Ah, Sleep, I will welcome your return. Oh, and June Stat Check

During the month of June, I wrote on 23 of the days (not bad considering there was a vacation in there)
I completed the first draft of a new story, started (but didn't finish) a rewrite of my first Critters story The French Maid, sorted through the critiques I got from my second Critters story Pandora's Time, and started revising Pandora's Time.
I made 1 submission
I received 3 rejections
I have 7 stories currently in slush pile circulation (well, technically it's 4 right now, but they're going back out in the next few days)
I only took 1 day to resubmit a story after a rejection early in the month, but then I had two rejections during crunch time, which are still waiting for resubmission at 12 and 5 days, respectively (for shame, for shame)
I made 9 blog posts
Between writing, this blog, and Critters, I took 4 days off (technically 5, since I planned some posts ahead of time before vacation)

Analysis
Pandora's Time is the reason I have been depriving myself of sleep.  It's not unusual for me to go to bed late, but not as late as I've been doing for the last week.  The deadline for the anthology is tomorrow, and once I realized how close that was I worked like mad to figure it out.  I wound up switching back to its original ending (I had modified the ending for Critters, and based on some comments decided to go back,) plus I tightened/cleaned it up and tried to address a few reader concerns.  At any rate, it's done with a day to spare.  In case anyone is wondering what I did about the dilemma I blogged about here, I went ahead and sent the story to Times of Trouble despite being over their word count.  In my cover letter I told them it was a bit longer than they called for, but I hoped they would do me the courtesy of starting to read it, just like they would with any other submission.  I really do feel like it's a good fit, and I had a lot of positive responses from Critter folk who said they didn't want to put it down, so I'm hoping the editor will feel the same when he reads through it.
 
I feel pretty satisfied with my progress this month.  I stalled a bit while rewriting The French Maid--that story has given me more trouble than any other I've written.  I don't want to abandon it, but I keep getting stuck with how to proceed.  This one will definitely need a second round of Critters once I get a complete draft again (I think I'm on draft 9 since I first created it.)
 
I even managed a little networking this month.  Not much, but more than I've done in May or April.
 
My goals for July are to finish rewriting The (danged) French Maid, do a second draft of my most recently finished story so I can send it to Critters, find some people to critique my mystery story (which is the wrong genre for Critters,) start a new time-travel story I had an idea for (thanks Dad,) and check out (and possibly participate in) a shared-universe story collection I've been invited to.  My blogging goals remain the same:  10-15 posts, and more networking.
 
Happy Independence Day, everybody!  (Unless you're not in the U.S.--in that case, just have a good July!)

"What I Learned on My Summer Vacation"

Two weeks ago, my husband, son, and I went to Tehachapi, CA with my in-laws for a mountainous Californian vacation.  Mountains are not typically what I expect when I think of California (that's what my own state is known for, after all.)  I didn't even realize, when my father-in-law talked about seeing giant Redwoods and Sequoias, that they'd be in the mountains (duh, Eileen, evergreens thrive at higher altitudes.)

We all had a great time, although I suspect that my sister-in-law's days of being willing to sleep on a sleeper sofa are about at their end--just as mine ended a few years ago.  My poor in-laws won't be able to fill their timeshares to capacity for much longer--at least until they get more grandkids, and the grandkids are big enough to need beds instead of cribs.

Here are a few things I learned while on vacation:

1. I think my son has chosen a new lovey--his monkey, which he carried through the airport without losing it or needing us to carry it for him

2. An ostrich egg is equivalent to 18-24 chicken eggs
3. Ostrich eggs require hammers to open (which we didn't have, so we used the knife block)
4. My son is still allergic to eggs (learned this from a cookie, though, not the ostrich egg--and kudos to my cousin-in-law's oldest son for tipping me off before my son had eaten much of it)
5. Alpaca yarn is very soft
6. Alpacas require big, friendly (to humans) dogs to protect them from predators
7. Ostriches are perfectly capable of protecting themselves from predators, thank you very much
8. A positive genetic link has been found between the ostrich and the t-rex (must be why they're so capable of protecting themselves)
9. My father-in-law seemed a little serious about the idea of starting an alpaca farm

10. Although my son can say the word "baby," he is wary of tiny babies, especially ones that make noise
11. I still sometimes get motionsickness, especially when paying attention to a wiggling child during turbulence (no barf bags needed, thankfully)

12. It took me 14 armspans (I'm 5'8") to encircle a giant Sequoia

13. Sequoias live up to 3,000 years, and drink 100 gallons of water each day

14. Farmers used to use the hollows in sequoias to house geese
15. Tehachapi has the largest wind farm in California
16. My son loves wind turbines

17. After standing directly beneath a giant 1.5 megawatt turbine, I have no desire to play Don Quixote (it was eerie standing beneath the blades, watching them swing down, and hoping they wouldn't break)

  18.   Oh yeah... and my son can climb out of a crib by himself

Wait... what was that last?

