Tag: writers life

Exercise to Writing to Work

admin / / Blog

Today we have the long-awaited (at least since Wednesday) expose on how Jeffe changes outfits multiple times a day.

No, really.

(I can’t believe you guys are interested in this. Or that I’m posting pictures to the internet of me looking scuzzy. But look, here I am.)

In the interests of science, and glasnost, I’m showing you my actual “look” for the various times of day. Hang on, phone is ringing….

Vogue, again. When will they take no for an answer???

Okay, so, KAK asked about PJs. Here’s me at 6 in the morning. Please cut me generous slack. This is the black wintertime robe. There are no actual PJs. We live in a natural world and, hey, I’m a natural girl.


I change into my exercise clothes. There’s a red jog bra under the pink sweat shirt. I would have shown you, but I figured you all don’t need to see my astonishing toned abs. The picture might make you spit up your coffee or something and that’s no way to end the week.

This pic is post-workout. The sky is barely lighter at this point. Looking very much forward to the end of Daylight Savings Time on Sunday!

Then we get to the best part: the writing clothes. This is what I’m wearing as I type. So, see, when I first started writing, back in the day, I really didn’t have a dedicated writing desk and I wasn’t good at sitting down to write on a regular schedule. I created rituals to ease myself into the process. I wore my favorite shleppy dress, this blue jersey knit that I loved. I loved it for years. Um, until it literally fell to pieces. Finally I wondered aloud if I should throw it away.

“Yes,” said David.

“But – ” I whimpered.

“It has holes in it.” He replied.

“But it’s been my writing dress for years!” I cried.

“The writing comes from you, not a dress.” He told me.

I had to concede the point. The dress went to the great beyond, a farm maybe, where it’s playing with other happy outfits and Velveteen rabbits. So now I wear the fab sweatshirt my stepsister Hope picked out for me. If you can’t read it, it says:

Careful, or you’ll end up in my novel.

Note that this outfit includes comfy slippers for feet and a headband to keep the hair out of my eyes as I furiously type. It helps me to stay in kind of a dreamy, sleepy mode to write, to maximize that subconscious flow.

Once I get my words in, it’s off to the shower for me. I do hair and makeup, put on some workier-type clothes. If I think no one is likely to see me all day, I usually wear something like this. It was tempting to put on one of my snazzier outfits for this photoshoot, but that would violate the honest spirit of this expose.

If I have meetings or will see people, I dress up more. If you’ve seen me at conferences, that’s the general spirit.

So – more than you ever wanted to know about me?

Yeah. That’s what I figured.

Neverland

admin / / Blog

The final dregs of a dark and dramatic sunset. Very all hallows.

I dreamed last night that Allison inherited an amusement park. Very Michael Jackson Neverlandish. I think the hidden meaning here is obvious.

This was probably stimulated our conversation yesterday when Allison asked what I was writing and I told her about this new novella and that it was fun to write. She said she remembered having fun writing. Being the sympathetic writing partner that I am, I replied “wah wah wah.”

After all, she’s got the amusement park. I’m still paying to ride the roller coaster.

But even an amusement park becomes work when you’re the one who runs it, instead of being just a visitor. You don’t get to come and go as you please. The rides have to be maintained every day. You don’t get to skip a day or a week, unless you really love nasty consequences.

The query process is a funny thing because it’s like an incredibly extended job hunt. You refine your resumes, send them out to all kinds of people. Hopefully some friends clue you in on opportunities, recommend you for a job. Of course, we’ve all heard of the person who just blanket-sends a resume to everyone in the phone book. If they like your resume, maybe you get an interview. Maybe you get six interviews, of increasing length and depth. At any point in the process, someone from HR or the marketing department might walk in the room, take one look at you and say no no no.

And you’re done.

It’s like being interviewed to take over as VP of Major Earnings. There’s no starting out in the mail room, or as someone’s assistant. No gradually building your clientele over the course of years.

Then, if you get hired, you’d better perform. Earn that corner office. Increase that profit margin.

No wonder that part isn’t so fun.

But never let it be forgotten that it *is* an amusement park. We choose writing for the wild rides, for the sweetness of the cotton candy, for the sparkling lights and the carnival music.

Oh yeah, sign me up.

High Functioning

admin / / Blog


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ran across this bit some time ago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sparks Fly Upward

admin / / Blog

Hi all – Please welcome my dear friend, Laura Bickle to today’s blog!

I’m privileged to host the debut of her second book in the Anya Kalinczyk series: SPARKS. Anya is an arson investigator with a most unusual familiar.

Let me tell you, you’ll never think about fire salamanders in the same way.

