WisCon

WisCon is a feminist sci-fi/fantasy writing conference held in Madison, WI every year. This year was my first time there. There are 1,000 people allowed in for four days of panels, readings, free food, workshops, bookstores, auctions, and more.

At WisCon, I had my first chapter of Riff critiqued by four other writers including Theodora Goss. See this entry to learn what they said.

The only person I knew going in to WisCon was Juliette, but when I left, I knew a few more people, splendid people. It's great to hang out with other writers and talk shop. And because of them, I joined Live Journal. No offence Blogger.com, but the comments button doesn't always work and there isn't such a sense of community that I need from other writers. This blog will still be updated with random creative things that I do as usual, but if you want a play-by-play insight to what's going on with my writing, then check out Live Journal for details.

These are the panels I attended at WisCon:

Grammer and Punctuation

Using Classic Myths in Modern Fantasy

Defining God

How I Did Everything Wrong and Got Published Anyway

Urban Fantasy

Terry Pratchett

Torchwood

Martha Jones

Magic Book Machine (publishing)

Publishing: Meritocracy or Social Construct?

5% of the people who attended WisCon came down with the stomache flu. I was fortunate not to be one of them. I hope everyone got home okay.

This is a scene from Riff that I made last night.

Exam time updates

I realize that I've been neglecting you when it comes to story time. Sure, I've swabbed your eyes with pretty colors as I've posted drawings and videos, but it's been a long while since I've given you any prose, for which I apologize. I'm in school--sometimes by the end of the day, I'm so sick of writing papers that I forget about the fun writing, the writing that people outside of the academic circles will--hopefully--want to read.

So hello, you!

Let's talk about me for a while. Then you can have your turn (please note the comment option at the bottom and that you must have a screenname in one of several sites or blog pages, but you can always email me at no1getzs0da@yahoo.com).

I've been doing everything in my power to distract myself from studying for my econ exam tomorrow. (Do you really want to know why an English major is taking microeconomics? Well I could rant and rave, but I'll save it for another day). The sandman has even added to my distraction as I just woke up from a "study session." Other things to distract me are the Charleston drawing below, DeviantArt memes (something I've just discovered, and I've only done two: Discworld and Dr. Who), and YouTube channels. Yes, I've actually subscribed to more than just channels of bands I like. I actually have two subscriptions to people who regularily sit in front of a camera and talk at you. It's wonderful! It's the wave of the future, man. Or something. (If you're curious, I subscribe to Llewtube (Robert Llewellyn) and Vlog Brothers (John and Hank Green).

So enough about how I've been spending my time, right? That's not why you're reading this, you've got plenty of things to do and don't need my recommendations and in fact have your own YouTube subscriptions to worry about thank you very much. Well then! Let's get to the point.

Writing conferences
The second writing conference that I will attend in the history of my entire life is in a week and a half. I have submitted my first chapter (of Riff) to WisCon where three other novelists will evaluate it along with a pro, Theodora Gloss, who I met at the Minneapolis Fantasy Matters conference. I'm pretty psyched to get some feedback. I still have yet to read the entries of the other three people in my group. I have been printing them off on campus because it's free. Teehee.

TANGENT: Speaking of the Minneapolis conference where I met Neil Gaiman...Neil Gaiman just came out with a new book called The Dangerous Alphabet, and it's "about two kids and their pet ibex." Now it just so happens that the ibex is my all time favorite animal. Coincedence? Probably. Great minds think alike. Ha! Blasphemy!

Grant writing
Next year, I'm applying for a grant so that I can afford to hire an editor for Riff. So, I've been doing some reasearch, getting some quotes. Prices vary a lot, actually. If anyone knows any thorough but cheap editors, let me know. The grant is at maximum $1,250.

Summer internship
I think I'll be working at Bleak House Books in Madison this summer. It's unpaid, but it's pretty much exactly what I want to be doing, so I can't complain. I haven't gone in yet or anything, but I'm pretty confident it will work out. Excited!

Other summer things
My main goal is to get Riff edited to the point where I'm ready to pass it on to an editor next spring (the grant money doesn't come in until December). There a bunch of work to be done, a lot of rewriting, restructuring, etc.

I'm also going to Charleston, as you can probably tell by my previous post. I'm meeting up with my flatmates from London who I haven't seen in a WHOLE YEAR! So excited!

I'm taking a summer portfolio class, which allows people who want to hire me to see some of the work I've done. Yes, that means that there will be some of my writing available to read on the internet. Are you excited now?

