous meds is pretty sucktastic. We got that straightened out, I came home and collapsed, and then took most of a week to recover. My stomach was mostly fine as of the next day, but being that sick sucks the energy right out of me, and it usually takes five or six days to get back to my old activity level, with enough energy to actually spend most of each day conscious.

[The upside of this is that it was my first ER visit in about eleven months. Two or three years ago, my husband worked out that we had to run to the ER on the average of every four weeks, for the whole year. Yeah, I'll take an eleven-month gap and be pretty happy about it.]

Then about a week before Halloween, I snapped an incisor. :/ I was chewing on something, then felt this SNAP! and one of my (thankfully root-canalled and crowned) incisors was just sort of sitting in its socket, not actually attached any more. Crap.

This happened to me before, a few years ago. (The other large incisor, the one right next to the one that broke off this time.) I just went to the dentist on Wednesday, because we'd cancelled our dental insurance (this has been a tight year financially) and had to sign back up again. The renewed insurance didn't kick in till the first of the month, so holding pattern until then.

Even if everything goes perfectly, this is going to take months to resolve. I'm getting another implant, which is fine, but it comes in several steps, with months between each step for thorough healing before progressing on. So I've got this hole in my face (again) and I'm going to be dealing with it until, probably, some time this coming summer. Late spring at the earliest.

I decided to skip the temporary, cosmetic not-really-replacement thing this time. Last time, I got an ultra-temporary fake tooth cemented in, because I was two days from dashing off to a workshop, and there was no time to do the long-term temporary replacement at that point. The ultra-temporary was so fragile, my dentist told me not even to brush while I had it. When your dentist says not to brush, that's Fragile with a capital F. :P And it fell out three days later anyway, so that was $800 wasted.

The long-term temporary thing was what's called a "flipper," which is basically a denture-y thing with only one tooth on it. You have to remove it to eat, and although they told me I'd get used to talking with it in, I never did. And after I got my implant post put in, the periodontist did some drilling at the base of the fake tooth in my flipper so it'd fit over the cap at the top of the post, but it never did fit right, so it was even more annoying to wear and I hardly ever did. I don't remember what the flipper cost, but it was somewhere in the $$$$ range. I've decided to bail on that one too. Way too much expense for a purely cosmetic deal that's non-functional and uncomfortable. Nah, I'll skip it. If people want to stare at the hole in my face, they're welcome to do so.

At least this time when I went to the dentist for the preliminary look-around (which was basically for the purpose of saying, "Yep, you need an implant,") she mentioned that I have a very deep bite, which means when I close my jaw, my upper teeth overlap my lower teeth almost completely. That apparently puts a lot of pressure on those upper teeth, which is why I've had the breakage problem. Okay, well, there's nothing I can do about it, but I guess it's good to know why this keeps happening. :/

So, that was October. Good riddance.

Now it's November, and I'm doing NaNoWriMo. I'm AngiePen on the site, if you're playing too and want to Buddy me. I'm working on a romance novel, and things are going well so far. I've had about 46K words of this one sitting on my hard drive for a couple of years now, so I've pulled it out to work on. I'm pretty sure I have 50K words of it left. If not, but I finish at some lesser wordcount, that's fine; I consider finished novels a win no matter what the wordcount. :)

If I wrap the current book with, like, 30K words or so, and still have at least a week left in the month, I'll probably pull out another partial project (yeah, I have a lot of 'em [cough]) and work on that, and lump the wordcount together for purposes of NaNo. No biggie.

I've been having a sucktastic writing year, though, so doing a couple thousand words a day for multiple days in a row has felt awesome. Now if I can only keep it going.... [crossed fingers]

Who else is doing NaNo this year...?

Angie

SF Workshop

I spent last week at a science fiction workshop taught by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It was freaking awesome, and if she offers it again (probably not for a couple of years) I strongly urge any writer who's into SF to dive in.

We started on 1 January, which is when Kris sent us a reading list:

Asimov's SF Magazine, the Jan/Feb and Mar/Apr issues
Women of Futures Past Anthology
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novellas 2016
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1
Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation
Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016

There were some people in the class (out of fourteen students) who were writers but weren't familiar with SF, so one of the reasons for doing the reading was to get everyone on the same page about what SF is. A lot of people who try to use SF in their writing (like pretty much every single romance writer whose "futuristic romance" I've ever tried [sigh]) seem to think that if you watch Star Wars and Star Trek, there you go, you know all about SF and are ready to write it. Not so much. So reading all the anthologies and a couple issues of Asimov's gave us all some common ground. We took some time at each evening session to talk about one of the books/magazines, what we liked or didn't like, what surprised us. That also let us see how people's tastes differ.

A couple of weeks before the workshop, we got a story assignment. One of Kris's pet peeves with SF is aliens who are just humans with weird foreheads. (Glancing back at folks who think Star Trek will teach you everything you need to know about SF.) So she linked us to the Oregon Coast Aquarium's web site and asked us to write an SF story with a really alien alien, inspired by something on the Aquarium's site. I wanted to go way alien :) so I paid particular attention to the invertebrates. I read the description for the giant rock scallop, and noted how the baby scallops are free swimming, and move by clapping their shells together and spraying jets of water. Then when they grow up, they cement themselves to a rock and live there for the rest of their lives. Add in the moon snail, another mollusc, which has a tongue that can drill through shells and rocks. I got an image of a hollowed-out asteroid covered in scallops, and baby scallops flapping and jetting away into space. Everything else followed from there, and I ended up with a fun story that got great comments from Kris. It's currently out with a magazine editor. [crossed fingers]

We wrote three more stories while at the workshop -- we had one due every other day, starting when we turned in the Aquarium-alien story on Saturday -- plus we read everyone else's stories, plus we had other, smaller assignments. Plus if we messed up on the smaller assignments [ducks, raises hand] they came back covered in red comments, with "Redo" at the top. I ended up redoing three or four assignments.

