That Lack of Ink

I have this thing about self-sabotage.

After I was settled in here, and my desk was set up, I set myself a daily goal of how much money I would make so I could get back on track. I decided to meet that goal seven days a week until I felt comfortable (or, preferably, overwhelmed) (ha) with the amount of money in my bank account. I also decided that if I couldn't meet the goal on any given day, I'd make up for it by working more on another day.

My failure was epic. Meeting my daily goal seemed impossible, and in fact I found myself working less capably than I had before the move (i.e. making less money per day), and dreading it and procrastinating against it more. My makeup goals became more and more laughable until, finally, I gave up.

It was a humbling experience. Trying to meet difficult daily goals didn't feel like a challenge; it felt like a wall someone had asked me to climb. All I could do was stare at it and be annoyed that someone had asked me to climb it. I felt lazy and undutiful and sucky.

So at the beginning of last week I set, instead, a goal that I knew I could reach, that seemed easy. All last week, I was easily able to meet and break and then double that goal. I worked effortlessly and cheerfully and, at one point, reached the "impossible" goal I'd set without even breaking a sweat. Mentally, the goal is still the small amount, because then if I'm having a hard or brainless day or if I have other things to do, I can always just work the minimum and walk away.

I also took the whole weekend off this past weekend, which I pretty much never did before the move. I still feel a bit guilty about it, but I'm looking at my tallies and I've worked every day since June 8th, so I don't think a whole weekend was a bad idea at this point. I was tuckered out. So I visited Fred Astaire's resting place and went to Matt's company picnic, and felt better, fresher for Monday.

I'm explaining all this because the same thing happens to me before I begin a writing project. It's the thing that's happening for my KUFC project. I'm getting that itchy feeling under the skin of my brain that means it's time to read over my notes and open a fresh new .doc and put my fingers to the keys. The song embedded above matches my character's state of mind in what's likely going to be a prologue, and I can't get that song out of my mental space. I know what I want to say in that prologue, and I want to write it.

But there's always a good reason not to. More to do for the apartment, more administrative junk involved in moving states (going to the DMV tomorrow morning, WOOOOOOOO), more paid work to catch up on, more correspondence to catch up on, more meals to cook or shopping to do. I went clothes shopping yesterday morning for two hours (frustrating the HELL out of myself in the process), even though I really can't afford it right now (although I genuinely do need clothes), because I knew if I worked as efficiently as I did last week, I'd be done by early afternoon with nothing to do and I'd have no reason not to write.

I'm so intimidated. I'm so worried I won't meet my goals for the project. I'm looking back at my last two books, and although I'm proud of my accomplishments with them, I fear that neither of them came out in a way that will appeal to a broad audience. Which means they're unsellable. I want to have learned from my mistakes and to write a terrific piece of work this time, one that only needs two or three drafts, not ten. I want to keep it light, action-y, kickass, and not get so into emotional and thoughtful shit like I did with the time book or so into character development (ultimately inadequate character development, to boot) like I did with the Greenland book.

Then I get to thinking about the kind of book I really want to write, and no, I want my books to be deep and thoughtful and stylistically particular. Even if it takes me ten more years to find an agent or a publisher or an audience. I admire transparent writers, but I'm not one of them, and I would flounder and sink if I tried to write that way.

Getting all knotted up in this stuff means that nothing is getting written. I thought I had moved somewhat beyond the ugly, inefficient, emotionally crippling perfectionism that defined my teens and the first half of my twenties, but here it is again, rearing up in a different way. Whether in paid work or the important work, if I set big giant goals, I can't even get started. Which was why, much as I wanted to participate in this (that gal is a very cool writer I found randomly), I knew I would just screw the pooch and maybe the book, too, if I tried.

It helps to forgive myself for my weaknesses. When, on Saturday morning, I said to myself "You can take the weekend off, Kat, it's okay", my brain sighed in relief. When every night I go to bed without writing that prologue, and I say sincerely "it's all right, you can try again tomorrow", it helps to keep self-hatred at bay.

But still nothing gets written. No words go on the page. And no amount of contentment is worth that lack of ink.

Goodbyes and Readings

So, the past week has been interesting.

Our flight to California leaves on Thursday morning, i.e. about 60 hours from now. All of our furniture and all of our stuff (including, unfortunately, my laptop charger) has been packed into boxes with miles and miles of gray paper and taped up and loaded onto a giant truck (tall enough to snap several low-hanging branches of the tree outside our house), and is tooling across our great and extremely wide nation at this very moment. Our cars have both been picked up, leaving us to drive my brother-in-law's car - and I have serious gratitude that the car is available to us, so we don't have to pay for a rental, but MAN. The thing has the turning radius of a yacht and smells weird enough to make me slightly carsick all the time.

Since Friday, all our big tasks have been wrapped up and finished. We're staying at Matt's parents' house, and they're away for the weekend. We've decided to treat the last few days as a vacation. We spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of last week packing and fraying our nerves, and I know exactly how much work awaits us when the boxes start getting opened, so a brief guilt-free vacation seems like a dandy idea. I've set aside my work for the time being, and we're hanging out on the breezy porch by the water and eating good food and spending gluttonous time with each other, around seeing friends whom we'll very much miss.

