Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 105

women's work

Talking to 14 recently about the value of cleaning, shopping, cooking, and laundry, led to an interesting realization on my part. 14 declared rather vociferously that none of "that stuff" was important, that if that was all she did all day, she would feel like she had gotten nothing done.

A part of me agrees with her. And yet, I reminded her that through most of history, keeping house was the central part of a woman's work and indeed, her identity. I suppose I could argue that "staying alive" was the main part of any human's work for hundreds of thousands of years before recorded history, but I'm putting that aside for now. What I was interested in was whether or not my daughter's pov represents a radical change in female experience or whether it is simply a teenage lack of reality.

When I was a teenager, I am sure I didn't dream of growing up and doing housework. I did want to be a mom, however, and I did look forward to playing with children, being in charge of the house, and I remember playing school with dolls a lot. 14 never played with dolls when she was little. At one point, I mistakenly bought her her own dollhouse and dolls so that she would stop taking away her older sister's stuff (and hitting her with it). This led to my realization that she didn't care about dollhouses at all, only about the pleasure of taking other people's stuff.

I remember watching the 1980 Olympics with the first women's marathon. I remember distinctly the commentators talking about whether or not women should be running a marathon, whether it would damage the female body. I remember thinking that they were right, that women shouldn't do such a thing, that it was indecent.

And how ridiculous it all seems now, especially since I run marathons myself, as a result of that marathon that proved what women could do. I am pleased that 14 sees no reason that her gender will prevent her from taking any path in life she would like to take. That is what the feminist movement was about, wasn't it? But I also wonder if she will discover that there are still blocks out there to women, glass ceilings yet to be broken, prejudices yet unexposed.

It is part of the path of any teenager, male or female, to see what lies ahead, how far one can go. For me, I don't think that the feminist insistence on women being treated exactly as men are is ideal. But it is as close to ideal as I can imagine in the workplace and in the government. I don't want 14 to live in a world where women are bodies judged by their appearance, nor where they are not allowed to show their bodies at all. I want to live in the world she sees now in her mind.

But someone has to get the laundry done. And today, that's me.

a true copyright theft story

About ten years ago, I had sold my first novel, just barely found an agent, and had a friend who was working at a craft publishing house (Klutz). She was looking for a book on knitting because it was hot with Hollywood stars and she thought young girls would be interested in it, but she worried that a traditional knitting method would be too difficult for younger kids to understand. Could anyone make it easier?

I spent a few weeks toying with different alternatives to casting on, because I thought this was one of the most difficult parts of learning to knit. I learned to knit when I was 14, but casting on was something I kept having to relearn over and over again when I wanted to knit, because you only do it a few times per project unlike the knitting stitch which you do thousands of times and tends to stick. One of the alternatives was using a lace foundation that already holes in it. This worked just fine, but the project ended with lace on either end, which wasn't particularly attractive.

Then I landed on a method using tying square knots and knitting onto them. The end product had a "fringe" look which you actually put on a lot of knitting projects at the end anyway, so it was perfect. All the knitter had to do was learn knitting (I cut out purling and had knitting on both sides) and then tying square knots. I showed it to my friend when she was in town, and she instantly wanted to buy it. I ended up signing the contract without my agent looking over it, and soon was knitting up projects that fit the new knitting method I had essentially developed myself.

It felt like it was the sort of dream-come-true story that you hear sometimes at conferences and which makes me (often) want to strangle someone because it sounds like you just have to know someone and you get published. No need to understand the industry.

Then my editor friend left the house after she remarried and the book was orphaned. She tried to make sure that it would go to a new editor, but I heard nothing for months. I kept working on layouts and photos, but no one responded to emails or calls. Then suddenly, a few days before the book was due to be published, I got a short email from the publisher announcing that the book had been canceled.

I felt sick over it. I had in good faith spent hours doing work on a project that I suspected the house knew immediately after the editor had left was going to be canceled. I had been given half of my advance, but it really didn't cover all those extra hours that I had put in, sure that the publisher would go ahead with the publication of a book that was so close to being finished. Since I had never had my agent even look at the contract, there was nothing he could do for me. He had not had a chance to ensure that various safety clauses were inserted. I had too eagerly signed and worked with a company that, as it turned out, was rather lacking in any moral commitment to the author.

If that was all there was to the story, it would be bad enough. But it gets worse. (You knew it would, right?)

