brb going camping.

Stop. Mocking. Me.

Okay, so I'm not really going camping. That would be silly. We all know Hildred doesn't go outside without whining a whole lot about it. Besides, camping sucks. There's like...bugs. And no electricity. And it's during those grossly hot months.  And you're expected to squat and pee. NO THANK YOU.  Instead I'll be doing my camping online this summer, because I've just officially signed myself up for Camp NaNoWriMo!

I'm not surprised if you haven't heard of it.  It's been pretty hush hush until the site was unveiled a couple of days ago. Basically what it is is...Nanowrimo in the summer! I think the goal is to be able to run it all year round so you can essentially choose what months you want to nano in if November sucks for you, but for now it's in beta for July and fully functional in August.

Well, of course I signed up. I've got nothing better to do with my time outside of work - lol what like i have friends.  It'll be good for me anyway. I've been so deep in editing lately that I really need to just write again before my brain turns to mush.  So, for Camp Nano, I will be starting a totally new novel once more.  I will be working on the first of two planned prequel stories to the CROSS// saga, this one in particular focusing on the original incarnations of our heroes. The reason why I want to write it now is because I really need to get a lot of this backstory down on paper for my own reference if nothing else!   I'll only be doing the August session, however, because July this year is super busy at work for me and I want to keep editing for now since I'm on a roll with it.

If you would like to be my camping buddy, feel free to add me as a friend! My link is below!

http://www.campnanowrimo.org/campers/hildred

At least with this kind of camping I can't get any sun burns...

Musings of a RAGEQUIT author.

It's in my dreaaaams.

I've been having one of those months, dear readers.  You know, the kind of month where nothing is good enough and you're convinced that you're going to fail at everything and OH MY GOD WHY DO YOU EVEN TRY?? JEEZ.  Yeah, that's me.

Editing.  And reading.  Doing both at the same time. That's usually a dangerous combination, really. After years and years of being forced to set aside "pleasure" reading for what academia threw at me, I am now totally incapable of simply "enjoying" a book.  (Especially if it's you know, a horrible book, like are want to fall into my hands.)  Nope. I have to analyze it every step of the way - from style, to characterization, to how many damn lines there are in the average paragraph.  This wouldn't be too bad in the end, if it wasn't for the fact that I compare myself to the author I am reading every step of the way.

It doesn't even matter if I don't like the author's style, prose, or the way they treat their fans via what I've read on Wikipedia - no, I could thoroughly detest them, and I still become convinced that I'm still not good enough.  This is especially bad when you write fantasy, particularly serial fantasy, because there is a very concrete standard that readers expect.  Yes, you're supposed to bring "your own" to the table, but even  I expect certain things from the fantasy I read:  a grandiose atmosphere, a sense of urgency, sentences that blow me away and make me go "I want to write like that."  And yes, I do have a very distinct writing style of my own that is not always the norm.  I've assigned dashes and ellipses very solid jobs.  I've become self-conscious of my overuse of three sentence paragraphs.  I struggle to balance my copious amounts of dialogue in some instances with an adequate amount of prose. And yet it often feels all in vain when I pick up another (popular, of course) work and notice that I pretty much write nothing like them.  Is that a good thing?  Most of the time, yes, of course.  But then anxiety and self-hatred set in, and I think, "I will never be as popular as this.  My works will never touch anyone like this has.  People are going to laugh at my style."

True?  Undoubtedly, especially if my works were ever to become popular in the general writing world, let alone fantasy. Somebody will be sure to complain loudly about the way I use dashes and ellipses, somebody else will tssk at extraneous dialogue, etc etc. I'm okay with that, really.  Yet that horrible sinking feeling of "NO EVERYONE WILL DO IT HAHA" is always there and inhibits my ability to proceed with my own works.

Like I said before, I've been editing.  Since this was primarily a NaNoWriMo work, it's riddled with disastrous attempts at inflating word count - most specifically, adverbs. Adverbs everywhere.  I feel like I need bug spray to wipe them out every time I edit.  I know this is normal, every draft starts off like horrible vomit and that's the whole point of editing.  But the vanity.  The voice.  The one that says "You will never be ready! No one will ever take you seriously!" I really, really hate that voice.

