Whew. Two eight-hour days of straight TA orientation is fairly brutal. We have the weekend to recuperate (with homework of course) followed by two more days next week, plus an extra-special bonus session on Wednesday. And I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that even with all of this training, you just have to stumble into teaching composition and learn a lot by trial and error. So it goes.

The Egyptian striker Mido has revealed that Wigan want to sign him on loan. From Spurs to Boro to Wigan? There’s a trajectory there son, and it sure as hell ain’t up. Next stop: Millwall.

My fiction group critiqued my novel Thursday night and I got a ton of valuable feedback. The things I thought were problems and I could quickly paper over? Still glaring problems. The parts I thought were the best part of the book? Yeah, they liked those the best. All without me really saying a word.

Sadly, the novel needs more work than I would have hoped. Happily, thanks to these friends, I have a much, much better idea of where and how to start fixing. Having good critical readers is invaluable. What I really learned is what themes or parts to ramp up a bit and what parts to suppress. And I found it oddly liberating to laugh along with them at the parts that just didn’t work. Like I said, far better for us to laugh so I can cut them than have potential agents and editors laughing at them as they seal up my pink slip.

Current Mood: Sleeping While Typing |

I finished the first round of revisions to my novel Kingdoms of Glass and Steel yesterday, bringing the overall word count up about 13K words, from 81,333 to 94,429. Honestly, I underestimated how long revisions would take and I hope round three (which yes, is totally necessary) doesn’t take as long. I think I have the plot arc pretty well nailed down now and I have asked my reading group to point out any areas where they wanted scenes extended, especially when it comes to getting in the main character’s head.

My overall feeling? I think it’s okay, actually. There are plenty of twists and turns and the plot is always moving (or perhaps rocketing) forward, so I think it would keep a body reading. My only question is whether it’s too plot-driven, but I’ll let my reading group be the judges of that. I find that it’s much easier to let the spirit take you where it will when writing a novel, but whether that translates into salability, who knows? Yet we shall see…

I’m finishing Blood Meridian today and it’s just as good, if not better, than the first time. A part of me wants to start it over and read the whole thing through again just because I like it so much, but I’m not going to do that.

I’m wondering, however, how Cormac McCarthy votes. Googling for his political affiliation results in nothing. My guess would be some strain of libertarianism, but I’m not sure—individual liberty turns pretty friggin’ ugly in Blood Meridian, for instance. In researching this question, I stumbled across some libertarian interpretations of No Country For Old Men that point out that the drug war that’s at the core of the story can only come about by governments making drugs illegal, and that the police (as representatives of the state) are unable to do anything about it. And then there’s the passage where the sheriff relates a story about sitting next to a woman at some event dinner going on about “right wing this and right wing that” and him responding that the world started to go down the tubes once young people stopped using sir or ma’am.

It’s an interesting interpretation, but ultimately makes the mistake of thinking McCarthy the author is on the same political side as the folksy sheriff who is totally out of his league against a force of nature like Chigurh. It seems to me that McCarthy is writing above politics and instead delves into the heart of human nature, which he sees as black and mean. We paper over that black heart with morals and social graces of our own invention (as opposed to necessary truths about the human condition) but ultimately, violence is at our very core. Characters who embrace this notion like Chigurh and the judge are alive at the end of their respective books, whereas those who act morally wind up dead. In my reading, this is neither right nor wrong (nor right nor left in the political arena) but rather it just is, and that to me is the ugly truth McCarthy wants to force readers to look at.

This doesn’t take into account The Border Trilogy, but again I would have to say that a strong political reading doesn’t come naturally to these books, which I would guess is part of the point. Early westerns certainly espouse what I would consider a libertarian ethic, but in The Border Trilogy McCarthy is both critiquing and criticizing this conception of the American West as an idealized space of individual freedom (an idea that of course is also at the center of Blood Meridian). And I’ve read a few interesting essays on how McCarthy’s fiction is a critique of capitalist expansion, where life is little more than a series of forced commodity exchanges that are rarely negotiated on equal footing between the two parties and hence always turns out bad for one side, an argument that I find compelling considering the strong evidence presented in both The Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian. Just because I buy the argument doesn’t mean that I think McCarthy is a Marxist though.

