Apparently, this is how I work:

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1. Shiny new idea!!! Must think about ways to make it good.

2. Think think think think.

3. I can’t stand the wait! Must start writing!

4. write write write

5. Holy crap, I’m just about at the end of the book and it’s only 34,000 words long? Why didn’t I think more before I started? If I don’t figure something out, I’m going to have to ditch all the work I’ve done on this shiny idea!

6. Think think think self-recrimination think think think.

7. Hey… what about [completely obvious thing]? Oh! Think think think think.

Norwescon Con Report

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Short version: No.

Long version: I’ll be spending tomorrow at the library, writing my new book.

Probably.

I will say that I saw more ass crack than I’m personally comfortable with, and while people were perfectly nice, the folks I did manage to chat with did not share any of my interests. No, I’ve never seen the Matt Smith “Doctor” (and I’m not all that fond of Tennant, either). No, I don’t know what “GNOME” is, let alone what it’s doing on my MacBook (“running” apparently).

Actually, it was pretty much what I expected: a place for folks to connect with their friends and blather about things genre.

It does require me to ask myself: What the hell are my interests? What could I talk about at a con? The nuances of the ACA? What the hell do I know about now that I’m a stay-at-home dad who spends most of his time working on books and trying to get his son to flush the damn toilet?

At least I know what programming is like.

N Things Make a Post

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n-6 ) I want to say thanks to everyone who answers my hypothetical posts. I don’t always respond to every comment mainly because I don’t want to do a bunch of “Cool!” or “That’s a great idea!” replies, but that’s pretty much what I’m thinking. However, my filmmaker friend Steve Barr left this comment, which probably deserves its own story seed spot.

n-5 ) “Then you are prejudiced, Timmy, because Steve is your filmmaker friend, and not your friend.” (I suspect that the only people who’ll get that reference are readers Of A Certain Age.

n-4) According to Twitter, ARCs of Circle of Enemies have been spotted in the wild. Yay! (gulp!)

n-3 ) Norwescon starts today but I’m not going. I have some stuff to do, and I have other plans for tonight. Here’s my schedule for the rest of the day: 1. Finish this post. 2. Email agent to let her know Twenty Palaces is on the way. 3. Walk to the post office on this chilly, sunny day to mail said book. 4. Go to library to drop off books and write a few pages of A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark. 5. Return home to have dinner (burger salad tonight!) 6. Kick back with a book and read for most of the evening. God, I’m so looking forward to reading again.

n-2 ) This deserves its own post, but R.I.P. Elisabeth Sladen. She was the costar of the first Dr. Who I ever saw, and every costar since has had to measure themselves against her. She was wonderful in the role, and I hope that she had good, happy, satisfying life. Too soon.

n-1 ) I’ve talked before about the Bookscan numbers Amazon.com shares with authors, and the fact that the numbers for my books were improving after I guest-posted at Charles Stross’s blog. Well, last week the numbers had nearly returned to the levels they were during my stint at antipope.org, and I wondered over it. This week, the numbers have jumped even higher. Like, much higher, about triple what they were before my guest blog. At this point, I don’t much care why. I just want it to keep going on.

n) I haven’t seen GAME OF THRONES and I’m not planning to. The problem with having a kid who’s a night owl is that I can’t spend late evenings watching grownup shows with the volume down while he sleeps. Instead, I spend them sitting beside him, gently suggesting he shut his damn eyes and lie back down. I’m seriously excited for the next book, though.

5 Things Make a Post

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1) I have three things left to do before I send Twenty Palaces to my agent: clean up some formatting issues like chapter headings, spellcheck, and check every instance of “him” in the script to see if I should have changed it to “me” when I went changed the book from a third person pov to a first person pov. So incredibly dull but I’m really catching some embarrassing errors, like “I jumped to his feet.” Oh well.

2) Here’s my Norwescon schedule:

Friday: Whatever I want.
Saturday: Whatever I want.
Sunday: Stay home and hang out with my son.

