by Cassie Alexander | May 30, 2013 | Uncategorized
I finally have a scanner now! Which means I can show you this graphic that Jay Lake drew for me on a napkin at a restaurant something like five years ago, and that I’ve kept on my corkboard ever since. This, my friends, is Jay Lake’s tub.
I was reading a post on another forum about someone who felt down in their writing career right now, and goddamn, do I know what that feels like. Five years ago, before I’d even written Nightshifted, but after nine other books and hundreds of short stories and huuuundddreeeds of rejections, I was feeling down and out too. I’d gotten a few short stories sold, but no novels, and I wasn’t selling reliably. But I had the good luck to be out with Jay and he took out a pen and drew this tub for me.
The tub’s the tub, the dashed line across it is the Line of Publication, and the faucet is you — or, me. The faucet’s the only thing you really have control over, how many words you pour into the tub. When you’re just starting out filling up your tub, the publication line is sooo far up, there’s no way you can hit it for awhile. You just have to keep writing.
Once you get a little good, sometimes waves will crest the line — but just as often (or more often!) they won’t. And this is the Most Depressing Time as an author, for some inexplicable reason. There’s something about finally getting one or two acceptances that makes it feel like you’ve made it — like you’ve sprinted across some line, never to return to the other side. But unfortunately a writing career isn’t like that. You cross the line once, and then sometimes it’s silence and rejection for years. This is when you break down, because before that sale, you were simply just Not Good Enough. It sucked, but at least it made sense. Once you’ve made a sale or two and then can’t seem to replicate it again no matter how hard you try — that’s when you start to doubt your sanity. What metric should you be judging yourself by? You’re the same writer who made those sales, aren’t you? Do you suddenly suck now? Were those editors being nice? Was it luck? Are you a flash in the pan? Is your career over already?!!?!?
Of course you want to decode your situation, to try to understand it — when really there’s nothing to understand. Your water line just isn’t high enough yet. But when you’re splashing around in the depths of the tub, sometimes that’s hard to see.
Everyone’s tub is different (and yeah, being self-aware and growing as a writer is important, but that would be/will be a whole other series of posts) but in general, if you pour enough water in, things eventually work out.
Keep pouring, people :D (and I’m super happy to get to share this with y’all after all this time!)
(Tacked on journal progress note ;): 10% done with the 2nd draft for Bloodshifted, and OMG Shapeshifted is out in six days!!!)
by Cassie Alexander | May 24, 2013 | Uncategorized
It’s the XXX part that’s going to get me all the spambots shortly ;).
Bloodshifted is done! This is the fastest I’ve ever written a first draft I think — four months? But there were some serious diversions into other projects there for a bit, which really dipped into writing time. This is also the fewest drafts I’ve ever done of anything ever in my life ever. Usually my books get up to 7-15 revs, which I retitle the word.doc after each major change, but this time there’s only 2. That’s right, just twooooo versions.
How on earth did I do that? Well, I let go of a lot more stuff this time around. I felt much more free to put my place-holder XXX in where ever I knew I’d need to go back and choose a character’s name, fix geography, flesh out a scene, or indeed even put a scene in, there’s a ton of “xxx emotional beat” placeholders in the current text.
There’s 224 of XXX’s to be replaced, in fact. Which is why I’m pretty confident that going into the second draft, and rev 3, will add 15k of text to the book, no problem. And I’m fine with that :D. What counts is that the bones are down right now and the plot flows — the action parts are so actiony, and the emotional stuff is super emotional — I almost wish I could keep rolling on and write the next book!
But I’ve got a long weekend at work coming up (complete with holiday pay, yo) so I’ll be taking a short break, and then restarting in from the beginning, now knowing everything I need to juggle for the end. I was melancholy about finishing this whole evening, but now I’m really excited about going back and starting in again :D.
And oh, yeah, Shapeshifted is coming out less than two weeks from now! *facepalm* I almost forgot, ha! Deep calming breaths, Cassie, it’ll all get done! ;)
by Cassie Alexander | Aug 29, 2012 | Uncategorized
So the past few days have been write-off days, post-Grandma news, which is entirely OK. (PS: thank you to everyone for your nice comments, especially on twitter. Responding to them individually would just make me sad. Sorry to be gauche and group it all here.) I did go to work the past few nights though, which has been a good thing, it’s been busy there and a good distraction. I am way behind in emails, sorry, I will be catching up tomorrow and Thurs.
Working on Deadshifted again tonight. I reread a lot of what I’d done to get back into the flow. I know most of what happens from this part on out, which is sort of insane for seat-of-pantser me. Which is also why I’m not super worried about not making huge word count lengths, because it’s still the best thing I’ve done, and I’m still making it better…and my process is changing again.
Process changes are a lot like puberty. You never know when precisely they’ll hit, but chances are you’ll be wearing white shorts in gym class, metaphorically, when they do.
