Lilith Saintcrow

First, announcements, then the meat of the post, then Damiversary giveaways. That is the order in which things will occur this Friday. I declare it. Hey, the Muse is just sitting there filing her nails, so I’ve got to be a petty dictator where I can.

Announcements! You can find a taste of my short story Best Friends over at FlamesRising! The story is in The Girl’s Guide To Guns & Monsters anthology, available just around the corner in February. Also, you can find a short preview of my essay Ambiguous Anita for the absolutely fabulous Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, which will be coming out in April. It was a pleasure to be included in both.

I still have other good news that I’m having to sit on. It KILLS me. But them’s the breaks.

And now, the meat of the post…well, don’t take this the wrong way. But I don’t wanna.

Seriously. I started out yesterday with a huge honking attack of the I don’t wannas. It’s only gotten worse today.

Any disciplined activity you put serious time and energy into–dieting, writing, dance practice–goes through periods where it temporarily gets harder to do. The reasons can be manifold: stress, life changes, boredom, the urge to rest for a bit, what-have-you. It goes in cycles, especially when you hit a plateau right before a leap forward.
I write a lot here about discipline and habit. Think of them as bowling bumpers, keeping your ball in the lane. During good times, when you’re excited and happy to be writing, the discipline is easy to maintain. Your motivation’s high. But there will come times when you just don’t want to, for a variety of reasons. It will get harder to keep a consistent schedule and keep writing a priority. Just like it gets harder to stick to calorie restriction or dance practice when your motivation goes down and a stack of Netflix DVDs plus a box of Entenmann’s are calling your name. (OK, I could be projecting here. Just a touch. But you still get the idea.)

I bump up against the hard edges of the habit of spending several years writing damn near every day occasionally, when the I don’t wannas attack. Sometimes I do slow down a bit and take a rest. It’s hard to differentiate between loss of motivation, just plain laziness, and approaching burnout. I’ve evolved a few questions that I ask myself and a process to tell if it’s burnout, but I sincerely doubt my methods will work for anyone other than me. Part of the difficulty of consistent creative activity is that it is so personal, and the methods of motivation and differentiating burnout from laziness differ from person to person.

Yes, I have trouble motivating myself sometimes. The advice I give is partly because I struggle to keep that consistent discipline and practice. Maybe for some people, it’s easier. I don’t know. The important thing is to keep the habit of discipline strong, so that when the I don’t wannas attack, you have nice strong bumpers keeping your ball in the lane and a fighting chance of getting to the pins.

My motivation to write is pretty simple: I have rent to pay and kids to feed. And yet, still, some days I struggle. It might be worse for people who aren’t depending on their writing to bring home the rent. I suspect it is.

No matter how hard I don’t wanna, I’m still in the habit of doing it every day. So I suppose I’ll just poke at a few things and see what happens.

And now, the giveaway! To celebrate the Damiversary, this time I’m offering 2 T-shirts from my CafePress store. (I really need to get some more designs up…) All you have to do is comment here at the Deadline Dames by midnight Saturday (the 30th).^[1] If you can’t think of anything to say, tell me what you do to get going when your own motivation suffers. I’m always looking for more techniques to steal, ahem, I mean, good advice to follow. I’ll pick the winners from Random.org, and the Dames will announce them next week along with this week’s winners.

Speaking of which, we still haven’t heard from some of last week’s Damiversary winners! Make sure to go and see if you won something, and look for other cool prizes that were announced earlier this week as well.

Vive les Dames!

^[1]Comments are closed on this post just to make everything fair.

Before I get started, I’d like to point your attention at an HP fandom site, the Leaky Cauldron. They’re doing a Help Haiti Heal telecast tomorrow; among the prizes will be full signed sets of the Valentine and Kismet (up until Flesh Circus) series.

