Writing telepathy and other aberrant behaviors

Wynette has begun the process of revising her cult classic Blood is Thicker Than Water in preparation for releasing a second edition. I'm doing what I can to help, of course, because that's what we do around here. One of my tasks is to weigh in on style issues: I will be the editor of record on the second edition, which should not be construed as my having any sort of power over any part of the endeavor. :)

One of the conundra (is that a word? seems it should be. must go look... Oh dear. Forget I even had that moment. Have I mentioned I never studied Latin, though my tuition dollars have paid for a few years of the stuff in the next generation?) Ahem. One of the conundrums of writing speculative fiction--actually, a high percentage of the conundrums involved--stem from the fact that in SFF we postulate certain activities as more or less normal when we don't have common consensual-reality labels, grammars, and stylistic conventions to describe and discuss them.

When I edit SFF, I spend more mental energy on how to handle these issues than on the garden-variety editing required on all the many pages in your average SFF book. Do we capitalize the pronouns that refer to deities? How shall we punctuate the telepathic conversations? Do we use the same set of verbs to refer to psionic behaviors as to the corresponding mundane ones? People grow surprisingly passionate about these issues, as if they might have definitive right and wrong answers--when, should we muster the perspective to view these issues dispassionately, it becomes clear that the answers can only be definitive to that particular author and work.

Digging back into Blood is a case-in-point. We have wound up having long (not contentious, thankfully) discussions about how to present telepathic conversation. Because I was wearing my Editor Hat during these discussions, I was able to maintain a neutral stance, give the whole issue up to my standard "as long as it's consistent and comprehensible, it cannot be considered incorrect, because the CMoS has yet to render an opinion on the topic". And Wynette, whose work this is, finally made a ruling on how this particular piece of imaginative styling should work in her book. Her ruling is *correct*, because it falls within the few definitive stylistic rules we have for these sorts of things.

But as an author and an SFF geek, I'm going, "No! Wrong!!! I TOTALLY DISAGREE with the way you're doing this!" When my book comes out at the end of this year, the telepathic conversations will be presented very differently from the way Wynette is doing it--because that's how I think they should be. Because that's my work, and no one else gets to say I'm imagining incorrectly, as long as I'm consistent about it.

We must remember to be polite about these things, and not smack one another with our well-worn copies of the CMoS. Because ultimately what we don't agree about is the way we imagine these uncommon phenomena for which there are no consensual-reality labels, grammars, and stylistic conventions--let alone definitive truths. Because ultimately what we're disagreeing about is the contents of our imaginations, which it would be very silly to expect to match up in the first place.

A short detour

Well, that scene didn't turn out at all the way I expected--but it did turn out *right*. Fortunately it was a short, character- and relationship-enriching detour.

Now, back on the bus.

Avoidance Behavior

After a couple good days in the study, I have run up against a plot-point long planned, a thing I reasoned Edward would decide to do. It seemed altogether sensible until last night, when I realized what Lesle's reaction was going to be: not at all what anyone else expected (including me, btw. Duh.) but inevitable given her character.

Suddenly I am waffling about this plot point. Maybe it's right; maybe it's not. And all at once I find that there are fifty tasks I have been ignoring that must be completed Right Now. It's all avoidance behavior, of course.

Even blogging about the problem is avoidance behavior.

Time to turn off blog and just go write the scene. I can, after all, excise it later if it turns out to have been wrong...

Q&A with Publishers & Editors

Part 2 of Diane Wolfe's project is up here. A lot of really thoughtful answers. Nice work, Diane!

Happy Birthday, Wordsmiths!

Just got back from Wordsmiths' first birthday party--what a cool crowd. Got to meet more of the crew from Wordsmiths, notably Alice, who shares a bit of a Texas past; got to talk a bit with Zach and Russ; got to listen to some fun readings and a spoken-word performance by a young man named Will, who was awesome and hilarious. And I finally met Tim from Baby Got Books--who boils a mean crawfish.

And oh the crawfish! I haven't had The Real Thing since leaving Texas. Tim knows what he's doing.

Crawfish are still a negative-calorie food, and a little bit Wild Kingdom for those of us who usually eat food pre-sanitized by food processor folk. You need those hand-wipes. But the potatoes in particular are not to be missed.

Happy Birthday, Wordsmiths! What a great party!

We're up on Amazon!!!

OMG, I am squealy excited! Shorn is available on Amazon for pre-order! There's no image yet (must add getting that taken care of to my to-do list) but there's a button one can click to pre-order the book.

Unspeakably excited.

FWIW, you will be able to order a pre-release version from the Mercury Retrograde website in a few days. Genre collectible to be? Maybe...

I'll post the link for the pre-release version when we've got all the kinks out. Meanwhile, BEHOLD! We are on Amazon!!!

Shorn on Amazon

Kortnee made me do it

Yeah, it began innocently enough. Kortnee, Mercury Retrograde's resident Web 2.0 guru, has been setting up social web presences for Mercury Retrograde. We've got a way cool Myspace Page now; and today a Facebook page for Mercury Retrograde went live. Complications develop: it turns out one must create a Facebook account to see anybody's page. So I had no choice but to create my own Facebook page. By this evening, even Kortnee could see that giving me that shiny new toy had been a mistake.

I've been nothing but social since noon. Mercury's retrograde phase must be ending. And me with my novel not yet finished!

More on that anon...

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. :)

Q&A with Publishers & Editors

Diane Wolfe, author of the YA Series "Circle of Friends", is one of the organizers of a writer's group called TheWritersMeow on the DeviantArt forums--and she and I have an e-list in common. She recently organized a sort of web-panel of publishers & editors to answer questions from TheWritersMeow members. Some good questions, and some interesting answers. And yes, I was on the panel.

This is the first of two installments in Diane's panel report:
http://thewritersmeow.deviantart.com/journal/18741889/#journal

I must say I love it when writers take the time to be smart about the business side of things.

The Shorn Launch

Look what I found on the Wordsmiths Books site!

The advance write-up for the launch of Shorn

I am over the moon with excitement. Russ said it best:

Free Drinks!

A few thousand words on book signings

from Ubermensch Russ Marshalek, who will be the True Host (I will only be the one who gets to look like she's done something important) of Larissa's book launch in July.

