100 pages!

 Look at this, guys! I have officially written a hundred pages.

 

That's 58% of the way to 50K words. 

I did another pie chart based on the end goal of 45K words, which is about the shortest you can still publish a novel. That gives me 65%.

Ahhh!

I'm unexpectedly upon the climax. Will I be able to stretch it and the denoument out into enough words to publish? Stay tuned to find out!

Mandala update

 

I made more! I took the color schemes for each character and shamelessly stole celtic knot patterns made of three strands off the internet and colored them. I tried to post this like two days ago but Blogger was giving me trouble.

Today's update: I wrote the scene last night. HALLELUJAH I WROTE THE SCENE. 

Guys I am so close to 45% I can taste it.

Summer Update

I finally have a week free, and I'm devoting it to the Art. I have a box full of things from the school year to look into, but primarily I'm working on the novel and attempting to get four other things published.
I got a chance to read the new Poets & Writers, which is about contest-entering. I circled some contests, and this time I've gotten so far as to look into the work each publisher puts out. A lot of them I have to buy, and I was stuck in the conundrum of that basically doubling how much cash I'll have to invest in this venture (the first half being reading fees). And then I noticed that one of the publishers sells through Barnes & Noble, and it was like a lightbulb. I have a Barnes & Noble card leftover from Christmas with more than enough cash on it to cover three publishers' worth of work. So I only had to spend $8 of my own money on one publisher that doesn't sell through B&N.
Also I got to 39%!

And 34 percent!

I did 4% and almost 2K in a single sitting! When I say I've been writing every day, I mean I've been writing a sentence to a page every day. This is a really good session, and I'm only stopping because I'm approaching the kind of tired where basic vocabulary eludes you.
In other news, I've finally re-reached the point where I can play guitar for longer than 15 minutes without giving up out of finger pain + frustration. I don't know how beginners are expected to play for half an hour at a time, three times a week. Steel strings bruise your fingers but good before the calluses come in. I started reading Passing Lines, and now I have a decent idea of Puerto Rican gay culture and where trans culture is likely to fit into that. Boring interny stuff now pretty much done. Of the two issues I had of Poets & Writers to catch up on, I finished the earlier one and I read through the classifieds of the second one. Seriously, they have so many contests, conferences, publishing companies etc. in the back of that magazine. It's awesome. I started looking into some of them.
I wish I had a decent sense of how long this novel is going to be. There's a contest for a novel, which doesn't have to be finished, just has to have a synopsis written and be projected to be over 65K, whose deadline is at the end of the month. How should I know if this is going to be over 65K until I'm done with it? How does one estimate such things?

30 percent!

I have reached 30% of said novel. I am very excited. This calls for celebration.

It's probably gonna be longer than 50K just because I've only just gotten to the scenes where Nadie and Leandra get to know each other. I like them. Nadie is gas and Leandra is a sparker, and together--fire.
Other news. I am teaching myself to play guitar with correct fretting technique this time, and now feel as though I don't know how to play at all. Is very frustrating. Most of my muscle memory--useless.
I have basically discovered that if you want my news in mostly sensible, continuity-heavy, long posts that read like chapters of a story in that they're mostly related to what happened before, you should stay here. If you like them in shorter chunks, don't mind me commenting on feminism, random other story ideas, trans* and NB resources, and a hell of a lot on asexuality; enjoy watching me get excited about random things, and like a consistent update schedule, you should follow me on tumblr.
My boring interny stuff is closer to being done but is still not done, same with the shopping stuff and reading through Poets & Writers. Dang, but that's a long magazine.
Also! I don't usually put fanfiction here, but! Aro/ace Natasha Romanov! Heterosexual biromantic Sam Wilson! The soulmate trope suddenly making sense!

Merry Christmas!

       I think I've managed to write SOMETHING every day except Christmas Eve (which was a travel day), though I don't feel like I've gotten very far. We're nearly to the actual coming out to Jimena part.
I finished a book I'd been working on that I bought way back in November: Afterworlds, by Scott Westerfeld. Honestly, I don't have the energy to review it properly, and I don't feel guilty about that because it's not queer fiction, and it has no trans characters whatsoever. However, what it does have is a queer main character and a plot that does not revolve around her queerness. It raises the tension, as it would by virtue of our society, without *being* the tension. And my favorite part about that? The inside flap mentions nothing about the love interest being a woman--it merely says "falling in love--with another writer." And it is that fact that is most important to the plot. Imogen being a writer provides far more tension than Imogen being a woman. Thus Westerfeld, and whoever writes his jacket copy if it's not also Westerfeld, puts another brick in the process of normative-ization. TW for pyromania, possible cultural appropriation (they actually talk about the lines of cultural appropriation!) death, terrorism, serial killers, murder, ghosts, degradation plot (character goes from innocent to murderous).
        It's written as two books in one--Darcy writes the words, as the cover says, and Lizzie lives them. Between that and listening to my mother talk about the new book by David Mitchell, who wrote Cloud Atlas, I had an idea for a story that follows four characters, each of whom is directly impacted by the same fifth character in very different ways. They each paint a different picture of him based on their own experience--one falls in love, one is terrified, etc.
       I've been playing along with ideas from this website: mogai-archive.tumblr.com. It lists tons of words for genders, orientations, and pronouns. I have a vague 'verse in my head about a people who are not sexually dimorphous (there's only one basic body type, and the variation is in the little details) and use all of the words for gender and all of the pronouns. I also want to write about characters with flower genders. I've been attempting to find a word that describes my gender, and I think I'm going to just combine two and say I'm subgirlfluid. Subgirl is 3/4 agender and 1/4 girl. Subboy is the same but 1/4 boy instead of girl. Subfluid holds the agender part constant and the 1/4 part goes between girl and boy. I don't *quite* like subfluid because I want to emphasize the girl side of the fluidity--the boy side only occasionally crops up and doesn't feel as much a part of me.
      Exciting news, or perhaps not so much, for my readers: I got for Christmas two of the research books I'd not been able to get ahold of. One is Passing Lines, which is about sexuality and immigration, and the other is another fiction book, Freakboy.
      I also got some of Jonathan Friesen's books for Christmas. He was my old writing teacher. If his style has evolved any closer to mine, which it looks like it has based on the fact his latest romance is with a boy with DID, perhaps I should look into his publisher? Never pass up a chance to name-drop network.

