Cupid Bow Mouth

Three books behind on this year's Reading Challenge that, if I'm honest, has everything to do with the way I'm mood reading my way through life these days. Bookmarks (of the chaotic kind) live in three things that I'm moving through regularly and three other things that are on the back burner but that I'm still picking at.

The sum of which means that I haven't finishing anything and I'm three books behind on #goals.

1. My Heart is a Chainsaw - Stephen Graham Jones
2. Gallant - V.E. Schwab
3. The Searcher - Tana French
4. The World That We Know - Alice Hoffman
5. Unlock Your Storybook Heart
6. A Song of Fire and Ice - George R.R. Martin

And then there's the things that are just kind of floating:

7. Caste - Isabel Wilkerson
8. Salem's Lot - Stephen King

I am a mood reader and all over the place. And because I am writing and chasing aesthetics, I re-read a passage or two of Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia and Daughter of Hounds by Caitlin R. Kiernan before I get started. I've added in Cassandra Khaw's Nothing But Blackened Teeth for parts of the novel because I'm also studying how body horror and dread work. It's a job of work on top of work. But I love it and it continues and the finish line is so close I can taste it.

Wrapped up two more chapters today. Pushing into another one and, although it needs polishing, it's in the right place enough for me to move on into another chapter. Ultimately, that's three chapters down. Things are very linear right now because I'm connecting all the dots and trying to make sure that the transitions transition. I've made some heavy decisions back in January to cut a character who was WAY to easy to remove and spackling over her absence has been surprisingly NOT an issue. She featured more heavily in the back half of the book, so we'll see how it goes when I get there, but still not foreseeing too much issue with excising her.

Writing and editing are crazy interesting and I wish that I could just do this over and over.

Xiran Jay Zhao posted two reels on Instagram about the timing for the sequel to Iron Widow that had everything to do with how much she was paid for the first book and how those payments were distributed. It's a transparency into the publishing world that I deeply appreciate. I already know that the pay isn't great for like 90% of authors, but the way the money gets released was a new one for me.

She could not prioritize writing the Iron Widow sequel since she had to prioritize making enough money to feed herself. We can't all be EJK Rowling-King and make millions of dollars! Most of us won't. It's nice to see conversations about what reality looks like and then how to negotiate life around it.

I have a writing schedule, but honestly, with only 24 hours in a day, it's hard for me to work 8-10 hours, commute two hours, try to workout, read, eat, and get a sufficient amount of sleep. Folding writing into that list means that something has to get de-prioritized and rescheduled. Honestly, it's usually the workout or the sleep schedule.

Ha!

So, then I also read THIS article and ... yeah ... I already knew I'd be keeping my day job, but I'll be definitely keeping my day job.

Back in October I made my first original short story submission. Two weeks later it was rejected. Two days after that, I submitted it to a different magazine.

Three months later, I was notified that my little baby made it out of the slush pile and was being considered for publish.

Two months after that it was ultimately rejected.

Whew! This process is hard ... and LONG. Five months for an ultimate no. I drawered the story for the moment while I work on novel revisions. I'll try submitting somewhere else later in the fall. Still, this was a nerve wracking and challenging time.

The rejection said that it was a close call and they hope to see more from me soon. I want to believe that they're not just being nice regarding the close call.

A stupid thing that I've realized is how my brain like to think that only 3rd person past is a "real" novel. So that even though third person present is what I like to write and mostly read, if I don't draft that way then I am failing.

Well ... I'm failing anyway. Struggling with a novel in 3rd person limited, past tense.

It's dumb.

I should be writing. I want to be writing. Work has me in lock down cause I just need to get through some stuff, but it's like when I'm the most focused is when the devil tries its best to get in my way. I'm writing tonight and working tomorrow. I'm also having a margarita, so writing might not last long.

There's also winter time (it's 48 degrees at night here in CA and that is COLD for me). I'm excited. As I've gotten older, I've embraced Christmas decorations right after Halloween. I need to put up my lights. Life is too short not to celebrate Christmas for two whole months.

So, okay ... moving on. Got to get some words in. I'm still in love with my story, even when the execution is hard and awkward. I love that I learned to write in fandom. I love that that is where I discovered I had stories to tell. It's exciting. Writing a book is exciting. Scary, but exciting. Okay. On my way...

I got words to get in.

Guys.

I've fallen in love with Tamsyn Muir.

I know. I know. I fall in love at least once a year. It's a song or a movie or a book and, well, yeah, maybe I'm fickle, but guys! It's always true.

Last night, I finished Harrow the Ninth, the sequel to Gideon the Ninth (which I read back in June).

