Lyda Morehouse's Blog, page 64

Weird Day

Okay, so, yeah, it *is* a Monday so probably accounts for a lot of it, but I've been feeling very off-kilter all day today. I started with very good intentions. I was proactive and e-mailed my agent about what the heck is going on with my career. Answer: still waiting on mysterious "NUMBERS" which will decide my fate at Penguin, but, on the other side, my agent is quite happy with SAMURAI HIGH and is considering where to shop it around. Fingers crossed on both accounts.

I had a nice time getting together with some friends at a coffee shop. I think maybe I drank too much coffee, but I ended up feeling kind of sick at lunch. I never quite felt like I got anything together today, and then, out of the blue, I found out something about a friend of mine that really made me feel out of the loop.

Weird day. Luckily, in a little bit, I'm going to give up on today and go to sleep. Mason has his big MCA tests and one of the things the school encourages is an early bedtime. Since Shawn is sick (she has what I had a couple of days ago) I think we're all going to turn in ridiculously early and see if sleep is the cure for what ails us.

The Infinite Page of DOOM

Yesterday was Alternate History (read: Steampunk) Day at the Minnesota Historical Society. I was invited to participate in a panel discussion about writing science fiction/fantasy. The discussion was moderated by Jody Wurl and my fellow panelists were Kelly McCullough and Kelly Barnhill, which meant it was basically Con. I mean, I was even able to look out into the audience and see people I would normally see at a local convention, including a bunch of folks who were cosplaying Steampunk.

I felt right at home.

I wonder what the MHS folks would have thought if I'd showed up in Bleach cosplay? Does anyone ever cross Edo period Japan and steampunk? How awesome would a steampunk samurai be, huh? ooooooh. Now I have a new idea swirling around in my head....

At any rate, the panel had the potential to be boring (though I knew with Jody moderating and with McCullough there, that was a lot less likely) since the topic was so broad and one that people have heard a ton of times. I mean, what's it like to be a writer? You sit on your butt a lot and type. Yawn. Luckily, we were asked interesting questions and we gave some surprising answers. The one that nearly did me in was this scene:

Audience Member: What's your revision process like?

McCullough and I: (standard answer, our version.)

Barnhill: Well, I might scare some people with this, but I open my document, hit "select all" and then delete.

McCullough and I: (sounds of heart attacks)

Me: Seriously????? You delete everything??? Even entire novels?????

Barnhill: Yes, then I recreate them from memory... (goes on about the awesome of "staying on the edge of the infinite page..." while McCullough and I struggle not to die of fright and horror.)

It took me probably a half hour to get over that. Thank GOD/DESS that Barnhill didn't bring that up until nearly the end of the session or we wouldn't have been able to talk about anything else, and, honestly, McCullough and I probably would have just continued to sputter like idiots. I mean, okay, it's her process and it works for her, but I nearly CRIED when I lost the first 30,000 words of Precinct 13. Okay, by chance, I think it is a better novel for that, but I can't imagine doing that on purpose... not without hiding a copy of the original somewhere at least. I know famous people have been known to do the whole "manuscipt goes into the fire" thing, but I think that's AWFUL. Plus, I have deadlines. Apparently, Barnhill has a deal where she doesn't have deadlines, which I can't actually fathom, but her publisher is Little Brown (not some nobody), so it's a good gig if you can get it, I guess.

Egads.

F*ck the Force, Aikido is Boring

Not only is there no yelling in Aikido, but it's also kinda... boring.

Don't get me wrong. I'm easy enough of a student that anytime sensei tells us to get a bokken from the collection and hold it, I'm already made pretty happy. However, last time we practiced letting go. Uh, literally. Holding our swords over our heads, and then dropping them.

It was all very mystical, you know, letting go and _LETTING GO_, but I kept thinking to myself, "No way Renji Abarai would do this. He'd never toss Zabimaru on the floor." Followed by: "Dang it. I wanna cut something."

