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Posts Tagged ‘graduate school’

Getting Down to Business

I’m quitting my MFA program.  Though money was partially an issue, in the end it came down to me not enjoying the program and my classes not helping me as a writer.  I think that I’ll be more productive on my own for now.  I have the Online Writing Workshop for my critiquing fix.  So the plan is for me to work on the current novel projects this year and come next year apply to a couple of other MFA programs.  I’m thinking Stone Coast and Seton Hill, since they offer Popular Fiction tracks.

In the good news from all this, however, a girl in my workshop who writes pretty delightful regency romance has agreed to do chapter exchanges with me.  So I’ll be emailing her chapters of Chwedl and she’ll give me chapters of her current novel project.  Editing novels is tough partially because they’re so damn long that getting people to read all of it takes some doing.  It’s been my experience so far with the OWW that novel chapters don’t get as many critiques as short stories, plus there’s often no one to look for continuity errors or flow since people might only read a few chapters and not the whole book.  I’m thrilled that this girl and I will be exchanging chapters.  We’ll both get eyes on the whole of our novels.  Not to mention that I’ve read the first couple chapters of her novel and am totally hooked.  Hopefully she’ll feel the same about mine once she sees the first chapters (she’s pretty brave to want to exchange without seeing the novel first, but she has seen two short stories of mine, so I guess that’s something).

I aim to have Chwedl finished by the beginning of July with an edited version ready by the end of August.  At that point I plan to write up a query letter and start the fun and exciting agent hunting part of the writing life.  I have a short list of agents I want to query and it’s my hope that I’ll maybe get to meet and chat with a few at Worldcon, though I intend to keep that informal.  It would be nice to talk to some of the agents I’m considering, however, so I can get a feel for it this project is right for them.  And of course, I have to find a real title for the book since “Welsh word no one can pronounce” probably isn’t going to fly.

Hmm… “Aine and the Hounds”? Nah. “The Hounds of Clun Cadair”? Too Holmes-ripoff.  Grr. I’m not good with titles.  If only I could bribe Elizabeth Bear into thinking up titles for me, hers always rock.

First Term and Future Plans

Heh, wordpress looks strange again. Grr.

Anyway, I survived first term of graduate school.  It was underwhelming.  Hopefully next term will go better.

I’ve decided to attend a couple of cons (specifically geared towards spec fic/writing/etc…).  The deadline for the workshops for the first con I’m going to is the 14th of this month, so I’d better get my ass in gear.  I think I’ll send them Bladebearer because it’s a complex little story and has some weird problems I could use perspective on.  You can send two pieces, so I’m tempted to send in the first 3 chapters of Casimir Hypogean.  I still hate that novel, but maybe feedback on it would somehow make the path clearer.  Or at least give me a few better ideas of what is going so wrong with the whole thing.  I’d have to write up a synopsis, however, which could prove problematic since I’ve never written one.  It’d be a learning experience.  Well, we’ll see how far I get this week.  Otherwise I’ll send Monsters as my second piece.

The second con is World Con, which is in Montreal this year.  I’ve always wanted to go to Montreal, and I think Chwedl will be in at least polished draft form by then and (cross fingers?) ready for agent hunting, so it’ll give me something to really peddle around at the con.  Plus the panels should be informative and I’ll get to vote for the Hugo winners.  Which means my summer will be full of reading the nominated books, never a bad thing.

I’m also, this month, polishing Space Bones and Delilah for my application to Clarion West.  I’m terrified I won’t get in and I’m terrified I will.  It’s like a perfect lose lose situation.  But really, I want to go.  I think it would be fantastic and horrifying and awesome all at once.  Besides, then I could stalk EBear in person (note, this is a joke, unless you consider reading someone’s lj stalking…).  I’m just jealous that she has a cat. Seriously.  Stupid renting with no pets rule.    Moving on…  I think that the two aforementioned stories have the best shot of showing how I write.  They’re  also now the most polished of my spec lit pieces and Delilah is still one of my favorite things I’ve written ever.  It might be a risk considering the very Christian overtones and the linear inevitability of the plot, but I hope that the characters and stylistic tones will override that and punish the reader with its awesomeness.  Seriously, I like that story.  And Space Bones has grown on me.  I wrote it mostly for the title at first, but after about four drafts I finally feel a connection to what is going on in the story and to the characters.  Hopefully this will all translate into the Clarion peeps thinking I’m whatever they’re looking for.

