‘Fess Up Friday
She tried her hardest, but Curtis Sittenfeld did not dissuade me from writing this week. Not to say that I didn’t enjoy American Wife. I did, but I also finished it in just three days.
Writing: Going well. Of course, I’m now on project number three since this ‘fess up series began. That’s three novels started and I think I need to work on actually finishing one of them before starting something else. Focus is a bit of an issue. And I welcome all suggestions for how to focus on just one project at a time.
Submissions: Why hello, rejection letters. Got three back this week. Nary an ink stain on them, all carbon copy slips of paper, most of which were smaller than the envelope they came in. The lowest of the low. Two of them came back last Saturday and getting dual rejection letters kind of sucks. I may have been a little down and self-pitying, but that seems to have shifted.
As for today, I’d be much more productive if I didn’t feel like half of my face was about to explode. Stupid sinuses. . .
‘Fess Up Friday: Distracted
Writing/Revising: I’m officially combining these categories for the remainder of my current project. The novel I’m working on was born out of a story, so I’d doing equal parts writing and revising. It’s only going okay this week. I’ve been distracted and most of my concentration has gone right out the window. I’m taking drastic steps to fix that this week. For instance, I’m kissing LJ reading and Twittering good-bye. I’m even cutting back on a lot of blog reading. My internet activity will mostly be reduced to this blog and my email.
The reason for this forced isolation is because I’ve spent a lot of last week and this week angry, sad, and upset. The fact that this coincides with the DNC and the GOP conventions is no surprise. Simply put, I can no longer tolerate the mean-spirited snark and trash talk that both sides seem to spew forth daily. There’s a lot of “we’re right, you’re wrong” out there. It’s odd, I thought the reason we were all so disillusioned with the current administration was because of this kind of black and white thinking. Shouldn’t the answer to it be to try to be open-minded? Isn’t unity about reaching out to others instead of alienating them? I whole heartedly believe that this is the intent of both Obama and McCain, I’m just not seeing it from either of their supporters.
Ugh. Okay, so political rant through. Point being, I’m closing down part of my internet access until November 6. (Yes, I’m aware that the election is Nov. 4 and this should all be over on Nov. 5, but with things as divisive as they are now, I expect the day-after commentary to be worse.) I will not be talking politics on this blog. PERIOD. Exclamation point.
I will, however, be talking about how much I am loving YA right now and how reluctant I am to return to literary fiction (though I really do want to read Joshua Henkin’s Matrimony and Andrew Sean Greer’s Story of a Marriage). And how adding a shitzu (no matter how temporarily) to a two-cat household is nothing short of chaos. And how our house hunt continues, though with less force than before. Oh, and writing. Hopefully, lots and lots of writing.
Happy weekend!
‘Fess Up Friday
Writing: . . . Aaaaaand we’re back. I finally put the real estate stuff aside and got back to writing this week. I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but I am back in the drafting stages of a novel. Cool.
Submissions: Got two back this week, including a rejection from a market that held on to my submission for 286 days. No personalization, no anything. Just a form letter that was 200 days overdue.
Etc.: The running continues to go well. The reading for the magazine has come to an end. The cats are both happy and healthy. In short, everything’s great.
‘Fess Up Friday
For today only (I hope!) a special edition of ‘Fess Up Friday called “What I have been doing instead of writing my novel.” It goes a little something like this:
Doing the real estate thing. We’re looking at houses and this an incredibly time consuming task. You’d think that it might be limited to a couple of hours on the weekend or something, but you would be wrong. There is the general house looking thing that can stretch into three or four hours (ugh), then there is the sorting through emails about properties, then there is the speculating about this neighborhood or that neighborhood, and then there’s all the thinking about houses and comparing houses and the list goes on and on and on.
In short, it has taken over my life.
And I am not terribly happy about it right now.
But enough about that. I have also been cleaning out our house just in case we find our dream home and need to sell this place. I made some mighty fine progress on the hall closet last week. It turns out that we actually have a floor in there. Unfortunately, that is only a small dent in our clutter-filled home, but since we have no dream home on the horizon, I’d say we’re doing okay.
