Note: I later changed the rule below due to the Amazon/Hachette tiff, putting Orbit books first.
Essentially, my policy is one Rick uses for other things: make it easy for me to help you. Orbit isn’t.
John Scalzi discusses Orbit’s decision to only include previews of their three nominees here.
This year’s kind of rare—I spent my year reading out of genre and have read exactly zero of the nominated novels.
My usual rule for book-length works is:
If it’s not in the Hugo Voter’s Packet, I don’t vote for it.
This year, I need to modify that:
If it’s not in the Hugo Voter’s Packet in complete form, I don’t vote for it.
Why? Because not providing a nominated book says to me that the Hugo Awards aren’t perceived as valuable by the publisher. Why should I reward that?
Meanwhile, this weekend attendees at RT Booklovers Convention in New Orleans are getting a thumb drive with 349 books. Self-published books, granted, but who has more to lose (or gain) than they do? (I have one of those, fwiw, Felt Tips: Office Supply Erotica, edited by Tiffany Reisz.)
There are a few modifiers to my rules:

1. I’ll consider voting for a work if I already own the book. So, of the Hugo Nominees for Best Novel this year, what do I already own? But, if I haven’t read it yet, it goes in line after the provided books.
2. If the book’s not supplied in EPUB format, it’s not in the packet. None of this PDF shit.
3. If the ebook’s on sale during the award reading period, I might consider purchasing it. (I will read the sample first, though, so providing one actually does help. I guess I should thank Orbit for that.)

If I read a book in a Hugo packet and I love the book, I will buy it if I hadn’t already. So, in that sense, being nominated already means I’m more likely to a) read the book and b) buy the book than any other random book published last year.
I no longer read print books, and not being a Kindle person, I don’t do ebook library loans.
In general, there are 1-2 Hugo-shortlisted novels per year that I’d buy. Stross wrote my favorite book, and the nominated book is the third in a series (and I haven’t read the first two in that series). Ann Leckie’s been getting a lot of buzz, I just hadn’t gotten around to buying and reading her book yet. And I’m so far behind on Mira Grant books that it’s not funny (though this one’s in a new series, so there’s that). All three are affected by Orbit’s decision not to put entire books in the packet. Here’s the joint post by the three affected Orbit authors.
I’ve already established that I’ll be putting Larry dead last. (Edit: to clarify, I mean in reading order. Since I haven’t yet read his book, I’m not sure where I’d rank it on the ballot, but I can say it’s unlikely I’ll get to it during the voting period.) Why? I don’t mind hearing people say, “I liked this, it’s eligible, I think you could check it out,” but I think that putting together a slate crosses the line. (This is aside from any issues of what he did or didn’t recommend.) So he goes after the whole Orbit crowd.
…which leaves…
(cue dramatic music)

I guess I’ll go about finally reading The Wheel of Time then. (Those books on the shelf? Rick’s. I almost never read incomplete series.)
Tentative reading order, possibly to be modified later:

1. Wheel of Time
2. Stross
3. Leckie
4. Grant
5. Correia

If Orbit provided full books, my reading order would likely be:

1. Leckie
2. Grant
3. Stross (as I want to read the other books too)
4. Wheel of Time
5. Correia

Mini-PDF Rant

I was asked on LJ what the problems were with PDF:

1. I can’t read it in my font of preference.
2. I like to read in white text on black because I read in bed (on an iPad) at night. I can’t control that with a PDF.
3. I like to read it at my text size of preference.
4. Which, if I do that, the page is significantly larger than the screen, so every single fucking sentence involves scrolling left and right.

Total pain in the ass.
I honestly can’t get into a book that takes that much attention just to read. I’ve tried before, and not voted before. The last time I tried was a Cat Valente nominee (Palimpsest).
No more.

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Fibromyalgia (FM) syndrome is a disabling clinical condition of unknown cause, and only symptomatic treatment with limited benefit is available. Gluten sensitivity that does not fulfill the diagnostic criteria for celiac disease (CD) is increasingly recognized as a frequent and treatable condition with a wide spectrum of manifestations that overlap with the manifestations of FM, including chronic musculoskeletal pain, asthenia, and irritable bowel syndrome. […]
This observation supports the hypothesis that non-celiac gluten sensitivity may be an underlying cause of FM syndrome.

Link to abstract.
I must say, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t really address the fact that a) I have been diagnosed (and recently re-diagnosed) with fibromyalgia, and b) I’ve been on a strict gluten-free diet for years.
I have noticed for quite a few years that errors in compliance do lead to whole-body flare pain, so I can definitely see how that could happen for others who weren’t on a gluten-free diet.
As always, I’m an outlier.
Hope this helps some of you, though!

