Bill Swears's Blog, page 2

Nanonovellas and public reading

This is a manual repost of what I wrote at billswears.com. I started my NANONovella on time, and wrote for some days, and am now hopelessly behind schedule.  Then I got up this morning, and started with a headache and growing sense of malaise, which I've always associated with laziness more than any sort of illness.  But the headache keeps getting worse, and my stomache is… Never mind.  I'm going to the pharmacy rather than the office, and then I'm going to go to bed.  Then, maybe, I'll work on the Nanonovella.  Why a Novella?  As far as I'm concerned, 50K words isn't a novel.  However, I committed to a YA, and so it might very well be complete at 60K or so.   

I committed reading in public last night.  Nanonovella and public reading tie together more completely than you might think.  I like reading from my book, and doing the reading out loud causes me to skip words and phrases that I love in written form, but that clearly slipped in while I was under the influence of my inner editor.  Write in passion, edit at leisure.  Fine.  But when you edit, keep that passion in the front of your mind, and don't let Strunk and White meddle with character voice.  Or narrative voice, for that matter.  Strunk and White aren't going to get credit for your book, and if you've made your book bland in search of Strunkly and Whitely approval, you may as well not publish. Strunk and White aren't going to approve, because they're dead.  English is not Latin, and the rules didn't freeze in 1918.  There is a lot of argument that the language has changed more quickly since the onset of rapid communications and information dissemination. 

Still, I'm now recognizing that when I go to read the book for an audiobook, I'll need to make some changes, even in a book that was always designed to leave the narrative voice ringing in the mind's ear.  Simplify?  Not at all.  But last night, with Jake's voice ringing in my head, my actual words were sometimes different from the words on paper, and I found myself falling back to word choices I made during the first draft. 

So, what does this have to do with the Nanonovella?  The Nanonovella is entitled Armagedon's Son, and is set in the Zook Country universe.  I guess that world still has more stories to tell.  But if I don't get on my tuckus and start typing, this is another year when NANOWRIMO is just an extended form of novel planning.  Since the story isn't even remotely about motorcycle gang members, I may decide to change the title.  Maybe I won't.  Armageddon's Son rings for me.

Last night did something else for me.  When I was planning how to introduce myself, I was using the "About the Author" formula, which is biographical and formulaic.  If comes from the heart of all those letters I've written to publishers, agents, and editors, where the biographical information explains why my life made me the best person to write this book.  That's great stuff, if I'm writing about running while pregnant, and I've actually done that.  Not so great if I'm fighting zombie hordes.  There are no zombie horde survivors, for various reasons.  I write because I have a passion for writing.  I use models from my life when they fit, because that adds verisimilitude. 

My wife said, "Start with, 'I'm a lifelong fantasy and science fiction fan.'"  She was right, but on a deeper level than she realized.  I needed to remind myself of that.  Yes, I have the military background that makes Jake and Gary credible as disgruntled veterans, but I also have passion for books in my chosen genres – including my own.  I have a couple thousand of them in my basement library, and I had shelves installed so that I could alphabetize and find them.  My library.  My passion. How many other Alaskans have libraries this size in their houses?  None that I know of.  My shelves are filled with old, beaten up, often reread paperbacks, for the most part.  I'm happy with that, and if I have to get rid of books, it will the clean and crisp ones, because those are the books I haven't reread.

My inner writer is much closer to my inner fan than my dirty old editor is. My inner editor has been getting far too much sway, and I'm going to shut him down. For the rest of Nanonovella November, anyway.

Ackk-Thhtpp

I"ve had a Bill the Cat day/weekend.  Someone got my password for my general e-mail.  This didn't cause me to be hacked, and apparently didn't lead to anybody getting into my e-mail address book, probably because I don't keep that in the cloud. 

What it caused was such a spam storm that I got 1073 replies from servers across the country to tell me that the account that mail went to didn't exist, or challenging my existence as a human.  If you got an e-mail from me that started:
"You are entitled to $920,000.00 USD in... ," I did not send it. However, apparently my e-mail account did, because GCI was forced to suspend the account after about three hours of constant automated responses.

