Category: Blog

Oxygen Masks

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The cholla are both flowering and fruiting now – a brilliant combination of yellow and this purple-pink that can look scarlet from a distance.

Quite the show.

Last night Kerry and I were talking about how making progress on the writing can make or break your day. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it can be astonishing how much of a difference getting the writing in can make.

She had slunk home from a grueling day at work. Her job involves people in crisis, so it’s more emotionally demanding than, say, mine. She said she was in a mood of deepest blue, but had to try to work on her revisions anyway. I gave her the virtual pep talk and she disappeared for a while.

When she came back a bit later, having hit her page goal, her mood had entirely shifted. Everything suddenly looked better. She felt ready to go spend time with family who needed her emotional support.

“I use the analogy with my patients of the airplane, where you put on your own oxygen mask before assisting another,” she told me.

Sometimes I think this is mainly true of writers. I also saw this guest blog post by D.J. Morel yesterday. (This is a bit of a departure for the Pimp My Novel blog, which is usually about the marketing end of publishing and well worth following. Clearly I liked this guest post, too.) He talks about choosing the day job that allows you to write. This line struck me:

When I realized that I was screaming at the walls of my house for a half hour after coming home each night, I knew it was enough. I quit, and didn’t come to understand how unhappy it all had made me until many months down the road. If you are indeed a writer, you can run away from writing, but it’ll only come and find you.

But one of my favorite quotes for a very long time now is this one by Mark Rutherford:

There is in each of us an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it. If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground around it into a swamp.

(It turns out I quoted this before on the blog, but it was back in January ’09, so I hope you’ll forgive me the repeat.)

He very carefully does not ascribe this phenomenon only to writers, though he was a novelist. I suspect we all have this, the upwelling spring that keeps us alive, engaged and vital. The Buddhists say each of us has one thing that we do better than anyone else in existence and that life is a journey to discover what that is.

Unfortunately it’s all too easy not to cut a course for the upwelling spring. Daily life piles up, gradually blocking the way. Often we don’t notice until there’s a flood and we’re standing in a boggy mess as far as the eye can see.

What to do then?

Put on your oxygen mask and take a deep breath. The rest will sort itself out.

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I couldn’t decide today between earth and sky, so you get both. Shades of blue.


If I haven’t mentioned, writing fiction is really fun.

(Well, except when it’s miserable, but that’s a whole other set of issues.)

Really I mean that writing fiction is fun compared to nonfiction. I started out as an essayist because that kind of voice came naturally to me. And there’s satisfaction in telling those kinds of stories. True stories about life and people, the things we experience. Once this new novel is complete, I might spend a little time writing or revising some essays, just to get my hand in again.

Then again, I might not. Because writing fiction is really run.

It’s fun like reading is fun. You know that feeling you get, when you’re reading a book you love, and your mind is sunk in that story, that world, that voice? I get that writing fiction. When its going right, my mind returns to the story and the characters over and over through the day and I would absolutely stay up all night to finish reading it.

If only I’d finished writing it, that is.

It’s an odd sensation, because that aspect of writing feels more like self-love, like navel-gazing, than any other. Like I’m so in love with the sound of my own voice that I want to listen to it all the time. Perhaps this is why so many writers like to ascribe their inspiration to muses or other outside storytellers.

“It’s not me, I just write down the story as it comes to me.”

Loving Calliope or Erato feels more wholesome than loving the sound of one’s own voice. Besides, as we all know, that way leads to insanity for writers. Ego is the eternal danger.

Amusingly, the last time I used the “insanity” label on this blog, I accidentally typed my heroine’s name when I logged in that morning, instead of my password. Which is exactly what I did today.

At least I’m consistent in the way my thoughts run?

Just so long as it’s not a foolish consistency, which leads to hobgoblins and all manner of obnoxious creatures. I’m pretty sure hobgoblins are not the new zombies, which were the new angels, which were the new vampires.

I know, it’s hard to keep up.

Remnants and Goodbyes

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All in all, it wasn’t so bad.

My mom and I went through everything and decided on keep, save or store. She’d already culled quite a bit, which made it all easier. We purged all of Leo’s things years ago, after he died. Then more when my mom married her David and she made space for him to move in.

The hardest part was the jewelry. For both of us.

