Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 195

Fall TV

They say that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, but I came close last night. It's funny how when I make a to-do list for myself, things take longer than I anticipate, but when I make a lesson plan for choir, things don't take nearly as long as I anticipate. Fortunately, I always plan for at least one extra item, and I did have to resort to the extra item, but the extra item was just enough. The Problem Child was late, and for a moment I thought we'd be off the hook for the evening. The other kids were rambunctious, but not obnoxious, and they were doing that endearing kindergarten thing of really, really wanting to impress the teacher and having to tell me all kinds of things about what happened in school that day. Then Problem Child showed up, and the boys immediately forgot about wanting to impress the teacher as they joined him in running around like crazy and ignoring everything any adult said. I don't know what it is about this kid that gives him this power over other kids. He just gets them in trouble and keeps them from actually having fun with the group, but they all want to be just like him. Meanwhile, I have several very proper little girls who are not at all amused by the boys' antics. As one little girl said very earnestly when I was explaining the class rules, "If you talk when someone is talking, that's called interrupting." Said with big, sincere eyes at me, and then a sidelong glare at the boys. I may have scared Problem Child a bit because just as I was telling him not to run because the floor is slick and he might fall down, he fell down. He looked at me with a bit of awe, like I'd done it to him, and I gave him an enigmatic smile with a hint of satisfaction. Though I doubt the lesson stuck. He was running around like a maniac during dinner, and his parents barely looked at him. I sat with his parents at dinner, and I repeated the "running will get him hurt and he has to stop that in my class" message a few dozen times. Oh, and I've learned from the teacher who had him last year that he actually likes time outs, so they don't work for punishment. I don't care about punishment. I just want to stop the running around. I suspect the other boys don't like time outs as much, and maybe if they suffer consequence from following his lead, he'll lose some of his power. Yes, I am now planning psychological warfare against five year olds.

Ah, well, at least I have a week to recover before I face them again. And it's going to be a good TV weekend. Friday night is the season premiere of Haven, and it takes me back to the Friday nights of X-Files days, in which I settled in on the sofa and created the proper atmosphere for absorbing all the details of a spooky show. It's still too hot for the blanket and hot cocoa, and candles don't work so well with the ceiling fan running, but I have the electronic candles. One reason I like this show is that I can't usually predict it (even though they often end up having the same plot elements that show up in whatever I was writing at the same time they were writing episodes -- I just can't predict which plot elements we'll both have grabbed from the ether). Last season ended with a mega-cliffhanger, and unlike most series, I haven't managed to mentally write the conclusion. Also, it was big enough a cliffhanger that I doubt it will be neatly wrapped up in the first minute of the show before they move on to another story, as happens far too often on TV. So, basically, calling me between 9 and 10 central time on Friday would be a bad move. Really, make that all of Friday evening because I will be finishing my season three marathon, probably with pizza and wine. Though I may have to plan a post-episode debriefing with a friend.

Then on Sunday night, Foyle's War is back on PBS. This is a mystery series that was about World War II in England, with the titular detective Foyle working in Hastings, near the coast. He wanted to get in the action of the war and tried to come up with all kinds of excuses why he was no good for the police force, but they needed him more as a cop to solve all kinds of war-related mysteries on the home front. Now the war is over, so it will be interesting to see where they take the series in the post-war era. My favorite part of the series was the quasi-father/daughter relationship between Foyle and his spunky young female driver, a proper vicar's daughter defying her father by getting involved in the war effort in the motor pool (the kind of job Queen Elizabeth did during the war). I'm hoping they'll find a way to continue that even after they're no longer working together or maybe find another excuse for them to work together.

The other night when there was some kind of delay in the TV schedule and I had to wait a while before the thing I planned to watch came on, I killed time by watching some of the network fall preview things that were available OnDemand. NBC's Dracula looks absolutely terrible. I found it hard to tell what was going on from the preview, though it seems as though they're somehow Twilighting the Dracula myth. I'm normally all over anything that even looks Victorian, but the pretty here wasn't enough to get me past the head-scratching. Not to mention, even the three-minute trailer was dull enough that it lost my interest.

However, I was rather pleasantly surprised by Fox's Sleepy Hollow trailer. I hadn't really put any thought into the series and watched the trailer out of curiosity, and then found myself watching the other material they had posted. It seems that Ichabod Crane was working for George Washington, died(?) fighting the Headless Horseman, and then has somehow been revived or brought back to life -- along with his nemesis and a bunch of other nasty stuff -- in the present day. Now he has to work with the one detective who believes him. The trailer reminded me a lot of Grimm and Haven, in that it looks like it will be a paranormal procedural that covers some dark topics, but does so with a lot of humor and snark. It's a dark world where the people are funny. The rapport between the two leads reminds me of Elementary or early Haven, with a nice mix of "you and me against the world," snarky banter and growing friendship. And then there's the fish-out-of-water element, which is the source for a lot of the humor. The part of the trailer that cracked me up, though, was when the cops who apparently aren't in on the secret encounter the Headless Horseman. They first see him from behind, where the giant collar on his coat obscures what isn't there. They start to tell him to turn around and put his hands on his head, but the words trail off when they realize he doesn't have one. Then one cop says to the other, "Can he even hear us?"

