Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

I've begun to feel a bit unmoored from, idk, life, in a way that I recognize is from a lack of general structure. When I was in grad school, I had classes, teaching, homework, grading, and other parts of my life to keep track of and make sure I had time for and keep generally organized. When I had a job, I had a place to be from 8:30-5 five days a week, and then I had friends and stuff to do things with.

Now, with the only structure to my day or week being what I impose on it, I don't know what's going on, and if asked what I did any given day, the answer is, "uhhh..." Everything feels vague, and I don't like that. So I want to start writing things down (like I said in my previous post).

I've been managing my planning with a regular spiral notebook that I write daily tasks on, but Leuchtturm has a BOGO promo on their planners and calendars right now, so I ordered a daily calendar (with hourly slots) in A5 and a weekly calendar in A6. I'm hoping to use the weekly one to do menu planning and keep track of what food I have, because twice a week I have to get groceries, and I hate figuring out what to cook. I'm getting 2 of each because of the promo, so I've offered the extras to roller derby people. I ordered them today, so I won't have them until the middle of next week.

Thus far in 2024, I have written another 800 or so words in my nonfiction book (which somehow has almost 30000 words in it, but I don't understand how that's possible), started 3 microfiction stories for an anthology call that opens the 15th, done a lot of laundry, and played a lot of video games. I've decided which of the 3 pieces I want to work on to make submittable; one of the rejected ones might go to my newsletter subscribers for fun.

I also signed a contract for a part-time freelance copyediting job that I got via a writing friend, and the money I earn from that will cover my rent and insurance, at least, so that will stop the massive drain on my savings. Will it be enough to get my visa renewed in November? I sure hope so. I also hope, once I finish my book, that people buy it off Amazon or wherever, and I get income from that occasionally.

Strange Horticulture was a fun puzzle game, and I've played it 3 or 4 times already. After the first run, once you know the answers to the puzzles, it goes a lot faster. I want to get all the endings (there are 8, I think), and I only have 1 achievement left on steam. You play as the proprietor of a plant shop who collects new and unusual plants. Your neighbors come in and ask for particular plants for various reasons (mostly relating to medicine, but also magic). There's a monster on the loose, and you have to stop it. (Or you don't stop it, if you want to get those endings.)

Bear and Breakfast is like Stardew Valley but more stressful in some ways and less stressful in others. It also has a lot more story/background than SV: there was some sort of authoritarian government? and there was a big fire in the valley, and people stopped visiting. You play as a young bear, Hank, and you befriend other woodland creatures who help you out. A raccoon operates the decoration store, and you pay them with "valuables" (trash); a beaver renovates the derelict cabins that you rebuild into your hotels.

More stress: you're not just managing your farm; you have 5 resorts to manage and match guests to rooms that meet their requirements (which include hygiene, food, and heat). You can get staff (eventually) to manage these things for you, but they cost money per day, and it's sometimes more than you earn from your properties. Less stress: there's no combat. All your crafting items are gatherable in the world, so you don't have to go fight vampires in the mines to get your minerals to craft with.

I have a woefully neglected YouTube channel where I talk about linguistics, and I've put up a new video. Let's see if the embed function works.

One of the things I find most distressing about Being An Old is how quickly time passes. You look up, and suddenly it's the end of December, when you're sure it was just spring five minutes ago. I don't like it.

But I guess I should write one of those yearly wrap-up posts, huh? Probably good for my mental health or something, putting all the things I accomplished into one place.

The year started out fine, I guess. I participated in the annual Weekend Warrior writing contest on Codex and got two usable stories (out of five) after revisions, which I've been submitting since March or April. Two of the stories are something I could do more with, and the last was an experiment that didn't land for the readers.

Then in March, Bear City Roller Derby announced that they were starting a newbie course, and I signed up, even though I'm not a newbie. It felt like a safer, more organized way for me to join the league, since there were going to be a bunch more people. So I'm now a skating official for Bear City, and that's rad. I've refereed 3 BCRD games and 2 for Starlight Excess, another league in town. I went to Hamburg to ref once, and I went to Dresden for a workshop weekend with a handful of BCRD newbies and a handful of folks from Starlight, where I refereed a rookie scrimmage.

