Jenn's World

Busy, busy, busy!

I know I haven't been getting to the blog lately, but I haven't been getting around to much of anything, honest. I've been taking intensive SCUBA diving lessons that run 6 hours a night (plus an hour commute) and keep me up long past my bed time.

The weird thing? I thought I was going to be claustrophobic and hate it, but by the end of the lessons, I seriously love it. I love swimming around in the bottom of the pool, seeing everything and never having to come up for air. It's so peaceful and beautiful. And I love watching other people. Especially the men and women in my class who've been married for awhile. Underwater, everything is magnified. Every gesture seems tender and romantic, even if it's not.

It's a whole new world, and I love it.

In the mean time, I have a goal to finish a first draft of Skin Farm by the time we leave for Maui (late June) but I don't think that's going to happen since I've been hovering around the halfway point for some time now. But I had a revelation today that fixes the problems I was worried about, so yay!

I also have a goal set up to revise the first thirty pages of God's Play by the time we go down to Maui. I think it can make it even more awesome. But completing new book is top priority over revising old, at least for now. I don't want to lose the Skin Farm mojo.

I'm really disappointed I didn't get to go to Children's Book Day at the Provo library. Rick Walton was there. He was in my mother's critique group. I used to sit by their knees when I was a wee thing, listening, and sometimes bringing my own children's stories into read. I had a story about a little girl who has an invisible monster at her side who keeps eating cookies and she gets blamed for it. In the end, she learns to love the monster for who he is, not scold him for who he isn't. It was cute and quite good-- I have an entire box devoted to the stuff I wrote when I was twelve, including my first novel. Which was about a girl with magical powers. Go figure. One day, when I'm a rich and famous author, I'll publish it.

Writing dream from last night: I'm at CONduit, the sci-fi/fan writing con at Salt Lake. There's a workshop that I think is on the writing. Actually, when I get there, I find out it's INTERPRETIVE DANCE. We're going to be acting out a summary of the first part of our novel in front of a panel of Utah writers, which includes Brandon Sanderson.

I get up, wondering how the heck I'm going to explain the world of Skin Farm through dance. When I ask, Brandon says it's okay to read parts. So I figure, I have a killer first page, I'll start with that...and then I look down and find that I've dropped the pages, they're all out of order, and I'm starting in the middle. Then one of the members of my writing group (Stephen) tells me he's sorted everything and hands me a stack of papers. But when I start reading, I realize: THIS IS NOT MY BOOK. Not only that, but our old inkjet printer has smeared the ink around so I can't read anything in the first paragraph. I start reading anyway, and end up mumbling all the words but "starfish" and "arena" before my time expires and I have to sit down.

The worst thing is, through this all, Sanderson watches me with this expression of total patience and sympathy. It made me want to cry. He starts giving a critique about "hackeneyed dialogue" and I wake up. Thank goddess.

Keep in mind that I slept through the dream I'd had right before about my uncle fighting off a werewolf and failing. So apparently, being asked to do interpretive dances representing my work in front of a panel of authors is a worse fate than being eaten alive.

Brandon Sanderson is in my dreams because I finished Warbreaker two days ago. Very awesome. I love authors who incorporate humor into their work, since it's something I struggle with. I would have liked it to focus more on the class differences between the Pahn-whatev and the Hallandren, but everyone knows I'm more interested in building cultures than plots. I think that's my main problem. I get so excited about cultures and characters (ooh, they worship earthworms!) that I forget about everything else.

I wonder what's up with him and female perspectives, anyway? His only book where the main character is male (other than WoT) is Alcatraz. Or am I missing one?

BOOK I'M READING NOW: Green, by Jay Lake

"Just a few hours into Boobquake day, in which lady activist-of-sorts Jennifer McCreight called upon women all over the world to wear revealing tops to refute the claim of an Iranian imam that promiscuity causes earthquakes, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake has hit Taiwan."

--From the National Post, via the New Yorker.

The background is: According to a Muslim fundamentalist, women's revealing clothing causes earthquakes and a bunch of women decided to show their clevage today to refute the statement.

While I don't deny the power of a good set of women's clevage, I figured this was a dumb idea because there are lots of earthquakes. Just because you don't hear about them or they aren't high magnitude doesn't mean they exist. For example, the U.S. Geological Service says there were 17,292 earthquakes last year. That's what, about 47 a day? And that was a slow year. We've had 4,896 in 2010, and it's only April.

Moral of the story: Think about your experiment before you do it, or risk confirming some looney guys' theory.

Besides, everyone knows that earthquakes are caused by the gays. (I'm joking!)

There's an article on writing from the Tor blog worth reading.

