Thoughts on Writing, Rewriting, & etc.

So, John Rickards is deep in rewrite mode, and I must admit that as a mostly-unpublished writer who's written nine books and god-knows-how-many-short-stories, I find it deeply comforting that even writers under 3-book contracts write shitty first drafts.

I spent yesterday working on book two of the fantasy saga, Over Burning Cities, which is shaping up to be a far stronger and more powerful book than poor book one, which has yet to find a home anywhere (for the better? I don't know). I also reread some of book one, and tinkered with some clunky dialogue, tried rewriting a couple of the scenes in the latter half of the book. It's a book I'm still not happy with.

I keep opening up Jihad, the latest stand-alone book-in-progress, and wincing at almost every moment of it. There are things I like - I think the characters and setting are neat, but the pacing is too slow and the dialogue (like most of my dialogue) is clunky. The problem with a first draft of anything new is that I don't often figure out my characters until the end of the book, at which point I have to go all the way back to the beginning and rewrite everyone from scratch so that they've got distinct voices and all of the action makes sense. This is probably why I'm enjoying Over Burning Cities more than the other two book projects - I'm dealing with characters I already got to know in book one, or characters I'd written about in prior books.

Opening up all these files and staring at them hasn't made me feel much better, and I went through my usual question-and-answer period.

"Why the hell am I doing this? Why should I bother trying to sell this crap?"

"Because you're going to do it anyway. Might as well try and make some money off it."

I'm wondering if I'm letting the fact that I'm *not* getting paid take away some of the glee of writing. I keep looking at the top shelf of the book case in the living room that I've set aside for books/publications I've shown up in, and it's terribly sad to only see the same two magazines there month after month (the rest of my sales have been online).

Just another tired day.

Speaking of Fighting

It's tough. It's often painful. But you'll walk down the street knowing you have a good right cross.

Need an overview of styles? Look here. For those interested in mixed martial arts, check out some more links here.

Trying to find the right school for you? For those in Chicagoland, I recommend my school (of course). If you're a woman, you'll be gratified to know that the clientele is almost 60% female, and they can kick your ass any time of day. Sifu Katalin is one of the primary instructors, and she fucking rocks. The other boxing coaches are male, but all of them are really cool with teaching women, and they don't treat you like you're a fucking idiot. Also, if you're embarrassed about being out of shape, and that's the only thing keeping you out - don't worry about it. There are people there who've dropped 50-60lbs in the 2-3 years they've been there - we know it's a process, and everybody starts somewhere.



And even those of us who aren't fashionably thin are really fucking buff.

It's worth every minute.

Getting Pissed Off

And then you get us pissed off:

According to women’s rights activists in the area (Nagpur, India), men who rape are frequently let off by the courts, and helped by police. This weekend, 50 women — led by a rape victim — burnt down the houses of three rapists who had been attacking women for months with no consequences.

"We have all waited for police to act, but nothing happens. The molestations and rapes go on and nobody does anything," said Madam Chandra, a women's rights activist in Nagpur.

This renegade rape punishment began several months ago when a gang leader who had raped multiple women was stabbed and stoned by a mob of women.

Though I cannot, in good conscience, endorse killing people or burning down their houses, I will say this: People are going to be a lot less likely to fuck around with women if more of us start fighting back.

There's your thought for the day.

via feministing

No Control For You, Woman!

So, it's finally hit USA Today. I'd heard rumors of scattered pharmacists refusing to fill contraceptive perscriptions to women, but now we've got a nice article all about it. This should scare the shit out of men at least half as much as it should scare the shit out of women.

If you don't want to fill a perscription based on "moral grounds" than you shouldn't be a pharmacist. If you don't believe in science, you shouldn't be a teacher, and if you don't believe that women are people, you shouldn't be a doctor.

It is nice to finally see in black and white what all the abortion bruhaha is *really* about:

"We have always understood that the battles about abortion were just the tip of a larger ideological iceberg, and that it's really birth control that they're after also," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood (news - web sites) Federation of America.

And controlling a woman's fertility is about controlling women. How many times do people have to say this before it sinks in? Before we all have to go marching on Washington yet again? Before we start being worried about packing the Supreme Court?

