Month: August 2010

So, titles are not my strong point. I’ve never given a novel a title I was particularly thrilled with.

My current project has a working title, but it needs a new one. My problem is, I know what I want the title to convey, but I’m having no luck at all coming up with a snappy word or phrase that conveys it.

The idea:
There’s this thing that happens in nature where prey animals kill their predators. Maybe they injure them during the chase. Maybe they’re diseased, and infect the predators. For this reason, snake owners aren’t supposed to feed their snakes live mice–the mouse can easily injure the snake in the struggle, even though it’s not likely to survive the process.

But there’s not really a good word for that, as far as I can tell. Counter-attack does not work. I haven’t been able to find anything else at all, let alone anything useful. Of course, it may just be that I don’t know where to look. Biology isn’t so much my area.

Another way to go would be to take a common saying about predators and twist it around into a good title. But all the ones I can think of don’t work. Cat and mouse, early birds and worms, etc. So far these all end up sounding like bad Agatha Christie knock-offs.

Yet another way to go would be something from an FPS, a word or phrase for being in a situation where you’re completely and totally surounded by superior forces and digging your way out. But if there’s a word for that, I don’t know it. Also, I wouldn’t want to go too far in the FPS direction, because while they play a role in the book, I wouldn’t want to brand it as a videogame book.

Of course, inventing a word is always a possibility, if it’s immediately obvious what it means. I’m not super good at making up words, though. This is one reason I stopped writing high fantasy.

Four months of thinking and all this conceptual work and I’ve got nothing.

It’s possible this book may never have a good title.

Any ideas?

I am writing every day again. Every every day. And now with over a week under my belt, writing is getting easy again.

(What does that under-the-belt expression mean? Is it referring to fat? Because that’s the only thing that’s under my belt, besides my internal organs if you dig deep enough. Okay, I’m talking about organs now. Can you tell I’ve been writing too much gore? My work in progress is DARK.)

Back to writing. The last few years, being one long transion, had completely destroyed my writing schedule. It frightens me that the last time I remember haveing a writing routine like this was when I was in school. That was almost two years ago. Coincidentally, that’s the last time I actually finished a brand new draft.

It’s not that I haven’t been working since then. I’ve done several very serious revisions and rewrites. But it was all done frantically, because I had no stable routine, no sense that I was getting things done at any kind of a steady pace. Those years were not the time for drafting, nor were they the time for steady work, as I was trying to keep up with the transitions and really, honestly doing the best I could.

But we’re done with that now, and I’m quite happy to discover that I haven’t lost my good work habits–only put them on hold for a while. And returning to them is much easier than I expected it to be. (I was afraid it would be impossible, honestly.) It feels like coming home.

Now that I have a steady pace again, I feel calmer and more confident. I’m discovering (again) that I’m not half bad at this whole writing thing. I can do this. One day at a time.

This makes me feel very defensive of my writing space. (Meaning it’s space in my life, figuratively, not the actual physical space. I’ve been writing at the kitchen table, so that could get awkward.) I want to defend it against the endless business tasks, the household tasks, the recreational activities. I want to stand guard over it and never let anything take it away from me again.

I’m sure something will take it away from me again at some point. But if I can just prevent it from being taken away for that LONG again, then I’ll be in really good shape.

In our second-floor apartment, we rarely saw any living thing besides the occasional ant. For the most part, I was happy with that. But for better or worse, our house is smack in the middle of a thriving ecosystem.

For example, this praying mantis has decided to take up permanent residence on the doorframe out front. He was quite unpreturbed by the camera, even when I stuck it an inch from his face. I took these photos yesterday; he’s still there today. He’s about three inches long, which is freaking huge for a bug this scary looking.

I hung up a hummingbird feeder soon after we moved in. We have lively hummingbird wars in the backyard now–so much so that the buzz past our ears chasing each other when we step outside.

We have an eighteen-inch snake living somewhere in our backyard. He’s a gorgeous creature. We see him in the evenings occasionally.

Yesterday I cut these flowers from the space next to our driveway. I brought them in, stuck them in a vase, and then noticed a bee still had his head buried deep in one of the centers, feeding. I took the vase outside and snapped this before blowing on him to get him to fly away.

Then, of course, there’s the wasps and the spiders and the millipedes and the ants and the dragonflies and the butterflies and the grasshoppers that flee in terror when we edge the lawn. I’ll have to get pictures of the grasshoppers one of these days. They’re quite pretty. And probably snake food.

One thing I worried about moving in to this house was yard work.  I’ve never really done yard work, having lived in dorms and then apartments for the last ten years.  My parents did all the yard work growing up, so my only real experience was helping my mother and my grandmother tend vegetable gardens when I was between the ages of about eight and fourteen. 

I didn’t really consider myself a yard person.  So I was quite surprised to discover that I actually enjoy maintaining our little piece of land.  I enjoyed looking at what was there and figuring out how to add to it and maintain it to turn it into what I want it to be.  It’s an odd feeling, like it’s a little stewardship–and if we maintain it properly, we will benefit from it.

