LiveJournal helpfully informs me that my last update was just 28 weeks ago. So, seven months of radio silence. How nice to be exact.

So, where have I been? Well, the last major work I did on A World of Light was in December, while I was visiting family for Christmas. Then, when I got home again in early January, all this STUFF started happening. I was sick for two weeks, and uninclined to type up my work. Then I moved into a new apartment, and predictable amounts of chaos resulted from that. Then...well. Then I realized that the stuff I'd written over Christmas wasn't usable. There wasn't anything wrong with the writing itself, but there was a foundational problem with the character being introduced in those chapters--and since a lot of the plot was founded on that character, there were cracks showing up in the foundations of the plot.

So I decided to take a break and see other people write other things for a couple of months. I started a short story that was a modern re-telling of the "Brother and Sister" story in Grimm's, another one that can best be described as Southern Gothic. I read some books, but a surprising amount of energy was expended just on settling into my new routines.

I discovered something interesting about how I write as a result of the move. I used to have a lot of trouble writing at home when I lived with my parents. I thought it was just because the computer was in an open place where people were walking by and talking and making noise, but it turns out that I'm not that much better at writing at home now that I live in an apartment with a door I can shut.

Last fall and winter, I had a few places where I got a lot of writing done. I had two hour gaps between morning and afternoon shifts on Mondays and Wednesdays, which I spent writing at an outside table at the mall. I loved this part of the day and it was often my most productive. Then there were the evenings that I spent at a large roomy Starbucks in Durham where I became friends with all the staff and the other regulars. On the days my shifts ended in Durham, I often went straight to the Starbucks and wrote until closing. Also very productive times.

Now, however, my schedule is entirely different, and doesn't afford any convenient gaps in the middle of the day. Going to Starbucks is different, since most of my old crowd is gone. I can write occsionally at home, but it's always hard because of all the distractions. The fact of the matter is that I'm not really at home yet in any of the places my new routines have placed me, and apparently I require a certain degree of hominess before I can really settle in to writing in a new location. It can be a place I've never been before, but I have to click with it somehow.

And I do have one or two of those places left, it turns out. There's a pub near a movie theater where I like to write and have drinks before seeing movies, so this week I spent a couple of hours before seeing Harry Potter knocking out the first half of chapter three. This gets expensive, though. But it managed to jumpstart me so that I've been able to carry on here at the apartment. And I figured out my problems with the one character, and have (mostly) managed to reconfigure the plot to adjust. So it looks like I'm (knock on wood) on a roll again.

And my Zukotou word meter has petered out. Bother. It was such a pretty color...

The holiday yielded one raging sinus infection, two hangovers, four epic fights with family members, and a little over six thousand words on my novel.

32,735 / 75,000 (43.6%)

I have now 1) exceeded my wordcount on the 2006 draft, which helps me to feel like I'm no longer playing catch-up 2) knocked chapters four and five out of the way 3) the reasonable expectation that chapter six and seven will more or less write themselves and 4) very little clear idea what comes after that. But who cares! I have a work ethic.

I saw madamedysart today, for the first time since last Christmas, basically, and she was asking sensible grown up questions about my job and my new apartment, and I tried to answer them through a haze of pseudophedrine, then admitted, "I'm sort of incapable of getting excited about anything other than my novel right now. Did I mention that I cracked 30k?"

It would be nice if my head could cease being an epic battleground for bacteria. I'm gonna lay down and read some Austen. Or possibly Bujold.

26,404 / 75,000 (35.2%)

"It's like I spawned a worth ethic, or something," I said to lizbee the other day. "How did this even happen?"

"Well, you're happy now," she pointed out. "Writing's become a joy, not a penance."

MY FRIENDS; SO WISE.

I really am so ridiculously content and pleased with everything that it's tempting to get superstitious and think that something's gotta give at any second. But the awesome thing is that even if that's true, it's not stopping me being happy right now.

And GUESS WHAT, 20-YEAR-OLD-ME? I AM ALSO WAY MORE INTERESTING AND FUNNY AND GOOD LOOKING THAN YOU. So much for being in love with your own beautiful suffering. I've come to the conclusion that you have to either get over it or die at some point. I feel confident that my thing's more fun than the other. I don't know if happiness is more ~*profound*~ or whatever after years and years of horribleness, but it certainly feels bought and paid for.