For every pair of earrings, for every ring and necklace, there was a story and a memory. Who gave it whom on what occasion. Some pieces were from the 60s, gifts from my dad. Some had belonged to my grandmother. We ruthlessly categorized – some I took, some she’s keeping, some goes to be appraised and sold, some for my aunt to look through.

The jewelry is when we cried.

But at least we got to do this together.

My mom and I have had a long-standing joke, whenever she brought home a great new piece of art and I said I liked it, she’d answer “good, because it will be yours someday.” Sometimes it gave me a thrill, thinking of the day I’d get to have that painting or sculpture. Until I remembered that would mean my mom would be gone.

I walked myself through it from time to time. How she’d have passed away and weeks later I’d go through the house and decide what to keep or sell.

I never could get myself through it.

Now I don’t have to. I brought home some of my favorite things now, the ones that won’t work in the Tucson house. Others I’ll take after the house sells. It feels good to have everything accounted for.

I’m giving my old dollhouse to Lauren, for our granddaughter to be born in October. The carpet above were pieces I’d cut for the dollhouse and carefully stored. Yes, they were remnants from our own house. The yellow was in my bedroom, the tile in the kitchen and the green throughout the rest.
My mom wants you all to know that she had that carpet out of there by the 80s. We were just stunned at how bright it is. Didn’t seem like it at the time.

I’m also lucky that way. I have friends whose parents never did redecorate since the 70s. One mother had a house with a different color for every room: purple living room, red rec room, green kitchen, yellow bedroom – and didn’t want to change a thing to sell it.
It turned out to be a pleasant weekend. We got a great deal accomplished and spent some time together on the patio, where we spent so many family occasions.

The twinsie shirts, by the way, were a coincidence, but I think we shouldn’t let them live it down.

Over the River and Through the Woods

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Turns out cholla do more than produce burrs.

This photo might seem silly soon, because when I foraged out to get a photo of this rare blossom, I saw that the entire cholla is covered in buds. So there might be photos of cholla in full bloom soon.

But for now, this is the first, and therefore special.

I’m off to Denver today, to my mom’s house, to help clean it out for the Big Sell. She and her David have been crazy busy fixing the place up to put it on the market at the beginning of July. Stepfather David instructed me to bring the biggest car we own. Or to borrow a bigger one. He’s big on getting rid of stuff.

Most will go into storage right now, until my mom buys a “little jewel box of a condo” to house her art. That’s the most important part.

People are predicting that this will be emotional, but I think we’re ready. It helps that my David and I purged last year when we moved. The house was the first my mom bought, and therefore special, but it’s not the last.

And it’s time to let it go.

A Thousand Words

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The desert four o’clocks are in full bloom, lighting up the landscape with their intense purple.

Turns out that the New Mexico Tourism Department is running a photo contest. I think I’ll enter, just for kicks. (No, not with this photo.) I can enter five, so if any of you have opinions on the pics you like best, let me know! I put all my best photos on the blog here, so I’ll likely pick from those.

I don’t expect you to troll through the entire blog archive, unless you’re really excited to to it. The New Mexico photos start almost exactly one year ago, which is a serendipitous coincidence, with I’m Just Wild About Harry in June 2009.

After that week, you’d have to skip into July, for the house-hunting trip beginning with Our Eight Lovely Finalists (which are only pictures of houses). Then it’s to August and Dances with Quail.

Yeah, I got sucked into reading those old posts. Such with the navel-gazing.

You’d be well-advised just to look through the photos. Or not. BUT, if someone suggests a photo and it wins anything, I’ll give you a prize. A gift-certificate to Ten Thousand Waves or to the indie bookstore of your choice.

See? It’s not always about writing.

Although, I can’t help but notice that the saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I write at least a thousand words a day. That means one photograph is the same as writing my 1K?

Yeah, not so much.

We need to reevaluate that saying.

Write Fatgirl Write!

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So, I might have overtrained.

Yesterday I crashed a bit. I could tell when I started that I wasn’t up to par. Some days I can just feel it, that the words aren’t going to flow.

I don’t want it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, so I make myself write anyway. But I’m not sure that’s best.

For some reason, Tuesdays are often like that for me. I’m kind of considering taking Tuesdays off from writing, if they’re all going to turn out like that.

