aamcnamara

I am a considerable way toward finishing this polish of A Returning Power. This morning, I have been contemplating query revisions.

And...well. It still all freaks me out. Kind of a lot. After ten years of "someday someone will pay me to write novels!" it's weird to find myself on the brink of taking that first step toward publication. (After "write the novel", that is.) I worry--what if no one wants to represent me? what if I can't tell who the Right Agent is? what if this kind of book just isn't selling right now? what if what if what if. There are so many things to worry about.

I know I'm decent at writing. I know this novel is the best that I can make it without waiting another year to get more distance (again), and that putting it away for a year is probably not a good choice. I also know that those things aren't enough.

I have always been the worst at not worrying about things when there is nothing I can do about them. All I can do, right now, is finish polishing the novel and finish polishing the query and sharpen up my synopsis and pick some agents, even if that means drawing names out of a hat, to send it out to. But I may need repeated kicks on the ankles to get that far.

Back on campus. Settled in, and almost surprised at how settled I've been feeling. Less stressed about almost everything than I was during January. Whew.

This may have something to do with the fact that I decided Not To Worry this weekend. On Friday I listened to the Swordspoint audiobook on the plane instead of freaking out about A Returning Power. I lazed about. I saw the Tennant and Tate Much Ado (aaa, their faces) and the Tennant Hamlet (...his face). I bought groceries in Northampton and made oatmeal-raisin cookies and ate most of them. Yesterday I had a to-do list but I only did half the things. Today I have done some more of the things! Someday soon I hope to return to full Alena functionality.

Meanwhile, it is the 24th. Going by my original goal--of "send query letters out by the end of January"--I have a week left for polishing A Returning Power and its query letter and its synopsis. And deciding which set of agents to query first. Today I realized that the first two scenes have to be combined. La.

But, well. Today's the first day of classes, but somehow I only have one class each day for the rest of the week. So I will have time to work on the novel, and then it can be out in the world and off of my mind. And then I will write something else.

(I may or may not be auditioning for a production of Midsummer Night's Dream this weekend. Um. Theater! I like it! It's not writing, but it involves lots of awesome people.)

Helpful hint: local offices of Senate/Congress members often still have (real, live) people answering phones when the DC offices are swamped. (Like, for example, today.) Look for a "contact" tab on their homepage.

Note to self for future: when you are flaily about some big task, try sitting down, writing out (truthfully! honestly!) why you are flailing about it, and then developing from there into actual things you can do about it. You are a writer. This is how your brain functions.

(Not every writer's brain does. But mine does sometimes, and more than I remember.)

I don't know that I have made material progress on my Conway research proposal--downloaded a bunch of scholarly articles, skimmed some of them to find out they weren't taking the tack I was trying to find--but I am way less flaily and stressed about it now. Which is progress of its own sort.

It snowed yesterday, properly, enough to cover most of the grass and dead leaves. Enough to creak under my boots when we walked down to a coffee shop and heard music: a band with two teachers from my high school in it. I drank a tall mug of peppermint tea. At the set break, they came over and chatted--what am I up to, all that sort of thing.

I hope the snow doesn't melt today. It makes this city feel like winter.

I like my dad's new house. It already feels homelike. I am glad to spend this week here (I fly back to Massachusetts on Friday). Most of the people I know have gone back to school already, or are leaving today; I've enjoyed having social times, but it'll also be nice to be utterly unscheduled. People should be getting back to me on A Returning Power soon, and then I can fix things in that, and keep making sallies toward a query letter. And I can keep working on plans for my hypothetical London jaunt--I've got a goal of drafting my research proposal before I go back.

In the meantime...
( boooks! )

Aaa I can't write a good query letter, maybe my book is just terrible, maybe I'm just a fail, noooo, etc., etc.

In other news, I have seen lots of awesome people this week! So that's good. Today I am taking an Introvert Day, because I need it. Also, there are Useful Things What I Should Do: Ideomancer stuff, writing yet another query-letter draft, maybe noodling on this idea I had a few days ago, reading more about Anne Conway.

