Sarah Monette's Blog, page 51

You are in a kitchen.

>OPEN CUPBOARD
You open the cupboard. A thin plastic bag containing approximately two cups of flour falls out. The bag impales itself on one of a pair of chopsticks that are standing, points up, in the silverware compartment of the dish drainer in the sink.

Flour begins to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>SWEAR
That's not a very constructive response, now is it?

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>TAKE BAG
If you do that, you run the risk of dislodging the chopstick. Proceed? YES|NO

>NO
Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>TAKE BAG AND CHOPSTICK
Carefully, you pick up the bag and chopstick. Flour continues to leak out of the thin plastic bag, but neither faster nor in greater quantity than before.

You are getting flour on your hands.

>S
You walk south into the pantry. It's small and dark in here, and there are a lot of bags of catfood. There are three drawers to your left.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>OPEN MIDDLE DRAWER
You open the middle drawer. Inside, there is a box of ziploc bags.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>TAKE ZIPLOC BAG
It's a challenge getting a ziploc bag out of its box with one hand, but you manage. Perhaps that swearing was helpful after all.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>OPEN ZIPLOC BAG
You open the ziploc bag.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>PUT BAG IN BAG
I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag.

>PUT THIN PLASTIC BAG IN ZIPLOC BAG
You're really challenging your dexterity tonight, aren't you? You put the thin plastic bag in the ziploc bag. It lands mostly upside down.

Flour continues to leak slowly out of the thin plastic bag, but with the ziploc bag in place it doesn't matter anymore.

>TAKE CHOPSTICK
You take the flour-covered chopstick.

>SEAL ZIPLOC BAG
You seal the ziploc bag. Take that, flour!

>N
You go north into the kitchen. One cupboard is open. There is spilled flour on the counter and one chopstick in the dish drainer.

>LAUGH
Well, really, what else can you do?

You laugh. In a minute, your husband will be laughing, too.

Accomplished!

A rough draft of "Hope Is Stronger Than Love," my episode for Shadow Unit Season 4. 11,500 words. Air date isn't until February 2012, but I feel so much better for having the story complete, even if in very rough form.

I shall now fall over.

5 things in the middle of the week

1. There's a new Submachine game: Submachine 7: The Core .

2. This is a lovely video of Zenyatta enjoying her retirement.

3. While I'm offering videos, the big cats at Big Cat Rescue really enjoy their Christmas presents.

4. There's a new octopus for the Octocam. Ursula is smaller than Deriq was, but she is every bit as fabulous.

5. I am not going to link to the story on the Republican state legislator here in Wisconsin who's trying to repeal the (new) state law aimed at abolishing "Indian mascots and other race-based team names and logos in Wisconsin public schools," nor to the story on the man in Toronto who pressured a twelve-year-old girl off his son's co-ed PeeWee hockey team, because impotent anger is bad for my blood pressure.* Instead, have some pictures of the lunar eclipse: here (wikipedia), here (National Geographic), and, oddly enough, here (DC Clubbing).

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*This would be the rhetorical trick called praeteritio. The internet makes it particularly transparent.

On Submitting Short Stories

I've had kind of a lull in short story production/publication the last couple years (mostly, I think, due to Corambis, but there's some other stuff in there, too, some writing-related, some life-related, insofar as the two can be separated), but I'm getting the machinery going again, and I thought I'd write a post about how I manage the submission process.

I've got four stories out as of today--"Coyote Gets His Own Back" at Tor.com, "The Devil in Gaylord's Creek" at Fantasy Magazine, "Hollywood and Vine: A Still Life with Wolves" at Apex, and "Learning to See Dragons" at Clarkesworld. When I was on top of my game, I had anywhere from ten to fifteen stories circulating, and I'd like to get back near that if I can. It makes me feel more like a Real Writer, even on the days when things aren't going so well.

I've sold forty short form pieces (counting stories, poems, and the things in between) since I first started submitting in 2000 (my first sale was in 2002). Plus three short stories with matociquala ("The Ile of Dogges," "Boojum," and "Mongoose"), and I'm not counting the three stories I've written for Shadow Unit , because that's more a co-op thing.

Point 1: Most of getting short stories published is persistence and obstinacy. Those forty stories have racked up one hundred eighty-three rejections, plus there's another twenty on stories that I pulled from submission to be original to my short story collections and an unknown number on stories I've either trunked or posted various places around the web. Round off to 200 rejections vs. 40 sales; that's an average of one sale for every five rejections. The most rejections on any successfully published story is seventeen, and there are three stories--"Sidhe Tigers," "Straw," and "The Yellow Dressing Gown"--that connected on the first pitch (with Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, and Weird Tales respectively).