Also, it’s the one-year anniversary of the Deadline Dames. It’s somewhat paradoxical, because it seems like just yesterday Devon Monk asked me if I’d want to be part of a group blog; and because it feels like I’ve known the Dames forever. They’re constant strength and support, they forgive me my scatterbrain and my little foibles (including my habit of getting very freaking foulmouthed) and they are, in short, too awesome for me to tell you about all their awesomeness without renting out a skywriter or a full-page ad in some ridiculously expensive newspaper. I am proud to be a Dame. Seriously, you don’t even know.

Since I’ve just returned from my first highly unpleasant tasks of the day (everything’s gone smoothly so far) I will content myself with a giveaway and some news in lieu of a Friday writing post. Frankly, I’m tired. This has been a bushwhacking week.

So. To celebrate the anniversary of the kickass, utterly fantastic Dames, I’m doing a giveaway out of Japhrimel’s Corner. Yes, I’m giving away two coffee mugs out of the little corner of the web that honors the demon even Lucifer can’t keep down. (I really need to get some new products in there…let’s just add that to my to-do list. AUGH.)

Here’s how you win: Make a comment OVER HERE, on this Deadline Dames post ^[1], before midnight on Saturday, January 23. (If you can’t think of what to write, just tell me what you love about the Dames. Hey, we like to hear that stuff!) Random.org will help me pick two winners, each will get their choice of cups from Japhrimel’s Corner mailed to them. Next week is the BIG giveaway, with T-shirts and a Special Spoiler Prize. (I think I’ll be announcing other winners next Friday too.) So stay tuned, and thanks for reading. I appreciate each and every one of you.

Viva les Dames!

^[1] Comments are closed on THIS post, you must go to the Dames site to enter. Because I’m shifty like that.

…just like my temper today. Ha ha. I got nothin’ today, so here’s a couple links:

* It’s the one-year anniversary of the Deadline Dames. Come over for giveaways, prizes, exclusive spoilers, and more!

* Plus, Philip Palmer (the coolest Welshman since Daffyd op Owen) has started a new feature: the SFF Song of the Week. Check out this week’s offering.

As for me, I’m still working away on Dru 4. Tentative title: The Blooming. The book’s taken a weird left turn, which is both terrifying and a Good Sign. Plus, today’s laundry day. The fun just never stops here at Casa Saintcrow.

Catch you later…

It’s Friday again. How on earth did that happen?

First, if you want to read a damn fine piece of writing, you can look at the Selkie’s Grief Is A Color. The Selkie has a very fine eye for detail and observation. Also, one other announcement: Irene Goodman is auctioning off 25 critiques between December 1st and the 10th! Yes, 25! All proceeds will go directly to the Foundation Fighting Blindness and the Deafness Research Foundation. It’s a tremendous opportunity for any writer, and you get to do a good deed as well. I, like all the Deadline Dames, am a client of Irene’s agency, and I really can’t say enough good things about them.

Now, for the Friday writing post. Here’s another oldie but goodie, originally posted over at the now-defunct-but-sadly-missed Midnight Hour on April 4, 2008. Enjoy!

Skill vs. Talent

It certainly does appear to be an age-old question. Is writing a skill or a talent? Is it something you can learn–tab A into slot A, tab B into slot B, rinse and repeat–or is it a numinous thing, a touch of mad grace from the Muse that the precious few are gifted with?

Well, it’s not really either. The answer lies somewhere in between. If you have no fire, no spark, your work–no matter how well put-together–will be soulless. And all the Great Ideas and burning “I could do that” talent in the world won’t save a book if you don’t polish your craft and strive to write clearly and well.

We have this perception of the creative that’s analogous to lightning strikes. The Talent, the Inspiration, strikes the Helpless Gin-Soaked Writer, and the book that results is the burn. It springs forth whole from the forehead of the Helpless Gin-Soaked Chosen One, who must endure Years of Battle against Naysayers and Fools to get his opus/masterwork/Great American Novel published and recognized as staggering genius.

The vice-versa runs thus: the crowd is fickle and will pick trash for no discernable reason, so you have to just figure out the Magic Formula to make them pick your trash and retire to your house in the Hollywood Hills, laughing all the way.

