Kat Dancing

My parents are back from Italy, heavily jetlagged and fretting over the state of their bootleg cheese but otherwise fine. Which is a good thing. Because I love my parents, and because I'm not prepared to take over the farm, and because I'd like to get off the 9 to 7 shift someday and, y'know, have a day off.

Someday. Not today. *sigh*

In other news, our youngest dog is officially Weird. She was so excited to see my parents back that she humped their luggage.

Which would nearly make sense if she was male.

Sometimes people tell me that homosexuality is unnatural. And I laugh. A lot. Poor little innocent believers in nature.

Type-In Revisions: 225 pages (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 117,520
Notes: Oh, so there's where that scene I thought I added got to. Better notes, dammit, better notes.

I have no brain. Therefore I meme. Stolen from scott_lynch:

Set your computer's music player to random. Note the first 10 discrete artists that come up. Find images of them. Post said images and let people try to guess who they are. [Read More!]

There's a rant over on Holly Lisle's blog which threw me into a bit of a depression. It's not just that it's anti-global warming; I've known for some time now that Holly and I have differing political and environmental views, which in no way lessens my enjoyment of her books or my respect for her as a writer. It was the content.

I am getting sick of refuting the same bloody lies.

The one that really bugged me was the "volcanos dump out more emissions every year than all the crap humans dump into the atmosphere" bit, because I've already refuted that one twice in the last few months. According to the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change, the Pew Center for Climate Change, this scientific site on volcanoes, and every other site I've seen that references scientific papers, this is flat out false. The IPCC conservatively estimates human carbon emissions at ten times those of volcanic; the volcanoes site says 150 times. The only sites that disagreed with these estimates were sites like globalwarming.org, and since they provide no references for their claim, there's not much I can say about them.

Except that they're funded by the National Consumer Coalition. That's probably significant.

And this gets my goat, because it is palpably false information, and the fact that I keep running across it suggests that someone out there is feeding it to people as God's gospel. Purposely lying to them. And most people can't get through stuff like the IPCC report (for the simple reason that it's bloody impossible to read. God, when will they start making English Composition mandantory for science majors?), so most people have no choice but to believe these confident liars.

The same goes for most of the other stuff Holly says. "The planet’s temperature has never been stable; it has gotten a whole fucking lot warmer than this before humanity came along, as well as a whole fucking lot colder": that's true, but misleading, since the last shift this bad was on the order of a few hundred million years ago and most of the climate shifts didn't happen this fast or were caused by something catastropic, like a meteor strike. "We are in a high sunspot activity cycle and a natural high temperature cycle": Pew, the IPCC, and all other scientific studies account for this, and they still believe that humans are contributing significantly to the observed global warming phenomenon.

I have heard all of this from badly educated people and from PhDs. I have heard it from people who really ought to know better, like engineers. I can refute it all I want. The frustrating truth is that I always have to add the caveat, "as far as we can tell," or "best data suggests," because I'm using scientific data and science always allows that it might be wrong. And we might, too. Global warming might be nothing more than a bad dream. God, I hope so.

But I must allow for that. The confident liars don't. There's no scientific data backing them up so they can talk as big as they want. And as a result they sound more sure than me... not to mention that they tell people what they wish to hear.

More on this later, when it's not cutting into my writing time.

Type-In Revisions: 222 (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 117,000
Notes: ... and now I only have half an hour to do revisions. Curse you, tempting rant!

I was thinking of posting about global warming... but, uh, well, there was this milking thing, and then I made dinner, and now I'm a zombie.

And to think, all the expensive ingredients those voodoo shamans wasted trying to get people to this state.

So instead I give you Frazz. Which I highly recommend, by the way, especially to parents and teachers....



I think this will be my totem comic when I start submitting to publishers.

Type-In Revisions: 209 pages (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 116.460
Notes: Not rejoicing in the word count yet: I have a whole big scene to type in tomorrow. Also, it appears I can write romantic tension, when I put my mind to it. Who knew?

Cows can be amazingly stupid some days. Yesterday five or six of them got out through a hole in the fence (Well, when I say "hole", I mean "spot we didn't fence because we thought you'd be smart enough to want to use the road rather than slog through the stinking swamp." But we'll let that pass.) Then, when I go to get them, rather than quietly going back the way they came, they charge up what they seemed to think was a hill - a cunning monoever, no doubt, in their minds.

