Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 50

Friday Tri: Stop Looking Around

I think I spend a lot of time looking around--at Cross-Fit, or on the bike or out running, swimming, or just walking around town--staring at other people and comparing myself to them. I think about a swimmer who has the perfect stroke, or the girl who can lift twice as much as I can. I think about how light on her feet that runner looks. Or how put together that woman looks even when she is just at the grocery store.

Here is the thing: sport is about being inside yourself. Yes, I know people will try to tell you that if you want to win, you have to really care about beating the other guy. You have to *want* to win badly enough that you'll do anything to push yourself a little bit farther to cross the finish line first or get the last goal. Maybe this is true in some arenas in sport, but maybe it isn't. Maybe the only thing the other person is there for is to remind you to get back inside yourself, where you can do something that matters.

Thinking back on my terrible career as a swimmer in high school, I think one of my biggest mistakes was that I was constantly comparing myself to the other swimmers--and feeling like I wasn't enough. I couldn't just get in the water, swim my heart out, and be happy with myself. It didn't help that other people were telling me that I had to work harder for the team, that I needed to hurt myself more. It's only as an adult that I have learned how to let go of what the voices outside of me are saying and listen to the voice within.

When I do my best at a race now, it isn't because of what anyone else is doing. It's because I am pushing myself against my own goals. And it is because I believe in myself. If I'm going to be able to make a new jump height at Cross-Fit, I have to visualize myself doing it. I have to tell myself that it is possible. Then I have to close my eyes and go inside myself and just push to make it happen.

Watching other people do things that I can't do might or might not be inspiring in the long-term but it doesn't help me with the day to day. Day to day I have to go back inside myself, look for the small changes, accept myself, and believe that I am doing my best. And this works in other parts of my life, too.

As a writer, I can spend a lot of time angsting over what other authors are doing, how much money they are making, the promotional budgets they get from their publisher, on and on. And it doesn't matter. That doesn't help me do my writing. It doesn't help me write the work I was meant to write. It often interferes with me sitting down and listening to my inner voice, going inside myself and believing that I can do it.

So my advice today: Stop looking around. Start looking inside.

Get a Free Copy of The Rose Throne

Over on goodreads, my publisher Egmont is giving away 8 copies of The Rose Throne in the next three weeks. Sign up and you might win!

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15841929-the-rose-throne

Rules of Romance #3: Physical Description

For the women, it's all about the hair. Black, brown, red, or blonde, it is flowing and blowing, and it is always mentioned. Ever read a romance about a bald heroine? I thought not. And the heroes? Must be muscular, broad-shouldered and tall. Also, hard. HARD. Yes, not so subtle, eh?

Be A Man For A Day

You will be told that you must not show emotions. If you have them, you must disguise them.

Your friendships with other men must always be based on masculine pursuits in common, but if you spend too much time together, you will be accused of being “gay” or “girly.”

If you have too many—or any—friendships with women, you will also be accused of being “gay” or “girly.”

If you show any interest in artistic expression such as theater, music, dance or art, you will be accused of being “gay” or “girly.”

You will be expected to conquer women's hearts while you are simultaneously told that you must have nothing in common with them.

Whatever your true interests are, you must direct these interests toward acceptable male activities, whatever those happen to be in your culture.

You may love your children, but you must spend most of your time away from them.

You will be told that what matters most about you is how much money you make.

There will be a uniform for you to wear on every occasion. No deviation from this uniform is allowed. Male fashion will change very infrequently, whether you like it or not.

You will be held up to an image of a body builder and if you fall short, you will be constantly in fear of being too small and powerless as a man.

You will constantly be shown sexualized images of women, and then when you have contact with real women, be constantly surprised and hurt by the reality that these women are not the sexualized ideals your have been taught to expect.

Women will often be angry at you for reasons you cannot fathom.

Speaking to women will terrify you because it feels that they have some “language” you have never been taught. Indeed, speaking of your emotions is nearly impossible, since you have been told never to have them.

Sports is supposed to be your main hobby, whether it is or not.

Male displays of physical strength are a constant part of your training to be a man.

Violence should simmer beneath the surface but never explode.

The size of your penis matters more than the size of anything else on your body, and this is not something that you have any control over.

You will be encouraged to take steroids and other drugs to increase your manliness. Ironically, these same drugs will steal your fertility and make your penis shrink in later years.

When you are old, you will be told that you must be as capable of having sex as in your teen years. If not, you should take drugs to achieve the same level of activity. You cannot possibly be happy with anything else.

