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Harstine Writers Retreat

April 15, 2013 By

Sorry for the blog silence; I’ve been working on my PhD dissertation. I also attended another writers retreat. Where I worked on my dissertation. There’s a theme here.

Since I’ll be leaving Washington soon, I’m very motivated to say yes to everything, in spite of stressful dissertations. This time “yes” meant hanging out at a ridiculous house in south Puget Sound, with kayaks and indoor totem poles and outdoor hot tubs and grass-fed steaks from Idaho and pomegranate margaritas and most excellent company. Many thanks to Kath for organizing, and to Sara, Dawn, Mary, Mickey, Amy, and Anne for their creativity and camaraderie. I was very pleased with my progress over the weekend. The magic of the writers retreat strikes again!

Some pics:

Writers writing

Writers writing

South Puget Sound at our doorstep

South Puget Sound at our doorstep

Mutual admiration society reunion

Mutual admiration society reunion

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Back from Rainforest Writers Village

March 18, 2013 By

… and finally on the upswing from flu/bronchitis/whooping cough, whatever circle of hell I’ve been living or dying in this past week.

Rainforest was fabulous, as it is. Patrick does a bang-up job organizing. The company is wonderful, and I loved seeing so many friendly faces and being able to converse for bouts longer than 140 characters. The trail running was so great that I went every day.

In addition to plenty of writing time, there were optional talks by pros. Here are some tidbits of advice I picked up:

  • A strong character is individual, plausible, and active ~ Nancy Kress
  • Inconsistency and lack of detail are the two most common worldbuilding problems. Politics, technology, geography, and economics need to be worked out in advance, in broad strokes at least. Details can be incorporated in later drafts. On second draft, focus on consistency and vividness. Show your characters interacting with the worldbuilding. In the beginning, it’s more important to be interesting than clear. ~ Nancy Kress
  • Write to two themed anthologies, the second deadline about three months after the first. This keeps you from writing to the center of any theme, and your story is more appealing, more fresh, as a result. Also, write to the word count that intersects both calls. ~ Mae Empson
  • Give yourself the opportunity to be both mean and kind to yourself ~ Mark Teppo
  • If you’re unhappy with your tale, or stuck, it may be a symptom that your story and plot have diverged. When this happens, you have to decide which is most important to you to keep as is. When you know that, you can test the secondary elements in the tale to see if there’s an adjustment that both fixes the problem and makes you happy. If doesn’t work, try to put your finger on the point where the tale broke, and see, with the benefit of hindsight, if there’s any wiggle room there. Tweak non-load-bearing plot elements to make it work the way you want. Note, there may not be a solution. And maybe there doesn’t have to be, if your plot is so hell-on-wheels that people will love it regardless. ~ Susan Matthews (2012, because I found last year’s notes)
  • Outlining can be a progression of questions. What does the character want and need? What happens next, why is this happening, what do they want? Whether or not the character gets what they want can have four outcomes: Yes, but; No, and; Yes; No. The first two make things worse and sets up new questions. The second two are endings, happy and sad, respectively. ~ Mary Robinette Kowal (2012, because I found last year’s notes). See also Wendy Wagner’s Inkpunks post and Episode 7.50 of Writing Excuses.

But that’s just Rainforest. There was also Kelly’s visit to Seattle (Fly Moon Royalty, Ravenna Woods, The Local Strangers, and Kithkin at a funky little art gallery in So-Do; some of my favorite watering holes like Fremont Brewery and Chuck’s Hop Shop), and my 24-hour academic bender in Boulder (the talk went really well, still waiting to hear back about the postdoc), and meeting up with Phoebe, who was in the neighborhood for her own writer’s retreat. Which was wonderful and random. We had teriyaki.

Related Posts

Quiet time in the Rainforest
Away at the Rainforest Writers Village

Filed Under: Events, Process Tagged With: , , , ,

Code for home

February 27, 2013 By

Yesterday I received my first postdoctoral fellowship offer. It’s for two years of salary, awarded directly to me, for a proposal that I wrote. I will not have a boss, but a host–the point being that I can follow my own research passions, rather than those of someone else. Academically and intellectually, it’s a thrilling opportunity, the top tier of postdocs. It’s a hell of a lot more money than I’ve made in grad school.

It’s not in Seattle.

I can’t tell if that sinking feeling in my stomach is just nerves over having to make a decision about postdocs and defend my dissertation and all of this compressed over the next couple of months, or if I should be legitimately second guessing my career plans and what I want from life. Probably both.

I realize this sounds ridiculous, but I’m crushed at the idea of having to leave my gym. I suspect “gym” is just code for “Seattle” in this case. But I’ve just found it, after a bit of a hiatus from martial arts, and of course the school teaches a style of kung fu that is taught nowhere else in the world. I’m falling in love with a sweaty room filled with punching bags, and with Seattle all over again.

I don’t have to make any decisions immediately, but they’ll come soon enough. Next week I’ll be giving an invited talk in Boulder (I have a postdoc fellowship pending there as well), and then I will rush back to Seattle and Kelly so that we can roadtrip out to the Rainforest Writers Retreat. I think I’ll be doing a lot of dashing, these coming months.

Somehow this will all get figured out, but right now I feel both excited and sad. It is nice to have an offer in my back pocket. I wish that offer came with a Space Needle and crummy weather.

