Lilith Saintcrow

Happy Thursday! And now it’s time for an announcement.

I put out the call, and it was answered! I now present you, dear Readers, with the winners to the Valentine Slogan Contest!

I say “winners” plural because the vote was three-way, and it was very close.

First place goes to Denelle! With 27.71% of the vote going to:

Next Time You Wake Me Up Before Noon, It’s YOUR Blood Filling My Mug.

Second place goes to Kyle, with 24.2% of the vote captured by:

I’m A Necromance. I CAN Kill You Now And Ask Questions Later.

And finally, a strong showing by Karen, who received 21.02% of the vote with:

Had To Go To Hell And Back To Find A Decent Man.

Congratulations to the winners–and thanks to the over 500 Dark Siders who voted! I was amazed to get this kind of response.

Some of you sent in longer slogans that echoed the MasterCard commercials, which I loved but were a bit too long. And of course, my personal favorites were Sandy’s Necromance Is Still Romance and Denise’s Bounty Hunters: The Quicker Picker-Uppers, but I couldn’t vote.

I am working on designing the mugs right now, and will send out an announcement as soon as I have them. Each of the three winners will get a free mug with their winning slogan on it, and the mugs will afterward be available at Japhrimel’s Corner.

Thanks to everyone who participated, both by sending in a slogan and voting. I am still agog at the response this time!

Stay tuned for more contests, including (gasp!) contests to win The Devil’s Right Hand ARCs. And as always, thanks for reading. I couldn’t do this without my wonderful Readers.

I’m sometimes asked what’s the best education for writing. To which I invariably reply, seriously and with great ironic delight, “Children.”

It’s true. Children require at once the most stringent protection and the most absolute freedom. You have to protect your kids and keep them safe, even when they don’t understand or see the peril. On the other hand, your job is to get out of the way and let them become the wonderful human beings they are and were born to be. IN writing, you have to protect a story when it’s fragile and new…and you have to be able to expose it to the harshest public criticism possible, if you expect to actually get published.

You also have to leave no doubt about who is in charge. Otherwise children–and the stories–will run roughshod right over you. And kids like boundaries. They like to know where the lines are. The world is a big scary place when you’re little, and knowing that some things don’t change is a relief. And yet the boundaries need to be reasonable, and up for negotiation as the child or the story matures.

Children need to be looked at. They need to be coddled, petted, and enthused over. Giving a child positive strokes not only encourages the behavior you want to reinforce, it also cuts down on the behavior you don’t want. (The old adage about catching more flies with honey than vinegar rings true.) Children are hungry for approval, and will get it one way or another, positive or negative. So are stories. They will bug and twitter and pull your hair, until you write them down or start acting them out, or start blogging endlessly about them. They’ll get their fill of attention one way or another. It’s best to make it positive attention–by which I mean writing the damn things.

As I type this, the Little Prince is cuddled up behind me in the papasan chair. He’s poking at my back with a paper airplane, in between babbling to himself about cars and peering over my shoulder at the glowing screen. The Princess is in the same room, eating breakfast and reading comics. They both like being close while I work, and I’ve grown used to a certain level of noise while I write. Occasionally I have to look up and make a response over the toy/game currently in session, so they know I’m still listening.

And as I often say, just because I’m not looking doesn’t mean I can’t see you. It racks their little brains EVERY time.

Heh. You take it where you find it, as a parent.

Stories are like that too. They gather around, wanting a pat on the head–a few paragraphs here, a few lines there. Pretty soon one realizes one’s written a book, and the baby leaves the nest.

Children and writing both require the utmost discipline, as well. Mum rarely gets sick, and when she does the house goes on as usual. If someone else gets sick, the world has ended, at least for them. But Mum can’t afford to be sick. There’s too much to do. If you’re where the buck stops, you don’t get days off.

Discipline in writing boils down to one thing: butt in chair, hands on keyboard. It’s all very well to have the story in your head, but you need to give it the chance to come out. I chortle at the thought of days off–mostly because I love writing so much I can’t envision a day without it. I suppose some days have passed when I haven’t written something, but they’re few and far between. Even when I’m not actively typing I still go through the slush pile, tweaking a word here, a line there.

Having children was the best training I could have hoped for as a writer. And being a writer gives me a small but necessary detachment when it comes to raising children. Both taught me that so much eventually comes out in the wash, there’s no need to get overexcited.

And both are just so much fun. They’re messy, glorious, wonderful fun.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a teenager to roust out of bed and a gawky, awkward story to revise.

The parallels are just amazing.

General warrants. Lettres de cachet. And now, our own government engaging in wholesale ignoring of FISA, wiretapping without warrants and daring us to care. The Founding Fathers are certainly rotating in their tombs.

