Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Did you all like my disappearing act? Next, I'll saw my assistant in half! But really, what have I been up to in the past month?

• Copyediting. A lot.


• Watching Leverage. (Thanks to lyster and publius513 for the recommendation!)


• Watching Eureka, on which my friend Margaret Dunlap is a writing assistant.


• Realizing that catching up on back episodes of cool TV shows takes a bite out of my reading time.


• Spending time with Bug, who is awesome and amazing to watch as she learns all about the world.


• Going to kempo with Twostripe.


• Reading books to review. I'm all caught up on my PW reading, but I have a review to write, and a pile of SLJ books, and some Flames Rising books and comics still piled up.


• Writing fake romance novel back cover blurbs as a game for a friend. I may post some here at some point, with the names changed to protect the innocent (or not so innocent, as the case may be).


• Reading books for fun. I just finished Ally Carter's Only the Good Spy Young and am reading Breaking Waves on my nook. (Breaking Waves is an anthology edited by tltrent to raise funds for the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund. Great writing and a worthy cause? It's totally worth checking out.)


• Keeping up on industry news. The NYTimes published an article about color e-ink displays. Remember how I was asking about this earlier this year? Yay news!


• Sending the Viking Saga team through Europe. This weekend: Italy! Next weekend: Crossover game with the Mythic Greece group! I can hardly wait.


• Finishing up at the library. I've decided I can spend my time more the way I'd like to spend my time -- on both writing/editing and on being a mom -- without those library hours. As much as I love my coworkers and my library, it's a good move. And we'll still be storytime regulars.


• Traveling for cool events. Last night I went to see Abundance with niliphim. Friends of the blog Mark Vecchio and Richard Vaden are involved in the production (Mark is the director; Rich is performing). If you're in Pioneer Valley over the next two days, go see it! And check out this article about the production, and a sense of the mythic in the Old West.

And finally, I've been writing. Not as much as I'd like, but I am doing it. I'm back to owing lyster a chapter of Blood and Tumult, but I'm also working on the sooper sekrit project -- which I can now say is a comic, and as soon as I tell my editor I'm going to start talking about it, I'll start writing about it here! The portion I'm working on is actually due sooner rather than later, so if I want to talk about the process, it'll have to be coming up soon!

In honor of my return, and to help with my going-digital initiative, I'm giving away my mass market copy of Happy Hour of the Damned by Mark Henry. Answer the following question by Friday the 24th, and I'll pick a random winner!

If you were stranded on a deserted island (with comfortable amenities and the knowledge that you'd be rescued within a week), what five books would you want to have in your luggage?

It was a wacky week, with Bug's baptism this past Sunday. The ceremony involved the baptism gown that I wore when I was a baby, and my sister wore when she was a baby, and now my daughter has also worn. It also involved the christening bowl from Twostripe's side of the family, which has been used now over the course of three centuries, with the first baptism taking place in, I believe, the 1880s. Three adults were also baptized in the same service, and all of the candidates had water poured over their heads with sea shells. It was quite lovely.

The biggest joy for me was having my family out to visit from Michigan/Chicagoland. They visited for nearly a week, and it was great to have them. It did impact my ability to get writing done, of course, so there's not much to report for KSC this week.

I do have some sooper sekrit news, though, which I'm hoping to announce soon. I never get to be the writer with sooper sekrit news, so it's totally exciting to post that! One hint: it involves pictures. Vague enough?

But here's the reason for my post today: there's a fantasy cage match going on that features two awesome duos: Alanna of Tortall vs. Meliara of Tlanth/Remalna and Aerin from The Blue Sword vs. Astrid from Rampant. Man, talk about tough choices between heroines I admire! Go visit and see the other duels -- and vote!

Edit: Just found out that Aerin was withdrawn from the competition by the author. Congrats to Astrid (whose author is dpeterfreund) on the default progression. (I'm assuming y'all know that Alanna's author is tammypierce and Mel's author is sartorias.)

I don't know what week it is. I'm beginning to think that will be a condition for the rest of my life as a mom. I do think a lot about how last year at this time, I was falling asleep for hours unintentionally and feeling sick to my stomach, and that my act of creativity was biological. Bug's "story," thus far, has been a delightful one, and I'm looking forward to her becoming a progressively bigger collaborator.

