Members of Critical Mass: Melinda Snodgrass

Melinda Snodgrass has been an opera singer, an attorney, a screenwriter, a television story editor, a dressage rider, a member manager of an oil and gas company, and a novelist. Not exactly in that order... I don't think. Honestly? It's hard to keep track. And yes, she is still disgustingly young. I am beginning to suspect she is secretly immortal and just hiding her real age from us.

When I was a kid, I really liked watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I distinctly remember seeing the episode, "Measure of a Man". It was a brilliant episode, and one I saw a lot of commentary about in the ST:TNG fan mags. I still remember reading the interview with Diane Muldaur, when she talked about the impact of that episode and the "brilliant young novelist" who had written it. It's one of the most famous episodes in the history of Star Trek.

It was Melinda's spec.

She also wrote my favorite Seaquest:DSV episode and the pilot for Star Command. This is just a sampling of all of the television work that she's done. The TV writer career came after her law career, which came after her opera singing career. Somehow she also had time to write for and edit Wild Cards.

I met Melinda at my first WorldCon. Actually, I met Daniel Abraham first and noted that he was from Albuquerque. I told him I was also a New Mexican and he gave me an odd look and darted off. Melinda then approached me later at a party and asked if I wanted to join her writer's group. Needless to say, I didn't have to think all that hard.

Nowadays Melinda splits time between New Mexico and LA, where she is working on several projects including another pilot and some feature films. She also finds time to write novels. (Okay, maybe she isn't immortal. Maybe time just flows more quickly in the Melinda-verse). Her Edge series launches this year and is her response to the Left Behind books and other similar works. Like me, Melinda has been both religious and non, though we've gone opposite ways. She started out religious and left. I started out non-religious and joined.

Though the first book is being released this year, she's already completed two others, so I can vouch. The series keeps getting better.

George RR Martin has posted books on EBay for Match It For Pratchett

So George RR Martin has put seven books up on EBay for Match It For Pratchett.

The link to these items is here. The cause is good. Bid away.

The Second Novel

So, as I continue to work on this second novel, I'm very frustrated at my emotions doing what my rational mind dictates they shouldn't. My first novel sold to a little niche market press. It's a wonderful publisher, but they don't sell through Amazon; their books do not cross over into the main stream at all; the stakes are low.

Therefore, reason dictates that I should not be worried about a sophomore slump. It's absurd, given only a couple of thousand people will ever see my first novel. I work hard on my writing, don't get me wrong, but I'm not going for an eight years in the making Pulitzer contender or Oprah's Book Club phenomenon. All I'm going for is consistency. Show the readers that the person who wrote book one also wrote book two, and that I write about as well . . . um, as I write.

However writing this second novel (actually my sixth, but second published, I should hope) I've stressed out and freaked out and forced myself to get those 1,000 to 16,000 words on the page each day. I've pushed past all my self set deadlines and often felt like ditching the whole project. Now, *finally*, I'm to to the point that, as I've posted before, the project's on a downhill roll. Now all I need to do is stay on board through every necessary rewrite, and there will be many.

Though I know this has been fruitless throughout this project, I am still resolved, the next one will not be this hard for these reasons. (It'll probably be harder for other reasons.)

Hugo Final Ballot

So a few people I know are on the Hugo final ballot.

Daniel Abraham is up for best novelette, for his story The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairytale of Economics. It's a wonderful story that was in the anthology, Logorrhea. I first heard him read it at Bubonicon two years ago.

Ellen Datlow, who was one of my Clarion West instructors, is up for Best Professional Editor, Short Form.

Connie Willis, another of my Clarion West instructors, is up for Best Novella for All Seated on the Ground.

And in that same category is Kristine Kathryn Rusch, for Recovering Apollo 8. Kris and I are on a common listserv.

Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, who was one of my Viable Paradise instructors, and is my friend Ian Tregillis's editor, is up for Best Professional Editor, Long Form.

Way to go, guys! The whole ballot can be seen here.

