Writing and Reading

I'm not talking here about the kind of reading that you do as a writer. I'm talking about what your third-grade teacher would have called "reading aloud." I have a special place in my heart for reading aloud and do it every chance that I get. If I'm at a party where there are children present, I'll sit down and read them a book. That way I'm doing something I love, interacting with the most-ignored party guests and avoiding the grownups who are normally more boring anyway. I volunteer to read my work at open mic events and workshops. When I get the chance to read on the radio or on someone else's podcast I'll take it.

You should seriously considering working more reading aloud into your routine as a writer, and I'll tell you why.

Here are my Top 5 Reasons to Read Aloud:

1. Reading your work-in-progress alound is the best way to find where it needs tightening up or smoothing out. If, as you're reading, the words don't flow easily from your mouth - if you find yourself correcting the words on the page to what your mouth thinks they should be - you've found a place in your writing that needs editing. You might find that even as you're reading, your attention is drifting. There's another spot that needs editing.

2. Reading to others (especially others who are significantly shorter than you) helps invest them in reading. Both my children are now avid readers, and they came by it honestly. I have a three-pronged approach: we have no television at our house (we live in the mountains without television reception and don't have cable), I read for pleasure and so have mountains of books and magazines of all descriptions littering the house, and lastly, I read to my children every day. Bedtime's sacred ritual is snuggling up and playing "You read to me and I'll read to you." The more children love to read, the more adult readers there will be later.

3. Reading your work on a podcast opens up an entirely new audience. I would never have "read" Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Iliad or any of the other weighty classics if not for audio books. My commute is pretty huge, and it's great to know that I'm not just wasting an entire hour - I'm spending it wisely by investing it in great literature. You can do that with your own work. If you record yourself and offer it up as a podcast, those people who normally don't have the time to sit down with a paper book or magazine will suddenly be able to listen to your work while they jog or do the dishes or drive to work.

4. Reading aloud gives you the opportunity to be the actor you've always wanted to be. Or the mug, the clown, the goofball, the Victor Borge, whatever. When you read, even if you're only reading to yourself, invest in the voices. See how giving each character its distinctive voice lends nuance and richness to a reading. Be loud! Be expressive! And don't forget to bow once you've finished reading.

5. Nobody can tell your story like you can. Have you ever heard David Sedaris misread a word? Probably not. Because he's not cold reading words that he's never seen before, or memorizing lines. He's giving voice to the story he gave birth to - putting the emphasis where he heard it in his mind as he wrote it. It's the same with all authors who read their own work aloud. Every time I've listened to an audio book, if the author doesn't read his own work, there are always errors. They're mostly small, but they pull me out of the flow of the story and make me remember that it's all an illusion. But when the author him/herself is reading, I'm caught up in the flow of the thing and listening to the story the way the author heard it while it was being written. It's an amazing thing.

The next time you're sitting somewhere in public with a book in your hand, put your mouth where your words are. Read your book out loud. Someone will listen, and be happy.

My 34 Minutes of Fame

I've posted yesterday's interview, which you can find here. In it, I talk about my process, read from the first chapter of my new book, discuss my next work, and reveal where on my body I keep my tattoos. Anyone who's seen me already knows. Enjoy!

I'm On the Radio!!

Tomorrow morning at 7:20am, I'll be on KFJC radio (89.7 FM in the Bay Area) reading from my new Nanovel, "Two Women and a Boat, to Say Nothing of Cthulhu." Feel free to listen in via their netcast. Ann Arbor has graciously invited the Nano gang back for another year, and I'm taking full advantage of it!

Fact vs. Fiction: Holiday Style

You know, normally I've got a schedule to keep. I check over the address list from the year before and make any necessary corrections on Thanksgiving weekend. I put the cards together and get everyone to sign them in the days between Thanksgiving and December 1. This year - it's mid-December and I have done NOTHING. I am looking at the blank page facing me and thinking "I have no idea what to say. Many things happened this year, but most of them are things I don't want to talk about.

Writing fact is so much harder than writing fiction, yet I write fact for a living. I get paid a whole bucket of money to write facts all day long. Something is wrong, here.

I think I've hit on it. I'm constraining myself to what *actually* happened, rather than what I *wish* happened. Problem solved!!

Fizzle Fizzle Fizzle

Now that November is drawing to a close, it's always hard for me to maintain focus. When it comes to certain things, I am NOT a procrastinator. I normally finish my 50,000 words for Nanowrimo in the first couple weeks (a little more if I've had to take days off). The problem is that once I've set my goal at a certain number of words and I achieve that, it's hard for me to maintain the focus to keep going until the project itself is finished. Even moreso if I've identified parts back at the beginning that I want to change.

I think that my second takeaway for Nano this year is that my goal needs to be bigger. I can write fifty thousand words in thirty days. I can write fifty thousand words in ten days if I need to. What I need is to challenge myself in a bigger, more fundamental way. I need to FINISH A STORY from "Once upon a time" to "The End." That's a little more difficult for people who start out with no plot, but I rarely have that problem.

Okay, got it? Next year, the idea isn't to get to 50k. The idea is to FINISH THE STORY.

Go Away!

We're coming up on the first part of the bingeing season, and one of the things that Thanksgiving affords is a FOUR DAY WEEKEND. How is gorging going to help your writing? It's not. BUT, the extra two days off that most of us are granted this time of year ARE.

One of the best ways to boost your productivity is to get out of your own environment for a significant period of time. It's tough to write in your natural habitat, either at home where there are always chores to be done or family, pets or plants demanding your attention, or at work where your inbox is stacked up to your very eyebrows.

Leave your natural habitat! Go to your local library or park. Go to an aquarium or zoo. Even going to your local coffee shop is fine, although for many people this is not so far out of your natural habitat. At least one isn't tempted to get up and do all the dishes.

I went on a retreat last week and wrote ~17,000 words in the time I was there, and still had time to do a little sight-seeing and take more hot baths than my skin was strictly happy with. I mentioned to my husband that the key to really productive writing and overall happiness was having no other responsibilities whatsoever. He mentioned that it didn't sound sustainable.

I'd love to find out.

Thinking: Enough vs. Too Much

Writers and artists pride themselves on the fact that their pursuit is wholly intellectual. It takes a certain amount of brains to sit down and spin out a scenario that doesn't, and in many cases couldn't, exist in real life. But a lot of writers sit in front of their computers and just stare. And stare. And stare. How do I get Maude and her sister from the party to the castle? I've just locked Throckmorton in a room with a hyena - what next?

For these occasions, I find it tremendously helpful to take off my writer hat (while keeping my writer gloves on) and just watching the action, taking dictation as it unfolds. In real life, most things happen fairly quickly. It takes a split second to run a red light, hit another car, and kill your family. It takes less than a minute for piranhas to rip apart and devour a frog.

When closing off your brain and just writing words as fast as you possibly can, you do two things: you allow events to come up naturally without overthinking or second guessing, and you move your plot forward by leaps and bounds. I have to say that my own experience has been that my plot and characters came together in a more realistic, more satisfying way than they would have if I'd sat down and planned it all out. And again, isn't that more like real life? You sit down and plan your day, but the minute you walk out the door, all bets are off. Anything could happen and sometimes, it's just a matter of time before your plan falls apart.

In real life, we don't spend a lot of time thinking and planning our every move. We tend to plan things in broad swaths and allow for the inevitable chaos that follows. Let your writing be more like your real life!

My Life Does Not Have a Rockin' Bass Track

Those were the words of my third ex-husband. He saw the soundtrack of my life being much more akin to the soundtrack from "The Little Rascals," rather than the soundtrack to "Fight Club."

What's your soundtrack? A recent study has shown that listening to happy music not only elevates your own mood, but can be good for you. My gut feeling is that it's true. I can be moved to tears of joy by music. I can also be moved to tears of grief, rage and hopelessness. And I listen to that kind of music far more than I should. My family knows exactly what I've been listening to in the car by the look on my face when I get out.

With the widespread availability of iPods and other devices that put enormous musical libraries into containers the size of cigarette packs, it's a common sight nowadays to see people plugged in everywhere - at work, at the gym, walking down the street, at the grocery store. In effect, everyone's life now has a sound track.

I have put my sound track to work for me. Each story I write has its own soundtrack so that if I'm interrupted in the middle of something, I can slip right back into the mood I was in when I wrote it. Normally it's music from the area or era of my story, but it can also be techno or country, or whatever it is that made me think of that story in the first place. It's sad to think that many of my characters have lives that are utterly governed by a rockin' bass track, but I myself am tootling along.

