Body feels better than yesterday, head feels worse.

Stuffed all of yesterday's weeding efforts into the yard waste bin, then lopped off all the suckers from the 40-ish trees lining our backyard, as well as the branches dipping down into walking height, and the ones blocking light from the windows on the north of the house. The yard waste bin is now full, so unless I borrow the neighbor's bin (which I might do; they have like no yard so never use it), I'm not pruning the rosebushes today after all. :/ I've also swept half the house and started the week's laundry.

Time for a sit-down break, which will probably consist of sun tea, painkillers, and more going through my backlog of edits on Queen's Choice. I've been powering my way through twenty pages a day, and it feels good. Both in the getting it done and clearing space on my desk sense, but also in the continual tweaking of the story for a smoother read. My word count isn't dropping much (currently at 118,124 words), so I'm also trying to identify subplots and characters I can cut if needed. 120K words is kind of the absolute upper limit for this genre, with 100K a safer goal. I think I've got one set of threads I could cut, if I can finagle the words to still make sense, but I'll need to be careful if I do so, because it's entwined with characters I cannot cut.

Too fragging hot today to do much. Fortunately, last night's find that I'm in the second round of the Pitch Plus Five competition shifted things around so that my priorities are (1) revising my first five pages, and (2) coming up with a 150-word "query pitch" (which are usually two different things). Which are both due tomorrow by 9pm PST. While dealing with the distraction of Squiddle playing with his new noisy toys.

But. I've got a first draft of the query pitch done, and some thoughts for what revisions I want to make to the first five pages. Onward!

A couple days ago, Tamora Pierce announced on her tumblr that she was going to be a judge on the Adventures in YA Publishing "Pitch Plus 5" contest. So I went and poked around to see what it was, and basically, fifty writers of unpublished Young Adult novels got to submit their first five pages to go on the blog to be read and rated. All fifty entries are now posted there, and comment threads are open.

Including mine. I decided that while Queen's Choice could be either adult fantasy or YA fantasy, what the hell, its protagonist is eighteen, I might as well give it a shot.

So, please go read the first five pages of my book and leave some comments! And, while you're at it, please read the other entries too. Writers love feedback. It has effects rather like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Tuesday night Squiddle slept the whole night through for the first time ever! Midnight to eight a.m.! Alas, he did not repeat this venture last night. Tuesday evening he also thought Wonderful Husband and I sitting down to dinner was the funniest thing ever. He did not stop laughing for at least five minutes. Seriously. ^_^;;

Last night, my writing class started up again. Wonderful Husband and Squiddle came with me for the beginning of class so that my classmates and teacher could coo over the cute baby. Which they did. Me having been away for the last term, I got given the first slot, so I got read in class, and the submission was generally agreed to have been one of my stronger ones. Yay! But once I got home, I found that Squiddle had not been happy about being sans mommy for the evening, and had been taking it out on his daddy. Ah well. Squiddle will just have to get used to hanging out with daddy one night a week, because I'm not giving up my entire life in favor of mommydom.

And, today is Squiddle's four-month birthday! In celebration, we took him to meet his new doctor, who I think we quite like. The baby's pretty much on track for where he should be developmentally, and physically at the 90th percentile for his age. He weighs in at 18 pounds even, and is now 25 inches long. He also got his next set of vaccinations today, which he definitely didn't like, but his dislike of them was less than his dislike of the last set. At least in volume, anyway.

But for now the baby is sleeping, the laundry is chugging away in the washer, and I am going to put down my current book (The Story Of My Life, by Helen Keller) and edit my next ten pages to turn into class next week.

Ha! Have gotten better at using the pump, and tonight Wonderful Husband experimented with Squiddle and found that, yes, he will drink from a bottle. Squiddle also got taken in to my writing class this evening (I am not attending this term, but will start doing so again in January), and unsurprisingly had an adoring audience.

Given that Queen's Choice was written very much from an emotional point of facing infertility and childlessness, with a goodly portion of my pain from that experience poured into the writing, I wonder how actually having a child now is going to affect Field of Stars. When I can get back to it, that is!

I have a list of reasons my writing class teacher frustrates me. (Yes, I know I've ranted about her here before.) But high on the list is the fact that she just doesn't pay attention. At least not to my submissions.

"Who is this character?" "It just said, Maralys, in the paragraph above this one." "Oh." Grr....

Honestly, when it gets to the point that she reaches one of her own notes for a correction and says, "Oh, well now that I've read it, that makes sense," I just want to throw something at her.

I realize she's a senior citizen. I realize she does not read or write my genre, and thus has no knowledge of its vocabulary and conventions. But when she doesn't even respect my writing enough to bother parsing what the words mean, I get a wee bit testy.