It took several weeks, but I’ve gotten all the summer projects done, and have settled us into a maintenance routine.  I actually remember a startling amount of gardening skills that I learned from my mother and grandmother.  To fill in the gaps, Google has been my friend. 

Here are our raspberry bushes, which are my favorite thing about the yard.  They were mid-berrying when we first moved in, and I had the most astonishing experience that first week.  I walked out into the yard and pulled a bowlful of tasty berries off this bush, washed them, and ate them.  And I didn’t have to pay the bush.  Guys, seriously.  Food comes from plants.  It just grows there for the picking.  The actual maintenance of the plant seems like suck a small price to pay for free food, especially when that food is something like raspberries that taste ten times better than the ones you buy at the store.  We pulled about sixty dollars worth of berries off this bush, and we weren’t even here for the whole harvest.  (It helps, of course, that someone else did the hard work of getting them to grow in the first place.  I hear starting raspberries is a lot harder than maintaining them.

Last week I googled trimming bushes, and then went through and cut down all the stalks that berried this year, as apparently they won’t berry again.  The bushes are looking much healthier and under control now than they were.

These are my irises.  A very kind friend had extras, and let me dig them out of her yard and transplant them.  I was worried they wouldn’t take, since you’re supposed to do that in the fall, but they’re starting to give off fresh shoots already.  I’m really excited about these.  Hopefully they’ll survive the winter and we’ll have flowers next year.

This is my rhubarb plant.  It looked about like this when we moved in.  I can’t tell if I’m supposed to be harvesting it; some accounts say you only harvest before July, while others say it doesn’t matter.  I’ve cut a few stalks, though, and made cold rhubarb soup, which I hadn’t had since my grandmother made it when I was a little girl.  It tastes just as good as I remembered.  I threw in some raspberries, which made it even better.

This is my sad, sad strawberry patch.  When we moved in the strawberries were barely visible under the raspberries and the weeds.  So I moved them into one of the garden boxes.  I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to transplant them in July, so I won’t be surprised if most of them die, but they were dying anyway, choked as they were.  We’ll see what survives the winter; I can always fill in with extra plants in the spring.

We have six tomato plants which probably shouldn’t be.  A friend gave me cuttings off her thriving plants, and I figured I might as well throw them in the ground, since they cost nothing.  The plants are thriving, but I’m not sure if we’ll get fruit before the end of the growing season.  I’m hoping we’ll get at least of few.  If not, it was good practice.

Sadly, no gardening center had tomato cages left, so we’re making do with stakes and plant tape.  It’s working so far, at least.

This sunflower grew spontaneously.  I almost pulled it, thinking it was a weed, but recognized the stalk in time.  Now it’s shoulder height.  I’m excited to see it bloom.

And here, hanging out on my sunflower, is my tiny nemesis: the wasp.  We’ve gone through six cans of spray.  We have a wasp trap, but I’m not impressed with its trapping rate.  The good news is that we’re winning the war.  I see far fewer wasps than I used to, and most of those are coming out of our neighbor’s yards.  (Living between two empty houses is not helping, I think.)

We have a pretty crazy ecosystem going on, here.  There’s at least one very large garden snake living under our patio.  When we mow, grasshoppers run for cover.  The gnats and flies glue themselves to our windows at night.  (Also the mosquitos, unfortunately.)  And then there’s the spiders.  Oh, the spiders.  I’ve been completely desensitized to spider fear.

I’ve already ordered tulip and crocus bulbs to plant in September, and we’ll be planting three fruit trees sometime in the fall.  If that goes well, we’ll probably do a few more next year.  I also have plans for next year’s vegetable garden, since we’ll actually be here during planting season.  Yay, yard.

We’ve now got a full week of settling in to routine under our belts, and are moving into week two.

Here are some observations, in no particular order.

• I’m writing every day again.  Yay for that.  I’m having a terrible time with one particular chapter, and am alternating between drafting material past that chapter and going back to beat it into submission some more.  I think I finally have a critiquable draft done, which means I can finally submit it to writing group.  I still hate the draft, though.  Hopefully my amazing alpha readers will be able to tell me what precisely is wrong with it.
• I’m finding that I did a pretty good job of holding things together during the months of insanity.  I am finding very few dropped balls lying around in the corners.  There are a few of them, though, like the still defunct web store.  Working on that now.
• It’s so nice to have time.  Drew and I have been hitting a badminton birdie around at the park.  We’re back to playing the videogames that require Drew to actually hold a controller, like Bioshock (love the game; hate the controller interface, so Drew does the actual playing) and Rainbow Six Vegas (awesome multiplayer, except that it won’t play the cutscenes).  Drew can go grocery shopping with me again.  He can run to the store with me.  It’s lovely.
• My allergies have chosen this moment to have a total spaz attack.  Could have lived without that, but at least I have the space to figure out what’s causing it.  One of those balls that got dropped may have been the dustmite proofing of our new residence.  Whoops.
• I am really stressing out about little things a lot.  I think that’s a factor of having a lot of unknown variables in the new life structure.  Our finances have changed (obviously) and even though I think we’re doing fine, I can’t know for absolutely sure.  There are a lot of things floating like that right now.  I suppose it’ll all settle out with time.  I’m really happy with the way things are going; my stress all comes from worrying about whether we can sustain it.  That’s been a theme over the last three years, and every time before this, the answer was yes, we can.  So we’ll keep walking forward and hope it’ll be true yet again.  These last years have been full of miracles.  What’s one or two more, right?
   

