A quick update…

First off, I reached my 50 hours target for revision in March, with – well, let’s say, with a little time to spare. 🙂

In April, you’ll hear a lot from me, between A-Z challenge posts and Weekend Writing Warriors, but you probably won’t hear much about my Camp Nanowrimo process in between that. Never fear, though, I’ll be plugging away at “The Gnomes are Missing” and hopefully having a blast.

Oh, I’m also going to be doing the open mike night in James Street North Wednesday evening, reading two flash stories, “I heard Dad’s voice” and “Welcome to Your Revolution.”

So yeah, that’s what’s up with me. (Or part of it.) Probably won’t be juggling What’s up Wednesday until April is over.

What’s Up Wednesday? It doesn’t look like spring yet

What’s Up Wednesday is a weekly blogfest to share the answers to a few simple questions… Join us!

What I’m reading:

Mostly short stories, from PodCastle, Shimmer, and Andromeda Spaceways. Still listening to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Culture: Excession’ on Audible. I found myself without my Kindle and tablet yesterday, still wanted to get some reading done. I stopped at a bookstore and considered picking up “Witches Abroad,” “Small Gods,” or “Magic Burns,” but ended up going home and reading a chapter and a half from “Knot Gneiss.”

What I’m writing:

NaNoEdMo hour counter is at 39 hours, 48 minutes, and I haven’t done any editing for today! The big changes to Orpheus/Underworld are underway, and I’ve broken ground on “The Time Bubble Blues.” Haven’t gotten much done on HTRYN and “The Angel’s Charlie” since last week.

What inspires me right now:

The Veronica Mars movie, whoohoo! Shiny new Chromebooks for Camp Nanowrimo. The lecture notes I brought back from Odyssey and the prospect of this year’s summer workshops coming.

What else I’ve been up to:

Getting locked out of my office, which is why I don’t have the Kindle or lots of my other gear which is locked inside. 😉 Checking out my assigned cabin and trying to get a little family reunion together.

What about you? Click here to join the hop or check in with some other great writers.

A disappointment and some new plans

Just heard back from Kij Johnson about her CSSF workshop – once again, I didn’t make it in. I’m disappointed, but not too badly. There’s lots of other stuff going on in my writing life, and ‘Kitchen Scale’ is no longer looking so shiny somehow.

I’ve sent a new sample story over to Chris McKitterick, to throw my hat into the ring for his CSSF workshop; that’s the two week short story critiquing program I attended in the summer of 2011 and 2012. I’ve been working on my enrollment form for TNEO 2014, where I think I’ll go in the novel group and workshop “Won’t Somebody Think of the Children.”

I’ve also committed to finishing “The Gnomes are Missing” for Camp Nano in April! This was the novel project that I pitched to Kij for the workshop last summer, and I’m really excited about getting back to it.

Let’s see, what else? I got a cool idea while walking to the bus stop this afternoon; guidance counselors. Like really freaky good ones who listen to anything you can come up with about what sort of life you want and come up with the perfect plan for what you should do to get that kind of life. Not a perfect plan perhaps, but much better than anything you could do for yourself.

Except no plan can ever prepare you for the choices you’ll have to make, or for the way life changes your priorities. And the guidance counselors are free until you’re 18 or 19–after that, it gets more expensive. (And not necessarily in terms of money.) 🙂 It’s just a novum so far, not sure what the characters or the plot will be, but I think it could be a really fun one.

Camp Victory is anticlimactic

But at least it’s a victory, right? 🙂

I had 534 more words to write when I got up this morning, (for my slacker goal of 10k in July,) and I brought the Alphasmart with me on the bus, hoping to get some more of ‘The Aurigae Express’ written. It went pretty well, got up to the word count just as the bus was entering downtown Burlington, read some of ‘My Man Jeeves’, which is pissing me off because half the stories don’t have Jeeves or Wooster–but that’s a different story.

So, the bus got stuck in a bit of traffic on the beach road this afternoon, but I was happy watching an episode of the ‘90210’ reboot on my iPod. After dinner, spent a while pulling together all of the different word count I’d done in July from nearly a dozen different files, and copied it into the validator on campnanowrimo.org

Yay! It looks like I got just the right amount of padding, because the validator took away about a dozen words and left me with exactly ten thousand. So next, of course, I clicked the goodies button, and…

No winner goodies for another week and a half, not even banner images or a PDF winner’s certificate. Le sigh.

A bad Camp Nanowrimo omen

 

Hey there, I’m back from Odyssey, good to see you all!

I haven’t really been doing that well for Camp in July. I set my goal for 10,000 words, and got off to a pretty good start, clocking up over 6600 in the first 8 days. But those were for Odyssey submissions, finishing up “That which was Caesar’s,” (which I started in June,) and writing “Frigga’s Masterpiece” over the first weekend in July. But then Masterpiece was submitted, and I haven’t really been pushing myself to write that much since.

I got a little more written over the last two weeks of Odyssey, and I actually got started on the end of “The Aurigae Express” last night. But I was going to my car this afternoon, pulled out the keychain – and my Camp Nano key fob broke! I don’t even know how it happened, I just pulled the keys out my pocket and what was left of the fob bounced on the pavement. It still looks very pretty, but there’s really no way to put it on a keyring anymore. 😦

 

It’s the square one that says ’50K’ with the bullseye that I’m talking about, not the round fob with the bird tweeting ‘Nanowrimo.’ Yes, I have an embarrassment of OLL riches and shouldn’t let the loss of one keychain fob get to me so much. But those would be easier words to live by after I’d made my camp word count goal. Sigh.