Disgusting Cover Karma

Daniel Abraham's always had gorgeous covers. His first novel cover was done by an artist who read the book (which they don't always) and fell in love with it. The artist even wanted to do the blurb. All of Daniel's Long Price Quartet books have also had lovely covers. The fourth one, The Price of Spring, will have this:



And then Melinda Snodgrass's book, The Edge of Reason, is coming out soon, and its cover art is spectacular. Take a look at this:

RIP Arthur C. Clark

As many of my friends are saying, the last of the Big Three science fiction writers has left us. Those three would be: Asimov, Heinlein, and now Clarke. I've of course read Clarke and admired him, but I'll step aside here and post a link to someone who is more eloquent and had a closer connection to him.

Click this link to go to Pat Cadigan's LiveJournal.

Now up on EBay, an ARC of Melinda Snodgrass's latest

Melinda Snodgrass deserves her own, more extensive entry, which I will give her once I'm out from under the latest round of deadlines. Her book The Edge of Reason will be out soon, and an ARC is already available on EBay.

How to describe it? If Phillip Pullman's work is a response to C.S. Lewis, then this Edge series is best categorized as a response to Left Behind. It takes on the religious debate in a set of books for adults, and there will be more. I've read three of them now, and they get consistently better and better.

And her cover art is gorgeous. I've snagged a bigger version that I'll post later.

Match it for Pratchett

Pretty much anyone reading this blog will have heard of Match It For Pratchett, Terry Pratchett's fund raiser for Alzheimer's research. Now a New Mexico writer is getting in on the action. A copy of George RR Martin's new reprint of Fevre Dream will be going up on EBay, and all proceeds will go to Match It For Pratchett. I'll post what updates I can for when items go up for auction.

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson's written a lot since Brown Girl in the Ring, but I confess it's still one of my favorite books by her. I read it when I was at my most insecure and critical. Well, let me back up a bit and tell the story from the beginning.

When I was in law school, I started trying to get in touch with writers. It amazed me how many had public emails, and I tried emailing questions to a few of them and got answers nearly all the time. I guess I looked smarter in text or something. Anyhow, one of these authors was Nalo Hopkinson, who had that year won the Campbell Award. Now this is really stupid, what I did. I emailed her about something before reading any of her books. And she responded, I don't know if she took pity on my or what. Anyway, I emailed back with more writing questions and we got into a dialogue. She said one of my questions (how to write about a multicultural envoronment without flagging race in a way that revealed biases or prejudices) warrented some additional thought. She mentioned that she was teaching Clarion West that year and that this was something that would be interesting to discuss with her students. I, being an arrogant law student, I guess, told her that if I got into Clarion West, I'd make sure to bring up the topic. Her response to that was: "Okay, deal."

But then I did get into Clarion West and Nalo was to be my third week teacher. So then I went and bought the two books she had out then, Brown Girl and Midnight Robber. Here I was, trying to take my life around a 90 degree turn at 70 miles per hour. I'd put writing on the back burner and now realized that was a Big Mistake. Clarion West had, I don't know, mixed up submissions or something, and let me in, and I was trying to learn to read with a critical eye in the hopes that this would produce greater writing talent in myself. At this time in my life I was having a very hard time getting through books. I was hyper-critical.

So I read Brown Girl in the Ring and just loved it. I tried to be distanced and read with one raised eyebrow, but by the end I was too engrossed in the story to bother. It's a lovely piece of craftsmanship from beginning to end. The setting is Toronto after severe political and economic upheavals. The protagonist is a single mother having issues with her baby's father and living in an old outdoor museum with her medicine woman mother. The prologue justifies itself (I'm not big on prologues) by being about the problems the main characters will face, and yet it doesn't feature the main characters. Therefore it makes sense that it isn't the first chapter.

The book pulls you into the milieu of Afro-Caribbean culture and without infodumping or slowing the action, takes even an uninformed reader like myself on a fascinating odyssey with a climax that is both new and exciting because of the milieu, but also so well set up that I wasn't lost for a moment. Given my background and this story, that was no mean feat.