This has been a good Christmas so far. My 27th birthday follows hard after that; I think it's going to be a good age on me. I hope it's good for you too.

19,348 / 75,000 (25.8%)

Finished the first draft of chapter two today. Once that's edited and sent out to the betas, I will start chapter three, which I'm hoping will be easier since it's the only place in this draft of the novel where I'll be able to borrow heavily from the draft I started in 2005. Then when three is done, I will finally, FINALLY have moved past the point where I'm re-telling the same bits of the story I've written before and got to the new stuff.

I'm moving into a new apartment right after Christmas. I keep wondering how the new living space will affect my writing. I find it almost impossible to write in the house when my parents are around; the vast majority of all the writing I've done in the last two years has been done in notebooks, out of doors, and only when I'm the last person awake in the house at night can I type everything up and edit and tinker and what-have-you. When I'm undisputed mistress of my own territory, will I still do my best work sitting outside Panera's in 30 degree weather, writing to save my fingers from auto-amputation? I don't want to lose all sense of structure just because I'm escaping a certain degree of restriction. I'm also not sure what's going to happen with my computer---my mother says this one is mine, but I can't leave her with no computer. A friend of working on reformatting my old laptop and restoring it to something functional, and I think I'm getting a portable HD for Christmas, so it will probably all work out. I just wish there was some kind of fund to get new laptops to aspiring authors with low-paying jobs.

17,444 / 75,000 (23.3%)

(ETA: Yeah, yesterday's wordcount was a mistake. I guess it's a good thing I'm pretty proficient with words, considering my relationship with numbers.)

Call for music: anyone who has, or can recommend, gorgeous, eerie winter/Christmas music for my novel playlist, please leave a comment and be rewarded with eternal gratitude and friendship. Loreena McKennit can only take me so far.

Dr. Wicked's Write or Die v. 2.0

Holy crabcakes, y'all. This thing was MADE for me. I have the attention span of a cocker spaniel with a toothache when it comes to just sitting down in front of the computer and punching the words out (this is one of the reasons I do so much writing by hand) but this website works like a charm. Who doesn't have an instinctive anxiety response to flashing red lights (and Hansen)? NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT FOR THE WIN. I wrote 1700 words in an hour and a half on that puppy, and let me tell you, that is progress for me.

As for updates, the Prologue is in the can---I emailed it to my betas and I've got two responses so far *glares at the rest of you* but I feel good about it and the responses I've got were very positive, so I'm confident calling a first draft wrap on that one. Chapter One is 4/5ths done and with the help of my new best friend over here, I hope to finish it this weekend.

Incidentally, if anyone reading this would like to be on my beta team, shoot me an email and I'll inundate you forthwith.

Briefly, before I get back to letting technology kick my ass for me, I read a blog today where an author talked about the five books that sort of made her as a writer. It got me thinking about what mine would be, and this is what I came up with.

1. the Authorized or King James Version of the Bible. Being the product of a Baptist church school, I was set to memorize great honking chunks of it from ages six to thirteen, and I was taught how to read out of it. I tend to blame my tendency to lapse into labyrinthine sentence structure on the 19th c. novels I read so much of as a kid, but purely on the level of received language, this was a big part of my life. It's probably why I say "Alas" in daily conversation and use "save" in the "all were killed save only myself" sense. Although being southern also does that to you.

2. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. It's not the greatest novel of the 19th century (even though I think it's pretty good), but it's the one I had the deepest emotional connection to and since I started trying to write my own stories as a kid, it was always the story I was trying to emulate.

3. Behind the Attic Wall, by Sylvia Cassedy. I was really drawn to stories about orphans as a kid, and this one was so important, because it was the first time I read a story where I was inexorably pulled into the inner world of a protagonist who didn't respond to her misfortunes by being brave and winsome and adorable. She was sullen, and passive aggressive, and kind of pissed off, and tried very hard not to care whether anyone loved her. But she spoke to a part of me that didn't get to speak up very often. Also, this is the book I look to when I think about what it is I want to accomplish with the fantasy element of my novel. The magic doesn't come from anywhere in particular, not from any religion or mythological system, it's just an organic part of the world, there to be seen if you have eyes to see it.

