Theodora Goss

I’m traveling more and more. In February I was at Boskone, which was a very short trip, just to the other side of Boston. In April, I was in Orlando for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. And last weekend I was in Arkansas for the Arkansas Literary Festival, which by the way was wonderful. I was even on television! I appeared on Today’s THV, a morning show on Channel 11 in Little Rock, Arkansas. You can see the segment here: “Reading Up a Storm at Arkansas Literary Festival.”

The thing about traveling, for me, is that it’s exhausting. And sometimes I feel as though I don’t do it very well, particularly when I’m traveling a lot. I don’t eat well, or get enough exercise, or get anywhere near enough sleep. But this time, I decided that I was going to create some rules for myself that would make traveling easier and healthier. I’ve got a couple of rules already.

1. Sleep when you can. You really do need to sleep whenever you can, and that includes on airplanes. I slept most of the way home today. (I took four planes in three days: two there, two back. Boston, Chicago, Little Rock, Chicago, Boston.) You should never hesitate to take a nap in the middle of the day. It’s very difficult, when you’re doing these sorts of events, to get enough sleep. Sometimes you’re at a cocktail party at night, and then you’re on television early the next morning. And you want to do all that, it’s important to do, it’s why you’re there. But when you can sleep, do. And don’t be afraid to miss events. On the last night, I missed two events I had originally intended to make, but I knew that if I went, I would be out late socializing. And I had a plane to catch the next morning.

2. Eat small meals frequently. First of all, you’re going to get small meals. You’re going to get crackers and cheese at a cocktail party. Or a free continental breakfast at the hotel. Travel is expensive, and you want to take advantage of all the free meals you can. You also want to try all the foods you don’t usually get to. In Little Rock, for example, I had a chai frozen popsicle covered with chocolate. It was very good, and not something I’ve ever had before. The trick is never to eat too much at once, and to eat at frequent intervals so that you’re never either full or hungry. You’re going to be so busy that you need constant energy, and small meals are best for that.

3. Bring short-sleeved shirts and sweaters. I inevitably find that I’m hot outside and cold (often painfully cold) inside. Planes are cold, hotels are cold, anywhere conferences are held are usually air conditioned. So I find that I need to be ready for both the heat and the cold. The best way to do that, for me, is to bring short-sleeved shirts to wear underneath and sweaters to wear over them. I also find it very useful to bring scarves. They fit into small spaces, and yet they can add color to basic black clothes and warmth when you’re cold even in a sweater. Otherwise, I travel in jeans. Jeans and black skirts of various lengths will take you through most events you need to attend, as a writer.

So those are some of my travel basics. It’s very hard to stay healthy, physically and mentally, when you’re naturally an introvert and you have an intense travel schedule that involves meeting a lot of people. The more travel tricks you learn, the easier it is . . .

(Oh, one last trick. Never try to read anything serious on an airplane. You may have the best of intentions, but you will inevitably give up. Trust me. Magazines and murder mysteries are best.)

Yesterday, I asked a question on my Facebook page:

“How do you all find time to write? Seriously, I’m starting to wonder how people do it. I know you’re supposed to make time, but out of what, thin air? It’s frustrating . . .”

I got some wonderful comments about how to find time, and some that recommended things I was already doing: for example, I don’t watch much television anyway. But reading through them, I realized that the real problem wasn’t time. It was energy.

The real question is, how do you find the energy to write? Because honestly, some days I can’t even write a blog post. Part of it is my schedule: I teach four writing classes, and I have a two-hour commute to the university. Those two things by themselves take an enormous amount of time, but they take even more energy. At the end of a working day, I often just want to lie in bed, under a warm blanket, and do nothing. I’ve spent the entire day interacting with people, solving problems, dealing with whatever issues come up, and I’m exhausted. Perhaps I’m different from other writers in this way, but I need a clear head to write. I need energy.

