My flight leaves in four days, ack so much to do! I am so looking forward to it tho, it will be my first real break since the accident. (Six weeks out of work due to injuries does NOT count as a break.) There is still a lot of reading I need to do to be ready, but I should be fine.

So I have ten stories out right now, which is everything I have polished. I’m still working on getting more polished, but of course this is taking a temporary back seat until the residency is over.

I have to clean my house too, I hate coming back to a messy house after being gone. I so wish I could say, Go go Gadget house cleaner! Heh

So of the stories I have out, three are running a long time, not a big deal.

But of the five I sent out in the last few weeks I have received two rejections already, from Not One of Us, and Vestal Review. One is for a long poem I am having a lot of trouble finding a market for, one of those hard-to-place pieces. The other was a piece of flash fiction that I really need to re-work. The other three that are out are stronger pieces, so I’m hoping for more luck with those.

On the upside, I finished revising another short story I’ve been working on, and it is going out this weekend. I also want to get a rough-draft revision done on the short piece that was just rejected. I also have everything I need printed for the residency done, and I’m reading the books I’ll need.

And yes, I think it might be spring here. Yea!!

So here are some of the promised sketches I’ve done. I have this little booklet on drawing dragons that came in a kit I got for my daughter called How to Draw and Paint Dragons by Jessica Peffer - I gave her everything but the booklet! It is really great to play around with, as I’ve done lots of art classes and art, but never drawn dragons - I now want her full book.

Couple of sketches below, along with the models I used. I’m more focusing on the build of the creatures, shape and muscles and stuff like that. Click to see bigger.

One more, probably unfinished, I think I might fill it in.

One of the books I read for this semester was the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Wow, I loved this book. Michael Chabon not only told a great story, but the amount of research he did on the history of comics, and then working it so well into the story was amazing. I love comics and it was so fascinating to read. There was one drawback that I found however, and that that was the way he foreshadowed the end of the story in the beginning – but didn’t follow it all the way though.
The very first page of the book with a snapshot description of comic book author Sam Clay in his later years, talking about what inspired him as a young man to turn towards comic book writing. Because of this setup, the main part of the story starts in flashback and moves on through Sam’s and his partner Joe Kavalier’s lives. But, by the end of the book, the reader is not returned to the beginning; instead it stops many years short. Because of this, the reader is left feeling like the story is unfinished because the expectation introduced in the beginning, of seeing Sam in his later years, is never fulfilled.

The first paragraph of the novel gives a clear image of Sam Clay in his later years, talking about his youth. Chabon uses the escape artist Houdini as an object to move the reader though the narration. The second paragraph uses Houdini as a mechanism to move into Sam’s childhood, and then through the first fifteen years of his life. Finally the third paragraph moves from the narrative summery that Chabon used until that point into a scene. While this works to draw the reader into the meat of the story, he also sets up the expectation that at some point the reader will be returned to the same time point they started at.

Chabon ends the story however with Clay leaving both his comic partner Joe, and Rosa, who was Sam’s wife and the mother of Joe’s son, behind in order to go to Los Angeles to find himself. Even without the way the beginning was set up this is a somewhat unsatisfying ending, as I really wanted to find out just a little bit of what happened to Sam, although a form resolution is hinted at. But because of the setup at the beginning of the book, the ending is completely unsatisfactory. Sam is heading out in his own direction, seeming to leave the comic book world and the people he is closest to. Yet, the scene in very beginning of the book seems to give a snapshot of a time much later then where the book stops. The beginning alludes to “later years,” when Sam talked to “aging comic book fans,” at places like “WonderCon or Angoulême”. This suggests that Sam was again very involved in the comic world at that point, but the ending offers no sort of connection between that beginning and where it leaves off.

Chabon wrote such a wonderful novel that kept me engaged all of the way to the end. The problem is though that even a well-written novel needs to be a complete narration. Without the foreshadowing beginning and the final ending being tied together the novel still feels slightly unfinished. When a story is started at a time point that is further along in the timeline the rest of the book, the reader needs to be tied into that beginning point by the end or they will feel like it is a broken circle.

