Everybody's Doing It

What do we do on New Year's Day besides wander around in a slightly hung-over state channeling Bono? Why, we make resolutions, of course. As a writer, I am required by law to set writing resolutions: you know, to write every day; to write MORE every day if I actually succeeded in the first goal last year (which, as you know, Gentle Reader, I didn't). As a publisher, I should set resolutions having to do with doing more, bigger and better; that's not going to happen, either. I will do more, bigger and better; I am too driven to do otherwise. And that's one of the primary problems I face as a writer.

My goals for this year have to do with balance: balancing the two sides of my professional life rather than allowing all the things on my publishing to-do list to push me out of the study; keeping enough sanity in my weeks to allow things like yoga, eating right, taking walks and spending time with my special people; thinking about my fiction like a writer while I'm developing the work, and only then putting on my publisher's hat; not letting any one project derail everything else; accepting that my resources are far outstripped by my vision, and that writing and publishing comprise a marathon, not a sprint.

In a year in which we will all continue to redefine prosperity, it seems senseless to set goals regarding productivity. This year I will concentrate on quality: not just in my work, but in everything I do. This will be the year I rip out a flawed chapter or subplot and rebuild it rather than worrying about self-imposed deadlines, the year I choose not to flay myself over mistakes or perceived imperfections but simply extract the lessons learned and move on. This year will be a road trip in the direction of goals: we'll arrive, but the exact time of arrival is impossible to predict to the minute, and detours may arise without warning. I will strive to enjoy and learn from them all.

But I'm not making any resolutions.

Waxing the cat

I'm doing it right now. I'm supposed to be writing this morning, but first I simply had to pop over to Facebook to see what's happening in my little universe, and there was a post for Russ's periodic stint on the group blog "A Good Blog is Hard to Find". About cat waxing.

Talk about synchonicity. I think I need to write about waxing the cat this morning.

What, some of the sane people who have mistakenly wandered here ask, is waxing the cat? How could you wax the cat? Wouldn't the cat object? And what would be the point?

The answers, of course, are:
(a) waxing the cat is what you do when you're supposed to be writing but are running out of good excuses why you aren't. "I had meant to write this morning, but the sink was full of dirty dishes, the TiVo was 99% full, and I simply had to wax the cat."
(b) If you try to wax a real cat, it's hard. You need protective gear and some sort of cat-restraining device. Possibly one involving duck tape. Or goose tape. Whichever you can find.
(c) Yes, the cat will object. Violently. Art doesn't come without cost.
(d) Nothing whatsoever. And that is the point.

Cat waxing is about coping with authorial insecurity. If you can't find the time to write, you can't be blamed for being a hack. You can die secure in the knowledge of your blazing talent, which simply never had time to be realized.

Some of us are better at this than others. I'm freaking AWESOME.

Sadly, this is a far less important accomplishment than finishing the freaking novel. I'm going back to the study...just as soon as I finish commenting on Russ's blog post.

I grow old...I grow old...I shall wear my trousers with 1% lycra spandex for comfort

First it was the stretch jeans. I had resisted them for a very long time because of their inherent wrongness. I mean, stretch jeans. Old people wear those. But then there they were on the clearance rack, and they looked like normal jeans, and they were so damn CHEAP. So I tried them on.

Hey, I realized. These are comfortable. And they look fine, and they're cheap. Check, please.

I won't recite the standard tales of all the things that we've had to explain to our teenage children didn't exist before their time. Yadda yadda, stipulated: the Internets, the cell phone, the personal computer. The first thing Rachael ever read, when she was 2, was "dot-com". I knew from the beginning that our kids were growing up in a completely different era. That they would never understand what it meant to not be able to program your own music without a great deal of patience and a tape deck.

But this morning, during our standard getting-ready-for-school mayhem, Daniel came into the kitchen for a fashion consult. It's 60s day at school. How's this Pink Floyd t-shirt? Yes, he knew Floyd played in the 70s and 80s (we're not going to discuss the post-Waters period) but didn't this t-shirt have, well, a 60s feel? Mark and I pointed out that the 60s were a period of loud attire and suggested a Hawaiian shirt. But predictably Daniel grew bored of the exercise and came back to the kitchen a few minutes later wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a bar code on it.

