Tag: writers life

Slow Growth

admin / / Blog

Agents often seem to admonish writers to be patient.

It’s one of their core themes of advice to aspiring writers and, I feel sure, to the authors they’ve signed to work with. The industry moves slowly, they say. Give them time to work.

This advice is, naturally, also self-serving. It’s a nice way of saying “don’t bug me.” Fair enough. Agents and editors juggle a lot of balls and reading takes time.

What they don’t think about, it seems to me, is that we’ve already exercised tremendous patience.

If slow and steady wins the race, then the writers are trailing over the finish line well after the tortoise is in the club bar celebrating. Writing is an incremental craft. It’s like building stalagmites with the water of your soul. You flood the page with words and hope a few stick. Day by day, you watch the wordcount gradually increase. Then you see something formed wrong and you knock off a chunk, and let the words accrete again.

Once your pillar of salts has grown large enough and seems done, you polish and carve. It feels like you’re using your fingernails to do it.

Then, after all of those hours alone with your creation, you package it up and send it out into the world, to find out if anyone else thinks it’s neat enough to pay you for it.

And they tell you to learn patience.

All you can do in the end, really, is not bug them.

Emerging Writers

admin / / Blog


I saw yesterday that my alma mater is holding a special event celebrating emerging writers in the creative writing MFA program.

This is likely code for “these are three people who’ll be graduating in May and trying to hack it in the real world, so let’s give ’em a bit of a boost.”

The thing is — and I know I read and watch way too much sci fi, so this could be just me — the term “emerging writer” always sounds vaguely insectile to me. Kind like pod-people covered in weird mucus-stuff. I know I’m likely meant to envision the beautiful butterfly, but I tend to fret about the cocoon itself. If a writer “emerges,” where were they before that?

Sealed in muck, wrapped in a protective package?

Maybe they have a point.

The word “emerge” comes from the root mergere, which meant to dip, sink or dive. So “emerge” originally meant (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, my bible in all things etymological, if not entomological) “to rise by virtue of buoyancy from or out of a liquid.”

See? There we are, right back in the mucus, the nutrient bath. I suppose there could be something to the metaphor. Many writers talk about the act of writing being like swimming. Annie Dillard said that it’s like diving underwater and not knowing where your head will pop up. But that idea implies that the diving and emerging is a regular event, part of a writer’s daily life. In that scenario, a writer would emerge by virtue of some unspecified form of buoyancy, only to deliberately dive again.

Which makes sense to me.

It’s one of the great truths of being a writer that you are never there. You never get to dry your wing membranes and fly off to giddily pollinate flowers. Which is probably a good thing, since a butterfly’s life is cruelly brief.

Only by diving back down again, can we find the buoyancy to emerge, over and over.

Breathing Water

admin / / Blog

This is from Valentine’s Day. Love this dramatic window of sunset. There’s probably better ways of photographing the sun dead on like this, but clearly that knowledge is not mine.

Alas. Still on my list to take a photography class.

Not more important than writing my novel at this time, however.

So, after two days of being full-time writer girl, I haven’t written more than I would on a normal day. I figure if I write about 1,000 words in two hours on a normal day when I also work the day job eight hours, then with six hours of writing time, I should be able to write 5,000 words.

Yes, yes — I know the math comes out to 3,000 words, but I have this dream that the block time will make the word count expand in this glorious exponential way. See, if I could write 5,000 words a day, then a five-day work week would give me 25,000 words, which means I could draft a 100K novel in a month. Give me another month to revise and that would be excellent productivity.

What? You already knew I was a dreamer!

Anyway, I’m not coming close to 3K words, much less 5K. But I am finding that the New Novel is coming together in my head in this most marvelous way.

See, I’ve been bemoaning (mostly to myself) that I haven’t yet written the truly complex novel I want to write. I want to have written Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Avatar (which means I would have written Kushiel’s Dart and Kushiel’s Chosen, too, then brilliantly capped the trilogy with Avatar). I want to have written A.S. Byatt’s Possession or Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye or Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game & Speaker for the Dead.

And I have this idea that, in order to write books like that, you have to be able to dreamthink them for long periods of time. Like diving into the lake and living underwater in the mermaid city until you learn to breathe there.

At any rate, that’s what’s happening for me now. Though I spend a fair amount of time staring at the screen and not typing, I am learning to breathe. And this novel is taking shape.

Deep breath.

Me Time

admin / / Blog


I made the mistake of showing my mother my writing schedule last night.

