Tag: writers life

Nothing to Fear but Deleting Itself

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David calls these horsetail grasses. I don’t know that the name is right, but I won’t argue. I just like how they look when they flutter in the breeze.

The yucca are about to bloom, too. The birds land on the heavy buds now, checking for progress. Or perhaps just for bugs on the buds. Hard to say.

This was one of four photographs I took, trying to get the right angle, so you could see how the grasses catch the light. I pulled the four off of my camera, picked the one I liked best, saved it and permanently deleted the rest.

I’ve gotten much better at deleting, I’ve found.

When I was younger, I saved everything. Albeit, with non-digital photographs, you kind of had to save them, along with the negatives. But I wouldn’t throw away even the blurry ones. Or the ones I accidentally snapped of my foot while loading the film. I saved the box from my Snoopy watch, notes from my friends, love letters from high school. In graduate school, I spent hours Xeroxing articles until I had stacks of them in my office.

Through it all ran a sneaking fear that I’d throw away something important. Something crucial, even.

Young writers do this, too. I certainly did. You just hate to delete the least precious word, much less sentences or paragraphs. Sometimes you’ll be persuaded to remove the prose and you carefully excise it and place it in a safe Outtakes file. After all, those words are singular creation that must be preserved lest it never come again.

Which is nonsense.

There’s an idea that, as we grow older, we’ll discover that the world is not as abundant as we thought. That we’re not immortal, that money really doesn’t grow on trees and that opportunity, having knocked, skeedaddles to someone else, never to be seen again.

Instead you discover that this isn’t true at all. Or rather, not in such a limited way. We’re not immortal, but life goes past your twenties, in a most satisfying way. Money comes and goes and there are many ways to come by it. Opportunities may be lost, but others turn up.

Words and pictures are plentiful. I can delete pages now without a qualm. There will always be more words, ones that don’t need deleting. Photographs that don’t completely satisfy can be discarded in favor of those that do.

I give away books, knowing that if I really want to see one again, I can always find it. I don’t worry so much about covering every little point of research – a general idea is fine and, if I need to know more, I can always find out.

There’s a relaxation to this way of thinking. Perhaps an absence of fear.

Now I really need to go through those old photographs, scrapbook the good ones and destroy the rest.

Except for that one of my foot. I’m kind of sentimental about that one.

There Is No "I" in Book

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A bit of Spring sunset tumult from last night. As with many things, it brewed up to be a big deal, but really produced very little.

Allison and I were talking about self-absorption yesterday. Self-involvement. Narcissism.

These terms get tossed at writers quite often. And usually, I think, by the people who want the writer to be paying attention to them, rather than to what they’re writing. I ended up telling Allison that she’d been necessarily self-involved in completing her Revisions from Hell in record time.

Then I realized, that’s not true at all.

She hasn’t been self-involved; she’s been absorbed in her work. Writers drew the unlucky straw of doing an awful lot of their work in their heads, in dreamy states that are arguably other planes of existence. It tends to make them unavailable for paying attention to the people around them, which can lead to rancor.

Blogging and memoir-writing – often the same thing – are also targets for the self-involvement critics. “Navel-gazing” they love to call it. If that’s so, would going back and reading one’s own blog posts be navel-gazing at navel-gazing?

I say no.

Once you produce the writing, it becomes something outside yourself. It’s art. A painting is not the artist’s self. A symphony is not the musician’s self. An elegant bit of code is not the programmer’s self. All of these things, to varying degrees, do reflect the person who created them.

It’s an interesting thing to me, as I’ve mentioned before here, to go back and read my older blog posts. I particularly like playing “this time, last year.” The May 27 post from last year is full of sadness about getting a “no” from the agent I really had set my hopes on. Quite a bit has changed for me in that time – my strategy, how I’m going about things.

What non-writers may not realize is, reading your own work rarely feels like a familiar thing. I’m often surprised by what I’ve written before. People have quoted my work to me and I failed to recognize it – which irritates them. I understand why it would, but it’s lovely that they’re quoting something I wrote. It just no longer sounds like a piece of me. It has its own life.