Be worried. Be worried about this more than terrorism, because times of Great Foreign Fear are the times when "little stuff" like this slides right in, and takes another two decades of hard fighting to get rid of. In the mean time, hundreds of thousands of women's lives will be co-opted by their fertility, and thousands more will die trying to get abortions illegally. That's what happens.

Stay awake, people.

Go to Naral Pro-Choice America and sign some petitions (it takes, like 3 minutes). Also, check out your local Plan Parenthood and see if they need any volunteers a couple hours a week.

via Jenn.

Some Mixed Bag Goodness

There's actually a competitive sport called wife carrying. Finland - like other geographic locations that are cold and dark half the year - comes up with some bizarre ways to pass the time. They even set up an obstacle course for participants. What's the background? Back in the day: "Raids on surrounding villages, with the express purpose of making off with someone else's nearest and dearest, were a popular pastime." Stealing women from other places was also a great way of insuring that women made up their own subclass. They'd have different customs, a different language, and be far, far away from potential allies. If you haven't read Blood Rites yet, I recommend it. Stolen women are even more readily given the "other" label than local women.

For all of the book-o-files, you'll want to check out Delicious Library. It's software that'll scan the barcodes on your books, look them up on Amazon, and catalogue title, author and other info into a database on your computer. Yea. That's right. No more "one day I'll make a database of all the books I have so that I don't buy more books that I already have." I think Jenn and Miriam will salivate over this one (via Jed).

There's also a nice little aurora display currently going on that's been seen as far south as Oklahoma and California. Check out the pics here.

More later.

Honeymoon's Almost Over

Ned, the big regional VP, came in yesterday to pick up his mail, and he said it looks like we'll be ramping up next week - that is, we've either just signed or are very nearly signing a contract, and it's time to pack up the office with employees again and get busy.

Yellow departed the office yesterday as well, as the project he's been hired to manage has now been closed out. He said he'll be back December 1st for the next project, after our ramp-up, so I've only got another couple weeks left of Instaquariam and desert writing.

It occured to me yesterday that I'm really going to miss Yellow. Who's going to wander around singing "Ice Ice Baby" and call me a granola-munching hippie?

It is quite sad. I shall miss him and his dorky comments.

There are more RFPs coming our way, one of which looks like fun, as it'll mean we get to work with everybody at the other companies I've worked with over this last year, and I've grown quite affectionate of them.

In the mean time, here's to my last couple weeks of free money.

Men Without Women

On the way home from kickboxing tonight, I was reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (believe it or not, yes, I'm a Hemingway fan). And I stumbled across this lovely passage:

"There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers."

These are Hemingway's observations on his friendship with Gertrude Stein.

Gotta love that Hemingway.

The World Bores Me

The world bores me today. As today is Bomb the Shit Out of Fallujah day, I find it appropriate that I drop off the radar early and get back to work on my blood & sand novel. I need to hit 54 pages today

Ah, The Young

NEW YORK (AP) -- A 25-year-old from Georgia who was distraught over President Bush's re-election apparently killed himself at Ground Zero.

And Etc.

Amanda's got some thoughts up on a silly Salon piece about the still-popular idea that women should only be dating men who are taller than they are.

Television continues to push the monstrous sexual dimorphism thing for no good reason, except to make people feel bad about themselves if they're not paired up "correctly" (or even paired up at all). There's nothing I find so irritating as those reality shows that cast mixed-sex groups where the men are all 6'2 200lbs and the women are all 5'6 108lbs. Like Sex and the City, it makes it look like men and women are totally different species.

As someone who's as tall as - and weighs as much as - the average American man, I find these portrayals disingenuous and slightly offensive. If you want to argue averages, and say, "No, no, television is just portraying average people," I'll laugh at you, because not only is everybody on television prettier than average (they're in the upper 2%), the average man in America is actually 5'9 191lbs, and the average woman is 5'4 145lbs.

In order to continue to perpetuate the monstrous sexual dimorphism myth, I'd have to eliminate 50% of the male population from my radar based merely on height. Because couples are "supposed" to "look" a certain way.

You know: they both have to be white, or they both have to black, or they both have to be hispanic. Or they have to be composed of one (1) man and one (1) woman.

Look at the huge media machine trying to keep us all in our proper boxes.

How exhausting it must be for them.