You’ve seen “Blanchefleur,” right? Well, that’s my first draft. And while I don’t want to praise my own writing, that’s the way it comes out: what I type up, for a short story at least, is usually close to a final draft. But when I write, I’m never sitting there, idly scribbling. It always takes my complete focus. An hour or two of writing can be exhausting, although at the same time it can also be exhilarating enough that I continue on, sometimes beyond the point where I’m about ready to fall over.

So I think the real solution isn’t to find more time, but to change my life so that I have more energy to write. That partly involves making sure I’m doing writing that pays, so I can justify not taking on other paying work and focusing on the writing. That means writing novels, and I’m certainly going to focus on novel writing next.

So here’s the plan. (You knew there was going to be a plan, right? I am an inveterate maker of plans. And, often, those plans work.)

The plan is to get through the semester and then finish the novel over the summer. That will mean a lot of work, a lot of writing, all over the world since I’m going to be traveling. But I’m looking forward to it. I know my characters, I know quite a bit of the story I want to tell, and I’m looking forward to that sense of full immersion I get when I’m really going, when I’m living in the world I’ve created.

I want to spend time with my girl monsters.

The visual I’m going to give you tonight is Sarah Bernhardt:

Why am I giving you Sarah Berhardt? Because in a way, she identified herself as a girl monsters long before Lady Gaga came along. She slept in a coffin and she sculpted an inkwell with an image of herself as a gargoyle. That takes guts.

I have an enormous amount of respect for Sarah Bernhardt. Maybe I’ll write her into my novel, somehow . . .

The problem, of course, is that I’m exhausted.

It’s been building up for weeks and weeks. Well, at least the last two weeks. And when I’m exhausted, I don’t have the energy to write. I just do what I have to, which at this point is work. I’m struggling even to keep up with the writing work: I have stories and interviews I owe people.

I keep trying to answer emails, but I get almost a hundred a day.

And of course, since I’m so tired, I’m not exercising or eating as well as I should be.

I think I’m just really struggling right now. Once the semester is over, I should be able to get my life cleaned up, get back on a better track. Because I simply can’t keep doing this.

The PhD is over, right? Things were supposed to get better. But I think that once the PhD ended, all the things I’d been putting off suddenly started to happen – especially all the writing things. I literally can’t even keep up with the requests for reprints and translation rights. And there’s a special project I’m supposed to be working on that is going so much more slowly than I would like. And sometimes daily life is just a mess. (I totally forgot about Easter, and had to run around tonight buying Easter things for Ophelia, and spent way too much money – as one does, trying to do anything at the last minute.)

I’m afraid this blog post is all complaints. Well, so be it.

Today, I actually slept most of the day, because I was so exhausted from the week. Here I am, at around two in the afternoon, in the bathroom mirror. I have not yet brushed my hair. Sad, isn’t it?

This may be a strange post for me to write, considering that I’ve been posting images from the photoshoot I did down in Florida. Those images are explicitly fantastical. They’re meant to be.

They’re fantastical representations of a fantasy writer, and I had a lot of fun doing them.

But something happens when you’re a writer, and you write fantasy, and you have an online presence. In some ways, you start to become a fantasy. You’re no longer the person you actually are. People imagine you in different ways, often as slightly larger than life, more magical. And that can become difficult, when they realize that you’re only human after all.

A human being trying to do magical things, which takes work and time and effort.

The thing about being a writer, even a fantasy writer, is that you have to have a very firm grasp on reality. You have to understand how the world works, what motivates people, how they sometimes fool even themselves. You have to have the magic inside you, which is a kind of sensitivity to the world as well as to language. That’s how you make it happen.

Writers like to spend time together because they understand one another, in ways other people sometimes don’t understand them. They know that everything in their books was once inside them, and that it took tremendous effort to bring it out. That the magic happens inside and on the page. That when people expect them to be fantastical creatures, they’re locating the magic in the wrong place. When writers get together, what do they talk about? All the dull, technical things they would talk about if they were in any other profession. Who has a new agent. What’s up for an award. Advances.