So, Allison, I take it back. You haven’t been self-involved at all. You’ve been involved in your book.

And that’s an admirable thing.

Pursuing the Vision

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I really wanted to capture the blaze of iris yellow with the blue flax behind it, but I can’t get the picture to come out right.

Yet again I can’t seem to capture in an image what my eye sees. My lack of photography skill or equipment. Perhaps the human eye still trumps all else. The neurophysiologist in me likes that idea.

I’ll keep working at it.

Every morning we take Zip for a walk and every other morning I run the distance. I do the Bill Phillips thing of pulsing my speed so I work up from slow walking to fast walking to slow running to fast running. Sometimes David jogs along with me, but his legs are so much longer than mine that he can pretty much stride along to all but my fastest jog. Which is clearly not very fast.

I try not to let this be a humiliating thing.

Frankly, I’m happy to be running at all, since I am most decidedly NOT athletic girl. Never have been. One of my friends has a son graduating from high school who, despite his startlingly good academic record, might be held back for failing a gym class. I can totally sympathize with this. In fact, all her writing friends chimed in and agreed that we all loathed gym. Why there aren’t more evil gym-teacher villains in books I really don’t know. Maybe we’re all still afraid they’ll make us do push-ups or something.

They even gave me the Greek body/mind ideal lecture in school, about how I should be wanting to build physical abilities as much as my mental ones.

Yeah, that didn’t fly, either.

The thing is, people who love gym simply don’t understand those of us who hate it. I even have an essay in Wyoming Trucks that delves heavily into hiding in the girls’ bathroom during gym. When one of my recently reconnected high school boyfriends read my book, he commented that it really opened his eyes to what school is like for others, especially for his adolescent daughter. It had never occurred to him that not everyone loved bombardment. (A particularly cruel form of dodgeball.)

But now I run. Not by choice so much, but because Mother Nature pulled the nasty trick of swapping the slim little body I could stuff anything into for one that converts muscle to fat if I’m not actively working to prevent it.

(Hit me with a potato famine, though – I’ll be all over it!)

Running, lifting weights, it’s something I hate while I’m doing it. I take no joy in the moment like those naturally athletic people do. All the pleasure comes when I’m done, when I finish that last minute of sprinting, out of breath and blood pumping. That’s when I feel a sense of accomplishment.

Writing can be like that, too. Sometimes the process of it is so grueling that it can feel like you’re out of breath, with half the hill still to go. You long to stop, to walk, to turn back. But if you push through, sometimes you hit the exhilaration. There you are, flying down the hill, the sun on your skin and wind in your hair. You become the vision of the true athlete, the Greek ideal of beauty, fitness and artistry.

I suppose that’s why we pursue visions. Their lure keeps us going, working ourselves so we don’t grow old, fat and complacent.

I’ll keep working at it.

A Noble Effort

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When we awoke this morning, Isabel greeted us with a series of excited chirping meows and significant looks at the big leather armchair. This can mean only one thing.

She caught a mouse. Oh, and it had escaped, by the way, and she needed help moving the chair.

Good morning to you, too.

See, in this new house, we’re on all one level with no basement, no cellar, no crawlspace. Thus, none of my typical kitty box locations. So, David installed an insulated kitty door in the human door to the garage and I stuck the boxes out there. This makes for great nocturnal fun, what with chasing mice in the garage all night.

Then bringing them into the house.

Teddy was interested, too, but in a more academic way, since it was Isabel’s prize. We lifted the chair, Isabel nabbed the mouse, David took it from her and released it back to the wild. Now Isabel is back in the garage, looking for more.

I had lunch with one of my Boston colleagues yesterday and we talked about how people feel about their jobs. She feels disheartened at times, she said, working with people who seem to care more about what time they get to go home than about the work itself. That their jobs seem to be entirely about working their flex schedules than what they’re trying to accomplish. Worse, despite their focus on getting away from the job, some seem to not have any particular passion outside of it, either.

