Category Archives: Writing

New Article Published!

Urk. When I wasn’t looking, the Owlyblog’s counter passed 10K. How did that happen?

My commentary on Oscar-nominated Lilo & Stitch has been officially web-published, and is up over at the fps site! It’s a five-fold project that looks at all the films nominated for Best Animated Feature Film category this year, each film examined by a different writer in a different light. The project centres around how each Oscar-nominated film stands for something within the animation industry, as opposed to “reviewing” or commenting on “Oscar-worthiness”. It was a really interesting exercise, and I enjoyed it a lot. I thank all the gods out there that Emru responded to the cry of “Who edits the editor?”, so that errors could be corrected and things flowed better. I can fix other people’s writing, but I’m always too involved with my own abstracts and thesis statements to do a final polish on my own work, because I know what I was trying to say all along.

By the way, do you think spring’s finally catching up with the calendar? Winter’s only got another three days, after all.

Back On Track

One of the things we have to get used to now in this new kitchen is the electric stove. After using gas for two years, it’s quite the adjustment. This is a brand-new stove, too, so it makes little pops and groans as we break it in, so to speak. It’s fiercely hot, although it takes a while to get there, unlike our previous gas stove, which was poof! hot as soon as you turned it on. Some day I will learn to only bake a single sheet of cookies when I’m trying out a new oven, so I don’t ruin two whole sheets of cookie dough.

The rest were just peachy, though. Mmm.

I’ve been reading up a storm this past week – it’s one way to escape the semi-chaos that still exists around here. (Mind you, ‘chaos’ to us means that we don’t have things up on the walls yet.) I’ve read Robin Hobb’s Golden Fool, which was even better than The Tawny Man; Jenna Starborn by Sharon Shinn, which is billed as a space opera and gothic romance retelling of Jane Eyre; Shatterglass, the final book in a YA fantasy tetrology by Tamora Pierce; and I’ve just reread Silver RavenWolf’s Beneath a Mountain Moon as well. None of them even made it to the “Currently Reading” table at the right. It might have had something to do with my reluctance to sit down at my computer, as overwhelmed as the desk was with piles of stuff as we sorted through boxes.

Speaking of which – all my books are now unpacked! Huzzah! I’ve had to double up all the bottom shelves, which means that a third of my books are hidden behind another row, but tha’s what you get for giving away a bookshelf just before the move. I’m fairly certain that I know where everything is now. (Fairly certain. Not positive, but fairly certain.)

The antibiotics proceed to drag me back from the brink of heart-rending, dramatic death. All hail Pfizer and their 7$-a-tablet pills!

On the work front, it looks like I might have a freelance editing contract for a privately published history, which will be nice; I have to sit down and think about how long it will take me to smooth out, copyedit and generally proofread a 100 page document in order to have a final figure to submit for the proposed budget. If there’s something I hate almost as much as deciding on how much my time is worth, it’s gauging how long it’s going to take me. At least after all that soul-searching a month or so ago, I had a ready answer when I was asked what my rates were.

We’re headed over to the South Shore tonight to my in-laws’ place for dinner, and then the Brier final on a glorious big screen TV. This is good, because the only channel we receive on our TV right now is CBC, and it’s really grainy. I’d rather not have to try to figure out who’s who during a bonspiel like this!

So, slowly but surely, things are getting back on track. I’m feeling more human than I have felt in quite some time now, which is a good thing, no?

Scattershot

More useful inbox spam: Lose 32 pounds by Easter! If I lose 32 pounds I will be dead.

The main problem with moving (because of course there are several) is that there are never enough boxes. I fervently believe that it’s one of those dark SF equations at work. Neil Gaiman should write something about this. No, really – it sounds like one of those mildly annoying things that the protagonist of a dark fantasy novel encounters as s/he prepares to move out of an equally dark house with A Presence. Protagonist gets boxes, packs, needs more boxes; calculates, gets more boxes, and falls short yet again. The pattern is repeated as an (apparently) minor amusing recurrance, and not until the end of the novel does the reader realise that The Lack Of Boxes Is Significant!

Sleep update: I didn’t Wednesday night. Did last night, thanks to the joys of drugs enabling me to (a) sleep, and (b) breathe while doing it. All bow to the pharmacists, architects of my preserved sanity. Somewhere around four AM on Wednesday night (Thursday morning?) I began to understand why sleep deprivation works as a method of torture. You literally don’t have a chance to download. No blessed darkness descends to make it all go away for a while. It’s reality, 24/7. And even if your reality is nice and humdrum, it loses all appeal at 4 AM after a total of six hours sleep over four days.

It occurs to me that for the first time in quite a while, I’m hungry. Really hungry. Hmm.

Today, more packing, and I have to take the delicate stuff over to the new place – cello, viola, bodhran, harp, stuff like that. While I’m there I think I’ll unpack what I can and bring boxes back. It’s nice to feel well enough to plan things like this, although you can be darned sure I’ll stop the moment I start feeling wobbly.

In Which She Drags Herself Out Of Bed

Update:

1. I’m out of bed at last. Yes, I spent the last three or four days sick under the covers, using up Kleenex and copious amounts of cough drops, and still not being able to sleep or even breathe with any degree of success. Off and on fever, eternal blinding headache. This is the frst time in years that I’ve been able to listen to my body and stay in bed during one of these episodes. Much easier to deal with than dragging oneself around a job environment, infecting others, and generally suffering longer as a result.

2. Packing proceeds apace. There have even been a couple of carloads of boxes taken over to the new place already. Today, I have trusty friends Tal and Tass coming over to help. I still haven’t decided if this was a good idea (i.e. we’ll get lots done), or a bad idea (i.e. we’ll have way too much fun and by the end of the day it will be, Boxes? What boxes?).

