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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s yours?

Related posts:

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

Whew. That’s a lot of links.

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

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

Now she believes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

Anyway. There’s an interview with me over at the Book Mogul. And this Thursday at 7pm I will be signing at the Cedar Hills Crossing Powell’s! Come on by, if you like. I will be reading from Defiance, the Strange Angels book that won’t be released until spring 2011. So now’s your chance to hear a little of What Happens Next with Dru and her (occasionally) merry crew.

Things have calmed down immensely. There’s a sense of the storm being past. When you decide to no longer deal with someone who creates drama like a thunderstorm creates lightning, there’s a certain relief. I can deal with the guilt of not being able to help –I did literally all I could, and not only am I at a loss to figure out what more I could do, so is everyone else involved in the situation. In other words, things didn’t go belly-up for any lack of work on my part.

Cold comfort, maybe, but you take it where you find it.

And with that, I’m out. See you later, alligators.

Related posts:

1. We’ve come a long way, baby…
2. The Merriest Time
3. Monday Five

My Friday the 13th started about 24 hours early. The 12th was one of the more bizarre days I’ve ever had in my life, and that’s saying something. I’ve found myself today having to say no, in both personal and professional (albeit completely unrelated) situations.

This is not easy.

In the first place, I was raised not to say no when someone pressed an emotional hot button–something like “I need you now.” My only value was how compliant I was, and I was trained well and thoroughly that compliant was what I needed to be to survive. For years it has been extraordinarily easy for anyone I cared about to get pretty much anything they wanted out of me, just by appearing needy or in-crisis enough. Now, taking care of your friends isn’t a bad thing–but you need to be cautious who you call “friend” if that’s a commitment you want to make.

If it’s very distressing for you to say no, you can bet a certain type of person will sense that. And a series of painful games may begin, with you trying to make this type of person happy and avoid saying no. And it can’t be done. You will be sucked dry like an orange slice, and they, flush with stolen vitality, will find another victim. It’s wreckage waiting to happen, and it happens every day.

As a female, too, it’s presumed that I don’t say no. It’s difficult for me to outright refuse someone, especially in high-stress situations. There’s a huge weight of cultural disapprobation involved in a woman saying “No.” Over and over, in many implicit and explicit ways, women are told that it’s necessary to play along, be gentle, be nice, spare everyone’s feelings. And God forbid you should say “No!” and stick to it, or listen to the inner voice that warns you of danger. Then you’re a bitch.

When it comes to working in publishing, another layer of uncertainty and pressure is added. If you say no, there’s always a chance you won’t be invited back. To be a writer is to be a freelancer, and to be a freelancer is profoundly unstable. Every “no” must be weighed against the damage it could do down the road.

You’re beginning to see why a “No!”, whether diplomatic or not, is an act sometimes fraught with danger.

Most often, my “no”s are part of a long process that involves me taking several barometric readings. In the case of a personal no, I usually discuss things with a friend I can trust. I tend to “chew it until the flavor’s gone” and agonize over how hurt someone will be if I say that dreaded single syllable. It takes a lot to make me close up and stop giving.

When it comes to saying no in the writing world, I have to balance the prospect of possibly not getting paid against the trouble the job will take, and how I interact with the editor, and a whole host of other issues before I even get close to saying no. I also often run a prospective “no” past my agent, partly to check in with the longer-term plan for my career and also to get her opinion on the best and most diplomatic way to refuse. It takes a while.

A great deal of my life lately has been saying no in small ways with people I trust. Just to check out what happens when I do so.

And you know, I’m discovering the damndest thing: most of the time, a no given in those situations isn’t really a big deal. The person you say that dreaded single syllable to shrugs and goes on to star in their own life movie. It doesn’t make the sun go out or the world end.

But in the last twenty-four hours, I’ve had to say no in a personal situation where I’ve felt unsafe to refuse, and yet compelled to do so. All my emotional hot buttons have been pushed, and the fact that I was also agonizing over saying no in a professional situation just made it worse. (I should stress again, the two events were in no way related. Except temporally. Bad luck, that.)

It’s been incredibly difficult. I’m fighting against my conditioning, my upbringing, and fighting in the face of a very real fear to say “no” and stick with it. My friends–those I can trust, those who I’ve practiced the little tiny “no”s with–have closed around me like a protective wall, each in their own warm way. I am told over and over again that it’s OK for me to draw my boundaries, that I am not, in fact, crazy, that I have a right to protect myself, and that they love me just as much as ever.

But it’s still tremendously difficult. And the fact that I care for and want to protect the person I’m having to refuse is extraordinarily painful.

