The Future Is Now

Once upon a time, I spent many long years working on a now-abandoned multigenerational family novel with storylines set in three time periods. I knew the date of every scene, and those dates were all locked together by the timeline of both the fictional family and real world events. One setting was pure history as far as I was concerned, one was a recent past that I'd lived through, and one was the near future. When I wrote the first draft in 2007, the familiar past era was closer than the imagined future. As I embarked on repeated revisions, on and off for more than a decade, the near future setting grew nearer and nearer. The year it took place (you can guess where this is going) was 2026.

It's a little strange to be in 2026 for real now, after spending so much time in my fictional version. (Of course, existing in 2026 is strange enough on its own.) But the strangeness is mainly numerical, and not from writing any vividly bold predictions about what life might be like now. In early drafts, most of my worldbuilding extrapolated from technologies I thought were cutting-edge. That tended to mean I accurately predicted how those technologies would be used about 18 months out, often before I finished a given draft. As my actual timeline barreled toward my near future, I gave up on any science fictional inclinations.

The major worldbuilding in my 2026 storyline was about a significant earthquake striking the Bay Area, something I never wanted to be predictive about. (But to make sure I'm not psychic, for the record: November 4, 7.5 on the Hayward Fault.) I also wrote the almost-throwaway but important-to-me line "The president was on her way to Oakland" way back before there was any particular woman (from Oakland, no less) who I hoped would be in the White House now. Sorry this game isn't more fun!

Anyway, that novel hasn't been in play for a long while, for many reasons, and that is even less likely to change in a future that's become its past. I only bring it up again to commemorate the weird space 2026 occupies in my writerly mind. And as a cautionary tale for other slow writers planning stories set at a particular point in the near future.

At present, I'm applying my slow writing to a different project. It's the novel my recent blog posts refer to, for some value of "recent" and "refer". I know I haven't said anything about it for months, and I've never shared many details. (Another thing that's strange is having a decade of blog posts about a novel that never went anywhere.) But I've been working steadily away, writing sentences and scenes that may eventually cohere into a finished novel.

This one is set entirely in the future. I've repeated the possible mistake of specifying a year, but I think I'm safe for not catching up this time, since the year is 2132. Spending imaginary time in that farther-out future is fun, and challenging, and definitely requires more meticulous extrapolations than I've ever made before. Not that I'm honestly trying to predict what I think the world of 2132 will be like. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in an often-echoed sentiment, "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." She wrote more about the idea than just the pithy sentiment, and I recommend the rest of her 1976 Author's Note to THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS.

I reread Le Guin's classic novel this month, and my book club had a wonderful conversation about it. Also in April, I turned 51 and had some delicious birthday celebrations, including a cake that I enjoyed baking. I got to show the world the sweater I've been knitting since last summer. And early in the month, early in the morning, I was woken up by a nearby earthquake that didn't result in anything besides the rude awakening. That can be my quake for 2026, thanks.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Miranda Shulman describes What Knitting Has Taught Me About Writing: "When I say that every stitch, every word, is progress, I mean that every stitch, every word, is a valuable learning experience, not that they are permanent. When I'm knitting, I'm often following a complicated pattern translated from Dutch to English. It usually takes a few tries to understand what's being asked of me, and if I'm knitting in a dark room (like a movie theater or a dimly lit restaurant) I'll probably make a mistake. Then again, when I'm knitting on my couch at home, I'll also probably make a mistake. There's no way to knit a sweater faster than the time it takes to create the right stitches and understand the pattern. You have to make all the mistakes and be okay with re-doing it until it’s right. That's the process of making. That's dedication to craft. That's discovery."

Ready for FOGcon and Beyond

It's one week until FOGcon, and I've been busy preparing for the tenth year of this awesome speculative fiction convention. This year, for the first time, I took on responsibility for the program book that contains information about the honored guests, the programming schedule, and so on. The book is professionally printed, with gorgeous cover art, so it serves as a nice souvenir of the con as well as being useful.

As program book coordinator, I collected all the different pieces that go into the book, edited everything, and did the layout. I had very little knowledge of layout or design going into this, so that part was a challenging but fun learning experience. I think it all turned out pretty well. You can see the PDF version on the FOGcon site.

Creating the program book was a big job for a couple of weeks, and the timing was good for me to handle it because I'm between things. Behind me is the completed novel revision, and I'm currently at a waiting stage with that manuscript. So now that I've taken time to recharge, caught up on other stuff, and finished this volunteer project, I'm ready to move ahead to... something.