The GCI techs reassure me that it happened at the server level, and suggested that it had occurred because I responded to one of those emails announcing that my e-mail account has exceeded something, and asking me to log in to avoid cancellation. I absolutely never respond to those things, except by telephone to my IT folks at GCI. But I do have a bad habit of booting up thunderbird e-mail from non-secure hotspots, and logging into my low risk sites (such as this one) from places like B&N.

The event led to sucky days. I think the e-mail world is done warning me that my e-mails still haven't been received by people who don't exist, but it put me seriously out of sorts, and now I have really complex passwords on several sites that have had always had very simple ones.

I managed to write a couple thousand words, but nothing special. I'm 4000 and change behind on my NANO goal, and don't want to fuss with it tonight.

I think I'll go cough up a hairball.

Bill

NANOWRIMO - Again

So, I let a friend of mine talk me into trying Nanowrimo again.  It always sounds like a neat idea. 

Do I know what I want to write about?  The rules are that I start something new, but I have three really solid starts that I want to work on, ought to be working on.  Do I bend the rules and work on something ongoing?  If I pump out 50K words and maybe finish a novel, have I still won Nano?  I'm doomed to failure by the fact that I keep making this thing seem important.  On the other hand, I have got to get a handle on writing creatively while still holding full time work.

Zook Country is on the way!

Go to my web-site at BillSwears.com to read about it!

Good News on the Ridan Front

As I commented at Jim's page, I'm not sure this should be treated as "problem solved".  But I'm reposting as requested.

Originally posted by jimhines at Good News on the Ridan Front

I spoke with Ann Crispin about her situation with Ridan Publishing. Apparently Robin Sullivan, who runs Ridan, called this morning and said she is going to fix this.

I have to say, I’m a little stunned. This is exactly what I had hoped for when I wrote my blog post last night, but I didn’t know what would actually happen, and I didn’t expect anything to happen so quickly.

I also want to publicly thank Robin Sullivan for making what I imagine was a very difficult phone call, and for working to make this right. I hope Sullivan will be able to work things out with all of her authors in a timely way.

And to those who signal-boosted (thank you!), would you mind linking back to this update, please?

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Ann Crispin and Ridan Publishing

I'm not reblogging this for fun.  Check up on Jim Hines's page, or go straight to Ann Crispins. unless Ridan makes this right, tell all of your friends to avoid the publisher, stop buying books from there, and whatever adverse action seems appropriate to you.

Originally posted by jimhines at Ann Crispin and Ridan Publishing

I’m pissed.

I’ve had an exhausting week, between taking care of my injured wife at home, trying to figure out my new job at work, conferences for the kids, and more. I was planning to come home tonight and crash.

And then I came across a post by Ann Crispin. You might recall me blogging about Ann’s situation earlier this year. She’s fighting cancer, and her only source of income this year would be through her Starbridge novels, which had been republished by Ridan Publishing.

Or at least that was the plan. Only Ridan Publishing apparently hasn’t bothered to pay her, or do to much of anything publishers are supposed to do. From her Facebook update:

Ridan has pretty much stopped communicating with me. My last two certified letters, which included the contract termination letter, were never picked up at the post office. Even though StarBridge came out on December 5, 2011, I have never received a royalty payment from Ridan.

I know some of you were waiting for books 6 and 7 in the StarBridge series. Those books were turned in months ago, edited and ready to go, but they have never been released.

Ridan Publishing is owned and run by Robin Sullivan. There have apparently been other questions and concerns about this publisher lately over on Absolute Write.

I don’t know if Sullivan is deliberately trying to scam authors, or if (more likely, in my opinion) she’s simply gotten in over her head.

But I do know that Ann Crispin is an author whose work I’ve enjoyed for more than half of my life, an author who has done tireless and invaluable work for other writers. To Crispin’s great credit, she wrote a very reasonable, level-headed post, hoping for a civil resolution to this mess.

I, on the other hand, am feeling rather less than civil. I tend to feel very protective of those I consider friends, even those I’ve only met and talked to online.

So instead of coming home to crash on the couch, and maybe — if I felt ambitious — getting up to put in an episode of Avatar, I sat down to write this.

#

Dear Robin Sullivan,

I don’t know what led up to the problems outlined by Ann Crispin in her latest Facebook post and on Absolute Write. At this point, however, I don’t particularly care.

Based on what Crispin describes, you have deprived her — an excellent author and an invaluable resource to the SF/F community, who is currently battling cancer — from her sole source of income this year. You have ignored her attempts to communicate with you.

