I leave for the Whirled Fantasy Convention in Austin on Thursday and probably won’t have much time between then and now to blog much. Dry your eyes.

If you’re going to World Fantasy and you’re reading this, be sure to say hi. The programming at conventions is usually decent, but I mostly go to meet folks.

I finished “Miss Pavlichenko” last night and it weighed in at a hefty 13,800 words. Happily, it breaks down the middle into two equal parts. The first half is Lyudmila’s wartime experiences, the second half is her post-war experiences.

The story may not entirely work in this form, but there’s a *lot* here to mine. It could spawn several shorter stories (like her American tour with Eleanor Roosevelt) or it could easily double in size, or even become a novel. Currently, it’s a series of episodes spanning a forty year period and the gaps in time are conspicuous in the second half, sometimes jumping decades. On the other hand, I’m skipping the time she’s working as a research assistant in the Soviet Navy, so there’s not much fodder for story there.

With the material I’ve dredged up, the story practically writes itself. Patience is the key with this one. I also realized yesterday that I probably would have given up on it had it not been an assignment for class, so kudos for school.

Current Mood: Busy Busy |

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Whew. Here’s the deal: school keeps me busy as it is. To really stay on top of everything it takes a lot of time. Add to this my commute, domestic responsibilities, and my non-school Spanish program, I’m a busy beaver.

In order to have “free” time, I need to pretty much work around the clock. My social calendar is really one of weighing the fun with balancing the workload. With World Fantasy coming up this weekend, that wipes out all of next Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, meaning this weekend’s highlight was ordering in pizza and watching about an hour of “100 Scariest Moments in Movie History” on Bravo. The good news is that I’ve been productive enough to feel comfortable leaving town.

“Miss Pavlichenko” has grown to 12K words and is easily the longest single story I’ve ever written. I thought that one of my earliest stories (entitled “The Buffalo Skinner” featuring the same basic plot as the Woodie Guthrie song) was 11K words, but I was wrong—it was only 8K. “Miss Pavlichenko” isn’t even done yet; she’s got at least another 800-1K words.

In the end, the story will break into two roughly equal parts: Lyudmila’s experiences during the war, and her experiences afterwards. As I mentioned earlier, this story needs a lot of work, but what first draft doesn’t?

Go Pack Go! They’re certainly showing that they can consistently beat the worst teams in the NFL, which means they’re not on the absolute bottom rung. Good news.

Go Badgers! I’m glad I sold the tickets for this one and listened to it as I studied, as it would have probably given me a heart attack. The upside is that the Badgers survived a very serious gut check after spotting Illinois three touchdowns in the first half. They roared back in the second and eeked out the win. 8-1? For this team? Never thought it would happen, even with the cush schedule.

I watched parts of Liverpool’s dismantling of Aston Villa and three top notch goals, including the beautiful movement and passing of the third one. Why can’t ‘Pool play like that every week? I saw Rooney’s treble on a highlights show and he’s as good as he is ugly. If Man Ure can paste a stingy side like Bolton, maybe they are legit title contenders. Happily, the Ars* drew with Everton and that keeps them out of the upper echelon. Spurs contrived to draw 0-0 with Watford in a game they could have easily won—or just as easily lost.

The Chicago Fire capitulated to the New England Revolution on Saturday night, bowing out of the play-offs at the first hurdle. When the Fire plays well, they’re quite good. However, in the few times I’ve watched them this season, when they go off the boil they’re frustratingly average. They didn’t deserve to win against New England even though they probably should have held on.

And finally, Robinho scored a beaut for Real Madrid in their comeback win on Saturday. La Liga looks like it will be positively tasty this season. Too bad I don’t have more time to watch…

Current Mood: Tired |

World Fantasy Convention is next week! That crept up on me. I’m really looking forward to it as it’s a chance to see old friends and meet some new people. I need to introduce myself to Shawna McCarthy and the team over at Wildside Press and thank them for buying my stories. Speaking of which…

Just sent off the final version of “Working Out Our Salvation” to Weird Tales, which I assume means it’s coming out relatively soon. More info as it becomes available.

