Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 52

My Friday

We've been in New Orleans all week. It seems we've been here a lot in the past few years—this is the third time since last May—and though I always say "maybe we should just move here" whenever we leave St. Louis for someplace else, I have to admit that I wouldn't do well in this city. I love it, but it's too warm and too humid.

Mind you, St. Louis is not much better, which is why I always cast my eye northward (like Yukon).

I'm looking forward to our next visit in May for Saints & Sinners, but I'm also looking forward to being home, which is what the picture above reminded me of, as I watched this lady walk her Westie past Café Lafitte in Exile across the street from the Clover Grill. It'll be nice to get back to Dakota and Anya. Work? Well, we'll worry about that on Monday.

While I've been here, I've finished writing a short story, which will be submitted to the editors of an anthology as soon as I get this post wrapped up and give it one more once-over—thanks go out to my two beta readers who graciously sent me feedback on short notice. You guys are great. Me, I'm still not sure, which is the topic of this essay from Glimmer Train's March bulletin, on when doubt is actually a good sign.

Is it sad that checking the mail is the highlight of my day?

Perhaps it is. Nevertheless, there we are.

Right after I graduated from college and got my first job in St. Louis, I couldn't really afford to go out. I spent most of my free time in my postage stamp of an apartment reading. Going downstairs to check the mail reminded me there was existence beyond my couple hundred square feet. (Bear in mind, this was before e-mail, and cell phones weren't as ubiquitous as they are now, so long-distance calls were expensive.

Yes, there really was a time like that.)

It's still one of the routines I look forward to every day, even though most of the post now consists of bills, advertisements, and junk.

Well, and literary magazines that are piling up in the magazine bin and threatening to tip over. Why do I subscribe to so many?

I nany case, it was a very pleasant surprise yesterday to get an honest-to-gods handwritten postcard. From abroad, no less! Charles Dickens' birthplace is one of the many locations being visited by A.N. Devers, who runs a website called Writers' Houses dedicated to "exploring writers' spaces and art of literary pilgrimage." As part of this project, she used a Kickstarter project to help make possible a trip to London where she's visiting 15 writers' houses in 15 days. As you can see from the postcard, she made it to the Dickens birthplace. (She also reports that the garish sign overhead has been replaced by something much more tasteful.)

It still helps to get a reminder that life is going on outside the front door, beyond the city limits, across the border. For some reason, getting a piece of cardboard with a handwritten note halfway around the world from one country to another seems a more impressive feat than my inbox going ding. I need to write more letters. Heck, I need to write a letter.

NOTE TO SELF

A four-day weekend helped me get a lot of things accomplished. Dakota got groomed (as you can see in the photo below), he got taken for his semiannual vet visit, and I submitted to the needle for my (always depressing) cholesterol test.

And I finished the first draft of chapter eight. That's a good thing, isn't it?

The further along that I go, the more I realize I will likely end up diverting from my outline. But, a first draft is fun, in its way. For me it's all about putting my head down and barreling through. Getting everything on paper. As a result (I learned this trick from my friend 'Nathan), the first draft has lots of square-bracketed, all-caps passages that I label NOTE TO SELF. If I write something that contradicts an earlier chapter or needs to be explained earlier in the manuscript, it gets a NOTE TO SELF. If I change a name, NOTE TO SELF. Alter a character's appearance? NOTE TO SELF.

Change the shape of reality as my characters know it? NOTE TO SELF.

I often wonder if I'm working as efficiently as possible, but then I wonder how long it would take me to learn a different way.

But enough about that.

I've added another book to my to-read list after reading this interview with Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. What I especially like about the interview, besides that I see more than a bit of myself in the description, is that she also points out there is a difference between being introverted and being shy. Also, that she points out there's a cost to be paid when you try to be something (extroverted) that you're not. Unfortunately, we live in an extrovert-centric world, and I find it just exhausting sometimes. As if being lefthanded weren't enough.

A reading, a chapter, and a well-groomed dog

If yesterday showed me anything, it's that I should post to my blog more often. Thursday's post got more traffic than the blog typically gets in an entire week. (Granted, that's not hard to do, considering my usual track record is once a fortnight.) Mind you, I also think that "Don't speak unless you can improve the silence" is a good rule to live by, so let's hope I have something to say more often.

