Today’s cool links:

* Denise Little on sell-throughs, in which she explains some of the Byzantine math publishers and writers have to deal with.
* Dame Jenna on countering the counter drive, the contradictory urge not to write.
* Dame Rinda’s path to publication.
* Dame Toni on dating for novelists. I should add that Toni is braver than I’ll ever be–I’ve permanently given up on dating.
* Victoria Strauss, on why getting published is not a crapshoot. (I have such a girl crush on this lady right now. It’s embarrassing.)

Last Friday I wrote about the cost of writing, and Reader Jessa S. had a great question:

Usually I lurk, but I had to respond. I’m writing my latest story on the tightest deadline I’ve ever had. The energy is coming (8 lb bucket o’ cookie dough instead of choco espresso beans) but I’m nervously watching the gauge, wondering how much of that energy is left (a mere 7 1/4 lbs, I’m guessing).

Maybe you could write another of your infinitely practical posts about where/how to siphon fresh energy? I’m down to the bone here (other than that 7 1/4 lbs) and it feels like there’s no place else to draw from. What do you do you’re trapped in a closed system of you and the story and the deadline?

This is a great question, not only because the questioner has realized that energy isn’t free. It’s got to come from somewhere, and when a deadline is putting you in thumbscrews, you have got to find a way to get it done. Preferably without totally burning yourself out, because you will lose a lot of time recovering from burnout afterward–time that could be better spent working on a new story.

Unfortunately, I have very little to say about siphoning fresh energy, mostly because I am a single mother and fresh energy ain’t happenin’, sugar. Instead, I focus on budgeting the energy I have pretty tightly, and that’s what I’m going to write about today. The good news is that the system isn’t quite as closed as you think. It’s not just you, the story and the deadline; it’s you, the story, the deadline, the minutiae of daily life, the timesuck, and the priorities.

Methods for dealing with this deadline situation are extraordinarily individual (just like writers) and I’m going to warn you: the advice I am about to give may not work for you. As usual, take it with a grain of salt and keep firmly in mind that you may need something different.

That being said, I’m going to go ahead and give you the five things that help me when I’m under deadline and I suspect I may not have the energy to reach the finish line. (Yes, this happens. It happens a lot.)

1. Pad your timeframes. The preparation for a deadline starts before the actual contract is signed. Don’t agree to turning a book in in under nine months if you know it usually takes you 11-14 to write it. I like to recommend at least a month’s worth of wiggle room when telling your agent/editor when you can reasonably turn the book in. Use this padding with care and caution. You do not have to go overboard and ask for five years to turn in your next novel/story/whatever; but that extra month can give the work time to lie fallow and get an extra polish before you send it in–or it can save your ass when Life Happens and you’re scrambling to get done in time.

2. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. Okay, so you’re in a crunch. Your month-or-so of padding is rapidly disappearing. This is when it’s time to get ruthless. Do what you have to do to cut timesinks out of your life. Turn off your router if you’re an aimless Internet surfer when under pressure. (I’m a big fan of Freedom, actually.) Tell your social engagements “No, I can’t,” and stick to it. Be honest with yourself about where your timesucks are and nip them in the bud. Get out your trusty kitchen timer and work in 15-minute increments all day. Let the laundry take care of itself for a couple days, if possible–and that goes for other kinds of housework, too. You don’t have to live in a sty, but you also don’t have to use the housework as avoidance. (GUILTY. I will just say right now, I’m guilty as hell of this one.) Write down a list of your timesucks and cut them temporarily out of your life. If writing is not a priority, the chances of your deadline (whether self-imposed or not) go down exponentially.

Plus, if you cut out the timesucks, that leaves the energy you would be spending on them–ta-da!–for writing.

3. Practice self-care. If I cut out exercise while I’m under deadline, I get cranky and even less inclined to work. Also, if I don’t plan my days pretty carefully, I can end up with anxiety-based insomnia, which just adds to the pressure. Part of prioritizing is knowing what you have to do to keep your body and mind in fighting–AKA, writing–shape. I am so not a health nut, but I’ve found out that if I don’t sleep, exercise, or pay attention to what I’m eating while under deadline, the results can be catastrophic. Which just stresses me out more and makes for an even more miserable time trying to meet the deadline.

4. Stop and dream. Okay, this is going to sound counter-intuitive, especially with #2 above. Bear with me.

Part of prioritizing is understanding that writing takes emotional and creative energy, and that well of energy needs to be refilled, or more accurately, dredged. One of the ways I do that is by setting a timer and laying down on the couch or the floor, and engaging in ten-fifteen blessed minutes of high idle. I either let the book play out inside my head like a movie, sinking into it as if I’m watching it, or I don’t think about the blasted book at all and engage in high-octane daydreaming, sometimes fueled by music. This not only relieves a great deal of mental and emotional pressure, but it clears out my pipes, so to speak. When the timer rings, I’m ready for Round Two with the book, and usually a knotty plot problem or two has been resolved. I’ll realize the resolution as soon as I sit down and put my hands to the keyboard. I don’t know why this works (I have a couple guesses, but nothing concrete) but it seems to be an integral part of my process, and it makes everything move much more quickly. The drawback is the seduction to just dream and not write–hence the kitchen timer, and my iron-clad limit of two of these sessions per day, maximum.

