The accent in cliché is there in spirit – I still don’t know how to put accents in titles in wordpress.

Yesterday on Rebecca Rosenblum’s site (she who wrote Once which was one of the very first books I took out of the library when I moved here to New Brunswick, a book full of stories of people riding on buses and going to Vietnamese restaurants but thin and light and beautiful all at once), she wrote about character hacks, the first three, I realise now that someone else has written them out, are omnipresent in my faerie story.

I need to find someone who writes a list of all the things I am doing in my faerie story (or Come From Away or really anything that I am writing) that are awesome to counterpoint and make me feel warm and squishy inside. Plus faerie story is at a sad part now where sad things are happening. I’m going to go back to my already-typed parts where things are just odd rather than sad and go play around in there for a while instead.

I haven’t been that good updating here lately, but, at the same time, nothing of great fiction import is happening. I write my faerie story some days. Other days I type my faerie story. Today I worked on Come From Away and it made me sad because there is a great story there, but it’s trapped and for all my trying to get it to come out and the fiction course I’m going over it in, I have no idea how to free the great story trapped inside. I’ve been putting off submitting the next section to my mentor, where one of the protagonists starts to fracture, because I know it won’t go over well and I just can’t afford not going over well with this story any longer.

Geoff just came to ask me if it’s my story that’s a problem or my course. They are intertwined. You can’t untie them back into separate threads. For the rest of its life, my story and this course are the same thing, the feeling of wastefulness that maybe I should just quit. Sometimes I think my mentor wants to say Don’t quit your day job. Too bad. Day job already quit.

No new stories accepted for publication. Not a lot of calls out lately either that I could finesse my stories into being good fits for. I did write a short-short (1200 words) story last week as a procrastination tool about a building in Calgary, I think it was 121 14 St NW, that used to have a sign etched in glass on one of the doors saying Philosopher, which I guess meant you could make an appointment and talk to a philosopher about your problems. I can’t tell if it still says that on the door via google maps. I also don’t know if it’s the right building. There’s a slew of such buildings along that part of 14 St NW in Calgary. It might be another one of those sixties style squat brick buildings. I can’t remember.

Geoff, home because of the strike, so I have incentive to work so he doesn’t think I am lazy. I’m coming near the end of my faerie story planning, which means new faerie story planning. I tried to pay my gas bill but the internet has died. It may be hours from when I write this post to when I post it if the internet doesn’t come back. You will have to wait and see.

Ten days ago, I sat down and made a plan for the rest of my faerie story since my current plan of Whenever there is an issue, I’ll just say magic and pretend it isn’t an issue at all wasn’t working as well as I had hoped. I made a plan to the next sticking point, which could also be a good stopping point for making this into more than one story (trilogy for three, I don’t know what the word is for two, doubligy? It is not very likely I can stretch this story further than two books, but I don’t know an appropriate word for a two-book series. It’s probably obvious and I’ve just gotten stupider and forgotten it).

I used to never bother with plans for stories. I am not a very good planner when it comes to writing. For short stories, this works out well. I usually have only one thing: a sentence or a thought or a picture and that’s enough to get 2500 words out and it all works it’s way out along the way. Usually, the times I do try to plan a short story, it doesn’t work and the characters all revolt and go off and do their own things, and then I get mad at myself for wasting time. But my faerie people have seemed to go along, following the master plan, so far. Maybe because I’ve been spending time with them on-and-off since April and they trust me. It lacks some spontaneity, but I’ve done work every day since making my plan, so I’ve got to give it that. Although I can hear my high school English teachers cackling in the background at me. All those years of having to hand in pre-essay outlines (that, of course I wrote up after I wrote my essay) have finally started to work.

So yay faerie story still in ascension as Come From Away descends some more. Tomorrow I’ll work on that instead and be miserable. But for today, magic wins.

