Delia Marshall Turner's Blog, page 13

How did this happen?

Apparently I am now writing an extended synopsis for Dog of the Dead, along with a list of characters both major and minor, and a brief description of the various settings, in preparation for tackling the manuscript of Mortal Affairs (the second book in the “Ms. Whitaker’s Last Year” series). I’m three chapters in. I don’t know quite how that happened. I had intended to go through my extensive notes for Shadow Practice instead (the fourth in “The Ways of Magic”), in preparation for revising the current version.

Does this happen to other people? I would hate to be my editor.

The Great Circle of Avoidance

Little dreaded routine tasks often destroy an hour or two out of my day. I don’t want to clear the sink and put the dishes in the dishwasher, so I watch an extra episode of a TV show, or I clean out a closet. Many of my drawers and cupboards owe their color-coordinated perfection to the looming presence of bill-paying, vacuuming, or putting out the trash.

Moderate-sized dreaded tasks, especially if they’re ambiguous, can destroy weeks. Do the income taxes, for instance. Arrange to have my sofa cushions replaced. I will put them in my task list, and then I stare at them and do something else entirely.

I don’t have writer’s block, as it is generally understood. Sit me down at a desk with a keyboard, or at a coffee shop table with a fountain pen and a journal, and I’ll write you a story.

But sometimes it’s not the story I’m working on right now, the one I really need to finish.

It really doesn’t happen often. I normally start my novels by sitting down and writing until I can’t figure out what comes next, which takes a couple of hours. The next day, somehow, I know what comes next, or at least the next thing appears when I start writing. Sometimes, indeed, I have to throw out ten pages or so when it turns out to be a blind alley, but that’s okay.

I can work for a solid month that way. And then something happens, and I start rethinking some of my choices. I can stave off the dreaded urge to rewrite the beginning of the book for a while, but then I come to a stop, realizing I have already started rewriting, but now the rest of the book doesn’t match.

Usually, I can fix that by (1) printing out what I have so far and putting it aside, and then (2) stopping and working on other writing for a while. Right now I have two novels in progress and a whole (terrible) other novel drafted, so that works out pretty well. If I’m desperate I start working on my calendar of first lines or on the short story collection.

This time, though, after I ground to a halt and printed out the fourth draft of a book in the Ways of Magic series, I looked at it and realized I was actually going to have to do what I don’t want to do: Make a timeline. (It didn’t help that I had to do a concordance for the other book I’m working on, too, the one I was going to go back to working on).

Some people prepare not only plot outlines, but also synopses and timelines, before they ever start writing. I don’t. I sometimes do them afterwards, of course. That’s how I dealt with the required outlines for papers in high school and college, too.

After I wrote the first two books, I did draft a concordance/summary/timeline for them because I knew it would make my editors happy, but I didn’t actually use it to write the second book, and I most certainly didn’t use it to write the third.

I realize this is counter-intuitive. If you have read the books, you should know that they have different first-person protagonists who are influential in galaxy-wide events and who only very slightly overlap in person. The events of the stories are interwoven intricately, however. But I mapped them out mostly from memory, and partly by glancing at the earlier manuscripts.

Now, however, there are three published books, and I have to actually know what happens when, because the current book starts before the events of Nameless Magery and finishes after The Stick Princess ends, and I have to make it all make sense, or I’ll run into major continuity errors.

I printed out the manuscript of Book 4 (Shadow Practice). Then I put the dishes away, cleared my inbox, organized my closet, and cleaned the downstairs bathroom. That didn’t work. I arranged for my sofa cushions to be replaced, scheduled two doctor appointments, did the federal income taxes, and ran a slew of errands. No luck.

There was no hope for it; the time-line had to be drafted. I brought out the manuscripts, opened the concordance, created an Excel spreadsheet, and got to work.

You know how long it took me to make the damn thing? Two hours. This morning.

You know why I started it today?

