Drowning Nor Waving

Line edits have developed a rhythm. I go for the easy things first, the low-hanging fruit; the changes I don't mind making or know most definitely that I won't be making. I work through a whole chapter, go back, pick at the other stuff until it frustrates me and I'm out of tea and avoidant and annoyed and magically rediscovering the urge to scrub out my bathtub or reorganize my kitchen cupboards.

Then I go back a day or two later and magically, those hard things are all easy.

I don't know if it's the absence of information overload (less red ink = easier!) or if reading the chapter through again helps set the newer shape of it, and so the bigger changes or thinky bits are easier to fit in when there's a more cohesive whole. But it seems to work. Let it sit and I can finish.

So the shape of my revising evenings now looks like this: do the second or third pass on the last chapter, vacuuming out all the hard things. Take a short break. Do the first pass on the next chapter, until it frustrates me and I'm out of tea and avoidant. Put it the hell away.

I am starting to pick out some of my editor's tendencies (she likes but vs. and and is trying to drive the general pacing faster, kick the whole thing up by 10 mph). I am starting to notice very sharply some of my own (describe everything, little things, big things; start the narration of an incident at the middle or end, and then double back to explain). This has all kind of been impressively educational.

No, I am not finished yet.

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In another part of the world, here's jimhines on readership, fandom, the Internet, and how they overlap (or don't). I endorse this theory entirely, and there's good stuff in the comments too.

In yet another, this band is good even if their video is terrible. Have some:

Watch on YouTube

Actually, in a few ways!

Most of the spare time around here in the past few weeks has gone towards the line edits for Above, which showed up before the holidays and are due in a couple weeks. It's reminding me a lot of cramming for exams: I wake up and shower and change into clean pajamas, and then sit at my desk for the next eight to ten hours drinking tea and eating takeout and shoving against the task at hand.

Some of the rest of it went to seeing Peter Watts, Caitlin Sweet, and Karin Lowachee read at the Chiaroscuro Reading Series on Tuesday night. This was fun. Many persons of quality were in attendance, including two of the ideomancer posse (Claire Humphrey and Michael Colangelo). While the venue (Augusta House) doesn't have all that much in the way of a beer selection, it has some incredible atmosphere and is a great room for giving a reading.

So it makes me pretty happy that I'm going to be reading at the next one, alongside Ed Greenwood, Michelle Sagara West, and Robert J. Sawyer.

I haven't actually ever given an outside-of-convention reading before, and I've never really given one in my home town. I'm still deciding what to read. There may be a poll in the near future.

This, though? I think it will be fun, and if you are a local sort I encourage you to come out and hang and introduce yourself.

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That being said, I should probably get back to cramming now. :p

In internet time, I did sort of miss a bunch of that. Sorry, peoples. Things were busy here, and there have been health issues (mine and other people's) and deadlines (mine and other people's), and it was all exceedingly stressful. Blogging has been about five thousand items down my list on any given day.

That said, here's some of it?

1) First off, a fiction sale: "The Ground Whereon She Stands", which is a story about boundaries, lesbian hedgewitches who actually wear clothes, and the subtleties of interpersonal communication, will be appearing in a future issue of the (reanimated) Realms of Fantasy. I'm not sure what the pub date is, but when I know, you will also know.

2) Today is issue day for Ideomancer, which I am willing to admit was one of those major sources of stress this month. Despite that, this issue's a really, really good one: we have fiction from intertribal, beccadelarosa, and Stephen Case, and poetry from hawkwing_lb (who is also going to be doing some book reviews for us), Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, and WC Roberts. At the height of my stress I was doing some proofreading of it, and went damn, this is a good TOC.

We are, of course, reopened to subs. Please form an orderly queue.

3) I have been thinking, due to about a half-dozen things that happened last month, about the nature of friendship: what that word means to me and other people, and the web of expectation and self-fulfilling prophecies that results from what weight we assign that word.

There may be an essay in this one of these days. Right now it's mostly just a mental tumbleweed.

4) I need, if anyone has it, a word for the quality of being present, of be-here-now. In-the-momentness. I don't mean a made-up word. A real one.

5) For the first time since spring, I am noodling at a short story. It has a title and 100 words. I don't know what the title, which is decidedly right, has to do with anything, and I don't know what's with the thing about the fingers. I am putting myself in the hand of fate on this one.

6) For those keeping up on the saga of Above as it trundles through the publication process, I expect line edits next week or week after. Also, a Locus announcement in the next issue or the one after that.

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That's most of what I can think of right now that bears repeating.

How was your month?

The edit letter is dead. Long live the edit letter.

Okay, it's mostly dead. I have to go do one more pass, check things for soundness and consistency; basically rap on the new parts to make sure they integrate well with the old parts, and that I didn't change things midstream and take them out of true, and hit a couple of points I just threw up my hands on and went bah, later. But the vast weight and substance of it is dead. Ahead of schedule, no less.

Weekend goal: achieved. And now I'm going to go make some borscht.

The Autumn 2010 issue of Goblin Fruit is up, containing poetry by S. L. Vitale, Jacob Garbe, Theodora Goss, Carolee Sherwood, Jacqui Deighton, Lisa Bradley, Cassandra Phillips-Sears, rose_lemberg, and mine own bad self.

It is lovely as usual, and csecooney has already reviewed it.

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In other news, this weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving and thus a three-day weekend. I have decided I will use it to finish revising Above. So by Monday night, I come with my novel draft or...well, just with it. There is no "on it" option.

