how accidents happen

one step closer to a book!

2013-01-29T01:38:26Z

Got the ms. for ARCHIVIST WASP in the mail today, marked up by the mighty Kelly Link. Most exciting. I have even cleared the mountains of random shit off my desk to prepare for revisions! Now to park my butt on the couch with this thing and read through it again. It's been a while. I think I missed it.

Book sale!

2012-12-17T21:26:38Z

Just this second got greenlit to announce a Secret! *ahem*

ARCHIVIST WASP, my postapocalyptic katabasis coming-of-age ghost story thing YA novel, with monsters and priestesses and supersoldiers and a saltlick!, has been picked up by Small Beer's fiction-for-all-ages imprint, Big Mouth House.

How excited an N am I? Lo I am a VERY EXCITED N INDEED. Specifically I am an N excited with the very specific sort of excitement that comes of realizing you are about to be working with the publisher who was at the top of your list of potential publishers because you suspect they are just that good a match for you. And also because they are straight awesome. No question.

If you are an excited you as well, you must go forth and kiss the exalted feet of Ysabeau Wilce, who is an Extremely Sneaky Instigator.

eeeeeeee.

unwritten story meme thing

2012-11-29T15:46:31Z

This one looks like fun, and I am so dire at posting on this thing that I am probably safe in my assumption that I will not get more comments than I have time to reply to, so!

From tithenai and cucumberseed and asakiyume:

Tell me about a story I haven't written, and I'll give you one sentence from that story.

great big bulletpointed WFC report thing!

2012-11-06T20:26:18Z

Okay so it was my fifth or sixth con but also my first con that was not Readercon. If I try to actually set this out in any kind of order it will never get done, so! Bulletpoints!

Was supposed to fly out of Albany. This did not happen. Allegedly my flight did actually run on time, but as I did not learn this until after I'd returned, and before I'd left I'd heard from at least two people whose airlines had lied to them about grounded flights being on time, AND given that Julia Rios (skogkatt) and Moss Collum and Claire Cooney (csecooney) were about 20 minutes from my house to pick me up by the time I even got my internet back, the flying did not happen.
What did happen instead was 8 hours in a car, arriving at 2 in the morning in Torontoish, having eaten apples and listened to lots of new-to-me music and doing a 3-hour Les Mis singalong with Claire, wherein I amused myself by remembering most of the lyrics to songs I hadn't heard in fifteen years. Only stopping at rest stops, because Moss and Julia are superheroes and drove straight on through.
This was one of those new-to-me songs, which csecooney theorizes is what my brain probably sounds like.
Speaking of groundless slander which I will neither confirm nor deny, pattytempleton asserts that I look like a spy who is trying not to look like a spy. Make of that what you will.
Did read from the recentlyish-finished novel. Did have an enthusiastic audience. Did appreciate this.
Live music. Sexy dancing women.
Attended readings, my absolute favorite of which was handful_ofdust's. She does things with language that should be illegal, and this was one kickass story I can't wait to see in print.
Very much enjoyed the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours (tithenai, csecooney, pattytempleton, sevenravens, plus banjo, harp, and cookies). Greater than the not insubstantial sum of its parts.
Helped set up a launch party! This does not sound like much in the grand scheme of things but was a definite highlight of the con. Mental note: volunteer often.
Lots of delicious food eaten in delicious company. There was salad! in! the con suite! And fruit! So much fruit! And excellent excellent Indian and Thai food and more salads. Also salads. And at least two very creative very tasty drinks. And rather more than two non-creative ones, though also tasty.
There seem to be five or so different kinds of friends at cons. There are the ones you already love and look forward to seeing. The ones you already know so well online but have never yet met in person, and get along with fabulously because how could you not. The ones you pass and exchange hellos and waves with in the halls and wish you could hang out with more, but scheduling always gets in the way. The ones you're just getting to know, and get along with, but you know you'll like them even better next year. And the ones with whom you get introduced, shake hands, and then proceed to exchange polite hellos with and wander off -- then get to know much better, all suddenly, purely by chance, and instantly click with, shortly before it's time to leave, and you find yourself sort of wanting to rewind the con so you can get that process started fortyeight hours earlier, but of course it wouldn't work that way, not if you tried to do it deliberately, it's the element of chance that makes it so astonishing.
So many books in my suitcase. Leaving home with a suitcase containing no books and returning home with a suitcase containing a couple dozen books is, in my view, a winning condition. At least I did not quite have to resort to piling my clothes on my head like a hat, as earlier predicted. Though I did have to jettison some stuff. I've never checked luggage for a flight and I don't aim to start now.
Still strange coming home from cons, adjusting from talking to hyperintelligent adults to talking to a four-year-old, albeit a super smart one. It's like speaking different languages. He still keeps running up to me and hugging me and saying he missed me. I missed you too, kid.
Still only about half unpacked. Still have only read one half of one book. I don't care about unpacking, but half of a new book since Sunday, when I have two huge piles of new books waiting for my attention, is inexcusable.
I love the cumulative nature of the con-going experience. How each time I'll meet a bunch of new people, really click with one or two if I'm lucky, and go to the next con knowing that many more people to spend time with. The flipside of that is of course that it also gives me more people to miss. Bah.
I know I am forgetting things but it was all amazing. My favorite con weekend yet.
Readercon next year! Hope to see you there!

