Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 109

Bad Electronic Morning

I don’t know how I’m going to schedule my day, since the piano competition is on a break today, but I guess I’d better get used to it, since the rest of the competition, other than Saturday, is going to be at night and then it will be over. I’ll have to find some other thing to keep me at the keyboard (the computer one, not the piano one). I was happy that my favorites made it to the final round, and for Friday night’s concerto event, we’ve got two Rachmaninoff pieces (though not my absolute favorite).

I did learn that I really can’t work while listening to Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. I can’t help but stop to listen. I’ve used some of his other music as background music for writing, but that one piece just gets me. I can’t even read while listening to it. I think there’s a story that this needs to be my soundtrack for, but I haven’t found it yet. It starts all strident and angry, then there’s this swooningly romantic interlude, and the final movement is passionate and fiery. It’s basically a romantic story — they meet and there’s conflict. Maybe they’re even enemies. But then they fall in love and have a tender moment together, and after that the two of them are fighting together, the two of them against the world, putting everything on the line for love. I guess that’s why this piece is so popular with pairs figure skaters. There’s a big, dramatic start, then a quieter, more graceful moment, and then a big, passionate finish. Except to get within the time limit, they chop it up brutally.

This morning seems to have been electronic failure time. At the very same time, my atomic clock went out and my cable box must have been trying to update and froze midway through the reboot. The clock was a matter of batteries, but then I had to find a way to get it to reset and find the signal. I tried contacting the cable company via online chat when the box was frozen midway through what looked like a reboot, stuck at the same level for an hour, but their chat window froze. I finally resorted to the old unplug it and plug it back in trick, and that seems to have worked. Not that I was watching TV at the time, but it just bugged me to see that “L-8” on the readout instead of the time, especially when I was having to manually set the time on the atomic clock before it found the signal, and my other source for accurate time wasn’t working. The cable thing must have been a system issue because it affected both of my boxes.

This is making me glad I backed up my computer last night. Maybe I should stay away from my cell phone.

Classical Work Scheduling

I have discovered the key to productivity: Classical music.

It’s not the Mozart effect. It’s the scheduling effect. The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is going on right now in Fort Worth, and they’re streaming the events online. For the semifinals, that has meant that they start a recital at 2:30 in the afternoon, it runs about an hour, there’s a 20-minute break, then another recital. They start up again in the evening at 7:30 with two contestants doing Mozart concertos (so I guess there is some Mozart effect), which takes a little more than an hour, a 20-minute intermission, and then two more.

That ends up being the perfect schedule for a writing day — an hour, a break, another hour, a dinner break and time to do some other things, then an hour, break, hour. I’ve been getting so much done while listening because I don’t want to get up to do other things during that time, and it’s like having a built-in timer.

This week, the classical radio station is intensifying the effect, playing a famous piano concerto performed by a former winner each day at 1. Today is Rachmaninoff’s second concerto, which is my all-time favorite piece of music, so I suppose I have to listen.

Since Thursday (when I remembered this was going on and discovered the streaming), I’ve rewritten three chapters of the novel, revised a novella, and revised a short story, as well as done a lot of work on content for the web site. Sunday I took a break from work and did crossword puzzles and read while listening.

Though all this virtuoso piano work makes me feel even worse about my struggles to use both hands and play more than one note at a time.

Meanwhile, it is possible I’ll end up with even more incentive to write and time to devote to work later this summer. I’ve had a wonky knee that’s been bothering me for nearly a year. Well, it’s actually been bothering me my whole life and I had surgery to fix some of that more than twenty years ago, but it went out on me in a different way last summer in a ballet class. It reminded me of a time when I pulled ligaments, so I did what the doctor had me do then and braced it and rested it, and it got better. then it went out again, and I had another couple of weeks of bracing and resting. It got better, then buckled out from under me on the stairs. Rest and bracing, and it got better. It started really hurting during my recent trip and hasn’t gotten better, so today I made an appointment with an orthopaedist. I’m hoping it’s just a physical therapy thing, but I’m worried that it’s a ligament tear that will require surgery. At least this time around, while I have a two-story house, I mostly live on the ground floor, especially during the summer, and I could easily arrange things to not need to go upstairs for a while. I mostly would just need to move the keyboard and harp downstairs. The last time I had knee surgery, I lived in a third-floor apartment. While I was at home, I was okay, but coming and going from home, especially when carrying things, was a challenge.

