Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 36

How to Turn Professional Book People Off Reading Your Book

1. Start with a comparison to Harry Potter, Twilight, or The Hunger Games. (If you want to do a comparison, try something a little less well-known and that has slightly less ambitious stats.)

2. Constantly talk about yourself and your own books on panels or in every venue in which you have a chance to “push” your own agenda. Seriously, the most annoying writers in the world are the ones whose only purpose in life is to talk about themselves and their own books.

3. Give a play by play of your entire novel. “And then this happened. And then they did this. And then this. And then they had to really think and they did this …” (I have already turned off my brain.)

4. Complain about how there aren’t any “good books” in the field. Really? Is that likely? Or perhaps you are not looking very hard.

5. Express nostalgia for the “good, old days” when books were so much better (thus proving you have not read anything new in the last 20 years).

6. Talk about how your book is based on fanfic, D&D or other role-playing game. It might be true, but I wouldn’t play this up. It should be good enough to stand on its own without that background information.

7. Complain that you couldn’t break in to NY publishing because you didn’t know anyone. Complaining probably never makes you look good as a writer, but this one is something that makes you sound like you expect something for nothing.

8. Mock potential readers. Why should anyone read you if you’re disdainful of them? And mostly, good writing comes from a place of love, not a place of hate.

9. Reveal sexism while simultaneously pitching to female readers. See above.

10. Tell every detail of world-building and cool magic in your book up front. This is so boring. You think it’s interesting, but it’s not. It may be interesting in your book. I really hope it is for the characters, but stripped from that narrative context, it is yawningly dull!

16 Cliches to Avoid in Writing SF/F

1. Overpowered characters who can do EVERYTHING and are constantly discovering new super powers.

2. The characters are only powerful, beautiful people: kings, rich people, white people, abled people.

3. A mirror which the character looks into in the first two pages, so that a physical description can be given, even in first person.

4. Prophecies

5. The “Chosen” One.

6. The orphan child who turns out to be the lost prince/princess.

7. A mysterious wizard/guide/mentor who knows everything but will NEVER tell anything.

8. Villains who are evil either simply to be evil or because of some terrible childhood hurt.

9.The feisty/sassy female sidekick who is always there for the hero.

10. Tokenism, so that there is one character for each “race” or kind of magical creature: dwarves, elves, werewolves, vampires, etc.

11. Women who are stereotypes/men who are stereotypes.

12. A prologue with all the backstory stuffed into it.

13. A story that begins with a character waking up.

14. Any dreams. Dreams are so boring. SO, SO BORING!

15. The “youngest ever” child to do anything.

16. Characters who learn how to do things twenty times faster than anyone else who has to study for years.

Using Your Best Hours Wisely

Some people are natural night owls. Some people are early risers. I don't think one is better than the other. Some people even change from one kind of cycle to another over the course of their lives, as they have children or go through hormonal changes. What's important is that you need to know what your best hours are. And you need to schedule your most difficult work for those hours.
If you are a night owl, make sure that you don't spend your night hours watching television because your morning person spouse enjoys that. These are your best hours for getting work done productively. I don't know if for you it's because you like the quietness of night or the sense that you are breaking curfew. It may be a biological difference. But use it. Use what works for you.

If you are a morning person, get up and take advantage of this time. Seize the day! Get up before anyone else in your house does and sneak down and get in some hours before breakfast.

For me, the hardest work that I ever have to do is outlining/brainstorming a project. The second hardest work is actually doing a first draft. Then comes significant revision that requires new sections to be created. Other kinds of editing take a different kind of brain. So I try to prioritize the work that needs the most of my brain for my best hours.

It used to be that I was a morning person. I woke up at 5 and exercised, then hustled down to my office and got in an hour or an hour and a half of work before my kids woke up and my husband left for work in the day. Then I fit in some more work time in in the early afternoon when kids took naps. But now that my kids are older and I have one in each of the different leaving times, one before 7, one at 7:30 and one at 8:30, the whole morning from 6:30 when I wake up until 8:30 when the last one leaves is a bit chaotic. I can do work, but it tends not to be the work that I need all of my brain to do.

During off-hours I can look over work I did the day before and edit it. I can answer emails. I can make lists of things that need to be done the rest of the month. I can write short bits for publication on-line, or for my tumblr or blog. I can write race reports or some non-fiction. But I am too distracted to do much else, so I don't.

