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(Personal) What’s Up in February?

04 Feb

Self Improvement 150Now that January has been put to bed, it’s time to look ahead into the next month. What does a successful February look like for me?

For one thing, I’m glad that this month should be a lot quieter than the last one. It gives me time to take a breath, regroup and figure out a few things for the spring and summer. Looking further ahead, there’s a lot to prepare for: the dearest husband will be going out of town in April, and I’d like to have a revamped Oak’s Home campaign ready and waiting for him when he comes back; I’ll be taking a number of trips later this year, though I really need to decide where — Wisconsin for an annual gathering of friends, or WorldCon in Kansas City, or Rainfurrest in Spokane, or my sister-in-law’s wedding (assuming I’m invited) in Arkansas? Dates, expense, time off and all kinds of other things need to be sorted out and hammered down. Making sure I’ve taken the time to prepare for this makes it easier to plan for everything else down the stretch.

But that’s later; this is now. So here are my biggest priorities for the month.

The Jackalope Serial Company
My Patreon for serialized erotic fiction got off to a shaky start last month, and I’d like to work hard on it to make sure that doesn’t happen again. With any sort of regularly-updating story, communication and engagement with your audience is key, so I’ve bundled that in to my weekly task list for the JSC now — every Monday, there’ll be a brief note about what my patrons can expect in the week or two ahead.

There’s also the matter of making sure The Cult of Maximus is written. Last month (and most of this one), I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants. I’d like to take the time to really plot out the next couple of chapters and write as much as I can so I can build a small buffer. This cuts down on interruptions, and being ahead of the curve means that I can double back and edit the weekly parts into a chapter a bit more easily. Having lead time to get things done is never a bad thing, right?

Beyond that, I need to sign up for a streaming service and buy a webcam in order to make writing streams or Internet hangouts a reality. And it would be nice to come up with polls for patrons contributing at the “input” level while The Cult of Maximus is going. Since this particular serial was designed to take us through 2016, it’ll be a little while before anyone gets to vote on the next one.

So: write as much of The Cult of Maximus as I can to get ahead of the release schedule, and work on making the patron rewards more consistent and clear. That’s what I hope to have accomplished by March 1st.

Other Writing
The People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction deadline is THIS MONTH, and so I need to write “The Tourist” and have it critiqued for a revision edit quick and in a hurry. Frith willing, the short story will be finished this weekend, sent to the writing group for notes and revised by right after Valentine’s Day. This is the fastest turnaround for a story I’ve ever attempted, but I would kick myself if I didn’t submit something — not just a story, but something I felt had a chance of getting in.

Once that’s done and my stomach is in knots waiting for a response, I can move on to the commission for a generous donor to last year’s Clarion Write-A-Thon. That’s been a long time coming — not as long as the commissioner for “A Stable Love” thank goodness — but still long enough. I’d like to have that work take me through the back half of the month, with an eye towards finishing a rough draft by early March.

So: biggest priority is making sure “The Tourist” is submission-ready by the Feb. 19th deadline, and I’ve at made progress on short story #4.

Reading
JM Horse convinced me to double-back and re-read Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, and I’m excited to jump into that. I’d like to have that (book 3 of 20 to read this year) knocked out by the end of the month. I’d also like to write reviews for the Apocalypse Triptych and Kindred by Octavia Butler, to go up here, Amazon and GoodReads.

My friends loaned me Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition a few months ago, and I’d really like to start in on that so I can decide whether or not to buy my own copy of the hard-covers. I’ve been considering changing my Oak’s Home Pathfinder game to a system that feels like it’s fighting me less (like D&D5e or FATE), but any shift in system feels like a dealbreaker to at least one of my players.

Of course, there’s also my growing stack of comics to run through — I’ll start taking a few with me to work so I can read a few pages while waiting for queries or processes to finish. Most importantly, I want to cultivate a habit of reading; it’s not something that I’ve prioritized for a long time, and I want to change that as much as possible.

So: read Steppenwolf, catch up on my comics, and dive in to D&D 5th edition.

Other Things
Writing and reading take precedence right now, but I’d also like to re-dedicate myself to taking better care of my body. I’ve had a…distant relationship with it and that needs to change. I’d like to be more mindful of it — I’m not just a brain floating through space, and the body isn’t just there to support my thoughts and make sure I continue to think. Eating better, exercising, grooming and looking after my health are all things I’ll be trying to do a better job with, though it’s not quite with the same focus I’ll be trying to tackle everything else.

