Uncategorized – Then They Kissed

Waiting

I think that writing a book might be the slowest way to go about getting a job.

The economic feasibility of said job aside (we all know that authors don’t really write because it’s fun or lucrative), it is an astoundingly slow process. Now, I write fairly quickly* and I’m still knocking out a full length draft in about three months. Self-editing until I’m happy with it takes a couple of weeks, beta readers take a week to a month depending on what’s going on in their lives,** and then there’s the entire rest of the process.

I have chosen to pursue traditional publishing, a famously nimble and responsive industry, because I’m aware of my weaknesses and I would do much better with someone else to handle 90% of the extrovert parts so that I might emerge from my cave with a new manuscript and then take my edit notes and scuttle back into the darkness. If I must do things that require either going places, or talking to people, I will require a very specific list of objectives, someone to ask exhaustive questions of before hand, and some degree of head pats afterwards.***

But the pursuit of traditional publishing means wading into the querying process, which I have come to understand over the last six months, is all of the least pleasant parts of job hunting, plus all of the least pleasant parts of online dating, combined into one activity where the average response time is six to sixteen**** weeks. Oh, and some people might not get back to you, ever.

I’m not going to try and claim that I’ve gotten better at waiting over the last six months; you don’t spend your entire life being bad at waiting and then suddenly git gud just because you sent your soul to internet strangers and are waiting to find out if they think it’s commercially viable.

The thing is, I handle waiting by doing stuff. My “stuff” of choice? Writing.

That’s how I got into this situation in the first place.

So now I’ve written two and a half more books while I wait.

They happen to be sequels to the one I am currently querying, and once the quartet is done, I’m finished with this particular world for a bit, so it’s not like I’ve got a backlog of things to query, but what if I did? What if they were all standalones? The stress of this hypothetical is upsetting, and it doesn’t even apply to me.

If someone does, eventually, decide they like me and my writing enough to work with me, when do I tell them about the looming tidal wave of other stuff I’ve written in the meantime? If the one I sent out today gets back to me in sixteen weeks, I’ll be well into writing The Bookbinder’s Guild at that point.

My choices are 1) continue writing and hope that no one accuses me of using AI***** and 2) idk, explode, maybe?

If no one has written a dystopia about how excruciatingly slow pipelines for artistic validation test the population for resiliency so they can resist the cyborg takeover, you should do that.

It’ll be at least a year before I can get to it, anyway.

Recent Writing

Wayne waved a hand down his body. “I’m not an outdoorsy guy. I’m an indoorsy guy.”

Aubrey smiled at the ground. “Well, thanks. I appreciate you braving the wilds on my behalf.”

“No problem,” he said cheerfully, stepping past her to continue down the track, one hand against the hillside. “I don’t mind visiting the outside. It’s just not my preference, is all. And I don’t have to be all that brave.” Wayne glanced back up the hill at her. “I’ve got you for that.”

What should we talk about next time? Let’s go with… writing advice. Yeah. That will no have no consequences, I’m sure.

Do good, friends.

*Or so I gather from the expressions on the faces of the people I have spoken to about it. The sharp intake of breath and the muttered “Oh, shit,” imply Some Things ™.

**They’re volunteers, as much as I want to loom over their shoulder like an SAT proctor, I’m not a monster, so I don’t do that.

***I can provide my own head pats, I am an adult, after all.

****Before this very day, twelve was the longest I’d seen in a confirmation receipt. I saw the sixteen and sighed. I have no idea what these poor peoples’s inboxes look like, but it must be hellish. When I went back to work after maternity leave, I just deleted my entire inbox; I wonder if that’s ever tempting to agents. Since I’m probably in some of those inboxes, I hope not.

*****Gun to my head, I’m not sure I could figure out what ChatGPT is, exactly. Is it an app? Is it a website? I’ve never been clear on that. I’m the wrong kind of autistic to be good at computers; that’s why I blog like it’s 2005.

