Category: personal

Announcement: Now closed for critiques

- Stacy

Given the demands on my time from a number of directions, I am now closing for new critiques indefinitely. I still have several critiques I’m working on that I need to get back to the authors on; if you’re one of those people, I apologize for the wait. You will be hearing from me soon. For anyone with whom I haven’t made a payment arrangement or agreed to do a critique, I apologize that I won’t be able to assist you.

To be able to have the time I need outside of my day job to start Tu Publishing, I need to reserve my evenings after the day job for that, once I finish the critiques that are in the current queue.

If you are local to me in Utah, I plan to recontinue the seminars on writing and publishing that I have done in the past. I’ve meant to schedule another one soon, but I’ve been swamped, and haven’t been able to do so. Seminars use much less of my time than one-on-one critiques, and so I’ll be able to schedule those much more freely in the future.

If you aren’t in Utah and would like me to come to your area for a seminar on writing and publishing, please contact me at stacylwhitman AT gmail.com, and we can discuss the particulars. Generally, you’ll need at least 20-30 people for a general seminar, and 10-15 people for an in-depth seminar.

My sincere thanks to all those authors with whom I’ve had the chance to work one-on-one this last year. I enjoyed reading your work, and I hope that my feedback was useful as you work toward publication.

*big sigh*

- Stacy 2 Comments

All I want to do right now is just play World of Warcraft and watch movies and pig out on food that’s really bad for me, but I’m actually going to go home and get critiques done. This week at work has been pretty scatterbrained. Weird problems kept coming up. Several things keep getting delayed because of weird errors that aren’t the norm. I kept thinking there had to be some easy explanation, some stupid mistake I was making–because it had already happened a couple times, when I would put http:// on an address that didn’t need it and didn’t work because I was doing a secure FTP instead, that kind of thing. Not realizing that I had the disc for the Norton problem I was having, and the associate editor having to ask me where the disc was when he was trying to troubleshoot the problem. Um, whoops. You know how a new job can be a little overwhelming at times!

But it turned out that the other problems that I was running into were actually real problems that the associate editor (who is our really smart all-things-computer guy to ask when it’s not a *huge* computer problem, for which we ask the actual computer guy) couldn’t solve either. I don’t know whether I feel bad about needing his time or justified that the problem was real.

At any rate, it’s been the kind of week that I just want to heave a big sigh that it’s done. Now, on to catching up on critiques for my “other life.” I really need to finish these up–some people have been waiting on me for months, which I feel awful about. Again, thanks for your patience, and I’m going home now, so at least 2 more people should hear from me tonight or tomorrow!

Tidbits–Tu Publishing, book club, critiques update

- Stacy 4 Comments
  • We’re up to almost $1000 on the Kickstarter project for Tu Publishing. Thanks so much to everyone for pledging, and please feel free to share the link with anyone who you think might be interested, even if they can only spare $5. We’re starting this through Kickstarter because it’s secure, run by a third party, and it’s a great way for me to be able to give back to the people who pledge — if you donate $10, you get a coupon for $5 off a book, and so forth. The idea is that if a lot of people pool together, artistic projects can get off the ground more easily. Tu Publishing will be a for-profit company, but we are committed to literacy for all children and young adults and will be getting involved in local and national endeavors as we grow, such as YALSA’s Teen Read Week. (If you have literacy projects to suggest involvement in, especially ones that I can volunteer for here in Utah, please feel free to let me know. I’m on the lookout, and will be getting more involved in the community once I finish up the critiques I’ve got in the queue.) If we reach our Kickstarter goal, and add to it the money from a private investor and some savings of my own, it will be enough to cover the costs of our first season’s books (author advances, small stipends for freelance, printing and shipping costs, and marketing), and it will also show a bank that we are a good investment for a small business loan going forward.
  • Our first two books will be fantasy or science fiction, and I’ll specifically be looking for books that feature characters of color, characters from minority or non-Western cultures, and/or non-Western/minority cultures. That’s pretty broad–it could be Japanese or Jamaican, Alaskan Inuit or African American settings and/or characters, and I’m not looking for books where race is necessarily the issue–just really great stories that will entertain readers from 7 to 18 (and up, if you count me and all you folks like me!). So if you’ve got a children’s or YA novel that you think will fit this criteria, if we make our Kickstarter goal I’ll be acquiring manuscripts beginning January 1. That means you’ve got just over three months to whip that manuscript in shape! I’ll be posting more specifics for our submission guidelines as that time comes closer, so keep an eye on the Tu Publishing Submission Guidelines page. As you can imagine, just as with the critiques, during this transitional period to my day job, these website changes will be coming along sporadically. I’ll post about them here as well to alert you.
  • In addition, several people have asked that instead of giving them the incentive, that I give it to their local libraries, which is completely doable. If we reach the goal, I will be contacting everyone to get their mailing information to send them their rewards. At that time, if you want me to send it to your local library instead of you, all you’d need to do is let me know their address. Full books will be sent later, of course, when the first season’s books are printed.
  • I’m hosting a book club tomorrow, where we’re going to discuss Justine Larbalestier‘s How to Ditch Your Fairy. The book is a fun read so far, but I need to finish it tonight! If you’re local and can’t make it tomorrow, feel free to go ahead and send your suggestions for what to read next month, so that we can have plenty of time to decide and prepare. If you can come tomorrow and need to know where to go (7 pm, my house), please drop me an email and I’ll give you the scoop.
  • The new job is becoming quite fun. In my off time, I’ve slowly been getting back to authors on their critiques, so thanks again to everyone for all your patience as I transition and finish up those critiques while starting a new full-time job. Now, if I can just get health insurance going, life would be just about perfect (it’s a small non-profit based in California that uses Kaiser Permanente, which means that here in Utah I’d have no coverage with that, which means that I have to get an individual policy, which is really, really complicated when you have chronic conditions like asthma). If you’ve been wondering why I twitter so much about health care, it’s because I have a personal interest in the health care crisis, seeing as how I’m having my own personal health care crisis. Hopefully, by my talking about it openly, it will put at least one face on the discussions out there–the face of a self-employed (and now employed by a small nonprofit) worker for whom taking care of something as simple as an asthma condition becomes out of the question due to the cost of health care and insurance.


