Read about specific works in progress: Those Ghosts of Time - Juvie project

 

	March 28	I haven't really done any work in almost a week. I looked at With the Phone in Her Hand and I'm pretty happy with the idea of sending it off to the Post. But I'm in a place where I'm writing sentences instead of paragraphs, and the more I push myself to get a draft of the end-of-humanity story, the more my cursor blinks at me. Forcing myself isn't working, and I know I just need to force myself harder but it's very difficult right now. 10X10X10 is okay. I've got stories from two terrific ladies whom I solicited (yeah, you heard me), along with the other content I've already accepted. One lady hasn't gotten back to me about whether she's willing to edit her piece, so I've got six firm stories. In two months. Rrraagh! If only all those writers out there who are always getting rejected knew that I would probably accept them if they submitted to me, I'd fill up an issue in a minute. I'm so amazed about that print acceptance. The editor said that Fucked was "a powerful, unflinching piece of work." I agreed with him once, but it kept getting rejected, so I was surprised to remember that I used to feel that way about it. Half my mailing list wrote me back to say they wanted a copy. It's sort of an NC-17 story, so I don't know quite what to say about that. See, even now I'm procrastinating on my novella. I don't know if you noticed that.   -----------
	March 21	Slog, slog, slog. Chill is going OK. I'm doing this really weird backwards/forwards thing. As I pointed out below, I sort of started in the middle, so I'm writing forward and writing backward--picking the next most previous scene to the one I have and starting there. It's weird but it's seeming to work. I am running into the same old problems, though, with not knowing enough about jockeys and being deeply afraid to just make stuff up. (How do writers who just make stuff up live with themselves? The guilt would drive me mad.) As I wrote in the 9 March entry below, I wrote about 2K on Crazy Greenland, but I wrote right up to a sentence that begins "Rose saw" ...and there I stopped. What did she see? Stone houses? Pale horses? Monkeys? I don't know. They're finally in Luquenor, and I haven't figured out exactly what it looks like yet. Because I'm lazy. Plus the language thing is a lot more challenging than I thought it would be. Formerly it made so much sense to me that they knew English down there, but now it doesn't at all, and I have to figure out a way to make it work. And I have to make up a zillion words in Luquenora. I am starting to feel as if I'm in a bit over my head (or as if I need a flesh-and-blood person to bitch to about this book). There is good news. a) I felt confident enough about the sprawling, possibly boring finished product of In Her Place to submit it to a magazine. b) Two acceptances in one week feels pretty damn good. c) I wrote that meat story, and it turned out just fine. I think I have OK potential as a semi-horror writer, if I can get my tongue out of my cheek. Sent it off to a mag that I think it's perfect for. e) I keep finding these terrific little presses that I want to submit work to. If only I weren't so gutless! d), and most importantly, I've started on a novella that is spooking the hell out of me. I like searching for anthology markets on Duotrope. I don't know why, but being published in anthologies is very attractive to me. I know nothing about the reader market for anthologies, or if it exists, but anyway that's how I feel. Some time ago I saw this one that was called INFRADEAD (yes, formatted that way), and when I clicked on it Duotrope told me that it was interested in novellas between 18K and 30K (woohoo!) that regarded the end of the human race (damn). I didn't have an idea about the end of the human race, so I shrugged and kept looking. A couple of weeks ago my brain obliged me by giving me a dream about, you guessed it, the end of the human race. So I'm turning that idea into a novella. The premise is that aliens come and kill all the pregnant women, and subsequently kill any woman who becomes pregnant after the first extinction, and the rest of us are just left to run out the clock. A world with no children. I'm forcing myself to write this, really it's like pushing a millstone, but I like the idea (despite how much I usually hate apocalypse narratives) and I've got a deadline (six months away, but it's still a deadline, and who knows if I'll still be able to write at work in six months?). More and more I want to start a blog, but it's such a trendy thing to do, and then I'll feel obligated, and I'm paying for this space anyway. Also I don't want to be part of a blog community; I want to be a Community of One. -----------
