This insomnia has spurred a number of life changes. I’ve started waking up in the mornings every day, even on weekends. I’ve stopped drinking coffee. I quit smoking. And maybe some of that has helped, but I still get these periods–weeks at a time–when I can’t fall asleep. I only have two hypotheses / solutions left. The first is that maybe I just don’t need as much sleep as I think I do (I try to get eight hours every night). Maybe I really need six or seven hours. Or maybe I just need to start exercising every day.

Ugh, I really hope it’s the first thing. If that’s it, then I’ll end up with two extra hours a day (score!). But if it’s the other thing, then I’ll lose another hour each day (boo!). I’ll do anything, though. This sleep stuff is brutal. I mean, cmon, if it’s such a necessity, then why can’t it just impose itself on me the way that every other bodily function does?

Does anyone else have any experience with insomnia? How did you all try to manage it?

It’s not only fun to make friends with delightful new people, it’s also fun to make new acquaintances. It’s nice to see someone every month or every two months and have a nice chat with them and not necessarily feel the need to see them more often. It feels very balanced.

With regards to my work life, things could not be better. I’m truly fortunate in my consulting schedule. If I could keep doing this amount of work for the rest of my life, I would. Unfortunately, my situation is inherently unstable, so I imagine that the day will eventually come when I’ll need to seek more traditional employment (or, at least, when I’ll need to hustle to find some alternate revenue streams). Still, for the last year, things have been ideal on that front.

Also, I quit smoking, which is pretty good. Woohoo for those seven additional years of life!

It’s been a good year, and it’s taught me a lot about myself. This year, I’ve come to realize that nothing new and transformative is really going to happen to me. I’ll have many more years. I’ll have good years and I’ll have bad years. I’ll have moments of joy and moments of despair. However, my future is going to be made of basically the same sort of stuff as the past. In the years to come, I might change significantly as a person, and my setting and situation will certainly change quite a bit, but the types of feelings I have are not going to change.

Basically, I don’t think that I’m ever going to be sadder in the future than the saddest I’ve been in the past, and I don’t think I’ve ever going to be happier in the future than the happiest I’ve been in the past. There are no higher peaks and there are no lower valleys.

So if I take this year as a model for how happy I am able to feel, then I am fairly hopeful for the future. I would love if I was as happy in every future year as I was this past year. This past year certainly had some darker periods, weeks and months where I felt quite pessimistic, but these were short-lived and manageable. Mostly, it was a time of contentment, punctuated by days (or even weeks) of outright joy.

Furthermore, I don’t even think I’d mind if all my future years were fractally similar to the year that just passed. If I never achieved artistic success and never found romantic fulfillment, I think I’d still be content as long as I was able to spend my days reading, writing, and hanging out with people that I enjoy.

However, when I’ve had good years in the past, I’ve always made a botch of them by attempting to hold onto them for too long. I’m not going to do that this time. I’m well aware that one can’t simply replicate a good year. Good years only come when you are alive to the present, and when you do one’s best to cultivate the good that appears in your year (rather than pining for good qualities that are absent)

Still, it can’t hurt to remain cognizant of the essential elements of (this) good year (freedom and good people) and to attempt to seek them out whenever I can.

• 600 – March 17, 2011 (seven months ago)
• 500 – June 22, 2010 (fifteen months ago)
• 400 – September 13, 2009 (two years ago)
• 300 – August 8, 2008 (three years and two months ago).

Clearly, this is an accelerating pace (which is due, mostly, to increased submissions volume). At this rate, I can expect 800 to come in around 5-6 months.

Saleswise, this has been my best century so far. From rejections 501-600, I sold exactly nothing, but from 601-700, I’ve made 5 short story sales (3 of them at professional rates), so that’s definitely something.

Every time I make this post, I am somewhat astonished at these ever-growing statistics: 105 stories of mine have gotten at least one rejection, and 165 markets have rejected at least one story of mine.

I feel pretty good about where I’m at, and I have reason to believe that my next century will be even more successful than the last one. However, I am looking forward to the day when my rejection rate slows down, not because my productivity has decreased, but because editors are buying my stories at a rate sufficient to slow my submissions volume (since frequently-rejected stories are better for submissions volume than quickly-accepted ones). It will be nice to reach a day when years–multiple years–pass between rejection centuries.

For me, the things I am anxious about are usually the things that I can only somewhat control. Things that are entirely out of my control don’t tend to worry me. And things that are fully within my control also don’t worry me. It’s the in-between things that are horrible. That’s why one of my biggest fears is getting into a car crash (because it’s something that can only be averted by constant vigilance and constant suspicion).

