Welcome to day 1 of the year end best-of blog circus! (Also, welcome to my birthday! Yay!) Up today, my top 5 albums to write to.

(Just a note that the music I love may contain dirty words and subversive ideas. Sorry, kids–when it comes to music, part of me is still a sixteen year old mohawked punk rocker!)

5. Now You Can See by the Thermals

On the surface, Now You Can See sounds like typical indie-punk. But take a closer listen to the lyrics: this is about evolution, the story (either) of a human turning into a sea creature or a race of sea creatures becoming men. There’s a strong sense of  epic history here:

We were born on an island,
we grew out of the sand.
Never saw another creature,
never knew another man.
Yeah baby we were nothing,
we existed for less!
Our present was empty,
our history a mess!

This is great music to write to when you want to mine the same sense of history. Who were your characters “before they could see”?

4. England Keep My Bones by Frank Turner

I first heard Frank Turner on late night television–he was playing his goofy quarter-life crisis anthem “I Won’t Grow Up.” When I picked up his album England Keep My Bones, I got the rousing drinking songs I expected–but I hadn’t anticipated his depth.

This is writing music for days when you have doubts, when you fear you’ve forgotten who you are and where you came from, when you need to be reminded the value of pure effort and moxie.

Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut,
not everyone was born to be a king,
not everyone can be Freddie Mercury,
but everyone can raise their glass and sing.

I may not be the perfect kind of person,
I may not do what mum and dad dreamed,
but on the day I die, I’ll say at least I fucking tried.
That’s the only eulogy I need.

3. On Avery Island by Neutral Milk Hotel

If you’re the least bit of a hipster (I’m a pretty big hipster myself), you’re probably familiar with Neutral Milk Hotel’s seminal In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Aeroplane is a great album, but I prefer to write to their chaotic, raw debut, On Avery Island. There’s something desperately YA about these lyrics–I’m fairly sure it’s about girls who grow up poor and chaste in Louisiana. Or, uh, something.

Threw a nickel in the fountain
To save my soul from all these troubled times
And all the drugs that I don’t have the guts to take
To soothe my mind so I’m always sober
Always aching, always heading towards
Mass suicide, occult figurines . . .

2. Dead Media by Hefner

I love all of Hefner’s music–but Dead Media is what I reach for when I write. Trippy and electronic, it’s a great background soundtrack. And yet it remains just as deliciously character- and story-driven as Hefner’s other albums.

Moving to the west end was a big, big, big mistake
We lost all our money and we got mostly heartache.
Some nights she would sigh, and place her head upon my lap
And she would cry. I couldn’t stop her shaking.

And I said, “Let me let you let me down again,”
She said, “No.”

1. Every Scene Needs Its Center by Tullycraft

I can’t explain my love for Tullycraft.

They’re my favorite band. And this album isn’t just my writing album, but also my dancing album, my making-out album, my afternoon-pick-me-up album. If there’s anything wrong with Every Scene Needs Its Center, it’s that I’m prone to jumping up and dancing like a dork while it’s playing. Makes it hard to reach your daily word count goals, but it sure is fun.

Every song on this album is about loving music, except for that one that’s about aliens. Every song feels like coming home at 2 am from a concert, your hair stinking of someone else’s cigarettes, your throat raw from singing. You’re tired, but you’re so, so happy. Yeah. It’s like that.

An orange glow, some blinking lights.
Don’t know how most folks spend their Friday nights.
Well I’ve seen evidence no one would dare dispute–
Witness accounts make up my life’s pursuit.
And in those photos there’s a sadness
And a message I can feel
Just give me one sign that you’re real.

Please give me one sign that you’re real.

—

Now go check out what all the other writers are rocking to!

Happy Christmas to all you Christians and Santa-lovin’ non-Christians out there! Just popping in for two quick announcements. First, the winner of the sonic probe for my big Doctor Who give away is . . .

Colin!!!!

Congrats, Colin! I’ll be in touch shortly to get your shipping info.

Secondly, I’ll be participating in a Best-of Blog Circus over the next five days, organized by the lovely in and incomparable Sarah Enni! Each day, stop by the following blogs to hear our favorites in writing music, YA novels, and more:

I recently had a short story, “Elsie and the Wild Boys,” accepted by the Young Adult Review Network. Hooray!

No word on the run-date yet, as I’m still working with one of their editors getting the story into tiptop shape. But I thought it might be interesting to share my submission statistics for this story. I know I always find such information interesting, at least.

I wrote “Elsie . . .” in 2009, shortly after my graduation from MFA@FLA. It was the second short-form fiction piece I wrote in that summer, as a sort of warm-up to a novel I was gestating (which has been, and shall remain, trunked). I’d been reading a lot of Kelly Link at the time, and so her influence was definitely there. Also a lot of Cat Rambo-era Fantasy Magazine. Those influences are pretty obvious to me in the story, though it’s different, of course. It’s more like contemporary fantasy than magical realism. I think. Maybe.

