Oh boy. It's been a long time. (Awesome at the bottom)

I don't even know what to do with myself--I am four days away from finishing grad school, and it's making me a weeeeee bit crazy.  Even for me, crazy.  Cray-cray.

I am 40,000 words into the second Rainey book.  She is cranky in this one, but then, so am I.  I can say with some certainty that facebook is at least partially responsible in both cases, for forcing me to have difficult conversations with old friends.  I knew getting that account was a bad idea; its like a private reality tv station for each of us.

But then...so is a blog, really.

See what I mean about cray-cray?  On the other hand, I am fervently hoping both of these will be available on amazon by the end of the summer, and now wouldn't that just be something.  Wow.

Coolest thing I've seen in the last two months:  http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix.  Seriously.  Check it out, you'll love it.

There is a lot of whining in the post below, and a little awesome. Skip to the bottom for awesome.

I'm listening to my upstairs neighbors root around in the basement downstairs.  Supposedly we were going to have that little number to ourselves, but.  Such is the way of landlords.

So now they have access to two parking spots and three floors out of the house, while we are barely holding on to two spots and one floor.

I didn't actually start this entry to whine, but whining seems to interfere with a lot of what I'm doing lately; I think it's at least partially due to the fact that I wanted to have my book published by the end of March, and we are now halfway through April.  I am really grateful to the enormous number of people contributing to it's life, but having spread the necessary jobs around so thin I also find I'm biting my nails and working hard on respecting the pace of other folks.  In other words, publishing a book, so far, is a lot like having a wedding: you are dependent on the kindness of the people who love you, and thus very grateful while also nervous and hand-bitey and ready for the whole thing to be done.

My natural project speed, as I may have mentioned, is totally bipolar.  The book in question was written in roughly two weeks (55,000 words), edited in one, and is now waiting (2.5 months) for a couple additional comments/edits.  I'm ready to let Rainey go meet some new friends, basically.  And start writing about pirates.  Cause that's how.  I have two other books at roughly 30,000 words a piece and one that needs editing...and has for a year.  Tri-polar, maybe.  Quad-poltastic.

I found the following video via Bust; as always, a little caution is advised--not only because the articles on Bust may be better suited to Older Young Adults (acronym OYA, pronounced OH YEAH!) but because once again...you are about to fall in love...over the internets.

You've been warned.  The associated blog is, as they say here in Massachusetts, wicked.

In case you were curious:

I CANNOT get the song that starts in this video at 8:00 out of my head.  

CANNOT.

You may recognize Darren Criss, of Glee fame, and Nick Lang, of Starkid fame (they are both really famed of the latter, or however that phrase should work), and if you don't, you are about to fall in lurve over the internets.  A dangerous business best avoided in most cases, but in this one, you won't be able to help yourself.

The song is in a play that has a Big Starkids Only theme, and I didn't want to link to it...on the bizarre off-hand chance that someday someone a lil too young for it will be reading this blog.  Hopefully, they will not have found this blog through my twitter account, where I have yet to successfully filter myself.  If, however, you do read my heathen thoughts there, you may remember that once upon a time I said I would gladly be a bigamist in the case of Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez, should they ever amorphize into a single beast with a name like...Lichtey Ropez.  For example.  In the Big Starkids Only play, Joey Richter sings this song to another beautiful, amazing starkid, Jaime Lyn Beatty...Thus the need for an awesomeness tag (really, a recursive awesomeness tag would be ideal, but.  There's only so much nerd I'm willing to cop to at any given time).

In case you were wondering (different, but similar, to a state of curiosity), I have no filter in real life.  My face is an open book, as the saying goes, and my mouth usually provides the footnotes, for better or worse.

I haven't yet had the time to make myself sit down and re-write the opening to Rainey's Mystery Numba One, which is the part I think needs the most work.  However, one of my good friends stayed up late to read it, and told me she loved it, and it needed to be published...So, this was a great week, in other words.

Back to business.  But seriously, see if you don't just find yourself humming this later...wait...just wait...there's something I need to say...

Wishes

Aerial work and Dark Dark Dark

This photo was taken during an art installation in the Netherlands by Tod Seelie; the Miss Rockaway Armada traversed the globe with their traveling art barges and wooed the masses with circus magic and street art.

Sometimes I think it'd be nice to do something like that.  I imagine that was the thought those folks had just before they actually went and did it.  It's similar to the thought I had when I decided to actually send out my last book to my friends for some feedback.

Sometimes just asking to be recognized as who you are feels reckless and brave, which strikes me as backwards.

The one friend who did read it said he loved my book.  "Nancy Drew at Monster High School!  Brilliant!"  It made it a lot easier to believe that they are worth sharing--I can't help but write them.  It's that second part that's tough.

But I think I would've loved my main character when I was her age.  The summer between eighth and ninth grade, when I was fourteen, I was mad for adventure.  I see the girl in that photo above dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, and remember my best friends and how much we laughed and did ridiculous things just to do them--dancing in puddles while it rained, scrambling up trees, taking photos of each other swinging high on the plank bench in the back yard--and I want them to find Rainey, who's currently in a different but similar kind of limbo.  Not as elegant as tissu work, but the effect is the same.  

