The Big "R" and Where to Go Next

The first agent passed on The House of Arkhangel'sk. The angels and demons, she said, were too human. Well, at least I succeeded in making them what I wanted them to be.

I know I shouldn't let it affect me, but every rejection does, and of course it's worse when it's on a manuscript and not just a query. There's no pretending I missed the "magic words" that get you in the door. It was my writing that failed to engage.

I also know that unpublished writers should never write trilogies or series, but that was what was in my head, so that is what I wrote, and I've recently started working on a second trilogy in the same world. While I realize this is only one rejection, I'm afraid I may be heading for misery by staying on this path. If this book doesn't make it, I am wasting more years of my life on an unattainable goal.

This is what wrecked me the last time. I was working on a sequel to Anamnesis and had another in mind, and wrote a novella in the same world, and when it finally hit me that Anamnesis was not to be, I had nothing.

I can't seem to walk away from great characters once I've created them. (And they are. I know that. If the book does not succeed, it is not the fault of these characters, it is my failure to do them justice.) But I cannot spend another twelve years of my life chasing a mirage. I have to walk away and work on something new. I simply don't know how.

What's worse is that if I do walk away, I will always regret it. I wish I had finished the Anamnesis sequel, but everyone told me I should let it go. Shiva still gives me dark looks from deep in my soul where I've shoved her down. And I've been so excited about this new book as I start to plot. If I stop and let it go now, it will never come to be. It's like being told to get an abortion just as I've really gotten excited about being pregnant.

So what do I do? Do I do the sensible thing and get rid of it now before I get too attached, or do I go with what my heart wants? (The irony of my art imitating my life is not lost on me. I have been faced with this decision before.) Can I write something else? If I knew where these stories came from, I would be down there right now digging in the alluvial mud for another.

I think I hate my muse.

Fuel

I'll be honest. I didn't read many books last year, partly because I was busy writing three of my own, and partly because I feel guilty when I read. I don't know why, but I always feel like I'm wasting time, even more egregiously than when I watch television. (Yes, I know. Sacrilege! And I should throw away my t.v. Yeah, whatever. Buffy.) I think it must go back to when I was a kid and I would sneak reading at every opportunity. There was always something else I was supposed to be doing. (And still is. I won't even tell you how long it's been since I cleaned this house.)

But words are fuel for writers, and I've been starving my poor writer-tum, so I'm making an effort to read more this year.

To that end, I'm going to keep a running tally of what I read—not for you, but for me, kind of like a dieting journal. Go ahead and be appalled at my reading choices if you must. I read what interests me.

So far this year:

Still working on: Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. I started reading this a year ago as research for The House of Arkhangel'sk, and it has been very difficult to get through, not because it isn't fascinating and masterfully written, but because it is. I pick it up, and in two minutes, tears are streaming down my face. I last put it down just after the Imperial family was put under house arrest and Tsarevich Alexei's formerly loving servant began treating him like an animal. I don't know why I feel so close to this tragedy, but it makes my heart ache with every word.

Finished: Mark of the Demon, Diana Rowland. First in an urban fantasy/police procedural series. Loved it. Can't wait for book two. I mean, female cop who happens to be a demonic summoner accidentally conjuring an inhumanly beautiful Demonic Lord who decides to seduce her instead of tearing her into tiny, bloody pieces as honor demands...what's not to like?

Currently reading: Fool Moon, book two of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. I don't have a copy of book one, which irks me, so I'm starting here. Initial impressions: enjoying it, but annoyed by the physical descriptions and stereotypical behaviors of some of the women, and really annoyed by Murphy's over-the-top assumptions of Harry's betrayal. I don't like it when characters are treated so unfairly by their supposed friends. I wouldn't tolerate it in real life, and it makes me mad on the character's behalf, and not it in a "you've really sucked me into this story" kind of way, but a "you'd better stop this or I'm throwing the book at the wall" kind of way.

Hoping to get around to reading: Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and hoping not to take as long as I took in reading Demons last year. It would have been a lot easier to keep up with the patronymics and remember who had done what to whom if I hadn't waited a week between every ten pages. (I have to stop considering my commute as my only reading time since I now only work at the office one day a week.) Even so, it was lovely, wickedly funny, and horribly depressing. I adored it.

Really psyched about reading: The White Road, book five in the Nightrunner series by Lynn Flewelling. Jumping-up-and-down psyched: I will be cruising the Bahamas with Lynn for its debut! (Not as her personal friend or anything, just joining her Writing on the Waves writing seminar at sea, which is, like, the most awesome idea ever...and has clearly regressed me to '80s teenspeak. And I think the video below in Making Me Mental really applies here as well.)

Writing right, or the penance of the pen

I'm always interested in how other writers write. The conventional wisdom is "never edit as you go, just get through the draft," and "when you're done, put it in a drawer for six weeks and come back with perspective." Most writers I know try to follow that advice. Not me.

I plow on through during a single writing session, but the next time I sit down to write, I go back and read everything I wrote in the last session (whether it was a few hours ago or the day before) and edit until I'm reasonably satisfied with it before continuing. Sometimes my edits don't satisfy me and I put things I absolutely hate in brackets to revisit later. But it makes it easier for me to go on when I see where I've been and feel fairly certain that I'm going in the right direction.

