A Heads-up

I'm moving into the end of the semester, a time of grading and great stress. To make the season merrier, I've been exiled from my building for today and tomorrow due to -- yes -- bed bugs. Office hours in Starbucks aren't so bad, though. Because of the piles of end-of-semester grading, I will be writing and blogging sporadically over the next couple weeks. 

Also, I feel a bit blue this time of year because, as you might have noticed, there's not much peace on earth and very little good will toward anyone who isn't our own people. It's been hard to be an idealist lately.  The naive child inside me feels pretty battered lately. 

Please send love and hugs and good wishes my way, preferably in a way where I can read it.

Going back and editing early

My final total for NaNoWriMo is 74,171 words -- but the novel, Whose Hearts are Mountains, is not yet done. I'm actually going back to what I've written already and editing before I write the last section -- in this case not subtracting, but adding foreshadowing, correcting details and making the earlier parts consistent with what I learn about the character later.

Why am I doing this instead of plowing ahead and going back later? Because the things I want to correct are bugging me. Like what signs do we have that Anna has the push-pull of a human side (wanting touch and contact) and Archetype sign (reserved, not emotive)? Not too much. Do we know about her stepfather's past? No, but hoo boy, I discovered it yesterday and it's big. Do we know why her natural father is so broken? No, I need to put that in. Do I have the chronology right? I hope so, because I'm really bad with time.

I hope this busts my writers' block. I hope this makes me feel better about this novel. I need coffee now -- today's coffee is Costa Rican Tarrazu, roasted last night.

Decoding a Poem I Wrote in High School

I wrote this poem in high school: *

Quand PJ, ma petite chatte **
vient, elle me demande ***
"c'est vrai, est-ce vrai?" ****
et je répond "c'est vrai". *****



* This is the only French I knew besides
"Bonjour, Guy!"
"Bonjour Michel! Ça va?
"Oui, ça va. Et toi?"
"Pas mal."
People who took high school French in my age cohort will remember this as the first conversation in Son et Sens, the high school French 1 textbook.


** Was PJ a petite cat? Bwahahahahaha, no. She was a watermelon on sticks.

*** Did PJ demand anything of me? Food. She demanded food.

**** Was PJ an existential cat? No, she was Stupid Like A Box of Rocks. She liked drooling on feet.

***** What was I discussing with my obese, slabor cat? (See **** for explanation of "slabor"). What is true? What is really true? It's lost to the ages, friends.



I was so pretentious in high school.

PS: Tis the Season to Have Writing Woes

I am less than 30,000 words away from a rough draft of a novel, and NOW I'm struggling to write.

Yes, I've said that before and I've gotten over it. I still want to talk about it.

It's the most stressful time of the year:

Fall semester ends soon, and do you know what that means? End of semester projects in three classes! Final exams! Finalizing grades!

Stressed-out students! Stressed-out professors! Stressed-out people driving cars!

My house has become Christmas Music Central! (All I Want for Christmas is Yoooooooo!)

What should I get Richard for Christmas?

Am I doing Christmas right???

So with all of this on mind (and more), I sit down with my work in progress and say "OMG I know I'm not doing this right! I should have done more of this, that, and the other! It's too long! It's too short! It's too complicated! It's too simple! I haven't even finished Prodigies!"

What to do?

1) Think about the book before I sleep. Some of my best plot ideas come from dreams.
2) Sit down during my usual allocated time (after I publish the blog in the mornings and before work) and GO FORWARD, not look back.
3) Drink coffee.

A NaNo Success Story

As you noticed from the title, today's post is called "A NaNo Success Story". But it's not my story, which you've already heard -- more than once.

This is my husband's story.

For those of you who don't know my husband, his name is Richard Leach-Steffens, and he looks like this (the person who isn't me):

We were both a bit chubbier then.

He is universally regarded as the sweetest guy in the universe. He has a couple quirks, but so do we all. One of his more obvious quirks is that he has trouble finding words, and instead of a stammer, he uses grand arm gestures to try to coax the word out of hiding. (In the fashion of married people, I have picked up this habit, except I also say "uh ... thingie" while trying to remember).

Richard has always wanted to write. When I asked him what job he dreamed of when he was younger, he said, "I wanted to be a traveling restaurant critic, but I have writer's block." I thought he had the perfect job idea, by the way: travel, eat, write, get paid. I'm still wondering why I didn't come up with this.

When I started participating in NaNoWriMo, I invited Richard to participate with me. "But I don't have ideas!" I knew that Richard had ideas, because he helped me with ideas all the time. Many a car ride and coffee hour has been spent bouncing ideas off him, and him bouncing ideas off me.

Richard, like many, dipped his toes in writing through Camp NaNo, a less strenuous version of NaNo, where one could set their own goal. Richard's first project was part 1 of a novel based on one of the characters in my series of novels, Arnie Majors, the D.B. Cooper of draft resistors. His second Camp project was part 2 of the same book. He felt comfortable writing in an established world, because although he'd gotten comfortable with his writing, he didn't feel comfortable with his imagination.

Last year, Richard started (and completed) his first NaNo book. Again, it was based on my Archetype world, but he took a character mentioned once in passing and created a book around her story. It's clearly his book and not mine -- yet it's true to the universe. He made his word count goal in time, so he won.

This year, Richard wrote a book with his ideas, his imagination, start to finish. It's soft Science Fiction, very conceptual -- in other words, his kind of book. (His Master's is in history, specifically military history; my PhD is in Family Economics, with a bunch of sociology and psychology thrown in).

Think about this -- Richard had writers' block. He didn't trust his ideas, he didn't trust his imagination, he didn't trust his writing skills. He now has one book to finish and then three to edit in case he wants to publish (and torture himself the way I torture myself trying to get published).

He's a NaNo success story.

Proposal: A Real February Holiday

We need a holiday in February.

In the US, we have Thanksgiving in November, Christmas a month later, and New Year's Day a week after that.  So we greet the darkness of midwinter with a vision of a glowing fireplace and wassail and Santa in the Coca-cola red garb and the reality of stolen moments of togetherness in-between the Christmas crowds and the ugly sweater office parties. But fantasized versions of Christmas are good; our movies reflect the family Christmas we need, and instruct us to make our own families and love the people we have.

Then there's the time from after New Year's until spring, the hardest part of the winter. Ice and slush smeared with cinder and mud, with no red ribbon or colorful lights breaking the monotony.

What about Valentine's Day? you ask.  Valentine's Day,  as long as I have lived, has been a show of lording privilege over others. In grade school, the children all decorate boxes for others who stuff valentines in. If the teacher doesn't require kids have valentines for everyone, then the popular children get valentines and the unpopular ones do not. If the teacher requires that children give everyone valentines, then the unpopular children get ugly, uncomplimentary, and sometimes literally snotty valentines. As adults, the haves display their Valentine's booty on social media, and the have-nots -- don't.

Maybe we should make Valentine's Day a real holiday, where we show love by giving? Gather our friends and have a good lunch before we put red bows on the dogs at the humane society and walk them; give manicures and pedicures to the women at the senior home; clean out our cupboards for the soup kitchen and give our old dishes to the women's shelter.

And those flowers? Give them to someone who would not get a flower otherwise.  A friend of mine gave me a white rose in my office one year, in a time when I hadn't dated for years. The best February ever.

melancholy moment

Here in the place where I dream,
I have set a table for two
With wildflowers and a pot of tea,
and one seat intended for you.

As the sky shades in greys,
And the fireflies start to gleam,
I ask you to tell me your stories,
Here in the place where I dream.

The Beginning of a Great Romance

I'm aware that many of you live in countries where Christmas starts Christmas Eve and ends on January 6th. In a way I envy you, because the Christmas season here starts on Black Friday (day after American Thanksgiving) and blares on with endless advertising, Santas everywhere, Mariah Carey wailing "All I want for Christmas is Yooooooo".

I'm not a traditionalist. I've never watched "It's a Wonderful Life". I want to see people make their own traditions -- I'll have a post later on about that. I want to see a thousand little Christmases with endless variation and stories that are honestly emotional.

I tried to write a Christmas romance novel. but Harlequin turned it down, because it didn't have what people were looking for. For example, the male protagonist was short. And he ran a toy store -- he wasn't an ex-Navy Seal become millionaire with a warm heart but a steely gaze. The female protagonist -- you might recognize her; her name is Marcia (I didn't realize I'd done that till today).  Not gorgeous, a little absent-minded professor with the heart of a child. The couple was split apart by mistaken notions, which you'd expect in any romance novel, and they get together in the end. But you couldn't give it a Harlequin title: "The Santa Claus' Frightened Elf".