Audiobooks and Reading

When I was maybe ten years old, my siblings and I went on a road trip. Naturally, we were not driving, the oldest of us being eleven. To pass the time, my dad put in an audiobook of The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey. It was on cassette tapes* from a squeaky plastic clamshell from the library, if you were looking to carbon date my age.

Obviously, this was not a democratic decision.

Now, I haven’t revisited this particular recording of The White Dragon, perhaps there have been other, better audiobook recordings done since then, but this particular one was the most boring thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life, for all ten minutes that I listened to it before falling asleep.

Which was a real shame, because it was about dragons, and, being ten, I really should have been more interested in it, because dragons are dope as hell.

Since that time, I decided that audiobooks weren’t for me. They were boring and would put me to sleep. This was reinforced by my partner’s love of audiobooks, which I also found very boring, and not just because he exclusively listens to Travis Baldree.**

My brilliant, childhood conclusion about the place of audiobooks in my life went unexamined until February of this very year, when I realized that I could not drive my gremlin around so they’d go to sleep, and read a book at the same time.*** I understand that this should have been obvious and that I was slow to come to this conclusion; if you think less of me for this, I can only assume that you don’t have children, and I love that for you. Please enjoy your complimentary consecutive REM cycles.

So I downloaded Libby because I’ll be damned if I have to share an Audible account with someone who thinks that Gideon the Ninth has very little worldbuilding.****

My very first audiobook that I picked out, as an adult, was To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, by Molly X Chang, narrated by Natalie Naudus. And you know what? I had a grand time with it. Sadly, the sequel doesn’t come out until 2027, but I’ll lurk.

Next was Starling House (Alix E. Harrow, also narr. by Natalie Naudus), and you know what? Turns out I only don’t like audiobooks if I don’t care about the book. I just looked at my stats right now, to write this post, and I listened to Starling House across three sessions. It’s a twelve hour book.

I’ve had some duds since then,***** but broadly speaking, audiobooks have entirely replaced physical books as my primary form of reading and I’m totally okay with that, because it lets me nurse my crush on Moira Quirk in peace.

I’ve seen a lot of folks on the interwebs defend audiobooks as legitimate reading, but I’ve never heard anyone say otherwise. Did I just enter the social media space at the wrong time to experience the anti-audio crusades? Let me know.

I will say, though, that there’s a lot to be said for what a good narrator can bring to the reading experience. I can’t say I’d have had as much fun with Gideon the Ninth if I’d been reading it (though now I would give my left leg (above the knee) for a fancy, pretty copy because of how much I love it), because the amount of anatomy that is in that book can get a little heavy and technical, and having to actually run my actual eyeballs across the actual words might have been a bit much for my delicate constitution. It would also have been highly unsanitary.

Every time you add a person to the creative process, it has an impact on the end product, and I think that’s just delightful. I have the privilege of knowing more than my fair share of actors******, which means that I’ve seen quite a few iterations of the same plays, and each and every time, I find them enchanting. The fingerprints of the whole team are all over the final production and there’s something really magical about the synthesis of good professionals who all love the work.

And I guess that’s the dream isn’t it? To be on such a team? It’s my dream, at any rate.

Recent Writing

Wayne laughed. “Because [witches are] not ‘normal people,’ whatever that is, and because you learn real quick that if you’re not honest with yourself, you’re going to have big-ass problems, so you ask the dumb questions and the silly questions and the questions that sound the same as the other questions but you’re not sure you understood the answer, because all the answers reveal something, and the way you take the answers reveals something, and all of that makes you better.”

“That’s a lot of work.”

“Witchery is when we look at reality and say, ‘no, I can do better.’ That’s a lot of work.”

Next time I’ll talk about waiting.

Do good, friends.

*Cassette tapes are a form of audio preservation where plastic is stretched very thin, and then a sound is projected at it, and the trauma of this experience is such that when you run the thin plastic across a very fine brush, it will repeat that sound until the plastic is worn through from the stress and breaks.