Friends, teachers, many people tell me that I'm a great writer even for my faults, that I'm on the right track.  The real struggle for me is being able to believe them.  Are they serious?  Are they just inflating my ego?  Did they even read anything? WAS I SO BAD THEY SAID SOMETHING NICE? It can't be helped. This is what happens when so much of your life revolves around writing novels. I imagine it's much the same for singers playing back a recording and shuddering, for painters stepping back from the canvas at a shared gallery and finding nothing but faults in their own works.   Art is completely subjective, and that's what scares us the most.

So even though this is just one of those hurdles that I must jump over in order to fulfill my main dream in life, that doesn't mean I can't hate every minute of it. Be right back, lighting my book on fire - and then blowing out the flames while I clutch the poor draft to my chest and baaaaw  it back into precious existence. RINSE AND REPEAT. WOO.

SHORT STORY: Men in Uniform

Time to post my first short story here! Yay! I don't often write them, so consider this a special treat!

I'm actually working on a short story compilation with a theme of airports/airplanes and other things having to do with air travel. This is the first I've written for it although I have other ideas as well. This story in particular also takes place in the CROSS// universe, so bear that in mind when reading. I've changed some things around so it can be read as stand-alone so it's more "our" universe than "their" universe. (Hello, uniform shenanigans all over again.)

Come and get it okay thanks.

"I swear, you &*%^ing swear a lot."

hypocrite, much?

(WARNING:  There's a lot of fucking swearing in this post.)

In real, everyday life...I swear.  I swear a lot.

On my OKCupid (don't judge) profile I say that I don't smoke, but "fuck is my nicotine".  I can clearly the remember the day, a few weeks after my grandmother died when I was nine or so, and I heard my mother say "shit" for the first time.  I remember gaping at her with that great "OHNOYOUDIDNT" face little kids get when their hero has just done something heinous.  Until that point my biggest swear word was "sucks".

Suffice to say, I grew into more and more swears.  My parents often comment on it (funny, considering they're the ones I learned it from eh.)  It also doesn't help that many of my public domains, such as school and work, never discouraged it and most of my scholarly/working peers swear/swore a lot themselves.  Swearing's even more prevalent on TV these days than it was ten years ago when I was still an impressionable little shit.

So, as you can imagine, my characters swear a lot themselves.  But miraculously enough my narration always remains devoid of words that end with itch, it, and uck. In fact, my narrating voice is often seen putting on a "oh these characters and their swearing~" hat.  If there is swearing in the narration, it's encompassed in quotes to imply that the narrator would NEVER say that, but the character sure did think it.

It's just one of those things I've noticed about my writing.

My narrator (who I often think of as myself, and I'm not sure how popular that is amongst authors...insights?) is  the divine neutral.  She (or he, or it, but since I think of the narrator as myself and I identify with feminine pronouns, there you go) sits back and omnisciently tells everything as neutrally as possibly, including the use of the most neutral language possible.  But when it comes to matters of evil, she always has the subtle stance that she realizes these acts and thoughts are wrong and does not condone them, even though she attempts to communicate them to the reader as neutrally as possible.  This is offset, of course, by my characters who are definitely NOT neutral and don't give a ~flying fuck~ about cursing everywhere if it's in their nature to do so.

In various discussions about writing I've come across throughout my years on the internet, the topic of openly swearing in novels is brought up a lot.  Some people are very much against it unless the situation "direly calls for it, such as somebody just died", or feel that swearing characters depletes the approachability of their novel.  Others don't give a flying fuck and happily let their characters ride the Swear Train to Swearsville, for it "realistically depicts the character's behavior".  As you can probably tell, I fall into the latter camp.  Most of my characters wear by default, unless it's specifically NOT in their nature to do so...and thus they spend a lot of time being abashed over the other characters swearing so much.  The only work I have those types of characters in, however, are in Nagnomei, where many characters are raised in nobility and find swearing to be crass and beneath them.  That's as intrinsically a part of their character as swearing is for characters who do so. 

Swearing a lot does bring its own difficulties, however, especially in high fantasy settings where a part of world building is to develop a land's own language.  Some swears translate naturally into Nagnomei, such as "ass", "bitch", "shit", and even "fuck" depending on the context, and if you approach some of the swears as a translation to what the character is actually saying.  But, of course, there are some forced changes.  Instead of saying "bullshit" my characters in that series often say "horseshit". And if there's any series where I just "fade to black" on cursing and cop out with "and then he said a string of obscenities", it's that series.  Because sometimes I just don't know what they would say in that land that wouldn't sound out of place!