When they get together, writers are as mundane as plumbers. The magic happens inside, and for the most part we don’t talk about it. Except as craft, in workshops. (But it’s magic nevertheless.)

We are human, so when people want us to be fantastical creatures, I think we try to look the part. Fantasy writers tend to be photographed in fantastical ways. Look at photographs of Catherynne Valente sometime, or China Miéville. At some level, we start to look like characters from our own stories. This could be an older version of Thea Graves, for example. (When I write about her going to the Shadowlands, she’s just out of college. She’s not quite this sophisticated yet.)

(This is of course a picture of me from the photoshoot.)

But of course we’re not characters, but the ones who create characters. The music makers and dreamers of dreams. And that means we get up in the morning, in our pajamas, and eat a bowl of oatmeal, and sit down in front of the computer, and check to see what we wrote the previous day, and how good (or bad) it is. And then we take a shower, thinking about the writing for that day. And then we sit down in front of the computer again. For hours and hours and hours.

The magic happens inside. And hopefully on the page.

Please excuse the appearance of this website. I’m in the process of updating certain things, including the general look of the site. It will probably be changing over the next few days. I want to make it more contemporary. And I’m going to be using images from the photoshoot I did with Walker1812 Photography. I’ll write a bit about that today.

Here, by the way, is the author photo that came out of that shoot:

What do you think? I like it a lot, of course, although it makes me look more glamorous than the typical author headshot. But there’s nothing wrong with glamor, is there? What I particularly like about it is that a lot of personality comes through. That’s what I’m like, minus some of the glamor. Looking at the world in that sidelong way, as though it’s somewhat, but not entirely, amusing.

So what is a photoshoot actually like? First thing that morning, I met the photographer. I was wearing no makeup, just SPF 30 because of the Florida sun. When we arrived at the location, I went directly to makeup. That was a fascinating process. I always assumed that the makeup used on photoshoots and in movies is fundamentally different from the makeup we use every day, and I was right. Oh, the makeup itself is the same (Mac, in this case), but it’s applied differently. By the end of the process, I looked as though I had been photoshopped. In the photograph above, my face doesn’t look all that different than it did in the original shot, although of course the photographer performed his post-shoot magic on it. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a perfect complexion.

And then there were five hours of taking photos in different settings and positions, with three costume changes. What you won’t see in any of the photographs is the assistant who dragged the boat around in the water. There were times when I couldn’t sit up by myself (after lying in the boat for an hour with my head propped on the wooden side, for instance). There was also a behind the scenes video being shot at the same time, which I’ll show you once it’s done.

I think I learned a lot from the process. I definitely learned, a bit late because I didn’t see the photos until after they were uploaded onto the computer, how I should stand, how I should turn my head – what works and what doesn’t. I learned about my own angles. That will be useful if I ever do a photoshoot again. If I do, I will focus more on telling stories. In the end, the photographs I liked best were the ones that told stories, either through action or through a facial expression. Even reaching out to touch a branch, or looking behind me, could be a story. In the end, I want images to make me think and feel, in the same way I want prose to make me think and feel.

That’s what I like about the woman in the headshot above. You can see her – me – thinking. What is she thinking? Ah, that you’ll have to tell me . . .

I’m going to try to do a proper ICFA post. (ICFA, for those of you who don’t know, is the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.) That’s where I was last weekend, and it was absolutely lovely. But honestly, I don’t have the energy tonight, and I’m in the difficult position of typing on an external monitor. My computer monitor broke and the part hasn’t come in yet, so I’m waiting. Sometimes my monitor works, sometimes it doesn’t, and working on an external monitor makes typing anything difficult, even though I’m a fairly competent touch typist.

I haven’t been updating a lot, and there are a couple of reasons. One is sheer exhaustion. One is the problem with the computer monitor. One is the workload I’m dealing with right now. Sometimes, it’s just all overwhelming, and the problem isn’t so much that I can’t find the time to type 500 words; it’s that I can’t think of 500 words to type. The internal peace that would allow me to write eludes me. That goes for actual writing as well, not just blog posts.