	March 15	Curiouser and curiouser...for the last few days I've started working on Winter's Chill! I sort of don't know what to do about it, because it's going exactly the way Falling Leaves went when I was first writing it: just rolling out, like a hundred miles' worth of Fruit Roll-Ups. I have to admit that the reason I started work on it was because I read through Leaves completely in the last week (more on that later) and I got, uhm, inspired to write the scene when Jessamyn and Jeremy finally have sex with each other. It turned out well and I just kept going, writing on to the next big event, where her dad comes back and confesses--well, never mind. I wrote up a synopsis for the rest of the series, and I'm just letting myself follow it. I'll admit that I've started at a relatively easy spot in the book (i.e. the middle), and that now that I've hit a stopping point (just before Jessamyn rides in the Derby), I should go back to the beginning and start with her breakup with Damon and leaving the Delahaye. But I don't wanna. So much more difficult. As for Leaves, the editing went pretty well once I got into the swing of it. My biggest concern is Phyllida. I'm worried that I don't spend enough time explaining her contradictory character traits. There are such good reasons for all the ways that she acts, and her character is clear in my mind, but I fear that I'm not explaining her well enough, and that she's not credible. Of course her motivations aren't going to be fully explained until the final book, the Summer book, but I need to make her unpredictability believable, if that makes sense. The Man From the Plane turns out to need a lot more work than I thought, so I'm putting it aside until the gas runs out on either Chill or Crazy Greenland or Ghosts. I keep rotating between them, writing a few thousand words and going to the next one, writing a few thousand words and going to the third, so forth. I also wrote two pretty exciting paragraphs for a horror story about meat. Something tells me that one will be pretty easy to dash off, but I'm putting it off. I think because I'm enjoying Jessamyn's world so much. O, the pounding of my heart within my bosom! O, Jeremy, no, don't kiss me! Don't touch me! Yes, I mean no! Gives me such a cheap thrill. -----------
	March 12	I know I'm doing a lot of updating lately...getting to be a little bloggy in here...but I have so much to say and I can only bore my houseboy so much before he gets cranky. This weekend I did some real work on Those Ghosts of Time, and you can read more about that on its own progress page, but I also did some work on a surprising subject: Leaves. At my writing class on Saturday morning, I mentioned this novel, and one of the ladies in front of me said she was interested in reading it. I jumped at the chance for an objective reader, so I went right home and got ready to print it out. Hoo boy. It's a mess. The electronic copy that I have is not the last edit that I did--that one was deleted two years ago through no fault of my own--but I had forgotten that I didn't have any chapter titles in this version, nor have I done an adverb edit since I was last in love with adverbs. So I did a stern edit on the first three chapters, and printed them, and then I printed out chapters 4 and 5 to edit at work today. Which I did. Goddamn, does this thing need a lot of work. My goal is to have it surface-edited (i.e. presentable as an early draft to an objective reader) by Saturday, and to maybe do some more work on it plot-wise after I hand it off. I figured out a talent that I can give to Jeremy other than reading, and now I just have to incorporate it everywhere (what a pain). I'm still working on a bunch of things, including everything below, and my mind is tumbling around a humor story about the devil. The houseboy helped a lot with that idea. Also I've had an idea for a piece of Warhammer fan fiction for some years now, and while I've got the heart of the story, I need to learn a LOT about Space Marines before it can be written at the level of the fiction that Black Library publishes. I have no comment on the quality of said fiction. Still and all, things are going well. I'm cooking with gas. -----------
	March 9	Surprise of surprises, I did some work on Crazy Greenland this week. I had to force myself to get started, but as usually happens, I got interested and started pursuing the little hopping bunny of my idea over hill and dale until I had 2000 words. I went back and looked at the first 20,000, and they are going to need a lot a lot a lot of work before the thing's finished. I overexplain, I get into too many heads at once, and I make events happen too quickly. Editing this thing is NOT going to be easy. But I'll worry about that later. The untitled story I mentioned below now has a title: In Her Place. I suspect that despite the plot, which I like, it is boring. I've sent it to a reader who will test it for me. Eleven Memories has gone to Granta. In this case, I am actually worried about it being accepted (very, very unlikely), and worried about it being good enough to be nommed for anything (preposterous), and what will happen with a certain woman that I know if it is.  