Midnight Kisa

My Two Cents on The Help

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:19:00 +0000

I saw The Help last weekend. And I know that for many engaged in the debate about the book and its film, my background makes me a priori unqualified to speak on the subject (because, after all, I am a Southern white woman who grew up with a black maid, so I "don't get it"), but I'll speak anyway, to those not so knee-jerk as to be unable to listen.

The arguments against the book (and movie) that I've heard tend to complain that the story is an inaccurate portrayal of history, and that it plays into a "conventional, patronizing arc of a white heroine lending a noble hand of assistance to black characters who couldn’t, without her help, have done it on their own." (The article in the link isn't saying that, by the way.)

On the first point: this isn't a history book. It's a work of fiction. Kathryn Stockett is not obliged to get every detail of 1960s Jackson, Mississippi right. You're welcome to not like the story because you want it to be utterly historically accurate--leaving aside the thorny problem of whose history, precisely, that would be, since history is always a record of events filtered through biased perception--but you're silly to condemn the book for having some goal other than historical accuracy as its main driver.

On the second point: Yeah. Because it would have been so much more realistic to portray Southern black maids in 1960 who had the ear of a major New York publisher--also black, of course, or she'd be the "condescending heroine." You know what? This is one of the places where the story is extremely historically accurate. It might rub you wrong, but the plain truth is, those black characters could not have done it on their own. Not in 1960s Mississippi.

No powerless group can. It's why there are child advocates to protect the rights of the youngest in our society in court. See, that's what you're upset about: that, as a whole, Southern blacks were powerless then. It sticks in the craw--yours and mine--but it was, very simply, true. You can hate that fact--and I think you should; I certainly do--but it doesn't change the reality that, for several hundred years, blacks in America were extremely powerless to effect change without getting killed pretty early in the process.

Is Skeeter's offer to use her "in" at a major New York publisher to serve the cause of civil rights "patronizing"? Doesn't that just sound stupid, when you put it like that? It's as "patronizing" as hiding Jews in your home during WWII. So why does Skeeter do it? Because--open your ears wide, now--though we whites don't feel the beatings or the discrimination, racism is intolerable to many of us. Is that so hard to understand? We all seem to understand why the persecution of the Jews was intolerable to many non-Jews; we all seem to understand why standing by when a neighbor child is being abused is impossible, even at risk to ourselves. Why is it so hard to understand that racism, like every other form of oppression and torture, wounds the hearts of decent human beings across the board?

That There, What I Just Said? Forget That.

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:27:00 +0000

Because I'm not going to pick eight lines from books I love to generate eight plot lines for a new novel. I'm going to run novel-length with the story idea I started on this week and see where it takes me. Because my pantser brain has never failed to take me to awesome places, while my planner brain always takes me to boring, predictable shit I don't even want to write.

I'm going to write every workday until my characters have done about eighty thousand words worth of stuff. And they, each day, will tell me what that stuff is. I am NOT going to think about what should or could happen between sessions. This is vital: I need to keep from predictorizing the story and killing it. I need to led the wild story juices flow untamed. (I feel I've mixed things that don't go well together in that sentence, like cheese and peppermints. But you get me, right?)

That means I'll have to do some backtracking from time to time and fix stuff that changes, and I'm sure at the end I'll have to go back and streamline and foreshadow and other things that make the book sing. Great! I do that all the time with my short stories; I know how to do that. And now, finally, at last, and so on: I think I know how to write to the end of a novel. Just write, baby. Just keep on writing.

Pantser Relapses, Saved by Eight-pronged Plot Maneuver

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 07:04:00 +0000

Well, the plot-n-outline approach sucked all the love right out of that story. Now, I am addicted to making lists and spreadsheets and color-coded charts, so I loved the actual plotting-n-outlining. I just didn't want to write the story that came out of it. I'm a pantser, pure and simple; the discovery as I write is what I love about writing. A well-formed mold into which I pour words to achieve story doesn't excite me. So I think I'll forgo the mad plotting-n-outlining for the next novel idea.

But 2012 shall be the year of my first novel! I have this other just-a-little, oh, just-ever-so fundamental problem, though...

I don't write long. Eight thousand words is the longest story I've ever written (aside from a vampire thing a couple years ago, but I was padding that like crazy, and there were scenes where the protagonist made spaghetti. Yeah).

