Month: October 2010

High Functioning

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I was really torn this morning, between the sunset photo and the baby quail pic.

Yeah, I know. Not a whole lot changes in my little world.

I once read that consistency in the rhythm of days is a mark of a mature civilization, and that’s why each day in India is virtually indiscernible from the last. There’s certainly something to be said for a smooth daily schedule, as opposed to the frantic dashing from place to place, forever trying to catch up. I’ve done that and it’s not pretty. It does give you more “things” to mention, though.

This sunset was from Wednesday evening and the baby quail – now with tufts on their heads! – visited yesterday, so I chose prosaic chronology as my guide.

Ideally, if you slow your life down, so it becomes a pleasant cycle of sunsets and sunrises, then you can notice more about the world. I know about what time the quail are likely to come by. I see that the hummingbirds have gone, but the jerichoes have arrived. The bushtits sweep through in their delirious chorus.

There’s a pleasure in being part of their larger pattern.

Schedule is something we all struggle with – usually with the goal of creating a manageable consistency. For writers, scheduling the time to write becomes a major concern, especially if you also work a day job. And if you have kids. And if you have multiple other responsibilities. Even those with the luxury of writing full-time have to manage how they apply themselves, with no timeclock to punch, no supervisor to frown over the long lunch.

I ran across this bit some time ago:

Perhaps the finest writer ever to use speed systematically, however, was W. H. Auden. He swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty years, from 1938 onward, balancing its effect with the barbiturate Seconal when he wanted to sleep. (He also kept a glass of vodka by the bed, to swig if he woke up during the night.) He took a pragmatic attitude toward amphetamines, regarding them as a “labor-saving device” in the “mental kitchen,” with the important proviso that “these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down.”

John Lanchester, “High Style,” The New Yorker, January 6, 2003

I know, right? I can’t get over what his liver must have looked like by the time he died at 66 in 1973. Which isn’t bad, considering how he treated “the cook” all those years. (No, mom, I don’t know what he died of.)

So, I suppose this it the other extreme. This isn’t the Annie Dillard, slow-down-and-observe-the-world approach. This is the fling-yourself-from-one-extreme-to-the-other method. Of course, more than a few people in the 40s through the 60s used chemistry for better living. Don Drake in Mad Men is the new poster child for this kind of thing.

We’ve entered a new era of teetotalling where the Mad Men style of office drinking is unthinkable. Anyone who keeps a glass of vodka by the bed to swill if they wake in the night would be labeled as having serious issues. On the other hand, we still tend to drive ourselves through a frenzy of ups and downs, sometimes with prescription medication, to try to meet all of our obligations and aspirations.

There are worse things than having a slow and quiet day from time to time.

Tee-hee

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The hot air balloon festival has been going on in Albuquerque. This photo was taken by one of my LERA (Land of Enchantment Romance Authors) chapter mates, author Sarah Storme.

I think it’s a fabulous picture.

Sarah is also a scientist, who has had a long time career with the Forest Service and is just now finding success as an author.

Success is a funny thing. First of all, it means different things to different people. A lot of us spend a fair amount of time defining personal success for ourselves. We have to break it out, too. There’s financial comfort, health, love, family, career and art. For some, career and art get to be the same thing. But it isn’t always, and doesn’t have to be.

For writers, it’s easy to focus on the big icons of success: the bestseller lists, the glossy bookstore displays, the admiring reviews. One big dividing line is whether or not one is doing well enough to be a full-time writer. Even this though, can be deceptive, because whether or not a high-earning spouse is involved can make a huge difference, or other, similar factors.

It is, of course, easy to succumb to that most unpleasant of disorders: jealousy.

There’s this young author I know glancingly. She’s on Twitter and is a friend of friends. By young, I mean mid-twenties. She’s enjoying the success of her first published novel, a young adult book that’s being received very well. I would be lying if I said I don’t envy her current literary fortune.

In fact, her name has made the rounds enough that a Big-Time Famous Author mentioned this gal on her blog. The Big-Time Famous Author linked to the young author’s blog, mentioned her book and how she planned to read it. I should add that this Big-Time Famous Author is also one of my all-time favorites, a personal hero and I might just have every book she’s ever written. I was thrilled for young author and mentioned it to her on Twitter. She hadn’t known and went to look. When she came back, she sent me the message “Tee-hee.”

