News! Real news. And a new blog!

Well, first things first! The little bit of cuteness in my mood photo is my new Shiloh, Kiki! We got her in August and she has been a ROYAL PAIN (in the way of energetic puppies) but we still love her. :)

Second things second--a lot has happened since my last post. I engaged beta readers and professional editors and a proofreader (oh my), I did at least five more rewrites on East of the Sun, and I submitted to 84 agents and got two partial requests and a lot of personalized responses but no offers. Even as I was submitting to agents, though, my mind had started to switch gears, and I was honestly relieved when the last rejection came in. I am now less than a month away from finally indie-publishing East of the Sun, and West of the Moon (the sequel) is about done, so that should be out later this year.

Though I understand that putting my first books out myself could mean dropping them into an endless black hole of unread books, I am honestly happy to finally be moving forward with my writing. I have digested reams of information on how to do all this "properly" while recognizing that everyone's road is different. I am progmatic, but hopeful that the books will find an audience who love this stuff as much as I do.

So, later this month I'll be making the final post on this blog, because I have a new one--on my new author web site, in fact! I'd post it now, but it's the last thing I'm finishing up before I hit "Publish". Well, that and the dang reader magnet for my mailing list. I still struggle with short fiction. Give me a new novel any day...

I did want to make a couple more posts here because I was on the Viable Paradise web site this morning, touching base with old memories, and I remembered that they'd linked to my post on how much I loved and valued my experience at VP. Since there's always the chance that someone will run across this old thing when they access that, it seemed smart to touch base again and at least give a bit of closure here and a redirect.

So--anyone who ends up reading this, do check in again toward the end of the month. I'll have a shiny book cover and new website to share!

Thanks everyone!

Doorways. Closed and Open.

First of all, Kyrie passed away this winter. The day after Christmas. I made the choice to say goodbye to her when her ailments had become too much; and I don't regret it, and I do, which is the way of such things. At some point I will probably have a great deal to write about grief. So that is a closed doorway. So is this, to start with. There is a doorway in the back of your mind. Beyond it is everything you need to know to write your stories. Everything you need is already there, waiting. The memory of your eighth-grade teacher who everyone was afraid of. The smell of popcorn crushed and rotting in the sun at the amusement park. The look in the eyes of your favorite and most beloved pet when you told them what a good creature they were and how much you loved them. The characters that live in your brain like a cast of disembodied voices. All of it. To reach for it, you need to take the steps. It will not come to you. Narnia will not find the door from the opposite side and tell you that it's time to come in. Or perhaps it will. Or already does. And these are the times we think about sitting down to write. Or to paint. Or to art in whatever way is our way of arting. But then, for whatever reason, we don't. Those calls are weak, apparently. We want the bolt of lightning. We expect to be swept off our feet. Until then, we wait. You will be waiting forever. Wake up. Show up. Move the first move. Open the door of the wardrobe. Push past the coats and stodgy rubber boots and floppy, moth-eaten mittens. Step out into the winter of your neglected creativity. Become its hero. Fight for the turn of its seasons. Create. And that is an open door.

A Brief Pre-Nano Blurb

Today's Mood Kyrie is grave and focused, gazing into the near-distance...where lies an almost-impossible amount of work!

It's been five years almost to the day since I was sitting in the condo at Viable Paradise, writing in my journal and expressing a lot of doubts. Oh, there were doubts. After the first full day I wrote about whether I was really cut out to be a writer. I wasn't sure what the heck I was doing there, in Martha's Vineyard that rainy October, trying to be one, when everyone else I met seemed to be fitting in a lot better than I felt like I was. Perhaps they were more comfortable in their writerly skins; perhaps my view was just skewed.

This attitude reversed somewhat after I spent time with my awesome roomie Gwen and a couple other students and of course instructors like Teresa and Steven and Laura, and I felt like maybe I wasn't quite so big of a social failure and that maybe there was hope for me after all. But in a lot of ways that me of five years back was pretty on-target. I had a LONG way to go.

So now it's 2015 and I've written two and a half novels and a dozen or so short stories, and, barring distractions like dogs and puppies and surgery and concussions and Crohn's disease, I've not lost sight of the gold ring. I feel like my writerly muscles have grown, and honestly for the first time I feel (despite still having a problem with passive beginnings--I HATE YOU PASSIVE BEGINNINGS) like I can actually set out to write some of the stories in my head and do them justice. Combine that with a wake-up call on a drive back from the hospital (which I may blog about later) and I have been busting my ass this month in order to get at least three stories out on submission before NaNo hits.

