Holy! It has been how long? Nearly a whole year? Seriously, what have I been thinking!? How could I go without updating my blog, my little personal website, my baby, for so long? And, even after I paid that Mexican to do design it and all? [for the sake of political correctness and avoid people complaining if they ever find this, I’m that Mexican, and this is my stupid bad joke]. Regardless! How could I have treated this place so badly?
Honestly, I don’t know. And to be even more underwhelming than that answer, my comeback does not come with any crazy type plans. Nope, null, zero, nada, ni maiz. I’m here, just updating my blog as, well, how other writers update their blog. If anything, I guess I will finally take on the blog title up there points up. To reiterate (since this is a “return” post), I want to say that I intend to update this for anyone who might stumble upon the website with my wild rants, moments of weakness, and heart felt insults. In other words, I’m going to chronicle my personal apotheosis (cough, cough, pretty much chronicle my failed attempts at getting my scifi novel published and cry when I get more letters telling me to stop sending toilet paper in the mail).
That said! I want to talk about a couple of other things. Following the amazing random order in which I placed them in the title, AWP. It was fun! It was great! And now, I have like 50k books to read (hahahaha, see what I did there? it’s a reference to the other thing I’m going to talk about). Silliness aside, I did meet some wonderful people. I will admit, I might have approached this conference from the completely wrong angle, but at the same time the only correct angle. Let me paint a picture.
I came into AWP thinking, “I’m a writer, and, if I want to be an Author, I should probably go to this conference because my professors in my MFA program say I should.” When I got there, I realized I should have known better. Turns out AWP is the most literary book fair I’ve ever been to. The majority of the booths were universities trying to sell you or give you some literary journal. Now, that’s all good and all (I got a bunch, and it makes me happy), but there’s one big thing missing.
If you don’t know me, let me quickly say, I’m a genre writer. Sure, I dabble in normal people fiction sometimes. I even write nonfiction when I’m particularly moody and I want to blame my parents (or family, let’s be fair) about my trust issues. But, I’m really a science fiction and fantasy writer. I pretty much say, “if it can happen in the real world, I don’t care. I want to read things that are impossible for me to experience”. I know it’s a bit conceited. Bite me.
Back to my story. So, I entered AWP and was, well, let down a bit. Where was the genre love? So, I did what anyone like me would do. I embarked on a journey to find all of the genre booths I could (spoiler, I found a grand total of four). sighs Yeah, so out of at least a hundred, I found four. That’s like 4% (yay, I got rad math skillz), which is depressing.
HOWEVER! I managed to meet some cool people that made me feel like I wasn’t some weirdo walking around in the wrong place (and that’s saying something when you’re surrounded by writers). The highlights were, an awesome group that had “cyberpunk” written on their booth title. That just made my heard come back from death. I think I discovered what the grinch felt after he stole all those presents and saw ’em little guys singing happily. On top of that, one of them gave me this rad poetry science fiction book in which she created her own language and then translated. And yeah, yeah. I’m not that much into poetry, but I like crazy cool ideas. And, as I’ve been told by most of everyone I should probably read poetry more. So, I’ve been paging through it, and it’s fascinating.
The other booths were also very cool. I nabbed three horror/fantasy graphic novels, and one science fiction one. Ah! and I managed to find the one steam punk western novel in the entire conference. If you don’t call that a find, I’m not sure what is (I’ve never read steam punk, so I’m super looking forward to checking that out).
And as a final thing about AWP, I guess this has taught me I really suck at talking with people. I’m good at keeping a conversation going, but I am awful at starting them. Introverted FTW!
Okay, so all those rants aside, let’s talk about the final thing in the agenda….Camp NaNoWriMo 2016. And for this, I shall write in a much less hectic way. I think it needs me to write with a little more care.
In the past few months, I’ve been struggling to revise the first draft of my manuscript. It has haunted my dreams, and it has made me suffer at a deep psychological level. I guess it’s all because I see it as my first “complete” book, and part of me wants it to be perfect before this school year ends. Sadly, I’ve been terrified by it. I’ve never revised 400 pages in my life, and they feel as if I were fighting an army of 400. It’s just intimidating. Consequently, I haven’t really written that much.
Enter Camp NaNoWriMo. After one of my tumblr dives, a very nice person asked if I would be participating in the event, and that gave me an idea. Why not use it as an excuse to force me to work on the novel I’ve been suffering with? On top of that, I had also managed to create a half decent revision plan (one that includes a lot of rewriting), so this whole NaNoWriMo is a crazy help.
Technically today was day 2 of the camp, which means I’m really announcing this late on my website. However, I hope to update throughout the month about it in order to just show my progress on the whole thing. If anything, in order to build a sense of obligation to continue. That means, I should be posting a lot more frequently here. But, it won’t end with the camp. I want to actually chronicle my path from finishing this novel to getting published. And with any hope, some clueless writer like me will stumble upon this website and get something useful out of it, even if it involves the mad ravings of some useless punk.
In conclusion: THE RAVEN IS BACK, MOTHER[REDACTED]S