I came up with this scene when I was fifteen. Yes, at fifteen, my idea of a hot guy was a short redhead who ran a toy store. It's obviously been brushed up, but I remember getting an A on it in Creative Writing class. Enjoy:

********

Marcia stood in front of a store she had somehow missed her first time down the block. She wondered how she could have missed it, as she could see through its windows well-crafted wooden toys and children’s furniture, not to mention dollhouses, rocking chairs for adults, and small carvings. Perhaps, she thought, she had dismissed it because of the “Closed” sign that hung on the door.

As she stood there, nose pressed against a misty show window, she heard the jingle of keys. Her reverie broken, she turned to see the flannel-shirted man, a short, rugged-looking redhead with a close-cut beard, turn a key in the lock.

“Sorry I wasn’t here,” he said pleasantly as he pushed the door open. “I had to get some – hey, weren’t you just in the Book Nook?”

“Yeah, I was the one chatting with your Santa friend.”

“My Santa friend – oh, yeah, Jack. He’s actually retired Air Force, believe it or not, but he comes out of retirement every year to play Santa for the community.”

“He does a great job. So, is this your store, or do you just work here?”

“This is my store.” He indicated the door with a flourish and stepped behind the glass counter full of small wooden sculptures.

Marcia stepped through the door he held open and instantly gravitated toward a wooden car that sat on a glass shelf, a cut-out with wheels. Of plain, unpainted wood, the car showed painstaking craftsmanship in the smoothness of the finish, the pleasant contours that comforted a hand. Marcia pushed it, feeling the “clack-clack-clack” the wheels made as it traveled down her invisible road. “I bet little kids really like this.”

“Not just little kids, apparently.” From behind the glass counter, the man grinned at her, a grin that removed all mockery from his words. Marcia realized that he was not as young as she had thought in the coffeehouse. He had the slightly weather-worn look fair-skinned men get in their thirties, with laugh lines around the eyes. The faint freckles and red hair, she thought – those must have thrown her off. 

“Oh, wow,” she breathed as things clicked in her head. “When you said this was your shop, you meant this was your shop.”

“Well, yes?” One of his eyebrows quirked.

“I mean – you make this stuff, don’t you?”

“Absolutely.” 

“Wow, you have a real talent!” She looked at the walls, the shelves with toys, the dollhouses, the hobbyhorses all glowing with warmth. "I mean, I used to play with trucks like this, but they never felt so good. I bet your dollhouses have stairs that really go up to the second floor!”

“Where else would they go?” The shopkeeper chuckled, and Marcia sighed happily.

“I’ve always hated dollhouses that you can’t really walk through. And dollhouses that are all out-of-proportion to themselves.” Marcia talked rapidly, breathlessly, then stopped. “Listen to me get so worked up about toys!”

“And what’s wrong with that?” He casually strolled over to where she stood by the car, still idly pushing it.

“Nothing, I mean …”

The flannel-shirted man cut her off with a question she hadn’t expected. “Are you from around here?”

“No, I’m on sabbatical here till the end of the month.” She was relieved to talk about something she felt comfortable with instead of babbling. “I’m a grant reviewer for a private foundation.” 

“Sabbatical, eh? That means you’re a professor?”

“Got it in one. Just got tenure last year, and the college thought they could spare me one semester of leave to recover.”

“I should have guessed you were a professor.” 

She glanced over her shoulder, and saw that he played idly with a pen. “Why?”

”Because you don’t miss anything. Luckily, though, you’re not one of those stuffy arrogant types.”

Again, his smile, the raised eyebrow, took all potential sting out of the words.

“Because you still know how to say ‘wow’.”

“Wow – er, I mean, thank you!” She felt her cheeks grow warm.

“See what I mean?” He grabbed the truck and said "Beep Beep!"

Marcia’s cheeks grew even warmer. Fortunately, as she glanced up at a simply elegant mantel clock, she found an excuse to flee – “Oh! I’ve got fifteen minutes to get back across town!”

“Here, take this with you.” The man handed Marcia the pen he had played with, and she discovered that it had a business card tied to the end of its smooth, curvy, turned-wood body.

“Kris Kringle’s,” Marcia read aloud. “How odd … but this shop is yours and not the Santa guy’s?” She looked around at the blond wood and the toys and the dollhouses begging for interior decoration.

“My shop. I’m Kris.” 

“Kris – oh, no, not Kringle, is it?” Marcia laughed.

“Nope,” he chuckled, “Kriegel. But you can imagine what it was like for me in grade school. I decided to use it to my advantage.”

“I know all too well. I’m Marcia Wendt – as in ‘Marcia Wendt to Hell?’”

“Oh, dear,” Kris Kriegel said sympathetically. “You do understand, then.”

“Well, nice to meet you, Mr. Kriegel, but I do have to go. This pen – it’s too nice to give away, isn’t it?” Marcia felt torn – the pen was glossy and fat and entirely too pleasant to the hand. 

“No, really. It’s yours.” He curled her hand around the silky wood with both his hands, which felt warm and calloused.

“But why?”

“So you won’t lose the business card, of course.”

Marcie's Thanksgiving

Hi, my name is Marcie, and I just turned 8! I spent Thanksgiving with my Aunt Laurie and Uncle Richard at a big hotel called The Elms. It looks kind of like a castle until you go inside, and then it looks kind of like a castle inside, only not in the big stone sort of way. They haven't decorated for Christmas yet, and they play old music -- really old music Aunt Laurie calls Sinatra.

Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful, but a bit strange. They had the turkey and the stuffing and the cranberries and the mashed potatoes and the gooey yams, but they also had salads and shrimp and this smoky undercooked salmon. I tried everything -- including too much pecan pie with lots of whipped cream. Real whipped cream.

I sat in the lobby by the fireplace for a while -- people brought their dogs indoors, can you believe it? I petted a big dog with stripey spots on it, and he leaned against me so I had to keep petting him. I tried to pet a little fluffy dog in a vest, but the owner said it was a service dog. Aunt Laurie said that the dog should have said "Service Dog" in big letters so you could see it.

They have hot tubs, cold tubs, and a place where you can walk in circles in the water. Aunt Laurie calls that a lap pool. That water's cold!  I walked two laps in it and then got too cold and hopped into the hot tub, which was hot! I guess that's why they call it a hot tub.

What they don't have is toys.  That's okay, because I brought my doll and my writing stuff.  My Barbie's chubby, and I picked her that way because she looks like my best friend Sara. And my Aunt Laurie. Lots of people are chubby. Barbie danced on the back of the couch (which Aunt Laurie said was leather) and then the wedding party strolled through with white and black dresses, and I thought it would be cool if the big dog was best man and the little dog was the ring bearer. Nope, they had little kids doing that.

Did I have birthday cake and presents, you ask? Nope, not yet. My birthday's not till Sunday and my mom does birthday things. I think my mom is going to get me art supplies like I asked -- not fingerpaint but paper and colored pencils and a coloring book with cats. And a cat! I get to pick her up (all cats are girls, by the way) from the Humane Society Monday.

Gotta go -- Aunt Laurie's walking over to the coffee shop like a zombie -- BRAIIINS! -- and I want to watch her order coffee!

Writer's Mini-Retreat

I've been at a writer's mini-retreat since last night, at The Elms in Excelsior Springs with my husband. The Elms is a pretty affordable hotel and spa, with ambience to spare.

We ate Thanksgiving dinner there, and that pretty much precluded any writing last night. We have no family nearby, we have no children, and it's no fun cooking for two. We're the people you see escaping to a hotel every year, because the alternative is the Hy-Vee cafeteria. Some years, we do eat at the Hy-Vee cafeteria.

Today, I'm writing for a while, starting with this blog, which I'm writing by the large stone fireplace. The lobby glows with small sconces on the brick Arts-and-Crafts pillars, and windows and woodwork carry on the simple, dark wood lines of the era. The tile floor bears a geometrically arranged motif of the Elms' logo, a shield.

I confess I won't get as much time writing as the name "writing retreat" deserves, because as a treat, I will be getting a massage and two hours' time in the Grotto, which is a comfortable and comforting spa room with dim lights, lounging chairs, and the spa part -- a hot tub, a steam sauna, a dry sauna, a hot and cold shower, mint face towels, salt scrubs, and -- you get the idea.

Maybe it's a retreat FROM writing?

Happy (US) Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a day where we express our thanks for the bounties in our lives. Personally, I do that every day (unless of course I'm depressed, which happens on occasion). I open the door of my life to a blur of tumbling colors and laughter and the search for the perfect words. This is why, if you meet me on the street and ask me how I am, I get this silly grin and say "Really good!" and then run out of words.  Thank you to the people I run into on the street who put up with my spaciness.