Oh, no. "Hey, that bar-code isn't sixties. They didn't have bar codes until the eighties."

"What?"

Here we go again, alas. I remember not only the invention of the bar code but the consternation it caused. I remember the appearance of the unlabeled generic item. (Repo Man, anyone?)

Hell, I remember when lycra spandex leggings were cool. Uh, the first time.

Check, please.

This might be a manifesto

Yeah, I might have to nail this one to the cathedral door when it's done.

Today is the official release date of Shorn by Larissa N. Niec: the first book published by my brainchild, Mercury Retrograde Press. I'm immeasurably proud of the work we've done on this one--and it *has* been a "we", because in addition to the writer, any book must also have an editor, a proofreader, a typesetter/book designer, a cover designer, one or more artists, and people whose task it is to get the word out so people can fall in love with the creation and make its story part of their personal myth set. Shorn has had--still has--a whole team behind it. Because we're a new press, and we can't afford to hire full-time employees yet, I've done the majority of the work on this project, and for the most part I find the work fulfilling; but in the race to do this book justice, I have mostly set aside my own writing life. This is a thing I've viewed as a temporary necessity; in my mind, once we crossed the finish line on Shorn, things would calm down and I could get back to the study with a clear conscience.

I now understand that was unrealistic. There is still work to be done for Shorn, and the work will continue for a couple months yet: getting the word out, setting up relationships with new sales channels (a task for which I'm hugely grateful, btw), propagating the ebook versions and beginning to figure out the logistics of audio book production. Meanwhile Anointed, the next book on Mercury Retrograde's menu, is already waiting for me to start doing my share of what it needs; by the time that's done, I'll be behind on the next one. (And, oh, you're going to LOVE the next one, but there are still nagging legal entanglements that must be resolved, so for now I must leave you to fantasize. Two words to start with: Urban Fantasy.)

The bottom line: I am never going to be *caught up* on Mercury Retrograde business, at least not until Mercury Retrograde can afford staff. That's normal for a start-up business, and I've done the whole start-up thing before, so while I'm not uncomfortable with the headlong dash and all the other stuff that goes along with it, now that we're in a Mercury Retrograde period, my muse is crying for time in the study...and suddenly I remember that I founded Mercury Retrograde because the house I wanted to publish my own fiction didn't exist yet. It exists now, and I love it; but if I publish six, nine, or twelve books per year that win the hearts of critics and fans alike, earn out and go on to make money for their authors, and yet I am not writing fiction, I will not have done what I set out to do.

It is never going to be a convenient time for me to go back to writing; so long as I am writing, things will move more slowly in the office than they otherwise might. But it occurs to me that, while I refuse to hold other Mercury Retrograde authors to hard deadlines when meeting those deadlines would require them to compromise their art, I'm giving my own work no such respect. That has to stop.

So, while Mercury Retrograde Press authors and fans may wish I could move a little faster in the office, I trust they will understand that I must go back to carving out regular time in the study. No book will go unedited, un-typeset, or unpromoted; it's just that schedules will be a bit more fluid than they've been. In the long run, I suspect, all of Mercury Retrograde's books will benefit.

In the mean time, I have to go back to the study.

You don't need celestial charts; you've got me

It's uncanny. I have no explanation for it that fits within the paradigm occupied by those who deny the possibility of any sort of validity to astrological theory. All I know is that as soon as Mercury turns retrograde, I am summoned as by some invisible force to the study, where I must work on my own fiction for hours each day.

I'm not telling you I'm an astrological believer. But I think I'd better start putting Mercury's retrograde periods on my calendar, so I can plan for these slowdowns in the office.

Ah, things are lovely in the study. I am deep in the early-development stages of the final draft of The Shadow of the Sun, the novel I was afraid to bring to press first but secretly wished I could--which, I realized earlier this year, really does need to be the first out the door. I think I'll be writing the whole thing in first, with only one PoV: because if I allow myself to explore the journeys of other important characters in the way I wish I could, there's no way I'll bring this in at a length I can afford to produce. In fact I realized this morning that I'm going to have to be very disciplined about what goes in and what goes back into the hopper for later, even with the single PoV, if I am to keep it to a manageable length.

But that single PoV is my favorite character, bar none, so I don't mind too too much.