If I'm honest, the program book timing also worked out well in that it provided a virtuous excuse to put off figuring out what comes next. I wish I had a solid novel idea that I could get started on drafting or outlining, but everything swirling around in my head is half-formed. I hope that if I settle my mind down to focusing on the possibilities, things will gel. But that requires convincing myself to get started, and I keep finding more reasons to delay. It's time to get back to writing. Definitely after FOGcon, anyway.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Christopher Gronlund considers inspiration: "There's a fine line between seeking out inspiration and working. When it's time to put in the effort, do the work -- don't look for inspiration because you'll likely find what little time you may have taken up by the literary equivalent of hollow calories."

The Annual Reckoning

This year I finished my novel, twice, once in February and once in November. That's pretty cool, but it's not unprecedented. In my long history of finishing THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, there was another year I reached The End twice, way back in 2013.

I wrote last December about the repetitive nature of my year-end posts, but it's not every year I complete this novel even once, so 2019 was definitely a year of accomplishment. One consistent feature of my annual wrap-ups is the belief that the following year will bring a much more triumphant accomplishment, though I think I stopped stating this explicitly way back in 2011. So I'll just say that this time, I'm extra optimistic.

This particular end of the year is also the end of the decade, and everyone's been reflecting accordingly. I started this blog in 2010, so it's easy to check back on what I was up to at the beginning the decade. I was preparing to embark on a revision of this same novel. As much as the world has changed since then, I guess it's nice to find points of stability.

Here's to a new year, a new decade, and progress in positive new directions. I wish you all much happiness!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Millions, Adam O'Fallon Price decides to face the horror of rereading his first novel: "One thing that struck me on this reading is just how much there is going on. It's a common feature of the debut novel, in which an author takes decades of reading and thinking about novels and compresses it all into their first try, as though it will also be their last. Some of it works here, and some of it doesn't. If I were to give critical advice to the person who wrote this, I might tell him to think about losing at least one of the component parts--maybe the Vietnam sections--and to also not feel like he has to conclude all of the proceedings with quite such a bang."

Finishing the Sweater

Back in June, I used the analogy of a knitted sweater's loose ends to explain why the new revision of my novel needed another editing pass. All my projects, whether writing or knitting, take far longer than I expect they will, but I'm relieved to say that I finally have this novel into the shape I want it.

I went through the manuscript addressing all those comments hanging off the side. I worked in the extra bits of ideas and trimmed away the strands that still didn't connect. In a few areas, I had to redo sections with tangled or dropped stitches so the quality would match the rest. I removed part of the trim and added it back in another color. I sewed on some buttons to make the whole thing more attractive and more functional.

One of the final steps in a knitting project is to wash the garment and pin it down flat in the desired shape. This is called blocking, and it can dramatically change the size. In the course of rewriting and improving my novel, I'd ended up with a manuscript that was rather baggy. Happily, after the long soak and determined blocking of the past months, it's shrunk again to a more flattering fit.

Now that my project is really finished, I'm going to send it out into the world and see if any, um, clothing labels want to reproduce the design? Here the metaphor breaks down, but it's just as well, because I have a habit of spending months or years knitting something that I then put in a drawer and forget about. My novel deserves to be worn.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Rahul Kanakia shares her approach for deciding what to write next: "I have an exercise where I imagine opening a new book, and I imagine staring at 'Chapter One' and I imagine looking at the page and what I'd like to see on it. What's my ideal page one? Not my all-time ideal, but my ideal for right this minute. What do I want to be on that page? Usually what comes to me first is a certain shape. I want the text to look a certain way on the page."

Weaving in Ends

It's been a while since I've posted a revision update (or anything at all). Some faithful readers may have been under the beautiful illusion that I was finished revising, but others may recall that my previous post about the novel referred to "getting back to work on cleaning up all these smaller issues." Yes, of course I'm revising again, because what else would I do with myself?

But allow me to explain in the form of a knitting metaphor. A large garment such as a sweater takes a long time to knit. It's made from many balls of yarn and often multiple pieces (front, back, sleeves) that get sewn together. When a sweater is finished and assembled, there might be a lot of loose yarn tails hanging from various edges and seams. The process of hiding and tidying up those tails is called "weaving in ends".

If I finish knitting a sweater and immediately put it on without weaving in the ends, it functions as a sweater, in that it fits on my body and keeps me warm. But all those tails hanging off don't look good. People can still admire the sweater's gorgeously complex pattern of color, but the glaring distraction of the loose ends catches their attention first, muting their appreciation. The year I put into knitting the sweater is undermined because I didn't spend the required hours weaving in the ends.

In knitting, I detest weaving in ends, and I don't think I do it very well. Happily, as I work through my manuscript again, tidying up ugly sentences and trimming away the irrelevant bits, I'm enjoying myself, and I'm feeling good about my editing abilities. It's highly satisfying to get each chapter into tip-top shape by removing the problems I don't want hanging loose. When I put this sweater on and wear it out into the world, it's going to look great.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Vox, Eliza Brooke investigates the practice of placing "A Novel" on book covers: "Books have used the 'XYZ: A Novel' format since the 17th century, when realistic fiction started getting popular. The term 'novel' was a way to distinguish these more down-to-earth stories from the fanciful 'romances' that came before..." (Thanks, The Millions!)

