Collection

But our stories are about resistance, resurgence and badass MMA fighting congresswomen, reconnecting with our grandparents, fighting for future generations, building pathways for our fish, our children and our more-than-human relatives to thrive. It's time to represent our stories, our voices, our insights, our languages and our words for ourselves. In most of our Indigenous languages, our terms for ourselves translate to "the people." "Who are you?" someone asks. "What is the name of your tribe?" Our word usually translates to "We are the people. We are people, human beings." It's how we have represented ourselves since time began. It's about time for the media to catch up.

Once again, I'm confronted with a scientific expression of that system/spirit intuition I've been working within for the past two years at least. This article is a beautifully put ... sense of self, if you will.  "‘you’ are more than the contents of your chromosomes. The human body contains at least as many non-human cells (mostly bacteria, archaea and fungi) as human ones. Tens of thousands of microbial species crowd and jostle over and through the body, with profound effects on digestion, complexion, disease resistance, vision and mood. Without them, you don’t feel like you; in fact, you aren’t really you. The biological self has been reframed as a cluster of communities, all in communication with each other." This is worth the click for the writing, too, which is wonderful.

Banana. Plastic. Cool.

Edited to go beyond the bananas.

We all need hope, and I am willing to be persuaded it's worthwhile. So - yes, the environment as it existed before human intervention is in TROUBLE ... but the rate at which we're recognizing and seeking to rectify our errors is increasing every day. That is a good thing.

We're figuring out strategies to capture CO2. We're insatiably curious, even as we're scared, and that means we're fighting the consequences of our own blunders. Because homo sapiens are innovators.

Yes, there will be more unforseen consequences. Yes, there will always be greedy bastards who don't believe and don't care what has been manifest for decades - and is exponentially dangerous with every year that passes. Yes, it's sad we all look to (my niece, whom I shall not name here), Autumn Peltier, and Greta Thunberg - and feel stupid and scared and ineffectually guilty. The stupids *are* real.

Those who contemplate the groceries and trash we use are often paralyzed by the solutions that make their way into our attention - out of reach financially and/or geographically. When even the solutions aren't solutions, some, overwhelmed, just throw out plastic when nobody's looking - the new "throw up our hands and give up."

But there is HOPE. We are more than the contents of our chromosomes. And we're more than the consequences of our hubris.

And we're smart. And we're fascinated. And we're thinking about this. There's never been more focus on the problems stemming from and leading to climate, ecological, specie-al change.

Hope. Hope. HOPE. And learn.

Sturm und Traum

This morning, it was one of those utterly implausible, plausible, detailed dreams. I was shot in a mass shooting - four times. My right flank, side (right in the imaginary tattoo - though I do have one on my left), shoulder, and right below my eye. As happens in dreams, I was initially terrified of death, but my dream kept going. Something about getting to my house (the one I grew up in, but now mortgagetually "mine"; that address seems to have appeared more, through the past year, hmm), getting to my mom, protecting someone else, and failing, failing, failing, failing to get ME to a hospital. At some point I was driving myself, again through the old neighborhood, not apparently to get care.

In the dream, the medical upshot of my injuries was unclear apart from bruises rising up from each bloodless bullet hole. One wound, indeed, couldn't be seen for the bruising and the tattoo. Even in the dream, I dismissed the caliber as a small one, since I could keep moving. For what seemed like hours.

The thing is, the real impact of the dream was that first moment: that fear of death. The shock.

The stunning truth of it.

I'm not special. ANY of us is subject to dying this way, in the United States. Land that I love. Sigh.



2019 has not been the worst year, for me, in recent memory. Yes, we still endure under the increasingly authoritarian and demented regime of the puppet Drumpf. Yes, there is much still to do. But even with that, much is happening, too. HR8 passed last week, and in a time of inured sensibilities, Cohen's testimony was scathing. (His redemption narrative, I could personally live without, but perhaps the benedictions he has received are not positivities best dismissed.)

And but personally, so far this calendar year is kicking 2018's ass.

The time I have taken off (quite a bit, so early in the year) has been for VACATION, not illness and death and mourning. So far.

I have spent time with far-flung friends, and family-by-adoption, people I love, and a new puppy I don't have to train. Mom's doing better, and my house has not fallen down around my ears. Yet.

Three four-day weekends in, I have celebrated a birthday, a bar mitzvah, and a long-distance visit.

2019 ... well, to quote something I said about 2009: it's been better than it had a right to be.


Breathing is good.


Now if I can just avoid being shot.

When I'm not reading, I'm not writing

There was a period of about two years, when I began seriously writing The Ax and the Vase, that I was not reading for leisure. Research absorbed me in a very special way, I read the work itself, I talked about it a great deal. And I've always read a great deal online. But sitting down with an unrelated novel in my hands, taking an evening or a whole DAY ... I didn't do that. My enthusiasm was all for my own work in progress. Maybe I feared reading other people's writing, even on different subjects, would influence - maybe even compromise - my own voice or story.

Some of this, I think, is new-writer superstition, or more charitably, maybe it was just a different process. There is this, either way: I can TELL you the day I read again for the first time just for myself. What the weather was, what time, where I was, what the novel was. (The Dogs of Babel, by Carolyn Parkhurst.)


My (counter)point is probably a matter of course for most writers: if we are not reading, we are not writing. Say it with me now: "Duuuhh!"


I have not been reading. "There was family visiting" ... "I've been occupied for months with two big meetings" ... "My stepfather's been failing" ... "Holidays" ... it's all the usual load of dingoes' kidneys. The more insidious truth is that I have not been ALLOWING myself to read. I think, ultimately - never knowing why, probably - that was why I didn't read for those two years, back when. I felt like reading was a luxury, or an adultery against my own work.

What we all know is, of course, to BE a writer, you have to be a reader - and suspending that is painful to the process.

So is viewing *writing* as a luxury, as an adultery to the life you're living.



Today, I stopped work and read at my desk. For a few months now, I've been avoiding this; working through, doing other things. Generally acting like That Guy, like what I do is so important it must never be paused - at work and in real life too. In my family, I'm behaving like my stopping to read on my own time may be disrespectful to the difficulty my mom is up against as a fulltime caregiver. At the office, I've had occasion for some guilt nobody has put on me, and I'm overcompensating for acts committed that I know perfectly well nobody holds as sins.