Read Vs. Write

I have heard a zillion times the advice that if you want to be a good writer, you have to read a lot. Various published authors have published their lists of recommended books (here's Philip Pullman's, and Nicholas Sparks', and here is a whole list of author's lists). I find most of these lists to be pretentious, saying not just "see how much better taste I have than you?" but also "see how, because I am a successful author and you are not, I have all the time in the world to track down and read obscure books?"

I don't need to be reminded of what a precious commodity my time is, and of the fact that every time I sit down with a sudoku instead of picking up Okot p'Bitek's White Teeth, I'm squandering what little time I have.

My advice for writing is not necessarily "write what you know," but "write something that you would like to read." Before you started writing, you probably read a lot. I know I did. And there's some stuff that I really like (military history, cheesy fantasy, non-fiction humor) and a lot of stuff I can't stand (romance, finely sliced histories of a single commodity or object, "chick lit"). Keep reading what you like, and don't let someone else tell you what you "should" read.

I'm off. I have many, many back copies of the Enquirer to get through. Deal with it.

Your Hat Collection

During November, I get lots of complaints to the effect that the writer has a day job and children and can't "fit it all in," and that I'm somehow unreasonable for scheduling writing events during the day or too late at night or on the weekends.

The first thing I think is that I can't please everybody, so I don't even try anymore. But the fact of the matter is that I have a day job. And a long commute. And a husband. And two children. And pets and a house with dirty laundry and plants that need watering and all of those things that everyone else has. AND I have writing that needs doing.

But even that can be broken out a little further. I have actual writing that I'm doing. And once something is written, it needs EXTENSIVE editing (I re-wrote this very sentence four times). When I've gotten something ready for publication, I have to research markets and prepare submission packets and send things off. I have to keep track of what I've submitted and where.

Everyone plays multiple roles in life every day, and the difficulty is switching effectively between those roles. Yes, you're being asked to wear a different hat for every hour of the day - now you're a parent, now you're a boss, now you're a customer, now you're a spouse - and it can take a little time to make that mental switch. The important thing is that YOU are the only one who can make it. While I have the greatest appreciation in the world for people with busy lives who are trying to fit everything in, I am considerably less understanding of those people who use their busy lives as an excuse. If you don't want to do something, don't do it. Please don't use the excuse "I can't find the time," because I am here to tell you that each and every one of us is granted the same number of hours per day.

To those people who find themselves buckling under the burden, I would respectfully suggest looking at your hat collection and seeing if there aren't a few that could be thrown out. That faded, fraying "reality tv" ballcap with the warped brim? Could that go? How about your Worlds of Warcraft battle helmet with the leather straps and metal studs and horns? Could that go? The jaunty little cap you wear when compulsively updating Facebook or Twitter? Look at all the hats you wear and make the hard choice about where you believe your writing hat fits in that collection. And then, having made that choice, act on it!

Who knows? After November, you might find that you like how you look in your writer's hat better than some of the other hats you've been wearing. Personally, I think it makes you look smart. And a little sexy.

They're Not Drinking

While my own November efforts are coming along swimmingly, it never ceases to affect me when others around me aren't going at it with the same enthusiasm. It makes me feel as though I've somehow failed.

Then I think of my harp. I took harp for a number of years (a very small number involving a decimal point) from a woman who makes her entire living playing and teaching harp. This woman spends hours every day sitting with a harp in her lap perfecting her technique, composing new pieces, thinking about new arrangements of old pieces. I'm sure that she was frustrated with my seeming lack of application - I'm not great at sight reading music, my fingers never seemed nimble enough to make the shifts from one chord to another in mid-song, and I wasn't properly apologetic when I'd gone from one lesson to another without having practiced at all.

It wasn't that I don't like the harp. On the contrary - I love it and think it's the best thing in the world. I just don't see myself ever becoming a performer on the instrument. I think it's fine if I spend five whole years trying to perfect "Garten Mother's Lullabye" and never play it for anyone who doesn't live in my house.

There are plenty of people who have no interest in writing a novel for publication. They couldn't care less about making their prose sing or seeing their books in the windows of bookstores. Those people have other things in their lives that they're striving for. They're excited about writing, but it's not their sole passion.

Each November, when I work on my new novel, I'm carried away by its possibility, and that passion informs not just the words themselves, but the speed at which I write them, but that's not the most important thing I do every November. The most important thing is learning more about myself and my own place in the world. Learning not to judge every person I see by my own standards and therefore find them wanting when they're not me. I'd like to think that the act of writing provides me one sort of view into my own heart, but that all of the work I do in accepting and being happy for the other writers with whom I surround myself gives me an even more valuable view into the parts of myself that need even more work than my first draft will.

Inspiring Others

My own personal challenge this month is not just writing my own novel - hardly a challenge anymore. It's being the guiding and inspiring force for others who are trying to do the same.

I have a dear friend, another writer, who has been active in many Bay Area writing groups for as long as I've known him. Wherever he goes, he attracts other writers to him by the force of his very positive personality. He is always encouraging and full of confidence not just in himself, but in the entire group. Being around him, it's hard to imagine that we won't all be rich and famous in no time at all.

My own attempts at inspiration seem feeble in comparison. I know that a large part of it is my own introversion. I love talking to people one-on-one, but I can't sustain that level of energy and enthusiasm for people in groups of more than three. I am deeply jealous of people like my friend who love meeting new people and can step with happiness and confidence into whole roomsful of people they don't know and act like they're all about to be best friends.

I guess what I can do is lead by example. I am a get up early, stay up late, keep working until it's done, do everything all the time sort of person, and yet, I think of myself as basically lazy and unmotivated. My trick is not thinking about it too much. I make my list of things and think neither of how many things there are on the list nor of the scope of any one of them. I just look at the next thing on the list, do it, and check it off.

"Write 2000 words." Check.

See? Wasn't that easy? Okay, now it's your turn.

Inspired by the Ridiculous

This time of year, there are lots and lots of people doing Nanowrimo, and one of the most common elements that people see in the discussion forums, in entries to the Nanowrimo LiveJournal group, in person at the writing events, is "I don't know what to write." Frankly, I'm always astounded by that assertion. I'm shocked that someone could exist on earth and have nothing to say.

I've always had the opposite problem. I have far more to write than I will ever be able to commit to paper. I've thought recently about why that is. How is it that I end up with an incredible surfeit of content and not enough time to write it? What I've realized is that it's my own failings and weaknesses that allow me a rich inner life.

I'm nearsighted and slightly deaf. The women of my family have all gone deaf at an early age. Here's a typical interaction with my grandmother:
Me: Grandma! I won a turkey platter at bingo!
Grandma: A turkey bladder? What on earth do you need that for?
Me: The gizzard and liver were already taken.

Going through life in a half-deaf myopic haze means that everything has a slightly magical tinge to it. People are much more attractive when you can't actually make out their wrinkles and pimples. And they're much more entertaining when just any old thing is liable to fly out of their mouths at any moment. (Luckily for me, my younger daughter, who speaks loudly and distinctly enough for me to hear at all times, is given to spewing random stuff all the time.)

I went through an entire six months driving by a large house surrounded by orchard and garden plots and reading the hand-lettered sign out front that read "Mary Ferguson Offered." I spun out entire stories about who Mary Ferguson was, and what she might have offered to whom that would move the offeree to want to let the world know. Was it a good thing? Or was this more like Hester Prynne's scarlet letter? And then someone who had never even seen the sign at all burst my bubble by telling me that it said "Massey Ferguson Offered," meaning that they were selling their tractor. And then, a few months later, the entire property went up for sale and my imagined stories became more sad and less fun and magical.

People are all in a rush to make sense of things. To prove how smart they are and how well they've figured it all out. It makes me sad because striving to prove your rationality every second of every day takes away so much of life's potential joy, and nearly all of life's moments of inspiration.

Throw away your hearing aids! Stomp on your glasses! Daydream in meetings and take all idioms literally (because they're quite silly)! Once you open yourself up to it, the world contains more inspiration than can ever be used up by any number of people.

Say It vs. Show It

This happens whenever I get busy. Just at the time that I have the most actual stuff that people might want to hear about (I'm writing another novel, I'm doing Big Things at work, I'm gearing up for the coming holidays), I am least inclined to talk about it all. I think to myself "I have five minutes to spare - I can either work on [name one of my zillion projects here] or I can write about something I've already completed. And who really wants to hear about my cleaning out my garage [or making chicken coop improvements or finessing my plot or creating a newer, better website] anyway?"

So, the reality is that when I'm writing least, it's because I'm doing the most. This month, I'm finishing one novel and starting another. That's huge to me, because I have high hopes for both of them.