Used with permission from Debbie Ridpath Ohi at Inkygirl.com.

I'm also not the kind of writer overflowing with more ideas than she knows what to do with. I am an idea pauper. So, a while ago, I decided to use song lyrics to spark ideas, which turned out to be brilliant. I even got two completely different stories from one line of one song.

So I have a new novel plan: I'm going to open eight books I admire somewhere in the middle, take the beginning sentence of the next chapter from each one, and use those eight sentences to generate eight plot lines that eventually twine together to form le libre magnifique. Or at least le premier libre.

And I'm sure that some adroitly applied plot-n-outline skillz will be useful along the way, just not as a starting point.

I'm Twins!

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 17:19:00 +0000

Amazon's software won't allow you to link a book to your author page unless the author name on the book is identical to the one on your page. That means I've now got two Amazon author pages, one for "Grayson Morris" and one for "Grayson Bray Morris," because I've now appeared in two anthologies.

Buy my books! And buy mine, too!

The first editor ignored my middle name (though it's part of my preferred byline); the second included it. I could ask the first editor to change my listing on the book, but frankly, I foresee this problem occurring again in the future, and I'm not at all certain every anthology editor will be as approachable as the two I've worked with so far. So it seems easiest to cover both bases with Amazon author pages.

Of course, that also means some of my books will be listed on one page and the rest on another. Oh, well. That's the price I pay to have the cool drop-down arrow thingy beside my name on a book's page, and to show up in the "More About the Author" section.

In Which I Dabble in the Delicate Art of Herding Cats

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:48:00 +0000

So what have I been doing, you ask? (Yes you did.) I've been PLOTTING A NOVEL. That's right: little old pantser me. I have been three-act-eight-sequencing and index-carding and inner-desire-outer-goaling. And it's all been very useful. And now I'm done. I think.

It's been good because it's forced me to really think about my characters, and about what it is I really want this book to be about. Which aspects are open to change? Which ones are the core coolness I want to groove on? I've got a better story for all that thinking and wrapping-of-brain around midpoints and tension and reversals of fortune.

But I'm pretty sure you can kill a story by plotting too long. In fact, some people who actually know what they're talking about think the whole sequence/act/midpoint/climax breakdown can only be fruitfully done afterward; it's great for analyzing a story, but useless for actually telling one.

It's been good to learn more about storytelling skills and balancing suspense with release; I'm so new to this, it's definitely been a positive addition to my arsenal. But now it's time to step down from the conductor's stand, take my characters' outstretched hands and let them lead me into the dark, labyrinthine corners of their tale.

Read my DSF story tomorrow!

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:51:00 +0000

My story "A Puddle of Dead" will be sent to Daily Science Fiction subscribers tomorrow, November 29. (Subscription is free, and it delivers a short-but-stupendous speculative fiction story to your inbox five days a week.) Non-subscribers can read the story a week later on the website; I'll put a permalink here when it goes live.

Update: permalink is http://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/nanotech/grayson-bray-morris/a-puddle-of-dead.

Knowing

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:43:00 +0000

Last night, I got on the stationary bike for eighty minutes of ~~torture~~ bracing exercise and watched the 2009 film Knowing, about an astrophysics professor who stumbles upon a page of numbers penned by an elementary school child fifty years earlier, which turn out to be eerily accurate predictions of every intervening disaster complete with date, death toll, and geocoordinates.

The premise was pretty cool (I am a number geek, after all), but the weird hissing aliens who apparently could predict our future with precision and had come to save humanity from extinction but decided to hang out for fifty years without warning anyone the Earth would be going up in flames from a major solar flare were just goofy. What was with the creepy stalking I'm-standing-in-your-yard-watching-you? And the black stones? There were some huge logical gaps.

All this made me itch to write a new story using some part of the basic premise. Which part, I'm not sure. I just want to rescue what started as an intriguing idea from its contorted, absurd end.

HTML Grows Up All Sexy

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 09:46:00 +0000

Wow. I mean, just WOW.

When I threw up my first web page back in the mid-1990s, HTML was just a middling set of keywords. Apparently I've been sleeping under a rock for years, because now, in its fifth incarnation, it's a whole freaking programming language. And it can do some amazing, awesome stuff.