Fix this.

Or I swear to God, I will do everything in my power to drop the entire fucking internet on your head.

Yours,
Jim C. Hines

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

the Jovers

http://youtu.be/XrlKxJ7yQbo

Happy Birthday!

I have a friend, birdsedge, and she is having a birthday.  I have no idea whether this is celebration or commiseration time. 

I'm wishing her a happy birthday, anyway.

Bill

Adventures in The World of Writing Vacations

Okay. You may know that I've taken a month long leave of absence from work to work on a sequel to Zook Country.  God, or somebody with that sort of extra-natural suasion has decided to inject some levity into my life.  I don't think it's funny, but apparently my supervising deity finds hurricane strength storms and late summer monsoons just really hilarious.

The south wall of my house took two seasons for me to seal up to the point where water didn't come through it when we had heavy rains during a serious blow.  But for the last five years, I've not had leaks during storms.  Until last week.  We've hand water coming through the walls twice in just over a week, and Thursday night it rained inside our daylight basement.

And I wasn't there.  I had decided, with permission of the management, to watch Resident Evil Retribution.  I went into the theater on the way home from an appointment I had made before the whole leave without pay thing had kicked up, but which had already stolen three hours from my writing day.  I walked into the theater at 4:40 pm, and the movie was just in time to be seated.  I missed a trailer or two ,but caught the flick.  What can I say about the film?  It has exactly the same story content as the average single person shooter RPG from the 1990s.  I'll probably watch the next one when it hits theaters, and be just as mystified as to why as I was on Thursday.

But then I got out of the theater, and my phone alarm went off to remind me that I had to be in choir practice. I called the manager, and my permission slip read "fine."

Fine is a bad word in my house, just as it probably is in yours.  I asked, and found out that right after I got permission for the movie, the winds kicked up on the ongoing rainstorm and she'd had to buy and place about ten large Tupperware containers on the downstairs bookshelves and below the points of lowest leakage in the kitchen.  She caught gallons of water in the various containers, and soaked up an unknown amount more with most of our household bath-towels, and she was fairly out of sorts.  Nonetheless, when I said I'd skip choir and come home, she told me that she'd already done about all that could be done under the circumstances.

From almost every perspective, the Thursday episode was her story of abandonment and triumph over extreme weather.  Rain really has to be going sideways to get under the gable and drive through the logs.  I went to choir practice because I’m a coward, and because I really needed to give her a few more hours to let her irritation develop a head of steam.  've spent the last few days trying to find somebody who can patch up the leaks in the log wall, because this summer looks to work its way into a stormy fall.

So, that's the most event filled part of my LWOP.  But I went on leave on the 12th, and had to work almost that entire  day.  I've had one friend whom I haven't seen in thirty years decide to come visit (we went to the dump together, oh my), and I think I'm going to have another visit tomorrow.  The other I saw a mere ten years ago, but still…  

In the last two weeks, we've had hurricane force winds, lost electric for a day and a half, and had rain-water come through our back wall, twice.  Since I went on leave, I've been to the landfill with friends, and family, in a steady downpour and high wind to drop off a half a ton of collected junk. In the last week, I've heard from two friends I hadn't seen in a decade or more, I've had two contractors come out to my house, see the flooding, and feel the soaked floor, then either pass on the job as beyond their abilities, or tell me that I'll have to try to stay ahead of it myself until the freeze, and had one contractor return my call to apologize and say he was leaving state for a family emergency, but that if I'd line my back wall with plastic he'd take a look at when he got back to Alaska.  I've got a bunch of stuff to plug checks (cracks) in logs, but they're so spongy from absorbed water that I can't do anything myself until the walls dry naturally. 

I've written maybe 3,000 words in nine days.  When I'm on-step, I can do that in a day, and still have time for chores.  Now I'm afraid to start writing, since it might be challenging the gods of chance, and cause a tree to fall on my house.

Aggghhh

Zero words today.  I had to commit one last day of work before the vacation.  Then, I decided to try to find an emergency generator.  But, the storm last week and the one forecast for this weekend meant all the local shops that do house sized installs are out of equipment, and out of prduct information. 

I guess I'll get a decent night's sleep, and if we still have electricity in the morning, start writing then.

Bill