Also, most of my short story writing career has been in the semi-pros. I have never sold a story to any of the "Big Three" (Analog, Asimov's, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) and although I keep trying, I'm not beating myself up over it either. Semi-pros can be wonderful markets--LCRW being the shining exemplar.

Point 2: The way to be (a.) successful and (b.) not insane as a short story writer is to keep stories circulating, as many as you can. Don't wait for the first one to sell before you write the second one. It took six years for my first story to sell, and I sold twenty-three stories in the meantime. Also, the more stories you have out, the less you invest in any individual submission, and this is a great help when the rejections start rolling in.

Point 3: You have to have a system. Short story markets vary dramatically in their response times, and some can sit on stories for months on end. You have to keep track of where and when each submission went out, so that you know when to query, and you have to keep track of the markets that have rejected you, so you don't submit the same story to a market twice. Believe me, as the number of stories and number of rejections mount up, it becomes a paralyzingly easy mistake to make.

I'm sure there are writers who use spreadsheets. I'm an old-fashioned girl; I use index cards. One index card for each story, with title and word count at the top, and then a list. Picking a story relatively at random, here's what the card for "Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland" looks like:

THREE LETTERS FROM THE QUEEN OF ELFLAND        5,000 words
OUT: 07/10/2001                                                             BACK: 07/17/2001
F&SF

OUT: 7/23/2001
Realms of Fantasy                      QUERY: 03/20/2002--ms lost in transit
                     RESUB: 03/21/2002                                 BACK: 05/06/2002

OUT: 05/23/2002                                                            SALE! 08/11/2002
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
It's not a perfect system: I have lost at least one index card over the years, so I have no idea which markets "Coyote Gets His Own Back" has been to. But it's infinitely better than no system at all, and I get a sense of accomplishment out of handling the fat stack of index cards that represent stories sold. It's good to have a tangible marker of progress, especially in something so Sisyphean.

Point 4: ralan.com is a wonderful resource for finding markets, keeping up to date on the state of those markets, and for staying organized as you submit.

Point 5: Be professional. Follow submission guidelines. If you want an example, my cover letter goes like this:
Dear [editor]:

Please consider the [enclosed|attached|following] [#] word [novella|short story|flash piece|poem], "[title]," for publication in [magazine].

My first four novels were published by Ace. My next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will be coming out from Tor under the pseudonym Katherine Addison. My short stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Strange Horizons, among other venues, and have been reprinted in a number of Year's Best anthologies. I have published one short story collection, The Bone Key, and another, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, is coming out next year, both from Prime Books.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

[me]
Before I had publication credits, I left that second paragraph out entirely.

Point 6: It's not your job to reject the story. It's not your job to say, "No one's going to want to buy this." It's the editor's job to decide she doesn't want to buy your story, just as it's the editor's job to sit up straight at her desk and say, "OMG I want to buy this!" Don't do the editor's job for her. Do your job. Write, submit. Write, submit. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Point 7: Be professional about rejections, too. (This can be really hard, and I know it, which is why it's worth saying.) Don't argue with the editor. Don't dwell morbidly on the rejection, or try to practice rejectomancy to figure out why they really turned your story down. Accept that the story wasn't right for the market, find some zen, and send the story back out the door.

Persistence and professionalism. And write the best damn stories you can.

5 things for the winter solstice

1. The eclipse tonight, in my tiny part of the world, will be eclipsed by snow.

2. I have accomplished Things today. Things, I tell you! Several of them Things that have needed accomplishing since sometime in August.

3. One of those Things was turning a rejected story right back out the door (no, don't take your boots off, you're not staying), and throwing another story into the eel-infested waters ring. I've got to finish editing "The Devil in Gaylord's Creek" and "To Die for Moonlight" so I can launch them out of the nest, too. And possibly unmix my metaphors, while I'm at it.

4. The winter solstice is the birthday of the protagonist of The Goblin Emperor. It's weird; I worked out Felix and Mildmay's birthdays, but I never remember when they are; I don't have the least idea when Booth's birthday is. But Maia's birthday, I remember.

5. matociquala observed (over on Twitter where she is, of course, @matociquala), that this is the first time there's been a total lunar eclipse on the winter solstice since 1638. There's a time travel story in there somewhere. I can feel it.

AKICILJ, cautionary tale edition

Greetings, O Internets! I am asking for help.

Many years ago, as a student in junior high school, I read a story in an anthology. It was very didactic, as stories in school anthologies so often are, but it made a lasting impression on me--pity it wasn't a story we were actually assigned. It was a science fiction story (which may be one reason I remember it so vividly):
Whereupon the proctor calls the cops to have him taken away, because the point of the test is that anyone who deserves to have a driver's license, or be a member of society, won't want a license after that simulation.

And Robert is dragged out, screaming, trying to convince himself that this, too, is part of the test
Does anyone recognize this story? Author? Title? Help?

