I Won't Dance - Don't Ask Me

For the next few days, I'll be writing from Park City, Utah, where the Pirate and I are attending Sundance. We've got 10 movies to see in five days, and I'm gonna tell you about them!

Today's our first day at Sundance. The trip here was great - utterly without incident for us. On the other hand, before we've even stepped foot into a theater, we've already seen one comedy and one drama.

Before we even got on the plane, there were two ladies ahead of us who had obviously primped long and hard for this event, and were ready to have a good time. They were made up, sprayed up and being the sort of loud, boistrous people who assume that everyone loves them and wants to participate in their deal. Of course, they were in our shuttle to Park City from Salt Lake.

First, the loud blonde with the weird topknot insisted that the unassuming snowboarder guy, who had been told to take the front seat, sit in the back so that her friend could take the front seat because "she gets carsick!" Said friend spent the entire trip turned toward the back of the van looking at her friends and reading her email from her Blackberry (gosh, I wonder why she's carsick!). Then, before we left, the same loud blonde told the Pirate (who is 2 meters tall) to sit in the back so that her friend could sit in our seat because "she's almost 6 feet tall!" He laughed and shook his head, saying "I'm pretty tall." If she'd been looking, she would have seen that he's so tall that even in this seat where we supposedly had plenty of legroom, he had to sit with his legs spread wide because there wasn't enough room for him to put his knees together in front of him.

They asked us if we were film makers, and when we said no, they asked us if we were film watchers to which we said yes. These were the only two classes of people these women were interested in. The Pirate and I did not say that are a Netflix employee and a writer; instead we looked at the scenery, responded to direct questions and generally kept to ourselves while these three ladies kept up a very loud and animated conversation that was the verbal equivalent of a Jack Russell terrier, although not as smart. However, since we were dropped at our hotel first, the three ladies enthusiastically wished us a very good time, promising to see us at some point during the festival. And if we see them, we'll smile and act like old chums, I'm sure.

Once we landed we were STARVING, so we walked off the lethargy of the plane ride by heading into town. We headed for La Casita, a nice little Mexican place (with real Mexicans!!) downtown, and sat at a table by the front window. I was facing the window, and the Pirate could tell when something interesting was going on outside by my face.

Outside, a man wearing a poncey hat and big glasses and the ubiquitous pass-on-a-lanyard (if even we have those, they can't be that big a deal) was angrily gesturing toward and yelling at a woman who looked like either his fed-up assistant (who would at least be getting paid for his abuse) or his even more fed-up girlfriend (who presumably would not). He finally ended up gesturing toward the restaurant and then walking toward it while she hurried to catch up. To his credit he *did* open the door for her, but within five minutes of their walking in together, she walked out alone.

The Pirate and I were both pretty happy about that, even though we don't know either of them.

Our first film will be tonight: Crossing the Line, about a man who defects *to* North Korea. I'll also be talking about some films that we won't be seeing but look interesting.

Writing: Blessing or Curse?

I know people who are writers, and I know people who *want* to be writers. The distinguishing characteristic in my mind is the quality of bitching between the two groups.

People who *want* to be writers complain that they can't get inspired. They're "blocked," they can't figure out what to write, they have a great first sentence or setting or ending but they can't do anything with it. They write endless blog entries complaining that they don't have time to write. I met one person who, in her late 20s, thought that she'd start writing "as a way to make some quick money." Her plan was to sell a few articles to Reader's Digest "because they'll take anything," before moving on to "real" writing. It seems sometimes like a lot of people who want to be writers want that because they don't believe that it takes any special skill or talent.

People who *are* writers tend to complain about the things they have to do that take time away from writing. They seem to always be spinning off ideas and trying things out and writing up outlines and sketches and scenes and characters. They've always got something lurking at the back of their minds, tucked away for a time when it's needed.

I think that's part of what attracts people to writers and writing - they see people with a lot mentally going on, people whose imaginations are teeming with stories and plots and worlds, and they want to be that. They want to have access to that kind of imagination and the ability to live more than one reality at a time.

I guess I can't blame them. To be able to look at anything that is and know a thousand things that might be is to be blessed.

Writers of a Feather

I know a fair number of people who are also writers. Their genres are different than mine (whose isn't?), their methods are a little different than mine, but they also tend to hang out with other writers.

The problem is that, while I have a few other friends that write, I don't really "hang around" anyone. I have one dear, dear friend with whom I do some weekly writing, but other than that I'm pretty much a loner.

It makes me wonder if I shouldn't be working harder to shmooze the writer crowd. Seriously - I don't link to any other writer's blogs, I don't eagerly eat up the written word as falls from the pen of this popular writer or that popular writer. Years of being a Buddhist have left me with the impression that I can't place full faith and credit in anything I haven't experienced for myself, so reading about someone else's experience of writing or the publishing industry really only has the effect of making me curious about my own experience of it.

But perhaps it's time. Perhaps now is the time to start reaching out to some other writers - to start making more of an effort to get myself and my stuff out there. I mean...you know...moreso than I am now.

December Slump

It happens every holiday season. During November, I'm going great guns, cranking out my November novel and feeling that this year, it's one of my best (yes, I feel that way every year, even 2004) and then come December, I think "it's time to take a little breather." And I pause to do a little gift shopping and visit family. I fully intend to take up my pen again and finish the masterpiece I've started, but it just never seems to happen - sometimes not until months and months later.

I still haven't found why I'm a freakin' dynamo in November and a complete slug the rest of the year. My first year, as many people know, I lost my job and had a death in the family in November. I had to travel out of state for the funeral, keep doing my regular job AND look for a new job and STILL managed to write over 100,000 words in 30 days.

Granted, I'm not the best person to ask. During all the time I was doing these things I have no memory of washing a single dish, preparing a meal, running a load of laundry or seeing either my husband or my children. I'm sure that they were in the house during November, and that they ate from clean dishes and wore clean clothes. I'm just not sure I had anything to do with it.

Over the years I've figured out how to better integrate writing with the rest of my life so that my family doesn't necessarily have to suffer for me to get stuff done, but it has meant that my productivity has taken a bit of a hit.

What eats at me in December, the busiest month of the year for the people where I work, is that all the people that I know who are successful writers have become successful because they were able to quit their jobs and concentrate entirely on their writing. For a ton of reasons, I'm not going to be able to do that for quite a while, but it's something that, in my fantasies, I'd love more than anything.

I guess the only thing for it is to continue to steal the odd hour hear and there and finish what I can. One day, this will all pay off and December won't be the slowest time of my writing year anymore.

How Does She Do It?

I've mentioned that I have an assistant who helps me with my submissions. We're still early in this process, so she's a little unsure about which pieces to submit to what markets. She is still looking to me for guidance, asking me "Which one do you want to send to Kidney Quarterly? How about to Hubcap Review?" Normally, I think about what pieces she has, which of them hasn't gotten enough exposure lately, and make my answer based on that.

When you look at the submission guidelines for most magazines, if they're not genre, they're depressingly similar. "Furgpickl Monthly accepts only the most outstanding fiction. We're looking for evocative, edgy, brilliant writing that makes the hairs on our arms stand up." Or something to that effect. Something that says "Don't submit anything written on the back of a napkin unless you're already an established name, in which case we're already bribing your office assistant to mail us your garbage."

Every magazine suggests that you look through their back issues to see what kinds of stories they've published in the past, but I maintain that's bullshit. Here's the thing: even at the smallest magazine, you've got at least two - more likely three to five - people making the editorial decisions. If you can find even one story that's like yours, chances are that not everyone on the staff liked it but they put it in anyway. Now, you don't know what it is that they liked about it. Perhaps it had a dog in it with the same name as a particular editor's dog, and that made him feel kindly disposed toward it. Nevermind that the meat of the story was the one-legged woman determined to run a marathon. And your story about the one-armed tennis player has no dog and is therefore going to be seen as derivative and tacky. You are being asked to look into the minds of an unknown number of people and guess, based on choices they've already made, whether they would choose another thing that you've produced.

There's a term for this: it's called "collaborative filtering," and it was the common way that people did things back before everyone shopped online or in big, anonymous chain stores. You would go down to your local grocer and he'd say "Howdy, Myrtle. I see you're buying some peaches. You know, Frances was in yesterday buying peaches and she bought some maple syrup to put on them. Said she's been having them that way for years and she loves them." You'd buy yourself some maple syrup, remembering that time that you had a nice salad at Frances' house and she'd put raisins in the salad and that was really delicious too. The grocer knows that you know Frances and knows that you like her cooking, and is passing along her preferences to you in order to make an additional sale.

Places that do a lot of online business do this with complicated algorithms. Amazon.com does it - you see a window every time you choose a product that tells you that "People who bought a cheese straightener also bought a left nostril inhaler." Netflix does it, first asking you to rate a lot of movies and then recommending more movies to you based on the movies you rated highly.

Both the Amazon and Netflix systems are flawed, though. They can only be binary in their calculations (okay, so Netflix's system has four stars, it still comes down to "like/didn't like"). They can't drill down on why you liked or didn't like a particular thing. Sometimes, they make some spectacular mistakes and we look at something that Netflix or Amazon has recommended to us and think "What in the hell are they thinking? Why on earth would I want to buy a crossbow, just because I bought some cheese popcorn? Why would I want to see Jesus Christ, Vampire Slayer just because I liked Jesus Christ Superstar?"

