Sharp Words

Sad news: it appears that my beloved desktop is well and truly dead. My Darling Smart Ass has been working on it, but it refuses to recognize its new hard drive. He says we will have to wipe it and reload Windows, which I believe would make it something other than the grouchy machine I’ve been working with for the past five years. (And it would kill the scads and scads of software cracks I loaded on it back before I decided to be an upstanding citizen and pay for all my software–oh, the remnants of my reckless youth!)

Darling Smart-Ass put a comforting hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s eight years old, that’s a long, full life for a desktop. I think it’s time you put it out of its misery.”

Me: “I can’t! You don’t know what adventures we had, what stories I wrote on it, what lovely, lovely software it ran.”

Him: “Do you remember that movie, the one about the dog where the boy had to shoot it at the end?”

Me: “My desktop is NOT Old Yeller.”

Too late. Smart Ass has now christened it “Old Yeller” and is urging me to let it go. It’s sitting beside my desk right now, all hulking and ginormous, yet still outdone in processing power and efficiency by my slim little laptop. Sure, the laptop has most of the programs I need to do my thang, but it just isn’t the same. It doesn’t have the same soul. Me and Old Yeller, we were a team. We stuck together through power-supply issues, dust-bunnies, and tense, nail-biting sessions of anti-vir. I’ll miss it.

Some good news:… Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sick. Sick and sad and uninspired. Stupid cold.

So here’s me cheating on my blogging by posting the start of a story I started a while ago, and mean to finish once I get three or five other Works in Progress out of my head and into my hard drive (and thumb drive, and back-up disk. Save early and often, peoples.)

Nieves

When I was very young, I asked my mother what had happened to the smallest finger on her left hand.

“I cut it off,” she told me, miming the chop of a knife with the flat of her right hand. One swing, sure and swift. She’d smiled when she said it, no doubt meaning to keep the conversation light. She often told outrageous tales just to see my eyes grow big. And when I asked, “Truly?” she’d shake her head and we would giggle over my credulity like a pair of mean little girls.

I did not realize until I was much older that she spun those fanciful tales a purpose. She meant to teach me to tell a lie from the truth, and to distrust even the people I loved the most.

A little bird reminded me I should be promoting Like a Thief in the Night and letting people know that this red hot futuristic tale of sex, murder, magic and mayhem will be available for sale at Samhain Publishing on January 15, 2008 for the low, low price of $3.50.

But how should I promote the novella? Maybe a contest? I wracked my brain, which took all of 2 seconds, and came up with these ideas:

• The “Guess Bettie’s Favorite Color Contest”
• The “Tell Bettie Why You Deserve a Free Book” Contest
• The “Guess How Many Fingers Bettie is Holding Up Behind her Back” Contest.

Maybe I’m not so good at this contest thing. Maybe I used up my one good idea on the Hard Boiled contest. No, wait, I have one more idea: I’ll let potential contest entrants make up their own contest.

So, here’s the deal. Post your single best idea for a contest in the comments of this post. If I pick that idea, you’ll win a free copy of Like a Thief in the Night and I’ll hold the contest in February, with a second copy of Like a Thief… as the prize. Entries must be submitted by 6 P.M. Pacific on Monday, January 14, 2008.

It’s summer. TV’s all in reruns, weather outside is broiling–there’s nothing to distract me from writing, right? Wrong. My darling SmartAss got a PS3 this weekend. How will I resist the temptation? Even though the game I am desperately looking forward to (John Woo’s Stranglehold, starring Chow Yun Fat [squee!]) isn’t out yet, our new gizmo upconverts the old PS2 games so prettily. And, who am I kidding, I could stare at the menu for hours. Seventy Days of Sweat just got a whole lot harder.

Angela James had an interesting post over on Romancing the Blog yesterday about people who are unable to let go of their unpublished novels.

Because I’m a lazy slob, and because I think the realization I came to while reading that post are my new words to write by, I’m just going to repost the comment I left right here.

That old quote, “Kill your darlings,” is some of the best writing advice ever given. When we fall in love with our books, we lose sight of their flaws. I’ve noticed that the more I love a story I’m writing, the less likely I am to even like it a year later.

A couple years ago, I wrote a story that I adored. My critique group wasn’t so keen on it; nobody seemed to like it but me. I shelved it, ran across it a year later, and realized I had been so enthralled with my own ideas that I’d written an over-detailed, under-plotted, meandering mess.

I still like the world and the characters, though. One of these days, when I’ve sharpened my critical eye to a lethal edge, I’ll haul that story back onto my desktop and gut it like a sacrificial lamb.

I’m starting to think that you can either love writing, or you can love the things you write. If you love writing then you change, you grow, you hone your skills to better practice your craft. If you love what you write, you drag the same manuscript around for years wondering why nobody appreciates your baby the way you do.

So that’s my new motto, right after “Kill your darlings,” is “Love writing, not what you’ve written.”