Reading My Words

For a while now, most of my posts have been about reading and books. This one is, too, but what's different is that the book I just finished reading is my own novel.

I finally reached the stage of this endless revision when it was time to read the manuscript all at once and see how it is. I'm relieved to report that this novel is pretty decent. Some places need adjustment to line up with things I ended up changing later in the revision. There are scenes I want to shorten to get to the point faster. But mostly, the story reads smoothly, and many excellent moments or sentences I'd forgotten popped up as delightful surprises.

I left myself many comments during the readthrough that I now need to go through and resolve. While plenty of sentences are "awk" or "unclear", the good news is that hardly any left me wondering what parasites had taken over my brain. The most notable of these was a sentence starting "Ironically enough," where I had to leave the very disappointed comment "that is not ironic." Aside from that, I rarely cringed, which is a notable improvement over previous readings.

So now I'm getting back to work on cleaning up all these smaller issues. Once I have a tight, coherent draft, we'll see what happens next

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Kim Liao reflects for Literary Hub about rejections and creative failure: "Rejection still hurts. My skin is not as thick as I thought it was, and becoming accustomed to something is not the same thing as enjoying it. Also, not all rejections are created equally. Tallying every rejection as 1 out of 100 doesn't account for the fact that some rejections barely even register, while others feel like the sky is collapsing."

Another Year

The year is drawing to a close, as years always do. Often around this time I wrap up the year with a post in which I take stock. Last year I didn't write one because we were in the middle of moving into our new house -- and having that excuse was a bit of a relief, because except for the house, I didn't feel I'd accomplished much in 2017. This year, I debated whether to skip again, since 2018 also didn't involve any exciting completions or successes in my writing life.

Still, I like getting an overview of the year, even for myself, so I looked back at what I've done, and it's not nothing. This eternal revision isn't over, but the end is in sight. The steady plod continues, even on days when it feels like pointless misery to so much as look at this stupid manuscript, and that is an achievement worth reporting. I can't know for sure what's going to happen at the end of this revision, but I do know that by persisting, I've turned my stupid manuscript into a far better novel than what I thought was good enough before.

While looking back, I also reviewed December posts I've made in earlier years, and there's a consistency in my reflections on where I am or am not at the end of the year and what I imagine happening in the next one. That could be demoralizing, but I actually found it kind of comforting. As long as my good fortune continues, there's always another year, and that's the best cause for celebration.

May you find reasons to celebrate in 2019, and may your dark days brighten!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Panio Gianopoulos extols the virtues of trains as writing spaces: "Can you really get deep into a piece of writing, into anything creative, when you've only got 35 minutes? Isn't that just the warm-up? Strangely, to invert the truism, more is less. On weekends, once the children have been anesthetized with iPads and I've ducked up into our attic with my laptop, I find that somehow I get less writing done in two hours."

Restructuring a Chapter

I haven't written much for my blog this year because I've been trying to focus my creative energy and time on revision. But when Christopher Gronlund posted a before and after of a paragraph he'd recently improved, I felt inspired to share a rewrite example of my own. I knew I'd made posts of this type before, though I hadn't recalled until locating the two earlier entries that both specifically demonstrate how a passage gets shortened along with strengthened.

Before I could go further with the idea of presenting a section of revised text, I noticed how many big chunks I was moving and deleting in the chapter I was currently working on, and I wondered if I could show off that process instead. The concept got pushed aside while I finished actually wrangling the Frankenchapter into shape. Then some initial work on this post was interrupted by the demands of the next messy chapter. Also, as usual, real life happened in the meantime, including a trip for family celebrations and the first Thanksgiving in our new house.

I've finally set aside the brainspace to finish a visual representation of one chapter, before and after restructuring. Many thanks to my in-house graphic designers and consultants for helping me realize my visualization vision! You can click to view a larger image:

The Steady Plod

It's been ages since I posted a revision update (or since I posted much of anything beyond book reviews). The thing about getting a novel into really good shape is that it takes a long time, and the thing about long-term projects is that there's a lot of same old, same old. I can report I'm in a good stretch of sitting down to write and making progress every day, but there will be far more of that before I reach the finish line.

Writing, like most work, is a daily plod that involves doing more or less the same thing over and over again. Those are the ideal conditions, really. Aside from when I occasionally reach a noteworthy milestone, the writing days that look different are the ones where I struggle to eke out more than a paragraph or rage against the corner I've written myself into. I'm good with the more common state of plodding unremarkably forward.

