Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 196

Expanding The Household

It's been fifteen years, and I think I'm about ready again. Well, I was willing a long time ago, but now I'm able.

That's right. We're getting a dog.

I went down to the shelter yesterday and we found a very sweet miniature Australian shepherd; a working dog. (They get a little antsy if they don't have a Job, and I sympathize. And there's plenty for her to do around here.) Venturing into the shelter is a particular type of hell for me–I want to take home every dog there and feed them and love them, but I can't. I was even prepared not to find a dog who wanted me, but my luck was good–as it always is, with canines. She looked at me, I looked at her, and I swear she cocked her head and said "GO HOME NOW PLEASE?"

It was that simple. Just like always.

Unfortunately, I had to explain that she'd be staying there just a little bit longer to handle the spaying, but I don't think she understood. In any case, I'll be bringing her home very soon, and the upheaval will be glorious. I was surrounded by canines growing up, and it's always been odd to not have a dog during my adult life. Now that I'm in a position where I can take care of one, huzzah! It will be good for me to have a hound around, it will keep me active, and oh, my God, I've missed having a dog so much.

I suspect the excitement (plus the tail end of a vicious flu bug) is what woke me up at 3am this morning. I gave in to the inevitable, got up and wrote for an hour before hitting the treadmill, and felt Very Virtuous. Still do, though I suspect I will need a nap before long. Before then, though, I'm on a roll. I have managed to introduce the assassin into the mix, and we're about to have a lovely knife-throwing, and a little blood shed, and an oath or two sworn in good faith. All in all, it's not a bad way to spend a morning.

I'm too excited to settle to much beyond writing and preparing the house for tomorrow. So, there it is. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Over and out!

Related posts:Random Friday
Back On The Chain Gang
…sick…

Gormenghast to Ziggurat

I can't afford to get sick. I have too blasted much to do. Unfortunately, my body is not listening, recalcitrant thing that it is.

For those of you asking: I don't know what's going on with Those Who Fight Monsters. It was supposed to ship in March; the publisher will have a clearer idea of what's up. (ETA: There's a giveaway here.)

I've also finished the Gormenghast novels. I was ambivalent about Titus Groan, I quite liked Gormenghast, but Titus Alone lost all the goodwill the first two books earned. (Can we please stop having the Callow Adventurer being so Irresistible To The Laydeez? GAH.) Peake's genius for names and the decaying Gothick splendour of the castle itself were magical, and I could even see the first two books as a sort of social allegory. Steerpike was my favourite character, with Fuschia and the Doctor as close seconds; but Peake betrayed every single woman in the book dreadfully. Anything with ovaries was a cipher, and not a very well-drawn one at that. However, props to Peake for taking Steerpike to his logical conclusion, and not flinching. I said it before and I'll say it again: I think Dr. Prunesquallor was Peake himself, and Titus was what Peake wanted to view himself as. This leaves Steerpike as the id, or the Shadow. (My vote is for Shadow, but I might be biased.) Once Steerpike was gone, the book ended. If the story belongs to the character that changes the most (as Laura Kalpakian, I believe, said, though I've attributed it before to Karen Fisher), then the Gormenghast books belong to Steerpike.

End result: I'm glad I read it, though I probably never will again. I may go back to Gormenghast and read for Steerpike, but that's about it.

A majority of this weekend will be spent sucking on cough drops and helping with the grand reopening of Cover to Cover, my favourite local indie bookstore. I was down there today, breathing in the new paint fumes as bookcases (recently cleaned of smoke, the old location suffered a dreadful fire) were carried in, as well as various sundries–and I just got a call telling me that the gigantic ziggurat of book boxes was making its way into the store. The books were lovingly cleaned and taken care of by the staff at Servicemaster (who have been incredibly wonderful, and gentle, thorough, and kind) and are almost ready to go up on the shelf. We just have to drag the shelves around and reassemble them.

So yeah, there's my weekend. There will be pizza, and sore muscles, and a great deal of dust and excitement. All in all it's a good way to finish saying farewell to a character or two. The old Cover to Cover saw many a long discussion with my writing partner, where we both hashed over aspects of a book (hers or mine, didn't matter) or generally noodled on about writing. Soon we'll start treating the book-lined walls of a new place to long discussions of plot and genre and animus, pop culture and lit fic and ships and seas and sailing wax, cabbages and kings.

You can tell I'm excited. I have a ton of pictures from the moving in. Including pictures of Shirley the penguin, perched on a high shelf as is her wont, staring dramatically at the ceiling. (Yes, we have a two-foot high plastic penguin, and her name is Shirley. Just one of the many reasons I love this store.)

