Category: Blog

Magic Bunny Ears of Fire

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When I saw the contrails light up with sunset fire the other night, I knew then what I would call the blog post for it.

Various things (read: deadlines, phone calls and meetings) conspired to keep me from posting this for a couple of days. But I’d been turning the phrase over in my head. Magic bunny ears of fire. I don’t know why. I liked the cadence of it and the image. The whimsy. It entertained me to wind the words around.

This, more than anything else, is the way in which writers are crazy.

When a writer has that far-off fuzzy look? Never ask what she’s thinking, because she’ll say something like: I’m thinking about the phrase “magic bunny ears of fire.” Which I suspect would be a conversation-killer.

Of course, if we’re in a sensible frame of mind, we won’t answer that way. My standard is something like: oh, I’m just noodling over what I’m going to write on my blog.

Magic bunny ears of fire!

And, in another way that I suspect most writers do, this phrase matched up in my head with a song lyric from They Might Be Giants: Sapphire bullets of pure love.

I’m thinking of a story now, surreal and whimsical, where sapphire bullets of pure love rain through the magic bunny ears of fire.

And THIS, my friends, is why so many of us are incapable of writing to market. Can you imagine pitching this image to an agent or editor?

No no no.

But I might write it anyway.

Otherwise the Magic Bunny Ears of Fire will never leave me alone…

Every Quail Is Sacred

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I’ve been trying to explain social media to people lately.

Yeah, you laugh.

And you should, because I am more often the luddite than the gal in the know. And I’m so not the generation of social media — though I notice that mine, the Generation Jones, if you will, has cheerfully glommed onto the concept. Perhaps because we’re all so determined not to become technologically obsolete before we absolutely CANNOT keep up any more. After all, we learned computers when you had to do everything in DOS, dammit. The younger people don’t know what it was like, creating graphics designating the color for each pixel, uphill, through six feet of snow.

Okay, I’m over it now.

I do, however, go to writing conferences where they talk about online marketing. And I go to those sessions, because I’m hopeful of one day having a new book to market. And do a better job of it this time. Though, granted, I used the tools I had at the time.

So, folks in the generations before mine, the Boomers and the Silents, (They all want to be Silent Generation now, have you noticed? No one wants to be a Boomer.) ask me to explain what social media is.

I tell them, it’s about creating networks of people, primarily online, and you share information about the things you like and use. And they say, oh, advertising and I say, no, because this isn’t controlled and it isn’t full of tricks. It’s about honest communication. Stuff you happen to buy is just one part of that.

They don’t get it.

I’m probably not explaining it well.

Penelope Trunk, one of my favorite bloggers (for the record, she does not pay me to say that; she barely knows I exist), does a better job of explaining it, though I can’t find the exact post I’m thinking of. She says the younger folks, the Ys, don’t even think about this. It’s just how they are.

What I suspect is, everyone heard in the early days of social marketing how people were paid to talk to their friends about products. Doing the Oh! I’ll have a Beerweiser! I lurv the Beerweiser, don’t you? Maybe this still goes on and I just don’t know about it.

Of course, we all thought this was really icky. Like stealth advertising.

But the thing is, we all do this all the time anyway; we’re just not paid to do it. Which makes it honest. My aunt says she wants to pick my brain on MP3 players — I’ll tell what kind I bought and why. My mom asks which brand of vitamins is the most trustworthy; David has researched it and we can tell her. They don’t know it, but it’s social media.

All of this comes to mind because on yesterday’s post, I mentioned that my internet was slow and carelessly cast blame on either Qwest or Google. (Relax Qwest social media team — you already contacted me!) And, as you can see from my parenthetical comment, someone from the Qwest social media team commented on my blog post offering to check my internet line for problems.

Totally cracked me up.

And then I thought, very cool of them, that they have a team that picks up on mentions of their services and responds. How smart of them to pay attention to honest, if flip, assessments of their service.