Please welcome Laura and make her feel at home. I just love the post she wrote for us today. As a special treat, I’m giving my own copy of Sparks to a random commenter who says what being in love means to them.

Welcome Laura!


Writing a book is a lot like being in love – good and bad.

Initially, there’s infatuation. The flush and excitement of a new idea. This is the easy part – words flow effortlessly. I can spend hours researching or daydreaming about how fabulous the idea is. I make notes, sketches, maps, cut clippings from magazines – I’ve met my characters, and am deliriously in love with everything they say. The project is, I believe, invincible.

It brings me flowers. I glow.

Then, somewhere around the 30,000 word mark, the infatuation fades. I begin to see the flaws, the inconsistencies, the cracks in the foundation of plot. I’m rolling over in the morning and staring at a book with bad breath that snores. It chews with its mouth open and forgets to say “excuse me” when it farts. It doesn’t bring me flowers anymore. It’s comfortable. Maybe too comfortable.

I sit in bed, staring at the book, wondering what to do. Should I abandon it for a newer, sexier idea? They’re always dancing around in my periphery, seductively whispering: “Choose me.”

But I know that it would be the same. I can choose another idea, but in a few weeks, I’ll be at the same place, the shiny newness and rose petals replaced by snores and scratching.

At this time, I’ve got to decide to be committed to the project, to see it through — even though my story is showing me its scraggly, unwashed underbelly. The challenge is to fall into a routine of writing that isn’t new or exhilarating — it’s to focus on the entirety of the work, good and bad, and love it enough to finish.

There are moments that test my patience. A character proves utterly useless around 50,000 words and is savagely eliminated. A timeline problem emerges that requires my heroine to be in two places at once. A loose plot thread dangles with no end in sight. But we get through it.

There are moments that are sublime. Keystrokes fly by through the last chapter. Edits clean the story up nicely, and all of a sudden, my story is standing before me. It’s shaved, holding a bouquet of flowers.

I feel the old love for it again. Not the infatuation of the beginning. But deep affection, knowing that we’ve weathered the writing process and have come out the other side of it victorious.

I straighten its tie, kiss it on the cheek, and send it out into the world. I hope that others will love it as much as I do.

-Laura Bickle has worked in the unholy trinity of politics, criminology, and technology for several years. She and her chief muse live in the Midwest, owned by four mostly-reformed feral cats. More information on her urban fantasy novels is available at www.salamanderstales.com.

Ant-Shadows

admin / / Blog

If the light is right, even an ant casts a long shadow.

This is very deep, I know, for a Monday. But isn’t it cool how the ant-shadow has more visual substance than the ant itself?

I feel certain this means something.

It’s funny to me that, after seriously pursuing writing for about 14 years now, I’m still discovering new things about my process. It shouldn’t surprise me, because that is one way to define an art over a craft or simple production. An art should evolve and change over time, growing as the artist grows. Craft or production is simply producing the same thing over and over.

The martial artists talk about this. In simple exercise, you might engage in the same routine over and over. A martial art, such as Tai Chi or Pakua, should change over time as the practitioner’s understanding changes, as new aspects are discovered and old ones discarded as no longer useful.

I’ve never been much of a reviser. I produce pretty clean drafts, which has always enabled me to skate by with the revising.

Yeah, I’m lazy.

But this new novel, The Body Gift, I knew I’d have to revise. It’s complex, with many layers. I also think it’s pretty good and I want it to really shine. As soon as I finished, I planned to turn around and revise.

And I just could not do it.

This surprised me, because when I have revised stuff before, it wasn’t that big of a deal. Print out. Read out loud. Proof read. Incorporate reader comments. Bim bam boom. Not like it was rocket science or anything.

It was worse. Which is saying something because I am not an engineer by any stretch.

I found that I’d really drained my well and had nothing left to work with. I had no choice but to put the manuscript in the proverbial drawer. My readers had it anyway. I had other things to do. Fine then.

Now I’ve discovered that, after spending a month in the dark drawer, the book is ready for revising. I have perspective on it that I lacked before. Gone are all the swirly, lovely, pleased feelings I swam in while writing. Like wine fermented in the bottle, the book had ripened into something of its own. Something I can work with.

Kind of neat, actually.

All from just a different change in the light.

Red Moon and Good Dreams

admin / / Blog


Full moon rising over the harbor at Newport.

Because it was in August, it was the Red Moon. Aptly named. I’d had an idea that I’d try to blog all the full moons for the next year, but then I went and missed the first one due to vacation lassitude. I’ll make it up with the September moon.

