Writers Helping Writers

B-UQ3E6CEAAPVlUI’m kind of blue today. For the past few days, my bestie and crit partner Carolyn Crane has been visiting. We got up in the mornings and did “parallel play” – working our social media and indulging in dishing about it, in a way we never get to do otherwise. Then we wrote, sometimes silently, sometimes discussing. On the best weather day we went hiking around noon. Regardless of weather we headed into town around midday and indulged in long, delicious, boozy lunches. We used the opportunity to give each other live discussion feedback on our latest works – so much better than on the phone or via social media. And we talked about writing careers in general – both our own and people we know.

This morning I dropped her off at the airport and my world feels emptier for it.

We talk a lot about writing being a solitary profession, which it certainly can be. Worse, however, the various writing communities can be, well, less than fully supportive. There’s a lot of professional jealousy out there. Carolyn and I both started our writing careers in the literary fiction world and that’s one of the worst. One of those cases where the fights are so fierce because the stakes are so small. There is very little friendship in those particular trenches, with plenty of tail-sniffing, jockeying for position and plain mean behavior. The egos run huge and the competition intense.

Neither of us miss it a bit.

The romance community is SO unbelievably better that way! With a very few exceptions, the egos remain manageable in romance. Maybe that comes from writing a much-sneered at genre or maybe from it being such a predominantly female community. Or from the original friendly and supportive mindset of the organization’s founders. Regardless, I love my sister romance writers and greatly appreciate having that network. Still, even in my few years spent in this group (six – since 2008), closer friendships have come and gone. I mourn some of the ones that have fallen by the wayside, but the ones I’ve gained more than make up for the few losses.

I’ve long observed that friendships tend to develop among the people who are doing the same things we are. You know – in college we have our college friends, and among those the theater friends or the peer counseling people. After college, most of those friendships fade away. Not because anything goes wrong, but because all that energy that came from shared daily experiences evaporates into the ether. It’s more difficult when the largest energy in my life, the experience I have to share, is with people who are also my “competitors,” in some sense. It can take an active effort to combat that, to not let it get in the way of supportive friendship.

Carolyn is an amazing friend that way. Someone I love, admire and enjoy – and who always makes me feel like an important and precious part of her life in return. Last night we skyped for nearly an hour with Anne Calhoun, sharing this same kind of friendship. There are others, wonderful, nurturing friends, but for the moment I want to celebrate these two and give my thanks to the universe for bringing them into my life.

Love you gals!

Cleaning Someone Else’s Kitchen

021A lovely vista at Cerrillos State Park from a hike last weekend. I mentioned before that author, critique partner and fab friend Carolyn Crane came to visit for a long weekend.

 She mainly came to Santa Fe to get out of the crushing Minneapolis winter. In fact, when she Tweeted that she didn’t know how she could make it through the endless snowstorms, I sent her a link showing how cheap plane tickets to Albuquerque were and reminded her that I have a guest room.

Ostensibly I was doing her a favor.

 But then she did me one. First of all, having her visit brought several days of nonstop writer convo into my life. Carolyn is one of my favorite people (and RWA roomie!) and we had the best time rambling over numerous topics, gossip, business and ideas. We even came up with an amazing brainstorm for a Sekrit Joint Project. Best of all, Carolyn got along great with David and even had him bringing out his guns to show her the different kinds. You’ll all be pleased to know that her Associates will have a much more varied arsenal now. 🙂

 At the same time, I got back my final set of line edits on an upcoming manuscript. For this third round of edits, my editor STILL wanted more on a particular scene I’d never wanted to put on the page in the first place. Her instincts are good on this kind of thing, but I felt so *done* at this point that I just couldn’t face taking another stab at it. But Carolyn – well, she cleaned my kitchen for me.

You all know what I mean, right? Or maybe this is mainly a female thing. I know a lot of guys cook and clean, too, but I’ve never heard them mention this. But my female friends and relatives sure have. And I know I’ve said it to them.

“Oh, let me finish the clean-up – it’s so much more fun to clean someone else’s kitchen!”

Because it just IS.

My own kitchen I’ve cleaned hundreds, if not thousands of times. I know every countertop stain, the persistent yellow crud in that hard-to-reach lip of the sink at the back, that one pan that never *quite* yields up that old burn on the bottom. Over time I give up on these things. I just don’t care enough and I’m resigned to these little, enduring failures to reach perfection.

