Laylah Hunter's Blog, page 7

Hurricane charity auctions are up!

I'm participating in a charity auction for original short stories to benefit charities doing recovery work for Hurricane Sandy. My auction listing is here; rules for the auctions are here. Please come bid! A good cause and a chance to get original fiction tailored to your specifications -- it's a winning combination!

There are a bunch of other folks participating, too; you can check the auction listing label to see who else is around and what they're offering.

If you got here from the auction page, hi! You can leave comments on this post with any questions you have for me, and I'll get back to you as quickly as possible. You don't need a Dreamwidth account to comment. Thanks for stopping by!

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hurricane relief story auction

So I found out this morning that Piper Vaughn and MJ O'Shea were hosting an original-fiction auction for Red Cross donations in Sandy's wake (the planning and setup post is here). I've volunteered to join the crew of authors who are participating -- I'm going to be offering 5k+ of either m/m or f/f speculative fiction, tailored to the winner's specifications.

I'll let you know when the auction posts go live!

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Seriously, progress! or else!

The day after my last post I woke up at 3am with a miserable earache, so I spent Saturday morning in urgent care getting a prescription for antibiotics and cough syrup with codeine. People say that's "the good stuff," but eh. It made me a little dizzy, is all. But I am at least sleeping a little better and no longer having terrifying coughing fits on a regular basis.

I'm now coming right down to the wire on one of the submission calls I wanted to meet this fall, and also coming up on the date when I'm supposed to hear back on a story I have out right now. Here's hoping for good luck on both fronts in the next few days! My plans for the weekend are fairly low-key, so I really just need to get my act together and focus on turning the rest of this outline into prose.

Any minute now.

ETA: I also keep stalling on things like "How hungry would you have to be before you were willing to try dog food?" QUESTIONS MY CHARACTERS WISH I DIDN'T NEED ANSWERS TO.

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The most frustrating thing about being sick -- I wanted t...

The most frustrating thing about being sick -- I wanted to say "the worst thing," but no, there are plenty of worse things -- the most frustrating thing is the way it just shuts down my ability to brain. I picked up another cold on the plane on the way home from VA. Between that and traveling, I think I've written about 1.5k in the last week. FAR from ideal.

Still, I think actually I might have been doing some helpful research (I'm going to tell myself that, anyway). The book I finished reading yesterday, K.J. Parker's The Company, did a really good job of modeling how to write "dreary routine punctuated by minor disasters," which is after all what a lot of surviving-harsh-environment narratives are about. Maybe I can apply that to making some good progress this weekend.

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leaving on a jet plane...eventually

Heading back east this weekend for the memorial service for my grandfather. (Condolences not really necessary; we were never close, as his relationship with my mother was difficult at best. But he was still her dad, and I want to be there for her.)

Loaded up my kindle and charged all the electronics last night (top of the reading heap: Santuario by G.B. Gordon, which I was looking forward to enough to preorder). I'm hoping I can make some good progress on both reading and writing fronts during the flights, which are ~5 hours in each direction. That should be enough off-the-internet-now-focus time to get some things done, I hope.

This morning: pack bags, snuggle the cats a little extra, have coffee and breakfast, clean cat box, depart on a bus-train-plane-rental car adventure that will, late this evening, land me at ilyat 's house. It's my first time flying since the introduction of the backscatter/patdown circus, and I'm not looking forward to that at all. Blech. Still, at the end there will be good company and quite possibly homemade tacos. That's a reward worth adventuring for, isn't it?

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the sentence-structure equivalent of a froofy dessert

My big productive activity this past weekend was more in the way of editing existing words than creating new ones. I did a lot of revision to the apocafic in progress, streamlining my existing draft so it would be easier to move forward, and I also did the revisions for my Dreamspinner short story. Several of the line edits in my DSP story were suggestions to reduce the number of semicolons and em dashes scattered throughout.

I have to confess I adore them both. I love huge, frothy confections of sentences, piled high with phrases and clauses held precipitously in balance with one another via the careful application of punctuation. I adore the 19th-century tendency toward sentences with not merely structure but architecture. I fell head-first in rapture with the Khaavren Romances subset of Brust's Dragaera universe, which are full of those glorious-excess sentences; they read like the literary equivalent of a dessert including fluffy pastry, whipped mascarpone, toasted hazelnuts, and buttery caramel sauce: one may speak in praise of their elegance, but not their simplicity.

