aamcnamara

Revised "The Densities of Hearts" and sent it out. That makes six stories out to markets right now, which is a personal record.

Also a personal record: I have already made more submissions in 2012 than I have in any other year. (Just in short stories, not counting the 26 queries I've sent out on A Returning Power.) I guess...maybe I have actually done some things this year? Weird.

In other doing-things news, I have found housing in London and copied a bunch of pages out of the new edition of the Conway Letters and fought with a microfilm machine (the microfilm machine won) and attempted to read 17th-century invoices. The operative word in that last clause being "attempted". (The 17th-century invoices won, too.) My advisor thought I should practice reading seventeenth-century handwriting, and he was right.

This weekend is WisCon! I am on one panel:
Are Children People? Sun, 8:30–9:45 am Capitol A
Benjamin Billman (M), Tuppence, Alena McNamara, Jack Shoegazer, S. Brackett Robertson, Kate O'Brien Wooddell
Are children an oppressed group? Certainly our justifications for treating children as we do (deciding for them, speaking for them, requiring compliance) sound familiar: Their biological differences from us make them incapable of self-determination; we must coerce them for their own good. A few SF futures imagine children commonly emancipated (Triton); more often, groups of exceptional children rebel (Slan, Beggars in Spain); and of course the single exceptional child who escapes adult control is a trope—glorified (Matilda, Ender, Lyra)—or terrifying ("It's a Good Life"). SF has an uneasy relationship with children's liberation. Are we ready for children's liberation? And what would it look like?

At times when I am not on a panel, I will go to lots of other panels, hang around in the hallways chatting, go to the Tiptree Auction (but not actually bid on anything, based on previous evidence), try not to buy the whole dealer's room, dance at the Genderfloomp party, etc.

Two weeks from now, I'll be in England. What...is this life? (I don't know.)

However much time I spend lying about making plans on how my next novel is going to be high-concept and awesome and have this structure sort of like sunlit glass...

...somehow I always end up back at, "Okay, so now I am going to write a gimmicky, queer YA paranormal romance/urban fantasy". Probably because, well, I like this stuff, and it's just fun to write. So this is self-indulgent novel number whatever I am on--complete with trickster-ish love interest, prestidigitation (which is worth it just for that word), magic, arts school students, nice clothes, queer romance...

It is currently two thousand words and rather a lot of plans. It may not actually turn into a fully-drafted novel, but on the other hand it might. Like the short story I haven't finished drafting yet, it is being written out of order; watching my brain change writing tactics is weird. Just a few years ago, it was "no, I will not write anything out of order, ever!".

In other news, I finished reading Welcome to Bordertown last night and it was splendid. Given the table of contents I knew the stories in and of themselves had to be good, but it was awesome as a whole, too. See, if the stories in an anthology are good, I always want to keep reading straight through; with a lot of anthologies, this means that I get kind of tired of whatever central concept there is by the end of it. (Zombies vs. Unicorns sort of avoided this by having two central concepts and switching off stories.)

With this Bordertown anthology, though, the only reason I kept stopping and putting it down was so I could have more of it to read later. Even though the stories were all set in the same world, they were so ridiculously different from each other--and yet clearly all part of a whole--that it was a joy to read them next to each other, find the differences, the connections...

...man, I love Bordertown. I do hope that this one does well enough that there can be another one. And maybe another after that. That'd really, really rock.

Oh! And I'm going to be at Wiscon this weekend, but I won't be on any panels (because me-going-to-Wiscon-this-year is sort of a last-minute thing). Um. Relevant information, for anyone who will be there who I have not met in real life before... I look pretty much like my icon of myself, except I am not usually wearing a tuxedo. I have lots of food allergies, but I like eating meals with people and will happily bring my packed food to a restaurant and order juice or something. Please ask before you pet my head.

Some Things of Awesome, numbered and cut-tagged:

( 1. People )
( 2. Panels )
( 3. Parties )
( 4. Assorted )

I could call that a con report.

That is kind of like progress.

Timesinks for today: wandering through TVTropes noticing ones I'm using in this novel; interviewing at the library for my volunteer position. Hooray!

Timesinks for tomorrow - Monday: WisCon and the trials of not bringing my laptop. (The horrors!) It is possible to write, though very slowly, on my iPod touch, which I do plan to bring. Maybe I'll compose some haiku.

The math prize that I won proves to be a book. There is something very soothing about this kind of circular connection. (Now I just need to win a library/book/writing prize that gives me some math or physics, and I will be all set.)

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.

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.

Getting to school much too early. Finding a sentence trapped in the empty halls; walk it out, feel it beat. Hearing "Rhapsody in Blue" from the band room and still feeling uncertain whether it was a recording or live music.

Taking the AP Calculus test in the east gym. Filling out bubblesheets for five hours. Walking out of school like we own the place. The sheer beauty of spring. Debating rules of childhood games at the park. Taking over the playground. Playing freeze tag.

The way intent and determination can change a friend's face into that of a laughing hunter. Seeing a friend for the first time in months. Sitting on green grass.

Finding sand from the playground in your shoes later. In your socks. Between your toes.

--
It looks like Odyssey is on. Now I just need to survive the rest of the school year--AP physics test on monday, and another test the week after that. The good side is that many of my classes are winding down, which means More Time For Writing. (The bad side is that my English teacher has decided to make up for all the homework we don't have in other classes.)

Wiscon is the weekend after my last big test. I don't know yet whether it'll work out to go. Of course, I want to go, but I don't know if I can.

Related Odyssey things: a second story is due May 23rd. I'm struggling with it--I don't want to send "story #1" because it seems too thematically similar and I'm not sure if it's up to the level that my "story #2" was when I sent it with the application; certainly it doesn't have as strong of a voice. However, if I'm going to write a new story, I should have already done it, and I don't have anything.

I found a first line this morning while wandering around the empty school and waiting for my AP test to start. This afternoon I tried to do something with it, which didn't seem to work too well. It almost seems like a long premise for something, but I'm not sure what yet. I might just scrap everything I have except the first line and try again, because I have a couple of ideas of things I could do with it.

(Of course, writing is rewriting. Maybe I should just finish a rough draft already and do what needs to be done to it.)

My other recent idea seems like it won't be going anywhere for a little while. It needs a lot of time devoted to it, I think. The main problem is that (in my head, at least) the narrator is somewhere in the gray area between male and female, and said narrator doesn't have a strong enough voice in my head yet to write a rough draft in first person.

Under most circumstances, if I have an idea, I can rattle out some sort of rough draft. However, in these circumstances I've been having some problems--I hate writing first person without a clear voice, because every sentence ends up starting with "I" and I cringe every time; in third person, to use "it" seems impersonal and "they" too collective, while "he" and "she" are both inaccurate and the nongendered pronouns that have been offered to me sound awkward to my inner ear--so I'm thinking of letting it simmer for a while in the back of my head, and maybe doing some exercises to figure out voice a little more.