Happy Holidays

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'll be devoting the holidays to my family and friends and will resume blogging after. Take care, all.

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

I was born into an a-religious family, but joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was twenty five. I'm what is commonly referred to as a Mormon.

To answer the usual questions, yes, I was quite happy without religion. No, I wasn't dating a member of the church when I got baptized. I was baptized by an ex-boyfriend before I met my husband, Trevor. No, I don't turn to religion for comfort or because I felt like there was anything missing from my life.

Before I joined the church, I was pretty much an atheist. I knew that it was possible there was a God, but I didn't see much evidence of one, nor did I feel like I needed one. I was quite content with the idea of living out my days and then ceasing to exist. Really.

Religion required stepping waaaay out of my comfort zone. If I could have self-designed a religion for myself that made me feel comfortable and at peace, it would not be one with a bar of judgment after my death. It would not be one with angels coming to Earth asking people to do things that others would find crazy. It would not be one that requires that I devote ten or more hours a week doing volunteer work for my church.

So why did I convert? Because I actually believe it's true. I wouldn't dream of practicing any religion otherwise.

Critgroup meeting, Ian didn't kill me

So I managed to survive the critgroup meeting without being offed by Ian Tregillis. Instead he writes the following:

I see there's no mention of the six different times I saved Earth from invasion. Nor of the various pen names I writeunder, such as "George Marten" and "S. M. Stirling" and "Daniel Abraham". I'll bet you didn't even know, did you? Bah!

And Blogger still thinks I'm a spambot. Bah, I say.

See, I thought Ian planned to stick with his Spider RR Zelazny pen name. Yeah, okay, another late night and a long drive, as you can see.

Sora story got improved marks from Critical Mass, but will need some further revising. Back to the romance novel tomorrow.

Reading for the critgroup

When my schedule's full, and the critgroup has subbed a lot of pages, I don't get to write more than a few words or tune up a couple of sentences. I'm not complaining. I'm reading novels by Melinda Snodgrass, M.L.N. Hanover (aka Daniel Abraham), and Ian Tregillis. This month, S.M. Stirling subbed his entire next manuscript in his series that began with Dies the Fire: A Novel of the Change. I get to see how cool it is before his editor or agent, even.

Members of Critical Mass: Ian Tregillis

This weekend I learned that Ian Tregillis's browser won't let him comment on my blog. I thought I'd take this opportunity, then, to say a bunch of stuff that he won't be able to contradict until Wednesday night's Critical Mass meeting (and Ian, if you kill me and I don't post on Thursday, all of my internet fans are gonna know, so be warned.)

Ian is the group's pity case. He attended Clarion the same year that Critical Mass member, Walter Jon Williams, taught, and Walter, being a kind hearted soul, told Ian that he obviously had a lot of enthusiasm for writing, and that's great, but he needed to break out of his usual first person stream-of-consciousness rants against goverment mandated medication for violent schizophrenics. Ian spent the rest of the workshop in the men's bathroom screaming about his need to feel at home in his own creative space and not to have to repel invasions by the FBI's god-machine, which kept breaking into his dorm room and replacing all of his things with identical looking items.

We took him in to Critical Mass because we're a charitable sort of folk. It has nothing whatsoever to do with him writing impressive stories that won him a spot as a contributor to Wild Cards, nor his cowriting a television pilot with Melinda Snodgrass, nor his landing a three book deal with Tor last month. Absolutely nothing. Ian inspires pity from everyone, including Patrick Nielsen-Hayden.

Nothing in this posting, I should add, is a quote from the absurd conversations Ian and I have when we're both sleep deprived, understimulated, and on long road trips across the desert to get to meetings and Cons. Nothing at all, I assure you.

Fake preview for a non-existant movie based on George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire

I'm not all that familiar with this fanfic-esque phenomenon, but I guess YouTube's got a bunch of A Song of Ice and Fire inspired videos.

This is a preview for a movie that doesn't exist.