This one premieres Monday night, and I've gone from "maybe I'll check that out eventually OnDemand" to "I am SO watching this." But I have a feeling it'll make the final episode of Over the Dumb/Too Stupid to Live Theatre, or as the network calls it, Under the Dome, even more painful. That show has to win an award for worst execution of an intriguing premise. I was in when I thought it was a limited series with a defined endpoint, but they've renewed it and I'm out after I snark at the finale on Monday.

As part of my marketing efforts, I've decided to revive (yet again) my sporadic Stealth Geek blog to talk about all this geeky TV stuff in more detail and with spoilers so that I don't clutter this blog or spoil those outside the US. Maybe a dedicated blog that isn't an overt author blog will allow other people interested in the topics to discover me and then maybe eventually buy books. I'll post pointers here for those who want to follow both.

Making Things Concrete

As the summer starts to wind down (ha! I wish!), I have to say that my knitted blanket, the thing that started what became a minor obsession, has worked out exactly as I hoped. On warm nights, the open, lacy blanket on top of a sheet has been just enough weight and warmth. If it gets cooler as the night goes on, I pull over my light down throw. I've got an idea for another blanket I'd like to make that's more elaborate and that would work as a full-on bedspread, but that's about three projects down in the queue and will require some thinking, as it's a modification of a Victorian shawl pattern. First I have to finish the current blanket, a cables and bobbles pattern I'm doing for Project Linus, and there's a Victorian capelet I'd like to have ready before Octopodicon (a steampunk convention) in November, and then there are potential Christmas gifts.

I spent yesterday revisiting and replotting the current project. I decided to start by working out the resolution and then reverse engineering. That led me to realizing that I had to commit to who the villain was. The villain is mostly offstage in the first half of the book, pulling strings that affect the viewpoint characters without them knowing who's doing it (like in a mystery), and I had several characters from the previous book who could potentially be doing it. I took another look at the previous book's outcome, and realized that a character I hadn't even been considering as the villain here actually made the most sense. Then I had to figure out exactly what the villain was doing offstage to thwart the heroes, essentially plotting the book from the villain's point of view. That made me realize that I'd done a few things wrong, but fixing those things will make the rest of the book a lot easier. I still haven't quite met in the middle -- I have the beginning and the end -- but I probably need to fix the beginning before I can figure out the middle. I have to give some props to Lou Anders of Pyr Books for his screenwriting lessons for novelists workshop at WorldCon for helping me figure out the end, which set all this off. I was pretty vague about the outcome, but I needed it to be concrete. The goal had to be something we could see being achieved, and we needed to definitively see the heroes achieve it. It also helps if achieving the goal coincides with the heroes realizing something important about themselves. Working until I got that made other things fall into place. I also think I've got a more concrete structure instead of a nebulous mass. The structure doesn't really change much because it was more a case of discovering it than creating it, but it makes it easier to think about the story in a coherent way.

We'll see how coherent I can be today. I took my first ever dose of Allegra in desperation when the allergies (ragweed season, yay!) got to the point of distraction. Benadryl works on the allergies but knocks me out, and I have to drive this afternoon. Theoretically, Allegra is non-drowsy, but supposedly non-drowsy Zyrtec knocked me out for 24 hours. I have children's Allegra and took a child's dose. So far, the sneezing and runny nose have eased, but I feel slightly "off." It's not a sleepy or impaired "off," just a sense of difference that may or may not be related to the drug. I may just be in shock from not having nasty allergy symptoms.

And tonight I have my first real choir session with the Holy Terrors. I need to come up with an action-packed lesson plan designed to maintain the attention of kids with serious ADHD for 45 minutes. I don't know if there's an actual medical diagnosis here, but I figure I should plan for it, and if they can focus longer, then it's easier to adapt to remove items from the list while doing other things longer than it is to scramble to come up with new things to do when they get bored after thirty seconds and I run through my whole lesson plan in fifteen minutes.

Out Into the World

First, thanks to all who responded to my questions about newsletters and discovering books. It looks like my instincts were right. The trick about marketing books is that it really is something that's hard to do on purpose because most people discover books in very accidental ways, such as finding them in a library and hearing about them from friends. I discovered two of my very favorite authors because I noticed the covers on their books, and something about the art spoke to me -- and in one case, the art turned out to be very misleading. It had nothing to do with the subject or tone of the book, though I think I would also have liked the book that the art would have fit. What I need to do is find ways to make people aware of the series and get them to try it and then to make sure people who've started reading the series are aware that there are more books.

