Lyda Morehouse's Blog, page 59

Decided not to post this on Facebook

Because, you know, it occurs to me that maybe my Facebook friends don't want all my half-naked Renji pictures.  (What?  NO WAY.)
Thus, I inficted half-nakedness on YOU, my LJ friends.



So, there you go.  Enjoy.

A Story About A Girl

First of all, for those of you following the story so far, I finished the proposal that was giving me keyboard impressions on my face.  I'm actually incredibly happy with it now, having killed my darlings, the enemy, and listened very carefully to what SF grandmistress Eleanor Arnason said when she explained that my story needed to be more "skiffy."

I have the best friends/writers' group.  Ever.

Now, I must relate the sad story of sexism and how it strangely still exists in the year 2012.  Sit back and prepare to be baffled and confused, possibly even shocked and horrified.

Go on, pop the popcorn.  I'll wait.

Okay, so I was at Walgreen's picking up perscriptions and whatnot, and I was being checked out (in the cashier way) by a young, twenty-something young lady.  The guy at the other register picked up the phone and answered it, "Walgreen's, at the Corner of Happy and Healthy!" or some other phrase the corprate office required empolyees to say when they interacted with customers.  I turned to the woman taking care of me and said, "Wow, that's annoying.  It reminds me of when I had to say 'Cheetah Pizza, Special Delivery' when I was delivering pizzas."  She gave me a very shocked look and said, "Women can do that?"  I said, "I'm sorry, what?"  "Oh," she said, "I didn't know women could do that job--delivering pizzas--I thought there was some unwritten rule that it could only be guys."  I blinked at her for a long moment, and I said, "Women can have whatever jobs they want, as long as they're qualified.  To deliver pizza, I only needed a valid driver's license and a car."  She seemed kind of impressed.  "Wow," she said.

I walked away, thinking, "WHAT??!!" 

Okay, if she'de been sixty or seventy, I would have shrugged it off.  This young lady was no more than 20.  I.. okay, maybe it's true that pizza delivery is one of those jobs men tend to drift toward, but it's not like it's particularly physically demanding, like, say, being a long-haul truck driver, a police officer, or a fire-fighter.  AND WOMEN CAN DO ALL THOSE JOBS TOO. 

Stunned.  I've been stunned since that interaction.

Like, Art

I have a penpal who lives in Seatle, WA.  Sometime ago, I decided that she needed not just my scintilating words, but also my art.  So, when you see the picture I'm about to post, imagine the top blank section filled with words of greeting, well wishes, tales of my life, tribulations, etc.

Don't you wish YOU were my penpal?



Although, you wouldn't right now.  I just sent this lovely picture of Renji to my penpal filled with tales of woe, mostly.  I've been contemplating what I might have to do if a book contract doesn't pan out soon.  Today, I'm working parttime over the High Holidays to help out a friend with her dog walking business.  It's not going to pull the "big bucks," but, well, a year without income has kind of sucked for me.  Turns out that starving artist gig really only works best if you don't have a family or a kid.  :-)

But, like Renji, I'm not beaten yet.  I've got a really cool idea for the proposal (the one I went Kelly Barnhill on) and I think with a bit more work, it will be ready for the big league.  Fingers crossed my editor agrees with me.

Kill Your Darlings AND THE BAD GUYS!

Yeah, so seriously--"kill the bad guys."  What a f**king brilliant plan.  You are exactly right, my friend. Exactly.  Right. 

After reading that comment to yesterday's post, I woke up an realized, "Yeah, that's what I've got to do: Kill all my darlings, AND THE BAD GUYS!"  So, I'm going to do it.  I'm going to go all Kelly Barnhill* on my proposal's a$$.  There's going to be a bloodbath of "Select-All, Delete" and it will be awesome!

*For those of you just tuning in to the story already in progress, 1) I've been stuck on my proposal for a week and a half, and 2) to "go Kelly Barnhill" is my writer-brain code word for the nuclear option. 