(Hey, I did learn PHP and a bunch of CSS stuff and a teeny bit of XML along the way, but I had no idea HTML had come so far. In my defense, I have been sleeping under rocks: crazy-busy child-infested household-running translator-and-writer rocks, for the past twelve years. Programming has been, shall we say, on a back burner somewhere deep in the far Pacific. Or maybe closer to Alpha Centauri.)

The link above may not work for you; be sure to give it a minute or two to check your browser setup before giving up on it. If it barfs on you, watch the video presentation instead.

(Credit for my ability to tell you about this goes to Jed Hartman, on whose public blog I read about it.)

We Have a Zombie

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:25:00 +0000

It died last year. It was dead all summer. D-E-A-D. As in, no life.

Now, suddenly, as a chill creeps into the wet autumn air, promising dark and wintry months to come, it's come back to life.

It was an outside tree. Is the Netherlands a Mediterranean climate? No. Yet this does not deter us--and there are many of us in this tiny, wet, chilly country with olive trees--from plunking the poor things into pretty little pots in our yards. Sometimes they survive; this one did for a year and a half. Then it died.

Did I mention that already? It was DEAD.

Naturally, we rushed to move it indoors as soon as we noticed its revivification this morning. It shall enjoy a mild, warm winter, sipping tea with us all cozy inside. Then, when spring bounds into Holland next May (you heard me), it will return to the balmy patio, where, if it is lucky, the sun will actually appear from time to time to caress its verdant branches.

Unless it eats us in our sleep first.

Mike Hits a Nail on the Head

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 20:12:00 +0000

I recently read one of Mike Resnick's "Ask Bwana" posts, which originally appeared at Baen's Bar, in which he defines a writer as "someone who sells his writing." I had no particular reaction to that definition when I read it, but I was at a party last night, and let me tell you, he's spot on in his reasons for defending that definition.

I have the great fortune to have sold a story before I attended said party. So when my hostess introduced me to another guest as "a science fiction writer" or someone asked me "what do you do?" and I said "I write speculative fiction," I was able to answer the reaction, which was 100-percent-without-a-single-deviation "Oh, really? Are you published?", with "Yes, I am."

Now, maybe some of them would have taken me seriously even if I'd said "not yet," but I know for a fact that all of them took me seriously last night. Because I am published. Let's face it: your average Joe and Jane aren't exactly up on how hard it is to sell a story. They aren't going to be impressed by your personal rejections from John Joseph Adams or Gordon van Gelder. A non-published author is akin to a stay-at-home mom; eyes glaze over and start searching the room for more interesting guests.

I'm not Stephen King published; I'm not even Octavia Butler published. But I'm published, in black-and-white, in a book they can look up on Amazon and buy. And, instead of feeling like I was justifying myself all night, I felt accomplished. All from that one story sale.

I don't think you have to have sold a single word yet to be a real writer. But it sure helps your street cred in the outside world.

In Which I Faint from My Lack of Procrastination

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:04:00 +0000

I haz a WOTF Q1 v29 story! And holy mackerel, it's not even the end of October. The quarter is a mere babe in swaddling clothes.

It is the best, kickest-ass story I or anyone else has ever written. (Check back tomorrow, when it will be the sorriest story ever to have sucked digital ink. Then check back next week, when it will be a pretty decent story I feel pretty decent about.)

It's a first draft, so I won't be sending it in for a couple of weeks, but I'm so pleased I could pinch myself. (Instead, I shall go forth and pour wine. Much better. Oh, and eat chocolate. Yes.) I sat down two days ago and told myself I was going to write a story specifically for this market, and I did it. And I did it early, which means I have those couple of weeks to let it ripen before I do the final readthrough-and-revise. Yay, me!

Long, Hot Pantser Sex

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:28:00 +0000

Remember when I said I was a short-story monogamist? Well, a tall, dark, novel-length stranger is courting me!

The premise is one I began fleshing out several years ago, then abandoned. I've expanded the narrative to four point-of-view characters (instead of one), and lo and behold my total pantser approach seems to be working beautifully. Which relieves me, because I'd convinced myself that being an überpantser was what kept my stories short. One has to be able to plan and outline, so my thinking went, in order to write a novel. Or at least a novel anyone would want to read.

I *love* being a pantser. I love all the amazing, kickass places my writing brain takes me when I'm at the keyboard. Whenever I've tried planning a story, I've lost interest in writing it. So I was willing to make the tradeoff in order to keep loving what I do. Fortunately I seem to be absolutely wrong about the whole planner-vs-pantser novel thing.

