Baseball bats are not my friends; why am I itching to use one?

Hm. Two deadlines whooshing past. Might be time to regroup.

Am stuck on scene/chapter 7 of the current revision. There are some big decisions I haven't made about characters and I'm not exactly sure where to proceed. Proceeding with a big flag that says "come back and fix this later" might get me through it.

Didn't write a blog post in March. A lot of things I didn't do in March, a lot of other things I did without planning for them.

Self-hate is on a back burner, but self-dislike is building. Anxious and angry, like I'm in a perma-triggered state with very little focus capability. Keep telling myself that is not healthy and keep reading the news anyway. Wishing I still had a pell in my backyard I could mushroom a stick on. *sigh*

Am I doing too much and not giving myself enough refueling time?

I am:
revising a novel, taking an online writing class with homework and an upcoming weekend writing workshop, trying to sell some short stories, taking part in two critique groups and a monthly scriptwriter's gathering; trying to do weekly political actions (calling representatives, writing and sending postcards, writing letters to the editor, donating money); learning french for an upcoming trip; taking voice lessons, singing in a choir (recital and concert both this month); trying to get off antidepressants (which involves daily meditation, exercise and healthy eating to avoid ... bad things); maintaining my basic household chores and little else (grocery shopping, keeping the cats fed, cooking at least four dinners a week, unloading the dishwasher, cleaning litter boxes and doing my own laundry, mostly. House is not really getting cleaned.); hobbies such as crocheting, small games like luminosity and PvZ and solitaire. I'm reading two SF novels and trying to keep up with my mag subscription short story reading.  I track what I do every day because otherwise I'd forget I'd done anything at all. I try to spend time with friends once or twice a week.

I've also been spending a lot of time keeping up on FB and Twitter, which frankly have been eating as much time as some of the above.

I have not been out in the woods in ages. (It's been winter, but still). The few walks I've been able to take in nature-esque settings have been heavenly. I can't remember the last time I was in a museum. The last art show I went to, a gallery showing of a friend's work, was last year and I still haven't hung the piece I bought.

I have to learn about the happy world of VPNs because of the f*g money-grubbing for-sale legislators in Washington. Probably should have done all that five years ago, but... *sigh*

Jesus, this sounds like first-world whining in paradise.

Keep making minor epiphanies in meditation and losing them. Life is perfectly fine right now. I have a roof over my head, enough to eat, a stable financial situation, good friends and a civil relationship. It's spring and everywhere I look I see bright colors (and just today I've seen everything from power-outage-level winds and hail to gorgeous sunshine).

I just feel like there's a critter inside me scrabbling to get out and ... *partner interrupts, takes me to dinner, we have a nice long conversation* ... it must have been a hungry little asshat, because it is much calmer now. Still there, but but not as desperate. Weird.

Early 2017 lessons

A few things I've (re)learned since the last blog post.

Anxious, nervous energy is really good for exercise. Put another way, exercise is good for working out anxieties and nervous tension.

Making big decisions and acting on them takes a huge weight off and allows creative energy to flow.

Unusual and untried foods make bad rewards because if you're disappointed or don't like it, you feel like you've wasted a reward. New things should be tried for their own sake. Just for, yannow, variety. It's a thing you could try.

Epically bad shit is happening to someone, somewhere, ALL THE TIME. It doesn't stop because I stop paying attention and it doesn't stop because I do pay attention. Taking a break from the deluge of bad news in order to maintain my sanity does not add to or lessen anyone's pain. It's a necessary and essential piece of maintaining one's ability to respond to outrage. For all I know sixteen more effective workers step up when I step aside for a bit. I just can't allow the rest to turn into paralysis or ostrich mode.

Rage is really unhealthy and hard on the body.

Some things cannot be reversed. Oil spills will desecrate water and land for my lifetime and the lifetime of those who rely on those resources for body, mind and soul.

I am not an effective advocate in fights where I feel we've already lost.

There are things I can do.

Given enough time water wears away rock.

I need to read more. Reading really helps clear my mind, takes me into others' imaginations and helps me find insights I would not have otherwise seen.