Plodding along means I pass minor milestones all the time, and I pat myself on the back whenever I nail down a scene, get through a chapter, or just craft a particularly nice phrase. Sometimes I even feel like crowing publicly. The other day I tweeted my triumph over coming up with a little moment to insert that really tied a scene together. I no longer recall what detail I was talking about, but the satisfied feeling remains.

So, while it doesn't look like much from the outside, I'm still revising, I'm still happy with what I'm producing, and I'm still here, keeping my pace to a steady plod.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Marie Myung-Ok Lee writes at The Millions about the evolution of her author name: "Leaving Korea, I also left Myung-Ok behind. Nobody in America called me that. I became Marie again and didn't think about it until, ironically, my Fulbright novel--many years later--was acquired by a publisher. Ever since I'd started publishing, I'd had a sporadic problem of another Marie Lee, a white writer whose Cape Cod Skull Mystery series was quite popular, judging from the fan mail she received, i.e., the fan mail I received."

Wait Till It Comes Around Again

Well, here we are much of the way through November, already into the hectic rush of the end of another year. I started the month with ambitious plans of drawing inspiration from the NaNoWriMo energy in the air and devoting bigger chunks of time to revision. That worked out for two or three days, and then there were some plot developments on the new house remodel that sucked up my attention. I never really managed the "NANOWRIMO AMOUNT OF FOCUS" that my all-caps to-do item called for this month, and writing progress has mostly trickled along. Our new home is proceeding more quickly, at least, and it will be ready for moving in next month. My manuscript will be ready next year, surely.

A year ago, November also began with high hopes. I was excitedly embarking on this revision that's still underway, and I wrote more or less the same thing about harnessing NaNoWriMo energy. Then the election happened, and focusing on writing got a lot harder for quite some time.

Of course, even under ideal conditions, I'm not super great at consistently putting hours of concentration into writing. Or maybe the issue is that conditions are so rarely ideal. Real life presents a constant distraction, which is a lovely thing as often as it's not. I knew I'd written about this issue before, and I found this post from many years ago on the topic, when naturally I was engaged in another revision of this same novel. Because let's not forget that I've been doing this over and over for a decade.

But hey, the tail end of the year is all about annual traditions, right? Some year it might be nice if my custom evolved to working on a different novel or revived making the most of NaNoWriMo. But I'm incredibly fortunate to get all this time for writing, and for that and so much else in my life, I'm truly thankful.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Millions, Adam O'Fallon Price explores the nature of both first- and third-person narratives in this Defense of Third Person: "We constantly divide our attention between the first- and third-person points of view, between desiring the shiny object in front of us and figuring out what it means for us to take it: who else wants it, what we have to do to get it, and whether it's worth taking it from them. In this sense, close third person not only accurately models human cognition, but omniscient third does as well, since, while we cannot read other people's minds, we are constantly inferring their consciousness--their motives and feelings. The human experience is a kind of constant jumping of these cognitive registers, from pure reptile-brain all the way up to a panoramic moral overview and back down, and human ingenuity has yet to invent a better means of representing this experience in art than the third-person narrator."

Horror Story

For Halloween, I present a list of scary facts about my novel:

→ It was ten (ten!) years ago that I wrote the first draft of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE for NaNoWriMo 2007.

→ At that time, the 2026 portion of the story took place at the far reaches of the near future, while the late 1990s section drew on my recent memories. Today, the 90s are a historical setting, and by the time people can purchase my book, 2026 might be their credit card expiration date.

→ The first draft only took 30 days to write. Sure, it's 83,000 words of mediocre prose, the characters are simplistic, and the plot is a mere sketch of the story as it currently stands, but I got from start to end in a single month.

→ I'm now on the fourth major rewrite of the novel. Counting less extensive editing passes, this is at least the eleventh draft.

→ Despite all the research I've done over the past decade (decade!), there are still endless details in the manuscript that remain to be factchecked or rendered more accurately.

→ I've written or planned out several other novels in the years since beginning this one, and I'm still just as far away from finding a story that might eventually turn into something worth publishing.

These are the terrors that haunt me in the night. I wish you all a better sleep, a happy Halloween, and a successful NaNoWriMo!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Annalee Newitz explains for Slate How to Write a Novel Set More Than 125 Years in the Future: "Possibly the most difficult part of building a future was coming up with little details, like the euphemisms people use for slavery, or how they access the internet. Characters have to do things like eat, turn on the lights, and get wasted on a night off. These mundane details lead back to larger questions. What powers the lights? My novel is set after peak oil, so do the lights run on alternative energy? Batteries? Are the lights in fact just glowing bacteria living on the ceiling? Also, when would my character go out to a club? Do we still have the concept of weekends in the future? Do adults socialize mostly in the evening, or are work shifts so arbitrary that they might consider it normal to go to a raging party at 2 p.m.?" (Thanks, Jamie!)

What's New

It's probably time for another revision update, and of course the update is once again that I'm still working my way through this draft. The new wrinkle is that I haven't been writing as much as usual due to real life demanding more time, as it so often does whenever the writing really gets flowing.