Wild Cards, featuring members of Critical Mass, plus a few

The Wild Cards franchise is back, with a whole host of new writers (and some of the original writers as well). Critical Mass members include Daniel Abraham, George RR Martin, John Joseph Miller, Melinda Snodgrass, and Ian Tregillis. Carrie Vaughn, whom I blogged about a couple of days ago, is also a contributor.

The first of the new trilogy coming out is called Inside Straight, and I have read many parts of it completely out of order, thanks to my writer's group. If you like the superhero genre, though, or if you've ever wondered what American Idol would be like with superheroes (the winner gets a contract to defend a city), you'll love this.

The Works of Jack Williamson published by Haffner Press

I first met Steve Haffner at the Jack Williamson Lectureship, several years back. Steve's photo report of the most recent Lectureship can be found here. Jack Williamson was one of the greats of science fiction who came to New Mexico via covered wagon, sold his first short story in the 1920's, and continued to sell stories and novels in every subsequent decade until his death in 2006. He was made a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in the 1970's. This honor is typically given to someone in their twilight years, but Jack lived for three decades after receiving his, and continued to produce top quality work. I had the honor of meeting this man several times before he left us. He was a kind, down to earth soul who opened his own house to us in Portales (and thanks to that I know what Hugos, Nebulas, World Fantasy Awards, Grand Master Awards and many other top trophies look like. I soon concluded that there were no knick knacks in this house, for upon closer inspection, they all had little engraved name plaques on them.)

Steve Haffner runs Haffner Press, a little publisher that has aquired the rights to publish vintage science fiction, fantasy, and horror greats. This is the place to shop for hard to find classics. Haffner Press also does the most comprehensive collections that I'm aware of. Check out their Williamson compilations, for example.

The only place to buy works published by Haffner Press, is on their site. I am not able to stock them in my store.

Re-pacing the B plot

No idea how many words I wrote today. I realized that the B-plot was unfolding too slowly, so I went back to condense and rewrite parts of it. Lots of cutting, pasting, and deleting.

Taos Toolbox

All right, are you a Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, or Viable Paradise grad who still hasn't broken all the way into a writing career? Are you looking for a workshop that won't be too basic for you but will help you along the next steps towards getting those first contracts?

I HIGHLY recommend Taos Toolbox. This year Walter Jon Williams and Kelly Link will be running the show. Walter is one of the most polished writers I know. One could learn a lot from just reading and analyzing his prose, picking apart how he controls mood and ambiance, how he carefully doles out information to the reader to build suspense or a mystery. Here's a chance to learn from the man himself. Kelly I have met on occasion, but don't know, personally. She's brilliant. Head over to her site, or pick up an anthology with one of her short stories in it and you'll see what I mean. She fits rich imagery into improbably small wordcounts and with simple language makes the mundane magical.

The workshop is also in the Taos Ski Valley. The location alone will improve your writing. I'm putting a more permanent link to the workshop on my page (if it's not there, it's because you're reading this after the workshop apps period closed). Surf on over to their site and check it out.

Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn

I originally met Carrie Vaughn at MileHi; she and I are near each other in age and both from the southwest. When I first got to know her, her career was just starting to take off. Of all of my writer friends, she's seen some of the biggest successes at a very young age (by writer standards). We often share a room and even a bed at MileHi (this is typical because writers are often quite poor, even the successful ones, and piling four and five people into a room allows more of us to attend the con), so it is very funny when book vendors in the dealers room ask me to come back at a certain time to "meet the author of the Kitty books." I usually tell them that if I want to talk to her, I'll roll over and tap her on the shoulder.

The fourth book in her Kitty series comes out in a few months and I'm very much looking forward to reading it. At first look, the Kitty series may look like a Laurel K. Hamilton knockoff. Look again. Carrie writes to the formula, but there are a lot of other layers in there. Think Jane Austin (but with horror); there's a shallow level you can read at if you just want a fun ride, but beneath it all, the author is smirking and messing with your head. Carrie is wise to the tropes used in vampire/werewolf fiction, and she subverts them all.

