Sheila and Sara

Please excuse Sheila from working on Vexations  today as she was mesmerized by the supermoon.

I just pointed some people to this blog, which I take as a hint that I should update the thing so the last entry isn't over a year ago. My various streams of income have been very demanding and I have been writing actual fictional stuff in the free time in between. And NaNoWriMo pretty much ate my November. But one of my New Year's resolutions was to do twelve posts in my various blogs (in totality--not per blog) and I just finished another resolution of submitting The Two Kinds of Magic  to at least five agents, so I'm feeling like things are possible. I'm working on two things right now. One is a short(ish) story called Vexations  which I was starting in the previous entry here. (It was 7,000 words then; it clocks in at 14,000 words now.) The other is a detailed outline of this coming November's NaNoWriMo effort. (It's a sequel to last year's--I guess I just didn't want the story to end.) I've sniffed out some potential places to submit Vexati...

As you may have noticed, I have successfully updated this blog after a little over a year of silence.  One entry I’d already written, to be fair, but I also restarted with new material. The thing that held me back was the lack of time.  I am currently working two jobs, sometimes three depending on the season, and I still have my Ten Thousand Flowers Project to attend to, as well as learning guitar and writing fiction.  Finding an hour or two, as most writing advice recommends, is not something I can do on a daily basis.  Even twenty minutes is too much to ask most days. So I experimented with five.  Five at minimum, sometimes more.  My technique is to sit down to work and glance at the clock.  I calculate five minutes from there and start to work.  Periodically I check the clock and stop when I’ve hit the five minute mark.  Sometimes I get so absorbed in what I’m writing I breeze past five minutes.  The point is to do something...

This is a piece I wrote for an event called Write Club, in which pairs of poets compete by writing pieces on opposing themes.  I was given War, and another writer given Peace.  Peace won, which I will take as a hopeful metaphor to console myself. One—The Imagine Fallacy John Lennon’s dream was a world without war and his roadmap to such an achievement was best summarized in the song Imagine. I can’t recite the lyrics without crossing the boundaries of fair use, and I don’t feel like being sued by Yoko Ono. But I’m sure you’ve all heard it enough times that it’s already an earworm in your head as I’m reading this. At any rate, permit me to summarize. If we no longer had religion to fight over, there would be no war. If we no longer had countries to fight over, there would be no war. If we no longer had possessions to fight over, there would be no war. John Lennon had two sons, but they were born to two different women and raised on two d...

This is a sequel, of sorts, to  The Ugly Handsome Man .  It is a true story. I was in meditation class, listening to a recording of the Dalai Lama and his entourage chanting at the sickbed of Vaclav Havel.  Somewhere in the midst of breathing and listening, I saw the Ugly Handsome Man in the eye of my mind.  He was in a dark room, lying on a stone bier, slit open straight down the middle.  Around him were gathered gremlins in mourning.  His body was completely hollow.  Then he abruptly caught fire and burned until all of him was completely consumed.  The flames then flowed into me, giving me back everything that he had taken.

Every night, one of the nurses would push open the door to the bedspace and shine a flashlight in to make sure we were still in our beds and presumably not in the process of attempting suicide.  She would leave the door hanging wide open each time.  I would wake to the light of the flashlight and stay awake to the light from the hallway.  Each time I would get out of bed and push the door almost closed--enough to block the light but not enough to click the latch, lest they come barging in again for our protection.

I knew it had been a while since I'd updated this blog.  I hadn't realized it had been two years . 2013 was the year of The Unpleasantness and after I signed off here I devoted my time to recovering from The Unpleasantness.  My recovery was such that I wasn't able to write much during it but once it was over I was able to devote my time to finishing and revising The Two Kinds of Magic .  It's made the rounds of all the agents I was able to find on AgentQuery.com and gotten either silence or polite refusals.  I've gotten more direct feedback from the writers' groups I attend, as well as a few people who have read the thing all the way though, and it's been overwhelmingly positive.  Even my sister, who didn't like my first novel, had good things to say about it.  So my ego isn't quite as squashed as it might be. I've sent it to a few publishers that take direct submissions and I think I'll be sending it to a few more before I resort to self...