When I'm done with a first draft, I go straight back to page one and read through for grammar, typos, and continuity, fix anything in brackets (if I can), and then immediately go back to page one to read again and rework sections I'm not happy with. That draft is what goes to beta readers and critique partners. (Though I have to make a confession: I don't really have critique partners. I have a single friend I share critiques with when I can, and another friend who's a very critical reader; Orson Scott Card refers to this as the Wise Reader: someone who knows how to let you know when you're on track and when you're skidding onto the shoulder—or way out into the dirt and weeds on an unimproved county road.) When I get their input, I start over. If I make significant changes, I go through all three stages again, and then try to find a reader I haven't annoyed.

The reason I write this way is in part related to my depression. Writing is necessary to stave it off (and usually results in some nice hypomania and occasional euphoria when it's all working), but when I reach "The End," I'm in danger of an epic crash.

The first two novels I wrote differently. I fed them a chapter at a time to my closest friend or partner (or both) while I was writing the first draft. I think it was necessary at that stage to have the external validation that someone was interested in the story and wanted to know what happened next. Without that, I would not have kept going.

But when I reached the end of both of those novels, it felt like the end of the world. I put them in a drawer for six weeks...six weeks that sank me deeper into despair, knowing that every word was crap, that I couldn't fix anything, that I would never write again. I tried to write other things, but kept obsessing about the "love I had lost." I didn't want someone new; I wanted them. By the end of six weeks, I had lost all faith in my writing and I was mired in hopelessness, which led to epic periods of writer's block. Maybe that still happens now, just a little bit later; I don't know. I certainly still have periods of despair, as evidenced by some of my recent posts. But I do know that re-reading and reworking while it was still fresh made me feel like I hadn't lost anything, and reassured me that I wasn't completely mad; the story needed work, but it was sound.

I guess what I'm getting at is that you don't have to follow writing advice that doesn't work for you, and you don't have to feel like a bad writer because you don't do what you're told. (I think that last bit was for me. Maybe this whole thing is for me. I seem to have a lot of "writer's guilt.") Anyway, I'm sure I'm not the only one who can't follow the rules, or who wonders if I'm being "bad" and somehow the writing gods will find out and punish me. (Fundie childhood PTSD, anyone?)

So, tell me; how do you write? Do you think I'm writing wrong?

This anticipation...it's making me mental

Just a quick follow-up to yesterday's whine-fest to report that the agent I queried before Christmas responded today...and has requested a partial of my manuscript. [Brief, undignified dance ensues.]

Maybe I am in the ballgame after all.

If there's one thing I've learned from the overflowing cup of writing and publishing advice available on the Web, it's that any given drop may be both absolutely right and absolutely wrong. Simultaneously. Like a character in a Dickian dystopia, you never know which truths apply to you. Because it's all true. Until it's not.

And here's what my little undignified dance looked like, in case you were curious:

When there's deafening silence, you have to listen more closely

Two great blog posts today from Rachelle Gardner and Janet Reid lay it on the line about what it means when you're getting no feedback from agents. (Here it is in short, if you're too lazy to click: it means epic FAIL.) This is not the first time I've heard this in recent weeks; several other agents have said as much on Twitter, albeit with a little less tact.

This revelation has put me into a serious funk. I've been hearing for years that when an agent sends you a form rejection, it doesn't mean that your writing isn't good, it just means it wasn't right for them. Coulda been anything, they say. "Go on, keep sending out those queries; did you hear how many times Harry Potter was rejected?" (Well, way less times than my book, actually. About a third as many times. But who's counting?) And so I did. Again, and again, and again. (To be fair, I did get two requests for partials eventually—and two polite letters saying it was well written but didn't excite them.)

If someone had been honest with me about what those silent rejections meant ten years ago, I would not have doggedly pursued representation for a manuscript that clearly was not even close. I would not have spent $4,000 on the Maui Writers' Conference (yeah, I'm that stupid) to pitch it to agents who had already rejected it during the pre-conference Manuscript Marketplace (pre-conference, but post-payment; no, I didn't feel at all like a chump getting on that plane for Hawaii). I would not have held onto that story for so many years, feeling brokenhearted every time I got a rejection letter but climbing back on the horse, because after all, it probably just wasn't right for them and someone would love it. It finally took a crippling depression for me to let it go and start something new.

That something new has so far received two form rejection letters. I consoled myself with thinking it simply wasn't right for those agents, rewrote my query letter, and got ready to send it out again. Reading those blog posts today gave me pause. Am I just going to keep repeating the same actions and expecting different results? How many silent rejections should I accrue before I get the message this time? Five? Ten? Twenty? If it weren't for the encouraging feedback I got at the Editors' Intensive, I would say that number was two.

So while I am going to send my little darling out there again, another dreadful possibility keeps me awake at night. Maybe, just maybe, I simply cannot write a query letter to save my life. I may have written a really great book...and a dozen iterations of an astoundingly bad query.

I've taken the WOW query writing class. I read Chuck Sambuchino's blog religiously. I follow Nathan Bransford. I have read dozens of other great blogs on querying. I have books on it. And yet I still managed to write a query that friends told me succeeded in making a really exciting story sound dull. (I have since rewritten it several more times, but how would I know a good query from a duck? I thought the first one was good after all.)

