It's A Binary Thing

This is the obligatory stuff-I-wrote-in-2014-you-might-like post. I spend most of 2014 either dealing with a broken leg or writing a novel, so I also don't have much to show, but I'm pretty happy with the stuff I did get out. I really hate self-promo, so if you do too, I promise not to do this again until next year :)

I had two science fiction novelettes:
Fly Away Home, Interzone #251, March. Darker than my usual stuff. Deep space mining colony, indentured servitude, corporations as government, stuff blowing up. Quite possibly triggery.

Shatterdown, Asimov's, June. Diving into a gas giant in search of living diamonds... There's also a podcast of this story at Starship Sofa (#346)

I also had a dark fiction/horror short story:
House Party Blues, Black Static #39, March. Ancient evil horror takes over a house, and discovers the neighborhood isn't the quiet refuge it had hoped for.

Tangerine, Nectarine, Clementine, Apocalypse is finished and off to my front-line beta-readers, who will surely, when they get out of bed and find it waiting for them in their email, crawl back under the covers and pretend they're still asleep for as long as they can.

I like it a fair bit and don't see any significant problems with it, so it's probably utter trash. We'll see.

With the mild concussion still making my brain all mushy and the revision work on the Flesh-Eating Bacteria Novel requiring some fairly careful thought and concentration that I'm just not quite capable of at the moment, I am contemplating a brief return to the Short Story with No Plot.

It being the end of the quarter, so to speak, here's a ( writing status )

Because all the cool kids are doing it. (And yeah, hoping this helps put a few more things in motion.)

First lines of works currently in progress:

Ancou (flesh-eating bacteria novel, on second draft):
Cairnes called the weekly meeting a day early, mandatory for all hands, no excuses, not even if you were, quote, "bleeding out both ears with an axe stuck in the top of your head", unquote.

Fifth Sun (the Aztec novella, 1/3 way through first draft, stalled in research):
The airship La Malinche slid gracefully over the ocean, stable at twenty feet above wavepeak and racing towards the dawn.

Untitled Mars story (short story, 1/2 way through draft with no discernible plot):
The man came across the red sands alone and on foot, the storm whipping at his back.

Mandrake's Folly (short story, 1/2 way through first draft):
The game had begun four years earlier when Onni's cousin Orph got him a job as a hauler on the Mandrake's Folly, one of the old skips doing the six-week Tanduou-Beenjai run.

Tucker's Fall ("the mountain thing". Novella? started years ago and set aside, not ready to abandon yet):
The rain was a thing of high August fury, hurling water down with such vehemence that even at double speed the windshield wipers fought a losing battle.

Some of these things have been on the list for a while. But hey, I think I finished up several things that were on the list last time I did this meme, so there's hope. Right now I'm working pretty much exclusively on Ancou, though my brain is trying to sneak a few cycles thinking about the two after it on the list above. I'd really like to finish all of these, maybe even this year, but that's crazy talk (-:

+1000 (3100 total) words to the new story tonight.

Excerpt for rolandgsl and varianor ( behind the cut )

Things Written:
Zombie Cabana Boy, horror short story.
Surf, science fiction novelette
Ancou, science fiction novel (the flesh-eating bacteria one) first draft

Things Published:
Zombie Cabana Boy in Black Static 17. One review (that recommended it) referred to it as "toe-cringingly tacky", which is *exactly* what I was going for and pleased me greatly.

Submission Stats:
11 things submitted total this year:
- 1 sale
- 7 rejections
- 3 still pending
121 submissions total since I started writing:
- 10 sales (9% of overall, full list here)
- 101 rejections
- 6 withdrawals
- 4 total pending

Of the pending:
Tor: 1765
Tor.com: 239
Analog: 26
Other Market: 3

Conventions attended:
None.

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That was my year in writing. Not bad with a full-time IT job and being a single parent to a moody teenager and two toddlers. (-: I think it's unlikely I'll make it to any conventions this year, though I'm sort of thinking about Balticon (which I've never been to before) or Wiscon if I can work out the travel logistics. Chances are good I won't be at too many cons until the sprogs hit an age where they can participate in kid programming, which is still another couple of years away.