If you have a comparable strategy, good. Do what you gotta. For me, those ten-fifteen minutes where I don’t have to do anything but daydream are a crucial steam-valve, and they let me work much more efficiently. And those sessions are far better for me than comparable time wasted surfing the internet or doing avoidance housework. Sometimes a writer is working hardest when they’re laying on the floor and staring.

But only sometimes. Heh.

5. Keep your agent and editor in the loop. If you’re having trouble or Life Trauma, tell them as soon as possible. Do not withdraw into a hole because you’re embarrassed. Being upfront about difficulty is professional. Retreating into the hole is being a prima donna, just like overplaying whatever difficulty you’re having. This is a delicate balance to strike, but if it was easy it wouldn’t be called professionalism, now would it?

Most editors are fine with things not quite turning out as planned. They’re human beings. They understand. You make their job easier by letting them know what to expect from you and how things are going. You also make their job easier by padding your timeframes up front and taking care of yourself so you’re not a hysterical mess when you turn the damn book in. You also make your own job easier when you’ve talked to the editor and s/he reassures you that the world will not end and you’ve got a little more time.

I realize a lot of this falls under preventative care rather than finding fresh energy, but as I’ve said before, fresh energy just doesn’t happen for me. I set out each day with a limited amount of hours, and I can’t cram any more in. Do I fall from grace and spend time surfing when I should be working? Yes. I’m human too. Discipline doesn’t rest in performing perfectly or being a machine. It rests in the continuous effort to get back up on the horse when you fall off. The more you practice self-care and timesuck avoidance as a matter of course, the more it will become a habit when you get down to the crunch, and the easier it will be to actually turn the damn internet connection off (or the television, or *insert your favorite timesuck here*) and get that work done.

Of course, a little cookie dough now and again never hurt anyone, either.

Thanks for the question, Jessa–and good luck!

Related posts:

1. Stages of Deadline Acceptance
2. The Five-Minute Trick
3. Burn

* Note to self: don’t ever buy cheap Q-tips again. You will regret it for MONTHS. It’s worth a couple extra cents to get the cottony goodness. Apparently Q-tips will be joining the short list of Things I Try Not To Skimp On, which also includes toilet tissue, coffee, and enrichment materials for the kids.

* I am at the stage where I just have to keep repeating, “You always feel the book is total crap at this point. Work through it. Put your head down and go through. You can’t fix what you don’t write.” Of course, the signs that I’m at this stage include staring blankly at the monitor, a sudden overwhelming urge to do housework, frequent rounds of whispered cursing, the urge to listen to the book’s soundtrack over and over while I’m running, and the frequent despairing thought that perhaps I should change careers. Go back to school and be a plumber or a paralegal or something. That thunking sound you hear is me hitting the desk with my head. Repeatedly.

* Our cats have gone insane. It’s like they’ve never seen rain or squirrels before, though this is impossible because they’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest all their lives. I can only surmise that they are two-marble beasts–they can only hold two marbles in their head at once. For example, the locations of the food bowl and litterboxes. If you try to shove something else in–like the idea that there is, yes, a screen that is ALWAYS pulled to at the sunroom door, or that windows are solid–one other marble, say the location of the food dish, will fall out, and crazed leaping and OMGWTFBBQLLAMA will occur. Therefore, the only marbles EVER in their furry little heads heads are the food bowl and the litterboxes, and anything else is a perpetual surprise.

I consider this an exciting, if terribly nervous, way to live. And I know I shouldn’t laugh at them, but I can’t help it.

Anyway. I’m going back to slugging away at Angel Town. One of the cats is perched in the window right now, staring at a squirrel in the front yard and making that throaty little oh please oh please sound in the back of his throat. He’s going to leap in a few minutes, hit the glass, slide down, then give me a filthy look as if I’m to blame.

Of course, I will be laughing too hard to care.

Peace out.

Related posts:

1. Sad writer. No cookie.
2. Late Nights Make Me Silly
3. Stages of Deadline Acceptance

Of course, the rain is cold and penetrating. If you don’t have a warm dry place to go to get out of it, your feelings are going to be different. Still, I love the rain. It’s part of why I live here. I tend to be a winter writer–something about the gray and the damp turns me inward and hikes my productivity like nobody’s business.

So, the story is calling today, and I think I might’ve found the point that was stopping me up. It just means I need to make some decisions. Some bleak humor would be good, too. Of course, any of the humor in my books is going to be bleak. It just works out that way. The only time I seem to genuinely write something happy is with occasional short stories.