Also, to my amusement I just realized the next draft of “Miss Pavlichenko” needs to be posted to the class website this Tuesday. Silly me, I thought I had until Thursday! I put another 1K words into it the other night (a scene starring Eleanor Roosevelt) which brings it to 8K. I think 10-11K is where this draft will land and will likely get longer the more I revise. The more I mull over this story, the more I like it. It definitely needs work—especially at the sentence level—but I find myself being moved as I write it. Which is always a good sign.

Loading up Pride and Prejudice on my iPod as the next audiobook to fall to my ears, followed by Great Expectations I think. P&P has been highly recommended by lovely wife and not-nearly-as-lovely Eric Bresin.

I just found out the new car has a six CD changer. Here’s how I think I’m going to load it up.

Slot 1: The Clash
Slot 2: Give ‘Em Enough Rope
Slot 3: London Calling
Slot 4: Sandanista (Disc 1)
Slot 5: Sandanista (Disc 2)
Slot 6: Combat Rock

That gives me a nice variety to choose from. Just in one of those moods…

Current Mood: Busy |
Currently Listening To - Beck - “The Information”

I finished Grapes of Wrath last night and boy, she was good. The ending didn’t entirely satisfy me as I didn’t like how Tom Joad just slips away, but the last scene with Rose of Sharon was quite powerful. A remarkable book.

Way to go Steinbeck.

I also started a book called Suite Francaise for one of my classes. I’m only 25 pages in, but I think it’s going to be great. It’s about rich Parisians fleeing the city after the German attack, and is told with a dry, ironic tone.

The preface is tragically saddening as the author, Irene Nemirovsky, was a Russian Jew who was living in Paris at the time. She’d converted to Catholicism because of the anti-Semetic sentiment washing over Europe at the time, but her conversion mattered little to the Nazis: she was a foreign Jew and that was all that mattered. She wrote this book during the occupation. Her health deteriorated and she was taken away “for medical observation.” She died in Auschwitz. Her husband didn’t understand that being taken away meant certain death, and when he inquired of officials when his wife might return, he was arrested and immediately sentenced to the gas chamber. What’s worse is how authorities hunted for their two little girls who were in the care of nuns. As it says in the preface, with the enormity of the war encompassing the globe, it’s shocking how much attention the police paid to finding these two young girls. They both survived the war, and the elder of the two had kept her mother’s manuscript of Suite Francaise with her over all those years.

For those who have known me for years, they’re familiar with my obsessive personality. When I get into things, I tend to go a bit overboard. For example, right after college I went through a phase where I read nothing but Greek stuff. I read all the tragedies, all the comedies, Graves’ myths, a couple text books, a couple great books by Carl Kerenyi on the heroes of the Greeks and the Gods of the Greeks (both of which I highly recommend), criticism of the tragedies, some Aristotle, Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica…you get the picture. A few years back I went Icelandic Saga crazy and read little else but Norse myth and sagas. (I was thick in this phase during Clarion.) I cooled on that once I got to the lesser read sagas and found that they were lesser read for a reason. This obsessive nature extends beyond reading. When I first got into Bob Dylan, I listened to nothing else for a period of about 18 months. Just ask my wife if you don’t believe me. It put her off Bob Dylan for good.

Now that I’m a full-time student, the majority of my time is unstructured and I’ve rediscovered a long-lost problem: that of remembering to eat. Apparently, I have a very dull sense of hunger. For years at work I’ve eaten according to the clock, i.e. I would remind myself to take my lunch break before 2:00. Instead of getting hungry, I get headaches. Only when I start wondering why I have a headache do I remember that I haven’t eaten for six, seven, eight hours. Most days, eating is little more than a prophylactic against lurking headaches.