Okay.

To cut her slack, maybe that’s her version of being modest. Maybe she didn’t know what to say. But I came away with the impression that this was just another mention, just another accolade, tra la, tra lay, tee-hee.

I also know she’s young and she doesn’t yet know that these really fabulous things don’t happen all that often. She’s tumbled into fame and adulation early; she maybe thinks things will always be this way. Who knows? Maybe for her they will.

But most likely not. Nobody seems to get the rose-petal path. The universe is forever giving us trials along with the blessings, just to keep it interesting.

It puts me in mind of Scarlett O’Hara’s character arc, and how she went from “fiddle-dee-dee” to “As God is my witness I’ll never go hungry again.”

It’s good to work hard for something, to struggle, to shed a few tears, to sacrifice some blood and flesh. The pain makes the reward all the sweeter. That’s where we grow and build character. It what makes us appreciate success all the more when we achieve it.

Tee-hee.

Feast & Famine

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David and I have started fasting once a week, just for 24 hours.

No – it’s not a religious thing, which is the first question another friend asked me in horror. It’s a health thing.

It’s interesting: we have this built-in cultural fear of going without food. The first question most people ask is if that’s healthy. Between our ancestral, and very real fear, of starving and our modern cultural icons of body-image psychosis that leads to anorexia, the idea of not eating is frightening to us.

But yes, it is healthy. A 24-hour fast once a week cleanses the digestive system and stimulates the immune system. It’s a good practice for warding off chronic disease, especially now that we’re middle-aged. We simply stop eating after dinner on Sunday night, then drink only water until Monday evening, when we break fast with a salad of red cabbage, beets and carrots.

Yeah, it was hard the first few weeks. My blood sugar dropped. I was headachey and dizzy, having a hard time concentrating. After that, my body got a lot better at unlocking the sugar I needed from my fat stores, which is what I want it to get good at doing. My body got a lot better at keeping an even balance, rather than demanding caffeine and sugar to keep going.

The best part is how good I feel the next day. The process leaves me feeling vital and energized.

The most interesting part though, is the food fantasies.

I’ll be working away and suddenly a daydream will seize me. I’ll want a cupcake, more than anything in the world. Or my mouth will suddenly flood with the taste of a baked potato oozing with butter. I’ll think I want food I never eat, or haven’t eaten in years. Sometimes, my brain will try to trick me, but inserting a random thought that I should just pop into the kitchen and grab a cookie. It’s not even being hungry so much as having little temper-tantrums of wanting.

For the first time in my life, I really understand now what emotional-eating is about.

It’s become almost a cliche now. “I ate my emotions” Reese Witherspoon says in defense of her teenage fat in Four Christmases – and it’s a funny line. (Yeah, I know I’m the only person who liked that movie. I laughed and laughed.) But it’s a truism, that much of our eating choices are driven by emotion, not nutrition. We eat to soothe ourselves, to ease the pain of whatever hurts us, to add to the happy.

I’m not saying that’s wrong either. I’m the first one to enjoy that chilled glass of wine. I’ll absolutely gorge on brownies with you to salve the pain of a rejection. Is spaghetti with meatballs one of my favorite comfort foods? Oh yes, yes, yes.

But I think it’s useful to know that. It’s good for me to know that I’m eating my big plate of pasta because it makes me happy, not because my body needs that kind of nutrition.

The other thing fasting does is break the habit of nibbling.

Once I overrule that little pop-up window in my brain that suggest grabbing a cookie, some nuts, a handful of chips, after a while that subroutine stops running. Eating becomes a deliberate choice rather than a habit. Since I work from home, with easy access to a kitchen full of enticing food, I’m pleased to break that particular habit.

Now if I could get people on Twitter to stop sending pictures of their treats…

The Pain Box

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I love the intensity of the color in these begonias, though it’s hard to capture. An ongoing effort to replicate what my eyes see.

