I would like to say the recent period of silence was indicative of my industriousness in producing mass quantities of scintillating prose. Really, I would. REALLY.

I've produced some mediocre prose, but that's about it. Meh. I bailed on the Cat's Curious Press idea I had, for now at least - the fairy tale I picked to humorize was pretty obscure, and while I'm all about writing an office revenge scenario retelling with the Internet as the fairy godmother, this venue wasn't the right one for it.

On a sort of good note, I had my suspicions about a problematic story confirmed by my lovely beta readers. I say good, because in the last year I've finally gotten the hang of really dissecting structural issues in my own work. I'm not quite yet so good about figuring out how to FIX the problem once I've sussed it out, but handwave. I'll cling to the victories I have.

I've also been doing this: shiny_omg. I've gotten back into beading with a vengeance, and while it's not been great for my budget, I think it's exactly what I needed to keep my brain and hands engaged and get me off the computer and away from the internets/fandom for a while. You know, since Spring is being a sulky teenager slinking in hours after curfew, and interfering with my plans for an early start on garden domination. Hard to do when the ground is still frozen, not that it's stopping the weeds.

I'm slowly working to add here posts from my old writing journal, that I started back in 2001, near the end of my first year of trying to write professionally. I just want to pinch my ridiculously earnest little cheeks.

It's both interesting and enlightening to look back and see how my writing landscape has changed, how the mountains have worn down, how old rivers have carved new chasms, how the landmarks of process and focus and goals have shifted, cropping up miles away or disappearing all together.

Today, it was 1. my sudden need to revamp my juliewinningham.com website. You know, the one that list my sole publication credit. From a non-paying market. In 2001.

And 2. http://www.hassleme.co.uk/. Sadly, I can only set it up to hassle myself, not others.

Mer and I will be back in the Write Club groove next week. My intention is to go back to using Write Club only for pro work. Which means I'd best get off my ass and get the damn challenge and ficathon backup off my plate.

I like to joke that I'm a full-time fan writer who writes for publication as a hobby. Which is a pretty accurate statement, actually. I cut my writing teeth on writing for publication when I had the starry-eyed dream of becoming a published writer seven years ago. A couple of years into that I figured out that approaching writing as a career, or even as a second job, was not for me. I not only started to hate the process, I started to hate the words.

Fanwriting gave me back my love of writing, and pretty much gives me everything I want out of the act of writing for an audience, but I admit the lure of seeing my name in print is still strong.

Steven Brust has posted a novel-length Firefly fanfic.

Looks like there's also the possible beginning of an interesting conversation in the comments there about making donations for fanfic.

I find this (Brust posting the fanfic, though the donations thing is a tangentially interesting fannish etiquette/ethics thing) especially interesting because while there are plenty of writers who acknowledge fanfic roots, it's not as common (at least in the circles I observe) to see active pro writers writing fanfic concurrent with salable work and labeling it as such. Naomi Novik is the most notable example these days (though I'm not sure she writes any under her professional identity), Elizabeth Bear, too, openly publishes the occasional fanfic on her journal.

I came back from ConFusion all raring to go with the writing and WHAM, got slapped with almost two weeks of con crud that's still lingering in my immuno-compromised respiratory system. Now I am feebly wheezing to go with the writing.

Anyway, last night I picked up my bedside notebook to jot down a few bits for a challenge fanfic due this week (you know, despite my Scarlettesque claim that "I will never do challenges or ficathons again!") and it was coated in dust and all crinkly and stained from the times I've spilled water all over it. That was a little embarrassing. And also not good for my sinuses.

But there are now notes, and that pleases me, because I have been lazy and relying on my brain to keep track of these post-shower before-bed revelations of my awesomeness, which is pretty much like going up to a chalkboard full of great ideas, erasing it, and then writing, "You are not awesome, you are an idiot" 500 times.

So. Shiny new notebook goes on the nightstand tonight. After I dust.

Trailer of new trek movie with construction shots of the Enterprise. (links to high res versions in the comments).

No plot spoilers (and it's rumored this trailer was done just for advertising, and the footage isn't in the movie at all).

As someone in the comments oh-so-accurately called it, it's the "Star Trek nerd porn money shot". I was so distracted by the shiny it took me three viewings to realize, "Hey, what idiot constructs all of a giant starship ON THE GROUND?"

And ha! Follow-up interview with Roberto Orci on the what idiot constructs a giant starship ON THE GROUND controversy with an appropriately Trek-nerd rationalization. Again, no real spoilers for the movie, just discussion of the idea behind the trailer and the thematic fit of the movie into the Trek-verse.

SF Signal surveyed the bright minds of current SF, asking today's authors to define science fiction.

All interesting, but I still think Mer and I boiled it down best:

"It's like, currently they have stuff, but in the future they have better stuff." -Mer
"And that is the core of what science fiction is all about." -Julie

Write Club wisdom at its finest.

I had an especially slow summer at work this year, but did I want to
write? Nooooooo. And now that I'm registered to finish classes and
work has gone nuts and I'm tearing out my hair, and I still have a crapload of stuff to organize and unpack at the house, my brain has
kicked into overdrive and that's all I want to do. It's like I have fic coming out of my ears.

Brain, you suck.

So. The Plan. Which will last maybe three weeks, but it's good to
have a goal (even if that goal is to ignore The Plan after about three
weeks...).

Mondays and Saturdays. Unpacking and house projects (Tonight I am
going to get those damn ugly bedroom curtains down if it kills me. And since it involves, me, tools and a stepladder, that's a distinct
possibility.

Wednesdays. Write Club. Back to working on original stuff for
publication.

Sundays. Grad project. Seriously. There is no damned reason I can't
finish this thing in three months. I have so much of the base theory
work already done, it's pathetic.