I’ve been thinking about YA a lot recently. Looking at my 2013 charts, I see that I read a few YA novels last year (although can only really remember reading one right now, Eleanor & Park, which I actually found more frustrating than enjoyable). But while my adult story is going down, my faerie story seems to be in ascension and I keep thinking that maybe that’s okay. Maybe I’ll write short stories for adults and longer stories for people who were like me when I was younger, who liked reading and didn’t really understand the rest of the world. I suppose we can adjust the tense in the last sentence: I don’t really understand the rest of the world, no matter how many studies they put out saying reading fiction helps improve interpersonal skills because I read a lot of fiction and I’m still stumped, staring at my feet at the bus stop while the other waiting mums discuss their wedding and engagement rings and I can’t think of a way to join the conversation to say that Geoff and I bought an iPod instead.

So maybe I’ll keep my YA faerie story going and let my adult longer stories just rest for a while. I don’t know. It’s winter and my fingers swell in the cold and it makes me miserable and hard to focus on being happy. We have future worries with the fact that Geoff is likely to strike soon and Tesfa is having some difficulty with trying new things and the tantrums that come with that. But escaping into fiction can be nice. In my faerie story, the main character is off to buy an extension cord, which is maybe not as fictional as I would like, but it is happening and that’s okay too.

(and I always say Why-Eh as yah! in my brain)

I got that acceptance letter this week – we love it but please resubmit it as 20% of its current length.

I’m pretty sure that to cut 80% of my story would pretty much leave us with very imperative sentences and not much else (He go. She eat. etc.) Maybe it’s worth trying as an intellectual exercise? But I can only imagine how frustrated I would get.

Back to the submission game.

I had a rhythm for writing in the first six months of 2013. My day had a nice natural, even divide of before and after lunch. I had time to write and read and generally fuck around if I felt like it.

Then summer, with trips away and people visiting happened.

Then September and kindergarten happened.

I do not know the genius who thought that having kindergarten in New Brunswick end at quarter to two in the afternoon was a good idea. If it ended at lunch, then I could find afternoon activities for Tesfa. If it ended at four, like Montessori, then day over. But Tesfa gets home by quarter after two and by the time I calm her down (walking home from the bus stop this year has caused no end of tears regarding the speed of my walking – too fast, too slow, why won’t I stand with my sneakers in a puddle with her, etc.), have a snack, and wait for her to decompress, it’s still only two thirty and I have not yet obtained the ability to tell Tesfa that I am writing and she needs to leave me alone – or I guess I have but I haven’t managed to get a serious business enough voice for her to believe me.

So now I find mornings frantic – trying to write as much as I can before lunch. And my course – which is rewriting and no fun and makes me sad and sometimes all I can do is fix one paragraph all morning – everything slows down.

Most of my back-catalogue of stories have been published. So I need to write new ones to keep my name out there, but I’m fading. Too much rewriting of my course story and I don’t even want to think about writing something new because it means at some point in the future, I’ll have to rewrite whatever new I write as well.

I finally sat down yesterday and began typing up faerie story. Two hours and ten pages. I need to type faster. Let’s not even think about how the story stops partway through because I ran out of time to write anymore and nothing is resolved as to how I’m going to get from where I stopped due to time constraints to where I want to go.

Other people are much better time managers than I am. I understand that. But I have some issue with time now, like an alien abductee, where chunks of time just get lost.

So, in 2014, I will do the following:

1. get dressed, bra included, (exceptions: birthday and days I am sick) so that I feel like a real worker bee every day;
2. exercise AFTER writing (this is to help me get more morning time. Equally, Tesfa likes watching me pedal on the exercise bicycle, so that’s keeping her entertained after school, right?);
3. when my course is done, waste no more time on Come From Away story until 2015 at least (barring something amazing happening, like my mentor suddenly being completely enamored with my story and sending me her agent’s info, publishing house details, etc. This is a funny joke. I need a smiley emoticon laughing so hard it vomits);
4. finish a first draft of faerie story;
5. write at least three short stories;
6. not writing related, but I am going to ascend in Nethack this year.

In 2014, I am going to write something good.

A truth I hold to, which has served me well especially in regards to programming and mathematics, is to say things aloud to other people, making yourself sound like an idiot, and then it will all work out. For example, at my old job, probably what I said the most was Jonathan, I can’t get this UNIX thing to work. Jonathan would come over, I’d hit up for the last command, hit enter, and then it would, of course, work and Jonathan would think I was a complete idiot regarding UNIX (which is also a truth). This also helped when I said they other day that the library didn’t have any copies of Hellgoing in the entire system (province wide) and then I checked ten minutes after I said that, and they now do have one copy with fifteen holds on it (for New Brunswick, that is an insane number of people on hold, generally only reserved for Dan Brown novels and Shopaholic series). So say your stupidity aloud and the universe will smack you down. Perhaps I should write a self-help book suggesting this. Maybe that’s what The Secret is about?

So on the weekend, I was talking to a writer-friend and he said You’ve already been published in journals. What are you really hoping to get out of this course? You are already somewhat successful. And I hemmed and hawed and thought how low the bar for somewhat successful is for writing and got the conversation onto something else.

Then on Monday I got an email from my mentor asking me if I had any concerns regarding the course. So see, the universe coming to smack me down.

My story, the ever-present and soul-sucking Come From Away is getting better. That should be the goal. I’m trying to be Machiavellian in my thinking regarding this because if I get a better story out at the end, then that should be enough, even if I am hating every step of the process. Working on my story now makes me feel sick, actual anxiety induced panickingly sick. (An aside: this is totally me – I leave my job that was making me ill and then I find myself a new way to make myself feel sick. But we’ll put my mental health concerns aside since that isn’t really the point right now.) I trick myself into working, putting Freedom on for short bursts, working at the computer (which I normally hate and write everything out in longhand for as long as possible), doing the focus-only-on-this-page-one-page-isn’t-so-much-you-can-do-it, and then staring out the window at the backyard for twenty, thirty minutes at a time rather than type one word.

But my story is getting better. That’s the point.

Geoff says maybe I should quit.

No, story is getting better, I say.

Even writing this now, writing about writing about my story is making me anxious. I can feel the vice around my heart start to squeeze.

What did I hope to get out of this? When I’m super honest, I thought maybe I’d make a writing friend, which is sort of pathetic. Maybe this was less about my story and more about being in a small-town now where things are different. Maybe, to mangle Noel Coward, I didn’t want criticism as much as I wanted unqualified praise. Who knows. If there is one thing I have learned about myself is that I make strange, snap decisions that often make my life harder than it needs to be. This course could be one of those snap decisions.

Did I tell my mentor this? No, I made some passing comment, roughly the internet equivalent of chatting about the weather with the people you wait with at the bus-stop, and sent the next chapter. What am I supposed to say? It’s not necessarily the course. A lot of it is me. Maybe I am just not suited for this novel thing. Maybe I need to work up more slowly, intertwined short stories until novel length. I’ve read some good books like that: The Madonnas of Echo Park – and I’ve read a book I should have loved, but didn’t and we just stood awkwardly around like on a bad blind date (The Juliet Stories). But both times, I though, I could do that. Maybe I should do that instead. Pregnancy Scare is a good start. I already have a second story germinating about Randy, a third about Herb, more about the baby getting older. Maybe.

Maybe.

I don’t know what to do. Geoff’s vote is quitting. My vote is riding it out, making Come From Away better but detaching from the situation. My writer friend who asked me What I hoped to get‘s vote is pretty much Why did you even take a course in the first place? I think if I finish, I get a certificate at the end. I do enjoy certificates and it might make up for the fact that I accidentally threw out my Masters (still have undergrad and PhD, but the Masters has gone missing).

Maybe I’m just a short-story person. Maybe that’s what I’ll take out of this. Maybe.