Sheila Rambles

So in the early morning hours of today, I pounded out the last few words of my efforts for National Novel Writing Month . It's a bit odd to see how controversial the thing seemed to be this year. There were dismissive articles about NaNoWriMo and, unsurprisingly, a number of people leaped to its defense in response. Some of the criticisms seemed to be along the lines of Stop Having Fun, Guys and a curious and unproven allegation that the slush piles of December are glutted with NaNovels. But there was also the concern, and I think it one that needed to be addressed, that people who fall short on NaNoWriMo wind up getting mauled by their internal gremlins, the ones who threw everything at them to get them to stop and then turned around and kicked them for not succeeding. (Nasty buggers, those gremlins. Every word I write for the world to read is a tiny victory against them.) This year I almost didn't make it. Part of it was perhaps simple overconfidence--I'd done it f...

Steven Pressfield's The War of Art is one of my personal creative scriptures. The eBook is available for purchase and if you buy it between now and Thursday, October 21, 2010, it will be a mere $1.99. Buy it. Now. Even if you don't have an e-reader, you can grab it as a PDF. You can thank me later. http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2010/10/two-days-only-war-of-art-ebook-for-1-99/

I first signed up for NaNoWriMo in the year 2004, and started a novel called Sam and Charlie Go On A Roadtrip , which was about two girls, Samantha (Sam) and Charlotte (Charlie) who took a roadtrip down to Florida. I stalled out at 8,881 words. My usual line is that I got my characters as far as Florida and got stuck. I've been told that Florida has a reputation for that sort of thing, but there were other factors involved. 1. Not actually having a plot in mind. The novel was written as alternating diary entries and I figured that just rambling about travel from place to place would be an easy way to rack up words. Wrong. That's not even what we read novels for, anyway--we pick up books and keep reading them because we want to know what happens next. If there's no tension, no conflict and no potential gain or loss, there's nothing to drive things forward. I almost made the same mistake in 2005, starting on a fantasy story that was supposed to be somebody dictating...

National Novel Writing Month is less than a month away. The good news is, last night I just got clobbered over the head with an idea that should work very easily within the demands of that particular event. The better news is, I've got a month to ponder the possibilities before committing anything to the page, so I should be ready to hit it as soon at November 1 rolls around. The, um, not so good news is that I'm still logjammed at about 23,000 words on my current project and I'm not sure I'll be able to wrap it up by the end of this month. I think I may just do what I can in the remaining time and then shelve it while I plow through NaNo and then return to it in December. (One of the luxuries of being as-yet-unpublished is that I can do things like this without sending editors into cold sweats. Though, speaking of, I do need to get my other manuscript packed up and sent out again. Two rejections is hardly enough to prove the thing useless.) I am encouraged by th...

The words are still coming with some reluctance but the books stacked on my table are looking like a reward instead of a duty, so I think I'll roll things in that direction.

One of the disadvantages of going at the slow crawl I'm going now is that I wind up losing track of things that happened only a couple of pages ago. For example, I did a quick reread of the scene I'm working on and realized oh, wait, they're still naked, aren't they? Hell of a thing to forget. My brain is still in ravenous devouring mode, so I checked some books out of the library to feed it with--a book about alchemy and a couple of volumes of the collected works of Carl Jung. Yes, really.

I'm not sure if this is true for other people, but I find that my brain tends to go in a kind of cycle between craving input and spewing forth output. On the "Input" part of the cycle, I plow my way through books, go out exploring new places and spend perhaps a little too much time on the Internet. I am ravenous for new sensations and new experiences. On the "Output" part of the cycle, I fill pages upon pages, scribble my attempts at artwork and find myself overflowing with ideas, though I may also want to retreat to more stable routines instead of taking in anything else. The problem with the "Input" cycle is that the words don't come easily, even if I need to produce them. (But I can catch up on my reading like crazy, let me tell ya.) Every indication is that I'm currently in an "Input" cycle. Instead of beating myself up for it, I figure I'll just stuff myself until I'm satiated and see if that helps any.