Another problem that hasn’t plagued me for years is that of sleep. I love sleep, and I think this stems from the fact that for way too many years as a teen sleep eluded me. My mind tends to latch onto things and won’t let go when I go to bed, but normally only when there’s stuff to think about, which isn’t that abnormal. Work, as a general rule, rarely stressed me out enough to give me too many sleepness nights. Now that I’m in school, I’m thinking about little else except reading and writing: what I’m reading, what I’m writing, what I’ve read, what I’ve written, what I want to read next, what I want to write next. You get the picture. The best remedy is physical exhaustion, and that’s why I’m bummed the pick-up soccer players have packed it in for the fall.

It’s been common knowledge for many years that inadequate nourishment and lack of sleep causes illness and premature death. I need to get a handle on this as I woke up this morning with the first traces of a head cold.

Current Mood: Stuffy |
Currently Listening To - Bob Dylan - “The Bootleg Series, Vol II”

I found a draft of the spring timetable and good news abounds. One: there’s a graduate class taught by one of my current professors entitled “Magic and Wonder.” We’ve talked a little bit about the reading list for an upcoming class of his because he knows this is my interest area, but I assumed it was an undergrad class. Two: there’s a graduate class on sci-fi utopias and dystopias taught by the other professor I’ve met with. These classes meet back-to-back on Wednesdays. I don’t think I should have a problem getting in (I’ll register ASAP) but if I do, I can always beg entry considering this is, you know, my main area of interest.

As a nice upshot, this means my commute schedule won’t be any worse than it was this semester and, in fact, it will likely mean I’ll only be gone one night a week. Less driving is good, but on the down side that means less time in the UW-M community, which is something I really ought to address.

On the down side, in thinking about a few things I fear I might have rubbed a few other students the wrong way. I’m genuinely enthused and interested in my classes and I get involved—I think I might come off as a braggart know-it-all. I acknowledge my personality is *ahem* strong at times (and overbearing the rest of the time) but it’s all part of my charm, really.

Frankly, I could give a rat’s ass if this is indeed the case. I’m certainly not trying to teach anyone anything. I share what I know (or what I think I know) and let the others decide what to do with it. To be perfectly blunt, my much larger fear is that grad school will somehow impede my progress as a writer, and that includes pussyfooting around and keeping my mouth shut when I have something valid to say. It could be that I’m misreading the whole situation but again, I don’t really care. My grad school goals are to keep getting published, to lay a solid foundation for my academic career, and to find writers/thinkers of like interests. In that order.

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I’m by no means an expert in story writing, but I have noticed an interesting distinction between writers in my graduate program and the up-and-coming writers I trade critiques with. Of course, what follows are broad, sweeping statements, so if you fall into either category, dont’ think I’m talking about you. But I might be.

Writers in my grad program seem to have a harder time coming to grips with story structure. Many stories don’t have enough tension until several pages in, and the stories frequently have pronounced skips—skips in time, skips in locations, skips in POV. The sentence-level writing tends to be clean and descriptive but the stories don’t have enough internal coherence. At least for me.

Non-student writers with whom I trade critiques often have the opposite affliction. Stories generally have a good hook, rising action, climax, tension throughout, etc. but the sentence-level writing usually could be improved to have more clever descriptions or well-crafted sentences. In fact, there are a lot of published stories in the genre that I think could use niftier language.

Of course, there are all shades between. I tend to think that my stories are generally well-written but tend to fall down in the structure category. Long denouement is a recurring problem for me. I also tend to write “situations” instead of full-fledged stories. My sentence-level writing can always improve. I probably have more short-comings, but these are enought to work on. For now.

Stories are tricky to study because no two are exactly alike. What works in one might be a fiasco in another. Ignoring “rules” can lead to disaster, or it can lead to the only possible solution. There’s also a great deal of subjectivity in what works and frequently selling a story means shopping it around until an editor shares the writer’s sensibility.