Hence why if I run a search of swears in any Nagnomei file, I do not find many.  In CROSS//Rebirth alone, however, there are 84 "fucks", 62 "shits", etc etc. It's a lot easier to let the modern American swears ring out when your characters live in, well, modern America...and swear just as much as you do.  Sometimes, even, it's just fun to sit there and childishly let your characters say all the swears you never got to say in front of your parents growing up.

This tangentially leads into another, slightly more serious field than just swearing - slurs, which a lot of swears fall under.  Some swears are wonderfully neutral as to who they go against - words like "ass", "shit", "fuck", etc.  Then there are the slurs, such as "bitch", "cunt", "retarded", etc.  Swears that come from the oppression of minority groups, pretty much.  I've cut many of these words out of my general vocabulary over the past couple of years, and I've deleted quite a bit of them as well from my writing - unless it really is time to drive a point home about a character.  Although I've stopped saying many slurs in my day to day life, my characters still spit them out on occasion.  Sometimes it's just a fantastic way to tell a reader "hey, this guy's a scumraking douchenozzle. look at what he's saying about women, eh."  Sometimes characters are purposefully trying to hurt one another with words, including slurs.  Some are probably even the type of people to go on their Livejournal and mumble about "political correctness".  And some just don't care, especially in a time period (in this case, 2007 and slightly before) when using more recent slurs was still more socially acceptable than it is now in 2011.  There are times when I am editing a scene in a novel and cringe at some of the dialogue a character is spewing and seriously consider changing it because it even makes me uncomfortable now - about half of the time I do change it to something more shitastically neutral, and the other half I leave it in based on the context of the scene and I decide that I want it to reflect (usually poorly) on the character.  Even my heroes are not exempt from the "ugh, did he really just call a woman a 'bitch'" anger. There is also the balance of my own - and my characters' individual - privileges, but that is almost certainly a topic for another entry one day.

For now, let's just leave it at this:  my characters swear twice as much during the month of November.  I'm sure most of you can guess why.

um, excuse you, this journal isn't pink.

Small update to announce that I've changed the layout here at the Blogger port of my blog.  The pink was starting to get to me (and the birds just, you know, didn't jive). Definitely feeling the neutral dark orange, brown and white now. Probably will change the Livejournal version eventually as well.

Also, new entry in the works.  There's a lot of swearing in it, I swear.

"But, like, why?"

This picture is amazing.

Since posting my intentions last week I've received some queries from friends / random strangers (don't you love how blogs work?) asking me why I plan to self-publish first before even trying to get published the old fashioned way...which is submitting my works to various (fantasy) publishers and crossing my fingers that they want to make me the next Big Seller.  I've already explained myself to most of those people, but overall it didn't seem like a bad blog topic idea.

I never really considered self-publishing as a foothold into the publishing industry until a few years ago when I attended a conference seminar that was all about tips for self-publishing (mostly, how to market yourself because it's all on you, bro.) I originally took it as a filler, but it ended up being the most informative seminar I attended that whole day. Since then I've thought about it off and on in terms of my long term goals for writing, and within the past year decided it's probably the most feasible option for me. Of course, as a kid and as a teen, I had fantasies about mailing off my manuscript to some huge publisher and having the editor go "YES. THIS. FOREVER!" and still do in a tiny little part of my ego.  But I am a huge realist, and in today's writing economy, the odds of me being picked up, even if a publisher does like my book, are slim to none.  Mainstream publishing is a fickle thing:  it's based around the current tastes of the public, including what is selling now and what the market wants to be selling.  So unless you happen to writing exactly what's up and hip at the very moment, you can expect a swift rejection or the request for a multitude of changes (...If I hear "how about some vampires?" one more time...) that you probably don't want to make.

Self-publishing, which is also sometimes called "vanity" publishing, gets a lot of flack, and for semi-good reason.  Basically, all it takes is money to get published, and then you can publish pretty much any dreck you want.  But it has its logical merits as well.  With most print on demand self-publishing, the author controls just about everything that goes on behind the production of the book, from cover to typos.  It does not take fancy companies to register with the Library of Congress or ISBN, which actually done on one's own without even the self-publisher can be cheaper.  And, most of all, the author retains all rights to the novel, including being able to have it published elsewhere later on if he/she so chooses.

It's pretty much all those things that attract me to self-publishing my first novel, if not more.  I like control, especially over my creative endeavors. I've had cover patterns and ideas for my novels since I first came up with them that I would love to see brought to life, and, damnit, you bet your face I want to retain all the rights for as long as I can. 

