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My roommate from Taos Toolbox, Catherine Evleshin, has been everywhere and done everything. And now she shares her wit and wisdom with us.

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Tamago: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Catherine: I still haven’t decided, just like it took me a long time to realize that I was a dancer. The IRS will make those decisions, and so far, they have not been brought into my writing “career.”

Tamago: Which writers are important to you?

Catherine: I adore Kim Stanley Robinson for his intellect, careful research, and inspired visions of our future. He can turn an unforgettable phrase, as well. I enjoy many other SF writers (often West Coast) who find a “mundane,” plausible near-future to be an exciting thing. Much of SF is fantasy to me, although often a pleasure.

Tamago: Why is so much of your writing about the environment?

Catherine: It is the future, and trumps all other concerns, in my opinion. So many “experts” on human problems, e.g. poverty, fail to factor in resources, because of the prevailing myth that humans can solve anything if we set our minds to it. it is unthinkable that we may be doomed to suffer. Indeed, half our species is already suffering…and dying.

Continue reading “TT Profile #7: Catherine Evleshin”

And now for my favorite video for 2012. Remember that the only criteria is that I had to see it this year for the first time. In no particular order other than alphabetical:

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Continue reading “Writer Tamago’s Top 15 Movies/Television Shows for 2012”

You may as well unfriend me now if you support the ownership of guns in the U.S.

Newtown, CT. is my tipping point, from which there is no return. I can see no reason for there to be a gun in any home. I don’t care about the idea that you need to protect yourself, or that only criminals will have guns if we take guns out of the hands of good, law-bidin’ people. I don’t care if you like guns, but would never shoot children. The ownership of guns and a stubborn resistance against calling people out for owning them, the problem of having these weapons of easy and thoughtless violence in our hands, is the problem.

It’s not the crazy people problem. Crazy people kill people with what’s at hand, but people have a better chance of survival against a knife rather than a gun. It’s not an irresponsible gun owner problem. Most of the guns in the hands of criminals come from regular channels. It’s not a lack of training. It’s not facism taking away our self-defense. It’s not even a chance that the government may try to get you to do what you don’t want, and you need to shoot someone. What the fuck ever.

What it is is the sheer availability of guns. So children can shoot each other. So crazy people can shoot children. So disgruntled children can snap and kill Mom and Dad. So angry lovers can passionately kill each other. So malls, homes, churches, movie theaters and schools become places where you don’t feel safe because there are crazy people out there with guns. Our response? Should we buy guns to protect ourselves, carry concealed weapons, praise God and pass the ammunition, because a man and a woman need to defend ourselves in these horrible times?

Or would it be wiser to get the hell rid of the guns? Because you know, if you’re trying to kill a bunch of people in a mall, and you can’t get, say, a gun, or explosives, or weapons, what are you going to do? Be very frustrated, but not become a mass shooter.

Statistics, Schaff-Stump? We don’t need no stinkin’ statistics, but Tobias Buckell has done that work for you anyhow, and saved me some. Go read. Go read.

What, you may ask has triggered this? If this killing of tiny, innocent babies with automatic weapons that someone’s MOM just had around the house isn’t enough, I have no idea what it would take to cure this country of this strange mental illness and paranoia. Guys, the government is not going to take away your liberty. You don’t need these guns. You strange, paranoid weirdos.

One set of my in-laws, my husband’s oldest brother and his wife, who have recently decided they are going full on Tea Party, are going to get guns for themselves in light of this recent tragedy. I am amazed.

And you know, living here in tiny Cedar Rapids, twice as big as Newtown, I have lived every day of my married life knowing that the statistic could be my high school teaching husband. Or even myself, as we had a shooting lock down at my college last year. It just takes one crazy person who gets his or her hands on one of the guns made available for the public to kill with by the paranoid antiquated second amendment.

Shame on you. And shame on us for letting you continue to keep them.

And so…links:

Bryon (my husband) forwards me this truly intelligent article on DC’s New 52 and why it doesn’t work for Laura Hudson. Since this article is from September, you may have seen it, but if you haven’t, go look.