Oh, and there's more trouble to get Bannon & Clare into as well. I think it's about time they met an Adventurer…

Related posts:Good News, Bad News, Farewell
What I'm Reading
The Shadow Journal is now up!

Valley Of Plot Tangles

A busy day looms ahead of me! First off, I'm over at Tynga's place with an interview and giveaway for Paranormal Spring Break. Also, neat stuff: how pain and the sense of smell appear to be linked.

We're right on the cusp of spring. The plum tree out back is dragging its feet over blooming; the snowball bush down the road only has a few lone petals standing out like white rags on a sinking ship, the birds are going nuts but the squirrels are oddly quiet. It feels like the world's holding its breath before the plunge into blooming and growing again. I'm okay with this.

…I just deleted a whole long entry about how terrified I am about taking on yet another project that involves a type of book I've never written before. Going outside my comfort zone is good; I think I can do this, I think it will stretch me and I will (hopefully) grow. Of course, I could end up in a flaming wreck on my living room floor, sobbing and drooling with my cerebellum fused, my agent and editors and readers dumping me in disgust. Too soon to tell. Of course, the fear threatens paralysis, and sheer stubborn bloody-mindedness is the only way through.

Good thing I'm good at that. Or at least, well-practiced.

With that cheerful thought, I'm going to go get started on the rest of the day. Yea though I walk through the valley of plot tangles, I shall fear no revision, for I've got the Muse chained up in the basement and neither of us are leaving until we've given this our best shot. *cracks knuckles* I may end up a drooling mess, but at least I'll have tried it. That's all I can hope for.

Over and out.

Related posts:Hyperactive Monkey Day
A Merry-Go-Round Full Of TNT
Time To Wheeze Out The Old Brain

Questions, Questions

I've been receiving a deluge of questions lately, some of which I can answer in the upcoming podcast (still hard at work on that, in between Other Stuff) and some I can just answer here.

* Are you going to be at X convention? Or, when will you visit my town? Unfortunately, I don't travel much. This is not solely because I do not wish to be pawed by a stranger, though that is a consideration. A more compelling consideration is that my kids are not at an age where I can leave them for overnight trips, childcare is expensive, and I can't afford multiple trips for all of us either. So, for the time being, I am extraordinarily limited in the conventions or signings I can attend. This may change in the future–I wish I could travel and see you, dear Reader–and when it does, I'll let you know.

If you would like to get a book signed by me, there is a way to do it! Just contact Cover to Cover Books. They can ship signed copies of anything out on the shelves; their shipping is quite reasonable. C2C has sent signed copies of books to the Philippines, Australia, Britain, and numerous other places. Plus, they're indie.

* Is there an excerpt from Defiance yet? You bet. It's right here, courtesy of the fine folks at Penguin AU.

* Who is the model on the cover of the Strange Angels books? I don't know. Authors generally have very little (read: no) control over their covers. I don't know the model's name, who she works for, or what kind of sandwiches she likes. All I know is that she was a professional model we picked out of a laydown–there were three choices, and I think the other two were blonde, so they weren't Dru, and that was it. If you like the covers, tell the good folks at Razorbill. They'll be happy to hear your feedback.

* Can you send me an ARC for review? I hate to break it to you, but I only get ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) for the first book in any series, and even then I generally only get one or two for my reference shelf. If you want to get on a publisher's review list, go to the publisher's website and find a link for their marketing/press department, and make your case to them. I can't get free books sent to you.

* Can I interview you? I try to respond to all interview requests. Sometimes they fall through the cracks–if you don't hear from me within a week, ping me again! I get 50-100 emails a day just through my website alone; unfortunately I can't answer all of them and sometimes an interview request will get buried under the landslide.

There are more, but I think that's about it for today. I am itching to get back to the gryphon stables and get my characters in some more trouble. Plus, the next scene involves capacitors. BIG FUN. I am actually wriggling with delight while writing this book, it's amazing.

Related posts:More Release Madness!
Monday Questions
Signed & Personalized Demon's Librarian!

From Hives To Cabana Boys

I'm starting out the week with hives. Actually, they started yesterday. I think I'm allergic to becoming vertical and achieving waking consciousness, since that's when they happen. Solution: stay in bed all day. (BRILLIANT!) Only I can't. (Bummer.) Besides, today I need to get two characters out of the Wark and separated, and introduce An Adventurer into the tale. That will be too much fun for me to stay away. I am literally chortling every time I think about this particular character's entrance.