But on to my goals. I said last week: when you leave a story alone that long, is it yours any more? Is it the story you're meant to tell if you can set it down and walk away from it for a full year?

A lot of people had great things to say in the comments on that entry. jeff_duntemann's struck me as particularly poignant:

It may be less fair to ask "Is the story still mine?" in these cases than to ask, "Have I changed too much to remain its author?" Stories are not the only things that may be considered "works in progress."

This is sort of where my thought process has gone. In my questions, which are related but not intimately, I was seeing those two changing factors in two ways:

1) If I've left a story alone for a year, am I still the person who should write it? Does that story, as I would have told it, belong to the writer I am now? To echo Jeff, "Have I changed too much to write this story?"

2) If I've walked away from a story for a year, and wasn't compelled to write any more of it, it may be that the story I was trying to write isn't the one that needed me to write it. I think about that in terms of the Blackstone Academy project a lot. There are elements in that story that came from an earlier story that was also not the story I needed to write. So I think what will be best is leaving that draft, those three chapters I've already written, as scaffolding. I think I should scrap them and start over. And based on where I am in my writing goals these days (inspired largely by slwhitman and her Tu Books project and the entries about the importance of multicultural F/SF over at Genreville), I think that some of those elements will stick around, and others will go by the wayside.

Now, the quantifiables:

Reasonable goal:
* With my cowriter, finish the draft of our serial novel. (We're at chapter 10 of 20 -- halfway there!)
I finally went over lyster's chapter 11, and in response, it's now been made into chapters 11 and 12. My goal is to write chapters 13 and 14 to be ready for his review after his upcoming life event. I've already written 800 words (of the 1500 to 3000 word limit per chapter) of chapter 13, but there's a lot to accomplish in those two chapters, so I'm not sure what percentage I've actually finished. Still, progress is progress, and I revised the outline for the rest of the story, getting some good feedback from Max, so we're solidifying the awesome of here to the end.

* Write one short story.
This one is sneaking up on me fast. I want to have a solid short story ready for a submission deadline on August 1st; my short story writing tends to work in spurts, so there's still hope. I've settled on the idea that I'm going to work on, and if I can get a few hours with no other priorities, I should be able to slam something out in time to actually do revisions before the submission.

* Write multiple book reviews.
Since last week, I've written a PW review, two reviews for Mythprint, and one that will appear here at MtU&E in honor of m_stiefvater's awesome recent release, Linger. I still have more reviews on deck, but I'm actually making progress here.

* Additional contracted work that's come up has been going reasonably well, also. Lots of copyediting, but also some writing -- I finished a short essay on the Harry Potter books and will be writing four more essays this summer about various notable novels.

Extended goal:

* Write three chapters of the YA novel I'm working on.
Well, you already heard about this one above. Scrapping and starting over.

* Write three short stories (including the one above).
When I was looking at my percolating ideas, I came up with a couple that might be worth following up on, besides the one for the deadline. At least one involves giants.

* Restart the adult novel I haltingly began last year now that it's percolated and I have an idea of where it's going.
I think I'm going to reprioritize this -- meaning that I'm unprioritizing it. I'd rather see what the restart on the YA novel becomes.

* Blog at least three times a week
Ha! Well, that may actually happen this week, but I've not established any sort of pattern, have I? :)

Most of what I've been reading in the past two months are books on the Mythopoeic Society Fantasy Awards longlists. We can't talk about the selections, and from the conversations via e-mail with the other judges, I think I may place more value on fun novels (or, novels that are both worthwhile and enjoyable, rather than worthwhile but wearing to read, or enjoyable but fluffy) than some of the rest of the committee. But, as Twostripe says, diversity in judges is important, and if I shift us slightly away from valuing style above many other qualities, I'm all right with that. I've remembered that I really enjoy reading what I think Shanna Swendson (shanna_s) calls a transparent writing style -- writing that you don't notice for itself, because you're so into the story being told.