Tom Wolfe Interview

There's an interesting interview up with novelist Tom Wolfe -

"I do think that if you are not having a fight with somebody, then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning."

Boxing Dayz

Had my first sparring class yesterday. Ended up being 3 hours worth of classes, as I showed up for pilates at 10:15, and the sparring class wasn't until noon, so I had an hour of pilates, an hour of boxing (partnered mitts), and then an hour of sparring.

Do you have any idea how badly I hurt right now?

Today's game is, "I wonder why *that* hurts?" I was trying to figure out why my forearms hurt - it's because my forearms were taking the majority of the blows aimed at my head.

It turned out to only be two of us staying for sparring. Natalie was my same belt rank, and we'd been partnered during boxing. When I saw she was staying, I stayed for sparring, too, and we learned defensive moves for half an hour before being turned on one another.

Natalie's no wimp - we're the same belt rank, though I've got a couple more stripes, and my footwork is better. But I was also a couple inches taller than her and about 50lbs heavier. Pair that with my hesitance at hitting people, and what you end up with is me pulling a lot of my punches.

This is fine, unless the person you're with is playing for keeps.

Lyndon said I did well in the beginning, when I was on top of my footwork, but got tired at the end, and I moved into defensive more than offensive, and Natalie got in three good hits - one to the left side of my face, and the other two to my gut. I managed to glance off the rest, but at the end, I was frickin exhausted.

It was a good lesson in why I need to get jogging again. My endurance is crap (and, granted, I'd just done three hours worth of classes. Still).

Actually sparring with a partner is wildly different from all of the other boxing drills. You can punch mitts and a bag and dance with a mitted partner forever, but trying to hit somebody who's actively trying to hit you back for the first time is really overwhelming. It brings home what all of these drills and the harping on and on about all the footwork are really all about.

After class, when Lyndon was making observations about how we did, I said, "My problem is I have this fear of hitting people. It's like I don't want to hurt anyone."

He said, "Hitting people is easy. That's the easiest part. That's not the problem. It's *not* getting hit that you need to worry about."

Ah. That's me. Always concerned about the wrong thing.

After class, Natalie said she was coming next week, and she's been looking for a good sparring partner. Mostly, her trouble with learning boxing has been similiar to mine, in that we're always paired with people who are wildly higher belt ranks, and we were both pretty pleased to be sparring against somebody who's rank was the same.

So next week we'll be at it again. This time, I'll be more concerned about not getting hit.

I met up with Jenn at a nearby cafe where Mary Anne et al. usually show up, but I didn't recognize any of the other writers there. No matter. I stayed and wrote for two hours, pushing to the end of the first chapter of my latest book, then Jenn and I caught the bus and then the train home.

It was a beautiful day yesterday, and I don't know that there's anything better than three hours of MA classes followed by two hours of cafe writing, then a nice trek home in the sun.

It's a good life.

Fun With Find and Replace

Read the original here.

Read the "find and replace" version below:

MIXED Sexualities AND MIXED Marriages
by Herbert Ravenel Sass
(From The Atlantic Monthly, circa 1956)

WHAT may well be the most important physical fact in the story of the United States is one which is seldom emphasized in our history books. It is the fact that throughout the three and a half centuries of our existence we have kept our several sexualities and the rights accorded to each distinct and separate. Though we have encouraged the mixing of many different sexualities in what has been called the American "melting pot," we have confined this mixing to the heterosexual peoples, excluding from our "melting pot" homosexuals. The result is that the United States today is overwhelmingly a pure heterosexual nation, with a smaller but considerable Homosexual population in which there is some heterosexual tendency, resulting in a much smaller bisexual population.

The fact that the United States is overwhelmingly pure heterosexual is not only important; it is also the most distinctive fact about this country when considered in relation to the rest of the New World. Except Canada, Argentina, and Uruguay, none of the approximately twenty-five other countries of this hemisphere has kept its sexes pure. Instead (though each contains some purely-heterosexual individuals) all of these countries are products of an amalgamation of sexualities -- bisexual and heterosexual and homosexual. In general the pure-blooded heterosexual nations have outstripped the far more numerous mixed-sexuality nations in most of the achievements which constitute progress as commonly defined.