**Mr. Baldree is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but listening to snippets of various properties narrated by the same man has lead me to the conclusion that there is a Travis Baldree Extended Universe that includes Cradle, Beware of Chicken, and Legends and Lattes, among others, and I did not find any of this particularly interesting or easy to follow.

***I am aware that podcasts exist. Toddler podcasts are not especially good for my personal wakefulness, and Behind the Bastards is not appropriate fare for toddlers. While the gremlin does not, at this time, speak English, the last thing I need is for their first words to be “Doritos over Dictators.”

****We listen and we don’t judge. Personally, I think that progression fantasy is among the most boring things to exist, nobody’s perfect.

*****Assistant to the Villain… I DNFed at less than 1%. I’m sure the book is lovely, but it’ll have to wait until I can read it with my eyes.

******And I’m keeping them. They are my hoard, these actor friends of mine, and I do not share.

Peanuts for Birds

There’s a lot of great things about living in Washington that I will never quite get over. For one, the water is actually blue here. If that sentence made you scoff, then you didn’t grow up next to a river called Big Muddy, and I love that for you. Every summer I go to Indianapolis on a business trip, and every time I get back and drive over the Sound, or the Columbia, or some random river or oxbow lake, I tear up a little bit because it’s so pretty.

For two, the number of crows — which I affectionately call “The Murder Rate” — is unreal. Those lil guys hang out everywhere. And like every good millennial, I aspire to a certain level of witchiness, and honestly, what could be better than befriending the local murder?

My office — this is going to sound unrelated, but it’s not, roll with it — is in one of those wedge-shaped rooms on the top floor of a house with one and half floors, and the window overlooks the porch roof. If I were younger, dumber, or had better health insurance, I could see myself spreading a blanket on the roof and hanging out there more; it’s got a slight slope, but nothing life threatening, even for my 30+ year old knees and budding back problems.

While I was sitting here, typing away at my lil werewolf stories, I noticed that there were a couple of crows — only attempted murder 😥 — who would hang out on the gutter, and I decided that this was my chance, and after copious internet research, I bought some bulk peanuts in their shells, uncooked, and every day I put a handful on the roof, on a wire cooling rack so they don’t roll straight into the gutter.

They were disappearing at a moderate rate, so I was hopeful that success was imminent, but the crafty creatures waited until I was not in my office to consume my tribute, and I wanted to make sure it was the crows before I decided what my next steps should be.

Alas, ’twasn’t the crows.

‘Twas the mountain jays.

If you’re not familiar, mountain jays are like blue jays that wear executioner hoods over their sick mohawks. Naturally, I love them.

Now, they are corvids, so this is not a failure, but they don’t really flock like crows do, so I shall have to scale my witchy aspirations appropriately. Jays are the sort of birds that hang out in pairs and divebomb anyone they think is an asshole, or anyone who gets too close to their nest, and they will take on anyone, of any size, with no regard for their personal safety, which I think is aspirational, personally.

I’m sure there’s room for some sort of urban witch with an unconventional pet flock, and perhaps, one day, that’ll be me. Stay tuned.

Recent Writing

“This will be war.”

Lucas sucked on his teeth and gave a disappointed shake of his head. “That’s a real shame; we’re so much better at war than you are.”

Next time I’ll talk about my tenuous relationship with audiobooks.

Do good, friends.

The Great ReWrite

As promised, let’s talk about the book, huh?

So when I wrote the first book, the one I am now querying, I hadn’t really planned anything for it. I had an idea, I wrote it, and that was that.

Except that there were just a few too many loose threads for me, you know? I had introduced several things that didn’t get satisfying resolutions, and I wanted to follow up on them.

So instead of writing a direct sequel, I took a side character who was in one chapter, and I wrote her story. Also a romance, but it introduced a lot more about the world, the magic, the hows of things, not just the whats. And when I got to the epilogue, I wrote in a hook that leads to the same place as the epilogue in the first book.