I adored almost everything about it. Both of them. Kick ass lady necromancer heroes, being petty and bad ass. I love Gideon is so much awkwardness and muscle and how Harrowhark is mean and confident and wicked intelligent. I love how co-dependent and toxic they are. Tamsyn has me INVESTED in these two. She's got me committed! The world building is intricate and specific. The writing is cheeky and chatty and intense and elegant.

Harrow the Nonth is partially written in 2nd person and it does a really unique thing. It forces you to pay attention and unwind the story to try and figure out what is happening because guess what? You are not the YOU who is being told this story. It's a whole puzzle and I am totally HERE for it. The pettiness of humanity, how you should really never meet your heroes, and how even God is a lie because people are fallible.

Definitely not for every one. I think you really have to have a yen for epic, space opera fantasies filled with bones and the threat of Armageddon. And don't expect a linear story, tied neatly at the end with a bow. Muir does not write that. She really doesn't tell you more than you need to know at one time. She expects you to work for you endings and, again, LOVE. I'm taking something from that. Working to trim my excessiveness in writing, I'm committing to a return to my fanfic roots where I kinda didn't care if you got all of it or not.

I've found that, some people want you to spoon feed them EVERYTHING and some people don't. I'm in the don't camp and, there's an audience for that. I'm one of those kinds of readers.

... first chapter revision of Briar.

1 thing at a time. Moving along, moving along.

Inspiration is such a subjective, unexpected, surprising thing. Ephemeral in its genesis and almost impossible to track in its totality. We can recall pieces of the elements that come together to inspire a work, but I don't think that we ever remember all of them.

Last night, right on the cusp of sleep, a light bulb went off and I found myself, not unusually, scrambling for a scrap of paper and a pen to scrawl out the opening of a CDTH fic. Since I finished the book, a scene has been continually turning over in my head, but I wasn't sure what the story was or how to get there. I jotted down notes and quotes and song lyrics. Listened to Bear (my Spotify playlist for the fantasy of all things love related) a couple of times and didn't really come up with much. I tried forcing the write and … nada. So, I closed my laptop. Got ready for bed. Snuggled down, closed my eyes, and WHAM!

The opening paragraphs and who knows why it decided to coalesce at that moment in time, all the desperate searching for inspiration melded together.

Maybe it was because I was relaxed?

Possibly.

I wasn't expecting it and it was all whatever cause I had other things to worry about. Namely getting enough sleep before work this morning and it was already nearly 11:30 and my alarm goes off at 4.

Whatever it was, It gave me a solid opening. Something to work from.

Who even knows why ...

Realized that parts of my B plot were broken. I think I fixed them. Luckily, thus far, it hasn't required too much re-writing, just tweaks to existing material. At the end of the day, I didn't have a clear handle on the impetus for B plot, it's genesis or how it was working in the background of the novel. This is all tying into that iceberg idea because even though most of the details aren't going to make it into the book, I needed to understand better what was happening in the background and in other places where the heroine wasn't so that I could make the book work. Like ... it's crazy to think about it and I always knew it was true, but it's not something that I worried about TOO much until now.

Writing fanfic, I realize, all of that background noise and understanding existed in my head while I wrote because I had been consuming the media and have thoughts and percolating all of that into this head canon that I would write from. Writing original, I don't have any of that except what I create and guess what .... damn it, it's still percolating.

Anyway, I am happier now then I was ... I've been writing all day sitting in my surprisingly humid house. Now, I will away and have a shower and go watch TV. Gotta catch my Sunday line-up:

NOS4A2, Big Little Lies, Euphoria (and maybe I sneak in another episode of Stranger Things 3 if I have the space and the time). Definitely not before Euphoria thought. That show consumes everything I have left in my brain.

Young Adult Fiction’s Online Commissars

An interesting look at the impact of social media and the ever shrinking bridge between author and audience. I’m curious as to why publications are pulled or retracted in the face of online censure (it seems very much part of the current cultural zeitgeist in which public apologies are de rigeur no matter the severity of the offense, intention of the offender, or the distance between the offense and the current day) especially considering that all books are not written for all people. I am very much reminded of the Goodreads ratings and reviews and how for as many positive reviews there are negative ones. I find it always disturbing when people opt not to read a book based on a negative, subjective review. Such divisiveness in literary trend really is par for the course and shouldn’t resolve itself into censorship. Per the article, the book wasn’t actually read in its entirety and that, also, is deeply problematic.

To the articles failing, the insistence that this is a “left-leaning” habit assigns blame of a wider behavior to a particular political movement. The underlying issue of censorship overall predicated on determining what is deemed appropriate to the masses is the larger concern that impacts a multitude of perspectives and authors writing about a multitude of subjects. I wish the article had moved beyond the specifics of this particular novel and touched more on the general habit because that is the location of alot of impetus that lands books on the Banned Books List.

Take a look, there are points for consideration. As always, I recommend staying out of the comments.