These facts are well known. But now there lurks in ambush, as it were, another fact: we have suddenly begun to move toward abandonment of our 350-year-old system of keeping our sexualities pure and are preparing to adopt instead a method of sexual amalgamation similar to that which has created the corrupt nations of this hemisphere. It is the deep conviction of nearly all heterosexual Conservatives in the states which have large Homosexual populations that the marriage of Homosexuals in the Conservative's civic centers would open the gates to moral corruptedness and widespread sexual tolerance.

This belief is at the heart of our marriage problem, and until it is realized that this is the Conservative's basic and compelling motive, there can be no understanding of the Conservative's attitude.

It must be realized too that the Homosexuals of the U.S.A. are today by far the most fortunate members of their kind to be found anywhere on earth. Instead of being the hapless victim of unprecedented oppression, it is nearer the truth that the Homosexual in the United States is by and large the product of friendliness and helpfulness unequaled in any comparable instance in all history. Nowhere else in the world, at any time of which there is record, has a helpless, backward people of another persuasion been so swiftly uplifted and so greatly benefited by a dominant sexual caste.

What America, including the Conservative, has done for the Homosexual is the truth which should be trumpeted abroad in rebuttal of the Liberal propaganda. In failing to utilize this truth we have deliberately put aside a powerful affirmative weapon of enormous potential value to the free world and have allowed ourselves to be thrown on the defensive and placed in an attitude of apologizing for our conduct in a matter where actually our record is one of which we can be very proud.

We have permitted the subject of marriage relations in the United States to be used not as it should be used, as a weapon for America, but, as a weapon for the narrow designs of the new aggressive Homosexual leadership in the United States. It cannot be so used without damage to this country, and that damage is beyond computation.

Instead of winning for America the plaudits and trust of the homosexual peoples of Asia and Africa in recognition of what we have done for our homosexual people, our pro-Homosexual propagandists have seen to it that the United States appears as an international Simon Legree -- or rather a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the Conservative in the villainous role.

100 Pages by the 20th, Dammit

Off to the library to renew my warfare and arab history books. Then I seriously need to come back and go jogging - haven't done that in awhile. Boxing tomorrow. 100 pages by the 20th.

In the meantime, here's some more New Zealand goodness:

Spin, Mandates, & Reading Data

From American Progress... Something to keep in mind while CNN blares:

ELECTION – NOT SUCH A MANDATE: Following President Bush's victory over Sen. John Kerry on Tuesday, conservative media followed Vice President Cheney's lead in declaring the election "a decisive mandate for Bush's agenda, and mainstream media outlets have followed their lead." In fact, the president's popular vote margin was the smallest since 1976 (with the exception of 2000) and, according to the Wall Street Journal's Albert Hunt, the president's victory represented "the narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916." Percentage-wise, Bush's victory was the narrowest for any wartime president in American history. And while President Bush did win more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history, "Kerry's vote total – 55.7 million – was still greater than any U.S. presidential candidate in history prior to 2004. That means more Americans cast their vote against Bush than against any other presidential candidate in U.S. history."

What We're Working on

Half-inched from misia
If you happen to be working on some creative writing project, fanfiction or NaNoWriMo or what have you, post exactly one sentence from each of your current work(s) in progress in your journal. It should probably be your favourite or most intriguing sentence so far, but what you choose is entirely your discretion. Mention the title (and genre) if you like, but don't mention anything else. This is merely to whet the general appetite for your forthcoming work(s).

Here's mine:

They were still three bounties short of rent when Nyx found the headless body in the trunk. She painted on nonsdays, the day before worship, the day after sex, when her body was loose and her head was clear and she hadn’t yet purged herself of the week’s paltry sins. The heroes took wing from a dark, raw field the color of blood. When she came home, a few of them always clung to the hem of her coat, the long spill of her hair, the bunched fabric of her stockings. She had long given up the idea of working without a crew, though Roman came into her quarters after every purging, his long face set in a dark, graven expression she had come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that season in her childhood, and never in as many varieties as it came on other worlds. They were looking for free locust stew, and they ruminated over cups of cinnamon tea, took comfort in sen pipes and Thordonian cigarettes, and lost themselves to a halo of sweet smoke. He waited only until her ghosts had faded, long after her feet had ceased to jerk, and then he turned away, pulled his hood up, and went back to the hold to inspect Thorne’s leavings. He was not beautiful.

