Category: Blog

Playing House

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Kind of a playful sunrise, with all the little swirlies.

It’s the common wisdom that the young of all species learn through play. Right? We know this. Kids play house and doctor. They play war and cops & robbers. You can watch kittens stalk imaginary prey. Puppies nip and wrestle for dominance. All of the developmental types love to do studies on this: how play develops the mental and physical structure we need to be effective in the world.

For the next week, I’m going to play Full-Time Writer.

Believe me, this is the funnest game ever! I hope so, anyway.

Things are slow at work. Predictably slow. as we’re in the doldrums between the crashing waves of last year’s projects winding up and just before the long voyage that will be this year’s projects. One advantage of my super-busyness last Fall is I’ve got a fair amount of vacation and unused holidays built up. Our company is really great that way — you can work on a holiday if you’re pressed and save it for another time.

This is that time.

Don’t worry — I’ll go on real vacation later this Spring, when David gets his two-week break from school and we’ll go to VIRGIN GORDA! Did I mention we’re going to VIRGIN GORDA?? Well, we are. (Thanks to Guavaberry Spring Bay for the pic!)

But for now, I want to use the uninterrupted time to get the scaffolding up on the new novel I’ve been noodling on. I need to think up a way to refer to it. I don’t really have a title. I know how *I* think of it, but I don’t want to put it out there in the world just yet. I’m feeling protective of her young and tender self. And you know I hate the term “WIP.”

Hell, I guess it’ll just have to be New Novel.

Once I did a writers retreat, at Ucross Foundation. An incredible experience that went a long way toward making me feel like a “real” writer in my early days. For two solid weeks I had a room, a writing studio and an actual staff that fed me. (And some other artists, too.) At midday they would creep up and leave a gourmet sack lunch outside your studio door, so they wouldn’t disturb the incredibly important work going on inside.

Of course, being a writer, I would long for the interruption. Listening for the lunch elves so I could quit agonizing and have a legitimate reason to stop writing. I don’t know what it is about writing that, once you have large blocks of time to do it, it becomes overwhelming. But, over the two weeks, I got better at it. There was no clock in my room and I didn’t bring one, so I tended to wake when the sun hit my pillow, around 7. The only scheduled event in my day was dinner with the other artists every night.

When I returned, a friend asked me if I’d found my “perfect calendar.” After a moment of thought, I said yes. Yes, that was a perfect schedule for me.

I’ve done the “at home” writers retreat once or twice before. But at those times, my writing habits were less solidified and my life was crazier. I ended up spending that time writing very little and napping a lot. Or catching up on other stuff.

This time though, I want to really test out what it’s like. I want to set up my perfect calendar as a full-time writer and practice for when it’s real.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Great Backyard Bird and Coyote Watch

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All the animals are out and about now.

Spring may not begin until March — which I quibbled about previously, so I won’t reiterate my arguments, much as I enjoy reiterating my favorite peeves — but the wildlife around Santa Fe is gearing up for warm weather.

Tuesday evening, as dusk fell, a couple of bunnies came out to hit up the game bird block out front. And a jumping mouse hopped by. Then, yesterday morning, I awoke to fog outside the window — and a coyote walking by. Last night, a bobcat came up on the porch to nose around. And sniff around the game bird block.

Predators following prey in the eternal cycle.

The flickers have been diligently hammering on the house. If you’ve never heard a woodpecker at work on your house, well it sounds like the roofing crew showed up again. Maybe just the finish crew. But you could swear someone’s out there pounding nails. If you look behind the suet feeder in this photo, you can see the fresh hole in the portal post that this selfsame bird drilled into it.

I assume that’s her, anyway. She refused to give her name.

Being a woman, I decided food was the answer. The gal at the local Wild Birds Unlimited was dubious.

“Are you sure they’re not looking to carve out a nest?”

“It’s about the size of a quarter,” I say. “If so, they’ve got a ways to go.”

