in Life's name and for Life's sake

I had two opportunities to talk about writing today with writers, which is really weird and unusual and lovely and should happen more often. Both of these too-brief conversations were held before the beginning of a class, and inevitably there were other (non-writer) people listening. In my Clarissa seminar the guy who sits across from me noticed my NaNoWriMo travel mug, asked about my history with NaNo, and was sincerely impressed that I'd managed it for seven years (this last year was his first). Of course my seminar leader/advisor/all around awesome person Jenny is a novelist in addition to being a professor and she started talking about writing too and it was awesome.

I was thinking about NaNo so when I somehow got onto the subject of writing fiction with a girl in the MA before my next class, I ended up mentioning a couple of my novels-in-progress. I gave her the flippant/irreverent/shorthand description of The Printer's Tale and she sounded interested, but one of the other girls in my cohort, who was sitting in front of us, turned around and made a disparaging comment that implied I was following up on the popularity of Twilight, of all things, simply because my less-than-one-sentence synopsis mentioned werewolves.

And the thing is, yes, my flippant, irreverent, shorthand description of the novels I write will always leave something out. And if you're not already into the few things that show up in the shorthand, that kind of description isn't going to interest you. But if you are? Then I can convince you in less than a sentence...or at least get a laugh out of you. In fact hopefully that's exactly what these will do!

Lunar Reflections (2005): teenage angst on the moon

Kes Running (2006): unpremeditated gap year in space

The Printer's Daughter (2007): Beauty and the Beast meets Jane Eyre with werewolves

Gil and Leah (2008): feminist fantasy cross-dressing farce

The Inconvenient Dreamer (2009): woman travels to alternate universes in her dreams

Beneath Strange Stars (2010): gender-swapped Pride and Prejudice in space

Chasing Ghosts (2011): Possession meets Neverwhere with cross-dressing

The moral of the story: I need to find more fantasy/sci-fi writers (or at least writers who are sympathetic to these genres even if not writers of them) with whom to talk about my novels.

This November, I'm doing so many things that I probably couldn't explain them all in the five minutes' time I've given myself to write this update. But if you know about none of the other things, know this: I, Candace, am writing a novel that is effectively Pride and Prejudice in Space -- with genderswapping! As much as I feel like death warmed over from a combination of too little food, too much caffeine, and far too many homework assignments, I can't wait for it to be midnight in this timezone so that I'm allowed to start. Before I go to sleep tonight, Ellis Bennet will meet Willamina Darcy at the local pub on a colony planet named Jane and find out that he's "not reprehensible, but also not worth her time" -- and the adventure will begin.

I might die this month. I might stop using all forms of internet communication. I might not respond to comments/facebook posts/emails/tweets/etc. I might write some of the most reprehensible English papers of my career, and fail at getting into grad school because application-writing takes time I don't have. But no matter how low I get, I know one thing: by this time a month from now, I'll have another novel draft in my pocket. With aliens!