A partial success!

That story I was working on last week has been partially successful.  At least, my query package, including letter which describes the story succinctly and yet enticingly, and one-page complete synopsis, did their job and the editors have requested the full manuscript.  Since this is how pretty much all new writer fiction novels are sold (often to agents, who then deal with the publishers if they choose to represent you), being able to create a successful query letter and synopsis in the short story market is encouraging.  I am learning how to improve on the "selling myself" part of the professional fiction writing process.  We'll see how the manuscript itself fares.

Debt

Debt scares the heebie-jeebies out of me.

If I could go my entire life without ever having to use credit of any kind, I would.  I have so far, in so much as I haven't bought anything myself with credit.  However I grew up in homes paid for on my parents' credit, now live in a mortgage-financed home and pay rent to the homeowner who is my housemate and Significant Other--but spouse he is not, so his debt is not my debt.  (Now that I work in the green building energy efficiency world, I can help him make some improvements that raise the value of the home!)

I have recently come face to face with the prospect of debt of my own, as I've been fermenting and slowly bringing to life my ridiculously ambitious graduate school dream.  Unfortunately not a graduate school discipline that offers much by the way of research or teaching assistantships, and watching my friends finance cars after getting accepted into physics graduate school, those disciplines seem safe and secure if not lucrative. But not the dream, I'm discovering.  This dream is ambitious not necessarily because I am trying to be accepted into an ivy league school, although I may indeed find that was over-ambitious, but because being accepted and actually going would mean going along with ivy league prices.

The only way to cover a fraction of that--because I have considerably savings, but it's still not enough--is with mortgage-comparable debt.  Is my dream education worth that to me?

This world...

Yesterday I sat through an all-day training on things my boss has heard a bazillion times but I'm new enough to to appreciate.  This training gives us a certification that allows our company to appear on a website list of companies who, by virtue of having sat through the training, are supposed to know more than what the average building company knows, which is little, about energy efficiency.

Since we are The Original Green Builder, we'd better know.

There are actually a heck of a lot of construction details that never get done, that are simple to do, that you cannot really access to fix once the building is completed so you ought to attend to them first, that make a heck of an energy efficiency difference.  But more on that later.

One of the speakers was really good.  Knew her stuff, told good stories, linked it together well, explained jargon and acronyms and put everything in helpful context.

The other presenter read off of the slides without elaborating, as if she didn't know what the things she was reading meant to be able to elaborate (probably not true, but how it came off), made no connections between things (because that wasn't on the slides!) slouched and shifted her weight constantly and didn't make eye contact, had a very shaky obviously nervous voice.

I can sympathize with those things, because you do them when you are nervious and don't know better.

I'm constantly surprised, now being in a professional setting, that people don't know better.  I've seen so many poor public speakers, read so many instances of terribly poor and unclear writing.  I recognize that when your job is something else, it isn't always worth your time to pay attention to those things.

But you sacrifice on how you come off if you don't pay some attention.  I'd thought, all while I was desperately interviewing and trying to get my feet through doors, that proficiency in those kinds of things were a baseline,  not the exception to the rule.

Teasers--or Yawn-Factories

One of the lessons thrown at aspiring writers over and over again is the need to sell your story quickly.  Since all editors need sometimes to make decisions is the first line or two in short stories, the first paragraph or maybe page in longer works, you can't wait for the rest of the story to be good enough.  It's got to grab from the get-go.  But especially in the "query" first world, you've got to sell your story without using the actual story, to someone who is slammed with submissions, doesn't know you from Joe, and probably knows a heck of a lot more about the craft and industry than you do.
So you must sum up theme and conflict in one sentence, and it has to be compelling, interesting, and fresh.  And if you work on them too long or look at them too many times you'll go frikkin crazy.

Here are some of mine, short story and novel alike,mostly in the "light fantasy or science fiction" category:

An uprooted man joins a theater to recover from a recent loss, and must delve impossibly far into the world of his character to save the lives of the cast.

Two young people fight for their own definition of true love, despite the decidedly strange physics which stands in their way.  (That one is shooting for the odd genre of science fiction humor)

A storm-followed teenager runs away from home to rebel against her family's destructive secret, and must fight to keep her family and small Appalachian town in one piece.

Stories I Hate

To get in the mood to finish this short story up...