The complexity of McCarthy’s work makes me not only want to reread his books, but to also read about his books and compare and contrast different interpretations and positions. The fact that his books spawn so many solid yet contradictory arguments would be one of the reasons why he can be called the best living American writer with a straight face. That may be debatable but when it comes to McCarthy, it seems like most things are.

Current Mood: Pensive |
Currently Listening To - The Hold Steady - “Stay Positive”

We spent a lovely weekend in the U.P. with friends and friends of friends featuring multiple late nights, sunning, napping, and generally putting the brain brake in park. It’s difficult to get the sluggish thing moving again, especially on a sour, gray day after so many sunny blue ones.

I heard this morning that Tom Disch died, or rather took his own life on July 4 at the age of 68. Of his body of work, I have only read a number of science-fiction-related essays and Camp Concentration, all of which I liked. I know very little of the man otherwise, but what I do know is this: he was a major figure in the New Wave of sci-fi and had an enormous impact on a number of readers and writers. But I also know that Google news search hasn’t mentioned it yet, and if in his last days Disch was fighting to stay in his rent-controlled apartment, then the unparalleled riches that many writers hope will be theirs when they finally make it “big” may not be as vast as imagined. Sad, sobering news all around.

The revisions to the novel continue more or less on track. I really can’t tell anymore whether the thing is any good and I’m ready to be done with this round so I can circulate it to my reading group and get some more feedback. Right now I’m trying to clean up the language a bit and to better tie the beginning and middle to the end.

I had it in my mind to take inspiration from China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station but upon further review it is much more like his King Rat. Whereas PSS has long and vividly described passages that really root the reader in the fictional world of New Crobuzon and the overall plot works in tandem with this world-building, KR takes place in contemporary London and is both more episodic and plot-driven as the protagonist learns more about himself and the city he thought he knew. In fact, swap out London for New York in that sentence and you pretty much have my novel. If it’s anywhere as good as King Rat I’ll be in good shape…

Otherwise, I haven’t sold any new short fiction in over a year and that sucks. Part of the reason is that my submissions in the last year have been anemic, but I also think that many of the stories I’ve sent out need some touching up—many of the rejections I’ve been getting have more or less said “this story is just okay.” Personally, I think really, really paying attention to language might be what’s needed, but my writing time is going into the novel right now.

And on the school front, it looks like I might have a lighter class load than usual come fall. It looks like an almost certainty at this point that I will not be getting a teaching position but all is not lost—at least not totally. They offered me the Program Assistantship, which is full tuition remission and some pay.

This does nothing to help me with the problem of getting teaching experience (and contrary to what some folks at my school think, it really is hard to get adjunct teaching positions without any experience, and when you apply they really do think something is strange when a 2nd year Ph.D. student hasn’t been a TA ) but the tuition remission staunches the outflow of cash and makes things a little more comfortable academically, meaning I only need to take two classes per semester. Unfortunately, the PA position does almost nothing for income since it works out to be around $3K per semester. Realistically, if I’m only taking two classes two days per week and doing 10-12 hours of PA work, I’ll need to get another job to help bring in some cash. Just another ball to keep in the air…

Crawling back into bed for another year or two sounds like a pretty good idea right about now.

UPDATE: Oh, how fortune can swing so dramatically. I just got word that I will indeed be getting a full TA position for the upcoming school year, which pretty much makes all of the above moot. And the sun came out. I’m not even kidding…

Current Mood: Monday Blues |

After two weeks of non-stop soccer-watching bliss, it’s all coming to an end on Sunday. I would suggest that this would lead to an upturn in productivity but I just got GTA 4 in the mail yesterday, having bought it on eBay for $35…

After a month-long hiatus, I listened to the second half of Owen Wister’s The Virginian and finished it yesterday. My verdict: not very good. It’s widely regarded as the first Western published, and I expected more cattle rustling and villain foiling rather than protracted courtship scenes.