 
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Posted by on February 4, 2016 in Comic Books, Reading, Self-Reflection, Writing

 

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(Personal) What Happened in January?

01 Feb

Self Improvement 150January 2016 was an extraordinarily busy month; everything just took off like a rocket, and it was all that I could do to hold on. Most of the work was anticipated, but I think I under-estimated the effect of a lot of it, and of course my still-developing organizational skills weren’t quite up to the task of keeping everything in order so I could get stuff done. I spent the last day of the month traveling from New York back to Silicon Valley, so exhausted I didn’t even realize how tired I was until I got a good night’s sleep.

Even still, I can’t say it was a bad time. I did a lot of stuff that was fun and enriching, and now that I made it through the worst of it I can take a breath, look at what went right, what went wrong, and how I can use the momentum of the month to propel me through my projects for this one. Here’s a brief rundown of the major events last month:

The Jackalope Serial Company
On New Year’s Day or thereabouts, I launched the Jackalope Serial Company. It’s an idea that had been brewing through the last six months of 2015, and I felt I was finally in a good position to make it happen. The JSC is basically the label through which I tell serialized erotic stories, one chunk every week, until it’s finished. The idea is to put up parts of 1500 – 2500 words a week on the Patreon, then edit those parts into monthly chapters that get released to SoFurry, Fur Affinity and Weasyl at a later date. The first serial is The Cult of Maximus, which I’m expecting to be a 100K-word story when all is said and done. That should take us through the first year of the JSC’s existence.

Launch was reasonably successful; to date I’ve got 17 patrons donating just over $100/month for the cause. I appreciate every single one of them! John Cooner did a bang up job on the launch poster/wallpaper, business cards and other assets that will be rolled out in the next month or so. And I’ve put up the first three parts of the story in January, with parts 4 and 5 coming (hopefully) this week to close out chapter 1.

I wasn’t as regular as I would have liked to be starting out, for reasons that I’ll talk about below. I’ll be spending much of this month and next trying to build up a small buffer so I can make sure the schedule is regular even if something unexpected happens. For now, though, I’m flying by the seat of my fluffy white tail. Thanks to my patrons for the patience they’ve displayed and the feedback they’ve given so far; really looking forward to having things settle into a routine this month!

Further Confusion 2016
This is kind of the biggest furry event of the year for me, and this year was no exception. I took part in five panels this year: “Power and Privilege in an Anthropomorphic World”, “Furries and the Other”, “Write Now!”, “Brainstorming in Real Time” and “Mindfulness and Transformation Workshop”.

The first two were the biggest surprises and fulfilling experiences I’ve had at a convention in a long time; there’s a real receptiveness to the idea of exploring our differences and power dynamics through furry fiction, and the audience was lively, insightful and wonderful. This is definitely a keeper; I’d love to be involved with it next year. The second two were awesome mainly because I just got to hang out with members of my writing group and talk with other writers about ways we can push ourselves past our blocks or think about constructing stories in a different way. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much as I did in those two panels.

For Mindfulness/Transformation, my friend Kannik and I tried a structure to make sure we went over the most important ideas we wanted to transmit and I think that went over pretty well. The exercise portion of the panel could still use some work, but we talked about how to adapt that depending on the read we get from the audience; next year, I think we’ll have a pretty good handle on things.

Away from the panels, having conversations and meals with a few people I don’t get to talk to that often were the highlight. This fandom is full of such a varied mix of interesting, passionate and unique people, and cons are one of the ways we can plug into that directly. I love talking to people and seeing their perspectives on all kinds of things; it makes me fall in love with the community all over again.

The Day Job Summit
This was a bit of a wrench. My company had merged with a similar one in Europe after being bought by a holding company last year. Initially, the plan was to bring everything together slowly and carefully, making sure the customers for each side didn’t feel spooked by what was going on. Apparently, the executives discovered that was no longer a concern and ordered a giant event for the merger kick-off this last weekend in January.

So, this was the first work trip I had ever taken, which is another milestone in my professional development. Thankfully, my husband came with me to hang out and be a tourist, so I was able to enjoy the vacation side of things through his eyes. We also know quite a number of people in the area, and we were able to visit with a few of them.