Which makes me wonder if I should write my story here, kill two birds with one stone as it were, although I would never hurl stones at birds. What do you think? The one I’m working on right now is called “The White Cat,” and I could do a first draft here. It’s a thought . . .

So last weekend I was in Orlando, Florida, at ICFA. On the first day, I had dinner with Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, which included a long talk with Nancy Hightower. Then I had a panel on monsters and some socializing to do. Finally, I had a long talk with my roommate, Karen Meisner. We hadn’t seen each other forever, and it was lovely to catch up.

The next day I wasn’t at the convention at all, because I had a photoshoot with Jesse Walker of Walker1812 Photography, which deserves a post of its own. (And yes, I will be posting pictures. If you want to see the first ones, go ahead and friend me on Facebook, where I’ve posted a few.)

The final day of the banquet, I did a reading with Karen Lord and Steven Erikson. I read my story “Beautiful Boys,” which is coming out in Asimov’s Science Fiction sometime in late summer or early fall. Then it was time to change for the banquet. I’ll post a picture of my ball gown in the next few days, but in the meantime, here is another picture you might like. James Patrick Kelly took this fabulous photo of me with Kat Howard and Maria Davanah Headley. We were being Charlie’s Angels. (Isn’t it obvious?)

And that’s it for tonight. Working with the external monitor, it’s taken me an hour to write almost 500 words, and there’s something exhausting about trying to write this way. But in the next few days, I’ll try to update you on everything that’s been going on in my writing life. (Not enough writing, of course.)

And I’ll think about whether I should post that story . . .

A friend of mine posted a video of the Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton fall 2012 ready to wear collection shown during Paris Fashion Week. I don’t usually pay much attention to fashion shows unless they’re by houses I like, such as Alexander McQueen. But this show was particularly wonderful. Watch it for yourself.

There’s some Downton Abbey in there, in the Edwardian lines of the coats and dresses. There’s some Alice in Wonderful, in the hats that look like mushrooms. And there’s quite a lot of steampunk. That’s what we need in fashion, I think. Interesting lines, interesting silhouettes. Fashion seems to be stuck in a sort of rut, and this is a way forward (also a way backward, but then aren’t ways forward also that as well?). And the clothes are coming out in about six months. I wonder what they will look like, how closely they will resemble what we saw on the runway. And more than that, I wonder how they will influence fashion in general, because the chance of my being able to afford Louis Vuitton ready to wear is approximately zero, but fashion filters down.

What interested me most about this collection, however, was the story it told. It was a magical story, about a sort of enchanted train trip. And of course, whenever I see anything like that, a magical story told in another medium, I start wondering about my own medium. About how I can capture something in writing with that same feel to it. One of the wonderful things about being in the arts is that all arts inform what you’re doing, all arts become possible influences. That means, of course, that it’s worth your while to pay attention to all arts, to keep your mind open, see beauty and meaning in places you might not expect.

What we particularly need in our culture, I think, are magical stories. Notice that the collection is fundamentally about connection: to the past, first of all, because the designs so clearly refer back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the shapes and colors are also organic, so there’s a connection to the natural world. And there’s also a connection to childhood, because of the ways in which things don’t quite fit. The shoes that are a little too high to walk in (some of the model stumbled on those platforms and heels), the hats that are a little too big. Even some of the clothes look oversized. It’s as though girls are playing dress-up. Magical stories give us those sorts of connections, to the past (both personal and historical), to the natural world. They tie the pieces of our history together, and tie us to the world we sometimes think we have lost: the world of trees and mountains and streams.

And yet the clothes are also modern and urban.

So how do I combine all those things? I’m going to be thinking about that as I write the novel. Which I need to start soon, although at the moment I’m still terribly behind on everything. And my computer monitor dying hasn’t helped.

Here, in case you’re interested, are some of my favorite looks from the show: