When you say stupid shit and read it back almost 2 decades later when you’re cleaning up your blog
Part 2 of a series
Magdalene: a contest and a prize.
03/28/2011
[link removed]
writing
Tidbits
Long ago, I went on a road trip with some friends to the Redneck Riviera. There were lots of things wrong with that trip including a severe sunburn, but I had fun.
We were at a bus stop in New Orleans where there was a girl about our age, mid-twenties, standing alone, waiting for a bus. We struck up a conversation with her. She was coming home from work or … something. Don’t really remember.
The Proviso, 3rd edition: A confession
It’s been seventeen years since I first published The Proviso, and a very hard ten since I put out the second edition. I can’t stop fiddling with these characters and I can’t stop feeling like I’ve missed something that will make the story richer.
My kids are grown and gone now, but not without a rough few years. Menopause has changed me in ways that have made me a stranger to myself—one I don’t like. My mother went through a medical scare that introduced a great deal of drama into my very large, previously drama-free family, which I never thought could happen. It’s not as intriguing in real life. I’m long past the pack’s age, and they are forever frozen in time. Read more
The Cult of Traditional Publishing Part 4: Da Rulez
The Cult of Traditional Publishing Part 3: What do you really want?
The Cult of Traditional Publishing, Part 2: People don’t talk like that
A tale of hubris and envy.
“I’ve always wanted to write a book!” I hear quite a bit.
“Do it!” I say.
Writing a book has the lowest barrier to entry of any craft, hobby, art, free-time waster I can think of. Read more
The Cult of Traditional Publishing, Part 1: The math don’t lie
Mormons aren’t a cult. I know because I’m a Mormon and I was in a cult. The cult had me far more brainwashed than Mormonism ever did or ever will.
I didn’t actually do the math.
I didn’t have the numbers for one side of the colon. But based on the proliferation of newsgroups, online critique groups, publishing forums in 2008, and the number of such denizens all trying to get published, I could guess. And it was huge.
Then there was me. 1 : x6214
Mormons aren’t a cult. I know because I’m a Mormon and I was in a cult. The cult had me far more brainwashed than Mormonism ever did or ever will. Read more
God is a terrible matchmaker
God is a terrible matchmaker.
He was, I mean, once upon a time when he started playing with dolls. He looked down on my team’s handiwork and said, “There’s something missing.” He told Michael and Lilith to go wander around and see if they could figure out what.
Dolls.
God saw Michael and Lilith walking around, said, “That’s it,” and there he went playing in the mud. Meanwhile, he told Michael and Lilith to name the animals and plants and oh by the way, do this thing right here so I can see how it all fits together.
They did that thing. Right there.
They didn’t stop doing that thing.
“Okay, I got it. You can stop now.” Read more
My well was dry …
… and then suddenly it wasn’t.
So what happened was, 1520 Main was a very difficult book to write for many reasons. It wore me out. I already had two titles on the table awaiting my tender hacksaw that I did not want to work on. I had had, in the back of my mind, since The Proviso, the idea of a Scottish historical featuring Bryce Kenard’s ancestors.
Because Bryce Kenard … le sigh.
All I knew was that it would start with a cliché: Interrupt a wedding to snatch the bride.
The Vomit Book
A hot new writer
One day, on a school bus, the bus driver was driving a load of kids to school. They were at an intersection when the bus driver made a right turn on red. A kindergartner who just so happened to be sitting in the front said, “Hey! You can’t make a right turn on red!”
The bus driver then turned around, not focusing on the road, yelled, “I CAN MAKE A RIGHT TURN ON RED!”
So since he wasn’t looking, a city bus came speeding and hit the school bus. Everybody died. The end.
This is why busses don’t turn right on red.
Rook Takes Queen
So I dug an old manuscript out wondering how/if I should rehab it. I wrote it so long ago, head-hopping was still acceptable, although on its way out. It’s 84,000 words. And there are no f-bombs. (IKR?!) The thing about headhopping, at least for me, is that I could tell a story in so many fewer words with it.
