Write-A-Thon Update

I've raised my target amount of money - actually slightly more than my target amount - and I'm going on a sabbatical from these daily blog postings. I feel bad doing so, like I'm letting people down, but I've just exhausted my creative juices. Guess I'm not like some of my friends in that regard, who can keep churning out good work without getting sick of it.

This does not mean I'm abandoning all writing enterprises, though. I am slowly building up a short story for a new Damnation Books anthology, as well as launching Humans and Demons and Elves tomorrow and the day after (time zones are making my schedule funny). I am also translating yet another Shakespeare play into modern English for my best Elance client.

I will eventually get back to expanding The Raw Ghosts of Thailand and working on Sweeping the Puddles Away, I promise. I'm just going to concentrate on the stuff that pays immediately for now.

Thank you for your understanding.

300 for 30: Day 19

The women's temporary nonviolent psychiatric ward is secured by locked double doors. There is a common area with battered and stained furniture, a television with a pile of VHS tapes – I’d always wondered where they went after DVDs took over, I suppose this is it – scattered fashion magazines, coloring books, and crayons. The carpet is that multicolored, slightly nauseating variety popular in waiting rooms of all types.

There is a station for the nurses and techs, who are able to take a shortcut and cross over to the men’s side as well. They have a counter one can lean on when you irritably ask whether one’s medication is ready yet, or plead with them to be able to go out to the garden for fifteen minutes that afternoon, with escort.

Down the hall, which feels very long if one’s side effects cause drowsiness and very short if one is looking for places to pace, there are two meeting rooms, only one of which has clear windows to the outside and is of course usually locked, and everyone’s bedrooms that we each share with a roommate. The soundproofed, solid white isolation room with cameras is off to the side. It frightens me, too Arkham Asylum.

One of the fluorescent lights in the hall has a panel laid over it with a painting of blue sky and clouds. I’m embarrassed how much it helps.

The “sharps” closet contains personal items we can only use with supervision, like my iPod and Stacey’s crocheting (wooden hook, of course, metal would be banned outright for the duration), for a three-hour window each day. A tech has to open the closet and sign things out.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in kindergarten. Sometimes I feel like I’m in prison. Sometimes I feel like I’m at a sleepover that just goes on and on and on, where I’m not allowed to leave until Mom comes to get me, and she’s late.

300 for 30: Day 18

I'm going with something half-baked today, because I'm tired and starting to slide into another depression. Who knows, I might perk up in the process.

So you get a list! (And there was much rejoicing - insert dispirited 'yayyyyy'.)



Writing-Related Things I'm Doing At the Moment

1. This 300-for-30 which is going to morph into 750-for-Clarion on the 26th.
A. Some it, as you have seen, is miscellany like this.
B. Another portion is my Raw Ghosts of Thailand expansion, again obvious on this blog.
C. Though I'm in composting mode, letting Sweeping the Puddles Away mature in my brain before I make a serious attempt at it, I may take a few nibbles as part of the Write-A-Thon if I tire of A and B.

2. A "translation" of a Shakespeare play into modern English [I won't say which publicly; I signed a non-disclosure agreement], ghostwriting for a $200 payment. Due on the 25th. I'm glad it's not overlapping with the Write-A-Thon.

3. Editing the first manuscript in my new long-term position, for $50. Low pay but great resume/work experience credit; the publisher is quite snazzy. This is due on the 22nd. I have not received the actual manuscript yet. If I don't get it by tomorrow I am requesting an extension, because I said I'd need a week to do it, and they had better GIVE me a week, by Eru! And they'll give me another one immediately afterwards that I must have done before August 1st, since they "had to fire one of their copyeditors".
* I must admit, I am curious about what the copyeditor did.

4. Waiting to hear back from Queryshark, of queryshark.blogspot.com , to see if she is interested at all in either posting my query for Seasons Four Open the Door on her blog and eviscerating it, or on, just maybe, requesting pages. In the meantime I am polishing the query until it screams, so that if 90 days pass with no reply I can resubmit a better one in September.

5. Waiting to hear back from various other agents for Seasons Four.

6. Promotion, promotion, promotion for Humans and Demons and Elves. I'm hoping to get the Facebook page fanbase to at least 300 before July 7th. I will have to take some time off my Embassy job on the big day to be available on live chat during my appointed hour, and draft up some contests/"press releases" to put on the Yahoo loop.

7. Waiting to hear back from The Memory Eater anthology about whether a story I submitted pleases the editor enough to be included. I would get a share of whatever the book makes. I adore the Ryan-North-edited Machine of Death anthology this is inspired by, and would love to be part of a similar project. I'm on equal footing with all the other submitters credential-wise, though, since the editor has explicitly stated s/he doesn't care about that. But their twitter does follow mine, which can't be a bad sign anyway.

8. Growing my Twitter community- largely consisting of trying to find interesting things to say on command, like a trained parrot.

9. Occasional fanfic, because I'm a writingslut like that.

10. And a partridge in a pear tree.

I've changed my mind...

As Margaret Hsu has begun to form more fully in my head, I realize that poetry is the writing that will be integral to her healing, not working on a script. The script is too much me. I write decent enough poetry but it isn't my favorite form. I haven't written much, on my own, for a while. I wrote it in the hospital, though. I can write it for her.