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Dante caught shit for writing in Italian instead of Latin.

My native vernacular comes across less in writing than it does in speech, but for those who have spoken with me and know the area, it’s totally obvious where I came from.
I’m a Valley Girl.
I can excise those speech bits when I wish to, and my accent has mellowed over the years, but it is still my “native” accent. Because a lot of Valley Girl is adverb usage, I’ve never really been aboard the adverb minimalization train.
My Valley Girl tendencies are modified by two other aspects of the time and place I was raised:

1. I’m of Irish descent, and some aspects of Irish (not Irish English, but Irish Gaelic) remain. For example, there are no words in Irish for yes or no. If you ask me a yes/no question, you’ll probably get a 2-3 sentence answer that doesn’t contain either word. This frustrates Rick at times.
2. I was born when there were 49 states in the US. During my childhood, Southern California was a walking tribute to Disneyfied Hawai’iana (e.g., Waltah Clarke), and that’s affected my speech, thought, and culture. So I have this weird relation to Hawai’ian culture despite not being of Hawai’ian descent.

The pressure to conform to “Standard English” in both writing and speech was very strong in both my father’s side of the family and in my education. The usual way this was done was insisting that non-standard usage is “illiterate.”
I still have non-standard usage that persists. In speech in particular, I’ll often muck up subject-verb agreement in longer sentences with this format: “one of the people who are.” I usually use the subjunctive in formal writing, but often don’t in speech, though I will admit that Gwen Stefani’s “If I Was a Rich Girl” really grates where “If I Were a Rich Man” does not.
When I first started hearing AAVE being given respect by literary and academic communities, I’ll be honest: it grated.
The thing is, I don’t want to sound like an academic with a Ph.D. in English. On the flip side, I actually like to feel comfortable enough with the rules that I know when I’m breaking them vs. when I’m not.
I like stories with a strong sense of voice. I like stories with a strong sense of place, which sometimes ties into a strong sense of voice.
As a fiction writer, I’ve learned that vernacular really can be about unusual (to the average white English speaker) speech patterns. In one story I wrote one character’s dialect using Irish Gaelic syntax, which is verb first and uses extra words for emphasis.
I got back one critique that said: “Sounds like Yoda, she does.”
Which is exactly Irish syntax. What bothered me more about the critique is that Yoda’s syntax was not consistently Irish, but at that time, that’s how most Americans had heard any such usage in English. One of these days, I might actually get the story back out and rework it, but part of that is just going to be affirming, “That’s how she talks. Deal with it.”
I remember, for example, Rick and I driving around Tahiti, noting that their usage of French was unfamiliar. Understandable, but different words were chosen than other places we’d been. I’ve seen this in English, too. I remember puzzling over a sign in Indonesia.

It is exactly those differences in usage that tie us to places. I recently read a romance novel that had every Irish English usage correct—except the one mistake I’d made myself, and was therefore very aware that her hero used the wrong word. It threw me out.

Not Our Kind, Dear

Some years ago, Rick and I went up to Petaluma for some Linux thing. We wound up having a long conversation with a woman there, and wound up talking a lot about the rules enforced on women.
For example, no white shoes after Labor Day or before Easter. Sure, you can wear “winter white,” which isn’t really white at all, but not white white (unless you live in Florida).
If you dared to do such a thing, you were “not our kind, dear.”
That kind of policing every detail is what I (and many other women) grew up with, and it’s toxic to everyone. Maybe I want to wear white shoes in February. If you’re so small a person that you can’t accept fucking shoe color (or, worse, straps around the ankle) as an acceptable variant in dress, I don’t want to be your friend.
Which leads nicely into AAVE.

What makes AAVE so dramatically different as a political issue from, say, Spanish (also spoken in Oakland, by up to a quarter of the population) is its close relation to another language of much higher prestige. Most speakers of Standard English think that AAVE is just a badly spoken version of their language, marred by a lot of ignorant mistakes in grammar and pronunciation, or worse than that, an unimportant and mostly abusive repertoire of street slang used by an ignorant urban underclass. (link)

I was that person ridiculing Ebonics. There’s probably evidence of same somewhere in the bowels of Google.

