Woo, happy (belated) blogiversary to me - what a year it’s been since I unearthed those shambling authorial ambitions!

ESPECIALLY because at the beginning of January – to further torment my favourite metaphor – just when the battlefield was growing quiet and the groans of my undead army were becoming fewer and farther between…there came a knock on my workshop door. Standing there was a feared and respected sorceress: the kind everyone recognizes because they smell dangerous, like ozone. And she had in tow one of MY ZOMBIES. The one I’d just unleashed YESTERDAY.

She said it was genuinely scary. That the fangs and claws were an inspired touch. It could use some more guts, she told me thoughtfully. Some intestines arranged just so, maybe. Or I could do something artistic with the eyeballs. So that it really has some punch.

But she seemed to think it could go places, this zombie, if I was open to working on it some more.

And I managed to stop grinning deliriously for long enough to respond that sure, I could do that.

SO having signed in blood on the dotted line, I am now represented by a LITERARY AGENT. Namely Lana Popovic, of Chalberg & Sussman.

Saying/typing this will never get old, you guys.

Allow me to bubble with enthusiasm and optimism at you, internets!
 
Things that were awesome about 2015
 

• I discovered the glorious, disastrous, mesmerizing, informative, ever-simmering stew that is Twitter and found there an incredible amount of writerly support and food for thought.
• I girded my loins, gritted my teeth, and (gasp) SHOWED PEOPLE STUFF, a prospect I was very nervous about this time last year. And then with the help of my faithful writing buddies, beta readers, pre-contest swappers, and providers of contest feedback, I revised the hell out of my little ghost story and attendant submission materials, with results I am pretty stoked about.
• I unleashed MANY, MANY QUERY ZOMBIES. AND, without going into too much detail, said zombies’ assault on Fort Publishing has been encouragingly successful so far! I live in hope that one of them may yet shamble back to me victorious.
• I blogged, albeit sporadically, another thing I'd been meaning to do but nervous about since approximately forever.
• I’m knee-deep in my next project and getting more and more excited about it (Look! Look! I’m writing something without years of prior contemplation!) and even the monstrousness of my first draft is not dampening my delight.

 
Things that will be awesome in 2016
 

• Topping the list: In March, I am going to Nova Ren Suma’s Djerassi YA Novel Writing Workshop! Which news still makes me want to squee and run around in little circles. I haven’t been to a writing workshop in years. I’ve never been to one that was focused so specifically on the kind of story I want to tell, nor one that was taught by someone whose work and ideas I was so excited about. Like, check out this article she wrote about magical realism, which made me bounce in my chair and go YES EXACTLY. Flights booked, deposit paid – THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING AND OMFG IT WILL BE SO AMAZING.
• It is my evil plan to complete the new project by 2017; the last one took me about 20 months, all told, and considering that those 20 months also included participating in an art show and building the deck, I don’t think it’s too ambitious to aim to make better time with this story. Especially seeing as how I have a sort of clearer idea of what I'm doing now. Right? Right??
• I have carved myself out a writing cave! One of the little cottages in the neighbourhood is rented out in pieces by its amazing owners as artists’ studios. I’ve had a room there since 2007 as a space to work on one of my other consuming passions, namely stained glass. It’s been woefully neglected for the last year and a half or so, since writing has pretty much devoured all my project time. BUT with the addition of a squishy new-to-me armchair and a little side table to hold a drink and a lamp, it makes an excellent, comfy, blessedly quiet retreat that I’m looking forward to holing up in as often as possible.

 
My lovely writer friends, I learned so much from you this year. Without you, my zombie army would be altogether toothless. You are the unparalleled best. To all of you, I wish courage and confidence and success for the year to come. Here’s to us!
 
Bring the old year out
Bring the new year in
Bring us all good luck
Let the good guys win!

#SpookyAllYear? WHY YES, yes I am. What an excellent idea from Faith McKay at The Midnight Society!

Since mid-November means we're thigh-deep in the churn of NaNoWriMo, I thought I'd share a few useful spooky writing resources in the form of atmospheric music to keep the prose flowing.