Day job, change in critiques

- Stacy 2 Comments

Just to let you all know: I have found a day job. Yay for paying the bills! Freelancing is great for many things, especially the flexible schedule, but regular work is hard to come by these days.

It’s not a job with a trade publisher (I’m not going to announce here what it is, to keep those things separate), so it won’t conflict with what I’m doing in my freelance life, but what it does mean for you, however, is that I’ll be much, much slower on critiques. I’m suspending any new critiques for now so that I can catch up on the critiques I already have in the queue. I don’t think I’ll be able to take any new critiques until at least October.

I will also want to keep room open in my schedule for working on the small press (another reason this day job is a godsend–once I start taking submissions for the small press, I will be ethically obligated to discontinue paid critiques, and honestly, I’d rather move forward on having the ability to publish people, rather than just give them advice on how to get other people to publish them! 🙂 ). It’s moving forward–I’m still very much in the pre-startup phase, but I should have something to announce next week, so stay tuned.

For those of you waiting on critiques, as always, thanks for your patience. I’m getting them back to people one by one, and if you haven’t yet heard from me you should soon.

Absentee blogger

- Stacy

I’ve been rather absentee from the blog lately. I’ve been working on a number of things–catching up on critiques (for those waiting, thanks for your patience), finding a day job (paying the bills is a good thing!), apartment hunting and then rearranging my apartment to allow for a roommate, and a few other things. I don’t like to talk much about any of those things in detail on the blog–I have tweeted some about some of them, but not much–so I’ve been quiet here and bordering on inane on Twitter/Facebook.

None of those things have been resolved quite yet, either, so I’m probably going to continue to be quiet here for a while. It’s all I can do to just try to get everything done in a day, and then in the evenings I tend to be watching TV or doing similar things to decompress, which is what I’ve been tweeting about recently.

I did read Catching Fire as one of those decompression activities, though, and perhaps later this week I’ll post a review of it, if I get the time. Hopefully by mid-September things will have settled down a bit and I’ll have some news for you.

Busy is good, but bad hair days are the pits

- Stacy 2 Comments

I’ve been busy finishing an edit for an author, working on a proofread, and getting submission packet critiques back to the authors who have been waiting for them for what probably feels like an inordinate amount of time. If you’re waiting on me for a critique, hopefully I’ll be catching up to you in the queue soon. It’s been so good to have work to be busy with — the bills are actually getting paid this month! If you’re a freelancer, you know what I mean — you start to panic when the workload starts to decrease, because who knows whether it will increase again?

But I’m taking a break this evening. I have a confession: A few nights ago, I got it into my head that if I just trimmed up the little wisps on my hair around my face, I wouldn’t have to dip into my meager funds to pay for a haircut. I mean, I’d rather pay the power bill and have groceries, you know? But the scissors slipped, and I ended up trying to even it out, and… well, awful story short, I think I have given myself a mullet. It’s bad, guys.

