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It begins…

The season has begun — not the season of manic holiday shopping, although that’s alive and well, too — but the season of manic writing in the form National Novel Writing Month, the annual challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days.

To all participants, I wish you much caffeine, words, and luck.

I will not be participating this year, although I have been severely tempted to throw yet one more thing on my plate. Instead I will take a more practical approach to the month of November and focus on completing my current challenge — writing and finishing every weekly story for the Brainery Science Fiction Fairy Tales workshop, which is enough work in and of itself.

What I’m Reading

I AM READING Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie AND I’M JUST HALFWAY THROUGH AND IT IS AS AMAZING AS Ancillary Justice. Leckie is my writing idol, with how she has created unique, complex cultures combined with a large cast of interesting characters combines with thrilling storylines.

What I’m Writing

See below, because only Brainery writing got done this week. All other writing was outside my ability to function last week.

Goals for the Week:

  • Finish workshop draft before class.
  • Edit Bluebeard tale in time to submit to Uncanny.

Brainery Workshop – Science Fiction Fairy Tales – Week Three

Last week’s topic discussion for Brainery Science Fiction Fairy Tales workshop group looked at the “Bluebeard” fairy tale with a connection to cryptography, a recipe for something dark and unsettling. (The exploration of the tale certainly had my mind going down dark alleys and even evoked an anxiety dream based on the movie It Follows, in which I continually tried to find ways to evade and un-evadable monster.)

After reading a number of cryptography articles, I decided to take a chance. Instead of including some sort of science fictional cryptography in my tale, I attempted to make the tale itself a kind of cryptography in which the readers would have to determine the ultimate meaning. It was really risky and (much to my surprise) was met with positive results from my writing group to the extant that I will be attempting to finish the piece by the end of the month in order to submit it to Uncanny Magazine at the recommendation of our teacher Jilly Dreadful.

This upcoming Thursday’s class will focus on The Three Little Pigs and animal testing, which may actually take me the dark and unsettling places I thought I was going last week. I have not started this yet, as I’ve been too focused on the Bluebeard tale.

Linky Goodness

  • Killing Like They Do in the Movies  by Justin Phillip Reed — “My first and only real conversation with my great-grandmother, the truest stoic I ever knew, was a warning after she caught wind that I “went around” with white girls. Perhaps she recalled how this would’ve ended in the early part of the century she had lived, had witnessed. The consistent drama of horror seems to be its nestling inside the trope of preying on and violating innocence, which is the domain ruled by young white women, if ruling is a way of being puppeteered.”
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In which there is an unexpected vacation, books, and kudzu

Last night, I got an unexpected vacation from writing — because I left my laptop at the office, which is an hour away from my home. So, I setting into the couch and let myself relax for the evening. I watched an episode of Scream Queens and then the premier episode of Supergirl, which presented a bright, enthusiastic hero and a wonderful cast of sidekicks. I’m looking forward to seeing more.

What I’m Reading

I finished All the Rage by Courtney Summers last week, in part due to a can’t-put-it-down-even-though-I-need-to-work-in-the-morning late night reading session. Let me just say, Oof, my heart. It’s a brutal, emotionally honest book with an intense exploration of rape and its aftermath. I’m still toying with the idea of doing a more thorough review.

Not sure what’s up next. I have Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie and a couple of audio books available to me. Although, I’ve joined a reading group and so should get started on Uprooted by Naomi Novik.

Decisions, decisions.

What I’m Writing

Just like an alien parasite, the Science Fiction Fairy Tales Brainery Workshop is filling me with euphoria and eating my brain — and I love it. Although very little of my other writing projects are getting done. I’m fine with that. Writing is writing is writing.

Goals for the Week:

  • Finish workshop draft before class.
  • Continue editing the Sleeping Beauty and/or the Iron Henry and/or Jack and the Beanstalk inspired stories (see how these stories stack up, I can tell) — if there’s time.

Brainery Workshop – Science Fiction Fairy Tales – Week Three

Last week’s topic discussion for Brainery Science Fiction Fairy Tales workshop group looked at the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale with a connection to invasive species. I focused in on kudzu, which an invasive vine infiltrating toward the north from southern states. It grows rapidly and in giant towers, knocking over power poles and causing a multitude of other problems. I find it incredibly creepy and I’m not the only one as the video below shows.

Continue reading “In which there is an unexpected vacation, books, and kudzu”

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A plethora of words and writing

Litquake, a weeklong festival celebrating the written word, be it fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, started over the weekend. Although I wasn’t able to attend any of the weekend events (due to the fantastic and extended celebrating of my brother and sister’s birthday!), I was able to shoot up to the city last night for two panels — Hot Off the Press: The Latest From the Publishing Pros and Horror and Hilarity: A Conversation with Christopher Moore and S.G. Browne.

