Full-Time Unpublished Novelist: Week 1
I did almost nothing last week. Well, okay, I went to dance, had coffee (for her)/hot chocolate (for me) with someone from my writing group, read a lot (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
norwich36 keeps reccing me stuff), ate a heck of a lot (a combination of stress eating and the time of month when my body thinks I should get pregnant and therefore eat a lot so I can provide for the baby [No, body. Just no.]), spent two hours just browsing at Barnes & Noble, walked to the grocery store, walked at least a mile three or four other mornings before breakfast, did yoga every day, plotted out half of a novel (see below), went to Sultan's on Friday night, passed on some recs, and sent a few emails. And wrote one sentence of the book.
I was trying to be kind to myself and tell myself it was okay to take a week off, but it caught up with me on Saturday, when I woke up cranky and later wrote, "I feel like a failure. I need to get myself in gear." in my one-sentence journal. On Saturday night, I sewed new elastic onto my good zils (one of those now that I'm unemployed I have plenty of time to do it tasks I hadn't yet done) and wrote a few more sentences of the book.
On Schedule
After spending a week doing pretty much nothing, I got back on track today. Yesterday I roughed out a potential schedule for myself, and I've stuck to it pretty well today, although it probably needs some adjusting. It's funny how just thinking about it makes me write. The day I turned in my resignation, I had trouble falling asleep, and I was pondering the book, and I thought, "Crap. Now I really do have to write the song" (there's a song that was supposed to be a minor plot point but became a little bigger in the telling of it), and then there part of it was and I had to write it down. I think I didn't quite catch all of it even then. Last night, after roughing out the schedule and telling myself firmly that I was getting out of bed by six-thirty today, I was having trouble falling asleep, and then there was more of the song and another three sentences and a phrase I had to write down. This is why I keep a pen and paper on the stool next to my bed that serves as a nightstand, and just enough light that comes in from the parking lot, even with the blinds closed, that I can see where there's writing and where the paper's blank, and I can write surprisingly well in the dark. Of course, today I wrote only a few sentences of the book and spent most of my assigned work time writing a 2700-word lesbian fantasy role-play short story instead. (I think it's a little flat at the moment, but I can probably spark it up a bit and make it salable if I can come up with a place to try to sell it to.)
Mawwiage. Mawwiage is wot bwings us togedder today.
In three out of the fourteen J2 Big Bang stories I read, they get married.norwich36 says this is more common these days, now that it's possible in real life. Apparently I missed this, which is what I get for pretty much only rereading fic for the last year or two. (Also, dammit! I should have done something about my Ted/Barney mpreg earlier because now they don't have to go to Canada, although that certainly has a flexible timeline, so it could be farther in the past. Except now I have to look up when the future bits are to see if that's true. Damn.) Between that and the joke I keep telling myself about the future - "A rich wife is not outside the realm of possibility" (I read Monika K. Moss's Life Mapping [It's fairly similar to other such books; if you've read a lot of them, you could probably skip this one. Also, if you're the type to be disgusted by The Law of Attraction, you should skip the prologue and chapter 1 and go straight to chapter 2. (I think it's mostly ridiculous, but I can also roll my eyes at that part and take the other things she has to say somewhat seriously.)] and worked my way through several of the exercises [I stopped when I got to writing down "Strategic Actions" because the one that kept popping into my head was "quit my job."], one of which is to write out your ideal day. I kept getting stuck and had to write three versions because I couldn't go for a more realistic one until I'd written the partnered version, wherein I write in the morning and volunteer in the afternoon and she works full-time at something she loves. We live in one of the houses in my neighborhood [but a few streets over] with two or three bedrooms - one for us and one to be my office, with a cottonwood tree outside my window, and maybe one more - and a detached garage that she's converted into a dance/yoga/workout studio for me. It has a wood floor with enough give for jumps, windows, one wall all covered with mirrors for dance and lush curtains that can be pulled over them when I don't need the distraction, a sink and mini-fridge because it's a good social gathering place too, and lots of cushions because it's a good gathering place and because doing shoulder stand with the head lower than the shoulders keeps the natural curve to the neck and because I maybe also have a harem girl fantasy where I'm the harem girl and she's the sultan.) - I have at least half the plot of a lesbian romance novel in my head.