As I mentioned, I’m practicing being full-time writer this week. I have vacation from the day job and need to get the New Novel underway. It’s a good opportunity to see how I’d set up a professional work schedule without co-workers or daily hours expectations.

One of the main things I’m trying to do is make sure I don’t dink on the internet all day. So I’m allowing myself online windows to check email, talk to people on IM, catch-up on Twitter and Facebook, read blogs and articles, etc. Which is why my mom asked, so she’d know when my online windows are. I pasted her my schedule into IM and she freaked.

Now, granted, people are often taken aback by my spreadsheets. I try to explain it’s that little wedge of Virgo peeking through all the Leo. When I was a grad student, there was a blackboard over my desk that I would draw the semester’s calendar on. I filled it in with all of my classes, office hours, and so forth. One professor, glimpsing it, said it looked like displacement activity to him. Some of it might be. But the practice helps me to get my head around what I want to do.

That’s the key to me: this is all about making sure I’m doing what’s most important to me.

One writer friend, Jeri Smith-Ready, announced on twitter recently that she created a screensaver that scrolled the message: “Is what you’re doing right now more important than writing your novel?”

My mom thought my schedule sounded sad, lacked joy and human contact. She wanted me to show it to David, so he could weigh in on whether I’m crazy. He looked at it and said, “She just doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do.”

Which she confirmed this morning, apologizing via IM during my online window.

I suspect a lot of the full-time writers out there would look at this and say I’m still spending too much time online. I wonder if I’d whittle that down over time.

But then, while I told my mom that David counts as human contact, my online time is the bulk of my social life these days. Quite deliberately so. When we moved, I decided not to join any organizations yet. Which I’m wont to do. I love to join. Then I inevitably end up volunteering to be in charge of stuff and suddenly I’m spending my non-work time on planning charity balls and not writing my novel.

When we moved, I sold my sewing machine and all the fabric I’d stored up, because when I’m quilting, I’m not writing my novel.

I can see how this sounds joyless. But for me it’s about making deliberate choices to do everything I can to get to the point of being a full-time writer. Once there, I can judiciously add back in all of those other things.

It’s difficult for people to understand, I think, the need writers have to build fences around the writing time. I suspect it’s because a person writing looks like they’re doing nothing that can’t be interrupted. Just a quick question. Can you do this one thing. The non-writers don’t know how long it takes to get the flow going and how the voice breaking in totally disrupts it. Soon to be published writer Allison Pang is facing this now. She’ll be doing revisions on her current novel, plus outlining and drafting the next two, plus working on a totally different story that she loves. All this while working her full-time job and raising two young children with a husband whose job takes him away from the house a lot. I keep telling her she’s going to have to get mean (not in her nature), carve out that writing time and fence it off. That probably sounds joyless, too.

What it comes down to is, when you want the big prize, you have to sacrifice to get it. Not a lamb or a pound of flesh. What you sacrifice is some of the other things that you decide aren’t as important as writing your novel right now. What will those things be? Individual and carefully chosen.

It’s the question wanna-be writers ask all the time: how do I find the time to write? The short answer is, you don’t. You have to scratch and claw it out of all the other things in your life that compete. You make what other people see as joyless choices.

Fortunately, in the end, the writing itself is a surpassing joy.

Playing House

admin / / Blog


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

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

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

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

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

This is that time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll let you know how it goes.

When I’m Down and Feeling Blue

admin / / Blog


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Your Game Now – Can Anybody Play?

admin / / Blog


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

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

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

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

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

Mornings it had to be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the way, I also saw this one:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And on the Eighth Day…

admin / / Blog

Today I decide what to work on next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I should enjoy this freedom.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll switch genres.

#queryfail

admin / / Blog


No, I have no idea what I was doing in this picture. My mom took it of me on my birthday and it cracks me up.

It’s apropos of nothing, really. Except that I’m clearly telling a story.

For those of you not on Twitter, there’s this deal where you can use what’s called a hashtag. People can add the hashtag to their message (yes, part of the 140 characters) that makes it searchable. So, if you go to Twitter.com, you can enter the hash-tag #queryfail and see all the posts related to that.

What you’ll see is primarily agents snarking about bad queries. It can be useful, especially for very new writers who have no idea how an agent sees things. One agent has started a new hashtag #thingsIshouldnotseeinaquery. Some examples:

“I am really quit unremarkable in all ways.” #thingsishouldnotseeinaquery

“I needed a new creative outlet.” #thingsishouldnotseeinaquery

“I am positive that it will be a colossal seller.” #thingsishouldnotseeinaquery

See? It can be really amusing. It can also get pretty snarky in the way things can when only one side of the interaction gets to be snarky. We all like to bitch about the annoying aspects of our working lives. I certainly do. But I have to be exceedingly careful about it. I’m not one of these writers who goes bananas that agents are parasites and we don’t need them. I really want to work with an agent because I believe in what they are able to do. But agents hold a lot of power over writers, so I sometimes have issues with the condescension.

