scribbling damselfly @ LJ

Today I have exceedingly good news: I have sold a story to ASIM. Tentative publication date is April 2010.

For those playing along at home, I wrote the first draft of this story in January 2005, during my stint at Clarion. (Actually, since it was my week one story, I probably started it, in some brief and jotted form at least, in late December 2004.) I can't remember what I called it at the time (probably something genius like "Untitled"), but it's since acquired the title "Shaping Lily".

The story was inspired by the meeting of two ideas: an epic(ish) quest fantasy story wherein the main character was a little old lady, and Web of Light, by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. (And in seeking out that link for you, I've only just gone and gotten myself lost in browsing Stephanie's site. Again.)

It's a quaint little story, and one I'm very fond of, so I'm glad it's found a good home.

And in updating my spreadsheet which records these things for me, I've belatedly realised I have exactly one short story currently doing the rounds of submissions, and nothing else to offer. I do have a handful of short stories in serious need of revising (some of my Clarion stories are still languishing, for example — although I think they'll stay languishing, except for one, which may turn into a novel. Like I need yet another novel idea in the queue. Still, too many ideas is a nicer problem to have than not enough ideas, I suppose).

H'm. Perhaps it's time to work on revising or drafting a short story or two.

Tactic: set the alarm clock for five minutes later. More sleep!

The world's answering gambit: garbage trucks. Ten minutes earlier. Ugh.

World: 1, Deb: 0.

Bit of a slow effort, writing last night, because I got distracted by playing with Scrivener. I suppose I could argue that I didn't get entirely distracted and skip writing altogether, and it would be a true argument, but a weakish one nonetheless. Bad author. No biscuit. No wonder the world sent me garbage trucks this morning by way of punishment.

Actually, it's occurred to me that I haven't spoken much about my writing on this blog of late. Or, in actual fact, quite some time. I suspect this is because I'm in the alpha draft of the faerie novel, and I'm one of those writers who isn't comfortable talking about a story until I've got something pinned to the page. My alpha drafts are usually shockingly incomplete, the equivalent of snagging a butterfly by the wingtip. It's an imperfect process, to say the least, because at best a few scales are going to shake loose and the snagged butterfly is going to look a little tatty. Sometimes the damn butterfly would rather rip its wing off than be caught, and I'm left with nothing but a ragged handful of dreck.

I would far rather be one of those efficient, organised types who nets the butterfly and pins it through the heart in one go, but of course I'd rather have wings of my own and buckets of gold to boot, for that matter.

I woke up off-colour yesterday, and felt too sick to do much of anything…so I cranked up Scrivener (at long last) and tried to figure out whether it would work for me.

I'm still undecided. I suspect I erred in attempting to discover how it works while in the middle of a novel, rather than starting fresh. I transferred most of the text of the faerie novel across into a scrivener file, and discovered that Scrivener feels the novel is almost 6,000 words longer than Microsoft Word thinks it is. Interesting… This evening I discovered a second way of counting words in Scrivener,¹ which tells me the novel is only 200ish words longer than Microsoft Word's tally. I do not understand yet why Scrivener feels the need to count words in two different realities simultaneously. Or which one I'm supposed to trust.

Either way, I've written basically 50,000 words of the faerie novel so far…and the faeries have only just turned up. That's a whole lotta non-faerie faerie story to start off with there.²

I suspect I'm not going to like the rewrite of this book very much.

But then, that could just be the dreaded muddle talking. Here's hoping, eh?³

1. using the Project Statistics window, as opposed to the Project Targets window, for those who care [↩]
2. In my defense, there has been killing while the faeries weren't around. Never let it be said that all my characters survive my stories. [↩]
3. Now, where did I leave that plot, anyway? [↩]

Ah, herbal teas. Smell fantastic, taste like … hot water.

Life is full of little disappointments, innit?

Yesterday I had lunch at one of those places which is more concerned with their atmosphere than with the provision of food.

You know the places: where the menu contains such exotic items as fillet of atlantic salmon, the fish in question having been nurtured in dark and lightless caverns tucked under the antarctic ice shelf for several years, before being slaughtered and the meat wrapped around a lemon and shot into space and thus lightly seared upon re-entry, and then served upon a bed of, god, I don't know, alfalfa sprouts drizzled in caterpillar spit. Gourmet.¹

The menu contained all of four items: one entree, two mains, and one cheese. It took the waiter no less than twenty minutes, and three trips, to bring us a slice of bread each, and there was only four of us present.

The meal arrived an hour and a half after ordering² — and vanished down our hungry gullets in thirty seconds. Partly because we were starved by the wait, but mostly because the portions allotted to us wouldn't have sated an anorexic silkworm.