Saying no professionally has consequently been more upsetting than usual. It may mean I don’t work with a particular editor again, but it’s a chance I have to take. I pride myself on giving my editors what they need, and I try very hard to be reasonable to work with. Having to refuse, especially when it’s really nobody’s fault and just a mess-up, is utterly crazymaking, and contributes to a round of professional second-guessing and doubt that makes a hurricane look like a teapot tempest.

Which leads me, in a roundabout way, to my advice. If you want to make a career of writing, sooner or later you will have to say “no” to something. Spend some time thinking about saying no. What it means to you to refuse, if you can do so with little angst or if it’s a hot-button issue with you. Figure out how to do it gracefully, figure out if you need backstops and people to talk to before you actually utter the dreaded syllable. Cultivate those habits and the comfort with that one little word now. Being unprepared when the time comes to say it is very uncomfortable. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I can only imagine how badly I’d feel if I hadn’t been working on this very issue for months.

Now I’m going to go do some deep breathing. And, my dear Readers, if you can, help me out here. What helps you say no? Have you found a trick to it? Do you agonize over it, or is it no big deal to you?

Related posts:

1. On Forgiveness
2. Letter To Weasel Boy
3. Where’s My Lifeguard?

So, I’ve stolen a question from the mailbag. Other Dames might have different answers, but I figured I’d give my twopence. Said question is from Reader Sara H., and is very interesting:

So, I’d like to write, maybe not as a career, but as a creative outlet, potentially getting to the point where I might try to have something published. I love the research portion of getting ready to write and I have ideas, but getting them onto paper and getting them onto paper in a grammatically correct way is becoming a problem. I have a, History degree, so I can write a fantastic essay about the Nazi art movement or how Martin Luther was the first multi-media rock star, but writing a scene of dialogue or switching POVs makes me want to break out in a cold sweat. I’ve thought about signing up for a creative writing class. Is this a waste of money? Should I maybe just go out and buy a style guide or am I beyond all hope?

Hi, Sara.

Well, you’ve taken the first step, which is realizing that academic or history-essay writing isn’t the same as fiction or genre fiction writing. I like to compare it to sports–different sports use different muscles, and writing in different styles or to different purposes uses different mental “muscles.” You wouldn’t believe how many people who want to write a novel that has a chance of selling don’t grasp that simple, essential fact.

First of all, are you absolutely sure you want to write to publish? Maybe research is all you want to do. If you’re absolutely certain you want to go ahead, think about why. Make a list, verbalize what you want to a trusted person, that sort of thing. A few moments spent discovering your own motivations and what you hope to get out of striving toward publication can be extraordinarily helpful, not least because it can tell you if this is something you really want to do. It’s a lot of hard work.

If you’re sure you want to get something published, and want to develop your novel-writing muscles, then here are some things you can do, and some things you should probably take into account. Ready?

* Treat this goal as a priority. Yeah, I say this a lot. No matter how talented or special you are, the chances of you tossing off a manuscript that will get snapped up first thing are pretty damn small. If you expect just to weekend-warrior it, your chances of getting to the finish line on any novel, not least a publishable novel, are not very high either. Get out your timers, make your lists, do whatever you have to do to prioritize two chunks of your time. One chunk is for researching the novel-writing and publication process. (There’s tons of advice, both at the Deadline Dames and on my own blog, not to mention many others, that can help you here.) The other chunk is for sitting your ass in a chair, putting your fingers on a keyboard, and taking a whack at it. Which brings us to:

* Recognize that there is a learning curve, and your first attempts will suck pretty hard. Just like you didn’t write a 1500-word one-subject essay perfectly the first time, you will not write a reasonable novel weighing in at industry standard (75-120K words, complex plot, characterization, etc., etc.) the first time. You probably will not even get close. Sorry about that. This sort of thing takes practice. For the first two novels, you’re not looking to win or to place. You’re just looking to finish.

* Don’t get bogged down. Do not cough up one novel-sized chunk of text and think you’re done. If you want to get published, endlessly flogging your first attempt at the novel form is not a good way to maximize your chances. It’s like van Gogh stopping after the first painting he ever attempted and declaring that he wouldn’t set brush to canvas again until someone recognized his geeeeenyus and paid him for it. Not only would that not have worked no matter HOW talented dear Vincent was, it also would have deprived the world of his later works.

* Study the form you are attempting. You already read novels, I’m guessing, and since you’re asking the Dames I’m betting you’re reading what you’d like to write–UF, paranormal suspense/romance, etc. If you’re not reading what you’d like to write…start. Set aside time for doing this. Give yourself a couple months to read with no other purpose than enjoyment and familiarity. Then get out a legal pad and a pen while you read, and start writing things down. Write down what works for you in the novels you’re reading, write down what doesn’t, write down what you would have done differently, make a note of typos or continuity errors you find. (You’re not doing this to “catch someone out”–try to avoid the little self-righteous thrill you may receive when you spot a typo or error.) This is to force you to think critically about the form and structure of what you’ll be attempting.