The irony is that I am still keeping up with reading my friends' blogs and occasionally checking out Twitter or Facebook, so obviously it's not that I'm not interested in other people's quotidian lives. It's the introvert in me saying "I'm not that important. I'm not that interesting. And I'm really, really busy."

Even at this very second, I'm having to fight not to erase this entire post. So, if it has spelling errors, it's because I didn't dare proofread before hitting "publish," or I'd just chuck the whole thing.

November 1

Once again, it's day 1 of Nanowrimo. I was up bright and early this morning (although not nearly as early as I should have been - apparently when the Pirate woke me at 6:30 this morning, I told him to go away and leave me alone forever) and off to the site of my write-in. Despite doing a little bit of catching up with my bestest ol' bud, it was lovely to sit down and get boatloads of writing done. Very small boatloads (I'm only at about 2200 words for today) but still - I love being in the zone.

And I owe it all to outlining. I know - you're the creative type who just sits down and the Muses dictate to you and you simply channel their wisdom through your fingers. Well, I don't. I have a horrible tendency to know sort of generally what I want my story to be about, and I'll think up amazing beginnings and fabulous endings, but I sit down to write and I get bupkis. My beginning is fabulous, and then it sort of trails off and.....

Especially when I know I'm going to be interrupted, I can depend on my outline to keep my story from getting out of hand and going in all sorts of unintended directions. It means that my original vision stays true all the way to the end. I guess in a way, my outline is my muse. The muse Otolynis, muse of outlining, annotating and indexing. I'll take it.

P.S. I would like to mention that today is the 5th anniversary of my grandmother Lilia Quintana's death, so it's fitting that today is the day to remember her as my first muse and inspiration. It's all for you, Nana. I still miss you.

Sometimes It Don't Come Easy

I was at a work event until 7pm last night, and then got home, spent some time with my kids, did some Nanowrimo stuff, then passed out. I did not write a single word. I had taken my laptop with me to the work event, even bringing the power adapter that runs off my car battery in case I had some time in the car, but I didn't. I've got one novel to finish in the next two weeks, and another one due by the end of November. And I'm not worried one little bit.

I make the effort to write every day. Not Monday through Friday, not every weekend. Every. Day. And I do that so that on days like this when I have to give it a miss, it's okay. I'm not going to beat myself up, because a year from now nobody's going to say "And things are in the state they're in because YOU WROTE NOTHING THAT DAY." It's just not going to happen. And not beating myself up about it means that tonight when I sit down to write some words, it'll still flow. I'll still be good.

See? Wasn't that easy?

The Guilt of Productivity

Yesterday I managed to do a fairly substantial re-write of about 90 pages of the thing I'm working on now. I have a large amount that I have to do from scratch for the end, and I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to pull that off, but it was a good day for writing.

On the other hand, I ended up in a place that's very familiar to me. If I'm writing, I'm not doing anything else. I'm not washing dishes or folding laundry or going grocery shopping or any one of a thousand things that need doing around a busy house. And for that, I was beating myself up. The irony is that when I'm at my 9-5 job (which is really my 8:30-4:45 job), I'm not washing dishes, doing laundry or grocery shopping and I feel no guilt about that whatsoever. What's wrong with this picture?

So, I have determined that my goal for this November (and hopefully one that I can hang on to for a while) is to let go of that guilt. My writing is just as important to me as that thing that I do to earn a living, just as important as clean dishes or food in the pantry, and about eight times MORE important than folded laundry. There you have my guilty secret. I don't care about folded laundry.

This November, I'm not going to make my family suffer with my angst. I'm not going to beat myself up about what I'm NOT doing. I'm not going to agonize over every decision I make about how to spend unaccounted-for time. And with all that time that I save on unnecessary histrionics, I'll get even MORE writing done!

But When Do You Find Time?

That's the most frequently asked question I get. Yup, I do have a full-time+ job, AND kids, AND a heinous commute, and I've still managed to write at least 50k words each November.

A big part of it is just forcing myself to write a little every day. You'll hear lots of stories about that legendary guy (and I know at least two) who were unable to write for weeks and then sat down and in 1 or 2 days wrote eighty baskillion words. That's fine if you live alone and can do that sort of thing. For the rest of us, that's not always possible.

What I've learned to do instead is to snatch what time I can find from anywhere. Write during lunch. Take a notebook and write in the restroom (and do use a notebook, as it can be disconcerting for others to hear typing in the restroom). I use my phone's voice notes feature and dictate during my heinous commute, and then transcribe it when I have the time later. This morning I found myself wide awake at 6am on a Saturday. Normally unheard-of, but I couldn't go back to sleep because I'm working on another piece of writing and I have solved a key problem. So, on with the bathrobe and fuzzy slippers and here I am, writing away while everyone but the Very Helpful Kitten is asleep.

You have time in your day. I promise. You have those little bits of time that you're currently spending doing sudoku or watching television (all those crappy shows you're watching now? either they'll still be there in December, or they sucked to begin with and you're better off without them) or in one of those meetings where you don't actually have to either participate or pay attention until someone mentions your name (you know you have them. everyone has them).

Okay, I'm winding up this post because the kitten is eating my head, which is even less helpful than merely lying on my keyboard. Ouch!

Heading Into November

When we last left our heroine, she was frantically trying to write the last couple of chapters of that same old book she's been working on for a while now. It's getting serious. If I don't get it done by next Friday, I'll be trying to finish two of the damn things in November, and just the thought gives me indigestion.

The interesting news is that I have given over the first part of my novel to my crit group and they have been instrumental in pointing out where it needs help. Unfortunately, it needs help in a very large and fundamental way. Their advice was something along the lines of "your writing is marvelous but your story sucks." Okay, they were actually tremendously more gracious than that, but emotionally it amounted to the same thing.

On the plus side, I'm heading into Nano this year as the ML for Santa Cruz. That's exciting to me because in the years that I've actively participated in Nano, I've enjoyed great success. Those years where I did Nano but tried to go it alone, I had a much harder time of it. I'm wondering whether being responsible for my little tribe will make things harder or easier.

I have done a lot more outlining and planning this year than I had in years past, so that's one place where I'm ahead of the game. But it's like any sporting event. You can read the team stats and think about their past performance all day long, but in the end, it's still a contest.

Winter is Coming

The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting colder, and I've started making bad, bad decisions. This is a yearly cycle.

This year, I've decided not only that I will actually, officially participate in Nanowrimo, but I will take up the mantle of ML for the Santa Cruz region. The gap was there, and I (like nature) abhor a vacuum. This explains why I have a cleaning lady.

I am blessed in a way that many writers are not. Both Truman Capote and Fran Liebowitz are famous for having written a very few brilliant things and then sort of just becoming essayists and personalities. They were never visited again with the spark that got them through that initial spurt of brilliance. I, on the other hand, am positively AWASH in fabulous ideas.

1. Trinity of Days
   A play that follows Mary, mother of Yeshua (Jesus, to you White Folks) through the three days between the crucifixion and the ressurection.


2. I Want You to Slowly Fall In Love With Me
   Twelve months in the life of a mediocre aspiring novelist and her transsexual neighbor.


3. Two Women and a Boat, to Say Nothing of Cthulhu
   A novel that follows an intrepid young bird and her headstrong aunt through some of the less glamorous (and therefore less expensive) vacation spots of the world, where they keep meeting mysterious, shambling strangers carrying distastefully ugly tchotchkes and muttering to themselves in the most unmannerly fashion imaginable.


4. R&D: Rule & Dominion
   The galaxy is ruled by humans, and the humans are ruled by greed. There is only one kind of currency in the future: intellectual property.

Those are just the ones that I can recall off the top of my head - the ones that haven't been written yet. My problem has never been a lack of subject matter. It's been a lack of time to sit down and delve into my subject matter in a way that does justice to what's in my head.

For this year, I've chosen #3. I've been spending all my free time sort of idly spinning up individual plots (most P.G. Wodehouse is short stories, and my intention is to copy that short-story style in a way that adds up to a coherent narrative - sort of like a Dorothy L. Sayers piece) and thinking about characters.

In my fantasies, I will have finished all of these pieces (these do not include anything that I'm currently editing) by next November and will have to come up with something entirely new. Wouldn't that be lovely?

When Opportunity Knocks, Put on Your Bathrobe and Open the Door

This happens to me more than I'd like to admit: I'm in bed, just falling asleep. As my brain comes unmoored from reality and starts to float away for the night, images come to me. Sometimes they're amorphous, conceptual images that dissolve like fog in sunshine the deeper into sleep I fall. But at times like last night, they just become more and more concrete.