Yes, my son learned to climb out of the portable crib while we were in California.  I had just put him down for his nap and then prepared to go to a wine tasting.  I was coming out of the bathroom (right next to our bedroom) when I saw the doorhandle moving.  The half-formed thought in my mind was that somebody had gone into the bedroom again, which was odd, when the door opened and my son peeked out at me.  I'll never forget that moment.  We stared at each other for a moment, me in shock and him with a mischevious smile, before he closed the door and scampered back into the room.  I walked in a daze to the living room (where my father-in-law, who had been sunbathing by our bedroom window, had just come inside because he'd heard a thump) to ask whether anyone had gone into our son's room.  No one had.

Finally my brain, almost in slow motion, made the full connection that he'd gotten out on his own.  I headed back to the room to put him back in the crib when I started laughing, and I had to stay out until I'd regained my composure.  I couldn't stop marvelling at his accomplishment for the rest of the day--my son had hit a major milestone!

After we got home, I checked the height of the rails of his crib against the height of the portable crib, and they were pretty darn close--so it was time to consider Big Boy Bed options.  My husband wants to get him a racecar bed.  Low-end toddler beds start at about $70, but racecar toddler beds start at $200.  If we're going to spend that much on a bed, it had darn well better last for a while, so we're thinking of doing a twin-size racecar bed.  We've found a few options, including these two woodworking plans that we could make ourselves--and when I say ourselves, I mean with the help of our dads :)

Which do you like better?  The second one requires more wood, probably because it boasts a "hidden storage area" (presumably a drawer underneath) and also sounds like it's a little more complex (i.e. harder for us novice woodworkers.)  I like how they both use the spoiler for a shelf.

Then my husband found this bed.  It's $900 ($1100 if you count shipping)

He wants to modify the woodworking plans to put the bat signal on the hubcaps and side, make the edges more wing-shaped, and of course paint it black.  And here I thought he was already living vicariously through our son with the racecar bed!

Of course, none of these beds match the jungle theme in our son's room, but hey, the kid loves cars.

For now, we took the dropside off the crib and added a bedrail, making our own daybed.  So far, he's stayed in bed at naptime (knock on wood.)  We'll keep it like this until we figure out (and possibly build) whatever bed he'll use for the next ten years or so.

I love this picture.  "What's this?"

Critters responses and Submission Dilemmas

I got much more positive responses from my second round of Critters than my first--mostly, I think, because Pandora's Time is a much tighter and well-written story than The French Maid.  The French Maid is still giving me trouble.  I started working on a complete rewrite, and I'm already stalling again.  I don't think any other story I've written has gone through so many incarnations, nor caused me to fret so much over how to approach it.  Hopefully I'll be happy with the end result, but right now it's sapping a lot of energy.

Pandora's Time got ten critiques, as opposed to the 25 from last time.  This is probably due to the fact that Pandora's Time is 10,000 words long, twice as long as The French Maid was.  Based on the responses I got, I'll probably quickly tidy up of Pandora's Time and then get it out into the world.  I'm having a bit of a dilemma though:  there's an anthology with an upcoming deadline that I'd like to send it to--it's called Times of Trouble and is to be full of time travel stories.  It sounds like a really great fit for the story--but I just realized that Pandora's Time is over their word count limit.

I'm torn.  Usually I try to follow submission guidelines to the letter, but I really feel like this would be a great fit.  And it IS an anthology, meaning they'll probably have some flexibility in lengths.  Do I send it anyway?  And if I do, do I say "my story is over your word limit but I feel it is a good fit..." (something editors probably get regularly and cringe to hear) or do I just send it without drawing attention to the length?  Gaahh!  I don't know what to do!

If anybody from Critters stops by, thanks for your helpful critiques!

It's Never Too Early to Introduce Your Children to Science Fiction

I found this excellent book at the library the other day.

Space Case by Edward Marshall, with pictures by James Marshall

Mostly I only get my son board books, since it's too easy for him to tear paper pages (in fact, he currently lacks the manual dexterity to turn paper pages without skipping a ton) but when I saw the title and cover, I couldn't resist.

