Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 103

Turkey Tri 2010

I have been battling Amanda Meredith-Dunlop since my first triathlon back in 2004. I think I have beaten her twice, both occasions on Olympic distance courses. But when it's a sprint like it was Saturday, she has beaten me every time. I have a ruthless competitive streak that comes out rather unattractively in triathlon. So, this is the play-by-play.

The gun goes off. I am about six seconds back from the front of the line. I feel slow heading off. My expectations for the race are low and I am feeling pretty tired and achy. I can see at least six women ahead of me before the first big turn down the hill. I figure there are at least that many that I can not see. I hit the second turn to go up the hill, look at my watch and realize I am actually a few seconds ahead of my best time. I have counted about a thousand steps at this point. (I count all my steps on a race like this--the total was 2368.) I am expecting to be passed going up the hill, and I am, but only by two guys and one woman. My strategy on hills is to keep my heart rate the same, which means slowing my pace and taking shorter steps. I have heard this is the "right" way to do it, but don't know that I have any proof about that.

Four hundred steps later, I reach the top of the hill at about 15:00. The woman who passed me on the hill I pass back. Another woman surges ahead of me as I go around the final corner toward the track circle. She is dressed in purple. I know her. She is my arch rival, Amanda Meredith-Dunlop. I let her go because a) I am too tired to chase her and b) I tell myself that I will catch her on the bike. I always have before. I am also aware of the fact that she can make up 2:00 on the swim. I do not think I will be able to create that much of a lead on the bike, but I will try.

I hit the transition area, take off my running shoes, put on my biking shoes and my helmet. I have chosen not to wear gloves or glasses for this short race (a little more than 2 loops of 5 miles each, with one massive climb on the loops). It is about 50 degrees and I am wearing shorts, a swim suit and a long sleeved T-shirt on top. I keep the T-shirt on. I grab my bike and run for the exit. One of the volunteers yells at me that I have my helmet on wrong. I put a hand up to feel it, and he is right. This is more ridiculous than you might first assume, because I have one of those cone like aero helmets which should be impossible to put on backwards. I struggled to do it, but then I have to take it off and put it back on. A woman passes me in transition as I do so, but it is not purple girl. She is already ahead of me.

I finished the run in 23:15, and am out of transition clicked onto my bike 1:10 later. I take it easy until I hit the first longish section on the big road. Then I crank up and pass the woman who passed me in transition. I pass three more women, counting them as I go. It will be impossible once I hit the second loop to tell who is my competition since by then people will be out who are on their first loop. I pass purple girl on the turn into the downhill. She passes me back on the downhill. I am terrified to let my bike go as fast as it can (I suspect it is 70 mph) and keep hitting the brakes. Another turn and she is still ahead. Up the big hill where people start to get off bikes and walk. I can see her ahead of me. I cannot catch her. At the top and into the start of the new loop, I pass her.

Yes! I think to myself that likely the only reason I pass her is because my bike is very light and I have an advantage there. She certainly climbs hills better than I do. I keep ahead of her for the next three miles, down the hill a second time. But on the uphill, she passes me. I grit my teeth when we are flat again and pass her about a half mile before we hit transition. I don't see her in transition. I am faster in transition than most people. I take off my shirt, my helmet, my shoes and socks and run for the swimming pool. I do not see her. I jump into the water and realize I still have my shorts on. Oh, well. Nothing to do about that now.

I hit a big clog of guys who are big. Normally, I will swim over, through, or on top of people who are in my way. But there are about ten guys all clumped together and they are showing no awareness of the fact that I might like to get by. They elbow me and yank on my legs through the first two lengths. And then she comes from behind me, and I see her pass me by. Yup. That is the way it is. I finish the rest of the swim without hurting myself too badly because what is the point? I get out of the water and dejectedly head into the shower area. I come out and see my sister-in-law and two kids come out of the water one after another. That is very cool.

Just for fun, before we head home, I check the results. I have taken second place overall. Amanda only beat me by 40 seconds, the closest gap in a long time at that distance. The woman behind me I also compete with a lot, Sue Pope. She is 49. We are all old ladies and we are on the podium. It feels good. No broken toenails, just a ravenous appetite to feed during the weekend.

World Fantasy and pitching

I have never been to World Fantasy before. In some ways, it is a fairly standard con, from this one year's experience. There are panels and readings and signings. It is in a hotel. Most people have flown in for it.

Some differences:

Almost everyone at World Fantasy is in the business. I heard Holly Black say 85% and she is probably right. I wanted there to be big flashing lights up around certain people, or for the badges with names to be bigger and always turned the right way around. Every time I asked what someone's name was, it turned out to be someone who was important and I felt I should have known. I knew their work, but not their faces. Often, that was all I had to say, and suddenly I had an enthusiastic conversation. I figure other writers will never get tired of being told their books are great. I can't imagine it getting old for me.