It turns out I kind of suck at putting really concrete details in my work. This is important with most fiction, but particularly with SF, because the reader can't take anything for granted. If you're writing something contemporary, you might have your character enter a barn. Okay, we all know what a barn looks like. But do we really? There's the classic red barn, but some are white, some are brown, some are corrugated steel. Some are multi-story, with a hay loft like the classic barn in kids' books, but some are lower. Some are long and wide, some are compact. So if you just have your character walk into "a barn" with no details, the reader will visualize a barn, filling in those details for you. Maybe they'll match the details in your head, but probably not. So if you imagine a barn with a basement or other sub level, and mention it twelve pages later, the readers who didn't imagine a barn with a basement will be all, "Wait, what?!" Or if your barn has a main floor and some side areas, plus an equipment room, and a room with tools where stuff is repaired, but your reader was imagining just one big room, then again, they'll have a huge disconnect that'll throw them out of the story if your character starts going from room to room later on.

So if you just say "a barn" in your story, that's a fake detail.

And that's with a barn. Everyone knows what a barn is, even if the details can differ. What if your character boards a starship? Or a space station? Or is walking around on an alien planet? What does that look like? You have to be even more thorough about describing everything, using concrete sensory details, because the reader can't fill in details for you.

So for our first technique assignment, we had to describe an alien space station. We were to write five paragraphs, each one using details coming from only one sense. Here's what I wrote for the first two senses:

=====

Sight -- Alicia's first impression of the Nonapus station was that it was dark. Well, of course; sight was a minor sense for them. Nonapus stations weren't bright for the same reason Human stations ween't tasty. The water that filled the corridors and chambers was just slightly chilly, and full of tiny particulates that made it impossible to see, even with a light, much beyond the length of her arm.

Touch -- Most of the station walls were smooth. There were no floors or ceilings as such; the Nonapus have been starfaring for millenia, and the main difference between a wall and a floor or ceiling was gravity. The Nonapus expected everyone to hang on to or push off from whatever's handy, and avoid dangerous or delicate equipment as a matter of course. All controls required a firm push or pull or twist; brushing up against something was done casually while moving around, and was supposed to be perfectly safe.

=====

Not bad, huh? I was pretty pleased with them when I wrote them (in a frantic hurry, but anyway). Actually, they suck. :P This was my first non-story assignment, and it came back covered with big red "Fake!" notes all over it, and a red "Redo" at the top. A few days later, I redid it:

=====

Sight -- The only light inside the Nonapus station came from tiny, glowing white jellyfish that swam through the water, expanding and contracting in a rhythm that made it look like they were dancing, their legs rippling in time like ribbons in wind. The passageways were tubular, too narrow for a human to stand up in; it made Alicia feel cramped, and a little claustrophobic. Everything was shades of grey; there was no color anywhere, not even on her fellow refugees. They'd all been given clothes that could stand up to weeks in the water. The plain, stretchy coveralls were comfortable enough, but their uniform grey made them blend in with the walls, and the rest of the humans, as though they were all ghosts haunting the place.

Touch -- The walls were mostly smooth, some sort of soft plastic, with patches and strips of texture on them. used the way humans would use signs. Rough and smooth and sharp, with and against the grain of the ridges -- all the different textures meant something, and Alicia knew she'd have to learn them. Swimming through the ship, she brushed against the jellyfish, couldn't help it, because they streamed and clustered everywhere. These didn't sting, like the ones on the beach at home, so she could touch them if she wanted. Their little round bodies were slick, like they were coated in gel. Their legs -- or were they arms? -- slid through her fingers like limp, flat pasta, light and smooth and rippling.

=====

Much better. I got a lot more "Good" notes on that one. See how things are much more concrete, more grounded on sensory details?

I need to learn to do this in my stories. Right now, it's hard. It's not something I do automatically yet. When I'm writing, in creative mode, when story's just flowing, it doesn't automatically flow with concrete sensory details. If I think about it, and consciously put those details in as I write, I slip into critical mode, which makes the writing kind of suck. (It has great sensory details, though. :P )

"Creative Mode" and "Critical Mode" are concepts Kris and Dean use in all their writing workshops. I think I've talked about them before, but just for drill, writing in creative mode (or in creative voice, or with your creative brain) is writing the way your brain produces story. The focus is on the story, not the craftsmanship. Your creative brain (your storytelling brain) has been absorbing story since you were pre-verbal, when your parents told you stories, sang you songs with stories, let you watch TV and movies with stories. If you're forty, you've been absorbing story for about 39.8 years of that. :)

Critical mode is when your focus is on the mechanics. If you're thinking about spelling and grammar and punctuation, and about how the plot's going to go and whether your characterization is right and how to format your dialogue and whether your transitions work, you're in critical mode. This is your inner English teacher speaking. Your inner English teacher kind of sucks at storytelling; they're focused on all the fiddly details, and they tend to lose track of the story itself, which is what readers read for. Your critical brain has only been learning to write since you started to learn reading and writing skills, which for most of us was first grade. So your critical brain is about six years behind your creative brain when it comes to learning how to write.

Your creative voice is always a better storyteller than your critical voice.