In a previous post, I described how, sometime last year, when I shared a panel on writing with the mild-mannered appearing Ms. Barnhill, I discovered the truth: she's a word-slaying NINJA OF DOOM.  Her plan for revision her novel _seriously_ goes like this, "Hem, hem: I hit 'Select-All, Delete'"  She means it, kids.  The whole novel--all 80,000 to 100,000 words of it goes into the great pixilization Mount Doom lava pit with no hope of recovery--"ahhhhhh!  My Precious!"  (Though I guess her husband now INSISTS on some back-up plan these days, now that she has contracts and stuff).  Then she opens a brandnew document and starts the whole novel over FROM SCRATCH.  I nearly fainted dead away when she told us that and I wasn't sure Michael Mirriam would EVER recover from the shock-induced heart attack/living nightmare this caused nearly every writer present to simultaneously experience.

So, yeah. 

Of course, I'm a lily-white pansy compared to the fearless Ms. Barnhill.  There will be a back-up document stored in any number of safe locations.  HOWEVER, I am going to open up a new document and do a complete do-over.  Just watch me!

Now, I'm off to my regular Women of Wyrdsmith's Wednesdays, wherein I shall daintily sip tea and be F**KING FEARLESS.

My Life and Such

So, yeah, what HAVE I been up to?  About 5'2" -- har, har.

But, in all seriousness, I've been away from the internets (mostly, but more on that in a second,) because I've been trying to get my brain wrapped around a proposal for a miliary SF novel.  I've got this awesome character, right? But, uh... no plot.  I've got and IDEA for events what should happen, but none of the "why the heck does this matter?" bits.  So, I've been banging my head against the keyboard A LOT this last week.

Of course, because I've been frustrated with the work I need to be doing, what's been pouring out of me like wine (or, perhaps "whine")?  Fanfic. 

This is part of why I said I think that fanfic can be addictive, in both the good and bad senses of that word.  The bad part is that "oh, holy crap, so much more FUN than thinking thinky plot thoughts!  OMG, look at me, I just spewed out 4,000 words in two hours!"  Followed closely by, "Wow, 80 people read it already!" 

So I've been trying the classic carrot/stick approach.  If I get some work done on the proposal, I'm allowed to go back to the fic.  But, I've been SO STUCK that it's been super-frustrating all around and has leaked out in fan art (see below.)  The only good news in all of this is that I have always had a profound sense of discpline.  If I want to continue to have the life of a writer that I've grown accustom to, I simply must "do my best!" (as the characters in my Manga are always saying) and get this thing out if it kills me.  I'm actually looking forward to tomorrow when I'm scheduled to hang out with my writer pals, so I can do some idea bouncing of their writerly brains. 

I kind of know my problem.  I need a good villian.  I laid awake a lot last night trying to figure out who that might be for this particular character.  I MIGHT have a bead on him now.  We'll have so see.  I'm off in a few minutes to learn how to walk a dog.  (I'm not kidding.  I'm learning the ropes of a dog walking job a friend needs help with during the High Holiday season.)  I'm hoping that letting stuff percolate without trying to force it out--which I'd been doing previously--might be the key.  I used to do a lot of my plot thinking on the treadmill, so the dog walkies might help me, actually.

Otherwise, Shawn had the day "off" yesterday.  In actuality, she had a fairly horrible test at the doctor's in the middle of the morning, and I not only drove her there, but offered to hold her hand afterwards.  It was actually pretty painful.  It involved electrodes and needles and... thankfully came out negative (the result that means normal.)  But, it also means Shawn still DOESN'T know what causes parts of her body to go numb randomly.  However, the doctor has pretty much ruled out anything that's super-life threatening at this point.  So it's a good news/bad news deal.

Mason is back to school.  We have some cute back to school pictures I should post finally.  Speaking of pictures, Shawn, the trouper, actually sent a gigantic order to Walgreens to finally print out the last two years of photos.  We spent nearly 70 bucks, but it should be nice to actually have hardcopies of some of these, and we can finally share some with Mason's school and our family.

Ah, so that's about all I know.  Hope you're all well.  I look forward to the flurry of spam this post is sure to elicit from the LJ spambots!

Fan Art and Stuff

I'm going to post a little fan art for now, and then come back to writing about my life.  The pictures below were inspired by myself again.  This one is called, "The Demon Stare" (and it's part 26 of the Curse of the Nue series) http://archiveofourown.org/works/509154.  Here is the inked, colored version.  As I think I expressed before, I'm pretty happy with a lot of what's been coming out of this fan art obsession.  I'm having a kind of break-through in terms of "oh, hey, I didn't need to look at a picture to draw this."  So, this came completely out of my head, which makes it extra-special in my opinion.  I had some trouble, however, taking a decent picture of this-- in the original you can see a bit of Zabimaru's tail (he's the striped ape-looking thing, there, in case you're wondering.)