One day an agent, intent on showing how pressed and busy agents are, tweeted that agents do reading for new clients almost entirely on their own time. I really wanted to reply that any of us whose jobs involve recruiting new clients and building new work have to do that on our own time. I know I do. That’s how business works. Selling to new clients isn’t billable and work for existing clients must be prioritized. Of course, I thought better of saying this because I didn’t wish to antagonize her. I’m still a supplicant in that world.

I have issues with a system where I feel like I’m not supposed to speak truthfully.

Last night I received a rejection on a query that truly took me aback. The agent took the time to tell me exactly why she was passing, which is kind of her, but I ended up wishing she’d given me the standard “not for me” because her reasons seemed so, well, foolish.

She had three points, in essence (the numbering is mine):

1) I like to see the relationship between the hero and heroine develop pretty quickly in a romance, but the beginning of this partial read more like a thriller or romantic suspense to me.

2) I also don’t love the use of the dream sequences as they can take the reader out of the narrative.

Okay, these first two are very standard romance formula “rules.” I must say it’s the first time an agent has quoted them to me rather than a contest judge. And this is definitely a choice on my part. I’m not much for rules. I don’t like lighting-fast relationship development and I think my heroine’s dreams are crucial to the novel, because it’s part of the movement between worlds. I can give her these though, even if it makes me wonder that she’s so wedded to these rules. It’s entirely possible they’re just a standard reason to throw out, to back up that she just doesn’t love it.

But then,

3) Finally, I was a little surprised that Jennifer’s profession was the same as yours, mostly because it didn’t seem to add to her character or to the plot in any major way. It seemed coincidental, and yet nothing in fiction is really coincidental…

Jennifer is my heroine and she’s a neuroscientist. It’s important because, when she becomes a sorceress, her scientific approach and way of thinking affects the magic. I mention that I have a Masters in neurophysiology, by way of giving my credentials, that I can write a woman who thinks this way.

I’m not really sure what this agent is implying, but it seems she thinks I’m lying somehow. Maybe I really *am* a neuroscientist who’s traveled to Faerie and become a sorceress and this is all really nonfiction that I’m dressing up as a novel???

And it kind of bothers me that I clearly told her my profession is environmental consulting, which means she really didn’t read closely. Which is also fine; it’s the Blink thing, whatever.

It struck me as an unprofessional response, however. Kind of a #queryresponsefail. I’d really love to tweet it, which I don’t dare do, since I’m a supplicant.

I’m taking a risk writing this blog post, really. I almost didn’t do it. But I don’t feel like I don’t dare speak up.

I won’t advertise it on Twitter this time, however… My bravery only goes so far.

Living the Dream

admin / / Blog


It’s one of those dreamy snow-globe days.

As the week has been, full of snowfall, hot tea and time by the fire.

I’ve been sleeping well. No dreams of starving cats. Instead I’ve been having the long and deep questing dreams I love. Just before I woke, I dreamed that Isabel was sleeping in the arms of a black bear cub. I laughed at how adorable they looked.

This is a quiet time at work. The early part of the year is always slow for our project, which is welcome after the hysterical push of the end of the year. I don’t travel again until the end of February, which means I’m caught up and am keeping up with everything right now. I have fewer than 15 emails in both my work and personal In-Boxes. My In-Box used to serve as a sort of To-Do list, so an In-Box that wasn’t empty meant I had things to take care of. Over the course of last year, my In-Box swelled to over 2,000 emails at times. The oldest one was from 2/9. Just as we’re now unpacked, I’ve now dealt with most of my email. The oldest is now 11/11 — for a contest I want to enter.

It occurs to me, this is what it feels like not to be stressed.

I watch the tweets go by. The news and opinions. I watch the snow fall.

There are so many people to save. So many causes to take up. So many things to become outraged about. Then I think about the idea that, if you want to change the world, first change your own life. I like to think I’m doing my part by not contributing to the hysteria. I’m solving problems, making positive contributions, finding ways to feed people.

It might be trite to quote John Lennon, but this lyric hit me with unexpected force the other day: I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go ’round. No more riding on the merry-go-round — I just had to let it go.

I’m watching the snow fall. And I’m feeling fine.