Good morning. I finally feel human again. Or at least, reasonably so. How about you?
Since today is a catch-all type of day, I figure I’ll do a catch-all kind of post, of Things I’ve Been Wondering Lately. I wonder about a lot of things and I suppose this is my chance to share the joy.
* I finished reading The Guns of August and immediately wanted to know more about the First World War. I’ve got a couple books about Tannenberg and the Eastern Front during WWI (I needed to do this for character research for the YA). I guess the clearest thing coming through, when reading about war, is what a waste it is. A monumental, colossal waste. I wonder why people in power are so fond of it?
* Not just that, but I’ve been seriously wondering lately about economic issues. I’d wonder why capitalism always wants to have a huge base of “cheap” (read: as close to “slave” as possible) labor, and those who profit from that cheap labor are usually rich and spend a lot of money ensuring the supply of cheap labor–but then I think of other economic systems that rely on a mass of cheap labor, like Stalinist Russia or even modern China. It makes me wonder if cheap labor is a political question instead of straight economics.
* And the more I read about economics, the more I realize that it IS a political question, because the intersection of money and power is political. Or to put it another way, if you don’t have enough money or control over your production, you probably yearn for revolution and social progress a lot more than if you have a whole fortune to lose if you have to start paying your workers decent wages.
* Which makes me wonder about imperialism too. Is a condition of empire to have a huge poverty-stricken underclass to provide that cheap labor?
*Why in the bloody blue blazes are they saying it’s going to be in the mid-nineties tomorrow? What the hell is going on here?
* Education is something I stand firmly behind. But the current norm in schooling isn’t education, it’s indoctrination. And then there’s the problem of funding–schools and libraries, if you look at the money spent on them and their staff, are just not a priority in America. (Neither, apparently, is healthcare or the eradication of poverty. See above.) Is it different in other places? Where would I find the stats on that?
* I wonder if trees are singing in math. You know, look at their branches, and the mathematical expression of regularity the branch structures have, and yet they are also flexible complex systems interacting with the world around them. They have to be singing. But it’s probably in math.
* I hate math. My second-grade teacher always told me I wasn’t any good at it. I believed her for years.
* Why aren’t more people really interested in wolverines? I mean, these creatures are fascinating. Although they are weasels. That is a strike against any creature. Not as big a strike as belonging to the rodent family.
* I realize a lot of people love cute little mice. But I HATE rodents. Mostly rats. It’s the beady little eyes and the naked little tails. How can one think anything with a naked tail is cute? GAH.
* The more I think about it, the more I think politics functions on the same principle (though with different social processes) as inner-city gangs. I once read somewhere that people still function in tribes, and they don’t care too much unless someone from their tribe (the group of thirty to fifty people they really know) is affected by something. Political parties seem to function just like gangs, which are really just violent tribes, or confederations of violent tribes. More on this when I finish reading Islands in the Street.
* I’m about to announce the Sooper-Sekrit Projekt.
* I wonder why the sky is a different blue in winter–a thin blue–than in summer, when it’s deep and hazy? And spring blue, washed with rain, is different yet. Is it light refraction and temperature and humidity changes? Or is it what I think in my heart of hearts, that the sky is speaking to the earth below?
* Oh, and I need a glossary if I’m going to write the second Steelflower. *headdesk*
For right now, that’s a little bit of what I’m wondering. Scary, ennit?
I think my body’s fighting off another bug. You know that flu feeling you get when you’re just coming down with something? Not sick enough to take to your bed, or even sick enough to take a decongestant. Just blargh, run-down, body aching, head caught in a vise not squeezing very hard but still there and stuffed with cotton to boot.
Yeah. Like that.
My Friday post is up at Fangs, Fur, Fey; it’s titled That’s Great. Now, Do It Again. It is a reprint of a post I did last June. Sorry about that, but the subject has come back up again and I think it’s useful. Above all, I didn’t want to retype the damn thing.
