Dear myself, age nine;

Hi! How are you? It's mid-December as I'm writing this, so you're probably sitting in your third grade classroom with Mr. D, wondering whether you're going to be able to get home in time to watch The Munsters on TV 20. The odds are good that you will. Just so we can get that out of the way early.

You know how on Career Day every year you say you're going to grow up to become a writer? Well, congratulations: you will. It's going to take a long time and a lot of work, and you're going to feel like giving up a whole bunch of times, but if you can make yourself keep going, you'll be me someday. You're going to write a lot of crap. I mean a lot of crap. It's necessary crap. (Well, maybe not all of it. There's going to be this novella in seventh grade that you'll be totally proud of and let a lot of people read, and trust me, you're wrong, it's terrible, and if you want to not do that, I promise I'll understand.)

Being a writer is a lot more complicated than it looks. You don't have the Internet yet, but let me tell you, it's going to change everything. You're going to wind up being friends, or at least acquaintances, with some of the people whose books you're reading right now. (Sorry, I still don't know Stephen King.) Learn to take criticism. Learn to shrug off insults. It'll all be okay.

Leela is going to live for a really long time, but not forever; be good to your cat while you have her. I still miss her. You're not going to be friends with the same people for your entire life, but you have them for now, and that's worth a lot. Hug Stacy and Natasha for me, okay? They're going to bring My Little Ponies back in 2004. That isn't as far away as it sounds. Trust me.

You're going to be okay. You're going to tell stories, and you're going to see the world, and you're going to meet amazing people, and you're going to be okay. Just wanted to drop a note and let you know that.

But I really mean it about that novella. Yuck.

Love,
You.

So there's a used record store near me that will occasionally get estate sale lots of paperback books. I go hunting there for crumbling manuscripts that chimera_fancies can use in her jewelry. This evening, I wandered over and discovered that they had apparently become The Land of Amazingly Old Science-Fiction and Fantasy.

For serious.

( Click here to discover what Seanan just dragged home, giggling madly the entire way.Collapse )

Words: 3,573.
Total words: 34,573.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter six, time to move on.
Music: Emilie Autumn, rocking the goth.
Lilly: asleep in the middle of my coat.

Chapter six of The Mourning Edition is finished! Ha! I bet you thought I forgot, didn't you? That I'd wandered off to greener pastures? Not this zombie girl! The living dead continue to be one of my life's great joys. It's just that sometimes, those great joys get faintly derailed by the need to battle Toby to a stand-still. Something about the girl having her own series already under contract makes her all pushy. I have no idea where she gets that...

So anyway, The Mourning Edition continues apace, and my understanding of the world is continuing to expand. Chapter six actually took as long as it did to finish because I kept back-tracking, ripping things out, and planting them later in the text. (Also because I got distracted perfecting my story for Grants Pass, but come on, the nice people invited me to their pandemic. They deserve the best I can possibly give them.)

I'm heading to Seattle for the holidays again this year, and while there's going to be a lot of rehearsal crammed into a reasonably small stretch of time, I'm also expecting long days where everybody else is off at work, and I can just write. If this goes anything like last year, I'm basically going to power through fifty thousand words and then look faintly confused.

And now, bed.