First draft of the nonfiction? Done.

What a weird feeling.

And no, let’s not talk about revisions. It’s going to be a while.

Not much to say just lately. Things are going at whatever pace they go at.

Urban fantasy partials are out to several reputable agents at several reputable agencies, along with the requisite handful of rejections, six queries still outstanding, and a growing list of agents to try next. Oddly, I am not in any particular hurry.

I got past 43k on the suburban fantasy today, or, as G has dubbed it, “The Not-a-Fairy-Story Story.” Since the manuscript is firmly YA this time, I figure the first draft should end up at about 60-65K. I like it better than the urban fantasy, but that may just be due to the fact that it’s the project I’m currently working on. The plot continues to not be broken. In some ways, boys are much easier to write about than girls (or sweet, good-natured demons masquerading as girls).

I’ll finish the first draft of Highly-Unmarketable Memoir by November 15th, which is relieving, because I’m completely sick of it. Then it can sit for a month. Or six months. Or it can go straight to hell. At this point, I think I’m fine with that.

My plan post-memoir is to get to work on some short stories and start submitting to magazines again. Over the summer, an editor at an excellent spec/fic publication sent me a very nice rejection. He said the story I’d submitted was beautiful but distinctly not genre-y enough and he wanted to know if I could send something else. Since I don’t have anything genre-y just lying around, I need to come up with something new and then hope and pray he’s still interested/remembers/is intrigued by whatever new thing I come up with. I’m thinking zombies, because I love them with a devotion that is thoroughly unfounded, but non-zombie apocalypse is also cool.

I’m getting things done. I’m writing. I’m looking ahead to whatever happens next.

Over the past weekend, I received my contest critique and I’ve got to say, it’s opened the current revision up like a chest-spreader. Not shocking or earth-shattering exactly, but confirming everything Syl pointed out, shoring up all my own convictions. Suddenly, motivation is high. I know what happens next. I’m on it. I knocked 7k off the opening in less than an hour.

At the risk of sounding fractured, it’s funny how a given situation can dictate your persona, your requisite set of traits. All my life, the girl who shows up to work each day has varied depending on her function. Now, looking at urban-fantasy-agent’s (specific—beautifully specific) comments, Revision Girl is back with a vengeance, and I just keep thinking, it’s about damn time.

“It must be hard, though,” my dad said, “to cut things.”
“Not really,” I told him. “I mean, if it’s not doing anything for the story, it doesn’t matter if it’s the most lyrical little scrap of prose ever. It’s still not doing anything.”
But that’s Revision Girl talking. She has no nostalgia, no sentimentality. She doesn’t have time for second-guessing or screwing around. She doesn’t feel things out. Give her a red pen and everything bleeds.

Continue reading →

This time last summer, I had just finished school. I was two weeks away from starting at the Publishing Institute. I wasn’t really sure what I intended to do with myself out here in my new adult life.

Okay, so the big not-so-secret is that I still don’t really feel like an adult, and I’m beginning to suspect that the feeling may never show up—at least not like I’m imagining it in my head. But I’m getting better at having the occasional adult thought, and what I’ve been thinking about is this: last summer was the first time I ever considered audience beyond writing specific short stories to please specific professors.

Chizine was having their annual dark fiction contest and they were advertising Neil Gaiman as their tie-breaker judge. I thought, I like Neil Gaiman. Okay, so it was a little more extravagant than that, because I love love love Neil Gaiman, but for the purpose of this post, I figure I should be at least marginally self-contained. I thought, I like dark fiction. Maybe I, too, could write a dark story.

I then exhibited some of my most methodical behavior to date: I sat down, wrote a draft, and showed it to Syl and J. Then I took their comments, and wrote another draft. I gave that draft to Syl, took her new comments, wrote a third draft that didn’t really resemble the first draft except in the sense that the characters had the same names, and submitted it. Then Chizine published it, which ultimately makes this a happy anecdote. I keep bringing up this particular short story because, thus far, it’s the only thing I’ve published that falls within the realm of what I actually enjoy writing.

The idea I’m getting at, in a roundabout fashion, is that even while I was thinking about publication, I still wasn’t thinking about what fiction does to actual live people. Syl and I spent a very nice afternoon sitting at her kitchen table, drinking black tea, eating chocolate chips, and talking about gore. She kept laughing and making witchy faces, acting out hypothetical scenes in which the character of Farid did ominous, creepy things. She kept pointing out all the places where it could go darker. We had lots of things to say about momentum and tension and the viscosity of blood. I was happy with the story because it was like an exercise, a test of how well I could adapt to the larger world of actual salable fiction.