Bookstuff!

2012-10-11T02:11:57Z

Wow, I haven't posted on here in aaaages. I guess time_shark realized that because he tagged me for this thingy. I don't usually do these but I'll make an exception for a chance to talk about a project I'm obsessed with! I'm stalling on the shit I'm supposed to be doing anyway. This I can at least pretend is constructive!

I think I'm supposed to tag more people to do this. Eh. Do it if you want to, and show me! I love seeing what you all are working on.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing

What is the title of your book? Working title is ARCHIVIST WASP. Either a project shows up waving its title around on a banner or it, um, doesn't. This didn't. Working title. Beta readers seemed to think it worked so we're going with it.

Where did the idea come from for the book? Oh dear. Hrm. I've been carrying the seed of this book around in my head for about half my life now. Maybe longer. Apart from that ... I always tell people that this book wears my heart on its sleeve. I've basically taken most everything I love, mashed it together, and dumped it into this story. Somehow it seemed to hold.

What genre does your book fall under? It's basically a SF story embedded in a postapocalyptic fantasy story. With a teenage protagonist and a coming-of-age thing. And a whole lot of violence. And katabasis. And ghosts. Really your guess is as good as mine.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? I'm terrible at this. I can never picture characters vividly, in terms of build or facial features. I only really see their personalities. If that makes any sense. It probably doesn't help that the whole time I was writing this it looked like a cartoon or a graphic novel in my head, so trying to translate these characters into real people is ... not happening.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book? Hmm. An unwilling ghosthunter/priestess of a rather unpleasant post-apocalyptic cult travels through the underworld with the ghost of a supersoldier to solve a mystery and attempt to win her freedom.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? It's already generated a lot of interest within one agency only to be turned down because it had elements of YA and adult fiction in it so it wasn't immediately apparent how it could be marketed. I suspect this will become a pattern. Honestly, with this book in particular, I don't really care whether it makes a pile of money. This book is intensely personal to me and I just want it to find its readers.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? Weeks. Maybe six of them? Usually it takes at least a year. I have a 4-year-old. I'm slow. But this book, once I decided to let it out, just ... fell out. I'm in the process of working myself up to deciding to let other related books fall out. It's ... a process. I make a pretty shitty parent when I'm in the midst of a project that's eating my brain and I can only work on it when my son is either in preschool (mornings only!) or asleep.

What other books would you compare this story to in your genre? Um. I honestly have no idea. Beta readers? Help?