The big-deal thing I did was go to Malmö, Sweden, for the EuroCup 2022, where I was a non-skating official (scorekeeper). My skating skills aren't up to snuff for European top 10 play, so I applied to NSO. I got to meet a bunch of officials from around Europe, which was one of my big goals when I started here. Back in Georgia, I was really well networked with officials in the southeast, and I travelled all over the place. It's different here, because I only know BCRD folks, and I'm working to change that.

I got covid in the middle of June, which sucked. I tested positive for about 10 days (I only bothered every other day) and was sick as a dog for the first 5 or so. Naturally it was the two-week period when it was over 90 degrees here (30+ C), and I couldn't even go out to the lake to cool off. I also had to keep my bedroom door shut to keep the germs in (fair enough, really), and ex-flatmate's belief that drafts make you sick meant that even when she was out of the apartment, I couldn't open it up for a crossbreeze, so it was 27 degrees and up in my room for over 2 weeks. Stuffy when I closed the window because outside was warmer (I used the fan she forbade me from using), too hot to sleep at night with the window open.

I recovered in time to go back to the US for most of July. I sorted through and reorganized the things I didn't have room to take with me when I left. I visited my sister, aunt, aunt & uncle, and family. We all went out to Olive Garden with Grandma so we could visit. That was nice.

I'm glad we did, because a few weeks later, Grandma was in the hospital with a hernia, got pneumonia, all sorts of terrible medical things. (She's 93. She was previously in excellent health for someone who's 93. She also lost two of her four children within a year (my mom in March 2021, my uncle last new year's), so emotionally she wasn't doing great.) My uncle texted & emailed us all with updates, and she's currently content, back in her assisted living room, I think, and looking forward to getting gussied up for a holiday dinner with her assisted living neighbors tomorrow. (She has macular degeneration and is blind now.)

After I got back, my dissatisfaction with my old apartment, mostly because of my old flatmate, hit a peak, and I started looking seriously for a new place to live. I'd been casually looking before, in an if-something-comes-up mode, because I hate Charlottenburg because it's so fucking bougie, but when I felt relaxed because she was out of the country for two straight weeks, I took it as a clear sign. I signed up for premium at the biggest apartment finding site and expected to spend the next six months or more looking for a place. Maybe even apply for a certificate that grants me access to a rent-controlled place (WBS). The rental market here is at least as competitive as the short fiction publication market.

And then I was talking after practice a few days later about how badly I needed to get out of my living situation, and my new flatmate said, "I have an open room. Do you want to come see it?" And now I live in a better room in a borough of Berlin that I like better, because it's more of the things I like about this city. I'm in Treptow, right across from the park. It's former East Berlin, so most of the buildings have that Soviet charm, but I'm not far from either Kreuzberg or Neukölln, which is extraordinarily convenient for going to roller derby practice in Kreuzberg. (Formerly 45 minutes by U-Bahn, now 20 minutes by bike or bus.)

I also adopted a cat. She's been here 6 days now. I just turned my head to check on her and caught her whiskers dream twitching <3 https://feuervogel.tumblr.com/post/704511174044254208/i-adopted-a-cat-from-dvor-nyashkam-shelter-in

The only fiction sale I got this year was a reprint in an anthology. I'm still chugging away on the DS9 coffeeshop AU even though I still have no idea what I'm actually writing. I set myself a deadline of Jan 31 for a finished first draft, because I need to send it out to a crit group by April 1. That means I can take February off and come back to it in March with fresh eyes.

Lots and lots of Hades.

I did NaNoWriMo last month, and I wrote a hair over 50k words of a feminist retelling of the Siegfried/Sigurd legend. I was inspired by the retellings I've read recently, and, in format/style, at least, especially by The Penelopiad. I haven't looked at it since the 30th, so I can come back to it with fresher eyes when it's revision time. It's extremely niche, so I have no idea if there'd be any sort of audience for it. I had fun writing it, and that's what matters.

This month, I'm practicing reading Old Norse because a) it's fun and b) I want to be able to read the source texts (or at least refer to them).

