19 posts tagged “pa”

Amusing story from work:  The cute young Shift Running Manager was telling me that Dave, one of the other crew members at work who will at some point in the near future be taking his Floor Manager exam, was considering cheating on his mock.  Aside from the obvious pointlessness of cheating, the cute young Shift Running Manager wanted to know how he intended to do this.  Dave replied that he would type 'AMC exam' into google and see what came up.  Well, cute young Shift Running Manager did this and guess what he found at the top of the hits?  My blog.  Apparently he had an amusing time reading it, and particularly loved my posts about Verity back in the summer.

Tee hee.  I have no idea if he still reads it, or if that's a one-off, but now I have to call him the cute young Shift Running Manager and mention him as much as realistically possible. 

The less amusing part of my shift on Tuesday was scraping ice off my car at midnight while wearing a short skirt and a thin fleece over my shirt and vest.  Knowing my luck, I'll be doing the same thing tonight and tomorrow night too.  Oh joy. 

Writerly Update

Rejection from Shimmer for TANSU.  They said:

I thought the strongest part of the story was the woman's ability to enter the furniture; that's a neat idea, and those passages held my attention very well. But I'm afraid the rest of the story did not live up to the potential of those parts. It all felt rather too convenient.

I'm not entirely sure what's convenient about it.  The only thing I can think of is that they assumed Bunia was the only person with that ability, thus it's convenient she was chosen to evaluate the furniture because she was the only one who could find out the secret.  Which means I'll be slipping in a mention that she's not the only person with this ability.  Other than that, I can't think of anything.  Once I've gone back through the story, I think I'll send it to Sybil's Garage.

I have a feeling that an entry for the Shimmer pirate issue isn't going to happen, but as the deadline is end of January there's time yet, I suppose.  Just that so far I've had the faintest of faint inklings of a plot, and I need somewhat more before I can write it. 

However, I have been working on an entry for the Iris Print 'fairy tales and fantasy' anthology, which has a deadline of 15th January.  Originally I was going to write something that followed on from SNOWDROPS, and some time I might still write the piece, but yesterday I changed my mind.  After having so much fun with the 'Juniper-Tree' fairy tale, I decided I would play around with pre-existing fairy tales / mythologies, and as I've recently stumbled across a literary form called a Triptych (where the story consists of three short stories that have some kind of connection, thematic or character or whatever - similar idea to the art form) I decided I'll tell the story in that way.  So there'll be three stories about relevant parts of the life of Isouso, my main character, and that includes the development of a relationship with another guy.  So far I've drawn on 3 Brothers Grimm tales, and there's a selkie and Baba Yaga too - and it's being wicked fun to write.   Tentative title is A TRIPTYCH.

PA is decidedly on a break.  I don't want to call it hiatus, but it's on a break.  I think I need more time before I go back to it. 

Sex, Money and... what else was it?

The cute young Shift Running Manager also thought my blog needs more sex, money and something else.  Well, can't deliver on the thing I can't remember, and nothing exciting is happening in my bank account (it's positive, hooray!), but I can deliver on the sex side of things.

- Skip the rest of this if you don't care about / don't want to know about my sex life -

So there's this guy I went to Sixth Form with (last 2 years of high school), and from pretty much the first week there's been a bit of sexual tension between us.  It's waxed and waned over the years since, but it's been there, and we made out back in 2004 but didn't do much.  When he came down to Karim's 21st we were flirting, and he offered sex, but I declined (wanted to enjoy the party with all my friends, not with just him), and he kissed another girl (he's a manwhore).  Then, at Andy's party last Friday night, we went back to my flat together and had sex.

And considering the years of sexual tension, and his bragging that he's amazing, it was.... pretty fucking anticlimatic really.  Sure, it wasn't awful, but I suspect that's more to do with me having gone 3 months without before that, so it was like "OMG penis wooooowwww.... that's it?".  I somehow doubt I'll be sleeping with him again. 

Oh, I also kissed a Chinese guy called Kenneth at the same party.  Just a little chaste kiss on the lips, but we'd been sort of flirting earlier, and we exchanged mobile numbers.  I have no idea if I actually want to go anywhere with him, but heh, we'll see. 

That's all!

My final count:

40,086 / 50,000 (80.2%)

While I couldn't hit 50k because of my cold, at least I managed to make my lowered target of 40k.  It's still a greater rate of productivity than I've shown all year.  And what I've written during November has been of surprisingly high quality - not perfect, for sure, but not dire either. 

What have I written?  I had a plan for what I would write.  Naturally, I didn't entirely stick to it:

• Painted Angels = 6,078 words
  
• Our Green Fairies = no words
• D'sil short story = 7,498 words

And then...