I took them up on the offer, too. The ‘net has been slow at our abode lately. I would love for them to fix it. I like Qwest’s service either way and I don’t mind saying so. No, they don’t pay me either.

What’s more interesting to me? Both my mom and aunt reacted to the comment from Qwest as a corporate intrusion. A Big Brotherish “they’re watching you” kind of thing. My mom even said to me (on Yahoo IM, if we’re quoting brands) “Now even I have to watch what I tell you. God only knows who is listening!”

I say, hey, I threw myself, my words and opinions out there. I made my thoughts accessible to the web crawlers. They’re smart to listen. In fact, I think they’d be fools not to.

The best part of social media is it’s FUN. It’s like a big party. Those Gen Y kids knew what they were doing when they started MySpacing and Chatting and FaceBooking and we, the grown-ups, all thought they were nuts.

David asked me how the photo of our Christmas quail figured into my theme tonight and I said it hadn’t come together yet. But you know, if the quail had a way to post “found a great feeder tonight — they’ve got the BEST seed!” — wouldn’t they do it, too?

Hell, maybe they do!

Puny, Inexhaustible Voices

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I have a thing about acceptance speeches from the literature laureates.

Okay, granted, I have a thing about a lot of things. Sue me.

And don’t blame me for fantasizing about what my own laureate speech would be. We all have our little daydreams, right? Never mind that genre isn’t the way to go, if one wants enduring awards.

In fact, I have a little faux-scroll in my writing studio of William Faulkner’s acceptance speech. (Okay, I used to have it up, then, when we moved, it seemed to garpy to put up again, but now I’m reconsidering. Not the least of which because I’ve now had to Google it, so I can share it with you, and the interwebs are running slow and cobwebby just now.Google is apparently afflicted by blizzards. Or Qwest is. We’ll never know.)

Minutes and minutes later — oh, the lack of instant gratification! — here is the bit I wanted to share:

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

I know, it’s ironic this means so much to me. Words from a man who would undoubtedly not include womens fiction, speculative fiction or sex/magic fiction as emblematic of compassion, sacrifice and endurance.

And yet, aren’t these the traditional female qualities?

Faulkner is all about the man. That was his era. We can forgive him and understand that women were meant to be included in this umbrella term.

We were. Meant to be. Right?

Okay, well, this really started with the speech from 2009’s Nobel Prize Winner for Litachur: Herta Mueller. What she said that struck me:

Can we say that it is precisely the smallest objects—be they trumpets,
accordions, or handkerchiefs—which connect the most disparate things in life?
That the objects are in orbit and that their deviations reveal a pattern of
repetition—a vicious circle, or what we call in German a devil’s circle. We can
believe this, but not say it. Still, what can’t be said can be written. Because
writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.

I feel like she’s speaking to me. To my small objects.

There’s this long, old debate about the things men write about versus what women write about. You can see it here, though you can blame it on era, if you like. The last worthless rock on the last red and dying evening compared to the handkerchief one’s mother mentions.

I would argue it’s not a matter of scale so much as a matter of perspective.

In the end, writing is, indeed, a silent act. That’s a profound thing, since it’s an echo of speech. It’s interesting to me that both laureates, sixty years removed, with gulfs of gender and culture between them, focus on voice.

Which, for those paying attention at home, is a spoken thing.

Sometimes I wonder.

Maybe it’s not what we have to say, so much as how we say it.

Simple Pleasures

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I think it was Alexandra Sokoloff who said in a writing workshop “if you’re not writing down your dreams, you’re working way too hard.”

If someone knows this to be true or untrue, please let me know. That she’s the one who said it, not whether writing down your dreams saves work. Or, actually, you can tell me that, too. At any rate, it seems I heard this third- or fourth-hand, but I liked it, so it stuck.

Many of my dreams have been written down, in various fragments, waiting to be stories. Obsidian started from a dream. From a series of dreams, really. I had another good one the other night and wrote several pages about it. Could be fun to see where it goes.

I have disturbing dreams from time to time, also. Rarely full-fledged nightmares, but things that prey on me.