Am I actually going to query agents about a novel? Flail, flail, flail.

(This entire post: proof that I need to send ARP out, if only to get myself past this stage of utter terror and panic.)

Well.

I've been training myself in how to read seventeenth-century sentence constructions, and meanwhile gotten halfway through Anne Conway's treatise and maybe a third of the way through the collected Letters of her and her friends and family.

I've attempted to outline Queen of Spades at least twice and may have to resign myself to not being able to write that right now.

I've read slush, I've sent emails, I've planned things, I've written letters myself. I have also read quite a few books and wasted a large quantity of time. (This is what break is for, sometimes, when you have just finished revising a novel. And then wrote a short story in a day. Um.)

Books read: include reread of Fire Logic and Earth Logic by Laurie J. Marks (underappreciated, even by me); Nnedi Okorafor's Akata Witch (intriguing and neat and hooking into her other work in interesting ways); and at least one other I can't recall right now.

And I've written some solstice stories, which is good because people gave me these prompts in December 2010 and there are still--er--three left, now. Usually I am close to done by the next winter solstice, and then I scramble to finish the last ones so I can get to work on the new set of prompts. This year, though, I was in the midst of revising fever when the solstice happened. So I didn't post anything asking for new prompts and didn't finish the old ones and... yeah. This happens.

Three left, though, and then perhaps I can figure out what I'm doing this year. Solstice stories again? Offer to hand-write and send people letters or fictionlets? Since I am usually too poor and/or cheap to buy presents for my friends, giving them my writing seems like the least I can do, but I am starting to wonder if people actually enjoy them.

On the other hand, one of the ones I wrote today made me remember why I like doing this solstice-stories thing purely for myself. Usually I would not write a story about a talking hedgehog and his rat friend catching moon-light in jars to light their houses during the winter. But I did, and now I'm contemplating writing more stories about them. What do they do during the summer? Who are their other friends? They seem like the sort of stories that need illustration, but I don't know how well I'd be able to provide that.

Which all makes me feel comfortable inside. Writing something that wasn't even in my head before the words started is something I hadn't done for a while. This says to me that my brain's recovering nicely from its fits of revision.

...into which it will descend again next week, after all the people who have ARP get back to me, but shhh. I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

( books read on winter break so far )

Reading books makes me a happy Alena. Today perhaps I will finally dig into research for my summer project proposal, and tomorrow even (gasp) go outside. If I want to see people while I'm back, I should probably schedule things, too...

Bad ways to start the New Year: finally falling prey to a sickness that'd been creeping up on me, I suspect, since the end of the semester; not being able to help my dad move furniture yesterday.

Good ways to start the New Year: having ended up at my mother's house with few books and slow internet, I wrote a draft of a short story, "The War of the Mages", in one day. (Well, one day and a couple of months of thinking about it.) It's in the same world as A Returning Power, so I wanted to get the story written before I started sending the novel out; and, as a bonus, the Dell Award contest deadline is today and I had no stories that weren't currently at markets. So: story written, story sent off to Dell Award contest, in the space of a day. When they announce the winners, I can go back, revise, and then send it to markets. Basically, I win!

Today I came back to my dad's house and re-shelved the contents of 11 (out of 14) boxes of books. My bookcases now loom properly over my bed, so it has started to look something like home.

...good gods, this year. In some ways it's been a hard one, and in other ways it's been an amazing one. It's pummeled me with exhausting research work, bad professors, and difficult classes. I did learn things from all those experiences, but there are some aspects I could definitely have done without.

What I didn't have was much time to breathe. Summer's usually my relaxing time, my time to work on big projects like novels, but this summer I had only snatched moments while on the bus. And yet I still managed to revise A Returning Power and I think it's better than it was. (Not going to risk "much better" quite yet.) Lesson: I might be able to keep writing after I graduate and get a real job?