Second, another one of my babies has gone out into the world, looking for a good home. Putting a book out on submission is like boarding an emotional rollercoaster. You start out with high hopes, looking at the list of editors and visualizing your book at each of those houses. And then the rejections start to come in. The rejections always come first because that can happen right away -- the editor may know from the first page that it's not right. Offers take a lot more time because the editor has to read more of the material, then take it to committee and persuade the publisher to buy it. Sometimes it seems like the rejections come all at once. You go through days of getting constant rejections. It hurts to cross each potential market off the list. But then you get a hopeful response, like when your agent follows up with the editors who haven't rejected and one responds that she's reading it and loving it or when one says she's waiting on a response from higher in the food chain. Rejections that come after that hurt more because they tend to be of the "I loved it, but I don't know what to do with it/don't think there's a market for it/haven't published anything like this before" variety. Then if you're really lucky, someone expresses interest, which triggers an auction among anyone else who hasn't yet rejected it, and that then triggers a fast slew of rejections among anyone who's not interested in fighting for it (a lot of the time, it's not that they had any interest, just that the auction deadline forces them to pull it out of the bottom of the pile, take a quick look at it and decide it's not worth the effort to do a quick read and push anything through). And then if you're really, really lucky, you end up with an actual offer with real dollar signs and numbers attached to it.

I know this is a difficult book to categorize, so I'm girding my loins. A contemporary Tam Lin (the folk tale or ballad, not the Pamela Dean novel)/The Goblin Market mash-up (the person stolen by the fairies who has to be rescued is a sister, not a lover) starring a ballerina, an injured detective and a bulldog and with a subtle semi-romantic thread that would be wrong if it happened is going to be a tough sell. I imagine a few of the rejections will be along the lines of "I love Shanna's work, but I'm not sure what to make of this." Possibly with the addition of "I'd like to see something more like Enchanted, Inc." But maybe someone will see what I love about this story and the characters and give it a good home. If not, I already plan to self-publish it because I believe in this book. Having that fallback position does make this a little less stressful. However, I would appreciate good wishes, prayers and other things intended to influence the universe.

But enough about me. My WorldCon hotel reading that I didn't get to until I was skipping the Hugo awards was Wisp of a Thing by Alex Bledsoe, a follow up to The Hum and the Shiver. It's sort of a sequel, in that it takes place in the same setting after the previous book, and there are characters who cross over. I suppose it does continue the big-picture plot from the previous book. But it also stands totally on its own. The main characters are almost entirely new, and I don't think you'd be at all lost or lose much understanding if you hadn't read the first book. These books are about a mysterious culture found deep in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. They have a kind of magic to them that's tied into their music. In this book, a young man who gained a kind of stardom as a reality singing show contestant comes to town after a personal tragedy because he's heard that there's a song in this town that could heal his broken heart. He's not one of these people, but he may be what they need to break a curse that's on the verge of becoming permanent.

I really love these books. The world captivates me to the point that I kind of want to go to eastern Tennessee and look for this town and hear this music. I like the characters a lot. He has a way of writing nice guys who are still interesting and complicated and damaged people who aren't all dark and edgy. I'd almost go as far as to say that this is "hillbilly Neil Gaiman." I think if you like Gaiman's novels, you might like this.

I spent yesterday rereading the work in progress. It seems I threw in a plot thread I'd forgotten about. Now I need to figure out where to go from here.

Military School and Marketing

I may be in even more trouble with the children's choir this year than I thought. I found out that the other adult teacher in my group has asked her Sunday school class for prayers because we'll need all the help we can get. I might also be wrong in my assessment about Problem Child. She doesn't think there's necessarily anything wrong with him, just inconsistent parenting. Yes, the mom does try to correct him, but she also tends to give up when her first attempt doesn't work, so he's learned to ignore all correction because it'll pass. I may not have a case of "no one can correct my special snowflake" or "we think the word 'no' stifles a child's creativity," but it seems to be a case of "maybe the teachers can teach him to behave, and that will make my life easier." The people in charge are even talking about getting a dedicated "buddy" for him, like they have for special needs kids, so that the teachers can focus on the whole class instead of having to devote all their attention to the one kid. I'd think that would be a huge parenting wake-up call if your kid isn't special needs but is such a bad behavior problem that he requires special needs treatment. Do they have military boarding schools for kindergarteners? That may be what this kid needs. I think I need to practice my military "Atten-hut!" bellow. Maybe the boys will enjoy being treated like they're in military school. I'll teach them to salute and march. That's sort of music-related, right?