Then, Syl’s sister asked to read it. In my naivete, I thought that was a good idea. She made it roughly two pages before putting it down. If this were a morality tale, the lesson would be that you shouldn’t expect everyone in the world to jump up and cheer just because you feel like you mostly did what you set out to do. However, from a more practical standpoint I’d have to say the lesson is: don’t inflict a story about a butcher shop on a vegan.

I’m not at the point where I have to think about audience in a Very Serious way—which is not to say that audience isn’t crucial when writing fiction for public consumption. But I don’t have an established readership expecting certain criteria to be met each time I sit down at the computer. I would like to/aspire to/intend to, but right now, it’s still just me and a couple people who volunteer their time. Even so, the subject keeps creeping to the front of my brain lately. Audience awareness, giving readers what they want. And having the sense to know who you’re writing for, that’s it’s not ever going to be everyone. Picking your readers without knowing them in person and then combining the particular elements that constitute a good story for them. I’m pursuing immediacy, urgency, vicarious appeal, and I’m not sure that I understand the mechanics of any of this yet, but I keep trying. I figure I should at least write it down here and that way I’ll remember. I’m working hard at being one of those people who Delivers.

I’ve been thinking lately about the intriguing phenomenon of the cult-following. There seems to be a science to it. Of course, to me, science and mysticism often fall into the same category.

When I was eleven, my mother worked at the public library, and I spent a lot of time there. It was at this age that I first started browsing the adult fiction. I liked Stephen King and Piers Anthony (hey, I was eleven). I’d always liked comic books, but was never a particularly avid Batman reader. I liked The Man-Thing, The Fantastic Four, and anything with Doctor Octopus. Basically, I liked Stan Lee.

But that summer that I was eleven, I was in the adult section on the second floor, and I picked up Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. It was like the world changed a little bit. I’d never heard of Frank Miller. This was shortly before the first Sin City yarn, and way before Miller established his Sin City dynasty, but he was charismatic and addictive and startling. Mostly, he was just different. I didn’t know the term character development, but it was an idea that I was starting to understand anyway. This was the first version of Batman that I found sad and tortured and selfish and fascinating (I really liked that he was selfish). I read it in a kind of breathless panic. I read more Frank Miller, everything they had. I thought about him as a person—this was at an age when I still rarely thought of writers as people. I decided that he understood Batman better than Bob Kane, or TV, or even Tim Burton. (And also that he had an obsession with hookers.) I felt like I’d discovered something, the actual truth, the real, secret Batman who had always existed, only no one wanted to see him that way. I suddenly felt like I was in on it, which, when you’re eleven and everyone is still intent on talking to each other over the top of your head, is a great feeling.

I saw 300 this weekend and started thinking about Frank Miller again. I’d always figured I was one in this tiny minority of people who had actually read 300, and purely by chance, too. Back when RKG worked at the library (again with the library) he got 300 on interlibrary loan from one of the bigger metro branches, along with two Sin City shorts and Ronin. It was during football season, when Madden was still doing Monday nights. The half-time show was on and I was losing patience. [Brief aside—my favorite John Madden quote ever: “Here’s a guy, when he runs, he goes faster.”] So, I started flipping through RKG’s special-order books. They were in plastic bags, with little slips of paper taped to them. I took out 300, and again, I was transported. I knew the account wasn’t exactly what you would call factual. Instead it was the myth, the folklore, bigger than fact, and gory and intense and very lovely. I thought, For the rest of my life, I’m going to remember how I feel right now.

When we went to 300, it was a Sunday matinée, and still every single showing had sold out since eleven o’clock that morning. The line was so long it looped back and forth just to fit in the building. People were talking all around us, speculating in whispers. The movie was so faithful to the book that I could recognize panels and long stretches of it word-for-word, just like with Sin City. It’s not a complicated story, and certainly not a long book, and so the movie mostly served to underscore the visual aspect, the graphic-ness of it. The audience was screaming and clapping as though it were real-life.

There are all kinds of stories that you can find by accident, but most of them turn out to be forgettable. I’m thinking about the stories you find by accident, and when you sit down and actually look closely, it’s like fireworks going off. The world changes slightly. It doesn’t matter if the book is cool, or not cool, or obscure and then later becomes. cool. It’s beyond that, because for a little bit, nothing exists outside of it, and when you’re done, you know without thinking about it that you would follow that author anywhere. If enough people are incapable of forgetting, then the cult-following takes shape. This is an intimidating idea, and scary, and very exciting—that as author, you always have to be prepared to act as one part hypnotist.