Hah! I’ll be there as a regular attendee, mainly to look around and see whatever this is to be seen. It’ll be my first convention, so I don’t expect to know anyone. If you’re going to be there and you see me, please feel free to say hello. I look like this. Also, I have a terrible memory for faces and names, so don’t be offended if it takes me a couple of seconds to “place” you.

3) Seattle is enduring the coldest April on record. I’m sorta sick of it.

4) Revisions on Twenty Palaces have taken control of my life. I can’t wait to send them off, if only so I can go back to responding to comments promptly (as opposed to passive-aggressively complaining on my blog, like this post) and reading books. Honestly, I can’t wait to spend some hours every day reading.

5) This NY Times article (only available if you haven’t used up your 20 articles/month) isn’t the first time I’ve heard that fidgeting has a powerful effect on weight gain and loss. I’ve been using my standing desk more often (thanks to the Topricin my wife just bought me) but I attribute most of the weight I’ve lost recently to the fact that I’m getting the sleep I need. I still have a long way to go, of course.

The Undiversified Writer

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Several full-time writers have been talking on their blogs about how they make a living. John Scalzi for one, Tobias Buckell for another, and Chuck Wendig for a third[1] have mentioned that they make sure they have several pots on the boil at once.

I don’t have that. It turns out that I’m much too slow a writer[2] for that. I turned in Circle of Enemies to Del Rey seven months late. That’s shameful, but luckily they were careful to set my real deadline quite a bit farther out, so I didn’t suffer the career disaster that, arguably, I should have.

And the truth is, CoE was a really difficult book to write. I don’t know if I’ve blogged about the book in this way, but it’s better than anything I’ve ever written. Briefly: Ray’s successes draw attention to him and someone strikes at him through the people he knew; he discovers that his old car-stealing crew has acquired magic–magic that may be killing them–and he has to return to L.A. to find out what’s going on. It gets deeper into the nature of magic, it reveals a bit more of the society, but most of the book is about his complicated relationship with these people who used to be his whole life. (Plus face-punching, as always).

And now I’m revising Twenty Palaces and let me tell you, revision is the sort of thing that expands to fill all the available time I have. I can write 500, 1K, 1.5K words[3] of first draft and spend the rest of my day reading or being a human being, but when I have a revision in front of me it’s all I want to work on until I’m done. How the hell would I have a second income stream (assuming I could even think of what I could be writing besides fantasy fiction) when I’m so damn slow?

[1] Three dudes. Hm. I have quite a few female authors on my LJ friends list, but I can’t recall a woman talking about this subject. Have I missed something in my little window on the internet or is this a guy thing?

[2] There’s a powerful tension between “This is how I am” and “Argue for your limitations and they’re yours” that I have to continually adjust. I’m trying to increase my productivity (and I know it can increase, because it’s better now than it used to be) while keeping my expectations realistic.

[3] Never more than that. Not unless I want to ruin the next day’s work.

Five Things Make a Friday Post

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1) Quick question: Should I do another August book giveaway to promote Circle of Enemies? I’m not sure it did me any good last time, as far as drawing in new readers, but it was nice to give away cool stuff.

2) My wife and son are spending the day on their bikes, riding the Burke-Gilman trail as far as they can go. That means that, instead of spending the day writing at a Starbucks and the library, I’m going to work at home, sans interruptions. Kitchen floor: swept.

3) What have I been working on? I should be able to let you know very soon.

4) Taxes are nearly done. At this point it’s about printing them, e-filing and transferring the money to the correct account. Also, I was a complete idiot about them this year. Here’s why: I’d been stressing over the bill. Now, we had the money in savings, but I was stressing over it because it would cut quite deeply into our cushion. It was only last night, late, that I remembered that I had a CD with no early-withdrawal penalties set aside specifically for taxes–and it has triple what I need to cover the bill. Phew!