But I wasn’t ready to write that story yet, I needed to fill in some gaps, which meant a third book, to connect the dots from “I need a favor.” to “How do you feel about regicide?” so I snagged another minor character from book one, and wrote book three. Also a romance. It fleshed out the overarching conflict, the thing in the background of the first two books that was the root cause of the things that were happening.

These books are all a continuous story, but it’s happening in different places, and follows different characters. Book four brings them all together in one place.

Now, I wanted book four to be a romance, too, which meant centering one relationship. And I happily wrote the first 48k words, having a grand old time, and then I came to a chapter that was POV one of the main characters and I just wilted, because I had decentered that relationship from about chapter 3 onward.

Writing the characters from the previous books was like wearing comfy shoes and the new shoes are nice, and I love them, but man, once those boots are properly broken in, it sure is hard to justify wearing anything else, you know?

So I wasn’t writing a romance anymore, and I wanted to be.

And that meant that I had to go back from the beginning, and look at every chapter and see if I could rewrite it from the perspective of one of the mains. The main doc gained 4k words. My scraps doc now sits at 12k.

It sucked. There’s a lot in the scraps doc that I’m very proud of. Some of it has made its way back into the main doc in one form or another, but most of it is tucked away like a backstory. And that’s fine. The main conflict is between these two idiots, so what the rest of the cast is doing in the background can be implied, for the most part. I’ve kept POV chapters from the mains of the previous books where either 1) the events were too plot-crucial to leave out and neither of the mains were present, or 2) the POV character’s perspective is adding to the interpersonal conflict between the mains.

Of course, I’ve complicated this by needing to resolve the dangling conflict between each of the first three couples, and I’d really like it to end up shorter than 100k. There are other things I can do in this world, but this story needs to be done.

Mostly because I’m super duper over it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my babies, and I want them to be happy (and they will be! Looking at YOU, S&S!), but I’ve got a gaslamp fantasy slow-burn romance about justice and revenge lurking just around the corner and I want to get to it.

A recent writing

Katie smiled almost fondly at the memory. “It was scary shit. You know, you can’t put an IV in shifters unless you also dose us with silver or aconite, and those aren’t long term solutions because of the toxicity, which meant that we were dosing her on the half hour to keep things level, and even then, the first few times she woke up already on fire.”

Next time, I’ll tell you about my attempts to make friends with the local corvid population.

Do good, friends.

Now I Own a Piano

When I was a kid, there was this standup piano that came with the house. We never figured out how the original owner of the piano had gotten it inside; it was wider in every dimension than any of the doors, because this house was built before codes and standards were a thing. Someone had slapped one streaky coat of robin’s egg blue paint on the whole things, and it had never been tuned.

I loved it.

Both of my parents are musicians, but not cool instruments, not instruments that you can play at parties. Well, I suppose that you could play a clarinet at a party, but for that to be a positive experience for the other people involved, it would have to be a specific sort of party.

So naturally, at the extremely grown up and two-digit age of ten, I was going to master this instrument, leave my nerdy-ass flute behind, and this, I was sure, would make me popular.

I bet you can see where this is going. You’re very perceptive, I’ve always admired that about you.

I learned to play “When You Wish Upon a Star,” but not the whole thing, just the melody. Real ones will know this from Disney’s Pinocchio. Everyone else will know it from the Disney studio card that plays at the start of their movies. You know, the zoom-out of Cinderella’s castle?

Anyway, that was the crowning achievement of the six months of piano lessons that I had somehow conned my way into getting for free*.

But then I just… stopped playing.

Now that I’m an adult who falls into the formerly gifted kid, pleasure to have in class, undiagnosed but we’re pretty sure, very large bucket of millennials, I know that I was autistic and not handling that very well. Still am autistic, but I handle it much better now. The extra twenty-five years of practice helps a lot.

