Michelle West

All disruption, no routine

A writer friend said this to me recently because I was whining, as writers--or anyone, really--often will when things are not going smoothly.

I did, however, get my book review column out on the late side of "on time". My sister is visiting from LA, my brother came to visit for a week - both live on the west coast, but were here because it was my parent's 60th anniversary.

Yesterday I sat down to write, and West words were fine - but Sagara words were... oh, that's right, this is ...

Copy-edits are gone

I have one book review column and page-proofs and I will be able to fully focus entirely and only on writing new words for the next several months. I am really looking forward to that.

I did, however, finish the last little bit of Endwalker, and I am once again thinking about story structure in MMOs, and in general. Structure thoughts and examinations are Michelle's happy place; it's not work, it's thoughtful joy. It's about story, the conveyance of story, the particular w...

Just a quick note

I am working on copyedits for the next Cast novel.

I had been writing new West words without the prior huge struggle (there was a lot of write-delete, write-delete), but it's difficult for me to create and revise at the same time (I've been trying anyway, because New Words), so now I am staring at copyedit deadlines.

They're due Monday, so I should be back Tuesday.

Sorry >.<

It probably won't come as a surprise

It probably won't come as a surprise that recent political developments caused possibly the blackest of crashes I have had since November 2016. It's not just me; almost all of my various writer friends on mailing lists (yes, lists; I'm a dinosaur) have been... similarly distressed; they've also struggled with the long covid lockdowns, partial lockdowns, and immunity-determined isolation. I live with my long suffering spouse and two sons, so my house was never entirely empty.

I am trying...

Well, that took longer than I'd hoped

But I also looked over the second line-edit pass that came back to me as I was trying to stop myself from rewriting every sentence I could see in the West novel. 

This is part of the reason I can't write new words while revising old words - I can't get down beneath the surface of the words to the book; I'm too busy looking for bad words, and if I can't find them, I doubt the words on the page and I start to choose different--but not necessarily better--words to replace them.

...

Still revising

I am hoping to get this off my figurative desk by Monday; book is not cooperating.

I turned in the book at 148.5k words. This is too long. I had cut about 4k words before I submitted, but, well. At this point, I needed an extra pair of eyes.

My editor asked if I needed one particular section, and I considered it for a while. The answer was a reluctant no. I could cut those words, but would then have to shore up a second set of words, because both of the sections emphasize and stru...

I am currently working on revisions

No matter how many times I've tried over the course of the past three decades, I can't actually write new words while fixing old words. I've tried writing new words first, and that works for a day or two at most, but after that my brain is in full revision mode, which his more about hunting down problems and fixing them. I tend to gloss over actual, good words because if they're good, they don't need fixing, and they are therefore not a problem.

In the past three days I have gone over c...

I've been looking at the old words for this book

... and they are very, very, very different than the words that are the book now.

I may have attempted to preserve one scene from those words. Again. I should really know better =/. The two books are not the same. They are not, at this point in the text, recognizable as the same books, although the characters have remained themselves.

I am ahead of the chapter I just posted - but I often want to be ahead because I end up scrapping things when they don't work or they're not quite t...

Well, after beating my head against the nearest wall

I have realized why my writer-brain has been dragging its feet, kicking and screaming.

So: a little bit about the two dreaded words Writer's Block. I know people who stopped writing for a decade (literally); they'd sit down in front of the keyboard and stall there, in a state of mounting anxiety and self-loathing. The self-loathing part is easy to understand: They're writers. Writers write. They have no excuses and no reasons for not writing; th...

Sorry I've been more absent than usual lately

Things have been hectic in the background here, and - unfortunately for my writer brain - I find the news coming up from the US enormously, enormously stressful, and that eats up space in the creative brain, so I've had to avoid on-line things (not that this has been hugely successful). Changes in my own life have also been stressful - nothing terrible, I'm not ill, my health is fine! - so I've been struggling to adjust. My long suffering husband has been ordered back to the office full-time ...