You’ve been continuously mugged and beaten and robbed blind for the past seven years straight, and as you lay there on the cold, hard economic ground, bleeding and gasping and wondering what the hell happened to your vacation time and your health care plan and your mortgage payment, your attackers scoff and leer and toss a couple of bloodstained nickels on your pulverized face and mutter, here sucker, have some bus fare, and then they cackle and stomp away with all your loot and dignity and hope, back to the White House from whence they came.
What, too harsh? Not really. It’s a lovely feeling, made even more sweetly ironic by the fact that Congress will likely soon shove through another $108 billion in war funds like a giant gallstone through our collective fiscal urethra. Right there, that’s about 500 bucks for each and every adult human in America, baristas and Baptists and NASCAR fans alike.
Do you see? Your “economic stimulus” check is meaningless, an empty gesture, a trifling crumb of recompense after robbing you blind via insane gas prices, infrastructure meltdowns, massive failed wars that aren’t really wars. Thanks for the bogus check, Dubya, now where can I buy a sliver of our missing national dignity? (Mark Morford)
Yeah. I really can’t add much more to that. Except that later on in the article, he links to a study that shows meditation can strengthen empathy. Make you kinder.
Boy, do I ever need that today. I’m feeling like Nix, our third cat–the one who looks like a ferret and is jumpy as a…erm, big jumpy thing. (I almost said coke fiend, but decided that would be Too Much. Oops…) Anyway, I feel like every inch of my skin is too aching and sensitive today, like I’m skittering and jumping from one shadow to the next, trying to find one big enough to hide me from.
Anyway–on the reading front, I read Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties and Specials yesterday too. The series was great. A little deus ex machina-y (what the Selkie and I call magic dingus-y) at the end of Specials, but no complaints. It was great, well-structured, and nicely done. Bravo. Usually when I blaze through a book or two that fast I’m not looking under the hood and tinkering with the engine, which means I’m not being pulled out of the story. I did find some of the luck stuff–like the main character just happening to land inside an anthropological experiment–a bit heavy-handed, but what are you going to do? It’s YA, and short YA at that. All in all, it was a fantastic little series, and just what I needed.
Last but not least, my Mother’s Day present arrived. I’ve taken to buying my own and enthusing over them so nobody has to buy me soap on a rope or a tie or anything, you know. Everyone’s happier that way. This year the kids got me a Garbo box set. I’ve always wanted Queen Christina on DVD. Now I can satisfy my longing for sultry Swedes who just want to be aloooooooone. What an awesome gift.
Heh. Not too many complaints, despite the post title. Oh well, it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised. Also: I scored this at Powell’s last time I went. What a great title, eh? I’m hoping it will live up to it. Even if it doesn’t, the premise is awesome and should provide me with grist for the mental mill.
But first, work today. And a nap. Definitely feeling like a nap.
I almost forgot: Saturday (tomorrow) I will be at Cover to Cover Books from 5-7PM for the monthly Writer’s Mixer. I’ll be presenting on the topic of continuity and character development in a multiple-book series. In case you want to, you know, come by and beat me up or anything.
I finished re-reading Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland, and I’ve been reading Crompton & Kessner’s Saving Beauty From The Beast. Both center on an issue that doesn’t get much airtime–”domestic” violence against teen girls by their boyfriends. Since the Princess is heading into preteenhood (I know it’s not a word) I want to know all I can about the warning signs, not from inside this dynamic, (I pretty much have those down after a bunch of bad relationships and therapy) but as a parent.
I don’t know why we think high school is insulated from (gender-based) violence. We’re shown every day that it’s not. I’m not talking about gangs at school or hazing, both violent in their own right. I’m talking about the daily warfare, the daily risk you run by having mammaries and female organs in this society. We’re soaked in that danger literally from the time we’re born.
This isn’t a feminist rant. This is a parent’s rant. I had boyfriends who beat me up and stalked me in high school. I’m not sure my parents ever grasped the nature of the problem. Of course I had punches I had to roll with at home, too. I was disposable.