Who or what inspired you to write this book? Ahahaha. I don't think I had a choice. This book has been trying to tear its way out of me for almost fifteen years. I'd been stomping it back down because I knew if I decided to write it it would utterly take me over. It did and still is and probably will for some while yet. But it's 100% the book I meant it to be and I can't really say that about the other ones I've written. Usually I hate the guts of every word I write after I've written it. Not so here. That's oddly refreshing.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest? Hunting ghosts with a saltlick, so as to learn from them about the long-gone preapocalyptic world. A rather unforgiving Golden Bough-ish mythology. Made-up constellations: Ember Girl, Carrion Boy, Catchkeep, the Ragpicker, the Chooser, the One Who Got Away. Ritualized combat to the death. Personalized underworlds. Katabasis. A war, and what it took to stop it. Unlikely Alliances. Hopefully-subverted tropes. Dead would-be superheroes. Things-that-are-not-as-they-seem. Child supersoldiers. Grail quests. Having to wear the trophies of people you never wanted to kill. A genetically-enhanced badass who just wants to be normal. Elaborate schemes to get out of bad situations ... which backfire, as elaborate schemes will do. A bridge made out of the tokens of the dead. A house full of ghosts in jars. People of opposite genders who can work together and efficiently in a totally nonsexualized way. Chosen Children who actually ain't. Swordfights. Monsters. Parallel mysteries. Treachery. Origin stories. The psychometry of the dead. Freedom, and what you have to do to earn it, which is very seldom pretty.

If all goes well, I shooooould be reading from this at World Fantasy with the indomitable Ysabeau Wilce. You have NO IDEA how freaking pumped I am to read from this thing. It's like I'm five and this is a million Christmases. They'll have to peel me off the ceiling. Come play!

Readercon! In a few weeks! HOW DID THIS HAPPEN

2012-06-25T00:23:59Z

Long time no see my lovelies! It's been madness here. However! Here's my Readercon schedule. (I know, I don't sign up for a lot of stuff. My problem is I'd infinitely rather hang out with everyone I hardly ever get to see than soapbox on some panel. But I'm working on it! Slowly but surely!)

It doesn't say, but I'm co-hosting that Mythic Poetry reading with time_shark. So come to that! It'll be fun!

Also also, because a couple of people have asked, if you'd like to order caramels from my etsy shop and have them delivered at the con, let me know and I'll throw together a custom listing wherein you don't have to pay anything for shipping. Win-win!

Friday July 13

11:00 AM NH Group Reading: Mythic Poetry. Mary Agner, Mike Allen, Erik Amundsen, Leah Bobet, C.S.E. Cooney, Gemma Files, Gwynne Garfinkle, April Grant, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Shira Lipkin, Adrienne J. Odasso, Julia Rios, Darrell Schweitzer, Sonya Taaffe. Over the past decade, speculative poetry has increasingly turned toward the mythic in subject matter, with venues such as Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, Cabinet des Fées, Jabberwocky, and the now-defunct Journal of the Mythic Arts showcasing a new generation of poets who've redefined what this type of writing can do. Come to the reading and hear new and classic works from speculative poetry's trend-setters.

6:00 PM G What Writers Want. Suzy McKee Charnas, John Crowley, Nicholas Kaufmann, James Patrick Kelly (leader), Nicole Kornher-Stace, Peter Straub. Genre writing is not a career known for its well-defined path. There are goalposts—bestseller lists, movie deals, inspiring reams of fan fiction—but do they sum up all that genre writers aim for? This panel dares to go deeper and uncover authors' true ambitions, whether they dream of exemplifying or transcending the genre, turning genre itself into art, being named a Grand Master, outselling everyone, or all of these—and to examine how those ambitions might be achieved.

Saturday July 14

3:00 PM NH Group Reading: Ideomancer Speculative Fiction. Mike Allen, Leah Bobet, C.S.E. Cooney, Amanda Downum, George Galuschak, Claire Humphrey, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Kenneth Schneyer, Sonya Taaffe. Authors and poets read work from Ideomancer Speculative Fiction, one of the longest-running speculative fiction webzines still publishing.

DRAAAAFT

2012-03-19T14:16:19Z

Okay, so I've been even more terrible than usual at updating this thing. But! I have an ~~excuse~~ excellent reason!

I just drafted my third full-length novelthing. (Well, apart from the one I wrote in my freshman/sophomore years of high school, the less said about which the better.)

Something funny about this. Let's recap.

I wrote my first novel the summer after I graduated from high school, because I fell down the stairs and fucked up my ankles and spent the better part of two months sitting in bed. I got five legal pads filled with notes, murdered I don't know how many trees with my rather copious use of index cards, and got the first half or so written. I finished it when I was 20 or 21. It took two years and change.