The bar is always full. At 3 in the morning, people were still there, chatting. When I woke up and went running every morning, there were people there. Probably not the same people as at 3, but I was never sure. I know my agent had people he needed to talk to there and he set up "dates" with them. There were also a lot of ad hoc conversations, where you are sitting with someone and then someone comes and sits with you and you introduce them to the person you are with, and then there is conversation. There were people I introduced around (not many) and people I was introduced to (though I doubt they were that excited to meet me). I did not push myself into any conversations. I figured they would happen without that.

There were free books. Most of the free ones I wanted were books I already had, but still. Free books, how great is that? I brought home about 3, but I could have had 20 if I wanted.

The mass author signing was very cool. Since it was still mostly professionals, the people who came to get books signed were always people you needed to get to know. And I felt a little less self-conscious going around and getting books signed by some of my favorites. I didn't bring books specifically for signing because it's just too hard to jug that many books around the airport, but I had brought books to read and it turned out that Sharon Shinn and Scott Lynch, whose books I was reading were there. I also went and said hi to Esther Friesner, whose Psalms of Herod I loved years ago, and Carol Berg, whose first book Transformation is incredible. And I never got over to say hi to Patricia McKillip although she was right across from me.

There was a significant portion of aspiring authors there who were pitching in various ways. I even ended up talking about a book to an editor I was introduced to, although it's not the same kind of pitching in my situation. When I heard from aspiring authors about how many editors and agents they had pitched to, however, I began to suspect that what they thought was going on was not what was really going on. They said they were given x number of invitations to submit, but the agents and editors I talked to sort of rolled their eyes and said that they just throw that stuff directly in the round file. Real submissions come from agents or from the regular channels. People who think that meeting someone is going to make up for lack of writing talent are annoying.

This is not to say that meeting people at a place like this is unimportant. Besides being incredibly cool, it is a great place to get to know people who may eventually matter to your career. It's just that it doesn't work in any obvious way. You never know who you are talking to who will matter and you never know what conversations will make them remember you. I think pitching directly may only work rarely, and that generally speaking, just being introduced is far more valuable. But perhaps this is my shy nature coming out. I hate pitching and being pitched to. I like meeting interesting people.

PW article on LAWKI month

Click here for link to the article. I think the bit on going without electricity must be Shannon Wright's. I don't think I said that, but otherwise, it was very accurate.

Very cool to see this written up. I'm sure I will now sell the book based on this experience, Practice Apocalypse, from this blog. Right?

panels

I've been on a number of panels now, and am trying to categorize them.

Panel Type 1

A--There is one "big" name on the panel. Everyone else defers to big name.
B--One particular person enjoys the huge audience draw for "big" name and decides to borrow some of it by tweaking big name.
C--"Big" name author is completely senile and while the others try to show respect, they cannot help but be bewildered by what comes from his/her mouth.

Panel Type 2

A--Everyone on the panel is pretty much a smaller name and they all wonder why they are being asked to speak on this particular topic.
B--The self-published author on the panel takes over and/or must be shouted down.

Panel Type 3

The panel is divided into two camps and there is pretty much a war between them on the panel, which sometimes devolves into physical fights.


Panel Type 4

Everyone is on the same page, has witty things to say, and the audience is tweeting the whole thing because it is so brilliant and quotable.

Panel Type 5

There is no moderator and the audience takes over the panel, not only directing where the questions lead, but giving "comments" instead that derail everything.

Panel Type 6

The moderator chides people on the panel as if in a classroom and he/she is the teacher of unruly students.

Panel Type 7

The moderator has no idea what is going on, rambles on, and the rest of the participants are forced to try to save the panel.

Panel Type 8

The panel is completely mutually incomprehensible to each other and to the audience. It is as if they are literally speaking different languages.

Obviously, I prefer Panel Type 4, but only about 5% of the panels I have been on are like that, and that is probably a generous number. I wonder if I were an organizer for a conference how I would put people on panels. I suspect it has a lot more to do with filling spaces and making sure everyone gets a proper number of panels than it does to do with figuring out who would work well together.

At Sirens, I got a lot of compliments from people who came to my panel on Female Friendships in Fantasy. I didn't really know how to react, since I hadn't moderated a panel before. After thinking about it a while, I have decided that if I did anything particularly well, it was simply that I picked good people to be on the panel, not that my actual moderating during the panel was superb. It's all about who is there and if they are willing to give and take.