Maybe it’s the rain.

Related posts:

1. Seasonal Writing
2. No Fish Today, My Dears
3. I’m Only Happy When It’s Complicated

If there’s a part I like least about writing, it’s the frustration of knowing that the process is in a certain stage, one can’t rush it, but one does need to keep knocking away, disciplined and irritated, so that when the magic happens you’re Ready and Waiting. I have to say, this stage is only about 20% of my writing days…but it feels like a much higher percentage. I don’t have the luxury of not writing, so I spend these days fine-tuning and poking at different scenes like jigsaw puzzles, a little here, a little there. It all adds up to wordcount in the end.

In other news, last night at dinner the Princess asked me what Labor Day was all about. I explained the ideals behind organized labor as well as I could. The thing that made the biggest impression on her was the child labor laws. “You mean they would make [the Little Prince] work in a factory?”

“Yes,” I said. “Look, every advance in working conditions hasn’t come about because companies or corporations are magnanimous.” (Yes, she knows what “magnanimous” means. It was a word of the day not too long ago.) “They came about because people protested and fought. Nowadays a lot of people are saying we don’t need organized labor…but I don’t agree. You’ll learn more about that later. For right now, we celebrate people who work and look back at how far we’ve come.”

“Oh.” She thought about it for a while. “They would have made me work in a factory too?”

Or worse, I think. “Possibly. We’re not rich. For a long time, we weren’t even middle class. It’s very likely you would’ve had to work hard in a factory so we could survive.”

She digested this. “How would I go to school?”

“You wouldn’t.” I didn’t even want to tell her about how recent an invention compulsory schooling for all social classes is, even in the First World.

It was a good thing too, because she looked at me with undiluted horror. “No school? At all?”

“Yep.” I took another bite. “I probably wouldn’t have gone to school either, not for very long. We might not even know how to read.”

Well, that did it. She let out a gasp. “I had no idea this was so important! I just thought it was a day off school!”

“Well, you can go look up the labor movement. We can get some books, if you like. Be warned, though–some parts of the story aren’t very pretty.” I was thinking, in particular, of the story of Wesley Everest, as sung on Washington Notebook.

“I’m glad I get to go to school,” my good little Princess says. And from there we were on to other things. I figure consciousness had been raised enough for one day. Hers–and mine, because saying these things out loud to her made me think about them a little bit more. It reminded me of how lucky and privileged I am.

A lot of people moan about unions and the like, even as they reap the benefits of coffee breaks, lunch hours, the eight-hour day, overtime, or vacations. A lot of people will badmouth unions in one breath and move onto bitching about how their rights are violated in the workplace in the next. Unions aren’t perfect–no group of human beings is going to be perfect. But, again, no advance in human or worker’s rights has come about from the noblesse oblige of those in power. The advances are fought for, sometimes tooth and nail, sometimes shamed and driven into the social fabric. Stumbles and all, those advances are worth celebrating, remembering, and endorsing. The effects and fruits of those advances, those fights, are something plenty of Americans feel the benefit of every day.

Things are deadly rough right now. People are frightened, hungry, and angry. Paul Krugman is making comparisons to 1938. (Unemployment benefits came about in the US in about 1932. Just something I found out today.) For a long time jobs have been exported to places where the workers don’t expect–indeed, don’t even know they can insist on, or may not even be able to insist on–decent treatment. But a lot of people in the US don’t give a damn about that, because they’re suffering, hungry, and scared right now. Tea-party xenophobia is on the rise, fanned by demagogues who peddle hatred and fear while reaping obscene profits.

This is when things get dangerous.

So, this Labor Day, I’m hoping we can all be a little more Mother Jones. I’m hoping we’ll take the long view, and I’m celebrating just how far we’ve come. I’m damn grateful that I’m in a position where I can be reasonably well-educated and send my kids to school. With those benefits comes the responsibility not to forget those who raised hell, fought, and shamed society into taking those stumbles forward.

Happy Labor Day.

Related posts:

1. Un Petit Linkspam
2. Labor Day
3. Sunny, Clear, Cold…RANT!

I am jacked up on sugar and caffeine this morning. Well, actually, I just took down a serving of dark-choco covered espresso beans for my midmorning snack. (I have decreed that today is a day of inappropriate food choices. Every once in a while I like to throw caution to the winds. I guess I’m just a party animal that way.) So if things get weird halfway through here…well, you know what to blame. Also, I have Depeche Mode going at jet-takeoff decibel levels in the dining room. The Mode is good to write to, especially when I’m in a Certain Mood. (For example, this is Japhrimel’s song. It’s one thing he can never say to Danny, but ironically the one thing she might understand…)

First, links!

* Emma Silver on why she won’t buy an e-reader. As someone who is utterly in love with the sensual aspect of the reading experience, I wholeheartedly agree. I might be just wired funny, but I prefer the paper experience. This is why I generally request hardcopies of things–I see things on the paper that I just won’t on the screen.