Working the balance

 Saturday I went to the women's march in Portland. Sunday night I settled in to read a chapter or two of a book I'd started and finished it at 5 a.m. Got up at 9:30 rested and satisfied.

Those two acts are related.

I got drunk Saturday night -- not on purpose, but because I hadn't eaten much all day and had wine when I got home. It felt like a good celebration for accomplishing something I felt I ought to do with all the mixed feelings it engendered. 

There was disquiet: I wanted to share in the emotional excitement that many of my fellow protestors had, an "old home week" sense that "Yay! We're pulling together to fight again!" I do not begrudge people obtaining the positive emotions they need to stay active. 

But it felt almost indecent to me, given the stakes. 

I didn't see that happiness in any of the faces of the women of color I saw. With some exceptions, they all looked grim, determined and tired. That disparity jarred me. They have so much, much, much more to lose than I do. 

I took a vacation from political work (which involved many acts and songs borrowed from the civil rights movement) after the anti-gay activists were defeated in Oregon. Very few women of color felt they had that option; they have been busy protesting police violence and other nearly-as-lethal forms of discrimination without such a break. 

So I also felt guilt mixed with a determination not to let other women down: an echo of the sense I didn't do enough during the election, including dealing with the racism among fellow white women; and a reaction to the "where the hell have you all been" and "I hope to hell you all show up again" feeling I got from some other protestors. (I know some white women have been involved all along. I haven't been).

There was exhaustion: I juggling those emotions on very little food in the cold, and more wearingly I spent a full day surrounded by other people. (Had I been carrying a sign, one side should have read "So bad even the introverts are here.") 

Finishing Ms. Cherryh's book early Monday morning left my brain with a very settled, satisfied feeling. Everything was in order, the plot points and all its characters were accounted for, and the bad guys had gotten their comeuppance -- all in a way that allowed for future novels. It was *complete.* A good novel is a very satisfying thing. My brain felt like it had had a delightful meal complete with dessert. 

Very little is settled or satisfying in my life right now. Political action can bring a certain satisfaction, but it also carries vulnerability with an backwash of futility and despair. I have to manage that, deal with it so I can continue to act. 

Writing feels almost exactly the same way. I'm writing better than ever, when I allow myself the focus and the time. But there's also a sense of futility: I'm aging faster than I'm completing anything and who knows if I'll ever publish? (And how can I if I don't finish and submit?)

Political action feels like an endless long-term project in which I can easily make mistakes I can't fix, AND I can never see how much headway I'm making.

Reading and cooking give me a sense of completion that is short-term and stabilizing. 

Crafts and hobbies bridge the two: most are longer-term projects that result in a concrete end product I can hold and enjoy, or at least a finish line such as a concert (ready or not). In the choir I sing with, we aim for 80 percent or better as individuals. At that level we can carry each other to a beautiful and moving performance. A too-narrow focus on perfection can actually detract from performance.

In my writing craft, much of my struggle with lack of completion is the sense that what I currently have isn't good enough. If I want a sense of stability and accomplishment around my writing I need to give up the sense that it needs to be perfect before I send it into the world.

And I need to maintain a balance in my life in other areas so I can continue to act politically, consistently and over the long haul. 

I need to fix the holes in MY work so I can do THE work.

Lessons from a science-fiction murder mystery Grande Dame

Not a review; notes about what I'm reading that might help me improve my own writing.

I cannot believe I've not read anything by Kate Wilhelm until this recently. She's a grande dame of Science Fiction and an Oregon treasure, and apparently many of her thriller/mystery novels are set in the Pacific Northwest. I recently read Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, about cloning and the nature of humanity, and last night finished Death Qualified.

Death Qualified is a Barbara Halloway mystery (she's written a baker's dozen, I believe) published in 1991. At 25 years old,  it is in many ways a period piece: the use of floppy disks, the lack of easy communication, the reliance on land lines, the science gaps (at one point a mathematician dismisses the possibility of reliable weather predictions), the villain's motivation, all set it clearly in a bygone decade. That said, it is damn well written and quite compelling, and if people can read novels set in WWII with glee there's no reason not to read something set in the decade I graduated from high school.