Maybe I'll finally figure out the answer to that one in another ten years.

What will this day be like? I wonder. What will my future be? I wonder.

Here's another year in front of me in which anything could happen. Like Maria von Trapp, I'm afraid of the unknown, even as I long for it. And of course, everything is unknown. The actions I take this year may have nothing to do with the events that will fill it.

I was reminded of this on Christmas Eve on the way to a dinner party, when a truck came out of the unknown and slammed into the car I was in while we were stopped behind a doubleparked car. The driver of the truck did not slow, and as near as we can figure, he was trying to pass someone on the left before switching into the left lane to go around us.

There was that sickening thud and lurch I have experienced before (that sort of "Pevensies at the train station" feeling, only without being transported into Narnia), and then the back end of our car was torn off, and Jack's cane, which he keeps on the dash while driving, struck me and became tangled in my hair. I had no bruises afterward, so I can't quite figure out where or how the cane struck me, although my head hurt as if someone had rattled my brain inside my skull, but there it was: the brass handle of the cane wrapped in several inches of my curls.

Ahead of us, a white pickup truck lay on its side in the left lane. Our car had served as a ramp and the driver had soared over us and flipped his truck. People were running to it, screaming, while Jack and I stood stunned in the debris of our rear bumper (now in front of the car). Someone shouted that the door was stuck, and they couldn't get the driver out until the police arrived. When they eventually pulled him out, he seemed miraculously unscathed, though they put a brace on his neck and took him away in an ambulance. We were uninjured, but Jack's car was totalled. Being unable to work for the past few years and dealing with chronic pain and health issues, this was the last thing Jack needed. But it could have been worse. Much worse.

Through all of this, I kept thinking that no matter how safely I drive, no matter what I do, there is no way to control what others around me might do. Had the other driver turned a second earlier, he might have missed us completely; a second later, and he might have seriously injured us, or worse. We are forever at the mercy of the unknown. All we can do is react when it comes flying at us.

While pondering these things, I came across a blog post written earlier today by writer and literary agent Lucienne Diver, wherein she contemplates an idea that has "spiraled into something truly ambitious, something I’m afraid I won’t be able to pull off." Well, there it is, the unknown we can affect, but which still looms like a dragon in the dark: our own words. As every writer knows, when the muse throws down the gauntlet, you have to take it up. Will I be able to pull it off? Will I do my darlings justice? I don't know, but I have to try.

So I wonder what this day will be like, what my future will be, and I remember that I must dream of the things I am seeking. (I am seeking the courage I lack.) Thank you, Maria von Trapp and Lucienne Diver, you are so right. Pants kicked.

Livin' on the air in Cincinnati, or an Unbearable Lightness of Being

I flew to Cincinnati against my agoraphobia's better judgment, expecting freezing rain and windchill factors of zero in both weather and critique. Two things happened that I was not expecting: the weather was relatively mild, and Writer's Digest editor Jane Friedman did not beat the hell out of my little darling. Instead, she compiled a list of agents I should send it to. (Yes, yes: "to whom I should send it.") I kept thinking, wait, does she think I'm someone else? Is this somebody's idea of a mean joke? Am I still rehearsing this session in my dream the night before? (I decided it could not be the latter, as my dreams run more toward, "This is the worst piece of tripe I have ever seen! What makes you think you have any business writing? Give me your keyboard: I'm cutting it in half!")

But Nelson Muntz did not pop out and say "HA, ha!" and I still had the piece of paper with all of the agent names on it when I went back to my hotel room. (And the little smiley in the margin of my manuscript where Jane liked my silly ZuZu's petals joke between the demons after the angel gets her wings.)

I was walking on air for several days afterward. Finally, some validation that maybe what I'm writing would be of interest to more than just a handful of my friends. Maybe, finally, I had something. And then the other pole of my bipolar head swung back around with a nauseating lurch, and the quotation that I have above my computer came back to me: "Expectation is the root of all heartache."

I recognize that this is chemical, that I have been staying inside my very dark, scaffolding-shrouded house for too long writing, and the Seasonal Affective Disorder is raging out of control. Still, I cannot convince myself that the upswing in my mood was not a total, helium-filled delusion, a Hindenburg awaiting a spark. The agent I queried on referral hasn't replied. Normally, I wouldn't expect a quick response, but I don't really know how it works when it's a referral, and I'm now trying to figure out if I've done something wrong. Yes, it's the holiday season, and I should take a step back and not worry about it right now; people are busy. Yes, I have other agents to query and a few more referrals. I think about that list of referrals and I'm a bit giddy for an instant. Still, I am gripped by self-doubt and self-hatred, as if the price for feeling good, for hope, is an equal amount of despair.

It's the Solstice, the time for lights in the darkness, the time to look into the leafless trees for the dancing snegurochka syla—but here I sit with an unbearable feeling of detachment and insubstantiality, a fear that like my mother, I am close to the end at the age of 43. I read of others for whom it comes so easy, who attain their goals so young, and I have been trying for so long, but it's always out of reach.