...Not all stories need sentences like that, though. In fact quite a lot of them don't. I struggle with that fact often, and while I've tamed down my penchant for em dashes since my school days—my graduate advisor managed to talk me down from once or twice a paragraph to maybe once or twice a page—I can never give up my love for them entirely. Sadly, my current projects require me to soldier on, passing up the temptation for elaborate antique constructions in favor of prose that belongs twenty minutes or two centuries in the future. When I'm done with this batch of stories, though, perhaps I should give some steampunk adventuring a try.

Those gentlemen, I'm sure, will wield their semicolons with aplomb.

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blessed silence

Tuesday is leafblower day at work. The guys show up every Tuesday morning from about March through the end of October and skulk around the building next door, firing noisy blasts of air through the stands of bamboo and under the landscaping shrubs. In my office we have to close the windows or it's so loud one can't hear oneself think.

There is a little irrational part of me that always pines after the apocalypse when the leafblowers are running. Surely there will be no more blaring engine noise then. ...Shortly thereafter, the rational part of me speaks up to point out there also won't be any internet, or plumbing, or medicine.

Clearly it isn't worth it. But sometimes I crave the silence of the machines all the same.

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Note to self:

Being a catalog of incomplete files on my computer which might in fact deserve better than to languish in such state indefinitely;
or, The Ineveitable To-Do List.

madetoorder.doc:
6,500 words of a probable 8,000ish. The only one whose working file name is also the story name! Creepy transhuman contract slavery. All this needs is to have its major sex scene finished, really; I will definitely be finishing it up and subbing it this year.

windfall.doc
2,800 words of...maybe 15k? That sounds like a good number to aim for. "The Windfall's Maiden Voyage," the one I keep referring to in conversation as "the space lesbians." Also includes smuggling, star travel, and ideally some laser guns before it's over. The world needs more lesbians with laser guns.

mistwood.doc
33,500 words of, oh, let's call it maybe 80k. An actual fantasy novel, which may or may not have some romance in it but is mostly a supernatural disaster survival narrative. I really like where this started, but need a lot of work to figure out how Our Heroes get out of their current predicaments and rescue each other from Certain Doom. (The romance is mostly stymied by the would-be-pairing both constantly making "grrr grr duty grr!" noises instead of stopping to make out.)

space monkeys.doc
24,000 words of oh god help. In the same universe as the space lesbians, above (they're supporting characters in this), only with a bigger cast and a lot more agendas at odds with each other. Also less space travel and more being-marooned-somewhere.

RT-apoc.doc
8,500 words that would need to be at least 25,000 to meet the call I started it for; I go back and forth between "I should scrap this entirely" and "but I want to keep working on it!" An apocalypse-survival story about a bunch of queer college kids, because goddamn am I sick of that genre assuming that decorated war veteran Butch Hetman is the only hope for civilization. I have so many feelings about this story! If only one of those feelings was confidence.

honorable mention for two things that are currently mostly sketchy notes:
ssfuckyeah.doc, the steampunk story with the libertine submarine captain
startafire.doc, a thing I just rediscovered in a subfolder today that wants to be dieselpunk prison-escape romance.

And I could keep going, too, if I were willing to list things that have sat untouched for longer. But there has to be a statute of limitations here somewhere. Now stop haring off after new ideas, self, and put some work into developing the ones you have!

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book week meme

Which I have seen going around both my DW circle and my plurk list:

It's international book week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 52, post the 5th sentence. Don't mention the title. Copy the rules as part of your post.

"The training of unhallowed thousands of years must lie behind that march of earth's inmost monstrosities . . . padding, clicking, walking, stalking, rumbling, lumbering, crawling . . . and all to the abhorrent discords of those mocking instruments."

...I am pretty sure that sentence identifies its author quite clearly with no further attribution.

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some good news!

Signed a contract with Dreamspinner last night to appear in their Advent Calendar collection this year! My short story Safe Harbor will be available with them in December; it's the m/m romance equivalent of a fuzzy blanket and a cup of hot cocoa, and I hope you will enjoy it. (Trying to write cuddly Christmas Eve fic in August, when we were having our one bout of actual summer here in Seattle, was a bit of a challenge.) More details to follow when we're closer to release!

For now, back to the word mines with me. I want to get a longer piece or two out the door by the end of the year (a few of Riptide's current open calls really speak to me)—short stories are well and good, but generally you need something with more meat to it to really make readers happy.

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