The overall effect of the summit was building a sense of community between two very different sides of the company; I’m not sure how well that came off, but I know that my particular department (Technical Support) grew a lot closer through the experience. I got to meet a lot of really neat people in European tech support, and we traded war stories. But for maybe the first time, I feel like a fully-accepted member of the team I work in, and that’s just incredible. I can legit say I love the company I work for, and the people I work with.

We also saw our first Broadway show while we were out there — the runaway-smash musical Hamilton. If you haven’t listened to the soundtrack yet, do yourself a favor and pull it up on Spotify or your music-streaming service of choice. You will NOT be disappointed. It’s a hip-hop/rap musical about a founding father whose story almost never gets told, Alexander Hamilton. The inversion of race (Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson and other major characters are black) really punches up the drive of the Founding Fathers, brings their tragedies home in a way I had never considered, and makes me empathize with them in a way I never had before. It makes this old, distant history alive and personal. It’s so good.

New York City is a hell of a town. We visited Wall Street, saw people fondling the bull outside of the NYSE, visited Trinity Church and Fraunces Tavern; we went to Brooklyn and had brunch at Flatbush Farm with a major sci-fi/fantasy author (!!); and partied pretty hard at Celsius in Bryant Park, The Eagle on the lower west side (?) and Grand Central Terminal. We saw subway dancers who were amazing, listened to cellists and jazz ensembles, saw the knock-off mascots threatening people in Times Square. All in all, a hell of a trip.

Writing/Reading
I started out strong in January, finishing my first short story of the year for MegaMorphics (“New Year, New You”) and wanted to have “A Stable Love” done but the JSC work sucked up all the oxygen in that room. I started The Cult of Maximus, but didn’t get as far with that as I’d like, so this month will be a bit of righting the ship as far as that’s concerned.

I did read an awful lot, though. I’m catching up on my backlog of comics — I’m finding “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl” to be a singular delight, and I’m really digging “Sam Wilson: Captain America”. I finished Kindred by Octavia Butler, and that has been a life-changing book for me. It fundamentally changes my idea of black women for the better, and I’ll need to let that cook for a moment or two. I started The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin, and I’m looking forward to finishing that, and I finished the third collection of the Apocalypse Triptych, called The End Has Come. It features (mostly) post-apocalyptic stories, many of them continued from stories in the other two collections. It was a neat idea that had a satisfying and surprising set of conclusions, and I’m looking forward to talking about that later.

Meanwhile, my reading stack grows all the time. 🙂 Since it’s Black History Month, I feel like I should be reading something theme-appropriate, and there is no shortage of books that fit that bill. I’ll talk a little bit about that tomorrow.

So that was my January in a nutshell; incredibly busy, full of wonderful and enriching experiences, as well as a lot of opportunities for growth and learning with various personal projects. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about my plans for this month and what I hope to have achieved when looking back on it sometime in March.

How was YOUR month? What were your highlights? What stories did you complete or make progress on? What things did you notice that you could do better?

 
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Posted by on February 1, 2016 in Better Living Through Stories, Comic Books, Furries, Reading, Self-Reflection, Writing

 

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(Writing) New Year’s Resolutions, 2016

04 Jan

Writing 150It feels like I swing back and forth with resolutions from year to year. One year, I’m all business with concrete resolutions that have a pass/fail success condition. Write 6 short stories. Read 10 novels. That sort of thing. The next year, having been beaten down by life and the unexpected, I ease back to more vague resolutions that have more subjective measurements of success. Be kinder to myself. Run more. Things like that.

This looks like it’s going to be a year where I have soft and fuzzy resolutions. It’s not necessarily that I don’t trust myself to make big goals and keep to them; it’s more that I just don’t know what’ll happen this year to take my eye off the ball. The more I settle in to the shape of my life and who I am, the more I realize that planning for November in January is just something that leads to disaster.

So I’d like to make resolutions that help me to refine my focus and habits towards a single goal this year. Instead of promising myself to hit a certain concrete measure of success, I’d like to make promises that help me fulfill my purpose. What is that purpose? To become a better writer, reader and person this year of course.