We’re at a funny place with our company, so it’s on her mind, what the ideal career would be. Projects are getting canceled; people are shifting around. In some ways, what project we move to is governed entirely by where the money is. But we were asking each other what we’d like to be working on anyway.

She knows I want to be a full-time writer, of course, but she wondered what in the company I’d most like to be doing. To some extent, I don’t care so much. The project I worked on for so long was one I fell into. I became an expert on the subject, but not out of any kind of passion. I like learning new fields, so really any project will do for that. I finally said I wished the company would use me more as a writer. I think it’s foolish that they don’t, but there it is.

When I returned the question to her, she said she really didn’t know. She didn’t know in college; she didn’t know when she got her Masters in International Relations, an admittedly vague field. I asked her what she’d envisioned and she thought maybe working for an NGO (non-government organization) or something.

“Ah,” I said, “something noble.”

“Yes,” she laughed, shaking her head. “That’s it – something noble.”

The question of what we all do with ourselves has a unique answer for each of us. Some of us have day jobs of varying interest to pay the bills while we indulge our true passions in slices on either side of the work day. Some of us work at whatever and live for our families. Others of us live for our careers and care for nothing else.

I think what my colleague is getting at is that she’d like to be doing something that contributes to the betterment of the world. The exact method isn’t important to her. I think that’s part of why many of us write, with the idea of giving back stories to the world.

But really, in the end, most of the things we choose to do, we do because we like doing it. Whether that’s having a job that lets you leave at 3:30 so you can pick up the kids, or having a job that gives you a thrill that you’ve saved a life.

Many writers note that the business end of it is no fun at all. I might have a noble idea of sharing my stories with the world, but the real reason I do is because I like to.

Isabel isn’t catching mice to rid our garage of rodents. She does it because it’s fun.

Money is Time

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We’re in this in-between time here, with this one last tulip barely hanging on, and the iris not yet blooming.

The fierce, cold winds of the last week or two (apparently it was quite stormy while we were gone) shattered the apple blossoms and threw everything back into stasis. The butterfly bush, the lilacs, the iris – they’re ready to blossom, but they’re waiting, leaves a bit shriveled, looking for an extra boost of warmth.

Any day now.

The other day a guy came to our door offering cleaning services. He was a twenty-something and granola with it. He said he had a number of clients in our neighborhood; I nearly asked him to name names. We were both home and the guy specifically mentioned window cleaning, which we need done, so I asked him to give us a bid to do it. Since washing the windows has been on my to-do list for several months now, I thought it might be worth finding out.

$350. I kid you not.

And here I was thinking $50 or $100. Who knew I would be so far off base?

I tend to think of things now in terms of what my hourly rate at the day job is. Especially if it’s something I don’t want to do. When I was a grad student, young professional, I had way more time than money. Mainly because I had no money. Anything I could do myself, I did. Then at some point the ratio changed and I had more money than time. If I could pay someone to do it, great. Especially if it would “cost” more to do it myself, in terms of my hourly rate.

Am I the only one who thinks this way?

I make a decent living, but I figure it will only take an hour or two to wash the windows. No, I don’t make anywhere close to $175. Washing the windows myself, it is.

We watched the guy walk away, hunched against the cold wind, joined by a woman his age in a flowing gypsy skirt. David wondered how they can charge those kinds of prices. I thought maybe it’s worth it to some people to pay that kind of price.

Now that I’m thinking more and more about truly being a full-time writer, my mind is starting to go back the other way. I’m doing things more myself and find myself less willing to shell out the money to hire someone else.

I’m seriously considering hiring out to wash other people’s windows, too.

Having It All

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I know, I know.

A conscientious gardener woudl have long since cleaned this up. It’s on the To Do list for Sunday. Ask me next week where the picture is of the cleaned-up pretty.

Remember how I mentioned that last weekend I got involved with Sterling and didn’t do any of chores?

Well, this was one of them.

