Cleolinda everywhere

So the last month has been such that I haven't even been able to stop by and say "hey guys it's my 35th birthday!" or "hey guys, happy holidays!" or "hey guys, I have a Black Ribbon story coming out in the Athena's Daughters anthology!" It was... that kind of month. Some kind of pinched nerve or pulled muscle in my back, a conglomeration of flu and blarg shortly after my birthday, other health issues, then two weeks off the grid partly to get things done and partly just to recuperate (and then my phone died again yesterday). So I feel like we need to catch up, although let it be noted that I've spent three days trying to put this entry together while feverish with a new rebound blarg--in fact, shit, it's only a few hours until the Kickstarter ends. Well, it's been an amazing success--over $40,000 at this point, I don't even know how. Anyway--here's a bit more about the final version of my story: a photoset of reference images, a little back story, and the idea of strength as a choice.

(I believe there will also be an Apollo's Daughters companion, with female protagonists by male writers, which certain accusers of ~misandry~ seem not to have noticed.)

Also, I started rambling on about That Time I Mailed In An X-Files Script, Or: Why Creators Can't Read Your Stuff, and ended up on Geekosystem? (That's got to be one of y'all. O hai!) Here's a longer version of the Twitter conversation we had, now on Storify.

Meanwhile: Dracula recaps: I don't even know, you guys. As of last Friday, I'm four episodes behind. I don't know if it's seasonal affective blarg or my own personal issues or this show genuinely not clicking with a lot of people (apparently I'm not the only recapper who's wandered away), but... argh. I want to give the recaps another shot, so I'm trying to think of a different format that's less labor-intensive than "8000-word recaps, wtf." Bullet-point outlines in Comic Sans with screencaps? I don't even know.

Because I want to save up my strength because Hannibal is coming back early! Hannibal is coming back early! HANNIBAL IS COMING BACK EARLY, THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

( omg )

(Also, I am still trying to figure out the username of the person who sent me one of the Wound Man sketches from SDCC, because that arrived a few days before my birthday when I was really down and it was like my favorite thing I got that week.)

Also-also, our vacuum cleaner died (House of Bark honors its service) and our washing machine is in its dying throes, so apparently we're doing the All the Household Appliances Dying at Once thing again. I'm at that point where I have tons of ideas--which are also possible sources of income--but no energy to write them down (untangling my illness bedhead was a major accomplishment today), so we'll see what happens next.

Sooooooo a thing is happening. Here's the deadline I referred to with such vagueness:




I'ma be in it. This is also why I asked the Twitters for help with an author bio, the writing of which was complicated by the fact that I've hardly DONE anything: ( An expanded discussion of Black Ribbon )

1) Bella Swan: vampiring better than you since *checks watch* 2008. This is the same teaser that ran in front of The Hunger Games, so you may have already seen it (stop poaching Katniss's deer, BELLA). ( Read more... )

2) Meanwhile, shit got real: The Hunger Games' box office crushes the Twilight movies. All of them.

3) I seem to have hit a hypomanic upswing; mine, as I've explained before, are pretty mild. The only thing someone would really notice from the outside is that I'm a bit more upbeat, enthusiastic, and talkative--but when a movie I've really been looking forward to comes out, that doesn't seem out of place. (Honestly, I've started wondering--as I've said before--if you can trigger manic moods. If nothing else, I think it suddenly being SUMMER IN THE MIDDLE OF MARCH gave me an overdose of natural light, and that may have caused it as well. As I recall, my most pronounced upswings are almost always in the spring and summer.) Otherwise, I'm outwardly calm, but as I've gotten older, I've been edging further and further into mild mania, and the happy creative bursts have been "evolving" into something less comfortable. The upside at the lower hypomanic end is that I feel happy and creative (verging on hypergraphic); at the high, verging-on-manic end, I feel overcaffeinated, impatient, and irritable, I have all these ideas but I can't concentrate or focus, I have a hard time sleeping, and I don't want to eat. I have a sample of BPAL's Safari blend, and a dab on the back of each hand (so I can smell it while I'm typing) seems to have centered me a bit. Once I was able to actually focus, I got 1600 words written in a couple of hours last night (there's your hypergraphia), but it took me all day to be able to concentrate that long.

On the other hand, you get wackadoo flights of fancy like the mandatory Panem TV schedule, and like this:

@cleolinda: WHY IS THIS STILL HAPPENING RT @NikkiFinke: Hugh Dancy To Star In NBC Series ‘Hannibal’

@cleolinda: Look, save some time. Modern-day Sherlock Holmes hunts Hannibal Lecter. In a dystopia. With a vampire. An alien vampire.