Finish what you start. This is a big one for me. I’ll often jump into projects easily with grand plans about what the end result will look like, with a vast underestimation of the time and effort it will take to achieve them. Sometimes, I just don’t have the space in my life to do what I would like to do; so it’s better to pick my projects carefully and devote time to making sure they’re finished before moving on to something else. If something that initially grabbed my fancy is really something I should do, then it will wait its turn in line until I get to it. It’s more important that I do what I set out to do. You don’t learn anything from a project until you have a finished one to look back on.

Be more organized. The ADHD diagnosis last year helped me realize that my brain just works in a certain way and I’ll likely never get it to be as clean and straight-forward as other people’s. Thankfully, I can rely on external tools to pick up the slack — notepads to write down bits of information that I need to remember; to-do apps that help me keep track of projects and deadlines to provide structure for my day; rituals that prime me to do certain things in certain spaces. Writing stories isn’t a science, or a project that lends itself to concrete and significant planning. But finally providing structure that allows me to focus on the important work will really help me to be more productive.

Read a LOT more. There are so many great stories out there you guys. SO MANY. As a writer, it’s really important to read. Period. You have to discover the stories you enjoy and the way you love for them to be told to learn more about your craft. A writer who doesn’t like to read is someone who has no idea how to create stories with an audience in mind. Besides, in order to come correct to the broader science-fiction/fantasy community, I’m going to need to know a lot more about what’s out there. In order to be a part of the conversation, I need to know a lot more about what it is. I’ve got a reading list of short stories and novels prepared, and I’ll be working on it throughout the year. I’m really excited to dig into books, comic books and other stories again.

See the spiritual in the mundane. The draw of Buddhism for me is the fact that its entire purpose is to push the mindset of the temple out into the world. For Buddhists, there’s no distinction between the you that’s on the meditation bench and the you that’s answering customer calls at work. Every aspect of your life deserves your complete attention; every interaction you have with someone else is a chance to worship the Divine. As I’m running through my day trying to meet deadlines or do the things I need to, it’s vitally important to remember this. Sometimes, that means slowing down, centering yourself, and doing the best you can to live up to your principles. It’s something I forget in the thick of things, and I’ll try to find ways to remember them this year.

Don’t forget to take stock. This year I’d like to save concrete goals for weekly and monthly check-ins. This week, I’ve set goals to make sure that something goes through the Writing Desk three times; that the first two parts of my serial will be written; and that a review for a furry anthology is finally edited and sent off to another blog for posting. I’d also like to make sure I get in a couple of runs and I keep a tighter leash on what I spend. We’ll see how that goes when I take my pulse for the week next Sunday.

So that’s it: this year, I’m focusing on seeing things through, putting myself in the best position to do that, reading and connecting with people more earnestly, and making sure I’m mindful of who I am and what I’m doing. Concrete goals will be set every week; project updates will happen every month. That’s the plan.

How about you fine folks? Have you set any resolutions for yourself this year? What does a successful 2016 look like for you, creatively?

 
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Posted by on January 4, 2016 in Better Living Through Stories, Buddhism, Comic Books, Furries, Reading, Self-Reflection

 

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My Writing Guide to November 2015

02 Nov

Self Improvement 150October was a pretty intense month. I went in for full training on changing my position at work, which means there are a LOT of holes in my technical knowledge that need to be filled. The shift also means that I’m down in the trenches with coworkers a bit more, and that means an opportunity to change the culture that I’d feel awful not taking. It’s important to me that any community I’m a part of feels more like a community because I’m a part of it — that may sound egotistical, but I like being a glue. I want to make people feel more connected, like someone has their back.

But that means paying attention to work in ways that I hadn’t before, which also means that it has to get a lot more of my time and energy. Because things happened so suddenly, I had to drop any other plans I had made in order to make sure I had the emotional space for it. Now that there are a few weeks of this under my belt, I think I’m able to take a beat or two to see where my head’s at and what I feel I can do.

I’ll still need to set aside a chunk of time to learn more about the technical aspects of my job, like getting to know Linux from the command line and how to work with PostGreSQL and maybe even learning more about SOAP API. But I’d also really like to use whatever remaining time I have for writing and reading — immersing myself in stories that matter to me and learning how to tell them better.

I won’t be able to join NaNoWriMo this year; there’s simply too much going on, and I’m too far behind on a few other things. Still, in the spirit of the month I’d like to set a few goals. They’ll be a bit more modest than what I may have originally planned, but I think they’re a good challenge for what I can handle right now.

