aamcnamara

"Graduation practice" yesterday turned out to be their method of trapping us all in the school auditorium for two hours while we waited in line to get our caps and gowns. I am deeply disappointed that the said caps and gowns are in fact purple--I had been looking forward to having a ready-made wizard costume.

However, if all goes well that is the last time I will ever be forced to go to that building, which is awesome.

Then I went with friends to see Up, which I liked quite a bit (though I noted some not so feminist things about it), and then hung out with them until one in the morning.

We've all taken to hugging each other fiercely when we say goodbye, even if we know with absolute certainty we'll see each other later that afternoon or the next day. Because now--time is limited, all of a sudden; and maybe that certainty isn't so certain any more.

The funny thing about going to bed at one a.m. is that you feel absolutely no desire to wake up at five thirty to work on your not-a-novel. So I slept in (which for me means eight), and then had a lazy breakfast and a lazy day, nursing the bruise I got from biking to school last week and the scratches I got on one arm from a failed attempt to climb a gigantic tree last night. I cleaned my room; it's amazing how quickly it becomes clear that all of the paper in which your desk is submerged is, in fact, programs from plays that you went to see five months ago, and assignment sheets for homework which has been done, turned in, and returned graded, and old college mail and information booklets from when you were still searching for a college.

By now I've kind of given up on getting any writing done today. I attempted to make a playlist for a story I want to write, but it turns out that I have exactly zero trickster songs. (Recommendations?)

So, on the whole, a peaceful day. I think I get one of those once in a while, right? Later I will go and drop in at my friends' grad parties, and maybe wander out 250 words on the not-a-novel just so I can say that I did something today, at least.

And tomorrow is a new day, and I don't have to go to school that day either. Or the day after that, ad infinitum until September.

Firstly, Ideomancer has hired me as a Junior Editor. I am super excited, because Ideomancer is awesome.

I would say more here, but I think that this pretty much speaks for itself.

Secondly, I have helped to edit my school's literary and arts magazine and have coded a webpage for it. My goal was to get everything coded and uploaded before my term at Ideomancer starts (which is Monday).

This was harder than it sounds because my school district uses a particularly annoying form of content management which is intended to make it easy as pie for teachers who don't understand computers to put up tiny websites for their classes. This makes it almost impossible to code a decent webpage if you actually know what you're doing with HTML.

However, I have emerged triumphant.

Y'know, this editing thing is actually kinda fun.

I am back from Wiscon 2009. I hung out with awesome people and met people who I previously had only known on the internet (hi, guys!) and re-met people from various places and times. I ate a surprising amount of strawberries.

In the way of cons, by halfway through the weekend I was going "I can't possibly write sff novels--how ever will I write something that is true to my experience that is not straight-up realistic fiction?" and by the next morning came up with an idea that I can't think about too hard because I'm going to finish this novel first, darnit.

An observation on cons: Last year at Wiscon was "see a panel, hang around for half an hour trying to look inconspicuous, see another panel". Last year at Readercon was, well, "run around on five hours of sleep, talking to friends and other people with wild abandon, miss almost every single panel and event and not care". This year at Wiscon, I got to panels quite often, but we also had the hour-and-a-half-long lunch break conversation about the philosophy of writing.

I took notes on some of the panels, but they will likely be singularly unhelpful to anyone except for me, as I wrote down chiefly things that I found fascinating.


Tomorrow I have to go back to school for the last seven days of high school. Ever.

This has been a good news, bad news day.

Good news: I feel like I did at least all right on the first half of the IB English test yesterday, and the first 2/3 of the IB History test today.
Bad news: I had to finish my IB History essays early and then run back to school from where we were taking the test (and ask the bus driver to wait for me while I ran inside and grabbed my stuff to study for the last 1/3 of the History test which is tomorrow morning) to actually be able to ride the school bus home. Otherwise I may have had to hang around school for another two hours, and I am not yet so nostalgic as to enjoy that.

And, when I got home,
Bad news: I am not a Presidential Scholar; they picked a different girl from Minnesota. (Tell me, what does she have that I don't? Tell me.)
However, Good news: This means that I will be in town for Fourth Street Fantasy Convention, which I have wanted to go to lo these many years since last year when it was revived and I went to Odyssey instead.

And, you know, I am sitting in the breeze and in the sunlight, full of blueberry muffin and chocolate, and there are a lot of worse ways to be on the afternoon before the last part of a large test on the History of the Americas. (Even if this chocolate apparently isn't okay for me any more. Boo.)

Some of you may have seen this already, but probably not twice.

I am Presidential Scholars semi-finalist. (One of, oh, 560 in the country.)

The best part? I don't have to write any more essays for them.

(The bad news is that I don't know yet if I'll be able to go to Fourth Street Fantasy Convention--because, of course, the Presidential Scholars all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, DC is that same weekend. Last year I said wild horses couldn't drag me away from Fourth Street in 2009, but they appear to be doing their best.)

Lately I've been thinking about context in writing. My writing teachers from a while ago would do a context exercise with the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice"; first they played the song, and then they played a clip where it was used in a documentary, with clips of a town dying because the auto plant that had kept it alive was closing.

The story that I'm working on right now depends on context. The trick, of course, is creating that context within what the readers get of the story. The first scene is one that has happened to the main character before: he is where he was before, seeing the same things and smelling the same things, but you can't step in the same river twice, and he is not who he was before. That context, that contrast, creates the tension between who he was, who he is, and who he's trying to be.