And so, today ... sitting down with just a few pages of LeGuin's Orsinian Tales ...

Ahhhhh. Not merely a luxury, not merely the indulgence of cheating on my job or even my own writing. It was - of course it was - inspiration.

And I found a scene in my throat, urgent as pain, which at first I thought might be a letter to Mr. X, and then I found ... was a scene a certain character really needed. Two of them, in fact. And I learned a little something new about one of the most important events in my WIP. And I learned how to feel from inside a man's skin, for this particular moment. And I saw what it meant, ultimately and really *meant* for the woman he's feeling for, for years and years and long after he is gone from her.

The scene, oddly enough, is all about something incomplete, something un-built; a whole, sought.

It doesn't work out, in the novel. No building, no completion.

But it worked its way out of my brain. No small thanks (eternally, consistently, recurringly) to Ursula LeGuin.

“Incomplete. It’s like building something. Unfinished.

And sometimes, putting a brick against a brick, you end up with a building.

Sometimes.

Take the Con 17

Two weeks ago, I was in Savannah for work. On Thursday, the 12th, I was home before midnight with nearly a thousand miles on my car ... and Saturday the 14th kicked off the annual James River Writers conference.

In the past, I've often done postmorten posts about how inspired I was and re-energized as a writer, after the conference. Well, or just gushed in real time about how amazing the events are. In the fifteen years of JRW's excellence, I've attended for fourteen of the annual conferences. (Thanks again, Mojourner!) I've watched friends chair the event itself, and met countless others. It's always inspiring.

But this year, I was so focused for so long on the meeting immediately preceding the Conference, I spared no time to get excited about it. (I was actually excited about the meeting - there was toy shopping.) For a while there, I also wasn't sure I'd be able to go to the Conference this year at all, and studiously tamped down any thinking about it.

Not only did I coordinate the meeting in Savannah, but I presented there. Speaking up in class, as it were, has never scared me - but speaking before the class was nerve-wracking. And once my nerves got bored, I finished off okay, and it was okay. I handed out little dart boards with my picture on them to people to whom it is generally my job to give bad news. I got to know a lot of people I work with constantly, but rarely or never have seen before. Feedback has been that the meeting was good. Travel was too (no flying!). I spent Friday in a dim drizzle with my mom, coming down off the big event, and NOT really thinking about or getting ready for the next one.

Coming into the Conference without expectations can be a good thing. I've long since put The Ax and the Vase to bed, and the WIP isn't even advanced enough to have announced to me what its TITLE is, so meeting with agents was off my list (and, in any case, I'm ever more persuaded by Janet Reid's objection to conference pitches - and, in any case, it's rarely the case participating agents even "do my genre" as it were).

The rub is, it's also been a long time since I spent time writing.

So I attended the "so you think you're an impostor - no you're not" session ... and, of course, came away feeling all validated but still knowing for sure I am an impostor.

And I spent $72 at the JRW Bookstore before 8:30 a.m. on day one.

And I talked to my new friend Sarah a lot, a writer who is eighteen years old and better organized (and more motivated) than I am, at damn near fifty.

And I spend time with my good writing friends, and Leila Gaskin said she would read some scenes for me and look to the knotty problem of whether I need all my characters ... and, if so (oh, I so need my characters!!!!), how to balance them ...

... and I finished the weekend more excited about the fact that the Festival of India had coincided with our event than about the Conference.



It was when I began drafting my email to Leila, and my very first writing partner, The Elfin One, and choosing scenes to share toward that question of characters and balance ...

... that it finally happened.

My ass was in the chair, and I sent off the scenes dutifully - and, writing to TEO in particular about writing ... I wrote.



"Also, I'm a Writer."

Collection

Marine biology geekness: Oct Tale of Two Cities ... Octlantis and Octopolis. I am not making this up. Even Sponge Bob isn't making everything up. Huh! (Plural-wise, though, they missed opportunities to use the super-fun word, "octopodes" ... oh well.) The click beyond - biomimetic architecture. SO COOL, and finally that word escapes Star Trek babble. Yay!

You can get the dirt off Donnie, but you can't get Donnie off the Dirt.
--RIP, Dirt Woman

And next, a tale of two dirties. It was a big deal around here - front page news - when Dirt Woman died. And there was a sort of bookend appropriateness to Hef, that dirty old man, dying right after. I won't link HH's obits; if you cared, you've read them - and I, frankly, do not. But Donnie? Yeah. RIP, with Dave Brockie, Donnie.

The Americans of, say, 1970 genuinely had more in common with each other than will the Americans of 2020. Their incomes banded more closely together, and so did their health outcomes. Almost all adults lived in married households; almost everyone watched one of three television evening news programs. These commonalities can be overstated, but they can also be overlooked. ... One more thing they had in common: a conviction that the future would be better than the past.

Sentence #2 above ... nobody has lost sight of the ravaging effects of wealth disparity, not only in the United States, but worldwide. As our lifestyles have diverged, the working class and poor have been left so far behind the famed one-percent, and the effect has been devastating. A worthwhile read (and possible TBR pile toppler) from The Atlantic - Politics must be affirmative. Opposition is a mood, not a program. (Personally, I'd put "obstructionism" in where opposition stands, but the point is well taken.) Two clicks beyond, for those really interested in layered views.

Pointing to the economic costs of bullying—in tandem with highlighting the psychological, physiological and academic ramifications—can be an effective way to garner high-level attention and spur positive change.

So what *does* bullying cost? Well, $276M in one single state alone - and that's just the K-12 educational budget. Add bullying in the work place, and the price of bullying becomes, at least for my wee and paltry brain, inconceivable. The cost in lives, of the contributions of those who are silenced, to the wellbeing of our community and culture ...

Work (the Paid Kind)

The only use spam comments have is to remind me of the occasional old post I don't hate rediscovering. Today's special was this one. I remember that day, but my memory is unlike what is said in the post. Funny how brains work.

Yet again, though, it gets me thinking about my current gig. For a long time, I still thought of this as my "new" job - and yet, in a career blessed with so many reorgs and layoffs, it is by a huge margin the position I have held for the longest time in my history.