It’s not always easy, balancing home life with writing life with career life. I remember growing up in the 70s amid the extensive conversations about “Superwoman” – the liberated woman’s answer to having it all and whether it really could be done. Women were trying to be mothers, housewives and career women, all while never letting him forget he’s a man. Of course, much of the pain came from the stretching of traditional roles – the obvious answer to women was for the men to do more with the kids and the house. Which many of them started to do. Some don’t, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

When a person is a writer, until you’re paid enough to write full-time, you essentially have a second unpaid career. Or a second career that pays beans. It’s like moonlighting at some crummy job with lousy hours, but not for the extra money. Okay, not a crummy job, a fabulous job. But the hours still suck, you’re forever interviewing and you don’t even get minimum wage.

A writer friend of mine was “outed” at her day job yesterday. It took her by surprise.

She writes romance novels, sexy ones. Turns out someone at her old job mentioned it to someone at her new job (manly gossip?) and the older male manager at the new job did a little bit of internet searching and found her ebooks…

He told her he thought it was just fine.

Yeah, it’s weird and uncomfortable. She feels exposed in a way she didn’t expect. And no, she doesn’t use a pen name, so she wasn’t trying to hide her superhero novelist identity. Somehow she thought the two worlds would never mix. Now they are.

I should also mention that she’s a single mom (though she’s now engaged a terrific new guy). She’s been handling all of it very well for a very long time. She’s still working at breaking into the mainstream publishers, where she could maybe make enough money that she’d have only one career to balance with all of the other jobs.

It doesn’t help that romance is a snicker-generating genre. If she’d been outed as a mystery writer, she’d have more cache. I can see why she’s bothered – it’s like she’s now a dirty girl.

Hopefully, that was the last of it. The manager told her he knew (bum dum dum!) and that he’s fine with it. Maybe she can get away with just doing the job she’s really good at and won’t get any grief for the work she loves to do on the side.

Maybe I’ll get my house and garden cleaned up this weekend.

Holidays at Home

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I like how Facebook and Twitter give me these little windows into peoples’ lives and what they’re doing.

Quite a few people have been doing “staycations” and commenting how much they’re enjoying them. One family is staying in Chicago and rediscovering all the fun things there are to do there. Another family went the short distance from their small town in Arkansas to St. Louis, to shop and see the sights. My friend was particularly excited to have the opportunity to dispose of her #5 recyclables.

Not at all glamorous.

And yet, that’s what people used to do all the time, right? Go to the village for market days. Travel to the city for provisions. Somewhere along the way, the stakes got raised.

I was supposed to clean the house this weekend and never got around to it. I try to clean it every other weekend. I’m far from being a fabulous housekeeper, so stretching the cleaning to three weeks means it’ll really show by next weekend.

But on Saturday I got really caught up in Sterling and spend most of the day on it. Then on Sunday we went out to breakfast with friends and ended up tooling around seeing the sights. After that, I worked on the novel just a little bit more and the day was over.

I did get the laundry done.

It used to be that I’d procrastinate forever on writing. I’d do every chore imaginable, plus some I made up on the spot, to avoid sitting down at my writing desk. I had to trick myself, or force myself, to sit down and write. Now I eye the dust bunnies collecting in the corners and think I should probably get after them one of these days, maybe after this next scene.

I think it’s healthy.

Sometimes people ask us how we stay entertained, both when we lived back in our small Wyoming town and even now in the “small” city of Santa Fe. It’s hard for me to explain that I never run out of things to do. I write and David studies. We read and talk and sit in the sun. We take long walks.

I’ve come to think that, if you set your life up the way you want it, every day becomes a staycation. It’s all about enjoying the place you’re in and indulging in the things you enjoy.

Sometimes what makes you happiest is to get rid of that pile of recyclables. Other times, you just need to skip the chores.

Joyful Narcissus

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I love how Ho Tai looks like he’s celebrating the daffodils here.

Of course, the lovely thing about Ho Tai is he looks like he’s always celebrating everything. I suppose it says something that we have him in our garden. It tells you what I worship most. What I strive for.

Is it silly to say joy?

There are so many opportunities to read and watch the awful, the hateful, the depressing. People are angry and afraid and feel more free than ever before, it seems, to vent that to the world.