I know we all worry about how our stories look at the line level, but seriously, if you're going to publish something, whether you go tradpub or indie, cleaning up all the little crap is what an editor is for. If your story is great, a copyeditor can clean up your spelling and grammar and fix your comma glitches. There you go -- clean story. If your story sucks, then even if your mechanics are absolutely a hundred percent perfect, the story is still going to suck. A fiction writer's focus should be on storytelling, in creative mode.

Of course, we want to absorb all the mechanics skills too. And we do. It takes a while, but if we work on it, eventually we'll load a new skill into the back of our brain. This is where the stuff that's become automatic goes. For example, you probably don't have to think about putting a period at the end of a declarative sentence, or getting your subjects and verbs to agree. Those are things you had to learn at some point, but then you got to know them well enough that they became automatic, and you don't have to think about them anymore. All your mechanics skills can be loaded into that same part of your brain, where they become automatic, as you work on them.

So I need to work on using concrete sensory details when I write. I'll probably do more exercises like the ones Kris gave us, and work on that until it's easy and automatic. It'll eventually show up in my creative-mode writing, without my having to stop and think about every damn word. :/ For right now, it's annoying, but I'll get it soon enough.

A lot of us in the class were having trouble with concrete details, so most of our small assignments through the week were focused on that skill. I got a lot better at it just in that week, and so did the others.

One of the things I learned last week was that I can write a truly amazing amount of fiction in one week. I was actually pouring it on from Friday through Friday, so eight days, but in that eight days I wrote 38,790 words of fiction -- four stories, two of them over 9K words, plus a bunch of bits and pieces of fiction in the smaller assignments. Just the stories totaled 30,893 words.

I've never done that before. I've written just over 20K words in a week, three times, since I've started keeping track. I've never come anywhere near 30K in a week before. O_O It's intensely frustrating. I've known for a while that I'm intensely deadline driven, and that it has to be a deadline set by someone else, with real-world consequences. Knowing that if I flake out on a story, I'll be walking into a room full of people I know, with no story to turn in? That provides an amazing amount of motivation to write like crazy, and finish a story. I can't do that for myself. I can't even do it for, say, an anthology I'd like to submit for. If I've promised a story to an editor, then that works -- having an editor get annoyed with me and have to scramble to find another writer to write something to fill the spot in the book I was supposed to fill is enough of a real-world consequence to get my writing in gear. But just, "Hey, that's a cool anthology, it closes next Friday, I'd like to write a story for it," isn't enough. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. :/ Very annoying. It's purely a mental block, but knowing that doesn't help.

It was bad enough before, knowing I can write 20K words in a week if I want to. Now I know I can write almost twice that if I'm properly motivated, which makes it that much more frustrating. Heck, I'd love to do 10K words a week. That's half a million words a year, even taking two weeks for vacation. :P

Coming up toward the end of last week, I planned to see if I could keep the momentum going. But around the middle of the workshop, Thursday or so, I started getting a bit of a tickle in my throat. Luckily it stayed at that very low level through the workshop, but as soon as I got home, I fell into bed, and when I woke up I had a raging cough, sore throat, and stuffed up nose. :( It's tough to think about writing, or much of anything else, when it's hard to breathe. I'm starting to feel more human, so we'll see how the writing goes next week.

If nothing else, I had an awesome April. :)

And seriously, Kris does a couple of genre workshops per year. If I had the money, I'd sign up for everything that's currently scheduled. (No, I don't get any kick-backs or discounts for reccing the workshops; I just think they rock.) She's teaching a Mystery workshop in September, and a Fantasy workshop next April. She's done Romance and Alternate History before. I think she did Thrillers once? I'd love to take all of them. Kris is a slave driver, but damn, it works!

Awesome workshop. Highly recommended.

Angie

New Year

I've been pretty quiet for the last few weeks, so I thought I'd crawl out of my cave and say hi. I've been sick a few times, got to know more of the folks working the local ER. I missed holidays with my family because I've been afraid to travel; having to start from scratch to break in a new ER staff, convince a bunch of strange doctors that I know what's going on and how to treat it, when at times I have to argue with the local ER staff who have my history in their records, just feels like too high a hurdle when I'm already feeling lousy. All together, my give-a-damn broke down about halfway through November, and I didn't feel like getting it fixed. I've read a few million words, played a lot of solitaire, and generally vegged for a while. I'm actually feeling eager to get back to the writing, so I guess the downtime did me some good.

My 2013 writing goal was 250,000 words. Even taking the last seven weeks or so of the year off, I managed 304,169, which feels pretty awesome. It's the most I've ever done since I started keeping track, and I'm pretty sure it's the most words of fiction I've ever written in a year. I had two novels come out this year -- Captive Magic and The Executive Lounge -- and one short story in an anthology that paid pro rates, another first for me that I felt pretty good about. I finished eight other short stories, which are making the rounds on the pro-pay side. All together, I'm pretty happy with 2013.

My 2014 writing goal is 300,000 words. It's obviously not a stretch goal, but I know myself; if I push too far and fall behind at some point, I'll get depressed and it'll be twice as hard to catch up. Almost a third of a million words is still pretty decent, and if I pass it, that's a bonus.

I'm looking forward to the coming year, and I hope everyone else is too.

Angie

Ten Reasons to Try NaNoWriMo

I have a post up at the ARe Cafe today about Why Trying NaNoWriMo Is a Great Idea. Check it out. :)

Angie

NaNo?

Is anyone else around here doing NaNoWriMo this year? I'm all signed up -- if you want to be NaNo buddies, I'm here on the NaNo site.

