If so, Hi!

I've fallen into the gay Chinese wizard Fandom hole, and been drawing and doing digital art more.

What about you?

I don't even know who is still here, but I can't let Facebook and the like continue to be too much of my life, just for moral reasons. So here I am.

I'm also kind of retreating from the awfulness that is the state of the world at large. I'm fairly happy with my own small corner of life, even if my environment and the national conscience of the country where I live are both going to complete shit.

I received a kidney transplant in December, as a part of the national kidney exchange. My dear husband donated a kidney to a stranger, and stranger donated one to me. I think there were 13 recipient/donor pairs in the exchange, and I can only hope that all of them are doing as phenomenally as I am. Seriously, very mind side effects, if any. They had to wait to taper some of my meds because I could not get one of the others for a little while due to the pandemic, but I'm three months back on schedule now. If there is any effect of the meds, it's probably that my face isn't as thin as it used to be. One of the meds can give you the munchies and make your face a little full. I haven't gained weight, so it's probably the medicine.

In any case, I'm super healthy and very lucky.

***

Recent obsessions include the video game /farming sim STARDEW VALLEY, and the Chinese drama The Untamed, based on the BL novel Mo Dao Zu Shi (translated as either Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation or Founder of Diabolism). It's freaking amazing and I love it. It's fifty episodes of the most fucking romantic shit that has ever been in my eyes. Here is trailer with english subtitles, though you may have to turn on captions to see them:




So, who's still here?

Even though members of my household have been going around muttering things like "Moffat must die", I am still personally hopeful about what is to come with Sherlock and Doctor Who. So there.

This made me LOL:



I do not know where it came from originally, but I thought narniadear and abrynne might be amused by it.

Also by this:




I continue to travel hopefully. :)

So, I entered the Baker's Dozen Agent Auction over at Miss Snark's First Victim. There were 25 slots for adult fiction, and up to 200 submissions were accepted for those 25 slots. (Submissions were a logline and first 250 words.

I was all excited that I got in, because I thought, "Hey, my logline doesn't suck!"

How it works is, they put up the submissions that made the cut on November 29th. Everyone who got in had to critique a certain number of the submissions, but they were all open to internet criticism, too.

One of the perks for those who made the cut was a critique of your submission by a pro writer and an editor in your category (Adult, YA, or Mid-Grade). After they were open to critiques, I realized that the criticism didn't bother me. Like, I was honestly able to listen dispassionately. That was huge, but I didn't mention it because I didn't want to jinx it. Like, as soon as I said, "Wow, critique doesn't hurt me anymore!" I'd be dooming myself to a truly spectacular breakdown. ;)

Yesterday was the auction. How that works is that the minimum bid is 5 pages. Then bids must be 20 pages higher (at least) than the last bid, and you can't bid a full manuscript until there are at least five bids. I checked just before lunch, and was pleased to see the top bid was 50 pages. I refreshed once and saw that the high bid was now a full manuscript.

That felt nice. My Beloved took me to lunch, and when I came back, it turned out that there had been a bad bid (less than 20 pages more than a previous bid), so the moderator threw it out. This meant that the full bid was also invalid because there had not been 5 valid bids before it. Make sense? I was confused. I went to lunch thinking I'd be sending out a full MS and came back and it was down to 100 pages. But still pretty cool.

Then a third agent swooped in made the 5th bid and then bid for a full, to lock it up. This agent "won" the auction of my submission. It was odd, because I looked at her page and she doesn't list an interest in the scfi/speculative fiction genres. She does list urban fantasy, which you could call mine that, but it has no romantic tensions to speak of. (My protags both have romantic impairments.) But it's cool. Maybe she's branching out, or maybe she thinks my story might have a strong romantic subplot. Anyway, I get to send her a full MS, and she has a week long exclusive on it. I can still query the two others who bid on my story after the week is up.