You will be lonely much of the time.

You will depend on the women in your life to do a lot of your emotional connecting.

You will be bewildered by your daughters and terrified by them as they become sexual beings, because you do not know how to talk to them.

You will wonder if there is some other model of manliness for your sons, but you have no idea how to model it.

You will feel disenfranchised and at the same time, told that you have all the power. You do not know where the power, but you are pretty sure you don't have it.

Be A Woman For A Day

Some thoughts on how to get into the mind of a woman. Just imagine that this was your life:

Every day you are told that what matters most about you is how you look, not what you do, not what you think.

You are constantly being told that you are too big, and should make yourself look smaller. You should sound soft, be nearly invisible, and be childlike.

But if you are small, or are childlike, you are told you should grow up.

You are complimented most often on superficial details, your hair, your makeup, your clothes or your jewelry.

Other women talk constantly about clothing, their bodies, how to make themselves look better, and how to avoid eating or getting larger.

What you can do matters less than who is attracted to you.

You are told to look up to women who are models, actresses, and wives of important men.

You are told that women are not good at math or science.

You are told that women are not logical.

If you cry or show emotions, this is considered normal, but weak.

If you don't cry or refuse to show emotion, this is considered abnormal and “mannish.”

Women will be jealous of you if you have accomplishments or are intelligent.

You may find yourself encouraged to pretend to be less intelligent than you are, to use smaller words, and to laugh often or at least smile.

If you compete with men, they will no longer consider you a woman, but nor will they think of you as an equal. You will always be an interloper.

Nothing you can do can prove your competence because being a woman means that there is an underlying unreliability about yourself.

Growing older is something to e dreaded, and you will find yourself looking in the mirror every morning, dreading the signs of gray hair or sagging facial skin or other feminine features.

What is comfortable is not of importance for you. You must choose clothing that accentuates and exaggerates your feminine features.

The worst thing that you can do is demand equality.

The second worst thing that you can do is earn equality.

You must worry about being “too” muscular, even if you are involved in sports or other physical activity.

If you spend too much time with men, other women will think of you as competition and shun you.

If you spend all your time with other women, you will find yourself thinking more and more about yourself in the terms in which they think about themselves.

You will be expected to have no boundaries and to never say “no” to others. If you do, you will be called “selfish” or a “bitch.”

Your body, your thoughts, your abilities do not belong to you but to men around you.

You will constantly see images of men in power who are threatening,dangerous, and strong. If you choose to have a relationship with a man who is an example of this type and he becomes violent, it will be all your fault. No one will understand why you would possibly continue in an abusive relationship.

Most of the time, things are your fault. Get used to accepting the blame because if you try to blame others, they will only think you are bitter.

You should expect to get about a tenth of the attention from teachers at school as your male counterparts. If you ask for more, it will be seen as irrational and unfair.

Teachers will make jokes about the stupidity of female students and you will be expected to laugh along with them as a "good sport."

If you try to achieve something in athletics, you will be constantly subject to a scrutiny of your physical assets and told what clothing is modest or not while you are competing.

Men will assume that they should be protective of you, and if you reject their offers, they will be offended or hurt.

If a man asks you on a date, you are expected to say yes, no matter if you are interested in him or not. Saying no expresses a kind of superiority that is unacceptable. In fact, once a man expresses his interest in you, it is virtually impossible for you to reject him and remain a proper woman. You must wait until he rejects you.

Men will frequently accuse you of being hormonal, whether or not they know anything about your actual menstrual cycle. Men, of course, are never hormonal.

Your maternal instincts will be called into question any time your children are in harm's way. The father will not face the same scrutiny because he is only the father.

If your children misbehave, it will be chalked up to you spending too much time pursuing a career or other “selfish” interests.

You will be told to feel guilty if you ever spend a moment not thinking or worrying about your children.

You will be expected to maintain a girlish figure but if you leave your children at daycare to workout, you are selfish and vain.

Appropriate clothing will be constantly changing. You will be scrutinized for wearing clothing in or out of style, too old or too young, and you will also be criticized for spending too much money or time shopping or thinking about your clothing.

You will be asked to shave your natural adult body hair so as to make your body appear like that of a prepubescent girl's.

If you have power, you will be accused of stealing it from your husband, father, or brothers, or possibly your sons.

Unattractive photographs of you will be shown and mocked, but if you become shy of cameras, people will accuse you of being obsessively private.