For decades, I never kept a single job for more than two years. By and large, this speaks to the nature of the economy since I began participating in it; and only a few of my job changes came at my own hands, as promotions of sorts. When I was with a certain large securities firm no longer as-such in existence, my tenure was over five years, but I held four jobs in that time: and every change was upwardly mobile, and every change was at my own instigation. But mostly, I am a product of the ever-"evolving" (growth-and-shareholder-obsessed) economic times I came of age in.

So realizing recently that I've been with my team, my "new" company, for three and a half years has been curious.

It doesn't feel like a long time, compared to the most important jobs I hold in my memory. It also REALLY doesn't feel like I've reached (or distantly passed) an endpoint, which I have felt even in jobs I have loved in the past. Two years and I become afraid. Two years, and I see change whether I want to or not. My last job, which I was proud to hold and did not want to leave, lasted two and a half, and I was giddy with fear just because of my own presumed expiration dating ... slightly before I realized that the changes around me gave me reason to be giddy with fear because I recognized what was going on. I left. And almost immediately, the cliff I'd been perched upon crumbled. I was safe, but it was heartbreaking.

And I am still safe.

The things I have accomplished in this position, with this company, pretty easily surpass anything I have been able to manage before.

When I began to look afield, after a couple internal interviews with said previous employer, I reached out to someone I knew from HR there, who had left. And ended up with the company she went to.

She had recommended me to my now-team, specifically my now-executive, knowing that I was a seasoned admin and he was unseasoned with having one, and that I would be able not only to step into required competencies, but also to form the work I'd do and essentially train my team to have an admin at all. The unwritten side of this was that she knew I'd be able to create my own work.

The way this has played out is that I have created my own terms.

My team don't have me doing PowerPoints to speak of, I rarely write memos that aren't my own idea, and apart from monitoring expenses for compliance and speaking to my direct boss's availability, I don't do a lot of the things most people THINK secretaries spend our lives on.

When I first started, one of the managers under my boss's care jumped in with both feet. He had me working on a lot of things, but one key one remains a core part of my work - albeit now in a very different way.

Both Feet left our company years ago, and in his absence, I picked up a great deal in his area. It took a long time to fill his position, so by the time we did so, I was uppity in the extreme in this department. So the new guy came into a situation with a secretary already managing up. And he seems to have been willing to leave me to it. With the result that that administrative tedium I picked up way back when is now an area in which I have streamlined, assertively managed, and brought into an entirely new proportion.

I've saved my company a crap-ton of money, on my own initiative, cemented best practices, insert-your-least-favorite-corporate-speak here. Because I cared, and because nobody else was doing this work, and because nobody told me not to.



I lived right up to what that HR person expected of me, and then some.


***


So re-reading that old post was interesting, in the context of my continued realization that I seem to be in a job well on its way to Methuselah status as far as my CV goes. I see in it a bit of the same sinking-my-teeth-in/getting-it-done-ery that has served me here, and even some of the amusement I felt at losing a job I so desperately hated (but which I took a long time to realize I did).

I still call that the worst April Fool's Day joke ever - not least as they jumped the gun by a day on the punchline.

January 20

Back in December, my brother and I were on the phone, and he asked me whether I was going to take off work on January 20. I thought about it, but really right now the place for me to be is here. There have been some protests locally - and, indeed, I am not so far from DC I could not have trekked up there to join the Women's March - but my job, I hope, has nothing to do with politics. I LOVE my job. And today, it kept me ... well, to use a political term ... occupied.

There's nothing to protest, with my work. When I was a public servant, really - probably even LESS. It might have meant more still than it does here, to man my post, to soldier on.

So, to take off today would only have been taking a day off, and I would not have been with any of my friends, DOING something in the world. Napping with Gossamer behind my knees while Pum snoozes and snores beside us on the floor is not the world's most efficacious piece of activism.

And so I worked.

I worked a LOT, in fact. It was a highly productive day. I reviewed my team's expenses, tweaked only a very few notes, signed off they were ready for approval. I got one of my dreaded piles of notices out, shipped a package for my boss, rescheduled one item, added another, generally spent the day kicking asparagus and taking names.

When, around 12:30, I heard the sound of the national anthem coming from a nearby office, I knew what it was, and just put in my earbuds for a while. RuPaul, of course, and a few of the Drag Racers.

By accident, the new sweater I chose to wear today with my poo-kickin' boots and comfortable, flattering pants happens to be perfect, primary, royal blue. All entendres intended, sure. I decided it is Hillary Blue. Bless her, I was late to be With Her, but my loyalty's confirmed.



So much of today's productivity came early on in the day. It seemed a VERY long work day, and that even knowing I would leave by 3:00 or 3:30 to make a supply run.

Emotionally, I have been neutral - numb, probably. But gratitude is something more than an emotion.

I immersed myself in my blessings today - one of the greatest being my living.

I love my job.



How did you spend Inauguration Day?

Not Done Yet

"Dixie Dupree is eleven years old and already an expert liar"

For my Reider readers and beyond, many of you have seen me mention The Education of Dixie Dupree, Donna Everhart's upcoming debut novel. For those who have not: I've been eagerly awaiting this book for a LONG time now. Eagerly!

Well, I am not alone ... and pre-order is always an option.

Donna knows I have a "thing" about the intimacy of reading, but I also have a thing about supporting good authors, and without a doubt she qualifies. The struggle to wait is real.

COOL cover, right?"
You know you're curious.

But now ... the wait is but a couple of business days!

Creative Not-writing

Most creative and/or artistic types express their limber right brains in ways other than being writers, painters, musicians, sculptors and so on.

I rock a bit of the Ageing Bohemian Authoress style in my wardrobe and home, and I also have this thing where I have to change things every now and then. There is a semi-regular seasonal rotation of my living room and bedroom furniture that just gives me a little pleasure looking at the same things in a different way.

Like my mom, I also have a collection of decorative items and wall art far exceeding space to exhibit it all at any one time. I haven't switched those things around much in the past year or two, but used to shift out a small portion of my dad's pewter collection for colorful dishes and Israeli enamel around the kitchen, or put out different knickknacks in the living room from one mood or season to another. Of course there are Christmas decorations, too.