My head feels asplode-y. I was not expecting that. It's not a deal, not an offer of representation or anything. But I guess it still feels validating. I had just said it was time to start querying. So.

I just compiled my 4th draft from Scrivener. It's 310 pages, and has some formatting issues. Guess I'll have to fix them fast. I'm just all O_o

I hope that it was great!bi

cafenowhere tagged me to answer ten questions about my current work-in-progress. (She tagged me just before I left town, so I apologize for the delay.) A lot of great folks have participated and I'm stoked to be part of it.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing

What is the title of your book?

Like cafenowhere, I've written two books of a trilogy. The first book is Form and Void; the second is Face of the Deep. These are just working titles, but they give the stories some shape in my head. I think of the series as The Genesis Consortium series.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I had a dream about the characters. One about Mobius, a major character in the second book, and one about Lethe, my protagonist. Not at the same time, but the second dream was just before I decided to try National Novel Writing Month. So, The first draft of Face of the Deep was written for NaNoWriMo, and finished shortly thereafter. The feedback I got from it was that my protagonist was unlikable -- basically, she cursed and was willing to consider violent solutions to her problems. I thought the same readers would not have blinked at a male character doing those things, and it really annoyed me. The prequel became all about showing how she got to that place.

What genre does your book fall under?

Because the main character has a special ability and the tech is still near-future-but-close-to-now, I'd have to go with Urban Fantasy. Not sure it fits -- no vampires or werewolves -- and it has a sort of thriller vibe, but that seems closest.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I really have no idea. One major character is called Cyrus Kane, which makes it obvious to those of you who know me that Christian Kane was a bit of a template for him. He's probably a tad old for the part, though.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book?

Arrested for a series of brutal murders she did not commit, Lethe Maya fights for her freedom and is soon caught up in a power struggle between a government agency that exists to control people with shifting abilities like hers and a mysterious cabal known only as the Genesis Consortium.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I'm going to start querying agents after the holidays. We will see.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

About four months for Face of the Deep. Form and Void took at least two years, but I was not working on it constantly. (During that time I moved house twice, homeschooled my kids and generally had a crisis about whether I'm really cut out for writing. The answer came when I realized I couldn't stop.)

What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?

Both stories have some themes in common with The Hunger Games, but a very different plot, beyond the main character making a regrettable decision to protect a family member. People in power are scapegoating shifters, so it has a mildly dystopic feel. The mystery element is a product of my love for the works of Val McDermid, Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell's more twisted pseudonym) and the mystery/crime genres in general. The killer for whose crimes Lethe is arrested is akin to a female Hannibal Lecter crossed with a T1000. None of those are technically in my genre, but there you go.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

It came out of my frustration with passive heroines in teen urban fantasy. I wanted to show that a girl doesn't need someone to rescue her, and even when bad things happen that she can't prevent, she doesn't lose her agency. I wanted a heroine with some fight, even if she starts off as a sheltered suburban girl whose worst problem before the story starts is a bad hair day. I wanted to make a character who is tougher than she knows.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

It's got mutants, shady and powerful corporations in bed with government agencies, a possibly ancient conspiracy, a sweet young thing who tries to lose her virginity and fails spectacularly, and a synesthesiac female serial killer with, like, knives for hands.

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.

I linked to Lisa at the top. I feel weird tagging people, but I would love to hear what you guys are working on, so feel free to snag this. Please talk about any creative project you're working on, be it short story, poem, novel, novella, anthology, collection--anything. It's a good exercise.

Tom Hiddleston impersonates a vilociraptor. A sexy, sexy vilociraptor:



That is all.

I hope it was/is glorious! :)

Friday night, I watched The Woman in Black with my boys and my youngest's friend Jake, who was over for a sleepover.

That is an extremely atmospheric film, and a fairly scary one. Not scary, maybe, to people who require/expect monsters or Saw levels of gore, but for an old coot like me, pretty tense. My Beloved refused to go to the theater to see it, because the trailer scared him so much.

