MeiLin Miranda's Blog, page 2

I've been burned out of my home

A version of this appeared on my nonfiction site.

On November 12th, at 2:30 in the morning, we ran for our lives from my home of 27 years. A tiny spark from our pellet stove caught the bark dust alongside our house on fire; it smoldered until high winds blew the burning bark dust against our basement window casing. From there, it burnt through the casing, and spread into the basement.

Our oldest daughter discovered the fire when smoke began pouring out of the heat vent in her room, where she was staying up late finishing her homework. The alarms went off, but if she hadn't run out of the house and begun slamming the front door and screaming her head off, we might not have woken up in time.

As it was, by the time the three of us made it downstairs the house was within minutes of total involvement. The fire department came in the nick of time to save the building, but not before the entire basement was charred, including the floor joists. John tells me the floor boards for the main floor are also burned. We escaped with our pajamas, our dog, one cat and no shoes. Our second cat was discovered dead in the basement last Friday. We were hoping she'd just run away.

It turns out we have good insurance. They have put us up in an extended stay hotel and have found us a rental house not far from our home. They will be gutting our house, to the studs; it is balloon frame construction, and smoke damaged the entire house severely, including much of our belongings. When all is said and done, we will have a new house inside a 130-year-old frame. It will take six months to rebuild, months we will spend in the rental house.

Needless to say, this is cutting into my writing time.

I don't mourn the loss of most of the things I lost. What gets me are little things: all our Christmas ornaments, including the stocking my mother made me when I was a baby; a favorite thermal knit Henley I'd embroidered; fiber, yarn and fabric I'd collected over 35 years, including handspun; a huge chunk of my craft and art reference books; and my comics collection--it's the second one I've lost in my life. I lost looms, my sewing machine, copies of my books. My piano. My drafting table I've had since I was 15.

And my cat, Inky.

The things we miss the most are those attached to memories. Furniture, dishes, TVs--those things can be replaced. Nothing can ever replace my stocking, my handspun, the ornaments my daughters made, or my cat.

It's been less than two weeks. I'm still in shock, I think, though gradually coming out of it. We're all exhausted. But we have discovered we are rich in friends. They've come out of the woodwork, offering help, supplies, and money. Twelve years ago, when we first discovered my weird heart condition, we also discovered we had no friends but my parents and our intentional brother. Four years later, when I nearly died, we had them, and my two best friends. This time, we literally cannot count the people who have come forward to support us.

We are so grateful, so, so grateful.

And yet, we mourn.

No guru, no method, no teacher

That's a Van Morrison album, titled for his revelation after he left Scientology. I kinda feel like I just left some kind of cult, the cult of not trusting myself. I am never again going to use someone else's work method as my own.

I'm a slow writer. I hate that. I've been trying to speed my output up, and several people extolled the method of breaking a novel down: three sections (acts one, two and three), so many chapters per section, so many scenes per chapter, so many words per scene. That way you know just what you're going to write every day and can go faster. It's logical, right? It should work. Just outline your work into that handy structure, write a scene a day, and boom, novel.

I've been struggling for nearly a year trying to work this way, believing it would speed my writing up. All the trouble I've been having, I've been chalking up to other things--things that were contributing, for sure, but in the end weren't the problem. I found the choke points (mostly stuff from the original draft that doesn't work any more), worked them out, and still couldn't get this book into a coherent shape.

Today I said fuck it. I jettisoned everything but the scenes themselves. Got rid of the three part structure, the x number of chapters per part and x number of scenes per chapter. Which I knew I didn't have to follow slavishly, but even having it like that in Scrivener was fucking with my head. I dumped all the scenes into one folder...

...and it straightened itself right out. In an evening. I rejiggered the timeline, adjusted the wordcount targets, and went over the outline obsessively. I moved parts around, discovered what happens in the missing transitions (which will now have deep resonance), and I'm finally ready to finish this goddamned book. For the first time in weeks, I'm excited about writing. I got excited a little while ago, but it foundered on the structure I was trying to use to "speed my writing up."

Never. Again.

This is the umpteenth time this has happened to me. It's no one's fault; no one's ever led me astray or forced me, I just haven't trusted my own process. Last year, I lost an entire Drifting Isle novel because I followed advice that I learned doesn't work for me: finish what you're supposed to be working on, not what you want to work on ("otherwise, you're procrastinating"--remember, I'm trying to speed up). I was supposed to be working on book three. By the time I realized I'm the kind of writer who has to follow the energy, it was too late: the Drifting Isle novel energy was completely gone, and I didn't have the book three energy, either.

After two years of working on book three--almost a year of which was spent having and recovering from various health calamities, granted--I'm finally on a serious track to finishing this goddamned book. As things already stand, I'm 90% done by wordcount, and 100% done in outline.

And I'm finally ready to trust my own process. After six years. No guru, no method, no teacher. Just me.

MeiLin's OryCon 36 Schedule

If you're going to OryCon (November 7-9, 2014, Portland, OR), I will be paneling and reading. Here's my schedule.

