reasons i suck

Dang-it

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I was about to post a link to a one-star review in honor of John Scalzi’s latest post on the subject, but I see I already have, way back in November. Ah, hell.

So instead, I’ll post this: The book I’m reading is The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston. It’s an interesting book–excellent in a lot of ways, and mildly disappointing in others. I get the impression it’s made for readers with buttons in different places than I have.

But that’ll have to wait until after I finish reading it. What I wanted to mention was a scene about two-thirds in where Protagonist’s Best Friend is talking to Screwed-Up Protagonist about his screwed-upness. SUP has a Mysterious Terrible Event in his past that has him acting like a contemptuous jerk throughout the book, and PBF takes the brunt of it. Eventually, PBF says this:

I read these books on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, they described you pretty smack-on.

And I was immediately thrown out of the story. My brain went straight to “Author did research. Research in book” and suddenly it was like I was smelling plastic flowers.

Which isn’t fair to the author, because the scene is completely earned and totally in character, but who ever said reading is fair? It was a clunker moment, and it hurt. I’ll want to write more about this book later.

Let me wrap up with this: After I wrote my “Review-down” post on Saturday night, I started feeling pretty rotten. Wisely, I announced this to my family and went to bed at 10. By 4 am, I was up again, thanks to muscle aches and a sore throat. I gargled with Listerine, took some Tylenol and played Meebling until the drugs kicked in (no link to Meebling, because your life is made of time, and both are so very precious). Then it was back to bed until–no kidding–ten am when my wife dragged me out of bed. Sleep! How good to see you again!

I still feel sorta awful, and I’m going to see if my good buddy Bed Rest can do anything about that.

Blog to LJ/Facebook/whatever

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Unlink your feeds, a manifesto. I wonder what folks think of this, especially folks on Facebook. Is it too much? Should I unlink my own feeds?

Man Bites World Revise-down!

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Today I am a dumb person.

I started late this morning–waking at 6 am–and caught a bus to the Starbucks. I worked until 11, had a quick lunch, then hit the library at 11:45. I worked there until they closed at 6 pm.

How much work did I do? I was five pages from the end of the stinking book when they threw us out. I couldn’t wrap up for the day so close to the end, so I went *back* to the Starbucks, bought a little food, and finished writing the new (much less dark) ending.

Success! Finish! All I had to do was note the changes I made in the change file, and cross off the notes I’d accomplished in my revision file, and I could call it done!

Except I opened the revision file and found one last note I need to address. One huge note. It’s not something I can fix in one scene; it’s spread throughout the whole book.

This shit wasn’t almost done. I still have an assload left to do. And I worked nearly 14 hours today. Jesus. I don’t mind having work to do on the book, I just wish I hadn’t convinced myself I was almost at the finish line when I came around the bend and saw a long stretch of road ahead. That shit is demoralizing.

I’ll try to post something interesting tomorrow.

Not day-jobbing today

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In truth, I feel like crap. Yay! The sun is bright, though, and I’m told it will be warm later. I’ll try to spend a little time outside in it.

Instead, I’m plugging away at Man Bites World. Why not? What else am I going to do with my time, read Facebook?

Let me put a question or three to you before I log off: How do you guys feel about a book that has the same title as another book? Does it matter if they’re in different genres? If the previous one is out of print? Still in print? And how would you go about judging the popularity of that older book to determine how well-remembered that title is?

Ugh. Not braining well today, but it’s time to log off and get back to my revisions.

Things that aren’t a secret

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It’s no great secret that Man Bites World is way past deadline. What startled me though was that I looked through my “goof” file for this project, and I realized I started writing it over a year ago. A quick glance at my LJ from that time shows that I was struggling with the outline back in early Jan. ’09.

Now, the revisions for Game of Cages took up a bunch of last year, but reviewing my progress notes suggest that it didn’t take that much time. I’ve just been struggling with this story.

::shakes fist at Word document::

In which I disagree with Patrick Rothfuss and John Scalzi

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While skimming around Scalzi’s blog, I found a link to this post by Patrick Rothfuss about advice for aspiring writers, along with a note by John saying he agrees. I recommend clicking through and reading it (if you want) but the Readers Digest version is that aspiring writers should live somewhere cheap so they have plenty of time to write.