I bought myself a cheap pair of outdoor skates so I feel less like I'm going to break my real (expensive) skates. They're currently out-gassing on the deck, because they're extremely cheap and have an odor. But they're cute, and if I break them, they're less expensive to replace than my real skates.

Because like everyone on the internet was talking about Hades (the videogame), I looked into it and decided it sounded like fun, so I bought it for the Switch. It's a LOT of fun! I turned on God mode because I couldn't get out of the first level without dying a lot, but that maxes out at 80% damage reduction. I've finished the main plot (Zagreus' plot), but there are still a ton of side plots to get through.

If you haven't heard of the game yet, you play Zagreus, Hades' son, and you're trying to escape from the realm of Hades. You have to battle through 4 levels (Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and Styx), each with a boss at the end, and if (when) you die, you go back to the House, and there you talk to people and that sort of thing. Then you go out again and try again. Considering that I've played both fighting games and Dynasty Warriors-style games, and I like them a lot, this moderate repetition is fine. Someone on the internet quipped something like "why should I play one game for 300 hours when I can play the same 1-hr game 300 times?" and it me, as they say.

The art is gorgeous, the character designs are FAB, and the music is fuckin rad.

And now it's time for my nightly escape from Hades, so I will sign off.

I don't have a theme for today. I worked on prep for my NaNo project. I've got the story written out, so now I just need to break it into a scene-by-scene thing with Feelings and that type of stuff. I have the feeling that this is going to be one of those things that I have to just write and let it come out and then figure out what it means. I hope not, because revising that kind of work is a royal PITA. Though I'll probably have to figure out some structural elements as I write through it, or in revisions.

So over the next couple weeks, around my column writing, agent-list making, and book writing, I'll be hammering at least a rough shape of this out.

Ooops, I got distracted by the NaNoWriMo page and thought I posted this.

I'm doing pretty well in Russian class. I think I have a 98% in the class. We've just encountered the first weird thing--verbs of motion. The "weird" part for me isn't that they distinguish between going by foot or by car, or that they take the accusative after prepositions (German does both, though the former with less strictness than Russian). No, the weird part is that you distinguish between uni- and multi-directional movement. (Which my professor explains as determinate vs indeterminate, and I think that's better than in the book.) It makes sense, but it's not intuitive, so I have to think about it a lot.

I have a vocabulary quiz on Wednesday, and there's a lot of vocabulary this chapter. And a lot of verbs. Hooray for flash cards. We also have our oral midterm on Friday (or Monday; I plan to volunteer for Friday). We get *practice* in class on Thursday. I am surprised at how much hand-holding there is.

I'm driving down to UGA next week, and this time I'm actually going to see the department and campus with students in it. Which will probably make me go "argh, students, go away," like Chapel Hill does. I'm excited but also nervous. I want to be enthusiastic but not trying too hard, and that's ... a difficult balance to strike. This time I'm staying in a hotel practically on campus, so I can walk to various campus-adjacent things as well as to campus. I'll be leaving right after class on Wednesday, or as soon as the bus gets me to my car (2:40ish) and I pop into WSM for a sandwich or something to eat for dinner on the road. It's 5 hours plus stops & traffic (I'll hit Charlotte at 5, which will suck, so I may stop at a rest area and eat my sammich), so I'll get in pretty late. Well, 9 or so, which isn't *late*, but I typically prefer to arrive places around 7.

I haven't gotten any editing to speak of on the novel since the semester started, but I'd like to start setting parts of Tuesday & Saturday (or Sunday) aside for that. Weekends keep being busy with things I can't do during the week; Tuesdays I end up running errands a lot. (Tomorrow I need to get an oil change, and I have to learn so much vocabulary...)

That's my super exciting life right now.

I posted this on tumblr, so sorry if you see this multiple places.

I’m going to get this damned novel to the point where I can call it complete and send it to people (what I call a first draft). Here’s how I’m gonna do it.

For the next month, I’m going to revise, rewrite, or write at least 2 scenes a day. (A scene is the basic unit of composition in Scrivener, which is what I use. You then compile scenes into chapters. I find this much more manageable than writing in Open Office, perhaps due to the aphantasia.)

