Long Time, No Write.

*BIG SIGH* Well, that only took long enough. I completely lost my INK login information and had to go a round about way to get back here...which worked fine because my email address was wrong from the original get-go.

I apologize for being so long out of the loop. I'm well aware of how life can interfere with the writing life if one is apt to let it. I just needed to wrap my head around how much more I needed writing than minute-by-minute dealings with the life I not-so-jokingly refer to as "The Daily Drama, The Weekly Crisis." That life is the norm now. I get it. What I'm working on is wedging my former writing self back into that life, come Hell or high water.  Been through near Hell. I'm told high water is a hoot and ain't so bad.

Thanks for not abandoning me, INK. Any thoughts on getting together soon? Any thoughts on NaNo?

Unrelated, sort of, I've got publishing news as of next week.

Honorable Mention for Writers of the Future

Yay!  I got an honorable mention for a story I sent to Writers of the Future.  

Keep sending those stories in to the contest, people!  You can't win if you don't play.

Okay, this is just sad....

No new posts since April? Tsk tsk. No meetings since...what, RadCon in February?

I know we're all busy. I've been busy writing--when I wasn't sick, which seems like all the damn time lately. But even so, since my last post--over the course of April and May--I finished the 98,000 word first draft of my starship repo man novel. I've played goalie for a few shorts that have come back to me in the mail, getting them back into play ASAP. And I've sent out one or two new stories.

And I know y'all have been busy too, but c'mon, fellow Kultists. We might as well all be laboring in solitude for all the group-type work we've done. Really, now, we ought to be doing just a wee bit better, don't you think?

I plan to spend the remainder of June doing a polish on my novel before letting my lovely and talented wife (and first reader) take a look at it. Assuming it passes her inspection, it'll go into the mail to five or six publishers. If it doesn't, I'll clean up the problems and then drop it in the mail. Either way, it'll be done and I'll start looking toward the next novel.

To quote Raoul Julia from some silly road race movie (as he ripped the rear-view mirror from the windshield of his race car and tossed it away, "What's behind me is not important!"

Goals

When I updated my INK goals today I blanched. Boy, setting the bar a little high, y'think? But I'm not going to change it. I can write at that pace. I'll even go so far to say that I can write at that pace easily. Why am I not? Because I'm spending too many of my evenings watching DVDs. Oh, I can curse The Tudors all I want. The blame must fall to me and my choices.

I am getting a new short story out almost every week, though. I think I can do two. That's what I'll aim for by next Monday.

Stayed tuned to see if Kami falls on her butt!

Aaaah

The best thing, no, the second best thing... maybe third. What the hell. One of the very cool things about having a wise, intelligent and extremely well-educated wife is that some of her knowledge occasionally get absorbed into my brain. Probably via friction.

Concluded the negotiations on the contract for "7". The hard copies should be in the mail very soon. The publisher is also interested in the possibility of a DVD. I have some very dark ideas for a DVD...

Anyway, the negotiation went extremely well. There was only one serious sticking point for me and David didn't consider it a problem at all. He offered a little better deal on one of the rights and even extended it to the contract for my last book. These are great people to work with.

Here's hoping that "7" makes YMAA (and me) an excellent profit.

EEEEEEEKKKKK!

[Hiding]

The scariest April Fool's post I've seen so far: Victoria knocks publishing horror out of the park.

Terrifying. Simply terrifying.

[Still hiding]

Goals & Meetings

So I completely bombed out on my March goals. I've kept my stories and novel submissions in circulation when they came back to me, but I haven't finished any short stories this month. In part, I was sick. But only in part. I've produced considerable wordage, but nothing that jelled into a story.

However, as Raoul Julia once said in a road race movie, "What's behind you is not important!"

Tomorrow is the first of April. I plan to start on not one but two--two!--novels. I don't guarantee to finish either one in April, but certainly by the end of May. Two novels so I can switch projects if I bog down on one. One science fiction (starship repo man!) and one urban fantasy.

But I'm gonna need some support along the way, I think. So...when are we meeting again?

Status

Things are moving apace.

Got a verbal offer on "7". The verbal offer triggered an agent hunt, and those queries just went out. I like my publisher, but as writing transitions from something on the side to a primary job, I feel obligated to start seeking more options and to negotiate smarter.

