Sunday 22 May 2011

Of Pestilence and Stories That Don't Know Their Place

Bleurgh. Pity me. I went to bed on Wednesday night with the vague sense of a cold in the works, and I've been down for the count ever since. It is surely not normal to be pestilent for this long. And I also have a hyperactive puppy that I can't get out of the house to walk and who, for reasons best known to his creator, is approximately the size of a small caravan but as intelligent and empathetic as a brick. A particularly stupid brick. That has suffered a recent head trauma.

However, there's only so long a virulent snot-fest can keep a writer down, and I've been taking advantage of the fact that, while the flesh might be weak, the brain is only partially marinated in excessive bodily secretions and it's not like I have any kind of better excuse to put off washing the damn dishes. So I've been trying to work on the ultimate goal again this weekend, and I've got a couple of poems sent off for a competition and I've also identified a couple of magazines who are about to bear the full force of my enthusiastic interest. The problem is that my absolute favourite short story at the moment, and the one I really, really want to share with everyone, is well over 5,000 words long, which kind of puts it around double the maximum length of most short story competitions and well into SCARY MANIAC!!!1!1! territory for a lot of magazines as well. It's not my fault. My characters wouldn't shut up. And then the protagonist insisted on looking for information in the wrong places for a while (for reasons of pacing, if you can believe it: I swear, the pacing was necessary!) and before I knew it I was pushing six grand. I wonder if other writers have this problem, pacing-wise? I read my work back over and it often feels like I'm rushing to the good bits so I stick in more exposition in case my readers feel like I'm cheating. I'm absolutely certain that's the opposite of the way it's supposed to be - didn't Stephen King once advocate chopping a third out of your manuscript in the editing process? If anything, I tend to add another ten percent. Oops.

So, being as how it's a Sunday and all that, and the world didn't end last night (super yay! Snark) I also tried to get moving on another short story that I've been working on now for well over two years. Although admittedly there's been a gap of, well, two years where I wasn't doing any work on it at all. So... yeah. But I'm not used to short stories giving me this much grief. Usually, what happens is: I get an idea, I think about it for a little while, and then I sit down at the computer and I make that idea my bitch over the course of a few hours. Voila: the creative process at work. Except this time, I feel like the story is making me its bitch instead. But I persevere, because I do think this could be quite good. I'm already a little bit disturbed by the vaguely sinister direction it's taking (which is incredibly tricky to write, since I'm using an unreliable narrator who doesn't think the situation is sinister and... yeah. I can see why I Bravely Ran Away last time) and I happen to know that the hook scared seven kinds of shit out of me when I... All right, I dreamt it. It's based on a dream I had. But really: you should see the kind of weird-ass, messed-up shit I dream sometimes. Actually, you shouldn't. Except in this case. And maybe one or two others.

Oh, and the thesis still sucks, but my lovely friend and former thesis-advisor has given me permission to turn a cold shoulder upon it for a few days. And, in the words of the great philosopher Terry Pratchett (whose career I unashamedly want), hate is just love with its back turned. I do love ya, baby. You just need to stop bitching at me for a while and make me remember why...

Tuesday 17 May 2011

Again With The Crisis-of-Faith Thing....

I don't know. Everywhere I look at the moment, I keep being smacked in the face with reminders of how difficult it is to (a) get published and (b) make a living out of writing. It's not like I don't know this. It's not like any of us go into the business for the yachts and the four Caribbean cruises a year. The chances of being the next JK Rowling have got to be on a par with any given RADA graduate becoming the next Catherine Zeta Jones. Or, I don't know, someone who went to RADA. She might have done. I don't follow her obsessively the way I might follow, say Zachary Quinto.... guh.... mmummumummuh... huh.... hmmm....? 
........
........
........

Nothing, I don't know. What?

My point is, it's another one of those Debbie Downer days (which seem, strangely, to be linked to the phases of the moon. Being female sucks, sometimes) and I'm basically on here now for three reasons:

(a) to moan; I might as well be honest about it
(b) to make fun of myself for moaning, and
(c) to avoid finishing off the boring stupid nitpicky damn stuff in Edge (I have, for example, discovered at least one Chapter Pluh and one Chapter That Follows The Last Chapter in the current MS, which made me snicker happily but also made me fear for whatever other placeholders I might have left in).