I've done NaNo a few times, only won once so far. The years I didn't participate, I was already working on a novel when November rolled around, and I was pretty sure I didn't have 50K words left. I didn't want to stop to start a new one for fear I'd lose my momentum on the old one. If I'm basically free, though, I'll jump into the NaNo pool, mainly because it's fun, but also because I've found that even in the years I don't win -- and I've had some pretty spectacular crash-and-burn experiences -- I learn something about myself and my writing. That's always valuable.

Anyone else in?

Angie

January Stuff and Onward

The Koala is still missing, but I've joined a challenge through a mailing list I'm on. Participants each picked a wordcount goal for the year, and we divide it by fifty to get a weekly goal (assuming two weeks of vacation per year) and report our progress each week. There's a secondary challenge to see how long we can maintain a writing streak, meaning writing every day for X number of days, "writing every day" meaning producing at least 250 words -- no adding one word and calling it a writing day. :) So far I've written every day since January 2nd (I didn't do any work on the first) and I'm well over quota for making my goal for this year of 250K words, yay. I'm not counting on that lasting, since my productivity is at the mercy of my brain chemistry, but it's great to see a buffer building up.

I added a wordcount meter-thingy to the sidebar of Angie's Desk to track my progress. Apologies to folks who read the other sites, but I don't want another separate thing I have to update regularly across three sites. Hopefully I won't completely embarass myself over the course of the year, having this out in public. [crossed fingers] I'll update the meter-thingy every Sunday night or Monday morning, when I send my wordcount to the guy who's organizing the challenge.

My total for January was 35,454 words, which is my best month since December of 2011. (I think I mentioned a little while ago that 2012 was a massively sucky writing year? :P )

I finished the third Sentinel Novel a few days ago, which is another major milestone. It still doesn't have a permanent title; I'll figure that out before I submit it. This is Manny's story, and since Manny used to drive an ambulance, I've gotten some feedback from a couple of friends in the medical profession on how I'm handling medical type stuff. I need to incorporate those comments, and also go over the whole thing with sandpaper looking for typos and stray commas and inconsistencies and such. I expect to get it subbed soon, though, and that's pretty awesome.

Since wrapping Book3, I've been kind of bouncing around, doing a bit of this project and a bit of that, not really finding anything I can settle on. I have a lot of partials on my hard drive, and I've worked on a few of them. I also started something new, but that was more in the way of getting an idea down in pixels before I lost it, rather than being ready to do serious work on it; I think that one'll probably stew for a while before I focus on it. But I'm feeling like a whole litter of popcorn kittens right now -- I always have a lot of ideas/stories I could work on, but having just finished a big project, I also have an opportunity to work on whatever I want, and it's hard to commit to any one thing because so many things look cool and interesting. :/ I figure I'll let myself bounce around for a few more days, then settle into something. Note that I almost always work a bit here and there on various projects; what I'm looking for is something to be my main project, that one that gets most of my attention.

Until then, I guess I'll keep poking around, working a little here and a little there. Eventually it'll all come together like biorhythms and I'll finish three things in a week, and that'll be cool too, LOL!

Angie

A New Year Starting With Free Stuff

I hope everyone had a great holiday and is humming along back at work. I'm doing well -- could hardly be worse after 2012 -- and have a couple of major goals for this year. One is to write at least 250K words of fiction. I've done that before, should be able to do it again, and have joined a challenge through one of the mailing lists I'm on to help encourage me along the way. On track so far, yay.

The other is to get into indie publishing this year. I have backlist stories that are sitting on my hard drive, unavailable to anyone who doesn't hang out on pirate sites, and I need to get those back up and available. I also have stories that've collected multiple positive rejections -- the kind that say, essentially, "Good story, well written, not buying it, enjoyed reading it, looking forward to reading more from you." If you have to be rejected, that's the kind of rejection you want to get, but it's still a rejection. I have some stories that've gotten multiples of these, from multiple professional editors. I figure any story that multiple pro editors thought was well written and enjoyed reading would probably be enjoyed by readers too, so I'm going to start putting them up myself.

To help me along with that, I downloaded and printed out the Smashwords formatting guide, figuring that was a good place to start. Then, in a great piece of serendipity, I heard that Adobe is giving away free copies of a lot of its older-version software, stuff that it's been using phone-home DRM on for a number of years while newer versions have been released. It's no longer cost effective for them to maintain the validation servers for their older packages, so rather than cut off all the customers who've handed them money for their software packages, they've released free, non-DRMed copies of this stuff, and it's open for anyone to grab. The list includes both Photoshop and InDesign, and I've grabbed copies of both. If you're thinking of indie pubbing, or if you're doing it already but have been saving up for expensive high-level software, I highly suggest you grab it too: Free Adobe Software. I have no idea how long this is going to last, so get it while you can.

And major props to Adobe for being cool about this. Plenty of companies in the same position just say, "Too bad, buy the new version, here's a percent-off coupon," and leave it at that. Making sure that the honest customers who've handed them money in the past can keep using the software they've paid for is a class act. Letting other people (like me) try these older versions for free is also very classy, and might make them some money in the future, if I like these tools and decide to upgrade.

Angie

Aicardi Syndrome and a Pose-Off

Fantasy writer Jim Hines did a blog post asking fans to donate to the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation, an organization that raises research money for Aicardi Syndrome, a disease that affects 1 in 105,000 little girls. He says, "It causes brain malformation, visual problems, seizures, developmental delays, and other medical complications. Most research puts the life expectancy for people with Aicardi between 8 and 16 years."

The Aicardi Syndrome Foundation is the only source of funding for research into this disease. It also helps families with daughters who've been hit with it. It's a great cause, and I urge everyone reading this to throw some money their way, even if it's only a few dollars.