I couldn't bear the thought of waiting another small eternity for the cheese dish, which I was rather beginning to suspect would be a single cracker with just a sliver, dahling, of cheese.

Give me a pub meal any day.

1. Okay, okay, I am not saying all gourmet food is bad. But there is a particular breed of gourmet establishment which confuses arrogance with a sterling reputation. Those ones. [↩]
2. I didn't choose the salmon kingfish. I chose the beetroot and goat's cheese risotto — which I think could more correctly be described as borscht with a bit of rice thrown into the mix. [↩]

Tonight's tram ride featured:

:: A passive-aggressive tram driver, who felt the need to rouse on the passengers for attempting to board the tram once it stopped at the tram stop. (Apparently, it hadn't stopped at the right bit of the tram stop to allow boarding. To which I ask: why open the doors then? To catch a breath of the refreshing arctic winds, perhaps?)

:: Ticket inspectors!

:: The passive-aggressive tram driver announcing he wouldn't drive the tram if people insisted on standing in the doorway and thus blocking his view of those getting on and off the tram. (The four people milling around in the corridor closest to the door shuffled about a bit. The passive-aggressive tram driver refused to start the tram and insisted they move. They moved. The passive-aggressive tram driver then hectored the entire tram on the evils of blocking the doorway, and only re-started the tram once he'd got it all off his chest.)

:: The ejection of a (presumably drunk) passenger. Don't really know why he was ejected — he was much, much quieter than the drunk and opinionated man in orange crocs who caught my tram on Sunday night. That guy was accosting fellow passengers and trying to send them "back to their own filthy, dirty countries". This guy was silent, even as he was being escorted off the tram by…

:: yet MORE ticket inspectors!

All in twenty minutes. Not bad, really.

I have no food in the house, and no clothes ironed ready for the dayjob tomorrow — but I have vanquished the civilisation which slyly staged a coup over my kitchen sink in my absence, and surely that counts for something.

I have also spent the majority of my evening noodling through Helen Austin's youtube channel — which is a most pleasant way to spend an evening. Highly recommended. She first came to my attention when a friend sent me a link to her Childbirth Song, which happens to be both amusing and set to the tune of one of my favouritest songs ever, The Pogues' Fairytale of New York. But tonight I explored her non-comedic work, and I'm hard pressed to pick a favourite.

I foresee a CD purchase (or three) in my immediate future.

A quick reminder for those of you in or near Newcastle this Saturday (since I'll be jumping a plane tomorrow morning and may forget to blog tomorrow) that I'm doing a signing at the Angus & Robertson at Westfield Kotara, from 11am.

Come and entertain me!

Today, I practiced Not Wanting things.

It worked really well — right up until lunch, when I decidedly did not want what I had brought, but equally did not want to shell out money for something else. QUANDARY. Apathy forced me to eat the lunch I had brought, albeit with much grumbling about the sub-par situation.¹

In other news, Tess talks here of her and my participation in the freeze frame project, which I link you to because it's easier than telling the story again myself. The first photo of us has shown up online: here you can see me gawking at Postscripts #18 while Tess gawks at Shadow Queen. (The reading of the books was Tess's brilliant idea. She is clearly a marketing genius. Everyone who came near wanted to know what we were reading. Quite a few went beyond gawking at the covers of the book and started reading over my shoulder. In fact, close as that fellow was standing, he was perhaps the least obtrusive of the folks that hovered around us.)

I suppose the presence of me in this photo does put paid to the theory that I have the vampire-like ability of not appearing on film, however. Which is a touch sad. I was kinda hopeful I could hone that and never have to worry about being photographed again.

Oh, and yeah — I'll be watching Ponyo:

1. Work laid on gourmet pizza for lunch yesterday. Now I am discontent with anything I can muster up and drag in for myself. [↩]

There's an old man I see on the trams, every couple of weeks or so, has the look of decay about him. Emaciated, with wisps of papery hair clinging to the back of his grey-skinned scalp, ears grown too large for his frame, and eyes sinking into their sockets. The flesh of his eye sockets is so heavy, so ancient and stretched, that they sag open, revealing their raw pink interior, in stark contrast with the yellowed eyes above, like a basset hound caught in the pallid grey throes of chemotherapy.

His suit is neat, and pressed, although it is probably as out of date as he is, and I've only ever seen the one suit on him.

There are stories in the creases of his skin, stories in the way he moves, the way he holds his shoulders as he waits. Stories in the quiet way he accepts everyone's furtive glances, and in the weave of his well-preserved suit. A thousand stories, carefully gathered and held against the ravages of time.