There are many problems with this book (especially for a pinko lefty reader such as myself) but politics aside, there is a massive problem with the title character. It won’t surprise you to learn that the Virginian is a real man’s man, one who knows right from wrong and doesn’t need law or religion to understand the world, and of course he’s the guy nearly everyone in the book looks up to—if not upon their initial meeting, then over time. The problem? He never makes a mistake. Basically, everything he says is true and everything he does turns out to be the correct thing to have done. This makes for extremely dull reading, but the book does an excellent job describing both the American West and the kind of man (and to a lesser extent, woman) it takes to settle there.

Which is why casually rereading Blood Meridian alongside it has been so enjoyable. Against the flawless, chivalrous Virginian you get McCarthy’s ultra-violent kid, and McCarthy depicts a very different kind of American West and the kind of men who inhabited it. My next audio book is going to be Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, another classic Western, and I’m starting The Orchard Keeper by McCarthy in hard copy. And I’m continuing to read Blood Meridian, because I love it.

I’m also working on rewriting the novel I wrote last summer and lo! ’tis way more work than I expected. I knew minor repair work would be needed but I underestimated the extent of the job. To belabor the construction metaphor, I believe the novel is structurally sound but it’s fleshing out every scene, removing clunky dialogue, and smoothing out the storyline so the beginning actually points to the ending that’s taking much longer than I expected.

My goal is to get a revised draft in front of my summer reading group by July 31st. It’s going to be tight.

Current Mood: Fine |

Is Rafa Benitez mad? Or does he just not want to win the Premier League? Why he doesn’t field an understrength team against European minnows in the more-forgiving Champions League as opposed to the intensely more competitive every-game-counts Premier League, I don’t know. Liverpool are in decent form. Why tinker?

Did anyone see Jose Mourinho’s demise at Chelski coming so early? I certainly didn’t. After he survived the summer I figured he was good for the season. Wrong-o. I can’t say that this is the best tactic. A number of the clubs key players are loyal to Mourinho and I would think that this move may have deep-sixed Cheski’s quest for a quadruple.

And we’re not even to October yet and I’m already sick of hearing about @#$@in’ Ars*nal. Yes, they’re playing well at the moment but it’s easy to ignore their cake schedule. Of their six games so far, four have been at home and one (Spurs) was in London. So the only travel game has been Blackburn. Now look at their upcoming fixtures: home to Newcastle (who just lost to Derby for christ’s sake) then away to West Ham (erm, still in London) then home again to both Sunderland and Bolton. So just to put this in perspective, for the first two months of the season (nine games), they’ve had to play one league game outside London, and in those six wins they faced four of the bottom six teams. In that same time, Liverpool has hosted Chelski, and Chelski will also be playing Man Ure tomorrow.

Recap: play lots of games at home, play one away game outside London, play crap teams, and avoid the other three Big Teams. Must be a nice way to ease into a season.

I had a meeting with my professor Friday to go over my novel and it went really, really well. He doesn’t shy away from (ahem) critical remarks, but he was overwhelming positive. Better yet, he had a lot of helpful suggestions to improve the novel. Overall, it made me excited to start revising it. When I get time. Whenever that is.

Almost exciting is taking notes for my Joyce paper, which has consisted of circling proper nouns in Dubliners in red pencil and trying to make an argument about whether they appear as subjects or objects in the sentence, and why that’s significant. Exciting shit, this scholarship. Another professor referred to Joyce scholars as “aliens.”