But Amazon and Netflix are dealing with exactly the same basic problem. They're trying to discern, based on previous choices, other things that you would like. They don't know you personally and can't tell why you might have liked a thing in the past, so they're making their best guess. And remember, their "best guess" involves engineers having spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars constructing, refining and testing algorithms that are supposed to more closely mimic the millions of decisions that go on in the human brain when developing a preference.

I don't have thousands of hours or millions of dollars. I have just me and the knowledge of what any given magazine has published in the past. And sometimes, I don't even have that. Is it any wonder that I look at this whole process as a crapshoot? So, in the absence of the kind of engineering power that large corporations have applied to this problem, I turn to wisdom that has helped people in my situation for decades now:

If you throw enough shit at the wall, some of it's bound to stick.

When Curmudgeon and Philanthropist Battle It Out

I've been submitting like a fiend lately. Well, credit where credit is due - my lovely and capable assistant has been submitting like a fiend on my behalf lately. The point is that over the last year, a boatload of my work has been sent out for consideration.

Many of those submissions are to contests of one sort and another, and most of those contests are held by college publications. I enter these contests not just for the glory of having someone tell me that my work doesn't suck (which has happened even when I haven't won), but because most of them offer a better payoff than actual publication. If I were to publish a short story in most magazines, I might get fifty bucks for it, but if I win a contest with it, I could garner $250.

The thing that cheeses me off about those contests, though, is that they all come with a catch: you have to pay an entry fee (which is fair enough), and they're then going to send you a subscription to said publication. I now have a 3-foot high stack of these things in my dining room - Tin House and Boulevard and Hotel Amerika and Alligator Juniper and about six with the word "Review" in the title.

When they first started coming to me, I felt it my duty to my fellow writers to look at them - to see who had gotten that coveted first prize instead of me, to see whose work fit the judges' notion of "good writing" moreso than mine. But then they just kept coming.

It never bothers me when the person who beat me for first place writes something wonderful. Even better if the person's style and subject are nothing like mine. That's fabulous! There's room for everybody.

But that do-gooder, beatific, sunshiney attitude goes right down the toilet the minute I read the first "experimental" thing that sounds as though my 6-year-old had written it, then torn it up in shame and hidden it under her bed because in first grade even she should know better. Those bastards! I think to myself. They've got some kind of balls to reject my well-written, beautifully-rendered, heartbreaking prose in favor of this foetid, gelatinous suet of words! And then I stop opening their stupid magazines, no matter how many they send me.

But wait! There's MORE! They've taken your entry fee, they've rejected your work, they've burdened you with the stinking drivel of people whose crap they chose to publish INSTEAD OF YOURS - and then they send a renewal notice!

"Your subscription to We're Never Going to Publish You Even if You Beg Quarterly is about to run out. Don't cut off our gloating before we have the chance to rub your face in the untutored prose of every semi-literate twelve year old on the planet!"

I called my local library. They don't even want these things for their periodical section. They have no use for four copies of Squat and Hunker Review. Who does, really?

I know. This makes me a terrible person. Terrible. I should be doing all I can to further the cause of literature in America, including donating zillions of dollars and acres of storage space to back issues of All-Adverb Review, but I just can't whack up the ginger, really.

In the Virtual Bank Line

I know, it's been a quite a while since my last post, but on the good side, if my evil plans come to fruition, I'll have much more to post soon. In the meantime, I have a couple of Virtual Bank Line episodes I wanted to record.

7.23.2006
I was sitting at my kitchen table with several of my former co-workers, including my old boss. We were trying to solve some kind of engineering problem and were in a heated discussion, but the television was on and it was loud enough to be distracting.The television show was some kind of nature program about how animals react to the panic and pain of other animals. The narrator was saying that when an animal was dying traumatically, other animals would kill it to relieve its suffering.

On the screen there was a dog. It had no hair left and its skin was a horrible, mottled pink, like a raw sausage. It was lying on its back, writhing and crying. The skin was stretched and looked like it was going to burst. Another little dog jumped onto it and began tearing at its belly, eviscerating it.

The engineers and I looked on, horrified, but soon realized that we had a much worse problem. We had vampires.

I came upon a vampire killing a very large woman (another co-worker of mine, but nobody I knew in real life). The vampire was a punk-looking blonde girl, about 12 or 14 years old. She standing in the shower, having dragged the woman halfway in after her. The blood was spattering all over the shower and her, and as I walked in, she looked up. The woman's blood continued to ooze onto the shower floor and down the drain, while the girl looked ashamed of herself, then turned to smoke and fluttered away.

The rules of vampires aren't what you think. Vampires don't die in the sunlight; they just lose their vampire powers, along with any memory they may have had of their nocturnal activities. As vampires, they have amazing strength, no fingerprints and they can turn their bodies to smoke, making them able to enter sealed rooms and fly through the air. They instantly regenerate when wounded, so they can't be killed, even by a stake. The thing that's lethal to vampires is the wood. It's like smothering a fire by putting to much fuel on it - when you put a wooden stake into a vampire, the wood "absorbs" the smoke and you're just left with a piece of wood. You can't ever BURN the wood, though, because it will release the vampire. You put it in a coffin and bury it.

As humans they retain the ability to regenerate, just not as quickly. They also have problems metabolizing food: their digestive systems are really set up for being solely carnivorous. Because of the way they metabolize they are normally very thin, with very pink complexions. Mostly, people think of them as beautiful, healthy, rosy-cheeked people. They have unusual amounts of energy and age more slowly than ordinary people.

Vampire victims do not turn into vampires; they just die. I have no idea what it is that turns people into vampires. Perhaps they're born mutations, perhaps it's some kind of virus.

I stood there over the body of the dead woman and wondered how I would catch the vampire, and if I caught her as a human, how do you even begin to prosecute that?

7.24.2006
I'd been on vacation with the Pirate, and at the end of it all, I had to go to a funeral. I was driving into the city for this funeral, but for some reason, I seemed to only intermittently have a car. I would be at a traffic light and realize that I was sitting on the ground with four large pillows in my hands. I was annoyed because I knew that I had to carry these pillows with me, but they were awkward. It's true that in real life, I often feel like I have too many things in my hands at any given time.

I arrived too late for the funeral, but went to the family's house for the reception. In the kitchen, I met the dead man's girlfriend. The dead man was the boy I liked when I was in kindergarten. He'd be my age, but in the dream he was only 20 or so. His girlfriend was sobbing because they'd been having problems right before he died. Suddenly, the wall opened up and I could see an image of the dead man walking down the front walk hand in hand with another woman as the girlfriend's voice kept crying in the foreground.

I went back outside and there were two groups - the dead man's family and friends and my entire family. Why was my entire family here? All of my aunts and uncles and cousins, everyone was gathered at picnic tables out on the front lawn. I noticed that most of the people who didn't know each other were making awkward conversation or at least sitting together and sharing their grief. But there were some men who were specifically avoiding even looking at each other. It was as if they were trying to maintain their status of strangers.

As I walked through the kitchen outside, one of my little cousins was talking to one of the dead man's little cousins, saying "My cousin Malachy's a hitman, but nobody else in my family anymore..." It was a well-known fact in my family, but not something we talked about. But I looked outside at the group gathered there in a whole new light.

In the Virtual Bank Line

I was at a luxury resort whose driveway included a bridge over a deep, clear moat. The moat was a decorative touch, the bottom covered with colorful fake plants and rocks visible from anywhere in the resort (think: the submarine ride at Disneyland). From the driveway, a stone footbridge led to a stone pavilion where one could be close to the water.

I was in the pavilion talking to the woman who had been hired to be the mermaid. She wasn't the voluptuous, hair-combing kind of mermaid. Rather, she was the bony, spiny, lobstery kind who looked more seahorse than manatee.

She wore greasepaint that highlighted the peaks and valleys of ther body, which gave her skin the look of a carapace, a hard shell. The mermaid complained about her job and the toll that the hours in chlorinated water and greasepaint took on her skin. She bitched about the impact that job was having on her acting career.

As I was leaving, cars were comign across the bridge - limousines and huge SUVs obviously carrying important people. Celebrities were showing up with the attendant lights and fanfare. There was going to be a magic show, televised and broadcast, so all the celebrities were dressed to be seen.

One particular man, a sporst figure, abandoned his SUV on the bridge, stepping out in a cherry-red silk suit that gleamed in the spotlights. The cameras swarmed to teh banks of the moat to catch the man, who said that he'd been studying magic forever and he had it all figured out. He was there, he said, to relax and have a good time, but he was too smart to be taken in by a little sleight of hand.

He strolled to the edge of the pavilion and bend over to start flirting with the mermaid who sat coyly on the bottom step of the pavilion, smiling at the man's advances. As he approached her, she smiled and flipped into the water. The man laughed at the antics of the mermaid and came closer to the edge of the water. The mermaid's head appeared, and as the man bent forward to say something, he toppled over and fell into the water.

The combination of his churning arms and legs and the bright spotlights rendered the water opaque and obscured the man's body from view. The water continued to splash and froth with the commotion, only dying down as the man managed to climb back onto the steps of the pavilion - but now, he was naked except for a pair of filthy sneakers. He pulled himself out of the water and stared around, not seeming to realize that he was nude. A lackey from the hotel came running up with a blanket to cover the man, who was now shaking and trying to cover himself from the cameras' view. As the huge man stared into the water trying to figure out what had happened to him, the mermaid's head appeared in a spotlight and she announced "The magic has begun."