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And I wanted to post about Jim Hines’ charity drive for Aicardi Syndrome, which has raised a little over $6800, but I got a little behind because of the good ‘ole self-induced cancer scare. It would be truly awesome if fandom could raise $10K for this charity, so please consider it.

The charity poses themselves have raised some comment given that they were not contextualized for people who haven’t been reading Jim for a long time, so in order to beat any issues you might have to the punch, read Jim’s entry and John Scalzi’s entry before looking at the pose pictures to understand what this is and isn’t about.

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Tonight, a little shopping. I still need to buy a cat castle for one cat, some stocking stuffers for The Man, and use that Barnes and Noble tea coupon. The Hobbit and dinner with friends tonight. Holiday gift exchange tomorrow. Abigail Rath the final revision before agents see it oh my gods begins Sunday.

Because it’s that time of year, think tinsel! I’ll be back with an interview on Monday.

Mer Haskell is the author of The Princess Curse, one of the best middle grade novels to hit in years, as well as author of Handbook for Dragon Slayers, coming out summer, 2013. She was kind enough to talk to us about her writing process.

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Tamago: Do you have a regular drafting process, or does your drafting process vary from book to book. Can you describe it to us generally, or at least for one project?

Mer: For the most part, my natural process is that I sit down and see what comes out. That makes me a pantser, I guess. The penalty to that is that pantsers are obligate rewriters, and since I hate rewriting, I have been trying to “fix” my process for a while now. (And learning the lesson that not everything needs to be fixed, but that’s a different issue.) Problematically, I’ve always been very secretive in the midst of my process. I don’t want to talk about the book. I don’t want to brainstorm. I don’t want to even breathe an iota of energy elsewhere than the draft itself.

This secretiveness, combined with pantsing, worked just fine before I had contracts to fulfill. The last book I finished (Handbook for Dragon Slayers) was my first book written to deadline, and dealing with the inevitable process change was like trying to restructure my brain. My editor was very, very kind and didn’t require me to do more than send a few sample pages her way to see if we agreed on the book I was working on, but the mere existence of the contract messed up my mojo in a big way. Part of the problem of not talking about my books while in process also meant not really talking ABOUT my process, and thereby I didn’t really know my process, and everything was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I never realized, for example, that I sit on a book like a broody chicken for about a year before anything comes out onto the page. So this last book, it got maybe a month, possibly two, of brooding, and it came out a very malformed egg indeed. With most of my books: my drafting process includes a lot of brain work time, upwards of a year or two, and then I write it very speedily, usually in 3-4 months. That was how The Princess Curse went, and all my trunk novels. And then… this other book. It just… well, I wrote it in about 8 months, and then I rewrote for all the time I should have been brooding on it.

Tamago: How do you know when a draft is working?

Mer: By my output. If I can sit down and doodle happily along every day for a month, I know it’s going okay. If I start sputtering on my productivity before then, I know that I’m doing something wrong. About once a month in the first draft process, though, I have to take a weekend and write *anything* else. Usually a short story. And this reinvigorates me and I get back on track easily.

Tamago: How many drafts of a project will you write? What do you do in each draft?

Mer: Well, left to my own devices, I would write about two. But I’ve never met any YA/MG author who has been able to get away with that few drafts. So far, 8 seems to be my average. Yep. Eight. There’s the first draft–the massive erp onto paper (well, into a computer); then there’s my second draft, the Shame Draft, where I try to get the grossly bad bits out before anyone else sees it. Then there’s the draft I do with the advice of Trusted Betas, who tell me if I’ve gone off my rocker anywhere–number 3. Then I seem to at that point do a draft or two with my agent, before it goes into high gear with my editor. The common denominator in all drafts is that I am spending my time smoothing, clarifying, checking plot and emotional continuity, and so forth. I might be cutting or combining characters as late as draft 6, or reworking theme even, so nothing is off the table. Though, it is often hard to tell where one draft begins and another ends, and I have only done this twice for publication, which is not a true statistical sample, so the best I can say is that I’m still learning how I generally do this.

