Welcome to my LiveJournal. I'm a science fiction writer with a growing collection of published short stories, and my collection Unwelcome Bodies is currently available from Apex Publications. It includes, among other stories, "Captive Girl," which was a 2007 Nebula finalist and which made the 2007 Gaylactic Spectrum Awards short list. I started this journal to have a place to talk about writing and the writing life, although you'll probably notice various digressions into belly dance and politics.

Please note that anonymous comments that aren't signed will be deleted.

My dream started with me meeting my agent face-to-face for the first time. He told me that the opening of my novel was crap, and it needed yet another revision, but not to bother giving it to him because he was dropping me as a client. All the editors he'd pitched my novel to had rejected it, but he hadn't had time to tell me because he'd been so busy with clients who were actually selling their work.

Then the dream transitioned to me getting together with two fabulous bellydancers (Rachel from Moire and Melina) so we could all go together to a show to dance. Melina knew the way, so we formed a caravan of three cars, with me at the rear, only I couldn't keep up, and I struggled not to lose them on the highway.

And these are my creative releases?

I was one of those kids that either got something or didn't. Reading? Got it at age three-and-a-half. Multiplication? Didn't get it until long after everyone else did. Dinosaurs? Got 'em. Riding a bike? Let's just say that my mother had to point out that if I started to fall, I could actually put my foot down to stop myself from hitting the pavement.

At some point, those of us who get things quickly start running out of things to get, and all that's left are things that are hard work. And for most people like us, things that take hard work aren't nearly as much fun as things that come naturally.

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Tonight, if all goes well, I will get a ton of stuff done.

However, if tonight goes like most nights where I have nothing planned, I will get about half of my to do list completed and then hit a wall.

We shall see.

Yet another WisCon has passed with no appreciable improvement in my abilities as a writer. I'm still not selling to top-tier markets, none of my stories are generating any sort of appreciable buzz, the two pieces I have in circulation are taking longer to sell than my average, I continue not to make it into any of the Year's Best anthologies, blah blah snooze blah.

Damn it, I want this to change. And this will only change if I become a better writer.

I need to get a few invitational stories written and off my plate, but once they're done, I'm going to spend some serious time trying to plot out a story that is Big Three-worthy. And I do mean "plot out," because plot is my serious weakness. I won't put fingers to keyboard until I have a serious plot arc that is driven by something more than the protagonist's emotions. Clearly, I need to move away from that kind of story if I want to attract critical attention, because that's all I write.

I am so sick of spinning my wheels. Honestly, it's embarrassing. I want to stop feeling like I should apologize for calling myself a writer. I love all the small presses that have published my work, and wouldn't trade those credits for the world, but it's just not enough, damn it. If I ever get nominated for an award again, I don't want to feel like I'm there out of tokenism or because of a voting fluke.

So there. That's my new goal.

Is it just me, or when you call someone to close an account and their response is, "Okay," rather than, "I'm sorry to hear that--do you mind telling me why?" -- does that not strike you as odd?

I am no longer an account holder at the World. Watch, now I'll need a dial-up line for something in the next month.

So I think my new strategy for getting things done is to not try to get too much done at any one time. For instance, on weeknights, I won't try to get equal amounts of writing and dancing in. I'll prioritize one, and maybe do a tiny bit of the other just to keep it from stagnating.

Tonight was a writing night. I finished editing chapter four and got halfway through chapter five. That's enough. Earlier this evening, I did my strength routine and practiced a new tribal improv move, and now I'll do a little more tribal improv, shower, and watch Lost. Tomorrow, I'll prioritize dancing drills, and perhaps do a little work on chapter five if I have time.

I am not Superwoman. I don't have to do everything at once. I deserve to be an artist, but I also deserve to relax.

I've been dealing with a lot of apathy lately. It's been hitting me on all fronts. I'm barely working on my novel and haven't finished a new short story in ages, I'm not doing nearly enough bellydance practice -- hell, I couldn't even bring myself to log my food for the past week. I'm not depressed, I'm just unmotivated, which is ludicrous, all things considered. I have an agent, he likes the edits I started, so why don't I feel the impetus to finish them? I was accepted into a dance troupe that I desperately wanted to join, so why don't I feel a fire under my ass to improve my bellydance skills? It's not just those things, either. My ironing pile keeps getting higher, which means I only have a few pairs of pants at my disposal. And even though I know we'll be getting a refund, I keep not getting my tax info together. It's a minor miracle that I got the bills paid on Monday.

