I’ve tried various schemes to keep myself going.  For a while, setting a daily word count goal and reporting in every week to an online crit group worked.  I drafted The Null Prophet in twelve weeks that way, and it was great.  But straight word count goals don’t work for editing.  And what about the time spent plotting and researching for the next book?

I had a rockier time drafting Unborn, and I found I just couldn’t make the same word counts as before.  Instead of changing my goal, I kept beating myself up about it.  By the time I did change my goal, failing had become a habit.  All of these tricks are just mental games we play with ourselves, and this one had lost its power for me.

My failed editing schedule

After wallowing along for a while, I finally decided I needed a new trick last fall.  I Should Be Writing is a pretty good source for these, so I tried Mur’s “don’t break the chain” trick.  I printed a couple months’ worth of blank calendars, and I put a big green X through every day that I wrote.  No word counts, just a yes or a no.  And below the X, I kept a running count of how many days in a row I had written.  It worked for a little while, but every time I took a day off for a migraine or for my writing group, the chain would break, and it’s a little depressing when it never rises above 13.

In the new year, I tried giving myself a deadline.  Finish the revision by the end of March.  I made out a schedule and hung it on my whiteboard, but after an initial rush, I stalled out and fell behind.  March ended, with weeks still to go on my revision.

Turns out, these tricks only work if I never fail.

Well, I think I might have found one that works.  A couple ideas got mashed together in my brain, and instead of taking someone else’s trick whole, I custom tailored it to me.  Idea #1: Chuck Wendig wrote two posts on a writing plan and an editing plan, the basic idea of which is that you can set a very reasonable daily goal for each of these tasks (Chuck uses 350 words for writing and 5 pages for editing).  Idea #2: Mur Lafferty started talking about her friend Tony’s Magic Spreadsheet on I Should Be Writing, which combines a daily writing goal of 250 words with a weighted point system that rewards you for keeping up a long writing streak.

My Custom Magic Spreadsheet

I mixed these two together to make my own version of the Magic Spreadsheet.  I have two goals: 250 words written or 1000 words edited (I write in Scrivener, so there are no page breaks).  When I feed in my numbers for the day, my spreadsheet calculates my combined progress, so if I only edited 500 words but I wrote 140, it says I met my goal and gives me my points for the day.  First day, one point.  Today, 42 points.  If I double my goal, I get double the points.  That’s my motivation to keep writing once I’ve hit 250, and I know it works, because several times I hit 350 or 400 words, and thought “Wow, I’ll get another 13 points if I just write a little bit more.”  And then it turns out I hit 700, and I’m so close to another 13 points, or 15, or 22…

The last feature of my spreadsheet may be the most important.  If I skip a day, I get no points and the streak starts over.  But if I write a little and don’t hit my goal, I don’t get any points, but the streak doesn’t change.  If I come home exhausted from my writing group and eke out a single sentence, I get to keep the streak alive.  I’ve had three days like that so far, and it’s probably the reason the spreadsheet is still working.  And just as soon as I get a handle on how quickly the points add up, I’ll start bribing myself with prizes when I hit the big targets.

Yes, I designed the spreadsheet to give me as many points as possible.  But it’s not cheating when I’m only playing against myself.  The points are just a sideline, anyway—the writing is the objective.  And right now, I’m at 18,594 words written and 13,804 edited.  Not bad for a silly mind game.

I’m not a big reader of short fiction—I guess my sense of appreciation isn’t calibrated for the usual hit rate of a good anthology—but this collection by Tansy Rayner Roberts was wonderful.

Love and Romanpunk begins with “Julia Agrippina’s Secret Family Bestiary,” in which, Julia says, “I have arranged the secrets of my family in alphabetical order, beast by beast.”  These family tales, told in Julia’s wonderfully dry voice, weave together into a fantastical and very unexpected version of Roman history where the monsters not only plagued Julia’s family, they were her family.

The second story, “Lamia Victoriana,” was probably my least favorite of the collection, though still quite good.  I think I’d have enjoyed it more if I was better versed in the classics.  The story is narrated by Fanny Wollstonecraft, as she and her sister Mary run away with an unnamed poet and his sister.  They are, of course, the titular lamia, seductive vampires in the old Victorian sense, and a lovely, spine-chilling change from the modern kind.  There’s an unexpected tie to Rome at the end, which I didn’t entirely understand at the time, but which sets things up nicely for the last two stories.