Sometimes I get so sick of being At Risk just because I have ovaries. The world is full of peril, and a lot of men in America, though sweet and nice enough, don’t understand the pressure of being literally under attack and/or seen as worthless/second class from the moment you’re born, because you’re born female. (It’s like the first strike against you, and God help you if you’re also brown-skinned or poor, too. Those are strikes two and three.) And the worst thing is, this is so implicit, it’s taken for granted that girls are virgins until they’re whores, that marriage is the highest good, that a girl has to belong to someone, that a boy can stalk the crap out of her and it’s “love” worthy of a pop song or movie. (My essay in Nothing But Red, originally titled Rape As A Property Crime and ending up as Half Of Humanity Is Worth Less Than A Chair, is all about this, so I’ll just Move On now. Because the next subject ties in. Let’s move on.)
I hate to point this out, but I was covering the fundamentalist polygamist Mormons years ago for StoryHunters. It’s no secret that these middle-aged, male religious-cult leaders have been providing themselves with teenage harems. It’s what middle-aged male religious-cult-leading bigots DO. I’m sure that’s a major attraction for becoming a middle-aged religious-cult-leading bigot.
It took long enough for someone to do something about it. But the press coverage…dear sweet Mother Mary in a jumped-up chariot-driven sidecar.
Here’s a little memo to the press: Will you guys stop f!cking going on about the hairstyles and dresses those women are forced to wear and start talking about WHY THIS WAS ALLOWED TO GO ON, ON AMERICAN SOIL, FOR YEARS AND YEARS? There are infant graveyards. Thousands of teenage boys thrown out so the older men can get clutches of young wives. Malnutrition. Child sexual abuse. Murder.
And the MSM is fixated on the goddamn hairstyles. I.e., “this doesn’t really matter, because it’s happening to women.”
God.
Yes. Damn right I’m angry. We all should be angry over this one. When a guy “marries” four or five teenagers and gets them knocked up, he’s a bigamist. And guilty of statutory rape. Why should his “religion” exempt him from the law against rape, statutory rape, and child abuse? I mean, I’m all for a dialogue between the people and the law, since the law is the servant of the people. I’m just not for child abuse being sanctioned or overlooked by the law. Which is essentially what we’ve got, with these fundie Mormon polygynist asshats.
I might feel a little bit different if the women could have several husbands each. But then, you know, if that happened, the cult probably would have never gotten off the ground or had a blind eye turned to it.
And the press is fixated on their hairstyles. Not to mention an HBO show glamorizing this sort of thing. Because if it deals with rape and oppression, it must be chic! Women don’t really mind! Hell, they like it! It’s on TV!
I’d better stop before some jerkwad thinks those last four sentences aren’t sarcasm. Or before I blow a blood vessel. Whichever comes first.
Jesus-please-us. This is why I stopped doing the religion-news blogging. I was in serious danger of having a coronary. And, you know, I started getting work elsewhere. But that’s another story.
I’m doing a lot of bulleted lists lately, for which I beg your indulgence. All my connect-the-dots is going into the writing. I just found out we need another revision on Redemption Alley. It’s not a HUGE one, it’s just one of those workmanlike things that’s got to happen once a story’s been pruned so an editor can see the nasty bits underneath. Heh.
* Gin, Television, And Social Surplus. This was AWESOME. I hope he’s right, but one of the things I’m struggling with lately is a bit of depression over humans as a species. We just seem so in love with destroying. Not even clean destruction, like a wildfire that clears everything out–but destruction for its own sake, from a dictator destroying lives and culture and social networks to wars destroying everyone who touches them in an ever-expanding ring, to gallons of poison pissed into our own life-support system. It’d be nice to find some evidence of people creating even half as much as they destroy, and just as reflexively.