I'll be part of the following panels:

Woman in the Fridge: Violence toward women as trope and plot device

Writing Believable Sex Scenes

Social Media and the Modern Writer

Synopses, Summaries, Book Descriptions and Other Horrors

Crowdfund Your Project

Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading

MeiLin Miranda reading from my work

Stitch n Share (formerly Stitch n Bitch)

Fragments of a Poem from Book Three

Sedra's favorite poet is Lassinia Heinigen, a Littan woman largely regarded as one of the greatest poets of her time, though considered controversial and somewhat frowned upon by the Scholars and other conservatives. A fragment of her poem, "She Walks Along the Strand," published in the 993 KY chapbook "The Passionate Life," is interspersed in an intimate moment of book 3:

That early evening when we paced the strand

The moon abroad late day, to peep through cloud

Soft-tinted gold by sunset’s soft command

And with my dreams for love and fame endowed …

For you, I let my verses wash away

Or so I told you, to allay your pride

The barren sand no marking did betray

But oh, my love, I’ve always fought the tide…

I love writing fake Victorianesque poetry, especially when it goes in a sex scene.

Tiny, pretty books

Why look, it's an unboxing!

Twenty copies of my event-exclusive (meaning I don't sell them here and it'll never be in ebook form--you can find them at Amazon but Imma make you look for 'em) little chapbook, About Time. It has two short stories in it, "Reset" and "Dalston Junction," which both happen to be about time travel. Jason Gurley did the cover. He's not just an amazing cover artist, he is a phenomenal writer. Check him out.

If you come see me at StoryCon! in Vancouver, WA or at OryCon in November, you can get one of these autographed--and free. The only other way to get one is to join my mailing list. I'm going to be holding a drawing soon for two copies.

A quick note on Facebook

If you are a "fan" of my Facebook page, be aware that I'm moving most of what I do there over to the Facebook group, Fans of MeiLin Miranda.

Why? Because if you've paid attention to FB lately, you know that you almost never see stuff from pages you've "liked" unless the page pays for you to see it. I can't afford to do that. So if you want to see me on FB, join the group. I know some people prefer FB to other venues, so that's why I offer myself there as well as here as well as twitter as well as *thud*

Welcome to the new site!

Hey, what do you think? I worked like crazy on this. The old site was broken, cluttered and just plain outdated. I hope this one works better for you guys. It still has issues--the user badges aren't displaying, for instance, but they weren't displaying on the old site.

Please let me know if you find any issues, or what you think.

The Machine God (Paperback)

$11.95
Goodreads overall rating for The Machine God: 4.06 stars over 32 reviews!
"Meilin Miranda writes a fascinating story about a person's search for the greater good. The Machine God is a story that I enjoyed thoroughly." -- Mihir Wanchoo, Fantasy Book Critic blog

Price: $11.95Catalog: Paperbacks
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I'm a temporary big deal

So here's a kind of cool thing that happened:



Yesterday and today editor David Gatewood is holding a 99-cent sale at Amazon for an anthology I'm in, Synchronic. It's a solid anthology; I guarantee you'll find at least three stories you like in it, and many of you will enjoy all of them. I don't get paid any more than I've already been paid, but it's the only way David gets paid for all his work so I wholeheartedly encourage you to get it. If the book does well, we get to make more anthologies and I get to work with David some more; he is just a terrific editor.

The side effect of our promo efforts for the sale is that as it catapulted the book up the Amazon charts--we topped out at #16 in the entire store, not just in SFF (where we made it to #1 in a bunch of categories)--it also catapulted its authors way up the author rankings. That's what the screenshot is of.

For a little, tiny while, I am ranked higher than Neil Gaiman. It's extremely temporary and reflects nothing but a successful promo push, but you can be damn well sure I took screen shots.

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The Bundle of Extraordinary Steampunk: The Machine God and 6 More Books!

I am tickled to death to announce that today The Machine God is part of the Bundle of Extraordinary Steampunk, at Storybundle. The collection was curated by my friend Susan Kaye Quinn, and if you've never heard of Storybundle, this is how it works:

The initial titles in the bundle (minimum $3 to purchase) are:

Black Mercury by Charlotte E. English (one of the other Drifting Isle books)

Zelda Pryce by Joseph Robert Lewis

The Machine God by MeiLin Miranda (that's me)

A Midsummer Night's Steampunk by Scott E. Tarbet

If you pay more than the bonus price of just $10, you'll get another three books:

Lumière by Jacqueline E. Garlick

Third Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn

Fall of Sky City by S.M. Blooding

You're going to want to sign up for my newsletter because I'll be giving away THREE of these bundles to subscribers later this week!

The bundle is available for a very limited time only, via http://www.storybundle.com. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get multiple DRM-free formats (.epub, and .mobi) for all books, but after the three weeks are over, the bundle is gone forever! You can also buy a gift card for this StoryBundle if you have a friend you think would enjoy this.

Why StoryBundle? Here's what they say for themselves.

-- Get quality reads: We've chosen works from excellent authors to bundle together in one convenient package.

-- Pay what you want (minimum $3): You decide how much four fantastic books are worth to you. If you can only spare a little, that's fine! You'll still get access to four thrilling titles.

-- Support authors who support DRM-free books: StoryBundle is a platform for authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog. Supporting authors who let you read their books on any device you want—restriction free—will show everyone there's nothing wrong with ditching DRM.

-- Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to charity. We're currently featuring Mighty Writers and Girls Write Now.

-- Receive extra books: If you beat our bonus price, you're not just getting four books, you're getting seven!

You've got three weeks to get this bundle, but get it now while you're thinking of it.

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