Sadly, it wasn't a hill, it was our compost heap. So then they're all like, "Shit, this isn't an escape route! WE'RE SINKING! Let's seek higher ground!"

Memo to cows: When seeking higher ground, don't do so on the same goddamn mound of compost that you're sinking into.

Jesus. Morons.

Type-In Revisions (for the last two days): 183 pages (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 117,520
Notes: Note to self: leave better notes to self next time.

I suck at miniature golf.

I also suck at bowling.

That will be all.

Type-In Revisions: 156 pages (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 118,820
Notes: And slowly but surely, the word count creeps upwards. Just stay under 20K, damn you. That's all I ask.

Lots of POV talk around for us writing junkies. Here's Elizabeth Bear on limited third and omniscient, with a bit more on omniscient. And here's Karen Palmer on first person (link ganked from Booksquare).

I've written two books now, one in first and one in tightly limited third, and I disagree slightly with Bear in that I find the two very different indeed. I also disagree with Palmer (ooh. Contentious today, aren't we?) in that, for me, first worked almost exactly opposite than it did for her. It was in third that I struggled with the default voice and finding a point of view for my character that wasn't either exactly like mine or soppily self-involved. Thinly disguised wish fufillment autobiography, in other words, also known as "writing a Mary Sue". In first, the character's voice came through with such terrifying clarity that I was blown away.

Of course, in my original attempts at writing that story third person, I not only didn't fully grasp POV but was writing an adolescent female who closely resembled me. It wasn't until I read a LeGuin article on POV and did the suggested exercise, writing a given scene from three seperate points of view, that I stumbled on the idea of writing first person. And the first person character just happened to be in her twenties (several years older than me) and was convinced she had no emotions*, which made her a rather good observer. So perhaps I just lucked out there.

On the other hand....

I've been hanging out on writer's boards for several years now, and in every debate or advice session, someone will say, "Don't do X. I did X when I first started writing, and it was crap, and then I switched to doing Y and whammo! My writing got better!"

This happens with such frequency that I suspect a deeper reason: the easy way sucks, no matter what the easy way may be. Most of us, as writers, started out writing in the way that was most convenient to us - that is, required the least thought or effort. Then we ditch the no-thought method and do something that is a struggle for us. We attribute the improvement in writing to the change in method, not our own change in attitude from "writing as play" to "writing as requiring effort" because, well, we don't like admitting we weren't trying hard enough before. It's ever so much nicer to think you've discovered the cure for cancer than to realize it was lying on the bedroom floor under the laundry where you'd have found it long ago if you'd bothered tidying up.

This can lead to two problems. The first (and I am not talking about either Bear or Palmer here, both of whom wrote excellent and non-lecturing essays. Come to think of it, I haven't been talking of them for some time. I'm a writer. It's all about me...) is that you may be tempted to order less experienced writers around: "Never use first! Never use omniscient!" Hang about any writers' group for a month or so and you will watch this happen. Advice is grand, advice is good, but what some fail to realize is that what worked for them may not work for others.

The second is that you as a writer may end up denying yourself valuable tools. I was very hesitant, when I started the current Damned Book, to write in third; I remembered the first book too well. But it was in my head as third, so I started, and suprise! No problem any more. Joey is just as strong a voice as my first-person character and no one could possibly mistake her for me. The method wasn't the problem; my attitude towards writing the first time I used it was.

Now I just need to work my courage up enough to use omniscient, which, aside from being a bugger to spell, is a whole new ballgame. Hmm. Maybe in a year or two....


* She was also convinced that she existed to kill people. Whenever I spent too much time writing her I would find myself stalking around campus in a trenchcoat staring coldly at people. This is the danger of first person.

Type-In Revisions: 147 pages (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 118,560
Notes: I just love it when my only hint that I've swapped the scene order is getting halfway through a scene and realising the revisions I'm typing in reference a scene that happens in the future. I guess I thought I'd remember. Bad Kat.

We've gotten into a routine now. At seven am I get up, check my mail, post, and am writing by 7:30. I keep it up until 8:30 or so; then I get dressed and get ready to go for work.

At some point in all of this Dan gets up (he was actually up a minute or two before me this morning. Go Dan!) I usually say something like "Morning, hon!" to which he responds something like, "Urg." He sits and stares glaze-eyed at his computer until I bully him into putting some clothes on and going to work.