My second novel, Blithen's Tarot, I also spent about two years on. Shopped it to the interested agent, interested agent changed her mind, it's on the back burner. But yeah, again, two years and change.

This last one, which doesn't even have a working title, took about two months. And that's with full-time mommying and also running a fairly bustling little etsy shop. I'm still not entirely sure how it happened except that this book basically ate me alive. I literally enjoyed every moment of writing this thing. I woke up every morning excited to get back to work on it, and drafting it made me feel more depressed than relieved, like what, over so soon? I wanted to back off of it for a week before I went back in for revising, but this thing has other ideas. I'm sitting here next to a pretty lengthy page of notes I took on it in the lousy day and a half I managed to keep my fingers out of the file. The last two, I was so happy to have them put behind me. This one, I never want to climb back out of.

I have no idea whether it's at all marketable. I could probably pitch it as YA, and will try to, as the protagonist is sixteen. I've been referring to it over on Facebook as a postapocalyptic katabasis ghost story, and it is that and it isn't. I'm terrible at synopses so I'm not even going to try, but in a nutshell it condenses so many disparate, mismatched things I love and somehow built them into itself: postapocalypse, katabasis, and ghosts, but also a Golden Bough-ish mythology and stars and a strong flawed ghosthunter-historian-priestess girl and (hopefully!) overturned tropes and dead sort-of superheroes and contested cities and loss and freedom and grail quests and knife-fights and swordfights and history and breaking oppressive systems down and Unlikely Alliances and trial by ritualized single combat and things-are-not-quite-as-they-seem, and about a million other things I won't tl;dr you to death with now. And also a saltlick. For catching ghosts with.

I've never had so much fun writing anything in my life.

Helping Rose get to Wiscon!

2012-03-02T15:29:22Z

I'm sure you all saw rose_lemberg's post on fundraising her way to Wiscon, so I won't clutter up your flist! I've just learned I have masses of surprise!new! dental work to have done, and a mortgage to refinance, so donation money is sort of at low tide right now, BUT if anyone places any orders from my etsy shop and mentions Rose's fundraiser in the notes to seller, I'll send her 25%.

con or bust!

2012-02-13T01:10:28Z

I've seen lots of really smart posts about why con_or_bust is a damn fine idea, and I bet you have too, so I don't need to hop up on my soapbox. Lots of shiny auctions to be checked out on there. I've donated signed copies of my books and also caramels from my Etsy shop. So if you were looking to get your hands on either of those things, this is an Opportune Moment.

writingnews, kindof

2012-02-10T20:13:50Z

1. 20,000 words into the postapocalyptic katabasis novel. It's fun. I think it might be accidental!YA. Which I'm okay with. It's going really quickly (most of that 20k in a couple of weeks), though I just lost this past week due to enplaguened 4yo plus etsy v-day rush. Apparently both strep and pinkeye have just been confirmed at preschool, which, well, we'll see how that plays out. I wave my white handkerchief to my ms from the shore.

2. this, in which I'm flattered to be listed with sovay, a genius in any light.

3. prospective agent does not in fact want to represent Blithen's Tarot, despite previous enthusiasm, and without requesting rewrites. Onward, I guess. First, though, writing new bookthing abovementioned. Prospective agent has "great confidence in [me] as a writer" and is very eager to see more from me. Deciding whether I want to pursue that if it means giving up on a book that my readers generally thought was pretty strong, and after only one rejection. Eh.

4. two poems written last year, two Rhysling nominations. Pretty cool.

wirewalking @ 2012-01-09T10:24:00

2012-01-09T15:24:48Z

I'm pretty sure the bugs in Skyrim are the most amusing part. We are never, ever, ever going to pick this cabbage.

better late than never (?): books read in 2011

2012-01-06T16:57:40Z

Hey, I had the list for last year and then completely forgot to post it, so this is a step up for me. And yet again it illustrates how little time I actually have for reading. Meh.

Some really sweet nonfiction this year! (And I'm starting 2012 with some more sweet nonfiction: On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma, which is so much fun.) As usual the list is pretty much all over the place -- I'll read anything. A couple of these were gifties from mer_moon (the Byatt and de Lint) and the Hunger Games trilogy was on csecooney's recommendation. I hardly ever read anything trendy but it was surprisingly fun.