Writing classes
I've written some great stuff for school this year. I took a creative writing course where I wrote some poems and stories. I'm pretty pathetic when it comes to poetry. I like poetry. In fact, I can suggest some good poems:

Theodor Roethke (Dolor, etc.)
Jane Hirshfield (The Envoy, Tree)
Yuhuda Amichai (I passed by a house where I lived once)
Bob Hicok (Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem)

But when it comes to actual writing them...eh. Here are some poems I wrote for creative writing class:

Leaving London

My flatmates say they left their hearts in London.
I lost my heart
in Heathrow baggage check.


No one claims the dirty dishes left in the sink
clogged with caramelized onion slices
evolved into minnows swimming in milk,
expired April twenty-second,
drained from a good-bye gift of mac and cheese,
last box of three.

We leave that for the future tenants of flat forty-eight.

I unpeel a layer of flesh from my chest
and pack my pulsing heart in the suitcase
beside the Venetian mask and headphones.

We didn’t just leave the flat
or the city
but the whole island
that day.
a journey like this:
Broken-wheeled bag.
Overstuffed tube.
Heathrow Station closed.
Rain.
Jam-packed bus.
Tear-stained t-shirts,
last flatmate of three.

Now boarding seats forty through twenty.

Chicago is upside-down,
sunlight winking at me from the roofs of parked cars
like the ground is the sky and the cars are stars.
A baby screams all the way home
like the wheels scream as they touch American loam.
First Mid-Western accent I hear in months:
“Be careful when opening the overhead bins,
because as you know, shit happens.”

My bags, more reluctant than me,
do no make the journey.
now my headphones play only
Billie Piper, The Fratellis, Kate Nash
to appease the pulsing contents of my bags.

When I hear they’ve cut my scene from the film

I creep through the dark to the projection room
where I find film sheets bending like waves,
all frames locking motion like somebody’d frozen the ocean,
curled like a nest, each scene a twig or list
of old groceries, a moment in a life—
but my twig is missing.

The gyre of tape mad-bird-screeches
as I tear off another wing
to adhesify my scene,
the one left so carelessly on the rug.

I explode the nest as strip tastes blade:
Snip! Slice! Split
screen, super imposed, juxtaposed
two characters that aren’t really together
but are now reely together, spliced forever
between rolls of holes and whole roles
like my twig in the nest.

Before the projector hugs the spool,
the director will bow
to me for mending his oversight
but when the doorknob jiggles
like somebody rattling chains,
they shatter my makeshift lock,
stuff fists into mine like a badass handshake
gone wrong

and a cop turned gardener weeds out film roots
from my upturned mitt,
crinkling minutes of characters’ lives,
stripping off tape like defeathering a dove.

They cuff my wrists behind my back and
as they drag me out the door, I watch my scene
detach from continuity and flutter
to the cutting room floor.


[Unfinished/untitled]

If I leave you
In the sun
Will your skin curl
Like paper?
Can I turn the pages
Of your flesh
To find a new chapter?

If I hold you
Under water
Will you rust?

If I saw you
In half
Could I count your rings
To find your age?


However, I did write some good stories. Well, one good story. It's called White Elephant. I was a tad nervous about how the class would recieve it, but it got a really great response. The students (and the professor) gave some good suggestions, but for the most part, people really liked it. It's kind of 50's sci-fi-esque. Someone mentioned that it reminded them of Twilight Zone. Another person said they'd forward it to their family. I will need some time away from it for a while in order to ever do a substantial second draft, but I did fine-tune the current draft to turn in at the end of the semester (aka today).

In my prose class, I wrote a character portrait about my grandpa. Weird experience, let me say. I dislike feature writing and non-fiction, but this was quite fun. There was a lot of research that went into it, which then came together like a puzzle. According to my grade, there are still some weak elements, but personally, I was electrified by the finished product. ZZT.

I also wrote some reviews. Again, not a fan of feature writing, but I picked some topics that interested me. You can actually check them out at the class's blog: http://nelson313.blogspot.com/
It includes the awesome Kate Nash concert that I went to. Check out some of my photos here.


I'd love to stay and chat, but I must be off to take my econ exam now. And yes, you may have noticed that an entire 24 hours have passed between now and the beginning of this blog.

Charleston

A little preview for the summer to come.

Drawn with pencil, scanned, photoshop colors with layers and paintbrush, paper texture background, couple o' hours of not studying.

Novel Promos

I figured out how to put them on my website: http://www.simple-assault.com/novels.htm

But you can view them right now!

Riff:



Haven:


Bowling Shoes and Murder:


Emerican Adventure:

videos

Videos I put on YouTube...