At any rate, I've just turned in my votes for the final five in the children's category. I turned in my adult votes on Friday. I am very eager to see what comes out on the finalist list! I'll probably talk a bit about them here when the list is announced.

In the meantime, I need to get some writing done. Twostripe has promised me an hour or three tomorrow to focus on writing while he watches Bug; this should allow me to get caught up with Blood and Tumult and possibly get some work done on the autobio project, making the final corrections before I start the typesetting process. But outside of that time, we're planning to spend most of the day at the beach! We had a cookout with the Mythic Greece gamers, niliphim, and the bananapants/bananaplants family. Gaming and a cookout at the beach? Can't be beat!

Hello readers!

I'm sorry for the long hiatus. Since I last wrote, the saying my mother always used to offer has come true:

Spring haz sprung, the grass iz riz; tell me where the flowers iz.

(She did not, of course, say it with the z's in place, but that's how I always heard it. My mother's grammar was always correct, except when she was quoting something silly.)

February and March were very busy months for me preparing for Bug to arrive, and then having Bug here with us! She's healthy and happy and a month old.



(Pictured here are Bug and the editorial staff outside with me. This is from week two -- all the more recent photos are still on the camera or are on a different computer.)

At any rate, the weather is lovely here in Shoreline Connecticut, the family is happy, and we've had a lot of company and family time. Next week, Bug and I are on our own again while Twostripe is at work, and after all the excitement, some quiet time will be good for us, too.

Along with learning about how to be a mother, I've done some creative work as well. I've mentioned before that Max Gladstone (lyster) and I are working on the novel Blood and Tumult for Baeg Tobar together, and we've finally managed to make some progress. (This means that I've finally managed to sit down and write chapters back to Max -- he was waiting on me to contribute for quite some time.) We're writing chapters back and forth to each other; it's back to my turn again, so I need to send him about 3000 words before the weekend is over. Collaboration is exciting, though, and it's fun to see how characters change or appear differently when they're built in tandem with someone else. (Also, it's brilliant motivation, now that we're in progress, to know that someone else is waiting -- perhaps even with baited breath! -- to see what happens next. *g*)

As far as blogging, I'm hoping to be back to my regular blogging schedule of at least several times a week, with guest blogs or excerpts lined up on Fridays. YA novelist and fellow Mythopoeic Society member Alma Alexander has agreed to talk about differentiating fairy tales and myths sometime in the near future; she and I corresponded recently on what being "mythopoeic" is all about, and I thought her notes were so interesting that I wanted her to share them here. (I haven't yet read her novels, though I have no idea how I missed them -- they look wonderfully mythopoeic and right up my alley!)

And finally, thanks to everyone who, while I was on hiatus, contacted me outside of livejournal. It was lovely to hear from you! And now, it's good to be back. :)

Wow, has it been that long?

Why yes, yes it has.

The holidays were fabulous around here -- lots of great time spent with family before the actual dates themselves and then lots of extra hours at work to cover the time I took off! We had some fun gaming in New York on the first with our characters from the 3.5 continuing Xen'drik Expeditions campaign (we couldn't just let it go when it stopped being an organized play game). Twostripe has ramped the karate schedule back up, and Bug is big enough in my belly now that I can feel her from the outside of my belly even when she's not moving. That, by the way, is wild. There's a little person in there! The editorial assistants are now eating grown up food ("We're not kittens any more, boss!"). And I've been copyediting, book reviewing, finishing up my Living Forgotten Realms Adventure (slot zeroes starting soon!), and doing reference writing -- my usual ridiculous pace of work. My big fun project for the weekend (besides crib shopping!) is creating a map of the kingdoms in Great Britain for the Viking Saga game. Since we're somewhere between 700 and 900-ish A.D., ambiguously, I have some great fun maps to play around with to help me decide. (New favorite resource: Anglo-Saxons.net.)