And Then I Grew Up (At Least Imperfectly)

You know what? I’m allowed to have been wrong.
I still have difficulty feeling that my own (white privileged) vernacular is “acceptable,” and it’s a recognizable (albeit ridiculed) variant of SE.
I can’t imagine what people who speak non-SE dialects feel when they’re minimized because of their native dialect.
So when @djolder posted links to this Storify version of his responses to this Strange Horizons review, I was horrified.
Strange Horizons reviewed a book, Long Hidden, specifically about marginalized cultures in SF/F stories. Then the reviewer calls out AAVE as “a literary trick”?
Writing in your own dialect is never a literary trick.
Saying that is othering and dismissive of the entire premise of Long Hidden. Rose Fox, one of the editors, said, “It’s an ethical and cultural error.” I concur. Strange Horizons has apologized. tweet one, two, and three.
I’m not even convinced that writing in another dialect is a literary trick. To me, “trick” implies deceit above and beyond the usual call of fiction. Sure, there’s the alternate meaning of “trick” as being clever without being deceitful (e.g., somersaulting on a skateboard), but that clearly wasn’t the meaning here.

So What Is a Literary Trick?

For me, a literary trick implies leading the reader to expect one thing, then delivering another. The classic “red herring” is a literary trick. “Who is Kaiser Soze?” from The Usual Suspects is a literary trick (sadly, I figured that out 15-20 minutes into the film). A wonderful quote from that link:

Kevin Spacey claimed that Bryan Singer managed to convince all of the major actors that they were Keyser Soze. At the first screening, an angry Gabriel Byrne stormed off when he realised the truth.

That’s a literary trick on an entirely different level.
Writing an unreliable narrator such that she tells one story on a literal level and a completely different story when you realize what way she’s being unreliable—that’s a literary trick.
But being honest and true about your own dialect? Nope.
I learn a lot from meeting people and reading stories by people who are quite different from myself. I love it when people take me unexpected places.
I think this bears repeating: Writing in your own dialect is never a literary trick.
See also: this great post from Troy L. Wiggins.

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Below is a video of a panel called “Opening the Clubhouse Doors: Creating More Inclusive Geek Communities” panel from C2E2 2014, April 25, 2014. It happened in Chicago.
At about 5 minutes in, one of the panelists tells the opening tale about an experience asking about diversity in comics:

“What is the percentage of female readers?”
And he literally said, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

Hat tip to Kameron Hurley.

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I’m in the middle of one big project. I also have a medium project that may cause slippage past acceptable dates of my big project.
I have no extra time to spend. I blow time on Twitter when I’m between project bursts. That’s my outlet. I occasionally check in on facebook, though not every day, and I don’t see everything.

How I Work

I need large, uninterrupted swaths of time. Those are far rarer than you’d think.
I turn off notifications when I’m working. Therefore, I may not see whatever until I’m not working. I’m working almost all of my waking hours, seven days a week. That’s what I need to do.
What I need are asynchronous forms of communication right now: email, IRC, Twitter. That way I can deal with them when I can.
NOT Facebook chat. No phone calls. No text messages. And, especially, no voice mail. Most of the time, I delete voice mail without listening to it unless it’s from household members. This is especially true if the voice mail comes from an unknown number. Voice mail is a pain in the ass.
I sort my email into mailboxes. I read everything that’s left in my inbox every day. I will not necessarily respond to everything unless it actually requires a response. If you accidentally wind up in my (rather aggressive) spam queue, it may take 3-4 days before I check all my unread spam, fish out any false positives, and mark the rest read.
Please spell carefully. A friend said an email he’d sent recently went unanswered, but I hadn’t received one. You have to spell my first name twice in order to reach me. Correctly. (I’m also amazed at the number of people who do that, but then misspell my first name in the body of the email.)
Also, I am not your e-mail monkey.

I Have a Lot of Projects

I have these projects—books that you probably already know about. And this new site to focus on one project type. You probably didn’t know about this project. Though you’ve heard about these. (and some of you rolled your eyes, no doubt) And I mentioned this once, but forgot to mention the second thing I put up.
See what I mean? Taken together, it’s a lot of stuff.
Which I totally need to get back to. Later!

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The first day I was at Apple (a bit over six years ago), I went to Caffé Macs.
And promptly burst into tears when I saw the menu.
Not, for once, out of sadness or frustration, but out of joy: they had four soups that day, and all four were gluten free.
I hadn’t had soup in a restaurant for twelve years.
Being celiac means you have to constantly have the conversation, both with others and with yourself: what’s in this? Do I trust that this person understands what gluten is? Are there any possible gotcha ingredients? Am I going to get sick? Am I in a situation where I can risk getting sick?
It’s. Fucking. Exhausting.
Some of you may minimize the illness. Here are some reactions of celiacs/gluten sensitive people I know.

