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.

House Woman

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No, I didn’t take that picture. I wish!

I pulled it from here and I’m hoping no one will mind. Once I snap a picture of our own little house wren, I’ll swap it out.

He or she – apparently the males and females look much the same – has been busily building a nest inside the cow skull hanging outside our front door. She goes in the top, (we’ll just decide it’s a she), through the cannula where the spinal cord would exit and has stuff the brain cavity with hair, grass and bits of floss pulled from the seams of the patio chair cushions.

Pretty styling actually.

At first I thought this was a bad idea. Disaster waiting to happen. But it turns out she knows what she’s doing. House wrens will steal other birds’ nests. She’s tiny, but she’s aggressive. She doesn’t mind us coming and going and she tells Isabel off if she gets too close.

I like a bird who takes care of herself.

I finished and sent in my line edits for Petals and Thorns last night. That was the third and final editing pass. Publication date is July 13, if I haven’t mentioned. When we first discussed the editing process, I made a joke to my Loose Id editor that it was amusing to me to contemplate editing on a BDSM novella. Like, would the hero’s motivation be to tie her hands with rope at this point or would he use cuffs?

I thought it was funny.

But no. She didn’t even bite. So I mentioned it to Allison, who didn’t get why I thought it was funny, either. Now I know why. That’s exactly what the editing process was like. Was it one breast or both, which means it should be plural. If he’s busy with the one hand then he’s only holding one shoulder so he can’t release her shoulders. I swear – even UNM Press and Redbook didn’t line edit this exhaustively.

Or maybe that’s the beauty of getting galley proofs instead of a document marked with track changes. I miss my blissful ignorance.

Amusingly, many of the commas my content editor inserted, the copy editor removed. Comma placement comes down to a matter of opinion most of the time. Some people have very strong opinions on the topic. Me? Not so much.

At any rate, there I am, working my little tasks while the wren works outside my window. Bit by bit, adding to our creations.

Maybe I’m styling, too.

One-Eye Blind

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I didn’t notice, until I went to take this photo of the pretty flowers, that St. Francis is now blind in one eye.

Apparently some sort of insect has built a cocoon or egg sack in the cavity and sealed it over. I can’t decide if St. Francis’ love of all animals extends to insects. You don’t really see him depicted with, say, a preying mantis on an outstretched arm. Still, life is life and I’m inclined to let whatever it is develop as it will.

That tends to be my philosophy on most everything. And not just because I’m lazy.

I think that’s why Taoism fits me well: just let it flow, swim with the tide, ride that wave into the shore.

It’s how I write, too. I usually have just a general idea of what happens, but not exactly. For example, right now my characters are visiting this sacred altar. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get to, being secret and sacred and all, but I wasn’t sure what the tricks and traps would be. I found out as my characters went along. Now that they’re there, I’m not sure exactly who or what occupies the altar. It hasn’t jumped out yet, either, which gets kind of frustrating.

I’m really not sure what I think about this kind of thing. Robin McKinley, who I just love, and who writes this nearly incoherent, stream-of-consciousness blog that I can only sometimes bear to read, writes here about why there’s no sequel to Sunshine, a book well-loved and which clearly ended begging for a sequel. She does the thing some authors do, saying that the stories come to her and she can’t make it happen. Other authors talk about their characters talking to them. The pre-plotters brainstorm it all out ahead of time and then, depending on their technique, either write it exactly that way or let the story wind around that structure.

I don’t know if I believe in the “stories are given to me thing,” though it fits within my Taoist inclinations. I don’t know that I think it all up myself, either.

I do know that the answers don’t come to me unless I’m writing what’s happening to the characters. Or letting the scene play in my head – that sometimes works. I think sometimes that it’s a combination of both, like most things. I point the imagining part of my brain in a particular direction and let it run. The neurons pull the energy from wherever they do and spin the story. Part of me can see it and part is blind.

Quite remarkable really.

Simmering

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This weekend was hot.

Santa Fe broke the record high on Saturday by hitting 100. So, yeah, not so bad. And it’s a dry heat. Believe me – I lived in St. Louis for a while. Lack of humidity makes all the difference in the world.

We have nice cross-currents for air flow in our house and ceiling fans, so we never felt like we had to turn on the air conditioning. But we stayed pretty still. Even Isabel stayed inside. She’s gone from being the toddler-cat who has to be dragged in from playing, kicking and screaming, then immediately falling asleep, to teenager-cat. Friday night she spent the entire hot, still night in the garage hunting mice. Then on Saturday morning she slept in, got up to eat breakfast and went back to her kitty condo – the cat equivalent of partying all night and watching TV in the darkened den all day.

Then this storm rolled in, creating a dramatic sunset and dropping cooling rain. All of us parched people, animals and plants drank it gratefully.

I’m making steady progress on Sterling. Allison called me “quietly enthusiastic” about it. I said that’s because I’m trying not to be obnoxious. I never thought I’d be one to agree with the write-every-day thing. When I was first working at being a writer and attending every workshop I could, almost every singled writer gave that advice.

Write every day.

Write at the same time every day.

Some would shrug, apologize and say they knew it wasn’t easy, but that it was the only thing that worked for them.

I felt like that was impossible for me. At the time I was finishing my graduate thesis, working full time and taking and teaching martial arts classes most nights of the week. Even if I wrote every day, it couldn’t possibly be at the same time, because every day was different.

So I wrote when I could. Usually in sporadic chunks. I was writing essays then, so I could write an entire essay over the course of a few hours and that worked for me. My first publications came out of that time and my first book. We’d have to agree that worked just fine.

But other things still took precedence. Even gardening and quilting tended to edge out writing time. I would bemoan my lack of writing time, but there it was.

All that changed when I went to writing novels. Obviously I couldn’t bang out a novel in a few hours. I found I had to work incrementally, building the story piece by piece over the course of months, holding the ideas in my head over that time.

It took me nine months to write Obsidian. No, I didn’t work on it every day. I had several long stretches where I worked on it only a little or not at all. Sterling will take five months. And I’ve really only hit the smooth rhythm in the last two months.

But I do have to write every day. At pretty much the same time. Shockingly enough, it works. That approach also requires that the writing time is my core schedule and I work everything else in around that, even the day job (unless I just can’t make that happen, which can occur).

Some people draft faster, then revise. For me, when I’m done by mid-July, the novel will be reasonably polished.

And I keep thinking that it might be really good.

Which is this lovely bubbling feeling.

My quietly enthusiastic.