Digital Art

digitally painted version of Promisus (Riff)

Leonard and Wintry from Riff

This took me like FOUR HOURS. I rarely have such patience, and with more patience, it would have come out better, but eh. Anyway, it's my first drawing where I didn't use paper. It's purely digital, purely Photoshop. I traced a bit, 'cause I'm a cheater, but still 100% my drawing. I don't really like using the paintbrush tool anymore. I know that's what all the skilled people use, but I find it annoying and don't know what wrong with just using the airbrush and smear tool.

Photoshop

DeviantArt is a great invention, not just because you can share your work with other people, you can see theirs, you can search for particular topics, you can collect works, print them, buy merchandise, but you can actually learn how to become a better artist on it, let alone get inspired. So there was this one things someone posted giving tips on how they use PS to color/paint their drawings, so I read it and was fascinated to learn that I don't know everything about PS like I pretend to. Here are my first two tries with the new methods that I learned today.

from the film "A Dog's Breakfast"

the Master in "Doctor Who"

Prison Shell

I'm really good at writing pretty-sounding nonsense in the middle of the night and I'm over tired. So here's a freewrite that just sort of fell out.

Prison Shell (2/16/08)

Tiny drops of Drucudian Lape hang, lingering at gravity’s fingertips. Gravity, the old witch, reaches, stretches her withering hand blindly, like a child reaching for a cookie above on the counter somewhere, much too out of reach. Breeze, blowing strong but futilely, like a desperate whistler whose lips are too dry to make a sound, tickles the drop at the edge, elongating and thinning the fleck of moisture. A miniscule ruby stream, it becomes, and dribbles over the side falling into Gravity’s greedy palm after all.

Drucudian Lape lies on his back, the circumference of his blood increasing by the second. He blinks blearily at the crimson sky, the sky of his degrading vision where blood has found a place to squeeze between lens and ball. It pours down through the pupil holes, which contract in the sunlight, or the sunlight his faulty vision perceives.

Lape is not alone. Life sits by his side, curiously watching the young man hold on so determinedly to the spirit that was never really his. “Drucudian Lape,” says Life, knowing the boy can’t hear anything yet, “you are the shell harboring the chick. It is time to give birth at the minor expense of the shell. Hatch, boy, hatch.”

But Lape doesn’t hatch. He can’t see, can’t hear, not in the sense that doctors would diagnose him as a seeing and hearing individual, but he thinks he can. With this ill-directed belief, he thinks the spirit will remain in him for much longer. No one he knows died before age thirty, so it can’t be his turn yet.

“Where is the spirit, Lape-boy?” asks Life. “What have you done with it? You can’t hold it prisoner forever. There are rules about that.”

The last of Lape’s blood channels out the crack in the back of his skull, but he continues to smile up at the sky, thinking he sees clouds now, but there are no clouds. Not for Drucudian Lape. Cold burrows into his pores like a nest of ticks, causing his skin to rise with bumps. Hollow of ruby sauce, which now sticks to his straw-pale hair, the spirit within him soars through the body, no longer blocked by dams of arteries and floods of blood. But it doesn’t find an exit. Lape smiles because it feels like he has jumping beans in his chest. The spirit careens through him faster and faster, panicked, gasping for fresh light, the light of the outside world. Time to hatch, time to hatch, but the shell is thick and the spirit is weak. Lape’s heart pumps its last, but his brain doesn’t slow down. He thinks it will be a nice day if it ever warms up.

“Prison shell,” Life states calmly. “Less than neutral encasement, indeed. Sent to keep the spirit from the light? You’d better watch it or Death will come back for you, and he will make you live forever, but empty. Empty little shell drilled through the head, sitting on a shelf to be displayed forever more. Come see the immortal prison who holds no keep. Whose warden is his own. It’s what shells want, isn’t it? To be more than just shells? To live a spirit’s life? But sooner or later the farmer comes for all of you. If you will not be a chick, then you will be an omelet.”

Mostly Editing

1. Editing -- Riff


Here’s a list of some productive criticism that I’ve gotten for Riff that I need to take into account on my second pass…


Positive feedback:

Sticks in the mind

Easy to keep reading

Strong mood and storyline

Good first sentence

1st person narrative allows reader to catch breath

Good descriptions of characters and places

Parallel storylines weren’t confusing

Shows research went into the project

The wrong brother twist was unexpected



Things to fix:

The word violacious appears in the second sentence of the novel. Too confusing? Spell-check doesn’t like it. Get rid of it all together or find a synonym?

Needs more backstory.

Chapter 1 – moving from Matthew’s bunkmate to Janek’s roommate is confusing.

Needs more time with 1st person narrator. Her epiphany comes too quickly. More internal dialogue. How does she reach her conclusion?

You probably can’t unembalm a person like that without collapsing veins.

