mood: optimistic about the future
currently working on: All the King's Women outline; I have it almost figured out…!
currently reading: Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs

2008 was long and difficult yet surprisingly interesting and rewarding as well.

On the writing front, the year started off with selling a book to Samhain so that's always fantastic. But the biggest accomplishment is of course signing with an agent. I also left a critique group, but I think in a way it was inevitable. I do miss many of the writers I met there. Oh, and I have a new pretty website. :)

On to the financial matters — my mom lost a ton of money thank to subprime. I wish she'd listened to me when I asked her to sit tight for another year before investing in the funds she was interested in. When you hear about banks raking in record profit from issuing more and more subprime loans, which are by nature very risky, you know there's something fishy going on, and that it's going to fall when weaker real estate markets start to lose their value one by one. I started the year with a ton of debt, but my venture investment paid off right before Christmas, so I'm starting the year with no debt (except the mortgage I have on my house) and some extra cash.

Talk about strange since I never expected to get any payment from the investment, given what's going on in the market.

My writing goals for 2009 are:

1. Complete two manuscripts. I think I figured out what's wrong with All the King's Women and Nine. W00t!
2. Read 52 books. Fiction, non-fiction, it doesn't matter. I just need to read to get more ideas and to recharge. I noticed that I didn't read all that much during the latter half of 2008, and it really affected my creativity.
3. Take time off! I'm absolutely terrible at taking time off and relaxing. I always feel like I have to work or else. Of course this is unsustainable, and I do burn out and can't write for a month or two. Very unproductive. So I'm forcing myself to take two days a week off, along with major holidays, etc. Oh, I'm also making myself go to the gym three times a week at least.
4. Read 2 how-to books (this does not count toward my goal #2) or take two online classes. I already signed up for a January class on how to not sabotage myself. I'm also eying another class on line edits because I think I can benefit from it.
5. Write 2 blog posts a month. I'm terrible at blogging because I just forget at times. So I resolve to do better this year. :)
6. Stop looking for and/or seek crit partners / groups. It's really not that I think I'm too good for feedback, but it takes a lot of time and energy to find a good crit group, and I've decided (after a long and careful consideration) that ROI would be better if I stick with the beta readers I have right now and spend the time I would've used to find good crit groups / partners on reading and taking classes. (BTW — this doesn't mean I don't want any CPs or anything if one happens to come my way, but I just won't be actively looking for them either.)
7. Evaluate and identify all not-helpful-anymore loops, groups, etc. Resign from them by Jan 31. This is a must since I decided that I don't have time for them. I stayed with most of them because you “have to network” but I had to wonder networking isn't about being in a group that sucks up all your time but gives very little in return. I should know better (or else my management consulting professor would send me a stern note saying she taught me better than this).

How about everyone else? How was your 2008 and what are your goals for 2009?

Diana Fox wrote an interesting post on agents with day jobs. You should all go read it. It's very illuminating.

Something else to consider in addition to what she's written:

Agents only make 15% of what you make. Since publishing pays authors very very little and agents take 15% of that very very little pay, do the math.

Furthermore, I think it was Donald Maass who said that it's extremely stressful when a client quits his day job too soon and begs his agent to sell anything so he doesn't have to get a job that gives him steady paychecks. Unfortunately the client is too depressed and/or worried about money that he can't produce his best work, and his agent is reluctant to shop substandard projects.

Now reverse the above situation. Imagine you have an agent who quit his steady paycheck job too soon. He realizes that he can't survive in the commissions he makes, so he tells his clients to pump out books faster so he can start shopping projects around, hoping to get commissions faster even though the client projects could've benefited from an extra month of revision. Or worse, he may get tempted by the client money and embezzle. (Desperation can make people do stuff that they would never dream of doing otherwise.)

I'd rather have an agent with a day job who doesn't pressure me to write faster than I'm comfortable with and / or doesn't get tempted into doing anything questionable / unethical.

Got notes from the agent re: All the King's Women synopsis. As usual, she was totally right to ask the questions she did. I have a bad habit of assuming that people know what I'm talking about. So I tend to skip explaining the basic background, etc. Must correct this flaw. (And she was also right to question the main aspects of my world building. I find WB to be one of the most difficult things to do well.)

Yesterday was superb. Hero Material and I went out to lunch with his students. Most of them are retired and/or in their late 50s or so, but they're absolutely hilarious. There's a male student in the otherwise all female group, and he told me that he was jealous of James Bond because “Bond gets a new girlfriend in every movie.” LOL.

Afterward, I came home and realized why Nine wasn't working. At all. It was one of those “OMG” moments, and I think the reason why it took me this long to figure it out is that I was way way too in love with the initial setup of Eve retrieving an old dude in a space station. I also think it'd be much more interesting to pit her against the archvillain much sooner. I'm also considering making POV changes.