Continue reading “The Writing Process and Mer Haskell”

Thank you all for the good hopes. I probably shouldn’t have written about it at all, but I was scared. My doctor was very sober about it, which didn’t help. As I mentioned, intellectually I was pretty sure we weren’t looking at cancer. Breast lumps that are cancerous are like little marbles, today’s doc told me. I knew that. And my background was in my favor. Still, the human imagination is an incredible worrier, and we artistic types are quite neurotic already.

Now, a word from the medical establishment: if you notice ANY bump, or you have any suspicions at all, it’s best to get these things checked. Just because it’s not cancer, you could have some other things going on, and it’s better to know the terrain of your body. Also, that reassurance that tells you that things are normal is worth WHATEVER it costs. Believe me. Today I believe I can function. Yesterday, not so good.

So, what is my problem? Same old. I’ll put the wimmin’s stuff under the cut for those of you who might be delicate flowers. 🙂

Continue reading “I’m Okay!!!”

Let’s do something fun for a few moments. Let’s talk about what things I’ve read this year that I’d recommend to you. These are a wide variety of lengths in a wide variety of format. The only requirement for making the list is that I read the thing this year, so that makes it a haphazard list indeed, but…well, I like doing it. This year seems particularly comics and graphic novel heavy, but there is a fair mix of fiction and non-fiction as well.

Cool things to read under the cut. In no particular order but alphabetical, then…

Continue reading “Writer Tamago’s Top 15 Books for 2012”

Tomorrow, bright and early. An ultrasound. Should the masses (turns out there are 3) be suspicious, there will be a biopsy, although I do not know if that will be tomorrow. So, if you have a moment to send me positive vibrations, that would be awesome.

Intellectual woman knows that the chances of this being serious is slim to none, given her genetic history, etc, etc. Uncertainty, however, is the domain of Emotional woman, who is unhappy at this turn of events. Because you know, it’s finals week, and that’s why it had to happen this week, to distract me from being a lean, mean checking machine. And because you know, breast lumps. Scary.

Back to being distracted and trying to check things until my two o’clock appointment. Woo.

Do you see that cloud of word exhaust? I’ve been getting a novella into shape for a beta reader thing, and that’s where I’ve been. Oh, and folding up the semester, working with students and getting ready for the next semester.

This Saturday is the deadline for the beta reads of Abigail Rath, so I’m going to roll up my sleeves and begin revising along those lines, in ultimate preparation for release into the wild. I am going to spend some time each night revising an element and working on synopsis documents, etc.

So, I have been trying to conquer the forces of biology and losing. I started some strong medicine for ringworm, and had some success, but then I had an allergic reaction to it. Not a big surprise. People who are allergic to penicillin sometimes have this happen. I stopped it on Saturday, and we’ll be talking to the doc about alternatives today, as well as about a spooky lump which I suspect may be a cyst from the way it behaves and is painful. No cancer scare here, so don’t worry about that.

Bryon and I are steaming the house. We are steaming all the rugs and upholstery, and then I will be doing my level best to make sure not to expose my skin to any of it, because it’s winter, and sleeves are good. This way, hopefully, we can make our home contagion free. Most people can wear the ringworm virus and are immune, but I’d hate to set anyone up for this.

The cats don’t seem to have it, and I’m the one staying away from them. 🙂

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So, good writing news. Inconvenient physical annoyances. There are a few links that I’ll put up tomorrow that have come to my attention as of late. I have an author interview to post–Merrie Haskell’s writing process interview, and you can look forward also to the annual Writer Tamago Best of 2012 lists. So it won’t be quite the ghost town that it has been around here. That’s the plan anyway.

Cath

Here’s an interview with Sara Mueller, whose taken a few moments away from working on her fantasy/historical Bone Orchard to answer a few questions.

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Tamago: Tell me about when you knew you wanted to be a writer.