Kitty, her main character, is not your typical superhero. She's a young woman with a dark, painful secret. Being a werewolf has cut her off from humanity and as the first book opens you see her working the midnight hour at a radio station because she's most comfortable alone. In her pack, she's the omega. Then, one night, she gets in a good natured debate with her callers about the existence of the paranormal, and a vampire calls in. She knows he's real. He knows she knows. The next day, her inbox is flooded with messages from people like her who live with deep, dark secrets and desperately want someone to talk to. The Kitty books are about Kitty becoming that person. It's a tough road with a lot of unexpected turns. Kitty isn't prepared at the outset and hence, situations often spin out of control.

That's what makes these books interesting and the plots meaty. I strongly recommend them. Sure, I read most of what my writer friends write, but seriously, I'd keep up with the Kitty books even if I didn't know and love Carrie.

Still going

Another 4,000 words today, and I'm looking forward to the houseguests coming! Both are dear friends of mine.

Gaining some momentum

4,000 words today. I'd really like to do that for a few days. Got houseguests coming, though, so we'll see how long I can sustain it.

Jumper preview

Found this preview for Jumper on YouTube. Looks very cool.

And on

3,800 words today. Not bad. It'd be nice to have a draft of this novel done by the end of the month. It's at 16k and I want it around 60k, so the actual typing of words won't be the problem. Just a matter of finding time to do it.

Crazy people living in my house: Ty and Jayné

I first met Ty when at LosCon. He walked up to me wearing a nametag that said "Slash", short for his internet handle "Slash the Berzerker". My then boyfriend had made some forum postings about us, and so, just like your parents warn you, this random guy was able to track me down. We've been friends ever since and started co-writing together a few months later. I saw him at several other get-togethers and got to meet his lovely wife, Jayné.

Fast forward seven years and I'm living back in New Mexico, married. Ty and I are back to talking every day about a video game deal, and Ty, Jayné, my husband, and I begin to share this very special bond. An almost sacred bond. You of course know what I mean. We started playing World of Warcraft together. At around this time Ty and Jayné were thinking of moving and with some not so subtle manipulation on our part, we got them to move to New Mexico.

Of course, their house sold in less than 48 hours (Jayné is a home equity machine, very talented at design, wordwoorking, landscaping, you name it) and Trevor and I persuaded them to come live with us while they house-hunted.

So you know how Char was nuts, cooking meals and all that? Ty and Jayné are just as crazy. They'd buy groceries and cook. Jayné began landscaping our front yard and would start scrubbing the kitchen whenever she got stressed (took me a while to believe it wasn't my kitchen stressing her). Ty co-wrote a story with me, and Jayné proofread my novel. She was one of the first non-LDS people to read it and her feedback was invaluable.

We weren't able to keep them secret, though. Ty now works as George RR Martin's personal assistant and is running an RPG for most of the members of Critical Mass. Jayné is in architecture school. These are two more people whom I don't know what I'd do without.

And on

1498 words and a whole bunch of rewriting. This is the next LDS romance novel that I'm working on. I got through the major event that sends the story in another direction. Since it deals with some fairly touchy issues, I've been writing and rewriting it. Now I think I've got it down clear enough to be able to attack the second act with a vengeance.

Or so I hope. Tomorrow is Sunday, which means I won't be writing. Gotta try to get the momentum to last until Monday.

Switching computers

All right, I'm going treat the oddness on my laptop as the death of the canary in the mine. I'm moving my files off of it and onto my desktop. Means I have to get used to writing on my desktop, for the first time in four years. Ah well....