The first is the schtick Byron used to get babes and wannabes use to avoid work. The second gives us huge piles of technical-manual crap with no characterization, power, or grace.

The real story is something like this: you can have varying levels of talent at this writing thing. But what is necessary is the discipline to grow that talent–and everything else necessary to a writer. If you, say, practice your guitar playing every day for ten years, you may not turn into a Segovia (who had to work his ass off too, dammit) but you WILL turn into the best damn guitar-player on your street, possibly in your town, and quite possibly within a couple hundred miles.

If you practice your writing every day, refine your craft, sharpen your language and read omnivorously, you may not turn into a Chekhov or a Dickens. (Who had to work THEIR asses off, too, let it be said.) But chances are you will start turning out decent, readable product, which has a far better chance of being published than the Werke of My Soule That Do Not Neede Grammare For.

Hand in hand with that discipline must be enjoyment. Don’t do this unless you enjoy it, for Christ’s sake. A writer writes clearly and well, using grammar and language as best as s/he is able to, constantly refining their craft for the eventual reader, so the telepathy between author and reader works with a minimum of distortion.

A writer gets up every goddamn morning and goes back to the laptop or the typewriter or the notebook because s/he enjoys it. It gives her a huge secret thrill to tell a story. Because there is something cool to do, something cool to say.

What other people call “talent” I usually think of as “joy in the making of something.” Look at, say, Eric Clapton or BB King. They’re not just up on stage whaling away until they can go home. No sir. When they pick up that guitar they are having fun. Their eyes light up. Christ, look at Mick Jagger. He still loves what he’s doing, and it’s not just because of the groupies.

Yeah, I know someone will say rock’n’roll ain’t writing. But it’s close enough for me–and really, writing is such a solitary thing that I can’t tell you what any other author looks like in the heat of creation. I can tell you that I’m having a ball, though. I look forward to writing every blessed day.

Someone can be immensely talented at writing–and can fritter away that talent by refusing to hone their discipline. Someone can be incredibly disciplined, but feel no heart-in-mouth joy in what they make. Those are two endpoints on a continuum, and it’s near the middle where the writer must balance. You’ve got to cultivate every scrap of talent you possess with discipline; and you must leaven the discipline with the joy and wonder of this marvelous thing you are doing, creating worlds. Juggling lives. Making little marks on a page into a living, breathing story.

The proper question, I think, isn’t whether it’s skill or talent. The proper question is, how do I balance what talent I have with the skill I can acquire? It takes hard work. It takes discipline. And if you don’t love what you’re doing you might as well deliver pizzas or practice law or take up with the Peace Corps or something, anything other than this.

Because it can eat you alive if you don’t love it.

But that’s another blog post.

First of all, we have a winner in the contest for a signed Flesh Circus! Random.org helped me pick a comment number. The winner is comment #11, kara-karina! Kara-karina, drop me an email with your snail mail address and I’ll send you a signed, personalized copy of Jill’s latest adventure.

Also, I am over at SciFiGuy’s place today, with an interview and a chance to win a copy of Betrayals. I will be answering questions in the comments all day. Come on by and say hello! Plus, I’ll be at the Cedar Hills Crossing Powell’s this Sunday for the SF/F Authorfest. Come by and see me, fellow Dame Devon Monk, Barb & JC Hendee, and a bunch of other cool people, including the 501st Cloud City Garrison (Vader’s Fist). Good times will be had by all.

And now, my dears, for my Friday writing post. Are you all settled in with a tasty sandwich and frosty beverage? Good enough.

If I’d listened, none of this would have happened.

You see, I grew up being told that I was a quitter. That I never finished anything, that I had no discipline. I was told that I had my head in the clouds, that I was unreliable, that I might be booksmart but I would never be smart in any other way. I was just too dreamy. I always took the easy way out.

Part of the work I’ve been doing on myself lately has been taking a look at some of those core assumptions I was raised with. A big core belief is that I’m unlovable. Only slightly less huge is the belief that I’m a quitter, that all my success has been a fluke and that I have to live in constant fear of being exposed as, well, a fake.

