Life with Chloe

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, we acquired a 8-week-old kitten who we named Chloe. This is a recent picture of Chloe:

Ok, that wasn’t such a good picture of her. How about this?

Ok, so she doesn’t pose well for pictures.

Chloe is a mixture of sweet and spicy — she curls up with me at night, right before springing over me and attacking my foot. Her acceleration rate far surpasses mine, and she can jump eight inches straight in the air. She licks my face, then nips my nose.

I’m her favorite, but only because she’s quarantining in my room until we can acquaint her with the other cats. So I am the source of food and pettings.

Yes, the other cats are jealous — not so much of the cat, but because they want kitten food too. Given the extra calorie punch of kitten kibble, of course the cats want to eat the kitten food. When one (usually Me-Me) finds their way in, I have to hide the food dish until they leave.

Me-Me and Chloe stalk each other. Today I watched Me-Me sneak up to Chloe until she had Chloe literally pinned up against her cardboard carrier. Then, as Me-Me walked off, Chloe started stalking her.

Someday Chloe will be a full grown cat, without so many of the charming kitten antics. But I’m sure she will be as magnificent and quirky as she was as a kitten.

The Calm Before the Storm

Right now, it’s the calm before the storm for me — school starts in two weeks, and I’m taking what I like to call my vacation, which is a blessed period of doing absolutely nothing important. Time enough to get worked up about immersing myself in small-room teaching for a high risk clientele that doesn’t mask.

But I’m not falling completely fallow. Yesterday, I attempted to get rid of my writers’ block by submitting a few pieces to literary journals through Submittable. This was recommended to me through a graphic artist at Gateway Con as a way to wait out finding an agent and publisher.

I have gotten a couple publications this way — mostly on web sites, an honorable mention on a major journal (on a story that was very much genre fantasy!), and a couple other journals and zines. So surprising to me that my work is finding traction.

So today I will be doing something. Submitting more materials, writing flash fiction, getting back to my book, sending a query letter in for more critique. Something to do with writing.

Try, Try Again

One friend liked my pitch (no, don’t like pitches if you’re not an agent!)

Three followers (also not agents) liked my pitch

One indy publisher with a suspicious business model liked my pitch

No agents liked my pitch.

What is the next move? Right around September or so, I can start pitching the new improved Apocalypse with its new improved query out to agents. I can research small presses to see if some tend more toward traditional and are looking for my kind of stuff. I can look at Manuscript Wish List to target agents to look at my stuff.

Lots of people retweeted me, especially the pitch for Apocalypse. So there’s hope if people recognize its worth.

I’m not quite ready to self-publish yet. I have doubts about my ability to market (which is why I’m wary of “hybrid” presses as well.) But I’m not giving up, because publishing is just the cherry on top.

#SFFpit

Today is #SFFpit, which is a Twitter pitch session for writers of science fiction and fantasy. The idea is one writes a tweet-length pitch for one’s novel and sends it out into the Twitterverse to see if it catches an agent’s eye. If it does, they will ask for a manuscript.

I have done several pitch contests (#Pitmad as well as #SFFpit), and I have never had much luck. But hope springs eternal, as they say, whoever they are. I load up TweetDeck, an automated tweeting app, with 20 pitches (10 for each book I want attention paid to) and wait.

I don’t expect to get any traction from this, because I haven’t before. I

may get moody later today, because nobody likes rejection. I will get over it, because hope springs eternal.

A couple days of laziness

This morning it’s coffee and Miles Davis. Life could certainly be worse. In the pandemic, I think moments like this save me from depression.

I slept all day yesterday. I don’t know what that was all about, except that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I think I might be able to today. Time to write — maybe. If I don’t fall asleep again.

I only have about two weeks before the beginning of the semester. I dread that still, because I think work (the college) will be a hotbed of COVID-19, but I really have no say in it. It’s too early for me to retire, because I have no health insurance until Social Security kicks in (and I’m only 57). So I have to face it.

But not yet. This is my actual vacation time, and I can spend it being lazy.

I need a good bit of luck to get through this novel.

I seem to be writing slow, but at least I’m writing under the current method. The method is to free write, then transcribe with editing to tighten the writing.

I feel overwhelmed by words, though, and wonder if the meaning is there. I’m really stymied by writing lately; I surely didn’t go through this self-guessing the first time I wrote this novel. To be honest, I didn’t go through self-guessing at all, which is why I’ve edited and re-edited this book over the past five years.

This book is a beast, and there’s no reason it should be, except now it’s a romance novel in addition to a fantasy, and I don’t know what I’m doing there. I need all the wishes for good luck I can manage.

Feeling young today

Sometimes, I feel really, really old.

Today, I feel younger than my 56 years of age.