There is also the allure of building my own fanbase and gaining the support for my novels as they are, in case they are picked up by larger publishers one day.  I am a stubborn woman.  While I am definitely open to suggestions on ways to improve my novels, I do not appreciate being told to stick in a vampire because that's what sells (can you tell this has happened a lot?)  I like the idea of building my own fanbase on the web to prove to any future publisher that my works can sell with the main plot and idea as is, structural edits aside. I've met quite a few successful authors (from my po-dunk community, even) who started off self-publishing and now enjoy a solid career with their homegrown fanbase.  While I do not indulge in the delusion that that could be me tomorrow, it is comforting to know that it has worked for many others and I'm not just making up wild ideas about the process.

Money will be an issue up front, but I have spent more money on even more ridiculous endeavors.  As it is I do not plan to do too many bells and whistles - the most extreme I'll probably get is hardcovers because hardcovers are cool.  And as I said in my last entry, I really need something for me to save up for.  This is as much about me fulfilling a goal and a dream as it is satisfying my silly ego.

The hardest part will be choosing which self-publisher to go with.  Everyday I do more research, and it reminds me of when I was researching for the day job I have now - which company to apply to, who will give me the best deal/experience, etc.  In the end  I feel like I made the best possible choice there, so hopefully I can repeat that with publishing.  I'm still looking for experiences from other authors who have self-published, mostly based on what companies they went with and the goods and bads they had.  As I learned from researching my day job, it's easy to look things up on the internet - but you have no idea who is being paid off/sponsored/trolling/etc.  Everything conflicts to both extremes, so I always prefer hearing from people I know exactly exist and are not being fed dollars into their pockets to say whatever.

---

As for actual writing, preliminary editing is still coming along, and the short story I've been promising is almost done.  Thanks to all who have been and continue to support me in my writing endeavors - you have no idea how much it means to me.

One Month Later, And Other Pertinent Announcements

Well it's been about a month since I've come to Japan.  The first two weeks were so intensely busy with training for my new job that there was absolutely no time to write / edit / etc! Not even on the short story I'm working on! Meh! Then two weeks ago I moved into my apartment and things have slowed down considerably, much to my blissful satisfaction.  Work still eats up a lot of my time, but my downtime is mine again and that means I've been able to get back to ~real work~ in the evenings. Editing on CROSS//Rebirth is coming along, but due to a brain-meltdown on where to put some info, I have not been able to put up any of the new revised chapters yet.

However, that's not the entire purpose of this entry (aside from letting you all know that I am -still- alive!)  I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do with my ~future~, as it were.  It's been a rough two or three years, so I've lost a lot of focus on long-term goals and what I would generally like to accomplish before I die. That said, one of the things I've been thinking about is what I want to do with my life when I move back home to America.  (As it is, I mostly came to work in Japan to make some much-needed money thanks to the great economy back in Oregon.)  Currently I have no great career goals (outside of writing, of course), a desire to go back to school, a place I just have to live in, or anything like that, so it's hard for me to think of what I have to look forward to - basically, I'm not really saving my money for anything other than to have something to live off while I look for a job back in America. That's not very fun.  Then it dawned on me while I was editing the other night...why don't I publish when I get back?  I've been talking about it for a long time, but real life stuff has always gotten in the way of me being able to actually finish my projects.  The reason why I need to save my money for this is because I've had it on my mind for quite a while now to self-publish, at least in the beginning.

If nothing else, it gives me some purpose to working other than "make money".  It makes working a little more bearable when you know you have this ultimate goal, doesn't it?  Publishing would also be very good for me mentally as well:  it would be nice to know that all my hard work has finally paid off!

This is all still at least over a year away before I start moving on it, and hopefully by then I hope to have CROSS///Rebirth edited to death.  Yes, that's right.  For the longest time I've had my heart set on publishing Nagnomei first, but it's not ready, and CROSS// more or less is (editing aside).  Until that time, however, I still have to finish editing it to death, having it proofread by others, finalizing cover designs (any bored graphic artists out there?) and researching publishers.  If anybody has any experience in self-publishing and can recommend (to use or avoid) who they went with, that would help greatly!

Meanwhile, I'll be over here with my fingers to the keyboard, as always.  I'm currently polishing a short story that I've recently written so expect to see that up soon! (Hopefully sooner than later ^^;).