I’d walked in and asked for the Woodpecker’s Friend. Which makes sense to me, but I apparently live in my own delusional world. I’m at peace with that. At any rate, the thing I thought I saw at Christmastime wasn’t what I thought it was and it wasn’t called that anyway. The upshot? I have to be my own woodpecker’s friend. So I got the basic suet frame and the recommended suet and made David install it all over the hole, so the flickers would eat the suet and not the portal.

Right, he thought I was nuts, too.

And for a while, all we got on there were the bushtits. Which turned out to be really neat because they hadn’t visited us other wise.

Then, a couple of days ago: the flickers found the suet. They’ve been happily cracking away on it — and no other part of the house — ever since. I know. I am totally vindicated. I *am* the Woodpecker’s Friend. One day all you people learn not to scoff.


The Great Backyard Bird Count starts on Saturday. No qualifications required to participate. This year, if you tweet, you can use the hashtag #gbbc to report bird sightings. Hey, it does NOT get more fun than that people!

Nobody seems to sponsor the Great Backyard Coyote Count. But we caught one on the night-vision camera last night. It’s actually an amusing sequence as he and the bunnies visit throughout the night. Tonight we’ll see if we can’t snap one of the bobcat and maybe I’ll post the whole sequence tomorrow.

Oh, in this photo? I’m pretty sure he’s looking at Isabel in the window.

She’s hiding in the laundry basket today.

In Flight Again!

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I think I’ve mentioned before that, when I’m not sure what I’m going to write about here, I look on my camera to see what might be on there.

It’s frequently a complete surprise what images I find there, which really shouldn’t be the case, since most of the time it’s only been a day or two since I snapped the pictures.

Short attention span much?

Except that’s not really true. While my attention can be diverted, usually my problem is getting too wrapped up in stuff so that I lose track of time and forget stuff. Like, say, the tea water boiling on the stove. I wish I could say that’s only happened once or twice, but I bet I’ve done it, oh, two dozen times at least. Now I actually set a reminder on my computer to go check it. Pitiful, I know.

In this way, the photos on the camera are like little notes to myself, to remind me of what I was thinking of or found interesting at that moment. Otherwise, I’m not one of those writers who writes notes to herself.

I saw a bit of advice the other day saying that writers should make notes with every idea or you’ll forget it and lose it forever. I just don’t think it’s true.

Admittedly, last night, David and I were talking about something and I thought, oh, I should blog about that in the morning and now I don’t remember what it was. But I’m not bothered about it because I truly believe that the thought will surface eventually, at the right time. If not, well, in the immortal words of Steve Martin, “It must not have been very important then!”

If you’re radioactive, you’ll remember eventually.

One thing that I do when I’m editing is I’ll think, oh, I really meant to add in this phrase or this idea or feeling. I’ll type it in and, two lines later? I’ll find that exact phrase. One day I’ll learn to read ahead and check to see if the past me already did what the present me thinks is so brilliant. One day I’ll also learn to trust myself.

Rarely do I find that I left something out of a story, mostly I’m refocusing the reader’s eye.

It’s funny to me, to look at these photos I took the other day. On Saturday we went to the mall to find the glassblower’s booth I spotted at Christmastime. Remember how I said malls didn’t have them anymore? Well ours does!

And they totally fixed my glass fairy, whose broken wings I bemoaned in that same post. The guy only charged me a dollar to do it. (I gave him $5 — not all miracles are costly.)

So, I snapped commemorative photos of the repaired fairy, for the triumphant return to flight blog post, since several people said the Broken Wings post made them sad. Witness my contract with the reader here: I’m providing you with a happy ending to the sad, sad tale of the broken fairy.

You can see, however, that I had issues with focus.

The camera kept “looking” out the window instead of at our main character, fairy reincarnated.

Some lovely nature shots there — not to mention the fabulous rain chain! — but the heroine is an unfortunate blur.

I finally figured out that I was too close to her and backed off. But then the secondary characters took over. Not that they each don’t have their own story. Just not this story.

At any rate, I’ve extended this analogy until it’s creaking, and you can see her at the top, in all her clarity and flightfulness.

