Worlds Enough, and Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virtual Bank Line: The Data Thieves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Process

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

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

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

Round One is Over

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

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

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

Genius in the Making

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

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

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

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

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

Garden of Earthly Dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tiny Fan Club

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

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

My darling Muffin,

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

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

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

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

Love to all, darling!! TA!

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

Virtual Bank Line Notebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you okay?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then I woke up.

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

English Major Cashes In

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

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

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

Sending Them Out

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

Wish me luck!

Chefs Dine In

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

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

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

Writer's Nightmares

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dream suck sometimes.

Technofear

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

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

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

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

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

To Work or Not to Work: That is the Question

I'm deeply conflicted.

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

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

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

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

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

Sources of Inspiration

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

Where do I get these ideas?

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

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

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

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

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

Hidden Gems

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

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

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

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

I love when that happens.

The Weather is Here. Wish You Were Beautiful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll see what happens next year.

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

The Play is Done

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

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

Another Year, Another Post

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

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

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

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

It's Been A While

So, I haven't written here in quite a while. Why? Let's see...

I started and finished Nanowrimo. I was more excited about the story this time that I've been in a long time, and that's an awesome feeling.

I'm heading up the team at work for the Shape Up San Francisco walking challenge. That means not only that I have to do all the team-leader stuff (leading group walks, sending out regular encouraging words, etc.), but I actually have to participate. I have to finish up walking 300 miles in 10 weeks. Not terribly difficult, but it's been very challenging this past week.

It's the time of year at work when I launch the year-end website. Of course that process started months ago, but it's always at the last possible second that everything has to happen. There's a ton of testing, the stuff that everyone left to the last second to create or approve or deploy, the stuff that still hasn't happened that we're waiting for. At this time of year, I end up having to hire a contractor who calls me all hours of the day and night (just ask some of my friends what happens when you call me last on a weekend night).

The hardest thing isn't the contractor or the walking challenge or even writing a novel. The hardest thing is that I still have the most important obligations before me - I still have a husband and children animals and a house to maintain. Mostly, I love all the stuff I get to be part of in having a spouse and kids and animals, but honesly, during November I find myself resenting them.

I resent the fact that they have the temerity to ask me to spend time with them; I resent the clothes they wear because it means more laundry I won't have time to get to; I resent the food they eat, because I've either cooked it or I'll have to wash up after. Sometimes I think that what I want for Christmas is a gift that comes a month early - to be able to have a housekeeper who cooks for the entire month of November. I'll never have that kind of money.

But I can dream...