(And I just know the title of this post is going to get me into all kinds of search results I don't even want to think about.)

Appreciating the Water in Which We Swim

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:43:00 +0000

A long time ago, my aunt worked as a secretary in an oral surgery clinic. She told me how the job she'd taken just to pay her bills had a thoroughly unexpected benefit: it made her intensely grateful to have been born without disfigurement. So maybe she wasn't Christie Brinkley, but damn, she looked fine. She never felt like a physical freak at the grocery store. She didn't have to wrestle with chewing and speaking every second of every day.

It made her appreciate just being ordinary.

I experience a similar gratitude watching the ease with which my children navigate the social world. I lack that ease; I was frequently bullied as a child, and I never understood how to interact with other kids the "right way." Without my experience, I imagine I'd be oblivious to the non-guaranteed plus that social savvy is in a child's life. Don't all little kids run off and play well together on the playground? No, they don't. So every time my kids do, I say a little prayer of thanks for that serendipitous gift in their lives.

In doing research for a story in progress, I've discovered another invisible plus to be grateful for. Most of us have never stopped to consider what an enormous gift it is to be born into the right body. But it is; oh, it is. Maybe the biggest invisible gift of all.

As a warm-up exercise, consider being born into a body that doesn't function properly: a body with ALS, for example. Imagine being Stephen Hawking, living in that body. Yes, you think, that does make me grateful for my healthy, ordinary body that walks and speaks and moves the way I want it to.

At least Stephen Hawking feels like his body belongs to him. Imagine looking in the mirror and seeing a body of the opposite sex. You recognize your nose, your height, the mole on your left shoulder, but the intimate bits are just...wrong. And not only those; there's hair where it shouldn't be (or not where it should); your voice sounds too deep (or too high); even your hands look wrong to you. Imagine living with that body every day. Imagine everyone assuming that you are what your body says you are, and telling you there's something wrong with your mind because you say you're not. No one tells Stephen Hawking he's out of his mind.

No, really: imagine that. Picture it in your mind. Picture being you, but in a body of the opposite sex. Picture that whenever you confide this to someone, the most positive response you get is an earnest urging to get psychological counseling. The negative...well, Google Brandon Teena.

Those of you who have gotten this far without actually trying the exercise: try the exercise. So it pushes a lot of your buttons. So it makes you feel queasy, or maybe out of control. So it's such an utterly alien feeling, you can't fathom what it must be like. Well, try: try to fathom it. Try to put yourself in that place. It's called empathy. For the religiously inclined: it's called compassion.

Main Entry: ¹com·pas·sion
Pronunciation: kəm'pashən, -aash-, -aish-
Function: noun
: deep feeling for and understanding of misery or suffering and the concomitant desire to promote its alleviation : spiritual consciousness of the personal tragedy of another or others and selfless tenderness directed toward it

But you know what? This isn't even really about compassion. This is about appreciating all the amazingly wonderful things about our own lives that we usually never even recognize could have gone differently. It's about recognizing blessings we erroneously thought were birthrights.

If you still don't feel humbled and grateful for the happy like-water-to-fish accident that is your matching gender-identity-plus-body boxed set, well, I submit you still haven't tried the exercise.

Me? I'm a woman in a woman's body: another lucky draw of the human diversity straw, for which I'm newly and humbly grateful.

Bridge Me, Oh Interwebz

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:17:00 +0000

So, for *years*, I've wanted to play competitive bridge.

I took a couple of classes when my elder two were little, to help me learn the basics and cling to what sanity I still had left. (Granted, it wasn't much. But hey, I can still string coherent sentences togther. And add!)

Then we moved to the Netherlands, and the bridge lessons fell by the wayside. (Cue the low-key sobbing in the background.)

But DAMNIT, I want to play bridge. I'm a self-styled SAYC intermediate beginner. I know Jacoby transfers, Stayman, Gerber, Jacoby 2NT, and Blackwood. I'm willing to learn More Useful Conventions. Utimately I want to play in European (and American, lottery willing) tournaments. Who, oh who out there, wants to be my Interwebz-and-eventually-real-life tournament partner?

Early to Bed, Early to Rise: Take Two

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 08:13:00 +0000

Back in June, I announced my plan to start getting up at 4:30 AM to write. I was nervous, if you recall; I've never been an early riser. So how did the experiment go?