I don’t want to do my Saturday-morning bill-paying task. Oh yeah, and I have to format The Stick Princess for paperback. I don’t want to do that either. I’ll probably get to those when I finally sit down to do the state taxes.

So I’m writing a blog entry, of course.

It all gets done eventually, in the Great Circle of Avoidance.

Dog of the Dead

The first book in the series about Ms. Whitaker is up on Kindle! I haven’t formatted it in paperback yet.

Although I was an English teacher when I wrote it, and though I had my usual November bronchitis when I started drafting it, I’m not actually the protagonist. I have to say that because apparently people ALWAYS think I’m writing about myself.

Also, though the protagonist teaches in a private school, it’s nothing like the school where I taught for over twenty years. Furthermore, nobody in the book resembles the wonderful kids I taught.

Let me know what you think of it!

Not promoting my books

I know it doesn’t make sense, but I loathe the idea of promoting my books.

Seriously, I know it doesn’t make sense. No excuse.

When the first books were published, I had an agent and I had a publisher. The agent was an amiable if blustery old coot who had been involved in SF for ages; he didn’t have much idea of how to promote me. The publisher was a very well-known one and a subsidiary of Random House. They didn’t seem to have any idea of how to help me promote my books either. In fact, they didn’t know how to market them; they put garish YA covers on the novels, and I think they were startled when the books sold well, were nominated for awards, were translated into other languages, and were made into a Science Fiction Book Club offering. The publishers did send me to a book convention, I recall, and suggested vaguely that I do readings. I did several readings, attended by a handful of people, mostly family and friends. I was invited to speak at the Smithsonian by their book club, and that was cool. The whole thing kind of bewildered me.

I don’t have an agent or a publisher any more. I decided to self-publish last year, not because I wanted to promote the books, but because I thought the books should be available. People occasionally wrote me and asked about the third book. Friends bought used copies and asked me to sign them. It seemed reasonable to have them somewhere, especially because it didn’t cost much.

I’ve looked into all kinds of Facebook groups and online seminars, and it seems to me there’s hordes of us out there trying to market our books. We’ve all been turned loose and told to be entrepreneurs. There are also throngs of agents , all of whom seem to be entrepreneurs themselves, mostly engaged in either turning people down or giving out false hopes in return for fees. And if the publishing business is anything like what it was before, it’s full of would-be writers who are also engaged in discouraging other writers. Everyone is involved in gatekeeping, everyone is trying to market themselves, everyone is trying to make a living charging other people for their marketing services, and it’s a huge whirlpool of frenzied expense and effort.

I like writing. I like releasing my books into the wild. People seem to enjoy my books when they discover them, at least that’s what they tell me, and what the Goodreads and Amazon reviews show.

That is to say I’m finalizing the ebook of Dog of the Dead on Kindle today. It’s not part of the Ways of Magic series. It’s something different, part of the Ms. Whitaker’s Last Year series. You might like it. I’ll let you know when it’s available. And I’m working on another book in Ways of Magic, plus two more in the Ms. Whitaker series.

Yeah, this is me promoting my books. I try, I really do.

The almost final draft

In January, I spent the month plodding through my edits to the manuscript of Dog of the Dead, the first book in the next series.

This stage is both curiously satisfying and thoroughly discouraging.

The procedure is consistent: I print out a copy of the book, and then I read it aloud to myself, thus finding all the curious typos, repeated words, illogical fragments that were left over from another revision, and dead spots, and then I make all the changes, chapter by chapter, a little bit every day.

It’s a satisfying activity for a number of reasons. First, the manuscript has reached the stage where it’s worth it to find the minor errors, and that’s encouraging. It gives me hope. Before this stage, if I do too much tidying up, inevitably the section I just corrected ends up getting rewritten, if not removed.*

The second reason the final edit is satisfying is that I get to use my fountain pens. I like writing with a fountain pen. A nice thin wet purple line, or red, or green, glides onto the paper from a beautiful instrument, and the annotated marks and notes are decorative and pleasing. Look at all my lovely markings, I think. Handwriting, to me, is a purest form of writing, and I have taught myself to write in a moderately pleasing cursive that makes me feel like an ancient scribe.

