eat · the · meatball · out · & · about

So there I was, beating my head against the 20k mark when I should be sprinting for the 25k mark, and I had very little plot and characterization and lots of writing my way in for this story #3, the middle grade one. And Miss E walks in the room and says "Do you think we could marry one of the girls [female kittens] to Thomas [who is very fat and 6 years old] so he can keep on being king?" Plot! OMG, Plot! Piling more Bad Things onto the characters!

Oh, and Miss E was not in any way discussing my current story being drafted. Because she's unaware I'm writing it. I've only told The Dude about it because it needs to be edited before she sees it and who knows how long that will take me. So Miss E is talking REALITY. Yes, she's got this elaborate monarchy going among the household cats, beginning with Mrs. Gaines as the queen, now deceased. (Ummm, plot? world? yup.)

And no, I have plenty of characters in this story, almost too many.

Announcing it here for the first time anywhere in print, Walkabout Farm now houses 8 cats. Yes, I said eight. It's going to be an interesting winter.

May they all become primarily outdoor cats by spring.

Frog Out

Here's the tease (WARNING: two of these books are my husband's doing):

( Book Bag of EPIC Proportions! )

That's it! Did you EVER think it'd end? And here I thought November wouldn't be a big month, but hell, it's not even over yet! Somebody stop me! :) Or not... buying books is too much fun, especially since I plan on selling some old ones. :)

What about you? What books have you gotten that YOU'RE excited about lately?

I take this as a good sign, because it means I'm sending lots of stuff out, and as long as it's all moving around, I'm pretty happy.

Better than that, lately they are all Encouraging Rejections. Which means they are all personalized, and they all say "No on this, but please send me more." Which is really good stuff, very encouraging.

The problem is, the lizard part of my brain (the one that likes gratification) is whining at me, saying, "But how come they ALL get rejected, if all these people like them enough to ask for more??"

But my forebrain knows I'm getting luckier all the time.

I hope.

I just figured out what the deep thematic structure of Dust is about.

Well, that only took four years.

I feel much better now.

Current Mood:	cheerful
Current Music:	Willie Nelson - Always Seem To Get Things Wrong

I’m in San Fransisco with Rob!

Why? Well, I’m reading at Writers with Drinks tomorrow night.

And our anniversary is on Tuesday, so we’re doing a little vacation here. Whee!

Come to Writers with Drinks and say hello!

Also reading:
Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman TV series)
Kat Richardson (Greywalker)
Naomi Quiñonez (Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry)
S. Bear Bergman (Butch Is A Noun)

All proceeds benefit EL/LA Program Para Trans Latinas.
At The Make-Out Room 3225 22nd. St., San Francisco CA, from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open at 7 PM.

Comments? -- Link.

I also wrote 2001 words on Grail this afternoon, which is pretty damned good for a girl who spent three and a half hours at the gym this morning.

I also did the stop-in-the-middle-of-a-sentence thing, because, well, I want to write the next bit I have to write, and that will encourage me to get a move on in the morning.

Tomorrow night, on the other hand, I will be here:

November 14, 2009
8:00 PM The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County, Saddle River Valley Cultural Center, 305 West Saddle River, Upper Saddle River, Bergen County, NJ

batwrangler will be my wingman, because she is awesome, and will drive down with me so I don't die on the way home.

Mean things today: second-guessing your ancestors, jihads and crusades, fear of alien invasion.

Current Mood:	smug
Current Music:	Junior Brown -Broke Down South of Dallas

Here's why the café will soon be going out of business anyway.

1. "Speed v. ambiance"—for a place like this you either have to offer fast service or a nice place to hang out. This café has selected neither speed nor ambiance. The service is slow primarily because the husband-wife team running the show designed the café improperly. The back of the house is too large and thus there are no front displays except for some sample dishes placed on the same counter under which the garbage is kept. Nor is there a useful shelving in the back for finished goods to be kept without exposing the goods to open air. So whenever someone orders a dessert item the server has to go to the back, open one or more large plastic tubs, pick out the items with a pair of tongs, and then place them either on a plate or in a bag. This slows service immensely—not only does the dessert orderer have to wait, so too does anyone ordering anything else as the counter is left unattended.

Ambience is ruined due to the excessive shouting and barking. Not angry stuff, but shilling. The café offers free samples but has no place to sit them, so often one person is fulfilling all the orders while the other is holding a plate and describing the sample and jamming the plate up under people's chins. The place is small enough that this leads to the other staffer often repeating herself or asking the customer to do so. So both staffers, husband and wife, end up shouting a bit in order to be friendly. This drives people out of the store.