I'm forcing myself to get back to "normal" this week. Five days should be enough time to recover from a convention and travel. I have some marketing work to do, some bookkeeping to deal with and then I want to get back to the writing in progress. I went to a really good writing session at the convention (about the only thing I managed to attend where I wasn't a participant), and now I want to see how it applies to the work in progress. I'll have to re-read the whole thing first, though. I'm a little hazy on what's actually on the page vs. what's in my head.

There may be some swimming pool time, as well, since I've realized that I need more exercise. I've put on a bit of weight over the summer, probably from eating out more often than I usually do. It's not much and probably doesn't show, but there are clothes I wore last summer that don't fit this summer, and I can feel the difference in the way my body works. I also don't have the fitness and endurance levels I'd like to have. I shouldn't nearly collapse after 45 seconds of jumping in ballet.

Back to the marketing stuff: How many of you subscribe to author newsletters? Do you actually care about them? Have you ever signed up for a newsletter to be eligible for a giveaway? If so, did you keep subscribing afterward? I suspect I'm about to have a tussle with my agent about this because she thinks newsletters are an excellent marketing tool and I think they're preaching to the choir. If you care enough to sign up for the newsletter, you're already on board. Hearing about the giveaway means you've already heard about the author, unless it gets out onto one of those contest junkie web sites, in which case they sign up for the contest, then unsubscribe (sometimes even being tacky enough to label the newsletter as spam when they do so) when the contest is over. Most of the authors I know have stopped the giveaways other than those to reward fans because they don't actually do much good. Then again, that may be my personal bias against marketing that looks like marketing, and "win an Amazon gift card!" looks too much like marketing to me. Newsletters might work better for the kind of self-published authors who have a constant stream of releases, but I don't have anything new coming for a while, just an existing series that's all out there. I guess I also have a personal bias against author newsletters. I've been automatically subscribed to too many by authors who just subscribe everyone in their address books, and I unsubscribe from them all. I do follow a few authors' blogs because they have interesting things to say, but this really doesn't affect my book purchases, and there are a few authors I follow on Facebook just to find out when they have new books coming out. I don't even know what I'd say in a regular newsletter.

What I need to find is a way to expose more people to the existence of the series, get them to try it, and then make sure they know there are more books. I don't think that e-mailing existing fans is the way to do that, but in responding to my agent, I can't just dismiss her ideas without offering any of my own. How did you first learn about this series? What works to make you aware of a book and then get you to try it? How do you keep track of a series to learn about new books?

Dreading "Mega Boy"

I'm faced with a dilemma. I finally have a whole day in which I don't have to leave the house, and I get a notice from the library that a book I have on hold is in. It's not like I'm lacking in reading material, but still, it's out there, waiting for me, and going to the library today will be more pleasant than on the weekend, when there will be people there. But that will require putting on "public" clothes and getting in the car, since it's way too hot to walk today.

Part of the reason for yesterday's post-grocery run hibernation was recovering from the shock of the first children's choir session Wednesday night. This year is going to be fun (for alternative meanings of "fun"). Until now, I've had mostly girls with one or two boys, and the boys haven't really been typical boys. They've been the quiet ones in the group. In the group that showed up for registration/meet the teacher night this year, I had five boys and three girls. Two of the girls are twins, and they're very, very girly. The boys are more typical boys. I've been warned from multiple sources about three of the boys. Separate, they're sweet kids, but together, as one other parent put it, "they become like some kind of Transformer mega boy." It doesn't help that the ringleader of the group has some behavioral issues -- and I mean actual neurological stuff, not just being a spoiled brat, because I've watched his parents trying to work with him. He literally can't control himself, but then the other two follow his lead. Fortunately, my adult co-teacher is the mother of the twins, and I figure the mother of twins is at parenting level ninja. We've already agreed that I'll do the music part and she'll handle crowd control. I don't think I'm allowed to use shock collars or tasers. It's not a good sign when people ask what choir I'm doing this year, and then they go, "Oooohhh. That's gonna be interesting." Fortunately, Problem Child's mother is aware of the problem and wants to work on it rather than being one of those "the world should revolve around my special snowflake" mothers, so there will be backup.

So this year my lesson plans will have to be aimed at Short Attention Span Theater, and I won't be able to fall back on putting on music and everyone dancing. It will help that I already know most of the kids from singing with the preschool Sunday school class over the last couple of years, and they already know me, so I won't have to worry about learning names or getting them comfortable with me.