So I’m off in a few hours to go have someone fix it — and yes, I’m paying for it, don’t worry. It’s going to probably end up pretty short. Which is *really* scary for me, because short hair on me usually just emphasizes how much weight I’ve gained in my adulthood. I’ve picked out a few pictures off the internet that might work, but those pictures are always of really skinny models and I’m just not sure how they’ll look *on me*, and I want as professional and modern a look as possible.

If you have any ideas for cute short hair, especially medium-length hair that’s relatively short in the front (here’s an example of what I mean by that, or perhaps the one on the right here), by all means, please give me a link in the comments (but do it by 4:30 MST, because I’m heading out to get it all chopped off after that).

Spaces still left for worldbuilding seminar

- Stacy

We still have about 11-15 spaces left for the worldbuilding seminar this Saturday, so if you were thinking  you might come but weren’t sure if there’d still be room for you, be assured that we’ve got plenty of room. If Paypal was the trouble, at this point, just bring your check ($45 for an individual, $35 if you’re in a group of 5 or more) with you to the library, but still be sure to email my intern, Chersti, at cjstapley AT gmail DOT com with your registration information to let her know you’ll be coming.

Hope to see you there, and for those of you not local, I’m still working on the online workshop idea. Last week was rather slow on that end, however, due to a family emergency and my own asthma problems–I’m still waiting to hear how my ten-year-old niece is doing (thank you all for your thoughts and prayers–she’s doing better, and every time they do a test, like taking her off the heart bypass machine, she continues to improve, but we’re still just waiting to hear about a number of tests that I’m not sure that they’ve been able to do yet). I’m trying to get that ox back out of the mire from last week, which means getting several critiques back to people who have been very patient as I’ve been dealing with other things. Thank you all for being so kind and thinking of my niece–between all of my friends, and all of my siblings’ and cousins’ and aunts’ friends, I think there must be thousands of people thinking of her and praying for her. Thanks, everyone.

Ramblings when I should be off reading the Maze Runner ARC or sleeping

- Stacy

Not really much to post about. I had a great time at Conduit seeing friends and talking books. Very nice Schlock Mercenary launch party, for which I dropped in and took some pictures. I’ll be downloading those straight to Sandra, who will probably post them on her LJ or Howard’s blog or both. I’m not terribly satisfied with the pictures–it was pretty dark in that room and I had to use flash, which always flattens the subject–but hopefully the Taylers and Schlock fans will enjoy them.

Went on my first bike ride of the year and it was nice, but I probably should have started with a jaunt closer to home, because while the outbound trip was awesome, I realized just why that was on the way home when the wind hit me squarely in the face. Between the wind (it was pretty blustery), my sore behind from not being in the saddle for six months, and being tired from the ride out, I ended up getting off and walking at least twice. I’m thinking I’ll take a rest day tomorrow and try again on Wednesday, but not try a total of about 7-8 miles round trip. Perhaps 2-3 total for a few days, to get back in the swing of things!

Had my own personal Bones marathon today, watching all the episodes from this season that I’d missed and had been recording on the DVR. Maybe if I clear out the DVR I won’t feel so bad about dropping the cable, which I’m really going to have to do. Also went to a barbecue at a friend’s, and thought about all my family members and others who have served in the military. I come from a long line of farmers, salt of the earth kind of people, and as you can imagine those are the type that tend to get drafted. (I also descend from one draft-dodger, and I’m grateful he did, or I wouldn’t have been born a Whitman, I suppose–he stowed away on a cattle boat to avoid the draft of William the First and Bismarck, the Second Reich that killed off a great number of Prussian peasants, and came to the US, to Illinois, and became my great-great-grandfather.) I have ancestors who served on both sides of the Civil War, including one who was on Sherman’s March to the sea, several vets of the War of 1812 (another reason I’m an Illinoisan–western Illinois was veteran pension land-grant land for War of 1812 vets), vets of several minor skirmishs, two grandfathers and a great-uncle who served in the army and air force, respectively, during WWII, and an uncle who fought in Vietnam.

More recently, I have an uncle who served in the Marines during peacetime (during the 70s) and an uncle who just retired from the Air Force as a navigator a few years ago. That same Uncle Kevin served two or three tours post-September 11th as a translator. My brother and several cousins have served in the reserves wherever needed. I have several friends who have done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and several friends whose husbands are currently or who have been deployed.