That’s my take-away today: trust yourself, things can always be fixed, and sometimes all it needs is a little refocusing.

When I’m Down and Feeling Blue

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Sometimes I feel like I’m speaking to an empty room.

Maybe this is a writer thing. You write the words, they go out there and sometimes someone answers, but most of the time, not. Most of the time there’s this vast silence.

Or, maybe people who become writers are people who feel like they’re talking to an empty room already and writing the words down is a way to at least make them visible, if not heard.

It’s a funny thing, because the reader doesn’t experience this. The reader feels like they’ve participated in this whole conversation with the writer. You’ve whispered in their ear, they listened and thought about it, ordered their responses and perhaps revisited what you wrote in their minds over the course of the day. This is the part the writer never gets to hear.

And, of course, we all seem to be this chemically unstable combination of insecurity and raging egomania. Perhaps it’s one of those things like running for President of the US, where only egomaniacs stand a chance of surviving the process. But, for writers, our marching melody seems necessarily threaded through with this minor harmony of doubt. I don’t know — maybe the President feels that, too, but doesn’t dare show fear to the lurking wolves.

This morning, two nice things happened. A wonderful friend, who happens to be a Nebula Award-winning author and who offered to read my book to see if she could help expedite it past the slush piles, sent me a note on FaceBook, saying: “Wow! I was hooked on Obsidian by page one. You write really well.”

And an email came from one of my oldest friends, saying: “I managed to get caught up on all of your blog entries that I didn’t get to while I was convalescing. They were full of lovely writing, touching sentiments, and pretty images.”

Those two things? They’re enough to make that empty room suddenly full of people.

More from the Nerd Journal

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I debated this morning: yet another sunset photo or yet another rain chain pic?

No worries — you’ll get the rain chain photo later this week, I feel sure. (Was that a collective sigh of relief? Thought so!)

I mentioned yesterday that I’m having fun working on this new novel. It’s really quite refreshing, getting to do research and chalking it up as progress in the writing column. Part of what I’ve been doing involves this great big ancient Sanskrit dictionary. The book smells like university libraries. It feels good to sit in the leather chair in the sun with this heavy book in my lap. It does feel more important, as I mulled over earlier this week.

My mother (yes, that was her) castigated me in the comments of my post (probably rightly so) for saying that I sometimes feel less intelligent than I once was. Well, tracing these words reminds me of studying back in college. I feel the rush of discovery, the fascination — I can practically feel my neurons buzzing to make new connections. I want to sit and read the dictionary all day. Which, now that I think of it, some of my high school cohorts snidely accused me of doing.

The other thing? It’s relaxing. I have proof, even. This article in MarieClaire cites a study that shows even six minutes of reading reduces stress levels by 68%. And, you know, if it’s in MarieClaire, it must be true. (They also helpfully translate, for the non-mathmatically inclined, that this is over two-thirds.)

The natural medicine types contend that our society is so chock-full of stress that we should be doing all we can to diffuse stress. They say that, even if we think our own lives aren’t particularly stressful, that we’re so surrounded by it that we cannot escape its impact on us.

Are you with me here? Turns out reading is healthy! Just like exercising and eating veggies!

I feel so vindicated.

What’s Your Game Now – Can Anybody Play?

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I really should scan in some of my photographs, so I don’t have to borrow pictures of my friends’ kids when I’m talking about my own childhood.

Though I love this pic of the red-headed urchin child born to one of my sorority sisters. I see a lot of my friend in this little girl’s face. Which is a lovely thing, I think.

So, I’m changing up my process again a little bit. As you may or may not recall, when I wrote Obsidian, that was a major writing transition for me. I had formed my writing habits around essays. That was a very natural way of working for me. I worked four ten-hour days at my job, then took Fridays off to write. I could generally write a full essay in that one day. Start to finish, I could hold the full idea in my head and get it all on the page.

When I went to write a longer work, which at first were a couple of narrative nonfiction books, I found this didn’t work. I obviously couldn’t write the entire thing in one day, I couldn’t quite hold the whole thing in my head and, if I wrote only one day a week, I would lose too much of it in between.