Heather Armstrong, better known as Dooce, and a blogger I admire, was recently invited to D.C. to participate in a forum on workplace flexibility. She’s kind of a poster child for it, because she was famously fired from her job back in the early 2000s for something(s) she wrote in her blog. So much so that being “dooced” means having that happen to you. A phenomenon of the new era. Now she supports her family from her blog and works from home.

But apparently, people were angry that she was chosen. It doesn’t surprise me, I suppose, though I didn’t read any of the comments. Heather elicits a lot of strong emotions from people, largely because she lays it all out there and doesn’t mince words. She also, like many people who are very good at what they do, makes it look effortless. So, she seems to be succeeding for doing nothing more than taking pictures of her dog and yakking about her children.

I’ve been going back and reading through her archives from the beginning. It’s like a long, real-time memoir. I’m fascinated by the window she’s allowed us into her life. That’s the best kind of memoir-writing, in my opinion.

What people don’t understand about writing memoir, or personal essays, which is what many blogs truly are, is that you’re still making artistic choices.

In short: you don’t tell every damn thing.

Even if it seems like you do.

There have been a number of discussions lately about how much of yourself to put on the internet and how much to keep private. Authors are encouraged by their agents and publishers to blog, but not everyone is good at it. Some authors are so concerned with their privacy that their blogs end up being little more than updates on books and appearances. Good information, but not interesting reading. Others go too far the other way and use their blogs as a dumping ground to vent about what makes them unhappy. Which, while it can be a way to connect with other people, runs the risk of being, well, not entertaining.

Kev warned me early on not to yield to the temptation to turn my blog into a rant, which annoyed me at the time. Most likely because he was right.

It’s hard to predict, of course, how people will react to what you write. I’m still surprised by which of my posts get attention and which don’t. I always enjoy seeing which elicit the most comments, both here and through other venues. It’s fun, because no other kind of writing garners immediate feedback like blogging does. But then, I rarely get negative comments.

I find myself moving to shield myself from the negative these days. I stay away from most “news.” I unfollow people who say things that depress me. I don’t read the nasty things that people say about Dooce.

Am I burying my head in the sand? I don’t think so. There’s plenty of pain out there. I know what’s going on politically – though my philosophy is to find out what I need to about candidates, elect the ones who stand for what I do and then I let them handle it. I feel like I hire them to worry about it so I don’t have to.

Sometimes I share my pain here – mostly if I feel like it helps to tell the story. That’s what it’s all about, telling the story. Sometimes I even have a point.

Maybe that’s why talking about joy seems silly sometimes. There’s not much of a moral there.

Except, oh look! Pretty daffodils!

Guerilla Marketing

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This morning, when I signed onto my laptop, an incorrect password error message flashed — and I realized I’d typed in my main character’s name from the New Novel, instead of my password.

I’m taking this as a positive sign. Or at least, a sign of the right kind of writerly craziness.

It feels good, actually, once you reach that level of immersion in the novel. That’s the point where it starts to feel more like it’s writing itself instead of you eking out each word, begging it to move forward. Forcing things to happen. Once the momentum kicks in, it seems things begin to happen on their own and you’re just there explaining it to the reader.

Which is fun.

Not so fun is this phenomenon I’m witnessing about the iPad, which is supposed to be the new tech toy. I’ve being seeing lots of stuff like this. Note that the headline is “iPad Killed Kindelnomics.” Then remember that, oh wait, iPad hasn’t been released yet. And then note that this a guy’s blog. This “article” is no different than me proclaiming that no one is buying chocolate ice cream anymore because everyone likes this new flavor of pistachio better. Never mind that very few people have even tasted the new flavor.

A lot of these sorts of these have been circulating through Twitter and various publishing venues. Some even have these graphs that supposedly show how Kindle users are giving up their Kindles and buying iPads. The statistics behind them are indecipherable. I’m starting to wonder if they’re not completely fictional.