How can acheiving some kind of normal, balanced life feel like a more impossible task than the things I have already done over these last years?

GAH.

Sometimes I find myself to be very screwed up.

The week we moved into our house was not what I would call a good week. 

The process of house hunting and home buying was immensely stressful.  The moving process was almost worse, with the cleaning and the moving coinciding with a major shipping event I bore partial responsibility for.  This came on the heels of the stressful novel submission/rejection/negotiation/sale(!) process.  That came on the heels of the stressful revision, which came on the heels of the stressful agent switch, which was immediately preceded by Drew graduating and working full time and us counting down the months of money left, which was of course triggered by me graduating and losing my day job and trying to transition into full-time writing and business managering when that looked like the craziest thing in the world to do.  That, of course, all came on the heels of that insane first year of marriage in which I revised and defended my thesis, we started a business (and figured out how to do all the million things that go along with it), made nearly no money, and adjusted to being married to each other.  (That last being, by FAR, the easiest of the lot.) 

You still with me?  Okay.

As grateful as I am for my life, that first week in our house, I found myself for the first time in three years grasping for energy to face the tasks before me, and coming up empty.

I consider myself a tough-as-nails, suck-it-up, get-it-done kind of a girl.  But it turns out even I can run out of fuel.

It was the shelves that did it, of all things.  As much as I like the look of our sleek, black Walmart shelves, they are not the sturdiest of things, and I don’t think our floor is entirely flat either.  They leaned six inches into the room even with the bottom back flat against the wall.  They loomed there, waiting to fall.

In the last few years I have done many things that I did not know how to do.  I have googled; I have implemented trial and error.  I have asked friends; I have called strangers.  I have puzzled; I have searched.  But that day, that week, I reached for the go-to girl in me, and she flipped me the finger and walked away.

I had nothing left.

We got through it, of course.  Drew helped me figure out what a stud finder was.  Four trips to the hardware store later we’d screwed the damn bookshelves to the wall.  They look lovely now. 

(They looked less lovely the night we tried to buy screws at Wal-mart and the power went out and they kicked us out of the store, sans purchase.  That was the day the wasp stung me and caused me to drop and break my brand new porch light, and the woman from the gas company spent five minutes trying to talk me out of paying for someone to just show-me-where-my-freaking-pilot-light-is-before-I -die-from-lack-of-hot-water-no-I-can’t-handle-dealing-with-it-myself-this-week-thank-you-very-much.  That’s the kind of week it was.)

Point is, we fixed it.

But I cannot forget that empty feeling. 

I don’t feel empty now.  I’ve gotten through the last few weeks, and with them, the last of the transition tasks.  Gencon has arrived and Drew finished the projects he has worked so hard all year to complete.  From what I hear, the convention is going better than either of us hoped.  

For the last three months, this has been our mantra: we just have to get through Gencon.  We could suck it up and go head down in the work for that long.  We could do it.

And we did.  I’m glad we did.  Our lives are so full of awesome.  And much of that awesome is directly due to our willingness to hold on tight and let our lives spin us around and around over the last couple of years.  I am so, so glad we did.  We’ve been wildly successful and ridiculously happy.  More of either than we deserved to be, that’s for sure.

But my body is sending me a very strong message–the one it sent most strongly that day when I stared in despair at my bookshelves.  This whirlwind transition does nothing for us if we just keep spinning forever.  Spinning forever isn’t the goal.  It pulls more energy than it gives and leaves us with less.  We need to refuel, to refill.  What we need most is to settle down.  Be still.  Write books.  Paint minis.  Work with clients.  Make dinner.  Clean the house.  Play video games.  Roleplay.  Sew projects.  Have dinner with friends.  Go camping.  Smile.  Laugh.  Be.

Three more days and Gencon is over.  Drew is home.

For both of our health, I need to keep that promise I made to myself.  I have to teach myself a new way to be–a stable way.  A sustainable way.   Because I don’t want to come up empty again.  And we have a few more big steps before all the pieces of our plan are complete, and I can’t possibly manage those steps if I’m not coming to it from a place of stability.

It’s one more thing I don’t know how to do.  But somehow I feel it’s the better part–and the most worthwhile to learn.