One of the places Rothfuss mentions is Seattle, my own adopted hometown, as though people would need to work 70-hour weeks to survive, and when would those city folk do their writing, huh? When?

Well, hey, I was an aspiring writer in Seattle for almost two decades and I never worked a 70-hour week in my life. At first, I shared an apartment for several months, crashing on a friend’s couch. That was back in ’89-90. Then we rented a house–a thousand bucks a month split four/five ways, depending who had come and who had gone.

Then my wife and I moved in together back in ’94. We’ve lived in the same apartment since then, with only a couple of minor rent increases.

Yeah, on one hand we’re lucky. On another we’re typical. We decided to live cheaply and we have. We don’t own a car. We just cancelled our cable. We don’t own a cell phone or an x-box, and if my wife were more tech-savvy we’d be all over Skype. My wife walks to the supermarket with a cart and carries our groceries home. I ride the bus to work (which is less than 30-minutes away, by design). My wife and I both have part-time jobs (if you don’t count my writing, which I don’t for this discussion). We work three days, homeschool the other three.

I don’t say this to crow about my virtue, such as it is. It’s really not a matter of virtue. It’s about choices. Living in a city means I can pinch pennies that non-urbanites can’t. It also means that I have access to public services that make it possible to live poor. The downtown bus that goes near my apartment is considered to run on a meager schedule, but that only means it passes by every 45 minutes. And if I take it the other way, I can ride to one of the largest parks in the city.

And that doesn’t even touch on our library system here, which is wonderful despite the belt-tightening that’s been ongoing.

You know what else helps? Living wages. The median wage in Southcentral Wisconson non-metropolitan areas is less than $13.50 an hour. In Seattle, it’s nearly twenty bucks. Yeah, it’s balanced by a higher cost of living, but there are ways to make that money go farther.

Above all that, you have museums, concerts, galleries, independent bookstores, and people. Lots and lots of people to meet.

What I’m saying isn’t that Rothfuss is wrong (actually, I’ll say that here: “He’s wrong”), it’s that you don’t need to run off to Small Town, USA to have time for your writing. You don’t need to work 70-hour weeks (or even 60- or even 40- hour weeks) to survive out here. You just have to want it.

Now, once you have a writing contract and are making your pennies from your books, that might be the time to run off to the hills and live cheap on your advances–if you can give up all those libraries and museums.

Here’s the Valentine I bought for my wife

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Touching, right?

What do you guys think?

The problem with giving up TV is that you don’t have TV anymore.

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So, I told my wife I needed to do some scanning tonight so I could mail back my galleys tomorrow. Fine, fine, she answered. We had dinner and the boy made me play the Lego Indiana Jones levels he created.

After that, they started putting on their jackets.

“We’re going to the pub on the corner to watch the Olympics.”

“What? You’re leaving?”

“I’m having a milkshake!”

“Well, I don’t know if they have milkshakes there–”

“Mom, they do!”

“But we’re going to watch the opening ceremonies. I don’t know how long we’ll stay.”

They put on their jackets. The boy refused–three times–to change from his shorts into long pants. My wife shrugged, apologized, and said “This will give you a chance to work.” Then they left.

So I’m sitting here in this empty apartment. It’s quiet. Jesus, it’s never quiet around here. I should be relaxing and enjoying the solitude. I love solitude. But the truth is that I already miss them.

Things that are annoying

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Let’s add something to the long list:

When I scan a document I have to lay it in portrait mode, even though the page is printed landscape. I scan it, rotate it appropriately and save it.

Sounds sensible, right?

Except this morning, after 80-some pages, I discovered that rotating it to landscape mode was cutting off the margins of the page. You know, where all my hand-written corrections were.

Dear software designers: wtf?

Wrapping up for the day

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The Valentines contest winner has been chosen. Macmillan books are back on Amazon.com’s shelves (I can’t figure out whether the two companies reached a deal or Hatchet’s announcement that they were going to an agency model took the wind out of their sails).

And tomorrow, February 6th, is going to be the two year anniversary of the day my agent and I accepted Del Rey’s offer for Child of Fire. I’ll be celebrating a couple of different ways. For instance, I won’t be bringing my lap top to the coffee shop in the morning, just my galleys. I don’t know what I’ll do later, maybe (gasp!) watch a movie! Shocking, I know.