Karen's Musings

I turned in my story for the music anthology yesterday. I'm very pleased with how it finally turned out, given that the first draft was only so-so. My writing group's comments on the final draft were very positive, and I trust them because they were along the lines of "Great story! I can't believe how much better it is. I didn't think you could pull it off." :-) Their comments on the first draft were a lot of help. Also, purplecthulhu is tuckerized in it, since he gave me some good astrophysics advice which I mostly left out since I changed my mind about what was going to happen. (So any astrophysics errors are all my own.) I haven't received the acceptance check yet, though, so I hope I haven't jinxed myself.

It was interesting to watch myself writing this story, since for the last two years I've had problems with learning things and remembering things (so much so that I had a medical leave from work last year for a couple of months). I've been steadily improving, but the usual difficulty with writing was made much worse by this, and it was literally a physical struggle at times. Still, it's done now, and I am getting better.

I've sold another story, which is the good news. The bad news is that I haven't finished writing it yet. It's not due for a couple of months, which is good. My boyfriend is coming to visit me in two weeks, which is good, too, but it means I really need to have the story finished by then. Since he's finishing a novel in the same time period, I don't have a lot of room to whine. I guess I'd better go finish the story.

The first story I ever sold is now available in the anthology Fabulous Whitby, for sale in England and via Amazon UK.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fabulous-Whitby-S-Thomason/dp/095584620X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215547441&sr=1-1

This is incredibly exciting. I think I'll find it even more exciting when I get my contributor's copy.

(If reading my story isn't exciting enough, there are stories in it by Liz Williams, Esther Friesner, Jay Lake, and other notables.)

Various writers post or talk about how they go about the process of writing, and of the ones I'm aware the majority appear to do a first draft fairly quickly and straight through, and then do a rewrite, possibly a massive one. I don't write that way. I think I'm closest in style to joe_haldeman, who writes only a couple of hundred words a day, but when he's done, he has a book that's almost final draft quality. I'll also write a couple of hundred words at a time, do a minor rewrite of those first thing the next time, then write a couple of hundred words more. When I'm done, I have a reasonably good quality draft, if not nearly as good as something Joe Haldeman would write.

The problem with this approach is that it's slow. Also, if I get stuck, nothing gets written. I've been stuck on one story, a rewrite from Milford, for several months, and last month I got tired of it. As an experiment, I partnered with a friend who was also feeling stagnant for us to each write a story to submit to the next Sword and Sorceress anthology, beginning on the first day of the reading period. Given the time pressures of work, which included a business trip, this meant that when I did have time to write I had to write many more words than usual much faster than usual. I did get it finished on time, and submitted (and rejected), and I learned a lot.

One thing I learned is that I can write faster than I thought I could. Also, if something isn't perfect, I can go back and rewrite even big chunks of the story without problem. I think I've had my first "dare to be bad" lesson, and I'm pleased. The final version of the story wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but it wasn't embarrassing, either. I'm also jazzed about writing again, and am ready to start tackling some projects. I also realize that I need to have a mix of new projects, not just a backlog, even if the backlog contains a new project. Going back and forth seems to work for me.

This experiment was a success, and I'm pleased. Now for the next story.

A friend of mine recently told me about a new poetic form she had encountered, the Jacobean Sonnet. Some of you may have heard of the Iron Poet competition, of which one form is to take a well-known sonnet or other poem, such as "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, snip off everything but the last word in each line, and have the competitors write a sonnet using the last words on a new topic.

A Jacobean Sonnet is to write an original sonnet, using any of the classic sonnet rhyme schemes, except each line is only one word long. The word can be any length, but if the word is more than one syllable long it should be iambic. The result should be a complete poem.

One of our mutual friends read me a Jacobean sonnet he had written, and I wish it was online so I could point people at it, as it is in a nutshell every single poem any bard has ever written in the SCA. If I get inspired soon I'll write one of my own.

Ah, you say, but there is already such a thing as a Jacobean sonnet. Where did this new one come from? It came from Jacob, the leader of the Surenos at my friend's high school, who was one of her students and who invented the form quite by accident.

One of my favorite dictionaries is Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words, and for Christmas this year I bought myself a page-a-day calendar that contains one word each day from Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary. January 17 this year the word for the day was jumentous, "pertaining to the smell of horse urine."

When I was in college I read Hamlet for an English class, and I had great difficulty getting through the soliloquys because so many of the phrases in them had been used as titles of other works, and I kept being thrown out of the flow of the work. So I started thinking. So many phrases had been used as titles that almost an entire soliloquy had been used up. Could that work in reverse? Could you open the complete works of Shakespeare, pick a phrase at random, and use that as your title for a story?

I couldn't resist this challenge, so I did just that, and the phrase I came up with was..."I do smell all horse-piss."

(The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1

TRINCULO Monster, I do smell all horse-piss; at
which my nose is in great indignation.)

I still haven't written the story, though I intend to at some point or other. I wonder if January 17 was a hint to get started?