Renee Carter Hall's Blog, page 8

Giveaway: Win a free copy of By Sword and Star

It’s a book-iversary! My novel By Sword and Star has now been out for a year — well, sort of. (Technically, Amazon lists it as having been available in February, but I’m going by this date because it’s when the publisher officially announced it.)

To celebrate the first anniversary of Tiran’s journey (and mine), I’m giving away 2 copies of the ebook. Winners can choose either epub or Kindle format, with the file to be sent as an email attachment. (Just as a reminder, the book’s recommended for teen and adult readers.)

To enter, just leave a comment below. Two winners will be randomly chosen on April 3.

Good luck!

 

“Horseman” on Tales to Terrify

For those who might have missed “Horseman” when it first appeared in Black Static #29, it’s just been reprinted in audio format, as part of the Tales to Terrify podcast.

Check it out here in episode 61, read by Steven Howell.

(I apparently never sent them a formal bio, so it sounds like they got their info either from my “About” page on my website, or possibly my Amazon/Goodreads bios that use some of the same text. Nothing wrong with that at all; it was just kind of amusing to hear the part about Beatrix Potter being an influence when the story in question is about a freaky hellish cannibalistic horse-thing.)

 

Friday Finds: Shapeshifters, Alien Parasites, and Disney Princesses

Not all in the same item, unfortunately. Even so, here a few things that caught my attention recently that I thought were worth sharing.

First, from the girl geek blog The Mary Sue, What Disney Princesses Would Look Like If They Were Actually Human. (Incidentally, if you go to Mary Sue and search for “Disney princesses,” I hope you don’t have anything pressing to do for a while — there’s an amazingly deep warren of Disney princess reinterpretations to get lost in.)

Second, two stories from Daily Science Fiction. I admit I don’t read every story that shows up in my inbox just because my inbox can get a little overwhelming during the work week (and during the weekends I’d rather stay offline as much as possible), but sometimes a title catches my attention and the story itself doesn’t let go. Here are two of those:

What to Expect When You’re Expecting an Alien Parasite by Rebecca Adams Wright (warning: disturbing content)

by M. Bennardo

Finally, the Oscars last weekend got me thinking about a bit I remembered from the Academy Awards in 1992, when Belle and the Beast from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast presented the best animated short film award. (Mainly I remembered that the Beast put on reading glasses and it was freaking adorable.) And yep, it’s on Youtube — poor quality, unfortunately, but here we are anyway.

So what interesting stuff have you found online lately — music, art, writing, cat videos…?

Remembering Mr. Rogers, ten years on…

I was reminded by a tweet today from the blog Letters of Note that Fred Rogers died 10 years ago today. (The tweet linked to a couple of very sweet letters he’d sent to a family back in 1990.)

As usual with anniversary-type dates anymore, it seems both not that long ago, and longer, at the same time. So I dug back into my ancient Works files and found the poem I wrote that year, and thought I’d share…

 

Elegy for a Neighbor

Fred Rogers, 1928-2003

 

He’s coming through another front door now,

exchanging that blue sweater for something finer,

hanging it up with the rest of his earthly form,

though I hope he somehow keeps the sneakers,

still tosses one from one hand to the other

where the music ripples in delight.

The Neighborhood of Make-Believe is in official mourning,

their king laid to rest, the trolley still,

Picture Picture solemnly dark.

He will not be back, now, when the day is new.

I remember watching him again

when I was first on my own–

the apartment’s cable hadn’t been hooked up,

PBS and daytime talk the only options,

so I watched him while I ate lunch and thought

how much he was like an old family friend,

that adult who didn’t wave you away

with “you’re too young to understand,”

a little, really, like we think of God,

benevolent, comforting, loving his neighbor.

He didn’t even know my name

but liked me just the way I was,

told me it was okay to feel the way I did,

that everyone felt that way sometimes:

angry, sad, jealous, confused.

