A Million Words

The weekend before last I had my flood of inspiration, and for most of the past week I've been planning my next re-write of Scrapplings. I drafted this version of the story at the 1369 in November-December 2006, re-wrote it and edited it during the first half of 2007, then sent out 59 queries and submission packs as Nova got ready to be born. A steady stream of rejections trickled back to me, and some are still out there, unread and un-responded-to.   As I sit down to write again I find myself hesitating.  What makes me think that this time will be different?  I've written, re-written, and pitched this novel, and the second one, so many times that it seems to be futile.  Earlier this year, I was thinking that the premise, the whole idea that my fantasy world was built on, was fundamentally un-salable. Now that I've seen the plot from a new angle, will it make any difference?  Should I really sacrifice all this time and energy for a story that has always let me down in the p...

I do not get it. I have fallen through the rabbit hole for the second time into an online world that puzzles me: Competitive shopping. The first time, it was diapers. I was looking for something practical and reasonably attractive for Nova’s bum, and discovered that there’s a whole world of women making diapers that very nearly qualify as art. That much, I thought was pretty cool. What I find odd is the whole culture of shopping, where women hover over their computers to get on waiting lists for the most sought after diapers. There are lots of nice diapers out there! You can make your own, even! Why the fixation on a particular brand? They’re not that much better than the others! The babywearing scene is just as bad, if not worse. Hundreds or thousands of women all over the planet are sitting at their sewing machines, making baby carriers. Making a good one takes some skill, some design testing, some good materials, but again, it’s not all that hard to make a nice, functional c...

I didn't manage to read to the end of two books in the month of June, as I'd resolved, but this morning I turned the last page of Writer Mama:  How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids by Christina Katz .   Writer Mama  is a pretty good book, a focused program for building a career as a non-fiction writer in whatever time you can snatch from the daily round of child-rearing and housekeeping.  It advises starting out small, with short articles and local publications, then building up to the better-paying markets and feature writing, followed by the possibility of a non-fiction book deal.   I could do this, I really could. I know what to write, how to query, and where to send it.  The trouble with Chirstina Katz's program is that non-fiction doesn't really fire me up. I might write an article here and there, but I always feel like it's a distraction from my serious work, fiction. The trouble with fiction is that the career path of a novelist is formula-resist...

Earlier this week, I was leafing through the internet or a book, and came across the advice that one should read to babies starting from the very beginning.   Now, I would love to read to Nova, but she sees books first and foremost as a thing to chew on.   Goodnight Gorilla   already sports quite an array of toothmarks.  I went onto one of the parenting chat sites I waste so much time on and asked for advice.  People had all sorts of opinions, as you might imagine, but all in all I was encouraged to give it another go.  The night before last, we turned all the pages of Goodnight Gorilla .   One piece of advice I found interesting was that you can read a baby your  books, by which the poster obviously meant whatever books you are reading, but that wasn't how I read it at first glance. I thought, "Aha!  I can read Nova Scrapplings  and all the other books in the Anamat series that I've been trying to write since 2002."  So last night, as I lay there just this side of sl...

A few weeks ago, I resolved to write during Nova's naptimes.  She often naps for an hour or two in the morning, and sometimes for an hour or two in the afternoon, as well.  If she did nap for three hours, that would theoretically be three working hours in a day -- a perfect amount of time. But today is like many other days.  I start off the day with my cup of tea and Nova amuses herself and practices standing and crawling for an hour or so while I make myself breakfast and perhaps check in with the world of the internet.  While she's nursing, I play scrabulous and surf around innumerable time-wasting sites devoted to the hippy fringe of parenting, or go off on a tangent and look at fabrics on-line. Sooner or later she nods off.  Some mornings it only takes 10 minutes of nursing until she nods off, this morning it was well over an hour (with a short interruption, when I thought she was asleep). The real problem, though, is me.  Once she's safely settled in her slumbers, I ge...

I know it's early yet, but I think Nova may have said her first word at seven months on the dot.  This weekend, when the three of us were wandering around town, she said "baba" every time she saw someone in a stroller, or a kid under the age of ten.  She also said "baba" a few times in between, and it is her most frequent babbling sound, so I thought maybe it was just coincidence, but she said "baba" again yesterday at an appropriate time, so I'm starting to think it's a word. She also says "mamamumumum" when she's tired and hungry, and is beginning to connect the sound with me, I think.  This morning she made a "papa" sound, so there's hope for Mike, too.