Eventually I gave in to the “write every day” crowd. At first it was quite painful. The other demands of my life didn’t lend themselves to writing at any other time than early morning. And I am *so* not a morning person. At that time of my life, though, I took or taught classes every night from when I finished work until sometimes 1 am.

Mornings it had to be.

Now it’s my pattern and it works for me. I get up early, exercise and write before starting work. Sometimes I have early meetings and that interferes, but in general, I get my words in every day. I’ve learned how to write a long work in increments, though I did it as I write essays: knowing my starting and ending point and letting the writing process wend me through it.

For a while now I’ve been wedded to that idea, that the true art of writing is letting the story emerge that way.

Several things have come together in the last week or so to change my mind. Allison is dealing with contract stuff and negotiating deadlines for her (very exciting!) three-book deal. She writes like I do, yet she’s expected to provide detailed synopses of Books 2 & 3, neither of which are written yet. The thought makes *me* nervous. I’ve realized that, not only is Allison going to have to change her process, now that writing is her job (albeit a second one), if I get a contract like this, which I want and I’m working towards, I will have to do the same thing.

I might as well start now, without the pressure of deadlines.

I mentioned at the beginning of the week that I’m taking this time to figure out what I’m working on next. I tried writing on my various projects, just to see which one wanted to flow. A new urban fantasy novel stepped forward and she’s going to be my dance partner for the next little while. I’ve been feeling like I should plot it out, but dreading that process. And maybe feeling like that’s an insincere way to approach a story

The other thing that happened was I ran across a quote at some point. I think someone tweeted it and I regret that I didn’t take note of who it was. But when I read it, I didn’t realize it would stick with me the way it did.

I thought it was Jung, so I Googled him and some of the words I recalled and found it on this site, which has a lot of really great quotes on this topic. This is the quote that caught the edge of my attention, attached itself and like a burr finally buried its way in enough to prick me:

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Heraclitus, Greek philosopher, 535-475 BCE

On the way, I also saw this one:

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.
Carl Jung, Swiss psychoanalyst, 1875-1961

That quote by Heraclitus reminded me of my childhood games with Linda Ceriello. We would create these elaborate games with stuffed animals and model horses, such as boarding school. We spent hours and hours in prep, giving each animal a name and sometimes a family history. We created course curricula and interpersonal conflicts. In fact, we rarely ended up playing the actual game for very long because we spent so much time on the set-up.

You’re probably way ahead of me here, but it hit me (sun breaking through the clouds, angels singing) that this was PLOTTING. Something about remembering the seriousness of our play and how gloriously fun it was, showed me that I have been plotting stories all my life. I just didn’t know I was doing it.

And see? Jung wasn’t the correct source, but he has something to serendipitously add: that new things are created through play, not intellect.

This means something to me because lately I’ve been feeling like I’m not as intelligent as I once was — no, I don’t know why I feel this way — and I’m wondering if I even can create a complex world like I have in mind for this novel. Knowing that I can do what I did as a child liberated me and now I’ve been writing up this world, plotting it out.

I still seem to need the process of writing, but I’m just describing things, characters, religions, history. I throw in snippets of dialogue here and there, bits of pertinent interpersonal relationships.

The best part: it’s really fun. Thanks for those days, Linda!

My Old Wyoming Home

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I don’t think about the old house much.

Which is kind of odd, because it once meant so much to me. Last week, when David and I went to Ten Thousand Waves to celebrate our anniversary by soaking in a private tub, he asked me if I thought the new people were using the hot tub much.

I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

“Our hot tub?” he says. “The people who bought our house — do you think they use the hot tub?”

Ohhhh. The hot tub we used to sit in pretty much every night for five years. In the house we bought for love. For jts beauty and the sunlight. I just hadn’t thought about it. “They’re from California and it’s been a cold winter — I hope they’re using it!”