Similarly, good stories are built out of blind intuitions that are ruthlessly subjected to second-guessing. For long periods of my writing career, I haven’t practiced the rigorous quality control that was necessary. A few weeks ago, I wrote a story so bad that it made me ashamed (luckily, no one has, or will ever, see it). It’s not that the story would’ve burned out the eyes of an editor, it’s that the story was worse than what I could do, and there was no reason for me, at my skill level, to have written something of that quality. Halfway through the story, I could sense that it was not what I wanted it to be, but I finished it anyway, out of momentum.

Now, most writers would say, “Don’t worry about writing a terrible first draft. You can fix it in revision.” But I know better. For me, once a story is done, it’s done. I can cut it down in revision. I can tamper with its balance or heft. But I can’t reinvigorate its rotten core. Revision, for me, can bring out only limited quality improvements.

So I lay awake that night, thinking, “What can I do to avoid writing stories that are this awful?” And while I was lying awake, I came up with what I think is a truly great writing process.

For years, I’ve been hearing about how typewriter-era writers were so great because they had to physically retype the entirety of each draft and, in doing so, transform every sentence and paragraph of it. For a time, I even experimented with doing the same thing, but I found it to be of limited worth since I would just stare at the last draft in another window and slavishly retype it (except for changes in a few places). It was not a transformation, the changes in the end amounted to nothing more than what I would have done during a normal revision.

But my new writing process was a simple variation on this typewriter style redrafting, except instead of looking at the previous draft while I retyped, I would start fresh, and just start writing the story again. The previous version of the story would be nothing more than a very detailed outline held entirely in my memory. As I wrote, I would be actively re-imagining every word of the story.

So far, I’ve written two stories using this method. For the first, I wrote the first 1000 words of the story. Then on the second day (without looking at the first day’s production), I started over and wrote the first 2500 words of the story. On the third day (with only small glances at the first day’s output), I started over and wrote the first 4200 words of the story. On the second day, I started the story in a different place. On the third day, I made fairly major adjustments to the main character’s motivation (and in doing so, changed the expected ending). On the fourth day, I was so ridden with the anxiety at starting over again that I just started off where the previous day had left off and wrote straight through to the end (another 4000 words). However, I was extremely pleased with the story that resulted.  I ran it through a critique group, and found that it won’t need that much revision.

For the second story, I wrote 500 words the first day, then started again on the second day and wrote the first 1900 words. Then I started over the third day and wrote 2500 words in order to complete the story. Again, my conception of the story changed significantly during each rewrite. Yesterday, I revised that story and sent it out. Again, I felt that it was about as good as it could be.

It’s an interesting technique. Oftentimes, I would struggle to recreate a passage from the previous draft, and feel that in the current draft I had produced a much-inferior replica. However, after comparing drafts, I usually found that the newer passage was better.

In the finished stories, I didn’t have the sense of gappiness that I often get from my stories, where some initial conception of the story was abandoned halfway through and then the hints of that conception were excised in a way that left scars. Oftentimes, I’ll feel (in my revised stories) that the paragraphs don’t transition smoothly, but I won’t know how to fix it.

I also feel like I am finally treating my subconscious with some level of respect. In a previous entry, I wrote about my writing process (writing dozens of beginnings in order to find one story worth writing). But I had never felt satisfied about how I would spend days writing these terrible, boring story fragments and then, when  I was finally presented with something worthwhile, I’d blow through it in one or two days. Now I feel like I spend the right amount of time and effort on these stories. Maybe there is a puritan strain in me. Maybe I just feel like if I don’t suffer to produce something, then it’s not worthwhile.

And there is a kind of suffering to this process. Oh, it’s not breaking rocks in the hot sun, but it is harder than what I was doing before. When writing a story straight through, it gets easier after about halfway through. I know how it’s going to end, and I just need to get there.

When rewriting from memory, it gets harder. It’s hard to struggle to write something that came easily the day before. It’s hard to keep forcing my imagination to work, long after it feels like it should shut down.

But it’s worth it.

So yeah, those are the kinds of rewards that anxiety can give you. Sometimes I read a blog post like this excellent one by Tobias Buckell (which approaches writerly anxiety from a different angle), and think, “Man, I need to stop worrying about all these carrots and sticks. I need to just sink down into the adventure of the writing process. I need to focus on saying what I need to say, and just getting it down there. The destination is less important than the journey.”

And that’s fine. But the destination influences the journey quite a lot. If all I cared about was writing for fun and companionship, then I would just put everything up for free on the internet. I wouldn’t care about quality. I’d probably write terrible fan-fiction or something.

