OK, it's been way too long since I've posted anything here.

Let's see....

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I finally got my plane tickets and hotel reservations for Potlatch.

The two previous cons I've attended were frustrating in opposite ways. At WisCon, my schedule was open (that was while I was still substitute teaching in Michigan), so I got to stay for a few days, but money was so tight that my brother and I had to stay at a cheaper hotel across town, which was a huge pain. At World Fantasy I could stay in the convention hotel (benefits of actually having a steady full-time job), but, since it was mid-semester, my schedule was so tight I only got to take in about half the con, coming in late enough on Friday and leaving early enough on Sunday that I missed all of the Friday and Sunday programming.

This time, I'll actually be OK on both counts. I'll be staying at the convention hotel, and that's my Spring Break (I'll be traveling opposite the path of the legions of tourists from the Pacific Northwest having Spring Break in Miami), I'm taking in the whole con, arriving the day before it starts and leaving the day after. So I should be getting into Portland around dinner-time on March 8th, and leaving around lunchtime on March 12th, which sounds downright civilized by comparison to the rush in and out at World Fantasy.

I will, btw, be back home for the rest of Spring Break, including the whole time ICFA is going on. On the off chance that anyone reading this is considering going to that, it's local for me and I'd be more than happy to come by for a couple of days of that and hang out. The GoH is Geoff Ryman this year, and last I heard, there's at least a chance that at least at least one of my other CW06 classmates might make it, so it should be fun.

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After prolonged thought about NaNo and JaNo--why I keep signing on for these novel-writing months and why they never seem to work for me--I think I've figured out what the problem is, and what I need to do differently.

Basically, there are two conflicting impulses at work here:

(1) I'm not Stephen King, or even 3na.

This might seem self-evident and straight-forward enough not to require further elucidation, but here's what I mean: King famously writes two thousand words a day. Seems to work for him, and in fact I quite like the results. Contrary to what some people think, popular doesn't equal bad, and the fact of the matter is that on a sentence-by-sentence level, the guy's a good stylist. (Ian MacLeod constantly referenced SK at Clarion. He was, apparently, one of his major influences.) Now, I realize that the theory of this kind of productivity-rate is that you write that way for your first draft without worrying about quality, and then you go back and improve it in subsequent re-writes, but on a basic level that doesn't seem to be how I tick.

For one thing, I tend toward fits and starts. E.g. almost everything I wrote at Clarion tended to be written within the 24 hour period before the deadline. The story that went over the best was entirely written within about a 8 hour period, getting the foundational image while I was sitting in class that morning and working furiously through the afternoon and evening with only a couple of breaks for meals and walks and whatnot. With the exception of a few flash and near-flash pieces, none of the stuff I wrote pre-Clarion was anywhere near *that* quick, but it was still written in fits and starts, with invariably at least 1/3rd to 1/2 written in one or two writing sessions at the very end. Even How to Light a Cigar, which is the story I spent longest on--it was the first story I wrote as an adult, and I wrote the first scene at the beginning of May '05 and didn't write the last scene until the end of June--I wrote the bulk of the story over the course of a couple of days at the end.

In other words, that kind of writing-every-day discipline is not my strength. For better or for worse, the muse tends to be a lot more ocassional and flaky for me than that. Which means that (a) I pretty much invariably do heavy revisions while I'm still working on projects, and (b) that this is in fact integral to my being able to write beyond where I'm at before. I often cut large bits of what I've already written, start again in different directions and find this is an absolutely necessary part of being able to write more. This isn't just a matter of deciding to change stuff on a this-happens-then-this-happens-level. (If that was all it was, I could just write a note to myself to go back and revise the early sections later to make them consistent with the later sections.) It's more like, on some almost subconscious level that I have trouble finding the vocabulary for, the new words flow from the old words, and I *can't* write new stuff if I don't like the old stuff enough.

Obviously, all of this creates severe problems for NaNo/JaNo-type efforts. I just can't crank out the 2K-a-day, and trying to do so back-fires. There's a momentum to these things, and not making quota one day makes it a hundred times easier to not make it the next. (As opposed to the weekly deadlines in Seattle, where I could fail to get anything done for two or three days in a row, but by the end of the week actually make the deadline.) I get stalled, and end up writing far less than I would have if I wasn't JaNo-ing or NaNo-ing.

Now, if that was all there was too it, I might just bow out of JaNo and say "it ain't broke don't fix it." If I'm happy with my existing writing process, why try to change it? The problem is that the competing impulse is...

