So, right now I should be working on the New Manuscript. I’ve been working on the New Manuscript pretty much nonstop since the first of the year, and whenever I do stop, a little voice comes on in my head and says, I should be working on the New Manuscript. I think this is good. It indicates drive. And also that I’ve finally started to respect my own deadlines.

I did some rudimentary arithmetic yesterday. My calculations are telling me that I’m at 95% of a first draft. Of course, I’ve never been particularly good at arithmetic. Or at gaging the length at which a story will come to rest. So I may be completely wrong.

Also, I’ve gotten to that useless point where I’ve stopped putting new material on the page in favor of obsessing about the stuff that’s already there, and it’s really slowing me down. I keep realizing again and again that no one has ever explained to me about pacing. I’m convinced that there’s some identifiable secret to it and I just don’t know the mechanics, all the gears and cogs.

In my off-time, I’ve been trying to think of a nice hook, and have started drafting a query letter. The manuscript is obviously nowhere close to a submittable state, but I’ve decided that I should be getting the jump on these things. At some point, I might post the hook here and see if anyone feels like weighing in on it. It’s still just very hard for me to tell if I’m communicating well in two paragraphs. Overall, though, the whole process is going much, much faster than last time.

I got a lot of personalized rejections on that first manuscript. They were all worded a little differently, but if you condensed them into one missive, the basic message is:

This is not really my thing. But it’s competent. So keep querying, because sooner or later, someone might like it. Just not me.

Lately, I’ve been reading some discussions online where people are of the opinion that in the event of rejection, you should keep querying, query widely, etc. I think this can be deceptive. I think that when people said nice things about my manuscript, it was because I tricked them into thinking it was viable just because it read cleanly. Like, this house is structurally unsound, but it has great counter-tops.

Anyway, my newly-defined goal for the year is to get to a point where I can just sit down and write something that reads cleanly and also has a good structure—where all the parts come together like well-choreographed ballet. Or Tinker Toys. So I’m taking stock of what I perceive to be my strengths and trying to come up with new strategies to minimize my weaknesses. I still don’t know if this manuscript is good enough, and won’t know until I start submitting it, but I do know that it is already much, much better than the last one.

I’ve decided that 2008 will officially be my Year of Hard Work, so I made some goals. Then I immediately realized I’d made too many, and narrowed them down to these:

• I will finish the first draft of the current YA by January 30th.
• Counting the current project, I will finish and polish two YA manuscripts to shop-able condition by the end of the year.
• I will make an actual effort to produce and submit short fiction and will make at least one sale, preferably to one of these places:
  • Cemetery Dance
  • Chizine
  • Strange Horizons
  • Weird Tales
• I will make an actual effort to be more social, writing-wise, by attending events, readings, signings, conferences, etc. I will possibly even talk to strangers.

These are things that seem within reason. Also, they’re written down. In public. Which means that I am now committed to them.

So, remember when I said a while ago that the first draft of this whole YA suburban fantasy thing would probably come in at 60-65k? That was a complete and total lie.

I’m now creeping up on 65k, and while the end is definitely in sight, there’s still plenty more story to flesh out. The second draft is going to take some dedicated pruning.

The main character’s speech patterns are consistent in the sense that they tend to duplicate themselves to the point of redundancy, and there’s an obscene amount of expository dialogue that was really just me working out the plot. The good news is, the plot still—you know—exists. And yeah, the transitions are a disaster and some of the characters are still standing around waiting to be useful and I have no idea how to denouement the thing (if I can misappropriate the word denouement for a second), but these are issues that seem fixable. I haven’t spotted any of those pesky fundamental flaws yet. Which doesn’t mean they’re not there, but I think it means that if they are there, they’re not completely glaring.

What I’m trying to say is, I like it. I like the characters and the story and the way everything is interconnected and fairly compact. I won’t say that it’s as economical as I was shooting for, but I think it’s still the best thing I’ve written. Or maybe it just feels like that. It’s the first thing that’s come about entirely without me being in some form of school—the first truly independent thing I’ve written. Obviously, I still carry a lot of the academic stuff in my head, but without professorial feedback, and research papers and copyediting exercises and reader’s reports, it stays near the back. Just enough to tell me how to format an ellipsis and not so much that I hear my adviser demanding fewer fantastical elements and more in-depth exploration of Lilith’s marital relationship. Not so much that I constantly hear generic workshop-voice saying things like, so, when the skeleton key melts the doorknob, is that supposed to be a metaphor for something?

I’ve dismantled and restructured the beginning of my demon fantasy, based upon invaluable first-reader feedback and contest-critique (and completely edited out the non-metaphorical skeleton key). I’ve sent out my queries and my partials and all that, but I still have a nagging feeling that it isn’t enough. The point at which the manuscript actually gets good coincides directly with the real-time date of when I graduated from college. This is not a coincidence. I know it, but I don’t quite know how to salvage it. My quick-fix solution was to chop out as much of the pre-graduation stuff as was functionally possible, combine the remaining scenes as often as was plausible, and completely rewrite large portions of the dialogue. I’m unconvinced that it’s enough, but I’m a point where I feel like, okay, this as good as it’s going to get right now, so it’s time to move on to something else. I think I can objectively say that it’s not a bad book. Unfortunately, it still just kind of has a bad beginning.

Even so, the post-critique beginning is still infinitely stronger than the pre-critique one, and more than that, the agent feedback continues to reverberate. It’s funny, that critique was of the opening pages of a second draft of something specific and self-contained, but it’s had unexpected ramifications. Because she’s a stranger and a professional. Because she said nice, complimentary things that boosted my morale. But mostly because she said true things and they were the kind of structural comments that don’t just apply to that one manuscript. I keep thinking about that other story as I write this one. I keep seeing the pitfalls, the mistakes I made, and then going around. It may be too soon to tell, but right now, it seems like the feedback on that book has had the unexpected benefit of making this one better.

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.”