Ha!

This morning I made a list of seven things to do. I just finished the last one. This hasn't happened in five years, folks! It doesn't necessarily mean I'm getting better (I could wake up migrainey tomorrow and do none of the five things I've listed to do tomorrow) but that's a problem for tomorrow. Health crap sucks but I'm still here and sometimes I can still beat it!

As much as I read you'd think I could comp better, but I just don't think in that way. Catergories are hard for me anyway because I'm a splitter rather than a lumper, as they say in the sciences, although I also follow the Fortean principle that everything blends into everything else around the edges. Categories are imaginary; individuals are real. Female-centric historical is so overwhelmingly heteronormatively Romantic and I hate that; I don't want comps like that (and a lot of it annoys me because they didn't research to my standards; I'm such a history snob). My favorite queer books are contemporary - most YA is contemporary. (Is Len really YA, though? The question I only recently though to ask) Conventional wisdom at the moment seems to be that young people don't like historical except there's always exceptions, aren't there?

So yeah, I'm agonizing on this because I wasn't prepared and had to enter excuses on a query form. When in doubt, check books out. I probably need to go buy/check out a bunch of recent queer, historical, western-themed, female-centric books and read them critically to see if I can find the commonalities. A project which, though worthwhile, also sounds like a great way to procrastinate and also to frustrate myself. Life is rough.

Reason Notwithstanding...

I'm still alive, though I'm sometimes dubious on the prospect. And I just sent out a query for Len, more or less on impulse. Wish me luck.

I have got to get out there and figure out what might serve for comps. Back when I was actively selling comps weren't really a thing, so it's a new trick for me; one I honestly can't take that seriously. I try, and then I get this vision of how the real estate appraisers I used to work for did comparable sales - adjust -5% because the Work is Historical and the Comp is Contemporary, adjust 15% because the Work depicts strong lesbian/horse bonds and Comp doesn't, etc. But does the camel adjust the value up or down? And pretty soon I've collapsed into a fit of giggles.

But hunting for comps ought to be fun, because it primarily involves rounding up and reading a bunch of books. You'd think I could do that much, health crap or no.

A Haiku for March

Banksia, blooming;
Warblers courting in its leaves;
Yet I am so tired.

Like Riding a Bike...

Officially restarting the agent search today.

It's nice to see that some of your skills don't rust with disuse. My procrastination techniques are as fine-honed as ever!

Welcome to the Dystopia

So. The electors didn't save us (it was never very likely, but this is 2016 - probability was not a limiting factor and if they'd had any guts they'd have done it) and we're living in a dystopia with an incompetent con man at the helm appointing neo-Nazis and profit pirates, incidentally encouraging devotees of every systemic evil that we've been papering over since the country was founded to come out of the woodwork and do evil by the light of day.

Well! This is not the first time the bullies have been in charge of the classroom, and we do not lack historical examples for how to behave. Unfortunately, most of them involve the most privileged hunkering down and collaborating or hiding and leaving the work of making things better to the major sufferers, who are pretty busy being oppressed and surviving - or not. A lot of people will die and someday the privileged will look back and say: "Hey, we survived, it wasn't that bad" and get angry at any one who tells us that the systemic problems still linger and if we'd look past our privileged noses and admit that, we might finally be able to dismantle dystopia.

Millions of stories are about to go down. Many will be tragedies. How many will be told?

It's hard for an artist to know what to do in these situations. Few of us have much in the way of margins in our lives, or resources to devote to dismantling the structures of horror rising up around us. We don't make much money, often have multiple jobs (the day job, the creative work, and the family work; possibly also the bureaucracy work of getting the help you and yours are entitled to), and our talents may not be well-suited for activism or actively rescuing the people who are getting thrown under the bus. It's a certain amount of work even seeing and recognizing a chance to do someone some concrete good. Jews are asking their gentile friends now "Would you hide me?" and they aren't the only ones with reason to ask that question; but I must number myself among those whose answer is: "I would, but I don't think my attic is really habitable and I'm not sure how to make it so."