In photography class, though, I learned that we can never make photographs that come close to what our eyes see, because our eyes are so much more sensitive and sophisticated. I suppose I knew that, but it’s important to keep in mind.

I was talking with a writer-friend yesterday about writers groups and people who’ve come and gone in our lives. She mentioned a gal who’d been in her group and had quit writing when she was “thisclose” to getting an agent.

I said I think that’s the most difficult time.

It reminds me of a scene in Dune, Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel. It’s been a while since I read it, so forgive me if I get the details wrong. As a test, the young hero has to place his hand inside of a box. He’s told he’ll experience excruciating pain in his hand, but if he can withstand the pain and keep his hand in the box, he’ll receive a reward he’s seeking (I forget what). If however, he tries to pull his hand out, a blade will slice his hand off at the wrist.

Most people can’t take the pain and give in to the desire to pull their hand out, losing it forever. Our hero, naturally, overcomes the fear that his hand is being destroyed as it feels, and emerges victorious.

It’s one of those scenes that makes the reader feel good about ourselves. We like to think we’d be like the hero. We would know that our hand is okay and why would you give in and yank it out, if the certainty is losing your hand? And yet, deep down, we all know how really hard it is to persevere when fear and pain become overwhelming.

This is why the “thisclose” is so difficult.

The proximity of great reward somehow makes the pain of rejections and setbacks just that much worse. It’s really difficult to stay there, with your hand in the box. At some point, losing the hand altogether, so you don’t have to wait and suffer a moment more starts to look really attractive.

That’s why people quit a lot of things. And yes, giving up on a dream is a lot like losing a hand. Oh, you’ll live, but you’ll be missing a vital piece of yourself. Something you could have used to do something special.

To all of us with our hands still in the box? Cheers and steady-on.

Low-Hanging Fruit

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We went apple-picking in Tesuque yesterday.

Some friends live on a fairly large property in Tesuque canyon, filled with apple trees. They invited a bunch of us to bring containers and fill them with apples. We shared a potluck dinner. Lovely activity for a golden fall afternoon.

Except apple-picking is hard work.

Lots of bending over to pick up windfall apples, ones shaken from the trees and ones cut off by the pickers. Lots of stretching up to reach the low-hanging fruit – a phrase that has entirely new meaning for me now – and getting tangled in the snarly branches. We only picked for a couple of hours, but it left me a bit tired and sore.

If anyone had asked me how I liked apple-picking, I was ready to say, “this is why my farming grandparents were so hot for all of us to get good educations.”

You guys do this, too, right? Prepare the witty remark, just in case someone asks. The only is, people rarely give you the correct set-up line and instead ask you something else completely unexpected that leaves you floundering for a response.

At any rate, I was thinking of my ancestors and how they spent their days. How apple-picking was probably a cake job for them. It kind of throws the whole writing and publishing business into a different light. There the labor is mostly mental and emotional. And yet, still strenuous for all that.

Last Friday I was chatting with Laura Bickle, whose really excellent book Sparks recently appeared here. We were talking about marketing books and publicity, what’s the most effective approach to spreading the word about your book, and whether the traditional publishers are falling behind. I told Laura about this, that I’d been meaning to post here, apparently since last January:

Tim O’Reilly, the founder and C.E.O. of O’Reilly Media, which publishes about two hundred e-books per year, thinks that the old publishers’ model is fundamentally flawed. “They think their customer is the bookstore,” he says. “Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.” Without bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their customers, and have no experience in direct retailing. With the possible exception of Harlequin Romance and Penguin paperbacks, readers have no particular association with any given publisher; in books, the author is the brand name. To attract consumers, publishers would have to build a single, collaborative Web site to sell e-books, an idea that Jason Epstein, the former editorial director of Random House, pushed for years without success.

It’s from this New Yorker article, if you care to read the whole thing. The article is on the long side (did I mention it was in the New Yorker?), but very interesting. What grabbed my attention in this bit is the idea that the traditional publishers think their customers are bookstores. I can see how that’s the case. Bookstores, and to a lesser extent, libraries, ordered the books and made all of the purchasing and return decisions. It was up to the bookstores to connect with the actual readers.