In a vexing turn of events, it looks like I’m going to have to restructure my independent study. I had grouped my books into three basic categories: fictional societies; the human, inhuman, and post-human in sci-fi; and American dystopia. After kicking this around with my professor a bit, we mutually agreed that it the study should have a narrower focus. As structured, this is a breadth of work covering a lot of material shallowly; it would be more useful to read with more of a thesis in mind.

So what I’m toying with now is the (failed) utopian promise of California, and how the locus for utopian thinking slid northward to Oregon and California. “North is better than southern California” is a prominent theme in a lot of Philip K Dick’s work as well as in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Obviously, Kim Stanley Robinson’s California Trilogy will be central, too. The question is why the Pacific Northwest became the new hot spot for utopian thinking, and whether the problems of southern California (as presented in these novels) would be solved by moving north. This entails a lot more research, and is more utopian-based rather than sci-fi based. Which is okay. As long as I get something useful out of it.

Current Mood: Bored |

Yeah, so that whole novel thing is now done. 81,333 words, 268 pages. Most of those words need a lot of work but at least it has beginning, middle, and end. The revisions begin, oh, tomorrow.

I started with an 8800-word short story and wrote about 10K words a week for eight weeks, averaging about 2K words per day. This was neither easy nor excruciating and tended to having bigger production days on Mondays and Tuesdays, lower production days on Thursdays and Fridays, and tended not to work too much on weekends; I often wrote but rarely on the novel. If pressed, I probably could have written faster but there are worse ways to go about your business.

Oh, Slushmaster Doug Cohen from Realms of Fantasy posted a piece on surviving the slush pile. He asked his survivors if he could share our opening paragraphs and why they made him keep reading; mine’s #10, “Black Jack Davy.”

Watched the non-event of the LA Galaxy vs. Chelski but I simply couldn’t not watch the first steps of David Beckham as an MLS player. I told myself, “You know, he’s going to play about ten minutes and won’t do a whole lot.” Which is pretty much what happened. His 60-yard pass was nice (even if not 100% effective) and yes the tackle that made everyone’s heart skip a skip made mine skip too.

And gawd, do Wynalda, Smyth, and O’Brien form a three-headed jackass in the commentary booth or what? They’re flat awful.

I finished the film version of A Scanner Darkly last week and forgot to comment on it. It was good but not great. It leaned a little too much toward slapstick for me. As Dick’s daughter said in the extra features, there’s no doubt the book has its funny parts but I thought Paul Giamatti did a better job evoking the general feeling of disorientation, where you have to laugh at the characters’ drug-addled antics because otherwise it’s just too damn depressing.

Still, I wasn’t sure how the director was going to be able to pull off such a complicated book, but he actually did far better than I expected. One of those movies where I’m not sure how people who hadn’t read the book first would feel about it.

I’m about a quarter through Jim Shepard’s Love and Hydrogen, a short story collection. I read the title story in one of my fiction workshops and was ga-ga over it. The others I’ve read so far haven’t wowed me nearly as much, I’m afraid. The stories are good but lack the sheer imagination of the story “Love and Hydrogen,” even they match its audacity. If that makes any sense.

I’ve also nearly finished Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Civil War. The play is crap. The stories are pretty good. On the back jacket, it’s called “unmistakable Hemingway” and I would have to agree—for all the good and bad connotations.

I tested out of the advanced level for my Spanish course Friday and begin the Expert level this week. At once, I’m fairly impressed with my reading comprehension and ability to hold a conversation in certain areas, but I’m also depressed with trying to comprehend a native speaker speaking at a normal pace and topics outside the narrow wedge of my vocabulary.

Geez, did you know they now make a see-thru bear can? Granted, you’d need to line it with a clear plastic bag, but it would be so much nicer than the black one, which was the only game in town for many a year.

Also, if I can vent: I’m not a fan of the Madison REI. It’s a small store that has an uncanny knack for never having what I want, meaning I should just cut out the middleman and order the stuff directly from the REI website and have it shipped to the store. I’m planning on getting an ENO Doublenest Hammock but, of course, they didn’t have it.