In SOMEONE ELSE’S KITCHEN, however, I become a dynamo of shininess. I scrub those pans until they gleam. Those countertop stains cannot withstand my zeal to see them gone, gone, gone. My mother managed to get my glass-top stove cleaner than it was when we moved in – and was happy to do it.

So much more fun to clean someone else’s kitchen.

Likewise, Carolyn took up the torch of expanding that scene with excitement and enthusiasm. She wrote a page for me in no time at all – and had fun doing it. Once I had that from her, I was able to see past the old stains and revised it to blend with the story. What she gave me was brilliant. More, I don’t know that I had it in me to do myself. I might have just let that stain go, yet again.

A gift beyond price.

Best of all, she’s excited that I owe her. She’s got ideas for a scene or two she’ll ask me to riff on. And I’m excited to do it. I’d love to take her story and play with it. For the first time, really, I get what fan fiction is all about.

It’s all the fun of cleaning someone else’s kitchen – just once – without having to face it day after day.

A Concatenation of (Mostly Unfortunate) Events

day jobYou ever had one of those mornings?

You know, where one mishap leads to the next until it begins to feel like everything is happening at once?

Yeah. So, this was my morning.

1. Get up at 5 am for important day job conference call with East Coast people. Discover Jackson has brought in a mouse. It’s under the treadmill part of my treadmill desk and cannot be gotten. I decide a shower and coffee-acquisition should take higher priority.

2. Have call, hoping mouse isn’t grinding up in treadmill motor

3. Post call, and post post-call, get more coffee, feed cats, who are no longer interested in mouse

4. New daybed is arriving between 8:15 and 9:15. Assist previously procrastinating man with moving futon couch bed out of guest room/office to make room for day bed delivery

5. Man decides we should take pics for Craigslist ad. Easier to just agree.

6. Movement of furniture gets cats excited, renewed interest in mouse. Suspect it’s in treadmill motor compartment (has happened before)

7. Get screwdrivers and vacuum to open compartment and clean-out while open, which has to be done every few months anyway.

8. Plug vacuum into APC power supply, which blows, taking monitor and day job VOIP phone offline.

9. No mouse in motor compartment!

10. But is now clean.

11. APC is dead.

12. Rearranged cords and outlets, back online.

13. Daybed guys arrive.

14. Jackson pretends mouse never existed and investigates new day bed (above).

All of this before 8:30 in the morning.

Send chocolate.

Does the Publishing Thing Get Easier?

005For those who don’t know, that’s the Lyman Whitaker sculpture I bought with my first advance money last summer. Looks so awesome, particularly at sunrise.

And every time I see it, I feel a dual thrill of pleasure – in the beauty of the piece and in my own accomplishment.

At the time, I wrestled with whether to spend some of that money on a fun thing. Then, when I decided I should, it came down to one of these Wind Sculptures or a hot tub. I’m glad I chose the sculpture for this very reason, one that I didn’t consider. Seeing it every day reminds me of the work I put in to reach my goals and is a tangible, beautiful icon of that success.

So important, for all of us.

Because the publishing industry is a difficult one. There’s no doubt of this.

Yesterday I saw this article and tweeted a link to it, joking that the title should be “Authors Not Satisfied by Anything, Ever.” It’s one of those not-so-funny jokes, because the results show that, even after reaching some publishing goals, things aren’t all wine and roses for authors.

 Lately I’ve been in the position of giving advice to aspiring authors. Just my karma? Perhaps. I participated in a panel (which I set up for my local chapter, but didn’t intend to be as advice-giving as it turned out), a couple of writers have emailed me for advice and I had dinner with a couple of my pre-pubbed local chapter gals.

One of the gals who emailed me asked about following up with an editor. She finished her email with: Gah!  I hate waiting.  Please tell me it gets easier?

I wish I could have. Of course, not to pull a Bill Clinton, it depends on what “it” refers to.

Does the waiting get easier? Yes, in many ways it does. Because, as I told this gal, experience helps your expectations align with reality. So when my New York editor says “I’ll send that next week,” I know full well it might not arrive for three weeks. That’s just par for the course. Also, I count on waiting times in ways I didn’t before, because I have so much more going on. For example, I sent book 2 of a trilogy to my New York editor by the 11/1 deadline and he recently confessed he hasn’t read it yet. Do I care?

