542 Pages

January 29

Boring night. I'm printing. My zippy little printer is not meant for printing out my whole novel. It's a sprinter, great over short distances, but asking it to print 542 pages... well, that's what I've been doing this evening, printing my book ten or twenty pages at a time, because the longer the printer runs, the more confused it becomes, and the more prone it is to print (or fail to print) pages at random. Sigh. One of these days I'll invest in a nice laser printer, the kind that can run several hundred pages without breaking a sweat.

Since I'm more-or-less tied to the computer, I'm reading journals, going down my links page one link at a time. Here are some comments! Whoo! My toil gives you something to read!

Kristin is sick, and cold, or at least she was a few days ago. I hope I get to meet her sometime soon. She's the Mysterious Ratbastard...

Mike recently printed out his novel manuscript to send off, too, though he didn't whine about it as much as I am. We have a deal; whoever sells their book first (to a publisher or to the movies) has to buy the other one dinner at a con. Hell, I can't lose! Either I sell a novel, or I get free food! Unless neither of us sells a book, but why contemplate such terrible things?

I sympathize with Patrick; we're supposed to be economizing, too, but mostly that means that Heather is reluctant to go out to eat. Since she's having a birthday dinner with a friend tonight, I bought myself a cheeseburger and entirely too many fries. It's a bummer, though, not being able to go out for breakfast like we used to. On the other hand, dinners out are more of a special occasion, now, and less a consequence of us being too lazy to cook. And we're making more meals together, which is a pleasure, though that produces lots of dirty dishes, which are not pleasurable at all... I shudder to think what it will be like when we move out of this place, too. Heather is deeply entrenched (4+ years in one house!), and I'm very very bad at moving. I get cranky. Fortunately, that's in the future, and why borrow trouble? But my sympathies to Patrick regarding his. House-emptying is no kind of fun...

I share Charliegirl's dismay over someone being refused custody of their children solely due to bi/poly tendencies. Heather and I have occasionally said we could never really live anywhere but the Bay Area, given our sexual/social predilections, but apparently not even the Love Bubble is safe...

Charles Stross is appalled by the likely death toll of a war with Iraq, and, damn, I'm with him.

Dave Moles has a very attractive site. (He's saying substantive things, too, but nothing I have any real comment about.)

Daphne got hit by a freakin' car! As if being a poet isn't hard enough! (But she's okay, if you're not a link-follower.)

[Up to 310 pages. More than half done.]

Greg is right about Miéville being right. You gotta get the words down. It's so easy to get creative vapor-lock. I was so worried about that happening to me after Clarion that I wrote a novel the next month just to avoid such a fate. Put the words down. You can fix them later, or throw them away, but you can't do anything with them if they don't exist.

You'd think all that above would shame me into writing fiction during this evening of being computer bound, but, nope, doesn't look like it.

Columbine is writing good stuff as usual, and in the most recent entry mentions a science fiction writer ending a book with the world blowing up, which as a science fiction writer I almost always find a terribly tempting way to end stories that are reluctant to end more gracefully. Nonetheless, I respect the objection.

Erin links to our Love chapbook (well, "ours" because some of my poems are in, but she did all the heavy lifting). You should buy this, and give it to someone you love. It's beautiful, and funny, and romantic, and erotic, and ever-so-cool. And it's got some of my poems in it that have never appeared anywhere else. Go! Now! You pay! $5! You get! I'll be mentioning this chapbook again. It's awesome, and Erin is awesome for putting it together.

Scott Nicholson just keeps selling novels, and it couldn't happen to a more talented, more deserving guy. I miss having Chinese food and bitching about the business with him -- especially since I could bitch so much more effectively now, and, I'm sure, so could he!

Gabe Chouinard, whose words I almost always find interesting and provocative, has been talking about his personal canon. So wholly different from mine. Briefly, the books that shaped my interest in literature are: The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural, 50 Short Science Fiction Stories, The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces, and the first Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. I can still name the stories I read in those books that charted the course of my writing life -- "Friend's Best Man", "DX", "The Gostak Distims the Doshes", "The New Accelerator", "The Sliced, Crosswise, Only on Tuesday World", "The Party", "The Jam", "Talent", "See?", "Pickman's Model"... Mmm. Makes me happy just thinking about them. I wonder if Mom still has the big Arbor house anthos? I'd love to get my hands on those again.