1. Guy winds up in the ICU with extreme anemia. He’s lost a ton of weight. His identical twin has not, so they don’t immediately think of anything with a genetic component. He’s apparently dying, but from no obvious cause. They give him two units of blood for the anemia. Eventually, they figure out he’s celiac. They are both now on gluten-free diets.
2. Woman who is so sensitive to gluten that she has seizures from cross contamination. Like any seizure, they can be permanently disabling due to brain damage.
3. Friend I know says that his daughter has been losing weight. She’s actually seen a gastroenterologist, more than once, but has continued to lose weight and throws up almost everything she eats. Her doctors have written her off as secretly bulemic. She’s not, though. I correctly call it: gluten reaction. No one had put her on an elimination diet.

Different celiacs have different reaction times. Some actually have part of their reaction in their stomachs. They will throw up their meals. I’m not that lucky. If it goes in, it stays in, meaning it’ll do more damage and I’ll be sick longer. Typical onset is 24-72 hours after a meal. (How many of you remember what you ate that long ago? Now you know why, when I eat out at a new place, I take pictures of my food. Timestamps are wonderful.)
My first reaction is usually a slightly elevated temperature, generally 0.3-0.5 degrees F. Then gastrointestinal cramping. In extreme cases, bleeding.
Not fun.

Celiac Disease Really Is More Common Than it Used to Be

Dr. Joseph Murray of the Mayo Clinic explains. (emphasis added)

Dr. Murray’s team tested the 50-year-old blood for gluten antibodies, assuming that 1 percent would be positive—the same as today’s rate of celiac disease. But the number of positive results was far smaller, indicating that celiac disease was extremely rare among those young airmen. Surprised, the researchers compared those results with two recently collected sets from Olmsted County, Minn. One blood-sample set matched the birth years of the airmen. Those elderly men were four times likelier to have celiac disease than their contemporaries tested 50 years earlier. The second set matched the ages of the airmen at the time their blood was drawn. Today’s young men were 4.5 times likelier to have celiac disease than the 1950s recruits.

Why? We don’t know yet.

But What About the Non-Celiacs? The Ones Kimmel Was Roasting?

I’d love to see a similar segment roasting Meat Free Mondays. Or any other diet fad where the choice is primarily political.
It’d never happen.
Being gluten-free is an extremely hard choice to make and to continue to make. It’s expensive. It lets out whole swaths of comfort foods. Most gluten-free breads suck.
Some days, I’d kill for a real croissant.
Our biochemistry is incredibly complex, and some foods will make us feel better and others will not. If that extremely hard choice makes you feel better, then do it. If not, well, don’t feel bad for having tried it.

How I Feel About the Gluten-Free Fad

My feelings on it are complex, but largely positive. Consider:

1. These days, I can walk into a restaurant, ask if they have gluten-free soups, and probably get the correct answer. That was not true 6 years ago. It definitely wasn’t true 18 years ago.
2. I no longer have to drive 30 miles to buy gluten-free flour like I did 18 years ago.
3. I can walk into a random restaurant and occasionally get a gluten-free menu. My mom and I went to the Union Street Grill in Courtenay, B.C.—not a big city by any means—and they had a gluten-free menu. Because of that (oh, and they’re good, too), we went back two more times. Then we went across the street (practically) to the Atlas Cafe, and they have a gluten-free menu too.
4. I can find dedicated gluten-free restaurants near me. Do you have any idea what it’s like to walk into a restaurant and be able to order anything on the menu after 18 years of not being able to? (Last night, we had dinner at Asian Box in Palo Alto, one of our favorites.)
5. I can visit entire countries with as good or better availability of gluten-free food than we have here in the United States. It might surprise you to know that Italy is one of the better places for gluten-free options. (Also note that that post was written almost 7 years ago, well before the current fad.) Argentina’s working on it. Brazil has pão de queijo as a street food. Yum! But my all-time favorite place for gluten-free food is New Zealand.

So, want to eat gluten free but don’t have a medical necessity to? Knock yourself out. Thank you for increasing my options. I really, truly, sincerely am thankful every single day.

That One Thing I Haven’t Yet Found

Gluten-free regular old meat lasagne in a restaurant with gobs of cheese in and through it. Please, no vegetables masquerading as noodles need apply here. That’s my grail food.