I dreamed one the other night. That David’s mother told me I was a bad influence. She asked me to leave their house in the middle of the night. I was heartbroken, but I wasn’t surprised. I knew how she felt already.

Isabel goes outside, despite the snow.

She loves to crouch behind the plants and watch the quail feed. Once they collect, she springs into their feathery cluster, sending shooting stars of birds in all directions. It’s her favorite thing to do, even though she never catches any.

Frankly, I think she doesn’t try very hard. They’re big birds, after all. She just loves the game. Snow collecting on her fur isn’t enough to ruin her fun.

When she gets cold and damp enough, she comes back in and curls up near where I’m working to snooze. If I get up, she takes possession of my desk chair, the best place to be.

And when she sleeps, she dreams of catching quail.

True Love

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“Well, Sundance, at least we have enough ammo to hold off the Bolivian Army.”

This is what I was planning to say to David when I came back into the house after organizing the garage. I had the words all picked out, amused myself terribly as I worked, but then I couldn’t quite tease him about it.

Contrary to some opinion, I do hold my tongue now and then.

However, I did tell David that I thought he was the worst packer on the face of the Earth. This is after I suggested throwing his old suitcase into the BB/BS donation pile for tomorrow morning, and he said there was stuff in it and I said, no, I checked and PUT AWAY the collection of BULLETS, CARTRIDGES, NAILS and SCREWS.

I kid you not. The suitcase was full of this stuff.

He says, “I had no choice about that.”

Which makes me laugh, because he totally means it. He means that, faced with drawers of random hardware condiments and ammunition, on a short timeline — and, oh my god, our timeline was short — that throwing a chunk of it into his broken old suitcase would seem inevitable.

In a month, we’ll have been together for 19 years. So, this is all stuff I know about him. One of my first published essays was called “Bullets,” and was about dating a man who had shotgun cartridges rolling around in his truck.

Of course, even though he doesn’t hunt anymore, we have plenty of ammo.

Which I packed away, in my organized fashion, into the plastic bin labelled “hunting supplies.” If/when he asks me where it all is, I can tell him. Because, you know, he will ask. Though I must grant that he remembered which broken suitcase he’d stowed it in. And I’m pretty sure that was late on the last Thursday, just before we closed the truck and left the house forever. Right after I asked him if he’d packed the stuff in his drawers in the basement. An ingenuous question on my part, because I knew perfectly well he hadn’t.

Which is why he had no choice and why I shouldn’t be surprised to find it.

All I can say is, if we move to Bolivia?

We’re taking nothing and starting fresh.

A Salute to Healthy Living!

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I made chocolate-chip cookies tonight.

Which is totally out of character.

Were I a character in a novel, some reader would tag me immediately and say, no, she’s into into low-fat diet, exercise and healthy living — it’s totally unrealistic for her to suddenly bake chocolate-chip cookies. Even if it was just a half-recipe, from the one her friend read her over the phone in 9th grade, because they liked the Nestle recipe best and she didn’t have Nestle-brand chips.

They’d put it down to sloppy writing. Bad characterization.

Because, in many ways, characters in books are trimmed down to a few facets. So there’s no room for change that’s not relevant to the plot. My 9th-grade sweet-tooth self can’t play into healthy-living modern-day character. Not without complex layers.

Including layers of fat.

Which is why I no longer do things like baking cookies. But, one friend, who shall remain nameless but who David has named an evil influence, baked chocolate-chip cookies last night and I’ve been jonesing for them ever since. I’ma slave to peer pressure. Except most of the time. More of those layers.

So I set out the butter to soften, just in case. Sometimes it helps, to see the stick of butter and imagine that much more on my ass. Which is a direct proportion for the over-40 woman, if you didn’t know.

(As an aside, I recently learned that the woman in her 40s should have an orgasm at least every 16 days to be healthy and the 6os woman every 30 days — I don’t know about you, but I have that aspect of healthy living So, SO handled!)

