OMG. OMG. OMG. *ahem* Nothing to see here, just somewhat excited...

I *was* going to give a Worldcon wrapup here, but that's going to have to wait for the weekend because....

..... I GOT A REQUEST FOR A FULL MANUSCRIPT!

*deep breath*

*happy dance*

*dives back into the manuscript thinking of all the things I came up with during the last month that I should change and now don't have time to fix*

ieeeeee!

Dublin 2019

WORLDCON HERE WE COME!

Pitching on Twitter; #SFFpit for the win, and other thoughts

Took part in #SFFpit this July. It was a lot of fun, far more engaging that I expected. Got up at 5 a.m to send out my first pitch and start retweeting. All we did was read and poke at Twitter for the next three hours.

Many kudos to Dan Koboldt  (http://dankoboldt.com/sffpit/) and Michael Mammay for taking so much time out of their writing lives to organize that event. Turns out I'd heard Koboldt speak at Norwescon and hadn't realized he was the organizer of this event.

I wasn't expecting a Twitter event to be so educational. First, there was the process of trying to summarize a 143,000-word book into 260 characters. Luckily, I'm on a writing retreat, so when my writing buddies and I heard about the contest -- two! days! in advance! the fantasy writer among us and I had 24 hours to draft 10 pitches, share them with each other, and rewrite them. That helped immensely, and was probably the only reason I got any likes at all. 

Pitches are HARD, y'all. 

We both got two "likes," meaning people wanted pages, but they were both from tiny startup publishers, so we're researching them before we get too excited about that. The validation was AWESOME, though. 

Reading other people's pitches and seeing which ones garnered agent attention was quite useful, and thought-provoking, as I'm just starting the process of querying. I sent out 13 queries yesterday, and will send another batch after a few people open at the beginning of next month. 

I'm not sure this book is ever going to trigger the immediate "oh, yes, I want this!" that some of the pitches had -- it's more a "how does a young girl figure out what she's good at" for women who tried to read Game of Thrones and balked at the violence and patriarchy. It's not a "chosen one" story, and it's more a "find thyself" than a "heroine" piece, although the protag definitely does heroic shit.

The manuscript started life as a NaNo novel and an annoyed-at-Hollywood attempt to write a space opera that would fail a *reverse* Bechtel test (two named male characters who talk to each other about something other than a woman). I let go of that during the revision, of course, but there are no male leads, only supporting characters. And it introduces a complicated, multi-world universe and a "good" versus evil background story that I see carrying through at least two more books (as yet largely unwritten). 

But back to #SFFpit --it was just cool to see the stories people were writing, and sad to see that several I wanted to read had no agent likes. Bah. As someone else said, the hard part of the day was wanting those pitches to be books I could buy right now!

REVISION, accomplished.

The novel is revised!

My novel critique group pushed me to hold to a deadline, and so the last three weeks of June -- and especially the last few days -- were revision-heavy. And it's Done!

Well, "done." I'm already building a list of things I forgot, or should do. But I'm setting it aside to wait for agent comments because Perfectionism may not be stoppable, but -- It Can Be Channeled. LOL.

I took a one-day Clarion workshop on revision from Fonda Lee this spring, and she also pointed out that one can't make a career out of revision. Finish the damn thing and start something new.

So, I'm starting on my agent research, reviewing the list I had several years ago and building a new spreadsheet of agents to query, which will begin the second week in July. Forward!

Goals, reviewed

 GOAL CHECK-IN at the end of February. 

-- Two weeks of travel and being sick has left me in a hole.

-- Purpose is not revised. I did a pass and I do have a chunk of the work done. But I hit a wall. I didn't get some of the feedback back, and I pushed the project aside until I finished a Writing the Other world building class that I correctly thought would give me another perspective on what I was doing. It did, but it also opened a caldera of self-doubt. 

--New deadline is March 15. I don't know if I'm going to make that -- BIG depressive slump -- but I'm not changing it yet because I'm already behind.

