Moby Awards!

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I’m way behind on this, but the Moby Awards were just given out a short while ago. What are Moby Awards? They’re given to book trailers, of course.

This may seem a little silly (and it is) but the award givers seem to understand this: Here’s a list of the winners over on the Galleycat site. They’re fun to watch, especially the bad ones. The winner of the “Worst Small/No House” is particularly special, what with the delightful animation, the empty corner of an attic repurposed as a secret waterfront back room, the pirate costumes made from what appears to be shower curtains, and of course “Dubloooooooons!”

And when they give an award called “Most Monkey Sex” they aren’t kidding. Jeebus.

I don’t really understand the “Worse Music” selection. The song isn’t to my taste, but it seems to be a mediocre version of that sort of song.

Anyway, you may have heard that I’ve hired some friends to make a trailer for the Twenty Palaces books (since I’ve only mentioned it about a billion times, but I enjoyed watching these. They’re basically commercials, I know, but some are clever.

It’s the funny ones that work best, don’t you think?

“They’re so funny. They use the subjunctive when they ought to use the nupative.”

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Let’s make this a quick list of items of interest, okay?

First of all: Hey New Yorkers! I’m going to be in New York City next week, visiting Manhattan with my wife and son. Yes, I’m also going to meet up with my agent (first time face to face) and my editor (not first time). And others, too, if things go well.

Publishing people! Who use the subjunctive correctly! And who probably also know how to use the nupative, even though that doesn’t even exist, except in last night’s dream about condescending NY grammar fundamentalists. (See subject header)

Anyway, I’m also planning to attend the KGB Fantastic Fiction Reading Series on June 15th. I don’t know either of the authors who’ll be reading there, but that just makes it more exciting.

Are you in New York? I’d like to meet there, and maybe do something after. I look like this. If you see me there, don’t hesitate to introduce yourself.

Second: I mentioned this on Twitter last week, but haven’t here; Twenty Palaces, the prequel to Child of Fire, is 100% done! Well, unless Del Rey buys it and my editor has notes. And except for the copy edits. And galleys. And another polish, if I want to give it one, (and I always do).

Still: One. Hundred. Percent. Done. I’m back at work on A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark (aka: The Auntie Mame Files). I like this book, although I suspect it’s going to be a stand alone. We’ll see.

Third: On the advice of a friend, I’ve started polishing up some old short stories to self-publish them. I mean, why not? Several have been published before and several will need substantial rewriting, but it will be nice to have something new to put out into the world.

Fourth: Look what came in the mail over the weekend?

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It had this in it:

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I’m going to assume he meant “this book,” to mean “the book for Harry Connolly.” Seems obvious, right?

I sorta expect a significant proportion of this text to be right out of his LiveJournal, but with luck I’ll pick up some extra tips for writing short work for small checks, rather than doing these months-long projects on spec, which sucks.

Fourth: Is it completely ridiculous for me to record all the Bookscan numbers I get from Amazon.com into a spreadsheet? I mean, I can’t even keep my characters’ names straight, but I’m fastidious about this?

Fifth: I still have a lot to do before I head to NY. Good thing I finished those Dungeon Quest books (by Joe Daly). Now that the hilarity is over, I can get some shit done.

Helpless in the face of luxury

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(I’m posting this to share my experience, not to solicit advice. If others want to share their experiences, too, I’d love it, but no advice, please.)

“It’s called willpower,” Colson Whitehead says in this PW article about… well, about many things, only one of which is the need some writers have of hiding themselves away in a hostage pit because they can’t handle distraction.

I’m one of those writers, and I freely admit that it embarrasses me. When the writing gets really difficult, I find it very difficult to focus on the problems and opportunities there, and all too easy to check my emails, or Twitter, or my LiveJournal friends list.

It used to be that I could hide at Starbucks. They charged for wi-fi and I’m too cheap to pay for my procrastination… then they backed down and offered it for free. Soon I was checking my emails, just in case something important came in, and are there new posts on LJ? Oh, what crazy shit has so-and-so said about books this time? An article on health care reform! It’s my duty as a citizen to stay up-to-date on politics, and besides I can read it while this funny video loads.

And don’t forget that I need things to blog about other than the usual I’m-tired-my-butt-itches crap. Links for the Randomness posts! Op-eds to disagree with! Movies to pick apart!

Except that I didn’t really need any of that. What I needed was time and quiet space to work. I don’t need a physically quiet space, but I do need one where my jump-around brain won’t latch onto something interesting and easy, like my Twitter timeline or the book I’m reading.

