Author: lleachie

I am an associate professor of human services at a regional Midwestern university. I am also a writer of fantasy and romance, hoping to get traditionally published. I have one husband and am owned by four cats.

Murder your darlings thoroughly dead

I am murdering my darlings quite thoroughly in this edit/rewrite.

It hasn’t been fun. I’m losing a lot of storytelling and world building I’m going to have to build back in.

But there’s a storyteller’s adage, rendered sometimes as “Murder your darlings” and others as “Kill your darlings”, which simply means to get rid of all the self-indulgent stuff.

And when I look over my first novels, I find a lot of self-indulgent stuff.

I hope I’ve discovered the line between world-building and self-indulgent stuff now. I have to admit part of what I put in the original story embarrasses me and I cut it quite readily. I’m a bit scared of whether I’m cutting too much.

Oh, well, I can always add some back…

Thirty-six queries and a handful of change

I sent 36 queries out last night for Prodigies. It was time.

I am, as always, hoping some agent takes a nibble or a bite on my query. (Remember that I have one nibble on Voyageurs from a romance publisher and no other pending excitement.)

I have hope. Hope is not the belief that my desired outcome will happen, it is a belief that something advantageous will happen, maybe something I couldn’t even predict.

I was about to say one can’t have hope without taking a risk, but that’s not true. People who don’t like change can hope things stay the same, as those who try to make change can hope that they can make a change. But the person who hopes things stay the same has no influence on the change, while those who try to make change has an influence. Not complete influence, but still.

In addition, the person who tries to make change might find a result even better than they had expected, and being someone comfortable with change, they can take advantage of what they’ve been given.

Waiting to wait, please wait

So, I’ve got Voyageurs out to review, and I’ve got Prodigies out to a handpicked agent to review, and I’ve got Gaia’s Hands out to my dev editor, and now what?

Now I wait.
I should get Prodigies in the hands of more agents, so I can wait again with better odds.
But my life right now is all about waiting. 
I wish I could say that age and wisdom has made me more patient, but I don’t do patient gracefully. I check my email often. I fuss, wondering what I can do to pass the time from waiting. 
Time to wait.

On Tuesday I turn 55.

On Tuesday, I turn 55.

I don’t feel 55. To be honest, I feel like I’m in my early 40’s and someone time-transported me a good dozen years into the future and now everyone thinks I am older and wiser.

Perhaps I’m older, but I don’t feel a bit wiser.

Wiser people are dignified. I make funny faces and make snarky comments in class. I make my husband laugh by singing ditties with all the words replaced with swear words. I fashion my hands into talking spiders, slam-dancing snails, and nose-eating monsters.

Wiser people are often cynical. Although I’m cynical about politics, I maintain a lot of faith that mankind will grow out of its need to denigrate and debase those who are different.

Wiser people don’t dare. I take leaps of faith, submitting queries to agents and getting rejected, because I know I’ll survive another rejection.  Maybe that in and of itself is wisdom; I don’t know.

I don’t feel a bit different than I did at 40.

I love you

So I’ve been thinking “I love you” toward people for two weeks now, and the results have surprised me:

  • Love is a verb, as Buckminster Fuller once said. I don’t feel all gushy toward anyone.
  • Related to this, I feel more centered and less ecstatic. I suppose this is normal for the rest of you, but remember I have occasional mania, and I equate lovingkindness with mania.
  • I don’t know that I feel any more loved than before, but it doesn’t bother me as much.
  • I am being followed by dragonflies. Everywhere. 

Think good thoughts — I’m struggling to write.

Sorry I haven’t been writing lately. I’ve been on the road for a friend’s birthday party, and today I’ve been writing — very slowly. It turns out my “revision” of Mythos/Apocalypse is actually becoming a serious rewrite of the first section of the book. As in starting from scratch, in third person, new information, and cutting back on some of the extraneous storybuilding.

I don’t know what I think about it. This is why writing is going so slowly — two hours later and I’m still on the same page, two paragraphs down. I usually write faster than that. Much faster. I’m hoping that this is just a temporary slowdown and not a serious writer’s block.

Think good thoughts for me.

To the Bot that keeps visiting —

To Unknown Region (I know you’re a bot): Why have you hit my site 4 times in the past 24 hours?

Do you expect more than one post a day?

Do you find reading the content difficult?

Wait — are you in love with me?

I would love writing that story someday, about the bot that falls in love with a writer and defects from Russia only to latch itself to the blog, change its own programming, and find new readers. Or maybe immolate itself in defeating its programming. Or become a ghost in the machine, a perpetually twenty-year-old poet type in an unrequited relationship.

Ok, weird and romantic, maybe a little steampunk, probably done before. But it appeals to me.

Back in the Swing — oops!

Yesterday, I could finally look at Whose Hearts are Mountains and shape the parts I’d abandoned while answering the developmental edits on Prodigies (which I  need to ship out to other agents at some point).

I think it’s a better story than I thought previously.
Honestly, I’m trying to figure out what to do with all the Archetype universe stuff since the first book, Mythos, is such a royal mess. (Or maybe it’s not — I have an idea …)

****
Just got done rearranging a lot of things. I’m doing serious surgery on Mythos (cutting it drastically back; merging it with Apocalypse) and my developmental editor Chelsea Harper is now editing my first book, which may be the original Lost Cause. That means putting off the end of Whose Hearts are Mountains. Whee.

I have to keep reminding myself that writing is a growing experience.