Worse, the workers are either clueless or assume you are. Most of the salespeople at the Seattle REI would ask a couple questions first to figure out who they’re talking to: a car camper, a day hiker, marathon backpacker, sherpa, etc. The workers at the REI assume that because they’ve been backpacking a half-dozen times, that’s more than you. I don’t like being told that my super-kickass all-time favorite piece of gear (the $135 featherweight bulletproof sil-tarp) that was tragically lost on a trip isn’t normally kept in stock because it’s “overkill.” If by overkill the guy actually meant “a bit pricey but often a friggin’ lifesaver” then I guess I would agree.

So when I tell the guy that I’m looking for a +55 degree sleeping bag to use for humid summer sleeping and for skeezy Central American hotels where the sheets can stand up and walk, don’t try to nudge me towards the +40 degree, $180 version because it’s more versatile. It’s also, erm, $120 more than I want to spend, considering I already have sleeping bags rated for both 20+ and 0 degrees. Thanks for the advice, but when someone walks in saying, “Yes, I want this exact product” you may wish to consider the fact that said person may not be a complete novice.

At the REI Seattle, the workers there were wilder mountaineers than I’ll ever be; at Rutabaga in Madison, the paddlers there know more about being on the water than your average duck. So it burns my cheese when some dope who has done a couple overnights in the Kettle Moraine thinks he’s a pro. Brutha, please, please, PLEASE!

Well, the novel stands at 77K words and is within a hair of being finished. This first draft will be about 80K, give or take a couple thousand words, which was the goal. Kinda creepy that I wanted to write about 80K words, didn’t really know where the story was going to go, and looks like I’ll be finishing pretty much right on that number. I’m fairly sure the next draft will be longer. How much longer, I’m not sure. The good news is that I know how it ends and there shouldn’t be any more surprises, so I just need to write it.

And man, has this been a learning experience. A few premature musings about the process:

* I wonder how much what I was reading came out in what I was writing. My suspicion? A lot. I think parts of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell bled through, even though the books are complete opposites. Magic—how it’s done, what it looks like, etc.—are at the core of both. I can only hope that my version is somewhere near as interesting as Ms. Clarke’s. The other book I’ve been reading, Regeneration is largely about repressed emotions, heroism, and Freudian psychology. My novel was always going to hit on these themes, but Ms. Barker’s book turned out to be a great companion piece to get me thinking about my book’s plot a bit differently.

* I wonder how much what I was listening to came out in what I was writing. My suspicion? A lot. The book was a lot darker than I originally imagined. I wonder how much Elliott Smith has to do that as I got hooked on him at the same time, and it’s not cheerful music; rather somber and defeatist. So’s the book. I listened to quite a bit of moody Wilco too, and that didn’t hurt either.

* As stated, the book came out darker, less comic, and more graphically violent than I originally imagined. I thought it was primarily going to be about clashing cultures in the global city, but it’s much more about walking the dark and filthy corridors of heroism. The last chapter is flat out horror—very gruesome and very Machiavellian. Didn’t expect that.

* Having the first draft of a novel is great, but I have a feeling it’s like finishing the first quarter of a marathon. There is so much work to be done but, at the moment, I’m looking forward to it. Now that I actually know where the story goes, I can start shaping the early parts to point in that direction.

Overall, I feel pretty strongly that there’s all the makings for a good novel here. The open question is whether I can make it a good novel. I hope so.

But I can totally see how novel writing can be addictive. This has been so much longer and more twisty and complicated and frustrating and rewarding and surprising than short story writing. Short story writing is snipe hunting; novel writing is snipe herding.

Current Mood: All is a Blur |
Currently Listening To - Elliott Smith - “From a Basement on the Hill”

Don’t you hate it when you’re 70K words into your novel and just then figure out what the book is really about?