With the colors and laughter and words comes the desire to make things better for people. I feel so powerless sometimes, what with the ugliness that passes for patriotism and nationalism and even religion these days. My seven-year-old alter ego Marcie believes that if everyone was nice to each other, everything would be better. I personally think that if those who have more would just share the power, the wealth, the love, the dignity, the recognition -- things would be okay.  Thank you to the people who passionately work for equality and equity, especially for the culturally and ethnically diverse, the neurodiverse, and those in the LGBTQIA rainbow.

I have been working on giving up things and holding on to people. I don't do this as well as I'd like -- I would just as soon curl up and suck my thumb as talk "small talk". I'm not an introvert; I just want to exchange stories and talk about what we're passionate about. Thank you to those of you who have gifted me with those kinds of conversations in my life.

Sometimes things get in the way of life -- in my case it's my neurodiversity (bipolar 2) and side effects of the medications it takes to help me be highly productive. Sometimes I'm weepy; sometimes I stagger and lose my balance, or my hands shake; sometimes I get sick from being too warm or too cold. Thank you to my doc, Dr. Jura, for listening and working with me to get my meds to work for me.

My life includes a career, a house, five cats, the most understanding husband in the world, and an imagination. I'm thankful for that most of all.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my US friends and readers, and to all of you, thank you again for reading!

PS: OOPS!

The excerpt this morning was from my work in progress for NaNo, Whose Hearts are Mountains. I will label excerpts from now on. The list is as follows:

Gaia's Hands
Mythos
Apocalypse
Reclaiming the Balance (which might fare better as a short story)
Voyagers
Prodigies (halfway done)
Whose Hearts are Mountains (Current NaNo project)

See why I need to get published?

Note: To the person doing translation work, if you're reading: today's excerpt is not from the same book you're helping with translation on.

An excerpt (again)

NaNo writing makes for a very rough draft. I look at this and see that it’s a bit more than a plot outline, but not much more. You can’t tell from this that Archetypes are beautiful but not imaginative, that their decor is very austere a a result — think Shaker or Scandinavian design — or that the only wall hanging is a representation of the community logo — which was designed and created somewhere else.

You don’t know that Daniel is having to process that the woman he brought to the collective has probably introduced the biggest danger to the collective, and that his son tried to kill her.

This is why revision exists.

************


Mari called the meeting to order. I noticed, for the first time, that someone had set up a short platform made in the same blond wood as the floor. Mari and Luke and William sat crosslegged on rugs on the platform, looking more austere and more unsettling than they had seemed before. 

Mari stood up briefly, projecting her usual benevolence, which did not calm me down at all. “We have an emergent situation, one which involves the events that exiled Jude from Hearts are Mountains, Jude’s questions about Annie’s identity, and the whereabouts of Jude after he left us. Other revelations will likely be revealed that cannot be discussed outside of this space. I would like Annie to come up here and tell the story of how she came here.”

I stood up, feeling my legs wobble. Mari motioned me up to the front where I stood, as she sat down. “Do you mind if I ask you questions? You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to.”

I realized that if I left any questions unanswered, I would look suspicious to the Archetypes gathered here, and I realized that I didn’t want them to mistrust me. I wanted their regard.

“Annie, can you tell us your name and background?” Mari inquired.

Oh, we’re playing hardball here, I thought.

“The name I was given when I was — engendered …” I began, and I watched eyebrows go up with the words I carefully chose, “I was named Anna Mîr Johnson, and after my mother married Arthur Schmidt, my identity papers were changed to name me Anna Mîr Schmidt. I remember that well now, and I realize this man — “ I waved toward Luke — “created papers for me at my — engendering —  and at the time Arthur Schmidt claimed me as his daughter. My birth father was William Morris — “ I waved a hand toward William — “but he left me the day I was engendered. I’m still trying to figure out what engendering entails.”

“This makes you Nephilim,” Kirsten called out, petting one of her clowder of cats. 

“Yes, I’ve been told I’m a Nephilim. I’m trying to get up to speed on that, because until today I assumed I was human with a really poor memory of my childhood.”

“Some of us have lived like that,” William breathed. “My parents, Lilith and the Kiowa Archetype, engendered me and left me with the Kiowa to be a brother to them. They didn’t, however, tell me I would outlive those brothers by hundreds of years. It caused me some trouble. If Mari hadn’t found me, I would still think I was human.”

“We’ve been taking Lilly to task since we found you,” Luke reminded William. “All of us have made mistakes, even though we are not human.”

“Anna,” Mari interrupted, “can you explain to us who Arthur Schmidt was personally and professionally?”

I took a deep breath. The stocky, balding man I had called father, Arthur Schmidt, had been my favorite human being on earth — and I realized how accurate the phrase was in this case. “Arthur Schmidt was, for all intents and purposes, my father. I met him two months after I was engendered, and he did not challenge my mother’s cover story that I was my mother’s distant cousin who had suffered from a severe amnesia that had taken my childhood from me. My dad took it upon himself to pull me out of my shell by teaching me about puzzles, cryptograms, and riddles. He was a cryptographer. You would not have known of his work for the government, where he placed his most sophisticated systems. You might have, if you were a burglar, cursed Arthur Schmidt, because his locks were, for all intents and purposes, invincible.”

“How much do you know about his locks, Anna?” Luke asked, rubbing his chin.

“I know everything,” I breathed. I saw everyone in the group I faced -- Ivan, Summer, Daniel -- study me with interest. “I have his codebooks and his lockbox here in my backpack,” I indicated the pack I had carried up with me. “I have his override, which works as a key and as a code simultaneously. I’m the only person in the world who can currently arm and disarm a Schmidt lock.”

The room was perfectly quiet; I wondered what the others thought. I spoke again: “Would that be enough for someone to try to kill me? Would it be enough for someone to rescue me from certain death? To have me followed? To put a bounty on me?”

Luke uttered one word: “Yes.”

I then understood why my situation concerned the collective. They lived in danger by merely sheltering me. 

Is it necessary to be tortured to write?

I hate Edgar Allan Poe.

Don't get me wrong, I love his short stories. I tolerate his poems, preferring The Cannibal Flea (I cannot find the author) to Poe's version.

It's just that Poe, among other writers, gives the rest of us writers a reputation it's impossible for us to live down to.

Edgar Allan Poe: an unstable alcoholic who married his 13-year-old cousin and was found dying in a gutter. History attributes his death as resulting from everything from alcoholism to syphilis to rabies.

Virginia Woolf: diagnosed with bipolar disorder, showed antisemitism in several of her written communications despite being married to a Jew, fought against the medical establishment's treatment of her disorder, committed suicide.

Tennessee Williams: prone to severe vegetative depressions, struggled with drug use, including the amphetamines and Seconal his doctor prescribed, mourned his younger days and loss of sexual attractiveness, died of choking on the cap of some nasal spray.

Dorothy Parker: escaped an abusive childhood, plagued with alcohol problems and self-doubt,  put on the Hollywood blacklist for being a suspected Communist.

Even Stephen King had a substance abuse problem -- just about every substance, from what I can tell -- until he quit in the early 1980's.

One of my thoughts here, as I read over these synopses, is that all of us, if dissected so thoroughly, would have many of the same issues. Alcohol abuse isn't the sole province of classic writers, nor is mental illness. My biography would have some of the same elements if I were one of the great classic writers (without the alcohol and drug use, as I like to live life unhindered), but I'm not even published yet, much less classic.

I also wonder if the public documents writers' demons simply because we expect writers to have demons in order to be able to create. We still suffer from the belief that bipolar and depression create more creativity (the jury's still out on that; I'm only able to create when the edge is taken off my mood swings).

So, this is our takeway: Everyone has demons, and the demons aren't what qualify us to write.

Celebration

This is me celebrating

This is why I'm celebrating.
(The JPEG version won't let me fill in the blanks.)

I didn't write yesterday.

I didn't write yesterday.

I guess sometimes I need a break. Although I spent a few hours doing the following searches:

permaculture greenhouses
permaculture greenhouse plants
honey bees
honey bees Elko NV
Africanized honeybees
honey bees greenhouse
lizards eastern NV
venomous reptiles eastern NV

And I'm still looking. I have six greenhouses to fill with herbs, greens, and the like -- well, five, because one dome is a production greenhouse for seedlings and the like.

Wish me luck today -- I'd like to get 2000 words in!

Playing with the Dark Side

The dark side of our imaginations exist to remind us that many of our fantasies should not be fulfilled.

I left a tantalizing remark about the dark side of my imagination at the end of last night's post, the type that begs for a response: "What about the dark side of your imagination?"

To be honest, the dark side of my imagination doesn't like talking about the dark side of my imagination, because it envisions someone taking these notes and applying them to the dark side of seduction, something obsessive and manipulative and successful in a way that, in real life, I would call the police on.