If all I cared about was writing for myself, then I wouldn’t subject myself to even the possible of rejection. I’d write in my journal. It’s worrying about the reaction of that wispy, near-fictional reader–someone like you–that drives me to produce something that might be worth reading.

But…I am going to keep trying to find a way to internalize that voice in a less physiologically and emotionally destructive way. Sometimes I think that what I need to do is think of writing in more spiritual or abstract terms. I am not trying to please an actual reader. I should instead try to conform to some Platonic ideal of quality that can only be approached asymptotically. Then this writing gig would not be a struggle to please an actual person; it would be an internal odyssey. It would be entirely under my own control, and hence less nerve-wracking.

Yeah, sometimes I think that, but then I gag on on the New Ageyness of it. Still, though, that’s probably what I’ll end up believing, someday.

I began Wrap-up Season on December 1st, but here I am a month later with all kinds of stuff left to wrap up! I wanted to write two posts on “Books That Left Me With Somewhat Mixed Opinions” which would have included all kinds of 200 word takedowns on such eminent books as Moby Dick, The Red and the Black, Sophie’s Choice, Persuasion, and, well, all kinds of stuff.

I wanted to have a post where I excerpted from the roughly 10-15 reviews that mentioned the three stories I published this year. (Yeah, I know about pretty much every internet post that contains my first name. [For instance, Lois Tilton mentioned it in her year end summary of top fictions that have appeared in various magazines! In Locus!])

I wanted to write about all kinds of things. But I didn’t get around to it. December’s been a pretty busy month. I was racing to meet my goal of 280,000 words for the year and 25 stories for the year. But mostly, my mind just turned in other directions. Summation requires a certain joi de vivre that has been slow in coming for the last two weeks. I wasn’t really depressed, but I was feeling a certain melancholy. Melancholy is the way I handle major life transitions. There’s a sorrow for the things I am about to leave behind, and I mourn them before they pass.

So my heart hasn’t really been in wrapping up, and January 1st allows me to officially give up on the whole thing.

2010 was a really great year. It did not begin so well. The first third of it involved me getting rejected by eleven graduate programs. But selling three stories, writing 27 stories, and finishing a novel made it pretty good. Of course, as is probably the case for most of us, the real joys of the year had very little to do with writing, and are not really anything I feel comfortable talking about on a blog. But suffice it to say that my life really changed, and one of the results of that change was that I was able to commit to writing in a way that had not been possible for me before. That commitment bore immediate fruit, in terms of my sale to Clarkesworld, and the presence of this awesome, delicious fruit reconfirmed the wisdom of making those changes.

Furthermore, locking down all of that personal stuff has allowed me to do something I’ve wanted to do for awhile. I’m leaving D.C. and returning to the West Coast (probably Oakland)*. Right now the plan is to continue working for the World Bank for at least another six months, but I will be doing so on kind of a long distance basis.

I’ll be sad to leave D.C.

This is the city where I did a substantial amount of my growing up. My family moved to one of D.C.’s Maryland suburbs when I was in 3rd grade (maybe 1993?) and moved to D.C. proper when I was in 7th grade (wanna say…1997?). This was my home base all through college. My parents moved to India around eighteen months ago when my brother went to college, but I’ve been holding down the house for them. Now that I’m leaving, the place will pass into other hands. It might be the last time I’ll see it. It’ll definitely be the last time I live in it. My cat, who’s been with us for fourteen years, is moving to Delhi too, next week. And as she flies East, I’ll be driving West.

But, it’s time for some new things.

Oh, the one part of Wrap-Up Season that I will proceed with as planned is posting a list of all the books I read. I kind of wavered on this, because the main purpose of posting it is just to be all like, “Well, I read alot of books this year” (roughly 180). And boasting is not a very attractive trait in a person. On the other hand, I really do like it when people post the books they’ve read in a year (for instance, look at Art Garfunkel’s totally sweet list of every book he’s read since 1968). So I decided to post the list without comment.

*It feels kind of silly to talk about moving, when I talk about virtually none of the details of my private life, but I am always very disconcerted when the authors of blogs I read suddenly jump from one city to another, so I swore to myself an undying vow that I would mark my moves with a blog entry.

This was my fifth week story at Clarion (which I attended in the summer of 2006). Kelly Link, who had been one of my favorite authors since I picked up her collection Stranger Things Happen my freshman year in college, was coming to be the instructor for our final two weeks. This story was the product of me walking around for three weeks being all like, “Oh my god, I have to write a fantasy story for Kelly Link”.

I mean, I had written fantasy stories before. But they were all like, fantasy stories with swords and wizards and stuff like that. I knew that I could be bringing that sort of stuff. I needed to write some hip contemporary fantasy filled with the strange and inexplicable. Except…I didn’t really know how to do that.