The man says a mouthful:

A Good Blog is Hard To Find: On the nutso book world, Vol I

For ancient religion geeks

Wynette and I were discussing recently how difficult it is to write works that touch on ancient Celtic culture, particularly Celtic religion. There Be Dragons there: that area of study is a battleground among academics, and those of us who have other flavors of attachment to that tradition tend to have a difficult time separating what truths we can glean of that tradition from the fantasy-movies that popular culture has overlaid them with. I have found a better flavor of understanding, not to mention some emotional peace on the topic, from digging into academic source materials. In the course of preparing for this series I went so far as to spend months (really, months!) reading academic works on Irish archaeology and actually dragged Mark all the way across The Pond to walk those sites myself.

Turned out to be a religious experience, ironically enough. But I digress, as usual.

Presently, I am reading a book loaned to me by Ron: The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality & the Origins of Culture by William Irwin Thompson (ISBN 0-312-80512-8) which essentially picks up where Frazier left off with The Golden Bough – with stunning results. I am going to buy this book; it is one I will find necessary to re-read fairly often.

In the section I am reading now, Thompson engages in a lengthy footnote on the topic of the original One World Religion (of the Great Mother, of course) and where Sumer, with its ultimately masculine tradition that became the backbone of the Etruscan, Roman, and Greek religions diverged from the continuing Mother Goddess trad of Western Europe, and recommends these books, which I am also going to hunt down, as context on that divergence:

Time Stands Still: New Light on Megalithic Science by Keith Chritchlow (London, Gordon Fraser, 1979)

-and-

The Silbury Treasure by Michael Dames (London, Thames & Hudson, 1976)

The Avebury Cycle by the same guy & publisher, 1977

It was this week, as I was reading Thompson’s book, eating my lunch, absorbing his discussion of the Great Mother as both womb and tomb and how that perception is reflected in Neolithic tomb-sites e.g. Newgrange (though he doesn’t mention Newgrange but rather Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales, and shows that picture)—when, because I’ve been following Thompson’s argument and have passed through the narrow tunnel into the inner sanctum of Newgrange myself, I suddenly saw what would have been obvious to anyone who breathed that religion: the entrances to those barrow-tombs are models of the vagina of the Great Mother, which in that way of thinking is a two-way street. But this is only one of many insights I’ve had into the profoundly male-female, always-about-fertility-and-yet-always-about-something-more, nature of that religion. So if ancient Celtic culture and religion are on your radar, do yourself a favor: pick up those books.

Book launch 2.0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxschLOAr-s

Please observe the no-coffee-while-watching rule...

Please. It's for your safety.

A laugh break

Alec Baldwin just keeps getting funnier. Go watch.

http://www.illusiontv.com/news/2008/05/alec-baldwins-scifi-pilot/

Eleventh-hour plot restructuring

Making fiction-sausage doesn't get much uglier than this. When Deaclan blew me off my story map a few days ago, I realized in short order that I had to rework the plot for this last section of the novel. My story bus gets hijacked frequently enough that I've actually got a methodology now. In the interests of full disclosure...

I've got two computers in my study. (Yes, I'm a geek. And I'm married to somebody in the computing industry, which means I have a great deal of tech support and the occasional hand-me-down from a defunct company, which is where I got Study Computer #2, my laptop.) I have an external monitor (another defunct-company hand-me-down) hooked up to my laptop, so there are two good monitors and a laptop screen at my disposal--which is a good thing, because it turns out I need to look at a lot of data at once when I'm developing fiction, particularly when I'm performing reconstructive surgery on a plot. So on one of my monitors I bring up Power Writer, the program in which I do all my fiction writing. (If you're not familiar with Power Writer, and you write novels, this is a thing you want to know about: go here.) And on my other monitor, the one connected to the laptop, I bring up MS Word and start brainstorming in a new file. (Fortunately I've also got my favorite new productivity aid, Synergy, running, and can talk to both computers with one keyboard and mouse.)

In my brainstorming file, I ask myself questions like What does Edward want now? What is he afraid of? What is he going to do about it? and then attempt to answer those questions. The answers frequently surprise me, and always lead me to discover things that belong in my developing plot. But then, of course, I must also ask myself questions like What is Deaclan going to do about this thing Edward plans? -- which leads me to even more plot points. All of these new plot points must be logged in my story file along with whatever notes I've got on them. I must go through this same exercise with each of my important characters, not just my PoVs.

In the process, for better or worse, I also discover pieces of motivation that have to be set up earlier in the story: things I was not consciously aware of until I began this exercise, even though they've been driving certain behaviors all along. Now I dive into earlier sections of the novel, layering in a few paragraphs of the rumination Deaclan favors (he says far more to the reader than to just about anybody else, as it turns out) or performing minor adjustments to existing dialogue.

Then, finally, I am left with a list of New Problems to solve: things I have determined characters will want or need to do, for which I don't yet know the mechanics of how to accomplish them. They include issues such as the things one of two people who are functionally joined at the hip must do in order to effectively deceive the other, within the story rule-set, and -- always the most challenging -- how to accomplish certain bits of magic that Deaclan will decide are necessary.

It will be a couple days before I am writing sentences again, but it is already becoming obvious to me that I was wrong in my previous post: this novel is not going to come in shorter than anticipated. Silly me. I am going to have a hell of a time keeping it from getting *longer*. But it will definitely be a more exciting final act than I had previously planned.

And this, finally, is another reason why I write sequentially and accept the shenanigans of my unruly characters. I could never have imagined this story all at one go; it evolves as I write, and is much better for it. The novel that will finally go to press will include only a vanishingly small amount of what I originally expected to write, and the muse--who mostly doesn't say much until I am putting words on the page--is better at this stuff than I. :)

Yeah, my plot's broken again

As usual, my conscious mind is the last to know. When I got nervous about Deaclan's reaction in the last scene, I *should* have been: I now realize it changes big chunks of his plot. What I'd planned for him between now & the climax has been entirely obviated; whatever changes I make to his plot must, perforce, ripple into Lesle's as well. I must, at this late date, engage in yet another round of plot restructuring.

Two pieces of good news:

The plot as re-planned by the muse (thought not yet fully revealed to my conscious mind) will be better than the one I'd sketched. He is better at plot than I.

The book will probably come in a bit shorter.

Now I just have to figure out what everyone will be doing instead of what I'd planned. Has anybody seen my map?

Why I write sequentially

Today I feel as if I've got a tiger by the tail. Yesterday I executed the plot point I had planned for that point in the story--but, as so often happens, I was surprised by a character's emotional reaction, left with a profound feeling of uncertainty about what he's going to do next and how it will influence the unfolding story.