5) I’m not gluten-free anymore. I did lose a little weight, but it was mainly because we didn’t have food available when I was hungry. Me with low blood sugar? Not a good husband. Not a good parent. Besides, it’s unsustainable and unhealthy. Also, it didn’t stop the allergic reactions on my face. (This is an FYI: no diet advice, please.)

My April Fools Day promise

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April Fools Tip: If you think it’s funny when someone gets worried, angry, or upset at a prank, you’re doing it wrong.

Personally, I can’t stand April Fools Day; too many people think saying hurtful crap qualifies as a “joke.” It doesn’t. If you’re planning April Fools fun, it should be a) cruelty-free b) clearly a joke and not c) actually funny. If you want to break one of those rules, you should remember John Scalzi’s advice: The failure mode of clever is asshole.

So, if you’re planning a post announcing an unexpected divorce/death/cross-country move/mass layoff/new direction for your writing career, please reconsider. Please.

I will not be posting any pranks.

Yesterday was one of those difficult days

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Sometimes being a writer is easy and fun. You know what comes next in the story and you’re excited to get it all down, all the nuance and confusion, all the sudden unexpected turns of plot that seem just right.

I don’t have a lot of those days, myself. I suspect I struggle more than most writers; I’m certainly slower. I don’t talk about it online as much as I used to but yesterday, as I was doing some revisions, I realized a major complex scene was completely wrong and ridiculous. It turns out I’d established a much easier solution to the Problem At Hand early in the book, and why were they going to so much trouble when they already knew the easiest possible solution?

Discovering this sort of plot hole so late in the process fills me with despair.

A week or so ago a bunch of Tor authors, including Beth Bernobich, were doing a chat on Twitter, and I offered up a question that I thought the readers might be interested in: paraphrasing myself because of poor memory, I asked: “What’s the most surprising thing that’s different now that you’re a published author?”

All three writers gave pretty much the same answer (“There’s an awful lot of additional work involved!”) but for me it would be different. For me, the surprising change is that, as far as the writing goes, nothing is any better.

In non-writing aspects of my life, things are absolutely better. It’s great to have readers, and incredibly smart pros offering me revision notes, and to see my books in stores, and the money, too. All of that is better.

But in terms of sitting down at my computer and putting words on the page, there’s no extra confidence, no sense of validation, no ease or comfort. If anything, the struggle has extra headaches added to it: deadlines, personal and professional expectations, so on and so on.

So this morning, instead of getting out of bed, I laid there under the covers for an extra hour, thinking about the characters, what resources they had, what they needed and what they would never, ever do. I think I have the scene ready, and it’ll be better (not so “Hollywood” if you know what I mean) and shorter, too. What’s more, it’s a less tragic ending than I’ve been writing, which makes a nice change.

I’ll write it out later today or tomorrow. I’m nearly done with this thing (which for me means… what? two more weeks of work?) and then I can go back to something more fun. And hopefully I won’t have to freak out on Twitter again.

Not another blog post about sleep

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Okay, really it is. After going to bed at 11 last night, I woke at just after 4 am and couldn’t fall back. No, I don’t feel all that well today. In fact, my joints ache, my eyes ache, and my stomach is feeling cautious.

On top of that, being gluten-free is a gigantic pain in the ass. Gi. Gan. Tic. There’s no carb to be kept on hand to eat quickly, when a meal is delayed or no one is home. If you cook rice and stick it in the fridge, each grain gets all hard like little pills. Potatoes just get soggy. And yeah, we have quinoa, but you know what? Quinoa sucks. Don’t tell me what a complete protein it is; I’m an American in the 21st century, I could build a whole new person with the protein I eat in a month.

You know what’s quick and convenient? Bread. You know what tastes like shit? GF bread.

Ah well. I’ve done fasts before, and they always challenge me in ways I don’t expect. I’ve been trying to stay on top of the meals and calories–even with the extra cooking time wasted spent preparing these more labor-intensive foods, but I’m still seriously hungry for most of my day.