Like all things spooky, of course, the helpfulness of a given soundtrack for these purposes is going to vary greatly according to your project du jour and your taste. My own taste tends to run to quietly moody, contemplative instrumentals these days, which seems to suit the quietly spooky contemporary settings I'm trying to paint.

Two standbys in this vein that have been the perfect backdrop for slow-building hauntings and resentful semi-sentient exurban wilderness:

​

If you want to get a smidgen more epic, you can't go wrong with Hans Zimmer. The first soundtrack of his I ever bought was Crimson Tide, which leavens stirring spikes of grim militaristic action with long, tense, broody, emotional intervals. His stuff is all magnificent, but I haven't yet found an album that surpasses this one for my purposes. (The OST for The Da Vinci Code is sounding promising, though!)

The full OST is not available on YouTube (there are playlists, but I find the ads embedded in those annoying as hell) but it IS on Spotify. Here's the first track, which is a pretty representative sample.

Shading further into fantasy territory, Naz Kutub tipped me off to this lovely album by the always amazing Coeur de Pirate, which strikes me as having a spooky flavour (or maybe just a melancholy one) - either way, I've found it helpful.

Do you have other spooky music up your sleeve? Tell meeeeeee!

Aaaaaand another edition of the long-neglected Wednesday Muse challenge! Six or eight weeks later. Ahem. Magical gardens are rather on my mind lately, so...

All right, in an effort to distract myself from Pitch Wars, I've been stumbling around banging rocks together in hope of striking some sparks to nurse into a shiny new project. One of the rocks I've picked up is Vanessa Barger's lovely Wednesday Muse challenge, parameters of which are to write A Thing every week in response to a photo writing prompt.

So here's my first, which I feel a little weird about posting, given that I scrawled it down in my Home Economicon notebook at the kitchen table this evening over pizza and cider and have just now spent an hour embroidering it. Have a post-apocalyptic radioactive Silent Hill Toronto? Or something?

Hello Pitch Wars mentors, fellow hopefuls, and random blog readers! Have some info about…

Me

I’m a 35-year-old mom of two living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, surrounded by a whirlwind of household chaos and unfinished projects and books and cat hair. My career path meandered through academics, carpentry and administrivia before I lucked into my current wordsmithing gig with the federal public service.



My writing

·         I’m aiming to follow in the footsteps of the understated, underexplained, deeply spooky books I love best.

·         My current project is a YA ghost story about a teenager under attack by a poltergeist, inspired in part by the haunting of Esther Cox in late 1800s Nova Scotia. There’s plenty of commentary on the case—most of it by men, most of it focused on reporting the observations of witnesses, and some of it downright obnoxious—but Esther herself is conspicuously silent, which got me to thinking.

·         I have lots of practice rejigging and overhauling my own work in response to feedback. I passionately loved writing classes and workshops right through grad school, but it’s writing and editing in the day job that has really normalized rewriting for me. When I get to doubting myself during this process, I find comfort in extended zombie metaphors.

·         Heeding the incisive wisdom of two saintly real-life writing buddies and a handful of generous readers I’ve met online has brought me to version 4.2. At this point I can no longer see the forest OR the trees when it comes to this story, and although I remain irrepressibly confident in its awesomeness, if I can make it MORE awesome, I am by god gonna do it!


Things I love

·         Thinky and stylish SFF, both in print (Ursula Le Guin, Lois McMaster Bujold, Tolkien) and on screen (Battlestar Galactica, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Star Trek TNG, Babylon 5, Dr. Who).

·         Introducing my kids, 4 and 6, to geeky awesomeness like The Hobbit, Harry Potter, Jim Henson fantasy movies from the 80s, A:TLA, Dr. Who, and She-Ra.

·         Anything genuinely and thoughtfully scary – but I’m very picky about what qualifies. Some things that hit the mark for me: Pan’s Labyrinth, Silent Hill 2, Coraline, Wait Till Helen Comes, The Walking Dead (broke up with the show after s2 – TOO scary), The Ring (American adaptation more so than the Japanese original, surprisingly), Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series. 

I’m much more interested in supernatural horror than the real-world psycho/slasher/stalker variety (to quote Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: “You’ve told them that there are bad people out there. And they’ve known that all along”) – but the supernatural has to have something to say about the real world if it’s going to have any punch.

