But first an outline

I think it might be almost time to start my new project.

The problem with being a writer is the constant influx of story ideas. In my case, they're all ideas for novels, which take a relatively long time to write. Sometimes I think an idea is a short story idea, and when I start writing it turns out I've got a novel idea after all. Sometimes I think an idea is ripe, and I get five or ten or fifty thousand words in and realize I only had half an idea. (Outlines help with that problem, but I don't always do an outline.) I always intend to come back to those half-done projects (like Little Sparrow and How Christopher Kaplan Learned to Lie and Adventures in Zoology). But time is short, and there are always new ideas crowding in.

I was messing around with the sequel to Misfits, which has a working title of Unsung Math Genius. But I'm hesitant to write too much on it while I'm still querying agents for the first book. I don't want to jump the gun on the direction the series takes.

So I've been doing some editing and a little bit of writing here and there instead. And then BAM! An idea smacked me upside the head. It's YA, probably SF/F although that's an aspect of the plot I haven't resolved yet (the bad guys could be aliens or zombie type monsters or real life terrorists, depending on where I want to take the story).

Last night I figured out the main characters' names. Tonight: outline time. And then the first words.

Thinking ahead

I've got an idea for a sequel to Misfits, and I can't wait to get started on it. But...I'm not sure if I should start writing it yet. What if Misfits doesn't sell? What if I get an agent for it and she/he wants me to take the next book in a different direction?

Anyway, I've got other books waiting for my attention. I don't like leaving projects half-finished when they're still "live" in my imagination. I've been planning to finish Adventures in Zoology for over a year; maybe I'll work on it next. And The Trickster Society really needs me to finish the rewrite.

Besides, until I can think up a working title for the Misfits sequel, I'm better off not starting it.

No, and maybe

I got a no today from Angry Robot, for those of you keeping track at home. Still, it was nice to be under consideration at that level.

Remember the contemporary YA I wrote this past summer, Misfits? It's revised now and I sent the first batch of five queries out to agents Friday night. I've already received three responses: two rejections--and a full request. So that's almost made up for my rejection today.

I don't know what I'm going to do with Bell-Men, to be honest. There's one more publisher I can send it to, although I want to revise it again first, but if they say no I'll probably just sit on it for a while. I've almost completed the sequel and I've always planned to make it a trilogy, so maybe I'll just wait until I've finished all three books to my satisfaction. And maybe by then I'll have sold something else and have an agent who can send it out to all those publishers who don't take unagented submissions ever.

What a query is good for

I am pretty sure all my obligations are currently met. I returned the edits for The Weredeer and Blood and Ashes, and I read and critiqued a (very good) YA book for someone. And I still have three weeks before NaNoWriMo!

I still want to finish the Misfits revisions. It's the first book I've written where I knew immediately that I needed to fix something, but I couldn't figure out what, so rather than convince myself I was wrong and it was ready to query, I just set it aside. Of course, I was busy with other stuff at the time. But it still counts as growth!

Figuring out what was wrong with Misfits turned out to be easy. When I started writing the query, every time I got past the hook I had to stop. I couldn't put my finger on the main theme of the book, which meant it wasn't clear enough. So once I had time, I jotted some notes down on ways I could focus the book--and then I had to do those damn edits, and never did get around to the revisions. Not until now.

I don't need a reward. Really.

Something's messed up when as a reward for finishing my Weredeer edits, I am allowing myself an evening to do revisions on Misfits. Of course, I had so much to do before I even turned on my computer this evening that I won't actually have time to open the Misfits file.

I have to address the Blood and Ashes edits this week, and this weekend I promised someone I'd read and critique their YA novel. So really, I shouldn't be slacking off with any darn revisions anyway. Yeah.

How I Spent My Day Off

I have a weird work schedule that involves Saturdays and evenings and getting most Thursdays off. Yesterday was a Thursday, and I was off work, which in the olden days meant I could have caught up on my writing/reading/editing/painting my bathroom bilious pink. But right now things are still in crazy mode.

Rather than claim I'm too busy to do any editing, I'll just list the things I did yesterday, from the time I got up to the time I fell into bed with a throbbing left thumb.