Busier Than I Knew

A little while ago, I was feeling sort of blue because I had friends who were saying "I have 25 pieces ready to be put into the pipeline..." and things of that nature. When people say that they have tons of material that they've written and are sending out, I feel the lack of writing time in my life keenly. I'd like nothing better than to be able to do nothing but write, but it's unlikely to happen.

On the other hand, I was searching through my documents folder for something and I came across two pieces that I had written a few months ago and then utterly forgotten about.

It's like finding a fiver in your pocket.

We Have a Winner!

I came home from doing a reading at the California Writers' Club open mike to find two envelopes that had my address label on them - obvious SASEs from previous submissions.

"Ah, well," I thought. "Another couple of rejections."

The first one was exactly what I expected - the cover letter I had sent along with a rejection printed on something larger than a business card, but smaller than an index card. Not the worst thing I've gotten.

The second envelope had the word "yes" stamped in green ink on the front. I looked at it and thought "Wouldn't it be cool if that meant an acceptance," but dismissed the thought because acceptances are in thicker envelopes. Or something.

I opened the envelope and pulled out a pink photocopy, trifolded, called "List of Winners for the 2005 Soul-Making Literary Competition." I started looking at the categories, because I didn't remember off the top of my head what I submitted to them. Under "Sheila K. Smith Short Story Prize" was my name under second prize. Yup, I won second prize.

On the back of the pamphlet was this notice:

"In keeping with our ongoing tradition, every prize winner and honorable mention is invited to read from his or her winning works at the

Soul-Making Literary Competition Awards Reading
Sunday Afternoon (1:00 pm)
March 12, 2006
Koret Auditorium
San Francisco Main Library, Civic Center
Program includes dance and music performances and art exhibit and will be televised for future viewing on Access San Francisco Channel 29.
Event includes a reception and is free and open to the public."

Hint. Hint.

In the Virtual Bank Line

I had two distinctly different dreams last night, which is only significant because the end of the first one kept coming into the second one in a kind of "WTF?" way.

At the end of the first dream, my friend Mortaine had a special kind of bell. It looked like a clear glass Christmas tree ornament, but inside it had three bells that looked like finger cymbals. They were one above the other, each with a hole in the middle so that tiny golden beads could trickle through, chiming the bells inside. She held it in her hand and, moving her hand slightly, made beautiful, trilling music with this tiny little thing. She told me that each bell produced a different note, and that the three notes together were especially pleasing. The notes were E, A and N. That's right. N.

I woke up from that dream thinking "N? What the hell does N sound like?" And then went back to sleep, but throughout the next dream, I kept thinking "E, A, N? That can't be right."

In the next dream, the Pirate and I had moved to a cute little neighborhood into a townhouse. All the houses shared walls, and we could all see into each other's yards. Our bedroom was on the ground floor, and the window was right above our bed. The blinds we bought were just a tiny bit too big for the window, and the breeze from the open window (it was hot) made them scrape softly against the window frame. It was right in the Pirate's ear, driving him crazy. I snuggled up behind him and put my hand above his head, holding the blind down to keep it from scraping.
{N? No. Not N.}
When we got up, we had to go to a party at my friend's house. My parents were going to be there, and a lot of our neighbors - it was going to be a big thing. I thought it was just going to be a barbecue, but it turned out to be a trunk show of jewelry - they were still setting up as the Pirate and I arrived. We talked to other guests for a bit, and then I wandered off to look out the window.
{E. A. N. E. A. N.}
The neighbors had caught a fawn and were using it to entice its mother across the creek. The mother was understandably nervous about trotting over, and it wasn't even clear to me whether they intended to capture the mother and kill her or just to get both mother and baby out of the way somewhere else. There was a boy - 8 or 10 years old - who wanted to pet the fawn, but the neighbors kept shooing him away and the boy was crying.
{It must mean something - be short for something. There's no N.}
Back inside the party was underway, and people were lining up to dance. They had a squaredance caller who was calling out the moves slowly so that even inexperienced square dancers could follow along. There were eight couples who were all in a line (instead of being in two squares). Now, remember, this is a jewelry trunk show. And who buys more jewelry? That's right. So, the couple are all dancing, and at one point, the women have their backs to their partners, and they lean back with their partners holding them under the arms, and kick one leg out. The caller then yelled "Now drop 'em!" and the men all dropped their partners, who fell on their butts to the floor. The whole place went quiet.
{If there's a note N, is there a key N?}
The caller came in quick with "Gentlemen, you can make it up to your lady by buying her some lovely jewelry!" And, while most of the women let their partners off with mean looks and expensive purchases, one woman with long, white-blonde hair started screaming at the square dance caller, telling him how dare he make her husband humiliate and hurt her just to sell some cheap costume jewelry! Then she ran into the bathroom and slammed the door. When she'd composed herself, she left the house, got into her car and drove off, leaving her husband behind. I watched the whole thing, thinking "Good for her. He was an idiot to drop her like that."
{E. A. N. N. N.}
The Baby Goddess came running into the room, telling me that I had to come and walk with her to her daycare. It wasn't her daycare in real life. This was a series of small buildings joined by corridors. The corridor that the children entered in the daytime was built to look like a forest path. There were round stones set into the concrete of the walkway, and everything was overgrown with moss. The buildings had columns that looked like giant tree trunks, and in the window of an office, there was a cutout of a kindly-looking old lady with the words "I'm watching you" above her head. Next to her was a video monitor where the children could see themselves walking down the path. (As I was telling this dream to the Pirate and the Baby Goddess, she said "That sounds really scary!")
{bEAN, clEAN, dEAN, lEAN, mEAN, wEAN}
There was a tiny door leading down to a sort of basement looking place, and I asked the BG what they kept in there, and she told me that it was where they kept Sarah. Sarah was one of the little girls at daycare, but because she was small, she stayed in that little room. I opened the door and saw a room that was about 4 feet tall, and perhaps six feet on a side. Along one wall there was a bench, and a tiny table in front of it. The only light coming in was from the cracks in the floorboards above. It was inconceivable that the daycare would be keeping a child in such a hole. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness, a tiny little person popped up and said "Is it time to go home?"
{Where would N show up on the clef?}
I didn't know what to say. It was Saturday afternoon. "Time to go home" would have been nearly 24 hours ago, and yet the girl, who looked to be a very tiny 4-year-old, didn't seem distressed at all. She was still wearing diapers and seemed to be a little addled, but pretty clean and cheerful. I was getting myself all worked into a state, wondering where the girl's mother might have been and how I was going to find the woman. I had changed her diaper and was trying to figure out her tights. They weren't proper tights - they were made out of cotton gingham, fitted to the leg and fastened with buttons all up the outside of the leg. They looked like doll clothes. The feet were much too small for the little girls' feet, which looked bloody from being jammed into too-small tights and shoes, but the little girl didn't seem to notice as I put the clothes back on her. I was getting more and more panicky - so much seemed to be wrong with the situation, and yet I was the only one who was noticing it or taking it to heart.
{THERE IS NO N!}
I woke up with my heart and head both pounding. Apparently, I'm still sick.

Taking Notes

I got the contributor's copy of my little magazine article, but still no word from the agent who promised to get back to me "much sooner" on the second submission.

I think it's time to do another round of submissions, although I must admit, I'm a little upset with myself. Other people I know who are writing have volumes of work that they're shoveling out the door with both hands. Due to my own perfectionism, I tend to have only a few offerings at a time that are ready to go out.

*sigh*

I have started a new writing notebook. For years, I have carried around a little green leather notebook that I have jotted down bits and phrases in so that I could save them for later. I like hearing things that people say that are particularly juicy, like "No hair is okay if you have really bushy eyebrows." People say weird things, and I like being there to chronicle them.

But this particular notebook is where I have been actually sketching out the skeletons of the projects I am working on. I've gotten to the point where my ability to work is so sketchy that it's best if I jot down everything about an idea that I can jot down so that when I do have some time to concentrate on it, I have a good idea of what I'm doing.

Thus far, my book is rapidly filling up with ideas that I don't have time to flesh out. But I'm not bitter.

The Bitter Tang of Success

I know now what it is that's been dragging me down lately.

It's success.

In November, I got word that a nonfiction piece I'd submitted in October had been accepted. The piece was short, the pay nominal, but it's an acceptance and that's what counts. The minute I got word, I started hating my job. I wanted to stay home and be able to get to work on all the ideas I had flitting through my brain.

I finished my Nanovel, but I wasn't all that excited about it. The plans I have need a little more work than I was able to give this one. The contract job I'm working at right now means that I have a boss who thinks that because I'm a contractor, I'm not subject to the normal rules that everyone else adheres to. I should be available 24/7, I should have no life of my own that might require my attention. I must be desperate enough to want to do nothing but work.

I got back on track and buried my head in work, but then along came a rejection that was better than anything I'd ever gotten. I note that actually called my writing genius and expressed deep regret that he hadn't been able to convince other editors to publish my story. Again, I'm sure that the pay would have been nominal, but it would have been something.

That note came on the same day that I had driven into work through one of the worst traffic jams I'd ever seen. It had taken me over an hour to drive the last four miles, and for the rest of the day my left eye was twitching the way it does when I'm deeply stressed and unhappy. A couple of days of working from home has fixed that, but I'm still resentful as hell that I'm working on this and not on something I'd rather be doing.

Back in December, I'd gotten a rejection of my first novel from an agent who said that they loved the work, but just didn't feel they'd be able to sell it. They asked to see something else I'd written, so I sent them another novel of an entirely different flavor - Genius of Want. The December rejection had come fourteen months after I had initially sent them the manuscript, and they promised in the letter to give the next one a quicker turnaround. I sent the next manuscript off two or three days after getting the news from them, and I have no idea what to expect, but I can't help but have some high hopes.