·         Thinky and stylish personal essays (e.g. Ursula Le Guin, Kameron Hurley, Lev Grossman) – especially about SFF, horror, writing, parenting and feminism.

·         Making things: home improvements, stained glass, quilting, knitting, crochet, pottery…

·         Singing: occasionally karaoke, but more frequently belting out Bon Jovi/Les Mis/Barrett’s Privateers in the car with the kids.

·         Gardening, i.e. home improvement with plants, mostly ornamentals. Also botanical names – I don’t know why. I think I just enjoy the illusion of power (it shouldn’t matter what the horrible invasive weed du jour is called, but somehow I feel better when I know!)

Confidence and enthusiasm at low ebb today. Bleh. 

Partly this is because I am tired, having unwisely stayed up past midnight working on rewrites.

Mostly, though, rewriting just kind of sucks.

This is pretty apt, except that I’m not sure all the bits and pieces go back together in the tidy mechanical fashion of gears and cogs and springs. A better metaphor might be surgery. On zombies. With hacksaws. It’s like I’ve taken a limb and chopped it into little gobbets that I’m now trying to stitch back together in a different order. The monstrousness of the result seems guaranteed.

Things I am trying to remind myself of:

* I have been through this stage before. I rejigged the opening not too long ago in response to contest feedback, and it was brutal. I had to peel back the nice stylistic veneer to get at the working parts and then layer it all back on once I had them functioning again in their new places. For a couple of iterations the revised version looked downright barbarous. It is OK for it to look barbarous at first. This can be worked upon. This time it will probably take longer, is all, since it involves ~40 pages instead of ~10.

* This is part of the process, and everyone’s gotta do it. Even – especially! – the pros. 

I do it at work all the time, too, after all – just usually on a much smaller scale. See above re. 40 pages. I am not going to turn this around as fast as I do a promotional email.

* Kids going camping with grandma next week will coincide with a couple of vacation days I’d forgotten I booked. So I can spend HOURS AT A STRETCH on this next week, completely uninterrupted. Dealing with All The Other Things this week need not sink me into the quagmire of time starvation.

* Lack of sleep will not help me come up with fresh verbs and musical sentence structure, to say nothing of focusing on the dayjob or being patient with the kids. Shoring up spoons is a legitimate use of my time.

* Having to break out the hacksaw does not make the positive elements of the feedback I’ve received any less encouraging. If nothing else, those positive comments reassure me that my once-barbarous opening is now operating at a high shine, and if I can achieve that once, I can by god do it again.

Here's a toast to a first book that shall remain nameless.

It was a YA novel just shy of 70K about three kids who find themselves suddenly transported to the world they made up. I first had the idea in 1996 or thereabouts while improvising stories from random objects with a couple of guy friends after school; I finally shut the drawer on it in 2007 after – if I recall correctly – about two dozen rejection letters.

It’s been a while since I thought about this project, mostly because I cringe a little bit at the memory. So much old anxiety. So many mistakes. So many egregious mistakes.

Topping the list: Querying before finishing. You might not have thought there were people out there with so little basic common sense, but yes, I was one of them. I was 18 and cocksure. I had zero doubts that I’d have the thing wrapped up within six months. Never mind that I’d never completed a project this long before, like, ever; never mind that I had only the vaguest idea where I was going with it past the first ten chapters or so. I was awesome and invincible. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, I could actually get requests, for starters.

Ha. Hahahaha. Oh, past self. WHY WERE YOU SO FOOLISH.

Next big mistake: Staking my life on finishing it. I signed up for a writing course in 2002 or 2003, thinking this would kick my ass into soldiering through completing the manuscript. I was also, to be honest, looking for some relief from the terrifying imposter syndrome that was paralyzing me in grad school. Because this, at least, I knew I was good at. Right? So naturally my instructor’s canny criticism pitched me into full-on panic: for the first time I seriously doubted whether I could actually do this. And if I couldn’t, what the hell else would I do?

