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Wiscon

long journey’s end.

June 11, 2014 by L.S. Johnson

I am finally home. After Wiscon there was family, and then more family. There were several planes. I was perpetually wrinkled. The keyboard and second journal I had brought with me came back unused.

I am always irrationally optimistic about writing on vacation.

Here are some things that I learned at Wiscon:

  • a great deal about being an ally
  • the titles of a dozen books that I need to read RIGHT NOW
  • some ideas for retooling this website
  • a shit-ton of story ideas
  • that I am still utterly incapable of talking about my work on the fly
  • how to properly read aloud

The last is something that I knew once, but had forgotten in these intervening years, and big thanks to Ms. S. for the refresher course.

If they’re out there at all, you should try and find videos of the GoH speeches. I am getting tingles from them still. They were worth the money and the rigamarole of traveling, hands down—and while the Jemisin was the more fiery of the two, they were also of a piece, calling for voices, for the act of speaking, for action.

Yes. Tingling, still.

I left the conference all fired up and I went . . . straight on to family stuff, and now half my notes aren’t ringing any bells. Another lesson learned: to carve out enough time afterwards to process all my impressions into something more clear and useful.

Because this is the thing about conference panels: they are brilliant for helping you to see what is wrong and for exposing you to different points of view, but they spend less time moving forward into ideas for making it right. Perhaps that’s the point of many panels, to put the onus on you to try and do better. But it’s hard to distill an hour and a half of don’ts into possible dos, and even harder two weeks later.

Overall, I found the convention fun, invigorating, and overwhelming in the best possible way. (Though I know now that as a newbie I was blissfully ignorant of some unpleasantries that were happening.)

Many, many thanks to Crossed Genres, Rose Fox, and Daniel José Older for letting me participate in Long Hidden. The reading was a perfect capstone to that wonderful project.


In other news: “Clotho” is now getting a second airing (and a better edit this time) in Niteblade, “The Queen of Lakes” will be out in July in Fae, and I have two more stories forthcoming that I cannot announce until later in the year. I am also participating in the second of Rhonda Parrish’s alphabetical anthologies, B is for Broken, and I have a couple of other stories in various stages of roughed-out. I have been stewing over the pacing problem in Talassio during this break, and starting to take notes on a possible little standalone novel. It feels very weird to be contemplating a separate book in the middle of this trilogy, and the more I think about it the more I get in a muddle of what I should be writing, what I want to write, what I could write in terms of trying to sell a book . . .

. . . and then I come down to the hard fact that I have decided to dip into the savings and take some months off from working to try to get all of this stuff written. There are many other reasons for this break, which have to do with matters such as health and family and so on. But I will have time this fall. Real writing time. I suspect the next three months will be full of planning, the better to manage this precious gift once it begins.

Filed Under: Conferences, Reading Tagged With: Long Hidden, Wiscon

wiscon/after

May 27, 2014 by L.S. Johnson

Wiscon was wonderful, and intense, in a wonderful way. Pulling together my thoughts and notes now but in short: I am very, very happy I went, thankful that the stars and finances aligned in such a way that I could go, and I now feel stuffed full of idea-seeds, all stuck in the dirt and warming to germination.

 

Filed Under: Conferences Tagged With: Wiscon

sea change

May 14, 2014 by L.S. Johnson

in a little over a week i’ll be off to wiscon, where i’ll be reading on the sunday.

this morning i figured out what is wrong with the story i’ve been trying to start (wrong pov) and at once i could see the rough shape of it and remembered, yet again, that it’s really not worth starting to write a thing until i get that insight.

i placed my last piece of polished writing from 2013 yesterday, after many months of nearly-but types of rejections.

the polar ice caps are now pretty much doomed. last night half of me was screaming at this, screaming at this and how we blindly keep going on and on, screaming at server farms so hot they can be seen from space and traffic so bad you take over an hour to crawl ten miles and all the waste, so much waste, packaging waste and shipping waste and fuel waste, and this endless stream of culture that bombards us every day—

—and my other half was calmly calculating a move inland, to the “country”: how much it would cost, and how much it would then cost to renovate said house for solar and grey water and basically become self-sufficient.

the last year has been far more down than up, yet the ups have felt so right that i cannot but think the downs are right too, a necessary part of the process. bittersweet has been the word of the day for some time now.

a couple of years back (!! was it really—yes, 2012, yikes) i found myself buying a tarot reading online, done in the form of birds: what bird you are now, what bird you will become. i was told my current state was a nightjar, and my future was a lapwing.

i still don’t think i’ve made it to lapwing; i still feel like i’m nesting in the darkness, waiting.

Filed Under: Conferences, Process, Soundtrack Tagged With: Nico, These Days, Wiscon

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