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.