4. A Ring of Endless Light, by Madeleine L'Engle. Really, it would impossible to account for the enormity of the influence Madeleine L'Engle has had on my writing---I've read almost everything she ever wrote, and she wrote quite a lot. But ROEL in particular achieved a transcendence you rarely encounter in fiction, where the emotional build up never shows, but carries you along with it until you're delivered up to the glorious catharsis of the ending.

5. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper. This is another book I look to for an example of fantasy done right, where the magic arises naturally from the world around us. I re-read it every winter, when the nights get long.

Those of you who write, I'd love to hear in the comments about the books you consider to be your formative influences as a writer.

ALSO, a big hearty congratulations to erinbow who just got a buyer for her novel Plain Kate. She has an excerpt up, and I encourage you all to go read it because it is ravishingly gorgeous and I for one will be snapping up my copy like it was the last Cadbury's egg at Easter time.

This is my writing blog, so I think it's appropriate I talk about what I'm reading. I'll be leaving these posts unlocked.

Recently, I finished these two books:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

It took me a really long time to get through House of Leaves. Proportionally speaking, it took me about as long to read it as it's taking me to type in the code to make "House" blue every time I type it and I'm only doing it because I spent four years as a writing tutor and leaving it off would feel like putting the title of a book in quotes when you're supposed to italicize it.

I'm not going to try to summarize the stories in this book. The Wiki provides a good summary. It isn't really possible to get spoiled for the end.

House of Leaves is effectively creepy for the first few chapters, but as you go on the effort required to slog through the hijinks and gimmicky arrangement of the text is just not adequately rewarded. If you don't know what I mean, the book employs Terry Pratchett-length-and-longer footnotes (only not funny), requires you to turn it sideways or upside down every so often and skip over patches of irrelevant or illegible text, derails you from the main action entirely at one point and sends you to the Appendix to read an epistolary novella containing a character's mother's backstory, and ends unsatisfactorily with a completely gratuitous breach of the fourth wall.

The unconventional structure is a gimmick, and I'm an absolute sucker for a gimmick. I don't know why I haven't learned my lesson yet, because I've never yet seen a literary gimmick that redeemed its flashy packaging. Although, to be fair, House of Leaves probably came the closest. It isn't a slight or inconsiderable book. In the places where Danielewski just lets the prose fly, the storytelling is quite decent, although the bulk of the text is a pseudo-academic analysis of a non-existent documentary film, which exposes Danielewski's wooden ear for dialogue more baldly than a different kind of story would.

And that's my only real critique of his actual writing. The book is full of flash and strut and look-at-me-I'm-so-avant-garde, but his writing is solid, except when he neglects it for shiny gimmicky crap. And the epistolary novella in the appendix was absolutely extraordinary, so much so that I purchased it in its published form as The Whalestoe Letters. I'm a sucker for brilliant, dangerous mothers.

*

The Graveyard Book was a very different experience. I bought it Friday afternoon and had finished it by that evening. (Yes, I read it all on Halloween, sue me.) I've never been able to finish Neil Gaiman's adult novels, though I enjoyed Coraline and have a signed copy of it and everything. The Graveyard Book was charming, but the story felt like an abridged version of a much longer one. It's about Bod Owens, short for "Nobody", a boy who grows up in a cemetery and is raised by ghosts. He's there because a man killed his whole family when he was a baby and is now trying to kill him.

I'm not going to tell you why the man's trying to kill Bod. I'm just going to say that it was a silly reason and I may have given a tired sigh when I heard it. The structure is unbalanced---we see adventures from Bod's childhood, then a miniature quest when he's a teenager, and nothing in between. Characters are introduced, appear to be significant, and then disappear. Bod is a lot more confident and assertive and has a lot more social intelligence than you would expect a teenager who's only ever interacted with dead people to have. And the villains, while sinister, are kind of arbitrary and nonsensical.