Two years ago, I took a bunch of the really vivid military battle-tech dreams I had and put them together into a novel. It didn't work. Really, really didn't work. Last night as I was falling asleep, it all fell into place. The key to the whole thing was a dream I had Saturday night (which did not make it in to the Virtual Bank Line) and the correct title. (R&D: Rule & Dominion)

I ended up turning the light back on, sitting up and writing all the salient points down in one of my many journals. I was so pleased at how it had just all come together so perfectly and ended by being so hyped up that after I had written it all down, I had to spend half an hour reading P.G. Wodehouse before I could drop back to sleep.

Oddly enough, I ended by waking up extra early this morning and having a good day. Go figure!

Virtual Bank Line de los Muertos

I was at my parents' house, housesitting. They're due back any minute, and I really have to get weaving on picking up, etc. My parents' house is remarkably unlike real life. In real life their house is decidedly Spanish colonial - chunky wood, leather and tiles everywhere. In my dream, everything was 70s futuristic with black and white plastic and bold geometric shapes.

My parents arrived with my girls in tow and I was forced to sit and look at pictures. There were quite a few taken at night at some kind of party that included tons of dia de meurtos paper skeleton cutouts. I asked about them and was told that they had done a midnight tour of the Palacio Blanco - the White Palace. Everyone (in my dreams) knows that the White Palace is a place where ghosts gather and go dancing every night. I know that, but up until now I couldn't have said what those ghosts look like. I ask if it was at all scary, and my stepmother replied that it was horrifying, although she said it such a noncommital way that I really had a hard time believing it. It was the same tone of voice my kids use when asked "How was your day?" And they shrug and reply "Eh. Fine." "It was horrifying." My daughters couldn't even be bothered to look up from what they were doing as my stepmother talked about it.

I looked closely at the pictures, and I was suddenly inside one of them. Palacio Blanco is on an open plain with cyprus trees lining the walkway that leads from the driveway to the main hall. The trees alternate with benches and I'm sitting on the bench closest to the driveway. Cinderella-style carriages pulled by skeletal horses wearing plumes on their harnesses drive up and disgorge skeleton homres y mujeres dressed in their dancing clothes. But the carriages, horses and people aren't the matte white of paper, nor are they practically two-dimensional. Instead, it looks as though they're made from sheets of sugar - about half an inch thick and glittering in the moonlight. Because they're like cutouts, they're exactly the same from the front as from the back, and as they walk to the hall, they carry on conversations with people behind them as easily as with those in front.

It wasn't completely horrifying, nor was it a non-event. I was riveted. I was captivated. It was beautiful. My dreams are trying to tell me that the season of the dead is starting, and I can hardly wait!

PFC Virtual Bank Line reporting for duty SIR!

At the very tail end of last night's dream, I was going on a business trip to Reno. Not surprising, considering that much of my team is in Reno and yesterday I was thinking about having to go in the next couple of weeks.

I got off the plane and was herded onto a train that let me off in a giant station filled with formations of people marching purposefully here and there. I took an escalator up to an observation deck that looked out on a practice yard. Down below were two men, one of whom was holding something that looked like a polearm, except that it had a huge sort of sharpened claw-looking thing on one end, and a big, curved blade at the other. The man against whom he was fighting wore armor that looked like horizontal sheets of glass held in place with rods. The glass kept the polearm from contacting the man's skin, but he was careful nonetheless.

I went into a room for a meeting with my boss, who was giving me my annual review. The result of my review was that I was being promoted to Lieutenant, and my next duty assignment was learning our company's policies and procedures in Italian.

I'm still a little confused.

Musical Chapters

I've been writing this book for, no joke, about five years. This is the third or fourth iteration, and it's coming back to the spirit of what it was when I first wrote it.

Every time I "fix" it, I end up moving the chapters around. This has made it horrendous for my alpha readers, who receive a new copy and start reading it and marking it up with comments like "Why is this the first time we've heard the name of this town?" when what they're reading is something like the third paragraph of the first chapter, it's just that when they received it, it was actually the third paragraph of the FOURTH chapter, and I took out all the earlier references to the cat.

I'm eternally grateful to my alpha readers, but I have to admit that it's a little taxing to sift through the comments and having to stop and think about whether this or that nitpick is still even relevant. I wish there was a way to instantly and automatically reflow the copies of everyone who's reading it, as I'm updating things.

But there's not. I'm currently working in Storyist, a novel- and screenplay writing software for the Mac. It's got some cool features, like the ability to drag pictures onto your character sheets and then have those character sheets sitting at the edge of your screen so that you can keep track of your characters. It formats everything for you and displays your chapters, sections, etc., in a column on the left. This means that it's already indexed once you're done and you don't have to do anything fancy to be able to move quickly from this part of the book to the next. It exports to Word or .pdf, too. Yay.

Until there's instantaneous transmission, I'll just gratefully wade through the comments and be happy that someone's willing to read my drivel before it's done.

Virtual Bank Line Celebrity Cameo

Last night I was taking the Badb to her father's house, which involved getting in a truck and driving over what looked like the landscape from the beginning of The Chronicles of Riddick where Vin Diesel is running over the frozen planet. It's like a fingerprint magnified a million times into a series of giant ridges. And I was driving on one of them.

I'm sure there's a word for when it's alternately raining and snowing, and the ground is covered in half-frozen slush, but coming from Arizona, I don't know what that word is. I just know that I was driving my pig of a truck through it and I couldn't concentrate. My gaze kept drifting to the back seat where Badb was sleeping, out the passenger window to check out the scenery, anywhere but on the road in front of me. More than once, I nearly drove off the road, off a cliff, and into a deep ravine.

We got to the Badb's father's house, but it wasn't his house. He was living there with his father. It was two in the morning when we arrived, and everyone in the house was up. I think it was because someone had just had a baby, but it wasn't someone related to the family. I started introducing everyone to my friend, Jim Carrey, but got annoyed that nobody seemed to recognize him. The funnier part of that was that Jim Carrey didn't even seem to notice that nobody gave him a second glance.

Then I had to move my truck out, but it was tricky because there were evil men that I was trying to escape. I went back into the house, but the house had turned into something like a convent and the nuns were hiding me from a man who looked like the movie portrayal of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, but who was sputtering to me about The Lord of Sweatpants.

Luckily, I woke up soon after that.

Capturing the Essence of Fhtagn

I'm working every spare second I have to finish the piece I'm writing now. It's coming along as quickly as can be expected, and I have every expectation that I'll be done in the three weeks I have.

What's next? Well, my next project centers around the Cthulhu mythos. I knew NOTHING of the entire body of work before conceiving of the project, so I did a little research on the right folks to read (besides the obvious, I mean) and then bought some books.

I'm about halfway through the first collection, and I think I've already boiled the body of work down to its essential tripes:

- non-Euclidean geometry that makes things either hard to see or nausea-inducing
- stuff so old that even the slime on it is older than the oldest thing that was old when the world was born
- things that are evil because they are outside of human morality
- using the word "obscene" to describe things that do not necessarily outrage one's sense of moral decency
- outrageous ignorant bigotry
- exotic, yet not necessarily attractive locations
- really big monsters from space

Man, I can hardly wait to get this baby started!

Moving Through Tumult

I flog myself constantly for not doing as much writing as many of my other writer friends. They all write a novel a week, and here I am still working on the same one that I've been working on for months and months. Sure, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.

But in the last two months, my life has had some pretty major upheaval. My household swelled to 7 and has now shrunk to 5 and looks to be holding steady. School has started. I have been the only person in my 3-person department for an entire month. And through all this, I've been chipping away at this monster. A little at a time.

I'm excited. The part of the novel that I was really worried about is really coming together, and I think that it's not only going to work, but it's going to work better than I had imagined.

And, I have my NEXT evil project planned out already.

A Weekend of the Virtual Bank Line

Friday night: I only remember the end of this dream. I had a vegetarian frog. It looked like a tree frog - a big head in relation to its body, but the whole thing was enormous. The size of a dinner plate. Its skin, rather than being smooth like a regular frog, was covered with fine green hair that looked like moss.

As a treat, I had smeared some avocado on a piece of cucumber. I threw it to the frog, who was sitting on a patch of sandy ground. It landed about 8 inches to the frog's left, so when it landed he tilted his big head and looked at it. Then he moved himself to the left to be closer to it.

Re-situated, he looked to the left, but it wasn't there anymore. He looked to the right, and it wasn't there either. He picked up his little froggy hands and didn't see it under them. He picked up his little froggy feet and didn't see it under them either. Because it was under his little froggy butt. I was getting really frustrated because vegetarian frogs are SO DUMB.