But I digress. To to get back to the object of today's Random Synaptic Rant, I'm not sure, for example, that I overly needed to know that middle-performing novelists of many years' standing are currently being dropped by publishers and agents alike, simply for not being the Catherine Zeta Jones (Zachary Quinto Zachary Quinto Zachary Quinto) of the literary world. I'm not sure I needed to hear that it's harder than ever these days to find an agent and then for that agent to persuade a publisher to publish you (really, when is it ever not hard for these things to happen?). I know it's hard, but the only reason any of us manage to keep on trying is because we know it's hard but we also know it's going to be different for us. This is very difficult to sustain when we're assaulted from every angle with a chorus of how badly everything in the universe sucks.

People, everything in the universe does not suck. I intend to demonstrate this one of these days.

Oh, and my thesis is the spawn of a syphilitic demon from the seventh pit of Hell. Today. Tomorrow we might be friends again (though don't hold your breath, because it's requiring me to read Cicero at the moment and that whiny little sod gets right on my tits), but today we are not speaking and IT KNOWS WHY SO STOP ASKING IF YOU LOVED ME YOU WOULDN'T HAVE TO ASK!!!

Wednesday 11 May 2011

Little Bit of Win, Little Bit of Fail

I've been going a little bit online-ordering-happy lately (this is what happens to me when I'm broke: for some reason, my inner consumer awakes and starts feverishly justifying all kinds of purchases. Perhaps I need an exorcist?) so the package that arrived at my door today didn't overly fill me with any kind of thrills or giddiness, besides the vague delight at the prospect of receiving Leonard Nimoy's autobiography. Yes, that's right. I love me some Nimoy. I am an unrepentant fangirl.

So, imagine the flailing that was done when I opened the package to find.... My latest printed word! It's a book review that I submitted to a (self-promotion alert) very prestigious academic journal this time last year, and it's made it into print! Nothing will ever dull this feeling, I am privately convinced. Every time I see something I wrote, out there for general consumption, it feels a little bit like flying. I am sick with excitement. I am jubilant. I am rapturous.

In other news, though, I got a rejection from the magazine to which I submitted my short story a few weeks ago. It was a bit of a blow. Never mind that I was fairly sure it wouldn't be their thing (it's science fictiony-ish, but they are out-and-out science fiction, and I didn't think it would wash. It didn't) it was still a bad moment. This comes at a point where I'm physically (and occasionally violently) forcing myself to Sit The Hell Down and Look The Hell For Some Agents, so now would really be the time to work on developing that thick skin you always hear that you need, but... yeah. It would be very easy to use this as an excuse to not try at all. Fortunately, I'm just far enough into my thirties to be horrified at my lack of progress in the novel-publishing business and have spent enough time in my head to be able to reliably call myself on my own bulls***. Plus, while I'm looking for agents, I'm not working on thesis rewrites. To be honest, I would imagine that's what really did the trick...

Monday 2 May 2011

Excitement! Thrills! Awesomeness!

So - final redrafting is finished on The Edge of Heaven! Updated sample chapters are available at www.rachaelkelly.com - and, naturally, any interested agents or publishers can have the full draft on request! Even if you don't know that you want to request it, I'm going to be trying to convince you that you do. You have been warned...


Sci-fi with a beating, emotional heart, that's how I like to think of it. Smart future-noir, character-driven but with hefty dollops of painstakingly-researched plot. And when I say "painstaking", I mean painstaking. This stuff has kept me awake at night. I'm pretty sure it's watertight now.


Here's the synopsis (imagine it with the Deep Voiced Narrator from the movies. I do...)



Limbe do Cælom is not the worst place in the world to live.  Granted, an objective observer might protest that the worse places could be counted on one’s fingers; possibly, if pushed, adding a couple of toes.  Some of those places are also in Olvido…

In the late twenty-second century, the habitable world is shrinking. The answer is Olvido, a bi-level city; a metropolitan leviathan that scrapes the clouds that hover over what used to be Provence. Olvido is the melting pot of nations, a city of a thousand languages, where the dark streets explode with colour and festas and violence. It’s the place where you go when home is just a memory.