In writing, the dark side of my imagination gets released. It imagines a dying world of lethal competition for scarce commodities like clean water (Voyageurs); a cold, vicious being crushing an unsuccessful henchman so badly that DNA analysis is the only way to identify him (Gaia's Hands); a near-immortal being bidding his protege and lover to hold his heart in its pericardial sac (Mythos); a crazed militia leader aiming at a courageous old lady with dispassionate media crews filming without interceding (Apocalypse). 

The darkness in these moments comes from the conflict of emotions and actions -- we aren't supposed to rejoice in having a hole punched in our chest or kill others with cold satisfaction or watch a murder with our only reaction professional pride at having captured the story. Writers feel their own conflicts -- in real life we would reject the possessive girlfriend, abhor the poisoner and his method, get grossed out at the righteous punishment of the rapist by crushing his testicles (or as an old friend once put it, castration by "a brick, an anvil, and some duct tape." My friend had a very dark side.)

We don't want to witness any of these things in real life. But we writers put them in books to exorcize the demons from our minds, to get justice in the end for the executors of these deeds, and to allow us to go back to our happier fantasies of sitting in the perfect bookshop.

Nurturing Spaces

Somewhere, there exists a perfect coffeehouse. The light is soothing, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. It is paneled in warm wood, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. It has local art on the walls, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. The espresso is rich with thick crema and a twist of lemon, and a piece of dark chocolate on the side, NOTHING like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. In the perfect coffeehouse, I can crawl in bleary-eyed after a day of writing and feel like I'm home, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. 

I think I've made myself clear about the coffeehouse I currently sit in.

One of the great things about being a writer is that I can create nurturing spaces that I can't find in real life, spaces that literally make me weepy-eyed. A kitten pile on a warm wood floor, a cottage in a place called Heaven, a coffeehouse where I can be completely unselfconscious, a toy shop where a young Kris Kringle builds wooden toys. A rainy alley where two people kiss for the first time, an attic where the sun shines in through a window, an auditorium with perfect acoustics.

If I encountered my imagination in real life, I would wonder if I was in heaven, which means I'd wonder if I was dead, and whether the afterlife would be a place where I literally walked through my imagination. That wouldn't be bad as long as I didn't indulge the darker parts of my imagination.

Thank you, Google!

A joke among writers these days is "I hope nobody looks at my search history". This is an excerpt of my Internet search history for this novel:


Sindarin language
Tengwar alphabet
Gold bullion
Pickle Lake ON
Grand Marais MN
Duluth MN
rat finish automobile
petroleum fractionator
biodiesel
jatropha biodiesel
castor oil biodiesel
sewage biodiesel
transesterification biodiesel
Pickle Lake, ON to Chicago
Milwaukee Avenue subway station Chicago
Adair, IA I-80 rest stop
Bull Mastiff
How dogs kill
Wagonhound, WY rest stop
Pine Bluffs WY
smallpox
underground desert housing
Owyhee Desert
desert sheep breeds
Navajo Churro sheep
Mammoth Jacks
desert goat breeds
guanacos
Great Pyrenees
off-road motorcycle
Nubian goats
goat milk
mare's milk
dry land farming
water reclamation
how to build a generator
borax mine Nevada
working knife wood handle
natural black dyes
pumice mine Nevada
flora Elko County Nevada
mines Elko County Nevada
ricin poisoning symptoms
how easy is it to synthesize ricin


(Note: I did not search "HOW to synthesize ricin", because I really don't want to know.)

This is only a partial search. When I write, I envision subject matter experts leaning over my shoulder saying, "No way can you put straight castor oil in that car!" and the like. Remember also that I'm not great at visualizing things, even if I've seen them before like the Milwaukee Avenue subway station in Chicago or the Adair, IA rest stop.

I could use a "fantasy version" of my post-United States, I guess, but I want people to feel the discomfort of seeing familiar places turned to rubble. So I need to work with earth rules -- except for the Archetypes, of course ...

Thanks again for reading.

Wow. I don't know what to write today. I think all my brain cells dedicated to writing are all tied up with this novel. Which is a good thing, I guess -- I think some of my posts have been suffering in quality because of my latest writing obsession.

I suppose I could take a break from the blog while writing, but -- I can't --

Because I love the attention.

I'm not really an accomplished Facebook writer, because I don't know how to be one of the cool kids. Honestly. I'm in my own little world sometimes, and someone asks, "How are you?" and I say, "Kitty! Look at the kitty!"

I love that you're visiting me. I hope I'm not babbling every day, I hope you care about what you read, I hope that I'm giving you an idea about what the mind of a writer, and in this case a cute, cuddly writer who writes about apocalyptic futures (appearances can be deceiving, can't they?) and cats.

Yes, I will be the first to admit that I can be a little dramatic, especially when talking about finding an agent, editing, and My Mission to Save the World through My Novels. (Capitalized for embarassing self-importance).

But I see you come visit -- not by name, but by place: US (the majority of visitors), Portugal, Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Peru, Russia, Costa Rica (I think I know who you are!), France, Canada, United Kingdom (I DO know who you are!), Hong Kong and India (Haven't seen you folks in a while!) and maybe a couple I've forgot.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for putting up with my ups and downs. Thank you for being the anonymous people who make my day.

Satisfaction

My seven-year-old honorary niece, Marcie, asked me if she could teach you about satisfaction, so here goes:

"Satisfaction, Aunt Laurie says, is a type of happy. I like the word 'happy' better. There are different types of happy, and they make you feel different ways. There's big wow happies, there's little fluffy happies, and there's the 'I'm so happy the tiger didn't eat me' happies.

"The thing is, how you get the happy makes a difference in how you feel the happy.  If you want to do something like write a book, and you finish the book, you're like 'Wow! Big happy!'. But the next morning you're like 'ho hum, time to find something else big to do.' It's like eating ice cream -- you want real food a couple hours later after you weren't hungry for dinner. But if you have something you want to get good at, and you do it all the time and get better and better, you feel this little warm glow and it lasts a long time. So getting better at something isn't as yummy but it keeps you full longer, like oatmeal with raisins and honey -- not as sweet, but it lasts longer in your tummy.

"Aunt Laurie just typed 50,000 words -- that's a lot of words! -- and so she won something she calls NaNo. But this morning she woke up and said, 'Now what? I met my goal!' Then she looked at her computer and said, 'I still need to learn how to write better, so I'm going to keep practicing and maybe someday I'll get published!'

"The End!"

50,000 is just a beginning

I've met my NaNo goal in half a month.
Phew!
But this novel writing is just beginning...

There's about 40,000-50,000 words left to write, and then there's editing, editing, and more editing. There's letting other people read it for reactions. There's marketing it to an agent.

But that's okay.

Phew!

An excerpt -- and the home stretch.

I am in the home stretch with 4000 words left. I might hit the goal today; I might not. I will keep writing till at least the end of the month; it's possible if I keep this rate up I'll be close to the end of the book. I doubt I will, however -- I'm traveling for a writers' retreat over (American) Thanksgiving.

Here's an excerpt from yesterday (really rough). Our protagonist, Annie Smith,  has accepted an invitation to the intentional community Hearts are Mountains, built in northern Nevada in the Owyhee Desert, for fuel and water. There are a few mysteries that Annie doesn't quite register:

I realized, as we went down another circular stairwell, that the underground building was a cylinder longer than it was wide. This being the central cylinder, the rooms appeared to be for collective use. Doors led to, I presumed, the other cylinders below the greenhouses. The layer below the great room served as a craft production room, and below that a root cellar and food storage area, with a full quarter of the area used for — 

“Water reclamation?” I asked, spying the tall cylindrical powered unit.

“Got it in one,” Daniel nodded. “We run the unit on skinky — generated outside, of course — supplemented with jatropha, which we grow in one of the domes, and castor, which we grow on the opposite side of the animals so they don’t eat the beans and die.” He indicated the large unit again. “One of the biggest hazards of living in underground units is the humidity level — too much humidity, believe it or not, makes underground living very unpleasant."

“This is a pretty sophisticated setup,” I remarked, looking at concrete and metal. “Pardon me for asking, but doesn’t this setup require a lot of money?”

Daniel paused for a long moment. I wondered if I had broken a taboo among these people by mentioning money. “I’m sorry — “ I blurted out.

“No, really, it’s fine. It’s hard to explain our funding for this, however. We built this with seed money and sweat equity. Although the cement habitats are prefab, we installed them ourselves. This one goes about seventy feet into the ground, while the others — living spaces — go down about sixty. As you can tell, almost all our living spaces are underground; we had to do some deep digging, and I don’t know if the site has fully recovered after twenty years.”