Finding places to put things is a major recreational and practical habit for any homeowner; often, this comes with the question of "How do I store X, Y, and Z?" but some of us just have fun with what's actually out.

This week (I hope!), I'm having my basement foundation jackhammered to the footing and waterproofing updated in this beautiful 66-year-old home, which I moved into fifteen years ago this month. Step one in this job is MY contribution, which has been to move everything down there away from the walls.

Any homeowner can tell you, any project involving moving every single thing in one room in a house ends up feeling like a massive undertaking. As a pushing-50-year-old woman with multiple back injuries to my discredit, it's also one you have to be careful about. Gossamer has fallen in love with my back for smelling like off-brand Icy/Hot, because the wintergreen drives him mad, and I've certainly been keeping the naproxen sodium business going. Hooray for NSAIDs!

And for subterranean dreams.

Moving everything down there presents the opportunity not only to open up a new line of credit debt in the name of resale value I hope not to realize any time soon, and also to Get Some Things Done.

Washing the walls is job one, once the contractors clear out. Just taking a hose to the whole place. Whether I'll follow that with a paint job I'm not sure. in some ways, being able to see the flemish bonding that goes all the way down under the house proper charms me. And exposed brick is a thing.

I *am* rather tempted to paint the floors with something glossy enough to take a good sweeping.

The clothes lines will probably move, but I haven't decided where. Some things will have to develop as things are shifted back into place.

The major workbench will be dismantled and its true two-by-fours kept for some other wonderful purpose, its massive legs saved likewise. This will free up a massive amount of space down there, and some of the furniture in storage will be put to use AS storage, as well as cleaning up the look of the place.

I don't intend to finish it completely, but I may let paternal grandma's easy chair and maternal grandma's dresser and vanity/desk serve some decorative and practical purpose. I have my eye on the vanity/desk as a spot I could set up my sewing machine, which currently stays stuck behind a filing cabinet, but which could have a living/working function in a safe, cleaned-up full basement.

The extraordinarily well-built shelves at the bottom of the steps, I think may be little gussied up, but cleaned and called for duty to hold some of those miscellaneous decorative items not always in service themselves. If I do anything to prettify this spot, it will be simply to hang a shower curtain to keep things safe from the worst dust.

Mom and I have some of our best conversations, stimulating each other's decorator brains on projects like this. It distracts her for a time, too, from the difficulties of being a constant caregiver, and I hope is some relief from the tension.

If nothing else, spending fifteen or so minutes actually starting that job we agreed upon, of dismantling the largest workbench seems to have provided some frustration working-out. She bashed every board off the top (NO damage; mom and I both get physically sick watching the careless destruction inherent in most "demo days" on HGTV shows) before I could even say I still needed it to stack the shelves on as I deconstructed those!

Along the way with creative projects of any kind come the surprises. The incalculable cache' of Gossamer poops, hidden away when he's been in some kind of mood or other. The ASTONISHING weight of a tiny vanity made out of hard rock maple. The fact that the smaller workbench, laden with firewood and appliance boxes I have saved because I am *that* person ("keep the boxes in case you ever have to move!") ... was missing a leg, and just propped against the wall. For who knows how many decades! The exact size of cave cricket poo.

But in a week or so (I hope! I got the call Friday the county permits had not been completed ...), I will be able to indulge some of these fantasies.

Right after I scrub down the falls and remediate the dust. Shew!



So. What's up with you this summer?

I Am Not Hilary Mantel

I have dreams of midlist glory!

--Me, as recently as six or so years ago 

People say all the time, "I'm no J. K. Rowling" - but the disclaimer has almost no meaning, really. Even in a climate where you *have* to sell, and sell well - in a climate where authors *probably* can't hope for second chances - where providing a moneymaking brand and the product to keep it going is the only hope for an author to gain "publishing success".

I'm not even Hilary Mantel.


Bestsellers, I rarely read. Some of the greatest authors I've ever found were ones who WOULD not emerge, or survive, today - at least in American publishing - at least not the way they did when they came up the Traditional path. Donald Harington. America's Chaucer, I've seen him called. Parke Godwin, who wrote perhaps the best work in my own genre, to whose standard I will always aspire - and who also was able to get away with comedic sci-fi/fantasy farce too. Not happening, that genre-jumping, not such a long jump.

There is no place anymore for the adequate author, for great writing but un-thrilling sales, for second novels from workhorse producers, for first novels from the rarefied genius.

... or is there ... ?

I don't know.

Among the great factors on my mind, as I have begun to contemplate becoming a self-pub/indie author has been the desolation of the middle class, in traditional publishing.


The situation looks, on the one hand, very much like a symptom of an industry upper-class avariciously destroying a wide, bread-and-butter segment of its own livelihood. I don't pretend to know that's the case. Whether it's the corporate imperative of growth above all, infecting a business ... which never has been entirely comprised of uber-moral artistes in any case ... or the creaking imminence of the death of an outdated system: my education is not wide enough to judge.

Even if I knew enough to judge, probably best to make few pronouncements, in this life.


I tend to be skeptical of harbingers of death. In my less than half a century on this planet, so many concepts have died, I no longer take stock. Rock and roll has died - multiple times, I believe - yet seems curiously animate to those of us in ignorance. Disco has died too - or was murdered, indeed by friends of mine - but retains some vitality, no matter how often we tell it it's over. Civility is a perennial hospice patient; it's been dying for centuries now, off and on.

And so I wonder whether the extraordinary shrinkage of the middle-class in publishing ... and I watch the increasing cross-pollination of self-pub and trad-pub - authors increasingly working both ways, at multiple levels of success and experience - and I am forced to wonder:

Are the evil gatekeepers in the traditional infrastructure the virus - or  another patient?

Or are they - is the industry - are we all - metamorphosing?


Transformation is painful, pretty much every time. We've watched for years as newspapers have died (another one for the list), going digital and either suffocating for life's breath without subscription money, or becoming less available ("you have read your limit of free articles this month PLEASE SUBSCRIBE" and you're splatted on a paywall), or even losing relevance just because the vastness of availability means ABC/NBC/CBS aren't the masters of the media universe.

Nobody cried for typewriters.

We kept them on at most companies, without pay, as long as carbon paper took to eke its way out of existence. Sometimes, we used them to cobble together documents already barfed out of a printer but in need of corrections or additions. We used pens, too.