Tea has been made, and Dr. My Roommate has graciously volunteered to give me, ahem, "book beats" if I don't do work. The possibility of Indian takeout for dinner tonight has been contemplated if I get through 50 pages. Feel free to make sure I'm working and shit. :p

Spartaaaaaaaa--

The weather's broken here in the T-dot; it's been cooler and sunshiny with bouts of Crazy! Rain! for added flavour for the past few days (which, might I add, is really lovely when we have all the windows open at home: it sounds like you're in the last treehouse outpost of civilization during a very Bradburyesque green end of the world). My two-week-long bout of insomnia hasn't broken just yet, but the cool weather's helping: I've managed to sleep some the past few days. Not enough (wah!), but enough to work:


The window table at Aroma is mine. I will unhesitatingly cut all trespassers.

The edit has progressed into chapter four, which is a land of mostly fairly focused and isolated notes, one of the major systemic issues, and then one tricky interconnected thing that sent me back and forward in the manuscript to construct and seed a consistent rationale for a whole line of conflict that's better than because I said so. I think it works now. I'll check for soundness on the next pass.

I've also hit the point where there are a few things I need to ask my editor about: wordcount inflation and clarifications on some notes and the like. I shall bundle them up in a package with an attractive bow and e-mail them over tonight.

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Otherwise, things we have been doing?

Went to a workshop in Kensington last night that was half identifying culinary and medicinal herbs that grow randomly in the downtown core and half making salve out of them; the workshop leader was, coincidentally enough, someone I went to elementary school with (see: the Only 500 Player Characters in Toronto theorem). They're doing another one on canning and pickling next month, and that's on the calendar. Afterwards, watched Proof with Dr. My Roommate, which was a startlingly chewable and amazingly well-written movie, and managed to finally deliver a late birthday present to a friend, who seemed to (yay!) really like it.

The autumn concert ticket pile has been started. Just two shows so far, but consider this to be a nice solid foundation for the fifty-floor skyscraper I'm planning.

Planning for the Most Epic Housewarming in the Universe has also started. A couple days of my time are going to be spent test-cooking party snacks very soon.

Did a stack of additional notes on Indestructible while I was feeling it the other afternoon, and have roughed the structure of the first few scenes. There is a thing in the file which could be the first line. It could not. First lines delineate and circumscribe so very much about a book. They have to be chosen with ultimate care.

Put in some work towards getting the September issue of Ideomancer ready, which will be coming to that website over there near you on, well, September 1st. I'm really pleased with the TOC on this one: it's thematically solid, but really nicely varied in terms of style and genre. We just bought a raft of really good poetry, too.

There is a cabbage as big as my head in my fridge, from last week's farmshare. Dinner tonight will be cabbage rolls. Apple coleslaw or Waldorf salad may also be in my future. It depends if I can get some decent apples on the way home.

Speaking of which, my battery has maybe 10 minutes left on it (and the downside of working at Aroma is that the plugs do not, how we say, plug), so home is where I'm going. More tonight, maybe, if my concentration keeps.

So, I've been revising. Here's yesterday's proof:



And here's today's:


Mmm. Fish tacos.

Technically I have not finished chapter two and so you're all probably supposed to treat me like something a cat ignores. But I will say in my defence that things got tangly and snarly, and I needed to do about five passes on chapter one to make everything click into place.

The edit letter is a multi-pass operation: individual chapter queries/issues, systematic whole-book arc issues that need to be checked for consistency in each chapter, prose stuff, things that aren't in the edit letter at all that I just want to deal with. This is tricky. The trickiest bit is finding the openings for new stuff: to borrow a metaphor, it's like finding a way to unpick three rows in the middle of an already-finished sweater to add in a dart or something without unravelling the whole book. Some bits won't let me in; others will. I have to sit behind a blind and wait and reread and pick until I figure out which is which.

I kind of knew it would be like this: not huge overhauls, but picky, delicate detail work. It takes concentration. I have to think before I slice, a lot.

I am not going to finish chapter two tonight. I've been at this all afternoon/evening. My brain hurts. I am going to go watch Heroes with Dr. My Roommate. And maybe knit.

Forward the draft. Tomorrow. :p

I have finished the revision (that was in the icebox, and which you were probably saving for breakfast).

What does this mean for you? Well, apart from getting yet another insight into the fact that the publishing process is nothing if not slightly repetitive, I may actually have interesting things to say about the world and said writing process by the end of this week. I know I was boring for a month. I'm sorry. There was this revision and this dayjob and things and I got very, very tired for a while there and could not come out to play.

I did start taking notes on yet another inappropriately-timed novel idea that will really have to wait its damn turn. Yes, I am writing a reply to -- of all things -- Darkman.

Go figure.

So what've you been up to?

Tonight I have yet another scene of Above out on the floor for reeducation rewriting and it's not done yet*, so this will be a linkblogging. Yes, I linkblog you. I am shameless. Mwa ha ha!

There is new Shadow Unit tonight, it being Sunday. Double your fun of new Shadow Unit, actually.

I don't remember if I pimped this before, but mekkavandexter has a newish project, three/60/five, in which her compatriot Scott takes a photo, she writes a short piece of flash for it, and they post one every day. It's on Day 28, and I have been following with super interest. You should read it.

We've run an acceptances and slush update over at the ol' ideomancer. We actually bought a bunch of stories! Fancy!

Finally, I am drinking this tea and it is freaking awesome. I commend it to you.

Okay, those are all the links I've got. Back to the revision mines! *whipcrack*


*Also I cleaned my bathroom today.** Oh, the virtue of me.

**It's really amazing how cleaning the bathroom takes an hour, but working up to it through the donwanna and procrastination takes *cough* long.