It's the countdown to NaNoWriMo, of course, and as Brandon Sanderson talks about doing in his awesome NaNoWriMo Pep Talk of 2011, I'm going in this time planning to use NaNo for less-than-conventional purposes. Because once NaNo is here, it is ON and East of the Sun is getting a complete re-write (sorry November, this year you're NaNoEditMo). I'm hoping to have it ready for my first reader(s) by the new year. So I won't have time for those shorts, and they need to get on the page now.

Much to my amazement, this is getting accomplished. I have a story out on submission, another finished and getting an edit before sending out, and yet another almost complete. And an idea for a fourth that I think I can finish by the end of the month. Madness! Hopefully I'm right and my muscles have really gotten strong enough to put these out there the way I'd like them to be. Crossing fingers...send up some good writerly thoughts for me, won't you?

See you on the far side of November, unless I'm driven to escape from Editing Hell through blogging!

Old Stories

I keep my old stories in an archive that I call the Oubliette. Because sometimes you write something that you end up just wanting to pitch down into the dark and walk away from.

There's sometimes a misconception, I think, that every piece of writing that a writer completes will be publishable (or at least useful) at some point down the road. Sure, we all hear about the "million words of crap" you have to write to get good at your craft. And yet, once you get to a certain point I think that there's this subconscious expectation that you are through with the crap.

My Viable Paradise classmate Jake Kerr once wrote something to the effect that he knows full well that not every story he writes deserves to be published. I know when I read that, I thought, "Oh!" with a small shock of realization. Because I had been thinking that every story that I had started or finished DID have to be good enough for that. At some point. In the far-distant future. After I had edited and re-written the hell out of it.

So, despite the fact that we know about the crap, sometimes I think our brains have a stubbornness about certain fragments or ideas. Perhaps these are the "darlings" we are supposed to kill (many times they probably are). But mightn't they also be…I dunno, vestigial bits of goo? Flapping their half-formed wings clumsily as they thrash about in much disorder, and yet hiding within their plasm a single perfectly-formed eye, or a hand crafted fine enough to assay Handel on the pianoforte?

I have formed the opinion that in every half-formed piece of crap there is a feisty dung-beetle that's actually a glittering scarab. When I look back at the stuff I have written, even as a kid, there is always SOMETHING there. A mood. The idea of a place. A line of description. (But never dialogue. I have always sucked at dialogue.)

There is the urge to stuff the crap into the Oublitte and never look at it again. The fear that it is, indeed, SO bad that reading through the thing will summon the gremlins of insecurity and doubt that writers and artists already spend too much time beating off with fireplace pokers (an ancient copy of Writers' Market works also).

I think this is a mistake. Often we wrote these things for the same reason we wrote the things that we think are really good: we had to. There was something about that idea that we had to explore. It had to come out. It did—perhaps badly. But that seed of what made you want to write about it is still there. Pull out that old story at the right time, and it might take light, like an ember, and tell you what it really wanted to be all along.

The Muse Trap

Today, Kyrie's daughter Astra. She's very bright and sunny, and thus suitable for illumination!

So…my muse is kind of scruffy, and she glares a lot. I imagine that she's a chain-smoker, because it would just figure, right, with me being allergic to cigarette smoke? My muse likes colorful language. It's a bit purple for my tastes right out of the gate, but we usually catch it in the edits.

Yesterday I posted about how I make myself sit down and write after the end of my workday (I have a perfectly good office at work, after all, which I do not have at home). I make myself do it even if I don't have much time at all. I do it even if all I have is ten or fifteen minutes.

That ten or fifteen minutes is not any ordinary quarter-hour. I am building a muse trap.

Not long ago I found myself on a flight to Wisconsin (where I got older, if not precisely grew up, for those keeping track of that sort of thing). I don't fly often, and usually I don't listen to music when I do, but that day I had the urge, so I dug my earbuds out of my purse and slipped them in.

The urge to write, WRITE, WRITE NOW! was immediate and overwhelming. I hesitated, confused, then whipped out my journal. Half an hour later I stopped and had a good think about what had just happened. It wasn't terribly hard to unravel--was, in fact, ridiculously simple.

It was this: For the past several years I had only put on my earbuds when I sat down to write. My subconscious mind had locked onto the action of putting on the earbuds as an indicator that it was time to write. And voila--the muse trap!

This isn't a new idea by any means and I had even read about it before. There is, in fact, an excellent book out there called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg in which the author describes how people, sports teams, and even businesses learned how to rewire their habits (or other people's) and experienced dramatic change.

But--it's real! (No, obviously I don't believe everything I read, even when I should.) And you can use it! So I'm sharing it! Here is how to Built Your Own Muse Trap in 15 minutes a day!