You see? I’m on a real kick here. And most of it is…
* Holden Caulfield. I bought Catcher in the Rye for the Teen, since he said he’d never read it and I thought it was a) one of those books he should read, and b) that he’s old enough now he won’t go into a huge honking depression over it and end up making some silly gesture that will land him in the newspapers. Then I got to thinking, it’s been a while since I read it, too. So when he was done he put it in my TBR pile, and I read half of it last night.
The Teen says, “It’s scary. I had to put it down and give it a rest before going back to finish it because that kid? He’s me. It’s like the author KNEW me or something. When I was fourteen to sixteen, that kid was me.”
Then I started reading it, and I remember my own painful uncertainty during those years. It’s achingly depressing that Salinger remembered so much of the absolute agony of being a teenager to be able to write it down. Or, more precisely, what is depressing is that I can see the difference between that uncertainty and my adult self, I can see how that uncertainty fed into my adult self, and my heart aches for every kid who has to go through that. You couldn’t PAY me to go back to those years between thirteen and twenty. They sucked bigtime, and I never want to be that lonely and uncertain again. I never want to be that hungry for approval and affection again.
I’ve been talking to the Teen off and on about that hunger, and about the fact that he doesn’t have to have his life all mapped out at 18. I didn’t figure out who I was or what I wanted until I was about 23-25. Now I had Issues, so I was probably happening a little later in that process than I like, and it’s only now at 32 that I’ve grown (by dint of hard work) into someone I like. Nobody tells kids that they don’t have to have it figured out by 18, that it will take them a while to figure things out, and that’s okay. Well, on the one hand it can be a prolonging of adolescence, but on the other it’s necessary to build someone who isn’t a jackass stuck in high school popularity contests.
It’s funny, (she says, fully conscious it’s funny-strange, not funny-haha) but all the adults I like and get on with were outcasts, nerds, etc., in high school. Those were the kids forced to develop things outside the hothouse jungle of school to keep their souls intact. Kids that were popular in high school kind of forget there’s a world outside those glass walls. They learn to game that system so thoroughly, so young, that when they reach the Real World outside they have no fricking idea and end up settling rigidly into what they know–the reflexes that did them good in high school.
By no means is this a hard and fast universal rule, (I AM fully aware that there are decent adults who were popular in high school out there) but all my close friends had trouble/were unpopular/were outcasts/were braniacs/were nerds in school. We sometimes talk about this dynamic–the people who don’t find some way of interacting with the world that’s outside halls and lockers and taunting. And (bringing it full circle) Holden Caulfield is reminding me of that. When I read Catcher for the first time I was nine and had no idea, I just liked that the voice seemed true–not like an adult trying to impress or Teach Me A Lesson. When I read it again at fourteen it really spoke to me on some levels, and on others I thought Holden was such a privileged jerkwad; oh noes he had money and freedom and was So! Upset! And then at nineteen I read it again and thought, Jesus, I have so much else to worry about with the rent I don’t need to be reading this, but still did finish the damn thing.
Now I’m reading it as the mother-figure/friend of a teenager, the mother of a preteen girl, and seeing the painful self-doubt and uncertainties from a whole new perspective. I don’t know if this whole long ramble has a point, but I do know that Salinger did what he set out to do, if what he set out to do was write a book that people can read from several different angles. Truth–telling the truth, a writer’s truth–is like that; it’s got so many different angles. And who was it that said a good book grows with you?
* This upcoming Saturday, May 2, I’m going to be the featured speaker at the monthly Writer’s Mixer at Cover to Cover Books. I’ll be talking about continuity and characterization over the course of a multi-book series. If you have any questions etc. about writing series, why not comment or drop me a line? It will help me gauge the types of things to talk about, and if I talk about it all week I might sound halfway coherent when I do my half-hour thang.
At least, one can hope.
Happy Monday, all. I’m about to go back to the YA (it’s rested for a week) and start weaving in things I missed the first go-round because I was going so fast. Oh, and I’m making chicken tikka masala for dinner. Wish me luck.