Once the semester starts and I have 4 hours of class a week, plus a good hour of travel on top of it, I’ll work for an hour before class and an hour after homework. (I’m learning Russian. There will be homework.)

I have other things on my schedule, like working out, class prep if my ad-hoc class happens, and (hopefully) making Shatterdome ATL 3 happen, so I’ll have a nice busy schedule.

If I can, and all goes well, I’ll have a finished draft by the end of the year. (90 scenes/2 scenes a day=45 days, but no guarantees on how much I can do while studying Russian.)

Today I’m rebuilding my outline (and timeline) so I can dive in tomorrow.

I went to the doctor yesterday for these weird pink bumps on my toes that hurt and itch sometimes. Chilblains. Caused by excessive vasoconstriction in the capillaries at the extremities. Not much you can do about it other than wear multiple pairs of socks and wait for the weather to get warmer. Can be related to Raynaud's, which I've suspected I have for a while now.

Since I've been feeling a bit off and have had more migraines recently, I brought that up, as well as this feeling of swelling on the front of my neck. She said if it's still bothering me next week, I should call & she'll refer me for an ultrasound. She also had me give some blood for a thyroid test, since my last one was 10 months ago.

(I haven't been feeling up for exercising, which I don't like. I like exercising. I felt too fatigued this morning to do my lifting, and I wasn't happy.)

I've got 3 stories on submission (20, 7, and 1 days) right now, and a fourth I intend to get out soon, once I remember where the next place I wanted to send it was. (I also want to give it a read-over in a few days to see if the revisions I just made work or are clunky.)

I finished the last exam in my certificate course, which means I should be getting my certificate in the next month or so. I don't know if I need to do anything else, like say "hi, I finished everything, do I need to do anything else?" I read the syllabus-like thing, and it didn't really help.

I've almost finished reading this book about Berlin 1961, and, somewhat annoyingly, it's given me ideas that would make my novel better but require more extensive rewriting than I did during NaNo. -_- But now that I've finished the course, I can spend several hours every day reworking it. (And I also have a white board where I can make notes and outline things that happen off screen.)

This weekend should involve hanging out with people I haven't seen in entirely too long, games, pizza, beer, and cupcakes, so I'm pretty excited about that. (There was a red velvet cupcake mix at the store, which I couldn't pass up. It included a frosting packet! Not that cream cheese frosting is particularly difficult, mind you.)

I think for my next baking trick I'm going to make chocolate chip cookies with dark chocolate M&Ms instead. Though I might hunt down an oatmeal chip recipe for that for texture purposes...

Um, still teaching & planning to apply to grad school, which means I need to revise the paper I wrote in Marburg and contact people about writing LORs and prepare for the GRE ugh.

Apparently the HS student who I was supposed to be teaching canceled, possibly permanently, while his mother shops around for a teacher. Never mind that they said they were looking for someone who would be able to teach him the next two years and wanted consistency. If I named the town they live in, any local would say, "Oh, of course." Well, private lesson 1 was interested in meeting twice a week, so we could do that instead.

I've finished reading the material for the second to last module in my certificate course. Since I'm traveling next weekend, I won't be starting the exam until after I get back, which gives me more time to make lesson plans for my classes that are actually meeting as well. I also am missing a DVD for the other module I need to do, and I hope it arrives soon.

I submitted a story to an anthology. I'm still waiting to hear back on a piece I sent to an editor last November. The slush reader said he's looking into it. (It's in the editor's inbox, somewhere. You have to ask him about it.) So I have three stories out right now.

If all works out, and I can get this nonfiction book read in time, I might try to get a reasonable first draft of ACARP together. (It still needs a title; I do not like naming things, I am bad at it; I don't understand how people name their cars and houses and stuffed animals and things.) I was planning to do that after I finish the certificate, so we'll see.

Also, convention planning continues apace.

My VP17 classmate captainecchi tagged me in this writing meme.

1. What am I working on?

Writing-wise, right now? Blessedly nothing. I have 3 stories (no, 4) on submission and a 0.5th draft of a novel, for which I am reading a book about the politics in Berlin in 1961 as research, and once I finish, I'll start revising it.