Two established authors have asked me to collaborate. I expect to have the first draft of both manuscripts done in four months. When nothing interrupts 5000-6000 words are going on the page between 0600 and 0930. Some of it is decent, too.

And, for some reason, two different chapters of the Romance Writers of America have asked me to put together on-line courses on violence, criminals and cop stuff. That's odd.

Teaching a seminar tomorrow and pitching the Conflict Communications course Wednesday.

Busy is good.

INK Visitor David Levine talks about Mars on Earth.

From INK friend and visitor David Levine on his recent Mars Mission on Earth:

"I had a great interview on KATU-TV this morning and it is already available online!

Mars Mission on Earth (KATU-TV, 2/26/10):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFOXSzzCtbM
or http://www.katu.com/amnw/segments/85507062.html

My previous TV appearance is stil available, if you haven't seen it:

Life on Mars... or at least a close facsimile (KGW-TV, 2/20/10):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcuOwpdkWCM
or http://www.kgw.com/thesquare/Life-on-Mars-or-at-least-a-close-facsimile-84735647.html

I think this may be the end of my 15 minutes of fame, for this round at least. I'll let you know if I get any more media attention.
--

David D. Levine | dlevine@spiritone.com | http://www.BentoPress.com/"

These are great interviews. David is an incredible author and speaker. I highly recommend checking out these videos.

Welcome Mark Jones and Next INK meetup!

Welcome Mark, our newest INK member! Mark is a very patient man, and talented author too with books and story sales left and right. INK is proud to have him onboard.

Next INK meeting is Friday, February 12th, 2010. Since all current members will be at RadCon (most of us in 'interesting' panels too, I believe, ahem), INK will meet when we're all free for a few hours. Maybe at the unofficial INK room Pajama Party!

January INK meeting 01/22/2010

Welcome to 2010. Our first meeting of the year will take place this Friday, January 22nd at the Mall 205 Elmer's Restaurant at 7 p.m.

9660 Southeast Stark Street
Portland, OR 97216-2404

Google map link

The restaurant closes at 10 p.m. and there is WiFi access.

Hope to see you there!

Meeting location wanted

INK is looking for a location for it's next meeting on Friday, January 22nd. Are there any great cafes or quiet coffee houses around that are open at least until 9 or 10 p.m.?

Go, Kami, GO!

Another great INK moment - Kami has her first, of what I'm certain will be many, SWFA-qualifying sale. Congrats Kami!!

Link: http://www.sfwa.org/2010/01/beneath-ceaseless-skies-is-sfwas-newest-qualifying-short-fiction-market/

48 Days

The manuscript went out to my publisher yesterday. Thanks to nano and encouragement from my lovely wife, it went from blank page to submitted in 48 days.

As usual, the most annoying and aggravating part was taking the pictures. Anything I do alone can be pretty efficient. Efficiency seems to drop and flakiness increase each time another person or a piece of equipment, especially a camera, gets involved.

Thanks largely to Rick P. the efficiency problem was shot, staked through the heart and buried, decapitated at a crossroads with silver coins in the grave and rosemary and garlic in the mouth.

Take that, inefficiency!

48 days. Not bad. Especially since it is very likely to sell. "Meditations on Violence" was the publisher's best seller for 2008 and they probably wanted something to follow it with.

Hmmm. This was just one big brag. Book off here; C.S. sale there... very good time to be an INKer.

First Sale.

Okay, yes, it's true. I've made my first sale. I've been in touch with my editor and you can look for my story 'Ash' in a fall 2010 issue of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

Thank you INK for being my first readers, critiquers, and pushers to keep sending it out, especially Kami whom I thought I heard once, over the phone, sharpening bamboo shoots in preparation for shoving under my nails if I didn't keep trying. Thank you, thank you.

Ah, the First Sale juice...it is sweet, like nectar of the gods.

Public Service Announcement

It's not my place to announce this, but since certain elements who shall not be named but whose initials are probably C.S. Cole is falling down on the job...

C.S. Cole sold a story to a well known and well respected Australian magazine. I thought that was an oxymoron, but I have been assured it is true and it is not necessary to hold said magazine upside down to read it.

This means that all active duty members of INK are professionally published. Statistically, this would imply that joining INK is a great way to get published. Hmmm. Plus the groupies.

Life is good.