Saturday night: I was driving my truck. I don't drive it very often, because it's big and sucks up a prohibitive amount of gas, but on this occasion I needed it. I was coming through a neighborhood and trying to figure out how to from where I was to where I needed to be, and the only way I could figure it out was to drive through the lobby of car wash, then the wrong way down and alley. The alley let out onto a little residential street with gingerbread-looking houses in fabulous colors - mauve with brilliant blue trim or apricot with lavender. The houses themselves were all alike, but the paint jobs were spectacular.

The street was really steep, though, and I had come out onto it going a little faster than I had intended. It ended in a T-intersection, and I was heading right for someone's front yard. I was standing up on the brake, but still going too fast. I swerved left, hit my right-side tires on the curb, and rolled the truck into the yard.

The truck was on its side, and I realized that, while the houses were lovely and the grounds looked well-kept, they were actually quite soft and swampy. My truck was sinking. I jumped up and pushed the driver's side door open so that I could climb out, then stood on the front porch of the house and watched my truck sink out of sight in the lawn, which closed over it with nary a ripple.

A woman, hearing the commotion, opened the front door and saw me standing there in shock.

"My car is in your yard," I told her, staring at the lawn where the truck had been sucked in.

She looked over my shoulder and saw nothing.

"No, it isn't," she said right back. And I realized that it was useless to argue.

Sunday night: I was at a school. Or perhaps it was my job. Either way, there were a lot of people I saw every day, and a lot of them lived near me. There was one house that we had to visit because something awful was happening there. Not law enforcement kind of awful, but the place was neglected and the mail was piling up, even though we knew that someone still lived there.

My companion (whom I never saw clearly, so I couldn't even say whether it was a man or a woman) and I went to the house, and when we walked up to the door, we saw the most extraordinary thing: as we walked up, something that looked like a giant hand retreated through the doorway. The four fingers took up almost the entire doorway, and it was as though the hand were reaching through the doorway as we walked up and was snatched back.

My companion and I left in a hurry and did a little more research. Then, the POV of my dream shifted. I could see another woman, a neighbor of mine, writing a note and taking some things - a pair of glasses, some letters - over to this house. She let herself in with a key and put the things onto a sofa. The house was clean and tidy, and she left because she didn't want to disturb the occupant. It had been her husband, and when they broke up, the woman had left alone, leaving her young daughter with the husband.

But now, something was happening to the husband. One minute he would be a normal man, the next he would be a giant so huge that he filled the entire floor of the place, which was by no means small. His daughter, no more than 10, was doing her best to keep some semblance of normalcy in the house because she loved her father and he wasn't abusive or neglectful. He loved his daughter very much and took excellent care of her when he was his right size, but he never knew when the change would come over him or how long it would last.

It was hard to know the right thing to do.

Worlds Enough, and Time

I'm currently in that pleasant place where I'm working very hard editing one project and starting the wheel moving on the next one.

Whenever I'm in this place, I'm constantly irritated by the fact that I just don't have enough time. I have a job that's fairly demanding. Every minute I'm at work(okay, every minute except this one) is taken up with stuff. My "To Do" list currently stands at slightly short of 100 items, although many are tiny.

I have children who don't raise themselves. The little one, who's been an angel lately, has been wishing for more attention, more snuggles, more Mommy. The older one is trying very hard to assert her independence now that she's got her driver's license, but she's making very 16-year-old decisions that need a lot of guidance.

I have a husband and little doggies and in-laws. I have people who need attention, and I want to give them that attention because it feels good to do it. I'm one of those people who needs that attention. I've been running again, trying to put in an hour a night, but for every hour I spend running, there are sixty little things that I'm not doing.

I'm sure that everyone has this same dilemma. If I do this, I can't do that. It's part of being human, I know.

But if I could just write more, that would really be something. Wouldn't it?

Virtual Bank Line: The Data Thieves

I was at a work offsite, and my co-workers and I were leaving the conference site and walking toward a shuttle that would take us to the airport. As I walked down the hall, my phone rang and I stopped walking and ducked into a doorway to take the call. As I spoke, more people walked by making it hard to hear.

I looked into the room behind the door and, finding it empty, I ducked inside. Just before my conversation was over, I realized that I wasn't alone. In a corner, in a chair behind a large table, was a man in a dark suit. I hadn't seen him because the room lights were off and the dark suit matched the shadows.

"Good, you're here," he said after I hung up. "It's time to go. We have to get started."

He went on to tell me that I would be partnering with another agent, and the two of us had many important meetings to keep with other agents. I got into a sleek, black car with another man in a dark suit and we drove from place to place where the other man talked furtively with other people in dark suits. I never took part in these conversations, and I felt superfluous to the proceedings entirely.

Finally, while my "partner" was busy talking to someone, I took off. I ran through streets that looked like Disneyland - clean and not meant for cars. The buildings were too close together for car traffic and there were lots of tiny alleyways with little shops. I was trying to get my bearings so I could figure out how to get home when I realized that I had to hide. The "partner" would be looking for me, and it would be bad if he found me.

I joined what looked like a large team of women who were walking to practice for some sport. As they walked, they talked about and demonstrated various warm-up exercises for the upcoming event, so to fit in, I went along with their stretching and twisting. We got to the top of the hill, and I looked down to see that the entire hill was made of snow. There was a man at the top of the hill, half buried in the snow. I could only see his dreadlocks peeking out, so I separated from the group and went to talk to him.

This man told me about the data thieves. We all knew that the government had undertaken to control speech on a vast scale. It was the aim of the government to control not just all communication coming from regulated channels (print, broadcast and electronic media, etc.) but all communication everywhere. Conversations between human beings were regulated as well. It was impossible for husbands and wives to have private conversations between themselves without government intervention. The vehicle for the intervention were tiny transmitters hidden in things like both paper money and coins, any plastic card (including indentification cards, credit cards and discount cards given out by stores). They worked in areas about the size of a good-sized room, which meant that even if you put your wallet on the dresser and huddled in the closet to talk to someone, you were still in the grips of the transmitters.

Whenever anyone tried to have a conversation that was "contrary to the interests of government," their very THOUGHTS would be replaced by something entirely different, such that they wouldn't even be aware that the words coming out of their own mouths didn't conform to their original intent. You might have it in mind to tell someone that you saw a policeman beating an innocent bystander, but the words out of your mouth would say that you saw that lambchops were on sale at the market, and you yourself would not know of the substitution.

The data thieves were working to bring down this particularly heinous form of control. Because they had to function in society, they took interesting precautions like keeping their wallets in lead-lined boxes. They were working on ways of both foiling the government AND raising awareness of what was going on. But it was much more difficult than most people realized. Thus far, the only thing that the data thieves had been able to do was to take certain patterns of data out of the stream. For instance, it would be impossible to transmit the letter "T," so hings would come ou jus slighly off, and no make sense. Enough of these tiny gaps in the data and people would become aware that they were not creating their own communications - it was all being created for them, and the system was breaking down.

"So, why are you here?" I asked the dreadlocked man at the top of the snow hill.

"I'm trapped here. I can't get off the hill."

I looked and realized that it wasn't snow. It was more like silicon so fine that it looked like and acted like snow, and it was leaching the strength out of both of us. But it looked inviting and shiny and sparkly, and I turned and ran full-tilt down the hill to the bottom. I got to within a yard of the street, and turned and looked at the dreadlocked man at the top. He was looking down at me with longing, knowing that he had important things to do but couldn't do them. I ran back up the hill, glorying in the work of moving up a steep hill through thick snow. The work itself gave me more energy, so once I got to the top, I grabbed the dreadlocked man's hand and turned, pulling him down the hill after me. As we ran down the hill, the dreadlocked man picked up speed and by the time we got to the bottom, he was in the lead pulling me behind him and shouting about how we were going to help the data thieves.

In Process

Having finished the big edits to my book, it's time to put the spine back in. Originally I'd had the whole thing tied together by the sister of two of the characters, her story going back and forth between the other stories, but it didn't work and when I took it out, I was left with five separate stories.

Now, I'm stitching them all back together with a minor character that runs through all the stories. It's going to take some doing, but writing it in the first place took some doing.

Well, now that I've said it - I guess I should get weaving.

Round One is Over

It has taken me a couple of months, but I'm finally done with the first round of serious edits to my novel. I shaved about 20 pages from the original 250, and it came in at something like 74,000 words. Now that I have it down that far (with expectation that it will be kicked down in word count again during round 2) it's time to put some other stuff in.

- The main character must be expanded, his story encompassing the salient points of life after the Mexican Revolution.
- The story arc needs to be clarified, as each story must make it clear which sacrament it is meant to encompass.