Sara: I don’t remember when I didn’t enjoy telling stories, but I didn’t really set my sights on writing a book until twelve years ago or so.

Tamago: What is your composing process usually like?

Sara: I come up with a character and situation. Once I have those, I tend to write Chapter One more or less immediately because the first inklings I have about the world are part and parcel of the character and situation.

Then I stop and think about a rough plot, and write on from there. I write in a sort of spiral process, with dialogue and a few very rough descriptions, then the next day I go back, fill in the descriptions, tighten up the dialogue, and go on from there.

I run my work past some prereaders or my writer’s groups as I go along, so I have continuing feedback to keep me going. I find well done critique extremely inspiring while I’m in process.

At about three quarters of the way through, my original ending will implode and I write a better one than I planned on.

I usually compose on computer, but if I’m not at the computer and have a notebook and writing instrument (which I try to always have) I often rough out scenes longhand. And if I’m really stuck, I go back to longhand and no matter how bad it is, I can usually get some momentum again there.

Tamago: How do you know when a project is working?

Sara: I know it’s working when the characters are really alive in my head.

Tamago: Do you prefer working with the initial draft, or do you prefer the revising process? Why?

Sara: Drafting is great in the early going, because it’s so organic and I’m really excited about the story. Theeeeen at about three quarters of the way in, it starts to be work because now I have to make it all come to a satisfying end. At that point, revising is my favorite thing, because it gets me excited about the particular story again and how to tell the story in the best possible way.

Tamago: Your novel The Bone Orchard is set in a steampunk universe, but seems patterned on European history. How much research do you do for your fantasy work?

Sara: Depends on the novel, really. Bone Orchard was a lot of research into dissociated identities (multiple personality), but on the research scale I didn’t need to do much more because I was pretty familiar with the period I was borrowing from.

For my alternate history, Lily Crown, I ended up doing masses of historical research because while I do have a pretty solid grip on English history of the 16th c., my story was set in France during that period. I knew a little, but as it became clear that the story needed to center in France I had to do a LOT of reading up.

Tamago: Which writers are your influences?

Sara: Oh good heavens, lol. Honestly the list is endless and depends on what I’m writing. For Bone Orchard it was obviously Frankenstein, and a lot of other Victorian work. Edith Wharton and Anthony Trollope, for two.

Tamago: How did you come to apply to Taos Toolbox?

Sara: David Levine talked about it, and I was looking specifically for a novel workshop. There are plenty of short story workshops, but Taos Toolbox is aimed specifically at novels.

Tamago: What advice would you give to a writer who might be considering a workshop?

Sara: Read up on it, check out blogs written by participants, and if you can, correspond with them politely and ask questions. And when you go, leave your ego at the door with the hat check lady. You’re there to make your writing better. It’s not about you, it’s about the writing.

Tamago: What are you working on right now?

Sara: I have two projects running. I’m working on another book in the Bone Orchard universe, and an urban fantasy. I haven’t written urban fantasy, but I had a character, a bad situation, and a world in my head so…

Tamago: Given all the obligations in your life, how do you balance, family, work, and writing?

Sara: I’m extremely fortunate that my husband and son support my writing. I write while I’m waiting at my son’s fencing lessons, I write in doctors’ waiting rooms, I’ve been known to jot down notes at the dinner table. Writing is the thing that’s always cooking in the background.

Tamago: What advice would you give to people who would like to write?

Sara: Write. Helpful, right? But seriously, the best way to learn to write is to DO IT. Read your work out loud, even if it’s just to the cat. You’re going to fail, and make a lot of beginner errors at first because beginners do that. The manuscript you end up with my look nothing at all like the one you started, but if it serves the characters and the story it’s because you learned how to do that better along the way.

Tamago: Where can people find your work?

Sara: Heh. Toughie, as I’m not a prolific short story writer and don’t have a book out. I cowrote a story with David D. Levine that appears in his anthology ‘Space Magic’. I have another in ‘Healing Waves’, which is a charity ebook for tsumani victims in Japan.