My Writerly Blog

I stumbled upon an online story a couple of months ago through one of the digital fiction feeds I actually pay attention to. It was a really fun, neat little story, and I subscribed to the author's feed because I wanted to read more of his work. That first story was completely free online and on various readers (Kindle included). It was a story that used elements of the new digital world, but was essentially a straightforward print story online. Nothing incredibly innovative, just good writing. It was fairly popular, though, to date generating 72 comments (not bad for a non-commercial, non-controversial post). I didn't get any further posts from that feed for quite some time. The second story that came out was under a different model - the Kindle version was for sale, and once 100 Kindle copies had sold, he would release the free online version. It took only a few days for the free version to go up. After that, he began a new endeavor: a not-yet-written novel (novella, ...

Neil Gaiman got an interesting question at the reading last week: how does he come up with such wonderful names? Coraline was a typo (he misspelled Caroline on a letter, and thought the result was lovely). Richard Mayhew was a combo of Richard Curtis (director of Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral , among others), and a friend whose last name was Mayhew. The character suited his namesakes in his sort of bumbling, unexpected charm. Nobody Owens comes from the verse that appears in the book, a line including "nobody owns". These names seem easy, particularly to an author as clever as Gaiman. But he did reveal that some names don't come easily, and he searches and searches and searches until inanimate objects like chairs seem to offer suitable monikers. For me, this is how it is every single time I need to name something. I once had a ferret named Ferret-head. (Best ferret I ever had, by the way.) I keep the US Census Bureau's list of names (sorted by...

I went up to the Edinburgh Festival last week, mostly to hear Neil Gaiman read (yes, again). It also meant that I bought far too many books, more than I'd given myself leave to purchase. I should have expected it, of course, but there you go. The to-be-read stack next to my place at the dining room table is now quite towering and somewhat precarious, but it's full of good stuff. The first thing I read was my new copy of Gaiman's Neverwhere , which was different from my current crap edition in that he'd compiled and edited the various British and American versions that were out there to create the "Author's Preferred Text." How could I not get it, when even the non-author's preferred text is one of my favorite books of all time, and the reason I'm writing what I'm writing, studying what I'm studying? That thing fracking launched me. Anyway, it's been a while since I read an "adult" Gaiman book, what with the recent popular...

I'm sure I've written this post before, and I probably will write it again, but I'm such a dope I seem to always be forgetting about this issue. It helps me to reiterate it, and maybe some writer on some random Google search will come across it and take something home from it. Who knows. I teach beginner writers a lot, and they always ask me about advice they've gotten from writing books or other writers with regard to process. They think they absolutely should be writing X number of words, every day, at the same time. That it should all come out perfect in the first draft, and that writers who are published are just amazingly talented geniuses. I don't know how much they absorb of what I say, but I try my damnedest to shatter these illusions. I talk about planners and "pantsers" (those who fly by the seat of their pants, never knowing what will come next). I talk about notebooks, about habits, about writing a few words every day. That some of us ca...

I was invited to sit in on a talk today in the School of Computer Sciences. Yes, I was the only woman there. We won't dwell on that. What I will dwell on is my introduction to this totally rad geek toy. I'm not a computer scientist, not even a computer expert on an amateur level. I'm more of a high-end user: I love finding out what I can do with my electronic devices, and playing with them, but I don't (yet?) have in-depth knowledge like programming, building, hacking, anything like that. I might just want to learn now, however. The talk started by introducing something that it seems a lot of electronic geeks know and use already: the Arduino . The Arduino, and many devices like it, is a small electronic device, essentially a little computer, consisting of a tiny processor, a serial port, a power port, a USB port, and two sets of digital (one can also do analog) input/output switches. You build a program on your computer, feed it into the Arduino, hook it up to som...

I did indeed survive to write about my first yearly PhD supervisory committee meeting today. I came out roses, actually. Nice. I'd prepared a summary report a couple of weeks in advance, detailing my current research plan, my accomplishments this year (3 conference papers, 3 published short stories, 1 accepted paper, 2 conferences organized, various training schemes attended, background research conducted, classes taught), my difficulties (*cough* money *cough* resources *cough*), and my plan for next year. It turns out I've exceeded expectations. My committee felt my progress was more than sufficient for a full-time first year, much less a part-time. There was happiness all around. Mostly the session focused on the elements of the story that I will be building in the next few months, and some resources I should look into to help me think about them, which is always helpful. We did discuss something that weighed quite heavily on my mind all summer: whether or not I will sus...

My day yesterday was full of discovery. I learned things about people, and rather than smiling and nodding and thinking to myself "Wow, people really suck for not being just like me," I actually absorbed some ideas about people's differences. I know. I think I'm growing as a person. I lecture my students all the time about how everyone's writing process is different, that every writer has to find his/her process, develop it, and go with what works best for the individual. I just never applied that thinking to regular people, i.e., nonwriters. Hell, it sometimes even shocks me to talk to actual writers (NOT students writing their first short stories, which are inevitably about ghosts, or child abuse, or rape, or all of the above), and find their processes are drastically different from mine. I start thinking that way about the rest of my life, too. My husband and I have lived together for years, and I never understood how every single morning his toiletries ar...

That's my goal, every weekday, from now until classes start at the end of September. If I can hit it, that will mean approximately 105,000 words in 7 weeks, translating to a finished draft of the La Llorona novel, several new short stories, and a buttload of blog posts. There will be setbacks, I'm sure. Like today - chaotic morning getting out of the house, dentist appointment that ran way late, soccer at 5, movie at 7. 3000 words have to be shoved in there somewhere. And next week is the Edinburgh Literary Festival, which will take up 3 days. Hmm. But I've got weekend buffer zones, which will hopefully help me catch up. And hey, I've done several 90k-in-4-weeks Novembers, thanks to NaNoWriMo. I just need these words out of the way. I need to send stories in to some competitions, to get a few more published. I need to finish this novel that's been hanging over my head as I take on more and more projects. I need to start writing some stories for my PhD proj...

I'm in the process of researching some background/inspiration material for my PhD project, gathering myths & stories. If you have one, please post a comment, send me an email, FB message, note (tag me), whatever. I'd really love to hear (or be linked/referenced to) your favorite stories/myths from when you grew up, wherever you're from. To get started, here's mine: ******* I grew up in New Mexico, on the banks of the Rio Grande. For generations, farmers along the river have diverted its waters into irrigation ditches for their crops. As the city of Albuquerque grew up around these small settlements, these 'deadly ditches' also served as population weeders - NM is prone to sudden bursts of rain, which send torrents of floodwater coursing through these irrigation and other drainage ditches. If you happen to be in one, say fishing for crawdads (for our yearly crawdad races at the Harvest Festival), you'll be swept away, drowned. But as a kid, you don...