5 things, for Monty Python definitions of "5"

1. On the meat front:
Went to the doctor Wednesday about the continuing nightly queasiness caused by the ropinirole (generic Requip), and I'm now on a prescription antihistamine, which both gets rid of the nausea and makes it easier for me to get to sleep. I'm not real enthused about the vast panoply of drugs I'm now taking, but in the short term, they're a good deal better than either unchecked RLS or being queasy every night, and in the long term, I'm hoping that when I can return to the exercise regimen I worked out over the summer (which is to say, when I can drive again), I'll be able to ease off on the ropinirole, which will make the antihistamine unnecessary.

My GP agreed with me that the next logical step may be a referral to the UW Sleep Clinic. If so, I will blog that for posterity, too.

2. I promised a report on Noodler's Old Dutch Sepia, ergo:
It's a perfectly nice sepia brown. I'd like a little more gray in it to get to what I think of as "sepia," but that's a quibble. More importantly, it does not read to my eye as shit-colored, which is the problem I have with most brown inks (although there, of course, YMMV). The Old Dutch Sepia is exclusive to Fountain Pen Hospital, but I find they're the easiest source for Noodler's Inks anyway, so that's not an annoyance for me. Again, YMMV.

Also, a follow-up on the Technixx and the Squeteague: MADE OF WIN. I've decided I don't want to fiddle with the Squeteague; it's gorgeous as is, even if more of a dark green than really a turquoise. It's all good.

5. The awesome Simon Tofield has a new and seasonal Simon's Cat short: "Santa Claws."

WIKTORY!

Today I have succeeded in giving blood. That makes the fourth time this year, which, allowing for broken ankles1, inevitable human frailty2, and uncooperative hemoglobin3, feels like a very satisfying achievement.

I may not achieve anything else today, but by gum, I donated blood.

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1Say it with me, ankle you are very stupid .
2Remembering the appointment, but forgetting what day it was.
3Last month, I went, but could not get a hemoglobin count above 12. Today, the first stick got a 12.4, and when we tried again, it came up an entire point. Baffled, but not arguing.

5 things: the winterness of you

1. Happy birthday (yesterday) to coffeeem and to matociquala 's Giant Ridiculous Dog!

2. My second Ellery Queen post is up at tor-dot-com, here.

3. Yesterday, heresluck and I braved the winterness of Wisconsin to go bookstore trolling. I picked up cmpriest 's Boneshaker and Dreadnought to give as xmas gifts (having given h.l. our extra copy of Boneshaker--I am flinging the steampunk zombies far and wide this holiday season), and had excellent book-fu on my own account:
Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (I'm hoping this will be more the book I wanted The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers to be).
Godbeer, Richard. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England.
Kater, Michael H. Hitler Youth.
Sigmund, Anna Maria. Women of the Third Reich (not quite as exciting as if I'd found Jill Stephenson's Women in Nazi Germany, but still).
4. There's even more winter over in Minnesota.

5. When I was buying Boneshaker and Dreadnought, the owner of A Room of One's Own did a double-take at my check and said, "Are you Sarah Monette the science fiction writer?" And when I agreed that I was, she said, "Are they going to put your books out again? Because I get a lot of people asking about them." And I told her about the rights and my plan to find a small press, and she mentioned the TOTALLY INSANE prices The Virtu is going for on eBay, and so on.

I've had conversations like that with booksellers before, but they've always been in-genre (Dreamhaven, Larry Smith, etc.). So having the conversation again with someone who sells all kinds of books feels like, in the middle of a lot of discouragement about my career, a kind of encouraging milestone.

A little seasonal celebration. Of gingerbread.

I am not, in general, a big fan of the holiday season. I loathe commercial "Christmas" music (due to having been in a variety of choir groups as a kid, I know the words to almost all of it, which means, oh yes, I can be earwormed in a heartbeat), and of course, you can't go into a store after, say, mid-November, without being assaulted with the stuff. It tends to make a person a little tense and resentful about the holiday in question.

But what I do like are gingerbread houses.

Cake Wrecks is featuring gingerbread houses for their Sunday Sweets today (i.e., the one day of the week when CW celebrates amazing cakes instead of trainwrecks). Jen linked to the Artisan Cake Company's blog entry about amazing gingerbread houses, which linked to the winners from the 2008 National Gingerbread House Competition (which include a gingerbread CAROUSEL), which led me, after a little Googlework, to the photographs of the 2010 competition (which include what I swear is a gingerbread replica of Fallingwater).

If you're going to click through to just one picture however, this one, of the octopus building a gingerbread house with some help from his crustacean friends (the work of Highland Bakery in Atlanta), is totally the way to go. That is an octopus who is happy in his work.

So whatever you celebrate at this time of year (Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, New Year's...), I hope it's a very happy one. I'll be over here with my fingers in my ears.