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Lis Mitchell asks:

Have any of my SF writing sisters ever considered writing with a neutral or masculine pseudonym? (Just curious what reasons, if so.)

Well, I do, but not to hide the fact that I’m female, though that is a side effect.
My reasons:

1. When I was at Clarion, Patrick Nielsen Hayden sat down across from me one night and said, “You have three names, all of them difficult to spell.” My response? “You’re one to talk.” He had a point. Thus, my future submissions had the byline of D. S. Moen.
2. Because, like the Nielsen Haydens, my last name is non-obviously compound, I realized that it would be easier to consistently ensure my readers could find my work on a shelf if my work were consistently shelvable. Then again, I did work at a bookstore that had a hangtag in the Ms that pointed out that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was shelved under “Garcia Marquez,” so I’m perhaps more aware of that issue than most.
3. I realize that my name is not only difficult to spell, but difficult to pronounce, thus I felt it was easier. While I’m constantly bemused by people’s attempts to pronounce Saoirse (hint: “Sounds Like Weird” is a hint for pronouncing both Deirdre and Saoirse), I’m not cruel about it.

I love the ethnicity of my name.
I love the fact that Deirdre anagrams as: dire red.
I love that Saoirse anagrams as: a rose is.
I love that Moen anagrams as: omen.
All together: red rose is a dire omen.
Which is just awesome. I didn’t plan it, it just happened that way.

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If you’re doing any indie projects, don’t sell your books through Blurb.
Passive Guy, who is a contract lawyer, says:

PG says that any licensing provision that is one immensely long sentence raises suspicions in his ever-suspicious mind that counsel is trying to put readers to sleep so they don’t pay attention to the sentence.
He will suggest, however, that the presence of words like “worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, perform, display, distribute, adapt, modify, re-format, create derivative works of, and otherwise commercially or non-commercially exploit in any manner” should raise concerns in any author’s mind.
PG hasn’t read the rest of this document and it is possible it includes other provisions that ameliorate the rights grab in this paragraph. However, PG doesn’t believe this is good drafting practice either. PG has tried a number of cases involving complex contracts and has seen judges completely screw up interpretation of complex contract provisions.

See also Meryl Yourish’s post here:
She highlights a point and says: “Here’s a clause that no writer, ever, should agree to.”

Going on the TOS alone, I would recommend that no indie ever publish with Blurb. These are terrible terms of service, and a horrible rights grab designed to screw the author.

That’s my take on it as well.
Blurb responded to me via Twitter with a link, saying, “We totally understand your concerns. We put together an FAQ that we hope clears things up.” Here’s the link.
No. A FAQ does not change the terms of the contract. It clears up nothing. It changes nothing. It expresses the current stated intent of the company, but it is not binding.
Blurb is demanding irrevocable rights.
Back to PG. He adds the following:

The combined length of Blurb’s various TOS documents is far, far longer than the longest New York publishing agreement PG has ever reviewed. (And PG is not holding New York publishing agreements up as any sort of paradigm of clarity.)

…and…

One of the things PG would do is call the CEO of the company to the witness stand and ask him/her to explain the meaning of various parts of the TOS. That would be a lovely show.

Can’t wait.
Just don’t want it to be over your book.
Okay?
Okay.

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This is a photo from a visit we took to the Military Vehicle History Foundation. It’s the battering surface of an M60A1 tank that’s privately owned. Every once in a while, they’d throw a party, invite people over, bring a couple of car wrecks up, and run over them with this tank.
This is what you call hard-earned real grunge texture.

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Some time ago, I realized I’d missed the two opening rounds of tickets for this year’s World Domination Summit and added myself to the notification list for the third round. And promptly forgot about it.
Over the weekend, I’d gotten an email reminding me that more tickets would be available soon, so I went over to the website and read up on the speakers.
I watched this completely amazing (to me) talk by Gretchen Rubin from last year’s conference.

Gretchen Rubin from Chris Guillebeau on Vimeo.
The segment about the Rubin Tendencies (begins around 19 minutes in), four different ways of approaching internal and external motivation was revelatory for me.
If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s a link to descriptions, from which I’ve excerpted the following short quote:

Upholders respond readily to outer and inner expectations (I’m an Upholder, 100%)
Questioners question all expectations; they’ll meet an expectation if they think it makes sense (my husband is a Questioner)
Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike
Obligers meet outer expectations, but struggle to meet expectations they impose on themselves

(I also think there’s an inverse to the Obliger, which I’ve labeled Self-Obliger for the moment.)
It’s like someone explained my life to me in a way I suddenly understand.
Now, some of us pretend to be one of those that we’re not. And we can have tendencies in other directions. I’m a Rebel with Questioner tendencies, and I’ve gotten through life by masquerading a Questioner.
But I’m not, and the façade is exhausting.
It leads to long stretches of anxious busy instead of katamari busy.

