A time to reckon, I guess

These were my goals this time last year

1) Complete my first two freelance museum gigs.

I did. Both well enough to get rehired [g].

2) Find more potential clients and land more gigs.

I found one more new client, which I've been working steadily for since April, plus, as I said, rehired by both my old clients, although one has since gone dormant till spring for lack of funds.

3) Go to more museum workshops and a conference, and continue Heritage League committee work.

I've been to two workshops and taken two classes, but I didn't make it to any conferences. The HL committee I was on finished its work in September, but I've been asked to be on the board, and probably will.

4) Write the mystery house rough draft.

Well, no. I've been working on the Yellowstone trilogy, though, and I will get back to it after I'm done with it.

5) Revise Sojourn, last year's NaNo book.

Again, no, because of the Yellowstone trilogy. It's in the pipeline, though.

6) Figure out what I'm going to do about the rest of the Yellowstone trilogy (which may end up as a duology), and get back to work on it.

I did figure it out, and what I did was do one more edit on Repeating History, create a cover, and format it for Amazon and Smashwords. I self-published it in early August, and it's been selling a steady trickle of copies ever since.
And, no, the Yellowstone trilogy is not going to be a duology. True Gold, the second book, has an almost complete rough draft, and I have begun revisions.

7) Finish piecing the Imbolc Flame quilt, and finish quilting the Yule Log Cabin quilt. Maybe start a nice, simple throw of animal fabrics and the animal cross-stitch patterns I did last summer.

The Imbolc Flame quilt is pieced. I haven't layered it yet, but I'll get there. The Yule Log Cabin, well... It's the disaster I finally ended up giving away partly quilted. First time I've ever done that with a quilt. The throw has just started to materialize (sorry, bad pun). I started piecing on it last week. I've also created several quilted pillows and am almost finished quilting a baby quilt for the great-nibling due in April.

8) Find some good 6" square flower cross-stitch patterns for my Beltane quilt and begin stitching them.

I've stitched half a dozen of them, but I got sidetracked with some other projects, including a cross-stitched pillow. The Beltane quilt will happen. Eventually.

9) Go to Crater Lake, Yosemite, and WorldCon in Reno in August with my friend M.

We went, we had a great time [g].

10) Do more research on Washington history -- find some more good stuff for my writing.

I did some, but I got kind of sidetracked researching True Gold.

11) Blog regularly.

Weell... Regularly, but not nearly as often as I would have liked.

And now this year's goals

1) Complete the new museum exhibit by the end of February, and keep getting rehired to continue the textile collection work.

2) Pursue more collections work as opposed to exhibits work. Only sign with the dormant client if they have sufficient funds to finish what they hire me to do and a concrete objective for that work. Sign a contract with at least one new client.

3) Join the Heritage League board. Take a Photoshop class. Pursue other career educational opportunities including the Washington Museum Association conference, in Seattle this year.

4) Finish True Gold and self publish it by the first of June.

5) Write Finding Home (the third book in the Yellowstone trilogy) and self-publish it, hopefully by the end of the year.

6) Learn better book marketing skills and put them into practice.

7) Redecorate the living room. My living room has had a lighthouse theme for the last twenty years, and it's time for a change. I have picked out some cross-stitch patterns and quilt fabrics with North American wild animals on them, so it's a start.

8) Finish the baby quilt. Finish the animal sofa throw. Make a new table runner for the sofa table. Layer the Imbolc Flame quilt and start quilting it.

9) Make new cross-stitch pictures for the living room. I have eight picked out. We'll see how many I can finish this year.

10) Make my first long car trip alone in five years [sigh]. The plan is to take off for two or three weeks in June and drive east. Maybe a night or two in Yellowstone to scatter bookmarks, but I want to go farther east than that, maybe as far as Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. I also want to visit some of the historic sites like Fort Benton.

11) Get the garden cleaned up.

12) Blog more frequently.

So, what are your goals for 2012?

Success, success, I did it, I did it!

By the skin of my teeth. It is 9:08 pm on Wednesday, November 30th, and I just wrote:



Ta-da! I'd rather have wine, but the little guy can have his beer. He's been working hard, too [g].

2404 words on Monday the 28th.
2242 words yesterday, Tuesday the 29th, and
a whopping 2950 words today!

So I have won NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row.

I only have what I think is half to two-thirds of a rough draft at this point, but I will have a completed rough draft by the end of the year if it's the last thing I do [g].