Part One: Steal Underpants. No, wait. Part one is, identify something that you do (or could start doing) every time you sit down to write. It doesn't have to be special or weird or involve chocolate, though it certainly can. If it involves an object, that object does not need to be Magical (my earbuds are the same sorry old set that came with my iPhone). Of course, you can certainly choose something Magical (say, super-special noise-blocking earbuds) but if you do make sure that it's the action that's important, not the object. Because then what happens if you desperately need to finish Chapter 15 and…you lost/forgot/your dog ate/your cat mangled your Magical object?? Yeah. So…it's the ACTION that's important. The cue, if you will, that it is now time to get serious. It's on. Oh yeah, it is.

Part Two: Sit down and write. But right before you do, use your cue. Put in the earbuds. Light the candle you carry with you even when you travel because, really, hotel rooms could stand to smell more like awesome. Pop open a beverage of your choice. But it should not be a beverage you have every day, unless you are writing every day. As you should. But I digress.

The thing is, this habit street is two-way. Once your brain latches onto a cue, you need to reinforce that cue by immediately doing the habit you want to form (writing). If you use the cue and DON'T write then you would have been me on that airplane if I hadn't whipped out the journal. If you are not reinforcing, you are undermining. You want your muse trap to work, don't you? So be particular about what your muse-summoning action is. Something you can do anywhere…but also something that you don't otherwise do all the time.

Don't look at me like that. I know you can figure this out.

Part Three: PROFIT. A muse! In the trap! One that is, given, probably glaring at you. But that's just because you haven't finished that story yet. And now you will!

In the future I'm thinking I'll need a different cue for editing. I really want to have my Creative-Brain summoned a little differently than my Editor-Brain. Maybe then I'll be able to switch gears in the flick of an…earbud?

So get out there, and figure out a good habit for yourself, for a change. Figure out how you're going to Build Your Very Own Muse Trap. In fifteen minutes a day. Although, usually it's not just fifteen minutes. But that's another post.

And remember…be vewwwwy quiet. We're hunting habits.

Perspective

Our Mood Kyrie today is actually her son, Ajax, on his birthday. Kyrie, for her part, refuses to wear silly hats.

So this January--after six various surgeries and other medical procedures--I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Upon this happening I was advised by my doctor to go gluten-free, which can help with inflammation. This was a big change--for the way I shopped, the way I cooked, the way I went out (almost being in tears because I couldn't order what I really wanted one night is a memory that will stick with me).

And of course I was still busy with everything else in my life. Trying to make sure the Shiloh Shepherd sticks around, for example. A breed is a fragile thing. When you're not AKC, who's keeping a breed of dog alive? I'll tell you--it's a world full of people milling around, disagreeing with one another. (Oh, just like real life, you say? True enough.) And just like with real life, if enough people stop caring about a thing, it dies. With a breed of dog, you'll never get that gene pool back. So here I am in the midst of everything else taking populations genetics courses and trying to absorb that too.

And the writing. Though I've been bad about blogging, I haven't stopped with the writing, nor with the submitting. The rejections slowly pile up, some of them with attached notes; others, from places that actually hung onto the story for ten months, with nothing more than a form. (Really? Ah well.) I have taken to writing every day after work, with the lights out, in my office, plugged into my mood music, for fifteen minutes to an hour. I don't track words because I can get obsessive about that. It's much like with weight loss; the scale can be depressing, so I measure instead. Word counts can be depressing, so I am happy getting something--anything--done on my current story.

It's all perspective.

In the midst of all of this and family and husband and a house to clean and work to do just like everyone else, a birthday came along.

Birthdays for me (and New Years, too) are days of forced perspective. They can't be ignored or blown off. Not totally. Because somewhere on that day, be it while I'm playing frisbee with a dog or when I'm finally falling into bed, my brain will sit up and say, "Well?"

What are you going to tell your brain when it does that? You're probably going to feel a lot like you did when you failed your parents or failed remembering your friend's birthday or failed on your latest diet. You're going to feel guilty or you're going to feel depressed or you're going to feel disappointed in yourself, which is the worst. Or maybe you'll just want a donut. And you can't have one (because you're gluten free).

But what you HOPE you can tell your brain is, hey, look, I'm progressing. Which is why, when I originally thought that I shouldn't bother to sit down and write at the end of my workday if I only had fifteen minutes, I ignored myself and sat down. It's all perspective. I'd rather be looking at the world--chronic disease, dogs, diet, donuts--and say that I'm at least still in there, slugging away and messing things up and every once in a while doing something pretty darn good.

On occasion, I even write something that seems to indicate that all the time my Viable Paradise instructors and fellow students (and my writing buddy, Jarrad) spent critiquing me wasn't wasted. Maybe I get the Final Fantasy "level up" music in my head. It does happen.