Don't read too much into my assertion that I had planned this plot point: I had only realized what Deaclan was going to do at this point in the story a few days earlier, when I began thinking about the plot point to which he's reacting and remembered that--because of the rules of magic and magical bonds already in play--Deaclan would be immediately aware of things anyone else could only have guessed at. And that those things weren't going to make him happy. Suddenly this event which I had originally planned as part of another plot was affecting Deaclan and his tactics, and -- more importantly, to my mind -- moving him into an emotional space I wasn't ready for. One unanticipated emotional response from a character can--and frequently does--change the way the plot unfolds.

The closer I come to the end of this novel, the more nervous things like this make me. In early chapters, when characters surprise me, I feel entirely comfortable just letting them do their things and finding out what they're getting at as things unfold. But now I am (I hope) within fifty pages of the climax, and the novel has to end in a particular place--and, more troubling yet, because the next novel will continue the action of this one, my plot structures must work across the divide between these books. I must not allow characters to reveal things that I need to use in the next volume--and I can't fall into the trap of allowing them to stagnate because I'm trying to hold off. And when my characters surprise me, they always move my reveals forward from where I'd planned them. I am, after all, notoriously slow at most everything. I can only assume that when the muse pushes faster, he's the one who's right. But suddenly each of my subplots is straining towards stuff that has to be in the next book, while my main plot is time-bound. The climax must occur on a particular day, because it is a holiday; and as my characters speed up the pace of the subplots, and I try to keep my reveals under control, that day begins to seem a very long way off.

Why all this worry? Because there are only so many pages that can be fit between a single set of covers before the book becomes too expensive to produce. If there were no such limits, I would probably write novels that were 800 or a thousand pages long. Readers will only pay so much for a book, and distributors and bookstores will demand their cut of the purchase price. If the money remaining after all those requirements are met is less than the cost of producing the book, I am essentially paying readers to read my stories. And of course I want to share my stories with everyone, but I can't afford to do that. As long as my stories go to market in book form, I have to keep the chunks of my story below a certain threshhold--and each of those chunks must stand satisfyingly alone.

This is a set of tricks which seems more easily managed by people who develop outlines and then stick to them. Unfortunately I develop outlines, draw maps of my story territories if you will, plan my trips--and then the characters hijack the bus. Every so often, when we stop for meals, I negotiate with them about moving in the direction of the climax point for which I'm shooting, and we modify our maps and set out again. But the characters have a tendency to forget to look at the map, or to drive too fast--and my nice measured story arcs look as if they were drawn by someone riding on a bus being driven much too fast on a poorly maintained road.

Which, of course, they are.

We will get there. But I'll be uneasy until I bring my subplots to their first-book climax points.

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.

Websites!

Yes, lots of exclamation points this week. Must be all that birthday excitement.

I realized I had forgotten to mention that my websites are now fully LIVE:

Mercury Retrograde Press

Be Mused Author Services

And, while you're out surfing the web, go check out Larissa's new site. That one just makes me feel like a proud grandmother (except of course, that I'm not that old...). LOL.

Wormwood!

Fair warning: there will be little fiction written this weekend. Tomorrow is my birthday; Sunday, of course, is Mother's Day. In honor of my birthday, I was given a nice allowance for new perennials for my garden--and what should I find on the clearance rack but honest-to-the-gods wormwood! Not that pedestrian variety of artemisia one usually sees, but the Real Thing. Naturally, since this is also the month for finishing Affairs, this feels like a Good Omen.

I will be out in the garden, planting and mulching and weeding, most of the weekend. Whee!

producing at a consistent rate

One of the precepts of writing I hear most often concerns the absolute necessity of producing consistently. I don't do that; I can't. I do have goals; right now, I'm trying to write 1000-2000 words per day, which is not unreasonable when I'm writing regularly. But yesterday I didn't write more than a few hundred: I just finished that last scene.

It's not that I didn't have time to spend in the study; it's that I had to stop and think. That scene was the end of a chapter, and I am switching between my PoVs by chapter--and while I've known for quite some time what the plot points of this next chapter will be, it wasn't until I'd written through the last one that I could plan the part of this chapter that matters. Because as far as I'm concerned, it's not what *happens* in this chapter that matters, but what it means to the characters.

In my view, plot only satisfies when it is a vehicle for character. I believe the stories that matter are about characters, not events. The events are critically important: they are the things that force the character to reveal himself, to grow and change. But if telling you the plot points of this next chapter would constitute a spoiler in one sense, in another sense they hardly matter at all--because what happens at the Winter Solstice in the Cathedral of St. John is important only because of the things Lesle learns about herself, because of the decisions Deaclan is forced to make which will push him closer to the commitment he fears, because of the conclusions the movers-and-shakers who are in that building will draw and the things they will do in response--which will reveal to each of my PoVs things they might never have otherwise figured out, and cause them to react in turn.

My characters surprise me--usually in little ways, but occasionally in ways that leave me reeling for days--in every chapter I write. It isn't until I put them into these situations I dream up that I discover how they will react--and, naturally, their reactions shift the situation as it unfolds, so that I exist in a state of continual surprise. That's what makes the work of writing interesting, as far as I'm concerned: in part because the work continues to challenge, as I must continually adapt to their shenanigans. It's part of what makes the story come alive; but it also makes productivity uneven, because once enough surprises pile up, I have to stop and think about how the PoV whose task it is to begin the next segment of the tale (in this case, Deaclan) will react to the things that happened while he wasn't driving.

I know enough of what's on his mind now to begin the next chapter--so off I go.

Fear not.

As usual, I did not forget how to write. After a morning largely occupied by Altered Forms of Consciousness, I now have six nice new pages and need only write a closing paragraph or two for the scene.

For me, at least, writing magical events from the point of view of the magical operator always induces altered consciousness--because, of course, the character in question must enter an altered state in order to work the magic. It's always fascinating to go back later and read what I wrote.

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.

The State of the Sausage

As of today, I am about 180K words into The Affairs of Dragons. At present I expect to write another 20K words before I reach the end of this segment of the series; but I am a notoriously bad estimator, so it will be interesting to see how many more words I actually write.

A quick anatomical sketch of the beast: this is a fantasy novel set on more-or-less-present-day Earth. There are two PoV characters (one male, one female) and two really significant secondary characters, both of whom are male. (Naturally there are other characters as well...) Each of the primary PoVs is presented in 1st. After years of writing close-3rd, in fact beginning this novel in close-3rd, I suddenly realized that I simply must write the female PoV (Lesle) in 1st. Why? That was how she started talking on this draft. In short order I realized I must also render the male protag (Deaclan) in the same PoV, because to do otherwise would be to suggest that his thread is less important than hers, which it definitely is not. Both are necessary. So, yes: this thing I'm doing, this multi-first, which looks like a Stupid Writer Trick: it's not a gimmick. It just happened this time. Now I find it difficult to imagine writing anything but first for characters with whom I'm intimately connected, but I've been through this sort of thing before: that is just how I feel while I'm working on this project. Other PoVs will become possible again.