At any rate, things I did this year:
- Acted in a full-length play (for the first time since, er, eighth grade when I was Oliver Twist in a community production of Oliver!)
- Applied and received offers for summer science research
- Did materials science research for ten weeks at Harvard University
- Figured out that I do not have the necessary commitment to do scientific research
- Did battle with the bureaucracy and fail that was Harvard University's attempt to feed me (and lost)(but, thanks to Kate's family, neither starved nor went to the emergency room)
- Explored Boston and the surrounding area
- Went to WisCon and Readercon
- Applied for, was accepted to, made necessary plans for, and attended Viable Paradise XV (independently enough that I forgot to tell at least one parent about it until the weekend before I left for Martha's Vineyard)
- And hence accumulated a new and excellent group of writer-friends
- Survived my hardest semester of college so far
- Had an awesome and close-knit group of friends (The Mob, Kate, and

acm28 particularly)
- Baked one million things (no, really, one million) in celebration of having an oven
- Waltzed around a church in the middle of a freak October snowstorm while dressed as a centurion
- Continued to be in a relationship that continues to be awesome (hi, Kate!)
- Stood up for my principles
- Wrote three new short stories and some flash fiction pieces
- Collected more rejection letters
- Revised a novel

...well, when you put it like that...

I continue to believe that the best things in life aren't planned. I do have a few goals for early next year--viz., begin querying agents on A Returning Power and also apply for funding to do history of science research in London next summer--and also next year overall--viz., get my license finally dear god--but they aren't really New Year Resolutions or anything like that.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm still reeling slightly from the notion that I actually revised a novel. Revising A Novel has been such a Big Thing for me for so long that it's weird to think that I, well, just did it. I will probably post more about the whole thing someday.

For now, though, happy New Year's Eve (in this calendrical system)!

I refuse to believe that this is actually a draft; I am still somewhere in the middle of the swamp, slogging. I just ran out of words.

Still and all--44,100 words, or 224 pages in MS Word.

Which is shorter than the first novel I won NaNoWriMo with. Shorter than any novel to win NaNoWriMo, too (the first novel I won NaNo with was 75k). Nearly half the length of the zeroth draft of this, finished the summer after I graduated high school. And yet...and yet...

Darnit, now I have to follow through on the rest of that resolution and write a query letter. (Weirdly, that is the most real thing right now.) And sometime in the New Year, I will dig out all those manuscripts from VP and figure out how terrible my prose is.

And then maybe I will query agents on a novel.

Um. Okay. Wow. Hi.

I just finished revising a novel.

One chapter to go. Possibly two, depending on how I swing it. Either way, like the nice post title says, I am still on track.

I took the king out of this scene, but I think he has to go back in. Alas. Well, kings are nice.

Social engagements today are zero: good, after the flurry of family-related events. (Every day since I returned on Friday, and in a way every day since last Tuesday. None of them bad, all of them draining in their own way. Introvert time is nice. I like introvert time.)

I've reread all of Protector of the Small over the past couple of days, and also reread The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For. My idea of comfort reads...may be different than other people's. Witness the time I thought that Mieville's The Scar would be a good thing to read when I was sick.

Oh, plus I washed my clothes and did other minor tasks important for life. That was a Good Thing. The Alena is rebooting from maintenance mode!

Maybe after the first of the year I will even start writing something new.

Feeling better about the world than I was yesterday: win.

In the interest of actually finishing this draft of ARP, I am going to Not Worry about Anne Conway until the new year. Part Four is less than ten thousand words. I can totally revise that in three days, right?

If I do--when I finish it--I think I will buy myself the Swordspoint audiobook as a reward.

Also maybe I should wash my clothing. (Pssh, household tasks. I don't need clean clothes, I have noveling to do!)

Noted: Twilight frequently taken to task for vaunting a relationship wherein one participant watches the other while sleeping without consent.

Noted: Santa Claus cited as paragon of virtue and dictator of morality.

[Exhibit A: Lyrics of song "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town": "He sees you when you're sleeping / He knows when you're awake".]

Noted: Based on present cultural mythology, you do not appear to be able to deny consent to Santa Claus.