Winter break!

So winter break is a thing. I has goals.

1. Practice guitar for an hour every day
2. Work on the novel some every day
    a. If I'm stuck, use Writing the Breakout Novel for inspiration
3. Read the newest issue of Poets & Writers
4. Boring internship stuff
5. Practice my ASL
6. Boring shopping stuff

I'm nearly done with Whitney's story!
In other news, I recently acquired a Tumblr: phoenixtawnyflower.tumblr.com. I post slightly more detailed stuff over here (I didn't transfer the conference stuff) and rather more reblog stuff over there. Anyway, if you have a Tumblr, you should totally follow me (innocent expression). I carefully manage my queue, so stuff you've already seen here will turn up there mostly in order, but mixed in with reblogs and other stuff.

Tell me a Whitney

Hello, everyone! Happy NaNoWriMo! And Thanksgiving, that little thing...
They actually have NaNo at my school. I've never tried it, but I did wish I could, homework-related-guilt-free, go to one of the several-hour writing sessions here.
Life continues very rough. Story continues very stubborn. I have now got to the point where I need to tell Whitney's coming out story, and despite everyone's insistence that I don't actually need the story, just the leadup and the fallout, I still feel the need to actually write the thing. I don't know if I want to switch POV or maintain a dialogue setting, but I dont think it matters. I'll write whatever comes out when I write it.
Unfortunately, this isn't a very well traversed blog, and y'all who do read are almost always silent. Otherwise I'd ask for ideas on what you think Whitney's backstory should include (siblings? With what reactions? Quirks? Interesting teachers?) in hopes something will strike a chord and I'll start writing it. Downsides to not being even reasonably well known.
It's also possible I'm counting on the phenomenon which goes, if you complain about something to enough people, the thing will go away. BRB. Going to try to write the thing again.

Back to school!

I realize I've been off the grid for almost a month. It's been kind of a hard month, and school started in the middle of it, so I've been scrambling to try and get everything under control. Sorry 'bout that.
I also got a touch of writer's block with one scene that I couldn't figure out how to write. But the idea came to me at dinner on Wednesday, and I held onto it until tonight, when I unexpectedly finished my quizzes an hour early and decided to reward myself with writing. As usual, the scene blew itself much larger than I expected, but it was fun. I'm a little worried that I'm doing too much tell instead of show, but I'm trying to leave that stuff till after I've got the whole thing written. It's probably going to go unbearably slowly from here on out, but hopefully it will be a steady slow instead of a is-this-ever-going-anywhere slow.

In other news, school is having a craft fair in December and I've booked a table to sell my wee bracelets. So I'm trying to work out what I want to make. I have a current stock of:
2 rainbow diagonal stripe bracelets
1 completed, 1 half made trans diagonal stripe bracelets
1 half made genderqueer bracelet
A long string of ace bracelet I can cut into individual bracelets
Yeah. Per-thetic. But I keep giving them away.
So I reckon I'm almost good with ace--I'll make another Viking Weaving of them and then cut them into bracelet sized strings. I'm going to steer clear of earrings (though I might do zipper pulls) and of multiple patterns--I'll do diagonal for the wider flags (rainbow and trans) and diamond for the narrow ones (GQ and pan). But wait! I can pull off diagonal of the narrow ones if I double the colors and work with six strings instead of three. Hm. And it's easier. Is the diamond cool looking enough to go the extra effort? I need more of everything. Diamond's way too much effort for rainbow or trans, so I'm probably good there. Thoughts?
Also, have a link the Trevor Project poked at me just today. Adorable humans for my inner hopeless romantic, who also happen to be a-spectrum.

Word counter

I looked at making this a widget on the side, but I can't find a way to do it where you'll still be able to read it. So! Based on the 50,000 word count for a novel that is the standard for National Novel Writing Month, here's how much I still have to write.