A slight caution here: once you’ve exercised those critical muscles, it might be difficult to go back to reading plainly for pleasure. Sorry about that. This is, incidentally, why I read so much nonfiction–because when I read fiction, I tend to reach for my pen and pad and start making notes as if I’m an editor. *headdesk* A book really has to work to pull me along so I don’t start checking under the hood, so to speak.

* Publishing is hurry up and wait. So’s writing, sometimes. When I finish a manuscript, I have time built into my schedule to set the damn thing aside. I don’t look at it–sometimes for a couple weeks, sometimes for a month or two. This is so when I go back, it’s relatively fresh for me. I have a better chance of reading it critically, of spotting small errors, and of seeing continuity/character problems.

Also, getting an agent or getting a manuscript accepted for publication is so not the end of the road. There are revisions, copyedits, proof pages, cover copy and other decisions, the wait for a release date, then the waiting for “numbers” that may or may not mean the publisher will want another book…in short, writing the manuscript is only the very first step of a long and arduous process. This process will take ten to twenty times more time than you ever dreamed possible. It will wear your nerves down to nubs. You’ve been warned.

Now let’s move along to some nitty-gritty.

* Dialogue is how people talk, but it’s also moving the plot along. Dialogue has to serve three purposes. It has to reveal character. It must also move the plot forward. Not only that, it must not sound clumsy/unreal. This is a tall order! So, to sharpen your ear for dialogue, go to public places (the mall, a casino, etc.), settle down with a coffee and your trusty notebook, and eavesdrop. Listen to how people speak. Listen to what they don’t say. Get your favorite movies and “watch” them–blindfolded. Listen to the dialogue and think about how it reveals character, see if you can tell what the people onscreen are doing by what they’re saying. Read your own dialogue out loud and think, really think about if it advances the plot and sounds like something a Real Person would say.

Real People talk with “um”s and “uh”s and “yeah”s and all sorts of other placeholders. People in books or movies can’t do that without a VERY good reason. Ideally a piece of dialogue gives you a mental snapshot of how a character’s thinking or feeling AND gives you information/impetus to move the story along. Sounds difficult, right? That’s because it is. Listen and practice, and your dialogue will get better.

* POV must be a conscious choice–you must know WHY you’ve chosen a particular POV. When I write in 1st, I have a small keyhole through which I–and the reader–must view the world I’ve created. That tight focus allows for immersion into a character, an immersion that theoretically makes it easier for the reader to identify with/feel for the main character.

The problem with 1st is that I must show other characters doing things and responding in a way that the reader will recognize but that the narrator may not. When I write in 3rd, I have much greater leeway and a broader “scope”, but I have to work twice as hard to show what my hero/ine is really thinking or feeling–and three times as hard to get the reader to identify with and care for said hero/ine. Each is a tradeoff, and you won’t know which is right for a story until you’ve practiced with both and understand the limitations and advantages of both. This is, incidentally, a big reason why anyone’s first finished manuscript pretty much sucks. This takes time and practice to figure out.

Opinion time: I have read ONE book in my life where the author pulled off multiple 1st-person POVs and made them work. (This was Peter Beagle’s The Innkeeper’s Song, if you’re interested.) If you have to cheat by throwing in another character’s POV two-thirds of the way through the book because there’s information your main character/reader can’t get in any other way? Unless you’re extraordinarily skilled AND talented, I’m going to call that a cheat and you’re going to lose me. It’s jarring, and I dislike it intensely. This is why I say POV must be a conscious choice–you’ve got to know why you’re doing it, and play to the strengths that particular POV gives you while figuring out a way around its limitations.

* A class might be a good idea. Or it might not. We all know how I feel about workshops, classes, and agendas. The only two creative-writing classes I was ever in were run by petty tyros who got off on destroying their students emotionally. On the other hand, I’ve run a couple writing classes myself, and they seem to have gone OK. (You’d have to ask the Scupperlout if I was a petty tyro, though.)

If you really want to take a class or a workshop, go into it prepared to learn–but not necessarily to learn about writing. Classes and workshops are more often about someone’s emotional agenda than about information-sharing; that can be great material. There are exceptions, but my personal advice is that the time is better spent writing and the money is better spent on postage or research on the market.