About six months later, a book on knitting by the same publishing house came out. By an in-house editor. I saw it at the local bookstore, and picked it up, annoyed. Then stunned and gradually filled with a stomach-churning anger. The projects in the book were SO similar to the ones that I had worked up. I stared at them, wondering if the situation was legally actionable. I ended up deciding that if it was, it was not worth the emotional and time investment in trying to recoup money from a company that stole my ideas.

I do sometimes go to conferences and hear authors talk about trying to protect their fiction by putting a copyright notice on it, or by mailing novels to themselves as a way of establishing a timeline. Some go so far as to refuse to send manuscripts out to agents or editors because they are worried their ideas will be stolen. And I always tell them the same thing. This is not something you should be worried about. Seriously. Do not spend a moment's time on it. I say it, even though essentially an entire book of mine was stolen.

Why do I say it? Because other than this one publisher, whose name I give out because I want to warn people away from working with them--it's my only revenge, forgive me for that--I have never heard a real story of ideas being stolen. And even if they were, I honestly think there is no point in suing over it. As an author, you should believe that you will have many good ideas. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. On the astronomically unlikely chance that a publisher were to steal your idea, you would go on. Because all that has happened is that the publisher has shown you you will never want to work with that publisher. And all of your other, even more brilliant ideas (and they will get better as you mature as a writer) will go to other publishers who value you, not as a producer of one particular product, but as a gold mine--and human being--who they want to establish a relationship with long-term, so you can continue to offer them more and more books.

I worry that in telling this story I will give beginning writers a complex, and so I do not share it lightly. Please do not panic. Take a deep breath, send your manuscript in and do not act paranoid. Treat others as if you have no doubt in their integrity, even if you do. And trust in yourself that you cannot be permanently hurt (cue Rocky theme song here), and that you will move on to better things. I know that I did.

September 2010 stats

Books Read and Recommended:

Ascendant by Diana Peterfreund
The Agency : A Spy in the House by Y.S. Lee (I am looking for the next book in this series!)
I am David by Anne Holman
Mindblind by Jennifer Roy
The Native Star by M.K. Hobson
Wild Wing by Emily Whitman
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay
Unicorns vs. Zombies edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbelestier
The Dead-Tossed Waves by Carrie Ryan (I would have considered myself Team Unicorn before this book. Now I suppose I must admit that I am fascinated by the post-apocalyptic zombie virus world that Carrie Ryan describes)
The Limit by Kristen Landon (This is the first book I've read by Kristen, who is a Utah writer friend. I thought it was a perfect middle grade translation of Hunger Games. Nothing graphic, but lots of suspense and family issues that seemed very real.)
Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

Hours:
MKT—22.5
IG—18
TRIS—37

This was a month with a couple of local book signings, but not much else in the way of marketing, just blogging. Which means I had lots of time to spend on actually writing, in this case editing Irongirl and Tris and Izzie. Not included: time spent cleaning the house and painting.

Go here to see my latest article for Intergalatic Medicine Show. This month it's on your family and your writing, sort of a reality check for writers. I also want to say how much I LOVE doing the column for this magazine. Not only is it very cool to tell people that I write for Orson Scott Card's magazine (because, you know, he thinks I'm cool), but it is satisfying in a way that I had only imagined it could be. I love to rant about writing, and this gives me a chance to rant in an organized, methodical way. Also, there may someday be a book in there.

deserving

We are doing some upgrading around the house, adding a nicer TV and couch. We have a rule at our house that we don't buy anything unless we can pay cash for it (this includes cars, though not our house, which we still have a mortgage on.)

When I went in to talk to one of the salesman, he wanted to know what we currently had. Well, we are one of those people who had to get the special boxes on all of our TVs when stations went digital because we still have all analog. Yup, that's how old the two TVs are (one is down in the exercise room). Also, not very big. After watching a movie on a nicer TV, all the kids came home and said they felt like they were watching TV through a keyhole on our old TV.

It has been interesting to me to observe my own feelings as I go through this process.

1. Embarrassment

I am embarrassed because I feel like I am exposing myself by having people come into my house and see what it is like inside, and deal with their judgments about my choices in life.

2. Guilt

I feel guilty because I grew up with the sense that you should keep making do with what you have on hand, essentially forever. You can only replace things if they are broken beyond repair. This attitude sometimes leads me to pay to repair things that I should probably replace.

