It's been an interesting month so far. Trying to work on the sequel to Foxfire while at the same time feeling totally demoralized by the agent search was, I decided, not the most productive way to go about things. On top of that, the protagonist of Foxfire is a socially well-adjusted extrovert, which is not exactly my comfort zone and requires a lot of effort to maintain as a POV. So I've set aside the Foxfire universe for the time being, and started a shiny new novel project. It's got steampunk war machines, fabricated pocket universes, and a comfortably damaged and introverted protag, and it's always fun to play around in a new fictional setting.

Anyway, stats for the first half of May are right on track.

new words: 6100
fail days: 5 of 16 (I think)
words/day: 555

I was going to post about something fun like my CSA (yay delicious local food), but I'm feeling too disheartened by the NC primary results. Apparently 60% of North Carolinians believe civil rights are just for them. Never mind the absurdity of putting civil rights issues to a popular vote.

I take some (but not much) consolation in the fact that my county voted 70% against the amendment, and that gay marriage was already illegal (just not constitutionally illegal) in NC, so it doesn't change much from a practical standpoint. But still: aaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh.

new words: 6800 (for all of April)
fail days: lots
words/day: who knows?

April ended up being the fail-month I'd expected March to be, but really not such a bad failure as failures go, since I still made significant progress on a couple projects. The agent search is a demoralizing process, so I've had more writing-related stress than I'm accustomed to (because day-job stress just isn't enough for me anymore!), and I think that's hindering my progress somewhat. Especially since I'm trying to write book 2 of a series for which book 1 hasn't sold yet, so there's always that lingering voice saying, if you don't sell book 1 you're wasting your time, you lunatic.

Was planning to write more tonight, but I had an unexpected urge to take out my dulcimer, which I probably haven't played in a couple years. Noodled around, broke a string, restrung her, noodled around some more for about an hour, and now my fingertips feel like they're on fire. Ow. But a good ow, a stress-relieving ow. I guess I need to displace my creative energy onto instrument playing more frequently.

Well, it's the end of another month. I was planning for March to come up short in the word-count department -- work stress, post-novel ennui, blah blah -- but I ended up hitting 10k words exactly, despite the intent to fail. I've been picking away at various projects in a haphazard sort of way, so I'm not sure how the work breaks down on a day-by-day basis. Some were new words added during Foxfire revisions, and some were for the new novelette, which I think is called "Stone to Stone, Blood to Blood." I'm actually rather excited about it, but it's also an emotionally exhausting piece to work on, so progress is unsteady. I'm also sorting out my thoughts for how to start the sequel to Foxfire, because I am psychotically optimistic.

I've enjoyed following Christopher Priest's cane-shaking and the various responses to it, but the whole event has left me rather puzzled about most readers' relationships to what they read. I do find it odd that any professional would choose to publicly hurl elephant dung at the likes of Charles Stross, Greg Bear, and Sheri Tepper -- I mean, nobody's even heard of those people, so it's not like you'd get the whole internet dropped on your head as a response, or anything -- but the part I really have trouble wrapping my brain around is how he rails against Embassytown as an example of literary failure.

I don't love Embassytown. But see, I've got these two axes in my head with which to judge books: I call them the "craft" axis, and the "squee" axis. Craft is a measure of how brilliant the writing is, ie, could I compose an interesting piece of literary criticism about this book? Squee is how well the book hits my personal preferences, how much enjoyment I gain by reading it. Embassytown rates high on the first but middling on the second; Ready Player One rates middling on the first and high on the second. I'm perfectly aware that both personal taste and objective goodness exist, and that they aren't equivalent, which is apparently an issue that some readers can't parse.

Priest accuses Mieville of carelessness, under-achieving, insufficient editing, and being "limited by the expectations of a genre audience." He simultaneously complains of insufficient characterization and a lack of ambiance, when in fact these are a direct result of Mieville writing the story as a memoir -- and it is precisely this memoir-style that most transcends the expectations of the genre. Contradiction, much? I may not personally enjoy all of Mieville's artistic decisions, but I see nothing lazy about them; they seem to me to be entirely conscious, controlled choices. The choices of a skilled writer writing at the top of his game.

Priest is dressing up his "squee" ratings as if they were "craft" ratings, and hoping no one will notice.

So I read a lot of books of the published-in-2011 variety recently, in preparation for Nebula noms and Nebula voting. Now that the voting period is coming to a close, I better start writing up my thoughts on them, lest they all turn into a blur in my mind. If I recall correctly, Ready Player One is book 26 of 2011, and the rest are hereby declared books 1-6 of 2012.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
A poor kid dedicates himself to a high-stakes video game contest. It wouldn't be wrong to describe this book as the ultimate nerdgasm, but I spent most of the book looking forward to climactic or post-climactic "ah-hah" moment that never really came. I wanted there to be a deeper analysis of genre fandom, rather than just a celebration of it. This one deserves a slot on the Hugo ballot, but I'm not too torn up about its absence on the Nebula ballot.

Among Others by Jo Walton
A girl who sees fairies deals with the death of her sister while being exiled to an English boarding school. Walton achieves a similar kind of nerdtastic appreciation of the genre as Cline, but her writing chops are more sophisticated. In the process of validating the protagonist's deep connection to sci fi, she also validates the reader's love of sci fi, creating a sort of double-reality reading experience where the line between the protagonist and the reader becomes blurry.