The other big news for the beginning of the year is that I've just gotten a Nook, and am in the testing phase to decide if I want to keep it. Much to my embarrassment (since I posted the assurances of a bookseller on several forums), the Nook does not, in fact, read .doc or .docx or .txt files, which was one of the primary convincing factors for getting it. (I had intended to use it primarily as a tool for 1) reading digital review books, and 2) keeping up with Substrate submissions.) The Nook does read pdfs natively, however, and there are plenty of free programs to convert files from Word to pdf. Next hurdle? It doesn't annotate pdfs yet (actually, it might -- there are differing reports from users on this, and I need to play around with it more; B&N just says it doesn't support the feature as yet). That's a hurdle for me, since I want to be able to annotate Substrate pieces to remember what my thoughts were while reading -- and want to be able to have other people do the same for me. (Twostripe has not yet given much response to my thought that he could, perhaps, read drafts of my manuscripts more easily on an e-book reader this way; he is a print guy.)

The reading function, however, works beautifully. I've had an overdue review for Flames Rising since, what, August? The book came to me as an e-book, and despite reading the first twenty-odd pages on my computer screen, and then printing it out to three-ring-binder in hopes that I'd actually read it in print, I hadn't managed to actually read the thing. With an e-reader, though the formatting is still a little wonky (the pages are about a screen-and-a-half, so every other "page-turn" is only a small portion of the screen), it's been a much easier read to digest. It's a short story anthology, and in the last two days, I've read the various introductions (there are three -- two nonfiction and one fictional) and three short stories (including the first actual fiction I've ready by Cherie Priest of Team Seattle, who I've been meaning to read for ages), which amounts to nearly a third of the book.

The Nook is easy to use, loads fast enough that I don't feel like I'm waiting, has decent wallpaper installed for when you put it to sleep (they recommend never turning it off), and seems like a pretty straightforward device. I'm enjoying the e-book reading experience far more here than either on computer screen or printed from a three ring binder, so it's a major coup in that regard (though whether it's better than any other e-book reader, I couldn't say). Since reading e-books for review was half of the point of buying it, I'm satisfied on that score. I'm still playing with the annotation function to see if I can make it work for the rest of what I need it for -- which will impact my final decision on whether I remain an e-book reader owner, wait for a model that does everything I want it to (the Kindle has a lot of the functionality I'm looking for, but doesn't natively read ePubs, and the conversion process for that sounds like a bigger hassle than .doc to pdf), or decide to purchase another of the devices on the market (despite what their flaws might be). In the mean time, I'm having a fun reading experience and generally enjoying using it, so I have no doubt I'll be an e-book reader owner in the future, if I don't end up keeping my Nook this time around.

I tried to find a good excerpt about thankfulness, but I didn't quite manage to come up with one. (I looked through a book by Deitrich Bonhoeffer, and funnily enough, the excerpt I ended up with is remarkably similar in theme to one I considered by him.) But I will say a few things I am thankful for in general: family, friends, a good work year, and especially that my little one on the way is healthy and just as she should be.

I'm also thankful to all the folks who have donated or made bids over at the kickstart_tu auction, and hoping that it continues to get more folks visiting over the next week and change that we're running it!

One of the books that I've always appreciated for distilling thoughts about the nature of divinity and the human relationship to the divine is a very small memoir called Mister God, This Is Anna. It's mostly a view of "Mister God" through the perspective of a six-year-old girl, who shares her wisdom with the author, Fynn. It has the kind of feel-good nature that reminds me of Thanksgiving, so that's where today's excerpt is coming from. I hope all of my American readers had a lovely Thanksgiving yesterday, and all my international friends have many things to be thankful for, holiday or not.

--

So far as Anna was concerned, being good, being generous, being kind, praying, and all that kind of stuff had very little to do with Mister God. They were, in the jargon of today, merely "spinoffs." This sort of thing was just "playing it safe," and Anna was going to have none of it. No! Religion was all about being like Mister God and it was here that things could get a little tough. The instructions weren't to be good and kind and loving, etc., and it therefore followed that you would be like Mister God. No! The whole point of being alive was to be like Mister God and then you couldn't help but be good and kind and loving, could you?

"If you get like Mister God, you don't know what you are, do you?"

"Are what?" I questioned.

"Good and kind and loving."