The one thing you are told you are allowed to be good at—interpreting emotions in others—is a skill that is considered innately feminine and therefore nothing to be proud of. You didn't earn it or learn it. You simply inherited it.

If you refuse to share your thoughts or emotions with others, they will call you “mysterious.”

You will be told that you cannot want anything, and then when you are unhappy, told that you never expressed what you want.

You will spend your life trying to suppress your wants in favor of those of others, and then when you cannot actually choose between one thing or another because it takes a long time to figure out what you actually care about, you will be mocked.

Men will say that they cannot understand you because they do not choose to listen to you.

Men will make assumptions about you based on stereotypes of women in the media and when you do not adhere to these stereotypes, they will be confused and bewildered.

Monday Book Recs--Sara Zarr's The Lucy Variations and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway's Ordinary Magic

Sara Zarr's The Lucy Variations



I have a musically talented daughter, so this book about Lucy Beck-Moreau, who abruptly ended her career eight months ago by walking off the stage of The Prague piano competition and hasn't played since, was especially interesting to me. The reasons for the end of Lucy's career rang true to me. I am not much of a pushy parent. I remember having a conversation with a mother of another musical prodigy in our area who was a friend of my daughter. I told this mother that I had threatened my daughter with cancelling her music lessons if she didn't clean her room. This was pretty effective, since I didn't care that much about my daughter's very expensive music lessons and she did. But the other mother was APPALLED. Couldn't I think of something else to use as leverage, like cutting off her computer usage? Well, my daughter simply didn't care about her computer usage. She cared about her music lessons and that was it. And her room had become a disaster. I truly don't expect a spotless room. Just a space that you can walk into without worrying about touching dead mice or rancid food.

Anyway, this was one of the many experiences with parents of the ultra-competitive music world I have had. I remember another mother telling me quite insistently that if I wanted my daughter to get into a good school like Harvard, music was the best way because it really looked "good" on applications. I was tempted to tell her that I had gotten into Princeton just fine without any music on my application, and that in my opinion, the best schools cared about the whole student and not about the parents pushing the student. I refrained. Barely. But there were also plenty of situations in which I ended up looking like the bad parent. Whenever I tried to tell teachers that I really did not know anything about music, I think they thought I was being falsely modest. They would introduce my daughter to a new piece and insist that she must have heard it before. Nope. She hadn't. I rarely listen to music of any kind at home because it interrupts my thinking while writing. Another instance was when my daughter spent hours talking to another parents at a music competition and came home saying, "Mom, I never talked to a mother who knew so all the pieces I want to play." So clearly, I am a defective mother of a musical prodigy. She also ended up spending at least a year known by the last name of another family because they drove her back and forth with their son to a regular musical event quite a distance away since I was unwilling to.

This is all to say that there was a part of me that was horrified and a little self-congratulatory at the look inside the world of an international music prodigy. Her grandfather and mother push-push-push her every step of the way, and she reaches the point where she doesn't care about music anymore. She wants a real life, a regular teenage life. But she also realizes she wants to get music back on her own terms. And she has to deal with the competition with her younger brother, who has now become the focus for the family's mania for musical success. I absolutely believed this family. I have met so many like them. I also didn't hate them, which I think is to Zarr's credit. She made me see them as three-dimensional people who were trying on some level to do what was best for the children involved. I cringed at things everyone did in the book, but I never for a moment disbelieved them. This is one of Zarr's great gifts as a writer. She makes me believe absolutely that these people are real. I feel I know them intimately and carry them around in my head for years afterward. Every one of Zarr's books is like this. I can say of few authors that I have loved everything they have written, but Zarr is one of them.

And in addition to that, Zarr's books always end up making me ask myself the uncomfortable questions I don't necessarily want to ask myself. Instead of feeling that The Lucy Variations "exposes" the dark underside of the competitive child-musical prodigy world, it made me ask myself if the real reason I don't push my daughter is because of my own laziness. It made me ask myself if I really believe in "talent," and it talent exists, if those who have it are obligated in some way to use their talent because of the people around them who wish they have it. And Zarr's book also made me ask myself about my own writing "talent." Am I using it well? When does the gift become a burden? Would I rather give it up and live a normal life?

Caitlen Rubino-Bradway's Ordinary Magic


This book was a fun romp through a world in which there are very few "ords," people who cannot do and are unaffected by magic. I loved the extensive world-building here. Abby's world is in the midst of an enormous change. Ords are still disliked, but the king has demanded that they can no longer be sold and has spent a great deal of money in creating a school especially for ords. But old habits die hard, and there are still those out there who want to buy ords, no matter what the king says. When Abby is kidnapped by one of them, she has to figure out how to save herself without any magic, just her own wits and courage.