Meanwhile back in the office, I'm waiting for printer's proofs of the FINAL version of the Shorn trade paperback and (with Wynette's help, of course) developing the e-book version. Gotta get Shorn off the front burner so I can dig into Anointed: Zach delivered revisions to that beauty a few days ago, and now he, Brett, and I will zip through final reads and final tweaks...and then plunge into pre-production.

During the parts of the day when I can tear myself away from the study, of course. :)

Back in the study

Woohoo! I wrote lots of sentences today. I'm a bit less than halfway through the first chapter of (please writing gods) the final draft of The Shadow of the Sun, and it actually feels really good. Unlike Russ, I lack the chutzpah to sign up for NaNoWriMo, because I am still trying to find a rhythm that will keep things humming both in the study and the office--but it is a delightful thing to be actually writing sentences that evoke what I mean to say.

Part of the reason I'm having fun with this one: crazy deep worldbuilding. I can't help it: I'm a worldbuilding geek. And I'm having a great time with the worldbuilding on this one, which feels like a cage match between J.R.R. Tolkien and China Mieville. (My money's on the steampunk guy, by the way. At least from the worldbuilding perspective. The old man may outlast that young geek in the long run...)

What the hell am I blathering about? Shadow is kinda sorta high fantasy...except that it isn't, of course. My protag is too flawed to be a hero of the high fantasy type. And I am intrigued by the idea of a world in which many of the problems we address scientifically are handled by magic--but in which magic is a scarce commodity, and those who lack the political clout to lay hands on it try to use tech as a substitute, and the whole universe is not stuck in some perpetual deodorized Middle Ages. (And in which the difference between good and evil is a profoundly relevant question, but there is neither a Black Hat nor a White Hat. But I digress, as usual.) I am not the first one to think along these lines, of course. But I've been tinkering with this novel for a long time, and tonight I feel as if I may actually pull it off.

There will be Talentless Hack moments along the way, of course. But for tonight I am enjoying feeling competent.

On Writing--Or Not

I am not writing right now. I cannot express how much this pains me; the writers among you will understand. It's not that I'm *blocked* or that I don't know what to write--it's that I can't find the time. I'm in a crunch period that began about two weeks ago and is likely to run two more, and I don't even have time to make dinner consistently or return phone calls not related to work (and I'm really sorry about that, btw. You know who you are.)

It's work, of course. The beautiful business of publishing. I am still the person responsible for most everything Mercury Retrograde does, and I don't want to complain about that: this is my brainchild, and I love the work. Well, except the filing and bookkeeping. In case you haven't heard, we have a book scheduled for official release on October 1st, and we are busily finalizing final things, scheduling Larissa's book tour, and doing truckloads of publicity. All very important and enjoyable stuff, and in many cases the first time I've done the things in question--which means there have been false starts and mid-course corrections, and just generally that things have taken longer than they will for the next book and the one after that. I understand all this, and it's not so hard to be philosophical about it, because I love the work.

But just the same there is a certain defrocked wizard on the verge of getting sucked into things it will take him years to fully understand, waiting for me in the study...and I know exactly what the next hundred pages should be. It's hard to be patient.

Must dig in and make the final push, down here in the office. Soon there will be things to read and see: a book, details of an author tour, a new Mercury Retrograde website, Mercury Retrograde's close-to-finalized catalog for next year. Right now it's insanity on the inside and pretty boring from outside. I'll be back in the study soon.

Yes, Virginia, there is a difference

I am adamantly opposed to gender roles. I believe that, in any situation, the role a person adopts--should it be *necessary* to adopt a role at all--should be determined by aptitudes and inclinations, not a person's role in the reproductive process. As a parent, I have worked hard to give my children as gender-neutral an upbringing as possible, and to imbue them with the attitude that any path for which they have the ability is open to them. As a small child Daniel had and loved toys supposedly intended for children of both genders; Rachael has always been just as interested in playing some game involving mayhem and death as any of her male friends.

But it is an inescapable truth that certain things do lurk on our sex chromosomes that are different from things on the other flavor. And some of them are funny as hell. Here's my new favorite:

Last night my mother sent this joke to all the women in our family (a group which is understood to include my brothers' wives):

THE PERFECT DRESS

Jennifer's wedding day was fast approaching. Nothing could dampen her excitement -- not even her parents' nasty divorce.