I took the boy cat to the vet this week. I have to brag on him for just a moment. Anyone who knows me or has read this blog has been subjected to the saga that is Mr. B’s health problems. The short version is that he had IBD. The treatment for the IBD gave him diabetes, which we treated with diet and insulin. That eventually gave him hyperglycemia and indicated that he was diabetes-free. But he still had the IBD. For a while there, we were making vet trips pretty much every month.
On the last visit we settled on a food trial plan for Mr. B. The food was expensive, but worth it. Especially since Mr. B has been puke free for about a month now (knock wood). The vet says that this kind of progress may indicate that we can stop the food trial and just keep him on the special diet. I’m very excited about the prospect. I love my vet and the staff, but I’m perfectly happy to not see them monthly. Keep your fingers crossed for continued kitty health.
Anyway, that’s some of what I’ve been doing instead of writing. At least, that’s the more interesting portion of it. Running continues to go well. And I’m slowly but steadily working up to a 9500 Singstar score for “Torn.” Achieving that may be my biggest accomplishment this summer.
Happy weekend!
‘Fess Up Friday: The Late Edition
But better late than never, right?
Writing: Much better than last week. I managed to get some writing in every day and increase my word count in small bursts. However, I’m reaching a point where I feel the novel spinning out of control. It’s suddenly not about what it is supposed to be about. The characters are changing, and I’m having trouble deciding whether to go with the changes or backtrack, erase, and restart. I know there are a lot of people who glamorize the whole “let your characters do what they want” approach to writing. I think if that works, go for it. I’m not so sure it works for me, though. I may need to rethink my main character and maybe do a little character sketch to find out what she’s really about.
I’m also fighting the urge to move to something else. It’s a pretty familiar feeling for me. As soon as I begin to get mired down in one project, I look for more attractive ones. Stories that are fresher. Newer. Never mind that 9,000 words in, I’ll probably be just as mired and exasperated.
Revisions: Not applicable.
Submissions: The mail void continues. I sent off another story for kicks, so I can expect to not hear from that market as well.
Other things: I’ve been regularly doing my Couch to 5K workouts and I’m seeing a noticeable improvement in my endurance. After upping my running time again today, I came home from the gym and browsed local 5Ks for the fall. I feel very good about this.
I’m currently swooning over Emily Carter’s Glory Goes And Gets Some. It’s scary good. I decided that I had to put it away for a little while because her writing just sparkles and mine does not. It’s intimidating as Hell. But it’s good. Go read it.
That’s it for this ‘fess up. Have a good weekend!
What Went Wrong with Breaking Dawn?
Warning: This post may contain spoilers for Twilight/Breaking Dawn, Harry Potter, and The Dark Materials. Read at your own risk.
Forgive me, friends, because I am a terrible person. I have a morbid fascination with the fallout over Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in the Twilight series. I’ve been watching the Amazon ratings and reading the fan discussions on the interwebs. My, there are a lot of angry fans out there.
Here’s the lowdown for those who haven’t been obsessively tracking the Twilight phenomenon. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series consists of four books dealing with (best I can tell) a love triangle between a teenage girl, the sparkley vamp she loves, and a werewolf. The much awaited finale had a midnight release this weekend to the tune of 1.3 million in book sales. Early Saturday morning Amazon reviews suggested some dissatisfaction with the book. (Two and a half star rating? Oh my!) Shortly after, threads suggesting readers return their copies or even burn them began appearing. Currently, the fandom appears divided between “Breaking Dawn is the BEST BOOK EVER” and “OMG did I just waste my Saturday morning reading that?”
Having read only the first 200 pages of Twilight, I am not at liberty to review the last book. I’m probably not qualified to even write this blog post. Still… In reading the reviews and discussions, one of the things that upsets me most are the people that answer any criticisms of the book with some variant of “it’s just fiction, don’t think too hard about it.” (For the record, there are a number of plot criticisms in which this comes up, but the primary discussion to which I’m referring to deals with vampire sperm. You see why this is fascinating to me.)