I’m stopping the cleanse two days early because the stomach cramps and bloating were just Too Much. But I’m satisfied nonetheless–I’m lighter and cleaner, ha ha, than I was before. Just so you know.

Pretty soon (like, tomorrow) the Valentine Slogan Contest will be over and I’ll announce the winner(s). It’s pretty close. Then there will be other contests to arrange, and books/coffee mugs to send off.

Today’s a nice sunny morning. I had an okay weekend, the kids and DHM were up in Seattle visiting the DHM’s dad. (Mother’s Day is hard on him, since he just lost his wife recently.) So it was very quiet, and I got a lot of housework done–but I was so cranky and hungry from the fast and cleansing that I didn’t enjoy much of it. Plus there were the cramps. Ugh. But I survived, and the laundry got done, folded, put away. I even cleaned the loos and hoovered. Go figure. The house is ready for another week of hard use. (The DHM calls it “that lived-in look.”)

I also finished Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy, as well as They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 and The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was a short but very enjoyable and thought-provoking read. Along with finishing this week’s Economist, I’m thinking the weekend wasn’t a total loss, though I didn’t get any writing done so of course I feel a bit like a failure.

They’re saying it will hit around eighty degrees today. Lord, I hope not. I don’t need that so early in the season. But the plants are all fed and watered, so if it does happen, I’ll send the Sullen One outside to mow the back yard (before it gets really hot, that is) and spend the day in the shade, tapping away at the keyboard while my innards forgive me for cleansing them.

I know, exciting big fun. But I’ll take it.

Cross-posted from The Midnight Hour. Because, well, it’s Friday. And that’s my day to post there.

I could have done something else. I know I could have. Pizza delivery. Law school. Dolphin training at SeaWorld. Lightweight boxing. Cat herding. Yak herding, even.

Instead, unwashed and sometimes uncaffeinated, I sit cross-legged in front of a laptop, clicking away. If a Martian anthropologist was observing, he might think I’m engaging in ecstatic religious communion with my Gateway. Instead of just, you know…typing. Furiously. Occasionally cursing as a character does something unexpected, or putting up both hands and doing a Rocky victory-dance in my chair when I finish a particularly difficult scene. Sometimes settling back, eyes half-closed and body motionless, engaged in a writer’s most difficult task–thinking one’s way out of a particular painted-in corner.

It’s not like I wanted to be insane. Really, it’s not. The world just looks a little different when you write it down for a living. I mutter to myself to work out dialogue, which causes no end of strange looks in the grocery store. I catch myself blocking out fight scenes in public places. (Thankfully, bookstores must be used to this sort of thing, because their employees don’t look at me funny. Fellow customers, though, that’s a different story.) Every situation I happen across outside the house–and no few inside my walls–I view with an writer’s cool and delighted eye first and a human eye second. That would make good material. I can use it. Got to remember THAT one, hoo boy.

I didn’t want it. I just ended up wired for it, the same way the gods wire people for mechanical aptitude or eidetic memory. But I didn’t get anything cool, no sir. I just got the inability to let go of a story until I’ve written it down as best I can.

Go ahead, laugh. It’s not so funny when it happens to you.

The symptoms are plainly horrific. Pedantically correcting other people’s grammar. Reading punctuation books (Eats, Shoots and Leaves is the current favorite) and grammar manuals (The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, my chicks, is fabulous) and chortling in delight at the garden of language. Wincing every time one sees a misused apostrophe. Collecting new words from dictionaries and other books, gloating over them in the dead of night when nobody else can see, precioussssss. Mainlining the smell of paper and dust that is a pile of books. Knowing when a book in one’s personal collection has been replaced, because one can FEEL it, like a splinter in the mind.

It’s not pretty.

And why, dear gods, did you make a writer and thus rob me of that most wonderful of things, reading sheerly for pleasure? Instead, I look under the hood of every book. What makes this run? Oh, nice trick. How did you do that? Aha! I could do that, but I’d do it THIS way… Rare is the book that will escape me fingering its engine, lifting its skirt and examining it–all with the most dispassionately scientific of intentions, I assure you. I just want to see how it works, and how I can appropriateum, utilize such tricks. No prose is safe from my tinkering, my narrow-eyed examination.

None of my own writing is safe, either. I take red pens to actual published copies of my own work. I can’t let the babies go, I’m always wanting to refine them–always wincing and thinking, I could have done that better. I know I could. I know so much more now.

It’s like being in a cartoon, only without the really fun visual gags. A writer’s brain is always going, dreaming up new situations and ironies, churning out what ifs like Einstein churned out equations. Sometimes the what ifs crowd around late at night, whispering, until the poor put-upon writer has to get up out of a nice warm cozy bed and fire up the laptop/PC/paper and pen, just to get it out of the skull and onto some paper. We’re haunted, we tragic souls.