Here's Courtney Milan on 99-cent ebooks:

Now, I don't deny that books are imperfect substitutes for each other. And I don't deny that this results in price competition. But as a general rule, the better the author, the harder it is to find a good old-fashioned economic substitute for her. Conversely, the worse the author, the easier it is to substitute. It's really easy to bore people. It's hard to entertain them. And the authors who can make you laugh consistently–or keep you on the edge of your seat–or have you reaching for your hankie–you know they are not interchangeable. (Courtney Milan)

The underlying assumption in the "race to the bottom" plenty of analyses of e-publishing are based on is that books are interchangeable units, which may be so for some (very limited) statistical purposes but is definitely NOT so for most statistical purposes, or in practical reality. This core assumption raises its ugly head in a number of ways, but most often (and most maddening) when non-professionals lecture writers about e-publishing. If I had a dime for every time someone not in the industry tried to "school" me with fuzzy illogic based on this assumption, I wouldn't have to write. I'd be relaxing on a beach somewhere with the cabana boy rubbing my feet.

Anyway. That's a rant for another day.

Spring proceeds apace, with new projects, trees just beginning to bloom, and the Scotch broom down the street sending up its yellow flags. The usual storms are coming through, the usual restlessness taking hold. I have itchy wandering feet, and it's not just because of the hives.

See you around.

Related posts:Publishing And Misplaced Punishment
William Morris Google Memo "Off Target"
Shake That Into Place

Turning In Different Directions

Lots of little things to report today!

* I'm over at Orbit today, talking about why series drag on, and why they should end. Also, why I think James Bond would be a bad writer.

* Last night I ran a short #askauthor session on Twitter. (I forgot how fun those were!) Don't worry–if you missed it, you can hop over to the podcast page and submit questions that way. I am working on the next podcast; it will probably be out next week sometime.

* We're coming up on the release of Defiance, the fourth in the Strange Angels series. Also, Penguin AU put an excerpt up.

* The last Jill Kismet book, Angel Town, is now finished and in production, ready for copyedits and proofs. I'm having a difficult time saying goodbye to Jill; writing her got me through some terrible moments. But I'm glad she's reached where she needs to be as a character, and I think both she and I will be just fine. I'm very excited to start in on Bannon & Clare, and turn the engine in my brain in a different direction.

That's pretty much all the news from Casa Saintcrow. I'm hard at work, as usual, and the plum tree in my back yard is starred with a few blossoms. It's not quite spring yet…but it's getting there.

I can't wait.

Related posts:A Very Fond Farewell
Got My Fire Back
Good Morning, All

Good News, Bad News, Farewell

The good news is, I'm up to the lower limit of my pre-injury speed during my morning runs. The bad news is, I'm only allowed to run three miles. Two steps forward, one step back. At least I'm running again, and the endorphins are smoothing out jagged edges. Thank God.

I am slowly chipping away at reading Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. The first book (Titus Groan) I only made my way through by the skin of my teeth. The second, Gormenghast, is already much more palatable. I suspect this was where the story wanted to start anyway. I am completely in shameful love with Steerpike; he is such a marvelous Machiavellian with perfectly-nuanced motivations. And Peake's naming of his characters! By far this is the aspect I enjoy most. Prunesquallor the doctor (who I suspect very much is Peake's unconscious authorial insertion, even though Titus seems like a more-conscious one), Deadyawn the Headmaster, Flay and Swelter, Sepulchrave the Earl of Groan–the names, they do EVERYTHING.

Also, I tremble to report I've finished the second round of revisions on Angel Town. I feel…ambivalent about this. The process of saying goodbye to Jill as a character is a pretty damp one. The snapback of finishing a book is compounded by the snapback of finishing a whole series. I'll send the revisions off later this afternoon. I am giving myself that long to bid farewell.

Anyway, the spring rains are moving in, there are errands to be done, and I really should do something about the hoovering and the laundry that piled up while I was working in sprints this weekend to get the revisions done. That might help the spinning engine in my head wind down a bit.

See you around, dear Readers.

Related posts:A Very Fond Farewell
Snapback
News, And A Little Process

My Wish For A Taser

I left the house without having coffee today. This was perhaps a mistake, but I was going so fast (long story, suffice to say I had shit to get done before 11AM) I didn't have time. I chose a workout instead, which was probably a good thing. Anyway, I reached my last stop–a grocery store with a Starbucks–and decided to have someone else make me coffee.