Related Posts

Quiet time in the Rainforest
Away at the Rainforest Writers Village

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: , , ,

Back from Pasadena

August 19, 2012 By

I spent last week in Pasadena (so hot! so sunny!) for a climate workshop hosted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. The workshop itself was great, with a refreshingly diverse pool of attendees. In addition to Science, highlights included soaking in the vibe from the Mars rover Curiosity landing, and getting to spend time with local writer friends. For the former, the general sentiment from the control room was “I thought I was going to throw up.” For the latter, I spent a most excellent day with Andy, who is a tour guide after my own heart, and Anthony, and later Andy’s wife Carol. And even later in the week, Kelly and Bradley! Great conversations all around.

L.A. had more character than I was expecting. I don’t have much in the way of photos, but I loved the southern California landmarks, burgers and beers at Venice Ale House, and watching the action at the Venice Beach skate park. I also wore shorts for the first time in five years, and I left with more freckles than I arrived. My only regret was I didn’t have the opportunity to go hiking. The hills were calling to me.

Next time!

On a different topic, I encourage you to check out this interview with Norton Award juror E.C. Myers, over at The Intergalactic Academy. The Norton Award is relatively new, and is geared towards science fiction and fantasy books for young adults–which I think is a really exciting genre. Many excellent books have been nominated in years past, such as Ship Breaker and Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and the award is definitely worth keeping on your radar.

Venice Beach

Andy, Anthony, and me

Filed Under: Travel Tagged With: , ,

Happy Blogoversary: A year of practicing at social media

July 25, 2012 By

A year ago today I didn’t have a blog. I’d heard ad nauseam about the importance of a consistent online presence for writers, and I challenged myself to blog once a week for an entire year. As someone who had never ever blogged, this was an intimidating move. Some weeks I was on. Others, not so much. But I’m really proud of myself for growing my own little section of the blogosphere over the past year. And I didn’t miss a single week. Woo-hoo.

Around the same time that I fired up the blog, I also signed up for Twitter. But that was never a hardship. I took to Twitter like a cattle dog to Frisbee.

So, what have I learned from a year of social media? 1) Making friends is awesome. 2) Practice makes less sucky.

I know there are social media detractors out there. They look at social media as all promotion all the time, and promotion is icky. Yeah, yeah. But I think that’s a flawed perspective. The thing is, I can’t imagine why anyone would argue that making friends is a bad thing. I upped my online presence when I got into Viable Paradise, and that was huge for establishing connections pre-workshop. I got hugs when I arrived (love you, Fran), which is saying something. From a writer’s perspective, social media is also great for keeping tabs on the pulse of the publishing world, and for finding local writers for write-ins and critique groups. Also for maintaining and strengthening ties with all the lovely non-local people I run into at cons and various writerly events.

Perhaps those are the obvious advantages. But it’s true that social media takes time, and people often say they’ll get around to it when they have a book coming out. And it occurs to me that if you take that approach, and if you don’t have a naturally charismatic online persona, you might fail spectacularly. Over-promoting and saturating your followers is a real risk. Savvy social media users can tell when you’re being genuine and when you’re trying to sell something.

So in addition to simply wanting to meet people and make friends, I look at social media as practice. For blogging, I’m always surprised by what people find interesting, and what posts get the most hits. I experiment. I know I talk a lot about hiking and travel, but it’s because I enjoy the outdoors and enjoy writing those posts. At this point in my writing career, I don’t really see how it can hurt (unless you’re being a jerk, in which case, stop that). On Twitter, it’s easy to make etiquette gaffes so might as well get used to the system sooner rather than later. On Goodreads and other review sites, way too many authors try to game their rankings, and then get publicly bent out of shape over critical reviews. For Goodreads in particular, I suspect that if you start to use the system as a book lover rather than an author, it gives a better baseline for what the site is all about. And hopefully you can avoid thinking that everyone is out to get you. It’s not all about you, and perhaps that’s the biggest lesson to social media.

All that said, this past year was a bit of an experiment. Welcome to Year 2 of the blog! I’m going to tidy up the archives soon and remove some of the detritus. Now that I have a better handle on what I want my blog to be, I’m not going to force myself to post every single week–I’m thinking biweekly will be more manageable. In case you’re curious, my six most popular posts over the past year were the following:

  • Ode to Scrivener, plus hot tips – The popularity of this post makes me happy. I love Scrivener, and I love pushing people at this powerful and shiny piece of software. Not surprisingly, this post saw a lot of action during and immediately following NaNoWriMo.
  • Sasquatch territory – Lesson learned, if you want to get a lot of random hits, include cryptozoology-themed titles. Sigh. Every time the search string “sasquatch sightings” pointed someone at my blog, I wanted to cry. There are no sasquatches in this post (or, you know, anywhere); it’s just a hike report.
  • All-new short fiction revision checklist – Posts on writing process and craft are popular, especially when they include the word “checklist.” Everyone loves a checklist.
  • Best books read in 2011 – Hooray, share the book love! I will definitely be doing another book round-up for 2012. I expect there were be a lot of YA science fiction in it.
  • The submission cycle as a story trunk – Some musings on submitting to short fiction markets. I got a boost in traffic through my writer friends Kelly and Fran, who posted on similar topics during an informal blog tour of sorts.
  • A bit of a situation – In which I put on my climate-scientist hat and talk a bit about global warming.

I’ll definitely leave these posts up. If there’s anything else you have bookmarked, feel free to drop a comment on behalf of its continued existence.

ONE FREAKING YEAR! ::throws confetti::

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