I'm really not sure what's going on here, but I'm going to try to try to bust through the writing and dancing apathy tonight and get some real progress in on both. I've started logging food again, so that's taken care of. As for the rest of my life, well, I guess I'll figure it out as I go along. Maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew, and this is my subconscious's way of letting me know that. I really hope that's not the case. I'd hate to have to drop art from my life.

Ever have one of those nights where you've planned to be incredibly productive, only to watch it all fall apart?

That was me last night.

Just about the only thing I accomplished on my to do list was beginning to revise Machine again. And good god, it went poorly. I thought I'd be able to get two chapters done, but I was barely able to finish one, and I'm not happy with it. It feels like I'm cramming the new subplot down the chapter's throat. It made so much sense when I was brainstorming it, and yet it's not working so well now that I'm actually implementing it.

It didn't help that my computer was being slower than snails last night, either. And then I wasted quality time struggling to reinstall SpyBot, only to find that I had *no* spyware infestations, period. On the one hand, it's good to know my computer's clean. On the other, it sucks to have not diagnosed and fixed the slowness problem. (Actually, Andy has an idea of what it might be. We're pondering buying more memory for the machine to see if it helps.)

I'll see about revising chapter two tonight. Maybe that one will go better. And maybe I'll manage to get that bellydance practice in tonight. My hips aren't going to learn to shimmy if I don't get up and move the damned things.

Apparently, Wiscon will be having a panel about the Helix debacle. I'm torn as to whether to sign up to be a panelist, or to sit in the back row and watch it silently.

Update: After some good discussion in the comments thread, I've decided to do neither. What I'll do instead is find one of the panelists in advance and chat with them about some of the actual facts of the case (facts which seem to be getting lost over time) to make sure that the truth is discussed instead of rumors. And then I'll keep far, far away from the panel.

As a direct result of the recent cultural appropriation flamewar, I have seen three white authors say that they are now less comfortable writing non-white characters than they previously had been.

Somehow, I doubt this was the intended result. But from what little I read of the flamewar, it's a totally understandable one.

Personally, I'm still trying to figure out how this will affect my writing. I was never that daring with my PoC characters when writing modern-day stories in the first place (my future fic was a different story). With nojojojo's goading, I'd been slowly trying to get better. Now? I suppose I'll find out the next time I sit down to write a modern-day story.

I'm leaving this post unlocked, but I'm moderating comments. If you do choose to comment, please keep in mind that I have yet to see an unlocked post on this subject that hasn't been found by participants in the flamewar. So please consider that anything you post here could be seen by a much wider and much more vocal audience than my usual one.

There just aren't enough hours in the days I currently have to work my day job, get my writing done, master belly dance, do chores, have a social life, work out, get adequate amounts of sleep, and watch a little TV. Does anyone know how I can get some more hours in my day?

*off to buy lottery tickets*

William Sanders reports in his newsgroup that the upcoming issue of Helix will be their last, and has been planned to be their last for quite some time now:

http://webnews.sff.net/read?cmd=read&group=sff.people.sanders&artnum=86316

I can vouch for the fact that they'd made these plans months before the kerfuffle.* In fact, knowing that made it more difficult for me to decide how to respond to the aforementioned kerfuffle. Saying that I'd never submit to them again would have been a hollow threat, because I knew that I'd never have another chance to send them a story anyway. And I wasn't sure that a boycott would have any effect on a magazine that was on its last two issues.

But there you have it. The news is out, and I will gladly vouch for them when they say that the kerfuffle didn't have anything to do with them closing their doors.

(*I learned about it either at the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008 -- they accepted my last story on 1/31/08, and I'd already known the news for at least a few weeks by that point.)