7:00am Wake up, luxuriating in sleeping late for a change
7:05 up, dressed, more or less presentable
7:10 Help Mom with her shower. She is insufferably chipper at this time of the morning.
7:30 Make breakfast for Mom. While she eats, I update my website. I forget to make myself breakfast.
8:00-9:00 Laundry laundry laundry, how do we use so many towels in a 24-hour span? Also, put away clean dishes from the dishwasher* and make a manful attempt to unpack some of the boxes in my closet.
9:00-10:30 Go to old house we've moved out of so I can clean the upstairs. Take a huge bag of trash to the dump. Forget to stop by a fast food place for breakfast.
10:30 Take Mom into neighboring town so she can look at a walker with a seat. She chooses a cool wine-red one that looks like it was a 10-speed in a former life. She is so pleased with it that we decide to go on into Oak Ridge, City of Assholes, to go shopping before her doctor's appointment.
11:00am-1:30pm Shopping with Mom, which is exhausting even though at least now I don't have to struggle with her old wheelchair. I buy a book, a valance for my bathroom (purple! with daisies!), a bedskirt, and a lamp. Mom buys a pair of sunglasses that make her look surprisingly dangerous. I also eat lunch, none too soon.
2:00-3:00 Mom's doctor's appointment. We are both relieved when it's over. Drive home from Knoxville.
3:30 Mom didn't eat much lunch, so I make her mac&cheese. I'm not hungry yet.
4:00-7:15 Mow the old lawn for the last time, drag brush out to the corner for pick-up, and pack my car with the lawnmower, garden hose, and recycle bin, which I take back to our new house. Mom is worn out and watching TV in a half-asleep stupor. She's hungry again. I'm starving.
7:15-7:30 shower shower shower, I really am disgusting
7:30 Mom eats leftover mac&cheese. I attempt to eat leftover mac&cheese, but since it's made the only way she will eat it (overcooked until the noodles are mushy), I only manage a few bites. I drink a Coke and eat some yogurt instead.
7:45 Put my new bedskirt on the bed, a more difficult prospect than it seems at first since I'm fussy and have to get it completely even, which entails taking the mattress off so I can arrange the bedskirt properly on the box springs. I am insane. Install new lamp, unpack another box from my closet.
8:15 My aunt stops by to admire Mom's new walker. When she leaves, I make sure Mom has her evening meds and get her settled in bed. I promise her (since she's worried that I'm tired) I will go right to bed myself.
8:30 Pop two Tylenol. Hang valance in bathroom, which involves having to hammer in a couple of nails while standing on a rickety chair. I am not good at hammering and whang my thumb. Mom hears hammering (and cussing) and comes to admire valance. It is awesome in its purple daisyness.
9:00 Mom back in bed. I turn on my laptop to check my email. I have received a fresh set of edits, which means I now have two novel edits to finish. Email back and forth with the editor a few times about rewriting a scene.
9:20 Realize I forgot to iron clothes for work tomorrow. Set my alarm for twenty minutes earlier than usual.
9:30 Lie in bed. Can't sleep. My feet hurt. My thumb hurts. I ache all over. I'm hungry. The Tylenol have not helped appreciably.
11:30 Get up to admire bathroom curtain. Realize I am actually sleepy. Go back to bed. Next thing I know, my alarm is going off.

Now, normally I don't have to clean or do yardwork in a house where we no longer live, and we're getting close to being finished unpacking, so hopefully soon things will settle down and I can get some writing done. But as you can see, it's a tiny bit busy around here right now. I am frantic to address these edits, and even more frantic to do some revisions to Misfits. Maybe I should just get up and edit when I can't sleep.

*I love having a dishwasher! OMG!

Misfits

I finished Misfits tonight. It's just under 86,000 words. That's a lot more than I intended, but I'm sure I can cut 5,000 words easily and probably 10,000 words if necessary.

I like it. It's not perfect, and I want to set it aside for a while to ripen while I work on other things, but I like it. And it's done. I've written 86k words in about two months. Not NaNoWriMo speed, but not bad--especially considering most of it was written while I sat by my mom's hospital bed.

Next I have to finish Bloodhound, although I've got edits still pending that have got to be done first. The problem with edits is that I have to do them at my desktop, and I don't have a lot of desktop time under ordinary circumstances. I'll just have to grab half an hour here and there instead of trying to work on the edits in big chunks of time. Maybe that'll make them easier, actually.

It's the little things that get you down.

The situation:
1. The house Mom and I rent together has stairs, and after her stroke she has a lot of trouble with stairs.
2. We're staying with her sister, my aunt, until we can buy/rent a house all on one level.
3. I have keys to my aunt's house.
4. I forgot those keys today.
5. At about noon today I discovered we were locked out.
6. We are now spending the afternoon at our old house, which is fine for me since I have no trouble with stairs. Mom is less thrilled, although she's lying on the couch watching a movie and drinking a Gatorade, so I don't feel quite as guilty as I did.