Anyway, the list!

1. Cherie Priest, Dreadnought

2. Catherynne M. Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed

3. Joe Hill, 20^th Century Ghosts

4. Geoff Ryman, Lust

5. Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

6. JoSelle Vanderhooft (ed), Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories

7. Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

8. C.S.E. Cooney, Jack o' the Hills

9. Elizabeth Bear, All the Windwracked Stars

10. Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy

11. Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber

12. Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

13. Roger D. McGrath, Gunfighters, Highwaymen, & Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier

14. Claire Rudolf Murphy & Jane G. Haigh, Gold Rush Women

15. Life and Exploits of the Daring Frank & Jesse James

16. Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

17. Francine du Plessix Grey, At Home with the Marquis de Sade

18. The Complete Marquis de Sade

19. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

20. Gemma Files, A Rope of Thorn

21. Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

22. Paolo Bacigalupi, Pump Six and Other Stories

23. John Crowley, The Solitudes

24. John Crowley, Love & Sleep

25. John Crowley, Daemonomania

26. John Crowley, Endless Things

27. Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow

28. Dictionary of Rogues

29. Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot

30. A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

31. Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs

32. Parker Pearson, The Archaeology of Death and Burial

33. K. David Harrison, The Last Speakers

34. Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

35. Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

36. Joe Hill, Horns

37. Joe Kelly and J. M. Ken Niimura, I Kill Giants

38. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

39. Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

40. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

wirewalking @ 2011-12-19T14:53:00

2011-12-19T19:53:14Z

No time to add anything to it yet (cranky sleepless child!) but my etsy shop now has a shiny new Facebook page!

Help out Terri Windling!

2011-11-28T19:20:05Z

Go forth and check out magick4terri to benefit Terri Windling! There is some seriously shiny stuff here. I've added books and caramels! Wheee!

so posting about rejections is probably pretty gauche, but

2011-11-16T15:55:09Z

How cool would it be if it were possible (obviously it isn't, this is me wishing for ponies) for all editors to put this amount of time into rejections? No, I don't expect it. Yes, this was a pro market. That's why I was so pleasantly surprised to see it! I mean seriously, how often is it that a rejection makes you feel good about your story?

Nicole,

Thanks for the submission! I hope you can forgive me for taking so
long to get back to you.

I was very impressed with "Queen's Progress" -- you have a real
gift for prose. It has a marvelously colorful setting, carefully
depicted, and complex and fascinating characters.

Most readers will be delighted to be immersed in such a colorful and
original landscape, and be patient enough while the narrative takes them
places they don't yet understand. Unfortunately, the opening pages of
"Queen's Progress" are so densely packed with unexplained
references and asides that they are virtually impenetrable.

For example, paragraphs 7 to 11 are pretty much incomprehensible, and the
next few pages are almost as bewildering. While you take great care
to eventually unravel the mysteries you lay down in those pages, by the
time you do I think most of my readers would have given up. As
strong as your story is, I'm afraid I'll have to return it, with genuine
regrets.

[etc etc etc],

[Editorperson]

See? It's constructive, it's useful, and the criticisms are specific and absolutely true. Most of my rejections follow this same pattern of "Wow, this was a super cool story and here are some things that we dug about it but we're not buying it." They don't often bother to tell me WHY they didn't buy it, and I love that this one did.

In other news, Blithen's Tarot is off to the agent! Longer post about that later, probably.

in which N decamps to Hawaii

2011-10-29T00:24:38Z

Expecting over a foot of snow tomorrow (WHAT) which I fully expect to knock out our power/internet for another week (heavy wet snow + high winds + still most of the leaves on the trees = very effing bad). See y'all on the far side of an asston of shoveling.

Love,
me.

wirewalking @ 2011-10-24T11:58:00

2011-10-24T15:58:57Z

I've been reading way too much about human sacrifices recently, so that's probably something to do with the dream I had the other night.

