Super Surprise Deadline Doom!

I found out through Facebook today about the StarCraft II writing contest, which has been running for who knows how long and which I would love to enter and oh God the deadline is on Monday. I've got a five day work week and a convention on Saturday, so getting an entry together for this contest is going to be a little like jumping into NaNoWriMo on day thirty.

But what the hell. I enjoy a challenge.

* * *

Today's writing output (on a different work in progress):

647 / 1000 words. 65% done!

Below par, but respectable (by my standards). Tomorrow I'm going to have to make par though, or I'm just plain doomed.

Testing, Testing, 1 2 3...

I'm thinking about running progress updates on this blog again, and I wanted to give the NaNoWriMo Word Meter over at languageisavirus.com a shot. It's a beauty of a word tracker, because it's really nothing more than some CSS you can post into a web page and get a stable word count image; it doesn't depend on languageisavirus.com staying up and running. You don't even have to have it link back to them, although it's only polite to give them credit.

So, let me know what you think about the aesthetics here. First up, here's my work in progress, if I assume it'll end up being 5,000 words:

1418 / 5000 words. 28% done!

Here's what the manuscript I sent to Black Library ended up being. 10,000 words was the minimum:

13223 / 10000 words. 132% done!

And here's what I've written today, with a daily goal of 1,000 words:

152 / 1000 words. 15% done!

Hrm. Looks like I've got some work to do...

Whoops (and Musings on Malcolm Gladwell)

So today it's been two weeks since I sent my novel package to Black Library. This is the point where the OCD starts to kick in. I'm not checking my email all day yet (that starts at around week five), but I'm still hoping for a response every time I open up my inbox. Even though the idea of getting good news about a 13,000 word document in two weeks is absurd. Ask any publishing editor, I dare you.

Still. The OCD is strong in the Force. It makes me doubt myself. Makes me read over the submission guidelines again. Points out the sentence that reads "Please e-mail all submissions as a single attachment". Reminds me that I split my submission into three attachments. Laughs at me as I bang my head against a wall.

There are six more weeks before I reach the fail date for this submission. I'll probably keep documenting my growing neurosis here as time passes. Admittedly, this is a horribly unprofessional thing to do; but there are much worse ways I could be shooting myself in the foot, so what the hell?

(To any of the God-Editors who might be reading this: know that I humbly prostrate myself before you, and beg your forgiveness for any offense I may have caused. But I don't make blood offerings without a signed contract.)

* * *

Penn & Teller, of all people, recently reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell and his assertion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of, well, anything.

My secret identity is a math geek, and he decided to run the numbers. If I practice writing for an hour a day (reasonable for a man with a wife and a day job), and if I assume that I haven't put in any practice at all up until now, it would take me 27 years(!) to become a master writer. I'm 27 years old now. If I'd been writing every day since birth, I'd have become a master sometime last month!

Clearly grade school was a waste of time.

If I further assume that being a master writer will guarantee fame, fortune and high sales (which is not necessarily true), and if I quit my day job to spend eight hours a day doing nothing but writing, I would just about be ready to write the next Great American Novel at thirty, and could conceivably get it published by thirty-two.

Unfortunately I need to eat occasionally over the next three years, and since I don't have a winning lottery ticket in my pocket (wait, check... nope, nothing there), I need to hold down a paying job. So it's an hour a day, every day, in pursuit of mastery; and I hope you'll all join me when I'm a sexagenarian and kicking off my world book tour. I'll be touring with Neil Gaiman's head in a jar.

Crab Feast

Yesterday was the annual Rotary Club Crab Feast in Annapolis, MD, where for sixty dollars a head you get all the Maryland blue crabs you can eat, plus corn on the cob and some tasty barbecue from Adam's Ribs. You might pay sixty dollars for a mere dozen crabs at a good seafood restaurant around here, so this is what they call a Good Deal. My family has made attending the feast a tradition over the last few years, and aside from the occasional scheduling conflict it's always been a blast.