I could go on–especially about style guides and reference books–but this post is already a monster. Sara, you asked a very complex and interesting question, probably far more complex than you really knew. I hope this helps. You’re the only person who can decide if the goal of writing to publication is for you, and you’re the only person who can write yourself there. A lot of it is hard thankless work, but you do get a few chuckles along the way.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Some Basic Questions
2. No Instruction Book
3. Friday Five

First the news: Escape Between The Pages has the cover art for the next Jill Kismet book, Heaven’s Spite, which is due out in November. It’s shiny and pretty, and honestly I can’t wait for this book to come out, because it’s going to just kick everything we know about Jill right in the pants. I can barely contain myself, the glee is so awesome.

Moving on to our Friday writing post…

Pride, like laudanum and other poisonous medicines, is beneficial in small, though injurious in large, quantities. No man who is not pleased with himself, even in a personal sense, can please others. -Frederick Saunders, librarian and essayist (1807-1902). Ganked with thanks from AWAD

I have a confession to make, dear Readers. It’s not pretty.

I am pretty savage, in my own little way, when it comes to Speshul Snowflake writers. The thing is, there’s a continuum of Speshul Snowflakery. It goes from the all-Speshul, all the time, to the occasional burst of Speshulness from even the most polite and well-adjusted person.

Nobody’s perfect.

Not even your humble Narrator.

A couple days ago I was bitching and moaning to my writing partner. (Hey, Nina!) I waxed pretty indignant, and cranky to boot. And Nina, bless her cotton-picking little heart, was very kind to me. She finally said, “Look, treat it like spec work. You can do that, you’re good at it, it pays the bills. Come on.”

Which brought me up short. I realized, in one horrifying moment, that I had been indulging in venomous Speshul Snowflakery.

Yes, I do mock the Snowflakes among us. But here’s the thing: everyone will have at least one Snowflake moment in their lives. This is a conservative estimate. If you have one a year, you’re damn near a saint. I suspect most reasonable, well-adjusted writers have one Snowflake moment a month, or even a week.

And that’s OK. No, really. It is. I’ll just wait a second here, so the surprise of hearing me say that can pass. *makes face*

All right. It’s OK. I swear. Because it’s not about having the Snowflake moment, it’s about knowing how to handle it.

This falls under the heading of “professional behavior”, and if you expect to make a living as a writer you need to start from the very beginning with a professional attitude. At one point or another, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot and make a withdrawal against that bank of goodwill. Everyone does. But it doesn’t have to be fatal.

First, accept that nobody is perfect, and you will have a Snowflake moment or two. Get used to the idea. Writing is an incredibly personal art, and writers are judged six ways from Sunday by every single person who claps eyes on their work. But if you know that sooner or later you are going to lose your temper, you are going to have a Snowflake moment, you ARE going to have that response, you are already three-quarters of the way to solving it.

Once you realize the possibility exists, you can try to pause when you’re angry (a hard but eminently learnable skill) and take a deep breath. Soaking one’s head in a bucket of cool water may also be necessary, or a good stiff drink. Whatever gets you there. It is hard, but it is possible to short-circuit the Snowflake moment so that hopefully, nobody but you or your best friend knows you’ve had one.

Here are a few rules I’ve made for myself to avoid the temptation to Snowflake out. You can, of course, leave your own strategies in the comments, where I (and others) will no doubt steal them shamelessly.

* Do not respond to reviews. Ever. Even the positive ones. I’ve covered this in detail, but I think it bears repeating. Responding to even positive reviews ups the chances that you’ll get all het up over a negative one and think it’s a good idea to explain/justify/attack the reviewer/whatever. This leads straight to an Internet Boondoggle and makes you look like an asshat, even if you’re right/justified/whatever. Just don’t do it.

* Don’t respond to emails that piss you off for at least 12 (ideally, 24-36) hours. It’s publishing, not triage. Nobody’s going to die if you take a few hours to make sure that rage pounding behind your eyeballs and cranking your blood pressure doesn’t come out in whatever response you choose to make. This will save you from many, many Snowflake moments that have the potential to shoot you in the career foot and bleed you dry.

* If you must blog about it, lock the post for at least two days. Sometimes you just HAVE to write it out. I’ve done it. And then, two days later, sanity has reasserted itself and I’ve deleted the damn thing no matter how funny and righteous it is. The risk in putting this sort of shit on your blog, even private-locked, is that now it is out of your control, on servers you have no control over, and you will be tempted to unlock it before you’ve cooled down. So if you have just GOT to blog about this huge injustice or whatever is pissing you off bigtime, lock the post up hard and go have a drink. Let your agent/writing partner/best friend know you’re considering putting up a post about X, and see what they say. (See next item.)