We began to think typewriters were cute.

We forgot they existed.

We began harvesting the truly quaint ones for keys to turn into DIY jewelry.

The typewriter lives on, but primarily in steampunk design now. Rarely used for writing anymore. Even spiral notebooks find more use there. Though those dwindle too, and we recycle more.

And so ...

I both reserve my weeds where death is heralded, and I believe in it at the same time.

And I grew up in Beautiful Downtown White Flight.

I know, sometimes, things just: move.

And again my education is poor.

Did the middle class move to self-pub when it got squeezed out of the ever-decreasing real estate available for non-bestsellers in traditional? Or give up and just ... keep the day jobs, losing the dreams.

The sheer volume of dreams clearly available seems in this world to me to discount the latter, to an appreciable degree.

Have dreams changed?

I wonder about that too. Because, before I ever even began my education as an *author* as opposed to a writer - my education, with the real and quantifiable goal of becoming published ...

I dreamed of not having to deal with those "gatekeepers."

And, no matter how many of you love Janet, and know you're going to do it, and *have* done it, don't you tell me for a second you never thought about that. "I'll just copy the thing and sell it myself." Even before the days when self-pub had gained the traction it has, the legitimacy it has. Even before people DID that, and it was a real Thing.

Before even I dreamed of midlist glory, before I ever encountered James River Writers, when I was a mere stripling of thirty, or in my twenties, or unable to concentrate but somehow aware I was a not-bad-stringer-of-word-thingies ... in fear and before the blank wall of "how the hell do people become authors anyway" and never knew I would, or could - I thought, "why not copy my writing and sell it myself?"

Easier than learning.

("Oh. Wait ...")

And, yeah. It turns out - something to learn, all itself.

I come from the generation that brought the 'zine to its apex. I come from a wordy dang family. I come from all the fear every Woodland Creature (reg US Pat Off, Janet Reid's Phrase and Wordventions Incorporated) ever experienced, not to say wallowed in. I come from curiosity and confidence and ...

Confluence.

I live, in myself, in that moment where the inchoate dreams of a non-author who was nonetheless still a writer has come face to face with the first dream I ever had, and found that a "real" author can do it too. It's not just the throwaway resort of a 'nartist.

It would be sad if it's the *only* way for a non-bestseller to be published, but ... again, I'm decreasingly of the opinion anymore that self-pub/trad-pub is an either/or proposition.

And I have a resolution in my mind, to always learn, to commit to the preservation of my wee and paltry brain by feeding it with knowledge, and challenges.

And ... self-pub was, in its way, the first dream I had, as a writer. Granted, out of fear. But the way I saw it was an instrument of control. The way I saw it was as an escape from rejection, yeah. The way I saw it came from a time before it ever really existed.

And now it does. Because my dream is widespread.

<Image I'm not stealing, but you should click to see>

Programming note for those who've been kind enough to inquire after me lately - the illness I've had is called labyrinthitis, it's something I've dealt with periodically since I was twenty. It STINKS but is nothing dangerous, and I've been so grateful for everyone's well wishes. It's still not quite cleared off, but I am safe to drive and very happy back at the office, and Penny will be especially pleased when I'm sure enough on my feet for her to get her regular walkies once again. (She's a tugger; you have to be *really* sure on your feet to walk her!)

Beginnings ... (?)

It looks like my last post was the 2500th on this blog. Interesting; it was about neverending dying. It was unplanned.

Like so much of life. Unplanned.

One year ago, I allowed myself to contemplate putting The Ax and the Vase away. At the time, I could not face that as a death, but a persistent coma eventually becomes a death for those who are still in the waking life. It hasn't been long since I memorialized that death, not for the first time, but pretty much in that context. I even said, there is a freedom in letting go. I have been seeing the "release" aspect of death a great deal of late.

And so, it is hard. It is hard to contemplate hope instead.

Stripping off the preciousness and poetry: it's hard, and terrifying, to find myself considering self-publishing.

There is an aspect to the idea that feels like death, itself. The dream of traditional publishing, for me, has been a long one - as long as the writing of Ax itself was, and that was ten years or more. In the beginning, there was a powerful challenge and a business to learn, and that appealed to me. In the midst of that education, the idea of learning another way was overwhelming.

I've seen the commitment it takes to be an indie. I've long, too, seen the liberty inherent in being pre-published. For all these years, the technical side of the self-pub path has been aplenty to stymie me and allow me to maintain an almost studied ignorance, focusing on the traditional pub path.

Damn my brain. I find with age, it is more open, not less, to new ideas and new ways of doing things. I'm a Virginian! This is not natural.

But, even my wee and paltry brain is capable of perception. It has not escaped me that the infrastructure and the process of self-pub has been refined and cultivated over the same years indie's reputation has grown, along with its popularity. And my wee and paltry brain occasionally gets the idea it might just be big enough to learn something new.

And my heart and my talent and my uppity-osity kind of think Ax is a good novel. That it should not die.

I'm still very well aware of its disadvantages as a product. But vanity wonders ... could it work in a market unlike traditional publishing? In this, my wee and paltry brain may admittedly be prone to arrogance.

I am by no stretch committed. Too much to learn even to begin. And this time has been a hard time; it is possibly the worst time in the world to take on such an enterprise. But this is perhaps part of the reason I contemplate it.

As for the rest: I blame my wee and paltry brain. And reading. Reading. Reading. Reading. And a friend who is willing to give me the benefit of her experience and expertise, at least as a starting point. I am grateful for Leila Gaskin. As who wouldn't be?

Sigh.

The comments are open. I would love to see others' thoughts.

Collection

First off today, welcome and thank you to JEN Garrett, my 34th follower! Yay!

Next - I'm a bit late with the link, but yay more, for a tribute to writer Leonard Nimoy's birthday.

Megan Sayer has a lovely post about hope. It's hard. But, I've found, sometimes it's even harder not to.

Agent Carly Watters has good advice/encouragement - for the pre-published debut author. Just when I cool it on querying, of course (but she doesn't do my genre, so it's all right by me).

