All posts by Catherine Brennan.

Catherine published a novel and short story back in the 1990s. Life intervened, and she didn't write for a while. But then she started writing again in 2010 for National Novel Writing Month, and has continued to write in November and throughout the year. She has stories in two Journey anthologies, Drops of Midnight and Other Worlds. She is currently either revising her latest NaNoWriMo novel from 2012, working on short fiction, or posting on her blog, CB's Mojo.

Scoreboard Update & Party!

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wikimedia commons image, artist unknown

I suppose it’s no secret that I’d like to have a fabulous writing career. I haven’t figured out exactly what that means. I’ll probably flesh it out as I go along, kind of like an outline. Here’s what I do know: I want to write things that people are interested in reading and I’d like to be paid for doing so. I hope that will lead to more people discovering it, and enjoying it. Upshot: I’d like to be published in the traditional way, by folks who have been at it for a while and know what they’re doing.

There’s a whole discussion on the interwebs about traditional publishing vs. self-publishing (aka independent publishing). I don’t know what my entire writing career will look like by the time it’s all over. Independent publishing might figure in, but not until I’ve learned a hell of a lot more about it.

My plan for now is to submit my fiction to magazines when it’s short and agents/publishers when it’s long.

However. I don’t have total control over how soon anyone will be interested in publishing my fiction. One thing I can do is to improve my writing, and thus my odds. There are multiple ways to do that, and I’m trying a few, but the underlying tenet is this: I need to keep writing. That’s why I post ad nauseum about writing daily, with a heavy emphasis on 750words.com.

The other thing I can do is to submit stories. It does me no good to sit on a story, stew over it, or endlessly show it to various groups for critique. I’m still working on when to let a story go. I may blog about that some other day. For now, I’m trying to aim for sooner rather than later. I have one story that’s as ready as it’s going to be, and which has, in fact, been submitted to several markets. I have another story that’s close, I hope. It’s the one I submitted to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction a while back, and which I’m revising next week. I will be looking for new readers for it soon. It’s already been through alpha readers and beta readers. What’s next, gamma readers? Omega readers, since I hope this will be the last pass? Anyway, if you’d be willing to read a 6000-word story for me, please leave a comment below, or facebook message/tweet/email me to let me know, and we’ll work out how to get it to you.

Ahem. I promised scoreboards today, didn’t I? Here’s my progress report.

Updated Scoreboard 1: Submissions

March 7, 2014
Submissions: 3   Acceptances: 0   Rejections: 2

I win!

If that’s not immediately clear, let me explain. As I said above, I have limited control over how soon my writing will be published. Two things I do have control over are:

  1. my writing process (practice makes perfect) and
  2. my attempts to get it out there (it does me no good sitting on my hard drive)

As long as I keep writing daily, with an eye to reducing suckitude, I’m doing what I can for the first part of the puzzle. As far as the second part goes, here’s my goal:
#Submissions + #Acceptances > #Rejections.

Since 3 + 0 > 2, I win!

As long as #Submissions + #Acceptances > #Rejections, I’ve done what I can on my end.

Updated Scoreboard 2: Words Written

March 6, 2014
-885,494 words- from a 478 day streak (out of 907 total) on 750 words.com

That word count puts me within 115,000 words of the million words Ray Bradbury says you need for mastery.

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Bradbury Image by Rev. Terry Canttel*

If I can manage to write an average of 800 words a day going forward, I can have my million-word party in about 143 days. As of this writing, that makes it July 25th, or thereabouts. I’ll firm up the date later.

So here’s the plan. If you want to come to my million-word party, leave a comment below, or message me via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+  to let me know. I’ll make sure you receive all the relevant information.

I don’t know what all will happen at this party, but there will definitely be singing and alcohol. And seriously, I’d love to see you there.

* Bradbury Picture Creative Commons License

Um…Little Help Here?

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Okay, sometimes it’s not easy

I’ve written a few posts talking about what I do to keep writing. After fielding a few responses, I realized that what I’ve posted up to now were pretty much along the lines of “Just do it.”

People wrote or grabbed me to say, “Hey! I’ve tried to write (or exercise) on a regular schedule and I just can’t keep it up. It’s all very well for you to say, “Just do it.” What if that doesn’t work for me?”

Fair question. Developing good habits is hard. Getting rid of bad habits is hard. Anyone who pretends otherwise is an annoying prig, like this girl I knew in high school, Angel McPrissyface. Here’s the background: I experimented my junior and senior years with smoking a cigarette while walking into a liquor store, hoping that smoking made me look old enough to buy alcohol. Since beer-and-wine age in Illinois at that time was something like 19, it worked better than it probably would nowadays. Ah, my halcyon youth! But the point isn’t that I was a degenerate who bought alcohol before I was old enough to drink legally. The point is, I was a degenerate who learned to smoke.

If you have never smoked, I cannot possibly convey how addictive nicotine is. By the time I was halfway into my freshman year of college, I was definitely a smoker. So: I smoked for maybe a year, maybe a year and a half. It took nearly as long to quit as it did to get hooked. I might still be smoking if BK, who I was dating at the time, refused to kiss me as long as I smoked. No question, kissing beats smoking.