I may know intellectually that this makes no sense. But the real work comes in when it’s time to change that sick heart-thumping feeling of danger, the feeling that you might be found out at any moment, that you are an imposter in a world of Real People.

I have two beautiful children I’m raising mostly-alone. I am making a living by writing, not the easiest task. I have over twenty books out. And just this week my editor at Razorbill called and told me Betrayals made the Times list for Children’s Paperback Fiction.

It was about twenty minutes later, when I was squeeing on the phone with my agent, that the ugly core belief came out.

“Do they ever make a mistake?” I asked her, anxiously. “I mean, will they find out they’ve been wrong and take it away? Does that happen?”

She reassured me that no, it did not happen, and we went back to squeeing. But later, after I hung up the phone, I wondered why I’d even thought that. It’s the New York Times list, for Christ’s sake. Why could I not accept and believe that I’d worked my ass off, day in and day out, and might deserve some part of the honor?

Because of that core belief that I’m a quitter. It was said to me so often for the first twenty-odd years of my life that I’ve ended up internalizing it, believing it–and it taints even the best news a writer could hope for with the sullen, gut-clenching feeling of being a faker.

But there’s hope. (There’s always hope.)

I pretty much accepted failure was going to be part of my professional life when I set out to get published. Rejection and failure happen every day, and sometimes multiple times a day for a writer. But total failure wasn’t an option. I decided to keep writing until someone, somewhere, liked what I did and offered to publish it. Sooner or later, I reasoned, if I kept working at it, I’d get on somewhere.

Lo and behold, it happened. I got my first break, and I kept writing. I networked like a mad bastard and kept writing. I got an agent and I kept writing. I got my first New York publishing contract and I kept writing. Other contracts followed and I kept writing. Foreign rights, requests for short stories, requests for other books followed–and I kept writing.

Do you sense a theme here?

The thing about challenging a core belief is that it requires that you take a look at the empirical evidence, not just how you feel. I am supporting myself and my kids with words I pull out of thin air. I do my best to hold up my end of the bargain with my Readers–to tell the truth–and you, my dear Readers, respond.

I made an effing NYT Bestseller List, for God’s sake. This is not something you get just by sitting back and smelling roses. It took hard work and a refusal to quit.

That refusal to quit makes me not a quitter. It means whenever that nasty little voice speaks up inside my head I can meet it with evidence in the real world that I am measuring myself by a broken yardstick. That’s the first step to replacing the yardstick with one that works–and not so incidentally, one that won’t stab me in the heart every time I’m down and a little low.

If I’d listened just to that voice, though, this would never have happened. I would never have even gotten published the first time. I would have quit when I got my fiftieth rejection slip, or even earlier.

Some part of me must have known it wasn’t true. Some part of me set its shoulders, lifted its chin, and said to hell with you and what you think, this is what I’m doing. That part is the real me, and it deserves to come out into the sunshine. This is the first jackhammer I’m going to take to that edifice of the core belief. I’m going to break that f!cker up and turn it into rubble, and build something better.

If I had listened, I would have stopped before I got published. If I’d listened, I would have stopped before I got an agent. If I’d listened, I would have stopped and accepted defeat years ago. I did not. I kept going, even while believing myself a “quitter” down in the secret chambers of my heart.

How’s that for crazy?

So, my dear fellow writers (and Readers), let me tell you this. You are not what other people tell you. You are not what other people say. You are what you do. Don’t stop. Don’t give up. Get that jackhammer, get that wrecking ball, and start the process of being kind to yourself by chipping away at those voices in your head that judge you and tell you you’re Worth Less. Look at what you’ve done so far. Imagine, if you’ve done all this while believing those awful things about yourself, what could you do if you were not chained? How awesome would that be?

It’s not easy work. But, as my sister once so memorably said, “They call it life because it’s hard.”

I won’t give up. And if I can refuse to give up, so can you. Let’s go kick some ass, you and me.

Over and out.