The novel is essentially a complete draft up to this point: I write straight through, and never knowingly skip a scene. The muse pulls the rug out from under me too frequently for me to get away with that. (This is not to say that writing out-of-order is bad, of course: many people do that, and do it well. It just doesn't work for me.) There are, however, a few scenes I forgot to write in the first third of the book, because I forgot about a sub-thread I had planned until my writing partners asked me what in the world had happened to it. (*Hand-forehead.* This is why we have writing partners.) And there is also one scene just a couple chapters behind the place where I'm working--which I never wrote because I just couldn't make up my mind whether to include it. (It doesn't matter for this book, but it will matter for the next two, so I've decided to put it in.) At any rate, there will be forward motion for another chapter or so, and then I will have to go back and fill in that last omitted scene before I can write the next one involving that secondary character. The same scenario will occur later, when I get to the point where that neglected subplot comes back into play.

When last I had a productive day in the study (and it's been too many days since that happened, as it has been an intense week) I was in the middle of a rather long scene. So my first task is to finish that: it's likely to take a couple days. Let's go find out...

Watching Me Make Sausage

I think it is a sort of shyness that makes me reticent about posting on the topic of what I'm doing in the study, that writing of fiction. Watching an artist create seems to me little different from watching people make sausage--and I've had that experience, thank you. Put me off sausage for quite some time: knowing what goes into it makes it less appetizing. Especially the part involving guts.

But I have been reminded this week that a certain percentage of the people interested in my doings are interested in my process--and that no matter how idiotic I may feel in sharing my struggles, wanderings, and false starts, mine is a sort of higher-order idiocy, and people just starting out in the craft, or people who need some perspective on the process, will benefit from being able to look over my shoulder. The rest of you can just ignore these posts, I suppose.

So: as I dive into the final stretch before completion of The Affairs of Dragons, we will have a sausage-making festival. I'll start off with a State of the Draft post, and will discuss the nuts and bolts, attempting always to avoid spoilers, as I go along. I hope you enjoy; and, as always happens when we journal about things that matter, I'm sure I'll learn from the experience of watching my own process.

One thing is certain: there will be guts. Consider yourself warned.

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!

One of the Top Ten Essays on Writing, Ever. Period.

I was just thinking of Jim Kelly today, and I realized I have never before thought to share his brilliant essays on writing here. My all-time favorite of his: Murder Your Darlings. I would say more about him and his work, but it would just sound fangirlish. Go read.

There's tons of other great stuff on his site. If you're a Connie Willis fan, you must also indulge in Excerpts from Willis Watch.

And if you'd like to observe some true mastery of the short form, go read some of his stories. Congratulations on the new book, sir!

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. :)

The First-Ever Wild-Eyed Conspiracy Theory Award

I don't know yet whether this will be an annual event. It remains to be seen what the people in charge of cooking up new theories manage to come up with over the course of the next year. But as you know I love conspiracy theories, and this one is too loopy to let pass unremarked:

The Jews Masterminded the Holocaust

At first I had the same thought you did: "er, yeah. Right. They can't be serious." But as a student of conspiracy theory I must say this one is sheer genius: it integrates the "Jews as the Master Puppeteers of the World" Theory into the events of the Holocaust without making the usual Newbie Conspiracy Error of attempting to deny all that eyewitness documentation. All in all, amazing work for Wild-Eyed Crazies.

So there you have this year's winner of the Wild-Eyed Conspiracy Theory Award. I'd wonder what they were smoking, but...eh, it's Hamas. We know what they're smoking.

Wow.

Like I need one more gadget

Eh, I'm a gadget geek. I can't help myself. Wynette sent me a link to Twitter, and at first I thought, "Oh, this is nothing but the geek version of reality TV." But I was just curious enough to watch their little video & set up an account so I could understand this phenom--and then it turned out to have a Blogger widget. I am done for.

The good news: Twitter restricts one to 140 characters. I must be succinct--which is, as you know, a challenge for me. So perhaps I will acquire a new skill. :)

If you're on Twitter, let me know, and I'll put you on my Magic Page.

What's Your Favorite Book?

I'm reeling. The Truth of the Publishing Universe has just been handed to us, and I'm going to be mulling it over for days. Harris Interactive surveyed American adults to find out "What is your favorite book of all time?" The answers:

1. The Bible
2. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
3. Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
5. The Stand, by Stephen King
6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
7. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
8. Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
9. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
10. Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

The results of the poll are fascinating, in a first-time-you've-seen-water-through-a-microscope way. You can see Harris's release here. One of the things we learn there is that every demographic group, bar none, chose (in unprompted results!) the Bible as their favorite book. But the #2 through #5 slots have more to do with the distribution of the sample than anything else: GWTW is #1 among women, LOTR among men, for example, and we all know more women than men bother with reading. The next few slots are heavily influenced by age and regional and ethnic identities.

What I take away from it:

1. I am going to have to finally sit down and read Atlas Shrugged, which can't seem to find its way off my long list.
2. The BIBLE??? Seriously???
3. To Kill a Mockingbird sucked. Just sucked. Why do people love it?
4. OMG, the BIBLE. No pun intended.
5. The DaVinci Code doesn't really surprise me. I mean, when's the last time you were flying someplace that you didn't see at least one person toting that piece of crap around? But he's got two books on the list. This makes me shudder for the reading public.
6. Dan Brown needs a really good editor almost as badly as THE BIBLE.
7. Books of Large Size win Fanbases.
8. It's good to be an SFF writer. I'm including Dan Brown for the purposes of this exercise, btw.
9. The Catcher in the Rye only made the list because they didn't interview anyone under 18. I spend a lot of time explaining to people who are now reaching its supposed target age that it was a mind-blowing book in its era, but its era is not our era, and that's why they can't figure out what the hell the fuss is about.
10. People need to read more.

I know I'm weird, but if someone had asked me that question, none of those books would have occurred to me. Oh, sure, LOTR blew me away when I read it--30 years ago. I've read works in whose company LOTR would hang its head in shame since. What is my favorite book now? (Besides the one I'm working on, of course.)

Twofold answer, of course:
Nonfiction (perennially): The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
Fiction (today): Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

What are your favorite books? Leave me a note & help restore my faith in the future of reading.