* If you are lucky enough to have at least one friend who will gently tell you to STFU and quit being precious, LISTEN TO THEM. This friend may be your agent–occasionally an agent will help you not shoot yourself in the foot. (Beware of expecting your agent to read yoru every diatribe, though. That can sour a relationship right quick.) More often this is going to be a writing partner or friend whose calm and judgment you trust. I’m lucky to have dear Nina, who is collected in the extreme, as well as practical and capable of unhesitatingly telling me when I’m getting my panties in an unnecessary wad. My job in those situations is to listen, and to at least agree to a moratorium on saying anything publicly until I’ve calmed down.

* Get away. Take a walk. Use Freedom to cut off that tempting Internet capability for a while. Push yourself away from the computer and go clean the kitchen or something. Just get away from that thing that’s bugging you. Hopefully, distracting yourself will give you enough breathing space for perspective to creep in…and it will save you from having a public Snowflake moment.

* Decide take the high road EARLY, and stick to it. This is useful at conventions–everyone is tired/stressed/excited/onstage, and behavioral brakes are weakened. Make the decision to treat the convention like it’s not going to make or break you–because it won’t. Remember that the hard sell doesn’t work, your time will come, and you’re there to ideally have fun and NOT make an ass of yourself. Also, staying classy on the Internet makes you the exception rather than the rule. You will never be ashamed of being polite and taking the high road. Getting into the habit of reminding yourself to be polite will help you when crunch-time comes, you’re tired and stressed, and that bitch on the panel has just interrupted you, or that jerkwad commenter/reviewer has called you a hack, or that editor has messed with your Precious Verbage for the last fucking time. You have a chance to not do something you’ll regret. That chance, that possibility is all we get. It’s got to be enough.

* Learn to let it go. One book doesn’t set the world on fire? Let it go and write another one. One reviewer goes on and on about how s/he hates your genre/your books/you because it’s all trash? Let it go, because if you respond it’s wrestling a pig in mud. An editor asks you to completely excise X, then in the next revision pass tells you to put X back in and they don’t know why you took it out? Realize they’re human too, scream into your pillow, and let it go. It’s not that these things don’t matter. It’s that you have to deny them the power to dictate your behavior.

This is an imperfect science for an imperfect world. Human beings are messy, they make mistakes, and they get angry and have bad judgment. However, the Snowflake moments we’re all prone to don’t have to be fatal, and you can make plans to minimize their impact. This isn’t to say that you won’t sometime, somewhere, have completely justifiable rage and you will let it loose in public in a way that will make the world a better place. Those rages and moments, however, are the exception, not the rule, and it’s silly not to plan for the other 99% of the time, when you’re just going to be falling prey to being human and excitable.

I was saved a rather embarrassing Snowflake moment (because I had vaporous dreams of a blog post that would be funny and explosive and would SHOW THEM ALL, DAMMIT) by dear Nina. I’m unendingly grateful, and I know how lucky I am to have her. Which means that next time we get together to dish about writing and the industry, I’m buying drinks. All things considered, that’s the cheaper alternative.

So remember: everyone has Snowflake moments. The professionals just know how to gain that critical few minutes of perspective that stops them from indulging them in public and turning their career into a mudpit.

Over and out.

Related posts:

1. On Retail, Food Service, And Speshul Snowflakes
2. On QueryFail, Or, The Lilybed of Grief
3. There is too much. Let me sum up.

* We’re coming up on the release of the third Strange Angels book, Jealousy, next week. I’ve heard from a few people who have already scored copies; my fingers are crossed. I hope you guys like this one. My pre-release jitters are in full swing.

* I’ve been calming those jitters by climbing somewhat obsessively. I am now getting consistently to the top of 5.9s without getting so hashed I can’t cling at the end of the ascent. Climbing is a blessed relief for me, because once I’m on the wall I’m not thinking about anything other than the rest of the route. My busy brain stops eating itself, and that’s damn near priceless.

* But the BIG NEWS is something I can finally announce after sitting on it for literally MONTHS. I am really, really excited.

Longtime readers may remember a little story I called (very tongue in cheek) Weasel Boy. The title morphed to Carcajou, but I was overruled. I’m pleased and proud to report that Weasel Boy will now see the light of day as Taken, a Harlequin Nocturne coming out in February ’11. More details and links as soon as I get them, but I am so happy to be able to announce this. You just don’t know. This is one of my very favorite stories, and it’s a pretty gentle one (for me). I loved having the chance to play with the kind of were-animals I always wanted to read about!

That’s the news. Now the links!

* Writers talk about toiling on content farms. Eye-opening, and the bit about how you shouldn’t trust EHow.com is…well. Thought-provoking. To say the least.

* Io9′s Words to live by: Advice from 34 sci-fi and fantasy authors. Some great stuff in here, including a few that made me giggle like a little girl.

* The most interesting thing today I’ve seen is Tobias Buckell’s post on mid-career advice for writers.