One woman is a painter. She had a scholarship to a fancy private school when she was younger, and her best friend is still one of the rich girls, who drags her along to a party out in the burbs one night when she's depressed because the coffee shop she's been working at for years and years and years to pay her bills and buy her art supplies is going out of business and she's going to have to find some other kind of job. The party's at this giant house that two people who work all the time live in, and she's in a room that's mostly empty with great light and says, "What a waste," because it would be such a wonderful studio space. Also at the party is the businesswoman type (maybe an ad executive, probably not a lawyer) who's so close to making partner, and she knows that what they really want is some assurance of stability, something that says she won't leave them once she's got a name for herself that will get her something bigger and better somewhere else. She knows a wife who's tied to the community would do it. They meet, of course, and have some kind of moment at the party, something that's enough for the ad exec to get her secretary to track down the painter and ask her out again. I'm not sure exactly how to get to the proposal, but the ad exec suggests it would be the best thing for them to get married - she would get the wife that will convince the partners she's partner material, and the painter will get whatever space she wants in their house as her studio and money for art supplies. And because the painter's been worrying about what the hell she's going to do ("I can't go work at Starbucks. I just can't!") and she's three days late with her rent and she just used her last tube of red, she says yes. So they get married, and the painter plays hostess when needed, and the ad exec stays out of her studio and doesn't care how much she spends on paint and brushes and canvas. And then there's some kind of event, maybe New Year's Eve, and the ad exec gets drunk and they have the best, sweetest sex ever, and each one of them realizes she's fallen in love with her wife, but, of course, this is a romance novel, so they don't tell each other that. And then there's more that gets them, eventually to a happy ending. (Yesterday, my brain wanted the ad exec to be an alcoholic and send her to AA. I don't know.)
Releasing Ideas Into the World: If I Were An Editor
I've long thought that you could make a great erotica anthology out of the Chico News & Review's spicy personals. (For those who don't know: the CN&R is the oldest, most establishment of the local alternative weekly papers. There was a time when they were really good and did investigative reporting, and then the quality fell off. I think it's getting better under the new editor. The old editor, who maybe got fired over the dildo story they ran in the center of the paper a couple of years ago, started his own alternative weekly paper, and it's terrible.) You could assign one to each author, or provide a selection and let the authors tackle whatever strikes their fancy.
You could also make a good anthology out of the example sentences in Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Well-Tempered Sentence. There are some wacky stories to be told behind some of those.
Emblematic of My Reading Habits
I went to the library on Saturday morning. I checked out three books: a young adult novel I had to get through interlibrary loan (Beauty Shop for Rent by Laura Bowers), a romance novel I've read before that I had to request from another branch in the system (Strange Bedpersons by Jennifer Crusie), and my Dewey Decimal book for September, which I originally saw when it was on the new books shelf (Free For All by Don Borchert). This is pretty much what my reading looks like these days.
Why Jennifer Crusie Novels Are Better
This week, I read two romance novels by other people - The Bachelor by Carly Phillips (not very good) and Remember When by Judith McNaught (better, but still left me emotionally unsatisfied) - which made me develop a theory about part of what makes Jennifer Crusie's novels better. Both The Bachelor and Remember When are horribly gendered, beyond even what you might expect from such a pillar of heterosexuality as the romance novel. Roman doesn't just like Charlotte's scent; it's her "feminine scent" that he loves while he's waiting in her bedroom for her to get home. It's not just the qualities that Diana's looking for that she finds in Chase, but the "male qualities." Here's a suggestion: if you can drop the gender word and your sentence still makes sense, drop it.
On the other hand, if there's an actual reason to keep it, do. I've always wanted to write a Klaus/Dorian story where part of what Klaus likes about Dorian is that he's a man and smells like one. (Can I tell you how much the Dorian smelling like roses thing drives me crazy? Yes? Well then: Very much.)
Elevator Priorities out of whack. More whack is on order.
It's cool and all that my cousin Sada (Technical details: We're not blood relatives. Her grandmother and my grandfather got married sixteen and a half years ago. We've been cousins for over half my life, which is long enough that some of the kids on that side of the family weren't even born at the time. Weirdest, to me, is that I'm pretty sure I'm the only one of all of us who remembers their Grandpa Jack.) won the silver in women's sabre and that they took bronze in the team competition, but what really rocks is that David and Tina (her parents) got to talk to Anthony Lane.
You All Fail
I watched The Boondock Saints on Saturday (I'm working my way through my Netflix Watch It Now queue before I have to give up Netflix for the time being), and I loved it. Why hasn't anyone forced me to watch it before?
( Two spoilery questions )
Digital TV: Not Quite All It's Cracked Up To Be
Our local PBS affiliate finished their transition to digital on Friday. I decided I didn't want to miss another episode of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, so I went out yesterday and used my coupon to buy a converter box (the Zenith DTT901) and hooked it up. I don't get channel 9. I suspect I need a higher quality antenna (they're out of Redding, which is quite a ways away), and I really have to think about whether or not that's worth it or if I just need to be bitterly disappointed. On the bright side, I now get the CW. (Should I just pick up watching One Tree Hill without having watched the intervening seasons? Will I still like it? I'm sure not having seen several seasons will make absolutely no difference to my understanding of the plot; it's not like it's a particularly complex show.)