Anyway, while I was home from college that summer, kissing was not an available smoking substitute. I was in Illinois, and BK was in Tennessee. I mentioned to someone I knew, who was still in high school, that I was having a hell of a time quitting. She put this prissy look on her face and said, “Well I never started!” as if I ought to give her a medal, or at least a cookie. Good thing I had a friend who heard the exchange and said Angel McPrissyface was an annoying little prig. Which she was.

I would like not to be like Angel; definitely not the kind of person who says things like, “Just do it.” (Sorry, Nike, but seriously). In the service of that ideal, I am coming clean. I didn’t always write every day, or exercise 5-6 days a week. I started the exercise habit first, and eventually got around to the writing habit.

And here’s something else I hate to admit. Unlike Stephen King, I don’t write 2000 words of usable fiction every day. I write at least 750 words of something. Sometimes it is dreck: just a mind dump. That’s certainly how I started. Or sometimes what I write is a blog post, like this one. I hope this isn’t dreck, but I’m not in a position to judge.

Finally, after well over two years of using 750words.com faithfully, the proportion of fiction to dreck is slooowly inching in the direction of more fiction, less dreck. Usually that happens best in November, or any other time when I’m able to write 2000 (or so) words daily, rather than just 750. Even so, much of that fiction might be a later draft, and much of what I’m doing in a later draft is actually cutting words I’ve written earlier. Transforming myself into a prolific fiction writer is definitely a work in progress.

So…I belatedly realized that when I posted (in my 3-Legged Stool entries) some of the reading I’ve found helpful , I left one really important book out:

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The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

The Power of Habit may or may not help you, but it was a relatively quick read, and it got me back on track when I hit a rough patch.

But let’s say you don’t want to buy the book or you’re too busy (or cold, if you live by me)  to go to the library. Here are a couple of interesting posts on using the peculiarities of your brain to trick yourself into good habits:

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Graphic from Robbie Blair’s site

I liked this post by Robbie Blair. He offers 14 ways to make it easier to start a writing habit. He mentions Charles Duhigg’s book, too, so maybe it’s not just me.

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Graphic from Wait But Why site

And this post by Tim Urban (maybe with help from Andrew Finn?) was entertaining and seemed to have more than a kernel of truth about procrastination.

Whatever Happened to Sharyn McCrumb?

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Sharyn McCrumb photograph by Jerry Bauer

I started thinking about Sharyn McCrumb after reading this post from Medusa’s Library. While talking about a section of The Hunger Games, she mentions a book called The Hum and the Shiver by Alex Bledsoe. It’s set in East Tennessee. I was immediately filled with a desire to read this book, partly because it sounds cool, and partly because I’m always looking for books set in East Tennessee. In a pinch western North Carolina or southwest Virginia will also do.

I married into a love for that region.  My husband BK is from East Tennessee, and he still misses it, years after moving away. We go back pretty often, but usually it’s to help take care of an aging relative, so there’s not a lot of opportunity to really get out and appreciate the beauties of the area. But that’s what books are for, right?

Anyway, now I can’t wait to read The Hum and the Shiver, just as soon as I can get to the library. Just the fact that it exists made me nostalgic for Sharyn McCrumb’s books, and I that’s what got me wondering whatever happened to her.  Full disclosure: I don’t know her personally, and haven’t kept up with her writing as well as I ought.

BK & I first started reading Sharyn McCrumb when she wrote a couple of novels – the Jay Omega series – for TSR. This would have been back in the very early 90s.  Her first novel was Bimbos of the Death Sun, published in 1988. The next novel of hers that I read was Zombies of the Gene Pool. It’s a mark of both BK’s and my geekiness that we first became aware of her work through what she wrote for TSR. They’re set in the world of  role-play gamers and science fiction/fantasy fans, which is irretrievably what we were back in those days. It’s interesting to me that we didn’t become aware of her Elizabeth McPherson novels until we started reading a lot more mysteries.

We kind of lost track of Sharyn McCrumb after we ran out of Elizabeth McPherson novels. Part of that is because her Ballad Novels, for which she is arguably best known, are more difficult to read than some of her lighter works. In addition, I think our library was slow to acquire her later books (post ~1998), possibly because she was more on people’s radar around 1995, when she won just about every mystery award there is for She Walks These Hills.

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When we did start reading the Ballad Novels, they were gorgeous, the kind of book that made BK think longingly of home. They were also a welcome antidote to the kind of portrayal one usually sees of mountain people, wherein they might be called hillbillies. These portrayals are wearisome and irksome in the extreme. Sharyn McCrumb knows and loves these people. You can hear the voices of mountain people in her work. Yet she never does a caricature; her characters seem real and wonderful.

So the answer to the question of “Whatever happened to Sharyn McCrumb?” is answered. Thank you, Internet! She hasn’t gone anywhere. I haven’t read her for a while, but I want to go back and pick up some of her novels I’ve missed. Whenever I need to revisit East Tennessee, she’ll be there.

I’m looking forward to reading Alex Bledsoe, too. I can only hope The Hum and the Shiver takes me back to East Tennessee they way Sharyn McCrumb’s books do.