Just my babbling, website related stuff — or whatever doesn’t fit in the other categories ;)
Me, to Jo: Hey, I have this idea for a short story that I think would be a great project for us to collaborate on.
Jo: What’s that?
Me: *Tells him idea*
Jo: *adds to idea*
Me: *adds more to idea*
Jo: *adds even more to idea*
Me: Um. I’m worried that this has gone from being a short story to being a novel.
Jo: Nah. It definitely hasn’t done that.
Me: No?
Jo: No. It’s got to be a series of novels.
Oh. My gawd.
You know, there are covers, and then there are covers. And while it’s always a pleasure to be included in an anthology, I will admit that I’m shallow enough that exactly how happy I am about any given publication can be influenced by the cover.
I am ecstatic about this one.
This is the cover for Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Hero Stories. I love this cover. Love it. Jo and I have a story in it called Sea and Sky and I just cannot wait to have this schmexy looking book on my ego shelf.
Unfortunately I have to wait because the anthology isn’t out until the end of the month, but damn.
Lookin’ good Tyche Books, lookin’ good.
Last year I wrote a letter to Santa on my blog and I thought it was a lot of fun, so have decided to make it an annual tradition. I am not writing this to request anyone buy these items for me, this isn’t that sort of wishlist. It’s just meant to be fun.
Dear Santa,
This year has sucked. Not everything about it, of course, but overall it’s been pretty tough so surely I can be forgiven for the times I wasn’t ‘good’? I mean, even when I was bad it was usually only to myself. That ought to count for something, right? With that in mind, this year for Giftmas I would like the following:
- Pretty much any of the cameras from the Lomography website. Really. I’d be happy with any of them. That being said though, I do especially have my eye on the Diana Baby 110 camera with the 24mm lens. So far I haven’t been able to get my IR filter to play nicely with my DSLR so if you were to couple that with some IR film I would think you were the most awesomest bearded dude evar.
- It’s really quite scandalous that as the publisher of an e-zine I don’t have an e-reader yet. That, coupled with my insomnia has inspired me to add a Kobo Glo to my wishlist. This, despite the missing w on the word glow. I picked the Kobo because it is only an e-reader. It’s not a camera, browser, game console, etc. etc. I don’t want to be more plugged in to online or play more games, I just want to be able to read a book in bed without waking up Jo.
- I kinda want to spit in a test tube. No, really.
- As you know, Santa, I am in the process of refinishing our dining room table which is a family heirloom. I would very much like to find chairs that fit it. Since we’re using an unusual color of stain I will give bonus points if the chairs are unstained, so I don’t have to sand them before I stain them to match the table. Not that I’m lazy or anything you understand…
- Lastly, Santa, do you remember last year when I asked you for “some baseboards and riser thingers for my bathroom and kitchen. If we don’t finish them up soon they are just going to blend into the background and we’ll never get them done.” Well I could still use those baseboards and riser thingers.
Thank you Santa.
Love,
Rhonda
I’ll leave you with one of my favourite performers performing one of my favourite Christmas songs ever (even if it does make me cry these days):
<3
The Best of Vine Leaves Literary Journal 2012 is now available for pre-orders and I think if you pre-order you get your copy at a discount.
From the Emergent Publishing page:
In late 2011, Jessica Bell and Dawn Ius founded Vine Leaves Literary Journal to offer the vignette, a forgotten literary form, the exposure and credit it deserves.
The vignette is a snapshot in words, and differs from flash fiction or a short story in that its aim doesn’t lie within the traditional realms of structure or plot, instead it focuses on one element, mood, character, setting or object.
The journal, published quarterly online, is a lush synergy of atmospheric prose, poetry, photography and illustrations, put together with an eye for aesthetics as well as literary merit. The annual print anthology showcases the very best pieces from across the year.
My piece, “Memories” is included in this collection and I am very much looking forward to reading my copy (which I pre-ordered :-p) as soon as it arrives 🙂
The actual release date in the 10th of December so it’s coming up quickly.
See this little guy? It might be difficult to tell because of all the snow, but this is a statue of a beaver. He’s sitting on a bench and holding a hockey stick (he used to have a mug in his other hand but it vanished about a year ago). This little dude lives just down the street from me and I have very warm feelings toward him. I pat him on the nose every time I walk by and I smile at the sound that resonates through his hollow body.
What you can’t see in this image is that people have obviously been letting their dogs pee on his bench. The snow beside him is yellow and gross and makes me sad.