Nooooooo……

Because I can’t possibly do developmental edits right now! In fact, I’m kind of banking on him not getting an edit letter back to me before mid-March. (Hear that, Peter? :D)

But, if I were, like the gal who emailed me, really waiting on those edits so I could get that going, I wouldn’t feel the same way. So, yes, Rhenna, in that way it does get easier.

Other things get easier, too. Once of the gals I had dinner with complained about how established and big ticket authors send in manuscripts that are riddled with errors (LKH – we’re looking at you), or that need extensive editing, while aspiring authors have to have every damn thing absolutely perfect, just to get in the door. She called it unfair.

I explained that it’s a test.

 Is this a real phenomenon? Sure it is. But the reason is not to conspire against newbie authors. It’s because those established authors have a reputation and a loyal readership. The publisher knows what the author is capable of. Nobody asks me to do a revise and resubmit any more, because my editors have worked with me on several books and *know* how I’ll treat edits. They trust me. In fact, I can sell on ideas now, because they are familiar with my style and how I’ll go from idea to finished book.

Is this easier for me? Yes yes yes! It’s a great luxury for me and, believe me, I relish it. SO MUCH EASIER.

But it’s because I did the work to get there. With a brand new author, nobody knows how he or she will accept edits. Nobody knows if she can write that sequel by a deadline or if he can handle copy edits without pitching a creative tantrum. So, of course, they want it As Perfect As Possible. Just in case that’s as good as it gets.

That makes it much more difficult for aspiring authors, yes. The good news is, that’s part of doing the work. That’s learning important skills that will make it much easier down the road.

So, with a nod to Dan Savage and not to downplay the very important message of the It Gets Better campaign, yes.

It gets easier.

At What Point Do You Dig In to Protect Your Writing Process?

025A shot from Los Angeles last week and lunch with the delightful Lynda Ryba (@fishwithsticks). She’s going to be helping out with my Facebook Author Page, so we should see VAST improvements in that! (Really, it couldn’t get worse…)

What with it being NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, if you live under a rock – basically you commit to writing 50,000 new words during November), I’ve been thinking a lot about the writing process. Quite a few people wanted me to participate in NaNoWriMo. I could, because I’m seriously drafting book 3 in Covenant of Thorns right now. (I think it will be called Rogue’s Paradise.) I’m almost 20K into it and will almost certainly write at least 50K during this month. And I’d like to be supportive – I really would. Some of the newbie writers in my local chapter are doing it and I can see it would be helpful of me to join in. I like being supportive that way.

Except I said no.

Why? Because I *have* to turn in this book – complete and polished – by December 31, according to my contract. Worse, my editor is going on this long trip to New Zealand (yes, we hate her) and really wants the manuscript by December 25, so she can take it with her. Really a week doesn’t make that much difference, but it makes the deadline ever so slightly tighter. I cannot miss this deadline.

But Jeffe, you say – isn’t that all the more reason to do NaNo, to crank on getting those words down?

See, it’s really not.

Over the past several years, I’ve put a lot of effort and concentration into learning and refining my writing process. I say “learning” because I really believe we all have an organic process that we have to discover and love. It’s rough to go against that. I’ve now written six novels and novellas according to the method I’m using now. I know how much I can do each day (right now, about 2,250 words in 2-3 hours) and how long it will take me to complete the draft and then to revise. Being able to reliably create on a schedule is crucial for being a professional writer. This process is delivering for me. That makes it precious.

Which means I’m not going to mess with it.

No way.

Call me superstitious, but I’m not changing a thing.

I’m feeling much the same about workshops and classes. Now, I’m a huge believer in continuing education, lifelong learning – all that stuff. I was the girl in college who took 21 credits every semester, just because there were so many interesting classes to take. That said, I don’t have a writing degree of any sort – no English major, no MFA. I’ve taken tons of writing workshops, etc., over the years, but for the time being, I’m feeling like I want to stay away from them.

This isn’t the hip thing to say these days. Particularly not in the romance-writing community. (In fact, I don’t recall seeing this perspective much at all in the literary community. Those writers are much more apt to be protective of their process and to be vocal about it.) People love to point out when established writers come to workshops. They say things like “I’m never done learning!” and “not taking workshops can lead to stagnation.”

In fact, someone said that last to me just the other day. I threw the question out to Twitter (of course). I framed the question carefully, asking if any of the writers – especially well-established ones – found themselves staying away from classes and workshops, to protect their method. I tried to phrase it to weed out the happy “I love to take classes!” answers. Even so, I still received those responses.