Anyway, my insurance has a high deductible, so seeing a doctor gives me incentive to write so I can earn some money, and if I’m not really mobile, that means I have time to write. The appointment’s next week, so I hope I’ll get some answers then.

Snail Watching

We had a nice rainy day yesterday, which is normally good for my productivity, but this time, it served as a distraction because it brought out the snails. A swarm of snails converged on my patio and front porch, and this proved so fascinating that it distracted me. Last summer, I found evidence of snail trails in my living room, but never saw a snail in the house. Now, seeing them having a convention just outside my house made me wonder what they’re up to. I do have a story idea in there somewhere.

Really, it’s interesting watching them move. Some of them were pretty speedy. They covered a decent amount of ground. I could outrun them, yeah (which kind of ruins the horror movie potential), but they still moved faster than I expected. Then there were the ones who barely seemed to be moving, I’d look away, then look back and they’d moved at least three feet.

We’re supposed to get still more rain today, but I will have to resist the lure of snail watching because I have work to do. I’m still getting content into my new web site, which means re-evaluating the old content. I’ll probably keep adding new stuff even after I launch, but I’m trying to get stuff in so I can launch. And then there are the two writing projects I’m juggling.

So, no playing with the snails today.

Productivity

Yesterday was supposed to be a non-writing day, but I ended up writing for nearly 3 hours. Oops. Or not. I guess I wanted to make progress. I’m juggling two different projects, a novella and a novel. I work on one until my brain gets tired, then switch gears. So far, it’s working pretty well, and I seem to be getting a lot more done. I still got my “get stuff done” stuff done, too. It’s that schedule shift. I seem to be a lot more productive when I go to bed early and get up early than when I stay up late and sleep late. I sleep better, so I’m spending less time sleeping, and that alone gains me nearly an hour, and I seem to be more likely to productively use extra morning time than extra night time.

I guess it’s a good thing I’m not going to any conventions this summer because that kind of schedule is completely out of whack with the way they schedule science fiction conventions. Nothing much happens until 10 in the morning. The “early” programming is usually a stroll at 9 a.m., which is late if you have programming at 10 and need to be able to shower and change clothes before programming. If you wake up by 7 in the morning, you have a few dead hours. At the Nebulas conference, they didn’t open the hospitality suite until 7:30, and that was just coffee. Breakfast wasn’t supposed to be out until 9. Then all the socializing tends to take place at night in the bar or at parties, and that doesn’t usually kick off until about 9 p.m., which means you miss most of it if you like to be in your pajamas and reading in bed soon after 10.

I wonder if there’s a coffee shop con equivalent to barcon for morning people.

It was worse for me on the west coast. I was taking hour-long walks in the morning before the WorldCon in Spokane and didn’t go to a single party.

But this summer is my personal Productivity Con. I want to get a couple of books written and one started, while also ramping up my promo activities. I’m calling it a “writing retreat” and treating it like I’m at a resort. We’ll see if that tricks my brain into going into high gear.

Random News Updates

One downside to getting up earlier: when I want to run errands before I get the day started, but the place I need to go doesn’t open until 10.

So, some random news updates:
I have a design for a new web site. Now I’m in the fun part of adding all the content to that framework. I’m hoping to launch it either this week or next week. Then I may be making some changes to the way I blog. The front page of the site has a little news item section where I can do status-type updates of the latest news about me or my books. Then the blog is for more in-depth posts. That may or may not be daily. I will post when I have something of substance to say.

The Japanese edition of A Fairy Tale is out — at least, I got my copy in the mail. It’s probably been out for a while because this book took the slow boat from Japan. I think their treatment of the cover is really interesting.


