Category Archives: writing

May 29, 2014 · 9:54 am

On Death, and Life

Sometimes I marvel that human life exists for longer than a mayfly’s. With news of wars, car accidents, freak accidents, illnesses, and more, sometimes it feels like we are constantly living in some kind of Final Destination scenario: everything is trying to kill us.
And yet, here we are, living another day.
It flummoxes me. It feels like, what with all the peril we encounter every day, that we are all, individually and collectively, beating the odds. And that amazes me.
Sometimes, because of circumstances or age or geography, it seems like the odds get really stacked against us. That things almost compete to try to off you first.
I knew someone who worked at a cancer-education place. She said it was crazy how nonprofits competed to be “worst.” See, if your illness was “worst” or “deadliest,” you could pull more funding, get more grants. In a twisted way, it was like the nonprofits were sort of hoping that their illness would be the most horrible.
Maybe the illnesses and other maladies are competing. Maybe they really are conspiring to get us.
It feels that way. A family member of mine is dealing with a cascade of health problems now… I’ll be macabre and say it: it’s like a race. Will it be age that does it? The broken hip? Maybe that mole is really a cancerous growth. Perhaps it will be pneumonia, slipped in on the hand of a healthcare aid.
Are they placing bets?
When I was recovering from a rough patch in life, I wrote a short story, attempting to highlight this: how many things are trying to get you any given day. I laced it with real death statistics to try to hammer the point home. And yet, my conclusion went somewhere totally different (in the way that writing sometimes does). It ended up not bleak but hopeful: there are all these things, and yet…life goes on.
Life goes on. What a miracle.
In the immortal and wise words of Kurt Vonnegut: So it goes.

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May 15, 2014 · 10:31 am

The Burning Jealousy of the Not-Quite-There-Author

Let’s talk about jealousy. I have it.

Of course I have it for the biggies, the JK Rowlings and the Stephen Kings and the Shakespeares and the Jane Austens of the world. That’s a given, but that kind of jealousy is motivational: those are the success stories everybody looks up to.
To a lesser degree, I’ve got that for the Hugh Howeys and the Suzanne Collins’, our most modern wave of authors who, one way or another, adapted to the changing face of publishing and owned it.  But even so, that’s not the kind of jealousy that seeps in under your skin and makes your heart clench up.
No, that kind of jealousy is more intimate… reserved for the people who you (or, at least, I) think I’m at least on par with, maybe in terms of skill, or concept, or–mostly–in terms of starting point. The other newbies; the ones who get just ahead of me.
The shoulda-been-me’s.
I feel spasms of jealousy periodically on twitter, when someone I don’t even actually know announces a book deal or landing an agent or winning a contest. But lately, I am struggling with a big weighty ball of jealousy brought on by a real-life connection.
See, someone I have known pretty much my whole life has just self-published. She wrote the book in less than a year. Months ago, she asked me for the basics on advice for how to get published, and I gave her the Cliff Notes version: you can do the long slog or you can self-publish. She said self-publishing sounded more like her speed, and I pointed her to some resources and offered my editing services at a “friends” price. She turned me down, and I didn’t hear much about it, until she asked me to be a beta reader on short notice. I’m a little overbooked right now, so I declined and wished her well.
Two weeks later, BOOM, there’s her book out on Amazon, and she’s promoting it like crazy. She’s doing interviews, working her contacts, shilling that book everywhere on Facebook–you know, the stuff you do when you’ve just published a book on Amazon and you’re trying to get the numbers up.
But, oh, does it burn me.
I’ve been to the conferences, I’ve read the books, I’ve built a blog and joined Twitter like I was told. I’ve gone the traditional route because of promises of greater potential. I’ve entered the big open submissions opportunities. I’ve written the succession of query letters and dutifully waited while working on something else.
In other words, I followed “the rules.”
It feels like a sharp and painful contrast to this woman, who right out of the gate “broke” the rules: she compares her book to a game-changing classic; she didn’t have any internet or social presence before publishing; she never did a contest; she’s never written before at all!; she didn’t get a professional editor to work on it; and, of course, she self-published.
But people in our circle are talking about her. She gets glowing praise on her Facebook page. She can call herself “an author” and not be questioned.
It burns me right up.
But I realize this kind of jealousy isn’t helpful. This is my problem, and her being different doesn’t mean I’m illegitimate.
(However, I will say that much of the claptrap super-small authors or aspiring authors pump out about “there’s room for everyone” and “your time will come” and “celebrate everyone!” feels like a lie right now. I have a hard time believing “anyone” can be an author…)
So I need to get over this. I may have to start by buying her book.
How do you cope with author jealousy?