OMG. The BIBLE.

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.)

Thinking of dealing with Amazon? Think again!

I am a blogging delinquent, and as I slowly begin to climb out of the morass of tasks that made keeping in touch with the world hover just out of reach, I'd been starting to think about sharing what's been going on with all of you...and I shall.

But today's development has derailed that: Amazon.com has decided, in a move that would put Microsoft to shame, to make it impossible for small publishers whose books are printed by anyone other than their own subsidiary, BookSurge, to get listed on Amazon. Those who are already listed there are finding their "Buy" links disabled, one by one.

If you are a publisher, Powells.com and even--against all odds-- BN.com are your new best friends. And if you're a reader, and a book buyer, I hope you will vote on this reprehensible behavior with your money, which you will take elsewhere.

Unless you like the smell of monopoly, and I'm not talking about the game, STAY AWAY FROM AMAZON.

More on other, less alarming, topics soon.

Just call me Penemue

Angel August's Abode - Fallen Angel Quiz - Penemue: "

Take The 'Which Fallen Angel Would You Be?' Quiz
Brought to you by Angel August's Abode

"

I especially enjoyed the question about which famous person I most identified with. Trying to decide between Prince and Galileo almost killed me.

If your head didn't just explode, you weren't paying attention. :)

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. :)

The power of character names

This week I passed 125K words on The Affairs of Dragons. It has evolved considerably, in a number of different ways, from my original conception of the work -- even if you don't take into account the drafts that came before this one, which are numerous. Today, after mulling it over for a while, I have changed the name of an important secondary character: the character formerly known as Kelvin has become Morgan, for reasons which matter to the plot but would constitute a spoiler. I've given a lot of thought to the change, and to the new name, and I'm confident in the decision. But in the process I have discovered, more forcefully than ever before, the power of a character's name.

Of course /what we choose to name a character/ is significant. Names tell us important things about a character even before we get to know him or her. A name conveys gender and culture of origin at the very least; a well-chosen name also brings with it resonances from its accepted meaning and real-life people who share the same name. But today, changing my character's name changed his hair color.

This is making me crazy. There's no rational reason for it. But Kelvin was always a blond, through all the drafts. Despite all the physical changes I have wrought in him in the course of supporting the re-backgrounding I did for this draft, his hair color remained the same. But while Kelvin was a blond, Morgan is inexplicably dark-haired.

What the hell is this? The only male Morgan in my experience is Morgan Freeman -- and, yeah, he's dark-haired...but the character formerly known as Kelvin has not changed race. Just his hair.

I am baffled.

a bit of perspective

This short film (click the title for the link) was developed by a man I don't really know but already respect by hearsay, Ali Shehata. Wynette has worked with him; I think if more of our clients were like him, Wynette would still be in the business.

What I really know is that he has something insightful to say. Take a look.

Digging through the creative block: for entrepreneurs, too

I am just putting the finishing touches on my part of the task of filing corporate taxes for last year. Thank all the gods everywhere for accountants: this would be so much worse without mine.

Closing out 2007 finances has been a more complicated task than usual: part of the reason for this is the fact that Wynette is leaving Be Mused. By far the bigger part is that, as the business side of my and our creative life grew increasingly undefined, I grew very resistant to keeping up with the financial tracking, which has always been part of my share of the work. Oh, sure, I paid the bills on time and all that stuff -- but the filing, the logging, even much of the decision-making for the next year wound up stalled in big piles on my desk in the office. That's not typical behavior for me: I don't really *enjoy* that work, but I generally don't mind it, and I am reassured when I can account for all the mundane stuff.

It wasn't until last night, when I discovered areas of my desk I haven't seen in weeks, that I finally began to think about what was up with that. For most entrepreneurs, business life is their creative life. A business about which you care so passionately that you pour yourself into it: that is a creative effort at least as heartfelt as most novels. When a novelist develops resistance to moving forward in her work, we call it being blocked. But as far as I know, there are no such labels to describe the procrastination, anxiety, and avoidance behaviors that manifest in business people when something has gone wrong with their creativity.

But there was no question in my mind, once I looked at my situation in the office with my coach-eyes on: I have been creatively blocked in my business life. Something was wrong, and I was resisting moving forward. In my writing life, I've learned to recognize that a block is often a gift from my subconscious: unless there is something external going on, when I begin throwing up roadblocks on a novel, it's because the muse has spotted something wrong.

I've been peripherally aware that something had gone wrong in the business part of my creative life, for months. After all, Wynette and I had individually and collectively informed the universe, as fall began, that we did not want any new clients just then. (The universe complied, of course.) As the year drew to a close, we began shedding pieces of our business strategy that we could see weren't in line with our as-yet-hazy direction. But it wasn't until Wynette decided to make the final break with the business that I was able to step back, look at the business as a whole, and begin to figure out why I wasn't having fun anymore. At the time, of course, I didn't think that was what I was trying to figure out: I was just trying to figure out how to structure an author services business that didn't offer graphic services.

But why I wasn't having fun anymore was actually the more important question. I have been figuring out the answer, lately; Be Mused had represented things Wynette and I are really good at, aid we could give independent writers and publishers in support of an ideal in which we both believe. But those services we offered were not things we love in and of themselves; we do them passionately in pursuit of our own publishing efforts -- but that passion arises from our commitment to the novels we publish, not the tasks of editing and typeset and cover design. The part of aiding independent writers and publishers that I do love, the part I kept sneaking in around the edges of other work even when I wasn't charging for it, is the coaching and creativity work I've been doing with writers, entrepreneurs, and other visionaries for lo these many years.

If there is a First Rule of Creativity, it goes something like this:

If you're not passionate about the work you're doing, and the job is a creative one, you are wasting your time.

This rule also covers the running of a business. It's true because work done without passion is inherently not our best work: the person who is passionate will give that extra something that makes whatever they do shine.

I may be a very fine copyeditor, and an even better text editor -- but those are not tasks that, in and of themselves, arouse my creative passion. So I will be taking Be Mused in the direction of the things I love: creativity work and development coaching. I'm better at those things, anyway, and they don't make me want to let things pile up on my desk. And now that I've cleaned all the stuff I couldn't seem to face off my desk, I'm ready to dig in and begin the site redesign that will reflect Be Mused's new direction. I'll let you know when it's up.

If you find yourself letting things pile up, finding excuses not to do tasks you believe you should be doing, I suggest this is likely to be a message from your subconscious. Figuring out exactly what that message means may require some uncomfortable explorations in the territory inside your own head. But figuring it out may mean the difference between spending your days in joyous pursuit of your dreams -- and dragging yourself through the motions, wondering who said this business thing was supposed to be fun.