Strengths
Sense of place. This was in part because this is set in my home state, not far from where I live, so  I could see many of the places she refers to. That's always fun. But she went deep into the SENSE of important settings, both the sensory input for the character and the emotional resonance that character felt for that place, and that worked at a very deep level.

 It uses chaos theory, which I find fascinating, as a metaphor and plot device. Hell,  I'll read almost anything that has fractals in it.

One thing I thought was a weakness was the lack of transitions in some places, but now that I've thought about it a bit, I realized that in the beginning, there were long gaps of time without clarity, intended to make the reader feel what the "lost" character was feeling. Years-long gaps in the narrative slowly became shorter and shorter until we were month by month, then day by day, then meal by meal, and finally in the hair-raising last few pages, second by second.

At the halfway point, I looked at how much book was left and said, "how?" but Wilhelm took the plot in a slightly different, and finally darker, direction than I expected. I had by that point correctly figured out who the killer was (not tellin') which of course makes a nerdbody feel good.  I gulped that entire last half of a 440-page paperback in one evening, and that pacing is largely to "blame."

She created compelling to reasonably compelling characters, all of whom felt true to me as someone who's lived in this state for most of my life.  Because of the plot, she created some evil academics, but balanced them with good ones, and the rural characters are all for the most part real people, which I appreciated. The far-off college campus and the academic realities of the bad folks seem tissue-thin, however.

Reveal: Wilhelm sets nearly all her hooks at the beginning, instead of the usual "set one hook, pay it off, set another hook" plotting, although new hooks got added here and there. There was *so much* hidden from the readers at the beginning that some readers I know would have dropped the novel, but I love that interlaced depth. Everything was unknown, including the opening POV character's real name, because HE didn't know who he was, where he was, who he could trust. And as it went on, the mystery around why he'd been kept essentially a prisoner and never discovered deepened. (This is also a weakness; I had a lot of trouble believing that they could change his name and keep him on the same campus and NOBODY would notice, but that detail doesn't become clear until one is so far into the novel that it's easy to slide on by).

Weaknesses
Some of the science feels weak,  but that's an age-of-book thing (and a "I wasn't aware of that" thing --- apparently there is a theory about object boundaries and brain injuries I didn't know about).

Bad guys not fully fleshed out: One villain is painted clearly, but his/her (not tellin') motivation is muddled, and not strong enough to justify the crime/s committed. Perhaps that's also a 25-year difference in culture, but I think it's more a 25-year difference in what the reading public would *accept* as a reason for murder. In that glaring error, the book has aged very badly. Can't even explain that without ruining it, but let's just say LGBT readers might that aspect upsetting. Motivation for someone else is unclear and that character *is* a cardboard villain.

What I can learn for my own writing
Relax and take my time. This may have been published 15 years ago by an established author (she first published in 1963, and she's got more than 50 novels to her name), but the pages of detail she lavishes to build that world painted those characters, created that sense of place.

If I want that depth of richness in my own prose I need to quit pushing short-story brevity into novel-length works.

Make your villains 3-D and not just heroes in their own minds but acceptably comprehensible at some level to readers. As in, "wow, that is screwed up rationalization, but I get how she got there" instead of "who thinks like that?" or worse, "Uh, no. That's not happening. S/he is too sane for that." Which, you know--I can't grok why anyone sane who isn't a neo-Nazi would vote for Trump, so--maybe I should expand my definition of acceptably comprehensible. Real life, however, is not an excuse for flimsy fiction.

That sense of place and emotional evocation of place (and people, for that matter). I might do that exercise where you copy a few pages of someone's fiction and then rewrite a scene of my own in an attempt to get the same feeling/style. Need to do that with James Lee Burke and NK Jemisin and Bradbury and LeGuin.

I'm not going to write much about Where Late The Sweet Bird Sang because while it is a classic, and I'm very glad I read it, it has not aged as well.  I should also be honest that short books that leap generations annoy me. I spend all that time with an initial cast of characters and I turn a page and now they're all dead and I'm supposed to instantly care about their offspring because, "humanity?" *boots book out airlock* Yeah, I'm not a fan of that concept.

