I am home from Taos Toolbox. I am still going to go over notes and memories and fill in the blanks, including some FAQs I’m getting (the short answer is: Yes, you should apply.)

But for now I’m going to spend the last few hours of my vacation recalibrating to my almosthusband and our life.

More soon.

Today is Saturday, our first “day off” since we arrived. Naturally, nobody actually took it off. Walter posted a comment to Facebook saying that we are the hardest working class he’s ever day–I can believe it. Nobody here is fucking around.

With the notable exception of last night. We ended the week with a plotting exercise. My novel was the subject, since it needed SO MUCH help. It took a dozen people more than three hours, but by Crom we got that thing plotted. I am SO grateful to my classmates for their help. But after that we were all beat and ready to blow off some steam. We went to town, went to dinner, came back with whiskey and wine, and stayed up ’til 3:00 a.m. talking in the common room. I am continually amazed at how great everyone is: kind, smart, funny–all of the things that are most important in friends.

There is already some talk about doing retreats together in the future.

Even now, it’s Movie Night–Memento is on the tv but some of us still have our notepads and laptops out.

Today I finally finished a draft of “The Three Feats of Agani,” a story that I’ve been agonizing over for the past six months. We’ll see how critique goes.

Today Nancy talked about effective description–that it needs to be specific, tonal, and interactive. By this she means that it’s not enough to say someone has a beer–whether it’s Oly or Blue Moon matters, because it tells you something about the person. For description to be tonal, it needs to take on characteristics based on the viewpoint character’s state of mind. The shade of a tree can be cooling, sheltering, restful, or depressing and sinister, depending on who is standing in it and where their mind is at. Interactive description involves a character coming into contact with the thing being described. So sure the coverlet is red, but standing in a room saying the coverlet is red is just kind of boring, so you say instead that she threw the red coverlet to the floor.

This came up a lot during the critique of my novel excerpt. I have what Nancy calls “White Room Syndrome,” and I know it. I even have “White City Syndrome” because I’ve been afraid to just go ahead and decide what city it’s taking place in (Minneapolis is where I originally thought it should be, and I think I’ll just go with it). I have a much easier time imagining people interacting with each other than with their environments, so there’s a lot of scene-setting that just hasn’t happened, or in some cases, happened too late. So I have a lot of work to do in that area.

Walter talked more about plotting today, which is another area where I am in sore need of help. I won’t recount his entire lecture here, but some of the techniques for building plot that he went over are:

-Doubling, where the main character’s problems and situation are mirrored by another character, who takes a different approach to it.
-Conflict.
-Back story.
-Side story, subplot. Subplots should reflect on main character and his/her problems.
-Foreshadowing. Crucial for surprises, particularly changes in character.
-Red Herring.
-Deleted affair, where the entire story occurs immediately after an event we never see, such as a war.
-Raising the stakes.
-Reveals and reversals.
-Literalizing the metaphor.
-Pyrrhic victory.
-Narrative hook.
-Frame story and framing device.

In Found Objects I’m trying to use doubling, side story/subplots, and reveals and reversals. We’ll see what else I end up with. I apologized again to the class for not having my outline done, and Walter asked if I would mind having my novel used in a class plotting exercise on Friday. Mind? I am SO GRATEFUL for the help! I really want this thing to work–I love the characters and theme but damn do I not know how to plot something as long as a novel. Short stories, no probem. Novels, I’m at a total loss.

The class really seems to be gelling. They’re all just such nice people, sincere and pleasant to be around. I wish we had a little more time to socialize, but we’re all working too hard for now. Maybe this weekend.

So far, so good. My only complaint is that my stomach hasn’t stopped hurting since I got up here. I was talking to my suitemate and she said hers did the same thing at high elevations in Colorado. It’s pain, not queasiness, which would be more readily associated with the elevation–but then when everyone in the house has the stomach flu and is hurling I just get pain for several days, so maybe this is what queasy feels like to me. It’s worst when I eat, so dinner is kind of a tense affair for me as I try not to grimace my way through a delicious meal. I’m really hoping it resolves soon, because it sucks and it’s making it hard to sleep, or eat, or smile.

Our assignment tonight was to write a paragraph of no more than seven sentences describing a person alone in a room in a house, doing something. I still have that and one more critique to do, so I’d better get to it.