It's a very fun story about a space alien who comes to Earth, discovers Halloween, makes a friend and follows his friend to school.  It has no real science of course--but that's part of its charm.  I cracked up at the line "After studying the dictionary, the thing found it easier to communicate."  And I love this page:

In case you can't read the narrative, it says "[It came] to meet the natives, who were not especially friendly."  The picture, and the implications that go along with space-alien-lore and cows was funny to me.

I definitely recommend this book to parents of young children, since it's a fun, silly little story.  It even has a tiny bit of a lesson in acceptance.

This is not my first attempt to indoctrinate my son into liking science fiction.  He has two Star Trek bibs:  one says "Jean-Luc's my hero," and the other has a picture of a baby Vulcan and says "Mind meld This."  He also had a onesie that said "Future Trekkie," which he has long since outgrown.  Here are some pictures I took of him last May, on the day the most recent Star Trek movie came out

I just love scifi, and I'm working to keep it going into the Next Generation!

NaNoWriMo this November

Okay, hands up.  How many of you have heard of NaNoWriMo?  It stands for NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth, and it refers to an absolutely insane event where writers and wannabe writers from all over the world sacrifice the entire month of November in the pursuit of writing a lucid, cohesive novel of 50,000 words or more.

50,000 words in 30 days.  That's 1,666.67 words per day.  (Or 69.44 words per hour, or just 1.16 words per minute, which doesn't seem too bad, until you remember that you still have to eat and sleep, and maybe take care of your toddler as well.)

My kneejerk reaction to NaNoWriMo, when I first heard of it five years ago, was a resounding "WHY???"  After all, I reasoned, anything I could write that was that long, written in such a short amount of time, would be absolute crap.  Why rush myself?

However, the answer is starting to dawn on me.  I've been writing for years.  Even before I decided it was What I Wanted To Do With My Life, I was writing a story here, jotting down an idea there, and making up an unending stream of fictional scenarios in my head (most of which nobody else would ever want to hear, but at least they keep me entertained.  Sometimes they even keep me from getting enough sleep, as they just keep growing in the middle of the night...)  I've also been writing seriously for about six years, and working hard and consistently for the last year.  I've got six stories that I'm currently trying to get published, one that is scheduled to be published, another half-dozen or so that just need a round (or two, or twenty) of critiquing and rewrites before I can try to get them published, and a children's book (technically story-length, for word count purposes) that also needs a bit of work before trying to get it published.

But in all this time I've never written, or even completed one chapter, of a novel.  I feel that it's time to take the plunge, especially since I've been working hard these last few months to write very consistently.  And what better way to take the plunge than by enforcing a crazy deadline?  I've already signed up on the website, with the username ScienceFictionMommy.  At the very least I'll be able to find out whether I will sink or swim (or swim with the literary fishes...)

My plan is to spend most of the month of October doing research and outlining, so I'll have a framework to build on come November.  In fact, the title I mentioned in a previous post, Smooches by Proxy, seems to have the potential to turn into this novel.  Maybe.  If I can just develop enough of a plot for it, hee hee.

Interestingly enough, the conclusions I outlined above mirror something NaNoWriMo has in their FAQs, which I will quote below for your enjoyment.  I'll blog more (probably a whole lot) about this venture come October and November, when you'll all get a firsthand account of how crazy this will make me.  :)



If I'm just writing 50,000 words of crap, why bother? Why not just write a real novel later, when I have more time?

There are three reasons.

1) If you don't do it now, you probably never will. Novel writing is mostly a "one day" event. As in "One day, I'd like to write a novel." Here's the truth: 99% of us, if left to our own devices, would never make the time to write a novel. It's just so far outside our normal lives that it constantly slips down to the bottom of our to-do lists. The structure of NaNoWriMo forces you to put away all those self-defeating worries and START. Once you have the first five chapters under your belt, the rest will come easily. Or painfully. But it will come. And you'll have friends to help you see it through to 50k.

2) Aiming low is the best way to succeed. With entry-level novel writing, shooting for the moon is the surest way to get nowhere. With high expectations, everything you write will sound cheesy and awkward. Once you start evaluating your story in terms of word count, you take that pressure off yourself. And you'll start surprising yourself with a great bit of dialogue here and a ingenious plot twist there. Characters will start doing things you never expected, taking the story places you'd never imagined. There will be much execrable prose, yes. But amidst the crap, there will be beauty. A lot of it.

3) Art for art's sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. Doing something just for the hell of it is a wonderful antidote to all the chores and "must-dos" of daily life. Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.