Her mother had found the PERFECT dress to wear and would be the best dressed mother-of-the- bride ever! A week later, Jennifer was horrified to learn that her father's new young wife had bought the exact same dress as her mother! Jennifer asked her step mom to exchange it, but she refused.

'Absolutely not. I look like a million bucks in this dress, and I'm wearing it,' she replied.

Jennifer told her mother, who graciously said, 'Never mind, sweetheart. I'll get another dress. After all, it's your special day.'

A few days later, they went shopping and did find another gorgeous dress.

When they stopped for lunch, Jennifer asked her mother, 'Aren't you going to return the other dress? You really don't have another occasion where you could wear it.'

Her mother just smiled and replied, 'Of course I do, dear. I'm wearing it to the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding.'

When I read the joke, I laughed so hard that both kids came in from the living room to see what was so funny. I pulled back from the monitor to let them read. Rachael (who is 13) HOWLED. Daniel (one of the most perceptive people I know, particularly for that late-teens demographic) just looked bewildered.

"So where's the punchline?" he said.

And that is today's lesson in the real differences between men and women. :)

Nerves...of steel

The closer I get to the end of Affairs, the more ways it finds to make me nervous. Today I am writing a scene that must be there for structural reasons--but it is turning out to have a surprising emotional charge, complete with elements I must keep under control lest I pull in thematic stuff that belongs in the next volume, because it is the first time Lesle and Deaclan have been alone in the same room since he pulled the rug out from beneath me *again*. I am once again walking the tightrope of being true to what these characters would really think, do, and say about everything that has happened of late--and controlling the flow of the novel.

This is complicated by the sheer mechanical issue of page count, which in turn is complicated by Mark.

Mark has been upper management for the vast majority of his career, which means he's got finely-honed methodologies for attempting to control things beyond his power. Since he helped me arrive at appropriate pricing for Shorn in the UK and European markets, one of those things has been Affairs. Suddenly he's gone from simply being proud of my artistic achievements to seeing the business side of it-- and he asks me questions like "When will you be done?"

(That all depends how much help I get on my mundane tasks, doesn't it?)

And "How long is it now?"

This is because he has learned to calculate the cost of producing a book. So rather than finally going to sleep last night, he's doing page-count math in his head and telling me that if I go all the way up to the 240K-word-count limit Wynette assures me I must observe if I am to keep the book under $20 on the cover, I will never make any money on this.

Now, which of my two advisers has published books before? Sigh.

I am trying not to take this personally. I know this is just a sign that he's fully on board and engaged in the emotional process with me, and it is simply a fact of his personality that things beyond his control make him crazy. But now, as I sit in the study writing this two-scenes-from-the-Act-3-break moment, I keep finding my eye on the little window in the menu bar that tells how many words I've used up, my attention distracted by the page count in this chapter.

Yeah, you've gotta have nerves of steel to be a writer-publisher.

You know you're a Goth when...

First of all, full disclosure: no one has ever, to my knowledge, actually adorned my face with the trademark Goth "I'm dead" makeup. I do have a sort of unconquerable natural pallor, however.

Nevertheless I was forced to confront the inherent truth of Gothness last night: Russ Marshalek was his typical considerate self and sent me an invitation to Wordsmiths' Black-and-Red Prom event in honor of the release of Breaking Dawn. Naturally I'll be attending.

Last night I was pondering what to wear; I've got a closet full of black, of course, though I do wear other colors, too. After a bit of consideration I came up with a choice that should work for both the event and the fact that it will take place in Atlanta in August. But then I wondered how I might go about *Gothing things up*: what did I have on hand that was really, really Goth?

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that I couldn't figure out how to make my planned ensemble more Goth because practically everything I wear is already Goth. Goth is like the air to me.

Duh.

Welcome to Mercury Retrograde

I am not someone who must check her horoscope first thing in the morning; as many of you know, I have essentially no *beliefs*, only suspicions and experiences and observations. One observation that will surprise no one who knows me: there is something oddly numinous about Mercury's retrograde phase, something that changes things in surprising and frequently unpredictable ways. I'm not talking about the fact that mail servers seem to be behaving badly right now, which they are; I'm not going to get into the disaster stories I'm hearing from people who had the poor judgment to attempt software upgrades during this phase. (Just don't do it: that's what you need to know.) As far as I'm concerned, the significant thing about Mercury in retrograde is the effect it has on *me*, particularly on the muse.

