I think I'm getting beat into the ground what with school and work and soccer and writing. I'm tired and worn out. I won't say much about school except to say I'm frustrated. I like the Freud, though. A lot. And Chris Baty of NaNoWriMo was fabulous and his book No Plot? No Problem was great, too. Monday I had to read for school, Tuesday, I had to go to school. Wednesday we celebrated my father's birthday which means I organized everything etc, and of course, had to socialize instead of write. After that I had to read for school and try to work on the Shards of Crimson galleys. Last night I worked on the outline for Scandal so that I wouldn't wallow today. But when I got home, I had to set up my son's wireless Nintendo DS, and naturally Windows Firewall made it too freaking hard. But success after not too much trouble. I swear, if I had the money I'd get a Mac.

Also, I should officially say that my agent search was over a while back. I've signed with Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency. A good thing, although it was almost a wasn't thing.

Scandal (nee The Rake) is coming along well I think. I'm maintaining word count, and the story is complexifying into something I'm really excited about. This was after I was advised by my agent to just start over. Ouch. That hurt, but I needed to hear it. I knew it already, but the last year-of-the-black-hole had me totally confused and lost. Never a good thing. So, I got a good hard kick in the pants to mostly put it back the way it was, only better. Which seems to be what's happening. My option period for Possession is up, I believe, on October 12, so still waiting on that. No word on that. I spend undue amounts of time imagining how I'll take the news that he hates it. After I have Scandal whipped into shape, I have to do Bloodhand. I got excellent feedback from my agent, but I've hardly had time to do more than skim.

My son has a soccer game tomorrow and right now I have to go cook dinner. I may just let him eat cake.

Today I read through what I've been working on and ended up making some immediate changes. Nothing drastic. We'll see. I'm doing OK word count-wise. The paper read-through always helps me see what's working and what's not. So, I fixed some stuff that wasn't. Soldiering on. I have a partial chapter I need to do some brainstorming on and then finish it tomorrow. I have some other issues to get clarity on before I proceed much further since the notion I have simmering requires a total reapproach to setting and situation. But that's good. It'll be cool. I'll know more tomorrow.

Yesterday I went to see Jet Li's new movie, Fearless. The opening was great. Most of the following 30 minutes or so should have been drastically cut, but the rest was really good. Thought provoking and interesting. Jet Li at his smoldering best. I just love martial arts movies. And I particularly like the ones set in historical China. The editor should be shot. And whoever decided to water down the love interest should also be shot. They could have cut the silly 30 minutes and expanded the love interest and had a totally fantastic film. There was this weird clown-like character that was so patently like the clowns in Shakespeare I kept waiting for someone to break out in iambic pentameter. Except this guy didn't serve as reason disguised.

Today my son and I went to the Antique Fair, where they block off the downtown and everyone shows their antiques outside. Always fun. But too freaking hot. At least I brought a hat. At first he didn't want to go, but I made him, and when we got there he remembered he's liked it in the past. And then we found this cool vendor who had stuff from the Middle East and South East Asia. I bought a mask from Tibet and he got a knife thing (very small) and another vendor came over and talked to him about collecting and then gave him a book on collectible pen knives and talked to him about how to start and care for a collection. He was thrilled to pieces! Me, too, actually. Oddly enough, he later mentioned how great it is that people with cool art and artifacts give you free stuff. When I suggested that it was perhaps his interest in the cool stuff that prompted people to give him things, he disagreed. His primary argument against me was that Balu (the ceramic artist he loves) has cool stuff and she gives him free art. I let him win that one. He'll understand much later. He has no idea how charming his enthusiasm can be. He'll stand in front of some display or exhibit gushing about how fantastic something is, and he'll stop people and show them! In the meantime, let him think it's just that cool people give free stuff to kids. He's right in a way.

Yesterday was the day from heck. Got up at 4:30 am, went to the gym where I had to read the Freud I didn't the day before. The bright side is that I am now two chapters ahead instead of one behind. Then I went to work, did a bunch of database crap until it was time to pick up my son and get him to soccer practice. Then I went directly to school, talked about Freud and did the workshop thing. Came home for 15 minutes where my son was stressing out over some homework. Fortunately (oh, bad mom!) he preferred that I leave him alone. So I ate some toast and went off to the soccer board meeting because that's my volunteer soccer job. (Gotta do it!) Took notes, got home 9:15ish. Supervised son's final draft of his homework, got it printed off and him to bed. Then I fell into bed and read the NaNoWriMo's guy's book, No Plot, No Problem! until I was wound down enough to sleep, which was later than it should have been. I did not write at all. I didn't even have time to notebook. Frown.

Today, I did have time to write, and I got a respectible amount done. I haven't read back much, but things seem to be shaping up pretty well. Hopefully this weekend I can get a lot written and then print it out and see where things need to go and where I need to cut.