I don’t know why — it’s not that I feel young. I just don’t feel like someone inching toward “senior citizen”.

I wonder if there’s something more energetic to listen to than classical music (Mahler) on this Sunday morning. Have I been missing something by not listening to Lana Del Rey? Lady Gaga? (I don’t feel like I’ve been missing anything with Ed Sheeran.)

I wonder if there’s a new hobby I could take up, as if writing isn’t enough. Or someplace to go (during COVID, this is a tall order.)

I suppose if I want to feel every minute of my age, I could just take a walk in this 100+ degree heat index. That would make me feel about 120, I suspect.

So maybe I’m not that young. But I refuse to think I’m old.

The joys of rediscovering free writing

I think I may have found a way to get over writers’ block — free writing exercises.

I have been drafting into Scrivener — which is very efficient, but not a lot of fun. I didn’t realize how its utilitarian background and the very edit-forward feel was keeping me from writing first drafts. The process — staring at the screen every few words, looking for the perfect word …

I attended a writing workshop/guided exercise over Zoom, led by Debbi Voisey, and it was a set of guided free-writing exercises, the type where you put pen to paper and then write. We worked through exercises on scenes, senses, and descriptions, and then we free-wrote.

It felt marvelous! It helped me put together a scene I was struggling with for the past two weeks. Moreover, writing felt fun again!

I believe the reason this works is because our internal editors get in the way of our creativity. There’s time to edit, and that’s after getting words on pages. I found that the words I was putting on the pages needed editing, but not while I was writing them.

I think I will use this free-writing. The way I can use it with Scrivener and with the “Save the Cat” framework is to take each chapter’s prompt (the tag on the chapter that says what goes there) and write that in my notebook, then start free-writing in earnest. Then I can enter it in Scrivener and edit.

I hope I’m onto something, because I have been working quite fruitlessly these last several weeks. (Not that I’ve been doing nothing; I reorganized my classes, recorded several lectures, taken a grad level class, revised my query letters for two books, set up my pitches for SFFpit … I just haven’t been writing.)

Ok, deep breath. I think I could get to liking writing again.

A Little Bit About a Little Kitten

After yesterday’s intense post, I’ve decided I need to write something fluffy. And purry. And zoomy.

So I’ll take a brief moment to talk about my new kitten, Chloe.

We got Chloe a week ago, as in impulse cat adoption after Stinkerbelle died. She’s a two-month-old kitten, at the time when their eyes aren’t quite the color they’ll be and they have little bellies still.

Chloe is a combination of sweetness and orneriness, like raspberry-jalapeno salsa (which I highly recommend). She will spend nights alternating between curling up against me and tearing up the bedroom she’s held in quarantine in. Sometimes she thinks my hand is something to gently pat with her little paws and sometimes she thinks it’s prey.

I love this little kitten. Biologists suggest that we love cats because they remind us of babies. I would introduce them to Chloe because she’s more like a toddler right now, one who draws with crayons on the wall and then asks for a hug with big brown eyes.

Chloe makes my dread about going back into the classroom a bit easier to take. There is life, and there is love.

I just made my will today

I just made my will today.

The faculty and staff at my university got the email yesterday from Human Resources referring us to a resource available to university employees. It’s a holographic will done with software our human resources area has access to. It doesn’t even cost us anything, because our university has been so kind as to provide this service to us for free.

I am furious.

Not because I made a will, because I should have done that years ago. I knew better, but let it lapse anyhow because, you know, time passes and nobody likes to think about death.

I am furious because this is the response of the university to the faculty and staff’s concerns about Coronavirus in the fall semester. We’ve already watched our cases double in the past week and a half in the county. Nobody has died — yet. What is going to happen when all five thousand-some students come back?

We faculty wanted online classes. We got assistance with wills.

To be fair, we’re trying some alternative classroom arrangements to allow for social distancing. I will have only eight students per class session; I will in effect be teaching only one class session a week six times (two sections x three cohorts of 8). But these students will be in residence halls, where social distancing cannot happen. They will be in the food court. They will get COVID and, hopefully, most of them will survive, except I guess those with comorbidities like diabetes and immune suppression.

We will wear masks — hopefully. I’ve not been told what to do with students who will not wear masks, other than “put them in the corner”.

The death rate from COVID in the US, according to Johns Hopkins, is 3.6%. Most of that is concentrated in minorities, older age groups and people with preexisting conditions that predispose us to complications. I am 56 and obese, and at risk. My husband is 51 with a condition that makes him high-risk.

I am told to prepare to go fully online at any time. When will campus call this? If students return to campus, some of which are already infected from group activities, the dam will already be broken. I am bracing for ugliness. I am bracing for illness.

I am writing my will.