Go have some fun. Be Mused. :)

A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations

Anyone who's ever held a phone conversation with me knows I am an inveterate multitasker. I've got to be, if I'm going to complete all my self-assigned tasks. While I'm on the phone with somebody-- clients, friends, and family alike -- if the conversation lasts longer than three minutes, chances are I'm doing something else at the same time. I've talked to clients while weeding my garden, driving to school to pick up my daughter, making dinner, and performing myriad other tasks that require half my attention or less. EVERYONE has held phone conversations with me while I did the dishes: I am the mother of two teenagers, a scratch cook, and wholly committed to organic food, and the dishes just never stop piling up.

However, I can't hold the really intense conversations with clients that our creativity work necessitates while doing much of anything else: all of me goes into those conversations, and I am very nearly as oblivious to the outside world as I am when I'm writing. I probably shouldn't even drive -- and I generally don't. Usually these conversations are scheduled, and I'm able to be safely ensconced in my office while we talk.

Yesterday, however, I had an Idiot Moment. I was on my way from Point A to Point B, in fact just pulling into the gas station to fill up, when my phone rang; the caller was a person I have just begun working with, who is working on the most challenging project anyone I know has had the guts to take on. The project is esoteric by anyone's standards (yes, even mine) and my caller has taken on the challenge of communicating some mind-blowing ideas even though not a writer by nature or training. Last week we had an intense, wonderful session that led to a fantastic breakthrough in the structure of the project -- but it was one of those breakthroughs in which you can see why your approach isn't working, and maybe you have an idea of how to proceed instead, but that idea taps into challenging and scary territory. After a session like that, it's normal to need to sit with one's own ideas and feelings for a while before even attempting to move forward -- and equally normal to feel the need to talk to one's coach when the moving-forward begins again. Suffice it to say that I was eager for the next conversation, because I hate the feeling of leaving someone I'm working with at sea, even when I understand it's a necessary part of the process.

Even though I shouldn't even attempt to drive during such conversations, and even though every instinct I possessed shouted for me to just park the car while we talked, I was on a mission that was pretty important in the mundane sector of my life, and I knew if I didn't keep moving forward I'd miss a deadline. So I decided to just get through the situation on force of will, pump my gas while holding this important and demanding conversation, and drive on to my next destination. My caller graciously offered to call back another time; but I didn't want to leave the conversation hanging. I pumped my gas while talking and drove to my next destination, finishing our call in the parking lot before going inside.

But while I did successfully pump my gas, I failed to contain my wallet. I was too locked into the conversation. Because I was working without a headset and attempting to pump gas one-handed, I set my wallet on the roof of my car while I pulled out the credit card for the pump, and -- wait for it -- drove off with the wallet still on the roof.

Of course it's gone. I should have known better. I should have understood and respected my own limitations. I can do two things at once, but I can't do three -- and I really can't do anything else when engaged in intense creative work, whether it's mine or someone else's.

So, today's lesson: understand and respect your needs and limitations. Creative work is not like the other sorts of work we do: it demands everything we've got. To give it less is to guarantee failure of some sort. All things considered, I'm lucky that my wallet was all I lost.

The Society for Free Range Muses: lessons learned

I touched on this in the previous post, but my keyboard runneth over as usual. Wynette and I founded the Society last year -- and have decided that, for the time being, it should go dormant.

We both feel passionately about the importance of writers and artists of every flavor honoring their creative needs and taking control of their creative lives, and we founded the society with the nurturance of those ideals in mind. We can see so many good uses for a cooperative of artists who prefer creative control and blazing their own trails to the pressure and seemingly-unending heartbreak of trying to work within a faltering paradigm. More than anything else, however, it turned out to be a venue for a group blog in which a bunch of writers participated for a couple months. It very nearly morphed into a small press consortium, but in the nick of time we realized we really didn't have time to run one more organization no matter how much everybody at MileHiCon loved the idea.

We are ending the group blog: we both felt it fulfilled an important need in some ways but derailed us from our responsibilities in others, and we have both finally understood the necessity of applying our energies (which are, sadly, limited by Universal Law) in the most effective ways possible. And for the time being the Society will be quiet, as Wynette and I make other adjustments in our professional and creative lives. But, like the Terminator, it will be back.

One of the most important things I learned from what we did with the Society was precisely what it is that's so difficult about maintaining one's own blog. I also gained a sense of how to begin correcting the problem. In essence, blogging is hard because it usually boils down to solo writing, when it's supposed to be a social activity. Like all writers, I spend hours every day writing alone; regular blogging, done properly, fills the same slot in a writer's social life as did the epic emails we all used to send one another before blogs became a Requirement. Or it attempts to, and that's the problem: all too often it's like shouting into a canyon. One blogs, and no one writes back. The emails I used to get from my writer friends were so much more satisfying.

The group blog we had on the Society site was different; it was truly social. We all posted in a common thread, talked about our writing lives, and discussed one another's thoughts. It was no wonder Wynette's and my private blogs languished.

So one of my goals for blogging this year is to do more in the way of starting discussions -- and one of my great hopes is that you (yes, YOU) will chime in. Let's talk about writing, publishing, creativity, and whatever else comes up. That's why there's a comments function. Please come by & toss ideas around with me!

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.

Why we can all stop trying to develop book trailers

They've killed it, baby. Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRjVeRbhtRU

Warning: you don't want to have any sort of beverage in your mouth...

Conundrum

We had a water main break a few miles from here: one of the big 48-inch deals that carries All The Water For a Long Way Around. While they attempt to replace or repair the thing, we are instructed to boil our water. We worry about e. coli, of course. So, for tonight, we are switching away from drinking filtered water (just how much can that filter do? We're not sure.) to bottled water. So far so good.

But a little while ago I found it necessary to clean the cats' litterbox. I can assure you that is how much detail you want on that activity: it needed doing, and I did it. But afterwards, I stood at the bathroom sink wondering: when one is under a boil-water advisory, and one has just cleaned out a litter box, is it helpful to wash one's hands?

This problem may keep me awake for hours.

Bravo, Mr. Harris!

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6413773.html?nid=2286

Prairie Lights, about which I lamented last week, has rescheduled the reading with Krista Jacob. My heart is gladdened.

Bravo, Mr. Harris!