The Hot Off the Press panel included a number of agents and publishing house representatives, including the amazing and wonderful Lise Quintana, founder of Zoetic Press and the Lithomobilus app. Much of the discussion centered around how writers can attract the attention of agents and publishers (i.e., treat your writing like a business, write good stuff, build an author platform, do your homework, etc.), with a little bit of attention offered to digital applications and other publishing trends. Overall, it was a good panel with the exception of the tendency of the gentlemen to interrupt the female panelists before they barely had a chance to get a word out.

Horror and Hilarity was good fun. Both authors — Browne (who I’ve read) and Moore (who I haven’t) write satirical fiction with speculative elements, such as vampires (Bloodsucking Fiends, Moore), zombies (Breathers, Browne), personifications of ideas such as death (A Dirty Job, Moore, and Fated, Browne), and so on. It was kind of a nuts and bolts of genre, publishing, and writing kind of discussion, so it was a bit dry in some parts. The most hilarious part of the night was the first audience questions, in which a young man asked the authors if they talked to girls, you know, for research on how to write women.

The rest of the week will include a ton of other exciting events, though I don’t know how many I’ll be able to attend during the work week, as I’ll be saving my energy for Saturday.

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What’s on Saturday? Just a little reading reading by Zoetic Press writers at Double Dutch from 6-7 pm, which will include Daniel Ari, Jaz Sufi, Rosemary Tantra Bensko, and myself! I’ve heard rumors there will also be some Literary Trivia fun, as well. The Zoetic reading is just Phase One of Litcrawl, which includes copious amounts of readings. So come by and say, Hi!

If you’re not going to be able to make it in person Saturday night, you can tune in online as Zoetic livestreams the reading.

What I’m Reading

Due to the amount of activities and writing I’m doing, I’m still working on Celestial Inventories by Steve Rasnic Tem. I haven’t been as attached to the later stories in the book as I have been in the first, but I’m still enjoying the read.

What I’m Writing

It’s been a busy week in terms of events, but I’ve eeked out some writing time in order to throw down a few scenes for this week’s Brainery workshop short story, while also inching along on the Sleeping Beauty (see below).

Goals for the Week: Finish workshop draft before class. Continue editing the Sleeping Beauty inspired story. Get one Twelve Dancing Princesses prose poem drafted. Submit one poem. (Because I don’t have enough going on.)

Brainery Workshop – Science Fiction Fairy Tales – Week Two

Last week’s class focused on reviewing work created for the Sleeping Beauty and science of sleep topic. I was really drawn to the idea of projecting dreams back to a viewer (not a new concept in science fiction) and was fascinated to learn through the class reading that scientists have actually been able to achieve something close to this. They can create a map of a person’s brain while they are watching movie clips and using the data can project the images back on a screen, which blew my mind.

My half finished Sleeping Beauty story used this idea of dream projecting as the basis for selling dreams, which turned into something dark and noir-ish. I got some great feedback from my fellow writers, all of whom shared their own creative spins on the tale, and now the story is poking at me to finish it and I think if I stay focused, it will turn into something submit-able.

This Thursday’s class will focus on The Frog King, Or Iron Henry with a connection to robots and cyborgs, oh my!

Linky Goodness

  • Pop Culture is ‘Boring as F!@#’: A Playboy Conversation with Monica Byrne — “The word “diversify” centers white experience as the permanent default, but whiteness is actually very rare and exotic, statistically speaking. “Equilibration” implies—if you’ll permit me to get scientific for a second—a natural process of diffusion across all boundaries. In other words, “equilibration” implies that the array of art that gets made will finally reflect the array of people who live under its influence.”
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What day is it?

I came to the realization halfway through writing this post that today Tuesday, not Monday. This is because I spent my Monday helping my mom clear out and transfer belongings from one storage shed to another in a grueling twelve hour period resembling the interminable curse of Greek gods. If we hadn’t been laughing so hard at the absurdity of the situation, I’m sure we would have been miserable. But we were laughing and we accomplished a hell of a lot and my mom rewarded my efforts with beer, so all was well.

In other weekend news, I SAW FLOGGING MOLLY at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival and they were —in what was no surprise to me — amazing. They played all my favorite songs and introduced me to new favorites. I danced my ass off that night and sang my throat out and it was worth the next day’s pain. We also saw The Brothers Comatose and Gillian Welch play and they were both wonderful, as well.

The crowds were thick and fun at the Flogging Molly performance in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
The crowds were thick and fun at the Flogging Molly performance in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.

What I’m Reading

I’m still working on Celestial Inventories by Steve Rasnic Tem, which continues to astound me with its ability to present stories, ranging from deeply moving to incredibly disturbing.

I’m also working my way through the 1001 Arabian Nights issue of NonBinary Review, which is full of amazing poetry and fiction.

