OMG OMG OMG

Crow Toes likes my story like a super lot and they want to have it in a future issue, but the next few are full, so I'll have possibly one forthcoming.

OMG i'm gonna be in print! OMG OMG OMG.

squeeeeeeaaaaaal.

What my new Beagle obsession has lead to:

Character drawings of Death and Lady Neville from Peter S. Beagle's short story "Come, Lady Death." However, the style of dress is definately more Edwardain... I blame Edward Gorey.

Things which I enjoy immensly:

1. The sound an orchestra makes when all its parts are tuning independently. It's always different and always the same each time you hear it. Somehow it's never obtrusive, which it ought to be when you think about it.

2. The smell of extinguished candles. Much more so than the smell of them burning.

3. This quote by Peter Beagle: " I very much doubt that I'll ever write a proper spy novel, but in a way most of my people are spies, or feel that they are: not government secret agents, but spies without homes, without memories, spies abandoned here with no instructions except to survive, to wing it and to look human. Some of us even manage to become human in the process."

4. Making things.

Once upon a time, back when I was stupid, I was at a rave with a friend and a bunch of people she knew. I used to go to those. Have a different name for a night, flirt and then go home alone because I could never follow through. I wore these bright green sparkely wings on more than one occasion, but the last time I wore them it was at this great big halloween bash. I danced with my friends even though I didn't like techno that much (still don't), then went outside to smoke when the air got too stifled with hot sweaty bodies and boys who were showing off. Yeah, smoking was the break for fresh air. It was a backwards time and I already said I was stupid.

So I got outside and of course every square inch of the smoking zone was taken up by just as many people as I left behind, but I could still feel the air overhead and I happened to be taller than the folks in my party. It was a break. And I smoked a ciggarette, and then half of a friend's, and we went back inside to dance some more.

At the end of the night I took off my wings to get in the car and saw a neat little burn hole the size of a ciggarette in my wings, burned clear though the gauze. Somebody out there in all that fuss decided to burn a hole in my wings. I repaired them the next day so you can barely see, but if you know where to look it's plain as day. And I never wore them again. Frikken jerks aren't going to burn up the rest of my wings just because they've got a mean bee up their bonnet.

I only just thought of it now because I've got my shoes on with the little round charr mark on the toe.

I miss card catalogs.

It just took me twenty fucking minutes to sign into my email account at comcast. Why? Because I couldn't find the button. There were so many bloody pictures and exclimation points and Hooey about god knows what, probably some celebrity's ass which got too big or something. But was there a button for email? Nope! Not where I could find it!

God I miss text. Just plain "whatcha lookin for? does that word ring a bell? why yes it does thank you" and it's all over and done with. But now everything got to be so bloody eye catching that all of it just washes over you as white noise.

I should have figured better trying to navigate through comcast's slushpile of nonsense, but I was just trying to log in and confirm my facebook account. Facebook! I swear for logging into that I'm going to have to take a week pennence and sit in a dirt hole with nothing more technologically advanced than a piece of string.


One of these days I'm going to finally throw in the towell and find a bomb shelter sealed away from new advances until I can finally wrap my head around how some dude just up and decided one day to record sound by dragging a bit of metal across wax. And yes, I'll be updating my blog from there.

Journal Trouble

I bought a literary journal in the hope to expand my horizons! I was dissapointed!

Why is it that everything I think might be a good fit for me because, hey it's a little weird, and I'm a little weird, and maybe this could be a beautiful friendship, I end up disgusted by how full of bologna they are?

"Oh we're so deep because we write about how crappy people are and how full of shit the world is and also we use words like shit and fuck because we're edgy."

God! I know how crappy people are and how full of shit the world can be. I live here, dammit, I know! But whatever happened to fiction trying to rise above the crap fest and celebrating the triumphs of life? Even writing horror (and sometimes especially writing horror) there has to be a bit of lightness for the reader to grasp onto, otherwise it just reads as pompous drivle.

I don't want to have to write only for children's mags just because I haven't lost all hope for humanity. Ah well. Maybe I've just been picking the wrong journals. God I hope so.