I pondered whether I should write this post. All that talk of building a platform, and the best I can do is blurt out my anxiety and paranoia for all the world to see like a stain of emotional incontinence. This is one of the reasons I've resisted the "public presence." I am all too familiar with my mood swings. Yet if I keep it to myself, it feels worse, and if I don't write when I feel like this, I don't write. I guess I'll take comfort in the fact that no one is yet following this blog, and apologize to my future followers should they ever happen across it.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to get myself to go outside and get a Solstice tree. After all, it will be up in plenty of time for the Russian Orthodox Christmas and New Year. Maybe the lights will work their terrestrial magic. As my leather demon Belphagor once said, it's why we fall.

Naked

Oh, dear. Who knew that following another's blog would mean this silly blog would become visible? I admit, I'm woefully behind the times (and woefully behind on my blog). I have never "followed" anyone before, because I wasn't quite sure what it meant. No time like the present. (And no present like time.)

So I suppose I ought to briefly update my blog, as the last post was over a year ago. And now that I'm exposed, I suppose I'll have to keep updating my blog. This whole public persona thing gives me the wiggins, I have to say. (Stop staring at me! Oh, wait...that was only the painters standing on the scaffolding directly outside my bedroom window while I sit here in my bathrobe at 4:00 in the afternoon. Another story for another dreadful blog post.)

To sum up over a year of blog silence, I finished up The Blood Maiden's Vision (formerly Under Galga) rewrite last Thanksgiving and sent it off to an LGBT small press looking for romantic fantasy. In February, they responded to say that it wasn't LGBT enough. (Because the B in LGBT apparently stands for "by the way, we mean same-sex only.") But they did give me some very useful critique.

Meanwhile, I had vowed to complete my Queen of Heaven book once and for all (after all, I'd gone all the way to Russia and started learning a foreign language just to write it), and I had begun in December, giving myself a deadline of April 1. It wasn't long before I realized that, dammit, I was writing not a single novel, but a trilogy. I then gave myself three deadlines: April 1, June 1, and September 1, to write the whole thing. I've pretty much been sitting here in my bathrobe ever since.

I finished The House of Arkhangel'sk in early February, and a second draft by the beginning of March. Not wanting to lose momentum, I launched straight into The Fallen Queen, and finished up its second draft by the end of May. Each day became progressively more difficult to force myself to sit and write (I'm not one of those people who can crank out thousands of words in a day), but the story wanted out, and I wanted it out. Writing the final book, The Midnight Court, was a painful, upward climb (barefoot, through snow), but just two weeks past my deadline, The Queen of Heaven trilogy was finally done.

I had hoped I could remain a bit detached from this story, because the last one took so much out of me, and each rejection was like having the same raw wound torn open again and again. (To those who like to scoff at us sorry losers who feel pain over a rejection, you know, some of us just feel it, all right? It hurts like hell and I keep going. I'm bipolar: a rejection is a suicidal low, but the writing is an ecstatic, religious high.) But I fell in love again. I couldn't help it. The damn things just get under your skin.

This weekend I'll be in the sleet of Cincinnati paying a Writer's Digest editor $300 (not to mention airfare and lodging) to beat the hell out of my little darling. As much as I've always loathed this saying, I hope what doesn't kill my little darling will make it stronger. As for me? Hell, I'm a masochist. I don't know when to quit.

Poison Poisson

First there was the mythologically bad "Greek Flounder" episode wherein I baked a gorgeous, pink fillet the size of a human infant into a complete, ungodly mush, then the dover sole I broiled with a little olive oil, lemon slices, and Ali'i Kula Lavender Seasoning Blend that was absolutely delish—and then there was last night's fish.

Again, I bought the dover sole fillets from Ralph's (packaged from the "fish and meat shoppe" display after it had closed for the day), and again I used my easy, tasty broiling recipe that was so yummy last week. Maybe these fillets were thicker and I didn't broil them long enough...they seemed overdone on the edges, but not quite "flaking easily with a fork" in the center. I didn't want them to get any dryer, so I took them out and decided they were done. It didn't taste bad per se, but it sure didn't taste fabulous. I ate half and then decided it just wasn't good, and I tossed the rest.

My stomach started churning shortly thereafter, and within a few hours, well...I won't go into the gory details, but suffice it to say, the digestive system just isn't supposed to work that way. Garrrrrrrrrrrr.

Hey, that reminds me: it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day and I completely forgot. Oh, well, thar she blows. (Yeah, you think that pun made you groan? I'll give you groaning. Come here and eat this fish I just made you.)

After eating soft, innocuous foods and drinking a lot of fluids today, I decided I could properly digest something, and I had these Zesty Lemon chicken breasts that I bought along with the fish. (Don't worry, it wasn't Ralph's "fish and meat shoppe," chicken, it was a prepackaged Zacky Farms thing; nothing untoward will follow.) It said "best if grilled," and I thought, Hey, I haven't used my mini-Weber all summer and the damn season's almost gone, and so what if it's already 5:00? There was this fabulous golden undertone to the blue-gray overcast San Francisco sky, and a sweet smelling breeze, and one gorgeous pink bloom on my aphid-ravaged Betty Boop rosebush, and I happened to have an unopened bag of charcoal briquets, so I fired up the Weber and threw on the breasts, and with very little fuss, I had made some really tasty chicken. How damn hard was that? Why don't I cook more often? Why don't I grill more often? Why don't I go outside more often?