Summer of the Apocalypse by James Van Pelt

I first met Jim Van Pelt at MileHiCon. It was the first year I went, and the group that I was sharing a hotel room with did something very cool. They held a readers circle. It was late at night, everyone had their laptops, and they took turns going around the room reading a story they'd just completed or an excerpt of a novel. The circle included Daniel Abraham, Carrie Vaughn, Aynjel Kaye, Brian Heibert, and Mike Bateman, among others, and needless to say, it was incredible.

After that I bought Jim's Strangers and Beggars, or, as Brian Heibert called it by mistake, Beggars and Losers. I was hooked. Jim's one of the best short story authors working in speculative fiction today. So when his novel, Summer of the Apocalypse, came out I bought a copy of that as well.

Summer takes place, as you can well imagine, post-Apocalypse, and despite the fact that there a zillion such novels out there, Jim really nailed a good story. I read the first chapter with a raised eyebrow thinking, "Now Jim, does that make sense?" at the occasional fact about his world. By mid-book I was just reading and enjoying the ride. By the end I thought, "Yep, it all makes sense. Clever foreshadowing in chapter one, Jim."

I don't have it on my shelf at the moment. People keep borrowing my copy from me. I may never see it again. Many are put off at first by the fact that it is published by a little known publisher called Fairwood Press. I have to recommend that publisher too, though. It is the same people who produce Talebones Magazine. The books they publish are of a much higher quality than the usual POD small press dreck that gives print on demand publishing a bad name.

And on

I'm losing a lot of time today trying to fix my computer. The file I tried to email to Char got corrupted. Looks like another night of just 250 words before bed. *sniffle*

Fixing the stupid computer

Something is wrong with my laptop. Every file I send from it using MSN email gets garbled. Gmail can send them just fine. I wish my computer problems weren't so weird, but they pretty much always are. This is rather important because the laptop is the computer I use for my writing....

The Secret of Grim Hill by Linda DeMeulemeester

Linda was another one of my Clarion West classmates. She gave the first impression of being a Canadian, suburban mom. Then I started reading her stories and got a little scared. The horror this woman produces is so unsettling that I sometimes wonder how she lives in her own head.

But she's got considerable range. It isn't all horror. She produced a space opera story I quite liked and her first week story was hard science fiction.

Now she's got a book out, The Secret of Grim Hill, which I read and really loved. It's middle grade/young adult and, yes, horror. The main character, Cat Peters, is a new girl in town who tries to get into the local prep school by trying out for the soccer team. The school selects two teams and has them play against each other. Cat makes one of the teams, so all she needs to do is have her team win, and she's in at the school. As soon as practice starts, though, things start getting strange. A shadow visitor appears in the bleachers and people in town begin to act as if not fully aware of their world. I highly recommend this book. I also have it in my store.

Nimrod International

Rejection today from Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry. I usually just sub to genre markets, but some of these submissions were done by Writer's Relief. They got my work circulating to all kinds of journals and other literary publications and got me some great contacts.

Members of Critical Mass: George RR Martin

So, I sent an email to my entire writers group asking for permission to blog about them and engage in some shameless promotion of their work. One of the first to reply with a thumbs up was George RR Martin. I'm not really sure what I can do to further promote George. His career's going rather well, what with his A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire)opening at number one on the New York Times Bestseller List and remaining on the list for a month. So what can I say about George?

Hey look everyone, I know George RR Martin!

Okay, that was low. I shouldn't say stuff like that and I should move on to raving about his writing now. Instead, though, I'm going to tell the story of how I met George. Before I went to Clarion West I dated a guy who was a hard core GRRM fan and so I read the first two books in George's Ice and Fire series and was appropriately impressed by both the quality of the writing and the sales figures. If you like high fantasy that is very character driven and powerful, evocative scene setting, these books are for you. Be prepared to get cold, hungry, have your skin crawl, and see sights you've never imagined before.