The third reason it’s satisfying is that it’s as absorbing as plucking stray hairs, which is a gross image, I know. But when you end up with something pleasing and symmetrical like a tidy eyebrow, it gives you the illusion that everything else about your face (or the manuscript) is perfectly fine. Look at that damn eybrow! It is a thing of beauty! I have a thing of beauty on my face, even if it is the middle of winter and I otherwise resemble a gecko!

The discouraging thing is that when you read this way, it’s obvious that everything is not fine, and that you were a fool to think the book was in acceptable condition. Reading sentences slowly, whether you’re marking the page or making the edits, takes away the headlong pleasure of gulping a story. You realize that your characters are dawdling, that your plot points don’t make sense, that you didn’t foreshadow something essential, and that there is no way in hell you can wedge foreshadowing in anywhere now, without rewriting the horrid thing. And you’re thoroughly tired of it by now.

Therefore, after the final edit, I print the whole thing out once again, and I put it aside to age, like cheese. Even though the words will not change, I know that a few days later, it will suddenly be readable again, and I will see the very few obvious things that need to be tweaked.

My wonderful designer, Jess Johnson, has done me up some concepts that use the general design of the Ways of Magic series but are clearly appropriate for the new series, so that yes, they are by the same author, but no, they aren’t exactly the same. She’s going to get me the finals soon. But she’s very busy at her other job, so I’m not afraid I will get the covers too soon. The book can hybernate for a few days.

Does that mean I get to rest? No. Apparently not. I have been vaguely thinking about what I wanted to write next, and instead of going on to the second book in the new series (though the manuscript is already in rough draft), apparently I have started another book in the Ways of Magic series.

I usually start with a character and a sort of scene.

The character is a small and unobtrusive person, and the scene is when a very important person comes in the front door and treats her as if she was nobody at all. Somehow, that was enough to allow my brain to come up with magic fabric, a house at the pole of a planet in a wide lawn, a ring of fire, a family of self-absorbed artificers, and an underground shop with a bumpkin suitor.

I have finished writing for today, and I can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow.

I know writers tell you and tell you that writing isn’t fun, but I don’t think anyone would write if that was really true for all of us all the time. Parts of it are disagreeable, I can confirm, but really writing is like dreaming. Sometimes the dreams are bad, sometimes they are repetitive and meaningless, sometimes you forget them right away and good riddance, but often they are gloriously odd and satisfying. I will continue to dream.

*That’s one of the reasons, when I taught English and I used to mark early student drafts, that I never made nitpicky corrections, unless there was a word they consistently misspelled. If a student had that problem, I caught up with them in person and told them about it. Mostly, on first drafts, I attended to meaning, organization, and sticking to the point, and it would have been terribly unfair to tell them to fix the errors in paragraphs I was telling them to delete. It wasn’t until the final draft that I noted the minor things, and even then I usually just put a check-mark in the margin, meaning they should find the error themselves and correct it.

I often had a line of students at my desk asking me what a few of the checkmarks meant. That was okay because generally they had already corrected most of the stuff independently, instead of depending on a teacher to “make it bleed.” Too many English teachers think students will learn from gallons of red ink. They never have and they never will. They look at all your careful corrections, and they feel discouraged, toss the paper in the trash, and then get snippy about the grade. No, you have to make them edit their work themselves.

I didn’t do that with every kid. Sometimes I told them to take their drafts to the learning specialist. Sometimes I told them to get a friend or a parent to read it aloud to them so they could catch their mistakes themselves. I wanted my students to use all the tools and services that were available to them instead of trying to hide from them. Parents often coach children to hide from assistance, fearing that getting help means being perceived as flawed. As a person with ADHD, I am all too familiar with the feeling that one is supposed to struggle in isolation. But the idea is to produce independent writers, not passive ones. All that happens with lots of red ink is that students grow up and turn into grammar bullies themselves, because that’s how they think the world works.

