I’ve mentioned many times that I keep a personal writing journal– it’s at InsaneJournal, which is like LiveJournal but with less rules and crappy ads. The “tags” feature as it works with LJ type platforms is freaking brilliant for a crazy anal retentive writer type. Any entry I make about a given book, draft, chapter, character, plot, list, agent, writer, whatever, all I do is click the tag and they all come up in a neat little row. All my pretty lists, perfectly organized. It’s quite beautiful. Almost moves me to tears.

Well, no, but it’s beautiful anyhow, dammit.

Anyhow, I have one post for each of my projects that’s sort of a go-to post, with links to the pertinent information in other posts, should the tag system not suffice. (Sometimes it doesn’t. Worldbuilding is a motherf@$ker, let’s face it.) I also have one that’s a list of ideas that I’m sure I’ll want to use some day, but at the moment have no idea how or why. I keep the thing diligently updated, striking out ones I’ve used, adding new ones at the bottom, etc. Occasionally I’ll see a prompt elsewhere, an anthology that I think looks really cool, a call for submissions with some direction or another, and go to my List of Ideas Post and see if anything starts throwing sparks off it.

It happened the other day when I saw the link for the Library of Horror Tales from the Cauldron link. I went to the Idea Post and found one based on an article I read in Smithsonian a few months back that referenced a particularly hilarious, incredibly Victorian reaction to a male peacock’s feathers– this man said it made him ill to see them, because it meant the man was parading for the woman, and she picked the prettiest one.

How vulgar. Female sexuality is a myth!

And so I wrote this story called The Peacock and the Raven about (not Victorian, but proto-Victorian, anyhow!) witches last week, the one I mentioned… and realized it wasn’t horror at all, and was no good for the anthology.

Not that I’m complaining– I actually think I can make something of the story eventually, and more importantly it was way fun to write. But isn’t that always the freaking way this goes? I mean, I knew how it would end, but I was totally wrong about the character reaction and… a lot of things. Do you all have more control over where these things take you?

If so, do you give lessons?

No. I guess I’ll have to content my control freak urges with endless listmaking and cross-referencing with hyperlinks, won’t I? Ah well, I tried!

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Now playing: The Small Faces – Come On Children
via FoxyTunes

Go ahead, finish that rhyme. You know you want to.

“Sometimes you can learn more about a person by what they don’t tell you. Sometimes you can learn a lot from the things they just make up. If you are tagged with this Meme, lie to me. Then tag 7 other folks (one for each deadly sin) and hope they can lie.”

So Cate Gardner tagged me for this one, and here I am! Welcome to my Emporium of Lies. Shouldn’t be too hard, since it’s what I want to do for a living, right?

Pride: What is your biggest contribution to the world?
Bought Paganini’s soul in exchange for awesome virtuoso capabilities. I’m that good. Here, let him entertain you while you read the rest of this:

Tell me the world does not owe me a serious debt of gratitude.

Envy: What do your coworkers wish they had which is yours?
Paganini’s soul. (The master wants him, but he can’t have him.)

Gluttony: What did you eat last night?
Half a cow. Including the heart.

Lust: What really lights your fire?
Those PETA ads. Yeah wow, naked proselytizing celebrities that make me look like a douche. I love it!

Anger: What is the last thing that really pissed you off?
The ending of A Tale of Two Cities when I re-read it recently. What a load of crap. I nearly tore the whole living room up, I was so very, very angry. F@$k you, Sidney Carton!

Greed: Name something you keep from others.
My stunning comedic brilliance. Soak it up, because I’ll have to lock it away after this. Don’t be jealous.

Sloth: What’s the laziest thing you’ve ever done?
In grad school I bought a Mt. Dew I.V. so I could play EverQuest for days at a stretch without ever leaving my desk.

And there we have it! Hmm, actually, I’m kind of surprised I never thought of that last one. That was a serious addiction. Aww, now I miss playing MMOs!

I think it’s safe to say I’m tagging the people who read this who haven’t been tagged already. It’s done the rounds!
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Now playing: Franz Liszt – Grandes Études de Paganini, No. 141: III. la Campanella
via FoxyTunes

Well it’s WIP Wednesday. What is this, you ask?

I have no idea, but the fabulous Catherine J. Gardner made it look like fun. Or, at least motivation. From what I understand, the idea is to hold yourself accountable to your blog for how much progress you’ve made on your current WIP(s) each week on the titular day. I already sort of do this at my little writing journal I keep, but since I hope this summer will be extremely lax in terms of what I get written (in other words, said writing journal will be littered with side projects and short fiction), it might not be a bad idea to keep track of it here. The whole group writing thing was fun in November, after all!

And so I say that progress on my WIP The Resurrectionists, a f@$ed up  zombie love story (er, what other kind could there be?) from 1820s Philadelphia, stands about here:

4995 / 80000 words. 6% done!

Good god, how pathetic.

Weird things with this one:

1. Not writing it in order. Haven’t done that with anything in over a year, and finding it lovely.
2. I have lots more of it scripted, but that can’t count. Finished scenes only!
3. In the process of trying to construct this one, I’ve so far done a related novella and short story. These total over 27k that probably should’ve been in this book. See, no discipline.

