and she was

I go through phases of "the mistakes I always make and have to correct" in my manuscripts. Used to be alot and abandonned, past for passed, and using too many gerunds, but these days I have a truly strange one. Which is, I keep putting in the wrong prepositions. Why, brain, why? Does anyone else have things like this pop up in their writing?

I printed up four copies of the book I'm working on for others to read. This entailed a huge amount of spelling and grammar checks (I write with Ulysses, so have to export to do it), making sure everything has compiled correctly, and then printing so! much! paper!

Anywho, I have very solid chunks of manuscripts and that's satisfying and weigh about as much as a baby, which is appropriate. I have no idea at this point what the books strong points are and what needs work, only that I love it dearly and am nervous and scared and excited to get feedback. Like everything I've written, I don't really know how to write what I want to write, so I make it up. That might be a good definition for what writing is.

Also, I'm getting a cold. I've had a big push to get the manuscript in good enough shape to get it out to my writing group tomorrow. I always used to get a cold after finals. So it's like that.

Also, saw Spiderman 3 today. I thought it was good, but then played the 'I would have changed this, and done this, and axed that' game with E for a couple of hours, so obviously it wasn't plotted so well.

I got the new Apex Digest with a story by moi, "The End of Crazy," nestled inside. It is pretty, has a great layout, and I'm pleased as punch to be included in this issue. My story stands solidly within Horror and Science Fiction, and I think would have been a hard sell in other places. It is one of the few stories where I have talked about schizophrenia head on--mental illness often shows up in my work, but often in more vague ways. I really like where it goes.

I ran into Deb Tabor a month ago at the Connie Willis reading. She is Apex's Art Director and one of their Editors, and I know her a bit from various Clarion West shindigs. I was struck, while talking with her, by the deep commitments people make to keep short science fiction alive and robust. At a dinner last night with Terry Bisson (ack! Does this sound like I'm becoming a huge name dropper? Blah blah blah, I hope not:)), he stated that science fiction has the only viable short fiction market, and that it's impossible to make any money in other markets. I trust him on this, and know in large part this is due to the labors of love people put into it.

So thanks everybody! For reals, it is extremely cool and appreciated.

While walking to the YMCA today and going up a particularly steep hill, I thought "All the anorexics stood in line for blocks and blocks in the rain."
There wasn't any reason for me to think this. So then I was like what? And then I thought, "when their time came, they chose invisibility, of course."
Then I came home later I pounded out a fully hatched short story that starts out with those lines. This was after I'd already written a lot today. I'm usually not the write and write and write some more type of girl, but more on the slow and steady wins the race. Today I was all flow flow flow. I usually also come up with story over a number of weeks, so I don't know where this one is coming from but it feels right somehow. It's nice when every once in a while writing is a little less damn hard than usual.
We shall see how the whole thing looks tomorrow in the light of day, but for right now I'm all about the flow. Whee!

Read a great story by Rick Moody today called 'The Albertine Notes.' I generally don't groove on lit people doing speculative fiction, because they tend to think that some very overworked territory is cutting edge, or just somehow not get what's stunning about the genre, but this was quite brilliant. Very different from another lit story of his I loved called 'Demonology,' which I think nails death on the head. If that is possible.
Today was the first day of the new Clarion West class, and I kept thinking how terrified and thrilled I was last year on my first day of class with Octavia Butler and 16 strangers critting my story. Octavia Butler was a writer I worshiped, and she was just like I wanted her to be--dignified, funny, and kind. My classmates were so good at ferreting out what work needed to be done on a story I felt like they were the amalgamated being from Sturgeon's "More Than Human." I survived day one, then day two, then day etc etc etc. It was one of those times where every day had meaning. I wish that was always true, but am glad that at least some of the time it's true.
Anywho, I hope the new class is getting exactly what they need, and are freaking out about how much work, pluck, and bringing it the workshop demands.
In other news, I got accused of anarchist grammar today. Dual power strategies in phrasing? Ends are the means punctuation usage?
Nope. The other anarchy--chaos. Dur. I'm pretty good on the copy-editing end these days, but my first drafts are rough as splinters. Sigh.