This last comment was delivered in her throw-away tone of voice as if it were insignificant and irrelevant. I knew this one of old. Either you had to pretend it hadn't happened, or start asking questions. A moment or two of hesitation on my part as I watched the grin spread from her toes and explode in one short sharp hoot of mirth, and I realized that she had sprung the trap. She had something to say and had forced me into asking the question. If I hadn't done it then I would have had to sooner or later, so...

"OK, Tich. What's all this goodness and kindness and loving lark then?"

"Well," and the tone of her voice slid down the roller coaster of excitement, shot up the other side, and took off. "Well, if you think you are, you ain't."

I don't know how I do this. When I start out with a new calendar, it's blank and clean and pretty! (My 2009 calendar is a lovely print calendar by Lindsay Archer (the 2010 version is available here if you're interested.) And yet, somehow, those dates get filled with black ink to mark my day job hours, blue for appointments, purple for classes, and green for social engagements. (I switch colors on pretty much everything except the red deadlines and the black day job hours -- I'm not as organized as I'd like to think.)

Usually, I'm a few steps ahead on the autobio project -- though, granted, the first half of the year deadline is always much easier than the one late in the year (because I get the contract for both in the late summer/early fall, which means the first deadline is a crunch and the second deadline is languid and serene). This time around, I had to hand off more than usual to fellow copyeditor and Substrater Michelle while I organized the administrative details. (It's a good thing she's a copyeditor I really enjoy working with! I love working on the essays myself, so it's hard to hand over the work to someone else. It has to be someone I trust -- and Michelle certainly fits that bill.) I've got a great batch of writers this time around, and I'm very much excited to see them all in print.

But in the meantime, there's a 4e adventure that needs to be finished over the weekend, not to mention the rest of my first chapter installment in my joint Baeg Tobar project with lyster. (Have I mentioned Blood and Tumult by name yet? No? It's in progress! I'm 1500 words in on my first segment -- unfortunately not the full 3000 that would let me pass it back to Max. *sigh*) I have School Library Journal reviews that need to be written, not to mention the overdue reviews for Flames Rising.com and the overdue article edit for Journey to the Sea. (Alas, the free work always ends up falling behind those paid assignments.)

I was raised to keep myself busy as a kid, and I think I've taken that lesson to heart. My mother was the kind of teacher who always had several projects going outside of the classroom -- the biggest one was building a life-sized rainforest in an empty mall store. So I'm sure I get some of this impulse to take on so many projects from her.

One of these days, though, I think I'd like a vacation. It's a good thing I've forbidden myself from taking any work that's due in March! (I'll be busy with another little thing around then, but she's sure to be a handful.)

I went out and took some leaf pictures the other day while we've still got color in the yard, and I thought I'd share.



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In honor of the fall colors here, the prizes for the new MtU&E contest are both the Red and Yellow Fairy Book by Andrew Lang. Two books, one contest! What do you have to do?

Post an image, in the comments or at your own lj (posting a link to it here), of fall in your neck of the woods -- or whatever landscape it is that's local to you. I think we'll give this context until Saturday, November 7th, and I'll randomly pick an image thereafter.

Happy photo hunting!

As my shape is changing, I've been recalling the neolithic figurines of women I've seen in museums -- the very, very old images of women with large bellies and breasts (and often large bottoms) symbolizing fertility. Given how my brain works, it's not surprising that this is the direction I've been thinking in regards to my own pregnancy.


(Courtesy of The Met.)

I was talking with violet_whisper about this at dinner yesterday, and she brought up the idea of feminine beauty, and how it's obvious that the fertility aspect was a large part of that beauty (rather than our modern fashion stars from the line of Twiggy). I don't know how much we can say about neolithic ideas of beauty -- as their reasons for carving stone sculptures were, presumably, different from the reasons of the Classical Greeks, who also appreciated a little bit of roundness around the belly -- but I do find these early representations of women much more intriguing as my own profile changes. I hadn't really felt a kinship before, but I suppose that one becomes closer to a representation when one could herself be the represented. :) (Just a little Barfield terminology thrown in there for fun.)


(Courtesy of Brigantes Nation.)

For more fun early woman/goddess images, check out this forum, which has a pretty extensive collection, some written about in English, and others, presumably in Dutch (given the site location).