For the last three years, since my partner and I have owned a house, I’ve been idly looking for a piano, to rekindle my childhood dreams of playing a cool instrument. Turns out, Craigslist is chock-full of people** who are willing to give you their pianos if you move them. However, said people are not typically willing to let you come by and see/push keys on their piano before you arrange movers. And moving a piano is serious business.

However, I am patient*** so I figured that it’s a numbers game and eventually, I would come across someone who wouldn’t give me a lemon.

And then I was at the end-of-season bell choir party, and the choir director, a former co-worker of mine before she had the audacity to retire, and personal friend, mentioned that since she had retired she was getting rid of a lot of stuff that she didn’t use, and this included her grandmother’s spinet.

So naturally, I asked how much she wanted for it, and she said, “Oh, you play?” and I was honest with her because I’m pretty sure that lying to women with silver hair leads to a curse on your entire bloodline, and frankly, we’ve got enough going on and don’t need that.

She said it was mine, if I could move it, because what she really wanted was for it to go to someone who would appreciate it.

If you are not familiar with pianos, spinets are the smallest of the analog pianos, topping out at around 400 pounds. Compact enough to fit in the bed of a full-size pickup truck, but still daunting.

But with some help from two strapping men who I bribed with lunch**** we got it moved in exactly the break between cloudbursts.

So now I own a piano. I ordered the Red Book, which looks different from the red book I learned to play the flute with, but which seems to be fairly well respected in the world of Amazon review. I also reached out to a friend of mine, who plays an astonishing array of instruments, for self-study materials. We’ll have to see how this goes. But since I told my friend that I wanted to learn, and lying to silver-haired women gets you cursed… well, I don’t have much of a choice, now do I?

A recent writing:

“This is what your life should have been like. You are an asset wherever you go. Remember that.”

Next time I’ll tell you about what I’m writing and why the current draft has been at 52k for a week.

Do good, friends.

*Out of pity. You can do things like that in small towns where everyone knows your mom works two jobs.

**Probably people with the same aspirational relationship with the instrument that I have. I am aware that this bodes poorly for my future. The potential future where I can play a piano at parties is far more interesting to me in this moment.

***This is a lie.

****Which they turned down, so these guys really just helped me move a piano for free. Having friends is underrated.

Welcome!

Suppose you’re the sort of person who started writing romance novels because you turn to art whenever your life is unhappy or otherwise upset. Suppose you got fired eight months ago and found yourself with considerably more time to write. Suppose you finished your first book six months ago and started querying it. Suppose that querying is a slow, demoralizing process with contradictory rules, unclear expectations, and inconsistent feedback. Suppose you finish two more books while you are waiting and are working on the fourth of the quartet. Suppose that you are still waiting.

Further suppose that you joined a writing server that was randomly suggested on Reddit. Suppose that you met your best writing friend (who has the shockingly poor taste to live across an ocean from you, stunning siren that she is), and with her support, started a writing Instagram. Suppose that you are autistic, and never developed an organic understanding of social media, and yearn for the old school days of posting blocks of text into the void instead.

That was a lot of work, supposing all that. I’m proud of you.

Anyway, here we are, with an honest to goodness blog, here in the big year of [current year]. Welcome.

I am the sort of chaotic millennial who has tried literally every form of scheduling ever developed (do not @ me, bujo people. I’ve tried. Yes I’ve tried the Ryder Carroll method), so I cannot promise you a consistent posting schedule. Nor can I promise you consistent content. The presence or absence of any aesthetic on my part will be up for debate. Not by me, but please, feel free.

I can promise you connection. I can promise you honesty. And I can promise you updates. I hope that’s enough.

You wanna end with something I wrote recently? Too bad, my blog, my rules.

“You will not apologize to anyone for not knowing something you haven’t been taught.”

Next time I’ll tell you about my new piano.

Do good, friends.