Anyway, I managed to squeeze some pleasure out of an otherwise unpleasant day of stomach upset, JavaScript menu-tweaking frustration of Sisyphean proportions, and an acute episode of "crazy brain and impending doom," and now I'm watching Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts bounce on Ghost Whisperer, and ultimately, I think I have earned a nice bath with lavender salts, candles, and incense. Of course, that means I'll have to spend 20 minutes scrubbing the tub, which will trigger my OCD because the old porcelain never feels clean, and there are stains that never come out. I'll let you know how it goes.

Synchronicity revisited

Other Betty Blue in the UK (whom I discussed previously) has mysteriously changed her name to just "Betty," making my Synchronicity post look a little silly (though not entirely, as everything else is still true--except that my birthday is apparently earlier than hers and now I'm older; hmph). So I have to wonder, did she find my blog and not want to be associated with me? (Yes, I'm paranoid; next question?)

I have to say, Other Betty (formerly Other Betty Blue), it irks me that you don't allow comments or have an e-mail link on your blog. I'm feeling slighted. It's not every day that one finds a doppelganger lurking about the Web, and I thought it was pretty cool. And now...snubbed by my own doppelganger. I feel truly unloved.

I found her

I've been thinking about "the girl that got away" for many years. I wrote a love story about her called "Heat" that was published in Best Lesbian Love Stories. (I thought I was just writing another erotica story, but it turned out to be something more.) I have no idea if she ever shared my feelings. There was one night in my memory where it seems that something else could have happened, if I hadn't been so dense (and so drunk); that's what inspired the story. I don't know if my memory is even accurate or a fantasy I've created over the years. It didn't even dawn on me that I'd been in love with her until several months after I'd moved away, when I realized how intensely I missed her. (I was involved with a man at the time, we both were, and being bisexual wasn't something it occurred to me that I could act on. Seems silly now, but I was 21, and had only recently escaped my Fundie youth.)

We didn't part on the best of terms, and I think it was partly because I needed to invent a reason to break that bond with her, because I knew I was leaving town for good. She went back to the reservation she grew up on, and I moved 2,000 miles away to the big city.

But I've been unable to stop thinking of her for 20 years. Every six months or so I Google her, trying to find her. I came close a few times, but was always a few months behind her, finding the place she'd been, but no longer was.

Tonight something on t.v. reminded me of her, and I looked again...and there she was, on a reunion site. And there were other links, articles mentioning her name in local papers: an obituary for her father who recently died, her time in a recent marathon, a paper she'd written for the school on the reservation. It's like the universe finally stopped hiding her from me.

And now...well, I don't know what to do. If I contact her, 20 years of dreaming of her might crumble into an unpleasant reality that I imagined our connection so many years ago, that she thinks badly of me because of the way we parted, that she's as straight as an arrow, a homophobe, or dear goddess, a Republican. Whatever her response, I know we'd still be separated by more than the 2,500 miles that are between us. We talked about it once, how I had the "city" in my bones, and she had the quiet life, the reservation, in her blood.

I know. I'm being a coward.

Fluff

I'm housesitting in the East Bay for a couple of weeks (a "writing" vacation away from shrieking cockatiels and other distractions) and the place has a darling garden full of flowers and trees (and birds and bees). I've been sitting in the studio behind the garden where the computers are, trying to work on my final tweaks to the fuel source in Under Galga, smelling this gorgeous jasmine that drapes the entire fence along the right side, just outside the studio door.

As I stare at the page and jump over to Google and skip back over to read more Capital Hill, I realize I really can't think. My head is full of fluff and I can't concentrate. Not that this is an entirely unprecedented state for me, but I've been having more trouble than usual getting myself to actually write two words in the novel. It finally dawns on me as I wait for some laundry to fluff to get the wrinkles out before I fold it that my head is thick with jasmine scent. To which I am having an allergic reaction.

This makes me sad. I love the smell of jasmine. Why is it that something I adore has to be on the list of things that hurt me? Moments ago, I cleaned the fluff out of the dryer lint trap, and I thought, yeah...that's the stuff in my head. If only I had a lint trap.

Ah, well. At least I can soak in the hot tub later.

Synchronicity

Okay, this is just weird. Today I decided that it didn't make sense for my blog title to be different from my URL (it was bettyisblue.blogspot.com, because bettyblue.blogspot.com was taken by some Jennifer in Amsterdam who posted all of one line to her blog in November of 2000), so I decided to change it. First I thought about the 37.2, and figured I wouldn't be allowed to use a period (full stop, for you Brits), so I came up with 37point2degreesinthemorning. And that just looked silly long. So I thought, okay: 37point2degrees. That's nice and neat. There's no way anyone could possibly have that URL. I like it. It's in.

And then Blogger told me I couldn't have it because it already existed. WTF? Who in the world would have come up with that exact shortened version of an obscure anglicized title of a cult French film and replaced the period with the word "point"?

Well, it turns out, I would.

Check it out: 37point2degrees.blogspot.com—a 41-year-old bipolar woman calling herself Betty Blue, using the same blog title and the same freakin' template! What are the odds of this? I wanted to e-mail her and tell her she had a doppleganger over on the other side of the pond, but she has no e-mail listed, and doesn't take comments on her blog. Drat. Well, other bipolar Betty Blue, maybe you'll stumble upon me one of these days and we can chat. (Hopefully, we won't cause our two worlds to explode if we ever meet face to face.)