@cleolinda: The alien vampire is on the run from a beauty pageant to the death. Also, Sherlock is a werewolf. His brother is a steampunk faerie.

@writingfreak88: No alien ninja turtles?

( Read more... )

@Kate_Hart: Loooove this post from @sarahockler about writer's resolutions: "Just make the bed." (Mine is always "clean the sink.")

Unfortunately, mine right now is "Get the sleep," because that jump in my eyelid has come back (probably from too much reading), and also: dubstep fever drags on. Night!


I will probably get up in the middle of the night and sit on the internet drinking iced tea, what

Jesus, how long have I not blogged in?

How long have I not blogged in. This is what is left of my brain, y'all. All my grammar is belong to novel.

( WE HAVE TO GO BACK, KATE )

@cleolinda: Extremely Crappy Draft: 173,749 words. Enter stage two: Readable Draft.

@cleolinda: Precisely! RT @particle_person: Yes! That is enough words to still have lots of book left when you toss the half that don’t work right!

@cleolinda: I guess it’s not really time for a victory lap yet. Maybe a victory… skip.

@alliancesjr: Admit it, you’re going to do a victory macarena like it’s 1992, aren’t you?

@cleolinda: More like a victory flop. I just keep sitting here going, I can’t do this. What am I doing? I can’t do this.

@cleolinda: But it’s like… doesn’t really matter if I can’t. Don’t really have a choice, do I? Have to keep going with whatever I’ve got.

@alliancesjr: Like a shark. But…on land.

@cleolinda: LAND SHARK!

( [BANTER] )

( RANDOM LITERARY DISCUSSION ) 

While we're here, hours after I started writing this post--the #occupywallstreet thing has blown up into a multi-city protest, but police have arrested "about 400" protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge so far. There's a livefeed, and, apparently, some kettling happened. Mark Ruffalo, of all people, seems to be tweeting from the front lines ("People in 5 different jails. They are releasing people now. 3 in NYC and 2 in Brooklyn"). BPAL, meanwhile, has put up a charity scent to help send pizza to the protesters (the pizza is already going out): "Rock the protester cliché! This is a filthy friggin’ patchouli, dark, deep, rooty, and strangely sexy, with cocoa absolute, tobacco absolute, and bourbon vanilla." More as I hear about it, assuming anyone in the media bothers to cover it in the first place (*side eye*).

ETA: Here's an article that does a fairly good job of explaining what's going on and how it came together.

Internets, I may or may not go see X-Men today, so in the limited amount of time I have, I will simply give you a (a, not the) Twitter-reaction round-up to the Wall Street Journal article about how YA is bad and it should feel bad ("It was all vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark stuff"). I don't feel like I really have to take it apart sentence by sentence, because it is so incredibly, self-evidently wrong in its wrongness to anyone who has actually read YA books.

@maureenjohnson: The Wall Street Journal has done it again. I am going to have some kind of an episode. *quivers* http://on.wsj.com/lwuPNd

( And then it snowballs into #YAsaves ) 

So. Writing update. That scene I had lost--I had tried to recreate it from memory. Turns out I ended up with an opposite take on how one character reacted, so after I found the original (like I said: Windows Explorer can't locate something you didn't type up), I realized that I had two opposing takes to reconcile. Which is fine; I just have to decide which works better. I have no problem writing out a scene in as many different ways as it takes to find one that works. I don't feel like the story exists, concretely, unchangeably, once you write it down, so I don't have a problem playing with different versions. I just have to sit down and figure it out now. It's a really interesting (to me) scene, so it's fun.

I'm skipping around at the moment because that's just how I always roll I'm trying to type up all my handwritten notes and drafts. I think the next bit I type up is going to be about the Chinese apothecary. ( Read more... )

I have been struggling with a severe downturn. I think what's happening is that we're getting into the seasonal depression... uh... season. And then there was the ice this week (we're still shoveling it off the deck; it's too thick to melt enough on its own). I mean, maybe it's natural to be sluggish when it's 18 degrees outside. Even though the days are getting longer from mid-December on out, the lack of sunlight catches up with you about now. And I usually get depressed just after Christmas and my birthday anyway. I tried to put together a linkspam post four days ago, and I just couldn't ever get it finished. I can get on Twitter to hit a simple "retweet" button and feel like that's the next best thing, for short bursts of sociability. It's hard to explain how you can bob to the surface, perfectly cheerful for a little while, or giddy about this or that little geek-interest thing, and then sink back under for hours of brooding. The thing about depression is that you can often keep up appearances in front of other people. Sometimes I think that depression is almost a separate, sentient organism, and it works hard to protect itself--it wants to make sure you don't believe in it, that you think you're miserable because you're a miserable person who deserves it, not because you have uncooperative brain chemistry. It wants to make sure you cover for it, you convince people that you're fine. It has its own priorities and best interests, a sense of self-preservation, and the self it wants to preserve is not you.