* Christopher Hitchens on Unanswerable Prayers. Generally I don’t like Hitchens’s style. However, I’m reading both him and Richard Dawkins on atheism, and this link popped up in my feed this morning. So, food for thought.

* Slacktivist with a very short, very pointed thought on Social Security.

* Last but not least: my writing partner sent me this early this morning, and it’s made me chortle at odd moments ever since. (Be sure to mouse over and read the alt text, and LAUGH YOUR ASS OFF. Also, this works with “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”) As I have this on my TBR stack, it was also a lovely little synchronous goose.

I’m moving more toward link salad on Fridays. Occasionally I go through periods where the Friday writing posts just wear me out, and I haven’t been blogging much lately. (I flatter myself that some readers have noticed.) I go through periods where I pull back into myself, usually when I’m doing a lot of flooding out new wordcount and revising at the same time. This brings up something I think a lot of new and aspiring writers don’t really grasp.

Writing takes energy.

“Oh, for Chrissake, Lili, I knew that!” you might say. But I would submit that a lot of new and aspiring writers do not understand the sheer amount of energy, and different types of energy, that writing–especially for publication–requires.

To have a writing career, you must have excess emotional and physical energy to pour into the physical act of brute creation. To arrive at a zero draft, you need to type 70-100K words. These must also be words you consider, words that string together in sentences, paragraphs, chapters. The words require emotional energy–the extended act of imagining yourself inside your characters’ worlds, the exercise of empathy both for your characters and for your potential reader, the emotional energy to stay committed to the manuscript and make it a priority, the endurance to finish a book that there is no assurance of anyone ever liking, the emotional energy to keep yourself on a reasonably even keel during the process and not, oh, say, eat your own young or scream at the Love of Your Life. (I avoid those last by reminding myself that I can’t possibly hope to recoup the calories I’ve spent on my young by preparing them a la Grecque, and not dating. *snort*)

And that’s just to get to the zero draft stage. Revision requires an investment of time and energy as well–the physical energy to sit and read critically, weighing the words; the emotional and mental energy to consider this thing you created as coldly as possible, in order to spot its potential flaws and fix them. Then there’s submissions, which also require physical energy, not least in the form of postage (you’ve got to pay for it somehow, even if it’s with a monthly bill for Internet connection) and emotional energy to endure multiple rejections and/or conditional acceptances.

Revising for publication requires a whole different mental set of mental “muscles” than the act of initial creation, and in some cases it’s longer, more drawn-out, and more terrifically exhausting. Looking over copyedits and proofing require yet different skill sets and an investment of time and energy–not least, the emotional energy to keep your cool when confronted with yet another person who has fucking marked up and savaged your precious manuscript KILL KILL KILL.

I am not exaggerating. There’s a reason why I open edit letters, read them, scream and curse, then set them aside for a week. I need that time to process, and that processing takes energy. Bringing a book from inception to publication is a long, emotionally and physically draining process. It requires several different types of energy and endurance, not to mention several different skill sets, at different parts of the complex process. (And let’s not even talk about the discussions over cover art, marketing decisions, and dealing with release dates and reviews, all of which require of the writer some measure of energy, restraint, and sheer bloody-minded endurance.)

When I tell people I’m a writer, I often get a blank look and a “That’s great! I always wanted to write a book, someday when I have time.” My usual response is a trill of slightly-insane laughter and a diversion of the conversation to another channel. I’ve reached the point where I kind of resent (despite myself, I might add) the idea that oh-just-anyone can just plonk down for a bit and dash off a publishable work, that all it takes is “enough time.” Writing for publication requires not just time, but effort, and not just effort but several different kinds of effort at several different points.

Like jugging chainsaws, this requires practice and investment.

Because writing is a largely solitary act, you don’t get to see the difficult, dangerous, dirty, nasty, exhausting bits. It’s like the cotton stuffed in pointe shoes so the blood doesn’t leak through and stain the satin. Some of the magic of writing is that illusion of grace, I suppose; there is a mystique about what writers exactly do and how they do it. It takes mere hours (or days) to read what might have taken a writer months or years to produce–and a publisher an additional year or two to refine, quality-check, and produce in reasonable book form.

The energy required for all these things is like a bank account: you can overdraw it, scrape the bottom of the barrel, burn out, run out and run up overdrafts. I’ve seen this happen and skirted the edge of burnout myself. It’s not pretty or comfortable, and it took time and care I had to fight to provide for myself in order to claw my way up out of. Part of the time and care means other things fall off the map–like, sometimes, daily blogging. *cough* *shameful look*

The upshot of this rather extended (caffeine-fueled) ramble is this: if you want to write for publication, you need to take a look at budgeting the energy you’re going to need. It has to come from somewhere, and often it comes from other aspects of your life. Writing down what you do every hour during the day and seriously looking at where you spend your time and energy is only a first step. Like any goal that really matters, you will have to make time and find the energy somewhere if you want to write. Nobody can do it for you, and it’s got to be something you want badly enough for it to muscle out other things that may provide more, let us say, immediate gratification. Do not underestimate the cost of writing the best book you can and taking it through the publication process. Do not even underestimate the cost of writing for yourself. Here, as in physics, there is very little that resembles a free lunch.