More tomorrow!

So it started today, for real. Got up at 7:00 and was in the common room by 8:00, finishing up a critique. People filtered in and we got started right on time.

Nancy talked today about writing in scenes, and the necessary elements of a scene:

• Orientation – where, when, who
• Purpose – advances plot, deeps characterization
• Dramatization – dialog, action, description, thought
• Tension – what the character wants
• Ending

Walter discussed plot, and gave us handouts on Lester Dent’s Master Plot Formula, and Campbell’s Hero’s Journey (as examples of plots and how to understand them–he wasn’t advocating their use.) Our assignment for tonight was to pick an existing movie, break down the plot, find the turning point, and then write a different ending. This could be in synopsis form, or we could actually write it out if we wanted. I summarized. I picked The Truman Show.

Apart from workshop time and dinner I’ve been in my room, reading for tomorrow’s session, working on that assignment, and thinking about which project I’m going to work on for next week.

Tomorrow my poor little novel is up for critique–based on some things Nancy said this morning during her lecture I know what some of the problems are that my classmates will undoubtedly be commenting on. “White Box Syndrome” struck me in particular–I have had a hell of a time setting the scene in the second chapter, so I fully expect to be called out on that.

It’s funny, I found myself severely rattled while giving my two minutes of notes to my fellows on their work, but I’m not nervous about my own being critiqued at all. Maybe it’s because I already think it’s weak, so I figure I can’t really be disillusioned. I’m certainly not here because I think it’s great, or even good–if I thought it was good I’d be asking Wendy and John to read it, and if I thought it was great I’d be querying agents. (I wonder if I will ever think it’s great?)

Oh and Nancy let me off the hook on the outline/synopsis–she says she can’t write the damned things either. So we’ll see if anyone thinks they’d want to read on without knowing what I had planned next.

My classmates are all smart, talented, serious writers. It’s nice to be back in a workshop setting–it feels a lot like the SBWC workshops, really, except that we’re critiquing more pages. I miss John and the kids already, but it’s familiar, and comfortable, even so far away from home.

I am writing this from a tiny California Pizza Kitchen in a terminal in my least favorite airport in the world, namely LAX. I am assured that it is only my least favorite because I haven’t been through Chicago O’Hare. I happily concede this point.

The last time I sat in this spot, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a California Pizza Kitchen–I think it may have been a Burger King. But I recognize the mural behind me–I have pictures of it. The last time I was here I was on my way to Defcon in Vegas. This time I’m on my way to Taos Toolbox.

I haven’t had time to get excited about it. Wedding stuff took up every spare minute of the past couple of weeks–I didn’t even get my outline done in time. Clearly I have a gift for planning major life events. I haven’t been able to get excited about the wedding, actually, either–there’s still too much to do. I’ll probably get excited half an hour before the music starts, when there’s nothing left for me to do or worry about getting done.

I wonder if I’ll be able to turn all of that off for the next two weeks and just be a writer. The stuff that needs doing I mostly need to be home to do, so worrying about it will be particularly ineffective.

The novel I’m workshopping is an urban fantasy absolutely riddled with plot holes. This makes me feel incompetent, like I’m going to be the remedial kid in class. John assures me that a workshop is a perfect place to get help in working out those plot holes. He is usually right about most things.

I’m fond of the characters, though, and many of the ideas, so I hope that my classmates and instructors will find something worth fixing in it.

I started reading my classmates’ manuscripts on the first leg of the journey, and am preparing to get my crit on. We have two minutes to present our notes. I haven’t done face to face critique in a couple of years now.

I should get as much done as I can now–I only got four hours of sleep, so the longer I’m up the less likely it is that I’ll be coherent. Class starts at 10:00 tomorrow morning–I won’t get in to Taos until about 9:30 tonight. I wonder if people will be exhausted from travel and hiding in their rooms, or if the adrenaline will kick in and everyone will want to hang out and get to know each other?

–

Update: Exhausted. Classmate Jeff and I were the last to arrive at 11:00 p.m. (it was much further from ABQ than we thought! Good thing we like each other) Have met my suitemate, who waited up for me. Passing out now. Workshop begins at 10:00 a.m. More tomorrow!

