So…Tired…
Long day today, and fussy-crummy sleep last night…I’m not sure why. I think I’m still nervous about the real estate work. Which, I’ve talked myself down from the anxiety before, and I can do it again–I AM doing it again. The only way past it is through it.
To that end, I’m sitting an open house this weekend. My first, alone! It’s not my listing–it may be a while before I get listings of my own–but I can meet potential new clients there, and talk to them, now that I’m licensed. 
And it will be good experience in any event.
Novel-wise, I got to the end of the first chapter in Hobgoblin, reducing the chapter from 19 pages to 16. Progress…slow, incremental progress…
But now, I’m zonked. Good night, interwebs.
Writing Advice We Give Each Other
So Mark called me this morning, stuck in his novel. “Here’s the next few things that happen, but if I write them all out, it’ll take chapters and chapters, and it’s enough like the other thing I wrote about earlier…”
“So summarize it,” I said. “We know what happens; we’re ready to get to the next crisis point.”
“Yeah but…this is the really interesting part of the [thing that happens to the main character]!”
From my Lofty Pinnacle of Wisdom and All-Knowingness, I said, “Yes, of course, but remember: the things that are interesting to the *character* are not necessarily the things that are interesting to the *reader*.”
“Ah!” he replied. “Of course! Brilliant! I’ve never thought of it that way…”
Then I went back to my own novel, where I have scene after scene of the main character looking for parking.
Among Friends
I met a LOT of people when I moved to Portland. Almost all of them came into my social circle via the relationship for which I moved to Portland.
Then that relationship ended; a few “friends” (very few) decided they needed to take sides and I quite noticeably stopped hearing from them; another few friends made it clear they were NOT taking sides, and that they valued my friendship as well as his, and that was very lovely.
But a whole lot of people just sort of…went about living their lives, as people do, and I stopped running into them, by virtue of my not showing up at the places where the ex was likely to be, and that sort of thing.
But now it’s been over a year, and there were a few people I remembered fondly from the ‘before’ time; and I’ve decided to take this in hand and reach out to people I’d like to have as friends.
It’s going VERY well. I’m building a warm and comfortable friendship with an LJ buddy. I’ve got hiking dates on the horizon with several different people. I had dinner last night at the home of My Dear Miss Q, who I emailed last month with some trepidation, because of things we won’t go into here–but she was very happy to hear from me. She is an absolute delight, and has already introduced me to friends of hers who are similarly wonderful–thus expanding my circle, to continue to step out of the sphere of the ex’s influence (which is mighty and powerful, as you might imagine).
This is good stuff, all of it. I’m putting roots down here.
People still sometimes ask me if I regret moving to Portland, since it didn’t turn out the way I’d expected. I still have the same answer: no way! I love it here. And my life needed a change–a big change. Maybe I could have taken ownership of my life like this if I’d stayed in San Francisco, but it would have been a whole lot harder. (Not to mention more expensive.) I love my house, I love this city and its crazy weather, and I’m loving my “old” friends and all these new friends. Portland is great.
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And I loved the sunny day we had today–I put in an intense hour or so in the yard, filling up my yard waste bin with clippings and dead stuff that I’d been eyeing for weeks and finally dealt with. There’s more, still–there’s always more–but this was a great start. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, though, alas. Well then I can stay in and work on Hobgoblin.
How Quickly They Grow
The baby shrimp are not so much babies any more…
Here’s two of them–and they’re not even the biggest I’ve got, just the ones who felt like posing.
Why, it seems like just last month, they were almost too small to see…
Why Do I Exercise
I was swimming at the gym today, and the pool was very crowded, as it has been since the new year and all its attendant resolutionistas; but that was fine, there was room enough for me to swim along, having my usual ruminations about my life, my writing, my relationship, my friendships, all that…the sort of wonderful idle mental state that happens when I’m in the groove of exercising, which sometimes leads to great breakthroughs and sometimes to nothing at all but is always very refreshing and useful.
And a young woman came along to share my lane; and she swam a few laps freestyle, and a few laps backstroke, and a few laps breaststroke, and then she got a kickboard and did a few laps kicking, and then she switched it out again…and I was thinking, Gee, what a good workout she must be getting, changing her stroke so often; should I do that?
And then I thought, Nah. I do my whole forty-five minutes freestyle, and I get into my nice rhythm, my mental groove, and my brain does its magic; and that is at least as important to me as the physical benefits of the exercise.
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That said, I am trying to vary my overall exercise routine a bit. I’d like to do the Ashtanga practice a couple of days a week, if I can manage it; and the vinyasa yoga class; and the strength training I’m learning; and swimming; and then toss in the occasional crazy thing like hiking, or cross-country skiing, or lion taming, or whatever. And I look forward to there being gardening again. (Although there are a few things that need doing in the yard now….just as soon as I get a Round Tuit!)