So How Do You Motivate Yourself?

I’m a very in-the-moment person, and I suspect many Rebels are. We make choices without necessarily considering long-term implications. Yet, many Rebels wind up in either the clergy or military/police, which are very structured.
My preference is for well-defined loose structure: several large constraints but without a lot of rules, but where the structure is consistent. I prefer large swaths of nothing on my calendar. A day feels “busy” if it has one timed item on it, no matter how short that time slot is. This week, I have timed items on my calendar three days in a row, and that feels impossible.
Thus, I’ve tended to work best on long projects where I don’t have a lot of daily (or weekly) milestones that are externally imposed, but can proceed making progress at my own pace.
The catch is what motivates me: whatever it is I’m doing has to be the most interesting thing to do in the world at that moment.
And I’m a person who’s fascinated by a lot of things.
You see the inherent problem here.
Squirrel!
There are a couple of other things that motivate me.
The thing I want to do can be the thing I most want to do in that moment. I can work on talking my way into that being something I really want to do. “Wouldn’t you enjoy eating something better for you than this bad thing? If you cooked it, you could have that.”
Like most rebels, I’m motivated by a realistic challenge.
A funny story of my teen rebel years. I wanted to take college classes while I was in high school, but the high school counselor said I couldn’t because it was against the law. Went to the library, photocopied the law (which, btw, said the exact opposite), came back and pointed out it said nothing of the kind. He still wouldn’t let me go to college, so I actually switched schools to the alternative school. My senior high school year, I had English, Physics, Horticulture, and (I can’t make this one up) Independent Study Table Tennis. In college, I took French, Calculus, and some other stuff.
Not many people would have done that at age 16.
On the flip side, I genuinely have never given a fuck about my GPA except where it has mattered for some goal I was trying to achieve. Instead, I’m that asshole who took notes during class, dutifully copying down all the professor’s jokes, never looked at my notes, never studied, often never bought the textbook—and aced the test. Obviously, I hated project classes unless the project was The Best Thing Ever.
Yet I wound up not only with a BA but also an MS (Computer Science) and an MA (Writing Popular Fiction). However, when I went back for the “F” (my MA program turned into an MFA program), my brain balked. I wound up dropping out because I realized that, for me, the money/energy/time was better spent on world travel.
That short stint in the MFA program led directly to the book I’m now working on, though, so it wasn’t a waste of time.

How This Affects My Writing Process

Given what I’ve told you already, do you think I’m a planner or a pantser? (Pantser refers to someone who writes “by the seat of their pants,” meaning without an outline or plan.)
Yep, pantser.
My attempts to outline ahead of time essentially wind up like this:

Outline says: “Jake wants rents a boat and discovers a long-rumored sea monster.”
What I actually write: Jake gets mugged while hiking in the mountains.
Me, arguing with mss/outline, “But…!”
Brain: Denied.

At the point where they diverge, I can’t even think.
Or, if I’m trying to interview characters ahead of time:

Me: “So what do you really want out of life?”
Character: “If you followed me around, you’d know this shit.”
Me: “…?”
Character: Turns back to me, and, like a cat, thumps her tail loudly on the wooden floor.

Fuck that shit.
I just can’t do an outline before I do the work. If it doesn’t lead to an outright block, what it does is drain the “new” energy out of the piece. That “new” energy is exactly why I like writing. I feed on it.
Some day, when I dig through this pile of stuff, I’ll upload the “outline” I did for grad school when I had to turn one in. Basically, I reasoned that I had X deadlines throughout the program, and each of those deadlines would be a chapter, and therefore I had X chapters to write. I was in a restaurant that had paper placemats, so I moved my plate aside and wrote down a short phrase (2-5 words) for each chapter.
That got me through the first draft, and it stuck.
I can only do that once I’m to a certain point in writing a piece, though. I generally have to start blind, write down a few ideas, and then Just Start Writing. I usually start at the beginning. In a short piece, I usually need to write the ending (so I know where I’m going) before I write the middle, but even that’s not consistent.
I often write longer books out of order, which I’m doing with the current book.
I keep a list of things I want to accomplish in the piece at the top of my document, and I’ll just delete those items as I use them. It’s not an outline, it includes all kinds of things like places, characters to introduce, a scene I want to write but don’t know where it goes, etc. Most of the items are plot pieces, though. (This was easy when I was writing in Byword, but not so easy in Scrivener, and I need to figure out a way that works for me in Scrivener. In Byword, I just peeled off a chapter as I finished it and kept writing in the same working document.)
When I know the order of those items, I’ll move them into order at the top before any of the unordered items.
At some point, usually 1/4 to 1/3 of the way in, I hit a wall. I know I’ve hit the wall when my productivity slumps and every time I write I feel like I have more questions than answers. Often those questions include, “Does this really go here?”
That’s when I need to start organizing a loose outline. It’s not what I’m keeping at the top of the document, but something more like a short synopsis.
The important thing here, though, is that it’s when the number of raised questions exceeds my comfort level. That’s something that happens organically during writing.