Hey, look. I'm progressing.

The Eye, the Hand, and the Mind

Huddle 'round, grasshoppers, says Zen Thorn, and let's talk about improving technique!

(Actually, Zen Thorn really wanted a treat and was attempting to mind control me. But let's go forward with the other topic; I'm not quite ready to talk about canine mind control. Yet.)

This week I sent out a new short story. It seems that the answer to being sick of editing my novel is to switch focus for a couple weeks. Which is not good, in that I need to get more done on the novel, but also good, because it helps me to internalize the techniques I'll use to make my novel better by practicing them on the short fiction.

I will admit that when I think about what this story put me through, and then consider that my novel is equivalent to TWENTY of those, the wisdom tooth surgery I have coming up next week looks paltry in comparison.

But I digress…

I talk about the relationship between art and writing a lot on here, and this is no exception. Long story short (hah!), there are always times in my writing where it feels like I'm pushing a boulder up a mountain. This time it felt like the mountain fell on me.

I despaired. I went from really feeling (in the early stages) like this might be the best thing I'd written so far, to raging and gnashing my teeth because I just could NOT see my way through editing the second part of the story. I knew it was flawed, and it drove me crazy because I couldn't see how to fix it.

Essentially, my Eye had progressed to the point where I knew something was wrong. But my Hand (or in this case, my Mind) wasn't yet at the same level as my Eye.

This is very similar to what happens in learning to paint, or draw, or attempt any other human pursuit of excellence, if you believe the Conscious Competence Ladder.

I think most of us have seen the Conscious Competence Ladder, yet I always manage to conveniently forget it exists when I'm in the middle of a funk where reminding myself that No, Anne, You Are Not Alone might help. Essentially the theory goes that there are four stages of competence:

1. Unconscious Incompetence, also called You Are Clueless And Don't Know It Yet, also called "Blissful Ignorance". You try something new and you are delighted. In painting, this is the "Hey! I painted something! Neato!" stage. In NaNoWriMo this is called the "YAY I Finished a NOVEL!" stage. It is followed by:

2. The Conscious Incompetence stage, which is what I hit on this story. Your eye has gotten better (usually through looking at the work of people better than you), and suddenly errors in your work glare out at you because your hand or mind hasn't caught up yet. Also called the "Oh God I Suck" stage. Or the "OMG EDITING?!?" stage. Or the "Have a Beer" stage…maybe that's just me.

But there's hope! Don’t quit! In my case, I had a beer. I played with my dogs. I slept on it, and I read a couple of excellent writing books (pretty much anything by Donald Maass, at this stage in my writing development) to try to troubleshoot.

In other words, I didn't give up. And when I realized what my problem was, I groaned. I had fallen victim to "Don't Tell Me About Your Character"-itis (hereby shortened to DTMAYC-itis, though you can substitute "world" for "character").

I'll make another post about this, maybe, but suffice to say that I had fallen into giving way too much information about the world and how it worked. This caused the story to feel slow, awkward, and contrived, because you shouldn't give away any information for free and then not until there's a reason for your audience to really want to know it. When I realized this, I couldn't believe that I'd done it. The solution was to step back and ask myself "What is the STORY about here?" Once I cut out all the goop and got back to the real essence of the story, the issue fixed itself.

BUT! The important thing to take away from this, other than to not ask people about their RPG characters (or tell them about yours), is that I had entered Stage Three, which is:

3. Conscious Competence! This is the "Ugh This Hurts" stage, in which you must THINK about what you are fixing, understand it, and OWN that bugger. This is the work part, where you train your hand and mind to catch up with your eye. I will never again fall victim to DTWAYC-itis. I recognize it now, and so I will be able to avoid it entirely or troubleshoot it effortlessly next time, thus leading to:

4. Unconscious Competence, where you live in a world of magic and rainbows (or, if you are a horror writer, perhaps evil cars and scary clown-people). This is the mindset where you're not sure why your stuff is coming out so well, it just does. It seems natural to you. This is what everyone aims for. Your eye spots issues, your mind knows how to fix them, your hand puts them down on the page. Maybe not effortless, but not like pushing a boulder up a mountain.

I have a theory that in complicated endeavors like art and writing, you hit steps one through four again every time you hit a new type of problem. This can make you want to hurt people, or to give up, or to make yourself another martini. But you should do none of these! Think on it: If you screw up in enough different ways, and learn to fix your screw-ups, and own them, then you will hit Unconscious Competence in EVERYTHING!

You can be brilliant in every aspect of your chosen field that matters to you enough for you to have screwed it up and fixed it. But the only way to get there is to get out and DO it. Draw. Program. Sculpt. Write. Don't quit.

Get out there and screw up!