DragonCon, DragonCon!

For the past few years I've been hitting DragonCon, a hard-to-describe con that is broken up into about 20 tracks that allow anyone who isn't boring to find stuff that fascinates them. The writer's track is full of panels that include writers, editors and agents. Some of the writers are pretty well known, others are low-level novelists who are still pretty interesting to hear from. I got to see Mercedes Lackey and other assorted writers who were fascinating to hear from and to grab little bits of advice from. Adding to the fun of DragonCon is that a large percentage of people dress up in costumes of every possible description from Spock to dinosaurs.

The Problem
Of course there was a problem. It's me. Usually when I go out of town, I worry about getting sick. Something about leaving town always makes me sick with sinus infections, colds and other assorted crap, but that wasn't even on the radar this year. I was just hoping that I'd be able to walk and stand well enough to get through the con. Waiting in line, walking from panel to panel and just standing around looking at costumes seemed like insurmountable obstacles after spending months unable to walk and then more than a month in physical therapy.
I told my physical therapist that I'd need to walk around for several hours a day, stand in line and make a long trek down an uneven street just to get my con badge and OH MY GOD I WILL HAVE TO WALK ALL DAY AND MY MUSCLES DON'T EVEN WORK!!1!!!1!! He thought it would be difficult, but he started me on various machines and recommended walking down the street every day to try to get used to it. I trained daily for more than a month and even went to the mall to ride the escalators to get ready for the multiple escalators at the con. The escalators are always crammed with people and if you can't jump off in time, OMG, the carnage!
So, I get there, trying not to limp and walking like a cartoon character, and was all set to take my walk down an uneven street in a crowd and then stand in line on an ankle that was still slightly broken. I told a friend that I had been training for this for a while and that I was confident that I could make it. She looked at me like, well, like I'd just said I'd been training for a month to walk down the street. The line was more than an hour, but all of that training helped me to do it. And all the vodka.

Mercedes Lackey Gives Me the Eye
Two Days
Once that obstacle was over, I had a lot of confidence that I could get through the con, listen to the writers I wanted to learn from and not look like too much of a freak doing so. I lurched around the con dressed like Edina Monsoon and saw amazing writers, a startlingly realistic Spock, two inexplicably naked women dressed in body paint, about 45 Khaleesis, some Tenenbaums(!), more superheroes than I ever care to see again, one of the Ghostbusters and a guy dressed like Sharknado.

I met Julian Sands and impulsively said, "I liked you! Like, a lot!" to the seventh Doctor as he rolled past me on a Hoveround.

Then I got sick.
I got two and a half good days in before I was hit by bronchitis and had to severely medicate myself in order to function. Then I got to hear "Why do you look sad?" every four minutes because apparently I looked as spacey as I felt. If you've ever had to suffer through bronchitis while being woken up all night by drunken roommates who thought they were whispering as they philosophized about life and then get told about all the fun you're missing downstairs, and who hasn't, you might understand why I was ready to leave when the day came. Usually I hate to leave and get back into the normal world where absolutely everyone is wearing clothes and no one is dressed up as anything, but this year I was pretty fine with it.

Because I'm Brilliant

Ok, so perusing the job listings this morning, looking for boring projects that I could use to expand my client base, I found a small listing for an online publishing company looking for short vampire stories. Scary stories, it asked for- no romance or sparkling. Kick ass, said I. I think I will comply.

Aside from my obvious poetry skills, I like putting together short stories that would have a hard time finding a market. But as soon as I read the description of what they wanted, a vague outline of an idea began to form. In three hours, I had written the complete story and edited it, and I was ready to submit.

It's then I saw that the deadline was yesterday. I submitted it anyway with a plea for deadline leniency. Will they even read it? You have to wait six weeks before you can even ask them about it, and no simultaneous submissions are allowed. In six weeks, I'm relatively sure that I will have forgotten all about it, and I can't submit it anywhere else right now if I want to keep them as a potential market. They may just delete it outright because it's past the deadline. I may never know. Good times, writers. Good times.