Anyway.

In those days, I had trouble Writing Short, so its final wordcount was somewhere around 6,000 words–making it too long for many markets. But as time passed, and several kind editors sent me feedback, I whittled it down, clarified. It original opened with a long, somewhat cliche dinner scene, which my mother (a harsh critic!) called “boring” and “obnoxious.” So that got cut about a year ago. In its final form, it’s likely to come in right around 4,500 words. Less is more, sometimes.

Here are the stats:

• Fantasy Magazine (no submission date recorded) – 9/8/09 personal R
• GUD (no submission date recorded) - 9/25/09 personal R
• IGMS (no submission date recorded) - 11/16/09 form R
• Abyss & Apex (no submission date recorded) - 1/10/10 form R
• Weird Tales (no submission date recorded) - 8/23/10 form R
• Ideomancer (no submission date recorded) -  9/11/10 personal R
• Subterranean Press 9/12/10 – 11/19/10 personal R
• Shimmer 11/20/10 – 12/5/10  personal, second-pass R
• Electric Spec 12/6/10 – 2/2/11 personal, second-pass R
• Fantastique Unfettered 2/2/11 –  2/20/11 form R
• Not One of Us 2/20/11 –  3/12/11 form R
• Scapezine 3/12/11 – 6/14/11 personal, second-pass R
• Clarkesworld 7/25/11 – 7/29/11 form R
• Apex 8/14/11 – 9/1/11 form R
• YARN 9/1/11 – ACCEPTED!! 9/26

(Format’s pretty much right out of my spreadsheet, except that’s all in pretty colors.)

So as you can see, that’s a pretty long path toward publication, even for a single short story. I don’t begrudge any of the editors or readers of these fine magazines for passing on my story, of course. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. This also wasn’t my first shot at submitting to YARN; they rejected another story of mine, but invited me to send another. Good things, I think, come from persistence.

In case you were wondering, I’m still hard at work on revisions for agent Michelle. At some point, hopefully soon, I won’t be–though I won’t say anything when that happens and we go on sub. Mum’s the word, and all that. But for now, she’s still helping me nudge my book into shape.

When we had our first phone call, she asked if I thought I was done revising. I think that every author hopes–on every draft!–that this version is the final version. And Daughter of Earth had been revised more than any book I’d written previously. The changes came about in a large part because of my now-defunct critique group, but more importantly, my change in attitude toward revision came through my online friendship with fellow YA sci-fi writer Sean Wills. Sean had an unspeakably good attitude toward feedback. He seemed to take it all in easy-going stride. I asked him about it one day, and he told me how he thought praise was useless. He wanted to write great stories, right? Only accepting criticism  in good stride would help him do that–not reacting defensively or in a proprietary way about his words. After our conversation, I began to shift my ego away from me, and my vision, to the book that was in front of me. No matter what happened with my career, I wanted my stories to be strong. I wanted them to stand up to critics who are just as tough as I am, if not tougher. And you can’t really do that alone, or in one fell swoop. You need time, and you need help.

So Michelle and I started revising.

I won’t deny that I’m impatient, or that I whine to my husband about how, ugh, revision hurts! I find it far more difficult and far more boring than writing. Writing I can handle–spewing out rivers of words. Revising is more delicate, more painstaking–but I’m starting to think it’s more important, too.

It’s been fascinating to see how my book has changed. Or . . . not changed really; that’s not quite the right word. But first my critique group, and now Michelle, have been able to see the latent promise in those earlier drafts. They’ve teased out meaning and nuance and plot twists based on little more than innuendo and gaps in my own flawed thinking. Daughter of Earth started simply, a long time ago. It had its genesis in a short story I wrote back in graduate school for a class on James Joyce. It was a pastiche of “Eveline” set on a generation ship (which will be published in March of 2012 in Aoife’s Kiss–makes me feel better about the B it netted in class!). The very skeleton of the story was there: abusive father, absent siblings, dead mother, ship in orbit, a closed society, a choice to be made. All of these things were present in my very first draft–Terra, on a spaceship then called the Maya, grieves the loss of her mother and then must decide if she’ll join up in a shipboard rebellion. But each subsequent revision has cast these plot elements into doubt, or given them nuance, depth. The story is now one of Judaism in deep-space diaspora; there are several twists. It’s more epic than I ever dreamed of, really. But the raw material for this story was there even way back in 2008, before I’d ever considered turning it into a book.

And I love it–I really love it. I have more affection for Terra than any protagonist I’ve ever written, and more of a sense of the Asherah than any setting I’ve ever visited before. Sometimes I feel like the books I was writing before were rushed, more vehicles for a career than passions. This book–this is a passion.

And damn it, I want to do it right.