Over on the writer site

I've posted some news. https://michellesagara.com/state-of-the-author-april-2022-edition-i-have-news/

What authors mean when they talk about being orphaned

It occurs to me that the minor stress of the past couple of weeks--well, all of 2022, if I consider Margot Mallinson--is clear to all the authors I know, but possibly less clear to people who aren't, and as I've been perhaps not as present as I would otherwise be, I thought I'd explain. Anything that's unclear, I'm happy to expand on if people ask questions.

This is entirely about being published by a publisher--it has nothing to do with self-publishing. Since the West nov...

I have a new editor

I have a new editor (at Mira). Hopefully things will now stabilize on the inside of Michelle's hyperventilating brain.

I have a dental appointment this afternoon, but it's just a normal check-up, and I hope I don't have to return for post check-up cavity work, as my emergency dental work occurred during Australian writing retreat.

I spent forty-five minutes on the phone with Subaru US yesterday. Those who know me know I don't have a driver's license, which means I don't own a car,...

I'm home

I am back home. I have taken covid tests every morning for 5 days, and seem to have escaped LAX unscathed. I passed through several airports on my way to -- and from -- Australia. LAX was, by orders of magnitude, the worst. In the gate area, it was constantly crowded. High school halls after class has let out crowded. For six hours.

The new computer I ordered in January arrived while I was in Australia. I did not have enough brain to deal with it until yesterday.

When I was young,...

What Michelle has been doing in Australia

1. Dental work, unplanned. Upside: dental work was not ruinously expensive for dental work. And also: the dentist took pictures of the work she was doing during each stage of said work. I have them. I promise not to post them, because who needs to see dental work? But she took them so I could bring them to my actual dentist, and I ... kind of find it fascinating. 

2. Finishing Cast in Eternity

3. Writing new Hunter's Redoubt words

4. Seeing a ...

Well, that was an adventure

Post-covid, there are fewer available flights and the routes that I used to take to come to Australia don't exist yet. I imagine, should things continue to open up, they will. I headed to Vancouver from Toronto, and to Sydney from Vancouver. All of that was fine.

But the Sydney leg of the flight was late to land, which means I missed by connecting flight. I hadn't cleared customs by the time the plane departed. I was not the only person in this situation; imagine an extremely crowded cu...

The next time I post I will be in Australia

...if PCR covid test results are good and I get them in time to board a plane T_T.

I tend, when anxious, to try to get whatever is causing anxiety squared away immediately, but with PCR tests, I can't. So no amount of planning changes the fact that I go in, take the test, and pray that the lab is not so backed up the results don't reach me in time to board a plane.

I've been reading the past couple of days, for the book review column that's due on the 20th of March; ...

A little update

I am not quite finished the book with the killer deadline. I was on track to finish by today, but when I told new editor about the reason the book was going to be a tiny bit late, she... walked over to a different department to ask if there was any reasonable way the book could be pushed back (which in publishing terms means: get published later).

And they said yes. She was apologetic that this hadn't happened early before my brain almost imploded.

Part of the reason I said yes wa...

Only tangentially about writing, character

I want to talk a bit about sympathetic villains. Or characters. Let me start again.

There is a school of thought among readers or viewers that appears to go like this: If I understand the reasons why someone has done something bad, they can't be bad people.

I find this enormously, enormously frustrating, for two reasons.

The first: It implies strongly that there are "evil" or "bad" people--and those people have to be so foreign, so Other, that they cannot have emotional comp...

Writing thoughts: emotional investment

I have - while tearing up all of chapter 26 because, frankly, it was garbage - too frenetic, too chaotic, been thinking about respect. Again. So I am taking a break from pulling all my hair out at the end of this book which is not finished yet because I've reached that point where the words I'm adding are ... not the right words, and rewriting the same paragraphs over and over is not productive.

Respect. Emotional investment. Things that readers offer when they love a...