3. Just so we’re straight on this, I do not in the least resent the fact that my mother is taking a well-deserved vacation with her sister in the Dominican Republic. It’s just that I’m here, packing, with tons of snow outside, and she’s reading on a beach. I wish I was with her. Impractical, of course; I mean, I was actually delighted that Montreal got a Real Snowfall in 2003, and with my lack of appetite the scrumptious vacation food would be wasted on me, and flying would have been excruciating. It’s the irony of it.

4. While I was stuck in bed yesterday and lucid enough to connect thoughts, I wrote 1,888 words of the Great Canadian Novel. I didn’t hit my 2K daily goal, but it was the first time I’d written in about four days, and I was pleased. Any words are better than no words, I always say.

Prepare for irregular postings and updates, as I shift into SuperPacking mode and place the remaining 75% of my home into boxes over the next three days. Then there’s that move thing, and the set-up of it all at the other end…

In Which Her Productivity Surprises Her

I’ve been experiencing a severe backlash against the amount of hours I’ve been putting in at the computer this past month, which is probably one of the reasons why the most energetic thing I can do is lie on the chesterfield with cats.

This afternoon, I decided to make myself work on the Great Canadian Novel. In a mood like this, writing for myself rather than for someone else means I’m operating under guilt as opposed to an irrational sense of resentment.

I not only reached my daily quota of 2,000 words in only one hour, I surpassed it by 600 words. Then I edited for a while, and cut and pasted all my various chapters into one file, as I had done with my NaNo novel.

To my astonishment, once I’d standardised body text size, I discovered that I had 127 pages and 50, 557 words.

50K is a magic number now. To know that I surpassed it – even over a period of months – means something special. I am quite chuffed. Not only that, I feel like I’m getting somewhere. After a month-long block, I’ve given my protagonist a new direction and new resolve, not to mention producing half a chapter.

Maybe there’s hope for me as an author yet.

Victory!

Well, we’re both still alive, we didn’t use copious amounts of Kleenex, and nothing valuable got smashed, so I’m calling yesterday’s NaNoWriEx session a success.

I really don’t know who Ceri has edited in the past; most of them must have been arrogant, insecure types, because she’s fantastic at offering creative, constructive advice, and helping you work things out. The point of handing a work like this off to someone else is so that you have a second pair of eyes seeing it for the first time to catch inconsistencies (which, bless her, she did) and take in the work as a whole and see how it balances.

We decided to hand them to each other with a minimal amount of editing, to see if the other reader would catch things we’d already pegged as problems, and sure enough, it was gratifying to hear her point out problems that I had already noted down to address — the resolution of a particular storyline, the use of minor characters in other places, and so forth. The good thing is she also pointed out other ways to resolve problems that I hadn’t seen. Likewise, the problems I talked to her about all seemed to be problems that she was already aware of or had anticipated in some way.

Moreover, Ceri put my mind to rest about things like my characters: she swore that every single one of them was different and an individual, and she loved them all. This made me squiggle with joy because I consider characters one of the most important elements of a story, something too many authors forget. (And for those NaNo participants from Montreal who are wondering: no, I have no clue when any of them were born, and what their favourite colours are. So there.) She also eased my paranoid fears regarding my portrayal of sensitive issues. What I wasn’t expecting was her comment that I had material for one or two more novels about these characters. I specifically did not plan a series, because so many YA novels end up as series — but it’s nice to know that I’ve created a sense of “life goes on”.

So! Back to the laptop! I have to add that penultimate chapter I had decided against in the orginal draft to tie up a couple of loose ends, incorporate her edits and word suggestions, and, well, the next step is shopping it around, isn’t it?

In Which She Muses About Freelancing And Self-Promotion

Sell yourself, don’t sell yourself short.

A lady whose opinion means a lot to me said this to me yesterday as we talked about my move into the freelance world, and this editorial position on the magazine staff. The work world is changing, and my generation seems to be the one that, as usual, has to strike a balance of some kind between the world of our parents’ generation and the world that the people fifteen years behind us will take for granted. In this case, it’s the realisation that we have to market our skills to a variety of places simultaneously, because our skills are theoretically valuable. They’re not valuable enough to build an entire job position around, however.

Hence the rather catchy phrase. As a freelancer, you do indeed have to sell yourself. And I’m terrible at that. I ‘m innately shy, and usually the last thing I want is to be noticed. When you’re seeking freelance work, however, that’s precisely the opposite of what you’re trying to do.

My strengths, of course, lie in the copy-editing and proof-reading areas. Areas which, amusingly enough, many tech writers and copy-writers I’ve met absolutely detest. It’s second-nature for me; sometimes I joke that I was born with a red pen in my hand. It’s an ideal situation, actually; the writers hand their work off to me with a sigh of relief, and I get work that I enjoy and that I do well.

In January, I’ll be polishing up my C.V. and passing it along to a bunch of people and places. I’ll agonise over a confident and clearly communicative cover letter (I hate cover letters) that announces my brilliant capability with style.

And, damn it, I’m going to publish. I have two and a half novels written since July alone, and over seventy single-spaced pages of notes on an esoteric non-fic reference book.

That lady whose opinion means a lot to me is right. I sell myself short. Most of us do. I think it comes from a combination of things, not the least of which was growing up in a world where you were polite, and never boasted, or said you were better than someone else, a world which taught us that if we were good, things would come to us on their own. Now, things have changed: the world has taught us that we have to shout louder than the next person in order to be heard, we have to show off in order to move ahead. Is it any wonder that people around thirty or thirty-five are so confused, and are one of the highest age demographics of the unemployed?

There are times when your mother tells you you’re special, and you think she’s saying it just because she’s your mother. And then, there are the times where she says it as one person to another, and you hear it in an entirely different way. I am talented. And I am special.

Thanks, Mum.