W2 - Wendy to the Second Power

Kudos to Chris Nakashima-Brown for arranging a special tour for Austin's science fiction/fantasy folks of the !!incredible!! Edgar Allan Poe exhibit at the Harry Ransome Center at UT. A dozen of us met last evening and got a tour of the "unusual topical and contextual approach to Poe's life and work."

And our tour guide? One of the men who put it together! Richard Oram, co-curator of the exhibition and associate director and the Hobby Foundation Librarian at the Ransom Center! Dick was really engaging and fun too. Told us several things about how and why you get such an exhibit together.

The why? It's the 200th anniversary of Poe's birthday.

The how? HRC acquired the full collection of Koester, the most dedicated Poe collector ever, and got a few more items from a Virginia museum.

Lots of stuff in his own handwriting, things about him by other writers, his actual desk for one of his editing jobs, early collections of just about all his works... And great illustrations! Many originals from the 20th century reprints by Arthur Rackham, some Edouard Manets... Even including some Vincent Price movie posters, and Bart Simpson as The Raven. he he

And there's a special sound effect in the mini-art gallery to the left. Walk in, walk around and it'll speed up as you approach a certain wall...

You play you pay! I knew it would be a big hunk of money to go away to Hawaii for two weeks for the HWC and Retreat. And to sting even more, my employer made us use up vacation at the holidays and didn't let us accrue more until April started. So I had 3 days without pay in there too.

I just did my spreadsheet "expense" report for my 2009 tax file, and confirmed what I thought. This was the most expensive thing I've done for my writing career and personal development ever. Well, getting my BFA at the University of Texas cost more, but this was all concentrated into two weeks!

Lodging, food, travel, tours, conference fees. It came up to $4,800. When you add in the hit my paycheck took, it's closer to $6,000.

Wow. But worth it! What a cool opportunity!

And this explains why almost everybody else was a retired doctor or attorney writing the Great American Thriller. Or looking back over their hippie days to write a sexy memoir.

Finally posted some of my 50 or so photos from my trip to Hawaii. It was so colorful and fun! Here's a handful of them...

( Putting them behind the cut... )

A long day of traveling yesterday -- got into the hotel's white stretch limo (!!) at 5:00 a.m. Hawaiian time. Lost the 5 hours I'd gained as I flew back to LAX then to Austin. Got onto the Super Shuttle, half the price of the direct taxi, which luckily dropped me off first. That was still getting me to my house at 12:25 a.m. though, Austin time. Then two hours to unpack, go through mail, get set up for the work day.

Then back to work 9:00 a.m. this morning. Very tired but I can handle for one day. However, how deflating to be back in the grind after the past several weeks of planning and going to Hawaii... I feel so low this morning!

More bummer real life stuff: the Austin Film Festival sent me notification CAN'T SAY NO, my comedy script, didn't make it to second round. I'm suprised because I did read scripts this year and it was certainly worthy of the top 10%.

And bummer real life: my novel manuscript I quickly assembled and sent to the Hawaii Writers Conference prose contest didn't even make top 10 finalists there. But it was firmly supernatural mystery, and those people they called to the stage were from the retreat, so I recognized their work from the "first page dread overhead" exercise and no one was genre at all. Well, the closest to genre were the two writers who retold Hawaiian myths, but not really close. The woman who won 1st place had a Korean mother's coming of (mature) age story. Congrats to them all; my manuscript did get some notice from readers, I think.

We said goodbye to our interesting (but not as well bonded as some of the others) screenplay workshop group at the Hawaii Writers Retreat. I learned a lot, and can already tell my two scripts that Margaret South re-plotted for me will need to sit and percolate because I'm not feeling attached to them right now.

But during the closing ceremonies, Jonathan from my group and I both won awards for writing badly. Hah!