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May 8, 2014 · 10:27 am

Garden Journaling with Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson is my favorite president. Sure, he had his faults, things we completely disagree with with our modern sensibilities (and rightfully so), but he was a contemplative man with a thirst for knowledge. And I’ve always thought he was just generally cool. He designed his house! He was personally involved in the Corps of Discovery expedition (better known as “Lewis & Clark’s trip”). He was pretty sure they would find wooly mammoths out there (I bet his was pretty disappointed when they came back without the mammoths, though…)

And, it turns out, he kept incredibly meticulous notes on his garden/plantation. He was an observational scientist who was willing to try out new things and keep records of the results. We know things about his era that would otherwise be lost to time if it weren’t for his careful notes. Plus, his garden is now used as a seed bank for rare plants.

A page from Jefferson’s garden journal

As it turns out, I’ve started a garden recently. My brother Ryan and I have taken on a plot at a community garden, and we’re excited to have a “real” garden (the herb garden on my porch is nice, but not exactly a vegetable mecca).

We talked about what to plant for awhile –squash, zucchini, tomatoes, bell peppers, other hot peppers, green beans, eggplant, and two varieties of sunflowers. Maybe sweet potatoes, but we’re having trouble finding the slips–and debated where to plant, etc. Then my brother joked that we needed a garden journal because TJ had one.

Being modern folks…we have a garden GoogleDoc. But, in keeping in the spirit of the thing, we’re writing it as if we were Jefferson.

Ex. “Hottie plant was selected for its humorous name and possible appeal to Ryan. Covered plants assiduously with organic material and watered three times as prescribed by our father.“

Ryan may have made a mistake in joking about the journal; so far, I’m enjoying that almost as much as the garden part. And it will help us keep track of who has watered and when, so it’s practical to boot.

I’ve never really kept a garden before, and I’ve certainly never journal-ed about it. Any gardeners out there? Any favorite tips to offer?

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Video

Lessons From the Renaissance Faire

A Renaissance Faire offers a special type of whimsy. It’s not remotely historically accurate, it’s overpriced, the scent of patchouli is overwhelming, and the attendees are a strange mix of plainclothes tourists and first-time cosplayers.

But I love them. It’s a crazy sort-of weird interest, but common enough that I can admit it in public.
So I went last weekend, which was fun (and I have the requisite henna tattoo to prove it!). During the Don Juan & Miguel show, I had an epiphany.
Don Juan & Miguel offer a swordfighting/whip-cracking/comedy show. They’re really good; they’ve been coming to our Faire for years, and they’re always fun.
Anyway, at the show I saw, Don Juan was playing around before the official start, chatting with the crowd. He had a bull whip and set up three cups on a tray, stacked one on top of the other. The idea was to use the whip to take out the middle cup, dropping the top cup into the bottom.
He screwed up. Twice. In a row. It just didn’t happen. The second time, he even managed to smack himself in the face with the tassel on his whip! (ow)
For some people, that would have been it: show over. In front of a crowd of about 30 people, he flopped.
But apparently missing isn’t all that uncommon when you’re a performing comedy/whip guy, so he maintained a cheerful patter and WHAM–there it went. Cup fell neatly into the bottom cup, and we all applauded like mad.
It didn’t even matter that he had failed.
That’s really trivial, I know, and obviously he is a really good whip-handler with lots of experience, but that felt really significant to me: he just kept going. He wasn’t remotely worried about the mistake; he just did it right.
In writing, it can be hard to know if you’re doing it right. But I appreciated the reminder to just keep trying.
Now watch these guys make some cheese puns and have a giggle:

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May 6, 2014 · 10:15 am
May 1, 2014 · 9:44 am

True Stories of Being Buried Alive

Snopes is definitely one of the best things to ever happen to the internet–maybe the world. The smart-but-snarky duo behind the website has saved me from many a well-intended grandparent spam message (“No, Grandpa, I don’t need to look under my car for someone who might slash my ankles…Snopes says it isn’t true. Ok, ok…I’ll check anyway. Love you too.”).