I also submitted Fucked to a Canadian magazine. I'm submitting it also to an anthology in the UK. To this end, I discovered that IRCs are being phased out by the USPS. I wonder how we writers will obtain SASEs now when sending to international markets. (This anthology agreed to email me in reply.) I'm also cobbling together a memory, The Man From the Plane, for submission to The Sun. I discovered The Sun last year when I was trying to find a home for "Banning Happiness in South Dakota" (which is much better off where it is), and since then my mind has gone back to it as a place where I yearn to be published. Very classy, very high-quality stuff. I have such a hard time editing my own experiences (I've discovered) that Plane is going slow. Again, I want an editor of my own. I'm starting to think short-story collection. I've written enough of them now for a book-length. I want to get a few more of them published before I approach a book publisher with hat in hand, but the thought is creeping into my mind anyway. -----------
	March 6	Wow! I had a hell of a week last week. I wrote: Final Qualifier, Eleven Memories, and Gone to Earth. I finished: an as-yet-untitled story I was working on, which topped out around 8500 words. I edited and/or rewrote: Fear: A Cautionary Tale, Fucked, a chunk of my memoir, and the Marilyn story discussed below, With the Phone in Her Hand. I submitted: Fear, the memoir chunk, and Final Qualifier. I'm going to submit Eleven Memories to Granta and Gone to Earth to Tin House. These are magazines well beyond my normal goals for publishments, very well-respected indeed, but that's how good I think my new shit is. And I've got to get Gone to Earth ready before March 21, and something, God knows what, ready for a 3/31 deadline. So busy! I'm glad I took February off from submitting, but now it seems once again like there are a million magazines that I want to submit to. The Marilyn story isn't due till May, so I'm taking a few weeks not to look at it so I can reapproach with fresh eyes. 10X10X10 might start going well soon. I've had a few great submissions and a few OK ones. Looking forward to the first issue...and learning a lot from reading other people's work. -----------
	February 28	I've put Deaf Boy aside for an exciting reason: the Washington Post Magazine is having a contest. Okay, so the contest itself isn't very exciting, but the story I've drafted for it has gotten me more excited than than I have been about what I've written since I was blowing hard on Crazy Greenland. The magazine printed a picture of a blond woman in bed talking on the phone in its Valentine's Day issue, and said that the contest was linked to the photo. Who is she? What does she want? The story has to be about love, less than 1500 words, and turned in by mid-May. The first thing I thought when I looked at the photo was: Marilyn. It turns out it's not her, but I still think it looks a lot like her. So I set down a story about a photographer taking pictures of Marilyn, and he took this shot of her, and would anyone recognize the woman in the picture as MM? This is the first story on which I've done real, serious work, instead of pussyfooting around it. I cut and slashed and rewrote, and cut and slashed some more. Every word seems to matter, and I'm trying to invest each one with what I want to say. I'm really, really excited about how it's come together. There seems to be a disagreement on the ending, but I'm hoping to get a few opinions and work it out somehow. The best part is, this story has unwittingly set me up to begin the Marilyn novel! My main character has entirely changed, and the way I'm attacking the topic, but nevertheless I feel like I've made a damn good start. I worked up McKinnon for submission this weekend. I took a long break from submitting through the month of February--some of the rejections of the last 60 days were extremely painful--but I'm back now, and I started by submitting three things yesterday. Oh, and I did do some work on Leaves recently. A friend suggested a different way to open the book, and the new way works much better, I think. I also went through the first three chapters armed with the lessons I've gotten from Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, and I blue-penned it mercilessly. I have to reread it and edit it someday, but my short stories seem more important right now, and anyway looking for another publisher as perfect as Kensington (which has been quietly ignoring me since I sent them a package in September) seems like SO much work.  -----------