You’ll see.

I had the best dream last night. One of those dreams that are so lovely, I’m still riding on the happy wave of it.

And, oh yeah, it was total wish-fulfillment.

I dreamed the agent that I mailed my first 100 pages to the other day called me and said she wanted to visit me to talk about my book. She came to my house and I had to pull the book from the library that had her critique notes in it. She told me they were in the Ignatius volume.

(Um, no, I have no idea what any of that means. It was a dream, okay?)

She pronounced it Ignashus and I thought maybe it should be Ignateeus, since it was Latin, but I didn’t say anything. She had me also read my synopsis to her, which I’d written on lettuce leaves. (Doesn’t everyone?) That one, I think could be related to the fact that she tweets about lunch a fair amount.

At any rate, it was wonderful, validating and everything I hope will happen. I knew that my book would be published and published well. I woke up feeling happy about it.

I’m still happy.

Even though I only mailed it on Tuesday, so I know it’s all wishing, even if it comes from the heart.

Still, Snow White is dancing around and singing, cartoon bluebirds flitting about.

Lovely day.

Come Blow Your Horn

admin / / Blog

A while back, I did a guest post on Elizabeth Flora Ross’s blog about defending your writing time.

I’m militant on the topic. I truly believe that if you want time to write, you have to build a fence around it, possibly with razor wire, and defend it at all costs. No ifs, ands or buts. Otherwise the time will get eaten away in nibbles and bites by everything else in your life.

Over time, it gets easier. Everyone else in your life becomes accustomed to you being unavailable at certain times. And, most importantly, it becomes a habit to sit and write. Defending the time means defending the habit.

In the last year, I’ve gotten really good at this. I drafted The Body Gift in half the time it took me to write Obsidian, plus it’s a much tighter draft. I also wrote Petals and Thorns on an efficient schedule. I’ve been working on revising and tightening The Body Gift and got a good chunk into a new novella.

Then I went on vacation.

I thought I might work on the book some, on long rainy Oregon coast days at the B&B. But my Jeffe Sunshine Magic (TM) kicked into effect and we had gorgeous weather. I didn’t sweat it. I knew I needed to relax, refresh and refill the well after my big push to finish The Body Gift. Vacation can be from all my jobs, I decided.

And so it was.

When I came back, however, relaxed, refreshed, ready to get back to work, I found my fence was in a shambles. Like Little Boy Blue, I’d allowed the cows into the meadow and the sheep into the corn. It’s taken me all week to get back into the habit.

Kerry’s book, Swimming North, is about dragons and dragon-slaying. She often draws a parallel between her day job and slaying dragons. But, last night, she agreed that cows were in her meadow, too.

Screw the dragons – it’s the freaking cows that are our problem!

“Mad cows. Complacent cows,” she says, “all of them are trouble.”

Sometimes you have to look closer to home, for the simple solution.

If you need me, I’ll be out building fences.

Herons in the Mist

admin / / Blog

Fog isn’t something we get a lot of around here, so I enjoyed Oregon’s coastal mists. This heron hunted the tide pools, barely visible. The telephoto got him, though.

Loving my new camera.

I remember one of the first times I saw those kinds of maritime fogs, in Davis, California at a conference.

Somehow I’d ended up on the board of our local new chapter of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS). A grant had been obtained and the group planned to send two members to a leadership conference sponsored by the national organization. However, so far only one person had stepped up to go. Hell, I said, I’ll go.

For some reason this is a very hazy memory for me. I was heavy in grad school, I know. After my Great Mistake but before David, which makes it sometime between spring of ’89 and winter of ’91. I think it was a hard time for me. I grieved for my lost college family – never again have I been privileged to be around so many truly amazing people. I lived alone. My love life was going poorly; I pretty much hated everything about grad school (which is designed to break your spirit, anyway), especially my manic/depressive Hungarian major advisor, though I couldn’t face any of that. I was in my early 20s, and most women agree it’s the worst age for us.

I went to this conference with no particular goal, no strategy, except that someone offered to pay for me to go. Morning fogs burned off into bright days and all of these women scientists gave talks about their paths and what their careers had been like. Everyone was brilliantly encouraging in a way that made me feel like a blossom in the sun. No scathing frowns like those doled out daily by my crazy Hungarian advisor.

One woman gave a talk and she was a writer. I can’t remember a damn thing about her – her name, face, what her career deal was. She might have gone from science career to writing? I do recall that her mother attended, which means her speaking was probably an honor and a big deal. At any rate, feeling inspired, thinking maybe this was what I really wanted to do: be a writer and write about science, not this horrible slog through the muck of research, I sat near this woman at lunch and said something along those lines.