I loved it. It was magnificent, being up while the rest of the world was asleep, feeling alone in my little office cocoon. It was absolutely stupendous knowing that I'd gotten two hours of writing in before the day even started. It felt awesome.

It was also untenable. After three weeks, I was experiencing a constant dull headache and the sense of meh that means I haven't had enough sleep. Even letting myself sleep in two mornings a week....then three.

Right now I have family obligations that keep me from going to bed early enough to make AM writing work, but even after the kids leave home, early rising may not be the most effective approach. I think I, personally, get more bang from eight hours of shuteye between, say, midnight and 8 AM than between 9:30 PM and 4:30 AM. I'm a night person; it's that simple.

So I have a new plan. Starting next week, I'm saying my day begins at 9 PM. And the first thing I'm going to do when my day begins is write for two hours. So when I wake up the next morning at 7:30 or 8 AM, I've already written for the day. No matter what else happens, I've written!

This won't have the same "the world is silent and asleep" feeling getting up early had, but I'm hoping to cash in on that sense of accomplishment permeating the rest of my (next) day. And someday, when the kids have flown the coop, maybe I'll stay up writing till three and sleep in till twelve. Till then, this will have to do.

I'll report back in a month or so.

Angst and Agony and Auauauauaughhh

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 20:21:00 +0000

The Writers of the Future contest liked my Q3 entry so much, they gave me my first-ever straight-up rejection.

John Joseph Adams at Fantasy Magazine liked it so much, he dropped me back down a rejection tier to "didn't quite work for me."

Jed Hartman at Strange Horizons was so sure he was going to like it, he closed the magazine to submissions the morning I wanted to press "send."

Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld liked it so much, he gave me my fifth consecutive bottom-tier rejection. (This hasn't actually happened yet--I'm still number 92 in the queue--but it will. Hey, if I have to come back and call myself a liar, well, I will be mighty fine with that.)

All this, on a story I thought -- think -- is a good one. I must admit, the WOTF rejection has taken the most wind out of me. I never thought I'd get less than an HM there, certainly not on a story I feel is superior to my previous two entries. Am I getting worse at evaluating my stories, writing more poorly though I think I'm improving? I doubt that. More likely, this story didn't stroke with the coordinating judge's taste. That's all; nothing more. I'll keep submitting it until I'm out of markets.

But it's a hard blow to the heart. Ah, expectation.

World's. Best. Gingerbread. Ever.

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:35:00 +0000

Years ago, I discovered Edward Espe Brown's gingerbread recipe in The Tassajara Bread Book. It's not only the best gingerbread in the multiverse, but also quite possibly the best dessert-slash-bread of any kind, ever, anywhere. And I say this as a devoted chocoholic.

To add awesome to addictive, each piece imparts 25 percent of your RDA for iron and calcium. Could it *possibly* get any better? Health requirements practically demand you eat four pieces. Every day.

But there the story takes a tragic turn: once upon a time, I moved to the Netherlands, where there is no blackstrap molasses. There's no real molasses, period. Oh, the horror!

So on my recent trip back to the States, I loaded up. And, for the first time in years, we haz ginjabred!

Blackstrap's important - that's where all those lovely minerals come from, and the rich, dark color.

Tids and Tads and Frustrating Little Turds

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:15:00 +0000

Finalists for the third quarter of the Writers of the Future contest (aka WOTF Q3 2011 v28) have been announced, and the HMs and semifinalists seem to have been notified, and I....haven't heard anything yet. My result seems to have been lost in cyberspace.

I just heard about Kindlegraph: a service for getting your e-books autographed by the author.

Summer, such as it was, is over in the Netherlands. We were geniusoidal to flee the country for a warm and sunny island; it was pretty much rain, rain and rain here. And rain.

Mid-July onward was devoid of writing and submissions, but now school's started back up, I''ll be righting that wrong. And patient, brilliant Alex will finally get the story critique he's been waiting for.

Mirror Shards Anthology Is Out!

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:31:00 +0000

A quick-quick post here - I'm currently in the US helping a friend during a time of crisis. Drumroll, please......

The Mirror Shards Anthology was released yesterday! The blurb (with links to the anthology at the bottom; font snazziness on my listing courtesy of moi):

EXPLORE the edge of augmented reality in thirteen tales from thirteen fantastic authors. When the digital world collides with our real one, bringing all its problems and benefits, mankind will have to relearn what it means to be human.

