Updating on the Blog World

Apparently it was a false warning or a temporary internet glitch on the part of Wordpress. That is, my newer author blog is up and running: http://sewigget.wordpress.com/2012/10/28/updating/

Talking Cats

At seven this morning, I could swear I woke to the sound of my cat Cheetah saying, in English, “Aren’t you up yet?” I felt a bit indignant. She was right next to me and had apparently said this in my face. After I was a bit more awake, this struck me as odd.

I’ve occasionally written fiction that involves talking cats. Perhaps I was a bit fixated on this as a teenager, because, coming to think of it, the first versions of both the works of fiction I’m thinking of date back to my adolescence. One is now my novella “Witch’s Familiar,” which is available in electric form as part of the Wormhole Electric Anthology on Smashwords.com. The other was my first novel, My Curious Adventures with a Witch, the original (and drastically different) version of a middle grade series I’ve begun writing, with the working series title “The Rowanwick Witches.” Perhaps it’s inevitable that the cat I live with would also start speaking. Or perhaps I should recall the words of the Cheshire Cat: “I’m mad. You’re mad. We’re all mad here.”

So Much for that Wordpress Blog

Since Wordpress is pretending as if I don't have a blog on its site, it looks like I have to go back to this blog. I had switched because another writer told me that Wordpress is more professional-looking than Blogspot. No matter how professional it may look, a blog doesn't have much point if I can't add new blog posts to it. I was able to access it as though I were someone else: www.sewigget.wordpress.com, so I now know the blog still exists. But the site won't let me create new blogs and won't admit that I'm the same person who created that particular blog.

Developmental Editing

A developmental editor as gentle as a kitten

If your developmental editing feedback doesn’t make an author feel eager to get to work revising the manuscript and instead makes your author depressed and reluctant to work on the manuscript, then maybe you’re doing something wrong.

When I’m working on a developmental edit—that is, editorial feedback on major elements such as characters, plot structure, and dialog (rather than grammar and spelling)—I typically mix in a lot of praise with constructive criticism about how the manuscript can be improved. Even as I do this, I sometimes think this praise is useless fluff. Perhaps the praise isn’t as necessary as pointing out how the book or story can be better, but it instills a sensitive author with confidence and encouragement. This is important, believe it or not.

Back in my undergraduate days in the early 1990s, I had a college instructor who was great at giving such feedback. No matter how much the story needed improvement, no matter how rough it was, this instructor got me excited to run to the computer lab or to my dorm room and get back to work revising that story. That’s the best way to do a developmental edit.

That constructive criticism sprinkled with praise is infinitely better than getting developmental feedback that leaves the author feeling battered and believing it’s not such a worthwhile writing project after all. Developmental feedback that’s abrasive, snarky, sarcastic, and/or impatient rubs the author the wrong way. Accusing the author of not writing in a scene or detail that they did write but that you skipped over also rubs the author the wrong way. Doing all that and/or refraining from supplying the author with any praise, not so much as a, “This is a very promising beginning and I’m looking forward to seeing a later draft!” also rubs the author the wrong way.

First Person v. Third Person

Revision that involves changing first person perspective to third person perspective is a bit on the tedious side, since I'm going through and changing pronouns. A problem I've found with this by getting rid of "I," I end up with an awful lot of "she" and "her," between Violet and Amaryllis interacting together. I just looked over a paragraph before changing it and now suspect that it works better in first person. Of the three editors who gave me feedback on this manuscript, only one of them said I should change it to third person, so maybe I'll just ignore that after all. Or maybe I'll continue changing it later, after I've worked on plot development more. Decisions, decisions.

I'm lucky nobody said I should change it from past tense to present tense.

Completed Draft

I just e-mailed the more or less first draft of my novella The Woodland Castle to Wormhole Electric, which has previously published my novella The Witch's Familiar in serial e-book format (http://www.wormholeelectric.com/StoriesByAuthor.html). The Woodland Castle (and that's a working title, by the way, not necessarily a final title) is a fairy tale inspired by the Burning Times and set in an alternate reality based on sixteenth-century Germany. Here's a little description of it:

WOODLAND CASTLE by Susan E. Wigget

HOOK

Princess Sarabina runs away from home when she discovers that her best friends only like her powerful position and that her father, King Arnulf, has an active role in the witch burnings.

PITCH

The crown princess, Sarabina, embarks on a journey from the royal castle of Matriolia to the legendary Enchantress’s castle in the eldritch woods. Brought up as a Polytheist by her mother and maidservant, Sarabina is disillusioned with her witch-burning father and with courtiers whom she mistook for friends. At the Enchantress’s castle, she may discover genuine friends… or more foes. But how can she end the witch burnings?