And now I am going to bed. Phew!

progress, and an interesting Yellowstone link

I've been head down in NaNoWriMo, so haven't been blogging properly, but I do want to report that I'm up to over 23,000 words on True Gold, the sequel to Repeating History.

And here's an interesting link to a series of photos made by NASA about the recovery from the 1988 fires in Yellowstone.  I hope you find them as fascinating as I did.

I love the Internet

Actually, what I love is the Open Library, which very politely digitized one of the early "no, we've never been there, but there's a big market for it" guides to the Klondike gold fields, published in 1897.  And made it free on the web. 

There's something just so incredibly civilized about being able to access an otherwise almost impossible to get hold of book by clicking a mouse a few times.

Also, I have written over 8000 words since November 1st.  We're still on the decrepit steamship, less than a day out of Skagway, and Our Heroine has already had more adventures (well, she is a long time ago and a fair distance away) than is good for her.

And it is officially Day 1

Of NaNoWriMo, that is.  2043 words on True Gold, the sequel of sorts to Repeating History, which is about a young woman caught up in the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s.  I will be posting word counts, commentary, and occasional snippets at my NaNo LiveJournal account (sojourn_town).  These posts will be friendslocked, which means that if you wish to read those entries, you will need to have either an OpenID account or a LiveJournal account, and you will need to "friend" me at LiveJournal, at which point I will happily friend you back as long as I know who you are (comment here as well, with your ID, so that I do). 

I'm sorry to make it so difficult, but I don't want to be posting even just snippets of the draft out where anyone can find them.

That said, if you are interested, and you do jump the hoops, I hope to make it worth your while...

plotting

I have finally restarted work on True Gold, a sequel of sorts  to Repeating History (one of the main characters is the son of the hero of RH, and the book takes place twenty years later).  Things sort of came to a grinding halt earlier this year, but I'm trying something new to me.  Plotting has always been my bête noire.  I love character development, world-building (or, in my case, historical research), writing dialog and description and all the other goodies that go with writing fiction, but unfortunately none of them are any good whatsoever without a plot. 

In the past I've used the process outlined in John Vorhaus's wonderful but grossly-misnamed book, The Comic Toolbox, and it's been a great help, but it just wasn't working this time around.  I had run across Holly Lisle's website a couple of years ago and had read some of her articles on writing.  So when I was casting about for something to help me get past the plotting beast this time, I ran across Holly's website in my lengthy list of links to writing websites, and discovered her Create a Plot Clinic ebook.  What the heck, I thought, it's only $10.  So I downloaded it and read it.

I appear to be getting somewhere now, so it was obviously a case of Right Book Right Time.  I've never outlined a book before -- I've always been a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person (what the romance writing community affectionately calls a "pantser").  But since that wasn't working this time, well, heck, I'm always open to trying something new.

I'm beginning to hope to have the outline finished by Halloween, just in time to take advantage of the worldwide cheerleading gang that is NaNoWriMo.  And to have the entire draft finished by the end of the year.

Eep.  Did I just say that?  Granted, I've got large chunks of manuscript from the failed drafts that I can use (just because it failed as a whole does not mean there aren't some -- or many -- individual scenes that will work just fine), but still.  I think I just heard myself committing to getting the whole thing straightened out by the end of the year.  Publicly (for whatever values of publicly the couple of dozen readers of this blog consists of [g]).

Oh, well.  As a college friend of mine used to say many years ago, "'S good for you.  Builds character."  I certainly hope it does...

today

Is the 51st anniversary of a day that changed my life.  Although it didn't actually do the changing until eleven years ago...

The Hebgen Lake earthquake was the largest earthquake ever to hit Montana.  It struck just west of Yellowstone National Park, and changed the landscape of the park forever.

It also was part of the inspiration for a trilogy of books I've been writing on ever since.  I don't know why I combined it with Grand Geyser to make a time travel device, but that's the way my brain works.

I don't mean to trivialize the devastation this quake caused -- it killed 28 people and caused over $11 million in damage in 1959 dollars, which was a terrible thing.

But my fictional hero learned to bless it for the changes it caused in his life.  And I have to say I appreciate the inspiration it has provided in mine.

starting again

Now that I'm back from Yellowstone, and my last day of classes in the museum studies program is this coming Saturday, it's time to start some new projects.