Deep breath.  Re-write time.

On Publishing

I've been doing a lot of thinking.  Scheming, in fact.

It was hard to write that first line without finding something punchy and funny to put after it, because I'm embarrassed (still!  Why!?!) whenever I write about this writing thing like it's a thing.  It is so, so hard not to constantly be self-deprecating, just because that's so, so much easier than being vulnerable to disappointment.

So.  Scheming.

I have found that I have no interest in pursuing traditional publishing.

A lot of indie writers sound, in some ways, as if they are justifying this position by having a miserable history with the entire traditional trajectory--query, rejection, to the milliontieth degree, until finally, agent, contract, advance, published!  You know what?  As I think I covered in the first paragraph, I don't need all of that rejection in my life.  My willingness to be needlessly punished and to prove my valor through humbly submitting to said punishment is done; I mean, I went to grad school.  That's the last major deposit in to the internal pain bank I'm willing to make when people I love aren't involved.  But for many writers, particularly successful ones, it seems like explaining their litany of failures is necessary to justify their (incredibly lucrative) lapse into self-publishing.

In other lines of work, self-employment is valued as the kind of American, wholesome enterprise our collectively capitalist butts are trained to love.  I was once a self-employed contractor; I've worked for them as hourly help many times.  It was way better than anything I ever managed to achieve as a dutiful cog in a major consumer business model.  And by 'better,' I really mean 'freeing,' 'empowering,' 'meaningful,' and 'satisfying.'  In fact, I gave the corporate consumer business model a try a couple of times, and it sucked in every suit.  There is a lot to say about these things, but they'll have to wait--I want to get back to how this generally relates to the business of writing.

Now, Amazon.com is a monster consumer business.  So is Smashwords, or any of the big vanity presses currently making millionaires out of dreamers in the writer-scape.  But being an independent contractor working for a monster still manages to be freeing, meaningful and empowering in ways that dealing with the traditional publishing model is apparently not.  Along with the successful writers saying how many times they were rejected, there are traditionally published successful writers warning noobs on all their blogs that getting paid to write is really hard, don't quit your day job, etc.  So how do I avoid the rejection and the shame and still share what I've made with that fourteen year old version of myself?

I avoid traditional publishing.

Former jokes aside, I didn't want to become an occupational therapist to become rich, and I didn't start writing as an elementary school kid to do that either.  The fact is, like many stubborn people that haven't fit well in any corporate model previously, I wasn't a good bet to go through the process to begin with.  I love deciding what I'm going to do with myself each day.  I play well with others, but not when they want to take my personal power away.  No thanks.  Not into it.  So I don't want a list of rejections, or the feeling of vindictive satisfaction when I succeed anyway, or the bitter satisfaction when I don't that if I'd only found the right heading for my query, if I'd only...Nah.

I just want to find readers.  That's it.  And I don't need them to do it any more.

There had to be a reason I have nine books and not a single draft of a single query--I just kept putting it off, and wondering why.  This must've been it.

Good to know.

Heroes

Dr. Amy Lehman was profiled in The Daily Beast a while back, and when I read her story, I was immediately enthralled with her crazy, amazing, ambitious, tattooed mission.

I am generally wary of falling in love over the internets, but I kinda lurve her anyway.

Her story is intriguing also because it involves the recreation of self after a major disappointment, which all of us can relate to, I'm sure.  Her right arm was damaged as a child by a neurological disorder, and she is unable to perform surgery; as a thoracic surgeon, however, she's more than qualified and capable of fueling a new dream across the Atlantic Ocean and into Lake Taganyika.  She's created a whole new level of awesome by fusing the power of her imagination with reality.  As a writer, I gotta love it, and as a human being, I can't help but be a little bit in awe.

This photo was lifted from here, which is also a recap of The Daily Beast's Women in the World Summit.  Some of their speakers I find shrug-worthy, but others are definitely going to find their way into a future post as heroes I unwittingly swoon over.  Not sure how they'll feel about it, but that's kinda what blogs are for.  If someone is magically patrolling the internets and sees this, today is the last day of live broadcasts from the summit!  Check it out, it's a lot of awesome at once.

Goodreads

Is pretty rockin.  I'm still trying to get used to navigating the format there--I goofed up and didn't mark Cleopatra as "currently reading," so I had to go back and figure out how to change that--but I like it.  I like the trivia function, and I love all the book lists.  Wow.

Not as in love with the kindleboards, but only because when I post in a thread I get bumped back out into the main board--why not just take me back to the thread?  Why you gotta do me like that, Amazon?

And all I can think of to tweet is ominous threats while I picture Tina Turner; maybe I need to listen to some of her music and get it out of my system.  What's love got to do with it, anyway?

Okay, bad example.  (Everything is the answer that popped up in my head.)

I've had evaluations to write all week, and my Pre-K and developmental groups to plan, and all this means no writing.  Which is tough.

I'm chewing on my paws to get my first draft back from one of my beta-readers.  There are already things I know I want to change but I don't want to start until someone says whether or not it's worth it with that draft at all.  I love the concept, but I'm not afraid to throw away major parts if they don't work for the reader to begin with.  I just want to start.