But Gaiman's prose gets better with every book, and it passes the acid test of any story, which is that I didn't want to put it down till it was over. So I recommend it, and I hope there will be a sequel about Bod's forays in the world as a grown up.

I've absolutely flooded the Scrapbook for this account with pictures I've collected as writing inspiration for AWOL---characters, places, such as this picture, which is of the antique carousel Odette rides in the first scene of chapter one---I found several pictures of it, but this shot shows the actual animal she rides, a leaping cat with a fish in its mouth.

Logged 500 words after work today. Not very much, but this is the last week of this insane schedule--my free time will double shortly. Let's hope I can muster the discipline to use the time for writing and not just sleeping.

Via rj_anderson and erinbow: Courting the Muse. You have to log in to see it, but it's very entertaining and accounts are free.

Here's an excerpt:

When I asked a few friends about their writing habits, I thought for sure they'd make up something offbeat - standing in a ditch and whistling Blake's ''Jerusalem,'' for instance, or playing the call to colors at Santa Anita while stroking the freckled bell of a foxglove. But most swore they had none - no habits, no superstitions, no special routines. I telephoned William Gass and pressed him a little.

''You have no unusual work habits?'' I asked, in as level a tone as I could muster. We had been colleagues for three years at Washington University, and I knew his quiet professorial patina concealed a truly exotic mental grain.

''No, sorry to be so boring,'' he sighed. I could hear him settling comfortably on the steps in the pantry. And, as his mind is like an overflowing pantry, that seemed only right. ''How does your day begin?'' ''Oh, I go out and photograph for a couple of hours,'' he said. ''What do you photograph?'' ''The rusty, derelict, overlooked, downtrodden parts of the city. Filth and decay mainly,'' he said in a nothing-much-to-it tone of voice, as casually dismissive as the wave of a hand. ''You do this every day, photograph filth and decay?'' ''Most days.'' ''And then you write?'' ''Yes.'' ''And you don't think this is unusual?'' ''Not for me.''

I did the same thing. I was like, "well, I just sit down and do it, don't I? I just sit down at my picnic table in the garden in the middle of the night with a pot of black tea and write by the light of red votive candles* propped on top of overturned wine glasses and mason jars. Um..."

How about you?

*Mackintosh scented from Yankee Candle

Hi, folks. Remember this journal? No? I don't blame you. I haven't thought about since two years ago, when I created it to make me look like a hip, techno-savvy candidate for library school. It worked, except for how it didn't. But you guys have already heard that one.

Some of you who had this LJ friended might also remember plums_roasting, which is slightly older and even more neglected than bnharrison. For anyone who doesn't remember, it was meant to be a character-developing exercise for my novel, in which I wrote blog entries from the main character's POV. That also died a quick, mostly noiseless death.

I'm older now, a little bit wiser, and a lot less prone to thinking that my angst over not being able to write makes me more interesting than my actual writing does, so I've returned to my novel with a vengeance, and the results have made me happy. Which is why I've come back to the idea of blogging about my novel, because no writer's happiness is real unless it's being inflicted on an audience.

If I ever get a story sold, I'll be able to use this for a professional blog, which is why it has my real name on it and everything. This is also why, even though everyone here knows my fannish LJ, I ask that you not do any kind of cross-linking between the two journals (at least in the comments of this journal).

Rather than trying to turn this into a character journal like in an RPG, I plan to use this as a kind of scrapbook for my novel---I'll post word count updates and favorite tidbits from the day's writing, fairy tale research (and other kinds) and sometimes I'll ask for input on stuff like character's names or any of the other attention-mongering thing I can dream up.

In the mean time, I suggest that you delight your eyes by checking out the userpics I've assembled for myself. I caved and bought paid time for this journal just so I could use them. lecollage, my favorite icon community, is being deleted by the moderator soon, so I spent last night going through and saving every image I could find that in any way reminded me of one of my characters or the universe of my novel, and the result is an amazing collection of illustrations that makes me want to write every time I look at them.

Which is the whole point of this journal.

I'm going to keep this entry public and post it to my other LJ, but after that all the entries here will be locked. Feel free to flee if you don't think my attempts to launch a writing career while working full time is your brand of masochism. :-)