No, really. It is. And I’m not the only one who finds this news utterly delightful. I mean, come on. Of course the Earth is singing as she twirls through space, like a four-year-old in the backyard with a Goodwill prom dress and a magic wand. Twirling in circles, and singing that tuneless sort of song kids half-hum when they’re having a helluva good time, completely absorbed in what they’re doing.
As the Selkie might say, “That kid has magic.” By which she means, a lucky child whose parents understand that sometimes kids just need to goof off and hum.
But maybe the Earth is humming like an adult in the kitchen, fully absorbed in the making of something. Or at the laptop, or just messing around with a piano. Have you ever done that? Not played the piano, mind you, but just listened to the sounds it makes when you plonk it, humming while you do so?
I think Gaia wants us to sing back.
That was always one of my favorite Sesame Street songs. I don’t know about the “sing just about the happy stuff”, but the “don’t worry if it’s not good enough for anyone to hear”?
Oh, yeah, I believe in that. I really think that’s part of the point of writing. Or creating anything. (You knew this would come around to writing, didn’t you?)
One of the best things that ever happened to me was reading The Artist’s Way–the part where Julia Cameron says to give yourself permission to create bad art. To me, that was incredibly freeing. Permission to write the worst dreck in the world, as long as I wrote and kept writing. As long as I was happy, and doing what I was made to do.
Heady stuff. Because before there is discipline and doing this professionally, there was just me trying to get up the courage to write without feeling like I was a failure every time I set pen to paper. Trying not to remember everyone who ever told me I was worthless and that I couldn’t create anything worth looking at. Even, yes, my mother’s voice saying, “You’re so smart, why didn’t you do this right the first time around?”
I had a writing class once were I started explaining this. “If you need permission,” I said, “you’ve got it. You’ve got a working writer’s permission to write however badly you want. It’s not important for the first million words. That’s why they call it practice–”
I turned back to the room and two women were crying. Turns out they had really just needed to hear some variant of it’s okay to try this, to be bad at this. So much of our culture is bound up in the idea of teachers or authority figures giving us “permission”.
We ended up writing out certificates that stated so-and-so was a Writer, goddammit (the “goddammit” was my personal hiccup, uttered mentally every time), and had the right to write. It was silly, right? Nobody should need anyone’s signature to attempt to write, or to create. (I’m not saying everyone needs someone’s permission or even my permission, so don’t get all het up about that red herring.)
What I’m saying is, if you need to hear from someone that it’s okay to do this, and it’s okay to screw up and make mistakes while doing this, consider it said. Consider it heard. For what it’s worth, I am telling you this: you have permission to write the worst dreck in the world, sing off-key, dance without being Baryshnikov, knit without worrying about dropped stitches. The world is messy and wonderful, and how do we ever expect to learn how to write better, dance better, sing better, knit better without practice? And practice means making mistakes. It means f!cking up and going back and figuring it out and messing around with the joy of making something. That’s the important part. The finished work is important too, of course it is–but don’t let the fact that you’re going to make mistakes stop you from trying. Please don’t do that. Make all the mistakes you need to.
Each mistake is a chance for joy. Each dropped stitch could be a fork in the road, one that can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Each clumsy word will strengthen you, each comma you go back and remove will cheer you, each time you stumble while dancing you can consider it an invitation to a new movement, maybe one that’s never been done before.
Earth has been singing for a billion years or so. You think she didn’t have a few dropped notes? And still, look at what she made.
You know? The day when you wake up out of a nice, beautiful restful sleep because they’re having some sort of screaming fire or something at the apartments behind you (no, there was no fire, just a lot of yelling and noise) and stumble into the kitchen for coffee. After spilling roughly a metric ton of coffee all over the kitchen, you finally get some into where it’s supposed to go and make some coffee.