Not-writing-wise, I am in frantic pre-con mode for Shatterdome Atlanta (May 31) and taking exam 5 in my German-teaching class. I'm not certain I'll pass this one, and this time I actually mean it. Like, there's one 3-point (out of 30) question that's all or nothing. 19 points is passing. (The first exam I got 19.5.)

2. How does my work differ from others in my genre?

Uh. Which genre? The most common theme/genre of my writing is (alternate) historical fiction with places as characters that is somewhere between fantasy and magical realism (that's 2 of the 4 shorts out right now; the novel is alternate history with superpowers and spies). They're also mostly set in Germany (and mostly Berlin).

One short is science fiction on a space station with cyborg prostheses and a bisexual dockworker protagonist. The last short is a flash pseudo-fairytale.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Because people seem to like it. My two published pieces are (alternate) historical fantasy, and a historical fantasy got me in to VP 17. I suppose that also means that I like it and that I'm good at it.

I wanted to write politically driven space opera, but it turns out I'm terrible at it. I love reading it, though.

4. How does my writing process work?

I've recently started using the outlining method Mary Robinette Kowal describes here. I find that it suits the way my brain works quite well, even if I kind of fudge the last stage and have a few "and then a miracle occurs" points (quite frequently the ending).

I tried not outlining a novel or two, but as it turns out, that means I have to delete a whole lot of words where there are plot holes or the plot sucks. In short fiction, if I don't outline, it's not as arduous to fix the broken shit in the middle.

In the novel writing process, the 0.5th draft (I don't call it a first draft until it's something I could give to a beta reader) is a detailed outline, and there's some amount of writing to figure out what happens next. There's not much description or emotion, especially at the end (when I just want to get the damned thing out of my head already). Then once I know how it ends, I can go back and fix the beginning and middle, add foreshadowing and characterization and description and all the other things. And take out the things I already said.

I use Scrivener on my Macbook Air, and I love it.

I'll tag whoever wants to do this.

Have been for several days now. I wrote a post about it here. It's entirely inadequate, though.

I've been catching up on things, doing laundry, napping, and getting over the plague (which came to us courtesy of Lynch and Bear; hey, someone's gotta be the plague bearer among the 40-odd people). All I have left is a bit of a cough, so that's nice.

Friday I'm driving to PA for my 15th college reunion and seeing old friends. Today I got my oil changed and my tires rotated (and patched up a bit where some asshole hit me while I was parked). My brakes are ok, but I need to get them changed soon, they said.

Have I mentioned how awesome our mechanics are? I trust them not to bullshit us into spending more money, and they certainly go beyond the call of duty. One of them loaned Ben his personal car (truck) for a couple weeks while Ben's Golf was having the entire steering column replaced. Wagner Tire in Hillsborough, NC. Good people.

Anyway. I'm also researching flights for my practicum in February. Leaving the US Wednesday or Thursday the 5th or 6th and coming back Monday the 24th costs the same ($1077 on Delta right now). It's just a matter of whether the inexpensive B&B is available and if I want to try the youth hostel instead (cheaper, but shared bedroom and no guaranteed desk space). Now, it'll be February, which isn't exactly prime time for tourism, so the hostel might not be too bad.

I also need to decide if I want to fly back through JFK and leave on a 1:45 pm flight, which would allow me to leave my friends in Stuttgart at a reasonable hour Monday morning or avoid JFK and potential ice by flying through Atlanta (9:45 am departure), which would necessitate an evening train to Frankfurt and a hotel. There's one at the airport that's cheap (45€/night) and has a free shuttle. Honestly, given my travel hell flying through JFK in NOT bad weather, I'm inclined toward ATL regardless.

I won't know until mid-December at the earliest when the Hertha v Stuttgart game is going to be. If it's Friday night, I won't likely be able to go. If it's either Saturday game or Sunday early, it won't be a problem. Sunday late would be less ideal but still manageable (since I'd have to get that late train to FRA for an early flight if I went through ATL). But even if I can't make it to the game (the Friday night match is 1 out of 9), I can see Joey, and he can show me around Stuttgart, where I've never been. And if I can make the game, he can get us tickets, and we can watch together.