Yes, I know about “bodies holding onto fat when they think they’re starving.” My body doesn’t think it’s starving; I fed it two eggs with potatoes, cheese and black olives this morning. It has fuel, just not always when it needs it. There’s a lot of mental self-sabotage involved with food denial, and I just need to be aware of it.

Time for me to send an email to my agent, then get back to work on The Project That Must Not Be Named. I want to get as far as I can before I return home. I’m expecting the galleys for Circle of Enemies to be there, waiting for me.

Also, no, I’m not wearing green (or orange); I’m green on the inside.

Writing tech, tax tech, belly tech

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The new iPad has had unexpected benefits: In landscape orientation, the keyboard is a good size for my son’s hands and he spent much of last night writing a story. The software eased some of his usual anxieties about writing anything–mainly spelling and penmanship–and he completed over a thousand words of an absurd story called “The Tooth Fairy.” It also helps me see what we need to work on in his schooling. I thought he had quotation marks down, but no.


It’s (past) time to do our taxes and this year I got a recommendation from a successful local writer for an accountant she uses. There are three main problems: One is that it looks like I’d be filling out forms for him that are like Turbo Tax forms which he, presumably, will then enter into his own version of tax software. Assuming we’ve been doing our taxes correctly (more on that later) this seems like paying for data entry–is there any real benefit to using a professional? Two is that they don’t quote a specific rate. This is what they say:

Tax return preparation fees are based on a per form fee or an hourly rate schedule; whichever is most appropriate, on a client by client basis. Hourly rates vary depending on the staff member performing the work and the complexity of the work itself. In addition, direct expenses may be charged when applicable.

That’s as specific as it gets. We didn’t earn all that much last year, so I have no idea what they’ll actually charge us, but it’s likely that we can’t afford it. Third is that my wife thinks problems one and two are bullshit and we might as well Turbo Tax again this year.

Me, I’d hoped to uncover some extra deductions and go over quarterly taxes with him. See, I don’t do quarterly taxes, preferring to take the relatively minor penalty (about a hundred bucks) to avoid all that estimating and paying early. That should probably change, though. Does Turbo Tax even do that for me? It’s not like I have a lot of money coming to me this year beyond the on-publication payment for Circle of Enemies–I need to sell another book or two, and I have no idea if that’s even going to happen.

Sigh. It looks like another year of Turbo Taxing, unless someone has better advice


Exactly one week ago I had an egg sandwich for breakfast… and I immediately started sneezing and my nose started running like crazy. When I told my wife, she gave me a finger-wagging and blamed it on wheat gluten.

She’d seen a nutritionist two weeks earlier and came home to tell me we were going to be giving up wheat flour. She’s done it, too. Her body shed ten pounds very quickly and the weird red, rough skin… thing that’s been troubling both our faces for a long while immediately cleared up for her. Now she’s making scary noises about giving up wheat for good.

The sketchy thing is that her nutritionist has told her that the gluten clogs the spaces between the villi in your intestine. Me, I’m doubtful about that, but the results are there even if I’m doubtful about the mechanism.

I couldn’t join in right away, because I’d just gone grocery shopping and I wasn’t about to throw out all that damn bread. Still, the last shop was pretty much wheat-free and it’s time for me to join in. And I will. With luck, my face won’t be red and inflamed, and I’ll drop some of this extra weight. Weighing less will hopefully mean less pain and therefore more exercise. Current goal: live long enough to see my son graduate from college.

Anyway, the iPad is going to be recruited to this effort–I just need to find a good calorie counter/wellness app to download. (Suggestions more than welcome–accuracy and ease of use are my top considerations). The thing about giving up wheat is that I’m hungry all the time. I can eat a big bowl of curried rice, veg, and chicken but it will never be as satisfying at the same amount of pasta. I don’t mind being hungry–I’ve done some pretty severe fasts in my time–but it’s important for my wife to know she’s getting all the calories she needs, even if they’re more complex than they used to be.

So… any thoughts on going gluten-free? Any iPad wellness apps to recommend? What about those writerly tax problems? (No advice on the boy and his story, please; it’s still too new.)

Thanks.