In this glimpse of possible futures, you will go on the hunt to track down a fugitive on the other side of the known Universe. Learn the price of ubiquitous knowledge, or find peace and understanding in the absence of it. Dive deep into the ocean to avert a kidnapping using only the tools at hand. Experience new realities underwritten by an alien love of entertainment. Find hidden truths contained within our smallest gestures. Hide something so valuable, it would drive a man to crime. Or find that sometimes, what it doesn’t hide is what endangers us most.

The Table of Contents:

"El Mirador" by Alex J. Kane

"Music of the Spheres" by Ken Liu

"These Delicate Creatures" by Melissa Yuan-Innes

"Below the Bollocks Line" by T D Edge

"The Sun is Real" by George Page

"A Book By Its Cover" by Colleen Anderson

"Of Bone and Steel and Other Soft Materials" by Annie Bellet

"Witness Protection" by Louise Herring-Jones

"Stage Presence, Baby" by E.M. Schadegg

"Gift Horses" by K.E. Abel

"The Cageless Zoo" by Thomas K. Carpenter

"More Real Than Flesh" by Grayson Bray Morris

"The Watcher" by George Walker

Amazon (Kindle): http://tinyurl.com/3mpp882

Amazon (Paperback): http://tinyurl.com/455vdbo

B&N: http://tinyurl.com/42hxklt

Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/82712

Back from Vacay on an Alien Planet

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 16:26:00 +0000

Not really, of course. Well, the vacay was real, but the planet was Earth. Only it was Fuerteventura, which is warm and sunny and rainless, completely unlike the Netherlands. The Netherlands is Venus in a Ray Bradbury story where the sun only comes out for two hours every seven years.

We had a grand time frolicking in the reasonably warm surf (way warmer than the Atlantic in NL, somewhat colder than the Atlantic in NC, but definitely swimmable).

Colorful graphic with helpful interpretive features, which I spent an hour creating and tweaking while I was supposed to be translating, so I bloody well hope you think it's awesome and totally worth coming back to my blog in case I make more

We had fun windsurfing. We saw camels along the roadside, and strolled along lots of very windy mountains and beaches, and drank a lot of Fanta Limón. Which is an awesome drink, when you live in the Netherlands and there is no American lemonade to be found. It was totally American lemonade on sparkly-water steroids.

Oh? And leche y leche *rocks*. Espresso with sweetened condensed milk in a pretty see-through glass. Yes. Very yes.

I am currently slogging through my Google Reader backlog (started at 200-something-high, down to 126 now) and looking foward to getting back to writing. I've had a million far-out story ideas, and I took a lot of photos to help me remember them. The kids are still on vacation, which presents a minor scheduling issue, but I shall work around it. More to come on that - I'll be posting on the results of my early-waking plan soon.

What an Awesome Moment to Wake Up Thirsty

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 09:53:00 +0000

Last night I came downstairs around midnight to get a drink of water at exactly the moment the documentary It Might Get Loud was starting (the Hubster was, as usual, still up and using the TV as background noise while he worked on worky-type stuff). What serendipity!

There's a scene where Jack White and The Edge are sitting on the well-worn couches in the "living room" studio where much of the three-musician documentary takes place, and you can just see it on their faces: "Holy shit, Jimmy fucking Page is standing three feet away, playing 'Stairway to Heaven' for ME."

I was also incredibly pleased to see Jack White acknowledge Dexter Romweber in the film. A clip of Dex begins--and Jack White has clearly taken the inspiration for a lot of his music and his look from Dex, so I'm thinking at first that I'm watching White, until about five seconds in, when I recognize the way Dex is moving. Dexter Romweber is one of those incredible, pure channelings of musical intensity and genius, and it's evident whenever you watch him play. Then the clip pans out into the crowd, and I'm thinking, "Wow...I wonder if I'm standing out there somewhere." I probably was, if the clip was filmed in the last half of the 80s.

I love watching insanely creative minds, the kind of people like Dex, White, The Edge, and Page who are thoroughly consumed by passion for music, drenched through with it, channeling some kind of perfection from another plane and absolute masters of their art form. It's tremendously inspiring, and I just feel kind of grateful I've been allowed to spend a little time soaking up their magic.