“The Patrician” was my favorite.  Set in modern-day Nova Ostia, a fictional replica Roman city in Australia, made with real stone from Ostia and Herculaneum.  That part’s important, because the stone attracts the beasts of Rome, giving the residents more than their fair share of monsters.  Sixteen-year-old Clea meets a stranger shortly before the Temple of Vesta burns down, killing two.  It was the stranger, of course, a man named Julius, and the dead women lamia.  He is the last of the Julias, and his task is to rid the world of the beasts of Rome.  He saves her brother from a third lamia, and disappears.  He reappears periodically throughout Julia’s life, killing monsters, and gradually revealing the story of his life, and becoming a part of hers.  I will admit, the ending tugged at my heartstrings more than a little.

The final story, “Last of the Romanpunks,” picks up with Clea’s grandson Sebastian, in an Ancient-Roman-themed bar on an airship–incidentally, owned by his ex-girlfriend, who is intent on bringing back the lamias Julius wiped out, and becoming one herself.  Fortunately, Seb learned a few things from his grandma, and the Julias never truly die.

Each story could stand on its own, but I loved the way they all connected, making a whole greater than the sum of its parts.  I may not know a lot of Roman history, but I could feel the author’s love of the subject in every line.  The monsters and monster-hunters may have been larger than life, but the ordinary people on the sidelines, Clea in particular, felt very real.  Love and Romanpunk is smart, witty, surprising, and very much worth a read.

Image courtesy of graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

One of the unavoidable hazards of writing is that it’s almost always a sedentary activity.  There are exceptions—Kevin J Anderson dictates his first drafts while hiking—but that kind of process doesn’t work for everybody, and all drafts eventually need to be read and edited.

I get a double dose.  My day job has me sitting in front of a computer for nine hours a day, and then I spend another hour in the car.  I’m a very visual person, so when my writing time comes around, I have to sit down again, and I spent most of my leisure time curled up with a book.  It worked for a while, but lately bad habits have been catching up with me.  For the last year or so, I’ve been in pretty much constant pain.  Back pain, neck pain, and I’m not even going to get into the chronic headaches and allergies.

This post is not about complaining.  Think of it as a public service announcement.  This kind of stuff is all too common, and you don’t want it to happen to you.

I guess the first thing you should know is that I’ve never been an active person.  I hear about people feeling energized when they’re done exercising, but it’s never happened to me.  I mostly just feel sore and tired, and if we’re talking aerobic exercise, sweaty and gross on top of it.  I’ve never had a weight problem, so I always regarded exercise as an unpleasant waste of time.  I mean, I knew it was good for me, but I never saw the benefits, and I never had enough time for things I wanted to do, much less something I disliked.

Bad idea, in case you were in doubt.

It’s been an excruciatingly slow process, identifying the problem and deciding that no, it’s not getting better on its own, and then figuring out what to do about it.  The pain started in my neck, so my first move was to change pillows, and then change again.  I may have to try a third pillow if this latest one doesn’t do the trick.  I’ve slowly become more aware of the strain placed on my body when I contort it into my habitual fetalesque sleeping position, and I’m trying to train myself into a more neutral posture.

The backaches snuck up on me.  The first acute pain happened about a year ago, bad enough to send me to the wellness center at work. They gave me an icepack and a prescription for muscle relaxant, and in a few days it was back to normal.  I figured I’d pulled it somehow, and went back to worrying about my tension headaches.  It wasn’t until last fall that the back pain became strong enough and constant enough to catch my attention again.

I got an ergonomic evaluation of my workstation.  I tried lumbar support pillows.  I finally started seeing a chiropractor, which at first made things worse, and then a little better.  But I didn’t see any real hope until I found the discipline to start doing yoga every morning.  I changed up my entire schedule in order to form the habit, but yoga’s a great gateway into exercise: low impact, minimal sweat, and I can do it on a mat in my living room where nobody can see me.