But now I feel guilty for being upstairs at my computer while Mom's stuck downstairs. A few months ago that was the norm--not Mom stuck downstairs, but Mom preferring to hang out in the living room while I'm on my computer. It feels normal to me right now that I'm blogging and I can hear the Lord of the Rings music downstairs. Then I realize I need to check on Mom to make sure she doesn't need anything. Then I feel bad for feeling so content at having a chunk of computer time.

Anyway, I'm at 72,000 words on Misfits and closing in on the end. All I have left to write is the main character's date with his new girlfriend and the big scene where a friend of his needs his help, then a scene of reconciliation between two estranged friends. Hmm, that sounds like more than I thought. It'll probably go over 75,000 words, but then again it's not like I need to keep the wordcount low.

I'm not sure about Misfits. I really like it, and I think it's a good book, but I've also stopped believing I'm ever going to get an agent or sell a book to a big publisher. Misfits is a YA book with no speculative elements at all, with a central theme of the bonds of friendship--but it's got strong LGBT themes, which means it's destined for a small publisher no matter how good it is. And I don't know anymore how good a writer I am. Last week I started rereading The Taste of Magic, a book I only wrote a few years ago and which was just published last month, and I couldn't even finish it. I didn't like my own writing style. I don't know what to make of that.

68,000 words

I'm closing in on the end of Misfits. I'm guessing it'll top out at 75,000 words, which is a bit on the long side for a YA novel but not ridiculously long. I'm 68k words in right now.

Writing it has been strange. I became obsessed with it a week before Mom had her stroke, and it was only natural for me to continue working on it at the hospital. But one part of the book concerns the main character's trouble with his mother; he's sixteen and doesn't always get along with her. It felt really weird to be writing arguments between the two when my own mother was lying in a hospital bed next to me and I was doing everything I could to make her comfortable.

I did a lot of thinking about my own teenage years. I was a pretty good kid, but Mom and I fought a lot--about stupid stuff, in retrospect. I'd scream at her and make her miserable, and those memories made me damn miserable in the late evenings while Mom was sleeping and I was trying to write. I wish I had known as a teenager just how tolerant and kind my mom really was.

But it's those memories of screaming at my mom that she was unfair that allow me to dig into the mind of a fictional teenager and really understand how he feels. So I guess that's just one more thing my mom did for me.

I have, of course, apologized to her repeatedly for my teenage self. That she finds it all amusing now says a lot about her.

Long Update

I asked for and received permission to post details about what's been keeping me away from the internet for so long. My last post was vague because I didn't want to share information that concerned others--specifically, as is probably pretty obvious, my mom, who is a private person.

Anyway, last month on June 23 Mom had a mild stroke. It's a long and frustrating story of tests and doctors and more tests and more doctors, but here's the short version: Mom has advanced cancer of the uterus, which caused her blood to be abnormally coagulative, which in turn caused a clot in her lungs, which in turn caused her stroke. She's now on bloodthinners to reduce the clotting and on chemo to address the cancer. Without treatment (chemo and bloodthinners), her life expectancy could have been as little as three months.

I've been staying with Mom at the hospital, with only flying visits home to do laundry, shower, and get stuff Mom and I need. For the last week she's been in the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center's intensive therapy inpatient program, where she'll probably be for another week. She's doing very well, I'm happy to say. Her stroke was mild, leaving her with only mild physical issues (weak right arm and leg leading to some balancing problems and difficulties doing things like tying her shoes and buttoning clothes) and moderate expressive aphasia, which is a fancy way of saying that somewhere between her brain figuring out exactly what she wants to say and her mouth forming the words, the words vanish into nothing. She's already regained a lot of speech, but it's incredibly frustrating for her--especially considering how eloquent and articulate she's always been. But she's very fortunate that her cognitive abilities are not affected.

I've taken a leave of absence from work until at least the end of August. I have been writing, though. I dusted off Bunny the eee and have typed up everything I wrote longhand during that horrible first week in the hospital. Now that Mom's in therapy most of the day, I write mostly in the evenings. I'm at 50,000 words in my YA novel, Misfits. My novel The Taste of Magic releases from Etopia Press tomorrow and the cover is awesome--I'll try to post it tomorrow if I get a chance. Blogger and Facebook are two of the sites blocked by the hospital's wifi, so I can't post or read blogs unless I'm at home, and I'm not home much.

I feel unbelievably disconnected from the world and from my online friends. I hope everyone's okay. I read Carrie Harris's awesome new book Bad Taste in Boys the other day, but I wasn't able to post on her blog and congratulate her. I know a lot of you have had triumphs and disappointments in the last three weeks and I wish I'd known so I could celebrate and commiserate with you. Once Mom's home, things will be a little easier, and slowly, gradually, I hope life will return to normal as much as it can.