We walked up three flights of circular stairs past the root cellar and the peaceful crafts room, where a man sat, spinning fiber — 

“Derek,” Daniel called out, “say hi to Annie. She’s having dinner with us.”

Derek, a pale man with incredibly long, pale hair, gave us a puzzled look and then smiled. “Hi, Annie,” he said and turned back to his work.

“Is he Kirsten’s brother?”

“Twins. They’re extremely rare among …” he let his voice trail off, and I wondered how the sentence would have ended.

“You don’t get visitors here often, do you?” I queried in what I suspected was a grave understatement.

“Not too many people are into rock climbing these days,” Daniel shrugged.

A really quick note

4000 words to go! Phew!

Also: Google Earth and Wikipedia — next best thing to being there in the Owyhee desert. I could never have written this book in my twenties, because the research I’ve done on desert-hardy goats and sheep, natural predator control, biodiesel, underground housing ...

You get the idea.

Also — love you all. Quiet time for me now.

Plans and plans

Barring a catastrophe -- which I don't expect, but who does? -- I should be at the 50,000 mark by Friday.  I had a fabulous writing day yesterday, with 2000 more words than I thought I'd write. (I wrote a total of 4000 words.) Then I will have met my Big Audacious Goal and made up for my failure at NaNo last year, when I had a meltdown during Trump's election as one of the millions of American women who wished we'd had been given a trigger warning.

I'll finish writing this draft until I run out at about 90,000-100,000 words. For those of you who have never written a novel, that's not as big as you think. The average science fiction book is about 100,000 words and other genres around that.

I fully expect that, on reread, this first draft will be pretty messy with plot holes, poor word choice, and lack of description. I still struggle with how much description to put into a book. The irony is that I love writing descriptive passages, but all I know about the terrain around Elko, NV (where my protagonist is currently at) is what I see on the Internet. I've hit the Internet quite a bit in this writing run, and I suspect I will some more.

I will probably put Whose Hearts are Mountains (this work-in-progress) into a hibernation when I'm done so I can look at it with fresh eyes later. My writing will probably alternate between finishing Prodigies and finding an editor for the ever important first three chapters to be sent to agents and publishers. Then I will go through another cycle of sending to agents, hoping that I will be lucky this time.

Thanks, all, for reading.

Once upon a time

My goal was 2000 words today. I'm already at 3000, and I might get more done today.

******

Thought on my mind:

Once upon a time, I had a muse.

What is a muse? In Greek mythology, they were the go-to goddesses of the Arts. There were seven, one for each of the Greek arts. In popular imagination, they are people who inspire artists, writers, and the like. Muses are usually women, but only because women do not take their birthright as artists to claim a muse. I am not like other women; I will have my muses.

Once upon a time, I had a muse.

Why did I want a muse?

There is a type of energy one can only get from a giddy affection for someone. It's an affection that has no future, has no lust, has nothing but regard for the other person and -- oh, the beauty! The beauty of that person!

It's pure ludus, as the Greeks would term it -- an infatuation that would only shatter were reality to intrude. It's embarrassing, painful, and distilled into perfection when the person merely utters, "hi".

When that person says "I'm following your progress", then that person becomes a muse. That ludus energy gives a creative boost that's like being high on the pictures behind your eyes.

Once upon a time, I had a muse.

Who is my muse?

I will never tell you. I will never tell him.

Once upon a time, I had a muse.

Notice that phrase is in past tense. My muse has gone.  All I can do when a muse disappears is let him go, and hope he forgives me.

Melancholy, foggy morning haiku --

A melancholy, foggy morning haiku --

I stepped into fog --
Perfect leaf laid on my porch,
memory of flame.

IF the above had happened, it would be a mystery -- the verb should be "lay", as in "the leaf sat there", yet the verb I use here is "laid", as in "someone put this on my porch". I meant to do that, to go with the word "perfect", to indicate that there's a puzzle here. Why do I think the leaf was placed there? Who -- or what -- would have laid a leaf on my porch? Why? Does the poem hint at a mystical creature? Will I be disappointed if I figure out the the wind blew the leaf from three houses away and landed it, somehow perfectly, on my porch?

What is the significance of the perfect leaf? What flame is it a memory of? Does this influence who or what I think laid the leaf?

Haiku makes us want to feel, to ride along with the words, rather than think. Thinking is for later.

*************
Today, I start the home stretch of NaNo. I'm way ahead of the game, because I'm a little compulsive about numerical goals, and because gosh, this book has spent thirty years in my mind. I have 10,000 words left to win NaNo -- but approximately 60,000 words left to finish the book. And one book half-done (Voyageurs), one three-chapter chunk I'm learning from editing (Voyageurs), and who knows what I can do with the others, knowing what I've learned lately.

And then I have searching for editors again.

BAG accomplished!

Big Audacious Goal of the Day accomplished:

4000 words written in about 5 hours (four hours if you subtract the interruptions).
Total: 40,315 words -- 5 2000-word days for the win!

How accomplished:
1) Fireplace program on the projection screen
2) One cup of Kenya Nyeri
3) One cup of Phoenix Valley Oolong
4) Occasional visits by Girly-Girl and Snowy
5) Promised myself I would stop in 15 minutes if I couldn't concentrate

Today's plot points: A town of the dead, smash-and-grab shopping, and two feral children at a rest stop.

10,000 to go!
Love you all!

This morning: Reluctance to write

I'm not sure why I'm not motivated this morning. It's bright and early (or at least early) in Maryville, MO; Girly-girl the deadpan calico cat sits next to me and purrs --

If a picture's worth a thousand words, why do I write?

It's a perfect day for writing: warm inside, rainy and misty outside. There Will Be Coffee Soon. I have all day to write --

At 5 AM, 4000 words (my weekend goal) is much too daunting.

How shall I deal with this?

1) Break the goal down into a couple parts -- four blocks of 1000 seem workable.

2) Start writing for fifteen minutes and let myself quit if I'm still not into it.

3) Drink. The. Coffee. First. It's Kenya Nyeri, home roasted, and sure to taste somewhere between a good solid cup of coffee and heaven in a cup.

4) Write a more fun part first. Actually, this beginning part is a good, dramatic part -- it begins with the protagonist reading a journal left by the last survivor of a plague -- but is the plague still contagious?

5) Alternatively, tackle the hardest part first. Right after this segment is a part I haven't really conceived of first, and it's kind of a transitional part. These are hard to write without sounding like a voiceover in a movie script: "As a matter of fact, my adventures were just beginning ..."

6) Forgive myself if I don't make the goal. I'm way ahead, as is expected from someone who loves personal challenges.

Talk to you later!

Lions and tigers and bears and deadly viruses ...

4000 words today, with the following plot quirks:  survivalist with dreams of using ricin; lions, tigers, and bears; a ghost town; a tornado; and the most boring stretch of highway in the US (I-80 in Nebraska). Good writing session, although I'm not writing as fast as I used to.

My eyes are so strained, they're practically bleeding; it's naptime for me.

Send me love, because I could use a little today. Terribly gloomy out, and I just killed an entire village with a viral plague.

Dream sequences

I love writing dream sequences. They allow me to write abstract sequences that nonetheless hint to future developments of the plot.

My idea here is that we do a lot of subconscious processing when we dream. One theory of dreams, which does not sit well with non-scientists, is that the objects and happenings in our dreams are processed and reviewed to put into long-term storage. If your newfound Aunt Martha reminds you of your long-departed Aunt Mary, you're as likely to dream of Martha as Mary that night, because your short-term memory connects Martha and Mary. The next morning, you think to yourself, "Oh, that's why I felt the presence of a ghost -- Aunt Martha reminds me of my dearly departed Aunt Mary!" often without remembering the dream.

Non-scientists like to believe that dreams are ripe for interpretation. Freudians have set symbols they look for in dreams, focusing on the Freudian hallmarks, the urges and taboos we sublimate to be acceptable adults: sex, defecation, and death. An interesting situation in Freudian interpretation: dreaming of turning on a faucet symbolizes sex.  Dreaming of having sex with someone does not. Many dream interpretation books on the market are at least semi-Freudian in their interpretations.

Meanwhile, Jungian interpretation focuses on the people in your dream, and how they resemble the archetypes that feature heavily in our stories and deeper psyche. So the Jungian dream would look at the animus (your darker self), mentors, quests -- in other words, Jung puts your dream through a Star Wars filter.

Others' take on dreams is that they give messages -- not only the result of subconscious processing above, but prosaic messages from the outside that the brain connects -- much like the scientific theory above -- but precognitive messages, messages from mystical connections, messages from others alive or dead, messages from our most inner self.  Even though this sounds like mental illness, we all know people we call superstitious that have these beliefs. The person who dreams of deceased Aunt Mary believes that anything Mary said or did in the dream is a direct message. They may believe that they themselves are the next family member slated to die.  A common belief is that cardinals carry messages from the dead, so someone might dream of a cardinal instead of Aunt Mary.