In it I was in a city where some kind of festival was about to begin. The mechanics of the thing were pretty timeless though the city was modern (I've no idea where it was meant to be -- could have been any major city on almost any continent from what little I saw of it). The people had picked out a man and a woman to stand as representatives/sacrifices. At the culmination of a bunch of feasting and games and stuff, all the people sat at a long table, much as you see in meadhalls in films, and the woman sat in the middle of one long end, her back to the man who stood about fifteen feet behind her, away from all the rest. Off about twenty feet from the table in the other direction stood a second woman, also apart from the rest. The man and the second woman were both armed with longbows and arrows. The atmosphere was very county-fair-ish, loud and boisterous, brightly colored.

What they had to do then was this. The man had to fire arrows into the seated woman's back while the standing woman had to fire arrows into the man's shooting arm. They took turns. They were supposed to hold silence. This didn't work very well. The goal was twofold. First, the man was trying to kill the seated woman before the archerwoman either incapacitated or killed him, which in turn she was trying to do before he killed the seated woman. Secondly, they had to preserve the spectacle, so neither could be killed (or the man incapacitated) too quickly. So there was quite an art form (and a lot of tension) to placing one's arrows where they would do enough damage to be amusing to the onlookers, while not ending the game too quickly, while the archerwoman had to protect the seated woman and the man had to protect himself from the archerwoman. The seated woman meanwhile had to keep eating and drinking at the table with everyone else as though nothing was happening. This also didn't work very well. What I remember maybe most distinctly was a little four-or-five-year-old androgynous child with whiteblond hair being bounced on a grandparent's knee not four feet to the side of the seated woman and cheering when the arrows went in.

I'm pretty sure this or something like it will find its way into a story at some point.

Can you tell we've had contractors fixing our house for almost 3 months now?

2011-10-17T15:53:49Z

Julian's been really digging this game lately in which you have to draw a guy and then draw more things to solve problems he encounters.

There's a part where you have to draw a sword to fight a dragon. (The whole game is very forgiving as it doesn't care what you draw, it animates and uses it anyway.)

Dan: Okay, draw a sword!
Julian: No.
Dan: You don't want to draw a sword?
Julian: No.
Dan: What do you want to fight the dragon with then?
Julian: A nailgun!

And so it was.

more Changelingstuff

2011-10-15T00:11:57Z

One thing about this child of mine is he's a perfectionist. It gets in the way of his speech as I've said, but it also gets in the way of him trying/practicing pretty much anything he's not automatically good at.

One of these things is drawing.

I realized a little while ago that if he draws on a magnadoodle thingy (and can erase "mistakes" at will) he's sometimes more likely to try his hand at it. But he avoids doing it at preschool, used to avoid it when he had occupational therapy, avoided it at his evaluations so he got the damn occupational therapy in the first place, etc.

And then this last week he finally decided he wanted to draw something. He said he wanted to draw an alien. I walked him through it a little, but he drew this frickin' thing without my doing any hands-on helping of any kind and no practice at drawing anything ever:

And then today when I was in the shower he apparently told Dan he wanted to draw a person blowing out a fire. No direction, no help:

And then he said he wanted to draw a dragon, did so, and then CALMLY EXPLAINED (the child has a very short fuse when it comes to frustration when things he does don't measure up to his ideation of them so this is freakin' huge) that the short lines are the wings, the long line is the tail (the face being on the body I find totally adorable, probably because it's my kid drawing it):

I know, posting about my kid. But for this particular kid, this is a really big deal. I'm a happy mommy.

Goodness.

2011-10-05T00:48:04Z

I seem to be in some very shiny company again.

bits and pieces

2011-09-26T15:27:42Z

Just a heads-up to anyone who bought cookies from me in my bake sale that I've now listed the recipes for all 3 kinds over on my etsy shop with 50% of profits to causes/organizations I like (charities to be rotated monthly).

Speaking of the etsy shop, I somehow managed to luck into starting it just in time to be included in this article. Apparently I'm a Vegan Etsy Superstar. Pretty cool!

Also for those of you who have wondered, no I'm not quitting writing! The timing is awesome as I'm waiting on readers now so I can send Blithen's Tarot off to the agent and I'm not going to touch the next novel (the post-apocalyptic Golden Bough one) until BT is in the agent's hands. I do miss writing but this is what I need to be doing right now. I could be writing short stories but those aren't going to pay for all this work on the house. Ah well. Onward!