What I’m Writing

Most of my focus has been on finishing an initial draft of a Sleeping Beauty story for the Brainery Workshop I started last week. I have the main outline and a good sense of how I want to approach it, but since it has some science fiction elements I’m not sure how much explaining I should do up front. I suppose I should just get the draft

Laura Madeline Wiseman and I have finished up a number of collaborative poems, which need to be sent out. At which point, we need to get started on some new ones.

Published! KYSO Flash reprinted “The Things I Own” — a poem that (I learned just five minutes ago) has been nominated for Independent Best American Poetry by Thank You for Swallowing, who first published it.

Goals for the Week: Finish workshop draft before class. Submit some collaborative poetry and get started on some others.

Brainery Workshop – Science Fiction Fairy Tales – Week One

The first meeting of the workshop, which is run by the amazing Jilly Dreadful, was introductory, introducing us to our fellow writers and to how the workshop will work. My fellow writers (most of whom I met, although there was a switch in students at the last minute) are all amazing as far as I can tell from the small piece of writing they all shared and from their comments during the meeting. This makes me even more excited to see how things will go.

Our assignment for the week is as I noted above, a Sleeping Beauty story, which can incorporate some of the sleep science in various articles Jilly assigned.

Linky Goodness

  • Justine Larbalestier notes Our Heroes Are Fallible And So Are We — “We do not write in a vacuum. We write about the real world while living in the real world. That’s true whether we are writing about zombies or vampires or high school or genocide or butterflies or all five. Our words have effects on other people.”
  • Afrofuturism Rising by Ytasha L. Womack — “While Afrofuturism is viewed as a tool of empowerment for people of color, the dual aesthetic and philosophy at large serves to provide answers for a gaping hole in the story of humanity. Afrofuturism values intuition, feminine aspects of humanity, and nature. Afrofuturism views the future, past, and present as one. Afrofuturism provides a platform to explore time and memory in the context of human life.“
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Vulnerability and Forgivness in Writing

Writing is an incredibly vulnerable act. You put piece of yourself, however fictional, down on paper — sometimes something deeply personal — and offer it to the world to be judged and sometimes its hard to distinguish between the art and yourself.

In Writing Begins with Forgiveness, Daniel José Older writes, “Here’s what stops more people from writing than anything else: shame. That creeping, nagging sense of ‘should be,’ ‘should have been,’ and ‘if only I had…’ Shame lives in the body, it clenches our muscles when we sit at the keyboard, takes up valuable mental space with useless, repetitive conversations.” 

Older is specifically talking about the “write everyday” advice that has created a feeling of shame in many writers (I’ve been known to be one), causing a feeling of paralysis. However, this sense of shame and inadequacy also applies in other ways, from comparing ourselves to others and feeling like an outsider (as I found myself doing on Friday at the latest Glowing with the Moon open mic) to judging our words too harshly and not believing in the value of our own work (as I also found myself doing despite positive feedback I’ve received lately). Many writers I know have experienced imposter syndrome, the feeling that their work is actually stupid and uninteresting and someday soon everyone is going to find out.

It’s not always easy to disentangle the layers of self-doubt and shame that come as part of the writing process, but Older’s lesson of approaching writing with a sense of self-forgiveness is a good place to start. It’s something I aim to work on as I continue to submit my work and attend events in the coming months.

What I’m Reading

I’m enjoying Less Than Hero by S.G. Browne, which is about a man professional guinea pig for pharmaceutical testing and his friends, who through some strange combination of meds develop the ability to project their medical side effects onto other people. It’s kind of a superpower. Mostly fun so far, but I’m not loving it as much as I’ve loved other books by Browne (such as Breathers and Fated). However, I expect it will turn out to be a fantastic read by the end.

What I’m Writing

On Sunday, Allie Marini and I ambushed Lise Quintana into an impromptu writing session, which resulted in some butt-in-seats hard work all around. My personal progress involved a couple of poem drafts completed on the Twelve Dancing Princesses manuscript and a couple of submissions sent out.

Published! The Myth+Magic anthology is out and contains my poem “Red Riding Hood Remembers.”

Submitted! Two poems send out to two separate markets.

Rejected: Another rejection from a publisher for the Sincerely Yours chapbook, which means it definitely needs to be reconsidered in terms of organization and length.

Goal(s) for this week: Finish another poem or two for Twelve Dancing Princesses. Submit something.

Linky Goodness

  • Matthew Salesses writes on Moral Craft: Issues of Plot and Prejudice — “Prejudiced writing is a moral concern and a craft concern, so I’m going to treat it as both. I should also admit that my concern comes from noticing a (mostly good) trend of white authors wanting to reflect the diversity of the real world by writing more characters of color.”
  •  This is (not) a Laughing Matter by Lindsey Hall – “Humor, I believe, is as effective a tool and as difficult a form of expression as anything else. Ultimately, humans seek pleasure, and writers hope to entertain, to arouse and sustain a reader’s interest. We have stories of suffering that must be told, and humor is a viable conduit. Comedy helps readers connect with characters; comedy helps readers swallow uncomfortable or painful truths.”