But I'll worry about that next week. For now, I need to unpack and do laundry (I still have suitcases sitting in the living room), and I have to marathon an entire season of Haven on BluRay (it came yesterday!) before next Friday's premiere. And then there's catching up on stuff from the week I was gone, though I'm irked that OnDemand skipped an episode of Broadchurch. It goes straight from episode 3 to episode 5, so I may need to find another way of watching the missing episode because you can't really skip an episode in the middle of an eight-episode mystery series.

Post WorldCon Wrap-Up

First, a little business: There's a survey being done to get a measurement of who science fiction fans really are, outside the demographics usually seen at conventions, and what their interests are. You can go here to take the survey and help provide a better picture.

Now, for the WorldCon wrap-up, or at least part of it. I think each panel I was on gave me fodder for multiple blog posts, so the true wrap-up may take a while as I visit each of those topics over time (and hopefully before I forget everything). I'm not going to dwell on the journey itself, other than to say that I've learned a few things about myself and road trips. One big thing is that I really need to stop and take a break every couple of hours. I haven't done a lot of really long trips before. Mostly, I drive to my parents' house, which is about two hours away. I've done some trips to Austin and Houston, which are about four hours, and there's usually a lunch/gas/bathroom stop about halfway. Most of the way to San Antonio is my route to Austin, and I stopped at about the usual halfway point for the Austin trip. Then two hours after that, I got really twitchy. When I drive in familiar territory and have been going too long, I get the road zombie thing, where all I see is the road and I'm not aware of where I am. But I've only driven to San Antonio once, and that was six years ago, so I reached a point where I got weirdly paranoid because I had no sense of how much farther I had to go and I started imagining that something was wrong with my car, mostly because of reflections off the dashboard that made me imagine seeing the "we're all going to die!" warning lights out of the corner of my eye. When I found a nice-looking gas station/convenience store with a big old oak tree in front of it, I stopped for gas even though I didn't really need to, just to walk around for a while. On the way back, I made a point of taking breaks, and it went much better.

I recovered from the drive by picking up take-out at the food court in the mall on the Riverwalk and eating in my room while watching an NCIS rerun. Then I made use of the hotel's rooftop pool and swam a few laps and just floated for a while to work the kinks out. There was a nice deck by the pool overlooking downtown, and I sat out there and watched the sun set and the city lights come on. I did the Thursday-morning Stroll with the Stars and saw a part of the downtown area I'd never explored, the dam and spillway at the end of the flood control channel behind the Riverwalk. I like water, and rushing, roaring water is even better. I spent the next couple of days sitting at the FenCon table in the exhibit hall, aside from the hour I spent at an autograph table. I didn't have a line of fans, but I did have a steady stream of people, and not just the "sign my program book" people or friends. In between autographs, I worked on my knitting, which brought a few people over to chat. I'll have to remember that for future autograph sessions. Knitting gives me something to do other than sit there and look pathetic and lonely, and it gives people a reason to come talk to me and then learn about my books. The same thing happened at the FenCon table.

Friday night, I got another new experience because the Random Penguin (okay, technically I think they're calling themselves Penguin Random House, but Random Penguin is much catchier) party was in the Tower of the Americas, which has an amazing view of the city. I kept forgetting to socialize because I was too busy staring out the windows. Then I had a number of geek moments in which I'd be chatting with a group of people, then belated introductions would be made and I'd discover exactly who I was chatting with.

Saturday and Sunday were my busy paneling days. I had a lot of fun (and a big crowd in the really big room) with the future of Star Wars panel, and had the rather surreal experience of having David Brin plugging my books during introductions. I wouldn't have thought he'd have any idea who I was. The geeky knitting panel was also a lot of fun. Since I was the closest to "local," I was the one able to bring visual aids. The TARDIS shawl got a lot of attention, as did some of my lace knitting and, of course, the lightsaber knitting needles. The Sunday morning panel on books being made into movies and television was educational for me and I did a lot more listening than talking. Charlaine Harris really is a hoot and a real sweetheart.

I'm afraid I skipped the Hugo awards ceremony. I don't have a lot of patience for award ceremonies in general, and I was dead on my feet. I went to dinner with some of the FenCon gang, then went back to my room, read a while, and was in bed with the lights out probably before the ceremony ended. I was one of the "stars" for the Monday Stroll with the Stars, so I had to be up early for that. I was getting really tired of the convention center by that point, so for my lunch break between panels, I went to the street festival at the nearby old church that I'd noticed them setting up while on the stroll, and I was fed by the nice church ladies and had an interesting conversation with one of the people working at the festival. It was a good break before the final panel.

I think I've started a tradition for the end of WorldCons. Last year, on the last night after the con ended, I had dinner at a cafe on the river in Chicago. This year, I had dinner at Casa Rio, the old Mexican place on the Riverwalk. If I go to London, I'll have to find some waterside dining, but probably more in the vicinity of Little Venice than on the Thames itself. There's something about just sitting on the bank of a river that's very relaxing and that helps me wind down.