Fortunately, this real life intrusion is a happy and exciting one. Somewhat out of the blue, we've purchased a new house, and we're now in the process of arranging renovations before moving in. The new house is only a few miles from the old one, in the same Silicon Valley city, which is convenient, since I've been over there almost every day to meet with contractors and repair people, make decisions, and dream about how we'll set up our new home once it's ready.

I could craft some sort of extended metaphor comparing revision to remodeling, but let's just say they both tend to take longer than expected. We're almost to the point where the professionals are going to get to work turning our plans into reality while I get back to focusing on the manuscript, but this past month my attention has been more on the house than the words. I'm trying to do at least a little bit of writing every day, and that's sometimes successful and sometimes a reminder of how poorly I handle distractions.

The progress that's been happening, while slower than ever, is nonetheless good, satisfying progress. I'm continuing to make this novel so much better, because I'm constantly a better writer than I was before, which is a cool thing to realize. Eventually, the work will be done, and I'm confident it will all be worth the wait!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Melville House shares an essay from Elisabeth Jaquette on translating Basma Abdel Aziz's The Queue (which I read last year): "Much of a translator's work boils down to being a mediator. In the larger sense, we're mediators between languages, of course. But translating an entire novel also means mediating between cultures, histories, and readerships in ways that can present daunting -- and thrilling -- challenges."

Things In Progress

Right now my life is fairly pleasant but a bit scattered, with various things in progress:

→ The revision, still, forever, but it continues to go well. Lately I've been really putting my characters through the emotional wringer, which I guess is a good thing. I keep believing milestones are just within reach, and then I hit a slow patch or discover more details to work out or have to manage the logistics of a scene with five people talking, and those points recede farther into the distance. I'll get there.

→ Three books I'm in the middle of reading. Earlier this year I was mostly focusing on one book at a time, and then I resumed my two-at-once habit until it got out of control this month. The books are wildly different, so I have nice variety to choose from, but it's a bit impractical. Expect reviews next week.

→ A knitting project, after a long bout of knitter's block. I spent a few months on a cardigan that was giving me a lot of trouble, and when I put it down in frustration a while back, I didn't pick it up again and was reluctant to start anything new. I finally decided I can return to the sweater when I feel like it and seek out more enjoyable projects in the meantime. It's soothing to be knitting again.

→ A heat wave. To be fair, the serious heat has passed for the moment, with temperatures only in the low 80s this week. That's still too warm for my taste, but it's far more tolerable than last week's record-breaking highs. It was over 100 outside my house.

→ Real life fun with family and friends. We've had various visits and celebrations around here, with more planned, and that's been nice. I'm glad I'm not a character in someone's novel of dysfunction and angst, because gatherings not interrupted by dramatic revelations are a lot more relaxing!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jason Black analyzes How Exposition Breaks Empathy: "It shifts the story into a mode in which the focus flips 180 degrees around, pointing out of the story rather than into it. That feels radically different. It yanks you out of the immersive reading experience by reminding you that you are in fact reading a story told by an author."

A Writer's Search History, Revisited

Last month I noted on Twitter: "My search history suggests I have small children and a drug problem. Happily, neither is true." Writing leads to a lot of internet searches, sometimes weirdly specific, often on topics that are odd or disturbing either individually or in combination.

Four years ago, I put together a post highlighting some search queries that had featured in my recent research. When I looked back at that post -- once I finished suppressing my panic about how it's four years later and I'm again, still, working on same novel -- I was amused (mixed with an additional dash of panic) to see many similarities with searches from the past few months.

→ Previously on Lisa's search history, I was seeking concussion information, and just recently I looked up "concussion check" and variations. As it happens, a different character is the subject of concern this time. Within the plot, this all makes perfect sense, but maybe I need to examine why my novel has a motif of head injuries. Related searches: "head wound blood", "bleeding from chin".

→ Last time, I wanted to know about the smell of vodka, and I didn't end up using the information. A couple of months ago, I put something in a scene about the narrator smelling tequila, but I wasn't sure it made sense and ultimately took it out. It doesn't appear I did any searching this time around, so I must have done some real world investigation, meaning the research didn't all go to waste.

→ In the category of "of course you can find that on YouTube", I recently searched "sound of a baby burping" and watched numerous videos, all in the name of essential research. More baby queries: "how long does it take a baby to drink a bottle", "when can baby roll over", "older child sharing room with baby". Incidentally, the baby and older sibling I was writing about are part of a brand new family of secondary characters introduced to the novel in this draft, since I didn't have enough people to revise already.

→ My previous search post discussed my brief desire to explore motel curtains for some reason. This year, my decor needs were about "bathroom tile walls". I'm reminded of a long-ago commiseration with a writing buddy regarding first drafts overly focused on describing wall and floor coverings.