WRITING
Ugh, I’m so far behind. On everything. But no worries! This month I’d like to focus on making writing a regular practice, so projects are geared towards that. In addition to making sure The Writing Desk is updated three times a week, I’d like to work on articles for other blogs like [adjective][species] and perhaps Claw & Quill. I’m not sure I’ll have anything ready to show this month — besides, at least with [a][s] they have a pretty solid line-up of posts to take us through the holiday season. Seriously you guys, I really think you’ll like what they have planned.

But there are things about the culture of the fandom I’d really like to write about — what we want out of an art/writing/music community portal, how the broader politics of other SFF fandoms influence our own, how the fandom treats mental illnesses, social maladjustments, and the expression of fetishes that aren’t seen as acceptable or respectable by the society at large. It’s interesting stuff to me and there are no easy answers for this, but it’s all top of mind and I think we should be talking about it, at least in a high-level way.

Here at The Writing Desk, I’ll try to tighten the focus to storytelling and the lessons I’m learning from it — which means more reviews of the stuff I’ve been reading, more thoughts on the lessons we can take from our stories to the broader world, and how our experiences in the broader world are baked into our stories. I’ll talk about the bricks of my Afro-Futurist philosophy as I discover places for them, and the ideas that are taking shape in my mind as I’m writing stories.

As for the stories themselves — well, I’ve got three short stories that I’d really like to finish before I really dive into anything new. “A Stable Love” is a commission that a friend of mine has been waiting on for years, and while I’ve been marching towards completion it’s well past time it was done. Another friend generously donated to my Clarion Write-A-Thon fundraiser, earning a commissioned story that I’ll begin as soon as “A Stable Love” is draft-complete. And then there’s a short story that I would love to submit for the People of Color Destroy Science Fiction anthology coming up next year. I have the idea and the outline for it in my head, and I’m really excited to get started on that.

I’ll also be working on a collaborative project with a few friends called “A Changing Perspective”. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure story spun off from an interactive over on writing.com; since that website has issues with advertising for their interactive space, I can’t ask friends to go read those chapters in good conscience. A group of four writers has made an informal pact to revisit the interactive through Twile, and cone we’ve got significant chunks of the story underway we’ll find a way to host it.

So for November, I’d like to finish “A Stable Love” and write 12 chapters for “A Changing Perspective”; update The Writing Desk three times a week; and have at least one complete article for both [adjective][species] and Claw and Quill. It’s an ambitious schedule, but I think I can do it if I keep my focus.

READING
I haven’t been reading nearly as much as I should. I’ll be honest — I’m a slow reader, and I often spend time I could spend reading doing something else, like playing mobile games. Making an effort to read more means spending more of my downtime devoted to it, and that’s something I’m very much in favor of.

This month, I’d like to finish two (I believe) short novels that I’ve been wanting to read for a very long time — Kindred by Octavia Butler and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. The former is a great introduction to one of the biggest black voices in science-fiction, and has been served to me as an Outlander-type story of the slavery South. It sounds like it’ll be incredibly rough, but an illuminating read. The second is a good introduction to one of the best black intellectual voices from the Harlem Renaissance, and that alone has got me tremendously excited. Reading up on black literature — not just sci-fi/fantasy, but novels, essays, and poetry — is something that I want to feel better rooted to the tradition I’m coming out of. I’m hoping that it will help me better understand why my community is the way it is these days, and better imagine what my community will be like in the future, or how it would deal with magic, or how my personal experience fits in to an Afro-Futurist context.

I’ll also be reading through the slush pile for New Fables, though we generally only have poetry to deal with at this point; short stories and novels from friends, of course; and the comics that are coming through the pike as part of All-New, All-Different Marvel. Exciting times, and as usual there is no shortage of reading material.

ELSEWHERE
There is no shortage of demands for attention these days — it’s tough to distill your life down to the essential things that you want to be doing. One of the things I’ve been trying to remind myself is that everything I do is a choice; if I spend a lot of time doing something that doesn’t get me closer to being a writer or someone with good technical skills, that’s a choice I’ve made. If I goof off instead of do something equally enjoyable but possibly more enriching, that’s a choice I’ve made. At this point, it’s important to make good choices about how I spend my time. There are only so many hours in the day, and it’s in my best interests to make them count.