It’s okay, then, to feel the way I do now.

Dawn has been only gray and cold,

but I turn away from the news

and stand to look out into the morning.

Snow covers the houses

like a child’s beloved blanket.

It is the beginning

of another beautiful day.

 

 

My Name is Renee, and I’m a Notebook Addict

Back in January, the awesome blog Notebook Stories posted my notebook collection as part of their Notebook Addict of the Week feature. (At first I wasn’t sure how I’d missed their tweet about it, but then I realized that was the same time as a four-day Internet outage and me subsequently working like crazy for the week after that, trying to make up all those hours.)

Needless to say, when I read June Thomas’ Slate piece on the subject this week, I understood it completely, on an almost embarrassingly profound emotional level.

I know there are writers who don’t keep notebooks. Intellectually, I understand that composing on the computer has a lot of benefits that paper can never match — for starters, not having to retype things, the ease of making backup copies, and simple searchability. I’m not against composing with a keyboard when that’s more convenient (full disclosure: I’m typing the first draft of this blog post on my Alphasmart Neo) or when the mood strikes me to change materials and methods to break through a block.

I also get what Stephen King was talking about when he once advised writers not to keep a notebook, that if an idea is good enough to be written, if it connects with you enough and is important enough, you’ll remember it, and the things you’ve forgotten weren’t worth pursuing anyway. (Though I counter that with the notion that there’s a certain psychological comfort in knowing that even if that idea that just came to you is crap, it’s at least written down, so you won’t forget it and then have that annoying nagging sense of having forgotten something even though you know you’re probably remembering the notion of it as better than it actually was.)

That said — to me, a writer without some kind of notebook is like an artist without a sketchbook. (Though there are probably those now, too, given digital media.) It’s a place to experiment, fool around with materials, catch stray thoughts and try to fit them together like puzzle pieces. For me there’s a definite tactile pleasure in writing longhand that a keyboard can’t match, especially since my job requires me to spend full-time hours at this computer as it is. And oddly, I find that writing on a keyboard feels public (probably from all those LiveJournal posts and emails and so on over the years), while writing on paper feels inherently private (maybe because of all those paper journals I kept off and on growing up). Even if I’m writing out a story that I hope others will read later, when I’m writing it in a journal, it feels like it’s only meant for me, and that feels safe. And when I feel safe, the writing is easier and, I think, better.

Aside from a diary or two as a child and various stories written in composition books and on notebook paper, I first started keeping what I then called a notebook when I was in high school. In hindsight, I was pretty fetishistic about it — I used only one brand (Mead Five Star, 5 subjects) and only one at a time. And it wasn’t meant to be a real what-I-did-today journal, so that stuff was out. Instead, those notebooks became, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, my letter to the world. They were my way of talking back, to everything. I made lists, asked random quasi-philosophical questions, systematically rated every Saturday Night Live sketch during those years using a point system, wrote tons of scenes of Star Trek: The Next Generation fanfiction (before I had ever heard the term), and on rare occasions even wrote a completed piece of fiction. Several years later, when I made a project of re-reading all those Five Stars, I realized that, though I hadn’t gotten much finished work out of them, I had unknowingly been keeping an incredible emotional record of those years.

I kept up the Five Star habit (though at some point I cut down to 3-subjects) for a few years after graduating high school. At the time, I felt like I couldn’t write in anything else; as much as I loved gilt pages and such, fancy leather journals felt paralyzing. Though it seems strange to me now, back then I could use blank books for diary-type journals, but not for the kind of freewheeling creativity that, to my mind, needed cheaper, more common materials. Gradually, as years passed, I branched out. I’ve used expensive journals and cheap ones, spiral and perfect-bound, lined and unlined, small and large. I’ve paid as little as 10 cents (one-subject spiral notebooks in back-to-school season) and as much as around $80 (a leather journal from a craft show), though for financial reasons, I try to keep myself pretty firmly in the $20-and-under region these days.