Now, however, I can vouch that I now buy almost all of my books electronically, from Amazon or directly from the epublisher or the author. As much as I love bookstores, I rarely go into one anymore. When I do, I usually don’t see what I’m looking for. I follow the recommendations of friends, book bloggers and other authors. Laura mentioned that Wal-Mart no longer will shelve books in the urban fantasy genre, which is what she writes. The big chain bookstores are failing as we see in the news.

It’s a new era. Which is not a bad thing.

Things change. I imagine a lot of us come from farming backgrounds, yet very few of us spend the day laboring to pull our food from the earth. We don’t need to. Why am I not going into bookstores anymore? I don’t need to.

In reality, the customers for books have always been the readers. Bookstores are the middle-man, taking a piece of the profit for the service they provide. As that service declined – you know what I mean, when you could walk into a bookstore and say “I don’t remember the author or the title, but it’s about an autistic kid who thinks he witnesses a murder…” and the lovely bookseller could hand you exactly the thing and recommend six others – we have less need for that middle-man.

The one thing I really miss is the fun of it. I loved spending an hour or two browsing the shelves. The smell of leather armchairs and fresh print. That’s the point of apple-picking, too, to spend an hour or two in the sunshine pulling fruit from the tree.

But the fastest, cheapest way for me to get an apple? Buy one from the store.

Trans-Genre’d

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This reminds me of hot summer afternoons, lying on suburban lawns and watching the clouds drift by. These are from sunrise this morning, though, thus the pink, and I was never up that early in my teenage summers.

Things change.

Irene Goodman, described as a “leading literary agent in New York who has has many New York Times bestsellers,” which means she’s one of the hottest agents out there, authored an article for the September Romance Writers Report. (RWA’s industry magazine.) She titled it “Common Mistakes by New Authors” and lists five mistakes. Of those, three are related to genre:

1. They don’t pick a genre and stick to it.
2. They choose uncommercial subjects.
3. They choose genres that are out of style.

(The other two are about plot and conflict/tension.)

This article immediately annoyed me. I can see her points, sure, but I think the article could be better titled “How to approach your writing like a product.” To me, this is something for the agents to think about, not the writers.

I could be wrong, but hear me out.

Genre is a marketing thing. It’s a false line drawn to give bookstores and libraries a way to shelve books. It’s intended to give readers a way to find the kind of book they love best. Music and movies are divided up the same way. And we have all had that experience, as readers or listeners, of vainly searching the shelves for a particular author or movie, only to resort to the teenage cashier with a slow computer.

“I think this movie is drama, but clearly you guys don’t.”

“Oh! That’s in comedy, actually.”

I have had this conversation any number of times. I’m sure you have, too. And who knows? Maybe the writer and director absolutely believed they’d made a comedy and I’m the odd one focusing on the drama. Or, maybe they made a drama and the marketers said, look! right there, someone laughed! and stamped the nicely selling “Comedy” label on it.

I’m seeing a lot of this from agents lately, that we as authors should know what genre our book is. They consider it fundamental. Irene says that we should pick a nice, fashionable and commercial genre and write exactly that book. This completely ignores the fact that most writers aren’t writing genres, we’re writing stories. Once we’re done, and we’re writing up our queries, we tilt our heads at it and say, “well, it’s got an urban fantasy premise in a non-urban landscape with high fantasy elements and also contemporary romance… I’ll call it dark fantasy.”

Yeah -all you agents out there (I fantasize that you read my blog – I have a rich imagination) are clutching your heads in despair. We’re sorry. We really are. But you knew we were doing this, right?

Fact is, I have two writer friends with books coming out soon, who were coached to revise their books towards one genre or another, after they had the publishing contract. I suspect this happens a lot. And really, both were fine with it. Shape it in this direction? I can do that. Plan it that way to begin with? That means you’re planning a product, not spinning a story. To me, as a writer, the two come from very different places in myself.

I’ve been president of the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal chapter of RWA for almost two years now and a frequent topic of debate is which genre to sandwich a story into. We’re obviously a polyglot of a chapter, with writers of Science Fiction Romance, shape-shifters, time-travel, vampires, swords & sorcery, ghosts, everyday magic. Really, if someone writes anything kind of weird, they end up with us.