I have a feeling Canada is holding all my letters because I don't write in all caps... damn you Canada.

Story Club: Birthday Edition

I am turning the glorious number twenty four! Many things can be celebrated with this number: I match the hours in the day, Jack Bauer probably thinks I'm sexy now, and I'm one year closer to crossing schizophrenia permanently off the possibilities list!

So I'm hosting a story club because I think they're fun.
Where? My house.
When? Wednesday Augest 19th, probably around seven or so?
A theme? Whateves. My favorite part of story club is surprises.

There will be cake fer sure, and probably other foodstuffs.

Harry Potter, Lois Lane, and April

Last night my brother asked me about my novel, and he remembered my character names, and the name of the town, and silly things like that even though he hasn't read it in probably two years and it's changed immensely since then. Awwwww that gives me the warm fuzzies like nothin else. Then we talked about Harry Potter. We both agreed the movies need more Nevil Longbottom, and Luna Lovegood. I'm really going to miss him when he ships out.

Still no news from crows toes. I need a new magazine to pester with stories. I also need to write up a query now that I've got the first thirty pages clean and shiny. Well, aside from spell check. Which is always the easiest thing. Occasionally the most painful, too. But that's because I can't spell my way out of a paper bag. But neither can Lois Lane, so I'm not worried.



Dang I just realized Dane actually named the octopus in my story. Of course he remembers Mahogany! He was always better at naming things than I was. Maybe I should ask him to title all my short stories.

In completely unrelated news

I believe I am losing my mind. I believe the people I work with are to blame. And I believe that if work does not stop looking like Tween Drama Freakoutland I will lose my better senses and destroy everything that even looks at me funny. I will destroy it with KNIVES.

This coupled with inclimate weather has kept me from writing anything aside from a bizarro world comic idea I had from a bizarro dream.

"Hey Mrs. Young... If you could be any bird in the world, what would you be, and where would you fly?"
"I would fly... to eat."
"Cool. And what kind of bird would you be?"
"... all of them"


Brilliant.

Rules in Fiction

I've been editing for a friend as well as for myself recently, and I just realized, as I rewrote a sentence for probably my eighteenth time that I'm probably being too hard on myself. As I was editing for my friend last night, I didn't stop and question every sentence of hers over and over to see if she should perhaps use the word "or" twice in a sentence or rewrite it to use "of" because "of" sounds nicer (this is sentence specific). In fact, there were huge swaths where I didn't feel the need to change much of anything aside from a punctuation mark or join two paragraphs into one, because I was more interested in the story. But of course, I know my own story, so Every Tiny Sentence is life or flippin death.

The main conclusion I drew from editing another person's work was that I was willing to fall for anything so long as it fell within the rules of the book. It seems like such a simple concept, but when you're reading about a girl so smart she's got extra genius just lying around waiting to be used and she channels it into telekenesis, and it's got Roald Dahl as the author, you don't even realize that he's using this rule. You just think "Well, hey, it's Roald Dahl, he can do whatever he bloody wants!" And then as a beginning writer you have a character who's an imaginary talking octopus, and a surly parental one at that, you just think "What the fuck why would anyone ever fall for it?" completely forgetting the rule of Rules in Fiction apply to you just the same as they do to Roald Dahl. So it's nice to edit for a girl who's got a character who can rewrite the peramiters of her world by simply speaking it, and this character has to watch her mouth at all times less she undo reality, and find that as a reader it's So completely plausible within the rules of the book.

So here I am, editing up a storm, and I just finished up the scene in which my main character traumatizes her only friend's parents by dropping a dead bird on their feet, and you know what? I'm perfectly fine with that. And I know that later on, when I have to delve into the horrors of human taxidermy (and why it's So not okay, kids, and it doesn't even work so don't try it) I'm going to be okay there, too. I've set up my rules, and all of their little loopholes, and I look forward to exploiting them to their fullest extent.

Four months

I sent my 6 page story The Shadows in Westport (have I mentioned I can't write titles? Because I can't) off to Crow Toes Quarterly today. I really hope they like it. I really even more hope they get back to me sooner than the 4 month long reading time posted on their website. I addressed the envelope in Edward Gorey letters in the vain attempt to get some extra wierd points. These people, I'm assuming, are all about wierd. They employ a "staff villian."