These are my three current journals. The leather one on the left, from Barnes & Noble, is nicknamed my “Stephen King” journal, because it has his signature on the flyleaf (see this post for the details). The pages are unlined, and it’s by far my “safe place” for experimenting and writing down random lines and images. The red one on the right is a Miro notebook (won in a Notebook Stories giveaway) that I started because the Stephen King journal was decidedly not portable (at almost 2-1/2 inches thick and nearly 2 pounds), and at the time I needed something to write in that would fit in my purse. The one in the middle – that I affectionally call my “nerdcat” notebook – is kind of my big-picture workbook, the one I pull out when I need to outline, brainstorm, knuckle down and finish the last few connecting scenes of a draft, or do something else that feels like it needs more room, physically and emotionally. (Target, last back-to-school season. How I love back-to-school season now that I don’t actually have to go back to school and can instead just buy discounted writing supplies.)

I haven’t done a precise count of how many unused journals I currently own, but the number is probably somewhere between 30 and 40 right now, not counting another half-dozen or so that I’m either currently using or that are sitting partially filled for some reason or other and haven’t been put on the completed-journal shelf in my library. Even though I feel a slight bit of guilt about the stack on my closet shelf — mostly because I feel like I should be more productive, filling them faster — I’m constantly tempted every time I walk into… well, nearly anywhere. (My last journal purchase was at Dollar Tree, a pocket-size leather-look notebook that caught my eye because the green vinyl/plastic/whatever had a slight iridescence that made me think of dragon skin. Yes, dragon skin — I’m that far gone. Bonus points if you can guess how much that one cost.) I don’t get into Barnes & Noble much for geographic reasons, but whenever I do, my first stop is to go fondle all the journals. (I remember reading once how people who touch an object in a store are far more likely to purchase it, because the act of holding something starts to form a connection with the object that isn’t present just based on sight. I think I may well be more susceptible to that than the average person, especially with journals — if it “feels right,” the right size and weight and paper texture, it’s probably coming home with me.)

From a practical standpoint, I’ve wound up with this hoard simply because I like way more journals than I have time and ability to fill, but I’ve read comments from other devotees that talk about a kind of Anne Frank-like (or perhaps more Life As We Knew It) sense that somehow our world is going to collapse and we won’t be able to go to Staples and Barnes & Noble anymore, and all we’re going to have to chronicle our society’s turmoil with will be the physical materials we have on hand – so we’d better have plenty. I think another comment I remember reading was more on the mark — that “as long as I have notebooks to fill, I can never die.” It was a joke — mostly.

In some ways, there’s definitely a romantic aspect of the physical journal that appeals to me. I love Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and in some ways what I’m always striving for is that Henry Jones Grail diary feeling, that sense of a little book crammed to bursting with detailed, varied discoveries gleaned painstakingly over a lifetime. So I paste in magazine clippings and ticket stubs and canceled stamps, and copy over quotes and poems and the URL for that website I saw a TV commercial for that I want to check out, and a list of the books I want to re-read, and that odd image that came to mind as I was waking up this morning, that could be a poem or maybe a story. I find myself wishing to be a field researcher in some far-flung area of the world not because I want to research anything meticulously, but because I just want to take pages of detailed notes and observations and make little intricate drawings. (Though I’m betting most of them use laptops now too.)

And I look at those completed journals on the shelf and can remember where I was when I was writing in them, or I remember a short story and can recall what sort of paper I wrote the first draft on, and where I was, and sometimes how I felt. It’s not convenient, it’s not easily searchable, and there are no backups. But there’s a deep personal satisfaction in looking at a shelf of journals that doesn’t compare to noting the number of files in a computer folder or how many megabytes are involved. They’re my Grail diaries. They’re my life, and not just my creative life, but all of it, expressed in my own handwriting. Is it any wonder, then, that I’m always looking for a new blank page?