I didn’t realize it may also be such an incredible font for story ideas and research…until I found this article: Just Dying to Get Out
True stories of people who were buried alive.
If that doesn’t send a flutter through your belly, I don’t know what will. Maybe this:
“In the 1850s, a young girl visiting Edisto Island, South Carolina, died of diphtheria. She was quickly interred in a local family’s mausoleum because it was feared the disease might otherwise spread. When one of the family’s sons died in the Civil War, the tomb was opened to admit him. A tiny skeleton was found on the floor just behind the door.”
Or maybe this punishment for vestal virgins who were found to be unchaste in Roman days:
“…a narrow room is constructed, to which a descent is made by stairs; here they prepare a bed, and light a lamp, and leave a small quantity of victuals, such as bread and water, a pail of milk, and some oil; so that body which had been consecrated and devoted to the most sacred service of religion might not be said to perish by such a death as famine. The culprit herself is put in a litter, which they cover over, and tie her down with cords on it, so that nothing she utters may be heard. Then they take her to the Forum…when they come to the place of execution, the officers loose the cords, and then the high priest, lifting his hands to heaven, pronounces certain prayers to himself before the act; then he brings out the prisoner, being still covered, and placing her upon the steps that lead down to the cell, turns away his face…the stairs are drawn up after she has gone down, and a quantity of earth is heaped up over the entrance to the cell…”
Eeeep.
So now we know: Snopes is good for a whole lot more than just crazy urban legend-busting. It’s also good for giving yourself nightmares.

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April 3, 2014 · 10:08 am

States of Change

I’m planning a wedding, and it’s got me thinking about how we live our lives. For the most part, we make small, inconsequential choices (ignoring the possibility of butterfly effect situations: stopping to buy a candy bar, which makes us late for the train, which means we are distracted when the taxi comes out of nowhere to hit us). Sure, these actions always have consequences of some kind (sunburn today = skin cancer in 20 years), but for the most part are unimportant.

But there are a few times in our lives when we make a choice that forces a change of state: we will no longer be the same thing we were before.

Putting aside all the situations that would be like this but that we could not control (tsunami, random mugging, diagnosis of a genetic illness, getting older), we are left with a few opportunities where we can make a choice and change who we are.

Getting married is one of them: once I am wed, I will never again be able to be “unwed.” Sure, I could be divorced, separated, or widowed, but I can never again go back to the “never married” state. It’s a one-time deal.

Outwardly, this doesn’t necessarily mean much: I check a different box on government forms, woo. And I don’t know if it will change my actual relationship with my significant other–some people say yes, but then there are a lot of people who are married in all but name, and they don’t seem that different–but this idea that I am consciously changing myself in a way that I can’t take back is pernicious.

There don’t seem to be many of these kinds of choices in life. Having kids, certainly: you can never really undo that, even if they are given up for adoption. Death, of course, is a major one, at least until we get some cryogenics going on.

Writing a novel is one, I think: even if you aren’t yet published, you have created something that will never actually go away, even if it is mostly just a folder on your desktop.

Some stories require this kind of grand-scale state-changing choice, but it’s sort of surprising that not all are required to. For example, in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo at first does not make a state-changing choice: he is just going on a walk because Gandalf told him to. It could be argued that taking on the ring in Rivendell “transforms” him into the Ringbearer, and he could never again not be the ringbearer, but I don’t think that’s true. Yes, he decides to stick with it, but there are multiple times when he nearly (or actually does!) lose the ring. And (while it wouldn’t have been a good story) there remains a choice that he could have made: to just turn around and go home.

But a state change does happen in American Gods, but not until very late in the story, when Shadow has already experienced much of the hero’s journey. It is similarly the pivotal moment in Good Omens, when our young antiChrist chooses to stop the apocalypse.  (What do you mean, you hadn’t read that one yet? Go read that book, right this instant!)

And the excellent Life of Pi does not offer much in the way of choice at all for our hero: he must make a series of small decisions. True, the stakes are high, but there is no one crucial decision.

For the broad swath of our lives, we make choices, but rarely do we make these kinds of life-altering decisions. Have you made one that I’ve overlooked? Are these choices similarly critical to our characters as they are to us? Tell me what you think.

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March 25, 2014 · 10:10 am

Query Conundrum

Fellow authors–I need advice.

If you have a nontraditional story format, how do you handle page requests?

Both of the novels I’m currently querying for are–unusual, to say the least. I actually think that’s a strength of them, but I’m worried now that it is handicapping my querying. One, Undead Rising, is a gamebook, in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

The other, Alt.World, is told through the eyes of two main characters–but “news” articles illuminating the pre-dystopian past, as well as cryptic messages, are folded in. All these pieces make complete sense by the end of the book, but at the beginning, it’s pretty open-ended and…well, a bit weird, if you’re expecting the normal “Chapters 1-3.” (It’s not unlike Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin or The Handmaid’s Tale or maybe even Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. The pros do it! But then again, they’re pros, they can do whatever…)

I recently had a page request for Alt.World, and while there was praise in the response I got back (“Solid writing!” *swoon*), she was (understandably, perhaps) confused by the interspersed news articles and the preliminary far-too-cryptic-to-be-yet-understood messages. And she passed on it.