I’m Not Uncomfortable with Open Questions

I’ve discovered that I’m happier with more open questions than the average person.
As a real example of that, last year my boss told me a week before I was headed out on a long trip that I needed to cut it in half. I made a bunch of changes to my itinerary, but one of the questions that was left open was how I was going to get home from South Africa. I had a tentative plan in place, but it didn’t meet the constraint he’d set. Close, though.
I don’t know how many people would set off on a trip with such an important detail hanging. But I did.
Did it bother me? Only insofar as I wanted to meet my boss’s constraints.
I trusted that I had the ability to return from South Africa. After all, as an experienced traveler, I know how to work the system, and I know that there is a system. Plus, there’s always the “pay more cash for what you really want” option, even though that’s not the way I preferred to do it. So I waited for something to open up, and returned via London, catching a show I’d wanted to see.

Part of My Process is Trust

Trust that I can make it work, trust that I will make it work. When it’s something I haven’t done before, I worry, but then I remind myself that I’ve done similarly complex things before.
I trust in my ability to be resourceful and adapt to new information.
One of the things I know I’ll need to do for an upcoming project is to make a small font. I have no fucking clue how to make a font. Worse, I’m going to have to learn Illustrator for some of the mockups I’m working on, and I’ve been resisting learning that for about 25 years.
I know I can do it, though. I just haven’t had a real need to before now. I’m excited about it because I know it’ll be interesting and different. Yay.
That’s the single hardest piece of the stuff I’m doing. I am working on other things (to go with the font), and it’s all new and fun.

World Domination Summit

Getting back to the start of this post, why yes, I am going to the World Domination Summit. July in Portland, Oregon. Fun times.
I’ve also updated my events page with other places I’m going to be this year.

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Recently, I deleted my Flickr account, which meant I deleted the only public repository of my oft-used “Fuck Cancer” graphic. The original is still as free to use as ever and is at the bottom of this post.
Over the weekend, I decided to re-make the graphic to be high enough resolutions for t-shirts and prints.

It’s on RedBubble in several formats:

• T-shirts and hoodies
• Stickers
• Prints
• Small posters

I’ve made this image so it prints well on both light and dark t-shirts (as it has a background)

Older, Free Image

The above images isn’t one I want circulating on its own, but if you’d like me to adapt it to some other need you have, (e.g., a poster or event), contact me.
You can always use the image below for free. Sorry, this is as large as it ever came:

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Some of you know about the Twitter hashtags #mswl (manuscript wish list) and #tenqueries.
A friend of mine has started a site that tracks recent entries of these and a couple of other things. Stuff can roll off Twitter faster than you can sneeze.
The first is #mswl, which is editors and agents requesting manuscripts. Each has the original tweet link.
The second is #tenqueries, which is agents responding to ten queries they’ve received.
Other tabs have query tips and publishing tips.
The site is mswishlist.com.

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As someone who was a band geek, I have to say that I was one of those who looked down on cheerleaders—and vice-versa. I was envious of how pretty they were, envious of the attention they got, and I thought my own skills on musical instruments were More Important. You know, petty how teenagers are petty.

I was wrong, of course, and I’ve learned to really respect the very real skills that cheerleaders (and people doing physical things rather than cerebral skills) have.

All the impure thoughts I’ve had about cheerleaders or cheerleading over the years? I’m sorry. I was reacting in my teens based on my own hatred about society’s messages about cultural expectations about women, and not considering that maybe some women really enjoyed cheerleading. It should be fun and joyous.

And paid well.

The working conditions for NFL cheerleaders are horrific, especially when compared with the opportunities for men in the field. > But even as collective bargaining has caused players’ salaries to skyrocket, cheerleaders are still treated with the expendability of borrowed college students. Of the 26 teams that employ cheerleaders, only Seattle publicly advertises that it pays its squad an hourly minimum wage.

