Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 91
January 18, 2016
Desert Storm: 25 Years Later
This weekend marked the 25th anniversary of the first Persian Gulf War, when the war actually started. For us, it started in the middle of the night because of the time difference, and by morning, planes were coming in low over our tents.
There were a lot of things I discovered while I was writing Soldier, Storyteller that I was glad I didn’t know then, because it would have make the non-stop onslaught of fear worse. But one of the things I remember from immediately after I returned to Washington State was that I needed books about other veterans’ experiences.
Other women.
And there wasn’t any. The Vietnam books were just starting to come out, but they were only about the men. So that was what I read. I heard that it takes 20 years before something war can be written about.
But a year after the war, I wanted to write a book about. I thought there was a story in it. I thought I had a story. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was an attempt to bleed off some of the poison of everything that happened.
The story never amounted to much. I’d get three chapters done, and it just felt wrong. I was focusing too much on details that no one would understand or care particularly about. Details were things I could focus on without touching things that were worse.
I’d revisit it over the years, even as a novel, but it just didn’t stick past the first few chapters. I had some people telling me I ought to write a book, and I don’t think they really understood that it was going to be in its own time.
One of the problems was that when I first thought about the project, it was to bleed off the poison, not to really tell a story. The creative brain put its feet down (being as my muse looks like a Golden Retriever) and said, “Uh uh.” I think a lot of memoirs probably never quite work because the writer is trying to get back at someone or exorcise the proverbial demons, not tell an actual story.
But it was like one day, it hit me how to write it, and I did. I guess it was time, and I was ready. Finally.
Filed under: History, Military, Thoughts, Writing
January 3, 2016
Checking in
I’ve been offline for a little while because I caught a cold. Christmas in Washington DC was 69 degrees, and then the temperature bounced down and will be in the 20s tonight. Everyone’s been getting sick.
Filed under: Thoughts
December 14, 2015
Organizing vs. Organizing
I just saw another one of those posts where an outliner writer tried to describe a pantser (person who doesn’t outline), and ended up making it sound like the pantser was terribly disorganized because they didn’t outline. It’s nothing new actually, but it hit me differently this time.
It was on organizing itself, where there’s about the same response to people who are creative and messy. Organization tends to be associated with being neat, though that’s not a qualification of being organized. Yet, if you travel the organization sites, a lot of them pound their fist and say that being messy is a sign of disorganization.
Whereas, for anyone creative, the process functions in a very different way.
When I was in the Army, I got a lot of this from my squad leader. I never quite understood it at the time; I knew where everything was, and I was working on it besides. And it didn’t help that HIS desk was disorganized and messy. What was he complaining about?
I even had another sergeant hover—actually hover—over my shoulder while I was cleaning up two supply drawers, then go back and “straighten” everything out after I was finished. Like I hadn’t done it right.
*Sigh*
So I came out of the Army thinking I was horribly disorganized. Every time I tried to organize in the “proper” way, I would lose everything.
One day, a coworker in my civilian job admired how organized I was. I was flabbergasted!
The perception is like the outliner seeing the pantser: They can’t see how it can work the way it does, so it must be wrong.
I’ve been looking at organization these last few weeks because it’s the end of the year, and also because I do need to look at things from the perspective of starting my own publishing business eventually. Honestly, it’s best to do it now while it doesn’t count, then learn how at the wrong time. And I still see how much all the advice that I’ve heard over the years that doesn’t work for me gets into how I do things.
Things I’m trying for working out my process:
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Most systems get pretty complicated pretty fast. I’ve found over the years that too many digital subfolders means I have to remember where things go, and sometimes I don’t always remember the same thing later on. The result has been that essentially stuff gets into an “inbox” and never comes out. I created an info dump digital file, renaming individual files and dropping them in there. Only files currently being worked on stay elsewhere. I’ve been amazed at how much old stuff I was storing with current stuff. And also how much disappeared behind layers of subfolders.
Top Drawer Current; Bottom Drawer Last Year.
Bookkeeping files are hard to save because you’re always going to have more past files than current ones. For the creative person, they become part of the big picture, rather than the logical sequential order of things. Moving the older files to the bottom drawer keeps them available but out of sight, and out of mind.
Separate folders for bookkeeping years
About five years ago, I bought a system called Filing Solutions, which works great. It’s prelabeled files so it was easy to set up. The one flaw is there’s one folder for, say, all the phone bills. Because everything was in one file, all the years got mixed together. It took quite a while to make sure I got all the old records that needed to be shredded, because I had to touch everything. I separated them by year in the bottom drawer, so next year, I can just pull one folder.
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10 Stories in 10 Weeks Update
This next story was a time travel story, which was for a specific call. When I got the idea, I thought it was going to a particular type of story, kind of nice and feel good.
Then, as I started it, I stopped to read the guidelines and thought that I needed to get time in up front. So I typed the first sentence, and it was a different story.