Since the table of contents is already beginning to pop up on various blogs, now seems as good a time as any to announce that “The Virgin Butcher”, also known to a few of you as “My Neil Gaiman Story,” will be reprinted in Horror: The Best of the Year 2007. The anthology is published by Prime Books and edited by Sean Wallace and John Gregory Betancourt. “The Virgin Butcher” also got an honorable mention from Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 2006, edited by Ellen Datlow.

When I was in school, people would often ask what I was studying. I would tell them that I was majoring in creative writing. Sometimes that was enough to appease their curiosity. They would nod, conversation would migrate to another topic entirely. Occasionally, people would pursue the matter, ask me what I liked to write. I would tell them fiction and they’d nod pleasantly. It’s harder now.
At school, people seemed ready to accept my chosen field of study as just one of those things, similar to exercise science or applied physics. They might want to know what I did, but they certainly didn’t want to know how.
Now, it’s different. People seem baffled, intrigued by the fact that I sit in front of a computer all day and it’s not “for a class.” They want specifics, and this is problematic. They say, “But what do you write about?” I equivocate. Sometimes, I make things up.

For me, school has always been its own universe, complete with an alternate set of expectations, its own charming reality. Taking that into account, I always wrote to the market when I was in school, mindful of the genre conventions. I went about the whole thing a little cynically, tailoring stories to certain professors, only writing my weirder things on the side. It was a business like anything else, the business of completing a program, meeting certain requirements. I was still waiting to find out exactly what it was I wrote.
Until fairly recently, I had no idea that I even felt this way. I was oblivious to my own machinations. Then, one morning last spring, I was at my literary internship. I was sitting around reading slush, and the editor came out of her office and asked me what I planned to do when I graduated.
I shrugged and said, “I’m thinking of becoming the first female horror mogul. I could be like a little Clive Barker, and write stories and scripts and video games. I’d become very famous and write whatever I wanted. And then Todd McFarlane would come and turn all my characters into action figures and I would play with them.”
When she laughed, I thought at first that it was because I was being outrageous and also, most people just don’t understand about action figures. Then she said, “But you write literary fiction.”
I said, “Sometimes.”
And inside-me was rolling her eyes, saying, “Yeah, for school. I also write twenty-five page papers about Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. For school.”
It was like waking up.

I still don’t know what to tell people when they ask what I write. Suddenly, the market is not a bank of four very literary professors, but any market I want. I could conceivably pursue any genre, any idea, as long as I could pull it off.
Since graduating, I’ve started writing whatever appeals to me, just any idea that seems insanely attractive. Currently, my favorite writing playgrounds are the second draft of My Great and Terrible Urban Fantasy, and the first draft of my-highly-unmarketable-but-entertaining memoir. Ancillary distractions mostly consist of various short stories in various stages of development. Horror. Spec fiction. Literary. Just-Plain-Weird.
I think I’ll start telling people that when they ask.
“What do you write?”
“Anything I want. Usually, though, it’s just plain weird.”

In the interest of discipline and acting like an adult professional, I’ve decided it’s time to adopt a real blog (you know, the kind where I talk about work and stuff, rather than just reminiscing about lyrical-but-open-ended things that happened years ago). My plan is to keep an account of my writing progress, complete with rants and thoughts and updates—all the good stuff. I may, let’s face it, go off on tangents about books I love, because I do that a lot in real life. I may talk expansively about literary criticism and theory (but probably not). My existing plan is simply to solidify my ideas pertaining to writing and then Write Them Down.

My dossier:

I am a blatant product of academia, who has, for years, secretly nurtured a love affair with genre fiction.
I have worked as an editorial assistant, a teaching assistant, and for the PR department at my university, as well as putting in more than five years as a Lab Technician at a photo shop.
I have a deep fascination with anatomy and botany. Also, horror movies.
I’m good at soccer, violent video games, and making very flaky pie pastry.
I’m bad at dancing, making decisions, and inspiring confidence as an authority figure (I think this is because I am short, and also terrible at sounding as though I have any idea what I’m talking about).
I was homeschooled until the ninth grade, which has probably affected my world view in ways I can’t fathom.

For those who read —, I am not abandoning that particular journal (although honestly, I tend to abandon it for months at a time anyway), but I plan to be more attentive to this one.

This is my chance to keep a real record of what I’m doing, so I’m going bite the bullet.
I’m going to buckle down.
I’m going to give it a shot.