The audience changes. For one, the aspiring authors, whether they realize it or mean to do it, start pushing back. If you start thinking out loud about problems they wish they had, there gets to be a certain tension. I full on encountered this when I had just finished my first novel. At a con a dear friend (and to this day still a dear friend and someone I respect a great deal) had asked what the toughest part writing this novel was. I’d responded that I’d just become noticed enough that halfway through I got asked to write two short stories, and paused the book to do so. My friend responded, ‘wow, I wish I had that kind of problem.’ At the time it was a punch to the gut, because I really wanted to struggle through talking about the difficulty of saying ‘no’ to opportunities I’d never had before, but then how it had killed momentum on the book and how hard it was to juggle what needed to be done, versus new chances. It’s a problem I still haven’t fully figured out. But it was clear that my privilege in having this tough choice mean I couldn’t clearly talk this out easily as I had when talking about beginner issues. (Tobias Buckell)

I’m struggling a little with this too, mostly when it comes to the Friday writing posts. Sometimes i feel like I’ve said everything helpful or useful that I can about writing, and that nobody wants to hear me go on and on like a cranky old lady about the same old things. I always seem to find something to say, but I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing, you dig?

The advice one can give and the problems one is working on are different at each stage, and I’m not sure just how much people are interested in hearing about deadline woes or the nuts and bolts of publishing. Some people seem fascinated, others just shrug and say “whatevah.” Plus, I come to writing as a working writer, someone whose bills don’t get paid if she doesn’t produce. My advice may not work for any number of people who come to writing as a hobby, or a Pristine Arte, or what-have-you. In gearing myself so specifically, I sometimes wonder if I’m running the risk of only speaking to a fraction of the people who wonder about what it’s like to write every. damn. day.

Speaking of which, I’ve got wordcount to grind out. More coffee, she cries. Into the breach! Make those characters sorry they were ever hatched!

And, um, let’s hope I can find a subject for tomorrow’s Friday writing post…:P

Related posts:

1. Link Salad, And Some Advice
2. There is too much. Let me sum up.
3. Some Short Advice

* Slushpile.net on Outdated, Stodgy Ivory-Tower Attitudes That Cripple Writers:

But, if you’re a writer who wants to be taken seriously by your peers? Then you’d better not do a damn thing other than put words on paper. And you certainly better not expect to earn any income from it. And in some ways, we hinder our own profession with that antiquated notion.

Yes, you have the choice to maintain complete focus on your writing if that is what you choose to do with your career. Take the Cormac McCarthy or JD Salinger route. Be “pure” and “unsullied.” That is a perfectly reasonable and respectable decision.

But don’t criticize another writer for diversification. (Slushpile.net)

I wrote my Hack Manifesto partly in response to this. I also wrote the Speshul Snowflake Bedtime Story partly in response to this dynamic. We have this ongoing assumption that writers don’t deserve to get paid for what they do, maybe because every fricking celebrity or chef can “write a book.” There is very little understanding of the hard cold fact that bringing an actual book (as opposed to a celebrity PR exercise) from original idea/inception to finished product is WORK. Lots of work, plenty of it thankless and drudging.

I’ve grown to hate it when people say, after finding out I write for a living, “Oh, that’s neat. I’ve always wanted to write a book. When I have time someday.” The assumption is that all they have to do is sit down and vomit up a few thousand unconnected letters, sentences, and paragraphs, and fame and fortune will inevitably result. I know they mean well, and I know they have no bloody idea. But I often want to reply, “What do you do? Oh, you’re a dentist? I’ve always wanted to come to a dentist’s office one day when I have time and mess around with the drills. How hard can it be?” I almost always restrain myself, and content myself with quietly pointing out that it’s hard work and I’ve been doing it for years, and only recently (by the grace of Steve, no doubt) have reached a place where it provides a decent, if not terribly steady, income.

The Slushpile’s point is slightly different, of course; I’ve yet to attend a group of writers where the implicit assumption that if you make money you’re not very good or dedicated or truly deserving to be called an artist doesn’t rear its ugly head at least once in some way. This assumption, that artists don’t deserve and shouldn’t sully themselves with cold hard cash, is endemic in our society. Personally, I blame the Puritans and their “anything that is a luxury is SINFUL, and writing is a LUXURY so it is SINFUL FRIPPERY” attitude.