First, I am now officially job-hunting in the museum field.  My resumé is here, and if you know of any openings for anything in the museum world within commuting distance of Tacoma, Washington, I would be grateful if you'd comment here.  Or email me.  Or phone me.  Or send me a carrier pigeon [g].  I am primarily looking for a position where I can work with collections, but I know since I'm being choosy geographically that I'll be lucky to find a position in the museum world, period.  I'm also M.M. Justus on LinkedIn, although I haven't done much with that yet.  Another thing to work on.

On a completely different note, I am this close to done with the half of the True Gold that takes place in the Klondike.  When I finish it, hopefully by the end of June, I will be starting on the other half of the book, which takes place back in Yellowstone and Helena, Montana, the settings of Repeating History, with a completely different point of view character.  When I have finished that half, I will be putting the two stories together in alternating chapters, and weaving them together at the end.  It's going to be complicated.  Wish me luck.

And on one last again completely different note, I have finally started piecing the new quilt that's been in the planning stages for a very long time.  It is a Storm at Sea pattern, but I am doing it in flame colors, and with an unusual color arrangement, mostly to avoid needing "light red," otherwise known as pink, which is not a flame color.  This is what, with any luck, it will look like someday:

As of today, these are the nine blocks I've got pieced, but not sewn to each other yet:

Everything about this quilt so far has been a challenge.  Flame colors are completely outside my normal fabric palette.  Working around the pink issue brought me to a halt for quite some time.  The color configuration makes me think I've lost my mind (there are over twenty colorways of each of the three blocks in this quilt).  So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that figuring out how to piece it has been a challenge, to say the least.  I had my brain set on doing it in a way that does not work (geometry and I have been known to have knockdown dragout fights occasionally), and I had to convince myself that, yes, I can still do templates as opposed to rotary cutting, and be taught by some ladies on one of my online quilt communities that plenty of starch will help keep bias edges from stretching (I hate bias edges with a purple passion).  All of which I have done.  Now, at last, I'm on my way.  I've got a long way to go, but that's okay, too.

So, what new beginnings have you got going these days?

Coloring all the way to the edge of the page

The hats are finished!  As of last Friday, I have labeled and photographed all 148 hats, and stored them in acid-free tissue in aluminum-foil lined boxes.  As in most small historical museums, money is short, and they can't afford archival boxes for them right now.  Hence the aluminum foil, which is supposed to be helpful to keep the acid in the boxes from damaging the hats.  I felt like I was protecting the hats from aliens.  There are a few loose ends to tie up -- some of the hat boxes are antiques themselves, and I want to accession and catalog them, too, and I need to do some minor rearranging so that everything is in as chronological an order as I can make it, but it's done.  Except for entering them into PastPerfect, the museum's cataloging software.  I don't know whether I'm to be allowed to do that, though.  We'll see.

Just in time, too.  Between my supervisor's trip to California next week and my upcoming trip to Yellowstone, I won't be back at the Meeker Mansion again for several weeks. 

Dorothy's part of True Gold is coming along as well.  I'm about two-thirds of the way done with that half of the book, which will eventually consist of chapters that alternate between Dorothy's point of view from the middle of the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush, and the point of view of Emma (the heroine of Repeating History, which took place twenty years earlier) back home in Yellowstone and Montana.  How it all ties together is something that will happen at the very end.  In the interest of historical accuracy and a good rich texture for her story I've been researching the Klondike Gold Rush for some months now, and I am very fortunate in that some of the largest collections of material on the gold rush (as well as a national historic site dedicated to Seattle's role as a major jumping off point) are located within commuting distance of my home.

Which brings me to the title of this post.  And not just in a historical research sense, but in a world-building in general sense.  A couple of things have been pushing me to think about this.  One was a PBS airing of a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet this past week, with David Tennant (the 10th Doctor Who, for those who might recognize him) as Hamlet.  He was fabulous.  No arguments there.  But the production itself, which was in modern dress and rather minimal, felt like a brand-new child's coloring book.  As if very few of the possibilities inherent in the play had been taken advantage of, both in the setting and in the way it was cut, or of the hints and suggestions Shakespeare left in the text when he wrote it. 

Now, I admit to being a fan of Branagh's film from fourteen years ago, which can, with a perfectly straight face, be accused of going over the top and down the other side in places.  But it was rich and full and textured, and not just in the costumes and setting.  Tennant almost seemed to be shortchanged -- his performance outclassed the rest of the production (yes, even Patrick Stewart's Claudius, in my humble opinion).  It left me wishing for more. 

