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Took ~20 minutes this morning and culled my dresser.  Tried to get rid of "I have 4+ items that serve the same purpose, this is my least favorite", "no longer fits", "not my style anymore" and "why do I even have this?"  Filled most of a paper bag with clothes to donate.

The problem is, now I have a paper bag full of clothes sitting in my room.  This was also a problem when I culled my books, but a box was easy to find space for elsewhere (stacked with all the other boxes of books to donate . . .).  A bag?  Not so much.  That's fine for right now--the bag has a reasonable spot--but I can see this becoming a problem as I cull not just the rest of my wardrobe, but all my belongings.  Where am I going to put the stuff before I can drop it off?

I may have to plan to make several donation trips, as annoying as that would be.  Clutter as a result of de-cluttering would be irritatingly ironic.

* checks date *

* checks date of last entry *

*shuffles feet *

As we used to say in the days of LJ (. . . and ffn, if that's not showing how long I've been in fandom), RL Happened.  I'd like to get back to updating this regularly, but I also know making promises I can't keep is never a good idea.  I also don't think it will look the same, if I do update more often.

Originally, I intended this blog to solely be about my writing, and writing-related things in my life (WisCon, book recs, etc).  And while writing is still very important to me, I have found that twitter is a really good place to put the sort of daily-ish updates and frustrations.  Less formal and quicker to jot off than a blog entry.  That's one non-RL reason I haven't been over here in a while.

I have some ideas about how I'd like this to evolve, while also being aware I'm pretty much talking to myself.  I welcome readers!  I'm also aware I don't HAVE many, and since that's not really the goal, that's fine.  Feel free to unfollow/follow/etc, no hard feelings.

There's a lot going on in my life right now that blog entries might be appropriate for--a new teaching job this summer (teaching talented kids to write fantasy!  Best summer job ever!), I've started a Massive Re-Write of the swan book (totally different outline, much more horror than urban fantasy), and I'll likely be moving for the first time ever as a grownup.  I've moved before, but not what I'd consider properly--I moved 2000 miles with two suitcases, which didn't involve much packing, and I moved within town three times the first year I was out here, but I've been in my current place for almost 5 years now, and I've accumulated stuff.  Unlike the last time I moved across state lines, I won't be able to leave anything I don't want at my parents' house.  The move is probably the biggest thing, really.  And doing new things always makes me want to write about them, and really, that's one thing that won't fit well on twitter.

So.  We'll see how it goes, yeah?

Meanwhile, I'm 1k into the Wingless re-write, and I have 2k more to write today, so I should stop procrastinating and do that.  Wish me luck!

Let Wingless lie fallow for a month, and then took another month (argh life) to do the hardcopy edit.  Now I begin to apply said hardcopy edits.

For the record!

Current Wingless wordcount: 95228

I shall update once I have a wordcount for the end of DII!  Here's hoping it's <95k.


NB: Okay, I admit, I'm looking at the stats I posted when I finished writing the rough and am wondering where 200 words went.  I haven't touched the draft at all (possibly some formatting changes?).

NBpt2:  Oooh, wait, I know where those words went!  Those are the words I cut from the first 3 chapters to bring them under 10k, so I could submit the beginning to the WisCon Writers Workshop.  Explained!

Note to future self (and anyone who's interested): check twitter for more day-by-day updates on wordcount.

So it turns out that trying to churn out 90k words in two and a half months takes up pretty much all your free time!  And while I sort of knew that, I'd never done it while also working, so that's a new and not entirely fun experience.  Getting sick for a week and a half also makes hitting daily and weekly wordcount goals difficult.

Doing this sort of intensive writing, though, makes me remember why I love it and why I want to do this for a living.  ( Cue writerly nattering! )

I'm enjoying this book so much, y'all.  I missed writing YA and I never thought I'd love writing in the modern era so much.  It turns out it's a huge relief to be able to write about characters driving and answering cell phones and saying "neat" without having to worry about whether or not it's authentic to the period or the pseudo-historical fantasy world.  I LOVE IT.

WAAAAAAAAY back toward the end of 2013, I mentioned briefly on here that I was worldbuilding for an urban fantasy YA book, and scrolling through my entries, it looks like that's ALL I mentioned.  It got usurped by Trial and The Forest War and The Novel and eventually my YA steampunk, which was my most recent project.

But the YA steampunk book has screeched to a halt over the matter of plot--as in, not having one that works with the wonderful characters and world I built--and the short I was working on fizzled, and I'm not in the mood to deal with the latest round of crit on The Novel.  Hence feeling like I've been bouncing around like a superball.

Since it's been so long since I worked on the UF YA, I couldn't remember how much work I'd done, so I decided to go back and check.  I remember feeling overwhelmed.  There's a lot of detail and a lot of worldbuilding and like, twelve important characters.  I'd hit a wall.

It turns out, though, that a year and a half of perspective brought me to a place where I could see that I'd done enough.  That it was okay to not have twelve fully-fleshed-out character bios.  That the pieces of outline I had, along with acknowledging and using inspirational sources, were enough to get going on a real three-act plot outline.

So spent a week or so refamiliarizing myself with all the materials, re-read some of the original research, and then set-to with a will.  And created what seems to be a sound outline in three days.