I had to take a break unfortunately as the tail end of the semester kicked my proverbial ass. Because of my wreck in December I ended up way behind, so when you add my schoolwork and slowly working back up to full time at my job, it ended up being a lot. Plus, finishing my first revision was a huge step, so I relaxed LOL. I am going to design a sign graphic that I will hang when I am not posting for a few days so that you know I am not leaving, I am just working on stuff.

So after the revision of the book, I turned my focus to revising some of the stories I haven’t sent out yet. I have several stories that are making the rounds, but I also have a backlog of stories that are very close to finished that just need polishing, as well as some that are good but need a couple of revisions. So I’ve worked on that, and now I have eight stories out. Three that have been out for a while, but I also just sent stories to Glimmer Train, Clean Sheets, Modern Fiction Magazine, Not One of Us, and Vestal Review. Glimmer Train is a long shot I know, but still, I’d love to get published in there. I also have six in the pipeline for not a ton of revision, and then a few more that will take some work.

I’ve also been branching back out into multi-genre work. I love photography, drawing and oil and watercolor painting, but I haven’t done any of for a long time, like a few years. (Well, I have done photography when I traveled.) So I have been missing all of it a lot, and I decided that I need to get back into it. I think that it is important to branch out into different types of artistic works because they enrich and help other branches. (That will be the focus of an upcoming post.) I plan on posting pictures of my artwork as well as my photography here as I talk about how they are connected, and also to help me stick with it along with my writing.

So, back into the posting flow!

The first full revision of Moving on Nightfall is done! The last 30 pages were aaaaaagonizing. Onto the next revision, it has been a while since I saw the beginning of the book, (like several months) so I am comfortible with jumping back to the beginning and going from there. I’m sure it will go fine again, until maybe the end 40 or 30 pages.

Whew! That was quite a job! But another milestone accomplished

I don’t usually do a lot of research for short stories, but occasionally I need a piece of information that I don’t already have stored in my brain or bookmarked. That’s when I do a little bit of fast and dirty searching.

For instance, for a piece of flash fiction I just wrote, I needed a name for Death. Because it isn’t necessarily obvious right off that he is death I wanted a name that basically said he was death, but at the same time wasn’t so obvious that the reader rolled their eyes. So Hades, Anubis, Osiris, Mors, Pluto, Odin, etc. were all out. I also didn’t want it to be such an unusual-sounding name - I wanted one the reader could easily believe this odd guy might have.

So I went to Google (yes, that is currently my preferred search engine - plus I love the changing logo. Anyway.) and searched for *name of death deities*. On the first page of search results I got a few worthwhile pages, but nothing that really helped. So back to Google, this time searching for *name of death gods*. This time I got a page titled “Dead Names, Death Names,” and on that page I found Thanatos, also Than for short, a Greek God of Death. I then Wikied it, and found the description matched closely enough with my Death’s personality that it would work well. It is easily searchable, but not so obvious that every reader will get it right off. Perfect.

So my Death is named Thanatos, but you can call him Than for short.

That is, if you ever meet him. Which you should hope you don’t.

If this generates a title of a book or short story already in existence, I assure you, it was completely random. If it generates a title you’d like to use, go right ahead! A word of thanks to those people who have created Javascript tutorials or put sample scripts up for people like me to see and learn from. (NOTE: There are a lot of words in this, some adult in nature. Just words, folks!)

I came across this Random Title Generator during my net travels, (yes, I was Stumbling again!) and it made me laugh. Pretty much all you do is press the button and it gives you six story titles. I suck big time at titles, I think they are the hardest part of writing, so this probably comes up with better titles than I do a good part of the time * g *. I probably wouldn’t use this for titles, however, as a story idea prompt it works great - it comes up with some wonderful combinations. I copied the code, per Maygra’s request to save bandwidth, to my site and you can play with it below. I might edit it later and add other words just for fun.

Let me know what the best title it came up with for you was!