Oh, and what does Other Betty Blue list as one of her interests? Synchronicity.

Ah the delicious irony: censoring a post I once titled Big Bloggerbrother

What a difference a year-and-a-half makes. Rather than boring you with a long, drawn-out pontification about What I Did on My Depression Vacation, I'll just summarize:

• Jack moved in with me and promptly became very ill (was it me?) and then disabled with a chronic, genetic immune disorder known as CVID
• Finished that semester of Practical Spoken Russian, but hardly wrote another word on my novel
• Went to Singapore again for work for a pre-launch strategy session for our new website
• Went to Hollywood with Chris for an Adobe CS3 conference, where I failed to properly fulfill the role of wingwoman (sorry; next time I'll shout: you do NOT want to tap that!)
• Went on a driving tour of the Cascades with Sam (which was a blast, except for the bugs...Sam and I hate bugs and we are petitioning for their removal from the planet), coming back down via the Oregon coast and ending with two plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It)
• Started seriously working out, went on NutriSystem and lost 20 pounds and got back into a bikini
• Went to the Maui Writers Conference on (duh) Maui; worth it for the week I spent there before the conference at a cheap condo, cuz, hey, it's Maui; not really worth the nearly $3,000 spent on the conference (which I really should have known; fantasy writers are not "real" writers); but I had dinner (and lunch) with Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, so that was cool (P.S., did not get a publisher)
• Sank into a deadly depression and gained back 20 pounds
• Got my stories "When She Was Good" and "Handy Man" published in Best Lesbian Erotica 2008 and More Five-Minute Erotica
• Went to Pantheacon with Jack and Sunny, where Sunny and I discovered we're both on a new path embracing Dark Magic
• Took an acrylic painting class with Steph and painted one of my photos of succulents from the Ali'i Kula Lavender Farm on Maui, which was then put into the instructor's gallery display for the class (which I felt pretty good about, even though it was a silly thing)
• Did a final, full edit and rewrite on Under Galga (in between hard drive and power cord dying on my MacBook) and wrote a 12-page synopsis in preparation for submitting it to an e-book publisher (because, let's face it, I will never be a "real" writer)
• Went to Lisbon, Portugal for a conference for work, and then spent three days in Barcelona with Chris (who has been living there and "telecommuting" for five months)
• Became completely disillusioned with the Democratic Party after the vile treatment of Hillary Clinton and the Big Bold Return of Pre-70s Sexism Complete With Code Words, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, nowotimean?

So that was my year (and change). What's next on the Betty agenda? Taking a housesitting "vacation" in the East Bay to do some writing on Arkhangel'sk in a quiet, gardeny house with no psychotic, screaming cockatiels for a couple of weeks.

Too old to learn new tricks, too dumb to stop trying

Another year goes by and I still have a vague idea of "going back to school" and no idea what I want to do. At what point does it stop being "cute"? (As if it were ever.)

Because I could think of nothing else, I am taking more Russian. I've written very little on Arkhangelsk, but perhaps this will inspire me once again.

To be fair, I was a little busy last year (while writing papers and presentations for Russian Culture) with creating the user interface for our new website, creating a user guide, style guide, training manual, and testing scripts, flying to Singapore to conduct user acceptance testing and content manager training with the Asia Pacific group, and then (oh, did I forget to mention this?) spending a month in St. Petersburg (yeah, that St. Petersburg) studying Russian.

Then there was Jack being laid off when I got back from Russia in July, my boss up and quiting in October, eleventh-hour activism to help return sanity to Congress, and the utter languishment of our website launch due to a third, and then fourth CEO replacement. (Meet the new boss: same as the old boss. Or maybe not. The new boss lives in Minneapolis and seems to have forgotten Chris and I exist.) And that Christmas thing. Okay, so I'm making excuses.

But today I re-reapplied at City College, spoke with my Russian Culture teacher (who sponsored the Summer in St. Petersburg), and will be taking her second-semester Practical Spoken Russian class on Wednesday nights.

Perhaps I will even get back to doing yoga. Perhaps monkeys will fly out of my butt. (Hopefully not during yoga.)

In the random category: Dumbass shit that sticks with me all year? Not realizing "Camus" was the spelling of the French philospher and thinking it was pronounced "came-us," and referring to Sasha Baron Cohen as Ali G, even though I knew that was a character and not his name. Why does this sort of thing haunt me? I don't know. But it makes me feel abysmally stupid.

Initial Apgar: A forgotten entry

After many months, I have finally popped in to write a new entry in my blog, only to find one languishing in the drafts. So here's that:

Sometime in the last two weeks, I started writing. I forgot to make note of when I began; I just got so excited about the coalescing story in my head that I couldn't wait any longer, and even though (once again) I have not fully plotted this book, I jotted down an opening scene from the point of view of the "skeptic" character. I just wanted to introduce the two main characters, but once I had done so, I felt compelled to flesh out what had come before: the Disturbance, wherein the protagonist's family is slaughtered.

So then I started to "jot down" that scene, and discovered it was impossible to make this a mere catalyst for the protagonist's action. Furthermore, Agnetha/Agnieszka needed to tell her own story in first person.