No one should have to endure such conditions.

What conditions?

“far weirder indignities (including elaborate rules about how to wash their vaginas..)”

The world is stranger—and far more horrible—than I give it credit for sometimes.

What I’d Have Expected Cheerleaders to Be Paid

I know a lot of people who watch games specifically for the halftime segments, who love the cheerleaders, and they’re paid how much?

If you’d asked me how much I expected them to be paid, I’d probably have guessed the median full-time salary for women, which translates to $36,380 a year (using the lowest woman median from last year). I’d have considered that a bare minimum, especially given the amount of money teams rake in, and how cheerleaders are used to boost a team’s image.

And before you tell me that they only work part of the year, they work just as long (and just as hard) as the star athletes.

We simply don’t value their skills as much, mostly because it’s a glamour job done by women.

And that is truly unfortunate.

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So, dark shirts outsold light ones by about 20:1, so I’m going to make only ones intended for a dark background this time—unless you ask for light shirts.
John Scalzi gives the background in this post, but the short version is that his wife Krissy was harassed by a man in a bar, and she backed the guy against the wall. This got conflated by a redditor with a photo of Krissy holding a baseball bat…but that wasn’t actually part of the self-defense story.
As John Scalzi said in a tweet: HOW DARE I approve of my wife defending herself. I AM A TOOL OF THE MATRIARCHY.
Believe in women’s rights to defend themselves against their harassers (while mocking those who do not)? This may be the thing for you.

Places to buy:

T-shirt and garments

Redbubble uses American Apparel, sizes to 3x. Zazzle has other shirt manufacturers and more styles, but is more expensive. Sizes to 5x plus pocket tees.

Prints and Stickers

Available on Redbubble.

Design Stuff

No matter what I wanted to do with this meme, the baseball bat kept wanting to be front and center. So it is.
The font (as well as the border and the lines and curves used to compose the baseball bat) are the work of Kimmy Kirkwood aka Kimmy Design. I bought it as a part of Design Cuts’s Monster Creative Font Bundle that’s still going on. She’s very talented. I also love her watercolor textures pack.
On the t-shirt, the only element not from there is the crown, which is from the Altus font by Jay Hilgert of Albatross, purchased in the prior Design Cuts font special. Because it’s not a matriarchy without a crown.
As usual, the print/sticker version is more complicated. 15 layers in total vs. the t-shirt’s 4.
My thought was neat graffiti behind the king’s throne, where the script was so neat and tidy one couldn’t help but have a few curlicues.
I used a transparent layer style to make all the elements look like they were squeezed out of a tube. It’s this text effect from mysitemyway, which has oodles of great free stuff. If you look hard enough, you’ll find the background image to my website in there somewhere.
Oh, and that layer style is truly transparent, as you can see with the crown. In order to get it to apply to the other layers, I had to duplicate them: one layer in color, one layer with the effect.
I used a grunged-up layer that I did over a solid color. Then I used a damask screen from Anissa Craig of le paper cafe, purchased from a Design Cuts vintage bundle. But, you say, it doesn’t look like any of those. Right. I used it in screen mode. (Or maybe inverted and used screen; it was an early choice and I’m very tired now.)
It still needed something something.
So I pulled out a scaleable vector texture from Offset, again purchased as a part of a Design Cuts vintage bundle. (I told you I had a lot of stuff to use! I haven’t even scratched the surface.) I made that a beige, which looks a bit green against the pink, so it just looks like veining that makes the wall surface feel more lived in.
And, you know, it’s got to be an actual wall surface that actual humans spent time painting. Because royalty.
Detail:

Full size:

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“Tool of the Matriarchy” is an expression mentioned in the series of John Scalzi’s tweets that led to the “Traitor to the Mens” t-shirts.
I’ve been working on getting the right look to try to communicate the intended tone with something that’d print well. I just haven’t been feeling really well (yay fibro), so I’m going to take the weekend off and have it ready Monday morning.
I’m really enjoying this t-shirt thing. Back in the day, I used to do abstract screen prints in like 5-10 layers and print my own shirts, doing all the photo separations myself. I’ve always enjoyed screen printing, though I haven’t done any in ages.
Then, once upon a time, there was a very limited series of Deirdre’s Pet Geek t-shirts.
I’ve designed other t-shirts, including a convention t-shirt for BayCon one year, and a couple of commissions over the years.

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