The kids are a little fractious and your six-year-old hates you because you won’t let him watch TV. You consider putting a brick through the television but settle for putting it out in the garage, removing it from sight but not from the six-year-old’s mind.
Various other things threaten to rain on your parade.
You know? That kind of day.
Then the Teen gets up and says, “I’m so glad to be here. This is like heaven, you know, being here.”
And the Prince decides he doesn’t hate me at all, he cozies up to me (pretty much just to watch the screen as I type) and the Muffin decides to take care of some stuff that’s been bothering me, so I don’t have to deal with it.
Couple of neat things: a Pub Rants post about why you need to pitch a complete manuscript and a Romancing the Blog bit about antiheroes. I do very much view Batman as an antihero, because he’s in it for revenge. Plus, he’s a vigilante–kind of a cheap and easy way to build an antihero, but it works if you don’t make him too romantic-squishy.
Now I’m thinking about heroes in antihero clothing. Wow. Possibilities.
In other news, I saw the end of the YA last night. Must be the spring rain, as the Selkie says. Damn Muse. She thinks if I have time to comment on Internet stuff that she’s obviously not working me hard enough.
Speaking of which, there’s still reverb going on about my Friday post at Fangs, Fur & Fey. Some people are still not reading 90% of the post–they’re just skimming until they get to one particular thing and then hanging all sorts of things on it. *sigh* Ah, teh interwebs.
Go ahead and get out the pitchforks. Because I don’t believe that just anyone who has an idea for a book that they’re going to write someday when they have time is a “writer”. There are people who like to call themselves writers for one reason or another, and I was posting about what separates them from the people I call writers–the ones who do the goddamn work. If you don’t agree, fine. The world is wide enough for both of us to call parts of it what we will. Who cares about the opinion of a barely-midlist hack anyway?
It is an unpopular thing, to state that one must have hard work and discipline to be a writer. And a lot of people are overlooking the fact that I said over and over again in the comment thread (because it was off the point of the post) that once you have built up your discipline you can “take a day off” and your busy little brain will continue to work on the story. That daily discipline will carry you and it DOES carry several professional writers, including a few who brought that up in the comments.
But that discipline absolutely needs to be reinforced and cared for just like muscle tone. Move it or lose it. It is fragile, and it is easy for it to succumb to timesuck.
In all the hubbub, I did not see anyone advocating another specific route that would do what I said writing every day does, to wit:
* You give yourself the clearest possible signal that this work is not going to go away, and that you are committed to it.
* You bolster the habit of just sitting down and putting your hands to the effing keyboard.
* You give yourself the opportunity to practice hard enough and long enough to start producing readable product.
* You give your writing a priority to match other priorities in your life.
So some people took issue and umbrage…but they didn’t bother to offer an alternative that would satisfy those things. If you have a Sooper-Sekrit System that will give you those benefits without writing every day, good for you.
Go do it. Don’t wait around to tell me how wrong I am, just go do it. You’ve got the jump on me, sweetheart. Use it.
There is no magic flexible bullet that will grant you writing success. If I told you there was, I’d be lying. But you know, it’s a lot easier to be successful the more professional and prepared you are, and that discipline is part of preparedness and professionalism. I would be irresponsible and untruthful if I didn’t say it.
You can hit the ball out of the park on a fluke, yes. But it’s a lot, lot easier if you’ve trained for it and showed up at the bloody park when the game’s on.
A lot of people like to pretend “writing” is some sort of super-classified Arte you have to Suffer and have the Magic Ingredients for, which are jealously guarded secrets only available to NYT Bestsellers. It does serve a lot of ego to act like this stuff is FM (F!cking Magic, for those of you not married to my mechanical-engineer husband. *grin*) Saying, plainly and clearly, what I believe about professionally writing strikes to the heart of that dynamic–I’m attempting to deobfuscate, with my Friday posts.
Writing, like any creative endeavor, ain’t simple and it ain’t easy, and there is no magic key–but hard work and persistence can prepare you for whatever magic there is to happen.