I did almost nothing last week. Well, okay, I went to dance, had coffee (for her)/hot chocolate (for me) with someone from my writing group, read a lot (
norwich36 keeps reccing me stuff), ate a heck of a lot (a combination of stress eating and the time of month when my body thinks I should get pregnant and therefore eat a lot so I can provide for the baby [No, body. Just no.]), spent two hours just browsing at Barnes & Noble, walked to the grocery store, walked at least a mile three or four other mornings before breakfast, did yoga every day, plotted out half of a novel (see below), went to Sultan's on Friday night, passed on some recs, and sent a few emails. And wrote one sentence of the book.I was trying to be kind to myself and tell myself it was okay to take a week off, but it caught up with me on Saturday, when I woke up cranky and later wrote, "I feel like a failure. I need to get myself in gear." in my one-sentence journal. On Saturday night, I sewed new elastic onto my good zils (one of those now that I'm unemployed I have plenty of time to do it tasks I hadn't yet done) and wrote a few more sentences of the book.
On Schedule
After spending a week doing pretty much nothing, I got back on track today. Yesterday I roughed out a potential schedule for myself, and I've stuck to it pretty well today, although it probably needs some adjusting. It's funny how just thinking about it makes me write. The day I turned in my resignation, I had trouble falling asleep, and I was pondering the book, and I thought, "Crap. Now I really do have to write the song" (there's a song that was supposed to be a minor plot point but became a little bigger in the telling of it), and then there part of it was and I had to write it down. I think I didn't quite catch all of it even then. Last night, after roughing out the schedule and telling myself firmly that I was getting out of bed by six-thirty today, I was having trouble falling asleep, and then there was more of the song and another three sentences and a phrase I had to write down. This is why I keep a pen and paper on the stool next to my bed that serves as a nightstand, and just enough light that comes in from the parking lot, even with the blinds closed, that I can see where there's writing and where the paper's blank, and I can write surprisingly well in the dark. Of course, today I wrote only a few sentences of the book and spent most of my assigned work time writing a 2700-word lesbian fantasy role-play short story instead. (I think it's a little flat at the moment, but I can probably spark it up a bit and make it salable if I can come up with a place to try to sell it to.)
Mawwiage. Mawwiage is wot bwings us togedder today.
In three out of the fourteen J2 Big Bang stories I read, they get married.
norwich36 says this is more common these days, now that it's possible in real life. Apparently I missed this, which is what I get for pretty much only rereading fic for the last year or two. (Also, dammit! I should have done something about my Ted/Barney mpreg earlier because now they don't have to go to Canada, although that certainly has a flexible timeline, so it could be farther in the past. Except now I have to look up when the future bits are to see if that's true. Damn.) Between that and the joke I keep telling myself about the future - "A rich wife is not outside the realm of possibility" (I read Monika K. Moss's Life Mapping [It's fairly similar to other such books; if you've read a lot of them, you could probably skip this one. Also, if you're the type to be disgusted by The Law of Attraction, you should skip the prologue and chapter 1 and go straight to chapter 2. (I think it's mostly ridiculous, but I can also roll my eyes at that part and take the other things she has to say somewhat seriously.)] and worked my way through several of the exercises [I stopped when I got to writing down "Strategic Actions" because the one that kept popping into my head was "quit my job."], one of which is to write out your ideal day. I kept getting stuck and had to write three versions because I couldn't go for a more realistic one until I'd written the partnered version, wherein I write in the morning and volunteer in the afternoon and she works full-time at something she loves. We live in one of the houses in my neighborhood [but a few streets over] with two or three bedrooms - one for us and one to be my office, with a cottonwood tree outside my window, and maybe one more - and a detached garage that she's converted into a dance/yoga/workout studio for me. It has a wood floor with enough give for jumps, windows, one wall all covered with mirrors for dance and lush curtains that can be pulled over them when I don't need the distraction, a sink and mini-fridge because it's a good social gathering place too, and lots of cushions because it's a good gathering place and because doing shoulder stand with the head lower than the shoulders keeps the natural curve to the neck and because I maybe also have a harem girl fantasy where I'm the harem girl and she's the sultan.) - I have at least half the plot of a lesbian romance novel in my head.One woman is a painter. She had a scholarship to a fancy private school when she was younger, and her best friend is still one of the rich girls, who drags her along to a party out in the burbs one night when she's depressed because the coffee shop she's been working at for years and years and years to pay her bills and buy her art supplies is going out of business and she's going to have to find some other kind of job. The party's at this giant house that two people who work all the time live in, and she's in a room that's mostly empty with great light and says, "What a waste," because it would be such a wonderful studio space. Also at the party is the businesswoman type (maybe an ad executive, probably not a lawyer) who's so close to making partner, and she knows that what they really want is some assurance of stability, something that says she won't leave them once she's got a name for herself that will get her something bigger and better somewhere else. She knows a wife who's tied to the community would do it. They meet, of course, and have some kind of moment at the party, something that's enough for the ad exec to get her secretary to track down the painter and ask her out again. I'm not sure exactly how to get to the proposal, but the ad exec suggests it would be the best thing for them to get married - she would get the wife that will convince the partners she's partner material, and the painter will get whatever space she wants in their house as her studio and money for art supplies. And because the painter's been worrying about what the hell she's going to do ("I can't go work at Starbucks. I just can't!") and she's three days late with her rent and she just used her last tube of red, she says yes. So they get married, and the painter plays hostess when needed, and the ad exec stays out of her studio and doesn't care how much she spends on paint and brushes and canvas. And then there's some kind of event, maybe New Year's Eve, and the ad exec gets drunk and they have the best, sweetest sex ever, and each one of them realizes she's fallen in love with her wife, but, of course, this is a romance novel, so they don't tell each other that. And then there's more that gets them, eventually to a happy ending. (Yesterday, my brain wanted the ad exec to be an alcoholic and send her to AA. I don't know.)