I am supposed to be spending a lot of bandwidth on discussing my race to finish Affairs right now: and no, I haven't forgotten, nor am I done. [Bad writer! I am seriously late on my deadline. Fortunately I know the publisher. :) ] I've simply been unable to talk about process, or about much of anything regarding my creative life. This is a well-known feature of the retrograde, at least for me. I've been working steadily--but in typical Mercury Retrograde fashion, I've fallen into a sort of communications black hole, and while there's a lot of words being conceived and written in here, they just can't seem to find their ways out beyond the event horizon to reach other people.

So, to catch you up a bit: the muse woke up at the beginning of this cycle and decided that nothing would do but to drop everything and go back to the beginning of the novel, and start building in that neglected subplot-and-a-half. Classic Mercury Retrograde stuff, actually. I finally finished that over the weekend; at last I am ready to work through the final section before the climax. My word-count estimate was Just Dead Wrong, as usual: I am currently at 197K words, give or take, and I *still* estimate about 20K more. Maybe more than that, actually.

Yeah, I can't estimate.

The most surprising statistic to me, since I've spent all this time working on a subplot that was all about Deaclan: the PoV proportion is still hugely tilted in favor of Lesle. Which seems appropriate, since this was supposed to be her novel in the first place. As of last night, 68% of the pages thus far are written from her PoV. Yes, I'm a geek, and I do chart and conduct the occasional structural analysis: I need to do this, just to control for how often I get hijacked by characters. One more observation for the structure geeks; the rest of you can look away lest your eyes burn: this novel is turning out to have a Syd-Field-classic 3-act structure. My Act 2 has 5 reversals, not counting the reversal into Act 2 or the reversal (not yet written) into Act 3. Of those mid-act reversals, one is driven by Deaclan, the rest by Lesle; which, I guess, is proportionally correct. So maybe my plot is working. :)

I'm feeling a sort of existential insecurity about this novel at present: not *can I finish?* because I know I can; I could tell you exactly what the major plot points are, for the rest of the novel. It's more "Oh, gods, what if it SUCKS?"

That's normal for me, too. I'll just have to keep writing and see how I feel about it when it's complete, and pass it along to my alpha readers, who I know I can trust not to let me embarrass myself in public. :)

Staying the Course

It's been a challenging day in the study: I won't say difficult, because that would imply things didn't go well, and ultimately they did. But getting there wasn't as easy as it might have been.

It's been a few days since I wrote: I had that big birthday weekend, and a heavy week leading up to it, and the rhythm I like to maintain in the study just wasn't there. That tends to spell trouble for me in the getting-started-on-the-page department, and even though I knew what I was going to write today, that's exactly what happened. For a couple hours things just didn't flow; I felt as if what I was writing was stilted and boring (and as you know, Bob, if *you* are bored with what you're writing, your audience has already turned on the TV); the phone kept ringing, with calls I had to take. During my less confident days as a writer, I would probably have concluded I was (ack!) blocked, let myself off the hook, and hoped tomorrow was better and the block was just a passing thing rather than the descent of True Creative Paralysis.

But I knew that the paragraph I was writing was there to set up data I needed in play, and that all I had to do was keep it short and move on; and I knew that, if I would just stick with it, I would become unstuck, and the words would start flowing. Because, if you are patient with yourself and you're honoring your characters, they will. So I stayed the course: accepted that I would be getting to my afternoon deliverables later than I'd hoped, but required myself to hang in there.

Now, I didn't chain myself to the desk: I wandered off and made myself some lunch, and shuffled laundry into the washer, the dryer, the piles of folded clothes; I sat down in the kitchen and read a book while I ate , and took my time with it. But then I went back to the study, and just slogged through another couple of paragraphs--and then Lesle walked through the door of the room where the action I'd planned was going to happen, and she and Edward started talking about things that needed to be discussed, and I forgot about feeling stiff. The muse just did his thing, and when next I looked up, the chapter was complete.