I absolutely understand that this is something that publishers, editors and agents have to think about. That’s their business. I suspect it’s an interesting aspect of the business for them. I would think they’d have to get really good at it, to succeed.

However, I think it’s a mistake to exhort writers to get on board that wagon.

And let me say, right here and now, that I do believe the agent/author relationship is a partnership. You have to work together for mutual success. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s very difficult for me to look at my story, which is this great swirling mass in my head of faces and feelings and conflicts and desires, and slap a label on it. If someone else looks at it and says, well, with a few tweaks, it would fit nicely here, I would be grateful.

To me, that’s part of what an agent brings to the relationship. You wrote it, now I’ll help you sell it.

Finally, the other day I watched Oprah’s interview of JK Rowling on You Tube. (It’s well worth watching and broken out into segments so you don’t have to commit to the whole thing at once.) At one point, Rowling talks about signing the publishing contract for the first Harry Potter and how her agent said, congratulations, but you’ll never make any money writing children’s books.

Of course, Rowling is now the only billionaire writer in the world.

I totally don’t hold this against her agent. Harry Potter could be slotted as a children’s book and they didn’t make money at that time. They were uncommercial and unfashionable. But if you walk into a store today, to buy a Harry Potter book – do you head for the children’s section?

Yes, I know Harry Potter was an unpredictable phenomenon. Like Twilight, like a bunch of others we could name. They broke new ground, because they were new stories. Genres lines are bent to accommodate them.

Things change.

I wonder, if those new writers had followed Ms. Goodman’s advice, would they have written those books? Of course, 99% of us will never become phenomena like them, so maybe it’s good advice for the working writer. And yet, I think most of us write, not to churn out a product, but because we become obsessed with a story.

Of course, we’d love to sell it, too. Have patience with us. Help us out here.

Maybe it’s really a High Paranormal Fantasy?

r-Factor

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Yes, I know, what you’ve been thinking. That what this blog needs is more baby quail pictures!

Fortunately a quail family stopped by just in time yesterday afternoon to help us out. Mom and dad escorted something in the neighborhood of a dozen chicks to pick under the bird feeder. It’s really impossible to count them, the way the little puffballs swirl and scatter. They really blend, too.

All gambits to increase survival for these little snack-sized portions.

The sheer number of chicks is, of course, one way that the quail ensure a few survive. Though the parents are also diligent in their care. In population biology, this is referred to as the r-factor. At one end of the spectrum is the capital R, with humans being the most extreme example. Very few young are produced, they are in a helpless state for a long time and require intensive parental investment to survive. On the other end are animals like insects, that birth thousands of offspring that are nearly mature at birth and receive no parental care at all. They’re on their own.

The quail made me think of this, but the discussions on bullying have, too.

A friend I met on the first day of first grade, and who I knew through all of high school and now talk to on the interwebs, posted a letter to several of us on Facebook, thanking us for standing by her while she was bullied all those years. The thing is, I never knew she’d felt bullied. I understand from these stories that people are stepping forward to tell, that often the friends don’t know, that the bullies attack when the victim is alone. And the victims of bullying rarely tell their friends or family how bad things are.

Now, I did know she was kind of a social outcast, but then, so was I. Neither of us were in with the popular girls. I had a particular pack of popular girls who liked to pick on me, but I was arrogant enough to be certain I was smarter than they were and I didn’t hesitate to let them know it when they got going on me. My brand of self-defense. Also my way of protecting my self-confidence.

We don’t like to think of ourselves in terms of population dynamics, but bullying really is the animal condition in action. All animals attack the weak or different. Albinos are expelled from the herd. Males that lose dominance battles become “losers.” There are fascinating behavioral studies showing that, once an animal becomes a “loser” it can’t win a dominance battle even against a smaller opponent. Only unless two “losers” compete against each other can one become a “winner.” Interestingly, that “winner” can then go on to defeat opponents that defeated it before.

Of course, humans bring emotion and psychology into the mix. Thus the bullies are usually those who have been wounded themselves. And those they pick on aren’t necessarily those whose presence weakens the herd, but those who are vulnerable to attack.