Don’t pee on other people’s art.
You shouldn’t do it, you shouldn’t let your dog do it.
I mean that literally as well as figuratively.
Even if it’s something you don’t personally feel connected to, something that doesn’t move you at all, you still shouldn’t piss on it. Someone put thought, energy and emotion into it. It may not matter to you, but it matters to them.
I had a rule, back when Niteblade used to do book reviews and that rule was ‘If you can’t find anything to like in a story, don’t review it’. Bad reviews are okay but tearing someone’s work to pieces just because you can is not. That’s pretty simple, pretty black and white. Sadly, there are so many different shades of grey involved as well.
For example, how many times have we all seen someone post something on social media (or elsewhere) that they think is amazing, that they have spent time and energy creating and the first comment is ‘Lawlz, you have too much time on your hands’. How dismissive. How rude. How painful.
How easy to do.
It’s ironic, perhaps, that I’d been planning to make this blog entry for a couple weeks now but hadn’t gotten around to it and then today I pissed on someone’s art.
I didn’t really mean to. It was an unthinking thing.
A friend on social media put out a call for people to ‘Like’ one of their friend’s photographs so they could win a contest of some sort. I ‘liked’ the photo and then commented on my friend’s wall about the three things I really liked about the picture and… the one I didn’t. The person in the photograph saw my comment and was hurt by it. She is not (as far as I know) a professional artist, not a pro photographer or model used to having her work critiqued. She is just a lady who modeled for a photograph (she may also have taken it, I’m not sure) and who missed the positives I said about the picture and focused on the negative.
It’s understandable. There is no reason she should have built up a thick skin to these sorts of things. She probably only expected friends and family to see the picture and find all the good in it and it was a photograph to which she had a strong emotional connection to.
*sigh*
I feel bad. I should know better. I really should. I considered before I made my comment whether I ought to share my opinion and decided to because I thought ‘It’s an entry in a contest in a public arena. Surely that means it’s okay for me to share my thoughts, especially since they are mostly positive’ but you know what? Not so much. I assumed a lot by deciding to post what I did, and that’s not fair. I pissed all over that lady’s art.
NAME REDACTED, if you happen to see this, I am sorry. It really is a beautiful photograph and beyond that I ought to have kept my opinion about it to myself.
It’s a tricky thing, I think, to find the balance between discussing art and pissing on it. I’m obviously still working on getting it right.
What about you? Do you have any sort of rules or tools you use to gauge when it’s better to hold your tongue?
(Photograph courtesy of Amanda Cornell)
ETA: I took the name of the person off my blog in response to her request in my comments.
For the most part I have a fantastic life. I’m relatively healthy, I have friends and family who love me (and who I love), I’m able to spend my days doing what I love (writing and editing) and, ya know, overall things are pretty good. They aren’t perfect, of course, but they are pretty good. But it always seems like just when I’d really like a nice, quiet period in my life the most something happens to make sure I don’t get it.
My mom dying last month was… traumatic, to say the least. It was pretty sudden — she was doing well, and then suddenly she very much wasn’t. I’ve been working to come to terms with her loss and with all the circumstances around it, and I’ve been doing pretty well. I was down, of course, but grief is a funny thing — it comes at you in waves. I was able to get things done, still, to lead a more or less “normal” life. I kept busy, which helped, and thought “Hey, you know what would be a great idea? I’ll do NaNoWriMo and NovPad and get the December issue of Niteblade ready. No problem.”
Then life stepped up and said “Nu-uh. No you don’t.”
We have three cats. They are all awesome and all very different from one another. Indiana, Eowyn and Absinthe. Indiana is the cuddly one, Eowyn is the proud/bitchy one and Absinthe is the shit-disturber. On Friday we had to rush Indiana (you can see him in these pictures) to the animal hospital because he had an obstruction in his urethra. He was diagnosed with FLUTD (Feline lower urinary tract disease), admitted and catheterized under sedation. Before they performed the procedure they asked if we wanted to visit him to say goodbye. I couldn’t. Just the idea of visiting someone I loved in a hospital again after my Mom… I just couldn’t do it.
On Saturday, the hospital called to say there had been a complication in removing the catheter and Indy was going to require surgery to get it out. We consented to that. Very late on Sunday night he was released and we brought him home. When we went to pick him up at the animal hospital they brought him out in his (huge) cat carrier. I knelt down to see him and stuck my fingers through the bars. He rushed over from the back of the carrier and tried to bonk me through the bars, and when that didn’t work he just rubbed against my fingers as best he could with his cone of shame on. It made me cry. Jo and the receptionist pretended not to notice, because they are awesome.