I have rarely wished so hard for a taser in my LIFE.

When you're got a line three people deep behind you at a Starbucks in a grocery store, you don't start stacking sixteen different one-liter bottles of soda pop on the counter one. at. a. time. You especially don't pause between each one to tell the poor girl behind the register what you like about the goddamn pop. You don't insist that she ring them up in a specific order. And for Christ's sake, when she's trying to fix your bathtub of an iced drink, don't lean your massive gut ON THE COUNTER and stuck your ass out while you root around in the pen cup by the register that's clearly for employee use only. WTF, dude? Then, when she's finished making your drink and clearly trying to call me over so I can get some goddamn caffeine in me, you should further not park in front of the register with your cart, attempting small talk with everyone, staring at her like you want to ask her out on a date. Here's a clue: she's not interested, neither am I, and a Starbucks line is possibly the most dangerous place on earth to pull these shenanigans. The people behind you are ADDICTED. You are between the junkies and their fix.

Hence, my wish for a taser. I kept muttering "No jury in the world would convict me."

Of course, the fact that I was on semi-emergency footing, had a List of Things to Accomplish, and am a breath away from finishing a round of revisions on the last book in a series probably did not help. Today, my mantra is "Okay. Let's get this bitch to Mount Doom." (Which, by the way, is one more line to love Sarah Michelle Gellar for delivering so well.)

You don't have to keep stepping backward. I've had some coffee. Really, I'm okay. *twitch* I'm not going to hurt anyone. *twitch twitch* Really, I'M ALL RIGHT.

Over and out.

Related posts:Read For Free!
I Get A Day Off
Not Funny Anymore

Friday Four

* First off, a collection of links on how to help after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Plus, emergency numbers and live reports.

* This week's writing post (Habit and Ritual) was on Wednesday. I am putting together ideas for a new podcast episode. Now's the time to get your questions in!

* Interesting article on Ayn Rand. I always wonder, when reading about Rand, how coverage or criticism would be different if she was male. But that's a question/rant for another day.

* Let's not forget that Governor Scott Walker and the Republicans in Wisconsin have basically given the finger to working families with a series of shenanigans. The cynic in me says that now that the bill is signed, the mainstream media will move on and shove more Charlie Sheen and disaster pr0n down our throats and hope we forget all about it. Let's hope I'm wrong. Also, Peter King's hypocritical McCarthyite witch hunt, America isn't broke, and Murder City just over our border.

Today I have to get some work done, so I'm signing off and turning off the Internet connection. I just can't handle any more. Have a safe weekend out there, dear Readers.

Related posts:Veteran's Day
Go In Peace
Random Tuesday

Ritual And Habit

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames. Check us out!

Also, the complete Dante Valentine omnibus is now officially released!

***

I think it was Flaubert who kept rotten apples in a desk drawer. He would open the drawer, lean over, and take a deep whiff to evoke autumn.

Everyone's got their something.

Ritual and habit: the best of slaves, the worst of masters. The habit of sitting down and getting your hands on the keyboard can take you through when your discipline is faltering, but your habit of "needing" to catch a particular television show can interfere with your writing time. The habit of consistently saving and backing up your work can save your cookies, but the habit of surfing the Net during writing time can cut your productivity by an order of magnitude.

To little people, the world is a big and scary place, and rituals are comforting. To bigger people, social rituals–weddings, funerals, what have you–serve as social glue, give a framework for celebration, and provide closure. To practicing witches or occultists, ritual is a way to build a trigger allowing you to step into another psychic "space." Human beings love rituals. We can't get enough of them. Left to ourselves, we'll make a ritual out of anything. Even the abstraction of writing.

There are two varieties of Things You Need To Learn To Have A Shot At Being A Working Writer–two species, if you will. I call them the two currents. One is the method of swimming against, the other is finding the best way to swim with. Ritual and habit help with both.

We're very fond of swimming against. The idea that all we need is a little willpower and some hard work is a very intoxicating one with a lot of cultural weight behind it. The whole diet and self-help industries, for example, are largely built on the notion that if you just have enough willpower you can "fix" yourself. (That brings up a rant, but that's–say it with me–another blog post.) The Puritans thought enough hard work and repression could fix just about anything, and we are heirs to that obsession. For some things it works very well, and for some short-term creative endeavours it's a godsend. Sometimes, the sheer stubbornness of swimming against has taken me through several ticklish situations, especially that one memorable 48-hour revision stint. (I was unwashed and a very cranky cupcake afterward, let me tell you.) I have nothing against the swimming against. It's just not the only way, and for a lot of things it's not terribly efficient either.