And then I started thinking more about how they were doing. If they figured out how to set up the pond heater so the koi in the pond will overwinter. The upstairs gets cold when it’s really chilly — I should have left a note telling them of my trick of closing the downstairs heating vents and turning on the upstairs ceiling fan and heating from the top down on those super-frosty days.

Last night I dreamed that we snuck into the old house. The person we were with — maybe a real estate agent? — knew they were out of town. So we went in to look around and all the windows were shaded so no light came in! Enraged, I went around opening shades and doors. I heard voices behind one door and there was a woman inside, reading to a little girl who was sick.

Oops.

So I fled. Fortunately she didn’t see me. (How she couldn’t when I opened the door to the bedroom is silly, but that’s the great thing about dreams.)

Anyway, I think I’m connecting with the timing. It was one year ago now that we put our house on the market. I started to say good-bye then. I wasn’t sure of the date until I checked this blog post. Amazing to me how our subconscious notes and commemorates anniversaries, even if we consciously don’t.

Coincidentally, I wrote about that house (okay, that part isn’t a coinicidence – I write about every damn thing, like cats and New Mexico weather) and the essay appeared in Going Green.
Recently the Wyoming Library Roundup published an article on the anthology and they used a picture of our old house. (Look at page 9 – I can’t seem to get it to bookmark.)

So now it’s immortalized the way I liked it, for all to see. Which is a lovely by-product of writing. It doesn’t really matter if they use the hot tub, if the fish survive the winter or if they close the shades.

It’s their house now. Mine is in the book.

Muddying the Waters

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We’re in this precarious season of freeze and thaw.

It’s a lovely thing, because it feels like Spring already. If we were in Wyoming, with all the snow that’s fallen, we wouldn’t be looking for it to thaw for months. In Santa Fe, the days warm up with gentle kindness, the birds swoop about singing with excitement and the road gets muddy as hell.

I’m talking deep ruts. That freeze at night.

But, aside from a filthy mailbox, it isn’t really that bad. I’m curious to see if I’ll have to wash the mailbox or if the Spring rains will take care of that. I’ve never washed a mailbox in my life.

I printed out my novel, Obsidian, yesterday. I can’t believe I haven’t used “Obsidian” as a label before, since I’ve prattled about it ceaselessly on this blog. What does it mean? Maybe just that I know the title could change (even though I think it’s a really good one). Now that Allison is hashing out her book deal, they’re discussing how to change her title. She doesn’t seem to mind, since Laurell K. Hamilton already stole the title she really wanted.

At any rate, I printed the whole thing out to send to a sci fi/fantasy author friend who (with incredible generosity) offered to read it and help me bypass the slush piles of a few people she thinks might like it.

It’s a huge stack of paper. Heavy.

It surprised me that I hadn’t printed out the whole thing before. And it put me in mind of the days way back when I first set my writerly goals. I was working with the concepts of visualizing what I wanted, but wasn’t sure what I was going to write. I knew, too, that I needed to be specific. (Be careful what you wish for!) So I visualized a manuscript, a stack of paper full of good writing.

When I printed out the final full manuscript of Wyoming Trucks to send to my editor at UNM Press, I experienced a moment of deja vu to see it looked exactly as I’d envisioned.

But with Obisidian, though I’ve sent out the full manuscript, I’ve always sent it electronically. Where paper, the post office and the mailbox used to be such a major part of my writing life — and least the sending it out into the world part — now it’s really all via email. Which is great in many ways: cheaper, faster, more green, less resource-intensive.

It’s also less weighty.

I saw this article yesterday, via the New York Times Science tweet. There have been a number of similar studies lately verifying this phenomenon of our brains, that what we think does have a physical effect on the world. This one is particularly interesting because they found that subjects assigned greater importance to things that were heavier.

You scoff? Go read the article. I’ll wait.

Isn’t that interesting? And you’re thinking the same thing I am, right: ebooks.

After all of the bruhaha over the Amazon/MacMillan tussle over how much ebooks are worth, I wonder about how our animal brains value something that has no weight. That, in some ways, has no physical existence. The publishers insist that a book shouldn’t be worth less because it’s not printed on paper. But all of us know that creating a document electronically and sending it via the ether is cheaper. No matter how you spin it, all of us who no longer budget for paper, toner and postage can tell you that.