The other thing was attending my very first Civil War re-enactment on Saturday.  No, there were no actual Civil War battles in Washington state [g].  This was a re-enactment of one of the major battles of the war.  I was told First Bull Run/Manassas, although it didn't jibe with what I remembered from studying the war, which admittedly was a very long time ago.  It was fascinating to watch, and it was obvious from the -- does one call it a performance? -- that the re-enactors had gone to a great deal of trouble to get the details right, to color all the way to the edge of the page.  If it didn't feel that way, it wasn't for lack of trying, it was for lack of numbers and the obvious artificiality of re-enacting a battle 3000 miles from where the actual battle took place. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are a lot of reasons for something not to feel finished.  Some of them are in the artist's control and some of them aren't.  But it's important, for all kinds of creative endeavors, to make the best attempt to color all the way to the edge of the page.  To make the creation feel rich and full and satisfying.

The way nature does.  And here, as an example, is the first bearded iris of the year in my garden.  Iris are my alltime favorite flower, and I think it's at least partly because they're rich and full and maybe even over the top and coming down the other side.  Nobody will ever accuse an iris of not coloring all the way to the edge.  And then some.

We're all doing it wrong, and that's okay.

Or maybe we're not.  I wish I knew how to say this better than Ursula V. does, but I don't. 

And so this is going to be one of the shortest posts of my blogging career.  Because she said it so much better than I ever could.

On the other hand, I could tell you about the last day of winter quarter of museum school on Saturday, where I learned more about exhibits from a curator's point of view in the morning, and got to see what everyone else's exhibits projects were about in the afternoon.  Everything from the history of perfume to ancient ships rescued from the bottom of Davy Jones's locker.  Fascinating stuff, and I wanted to see them all as real exhibits, not just words, diagrams, and pictures in notebooks. 

Or I could tell you about how I spent four hours today continuing to unwrap and reconnoiter hats.  Six boxes worth today, twenty-odd hats -- and some of them were very odd indeed.  I was especially enamored of the little straw newsboy cap with the feather/ribbon hybrid accent.  And the ~110-year-old top hat.  Then there was the bright red sort of turban with the clusters of inch-long wooden cherries strewn all over the brim (turbans don't have brims, but, well).  And the black velvet toque with what looked like beaded bulls-eyes scattered over it.  

People wore some very strange things on their heads in the olden days.

I am very close to halfway on the Klondike half of the rough draft of what I hope will become the sequel to Repeating History (the book, not the blog).  Half the book takes place in the Yukon.  The other half takes place back in Yellowstone.  No, this structure is not what I would have preferred.  It seems to be working, however.

Oh, and here, have a view of my front garden.  It's actually beginning to look like spring.  The snail's name is Alistair.

And so now maybe this post isn't quite a short as I thought it was going to be.

So we are doing it right.  Go read Ursula's post, anyway.

The things I never wanted to learn about

But that my characters insisted upon.

No, I’m not one of those writers who insist that characters take on lives of their own. I realize that if they do live at all, they live inside my head, with all the limitations that implies, including my personal knowledge base and what I’ve always thought must be the limits to my creativity. Just because it feels like my characters have taken off into left field doesn’t mean that it wasn’t me doing that to them.

Or so I keep trying to tell myself.

But if that’s the case, then how did I end up learning about 1950s motorcycles, gunshot wounds and gangrene, and childbirth in a cabin on Bonanza Creek in the Klondike in 1898? Not to mention the care of a newborn then and there. It certainly wasn’t because I felt the need to on my own account.

Admittedly, some topics my characters have needed to know about have been fascinating. 19th century eyeglasses, various horse mechanics and equipment, how bricks are made, the early scientific research on geysers and how it was conducted. Courting in the 1870s. And the resulting marriages. The history of photography. Early tourist services in Yellowstone National Park and the people who ran them. The Nez Perce Indians. The process of mining gold in the frozen Klondike. Then there’s the whole basic food and clothing and shelter business at various times in various places, by various kinds of people, which is always interesting.

But I don’t care much for motorcycles, thank you. And while I respect the many, many women who went through childbirth in various primitive conditions, I really didn’t want to know the gory details. Most of all, I seriously did not enjoy learning how to realistically kill one of my characters via gangrene resulting from a gunshot wound to the hip in 1877. But I did, and I hope I did a reasonable job of it, even if judging from the way it turned out it was pretty darned painful. More than even that character deserved.

So, what good stuff, and bad stuff, have your characters insisted that you learn about recently?