Hypothesized: Our culture has really weird standards.
Hypothesized: Telling kids that it's okay if someone watches them sleep (as long as they have good intentions) is fine when they're little but not fine when they're teenagers.
Hypothesized: Santa Claus is, in fact, Edward Cullen.

(Yes, yes, I understand there are differences. I stand behind my claim that Santa Claus is actually kind of a creepy guy, at least as represented in some of the songs. I may or may not feel similarly about omniscient gods.)

If I'd been confused before, now I was utterly at sea. I'd been living in a house with four other teens. None of us could remember anything before it, and were all still a little fuzzy on what was happening now. Sometimes we got to go outside with the woman who'd taken us there and erased our memories, little trips to the grocery store or the storage unit. But then--I'd been outside for some reason by myself--somehow someone else had taken me away from her.

This witch didn't bother erasing our memories or else she couldn't. She didn't know about the first one, she'd just been trying to get regular kids. The other teens there remembered everything; I remembered vaguely what had gone on at the first house, and nothing else. One day we were let out for a few hours, told strictly to come back at such-and-such time. A girl and I started wandering. "Oh!" she said after a couple of blocks. "I know where we are!" Her house, her family, her school were close by. Years of memories stretched back. "Where's yours?"

I thought that one part looked familiar--a stone wall at the top of a small hill. We went that way. The girl kept asking me: is that it? is that house it? They were the untidy ones, the ones that needed a paint job, that slumped uneasily behind their yards. I shook my head. All too small.

"That's it," she said definitively when it came into view. It was. It was a big suburban house with a peaked roof, not shabby or untidy... brooding. The housing development had run out of money right after building it so the land dropped off into untilled dirt behind it.

And the house was also sort of a complex of buildings; it had a big modern glassed-in room at the top, where the other three teens who'd been there with me were enduring a party. One girl had fallen for a boy that our witch-mother deemed unsuitable, but through complicated political machinations, he got invited to the party anyway. She was trying to decide whether to go over and talk to him. The others stood around making small talk, looking for their opportunity to reveal what was really going on so they could escape, but everyone who'd been invited had the shiny politician smile that tells you "I'm not going to listen to a word you say" and "appearances are more important than what's really going on".

I wanted to help them, who were still stuck there. But I was trapped myself by the new witch, and even if I ran away right then, well, I didn't remember anything. I don't think even the girl walking with me really knew what had happened to me--she thought I'd just gotten amnesia somehow.

We kept walking.

I was super-productive today (even though I went to a solstice concert in the afternoon--initial research on a project, reading a whole book I have to write an essay on in the next week and a half, reading for class tomorrow, getting ahead (!) on reading my slush), so this evening I got to work more on A Returning Power.

Right now I'm in the beginning of chapter twelve (of 18, so approaching 2/3 done). It's pivotal in a bunch of ways; mostly what I'm noticing right now is how this section intersects with a short story I have in planning stages. I have to make sure everything will match up--I'll probably at least draft the short story before I send A Returning Power out, just to be certain.

In general, this draft of the novel feels like it's taking shape. I can nearly imagine it as a real printed book, which is a) probably a good thing given that I am planning to start querying on it early next year and b) reassuring.

Lots of bits of the previous draft make me wince and go "I'm glad that that didn't go to VP." But the thing about revising is, when you find one of those things, you get to fix it! I am starting to like revising. (I know, I know, now I've jinxed it.)

I've talked to several people now about my Epic Plan.

In summation, the Epic Plan consists of doing history-of-science research next summer at the British Library. In Anne Conway's papers, specifically, which: aaa, getting to do archival research at a huge library! It'd link in to my physics major, because she worked vaguely in that area. It would also link in to my Critical Social Thought minor (currently undeclared) focusing in Narrative; I'd bring my research back senior year and write a thesis, probably something along the lines of "a short story about Anne Conway plus a long academic essay about various choices I made in the writing of it".

(Like I said. Epic.)