Fic writing and online dorking around will be fit in as needed (and
will likely overtake The Plan as soon as the DSL is installed).

*pets Plan* You'll be so nice while you last.

"Little Green Gods" came back yesterday, and will be out the door again tomorrow. Still in denial that school starts (for me) in a week. Classes started today at UM, so work was... fun. Yes. Fun.

Had minor epiphany about "Vacationing in the Entropics", so hopefully can get some major work done on it at WC this week.

Only managed a few hundred words last week.

"Little Green Gods" is in the mail and I started a new story last night. Which was interrupted by the tornado warning, but I got a few hundred words down and pulled up some information on entropy (the story is entitled "Vacationing in the Entropics").

I feel good about this one, in a way I haven't felt about writing in a long time.

Minions seemed to go well. I'll feel better when I have something to turn in, but it's always good to talk writing with the Minions, even if I'm not doing much of it. And then there was the wonderfully nostalgic discussion about SF/Fantasy TV shows and movies from the 80s.

I went home last night and took out the garbage. We'd had chicken recently, and the discarded bits and pieces were starting to smell. On my way back into the house, I stopped and picked the tomatoes that were ripe, bright and red and full from the recent rains. It was only a handful; I mistakenly bought cherry tomato plants this year.

Standing there, among the red tomatoes and the bright purple flowers on the heather near my feet, I tried one more time to hold on to the composure I had been so close to losing all day.

It had seemed distant all morning, removed, even in the face of the news reports, the people on forums talking first hand. Because it wasn't here. It was a big city. These things only happen in big important cities. But even then it didn't seem real, somehow. These things only happen in movies right?

Then I heard that classes were cancelled. They never do that. It somehow became a little more real. Not long after that, I heard someone tell everyone to get out. They were evacuating the building. Someone had called in a bomb threat.

Right then, I realized how naive I was being. It was real. And it was everywhere.

Standing outside, we all tried to keep some semblance of normalcy, but as the time wore on, and we had no word of what was happening, with the bomb threat or the situation in New York, our words, though light, got brittle around the edges, as if they might shatter open into something deeper and distressing at any moment. None of us thought the threat was real, but there was that little twinge of worry, that little voice of "what if" in the back of the mind. And without the news, without the pictures and sounds upon which to focus, it was left to the imagination and the fear.

Suddenly, I missed that sense of distance from the morning.

The all clear came, and we were sent back in, but by that point there was nothing left to do that seemed to be at all important, and we just went home.

I went inside with my handful of tomatoes, and turned on the tv, seeing the footage of the second crash for the first time. Watched for hours, even when it all started to blur, because it wasn't distant anymore, and I didn't want it to be. We need to feel this, we need to be so very aware how real this is, how close to all of us this is, that this isn't just their pain, but our pain. And we need to be strong, and not blame a neighbor, or a coworker, because of where they come from, or the religion they follow. There is a fine line between justice and vengeance, and we cannot cross it, or we will become no better than those who perpetrated this devastation. Think hard about the the paths we have before us, and choose not with your anger, but with the will to move beyond this and prove to everyone that we are something more than a sum of our rage.

Give blood. Send donations. Speak wisely, speak calmly. Don't forget. Don't fear. Don't inflame the senseless panic and violence that lurks just under the surface. And for the sake of whatever god or gods you hold dear, don't fall into the trap of mindless hate, the trap of anger and retribution we all want, in some part of our souls. We've already seen the horror to which that leads.

My thoughts, my hopes, my love goes out to all who were touched by this.

Friday was not a good day. It was one of those days that had me in tears by the time I got home from work, and in a deeply pessimistic mood about my abilities. It was one of those days where I found myself in one of those pessimistic slides down

the "this idea of being a writer is never going to work" path.

It wasn't pretty. Then there was pizza and a trip to the bookstore, and a less maudlin perspective reasserted itself in the face of a patient husband, pepperoni and Leonard Nimoy's autobiography.

It's been almost a year since I made the decision to seriously focus on my writing. I started this journal as a public recognition of that decision, so that I would be less likely to back out of it when the going got tough.

And the going has been tough this year. I got married (which was a good thing, though time-consuming). I work a full-time day job that isn't what I want to do. I go to graduate school part time, so that I can hopefully move beyond my day job into something a little more intellectually fulfilling, and flexible. I want to be a writer, yes, but I also have no illusions about my ability, at this point of my career, about being able to support myself as such. I'm willing to sacrifice, but I'm not the only person I have to consider when I think about such things. I can't just quit my job, or cut my hours. But I can, and have adjusted my schedule, left myself pockets of time where I can to write. It's not always much, but it's a start.

I am at the beginning, the very beginning, of my career as a writer. I made the decision, but that was really only a small part of the battle. I'm still settling into the idea, finding my voice and getting my feet under me. I'm still trying different things to see what works best for me, still using the furniture to pull myself up, so to speak. I've spent hours reading, researching, thinking, plotting, planning. And writing. More than I have ever, even if it's nothing I've managed to complete or publish. It's a beginning, and I have to remember that you can only go forward to better and brighter things from there.

I'm going to shoot for two stories a month. We'll see what happens.

I'm not quite halfway through a wonderfully lazy five day weekend. Man, I need to do this more often.

So I was thinking that with this five day weekend, I'd get my laptop fixed (now the i, k and < keys have died), but I misread my service agreement, and thus now have to wait until next week. So much for my plans to do tons of writing. I'm stealing my husband's machine to post this, but I don't think he's going to be pleased if I stay on it all weekend. I've been writing some stuff by hand, but I'm very slow that way, as my fingers cramp quickly.

I did see the proof page for my story that's due out in Aphelion in a couple of weeks, and sent in the corrections for that. So I feel like I did accomplish something.