I’ve developed a new cooking obsession: homemade yogurt. A few years ago, I read an article about making certain things at home vs. buying store-bought. I tried some of them, just to see how they worked. Yogurt was on the list, but I didn’t try that. Then a few months ago, someone I follow on Twitter mentioned it and posted a link to an easy recipe. I was thinking about that while I was at the Nebula awards weekend because last year, the person running the hospitality suite offered homemade yogurt at breakfast, and it was soooo good. I guess that popped it back into my head, I found that recipe, and thought I’d give it a try. It’s really easy — just pour milk into the crock pot, let it heat to 180 degrees, turn off crock pot, let it cool to 110 degrees, stir in starter yogurt, wrap pot in a towel, let sit overnight, and then strain. Here’s the recipe for more specific instructions. It was so amazingly good, practically a totally different substance from what you buy in the store. My standard breakfast has become yogurt and fresh fruit. I made a half recipe when I tried it, and I’ve just about eaten it all in less than a week, so I think I’m going to make a full recipe this time. When I’m deciding whether to make something at home vs. buy it in a store, I look at the cost savings, the effort, and the quality, and this wins all around. It takes a lot of time, but most of that is sitting, so there’s very little effort. As for cost, I ended up with the equivalent of about 6 containers (not counting the amount I set aside as starter for the next batch) for the cost of one container of store-bought Greek yogurt (and that was on sale). But the main thing is the quality. The taste and texture as so much better. Even without any sweetener, it can work almost as a dessert. In fact, I did make a sundae out of a scoop of yogurt and some of my homemade strawberry jam. I may try putting some in the freezer to see if it works as frozen yogurt — I know it won’t have the same texture as frozen yogurt you buy in a store, but I’ve frozen regular yogurt before, and it works okay.

Anyway, one of my morning errands will be to pick up more milk to make more yogurt.

I’ve been getting a lot of good progress done on writing. The changes I’ve made to the book I’m revising seem to be working. I may have finally stumbled upon the right approach to it.

Now I think that by the time I get dressed and out the door, the stores should be open.

Back to the Slums

I enjoyed a bit of a holiday weekend. I still worked on Monday, but I didn’t keep to my normal schedule or expectations. But today it’s on and all-in. I’m still on an earlier schedule, which means that today I’m more or less on my usual “ideal” routine, except I fit in a half-hour walk and am still slightly ahead of where I typically would hope to be at this time of the morning. Supposedly, exercise makes you more creative. We shall see how that goes this afternoon. Yesterday I got the first two chapters of that novel revised. There’s some tweaking to be done, but otherwise I think it’s going well.

Tonight is the finale of that Victorian Slum House show on PBS, and it turns out that they did address the issues of alcohol and sanitation in the 1890s episode. They kind of skimmed past alcohol, just mentioning that there were some people who spent up to a fifth of their family income on alcohol and that there were a lot of temperance movements, but they didn’t make any of the participants spend their rent money on gin to show the effects on the family, and they didn’t get into the fact that a lot of the temperance movements weren’t so much about sobriety and morality as they were a movement against domestic violence. That’s why these movements were driven by women — women and children were getting abused when men came home drunk or when men wanted more money for alcohol and their wives hid it so they could pay the rent or buy food.

They addressed sanitation when they got into the various reform movements that came along in the 1890s and how there were efforts to inspect the slums for cleanliness. Some of the participants got to visit a public bath house — what’s now a public swimming pool. From some of the other research I’ve done, those public pools weren’t really about cleanliness — you had to wash before getting in, and that was where the “bathing” part came in — but rather about health. There was a belief that there were health benefits to soaking in water. Then they figured out that it was also fun, and that’s where we got swimming pools. These participants talked about this being the first time in weeks they really felt clean, so I guess they weren’t getting modern showers offscreen.

Tonight, they’ll be moving into the turn of the century and the end of the Victorian era and see how our various families ended up.

And, no, this isn’t research for the Rebels series, though it’s interesting to compare London to New York of that timeframe. I have something else in mind that’s more Dickensian, but secondary world, so it is London-like but not actually London.

Victorian Slum Life

I feel like I’m really back in the swing of things, after doing two full days of work-related stuff. Yesterday I finished a draft of a novella that’s going to need a bit more work, but at least I reached an end point. I also figured out the problem I was having with a short story I wrote a couple of years ago. I like the voice in the story, and there’s some good stuff there, but it seems to jump too abruptly to its ending, and I have now figured out what to add to make the ending fit better. Then I can start submitting it and see what I can do with it.