2. Lapses in service generalship: I've ordered things and have been interrupted mid-order to be offered a sample of something else. I've been handed frosted cupcakes in a paper sack, meaning that I end up with some naked cupcakes and a sack full of frosting. The place is cash-only. I was told three times just now about a flyer I'd already taken—on Monday if I buy something at the café I can get a price break for some stuff at the Verizon store next door. Sounds good except I was quizzed so thoroughly on the flyer, my possession of a copy, and the nature of the deal, that I don't want to go to either store.

3. The owners are clearly terrified of people. They just are. The wife does most of the front of the house stuff, and she by turns mutters and shouts. Her eyes dart constantly to avoid making eye contact. The husband is the pastry chef and if there is anyone who should be neither seen nor heard it's a guy who just sank $200,000 into his ice cream-making hobby during a recession.

4. Bad location. Two blocks in-city from Fisherman's Wharf, which is full of touristy chain sweets and crap. They're too upmarket for their location, and too far from the traffic anyway.

5. Prices are too high. Waddling tourists and workers on their lunch breaks buy by the pound, not by units of exquisiteness per bite. Sure, peanut butter in a red velvet cupcake is a good idea for a bite-sized treat, but at $2.25?

6. The tip jar is marked "Baby Fund." It just strikes the wrong note—this mom-and-pop place doesn't read at all like a mom-and-pop place except for the tip jar.

7. Inadequate seating: a counter and a four-top. No place to leave papers or magazines, no place to sit if you happen to have a bag or knapsack with you (as 90 percent of the passing trade—wharf tourists—have),and the countertop is too small for any but pocket-sized paperbacks and tiny palmtop computers.

8. They keep the door open and a sandwich board outside the door. This actually BLOCKS people from coming in, rather than inviting them in. One physically has to snake around in order to enter if approaching from the wrong side of the street.

So anyway, if you want peanut butter red velvet cake, you'd better stop by the joint NOW as it isn't long for this world.

peadarog

This one won't be to everyone's taste, as the comments and votes already there indicate. But it seems to have worked for some people, which makes me happy.

feiran

They're also showing a lot of other cool stuff at the festival, including some Tezuka short films from Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, the latter which may have "inspired" Disney's The Lion King.

Anyone want it? (You'd have to pay a bit for shipping (flat rate box to prevent crushing), but...)

Nanowrimo continues, and The Third Transmutation is coming along very nicely. The write-in last Sunday was a lot of fun, and I think we all added a good chunk to our word count (for some reason we all ignored our word dukes at the meeting...)

The main reason for my progress is that I find procrastination a lot harder when there's a goal and a deadline, but there are several other types of fuel that make the writing roll along:

1) Lots of time. I run my own company, so I'm pretty much able to control my own time and projects. I do use work for procrastination once in a while, but generally I have a good deal of time on my hands. Even so, I'm surprised how much I get done when I take an hour at odd times between other tasks during the day.

2) Music: This novel seems to be written mostly to the tunes of Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Marty Friedman, Queen, Dire Straits, and a good deal of new age music. A pretty weird combination, come to think of it.

3) A little too much chocolate for my own good. The ill effects are alleviated to a certain extent by:

4) Exercise. Running or taking the bike to work means I burn off some of the stress that would otherwise keep me unfocused and unproductive.

5) Meditation: I'm attending a course in Mindfulness Meditation, and it's Very Good for anchoring me in the real world. It takes a great deal of training and daily exercises to make it work, but in general it helps me separate work from family time, so I'm not lost in the novel 24 hours a day.

6) All right, put this up as number 0. I really want to tell this story. The characters are alive in my mind, they experience great and horrible stuff in an interesting world. Because of the speed I'm writing at and the lack of planning, some very unexpected things happen to them, and they seem to handle themselves quite well. (All right, in places the story hangs together only because I insist it does, but I wouldn't send this off without editing anyway :-) )

http://tr.im/gudpwyw

GUD (pronounced "good") is Greatest Uncommon Denominator, an award-winning print/pdf magazine with two hundred pages of literary and genre fiction, poetry, art, and articles.

I updated my files and found I had forty eight stories working the slush. What's funny about this is that for the past six months or so, when I've gotten to forty eight stories, I sell one. My most recent sale came when I bumped up to forty eight again two weeks ago.

So, while I've always thought it was cool to make it to fifty stories going to work, I'll be happy if forty eight is my magic number! Perhaps there is some credence to that old Soviet proverb: "Quantity is its own form of quality."

I must be losing it if I'm quoting the commies!

JSR