Lilith Saintcrow

One of the best things about not working retail or office space is missing the “blue Mondays”. Mondays are still an adjustment, since it’s back to just me and the usual complement of kids, all guests and the Muffin gone for the first time in a couple days. Plus I never get even half of the cleaning I want done, done.

Mondays aren’t bad days. They’re just changeful, like the moon they’re named for. Of course, change is the way you know you’re still breathing, and breathing is good.

Breathing is very, very good.

It was over ninety degrees (to the tune of 100 on Saturday) this past weekend, and sticky-sultry-hot. I live up here in the grand Pacific Northwest because the weather doesn’t often make me want to peel off my skin and sit around in my bones, like in that Shel Silverstein poem. But we did have thunder yesterday evening. Ever since we lived for a little while in Wyoming I’ve loved thunderstorms.

So when the heat broke late last night it felt like a blessing, and it’s going to be a warm but not unlivable day today.

Look at that, I’ve just chatted about the weather. How banal can I get? Let’s go a little deeper.

This weekend I finished Absolute War by Chris Bellamy, a study of Soviet Russia in WWII. And I also finished Vircondelet’s Duras, a bio of Marguerite Duras, one of my favorite authors.

I like Duras’s work, for some ungodly reason. I don’t know why. Everyone always reads The Lover first, because of the movie, but I actually read Summer Rain back when I was living up in Seattle and working for yet another bookstore. After that I started reading every Duras I could get my hands on. The Sailor From Gibraltar and The Ravishing of Lol Stein are also perennial favorites. But I rarely recommend her to people for a number of reasons.

One is because of the translation. She wrote in French, and any time you get a translation of ANYTHING it’s hit or miss. (Like the *flinch* Fagles translation of the Odyssey. I really, really prefer the Fitzgerald.) For some languages, like French, translations are easier for me to read because I can make a shoddy guess at the turn of phrase the writer is originally going for. On others…well, I’m at the mercy of the translator in a way I don’t exactly enjoy as a reader.

Another reason I don’t recommend Duras to people is because she feels so excruciatingly personal to me. There’s a certain hypersensitive, doomed fraught-ness (that’s not even a word, but you get the idea) running through her work I can, if not identify with, then at least imagine. For some reason she’s very successful at putting me in her character’s shoes, even over a language barrier.

The last reason is because her books deal with a sort of interior motion a lot of American readers don’t traditionally like. They break a lot of fictional “rules” in ways the vast majority of the reading public I’ve waited on and recommended to (as a bookstore employee) just don’t enjoy or understand. It’s like my taste for peanut butter curry, or peanut butter and dill pickles. I know there are other people who enjoy this sort of thing, but it’s not something I can recommend without knowing you.

Vircondelet’s bio of her was…interesting. I much prefer Adler’s, but I understand that Vircondelet was trying to take a bath in the experience of this woman, this author. I can respect that. It was a bit of a slog in places, just because I don’t like that style of biography. But all in all, well done.

Bellamy’s book was incredibly enjoyable. No, it’s never enjoyable to read about war, but when you’ve read about a subject like the Eastern Front in either World War, where there’s not a terrible lot of archival sources for one side available to researchers, you get a kind of static picture of the whole thing. You know pieces are missing. But then, when someone gets access to the closed archives (as Bellamy did before Putin re-closed them, plus ca change…) and has a fair degree of talent for writing coherent, clear text…Well. Things become very interesting, and the picture becomes dynamic. One begins to see the interplay of moving forces instead of just a picture of rubble.

So it’s been a good book week, all things considered. Next I have a couple things I have to read for possible cover quotes, which is an enjoyable part of an author’s job. I’m always stunned to be asked for cover quotes. I rarely think anyone will care about my opinion of such-and-such.

Which partly accounts for the weird tone of my blog some days, dear Reader. Part of writing daily in this space is a certain feeling of shouting into the wind, in a good way. It feels very intimate, as if I’m writing this just for myself. The tension between that and the fact that it’s public space and there are boundaries between it and my private life, is a source of creative fuel some days.

Other days I just ramble on about nothing, and close with a civil adieu. Which is, I suspect, what this Monday post has turned out to be.

So. Happy Monday, dear Reader. May it be breathable. Because, you know, the alternative really doesn’t bear thinking about.

Welcome to another Friday writing post, my dears. Before we go further, I’d like to point you toward this post by Jeaniene Frost, about money. She demystifies a lot of it.

Look, it does take a couple years to get paid at this line of work. I was talking to the guy who’s going to reshingle our roof last week, and telling him that when one writes, one gets an advance one has to make do with until the royalties come in. IF they come in, and IF the book earns itself out to repay the publisher for the advance, and IF the book keeps selling, and IF you can wait six months between royalty checks which may or may not be worth a piddle in a rainstorm, as my grandpapa used to say. (About the rainstorm, not the royalties.)