I spent most of the evening doing research for a future project. There’s been an educational reality series on PBS that fits with something I’ve been researching — Victorian Slum House. They re-created an East End slum tenement and have a group of people living there to experience life in that era. Most of them are participating because they had ancestors who lived in that area in that time, and they wanted to learn what their ancestors experienced. It’s really sweet that there’s one family in which it was the grandmother who wanted to see how her grandfather grew up, and her granddaughters eagerly participated because they knew it was important to their Gran. One man in the group is a tailor in real life, making bespoke suits in London, so he’s the resident skilled laborer, and the rest have to kind of make do. Each family is assigned a room or rooms in the house and a profession/backstory, and then they have to figure out how to make enough money to pay the rent and buy food. They’ve converted the prices from that era to modern money, so that we have more of a perspective (and that helps when the people who have to sell things go into the market to sell to modern Londoners). Each episode covers a particular decade, and the producers change the circumstances each week to show how the world changed — technology, the economic conditions, laws, mix of newcomers, etc.

They start in the 1860s and go to the 1890s, and I just have one more episode to go. I’ve been reading on life in that era, so seeing it play out and affect real people is fascinating. The attitude toward the poor in that time was absolutely horrendous, especially since it supposedly came out of their interpretation of Christianity (some of it is eerily familiar for our time). There was so little opportunity, and there was so much exploitation of vulnerable people.

It is rather sanitized. They show that there’s a communal privy in the courtyard, but otherwise they don’t even mention bathrooms or sanitation, so you have to wonder if the participants really had to use that privy or if they had a regular bathroom anywhere nearby. There are likely health and safety rules governing that sort of thing. Everyone looks pretty clean, and some of the women are obviously wearing makeup (and not just “being on TV” makeup), but they don’t address the issue of bathing. The issue of alcohol hasn’t come up at all, and that was a major problem in slums. They haven’t diverted a man on his way home from a day’s work and made him spend all his wages in the pub on gin. So, it doesn’t quite work as true research other than getting a generalized feel for re-creating a similar world in a fantasy novel.

What I have found interesting is the dynamics among these people. Those teenaged granddaughters are so enthusiastic even though it’s their grandmother’s deal. They dive right into all the work, whether it’s hauling baskets of watercress to the market to sell, making paper flowers, or even telling jokes to people in the street in hopes of earning a penny or two. The ones who had ancestors living that life are in awe of how strong they had to be, and there’s a touching scene of a woman finding the graves of her great aunt and uncle who died in infancy. The whole group has come together as a community, trying to help each other even though they have the tough dilemma of trying to make it, themselves. The shopkeepers don’t want the children to starve, but they won’t be able to pay their own rent if their customers don’t pay their debts. There was one family, a single mother and her kids, who really weren’t coping well, and the others did their best to help them, bringing them in on their piecework enterprises so they’d have some money, but they still didn’t quite get into the spirit of it. The others were all working hard, getting up early and staying up late to work, and this family would sleep late before finally joining in on the work, and then would go to bed early. They ended up leaving, sneaking out during the night — they were used as an example of what some people did when they couldn’t pay the rent and were in debt to the shopkeeper, but they didn’t show up in the following episodes, so I’m guessing that family just left the show.

The whole series is available to watch online at the PBS website. I’m not normally a fan of reality TV and the “let’s watch ordinary people try to do this thing” sort of show, but this is cooperative and educational rather than competitive. They bring in historians to talk to the participants about what the era was like and what was happening.

Nebula Conference Thoughts

Now that I’ve been home long enough to process everything, I thought I’d share some thoughts on my trip last week. I will admit that I found last year’s Nebula conference rather discouraging. I had a good time largely because I had local friends who were on the staff, and it was fun hanging out with them, but the conference part was difficult for me. I learned a lot and got some good business things out of it (that’s how I found my web designer), but I felt very alone and invisible in the crowd, and it was disappointing seeing that I was totally unknown in spite of having been published in fantasy and a member of the organization for more than a decade. There was very much an “in” crowd, and you could see the cliques.