If you do donate, and report your donations to Jim, he'll do another set of book cover poses at each milestone. If you haven't seen this post before, check it out -- Jim demonstrates the ridiculousness of the positions SF/Fantasy/Paranormal female characters are twisted into on book covers by attempting to get into those positions himself, and having his picture taken. It's hilarious, and also underscores some serious shenanigans on the part of the big publishers, 'cause seriously dudes, this is stupid, and it's all based on the idea that the men who buy these books just want to see boobs and butts, and the women who buy these books will go along with stupidly impossible objectification on the covers, because women will sigh and shrug and buy whatever makes the men happy. [cough]

[If you're still going, "Wait, what--?" then check out this pic, parodying one of the Avengers movie posters. In the real poster, Black Widow is doing the boobs-and-butt pose, but all the men are in normal, tough-guy-ready-for-combat poses. This artist turned it around, giving Black Widow a normal pose and putting Captain America into the standard female boobs-and-butt pose. The other men are just displaying their butts. It's awesome. :D ]

And as if that weren't enough, Jim is challenging John Scalzi to a pose-off at two of the milestone points, $1000 and $2500. I really hope they make the $2500, because the pose-off should be great.

Aside from which, Aicardi Syndrome sucks, and deserves support. Please help out.

Angie

April Stuff

Writing: 5058 = 1pt
Editing: 67,875 = 13pts
TOTAL = 14 pts



No subs last month, sucky writing, but lots of editing. That's probably not going to change this month, either, with my novel in process. I'm going to have about 5 days to do edits on 114K words toward the end of May, then it's going through two rounds of proofing (which I'll get to go over and make changes on) and they're looking to release in late July. [flail] This one's definitely going through faster than the last one, and once I get edits back I'm not going to have time for much else. Oh, did I mention the spousal unit and I are going on two out-of-town vacations...? We leave for a cruise (Alaska) this coming Friday, edits should be waiting for me when we get back on the 18th, I hope, and they're due on the 25th, which is when we fly down for BayCon so I have to get it all done in time to send it before I go.

I'm actually lucky my vacations dovetail with the schedule so well, otherwise we'd have to do some scrambling, and with a schedule this tight, that could've been awkward. On how long we have, I guess it's just a matter of what they have in the pipeline at the time and which slot they decide to put a book into. Hidden Magic got slotted far enough down the line that the schedule was almost leisurely (although it didn't feel quite so slow then), while Emerging Magic was slotted sooner and needs to hustle.

Still wish I were writing more, but at least I'll have a new book out soon, which is very cool. :)

Angie

March Stuff and an Early April Mishap

Writing: 5997 words = 1
Editing: 114,093 words = 23
Sub: 1 loooong novel = 1
TOTAL = 25 points

I didn't look at my total until April, so of course I didn't have a chance to write another Three Freaking Words to get another writing point. [headdesk]



I finally finished Emerging Magic the sequel to A Hidden Magic. Actually, I finished it in February, but it took most of March to get through an editing pass and ready to submit, but it's in, yay! This sucker's taken more than twice as long as I thought it would, and having it finally finished feels wonderful. :)

I'm visiting my mom in Reno over Easter, and the world is letting me know I should've stayed home. :/ I only have one pair of jeans that fit, so I wore them up here, and brought a couple of pairs of sweats to sleep in, and bum around the house in, and hopefully wear to the gym if I can go with my brother whenever he goes. Also brought a skirt in case we go somewhere fancy for Easter dinner. So I flew up Tuesday, and when I got in, my mom made me a cup of hot chocolate. She has a tablecloth on her table, which I'm not used to, and somehow while sitting down to drink (with the cup at my place already) I managed to catch the tablecloth on... I don't even know what, maybe I sat on it somehow, although I didn't think it was that long. Anyway, next thing I know the cup's fallen over and I have HOT chocolate all in my lap and some on my top, and a second later it soaks through and it's freaking HOT! Damn!

So I go change out of my jeans and top, put on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt, and put my jeans and top and the tablecloth and the placemat and all in the laundry. They wash, and I put 'em in the dryer when I go to bed.

Yesterday, we're going grocery shopping so I go to get dressed. Get my jeans out of the dryer... and there's a huge shredded rip down the seam in the seat! [headdesk] Totally ruined. The washing machine just ate my jeans, and of course they're all I have. :(

I get online and go to the site where I bought the jeans to get more. Can't just go out and buy a pair; no stores I know of carry pants for women who are tall and fat both, right there on the rack. I wear a 24T, and the only way to get those is mail order, and not from very many places even that way. :/ So I go to Woman Within, and sure enough they have a nice selection. I pick a couple of pairs, both on sale yay, and order. I was originally thinking to just have them sent home and that I'd be wearing sweats the rest of my time here (got the skirt, but I don't like wearing them unless I have to) but I see the site has a super-duper express-zoom delivery option that'll get you your stuff the next business day if you order before 4pm Eastern, for only twenty dollars extra on the delivery charge. O_O Okay, yeah, it's a lot, but if I can get jeans to wear while I'm here, that's awesome. The stuff I ordered was on sale, so it sort of makes up for the delivery charge, right? :P So I change delivery to Mom's address and go for it. By this time it's like three minutes after 1 here, which is 4 on the east coast, so I'm hoping it'll sneak in and be delivered tomorrow (which would be today now) and if not then it'll come on Friday and that's still good.

I hit confirm order and it chugs along... and the confirmation screen comes up showing regular delivery to Mom's address, estimated delivery date April 14th. WTF?? O_O

I won't even be here then! :( :( :( Something screwed up, and I'm pissed off.