I'm a dumpy little white lady who writes books for young people but can't land an agent and is therefore in a long dry spell. I have health crap, I have no energy and a dodgy memory, I have a single-income family and the car is officially dead; but I know I'm still better off than a lot of people are going to be at any given time in the next four years. (I hope, only the next four years; I know that's not realistic, but some of us have to be optimists to get out of bed in the morning.)It cannot be enough to click and reblog and send occasional small donations to a handful of important activisms, to tread water and keep stuff in the mail and maintain an escapist little simblr and grumble to my friends. But what more can I do?

And do I even have the right to keep writing and trying to sell stuff, when it's so clear to me that what publishers should be doing over the next four years is dropping all their cis-het-white-abled writers in favor of amplifying marginalized voices? Seriously, if every artist of any kind who met that description stopped producing work for the next four years, and the amount of media published remained the same, the level of representation for people who don't meet that description would increase more than the level of cis-het-white-abled representation would decrease, with a considerable net gain for the world at large.

These are things that we must all consider. What privileges do we have? Is there a way to leverage them into the service of the unprivileged? Are we terrible people if we do not go to rallies because we simply cannot face the crowds or stand long in the cold, or are too afraid of tear gas?

Which privileges are we denied? Do we deserve to have them if we don't fight for them? How do we know a right from a privilege?

Back in middle school, I heard a family friend (who would have vigorously denied that he was racist) say (in effect) that "Negroes" had done a lot of things for "Society" and deserved not to be discriminated against, but "Mexicans" did nothing for "Society" and could be excluded, marginalized, and looked down on, guilt-free. I was not brave enough to speak up against a grownup, but we were living in West Texas at the time and I was aware enough of my surroundings to think: "But without Mexicans, there is no Society here."

And this is the bottom line, this is what the con man and his cronies and those who put him in power don't realize - we are all Society. Those who survive the next four years will be diminished by the loss of those who do not - and by the loss of the voices that fall silent in order to survive.

It is our responsibility to diminish this Society as little as possible - to help others to survive, and this is important.

But it is also important to keep making a Society worth preserving. To contribute our little mite, no matter how trivial it may seem, to a world that is not unrelieved misery to live in. To encourage others to create, to empower those less privileged, and to get the attention of those more privileged. To amplify the whispers of others and to make ourselves heard amid the raucous shouting of those who think that they are Society and that anyone who is insufficiently like them has to earn the right to exist in their shadow.

Resist by existing, if that is all you have the energy to do.

And if you must die, die loudly. Make it count.

Happy Birthday, Louisa May Alcott

She'd have been 184 today, and she got a Google doodle, an honor I'm sure she'd be into if she understood it.

As for me, I'm at the stage of revision where the lesbian western is awesome, brilliant, and sure to win all the awards; only to be censored and become a rallying point for civil rights activists everywhere! Otherwise, I'm just fiddling while America burns and I can't bear it.

But - and I think we all need to bear this in mind - although there is no excuse for watching your country's ideals go up in flames and water cannons as if it were nothing to do with you - our ordinary daily pursuits do have value even in times of despair. The arts help us cope with reality far more often than they provide a place of irresponsible escape.

And it doesn't have to be traditional art, or paid art, to do that. Shortly after the election I was informed that someone had downloaded Widespot specifically to provide a healthy distraction from the fear and hopelessness felt in its wake. Lots of people turn to fanfiction in times of crisis - fanfiction being full of the specific content that people in crisis feel most need of, but are least provided for by the media.

And the afghan your aunt knitted for you is warmer than the throw you bought at Sears. It just is.

The Morning After the Election

Social injustice is like depression.

It's always there, lurking. You clear it in your immediate vicinity for awhile, but you know it's still out there affecting someone, and you know it will come back to you, and you know that it's frequently fatal. It feels like no progress is ever made.

But progress is made, so gradually that we don't notice until we compare a sufficiently distant past with the present. More people understand more about the causes and processes that create the condition than ever before, and are constantly working to improve our tools to combat it. It is more curable than it ever was, though less curable than it will be. It is more preventable than it ever was, though not as preventable as it should be. Failure happens again and again and again, but success can't happen without the risk of failure.