When I write about dreams, they have elements of subconscious processing of mysteries with a touch of the mystical -- but just a light touch. Generally, a series of seemingly unrelated data come together through subconscious reasoning -- but still may not be interpretable to the dreamer because of the need to disbelieve. At the end, I introduce the mystical finger pointing to a future revelation. That's just how I do it, and I'm sure the Freudians and Jungians disagree.

I wrote a dream last night and I'm really proud of it. I may show it to you later.

**********
This morning I start at 32,000 words, give or take a couple. My goal is to be finished by Friday, which gets me to the 50,000 goal 14 days ahead of time. I will continue writing, except at a slower pace, and I will have a writers' retreat (with massage! And sauna and steam bath and hot tub oh my!) at The Elms in Excelsior Springs for Thanksgiving with Richard!

Love you all.

For the love of a mystery

I confess: I love a small mystery.  I don't just mean big mysteries of murder and espionage, although I adore Agatha Christie. I mean an answer that begs to be revealed, a message that needs to be decoded, a package without a sender (and without wires, grease marks, or the smell of explosives), an anonymous letter with only a line of poetry.

I find mysteries tantalizingly frustrating. Frustrating because the mystery turns over and over in my mind, like a beautiful wooden box with no entry. I fumble at the box, trying to find the twist or turn or shake that will get me access to the box because I desperately want to know what's inside. Tantalizing because the mystery is by definition a message, and the message by definition is a mystery. 

I find mysteries romantic. By romantic, I do not mean "only permitted from a significant other or, if single, a potential suitor". I mean that mysteries carry a whole story -- why is the information concealed, kept secret, or denied? What is the importance of the information? What are the consequences of the information being concealed -- or revealed? 

I have been the recipient and the perpetrator of many mysteries. My aunt sent inspirational poetry to me anonymously when I was ten, and trying to solve the mystery of who the sender was got me through a very difficult period in my life. I once sent a line of my poetry to a guy I'd met in high school, and when we started dating, I discovered he'd put it on his wall, not even knowing it was me (and I proved myself a goddess when I claimed it). An old college friend anonymously sent me a CD for a 20-year reunion concert of my favorite local band -- or at least I think it was him. 

I find myself putting small mysteries into many of my novels. The protagonist asks, "Who sent me this message?" or "Why do I recognize this?" or "Why did this person say that?" or "What does this dream mean?" 

My wish list for secrets:

No nastygrams -- if you want to be nasty or mean, say it to my face

No postal bombs or anthrax

No pictures of your junk

Yes to subtlety

Yes to difficulty in solving

Yes to something you'd like to share

Coffee is always good

*************

Now at 32,000 words. Today's writing included a dream sequence, calligraphy in a foreign language, and doubts about a character's "insanity".

Love you all. Talk later!

Technology in the background

When I was five years old, the object that most epitomized the grownup life I wanted to live was this:

This is a Western Electric circa 1965 Princess phone in its dial configuration (I thought touch-tone was so ugly). For some of you, many of you in fact, "Western Electric", "Princess phone", and "touch-tone" are terms you've never heard, and the term "land-line" is a term you've heard of and consider an archaic technology.

This was the phone I got:

My first cell phone looked like this:

No putting it in a pocket like I'm used to now.

Technology anchors the story in time and place -- a protagonist can call someone on the phone, but describing the phone ever so briefly reminds the reader of when the story takes place. Describing can be succinct, like "She called on the bag phone", or more interactive, like "she unzipped the vinyl bag, raised the antenna, and put the headset to her ear."  To a reader who has never seen a bag phone, the description will give them pause.

In actuality, there is no era without technology, no matter how primitive that technology is.  Technology is simply "the collection of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods and services or in the accomplishment of objectives" (Wikipedia, 2017). Therefore, fire, torches, Betty lamps, tallow candles, lanterns, gaslight, incandescent bulbs, fluroescent bulbs, halogen bulbs, and LEDs are all light technologies depending on the era.

My current work in progress is set 15 years in the future after a national economic and governmental collapse. The country, now countries, have lost electricity, gasoline (petrol), and long-distance trucking of food and supplies. Their technologies, therefore, have been created from knowledge, ingenuity, and scavenging. The main fuel used is bio-diesels made from rendering of dead cattle, plant matter, and sewage. Wood, of course, still work, as do scavenged stores of gasoline and kerosene, but these are rare. Solar installations and wind turbines supply power until parts need to be replaced, because machining has not yet converted to diesel-generated power.  People have developed diesel generators and kerosene/diesel refrigerators. They have begun to pick up old arts like weaving, hand-sewing, and preserving food by smoking. Economies are very localized, and trade is done by barter.

That is their level of technology. It's not as advanced as ours, but it may help them crawl upward to their own technologies, developed from the available materials, mimicry of the scavenged goods, ingenuity, and need.  Without me writing about it, however, nobody will understand how different their world is than ours.

*********
I'm writing pretty fast -- my goal today is 32,000 words total, or 3000 additional words for today. If I have to take a break, I have a wide cushion.

The part I'm most proud of today

I wrote 3600 words today to make up for the 2500 words (yes, I'm aiming for 3000 words, 4000 words on weekends) yesterday, and probably to make up for the fact that I didn't win NaNo last year. 29,000 words so far.

Here's my favorite segment of the day -- an indigent with mental illness tells a story. Remember this is a rough draft. Really rough:

*********

Pagan paused again for a long time, cocking his head. Then, his voice became that of a child’s, and he spoke:

“I am supposed to be one of them, but instead I got put into the hospital. It was after I woke up, after I started existing. I woke up in a room, and a woman started screaming. I ran outside, and all these big machines tried to kill me, and everything was loud. I started screaming, like the woman. They took me to this white  place, the hospital, and tied me down. Then she told me she was like me, and we were their abandoned children. That’s what she told me, the one who talks in my head. 

“‘Who are they?’ I asked her in her head.

“‘The ones who wander. Sometimes they make us by accident, sometimes on purpose. We are them and we are humans, so they abandoned us.’

“The people who tied me down asked me questions I couldn’t understand: What my name was, where I lived, who my next of kin was. All I could answer with was ‘I’m them and I’m human,’ because those were all the words that I had.

“They untied me, but they kept me in that bright room, and occasionally something would make their name known to me. Someone in white would come into my room and ask me if I wanted the lamp turned on, and I knew ‘lamp’ and ‘on’, and then ‘light’ and ‘food’ and ‘bathroom’

“But I understood the voice from the moment I heard it, because it didn’t talk in words, but in meanings, and it was words I didn’t understand.

“’Who are they?’ I asked again. ‘Who are the ones who wander?’

“She would not answer me.”

******
This will become important later.

Advising about Advice

My editor redeemed himself.

Not by giving in, not by praising my work, but by naming specific things I needed to work on.  In my case, it's adding other details happening that don't have to have to do with the story. Given how I write (from what I've seen yesterday), that focus and immersion on the experiences of the protagonist is like riding a train through a tunnel, and I have tunnel vision.

Successful authors don't want editors to rubber-stamp their work, they want to be pushed to grow.  But we're all blind to our idiosyncracies that get in the way. That's why we have editors.

Because authors are intimate with their books, they don't understand global comments like "it's a bit choppy", "drags a bit", and "needs more cowbell". There needs to be a more specific, actionable comment like, "You need to include detail that does not involve the plot." or "you've used the word 'vitriol' five times in the first chapter -- can you find a synonym?"

The other thing about global comments is that sometimes they're spirit-killing. Unless you're Dean Koontz, apparently, in this pep talk for NaNo that all editors should read (and I use "should" very sparingly):

https://nanowrimo.org/pep-talks/dean-koontz

Note to my editor: Just as I like to be praised when I finally "get it", I'll praise my editor, who I'm sure is reading this blog. Editor, you're getting it. I don't remember calling you names, and if I did, I'm sorry.

Note to authors: This is the reason you don't write the nasty note to your editor when your ire is up. Rant about your feelings and not about your editor. Keep those sadistic fantasies to yourself. Then take a deep breath, and if your editor doesn't redeem himself, fire him.

*******
Back to NaNo. I wrote about 2500 words yesterday, but I'll eventually catch up. I'm actually ahead of schedule -- at the last checkin, I would be done by November 17th. I won't be putting in the detail requested above in this story, because it's not time yet. Now is the time to lay in the skeleton.

Serious setback

I'm struggling today -- struggling in a "I don't know if I want to keep doing this" way. I don't know what I need from you, dear readers. Bear with me.