I haven’t been able to write much in the last week or so because I didn’t know where the story went. The big climactic section has to more or less make sense of (or at least with) everything that came before it. Right now, I’ve got 70K words that constitute the plot, but not so much on what it all means. But I’m slowly figuring that out. I checked out some Jung and Freud from the library and it’s helping—helping the novel, not me personally, I swear!

Anyway, this novel started as a meditation on Theseus and other Greek heroes and how they weren’t really that nice. It’s no secret most myths and fairy tales in their original form are really pretty nasty. So I guess I’m trying to write a modern story that’s at once mythic and yet simultaneously nasty, so you get this “Man, that dude is bad ass” along with “Erm, wasn’t that just mass murder he committed?”

And after reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a book I read as being largely about the magic of books, I realize that my book wants to say something about fantasy; about why we desire the fantastic, why the nasty bits often make it better. That’s where the Jungian and Freudian stuff comes in handy as a handrail with all the archetypal hero stuff. Horribly, however, it doesn’t help me with my ending.

My project for this week is to try and work through that, to just write an ending that doesn’t need any meaning whatsoever. There’s the big showdown, lots of explosions and fireworks, death at every turn, that kind of stuff. It definitely needs a twist or the stakes raised or something, because the ending as I envision it is pretty straightforward and predictable. But once again, the lesson that I’ve learned over and over again while writing this novel is that the only thing that counts are the words on the page. Of course it needs to be reworked (probably pretty heavily in fact) but that can’t happen until there are words in sentences in paragraphs in chapters to tear apart. Waiting for the right answer to pop into my head is not a good solution.

Rolling up the driver’s window in the Jeep yesterday caused it to break. There was a grinding noise and the window fell as though it had just been dropped and, amazingly, no amount of pressing UP on the button would make it come back up. And wouldn’t you know, after weeks of it looking like rain, today it’s actually going to rain. Perfect.

A quick note: Brazil 3, Argentina 0 in the Copa America final? Who’d have thunk it? Far from a classic and, regardless of what Phil Schoen and Ray Hudson said, you can’t call it an upset. Yes, Argentina were playing silky football heading into the final and Brazil was stop-n-start, but c’mon—I don’t care if it’s a team of 6-year-olds playing against pros, it’s never an upset if the Brazilian team wins.

And I have a love/hate relationship with Ray Hudson. Sometimes he says stuff that makes me laugh, and he often makes astute points about the game, but often he just won’t shut up and Phil Schoen just feeds into it. Check out his over-the-top commentary parts one, two, and three, courtesy of YouTube.

Current Mood: Peevish |

The novel is stuck at 68K words and I can’t seem to make it go. I kinda sorta know where I want things to go but I’m running smack into the whole Freudian unconscious, Jungian collective unconscious/archetypal…thing. I’ve got the whole “on the surface it looks clean but a peek beneath reveals it’s nasty-dirty” groove going on (as I’d like the novel to be a critique of traditional heroism on some level) and I’m at the revelatory wind-up scene before the dramatic conclusion. I’m infodumping like mad here, which I think is okay, but I need to read some Freud and Jung to get the flavor just right. The question is whether to leave this for later and press on to the end (which is my inclination) or stop to do research. Answers on a postcard…

Good gravy, the footie has been relentlessly exciting. The US came from behind to beat Uruguay 2-1 in overtime at the U20 World Championships, and I also caught much of Spain’s dramatic 4-2 comeback overtime win over Brazil. The highly-touted Brazilians went a remarkable (and miserable) 1-0-3 in this tournament, in which they were one of the favorites. The US now faces Austria in the quarterfinals and, should they win (and I think they should), they’ll face the winner of Spain vs. Czech Republic in the semis. You can find the knockout bracket here.

