In the name of procrastination, I give you a silly meme
Pay for my
Go reading three times a week.
Ask my boss for a horror.
Connect with my inner yoga.
Find a new theater.
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Yup, it's that time again: the end of another artificially imposed construct approaches. January 1 may be a fairly arbitrary marker for the start of the new year, but it does serve as a convenient measuring stick for looking back and taking stock of where I've been and where I'm heading writing-wise.
So with that said, let's take a look at 2011--not as epically awesome as 2010 was for me on the writing front, but not a bad year.
Novel Progress
Ha! I said "novel progress."
There was lots of valuable brainstorming and jotting down of notes and ideas during 2011, but otherwise, revisions on My Big Fat Epic Fantasy novel took a back seat to a great many other things. Hopefully that will be remedied in the near future.
Short Stories
Stories written in 2011 include:
My first semester working toward my masters in library and information science is over, and I feel confident in saying that I totally rocked it. I was pleased to discover that, twelve years after finishing my undergraduate degree, I haven't lost my Nerd-Fu.
On the downside, first semester craziness combined with Ye Olde Day Job seriously cut into my fiction writing time. I did, however, find my fiction writing life creeping into my grad school life in fun little ways.
How do I love Scrivener? Let me count the ways . . .
I bought Scrivener several years ago for novel writing. When putting together a lecture for TNEO one summer, I discovered that Scrivener was also great for collecting and organizing research for that. So when it came time this semester to turns lots of research into a presentation for a group project in my Human Information Behavior class, Scrivener once again became a handy tool. And then came my final paper for that same class. In addition to using Scrivener for organizing my research and turning it into a paper, I discovered that Scrivener had an APA style template. From my undergrad days, I was used to writing papers in MLA format, but the MLIS program requires APA format, which was new to me. Scrivener saved me huge amounts of "how exactly am I supposed to format this again?" time on the APA learning curve.
It's just like a short story, only it's mostly plot with very little setting and character development . . .
At first, I was a little apprehensive when faced with the prospect of writing a 15-page research paper for the first time in over a decade. But then I thought, "Hmm, 15 double-spaced pages in 12 point Times New Roman font with an inch margin all around--that's roughly the equivalent of a 4,600 word short story for which I've done lots of background research. Piece of cake!" On the downside, years of focusing on the style and rhythm of my prose made the paper revision process go a little slower than it might have otherwise. Without the fiction writing experience, I probably wouldn't give a damn about using the same sentence construction twice in a row in a research paper.
This one time, at writing camp . . .
Human Information Behavior, where we studied how people search for and process information in a broad number of contexts, was a fascinating course. Several times I found myself drawing on writing-related experiences as an example of information-seeking behaviors and how library and information science professionals interact with users in their search process. One example was the judgmental you-frighten-me look I got while checking out a book called On Killing for research purposes and how that kind of attitude can dissuade people from using the library. And as an example of the Principle of Least Effort, where someone consults a known resource instead of investing the small bit of extra effort needed to get what they know would be a better quality answer, I mentioned the weird phenomena I sometimes saw of individuals asking very specific research questions in a writing forum where it was unlikely anyone had expertise in the area in question, and then balking at suggestions to consult resources more likely to actually provide an answer to their question.
The geek is strong with this one . . .
My other class this semester was Information Technologies, where we got to learn some basics about web design, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, and other fun stuff. The class seemed like it was a struggle at times for several folks, but I was safely in my geek comfort zone. I already knew how to create a website with HTML going into the class, and I picked up the rest of it pretty easily. Two of our projects involved creating an "information resource" on any topic of our choosing, so I created a site called So You Want to Write Speculative Fiction? And for our final project, we had to create a site using WordPress, so I tested out a redesign of my writing website.
And there you have it. Now to check off more items on my winter break to-do list, which includes paying attention to this blog again and rediscovering the fact that I'm a writer.
Originally published at Barbara A. Barnett. You can comment here or there.
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Dear Potential Future Readers:
So I'm working on this Big Fat Epic Fantasy Novel. If it ever sees the light of publishing day, then you, dear epic fantasy fan, will possibly read it. And several of you are going to raise certain complaints. I would like to preemptively address one of them now:
No, it's not that my female characters never menstruate. It's just that their menstrual cycle is not relevant to the story*. And while you may not see my characters answering the call of nature, it's not that they don't have to. They urinate. They have bowel movements. Again, it's just that those things generally don't contribute to the advancement of story*, and so I don't include them.