-- I have read at least 15 ss this month but haven't tracked them well; I need to pull together the list I've read. Hugo noms are due soon and I'd like to contribute to that. Last month I didn't read as much as I would have liked and I was really bad about tracking. Again.

-- My weakest skill RIGHT NOW is maintaining a working schedule and figuring out how to move forward when new information and/or mood shifts shake my existing plan. 

-- I decided against applying to either Clarion this year. Instead, I'm taking two Clarion West one-day classes; one on revision and one on making stories stand out, since I'm not selling my stories and since revision is a fucking nightmare and I hate it and Fonda Lee says that's where the magic happens. Well by ghoddess I hope she can SHOW ME WHERE.

-- Two (of aimed-for-13) stories currently on submission; third got an actual "we liked this and kicked it upstairs but decided against it for maybe these reasons" PERSONAL REJECTION on my favorite short, so maybe there is hope. If I remember it's the same feedback I got from elsewhere so maybe I should take that feedback and ask about resubmitting. 

-- Won't submit an unrevised manuscript, so that's on hold. 

-- Retreat this summer is verbally happening. Need to look at schedule and nail down dates.

Year in Review

It's my end of year, beginning of the new year (winter starts for me Nov. 1) so it's time for the annual did-I-meet-my-goals post.  Bleh. 

LOL. It's a pain in the ass and I hate it every year because I just KNOW I've done awful (and am usually pleasantly surprised, there's that only-remembers-bad-stuff brain for you) but it also helps so much in prepping for next year's goals, so ... here it is.

I wanted to simplify my goals this year because I was getting waaaay to wrapped around doing and tracking a bazillion things and it felt like I was tracking more than I was doing. Which continued somewhat, but I also identified a different problem this year, which I'll get to in my 2019, eventually. 

My past year's goals 

(with my top-of-my-head reaction to how I did)

- Read more, track better  (which worked BEAUTIFULLY some months and Horrifically others)

- Write better -- improve skills (meh)

- Take classes to increase motivation  (dunno how I did on this)

- 20/hrs writing a week or better (such a damn low bar. Sigh) 

- Send Purpose to agents by Samhain (Falls off chair laughing)

- Be more collected and sane, i.e. -- 

  -- more single goal weeks, (eyes ceiling)

  -- more forest, more river: kayaking shape (winces)

  --Stay on top of budget, house and personal time (seriously winces)

-Stop Nazis. (blows a gasket)

What I actually accomplished (Nov 2017-Oct. 2018)

75,000 new words (or 1500/week for 50 weeks) A drop from last year, but I didn't hit my NaNoWrimo numbers at all.

336 revision hours. (Wow is does that feel low; but I hit 358 last year and I got a major revision done) 

452 other writing-related hours (drafting, marketing, printing, critting other folks' work, meetings, classes. Reading not included, I can't seem to get myself to track that accurately or consistently). 

That included 27 skill-building sessions (much too low to honestly feel I made much progress on my "write better" goal, but slightly better than last year) and 140 crits for other people (including one novel and one full-length play--similar but slightly higher than last year). Part of the problem is "write better" is a subjective goal. I know I'm a better writer than I was five years ago, but last year? That's harder to quantify.

At any rate, that's a combined 788 hours -- only about 20 weeks of full-time work. *sigh*  It is about 60 hours more than last calendar year, and close to two hours more a week in a 50-week year. So... slight improvement. But it's still 4.25 hours a week shy of my 20 hrs/week goal. I need to boost the annual number by more than 200 hours just to hit what I'm calling a low bar.

Read 24 books and more than 93 short stories  (blink. blink. Same number of books, but I hadn't tracked short stories last year. And I KNOW  I read more short stories this year. So that's good.)

Submitted work at least 16 times. (that's... more than double last year's number. Blink blink. cool!)

Sooo the numbers are a trifle skewed because I'm comparing a Nov.-Oct year with a calendar year (last year I didn't get this done until January) but I think it holds up okay. I'll do a "non-writing things I accomplished this year" post later; most of my monthly records are buried on my desk halfway across the state.