You may not know this, but Mason and I started at KSW through community education too. We took a six (or maybe eight?) week class, but SBN and JKN were smart enough to make the community education classes ridiculously fun and addictive to the fan-personality. There was YELLING. There was hitting and rolling and jumping and kicking and lots, and LOTS of demonstrations of the awesome. Nearly every class through that community ed course ended in SBN showing off -- spear form, sword form, all the wicked cool stuff -- that made Mason and I say, "Oh, holy CRAP, I want to learn THIS! I NEED to learn this NOW!!"

I found out that I could take JUST bokken through the Center for Mind-Body Oneness at a pretty reasonable price per month, but I'm just not sure. It's COOL to hold a sword, it's even more fun to actually hear people say a few words in Japanese ocassionally, but... I'm not sure I'm adult enough to spend an hour letting go.

Dude, this is why I'm a dark sider. The Force is f*cking boring, man.

Samurai Training!

Yesterday, we had all the greatest intentions of getting to KSW, but I was derailed by my son and my partner who offered snuggling and reading. Hard to resist....nay, impossible.

Thus tonight will be my first excercise for the week--back to bokken. I will let you know how the further adventures of samurai/Jedi training goes.

Meanwhile, I started working through the copyedited manuscript for Tate's PRECINCT 13. I don't know if other writers experience this, but, sometimes when I'm reading my own work, I wonder, "Did I really write this?" I mean, we all have those moments when we impress the heck out of ourselves (I had to read a scene to Shawn last night because I was still so proud of it,) but this is different. I look at the words and I think, "That's not my usual style." I actually do wonder if I don't notice the light massaging that editors do to sentences, etc., until it's in its fancy font in a .pdf. So, it is possible that I *didn't* write that sentence, not exactly the way it appears now, anyway. Which is why this experience is so jarring. Usually, it's a phrase I remember composing, only the words aren't the way I remember them. But, given how much editing I do myself, I usually stare at it for a beat or two, try to decide if there's anything WRONG with the way it's composed, and then shrug it off, chalking it up to my bad memory, the mystery/magic of writing and revising, and/or editor interference.

I have a werid job. It messes with my head.

News that's Fit to Print

Today is shaping up to be a productive and possibly social day for me. I managed to get a bunch of errands all done before 9:00 am (including returning a purchase to Target) and Shawn just e-mailed to say she might be available for a lunch get-together. At 1:00 pm I'm going to be meeting a friend from KSW to read his astrology chart. So, that's like twice as many people as I usually see in any given afternoon.

Otherwise, after about fifteen minutes or so, I'm planning on getting up off my sorry butt and doing the dishes while watching Anime. I'm still working through the original (1984) FullMetal Alchemist. Mason suggested I just give up on it since so many people seem to prefer The Brotherhood, but I'm stubbornly seeing the storyline through to the end. Because I'm like that.

CONvergence is clearly picking up steam, as I've been contacted a bunch of times about various preferences and arrangments. I still can't quite believe how awesome it is that I'm going to be one of their guests this year. This is the event, after all, that much of the Twin Cities simply refers to as "Con" (which implies it's the ONLY ONE, Highlander-style.)

It has now been confirmed by the programming guy that my con schedule for CONvergence is "crazy busy." Anton had earlier hinted that my programming was "a metric tonne." So, I guess I get to have ALL THE PANELS. Hooray! It's like Christmas in July!

Multiple Degrees of Blackness

Mason spent Saturday afternoon from 4 - 6 pm (yes, kids, that's 2 HOURS) testing for his blue stripe. As a proud ima, I'm happy to announce that he passed!

Traditionally, I'm about two or three months behind Mason... part of this has to do with the fact that Mason is still a junior, and so there are fewer requirements for him to move up, but also because I have the worse memory for techniques and my instructors know I need the extra time. So, Mason will out rank me for a while. Luckily, that doesn't mean too much at this stage... except he gets to be in front of me in line and closer to the "cool" side of the room when we line up (the cool part being, of course, where all the black belts are.)