This is a bit of a tangent, but it’s a bit like shaping your diet so that you eat better. If you’re trying to make sure you only eat a certain number of Calories per day, then it becomes a lot more important to make sure those Calories are doing something for you — either helping you with your exercise routine, or making sure you’re full for longer, or helping out with your digestion. When your Calories become precious or finite, the impact of empty Calories — those in say, candy or a milkshake — becomes startlingly apparent. If I’m holding myself down to 2000 Calories in a day, I really can’t afford to spend 650 of them on an Oreo milkshake, no matter how much I want to. It’s either that, or dinner.

Bringing that awareness to my time is a lesson steadily, painfully being learned. There’s only so much free time that I have on a weekday; an hour before work, if I wake up on time, and maybe two or three afterwards. What am I doing with those four precious hours? Am I playing Marvel Puzzle Quest on my phone? Am I looking at Facebook without actually absorbing any of the information I see there? What else could I have done that would help me get closer to the life I’d like to be living?

This month I’ll try to make more responsible decisions about how I spend my time. Don’t get me wrong — I know that I’ll need to blow off some steam, or do something inconsequential sometimes to relieve some stress. I’d like those activities to be a mindful choice, though, not the easiest option available, or some sort of default.

To those of you participating in NaNoWriMo, good luck! This will be a crazy and exciting month for you. I hope it’s fulfilling as well. Let’s get to work.

 
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Posted by on November 2, 2015 in Better Living Through Stories, Comic Books, Furries, Novels, Self-Reflection, Writing

 

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A Look Through the Stacks

26 Aug

Myth 150To be honest, I’m still recovering from Sasquan. Monday was a bit of a lazy day for me and Ryan, and Tuesday was all about diving into the day job. I’m mostly caught up there, just in time for my annual review later today — at this point, I’m expected to prepare to hand off my current workload as an administrator so I can begin training as an actual support engineer. That means documenting a LOT of processes as clearly as I can.

After that, it’s all about technical training — which as I’ve mentioned before is pretty daunting. I’m excited, though, and optimistic. I think if I put my head down and push through with a clear plan on how to learn the things I need to, I’ll do fine. I just need the time.

In the meantime, there are a number of projects that have been stacking up here on the Writing Desk. I have a number of essays planned about all kinds of subjects — the meaning of bigotry, dipping my toes into the waters of afro-futurism, stepping up my game when it comes to tabletop RPGs, crafting a “season” of podcasts for mental health issues. I want to talk a bit about what sort of things we would want in a “perfect” furry hangout spot; if we had the opportunity to say, rebuild FurAffinity from the ground up, what kind of features would we want? What would the perfect user experience be?

I’m still working on “A Stable Love,” with the hope that it’ll be finished by the end of the month. From there, I’m moving on to three more short stories that I’m hoping will be polished and ready to show by October. I’d like to really get my act together for my Pathfinder game, and start doing periphery writing for my characters in other games. Kraugh the Togorian, Veniamin the werebear, Kerrebuck the Wookiee, and Takoda the troll all have stories that need telling. (Also, holy crap, I really do just play earnest giants, don’t I?)

I’m reading an anthology of furry stories for review elsewhere, and I’m noticing an interesting theme that runs through the stories there. I’m really looking forward to writing my review of it, mostly because I get to talk about the intersection of furry fiction and minority issues. You might have noticed that’s been something on my mind a whole lot this year.

So for now, head down, quiet time, hard work time. It’s time to transmute the excitement of the convention into fuel that propels me through the effort of creative production.

 
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Posted by on August 26, 2015 in Uncategorized

 

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It’s the End of Summer, Start Falling

01 Sep

Self Improvement 150The summer of 2014 was a pretty crazy one for me! Most of it has been structured around Ryan’s trip to Clarion, the associated Write-A-Thon and all of the lessons I’ve learned since then. It turns out I needed to take a bit of a break from writing after that, just to process what I had done and return to the desk with a greater understanding of what I’m about.

Now that August is behind us and we’re looking ahead to the season of turning leaves, cooler weather and hot drinks, I thought I’d take a little time to think about how I would like to spend it. Where do I want to be by the end of the year? What would I have liked to accomplish?