Walking to, with, or away from.

I believe in walking, or in putting one foot in front of the other, if you prefer.

Almost every day, I leave my house in the city to “run errands.” I put it in quotes because sometimes my errand is to pick up groceries or iboprufen, or to run to the hardware store for light bulbs. Just as often, the errand is just to check that the stores are still there. At any rate, I leave the house at least once a day and walk a mile (or two, or five), errand or no errand. I’m not precisely getting exercise.

Walking the way I do it is not about fitness, even though it serves that purpose just fine.

No, the older I get, the more I realize that fitness is an incomplete, vague goal. Fitness for what? For being alive? I think perhaps I will choose to be alive, instead of trying to prepare myself for the possibility of being alive.

Walking in the sense I mean isn’t just locomotion. It’s walking to, of course, but it’s also walking with, or even walking away from. To, with, or away from nothing in particular. The destination appears as a result of the walking, not prior to it. Or perhaps the destination is right there within me. I just leave the house. Every day. I walk out with my thoughts and my feelings, letting them settle, paying attention to how I feel, trying to look at what’s around me.

I do not walk fast. I just go. Sometimes I happen upon a bus stop, and on impulse I board and go somewhere farther away (I have a pass), and when I arrive, often I turn and walk back home. Sometimes I take photos of what I see. By the time I return to my house, I have been out in the world long enough. I have been around the products of human ingenuity and of human carelessness, around the glorious and hilarious variety of human beings and of urban wildlife, to know who I am and what I think and how small I am. I come back into the house feeling as if I’m the appropriate size.

At some times in my life, I also simply walk away. That’s how I find out I’m really upset. When I was young and wrestling with family dynamics and early failures, I used to walk in the middle of the night on the college campus near my house, drifting in the darkness between the trees on the wooded path I knew by heart, and avoiding other human beings entirely.

When my mother died, I had no space to grieve. The morning after her death, I left the house before the sun came up, and walked for miles. Because I took a few photos of odd things I saw, I know I covered the miles between Center City Philadelphia and a gazebo in the heart of Fairmount Park, just walking. Walking, looking, and thinking. When I was able to consider coming back, I did.

I’ve already been out walking today. It is cold and I’m busy, so it was a short walk. I paid some bills, mailed a check, deposited some cash, and took a couple of buses in between. But the errands weren’t the purpose of the walk.

The bank teller gave me his recipe for hot chocolate, a white man on the bus was evangelizing a black man in a loud and resonant voice, and I picked up a fallen trash can and placed it upright, but those little events weren’t the purpose of the walk, either.

The point was to go. To go, and then to come back. The most important thing that happened was that the pavement traveled past me. The buildings got bigger and then smaller as I walked. The cars hissed along in the road, carrying their human freight. And I put one foot in front of the other, and paid attention.

Resolution

I absolutely believe in resolutions, even though every year I’m told (in annual articles as predictable as the resolutions themselves) that they don’t work.

Mind you, I’m not really a fan of the wholesale New Year’s Resolution. My resolutions are lower-case, and can start any time. Resolutions are a way of trying things out. Sometimes they are the start of a daily habit, or they result in accomplishments I didn”t think I could achieve. Other times, resolutions don’t succeed at all, and I learn something new about myself.

I have some rules for effective resolutions. First, they have to be really, really simple. Then, make them even simpler, until they are evaporated down into crystals. After that, do them almost every day. It’s okay to skip occasionally. And don’t do them all day. Five minutes counts. Perfectionism just results in not doing anything at all.

Then there are the general resolutions. Those aren’t tasks. They’re things to remember, ideas, guidelines. Here’s a little list of my current ones.

I have enough.One at a time.Plan. Pack. Put away.

That’s it.