• Bunia's Journal = 17,811 words
• Other short stories and edits = 8,613 words

I think my biggest regret is that I didn't write more PA, but I am glad I wrote what I did for it.  The book is very close to the end now - I think there are only a handful of chapters until it's done - and I need more time to plot out exactly how the final fight is going to go down. 

Bunia has been an... interesting... muse.  I really enjoyed writing her journal, and now it's sort-of done (I haven't posted the final entry yet because I don't like it all, so sorting that out is one of the first things I'll do when I next write) I can start planning out her novel.  I never do deep plans, but I want a little bit of planning on this one because it's a quest-of-sorts (she goes questing for an interesting piece of furniture, but the collapsing Serrian Empire gets in her way) so I need to make sure it doesn't get all rambly and long and crap.  I need to know when and how she goes from A to B, and I need to keep my narration succint and interesting.  Plus, I need to figure out what exactly D'sil is doing - okay, so I know he'll be working for conflicting people, as always, but I need to be a bit more specific than that.  So I intend to do a sort-of outline - which, probably, will get hacked to pieces in the process of writing the book, but heh.  At least I have a tentative title for the book: The Ephrebet Bed, which is the piece of furniture she goes questing for. 

I do intend to work on Our Green Fairies, I just realised it's not suitable Nano-fodder after all.  The descriptive narrative style demands time and thought, rather than blindly punching out words, as walking the fine line between descriptiveness and purple-ness is tough.  I also think I need to leave it a while longer to let the characters crystallise a little more in my head. 

My vague plan is to get PA done, and in the process of doing it maybe work on TEB's outline and perhaps a handful more short stories.  Then I'll need to edit PA, and once it's all shiny and shipped away to publishers I can work on the book that comes five years after it, Renegade Star, and also TEB and OGF.  I'm sure I'll start working on those while I'm editing PA, just for a change of pace, but heh. 

However, I suspect I won't get much writing done til the end of term, in two weeks' time.  That's because I have my floor manager exam next Friday, and I need to start hard-core revising for that today.  I also have two essays to do, and I need to apply for a job.  *shakes fist at reality*  Also, to be honest, I want to give writing a brief respite after the pressures of Nano.

All in all, Nano has been a productive and good venture, and I'm glad I did it.  And now, back to reality...

Some moments I'm happy with it.  Quite a lot of the time I hate it. 

I love the beginning of my book, the first two-thirds in fact.  I think the world building and plot is strong, and the characters are interesting.  But now, working on the final chunk of chapters, I don't like what I'm writing.  I don't think it's as strong as the beginning.  I'm better at writing the early stages, hinting at various elements of the mystery through different characters.  When it's all in the air and has to be dealt with - in this case, with fighting - it just feels flat.  Dull.  But it's not like I can go "hey, mystery solved, why bother depicting the culmination of it all?"  I have to.  Otherwise the book wouldn't work.  And the ending is the ending, it's the only thing I can see happening as a result of all that's happened in the book thus far.  It would be a fairly unsatisfactory ending if the main characters weren't involved in the culmination of the war, I feel.  What's happened in all the good stuff demands it.  And hey, I do like it, and I think it could work quite well, but I only feel that some of the time. 

This is probably symptomatic of approaching the end of the book.  At least Nano is forcing me to write on it, even though it's mostly slow going.  Hopefully I'll even get all the final chapters hammered out, and can begin the joyous process of hacking it up and trying to make it work for me all the time, or at least almost all of the time. 

Fuck, some of the scenes I wrote today aren't that bad.  I think I'm being overly negative.  Hard bastard to shake, though, this negativity.  Must just press on.

......
In other news, I posted A SHADE OF YELLOW off to Interzone today.  Hopefully third time will prove the lucky one for this story. 

I am a little annoyed with the Nano counters I used in my previous posts.  I'd hoped they would continue to show my word count at the time I posted them but they actually update to show my current wordcount, which right now is...

10,115 words

Understandably, I am quite happy about this fact.  I fell behind yesterday, writing only 300 words to bring me to a total of 5,734.  This morning, lying in bed and feeling proud for waking up at 9.30, I finished the first draft of the longer, still-nameless D'sil story.  Then I wrote a whole chapter of PAINTED ANGELS.  But while working on PA, something... interesting... happened. 

Bunia prodded me.  I've been growing quickly used to this, so I was about to brush her aside in favour of Trifmara, but Bunia held her ground.  She informed me that when I write her novel, I should post it in a seperate vox account under her name, and that I should get said account right now before someone else steals her name. 

Sighing, I complied, and you can find the account - HERE!

I returned to PA, then I ate some dinner, and at the end of the PA chapter found myself less than 500 words from the target I had set myself of reaching 10k.  I decided to start penning a piece for On the Premises 1, but I was a mere paragraph into the story when Bunia smoothly stepped in my path with another declaration. 