There's a message about the reality of plans to survive climate change which I find very apropos despite the book's age. It feels like an entirely different style than the book above -- it's nice to see that in an author's collection of works.

But it also reads like a book that wouldn't get published today, and I'm not sure why. I'm certainly not qualified to say that, since I've read so little of what's coming out, but ... just reading it evoked my middle-school library, where I checked out so many of the sci-fi books I binged on and then forgot I'd read. There's a bright through-line in a lot of that fiction that's not character but idea; idea excitedly explored. You have to handwave so many variables to buy into the premise that the only thing you can do is cling to that idea and hurtle along with the author to his or her conclusion.

Which is the novel's sole weakness; its strengths are many--description, concepts, sense of place, emotional evocation among others. So what could I learn from it?

To make generation-spanning fiction work for me it has to be obvious from the get-go that's going to happen.

Don't dismiss idea fiction--it can be a powerful story form.

Again, taking some of the sections of emotional evocation of place and dissecting the text for what works.

Tone and style matter. And I need to learn more about how to use and create both.

Name change in the offing

Well, shit, I need to rename the blog. Just realized it's *way* too close to the blog name of one of my idols/inspirations (who I follow on Twitter, Facebook, but apparently have never actually looked at her BLOG). *headdesk, headdesk, headdesk* She's had "Epiphany 2.0" since 2008, it appears.

So. I haven't changed it yet because I don't know what to change it to -- but a name change is happening soon. And this time I'll freakin' google variations instead of just the word.  *shuffles off, annoyed at self*

2016 in writing review: I did not totally suck, again.

Year in review post of sorts. Since January of last year, I:

• wrote 38K new words (plus Feb/March, which I didn't record)
• did 53 skill-building sessions (roughly one per week; better than I thought I'd done)
• finished one novel revision and
• sent that manuscript to beta readers (and read and took notes on all feedback)
• read 21 books, 15 of them novels (though novel analysis was more miss-than-hit)
• did 110 critiques (two novels) as part of my participation in two crit groups
• submitted short stories five times
• wrote four blog posts
• took three writing classes (WTO, RW, and NKH ss class*)
• went to one writing conference
• hosted a writing retreat.

Huh.

New word count is really, really low (I usually top 100K but I didn't do NaNoWrimo this year and I didn't track any of the manuscript rewriting as "new words") and I really need to submit more. But  ... maybe I don't totally suck.

Really, that's the reason I do an insane level of hashmarks and spend part of every day recording time spent on activities that I'll never be paid for -- to remind myself that I'm not twiddling my thumbs eating bonbons every day. Because next week I won't have any idea how I spent today; next month I won't remember this blog post; by the end of the year I won't remember whether I spent the entire month writing or shoveling snow or reading incendiary anti-Trump rants on Twitter. (For the record, I did spend some time doing the latter).

But I'll *assume* I wasted my time and accomplished nothing in every case, because that's how I'm wired. If I don't write it down I forget it, and if I don't write it down or check what I wrote down I beat myself up for not getting anything done. Of that list above, all I remembered without looking at my records was I'd read a few books, finished the novel revision (hard to forget that milestone, yay!) and took a class. Oh yeah, and that retreat. And I did a blog post in there somewhere, and was that other class this year or last -- maybe I should check?

Keeping track keeps me from burning myself in effigy for incompetence and uselessness Every. Damn. Year. As a depressive person to begin with it's a worthy enough cause that I keep it up.

This month, I'm experimenting with bullet journaling, because it's essentially what I've been doing, only ORGANIZED.  (Organized is good. Hell, organized is the holy grail. I'd post a picture of my box-and-paper-piled office to show you why, but I'd never recover from the shame).

I use People System's uncalendar and I love, love, love it. I keep mine in a big high-school zipup binder and call it my Brain and if I lost it, I'd cry for a very long time.

Uncalendar's clunky website (they seem to be unwilling to post images of their pages anymore)

It's an incredibly flexible and integrated (as much as you want it to be) system and I've been using it for decades. It's already a diary/planner/organizer/taskmanager/journal in one place, which is the cool thing about a bullet journal. I use the monthly pages to track what I did every day and keep track of my goals.