Loving the Process

I'm a short story's length within the 50,000 word Nanowrimo goal. How long the book will turn out to be, I really have no clue. Normally I have all kinds of clue by the 40,000+ word mark. I think I'm about 2/3rds done, but depending on how the plot twists and turns, I might only be halfway, or I might be within 20,000 words of The End.

Nanoing this year has felt a little weird, but a good weird. I feel really free. I've accepted the idea that I have enough writing skills that I don't have to rewrite something to death. If I go back through, it'll be to clean up details, not to 'polish.'

If I think about it in terms of rice, I like brown rice way better than the super-polished stuff anyway. Wild rice is full of awesome too. Somewhere along the way I stopped learning and improving when I rewrote something and started making my writing worse. I've had this proved to me many times now. So, enough.

That gives me much more time to develop new work and play in new stories and revisit ideas that I loved but sadly polished into a little bead that had about as much life in it as expired corn starch. That allows me to move on to the next story, whether it's the next in a series or the next in a whole new universe. And if I want to enrich a story with details or something, I'll have more time to do that if I'm not obsessing on the line by line on an extensive polish.

It's made me a little more careful about how I write those words as they land on the page, but it hasn't slowed me down all that much. Again, I've got over 43,000 words on the 16th day of Nanowrimo, and I haven't been writing non-stop. We've done housework and gone to meetings and such. I've been living a pretty normal life. I've been sick too.

I can do this. I can be a full time writer with this process, and produce more good stuff that I've ever dreamed I could. Plus, I'm not going back and ruining what I do write. Bonus!

But I'll always need my critique group, I think. I need to keep a sharp eye on what I miss, and what doesn't work, especially if it's a pattern with me. I already know I could do a lot more with setting. So as I go forward, I'm going to keep hunting for those weaknesses, and I'll depend on the Lucky Labs and INKers to help me out (and keep me motivated too.)

Done and Not

By nano standards, the book is done. Broke the 50k mark yesterday. It's not actually done yet. I am not quite halfway through the last chapter. I think two days for that... then bibliography, acknowledgements, a table of contents. Possibly indexing. Go through looking for all the little places that say "XXX Research and cite XXX" (XXX makes a 'find' function very easy.)

Then the choice- send to first readers or directly to my editor. It's strong enough to go out, but I have some very fine first readers, subject matter experts who can add a lot in terms of insights and supporting anecdotes. Decisions, decisions.

Hats off to Nano and the INKers. It really got me off my ass for this project and potentially put me a year ahead on my goals.

Damn

Over 19K on the new book in the first six days and wrote a flash fiction piece last night. Things are rolling.

I don't usually write fiction. The non-fiction that I write is personal, exploratory and digging into things that are off the map for most people- 'Here be Dragons". Think Charles Darwin and "The Voyage of the Beagle."

In 19,000 words, in the rush to get the ideas onto paper the process has really streamlined. The book, "7" expands on one of the themes in "Meditation on Violence". I think it may make most of MoV and most of everything written on the subject of the genesis of violence obsolete. Connections and classifications are falling together in a way that I knew was missing form MoV. The process, the ability to see the connections at speed has been a gift of grace.

This may just be the first blush of passion. With a few weeks to re-read and consider I may find the holes, notice what is missing. But this second it looks good. Very good. That doesn't mean it will be a good book- "The Origin of Species" was quite a plow- but the idea seems critical and solid.

Yesterday I spoke at a local college for a Criminal Justice class- mostly on how to recognize and avoid when your ego was getting sucked into a Monkey Dance. The new material let me teach it with more depth and more utility than ever before.

This has the potential to be very, very good.

Ready, Set, NaNoWriMo Begins.

4188 words this morning logged in beginning at the stroke of midnight. Naturally, as the past three years tradition holds, I can't log into the NaNoWriMo.org website to register anything and countless email requests for a new password has been sent. If this year is anything like last year, come day eleven, I'll get a flurry of email replies with countless password resets. Anything received earlier would just get lost in the typical NaNo server crash(es). So typical. So NaNo season!

Things Fall Apart...

...the Center cannot hold.

I may have that backwards.  It's a wonderful poem, though.