Once my youngest is out the door, however, it's to work on the hard stuff. I work for a couple of hours, take a lunch break, and then get in a couple more hours before my oldest son is home from high school. Then the house becomes noisy and chaotic again. My kids need me to be available for homework help, running errands, and talking over problems at school in the afternoon so I try to leave that time available if they need it.

In the morning, I am trying to make sure that everyone has what they need before they get out the door and that they remember anything they need to turn in, appointments during school, after school schedule, and so on.

I don't know what my life will be like when the kids are all out of the house. Maybe I will go back to being a morning person. Or maybe I will turn into a night owl. But I still think everyone has more productive hours and less productive hours. It can be tempting to use all your hours to deal with easier projects. Don't do this. Be self-disciplined enough to make sure that you move on to the hard stuff when it's time.

Your Time Is More Important Than Anyone Else’s

I don't mean this literally. I am sure there are many people whose time is more valuable than mine. The President of the United States. The Pope. JK Rowling. Well, maybe not the Pope.
My point is that most people do not value their time in the way that I value my time. They are not trying to fit three times as many things into a day as any normal person. They may be happy with fitting in half the things in their day that a normal person does. A lot of these people are on committees that want me to help them because I work efficiently. Well, the first rule of working efficiently is never attend committee meetings because I suspect no one in a committee meeting values their time. There are simply a thousand better ways to use everyone's time more efficiently than a committee meeting, in my experience. And I guess it doesn't make me a super popular person to say this out loud to anyone on the committee. So I have to come up with excuses. Or come late. Or leave early.
I am not trying to say that other people are stupid and that everyone should live their lives like I live mine. I recognize that I am probably a bit obsessed with efficiency. But it IS how I get so many things done in my life, mental illness or not. And not being driven to use time efficiently is why other people don't get as much done.
So if I find someone who uses time efficiently, I tend to value that person's time as much as my own. If I am going to my current doctor's office, I show up on time because he tends to make sure his office is run efficiently and he almost always calls me in within 2 minutes of when I arrive. The same thing with my dentist. When my oldest daughter had her first music teacher, the woman insisted that we show up on time and that we pay her if we forgot to show up at all. She didn't want her time wasted, and she made us pay when we didn't. Guess what happened? We were always on time for her lessons and we never blew them off (except the first time, when she chewed my ear off and demanded I pay her anyway).
I don't want to spend a lot of time chit-chatting with people when I have business to get done. I want to get the business done. And there are ways that you can subtly (and not so subtly) impress this on the people around you. You simply cut off the small talk and say, "So, let's move on to why we're here today." You write up an agenda and you move quickly through it. You treat people as if they are intelligent and don't need their hands held through simple tasks. You write things up in advance and send them around to people so no one has to waste time reading something. (I read quickly, so I can be easily annoyed by the time it takes others to read.)
And finally, make sure that if you are going to run an errand where you know your time will be wasted (the DMV, for instance, or the bank), you bring something to do with you. This communicates to other people that you are busy and that you don't need to sit around waiting in order to find things valuable to do with your time. It may not be the most efficient use of your time if it's noisy, but you can at least read a book or do something else that you would likely have to get done anyway.

The Burden of Grief

One of the most difficult things about being grief-stricken is the many times in which you are forced because of the rules of social interaction to set aside your grief and be kind to people who are being jerks to you. Some people are being jerks because they do not know. And some people are being jerks because—who knows? You try to come up with reasons for them and excuse them in your mind because frankly, you don't have enough energy to feel your grief and also the anger for the people who are around you being jerks.

It has been some years now, and I suppose it must be some comfort to realize that the grief is gone enough that I space now for the anger. I am a little surprised that it comes back, but let me tell a few examples of things that still make me angry, after all this time.

The telemarketer who called and announced eight weeks after the loss of my daughter that she knew my husband and I had just had a baby, and she was happy to announce that we had—won a free cruise! Wasn't that great? She was so enthusiastic, and I knew that she was just a teenager trying to earn a living. She didn't know. But I said very softly, “My baby died.” I thought that would end the conversation, that she would apologize and hang up. But she didn't. She went on with her spiel. “Well, then,” she said, “you need a cruise even more, don't you?” At which point I hung up on her.