Speaking of paper and pens, that’s another thing. Writers and the Levenger catalog. It’s probably our version of Playboy. Dear gods,why did you make me so weak when it comes to fountain pens, quality paper, and sturdy bookshelves to hold my accumulation of tomes? WHY? The UPS man smiles knowingly each time he drops off a package. Do you think he knows this house holds that thing worse than a plague, the unwashed word-addicted sentence-dropping etymology-junkie Muse-driven writer?

Speaking of the Muse…the horrid little daughter of Zeus inside my head, providing inspiration when she ruddy well feels like it, and demanding I drop everything to preserve it for posterity–i.e., most often the slush pile. Why did you inflict such a picky creature on me, dear gods? Why? I want nothing more than to write comedic short stories, and you give me a Muse who specializes in tragedy, angst, and gunplay. It’s not FAIR.

I know. Life isn’t fair. But seriously, sometimes being a writer is like having a vaguely socially-acceptable but slightly risque habit–it doesn’t disqualify one from being invited to parties, but it makes for some embarrassing self-consciousness whenever one is with Normal People.

There are benefits. The jolt of pleasure when one retrieves just the right word for a sentence and plugs it in, creating a serviceable, beautiful thing. The smell of ink. The feeling of opening up a box of one’s own books, with one’s name on the cover. The vast cornucopia of ideas available to the omnivorous reader in our day and age. The adoration of millions of screaming fans–

Oh. Wait. Writers don’t get that. Rock stars get that.

Dammit.

Of course, rock stars also get hearing loss and paparazzi and weird diets, not to mention their every movie dissected in the tabloids and probably the torture of hearing their music turn into Muzak. Which must be a hideous torture unparalleled in the history of art, I’m sure.

Come to think of it, being a writer maybe isn’t that bad.

Now where’s my Levenger catalog?

Lots of stuff out on teh interwebs today. First, courtesy of CyranoCyrano, I came across this link: George Lucas says Empire Strikes Back is the worst Star Wars movie ever.

No, George. The Phantom Menace is the worst, if only by grace of JarJar and by the sinking sensation I felt while watching wonderful, magnificent actors trying to totter under the weight of your ego. Followed closely by War of the Clones*, where I was SO SQUICKED OUT by the idea of Amidala fallin’ for a kid she knew when he was eight, not to mention MORE JARJAR, for Chrissake. And lastly, the third worst Star Wars film is Revenge of the Sith, because Hayden Christensen was so frocking henpecked by the director he couldn’t even work up the energy to pop a believable boner at Natalie Portman. (I’ve seen Christensen in other movies and am relieved to report that it wasn’t his fault.) At least the latter two films had fight sequences that were almost worth watching. Phantom Menace? We get Nascar with aliens. Boooo-ring. There wasn’t even any cannibalism.

I mean, it was hideous all the way around. Watching a copy of Revenge of the Sith, some friends and I heard the line, “Love can’t save you, Padme. Only my new powers can.”

My scream, a cheated howl, rattled the windows. Literally. And I wasn’t alone. We had to rewind it a few times to make sure we hadn’t hallucinated.

And come on, George. Midichlorians? My ass.

ANYWAY, let’s move on, because I’ve gotten over my huge feelings of betrayal and loss at the last three Star Wars fiascos. Really. I have. No, honest. I have.

In other news, Andrew Smith has a drop-dead hilarious guide for creating a fantasy/urban fantasy novel people will totally read. Don’t drink while reading, for it will end up splattered across your monitor.

Then there’s the incomparable Glenn Greenwald on why Beltway pundits do not represent the average American. And some Beltway journalists still don’t get it. They don’t get that their proximity to and dependence on political money machines makes it difficult if not impossible for them to be, well, objective. And journalistic.

And the House is considering a fully-funded withdrawal vote tonight. It’s about bloody time. How many times will Bush try to veto the will of the American people–the people he claims to be working for? Grrrr.

In other news, Harry Potter fanfic reading in NJ Bookstore, Smart Bitches discussion at 11. SRSLY? Fanfic? *boggles* Wow.

Evil Auntie Peril talks aboot infodump in detective novels. Get that girl some Hammett and Chandler, stat!

And several peeps sent me little giggles to get through yesterday as I stumbled, sleep-deprived and slow, through copyediting. (Got a fair bit done, BTW.) Thanks to everyone who made the day a little lighter.

Last of all, in garden news, I HAVE A ROSE! The Mr. Lincoln bush I bought has produced a beautiful, dark-red, sweet-smellin’ flower, which I have cooed over and sniffed to encourage more such behavior from the bush.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

* I know it’s Attack of the Clones. I like my title better. For obvious reasons.