Danae lives alone in the nineteenth district, Limbe do Cælom, nursing the kind of secret that can get a person killed. Turrow lives a little life and plans for a better future, maybe even a job where no-one punches him. Neither one hopes for the spectacular or the glorious, so when the city throws them together, neither one is prepared for the depth of their connection. But it's the kind of love that comes with a price.

Because Olvido isn’t the land of happy ever afters. Crumbling buildings and casual violence vie with endemic disease to top the mortality lists in the crowded, heaving streets. And now there’s a dark shadow from the distant past creeping up on the city, ready to strike. Danae is going to have to make a decision: what would you give up to save the one glorious thing in an inglorious life?

The Edge of Heaven is a story about holding onto the little things in life that make us human in an inhumane world; about making a life where life is cheap; about conspiracy, loss, and hope.



Yes? Yes. PEOPLE, I WILL GIVE YOU CAKE.

Sunday 1 May 2011

Serendipity

Well, I've gone a bit quiet lately, admittedly, but it's been for good, honest reasons: I finished my paper - in the predictable last-minute chaos of "Aaaarrrrggghhhh-I-have-negative-time-to-write-six-thousand-words-and-I-know-nothing-nothing-NOTHING-WHY-GOD-WHY???", but it's finished nevertheless, and, if I haven't learned how to write without ulcer-inducing panic by the age of thirty-two, then I think it's reasonable to assume that this is my standard modus operandi for the rest of my life. It's not the best thing I've ever written, but I'm pleased with it and happy to have it sent off. Let's see if it makes publication now; it's a little on the short side, but fingers crossed.

Good God, did I just write those words? "It's a little on the short side"? Coming from me? About something I wrote? Could someone just quickly check outside and see if there are any other harbingers of the Apocalypse? kthx. I'll wait.

In other news, I've been carrying on with the final final FINAL edits of The Edge of Heaven and am almost finished now, which is scary, but in a good way. The intransigent middle section has been transigented. It is now transigent. I have even re-read it a quite, quite obsessive seventeen thousand times (possible hyperbole) and it seems to confirm the transigency report on fanatical review. So then I got to the beginning of the third act and was absolutely certain that I'd taken a shot at re-writing it during the doomed 2009 blitzkrieg but couldn't find any evidence of the rewritten scene on my hard drive. This was a cause for panic, as I had been in the habit of saving everything onto a pen drive until I abruptly (and predictably) lost it last year - fortunately, after I'd been beaten around the head with the stupid stick by enough people to back most everything up onto the hard drive - but the only possible explanation was that this draft that I'd been working from was not the most recent draft. Worse: the most recent draft must have been on the pen drive when it disappeared. Luckily, some of the folks with the stupid stick had also known enough about computers to recommend that I back stuff up to a... thingie, I don't know. One of those thingies that stores stuff in cyberspace for you. A cyberspace file storage thingie. There's only so much the stupid stick can do for the technologically illiterate. And it was there that I made the dramatic discovery: the existence of a hitherto unsuspected seventh draft!!! Ach, du liebe! Sorry, I've been reading the most fabulous fic site recently and that term crops up a lot.

Now, remember I was saying that I didn't know how much damage Insane 2009 Rach had done with the Insane 2009 Purge? I'd been quite pleasantly surprised at how little of the flesh was hanging from the skeleton of my poor, eviscerated baby. Turns out, Insane 2009 Rach, in serial killer style, had been hiding the actual carcass in cyberspace this whole time. So it seems that I've been working off of the last, decent draft before the insanity began, without even knowing it. All right, Insane 2009 Rach had a moment of clarity with the cytokine storm scene (impressed? Be impressed! You have no idea how hard it is to research stuff like that when you have no background in human molecular biology!) and I'll have to do an unexpected sweep through of the cannibalised remains at some point and see if there's anything else good that might transfer over, but, all things considered, it could have been much worse. I like this novel. I would like to release it on the world at large. If anyone has any inspiration (or a publishing deal that they'd like to give away), you know where I am.

Also: remember I have cake....