We feel like adults in those high school years, but we aren’t. We’re still maturing, under the care of our parents, though these are situations they can’t protect us from.

I know there’s not a clear answer. I like to think if I had known what my friend was going through, I would have stood up for her. Maybe it was enough that we were the friends that we were and that gave her some strength.

Sometimes I think it comes down to surviving until you’re stronger. Hide from the hawks, the coyotes and bobcats until you’re not quite such an enticing snack.

It does get better.

A Day in the Life of a New Novel

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The UPS man brought me a special present the other day, courtesy of the fabulously sweet Danielle Poiesz at Pocket Books:

An Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of Allison Pang‘s A Brush of Darkness!!

Yes, there was much rejoicing. And tweeting of my good fortune.

For those who don’t know, an ARC is an early version of a book, the publisher makes it up to send out to reviewers and so forth. It looks very close to the final product, but has yet to go through a couple more QA passes. ARCs are like teenagers, stepping out into the world, trying things out.

It’s a very exciting time.

So, I thought you might like to see what a day in the life of a new novel is like.

A nice start to the day, with toast and coffee.

Some time enjoying the fall flowers in the garden.

A cruise in the convertible is always fun on a gorgeous day.

After all that excitement, an afternoon nap. Isabel makes fine company.

Refreshed for a night on the town, happy hour with a lovely chardonnay and some taquitos. (Our novel is over 21 now – it’s okay.)

Taking in the historic sights of Santa Fe.

And dinner at the Cowgirl.

Finally, a bit of sexy time and sleep.

Goodnight, sweet novel – tomorrow will be another exciting day!

(Thanks to David, my mom and Dave for assisting in Brush of Darkness’s night on the town!)

The Book of My Right Now

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Sometimes our dramatic landscape shows itself in subtler shades. Sunday evening’s storm reduced the mountains to grayscale, with all of the interesting outlines that brings. This is a piece of the ridged horizon I usually show you, my blog-gobblers, just with different perspective.

(I’m also getting better at my telephoto lens.)

When I was a kid, my mom loved to come down to Santa Fe, Phoenix and Tucson for warm-weather breaks. They were within easy striking distance of Denver and she has always loved the desert. Even then I was struck by the way the light down here makes the mountains look two-dimensional. I wrote terrible poetry in my adolescence, as adolescents are wont to do, and I seem to recall that one line went “the mountains are a cardboard cut-out, propped against the western sky.” Good set-design makes you believe a flat is three-dimensional, but the real world doesn’t always have depth.

I find it interesting to think about, but maybe that’s just me.

Kelly Breaky likes to tease me about my interest in perspective, and I suppose she’s right that it’s one of my core “issues.” I often say I’m a grey-area kind of gal. Very rarely am I willing to commit to the absolute yes or no on a scale.

For this reason, I have trouble with writers who talk about their “Dream Agent” or the “Book of Their Heart.” Actually, I never heard the term “the Book of My Heart” until I started hanging with more of the romance community. Granted, we’re more about expressions of love and passion than some other genres, but it’s still an odd idea to me, that there’s one book we’ve written that we treasure above all others. I loved Obsidian, but now I think The Body Gift is a better book. I tend to be passionately in love with whichever book I’m currently writing, in fact.

The Dream Agent hits me the same way. I don’t believe there is such a person for me. I can think of quite a few agents that I think do great work, any of whom I’d be delighted to have represent me. But then, I don’t believe in a One True Love, either. I think each of us probably could have wonderful lifelong relationships with any number of people. Each person and relationship is different and brings something new. Sure, we can’t fall in love and treasure just any person off the street. But the pool is bigger than just one.

The romantic in us loves the idea of the Dream Agent, the Book of Our Hearts, the Happily Ever After. But the practical person in us, who lives in a three-dimensional world, knows that everything runs deeper than that. What is right now, may not be right later.

All we can do is make the best possible choices, given the information we have right now.

The best part about life and the way it always changes? Nothing is truly permanent. If other paths are meant to be, they’ll show up, too.

Just wait for the light to change and show you something different.