I wouldn’t consider my family a “military” family. Far from it. We’re just average working Americans, and each of these people served when they were called to do so, or even just to find a better life through the GI Bill. But it makes me proud of them to know that they served when they were needed, even if they occasionally did so a bit cantankerously. The cantankerousness–that’s just a Whitman family trait. 🙂

Back to real life tomorrow, catching up again on those short pieces I didn’t get to yet last week, and two manuscripts that I have waiting in the queue as well. I’ve got a few other things going on this week that I’m excited about but can’t talk about yet, so when I can, well, I guess I’ll drop the mystery and post it. 🙂 Off to sleep!

The TBR pile

- Stacy 1 Comment

My desk is still groaning under the workload that I’m catching up on (finishing up another manuscript right now, about to send out the editorial letter, then on to more!), so I haven’t had much time to do much else. Hence the reason I haven’t posted in almost a week–not much to report. I’ll have more to report once I catch up and can finish the other things I have waiting for me, which aren’t work so much as kinda-work-related-fun. Such as:

  • Halfway through Bloodhound by Tamora Pierce ([ljuser]tammypierce[/ljuser]). I liked her Alanna series, but I LOVE this latest series in the Tortall world featuring Beka Cooper, one of Alanna’s ancestors. The narration on the audiobook of the first book, Terrier, was just awesome–I’m not sure where the narrator’s accent was from, but it fit the story perfectly. I’m a slow reader in print, though–probably because I do so much reading for work–so I’ve had it for a week and I’m only about halfway through, like I said. But so far, that halfway part is good stuff.
  • ARC of The Maze Runner by James Dashner, which I had a little tiny bit of a hand in, so it’s excited to see the end product. (True story: I wanted it. Couldn’t acquire it for a multitude of reasons, had to say no. A week later, James sold it to Delacourt. Delacourte! [picture me there, fists to the sky, like Stephen Colbert] I’m really glad to see he found an editor who saw the vision of the book and took it probably farther than I could. So far, everything about the book is far and beyond better than what I read in manuscript form. Which it should be! That’s what the editorial process is for.)
  • ARC of I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells. He’s big in Europe. 🙂 Seriously! His first YA thriller came out already in England, though it won’t be published here until next year. The concept: a kid who is a sociopath but is trying not to grow up to become a serial killer. Creepy stuff! I haven’t read this book yet, but I’m excited for Dan, who is a personal friend, and looking forward to the read.
  • ARCs and full books of How to Ditch Your Fairy, Graceling, Skinned, Wintergirls, Skin Hunger, The Thief, Nightmare Academy, Kiki Strike, The Lightning Thief… the list goes on and on. Actually, all in that list were final books–I’m way behind, still, on my reading. I thought going freelance would give me more time for reading, but instead I find that I spend even more time working just to make ends meet, so when I’m done working I just want to do something else! Hence the anime craze lately.

What are you reading lately?

Playing catch-up

- Stacy

The site (at least, I believe) has been back up and running most of the week, but I’ve been swamped and haven’t had a chance to update on anything. Between allergies and some mysterious blah-ness, my health has really been on the outs with me this week, so it has slowed down all of my work. (In fact, I basically just took Tuesday as a sick day and slept all day. I haven’t done that in months. Then on Wednesday I kept thinking it was Tuesday, and I completely lost a day when I realized Wed. night that it was actually Wed. I haven’t really recovered the rest of this week, but I’m pushing through it because I have so much work to do.

So to those of you who are waiting on me to get back to you on a critique: thank you for your patience. I’m slowly catching up. I have two more manuscript critiques to get out the door this week (which, since I lost a day, might push over into Monday), a couple of small critiques to get back to people in the next week, one big edit to finish up next week, and a new project to start when the author gets me the manuscript.

Among all of that–note that these are the projects that are paying the bills right now–I need to get caught up on my Tor submissions as well, for which I’ve had a huge backlog for a few months now. If you gave me something to consider for Tor and haven’t heard from me, it’s because I’m afraid it’s very hard to pay the bills as a freelancer and while those submissions are very, very important to me, it will take some time because I’m juggling essentials like paying the rent and having enough food to eat. Combine that with a few weeks of allergies and suddenly I get even more behind!

But there’s good news! I have finally gotten new insurance, which will allow me to refill my asthma and allergy prescriptions–I have a feeling when I come back from the doctor’s office this afternoon, I will feel like a new woman, with all that breathing and everything. Part of the problem of the last few weeks is that it’s been the worst part of the allergy season (blooming trees) and I had none of my prescription-strength medicines to help me out. As you can imagine, when you’re as allergic to everything as I am, not having the right medicine can leave you in a puddle of wheezy, eye-itching, worn-out, possible-sinus-infection muck. I’ve actually been amazed that I’ve lasted as long as I have.

Here’s to getting caught up!