19 authors who influenced me

Just off the top of my head:

Lois McMaster Bujold
Robin McKinley
Orson Scott Card
Stephen R. Donaldson
Connie Willis
Nancy Kress
Walter Benjamin
Theodor Adorno
Rainer Maria Rilke
Robin Hobb
Megan Whalen Turner
Edward Eager
Arnold Lobel
Madeleine L'Engle
James Marshall
Bill Peet
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Margaret Peterson Haddix

Female series heroes

I spent a good deal of time at World Fantasy this last week thinking about new female series possibilities.

Seaman Maguire's Toby Daye loses 15 years to an evil villain, along with any connection to her only daughter. To the daughter she has been abandoned and Toby is not tied down by motherhood, but also we don't hate her because she had no choice in the matter (shades of Angel who becomes father to a teen in the space of a few episodes).

Isa in Paladin of Souls is an unwilling heroine in later years but only for one episode and then she retires from heroing. Ditto Cordelia who is fierce in pregnancy and shortly after but goes back to mothering as soon as she can.

Jo Walton's Sulien who fights at Arthur's side is barren and can keep having adventures though she has to be devastated by rape first to free her (perhaps in the reader's mind) from obligation to be a mother.

Robin Hobb's new series has interesting women. Curious to see where it leads.

Diana Gabaldon's series starting with Outlander has an interesting break for childbearing, then continues 20 years later.

Any other women/mothers who are heroes in a series? I think our cultural imagination is lacking here.

Reading Recommendations for October 2010

*Tease* will continue as tease this week. Sorry! I jumped the gun a bit.

Invisible Things by Jenny Davidson (such an interesting series, and the writer is also a triathlete and a professor)
Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs (a)
A Local Habitation by Seanan McGuire (a) (read by Mary Robinette Kowall!)
Curse the Dark by Laura Anne Gilman (a)
Ash by Malinda Lo
Red Seas under Red Skies by Scott Lynch (not for teens)
Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs (a)
The Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein (book club)
All Clear by Connie Willis (I love Connie Willis and pretty much everything she writes!)
Die a Little by Megan Abbott

If these lists are a little shorter than they used to be, it is partly because I am doing less reading and partly because I am not posting all the books I read, only ones I think are pretty much perfect for their kind of book. If I have reservations, even if I enjoyed the book, I'm doing the painful thing of leaving titles off the list, though I keep them on my own log for my OCD purposes.

Also, a list of accomplishments this year, now that we are closing in on the end of it.

1. 1 Ironman, 1 Half Ironman, 1 marathon, 1 ultra marathon, 1 half marathon, 4 Olympic tris, 3 sprint tris
2. six full novels written from 12 months ago, 3 of those under contract, and two novel starts
3. 1 community play written, directed, designed, and just about everything else--for 29 kids mostly under 12.
4. 2 AP tests, 1 PSAT test, 1 driver license test survived by Mom of teenage daughters
5. 130 books read so far this year (versus 250 total last year)

favorite writers and male or female characters

Second tease: it's about LAWKI month.

I should be able to post about it tomorrow or Friday.

I am still thinking about the problem of my favorite writers being women who write about male characters. Perhaps in an ideal world, women would write about men and women in equal portions, and men about women and men ditto. And I would like them all based on how cool the worlds and magics are, and how interesting the characters, and how good the writing. But it isn't so.

Some possible reasons for why I like female writers writing male characters:

1) I am used to reading about male characters because as a child and teen, I read mostly about male characters (written by men) who had the kind of adventures that women could not have.

2) I have a gender identity problem.

3) Female writers who write about male characters write them in a way that is actually less masculine and more feminine, and I wish that actual men were more like those male characters. And this is possibly a fantasy that many other female readers share.

4) Female writers who write about male characters get a bigger audience and therefore are able to keep in the business long enough that they become better writers. And then they can write the female characters I love, as well. (Although they have to remain side characters or become side characters like Bujold's Cordelia.)

5) I am still prejudiced against female characters because that is the way I grew up, and no matter how hard I try, I won't read about female characters doing the same cool stuff as the males.

6) Female characters are much harder to write in a series, and I like series better because there is more space to develop character. The reason that women are trickier to write is that there is the whole pregnancy, child-care problem. It might be that the most interesting female characters to write are going to be postmenopausal and the kind of adventures they have are very different, even undiscovered as of yet.

7) I am a heterosexual woman and have a partly sexual interest in male characters, especially hot ones.

8) The male characters I like to read about are actually symbolically women. (My brother argues that this is true of Miles Vorkosigan, who is shorter than men, weaker than men, and smarter than men, but has to be twice as good as men in order to be allowed to compete.)

9) For female characters, romance tends to take over the plot. For male characters, it is only one element of the plot. My definition of romance fantasy: two characters who have to save the world find each other and happen to fall in love because they are both interesting, committed, moral people who are in pursuit of the same goal. My definition of paranormal romance: two characters who have strange fantastical powers fall in love with each other because love is the most important thing in life, and possibly have adventures on the side.

failures

Here is my latest essay on writing at Intergalactic Medicine Show, on meeting deadlines.