Recently I attended a Shawn Mullins concert with my daughter. Mullins came to my attention pretty much when he came to everyone else’s, when his song “Lullaby” became a hit smash. (Click on the link to go to Amazon to hear a clip if you don’t remember it.) I purchased that album, Soul’s Core, and fell in love with both his style and his songwriting. “Lullaby” became something of a personal anthem for me during a time when life was really hard, and it has carried me through several more since then.

So at the concert he played a set of 19, which included a three-song encore. The whole show was acoustic, just him and his guitars. Not a lot of chatter between songs, but he became a bit more loquacious as the set went on. He’s not quite folk, not quite blues, not quite rock, not quite country, I’ve heard the term “Americana” in reference to him, but several songs he did, particularly off his new album “honeydew,” were very political. He also talked about one of his own idols, Kris Kristofferson, who is an amazing and prolific songwriter, as well as some of the things that inspired some of his songs, and where he got some of his inspiration from.

His inspirations sounded a lot like the kind that I have as a fiction writer, but he goes a very different direction than I do. I have always had a lot of respect for songwriters. I’ve known people who thought that writing songs must be an “easy” thing to do, but those people have no idea. I’ve penned some lyrics, and really, it is a whole ‘nother aspect to writing. The way that the words work is different from even spoken written word, the flow is different than most poetry, and the words and the rhythm and the music all has to go together. Word choice is critical in lyrics, and badly worded language glares. I would never dismiss songwriters in any shape or fashion, and I’ve studied song lyrics for the way the imagery is created.

It was just Mullins and his guitars for almost 2 hours straight, and his songs were amazing. There is a lot of passion behind what he writes, and watching him perform it was just wonderful. It was so low key, but it was easily one of the best concerts I have ever been to, and lyrically, some of the best written songs I have discovered in a while. Set list with links to lyrics and albums below.

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I upgraded Wordpress and it is not playing nice with my theme. However, after upgrading 4 different Wordpress installations, I’m gonna wait a day or two to do up a new theme. So please excuse the funky fonts and I will fix it asap

by Tattoo Highway. It tied for second place in their “Picture Worth 500 Words” contest. Check out the story here, then come back and read my comments, and then pass on any feedback or comments you might have for me!

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1.) Piperka - Piperka is a site that tracks when many many web comics (and more are being added all of time) are updated. I read something like 150 web comics, but many are very rarely and sporadicly updated, so this site rocks.

2.) HEMA - online winkelen - it’s not in English (nl - Netherlands?) but it is crazy and strangely hypnotic.

3.) 35 cool and inspirational business card designs - just what it says. I’m making cards to hand out with my site on them, and this really sparked my creativity.

4.) FlexYourRights.org - I happen to be a big proponent of police officers, but at the same time this is information everyone needs to know.

5.) Dante’s Inferno - A Virtual Tour of Hell- just what it sounds like.

The purpose of this meme is to give high-fives to 5 people, posts, blogs and/or websites you’ve admired during the week, so who are YOUR High-Fives? Post them to your blog and then Share the love.

When somebody mentions “literature,” what’s the first thing you think of? (Dickens? Tolstoy? Shakespeare?)

Do you read “literature” (however you define it) for pleasure? Or is it something that you read only when you must?

This is a good question. Personally, “literature” for me means reading material. This is probably in good part because as a writer, I tend to think of books in genres, sci-fi, literary, romance, classics, fantasy, etc. When I am researching markets for my work I have to pay attention to what kind of fiction each market publishes, and “literature” is way to broad of a term, and therefore I think in genres. So, for example, when someone mentions Dickens or Tolstoy I think classic literature. Shakespeare, plays. Ray Bradbury, science fiction. Yakio Mishima, world fiction.