The absolute most I could hope, though, is some reader in Little, Brown picking up a copy, enjoying it, and then calling me to ask "Hey, have you got a novel I could peruse?" and i'd say "Yes I Do!" and then of course everything falls in place from there.

That will never happen.

Overreaction

Reading further along, I realize I am being overly critical. Much can be salvaged, and quite a bit more is pretty dang good. Of course, the part I've always disliked is still awful, but now looking at it I find I've been aproaching it the wrong way. Yes, otherwise intelligent parents abandoning their child to a completely new town an entire world away is difficult to pull off, but my previous answer was only a bandaid. I think I can restructure everything so the reader won't even find a scar.

And yes, it will still be work. But this is the fun kind. I thought I'd thrash this baby and end up with a mummy. I'm going to end up with a frankenstein, bitches.

Started work...

On a thing I'm not supposed to be working on. Well, according to me. And I've got about as much authority on my own workings as a ice cube has on the sun. Anyway, I've started a scary story for children about a tattoo that's taken root under some kid's skin and slowly spreading. Hopefully it's the sort of scary Crow Toes Quarterly is looking for. But then, I'm never sure on what scary is. I don't like scary movies.

It's not something I expect to ever be paid for, but I figure if I can get it into print I won't feel like such a douche saying "yeah, I write." It just makes me think of that spaced episode where Daisy is in the Cukoo's Nest job and finds out "they're all writers, Daisy. Even Billy." and Billy stutters out "I had a p-p-p-poem in n-n-n-n-n-ninty eight."

Up date

It's not as bad as it seems. It's not good either. But it's not beyond all hope.

I even d'awwwed at part of it. Two laughs and a d'awww I think are worth the work this will take.

The Terror Begins

I've begun reading the Taxidermy manuscript. It isn't all bad, I suppose. But a lot of it is, well, you know when you have a massive bonfire and people burn plastic cups and tin cans and in the morning you have these funny lumps of what might have been, and you try to decipher what they were? That's how I feel right now reading this. And I have to take these lumps, pull them apart, and try and stitch them back together into the story that I only now feel I understand. I have my work cut out for me.

Also, I have to write this all into 1998. Why, you ask, would I write a contemporary YA novel for readers who have no ties to this year? Meh, it was a good year. And I refuse to change my main character's birthdate, even though I'm changing her age in the story so I don't have to send out querys for a YA novel with a character in her mid twenties.

The most difficult part I'm finding so far is unsticking all the subplots which glommed together in the first half of my book, and stretching them into the second so I don't have such a bloody long beginning.

SCBWI, episode one, A New Hope

At the suggestion of Nathan Bransford at his very informative talk at the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators conference, I've decided to build my internet presence by blogging. And although I have scorned journals throughout my meager years, I think, perhaps, if I write about writing, there's a much better chance of this holding water. Which is, I think, a pretty good thing if you are a submarine and a pretty bad thing if you are a boat.

I am neither, by the way.

So, to begin, I am twenty three years old, called Megan, and currently on an epic quest for that glory of glories: Publication.

So far I've written several absurd short stories, a novel about a taxidermist and her imaginary octopus, and the beginnings of a novel about Baba Yaga. To quote the Wonderful Jenn Webster: "Yeah I wrote a novel. Pfffft. Who hasn't?"

And this blog here is to aid me in that quest. In it, I will chronicle my fantastic voyage through the perils of editing, first drafts, absurdist shorts to keep me from losing my mind, and even the various doodles and photographs (maybe even some models and dolls and miniature knits- I'm very visual for a wordsmith) I go through on the way. So here it is! My internet presence! And here's to remembering to update! To future publication! And to all the horrible self doubt, painstaking rewrites, and mind numbing hours at a hateful computer as I learn there is no easy way to convey what it's like to attempt to embalm a friend! Here Here!

You may now imagine corks popping and the clinking of a thousand joyous glasses.