Just . . . damn.  It's been a really long time since I had writing flow that easily, even if it was outlining.  Every time I hit a wall, it was a sign I needed to go away and come back, and I did so, and when I came back, I could poke at it and come up with a great plot twist.

For the first time, also, I am writing something that could be called horror, or at least have a horror subgenre.  I've never been into horror (I'm a total scaredy-cat and always have been), but Seanan McGuire, who is pretty much my favorite grownup author, is very horror-oriented.  Ever since I started reading and following her online, I've come to the conclusion that she's very smart about stories and that horror might have something for me, if I could get past the stomach-churning and triggery stuff to get at what good horror actually does.

Whether or not this book ends up being more or less horror oriented, reading articles about how horror works got me through the outline.  It reminded me that characters need to make decisions that get them in worse trouble, that jump scares should happen when your reader and character are experiencing relief that they escaped, and that if your characters are secure in their plan, the only thing to do is have the entire plot change direction.

I need some time away from this outline now, to make sure I didn't miss any obvious plot holes or places where my character arc should show up, but . . . right now this feels not only solid on a plot and character level, but like a YA book I could sell.

The excitement is making me a little light-headed, but it's also awesome.

Of course, the damn thing doesn't have a title, but we can call it the Swan book.

Want to send me into a research spiral?  Have me going over my character profiles since it's been more than a week since I picked them up and realizing I don't know what they wear in winter, and my book takes place during a Colorado winter.

Cue an hour and a half of googling trying to figure out not only what they should be wearing culturally (difficult, b/c they're both second-generation immigrants from very different climates), what they should be wearing given the Western/American influence, what they're be wearing considering they're both working class/teetering on the edge of damn poor, what materials would've been available, and whether they'd've purchased said winter clothing or made it.

ARGH.

( Mostly research venting )

All right, venting over.  Maybe now I can actually get to the new plot, which is what I intended to work on today . . .

. . . unless I get snagged in another character detail.  *sigh*

(It's such a good thing I love worldbuilding.  Such a good thing.)

HAH it's been a long time since I posted . . . mostly that's because I've had my head stuck in my railroading research.  Four volumes on train technology in the nineteenth century, that are well-written, understandable by a layperson, and in-depth?  It's like research Christmas.

It's also like Christmas because it's lasting longer than I could've guessed.  Like, well over a month at this point and I still have two volumes to get through!  But I'm nearly finished with the most relevant volume for the book.  But it's just so much fun!

My latent engineer and history geek have been showing through in a big way with these books.  'Course I've also got a couple of social science volumes coming in, and have been really enjoying a few other books.

There's also a boatload of editing to do on The Novel, but I've been very  very distracted by fun research.  I'll check back in later!

I appreciate workshops.  They show you new sides of your work, introduce you to new fellow writers, and hopefully give you useful feedback about your work.

It's just FRUSTRATING when you have five peer edits of the same chunk of manuscript and some of them contradict each other, and some of them agree with each other about something YOU think is wrong, and nobody comments on THAT ONE THING you were secretly hoping to get specific feedback about.

I spent today painstackingly going through every crit and dealing with comments small and large.  I also dealt with all the things I needed to think about for this draft that I discovered between submitting it to the workshop and actually workshopping it.  Basically, today was seven hours of fiddly, consequential drafting, and between the last few days and my scene re-write after FogCon, I've added ~1100 words to The Novel and have officially declared Draft IX done.

With any luck one or two folks from the workshop will be willing to exchange work with me, because I'd love to know if the issues they spotted in the first ~10k words are present in the rest of the book or if it's a beginning thing (I suck at beginnings, argh).

But until I know for sure, I think I need to set The Novel aside for a while and do some work on what might be my next project--YA steampunk, ahoy!

12 hours of travel, meeting with folks I haven't seen since last year, swimming, and last-minute workshop and panel prep.

Getting up at 8 for the 9am workshop, 3 intense hours of discussion, and then AFTERNOON PANELS ON FRIDAY WHAT IS THIS MADNESS?

Then napping, then dinner and evening panels (LOTS of stuff for my How to Ally panel gleaned from the Reconciliation panel and the No More Missing Stairs panel).

Currently exhausted.  Fic reading and then bed.

Workshop was lovely!

Would you believe I FORGOT that I wrote Trial in the present tense?  I opened the doc to start draft III today and had a "Huh . . ?" moment.

But once I got past it I hit a few fiddly things of the type that are a pain to change but a good way to get re-acquainted with a MS I haven't worked on in months.  Researched medieval heraldry, did some shoe-related clothing extrapolation, fixed some capitalization inconsistencies, that sort of thing.  Then I went back through my notes from the first few chapters and hit the things I knew I could fix right then.

I haven't touched the larger underlying stuff that needs to be added--more magic, and the magic-related subplot I discovered while crafting DII--but that should come soon, hopefully.

In the meantime I'm toying with another YA idea, since the fairy book doesn't look like it'll be going anywhere for awhile.  Steampunk, because it is a genre I love, but with magic this time (there's no magic in Skywatch, and also Skywatch is middle grade).  I'm thinking another dual-POV book, and possibly may involve the transcontinental railroad or a steampunk-alternate-history version thereof.  We'll see!

Plus, since I DID fix that scene in The Novel, I need to query that some more.  Yay, a writing to-do list!