If it Was Up to the Under-30s

Here's how the election would have panned out if it was up to all the under-30s who showed up on Tuesday.

Obama is so winning in 2012.

Today's New Zealand Pic

It's cheaper than London, and less people live there.

Auckland is a lot like Seattle.



It'll be like an episode of "Lost" - only, with cities.



Anyhow, I'm outta here. Taking tomorrow off to stay home and write, because really, you can only play so many rounds of Xuma.

Why I Blog

"She wanted to be the heroine of her own life." - Carol Emshwiller

While on the phone with my dad last night, discussing my virulent rants here on Brutal Women, he asked me why I started this blog.

There are several reasons for it:

1) I get to meet new and interesting people
2) I get to say what I think without feeling censored
3) It gives me something to do at work, as I haven't had a real job since June.
4) As a sporadicly-published writer, I wanted a place where people could go to learn more about the name behind the story.

The second and fourth are probably the biggest reasons. I used to send out e-mail rants and/or "life updations" to friends while I was traipsing around the globe and fretting over Alaskan life, cockroaches in Durban, and establishing an existence in Chicago with $20 in my pocket. I still post these rants to the private messageboard I keep with a handful of my closest Clarion compatriots, where I can post more honest rants about friends and family. Here, in this more public venue, I get to talk about things like health, fighting, women's rights, fantasy fiction, shit books and better books, and all sorts of general subjects that I don't neccessarily talk about all that much in real life.

I'm not, in fact, much of a talker. I express myself far better on the page. I've got a "regular reader" count here of about 40-50 people, another 10-12 sporadic weekly readers, and 5-10 "random blog" or "random linking" people a day who stumble onto a particular post. Because I've never personally met the great majority of my readers, I'm less likely to censor my thoughts. When you're talking to people you know, you're more likely sit around and stew about issues instead of thinking them through and articulating them. I've always disliked conflict with those I have great affection for.

And then there's reason four. When I finally broke into print mags last year, I realized it would be great if I had a site to point people to if they wanted to learn more about me. As a fan, I love looking up writers who's work I've "discovered" and learning more about them. Looking toward the future, I wanted a place for other people to come if they were interested.

And that's here.

I also began my kickboxing odyssey just before I started this blog, and it's been important to me to get down on paper how difficult it is for a sendentary dork to change their routine and work at accomplishing something they always thought was impossible for somebody like them. We're always seeing these "quick fixes" in magazines and movies, and the media paints a lot of celebrity portraits with the "overnight success brush."

I want to be here to remind everybody that there's no quick fix. That you've got good fighting days and bad fighting days, that sometimes I stay home and watch Titanic and feel miserable for myself, and the next day I'll go out and beat the crap out of something.

And I want would-be writers to see the piles of rejection slips. The good, brillant days and "I'm such a crappy writer I should be shot" days.

I want to document a road that isn't easy, and doesn't happy just because I roll out of bed in the morning. It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of good days, and a lot of bad days.

And most of all, it takes not giving up.

You keep writing. You keep collecting rejection slips, you store up all those agent rejection letters from agents who haven't seen a page of anything you've written but the query letter. You keep going to the MA classes even though some days it feels like you're a complete uncordinated idiot and have no right to be there, and you go even though your entire body hurts and you can't remember ever willfully putting yourself in the position to exist in that much pain.

And I come back here every day, and I say: See. Don't give up.

Whether or not all of this work will pay off - hell, I don't know. But doing what I do, and documenting it, gives me a lot of self-confidence and assists in the clarification of my own thoughts and expression of ideas.

If nothing else, it's a really handy writing exercise.

Ha.

Today's Goody Bag

It's a lovely rainy November day here in Chi-town, and Al-jazeera has some news about Bush's cabinet reshuffling (Colin Powell has had enough, and it's rumoured that Rumsfeld is leaving), and here's a neat 10 things the Chinese do better than we do from the Globe & Mail, and a boingboing reader sent in a cool purple-haze electoral map that more accurately shows how the mood of the country actually went (very purple) - we should be using this one from now on, and Xeni asks: "Could someone who renounced their US citizenship declare themselves a citizen of the Internet?" (cool), and for those who didn't catch it on CNN, did you ever think you'd see this headline: "Blogs Send Stocks Into Reverse"?

More later....