Personally, I think it’s more fruitful to concentrate on what makes stories work. I listened to three writers read their (non-genre) work on Sunday and all three were quite different. The prose was generally excellent and the stories riveting. When asking the question, “What drew you into Story X?” the answer is rarely, “The sentence-level writing.” That can be a big factor in setting the story’s mood, but I’d argue that’s not the main thing. Language is like the lighting and scenery in theatre; it makes a huge difference in the quality of the production, but if that’s what you’re primarily admiring then there’s a problem with what’s happening on stage.

Just like Clarion helped me identify the stuff I find most illuminating in the genre, my classes are helping identify non-genre stuff that I’m really digging. I like pulling apart stories and looking at the guts. The greatest compliment I can give a writer is that I found his/her stuff worthy of dissection to try and figure out how they did it. Thankfully, school is pointing the way to stories and authors that I greatly admire and are worthy of detailed study. I feared we’d be reading domestic, plate-throwing dramas that bore me to tears, but none of those, thank God.

Current Mood: Pensive |
Currently Listening To - Blind Willie Johnson - “The Complete Blind Willie Johnson”

Footie
Tottenham vs. West Ham @ noon
Barcelona vs. Real Madrid @ 2:00
Chicago vs. New England @ noon
Packers vs. Dolphins @ noon

Wisconsin Book Festival
Genre Fiction and the New Wave Fabulists @ 4:00
Dan Chaon, Benjamin Percy, & Dean Bakopoulos: An Evening of New Short Stories @ 6:00

The worst part is I’m a little under the weather and not in the mood for any of these, to be honest.

By the way, we did end up buying the car at the price we wanted. It’s a 2005 with 22K miles and we got it for $13.5K, plus tax and title which we thought was a good deal.

Current Mood: Mild Permaheadache |

Yeah, so I need to get some things squared away in this arena. I’ve only got four stories currently pending (which is kind of low for me.) I’ve decided that “Five African Beers” needs a complete rewrite based on the rejection from Gordon at F&SF, who said he thought the story was told from the wrong POV. I happen to agree, and I don’t see much point in sending it back out until it’s fixed. That could take awhile. “Sleeping Weather” wait patiently for me on my hard drive. It needs a once-over (or twice-over) before it starts doing the rounds.

“Miss Pavlichenko” has a second draft due in class in three weeks. Among lots of retooling, it also needs, erm, an ending. I want to see if maybe this story, which can easily hit the five-figure mark in word count, might serve as about 2/3rds of my masters project.

Of course, the non-sensical thing to do is to start a new story, which I did this morning to the tune of about 1K words. “Pastures of Plenty” it’s called, which I’ve mentioned before. This story is like a nagging child tugging on my coat and I’d like it to stop bugging me, please. Since you can’t tie up an unwritten story in a sack and drop it off a tall bridge into moving water, I’m just trying to write it to get it out of my system.

The end of Grapes of Wrath draws near, probably sometime next week. ‘Tis good. It’s helping fuel the story referenced above.

I had a meeting with a professor yesterday who has a professional interest in science fiction, more specifically utopian studies. It turns out he’s a huge Jeff Ford fan and is planning to write a paper on “The Well-Built City” trilogy. I didn’t tell him I’ve seen Jeff wearing eye shadow and a tiara and lived to tell the tale. He’s also teaching a utopian seminar next semester (he mentioned a couple Sam Delany books) and said I should think about taking it. Um, yes.

In other good news, the graduate school said I could transfer three credits from MSU to UW-M for attending Clarion. This still needs to be approved by the English department, but I thought the grad school would be the harder nut to crack. If the English department approves it and a few other things fall into place, I could conceivably be sitting for my masters exam this August. I think this is a good thing.

In summary, life is busy but swell. Everyone at school keeps telling me to be as productive as possible before disillusionment sets in, so that’s what I’m trying to do.

I haven’t been surfing blogs very often and if I owe you an email or haven’t touched base for awhile, forgive me.

Finally, I’m happy to say that today is my six-year wedding anniversary. Normally, we celebrate with a high-five and maybe splurge on crab rangoon appetizers with our Thai carry-out. We might try one of the shiny new restaurants in Milwaukee this year, but we’ll see.