This story has a story.
Rules, broken
“Any halfway decent artist can outline,” she sneered.
You can’t sneer a statement.
She raised her eyes to his.
What’d she do, pick them up off the floor? Read more
The Proviso rebooted
You know how when you’re in a discussion and it’s really animated and you have things to say but you don’t get to because the discussion’s going by too fast and then you forget until you go home and you’re cracking wise to yourself because you really are that witty, but your timing’s shit and you go to bed annoyed because you didn’t think of it when it really mattered?
And you know how you laugh at a joke you don’t understand because everyone is laughing and you don’t want to look stupid, but you forget about it until, like, seven years later you come across the joke and you’ve lived a little between then and now, and now you get it and it’s hilarious?
And you know how you said something really stupid back in second grade and you can still see and hear that moment like it was yesterday, and your face turns red and your sphincter clenches even though it’s forty years later and you wish you could have a do-over on that moment (or any of the thousands in between, all of which you remember)?
Yeah, me too.
Hence, The Proviso, 2nd Edition.
Hopefully some time in October 2015, to pay homage to the one I published seven years ago.
Seven.
One day I started writing a book.
That day was November 6, 2013. I finished it December 8, 2013.
I haven’t done THAT since I was working graveyards at a convenience store, but Sabrina Darby kept poking at me.
Whatcha workin’ on?
NOTHING! I’M DRY AS A BONE! DUNHAM DRAINED MY WELL! I’LL NEVER WRITE AGAIN!!!! WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
So … what’s in your idea folder?
OH, FINE. Here’s a list. I don’t know what to do with ANY of this stuff.
Tell me about THIS one. It seems most fully developed.
It’s just sketches. I have no idea what to do with it.
Hmm. *reads* So, um, why does X character do Y thing?
And that was pretty much all it took to start dumping in email at her and then I started sketching and next thing I knew, it was November 30 (end of NaNoWriMo) (no, I didn’t have any intention of doing NaNo) (no, I didn’t do it FOR NaNo), and I only had one scene to finish.
It is 95,000 words long. It has no title. It has no playlist. It has no cover. It has no release date.
But here I am telling you about it because, well … You know that scene in The Proviso where Giselle’s looking at the little blue lines on the pee stick and getting a weird feeling in her stomach?
Yeah, that.
But what it does have is a rough blurb and excerpts I’ve been posting on Facebook, but I’d rather not punish non-Facebook fans by doing that. So … here’s me naked.
So to speak.
Nineteen-year-old fresh-faced Mormon missionary Étienne Dunham LaMontagne, engineer, inventor, was always easy to love, but he was a nightmare to live with—his brilliance, pirate-king beauty, and penchant for high drama exhausted everybody who loved him. There was only one girl who could do it—seventeen-year-old budding green architect Mi-Kyung Tess Chun, with her visionary genius, flamboyant beauty, and penchant for bringing on the crazy.
Until she couldn’t.
Twenty years and five children later, her genius is gone, ground fine as talc under the unrelenting heel of life as a wife, mother, cleaning service, chauffeur, Relief Society president, and Étienne’s personal handler. It was exhausting. And she had exactly five groundbreaking buildings to her name—built with Étienne when she was young and stupid in love and bringing the crazy.
And Étienne—well, he hadn’t wanted a wife, mother, cleaning service, chauffeur, Relief Society president, or personal handler. He wanted the visionary architect and voracious lover he’d married who asked him to build things he had no idea how to build to power her buildings. He resented that somewhere along the way, she had allowed her vision to crumble in favor of dusting miniblinds and baseboards.
They part company bitterly, all that love and genius and drama wrapped up in cold divorce papers, their complaints unintelligible to the other.