So the other one can also be a story as well …
Learning Thing: Writing science fiction and time travel. I typically write more fantasy, but I want to venture into science fiction. That’s a muscle I’m going to work again.
Filed under: Thoughts Tagged: 10 Stories in 10 Weeks, Army, Organizing, Pantser, productivity, Right-Brained
December 8, 2015
Combat Doesn’t Respect Anything
I find a lot of veteran articles and videos posted on Facebook–curiously, not by the veterans. This one is on a woman who served during the Vietnam War and shows some of the unrealistic expectations the military had when they say “Women are not allowed in combat.”
The problem is that combat doesn’t respect that declaration.
Filed under: Military, Opinion, Thoughts Tagged: Army, Vietnam War
December 6, 2015
10 Stories in 10 Weeks: Story 1
Yay! The story is done.
The day the first post went live, I woke up and I felt awful–scratchy throat, hoarse, cough. My first thought was “Oh, crap,” because I wasn’t going to let being sick keep me from writing the story, but I didn’t want to write the story when I was sick.
It wasn’t a cold though. More than likely it was because the temperature went from 69 to 30s, and my sinuses didn’t like it much. So that day, when I came home from work, I had a terrible sinus headache. Figured I’d do 30 minutes on the story to get something done. Did about an hour. Felt better, but still had the headache.
The story is called Monkey River, and it’s a 3,500 word fantasy.
At the moment, it isn’t in submission. The market I was thinking of sending it to disappeared, and I have something in at the other markets where I could send it. Or it’s too long for one of the markets. I did find a new one that might be a possibility, but their submission software is broken. When I try to register, it says my email address is in use and to use another (ate two email addresses from this). When I try logging in, it says either the email or the password is wrong, but when I request a new password, it says the email doesn’t exist.
Sigh.
Next story? I haven’t made up my mind yet.
Meanwhile, I’m working on my end of year stuff. I discovered that the county will shred two paper bags of paper once a month. I took down two this weekend that have been sitting and filled up two more with the papers that need to go next month.
I’m also working on setting up a filing system for the business side. Even if I’m not a sole proprietor yet, the time to get into good habits is now. I ran into this site, which had a lot of good information on the bookkeeping side. He gives a lot of options for filing systems.
I’m taking a six-week workshop on interior book design, using Adobe InDesign, which starts this week (yes, while I am writing these 10 stories). I was finding that trying to put up ebooks via Microsoft Word was just too complicated. I could use a template for Smashwords that was easy once I worked it out, but Amazon had additional steps that resulted in it being difficult to get the stories up. Then there was the Desert Storm book, Soldier, Storyteller, which was a nightmare trying to get up on Smashwords, and now a relative wants it in paper form. Yikes!
Filed under: Writing Tagged: 10 Stories in 10 Weeks
December 3, 2015
Star Wars Goes Navy
November 30, 2015
10 Stories in 10 Weeks
Starting this week, I’m going to be doing 10 Stories in 10 Weeks. I did the same thing a few years ago, and it was hugely successful. I produced one story a week, proofread it, and submitted it to a magazine.
The only way to make money in indie is to produce lots of stuff, and I’ve been having trouble this year getting this done. I had a personal rejection that was pretty big an important, and it just messed me up. The Desert Storm Reunion also had some baggage that I didn’t expect. So I’m using this streak to help me get over that hump.
If you want, you can join in and share progress. The rules:
One story completed each week, beginning to end, and proofread.
The story is submitted to a professional paying magazine (five cents a word).
The story should be in a genre. Last time, I didn’t take that into account and wrote a lot of general fiction. But there aren’t a lot of magazines that take general fiction and pay.
The story can be flash fiction, but it should be in the 1,000 words range. Most venues don’t want under 500, so those are hard to sell. I have two 25o word ones I submitted to Alfred Hitchcock’s contest that I can’t submit anywhere else.
Pick one thing you want to learn for each story. It can be a craft skill like working on pacing or a subgenre you haven’t written in before, or even a theme that’s way out of what you would normally do.
My first story will be a Fantasy called Monkey River, which is inspired by Honduras and the howler monkeys. And also by Mallows Bay. For what I’m learning, it’s Sword and Sorcerery. I’ve never written in that subgenre before, so this is new for me to try out.
Filed under: Writing Tagged: 10 Stories in 10 Weeks
November 23, 2015
Not leaving it for the revision
I’m on a Facebook page where everyone’s focus—especially now with NANO—is to simply get the first draft out of the way so they can get to the revision. It’s like the first draft is so distasteful, it’s like, “Let’s just gulp this down and get it out of the way. Everything can be fixed on the revision.”
I used to think that, too.