Swimming with, on the other hand, is the process of taking one's own laziness and habits and making them work for you. An essential part of a writer's career is learning to manage one's laziness in the most efficient way. Human beings like habit because it's easy. The needle slips into the groove, we slide into the track, and a significant amount of effort vanishes. We can just follow the groove. The initial investment of making a habit is swimming against; the payback is when the habit has become a groove and we're kept in it without much effort on our part.

This is why every writer needs a working knowledge of how to build a habit, what constitutes a ritual, and the borders of their own laziness. This working knowledge can't just sit there, it has to work. In other words, the writer needs to do something with it.

Building a habit takes anywhere from four days to a month of doing the same thing, whether it's smoking a cigarette at 10pm, peeing in the shower, reading for a half-hour before bed, or picking one's nose. Or carrying a notebook everywhere, jotting down dialogue on your lunch break, eating the same pastrami on rye for twenty years, tapping the dashboard when you go through a yellow light, or knocking on wood. Rest assured, most of your day is made up of habits. Gurdjieff swore people live in a sort of waking sleep, robotic. He's probably right, only I don't think you have to work yourself to exhaustion to be granted a taste of consciousness. I think habits are a grand thing–I mean, I like that my heart has the habit of beating–and the gift we have is the ability to choose a few habits all on our own.

A ritual is a set of actions. (The actions may have a religious or social meaning, yes, let's not get bogged down.) One of my rituals when I finish a very emotionally draining scene is to get up and walk around the room I'm in, clockwise. It leaves the scene in the story where it belongs, instead of it leaking agony inside my head. I often touch the statue of Ganesh on my writing desk when I'm about to start a new story. The plum tree in my back yard gets a cup of milk the first day I notice it's bloomed. I read an edit letter once, then scream and stamp and throw it across the room; a week later I go back and find out it's not really that bad. (That's a ritual of processing, right there.)

To get your habits to work for you, first you have to figure out what habits you have. The easiest way to do this is to try to start a new habit. Do one thing at a specific time for four days in a row, and each time you do it, write it down. If this is hard to do, if you keep forgetting, take a look at what habit you might be inadvertently cutting across. Bingo, you've found one. Once you've practiced this process a few times, you'll start spotting habits everywhere. You can't change what you can't see–spotting your habits is the first step.

Here's a secret: it is much easier to replace a habit than it is to lose one. I call this the Addiction Theory of Self-Change, with varying degrees of tongue-in-cheek. I know several people who have substituted playing with a pen or pencil or chopstick or what-have-you at all times for smoking, which seems to work okay until stressors pile up. I myself have substituted working a heavy bag for self-injury for years. Currently I'm trying to substitute deep breathing for my obsessive email-checking. (We'll see how that one works out.) If you can't break a habit, work it around by degrees until you've replaced it with a better one.

Rituals are a little different. I always end my books with the same finis. I always sit and stare for a few moments after I've typed it, while the engine in my brain slips its traces and starts the rebound process. I always do the same things on a release day–no, I will not tell you what they are. When a well-loved book gives up its ghost and its pages, I give it a funeral and a proper burial. I have rituals that hedge in each day's writing sessions, and each time I perform them I am reinforcing the little click inside my brain, the shift over to another mode of being. The rituals have changed as my writing space has changed–for example, when I was writing in the middle of the night in the bathroom while a boy slept in the bed my ritual was very different than the sitting down ritual I perform nowadays.

There are Speshul Snowflakes who use habit and ritual as excuses not to write. "I can't write if I don't have X!" they wail. Bullshit. Your habits and rituals are here to work for you, not the other way around. It's not "I CAN'T write," it's "I WON'T write." Fine, if you don't want to, don't. Be a Beethoven Blonde. It's your life.

Swimming with is easier in that it takes advantage of one's natural propensities instead of fighting them. The drawback is that it's easy to slip under the surface of the habits you've created, and not take notice of changing conditions. Keeping the swimming in either direction balanced is a little tricky. You need the swim against to cut across the grain every once in a while and figure out if the current you're surfing is really taking you where you want to go, or if you need to nudge it by a couple degrees and find a slightly-new groove to slip into.

And now that I've beaten that metaphor to death, it's time for me to engage in the private ritual marking the beginning of yet another revision. (Two points if you guessed it involves a fair amount of swearing.)

Over and out.

Related posts:The Importance of Habit
Sunshine And Peppermints
I Don't Wanna