Now he’s home, but the stress doesn’t stop. There’s money stress because stays in the animal hospital and emergency surgery are not cheap. We’re lucky in that we were able to pay for this without too much hardship, but if it becomes a recurring thing that may not remain true. What’s more, the urinary tract obstruction he had does tend to be a recurring thing, and if it happens and it’s not caught in time, it will kill him. Straight up. So we have to watch and make sure he’s not straining to pee or showing any of the other signs of obstruction. 
But wait, there’s more! He has three medications to take; pain killers, antibiotics and antispasmodics. Happily Jo is all over keeping track of and dispensing that as it would break my brain. Seriously.
Indy also has a cone of shame on, and he can’t quite figure out how to eat or drink normally with it, so we are essentially hand-feeding him (or had been. We’ve recently decided to take the cone off when we are able to supervise him to make sure he’s not licking his incision, and hopefully he’ll feed himself). He’s not eating as much as we’d like (I think partly because of the cone and partly because he doesn’t like his new, expensive, prescription food). But he seems to be in good spirits and has lots of energy (in between painkiller doses, anyway), so I’m tentatively optimistic.
This is more than a little stressful on our other animals too. The other cats have to switch over to the same diet as Indy and they aren’t fans. Neither of them is eating as much as they should be. We can’t really feed them prescription kibble (which I think will help as they will be able to eat when they want, not just at mealtimes) at least until Indiana is out of his cone of shame (middle of next week) and able to drink enough water to make dry food a viable option for him. Even Tre’s (our dog) eating has to be altered because we can’t let him have hard food sitting in his bowl because Indy will steal it, eat it and obstruct again.
I freaking suck at ‘wait and see’ and this is one big-ass case of ‘wait and see’.
I’m not handling it very well. I’m the sort of stressed/depressed right now where all I want to do is sleep. That really isn’t good for NaNoWriMo, November Poem-a-Day, Niteblade, or, ya know, life.
I’m doing the best I can though, and I’m still writing. Not as much as I should be, and I’ve switched NaNo novels again to something that requires a little less thought than Hollow Children, but I’m writing. If Jay Lake can write through all the crap he’s been dealing with over the past five years, and all my friends on Team Thalia can write through the curve balls and hardships life throws their way, then I can write through this.
And besides, when I’m writing, when I’m actually in the middle of the action, then all this just goes away for a little bit. It’s only for a few minutes at a time, but I’ll take it. Oh yes, yes I will.
ETA: I spent the afternoon working on catching up on my NaNo project and I’m currently only about 2,500 words behind. Yay!
I forgot to post a W1S1 update for June. In my defense July (which is when I would have posted it) was pretty crazy around here. We had two house guests (one of which was a toddler) in our very small house, someone I love was in crisis and we had a family vacation. All in all, a pretty stress-tastic month and I’m pretty pleased everyone involved made it through still upright and breathing 🙂 So, in the grand scheme of things, not such a big deal that I missed a check-in, right?
The good news is that my check-in would have said that I was still on track for my W1S1 goals. I’d written stuff, I’d subbed stuff, hell, in June I even managed to sell two poems and see a third get published. It was a good month.
As it turns out, July was also a good month 🙂 I sold five poems and saw a sixth get published in Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. When it comes specifically to W1S1 goals I managed to meet those too. I wrote a couple short stories for this year’s Whittaker competition and submitted a few things to publishers.
I feel like I’m building momentum and it feels good 🙂
My Whittaker scores have been less than impressive so far. Each round’s score is out of 100 and so far I’ve earned a 72, 64, and a 71. To be fair to my poor little stories because of the nature of the competition and my uber procrastination skillz they have all be completely unrevised first drafts so far.
It’s a slobby segue, but that brings us to another thing I wanted to talk about, something that came up just this week. Last year when I was doing the Whittaker competition I wanted to have some feedback on my stories and to revise them before I sent them in for judging, so I signed up at Fanstory.com.
Fanstory is one of those online communities where you critique people’s work in order to earn karma/points/dollars that you use to get your own work critiqued. There are loads of problems with sites like these and I was very aware of them going in, but I thought I could just shut my eyes to the ridiculous bits and get a couple critiques of my work from strangers (aka people who have no reason to be nice to me LOL).
I only posted my first drafts, no finished works, and I disabled them from public view once I’d received feedback on them. I hung around there for a couple months, until I couldn’t turn a blind eye to the problems with the community anymore, and then I left (I was too busy to keep posting critiques there anyway, to be honest).
Last week I submitted one of the poems I’d posted at Fanstory to Every Day Poets. It was declined within hours because it was previously published.
O_o
That was what my face looked like. Previously published? But… um… no. I hadn’t published it anywhere yet. What the?
It turns out the poem was still visible online at the mobile version of Fanstory. That despite the fact I had ‘disabled’ it (which was supposed to make it invisible to anyone but me) and I had actually closed my account.
I was not happy.
I re-activated my account and sent an email to the admins asking them what was going on and why my stuff was visible when it shouldn’t be. I was told “That was strange because it was our mobile version. So we didn’t have that set to be private. We updated it. So it is now. That is true for all your work.” At that point I didn’t trust their settings so I actually deleted all my work from the website, which seems to have fixed the problem. The admin also tells me that there was a check box I could have clicked when I posted my work for critique that would have kept it from being visible to anyone who wasn’t logged into their own Fanstory account.
I should have clicked that box.
I am not blaming Fanstory for what happened. It sounds like there was a bit of a bug with the mobile site, but it’s still my fault. I should have been more careful. I should have clicked the check box that would mean the general public couldn’t see my work, and when I left Fanstory I should have deleted all my work, not just disabled it.
I screwed up.
Learn from my mistake.
Also, if any editors from Every Day Poets happens to see this? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to send you something that was online elsewhere. It won’t happen again.
**Insert Clever Segue Here**
One last, completely unrelated thing? I’ve decided to discontinue my Two for Tuesday posts. Not because I’m suddenly uber with consistency but because they allow me to be lazy. I don’t want this blog to turn into weekly posts of two photographs I’ve taken. It’s not that I don’t want to show off my pictures, I do, but this is supposed to be primarily about my writing. If I give myself permission to post pictures and have them count toward my one blog a week goal, well, that’s all I’ll do. Because I’m lazy. So buh-bye T4T. Buh-bye…
Motivation. It’s one of the things I struggle with the most.
Well, actually, not motivation, per se, but more the willpower and the focus to sit down and freaking do the work.
But motivation is related to that, so it’s my topic for today :-p
I’m not alone in struggling with this. I think it’s pretty nearly universal. A lot of people have trouble getting their butt in the chair and their words on the page (figuratively speaking, of course, especially since I don’t write my first drafts at a desk these days). Kern Windwraith had a guest blogger, JoAnne, over at her blog the other day talking about this exact thing. Her point? Just Do It.
It’s fantastic advice, but doesn’t necessarily make it easy to follow.
Over time I’ve slowly begun to understand the things that motivate me. The two biggest ones are Deadlines and Accountability. I’ve totally signed up for workshops and paid good money just to have deadlines I had to meet. I’ve used my critique group meetings the same way. I didn’t win NaNoWriMo until I founded the NaNoLJers group (now run by the awesome Amber Stults) and knew that people were watching how I did and would notice if I slacked off.
Deadlines and Accountability. Those are the tricks for me.
This year, not only did I post a list of goals for the year publicly on this blog where everyone can see them (and see if I don’t meet them), but I also signed up for Write 1 Sub 1.
Write 1 Sub 1 has been fantastic for keeping myself motivated, largely because it combines accountability and deadlines together. The idea is pretty much summed up in the challenge’s name — you write 1 piece and you submit 1 piece. In my case my goal is to write (at least) one story or poem a month and submit (at least) one new story or poem a month. Some super ambitious people are writing and submitting at least one story a week. I’m not that brave or masochistic LOL I think most people doing the challenge write and sub the same story, but I’m not like most people.
When I write a first draft of something (especially poetry) I like to let it rest. A lot of people do, I know, but I like to let it rest a good long time. Like, at least a few weeks. At least. That means I’m never writing and submitting the same piece of work in the same monthly period, but I am writing and submitting, so that’s good.
We’re only four months into this year and already if it hadn’t been for W1S1 I wouldn’t have written anything new for at least two of those months. It’s easy, for me, to get caught up in the novel I’m revising or Niteblade, or whatever and just not write anything new, but W1S1 keeps that from happening, which is a good thing. A very good thing.
It’s not too late to join in if you haven’t already and this sounds like something you might find useful. You can check it out at Write 1 Sub 1 Do you use another similar challenge/website/program/group to stay motivated to write? I’d love to hear about it. Sometimes diversity helps and you never know when I may need a little extra something to help keep me motivated.