But he has the look of someone who's never asked to tell any of them.

There is nothing I love more than a typo on a menu (unless perhaps it's a malapropism), and today I have an absolute corker of a typo to share with you, one of those instances where the error results in a phrase so sublime… well, to be honest, I start laughing and lose the capacity to speak in sentences:

because when we offer spite as a beverage, we do not shirk - oh no! you will have some lemon, nay, some salted lemon along with that spite!

An email from my publisher today tells me that the mass market paperback version of Shadow Queen should be available for purchase before the end of the year. This means those of you who hate and loathe the trade paperback format, or don't hate it so much as think it's simply too expensive, will have the chance to buy the smaller, cheaper format. Much more suitable for shoving in small bags and reading on buses and trains and planes.

This means the current publication date for the second book, which I've been calling Pledged (but the title is already slated for change), should be hitting shelves around March 2010.

The (first round of) publication edits for Pledged are due to land on my desk inside the next month. At which point I'll probably have to put aside the faerie novel and retreat from the world until they're done, because otherwise they'll never get done and the book won't be out in March because I'll still be slaving away over where to put my commas and everyone who's waiting to find out how on earth Matilde manages to dig herself out of the hole the first book put her in will come and bludgeon me to a paste with their trade paperback versions of the book.¹

1. Except for Tessa, who already knows what happens. But she may join in just in the interests of solidarity, I suppose. [↩]

I am growing less and less, by the day.

Last weekend, in between a quest to find the world's best jam (victorious, despite wily misdirection from the internet and two-faced cafes) and wandering about cemeteries, I had to go, of all the most horrendous things, shopping. For bras, no less, that most heinous of all heinous shopping chores. Because a year ago I stopped taking the pill, and consequently my anatomy has leaped at the chance to, er, jettison some weight.¹

Last year, I visited a plastic surgeon who took my face, cut two triangles out of it, and left me looking like Zorro had dealt with me and my infamies for good.

Today, I visited a dermatologist who, for the bargain-basement price of $350, ogled me all over for scarification possibilities, jabbed me with a needle containing (admittedly boring) drugs, and stole a piece of my thigh.²

Day by day, in chunks and slices the size of pygmy shark bites, I am being whittled away.³

1. I am not unhappy. It's ever so much easier to do simple things like, oh, run. Bend over. Jump. That sort of thing. [↩]
2. The curse of pale skin: I leave the house, and catch cancer. Dammit. [↩]
3. Luckily, I have discovered that eating with abandon can accumulate weight faster than life can carve it away from my frame, so I have no anxiety on that front. [↩]

Let it be known that I highly approve of flex.

Flex is wondrous, flex is superb, flex is the reason I did not go in to work today. Because all those extra minutes each day turn into extra hours each week — which means I've already worked today and didn't need to do it again.

This, my friends, is sheer genius.

If only it worked on novels as well, I would have already written my entire life's oeuvre and could spend this evening lolling on a couch.¹

1. Er, provided I had a couch. Note to self: buy a couch already! [↩]

Whoops: when will I learn there is no internet at my mother's house?

I'm back with the family this weekend, for birthdays and bon voyages, and I was rather counting on snatching a quiet moment to check and answer my email and update my website. But how quickly we forget, that the internet here is reliant upon mobile phone signals, and thus vanishes whenever more than one person is using a mobile phone in the vicinity. Saturday is a very mobile-phone-intensive day, as are any hours out of the 9-5 grind.

One thing my mother's house does have, that mine does not, however is TV. And do you know what's on TV on Saturday evenings round these parts? Seven gazillion hours¹ of The Simpsons episodes.

Sometime during the last week, I was chatting to work colleagues about TV episodes, and The Simpsons came up. And I said that I really liked the show, but had gotten a little complacent over it, because there just seemed so much of it on, and I never seemed to catch any new episodes. But you know what? I think I have to take it back, because I sat through around three hours of it yesterday afternoon, chuckling all the while. And nary a previously-viewed episode among the bunch (which probably has more to do with my not having a TV recently than the tv station's broadcasting policy). (Also, sitting through three consecutive hours of the one show may have had something to do with my having been up since 04:30, and running on only 4 hours sleep, and thus in possession of a brain with the consistency of stewed apple by the early evening.)

All of which got me to thinking about the delicate balance between "more" and "too much" of a good thing.

It's a good show. People are inevitably going to want more of it, which is why, in addition to continuing to air new episodes, tv stations will air reruns — to slake our thirst while we endure the delays inherent in the creative creation (vs consumption) process, but also to catch new audience members. How much is too much, however? How often can you air and re-air and re-air a single show before you've worn it away? How much of your broadcast schedule can you give over to rehashed content before you turn the audience away, because they're tired of never catching new content and come to associate a new show only with tired, pre-digested material because that's all they ever seem to catch on the airwaves?