Small update

I am on track to make my deadline--but it's very, very tight. A minor communication snafu meant that I thought that deadline was a month later than it actually is T_T. At the moment, there is no wiggle room in the schedule because supply chain issues puts a lot of pressure on making absolutely certain that everything is ready for the printer, period. They can't reschedule print runs--they simply lose that run.

Given that some books are being pushed back (i.e. coming out later) even now,...

Patreon posting interruption

This is not actually about the West novels, but I have a fairly hard deadline--which I can meet--but not with a lot of mental space for, oh, anything else T_T.

So I just wanted to let people know that as my brain is now ultra-focused, I'll probably be writing less "stray thoughts that won't leave me alone" (which would pretty much be all of the writing-adjacent or related posts) posts until I turn in the submission draft of the next Cast novel.

My in-house editor's l...

Writer Anxiety

Writing - for me - has its roots in reading. I was a reader before I was a writer. I didn't understand, initially, how books were produced, so the very first book I tried to write (at the age of six) was handwritten, and I was in agony because nothing I could write by hand looked as clear, as good, as all the other books. My mother attempted to explain that these books - the ones I loved - were not written by hand; they were typed. We had a type writer.

So I then tried to somehow type. ...

Progress Report, January 2022

Hunter's Redoubt: 117k words.

It occurs to me that I didn't actually make a progress post for December at the start of January. I did talk about the state of Michelle, but that's not quite the same thing.

The last half of January was almost normal in terms of writing; the first half was the slow crawl back to the right frame of mind, the mental readjustment to Omicron, etc. I consider myself lucky: no one in my immediate circle has caught Covid. There's a sense that it's inevitabl...

Structure thoughts, workshops

I have been on a couple of writer's workshop panels at various conventions. I stopped doing them for a couple of reasons, but the biggest one is this: I find it very difficult to evaluate a partial novel, a partial story in a way that I personally feel will be useful to the writer. So: this doesn't mean that workshops at conventions or other places are useless--far from it. It simply means that I don't feel that I can do my best review work in the context of a workshop.

It's hard f...

Story vs ?

In my time as a writer, I often get asked: What's more important to you - character or plot? This has always been a bit of a head-scratcher for me, because my writing process means that character is plot. If your writing process doesn't mean these two are so deeply entwined as to be impossible to separate, this does not mean there's anything wrong with your process. (I swear my process posts are 1/3 process and 2/3's "this is my process and everyone has a different one" >...

Thank you all so much

I'm almost overwhelmed at the number of responses my question received.

I want to quickly say couple of things. First: I didn't intend to criticize people for their expectations - I was worried that it was my understanding that was flawed. When I spent the weeks trying to decide what my path forward was or could be, I did look at various platforms and various different approaches. I looked at what people at various levels were doing, what they were offering, what I might expect given ho...

A question for Patrons

When I started the Patreon at the end of July, I had only one worry: that people wouldn't support it. I tried to be clear what I hoped I would achieve with the Patreon, and I offered only what I could - as myself - reasonably offer. But people didcome, and did support the Patreon. And I was relieved.

But a couple of people who've left have left exit survey comments, and I want to talk a bit about that. They felt I didn't interact enough.

Part of the reason I was...

Answering Questions, part 2

I am sorry to have taken so long - I started to answer this before the omicron meltdown here - which is still ongoing. For some reason the last three days have been playing air-pressure yoyo, so half the time the sky is sitting on the right side of my head =/ (my son keeps coming downstairs to ask how my head is doing because he also gets air pressure headaches; husband & younger son are exempt, and I am trying not be envious).

At the moment, Ontario is in partial lockdown - no dini...

Well, that was an interesting holiday

I had a choice between getting a booster in January or getting a booster on Christmas eve, and my long-suffering spouse, who does so much and asks for so little, asked me to take the soonest possible shot. To be honest, this surprised me. I was the driving force in our house for vaccinations, and I haunted the Vaccine Hunter discord to find pop-up clinics for second shots, finding pop-up clinics for my two sons before I could sign them up for their shots via our provincial vaccination portal....