It’s slow going.  I’m definitely improving, but six weeks in, my back still hurts almost constantly.  The difference is, it’s dialed back from Something Is Really Wrong to Wow I Haven’t Used These Muscles in Forever.  And as I keep using them, I have faith that the pain will become less and less.

So, the point of all this is, take care of your body.  For years, I coveted that half hour a day as time to write or relax, but when you’re not healthy, it gets damn hard to do either.  When the body gets sluggish, so does the mind.  There’ve been a lot of days this past year when I didn’t write at all.  Now, slowly, that’s starting to improve as well, and I’m happy to say that I’m on an 18-day writing streak (and counting!).

Sometimes, giving up a little writing time really can help you write better.

When the 2012 Nebula Award nominees were announced, I was pleased to find I had read (and enjoyed) four out of six in the Best Novel category.  The fifth has been on my reading list for a while.  The sixth, the only one I’d never heard of, was Ironskin by Tina Connolly.

I picked it up so quickly in part because of some idiot comments floating around the web about the genre becoming too girly, and it made me happy that books like this are starting to get serious recognition.  Once I read the description, I was curious about what made this book so special that both it and Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamour in Glass were included on the shortlist (both being alternate histories in the regency era).

Ironskin is a retelling of Jane Eyre with fey.  Unlike Glamour in Glass, where society is practically unchanged by the addition of magic, Connolly’s world is dramatically different.  Society had become dependent on fey technology, powering everything from lights to motor cars with magical “bluepacks”—until the Great War.  The story starts five years after the war’s end.  The fey are gone, but the country is left devastated, and scrambling to make do with coal and steam.  A generation of young men is slaughtered, and many unlucky survivors are left with fey curses that can only be suppressed by covering the scars with iron.  Jane Eliot is one such ironskin, hiding her deformed face with an iron half-mask.

I thought the language was lovely, and really captured the feeling of Jane Eyre.  The societal consequences were well-thought out, and I loved the references to slightly altered titles and quotes from plays by “Shakspyr.”  The fey were very traditional and satisfyingly malevolent in contrast with the recent abundance of urban fantasy reinterpretations.

Jane’s interactions with the fey-touched child, Dorie, actually bothered me quite a lot through the first half of the book, but I think they were meant to.  It was heartbreaking to watch all the life and spirit drain out of the girl as Jane and her father insisted she deny her fey gifts in favor of acting “human.”  There were strong reasons for her doing so, but rather lightly touched upon, and I can’t help but wish that I could have been made to really believe in those reasons along with Jane.

The other aspect of the story that bothered me was the easy resolution of Jane’s dislike of her scarred face by giving her a new, perfect fey face.  It feels like a cop-out.  I was disappointed in Jane for forcing Edward to make her a new face, and while I loved the horrifying way in which that backfired on her, I hate that she got to be magically beautiful anyway.  It sends a conflicting message.  On one hand, it tries to convince you that fey beauty is deadly and Jane’s scars mark her bravery, but the other hand snatches it all away in the ending with the impression that it can’t be a happy ending if she’s still ugly.  Needless to say, that left a bad taste in my mouth.

If you can overlook that distasteful theme, however, I found Ironskin to be very engaging overall, and the faery queen beats the insane wife in the attic, hands down.  Worth a read for fans of the classic.

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear is the story of an empire falling apart.  The Old Khagan is dead, and his nephew Temur is left for dead on the battlefield.  However, in a land where each of the Khagan’s living heirs has his own moon in the sky, his survival is no secret, and his uncle is determined to hunt him down.  His first instinct is merely to get away, but when an enemy sends the ghosts of his people to capture his bed-mate, he sets out on a quest to reclaim her.  Along the way, he joins with the wizard and once-princess Samarkar to stand against a hidden cult that seeks to play Temur and his uncle against each other and conquer their people.

The language in this book was beautiful.  Not overly showy, but fluid and graceful, effortlessly leading me through the story.  The love scene early on is one of the most poetic I’ve ever read.

Lots of great female characters: wizards, warriors, horsewomen, grandmothers, princesses, an even a female king.  And horses; Temur’s mare Bansh truly was a character in her own right.  I always love seeing a range of strengths.  Looking back on it now, this book was actually very heavily populated with women.  Given that a lot of the men all killed each other off before the story started, that makes a lot of sense.