We work.

By the time we get off work, at 2 or 3 pm if we're lucky, I'm getting tired. I'll have spent most of the day in a sensory deprivation chamber, aka the cheese cooler, and I know I still have to milk, and all I want is to go home and sleep. Dan, on the other hand, is quite cheerful, and will usually try to convince me to run some stupid unnecessary errand like groceries or do some stupid unnecessary thing like pay my credit card bill.

We have a lot of arguments in the afternoon.

At 4:30 I go back to work and milk until 7:30 or so. Then I stagger my way home, have a shower, and sit and stare glaze-eyed at the computer until Dan bullies me into going to bed. He will occasionally try and communicate something to me, like, "Dinner's ready."

"Urg," I reply.

Darned romance novels. They never warn you about the real relationship stressors.

Type-In Revisions: 136 (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 118,560
Notes: I have a schedule now. If I can get 8 pages of type-in done per day, I can be done by World Fantasy and still have time to write up my synopsis and query letter. If I get 10 pages done per day, I can do all of that and have the next book started.

So far, so good.

Memo to my brother left at work:

Your dog stole my sandal. If you find it please put it somewhere safe.

Pretty much a fitting end for a - well, not a bad day, but a day beset with small frustrations. Certainly not a day on which I wanted to stand in front of the barn contemplating my lone shoe and thinking of all the places that an intelligent, creative, kleptomaniacal shoe-fetishist dog could hide a rather small brown sandal on 175 acres of partially wooded farmland. Nor the kind of day on which I wanted to spent twenty minutes clumping around in my shed boots looking in the most likely of those places, escorted by the dog, who thought it all great fun. Nor even the kind of day on which I wanted, after giving up on the sandal, leaving a testy memo for the brother, and putting the shed boots where the rat-bastard dog couldn't find them, to limp across the gravel driveway in my bare feet and drive myself home to limp across our gravel driveway.

Fucking animal kingdom.

Other people get the kind of misfortunes where they are offered alcohol and sympathy. Me? I get "Oh, that's terrible," followed by a not-very-muffled snigger.

Okay, and alcohol, and some sympathy. But not enough.

Type-In Revisions: 126 pages (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 118,300
Notes: You know the pages I hate? Not the ones with the big Xs over the whole thing, all the angst has already been done and all they require is the good ol' delete button. It's the ones where I can barely read the type because of all the arrows and line-throughs and stuff written in between the lines and into the margins. Those suck. There were a lot of those yesterday.

In a heroic attempt to get his ass out of bed, Dan has set his alarm clock to start playing dumb radio shows at seven. Doesn't seem to have affected him so far, but it sure got me up. An extra half hour of work time today.

Cool.

Link wankage: on the politics side, This is a remarkably cool article on "the Christian country", which is, sadly, us. The author (a Christian) remarks on how the US, for all its Christian values, ranks nearly last among developed countries for stuff like foreign aid (the only country lower is Italy. Let's hear it for the Catholic country, eh?) He then goes on to suggest that the original "love thy neighbor" emphasis of the scriptures has been hijacked by suburbia, turning Christianity into "a reflection of the dominant culture, a culture of unrelenting self-obsession."

It's very good. Read it.

In lighter stuff, here's Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction, which I ganked from zarq, and here's a very useful text tool for you Mac OSX users. It's called Textpander, and I've used it five times already in this post. Donationware. God, I love my OS.

Type-In Revisions: 119 (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 118,300
Notes: Ah, the progress you can make when you chuck entire scenes.

Finally got back to doing the type-ins. Up until now I've been rereading what I typed in beginning of August, because it's been so long that I've forgotten half of what I'd done, but the process has been slowed down by two problems. The first is time. I'm working from nine in the morning to seven-thirty in the evening, sometimes with an hour or so in the middle, and then there's all that cooking-and-eating business to attend to. By the time I finish the day, I'm too tired to do anything but read LJ and veg. So, I get up at 7:30 every morning, which gives me about an hour to work on the story. If I ever get better about going to bed on time I might be able to get up at 6:30 and make it two. Oh luxury!