I did not reach my goal today. I only made it half-way there. I will struggle to get there tomorrow, if I get there at all.

Today, a friend of a friend who was supposed to edit the first three chapters of my book said something in the guise of advice that has made me feel, more than anything, like giving up:

"A reader is a simple organism.  We expect A, will be happy with B, will grudgingly accept C, and all the other letters are crap.  Stereotypes and tropes exist for a reason.  No matter what someone says about wanting pure original stories, they will get pissed off if the wizard doesn't carry a staff."  

I know I can get a bit sensitive about criticism. But usually, I can step aside and say, "Yeah, that needs work," and I can get to work. I'll be the first to admit that my words are too big and I need help in pacing the plot. I read advice to writers and implement it the best I can.

But the above comment basically tells me that my viewpoint is not valued, my voice is just wrong, and I have to write at the level of The Flintstones to get published.

I could live with "write at the level of The Flintstones to get published" if that were all that was said. I would keep writing my stuff and not publish it. End of problem.

But the rest of it tears into my very soul.  I do not want to be known for writing Islamic terrorists, white saviors, and Fu Manchu.  I also don't expect to write stereotypes in terms of "the repressed but sexy librarian", "the rugged action hero", and "the desperate sexless nerd." I expect my characters to be three-dimensional. I in fact try to write outside these stereotypes.

As for tropes, it's impossible to write without them -- Every story I've ever written touches on self-discovery, which is a trope called The Hero's Journey. (Some argue that everything written is the Hero's Journey, but I'm skeptical.) I've written in "boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back after 150 years" trope. Obviously I subvert tropes.

I firmly believe that words are so important that writers have to choose them carefully. Words have the magic to change perceptions or to freeze them into cages. I believe that roles are held by well-formed characters and stereotypes hold characters hostage.

The worst part, though, is that I can't even conceive of what this man was talking about. He might have been talking in a different language about a world I didn't live in.

When I write a book, I don't say, "Hey, let's put the clever and debonair robber and the stupid cop and the clueless but hot woman in and first the robber breaks into the bank in a tension-filled scene, and then he sneaks the money out right under the nose of the cop, who chases him, and he carjacks this fast car and the clueless woman falls in love with him." I don't shop at "Tropes r Us" to find a plot.

When I write a story, it's like I have these characters, and yes, I deliberately pick them so that they don't fall into stereotypes, because people who aren't white, beautiful, and upper class deserve to have adventures and fall in love (this is why I can't write romance novels). I write a plot, and the chapters take me traveling through the plot.

I travel with the characters in my mind when I'm writing, seeing the same things and experiencing the same events they do. It's an intense immersion process (and the only time I can actually visualize). This is how I write. It's like I'm creating the world I want to live in in the remains of the world I live in, right before my eyes.

In fact, I have trouble editing my books because I don't get the same intensity I got when I wrote them. Honestly, I don't know if what I'm doing is readable. That's the problem -- I honestly don't, because when I get to the editing stage I see that it all makes sense, everything follows logically -- but I can't tell if the pacing is right and I really can't tell if anyone besides me would find it interesting.

Notes: I have trouble finding beta-readers. Am saving up for an editor who has more experience, but I'm so afraid that I'm going to keep getting critiques of what I am and not what I need to improve.

Thank you for listening.

A shout-out to my childhood town:

Outside of Chicago, the scenery of what the mapmakers in Grand Marais called The Jungle seemed no different than the rural areas of North Ontario or Minnesota. The land was flatter, and in the March weather, the overgrowth of grasses just started to show green through last year’s dried stalks, and the trees in the distance didn’t glow with green buds yet. The farmland that would have spread for miles in a farm economy sat fallow and grey, drought and the collapse of factory farming ending the land’s purpose to the economy. The highway, with its occasional potholes and washboards, was no different than those I had seen North. 

I turned off the road at a ragged road sign that announced a town with a preposterously French name, hoping to hear some stories there. At the bottom of a graceful hill, I heard the sound of a shotgun close by, a warning shot. I spun the truck around and headed back up the hill. Nobody had shot at me in Chicago proper, but here in the rural Midwest, someone shot at me. 

*******
Writing that was almost more fun than killing off my ex-husband in Gaia's Hands. 

Thank you, friends, for reading. Now to go write a few thousand words.

I'm still going -- 3000 words today

I made it through my 3000 word goal, although I am seriously not feeling well today. (I also made it to work). The fun today was writing in a bit of urban shamanism:

The collective had offered me a place on the floor of the Commons building, which I took with gratitude. I suspected my days sleeping in a bed would be over, and I suspected that I would sleep in the cab of my truck after I left this place.

I laid out my bedroll, using my backpack as my pillow as always. The moment I laid down and closed my eyes, a voice behind me, low and gravelly, said, “Tina and I need to talk to you outside.” I turned around and saw some of the few white people from dinner, a man of about average height with long, wavy greying hair and goatee; and a diminutive blonde woman, all dimples.

“Okay,” I queried. “What’s the reason for the secret meeting?”

“You looked really freaked out back there. During dinner.” He raised his eyebrows, and I noted that he looked much like the Asian Boys in Duluth, only with stunning hair they wouldn’t have sported.

“Well, David talked to me about hearing voices in my head. I got uncomfortable.” The shorter woman shot me a sympathetic look.

“David’s not crazy,” the man shook his head. “Streetwise, like me, but not crazy. You might want to listen to him.”

I knew I should be taking these notes down in my head, or in my notebook. The collective had a tendency toward superstition - the tree that protected, the wise crazy person — but that wasn’t the story I looked for.

“So who are you?” I asked “And why are you here?”

“I’m Allan Chang, and I should tell you I’m a shaman so some of this makes sense. This is my partner, Celestine Eisner.” Celestine, who looked about twenty, waved in acknowledgment.

“A shaman. How does that fit into the collective?” Most self-identified shamans in the post-Industrial era did not come from a culture that believed in shamans, and the likelihood was that they used mysticism to compensate for being powerless.

“They think it’s strange, because they’re not used to Asians hearing spirits.” He grinned, a wolfish grin that for a moment made me believe in totems.

“So, what’s our business tonight?” I hoped it was a story of the Alvar, because I hadn’t gotten my quota for the day.

“We need to consult the subway oracle.” Oracles in subways? That was a new one to me; previous to this, I had thought the conjunction of fortune-telling and technology had been limited to tarot readings and Miss Cleo.

“And you need a ride?” I asked, realizing that my sleep time would be shortened.

“No. By we, I mean you need to consult the subway oracle.” Allan emphasized. “I can feel the agitation David is causing you.”

********
Incidentally, Allan and Celestine show up in a couple of earlier books. Celestine, it turns out, has something in common with the protagonist of this story.

A short excerpt -- I'm on a roll on a difficult part

I have a couple hours to write before work today, and I want to get moving, because my mind is playing with a difficult part/concept: What if your first memory is of being full-grown, but totally bewildered by your surroundings:

The faded man sitting next to me introduced himself as David Burris, Valor’s son and Justice’s brother. It seemed odd to me that he looked as if he could be Valor’s father, not vice versa. Then he asked a question, a nonsequitur that nonetheless resonated more than a stranger’s question should have:

“What’s your first childhood memory?” he asked, his gaze searing into me.

My mind spun in panic — I had no childhood memories. I couldn’t get to them. The first thing I remembered in my life was a dream of standing up in my parents’ living room, in the old house where they used to live before they disappeared from society. Durant — my father — wasn’t there, but that wasn’t surprising; I had always known he came into my life later. Three people sat in the room: my mother; plump and curly-haired; a man, tall with long black hair and implacable eyes; and another woman, short and slender, smiling like a grandmother. My mother and the man were bundled up in bathrobes and blankets like they’d just come in from the cold. I couldn’t understand. I stumbled away.

“Come here,” the dark-haired woman said, with a curious gesture of her — I looked down at what I quickly learned was my hand. “Let me look at you.”  

I stepped backward. “Here” came with the woman’s gesture toward herself. “You” — I guess that meant me. 

*******
So this is obviously written in first person, and the person is a Nephilim but doesn't know it. Nephilim are born full-grown and biologically learn very, very quickly such that in a week, she understands everything in that room and shows proficiency. But, at the moment she describes in the memory, she knows literally nothing. So I have to write the scene dividing her observations into two parts: things she can describe and understand at the time of reflection, and things recalled at that exact moment. Tough, huh?

Thanks for reading, friends.

Rituals and word counts.

Thank you for keeping up, friends! I made the 20,000 mark today after swearing to write 3,000 words today despite not feeling well. I had time to write during my lunch hour, so I decided to stay on the goal. Specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, time-bound.

