Drowning Nor Waving

In March 2011, I am living in the Annex, on the first floor of a hundred-year-old Edwardian with noisy upstairs neighbours and iffy water pressure. It is perfect.

I have just finished the copyedits on my first novel, which is now going to typesetting at a publisher I didn't think I could aspire to; by midwinter my book will be in those school book fairs I loved so much as a kid. At work, I've just been promoted into the next job classification; as high as I can go unless I want to work evenings. And I don't: For someone who's been an introvert all her life, I spend an awful lot of time at concerts and readings and out at dinner and attending artsy social media geek sorts of parties. I pissed away my early twenties working 60-hour weeks to keep a roof over my head, and I've spent the last year and change resolved to make up for that now that my job and income are stable. I've had my heart broken more times in the last year than I have in the five before that, and I'm surprisingly okay with that, because it means I'm actually using the muscle again. I am planning to buy a bike.

I spend a lot of time stretched too thin, overbooked, and very tired.

I have never been more engaged with the world around me, in all its little details and oddities. I have never felt more alive.

#

In March 2001, I am 18, and I am a mess. I live in North York with my boyfriend, who scooped me up and moved me in four months before, after a familial falling out so severe that I can no longer live under the same roof as my parents and what at this time feels like a death blow to my chosen career (classical voice performance; yes, I was going to be an opera singer). I have my high school diploma, but I've left school one OAC credit short of a university admission application, and I'm in no real state to care about that yet; I'm so much a mess that I have no concrete idea of how messed up I am and will not for years. Ironically, this month I have found out that for my other four years of academic and extracurricular excellence, I've been named a National Book Award recipient. Later, this will get me admission at the university of my choice in under a week.

I'm working at a hippie/Indian stuff/Eastern/whatever store at Yonge and Bloor, and have vague notions of trying to move down into the city although I don't know how it can be afforded. I've left both friends and hobbies in my old neighbourhood, along with most of what used to define me in the ecosystem; I don't feel like I belong with any of it anymore anyways. I don't know who I am. I don't know where I'm going. I have always had some idea of where I was going, even if it was someone else's idea grafted onto my own head and my own wants, and I am not admitting it to myself in this day-by-day existence I'm leading, but I am terrified.

I have not yet started to write fiction again, and won't for three months. Writing is something I used to do when I was a kid because I had no friends. I grew out of it.

#

In March 1991, I am eight and shy and taciturn, and there are all these things floating around in my head. There's a kids' word processing program on the hand-me-down family computer, something from my father's business that he's passed on to us. I have taught myself to touch type, and I use it to write my stories down. All my stories are four pages long, because the document size the program creates is only four pages. When I start what I consider my first long-form work, even though it'll only top out at novelette length, I will write it in chapters of four pages each.

I'm good at school, but I'm bad at people. The teachers all love me, but it's souring a little since we started homework and I've immediately not wanted to do it; it's cutting into my reading and writing time. I have recently got huge red-framed glasses for the nearsightedness, but this is not why I get picked on. I spend a lot of time in the library, reading Agatha Christies and Susan Coopers. I spend recess in the back field behind the schoolyard, inspecting wildflowers and the ornamental bushes pushing wild through the chain-link fence from the backyards on the other side, and pretending myself a magic kingdom. The boy I've known since we were babies, my best friend, has recently distanced himself. I'm friends now with a girl who lives in midtown, exotically far away for me, in a house next door to her grandmother's. We pick chives from her grandmother's garden and eat them raw.

I don't know if I'm unhappy or not at this point. I don't honestly have much basis for comparison.

Under the covers at night, I turn on my flashlight and read my kids' almanac, naming the constellations and matching them with the names in the pantheons two chapters ahead. At eight years old, I am going to be a chemist. Or an astronomer. Or an archaeologist.

Someday, later, I am going to be something.

#

In March 1981, I don't exist yet. Not even as some cell division. And so of course, at this point? Everything's possible.