I’m on vacation.

And now, a piece of one of the three scenes I have written. Oh, the joy. Two dudes and two prostitutes walk into a room…

Once they were safely bestowed out of sight of their female companions, Tommy let him go, leaned forward, and began undoing Paul’s neckcloth industriously. “Sweet heart, listen to me. She’s not sure you want her, and so she’s waiting for a sign. Kiss her, and she’ll do the rest. She’s worried she’ll lose her money, and it’s too late to find another customer-”

By this time his nimble fingers had made short work of the damned cravat. When he yanked it out and dropped it to the floor, Paul finally acquired the presence of mind to swat him away. “I say, Tommy, I don’t think I can-”

Tom swatted back and set his fingers to work on Paul’s waistcoat.

Paul felt very much like a little boy being undressed by his mother for a Sunday bath. He swatted half-heartedly once more, but knew it would be useless.

I’ve no idea why I felt compelled to use that bit, except that it pretty much says everything about these two idiots. But there it is.

Join us! Come on, it’ll be fun.

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Now playing: Franz Liszt – Reminiscences de “Don Juan” (after Mozart)
via FoxyTunes

Well, okay, the raddest thing ever to me. Hey, you knew there’d be a qualifier.

I’m fond of having drawings of my characters, especially the ones that hang around for multiple books/stories. Oftentimes I do them myself, but frankly I’m not very good– I’ve not had an art class since my first year of college: 1998-99, and even then I wasn’t exactly the queen. (Evidence directly to your right. That’s as good as it gets, y’all.) Still, I end up doing it a lot, because as you’ve surely noticed by now I love shiny things, and use them regularly to keep me motivated/inspired.

But imagine if a professional artist got hold of a character for me. That’d be the raddest thing ever, wouldn’t it?

Exactly. Corinne Duyvis (and check out her blog here), also a writing buddy of mine, was awesome enough to do it. She drew Izzy Fenwick, my MC from the Audio File. Check it out here, and click the image for the full-sized, even radder version, then feel free to say nice things about Cory.

Extra awesome because Reenie (for those of you new to my ravings, the Resident Neuronaut thing refers to her– yes, that is a clever way of combining our affection for Freakangels and the fact that she’s actually a neuroscientist) always tells me it should be a graphic novel ala the fabulous Phonogram. And she’s probably right, if it’d look like this.

Also, if you’re in the Netherlands, Cory is going to be on Sterren op het Doek doing a portrait of Dutch football coach Foppe de Haan very soon. Check her out.

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Now playing: Oasis – Bag It Up
via FoxyTunes

I spent last Monday in the National Gallery’s East Building by myself, and then I had a lovely long weekend playing tour guide around DC—this time for my best friend and her family. We wandered around the Mall, went to the newly-renovated Museum of American History, and saw the Jefferson memorial lit up at 11pm. So that’s more stuffing my brain with useless information, the thing I love to do second best in all the world.

The first being to make up stories about the useless things I’ve stuffed into my brain, obviously. Which might account for the story I wrote last week, which takes place during the dirty, dirty Adams/Jackson election of 1828 and involves… witches, I think. Weirdly enough, written before I went to the American History Museum and picked up a book on the subject. I’m just that lame all the time.

That was just one of the ridiculous ideas that started clamoring for attention the second I finished that AF edit. It was like the dam broke after seven months of forced editing. Since I stopped that whole “real job” thing a few years back, that’s the longest I’ve gone without writing a shiny new first draft. Not because I wanted to (god, believe me, I did not want to be editing), but because it seemed the responsible thing to do; too many novels in various states of disrepair, each uglier than the last. In the last four months, I hardly even wrote anything short until that week when I was moving—and therefore not editing anything for the first time in forever—and my brain freaked out with all that freedom. That’s how I ended up with a 20k novella. (Vampire in a cage, cravats. That one.)

I’m making this official: I will never do that to myself again. It was miserable. I realize it’s stupid to keep puking up novels and not doing anything with them, because I’ll never get anywhere if I don’t polish them up and send out the queries. But dear god, not for seven months straight. The hell was I thinking?

So now I’m writing whatever the hell I want, and gnawing through the pile of nonfiction I’ve accumulated this year—both research for my current, lazily-paced novel project (currently: A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America) and random things I picked up on the bargain table at the National Gallery, or just because I’m, as previously stated, a huge nerd (currently: Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence).

Hence the lack of book reviews lately. Not exactly speculative, at least in that way. Don’t hate me because I read boring things. I’ll use them later, and put a lot of magic, sex, and death in them! Some might say they already contain a lot of magic, sex, and death, and I’m just being overly blunt. But hey, I don’t mind. There are worse things to be.

Seriously though, how long can you survive without writing something new? Any stories of misery or happiness from prolonged editing/not writing? Or do you take comfort in editing and find the actual writing to be the more miserable activity?

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Now playing: Suede – She’s In Fashion
via FoxyTunes