And now, a three-fer from The History Blog:

Scratch any archaeologist (but not on the lower back, their legs will never stop kicking) and you'll hear a midden story. This one may be a little adult for some readers (I'd call it NSFW), but it's still interesting history! Hint: sex toy. Yeah, we didn't invent those in the 20th century either.

Out of the toilet and into ... oh, wait. The sewer. Italian family finds 2500 years of history while looking for a broken sewer line. Man, it's boring when my toilet backs up. You know, by comparison. aaaaaaannnnd I'm okay with that. (Also with my parents not lowering me into the, erm, bowels of our home when I was twelve.)

And last, but least gross (though possibly disconcerting! and that is a pun!), 18th century Swiss automata. I'll embed the punnish clip below ...

The Dull Ache ... and Something Else ...

Of my readers who are also writers, a question: has any one of you who is going or has gone the querying route to publication ever received a request for pages or a full more than a week after an initial query? I never have.

It’s been a few weeks since my last query – and so, regardless of all those agents’ timelines now commonly stretching to three months for theoretical viability (“will try to respond within” or “if you don’t hear within twelve weeks, no means no”) – I essentially view EVERY submission I’ve put out there as a done and dead deal.

Which is why this contemplation that Ax is not a viable product right now is my ever-growing expectation.

It’s a good novel, The Ax and the Vase. Of that I have no question. But a novel and a product are two different things; and the publishing industry is a business in need of PRODUCTS. To sell. I can polish a piece of gold till it shines (and it does) but if the kind of bauble it is is out of style, it’s out of style no matter how gleaming.

So I have this precious thing *I* still find beautiful, and which can be appreciated by many – but not a *market* … and so, increasingly, I find myself pushing it less, and focusing on another piece, not even close to ready to polish yet. Still in the making.

It’s difficult not to think of the years I have invested in Ax. We all know, I’m a Thoughtkiller, not shy nor squeamish about “killing my darlings” and open to professional feedback to make my work the best it can be.

Even so. Abandoning something I’ve worked on so long, putting it away as a “maybe once I sell the next one, this one may follow another year” – or, heart-crunchingly, putting it away with the possibility it will never sell at all …

That is painful.



I once married a man I knew was A Good Man. I knew those were thin on the ground, and I recognized (and still do) so much that is fine and good and worthy and fun and loveable. Beloved Ex was, and is, a marvelous property, and the fact he’s not with someone even still kind of kills me. He’s a catch, and there are so many women who deserve the heart that beats in that man.

And I loved him. And I married him.

And love is no reason to marry someone. I love him still: and yet, my life is full enough, and fulfilling – even without Beloved Ex participating daily.

You marry someone not because he’s a treasure, nor beautiful, nor fun or sexy or any of the rest of it – but because life, without them, would be *less*.


The point is: I know a good thing when I see it. And I inherited a tendency from my mother: I sometimes grip things because I know they’re precious.

I married a man I truly did love, but a very big part of the marriage was acquisitive. It was nothing on which to build a lifetime, and the mistakes we both made drew blood. We may be friends now. But there were many years we were nothing to each other, and there resides even in our old bond not only the memories, but the damages. I wasn’t the only wounding party. But I know my part was, *in* part: a matter of greed.



Ax is another treasure I know for what it is. I know how good it is, I love it, I MADE it – and that didn’t draw blood exactly, but it occupied years of my life. I can admit, I have been greedy to see it succeed. Greedy.

As life tips past what we call Middle Age (yeah, I look fine and am healthy; yes, people like to think Middle Age lasts into their sixties; but I’m pushing fifty, and frankly don’t expect 100 years – I am decidedly getting past “middle aged”), the prospect of losing *years* of such work as the intimate, intense, and exultant craft as writing …

It’s really kind of heartbreaking.

Losing all that. Wasting it … ? No. Not waste. But not being able to share it.

The loss is giddy enough to make me somewhat sick.


My life is FILLED with good friends, good music, good food, and the two best pets any person could hope to be blessed with. I have a nice home, a spiff car. My mom is near – and, as far as they are, my brother and nieces and their mom are not truly *distant*. There are so many ways now to be with those we are not near to. My paying job is constantly fulfilling, and I honestly love it, and its people. There is so much to be grateful for.

Yet.

Writing Ax has, as I suspect any fool can see, has been a balm to me through the years Mr. X has lived half a world away. I’ve hated having no partner. But I’ve had this thing – this “second” job – this work I have poured my heart and mind int. This work which has returned the favor by expanding my life itself, by making even fuller a blessed existence which was more than I ever should have dared to ask in the first place, and by teaching me so much more than its business and process.

It’s also been, in some way – both a tribute to my grandma and my dad. Dad, because he missed my writing it. Because he never knew I would make such a thing as this great book. Because, honestly, I think he’d have really LIKED it. And my grandma because … I am her namesake.

If I’d not been The Louise of my generation – there would have been no Clovis. A reverse etymological progression.


The prospect of losing this almost-memorial effort, this thing I have done, which has sustained and enriched so much of my wee and paltry little life …

It’s really kind of heartbreaking.







And yet …



And yet.

There is the WIP.





The energy, and the transportive experience of writing – of experiencing creation first in the learning/exploration/discovery of research and then in experiencing *what it is* to CREATE something. To *make* something, and know it both for your own and for the inspiration that it is. To understand that it is possible to both bleed a thing, and still somehow see it as an object so nearly-miraculous that to claim it for your own is almost hubris.

To write.

The bouyant power of … making … of creativity – that elemental, ineffable thing that comes from within but is sparked with something so much more than we are in and  of ourselves.


It is … compensation.


There is no art without pain, they say.



But, Christ Lord. I have to believe: it’s worth it

Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Slowing Down ...

Uhhhh - I got seven queries out tonight. Holy damn.

Savoring Christmas Treats

My brother and I have swapped a certain indulgence, over the years, with each other for being late with Christmas gifts or the like. As each of us has a birthday not many months out from “The Holidays”, we grew up on “this is Christmas … AND your birthday” with our gifts, and so (a) birthdays never were quite the Busby Berkeley production around our house, and (b) sometimes were a bit of an extension of the by-late-winter extinct holiday in December.

All this is to say: I suck, and I send his and my nieces’ presents late pretty much every year. At this point, I’ve missed not only Christmas, but one of the nieces’ birthdays, and will miss the older one’s soon if I don’t get crackin’. As for big bro, there is still time, and he and I don’t worry a lot about on-timeliness, because – extended Christmas! (Or birthday!) Fun!