Certainly the publishers add value, through selection and refinement of the work. As do the agents who bring it to the publishers. And the booksellers who bring it to the readers. I noticed that, in all of the opinions flying around, most were from the publishers, agents and booksellers. A couple mentioned the readers. Almost no authors have spoken up. An oppressed people, we.

But, if we’re to look at the core value, what people pay for is the story. Which has always been intangible. Which might be why the author’s contribution to the equation tends to weigh less heavily.

I’m thinking, though, for important submissions I might invest in paper. Thick stuff with a formal feel.

I might have to wash the mailbox.

And on the Eighth Day…

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Today I decide what to work on next.

It’s an interesting place to be. When I was a reader only I felt this way when I finished a book. I’d turn to my always-towering TBR (to be read) pile and select what came next.

Sometimes the choice was obvious and I would dive into the next in the series. Other times I’d want to switch genres entirely. Every once in a while a book would be so powerful I’d just dream about it for the rest of the day, or a few days even, before I would be ready to move on to another.

I’ve realized recently that I used to identify periods in my life by what I was reading at the time. The auras of those books permeated how I thought and felt. That isn’t so true anymore. Perhaps because I don’t read nearly as much as I used to. Perhaps because I don’t immerse in books the way I did when I was younger. But largely I think it’s because I’m writing instead.

I’m noticing that my thoughts and feelings are now heavily infused with what I’m writing at the time. (I’m also noticing that I’ve started using “now” way too much. Allison pointed it out and it’s like a freaking verbal tic that’s driving me nuts. I tried to use “now” twice in the previous sentence. I need an exorcism…) I’ve finally moved into a place where I’m able to write longer works, by working on them every day. That means I dream about what I’m writing the rest of the time, which is really useful when it comes time to sit at the keyboard again.

But it means I don’t mull over what I’m reading as much. Maybe this is a natural transition.

So, (I so want to type “now” here – argh!) here I am, between works. I finished the novella yesterday and sent it off. Obsidian is off with a couple of agents. After I finish this blog post, I’ll need to work on something. One thing I’ve found, and I resisted this for many years when other writers gave this advice, it’s really much easier if you write every day. I don’t know why, but it’s as if the pipe starts to crud up if you don’t run water through it every day.

How to decide which project to work on next? I have no shortage of ideas and six projects in various stages of completion. If I had an agent or deadlines, I would know what project was jostling up to the front of the queue. I wouldn’t have a choice, really.

So I should enjoy this freedom.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll switch genres.

Eldorado on Ice

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This was yesterday.

We hung this suet feeder on the portal post, because a ladder-backed woodpecker had taken a liking to this spot and was hammering away at it. The Wild Birds Unlimited folks thought he might like this suet. He hasn’t been back, that I’ve seen, which is also a solution. But for two days in a row now, this flock of little birds descends on the suet like flies. We think they might be bushtits. They appear suddenly, feast for a few minutes and disappear again. Spooky, too, which is why I had to take this picture through glass.

It kind of reminds me of the twitter/blog bruhaha over the iPad, Amazon and Macmillan. Jackie Kessler, who’s a lovely person and who writes really fun books, has a good summary on her blog, if you want to catch up. I think it’s just the latest fat-rich tidbit and people are getting quickly hysterical over what will likely be nothing, but what do I know?

We had fog last night, so when we walked this morning, the moisture had condensed all over everything and left it frosted. Fog still hung heavy in the valley.

It’s funny to me to see the cholla cactus covered in frost, but they don’t seem to mind.

Maybe I’m saving words to finish the novella today, because I’m mostly just wanting to share photos from our walk.

These are worth thousands of words anyway, aren’t they?

After this, we went to eat breakfast. As we left, the hostess said “Thanks for starting your day with us!” It’s a new neighborhood place and David says they’re still trying to find their way to be part of our community.

But I thought it was funny, because my day already felt so full.