The baby formula and baby diapers company that sent us “samples” to try, along with cards of congratulations. I have no idea how they got our name and address, but I wanted so much to call someone and strangle that person. The hospital had been pretty careful to make sure that our door was marked specially so that despite the fact that we were in the delivery ward, we would not get visits from lactation nurses or any gift baskets to take home. Someone messed up here. It was likely some kind of clerical error. But the pain that came from seeing those samples in the mail box was really terrible. I didn't need new reminders, and I certainly didn't need to know that my pain was insignificant to a big company and its marketing ploy.

The person who told me confidently a story about a man who had lost his arm and learned to tie a tie with one arm faster than anyone he knew with two arms. This was, I think, supposed to be a lesson in how adversity makes us stronger and that a loss can become a gain. But for me, I kept thinking, if only I had lost an arm! I wished dearly that I had been the one to pay the price of whatever went wrong. But I wasn't. And the translation of this story still feels impossible. Do my 5 remaining children now feel like 6? Do I run faster because I lost my child? Is our house larger now because we are missing a person?

The people who assured me that they had seen my daughter in some kind of spiritual visitation. I hate to say it, but this made me angry even at the time, as much as I tried to be nice about it and nod and say thank you. I haven't seen my daughter in any spiritual visitations. I have never felt her presence at a special family event. I have never seen her as she should be at the age she would be now. And the idea that somehow she would (if there is some way in which she still exists) visit other people but not me is heart-breaking. Can you not see that your spiritual beliefs are painful to me?

The woman who told me that this was a wonderful thing for our family, because now everyone in the family would have a “reason” to be better than ever. It was as painful as a blow to the stomach, and I doubled over when I heard it. How can anyone imagine that this is a kind thing to say? You have lost a child, and now someone tells you that you deserved it because you weren't good enough, and you needed to go through this enormous pain because nothing else would make you better? I do not deny that sometimes tragedy brings out the best in people. But I have no statistics that lead me to believe this is often the case. And the idea that this was a hand-crafted tragedy designed to improve my personality is just so cruel. Could this person not see that? I would rather believe in the random cruelty of the universe than a god who shows his love this way.

A very few people were capable of making my grief feel lifted for a moment. One was a woman, a near stranger, who was a clerk at a bread store I frequented. A week after my daughter's death, I was at the counter and she commented on the bracelet I wore. It was the first time I had worn it in public, and the first time someone had commented on it. I was dumbstruck with what to say. I could have chosen to say “thank you.” Instead, I said that it matched my baby daughter's, which it did. The woman asked how old the daughter was, and I said, “She died.” The woman might have said simply that she was sorry. Instead, she burst into tears and hugged me. I felt bad that in this case, I had added to her pain, but in fact, she knew exactly what to do, which was to grieve with me.

The other instance was a friend of mine who had lost her husband to cancer in completely different circumstances some years previously. She told me a little about his final days and about how tired she was then of him being alive and how she prayed for him to die. She felt guilty about it, but she admitted this truth to me, and I was touched because of all the people I knew who talked to me about grief, she was the most honest.

Grief makes us worse than what we want to be. It makes us ashamed. It doesn't make us rise above. It doesn't make us better. It hurts us. It is a loss that we carry forever and it will never be healed. There is no magic trick to showing off how you conquered grief faster than anyone else. The only gift that comes from grief is the gift to understand the horror of grief that others feel. I cannot say that I am strong enough to be glad that I understand true grief. There are many times when I think that my knowledge of grief makes me less capable of doing anything useful because I am so overwhelmed with feeling. But since my own experience seems to indicate it is that connection that matters most, maybe this is the only gift that matters, in the end. And yet, I would still choose to go back and not go through this. I would choose not to be “improved,” not to be connected. I would choose for her to live.