In some sense, all stories depend on context, certainly inside the story's action (we expect characters to be the same person the whole way through, bar revelations). Many stories also depend on exterior context--from actions taken just before the story starts, to backstory of characters, to the entirety of the genre. How much they depend on context, and how many layers of it exist to be unraveled, depends on the story and the writer.

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Another observation about stories: usually, they leave out the waiting. (Waiting For Godot being the exception which proves the rule.)

In an unscientific study of two anthologies of short YA fiction about GLBT people (from the '80s and today), there are a lot of stories about "main character encounters gay parent/other relative/teacher/neighbor, has perceptions changed", and a lot of stories about "main character discovers he/she is gay through mutual falling in love with someone of the same sex".

The second kind irks me more than the first. Self-discovery is not always like that; in fact, probably it rarely is. (And the circumstance in those stories is not required by self-discovery, hence the 'self-'.)

This connects to waiting, I swear--due to proportions, if you're gay, you're going to spend a lot of time waiting. Even if you're straight, you're going to spend a lot of time waiting.

Waiting is boring.

We want to read the glorious moment, the moment when everything changes. But it isn't that 'nothing happens' when you're waiting. It's that other things happen. Still, the waiting goes on, underneath.

(I would feel bad about the relative teen-angst quality of this section of my post, but, after all, everyone who's here signed up for it. Hi. I'm Alena. I'm a teenager, as much as I like to deny the fact.)
(ETA: Okay, so waiting is what builds the context for stories. Still, everyone is always waiting for something; it doesn't go away just because the current story is taking place in some other aspect of life.)
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School is, as always, school. As my last posts indicated, my big papers are in, but that doesn't mean that they're done with me. Oh, no. Never that. So we have projects to do, and presentations to prepare, but I am writing a story--well, I am writing this post, but I've written five hundred words tonight, which is more words of new fiction than I've written on any story for quite a while, and I'm not sure how the next scene starts.

I had an overnight at a college this weekend. It brought college crashing through "well, in September; that's a while away" right up to now. I wish that it were now; I wish all my hard choices were over and done with. But it's not, and it won't be for a while, and I have to take it one day at a time and move on.

I appear to have emerged victorious from the morass of essays, papers, and college applications in which I was temporarily submerged. This weekend, which is three days long, has so far done much to recover me. (Books, for one thing. For another, new boots. I usually hate shopping, but I am pleased with these boots.)


My theater class appeared to at least not detest the scenes I put in front of them on Friday, which is a good sign. It's an Icarus telling, twisted and spun through the way that I think about things, and so it both is and is not speculative theater, if I am allowed to make up that awkward phrase. I plan to work on it this weekend, despite the fact that that means sinking myself into his world and not coming out until I feel like I've drowned.

I also want to work on an entirely uncomplicated story. My hope is that the two will balance each other; the Icarus play is exactly the sort of overcomplicated concept that I usually simultaneously delight in and suffer from. Also, it's theater, which I am absolutely certain I am terrible at writing, but I think I have to write it anyway; I've been dancing around the concept since Odyssey, when I was trying to write my slam piece.

We'll see if the theory works, I suppose, though my guess is that if I can figure out the characters in the uncomplicated story, I could at least attempt the balancing act.


Unrelatedly, I've now registered for Wiscon and, apparently, reserved a room to stay in. I'm planning to also register for Fourth Street, but I haven't done that yet. Anyone on here that I can expect to see at either of those places?


Expect more posts to follow, things that I think deserve their own posts, or at any rate will get them.

Final revisions on "The Mermaids, Singing" are done, such as they are; the story is off to Interfictions for consideration.

Next project? My homework.

... seriously, though, after that, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I know I should write something new now, and I want to, but it's always been difficult for me to get ideas and start writing stories during the school year. Continuing stories, finishing stories, revising stories, those have historically been fine for me to do; but starting stories, for some reason, eludes me a lot of the time.

So far I don't have any particular strategy for how I'll reverse this trend, unfortunately. Trying a lot of things and seeing what works could be good; additionally, if anyone has ideas or suggestions of what they do to get themselves going, that would be great.

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In other news, it's snowed here twice in the past few days. It's beginning to look a lot like winter.

Breaking radio silence (because of Way Too Much To Do and Way Too Little To Talk About) to celebrate.

I entered the Writers of the Future contest this summer while at Odyssey, with a story written and, with the help of my classmates, revised there. It was the first time I'd entered.

And guess what? I got an honorable mention!

http://wotfblog.galaxypress.com/2008/09/final-honorable-mentions-for-3rd.html

Okay, so it's not finalist, and it's not semi-finalist, but there is time, there is time. For right now, I'm pretty pleased with my result.

Maybe this will give me the needed momentum to start revising, writing, and submitting stories. School provides a much-too-easy excuse to me--oh, I couldn't possibly do that, I've got homework! I've got extracurriculars, and college applications!

On the one hand, yes, those are still important. But I do want to keep writing.

It's nice to know that I still have it.

--well: I guess I don't know, necessarily, whether the story's any good. But I wrote a story today, and it felt good, like stories should feel coming out of my brain. It needs work; oh, it definitely needs work.

But school squashes my creativity so much that sometimes I despair of ever getting it back, and I love the moment when I realize, No, I still do have that. It's just tucked away for the moment.

Tomorrow is my last day of school for the year. I've managed to fight my way through most of everything I had to do, which of course means that I discovered another fifty things I have to do.

I leave for Odyssey on Sunday--my plane leaves at, er, six a.m.

...that's a little early, even for me.