But as I've done more and more with the uncalendar over the years, I hadn't figured out how to organize the pieces, so I was wasting a lot of time flipping through finding the right pages. Just the concept of adding an INDEX -- yeah, yeah, I know -- was a light bulb moment for me. My index was in my highly scattered frontal cortex, but having an actual page is... helpful, okay?

And the idea of doing fun arty things to leaven what has become crammed pages of solid text just cheered me up. I added a bookcase drawing for my book list, for example, and tore out an adult coloring book page to illustrate my "rewards" page (because I'm not much of a skilled doodler but I like the idea of breaking up all those lines of text with fun and colorful images). 

If you're not familiar with bullet journaling go visit these pages and some of the links:

shannagermain's bullet-journaling-for-writers

or

Something delicious on bullet journaling for novelists

 and you'll see what I mean by arty journals and designs-incorporated-into-goals-and-tracking. AWESOME but a little beyond me for starters. It took me half a day to draw a bookcase page I liked. LOL.

But I'm already way beyond some of what they're doing for *tracking* (daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal tasks and goals) and I want to keep that because maintaining it gives me a good continuity of comparison. Some of what's not working, though, I could shift to their visual system-- it could be faster and less repetitive. Just need to experiment a bit.

2017's writing goals will be similar.

• Need to finish the beta manuscript SOON and send it out to agents (I'll give it a year of submission, and then if no-one bites I'll self-publish, I think). 
• I'd like to read more books this year *and pay more attention* to what made them tick.
• I'd like to write more fresh fiction but I'm discovering as I get better I have less tolerance for what feels like "junk/crap" stories with no point (but I don't know if it can be more than junk until I finish it enough that it can be revised, now do I?) More skill-building sessions--writing just to practice--might help me get past that.
• Submit more short stories! I have nearly 100 short stories. I should have more than one sale. I can't sell if I don't submit!

How was your year? What are you planning on for 2017?

*
Writing the Other (Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford)
Revolutionary Writing (Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due
Joy of Short Story Writing (Nina Kiriki Hoffman)

Phoenix blogging

Six months. Wow. *dusts everything*

My writing output comes in gusts, my revision energy burns intensely and then vanishes, my belief I know what the hell I'm doing peaks and plummets. I guess it's not too surprising my blogging would follow the same pattern. Blogging as phoenix.

There's one recurring lesson I should like to remember before it trips me up again: I may feel like I'm burning out and being reborn, but I'll always carry the seed of who I am. Not even a phoenix (or at least not even this phoenix) loses herself entirely. And it feels like I'm retaining more and more of the useful, good and productive part of self each cycle.

This latest fallow period was a combination of being very busy finishing a revision, followed by a relieved slump that slowly slid into a deep and murky depression.

Early this week I attended a gathering with an author, and realized afterwards that I was *happy* and felt like myself again. It was a momentary gleeful recognition of a confident self, someone I felt I hadn't seen in decades.

 What happened? That I felt I was treated as a colleague by a well-known author is no small part of that, I'm certain. But I'm frequently treated as a colleague by others I respect, so that's not all of it. I'd successfully navigated a social situation I was uneasy about, so that could have contributed (if nothing else, euphoria I wasn't going to spend the rest of the week beating myself up for saying something stupid. That is not a *small* win in my life).

It wasn't a sudden surge in exercise; I've been struggling with various minor health inconveniences that have dissuaded useful exercise. I've been eating yogurt again, due to a heavy cycle of antibiotics. There's some research that suggests a connection between depression and unhealthy bacterial gut populations. (And a fascinating one that links a combination--fungus and bacteria--to severe intestinal disruptions like Crone's, but I digress). Perhaps I should add yogurt with my meals for the next two months and see how that pans out.

And maybe this episode of bleakness has finally burned itself out. It fought back; the good mood didn't last. But I've made more revision progress this week than I have for two weeks, so I'm pulling out of it. I've gotten very useful feedback from beta readers that has opened some possibilities for me, and I'm ready to go forward. I'd hoped to be at this stage three months ago, but I'm here now, so... onward.