Those of you who follow the play-by-play around here may remember that just last week I was speaking out against the prevalent belief that one must produce at a consistent rate; this may seem as if I'm contradicting myself. I don't think so: what I'm saying is not that we must produce n pages per week or per day (although goals are useful)--but that we must be both patient and brave during those moments when we walk into our writing places with ideas we want to pursue, and it doesn't go easily. What's easy in those moments is to declare ourselves blocked, broken or inadequate as artists. What we need to do is be patient with ourselves.

No sausage yet

I don't know if there is such a thing as a typical writer's life; I doubt it. I am the only one I know who has trouble writing on weekends, though. I didn't get any pages written on Affairs this weekend, for all the usual weekend reasons:

* I was catching up on my sleep, which I can't seem to get a full quota of during the school week.

* When all my people are in the house, I try to remember to enjoy their company. Daniel in particular will be living under this roof for little more than a year; I've got to enjoy the incidental, no-stakes encounters while I can.

* We tend to plan and eat meals that require a significant amount of time in the kitchen on weekends, largely because I am not the only one coming up with food ideas. I lose hours to this activity, but we all enjoy it. (And frankly it's a change of pace from my current first-book-release-ever freneticism, which results in catch-as-catch-can meals.)

* Laundry. It's inevitable, it's weekly, it's a time-sink.

* When Mark is home for hours on end, he reminds me of all the responsibilities I have outside my study and office. I tend to spend time on things that otherwise get ignored.

At any rate, now it is Monday morning, and the quiet descends. It's time to write. Unfortunately, another thing that frequently happens to me when I've been away from the ms. for too long is that I begin to feel anxious--as if I might somehow have forgotten how to write in the interim. So I will have to spend a bit of time easing myself back into the story before flow sets in.

Tomorrow will be better in this regard.

At long last, Bat Mitzvah photos

They are finally all up, with many thanks to many helpful friends with cameras. View them all here. (The pictures. The friends, too, actually.) You will note immediately that I am a completist, rather than only posting photos in which I look good.

Lots of red-eye in the shots from the party. We're not demons, no matter what you've heard. It was just the lighting.

Ah, the memories!

Real Book Fans

If you've ever wondered what it's like to be followed by adoring and slightly (okay, perhaps more than slightly) obsessive fans, read this. In particular, read the comments. All artists need true fans, of course--and Wynette has this amazing pipeline right into the collective unconscious that makes her work generate this response again and again. (Blood Is Thicker Than Water, anyone? Even the people who hate it can't stop talking about it on Amazon.)

I won't be camped out on the lawn waiting for the book, of course. I've read it already. Twice. :)

I am weirder than you

Once upon a time, my mother and my mother-in-law were visiting at the same time...and actually achieving rapport. (I hear the married people among you gasp; for the benefit of the rest of you, mother and mother-in-law working together can generate exponentially more aggravation than either of them alone. Go rent The In-Laws if you don't believe me.) At any rate, they were commiserating about how unreasonable and unmanageable Mark and I were, individually and collectively.

"It's like they're having a contest to see who can be weirder," my mother opined.

Well, let me tell you, I Win. Naturally Mark doesn't want to admit defeat, but I know I've got it locked. Not only am I weirder than him, I'm weirder than you.

It's tempting to blame my father. Evidently it was his idea to name me Barbara, the accepted meaning of which is Stranger. He loved the cognitive dissonance generated by pairing it with Friend, which of course was my last name until I married Mark and added his to the mix. Any Rosicrucian worth his salt can tell you that enlightenment can be achieved by disciplining one's mind to accommodate contradictory truths: what they call achieving modulated paradox. (Knowing that, of course, is one of the things that makes me Weirder Than You.) But my father is a very logical person, so I don't think that was the intent.

Nevertheless, there it is: he named me Stranger, and I am.

I realized recently that one of the things that marks me as different from the norm is my taste for the edge in my business and creative lives. Most people crave safety; I'd rather work without a net. I'm not an adrenaline junkie; it's just that the places where they string the nets are not interesting, and I'd rather have a rich intellectual and creative life. Mark and I have spent our adult lives embroiled in one start-up and/or privately-held business venture after another. There's no net out here; we swing from one chandelier to the next. Sometimes it's fairly hair-raising, but none of the mistakes we've made have killed us, and very few of them were irreparable. We exchange the feeling that we are safe and everything is under control, which is most people's primary motivation for choosing big established companies when they look for jobs, for the opportunity to make our own mistakes, do our own art (his is a scientific rather than *artistic* art, but the principle is the same) and pursue our own visions.