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I finished my read-through of Hobgoblin today. I do like how it ends–I always seem to be pretty happy with my novel endings. Which is weird, because I don’t know how to end a short story to save my life. (This is what collaborators are for: they always know how to find the end of a short story!) But before the ending…there is much work to do.
I made lots of notes. There are some conflict-related details I need to figure out, and some world-building; and I REALLY need to break that habit of having all the action take place off-stage; but I think I’ll be ready to dive into a deep edit in a few days. I bet I can cut 20,000 words from the manuscript, maybe more. That would be good–it would get it closer to 100K. Not only was it badly overwritten just on a language level, but there are clear areas where I was just riffing, not knowing where the story went next. From this distance, it’s so easy to see, though I had no idea during the writing, or the first edit.
Funny how this works. I guess this is progress!
For Real(tor)
At long last, the snafu with my license is cleared up, and I am a real realtor now! Which is exciting. The training has been going well, but there’s been this constant “well you can’t do this or that or the other thing until your license comes through…” and now we won’t have to do that any more. Yay!
And I’m continuing my read-through of Hobgoblin. I thought I might finish today, but I came across one chapter that was just a shambles, and then the very next chapter needs to be written from an entirely different point of view, and maybe one character needs to lose his/her point of view throughout the entire novel, and I keep finding places where all the boring stuff is written out in luxurious, mind-numbing detail while the exciting stuff takes place off-stage and is just reported in ruminations, and….sigh.
I mean, on the one hand, it’s really encouraging that I’m seeing all this so clearly, and I know how to fix it. But on the other hand: SIGH! This is a huge repair job.
I still think there’s a good book in there somewhere. But boy, the layers and layers it’s buried under… :/
Oh and: I actually did (most of) my Ashtanga practice this morning. First time in months. I got to thinking about why I’m not doing it any more, and how similar some of the stuff we’ve been doing in yoga class is to that practice, and thought, Why not give it a try? So I did. It was very hard–felt good, but very challenging. I couldn’t do jump-throughs at all, and toward the end of the practice I even got iffy on the push-up part of the vinyasa, and I’m totally sore now, but–hey, it was my old practice!
So, now, Advil and bed.
Oops!
Yesterday I mentioned my publications of last year, for Hugo (and other) nomination consideration….after a closer look at the word-count cutoffs, I realize that “Oh Give Me Land, Lots of Land, Under Starry Skies Above,” my collaboration with Mark, is actually a novelette (it’s 10,000 words)
Sorry! ::embarrassed grin::
Resolutions, or Some Such
I don’t do new year’s resolutions per se (any more), but the end of the holidays is a nearly unavoidable time, it seems, to get one’s act together.
Plus, the gym had a special on personal trainer sessions.
So I signed up for a package of three sessions, and had my first one today. Oh boy am I going to be sore tomorrow! But it was really useful, I think. I last did strength training more than 15 years ago, before I got into Ashtanga yoga; I dropped it because the yoga seemed to be doing all I needed there. And it did, for many years.
However, mid-last-year my back started being tweaky, so I’ve not been doing most of my Ashtanga practice in some time (though I am doing other yoga). So I needed something to replace that. And, well, change is good, right?
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Also I made more progress reading through Hobgoblin and making notes. My goodness, who *wrote* this novel? Clearly she had no idea what the story was. It’s amazing how obvious this is to me now, when it wasn’t at all when I wrote it, or edited it…. I’ll probably finish this read-through tomorrow or the next day.
Then the hard work begins.
Oh Look!
I got my new Locus mag today, and a full-page ad from Tor caught my eye:
Yes, that’s Mark’s first novel at the bottom left, coming out in mass market paperback this month. (And his dragon-design gracing the title of the ad.)
Also, they noted Space Tramps in “books received” and listed three of the many authors…Mark and me being two of them.
Cheery things for a wet afternoon!
The Publications Post
I saw five short stories published last year:
“The Passion of Mother Vajpai” (co-authored), Subterranean’s Tales of Dark Fantasy 2.
“In the Beginnings” (co-authored), Electric Velocipede 21/22.
“Bane,” Human Tales.
“A Place To Come Home To” (co-authored), The Hero Comes Home.
“Oh Give Me Land, Lots of Land, Under Starry Skies Above” (co-authored), Space Tramps: Full Throttle Space Tales #5.
They are all good stories (if I do say so myself); for your nomination consideration, those of you who are nominators (and you know who you are), I would like to call special attention to “Bane” and to “Oh Give Me Land…” Especially the latter: it was Mark’s and my first collab (and his first published short story), and I think it came out very, very well.
Okay, self-promotion over.