My initial goal for this con was to improve my networking, and I'm not sure how well I succeeded there. I probably ought to get more involved on the SFWA forums to stay more in touch with the people I was chatting with at the party. I didn't exchange business cards with people, or anything like that. On the other hand, I ran into some friends from college, someone I worked with 15 years ago and someone from a book club I used to be in.

Now, I'm going to have a little resting/hibernation time. I had ballet the night I got home, then children's choir started last night and I had choir rehearsal. Today, now that I've already obtained groceries, I can just relax for a while. As I get older, my body seems to be less flexible about changes to routine, and a week of changed sleeping schedules, irregular mealtimes, different kinds of food, probably not enough water and lots of social interaction has utterly drained me. I have a few business-related tasks to take care of, but otherwise I can catch up on the TV I missed while I was gone and maybe start a season 3 of Haven marathon if my DVDs arrive as scheduled today.

Know When to Fold 'Em

I'm back from WorldCon, but the report will have to wait a while because I need to organize my thoughts. At the moment, I'm afraid I'd mostly talk about the drive home, in which I seemed to come across the world's slowest McDonalds, where it took something like twenty minutes to get a drink. Meanwhile, Texas is big. Really big. Someone needs to invent teleportation. While I'm processing to the point I can talk about more than how long the drive seemed to be, it's time for a Wednesday writing post.

I'm going to get a bit radical today and go against one of those pieces of writing advice that I hear all the time, that you have to finish what you're working on. To some extent, that's true. You won't get the first two chapters of a book published (unless it's a short story in its own right). But at the same time, not all ideas are viable, and bogging yourself down in a story that really can't be finished and shouldn't be finished isn't going to help you much. My career might have started sooner if I'd finished something instead of flitting from idea to idea, but I think I did more harm to my career and delayed myself more because of stubbornly insisting on completing something that wasn't viable. I'd have done myself a favor if I'd allowed myself to move on when I realized that a story just wasn't working instead of spending years trying to make it work and hating every minute of it.

The trick is in knowing when something isn't working as opposed to hitting the "slog through the middle" hard part or being distracted by Shiny New Idea syndrome. The middle of a book is hard even when the story idea is good and perfectly viable, and I find that when I'm slogging through the middle, that's when my best ideas for other stories hit me. If you're struggling with the middle and get hit by a new idea that sounds fun, It's even more difficult to keep on. How do you know the difference between a book that's hit the hard part and a book that isn't working?

If you've been hit by a distracting Shiny New Idea, give yourself a day to play with the new idea. Do a brain dump and write down absolutely everything you know about this idea. If scenes come to you, write them. List facts, character details, etc. Most Shiny New Ideas aren't really ready to be written yet, so you're likely to run out of information, and you'll see then that this isn't a book you can drop everything and write. Getting the info out of your head may make it easier to go back to your current project and focus. But if you keep coming up with more and more stuff with the new idea and scenes turn into chapters, and you still have more in your head after a day, then you may be on to something that's worth developing.

If you're just stuck and slogging on a story without the distraction of a new idea, it may help to give yourself a break, especially if you've been working diligently. Some writers call this "refilling the well." Take a time you'd normally devote to writing and do something else, like reading a book, watching a movie, listening to music, visiting a museum or even just taking a walk. You may find yourself returning to the project with more enthusiasm.

You can try going back to the beginning and rereading what you've written so far -- without doing heavy editing unless you discover a major plot flaw that needs to be fixed in order to get the story back on track. You can read in a few hours what takes weeks to write, and sometimes reading it like a reader would gives you a sense of forward momentum. Something that seemed like a slog to write may zip by when you read.

Another way to deal with feeling stuck is to take a step back and do some outlining or brainstorming. Make a list of ten or twenty things that can happen next. Make a list of things that need to happen before the end of the story. If there's a future scene that's already clear in your head, write it. Look at your characters and see if there's something about them you haven't fully used or developed. If you have a good idea what the ending will be, reverse engineer: think of what needs to happen immediately before the ending to make it happen, then think of what needs to happen to make that happen, and so forth.

If you try these things and are still stuck, you may not have a viable idea. If you're not seeing future scenes in your head, if you don't find yourself thinking about the characters, then at the very least your heart isn't in it, and the result probably won't be very good even if you force yourself to finish it. If the book isn't contracted, then there's no harm in putting it aside and working on something else. You'll be better off than if you spend all that time working on it and the result is something that can't be published, anyway.