What ended up happening was I took an SF story I’d been planning to write about a garbage dump and India’s untouchable castes, mashed it up with some fairy mythology, added a nuclear war, and created this story over the course of one all-nighter. The next day I showed it around, realized it was somewhat incomprehensible, grabbed two hours of sleep and pulled another all-nighter to revise it.

Even in final draft, the story was still somewhat garbled, and many of the scenes were just somewhat perfunctory placeholders for scenes that needed to be there and things that needed to happen. But I accomplished my goal, in that Kelly Link liked it in fairly unequivocal terms. I promptly became totally burned out, and was unable to write anything for the final ten days of the workshop.

A year after Clarion I revised the story and sent it out to a bunch of places before finally selling it to ‘zine edited by Kelly Link and her husband Gavin Grant.

At one point, this story was alot of things to me. It was a huge departure for me in terms of content. It was the first time I’d tried to add an Indian cultural element to a story. It was my first contemporary fantasy. It was my first extensive revision. And it was the first time anyone ever intimated to me that I might have some kind of potential. At the time, and for a long time after, I despaired of writing anything better. This story profoundly altered the kinds of stories I write and the way in which I write. In particular, I don’t think I’ve written a careful, extrapolative SF story since this story showed me what I could be doing instead.

Rereading it now, I’m not sure how I feel about having it out there. I have written better in the four years since. In the last year I’ve probably written stories that were many times better. But, you know…I am happy that it’s been published.

I’ve found that, over the years, I’ve had stories that were an effort to write, ones where I reached for something new and which, once completed, inspired me with the highest of expectations for their future reception, and then I’ve had stories where I just sort of fooled around for a few afternoons and didn’t expect to sell at all. Inevitably, the stories I have sold have been the latter. I have my own theories as to why this is the case, but I am happy that for once one of the former is going to see the light of day.

The other audience is composed of people who find it…somehow, I don’t know how, probably by clicking the link to it from my published stories online. To those people, I am probably primarily an aspiring writer. I am not so worried about them.

But you other people are more likely to know me because I vomited on your futon than because of anything I wrote. So here’s where I’d like to officially come out. I write stories. It is a pretty serious thing. For the last seven years, I have cranked out 40,000-200,000 words a year (for your reference: the Great Gatsby is circa 40k works, Moby Dick is around 300k).

It actually seems kind of absurd when I think about it. I come home and write down stories about people who don’t exist, and those people sometimes shoot equally fictional guns at each other (and sometimes they fall in love, live forever, download themselves into computers, snort cocaine, predict the future, found religions and — far more often than you’d really think would be necessary – usher in some sort of apocalypse). It doesn’t seem to be very in keeping with my image, somehow.

Since I have somehow have drifted over into looking at this blog primarily as a means to connect with those other people, the community of people who read and write stories, I thought it would be useful to formally admit the story-writing. Up until now (and especially when I was in college), I tried to keep the story-writing thing a little bit low-key. I had varying success with this, so it’s likely that most of my good friends already knew about it (especially after, two years ago, I drank a fifth of Bacardi rum and called up half the people I knew in order to tell them about my sale to Nature, and then emailed the other half when it came out).

Personally, I find being an aspiring storyteller somewhat uncool. Like, it’s okay to be a fanatic about model railroads, but you should try to avoid talking about model railroads to people who don’t care at all about them. And…aspiring writers don’t even produce anything that their friends can really enjoy. I’ve seen dozens of my friends showcase their musical or acting skills, and it’s almost always been pretty cool. I don’t know, there’s something about seeing your friend, this person for whom you have all these very personal feelings tied up in their image, transfigured that way – turned into a performer – is really cool, no matter the objective quality of their art.

But anyway…I’ve now progressed a little bit past aspiring. For at least four years, I ignored the requests, by a friend of mine, to send her something I’d written. Last summer, I finally sent her something. So, now I’m not as coy about it (which is good, because I wasn’t really fooling anyone before), and I thought it was time to enshrine that in blog form.

But the magic has begun, my story, “Death’s Flag Is Never At Half-Mast” has gone live in Redstone Science Fiction’s August issue. And it’s the cover story, which is not at all unsweet. In case you missed my previous post, this is the story I wrote as a result of this blog post, entitled Lord Nelson Could Beat Up Your Dad.

And, really, more than anything, it’s my tribute to (and parody of) military science fiction, a genre that I love reading, and would never write.

But any online followers from the writing world are probably not my facebook friends, and they might follow either blog or twitter. Anyway, I posted this to twitter a few days ago, but my story “The Association of the Dead” is online at Clarkesworld Magazine.