I’ve written about this before, but I think it’s still a topic worth exploring, so that the information is out there. The first time my process changed I had no idea what was happening — all I knew was that what I was doing before suddenly wasn’t working for me anymore. I’d written nine very linear books, everything in plot-order, like beads on a string. The strange new urges I had to hop around and explore things and bring in characters that I was unsure about, and write scenes far in the future and sometimes in my character’s past — it sent me into a funk, because all of a sudden I thought I was doing it wrong. I couldn’t understand why my old linear way wasn’t working, for years. I didn’t really trust myself again until I attended Clarion West, where writing a story a week for six weeks forced me to go with the flow and fully explore my new 360-style of writing things — and also produce the best work I’d ever done up until that time. That experience led me to ultimately write Nightshifted.
This process change seems to be more word-level oriented. (Which, now that I type it, amuses the hell out of me because oh-god I am not a wordsmith.) I can’t say I’m thrilled, because there’s comfort in knowing what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and how it’s all going to work out in the end. I don’t like freefall or exploring new ground too much, when what I’m already doing works. But this is what the writing-part of me seems to want to be doing now, and I know that I fighting it will only lead to sorrow.
If it sounds a little woo-woo and divining rod-ish, that’s because it is. (To my eternal, rationalist, shame.) But, well, sometimes I think of the writing-part of myself like a huge draft horse. It’s strong, it enjoys working, and we’re a team. A good rider knows that sometimes you have to trust the horse, like when a jump is coming up, or you’re crossing a challenging field. You have let out the rein and give it it’s head, so it can see what’s going on and do what needs to be done. I think that’s the least woo-woo way to explain how process changes are for me.
More soon, once I’ve caught up on emails ;P ;).
by Cassie Alexander | Jan 22, 2012 | Uncategorized
Sinnnnce it’s Sunday night and the internet is asleep, I can share secrets from my nerdy adolescence.
I babysat extensively in the neighborhood I grew up in. I did it pretty much every weekend because a) I had no life and b) I had no idea what the going rate for a babysitter was, so I undersold everyone on accident (I was charging like a buck an hour per kid! And I’m not that old! It was reverse highway robbery.)
Anyhow, one family had all of the Star Trek books, and since I was charging them three bucks an hour, I was basically living at their house with their hoodlum spawn every weekend. I started reading the books there, and they eventually trusted me enough that I could take five or six of them home each week. I would read them on the bus and at school and at lunch while I was hiding in the library — you get the idea. All of them.
So here where my folks live they have a library sale every Saturday morning. We all went (library sales being one of the few things my back is up for :P) and guess what I found?!?!? :D
That’s right! Those are Star Trek books! Some really good ones too, like Sarek and Uhura’s Song! My husband picked up some that had Data and Picard on the front and I was all PUT THOSE DOWN. Nothing against the Next Generation, but those are not the books of my childhood. I might not get a chance to read them for awhile (or be horrified when I do) but sometimes it just feels good to own pieces of your childhood, and at a quarter a book the price was right ;).
Then today, we went and saw the newest Sherlock movie with my parents. And I’ve been watching the BBC Sherlock series at home (very slowly, since there are so few of them to watch, pacing myself.) My husband thinks Sherlock (in the BBC series) is an asshole. Which he is. But I love him. I can’t help myself. Before him, there was Jeremy Brett, who I unabashedly adored.
And before that, there was the man in the stories and books. I had a compendium as a child, and I read it over and over, through and through. I (like every other teenager in the world) felt quite out of place as a kid, and hideously ugly, klutzy, repulsive, etc etc etc. And here was someone who didn’t care what anyone else in the world thought of him, because he was brilliant, because he was right. I put two and two together — I had my brain. All I needed to do was become a genius and that was what would shield me.
Through Sherlock Holmes’s stories, his way of life, I saw a way out of what I was, into what I could maybe-someday-if-I-tried-hard-enough be. I wasn’t ever going to be Texas pretty or Texas thin, but by god, I would get smart enough to not let stupid people or petty concerns bother me.
I realize in a way that the worst parts of SH have been co-opted into nerd culture, the inability to not correct people who are wrong, the slavish devotion to miniscule detail for things that are of no real consequence. (In a way, reading SH has prepared me to deal with those types of people politely at SF-cons, heh.)
But he was my savior at a very young age, and because of that, I’ve been in love with him ever since. He was even safe to love, if you think about it, because he’s not the kind of person who would ever return it. And because of that early imprinting, I love most versions of him (ironically) uncritically. So the movie was grand, and the BBC show reallllly gets it right, and Jeremy Brett will forever hold a special place in my heart.
I think that’s enough show and tell for tonight ;). Back to work on Shapeshifted edits tomorrow :D
by Cassie Alexander | Jan 1, 2012 | Uncategorized
I can remember 12 years ago, when i was 24, thinking “Wow, this is it, maybe this’ll be my year, maybe this’ll be the year that one of my books gets accepted.” I was wandering around San Francisco with my brother at the time, and everything touristy in Chinatown was dragon related. I was born in the year of the dragon, and thought “Why not now? Why not me?”
Now, it’s the year of the dragon again…and I do have a book coming out. It only took 12 more years of persistence is all.
This year is actually going to be my year.
I’m nervous, but it feels great. Here. We. Go.