 

 

and

 Another author, who preferred to remain anonymous, told me about an experience early in her writing career about “you can’t do that” that stopped her flat. She didn’t write for almost a year.

I think if I cast my net wider, I’d hear more of this kind of feedback. Because it sounds better to be enthusiastic about learning and growing, those writers who feel protective of their process might be less likely to speak up. But, I think it’s an important point – and speaks to the gal who said that not learning could lead to stagnation, a very common view – to remember that growing isn’t necessarily derived from taking workshops. There are thousands of ways to learn and grow as a writer, not the least of which is reading!

It’s certainly a fine line to walk. And it’s not that I think my process or my art is perfect. I do feel, however, that it’s working for me. I’m continuing to improve as a writer and that’s important to me.

More, I’m protective of it.

One Cure for Writer’s Block

Jackson 7_7_13Jackson will take treats from my hand like this. He puts his paws on me to steady himself, then plucks the shrimp, or ham, or turkey, or salmon, or beef, or really any kind of meat at all, with his teeth. I’ve never had a cat that would do like this before.

David says I was talking in my sleep a lot last night. That should come as no surprise, since I’m getting heavily back into drafting this novel. The big fantasy novels seem to do it to me much more than the shorter, erotic romance works. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe because it’s more complex storytelling. Maybe because I’m constructing an entire world along with the story itself.

At any rate, it makes me aware of how much my mind works on this kind of thing. I also find I begrudge distractions more. It’s like I already have so many conversations going on in my head that I can’t bear to listen to any new ones. At times like this I understand the writers who lock themselves away in a cabin for a few weeks or a month, to focus only on the book. I try to keep my life as normal as possible, evenly moving along, but sometimes I envy that model.

Quiet is just so crucial.

A few weeks ago, I flew to Ohio to meet up with some CPs and go to a conference. It was a fairly long flight there – about 3 hours – and I happily found a window seat to ensconce myself in. I exchanged hello’s with the gal on the aisle and set about staging my supplies for the flight. I knew the week ahead would be busy enough that I wouldn’t get tons of writing work done and I hoped for some solid writing time during the flight. As the plane filled, another gal took the middle seat. She and the woman on the aisle kept going after the initial greetings. And going. And going.

I even tweeted, before they shut the plane doors, that I really hoped they wouldn’t talk the entire flight.

They did.

Non-stop.

Some helpful Tweeters predicted this and suggested I go for ear buds early. Fortunately I could. I plugged in the music, opened my laptop and worked away. Every now and again – like when I removed my ear buds to talk to the flight attendant about what lovely drink she could bring me – I became aware that the conversation continued apace.

No, I have no idea what they found to talk about for that long.

But they had gone from total strangers to BFFs within minutes. At the end of the flight, once they stood, they reverted to strangers, as airline passengers do. We all wait, sitting, standing, half-stooped because the overhead bins are in the way, not making eye contact, pretending we aren’t Hugely Impatient to get off the stinking plane already. They went their separate ways without another word.

The new found connection was apparently just to pass the time.

I notice that, the deeper into creating I am, the less I want to talk. It’s like I have energy for the one thing or the other. I think that’s worth exploring. I rarely have good advice when people ask me about solving writer’s block or increasing productivity or enhancing creativity, but there’s something.

Try talking less.

It might feel weird at first. Maybe lonely. Maybe TOO quiet. But I do believe that, once you create that silence in your mind, other things will come to fill it.

Ideas.

Images.

Stories and characters and worlds.

Shh…

Hear that?

Is Your Brand Interfering with Your Writing?

001It’s funny living in Santa Fe, because it’s such a center for the visual arts. Ever since Georgia O’Keeffe arrived for a visit and fell in love with the light, visual artists of every stamp have flocked to the region. Galleries are everywhere and nearly every person you meet is a painter or a sculptor or  a photographer or a jewelry maker and so on. It’s prevalent enough that it became a kind of running gag after we moved here, when we met new people – what kind of artist they’d be and how long before they told us we should buy some of their art.

(I am deliberately specifying the visual arts because there’s a weird dearth of writers here. One of my writer friends calls it “the vast Siberia of literary arts” and she’s not far off.)