What else? I'm tired. Oh, I remember. There's a new gym elf. He has two tatoos and muscles o' plenty. Nothing excessive. He's not quite the original gym elf, who I miss desperately inspiration-wise. But I can definately see this guy inspiring some hero thoughts. There's another guy who isn't quite gym elf. He's something else and I haven't figured it out yet. Not an elf. More like a-- he'd be a jaguar or something sleek and kind of dangerous. I suppose it's horrible of me to objectify these exercising gentlemen like this. Ok, so I'm shallow. It's 5:00 am by the time I get there. I am incapable of anything BUT shallow thoughts at that hour. I'm lucky I have any at all. Elves and jaguars. Not so bad I guess.

I have school tomorrow so today I had to try to do a bunch of reading and critiquing. Very time consuming. I blew off the reading for tonight so I'd have time to write. Which means I'll be reading at the gym in the morning. It went OK, I think. Then I had to break off school work to feed my son. He got soup, bacon and a toasted bagel and cream cheese. Bad mom. Behind on her school work and now this. After that, I finished the critiquing and by then it was time to read to my son. Then furious writing and I have barely time to blog about school on Tuesday. Which was totally cool because Chris Baty of nanowrimo fame came to talk to us.

Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November. You commit to writing a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days. (That's 1,667 words per day, which isn't all that bad.) He was really funny and insightful about writing. So, here's some quick hits on the cool stuff he said, some just partial phrases as you'll note:

running amok in your own imagination

the human brain is a procrastination engine

your imagination will rise to the occasion.

intuition and improvisation

I wish I had time to elaborate, but as a writer who is currently working hard at letting my intuition be heard, these were important things for me to hear.

Tired. Off to bed with Freud unread.

Today I took the opportunity to check out the online archives of the Royal Society of London which has been publishing continuously since 1665. That's 341 years. Until December, the archives are free and open to the public. Subscriptions are thereafter astronomic, but they hint that individual articles can be downloaded at some supposedly modest price. Let's hope. But between now and December, I'll be looking around and downloading as much as possible. It looks to be in conjunction with JSTOR, so I think their pricing structure is geared toward academia. Herschel published a lot during the Regency. There were several articles on shipbuilding, lots of astronomy, calculus and chemistry. And, I was thrilled to see, they published meteorlogical observations of the London weather.

So, for example, I can now report to you that on January 7, 1812,at 9:00 am, the recorded temperature at the Society apartments was 33 degrees outside and (if I'm reading this right) 45 degrees inside. (Does that make you appreciate central heating?) The barometer was 29, 63 with winds from the west. The weather was reported as "Snow. Much snow in the night" Total inches of rain for the month was 0,779 inches. That is a freaking lot of rain. These weather reports looked to have been regularly published. Oh joy!

Writing is going OK. I'm not churning out the pages just now, but I'm making progress, and given my tender state of recent days, that's OK. It's late but I think I can get a few more words out before I risk starting out my week sleep deprived.

It's been a rough week for me. School is . . . taking more time than I thought it would and at much more cost than I thought. When I judge a contest or read a fellow author's stuff, I have to be nice, but I say what I think, honestly. In neither case (contest or critique) is the writer served by me saying things I don't think are true. And in the case of another author, I know I'd be darn upset if someone didn't tell me something sucked if they thought it did. But this workshop/seminar is a real challenge. So far, most of my fellow students are horribly naive.

For several reasons too complicated and personal to mention just now, I have decided to get stricter with myself about listening to that little voice in the back of my head that whispers, Hey, you should do (fill in the blank). I have come to the conclusion that the inner voice is right more often than it's wrong. I am not, by the way, referring only to writing.

Speaking of which, I'm doing a complete and utter rewrite of The Rake, which I have retitled Scandal. Basically I'm starting over. I like what little I have so far. Up until tonight I had three chapters, and I was staring at chapter one today and working on it a bit. Then I got to chapt 2 and I thought, gee, this is more interesting than chapter 1. I should just toss out all of chapter 1. But I didn't want to throw out 1500 words that were pretty good, and then I thought I could just leave chapter 1 there and see if I couldn't do something with it. Then I realized I needed to listen to the instinct. So I'm now starting with chapter 2, and it's already much much better. I've been working on chapter 3 (now chapter 2) and am marginally happy.