Midnight Robber was actually her first novel, but it was published second. It's science fiction, where Brown Girl is fantasy. It too is steeped in Afro-Caribbean culture, but is set on another planet. Parts of this book are especially hard to take as the main character, another strong young woman, endures some of the worst crimes imaginable. And yet, Nalo manages to keep a certain sense of whimsy to it all without disrespecting her. I recommend this book as well (but will always have a special place in my heart for Brown Girl, I must say.)

Since then Nalo's also written The Salt Roads, The New Moon's Arms, and has a collection of short fiction called, Skin Folk. She's a very accomplished short fiction author and at Clarion West taught us that even a short story shouldn't have just one plot. There should be a counterpoint story, even if much of it is conveyed in the margins. This definitely helped me beef up my short stories.

And Nalo herself is a wonderful person. Later that same year, I met her for the first time at the UCLA Festival of Books. I introduced myself and she immediately knew who I was. In my two books of hers that I had she wrote: "Looking forward to Clarion West" and "A virtual friend made real."

The Portland Review

Form rejection from The Portland Review today. They have a very nice form.

Head hurting

So yesterday I wrote 14,000 words. No idea how many of them I'll keep, but at least they're down on paper (or on my hard drive, actually) ready to be edited and pushed around. I sent 60 pages of the manuscript to Critical Mass last night and will send more next Wednesday. This is the requirement for any of us subbing more than 100 pages total.

Really, I think that once I get my sections to Critical Mass this month, I'll be pretty well critted on that book. I may or may not get the last scenes polished up, but honestly, if the ending doesn't work, that usually means the beginning is screwed up. So, I'll stop torturing my colleagues there with LDS romance and go back to science fiction for a while. At the same time, the novel in its "best I can do just working on the technical aspects" form will go out to proofreaders who can tell me all the ways it fails on a non-technical level.

I'm totally exhausted and more than a little cross-eyed. I know I'll be rewriting and reworking those scenes for another month and will have produced many times the number of words that will actually make it into the novel. Yet, I keep reminding myself that the end product is worth it. You know, for those five minutes between when I finish and when I send it out to get ripped up by publishers....

Back

I was out of town this weekend, at a funeral. One of my aunts passed away, and while I'll miss her, I'm glad I was able to go spend time with family and see my mother's home town again. I won't say much more about this, as I don't intend to write publicly about other people's personal matters.

Instead I'll just put my own obsessiveness on display. How does one write while traveling? I write in whatever spare time I can find. When I'm with family there isn't much of this, as I'd rather be with them, listening to what's going on in their lives, but whenever I need to dart up to my room, I'll see if I can spare ten minutes to jot down a few lines. I'll get in a few more before bed.

Then I came home and wrote a thousand words yesterday, and began reworking act two today. It's getting there. Critical Mass deadline is tomorrow night. I'll have my chunk ready.

My posts may be short

but the writing is going well. The project is picking up the momentum it needs for me to see it all the way through rewrites. The scenes are lining up, the characters are getting mouthy and saying what they really think, and my inner masochist is ratcheting up the torture for all of them. The story's finally come into sharp focus, which means there are a ton of scenes I'm going to cut and new ones to patch in.

Anthologies

I had my first direct anthology invite today. I won't say much about the antho, since it is only now being shopped around to publishers. Still, it was very flattering to have someone track me down without my sending them a query, or even having any idea they were doing an anthology.

And on a related note, my Clarion West class has been talking about doing an antho. As discussion progresses, several ideas are being kicked around. It's come to our attention that some of our writer friends and mentors have fallen upon hard times. This is common in this field, but heartbreaking all the same. Our goal is to reprint some of our stories and give readers the option to donate to a fund that will go to certain writers in need. I'll post more about this as the project develops.

Moving towards the light

55,000 words, means I'm nearing the end of this novel. There's a ton of redrafting and editing and moving scenes around to be done, which'll mean some long days of typing for hours on end. Still, this is when the project starts rolling downhill.

The Leading Edge

Rejection today from The Leading Edge. This is a market I can't say enough good things about, given my experiences. They're rejection came with detailed critiques by two editors, and they offered to do an editorial review of the story, with an option to purchase it. When I told them that another market had asked to see the story, The Leading Edge held onto their copy of it for a month, in case the other market rejected it. I'm definitely going to keep subbing to this mag.