Stories with only male characters, stories with only female characters, senseless rambling while vaguely intimating that the Protagonist Is God On Earth (or not, in the case of Children of Dune, which I literally threw across the room, although I liked the first one okay), stories which don't make sense but try to call the nonsensicalness intellectual superiority, utterly any variation of the "Super Smart Scientists/Mathemetician/Intellectual With No Social Skills Who Suffers From All the Mediocre People Who Just Don't Get His Brilliance," any story at all that makes the protagonist Oh So Superior to Everyone Else, yet also protagonists whose faults make them despicable rather than human, stories that just don't go anywhere (books 7-10 of Wheel of Time), anything whose only theme is a commentary on the utter futility of caring about anything (Heard of Darkness, and too much of what is considered "literary" and also "intellectual"), books where all women are weak and "giggly" except for the one female protagonist who is masculine and continually described as an utter rarity (fantasy suffers so, from this, with the very notable exception of Wheel of Time), stories that portray all members of one gender as unworthy or useless end of discussion, stories that end in horror, despair and futility, stories with too much action and nothing else, stories with too much description and no movement...

That's all I can think of for now.

What do I like, then?

Stories with characters I can't help but care about making brave and difficult choices in the face of something that matters, or else learning something about themselves or the world in a way that relates strongly to a compelling and optimistic theme.  I can deal with pessimistic themes on occasion if they're thought-provoking (and NOT in an "oh it all sucks lets just go crawl in a hole and die" kind of a way), but I am at heart a romantic, a believer in right and wrong and the power of human decisions to make the world into a better place, even if it's just one character's struggle for his or her tiny piece of the world, even if "better" is fraught with imperfection.

Why I Bike (To Work, Sometimes)

I have such a backlog of half-formed posts.  One thing biking (and running, for that matter, started doing a lot of that also) does is allow time to think through and compose various blogsays.

Mozilla totally thinks that's a word,"blogsays," even though I just made it up.

Right now I am scurrying to finish a major overhaul of a short story I wrote a long time ago for hopeful publication (actually, it's just so that my query letter will in fact have a real story behind it), so the backlog won't be coming just yet.

The trouble with composing while biking is that I mostly compose bike-related posts.

There are three reasons I bike what I think is a considerably distance in considerably traffic to work, and they are not necessarily hierarchical.  One by itself isn't enough, two together make me feel vaguely wistful if I end up hitting the snooze alarm on any given day instead of doing it, and three together are why I do end up doing it.

1)I am concerned about climate change and think I have a moral duty to try to do what I, personally can do to help us reduce our collective carbon emissions by the scientifically-advised amount in the scientifically-advised amount of time.  I hear people argue that what one individual does matters not at all in the face of tons of individuals probably never doing what many individuals ought to to make a difference.  Like my 1 ton less CO2 a year does a damn thing to alter climate change--but to me; the moral obligation remains the same.  If everybody waited for everyone else to do the right thing before doing it for his or herself, then any will or vision to create a world that is better than the world that currently exists would be essentially nonexistent, and that would be a terrible world indeed.  (Is riding my bike to work really that heavy?  Symbolically yes, because the moral imperative of climate change is just that heavy.)

2) I want to reduce the amount of money I spend on gasoline by a noticeable amount.  If I only bike once every now and then, the amount isn't noticeable.  If I do it once or twice a week, I can save about one fill-up a month.  If I do it whenever humanly possible I can save any more, and sometimes I have that goal.  When it's not below freezing outside in the morning.

3)It's frikkin' awesome!  I feel great afterwards.  I'm physically stronger for doing it regularly.  I feel more alive and connected to my community.  And you know, it's just fun, even (with the right gear) when it's not all that warm outside.

Clothes

One of the unexpected weird things about my new job is that I have to dress each day like somebody who knows how to dress nicely.  Not that I think I ever dressed like a dirty slob hippie before, (I mean, I wore clean clothes without holes) but, I never really put any thought into wardrobe planning, either.  I have a decent collection of business casual, due to planning ahead for this day while yardsaling and visiting the goodwill bins and chiding various department stores for not stocking anything smaller than a frikkin 4 petite--but I really am clueless as to what to do with it.   I feel vaguely fake and vaguley aloof wearing this stuff, and the problem with nice clothes is that it's not always pratical to do much in them, becasue they're nice and you don't want to mess them up.  They're just not me, but maybe the problem is that I still don't really feel like the business world is me.