(2) It's broke, and deadlines are a good thing.

I am in fact pretty unhappy with my post-Clarion productivity. I don't necessarily mean that on the "I'm not writing enough stuff level (though that's *also* very true, having completed a grand total of three new stories in the almost six months since Clarion, and only two of my Clarion stories cleaned up and shoved out the door, which is not exactly hitting the ground running), but in a deeper sense. Most days I don't write, and most days I feel anxious and unhappy about that fact. This is the primary thing I want to do with my life for a reason.

....and, in fact, as long as they aren't excessive or unreasonable, deadlines are my friend. Clarion certainly should have proved that much. I know people who freeze up when they have deadlines (different strokes and all that), but not me. I thrive on them. When I know I have to get stuff done by a certain point, that's actually good for loosening the creative dams.

So, from the combination of these two things, I've decided to bow out of JaNo, realizing that these novel-writing months are not for me. (Maybe if I've got the *first* 50K of a novel done some year, I'll use NaNo for the *second*, when I've got a rush for the end, but that's the only scenario I can see doing one of these things again.) At the same time, though, since it is broke, I don't want to go back to same-old/same-old.

So, as a compromise, I'm going to try the Jay Lake approach for a while. I know he has for many years done one short story a week, and since he started writing novels, he counts novel chapters the same as short stories. Same basic idea, but I'm also going to consider dramatic re-writes of existing stories (but not superficial revision passes), both to lessen the pressure and because I have so many of these that I need to work on. Right now, I'm finally getting some headway on the new Shadowmind ending, so I'll count that, and have my first deadline for something new be a week from whenever I finish that. After that, for the near future at least, I'm going to try to get either a short story, or a short-story-sized novel chapter, or a re-write of an old story, done every week. Since I'm sure I'm not going to be coming up with story ideas every week, I figure that I should actually get quite a lot of the novel done done this way, certainly more than I'd get done with the "oh, shit, I need to make quota today" vicious circle.

....and it should be good on the other issues too, since back when I did have weekly deadlines this summer, the pressure of that schedule meant that just about every day, even if I didn't necessarily *write* every day (and even if the vast majority of days what I wrote were fragments that didn't go anywhere and got swiftly abandoned), I at least did some blank-screen-staring-and-sweating every day, which seems to be an important part of the process by which I tend to make my way to stories that actually get written.

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After thinking about it for years, I finally broke down and got a Netflix subscription. (At the rate I tend to go through video rentals, Netflix is vastly cheaper.) This means that I've been going through the first season of the HBO series "Rome" at a pretty furious rate. I caught a few episodes of it when it was on air (at my apartment back in Kalamazoo, HBO was included in the cable package...happy days), and enjoyed it a lot, but I missed most of the season. Much like "the Sopranos", it combines oodles of sex, violence and stuff you can't get away with on network television with some of the most intelligent and literate writing on television, making for an addictive combination.

It really hit me in the last episode I watched--"How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic"--when Caeser's army crosses the Rubicon, and it hit me that a lesser show--one on a regular network, where they have to worry not about whether people will like the programming enough to re-subscribe at the end of the year, but about whether they'll be momentarily bored and change channels, thus losing advertising dollars--a character would have immediately infodumped that the river was the Rubicon for the benefit of the viewers. Here, you knew in general what was going on, and they count count on readers with basic educated-layman knowledge will know what's going on when a big fuss is made about the soldiers trampling across a river in slow motion with tense music in the background. And if the viewers didn't figure it out right away, screw 'em, they'll be filled in later when people refer back to it, so there's no need to spoon-feed them the information right away.

Which is the kind of adult treatment you get all too used to *not* getting from tv shows, making it pretty refreshing to get it.

(The "Sopranos" comparison is hard not to make, since the writers are obviously keenly--and appropriately--aware of how mafia-esque a lot of the Roman history stuff ends up coming off as from a modern lens. There's actually a line of dialogue where Julius Caeser turns to Mark Antony to scold him for questioning his judgement in front of his factional enemies that's almost word-for-word from Don Corleone yelling at Sonny in Godfather I.)

The point being, it's really good. It's also pretty much constantly terribly suggestive of fiction ideas. I realize that Roman-history-inspired skiffy is approximately as original as sliced bread, but anyone unlucky enough to be in one of my crit groups should be prepared for the distinct possibilit that they'll have oodles of such to critique in the near future.