I found myself liking the world so much that I immediately wanted to hear other stories. I wanted to read a YA fantasy romance written from the pov of Abby's older sister, who clearly has a great story going with the king. I wanted to hear more about Abby, but also about Peter, the rich kid who has been dropped suddenly by his parents and has a rather nasty temper. I wanted to hear about the cook who enters competitions with magical cooks and beats them because she doesn't follow the rules. You get the idea. I'd use this book as an example in a class. So many writers think that worldbuilding has to be done as it is done in a lot of adult sf/f, with info-dumping. Not so. We have a single pov character here and we find out everything we need to know about this world from her pov without it ever slowing down the plot.

The Best Thing Since Amway is Amazon E-books

Surprise! There are ways to make sure that your book sells well that have nothing to do with writing your book sell (see this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323864304578316143623600544.html). I had never actually talked to someone who was serious about sharing this information, but all of these pieces of advice were from a real talk I went to recently. I have no idea if the hundreds of other people who listened were as skeptical and amused as I was, but I suspect not.

The most useful thing to come out of going to this talk for me was the realization that I didn't care as much about my books selling way as I thought I had. I cared a lot more about people actually liking my books and admiring my writing. With no further ado, however, here are the million-dollar tips:

Make sure your cover looks like other best-selling covers in your field

If you don't have a blurb, put something else in the blurb spot.

If you're not a NY Times bestseller, say something else in that same spot—no one will be able to read it in a thumbnail size cover on amazon.

“It doesn't matter how good your book is. It's all about marketing.”

“We buy things because people tell us to buy things.”

Get 10 reviews as fast as you can. Pay for them if you need to.

People want books now and they want them cheap.

If you cut a book into smaller pieces, you earn more money and your customers are happier because they feel good about how many books they have finished.

Write one-page chapters. People like them.

1 thing will guarantee success: writing more books.

Do you know anyone out there who has 50 titles and doesn't sell? (Um, yes.)

The only thing you can control is how many books you write. (Or how good those books are.)

The era of a book a year is over. You need to write 4-5 books a year.

If you have 100 books published, then people will now you are a good writer. (Really? What about Margaret Mitchell? Or Harper Lee?)

Rules of Romance #2: Covers

All About Typical Covers: The Clinch, Two Faces, Naked Male Back (With Sword), Headless Woman, and Flowers/Architecture/Object. Also, how to break the rules!

Quick Thoughts on Social Media

Social Media

Do what you want to do and be who you want to be. If you don't want to be on Twitter, it will show in everything you post. Just don't be there.

Be a part of the community. Don't imagine that you can just show up to promote your book and that will work. That's like deciding that if you have to choose between your friends and your downstream, you are choosing your downstream.

You will make mistakes as you learn how to do it—accept this as part of the process

Posting everything everywhere reveals to me that you aren't really part of the community, that you won't respond to me because you aren't there. So I'm not sure that's really going to get you very far. Post facebook things to facebook and twitter things to twitter.

Twitter is like walking past a school cafeteria and hearing snippets of various conversations. You won't get everything and that's OK.

What Twitter does well is short, pithy messages and retweeting. Also, no obligation for reciprocity so people can follow you even if you don't “approve.”

Tumblr is great for reblogging and commenting to your followers without necessarily engaging others. You can post video, music, photos, and text on tumblr easily.

Start with one thing, not everything at once. Give yourself a month to see if you like it.

Facebook is a place for family and friends. It can be a challenge to use it for networking. And as writers, many people think that facebook is all about managing annoyances.

Are you on-line all the time or do you feel guilty if you are not? You have your own life and should feel free to turn off the social media whenever you want.

What I Wish I Had Known Before I Got Published

The bigger you are, the more people will hate you

If you think you will be happy when . . ., you will never be happy

Most writers do not publish their first book.

Most writers are rejected again and again, even after they have been published

The next big thing is never the next big thing

Ellipses and exclamations do not make your writing better

You will likely have no promotion budget for your first book or any others.

An agent is like a spouse—forever

Most people will not care if you are published.

Be ready to write the next book as soon as you can after the first one.

Have a back-up plan. Have three.

Networking is really just a fancy word for making friends

Pay it forward

Write for yourself first

Don't chase the market

Stop whining

A query letter is just to weed out the crazy people and to make sure you are writing the right genre. Be professional and short.