Children's books I will write one day

Don't Throatpunch Mommy
Freddy Fussypants Gets Eaten By The Monsters Under The Crib
It's Okay To Grab That, Just Not In Public
Mommy Only Drinks Special Grape Juice
Mommy's a Fat Alcoholic Because You Won't Sleep

Writer, interrupted, thanks to the offspring screaming as if he were being eaten by zombies. Also, why do we have to live on a fire truck route, and what kind of child- and parent-hating sadist designed the gap between crib bars to be the right size for baby limbs to get stuck in? 

Anyway, after a few renditions of "Yellow Submarine" and "Baby Beluga", and a couple glasses of wine (for me, not the offspring), all is well. For now. And now we return to what we do, because we must. Rain, sleet, snow, or screaming baby--we write.

(If you do want to have kids and be a writer, don't let this scare you. The offspring normally rolls over and falls asleep easily if he's not physically distressed. Poor little guy. What a rough night for him.) 

This title brought to you by voice to text

Fun with Siri. Although she was probably all "Psshhh...like I haven't heard that one before." Her droll robotic voice again has me concerned, as I'd said in my previous post. If this phone is my daemon, what does it say about me? (I did not have her call me Ishmael. I am undecided between "Commander-in-Chief" and "Princess of Power.")

Otherwise have discovered voice to text. All this time I've been using my thumbs like a sucker. Not sure yet if it will affect my workflow; it's pretty good, but not perfect. It's not totally hands-free (that I can tell) so it's not much more convenient. It doesn't pick up on punctuation, and I can still type faster than the time the phone takes to think about what I've said. The offspring also looks at me, confused, as I'm talking to no one in a funny voice. Still I imagine the technology will get better. (And the offspring just looked at me, alarmed. Food Lady's talking to that new teether again.) The question then becomes: which is better for keeping up with the speed of thought? Typing or speech? I guess it would depend on the person.

Status

Blowing apart the first few chapters of The Good Brother and piecing it back together. Word count: 16,325. No sentences to show off as it's all patchwork at the moment; some new, but mostly copied and pasted from two previous drafts.

Something weird is happening: either the Freedom app is no longer working, or I am so absorbed in writing that I forget to take a break when it goes off and then forget to turn it on again. I suspect it's the latter. This is both good and bad. I'm glad (albeit bemused) to have found the ability to focus again, but I need to timebox in order to keep my head straight.

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So I am not getting as much writing done as I would like to tonight, because a) J. put on an episode of Frozen Planet, and b) my 3-year cell phone contract ends this month so I has a shiny new iPhone. I wrote even on my birthday. It took a phone to make me break my routine. I am experiencing a kind of first-world geek shame. There must be some multisyllabic German or Swedish word to describe this. Furstwurldgeekangsten or some such.

I kind of miss my old phone though; I had a silicone case with horns and a face cut-out on the back. This new phone is all stark and cold and white, like a prop out of THX 1138. Which is kind of ironic, as Apple's aim is to make their devices friendly, even anthropomorphic. I realized that with people intensely personalizing and anthropomorphizing their phones, we are a step closer to having daemons out of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. Souls and consciences on the outside. And mine has now been replaced by this machine out of a mod future. What's that, Siri? I will grow to love you? Yes, Siri. Whatever you say.

Littlest lit critic

Wanted to add that I am still trying to sneak in some reading here and there by reading bits out loud to the offspring. I really should set up a camera while I do it and post the videos online. He's yawned and fussed at my stories and totally ignored Kelly Link's Magic For Beginners and David Nickle's Eutopia. But now I am re-reading Sandra Kasturi's poetry collection The Animal Bridegroom and he gives a little happy laugh every time I read him a poem. This is totally inexplicable--well, other than him actually enjoying the poems--as I've been reading everything to him in my I'm-reading-out-loud-to-a-baby-but-don't-want-to-be-totally-condescending voice.

In the to-read pile: Ken Dryden's The Game, Alan Bradley's I Am Half-Sick of Shadows and Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Red Tree. (Now that I timebox my writing I actually have time to read afterward.) We'll see what the offspring has to say.

Good Brother, take three

Starting from the beginning, sort of, for The Good Brother. Rewrote the outline as if it were a synopsis instead of a point-form list of scenes and and stuff got rearranged and stuff got taken out and old stuff got put back in. Writing a synopsis helped a lot; instead of "then this happened, then this happened, and oh, I have to stick in this scene because it's full of darlings", I saw it as a story and could plot the rise and fall of action appropriately.

So now I am starting the first draft yet again, from the beginning, with my two previous unfinished drafts (v0.1 and v0.2) marked up and stacked on the table for reference, v0.2 open on the laptop for cutting and pasting, my new outlines (synopsis + Workflowy list of scenes) within reach, and a brand new file (v0.3) started. (How anyone wrote novels before computers is beyond me. But I'm sure writers thought the same thing when typewriters became the norm.) I don't recommend this approach at all. Anyone will tell you that you just need to write and write and write and accept it's crap and fix it later. Stop and restart and you'll never finish. So don't try this at home, kids.

But I was reminded recently that there's no one way for a writer to write a novel. You only learn how to write that particular novel. With The Good Brother, I'm learning how to write novels in general, and although there have been many starts and stops and restarts, I've learned a lot from my mistakes. I think working on Panda Suit and Hardy Boys, which were totally new stories, helped me tone my voice and rhythm. I'm writing like E. L. Chen, at last, or at least the way she writes now.

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I probably won't be able to spend much time at WFC this year, maybe just Saturday and Sunday during the day. It's in the middle of nowhere and I don't drive, plus now that I have the offspring I don't know what my childcare situation will be like by then. If he were older I'd bring him with, but I don't even know if he'll be walking by then. But the biggest deal-breaker is that my husband's birthday is that weekend, so I'd be a crummy excuse for a human being if I abandoned the family.

Status: Good Brother

The novel is burning inside me, kind of like its eponymous character. I haven't been able to split my headspace into writing and not-writing, which I suppose sounds normal for a writer but is unfair to the offspring, with whom I spend all of my daylight hours. I think it's because I've neglected to use the Pomodoro Technique these past couple days. Not intentionally; I had underestimated the amount of time it would take to finish some steps (making detailed character notes and reviewing my outline) and thus chunked my time by task instead of by, well, time. And now my head doesn't know whether the clock is on or off, and the story burns, burns, burns and every thought is another log on the fire.

Thwppp

That's the sound of a manuscript and cover letter being slipped into a manilla envelope. The short story code named Panda Suit has been printed and sealed away, ready to send out to seek its fortune. Ding ding ding ding! Where's that bell when you need it?

I think it's been a few years since I actually printed out a manuscript and packaged it up with a cover letter and SASE. I know it's not as environmentally friendly as electronic submissions, but there's something deliciously satisfying about it, to be able to feel the weight of your story in your hand.

And now we move on - or rather, back - to the novel. I'm very glad to be working on it again. Despite all my waffling, I am going to keep some elements as they are. At first I was like, "Well, I have to change this, this and this if it's going to be saleable as a YA book." But now I'm like, "Pffffbt. Write it as it should be. In fact, write it to be as unsaleable as possible. Then we'll figure out what to do with it."

I hate it when I'm right.

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So apparently HBO is planning to adapt Neil Gaiman's American Gods into a 6-season series. It'll be interesting to see what they do with it. I mean, it would make a great one-off series, but six seasons seems optimistic to me. I guess, considering it's HBO, they plan to pad it with gratuitous sex scenes. ("We have to slip in this boring but important bit of information... Have someone tell a naked girl.")