I've also revised and submitted the UST short I was working on. If CG doesn't want it, I haven't lost much. I don't know if there's enough of a spec hook for other magazines, but I also am not allowed to reject myself from magazines; that's all the editor's decision. But I need to make sure it's not something completely off their regular list. (ie, don't send it to Analog or F&SF or Lightspeed. Which rules out a lot...) Even if I can't sell it anywhere, I've got some character backstory for the novel, which isn't a bad thing. I like writing character vignettes for backstory.

I need to revise my Thursday story and submit it; I haven't had a chance to start that yet. I read a collection of Grimm's fairytales I picked up in college to prepare for it, though. I also need to revise my application story, which I haven't had a chance to even think about yet. Except that I'm indebted to Bear for the new title of it. Which is a good one, actually. (I am rubbish at titles.)

I'd intended to take a nap this afternoon, but that hasn't happened. Oh well.

Greetings from Martha's Vineyard, land of shitty wifi reception and cold wind.

I had my first one-on-one today with Teresa Nielsen Hayden. It was less terrifying than it could have been, and she gave me good feedback. (I know; she's an editor, that's her job.) Tomorrow I'm one-on-one with Bear, ack. I don't have my group critique until Wednesday.

Though I broke down in tears while giving feedback because the story was about a woman grieving for her dog (and also her husband), and a couple sections hit really hard. Like way too close to home. So that was a thing that happened. I started talking about the parts that were just spot on, and I couldn't. And I apologized for ugly sobbing in the middle of group :/ A lot. But I may have spawned a story to tell future students, about the student who started bawling and it wasn't even her critique! Eh.

Interestingly, this was at heart the same story I submitted, except hers was about a ghost dog in now-ish here-ish, while mine was about ghost war dead in 1917 Dresden. But hey. Using ghosts as a metaphor for the grief process. (I pointed it out, and Doyle said, "hey you're right, I didn't even notice that!" and then stated that the outline doesn't matter, but the execution does.

Have pages of notes and recordings of the lectures so far. My phone says it can record 176 hours, so I have a lot of space and don't need to worry much about clearing it out. Though I hope the sound quality is good.

I saw bioluminescent jellyfish! It was fucking cold, but magically glowing jellyfish!

I am terrible at Mafia and Thing. Somebody told me I was really quiet (because I wasn't really participating in the Mafia game), and that's something I haven't been called in a really long time. Though a couple folks said I was less garrulous than they expected from twitter. They'd just missed an epic wide-ranging conversation I'd been in (though I also don't want to dominate the conversation, which I know I can/will do).

I have been cured of scurvy, and I hope I can be cured of it again tomorrow.

And now I sleep, assuming the wifi works long enough to post this.

I wanted to get some writing in this afternoon, but I got new credit cards to replace the expired ones, which means updating all the autopay accounts.

It took a minute or two to get it changed at the home security company. Yay.

Then I tried to update the room I booked yesterday for DragonCon (yes, next year). All reservations are completely unmodifiable. Like, I can't even update my credit card using the online system. I probably can't add names to it there, either. I can understand making the rate not changeable (the Hilton charges more per person in the room), but the rest is ridiculous.

Which meant I had to call the hotel. So I called the hotel directly in Atlanta, and the reservations line was busy. So I called the central number, and the guy there took my information, put me on hold while he looked something up or talked to a supervisor or something, came back on and told me I needed to call the hotel itself.

...

So he put me on hold again while he transferred me to the hotel's rate department(?). Who took my information again, put me on hold again, and transferred me to yet another department. Who was actually able to change my credit card's expiration date in their fucking system. All that needed to be done was literally changing one digit in the expiration field. And it took 15 minutes.

Then I had to update my cell phone billing, which involved logging in to an account I never log into, which mysteriously got changed to have Ben as the primary user, so I had to get him to go in and fix that.

And now it's too late to get into writing, so I guess I'll go read about language acquisition theory instead.

I was accepted to Viable Paradise, and I'm a member of VP XVII!

ALL THE SQUEE.

The Viable Paradise application period closes tomorrow. That means I only have another couple weeks to wait to find out if I got in.

Ack.