As a response to the Helix controversy, a group of us who've been published by the magazine have come together to create Transcriptase, an archive of our Helix-published work for people to visit as an alternative to reading it at Helix. The current roster of authors is:

Elizabeth Barrette
Beth Bernobich
Maya Bohnhoff
Eugie Foster
Sara Genge
Samantha Henderson
Janis Ian
N.K. Jemisin
Vylar Kaftan
Ann Leckie
Yoon Ha Lee
Margaret Ronald
Jennifer Pelland
Vaughan Stanger
Rachel Swirsky

Massive kudos to vylar_kaftan for bringing us together, and to eugie for creating the site and doing the lion's share of the heavy lifting, plus nkjepiphany for doing so much work on the site.

I headed up to Readercon on Friday afternoon, making a pit stop at Patterson's Back Bay Dancewear on the way. Alas, they did not have quite what I wanted in stock, but they could order it, and it would arrive in three business days, which alas does not work for me, because in three business days, I'll be in Worcester for my dance class. So I'll look elsewhere early next week (maybe the place in Newton, maybe the place in Worcester, maybe Teddy's Shoes in Cambridge, although that's less likely), or wear my china flats on Thursday or something.

Then it was on to Readercon itself. I dumped a stack of books at the Broad Universe table and headed for my first panel (the writing groups one) where there were nearly as many people on the panel as in the audience. Then on to a stint at the Broad Universe table in the dealers room, then dinner, panelage, blah blah. I thought I might go home after my 7:00 panel (Waking up Sober Next to a Story Idea, in which I was the token baby writer among the panelists) because I was feeling rather out of sorts over the whole Helix thing. There are at least three writers at Readercon who are very much in the anti-Helix camp, and I found myself getting paranoid about how widely-spread the disdain was for multi-pubbed Helix authors. Plus, Andy had already left, which left me essentially alone. But I started running into people that I wanted to talk to, and then I had a few really enlightening conversations about the whole issue with a few other folks who are in my boat, as well as a few seasoned genre veterans who've been watching it from the outside, which was really, really helpful. And in the end, I ended up staying long enough to give away all my stickers at the Meet the Pros(e) party.

Today I spent a whopping two hours at the convention, then it was off to the Boston Fetish Fair Flea Market. The staff were extremely gracious towards me, treating me like a special guest, which was just lovely. My audience at the reading? Well, small. And I had about a dozen walk-outs over the course of the story. I think some were simply hoping for more sex, and others I think were bothered by the way the story wasn't 100% fetish-positive. And that's absolutely a fair cop. "Captive Girl" is a story about a woman who discovers she's a fetish for her lover, and has real struggles with it. It takes an uncomfortable look at the nature of consent. And I can see how someone who wanted an afternoon of fetish fun would be unhappy with that. Andy and I spent the hour after that looking at all the vendors, and it became clear to me that I was a tourist and not a participant. And you know what? That's cool. I'm glad to have been a tourist in that world for an afternoon, but it would be unfair to go back and be a tourist again. People don't go to the Fetish Flea to have Jane and John Vanilla gawk at them.

Of course, I did gawk at the ponies. OMG, they are the cutest BDSMers ever! Bondage gear...with prancing! And Maureen's pony had this incredible dignity about him. It really was something to behold. I think he might inspire a story some day.

After the ponies, Andy and I headed out for dinner, then came home. I'd originally planned to head to Teddy's Shoes on the way home, but I was just too damned tired. And while I'd love to go back to Readercon for the Kirk Poland competition at 10:00, I'm not sure I want to get my ass in the car alone (Andy's gaming) to make the drive when I'm this tired. I'd planned to spend my evening working out choreography for Thursday, but it's so freakin' hot, plus see above comment about being tired. But I have done some more dance name research. I'm still pondering Verity and Una/Oona, and have also tossed the following into the mix: Juniper (a play on Jennifer Juniper), Eris (although I fear that might be too pretentious), Morrigan (see previous comment), Nemesis (see previous comment), Zia, and a few others that I'm a little less thrilled with, but have scribbled in my notebook nonetheless.