I am home from work, tired, angry, and in need of fifteen professional hockey players with respectable and yet unprickly hockey stubble to cuddle me and make it go away. Barring that, I'm ordering takeout, but it means I have sadly got nothing here and all you get is a meme.

So.

If I came with a warning label, what would it say?

Since I'm apparently not doing any work tonight (although I did pop a few sentences onto "Know Your Apocalypses!" and will claim they're just for wirewalking), here comes a memememememe.

Ganked from just about the whole internet:

-Describe me in one word: just one single word. Positive or negative.

-Leave your word in a comment, before looking at what words others have used.

-Copy and paste the meme to your journal to find out how people describe you when limited to one word.

Back to muffin-making! Mmm, muffins.

I have been poking at "Sugar" tonight, as is my duty, but between my performance appraisal at Dayjob yesterday and today's inauguration (which we were able to watch at work) and good news for friends (see: hollailama) and contracts and books in the mail and candlelight inside with snowlight outside and strong tea and Yo Yo Ma playing Simple Gifts, I am actually, well, too happy to write that story.

No, really. It's not a happy story.

So I am trying to write another story and can't decide which. And I apparently haven't done the First Line Meme since *checks* December 2007, so I think we're due.

Novels
The Enchanted Generation: It was six-o-clock when he came home. I recall it six-o-clock because the light was coming from the west, and Lilli had just broken Mother's last good china teacup.

Saturnalia: The hour after the clocks turn back is the time for regrets.

The Patron Saint of Nothing: Catherine liked high places.
There were no mountaintops in the city of Charybdis, so she built her mansion in the trees. It was paneled in wood and walled with wood; it spiraled like a chambered dahlia, and ghost moths fluttered in its rough-hewn hallways, tasting its walls in vain.
It took her a year and a day.

Rosemary, For Remembrance: After the accident, there were things Mary forgot.

Caravanserai (working):The difference – or so say the caravanserai of the inner flats and environs – the difference between man and sand is entirely a matter of texture. The outer flats were born when rock and shell ground apart, flaking into a million million pieces, each rough-edged and distinct.
Man, they continue, was born when the world ground apart, and the only thing that holds us together is the great and spired city of Ter'etzlan.

Roof-Sheep Book (working): No first line.


Short Stories

"Bachelorette: Practical people don't wear Versace to full-moon night. But then the Pack's not practical people.

"Indestructible: (No first line, just the last and a thematic argument.)

"Know Your Apocaylpses!": The first step to successfully surviving any impending apocalypse is identification.

"The Mouthwash Story": Years later, as he lay broken on the cast iron fence of Gramercy Park while the snow fell, Puck was to remember that distant summer evening when Titania had taken him to Macy's to discover mouthwash. (This line courtesy ccfinlay, who wrote it as a joke, and said I could have it For Serious.)

Roses My Colour, and White: There were no more roses, after the world fell.

The Right People: The Right People walk the walk. You can see it in the long click-switch of their shoes on concrete down the middle of the sidewalk on a hot summer night. They don't walk regular, one-two-one-two; they hitch; shimmy; jive. They switch up the rhythm just when you got it made; expert deejays of the street. They grin shag-teeth grins into their tiny phones with their elbows spread wide and point-jointed.
And you dance. Oh, you dance.

"When Your Number Isn't Up": The sirens didn't trouble [NAME]. People came to the [SOMETHING] Hotel to die.

"Wedding Dress": They wed her to a sailor when she refused all others, and everyone knew sailors go to hell.

"Language Lessons": Naanaa's house smells like blackberry tea on Sundays, the day Helen takes the streetcar across to Cabbagetown for language lessons.

"Rose White, Rose Red" (now celebrating six years in my notes folder): They fed you red beans and rice on the day your mother died.

"The Mad Scientist's Daughter": My first memory is the lab.

"The River God's Son": The river bore only daughters. This was a vexation.

"The Whole Story": You will never get the whole story.

"Un Annee Sans Neige": January without snow and the city trembled.