While she accepts that I won't be starting on her novel any time soon (though I suspect I will be starting it sooner than I originally intended), she said that I should use the journal to write journal entries of what happens between TANSU and the novel.  Sighing once more, I was forced to comply.  The journal entry is in her blog, friends-locked.  To my delight it knocked me over my 10k target.

All in all, I am feeling quite satisfied with my Sunday.  I have a written a lot, and I even managed to fit in some university reading too.  Bunia is happy too, which certainly makes my life easier. 

Nano was definitely a good idea.  I haven't felt this productive in far too long. 

This November I will be participating in the wondrous Nanowrimo, the aim of which is to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month.  I'm going to bend that slightly.  Instead, I am going to write a total of 50,000 words in November, with those words falling into any of the following projects:

• Painted Angels. I would like to have a complete first draft by the end of 2006, after which I can spend a few months polishing it off before submitting it to publishers.
• Our Green Fairies.  This was originally going to be my Nano project but I realised I didn't want to limit myself to only one story.  However, I would still like to write something for this novel, so it remains in the Nano ranks.
• The short stories featuring D'sil.  They have deadlines of 15 and 31 January, meaning that I would like at least one polished and sent by the end of 2006.  I hate rushing, so they're Nano projects too.

Now that I have said in writing that I will do this, I will, or I'll kill my vague attempt at a social life trying. *grins*  I'm like that.  Earlier this year I said I'd give up chocolate for lent, not to please the god I don't believe in but to make my ex give up alcohol for lent, and even when he utterly failed to keep his side of the bargain I kept mind.  And a couple years back I said I'd eat only fruit for 5 days to support a friend who was going to do the same to lose a bit of weight, and even when she gave up after a day I still did it (well, except for the part where I figured going on a CCF overnight exercise and eating only fruit would probably kill me, so I ate the army ratpack on that).  If I say I'm going to do something, especially if it's something mildly stupid, I do it. 

November promises to be a productive month.  Only 2.5 days to go.

Sidenote:  Taking into account the clocks changing, I got 11 hours' sleep last night.  What the hell?  I do not need that much sleep!  Wasted time, wasted time.  Grr.

Sidenote 2:  Vox is playing silly buggers.  I posted this earlier, then edited it to correct a spelling mistake, after which it refused to appear on my blog page despite appearing on Rhi's neighbourhood page and the number of my October posts clarifying its existence.  Vox has also started not letting my type in the compose box unless I refresh the page.  

I'm stuck on PA again, though I'm not entirely sure why.  I'm getting to some good stuff now - finding out something very important, and then Trifmara's reaction to that.  And, soon, a big battle near Katina which will be followed by the final battle at Krak'vi. 

I think maybe I'm worried it's starting to drag a bit, that I should wrap it up faster, even though the sensible part of my mind says to just write the damn chapters and then go back and make changes.  Blegh.  It's probably just the same "getting towards the end" mental block I get when I approach the end of anything long - happened with my finished piece of mystery crap that will one day be totally reworked, and also with Statues. 

In the meantime, I've been working on short stories:

Statues - Still waiting for a response from Writers of the Future.  I reckon I'll hear from them January-ish, maybe later.  If they don't like it, I'll send it to Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine.

A Shade of Yellow - Still waiting to hear back from Sybil's Garage.  No news is, I hope, good news; a suggestion that they're having to think about what to do with my story.  If they reject it, I'll send to Apex Digest.

Tansu - This is finished and ready for submission, but I'm waiting for Sybil's Garage to respond because if they don't want aSoY then I'll send them this.  If not, I intend to send this to Shimmer.

Snowdrop - A flash fiction of 99 words, submitted to Flash Shot.  Still waiting for a response.

The Beautiful Collection - A fantasy short, just over 1,000 words, that I began in the summer and finished the other day.  I'm not completely happy with it yet, but when it's done I think I'll submit it to Midnight Street first. 

I'm also working on two pirate stories, one for Shimmer and one for Sails and Sorcery.  Both feature my latest muse, D'sil, a mercenary-pirate type.  He's certainly an interesting man to have around.  And my cross-dressing muse will have a short story of his own, but I can't figure out quite how to start it.  

My ambition is to have found a home for all of these stories by the time I submit PA to publishers. 

In the immediate future, November is nearly upon us, which means that Nanowrimo approaches...  I've pretty much decided to write a first draft of Our Green Fairies for this, simply because I feel that if I can get a first draft of it done, no matter how crappy it'll be, at least I'm one step closer to having another finished novel.

I am writing.  Just slowly at the moment. 