I don’t have a lot of use for most of the stuff Natalie Goldberg said (there was a lot of complicating the simple in there) but one thing she said did particularly stood out, for me. It was about sitting at her typewriter and looking out the window, and feeling a rush of Joy and Love For All Things. When she told her teacher this, thinking she had hit some sort of enlightenment, he simply said, “Quit stalling. Get back to work.” (I’m paraphrasing, she wrote it better.)
And on that note, dear Readers, I’m going back to work.
My Friday post about writing is up. It’s about doing it every day. I seem to be possessed of very strong opinions lately–not like that’s anything new, but I do find myself more willing to say what I mean and mean what I say lately. Maybe it’s dealing with the local community college’s unwillingness to Do Anything about the stalker harassing one of my kids. Maybe it’s hitting thirty and finally feeling like an adult who has boundaries. Maybe it’s just because I’ve gotten tired of bullsh!t.
It is a lovely sunny day, and if I hit my wordcount goal I think a little bit of playing outside in the sunshine will be an excellent reward. I don’t think I’ve written yet about the importance of little rewards when it comes to this kind of work. Some days the little rewards are all one has to keep one going.
But that’s a different blog post. Maybe next week.
So, have a fine feathered or furred weekend, my dear Readers, and I’ll catch you on the flip side.
It used to be really quiet around here. Then they built a huge, stupid apartment complex behind our house, in a field that had been a great place to fly kites and watch cats hunting fieldmice.
Now there’s broken glass everywhere. It’s like some sort of epidemic. The tenants at the apartments throw garbage over the back fences of everyone on the street. And kids who should be in school are riding stupid crotch rockets up and down the street at all hours of the day and night.
I don’t mind the new people in the neighborhood. I DO mind the broken glass, the rubbish, the noise, and the thumping of jet-takeoff-decibel music at 2AM.
*sigh* Do I sound like a crotchety old woman, or what?
Now, there’s an attitude among critics and a certain strata of readers that fast=hack and slow=literary geeeenius. But they’re wrong. That’s blunt, but they’re wrong. You write at the speed you write, slow or fast, flurry or steady pace, many words a day or a few hundred–and if you’re earning a living solely from your craft, guess what? Learn to write faster, slowbie. Discipline yourself to put down 2-4k words a day on the page. It’s rough at first, and you feel like you’re drowning, but a steep learning curve will improve your sentence-level craft like nothing else. Rather than poking out those few hundred golden words, put down 2,000 words that actually move the story. Then, in the evening, you can sit down and edit if you’re that OCD about first drafts.
This isn’t just me railing against litfic, although I do plenty of that. This is the same advice agents, editors, and seasoned pros give. If you don’t meet your deadlines, you have no currency with publishers, because you’re unreliable. This goes for you if you’re a debut author, midlist or bestselling. Sure, if you’re bestselling they’ll still renew your contract, but they’ll be talking about you around the coffee pot down there in NYC, mark my words. They probably put your author photo on the dart board, too. (from Caitlin’s blog)
Amen, grasshopper. I always roll my eyes when I hear, “But wordcount is so HARRRRRRD!” Jesus wept. Just do the goddamn work. If you’re really squeezing to get those words out, figure out where you’re wasting your time elsewhere and quit it. Do a time-log, and find out where the timesucks are. Then get rid of them and use that extra time and energy for writing.
This is a job. It’s not a wave of the magic wand to automatically get fame, prestige, critical acclaim, and a fat check. This is hard work, and you don’t do it because you’re going to get rich (unless you want to be disabused of that notion in a hurry and end up bitter and nasty.) Writing is a job, and it’s a lot less difficult, dangerous, and nasty when you love it, but it’s still a JOB. It requires WORK.
Go ahead and get out the pitchforks, because a lot of people don’t want to hear that writing is work and should not automatically garner praise. A lot of people who call themselves writers never seem to get anything done because they are allergic to the “work” section of it. These people want all the social cachet (however much there is, I guess) of being “artistic” or being called a “writer” without doing any goddamn work.