Last night we sat outside after dinner and took the air before bed. We were talking about our early memories when I looked at the dock and saw that, without us noticing, a blue heron had landed in the pool of light thrown by the lamp down there. It nicked its head back and forth, neck doubling and redoubling, the fingers of feathers on its breast ruffling in the light wind. As we watched, it stalked to one end of the dock, peered over the side, and did nothing for several long minutes. Then, in no hurry, it went to the other edge and gazed fixedly at the water lapping against the pilings for so long that we gave up and went inside before it caught anything. I thought about how fishermen would likely be inspired by this heron's patience, the way it looked and looked and looked at the water, waiting. And waiting. And waiting. I wondered if it had babies to feed.

I taught my last yoga class yesterday afternoon, and it was a sad thing. My brain hasn't quite gotten that I'm finished with my yoga responsibilities; I don't have the stamped FINISHED feeling that I usually have about something like this. Perhaps I'm thinking that on Thursday, instead of taking a flight, I'll just have to head in to the Odenton studio again in the evening and spend an hour making jokes with my regulars. That was a much sadder class to say goodbye to than either of the Ridgely classes, but few of my regulars showed for the Ridgely ones. (They always desert slow-paced classes when spring hits.)

I also read Guilty Pleasures, the first Anita Blake book, and read/skimmed a book called Under Wraps in the last week. I didn't really enjoy either one of them. But they definitely helped me garner some insight on the urban fantasy genre, and I kept the receipt for both, so, score. I still have plenty of material for the next few days and for the plane flights: Ganymede, Plague Town, Just Cause, and the two most recent Sookie books. I read last year's Sookie book...last year, but I don't remember it well enough to jump right in to this year's, and yes, I caved and bought the hardback. Guilty. I kept the receipt for that, too, but by the time I'm finished with both books, we'll be a few thousand miles away from that particular B&N.

The point of that paragraph was to say that, having read these two books, I now feel confident about discarding all the rules for my KUFC book. I could keep doing research and reading books for another six months, but that'd just be dawdling when I know what I'm going to do. I can't wait to get started. I'm sure that feeling will evaporate a few chapters in, but for now, golly gee, oh boy.

Oh! And I also read a romance novel this week. I haven't read any romance since I was about 12, but I read the query for this one and it hooked my interest as surely as it hooked Kristin Nelson's, so I ordered it from Amazon and sped the hell through it. It was awesome! I'm definitely reading more from this author. It was great fun to read something for which I had zero expectations and be pleasantly surprised by how witty it was. Huzzah for totally anachronistic historical romance! And sexy sex!

KUFC (New, with Parkour Action!)

On Wednesday, I wrote this:

I guess I pictured that those ubiquitous kickass book-cover chicks would be parkouring all over a sooty Gotham with explosively powerful crossbows. In fact, yes, that's exactly what I pictured when I thought of "urban fantasy". 

After reading my post, Matt messaged me and said "You should just write this book." I joked back that I totally should. And then I thought about it for another day and the joke part sort of faded.

This is concept art from Diablo III (and has some of the problems of fantasy figures of women) (PUT HER DAMN HAIR BACK), but this is sort of what I picture. Only...steampunk. Oh yes: steampunk crossbow parkour chick. I'm giddy with the awesomeness, and 95% committed to writing this book.

I toyed with several central ideas, but over the course of the weekend I finally settled on one that I like, not involving demons or vampires or werewolves as the main enemy, and giving my chick a backstory that makes the skin crawl. I also went to Barnes & Noble and picked up a dozen books with kickass urban fantasy chicks (KUFCs) on the covers, reading the backs, putting them down again. I very much doubt that they were all the same on the inside, I give published writers more credit than that, but they all seemed the same from the back covers. I bought the first Anita Blake book, because I think you could make the case that that's where all this came from, and a book called Under Wraps about a demon hunter in San Francisco, and Plague Town, which really doesn't have much to do with all this but which Steve Saffel talked up a lot at the PPWC. A day later, when I settled on steampunk, I went back and bought Ganymede.

See, because I haven't actually read that much of this stuff. Particularly steampunk - I've read one steampunk short story to date, and it stank so much that I figured it was just an art that I'd enjoy visually from here on out. (It was that bad.) And although I've read all the Sookie books, I haven't read any KUFC books, or any real urban fantasy in the new wave - I've read Neverwhere and nearly all of the anthology I mentioned the other day and short stories in Weird Tales and the like, but no novels in the zeitgeist, and not much that resembles what I want to write.

Recent events, though, have made me debate internally whether this is a bad thing. Most of my grounding as a writer comes from non-commercial fiction. I haven't read many of the books that establish the rules of engagement for writing stories about fairies and elves and robots, so I tend to break them without realizing it. I have always believed (through significant insecurity, of course) that this makes for better work, because when you don't feel compelled to play by a certain set of rules, you wind up with more original ideas. Ask any entrepreneur. If you can't find what you want to use or own or read, do it yourself, and someone will probably like it the way it is.