Here, actually, is the one poem I wrote in the hospital I still like:

~*~

The Gargoyle Principle

Written Halloween 2010, in ---- Psych Ward (Nonviolent, Temporary, Women’s)

It was All Hallows’ Eve, Samhain, Hallowee’en when the pills

helped me fall asleep despite the shhhnoisyshhh

which, it being 3 AM, means it is All Hallows

the day, itself, with spirits awake and walking

the way I am awake and wanting 48 hours enchanted away.

We don’t sleep well here on the best of nights

and one might think our own demons animate

us to mutter and toss, thrash and request

for sedatives from the front desk, the night shift –

nurses nursing coffees as they nurse us.

Cathedrals have gargoyles as sort of psychic

bodyguards, a demon on your side to frighten

the ones that would do you ill. In my current

illness I have an ugly bat-doll clutched by my side

hug-sized, looking alarmed enough for the both

of us so I can be calm, calm, thanks to the gargoyle principle,

thanks to the slow but reliable tick of time

towards the day, hour, minute my body is free as my spirit

sheltered by my plush gargoyle and a blanket of inky scribbles.

300 Words a Day for 30 Days: Part 2

“Are you absolutely sure all this is necessary?” I ask my aunt, Isabel Hsu. I finger the stitches as the mixture of city and clinging-for-dear-life vestiges of farmland skitters by the taxi windows. We dodge cyclists like they were pitfalls in a video game, turtle shells in Mario Kart perhaps, points deducted and life decreased should our vehicles touch. It’s likely the driver does not understand English, but I am not terribly worried about him understanding. My worries are occupied with more important things, like whether I’ll ever get to teach at an international school again, what Mom and Dad would have said if they were still alive, how Uncle Timothy Hsu is going to choreograph the dismantling of my two years in China without breaking or losing any of my possessions - and whether, assuming I never kill myself competently, I can one day wear short sleeves without embarrassment.

Aunt Isabel snorts. “They pumped your stomach, Margaret dear. Now don’t ask silly questions and eat your breakfast.” We left for the airport at five in the morning, and she insisted that I take along this steamed pork bun that now sits in my lap like a quadraplegic bunny. Though I’m not hungry, I unwrap the plastic from it to show good faith.

I don’t mean sending me to a temporary psychiatric ward in the U.S - after a few days’ observation to make sure the worst of my temptation had passed, and for them to put me on enough sedatives and antidepressants to make me numbly melancholy rather than violently despairing. Insurers have to hedge their bets. I mean making my relatives come all this way to tidy up my affairs and babysit me. Just because I tried to die earlier this week doesn’t mean I’m a child.

A New Novel

Last night the idea for my next novel came to me! A realistic one for a change, even. I'm calling it Sweeping the Puddles Away.

Twenty-nine-year-old American Margaret Hsu attempts suicide while living as an expatriate in Beijing. She is discovered, saved, and sent to a temporary psychiatric ward in Virginia, the USA, for two weeks as doctors adjust her medications. Woven in with her experiences and tentative friendships with the other women in the ward are flashbacks to the tangled web of mental illness and life experiences that led to her desire to die. She finds solace in working on a script, just for fun, of a modern version of Hamlet where the protagonist is merely under the delusion that he is Prince of Denmark. She lets her hidden writing talents blossom for the first time, having been discouraged from creative activities growing up. She also begins to rekindle a romance with an ex-boyfriend, who is one of the few people to visit during her stay. By the time she is released to recover with a cousin in Maryland, she has begun, slowly but surely, to heal.

Here is what I wrote this morning, as part of my 300-words-a-day challenge (384 words, actually, yay):

Beijing is not designed for heavy rain; it is flat, without enough places for the water to go, and full of cyclists holding an umbrella with one hand and trying to steer through schizophrenic traffic with the other. This is obvious even in my gated housing development out in Shunyi, the district near the airport, where the international schools tend to cluster. Lake Limonade is designed for expatriates, hence its large staff of guards and cleaners. I see a crowd of young men after every storm, shirtless, hollering in Mandarin unison, pushing their giant brooms towards the nearest drain. They are trying to sweep the puddles away.

I like the rain, in fact, which many people wouldn’t expect if they knew my temperament. Even growing up in the United States I liked the thrumming of it, how it meant P.E. class had to be inside (no running the mile) on schooldays, the smell of the soil after. In Beijing the pollution clears away for a day, maybe even two, and you can see the sky without smog blocking it. I wish it were raining now.

It would seem more theatrical for a gale, a maelstrom, or, hell, even a light drizzle, given what I’ve finally screwed up the courage to do. But no, it’s one of our typical days with the sunlight sifting as best it can through the dioxides and monoxides, everything calm. I am empty and quiet the way one is after thorough vomiting. I take thirty grams of Klonopin, prescribed for my panic attacks at the dosage of a quarter of a gram a day, and wash it down with a bottle of astringent cheap vodka. I slice lengthwise down my forearms with a steak knife for good measure – I wince during the millisecond before I plunge but it barely registers as pain - letting my bleeding limbs flop over the side of the bathtub to simplify cleanup for whoever comes after.

It is through a dreamy haze that I notice my ayi, literally “auntie”, metaphorically “housekeeper”, unlock the door. I forgot she had the keys to all the rooms, and that she has been worried about me lately. Stupid, stupid. She screams and I wave sluggishly. “Mei guanxi, zhende mei guanxi…” Not a big deal, really not a big deal…