The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Got a story to finish and a deadline coming up, so I’m going to be more or less going dark for a bit until I get everything done. Unless something interesting happens. 🙂
Feel free to talk amongst yourselves. In fact, tell me if you’ve read anything interesting recently.
Tomorrow morning looks ugly, Friday morning looks ugly, and Saturday morning looks ugly. I will, I swear, eventually make it to work five days in a row in 2015. There’s some sort of weather warning thing for tomorrow, too; not a lot of snow, but nasty blowy crazy shit that’s going to blind everyone. I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll be home, but it’s far from impossible.
Today was exhausting, guys. I spent some time teaching today, because reasons, and holy hell am I out of practice– not for the instruction itself, but the physical act of projecting my voice to fill a room. My wife noticed I was hoarse right away when I got home, and my throat still hurts. And I was not raising my voice– just speaking to be heard, something I really haven’t had to worry about much this year. Most of the time when I’ve had to fill a room, it’s been of the “speaking quietly so that you understand your life is in danger” variety, which doesn’t hurt my throat but is the wrong tone for instruction.
Also, They Might be Giants released a free live show of the entirety of Flood today, which I am listening to as I’m typing this and all of you should have. It is the best thing that happened today. It’s in reverse order from the album, which I find hilarious.
That’s all I’ve got. I have to watch The Walking Dead with my wife before I go to bed and honestly I may not make it. G’night.
Yesterday was long and crappy and entirely unworthy of the title of “Sunday,” and I’m in the classroom all day today– 7th graders, no less– so I’m far from convinced that today will be better. In fact the entire week is not looking encouraging at all.
Blargh. Post some kittens in comments or something.
I have been nominated for a fair number of WordPress blog awards in the past year, and I’ve ignored almost all of them. That’s not because I’m not grateful, because I am; it’s always awesome when people think of my blog in any remotely positive context, much less in a context involving a prize, but because I end up having to write the same post, more or less, over and over. I need to start working on recognizing other blogs more often, and the awards help with that, but it’s not at the top of the priority list just yet. (He said, smarmily.)
Anyway. It stands to reason, then, that the one time I see a viral blog post happening that I want to post an entry for, no one nominates me. 🙂 So I’m pretending that Taylor Grace or Part Time Monster nominated me, and I’m going to re-tag Winter Bayne and Gene’O over at The Writing Catalog just to be a jerk.
On to the questions:
1. Why do I write what I do?
I write, loosely defined, speculative fiction— mostly of the science fiction and fantasy genres, with a smattering of heavily H.P. Lovecraft-influenced horror mixed in there as well. Trouble is, for the most part I can’t keep my genres straight. Those three were what I read most as a kid (and, truth be told, still do) so they’re what I associate “writing” with. When I’m not writing fiction? Well… look around. My nonfictional/blog stuff is mostly about teaching, although I’ll write about anything that strikes me around here and my blog is frequently filled with nonsense.
2. How does my writing process work?
Blogging is first-draft, sit-down-and-go stuff, and once I can get started (which can take a while) if I’m writing nonfiction I write insanely quickly– I once pulled off a thirty-page paper in a few hours in grad school. Got an A, too. Fiction requires hours, days or weeks of “thinking” (read: procrastination) and is much, much slower, although one benefit of the advanced thinkytimes is that my first drafts tend to be pretty clean.
If I’m doing blog posts, nothing is required– I can bang out a blog post while watching my son and cooking dinner at the same time. (And I’ve done that.) Fiction requires solitude, music, the house to be reasonably clean, nothing else hanging over my head, and music. I’m thinking of keeping a running soundtrack of my current novel, actually, which so far includes Murs, Mika, and Meg Myers, because apparently iTunes got stuck on M yesterday.
3. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Genre-bending and humor, although I think tonally my work sounds a lot like John Scalzi, if John Scalzi were about a third as good as he is, and that might be overstating my abilities. But, yeah, the genre-bending. My series The Benevolence Archives involves ogres and gnomes and dwarves who ride around in spaceships, so I clearly don’t know what the hell I’m doing in keeping genres together. My first novel, Click, was originally going to be a Conan-type barbarian sword & sorcery thing and somehow ended up with the first major scene being set in an antique shop on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. Hopefully this means fans of either genre will like me; the darker parts of my brain think it’s going to ghettoize me out of existence.
I suspect I was bad at coloring in the lines as a kid.
(You can buy The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 at Amazon right here, if you like.)
4. What am I working on at the moment?’
Two projects: One, a Benevolence Archives novel (the piece linked above is a short story collection and is novella-length) and two, an entry for the Baen Books Fantasy Adventure Award that is– eek– due in just a couple of weeks. The contest entry is kinda giving me fits, because of the genre-bending tendencies I discussed above: it’s wanting to bend toward horror more than I think a “fantasy adventure” story ought to, and I either need to rein it in in a direction I don’t think the story wants to go or give up on submitting it and come up with something else. Which… God, who knows how long that could take.
(Oh, and random advice: if you’re going to take a picture of your workstation for a blog post, make absolutely sure there isn’t a credit card sitting on your desk, face-up, right next to your keyboard! That is an incredibly bad idea!)
It’s slowly dawning on me that yeah, I really do have to write a novel this summer, and maybe it might behoove me to spend some time actually thinking about what that might be about. I’m kicking around a bunch of different ideas– from stuff in preexisting “worlds” I’ve created (BA 2 wants to be a novel) or a sequel for Skylights, which is actually getting published, to a few different somewhat more nebulous ideas for newer stuff. Part of me kinda wants to try a YA book, too, but I feel like epubbing a YA book is asking for trouble. Kids love technology but I’ve never seen any of my students with an e-reader, even the ones who can’t go anywhere without a book in their hands. My kids read books. I feel like this is a loser as a proposition.
(I could go the John Green route, though, and make millions. Nebbishy main character falls in love with perfect person, lots of age-inappropriate clever banter, and then kill the love interest. Tearjerky! I can do that!)
Anyway, yeah, it’s weird, and looking through my loose notes and the app I keep random thoughts in is kinda hilarious. One whole page has nothing but the words “Citymancy/parkour??” on it. The scary thing is I know exactly what that means. There’s also a mess of other projects that I’ve started and not finished; I could try and reboot one of those.
I sorta want to see if there’s something larger hiding in “Crossroads” and “Confession,” too. I wouldn’t be able to write them in the same tone; something novel-length written that way would be unbearable, I think, but with a different style of main character there could be something interesting in there.
Hmmmmm.
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