This is where the rubber meets the road, ladies and gentlemen.

Genius in the Making

My younger daughter came home from all her travels yesterday. I was so happy to see her - I'd planned cookie making as a way of bonding when she got home, and the two of us made Thumbprint Cookies out of the wind eggs our chickens laid and homemade blackberry jam from the blackberries in our yard. The cookies are fabulously shortbread-y, not too sweet, so that the jam is a lovely counterpart to the pastry-like cookie part. We don't use nuts because of the Badb's orthodonture.

We were sitting on the couch enjoying cookies and milk when Badb announced "I'm writing a book!" She pulled a tablet from her suitcase and handed it to me. Her irregular printing covered two thirds of a single page and told the story of a little girl named "Lean," (pronounced "Lee Ann") who went first to Phoenix, then Washington D.C., then New York where she was obligated to walk everywhere or take the "sobway." Sometimes, she had to both walk and take the sobway. Then she went to camp, and then to South Carolina. Lean bemoaned the fact that she was never in one place long enough to feel settled, and as a result she was "egsosted."

I read the story, and as I was drying my cheeks, the Pirate read it. Both of us made that "Awwwww!" face at each other.

I was impressed both that my daughter had felt the need to journal at all, and then that she went right for the heart of the matter. Not a dry recounting of the facts and sights - anyone can write that kind of list. My daughter at the age of eight has already stripped away the actual events and gotten right to the place where the writer's value lies. She pulls her own hopes and miseries out of her viscera, pokes through them, and then smears them on paper so that we can all look at it and say "Yes. Inside, I'm like this too."

It's easy to entice children of any age into cookie making. They immediately see the value of it and will participate just for the promise of being able to eat cookies. Writing is a little different. How do you convince your child that her efforts, while not the classic third-grade "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" fare, are more fabulous, more noteworthy? Less chocolate chip with toffee bits and cream cheese frosting, more subtlely sweet shortbread with occasional tart blackberry nuggets? All I can do is continue to consume them with great relish and let her know that, even if nobody else likes them, they'll always be my favorite.

Garden of Earthly Dreams

When I was pregnant with Badb, my husband and I didn't want to know in advance what gender the baby would be, so we had to pick out both boy and girl names. We started out with Celeste and Julian. I wanted the boy's middle name to be Fox, and my husband didn't like Celeste as a first name. We settled on Athena Celeste for a girl, but hadn't quite fixed on a boy's name until well into my seventh month when I decided that it would be Hieronymus Fox. I can tell you two things: the first is that I have never seen a single episode of Buck Rogers and would have been mortified to know that I would be naming my child after a television character played by Gary Coleman. Luckily, I didn't find this out until well after my child's birth. Second, every single person I knew, without exception, expressed a fervent hope that my child would be a girl. Nobody liked the name Hieronymus but me.

Of course the most well known Hieronymus is Hieronymus Bosch, the painter of the famous tryptich The Garden of Earthly Delights. I myself probably own three or four copies of the painting in one form or another. Maybe I like Bosch because I feel a kindred spirit. His visions and my dreams agree in startling ways.

Last night, my husband and I were at something that used to be a high school. It was no longer used for such, but it was a public space now. We were hanging out by the lockers with about half a dozen other people wearing jeans and t-shirts and carrying manga comics. Everyone had wild, stand-up hair and their clothes and accessories were festooned with likenesses of animated characters.

My husband and his friends were deeply involved in watching the most recent installment of some favorite show, and one of our other friends leaned over and asked me if I'd like to go for a ride. I said I would, and we ended up seated on what looked like a giant cafeteria tray. We gently lowered ourselves into a rushing river...of pasta sauce. It was at least twenty yards wide, and although it bubbled and swirled around our tray, it wasn't hot. All I could think every time our little craft took on "water" and we were splashed was that I would have some intense stain removal to do later.

We came around a tiny isthmus - a little peninsula that held a children's playground, but the players weren't children. They were all animals dressed as children. Two things in rompers with pterodactyl-looking heads hung from the jungle gym as something that looked like the living version of the Montauk Monster walked underneath. The Montauk Monster looked like a large cat with white fur over very red skin and a beak that made it look like an Egyptian carving. The pterodactyl-heads were grabbing at it, biting at it with their larger, more ferocious-looking beaks while the monster stalked by unconcerned.

The playground was bordered by a cinderblock fence, and there was a javelina wearing overalls and a striped shirt somehow pinned to the fence a foot or two above the ground. It was squealing in distress, clawing at the wall with its hooves, rubbing itself bloody against the rough cinderblocks. My skin crawled at the sight of the suffering beast, but the current was taking us away from the scene.

When I woke up, I was thinking about my daughter. I don't think that it would have been so bad if she'd been a boy and have been named for the Dutch painter, who himself was named for Saint Jerome. But instead, she is named after the goddess of wisdom, and is living up to that promise instead. I can only hope that when she gets home, she'll have something wise to say about my dreams.

The Tiny Fan Club

I've been writing to Peaches at camp. They have something called "Bunk Notes" at camp. You send an email, and at dinnertime, the counselors print out the emails and hand them over to the campers with the other mail. I like it because I don't have to leave my house or find a stamp or envelope, and the lag is minimal.

In the first week, I wrote normal letters. "Daddy and I had enchiladas for dinner. The dogs miss you," that kind of thing. At the end of the first week, my older daughter came home from camp announcing that she had been nicknamed "Muffin" by the rest of camp. I'm not the mother of anyone named "Muffin." But if I have to be Muffin's mother, my daughter is going to receive letters from Muffin's mother. Here's a little sample:

My darling Muffin,

Daddy and I went to the theater last night and saw a lovely production of the new play "That One Guy Talked to That Other Guy For an Hour And a Half and Then We All Went Out For Drinks." I just love art that imitates life! Anyway, I saw Mrs. Wellman-Bryson down near the orchestra wearing something that looked like it was made out of meringue and spiderwebs. Honestly, one shouldn't appear in public wearing just whatever rubbed off on one while breezing through the kitchens!

Today has been hectic, hectic, hectic! The Prime Minister dropped in unannounced and asked me if I would be available to be the ambassador to one of those South American countries that begins with...S? R? I don't know. It's a letter of the alphabet, anyway. I said I wasn't terribly keen on moving to a country with spiders the size of briefcases, but he assured me that my impressions of South America were all wrong. So, when you get back, we're all moving to Paraguay. Brush up your Spanish, my darling!

In other news, your winter wardrobe has been solved! The gardeners came rushing into the house (through the FRONT DOOR, no less!) shouting that we were being invaded by bears. Daddy took his musket and took care of the brutes, and the short story is that you will have a lovely new bearskin coat for school this year. You'll look so rugged & rustic, my darling! Let us know if you're in the market for a coonskin cap to go with it. I'm sure we could arrange something.

Well, I should wrap this up. We're expecting the champagne truck to come rattling up any old minute with this month's delivery. We're doubling up this month because we're hosting the Duchess' 104th birthday celebration and you remember how that woman can pour the stuff down! I guess when you're that age, it doesn't matter whether you're asleep and drooling in your chair before dinner. People expect it of you.

Love to all, darling!! TA!

I was flattered to learn that all of camp was reading my letters daily. The woman who was the counselor of Peaches' cabin asked if I would continue to write to her, even while Peaches is out at Yosemite this coming week and won't be getting emails. I told her that of course I'd write. One must support one's fan base, after all.

Virtual Bank Line Notebook

Last night's dream will definitely be mined for all it's worth at some future point.

There had been a terrible plague. Only about half of the human population survived, and those that did mutated. But when I say "mutated," I mean like Spiderman mutation. Everyone was some kind of amazing atomic super ninja.

Now, of the super amazing atomic ninjas left on the earth, half were insane and half were sane. The insane ones were extremely paranoid and believed that everyone was trying to kill them, and they responded in kind to everyone they met. The sane ones were lovely people. The hard part was that you couldn't tell who was who by looking - everyone looked perfectly normal.

The plague was also sort of slow-acting. There were still people dying all the time. The illness made them waste away, toughening their skin and wasting their muscles so that they looked like mummies. Finally, the heart and lungs were too weak to support life and the victims died, usually in their beds, although sometimes they would fall down in the street. The bodies would already be so dessicated that they would just crumble to dust.

I was rifling just such a body for whatever might be in its pockets one day when a man walked up to me.

"Was it someone you knew?" he asked. He seemed calm and lucid, but that didn't mean anything.

"No." I went on digging in the pockets.

"Are you okay?"