→ "election day 2026" is the sort of search I do when I suddenly consider that the part of my novel that takes place in the future also takes place in early November. Election Day will be before the novel starts, and of course it's a midterm, so there shouldn't be a glaring absence if the characters don't mention it. Most likely, I went through this same panic cycle years ago.

→ "california shrubbery" is the sort of search I do when I suddenly doubt that an extremely small detail is realistic. I'm imagining a row of bushes in front of a house, which I think of as a very common yard feature, but what I'm picturing is a childhood home in Massachusetts, so do houses have those here? Several times a week, I walk around my neighborhood, but I guess I immediately forgot about this query, because I still haven't paid any attention to the question while outside my (unshrubberied) house.

Spring Is in the Air

It's April, so the cherry blossoms have scattered to the winds, flowers are springing up all over my neighborhood, and sneezes are in full bloom. After years of not enough rain, California has probably finished a season of too much rain, and we're looking at a stretch of pleasant sunny days before my valley inevitably gets much too hot for my taste.

I'm another year older now. I've been celebrating my birthday primarily by eating lots of delicious treats. I also bought myself a few books, celebrated with friends, and have more festivities planned for this weekend. Once again, I find it's good to be the birthday girl.

Between birthday activities and unrelated commitments, I haven't done much writing this week, but in general I've been making steady if slow progress on the revision. As I mentioned before, some of the changes to this draft involve writing entirely new material rather than simply adjusting what's already there. Something I only recently articulated for myself is that I'm trying to write this new stuff not as a first draft but as a fifth/tenth/whatever-this-is draft so that it matches all the parts that have been through many rounds of polishing. That's not completely possible, but I'm getting at least partway there, and it's one reason things are moving slowly for now.

While I'm working from a detailed outline I developed in the fall, parts of the story have drifted away from the plan, as tends to happen. I hit a big plot snag about a month ago, but I eventually wrote my way out of it. Though I'm still winging it a bit more than I was hoping, I'm happy with how the new version of the story is developing. I do have concerns that too much of my novel revolves around chairs, sandwiches, and ice cream, but after all, those are a pretty good set of things.

I hope spring is bringing good things your way as well!

Slowly But Surely

I've had a busy month, but mostly not on the writing front, so while revision continues, my progress has been rather sluggish. Still, I figured it was time for an update on the project.

As usual, rewriting involves a lot of new writing, which means figuring out the logistics of scenes and even characters who didn't exist before. Though I planned a lot in advance while outlining, I've come up with plenty of enhancements and changes since then, so the story is getting better but taking longer to revise. I'm pleased about making these improvements, despite the frustrating pace.

It's always exciting to finally write a scene I've imagined for months. I recently reached an episode I was anticipating with a special thrill because it was a sex scene. The reality of the event didn't quite live up to my expectations, which created an entirely appropriate tone for the scene.

Sometimes I get confused about what season it is because my mind is still inside the calendar of my novel (no, I don't usually forget the current decade). Other times, life and fiction line up nicely, as when I needed to write my characters getting caught in the rain while rain poured down outside my window. Occasionally, reality produces parallels that I wish it wouldn't. While I subject the characters in my novel to the loss of housing and possessions after an earthquake in San Jose, some of the city's real residents are coping with the effects of a devastating flood that damaged thousands of homes. Reading about the relief effort for this disaster has been familiar and odd and uncomfortably informative.

A couple of happier real life distractions are coming up, in the form of a visit from family and then another fun FOGcon weekend. So it's going to be a little longer until I get time to seriously focus again, and inevitably at that point I'll find another excuse to take time away from my novel. But I really am still hard at work -- except when I'm not.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jason Black discusses the tricky question of when to reveal backstory: "The difference between building up a reader's curiosity and spoiling it is this: First you hint that there's something to be known. Only later, after readers have had a long time to stew in their curiosity about it, do you ultimately reveal the Shocking Truth about the past."

My Year in Sometimes Writing

Well, here we are at the end of one eventful year, facing the start of another. In 2016, my personal writing progress and accomplishments feel particularly small and unimportant, but this is my blog all about me, so I'm reviewing my year in writing and related activities. I'll do a separate post about reading and books in January.

For the first four months of the year, I didn't write any fiction. I did some research and idea generation for a project I'm still thinking about. I reread a few old manuscripts and considered what I might salvage from them. I wrote a couple of essays that didn't end up going anywhere. Writing-wise, the early part of the year was mainly about investigating possibilities.

Much of what I actually spent time on during those months was cleaning my writing room. I filed years of documents into filing cabinets, got rid of a huge amount of clutter, and rearranged furniture to make my space more usable. I meant to post photos of the final product, but then I never entirely finished organizing the last few small areas to make it picture-perfect, and my attention moved to other things. Until I maybe get around to someday sharing the results, just know that I'm very happy with what I accomplished, and my room is a great place to work now.