Wormholes, Witches, and Castles, oh my

I just found out that Wormhole Electric, the e-book site publishing my novella The Witch's Familiar serially, is getting three to four visits a day. It's only been around for a few months, which is quite different from an old, established business.

Meanwhile, as obsessed as I am with revising my YA fantasy novel into three or so Middle Grade novels, I'd better set that aside for now and get back to work on Woodland Castle, the next manuscript I'm submitting to Wormhole Electric.

Deadlines are good. They cut down the procrastination. Without them, you might never get projects done.

A Nightmare...Sort of About Revision

After slightly fewer than three hours sleep, I woke from a dystopic science fiction nightmare involving a dark indoor place with rooms that look like gigantic, vast stadium seating auditoriums with a vast circular stage in the center (something like the courtroom scenes in the Harry Potter movies but about three times as big). I see a lot of black—black walls and floors and such—and people wearing identical dark purple clothes.

Many—probably the majority—of these people are androids, computers in humanoid form, but I didn’t know this at the beginning of the dream. I forget how I find out. I’m an innocent citizen going about my daily life and feeling confused by the behavior of most people (well, that sounds like my everyday life when I lived in the Midwest). One day, some of these computer-androids collectively go insane and want to overthrow the system. As a real human, I’m anxious and panicky as I observe one of the insane (or malfunctioning) androids run into one of these auditorium rooms and flinging herself (or itself, if you prefer) at a bunch of the androids seated in the room.

Large numbers of androids, when the crazy android makes contact with them, shatter like glass into tiny, jagged fractures, flying all over. I’m terrified not only of being hurt by the flying glass but of shattering like glass myself. (Incidentally, the hallway leading to this room feels rather like the hallway in my parents’ house where I grew up, and the doorway feels like my old bedroom doorway.)

This is my interpretation of what that dream was about. Yesterday I read a lot of editorial feedback on a fantasy novel I wrote as a teen, and I discovered that the manuscript is far worse than I imagined. Part of me is antsy to start revising, taking the novel apart and turning it into a series. Another part of me is terrified of “killing my baby” as the writing expression goes—making such drastic changes as taking the characters from Victorian England and sticking them in twenty-first century America. After all, this novel was what I found escapist when I was a teen, and for decades I’ve thought of these characters in that Victorian setting.

In the dream, the hallway led to the doorway of the bedroom in which I hid while writing those stories (that I stuck together and called a novel) as a teen. The big room resembled a courtroom, and reading the developmental edits felt like I was on trial. The androids that shatter like glass represent characters in my novel, characters who will be altered or deleted altogether.

On the bright side, I’ll certainly keep the current draft rather than destroy it like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who tended to burn manuscripts he didn't like. The current manuscript will be a reference… and a sentimental possession. Meanwhile, I’m already getting visions of what to do in order to set this series in modern-day America, and even bits of truly modern dialog are popping into my head.

Feedback on My Curious Adventures with a Witch

I met up with Michelle and collected the student feedback for my Aunt Amaryllis novel. Three student groups (out of six) from her YA Publishing class chose my novel, and they all agree there's too much in the one book. They also all agree in changing the title, which is fine with me since My Curious Adventures with a Witch is the fourth working title. And they all agreed that it's middle grade rather than YA, which I thought might happen, even though the protagonist is seventeen.

I'm thinking I'll make it into a series. I've got other ideas for writing about these characters, so I have thought about a sequel anyway.

Strangely, I'm talking about characters I invented and started writing about back when I was sixteen years old. Originally Aunt Amaryllis was purely escapist, something fun to write about while living as a social outcast in rural Indiana. The novel started out as short stories that I decided to string together and call a novel since I was compelled to keep writing about these particular characters.

Perhaps the main characters you invent when you're young are the ones who stick with you the most. I certainly haven't been as attached with other characters as I have been with Aunt Amaryllis and Violet.

Because of the success of the Harry Potter books and the consequent popularity of YA fantasy, I decided in 2003 to dig out that old manuscript and revise it and expand it. Violet became Aunt Amaryllis's apprentice rather than just a niece who shared her adventures; I also made it more clear that Violet is the protagonist. I filled in chronological gaps between chapters/stories.

I'm doing somewhat last-minute work on a fairy tale novella inspired by the European witchcraze. It has a due date of Feb 10. That said, it's far enough along that I can also get back to work on Aunt Amaryllis. So much to write! 

Witch Fiction Trend

It looks like my timing is odd--witch fiction happens to be a trend, and here I am writing it. I've read A Discovery of Witches, which is adult paranormal romance about a witch who's from a long line of witches, and now there's the YA novel Life's a Witch and its eventual series (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/50213-swamped-by-offers-self-pubbed-ya-author-gets-agent-and-more.html). I read Beautiful Creatures about a year ago, and that's also a YA witch novel.