Don’t Feel the Need to Impress Other People

I think we spend so much time trying to impress other people that we sometimes don't realize where the energy is going down the drain. The way we dress is so often about impressing people. The need to get nicer clothes, to look like someone we admire, to have a nicer house, car, or other object--it usually is less about making us happy and more about making us feel less inferior to the people around us.
What if you just stopped caring what other people thought of you? How would that change your life? Can you even imagine it?
Humans are naturally social creatures and probably we couldn't survive without any social contact, but I don't think that social contact has to be as competitive as we sometimes allow it to become.
Let me share an example. I was speaking to a group once on a panel and one of the other panelists introduced herself with reference to some of the accolades that had come her way. As a result, I felt the need to mention the fact that I had a PhD from Princeton University and that I was a nationally ranked triathlete. This had nothing to do with the topic of the panel in either case. But it was a kind of one-up-manship contest that I allowed myself to be conned into. I wasted the audience's time, my own time, and my energy. I spent a week afterward wishing I hadn't done it and wondering why I cared what the other panelist or the audience members thought of me in terms of professional accolades. I was there, at the panel, to speak intelligently. Surely what I said about the panel's topic was proof enough of that.
But this kind of thing happens all the time. With women, it sometimes happens stealthily, as a kind of one-down-manship contest. We will talk about how horrible we look, how we threw on what we are wearing and didn't even take a shower, or how badly we cook, how we are idiots when it comes to cars or machines and so on. We do this as a way of making other people comfortable around us, but it is still a defense mechanism, a way in which we prove how much we worry about how other people think of us. We want them to think we aren't too stuck up, too full of ourselves, or too intimidating.
What we should probably be doing instead is getting on with our work. Instead of worrying about ourselves, we could use that mental space to work out a new project or to think new thoughts.
There's nothing wrong with having friends, but consider if you are doing this, are these people your real friends? If they are, then why are you doing this to each other? If they are not, then why are you wasting your time caring what they think of you?

Insomnia

I struggled with insomnia for about two years, basically getting through on Ambien. I don't think that sleeping pills are a cure all for insomnia. My insomnia was anxiety-based, but I needed the sleep in order to have the energy to deal with the anxiety. I now still use occasional OTC sleeing pills to help me deal with race day anxiety, beginning of school jitters, and other general stress issues. I think this is a reasonable choice. However, I also think there are a lot of other things you can do to deal with insomnia.

1.         Go to bed and wake up at the same time, every day. Yes, even the weekend. It really helps your body to have a schedule.
2.         Get outside and get real sunlight on your face during your waking part of the day.
3.         Exercise regularly. And by that I mean every day. It helps if it is the same time every day. I think that exercising hard is good. It helps get your body tired.
4.         Don't use caffeine or alcohol. Caffeine is a stimulant. Alcohol is a depressant. You want your body to have its own signals for sleep and wake, not to depend on artificial ones.
5.         Eat healthy. Especially make sure you get enough fiber from fruits, vegetables, whole grains and beans.
6.         Give yourself permission to not be in control of the entire universe. When you sleep, things will happen you will not control. That is normal because when you are awake, things happen you don't control. Very little stuff is stuff you control.
7.         Control the stuff you can control while you are awake. This means you do the work you need to do, a reasonable amount of it. And when you're done, you get to be “off.” If you are someone who runs your own business or works from home, it can be really hard to give yourself “off” time. Do it anyway.
8.         Do fun things with people you love. Strong, healthy relationships make you happier and will help with anxiety issues.
9.         Make sure you have things planned each day. Even if you are stressed, you need to have expectations of yourself to get things done.
10.       Spend time at the end of each day reviewing the day and reminding yourself of the things you did that day that mattered and made you happy. You can also review people you love, and remind yourself of your own good qualities. You may think of this as part of your meditation/prayer practice.

When you have insomnia, you want it be solved fast. You want to go to sleep RIGHT NOW. Part of the problem with insomnia is the anxiety that is created by the insomnia around sleep. There's no quick fix to this (other than sleeping pills, which are still not a quick fix). For me, it has helped to make sure I have books on my iphone that I really, really want to read. If I can't sleep, I keep the lights off to remind my body it is actually sleeping time, but I don't stress about it because I have something I want to do. Strangely, having a book I want to read tends to decrease my insomnia and I end up having to read the book during regular daylight hours because I go to sleep easily. The irony!

But insomnia sucks. If you are suffering from it, you have all my sympathies. Get your life right physically, and then if you need to see, get to see a therapist and possibly a doctor who can prescribe any drugs you will need to get your life back on track.

Also here is a great post on insomnia by Justine Larbelestier which I read when I was suffering: <http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2008/02/27/insomnia/>.