Honestly, I'm not a horribly organized person who drives toward goals except at NaNo time. I meander most of the year, play with words, set soft goals. NaNo time is different -- it's as NaNo is a ritual I satisfy yearly to belong to my tribe of creatives. It's like my version of an all-night drumming circle at Midsummer or my First Snow ritual that I no longer hold because nobody's calendars are clear on that random November night when we get our first inch of snow.

I have to go to class now -- don't tell anyone.

Do you want to read an excerpt tonight? Please let me know!

An Excerpt: A Story about Stories

Day 6 of NaNoWriMo, and I want to get at least 2000 words in before I have to go to work, because it's a long day and I need to get started soon. I'm at 17,000 words, up 7.000 words, so if I don't get all the words in today, I'm okay. 

An excerpt (remember this is rough draft time). In effect, what I'm writing is a story about a story:

As I drove down the highway, I thought about Hakeem’s and Bosco’s words — I couldn’t help but laugh at those two young men wanting to — what? Offer themselves up as husbands? Be my protectors? I seldom picked up on those kinds of currents. As role models, my parents gave me the gift of watching their near-perfect relationship, perfect except for my father’s belief that my mother kept a secret he couldn’t crack. However, I didn’t seem to fall for the occasional men who took me out for coffee and complimented me. I literally didn’t understand the process of “I take you out for dinner, you have sex with me.” 

From there, I thought about Sonya’s words. “If you’re looking for the Alvar, you’ll have to look in the worst places.” Wasn’t that always the case with fairy tales? The Hobbits had to throw the One Ring into Mount Doom, a raging volcano. Little Red Riding Hood had to go through a dark forest and visit the wolf to pass through menarche, symbolized by the red hood. Would my quest follow the parameters of the Hero’s Quest?

I was not a hero. I was an academic without a job and without any useful skills except the ability to crack Schmidt locks — and other locks, albeit with the help of a lock pick. I was an anthropologist searching for the inevitable, unpublishable study, a study of the origins of a mythical people. If the Alvar actually existed, what would I do if I found them? If they didn’t exist and I found the human origin of the tale as if it was an urban legend, where would I publish my findings?

Did I chase the legend simply because my mother once told it to me in a bedtime story? 

I pulled myself back to reality and saw a roadblock up ahead, just before Eau Claire.  I slammed on my brakes, nearly skidding as I approached the barricade with three men, all armed with semiautomatic machine guns. When one of them walked up to me, his hand on the strap of the gun slung over his shoulder, I rolled down my window, hands shaking. “What seems to be the trouble?” I asked, trying to school my voice into calmness.

“Your papers,” the man, with the hard voice and face of the military, held out his hand.

Of course I had identity papers. My parents had warned me that, if I had to bug out of town, that I needed at least a copy of my birth certificate and my drivers’ license. I had not been asked for them before this moment, and I wondered if I had hit a border to a newly formed country.

*******
May you find wonder in your day.

PS: The Words Are Important

I had just enough words left in my mind for a poem:

Just words,
all I have to offer
in the darkling storm.

You, my stranger,
read the words as rain
from a storm you cannot touch.

To you, the story
is that you found the words
when no one else noticed,

the words only important
when they crawled into you,
and became fluttering birds.

Big Audacious Goal part 2

I told myself I wouldn't post today until after I got my other 4000 words written for the weekend. It's 10:40 AM Chicago time, and I've completed my word assignment. Yippee! Yahoo! Oh Boy! Time to rest!

As I mentioned yesterday, writing 4000 words was onerous. It felt like crawling down the street with three dead moose tied to my waist and the goal of reaching Pumpkin Center ten miles down the road. Without knee pads. And the moose has been dead for a while.

I don't know why yesterday was so difficult -- except that I had put up a psychological barrier of writing 1000 words a day more than I'd been writing. Today, I woke up knowing that I had written 4000 words the day before, so I didn't feel the burden.

I am not writing any more today. As it is, I dream nothing but this book for the moment.

Thanks for following me.

Big Audacious Goal reached for today.

Officially at 13,000 words (give or take a few!) One quarter of the way through!

*******

Afterward, I dreamed that my dad yelled that I had written the story all wrong and that the aftermath of the collapse on Duluth, MN would look nothing like I'd written it. I fled to the bathroom, and tried to put makeup on for some high school banquet I was about to be late for. I had put on skin correctors of different colors for different parts of my face, except they were glossy and glittery in patriotic red and blue and would not smooth in.

I walked into my room, and clicked the mouse on my computer, reading the notes I had taken when I interviewed a Texas secessionist for my story. I remembered standing on the loading dock as he stood there, semiautomatic rifle slung across his back, explaining that the patriots needed to get the country back from the foreigners. I wrote down the words, sickened.

I tried to dress as quickly as possible, sensing that I would never arrive at the banquet that I would be honored at.

I woke up, reminding myself that the words are important and wondering if I was ever going to get them out in an order that would compel people to read them.

Update on Big Audacious Goals

First 2000 words today -- done.

Second 2000 words -- OMG, I'm never going to make it! (*scrolls through map*) Where is she going to cross the Canadian border at, International Falls or Fort Frances? When is she going to start noticing the changes in US culture since the collapse? Why the HELL is she going straight into the Jungle? My brain HURTS!

I guess it's going ok.

Quick post -- Big Audacious Goals

Every now and then, it's good to have a Big Audacious Goal, but only if you have a Big Audacious Plan to go with it. Goals without plans are called ... wishes. And I'd rather fail at a goal and learn from the failure than wish about it for the rest of my life.

Goals should be SMART, according to the planning experts. That stands for Specific, Manageable, Action-oriented, Reasonable, and Time-bound.  Writing plans can be as elaborate as an outline that includes every chapter of every scene, or as simple as "I will spend two hours in the morning typing whatever comes out." Either works, because in their own ways, they're Specific, Manageable, Action-Oriented, Reasonable, and Time-Based.

Big Audacious Goals have those parameters as well, but also stretch our definition of Reasonable. NaNoWriMo, for example, sets a Big Audacious Goal of 50,000 words in a month. That's reasonable at 1,667 words a day, or approximately 2-3 hours a day, but it's more than a new participant has likely ever written in a day, which makes it a BAG. 

My Big Audacious Goal for this weekend will be to write 4000-word days today and tomorrow. The amount is very specific, and I'll know when I reach it. It's manageable on a weekend for someone like me who hasn't gotten anything else planned and whose husband will be putting on a big pot of 13-bean-soup on the stove. The goal is action-oriented -- write and write and write. Although that's a lot of words, I have written 3000 words/day for the last three despite having to go to work, so it's a reasonable stretch goal. And it's time-based -- 4000 words today, 4000 words tomorrow.

I might not make it. It won't be the end of the world if I do. But I'm motivated by the way this 30-year-old idea is turning out, and an 8000-word weekend will get me 1/3 of the way toward the goal in 5 days! 

Wish me luck!

PS: Heart as Large as an Autumn Moon.

I don't want anyone to think I'm an expert at this. I have not yet found an agent or gotten published. I just consider this blog a way to communicate with people, let people read my stuff, and teach myself by teaching others. That being said, the alternative name for this blog was "The Words are Important". I chose the name "Words Like Me" because of the pun in English -- "Do the words like me or ARE they like me?" (Both, I think).

Words are my way of expressing myself, because my voice has grown rusty, I have pretty noticeable coordination problems at times, and my ability to draw improved till fifth grade and then stopped. I am from a creative family -- in fact, I sometimes think I am the least talented. My mother designed embroidery projects that became poster art and painted Easter eggs with flowers. My father designed projects; the china cabinet he made me out of an old wooden crate and panes from our 100-year-old house is my most prized possession. My sister does photography and my mother told me repeatedly that she wrote better than I did. My youngest niece has considerable graphic talent.

I feel the need to express myself. I had a childhood of emotional and sexual abuse and bullying. I once had a classmate try to run my boyfriend and I over with a car. I was an easy victim because I was emotionally sensitive and socially awkward. I survived because I have uncanny emotional strength, not because it wasn't all that bad. I'm still socially awkward at times and emotionally sensitive, but I get away with it because I'm an adult now. And because it provides the fuel for me to write.

My writing includes themes of overcoming dystopia through human resilience, finding beauty in people around me, and moods, moods, and moods. I want you to read these. If I write these things, I do so because I wear my heart on the outside.

I want to know you. I want to know you if you write; I want to know you if you don't write. I want to watch your creativity, even if you don't think you're creative. I want you to critique me (honestly) or just say "Hi"! I want you to take my words and tuck them into your heart and go out and love one another.

My heart is large enough for new family members. If you want to be family, let me know.