I made an etsy shop!

2011-09-20T13:14:55Z

Keep forgetting to mention on here, but after several of you suggested it to me, I've started an etsy shop for the caramels. The bakesale/booksale is still ongoing. This is just another option. Also, pictures! :)

Another languagepost, this one a bit different

2011-09-20T00:11:53Z

So I tend to blather sort of a lot about language use in fiction. (I was going to link my Apex blogpost, "Your Voice Is Not Your Enemy," but the page seems to have disappeared off of the site. Curses!) Language use for me is one of the most fun and satisfying parts of writing and reading and I could blather about it even more with very little provocation.

This post is not about that.

Before my now-preschooler Julian was a week old, before he was really giving me any reason to, I was already calling him the Changeling. I'm not even sure why. It was just a nickname that stuck. He always seemed (and still does) different somehow from his peers. When I'd go out with him I'd get accosted by women who would stare into his eyes and tell me what an old soul he was, or how he was the most alert baby they'd ever seen. But he never talked.

See, as a baby I was a talker. I'm told I spoke in complete sentences by age 1 and was reading -- really reading, not memorizing words by sight -- and making up (nonsensical) rhyming couplets by 2. It was only within the past several years that I realized this was sort of unusual, and maybe I did Julian a disservice by assuming the same would apply to him. I have videos of him at 14-16 months or so, babbling into the camera, me filming for no other reason than he was babbling, doing what other babies do from a few months of age onward. I have a memory from when he was maybe 24 months or so, when he'd made my day by attempting to say the word "duck," and I then heard that a friend of mine's same-aged toddler had begun to correctly conjugate verb tenses. That might have been when I realized he probably wasn't going to just catch up on his own. He was already in Early Intervention for speech but EI, while very probably useful for many many problems, was crap for him. I'd correctly diagnosed his issue ages ago, but EI specifically says they don't do targeted therapy for it. Kids have to wait until they're 3 and go on to the district-supervised therapies to get that help.

Turns out he has pretty severe oral/verbal apraxia. What this means in his case is that while he's cognitively normal and seems also to be very bright in some areas (receptive speech included -- he builds vocabulary like a machine), his brain and the muscles of his mouth don't communicate that well. He couldn't purse his lips (to drink through a straw, kiss, or blow air out of his mouth) until he was two, and then only after I spent hours with him blowing cotton balls across a tabletop at each other with straws. He couldn't stick out his tongue and wiggle it until he was almost 3, and that not until his (utterly fantastic) speech therapist and I had to manually input the muscle memory by moving his tongue around with a popsicle stick, every day, several times a day, for days on end. He had no gag reflex as a baby/toddler, which led to many, many horrible choking episodes in which he very nearly died. Even now at nearly 4 he has a hard time touching the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth on command, as you do to vocalize the L sound.

How do you correct apraxia? Practice. Lots and lots of practice. When I said we had to manually input his muscle memory, that was no lie and no exaggeration. It's what you have to do. Over and over. For each letter. For each letter sound in isolation. For each letter blend in conjunction. For every single little thing you take for granted in a neurotypical child's speech. Dozens and dozens and probably hundreds of times. He'd go for weeks with no progress and then wake up one morning making one new letter sound, or trying to approximate one new word, and that was a Good Day. With apraxia you fight for every inch of ground you gain, and then you fight to hold it, because without exercising that newly-input muscle memory, it disappears.

Combined with the fact that he's a bit self-conscious and a bit of a perfectionist, leading him to refuse to practice things he couldn't already do perfectly, there was little-to-no progress made on all of these fronts for a long, long time. Only within the past few months have I realized I no longer have to translate everything he says, even to my parents and other adults who see him often. But he still has an odd staccato quality of speech, though the gaps between syllables are shortening and he can make and blend most sounds in isolation and combination without over- or under-emphasizing. He went through the longest phase of overemphasizing end-sounds, so for, say, "dump truck" he'd say "dum-(pause)-PUH tru-(pause)CK." Besides that he couldn't make r blends so "truck" sounded bizarre anyway. And that he'd default to indicating words by making their initial sound and nothing else, so every word that began with B he would say as "buh," no matter how many syllables it had after that initial B sound. Same with D and P, which were the other two consonant sounds he could make cleanly. He used to love the Curious George books, but he couldn't say either of those words, or make a soft g sound for that matter, so he'd shorten "Curious George" to a sound sort of like "guh." And this was endemic to his speech. For years he was virtually unintelligible. Everything hinged on context. If I couldn't see what he was pointing at I could barely understand him. Talking to him on the phone was out of the question. Holding a conversation with him, forget it. I was away for a couple of days last November and called him every morning and I couldn't understand 95% of what he was saying. He was 2 years, 23 months old at the time.