You can't control anyone else. You can't always control yourself. But you can do more than despair. Keep the manuscript in the mail. Take your meds (as long as you can get them). Donate if you can, march if you can, stand firm if you can. Vote in the little elections as well as the big. Speak when It wants you to shut up and die.

If you can do nothing else, choose kindness at every opportunity life gives you for cruelty. It's the only way to reduce suffering, your own and others.

Back in the saddle again?

Sorry, no ideas for sale today.

But I just thought I'd check in and say I'm working on the lesbian western again, despite weirdness with the sleep schedule and other factors.

Mind you, this is the easy kind of work - revision. Can I face the hard stuff, the querying and the hunting down of people to query? That remains to be seen.

But it's good to be with Len again. And I can't query till revision is done, so this is a start.

Good for Her!

Beverley Cleary is a hundred today, and she is still here.

Wow.

Events!

I'm driving up to San Marcos in a little bit to hear Dr. James Adavasio speak and to prove to myself that, little by little, I am coming back. Sunday I'll be going to Austin, to BookPeople and Greg Leitich-Smith's book launch.

On Veteran's Day, I took Moby out for a bit, to replace two dodgy tires and get the oil and coolant checked. I feel a lot of kinship with Moby at the moment, as bits of him stop working properly and are replaced - the driver's side seat belt, the interior door handle - or not - one of the door locks, that strip of chrome that the gas station ate when I parked a bit too close to the pump. Yet he keeps moving, and so do I.

And whereas, someday, inevitably, Moby will limp off to the junkyard to be stripped down for parts, or get donated to one of those charities that takes even cars that won't move anymore to generate money in some mysterious way (which presumably amounts to the same thing), I will someday cycle all the way up again, and transform all the mental coolant and oil I've been sucking down into - something. I don't know what. But I know I will. It's in there. Somewhere.

Gestating.

Whether I can transform whatever it is into income to justify my existence to the consumer society, I don't know. So I stick that consideration onto the shelf in my head marked "Stuff I can't do anything about right now" and keep gestating, and even occasionally driving to hear speakers and cheer other authors on.

Meanwhile, I'd better get some lunch. Because lunch is inevitable.

Always an Author

Sometimes I wonder, as the months without school visits turn into years, as I write without attempting to publish, as I stare at Publishers Market listings and don't start a query, if I'm still an author.

Monday, I proofed galleys for a short story I recently sold (for remarkably little money; but it's a remarkably little story) and got a fan letter from a child who, in the course of reading The Ghost Sitter, "went from hating reading to loving it!!" (Who wants to write for grownups? Grownups don't write letters like that. You're lucky if you can get one exclamation mark out of a grownup.)

So, yeah, just because I live in professional limbo right now doesn't mean I'm not the woman who wrote The Ghost Sitter and Switching Well - and other things less likely to generate fanmail. Maybe my time is over and I'll never sell again; or maybe I'm about to get that query mojo working again and have a renaissance that catapults me into the literary stratosphere. (Hey, stranger things have happened.) Regardless, what I've already done will remain valid.

Today is Marty McFly Day - the day he spent in "the future" in Back to the Future II (IMHO the best of the series). From today forward, the Back to the Future movies will be entirely set in the past. Now there's a time paradox for you! Time does that, keeps rolling on over and past us and our creations, changes how they look and inevitably, eventually, destroys both us and them. But it takes a long time; and even dead work may be resurrected in unexpected ways. Why, not long ago a new passage to the Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered! (As one tumblr user observed, this means that the Gilgamesh fandom is the one that's had the longest wait for an update, by a considerable margin.)

The work is resilient, it is tough, and it can go on when we can't. Or won't. Or don't.

Domestic Analogies. I Can Always Make Them.

Still alive here, and a miracle occurred - I learned how to install fly-front zippers! Part of my problem, it turned out, was that the markings on the pattern were confusing me. Now that everything's clicked, I can ignore them. I also successfully did a new, and more difficult, alteration to the pattern than anything I've done before; something I would have been incapable of doing six months ago, just because I couldn't have focused long enough to do it. So I have four pairs of pants that fit perfectly in the back and almost perfectly in the front - I still have some bugs to work out in fitting the waistband. But even allowing for that and my inability to get all the basting stitches pulled, they're still better than anything I could have gotten at a store. I probably cried less than I would have if I'd gone shopping, too.