Five years later, Étienne is utterly humbled after having built Whittaker House—a disaster of a building—with an average architect. The shame of it sent him traipsing around the world with his oldest—and very angry—son. Along the way, he’s learned a thing or two about functioning in the world on its terms instead of his. When his youngest daughter begs him to come home to check on his oldest daughter, he does so reluctantly, only to find himself cleaning up the mess her life has become—something he couldn’t have done five years before.
Tess’s vision has returned and she is again on top of green energy architecture, her flamboyance tempered but her vision strengthened, broadened, lengthened with time, age, and maturity. But she’s still a mother, and her now-adult children have problems of their own—serious problems. Her oldest son has been missing for five years. One of her low-maintenance children has severe antepartum psychosis. Her youngest daughter dropped out of high school.
Tess was exhausted being Étienne’s keeper, but once free of her, he’s learned how to be a normal human being.
Étienne resented Tess for letting her vision disappear, but once free of him, her vision has returned.
But even separated by distance and time, they never stopped loving each other. It’s just that sometimes … love isn’t enough.
Until it is.
Did I mention it’s a sobfest?
Veni, vidi, vici.
I had several ideas for this post’s title:
“I’m not one of you.”
“Repeating myself”
“Tired of the sound of my own voice”
“Being silent”
“Serial starter”
Anyway, all of them are pertinent to my point, but they all mean different things. I’ll take them one by one.
“I’m not one of you.”
In the cult of self-publishing, the loudest voices are the ones who write fast and put out an oeuvre faster than I can switch channels on the TV. They are the ones who say such things as:
“If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer.”
“If you want to make any money at this, you have to write X number of words per day.”
“Writing is a business.”
“You must outline to write a decent book.”
“If you want to make any money at this, you have to write X number of words per day.”
“Writing is a business.”
“You must outline to write a decent book.”
and my personal favorite,
“Writers are lazy,” which post I would link to, but it has since been pulled. (Here’s the rebuttal.)
It’s all bullshit. Rather, the fact that all writers must follow these instructions as gospel is bullshit. The fact is, writers write for a whole host of reasons, only one of which is to make their works commodities. I provide a commodity service. I’m not in the business of writing novels to make them commodities too.
Commodities are soulless, interchangeable widgets, and I don’t believe that books are commodities at all. I also don’t believe that writing fast makes a book soulless. I simply can’t write that fast and put the time and thought into them that I do.
So, to you incessant voices in self-publishing and those of you who were trained as midlist authors to keep putting product out there, I’m not one of you.
Which leads me to my second point:
“Repeating myself”
I am not on the vanguard of self-publishing. Dan Poynter is. Aaron Shepard is. Morris Rosenthal is. April Hamilton is. They are mostly nonfiction writers and they speak to writers of niche nonfiction. For instance, Dan started out publishing parachuting and skydiving treatises.
I am, however, on the vanguard of self-publishing fiction, along with Ann Somerville and others in niche genres. I took a lot of heat for it, too. The loudest voices in self-publishing now were once rabid anti-self-publishers and some of them attacked me personally both publicly and in email for it. Hey. Assholes. I blazed your trail. You’re welcome.
(Oh, is that arrogant? Yeah, I know. I’m a woman. I’m not supposed to be arrogant. Suck it.)
I’ve said all I want to say, I’m noticing repetitious themes in my writing that annoy me, and I’ve become
“tired of the sound of my own voice.”
You may have noticed that, other than posting Dunham chapters, I haven’t blogged a lot.
“Being silent”
I seek silence like water seeks the ocean. You wouldn’t know it to meet me at a cocktail party, conference, or convention, but I’m an introvert. (Please see ”Caring for your introvert“ and ”Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.”)
“Serial starter”
I like to start projects. I rarely finish them. The ones I finish, I really, really care about. And then I abandon them. Because I’m bored with that.
“Veni, vidi, vici.”