So I’m wondering what I should do: send in 50 pages, excluding the news articles/messages, etc. to make an easier read for agents by putting it in a format they expect? Or continue sending it as it is, as the story truly is, and hope to eventually find an agent who “gets” it–and possibly creating a harder path for myself in the meantime?

Anyone have any experience in this situation?

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March 15, 2014 · 11:49 am

Imaginary Books From Real Books

This is a pretty fun list: pretend books mentioned in real books. It’s designed as a “library,” so (rather inconveniently) organized by imaginary author, alphabetically (personally, I’d prefer to have them listed by the real book in which they are included).

It looks like the curator of this rather impressive and oddball list hasn’t read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic books, which is a pity. Sandman has a whole library of pretend books, the premise being it’s a collection of all the books the authors dreamed of writing but never actually got around to. It’s a fascinating list, and shows an interesting peek at sigh authors’ (imagined) psyches.

Still, take a moment and peruse the books that only exist as a figment of someone else’s imagination. It’s sort of fun.

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March 13, 2014 · 9:46 am

You’re Incompetent and You Know It (Clap Your Hands)

I discovered a really awesome model of learning recently. It’s known in psychology circles as “The Four Stages of Learning”  and is frequently shown as a little four-part box. (Personally, I prefer a list, because it’s a progression, not a hopscotch situation.)
The four stages explain what it is like to learn something new: you move from not knowing how much you don’t know to eventually being completely proficient.
The four steps are:
  • Unconsciously Incompetent- You have no idea how hard something is because you’ve never tried it.
  • Consciously Incompetent– You’ve tried something and found out it’s actually not that easy. This is a potentially embarrassing place to be.
  • Consciously Competent– You’ve worked hard and now you know you’re actually doing it pretty well.
  • Unconsciously Competent– You’re so good that you don’t even have to think about it anymore, it just happens naturally.
As a writer, my guess is you spend at least some time feeling Consciously Incompetent, especially when there’s a deadline approaching and you have writers’ block and it all sucks. But with time and practice, you’ll be Consciously Competent, and that’s sort of an amazing and magical feeling.
I feel like Ira Glass’s quote about creativity strongly reflects this growth (I’ve marked the stages in brackets):

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.[Unconsciously Incompetent] But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.  But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. [Consciously Incompetent] A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, [Consciously Competent] and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Plus I have a feeling the folks who hear you’re a writer and say something idiotic like “oh, well you just stay home and write stuff all day, that’s not real work at all!” are just Unconsciously Incompetent. If they ever dared sit down and try to do it, they’d quickly realize that gap, too.
It’s good for our brains for us to move through these steps by trying new things. It’s also really hard. Do you make an effort to stretch yourself and learn something new? (I’m taking swing dance lessons. I am SO consciously incompetent right now!)

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March 11, 2014 · 9:44 am

Amtrak to Offer Free* Trips for Writers

This is one of the wonders of social media, folks: someone has a good idea that involves a large organization, large organization hears about it and agrees it’s a good idea, makes it happen. Incredible.
The idea is that trains are particularly good for inducing writing. This story doesn’t explain further, but I have theories:
  • Trains get you out of your comfort zone
  • You’re trapped for hours, which halts many avoidance techniques
  • You can look at the window to see things pass by. The changing view is nice to look at when your brain needs a break.
  • Internet is spotty, if available at all (at least in my area). No hours of “research” (ie. looking at cats being silly)
  • No one wants to talk to strangers, so people pretty much leave you alone.
I don’t know if this is something I would do. I rode the train to and from college a few times, and it was a weird anachronistic experience. That probably has a lot to do with my routes: Texas to Missouri doesn’t get a lot of traffic. (It was somewhat more busy on the St. Louis to Chicago route. Chicago was absolutely bustling; the Texas stops were very much out of an old Western.)
I wasn’t actively writing at the time, but it would have been a good place for it; I got a lot of reading done, and met a really sweet little old lady from a very small town, and a young family from Wisconsin (they said the cheese thing was true.) It was nice to be forced to interact with strangers in that way, if a little weird. It was only exciting to be on a train for about 2 hours, then the rhythm got a little sleep-inducing. (I quite liked buying food from the little restaurant, even if it wasn’t very good. I felt like I was in Harry Potter.) And falling asleep while sitting upright in a chair you’ve been stuck in all day sort of sucked, especially when the train stopped at 3 a.m. to pick up more passengers (goodbye sleep!).
It was an odd experience, but not a bad one. I wouldn’t be happy to get to a place then instantly leave again; I’d want at least a day or so in the new place. It probably would be productive, and at least makes for an interesting story in and of itself.
 
Would you want an Amtrack residency? Does writing on a train appeal to you?

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