Too bad my novel My Curious Adventures with a Witch isn't already published. On the  bright side, my novella Witch's Familiar is available on Wormhole Electric's site. Furthermore, I'm about to get feedback on My Curious Adventures with a Witch, because I handed it over to Michelle, my former YA Publishing instructor, and she's about to give me the developmental edits that students did on the manuscript last term. So I'll soon revise it, probably share the revised version with my writers' critique group, revise some more, and start contacting agents. Then hopefully it'll get published before witch fiction goes out of style. I think many people have seen enough of vampires and are ready for something different, and I suspect witch fiction won't go out of style any time soon.

Awkward Situation

Note to self: stop being nice and polite to bullies. Transcend that childhood conditioning. Next time a creepy guy bullies me into giving him my phone number, even if he claims to be a feminist, refuse and keep refusing.

He left a message on my answering machine a few days after we met (I'm not returning the call!) and knows where I’m a volunteer. I refrained from attending an event there because I had told him about it and he seemed interested. He needs a therapist, and it’s not my job. I have a theory that he may be psychotic, since I’ve noticed insane people giving off creep vibes.

The situation has certainly confirmed that I’m still conditioned to be nice and polite to bullies—probably conditioned by relatives more than anything else, though our patriarchal society generally teaches girls to practice self-negation and be nice and polite in any situation. While a part of me is concerned, I have to protect myself. In my early childhood, relatives conditioned me to have unquestioning loyalty to them and to their side of the family, simultaneously demonizing my dad and his side of the family. But these relatives are also verbally abusive toward me, so I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to say that they conditioned me to be on their side against me. Weird, I know, but it’s probably not unusual. After I went off to college, if someone bullied me in a way similar to that of relatives, I had an unfortunate tendency to be in denial that I had a problem with this bully. Since then I’ve analyzed my relatives and intellectually reject bullies, the emotional conditioning isn’t completely gone. It takes a long time to completely purge crap from your childhood.

Before New Year's Resolutions

End-of-year rush
to bakeries for chocolate chip scones
and Boston cream pie:
hedonism before next year's ascetism.

I had a dream in which I was staying at my parents’ house, and they were there, but so was a young woman I’d never met before; she may have been Indian. I went into the bathroom, and the tub was full of water and bubble bath and a colorful plastic Sarasvati statue (she wore a red sari) that served as a water fountain—water spouted out of her hands. It may have created an arc the shape of a rainbow. Later I went into the bathroom again with the intention of taking a shower, and although the tub was drained, the Sarasvati statue was in the tub again, sitting on the floor of it. I considered taking her out, but then it occurred to me that she filled at most half the tub’s floor, and  I could leave her in there while I took my shower.

Sarasvati is my favorite Hindu goddess—she and Durga are the two I relate to the most. Sarasvati is the goddess of the arts and knowledge and wisdom. According to the New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, “She is not only the water goddess, one of a trinity that also includes Ganga and Yamuna, but she is also the goddess of eloquence, which pours forth like a flooding river.” The book also says, “Sarasvati is the prototype of all female artists (p. 273).”

Although I read a book called Hindu Goddesses before I went to India, I'd forgotten Sarasvati's association with water. It's appropriate that the dream involved seeing her in the bathtub. It's also appropriate that I dreamed about her while I'm immersed in writing a novella.

Character Naming

I'm in the process of revising my fairy tale novella Woodland Castle (it's a working title, and honestly it's a lot better than the first title I came up with). I originally wrote it rather intensely, the whole thing during the month of November, as part of my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) project. (Maybe next November I'll actually write a full-length novel instead of a novella and three stories.)

I just discovered that during that intensive November writing experience, I had created a witch-burning character called Father Duplicitous. I might want to change that name to something a bit more...subtle. After all, a villain shouldn't have a name like that unless you're writing for cartoons ("Dudley Do-Right," for example) or writing slapstick comedy. This novella is neither. I've given all the other characters German names (since I eventually decided to base the kingdom on Germany), and there's a posibility that his name might be the same thing, or something similar, but in German.

Researching Disturbing History

I'm currently working on a fairy tale novella inspired by the Burning Times, a. k. a. the witch-craze in Renaissance and "Enlightenment" Europe. That's right, while there were some scattered witch trials and executions in medieval times, the actual witch-craze--that involved the execution of between 50,000 and 100,000 people (the vast majority women) didn't begin until about 1540. That's the Renaissance, not the "Dark Ages."