From May to July, I took an online short fiction class from Gotham Writers Workshop, and that provided deadlines and motivation to get me writing again, eventually. While some aspects of the class worked better for me than others, I got a lot out of it. I wrote two stories, in addition to some smaller pieces prompted by exercises, and the process of writing them, receiving feedback, and reading and critiquing the work of others was all very instructive. In the writing and revision I've done this fall, I feel like I've made noticeable improvement, and it's in part because of what I learned during the class.

I intended to try publishing my class stories and others in literary magazines, and I did get as far as researching the submission process and revising one of the new stories in September. The feedback I got from critique partners indicated that I still need to do more work, and then the project fell victim to timing, because I was hoping to finish the story while planning my next novel draft. Once I started the actual revising of the novel, I was reluctant to put any time into reworking the story, so I set it aside. I would rather not abandon the project at this stage after all the efforts of my kind commenters, so I want to return to the story with fresh eyes in the new year.

The latest revision of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE has been my big writing focus for the last few months. Unfortunately, timing also dealt a blow to this project. I completed outlining the new version and started revising at the end of October with grand plans for a productive November. Then the election happened, and focusing on writing got a lot harder.

I haven't made nearly as much progress on the revision as I expected back in October, but arguably, that statement was going to be true no matter what, because all writing is always slower than I anticipate. I produced good writing in November and December, but I spent a lot of time not writing. Some of the interruptions involved following the news and making phone calls and attending a town hall and learning about political action. Others were all the usual distractions of life, which tend to be especially numerous toward the end of the year.

2017 promises to bring more of everything: more revising, more reasons to take action, more real life. I have a lot to keep working on.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lorraine Berry at Literary Hub contacted authors a few weeks after the election to find out how writers are getting back to work: "How are writers using their rage, their disappointment, their grief to get themselves moving? Mixed in each of the letters I received, even the ones where the sadness felt the most crippling, the writer recognized that action must emerge from the sadness."

It's Novel Season Again

Since I last reported in, the aforementioned revisions have been keeping me busy, and I'm making good if gradual progress. I devoted a solid, necessary chunk of time to planning the next draft of my novel but avoided getting trapped in that stage forever, so I'm now on to rewriting based on my plan.

My planning this time mostly involved making outlines, for some reason multiple partially overlapping outlines that I eventually had to merge together. Using these outlines, I tested out different ideas for new plot directions until I settled on the sequence that works best. I dealt in advance with many of the time-consuming logistics that so often stall me in the middle of writing, such as determining how to place a specific set of characters together with the motivation to discuss a certain topic, or deciding whether events should be shown, summarized, or skipped past with blank space. The scene-by-scene outline I wound up with gives me a place to keep adding any notes I think of while working on different scenes, or while lying in bed trying to sleep.

Tearing apart text I've previously worked so hard on is always scary (insert Halloween sounds), and I was nervous to begin actual revision, but I'm getting back into the swing of it. It's satisfying to recognize that I'm creating even better text, and I'm excited about putting my new plot and character ideas into action. Of course, I'm generally the least excited about writing at whatever moment I have to force myself to sit down and begin, but once I've stared out the window in despair for a few minutes, I tend to find that somehow sentences are coming together and time is passing and oh yeah, I guess I really do like this writing thing.

I haven't participated in National Novel Writing Month in years, but I'm still well-conditioned to find November an excellent month for writing productivity. As I'm cheering on my NaNoing friends, I hope to gain inspiration from the wordiness in the air this time of year. I don't have a specific goal in mind for next month, but I do intend to buckle down and focus on my novel (which originated as a NaNoWriMo project long ago).

In other seasonal developments, we've finally had some rain here in northern California, though the weather keeps climbing back to summer temperatures. While I do prefer sun to not, it's been such a hot year that I'm looking forward to chillier days and a chance to snuggle inside the cozy sweater I finished back in February, just before the weather started warming up. In case winter never comes, I've also started knitting a lighter weight sweater. And since the real purpose of this paragraph is to brag about my knitting accomplishments, I'll point out the two wraps I completed this summer.

Onward into autumn, and good luck to everyone embarking on NaNoWriMo or an alternate challenge!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ The Millions shares a comforting/panic-inducing conversation between Whitney Terrell, Emily Barton, and Alexander Chee about spending ten years or more on a novel: "Working so long on a book is a scary proposition in the supposedly 'fast-paced' media culture of the 21st century. But it happens more often than one might think. The three of us sat down to share strategies and retrace our steps in the hope that our experiences might provide a practical map -- or at least give some hope -- to other writers engaged in a long work. Here are our notes on a decade in the literary wilderness."