It is my current belief that there are certain experiences which change a person so profoundly and irrevocably that it becomes almost impossible to remember what it was to exist on the other side of that experiential line. Becoming a parent, particularly the parent of more than one child, is one of those things: when you are truly responsible for another human who you know will not thrive unless you give them heart and soul, that changes everything. People who have crossed into the parent zone share understandings that people who have not had the experience will never really comprehend unless they make the same crossing.

Likewise, declaring oneself a professional in the arts works a profound change on the artist. There the responsibility is to one's self; but the necessity of taking responsibility rather than waiting for the Gods of Art to come down and anoint one changes works a change in one's artistic life which is nearly as profound as the transition to parenthood: we become, in effect, artistic adults. Becoming a pro liberated me; I now believe that has a lot to do with the fact that I came out where I did, on the independent side of the line. Becoming a pro finally gave me the control to go with my outside-the-norm ideas.

I have only recently recognized that choosing start-up or independent business models is another of those paradigm-changing choices. Those of us who run our business lives from the chandeliers share experiences and attitudes that people who gravitate towards the feeling of safety view as just plain nuts. We're accustomed to being in the fray of business, to dealing with whatever comes our ways, rather than being insulated; we take for granted that we will make mistakes, but that we will survive and learn from our mistakes, and we know from experience that very few of the mistakes we make will be uncorrectable. We accept all this in order to pursue our own visions, and most of the time we take for granted that this is just the way things are: because we know that working without a net is the price of doing the work that lets us grow.

Wynette likens running your own business to running the Iditarod. I find real resonance in that: running the Iditarod is -- well, am I the only person who has noticed the similiarity of its spelling to the word idiot? It seems a senseless activity. You assemble your team and drive out into the middle of nowhere, under conditions that could potentially kill you. People who have been through the Iditarod not only share an experience, a mode of being, that the rest of us can only look at in puzzlement, but are driven to repeat the experience over and over. Mark and I have been running the Iditarod, metaphorically speaking, for about 20 years now. We haven't won yet; but it hasn't killed us, either, and we've managed to raise two fantastic humans and have some wonderful intellectual and creative adventures along the way.

To outsiders, I know, a high percentage of what I do looks crazy. But I must swing from the chandeliers, indeed must have a fistful of exposed wiring, if I am to reach my potential. It's just one of the things that makes me weird. I am grateful to have a husband and creative partners who understand and are willing to join me out here, beyond the nets.

(Yes, we are secretly having more fun out here. Anyone who has ever heard me laugh the Evil Laugh will surely understand.)

The Soul Team

Recently, Wynette & I were discussing a difficulty we share in the area of keeping up with our blogs: the fact that, as publishers and people with a dizzying variety of involvements in the tiny little arena of the publishing world, more often than not the thing that most occupies our minds is a thing it would be inappropriate to get into in public. There are days when it feels impossible to say anything in public at all.

Once in a while, fortunately, there are elixirs we can distill from the peat bogs of our lives and share. Here is today's brew:

Some months back, Sonja watched some film about people swimming the English Channel. This is an activity that makes no sense whatsoever to me, but I suppose that most people would find all the craziness that goes into writing and publishing incomprehensible, when it implies making sacrifices in key areas such as free time, one's social life, and the leeway in which to pursue really high-yield pyramid schemes. I digress, as usual. My point lies in what Sonja took away from this nameless film.

In watching the film, as I understand it, Sonja was forcibly struck by the fact that the swimmers who crossed the English Channel didn't make that insane crossing alone: to go it alone was acknowledged to be tantamount to suicide. They were accompanied by support teams, who brought them potable water and (I'm guessing now; I haven't seen the film in question) let them hang off the boat for a bit of a breather now and then. The point is that the one person who the media et al might notice was just the visible part of a vitally important team. Sonja's take, upon reflection: "I need a soul team."