Both my advisors are on board with this--my CST advisor, who's kind of a history-of-science guy, offered to do an independent study with me in the spring so I can get caught up on all the secondary-source reading I'll have to do ahead of time.

I don't have to propose it formally until February, when the college-wide application for summer funding is due, but I went to talk to the relevant people anyway. Basically, they said that my project sounds really cool, but they can't give me that much money, so what I need to have (in my application in February) is some kind of housing figured out for the 4-6 weeks I'd be in London. What the person recommended was looking at the alum network for MHC, but I looked at it and there are no MHC alums in London who're offering to host current students (boo).

So--flist! Do any of you know anything about finding inexpensive housing in London?

There is a new issue up at Ideomancer!

magick4terri continues to be awesome, and pretty much exclusively out of my price bracket. I really want the new Swordspoint audiobook. I also want to keep revising A Returning Power.

First I should probably finish this essay about Machiavelli, though. And maybe study for the physics test I'm taking tomorrow...

End of the semester. Grr.

Today I made these cookies (substitute potato starch for the eggs and gluten-free flour plus a bit of xanthan gum for the flour, use brown sugar not white, what is this "chocolate chips and pecans" thing doing in my cookies?). Except with squash, not pumpkin.

Still not quite like the pumpkin/squash cookies my dad makes, but they're closer than the last ones I tried. They'll do.

Mmm, cookies.

Meanwhile, too many things. The sharp wish for a return to Thanksgiving break. Lots of meetings scheduled this week, too, which adds stuff to my already kind of packed schedule. (Up this week: history paper, physics test.)

Earlier this evening my theater-history textbook was telling me about Cardinal Richelieu's role in consolidating French theater, and all I could think of was Dumas. This is how you can tell I'm a geek, ladies and gentlemen and others! Still--interesting to get even that glimpse of him from outside the world of D'Artagnan. Between this and my Renaissance Italy class and my classics art history course, I feel like I'm starting to get a sense of western history. Which was something I really wanted to get in college, after mainly being taught American history three times over in high school.

Still noodling on the difficult scene in A Returning Power. I think I might have to restructure this whole bit, scene-wise, so it works with what I have to do now. Alack and all that.

What else? Vaguely disconnected, floaty. Not ready for finals. I want winter break, but I don't want the semester to be over. The end of it is racing toward us, though. Next semester will be good but very different and in the middle of it there's J-term, where I will be at home and hopefully doing stuff but I've started kind of wishing I could be here.

So, in essence, as are we all: full of contradictory impulses. And squash cookies. (Nom.)

Thanksgiving break has, this year, been not so productive. But that's okay.

I'm staying with Kate and her family and the two foster kids they've got for the weekend. Though I haven't interacted with the kids a ton, the forced perspective is interesting: how do you explain to a five-year-old the similarity between ice cream and sorbet? It has the same sort of texture, or maybe consistency, but are those words she's going to know? My vocabulary avails me naught!

This evening, I have had writing time. I didn't do anything last weekend, so me being into Part Three now is just catch-up from that; I'm currently at the end of the first chapter in Part Three and, having hit a scene that needs to be completely rewritten, that may be where I end for tonight.

I have this odd double vision: I know I am making the novel better, I can see where I am trying to take it, but I also have the distinct impression that even if I get it where I want it, it'll be vaguely boring and no one will really be interested to read it.

...then again, that may just be the middle of the novel talking.

Back to campus again tomorrow. It feels like I barely left yesterday, but it also feels like I've been gone for an age. Not looking forward to the run-up to finals--I just want it to be winter break, with a good three weeks where I don't have homework--but I am fairly well prepared for them, I think. Nevertheless, I will probably vanish again after I hit "post" on this. Such is life.

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Recent Entries

in which new things are scary

well.

stopping SOPA/PIPA

hmm.

everything dusted in white

query letters are haaard

just where he'd left it

some things I read

like too-hot tea

this year

no, no, not done

still on track

improving

Twilight and the Problem of Santa Claus

(no subject)

this wasn't a war

can has London?

know well how to use the beast

squish.

her imaginings were mostly wrong