There are a few things that I’d really like to focus on over the next four months: writing, reading, exercising, eating. You know, the basics. I think of them as the four things that encourage both physical and mental health, two sides of the same coin. You have to exert the proper effort to keep yourself in fighting shape, and you have to make sure that you’re intaking the right things to fuel that effort.

For writing, I’d really like to get more consistent. A friend of mine intimated that his goal for word count is 500 a day, 3000 a week — I think that’s pretty strong, so I’m going to shamelessly steal it. That word count will only count towards short stories (both preparation and writing) and the Pathfinder game I’m running. Blog entries will be their own thing entirely, hopefully focused on over the weekend. Putting in the effort consistently, grinding out the words every day rain or shine, has never been one of my strong suits. I really need to learn how to do this if I’m going to get serious about writing.

For reading, I’d really like to read short stories and novels in both the science-fiction/fantasy and furry fiction “genres”. There’s a ton of great stuff out there in each space, and I think there should be more folks who are really invested in the literary traditions that have been built. I have a unique perspective, and I’d like to get better at thinking about fiction critically. Part of that means reading as many stories as I can and breaking them down to see how they work. I’d like to post critiques and thoughts about these stories as I go, just to get into the habit of talking about them, sharing them with all of you.

For exercising, I really need to get a bit more flexible than I am! I’ll be trying to settle into a routine with body-weight exercises and stretches/yoga so that I’m toning myself and making it easier to get in running and biking. For the next few months I want to focus on cardiovascular health and mobility — those are pretty easy spots to hit with a minimum of, say, going to the gym or needing special equipment. One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I’m going to need to remove as many barriers as possible to getting exercise. Otherwise, it’s just way too easy to make excuses.

Finally, for eating, I’m going to have to retrain my palate towards healthier food. I love carb- and sugar-heavy things at the moment, and that really needs to shift towards fruits, vegetables and lean meats. I don’t think I’ll do anything as crazy as Whole 30 or Paleo right now, but cutting down on carbs — or at least being a lot more mindful about the carbs I do eat — is absolutely necessary. It’s going to suck for a while, but I need to push through that if I ever hope to slim down and get rid of this rather impressive spare tire I’m sporting at the moment.

So those are my goals, in broad terms. I’ll have to develop a plan to make sure I actually stick to those, and that’s fairly exciting. I know I talk a lot about my interest in project management, and it sounds really boring, but there’s this exciting bit of alchemy in taking these vague, broad, big goals — “I have to eat better.” “I have to write more.” — and figuring out how to actually turn them into working, flesh-and-bone plans of action. Drawing a line from desire to doing is pretty satisfying.

So that’s my fall — as usual, putting my head down and trying to calm the mind from being flighty and thoughtless. Every time I put a new plan together, it’s a little stronger. I learn from my mistakes, incorporate more personalized protection against pitfalls, have a bit more willpower. I accept that I might not reach all (or even most) of the goals that I’ve set, but striving for them gets me closer than I would be otherwise.

 
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Posted by on September 1, 2014 in Diet and Exercise, Reading, Self-Reflection, Writing

 

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What I Learned from the 2014 Clarion Write-A-Thon

18 Aug

Writing 150As I’m sure most of you know by now I participated in the Clarion Write-a-Thon this year with the aim of writing 50,000 words between June 22nd and August 2nd of this year. I’m pleased to announce that I hit my goal (with about 100 words to spare) and raised $600 for the Clarion Workshop, thanks to your help! I really appreciate the generosity of everyone who donated and the support of my friends to keep me motivated and writing. I feel tremendous about being able to hit my word count, and contributing to Clarion in my own way.

I managed to finish three short stories through the Write-A-Thon; I wrote “chapters” to two other short stories and made it pretty deeply into one more. The three finished stories have been put into a drawer where they will next see the light of day only when I’m ready to face the ugly lump of clay I vomited up onto paper. It’ll be exciting, actually — a little time capsule I’ve sent to some future self of the things that interested me months ago. I’m sure I’ll scarcely recognize the writing as mine, for better or for worse.

The “chapters” of the other two stories are up and around the Internet in various haunts, and I plan on collecting and editing those too, once I have enough. It’s a bit more collaborative in nature than straight single-teller fiction, but I doubt there’ll be too many people following my thread. The sixth story that I was writing will be finished and sent off to the person who commissioned it; once that’s been approved and edited, that will end up in other places as well.