I didn’t make my 1.85 K. I wrote 1270 new words and deleted a whole bunch of stuff. Frogging again. I kind of hit a blind pocket in the story and, in brainstorming with KAK, realized I had to go back and redirect an earlier scene, which meant deleting an entire scene that now never occurs.

The upshot is I ended up 200 words down. Alas.

Now I have to stop there and acknowledge that writing 1270 new words is really good. A step up from my 1K. So not bad for a “bad” day.

Elizabeth Ryann asked me in the comments yesterday if it helps that I have a definite time to stop writing, because I switch to the day job and I cavalierly said yes. Which is true, it normally does.

However, yesterday was such a grueling day with so little accomplished, that I had Sterling up on my personal laptop for most of the day, trying to add a little more when time allowed, trying to hit that finish line.

Finally I realized I was doing the equivalent of Simon Pegg in Run Fatboy Run, dragging myself along in the middle of the night, long after the marathon has ended.

There’s something to be said for pushing yourself, for holding yourself accountable to meet the goal. But there’s also a time to realize that you’re only exhausting yourself.

And likely only putting down words that will have to be deleted anyway.

So, I’m still going for my 1.85K each day. But I’m holding myself to my stop time. If I’m feeling it and I need to, I might do another hour or so at the end of the day.

Feel the burn!

Creative Conditioning

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The moon and Venus last night, from our bedroom window, with the lights of Santa Fe below.

Not perfectly crisp, but close.

I’m feeling creaky today. On Sunday I engaged in a major weed-pulling effort. I reaped the reward of all the laziness I sowed the last few weekends, which means it took me a few hours. Of bending and pulling. Only a little sore in my muscles yesterday, I didn’t give it another thought.

Today I’m feeling it.

In college, I briefly dated a ballet dancer. Beautiful body, but unfortunately quite wooden in bed. At any rate, he told me that they’d learned that it takes a full night and day before you feel the physiological effects of something. So he’d feel a grueling dance workout, not the next morning, but the following one. Same for eating heavily or lightly. It’s an interesting tidbit of information, but it probably says something that that’s what I remember best about him…

Yesterday, my 1.85 K was more difficult than Sunday’s.

Sometimes I think writing can be like working out. On a given day, it’s not hard to stretch yourself and go the extra mile, do a bunch of yardwork, add some weight to the machine. You might not even really feel it the next morning. But after two days of it, I’m feeling a little tired in my brain. It doesn’t make sense to me that I’d have only so much writing energy, but I keep running up against that.

It would probably make more sense to gradually add words, like I gradually increase the weight I lift or the distance I run. Mental conditioning, as it were. Or Creative Conditioning. An extra 50 words a day and soon I’m staying up all night writing Interview with the Vampire in less than a week.

(Though I’m fairly convinced cocaine was heavily involved in that particular effort.)

So, here I am, warming up, stretching my muscles. Bouncing up and down a little to juice up those ligaments.

It will feel good when I’m done.

A Single Step.

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These yellow columbine are growing with crazed bushiness right now. I’m thinking I need to plant some rose bushes behind them, in the corner just there.

Pink ones.

Maybe a climber with a trellis. I still haven’t put up any of the trellises I brought from the old house. Now I must be more ready to deal because I’m thinking about them and about climbing roses.

You know I’m big on the one-step-at-a-time thing. I can’t deal with everything at once, but I can get things set up one by one.

The journey of 10,000 miles and all that.

This weekend I went to the LERA meeting (Land of Enchantment Romance Authors) and Gabi Stevens confessed immediately “I always read your blog, but I never comment. I feel really bad about it.”

Which made me laugh. (Hi Gabi!)

And, of course, I told her there’s absolutely no onus to comment. It’s always fun to get comments, but I must admit, one of my blog-reading peeves are posts that are clearly set up only to elicit comments. You know the ones, little more than a remark and a question. To me, that’s less like writing and more like soliciting.

Gabi, whose first book, The Wish List, came out from Tor in May, with two more to follow (I know – sweet deal), said well, yes, but she’s trying to get better at the social media thing and she knows commenting is part of that and that’s her next step.

Fair enough.

(I offered to help her figure it out, so let’s see if she comments with a link to her site. If not, we need to nag her.)