For your edification, here's the sketch (you lose a bit of Renji's arm, but you can see the snake-tail here.):

WTF! Still alive??

Okay, my Bleach peeps, does this NOT look like Byakuya is still alive??  Eyes are open.  Okay, so spitting blood, but, honestly, looks more conscious than Renji in later section of same page.  Because if this is meant to look like the empty gaze of the dead, I'm not sure Kubo-sensei captured that.  And why juxapose with Kyouraku who is alive but blinded???? 

Of course, I'm grasping at straws.   My f*cking OTP is at stake here, people.

Also, as note on my fan fiction completely unrelated to anything of worth, I wish I could go back and add a TINY detail to the Hanami romance sections of my Byakuya/Renji, and that is... now that I'm growing my hair out (which I consider as annoying as I imagine Renji who always has his tied back must also), I think it would have been hillarious (and accurate) to have Byakuya randomly reaching out occasionally to untuck the hair from behind Renji's ears. I find myself doing this, despite knowing I look like a dork.  And, Renji is wearing his hair down for an entire weekend.  It must have driven him a lot more insane than I wrote.

More Fan Art

So, the problem with art, like writing, is that sometimes the good one gets away.  There are some characters I CAN NOT DRAW no matter how many times I try.  I struggle with Byakuya.  His cold beauty eludes me.  However, I wrote a scene in which a couple of images of him kept sticking in my brain, so I gave it a go.

I'm not happy with these, thus they remain sketches.  Also, I have to apologize for the quality of the photo.  The camera I usually use is off for "First Day of Fourth Grade" pictures, so I had to try us the iPad's camera feature to somewhat dubious affect. 


Here is Byakuya and Yachiru as they sit on the bridge at the Kuchiki estate discussing the fact that Byakuya's life has been rather friendless and sad. I kind of like Byakuya here, and his expression.  Yachiru looks too old, alas.  She's surprisingly difficult to draw, though I think I got her hair.  (She's wearing kitty ears, and doesn't come with them.  This is a reference to a Bleach omake in which she is clearly stealing the carp from the Kuchiki estate dressed in a kitty costume.)

Below is a later moment when she talks him into trying to go to a party.



I'd really wanted to include Byakuya's muddy feet, because that figures so strongly into the story (which, btw, you can read at: http://archiveofourown.org/works/501531.)  But, apparently I suck at getting the whole body onto the page.  Ah well. I think sometimes it's good to share our failures as well.  I hope you enjoy seeing these attempts.

The Hotel Fairy

I forgot to write about the one other strangely amusing part of WorldCON.

Naomi and I had a room fairy--and I don't mean the FABULOUS kind. 

When I first arrived, I set some stuff down on the bed--my program guide, badge, and... my glasses.  I have a tendency to take my glasses off a lot because I can actually see really well in the middle-range.  I need bifocals for reading and distance correction, specifically for driving.  But, when I'm walking around the house (or hotel room) or working on my computer, I see perfectly without them.  Hence, the glasses hit the matress.

I went to the bathroom and my glasses DISAPPEARED.

Luckily, Shawn packs for me, so not ony did I have a first aid kit (you think I'm joking?), but she also packed my spare pair of glasses.  Since I had to run off to some event or other, I put those on, figuring that FOR SURE my glasses would show up at some point.

When I told Naomi about this, I think she thought I was a little crazy, until the hairbrush incident.  She was getting ready to go out to a party and stopped to brush her hair.  I watched her set it down on her suitcase.  She went to the bathroom and then couldn't find the hairbrush anywhere.  So, I said to her, "I think we have a room fairy.  Offer silver."  So, she made a great production of offering a quarter to the room fairies and she dug through her suitcase ONE MORE TIME, and, lo and behold, the hairbrush appeared.

Now, back to my glasses.... being the kind of laissez faire personality that I am, I kind of didn't worry about finding my glasses until it was time to pack.  Then, Naomi and I did a full and complete search of the room.  We moved chairs, looked under beds, and nearly turned everything out.  Finally, in frustration, we offered silver again.  I left a quarter on the bed (housekeeping had already come), and told Naomi to let me know if the fairies ever returned my glasses.