And she was mean to me.

Mean enough that I started crying.

Oh, I tried not to show it, sucking up my shameful tears into my sandwich. But I remember the mother throwing me sympathetic looks while the writer-daughter went on about how hard is was to be a writer and all of the stupid, foolish people who thought they could just waltz into it.

Why it hit me so hard, I have no idea. I don’t know if she even gave me any good advice – I was just trying not to let everyone see me cry.

I don’t tell this story often. In fact, I’m not sure what made me think about it now, except for something about the heron in the fog. I couldn’t say whether that incident really affected my writerly ambitions one way or another – I neither gave up at that point nor raced out to prove her wrong.

That woman maybe never realized how hard I took her words. Maybe she was frustrated at not making more money. Maybe she’d just lost an agent or a book deal. It could be she wasn’t accustomed to being in that position, where someone might want to be like her.

But it’s a good lesson, no matter where we are in our writing careers. We should be careful of those who look at us with shiny eyes and hopeful ambition.

We were all that girl once.

Writerly Angst

admin / / Blog

My mom said yesterday that my recent posts sound full of writerly angst.

I mentioned it to one of my writerly friends, Marcella, and she asked if my mom reads the comments to my posts.

“Sometimes?” I ventured.

“See,” Marcella said, “the comments on your posts are all the ‘oh, yeah, I hear you’ type. Nobody is telling you to chin up or that things will get better. That,” she concluded, “is how you can tell if you’re leaking too much writerly angst.”

Marcella is very wise.

What normal people don’t understand, she agreed, is that writers are pretty much always full of writerly angst of one kind or another. It’s really just a matter of how much normal people notice it. We’re kind of like highly functioning alcoholics. Most of the time, we seem like everyone else. Until you notice that we always have a drink in our hands.

“Oh this?” we say with nonchalance, swirling the wine in the glass, “no, no – this just the usual.”

Then we kick the empty wine bottles behind the recycle bin.

My folks have friends who do something like this. On recycle day, he goes up and down the block putting empty wine bottles in other people’s recycle bins, so it doesn’t look like there are *so* many in theirs.

We all have our issues.

The hummingbirds area study in frenzied activity right now. We have a regular crew of five to seven rufus hummingbirds flying about in a near-constant assault on the feeders. They’re forever zooming in, squabbling, squeaking, snatching a drinking and rocketing off again. I’ve been playing with the tripod, getting action shots.

I’m getting a new camera for my birthday – everyone who loves me is chipping in for it and I’m tremendously excited. I’m graduating from my point and shoot. Hard to say if my photos will get better with a better tool. I’ll have a steep learning curve.

You can look forward to me posting about it, full of photographerly angst. Which just doesn’t sound nearly as profound, does it?

But you all can stand ready to tell me to chin up, stick with it.

Or hand me a glass of wine.

Waiting for the Rain to Fall

admin / / Blog

I love living in a place where I can watch the rainstorms arriving.

This is how a lot of our weather hits – a train of thunderclouds rolling up the valley from the Sandias. Clearly you have to be in the exact right path to get the rain. Fortunately, it’s a slightly different path every day, so everyone gets the rain at some point.

Much is made of being in the right place at the right time with publishing. It’s true of all endeavors. Serendipity, synchronicity, just plain luck – all factor into whether something hits the right person at the right moment. In publishing, I think it’s particularly easy to observe, because the business is so terribly subjective. Reading is for pleasure and what gives people pleasure is something that’s constantly changing.

You have to hit the right agent at the right moment, who hits the right editor at the right moment, who hits her administrators and marketers at the right moment, who do their best to stack the deck and manipulate the market, but in the end, you have to hit the right readers at the right moment.

Small wonder full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

(No – that’s not me. It’s Thomas Gray. Just in case you were inclined to give me more credit than I’m due.)

But the flip side is, if you patiently persist in waiting, one day the rain will fall on you. Maybe on many days. I’m quite sure, however, that if I spent my days dashing about the valley, trying to get under the rain, I might hit it more often, but I’d exhaust myself in the process. Besides, it’s hard to move a whole garden around.

Some days, the rain dries up before it reaches us. Or it takes an abrupt turn. What looks like a sure thing can evaporate in moments. Other days, the rain sneaks up from another direction, slipping over my shoulder from the north with an abrupt drenching.

It’s not something I can control.

The people who are reading my novel read at their own pace. I won’t know what they think until they tell me. In their own time, according to their own busy calendars.

Until then I wait. Enjoying both the sunshine while I pray for rain.