So I send an e-mail to their customer service address, explain what happened and why this is completely unacceptable. I tell them I want delivery expedited to arrive either Thursday, or Friday at the very latest, or I want the order cancelled, one or the other. Hit send, then we go off grocery shopping with me in my sweats.

Give them credit, by the time we got back, there was an answer in my e-mail with an apology for the screw-up. The Customer Service lady said she'd make sure I got my stuff on Friday. We'll see. If so, then cool. I still wish their system had worked the way it was supposed to the first time, but an efficient and prompt fix is what you want from a good company. Everybody makes mistakes; what separates the good companies (and people) from the bad is what they do after they've made the mistake.

I hope everyone has a great Easter, or just a great weekend if you don't observe the holiday. [wave/hugz]

Angie, hanging out in sweats in Reno

February Stuff

Writing: 13,508 = 5 pts.
Editing: 26,488 = 5 pts.
Beta: 1 novel = 1 pt.
TOTAL: 11 pts.



I spent most of a week out on the Oregon coast at a writing workshop. Came home physically exhausted and mentally buzzing, because as dead as I was at the end, this was an awesome experience. If you ever have a chance to take one of Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch's workshops, do it -- they rock.

Angie

January Stuff

Writing

Writing -- 6717 words = 2 pts.
Editing -- 12,995 words = 2 pts.
Submissions -- 3 = 3 pts.
Betaed Novel for Friend -- 1 = 1 pt.
TOTAL = 8 pts.



The writing total is pitiful, especially considering how I did October through December. In my own defense, I'll say that I had TWO laptops in a row get borked out from under me. The first one's still a doorstop and the second one was only fixed (sort of -- it was fixed by turning off the TAP function on the touchpad completely) a few days before the end of the month. Still sucks.

The good news is that the time I spent not writing I spent (among other things) thinking about how the book was going, and I realized that approaching the ending action realistically wasn't working for me. :P I'm usually all about doing things right, but there's a volcano involved [cough] and the idea that the boys could just sort of magic an about-to-erupt volcano back into stable peace and quiet was pretty boggling. I've done some volcano research for this storyline, and I decided that they were able to prevent things from getting any further, but so far as it'd been stirred up already, it still was, and things were going to proceed apace, with tremors and news bulletins and alerts and some eventual lahars hitting a few small communities. Which is what would happen if Mt. Rainier had a significant but not catastrophic (that is, far short of Mount St. Helens) eruption event. Everyone around here has volcano insurance, and there are signs posted in dangerous areas pointing out volcano escape routes to take in case you have to evacuate; there's plenty of info on what'd likely happen and what people would do.

The problem is that this doesn't happen all at once, boom, like someone setting off a bomb. I had some other loose ends to clean up, and I did that, while the characters kept an eye and an ear on the volcano news on TV. But still, the wrap on the characters' active participation in the eruption was the action climax of the book, and I had several chapters written after that, with at least one or two more to go. All of that was, literally, anti-climax from the POV of the built up action/danger thread of the story, and the longer it got, the more draggy it felt. I could just see readers getting bored and impatient.

So I ripped out almost 10K words and decided to handle it differently. They needed to really wrap up the volcano problem right there, and I came up with a way to get it done without giving the characters a ridiculously huge amount of power. Now I still need to wrap up those other threads ASAP, but at least the volcano thing isn't draaaaaagging out like it was. Once I've written to the end, I need to go back and tweak a couple of things I've thought of as I've progressed, but that shouldn't take incredibly long. Then it's into submission and back to work on the next book, the one I did 50K of for NaNo.

Workshop

I also have to write a short story for my upcoming Anthology Workshop; the assignment for that is due any time now, and I'm looking forward to getting it. This should be fun. :)

I'm doing one of the workshops Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch put on each year, and I'm pretty excited about it. It runs in early March, and I'll definitely be blogging about it when I get home. For the anthology workshop, we get a theme assignment in advance (like RSN) and we submit a story for it, as if we were submitting to an antho. When we get to the workshop, several professional anthology editors will tell us whether they'd have bought our story and exactly why or why not. We also have an option to write another story and submit it while at the workshop, and get feedback on that one as well.

This kind of info should be gold, seriously. I've been getting a lot of "Good story, well written, not buying it, enjoyed reading it, looking forward to seeing more from you" type rejections in the last year or two, and while they're an order of magnitude better than the "Thank you for thinking of us but this doesn't meet our needs" type, it's still frustrating. I feel like I'm standing right on the threshold, and there's some key thing I'm missing that's preventing me from stepping over. I'm hoping to get the information I need to take that step when I do the workshop.

Anthology Listings

Thanks to everyone who answered my questions about "Until Filled" anthologies. Taking feedback from folks in the three places I posted that query, I've decided that what I'm going to do is include all the Until Filled anthos in the next posting, in just over a week, with notations showing how long each one has been open (or how long I've been aware of it -- close enough) and which ones are being dropped. Anyone still interested can bookmark the page the antho call is on, but after this month I'm dropping anything that's been hanging open with no progress posts from the editor in a year or more. That means no update posts, no update edits on the original post, no replies to comments on the original post, for a year. I think that's more than reasonable, and feedback indicated that most folks who'd sub to an Until Filled antho at all were less likely to sub to one that'd been hanging for a long time. So one more month to let people bookmark what they want, and then I'm going to prune the listings.

If you're an editor of an Until Filled anthology and I drop your listing because I missed an update post or something similar, feel free to e-mail me at angiebenedetti AT gmail DOT com with a link to your update. As always, final decisions about what to include on the listing are mine, but if I've missed something, I want to know about it. (And note that I always check the Until Filled posts when I'm prepping a new post -- if there's no link to your update on that original post, or if it's buried somewhere hard to spot, maybe that's a problem. If you want submissions, especially on older projects, make it easy for writers to find your updates.)

