Dangerous confidence

I went to a book signing tonight. Marissa Meyer was at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, promoting her novel Cinder.  I unfortunately missed the reading, due partly to my propensity for tardiness and partly to a wrong turn at Albuquerque, but it seemed to have been a very nice reading, and the bookstore was lovely. The author herself was sweet and charming and well-spoken, and her signature message is adorable: "May the glass slipper always fit." (The book is now on my shelf, trying to cut in front of the other books on my to-read list. I think it's about to get into a fistfight with my copy of Anna Dressed In Blood.)

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Seeing people promote their books-- hearing authors talk about their careers-- inevitably makes me desperate to be one of them. I feel like telling people, I'm like you! I'm an author, too! You can't see it, but I'm almost done, and soon my book will be published and it will be on the shelf like yours! Even though it's not finished yet. But it's almost there, and it makes me crazy with anticipation sometimes. And ambition, as well. 

The thing about writing is that until you are published-- until you have an actual, physical, beautifully-bound book with your name on the cover-- authorial ambitions are generally seen as empty daydreams. "Yes, dear, you want to write a book, just like everybody else. Maybe you'd better do something else in the meantime-- you can always write in your spare time!" 

And I want to say, No! Not me. I can do this. Other people might give up, but I'm going to make a career as a writer. Someday I'll have a whole row of books on the shelf, each more beautiful than the last, and people will see them in the bookstores and point them out to their friends. And then their friends will pick up one or two of them and take them to the register, and maybe read them and fall in love with them and point them out to their friends, later. And all the while I'll be writing more.

And on that note:

More on the slow evolution of my writing process, huzzah.

I'm working out a kind of assembly-line process for my stories. In case anyone is interested-- and for my own documentary purposes-- the current process is as follows:

1) Start with a twenty-minute free-write of whatever's next in the outline, dictating the story to myself as I type it.

2) (This is a new step.) Add in significant sensory details, from the least to the most obvious: taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight.

3) Read through the new material once, cutting excess as I see it.

4) Go back to the beginning again and read the whole thing aloud. This brings a lot of needed adjustments to mind.

5) Read through the whole thing one more time, then save it for later revisions and move on.

I tend, however, to do most of the editing in between looking at interesting links from Facebook, Twitter and Blogger-- look at a page, fix a paragraph, etc. This makes the process much slower, of course, but I've tried just not surfing until I finished my page count and it failed dramatically. Anyway, everything is research. *shifty eyes*


So that's what I'm doing. I'm at 7500 words on Dwellers now, and I expect the word-count will go up a lot more now that I've added descriptions to this draft. I know this all probably sounds weird and backwards to a seasoned writer, but I'm in an experimental stage right now. When I finally reach the end, I'll put the draft aside for later revision-- may or may not try to get through a first draft of the next (unrelated) project before revising this one.

Still trucking through Middlesex. I'm past the halfway mark now. Woot!

Short Stories

I have made a new rule for myself: until I'm done with my 2000 words, I'm not allowed to do anything online but check my email and look at writing-related sites. No Facebook. No Stewart. No Colbert. I thought it would improve my productivity dramatically, but I'm lagging a bit today.


One of the writing-related websites I've been looking at is sfwa.org. (Joining SFWA is one of my most concrete career goals.) They just put up a post about the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, which is held in New Hampshire in early summer. It looks thrilling, and I wish I could go. Maybe some year. 


While I was poking around the Odyssey website, I read the following on the Syllabus page: 


"You are strongly encouraged to work on short stories while at Odyssey, because most writers improve their skills more quickly when writing short stories."


I'd never thought about that before, but it certainly sounds as if it might be true. I've never really thought seriously about short stories as anything but side projects, but of course they'd be good writing exercises-- you can see the results of new techniques immediately, and rewrites aren't too traumatic if something doesn't work out. It's a great medium for experimentation. As it happens, I just started notes for a new short story today. I think I might try to keep one going on the side-- something to do after the word count is done for the day.