what

I'm in the middle of putting together applications for writing fellowships, which is basically the same thing as applying to college... again... and they all require a statement of plans, the parameters of which are deliberately vague. (Damn modern writers and their emphasis on self-derived forms.)

Writing a statement of plans has been more difficult than I thought it would be. It's a dance of delicacy between candor and professionalism--clear and specific, but not too confessional. Not as sterile as a resume nor as goopy as a diary entry. Not too flip, either, which tends to be my refuge. Even the content is troublesome... these are highly selective workshops, but they're still workshops. How am I supposed to resolve "I'm super awesome and you should accept me" with "I need your help and you should offer it to me"? And how do I do this when my struggles with writing tend to be mostly internal, and I'd probably benefit more from cognitive therapy or astral projection than sitting in a room soaking up surface-level feedback?

More to the point, how do I expect to nail this sale in a pool of 1400 applicants when I've never been able to get even the most basic writing or editing job? (Yes, being fifth out of five in a bid for four spots on the Prism board still haunts me.)

More more to the point, why am I bothering with this at all when some guy in my fiction class just turned in a story that blew me the hell away and encapsulates everything I've ever thought about saying in my own writing, but did it more beautifully and elegantly than I would ever be capable of?

the whinge stops here

In an effort to steamroll through my novel-block, I pledge to write 5000 words a day for thirty days. On the thirty-first day I'll be flying back to Canada, at which point I'll at least have... something, if not a finished draft. I will apply out-of-order scenes and scene rewrites toward the word count as long as work is done. Hopefully a pace like that will prompt me to just get the crud out instead of fretting over every word choice, but we'll see.

whinge

Last week I finished a book titled Watch Your Mouth, which is... I wouldn't call it experimental per se, but it adopts the conceit of being an opera told in book form. I found this both charming and irritating at various points in the telling (I do not need to be told what the instrumentals are every time a character exits the room, thanks). It was really just a charming and irritating book in general. Anyway, the thing ends with all the major characters getting messily slaughtered by a giant golem, and I thought, man--I would love to do that to all the characters in my thesis. Not at the end of the book, but right now. Eat clay and die, and never trouble me again.

I really hate novels.

Yes, I've spent all summer in an air conditioned house eating pâté from a silver spoon and fretting about words on a page no one's ever going to see. My life is so hard.

in solitary

Interesting post on Strictly Writing this morning about writing commercially versus writing personally:

http://strictlywriting.blogspot.com/2009/06/dont-tell-me-to-write-for-fun.html

What stood out to me was this bit --

For me, things are better if shared. When my husband is out I find I cannot watch a film. I cannot cook a meal. It’s channel-surfing and snacks on the sofa – alone. And that’s how satisfying I would find it to write a story and never show it to the world.

Whoa, that is so not me. All my hobbies are solitary. I actually get uncomfortable watching movies and TV with other people; I usually hoard all the DVDs in my room for privacy or wait for my roommates/family to take a vacation before I venture out to use the good stuff in the living room. And I'm rarely happier than when I'm holed up doing something by myself. I wonder if that's related to my avoidance of submitting things. Hmm, writing as a social activity... who knew?

Internet is different, of course, for whatever reason. Also sporting events. Happy to gang up for those. Weird.

scattershot

A few weeks ago, I heard an interesting story from the new staff of PRISM, which is the literary magazine run out of my grad program. Every year, the magazine runs contests in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. This one dude, when notified that his entry had won second place in the poetry contest, huffily wrote back declining second place--the runner-up award wasn't enough money and he wanted to be free to shop the poem elsewhere. Apparently this guy bases his entire submission process around contests and maximizing the returns he gets from them. Pretty mercenary (if not dick) of him, but it also makes a bit of sense. And it made room for someone further down the list, so... good?

In any case, this tale inserted the idea of contests into my head. While I don't plan to go around balking at anyone who doesn't leap at the chance to throw money at me, I think it might be an interesting place to start my foray into literary rags. I do keep hearing how the majority of magazine contest submissions are unpublishable garbage, so odds of making the shortlist are high for anyone with a modicum of objective self-judgment. I think I have that...

So I've identified and vetted eight content-appropriate contests with deadlines in June, and the plan is to enter them all. I doubt I'll have enough material prepared by then to actually enter every one, but setting the bar high might mean I'll get to some. A few. More than zero.

In an effort to fill out my submission pool, I dug into my old computer and took a look at some of the stuff I did during my undergrad... the idea being that I could just grind these old drafts through the sausage-maker of my new brilliance and come up with something acceptable. Honestly, I'm kind of astounded at how different this undergrad stuff is from what I'm doing now--so spare, so minimalist, so not-in-first-person-full-of-ponderous-hand-wringing. I wouldn't say it's better, necessarily, but I think it takes a better approach. Comes from a better place. I think I'll enjoy revising these for the final product that will come out, but I'll probably also spend a lot of time whinging and wondering where that "better approach" went to in my time off school.

half the battle

So first I was like: okay, I'm gonna get over myself and start submitting things this summer.

And then I was like: oh wait, I don't have anything finished.

Write first, then submit. Is that how it works?

FW fatigue

I belong to the forum at GameFAQs, a site for video game enthusiasts where probably 95% of the membership falls between the ages of 14 and 17. The forum is divided into hundreds of subforums, some for general interest stuff like movies, TV, and, yes, books, literature, and writing. I'm both surprised and not by the fact that more intelligent and thought-provoking discussion goes on there in a day than has come up on fantasy-writers.org in the past few months. It's not a genre thing, either--most of the members there are fantasy fans, being gamers, and there's a lot of interesting discussion of classic and contemporary speculative fiction.

It seems like a lot of FW members are satisfied posting mostly (or in some cases exclusively) in pursuit of silly social threads and other non-writing-related things. And then there's this persistent undercurrent of willful incuriousness, the rejection of "elitist academia" and such that always rubs me the wrong way. I don't know why it bothers me so much. It's not like any of it really affects me--how other people choose to approach writing has no bearing on mine, and if the social threads are how people like to have fun, I should just be cool with that and ignore it, right? But over the past few weeks I have been dangerously close to being driven away by the volume of it all... moreso than usual. Honestly, if it weren't for the handful of people there I really like (and my modly responsibilities), I'd have probably wandered away long ago. Sigh.