Over and out.

Related posts:

1. Different Effort
2. Upward And Inward
3. Making Time, Making Energy

* I’d done about three miles on the treadmill this morning when a grayish blur caught my eye. It was a squirrel hurtling from Heaven. Or more precisely, hurtling from a rooftop. It fell through several whippy tree branches, somersaulted, hit the fence, bounced and twisted, then hit the ground and bounced again. I thought for sure the little guy was a goner. Instead, he leapt to his feet, glared at me, and scampered off. I gasped and almost fell off the treadmill. I am now told squirrels are tough little mothers, and this one was obviously a ninja. I am torn between the desire to go check the plum tree and see if he’s licking his wounds, and staying as far away from a Terminator ninja squirrel as possible for my own well-being.

* Today was, incidentally, the first day of school. The house is very, very quiet. I keep starting up from my chair, because it is too quiet, then sheepishly remembering that it’s not the silence of Children Up To No Good. I think I’m more nervous than the Little Prince and Princess were.

* I have two books fighting for the right to eat my brain first. Right now I’m settling back and seeing which one wins. They’re both under tight deadline, so I might have to send Necessity in with a baseball bat to restore order and cudgel my gray matter into behaving. That shoudl be fun to watch. *gets popcorn*

Huh. I wonder. Necessity vs. Terminator Ninja Squirrel. A fight for the ages, no doubt. I leave you with that hilarious little visual.

See you ’round!

Related posts:

1. Life and Art
2. Cat vs. Treadmill, Round One
3. Monday Five

I don’t know. I’ve officially thrown up my hands (when they’re not crossed protectively over my aching middle) and decided to just treat my stomach gently, and devil take the rest.

This didn’t stop me from my first five-mile run this morning. I got on the treadmill determined to only run as long as it felt OK, and to stop at the first twinge of not-really-all-right. Five miles later, I forced myself to stop, but my stomach kept running, revolving like a bus wheel. It just felt so good to burn everything off and keep moving, really. The only problem was when I stopped. And I do seem to have largely sweated out whatever-it-was.

I’m sure you all wanted to hear about the state of my belly. So I’ll just tell you that I’m working (between naps) on proofs for TAKEN today, as well as getting an amnesiac heroine in another lead-spraying fight, and shuffle off stage left, muttering. I had big dreams of walking down to the corner grocery for pesto today, but it looks like that’s not going to happen. It’s eleven AM and I’m beat.

See you around.

Related posts:

1. Book Must Flow
2. Network Goddess, Thy Name Is NOT LILI
3. Slow And Steady

* Dame Devon: How I Got To Where I Am
* Dame Jackie: My Path To Publication
* Dame Rachel: The Echo Of My Own Voice
* Dame Keri: The Long Road To Publication
* Yours truly: The Rocky Road
* Dame Jenna: An Overnight Success
* Dame Kaz: Dark Nights and Brighter Days
* Dame Toni: A Business Analyst Becomes A Novelist

There’s a lot of good stuff there, and frankly I don’t have much to add. Earning a living through writing is a chancy proposition, and certainly not one I’d recommend unless one has near-pathological persistence and a taste for punishment, as well as tolerance for manic-depressive career swings. (I’m only exaggerating slightly here, if at all.)

So why do it? Why on earth would anyone pick this way to make a living?

I can’t speak for anyone else. Why do I do this, then?

I’ve always loved writing. No, that’s not quite accurate. I have always written, ever since I can remember, and sometimes I love it. More often, I write because I am in the habit of writing and I am unable to stop. I compare my urge to write to a socially-acceptable mental disease, and I am only half joking. I am compelled to write, and extraordinarily uncomfortable when I do not write.

Writing is how I’ve chosen to make sense of the world for years now. Writing was my sanity during my childhood and difficult adolescence, my most trusted friend in young adulthood and my faithful ally now. Writing was and is my constant companion, the way I chose to sharpen my skills of observation and expression, the thing that made me feel sane when the world was falling apart. (Or if not sane, then, at least, marginally more able to cope. I’ll take what I can get.)

I write because it feels good. I write because it helps me make sense of the world. I write because there is a pressure inside me, and the writing bleeds that pressure off. I get paid for writing, true–but that’s merely a recent development. My writing life has spanned a good twenty-five years, and it’s only in the last four or so that it’s paid enough to be considered a decent living.