The problem is that those high hopes are making it really difficult to concentrate on making a living. It's not my boss's fault that I have literary aspirations. It's not her fault that I'd rather be creating swirls of magic than bringing my considerable organizational skills to bear on her subscriber communications.

I just can't help but realize that every other successful author I've heard about has bitten the bullet, made incredible sacrifices and NOT WORKED A DAY JOB while they were working on the novel that made it for them.

I keep wishing that something will happen to make that possible for me, but that's unlikely.

In the Virtual Bank Line

It's been a while, but I've had some pretty mundane dreams lately.

Last nights' dream was a little disturbing and I don't even really understand why.

I was jogging through my old neighborhood, back in Phoenix. There's a maze of condos there called "Concord Village," and in the dream, it had been given over to some sort of military training complex. As I was jogging along, I turned down a path and came upon some guys showering under an upturned hose. They weren't in a camp shower or anything - just hanging out in the middle of a public pathway, naked as could be. They started to laugh as I jogged through, but I told them they didn't have anything I haven't seen before and kept running. It was kind of funny, I thought.

As I jogged, I realized I was holding someone's towel. I slowed down as I came to a house that I remembered seeing as a kid. I looked at the front door, and it was open, so I went inside. The place was two stories and filled with rustic-looking antiques. There were three cradles that looked as though they were made from bark, and three trundle beds and three high chairs. They looked at least a hundred years old. I managed to walk all through the house without seeing anyone. It looked like a tiny little museum of old pioneer artifacts, but when I came out the other side, I realized I had left my towel inside somewhere. I put my face to the window and saw it on the stair railing. Just then, a woman in her mid-thirties came out of an upstairs room and saw me. I was going to run, but she opened the door and led me inside, telling me all about how her grandmother had collected all these things, and how she and her two brothers had been the babies who had used them.

I left the woman's house and went back toward my own place. As I neared my condo, a little kid came running toward me, showing me some treasure she'd found. She was babbling on about it, holding my hand as I went toward my place. As we got nearer, I realized that this was a kid who belonged to the daycare just across the passageway.

I went to my place and changed clothes, and the minute I was done my best friend from grade school showed up. She wanted to go shopping for something, but she was being really mysterious about it. We went to a strip mall that had one shop with no sign outside. Inside, the whole place was full of huge chests of tiny drawers. The drawer fronts were all carved wooden filigree with tiny elephants on them whose trunks served as the drawer pulls. I looked inside a few of them and found carved wooden rings, bracelets and necklaces of various sizes and colors. There were tapestries in back, black hangings with bright weaving through them depicting various Latino left-wing heroes. My friend was looking around with her nose wrinkled.

I had no idea what she could have been looking for or how she knew about the place, but it was obvious that she was disgusted by what she'd found. I realized that she was just checking the place out. She was going to report back to someone else, who would then take some action I couldn't begin to predict. I told her that I thought she was a bad person and walked away back across the parking lot.

On my way home, I went through an open-air market. I started going up and down rows of market stalls filled with all sorts of things - food, clothes, housewares, auto parts - and I was looking for something specific, but I couldn't remember what it was.

I was still looking when I woke up.

Another Opportunity to Get My Message Out

Once again, I'm going to be on the radio. I did it last year and it was really fun, even though what I was reading was silly, silly, silly. This year, I think I'll mix my soundbed carefully and practice a lot. I haven't read in public in a while, and I'm feeling out of practice.

It would be even better if, by the time I read, I can tell people that the novel is due to be published....

The Days Simply Fly By

In October, I announced to people that I was definitively NOT participating in National Novel Writing Month. And then, at the beginning of the November, I found myself with some unaccustomed time on my hands and an idea that was just sitting there in my brain waiting to be written. I wrote nearly a quarter of my novel in three days.

I was 60% done by the end of the first week, and then things hit a snag. I had no time, I had more projects in the real world than I could reasonably complete, and besides, I wasn't participating. Why should I worry about things like plot trajectories and word counts if I'm not participating?

But then, just after Thanksgiving, guilt caught up with me. November 26th and I'm still stuck with the same 35k words I'd had for the past two weeks, and not a word more to show for it. I knew that, given my logorrhea, I could certainly produce the requisite 15k words, but would I? After all, I wasn't even participating.

I guess it says a certain something about my character that, given the writing successes that I've had this November, I decided that I wanted to go ahead and finish. The effort sapped my health (okay, that may have been cold season and my proximity to a 5-year-old) and I ended up, at the end of things, in bed for an entire day, but I did finish.

And now, I don't even know how I feel about it. Happy? Not really. More like, not embarrassed that I gave up in the middle of things. Proud? Again, not so much. The first year, I was proud just that I had finished, despite the fact that what I had at the end of the process wasn't usuable. This year, I realized that my novel was not even close to coherent until the last 10k words, which means that to make it usable and readable, I have to pare away several weeks' worth of work and do several weeks more, and that's just writing. Being proud of my effort at this stage is akin to being my age and being proud that one can use the potty like a big girl.

So I guess that my feeling right now is really just relief. Once again, I haven't embarrassed myself. I have been a good example for other people I know who are struggling and who may or may not have finished. I have the beginnings of something workable and ideas for a great many other things that are possibilities. The whole exercise is not a loss, and I do have to say that the ultra-competitive side of me really loves knowing that I'm one of only a handful of people who enter every year who actually finishes. It does make me feel that I am, indeed, a writer after all and not one of those people who thinks that any boob can sit down and crank out a book.

Much Ado About Much

I haven't updated much because at this point I am working a full-time job, raising two children, writing a novel, keeping chickens and keeping up three other blogs about the whole mess. I've been...distracted.

First, the Santa Cruz chapter of Nanowrimo made the local paper. You can read the article, complete with an interview with yours truly here.

Second, just because I'm writing a novel doesn't mean that I'm brain dead. One of the inevitable effects of writing a novel is that I end up with more story ideas than I can possibly manage. I currently have three or four, and they end up falling out of my ears. Here's one of the ways I ensure that I have story ideas that work: I don't write them down right away. The good ones are the ones that stay with me over several days or weeks, popping up in my psyche and demanding my attention. By the time I get around to writing them, they're much more powerful.

Third, just because you're done writing doesn't mean that you're done. A few months ago I went through an orgy of submissions. I do this every once in a while, sending out dozens of copies of work to dozens of markets hoping that something will stick somewhere. As of right now, I have one essay sold, a short story on an anthology's short list and a novel that might be delighting an agent as we speak. Call me a mercenary, but I'm doing this for money too.

I'm two-thirds done with this year's Nanovel, and I'm confident that in a year or so, it'll be just about ready for people to look at. But I'm just as confident that in the meantime, other little seeds I've planted will have sprouted and flowered.

Break Taken

Tuesday last, I woke sick as the proverbial dog. I stayed home from work and mostly slept, but did manage to get a few words down, seeing how it was the beginning of the month and all. Wednesday, more of the same, but I must say that I was feeling the pressure to get better, as my boss was leaving for three weeks and Thursday would be her last day. Thursday I dragged myself into the office, did a few ineffectual things, and then wrote some more when I got home. Friday, I worked from home and did a little writing in between emails.

What this all adds up to is that by the 4th, I was 40% of the way through Nano.

This, despite the fact that I have still not officially committed myself.

Which means that the fact that I was so sick on Saturday and Sunday that I did literally nothing but sleep and zone out in front of some DVDs makes me feel not one whit guilty.

No guilt. None whatsoever.

Okay. Maybe a little.

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y

As some of you may know, my first Nanovel, Mitos del Pueblo, garnered first place for novel at the 2004 East of Eden Writer's Conference. That was a wonderful perk and a great feeling, but it wasn't the end of that particular novel's journey. In fact, it turned out to be little more than a bump on the Road to Publication, which it's still barrelling down with no signs of ever coming to rest.

But I did write about that process, and the resulting essay "Putting the Suck in Success" was accepted by Rambler magazine for publication.

Well, it's a start.

Oh, Naughty Me

It's been months and months since my last post, and here it is the 3rd and I haven't said word one about Nanowrimo.

Honestly, there are two reasons for that:

1. I haven't had time. Since I last posted to this blog, I have been a writing and submitting f3wl, so it's not as though I've been entirely idle. Partially, but not entirely.

2. I still have not committed to actually *doing* Nano this year. Having said that, I must confess that as of last night, my word count is over 13,000. No, it wasn't a typo, it is the third day and I'm already a quarter of the way to completion. But the thing is this: I know that I can do it. You know that I can do it. It's just that I also have many, many other things I have to do this month, and therefore I don't want to begin by oversubscribing myself.

Although we all know, don't we, that I'm incapable of *under*subscribing myself.

The New Project

I've been busy. I've written a couple of short stories and done a flurry of submitting - nothing yet. It's a little discouraging, but I'm not sure what to do.

I've come up with the plot of the next novel/play. When I wrote "Leif the Buddhist Viking," it was originally conceived as a play, but I had gotten the advice to write it as a novel first. It worked well as a novel, but I'm still committed to turning it into a play.

This new work is similar in that it occurs to me as a play, but I should novelize it first. The working title is "Trinity of Days," and it's about the three days that Mary spends between the time Christ is crucified and the time that he is resurrected. The themes are before and after, the Holy Trinity (which, interestingly enough, has no room for her), the stages of grief, and women and middle age. It's a lot to work into one play, but that's one of the things I like about the form. It's elastic.