So, yeah. Things are a little busy. Busier even than I thought they were–for some reason I’ve been thinking I had a month until Taos Toolbox. I don’t. I have 16 days. Plus a wedding and two birthdays to plan. I haven’t even bought my plane ticket.

I finally finished a draft of that short story I was rewriting and sent that off to a beta reader today, who came back with some great comments. It really needs a solid weekend of grooming before it’ll be ready to send out. Maybe I’ll have time at Taos, maybe not. Depends on how far ahead of the game I can get before I go. Right now I’m more worried about just trying to not be so far behind. I have to write my synopsis from scratch, starting now, and I still have some more rewriting to do on the opening chapters of the novel, and then I need to send those out to my classmates, who will meanwhile be sending theirs for us to read. Plus a ton of Lightspeed stuff.

I am panicking.

A couple of cool things happened this week. First, we learned that Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 is out, and John immediately bought a copy. (I should get a contributor’s copy at some point, but I don’t know when.) Seriously, having a story included in something like that is something that seemed so impossible I never even bothered to daydream about it. And yet, there it is, sitting on the table, with my name in it. People are going to read that. (I hope they like it.)

So that was Monday. On Tuesday John and I went and spoke to the spec fic class at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. I was nervous and severely underslept, but it still seemed to go pretty well. I was pleased to see that most of the class is writing short fiction, and surprised to learn that most of them had never submitted their work to a magazine before. We took some Lightspeed print samplers with us and let them know how to find a market and write a cover letter, advised them not to pre-reject their own stories, and told them where they could continue their spec fic education after they leave the conference.

I’ve now attended SBWC as a student, a volunteer, a staff member, and a guest. All that remains is faculty. :) (Some day!) It was a little strange, being the person people were listening to for answers instead of being the one with a thousand questions. It was a strong and very positive reminder of just how much has happened in the past two years.

Back to the panic: I am probably going to largely disappear for the next couple of weeks, both from the blog and from Twitter. I need to seriously buckle down. I can’t believe the way time got away from me. I am going to have to work very hard to get caught up and make sure I’m ready for Taos. So if I’m slow replying to emails or not terribly chatty, please don’t take it personally!

Wish me luck.

Tools: Written outline, printed draft, scissors, tape, post-its, blue pen, red pen, lots of floor space.

Where we left off yesterday in the checklist:

• Write a new beginning – done
• Do a basic rewrite of the existing story, smoothe out prose – done
• Fine-tune character motivations – done
• Print draft, get out the scissors and tape, evaluate structure, fix – in progress
• Improve beats, heighten tension
• Groom for economy: cut, cut, cut!
• Groom for voice. Find the section that reads exactly the way I want it to, get that voice in my head, and carry it through each paragraph.
• Read aloud/proofread, fix anything that I stumble over
• PROFIT. I mean…what? Submit, and cross tentacles.

I spent a little time just writing down the outline and identifying the acts and scenes. I feel pretty good about the general structure, but I’m definitely moving some things around.

I only got through half of the story tonight, but I have a narration that’s way overdue that I need to finish editing, so the second half will have to wait. That’s probably best anyway; I’d been focusing on it for two straight hours and was losing stream. Better to come back to the second half fresh tomorrow.

The rewrite is coming along pretty well, I think. I really enjoy the editing process–first drafts are like pulling teeth for me, but editing a story into shape afterward is great fun. I feel like this is exactly what I needed. I’m looking forward to getting this one out the door, but there’s a lot of work to be done first. I’m taking it in steps:

• Write a new beginning – done
• Do a basic rewrite of the existing story, smoothe out prose – done
• Fine-tune character motivations – in progress
• Print draft, get out the scissors and tape, evaluate structure, fix
• Improve beats, heighten tension
• Groom for economy: cut, cut, cut!
• Groom for voice. Find the section that reads exactly the way I want it to, get that voice in my head, and carry it through each paragraph.
• Read aloud/proofread, fix anything that I stumble over
• PROFIT. I mean…what? Submit, and cross tentacles.

Those are the steps that seem to produce the results I’m happiest with. I’m hoping to get this done by the end of the weekend. I’m fond of this story and hope that I can do it justice finally. (It is kind of funny to think that John rejected this story back in 2006, long before I had any idea who he was.)