They did.  Shortly after I boarded the train home, I got a text.  The glasses had reappeared under the bed near the headboard.  Considering that I'd left them in the middle of the bed, that's a plausible but weird place for them to have been discovered. 

I'm telling you, room fairies.

Naomi was surprised that the fairies didn't actually take the silver.  But, in my imaginary world, it was the offer that counted both times.  Trade is always acceptable to the fair folk, particularly for something shiny, right?

WorldCON Report

I'm beginning to recover from WorldCON. I took the train to Chicago on Thursday, which was... well, it was long, and made longer by the fact that I believed the Internet (I know, right?) and decided to hoof it from Union Station. The directions were excellent, just much more of a walk than I was hoping, especially since I was carrying at least one heavy bag.

The train arrived too late for me to make it out to Mary Anne Mohanraj's party, and, I kind of wanted to hide in the bed under a blanket because I was feeling a bit like a fraud. It's a weird phenomenon that happens to writers from time to time. Even though I had a book come out last month, I instantly stop feeling like a writer the moment I no longer have a contract. Worse, in my business, there's always someone cooler or more famous or more successful than you are, and at WorldCON, they're always standing RIGHT BEHIND YOU IN LINE while the person handing you your program participant package misprounces your name.

Yeah. I kind of wanted to crawl away and die after that.

But, Naomi showed up at the hotel room and insisted we hit the party circuit, which was a good idea.  I may have found a publisher interested in reprinting the AngeLINK books at POD (print-on-demand).  They don't even care that Wizard Tower Press just acquired the e-rights.  So, that could be something perhaps...  But, otherwise, I feel like I've sort of lost my touch.  I seem to have loaned my "right place, right time" superpowers to Naomi, who kept coming back with, "Guess who I just hung out with!??" stories all throughout the convention.  I'd be more jealous of her, but she totally deserves to have a moment or two in the sun.  She's finally having a writing comeback in short stories, so it's awesome that people are sitting up and taking notice.  Meanwhile, I mostly reconnected with old friends and made new ones, which is a different kind of awesome, you know?  Not the schmoozing I thought I SHOULD be doing, but good for the soul.   In fact, on Saturday night, just when I needed it, I fell in with some Bleach fans.  But, I'm getting ahead of the story.

Friday, I got up early and went to connect with Eleanor who I knew had an early morning panel.  I listened to that, and then we caught breakfast together at the hotel.  Perhaps it was the blue moon, but Eleanor was suffering from "feeling like a fraud" too and had decided to wallow.  So, I left her to go hide in her room, and I wandered around the convention.  I had the Broad Universe Rapid-Fire reading to prepare for and I realized I hadn't brought a copy of PRECINCT 13 to read from, so I headed to the dealer's room to buy one.  I bought the second to last copy.  They were sold out of me by Friday afternoon.  The reading itself was marvelous.  Everyone read something very different, and I got to meet Cat Rambo (whose stories I've talked about here) and I think she thought I was a completely dorky fangrrl, but there you have it.  A woman from the Clarion Write-a-Thon folks came up and introduced herself and asked if I would consider writing something on internal dialogue for their newsletter, which I happily agreed to do (especially since they don't want more than 400 words.)  A lot of people told me how much they enjoyed hearing me read, and that helped with the fraud feeling quite a bit.

Friday night was also the "Social Rounds" as Eeyore calls them.  I had the Random House boat cruise, as well as Chinatown dinner with Lynne Thomas and crew, and the Harry Potter/Hogwarts Renunion Party later.  The diner was lovely.  We had some fun getting there via taxi, and then the food was phenomenonal.  The folks there were all lovely, and I honestly should have hung out with them for the remainder of the night.  Instead, I totally had to HAIL A TAXI (OMG so much harder than it looks on TV!!) and rush back to the Hyatt to get on the f*cking boat.

The boat.