As if that wasn’t enough, another big mistake: Once I finally hauled myself through a complete draft – it took me until June of 2006 – I cracked open Writer’s Marketplace and fired off more queries. Revision? Screw that. I’d finished the goddamn story and I was closing the book on it, so to speak, come hell or high water. I did actually get a couple of requests for partials, but they fizzled, albeit in relatively encouraging rejections (one agent told me I was a good writer). I sent my last one in February of 2007 and, with a mix of relief and faint mortification, decided the market had spoken.

By now I can look back on the whole thing with a more clinical eye, overlooking (mostly) both the dogged devotion and the mortification I associated with the project for so long.

What I see: An assortment of spooky scenes I’m still proud of. A neat humanist creation theme. A world I still find compelling, despite its generic medieval trappings. A travelling troupe of actors from an oppressed minority group who were well and truly scooped by Patrick Rothfuss’s Edema Ruh in The Name of the Wind (and he did the concept so masterfully I couldn’t even be too dismayed). A weirdly middle-grade voice that clashes entirely with the darker elements of the story. A premise that is, in the words of that kind rejection, a bit too familiar.

All in all, I look at it now and see a flawed but not-so-terrible story that (a) taught me how to damn well finish something, i.e. how to apply butt-in-chair-despite-anxiety discipline to fiction, and (b) smacked some desperately needed caution/humility/realism into me. I’ve toyed with the idea of dusting it off and rewriting a “good parts” version, but I think it will probably just go on the scrap heap so I can recycle said good parts into a worthier project.

I would not wish you back again, first novel, but I learned a hell of a lot from you. Requiescat in pace.

We are, predictably enough, a bookish household over here. One of the things Corey and I always daydreamed about before having kids was lazy afternoons like I remember from my own family, with everyone lounging around in various comfy corners of the same room, lost in their respective books.

So now that we have kids, we read to them as much as possible in the hopes of dragooning them into this vision.

I was emphatically never a drama kid; too shy and methodical, particularly once adolescent mortification set in. So I’ve been a little surprised to discover how fun some books can be to read aloud. Partly it’s just hard to be self-conscious around the six-and-under set, and partly I think there’s a secret genius to writing good read-aloud books.

Take Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches and Other Stories, for example. I never get tired of reading it; at this point I could stand up and declaim any part of the book from memory. I’ve always had a particular soft spot for “What Was I Scared Of?” i.e. the one about the pale green pants with nobody inside them – the nightscapes are delightfully atmospheric, especially considering there are four colours involved. I mean, look at this:

This is a story I adored as a kid myself. If I can’t credit the pale green pants for my love of things spooky, it’s certainly the first example of it.

One that surprised me was The Hobbit. I have a nice oversized copy with full-colour illustrations throughout sitting on the shelf. My then-four-year-old, Rose, was a big fan of Beatrix Potter, so I figured she might enjoy it despite the winding British style, which I found very dry when I first read it in grade five. Once I got going, it actually rolled quite trippingly off the tongue, and by the time we got to Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug, I was full on in love (as was Rose!) Ursula Le Guin writes a lot about the beauty of Tolkien’s prose, but it wasn’t until I read it aloud that I understood what she was talking about. Seriously, I challenge anyone to read that scene without discovering a secret dramatic flair.

Another excellent one that was new to me was Mary Pope Osborne’s Tales from the Odyssey (which comes in two volumes). We have some playbills from the Stratford Festival hanging on the wall, and Rose (whose dramatic flair is no secret at all – she loves being on stage in costumes and makeup) asked me to tell her about them. Odysseus’s adventures particularly piqued her interest, but I sure as hell couldn’t remember them from first year Classics. Osborne’s take on them is crystal-clear, emotional, and engaging, and she doesn’t pull any punches.

We tried Harry Potter next, and interestingly, it was much more difficult to get into for both of us. I think part of it is characters with accents (e.g. Hagrid) that I find difficult to render in my flat Canadian English, but there’s just something about the way it’s put together that seems to work better on the page than it does read aloud. I wonder how much this is a question of personal preference and how much it has to do with the actual structure of the language. Interesting too that the ones easier to read aloud involve more distance from the characters.

Our younger daughter is coming up on four years old now, while Rose – now six – pretty much reads on her own. One of these days I am going to have to try cracking one of these open again and see if I can snuggle up with the two of them a chapter at a time. Geeky bookish parenting daydream: ENGAGE.