This year was better for me. It helped that I’d met some people the year before. It also helped that I got there a day early and went on the pre-conference walk to the farmer’s market for lunch, so I met some people there. I was on a programming item the first day, so people talked to me at the opening reception and I didn’t feel quite so lost and alone there. I still feel like a nonentity in that world, but that means I have a huge opportunity of people who haven’t discovered me yet. And, at the same time, I learned from some of the panel discussions that I’m a lot more successful than I realized. There were some things I took for granted that I thought would surely apply to others who have a lot more recognition than I do if they applied to me, but it turns out that financial success and recognition don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. I’m making decent money, enough to live on without needing another job. My books from more than a decade ago are still in print and earning royalties. I’ve had a book optioned for film. My books do really well in audio. Sometimes it’s frustrating chugging along in obscurity while watching other people get the recognition, but I’d rather have the financial success than the fame any day. So, I came away feeling better about myself and about my career and able to see my lack of recognition so far as a huge opportunity of an untapped market rather than as any kind of slap in the face.

Meanwhile, I learned a lot — about social media, Facebook advertising, conflict resolution (both for career matters and using it for characters), what actual teens look for in YA fiction, fairy tales as a storytelling medium, audiobooks, finances for freelancers, dealing with discouragement, and the list goes on. Even when I was on a panel, I usually learned something new from it. I believe I attended a session during every time slot, except for the slot during which I was getting trained on using my new web site architecture.

Treating this weekend as a professional conference is relatively new. It used to be just about the awards ceremony, but has come to be a lot more like the RWA national conference, in being a professional conference that contains an awards ceremony. Membership in SFWA is still limited to those who have met certain publishing standards, but the conference is open to everyone who’s interested in writing science fiction and fantasy. I’d say it’s very worthwhile to attend if you have writing ambitions. There’s not a lot of “how to write 101” stuff, but there is a lot of good information on the business of publishing and managing a writing career. I will very likely go back next year because I think there’s a lot more bang for the writer’s buck than, say, a WorldCon. Plus, they give you a big bag of books. I was pretty ruthless about winnowing it down to the books I was sure I would read, and I even read a couple during the weekend so I could put them back on the swap table instead of hauling them home. And then I got to the airport and my bag was only 33 pounds, so I could have brought more home with me.

Surprise!

I was out of town last week when I had a writing post scheduled, so I’m catching up this week.

I’ve written in the past about the difference between surprise and suspense in writing — the times you want to shock your audience and the times you want your audience to know what’s coming so they have time to dread it. But although we worry about spoilers and ruining the surprise, there are times when it may be bad to surprise your readers.

One case is when there are genre expectations. It would be a big surprise if a romance novel didn’t end with a couple getting together or a mystery novel didn’t reveal the identity of the killer, but most readers wouldn’t be pleasantly surprised. You might be able to get away with that in literary fiction, where you can use those genre expectations to create something different, but if your book is shelved in those genres, that kind of surprise would be a bad thing. Romance readers want the couple to get together. Mystery readers want the mystery to be solved. The big question in romance is how they get together and the emotional journey the characters take. The big question in mystery is who the killer is, and readers don’t even always mind if they figure it out before it’s revealed, as long as it’s still a bit of an intellectual challenge.

Another case of a bad surprise is when the surprise isn’t properly set up. It’s easy to surprise your audience if something just falls out of the sky, without any setup to indicate that things falling from the sky is a possibility. When I see writing like that, it reminds me of a mystery-themed party I once went to. It was a big banquet at a hotel, and each table had paper and pencils to keep track of clues, as well as table decor that looked like it might contain clues. Every so often, the emcee came out and told us about some new development. We were diligently taking notes and trying to piece it all together, but when they announced the “solution,” it was some random thing that had absolutely nothing to do with what had been announced. It turned out that it was all a joke, and the solution was the punchline. I guess they thought it made for a good icebreaker, but it was absolutely impossible for anyone to have solved the mystery. You may surprise readers by doing that sort of thing, but most of them will be angry that you didn’t play fair. The solution needs to have been set up properly so that you can look back at the story and see the clues. The trick is to hide the clues in plain sight alongside other clues and to give each clue multiple layers of meaning, so that there’s another reason for it not entirely connected to the solution. One of the better examples of this is the movie The Shawshank Redemption. Everything that happens in the story makes sense in that context — and then there’s a big twist. After the twist is revealed, we see that everything we saw before also had an entirely different reason behind it. Without the twist, the story still makes sense and would have been a good story. The twist changes everything, but it still makes total sense. The second time you see that movie, knowing the twist, it’s an entirely different film.

