Writing Stuff

Apex Digest #12 is out! Dear Diary is in it! It's a special double issue with a cool cover! Go buy!



Ok, now that I've gotten the squee moment out of the way, let's proceed to other things:

I signed up for SFWA and sent out the contract and proofs. The photocopies were crappy, but I don't own a working copier and there aren't many places where I can get a photocopy in my neighbourhood. I hope the accept my mangled copies as evidence enough.

Which takes us to the second point. Brace yourselves: I am not a particularly neat person. I seem to attract more entropy than is my due: my shoes wear out faster than a normal person's, my clothes bleed colors in the wash, and don't even get me started on the three or four times a year when I try to wear makeup.

Sometimes I think there's a fundamental rule I'm missing, one of those things people learn implicitly in kindergarten which make it unnecessary for their mothers to warn them that "you should not eat your classmates" (Intended Heinlein reference there). M says "I'm hard on things", meaning, the coffee maker you gave me for Thanksgiving? It'll still be working by Christmas, but it might look a little... tasered? burnt? melted? You get the idea.

Most of the time there's nothing particular I've done wrong in order to hurt the things in my life. Malfunction just seems to gravitate towards me, like bad handwriting (1). Hence, the bad photocopies at the shop today. I didn't even make them myself; there's no way those can be blamed on me, but I still have the nagging feeling that if one of the perfect people had gone to get her contracts and table of contents copied, she'd have walked out of there with a readable version.





(1) The whole point of this post is to make excuses for my poor handwriting. I'm sneaky like that.

Sale and proation

Asimov's wants "Prayers for an Egg". This story was work-shopped in Villa Diodati, where the magnificent writers there said something along the lines of "more alien, less patchwork". The aliened-up version seemed to be to Asimov's liking.

The world needed a story about tentacles, tri-gendered aliens and their ambivalent relationship towards their own eggs. I've only written two stories with tentacles in them, but both have been accepted by pro mags. I think I'm onto something here. What's with editors and tentacles, anyway? Because yeah, I find them cool, but then I wouldn't put them in my stories otherwise. It just seems peculiar that, for once, the universe and I are on the same tree. I'm tempted to graft tentacles onto my trunk stories, see if they get sapped up... That's a fun writing exercise if I ever heard of one.

This is my third pro sale, so I guess I'm on proation, that ample space-time continuum wherein writers reside who have sold three or more stories to pro markets but who haven't yet achieved the level of excellence and consistency of say, Nancy Fulda, Jay Lake, Ruth Nestvold etc. For me the consistency thing is a big issue, I can sort of get things sort of right like 10% of the time but 90% of my writing is wasted on unfixable drafts. If anyone has suggestions to help with this, I'm all ears.

Now, should I join SFWA or not? The fact that I can doesn't mean I have to, but there might be cool stuff in that organization that I'm missing. So far, I've only seen the icky stuff.

Sorry if this blog post doesn't make any sense: I'm kind of giddy. I may have to go eat some chocolate.

Edited to add: Thanks to Marshall Payne who helped me with an early version of this story. I don't know how I forgot to mention him by name. This story has gone through a lot of fazes and there's probably other people who have critiqued it and who I've forgotten to mention in this post. Among them are several Hatrackers and several Liberty Hallers. Thanks to all of them. I doubt there has been a story that's been more critiqued and edited than this one has.

An Alternative To SFWA?

Lisa Mantchev threw a few ideas to the wind a couple weeks back about creating an alternative organization to SFWA or fixing the one we have. Those threads are closed for the moment, but Mary Robinette Kowal has set up an interesting poll.

Take a second to answer the questions. The stats are revealing: most people eligible to join SFWA in one category or another are choosing not to do so, mostly because of perceived ineffectiveness of the organization or lack of info as to what exactly it does.

I don't feel informed enough to give my opinion on the inner workings of SFWA (I am not a member and I don't yet qualify for active membership). What is painfully evident is that their public relations department sucks.