The Maryland blue crab is one of nature's miracles. It is both a meal and a puzzle box. To eat a steamed blue crab, take the following steps:

1. Remove the crab's claws and legs. Set these aside, because the main bulk of the meat is in the body and that's getting cold even as we speak.
2. Flip the crab onto its back. There will be a vaguely triangular crotch plate on the bottom. Pry this up and off.
3. Flip the crab again, then rip the top of the shell (the red part) off and set it aside. This will make a handy receptacle for the inedible bits or, if you wish, a dandy skull cap.
4. Take a plastic or metal knife and cut the crab's face off. It is not essential to wear this as a mask. It would only be a mustache anyway.
5. Remove the gill meat (sometimes called ladyfingers), as they have been filtering the crap in the Chesapeake Bay and will taste terrible.
6. Remove the guts from what's left of the torso. There is some disgusting yellow goop in here that you can use as a sort of sauce.
7. If you're from out of state you probably excused yourself from the table a few steps ago.
8. Break the torso in half. Squeeze, split, or break apart each half to get at those precious few ounces of delicious crab meat.
9. Completists can, at this point, crack open the claws with a cracker or mallet to get a few more ounces of meat. The remaining legs should be discarded unless you want the meat for a recipe, in which case a rolling pin will squeeze it out. And if you're in a hurry, foist the claws off on some sucker and go after another torso.

A puzzle, a meal and a light workout. Who could ask for more?

* * *

The sideshow at the Crab Feast is the campaigning, at least in an election year. Theoretically nobody is supposed to be campaigning, but who's going to enforce that? Especially if a former governor like Robert Ehrlich turns up to shake a few hands.

We didn't get to see Ehrlich (he turned up after we'd left), but we did get a candidate for lieutenant governor, who shall remain nameless (not that you won't be able to work out who I'm talking about if you really want to). He and his self-proclaimed mouthpiece walked up to our table and introduced themselves, at which point Mouthpiece bragged that the team had just gotten Sarah Palin's endorsement.

Now let's be clear: Maryland is very much a blue state, especially off the Eastern Shore. An endorsement from Sarah Palin is not necessarily a liability, but you can't lead with the damned thing.

The Candidate explained that he was a former Marine and a former FBI agent, and that he and his running mate intend to fix the budget by cleaning up fraud and waste in the state government. At this point the trickster god convinced me to ask the Candidate if he was going to cut spending or raise taxes.

The Candidate looked at my second head with a blank expression. He hadn't quite caught that, he explained.

"Are you planning to cut spending or raise taxes?" I asked again. The Candidate stared at me again, then raised a hand, explained that he had a bad ear, and asked me again what my question was.

I told him not to worry about it, and he excused himself.

(For the record, according to the campaign website the answer was "cut spending", sort of. The site promised no tax increases, and that the state's senior leadership would take a 25% pay cut.)

That Period of Peace Following a Deadline

It's a sunny afternoon in Annapolis. I've spent the day trimming back trees in my mom's backyard, and cutting away new growth from the hedges in front of my house. I just finished having a few slices of Domino's pizza (and maybe a few chicken wings). Iron Chef is on the television, and I've got a novel (Dark Creed) I'm flipping through while my wife reads through the foodie issue of What's Up, Annapolis. The Corgi is outside flinging her rubber red frisbee around the yard. She looks like she's having a blast.

For the first time in months I'm at peace, because for the first time in months I don't have a submission deadline hanging over my head. I sent off my novel package (three chapters, a 1,000 word synopsis, and a complete breakdown by chapters) to Black Library on Thursday night, and it'll be weeks before I can expect to hear anything back. I don't have anything else I'm particularly desperate to work on, and I just got my copy of Starcraft II (which is living up to the hype quite well), so I'm considering this a free weekend.

And then the doubts start creeping in: "I kind of rushed the query letter; could I have done better?" "Was it really necessary to mention that I've been published by these guys before?" "Should I have explained that the book could kick off a trilogy, if they're interested?" "Why the hell did I throw that twist in at the end of the synopsis? They're going to kick it back for sure!"

I look at the book I'm reading, and I see some dead brilliant descriptions of Imperial Guardsmen meeting a Space Marine for the first time. "Why couldn't I have read that even a week ago?" I say to myself, groaning in pain. If I'd seen this level of prose even a day before the deadline, I could have made my sample better. Fat lot of good it does me now.

The dog's curled up under my feet, having worn herself out in the yard. My wife's chatting with a friend on the other side of the couch. I've got a queasy feeling in my stomach just from thinking about all the things I might have done better, and it'll be weeks before I can expect to hear anything back.

And suddenly I'm not at peace anymore. I need to get my mind off of this. Maybe I had better start working on something else...