I wonder how much money you need to make to become a "frillionaire?"

I feel that way sometimes. I have a hard time seeing things through, but my rigid journalism training pushes me up and over my writing blocks. Even though I may hate writing about that damn city council meeting, I have to do it so I make the best of it. I may despise my novel at the moment, but I'll keep plugging through until it's finished. That's why, for me, writing block almost never happens. I'll write something, acknowledge it's crappy, re-write it ten thousand times, and then maybe end up satisfied. It's actually an inhibitor in some ways, because writer's block is a warning siren. I bet I wouldn't have to revise so much if I had it more often.

I miss the newspaper world in some ways. Having a deadline always hanging over my head made it easier to write, which is why the strict structures of a writing group can be very helpful.

I'm working on reading the Hugo nominated short stories. They're available for free online here.

Bridesicle sounded the most interesting, and the most creepy, so I read it. It's amazing in a really disgusting way. Definitely worth reading.

I'm glad it had a happy ending. And it makes me hope they NEVER invent the ability to freeze people.

Speaking of cryogenetics, if you're not a "This American Life" fan...WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? If you are, go listen to this episode. Some things are too amazing to be fiction.

I so would wear this.

My younger brothers fail to appreciate the awesomeness of Spiderpig. I think they just don't understand how epic it is.

Maybe they fail to understand the epicness of the Simpsons in general. For me, even though some more recent cartoons have surpassed them in humor (only to go down into their own abyss of repetition *cough* Family Guy), they all owe a huge debt to Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. And unlike the more recent adult cartoons, the Simpsons had heart. It was about people who, more often than not, were trying to do their best only to have things go horribly wrong. The best Simpsons episodes weren't focussed around guest stars and gimics, but around the relationships of a family that wasn't too different from our own.

That's while I'll always be a Simpsons fan, even if some episodes/entire seasons make me wince and reach for the shark repellent...

In other animation news, I finally went to see Avatar. I was pleased by the animation and all the little touches that went into the story. The technology was wonderful, the scenary breathtaking. While nothing new on the story front--white man goes and becomes truest member of native culture--there were enough little twists to keep this interesting. Like the evil corporate dude was reluctant to commit a massacre and the main character started things in a wheelchair. I don't think Avatar will become the classic Star Wars is, just because there wasn't enough groundbreaking, either in terms of idea or plot. But for what it is, it's the best. Enough little flourishes and details that I could tell everything came out of love, and I'd put it at the very top of the "nature-worship" genre, which in general bugs me because it because it's so didatic. Nature = good. Technology = bad.

There is some irony, of course, given the high involvement of technology in this film.

Speaking of Spiderman, there's also supposedly a Spiderman Broadway muscial in the works. From comics to movies to Broadway. Weird.

Maybe this makes me a really bad person, but I find this typo hilarious.

I bet the proofreader is getting a ton of slack.

So yeah, I've been busy. I've been putting up fences, spending time with the family, planning trips, cannodling with Fred, celebrating birthdays, reading books and writing Skin Farm. It's about a third done, and I finally have a handle on one of the characters that was giving me a hard time.

I haven't forgotten the blog. I just haven't put the time aside to work on it. I have like thirty books in the queue for review which I'll get to. I read a lot without writing anything because I'm pretty picky about my books, and I try not to write reviews if they're mostly negative. But I think for a few of the books I review, I'm less going to advocate reading them than pointing out the lessons writers can learn from them. Even if I don't particularly like a book, I can still learn from it.

Speaking of learning, you might want to check out "Ten Rules for Writers." I especially like Margaret Atwood's advice. Number seven on her list: "You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine."

I had an odd dream last night. I was biking and a friend of mine came up to me. I knew she was the servant of an old woman who lived in a house nobody but writers could see. She was a witch, but not the bad kind. A wise woman muse who offered advice to young writers. She lived there alone, except for her servant, her daughter/niece, who spent time reading, chuckling, and breaking wood for their shack's fireplace. I knew that this muse had given Robert Jordan advice in his youth, and that she had been his model for an aes sedai, because when I walked into her shack and saw her cloak on her hook, I saw not one, but many, all flickering because they contained all the ages and styles of the world, including Verin's brown vines. She had lived a long time, was very powerful, and very wise.

I would go to visit her as often as I could. Once, I accidentally led a boy to her, even though her location had to be secret. He followed me, desperate to talk to her, even though the road to her house is laced with broken glass meant to cut the unworthy. I'm not sure what happened to him. When I tried to follow him in, the muse's servant slammed the door in my face.