Projects for 2011:
revise, finish, and submit novel Ancou
finish unnamed short story (currently ~1k) started this week
finish the Aztec story
finish the mountain story
continue to seek an agent
attempt to find new in-person writing group

When I hit the end of NaNoWriMo, my first draft of the Flesh-Eating Bacteria novel was just a smidgeon short of the end -- maybe a chapter, if that, left to go. Part of me feels lame for not having pushed through that last bit, despite the past week's extraordinary distractions, but tonight I was staring at it (I've opened the file and stared at it nearly daily since November) and realized it's not just a post-NaNo funk, I'm *stuck*. And I've been writing just long enough to have started to figure out that when I get stuck like this and can't move forward at all, it's because I broke something significant in the story.

You know in cartoons when a character is running by and someone reaches out and hooks a big rubber bungee thing onto the back of them without them knowing, and the farther they run the more the bungee stretches and slows them down, until they're pretty much running in place against the tension of the band? Eventually they get snapped backwards and slapstickilicious hilarity ensues. For me, this is what getting stuck feels *exactly* like. The farther I've gotten from the break point the bigger the snap-back, but it doesn't come until I realize I'm stuck and stop trying to run forward (which can sometimes take a really stupidly long time, because I'm kinda dim.)

There's a great thread on Making Light right now about how to get published, with a lot of really good basic advice, much of which matches sort of my own experience in what works for me, with occasional bits that really don't. Somewhere in the comments, Jim Macdonald describes how, when he realizes something is broken, he keeps writing forward from that point as if he'd already fixed what was broken, and then goes back and takes care of it on the next pass. Jim is also a very excellent chess player. Me, my brain doesn't work that way: I can't write the next part until I've fixed what proceeds it, at least in part because until I've fixed it I can't see *how* I'm going to fix it, much less what then actually will come next. This is probably also why I'm terrible at chess.

Odds are I'm going to let the FEBn rattle around in my brain again for the remainder of the work-week (too much on my plate at the day-job for anything more than casual tinkering during lunch, which I need more than for this) and this weekend take a stab at figuring out where I got snagged with the big rubber-band-of-story-doom. I don't think it's too far back, but I won't know until I actually land on my ass and manage to stand upright again, and then sometimes several additional steps backwards are necessary to get enough slack to unhook that hook. How all this plays out will also determine how/where/when I jump into the second draft.

So that's where I am.

I hope all your writing, and other projects and dreams, are moving forward for you (-:

One of the things I absolutely love about writing is, when I'm reaching the end of a first draft[1], that rare moment when I realize that my subconscious has been totally setting up all these little bits and pieces for some *fantastic* bit of plot-twist that my conscious writer-mind has been entirely unaware of. And, ooooh, have I surprised myself with a doosie this time, enough that I've been doing the excited happy-dance around the house all evening ever since it first struck me where I was inevitably going. It does further my willingness to believe in a supernatural muse, because I know for a fact I'm really just not that clever myself.

Meanwhile: 77k of the FEB novel first draft now done[2]. Social obligations tomorrow, but we'll see. Definitely have some serious forward momentum right now.

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[1] I write entirely sequentially from beginning to end, no scene placeholders or skipping around, and I often have only a vague idea of the larger plot bits and just wing everything as I go. It makes for occasional lengthy stalls (like the still-incomplete Aztec story I've been working on for forever) and also complicated and sometimes frustrating second-drafts, but it's how I work.

[2] bringing my NaNoCheaMo total so far to an insufficient 37k.

33,200 words of the FEBN now scooped up off the scree and set back upright on the tracks, and it's even still facing in the right direction. Another 5,000 words or so and I'll be back at the unfinished end of the first draft, ready to get rolling again. The goal is to have this chunk of the ms. fixed so that I can then jump with both feet into NaNoWriMo (where I am "cicada", if anyone cares) and try to crank out the second half of the novel by the end of November.

Hahaha. Riiight.

As my character Roger just said, "...we're a quarter million miles from the nearest sunset, backyard grill, or toilet that isn't vacuum-assist. And if that last fact alone don't make you need a drink, it should."

Sometimes you get a story where the characters name themselves. And sometimes those names are things like Tangelo-boy, Assface, and Beersmooches.

And then you know it's going to be a mad, fun ride to write.