Okay, the boat.  Remember that feeling of being a fraud?  Now multiply it by a THOUSAND BURNING SUNS.  I got there early, so I sat under a tree on the Chicago riverfront and watched as one-by-one, the luminaries of the SF community strolled up to get in line for the boat.  The first person I saw was Connie Willis, followed by George R. R. Martin, then came Joe Haldeman, Walter Jon Williams, Robert Silverberg, Ellen Datlow, Betsy Mitchell, China Meiville,  Charlie Anders (of io9),  and the list goes on and on.  Finally, at last, I saw my friend David D. Levine.  I instantly attached myself to him, and along with my boat buddy and Kristine Smith, we kind of played wallflowers to the massively more famous.  No one I talked to had any idea why we were selected to be on the Random House boat.  I certainly didn't feel like I belonged.  At least there were pretty sights.  The boat took us down the canal a ways and then turned around and took us out into Lake Michigan.  All of this as the sun was setting, so we got the full experience of the lights of Chicago and its famous skyline.  That part was breathtaking.  Standing around feeling like a turd among giants... not so much.

Once the three hour cruise (no kidding) was over and we debarked, I rushed off the boat like it was on fire and headed for the Hogwarts' Renunion party after changing into my robes.  That was SO MUCH BETTER.  This was when I fell in with some Bleach fans, and they SAVED MY SOUL FROM BEING CRUSHED.  We could talk about things that *matter* like Byakuya's death, and I did not feel like a turd.  I felt like I was surrounded by friends.  That was awesome.  Thus, I hung out as long as I could in my Slytherin robes and watched the fan art flash on the wall.  Thank god for fans is all I have to say.

Saturday was my "busy" day, in terms of programming.  I had an utterly demoralizing signing (which I specifically did NOT WANT.)  WorldCON had these huge tables in the back of the dealers room for authors.  Each author table is roped off for crowd control.  Or, as it turns out, to make it VERY CLEAR who has a crowd and who doesn't.  I signed a pile of books for _one_ guy.  But, I think that was still better than the poor web comic artist at the end.  Right next to me, of course, was the guy who had the line all around the block.  I think he was the artist guest of honor.  No kidding.

Demoralizing.

I think it was Saturday that Naomi and I connected up with Eleanor and had tea with Jo Walton, (who, it turned out was on THE boat.  Had I known, I would have totally attempted to attach myself to her, as she is beyond sweet and awesome... and now a Hugo award winner.  Congrats!)  That was a lovely time.  Kind of worth the entire trip, IMHO.  We did that thing writers do together behind closed doors, wherein we ate chocolate and talked about other writers, our careers, the careers we wish we had, etc.

Later, I had what turned out to be my one panel of the con (I was supposed to be on one about Grimm, but it was scheduled when I needed to be on the train home.)  The panel had possibly the most boring subject ever, "Series:  Why We Love Them, Why We Hate Them."  It was made somewhat more... difficult by the fact that I was the only woman on the panel and was sandwiched between two gentlemen with a lot to say about their series.  Granted, one of them was Eric Flint, whom I think most of people in the room had come to see... so he, consequentally, dominated a lot of the conversation.  I had wanted to hear more from Shawn's favorite author in the whole world, Jack McDevitt who was sitting at the other end of the table from Eric.  At least, at the end of the panel I got a chance to tell Jack McDevitt just how much Shawn and I both admired him, and go all squee-fan-grrl on him. He seemed to appreciated it because he's just that awesome.

But, that was weirdly demoralizing too because I was the only one on the panel who had FAILED series under her belt.  I left feeling pretty loserish.

Then, con com in all its wisdom gave me a reading at 10:30 at night.  I was expecting an empty room in which I planned to regale the hotel ghosts with my nastier, pornier Bleach slash, but alas PEOPLE CAME.  I was pretty shocked, and was forced to read from my superhero romance in progress as well as tease with a bit of Samurai High.  Of the many cool people I hung out with at my reading and after was one of my fellow guests-to-be-of-honor at Gaylaxicon. 

We went from there to the Baen publishing house party, en masse, and that was crowded, noisy, hot and, as it happened a lot of fun, due to the company I kept.  I did say hello to my old friend Jim Minz, but not much else, as he was busy playing super-host to the hottest party on the floor (literally and figuratively.)

Sunday I had to leave.  Yeah, I kind of FORGOT that Sunday was the Hugo day, so I missed out on kind of the whole point of WorldCON.  But, Naomi got to be a super-cool schmoozer in my absence, so I'd say it worked out.  I, meanwhile, had a pleasant train ride home, where I worked on some proposals for new projects.

Whew.  That about all the news that's fit to print. How was your Labor Day weekend?