The most depressing development this week

I recognize that this is a tragedy of a fairly abstract variety, but it makes my heart heavy anyway:

Prairie Lights Bookstore, the literary hub of Iowa City, closed its doors early Tuesday evening in response to threatening phone calls and letters received by store owner Jim Harris that day. Although PW Daily was unable to learn the specifics of the threats made, they clearly were in reaction to a reading scheduled for 7 p.m. that evening by Krista Jacob, an abortion rights activist and the editor of the book Abortion Under Attack: Women on the Challenges Facing Choice (Seal Press, 2006). Jacob's collection of essays by a number of feminist writers explores the impact of race, economics and culture on women's reproduction rights and women's attitudes toward abortion.

Iowa, for those of you who don't keep score, is -- against all odds -- one of the most significant literary destinations in the country. In the scheme of things, this was an important reading. Whether or not one happens to agree with Ms. Jacob's philosophy (and I must admit I haven't read her work; that's not the point) the fact that a mob was allowed to shout her down is an outrageous offense against some of the most important flavors of freedom humans are supposed to have.

My first reaction, on reading this, was (of course) outrage at the terrorists who made the threats. My second was horror that the owner of an independent bookstore -- in Iowa, of all places, where they take the literary as seriously as they do their religion -- caved in and gave the terrorists what they wanted.

According to store book buyer Paul Ingram, the decision to close the store was made by Harris, who was preparing to leave the country the next morning. "Jim did not want to subject people to possible harm when he was leaving town. He did not want to leave his staff in an awkward situation," Ingram said.

How can free speech be less important than that trip? Miss Outrage thought, immediately. Postpone the trip by a day; cancel it if necessary. A stand must be made. We'll hand out flak jackets and mace to everyone who comes to the reading...

What? The owner had staff? And they would be present, because their boss required them to be?

Even Miss Outrage must admit this is a quandry. I am, after all, that same wild-eyed chick who was prepared to go chica-a-chica against the crazywoman who threatened the old lady working the counter at a boutique in Red Bank: her broadsword against my, er, machismo. This was an old lady we were talking about, and none of it was her fault. I could see how to take the crazy one. But the pregnant friend with whom I was shopping was, well, outraged at the suggestion that she should put her pregnant butt on the line. And once the adrenaline wore off, I saw her point.

The same point applied to Mr. Harris, unfortunately. It wouldn't have been right for him to DRAFT his staff into the War on Troglodytery. But in my heart I wish that, just for that one night, I was an employee of the Prairie Lights Bookstore, and Mr. Harris was taking volunteers.

Oh God Yes

http://www.getafirstlife.com/

I need the t-shirt. I'm just afraid that if I wear the t-shirt to cons, I'll get roughed up by geeks.

Well, ninja geeks maybe.

Am I gorgeous yet?

Lately I have been looking at humans with the eye of an exobiologist. Yeah, okay, I'm an SFF writer. But while most of us will look at most cats, most horses, most members of whatever other species we have decided is generally appealing, and just appreciate their highly varied beauty... when we look at humans, we make judgements. He isn't as ripped as the models we see in ads; her thighs are too big; doesn't he see how stupid he looks with that cheesy moustache?; I might look good if I weighed 20 pounds less, dyed my hair, had plastic surgery, worked out 12 hours per week, whatever.

Models aren't beautiful enough yet -->>

Porn stars aren't beautiful enough yet -->>

But what I have observed, lately, as I looked at humans as individual examples of a widely-varied species, is that they are all different. And when I look at them the way I look at cats, or horses, I see the beauty in all that variation, and I wonder where all that judging comes from.

Someone (with an awful lot of time on his/her hands) figured out, a few years ago, that if Barbie dolls were real women, they wouldn't be able to stand up -- they're that distorted. In the short film about the model in the link above, the most telling moment for me was the part where whoever finally prepared the ad elongated her neck, shrunk her shoulders, and rearranged her eye sockets until she was as distorted as poor ol' Andrew Jackson in the new twenty dollar bill. In fact, seeing the final product of the billboard in the short after having seen the process through which the billboard was developed, I was finally, forcefully struck by the distortion in the image. I wonder how many other distorted images seem normal to me. I wonder if I've ever seen anything real in the media at all.

Of course, because I am an SFF writer, this makes me wonder how people can object to SFF on the basis of non-realism. At least, in SFF, we're honest about the ways in which we rearrange the truth. But I digress, as usual...

The Iron Man Returneth

Mark finally came home yesterday morning, after circumnavigating the globe in 9 days. "Eighty days? Pheh! Real men do it in nine!" says he. After meetings in Texas, China, and Israel, presenting at a conference, and more nights upright in airplanes than in beds, he should be an absolute mess -- and he isn't. Oh, sure, by the time he got to Israel he'd developed swollen ankles -- but, sheesh, one transcontinental flight will do that to me. And when he got home yesterday morning, without the adrenaline that had been the wind beneath his wings, he was tired enough to spend much of the day napping. But he was not the mess that anyone who had transited 24 time zones in 10 days should be.

How does he do it, you ask? Well, homeopathic has a lot to do with it. Our dear friend Sonja Benjamin, world-class homeopath, put him on a regimen of Arnica (yes, that same stuff you take when you've overdone it on the tennis court or injure yourself running), which is apparently the classic remedy for jet lag. Having spoken with him from his last stop in Israel, where he sounded nothing short of chipper, I can attest that the stuff works for jet lag as advertised.

Sonja gets to reap the benefits, too: we're all going out tonight, Mark & me & Sonja & her husband Walter, an iron man in his own right-- for jazz, drinks, and art that has escaped the Louvre, at the High Museum. Tomorrow morning, we plan to sleep in. And then, perhaps, things will return to normal.

Well, normal for us. Which is really not normal at all. :)

In case you had forgotten how powerful ideas really are...

The right blurb can shake up someone's whole day.

What I know, with unshakable confidence, is that I NEED a container of Certainty. I must find out where to purchase one, and then have it shipped to me...by UPS, obviously. Clearly FedEx can't take the risk.

Outside Time

Back before we had the Julian and the Gregorian calendars, there were older ones. You knew that, of course. The Hebrews started counting time thousands and thousands of years ago. The Sumerians made them look like the only guy at the meeting still trying to work with a paper planner when everyone else has a Treo. My favorite old calendar (yes, I am a calendar geek): the old Celtic calendar. It tracked both the solar year, which of course is the one we run on, and the lunar year; and it had an entire leap MONTH every few years to make the solar and lunar years line up like they should. It also had a period outside time, every year, called Yule.