Perhaps it’s just knowing what side my bread is buttered on, but I agree with Mario Vargas Llosa that writing, literature, etc., is not a luxury:

They earn my pity not only because they are unaware of the pleasure that they are missing, but also because I am convinced that a society without literature, or a society in which literature has been relegated–like some hidden vice–to the margins of social and personal life, and transformed into something like a sectarian cult, is a society condemned to become spiritually barbaric, and even to jeopardize its freedom. I wish to offer a few arguments against the idea of literature as a luxury pastime, and in favor of viewing it as one of the most primary and necessary undertakings of the mind, an irreplaceable activity for the formation of citizens in a modern and democratic society, a society of free individuals. (Mario Vargas Llosa)

I’m not saying I’m George Orwell or anything. But a vibrant literature holds a place for me to make a living, and my refusal to give anything less than my best to any project I sign a contract for is my implicit and explicit agreement with my Readers. From that agreement we both draw strength and sustenance. It’s bloody hard work that I do with a song in my heart because I believe it’s important.

* Stacia Kane approaches this from a slightly different direction in a wonderful essay:

But I do think there’s a weird kind of pressure on genre fiction writers to not let on that they see themselves or think of themselves as artists. There’s a definite pressure to act like their art means nothing to them, like it’s an entity completely separate from them.

Think of it this way. If a painter has a gallery show, and a critic ravages his work, does anyone frown and kick up a fuss if the artist gets upset about it? Does anyone remind him that reviews don’t exist to make him feel better, but to inform art lovers whether or not his work is worth their time? Not as far as I know. People expect the artist to be upset about terrible reviews. They expect him to be temperamental; hell, we all know what the phrase “artistic temperament” means, don’t we?

Now, I am NOT, absolutely NOT, implying in any way that reviewers don’t have the right to say whatever they want about books, or that reviews aren’t for readers and not writers–they absolutely are–or that writers should be allowed to freak out all over the internet and threaten people or name crack whore characters after people who gave them bad reviews or whatever. No, no, no, I’m not saying that at all, not one bit; you all know how I feel about that. This post isn’t about reviewers or reviews, except insomuch as they can be another example of what I feel is the expectation that genre fiction writers not consider themselves artists, not think or talk about themselves as artists, and not act as though their art is important to them. Like caring about your work has become synonymous somehow with freak-out rants and threats, instead of just…caring about your work. I’m not implying in any way that this sort of pressure comes solely from reviewers or readers, either; it comes from other writers just as much if not more. (Stacia Kane)

The implicit assumption that genre is filthy, “disposable”, and that only the idiotic hoi polloi read it as escapism is just as damaging as the assumption that artists don’t deserve to get paid. And you can tell just where I like to suggest people stick both those assumptions.

Later in the essay, Kane asks “We’re all so worried about being professional, about being easy to work with and seeing our work as a commodity and ourselves as commodities and all of that…have we become so focused on publishing as a business that we’ve forgotten about the magic of it?”

Which I think hits the nail squarely on the head. There is magic. The writer’s job is to show up consistently to help that magic birth itself, in a variety of ways. The reader plonks down hard cold cash because they like, want, and need the magic. Both invest time (in the form of money or effort) in the magic, and both get a reward from it. The difference is the writer’s reward is often implicitly denigrated, or it’s even suggested that the writer deserves no reward at all because they should be Just Doin’ It For The Arte And The Luv.

I don’t like this. For obvious reasons, I think it’s unfair. I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep or cry into my coffee over it, but neither do I have to put up with any shit over it. It’s about the best one can do in this situation.

* Which is why I love Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and think it’s so valuable. Cameron unpacks this dynamic and the various ways the stereotype of the self-destructive artist and the idea that art is a useless frippery are both used, by artists and against them. And if you want a productive long-term career in the arts you could do a lot worse than the exercises she suggests for catching that dynamic and kicking it in the balls before it messes up your head, your workspace, or your life.

That’s pretty much all I have today. Now I’ve got to turn my attention to Perry and Jill and some very interesting implications of gifts and imputed obligation. Plus there’s the structure of the Essay of DOOOOOM to rip apart and put back together, and a couple edit letters to plug into and start thinking about. Never rains but it pours.

All else aside, I’m very happy about that.

Over and out.

Related posts:

1. The Myth Of The Destructive Artist
2. Selling Out? Says Who?
3. On Money, Or, Pay The Writer

…you know what? I’m going to set the timer for twenty minutes and take a nap. Because thinking of everything I have to do is just making me run barking in circles. And that’s not good for anyone.

Regular blogging will return tomorrow. Peace out.

Related posts:

1. Time To Get Laid Back
2. Good afternoon. And BREAD!
3. The Five-Minute Trick

It’s been a rough year. To say the least. Major Life Changes, some I talk about here and some I don’t, have come thick and fast. Eight months ago I wasn’t sure I’d make it. Three months ago I saw light at the end of the tunnel. A month ago I decided I was, in fact, okay and going to stay that way.

I’ve been writing all the while.

