At least I know the backstory of my own life.

[devi]

What a grim, ugly day, with hardly any light. I'm fighting it with fairy lights, candles, and work.

Right now I'm filling in the ISBN application form - which is pretty scary, requiring all sorts of precise details I don't know yet - and mailing hatmandu to ask him lots of dull questions about booksellers' pricing practices. puritybrown has half the manuscript and is editing it. This is closer and closer to being a real thing. The rest of the time my head is in China. It's brighter there.

I haven't much faith in the book today. But I press on regardless. I was saying to metame on Sunday that this is one way travel writing is easier than novel writing. When I'm writing novels and start to panic, I lose faith in the whole plot. Maybe the main character should change gender? Maybe two characters should merge, like the opposite of amoebas? Maybe the ending sucks? If this book was fiction, by now I'd be thinking it was lame and cliched to send the characters to Japan and it would all be so much better if they went to, say, Kamchatka instead.

But no. I know what the next bit is, because I was there when it happened, and I write it, and then I write the bit after that.

Comments

[absinthecity.livejournal.com]

that's funny - I was just wondering the other day if you and the Hat had been introduced, as I thought he could be helpful on the publishing front...

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

He certainly has been. Like I just said in an email, by now I feel the need to buy him a great deal of beer.

[hatmandu.livejournal.com]

Mmm, beer

[millionreasons.livejournal.com]

this might be of interest to you (issue 31)

http://www.mslexia.co.uk/v2/menu/submit.html

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Travellers' tales! Thanks.

I should resubscribe already, as per my task list.

[metame.livejournal.com]

hmph... women's only... hmph...

I'm not exactly your stereotypical feminist-basher but bias in writing always gets my goat. It strikes me as a field where there really isn't a glass ceiling to be shot out with positive discrimination like this.

And if it ain't justified it ain't 'positive' it's just discrimination, and I don't like that.

</rant>


Ho hum

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

I agree with you completely! Mslexia is such a darn good little magazine, but it always leaves a nasty taste in my mouth that men are explicitly excluded.

It wouldn't matter so much if there was a good unisex writers' magazine out there, but to the best of my knowledge, there isn't...

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

like the opposite of amoebas

Ooh, thank you for this. Have any of mine you want in return?