My research (and I do get sucked into research!) has led me to an online e-book called Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/women-and-the-practice-of-medical-care-in-early-modern-europe-1400-1800-leigh-whaley/1023351355?ean=9780230282919&itm=1&usri=women+and+the+practice+of+medical+care+in+early+modern+europe

Many of the women accused of practicing witchcraft were traditional healers, who used herbal medicine and in some cases practiced midwifery. For a long time, women practiced in the medical profession, but in the late Middle Ages along came official medical schools in universities, where women were barred from studying. Accusing traditional, unlicensed healers of witchcraft and burning them at the stake was quite a way to decrease the competition.

I visited Massachusetts in the fall (including a day in Salem) and although I have previously read up to some extent in the Burning Times, since then I've gotten sucked into doing research on the topic and incorporating it into my fantasy fiction. My sources include:

Barstow, Anne Llewellyn. Witchcraze: a New History of the European Witch Hunts. Pandora, NY: 1994.

Demos, John. The Enemy Within: a Short History of Witch-Hunting. Penguin Books, NY: 2008.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: a History of Women Healers. Second Edition. Feminist Press, NY: 2010.

Illes, Judika. The Element Encyclopedia of Witchcraft. HarperElement, London: 2005.

Russell, Jeffrey B. & Brooks Alexander. A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans. Second Edition. Thams & Hudson, NY: 2007.

Whaley, Leigh. Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe. Palgrave MacMillian, NY: 2011.

Inspiring Walk

It's an unseasonably sunny day, with an unseasonably bright blue sky, and a temperature around forty-five degrees. I took a walk to the library. The walk (approximately twenty blocks each way) inspired a total of four little four-and-twenty poems (that's poems that are no more than four lines and twenty words). However, I won't post them here because I'd rather hold onto them and submit them to the fourandtwenty.com or, failing that, another literary journal that takes poetry.

I've been meditating a lot since last Thursday--experiencing an unofficial at-home meditation retreat often interrupted by working or hanging out at In Other Words (the only remaining nonprofit feminist bookstore/community center in the United States), or by attending parties. Tonight, for the first time, I'm going to join a Buddhist sangha, the Portland Friends of the Dhamma, even though I've had bad experiences with two previous sanghas.

A few weeks ago I went up to a Buddhist monastery in White Salmon, Washington and met some members of Friends of the Dhamma, and they have me convinced--or at least hoping--this will be a much more satisfactory sangha. I'm glad I'm back into my formal sitting meditation practice after two years of grad school--no sitting meditation, and no reading Buddhist books for a whole two years. I graduated in the spring but wasn't very disciplined, despite my intention of plunging back into sitting meditation immediately after grad school. I think visiting the monks at White Salmon was an inspiration, a reminder.

"Do not go gentle into that good night"

I'm currently reading the young adult novel Matched by Ally Condie. It's been compared to The Hunger Games, but  I see more similarity in it to Lois Lowry's The Giver. After a couple pages, I began to think I'd like to see a novel set in this world but from a non-white and a non-heterosexual perspective. Outcasts are so intriguing.

Here are links to a couple of poems that are mentioned in Matched:

"Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" by Dylan Thomas  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15377

"Crossing the Bar" by Alfred Tennyson http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/Crossing_Bar.htm

Adventures with a Witch and a Manuscript

While I was in grad school last year, I took Michelle McGann's YA (Young Adult) Publishing class. In this class, we read and discussed many novels written for teens. We also broke into groups--pretend publishing companies--and worked with manuscripts on editing, marketing and promotion, and book design.

After I took the class, another student suggested I submit my completed YA novel My Curious Adventures with a Witch to the YA Publishing class, so that rather than paying an editor to work on my manuscript, I'd give students an opportunity to supply me with editorial and marketing feedback. So this past term Michelle shared the manuscript with her class.

I found out yesterday that my manuscript was so popular that three out of the six groups (pretend publishing companies) chose my manuscript to work on! I'm so looking forward to revising it...and I'll likely share the next draft with my new writers group. I hope that after the next revision, literary agents will have a similar reaction to that of the students.

Mink False Eyelashes

This isn't really writing-related, other than an example of me writing a letter, but it's important to get it out there.

E-mail to contact in order to let Jenna’s Make-up and Waxing Studio know what you think of using real mink for false eyelashes:
jennaschneider@comcast.net

My e-mail message:

Interconnectedness Petition

I have a tendency to write and  blather about the importance of interconnectedness.  We are all part of planet Earth, our home, and should respect it. Oppression of any--women and children, people of color, the environment, animals, other countries--is oppression of all. Here's a petition to sign:

http://signon.org/sign/international-interdependenc.fb1?source=s.fb&r_by=1531872