In any case, the boys and i had plans to watch it, and we had been under the impression that Jake had several other offers for the night and would not be coming. But, he came over anyway. Robert and I told both him and William not to talk during the movie, but you might as well tell water not to be wet. Jake's a talker.

"There should be monsters. Monsters are scarier than ghosts. Ghosts aren't scary..."

Robert and I, together: Shhhhhh!

And so on. Eventually, he excused himself to William's room. I figured he'd just get his laptop out and wait for William to join him. But no.

A few minutes later, this black thing jumps out from behind the couch onto William, making a strange, blood-curdling noise. It's Jake, who had excused himself to change into a black morphsuit. He then sat down and watched the rest of the film through te mesh of his morphsuit.

Jake is a bit of a character. He is a very good actor - he's very expressive and loud, and also makes some amazingly ...um, atmospheric noises. He and William get on very very well, partly because William is just socially impaired enough not to exclude Jake for his obvious eccentricities. Not that there is anything wrong with Jake. He's actually amazing enough that if he were a grown man, he'd probably already have his own TV show. Part of his amazingness is how little he cares about fitting in, when most twelve-year-olds think that is their full time job.

What amazed me was that, when packing for a sleepover, he brought a black morphsuit, just in case.

He got us all, good.

***

The movie was creepy enough that my creepy old house -- to which I am largely accustomed -- once again became old and creepy. I hung a dress over my mirror just to sleep. (It is positioned such that when trains go by a lot of the light that makes it in the window gets cast about by it, making my bedroom full of writhing black shadows.)

Also, Dan Radcliffe grew up kind of hot. I feel a tad dirty-old-woman-ish just saying that, but... yeah.

I'm not even sure how this happened, but I've spent a few days spending time on YouTube listening to interviews and discussion programs with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher and Penn Jillette. Basically a rotating mish mash of delightfully smarmy atheism, and sometimes some very interesting and impressive discussions with people of faith.

I was especially impressed with an Australian show called Q and A.



I think the most impressive thing about it was the lack of yelling and the fact that they seemed, for the most part, to be genuinely having civil discourse. On Television. I had forgotten that was possible. I mean, I knew it was possible as a sort of hazy theory. Of course it could happen. But it was a bit like seeing an albino alligator in the wild when I actually saw it happening.

It filled me with longing, and an almost bone-deep weariness.

***

Spent the day today visiting with pals from the homeschool group. The weather was fabulous. The rain had left some temporary swampy areas in the green of the park, and many water birds had moved over from the lagoon to reap the surprised insects from the waterlogged areas. It was just lovely.

I spoke a bit with the lady whom I always liked, but who went a tad crazy on me on Facebook before I left, and found it very easy to be nice and positive and loving toward her. She's been trying to conceive for six years, and just found out she's pregnant, so it was easy to share her joy. Also, I had read and copy-edited her daughter's submission to the NOCCA Creative Writing program, and I was very anxious to encourage her. (The daughter had approached me independently of her mom.) She writes well. Incredibly well for a twelve year old, and she has the disposition to write and read quite a lot. I get that fluttery feeling from her work that I got in the past from writers I worked with who have become really successful. All the elements are there, and I'm really quite antsy to support and nurture them in her, in any way I can. But I'll let her come to me, if she wants.

If I have a superpower, it might be that I can see the greatness in others. That is, at least, the superpower I hope I have. :D

***

Visiting with another one of the moms was also great fun. She was always very encouraging to me, and always remarks on how nice I am to everyone, and how diplomatic she's seen me be under stress. That's encouraging, because that is who I want to be, surely.

I ended up speaking with her very passionately about some things, without even realizing it until she pointed it out. I'm usually a thinker, a muller-over-of-things, but for the first time in a great while I spoke out loud of things that are very important to me.

Which kind of gave me an idea about something I might just have to do.