I've been talking to The Pirate's parents, who are chock full of Biblical knowledge. They're giving me a ton of information - so much so that it's getting hard to decide what to include and what to leave out. I'd like to make the action of the play something that can be staged in a variety of ways. Contemporary, period, etc. We'll see.

I'm happy to have something to work from. Sometimes the ideas come thick and fast, and sometimes not at all. It's always nice to have something.

In the Virtual Bank Line

I was at work helping out with some software testing. For some reason, our software worked just fine on stationary systems, but on a laptop when you switched between one screen and another, it would consistently crash. I was getting very frustrated because this is one of those fields where I know enough to recognize a problem and not enough to fix it.

While at work, the woman who was my roommate was giving me grief. I had just bought a new phone and answering machine and had left myself a note about some expenses on top of it in my bedroom. She called me to discuss the expenses with me, which meant that she had been in my room going through my stuff. I told her that I'd talk to her about it later, but that I would be gone for the weekend. I was going to my other house. Upon finding out that I had another house, she got all bent out of shape because she felt, as my roommate, a certain entitlement to anything that was mine. Whatever.

I left work and headed to my other house. My other house was on a spit of land that was only accessible during low tide. The spit of land had trees on it, and my house was an inn in those trees. To get there I had to wait until low tide and pick my way through the rocks and then along a path into the woods. To outsiders, the house itself was only visible (but not accessible) during high tide, but to the creatures who lived there, it was just the inn.

The creatures who lived there were elves, fairies, trolls, fauns, brownies and all manner of magical creatures. My place was the only building in the whole area, and the only place where there was alway a meal cooking. The minute I walked in the door, I heard nothing but complaints from all sides. The fairies were ripe, and they were into the kind of trouble that only adolescents can get into.

See, here's the thing: a fairy is the larval form of an elf. To be specific two fairies form every elf. All fairies are twins - one good, one evil. The evil aren't so much "evil" as "mischievous." They can take any shape (because fairies are not a species, just a phase) just like elves can take any shape. There are short, troll-like elves, elves with goat's legs, human-looking elves, etc. The fairies all fly (though not all with wings) although they lose that ability when they become elves. They spend the first several years of their lives in this state of fairiness, flitting about and cavorting and learning about things by getting into things. If you have a good fairy attach itself to you, you're very lucky because they're helpful and kind and good-hearted. If you have an evil fairy, you're in for years of bad luck. You can tell when it's time for the fairies to go from larva to adult when the good ones are competent and kind and the bad ones have made enemies out of just about everybody.

There were three at the inn who were ready - a male trollish fairy, a male faunish fairy and a female humanish fairy. When I got in, everyone was screaming because the faun and the girl had ridden ponies into the drawing room and were causing a general ruckus. I came downstairs and told them that if they would put the ponies in the stable where they belonged, I would get their boxes and give them something delicious to eat. That's the trick. Fairies don't eat. It would just never occur to them. To the good ones, food preparation is a skill to learn, and to the evil ones food is another trick to play (spoiling the cheese, putting mice in the flour, etc). The minute a fairy eats a mouthful of food, the transformation begins. They turn into something that resembles a doll - hard and lifeless, but colorful. You must put the evil fairy and the good fairy together in a special wooden box that's pierced all over with holes, and put the box in the sea. In the morning, an elf will have come out of the box like a bird from an egg, and grown to its right size.

I had all six fairies lined up in front of me and had given them each a slice of bread. They hadn't even swallowed the first mouthful when they fell over, cold and brittle. I was just gathering them up and sorting them into their boxes when the dream ended.

The Cost of Productivity

This weekend, I missed an event I had really been looking forward to. My friend Cliff had invited a bunch of us up to his place to watch a movie and hang out, and I had promised to make it.

In the meantime, half of the family has had the same creeping crud that's going around. The Pirate has a rattling cough, and the Baby Goddess has a perpetually runny nose and no energy. This means that I spend my time doing a very few things: working, taking care of someone who is not me, sleeping or editing. I've been utterly heads-down on my editing such that although I had announced my inability to complete Nanoedmo this year, it's the 13th and I've got something in the neighborhood of 27 hours under my belt. I've done some re-writing, some re-arranging, some cutting and a lot of reading out loud.

Saturday I spent the day running around, and got home late in the afternoon and started my editing. I didn't even remember my date at Cliff's house until this evening, and when I remembered it I broke down in tears. My harp needs a new low A string, I need to work out more and I owe about fifty thousand people phone calls or emails. And none of those things is probably going to happen before I finish this draft of my novel.

Will my friends forgive me? I'm sure they will. It's not like they've never done it. Can I forgive myself? I don't know. I've trained myself to think that I'm a superwoman and can do everything, but that's not true. What it's come down to is this: I'm angry at myself for focusing so completely on the priorities I set myself. It's stupid, I know, but there it is.

In the Virtual Bank Line

I am with a scouting mission of five. We've tracked signals to a particular small planet, but we can't decode the signals or tell who they're aimed at.

We land in an area composed mainly of swamps (a class N planet). There appears to be no animal life more evolved than small plants, and there is one structure. It's a three-story house-looking structure covered over with something resembling white ivy and caulking. My particular mission is to find and disable to signal's source. Three will find the person/persons manning this signaling station, the last is the radio who keeps communication with our ship, parked on the other side of the sun from this planet in synchronous orbit (SOP - it keeps our troop carrier hidden until we need them).

I've discovered that the signal source is organic - it's the white webbing that covers the house. It's like an organic web of signal processing and accelerating synapses grown over an artificial structure. By following the whole down to its root, I can knock out the signal. This is why our scans found nothing - it's another organic structure in the middle of a wealth of organic structures.

In the meantime our people have discovered the man stationed here. There is only one, since there is no machinery to maintain. We have found out from whom he is getting his information, but we don't know for whom his broadcasts are specifically intentioned. The fact that it's a broadcast rather than a beamed signal is disturbing. The man gets away, and our troop carrier follows him.

He's gone to an inhabited class M planet, and since his propulsion system is superior to ours, he gets there long before we do. By the time we get there and locate his signal again, he has already constructed a wooden building and begun the process of growing the communication web over it. The tendrils are still young and small, though, so their signal is too weak to leave the planet's atmosphere. However, our scans show that thousands of his troops are in the vicinity.

My advance team of five goes to the planet to find him. Three are out doing recon, radio is with me, and I'm at the structure scraping the new communication lines off the building. We look out over a grassy field next to the house. It's the size of five or six football fields, covered in picnic blankets and umbrellas where the inhabitants of the area are having a public festival. They are getting up onto a stage at one end and taking turns singing for the crowd. Beyond them, in the very tall grass, we can make out the soldiers from the other side. They are just sitting there, waiting for us.

We make our way into the crowd. We've done this before. We talk to the people in charge, telling them that we're just here to purchase supplies, that we don't want to interfere with them in any way. These people are friendly and offer to share their picnic with us. This works to our advantage. Our troops work their way into the crowd, keeping one eye on the soldiers in the tall grass off to one side. In case of attack, our soldiers will be able to rush to one side, keeping the civilians out of the line of fire.

The waiting is the worst part. We sit there for hours, trying to be friendly and interact with the people on this planet, wondering why the enemy is just sitting there. We have the advantage at the beginning of the battle, since several hundred yards separate us and our weapons are all either pulse or projectile, good at longer distances. Their weapons are also based on that white organic goo and are only good at close range, but are more deadly since the white goo sticks and then sends tendrils under the armor. We don't want to rush into a trap, but the waiting is tense.

My job is done. I get into my short-range ship to head back to the troop carrier where I can analyze the white goop and its communication tendrils. As I am leaving the planet's atmosphere, I encounter something else disconcerting. There are single soldiers in individual carriers - hundreds of them - scattered in high orbit. Their carriers are like space bicycles - good only for carrying one person to and from a craft in orbit. They carry only a couple of hours' worth of oxygen and can't hold any cargo at all. The most a person would be able to carry is the gear they were wearing and perhaps a hand weapon.

These troops aren't in a formation. They can't be waiting to be called to the surface - they're too scattered. They can't be waiting to intercept anything coming from the planet - they're not armed. As I pass them (they don't appear to notice my small craft) they are making noises and gestures amongst themselves that indicate that they are a suicide squad. They are there to perform one mission that will take them out along with their target. I just don't know what their target is. Capturing any of them is no good. That soldier would be dead before I got him/her on my ship.

As I head back to my ship, I wonder whether there is a plan of attack that is so subtle and insidious that we're not seeing it, or whether these are the last, desperate moves of this particular enemy. I don't know how the overall battle is going. I'm not privy to that. I only know that I'm still alive, my people are still alive, and that we've been victorious through more than one battle. What I've seen so far - the broadcast signals, the low-tech weapons, the scattered attacks, all look like desperation.

I don't know what this war is for.

Things Sighted, My First Day's Editing

Yesterday, on my way to the grocery store, I was behind a truck that had the following painted on a board attached to its camper shell: "His MOMMY (the Virgin Mother) called him Ye-SHU-ah <-Hebrew. The English translation is Jesus.

I desperately wanted to talk to this person, but it's just not feasible in a car. Oh well.

I spent about an hour editing last night. Got the first 30-ish pages done. Took out many little awkwardnesses, added a little bit. I realized that I refered several times to events that I never went on to include, and I really should include them in order to make the whole thing a little more believable. I know, it's comedy, but still.