World's Most Concise BCS Rejection

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:54:00 +0000

I submitted my WOTF Q2 Honorable Mention story to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, a fantasy magazine known for the detailed personal rejections it writes for every submission. I wasn't sure the story was a good fit for BCS; it has a grittier, less fantastical feel than most of what they publish, but I figured I'd give it a try, and was eager to see what storytelling feedback they'd have for me. I woke to this in my inbox:

Thanks very much for sending this story to _Beneath Ceaseless Skies_. Unfortunately, it's not quite right for us. This tale is more contemporary than we are looking for.

We appreciate your interest in our magazine. Please feel free to submit other work in the future.

Regards,

Kate Marshall
Assistant Editor

The encouragement to submit more work appears to be a standard part of their rejection letters (as opposed to indicating a higher-tier rejection as with Neil Clarke or JJA). Given the brevity, I do feel I've gotten a bottom-tier rejection. Oh, well. Off to the next market!

Seven Things You Don't Know About Me

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 10:17:00 +0000

The fabulous Alan Ryker posted his answers to this meme a while back, inspiring me to do the same.

1. I was this close to picking up an STD from one of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Back in 1985, after I'd dropped out of college and was embracing the alternative life style with both hands and feet, the then-relatively-unknown Peppers played my hometown, opening for Someone Bigger. Being then-relatively-unknown, they didn't have a lot of moolah to shell out for a place to stay, so they stayed at my house. (My housemate, Ben, who owned the local alternoclub, knew them.) Alas, I was out of town that weekend, so I missed my chance to (ahem) 'host' them in my own home.

2. Back in 1988, David Gilmour (of Pink Floyd fame) played my town. My boyfriend at the time was something of a local rock star and a big Floyd fan, and he managed to finagle a meeting with Gilmour after the show. The boyfriend shook Gilmour's hand, but I did not; I've always been reluctant to accost famous folk, and I didn't want to steal my boyfriend's moment in the sun. But I once stood beside someone who was shaking David Gilmour's hand.

3. I was once charmingly described as "obviously well-fed" in a newspaper article. It was in the context of my 1982 efforts on behalf of The Hunger Project; I organized workshops and tried to educate people about world hunger and how to end it. The reporter and her photographer drove nearly two hours from Raleigh to Greenville to interview me, with, like, photos and everything. Being fifteen, I immediately freaked about my weight, which I now find absurdly amusing, considering I weighed about 105 pounds then.

4. I wrote a sequel to the very first Star Wars film. I was ten in the summer of 1977, and I still remember coming home from the movies and dancing around with a table knife like a light saber. That film changed my life. I lived, breathed, ate and slept Star Wars for well over a year. One night I had a dream, and I wrote it down, then typed it up on the seventh-grade classroom typewriter over several weeks. Then I sent it off to George Lucas. Episode V didn't end up using my plot, so who knows whether he ever received it? But that, dear reader, was my first experience of a story that just had to be told.

5. The typewriter in the previous item was seventh grade though I was only ten because I skipped two grades in elementary school. Word to the wise: never do this to your children. My poor parents thought they were doing me a favor, but it killed my already tenuous social life. It took moving to a new town and letting me repeat seventh grade to remove (most of) the stigma.

6. In an attempt to overcome my intense geekdom, I was a cheerleader for two years, in ninth and tenth grades (before I went to NCSSM). I loved the dance routines--I still love dance, and if the universe would get with the program and offer streetdance classes for adults near my town, I'd be all over those puppies--but I hated the social hierarchy posturing.

7. I don't have a driver's license. I used to, when I lived in the States. Got it when I was sixteen, like everyone else. When we moved to the Netherlands in 2002, I failed the test on a technicality. Truth be told, I don't really mind; it's scary as hell driving here, and the older I get, the less able to adapt I seem to be.

Okay, Internet friends and acquaintances: I hereby charge you to go forth and be revealing. What are seven things we don't know about you?

My First Shiny WOTF HM Certificate

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:06:00 +0000

Hey, it's the flashiest rejection I've gotten so far.

Sale Number Two!

noreply@blogger.com (Grayson) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 08:24:00 +0000

I woke up this morning to a lovely acceptance from Thomas K. Carpenter at Black Moon Books. My story "More Real Than Flesh" will be appearing in volume one of the annual anthology Mirror Shards: Exploring the Edges of Augmented Reality. Publication is scheduled for September. Woo hoo!