What did she mean? In reflecting on the journey we all make in trying to grow and develop our selves, our craft, our souls, we all need support teams of people who -- whether or not they always agree with us -- at least understand and support our goals and give us help, water, and maybe the side of a boat to cling to when the going gets tough. Because, let's face it, it does. In any all-out creative endeavor, whether it's starting and running one's own business, writing the novel, achieving enlightenment, or whatever, attempting to go it alone is to plan to fail. This doesn't mean that the people on our soul teams must lay aside their dreams and goals in favor of ours; just the opposite. It means we must take care of our soul-team-mates as we pursue our various paths, and share our journeys, and support one another when the water is choppy.

I have been in the midst of some rough lessons lately -- which, of course, is part of why I've been quiet on the blog. But I have been blessed with, and grateful for, the support of my Soul Team, who have let me hang from the side of the boat now and then, helped me consult my (hopefully waterproof) map of the mysterious territory I'm attempting to traverse, and especially brought me the emotional nourishment and support I've needed while I've done my work.

Mark, Wynette, Sonja, Ron... thanks for the water. :)

Long time no blog...

It's been such a long time it's hard to know where to begin. Last year's highlights:

Mercury Retrograde Press

Yes, it is what you think. I took the plunge and founded an independent press. We will be releasing our first two novels this year, and I am insanely proud.

Rachael's Bat Mitzvah

Rachael celebrated her Bat Mitzvah in November. It was, without question, the Best Bat Mitzvah Ever. All business came to a screeching, or perhaps whining, halt for nearly two months while I devoted all available energy to supporting her through the process. Time well spent. Yes, I will be posting the rest of the pictures everyone shared! Shortly after I update my business websites, which are in dire need of attention.

Be Mused

My business and writing partner, Wynette Hoffman, and I spent much of our time and creative energies aiding writers and fledgling independent publishers in readying their creative efforts for market. We learned even more than our clients did, I think.

the Society for Free-Range Muses

This was a good idea, just slightly ahead of its time -- as is par for the course with everything Wynette and I do. And it turns out that I've got so much to say on this topic that the only sane thing to do is to make it a separate post. You can read it here.
Other things that happened while I was away from my designated blog:

* Mark took a new gig, with LSI
* Mercury Retrograde Press hosted its first-ever Writers' Retreat. I almost didn't come home!
* Daniel played lacrosse, played Gus in a production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and drove himself to school every day. (!!)


It was a pretty interesting ride. This year is shaping up to be even more exciting. Some of the things I'm engaged in/looking forward to:

* my novel, The Affairs of Dragons, is scheduled for release this winter. I just passed 118,000 words, out of an anticipated 180-200K. Hey, I know how it ends!
* I will once again be serving as editor on Wynette's next novel, the much anticipated Raised By Wolves: Treasures. As one of her alpha readers I have the privilege of knowing that this one is already even better than the previous two!
* I will be editing and publishing Larissa N. Niec's debut novel, Shorn, which is scheduled for release this summer under the Mercury Retrograde imprint. I am unspeakably proud that Larissa chose to let me publish her work, which could have commanded Large Advances from Publishers Who Shall Remain Nameless.
* I am engaged in developmental editing for a couple of very exciting nonfiction projects of the New Age/self-help variety. More to come!
* more and more of the people I work with are getting serious about nurturing their creativity and learning how to manage their creative processes. We are having such wonderful, rewarding, intimate sessions together, and this is rapidly becoming my very favorite aspect of my client business.
* Larissa taught me how to knit at the Writer's Retreat last year. After my triumphant completion of two scarves, I am knitting a sweater! (Yes, unreasonably excited about this.)
* Rachael is in the process of choosing and applying to high schools. Daniel has entered the serious phase of his college search. It is my job to act as facilitator in both of these endeavors -- and to observe in awe how well they understand themselves, their strengths and weaknesses, their needs as students -- and the process of courtship with schools, which has become a mutual-interviewing rather than a supplicant-based process for their generation.

I have days when I wish I were younger, which is really just a highly displaced way of saying I wish I were more decorative. It has taken me this long to get to the point where I could be living this life. No way would I go back in time!

Happy New Year, all. Having spent such a big chunk of last year making the changes that made everything I'm doing this year possible, I finally feel ready to be consistent about keeping the Outside World updated. Please check in and comment, because there's a lot I want to chat about.