On the other hand, if you set something up, you need to use it. There’s the old trope of Chekhov’s Gun — that if there’s a gun on the mantel in Act One, it needs to be fired by the end of Act Three (or something to that effect). If you bother to set things up, they need to go somewhere or readers will be annoyed. It may not go where you expect, or may not be directly related to the main plot, but something really should come of it. The more you draw attention to it, the more important it is that you go somewhere with it. If you can cut a whole scene or other story element without having any impact on the plot because that thing really makes no difference, then don’t put it in there to begin with. This applies to pointless side trips, character backstories, desperate messages, and quest items. Even if it’s a red herring, it needs to matter and be relevant in some other way.

Then there are the things that the audience wants to happen. It may not be a huge surprise when these things happen, but the audience is usually okay with that because they’d be disappointed if it didn’t work out that way. Readers of genre fiction generally want to see the couple get together, the villain defeated, the battle won by the good guys, the bad person get a comeuppance, the underdog rise to the occasion. You can keep in some element of surprise by allowing this to happen in an unexpected way, but if you don’t give readers what they’re hoping for, you need to give them something they’ll like even better. Sometimes tropes exist for a reason, and that’s because these are things we enjoy seeing. You can twist them to some degree, but twist them too far or undermine them, and the result is an unsatisfying story.

Finding the balance between surprise and satisfaction is an ongoing struggle for writers that becomes more difficult as readers become more sophisticated consumers of stories. But it’s worth it to put in the work to find a way to meet expectations while keeping things fresh.

Home from My Travels

I’m home from my travels and very happy about that. I won’t be traveling again until October other than to visit my parents (unless I have a whim about taking a summer vacation). I like seeing other places, but the process of travel is getting harder, and I’m really spoiled by my fancy bed so that I have a hard time sleeping even on a good hotel bed, since it’s flat. Maybe before my next trip, I’ll gradually adjust my bed closer to being flat so I can be used to it. Then again, I seem to remain much healthier sleeping on an incline, so I might want to be as healthy as possible before traveling.

On the other hand, there’s a lot I miss about hotel life. I love having a totally non-cluttered space. It’s very peaceful. To get that at home, I’m going to need to do a total possession purge, then do some organizing so that I have a place for everything and can get everything in its place. And then I need to form good habits and tidy up as I go. The daily housekeeping service does help, but the real key is that I like to have everything put away before the daily housekeeping service, so my room is reasonably neat even without the hotel maid. All I really need the maid to do is empty the trash and give me fresh coffee cups.

But enough about the process of travel. It was a really good conference. I went to this one looking at it as more of a professional development and networking event, and it didn’t disappoint on those terms, but I think it might also have given me more of a promotional boost than the more promotion-oriented conventions do. I came out of it with a bunch more Twitter followers and tweets/retweets, which broadened my name recognition more than I seem to get from other cons.

I went to a panel during each session of the con, took a lot of notes, and got a lot of ideas, both for writing and for general professional life. It may take me a little time to process it all. My brain is full.

I didn’t get a lot of sightseeing done, but we did do a group walk to the farmer’s market on the first day, so I was able to stock up on some good food to have in my room for snacks. On Sunday after the conference ended, I walked over to the incline railway across the river. It’s the kind of thing they have in Europe at ski resorts for getting up and down mountains. Here, it’s for ease of commuting. It was built in the 1870s and uses counterweights — two cars connected by a cable, and one car going down the mountain pulls the other one up. I’d just been researching this kind of thing for the book I’m working on (though with a cable car rather than on rails), so I took lots of pictures and some video. All this was happening on a rainy day during a playoff hockey game, so the town was very quiet. My hotel was across the street from the arena, so I timed my dinner in the hotel restaurant to end just as the game was ending. I managed to get out of there just as all the fans started swarming in. I watched the flood of people leaving the game from my hotel window.

The conference will be back there again next year, so maybe I’ll find other things to see, or maybe I’ll ride that railway on a clear day.