Epic To-Do Lists

Today is really going to be Get Stuff Done Day. Also known as The Day of the To-Do List. And also The Day of Removing Stuff From the Epic To-Do List. One item I've already removed was baking blueberry muffins. I had some fresh blueberries, and I thought that would be a good way to use them, plus I'd have something for those "I'm not ready to face people yet" breakfasts in my room. Then I remembered that muffins don't travel well. I tried that once, and they crumbled. Then there's the baking time and clean-up time. So I'm freezing the berries to make muffins when I get home, and I'll find a bagel shop in San Antonio for my breakfast needs.

Really, most of today's to-dos are quick little things, like plug something in or print something. I decided not to go overboard with orchestrating my travel mix CD. I let iTunes shuffle the songs I've chosen without worrying about when in my trip a particular song might fall. This way, the order will be a total surprise, which should help keep me alert. I just hope that none of the singalong opera arias fall when I'm sitting at a stop light in a small town. For those who are curious, this is a strange mix that mostly seems to involve ABBA, Billy Joel, Pat Benatar, Meat Loaf, Queen, Tori Amos, Sarah MacLachlan, Josh Groban and Unwoman, a ton of show tunes (Les Mis, Into the Woods, Phantom of the Opera, Ragtime, The Secret Garden, Wicked, Songs for a New World), some 80s stuff, a dash of Enya and a couple of arias. I could do 700 MB on the disc I was using, which came to about 10 hours of music, so it will cycle back to the beginning before I get home.

I don't normally post my convention schedules, since if you're not going you don't care and if you are going you have easy access to that information, but this is bigger and more difficult to wade though than most conventions, so here are some highlights. My autographing will be Thursday at 2. I'm not anticipating long lines. The infamous geeky knitting panel is at 3 on Saturday. Sunday at 10 is that panel on TV/film adaptations. I'm part of the Stroll with the Stars gang on Monday morning, so if you're still functional on the final day of the convention and like to walk fast, come join me (it's supposed to be a stroll, but I can't walk that slow, so mine will be the fast group). The full schedule will be available and I think is searchable, so it should be pretty easy to find me. FenCon is hosting a party on Saturday night, so look for the signs and come say hi. I don't know yet exactly when I'll be working that party, but probably early in the evening because I have early events the next day.

Which is ironic because I recently came across scientific proof that it's not necessarily better or efficient to be an early bird. I've ranted over the years about the general societal attitude that if you get up early and get stuff done, you're efficient, but if you stay up late to get stuff done (and then sleep late in the morning), you're some kind of sloth. Actually, you may be more intelligent.

I don't know how much checking in I'll be doing the rest of the week because I don't yet know what the Internet situation will be. I'm more likely to update Facebook because I can do that more easily from my phone.

Full report when I get back!

Every Shoe Store in the Mall!

I think I've now done all the errands needed in preparation for my trip, other than the ATM run, and that I can do on my way out of town, since the bank is a block from my house. This morning was going to be a quick trip that ended up expanding. My black sneakers -- the ones I use for casual wear -- have just about died (a hole is forming and growing visible). I hadn't been able to find black sneakers that didn't also have neon pink or green on them. The current pair was a replacement for what I wanted to find again, some Keds I bought to celebrate the completion of the first draft of Enchanted, Inc.. They were a sort of retro 70s looking sneaker in black suede with subdued gray/silver stripes on the side. Alas, they quit making them and had nothing like them when I needed to replace them after wearing them to death. When I realized I needed new sneakers last week, I checked the Keds web site, and they had a new kind of black shoe that wasn't their standard Keds style. Then I discovered that there's a Ked's outlet in the mall near me.

Since today was the first day of school, I figured it was safe to go in the mall again. Unfortunately, the Keds outlet turned out to be a mix of several brands, and they had about three pairs of adult Keds. So, I decided I might as well see what was in the other shoe stores in the mall. I needed some exercise (I tried on clothes last night to decide what to take to WorldCon, and I discovered that I've put on a little weight lately), so I might as well walk the mall. I found absolutely nothing until I got to the last shoe store, one that must be relatively new because I didn't recall seeing it before. There they not only had the Keds I saw on the web site, but they had them in my size and they were on sale. They're not quite as "cool" as the original pair, but oh my, were they comfortable. Meanwhile, I discovered that there's a Levi's outlet in that mall (the mall closest to me is an outlet mall), and I got a new pair of good Levi's for less than Target store brand jeans. I may have to cut them off to capris within a couple of years because if I buy jeans short enough to wear with flats, they'll inevitably shrink into high-water length, but I have too many pairs of "wear with heels" jeans right now (that will likely shrink to wear-with-flats length eventually).