 

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Aurigae Express 7

Greetings from Odyssey! Sorry I missed WeWriWa last week, but I’m going back to  my Camp Nanowrimo project “The Aurigae Express.” Alan and Diane are police partners who’ve volunteered to visit an alien planet where very few Earthlings have gone, to track down a fugitive and retrieve her ill-gotten millions. They’ve boarded an alien ship that takes Earthling passengers through hyperspace, and the ship’s made its first Jump. Neither of them are reacting very well to the experience.

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A frightening vision popped into view, curling brown tendrils and two piercing eyes at the bottom of a face. Alan yelped again before realizing that the face was upside down and Diane was peering over the edge of her bunk. The upper levels of his brain resented her for having recovered so well that she felt comfortable moving about.

“We should probably think about going to meet our fellow passengers.”

Alan whimpered again. Fear of strangers was something that he couldn’t even put into words at this point, but he definitely wouldn’t feel comfortable around them yet.

“Okay, okay, no big hurry.” Diane’s upside-down face withdrew, leaving only a few trailing ends of hair to taunt him.

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Aurigae Express 6

Good morning! This may be my last Weekend Writing Warriors entry for a while; I’m off to Odyssey today, and not sure if I’m going to keep up with sharing eight sentences a week while I’m there. But for now, I’m still in  my Camp Nanowrimo project “The Aurigae Express.” Alan and Diane are police partners who’ve volunteered to visit an alien planet where very few Earthlings have gone, to track down a fugitive and retrieve her ill-gotten millions. They’ve boarded an alien ship that takes Earthling passengers through hyperspace, and the ship’s just made its first Jump.

First Snippet Second Snippet Third Snippet Fourth Snippet Fifth Snippet

“Are you…” Those were both letters, weren’t they? R and U… what had he been trying to spell–R U N for run? No, he wasn’t in any shape to run anywhere, and it would be impossible in zero gravity anyway.

“That was fucked up.” For a few seconds, Alan was impressed that he’d managed such a coherent thought, and then realized that he hadn’t. He hadn’t moved his lips, or formed that thought before he heard it.

“Dixie?”

“Kick your ass…”

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Aurigae Express 5

Good morning! It’s time for the next eight sentences from my Camp Nanowrimo project “The Aurigae Express.” To briefly set the scene, Alan and Diane are police partners who’ve volunteered to visit an alien planet where very few Earthlings have gone, to track down a fugitive and retrieve her ill-gotten millions. They’ve boarded an alien ship that takes Earthling passengers through hyperspace, and the ship’s just made its first Jump.

First Snippet Second Snippet Third Snippet Fourth Snippet

His body no longer seemed to be some hideously unfamiliar monstrosity, and the sights and sounds of the chamber were becoming more bearable as he got used to them.

 

“Ummmmmmmmm…” The humming sound that Alan could make was so immediately soothing that he kept it up for a long time before remembering why he had started in a first place. The sound was a word, wasn’t it? Well, not really a word, but a sound that held a meaning like a word in some ways, except that he’d stretched it out for so long that even that sense of it was lost. He forced himself to stop the humming, and some inner child he hadn’t known about made a disappointed sob. “Die…” That wasn’t so pleasant to think about. No, he still didn’t have the right word, the right name. He forced himself to try again.

 

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Aurigae Express 4

Good morning! It’s time for the next eight sentences from my Camp Nanowrimo project “The Aurigae Express.” To briefly set the scene, Alan and Diane are police partners who’ve volunteered to visit an alien planet where very few Earthlings have gone, to track down a fugitive and retrieve her ill-gotten millions. They’ve boarded an alien ship that takes Earthling passengers through hyperspace, and the ship’s just made its first Jump.

First Snippet Second Snippet Third Snippet

The next thing he realized was that he was curled up in a fetal ball. That seemed to be wrong somehow, and after a moment of painful thought he figured out why; the last thing he remembered was being strapped in. How could he have curled up into a ball while the straps held his limbs in place?

The answer to that was obvious. Somehow he must have been desperate enough to retreat from reality that he’d worked the strap releases himself. That was a little hard to reconcile with his memories of being so unfamiliar with his body, but maybe there were layers and layers to how the human nerve system reacted to hyperspace exposure.

His nerve system reacted to the thought of hyperspace with a series of violent spasming shudders, and Alan struggled to strap himself back into the crash couch again before he managed to go flying into a wall.

Aside from that looming memory of something traumatic looming at the edges of his awareness, the worst appeared to be done with. 

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Aurigae Express 3

Good morning! It’s time for the next eight sentences from my Camp Nanowrimo project “The Aurigae Express.” To briefly set the scene, Alan and Diane are police partners who’ve volunteered to visit an alien planet where very few Earthlings have gone, to track down a fugitive and retrieve her ill-gotten millions. They’ve boarded an alien ship that takes Earthling passengers through hyperspace, and the ship’s just made its first Jump.

First Snippet Second Snippet

He felt a mixture of pain, confusion, and some kind of a deep melancholia or depression. All of his limbs appeared to be hooked up the wrong way, and he wasn’t even sure what the proper number of them was. Some kind of vibrations and lights appeared to be assaulting him from particular directions, but for a long time he couldn’t make sense of them. Everything hurt, especially remembering.

Eventually things clicked near enough to the reality that he knew that he could recognize a few things. He remembered that his name was Alan, and that he’d actually lobbied to get into a starship travelling to an alien planet eight and a half light years away using some mode of transportation far beyond everything that the human race understood as being possible under the laws of physics.

For a second he tried to reject that identity. Alan was obviously dangerously insane.

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/.