So prolonging the fun of a gift is always a giggle for me. And, not being a Liddle Kid anymore, Christmas revolves a lot less around presents and so on, and thus the ones that do come are often a genuine surprise.



This year, Cute Shoes and another friend of ours went in together on a joint present for me – which is, ironically, pretty much going to become a new pair of shoes.

Not just any shoes, mind you. American Duchess shoes.

They gave me a substantial start with a gift certificate, and ever since we three got together for our own belated Hannukah/Christmas Ladies who Lunch Date, I’ve been SAVORING the catalog at AD.

If I went with the Claremonts, I’d wear them to work and enjoy them immensely. They’re just the sort of 30s-chic I like very much, and they’d be a great addition to a collection of less authentic similar styles I already have …

… but then: I already have shoes for work.

… and, really, my work doesn’t even require the professional wardrobe I already have.

So … ahh, wouldn’t it be fun to pick something more entirely special?

The dove-grey Seabury pumps - or even the black ones?

The oh-so-eighteenth-century Antoinette mules?

Ahh, but I am not confident in my ability to DYE such a fine shoe.

Perhaps the black Savoys? I could embellish those (or even not!), with somewhat less fear.



It’s fun having options – and, of course, if I give it a minute, their next exclusive design might sweep me away.

If I give it a minute or two, it might be a fun way to celebrate finally agenting The Ax and the Vase.

What it’s given me – obviously – is a great deal of fun, and that most wonderful blessing in life: antici ……



……. Pation.

Gratitude

I hope I'm fortunate enough to work with an agent who is as grateful for their job as I am for mine.  There's something intensely rewarding about people who *practice gratitude*.

It's Like Wearing the Corset ...

“Fake it till you make it!”

The little piece of wisdom above has become a facile mantra for a society increaingly occupied by the hectic schedule of life as we’ve constructed it, and particularly by professional frustration and ambition in an economy not well laid out for most of us to find the types and levels of comfort we’ve also set as a general expectation.

The fake-it mantra goes along with the “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” maxim (and there is a whole blog post in that one, considering how resolutely “casual” so many workplaces have become …), and various other positive-professional mottoes we try to post in our brains and daily behavior in order to attain – basically – whatever it is that passes for financial success, as compared to where we stand right now.

“Fake it till you make it”, though, has applications and effects apart from the financial, and the older I get the more surprised I am – and pleased – at how very well it works.

There are days at both the office job that provides me regular paychecks, and at the unpaid job I maintain as an unpublished (but persistently aspiring) author, when really it’s all just a game.  And that’s not a bad thing.  It can make The Game easier, actually, to make it *play*.  Life’s no fun if you never play – and, sometimes, play helps you do life a bit better.

If I’m not feeling satisfied or motivated or even competent at the paying gig, I’ll make a point of popping in the boss’s office with a drive-by handful of “I’ve done this and this and this for you” comments – or questions “do you need hard copies/lunch reservations/documentation for X-meeting” – and the effect is usually strongest on myself.  It’s like I won the role of Moneypenny in some play – and saying the lines and getting the responses makes me feel like I’m playing it well.

So I get to *feel*, “Okay, I am not a fraud.”

And I also basically remind myself, “Hey.  *I am not a fraud.*”

I’ve been doing administrative/secretarial work for close to thirty years now, pretty much to the exclusion of any other professional work.  It’s something I enjoy, and/but changing jobs as often as I have, it’s never something I feel I know completely – which is a good thing. 
One of the important parts of changing jobs is overtly playing the part of a competent professional.

Being able to do a job and demonstrating that I can do it, I have found, are vastly different things:  and the latter is the wiser course.

It’s a bit like feedback from a boss; if you hear “thank you” or “can we widget this, thus” now and then, fairly consistently, it makes all the difference in knowing where you stand.  Performance reviews don’t do that, never have, and never will – but the smallest acknowledgement of daily to-do’s coming along regularly provides good bearings.  And that works both ways (the corporate-speak phrase “managing up” comes to mind, though without the passive-aggressive intent).  Feedback of the “A, B, and C are done/need something to get X done/changed the way Y is done” variety keeps ‘em aware you’re there and functioning.



I know an author who spent something like a week wearing a corset and cooking medieval recipes out of turnips, in order to get a feel for her period.  We can hardly replicate “what it was really like” – but method writing like that makes sense.  It’s the same at a job.  When I wear the rold of Moneypenny, I realize that not only can I walk in those shoes, but I can project that to others, and that’s a useful reminder/demonstration/feedback on all sides.

It also encourages others to TREAT me like Moneypenny – or like an author.

I approach an awful lot of my life with some form of calibrated appearance in mind.  This isn’t affectation nor artificiality (it may be manipulation, though …).  It’s just an actor’s heightened way of going into any scene.  I dress for my job, or for time spent with my mom and stepfather, or for some specific group of friends (… or for the Conference, yes) – I behave in one venue in a way I would not in others.

“I contain multitudes” …

Many of us do this without really thinking about it all that much.  Many can’t release themselves from a single self-image (when I see women on TV who wear $600, 7-inch high heels for every conceivable occasion, heavy makeup at all times, and false eyelashes even in the middle of the day, I pity them the stultifying consistency of such “glamour”, since it cannot be special, maintained at all times; likewise men who cannot get beyond khakis and polo shirts no matter where they go bewilder me with self-imposed homogeneity).

So we all play roles.  I need multiple roles, in order for any one of them to seem worthwhile or fun – being a slovenly hausfrau all day on a Saturday makes the odd Saturday night out with friends so much more fun, as does the pampering self-transformation from slovenly comfort to arch impracticality.  I need time with family and time as an employee and time as a friend, and time ALONE, just laughing at my dog and cat.  I need the demanding and yet transformative rituals of my day – getting up and getting dressed, as much as coming home, and getting dressed *down*.

It took me a long time to really believe I was a “real” author – not a laughable fraud.  This is true of a terribly large percentage of writers, and the way the industry is configured, unfortunately, encourages this, at least in traditional publishing.  Yet this isn’t on purpose – the more agents and editors I’ve met, the more delightful I’m aware that they are.  These are people who get to make a living not only doing something they love – reading – but they also get to act as conduits to bring new things they love to a whole audience.