Current Mood: Busy |
Currently Listening To - Woody Guthrie - “The Asch Recordings - Volume 4″

Well, it finally happened: I missed the last bus.

This is greatly irritating. The last bus out of campus for the remote park-n-ride lot is 5:30 and the busses don’t run quite on time. They come a little early, they come a little late, yada yada yada, I missed the last bus even though I was at the stop at 5:32 according to my watch, which is four minutes fast. To get out to the park-n-ride now would take five or six transfers and would take hours upon hours. Not a good system considering some classes go until 7:30.

My inlaws are graciously coming to pick me up.

And I’m already irritated because of the circumstance which led to me using the remote lot in the first place. The Geo Tracker hand-me-down from Amy’s brother is in a near-undriveable state as the driver’s side door is sagging due to internal rusting and doesn’t shut properly. The door visibly jiggles on the highway and you can see the sky between the door frame and the car even when the door is “snugly” closed. This means we’ve been car shopping, and car shopping irritates me.

I hate how much cars cost, I hate used car dealers, and I hate used cars for all the terminal illnesses that potentially lurk under the hood. I hate haggling. I hate all of it. And we’ve been doing it for weeks trying to find the right balance.

We’ve found a Pontiac Vibe that’s a strong contender. It gets good gas mileage and is very roomy inside. We go into to potentially settle the deal tomorrow. I am extremely sick of car salesmen and hopefully this works to our advantage. The other good thing is that if it falls through (because they’re not willing to come down to what they claim is “in the ballpark”) we’ve got a good line on some others, all around the same price and mileage. I’m tired of looking all over creation and I’m doubly tired of being shown a bunch of models that don’t interest me. Ugh.

Current Mood: Arg! |

Shame on everyone who knew the Supersuckers’ “Must’ve Been High” was something I ought to have been listening to for the last eleven years. I even had it hiding in my music collection and didn’t know about it. Shame!

I wish I would have known Beck’s “The Information” came out two weeks ago. I’ve procured it and given it a listen. It’s sort of a cross between “Guero” and “Mutations” I guess, but not quite as good as either. I’m sure it will grow on me, but I found it to be a bit uneven on the first listen. As one of my all-time favs, perhaps I have unfairly high expectations. Average Beck is still better than 99% of the crap currently out there.

And just to make sure everyone knows I am musically challenged, I wish someone would have told me that I would like Cat Power, too. I’ve only heard “The Greatest” once, but I’m impressed.

Friend David Schwartz announced yesterday that he sold his first novel. Yay Dave! His stuff has appeared in Lady Churchill’s, Strange Horizons, and other find venues over the past several years, and now he’s made that broad leap into novelism. Once again, yay Dave!

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“Miss Pavlichenko” was workshopped today in my first real grad critique session. It went fine. Per usual for my stories, the class was divided on which way the story should go: focus more on the war scenes, focus more on the parts between war scenes, or focus on the story after the war. Or write a really long story. The professor originally called this a novel-length story, and he was right. My challenge is to get it working at the 8-10K word range.

One thing I would say about critiques: always start with a positive, even if it’s a stretch. I find that I’m far more apt to hear the criticism if I’ve been warmed up by a few compliments. A few people were really critical of sentence-level stuff, and my overall reaction to this was a shrug. It’s a first draft of a really long story. Helpful to have it pointed out, but no sense in fine-tuning scenes I might be axing down the road.

Today we did a “lightning round” where everyone said whatever s/he wanted for 15-30 seconds followed by a general, chime-in-as-you-wish session to questions about style, structure, whatever. The writer must stay silent, thank God. I still like the two minutes per person routine a la Clarion better but that could just be what I’m used to. That time limits how much a person can say but also compels them to get across their most pronounced feelings. Drafts two and three will be weird, as I usually only put one draft through a critique group.

For my money, Hunt’s knee to Cech’s head looked like an accident. If this means nothing to you, please ignore.

Current Mood: Bleck |
Currently Listening To - The Supersuckers - “Must’ve Been High”