I've been trying to write. That actually went pretty well for a couple of days, except that people kept interrupting and pulling me away to do this or that just as I was getting somewhere. So instead, I went back to reading--non-fiction, which is why I haven't mentioned it; I might do a quick writeup on a few books at once. It's the kind of thing I take notes on while I read and come up with new characters or plot additions for Black Ribbon; a lot of it is to get details for high-society scenes or help me get a grip on the international political situation circa 1889. I think I'm going to be doing this mix of real names and fictionalized characters; I'm okay with dropping the name of a real person, but much more interaction than that, and I start to feel weird. Maybe you'll be able to tell who it's meant to be, maybe not. Because the thing is, Black Ribbon isn't a wildly alternate universe, though it looks like some historical elements are going to be accelerated a little bit. Major anarchist activity is going to start about four or five years early (uh. That is maybe giving something away), and we're going to have some technological developments happen 5-10 years early. In a weird way, I think I feel more anxious about getting away with this because the story world isn't wildly different. If I were just going to do outright fantastical steampunk with the airship pirates and whatnot, I don't think anyone would call me on discrepancies, because they'd know it would be pointless. But what I'm doing now is close enough that people are going to think I meant to be historically accurate, but internets, let them tell me, I am WRONG. I guess the solution is to put in a few Wildly Different elements to signal that. I was hoping that a mechanical peacock in the first chapter would suffice, but maybe not. I guess the only thing to do is write it and see. The only way out is forward.

I know I'm behind on Varney and Secret Life, but... just... nothing. I actually think about Secret Life a lot, but I can't get the new entry to turn out right. You know how there's usually more than one storyline going on at a time? Like, we visit with two or three different sets of characters? I've got one set of characters planned out, but the other storyline or two, they're kind of vague. I don't quite know how to get this entry to fill out properly. I mean, it's a process I go through every time; I'm just completely stalled on this one. And I don't want it to take nine months to work out again. But I think I am going to have to call a hopefully short hiatus until I work it out, rather than show up each weekend and go, "Yeah... still not done" and feel worse every time. I think the guilt actually torpedoes me worse than the block itself.

Meanwhile, the Golden Globes are tomorrow night. This is one of the awards shows I traditionally liveblog (one of the many services we provide at Cleolinda Industries). I keep trying to gear myself up for it, and... ehhhhhhhh. And we've got a really good slate of movies this year almost none of which I've been able to leave the house and see, so it's not lack of enthusiasm for the nominee pool. We've got one of those rare years where almost anyone could win and it would be deserved. I just... can't muster the energy. But I have to. I hate defaulting on things I like to do just because my dumb ass feels whiny. So I'm going to try to do that tomorrow night. At least with Lizzie now, it's easy to set up in front of the TV.

Also, I can't find my Lillie Langtry bio, which VEXES ME. On the upside, I've been given a couple of new YA books, so I might get to those soon.

I just want to let you know that I'm not dead or anything. I am having a very good time writing and wallowing in research materials, particularly a gold mine I stumbled upon for a subject I hadn't been able to find anything on in years previous. (Shhhh.) As such, I am behind on EVERYTHING. Well, I try to keep an eye on everything, but I've stopped posting anywhere very much. Tumblr in particular has gone by the wayside (but I will come back to it).

Basically, I spent the last months, if not year(s), wrestling with this goddamn novel and thinking that if I were just a good enough writer, I'd not only be able to make it work, I'd be able to make it brilliant. And then suddenly, ( Read more... )

So I'm trying to keep up with everyone, but I'm also just really happy at the moment, and I have to chase that wind as long as it blows. I would really like to post some linkspam today, but I don't know.

I am trying to get this week's Secret Life of Dolls finished. (I did put up a new installment on Sunday night.) The good parts are written; I just have to work on the connective tissue. This is generally my process anyway, and speaking of which, it is exactly how I write Movies in Fifteen Minuteses, and I realized with a start I'm supposed to start writing one of those this weekend. My time frame on turning one of those out these days seems to be 10-14 days, which sucks (because you want to be among the first out of the gate when it comes to cultural parody/commentary), but you get higher quality when I take my time and sleep on it, so what're you gonna do. BUT. I did want to put out a new Secret Life for people who would like unPotter counter-programming this weekend, and also, if we keep the story going, we'll get to our new arrivals in a more timely fashion. My birthday, which is now Relevant to Your Interests, is less than a month from now, after all.

ANYWAY. Back to wallowing in sources. So much to read, so little time, so much fun.