They have a "bad first sentence" contest here. He got runner up (2nd place) and I got 3rd place. Here's mine -- which reflects the stuff around me this week:


As ukuleles twanged and steel guitars thrummed, Gertrude sat at the hotel’s craft table stringing a special lei for her beloved, Throckmorton, that would tell, through scent and color, just what he meant to her: red for passion, orange for fiery sunsets, yellow for that poor bird all the Hawaiian royalty plucked for their capes, green for the banana leaves that had wrapped the fish in their engagement dinner entrees, blue for the forever brilliant skies over Honolulu, and a bunch of additional flowers for those other rainbow colors she was too tired to remember now, but Throckie would totally understand.


Tomorrow early starts the Hawaii Writers Conference. Opie (Ron Howard) is coming to town!

I got a lot of good workshopping and structure from Margaret South, who analyzes scripts and novels using her Art of Story system. We've met twice a day on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Today was our one-on-one sessions. I went to her with my need to structure a different love story for my HEAVEN & NELL screenplay. She helped me make some good streamlining decisions, move the conflict around so that my main character is Nell, not Lee the love interest or the town of Enoch. For Hollywood, simple is better, especially for a spec script from a beginner. (Even though I'm not a beginner because I've written 7 feature-length scripts already, but Hollywood will call me one because I don't have a job in the biz yet.)

Other people in the group are also getting good advice. Whether they're taking it or not remains to be seen. Seems like the indicator for how much insight someone will accept is how much testosterone runs through their brain. This stuff is gold, but some of these guys... And I hear from some of the group critiques (which we don't do) in other classes that mini-rebellions are breaking out. Seems to me the issue is that people spend $$ and time to get here, so they're typically mature and opinionated people who can carve 1.5 weeks out of their lives, so they're pretty powerful. And successful. Some seem to expect to show up and have people throw bouquets to them for their every page or thought. Not so!

The daily general sessions are also being interesting. I got insights on ways to pitch from Sam(antha) Horn. Learned about thrillers and plotting from Gary Braver and Karin Slaughter. Got story beginnings from multiple people, including Diane Lake, who J4 and I workshopped with last August in Cape Cod. It is being interesting and fun!

Then today, I also had the morning off so I took a WONDERFUL tour to the misty valley area and saw Queen Emma's summer palace, a Pali lookout point, drove through rainforests and found a hidden waterfall and ancient petroglyph -- just right off the highway! So lovely...! Go here for the photos.

Went to ArmadilloCon for the Saturday, took my sweet time and got there around 11am. I missed KD Wentworth's reading, which was too bad since she can be so very funny. I did hear Joe Lansdale read "The Folding Man" and Bill Spencer read "The Empire Gloria" and Sharon Shinn read ?"Black Jade." All were good and interesting, but Sharon's never got to a vivid enough point to hook me. Maybe because it's YA.

Went to the vampire panel, and was more impressed that Paige Roberts has such good quality fake fangs than anything else. They suggested you come up with your own take on vampires, and that it NOT be "they're so dreamy, and they sparkle in the sunlight." The vampires in the novel I've started haven't shown up yet, really. But I know my subconcious will give me something cool & fun about them. For one thing, my vampires get drunk on peppermint oil because it stimulates what passes for their hearts and gets them woozy yet exhilirated.

The panel on using religion in your stories, which I myself have spoken on in year's past, was pretty cool. Guest of Honor Scott Lynch hardly talked, but he did say a few funny things. I really enjoyed the editor and essayist, Matt Cardin, who has a masters in comparative religions and studies it in genre writing. When the talk would get silly, he'd make some useful, academic comment that would ground everything. Oh, but it was sad to see Joan Vinge on the panel. She had a bad accident some years back and is very ditzy and repetitive now. When she taught the workshop for J4 and me, she was such a sharp, great lady. Still a nice person, but challenged...!

There were three parties I wandered into and out of last night in the DoubleTree. That was kinda the highlight of the day for the science fiction/fantasy conference I visited. The Space Squid guys were testing an instant beer chilling device with electricity, tubes, ice, rock salt, towels on the floor... I pointed out my Ravi wine chiller did the same thing in a small size without mixing electricity and water. So next year, Matt and I will have a CHILL OFF!