There was a Radiolab from a while back that talked about the bargains creative people have to make. It’s worth listening to, maybe while you’re doing dishes or something. For me, it’s helped me work out a new plan to increase my productivity: just like all those people who put A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE in their Netflix queue as something they’ll watch someday way out in the future while continually picking THE HANGOVER or DRIVE ANGRY for what they want to watch right now, it’s easy for me to plan virtue way in advance, but nearly impossible to grasp it in the moment. If I could be trusted to back up my own material manually, I’d crack the case of my laptop and pith my wi-fi connection. Since I can’t, I use Dropbox.

So I turn my laptop on the night before and set Mac Freedom for six hours. Maybe eight, but usually six.

That’s long enough for me to do my pages, then revise one of my old short stories for a self-pub collection I’m considering, and that’s it. I can reboot if I want to check my email at the library or whatever, or I can come straight home and wait for the timer to run out, at which point the household wi-fi handles all the backing up.

But that’s the best work around I can come up with at the moment. My brain has a hard time staying on task, and talking about willpower misses the point. If I’m hungry, tired, cold, or depressed, I can write. Adversity I can handle. What I have a hard time with, apparently, is fun, luxury, pleasure, and comfort. Those are the things that will ruin me.

Update: An article on the limits of willpower.

Eating 3.64 cookies

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Friday on Twitter, I joked that once Child of Fire received 300 ratings on Goodreads, I would eat 3.64 out of 5 cookies in celebration. Well what do you know. It happened! Last night I bought some Pepperidge Farm Nantuckets (no limericks, please) because I knew I wouldn’t have time for the preferred option, which was baking fresh.

And I took pictures:
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In which I work

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I’ve been a little unproductive lately. I’m not sure exactly why, but the pages have been difficult. Revisions have been difficult. Polishing has been difficult.

Yesterday I deliberately got a late start, set Freedom for 3 hours, and focused. It was good.

This morning I made sure to be up by 5 am. I set Freedom for the max: 8 hours. I hit the Starbucks and the library and tore into the notes (and polish) for Twenty Palaces.

And I finished more than half the book.

I dunno, you guys. Do you think the internet might by harming my productivity?

Progress on Twenty Palaces

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This morning I spent about half an hour on the phone with my agent going over her notes for Twenty Palaces aka “book zero” aka “the prequel.” They were mostly pretty straight forward and will not require much work to fix. One note, though, was a biggie. It gets at the heart of Ray’s actions and motivations in the last part of the book, and it’s yet another example of me failing at the craft because I wanted to make a point rather than keep to the characters.

Still, I took a long walk in the hot sun and I think I have a solid, sensible way to address it.

Now I just have to get to work. Good day.

Sun!

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It’s almost seven am, I’m freshly breakfasted, the hummingbirds are floating outside my window, the stellar jays are squawking, and the sun is shining.

I’m going for a walk.

But it’s not going to be a “fun” walk; it’s going to be a vigorous exercise/plot walk. A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark has been a bit difficult lately and I’m not sure where it should go next. This walk will be a chance to plot a course forward. Which I need.

Also, did I mention that the sun is shining?

Hopefully, I won’t see you guys around the interwebs for a few hours.

This is worth reading

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Running the Barkley.

It’s the sort of extreme running event that extreme running events think goes too far, an event where people literally lose their minds while running it. They start hallucinating, get amnesia, totally lose themselves. It’s a race that’s almost designed not to be finished.

It reminds me of a profile I read some time ago about a distance runner and his training methods. He’s from Eastern Europe somewhere, and he does the same thing: runs until the pain is too much and the exhaustion made him hallucinate and go mad. The quote that stuck with me (which I’ll have to paraphrase) is from his trainer, who believed that when the runner was telling them the pain was too much, when he hallucinated, thought he’d gone blind, couldn’t remember where he was or why he was running, that was the point at which the trainer thought he’d given about 50%.

There’s a temptation to turn all this into a lesson for my own life. Maybe you feel that temptation, too. I mean, what’s the analog in my life for a long project that makes me crazy? Not writing a novel. I may complain about it (because I’m a crybaby, but you knew that) but it never drives me to the point of hallucinating. Maybe if I wrote something as long and complex as George RR Martin’s series, I’d have something comparable. I mean, seriously, writing a novel is not that hard.

Of course, there’s also parenting, but the rewards of that are self-evident, no matter how grueling it can become.

But it’s interesting to me, to see what people can achieve. It’s strange to think of something as the upper limit of human endurance, only to discover other people blow past them regularly.