Don’t get me wrong. I love making a living from writing. To be able to make a living from the thing that makes me feel most alive is a gift I will always be grateful for, and one I intend to hang onto for as long as people will read the stories I spin. As Louisa May Alcott once said, I have taken Fate by the throat and I intend to shake a living out of the bitch. I am determined that if my career goes south, it will not be because I’ve given up. It will not be because I’ve stopped trying.

But.

I am going to be writing as long as my body and mind permit such an activity, whether I am paid or not. I cannot not write. I literally don’t feel right if a day happens along that I don’t write. I can only think of a handful of days in the past decade when I haven’t been able to write, and most of that handful have diary entries to mark them, so I’m not sure they count. Writing is just what I do, and if it is an addiction I don’t particularly mind. I don’t know what might happen anymore when I don’t write, simply because any attempt I make not to write during a day results in extremely uncomfortable tension. I wouldn’t hesitate to call it anguish, even.

So, I write because I must. I have grown accustomed to it, it seems, much as I’ve grown accustomed to caffeine.

Yet I also write to please myself. I listen to editors who help me make a book better and I listen to Readers and reviewers, of course. But when it comes right down to it, you have to get something out of the hours a day you sit, day after day, and pour out the words to make a novel. If you’re not getting some pleasure or enjoyment out of the process, it’s not going to end well. When all is said and done, I revise to please my readers, of whatever stripe they be.

I write, I create, solely for my own pleasure. And what a marvelous pleasure it is.

When I was about twelve, I got a set of Mary O’Hara books–the Thunderhead and Green Grass of Wyoming novels. (Curiously, though, I have never read My Friend Flicka.) Thunderhead was a magnificently ugly white horse, and he could run. He didn’t care if it was on a racetrack or with the herd. When he decided to, something would go off inside him, and he would shift into a curious, floating gallop and leave everyone else in the dust.

This made quite an impression on me. Because every day, when I am writing, I feel like I’m doing the thing I was made for. I feel like Thunderhead probably felt when the explosion happened inside him and the gallop took over. Making a living from writing is damn fine, and I don’t ever intend to stop. I’ll do it as long as the Readers let me. Still, like Thunderhead, I don’t care if I’m at the racetrack or a city street, a meadow or a canyon or the surface of the moon. Every day, that explosion goes off inside me…

…and I write. I really can’t see doing anything else.

For what it’s worth, that’s the clearest explanation I can give of why I do what I do. Your mileage may vary. The world is an odd place, and we are forced to make sense of it in whatever way we can. Mine is with words.

What’s yours?

Related posts:

1. If I’d Listened…
2. Dame Smackdown Winner!
3. Winning Is Just Showing Up, and Jealousy Giveaway!

Whew. That’s a lot of links.

Every once in a while, I like to work some retail to keep my hand in. Being on-call on a volunteer basis for that certain local used bookstore suits me fine. Yesterday I opened and closed the store, and as usual there was a certain amount of craziness. The owner calls it “the Vortex” because the weird swirls around and around, and sometimes funnels through with a gurgling noise.

I tried to warn her this was the rule more than the exception in working retail. She didn’t believe me, having been stuck in the corporate hell of a cubicle job for years.

Now she believes.

Anyway, yesterday I got called “Peggy”, was sized-up by a cologne-dunked man buying mythology, found textbooks online for a half-drunk college student, drank and made a lot of coffee, took in a lot of books, hand-sold some of those same books less than an hour later, explained why Clancy hardbacks just don’t sell, and just generally chuckled and meandered my way through the day. If one must work retail, a bookstore isn’t a half bad place to do it.

One funny side effect, though, is that people wander in with the damndest questions.

* “Where’s the liquor store that used to be here?” Answer: “It’s moved about a block and a half up the street, and that was over twelve years ago. You can see it from the edge of the parking lot. Good luck.”

* “Do you have a phone book?” Answer: “Yes.” Then a long beat of silence. Finally, the second question will come up, which ranges from “Can I borrow it?” to “Can I look something up in it?”

* “Do you have maps?” Not heard as often as just a plain, “Where’s X?” X can be the local museum, any other local business, any business in Portland, a random street number, an address, or (on certain memorable occasions) someone specific’s house. Usually, the people asking for someone’s house are pupil-dilated, disoriented, and have to learn to live with “I don’t know. Are you all right?” for an answer. People just think that when you work in a bookstore, you Know More, and will disperse that information rather like a search engine.

* “Where’s your bathroom?” OK, a lot of retail places hear this. It becomes time for a judgment call as soon as the words are uttered. Because for some reason, the loo of a bookstore is apparently second only in desirability to pub or music-store loos as a place to shoot/snort/whatever. So the answer ranges from “We don’t have one” to directions.

* “I’m looking for a book…but I don’t know the title or the author.” Answer: “Well, what do you remember about it?” Between what people remember of the cover or (less frequently) the story, we can usually find it. The owner used to laugh when I told her she would get this question and soon develop an encyclopedic knowledge of cover art people are likely to remember, as well as a finely-sharpened intuition about what title people are really looking for based on what they remember of the story.