	February 16	Aw, crap. Good news first: I've written McKinnon. I'm not sure it's a particularly compelling story - it seems far too banal to me, although I don't have any distance from it yet - but the bulk of work on it is done. Even if I don't sell it on its own, it will suffice for the book. Second piece of good news: I'm taking a writing class at my handy-dandy local community college, and we're writing a story to go along with the class. I've got a pretty good idea, and as I got started on it, it all flowed so easily. I told my houseboy that I was amazed at how doing a character sketch before you begin writing really does work to make the writing a lot easier. He responded with sarcasm. Think I'll demote him. And the bad news...the Return of Deaf Boy. Son of Deaf Boy. The Bride of Deaf Boy. When will the horror end?? As the faithful know, I submitted the story to an online Christian mag called Haruah, which claimed in its submission guidelines that it wanted to challenge traditional notions of faith with interesting takes on modern life. I do not believe that they really meant this, because their rejection letter was pretty nasty about how sinfully and immorally my characters behaved, and they disliked that the story endorsed that. Which proves to me that they missed the whole point. But this was just one of the editors. The other editor pointed out things that made me think that I have a lot more work to do yet on the story, so I sat down to take some notes on what I believed needed to be done. I had a page before I even looked up, and I've realized that 1) I have lots more to say about these characters and 2) I am in way over my head on this one. I need an editor, or some kind of exterior help. I've asked my instructor at the CC class to help me (she is also a professional editor), but I have been too cowardly to email the story to her. What if she tells me it's hopeless? What if I have to consign Brother of Cousin of Deaf Boy to my box of Bad Old Stuff instead of having it triumphantly published? Oh, the pain! -----------
	January 27	Crazy Greenland has come to a halt for the moment. I'm theoretically ready to move on to Part II of the book - when they actually travel to Luquenor - but I know that I wrapped up Part I badly and I don't have the willpower to go back and edit it. Beginning Part II without reediting the last piece of Part I seems like very poor discipline to me. So I'm procrastinating doing either. Deaf Boy is officially disappearing from this page, as it is no longer in progress. It's done! Hooray! I figured out the problem I was having with it was that I wanted too much to be included: I wanted the twist with Betty's husband, I wanted Evelyn's drug thing, I wanted to start with Daniel and move to Betty. Too much stuff. So I cut a lot and wound up with a shorter, more focused story - or at least I think so. Haruah, the market I submitted it to, is a Christian online mag, and although I don't think Deaf Boy is specifically a Christian story (and although I am not Christian by any stretch of the imagination), I think it would fit well in that market. It certainly does deal in faith throughout, and I suspect that mainstream markets would tell me it's too Christian for the mainstream. I've got a few little ideas for stories: woman disintegrates into forest undergrowth, why does the devil want souls, horror story about cuts of meat with beating hearts (from a horrid nightmare last week), other more personal work. Also I have to write that third story for Those Ghosts of Time (now to be known as McKinnon), the one about Celia McKinnon and Mark. I feel like I've got a few different perspective choices: framing device with Celia standing on the bridge, story from Grant's POV (not very nice at all), maybe something with an unreliable narrator. None of them are exciting me enough to get off my ass, though. My memoir is weighing on my mind. There's a press that I think would be perfect perfect perfect to publish it, but it is separated from publishability by a vast deal of work, and I feel (irrationally) that time is running out for the query I want to send. I know clearly what I need to do in order to work on the thing, but as soon as I open it up and start scanning for edits, I can't find any. I really need the help of an editor with it, someone who will talk me through what I need to do. A sad impossibility.  -----------
	December 31	Been pounding out a few thousand words a day on Crazy Greenland. It feels really good. I'm nearly done with Eliza's backstory, and soon after that they're going to Greenland...exciting. Just cracking 20K, and the meat of the story hasn't even happened. Hooray, length! I am having trouble with Rose's POV, though, which is something I didn't think I'd have trouble with. I also want to develop Eliza to the reader better, impatiently, when I'm sure that will happen in the fullness of time, so I have to stop myself. Also, a reader FINALLY actually talked to me about Deaf Boy and gave me some great ideas. I'm not sure whether I should pause on C.G. in order to work out the kinks in D.B. My instincts are telling me to keep trucking with Eliza & Co. There is news (of a dullish sort) on the Juvie project, though, so check out that page. -----------