3. Amusement

It isn't until I am replacing things that I realize how old they really are. We have realized over the last couple of years that if we are getting rid of something because we don't think it's nice enough--no one in the entire USA wants it. No one is that poor. I think of myself as fairly well off, so that's why this seems amusing to me.

4. Relief

I hate the commercials where the message seems to be that you should buy this because it is "deserved." You've worked hard enough, or you are good enough, that you should have whatever expensive thing is being offered. I don't accept this attitude. I don't think I deserve much beyond basic living expenses. But when my old things have become so outdated that I am forced to replace them and get one of the nicer things that is all that is available now, it is a relief to no longer have to convince myself that it is allowed.

The most recent experience I have had with this kind of replacement is when I finally decided that I needed a cell phone. Last year. Yup. 2009. When I finally decided it, I went out and got the one I liked the most, which was an iphone. It completely changed my life. I know how I lived without it, and I'm sure I could again. But boy is it a dandy piece of fun to have around. Also, useful.

glory and decline

A professor I knew once said that the one thing he learned from studying Shakespeare for thirty years was that he should have written less.

At first glance, this statement seems stupid. Maybe at second glance, too.

On third glance, I wonder if it says more about us as readers of Shakespeare than it says about him. *We* think of him as the greatest writer who ever lived. But *he* thought of himself as a guy who was making a living doing what he wanted to do. He made it work. He followed the rules he had to follow and he made his audiences happy.

I often think about television series (and movies series, too, I suppose) in something like this same vein. Even sports stars like Lance Armstrong and Michael Jordan could fit into the category. We don't know when to quit. We keep asking for what we want, until we don't want it anymore and it makes us sick. We keep asking stars to come back, until they cannot do it, and all their glory is gone. Of course we are like this.

I actually don't think there is anything wrong with it. I don't think it makes your favorite Shakespeare play one bit less brilliant because there were ones that weren't your favorite. Perhaps more so, in comparison. (Also I don't know that we could really get consensus on which are the best--my favorite is A Winter's Tale, which isn't usually on anyone else's list.) I don't think people can accurately predict when a series or an athlete is going to be at the end, and even if we do, is there anything wrong with pushing it? I know some people hate the last two seasons of Buffy, but they are my favorites. I think there is something interesting about decline.

truer than truth

One of the characters in my revision novel says, "There are stories truer than truth."

That is why I read. Life is a series of events that happen to me, or to other people. But I never am able to see them clearly enough to understand what they mean, at least not in the present moment. More often, something happens, and then only months or even years later, it will suddenly come into clarity, as it becomes part of a pattern that I had not seem before because I lived it.

Stories are the way that we are able to show that moment, the pattern that was always there, waiting to be seen, unfolding in a shorter format. As a writer, the best moments are when I realize, as in life, that a pattern has unfolded before me and I didn't know I was the one making it. Maybe I'm not the one really making it, and it was all just the world at work. I don't know. But that shivery feeling of realizing something means something other than what it seemed to, is truer than truth.

And sometimes, it happens multiple times to the same event, which turns out to mean something else again, in light of a new pattern.

how I use a revision letter

I have no idea if this is the right way to use an editor's revision letter. I've never taken a class on this, or been given a degree. There are no classes, that I know. Which makes me think about the fact that most of the things in life that you have to figure out how to do, there are actually no classes for. Because no one can teach a class in that. You have to figure it out for yourself. What do you want as a career? Who should you marry? How do you parent this child? And so on.

1. ...

stupid advice on writing

At the risk of offending practically everyone on the planet, I am nonetheless going to post a short list of advice on writing I have heard at conferences which I now think is useless:

1. You must print your document out in Courier 10 pt with 1 inch margins all around, using underlining to indicate italics. (I know one sf author who insisted on this, and for years I followed it slavishly, only to discover that no editor I ever met cared if you printed your manuscript in Times Roman, and most pr...

signing

Tomorrow 5:30-8:30 I will be at the Murray Barnes and Noble with other local teen authors, as part of their teen author event, in conjunction with the school district. Hope to see some of you there!

stupid advice on exercise

I spent years looking through articles on running, biking, swimming, yoga, weight lifting, and so on. I still read several fitness magazines on a monthly basis. I enjoy reading about the topic, but I have to say that it is not very often these days that I read something and think, Oh, I must try that. Way more often, I read something and thing--that is completely wrong or untested.

So, as a prelude to a later post on stupid advice on writing that I hear at conferences, I thought I would wri...