I also watched (or rather half-watched while reading) Argentina vs. Mexico in the Copa America. Our neighbors to the south played very well for the first half and were marginally the better team, creating better chances and having their fair share of the ball. The Argies broke the deadlock just before the half and that broke Mexico. Argentina went on to play miraculous, breathtaking, and often downright stoopid-good football in the second half. Check out Lionel Messi’s golazzo, Argentina’s second. This play was typical of the second half. Heinze, the left back, hits about a fifty-yard pass to Tevez who brings it down and passes to Messi, who is in acres of space. If you’ve never played soccer, you have no idea how hard it is to chip a ball like this while running, much less stick it in the side netting with perfect placement. This laugh-out-loud, rewind-four-times-to-watch-again good. Audacity backed by skill—a brutal combo.

So it’s the final everybody wanted: Argentina vs. Brazil on Sunday. I rather recommend you watch it if you have any interest in the Beautiful Game whatsoever.

Down to the last third of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and I’m a bit sad by that. It’s one of those books you wish could go on forever.

I’ve also been cheating on Ms. Clarke by reading Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War. I often find Hemingway annoying, but more often I find myself marveling at his skill in telling a story. The opening paragraphs from the short stories just suck you right in. I may reproduce them here to make a point about how good opening paragraphs. But if I do, it will be later.

Current Mood: Fine |

As of this moment the novel stands at 67,493 words. The Fourth of July screwed me up a bit and I ended up being 2500 words under my weekly goal of 10K words but I’m getting astonishingly close to the finish line. I suspect I’ll have the first draft done before the month is out, and that makes me happy. The big question is whether I’ll have time to continue revisions after the semester starts. Like with all things pertaining to writing, as long as I don’t allow that to be an excuse, I think I can work on it fairly steadily during the semester.

It will be interesting to reread the whole thing from beginning to end. The last 4K word section, for instance, was a treatise on genie genealogy. Does that work? I dunno, but it was fun to write and kept my momentum moving forward. A lot of the character relationships need more depth. The hero’s sister is mentioned in the opening chapter and her name is dropped here and there, but she’s a major factor in the last third of the book. She needs to be addressed in more than just passing in the first two-thirds if I expect readers to be interested in her once she comes on stage.

It’s also funny how things that I thought were important, like having evenly balanced sections of roughly the same length and similar arcs, probably won’t be in the end. In order to strictly follow the Theseus cycle (which the events are loosely based) the story would have to make some twists and turns I don’t want. Jeff Ford told me at Clarion that you can’t afford to let yourself be tied to the mythology you’re working from, so I’m taking that advice. One of the great joys of writing this book have been all of the nifty things that connect that I didn’t really intend. There’s a lot of bull/ Minotaur/ labyrinth stuff going on that I didn’t do on purpose, but Fred supplied it and it fits in pretty well. I don’t know if the story necessarily shouts that it’s a modern retelling of the Theseus cycle, but the echoes are certainly there. Writing’s neat that way.

And what’s not neat are lost submissions and responses. I found out yesterday after querying that a 160-day submission pending response was not actually pending; the response got lost somewhere in the shuffle, and it was a “No thanks” to boot.

Out of 125 submissions, that’s my fifth instance of something getting lost in transit, either coming or going. (One of those stories, “Working Out Our Salvation,” ended up getting published after the resubmit.) I don’t blame publishers any more than I blame myself. Postal mail occasionally does get lost or mangled beyond recognition, and then there’s the whole matter of keeping the SASE with the manuscript and yada yada yada. It sucks, but it happens, even with electronic submissions.

Frankly, I don’t understand not carefully tracking submissions. It’s hard to remember what you sent where and when without at least a spreadsheet. My database may be dorky, but I do get useful stats from it. I was teased as being a geek in one of my grad workshops for keeping a database, and I may well be one; but I am a very organized, well-informed geek.

I think my WordPress upgrade went okay yesterday, and I’m also trying to migrate my many email accounts to Thunderbird. It took a lot of fiddling but I think it works now. Again, if you notice weird stuff drop me a line, but I think this is stable ground.

Current Mood: Fine |
Currently Listening To - Wilco - “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”