If you're wondering, the ranking system in our martial arts goes as follows:

white belt
white belt, yellow stripe
yellow belt
yellow belt, blue stripe
(and then up through blue (+ stripe), red (+stripe), brown, and black. The browns have several iterations of "stripes" and, of course, there are multiple degrees of blackness, as it were.)

As a surprise gift for Mason, Shawn framed up an animation cell from Bleach that I purchased at Anime Detour. The cell is a close-up on his favorite character, the prodigy captain Tōshirō Hitsugaya. It's hand-painted and pretty awesome, actually. He was THRILLED. Plus, mom made us all a lovely lasagna dinner, so the day was really fairly wonderful all around (except, I'm sure for Mason, all that sweating and grunting for two hours... though he got to quit before the brown belts, so he probably only went an hour and a half.)

Anyway, today I'm trying to resist the urge to hunker down and hide from all the snow and cold.

I am Samurai!

I realize I never wrote about my bokken class. My friend Sean (not to be confused with my partner Shawn) and I decided to take a four week class in the art of the Japanese wooden sword through Community Education. The class is being taught at the Center for Mind-Body Oneness by Aikido Sensei Jon.

I had an awesome time because I discovered that Aikido is, in point of fact, the Force.

We spent a good portion of class time becoming "one" with our swords/zanpakto. We didn't do a whole lot else with the swords that day, but I *did* realized several important things about myself and why my personalty doesn't mesh well with Aikido.

I'm too polite for my sensei. Now, you'd think that my default "sir" would translate well from the Korean Kuk Sool Wan to the Japanese Aikido, but that didn't seem to be the case. In fact, Sensei Jon made a point of telling me I only needed to call him sensei in the dojo, and that otherwise he was just Jon. Perhaps I messed with his sense of humility to constantly defer, but, I tell you, once on the mat it's REALLY hard for me not to pepper every sentence or two with sir when speaking to or being spoken to by an instructor. I'm going to try to abide by his wishes next Wednesday, but I may just have to apologize and explain that it's been drilled into me after a year and several months of KSW. But, damn it, dude, you're the sensei. You're also the founder of your dojo, a third degree black belt in Aikido and a pretty seriously ranking guy in the Ki Soceity, suck it up and take the respect I'm offering.

I'm too loud and enthusiastic for Aikido. Guess what? Quite contempation is not my strong suit if you can imagine that. I think sensei was pretty baffled by my ocassional outbursts of, "This is AWESOME!" To be fair, I probably would have been a little less out loud but, as it happened, Sean and I were the only students. It was easy to forget to have on my "inside personalty," as it were. This experience, however, has caused me to have some deep understanding of my favorite Bleach character. There's a scene in the Anime where he's admonished for being too enthusiastic a student. Some of this is clearly about class (for him, given what follows in the scene), but I think, too, self-control is so highly valued that even happy/positive outbursts are considered shameful. I would SUCK as a samurai. I'm too [bleep]ing into it.

Also, I probably should lie more. When sensei asked why I signed up for the class, I admitted that I was a samurai in my imagination and I thought it might be fun to try being one on the outside. I also confessed to being an Anime fan, which caused sensei to think I might be able to count to eight. I can't. I know a lot of the numbers thanks to the fact that the Soul Society's Court Guards have 13 squads/divisions. I tend, however, to visually recognize the numbers better than the hear the words. Regardless, I think that even though being an Anime fan who wants to be a samurai is not only a perfectly valid reason for taking an Aikido class but also secretly the reason a lot of people sign up, I suspect more people keep that sort of information to themselves.

So, even if I end up being the weridest student ever, I'm learning a lot. Not all of it is about the sword, however.