Maybe everyone knows this but me, but I think Apple has been encouraging an army of tech bloggers to push public opinion in favor of the iPad. It keeps hitting me wrong because I have a Kindle 2, which I love. I have absolutely no desire to acquire an iPad. Actually I have no interest in it at all. I have a laptop (two, actually, one for work and one for personal), a Blackberry, a Kindle and an iPod. Their overlapping functionality more than fulfill all of my tech needs.

What I love most about my Kindle is it feels more like reading a book instead of being forever on the computer. I love that the screen is not backlit, so I can read for hours without eye-strain. I love that using my Kindle is only about reading, not multitasking.

Wasn’t that the point?

I mean, a few years back, I remember answering surveys about an ebook reader and what would it take me to convert from paper to electronic. Those were the major points that it seemed all readers offered. And Amazon developed the Kindle exactly along those lines. Everyone I know with a Kindle loves it. One person, a prominent blogger, doesn’t like the lack of organization of the books on it – which is an issue I don’t get because I can always find what I want.

So, the always-evolving, always-competing tech world wants to convince me that what I wanted most in an ereader isn’t what I wanted at all, that I’m not satisfied. Despite their creative representation of the world, I don’t think the techies will convince most readers either. The editors and agents may want greater ability to annotate, but the mass of people out there who just READ, who love BOOKS and not computers, don’t think this way.

Of course, none of them read techie blogs, either.

It seems to me to be the one thing forever being left out of the equation: the reader. Which is ironic, since we all started out that way. Writers may love to use the saw “I wrote my first book when I was seven in purple crayon,” but they should really mention when they read their first book. Or when it was read to them.

My mom used to read to me, every night. She stopped when I started reading over her shoulder and correcting her when she missed words. She finally handed me the book – I remember it being Charlotte’s Web, but that seems awfully pat – and said I was ready to fly the reading nest.

That opened the world of books to me. Any book would fall before me. I could consume it at will, yanked away only for meals and school.

Isn’t that where we all started? Nose buried in a book.

Don’t offer me a better way to multitask. I just want to read.

Spring Cleaning

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No, it’s sunny and warm today. This pic is from a few days ago.

Sometime soon, this weekend maybe, I’m going to cut off those seed pods. The gillia need tending also. And the whole secret garden needs clearing out. Time to clear the way for the new.

So, yesterday, I held to my ritual and I did not turn on my phone until after I finished my wordcount. Then I turned on the Blackberry and watched the email messages stack up. And then, wow! A voice mail!

I confess I felt a thrill, dialing in waiting for the voice of RWA to tell me that I’m a special unique snowflake.

But no.

Staples.

Yes, the office supply place that has never, ever called me before, calling to warn me that my order had been delayed until 3/25. For those keeping track at home, yesterday was 3/25.

Just a little cruel jab from the universe, mocking my little dreams.

And apparently the universe couldn’t get enough of the joke: I received two more calls yesterday morning, both from numbers I didn’t recognize, one being a wrong number and the other being Staples, AGAIN. This from a cell phone that doesn’t ring for days.

The great lottery goes on. Allison didn’t final either, with the manuscript that just snagged her an agent and a three-book deal, so that gives you an idea of how well a contest like this predicts publishability. Amusingly, blogger doesn’t believe that’s a word.

An agent who has my manuscript Tweeted from the Bologna Book Fair that what’s “in” are angels, zombies and dystopias. None of which are in Obsidian. I envision that all across Twitterville, writers were brainstorming post-Apocalyptic landscapes with zombie angels.

Nothing new under the sun. Chasing after the wind. Don’t call me angel of the morning.

Staples called me one more time in the late afternoon, asking if my order had arrived. I said, why no, but I was in no hurry. He asked me what time it was for me and I said 4:09. He told me the driver had until 5 to deliver the package. Okay, I said, though did I mention I don’t care. He tells me that by law he’s required to make sure it gets delivered by 5.

I’m wondering if this is part of the Health Care Reform.

After all this? No, my printer ink never arrived. Not that I care, since I’m all set right now and was planning ahead for when the ink in the printer runs out. I imagine that, when I turn on my phone, I’ll have a voice mail from them.

I’m thinking about submitting my manuscript to Staples. At least I can be sure they’ll call.