So, it’s not unusual to see people’s artistic efforts around the neighborhood – in a way you would never see in another community. It’s quite wonderful, really, even if some of the art is kind of bizarre. There’s one house down the block from us where the resident artist – I’m convinced it’s a woman, but I don’t know – is into painting the desert plants and artifacts. First she painted a cow skull in big blocks of lurid tempura colors – pink, green and yellow. Then a piece of driftwood. Then a wooden saguaro cactus. She seems to be into the quadrants of unnatural colors thing.

It’s not pretty.

Then I noticed the other day that she’d attacked a large, many branched cholla on their property and the poor thing is now painted in similar chunks of this bright color, which I’m pretty sure will kill its ability to photosynthesize. It’s like she’s Goldfinger, serially murdering the landscape.

At any rate, I can see what she’s going for – a very clear style – even if it doesn’t do much for me. I do wonder, however, if she’s sacrificing a heartfelt artistic effort for the sake of this style. This brand.

We writers hear about brand all the time these days. We’re in a peculiar position in that we, ourselves, are our brand. Just as we glommed onto authors, reading everything from an author on the library shelf, readers follow US, not necessarily our publishers or our genres. What we write arises out of us, but we are the physical embodiment of it because, even with print books, story remains intangible. It can be kind of a funky thing – especially when being sane about the business requires separating ourselves from our work.

I’m very careful to say “this work was rejected” or “this book got a good review,” not “I was rejected” or “I got a good review.”

But, for the purposes of branding, well meaning and helpful marketing types are forever reminding me that *I* am my brand. My brand is me. I’m pretty much just a walking, talking advertisement for All Things Jeffe. I’m picturing something like that old movie poster for the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

See how creepy this gets?

It struck me the other day, because I saw a youngish writer tweeting about writing tips. She said something along the lines of that, when she gets stuck writing, she thinks of her brand and what her readers would expect from her. I can see how this is smart marketing, but it bothered me. It took me a few days to pin down why.

This is the tail wagging the dog, right?

I mean, let’s look at someone like Neil Gaiman. He started out writing dark graphic novels and creepy stories. He liked wearing black t-shirts because they generally looked clean and matched everything. Over time, the way he looks and the stories he writes merged into a very recognizable “feel” that is quintessentially Neil Gaiman. This is partly because he’s a person who is comfortable with himself and his career. His sincerity and honesty, his self-deprecating humor and insightful intelligence – all of these combine to make him very recognizably himself.

But WHAT he writes is all over the place! He does exactly what the marketers advise us not to do. He writes children’s books, adult magical realism, horror, screenplays, graphic novels, science fiction and more. All under the same name, too.

Here’s how he answered a recent set of questions on his Tumblr:

1. How would you describe the genre of your work?

 Stories.

 2. Have you always known what genre you wanted to write, or was it a process?

I don’t know. I write stories, if that’s any help.

3. How important is the development of atmosphere and setting to the genre of your works?

Very, I think. Whatever genre they are, if they had no atmosphere or setting they would not be as good.

4. What do you prefer to write and why? (short stories, novels, screenwriting)

Yes. And the rest.

 5. Is there any advice you would give to young aspiring writers? Thank you!

 Write. Finish things. Worry less about genre and more about telling good stories.

Answers like this are why I admire him so much.

When he writes and hits a snag, do you think Neil asks himself what his brand is and what his readers would expect?

No no no.

Neil doesn’t think about what his brand is – or his genre, for that matter – because his allegiance is to the story. I feel very strongly that if we as writers don’t have first allegiance to the story, then we may become nothing more than factory workers, packaging little chunks of canned brand in the hopes of filling the supermarket shelves.

I don’t think we should EVER be thinking about brand while we’re writing. Writers often talk about the art of writing and the business of writing being two very different things. For me, I want to keep them that way. It’s a reality of the modern marketplace that writers must engage in the business end of writing far more than in the past. Nobody gets to be JD Salinger anymore, playing the hermit and refusing all interaction.

But we also don’t have to become what the marketers would make us into. There’s a soullessness to that and there are plenty of ways out there to make a living that are soulless and are much easier and more lucrative.

Like marketing. 😀

Seriously, if I wanted to be in sales and marketing, I would have gone to business school. I’m glad there are people who did and who then give us advice on how to get our books out there and into the hands of readers who will love them. But that’s a different way of seeing the world. I don’t tell them how supply and demand works and they don’t tell me how to craft a story.

That’s where I want my first loyalty to always be.

Story first. Sales later.