Alright, INKERs, what's the deal?  No goals updated, no meetings planned... is this because I came back from Iraq and you no longer have the safety of keeping me at Skype distance?  I don't bite.  Much. Only Kami. Unless I can't create space any other way.  Or I want to see the looks on their faces when they realized the mistake in thinking they were fighting a civilized human being....

But I digress. Ahem. Nano is upon us. Who is in?  I'm not particularly interested, but I'll do 50000 words in 30 days if anyone cares to throw down the gauntlet.  To sweeten the deal, I'll even do fiction.

I think, IMHO, INK is and should be more than a critique group.  Critique groups are cheap (and easy and rarely more help than aggravation/drama).  INK should  be what writers need: part networking, part a good kick in the ass when people get lazy, and part professional advice.

Time to stand and deliver, me hearties.  The center canna' hold.

INK news.

Welcoming back Kami from the 2-week Kris and Dean's Master's Writing Class. She's got lots of good info over at her blog at http://kzmillers.blogspot.com/

Also in the news, allow me to introduce OryCon's Open Read & Critique (ORC) Coordinators for this year - Curtis Chen and DeeAnn Sole. I think the ORCs are in very good hands.

We've got a winner! Friend of INK Ken Scholes' 200-word Writing Contest.

Cross-posted from CSCole's LiveJournal page:

Today, after battling with our broken washer yet again (it's a goner for certain now), I discovered something that has put definite Squee! back into my step.

I did well in Ken Scholes' 200 word "The Tim Machine" contest. The contest was judged by three distinguished writers: maryrobinette, princessalethea, and jaylake.

I was just mentioning, reminding, Steve that Ken's latest book, CANTICLE" was getting ready to make it's debut and it was the one book purchase budgeted for this fall/winter. One guess as to what one of the contest prizes was.

OMG with Raspberry sauce on the side! An ARC copy of CANTICLE! THANK YOU, KEN! THANK YOU JUDGES!

Trust me, much dancing will occur throughout the rest of the week. MUCH dancing.

Please stop by Ken's LJ post here to read most of the other stories entered. All are incredible. All made me wish I were a better writer. To be included in this group is every bit as exciting as winning. Bravo to all!

Ken asked on his LiveJournal page if I might post my story. You can read it HERE. Naturally, after rereading it for the first time in months, I see so many flaws in it, I want to tear my hair out. I guess I just might be starting to understand the point of rewrites after all.

(P.S. The opening line from my story was a prompt used during a writing exercise at a late spring INK meeting. Kami and Steve might recognize it from then. I'm never going to pass up using prompts for exercise again.)

Chick Lit, Dick Lit: Really Not So Different.

Chick Lit, a genre sub-set of young women's fictional literature, is a term that sets my teeth on edge. Though I have read and own enough chick lit to know what it is, I am most definitely not a fan. For the record, I never understood the popularity of "Sex and the City" or 'Sex in the City" or whatever that series/movie was called either; the TV equivalent to chick lit. Too much whining. Too much flip-flopping. No one knows what they want. Bores me to tears.

No, I lean more toward male-oriented fiction both in my writing and reading. Sometimes I enjoy the rare intelligent, strong fictional woman's story (TRULY intelligent and strong which is much, much harder to create than that would seem - it shouldn't be because the writer tells me that's what their female lead is [I've read way too much of that lately and am just as guilty of writing it myself]).

Lately I've begun to realize what I'm writing and reading are really just men's versions of chick lit, complete with all the whining, and after mentioning it to INK member Steve, he came up with the correct terminology for it - Dick Lit. Crude, yes, but right on the money.

Steve isn't a crude man but he's observant. He knows chick lit, has read it and understands it, and he knows all too well most of what I've written and the demographic to whom I direct most of my writing efforts toward. His term 'Dick Lit' nails it square. Though I have my doubts, I hope someday he gets credit for it.

Submission Machine

I went on a total submission spree.  Now almost all my inventory is out, leaving the remaining few still at home whining about when it's going to be their turn.  I've got seven things out at the moment.  That's not bad for someone who doesn't usually write short stories, eh?  I've got three 'problem children' I'd like to tweak a bit before sending them out again and a few more that I'm not quite satisfied with enough to debut.  If I can get all of that done and away out the door, I think I'll have a non-zero chance of making a second sale.  

Not a shabby August so far, not at all.

I've upped my month goals because I finished them, and it's only the 6th.  I've got to have at least a shot at failure here!