I have been thinking about my failures today, and I think what I learned was that there is a lot of truth to the idea that there is no such thing as failure unless you give up. But there are certainly things that feel like failure.

1--After I had published my first book with Holiday House, The Monster In Me, I tried for two years to get them to publish my second book. It was called Counting Steps, and in the beginning it was told alternately from the povs of an autistic boy and his younger brother. I tried using only the normal brother's pov at one point in the many, many stops along the way of my revision attempts. I could not get my editor to bite on that manuscript, and it wasn't because she didn't like the concept. I felt like a failure because I couldn't revise it well enough, and eventually, she told me to stop sending it to her (nicely, of course). I didn't sell a second book to her. Ever.

But looking back on this, my only regret is that I didn't figure out sooner that the revision wasn't working. It's not that I think the book is a bad one, but I wasn't ready to write it then. Honestly, I do not know if I am ready now. But I may get there at some point. And that closed door led to other open doors with my fantasy writing, which I am very glad to have a chance to show to the world.

2--After I published Mira, Mirror with Viking, I sent the editor The Stepmother's Story, about Cinderella's stepmother, and it was rejected. Then I sent The Princess and the Hound and we worked on it for two years, but eventually it was rejected as "too old," which was the same reason The Stepmother's Story was rejected. I was devastated. Two books, two houses. What was wrong with me that I couldn't write a second book that an editor liked? I had tried so hard to write in the same genre for the same audience in those second books. But it didn't work.

Then a few weeks later, my agent sold The Princess and the Hound to Harper, where I have been very happy. Except . . .

3--After The Princess and the Hound came out, I sent four manuscripts to my editor, thinking that we would have to find a match in there somewhere. The editor ended up asking for a fifth manuscript and took it to committee. But it was turned down, at least in its current state, though the editor still liked it. She just didn't think the market was ready for it. Then she told me that the committee wanted a sequel to The Princess and the Hound. Problem" I had no sequel ideas. So I had to wait for about six months for one to hit me. And then I get a new contract and all was well, until . . .

4--My editor was laid off in 2008 amidst the massive economy down turn of that year. I was assigned to another editor I had never worked with before or met. And unlike in many cases, my old editor wasn't moving to another house where I could submit to her and my old house. I kept working on my projects with Harper, but I was devastated. Losing an editor sucks, even in the best of cases, and mine was certainly the best. Harper still loved my series and wanted it to succeed and did lots of marketing to help it. But I missed my editor.

And then this year, she landed at Egmont and we are a happy team again.

I'm not saying all failures end in getting what you want. But if you keep moving forward, you find that the wall blocking you led you to find a different path--or perhaps make a different path. And maybe what you wanted there isn't what you wanted anymore or it doesn't matter because you can't imagine being happier than you are now.



I have some really fun news to share with you soon about this blog and some attention it has gotten! *Tease* *Tease*

joy and train

This morning I feel a bit like a train has run over me. I can't really point to a specific locus of pain, just overall feel wrong, tired, depressed, and weak.

But I remembered something about the race on Saturday that has made me a little more reflective about my current physical state. As I often try to do, I took a few moments during the slowest portion of the race up the final 15 mile section toward Snowbasin, to turn back and look down at Pineview Reservoir and take in the beauty of the fall scenery. This is an area that hasn't yet been overbuilt, although it has seen a lot of growth lately. The water shone in the bright afternoon light and just the sense of how far I had gone and how high I was overcame me with a feeling of awe. I think Kant calls this "Beauty" in a philosophical sense, the experience of seeing what is beyond oneself, whether or not one is religious.

And in addition to that, I was reminded as I struggled of all the people who cannot do what I am blessed to be able to do. Running a marathon is a crazy thing to do, in the sense that the human body is just not designed to do it. Your pain sensors have to be constantly ignored in order for you to do the training and then the race itself. Athletes do marathons, and I have never considered myself an athlete. I'm just a regular person who does crazy stuff for a reason that no one (including me) understands. But I am a lucky crazy person. Though the pain in my legs was there, reminding me that I am mortal, I could keep going. I'm not in a wheelchair. I don't struggle for every breath. I'm not lying in a hospital bed with a terminal diagnosis. I'm not in a situation where I have to use every bit of energy to survive. I am not in a country where women are treated as cattle.

When I got home from the race, 15 was watching The Princess Bride with her friends before we left for dinner, and I think I caught a glimpse of Wesley telling Buttercup--life is pain. Yes, life is pain. Pain means that I am alive. The pain of this race was pain of my own choosing, but it meant that my legs work, that they continue to take me up and down hills, that the world is on its axis, that there will be better days ahead.