[Continued Tuesday, January 16, 2007]

What I ended up with is, as usual, flouting the rules of writing: a novel that switches between first-person and third-person limited omniscient. Will it work? Who knows? Maybe my novels will never be publishable, but maybe I need to give up on that dream and be true to my muse. Bern's blindness should have remained a secret, 'gite speech should have remained a dialect, Shiva's story should have remained in Anamnesis as a single book, and the sex should not have been compromised. Screw publishers. I'll stay at a dreary desk job for the rest of my life no matter what I do anyway.

So there's that.

Gotta be startin' somethin'

My friend Chris is an instigator. If you mention an interest you've considered in passing, he challenges you to pursue it. "Why not? What have you got to lose?" He is pursuing his own dreams and interests and doesn't take no for answer when obstacles are placed in his way.

He recently came back to Mercer after a four-year absence, working directly with me, while going back to school for a degree in classical languages, and talking of school got me thinking of my own half-assed attempt to go back to school as a post-baccalaureate pre-med student when I was 30. The thing is, I'm almost ten years older now, and it's ten years more impossible, yet this weird little urge never quite goes away. Watching Scrubs and Grey's Anatomy lately, both shows that focus on interns, I feel like I'm missing something vital by not having that experience. But is that all I want out of it? Do I really want to be a doctor, or do I, for some inexplicable reason, only want to go to medical school? Because that's the part I imagine doing, not the doctoring. That's the part I imagine loving: the learning, and the proving myself.

Yet on Wednesday morning, Chris almost had me signing up to take a full-time classload of General Chemistry at City College starting immediately. The idea is absurd; it truly is. Going back to school at 40 to become a doctor at 50? Who am I kidding? And what, pray tell, would become of my true passion: my writing? Is it discouragement over not getting published that makes me yearn for something else, something I know I could do, rather than this capricious field that doesn't care whether you're good or bad or how much blood and sweat you pour into it? Is it because going back to school makes me imagine that I'm still young and life is still ahead of me, not half behind me? The funny thing is, the last time I was in school I got so inspired to write that I finally finished my first novel, blowing off my chem class after spring break and deliberately getting a D so I could take it again sometime if I ever decided to and work for an A. I think there's something wrong with my brain.

But before leaping back into chemistry, I thought I'd pursue another interest that I've never gotten around to, one that is tangentially related to Arkhangelsk: learning Russian. After renting Russian Ark last week and watching one of the extras about people living in St. Petersburg and working at the Hermitage, I wanted to learn the language even more. And it just so happened that City College was offering a beginning Russian class starting this week, one night a week, at the jr. high just down the street from me. I mentioned it to Chris, and he said, "Take it! Sign up right now!" When I mentioned it to my friend Jon at tea, he exclaimed that he'd always wanted to learn Russian too, and might be persuaded to take the class with me. So I wrote to the instructor to find out if we could still add it, even though classes started this week, but sadly, the class was already full.

When I told Chris that the Russian plans had fallen through, he said, "So take something else!" He uses that same "won't take no for an answer" attitude when I try to make excuses for why I want to put it off. He tells me to go look and see if there's anything else I'm interested in at the campus near me. I look, and discover Russian Culture and Civilization. There's no good reason I should take this other than Chris is prodding me, and I've just been admitted to City for the spring semester, so I feel obligated to take something. Well, there is one other reason, which is that it might be good research for Arkhangelsk. So what the hell. I've written to the instructor to see if I can add it next week. And in the summer semester, Jon says he definitely wants to take Russian. (An interesting side note: the instructor of Russian Culture and Civilization takes a group of students to St. Petersburg every summer to live with Russian families for a month and experience the arts and culture while being immersed in the language. Wouldn't that be cool? But that costs money, and money is increasingly something I haven't got.)

One final offhand comment to Chris, and I've ended up committing to take Hatha yoga twice a week with him starting Monday. I can definitely say one thing: working with Chris again won't be boring.

Love, angel, music, baby

"Inspiration comes from everywhere and anywhere. I've been inspired by landscapes, by vivid dreams, by other books, by movies, by art history lectures, by passing comments, by a fleeting emotion, by misremembering an entry in a dictionary. Beyond that, I couldn't say. How it all coalesces into fiction is a mystery, even to me." ~ Jacqueline Carey

I read this earlier today, when I wandered by Jacqueline Carey's website to jog my memory about the name of Terre D'Ange (TNB* is tentatively set in Arkhangelsk, and I had forgotten that the Kushiel setting was a "land of angels"—I didn't want them to sound similar), and I got to thinking about how I would answer this question ("Where do you get your ideas?"). Everything that she said fits for me as well (especially the part about dictionary entries), but I would also add ineffable feelings evoked by a twinkle of light, a color, a note from a violin.

Music, in particular, as I've noted here before, almost compels me to write. There are notes that fill my head and heart so completely, make me feel so intensely, that I think I might burst, or weep, or die. These notes feel as though they're swimming inside my brain: physically touching the pathways of my mind, as though they themselves are the firing of synapses and neurons connecting; it is better than a drug, though it only lasts for a fleeting instant. It's the instant after, the loss of that ecstatic feeling, that drives me to write. In my writing, when it works, when it's good, and my characters themselves are feeling those moments of ecstasy and agony, that's where the high lasts forever.