 

Two links: Flash fiction and an interview

My flash fic “The Quiet Dark” is now online at Mustang’s Monster Corral, accompanied by another fun little piece by Ken Goldman. The timing of our submissions was a coincidence, but it looks like we’ve almost wound up with two sides of the same story.

(Read “The Quiet Dark” at Monster Corral)

In other flash-related news, the interview with me by Women on Writing has now been posted on their blog:

(Read interview)

Haven’t been doing much writing lately, but I did spend a recent afternoon doing some brainstorming/outlining for a novella I’m planning to write this spring. It looks like Camp NaNoWriMo has scheduled this year’s two sessions for April and July, so I’m figuring on getting a solid draft banged out during April…

 

Photo: Cat + fire = bliss

Contented kitteh is contented.

Bijoux soaking up heat from our woodstove this afternoon. Someday I hope to learn how to relax this much.

 

Goals for 2013

Except that technically I’m not even calling them “goals” this time around. The list in my journal is headed “Things to work on in 2013,” since they aren’t really quantifiable goals and instead are more things I’m generally aiming at and focusing on. The first two are holdovers from 2012, but the others are new:

1) Complete The Second Life of Bartholomew T. Lion. (In this case, I’m considering “complete” to mean a finished draft that’s suitable for getting critique/beta reads on. I’d love to define “complete” as “ready to start querying agents,” but that may or may not happen alongside other projects, so we’ll start with step one and go on from there.)

2) Get a professional headshot taken. (Between financial issues and the entire year mysteriously disappearing at an alarming rate, this never happened in 2012, though I did start researching local photographers to see what was available in my area and what the price range might be.)

3) Keep chasing that last pro sale that will qualify me as an active SFWA member. (If “Nevermore” had just been twice as long, I’d already be there…)

4) Work more on this blog. (In other words, make more posts than just announcements, though I think I’m still most comfortable on Twitter.)

5) Try to find a critique/writing group. Because of where I live, it would need to be online, and I’ve had various ones recommended to me over the last few years but haven’t found anything that (at least from the outside) feels like it would be a good enough fit to be worth the effort. I’m looking at groups focused on professional publication, but I’d like something small and intimate, and most of the well-known fantasy and science fiction groups just feel too large and impersonal for my taste. Granted, some days I feel like my current beta system works well enough, but sometimes I also think it’d be helpful to have a more formal group with structured requirements and such. (Got a suggestion? Let me know.)

So those are my areas to focus on in 2013. How about yours?

 

 

One last taste of Christmas…

…before the start of the new year.

My Christmas-themed story “The Gingerbread Reindeer” is now out via the Anthro Dreams podcast:

http://www.anthrodreams.com/wordpress/2012/12/30/ad-050-gingerbread-reindeer/

(For my other holiday offerings from the podcast over the past few years, check out “An Older World,” “Special Delivery,” and “Holly’s Jolly Christmas” part 1 and part 2.)

 

 

The obligatory year-end post

I went back and forth for some time trying to figure out the best way to structure this post. (Should I go month by month, the way I’ve seen some artists do in talking about what they’ve created/learned in the past year? Should I give a recap list of everything that was published this year, along with my thoughts about each piece? Should I separate things into categories, with publishing in one place and writing in another?) In the end, I decided to use a tactic that works well enough in my writing — namely, to just jump in and see where I wound up.

Which means this will probably be long.

(Oh, hey, you’re still here! Cool.)