I’ve learned quite a bit about my writing process over the summer — it’s hard to write 50,000 words in six weeks and not learn a thing or two about the way you write. The experience has given me the confidence to move forward, while letting me know at the same time that there’s so much more work to be done before I feel like I’m in the same league with the other folks in my writing group, or the people I’ve been fortunate enough to rub elbows with recently. And that’s fine — I like knowing where I’m at, and looking forward to getting better. If nothing else, the Write-a-Thon has shown me that I’m willing to put in the work to do so.

Here are a few of the other things I’ve learned:

I need to read a WHOLE. LOT. MORE. Seriously, there are so many great stories out there being told by an astonishingly vast galaxy of writers with a dizzying breadth of experiences, interests and perspectives. At the same time, there are so many classic stories that I haven’t been exposed to waiting for me to pick up. This is not just true for the sci-fi/fantasy genre — there are a number of black writers I need to visit and revisit, and furry fiction has an interesting history to be mined. A lot of these stories and perspectives will speak to me personally, and a lot more will challenge me from a perspective that I will never quite meet. But it’s all engaging, and exciting, and in order to become a better writer (and a more complete person) I seriously need to get started on all this wonderful stuff that I’ve been neglecting.

I write truly shity first drafts. But that’s OK! I think that being among the writers I talk with has given me weird expectations about my own fiction and process. Ryan is especially lucky in that his first drafts are pretty close to what he submits as a final draft — he has a great way with language, a wonderful wit and sense of humor that translates well to the page. I watch him write, and I think that it should be that easy for me, too — when I sit down, I should be writing near to my finished draft, with only a few minor tweaks here and there.

But that’s just not me. I write long and dirty, with lots of asides and muddled ideas that only bubble up to the surface once I’ve taken a step back and seen it from the long view. Writing first drafts are like digging holes in the weeds, hoping that you’re getting the good, strange stuff you’re striving for. I tend to work extremely close in, paying attention to small details, with not that much regard for how they flow together. Editing, for me, is going to be the process of elimination; clearing away the weeds to cultivate the landscape I know is there. That’s going to be scary, but exciting, and it’ll teach me to look at my writing in a whole new way. I’ll need to be critical, but encouraging. That’s not something I’ve been able to do with my own work, traditionally.

Pre-writing preparation makes telling the story so much easier. For the very long story that I’m still in the process of writing, I went through the trouble of breaking down scenes, themes and characters in Scrivener, and it really helped me to clarify what I wanted to do with it and exactly how to do it. I’ve been getting into the idea of project management lately, and the art there is to take this huge thing and break it down into chunks that allow you to put your nose to the grindstone confident in the knowledge that these small details fit a larger vision in a specific way. I know that a lot of people will just sit down and wing it with their stories, and work magic right off the top of their head. That’s great; I wish I could do that, but I’m not that kind of writer. I need to have a map of where I’m going, if only to take a bit of the anxiety out of the journey.

It feels really good being down in the trenches with fellow writers. I had the extraordinary good luck of visiting Ryan while he was at Clarion this year, talking to his fellow students and the teachers that were there that week. They’re all AWESOME people, holy cats! I also had really great discussions with Kyell Gold and the folks at Sofawolf Press about the business of writing, and the more I learn the more I want in on all parts of it — not just being an author, but being an editor, a curator, a signal-booster, a member of the community. There’s a lot of weirdness and quirks and issues that need to be addressed, but now more than ever I’m convinced that sci-fi/fantasy writers are My People and I’d absolutely love to be among their number forever and ever, amen.

So there we go: I now know that I’m someone who needs a bit of structure in their writing to feel confident about what they’re doing; that my first draft is likely going to suck anyway, and I’ll need to revise heavily in my second draft; and that I’m ready to embrace the SFF community and all of its fiction.

Now I have an entirely too-large stack of books to pore through, so I’ll need to do that next. For now, I’d like to hear from you — what sort of writer do you see yourself as? Are you careful with your words right up front, or do you get it all out in a frenzy and pare it down later? I’m curious.

 
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Posted by on August 18, 2014 in Better Living Through Stories, Reading, Self-Reflection, Writing

 

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