By the end of December I hope to have the draft of Chwedl complete.  Then comes the editing and pain, but I already see things I can do to help it along.  This novel, to repeat myself, is nothing like Casimir Hypogean.  It’s such a breeze to write and the language flows nicely instead of feeling forced and choppy as all hell.  I wonder if I haven’t written the world of Casimir Hypogean too bleak, its characters too unsympathetic.  After all, why should a reader care about chars who hardly care about themselves?  It’s a strange dilemna.  More reason probably for why I should edit up those first 3 chapters of the rewrite and send them off for critique.  Maybe the novel is dead and I’m still pining for a ghost of a thing that shouldn’t be.  It’s hard to tell such from my close perspective.

Graduate School First Day

I’m accidentally taking a poetry class.  This is both good and bad.  Good because I like my poetry.  Poetry is fairly easy to write (for me, maybe not for others) and I think I’m decent at it.  The bad is because I haven’t written any poetry in over a year and because I’d sort of looked forward to writing prose.  I think I might get around this by making one of the required poems an Epic Poem.  Complete with alliteration and such.  Oh yes.

I’m also taking a class where the sole purpose is to get a graduate writing credit by doing National Novel Writing Month.  I’m aiming for 100k words, a proper novel instead of a novella.

I don’t know yet how much Grad school will eat my time and my brains, so I can’t promise much posting.  I feel badly that I haven’t been posting here more, but somehow when I’m writing on other things the urge to blog dies away.  I’ll try of think of some relevant topics to write about since I enjoy this blog and even get a few random readers from time to do (about 12 of you a day, far as I can tell.)

Quickies (1)

I have an adviser.  This is both a good and a bad thing.  The good is that I have an adviser.  The bad is that his area of specialty is in 19th/20th century American Lit.  Which I generally hate with a burning unreasonable (or entirely reasonable if you’re me) passion.  So, um, I’m doomed.  Though if I write War Witches for my thesis project, he might like it if he gets past the, you know, magic part.  After all, it is about 19th C. America.   Just, better.

Other than that, I’ve been swamped by work.  Sigh.  But I’m slowly doing at least somewhat writing related things like editing and idea generation.  I also have yet another idea for a yet another novel.  It is going to take a couple lifetimes at this rate just to get this stuff into draft form, much less completed.

I think I can. I think I can.  I think I can.

Good Times

Two awesome things happened in my writing life in the last two days.

One: wrote a short story I’d been wanting to write for a while now.  I managed to quiet down the excuse monkey and do it.  Amazing how after working on a 60k word + novel for a while makes writing up 3 to 5k words seem like so much less work than it used to.  I finished the entire first draft of the story in about 4 hours.  It’s a retelling of the Samson and Delilah story.  I’ve wanted to retell it ever since listening to Regina Spektor’s Samson song.  The original story is so stupid that I wanted to write a version that makes more sense (and involved more of a fantasy/sorcery bent to things rather than just stupid people).  It feels really good to get the story done.  I think I might take a chance and submit it to S&S depending on how my rewrites of the two other stories I’m considering go in the next week.  Though Samson drives some of the action, I feel that Delilah is truly the central part of it, so the strong central girl thing comes through well enough if subtly.

The second awesome is that I found out about grad school.  I’m in!  So now I have to figure out how to pay for it and what I’m going to do about that whole “sorta misrepresented the stuff I write” problem.  Though, to be fair, my two stories I sent in weren’t exactly mainstream normal either.  One is about a teenager heroin addict who kills her abusive ex (and has his ghost in the story) and the other is about a violin player from Hometown, Everywhere going to the Big City and finding herself (and falling for another girl). (And the final installment of that story, which I didn’t send them because I haven’t finished it yet reveals that the girl she’s in love with is actually a hermaphrodite with the bits of both sexes.  And I’m probably going to rewrite the whole thing and put a more high fantasy bent on it since as one reader pointed out it has that feel anyway).