Hopefully, I can get another couple of hours in tonight. I know that I should be spending an hour and 40 minutes a day, but that's a tall order in one shot. Perhaps I should be getting up early and spending some time on this. Wow. You know I'm desperate when I propose getting up early.

National Novel Editing Month

Tomorrow begins National Novel Editing Month. I've got my novel all set to go, I've committed to showing up to public events.

I haven't gotten as much done as I'd like to have, but I couldn't tell you why. After the whole let down with the agents, I just lost momentum. I'm sure it happens to other people all the time, but that's cold comfort. I know that I should just stay on the horse, ride it out and keep working, but it's hard. I'm pretty unmotivated by the whole thing.

I need to dust a few things off and shove them the hell out of the house. The only thing that makes it all worthwhile is that I do have stuff out there, on people's desks.

I've bought the new "Writers' Market Guide to Literary Agents," and from what they're saying, I'm on the right track. It's just such a goddamn LONG track.

New Year, New Goals

We're nearly at the end of the first week of the New Year, and there's no time like the present for looking at what we mean to accomplish this year in terms of writing.

In my last post (done nearly a month ago now), I outlined some of the goals I had. Which of them have I accomplished?

I have bought the new Writers' Market and a postal scale.
I have submitted Ressurection to one market.
I have begun the Aurelia Mudlark novel.
I have started sketching my first short for the year.

I'm now up to six out of eleven agent rejections, so we'll see where that goes. I have submitted my novel to another contest, and we'll also see what comes of that.

It's good to be a writer. I love the process of sitting down and creating something that moves people. But if you want to be a writer for a living, you can't stop there. You have to take off the creative hat and put on the business hat at some point. I found that I need to devote at least 25% of my time to the business part of things, or it's just not worth it. I need to make copies, put together packages, look up markets, attend conferences, etc.

I think this year is going to be my year.

My Post-Nano Goals

Every December, I take stock of my writing output and formulate my goals for the coming year. It's sort of like New Year's Resolutions, but a month early and with the prospect of great rewards. Here are my goals:

1. Re-read "Sven" and re-work in play form
2. Submit "Resurrection" and "Temple in a Teapot" to at least 6 markets each or until accepted
3. Write at least 1 new short per quarter
4. Re-work the last 2 chapters of "Mitos"
5. Write "Cuckoo Bee" as a play
6. Buy new Writer's Market
7. Buy postal scale
8. Write the "Aurelia Mudlark" novel

Okay, I think that's enough to last me until November. That's two plays, four shorts and a novel. NO SWEAT!

And you? What are YOUR goals?

What Happens After You're Done?

I've been done with my novel for more than a week now. Crossed the 50,000 word mark on the 20th and decided not to punish myself and my family by keeping up my 2,500 word a day pace. So...what have I been up to?

Apart from the whole holiday thing (made easier by the fact that both girls were out of town for this holiday, leaving the Pirate and I to fend for ourselves), I have been doing a whole lot of NO WRITING. I haven't edited anything. I've barely updated my blogs. If you count all the words I write on a daily basis for work (yes, I write for money), in email, updating my blogs and for actual fiction content, my normal output in November approaches 10,000 words a day. But for the past week, it's been more like 2 or 3 thousand words a day, which is negligible by comparison.

But I have been reading, and let me tell you something - if there's anything that's as important to writers as actually developing the discipline to sit down and write, it's reading. Novels, short stories, news articles, magazines. It's all important. Pay attention as you read to descriptions that are particularly moving or surprising. If something makes you happy, sad or angry, dissect it. Find out how that author was able to manipulate you into feeling what s/he wanted you to feel. If you find something particularly bad, dissect what was so awful about it, and don't ever do it yourself.

I tend to read a lot of magazines, mostly The New Yorker. It has some amazing fiction that has informed my own fiction for quite a while, now. There are things about New Yorker fiction I do not like, and I'm hyper aware of that in my own work. I look at the words and mull over the choices that someone else made and think about how I would do it. I notice how a lot of the stories in The New Yorker have a sort of sameness about them. Part of this is editorial choice - the New Yorker audience is young and hip and experimental, but let's not lose our heads, right?

Find a magazine or book or newspaper whose style you like, and figure out what about it appeals to you. The thing is not to make your fiction sound like their style, but to know how to create mood, to influence, to illustrate.

Crossing Over with Aoibheall

As of last night, I've officially crossed over the 50,000 word mark. I could have done it Friday, but I made a conscious decision that since I can't even validate my word count until Thursday, there was no need to keep flogging myself.

Unless I really wanted to.

Now, I've finished 50,000 words. What am I going to do next? I think I'm going to finish the novel. There are two scenes left to write that will probably add up to a total of about 7,000 words. And then, I don't know. Sure, I've said I'm going to take some time off, but the truth of the matter is that while my intentions are good, I'm not capable of just not writing at all.

But the thing is, during the month of November, I've continued to write down my ideas and generate characters and plots for my next projects, so it's not like I'm at a loss.

In the meantime, though, I think I'm going to stand here with a whole bunch of other people at the finish line, cheering on those who are still slogging through it. GO TEAM!!

Lies, Damned Lies and My Blog

It has now been suggested by a commenter that I have been "economical with the truth" when presenting my stories about my prodigious literary output.

I can assure you that, while I am a fiction writer, this particular blog is nothing but a bald, factual account of my writing process. There are, of course, things that don't fit within the scope of a "my process" description, and now I realize that by leaving them out, I am painting myself as a writer with the energy and drive of a chihuahua on crank.

Here are some "how I do it" sorts of things:

1. My kitchen floor would grab your socks off.
I have not folded laundry, completely finished doing the dishes or mopped the kitchen floor since late October. These are things that, in the normal course of life, I do regularly. But not in November during the big push.

2. I am not (despite what I would like my boss to think) a critical member of my work team.
I am a tech writer. My job at meetings is to take better notes than the engineers (which I can do with one brain lobe tied behind my back) and to offer witty and acerbic commentary where appropriate. My boss knows that I can multitask well enough to both take notes and write my novel, and is fully aware that I am doing so. But I am important enough that my boss supports my literary efforts (winning literary awards goes a long way toward validating one's street cred) and wants to keep me working for him. He's not hung up that I'm not listening to every single blah blah blah about aligning the debenture to maximize phalangeal output. This is why I keep this job.

3. I am not superhuman. This does take a personal toll.
I recently went through a bout of depression that was fairly severe. I questioned a lot of my decisions, including whether to keep participating in Nanowrimo. I ultimately decided to continue, but other things went by the wayside.

4. Restaurants exist for the same reason that frozen dinners do, and there's nothing wrong with cereal for dinner.
My husband and I normally love to cook, but during November, we do it less. The crock pot is our friend, and my 12-year-old budding cook loves the chance to stretch her cooking wings by making the family dinner at least once a week.

5. Three words: noise cancelling headphones.
It normally takes me a little over an hour to do two thousand words. I am disciplined enough and have been doing this long enough that I can reliably work at that pace for a sustained period of time. On the other hand, I am also a person who, once my process is interrupted, takes a while to get back on track, and it takes an enormous amount of energy to sustain that kind of focus without help. Fortunately, noise cancelling headphones are a godsend. I have gone so far as to wear them WITH earplugs, meaning that I can hear absolutely nothing but the music I've chosen. This isolates me completely from anything that could distract me and cuts my writing time dramatically.

Those are my words of wisdom. Some actual, practical things that keep me writing constantly. But why? Why do I do this to myself and how can I keep up the pace? I've asked myself that a lot lately as I transition away from Nanowrimo. There have been several of us who are professional writers of one stripe or another who have realized that Nanowrimo was a miracle for us at first. We needed the motivation and the structure and the goal, but we don't need it anymore. We're now internally driven and writing all the time. We're ready for the next step. It's made me question my participation in Nano, and here are some things I've come up with:

1. Nanowrimo was the best thing that ever happened to my writing.
In the same way that college was the best thing that ever happened to my thought process. It taught me how to do it. How to plough through my blocks and get the words down. I would never have made it this far without it, and I will always be grateful. But I was graduated from college and have moved on.

2. I am the exception, not the rule.
I multitask better than anyone I know. That's just true. I am also absurdly hard working and internally driven. A lot of the time, I AM a chihuahua on crank. I realize this. But I also know that as a child, my parents constantly berated me for being "lazy," and I have always seen myself as a mostly unmotivated person. But this is important to me, and when things are important to me, I make them happen.

3. My name is not Mary Sue.
It's true, I ride a motorcycle and look pretty good doing it. I can cook and sew and write award winning novels. I'm a good singer and can be entertaining at parties. But it's also true that I cannot play a musical instrument to save my life. I have tried. I have taken lessons, submerged myself in it, and have come out on the other side untouched by talent. I am NOT good at team sports. I can't dance. I hate those parties and their loud music and crickets scare the shit out of me. I am overly emotional much of the time, and my life can be full of the most sophomoric kinds of drama. I don't pretend to be perfect. I'm not. I can't do everything.

People need to find their own reason for doing it, and recognize that you are not going to be the best at everything. Yup, it's the 19th and I've only got 4500 more words to do. Hooray for me. On the other hand, there are other people who have hit 100k+ and are still going. I can't compete with them. I don't even try.

You don't have to believe me when I say that I write 2500+ words a day, even when Nano is not in session. It will not impact my process. What you have to believe is that, if you want to, YOU can write 1,666.6 words a day and finish. This is doable.