For more on how to make your 24 hours so productive, they seem like 27, go here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Hour-Day-Productive-ebook/dp/B00F8JTZ9K

Something Doesn't Love a Clean House (with apologies to Robert Frost)

Something there is that doesn’t love a clean house,
That sends dust motes through the air,
And muddies little childrens’ feet:
And streaks the windows and the walls.
The work of cooking is another thing:
I have cleaned afterwards, the stove, the table,
And the floor.  The dishes that grow dingier,
The pots that will not be shined.  But who is it,
Who makes the messes in the night?
Or when the house is empty and no one in sight?
I wake and find the beds unmade, and more-
The lines in carpet washed away.
The tiles smudged and the wood made wet.
I tell my husband and ask for his help,
To keep the house ready for guests,
Invited and not, who come and view our disarray
With pinched lips and shaking heads.
They know how to keep a clean house-
Why not I?
The hours of each day pass by with this book,
Or another.  With worlds made of words that
Make no sense of time and dirt.
A child comes to interrupt.  He points to
A bruised knee, a bleeding lip.
I kiss, I hug, I sing a song,
Then send him on his way,
as happy as he was before.
And open my book again, find unerringly the page
Where last I left my new best friend,
husband, lover, or King.  And breathe the breath
Of sweet life, neither clean nor dirty, but real.
When I wake from that sleep, I see the dirt again.
And wonder-why must a house be clean?
Does it make our feet warmer in the night?
Does it keep a smile on our faces?  Does it make us
Remember the taste of forgotten herbs on our lips?
And what would I lose if my house were clean?
An earthquake or flood would do its work just as well,
On clean floors or dirty.
But a child should cry where the tears can drip freely.
And a child should read, barefoot or in streaming boots,
Without a care.  A child should be lost in a book.
Why not I?
And still the guests come, invited and not, who view
The dusty pictures and corners, the paintings on the wall,
In pencil or crayon, made by minds free to build.
And wreck.  Or whatever they will.

Character Questions

1. What is her deepest secret/shame?

2. What is her great wound?

3. What does she want or need?

4. What is her dream of the future that she will not admit even to herself?

5. Why will readers love her?

6. How will she be humbled?

7. What must she sacrifice?

8. What is her greatest flaw/weakness?

From Comic Con on Teens:

"My own experience as a teen [was that] the main role of adults was to hold me back from adulthood under the guise of protecting me… [As an adult], I am often surprised at those around me who roll their eyes at their teens’ complaints, who sigh with fond memories of their children’s early years, and who seem to disdain everything teenage. They wonder how it is that I can enjoy my teens’ years . But simply giving my teens the ability to make their own choices in their lives has made them very unteenly. They don’t make extravagant gestures of rebellion because there is very little for them to rebel against.

When my teen can’t do a family job because she is busy doing homework or being in a play at school, I don’t make a fuss about it. When a teen needs some time off to spend with friends, I encourage it as I would encourage a healthy adult friend to care for her emotional needs. When my teen decides that playing an instrument is taking up valuable time that might be spent pursuing another aspect of her life that will help her in her career, I don’t try to talk her out it. I commend her for the adult decision she has made. My main interest as a parent is in helping my nearly adult children get what they want in life once they have figured out what that is. I am not interested in making them do things I think they should want to do. I expect my teens to give me respect, but I also offer them respect for their areas of expertise in turn. I am flexible about rules of the house in much the same way that I would be with another adult who lived in my home.”

"A Teenless World," Ender’s World

My essay was about how Ender’s Game is a utopia for many teens, despite the dystopian elements because teens are treated as adults and given adult choices to make. They are given respect, which is something so few teens ever see in the real world.

I get so very tired of adults who think that when I talk about my teens, who openly discuss my flaws as a parent, human, and individual, I am asking for sympathy. Quite the contrary. My teens are brilliant, warm, and kind. When they criticize me, they are almost always right. Why should they not have the same right to speak as a friend of mine would? Why should their point of view not be given the same credence as an adult’s? Because they are young and supposedly don’t have fully formed brains? Ha! I heard that when I was a teen, too, and let me tell you, I saw plenty of adults whose brains didn’t seem any better formed.

Yes, teenagers aren’t supporting themselves financially. Guess why? They aren’t allowed to. The government has put in place a bunch of systems which are designed to protect teens but which also make it impossible for teens in certain circumstances to make a living, even if they are capable of doing the same jobs as adults. I am not saying we shouldn’t have education for teens, nor that we shouldn’t support them. But the disdain that adults show on a regular basis for teens just makes me furious. If you want respect from your teens, you show them respect. That is all.