	December 9	Success! I finished Deaf Boy and started serious work on Crazy Greenland, which has now been titled The Weight of Ice. (I'll still refer to it as Crazy Greenland for the sake of simplicity, and because that's what it means to me.) I am baffled by the completed Deaf Boy. It spun completely out of control in plot and ballooned out of control in size as well. I added a subplot without expecting to and came up with a twist that I'm not sure works for the end. In general I have no idea of its quality and am terrified that it totally sucks, after spending 8K words and a good deal of energy on it. My friends/editors so far have been entirely unhelpful so I am waiting for a while before I look at it again. Crazy Greenland is going OK so far. I researched Greenland at my helpful local library, and the most useful book was a children's book. Does that make me stupid? Anyway, I learned all kinds of interesting things about Greenland and I feel like I have a firm base from which to get this thing done. Just about to break 10K on it, and just about to tell Eliza's story about her homeland. So much more to do! This book is crowding my head and I hate that I have to go to work all day instead of working on it for hours on end. In other news, I revised an old erotica piece to make How It Is With Us and submitted it to Bust magazine's One-Handed Read department. It's such a poetic piece of smut that I have no idea if they'll like it. Also, I found two old pieces of work: a horror satire called The Editor, and a sci-fi juvie story with no name as of yet. I've done some work to punch them up and completely rewrote The Editor, but they both need more work. I am jammed with new ideas. I wrote a weird little fairy tale for no reason that is pretty useless (unless I write a bunch more fairy tales, enough for a book that could include Words in the Air). Lots more ideas in the chute; trying to concentrate on Crazy Greenland and getting more archived stuff ready for primetime. The more submissions, the more rejections; the more rejections, the more acceptances, so I've got to keep on truckin'. No, I haven't touched Leaves or Juvie in months. Go away. -----------
	October 30	That personal reflection piece mentioned in the previous entry has now been completed. It's not as smooth as I wanted it to be, but I don't think I can bear to edit it any further. It hurt like hell to write it. It was probably foolish to submit something less than a week after I wrote it, but I did. Here's hoping... No, I haven't written anything else on Deaf Boy or anything else in the table. But I had to work on Morning Glory over the weekend, and writing smut takes a lot out of you. -----------
	October 26	Deaf Boy has been moving (in second gear, up a steep hill) for the last week. I'm still a little stalled because I'm not sure that what I'm turning out is any good. I decided to add a little Thorn Birds in there with the rest of the tragedy, but as always, I just don't write very good dialogue. This is a near-impossible hurdle for me, because the characters have important stuff to say to each other. I am also not excited about what I'm writing, here in the middle, because I'm most excited by the two plot points that bookend the part I'm writing now, so I think I'm going too fast. I am still procrastinating on Leaves Revision, and putting off typing more Juvie into my computer. But I am working on a personal reflection piece in the midst of my other laziness.
	October 18	Welcome to Work-in-Progress. On this page I will try to refrain from writing meandering blog entries about the projects I'm working on. The table below lists the main stories on my radar. Crazy Greenland is a fantasy/sci-fi story (I'm thinking novel-length) about an alien visitor and a lost race of people living below the glacier that covers Greenland. (The storyline is nuts, which is why I call it my "crazy Greenland" story to my friends.) I know it will be totally awesome if I can make it work, but I am deeply concerned about making it work. Deaf Boy is a short story about a young boy who is born deaf and mute who miraculously regains his hearing, but the family is soon to realize that miracles really aren't all they're cracked up to be. Leaves Revision refers to the heavy-duty revision of my novel Falling Leaves that I need to do. Chill refers to the second book in the Whitfield series, which I have tried to start several times. There seems to be something wrong with the ignition. Marilyn refers to an idea I have for a novel about Marilyn Monroe. My fears of blasphemy have stalled me for the time being on that one. The Difficulty rating refers to how hard it will be for me to get cracking on each project. The Goodness rating is how well I think the work is going to come out when I'm finished. The table is only a summary of my status on the project. For more information see the W-I-P archive. Samples of Crazy Greenland and Deaf Boy are available on the Samples main page. A sample of Falling Leaves is available here. A synopsis of the Whitfield series is available here will be available one day. I welcome comments and buttings-in on which project I should do next and which one you like best. Please feel free to email me with your thoughts.

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