1. okay, so this may be a slight exaggeration. maybe. [↩]

Courtesy of Holy Robot (whose work I found via PixelGirl), my new desktop:

(Click on the piccie to get the full impact. The website provides several resolutions.)

I must say, Nemesis looks quite fetching decked out in balancing panda.

Today, it being a blustery, sombre sort of day, I invaded the local cemetery, for I ain't afraid of no ghosts weeping angels. You know what this means, don't you? Oh yes. You guessed it. Cemetery photos!

I met a lass, not long ago, who had once worked at a cemetery taking photos of headstones &c, because apparently once the family stops caring for the grave, the caretakers are not allowed to halt the decay and all that history crumbles away into nothing. Which is the natural course of things, and part of what makes cemeteries a cool place to spend a rambling kind of hour.

Halfway through my walk (which didn't actually come close to circumnavigating the cemetery; I think I managed to see maybe a third of the grounds, at best), I came across a mausoleum set atop a hill. It had a roof of red-hued stained-glass scales, so that looking up was like looking through the heart of a flower, or the underside of a young, unscarred dragon.

I never did find the name of the lady buried there, but she was loved:

And she was … synchronous? Is that the word I'm looking for? Well, whatever else, she was young:

All I could make out of the fellow buried here was that he was the second son of someone or other. Not actually a dog, as I at first suspected, but I'm guessing he rather liked them.

This week I discovered many things.

I discovered (yet again) that I have very little no capacity for alcohol. Shortly thereafter I discovered (yet again) that the curse of pathological honesty is only exacerbated by the presence of alcohol. Note to self: you don't have to answer any random question put to you.

I also discovered that the Option key on my keyboard lets me print funky characters like Ω and †, œ and ø without any complicated keystrokes at all. Win! (Not that I use the Greek alphabet overmuch, you understand, but it does come in handy. Or, you know, it might. Next time I need to talk about µtorrent, for example. Shut up. It could happen.)

Have a copy of Shadow Queen you want signed?

Live in (or near) Newcastle?

If so, mark down Saturday 27 June 2009 in your calendar, as I'll be at Angus & Robertson Kotara from 11 am.

At this stage, I have no signings organised anywhere else, but if you don't live in Newcastle and you'd be interested in attending one, you should let me know, either through a comment here on the blog or by email.

I am feeling somewhat serious today, and so I point you to Richard Flanagan's closing speech at the recent Sydney Writer's Festival:

At the moment, Australian writers and readers are being asked to take a fall in order that a few rich people get richer.

… This dullest and dreariest of phrases - territorial copyright - is the drab motley thrown over a measure which will do untold damage to Australian culture. I cannot begin to convey to you the destructive stupidity of what is being proposed, nor the intense sadness and great anger that so many Australian writers feel about this proposal.

…Writers and books that matter will become like an endangered species with no habitat left to support them. The fate of most of them in the large chain and discount mega store culture will be that of marsupials in new outer suburbs, dicing with death on freeways, not knowing until that short moment of blinding light dazzle that this is no longer their home.

I highly recommend reading the full text of the speech, but for the edification of those non-Australians who read this blog, there is a proposal afoot to remove Australia's territorial copyright laws, and allow the parallel importation of books. Proponents argue it will result in cheaper books for the public.

Now, I'm all for cheaper books,¹ but the arguments for parallel importation are specious, as Richard Flanagan summarises (emphasis mine):

Of course, as the Coalition for Cheaper Books - or, as we might more accurately call it, the Coalition for Bigger Business - would point out, that's not the whole story.

This is.

What is being proposed doesn't exist in Europe or the USA. And even if US and British publishers are allowed to dump books on our market, Australian publishers will not be allowed to do the same in theirs.

In the one country in the world where the change was introduced, New Zealand, publishing has, according to the New Zealand Publishers Association, suffered, and books are now more expensive.

If it were a reciprocal arrangement — if Australian publishers were granted access to the North American buying public at the same time as the North American publishers are granted access to the Australian buying public, for example — then the story might be different. But as it stands, the current proposal isn't "opening the market": it's turning Australia into a giant remainders bin for foreign publishers.

I don't know about you, but I get plenty of foreign culture on my TV and movie screens and book shelves as it is. I don't want those to be my only options.

More detail can be found at the AusBooks site, including a video of Richard Flanagan's speech, for those who don't want to read a slab of text online.

1. Let's just say I don't know any published writers who got into this gig for the money [↩]