They are short enough to use as reminders, and short enough to remember.

“I have enough” applies to buying things, but it also goes for trash-picking, and seconds at dinner if you’re full. It applies to over-packing bags for trips, too. It prevents operating from a position of deprivation or craving. “I have enough” is a useful reminder.

“One at a time” used to include the words “one book, one project, one task.” But that’s too specific. It’s just a reminder that no one can do two things at once. Say “one at a time” and put the other thing away. It means “pay attention” but it also means “do what you’re doing.”

“Plan. Pack. Put away.” This is the power resolution, especially the last one.

Plan: Have a good idea of tasks that need doing. Keep one list and revise it regularly. Pack: Get out the tools and materials that go with the current task. Put away: When done with something, even if just for now, it gets put away. No matter what. Never assume you will get to it later. Never leave things out as a “reminder.” Put them on a list and then put them away.

Your mileage may vary. These are just the New Year’s resolutions that stuck. I don’t remember the ones that didn’t.

Living in the story

When I was young, I told myself stories. Or rather, I lived in the stories I told myself. It was daydreaming on steroids, not confined to lying in bed at night or sitting idle, but all the time. Most of the stories were not about me, but about my characters, such as angels, warriors, sorcerors, and even people in the books I read and the series I watched. When I wasn’t storytelling I was reading, or watching television.

These days, you might expect that a child’s intense absorption in fantasy might capture the attention of a teacher, and might lead to testing and diagnosis. Actually, though it was only the 1950s, it did.

I was so extremely inattentive, , disorganized, impulsive, and even destructive that the school insisted on testing me. The results meant I was skipped from second to third grade in the middle of the year, instead of being held back. Because I was still nonfunctional, therefore, my story-telling intensified, and so did my misbehavior, and I got steadily worse.

In my twenties, half way through school and completely unable to do anything, I had to learn, slowly and painfully, to pay attention to what was actually in front of me. To tell the story of my real-life self. One small step at a time, I finished college, got a job, married, raised a child, went to graduate school, and started a career as a teacher.

I still told stories, but I was writing them down, not living in them. I even got a couple of books published. But I couldn’t spend my days dreaming of the stories I was telling, because I was too busy. I had to force myself to sit down and get in the writing mood when I was writing. I had to steal time to do it. That felt wrong.

It turned out when I was the main character in my own life story, and when I was really paying attention to the escalating plot of real life, I didn’t actually have time to focus on my stories.

I kept writing. But I couldn’t daydream. Couldn’t immerse myself. Actually being in my life as the main character meant I couldn’t just drift off. I had to be present. I couldn’t even read the way I used to, because real life kept intruding.

I missed my stories so much. I was writing, but I wasn’t in the story any more.

Then I retired and took a part time job. I got my life organized, I tidied up my house, and I got rid of possessions I don’t need. I republished my books, and wrote another one. The pandemic intervened and I ended up quitting even my part time job.

Now I notice something I should have noticed during the past year when I was writing The Stick Princess. All the time, I am thinking about what I’m writing, but it doesn’t mess things up any more.

I actually look as if I’m paying attention.

Inside, though, I’m saying excitedly, “Emphasize that the final scene is on Christmas Day! Work Charon’s statement to Orpheus into the climax! Combine those two characters! What if I did it this way instead?” *

The stories are back. Well, Story is back.

Of course, it’s all Story, isn’t it?

*The current novel has always had the title Dog of the Dead because Lost Dog of the Dead is too long. The second novel in the series is tentatively School Dance of the Gods because Dance of the Gods seems misleading. I haven’t decided on the third book’s title. Elemental School won’t work because it’s a dumb pun and the protagonist of the series is a middle school teacher, but Earth, Air, Fire and Water are main players. Any ideas for titles? I suck at titles. My publisher named my first two books. I have to have titles because my awesome graphic designer will be free to make some covers for me in January. What? I’m rambling? I’m in the story again.