You know where I’m going with this by now. For decades, I have wanted to be a published author. Like, since I was 15, which is exactly three decades. It may have been earlier, when I was around 10 and wanted to submit something to one of the Reader’s Digest quip sidebars. I knew how to follow instructions. My submission wasn’t published. But by the time I was 15, I had found out a) how to submit to Harlequin, b) what to submit to Harlequin, c) how many words I had to write to submit to Harlequin (Presents line, in case you were wondering), and d) about how much a Harlequin advance was and how much in royalties I could expect and when (answer: zero, which was okay with me at the time).
Along the way I have had disappointments and obstacles and tangential projects and replacement projects, all while going to school, earning a living being, basically, an administrative handyman because I had an unbelievable skillset and a degree. You know, living life as a marginally normal person. There was always something odd about me. Everybody knew it but me, until I finally got a clue by working in a very dysfunctional place.
So along comes 2007 and, after 7 or 10 or however many years when I had given up writing totally, out pops this doorstopper. And so I published it. And so I had MOAR STORIES TO TELL!!! So I did that. And here we are, five years later and I’m about to publish book 4 in a planned 5-book series, and I realized this morning … I’m done. I did it. I did what I wanted to do, which was to get my stories out on paper and to the public.
I have no more stories. I will write book 5, but it’ll be a while, and I will likely go dark for that time, but I owe those fans who have been slowly accumulating and who love the world I built.
The difference this time, in seeing the light at the end of this obsession’s tunnel, is that for the first time in my life I have no overarching “This is what I want to do.” I’ve done it. I quit writing once and had nothing to fill that creative void so I made a cross-stitch design company and permanently killed my love for my favorite hobby. But always, getting a book published was my overarching life goal–because I thought it would take my entire life to do so. Writing was my life’s work and I never thought I’d run out of stories to tell.
But I have, and now it’s time to move on.
So … where do I go from here?
I dunno, but I’m gonna read a lot of books while I try to figure it out.
Journal entry: February 3, 2007
I used to be a writer. I wrote lots of stuff. It never got published and I gave up. I just … stopped … one day. Sometimes I read what I wrote and I get a charge from it, and I catch myself wondering how the author would have finished it if she had finished it. I suppose I’ll never know.
(I started writing The Proviso in August 2007.)
How to destroy a brand in one easy (lazy) step
So most of us DIYers out here are trying to brand ourselves. We spend our time on Twitter and Facebook and message boards and whatnot trying to build an audience and a fanbase.
Then the midlist authors come along and digitize their backlists, and everybody’s happy because they already have a brand and they’re simply supplying a product that people want. Yay.
And then there are the midlist and higher-up authors who self-publish new stuff. That’s kind of an interesting experiment. I like watching it all play out even though, well, their brand trumps my brand and I have to work harder at establishing my brand.
Thus, it should make me happy when a very well-established author self-publishes something new and it’s crap. But it doesn’t make me happy. It makes me sad.
See, one big slip, and the reader suddenly suspects that you’re not a very good writer and that your editors made you who you are, and … you’re going to throw away years of investment in your brand and your work product just because you want to cash in on a 99c romance novella heatwave or make money off your under-the-bed manuscripts?
You insult your readers. You insult your former editors. You make a mockery of your previous publishers. And you embarrass the hell out of yourself. Do you really not know how bad you look, or do you not care?
If your intent is to destroy the brand you worked for all these years because you just have to put up that novella right now because can’t wait because you’ll miss the self-publishing train if you don’t, then you are succeeding.
And you deserve it.
P.S. If you insist on going without an editor, learn how to fucking write. If you can’t do it after all these years and titles, you’re a fraud.
Writing: Ur Doin it Rong
I saw this in an author post somewhere on the ’net:
Thinking isn’t writing.
Outlining isn’t writing.
Research isn’t writing.
Rewriting isn’t writing.
Putting pen to paper is writing.
Really.
That’s odd, because I’ve been writing in my head for years, starting circa fifth grade when I couldn’t understand the concept of an outline, but could construct a well-organized essay in my head after a great deal of reading, assimilating, and thinking. When I finally put pen to paper, the work was already done.