Still chiseling it out, it seems, but part of the issue is that my time and energies are being taken up with other matters, so what little bits I get in are better than rationalizing that I'll get back to writing when these things blow over. I stopped at the question "Are you all right?" so it should be easy enough to pick up when I return to it.

. . . when a mere forty-three words feels like a victory. Today, apparently, is one of them.

Two submissions, two rejections. Yes, I know, it's what's supposed to happen. Labor Day weekend was spent at Dragon*Con, where I was able to talk with all kinds of smart people and get different kinds of writerly advice from various writerly types. I also had a few people ask to read the novel, so I'll be gathering email addresses and sending out PDFs to them soon. I'm also 21,000 words into another book and STUCK AS HELL on it. I think I need to grab a looseleaf notebook and do some free writing to get through the logjam. Thanks to a link on the Absolute Write forums, I came across Query Shark , which has been enormously helpful for giving me ideas on how to tighten and refine my query letter. It does help to learn from other people's mistakes. I've just put my own query on the block and we'll see if I get a response on it, but I'm not going to let that be an excuse to keep me from sending the thing out anyway. I've fallen for that trap before...

The spam from China has been coming thick and fast enough that I have to switch on comment moderation. Sorry about that. The notifications go to an email address that I check pretty regularly, though, so comments from actual human beings who are reading and responding to the entry and not planting links at random will show up soon enough. The new book is coming along by degrees, and I've taken everything I've learned from NaNoWriMo about forgiving imperfections and applying it to this draft. It's a mess at this point, but it's a start, and as I've said elsewhere, there's no way to sharpen a blade before it's been forged.

Took me all morning to muster up the nerve, but there you are. Soft Places has been submitted to an agency and I will keep myself occupied with my next book while waiting for a reply. Oh, yeah, by the way, I started writing another book. I'll probably resume the habit of excuse notes here until I've at least gotten the first draft hashed out. That is all.

I think I'm finished with the final pass of revisions on the manuscript and I'm getting it ready for submission to an agent. Yikes.

The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death. --Steven Pressfield, The War of Art In December of 1999, Justin Kruger and David Dunning published a paper entitled Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments . In it, they described what has since become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you’ve ever seen a craptastic poet who thinks he’s some kind of genius, you’ve seen the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you’ve ever seen a brilliant artist fret over the tiny flaws in her work, you’ve also seen the Dunning-Kruger effect. The gist of the paper, as the title indicates, is that the worse you are at something, the worse you are at determining just how bad you are at it. The flip side of this is that the more skilled you become, the better you get at assessing your ability. In the course of the original research, Kruger and Dunning also found that as people ...

. . . which probably isn't news to anybody who has written anything, but struck me as a bit amusing. Sometimes the work bears a remarkable resemblance to doing nothing at all. Anybody who observed me over the past half hour or so would have seen me staring out the window, occasionally pulling at my hair and drinking my orange juice. Those were my physical actions. Internally, I was mulling over the possibility that an abandoned short story idea of mine may well be the seed of another novel. It's something like watching a Polaroid picture develop from hazy shapes into a detailed photograph. I've come up with a few becauses for the whys that I've raised. I have the place figured out but I still need to determine the time, since setting it in the present day would create a very different story than setting it in the time period that the idea originally sprang from. Maybe another NaNo, maybe something else. We'll see.

I just canceled my Amazon Prime membership. First off, I'm not sure if the money on shipping that I was saving was that much more than what I paid for the yearly membership. It came in handy when getting birthday and Christmas presents shipped to my nieces (which is pretty much what I've been using Amazon for) but I'm still too broke to do much book shopping for myself, and I have this thing for browsing in physical bookstores anyway. The main reason, though, is that Amazon has been acting like the 900-pound gorilla of book sales and doesn't seem to realize that it's not the only gorilla in the jungle anymore. The standoff between Amazon and Macmillan has been documented in more detail elsewhere. John Scalzi has provided the snarkiest coverage (and is where I was first made aware of the issue) and Tobias Buckell perhaps the most detailed. Short answer for those who don't feel like clicking on links--Amazon has stopped selling Macmillan titles because Macmil...