Angie

December Stuff and New Year Stuff

Holy sheep, how'd it get to be 4 January??

Writing: 38,298 words = 18 pts
Editing: 17,382 words = 3 pts

TOTAL = 21 pts



No submissions this month, but I'm still happy with the outcome. :)

All together in 2011 I wrote 218,020 words. Wow. I just added it all up, and I'm... wow. I think I'll just stare at that for a while. More than half of it -- about 127K -- was in the last three months of the year, too. I finished five new stories, which was three less than I wanted to, and I didn't finish my novel. On the other hand, when I decided I'd finish my novel and write eight new stories, I was still thinking said novel would end up around 80-85K words; I'm currently a bit over 105K and still going, plus I have just over 50K done on the third book, which was my NaNo project. It's frustrating to still have the second book hanging out there, but I've done more writing than I'd expected to do, so I think I'm good with the outcome. And I wanted to write at least one more free stand-alone story for my web site, which I did.

I sent out 39 submissions in 2011, which was 13 more than in 2010, so that's a nice improvement. I got a bunch more of the "Great story, well written, not buying it, enjoyed reading it, looking forward to seeing more from you" type of rejections this year. It's been pretty frustrating for a while now, but I'm hoping the workshop I'm going to in March will help me get over that hump.

I wanted to be on Koala Approves every month in 2011, and I achieved that, except for my month off. I'm still trying for a minimum of nine points per month on writing alone, though. Maybe this year.

Also for this year, I want to finish the novel I'm almost done with, plus the third one that's about half done, and I'd like to do at least five more short stories, including one more free stand-alone story for the web site. That should all be doable in the next 362 days, if I get some good work in. :)

Best of luck to everyone else in 2012!

Angie

November Stuff

Writing: 60,826 = 29 pts.
Submissions: 1 = 1 pt.
TOTAL = 30 pts WOOT!



NaNo went wonderfully, as you can probably tell from the above. :) I wrote just over 50K on my NaNo project, which was the third book of my Sentinels series, and another 10K and a bit on book two of the same series. Sentinels 2 (the book that comes right after A Hidden Magic) is almost 85K words and I think I'm about two or three more chapters from finishing.

Doing both at once actually worked out well. The two stories take place at the same time, with most of the team up in Seattle in Book 2, and the guy left home to hold the fort having an adventure of his own back in San Jose in Book 3. I had to go back and do a couple of tweaks on chunks of Book 2 I'd already written to make the timeline work with Book 3, which I wouldn't have been able to do if I'd finished 2 and turned it in (especially if it'd already been published before I got significantly into 3), so I'm glad I decided to start 3 even though 2 wasn't done.

The current plan is to finish Book 2 in December and get it submitted and in the pipeline, then finish Book 3 (maybe before spring?) and submit that. If I can have two novels published in 2012, I will be absolutely delighted.

Jim and I went to Reno to spend Thanksgiving with my mom and brother, and we had a wonderful dinner (on Wednesday, because my brother is a retail manager and worked both Thanksgiving and the day after) at a very nice steakhouse at the Atlantis, the same hotel WorldCon was at this last August. I had American Kobe beef for the first time, and I now understand what all the fuss is about. It's sublimely beefy, tender and flavorful and rich. I could have eaten three of them, except then I wouldn't have had room for the excellent beef-vegetable soup or the great cheesy-buns that came in the bread basket or the very good creamed spinach or the creme brulee (yum!) I had for dessert. The service was great, not at all snooty, and the little extras -- like the coffee service, which came with rock sugar on sticks, cinnamon sticks, white lump sugar, brown lump sugar, chocolate shavings, whipped cream, and I don't remember what-all else to put in your coffee -- made the whole dinner a wonderful experience. It was expensive but very much worth the price. If you're ever at the Atlantis and have a week's food budget to blow [cough] I highly recommend the steak house.

The Friday before Thanksgiving, Jim slipped on an oily metal grate or something on his way home from work, and banged up his knee pretty bad -- all scabby and sore -- so he kept it bandaged and went on with life. A couple of days after we flew to Reno, his leg from the knee down was incredibly swollen and red, and a bit warm to the touch. Mom and I persuaded him to go see a doctor; the local urgent care clinic was on our insurance, so Sean dropped us off on his way to work. The doctor took one look at it and said it looked to her like he had a blood clot, and she wanted him to go to a hospital for an ultrasound immediately. She said that if they found a clot, they'd keep him at least over night, because you don't mess around with those things. We took a cab to the medical center and after some really ridiculous run-around about where we were supposed to be and who we were supposed to see -- the urgent care doctor called and talked to an ultrasound tech and made an appointment for us, but no one else seemed to have ever heard of Jim or of the tech -- we finally got in and he got his ultrasound. She didn't find a clot, which is good but kind of weird; she said that just looking at the leg, she'd have assumed there was a clot too, but no. Apparently it's just an odd case of cellulitis, or however you spell it, and so he's on antibiotics. If it's not back to normal by the time he's out of pills, he promises he'll go see our regular doctor.

That was scary for a while, but it looks like he'll be okay. :/

I did my usual travel-sick thing, which continued after I flew home, yay. I missed going to the movies with the rest of the family, but they saw The Immortals and from all accounts I didn't miss anything. I'm used to the whole post-flight sickness now, though; I'm just glad I have my pills.