Poetry

"John P. Robarts and the Dancer": For what mere book can grant a knowledge / With an impassioned gravity?

---

Moral: I do not write happy things. Perhaps I should read instead. :p

I have been fighting a deathly battle against an invading force in my sinuses since about Wednesday night, where fighting a deathly battle equals coughing up gunk, blowing gunk out of my noise, and talking in gestures where I'm not talking in a weird creaky alien voice. I'm pretty sure the tide is turning, since yesterday morning ( Lakism ahoy )

(For those not familiar with my personal coinages which I told only three people about: Lakism [noun]: Something nasty and TMI, usually to do with a bodily fluid or somesuch, which you immediately put on the internet. Named in affectionate honour of jaylake, expert practitioner if not originator of the practice. Also known as "Ew! That's so disgusting! Everyone come look!".)

This means I'm sorta dumb and sleepy, never mind a little annoyed about possibly having to stay home from work tomorrow unless this crackling in my ears gets gone and my voice comes back (I like my work), and so you get a meme.

Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer: 8, when we had an author visit at school which...my brain tells me was either Claire Mackay and/or the writer of a book about Cabbagetown in the Great Depression? Wherein I ballsily (as was my habit at the time) informed said author I wanted to be a writer too. She actually did contact me and ask if I wanted to send something to some anthology for kids-by kids, but I think I was spooked off.
Age when I wrote my first story: 19, not counting juvenilia. Counting juvenilia, 3. It's in crayon. My mom still has it, and it displays a freakily coherent narrative arc.
Age when I first submitted a short story to a magazine: 19
Age when I sold my first short story: 19 ("Playing the Dozens" to Ideomancer)
Age of my first professional sale: 21 or 22. It was right around my birthday, and it was actually my first two; I had acceptances come in from Strange Horizons and Realms of Fantasy inside eight hours of each other. That was a kind of rocking day.
Total number of submissions: 637. Most of them pre-2005. I've slowed down.
Total acceptances: 78
Thickness of file of rejection slips prior to first story sale: 16
Approximate number of short stories/novelettes/novellas sold for cash money: 36. And one for free when I was first starting out, but we don't acknowledge that publication and it's been offline forever and you will never see it ahahahaha.
Age at first Year's Best reprint: 22
Poems sold: 31

Age when I started writing my first novel: 20
Age when I started writing my first completed novel: 20
Age I finished that novel: 20
Age I started my second novel: 21
Age I finished my second novel: 21
Age when I sold a first novel: Pending!
Total number of novels written: *counts off on fingers* 5. And several false starts.
Books sold: Nada. I only really did query two of those, and inside a year with each I could see why I wasn't going to sell them as-is. Those two are in a box for redrafting one of these days to fix their suckitude. And one is Above, which has yet to reach the query bit.
Books in the process of querying: None.

Age when first nominated for an award: 21, I think?
Age when first won an award: 21
Nominations: 4
Awards won: 1

Age when first applied for an arts grant: 23
Age when first got an arts grant: 26

Short stories in the slush: 6
Short stories written this year: *cough* 1. I was busy. There was a book to write and a degree to finish and a job to get and--stop looking at me like that!
Age when I became a full-time novelist: Probably never. I have noticed that I don't function well when I lack external structure to my day. So even if I land in the J.K. Rowling/Stephen King pit of money (never happen), I would at least maintain a part-time job to keep myself from going batshit and gnawing my own arm off.
Age now: 26


I'm sure that was dull edifying. :p

After a birthday dinner last night that involved copious amounts of both champagne and a nice red wine, this is about all I'm up to:

You Are Scary

You even scare scary people sometimes!

Yes I am. And hung over.