None of which, alas, enables me to do what I need to do to start sending queries out again.

The trouble with queries is, that they are the exact opposite of how I need to do things. I can force myself to write them, but I inevitably do them badly. Sometimes, so badly that I wake up in the middle of the night with that excruciating twist in the stomach that says: "Holey cheese that was the worst possible way to do that and it's too late to take it back now."

And other people's advice on how to write them? Is a lot like the markings on the pattern intended to help me install a zipper. Obviously they work for some people - probably most people - and I needed them in order to learn, but they didn't - couldn't - take my alterations into account; and the markings and instructions and diagram laid things out so antithetically to the way I learn things my illegible notes on the instruction sheet say things like "And by left they mean right" and "Line up with the top not the bottom." (That my notes are illegible doesn't matter; making them renders it unnecessary for me ever to refer to them.) I get this in recipes, too. Food doesn't behave the way the recipe says it will, no matter how closely I follow the instructions. So after I've made a dish a few times and start succeeding with it, I ignore the recipe. Level measurement gets me a different result every time, but I make pancakes with scant measures of milk and heaping measurements of baking powder and they're good, low-sodium pancakes, which is what I'm after.

All of which gives me hope that I'm going to get the query thing down eventually, too. The truth is I've never sold anything on a pitch or a query - I've only ever sold on the work, and on personal contact with the editor. And I have no freaking clue how agents work as human beings let alone as professionals. They might as well be aliens, for all I can think my way into their space. It's really, really tempting to send the first X pages with a list of credits and a cover letter that says: "Look, I'm good at writing stories but I suck at selling things. Read the enclosed and if you want to see the rest, let me know. YA, lesbian western, complete, about 70,600 words. Thank you for your time."

For one thing, the agent who doesn't just delete that is probably an agent I could work with.

But that's not how the industry works. So I will just have to keep sending out queries full of excruciatingly wrong things to say like I kept putting in and ripping out zippers, like I kept throwing out pancakes with runny middles, till something clicks and I figure out the point at which the advice givers tell me to go left and I need to turn right.

Not Sure How Much This Helps

Despite frontloading a lot of the second-guessing of myself, and going in with a sense of not having a damn thing of use to offer; despite both of us being unreasonably tired and Damon missing half of Saturday due to health crap; despite a surprisingly small dealer's room (no t-shirts? How can there be no t-shirts?), Armadillocon was good for me this year.

I can never remember what I say on panels, though I always think afterwards of things I absolutely should have said, but after each one someone in the audience sought me out to remark favorably on what I said, and moreover on how I said it. I always have the vague sense that I've talked too much (and too loud, and too diffusely) and not said any of the right things, but the audience - or these specific portions of the audience anyway - perceives this as me being passionate about things.

That is certainly true as far as it goes. And apparently the other panelists don't find it too obnoxious, either, because when the ghost story panel was short of participants, at the tag-end of the day Saturday, someone I'd been on with earlier in the day invited me to get out of the audience and onto the panel. So I did. Because, ghost stories. And we were all weird by then anyhow, it wasn't just me.

I once again sat through a panel on promotion and was once again admonished that all sales involve "selling myself" and once again concluded that if that's true, I'm screwed, because I can't sell myself. This is not reluctance; this is not naivete; this is not cowardice; this is demonstrated fact. You might as well tell me to flap my arms and fly to the moon, or do a pull-up (honestly, how? I've never managed even one; I can't even bend my elbows), or fall asleep because it's bedtime. I've had 54 years to try this advice and it's not going to work because I can't do it, and my ability to network at all is small.

But I have sold books, and I have given workshops and been on panels that apparently were good for some of the participants, and I do get traffic on this blog, and somehow I've accumulated 337 simblr followers as of this morning, the vast majority of whom are not spammers, without any promotion at all. This is all small, but real. I'm okay with small success, and all my small successes have been the result of me telling stories and talking about the things I care about and basically engaging passionately with something, and conveying that engagement to people outside of it.