I digress. To continue the story, David spotted the butter, I used to bake all the time, he knows what it means. I say I was thinking of making… but we don’t need … and he interrupts me with the mmmmmm noise.

Made it a done deal.

After all, who loves living with Healthy Living Woman? (Except for the orgasm part, natch.)

So, it’s cold tonight. There’s a fire in the fireplace and wine in my glass.

And warm chocolate-chip cookies.

Moonset at Sunrise

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The moon has been so bright the last few nights that it shines in our west-facing bedroom like a spotlight.

Every night, the moon rises one hour later. So the time the moon shines in our window has gotten progressively later. The last few nights, we’ve awakened when the moon hit the window at just after midnight, then 1:30 and so on. Last night I woke up at 3:45 and got up to pee, which is fairly usual for me. When I came back to bed, David was sitting on the side of the bed, which is very unusual. He gave me a bright-eyed look and said “time to get up?”

Um no, I told him. I realized the room was so bright from the moon it could look like sunrise. It’s not even four o’clock yet.

Oh good, he says, lays down and promptly goes back to sleep. If he was ever really awake at all.

I was awake for a while, watching the mooon shine in. I inherited the family gene for fretting in the middle of the night. Fortunately I don’t do it often, or for very long.

Having the moon there comforted me.

When we got up to the alarm call at six, the moon still hung there, just setting as the sun rose.

Soon it was gone and the day belonged entirely to the sun.

Pearls Before Swine

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So. The news from the agent isn’t good.

It’s sad. Not so terrible. But heartfelt and sad.

Dear Jeffe,

Well, this is an unpleasant letter to write. I really do feel that OBSIDIAN is hugely improved with your revisions. You’ve done an enormous amount of work, and I felt that, especially with the ending, the changes were dramatically clear. However, I still have significant reservations about the manuscript, and I honestly don’t know if they can be addressed in yet another edit. Some of this just has to do with your natural way of telling a story, the way that it feels right for you to be telling it. The prose problems that I had in the draft of last spring have persisted. It’s your writing style, and though I know you worked hard on nailing down the nuanced edits I had suggested, you ultimately need to be the writer that you ARE. And who am I to change that in you? Unfortunately, agents tend to have that effect and it’s not always a good thing, certainly isn’t a fair thing. The fact is that we’re just not connecting as reader and writer, you and I, and it’s not something you can change any further from here, I think. Objectively, I can tell you that the manuscript is 200% better now with your revisions– you haven’t wasted time, and I think you can agree with me there. Do you feel that it’s greatly improved? I do believe that. But I’m sorry, I don’t feel confident enough to offer you representation. I don’t personally connect to it enough to think I could sell it effectively. I need that deep passion before I take something on. I do hope that you find it in another agent, and I hope that if and when our paths cross in the future, I will be able to congratulate you on landing a terrific agent
elsewhere.

Yeah, I wept a few tears. And I think I’m over it. She’s right: I believe the book is MUCH better and that I likely can’t change my prose style, even if I wanted to.

There it is.

So, Allison is all about me switching to the sci fi/fantasy agents instead of the romancey ones. The great irony will be that she’s signed (pretty much) with a quintessential paranormal romance agent and she doesn’t really read romance. She digs that my book is full-on fantasy (with big dollops of sex). At least she says so, because she’s sweet to me. 😉

I threw Pearl on here, in tribute to that side of me. That I was the sci fi/fantasy girl from way back. The girl who read Dragonflight long before she read Indigo Nights.

Can I help it that I long for Indigo Dragon Nights?

Pearl, for those who don’t know (which is a lot of people) is my first pubbed speculative fiction story. From Aeon Magazine, Spring 2008. I loved the image they came up with for the story. I like her wistfulness, the hope for something more than her world currently holds. It’s very her.

And yes, it’s very sci fi — with great dollops of sex.

December 1. Never a lucky day for me, the first of the month. Or rather, it’s a day of change.

Which also means opportunity, right?