*huddles in cubicle with sammich and picks at piles of work*

Above is set to be my first finished novel in two years or so. Stolen from katallen, jmeadows, stillsostrange, and stillnotbored, here's a list of the unfinished novels and idea-stage stuff:

Saturnalia (~600 words) This is most likely next in the barrel.
The Patron Saint of Nothing (36k) ksumnersmith is frequently after me to pick this back up, but that would require a plot. It sits in the corner until it puts out the plot.
Rosemary, For Remembrance (15k) A direct sequel to "Lost Wax" and "The Sorceress's Assistant", about a girl who hits her head and the revolution that eventually follows. Put it down for not doing things sufficiently interesting to me, but it is likely I was being too harsh.
The Victorian Book/Pritchard (25k) I will likely scrap this for parts. It had an overarching plot that can only be charitably described as stupid.
Toronto Book 2 (71k) Well, I couldn't do much with it without selling Toronto Book the First. Although now that I'm rereading it it's not at all bad, and maybe I should.

And in the idea-and-notes stage...

The Roof-Sheep Book (250) Wherein Six and Joe and Angeline's parents, young and able-bodied, walk across Canada in the wake of the apocalypse. Why? They haven't told me yet. But it would have lots of tasty survivalist logistics. Mmm.
Caravanserai (500) Exile, desert worlds, a beautiful woman king who was once a shit disturber, ancient bone cities, and (I think) war.
The Enchanted Generation (notes) Too nebulous for me to even comment on yet.


And now I shall go to my job interview, even though the rain it raineth today of all days.

Haiku2 for cristalia
time and i am making a short list of things i have this feeling
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Created by Grahame

I am, in fact, making a short list of things. I have this feeling...

I would really like to write words sometime this fall. So we are going to have a go-round with the first line meme.

( Well the stories come in these places, and the stories are all the same )

I should probably follow my own advice. When in doubt? Write about hockey. *g*

November 6, 2007 Progress Notes:

"The Ground Whereon She Stands"

Words today: 950.
Words total: 2000.
Reason for stopping: It's late. And this story moves ever so slowly, and I won't push.
Tea: N/A.
Munchies: Pizza, which may have been too soon. After the bathtub barfing incident of last month, it appears pizza still smells a little like barf to me. Bleh.
Exercise: N/A.
Mail: Nomail.

Darling du Jour: There were flowers in my mattress, curling around the springs. Ivy had strangled my alarm clock sometime before eight-forty-five a.m., and all around me, opening, were roses, roses.

Tyop du Jour: N/A
Words MS Word Doesn't Know: N/A
Research Roundup: Seasonal Vermont produce, physiology of butterflies, Vermont forestry publications, Jainism. The produce site is actually really neat, so I'm going to link it: Seasonal Produce of the American Northeast.

Mean Things: Enchantment, the inability to communicate with each other clearly, and the passive-aggressive actions that leads to. Roses.
Books in progress: Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia; textbooks.
The glamour: Nothing was especially glamorous today. I sent some queries about some poems, but really that was it.

---

In keeping with my lack of glamour is a decided lack of content, so here is a meme:


My Personality

Neuroticism	54
Extraversion	4
Openness To Experience	86
Agreeableness	31
Conscientiousness	61

You do not experience strong, irresistible cravings and consequently do not find yourself tempted to overindulge, however you tend to lack energy and have difficult initiating activities. People generally perceive you as distant and reserved, and you do not usually reach out to others. You prefer familiar routines and for things to stay the same. You can tend to feel uncomfortable with change. There are times when you believe that a certain amount of deception in social relationships is necessary, however you are mostly candid, frank and sincere. People find it moderately easy to relate to you, however you generally see others as selfish, devious, and sometimes potentially dangerous. You are well-organized and like to live according to routines and schedules. Often you will keep lists and make plans.

Test Yourself Compare Yourself View Full Report A wide variety of myspace layouts to choose from.

I would be interested to take this again when it's spring and the sunlight is rising, and see how that extroversion and neuroticism score looks then. That's one of the problems (aside from wankery) with the internet personality quiz: personalities exist in flux. This time of year, mine is tending to hibernation and solitude and a certain amount of depression. I would suspect myself of being a dryad if I wasn't so fascinated with fire: pulling in the leaves and shutting down for winter.

And with that, I'm blowing out the candles and tucking into bed. Goodnight, internet.