I turned to him. He was handsome - medium height, curly brown hair, brown eyes. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and some kind of backpack.

"Sure. I'm fine. It just seemed a shame to let whatever he...she...whatever might be here go to waste."

"Ah, sure. Hey, do you know of a good place to sleep?"

I told him about a friend of mine who lived about a block away. She had a nice place and was open to letting friends squat there while looking for a decent house that hadn't been too damaged by looting. He told me that he had to go take care of some things and went walking off, promising to be back soon.

I skipped off toward my friend's house. We were in a residential neighborhood with ranch-style houses and big lawns. About half the yards were dead or overgrown. The rest had well-manicured lawns, some groomed with obsessive zeal - garden gnomes, pink flamingos, ornamental wrought iron, etc.

My friend's house had a nice lawn littered with beach balls and croquet implements. Inside, she always seemed to be eating sweet and sour chicken. I went in and asked her whether she had room. I mentioned that the person in need was a handsome man and she immediately assured me that she had plenty of space. Then she told me that it was getting dark out and I'd better go. I went out the door at a run, nervous about the gathering dark and worried that the stranger would get back before I did and think I'd abandoned him.

In the twilight I made an uncomfortable discovery. The well-trimmed hedges, the careful topiaries were almost all made of thorn bushes, specifically placed to grab the clothing of anyone foolish enough to pass too closely. I tried cutting through a yard that had a tableau made with mannequins. A male mannequin was on the ground while a female mannequin loomed over him with her foot poised over his neck. I bumped into the female, nearly knocking her over. From nowhere, a woman appeared and demanded to know why I was upsetting her "reenactment of the recent crimes."

I was temporarily speechless, but then she stalked to a brick pillar at one corner of the yard. She stepped off the grass and said "Would you like to see what I've made for my yard?" I was looking all over, trying to figure out how I was going to calmly edge out of her yard without her going all ninja all over me. Too late.

She pushed a button and from the edges of the yard, wrought iron fencing edged with spikes came shooting out of the ground as a latticework of laser beams patterned the grass at my feet. As it reached higher and higher, I could hear the faint hum of electricity crackling through it.

"Yes," she said. "It's electrified. And you are trapped. If you hold perfectly still, you might survive the night. However, if you move a millimeter, you are dead."

But I knew what to do. I *AM* magnetized after all. As long as I only touch in one spot, I'm okay. I grabbed the fence with one hand. Swinging as hard as I could, I flung my other arm upward and let go of my handhold just as my other hand grabbed onto another spot a few feet above. Between my flinging myself upward, one hand at a time, and the inexorable upward climb of the growing fence, I was soon about 30' above the ground. I flung myself over the spikes at the top and jumped down, landing lightly on my feet.

The woman, who only just realized that she had lost me, was yelling at me as I ran toward the rendezvous point.

And then I woke up.

Yeah, this'll be come a story at some point.

English Major Cashes In

Yeah, I make my living writing after a fashion. And it's not a bad living, at that. But what *else* can you do with those wordsmithing capabilities?

You can win prizes. It's not as though I find this particular piece of prize irresistable, or even that attractive. It's that I could think of a thousand different entries for this particular contest, and it seems like nobody else could come up with one. Okay. Obviously there was at least one more.

About the prize, it's not terrible, but when I checked out the artist's site, I found that I like nearly everything else on it more. Especially the babies. I love the babies. They crack my shit up.

Sending Them Out

I have scrubbed, polished, cut, and otherwise readied my stories Bella and Sacrament for publication and have sent them out to a combined eleven markets today.

Wish me luck!

Chefs Dine In

If you're a good cook, going out to dinner is often an exercise in picking apart your meal and reconstructing it in the perfect world of your own kitchen. "I would have added shallots to the butter." "This isn't creamy, it's just greasy." "I think they could have been more adventurous with the wine sauce." But it's possible to go out and have a meal and think to oneself "I would never have thought of this!"

About once a quarter, I have a similar opportunity. My writer's group, the Zombie Club, meets every other week to review each other's work and provide encouragement. In between critiquing each other's novels, we read our own short fiction, and last night was a fabulous opportunity indeed to hear some really first-rate stuff.

You can see one of my friends, S. G. Browne, reading his prize-winning story "Zombie Gigolo," his selection for last night. I feel lucky that we get to hear this stuff in the intimate setting of the Head Zombie's living room. IT's GREAT to have the privilege of having talented friends.

Writer's Nightmares

Before I went to bed last night, I did a couple of things: I worked on a short story that I need to finish by Thursday, and I thought hard about a book I'm starting and how many more themes I can possibly cram into it. Because gender identity, the culture of youth worship, the writing life, introversion and the individuality of perception aren't enough. I know that I can shoehorn music theory, extraterrestrials, the nature of time and makeup tips in as well.

So, in my dream I was hanging out with the Zombie Club, except that it wasn't the actual Zombies themselves. One of them was a tiny little short man that I've never seen in real life, another was a dear friend of mine that died two years ago. We had all gotten together on a sort of field trip to visit an agent's office, but it wasn't like any real agent's office, I'm sure.

At this particular office, you made appointments with the various agents, and there were about a dozen to choose from. You were allowed to pitch up to six works, but the pitch went like this: first you had a card with six lines on it. On each of the lines, you write three words that describes the work you're pitching. Based on those three words, the agent may ask to see a two-sentence synopsis. Based on the two-sentence synopsis, the agent may then ask for a whole package - a full-length synopsis, sample chapters, etc. So you go in with a suitcase of stuff, but it all hinges on the three words you've chosen for the card at the beginning.

The six of us (there are eight Zombies in real life, but in the dream, only six) sat at a table facing the agent who looked at our cards one by one. He would check off the things on the card that he wanted to see, and each person would then get out their two-sentence thing. When the first agent looked at my card, he just said "Hmmm, no...too dark...no...gloomy...sorry, nothing here." And handed it back.

I was embarrassed and a little angry because he'd only really looked at the first three. I was thinking "You think you're so goddamned important that you can't even look at EIGHTEEN WORDS?" At the end of the day, we'd seen at least four agents, and everyone else had gotten at least two or three requests for samples, but I had gotten NOTHING. I was so angry, because this wasn't a commentary on my writing skills, but on my skills at picking the three words that would market my book most effectively. I have to admit, being still unpublished at this late date makes me keenly aware at how important those things are, and makes me panic a little at not being better at them.

And just to add insult to injury, at the end of the dream, I got separated from the rest of the Zombies and couldn't find the car in the mall parking lot, and my phone got all screwed up and I couldn't even call them.

My dream suck sometimes.

Technofear

I got a new computer today. My old one, a lovely IBM ThinkPad, has become so bunged up with Windows crap that it was taking 30+ minutes to boot, and I long ago decided that Vista was never crossing my threshold, so here I am with a brand new MacBook.

The first thing I like is that it sounds Scottish. I can get behind that. The second thing I like is that mine is a nice matte black, so it already goes with everything I own. No, I'm not goth. I'm just incapable of putting together a matching outfit out of two different colors.

Here's my difficulty: I've always used Windows. I mean, I've used Windows since there *was* Windows. I haven't liked it, but it was what I was used to. My brand new computer is sitting right here, to my right, but I haven't opened it yet. I haven't opened it because I know that the minute I do, I'm going to start feeling stupid.

It's not going to work the way I'm used to, and I'm going to get all frustrated and start calling it names. I'm going to give up after half an hour because I'm an adult and I'm just supposed to be able to touch things and automatically have them work, right? And the worst part is that I'm going to miss out on something really cool that it can do, because I'm too frustrated that "it doesn't work like my old one" and I'm not willing to be patient and interact with it on its own merits.

The worst part is, I can see all this coming. *sigh*

To Work or Not to Work: That is the Question

I'm deeply conflicted.

On the one hand, I am an award-winning fiction writer who has yet to publish anything substantial and is just waiting for a chance - a big break.

On the other hand, I am a highly-paid manager at a large company with a mortgage and two children who have big dreams that involve college educations. And I just took on a second job.

There are many things I could do that would help my fiction career. I could sell my house and move somewhere cheaper, quit my job and let my husband support me while I wrote full-time. I know that all it would take is some time, and I don't have any of that right now.

On the other hand, my children LOVE their schools and their friends, and where we're at now we have chickens and a burbling creek. Most people pay big bucks to spend a precious few days vacationing in the kind of place where I live all the time.

I just wish I could figure this out. I wish there were an obvious, win/win solution. I'm not seeing it.

Sources of Inspiration

I've never once suffered from "writer's block." I've never sat at my computer, looking at a blank screen without an idea in my head. My problem is most often the other way around - I have too many ideas running around my head and can't get them all down fast enough.