A lot of writers get a rude shock when they realize just how infrequently this career is economically stable or viable. There’s no health insurance, no safety net, Dog willing and the creek don’t rise.

I don’t particularly like this state of affairs, but there’s nothing to be done for it. I write as much as I do largely because the Muffin has a Day Job and I am home with the kids all day, every day. Writing is my method of financially contributing, mostly because I can’t earn enough to even pay for daycare nowadays. (Don’t get me started, that’s another rant.)

Which is partly why I view writing the way I do–as a hack. The art to it is solely to please myself.

As long as I’m playing link salad, I should add a couple posts by my LJ friend Kaigou, who writes eloquently on what authors often miss when it comes to people trained for violence and mayhem and (a more useful and thoguht-provoking post) what authors get wrong when they write about life on the street.

The latter error bothers me the most. I can’t count how many books I’ve read, YA and others, that make homelessness “romantic”. Or that gloss over the danger of it. Or the fact that when you are on the fringe, everything has a price and nothing is free. I get a little buggy when I read something that to my mind glorifies street life. The streets are hard. Nobody ends up there because they’re well-adjusted or special. If you’re going to write about street life, please don’t think it’s glamorous or fun or “edgy”.

I am drained and nerve-sparking today (as if you couldn’t tell) so I’m just going to close with one piece of observation/advice. Please, for the love of God, if you want to write, learn your possessives and contractions.

Like it’s is short for it is, and its is a possessive–”belonging to it”. Along with they’re and their, this is the thing that made me chuck a manuscript in the “reject” pile quickest when I was reading slush. I still see it sometimes, especially in blog posts, and it makes me cringe and make that “GUHNAAH!” sound each time.

This is such a basic rule, it gets overlooked a lot. I wish it wasn’t.

And now, dear Reader, having spastically gone all over the board, I take my leave, preparatory to taking some ibuprofen and stretching to kill this headache. Wish me luck.

Dear Work In Progress,

Screaming that you have to be finished “OMG TODAY NOW NOW NOW WTFBBQLLAMA WHY ARE YOU SITTING THERE WHEN I NEED TO BE FINISHED?!!!?!!!1!” is not guaranteed to make me do what you want.

As a matter of fact, it is guaranteed to make me dig in my heels and refuse to do anything. Especially when I have kids to take on a shopping expedition and dinner to make as well as a tonne of housework to be done.

Stop it. I refuse. I’ve GOT to get this stuff done, I’ve been working nonstop for the last month. I just finished those revisions. Go away.

Quit sitting in my head and making little quivering noises. That doesn’t help.

*time passes*

OH OKAY. FINE. I’ll bloody well drop everything and write one scene. ONE. You got that? Just one.

No love,

Me

PS: I fully realize I’m doomed. Try not to cheer and do a victory lap.

Damn stories.

Just a quick note to let you know: you can find an extract from the just-released Jill Kismet book Night Shift over here on the Orbit site. Enjoy!

Yep, that’s right. Night Shift, book one in the Jill Kismet series, is officially released today! (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s) I am so very, very excited to announce Jill’s official debut.

Here’s the blurb:

Not everyone can take on the things that go bump in the night.

Welcome to the night shift…

I don’t think it’s possible to put into words how excited I am.

Also debuting officially today is the Hotter Than Hell anthology, edited by Kim Harrison and chock-full of great stories by luminaries like Keri Arthur, Marjorie Liu, and L.A. Banks. Why, Yours Truly even has a little story in there too, titled Brother’s Keeper and starring your favorite Nichtvren, Selene and Nikolai. Those of you who like that dynamic duo, just hold on a little longer. I’ve got great news to announce about them, but I just can’t do it yet.

Last but not least, you guys are way, way smarter than I am. Yesterday’s Weirdsville post is indeed the result of a viral marketing campaign for Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books–or more precisely, the HBO series made of those books. I got lots and lots of comments and emails telling me so.

I initially did think it might be my sister’s nutty stalker, so I didn’t spend the effort on it I might otherwise have. I feel like an idiot–it was the Teen who found out exactly what it was for me, and only because I finally mentioned to him the sort of strange stuff I’ve been getting in the mail. (It says something for the weirdness quotient in our household that I’ll just put mail like that in a Ziploc and file it somewhere with a shrug and a raised eyebrow, doesn’t it.)

Still, my dears, it’s a shame to let a good viral go to waste, and I was delighted by this one (once I actually figured it out.) So, there may be more Weirdsville in the future. *rubs hands together with evil glee* The Teen and his friend Squeaker are ALL OVER the idea.

Though it IS weird, the cats suddenly wanting to be in at night. Really weird…