Embassytown by China Mieville
I really tried to love this book. From a distant academic viewpoint, I can agree with those who think it's brilliant. But personally, I quickly tired of the constant incomprehensible/indescribable-ness of everything. It made me feel like I was saddled with the POV character, that she was a barrier to my understanding the world rather than a facilitator. Mieville also employs the mini-cliffhanger technique of following a scene right up until the point where something interesting is about to happen, and then cutting to a different scene. The more I write, the more I find this technique tedious and transparent as a reader--I know how that magic trick works, thank you very much.

Chime by Franny Billingsley
In early 20th century rural England, a girl is convinced that her ability to talk to the Old Ones marks her as an evil witch, while the subtext makes it clear she isn't. I should mention that I have a pet peeve against stories in which the reader knows something important that the protagonist does not, because it usually leads to the protagonist coming off as stupid, so it's a testament to Billingsley's talent that I made it 80% of the way through before feeling impatient for the protagonist to hurry up and figure things out already. The prose is thoroughly delightful, and the author draws a heartbreaking portrait of a girl who has been psychologically abused and has thoroughly internalized the vitriol. Warning: significant potential for dysfunctional-family related triggering.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
An orphaned girl is raised by demons who collect human teeth in exchange for granting wishes. The plot structure is very unusual -- most of the second half of the book, including the climax, takes place in an earlier timeline told through flashbacks and recovered memories. Taylor carefully constructs a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, which was delightful in its level of awfulness, if that makes sense. The ending left me wanting a greater sense of resolution, but I understand why, given that a sequel is planned.

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
An outcast girl in Nigeria discovers she's a Leopard Person and must quickly learn how to function in the magical world. Okorafor delivers her usual dose of delicious worldbuilding and fun, quirky magic. A flawlessly balanced book, with all the stuff you want from YA: complicated friendships, becoming comfortable with onself, realizing adults are flawed human beings, discovering the world can be a dark place, etc.

City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare
The fourth in the highly successful Mortal Instruments series. I wasn't expecting this to be a candidate for nomming, and it wasn't, but it's enjoyable nonetheless. I could have done with less Jace-and-Clary drama and more of, well, everything else. While I appreciate the idea that the love of a pretty girl (Clary) doesn't immediately erase years of childhood trauma (Jace), there was a sense of closure at the end of book 3, and this new Jace/Clary drama 2.0 feels contrived, as if Clare put it in there just to please fans who want more opportunities to drool over Jace's imaginary washboard abs.

I was tentatively planning to take a week or two off after finishing the novel, since things are crazy at work right now anyway and I have a weekend-long martial arts workshop starting tomorrow night. But the brain keeps coming up with things it wants to work on, including a couple short stories and some query package stuff for Foxfire. So I actually have respectable wordage to report for the first half of March. What can I say? I just do what Fred tells me to.

new words: 5600
fail days: 6 of 15
words/day: 622 words/day

With the Department of Justice threatening to sue Apple and five major publishers for collusion, we get another free ride around on the agency-model carousel. Obviously, if they actually did collude, some finger-shaking is in order, because how dumb can you be? But I don't see the agency model as some terrible anti-consumer monster, so it wouldn't particularly bother me even if they had conspired behind closed doors.


Consider this hypothetical scenario, in the absence of the agency model:

-- Amazon sells most ebooks at a loss, encouraging consumers to buy Kindles

-- ebook sales continue to increase like crazy, crossing the 50%-of-the-market threshold in, say, approximately two years

-- unable to compete in the ebook market and facing a 50% reduction in paper sales, Barnes and Noble goes the way of Borders

-- with its major competitor eliminated and the vast majority of consumers already invested in the Kindle hardware, Amazon is now free to set whatever-the-hell prices it wants for ebooks


Now I'm not trying to claim this is what would happen. For one thing, this scenario requires some long-term business planning, and thinking beyond next quarter's bottom line is somewhat out of fashion in modern USian business practice. But if I were an evil mastermind bent on world domination through monopolization of the ebook market, this is exactly what I'd try to orchestrate.

What I'm really trying to say is: things that seem good for the consumer in the short term will not necessarily be good for the consumer in the long term, and things that seem unfavorable right now may actually be beneficial over time.

I just wrote a novel! I just wrote a novel! *happy dance*

Foxfire is now complete at 77k words. I don't yet have enough distance to know how extensive the revisions are going to have to be for the last third or so of the book, but hey: I have 77k contiguous words now, with no missing scenes or [insert witty dialogue here]s or anything. It can be read from start to finish and make sense, which is a benchmark worth celebrating. Whew.

76900 / 76900 words. 100% done!

Wait a sec. What am I supposed to work on tomorrow night?

Another month comes to a close, and another bimonthly progress report is due:

new words: 6500
fail days: 6 of 15
words/day: 722 words/day

That's 1800 words on a now-complete short story ("Emergent Properties") and 4700 words on the WIP, making for a perfectly respectable February turnout. I am really sooooo cloooooose to being done with the novel now, it's ridiculous. If I wasn't getting an eye-strain headache already from staring at the monitor, I'd be tempted to stay up late tonight in a final push to reach that elusive -END-.

76800 / 75000 words. 102% done!

Woops! Word Meter is confused. But that's okay, since it's probably time to take my "dregs" chapter and move it into another file. (I tend to keep notes-to-self, edited out sentences, etc in a junk chapter at the end to reduce the pain of deleting things.) And so, after cutting out the dregs:

74600 / 75000 words. 99% done!

That's better. Looks like it will clock in very close to 75k after all.