My favorite part was the magnificent world building.  The feel of the silk-road fantasy world was very solidly Not European, from the Rasan custom of sticking out your tongue to show respect to the life of the steppe clans, with their horses and white-houses and true names.  The sky changes to reflect the god of whomever holds power in the land, and the gods seem very close.

It was incredibly refreshing to get away from the familiar old tropes, but in some ways it also placed an extra layer of distance between me and the characters. It felt more like watching a grand adventure unfold than being plunged into the midst of one myself.  I enjoyed the story, but I wasn’t emotionally invested.  I wasn’t compelled to keep reading.  I feel bad about saying that, because it really is a great book, and I’m planning to read the sequel when it comes out.  I think it probably says more about me as a reader; the emotion is all very subtly drawn, dipping very shallowly into the characters and letting their feelings come across mainly through their actions and the choice of description.  Quite different from a lot of my other reading fare, and requiring more concentration on my part.

I went into this book thinking it would probably end up on my Hugo nomination ballot.  I’m not sure it makes it into my top five, but Range of Ghosts is definitely in contention.

I’ve been hearing good things about Graceling for years, but the description always put me off.  A book about a smart, beautiful teenage girl with a magical talent for killing?  Right.  Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve read perhaps too many urban fantasies in the last few years about hot young women who are deadly with their weapons of choice, and I just wasn’t in the mood for another one, even if it was set in a fairy-tale kingdom.

Turns out I was wrong.  When I finally picked it up from my local library, Graceling upended all my expectations.  Katsa kills, yes, and she’s magically good at it, but that’s not what the book is about.  It’s about Katsa herself, and what it means for her to be forced to act as a thug and a killer when all she wants is to be a good person.

The book opens with Katsa in the midst of a secret rescue.  Secret, not because the kidnappers might manage to stop her, but because she can’t let her uncle, the king, find out.  I love that she doesn’t even know the victim, and she’s saving him just because it’s the right thing to do.  And contrary to my fears, she’s very careful not to kill anybody, not even the one witness who might have recognized her.

Katsa is the very definition of a strong female protagonist.  Not the physical strength, though obviously she has that in abundance, but the strength of character.  She is her own person, and she doesn’t need to hide behind or depend on anyone else; but at the same time, she can accept help with grace.  She doesn’t stupidly insist on doing everything herself and shutting out the world.  When things go wrong, she takes action—and responsibility.

I thought the interactions between her and the two potential love interests were very well done, and thought-provoking in ways you don’t find in most teen books.  When her friend turns out to be in love with her, she has the admittedly cliché reaction of having never seen it coming.  But instead of being flattered by his protectiveness, she feels insulted; after all, she can defend herself better than anyone else in seven kingdoms.  His assumption that she would change her mind about wanting children was particularly condescending, and I loved Katsa’s disgusted reaction.

I think it’s so important for young adult books in particular to show young women that they don’t need to conform to the expectations of a handsome man just because he likes her.  Her life doesn’t need to become about him—even when she does like him back.  When Katsa finally does fall in love, I love that she doesn’t turn to melodrama and decide that she can never be with him without being owned by him, so they must break their hearts and never be together.  But she also doesn’t just jump into the sack with him.  She takes the time to think about the consequences, not only the immediate ones, but whether she can be his lover without feeling owned, whether she’ll be able to leave, and how it will affect his feelings when she does.

The final showdown with the evil king was abrupt, but I realized, reading the denouement afterward, that it fit.  The encounter didn’t deserve any more page time, because it wasn’t actually the focus of the book.  Katsa’s acceptance of herself is the focus, and her relationships with the other characters.  It was only right to spend more time dealing with the consequences of the king’s evil and Katsa’s role in his demise (sorry, hope that didn’t spoil anything…but come on, was he ever going to win?) than with the actual encounter.

Graceling is a thoughtful, imaginative, and thoroughly enjoyable book, which I heartily recommend.  I can’t wait to read the rest of the series.