Where do I get these ideas?

Stuff happens to me. Like...going through my spam folder and seeing the eight million messages that tell me that I should be concerned about the size of my penis. Since "my penis" doesn't exist, should I still be concerned about it? Or should I be even MORE concerned? And is it even worth it to add "up to 1 inch" to something that doesn't exist, leaving me with only one inch?

Or the fact that I'm stalked by meat. It started happening about eight years ago, and it continues to this day. Last month I was at the car dealership getting my car done, and as I was pacing in the parking lot waiting for the Pirate to pick me up, there was a giant slice of ham lying on the ground. It was gone by the time I came to pick up my car.

And the newest, and bestest? A psycho has been BCCing me in a series of emails that outline his ongoing effort to sue the state after an incident last year where he was carted off to a mental hospital. I've talked to quite a few people about whether or not you can "accidentally" BCC someone on a series of emails. No. You can't.

So, now I'm thinking hard about what it means that this person is copying me on what is, essentially, a very self-incriminating series of emails and what he might be trying to tell me.

It makes me wonder if this kind of stuff happens to everyone. It must, because my life is sort of boring, compared to the lives of most people.

Hidden Gems

I'm doing a reading on the radio station KFJC tomorrow morning. I was thinking that I'd do a piece from my last novel, but as I was looking through the contents of my thumb drive, I found a short story that I really loved that I'd written last year. It wasn't edited at all (the word "shit" appeared about fifty times) and when I read it, it came out to about 45 minutes.

Oh, did I mention that I hadn't put on an ending?

The nice thing is that I had a deadline. I have to get this polished and ready for prime time by tonight because the reading papens at 7:20 a.m. PST tomorrow morning. I'm always impressed at the depths of laser-like focus I'm able to muster when faced with a looming deadline, and I was able to write the ending (a different, and I think better, ending than I had originally imagined) and cut a great deal from it in a couple of hours last night. Tonight I do some more editing and then decide on the soundtrack.

The best thing is that after this intensive few hours of work, this story will be ready for prime time. It goes on my list of stories ready to be put out there in the world.

I love when that happens.

The Weather is Here. Wish You Were Beautiful

I'm here at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars writer's conference, and it's been an enlightening few days. For those of you able to make it out to this conference in 2009, I would highly recommend it. The staff and faculty are all accessible, and the variety of subjects presented is phenomenal.

Wednesday was the first day of the conference, and I showed up bright and early at 9-ish to register. I hung out for a while, then attended the keynote addresses from Bernard Cooper and Jeff Biggers. The irony is that Tuesday night my mother had been telling me about going to a restaurant entirely staffed by fabulous drag queens in Greenwich Village with a man who was, at the time, head of Literacy Volunteers of Coconino County. That guy was Jeff Biggers.

I've rubbed elbows with authors and shmoozed at least one agent, and I got to have a conversation with Orson Scott Card, who is the happiest, sweetest guy you could ever hope to meet. He was as nice as Rick Moody, who was not only one of the nightly speakers, but also on the faculty. He gave a great class on story structure, which he entirely based on grammar and sentence structure, and he told me I'm a genius. So I automatically like him.

But it's not just the classes presented that have been enlightening. The interactions between classes have been just as intersting, and are coming thick and fast. In particular, the "small group intensive," a session where your work is being critiqued by a group of 3-4 of your peers, has been...a treat. This is the first time in my adult life that I've sat through a class that has been reduced to a shouting match between the presenter and one of the students.

The class was a playwriting class, and all the participants were to have had their entries in five weeks before the start of the class. I submitted the first 30 pages of my play, one of the other women (we were all women in this class) submitted a single-spaced 44 pages of her play, and the other two submitted far, far less. One submitted 12 pages of a poorly-written play (she later told us that it was three scenes from a larger work)and another submitted 17 pages of character sketch for a novel.

The instructor's idea was to tackle the shorter pieces in the first session and spend the other two sessions taking on the longer pieces. But, as the man said, the best-laid plans blah blah blah blah. The man who said that was white. As the woman who completely derailed our sessions would have pointed out. Her 17-page play was three scenes of dialog about a slave woman who was 1) thinking of escaping, 2) about to escape and then 3) had escaped (no, the escape was never shown), but she kept insisting that there were depths to it that we just didn't get. Because she hadn't written them.

Every time the instructor asked a question, she would give him a coquettish look and a non-answer. It didn't help that she had the voice of Butterfly McQueen, which, when she laughed turned into Zoe the muppet. It's hard to take seriously the insistence that someone is a serious scholar when they talk like a muppet and act even less mature.

"You don't give any descriptions. Who is this person?"

[Eyelash bat] "Who do you think it is?"

"You don't give a time or place. When and where does this play take place?"

[Sideways glance] "When do you think it is?"

By the end of the class, we had talked about nothing but her play and she kept going on about how it was full of taboos that were risky and hard to write about, although none of it was in the material we were given, so it was hard to credit her with it. By the end of the class, the instructor was literally shouting at her, telling her that she was being unhelpful and unprofessional. It was uncomfortable for the rest of us, and I found out later that all three of the rest of us resented the hell out of her for dragging the entire process on. This woman kept insisting that the rest of us had no appreciation of the history of slavery in America, of the nuances of African-American culture since then, the fallout, both economic and social of slavery and what it means, particularly to Southern, African-American women. She was taking a huge risk, she said, in just writing this down. Although she had written, effectively, nothing.

On the second day, we did the second short piece, since we hadn't gotten to it on the first. Unfortunately, it was called "Never Cross a Southern Mama," and the muppet woman said "Whose mama? Yours? I was interested in the title, but it was just a bunch of white women, so I stopped reading." Yeah. That's a helpful attitude in a workshop. Without mentioning any of the content of the woman's piece, she proceeded to hijack all further discussion into an indictment of modern society and its ignorance of black history, and once again degraded into a shouting match.

By the time the instructor called for a break halfway through, she started telling us that she "didn't feel safe" offering criticism. When I told her that we were showing respect for her point of view, but she wasn't showing us the same courtesy she cut me off in mid-sentence. I made the mistake of calling her "hon," and she told me "Don't talk to me like I'm a child," and got up and walked out.

The minute the door closed behind her, everyone uttered a sigh of relief.

The amazing thing was the she came back about 15 minutes later and sat there in the room with a book in her hand, making notes on 3x5 cards. I was at least grateful that she'd shut up.

Later that day, I tracked down the coordinator of the conference and told him about the horrible disruption she'd been, and he told me that I was the third person to come to him. The second was the woman who'd written the Southern mama story. The FIRST, was the muppet woman. She'd accused the instructor of being both sexist AND racist, and told the coordinator that she'd felt threatened. What he told me was that she had a reputation around the university as an amateur, as immature and not really ready for workshopping. He felt bad for those of us who had suffered her in our midst, and that he would do "something" to make it up to me.

I suggested that next year, he give the instructors permission to throw out participants who act inappropriately (the instructor said that if he'd been allowed, he certainly would have thrown her out) and publish some code of behavior for small-group participants. He agreed that both of those were worthy suggestions.

We'll see what happens next year.

What about my play? Well, I was given some solid suggestions that I shall spend the next few weeks implementing.

The Play is Done

When I started in 2004 writing "Genius of Want," I had originally envisioned it as a play, but was unfamiliar with the play form. Well, for this year's Desert Nights, Rising Stars conference, I decided to commit myself to taking the playwriting small group intensive. This meant that I had to actually write the play.

It took me two months, but I finished the play last week. If you'd care to, you can even read it by clicking the link in the title of this post. I just ask one thing: if you do read it, I'd appreciate you leaving your feedback in comments, as this is the first draft and it's likely to change significantly.

Another Year, Another Post

Back in August, I threatened to turn my novel "Genius of Want" into a play. I begged for people to read for me, because that's really the only way to get a sense of where it needs fixing. I thought that I could have it done by September, and everyone was keenly on board.

And then...it languished. I've been an accomplishing fool, don't get me wrong. Slacking is not at all why it didn't get done in September. But now, at last, five months after I said I'd do it, it's done. Genius of Want is now a play that has gone back to the original title "Leif the Buddhist Viking and His Epic Search for Love."

I'm thinking as I translate this particular work into a play that I really, really like the play form. I am now seeing a great many of my earlier works in terms of how they might translate into plays. I've promised myself, though, that I'm not writing much new stuff this year. This year, I've promised myself that I'm going to concentrate hard on submissions.

And once Leif the Buddhist Viking is ready, it'll go into the submission bucket.