P.S. I fixed the typos in the paperback version of Stick Princess. That required reformatting and re-uploading the whole thing, which took ages. There were only three typos, and I almost considered letting them go, but I’m between revisions right now so I could afford to lose a day. If you were considering buying the paperback, let it go for a couple of days until the revision is live.

Chilly comfort reading

I have been lately avoiding too much political news, because being informed is not the same thing as making a difference, and because the winter months are hard for me. Instead, I’ve been reading books that put humanity (and the universe itself) in perspective. One is Katie Mack’s The End of Everything, which is a delight. I find it perversely cheering to be reminded that the universe will not last forever. Not only that, it quite possibly could be ending right this moment. There are many, many ways astrophysicists can imagine that reality itself will unravel;, and Mack explains all of those possible ends with the maximum possible clarity. That doesn’t mean I actually understood all of it, just that I had faith she had done the best possible job of presenting something utterly incomprehensible.

The other was A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth by Henry Gee, which presents a paleontological/geological/biological overview and is just as clear and thorough as Katie Mack’s book. Hominins only appear in the 9th chapter of 12, and though the book is aimed at human life forms to read (we being the ones who read such things), it is most decidedly not upbeat on the prospect of our continued existence. He isn’t blaming the usual culprit, global warming. He’s just pointing out that extinctions are routine on Earth and we’re due for one some time. Catastrophes have many times nearly ended life on Earth, whether they were asteroids, volcanoes, or just the routine ice ages that come and go.

Yes, I find it cheering to read such things in the holiday season. I am reminded that my little life (the one that is “rounded with a sleep” as Prospero says in The Tempest) is most unimportant in the larger scheme, and I might as well enjoy what I have, while I have it.

That said, I received two physical copies of The Stick Princess in the mail yesterday and every time I looked at them, my eyes welled up. How lucky I am to be alive, if just for this specific moment in the Anthropocene Age! I happen to know of three typos in the book, thanks to the diligence of a reader, but I haven’t corrected them because I am all too aware it would throw off the formatting. Jess Johnson, my cover designer, worried that the files she made for me wouldn’t do for a physical book, but I am here to tell you the book looks just wonderful.

Better than expected.

I was a classroom teacher for a long time. The job tends to weed out drones almost instantaneously; something about the daily weeping and constant despair of the first years tends to discourage people who are in it for the salary. My husband kept saying for decades, “Surely this should be getting easier?” I would glare at him. Sometimes, in February, I would drift past colleague’s classrooms after the children were gone for the day, look in, and see them, pale and grim, staring down at papers or computers, or talking to parents on the phone.

Teachers have high expectations for themselves, and the rest of the world does too. The image of the teaching saint persists in society, as does the idea of the drone, and neither one is true. I got through decades of teaching by concentrating on showing up for my students and myself, and by celebrating the small differences I made to them. I kept my expectations low enough to make them achievable, and because of that, I was able to keep teaching. I didn’t burn out. I’m not saying I gave up. I’m saying I set the bar a little lower than perfection.

And I celebrated my little successes, and took little credit for the big ones. For instance, the mother of one of my students told me he got into Juillard because I got him interested in theater in sixth grade. I’ll take a tiny bit of credit for that. But mostly his achievements came about because he and his mother are awesome, not because of me.

What I’m saying is that if you lower your expectations ever so slightly, it’s so much easier to keep showing up. So much easier to try to make a small difference instead of shooting for the utter transformation. Then you can celebrate when things go right.

People also have high expectations for writers that also don’t reflect reality. Media reports of author contracts tend to reinforce the glittering image of what publication means, and the layers upon layers of gatekeeping that have risen up around official publishers have intensified those images. But most published authors do not sell well, let alone well enough to make a living at it. I know that. I have lowered my expectations. My plan was to put the books online and make them available.

So I am over the moon right now. I have sold 31 copies of my books since The Stick Princess went live. OVER THE MOON.