Got to chat with several folks, local and out of town. Had a problem, as I did last year, with some of the clique-ish folks when being inclusive was always such a goal of the SlugTribe actitivities. But it was a small con, so screw 'em. Chatted up lots of people from all over I only see once a year. Heard from NB, Jr and it looks like he's turned in a script to the producer I introduced him to; a movie based on a NB story would be awesome; and it also reminds me that I haven't reached out to that producer in a while myself... AND that reminds me: this would've been my first ArmadilloCon I could've included my new IMDB.com link. Ehhh. I confess I've lost most interest in cons.

The local SF/F convention is this weekend. I've been a panelist and participant on every ArmadilloCon for the past 15 years or more.

But not this one.

Got unhappy over who they let run the writers workshop last year, how she snubbed me, lied to the event organizers about doing it as well as to her apologists who assured me it was not what it looked like. It was what it looked like. Then the organizers made a decision to leave my name, and others, off the DilloCon flyers because we hadn't written a novel. That was too much disrespect for me.

J4 and I put that writers workshop on the map over many years, which took many, many hours of volunteering, setting up, coordinating, etc. We attracted some really awesome talent to be instructors, too. I continue to feel unhappy that my skills and time were so devalued by the con organizers. Not participating on programming anymore is my own little protest. Nobody else will notice, but I'll feel consistent in attitude and deed.

But, I will be a $30-paying Saturday attendee. Catch up with friends, see some panels, check out the dealers room. Bill Spencer is reading; there's a fun panel on Texas as a state of mind, etc. D.D. is hosting a party Saturday night for his fiction contest and anthology.

Check out the wry, wry, painfully ironic Publishing Glossary by Rightreading.


Yes, I know Bierce was indeed an editor and pretty close to being a publisher. I'm being ironic!

When I got so much into screenwriting, and evolved into the kind of jobs that eat your life and creative mind, I quit doing the fiction so much. I wrote 2-3 stories in the past 5+ years, but didn't even send them out.

But now I'm starting that up again! I sent a slipstream story to Delia Sherman for her Interstitial Arts anthology called Interfictions. Got word a few weeks ago that it was rejected. (Gone are the days when I could send a story and be confident it would sell in the first one or two markets, I guess. But this antho only seems to have 7 stories in it, so chances weren't good to get a slot.)

Now I just sent the story to Ideomancer, and hopefully they'll respond to the slipstream, plural first-person-ness of it. It's the kind of story that the SlugTribe reads and criticizes for not being fantastical enough. But it's slipstream, y'all! It does what I want it to, has depths it pulls from the odd, surreal imagery, but it doesn't go kick down that door into magic. On purpose.

We'll see how "Devouring Day" does with Ideomancer.

My goal in March is to rewrite my comedy script CAN'T SAY NO and polish it. By the end of March I want it ready to send to contests and producers. I feel optimistic about the script because comedies are hellaciously difficult. A joke or three on every page -- I haz them! And getting input from the full ASG table read in December, plus the excerpt reading in the Austin Cats and in the SlugTribe (hey, they may not be screenwriters but we have fun reading and they give great plot logic and character development for genre critique which the screenwriters cannot) to direct the rewrite has been really useful. Maybe I'll take excerpts back to the Thurs night ASG study group too...

Following this project, I will clean up, polish and start submitting:

1. "A Black Habit" - the erotic SF story I didn't get finished in time for the Sirens antho all those years ago
   
2. "Locking Horns in Ladyland" - the satire set in a future gynocracy that makes nerd boys spitting mad, for some reason, but Bruce Sterling and Don Webb liked it
   
3. "Orbiting the Egosphere" - alternative, literary SF (really hard to write, btw, so that it's not just "look at my tricks!")

Right. This post is me giving myself marching orders.