The second problem is that I've hit That point in the revision process, the point where you've read the damned thing One Too Many Times. Every word I read seemed to be crap. I was pretty sure, even then, that it wasn't crap, because when I read the new scenes I'd put in I liked them, but there was always that niggling doubt that made itself heard at about, oh, 2 am, that perhaps the damned thing had been crap all along and I hadn't noticed until now.

Never listen to the 2 am voices. They lie.

The worry is (says the 2 am voice) that the story is not very big. Every story I read in science fiction these days either has a really big plot - fall of starships, empires exploding, that kind of thing - or a really big idea, the kind that crawls in through your eyes and turns your brain inside out. And I love those stories. I just don't write those stories. I set out to write a rather long, rambling story about a character I liked who'd been sitting in my head for years, and at some point it turned into a murder mystery, which was fine with me since I'd been reading Sherlock Holmes since I was old enough to lift the Collected Works. There are no explosions (well, one small one). I tweaked the setting enough that people no longer compare it to B5 or DS9, much. And, conveniently, the murder made me tighten a long rambling plot into something readable. But it is still a rather small story.

It was fun to write. I think it'll be fun to read. And God knows I've made it the best book I can. I'm just not sure it'll be enough.

On the other hand, I've really got only two choices: a) Abandon three years' worth of work and cry like a baby or b) Take a tamping iron to the 2 am voice, finish the type-in, send the bastard off, and start writing another, better novel, which will not be a sequel to this one! Bad Muse! Go sit in the corner!

Rats.

Type-In Revisions: 99 pages (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 121,420
Notes: So much for word count shrinkage. Oh, well. And I finally figured out how to unobtrusively and quickly explain what a flikk was early in the story while driving to work yesterday, so I'll write that in today.

Disadvantages of working on a family farm:

The pay sucks.

Likewise, the hours. Can we say "seventy hour workweek?" I thought we could.

Staggering home after a long day's work and having your beloved take one look at you and say "Shower. Now. You smell like shit." And knowing he's dead on.

Living two hours from anything resembling civilization.

Waitaminute, why do my parents get a European vacation and I don't? And why do I have to do all their work?

Having no time, ever, for stuff like writing. Including blog posts.

Advantages of working on a family farm:

Novelty value.

All the cheese and meat you care to cart home and all the milk you can drink (that last may be more valuable to me than most. You know the way some people are about beer? This is how I am about milk. Sometimes I even quaff, though Dan makes me mop the floor afterwards.) Plus, sometimes there are veggies from the garden or eggs from the only non-family employee, who also brings nummy treats to work on Mondays.

Wildlife exposure. Dan got bad karma points from the Snake Gods for accidentally soaking one with the hose today.

Working in the same place as your beloved is not considered a conflict of interest, but ordinary healthy preferential hiring.

If you want a couple of days off work for, oh, say, World Fantasy, you say, "I need a couple of days off in November," and lo, you have days off. Who's counting?

You can cuss at work all you want. There's no way you'll ever top Dad anyway.

Ditto pinching your beloved's butt. Dad's ahead of you there too.

"I was late for work because there were cows in the road" is, in fact, a valid excuse.

More regular posting soon, I hope. For now be content knowing we are alive and settled in, for certain values of "settled in" which are equivalent to "getting our butts worked off".

I go, I come back.

Or, if you want the long version, I went to Canada ten days ago, threw a party to say goodbye to all my friends, packed Dan's house into the car and basement, added Dan (to the car - no rescue attempts required), and drove the lot to Virginia, where we moved into our new apartment.

We did not kill each other. This was not a given for certain parts of the process.

The new apartment is lovely and roomy and I adore it. It is also an education. I've never had a house of my own; either I've been living in other people's, or I've been in dorm rooms, caravans, and other temporary accomodation. So I didn't know that houses didn't just come with, y'know, shower curtains. Or trash cans. Or toilet paper. (My mother kindly provided that last, else there would have been a very hurried trip to the store at some point.)

But it is lovely, and we have a working computer and a gorgeous fast internet connection, and my family came and ate take-out barbecue with us on the kitchen floor and we all drank champagne and toasted the house, and Dan and I found that there was an automatic ice maker in the freezer and turned it on and watched it for a while, and then we got bored and went away, and when we came back, my God! Ice!

And now it's godawful early in the morning and I'm contemplating the idea that I might actually have time to write again. Perhaps not a great deal, and perhaps not today, but soon.

Life. Good. Joy.