I’m now brainstorming and taking all ideas for how to raise money for school.  So far on the maybe possible list (instead of the silly list) I’ve got bake sales and chapbook donation/sales.  It wouldn’t be that expensive to print up a little (maybe 40 page) chapbook of my poetry.  I’m not sure how many people I could convince to donate/buy them.  Anyone know how bake sales work?  Any other ideas?  I’m not expecting to raise all 25k, but it would be nice if I could get some monies to put towards books and such.  The more costs I can defray on the front end, the better it will be in the long run since I’m pretty much doomed to some sort of Federal loan.  (So much for having no debt. At least interest rates are low right now).

This does not affect the Ten in Ten plan, by the way.  I’m going to work my thesis into my novel plans and hopefully write a novel for it which will be that year’s novel.  Probably War Witches, but maybe the sequel to Dangerous depending if I get lucky and the whole sale thing happens.  I guess I’ll have to cross that whole “doesn’t like to write lit fic” bridge when I come to it, eh?  MFA programs do have a reputation for turning out writers who sound just like each other (and their profs), but I have my own fairly distinctive voice and thus this isn’t a huge concern.  I’m stubborn.

Well, now to wait for the paperwork machine that is the University proper to get around to processing that I’m admitted to the program and do the whole actual admission process so I can find out about aid.

Back to writing. Yay.

Window Closed, Window Open

My application is in, and hopefully complete. Now I get to play the waiting game. (Insert epic scrabble game here, final scores 259 to 442, I win- ok, now back to the entry). I wish dearly there was some information on how many people apply and how many they accept. I couldn’t find any numbers. None. Grr. The only thing I have to go on is that the max number of people who can register for many of the graduate level writing courses is 10-15. Which says that they don’t have very many grad students. Now, most of those classes aren’t full either, which means even fewer people. I’m freaking out, just a little. Sigh. It’s always been very hard for me to let anyone read my stories, much less strangers who are deciding my academic fate. and yes, I know I’m being a tad dramatic. If I don’t get in, I have other options. But they are far less convenient and more expensive.

Speaking of expensive, it isn’t exactly going to be cheap if I do get in. But I have some ideas for how to offset the costs. One is applying for aid, obviously. But loans are loans, and I’ll have to pay the monies at some point. My other ideas are along the lines of trying to come up with some of the monies by self-printing a chapbook of my poetry and seeing if I can’t get people to buy it as a nice donation thing towards my schooling. Bel had the idea that I should do this and print out an expanation of what I’m doing and what this book is for the back cover and then leave some copies in places with a “Free” sticker on it to try to draw in strangers as well. A chapbook is fairly cheap to self-publish, and my poems are things people have liked in the past. It’s something I’m considering, since I have a pretty large body of poetic work. We’ll see. Like I said, I have ideas. First I have to get accepted. Which means waiting. Did I mention I hate wait?

Fortunately, I have a great novel idea I’m fleshing out to help tide me over. It’s going to be novel number 1 of the 10 novels in 10 years personal challenge I’m giving for myself. It’s a psuedo fairytale set in Ancient Wales (sort of). I have a degree in Medieval Studies, and I took medieval Welsh as a language during that time. So I already have some feel for the culture. I’m not going to make it historically accurate, however. It’s supposed to be fantasy. As long as I get it consistent, I’m not going to worry too much. I’m excited though. The plot is pretty much there, the characters are fairly defined in my head, and I have all kinds of ideas for things to research to give it that extra bit of credibility and sense of the fantastic. Plus Welsh fairytales are notoriously more gory and strange than the better known Irish ones. Which will be a blast to write, I’m sure.

The insane part of this is that I’ve decided to write the novel by hand. I used to do all my writing by hand pretty much right up until my last year of college. It was how I ever got around to editing anything. I’d write it up by hand and then the first rewrite would happen as an incidental part of typing the story/poem/academic paper. I’ve never written anything by hand that was more than 30 or so pages, however. I want to make this novel at least 400 hand-written pages, which will end up being around 250-300 typed pages. I bought a fresh pack of moleskine notebooks . And I bought a neat little book on early Medieval Wales which has some sweet maps. So I’m ready.