What Does It Feel Like?

A friend pointed out an interesting thing: I am my novels.

When I was writing about the singer who courted the dancer by creating music for her, I read it out loud incessantly, trying to get people to listen to it and love me. When I wrote about the woman who had been neglected and abused all her life and left her home to live with a man who would ultimately abandon her, I felt protective of my women friends and angry on their behalf for any mistreatment the world dealt them. When I wrote about the man who fell in love with himself and died trying to possess an illusion, I withdrew from everyone around me. Now I'm writing about a woman who is putting her present in jeopardy in order to fix her past, and my home life is suffering.

On this one, I don't have any advice. I'm lucky that I'm married to an understanding person who doesn't take it all to heart. Much.

But if I really want my characters to have life and meaning, I have to be them. I have to be inside their heads and live with them and move them around. Unfortunately, I'm not terribly good at switching it on and off.

And now for something completely different...

And, for my very first (and likely only) writing update: today is Tuesday, November 16, and I am 37,693 words into my 50,000. I'm 75% finished, having written an average of 2,513 words a day (with a day job and two children). At this rate, I will write 75,360 by November 30th. I actually have a plan for that too:

The novel I'm writing now, Mary Ferguson Offered, is probably not going to be much longer than 50,000 words. So, my plan is to go straight to novel #2, which is unnamed as of right now. I am not sure which of two novels I might do first (remember - always be planning your next project) but if you'd like to have a vote in it, you can take this poll at my other blog. I won't start writing the next one until I'm done with this one, but that could be very soon.

Tips & Tricks #7: Juggling for Writers

Reading the profiles on the Nanowrimo site has been eye-opening for me. The biggest surprise has been finding out people's reasons for writing. Some people got into it just to "see if [they] could do it." Some people always wanted to write a book but didn't know how to get started.

A surprising number have attempted it and failed, and are coming back to try again. I admire those people the most, although they confuse me just the same.

Me, I do it for the money. I would like to get my writing published and out to a wider audience. Maybe it's mercenary of me, but the reason I devote so much of my time to this is that I expect my efforts to eventually mean something.

If you want to be a writer who gets paid, though, there's a lot to do that does not involve writing.

Editing
The only people whose first drafts are perfect have sold their souls to Satan and will be paying for it in the hereafter. For the rest of us - there's editing. It's generally a good idea to put a piece aside for a few weeks. Forget about it. Lose the associations you have with it so that when you go back to it, your mind isn't automatically filling in the blanks the way it was when you wrote it. Then pick it up and read it again. Fix all those places where you had said to yourself "I'll take care of that later." All the inconsistencies, the incongruities.

Then give it to a friend. Let someone else who doesn't already know the story look at it. It's best if it's someone who can be honest with you, because chances are that they're going to say that your story is *gasp* not perfect.

The last one is one I found out sort of accidentally: read your story out loud. Even if you're alone, read it aloud. Your mouth is much smarter than you think it is and it'll make word substitutions and point out problems that your brain glossed over. It's better if you have two copies of your manuscript - one for you and one for a friend who can make note of your changes while you read.

Marketing
You've spent months building your trumpet. How silly are you if you never blow it? Get a copy of the Writers Guides to the Novel and Short Story Market and look at it. Refer to it. Mark it up and put zillions of little tape flags on it. Send off for copies of the publications that interest you, or head to the library or bookstore. Then start sending off those submissions. The very worst they can do to you is say "No," and after a while, even that doesn't hurt anymore.

Creating
If you have a piece that you think is great and you've worked hard on, by all means take a rest and enjoy the fruits of your labors. But don't let that rest be any more than five minutes. Get back to work. Keep writing. Keep generating ideas. The brain is like a muscle in that the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Every time you have a story idea, jot it down, wherever you are. When you're ready to start work on a new project, whip out your notebook and you'll have a wealth of material to choose from. Not every story is right for every market, so the more you write, the better your chances of catching on somewhere.

Ideally, you should be doing all of these things all the time. Isaac Asimov, a man with over 500 books to his credit, always had five or six projects going at once. When he ran creatively dry on one thing, he picked up another, which would often give him ideas for yet another.

You're a writer. Act like a writer!

Tips & Tricks #6: Checking Out the Competition

My first year of Nanowrimo there were 14,000 people signed up. I had a story that had been churning around in my brain for years and I felt that I finally had the bugs worked out of it. I was, as they say, at the height of my game.

And on the night of October 31, my grandmother died. I changed my plan with mere minutes to go before the writing could officially commence. I spent the first week of November either in route or actually in Phoenix attending her funeral. And writing. Every day, I wrote. I would write like a fiend every night, usually upwards of 2,500 words. I wrote while crying, I wrote while laughing, I wrote alone or surrounded by mourning family.

Then, on the 13th of November, I found out I was being laid off. I had a month to find a new job. So, I got my resume together. And I wrote.

Here's the thing: what spurred me to write like the wind was not the fact that my circumstances were bad. What spurred me to write was the fact that when one searched the Nanowrimo site, one could plainly see all the other writers out there whose word counts were...improbable. There was one that first year whose word count bar indicated 999,999 (the highest the indicator goes) but whose novel consisted of its title endlessly repeated. There were several like that, and they were at the top of the list. It was easy to say "if you're not going to take it seriously, why bother?"

I finished with over 83,000 words that year, making it into the top 20 finishers by word count.

The next year was a little different. The next year, there were 25,000 people participating, and of that 25,000, I wasn't even in the first 5,000. I did finish, but I only wrote 51,000 words. I wasn't as excited about it as I had been the year before, and my lack of excitement was worsened by the fact that I knew that practically everyone on the planet was doing better than I was.

This year, I have decided that my answer to the stiff competition is this: complete denial. I have not even LOOKED at the entire list of authors to see who's doing what. I can see the people in my local group, and some of them are ahead of me and some are behind. And it doesn't matter. This isn't a contest with anyone but myself. This year, I am not going to write until I drop because I know I don't have to. This year, I am not going to obsess about how someone in the world has written more words than I have. I am not going to blame myself if I don't spend every second writing rather than hanging out with my children and my husband. They're what counts. They love me whether or not I'm a novelist.

I guess my tip about checking out the competition boils down to this: don't. Because it doesn't exist. No one can write your story. No one has your voice. Pay attention to what you're doing, sit down and write the words, and you won't need to worry.

Day 6: Hey, What Happened to YOU?

Those of you who have actually read this now (yeah, both of you) will realized that I was going along great guns for days and days, and then stopped. What happened? Did I give up writing? Am I dead?

What happened to me happens to all of us sooner or later, and it's what separates the writers from the wannabes. What happened is that my life blew up.

On Monday the first, I sat down and wrote about 2100 words. It was easy. It was fun. I was enthusiastic as all get-out. I planned to go to the write-in on Tuesday and write even more and hold myself up as a shining beacon of authorhood. Then, just before I was set to leave for work, one of the people who works for me announced she is quitting.

My world was suddenly in a tailspin. This is a person who does an amazing amount of work in our little group and her leaving is a tragedy on a grand scale. This is worthy of panic! However, I went to the write in. I was even productive, writing nearly 3,000 words.

Wednesday, I went to work and attempted to deal with the aftermath of her leaving, but I felt awful. By Wednesday night, I was fully in the grips of a stress-induced attack of the shingles, which for me is pretty debilitating (they're on my face and cause blinding headaches and the kind of pain that is normally cured by swallowing a bullet fired directly into the mouth). But I wrote anyway. Thursday I tried going into work and ended up coming home early, I felt so horrible. I couldn't do a blog entry, but I wrote anyway. Friday I never got out of bed until afternoon. But I wrote anyway.

Here's the thing: as long as I can figure out, in my blindness, in my searing pain, how to turn on the computer, I can write. It takes almost no energy to touch the keys and make them produce letters, and even if I nap between each word, I can write.

I still have to clean my house and take care of my family and figure all this work crap out, etc. But I'm not going to fall down on my words. That's too important. If you're a writer, that's what you do. Regardless of what else happens, you make the time to do the writing. Otherwise you're just another one of those whining wannabes who sits down, writes a sentence or two, and then succumbs to an attack of the vapors and just can't go on.

Writers, we're better than that. We're stronger than that. We know that the only thing that makes us writers is that we write.

Tips & Tricks #5: In the Company of Writers

During November, writers all over the world gather in little clutches to huddle together over the warm glow of lighted laptop screens. These are our most sacred rituals. These are the write ins.

Make no mistake, I'm not a gregarious person in the least. I hate everyone and wish they would leave me the hell alone. On the other hand, it must be understood that at least part of that desire is the acknowledgement that I can talk the ears off a gundar, and solitude forces me to focus on the tasks at hand.

During write-ins, however, there is a different dynamic going on. For the first half hour or so, there's the inevitable gossiping and catching up, but then people settle down and begin writing. It's inspiring to see other people in action. Some stare up at the ceiling for a few minutes, then turn their faces to the screen. Some stare fixedly at the screen, although their typing may only come in short bursts. Some stare furiously, as though they will fix the words to the page through sheer force of will, which is not far from the truth.

I always end up feeling as though I get bonus words by writing in a gathering. Like, for every 10 words I type, I get one free, upping my night's word count by ten percent. Last night, I ended up doing an extra nine hundred words for the day, which pleased me no end. I'm not saying that this will happen to you, but you never know if you don't try.