Get that? The hard part was not done on the paper. Ever.
And here I am, thirty years, innumerable essays, a gazillion blog posts, a few short stories, a novella or two, a speech or four, two screenplays and one stage play, ten novels, three agents, and a writing degree later, still constructing fairly well organized works in my head, and sometimes after much research. Not only that, but I write out of order.
So I have to put some scenes and ideas down on paper before the story can be fully realized. So what. Let’s face it: a novel is not an essay.
I do a lot of thinking.
I don’t outline as it is understood.
I research.
Then I rewrite. A lot. In my head.
And voila! A novel.
Now, I can write on spec, but I prefer not to. I prefer to take time to assimilate information, to percolate fleshed-out characters and their motives, to ask “Why?” a lot and attempt to plug all the logical fallacies myself, but it gets done.
What I find curious about such assertions is the assumption that that person’s experience is, to him, universal, and then proceeds to instruct the world at large that his way is the only way.
So. Authors. When you get stuck wandering around the ’net gathering advice and feeling guilty because you don’t write “right,” remember this: Writing, like life, is a journey, not a destination. You have to find your own way.
Whatever allows you to produce a finished product works. And why mess with what works?
People watching
Yesterday I had surgery for the first time ever (not counting wisdom teeth). It was elective and went well, so everything’s fine.
Anyway. I very rarely go out. I’m a serious hermit. When I do go out, I avoid people like the plague. I don’t care to be touched or talked at by total strangers. I’m very conscious and protective of my personal space. But.
I watch.
Maybe out of the corner of my eye. Maybe I use my ears to see (comes from years and years of transcribing for a living—you get to know people pretty well by voice inflection). Maybe a small gesture catches my eye. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen enough that I get lots of ideas for characterization. I take lots of notes in my head. I’ve even taken notes on paper.
They never know I’m watching them.
Years ago, I was eating lunch at a restaurant, reading a book (natch), and three programmers for a medical software company headquartered here were talking in not particularly low tones. They were talking about a software they were selling that controlled the machines that administer insulin doses to inpatients. They’d found a bug that multiplied the dosages many times what was prescribed and it’d killed a few people before they caught it.
I managed to keep my jaw from dropping on the floor and went for pen and paper with great stealth. (Yes, I still have that conversation written down.) I went home after work and started writing as fast as I could. Before I got the story finished, though, it popped up on Law & Order, so I didn’t bother.
They never knew I was listening.
So yesterday.
My preop nurse caught my eye. I don’t know why. She was average height, with curly red-blonde hair, average facial features, and an overweight apple-shaped torso—in short, very similar to how I envision Giselle from The Proviso to look. She wasn’t particularly bubbly; she didn’t smile; she was even a bit terse. She was relaxed but confident. She wasn’t ugly nor truly fat. Just…plain. Ordinary. Average. Whatever it was, which I don’t know, it made her very attractive. In fact, I told Dude she was very pretty.
Next up: My surgeon. He delivered TD #1. Until I went to him last month to say, “I want this procedure,” I never really knew how genuinely caring he is. I’ve very rarely had that from the doctors in my life, but this guy … I’ve never written a doctor as a character before, mostly because my relationships with them as (by turns) patient, investigator, and vendor have never really been good ones. But now I have a model from which to write one.
Last: My operative nurse is someone I’ve known for years, from church. At church, she has always been very dour and standoffish. Her husband is affable enough, and he’s our new bishop (THANK HEAVENS!!!). But I’ve never really gotten to know her because of the brick wall she wraps around herself. But yesterday… Yesterday she was all smiles and genuine warmth and caring. I’ve never seen that before, and now it makes me wonder what about being at church makes her spine stiffen and her smile to go away.
I see people watching people all the time. They sit and watch people go by… You can tell. It’s the people watchers like me—the ones who seem to not be paying attention to anything around them—who could turn you into a character one day.
And you will never know.