At Clarion West I learned about WorldCon, so a week after we got out I went to that year's WorldCon, the Millenium Philcon in Philadelphia. There I ran into George RR Martin and was rather surprised to see Santa Fe, New Mexico on his nametag. I said "hello" and told him I was a northern New Mexican as well. Two days later I found myself deep in conversation with Daniel Abraham and Melinda Snodgrass about Critical Mass and how I could join because I'm a Clarion grad. So a week or so later I'm emailing George RR Martin about getting to the next meeting, and he offers to carpool. This is how I went in the space of two months from reading my first GRRM book to sitting in a car next to him for the hour long drive to Bernalillo. It was surreal.

He's a great guy. He's a fantastic writer. Pick up any of his books. His biblio can be reached by clicking here.

What kind of stuff does he say in crit sessions? Well, to me it's usually something along the lines of, "This is all wrong because...." Watching the progress of his drafts has taught me about how meticulous he is about his writing and the world he creates. He will *always* choose to show rather than tell if he can help it, and the history and geography are very real in his imagination. He knows how many days it takes to cross such and so desert and who in which family married whom. It's impressive. When is his next book coming out? I don't know, and don't harass him about it. He gets that all the time.

Jumper by Steven Gould

Just got this email of a link to the movie poster for Jumper. It's a great poster, and I'm excited to see this movie when it comes out next year. I already know it isn't all that much like the book, but still, the fundamental premise is so cool, I'm interested to see what they do with it. For anyone who doesn't know, Jumper is about a troubled teen who has the power to teleport. After finishing this post, here, I'm going to go review it on Shelfari.

Steve Gould was one of my instructors at Viable Paradise, which is an excellent workshop I'd recommend to anyone. Steve and I are also both New Mexicans, so I see him and his wife, Laura Mixon (also a writer, who will get her own blogpost later) every few months or so. Great people. Oh, and by the way, according to Steve, the book title is pronounced "Yumper".

And on

Whew! Got that draft done today. Probably wrote about 4-5,000 words, but did a lot of deleting. Back to work on the novel tomorrow.

And on

One of "those" days, the bad kind. Worked for eight hours on the story and still can't get a workable last scene. Better luck tomorrow, I hope.

And on

Wrote over 5,000 words today, that I kept. I ripped out the last scene a few times and still need to get it to work. Sadly, I didn't get it done tonight, but I got close. Don't kill me, Char! I'm working, I promise!

Crazy people living in my house: Char

I've been meaning to start the "crazy people living in my house" series in order to explain how it is I have found these people whom I will refer to often on my blog, in acknoweldgements, etc. Char is the first person I ever shared a house with and all of the signs were there. We barely knew each other. She seemed nice enough and I really needed someone there who could be around during the day.

Having near strangers move into your home is generally considered a bad idea. What if they're totally nuts? Char was and is. First of all, she put up with overworked, undiagnosed insomniac me for months. She would do things like take over the kitchen and cook meals. Then she started reading my fiction. When she read something like 3 iterations of a story that was Really Not Working I sent her an email explaining that she did not have to keep dredging through this stuff. If she was acting out of some sense of obligation, there was no need for that.

Well, that's when I learned the truth. Char once read a forum post by her favorite author thanking said author's friend. The friend, it turns out, is the first reader for all of the author's work. Char decided then that she someday wanted to be that friend to a writer. After all, she has a degree in English from the University of Utah and is a talented editor, literary analyst, and has worked as a technical writer. The moral of this sad precautionary tale that we can all learn from is that she latched onto me, despite the fact that there are many talented authors in the area with bright careers ahead of them who would kill to have their very own Char. She has been subjected to unimaginably bad work ever since.

I don't know what I'd do without her. She's the first reader for most of my stuff, and the polish-up proofreader for anything that I've workshopped through Critical Mass. She read the original draft of my romance novel in something like twenty hours. And, as a former roommate, she's past being polite to me. She'll tell me when my work is awful and give me a detailed list of why. And yet she goes on to read the redraft, and the next thing I write, and the next. This poor woman. That novel I sold would never have had a shot at publication without Char.

So yes, I'm off to finish the rewrite of that short story that I will then sic on her.