Today my son had a soccer game in another town. I looked up the exact street address of the field and then got directions and had them with me. I have admitted before I am directionally deprived. It's a sad affliction. Oh, how things went awry, and it wasn't even my fault. It's a 30 minute drive. We left the house with 15 mintues of Carolyn-is-lost-again time built in. I decided to take the back way to the freeway rather than drive through town and have to stop at all the stoplights. Oh. Fudge. It took 30 mintues to go about five miles because, as we found out, there was some sort of garbage disaster on the freeway right before the on-ramp I would have taken if I had gone through town. 101 was just one lane at that point and the CHP was busy scraping mounds of garbage off the freeway. So we make it to the field's address about 12 minutes before game time, only there's no field there. Nothing except a sign that says no soccer parking. After a few frantic phone calls I learn the physical address of the field has NOTHING to do with how you get there. The field is in fact, half a mile back the way we came and a quarter mile down an access road that does not allow vehicles. Sigh.

So after the soccer game, we went to Art in the Park a yearly event which I have been taking my son to for 5-6 years now. Good Art was had by all. We bought some stuff, listened to a great band, ate good food and looked at art of all sorts. We may go back tomorrow.

When we got home, I fell asleep for two hours, then started working on Possession. Not writing, but on the chapter outline and on pulling together a Miss Snark inspired statement of how of write the guts of a query. Very helpful. I feel much more focused now. I'm not even depressed that I'll be throwing out about 10 chapters. Those chapters don't have anything to do with the story it's turning out to be so I can pretty cheerfully wave goodbye. Not that I don't wish I weren't doing that, but they were brave and loyal explorers for me. Because of their sacrifice, I know what my story is not. And that's a good thing. And now, to bed. There's another soccer game tomorrow and I have to get up early.

I am so very much in need of a weekend. I've been notebooking Possession a lot and I am making progress. So I'm feeling OK about that. But all this other sh-- er, stuff keeps happening and I have to spend my evenings pulling sh-- er, stuff together as promised and ZAP, like Miss Snark at the Crap-o-meter, it's 9:30 or 10:00 pm or worse and I haven't done the writing I need to. Like tonight. I'm going to bed. But, I would like to reassure everyone (that would be me, actually) that Possession is solidifying and I am happy with the notions I've come up with. The stupid ones are starting to drop away in favor of more interesting ones.

From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.
-Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)

I've been a bad writer. Bad, bad writer. As in not much. I have a few excuses which I'll get to later. I won't talk too much about school. It's keeping me busy, but not overwhelmingly. So far no one is a wretched writer, far from it, so reading MS isn't anything like as painful as, say, contest judging can be. I've been engaging in avoidance behavior (as in avoiding writing) so I've been reading massive amounts. I'm not even sure I can recall all the books I've read. I did read laurel K. Hamilton Cerulean Sins which I enjoyed a lot. I know some people miss the old style Anita Blakes, but every series needs to evolve or it gets stale. I like the new Anita because it allows LKH to get Anita and Jean-Claude together even more tightly without the series becoming about Anita and Jean-Claude only. I like her writing. I also read a couple of meh books.

Today, I threw one away without finishing it even though it was well written, and the intimate scenes were hot. This particular story revolved about a love that began when the couple were teenagers, and that just never rings true for me. Teenage love just can't be a touchstone for adults. How can it be? How can an adult some 13 or whatever years later not think, Sheesh! I was in "love" then, but I had no idea what real life is like...? The hero was some sort of weird special forces guy, but the story just never felt deep to me. Everything was shallow. Did Not Work For Me.

Then I read a book called Improbable which I loathed at the start. Absolutely loathed. I hated all the characters and thought they were horrible, hateful awful and depressing people. The premise of the book was a fascinating extrapolation of probability theory, special relativity and quantum mechanics. The author just flat out stuck in awkward scenes in which some character got to play a professor explaining the history, highlights and theory of the subjects above. I felt like I was being lectured to (I was) and frankly, I skimmed/skipped over those parts because I already get enough of the subjects not to need to sit through a freaking lecture on them, thank you. BUT the writing was pretty good except for the clunker parts and there were these inklings things might improve. About half way through, things did improve and the last quarter of the book was taut and thrilling. Not a keeper, but still, interesting reading. I'd read other stuff by him.

Writing-wise, I've worked a bit on Possession. What I need to do is notebook. I thought at first that I would have my h/h intimate very quickly, but I think that's wrong now. I need to do something a little different. Tomorrow at the gym I will notebook my way out of this and be on track. I'm tweaking chapter 4 and re-doing it from the heroine's pov. I may not do hero pov in this book. We'll see.

In other news, it seems Marjorie M. Liu has withdrawn her story from the Shards of Crimson Anthology. Bummer. Hopefully they'll get the cover art redone quickly.

Agent-wise, one really nice rejection -- obviously she's just not looking for romance authors like me, since the rejection was based on the query only. And one that kind of made me raise my eyebrows and think she might want to send a different boilerplate rejection to authors who have a track record.

But, I want to sign with the agent I talked to last week. She gets me and my writing and she's what I need. So, I'll call tomorrow.

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