The Sleeper Must Awaken

So, I broke my ankle. I have no excuse for doing so. No one was negligent. No one left junk lying around for me to trip over. There wasn't even an incline to make walking difficult. I was walking along a gravel road staring at some bees and I fell over sideways. I literally just fell over like a dumbass.

It's been seven weeks now, and I just now feel like I'm waking up from it all. I wasn't able to walk at all until a few days ago, and even now my walking is pretty limited. I was high on pain pills for a few days after it happened. Ok, it was a few weeks. It was painful enough that I wasn't able to function well without them, but then you get the dizziness and weirdness that comes with them.

Writing has mostly been perfunctory SEO mill junk up until last week when I finally started to feel like myself again. There have been several times when I felt like I was asleep for long periods of time. Every time I've given birth it's been about two months until I felt like I was fully awake again. When I almost died from a staph infection two years ago, it was about the same amount of time. Writing during those asleep times is always in the back of my mind, but meaningful words are hard to get out.

Luckily, I've been doing content writing for so long that I have been able to do product descriptions and SEO stuff through mills pretty much the whole time, so we won't starve. People dump on the mills all the time, but I for one am glad they're always there. Sometimes, writing has to just be about money and making words appear in exchange for it.

A New Year

I struggled at the beginning of this year to come up with resolutions that would be useful instead of damaging and reasonable instead of completely insane. I started looking over the past few years and trying to think about what would really be helpful. And in that looking, I discovered that every year seemed to have a distinct theme.

Some years were all about work. Expanding my writing business was really all that I cared about for the most part. Some years I struggled to find a balance between paying writing work and fun writing work. Some years I struggled with confidence. I stumbled a bit under the weight of everything I was doing. This year is about me getting my power back. Starting a couple of months ago, I really started to see how much power a handful of people had over me. I started seeing that to get my power back, I would really, really have to fight. I'd have to step outside my comfort zone and teach others how to treat me. I firmly believe that we train everyone around us how to treat us, and sometimes that training goes woefully wrong. Not having your own power can shake your writing confidence and give you less force to thrust at the page. It was simply time to get it back.

And so I took a stand. I stopped going to BS events that I didn't want to attend, and I stopped making excuses. "I don't want to go. That sounds stupid," is an acceptable way to turn down an invitation to something that shouldn't exist. And if there's something that you hate, that represents oppression and upset and everything unpleasant to you, giving it to the thrift store isn't enough. You should really just take a rubber mallet to it and smash the living hell out of it.

My only resolutions this year are to trust my own judgement and to finish the novel I've been working on for the past year. Those two things are really enough. I may query magazines, I may finish a couple of short stories and I may decide to start smoking cigars, but whatever I do this year will be on my terms.

Kinda Hate to Do This

I see a lot of questions about where to publishing things, like a LOT. Like, every time you say what you do they say, hey, where would I publish this weird thing I haven't actually written but want to write? I get it in person and every third question on writers' forums is this very question.

Now, I have spent waaaay too many hours writing online publishing articles for Suite101, but I don't really want to direct people there to answer their questions. It's not because they suck or anything, but they kind of do.

So last year I took all of the articles that I have written about online publishers and put them on a site of my own because I thought that would be easier. I have repro rights on everything, and anything a year old or older can be put anywhere I care to put it. I then kind of forgot about it. It occurred to me today that I probably have repro rights to more now, and I totally do. So I put a bunch more of them on the site. Almost all of them are royalty-paying publishers, and two or three are self-publishing sites.

The site is dedicated to online publishers only- and a lot of them you've never heard of. Since I wrote the originals, some that I wrote about have gone out of business, so those aren't included. So, no dead ends. Some of the articles are overly SEOd, as that's what Suite required at the time, so try to overlook that. But overall, I think it's a crazy useful site for anyone who wants to go the online publishing route, but I never marketed the site, so no one knows it's there. So, here it is:

Book Publishing Online

Don't be too intimidated by the award-winning Web design. I know it's hard not to be jealous of such beauty, but you'll be a better person if you try to get past it.

I hate marketing myself. I have a Kindle book and so far I haven't created a single link to it or marketed it in any way. That's how much I hate self-marketing. But, I do feel like this information would be useful to people, so I am dealing with the skin-crawly feeling just this once.

Novels

I am working hard on a novel right now, not blogging much because any free time I have is being driven into the story. It's hard to think straight most days because I'm thinking of backstory or coming up with the next step in the plot. It's what I've always wanted to do, but time will tell whether it's worth it monetarily.

I wrestle a lot with whether to spend time on work that pays now or working on a novel that may pay in a year. When I work on paying work I think how it will pay the bills now, but if I spend too much time on it I'll spend the rest of my life doing content and PR work. It's a delicate lime to walk, and I'm not always convinced that I'm walking it the way I should.

I've been researching agents for a few months, and I have one picked out that I really, really want. I have to assume that she will reject me completely and I'll have to keep applying to agents to find one that will handle all of this. That seems to be what people do, and I'm certain that I'll be no different. Ick.

Book Channels, Writing and Rejections

It's been a while since I blogged. One of the offspring has been very sick for about three years, and that has been taking an increasing amount of my time. It's odd how things crop up and grab your time when you least expect it. I've also been questioning the nature of blogging lately. I've noticed ego taking a serious toll on blogs that I once liked, and I wonder whether that happens to everyone who pours out their feelings in a blog.

Someone at a Kansas newspaper checked my book out of the local library and mentioned it in her column. I thought that was neat. Super neat! I had forgotten that libraries were one of the distribution channels. It's a good book to have in libraries, I think. It might be useful. Isn't that what non-fiction writers want? To be useful? Unfortunately, I don't want to be a non-fiction writer.

As for fiction, I have had difficulties in working on my novel lately. Everyone who has read it, at least, the first 20 pages or so, liked it and had been telling me to finish it. For some reason, I don't have any doubt that it will be published. I've never had that feeling before. I have been writing stories and novellas since I was in grade school, and all of them were fun to write. They got out my aggressions, my anger, my disappointment or whatever was boiling over the surface. They were fun to write, but none of them felt particularly engaging to read. I started submitting fiction works and non-fiction queries when I was a teenager. Oddly, whenever there was interest I froze completely. I had two publishers interested in my queried ideas at one point, in my early 20s, and both times I freaked and didn't respond to them.

I still have this problem. I was powering along this novel when the spouse copied it onto a flash drive and threatened to read all of it while I went to the beach two months ago. That froze me instantly. I couldn't write a word, wondering what he thought of it. I called and/or texted every night, wondering what he thought of it. He hadn't had time yet. The next night, he hadn't had time yet. It must not be that engaging, it must be stupid and an abomination to fiction itself.

I found that I couldn't write a word of it anymore, it was stuck in the purgatory of haven't-been-read and couldn't leave until I was either told that it was terrible or that it was thrown away. I insisted that it be thrown away. I finally succeeded in getting it thrown out this month. I am working on it again, easing back into it. Unlike my other fiction, I enjoy reading it. It isn't just a good experience for the writer, I think it will be a good experience for the reader. Something about the work feels different from any other that came before. I can't think of anything else. I can't follow conversations. It's just there. Always.

I was never afraid of publisher rejections before. I thought they were neat. But when this work is sent in, I will take it personally. I will bristle at every generic little slip of rejection. However, I found this rejection generator that may ease the trauma a little. By reading all of the possible rejection types, you can become immune to their power. You can choose the kind of rejection you want- I chose all of them. My favorite:

Dear Writer,

The void awaits us all, but your prose was a gaping hole of premature death. From your submission darkness seeped, the groaning collapse of the inept, in throes. It shocked us into brain-dead spasms, and we only recovered when a cat happened to jump on the keyboard and hit delete.

We kindly ask that you not submit again.

But one thing remains to be known: what rough beast slouches at your keyboard?

Don’t answer.

The Editors