The SFnal writerly blogosphere is currently exploding over the William Sanders rejection letter controversy. No, I'm not going to post links. Do I have opinions on this? Yes, I certainly do. Am I going to air them publicly? No, I'm certainly not. I have friends on both sides of the issue, and in the middle is a magazine that got me on the Nebula ballot and that has a story of mine in its current issue. As you can imagine, I'm in a difficult place right now, and I'm not interested in making things more difficult.

I feel crappiest about my writing career when I'm not actually writing.

Must rectify this tomorrow evening, now that the heat wave has broken.

The writing funk, that is. I'm pretty sure this happens to me every year as the year starts to draw to a close, and I look back at what I've accomplished and find it lacking. Okay, so this year, I still don't have an agent, and I'm once again in the position of having an editor sitting on a full novel manuscript and refusing to return my calls. What I need to keep reminding myself is that I'm on the preliminary Nebula ballot and I have a short story collection coming out, both of which are pretty fucking fabulous.

I think 2008 should be the year in which I let go of trying to sell a novel. I'll make one more attempt this year to get the editor who's got Machine to acknowledge my existence, and if that fails, I'll just write it off. I do believe I'll attempt to complete a new novel in 2008, but I won't try to interest anyone in it until 2009. But I'm going to try to fulfill my "short story every month" goal in 2008 and maybe one of those short stories will finally be the one that boosts my career to a new level. After all, the whole preliminary Nebula ballot/short story collection thing is kind of an indication that I'm good at shorts. It's just frustrating, though, because growing up, when I'd dream of a writing career, I dreamed of being a novelist, not a short story writer.

*smacking self*

Time to re-read that bit about what I've accomplished that's pretty fucking fabulous.

So, for the writers out there*, what have you done during bleak times to keep your spirits up and keep writing? What's kept you motivated when your career seems stalled?

It's maddening. I've got a story qualified for the Preliminary Nebula Ballot (not yet officially announced, but still) and my first ever short story collection coming out shortly, but I still can't land an agent, can't get any of the Big Three to come close to publishing my stuff, and I haven't been able to garner any critical attention for any of my newer stories, and that's what my brain keeps fixating on. It dismisses those successes as "things you did in the past," which is true. The Nebula story was written in 2005, and I got the collection based on my Apex stories, the bulk of which were written before this year.

So, what's a pessimist to do?

(* You know, this probably doesn't need to stay confined to writers.)

I've been noticing lately that the better I get at yoga, the harder it becomes. And that frustrates me. I know it was easier before because I wasn't as strict about my form. Hell, I couldn't tell what my form looked like, because I had no way of seeing it. But once I stopped using DVDs and started doing yoga in silence, I could see my reflection in the dark television set and started working to correct my form. And now everything's harder because I'm doing it correctly instead of doing it the way that feels good. But I've been working on form for a while now, and it's still not getting any easier.

And I just realized today that this explains my current relationship to my writing. When I started out, writing was easy and fun. I'd bang stuff out, quickly and gleefully revise it, and send it out to markets -- and promptly start collecting piles of form rejections. Many stories got trunked in the process, but that was okay, because there were always many more to take their place. And some of them even sold -- two to a pro mag, a few to decent semi-pros, and a lot more to really small mags. Nowadays, I'm much more careful about what I write. Rather than say, "Aha! I have a kernel of an idea, so I'm going to start writing to see what happens!" I instead let the idea simmer for months, jotting notes down whenever a new bit occurs to me. A good 3/4 of the ideas never get turned into stories, and those that do are written slowly and laboriously in a process that is never all that much fun. But they mostly sell, and to decent semi-pro markets to boot. It's been a while since I sold to a market that I later came to regret.

So, just like with yoga, now that I'm better at writing, it's harder. What ever happened to the glee? The wild abandon? The writing binges? Why did I have to lose that as my skills improved? I realize that part of this is that I've lost a certain naiveté about the process, but does naiveté have to equal happiness?

I need to find a way to marry skill and abandon in my brain. I want to write with that same glee and speed that I had back in the beginning, but I want to produce stories at or above my current quality level. I'm just not sure how to go about doing this.

I want writing to get easier as I get better. Is that too much to ask?

Please stop throwing financial wedgies at me and my husband. After this most recent one, we'll be just about completely broke.

kthxbi