The Dude Abides, but The Universe Provides

Despite my bravado, I was feeling a bit down after reading the hateful review yesterday. Thus, the universe interceeded on my behalf. First, I had a lovely time hanging out at a coffeeshop with my friend jiawen in which she nearly convinced me of the merits of writing fanfic in my own universe (it could happen.) Regardless, we had an excellent time chatting about Minicon and fangirliness.

Then a royalty check arrived in the mail.

The very best revenge, my friends, is living well.

Later, Mason and I had a fun time at Kuk Sool Wan, despite the fact that I SWEAR TO GOD/dess, that as soon as my groin muscle starts feeling better, Sa Bum Nim decides it's an excellent day to spend the _entire hour_ working on cartwheels. I did pretty well, but right at the end I twisted funny and pulled it again. Sigh. But in some good news, I think I might finally be remembering some of the techniques thanks to the patient teaching of Will JKN (who normally scares the crap out of me, but who is secretly a very sweet young man.) Regardless, we're actually going to be going a lot this week because, as I said earlier, Mason is testing for his blue stripe on Saturday. I also just signed up for a topics class in "falling" for Friday. I'm going to be an excercise queen between all this KSW and Japanese bokken which starts Wednesday (tomorrow! Whoot!)

I also spent some time yesterday working on another proposal. For years Shawn has been bugging me to write up a series idea we had a long time ago based on the idea that somewhere out there is a "hoarder" who is actually Pandora, of the famous box. I got most of a plot formalized while waiting for jiawen to meet me so we could figure out where to go (the original coffee house we were going to meet at is SO IRISH [how Irish is it?] that they were closed for Easter Monday.)

Let's hope today is as productive, eh?

Nerves of Aluminum

I came across this review this morning: Requires Hate: Archangel Protocol. Actually, I was warned away from it by naomikritzer , but I read it anyway.

I'm not posting this because I need sympathy. I'm posting this to curb the impluse to click on the "reply" button at the bottom of the review page. I don't actually want to engage, because it seems one of my biggest sins in the reviewer's eye is my atrocious dialogue and, frankly, I don't have a big argument there. My partner knows that if she wants to see me blush and cringe, she can read some passages of ARCHANGEL PROTOCOL out loud. I actually also agree that my generic heroine was a bit generic and sometimes so stupid as to be a plot coupon. (I got that complaint in writers' group. I ignored them to my own peril.) I also liked Rebeckah enough to make her a p.o.v. heroine in a follow-up book.

But, I also happen to still believe there are moments of pure brilliance there.

The thing that really, really had my trigger finger itching was the commentary. The glee that is shown for the fact that my series is out-of-print made me want to say, "Hey, you haters don't get revenge after all. I'm still writing! Published several books after that one! Ha!"

But of course, all this would hit when I'm feeling rather vunerable in that regard. I haz no contract currently, and I'm even kind of feeling like I will never be a master at slash because I'm not very good at teh p0rn.

So sad.

I promised Shawn that I'd have a proposal done today, so I'm going to have to put my head down in a minute and get serious about that.

Ah, well. In other news, we had a nice Easter dinner with Shawn's brother Greg's family. We have skipped a lot of these family gatherings over the last several years for various reasons, but it was good to go. Mason had a tremendous time. I managed to not feel too awkward.

Mason will be testing for his blue stripe this weekend, so we're going to try to step up our KSW goings. I also get to start Japanese bokkon (sword) this Wednesday, and I'm seriously looking forward to that.

Bah, Who Needs Costumes?

I just spent a lovely half hour playing with lightsabers and nerf swords outside with Mason and an entire cadre of neighborhood boys. Mason and I played shinigami/samurai while the other kids were all Jedi. Strangely, this combination goes together very well. Shinigami have powers that are not unlike the Force, including healing, so I switched back and forth from being in the 11th Division (fighting) and 4th (healing.) Mostly, we all just jumped around and shouted.

I was four times the age of the oldest kid, but, you know, we were easily the same mental age. It worked out.