I thought that this potential originality made up a little bit for the confusion faced by readers who are expecting some particular thing and instead get something else with different rules. But recently I've gone back and forth about that. I still don't want my work to be formulaic, but I do want it to get sold. And there's no way around the basic problem of not knowing my market.

My conclusion for right now is to sketch out the fundaments of my KUFC idea before reading all the books I bought the other day, and then read them to see how the details are done. This was the same thing I did with my Greenland book - I wrote a lot of it, and complained to Matt about how hard it is to build a world underground, and he told me to read Homeland, and I did, and it helped with the detail and with addressing the illogical aspects of living underground. I was really glad I didn't read it first, though, because it would have skewed and influenced stuff that it shouldn't've, and made the work less my own.

Anyway. Matt points out that the Marilyn book will take a lot longer than this KUFC one, so I should write this one first. I'm happy to take that advice. Anything that delays the Marilyn book. I also have a couple of short stories on the brain: one literary based on a nightmare I had, one slipstream that will help me clear some emotional chaff out of my life. Or so I hope. And we have to pack all of our stuff THIS WEEK and get ready to live in a completely empty house for another week. Yippee. At least that'll be a week to get a lot of reading done whilst sitting on the cold hard floor.

Isn't It Just Contemporary Fantasy?

In my local library, the SF and fantasy are in a section far away from the regular fiction section, and in fact are in the same area as teen fiction. I am not in love with what this connotes but, you know, oh well. I was browsing along the shelves a few weeks ago and came upon The Urban Fantasy Anthology, edited by Beagle and Lansdale and with a few top-notch authors in it, and picked it up. I've heard an awful lot about urban fantasy in the last five years, and seen increasing numbers of these terrible covers at Barnes & Noble, but if you asked me to define it I could only guess lamely. (Related to that link and well worth reading: this. Also this, funnier still.) I thought it would help to read a whole anthology of the actual genre.

There are no fewer than four introductions in this book, and three of them mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I saw that, I went [oh.] So that's what urban fantasy is. It would be nice if they'd just said that.

As I work my way through the stories, a lot of what I read reminds me of Charlaine Harris's Sookie books, which I read voraciously whenever they're released (every year on the dot - actually, it's May, isn't it? Yessss!) and which I love for their transparency and speed and sex scenes. I would never call them great literature, and some of them I wouldn't even call good writing. They are, however, extremely fun. But there's a sort of studied casualness to the fantasy aspects of both those books and these stories that I find hampering. I remember, when reading Neverwhere, how effortlessly Gaiman introduced London Below, and how he didn't linger or waste words on supernatural stuff when it wasn't necessary. This is hard to do while building a genuine world, really really hard, and some of the authors in this anthology don't seem to have mastered it.

The thing that bothers me, though, is how ho-hum the stuff that comprises "urban fantasy" seems to me. In the anthology, I've read a pretty good but more or less standard ghost story; a lovely Gaiman story, wistful and imaginative and really very unfantastic (and not at all encouraging to someone moving to Los Angeles in a few weeks); a story by Lansdale that I truly hated, a dudeish post-apocalyptic zombie/sex bloodbath without a single pleasant sentence; and a few others in the realm of fantasy that I enjoyed, but that I wouldn't call urban. I guess I pictured that those ubiquitous kickass book-cover chicks would be parkouring all over a sooty Gotham with explosively powerful crossbows. In fact, yes, that's exactly what I pictured when I thought of "urban fantasy". Is there a book like that, one that's actually decent? Because I'd read that.

In other news, I have another story idea. This one might keep me from having to write the old old idea that I fear fucking up, or from having to iron out the Marilyn book until I get my nerve up.

In the last week, I've completely gorged on Twilight Rifftrax, watching all four released movies with their accompanying riffs. It's really helped. While I'm not exactly embarrassed about the thoughtfulness with which I've (perhaps needlessly) approached the series in the past and the complete sucker that the romance bits made of me, I did want to have a more objective view of the whole thing. Rifftrax has helped with that a lot, although I still find myself being a sucker for certain aspects of the movies.

That suckerism, along with some gender reading I've done in the past couple of weeks, made me ache desperately to write...something. Some kind of thing that would explore idealism and yearning in relationships, that would get down to real words all the vaguenesses I feel when I read romance novels and watch Edward and Bella getting it on. An essay wouldn't do it, wouldn't give me the freedom I needed. So I was really grateful when I came up with this idea. It's sci-fucking-fi, AGAIN. Digging myself in deeper. I suppose I could mutate it to more present-moment fantasy, make it fae instead of techy, but that's not how I picture it right now.

Of course, writing will have to wait until I get some actual frickin' sleep. Or have my house packed and ready to move. Or find a renter. Or...daaaaaaah.

In this post I've copped to devouring Sookie Stackhouse books and getting roped in by Twilight. If you're just joining me for the first time, I promise I'm not always such an airhead. It's just, y'know, you have to read everything. High, low, creamy middle. Stick only to uppercrust stuff and you become Harold Bloom: soulless, snobby, relentlessly confused about why the world doesn't agree with you. I'LL GET YOU ONE DAY, BLOOM! BLOOOOOOOM!!