Jen spoiled me with lots of entries in December, but, alas, the new year is yet bereft of her words.

kest needs to sell her car. I can testify that it gets her reliably to work. Any takers?

Jon's Tales of the Plush Cthulhu has been translated into French! The world is a strange and wonderful place.

Susan Marie is buried beneath a pile of work, and couldn't even come over for wine and Smallville last night. Our thoughts are with you, Susan!

Jed has used his techno-magic to make his journal even easier to use. His site design has always impressed me; simple, elegant, giving priority to the text, but with a solid and logical structural underpinning. Unlike my messy slough of hypertextual gobbledygook...

Mary Anne is working hard to finish book-related work I can only dream of, as it comes much later in the process (after, you know, selling the thing).

Barzak is mourning the imminent end of his academic life. He's quite right about finding a place where you're comfortable and keeping yourself there. I sometimes regret not pursuing academia farther, actually, getting a Masters in poetry... it would've been a different life. Generally, though, I'm happy to be where I am, scrabbling tooth-and-nail to reach the point where I don't have to do anything but write fiction all day long. Maybe I'll never get to that point, but I'll never have to hate myself for not even trying. Which I think I would have, if I'd become a creative writing prof. Which isn't to say that I don't want to teach again someday -- I do, I do!

[400 pages. Only 150 to go. Oof.]

Jenn is productive, and exercises. Heather and I exercised last night, actually -- stretched a bit, mostly. Amazingly, my body hurt less today than it has lately. Could there be a correlation?

Michael Kelly's journal (well, the server) is down.

Nick joined CBLDF; I should quit HWA and give the money on CBLDF instead, I think. Except the free books at Stoker time is kinda cool. During college I was in a writing group with censored comic-artist Mike Diana's sister; whenever I think of CBLDF, I think of her, and her boyfriend, and the tipi they lived in, up on the ridge...

(Wow, I'm free-associating now, huh?)

Diane talks about $50 burgers (with shaved truffle topping!). Madness. And here I felt kinda bad for buying a $6 burger. But then, I don't live in Manhattan.

Jonathan, my noble and intrepid Reviews Editor, is struggling to write his next month's column. And, yeah, it'd be nice if he finished it, since it's the only review left to put in. But he has not been idle -- he edited everybody else's columns in record time (and touched mine only lightly, as always, which is nice). Though I suppose he might characterize editing as more column-writing-avoidance behavior...

John claims to be boring, but of course he is anything but. Unlike, say, me.

Alan is inscrutable. (This is not derogatory.) Though possibly ill.

Gwenda (who I also hope to meet one of these days) successfully moved, for which I have sympathy, and got a new bed, for which I have envy. She loves Janeane Garofalo, as do I. Actually, her taste in movies seems very in keeping with my own, which is why I watch her journal eagerly for titles I don't recognize...

Gary is writing difficult stuff, and I applaud him for it. I have difficult stuff I should be writing, and here I am not writing it, and I don't even have an onerous job to blame.

Pamie is plagued by Job Goblins, but, to make her life brighter and shinier, her book has an ISBN, and an entry on the Simon & Schuster website!

Derek posts a pretty interesting essay by William Golding, which gives Derek's journal its name.

Zak is busy. He makes lovely pictures.

I will never be as interesting as William Gibson.

And that's all, more-or-less, except lots of NAWers and Web Rats that I don't have directly on my links page, and Jay's Story Words because it's not a journal/blog, and Heather's because I linked to it last time she updated, and some that are inexplicably down. They're all worth reading, too! Find them via my Links page!

And after all that, I still have 50 pages to print. Oy. Though I did take a break to watch Angel, which is why I'm not done already. And then I have to write a cover letter, and package the ms up, and so forth. And miles to go, and miles to go...

My printer is so cranky. It won't print more than 10 pages at a time.

Is this my longest entry ever? Certainly the linkiest.

S'pose I'll upload this, now.

Words written since February 1, 2002: 208,700

Words written since last entry:
Zip.

Go buy mine and Erin Donahoe's new chapbook, Love!

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