Now gas is dirt cheap again in the States. I heard that it's going for $1.50 / gallon. This is great for many of us short-term as we ride out the current recession. But it's a disaster if we let the cheap gas lure us into complacency and not innovate green technology, such as solar power, etc.

Why?

Because as long as we depend on oil as our primary fuel, we'll always be at the mercy of the OPEC nations. Take a look at the following list of member countries (* denotes founding member):

• Algeria
• Angola
• Ecuador
• Iran*
• Iraq*
• Kuwait*
• Libya
• Nigeria
• Qatar
• Saudi Arabia*
• United Arab Emirates
• Venezuela*

How many of them do you suppose is our ally and promoter of human rights we hold so dear? Not many. We worry about things like gender equality in countries like Iran and Iraq and Nigeria and/or Iranian nuclear threats, etc. Guess what? They can do what they do because we give them lots and lots of money for oil.

Hero Material and I've been watching The Closer recently, and who would've thought it would manifest in my subconscious?

A couple of nights ago, I had this weird dream that Kuro committed some kind of crime. I don't even know what he did, but that's not the point of my dream. The poor hamster was arrested, complete with teeny handcuffs. Shiro, with her litter, came to the police station to defend him. I was playing the Brenda Leigh Johnson character (the investigator, if you're not familiar with the series), so of course I asked her lots of difficult questions. The poor hamster squeaked in distress, hopping around on the table, but I didn't believe that she was telling me the truth. Meanwhile the infant hamsters were writhing on the table, blind, deaf and hairless. It was just really surreal. Kuro told Shiro he loved her, and the dream more or less ended.

On the non-weird-dream / hamster front, the weather's been odd. The temperature plunged suddenly, and it's freezing here. The big news here is the “massive” layoffs of maybe 2,000 workers or so by several local corporations. In Japan, there are two tiers of employment: seishain (full-time regular company workers) and contract / temporary workers. The latter category is broken down into two categories: shokutaku shain and hakken shain. Shokutaku shain is someone employed directly by the company on a short-term contractual basis, usually for a year. Hakken shain is what most Americans consider temp workers, meaning the company got them through temp agencies. When companies decide to cut costs, they usually let go of their contract / temp workers first. Currently Japan still clings to lifetime employment, and companies have certain obligations to their seishain. That includes not firing them first, paying for their health and pension insurance premiums, giving perks, bonuses, etc. (Contract / temp workers do not receive any bonuses or pay raises, etc.) Due to all this inequity in employment, a lot of non-seishain have been protesting the recent layoffs, etc. Furthermore, IBM Japan laid off its seishain (gasp!), which created even more drama. Oi.

BTW — The Big Three bailout is a huge conversation topic in Japan. After all, it does affect Japanese firms. Auto suppliers hope for the bailout since many of them have contracts with the Big Three. I enjoy reading financial analyses, etc. but if I read another person write that Japanese firms have a huge cost advantage because they get free health insurance and pension, I'm going to scream. I've been in two countries with nationalized health care. It is not free. Everyone must pay. People pay about $400 or so per month, and if they're seishain, companies pay a big chunk of it. Companies also pay for their pensions. If that's not bad enough, Japanese companies must ensure that their workers aren't overweight or overly rotund around the middle or pay an enormous fine to the Health Ministry for overburdening the national health insurance system. Furthermore, the government had a huge screwup with its pension funds, and since Japan has too many retirees and not enough young workers, it's planning to double the sales tax. So please, stop with all this “free” stuff.

These are some of my favorite quotations on writing. If you have any to add, feel free! :)

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” — Marcus T. Cicero

“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.” — Oscar Wilde

“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.” — Oscar Wilde

“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.” — Oscar Wilde

“Grammar, which can govern even Kings.” — Moliere

“I always write a good first line, but I have trouble writing the others.” — Moliere

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” — Moliere

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” — William Faulker

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” — Robert Frost

“The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image, but thee who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” — John Milton

“Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.” — John Osborne

“I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers’ circles and at summer schools, and I’m continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarcely read. For ideas to germinate and proliferate there has to be fertile ground to sow them in, and for the ground to be fertile it must be mulched with observation, imagination, and other writing.” — Sarah Harrison

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” — Thomas Edison

“The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.” — Mark Twain

“You must keep sending your work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success — but only if you persist.” — Isaac Asimov

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov

“Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.” — John Farrar

“The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.” — William Hazlitt

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.” — Oscar Wilde

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” — Oscar Wilde

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” — Cyril Connolly

“Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.” — Charles Caleb Colton

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” — Edwin Schlossberg

“Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.” — Jesse Stuart

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.” — John Irving

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.” — Leonard Bernstein

“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler

“Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.” — John Ruskin

“About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.” — Josh Billings