Not too long ago, during a group meeting of writers, the Beethoven Blonde showed up. This was a woman who talked and laughed loudest when it came to the social part of the gathering, literally grandstanding and steamrolling over everyone else in the room. When it came time to read some pages, though, she had a ready excuse, flipping her long blonde hair back over her shoulder with an affected laugh.
“Well, I suppose I’m still developing. It just takes so much time, you know. I have to go upstairs to my room, where I can have absolute quiet, and then I turn on Beethoven and I struggle to create.”
No sh!t. It’s this kind of “writer” that gives the hardworking midlister–and creatives everywhere–a bad image.
The hideous thing is, I’ve seen this type of behavior over and over again, from the epic-fantasy people who didn’t want to accept critique (and who wouldn’t listen to their editor because he reads Proust and “Proust isn’t fantasy”) to the “writers” with streaks of entitlement a mile wide up their back (they are Speshul Snowflakes and deserve attention not because they’ve finished a manuscript, but because they’re working on one.)
That being said, you’ve got to learn–once you’re disciplined and producing sellable work–to stand your ground and agree to the deadlines you can reasonably meet. Production schedules, once they’re decided, are there for a reason–because bringing books out is a business. If you can’t make the deadline, don’t set it in the first place. It’s that simple. It’s hard to do, because if you consistently produce sellable product editors and publishers will want you to do it regularly. The writer’s natural desire to please (sharpened by constant rejection during the first however-many-years of their careers) and the idea that a publisher could go for someone faster works against this, but don’t let it. You are responsible for the deadlines, and responsible for making them far enough apart that you can meet them.
And Caitlin is absolutely right. If you want to make a living, you need to find out how to work reasonably quickly. There is just no two ways about it. Producing sellable writing in a reasonable amount of time can be done. It requires discipline and hard, hard work, but it can be done. It’s the writer’s job to do it.
That’s just the way it is.
I now close this rant. I’ve got some pages to knock out. *wink*
Whew. I finally got some sleep last night. I drank enough valerian tea to put Caesar’s legions to bed and folded laundry, then settled down with a Bukowski book. Maybe I’m weird, but I find Bukowski soothing. I end up reading his stuff a lot when I can’t sleep. But along about midnight I was yawning, I went to bed, read some of The Unfree French (which is a fascinating book) and was finally out like a light. It was kind of funny, because I was reading about the intricacies of the Vichy policies and was really interested until I zonked. I was almost sad to pass out.
This Friday’s post on writing is up. It’s about skill vs. talent. Part of the genesis for this post was seeing Jim Butcher on Wednesday, and hearing him tell the story of how the Codex Alera books came into being. Heh.
Oh, and Tami? Thank you for the herringbone cuff. It is gorgeously awesome.
Rain is moving through in sweeping bursts today, interspersed with sunshine, everything riding on the back of a wind that smells like sweet spring. The first lawn-mowing of the season will be taking place this weekend, and I plan on nagging until some screens get repaired too. The two eldest children are also big enough for yard work. BWAHAHAHAHA! Mine is an evil laugh, for I will finally have enough help to hopefully whip the garden into some kind of shape.
About the only fly in my ointment is that I have to wait until tomorrow to get the huge bar in the Monroe piercing changed out to a smaller one. It’s healing nicely (we’re in the crusty lymphatic stage of healing. Gross, right? Heh.) and I just can’t wait to get the smaller flat-back stud in. Then I will feel even more like a pretty pretty princess.
And if that’s the biggest problem I have today I am a happy duck.
Have a good weekend, everyone! I’m due for proof pages this weekend, and several hours of plugging away at the YA. Things are beginning to Get Interesting. I think we need another fight right about now. My poor heroine. She’s too young to have back problems but she probably will by the time I get done with her. *another evil laugh*