Of course, I was also cringing when she was talking about one of my fellow student's family history (sorta memoirish?) submission tonight. Particularly the part where she was talking about one of the people in it as a character, and I had read ahead to find out the "character" in question is my classmate's grandmother.... There is a certain discretion and respect one should be able to expect when talking about kin. Even when they're framed in written words.

HA. Screw my dread and depression, I've edited ten pages of Queen's Choice to turn into class this week, along with a summary page for the handful of newbies, and the first fifteen pages for Pat to take down to the writer's conference in San Diego next month. Which involved hunting up proper MS format, and oh frag, what do you mean I'll eventually need to turn all italics in the nearly 120K-word document into underlines?

Fanfiction has so spoiled me for using the actual emphasis type I want.

Since it was raining off and on yesterday, Wonderful Husband and I went to see The Hobbit. It was fun, but not quite as good as the LotR films. I think part of why it seems to drag a little bit is the inevitable problem with making one book into three films. Part of why LotR paced so well was the ruthless cutting out involved; there was no Tom Bombadil, there was no razing of the Shire. The Hobbit, in contrast, seems to have the filmmakers stuffing every single bit of padding they can think of in....

That said, Martin Freeman is brilliant and I was quite pleased to discover that my hindbrain was not hearing and seeing him as Watson through the entire film. :)

And, of course, I wrote. I will likely stop posting fanfiction relatively soon, as I have made a pact with myself that January is a month to concentrate on writing novel #2, Field of Stars. And oh god I am not looking forward to going back through Queen's Choice for like the fourth time to add tension and drama to it, but I know it needs to be done. It's non-saleable the way it is now. I'm also still debating whether or not I'm going back to Maralys' writing class. My frustration with her reigns supreme.

I'm doing the turn-in-every-week thing in the writing class, as there aren't too many others submitting this term. Kind of odd, but also quite nice to be getting feedback on ten pages each Wednesday.

This week my class hit the scene with the dragon council, which I knew was problematic, but I didn't know quite why, or how to fix it. Maralys wants me to cut it/them. I can't. This scene, and its associated handful of new characters, is going to be significant later. In book 2 or 3. I need to set it up now. But I did come away with the idea of working at least a couple of the characters in earlier. Which means writing new scenes but possibly truncating this one a little. This is probably going to push me back up over 120K, though. Grr! Fixfixfix.

I wrote up the grand list of stuff I would like to get done/have done by Thanksgiving, and handed it to Wonderful Husband. We'll see how much of it actually ends up happening.

Writing class resumed tonight, and for a change we have a full 25 people! (We'll see how many drop out between now and the end.) This means I got my photocopying guess almost right; I need to make one more copy, for Dan, who wasn't there this week but will be next.

We went around the room and everyone did a brief intro and description of what they write. Dorsey, who has been submitting a very good book that I can best describe as Romancing The Stone meets the Mexican drug wars with Navy SEALs instead of Jack Colton, described her work as somewhere between thriller and women's fiction.

WHAT THE HELL IS WOMEN'S FICTION?!

I mean, do we categorize things as "men's fiction"? Why is there this special genre called women's fiction, and what the hell does it consist of???? It's not romance, though those are books (mainly) targeted at a female audience.

(Wonderful Husband postulates that "women's fiction" is the literary equivalent of a "chick flick." I feel he is likely onto something with this description. He also thinks it's one of those things that's hard to define, but that you know it when you see it.)

So now I'm trying to decide - all but one of Tamora Pierce's books have a female main character. Are those "women's fiction"? Marin is the nominal main character of Queen's Choice. Does QC qualify for the category?

Also, I do not have a romantic interest for Marin. Not even in book 2. I have a veryverymaybe/outside possibility for one, who she hooked up with when I was first envisioning her narrative, but he doesn't even exist in the written word yet and I'm not sure if I have room for him or not. Especially since he ended up dead in the version in my head. But then Higami doesn't get a romantic partner either. Terren comes with three ready-built in. Brise has had one (Tragic First Love Who Never Loved Her Back and hoo boy I know where my hindbrain got that motif from... Jason from middle school), and gets maybe-probably another later, and I have no idea yet how that relationship's going to turn out.

Not having a romance for my main character rules out at least one publishing house, but despite suggestions in the past from Maralys that I import one... Marin isn't ready. She's not in a stable social position, and not interested until she is. She also has too many things to learn, too much growing to do. To paraphrase one of my teenage-reading books, she is not ready to be a we until she knows who she is as an I.

In short, trying to figure out what this category "women's fiction" is, and whether, given my main character is a woman, my book qualifies for it.