And it’s like the hatred of the first draft feeds on that thinking. I remember working on the first draft of one particularly problematic book. At that point, my writing was starting to really clash with all the outlining advice that was out there. Little things like “Know your plot points” that are sternly recommended for pantsers were interfering with my story, and all I could think about as I was writing it was that I was looking forward to fixing it on the revision.
Then I got to the revision, and it was a terrible mess. It seemed like every decision I made in first draft affected events that followed. If I changed A, then B, C, D, and X also changed. But I wasn’t done! A changed P, S, and T, and changing P changed C, which changed other things. It just snowballed into a mass of revision that had me pulling out my hair.
But if you’d told me that it was how I was thinking about the first draft at the time, I wouldn’t have believed it. A lot of emphasis is put on that the first draft is always terrible and revision is where the story really comes out.
I saw this first hand when I took Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel. I had this tangled mess that looked like the cat had taken the ball of yarn outside and unrolled it out in the leaf pile and then dragged it around in the dirt and picked up the fox gloves. One of her lessons was to look through the entire story and simply identify what was wrong. I couldn’t believe the amount of problems that I had created by the magic words, “I’ll leave that for revision.”
It was horrifying when I realized what this was doing to the story. Each part of the story connects to other parts of the story, so if one decision isn’t made, it’s like a car hitting a pothole. The alignment gets thrown out of whack, and every decision that follows is based on that part that’s out of whack.
I ended up tossing out that entire story and redrafting it from scratch—essentially pretending like that mess didn’t exist and doing a new first draft. It was much easier than trying to fix what I left for revision!
Now, if I get stuck in the first draft, I stop and figure out why. Sometimes this takes longer than I really want, but it’s far better than the old way of “leaving it for the revision.”
Filed under: Writing Tagged: First Drafts, Pantser, revision
November 19, 2015
The Magic of First Experiences
We always get a day like today in Washington DC once fall sets in for a stay. The sky goes very blue, and the winds start up, scattering brown leaves all over the streets. I usually have to stop visiting any parks at this point because there are so many leaves on the ground that I can’t see tree roots or rocks that would cause my ankle to turn.
But streets are fine because they’re always nice and flat, even when it’s a hill. I’m not going to find a tree root poking up in the middle of the street.
So I picked this one street and followed it, looking at the houses and watching the squirrels dash around in search of nut prizes to bury. There was this one garden next to the sidewalk. Nothing spectacular, but it was bordered by white quartz.
It reminded me of when my family first moved into the house I grew up in, the Los Angeles suburbs. I had to be in kindergarten, so a lot of things I saw were still firsts and new experiences to me. At that point, I’d lived in an apartment, so a house was a new thing.
It was a slab house (concrete base; no basement), and stucco, which was common in Los Angeles. Painted Pepto Bismal pink, and still is. It might have been two bedrooms at one time and had an attached garage converted into a master bedroom. The master bedroom had that garage shape and a strange built in working surface that seemed more for tool tinkering than for a bedroom.
The backyard was huge. Not like the postage stamp-sized ones so small it’s hard to garden. This backyard was big enough that we could have put a swimming pool in if we’d wanted. At the time, behind the house was a gigantic vacant lot that stayed that way for quite a few years. Now it’s a bunch of condos.
Anyway, the yard consisted of a small hill in the back with a stand of paddle cactus, a century cactus, a stand of bamboo, and a whole lot of tall, yellow grass. Los Angeles is always in draught, so when it rains, the grass grows really fast, then goes yellow and dies. When I walked through, the grass would always leave little rocket ships of foxgloves in my socks, which are how it moves seeds around.
And, of course, this vast backyard, was something to be explored. So I’m on a mission into the unknown to find out what was out there, and I discovered treasure!
It was kind of a dirty yellow crystal, scattered all throughout the yard. In hindsight of experience, the crystal was probably a quartz used as part of a garden. I remember bits of concrete stuck to some of the pieces. But I’d never seen anything like it before, so it was part of the adventure of exploring and discovery.
As adults, I think we sometimes forget that there are things that still need to be discovered, even if it’s a new experience that we haven’t had that just shakes us up a little and gives us something new. There’s still room for a lot of firsts, even if it is just seeing a black squirrel for the first time or watching the leaf truck suck up leaves.
Filed under: Personal, Thoughts Tagged: California, Fall, Los Angeles, Nostalgia, Washington DC
November 16, 2015
Veteran’s Day
I went to IHOP for Veteran’s Day—they were offering red, white, and blue pancakes to the vets. I wore my Desert Storm because well, I could. The reason I picked the IHOP is because I go there are the time, and the staff all knows me. I thought they’d have a blast, and they did –a lot of the specials offered that day are not really about someone getting something for free, but simply giving.
That was one of the wonderful thing during Desert Storm when we receive Any Soldier mail. People who didn’t know us took the time to send us mail. Every little bit counts.
Filed under: Holidays, Military Tagged: Women Veterans