In other news, the standing desk experience is improving. The first three days were pretty painful, but today wasn’t too bad. I find that I need to stretch and/or sit every two hours or so. Moving helps, breaks help, but by the end of the day I’m definitely ready to get off my feet. We’ll see how it is at the end of this week.

In general I’m feeling pretty good. I feel like these are two good things for me to be doing right now. The next three months promise to be absolutely crazy, so I’m enjoying slowing down a little and focusing on the work.

I’m sure I’m not the only person this happens to: Stuff starts happening in life, and the creative waters just dry up. There’s so much on your mind, it’s impossible to make up new problems for your characters to solve–you’re too busy trying to solve your own. That’s where I’m at right now. Planning a wedding, trying to get a kid into college, stressing over a partially written novel with a workshop deadline, various financial concerns, day job nonsense–it’s like each of them is a stone tossed in the well, until all of the water has been displaced, and my mind is just a dark hole full of rocks.

It’s terrible timing. I have a little free time on my hands right now, with John traveling, and I’ve sat at the keys two nights in a row unable to find anything to say. This was supposed to be my super-productive time.

The problem is that when I’m not writing, there hardly seems to be a reason to get up in the morning. Seriously. I’ll think melodramatic things like “What’s the point? I can’t write.” I did exactly that this morning. I lay there and thought about my novel and short stories in progress and just couldn’t find it in me to care about my characters’ troubles and goals, and decide what happens next.

So I decided to fix an old, broken story instead. It was the second story I trunked. Reading it now is pretty painful–there is some really terrible writing in there! But the heart of the story is good, and I think it can be saved. I’ve been at it for a couple of hours now. This is something I can probably have out the door by the end of the week, and I think that will go a long way toward helping me feel less useless.

I don’t know whether it’ll do anything to free up my mind for new material. That might only happen when these other life things get resolved.

What do you do when the well runs dry?

Literally.

When you have friends like fitness professional Sandra Wickham it’s pretty hard to keep ignoring your fitness or lack thereof. (Also hard to ignore is when one’s clothing no longer fits. Since I started working from home a year and a half ago I have “grown” two full dress sizes.) A lot of my friends are currently working on their fitness levels, some of them directly with Sandra using her Virtual Bootcamp program, others on their own.

In the past year I’ve been slowly working out what does and doesn’t work for me. Big changes that require a lot of will power don’t, so a sudden change in what I eat results in disaster after a week or two. I’m a good sprinter, but a lousy long-distance runner (metaphorically speaking. Literally speaking I’m lousy at both.) I’ve slowly honed my diet so that I know what my caloric intake is, I avoid fats, eat a lot of vegetables, and don’t eat a lot of processed anything.

That’s been a step in the right direction, but obviously I needed exercise, too. Again, slow changes: I got the 100 Pushups and 200 Situps apps for my iPhone. I do “modified” pushups–the ones where I’m on my knees instead of toes. Right now I can do 65 pretty comfortably (in five sets, which the app calculates for me.) Once I get to 100 I want to start the program over with real pushups.

So Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I do my pushups and situps followed by twenty minutes of cardio, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I do thirty to forty minutes of cardio. (I just pushed past the thirty minute mark this week. Took me a while.)

I certainly feel better having made those changes, but it’s not enough. I started reading about how bad sitting all day is (and I was sitting roughly 15 hours a day) and how it slows a person’s metabolism waaaaay down. It also puts us at higher risk for heart disease and all manner of horrible things. So today I made the switch to a standing desk.

I had read that the first three days or so are pretty hard, and it’s true. I made the change at 2:00 p.m. today and by 5:00 my feet and legs were definitely ready for me to get the hell off them, thank you very much.

But I immediately discovered benefits that I didn’t expect. I was able to focus better. I put on some music and caught myself dancing. I wasn’t cold–and I am always cold. Normally I sit with my space heater on all day, but not today. I felt like getting out of my sweats and into, you know, grownup clothes. My whole attitude was different.

I imagine that tomorrow I’ll be hurting by the end of the day, but it should start to improve after that. My writing desk (in a different part of the house) will remain a sitting desk, but I don’t spend much time here (sadly.)

I’m really hopeful that I will see changes in how I feel and how I look. I know other people are thinking about making the change, so I’ll be sure to report back on any progress or setbacks.