During Yule, you weren't supposed to do anything except celebrate Yule. This was the period during which ordinary rules were turned on their heads, and the rich had to give to the poor, and crossdressing was the order of the day, and a temporary king, the Lord of Misrule, was appointed: and whatever he said, went. Mostly, it seems, he ordered another round of drinks. It was Yule, after all, and it was too cold outside to do anything except hang around, watch the Yule Log burn, and have another drink.

Where were you during that wonderful no-time that we no longer call Yule, but now call Christmas Break, or even Winter Break? I was playing with my family, resting from my war against the Gods of Computer Chaos, and trying to recover what measly scraps those aforementioned Evil Gods left behind.

I didn't do any of the things I was supposed to do, though. I didn't update my blog -- obviously. I didn't stay in as close contact with my clients as I like to, because email wasn't always working. I didn't make a whole lot of progress on most of my self-appointed jobs. But it was Yule, and for a blessed little while time didn't count. And trying to recover lost data was just one more way of getting in touch with the people who matter to me -- in this case, most notably, the writing partners for whom I am constantly grateful, who found new ways to overwhelm me with gratitude for their presence in my life, when they turned out to have saved everything I had been sending them. If only I'd sent them what I'd been writing for the past six months...

I'm back in Ordinary Time, of course, as are we all. Because my daughter's Winter Break didn't end until this week, I'm one of the last to climb back into the pool. This time in, I come back not merely refreshed but with a renewed sense of gratitude: for my wonderful family, for my ever-illuminating and patient clients, for my fabulous writing partners. Whether or not we realized it at the time, last year was way cool. This one's going to be even cooler: I can feel it already.

Welcome back. :)

The Technophile's Psychic Reader

This is like the Magic 8-Ball, only much, much cooler. Think of all the ways it can tell you what to do. I am intrigued by the idea of using it to break free of creative logjams. Or to decide what to make for dinner. Why, just now, it said to me,

"Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them."

How cool is that?

Wikipedia says of Oblique Strategies,

Oblique Strategies (subtitled over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas) is a set of published cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Now in its fifth edition, they were first published in 1975. Each card contains a phrase or cryptic remark which can be used to break a deadlock or dilemma situation.

A few examples:

• State the problem in words as clearly as possible
• Only one element of each kind
• What would your closest friend do?
• What to increase? What to reduce?
• Are there sections? Consider transitions
• Try faking it!
• Honour thy error as a hidden intention

From the introduction to the 2001 edition:

These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.

They can be used as a pack, or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear...

...but you knew that...

I found the link to Yet Another Quiz on another blog, where I was doing *research*. Really. Anyway, I found this amusing:

You are The Magician

Skill, wisdom, adaptation. Craft, cunning, depending on dignity.

Eleoquent and charismatic both verbally and in writing,
you are clever, witty, inventive and persuasive.

The Magician is the male power of creation, creation by willpower and desire. In that ancient sense, it is the ability to make things so just by speaking them aloud. Reflecting this is the fact that the Magician is represented by Mercury. He represents the gift of tongues, a smooth talker, a salesman. Also clever with the slight of hand and a medicine man - either a real doctor or someone trying to sell you snake oil.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

My favorite part, naturally, is that this quiz was somehow endowed with the power to recognize the fact that I am male. Which, as my husband will tell you, is true in most important senses. :)

A cautionary tale

Yeah, I had all the usual excuses. I had a new computer; I was using a rock-solid writing program. Our server had just died and we were learning to live without it. My writing files were far too big to fit on one or even a couple of CDs, and backing up was a hassle. Sure, I thought about buying an external backup drive; but our kids are in high school, and our house is twenty years old, and the unexpected emergencies (new roof, anyone?) just kept coming. So for the past year I've been working without a net, and I didn't worry too too much. After all, my computer and my writing program were rock-solid.

But what I never expected was the day HAL (aka my Acer laptop running Windows XP Home) would wake up and decide to reallocate my entire D partition to swap space. I never authorized this change, folks; I just came back after a particularly busy week during which I hadn't used my laptop, which is my primary work computer, for anything but email -- and discovered that every file that couldn't be replaced was just freaking GONE. Ten years of work on the series I plan to start publishing next year: G-O-N-E. Ten years of digital photos. You get the picture.

Last night we downloaded Stellar File Recovery (http://www.stellarinfo.com/) which went out and found most of the things that HAL thought I didn't need anymore. The bad news is that my rock-solid writing program (Power Writer) uses a proprietary file format, and at the moment all of my recovered fiction files are pretty garbaged up. But Stellar promises total customer support, and I already know Script Perfection, who develop Power Writer, are very responsive; so hopefully we will find a way to un-garbage all of the Most Important Files in the World.

I will keep you posted. Meanwhile, I'm sure you know a HAL. Don't trust him.

Not for lack of something to say

It's been a long time.

People don't fail to blog for lack of something to say: the vast majority of what goes on in the blogosphere makes this painfully clear. I think most people fall out of the habit of blogging because there's *too much* to report; and where do you start, find the time, etc.?

One of my resolutions for the new year is to show up here at the blog. I'm starting early, because I have something to say that I want to get out there right now. Subsequently there will be more about all the things that made blogging both impossible and (hopefully) more worthwhile than the usual reports of what movies I've been seeing, etc.

Onward.

This has been a long time in coming

Today, I rock.
//insert happy dance here//

Maybe the planets have finally aligned
...well, actually, from what I understand, Saturn (who has been retrograde in Cancer for over 3 years) finally decided to put his boots on and get the hell out of there. (Like I needed more challenge in my home life...see-ya, Saturn! Looking forward to seeing you in Leo, moving in the CORRECT direction...)

Maybe I've been seeing the right therapist
...could be all the folks I played with at Opus in May... Wynette Hoffman, Carol Berg, Phil Brucato, Maggie Bonham, Jan Scott-Frazier -- and did I mention Wynette?? -- collectively and individually helped me re-find my missing groove. They sent me home ready to rock out, but of course only I could clear the stage...

Maybe it's because Mark & I actually got off our asses and went out while it was cool enough to do our walk thing this morning...

But more than anything, I think, it's because I just gave it all up to the muse today. I didn't *care* about productivity; I hung out near the keyboard, reading, and when he decided he knew what the next paragraph, the next sentence, the next image was, I got out of his way. Next thing I knew, I'd forgotten the book I was reading (a nice change of pace: Xtian conspiracy theory. Grist for the mill...) existed.

Yeah, and I went out to the garden.

Do you care? Not nearly as much as I do. But next time I'm stuck, I can come back here and remember what I did right today:

GOT OUT OF THE MUSE'S WAY.

:)