Trust me, dear reader, if I ever find that a depiction of defecation, urination, or menstruation would serve to advance plot or character, enhance my setting, or otherwise serve the story, I will not hesitate to describe it. In fact, such things have showed up in my short fiction when relevant. But as far My Big Fat Epic Fantasy Novel goes, please just assume that my characters take care of their business off-page. I mean, when your first draft clocks in at 118,000 words, the poo really has to earn its place on the page.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go use the bathroom.
Love,
Me
*One helpful comment made me realize that this is probably worth clarifying: when I talk about relevance to the story or advancement of story, I'm not talking about plot alone. If a woman's menstruation or the way a person goes to the bathroom tells me something about a character's personality or the world or the setting, then I consider that relevant, something that advances the story by adding to my understanding of the world and the characters. But showing someone going to the bathroom simply to establish that they sometimes have to go to the bathroom, not so much.
I know I keep threatening to return to a regular blogging routine, but life seems intent on not letting that happen, which is frustrating since not posting regularly tends to lead to hardly anyone paying attention when you actually do post. So even though I may be blogging into a void, here's the state of me:
* School is keeping me busy, but I'm enjoying it a lot more than I ever did grant writing. This whole getting my MLIS thing? Good damn decision, I think.
* Speaking of life keeping me busy, there will be a distinct lack of con attendance on my part for the rest of the year. I had been hoping to attend Sirens and Capclave this month, but there's just too much else going on for me to swing either one. And I'd normally do Philcon in November since it's practically right in my backyard, but I'll be off in Austin that weekend.
* Writing progress! Well, at least there was progress until a damn cold sidelined me yesterday (it's hard to focus or stare at a computer screen for too long when it feels like you have a head full of gauze-wrapped bricks). But before then, I got my short story "The Girl Who Welcomed Death to Svalgearyen" revised and sent out the door, and now I'm working on revisions for "Demon Dreams." And when that's done, I think I'll dive back into the never-ending My Big Fat Epic Fantasy Novel revisions.
* And last but certainly not least: I can haz zombie art? The awesome-looking title spread (with art by Dave Senecal) for my story in issue 25 of Black Static, which should be coming out this month:
But trying to maintain any kind of structure to my days this summer? Didn't happen. Too much flux, which is one of many reasons I've been so scattershot about blogging the last few months. Hopefully, though, September should bring a touch more stability with it. Classes for my MLIS program start this Thursday. Regular weekly choir rehearsals start up again next Wednesday. My last day at Ye Olde Day Job was a week ago; I'm hoping to find something part-time and library related, but in the meantime, there's a freelance database project I'll probably be taking on. And with all of those things set, maybe I can get back into something resembling a regular routine for writing and exercise, both of which I'm ashamed to say I've been mostly neglecting lately. Bad me. Bad.
Related to all of the crazy flux in my life right now, trying to answer the question "What do you do for a living?" at my grad school orientation last week was far more difficult than it used to be. "What do I do? Up until a few days ago, I was a grant writer for a theater company. Why did I leave something that sounds so cool? Well, working in the performing arts was cool, but fundraising made me miserable, and I really loved the two years I spent working in a music library, which is why I'm pursuing my MLIS now. Why didn't I stay at the music library job? Because it was a temporarily funded project, or else I would have. No, I'm not going to be a fulltime student now. I'm hoping to find a part-time library job, and I'll probably be taking on a freelance database project. Oh, and I also write fiction."
Postcript: in keeping with the spirit of randomness, is anyone else having issues with LJ's new text editor for posts? This entry got rid of all the spaces between paragraphs when I first posted, and then only the space between the first and second paragraphs on subsequent edit attempts. And with the last entry I posted, every time I selected text to put behind a cut, it moved the text before the cut text to after the cut. Damn it, LJ, I shouldn't have to keep tweaking the HTML in order to get simple entries to look normal.
And there I go disappearing from LJ again. It's been crazy lately!
Anyway, I'm emerging for a brief and belated moment of pimpage (apologies for shameless self-promotion being the bulk of my posts anymore): the July 2011 issue of the young adult magazine Beyond Centauri, which includes my story "Unlucky Clover," is out. "Unlucky Clover" is a sequel of sorts to my similarly titled (and much shorter) story "Lucky Clover," which appeared in Flash Fiction Online in March 2008.
*crawls back into the Pit Of Too Much To Do*
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