On Wednesday I finished the zero draft of the fifth Strange Angels book. I never leave the keyboard after I finish something, whether it be a chapter or a whole piece, so I opened up the next Jill Kismet book and tinkered on it a bit. Then I dragged my weary self to bed, nerves jumping and the flywheel that was powering the story still sparking and fizzing inside my head. Finishing a book is like that, for me–there’s a nervous sense of all that energy and focus bleeding away but not nearly fast enough to let me rest, everything in me raw and quivering. It’s kind of like the adrenaline aftermath of a crisis, before your body gets the memo that everything’s over and it can collapse.

I lay in bed, and I realized with a start that I’d actually finished three books since my life began to implode last May. I was afraid during each one that I wouldn’t be able to get to the end, that the crises would rob me of needed energy to finish or that without the fuel of adrenaline and pain I wouldn’t be able to write something good. This is a perfect example of the irrationality of severe stress, because I was afraid of contradictory things at the same time. Telling myself it was irrational did not help, because then I felt crazy. The only thing that helped was the habit of looking at what needed to be finished first, putting my head down, and plowing through. Breakdowns, crying jags, and dealing with the minutiae and paperwork of a life undergoing massive changes was all very well, but I had wordcount to achieve.

I was so afraid I wouldn’t make my deadlines. There’s no shame in admitting I was terrified. Would I lose my edge or my empathy for my characters if I wasn’t miserable? Would I have to find another job because the writing would suddenly fail? Would my editors look askance at the manuscripts I turned in and gently tell me, “This is unpublishable…just go away”?

I was afraid of all that, and more.

Yet I finished three books. My editors liked the first two as much as they’ve liked anything else, revisions were just the same as they always were. The third has to rest before I can make any judgment, but I suspect it will be no worse than any other messy, terrible, hole-filled zero draft.

Time and again I keep coming back to the simple fact that writing is what I was meant and made to do. I can’t imagine living without it. And writing keeps saving me long after it feels like the rest of the world’s given up. All I have to do is show up, and the Muse is there. As long as I suit up and start swinging, she keeps feeding me the balls. My end of the bargain is simply to make writing a daily priority, and writing takes care of the rest. It is my life-raft, my safety line, my rope, my net, the way I make sense of the world and the way the world makes sense of me.

At the rock wall on Thursday, one young man could barely get four feet off the ground. Shaking, sweating, but grimly determined, he would clip in and climb those four feet. The belayer on duty encouraged him each time. “It doesn’t matter how high you climb. It just matters that you get on the wall. It’s okay. Take your time. It’s not a race or a contest.”

Watching that, I thought of where I was months ago, too frightened to reach the top of the wall. Clinging, terrified, to any hold I could reach, despite marked routes. Just getting into my harness and clipping onto the rope was a victory. Just putting my hands on the wall was another. The actual climbing? A series of small victories. And I thought, as I dusted my hands with chalk and glanced at my belayer, real courage isn’t fearlessness. It’s trusting yourself despite the fear.

I keep coming back to this essential fact, over and over again. Writing has taught me this much, and writing keeps patiently reteaching me when I forget, as I frequently do. Sometimes I feel like an idiot when I realize that once again, I’ve proven to myself that all I have to do is show up and be ready to work, and the writing takes care of the rest.

I suppose I’d feel a lot more idiotic if I actually quit.

So here’s what I have to say this morning. Do that thing you love. Don’t stop. It doesn’t have to be writing. It’s whatever your thing is. But do it. Show up and swing. Get into the habit of doing it during the good times, so it can carry you through the bad. I can promise you that you will surprise yourself. You will eventually get to the top of the wall. You will eventually get to the end of the book. You will eventually get to wherever you need to go. That thing you love, that thing you do, it’s endlessly faithful. As long as you’re in there swinging, the Muse or whatever else will be right there with you. It’s not a contest; it’s not about winning. Or if it is, winning might not be what you think it is.

To me, right now, the winning is just showing up. It is looking back and realizing that once again, writing has saved my life, because I cared enough to show up every damn day. Even when I was half-dead of heartbreak, even when bathing or feeding myself seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, even when I didn’t know how I was going to get through another five minutes without the pain eating me whole, the writing was always there. The writing, for me, will always be there.

I kind of feel like a goober for doubting it.

Over and out.

Or actually, NOT over and out. I promised a giveaway of Jealousy, due to release on July 29. So here’s the rules: comment over at the Deadline Dames, by midnight PST on Sunday, July 11, (do NOT comment here!) and with the help of Random.org I will pick two winners to receive signed copies of Jealousy. I can only ship to those in the US; sorry about that, but that’s the way it is.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Keep Showing Up
2. Zero Draft, Jealousy Giveaway, And Snapback
3. I Am Not Them, But I’m Just As Scared