I will pretty much read all genres, although of course I do have preferred genres. Classic literature I don’t read often, but I enjoy it when I do. Literary fiction I tend not to enjoy as much, so I don’t seek it out, but I do like a lot of it so I don’t avoid it either if I find something that interests me. Westerns, romance and mystery not so much, but I have found books in each that I enjoy. I love to read so there is very little that I go out of my way to avoid. If what I want at the time isn’t available, anything else is fair game

I first read Things Fall Apart in a World Lit class I took a few years back. I had never heard of Chinua Achebe, and to be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of the book when I read it. It is set in the 1890’s, in Nigeria, and focuses on one of the leaders of the Igbo tribe, Okonkwo. Okonkwo is a deeply flawed character, prideful, aggressive, very afraid of being considered to be as weak as his father was. Reading the book it is very easy to dislike Okonkwo, and the book is very different from much American literature.

My dislike for Okonkwo was a big part of my initial first impression, and i had trouble keeping the characters straight. I have a slight difficulty differentiating when characters’ names are very similar and unfamiliar, (and this is a problem for me off and on,) and of the main characters’ names there is Okonkwo, Obierika, Ogbuefi, Okagbue, Obiageli and Ojiugo, Ezinma and Ekwefi, Nwoye and Nwakibie and Uchendu and Unoka. I read the book, and understood when the white missionaries came and initiated the destruction of the Igbo, but I didn’t feel the book was particularly “great.”

I went back and read it about a year later, after using SparkNotes to help me get a better grasp on the characters. I also did some research on the background of the story, how it was written in 1958 and was really not only a break through in giving African writers a voice, but also in breaking cultural stereotypes of Africa that were very much in place at the time. This time reading it I understood why Achebe is considered by many to be the father of modern African literature. I still didn’t like Okonkwo, but I understood him much better, as well as the other characters he interacted with, (and I was also able to keep them much straighter). The Africans that he described were intelligent, had strong cultural connections - and their culture and way of living independently was shattered by the white missionaries.

Achebe is a strong and interesting person as well. He reclaimed a great deal of his cultural heritage, was accused of inciting a coup because he had a novel that featured one published at the same time as a real one, survived an automobile accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down and lives in New York while teaching at Bard College so he can receive the medical care he needs. He hasn’t published a novel since 1987 - before he left Nigeria. He still has pain problems, and he misses Nigeria. So the man who published one of the most influential novels in modern African literature can’t go home because of his medical problems, and seems to be can’t write without being home. And not being able to write, how hard, especially for an author like that.

Chinua Achebe on Wikipedia
‘Things Fall Apart’ still teaching lessons 50 years later
A long way from home
Things Fall Into Place

I wrote about the stress of revising my novel last week, and how with a long work sometimes I find it a challenge to make it all of the way through revision process. The comments to that post inspired me to think a bit about my process of writing and revising, and analyze a bit why I write the way I do.

When I write I tend not to revise as I go. There are several reasons for that, one being that I can sit down and turn out 1-3000 words pretty easily once I get going, and revising takes time away when I am trying to get it down, particularly if I am writing a novel. It is very easy to get bogged down in revising, and use it as an excuse not to write, or to get distracted. With shorter works I can sit down and bang them all out pretty fast. The other reason is generally I write, and then I let it sit for a bit before I go back and start revising, even if it just a few days. That gives it time to settle and the whole piece feels a lot more jelled when I go back to it.

I break my rule a bit when writing novels, because I don’t plan any of my writing out beforehand. I generally know a scene or two ahead of where I am currently writing, and so if the plot changes from something I wrote before I’ll go back and tweak where it varies from the current direction, again not necessarily a lot of editing, but enough that when I go back to revise I know what I am doing.

In revising short stories I do everything as I go along - language, spelling, plot holes, character issues, etc. In revising my novel I do the same thing, from beginning to end, but where as short stories generally need one really hard edit and then a few refining edits, I know I am going to need a second hard edit for this book. As the novel is all drafted down I know how it ends and how the plot is going to go, and as I revise for the first time there is a lot of scenes where I either need to or choose to do a lot of rewriting, sometimes a few pages worth. there are also scenes, more towards the end, that I rushed through and summarized when I got tired, and those I expand. But I also pay attention to grammar, spelling, characterization, language, all that, so the second hard edit isn’t to focus on those issues, it is to go over the more jelled together novel as if I am revising it for the first time, to turn it fully into something I can do polishing edits on.