Considering my prolific reading habits, 12 books is no challenge, nor that they’re written by women.  (My statistics on this are actually pretty fascinating.  A full 73% of the books I read last year were by women.  However, only 55% of my “favorites” shelf on Goodreads are by women, so it’s possible I still have some of that bias.  It’s also possible that my reading habits have changed, and my favorites haven’t caught up yet.)  The “never read before” restriction may cause slightly more trouble, for the same reason, but that’s the point of the challenge–to discover new women authors.  No matter how many I’ve read, I’m sure there are plenty left to choose from.

No, I expect the challenge for me will be the reviews.  I occasionally review books on Goodreads or Amazon, but they tend to be very short, just a quick description of what I loved about the book (or, very occasionally, disliked).  I’ve never attempted to summarize the plot, or do any sort of deeper analysis.  I want to be more complete with these 12 reviews, and it will be a new sort of writing for me.

I’m considering posting my reviews here, though it’s a little outside my normal scope.  Does anyone have strong feelings about it, one way or another?

Happy new year (Photo credit: Amodiovalerio Verde)

Happy New Year!

I’ve been kind of quiet lately, most of which I can blame on the holidays (Three weeks off work!  Snow!  My annual Christmas cold!), but not entirely.  This wasn’t intended to be the kind of blog where I talk about everything that’s going on in my life, and unfortunately, most of my energy this winter has been spent dealing with Things That Are Not Writing.

I don’t really go in for New Year’s resolutions, but I did take a little time to think about my writing goals for the year: finish my rewrite of Unborn by April 1, get a first draft of my next novel (working title: North) finished by October 1.  It also seemed like a good time to reassess the website.  Breaking news: I’m probably not cut out for a regular, post-a-week schedule.

And you know what?  I think that’s fine.

When I started the blog, I read a lot of advice, most of which focused on Building a Platform, i.e. how to get as big an audience as possible, and of course they all stressed the importance of getting good content out to your readers on a regular, predictable basis.  But that was never really the point for me.  I never expected my blog readers to be potential fans who would start clamoring for my work before I’ve ever been published.  No, I’m pretty sure the readers I’ve managed to attract are all writers like me.  (And family.  Hi Dad!)

Ultimately, the blog is for me.  There’s no point in writing posts just to be writing.  I’ll save that for my fiction, thanks.  The internet at large, and the writing community in particular, don’t need me regurgitating the same old advice, retreading the same tired topics.  Instead, I’m hoping to dig a little deeper.  I read constantly, but I tend to get lazy, and not spend much time thinking about any one book or article.  One of the reasons I started the blog was to encourage myself to slow down and establish a coherent opinion on Things I Think Are Important.  I know myself.  That’s not going to happen once a week.  But over the course of 2013, I’m hoping it’ll start to happen more often.

One of the biggest criticisms of romance in fiction is how unrealistic it often is.  Too-good-to-be-true heroes who act like women wish they would; young people whose first love turns out to be their perfect match; impossibly good-looking suitors lining up to fight over the heroine.  I’m the last person to naysay young love, having married my high school sweetheart, but I think it’s important to show that there doesn’t always have to be a relationship.  Not just through the absence of romance, but through consideration and rejection of it.

To explain what I mean, I’ll need to use an example.  Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I read the first three books of Robin Hobb’s latest series, The Rain Wilds Chronicles.  This may contain some spoilers, so consider yourself warned.

One of the storylines concerns a young Rain Wilder named Thymara (I think she’s sixteen).  She has spent her entire life knowing she’s forbidden to mate, not only because her children would be too monstrous to survive, but also because the pregnancy and birthing might kill her.  When she leaves civilization with a group of other young outsiders, she never even considers breaking that rule.  She’s shocked to discover one of the other girls has been sleeping around, and outraged when the group’s self-appointed leader orders her to pick someone to keep the boys, who vastly outnumber the girls, from fighting over her.

One of the boys, Tats, is her friend from home.  The perfect choice, but she refuses to choose him (or anyone else).  It’s not an easy choice.  She does like him.  But she’s not in love with him, and she knows she’s not ready, and that she can’t afford to get pregnant (and that’s before she witnesses the other girl’s messy miscarriage).