I returned from the meeting feeling fired up to finish Sterling, which is all one can really ask for from a writers meeting. Matt McDuffie, who teaches screenwriting at University of New Mexico, and apparently has little internet presence, gave an energizing presentation on story structure. Nothing I didn’t know before, but still stimulating. Listening to him talk, I could trace my story with it and feel where the next steps are going. I know I’m coming up on the crisis, the Act II climax, though it’s taking a bit longer to get there than I thought. The way it’s looking now, what I thought would be a 90K book looks like it’ll come out around 113K, which is fine. I’m on track for that.

Which is good, because KAK came back from her meeting (lots of RWA groups meet on the second Saturday of the month – kind of an odd synchronicity), where Bob Mayer, who does the whole warrior-writer thing and has and exhaustive internet presence, got her fired up about accountability and goals.

And it turns out he’s a fan of spreadsheets, too. So there.

So between KAK wanting to synchronize our goals and my screenwriting induced re-evaluation of my story arc, I discovered I had to up my daily wordcount goal if I’m going to make it by mid-July.

So no more 1K/day. I’m upping to 1850/day. I made it yesterday, pretty easily. We’ll see if I can sustain it during the work week, too. The story is moving faster now, so that helps. Less time staring at the screen wondering what happens next. If I’m writing well, I can write about 1K/hour, so this should be doable.

One day at a time.

Creepy

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She grabbed the microphone back and started clarifying that she really, really, really is a brand and brands are awesome . . . and the more she went on, the more I thought: I am not a brand. I wanted to whisper it, but that would have been creepy.

That quote is from Maureen Johnson’s most excellent blog post on how she feels about social media.

She says something I’ve tried to say several times here, only she says it far better. If I could get away with it, I’d just post what she says here and point at it. So, that’s essentially what I’m doing. I’m assuming you all clicked and went to read it already.

Though I confess my favorite part is when she wants to whisper to herself that she’s not a brand, but decides it would be creepy.

The interwebs have their decidedly creepy aspect. People behave in odd ways, act aggressive or just plain nutty sometimes. Enough so that I’ve researched a few to try to determine if they’re really as nutty as they seem or if it’s a communication issue. That said, I’ve met far more really great people, some of whom I’ve gone on to meet in person. Which is really the point of the whole social media thing.

I confess I started using both Facebook and Twitter to pimp my blog. I know, I know – but if I was going to write the damn thing, I wanted someone besides my mother to read it and that seemed to be the way to go. It worked, too. But, to my surprise, I found I really enjoy the communities I’m now part of. There are people I talk to every day and who miss me when I’m gone – which is always comforting in a someone-will-find-me-before-the-pets-totally-consume-my-body kind of way.

But Maureen is dead-on about the shysters, the shills, the snake-oil salesmen. One author I unfollowed after less than a day because he tweeted, in all caps, to buy his book, every hour, all day long.

No no no.

It’s no fun to be friends with a brand. That’s what it comes down to, really. I might like Burt’s Bees, and expect a certain quality in the products that pleases me with its consistency and nice scents, but I don’t expect to interact with my Beeswax Lip Balm. Beyond keeping my lips kissable, of course.

Authors are different. When we love their books, we want to talk to the people who wrote them. We have this odd tendency to feel like they’re friends because we spent time wrapped in their view of the world. And man authors – certainly not all – like to interact with their readers because, well, otherwise we never really get to be part of that experience.

Storytelling is intimate. Personal. It’s not like selling lip balm.

I am not a brand, she whispered quietly to herself.

The Living Is Easy

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Our neighbors have two tween girls, who are on school break now.

Though our houses have a good distance between them, I can hear the girls play the radio on these hot summer days. I don’t mind it a bit. I think they must be sunbathing on their walled patio. From time to time, I hear their happy voices in counterpoint to the pop songs and boomingly enthusiastic DJs.

I remember that time, spent mostly at the neighborhood pool. We slathered on tanning oils and watched the older girls, relaying to each other the stories we’d heard of who those girls were tanning for. We had this pervasive sense of preparation. That if we groomed ourselves enough our lives would begin and all the excitement bubbling inside of us would have somewhere to go.

The days then lasted forever, though summer was always over before we knew it.

Some of that feeling returns to me, hearing the neighbor girls’ radio. I sit at my desk, reviewing comments on EPA’s proposed Geologic Sequestration Rule and time stretches out, becomes languid. Hot summer air pours in the window.

Happiness can be such a simple thing.