Overall, this was one of my best years in terms of publishing. My first novel, By Sword and Star, was released from Anthropomorphic Dreams Publishing, after months and years when I was unsure if it would be published at all, or if I would wind up just putting it online for free. There were good and bad parts to the experience, which I suppose is true of anything, and in the end I find that I’m regarding it as something of a “practice” novel, in the sense of it being a learning experience both in the writing and the publishing. I will admit that there were times this year when I wondered if I should have published it at all — I’m not ashamed of it by any means, but I’m already a better writer than I was even when the final draft was completed, so the weak parts certainly stand out to me, and some sluggish sales didn’t help my confidence about it. All in all, I’ve had to try to come to terms with the fact that, in a nutshell, I wrote this book for an audience that for the most part just wasn’t interested in it. (This has led to some ongoing soul-searching about just who my audience really is and how that may differ from who I’d assumed they were.) There’s no way to be certain, of course, but I kept having the feeling that if I’d written and published it ten years ago, or even five or six back when it was first written and being revised, perhaps it might have sold better in the furry fandom that existed then. But things change, and over the years since I first learned about furry, tastes have changed and evolved among its readers and book buyers. I’m grateful that BS&S has found readers who’ve enjoyed it (inside and outside the fandom), and I still believe it was worth writing and publishing and sharing with readers — but I also have to admit that it was written, at best, for a niche audience within a niche audience within a niche audience, and with that in mind, I had some unrealistic expectations for it that set me up for disappointment. At this point, while I’m still promoting it where opportunities present themselves, I know the best thing to do is turn my attention to finishing my next book, which I already know will be stronger, fresher, and appeal to potentially a much wider audience. (More on that in the obligatory “goals for 2013″ post coming soon.)

On the more mainstream fantasy and science fiction publishing front, I have to admit this was something of an awesome year. “The Bear with the Quantum Heart” ended up being my second professional short story sale (the first one having been more than a decade ago), and along with “Horseman” in Black Static, ”Bear” was my first taste of having a short story actually reviewed by various people I don’t know and who don’t know me. Along the same lines, ”Bear” also marked my first true taste of impostor syndrome – yeah, sure this got published, but it was probably a fluke, and it’s obviously one of their lesser stories in terms of quality, and it got talked about a little but not that much, and… yeah. In the end, I finally shut myself up by telling myself that, issues of inevitably subjective editorial taste aside, Strange Horizons does not publish crap. My story was published by Strange Horizons; ergo, my story is not crap. Whether I will ever write the sorts of stories that wind up in “best of” anthologies or get nominated for Hugos or Nebulas or whatnot, the way I often catch myself fantasizing about… that remains to be seen. I hope so, of course, but I also recognize that a good deal of that sort of thing isn’t under my control. What is under my control is the writing — the characters, the story, the emotion – and most importantly, the willpower to finish and revise the drafts. As weird as some readers apparently found the story, and as far from my intentions as some may have interpreted it, I’m still darned happy with how “Bear” turned out, and to my mind that’s what counts.

(Footnote: Along with the impostor syndrome with “Bear” came another reminder: No matter how many positive comments I receive about a story, the one truly negative review I get is, of course, the feedback I remember most — in this case, at least partly because it reinforces the insecurities I already have about the kinds of stories I write. Which may be another blog post in itself.)

This was a good year for me for flash fiction, which amuses me because for the longest time I felt like I couldn’t write anything worth reading under 1000 words. My muse seems to delight in proving me wrong in her own good time, though, so I found myself writing a good amount of flash this year and was able to find good homes for “Secondhand,” “Nevermore,” and “Nativity.” (I even had a piece of Twitter fic published by Seven By Twenty, which I would have titled “Room Mother” if there’d been space.)

All that said, in the end it was a stronger year in terms of publishing than it was for writing new work, which means I need to get some more drafts finished soon if I don’t want 2013 to automatically wind up being a dry spell. I did just finish a novella, “Signal,” that I’m very happy with, and whether it’s through a magazine, small publisher, or self-publishing on Amazon/Smashwords, I’m hoping to get that in front of readers sometime in the coming year. (Again, watch this space.)

Well. That’s enough creative introspection for one day. Now let’s do the obligatory talk-back question that all blog posts are apparently supposed to end with – except in this case, I really am curious:

What did you do this year (creatively or otherwise) that you’re most proud of?