I can’t remember the last time I actually rooted against a romantic attachment, but Hobb pulls it off here, and she does it brilliantly.  Part of it is how she portrays the selfishness of the boys—not enough to make them jerks, but enough to put me off.  Tats keeps pushing, accusing Thymara of teasing, of not being willing to take a small chance for him.

Her second suitor is even worse, giving her magical Elderling memories of a love affair between them (without so much as warning her), and then seducing her.  He obviously thinks of it as a grand romantic gesture, but to me, it reads like date rape.  Afterward, though, Thymara comes to her senses and realizes it shouldn’t happen again.  She doesn’t confuse passion with love, and doesn’t let pleasure circumvent her good sense.  Unfortunately, the book ended without anyone in the story recognizing what a violation it was.  I will be extremely disappointed if his bad behavior gets swept under the rug.

However the story plays out, though, I know Thymara’s not going to go starry-eyed.  If she ends up in a relationship, it will be based on real, lasting feelings, and no teenage boy is going to trick her into it.  She’s too strong to settle for anything less—and that’s an example a lot of teens could learn from, girls and boys alike.

Not that I don’t still read–I’m at 153 books this year and counting (as compared to 47 on audio).  But life is increasingly busy, and audiobooks have a distinct advantage for times like my daily commute, when a print or ebook would be hazardous in extreme (not to mention illegal).

What I like best about audiobooks

• Making use of wasted time*
  I tend to feel guilty when I waste all my writing time curled up with someone else’s book.  With audiobooks, I can listen while driving, doing housework, exercising, or doing any other routine task that requires my eyes (which, lets face it, is just about everything).
  *AKA multitasking, which is also one of the biggest downsides.  More on this later…
• Easy on the eyes
  I’m the kind of person who likes to keep busy.  Not necessarily active (writer-engineer, here), but my mind engaged.  I’m also a very visual person.  Unfortunately, I get chronic headaches, often triggered by eyestrain, that sometimes turn into month-long migraines.  If I can’t read, and I can’t write, and I can’t even mess around on the internet, then the next best thing is to lay down in a nice, dark room with an audiobook to keep me company.
• Narration
  Sometimes audio versions of a book are just okay, equal or even inferior to the printed version.  But when the narration is right, they can be so much richer and more powerful.  I’m a fast reader, and I admit that means I often skim, taking in the words without taking the time to savor them.  Audiobooks force me to slow down and enjoy.

Of course, audiobooks aren’t all rainbows and unicorns.  For one thing, it can take a week or more to listen to a book that I could rip through in a day.  And that whole multitasking thing?  Yeah, sometimes that doesn’t work so well, and I end up missing whole chunks of the story.

As I’ve branched out into a more diverse selection of audiobooks, I’ve noticed that they seem to fall into several categories:

• Old favorites
  For me, The Wheel of Time, Pride and Prejudice, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  These are the books I’ve read and re-read, and come back to listen to and love even more.  These are the best for multitasking, because I already know the story.
• Slow and lyrical
  Books like Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander.  They take their time, and linger over the details, so they really have time to sink in, even if I’m only half paying attention.  Plus, the prose is so beautiful, my attention is less likely to stray.
• Transparent as glass
  Books like Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.  The pace keeps clipping forward, but it’s all so clear and easy to understand that I hardly miss a word, no matter what I’m doing.
• Fast-paced muddle
  These are the ones I have the most trouble keeping track of: sword and sorcery, space opera, and the like.  The fun adventure-y books that are great to read, but maybe not so easy to follow with half an ear.  Fortunately for me, I haven’t come across many in this category.
• Bad narration
  Then, of course, there are those unfortunate books whose wonderful stories and lovely prose are rendered unlistenable by a bad narrator.  Dull, annoying, whatever the reason, their words just won’t stay in my head.  This is why it’s always a good idea to listen to the previews before buying.

Fortunately, I can’t remember the last time I came across an unlistenable audiobook, and I’ve actually thought twice about buying some books as gifts because I wasn’t sure if they would live up to their full awesomeness without the narration.  So, yeah.  I’m hooked.  I doubt I’ll ever give up reading paper/ebooks, but I’m pretty sure audiobooks are now a permanent part of my entertainment mix.