The other thing is that the people in the room serve as a handy source for opinion polling (which do you like better - sauerkraut or cotton candy?), thesaurus information that's more contextually sensitive than you can get anywhere else, and cheering section. Don't underestimate the value in that!

Write by yourself. Write in a group. Write. Now.

Tips & Tricks #4: Know When to Quit

I've said it before and I'll say it again - I'm not the sort of person who can pull off a Herculean all-nighter on the last day. Yes, I'm a procrastinator. Yes, I'm a rationalizer. But I'm also aware of the value of sitting down and getting it done.

Here's the value: getting to do something else.

My daily goal is 2,000 words. Most days, I beat that goal by a hundred or so words. If I meet this goal on a daily basis, I will easily make my 50,000 words in 30 days. In fact, I'll make it in 25 days. Lucky me.

But in the meantime, there's laundry to do. Children do feed. Winter in the mountains also involves lots of additional chores like bringing up wood, covering plants, finding lost mittens. The point is that while I think it's important to sit down every day and not get up until my 2,000 words are done, I think that it's equally important to GET UP after they're done.

I think a lot of people sit down for 12 hours a day for the first few days, write 10,000 words, which is a great thing, but are so overwhelmed by how much it takes out of them that they can't see going on. And I can't say that I blame them. I don't have 12 hours a day for a month to do anything. Modern life just doesn't work like that.

The only way I've been able to consistently do my thing and finish is by working the day I have set before myself, and then giving myself permission to stop. Lay down the pen, shut off the laptop, step away from the blackboard.

The plus side is that when I go back to it, I have had off time to chew over ideas and figure out where my characters are and where they should be. That off time for thinking things through is valuable to me, and without it, I think that my process would take me much longer as I tried to muddle my characters through poorly conceived situations on the fly, only to have to write them back out of it again.

Hang out. Sleep. Read a magazine. Eat a meal while holding a glass of water in the other hand. Do things that don't involve writing for a little bit.

And then go back to it.

Tips & Tricks #3 - Day 1

There were a lot of people who stayed up until after midnight to begin their novel. Good on them! While I did a lot of reviewing and perfecting characters and plot points prior to midnight, I did manage to make it into bed at 11:49 p.m., and therefore didn't write a word until this morning.

And I'm not convinced that any of it is any good. See, I'm not a morning person. In my perfect life, I would wake at about 8, spend an hour washing, dressing and eating breakfast, go out and get some exercise, and then about lunchtime settle down to writing. I would work for 4-5 hours, take a break at dinner time, then work another 4-5 hours, ending my night between midnight and 1 a.m. It would be lovely if I could maintain this schedule, but alas, the rest of my household seems wedded to a more traditional schedule.

For the month of November, I attempt to have it both ways. I still have to get up each day and leave the house at 6:25 in the morning to get to work by 7, but then I also stay up until midnight or 1 every night, cutting my effective sleep by a tremendous amount. I tend to make up for it on the weekends, which generally involve the entire family tiptoeing around the house until about 10 in the morning so as not to wake me.

I can hardly wait until success steps in to make this whole ugly process much, much easier (i.e., cutting out the day job).

I have begun writing, and have amassed a whopping 551 words as of 11 this morning. I'll most likely cross my 2k word goal at this afternoon's management meeting where I intend to be completely oblivious (as soon as I'm done giving my presentation).

November has begun. My head is bowed, but unbloody.

Incipient Authorship

Tomorrow is the first official day of Nanowrimo. I'm not terribly worried. This will be my third time out, and because I do this sort of thing a lot, I'm not particularly concerned. I feel like a person who runs ten miles a day contemplating a 10k. It's just not a thing.

What, in view of what I'm hoping to accomplish, have I done to prepare myself over the past few days? Here's my list:

1. Make an outline
You may not keep to it, but at least having an outline gives you something to which you may refer when you get stuck.

2. Plan out your main characters
Give them names, birthdays, physical descriptions. I often either pick real people I know or cut out pictures of magazines so that I have a consistent description.

3. Get your time line straight
You'd be surprised how many stories fall down because they can't be placed in time. In a short story, time matters less because the action tends to take place over a short period of time, but in a longer story, there are holidays and life events that help to anchor things in time. Help anchor your story in time by having those events there.

That's it. It's not many, but each one of them can take a lot of work. I don't necessarily plot each and every one of my secondary characters, but it's certainly helpful. It's embarrassing to have a character who's called "Bob" on page 52, and "Rob" on page 79, and "Bert" on page 114, or who changes height or eye color.

Little things count, and the more you put into planning, the better your end result will be with less work.

Six Days and Counting

I had sworn off doing any sort of writing in the week before Nano, because I had just finished putting together my submission packages and wanted a break.

On the other hand, I'm terrible at "taking it easy." So, yesterday during a meeting that went more than half an hour over and included me saying exactly five sentences (one of which was "some of us will die sooner rather than later") I outlined my next endeavor.

I bought a program called "Write It Now" that enables me to keep characters, chapters, etc. together on my novel. So, now I have my outline to which I may refer throughout my process.

It's six days before 11/1, and honestly, I'm not feeling even a little bit nervous or worried about being able to make this happen. I have done it at least six times in the last three years, challenging myself in November and other times throughout the year to push my word count in order to get something done.

In that, at least, I feel like a real live actual writer. When the pressure's on, I can perform.

Telling People You're an Author & FAQ #1

I started writing when I was about 5. I had started making up stories long before then, but I didn't know how to write. When I was little, I dreamed of being a "writer," but somehow got the notion that "writers" weren't live people and that I needed to think of something else to be.

Later, I became an editor. Not only did this sound like something a real person could do, but it exposed me to some of the worst writing on earth.

It was only after I got a job with a magazine that forced me into writing large articles in short timeframes that were then ripped to shreds by editors that love me, but not my ledes, that I started calling myself a writer. I felt that, after having my ego forcibly ripped from me, mauled with a red pen, and handed back, I had earned it.

When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I'm an author. "Ooooh!" they squeal. "Have I heard of you? What have you written?" Now, my normal response to this is "No, you haven't heard of me, and I've written tons of articles that you, my retail clerk/grocery checker/dry cleaner would not have read because they were for a semiconductor industry business magazine." Do I feel cowed when they sniff impertinently at me, implying by their dismissive attitude that what I have accomplished might not be "real" writing? I do not.

The point is that you can consider yourself a writer an author whenever you wish. Just because you're not Danielle Steele or Stephen King does not mean that you are any less of a writer. In my book, the less like them you are, the better your work probably is.

You are a writer now, as long as you're writing.

FAQ #1: How could you have won an award for a book that isn't published yet?
That's a good question. I'm glad I asked it. My 2002 novel, Mitos del Pueblo, won at the East of Eden writer's conference in a contest for unpublished works. Not only was it not published, it wasn't even properly finished which is why, two months later, I'm only just getting around to sending it out to agents who requested to see it.

And, finally, an update:

This past weekend, I made up my agent packets and will be sending MdP to 11 agents. I'm sure I will hear back favorably from more than one of them, and we'll see how it goes.

Tips & Tricks #2: Where to Write

I read an article by a reasonably well-known writer recently that said something to the effect of "don't think that if you're sitting there in some coffee house banging away on your laptop, people are going to think you are a real writer. They're going to think that you're a big poser trying to impress people."

To which I must offer a resounding PSHAW! Many of my very productive writing friends have collectively written many words in coffeehouses, all while not giving a single thought to how they might be appearing to others in said coffee house. All of which adds to their cachet, by the way.

But seriously, where to write is the subject of no small anxiety. Many people are worried about creating just the write atmosphere for practicing their "art," and therefore end up putting more energy into creating that atmosphere than into writing anything.

So...where's a good spot to write? That's easy. Anywhere. Get into the habit of carrying pen and paper with you wherever you are. If you're particularly rich and muscular, perhaps you might even lug a laptop everwhere, but for most people, pen and paper are enough.

Meetings offer a wonderful place to write. At the average hour-long meeting, the average person spends 10 minutes discussing topics relevent to them or their work, 10 minutes making stupid jokes about co-workers who didn't make it to the meeting, and 40 minutes trying very hard not to fall asleep.

In that 40 minutes, it's possible to write nearly a thousand words! Public transportation is another great opportunity for writing. I am told that Caltrain has actual outlets where one might plug one's laptop in while commuting up and down the peninsula. I write while waiting for things to compile on my computer. I write while sitting in line at the grocery store.

Even if you're only writing 50 words at a time, those tiny little dribs and drabs add up, so that when you sit down at night to do your main push, if you've taken all the opportunities given you during the day, you might find yourself with only a few hundred words to go to reach your goal.

If you do choose to employ the notebook-and-longhand method of writing, don't tear the pages out once you're done. You'll want to refer to them as you go along in your story.

Of course, if you do have a laptop, you save yourself the necessity of transcribing your work later. Laptops go everywhere, and the newer your laptop, the better your battery life is likely to be.

Another wonderful mobility tool is the AlphaSmart - the pocket calculator of the word processing world. It has most of the desireable word processing functions, but weighs in at about 8 ounces - about an eighth the weight.

But...where to do the main push? For me, there is one essential element of the perfect place for writing. I have two children and a husband who is best described as uxorious. That ultimate essential element for writing would be a door. The ability to close the door and have five minutes to myself where nobody is pestering me is useful, but not essential.

Yes, in a perfect world, all of us will have a room of our own where we can exercise our genius, but if that isn't the case for you, you can still be a success!

Next issue: Telling People You're an Author