Okay. So where I missed my goals entirely:

Getting Purpose to agents (it's... close... but I've stalled, which tells me I've got a major issue I'm avoiding)

Physical health -- I started up with Pokeman Go to get walks in, and that has helped. But my weight has stabilized at a bad (high) place and I've ceased doing any of my PT exercises, so my shoulder is increasingly unuseable -- I had trouble cutting a hamburger on a plate today.

Mental health -- Like many creative and empathetic folk, I am high anxiety central over the state of the country right now, and I've not been meditating, exercising or taking sufficient mental health breaks. 

I have been doing SOME things--singing lessons, singing with the choir, taking breaks and mental health days and doing what I can on the political front. But my writing, my focus, my ability to contribute, my body and my creative capacity have all suffered.

 Moving forward into Samhain, into 2019

So... I'm trying a new Goal-setting process, this one with only four to six annual goals, which I'll rotate through the months. Each Goal has its own page with why, how, and "what would success look like." So far for Nov. 2018-Oct. 2019 I have:

Break the electronics habit

Regain and feed resilience and equanimity

Be a better writer

Be a better citizen (country and planet)

Breaking the electronics habit came from realizing part of the reason I'm not getting more work hours in is ... well... Facebook, Twitter, Plants vs Zombies and all the other electronic distractions. It's not all bad, obviously -- I use a computer to write, I'm using a work tracker, focus app and timer/alarms on my phone to help keep me on track. But I need to give up some screen time in order to have more USEFUL screen time. 

I'm still filling out the "Why," "How," and "Success Looks Like" but it's interesting that Success in one of these goals feeds and bleeds over into the others. 

I can't control the outcome of the election, and no matter what happens, we're likely to have two more years of 45, so. Maintaining my health and sanity so I can contribute in a positive way -- and then making that contribution -- is going to be key. So. Onward.

It's 100 degrees outside, and sunny, and about 5 percent humidity. The air conditioner is working, the fumes from the painting I've been doing are *mostly* contained to that room. Can't do anymore on that until tomorrow, so I'm a bit at loose ends, which is about the only time I update this thing.

Been doing reasonably well on my goals. Been reading a lot (24 books!), but it doesn't feel... purposeful. I don't feel I'm learning as much as I should from it (although I am enjoying reading more!). I gulp-read: I read the bulk of Goss' four-hundred-page "Alchemist's Daughter" in one insomnia-plagued night. I feel a tad guilty for having left no reviews; I feel I should let a book sit and write a review after some processing time, and then I rarely make that time.  I suppose that's why e-readers ask you to review the book right away; I'm not the only one whose, "I'll do it later" becomes "I didn't get around to it."

Hm. Let's see. I had four skills I wanted to work on: dialogue, description, vivid sense-based experience, and more efficient, faster revision. Of the books I've read this year, which ones carried those skills off the best?

Can't really tell how efficiently a finished book was revised, although one can tell if revision wasn't really *finished.* Hm. None of the books come to mind, although I would say the "third-and-a-half-wall conversations" in Goss's "Daughter" that ended up working so well would have been easy to excise, and I'm very glad an overzealous editor didn't do so.

Vivid sensory writing that worked for me: China Mieville's "Station," Cat Rambo's "Hearts,"  Cassandra Khaw's "Food," Gaie Sebold's "Babylon," worked best.  Sarah Gailey's "River," Nina Kiriki Hoffman's books.

Description: I have to go back to Mieville, who blew me out of the water, and Khaw and Gailey. Also Yoon Ha Lee's "Raven" and "Revenant," for telling concise details, as opposed to Mieville's pages of it. Nnedi Okorafor's "Akata" and "Phoenix," for middle ground. 

Dialogue: too many to list: Yoon Ha Lee, Rambo, Vernon, Valente, Goss. Mieville, Gailey. I don't recall anything I read this year having dialogue that wasn't good, in fact.

So I should probably be using these novels to help me do my own writing better; take apart a scene, a conversation, a description  and see how it worked, how it was crafted. Worth an attempt.