I do not know how to translate Being All About the Story into, say, a living wage.

But it's clear enough that Being All About the Story has to be where I start, or nothing else is going to happen at all.

Starting over and over and over and over...

Starting with the gunshots trims the first chapter too much. You don't know Len and if you don't know Len it's not worth it to keep reading. I'll never sell it like this and I don't know where to start now.

This is what I get for following advice about how to make your query and first pages attractive...I should know by now that what works for other people doesn't work for me, and no one can tell me what will work, because nobody knows. It's trial and error time again and I have no way to measure success short of acceptance, which means I could get several rejections even with the winning format and never know I'd hit it.

Life in the skinny part of the bell curve is tough, film at eleven.

This can be "fun with first lines" if you want it to.

My house smells like wet possum and I went to bed at 6:30 this morning. These facts are not unrelated.

(No wonder I'm always tired.)

Happy Memorial Day.

Enabling the creativity of others may or may not be inherently creative; may or may not advance your career; may or may not be rewarded in any way.

But it is not nothing, and is worth doing.

I Aten't Dead

Sorry to miss a Sunday. Nothing's wrong. We had to leave for the game a bit earlier than usual, and in the evening I had other stuff going on. Monday I was light-headed, and anyway all the stuff I came up with I'd think: "Naw, I may need that one." And the prime motivation to garage sale ideas is to get the excess ones out of my head to demonstrate how easy they are to generate, not to give away stuff I might use.

Since stalling out on the WIP, I'm considering doing short stories again for awhile. Six books, in various genres and age groups, in the bank unsold is kind of a lot, and they tend to get in the way of my hands as I'm working at novel-length, their unsold state a reproach to me. Starting another full-length work feels a bit like getting pregnant again when I can't feed the kids I've got. But if I'm not writing new stuff -

-- Okay, so, that doesn't happen unless I'm deep in the old depressive hole and not doing anything constructive at all. Every time I try to focus on selling, revising, tweaking, whatever, old stuff, I find myself directing more of that creative energy into some game or other. (Hence the current healthy state of my simblr.) Telling stories is what I do, whether anyone listens or not, and my media for that are text and games.

Short story markets are frustrating in a completely different way than novel markets, of course. But what isn't frustrating most of the time, when you come down to it? If you avoid all frustration, you avoid all accomplishment.

Dadgummit to Heck

I have now put the same damn zipper in wrong seven times.

Only four ways to put it in at all exist. Three of them are wrong. So I'm repeating myself. Multiple times.

But if I don't make my own pants I don't get pants that cover my butt. It actually costs me more woman-hours, and more tears of frustration, to buy a pair of pants that doesn't quite fit than to make one that fits perfectly.

And seven times is nothing - I'm well into double-digits for queries on every work I have ready to sell. So when I stop being lightheaded, and have gotten myself round some chocolate, I'm going for lucky #8.

Because even if you're bad at something, if it's the only way to get what you need, you're stuck.

Edit to Add: I was wrong. I just invented two brand-new wrong ways to put in a zipper. Clearly, I have talent for this. Too bad it's not one I can be paid for.

Tomorrow is another day. Today I'm thinking: Sims and more chocolate.

First Query of the Year

It's in the mail. The e-mail. Whatever. And - we'll see.

I believe in Len's story so hard and so much, a part of me is convinced each time I send it out that the person on the other end will see what I see and realize what potential is there, to change the whole game.

And I also find myself believing that, if it once again doesn't happen, that something I did or didn't say or do is at fault. The story is great, so I must be screwing up, right?

Well, maybe. Or maybe the agent just signed somebody else with a transgender western. (We can only hope.) Or maybe she has so many clients she decided to stop taking queries five minutes before mine showed up. Or -

There are a thousand reasons to turn down a query, only one, maybe two, to accept it.

It's hard to remember that when you wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, suddenly certain that what you said in the third paragraph gave entirely the wrong impression and guaranteed rejection. But it's true, whether we remember it or not.

And regardless of whether I screw up or not - I'm the only one who can sell this story, because I was the only one who could write it. So it is my duty to the story to keep it in the mail.