There are also moments in books and film, moments of romance, eroticism, and tragedy that make me long to find that feeling again, to capture it in the ecstatic notes of a written word. Tonight I saw Brokeback Mountain, and another piece of TNB's puzzle fell into place; my demon character, my fallen angel, will not be the love interest of the female protagonist; he will have a secret, his "fall": the love of another man.

Instead, the love interest will likely be another character, one whom I had already decided will be enchanted by a demon queen, a nod to Rillian and The Lady of the Green Kirtle in The Silver Chair. This was bothering me a bit; I thought the idea was "illegitimate" because it was inspired by a story of someone else's; then, while looking up names for my demon Lady, I moved from a search of celtic names to a search of fairy names, and stumbled upon the story of Tam Lin. To my surprise, I realized that Lewis himself had been inspired by this tale, for there was the enchanted knight in the underworld of a fairy queen, and even the mention of a green kirtle. And probably, the writer of Tam Lin heard a story in his or her youth, a folk tale passed on by verbal tradition, of a man tricked and taken by the queen of the fairies, and perhaps that verbal tradition began from a dream someone had, or an afternoon in a meadow listening to a lute whose notes struck moments of transporting ecstasy, like the fingers of the fairy queen herself plucking at one's neural pathways.

The notes of unattainable fairy music, as I drove home tonight from Brokeback Mountain, striking those flashes of painful beauty in my head that make me yearn for an outlet in words, came this time from Depeche Mode, in a song ironically about the desire for no words at all:

Words like violence
Break the silence
Come crashing in
Into my little world
Painful to me
Pierce right through me

And that is how the notes make me feel: they pierce right through me.

So there it is for tonight: the inexplicable mishmash of moments, music, and movies that will become—that must become—a story.

*The Next Book™

Early polypeptides

Further thoughts on The Next Book™:

Setting: Arkhangelsk, an island city shrouded in mist; a city of angels.

Protagonist: [Agnetha], daughter of the royal family of Arkhangelsk. Agnetha is third in line for the throne, her older brothers above her by birth order, not by sex. She has one younger sister.

Antagonist: [Anael], a high-ranking angel intent on usurping the throne; Anael has enchanted [Kaleb], Agnetha's cousin, using him to overthrow the royal family.

Other characters: [Byron/Bryson], as previously described.

Balance: The royal family has an idyllic life; all the children are close. Agnetha feels something lacking in the state of sterile perfection and peace. She is fascinated by the demons, her father's subjects, and disguises herself to move among them, playing at games of chance.

Disturbance: While Agnetha has slipped out for one of her adventures, the royal family is overtaken by Kaleb, who has also killed his own father, the king's brother. (His mother died when he was young, and he has spent much time with the royal family, treated like a brother.) A servant of the palace who has escaped finds Agnetha in town, still disguised, and gives her the news.

Problem: Agnetha, the true heir to the throne, must go into hiding, and must find a way to defeat Kaleb (who is working powerful magic [something to do with music?]) to take her rightful place before she is caught and executed.

Complication: Agnetha discovers the ugliness beneath the perfect veneer of the Dominions [higher order of angels]; good and evil, angel and demon become less black and white, and along the way, her relationship with Byron becomes an entanglement. He is a thief, and unapologetic about it, but he has become her friend. Agnetha can't quite reconcile the contradictions.

I gotcher "writerly" right here

So the blog hasn't had any writerly ramblings since August. What are you gonna do about it? I said there would be random rants, didn't I? Do you want the damn fork? DO YOU??

All right then. So I seem to have this pattern...I can write from May through August. If I'm "in the zone" (Jesus Christ on a crumpet, I hate that phrase), I can write like a demon, day and night...and then the light changes, and I got nuthin'. How lame is that? (Am I the only one who sees that? That the light changes, somewhere around the last two weeks of August, drastically, dramatically, from bright, summer white to the weak, tired bisque of autumn? Is it just here, in the Bay Area? I can't remember anymore. Tucson is twelve-hundred miles and a million years from town.) (And while we're on parentheses, I overuse them, apparently. Like adverbs.)

My point is, here it is, the last day of the year, and I'm getting older by the second. I'm unhappy and filled with anxiety all the time, with a new psychosomatic illness every week. And I know that in large part it is my inability to write that is making me feel this way. So I'm going to force myself to write, and to write something that is not set in the world of Anamnesis, because thinking about Anamnesis thrusts me down into the Slough of Despond. (And I'm going to start all of my sentences with "and" and "so" and use tons of parentheses, just to bug you.)

And so (ha!) here are my nebulous ideas for the The Next Book™:

Setting: I dunno. Probably not the Real World, but a magical realism setting is an option.

Protagonist: Some guy named Byron, or something like Byron, an antihero. He is a demon, of sorts, who performs cheap/fake magic tricks, perhaps a traveling "fool," and a thief. (He is not a Scarlet Pimpernel, a Nightrunner, or a Malcolm Reynolds, but a geniune, amoral thief; there is, however, an episode of Firefly that inspired this proto-character: "The Message.")

When you can't run anymore, you crawl, and when you can't do that...well, if you're a Flan, you know the rest.

And that's it for now. At least it's something.