Releasing Ideas Into the World: If I Were An Editor
I've long thought that you could make a great erotica anthology out of the Chico News & Review's spicy personals. (For those who don't know: the CN&R is the oldest, most establishment of the local alternative weekly papers. There was a time when they were really good and did investigative reporting, and then the quality fell off. I think it's getting better under the new editor. The old editor, who maybe got fired over the dildo story they ran in the center of the paper a couple of years ago, started his own alternative weekly paper, and it's terrible.) You could assign one to each author, or provide a selection and let the authors tackle whatever strikes their fancy.
You could also make a good anthology out of the example sentences in Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Well-Tempered Sentence. There are some wacky stories to be told behind some of those.
Emblematic of My Reading Habits
I went to the library on Saturday morning. I checked out three books: a young adult novel I had to get through interlibrary loan (Beauty Shop for Rent by Laura Bowers), a romance novel I've read before that I had to request from another branch in the system (Strange Bedpersons by Jennifer Crusie), and my Dewey Decimal book for September, which I originally saw when it was on the new books shelf (Free For All by Don Borchert). This is pretty much what my reading looks like these days.
Why Jennifer Crusie Novels Are Better
This week, I read two romance novels by other people - The Bachelor by Carly Phillips (not very good) and Remember When by Judith McNaught (better, but still left me emotionally unsatisfied) - which made me develop a theory about part of what makes Jennifer Crusie's novels better. Both The Bachelor and Remember When are horribly gendered, beyond even what you might expect from such a pillar of heterosexuality as the romance novel. Roman doesn't just like Charlotte's scent; it's her "feminine scent" that he loves while he's waiting in her bedroom for her to get home. It's not just the qualities that Diana's looking for that she finds in Chase, but the "male qualities." Here's a suggestion: if you can drop the gender word and your sentence still makes sense, drop it.
On the other hand, if there's an actual reason to keep it, do. I've always wanted to write a Klaus/Dorian story where part of what Klaus likes about Dorian is that he's a man and smells like one. (Can I tell you how much the Dorian smelling like roses thing drives me crazy? Yes? Well then: Very much.)
It's cool and all that my cousin Sada (Technical details: We're not blood relatives. Her grandmother and my grandfather got married sixteen and a half years ago. We've been cousins for over half my life, which is long enough that some of the kids on that side of the family weren't even born at the time. Weirdest, to me, is that I'm pretty sure I'm the only one of all of us who remembers their Grandpa Jack.) won the silver in women's sabre and that they took bronze in the team competition, but what really rocks is that David and Tina (her parents) got to talk to Anthony Lane.
You All Fail
I watched The Boondock Saints on Saturday (I'm working my way through my Netflix Watch It Now queue before I have to give up Netflix for the time being), and I loved it. Why hasn't anyone forced me to watch it before?
( Two spoilery questions )
Digital TV: Not Quite All It's Cracked Up To Be
Our local PBS affiliate finished their transition to digital on Friday. I decided I didn't want to miss another episode of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, so I went out yesterday and used my coupon to buy a converter box (the Zenith DTT901) and hooked it up. I don't get channel 9. I suspect I need a higher quality antenna (they're out of Redding, which is quite a ways away), and I really have to think about whether or not that's worth it or if I just need to be bitterly disappointed. On the bright side, I now get the CW. (Should I just pick up watching One Tree Hill without having watched the intervening seasons? Will I still like it? I'm sure not having seen several seasons will make absolutely no difference to my understanding of the plot; it's not like it's a particularly complex show.)