I almost can’t imagine what that’s like.

But it’s certainly true that many of the editors and agents and designers and all the newer facilitators in a publishing world no longer strictly fashioned as a paradigm of “gatekeepers” (agents) and “keymasters” (publishing houses) SAY that this is what they love about what they do.  There is an undercurrent of glee – “I found something wonderful! I must have it! I must share it!” – and a very emotional kind of satisfaction in most interviews I read when I research agents, but also when I find articles and blogs and so on by cover designers and book doctors and editors who work outside publishing houses, helping authors to craft not only good work, but marketable work.  There is a mutual drive for satisfaction I’ve never seen in other areas of my own admittedly limited life, but it’s pretty wonderful.  The blogs I follow avidly all share this with a depth and clarity that is infectious:  they keep ME going, by telling me and ten thousand others, “you should KEEP GOING.”

This really isn’t faking it till you make it, of course.

But we all still have to fake so much.  We have to put on our Editorial Boots and kick the hell out of our manuscripts and plays and poems.  We have to put on the Authorial Jacket (with or without the little suede elbow patches; as your preference or genre or predilections dictate) and brave the autumnal blasts of rejection and revision and education until we’re tempered.  We have to wear a Marketing Hat, too – and live a bit online, and reach out, and plan, and consider, and be ready to Be Told, when it comes to supporting our work.

THIS is undoubtedly faking it, for most of us.

•    Faking like we have time in the week,
•    Faking like we are not scared out of our minds,
•    Faking like we really feel like we know what we’re doing,
•    Faking like it’s not annoying to have to do all this stuff without pay,
•    Faking like the friends and family around us who
     (a) overestimate the likelihood we’re going to Become the Next Bestseller, or
     (b) bitterly, ignorantly UNDERestimate it
     … are not discouraging beyond toleration,
•    Faking like there is anything at all about writing, other than the doing of it – all alone, at a wonderful desk or curled up with a beloved furbaby – that we can stand at all.

Faking it and knowing the fakery isn’t so much a lie as a *reminder* either works better and better as I get a bit older, or I am just finally getting, at my advanced age, just how well it always would have worked.

What’s your costume, what is the swashbuckling role you play … ?

JRW Conference

It's coming, y'all.  Who's with me!?

Home (and Other) Improvements

Regular readers will understand that a number of the things I’ve been doing around this house were initially spurred on by a plan to throw my mom a birthday party.  I remember so clearly when dad and I worked on a party for her together, and at the same time he was making sure she had a new microwave in her kitchen, and so on.  Guests get us going, I suppose, and when there’s a good “reason” I know I enjoy a bit of nesting.

One of the major excitements around here, of course, has been the new writing desk.  It’s been in the house just under two weeks, and I have been enjoying it to bits.  The thing is six feet by three, and I joked before it came along “It would eat up all the space in that room and burp happily” – but as imposing a piece of furntiture as it is, it’s not out of place nor proportion.

Ohhhhhh, and having a huge desk.  I come home to it every day, and it’s so much easier getting a bit DONE on this desk.  It amuses the cat, of course, to get in my way – but overall this investment has been a good choice.

So far, it’s seen perhaps as much bill-paying and administrivia as it has writing, BUT … it’s been a pleasure to get a little bit into the WIP, and to have a place where my research and writing are capaciously accommodated.  A positive luxury, actually.

The hugeness of the desk allows both the resource of space to work, but also physical comforts as a writer I have never had.  Contemplating the need for a foot rest, I’m not sure my grandmother’s old footstool wouldn’t fit just fine down there, and that gives me a little grin.  It has a rightness about it, writing while surrounded by family artifacts, writing on a desk I fell bewilderingly in love with.  All of my family are teachers – whether by formal profession or not – and the books and chairs and *things* of them and their minds mean a little something to me, as I crack a new book of my own, to do the reading and research I must, or as I noodle about with actual-writing which isn’t actual at all, but only exercise, to learn about my characters, my scenes, my setting, as I go.

Many historical fiction authors have a set process by which the research for x-amount of time, outline, collate, and writing is a separate thing, done after all the rest.  I never was a fan of steps, and to hold back from writing now, at the point where I feel it’s been so long since I “finished” Ax (… which time … ?), would just be punitive.

And pointless.

The thing is, the writing I am doing now is not work I expect to make the final cut, it’s not even something I’d consider draft work.  The writing I do when research is still new is writing both to flex my creative muscles and to find my inroads into the next novel.  Given the connections between Ax and the WIP, much of it is swing lines – taking a point from the one, and finding its connection to the other; traveling, Tarzan-style, from the branch of one tree to some hold on the next.

The WIP has never, in my mind, been a sequel – but perhaps I need to reconsider that, or perhaps I’ll learn better.  It has little to do with Ax in some very fundamental ways:  not told first-person, setting more cosmopolitan, multiple generations and character focal points, the story of women rather than one man …  Each one will stand alone.

But, too – it’s an obvious starting point, to approach this WIP, by taking a look at the moments and effects where these two stories touch.  And so, I grasp the line in the first novel, which leads to the next – where Clovis’s sister marries south – where his niece grows up daughter to an inimical ally – where she actually visits her mother’s homeland, as a girl, and *meets* this branch of her family.

That last point, too … I had a little fun, taking a look at Clovis through this new character’s eyes.  For one, there was a perverse pleasure in minutely describing him physically – which is NEVER done, in Ax.  My feeling is, readers often invent their own faces (I always have) and anything laid out may be ignored.  More to the point, Clovis’ novel was told first-person through his own eyes, and this was not a character much given to gazing upon his reflection, even apart from the fact that he lived in a world siginificantly lower on mirrors than our own.  I also got to learn a little about Amalasuntha at thirteen-ish; how she felt about the smells, the chills, the sights – and the people – of this strange world from which her blood had flowed, but which was so foreign to her.

That scene, though perhaps in a much-altered/entirely gutted form, I expect will survive, in some way, into the WIP proper.

But, for now, there is a freedom in writing, knowing it is commitment-free if I need it to be … and in working, at my new desk.