* “Do you sell…magazines?” Answer: “No. Especially not those kind of magazines. Check the gas station down the street.” Which really, they don’t have any either, but it gets the men who come and ask this particular question out of the store. I mean, occasionally a dude will come in looking for a Ladies Home Journal or something, but that is by far the exception. Mostly they’re looking for Playboy. (For the articles. Yeah. Right.)

* “Oh…damn…where’s the bar?” Answer: “Right next door.” Yes, there’s a bar next door. Sometimes drunken patrons are sent over with trivia questions so we can settle the bets made over shots of something-or-another. Plus, their karaoke comes throbbing through our walls at night. It’s…interesting.

* “Where’s your fiction?” Answer: “What genre?” And a quick list: litfic here, mystery and spec fic (sci fi and fantasy) and horror and romance around the corner there, suspense and spy fiction in this room here, westerns up front…and nine times out of ten, the questioner will simply look at you bug-eyed and repeat, “Where’s your fiction?” Which generally means they have rarely been in a bookstore before and want a recommendation, because they don’t know what the hell they want, but they want something, dammit, and it’s YOUR job to see they get it.

* “Are you hiring?” Answer: “No.” Bookstores are pretty desirable places to work, either because the questioner thinks we’re edgy and snarky a la music stores, or because they think it’s easy. Just drink coffee and read all day! They have no idea about the customer service, the answering questions, the art of buying books and weeding the shelves to make sure they can breathe and tempt consumers, the little maintenance tasks…I could go on.

* “Do you buy books?” Answer: “We do, for in-store credit. We do not pay cash.” Around the end of the month we get this question about twenty times a day over the phone at least, and a few times in person. It’s amazing, though–98% of the questioners then say, “Oh, thanks.” And hang up. Or just hang up without the thanks. Sometimes they try to argue. “But I have pristine hardbacks!” (I am not kidding.) The most fun, however, came when I was working in new bookstores and people wandered in to ask this…

Every bookstore I’ve ever worked at (they’ve mostly been used bookstores, natch) has a board set up in the employee area with variations of these questions in different boxes, and some way of marking them off. It’s just like Bingo, only with retail and caffeine. Days when you get a bingo used to mean drinks after work for everyone on shift. Nowadays they’re more likely to spark a flurry of emails, mostly variations on “Guess what happened THEN?”

If you get a blackout on that board, though, it always means drinks after work.

I’ve worked a lot of jobs in my life, and a good proportion of them have been service or retail oriented. You get to see the best and the worst of humanity. I have a special place in my heart for working in a bookstore, though. Even on blackout Bookstore Bingo days, the regulars and your fellow employees more than make up for it. The joy of matching the right book with the right person, too. Those times that someone returns and says, “You recommended X to me, and I LOVED it!” make one happy to be alive. Plus, geeking about Litrachur with the oddest people–people you wouldn’t think twice about talking to if you saw them on the street, or people you would simply never meet because their slice-of-life is so different from your own–has to be one of the most sublime acts of social and intellectual connection I think I’ve ever experienced.

The greatest thing about it, though, is that working in a bookstore provides such awesome material. Nothing is as absurd as real life, nothing. Fiction has to obey rules. Reality is far zanier than anything a writer can come up with, but you can strip-mine it for the telling quirk, the tiny detail, the internally-consistent eccentricity.

I don’t get paid for any of the volunteer hours I put in. I have to tell you, though, the experience of the daily Vortex spin damn near pays for itself. At the very least it provides me with hilarity I don’t have to watch on a screen. And it reminds me that people are the most strange and wonderful oddities the Universe has going at the moment.

So if you’re working retail today, I salute you. I hope you’re getting great material. And I hope you’re only crossing off a few of those bingo squares…

Related posts:

1. More Monday Questions
2. Good Morning, All
3. Drops of Crimson interview!

Short story: it was fantastic.

Slightly longer story: I arrived after traffic that seemed designed to test the temper of a saint, had to check twice to make sure I’d brought the chapter I was going to read a bit of, and saw people waiting in the event area. I was only prevented from fleeing by the fact that I was in heels and couldn’t run very fast without wrenching a muscle or three, and I was already in the bookstore anyway.

It’s not that fans are scary. It’s that public speaking surpasses Zombie Apocalypse on the list of Things I Fear Most. I know the Zombie Apocalypse is not likely to happen, but public speaking? That will be with us, lo unto the ending of the world.

ANYWAY. There were familiar faces in the audience, like Jay (Kimberly, that hug should have reached you uncrumpled!) and Marne O., as well as the Martian Mooncrab and her Sister Creature, and the fabulous Suzanne Young, whose smile I recognized. Must Love Books and the Novel Novice were also there (hi, guys!) so every time I glanced up, there were encouraging smiles and friendly faces.