The Breaking Dawn problem seems to stem from the fact that Meyer broke the rules of a world that she created. Anytime you write fiction, you get to establish a new world. It can be a world just like ours, or it can be a completely other world. Rowling created a underground magic school and an entire society of wizarding folk. Pullman assigned people daemons that were tethered to them. Both of these world were completely plausible, despite the fact that they were completely unlike the world we live in.
But, just like our world operates on rules (the laws of physics, as just one example) so do fictional worlds. In Pullman’s world bad things happen when daemons are severed from their humans. It’s a rule. It would take a hell of a lot of skill to break it.
So Meyer built three books that established the world of Twilight and among the established rules is one that says vampires can’t have babies. Sorry, vamps, just the way it goes. And then in the last book, the rule is utterly, spectacularly broken, and revamped (sorry, I really couldn’t help myself) with some vamps can’t have babies, but others can. Hmm… remember that part about it taking a lot of skill to break an established rule? I’m gathering from the Breaking Dawn fallout that this book didn’t pull it off. People are pointing out that the whole vampire siring a child thing is completely implausible in the Twilight world. And it’s a valid criticism, one that has the other half of the fandom answering it with “it’s just fiction.”
To answer that criticism, or any criticism with that remark suggests that fiction doesn’t have to honor the world it creates when, in fact, it very much does. The best stories are the ones that I get completely lost in and I never question their plausibility, but that’s because they establish their rules and they don’t break them without some serious skill. Just because “it’s just fiction” does not give the work a bye when it isn’t plausible or breaks the rules that it has created.
Sorry if this post seems extremely harsh toward the book or toward Ms. Meyer. I actually feel a lot of sympathy for the Twilight fans that are feeling ripped off by the latest book. It really sucks to get very much invested in a book or a series only to want to end up burning it when it’s over. I hope your next reading adventure is much more enjoyable.
‘Fess Up Friday
Um . . . Yeah.
I did nothing this week. Seriously, there’s not even a point to breaking it down into categories because I didn’t accomplish anything. On any of them.
Today, I’m not even going to try to write. I didn’t sleep until 4 this morning and the house is something close to a disaster. So I’m going to straighten the house, do some reading, and hope to God to take a nap this afternoon. I am planning to shut myself in my office sometime this weekend with only the novel to work on, so maybe I’ll make some progress this weekend.
Happy weekend all.
‘Fess up Friday: The Whiny Edition
Writing: Got in two good days of writing. I spent the rest of the week frustrated because I still have no freaking clue where this novel is going. I have no plan, no outline, no nothing. So on Thursday I decided to hell with the outline and the plan, there’s always revision. So my new plan is not to have a plan. I’m just going to write instead. And once I came up with this plan, the writing started going a lot smoother again. Still, not such great progress for the week.
Revisions: Zilch. I really, really need to get back on this.
Submissions: Thirty five markets are holding two of my stories hostage.
What I’ve been doing instead:
- Reading submissions for a magazine that will launch in the fall. That’s time consuming, but not all bad. I usually set aside four hours one day to work on this and so far it’s been a lot of fun.
- Taking kitty to the vet. Earlier in the week there was some drama with our tabby cat. It seems once we get one of our cats healthy, the other decides it’s their turn for some attention and so off to the vet we go.
- Seeing Mamma Mia! I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. It’s a romp. I don’t recommend seeing it if you are looking for greatness. A lot of the cast cannot sing and it delves to a level of cheesiness that is only possible by combining ABBA and musical theater. However, it’s so much fun. I smiled throughout the movie and I can’t remember the last time that happened.
Happy weekend!
From the “I Wish I’d Written This” Department:
Margo Rabb’s “How to Tell a Story.”
Even though it’s not possible that Margo and I were in the same MFA program, this story feels so true to my experience (right down to the sentiment/sentimentality lecture) that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that she was sitting right next to me all that time.
I discovered the story years ago, just before my third year in the program. I thought it was so dead on that I sent copies to classmates with the subject line, “OMG! Is she talking about us?!” In the years since, it has served as a reminder that I’m not the only person who had an F’ed up MFA experience. There are plenty more of us out there, and God Bless us all for surviving it.