I hope everyone else had a great Thanksgiving, or if you're not in the US, had a great November anyway. :)

Angie

Halfway Through NaNo

Last time I did NaNoWriMo, back in '08, I got to eight thousand words and change by the middle of the month and threw in the towel. It just wasn't working, and constantly failing to find the groove was stressing me out horribly. In '09 I was working on wrapping A Hidden Magic and skipped NaNo to focus on that, and in '10 I was... I don't even know, working on something else again. Or maybe I was just afraid of another crash-and-burn?

This year it's awesome. Even the first year -- '06, the only time I've tried and actually won -- didn't go this well. Someone passing by me in a crowd obviously whacked my writing throttle with their elbow somewhere in late October, and it's been open ever since. :) As of midnight last night, I'd done over 36,000 words on my NaNo project (Book 3 of the Sentinel series -- Hidden Magic is Book 1) which is 11,000 words over par to hit 50,000 by the end of the month. On top of that, I've written almost 6000 words on Book 2, which I also want to finish this month; it's currently just a few hundred words short of 80K. That's about 42,000 words all together, in fifteen days. O_O

I know I keep saying this, but I wish I could do this all the time. I've slown down a little in the last few days -- I'm hitting a part of Book 3 where I had only a vague idea of what was going to happen when I started -- but I'm still doing well and I have plenty of margin. I'd pretty much have to get hit by a bus tomorrow to not make my 50K by the end of the 30th. (Of course, I've probably just jinxed myself -- I'll have to make sure I stay home tomorrow, LOL!)

Anyway, the writing's going great and hopefully it'll stay throttled up. I hope things are going well for everyone else, too! [crossed fingers]

Angie

October Stuff

Words: 27,412 = 12 pts.
Submissions: 2 = 2 pts.
TOTAL = 14 pts.



Awesome writing this month, and hopefully I'll do better for NaNo. [crossed fingers] Twice as many subs as last month [cough] but still waiting on several slow markets.

One more new thing that happened just today (okay, yesterday -- pre-midnight) was that Google forced the Google Reader (which I use to read RSS feeds) into their new format. Which is fine, I like the old look better but whatever, except that you can't just "like" a post now. You have to "+1" it via that Google+ thing, which attaches your real name to it. :/ And like an idiot, I actually put my real name when I created the account, way back when only you saw your account information. I don't particularly want my legal name to be attached to everything I do online -- I write under my pen name for a reason -- so I can't help promote people's web posts anymore without outing myself. Lovely.

I followed the brangling over Google's refusal to allow pseudonyms a few months back when they started up Google+, but it was academic at the time. I agreed that Google's making a huge mistake (and a distastefully self-righteous mistake at that) but since I had no interest in using Google+, it didn't affect me. Well, now it does. Wow, thanks Google. :/

On the writing front, I'm doing NaNo this month, for the first time since 2008. In '09 and '10 I was working on large projects in November that had less than 50K words left to go and I didn't want to derail them to break off and do NaNo, maybe losing momentum, so I just skipped. This year, I'm this close to finishing the second Sentinels novel, like maybe two more chapters after the one I'm on, and I've been in a great writing groove, so I figured I can do both. That is, my NaNo book this year will be the third Sentinels novel, which I'll be starting as soon as I'm done here, but I'll be finishing the second one at the same time. I figure it shouldn't take more than a week or maybe two [crossed fingers] even working around my 1667/day on Book Three.

I'm thinking this should work well because:

1) I'm used to switching back and forth between projects; that's how I keep writing when I'm blocked on a project but not on writing all together
2) The books are related, taking place in the same verse, and with some overlap characters
3) They're even mostly concurrent, since most of the gang heads up to Seattle a few chapters into Book Two while Manny (the protag of Book Three) stays home to hold the fort and has an adventure of his own.

So it's almost like writing one book anyway, right? We'll see. :D

Anyone else doing NaNo this year?

Angie

September Stuff

Writing: 21,266 = 9 pts.
Editing: 6594 = 1 pt.
Subs: 1 = 1 pt.
TOTAL = 11 pts



I have several stories sitting in slush piles with long response times, so subs were way down in September. Luckily I found the ON switch for my writing engine (or more likely, some stranger whacked it with an elbow as they passed by, but whatever, I'm taking advantage of it while it lasts) so I made up for the points and then some with writing, yay! And actually, I've had a sub-goal all year of hitting nine points with writing alone; this is the first month I've managed it, which feels pretty awesome. Now if I can just keep doing it. :)

Angie

July Stuff (and a bit of early August)

Writing: 7627 words -- 2 pts. [sigh]
Editing: 41,093 words -- 8 pts.
Submissions: 5 pts.
TOTAL: 15 pts.

Still want more writing, although what I did was all in the last two weeks, after I had enough focus to get back to it. If I could do twice that next month, I'd be pretty happy. [crossed fingers]

And I just want to note that it's pretty darned annoying to go over a WIP for like the fourth time and still be finding typos and glitches and WTF bits. [headdesk] I think they spawn on their own when I'm not looking.

Edging over into August stuff, I had my first root canal yesterday (Tuesday) and... it wasn't too bad. The doctor doing them is a root canal specialist; it's all he does, so it makes sense he'd be good at it. I spent most of the next twenty-four hours unconscious, which I did with the deep cleanings too; I'm blaming that on the drugs. Yay drugs!

My book A Hidden Magic is one of the Books of the Month over on the Goodreads M/M Romance group this month. It's basically an excuse for the group to read and discuss. You have to be a member of M/M Romance to join in, but if you're able I hope you'll come chat.

Also, today is my birthday, yay! I'm forty-eight, which is a pretty cool number -- even four times over. :D

Angie