~*~
This blog post is part of the Blogging from A to Z challenge over the month of April and was brought to you by the letter M. Please come back on Monday when I’ll be talking about something near and dear to my heart — Niteblade.
I noticed that several of my domains were down yesterday and contacted my host about it. Long story short, there was some sort of hardware failure on my server and blah blah blah…
The point seems to be that my domains are a little yo-yoish at the moment, and for some reason the images in my blog posts aren’t loading. Fun times.
My plan for right now is to wait and see if the images come back as the server stabilizes (or whatever) and if not I’ll replace them all.
*fingers crossed*
ETA: They aren’t coming back. Every image I uploaded in March is gone and needs to be replaced. Yay! (Um, that was a sarcastic yay. You knew that right?)
I participated in the Month of Letters this year. The idea was that every day in the month of February I would send something out to someone via snail mail. I know, you’re probably looking at the date at the bottom right corner of your screen, scratching your head and re-reading that second sentence. I know the Month of Letters officially ended almost a full month ago and I’m just doing a recap about it now but, the thing is, it’s still not over. Not for me. Not really.
I didn’t know who I was going to write in February so I posted on here, Twitter and the Month of Letters forums and said if you want me to write you, send me your address. And you did. A lot of you did. I wish I’d kept better records so I could say exactly how many of you gave me your address and your blessing to send you a letter, but I didn’t. I don’t actually even know how successful I was at doing the Month of Letters LOL.
I didn’t write everyday. I just couldn’t. However, I did write most days, and I think I made up for the ones I missed by writing two or three letters on some days. More importantly (to me) I wrote every single person who sent me their address. It took a long time, I had more addresses than there were days in February, but last week I mailed off the last letter I owed anyone from February (better late than never, right?).
Writing the letters was awesome. It gave me an excuse to buy schmexy papers and envelopes (always win) and when people wrote back it meant I got to meet new people. I feel like several of those people are going to become true and lasting friends. What’s more, it helped me connect with existing friends on a different and more real level than we previously had.
Writing letters is going to remain a very important part of my life from now on. It really is. Without sounding too flaky, I feel like regularily writing letters has been a transformative expirience for me. Writing to friends is like having a little conversation with them, except in my head and on paper (one of my new friends phrased it that way, I thought it was perfect) and it’s so awesome. In order to have that conversation I have to slow things down, focus on just what I’m doing. It’s not like writing an email where I might stop part way through to check Twitter, or where my attention is divided between four email accounts, the website I’m referencing and the open Word .doc I’m working in. When I write a letter, a real letter, that gets my complete attention. It’s relaxing, meditative.
I’m not doing a very good job of explaining, I don’t think, but it has helped me make real connections, both with other people and myself. I love it, and I have the Month of Letters to thank for it. Yay!
Do you write snail mail letters? Has your expirience been similar to mine?
If you haven’t written a letter in a long time, why not try it? Send me your address even (email, comment, whatever) and I’ll drop you a line to get you started 🙂
Yesterday I blogged about my quilt, the one my mother made me when I was teeny tiny. By the time I’d finished that blog entry I had pretty much talked myself out of getting rid of the quilt but if I hadn’t the response I’ve received on my website, Livejournal and privately would have changed my mind.
To everyone who commented or contacted me anywhere, thank you. Really. You’re awesome.
I want you to know that I’ve got a new plan for dealing with the quilt. I’m going to cut the ties out and take the backing and batting out. I’ll applique something (I have a few ideas 😉 ) over the big holes in the top and then re-quilt it.
To everyone who asked, yes, I am a quilter too, and I’m not bad (you can see some of my work here). When I said I lacked the skill to fix it, it was because, for some reason I was completely focused on fixing the quilt as a whole. Once I realised I could get rid of the back and batting and simply “patch” (haha) the top it became clear this is a job I could handle.
And who knows, maybe next time it needs fixing my daughter will take care of it adding her own personal touch to it, and then maybe my grandchildren…
Yeah, I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, but I think the point I wanted to share is that the quilt is safe. Thank you SO MUCH for caring. Truly. I will update this blog with progress as I make it, but there are a few projects ahead of this one on my crafty to-do list so it could be quite some time.
seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew
O_o I got up to answer the phone and when I came back my cat (Absinthe) had typed that. Since it was on topic I decided to leave it. In case you’re viewing this somewhere the formatting is weird, that says sew… more or less.