Naturally, on the second new chapter of Painted Angels the dreaded Chapter Hate strikes.  I wrote just over a page on MShit the other day before going to bed, and when I came back to it I didn't like it.  It just didn't feel right.  I did figure out how to restructure it, but then I got distracted by a new competition popping up on my LJ flist courtesy of the wonderful specficmarkets community. 

The competition rules are here. 

For some reason, it clicked for me.  I normally read the submissions posted on specficmarkets and think "hmm, I should do something for that" but never get round to it.  This time, something clicked in my mind.  I have since written 1,200 words of a thus-far-nameless short story, and I'm certain it will fall between the 2,000 to 5,000 words margin of the contest.  It's a weird thing, very different to my usual writing.  The moment I started, I knew it needed to be told in present tense.  It's steampunk, fantasy, with shades of horror (to suit the people who will publish the winners) - disturbing horror, that is, rather than wet-your-pants horror.  I hope, anyway, it will have that kind of horror.  Having never written for the genre before, the result will be interesting. 

With the deadline in March '07, I have plenty of time to get the thing polished off.  Not that I think it will take that long.  A couple days, probably.  There's no muse in the usual sense; just an idea that demands to be written.  And obey it I shall, because this is fun.  Good ol' diversions from chapter hate. *grins*

For the first time in a week, I have written something!  Hurrah!  Breaking up with my boyfriend sent my mind into a confused mess, but the muses have finally emerged and started prodding me once more.  The result is a brand shiny new chapter of Painted Angels, which I will post on fictionpress as soon as I find out the word to describe the interior of a troop carrier craft - the 'room' the troops all sit in.  I also delected a bunch of other stories from my fictionpress profile, ones I won't be working on for a looong while and which will be very different once they resurface, and intend to begin being active on the site in the near future.  I've fallen so far behind with some people's stories.

I wrote!  *dances*

ETA: I went for 'troop compartment' to describe where they sit in a troop carrier. 

Yesterday I went to a Neil Gaiman signing for his latest book, a collection of short stories called Fragile Things.  I had to queue for two and a half hours outside Forbidden Planet, which hurt my feet but was redeemed by reading some of the book (very good so far, I think he's better at short stories than novels; at least his narrators piss me off less), by figuring out the closing line of PA and by deciding how much of the next action scene to depict.  Then, finally, I got inside.  We'd had to write on a post-it note what we wanted him to write in the book, to make sure he got it right.  Though I doubted the necessity of writing my name, as few people get it wrong, I figured I might as well.  So I handed my book over the counter to him along with the note saying 'Alex'... and he drew a butterfly as well!  *grins madly*  Of course he has no idea how much I LOVE butterflies, but seriously, it totally justified standing in that queue for so long. 

...and I barely survived fours days without the internet.  My parents' computer spontaneously died on me (which of course makes it my fault, even though I wasn't doing anything likely to break it), and it was the only computer in the house with our internet service registered on it.  Now I'm back in London with wireless, fast broadband, and it's like being whole again.  *grins* 

In that desolate time I managed to finish the editing on what I've written of Painted Angels so far, meaning that I will next be writing new material!  Hurrah!  I also penned the beginning of what's currently titled Renegade Star, set five years after PA, but stopped myself at the point when I decided the SpecOps team would approach an aquatic base in fake sea creatures of a distinctly phallic shape.  *snerks*  So sue me, I was tired.  I thought it would be a good opportunity to show the team's camaraderie as they joked about the crafts, but this morning told myself that phallic/toilet humour is one quick way to get yourself not taken seriously so they won't be shaped like that. 

I took my mock AMC on Friday.  It went well.  Turned out the mock paper was exactly the same as the thing I'd been given to revise from, so I knew most the answers - but there were some I hadn't got round to finding out the answers to, and had hoped to avoid by not taking the same paper.  Mixed blessing, in all, but I reckon I got over 80%, which means I'll be taking the real test and taking the course (there's a week-long course to be a McDonald's Floor Manager) during term time and going back to work at Christmas in a white shirt.  I'm not going back to my London store during term time - I have too many issues there, mainly revolving around the dishonourable things they do and my inability to work with my boyfriend - so I'll be looking for temp work in bookshops (bring on the staff discount). 

Speaking of shirt colours, the demoted manager, Verity, was wearing her black shirt in work on Friday and Saturday, and she was spinning the ultimate yarn about why she's wearing a crew member shirt.  A while ago, a bunch of crew members were being trained up as a strong drive-thru team, but they thought they were being trained to be managers.  To smoothe everything over, they were made 'Service Managers': a totally made-up role that doesn't exist in the real hierachy.  Verity has been made one of those to smoothe her over.  She's been telling people that because she refuses to work in the grill area, she's been made a Service Manager, which she claims is higher than a Floor Manager.  As a member of Training Squad, I am higher than Service Managers.  *dies laughing*  Still, listening to her tell this crap was priceless.