Explain better that the chicken farm is not slave labor. Many people in Thailand have chickens in their backyard.

More background with Matthew’s relationship to his brother.

Wintry’s fate doesn’t seem deserved.

Leonard’s identity was guessed from the beginning.

Hell’s souls are either crowded or absent – why? (because they all go to the ring they’re supposed to end up in)

Too much vomit.

Missed Truick’s intent for pushing the angel.

Must add thing about how Truick’s watch stops (my memo).

Wintry was too whiny in the end to make the reader care about her and too pathetic in the beginning.

Maybe make Wintry’s ‘turn’ on Leonard slower. At first she might try to convince him that he’s confused, but then her anger starts slower. Need to go a little further with the blood thing though, I think.

Coins on the eyes of the dead is a Roman tradition, not African.

Make the mental pull of Satan on Wintry stronger. (also get rid of "fortunately" in that scene)

Fix that confusing bit about how they got into the circus wagon.

What in the world is Sara-Jayne doing during the time Leonard is trying to help Janek?

Wintry breaks down one too many times.

What does the facade feel like? Does it tingle? Hurt? Warmth? Icy?

Make Heaven more Heavenly. Add animals. Some souls weighed down by evil, dragged down, take refuge in bodies, rejoice in being able to view reality for a short peroid. Other souls, pure and light, whip around Heaven.



2. Editing -- Haven


I haven't looked at it in a while, but I bet, despite how perfect I thought it was 1.5 years ago, it could probably do with another draft. One thing I thought I should do is change the first section (with the movie) to be more poetic than clinical because it's being told from the perspective of a poet. Also, it would make the agent like it better from the start. Right now, you have to fight your way past that part, not realizing it's a movie until the second page.



3. Drawings



I'm still working with the paintbrush tool in PS. Haven't quite reached the quality I want, but here's another practice of Sam Vimes from Terry Pratchett's Discworld.









4. Scrapblog

I found this cool site called Scrapblog, which I invented in my head a loooooong time ago, but I'm glad there's a free and sharable (sp?) one on the internet. It has some bugs, like it didn't let me save after 30 pages and such, but here are two examples.

My sketchbook:
http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/vw_full.aspx?sbid=164892

Bowling Shoes and Murder picture book:
http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/vw_full.aspx?sbid=166051

Winter Break News

1. RIFF

I'm happy to announce that I have finished writing the first draft of Riff. Technically it is the second draft because I hand-wrote the whole thing in two journals and changed some things as I typed them up. I did a pass for grammatical errors and spelling off the screne. I still need to read it on paper. I've printed it off in single spacing and tiny margains. It clocks in at 95 pages. That's just under 60,000 words, which is a bit short for a first novel (to be published), so I'll have to flesh it out before I consider querying anyone. As I start school on Monday, I think I'll wait before doing a second pass. I like to forget what I've written so that it's all new to me and easier to catch mistakes.

I have to say it's not half bad. I struggled with this novel more than any other. It was almost physically painful to write because I forced myself to finish before school starts. I don't know what that says about the quality, but it is just a down draft after all. It ended almost exactly how I planned, which never happens. I think it's because I wrote it in so little time, I didn't have time to get distracted by other ideas, which can be a good thing or a bad thing.

The more I think about it, the more irony I'm finding in the text that I didn't put in consciously, but it's perfect, really. One man spends the entire book trying to find out who killed this one guy, but in the end, he's the one that kills him again. I hadn't really put that together, but it's really cool. I don't think I'm even going to draw attention to it. You can figure that one out on your own.




2. Absorbing the Media

I've just saw the season finale of Life on Mars season 2. I thought it would be a rip off of Terry Pratchett's book Night Watch seeing as how the main characters are both named Sam, are police officers, and are accidentally sent thirty years into the past, but the show is actually really good. There's a coma aspect I hadn't known about. I've been watching Dr. Who and Torchwood reruns as well, and Graham Norton. Torchwood season 2 premier this Saturday, you know. I got some new movies too. Night Watch and Day Watch are phenominal. A Dog's Breakfast is good too. And A Fish Called Wanda. I also bought Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (Kevin Klein).

I haven't been sitting in front of the TV the whole time, promise. I'm reading a book called A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. I recommend it to anyone. I'm only half through, though. And I read the first Return to Labyrinth graphic novel based on the Jim Henson movie. I've ordered the second, but B&N hasn't recieved it yet. The writing and art is perfect as far as staying true to the film.

3. Drawing

There are some Riff drawings here:

http://simpleassault.myphotoalbum.com/view_album.php?set_albumName=album132

I don't know why they didn't all load. :(

There are some other drawing's I've done lately too. Check out Deviant Art