I think what I'm getting at is the irony of it, if irony is actually what it is. Language is one of my major passions, and I went through every day of his infancy not being able to wait until he could communicate with me -- only to find that I would have to fight tooth and nail for each spoken word he added to his vocabulary. It was the hardest fucking thing I've ever done in my life, but also one of the most satisfying. He still has habitual speech issues like the staccato sound -- oh yeah, another setback is that he imprints on bad speech habits and they are hell to unlearn! and he gets self-conscious and quiet when he's working with his speech therapist so I'm not altogether sure she believes me when I list for her the improvements he's made recently, and just how immense they are. Right now we're working on those little words like a, the, to. But he's speaking in 10-word+ sentences regularly and damn near all of his sounds and sound blends come out clean.

Plus he's a coy little thing. He keeps coming out with words or ideas I didn't know he had in there, but when I ask him to repeat them he goes all shy and "I don't know." and that's the end of that until I can trick it out of him later. This is the same child who had me convinced for over a year that he didn't know his colors and I wasn't sure he did until I tricked that out of him too. Same with shapes and letters and all those things they use to quantify children's intelligence which he doesn't give a shit about and never has.

I'm not sure where I was going with this, apart from to vaguely reflect on being a very language-oriented person and having a child who can't be, or at least not yet, and how very strange that feels. It's still a fight to get him caught up, and he's still not confident enough to really try to engage the kids at preschool, but he'll get there. He's still gaining ground, slowly but surely. Today I noticed he's finally putting his final S sounds on possessives, and his beginning S sounds on words that begin with it. (For whatever reason middle S blends he was ok with but beginnings and ends were weird. He'd leave the ends off but nasalize the beginnings, so for "snow" he'd sort of blow air through his nose and then vocalize the "now" part so it would come out sounding sort of like "fhnow." Hard as hell for people-not-his-parents to understand.) A couple of weeks ago he mastered Z and V blends. It's little steps like these that add up to fluency. A lot of his issue now is habit -- if he breaks up a word into staccato sections, you tell him to "put it together" and he'll repeat it a bit smoother. If he habitually shortens a sentence, say, "No brush teeth!" and you say "I don't know what that means!" he'll self-correct to a complete and grammatically correct sentence. It's tedious as hell but it works, and I'm convinced there's still so much in there in his head that he doesn't feel confident enough to try to share. My goal is for him to have caught up by kindergarten. Luckily his birthday is two days from the state boundary line so he won't start until he's nearly 6. I'm pretty confident he'll get there. He's smart and he's reached a point where he's willing to work for this, and we'll get him there, one little step at a time.

Meantime, the cute!

Signal boosting!

2011-09-08T17:19:08Z

Tori Truslow (amagiclantern) needs your help! Not only that but she makes it utterly worth your while to do so. Original stories! Gorgeous artwork! Pumpkin quince chutney! Crabapple chilli jelly! Blackberry brandy! HOMEMADE BLACKBERRY BRANDY HELLO? GO DONATE AND WIN THIS.

Also! If you were thinking on making a purchase from my bakesale/booksale but hadn't yet -- or if you need to restock your cookie/caramel supply! -- if you make a purchase and tell me Tori sent you, I'll kick 10% over to her fundraiser, through the end of the month or until she makes her goal.

She only needs to raise £200 before the end of September. We can totally do this.

wirewalking @ 2011-09-08T10:33:00

2011-09-08T14:33:20Z

Results are in and it's a benign fibroadenoma as suspected. I know some of you were wondering. <3