I ended up reading a whole chapter of Defiance, book 4 of Strange Angels that comes out next spring. I stopped a couple times, certain that everyone was bored beyond belief, but was pressed very politely and firmly to continue. I also gave out a few spoilers, but not many. Most of them concerned who would and would not die in Certain Books. For some reason I have a reputation for killing characters. *evil grin* I gave as much hope as I could.

Everyone was very patient, waiting in line for the signing portion. Thank you all! I had a great time once I got over the fear of standing in front of everyone and talking. I’m always certain I sound like a complete idiot in front of a group of people.

And now, onward to the Friday post!

The Dames this week have been talking about their paths to publication. Dame Devon, Dame Jackie, Dame Rachel, and Dame Keri have all weighed in on different aspects of their experiences; next week, more Dames will share.

…I just sat here for a good ten minutes staring at the screen, noodling, trying to think of what to say about getting published. The thing is, I never really saw not getting published as an option. The kids had to eat, I had to bring in some work and money somehow, and so it was just a question of what I could write or how I could work in publishing to make some of that happen. I figured that if I did what I could and learned enough, someone somewhere would want something I could write, and I’d figure out the rest later.

All too often, I see aspiring or “new” writers who have just this One Special Thing that they’re determined to see in print or die trying. The trouble with this is, they keep flogging this One Special Thing like a dead horse on their front lawn. If you do that long enough, pretty soon even the tourists will stop staring.

It’s all right to have that One Special Thing, that book you love, the thing you really want to sell, the thing you feel you were born to write. This is perfectly okay. Unfortunately, that One Special Thing might not be sellable, for a variety of reasons. You may have to wait until the market improves. You may have to learn more craft before you can revise the Thing enough to make it publishable-quality. It may be so outre and strange (that’s not a bad thing!) that you need a platform of reliability built up before someone will risk publishing this weird thing you’ve got.

I’ve been told before that I shouldn’t give writing advice because I’m not a Real Writer. Instead of being a Real Writer, I’m told, I am a filthy hack. I expect to get paid, therefore I am not a real artist and I should shut my mouth and live in the genre ghetto. (You already know what I think of this.) I suppose it’s catty of me to point out that writing for money requires careful attention to craft and to one’s audience, as well as utter commitment. I happen to believe that people will pay for the truth in the form of stories I write as best as I know how to. It never occurred to me to spend ten years polishing every word in a single manuscript, because my kids needed to eat a little sooner than that.

So I was flexible. I took a couple editing jobs, I pitched in reading slush submissions, and I kept my ears open. I tried my hand at writing serials, short stories, a couple novel-length attempts. The serials taught me about structure and gave me contacts. The rejections from the novel-length works got better and better, until I finally got one that said, “We can’t use this. It’s got adultery, illegal drug use, and too much gore. Do you have anything else?”

(I should note here that my hallmarks and preferences, so to say, apparently started early.)

By then I had a much better idea of how to write to genre, and the result was Dark Watcher. While that was in the submissions queue for a small press, I wrote the third in the series–Fire Watcher. I thought very seriously about the structure of both books. By then I knew much more about the romance genre, paranormal romance in particular, and I was fairly sure I’d turned in a book that had at least a shot.

The most important interaction in my fledgling career came when I got a letter from the small press I’d submitted to, saying “Can you do these revisions?” There followed a good three pages or so of things that needed to be fine-tuned and tightened.

I had a choice here. I could be a Special Snowflake and stamp away. (“No! Of course I will not revise my deathless prose! Isn’t it good enough that I sweated this out for you?”) Or I could be an adult. (“Yes. These changes I can do, these others I have even better ideas for, this one I’m not sure about for these reasons but I’m open to discussion.”)

I chose the latter half, and was offered a four-book contract. Dark Watcher wasn’t perfect (it still isn’t, my God, believe me, I know!) but my willingness to work hard and be reasonable opened the door. The Watcher books taught me a lot, and that entry into small-press publishing paved the way for other things down the line–opportunities I was ready for because I’d already started building good habits and a good reputation.

If you don’t want to write for money, that’s your right. If you want to flog just that One Special Thing, that’s all right too. Just be warned that the odds are not in your favor. As far as I’ve figured out, even taking into account that everyone’s path is different and unique, the odds favor writers who have more than one arrow in their quiver, writers who are open to revision and tight with deadlines. You have a fighting chance to seize opportunity by the throat and make that bitch start paying attention if you’ve put in some time preparing the ground and gathering those arrows and that willingness to revise.

It is indeed a rocky road, whichever way you try for publication. But there’s also some chewy marshmallows and crunchy nuts, as well as some damn fine chocolate moments, to be had along the way.

Huh. Now I want ice cream.

Good luck out there.

Related posts:

1. Tonight’s The Night
2. Huh. Is There Any Money In That?
3. If You Need Permission, Babe, You’ve Got It