My dad may develop a PTSD twitch after hearing this story, thanks to a long-ago back-to-school shoe shopping expedition in which I visited every shoe store in a large mall, tried on shoes in every store, then went back to the first store I visited and bought the first pair I tried on. In this case, though, I wasn't reviewing every option in the mall before making a choice, I only tried on one pair, and I bought that pair. I only went to every shoe store in the mall because none of them had what I wanted and I had to keep looking. Seriously, what is the deal with neon all over the shoes right now? The guy at one store did tell me he's been telling his company that there really is a market for "fashion sneakers" -- sneakers worn as casual wear, not for sports. They carried them for men, but didn't really have anything like that for women, and they get asked for them all the time.

Then on the way home I made two trips to Target. The second trip was because I needed to get printer ink, so I went to the Office Depot next to Target after the Target run, only to discover that the same item was $5 less at Target, so I went back to Target. It wasn't like I had to go out of my way, since I had to pass Target to get back to my car from Office Depot.

Now I'm down to the at-home preparation stuff, like doing laundry, baking cookies for the FenCon party, making a few promo items. I spent the weekend cleaning the house so I won't come home after a week in a hotel with maid service and want to leave again. After today, I should just have to pack and then do the final spiffing up. One of the many nice things about driving is that I can leave when I want to. It's a 5-6-hour drive and hotel check-in is at 4, so I don't have to leave at the crack of dawn. I would like to be within the San Antonio metro area by about 3 because I'd rather not hit a lot of school zones in the small towns along the way, and that road turns into a regular elevated highway once it's in the city, so school zones are no longer a factor. So, the plan is to leave sometime between 9 and 10.

Road Trips

I managed to check a couple more items off the epic to-do list yesterday -- and added several more. I was a little irked that one of the key items on my shopping list was missing from the store. There was a little shelf tag label where it was supposed to be, but the shelf was completely empty. That's why I do my pre-trip shopping a little ahead of time. That way, if a key item is missing, I don't have a last-minute panic of running from store to store that final day. Instead, I can look for it in other places as I go about my business for the next few days.

I'm taking advantage of the fact that I'm driving instead of flying this year to not only bring a broader variety of shoes instead of just rotating among a few pairs that go with everything and bring dresses instead of a couple of skirts and a mix of tops, but also to bring my own snacks and in-room dining options, like shelf-stable bottles of orange juice.

This isn't just a being cheap thing. I like to be ready to have breakfast in my hotel room -- or at least a pre-breakfast snack -- because I'm generally not good for dealing with people until I've had at least a cup of tea and some bread of some kind (roll, toast, muffin). Orange juice is also good (plus, bonus vitamin C for helping fend off Con Crud). Plus, it means I can sleep a little later if I don't have to go in search of breakfast before any morning activities. Then there are the times when I just need a little quiet time, and often the only quiet time I can carve out is lunchtime, so if I've got some cup of soup and crackers in my room, I can kill two birds with one stone. And then there are the times when I find out I've just missed the lunch or dinner outing with friends and am not up to scaring up any other dining companions, and I'm not crazy about eating in public by myself. There are a lot of things I do on my own with no qualms, like going to movies or even traveling abroad, but there are only certain settings where I'm not uncomfortable in a restaurant by myself (I'm okay in New York and Europe, where it's not at all uncommon for people to dine alone, but in this part of the world, you get some really funny looks and the waiters often treat you like they're irked that there are non tip-paying seats at your table).

Plus, there's just something about a road trip and snacks. I think that stems from childhood, when the snacks were the best part of a road trip. There were things that we seldom got to have at home that we got when we were traveling. I still do that. I just bought a box of Cheez-Its, and I never have those at home. I'll also get some healthy stuff to eat as I drive, like some nuts, carrot sticks and apple slices.

Speaking of road trips, that reminds me that I need to make my road trip CD for this trip. I still don't have an MP3 player and haven't figured out how to do playlists on my phone, but for a trip like this, an MP3 CD is just as good, and I don't have to remember to take it out and carry it with me when I stop. I can get about 11 hours of music on a disc, which should cover the whole trip, possibly cycling back to the beginning for the last twenty minutes or so, and that actually makes my trip something of a heroic journey, if it returns to the way it started, but seeing it from a different perspective. Now to winnow down my collection to the 11 hours of music I want most, perhaps starting with some enthusiasm, then a little more mellow until I get out of the city, more lively during the country driving, back to mellow when I hit San Antonio, and then reverse the order for the second half. The most favorite songs may be repeated so that I get them once on each leg of the trip (Terrence Mann has to sing "Where's the Girl" from The Scarlet Pimpernel to me at least once per long-distance driving session). I also have to fit in some of my more obnoxious soprano stuff to sing along with, because in a car in the middle of nowhere is the perfect place to go for the really high notes.

Now to make a quick Home Depot run. I need to make another Target trip, but that may wait for next week when I have a better sense of everything else that needs to go on the list. Then the rest of the day will be devoted to getting stuff done and checking items off the list.