Such a Lonely Word

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People talk a lot about honesty and wanting it.

I’m persuaded to think that they’re lying about this.

Perhaps they lie only to themselves and, since that’s as human as pretending that alcohol has no calories, it’s commonplace. Oh wait. That’s the same thing.

At any rate, a friend of mine from long ago posted on Facebook that a girl he liked who said she “wasn’t dating” turned out just not to be dating him. He lamented that he hadn’t learned this line in 40 years. I attempted to defend my gender saying that we don’t want to hurt a guy’s feelings with the honest answer, which could be “ick.” Another commenter said he’d want the honest “ick” so he could learn what to improve on.

The thing is, I think he got the honest “ick” to begin with and didn’t want to hear it.

There’s “ick” on many levels in life, from the color of a shirt, to the taste of avocados, to your best friend’s new boyfriend. And often there’s absolutely no reason for it. Maybe you got sick on bad avocadoes once, maybe it’s just a texture thing. Maybe you secretly think it makes you interesting not to eat avocadoes, gallantly passing on the tableside guacamole with a wry smile.

I’m not sure there really is an honest reason for rejection.

Writers lament that agents and editors don’t give good reasons for rejections. There’s the nearly universal “full client list,” which is really not far off the “I’m not dating right now” response. If the perfect manuscript came along, of course there would be room. More often you get the “not for me,” which is the nicest way they’ve found for saying “ick.” Just I don’t like avocadoes ick, not I wouldn’t rep you if you were the last author on the planet ick.

One hopes, anyway.

That’s the beauty of a little fudging, a gentle dishonesty: you don’t have to elucidate the level of ick. Believe me, I’ve been rejected, too, both as a writer and as a female. The honesty of some of those male rejections left me bruised for years. I didn’t need to know how deep the ick ran.

Because, in the end, it didn’t matter. “Not for me” is really the most honest explanation there is.

(And no, I haven’t heard back from the agent yet. Here I am, sitting by the phone, hoping she meant it when she said she’d call…)

Thanks for All the Fish

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I had this vague Idea that I would write a Thanksgiving post.

I mean, I didn’t do the whole Facebook thing of daily posting what I was thankful for, because, hey I have a blog and would write all about that. In my own time.

Which turns out to be days later.

I did post that I was considering just reverting to childhood at my mother’s house, which would consist of lying about reading and generally being a parasite.

The beauty of the adult version of this is, you get to drink beer, too!

So, yes, this is what happened to my Thanksgiving post. I was sitting in the sun on the patio, drinking beer that my wonderful Stepfather Dave stocked in his special Corona cooler, reading and being a parasite. Here is my list of thankfuls for that:

To my mom, for making sure I got to relax;
To Dave, for being a great host and for putting up with HER side of the family;
To David, my love, for being the kind of guy who loves to sit and read on the patio with me;
To the sun, for shining.

I wasn’t a complete loser, but I came quite close. Somewhere around the Monday of Thanksgiving week, between emails and phone calls, it occurred to me that my mother hadn’t even mentioned the dinner menu, much less asked me for input.

This is what’s known in the business as a Bad Sign.

When I asked my mom about the plans for the holiday meal, she replied that Thanksgiving is a slam dunk, she and Hope had it handled. So, while I did make my cranberry/pear chutney on Thanksgiving Day, it was an afterthought. Here’s me, in my desultory cooking, laptop at the ready. And no, my mother’s kitchen is never that cluttered. That’s my fault, too. Thus I am thankful:

To Hope, best stepsister anyone could ask for, for stepping up when I didn’t;
To my mom, who never once bugged me about the dinner menu and who just wanted me to relax.

So, while I managed to make chutney, consult on the stuffing and set the table — yes, I was totally 13 again — I was worthless this Thanksgiving. Even for giving thanks.

In the end? Hands-down winner: I’m thankful for my mom. Who promises that I get to make it all up by hosting Christmas. And she won’t do anything, especially not scrubbing my stove top in the middle of the night.

I love you Mom!