But one day, the servant came to me and told me I had to come, and to bring one of the people in my writing group. She warned him that the "life" of his story was in danger because it wasn't political enough. By which she meant that he wasn't exploring the tyranny of the government's effect on the 'little people' and he needed to do more with it. He needed to reflect on our own government and compare it to his, weaving its follies of history into his word. His story lacked Truth with a capital T, and so would fail.

I asked her what I needed to do. About how I was afraid I was just a wordcrafter, not a storyteller, because I can spin descriptions and make words dance in people's heads, but my stories are not as good as the writing deserves. About my concerns about whether I should continue on as I am, unemployed except for the small jobs, or try to find a job that will let me write and earn money at the same time. Her answer was mostly a shrug, that I should do what I think is best. Then she asked me to describe the stories I was working on, and I told her about the three, how I couldn't seem to settle on my next project because none of them felt right. She told me all my stories were good ones and the main thing I lacked was patience. Patience with myself, patience with others. Patience with the characters that hadn't yet found themselves in my text.

Then she stroked my cheek and said, "don't worry, if you work hard enough, you'll be able to take my place here one day."

And I woke up deliriously happy, because I knew that this is who I am and always will be, and one day, I will get to live in a wood-heated hut in the middle of the slums that no one can see, giving advice to young writers that can change lives. Coax happiness. Give thought.

***

A true dream, I think, advice to stay on the path I have chosen. People who read my writing later may be surprised to find out that I'm a Christian, because I write such blasphemous things about gods. Take the current epic fantasy I'm working on, where there are seven nations, each one's culture inspired by the seven deadly sins. Part of Christianity's domination of the western world came from the fact it absorbed pagan religions. In my world, it's the other way around, paganity won, but many of the Christian rituals are kept, because they were absorbed. This creates interesting contradictions that I'm still trying to work out (Like, why gods and goddess with such sexual natures would have priests so fully determined to censor everything).

I suppose it is my backlash against worshippers of the recidivist Goddess theory, which believes that there was once a goddess religion that taught peace and love and everyone was happy until the big bad male-centered religions came to suppress them, demonizing Eve and Pandora until all we have left of that religion are little fertility statues and memories of goddesses as bearers of evil.

I believe that there certainly was goddess-worship in the past and that it certainly was repressed, but I don't believe that it was the peace-loving, nature-worship that certain authors claim it was. So my goddesses are sexually-charged and as brutal as their male collegues. Perhaps because I am so full of emotional conflict and hatred and frustration, I sympathize more with the war bringers dieties than the mascots of peace. They are more...human.

But though I cannot explain god's interventions in certain lives, I believe sometimes he whispers peace and confidence to me through my dreams. I believe that it is not the wish-fulfillment of my subconscious, but a true message to keep on trying until I get it right.

So I have written my place of peace, of inspiration. What's yours?

WRITING PROMPT #14
Title: Place of Peace
Genre: None
Type: Self-exploration, Dialogue

If you could go somewhere to experience peace and confidence in yourself as a writer, somewhere to go and get ideas, where would it be? What would it look like? Who would be there? What kind of questions would you ask that person?

Some people are lucky enough to have places like this in real life. In high school, I had a bridge. And under it, I could lay back and just listen to people crossing and talking, and no one knew that I was there. I liked that. I'm a bit of a sociophobe, so being able to satisfy the human need for company without having the stress of having to act a certain way was very nice. I never had to perform for anyone, but I wasn't completely isolated either. That's my perfect place, where I can be with someone so completely that I don't have to worry about what I say or do. That I can be as bitter and vulgar as I want to be, and no one will judge me or think less of me.

Find your peaceful place, populate it with a muse, even if you'd prefer to be alone, and write to that person about a difficulty you're having with the story. Let your mind drift as you write the response your muse might make. Perhaps, by writing it out, you'll be able to find a way around your difficulties.

That's what I do. And I'm surprised how often it works.

History is made. The first woman wins best director award at the Oscars for the Hurt Locker. I never even heard of the Hurt Locker. It's all the more interesting because Kate Bigelow is James Cameron's ex-wife. I would have been surprised if Avatar won, just because of the stigma the Hollywood establishment tends to show against popular and genre movies. Avatar had a double doom. I was so amazed Return of the King got the nod just because the deck was so stacked against it. Reuters' write-up of why Hurt Locker one mentions that one of its producers got banned for campaigning...wonder what he did. I was surprised the award didn't go to Precious.

Another first in history: Sandra Bullock wins awards for "best actress" and "worst actress" in the same year. Red boots do not win audience hearts.

District 9, another sci-fi flick, was nominated for best picture as well.

I don't think there's been a time when two sci-fi pictures have cracked the top nominations, which I think says something about the genre's acceptance as art.