Double Revision

After a wonderfully hectic summer filled with great visits to and from family members, I'm happy to be immersed in writing again this month. I'm enjoying having plenty of uninterrupted time to write, and I'm excited about moving forward on projects with some new goals and motivations.

Recently I received some very helpful advice and encouragement about THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, and that's inspired me to embark on yet another revision. The focus of my previous revision was shortening the manuscript, and I cut over 20% while keeping the plot more or less the same. This time, I have suggestions and ideas about improving some parts of the story that aren't as strong as the rest. I'm planning to add new elements and remove others that aren't working, ideally while keeping the length about the same, which I'm sure will require further use of the compactness techniques I relied on last time.

I started off by rereading the manuscript, which I hadn't really looked at in more than a year. As always happens after time away, I saw plenty I wanted to change, but I was heartened by how much of the novel I was happy with. Before the last revision, my reread of the previous draft put me to sleep at points and left me wondering if gremlins had rewritten my sentences for incoherency. It was an enormous relief to not have a repeat of that experience and to confirm I'm actually making the book better with each edit. I was also pleased to notice that some of my thoughts about improving sentences and paragraphs came out of what I learned from the writing and critique in the class I just took.

I'm now on the next step of revision, the planning stage. I've written before (while in the middle of a still earlier, quite lengthy revision) about the value of planning and the danger it can morph into procrastination. I think I'm doing okay at the moment. I'm outlining the changes I want to make and trying to figure out the best options for the story. Some of my notes are lists of pros and cons for different plot directions. Some include comments like "but is it all just too ridiculously melodramatic?" and "this needs to conclude whatever the conclusion turns out to be". It's a process. I'm making good headway, and the plan is gradually coming together.

I don't think I've blogged at all about the writing software Scrivener, which I began using a couple of years ago, I believe when I was preparing for the previous revision. It's a powerful application with a lot of features, and I'm starting to use more of these than I had before, though nowhere near all of them. Maybe later I'll write about my Scrivener techniques, but for now, here's a screenshot from my revision planning:

Wrapping Up and Winding Down

The end of 2015 approaches, and I'm ready to switch my brain to vacation mode. Before I sink into a revel of books, knitting, and sugar, here's an update and overview of my writing year.

At the end of October, I mentioned I was a month into a new novel that I was writing with very little plan in mind. Yesterday I completed that first draft. I brought the characters and situation to a reasonable point of closure a bit past the 50,000-word mark that defines a novel in NaNoWriMo. The manuscript concludes with a self-indulgent epilogue that gives every character a happy ending, which was my reward for pushing through to the end.

Nobody gets to read this story. It's not at all good. Though I didn't restrict myself to writing in a single month, I basically NaNoWriMoed this first draft, and in true NaNo fashion, there are some tiny brilliant bits that emerged as surprises in the course of writing, and the rest is discardable. The premise turned out to be only marginally fruitful, and everything interesting happened in the subplots. I do like how many of the characters evolved, and some elements of the story have potential, so maybe certain parts could be salvaged and turned into something else. But that's a concern for another year.

At least I can report that I wrote a novel this year. I learned some things in the process and reminded myself what first drafts are like (bad). I derived some satisfaction from following through on a large project. It kept me from running wild on the streets or the internet for a couple of hours each day.

The more significant and satisfying writing endeavor of 2015 was yet another revision of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, which occupied me for the first half of the year. After confronting the fact that my manuscript was just too long, I shortened it by over 20%. By now I can't even remember how I possibly achieved this feat, so I'll have to review my series of posts about The Incredible Shrinking Manuscript.

All throughout the year, I've continued fiddling with the outline I keep talking about that I hope will eventually become another novel. This has been mostly a background project, and while I'm making gradual progress with it, I don't have any exciting milestones to announce.

I had a lot of fun this year composing blog entries that explore my childhood writing. Reading and analyzing the bizarre things I wrote as a kid has provided me with great amusement each month, and I'm glad my readers find these posts entertaining as well. I have more gems to share in 2016.

My final ongoing writing project is producing reviews of every book I read. The monthly recap format has been working out well for me, and I'll probably continue with that next year. Stay tuned for a January post with my favorite books of 2015, reading stats, and so on.

I'll wrap this up with two non-writing notes. First, for those who didn't see it elsewhere, check out the sweater I finally finished knitting and assembling this fall, a year and a half after starting it. And lastly, let's not forget that in 2015, we learned that I am a treasure chest once owned by the Visigoths.

May your 2015 wind down with some moments you can treasure. Here's to the end of another year!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel considers genres and the myths of popularity, with statistical analysis and an overview of ongoing debates: "There is an odd cognitive dissonance that happens in these conversations, where we are simultaneously supposed to believe that literary fiction is 'mainstream fiction' and genre fiction is 'ghettoized,' and also that literary fiction is a niche nobody reads while genre authors laugh all the way to the bank."