And I do have something to say today. Mark your calendars for March 13 (that's a Tuesday), when I'll be doing a reading and book signing at the St. Louis Artists' Guild at 7 p.m.. I'll be reading from Detours, my first novel, and might sneak in an excerpt from my work in progress. Want more details? My fellow writing group member Jeannette put together a nifty little flyer.

Right. I took today off to work on Chapter Eight of book #2, and I'm going to get back to that. Finishing Chapter Seven last week felt like slaying a dragon, and working on this one feels more like attending to a petulant child. I also took Dakota to the groomer, and he turned out quite nicely. Do you want to see a picture? Of course you do:

Dying of neglect

Do you remember those Tamagotchi pets that were all the rage for about five minutes back in the 1990s? You had a virtual electronic "pet" you had to pay attention to or—get this—it would DIE.

A bit grim, if you ask me.

Still, if my blog were a Tamagotchi, it would be a shriveled husk lying on its back with its legs curled in the air. I'd promise to be more regular, but, to paraphrase, I won't write checks my blog can't keep.

It's not like I'm not writing, though. Having currently sort-of slain the beast known as chapter seven, I've plunged into chapter eight only to realize that chapter seven, which weighed in at a healthy, hefty (checks count) 8,032 words, is most likely chapter seven plus a decent bit of chapter eight. On the one hand, yay. On the other hand, where do I split this thing?

Maybe chapter seven is just too long.

It's odd, because I've been writing these middle chapters (it's outlined out to chapter 16) while my friend David has been reading and giving me feedback up through chapter six so far. (I suppose I could give him chapter seven and say, "Where would you end it?" but that just seems, well, lazy—and a little mean.)

Right, now that I've pressed the blog's buttons a bit, I'm sure I've staved off any terminal condition, so I'm going back to writing chapter eight. Meanwhile, here's a picture of my cute dog, whom I have managed to keep alive for years now.

New ways to chase your tail

So, my friend Laura asked me to write a top 10 list for her online magazine at the beginning of the year. I thought, "Great, I'll do a top 10 favorite books of 2011."

I used to keep a running tally of books I've read on this blog until, well, I guess I got busy and Goodreads just made it so much easier to do, and so the list is languishing. (I should take it down, shouldn't I? I probably should. Maybe later.)

What was I saying? Oh yeah. Top 10 books. I looked at my Goodreads page and realized, much to my dismay, that I read a whopping 17 27 books last year. (See, originally I thought I'd read only 17, then I realized I added a slew of books all at once that I'd read in a madcap dash, so I feel slightly better.) In any case, not even half of those books came out in 2011. Most were much older. So, how could I really write a top 10 list when the number of books published in 2011 that I'd read was probably, oh, 15?

Far from definitive. (Be that as it may, I will say that my favorite book from 2011 was Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones. She is brilliant. Read her. Seriously, step away from your computer, go to your local bookstore, and get this book. Don't worry, we'll be here when you get back.) So, no top 10 list from me.

But.

Since my novel came out last year, I discovered many new ways to obsess about things completely beyond my control. So, without further ado, let me tell you about a few of them:

Novelrank.com

This is a wonderfully evil little website that allows you to plug in the ISBN number for your book and get sales information from a variety of sources. It's like watching your novel tread water in (sort of) real time!
Amazon Author Central.

As much as I find Amazon kind of icky, if you've got a book for sale there, you can set up an AuthorCentral account and see just how many copies have sold over the past eight weeks. You can even see where they sold, when, and in what format (not surprisingly, I've had a lot of sales in St. Louis).
On the other hand: The joys of having a good publisher. In case you've been living under a rock, my novel, Detours , was published this past November by Bold Strokes Books. I've had the good fortune to contribute short fiction to several of their anthologies in the past three years or so, and I've found them to be uniformly supportive and encouraging. Which helps. A lot.
The fear of the sophomore slump: I'm working on my next book, and I'm behind schedule, and I keep wondering if it'll be good enough.
On the other hand: Editors are still asking me to contribute stories for their anthologies, so I guess it's not all bad.
BONUS: Realizing you will please some people ("Hey! 5-star review!") but you will never please everyone ("Wow, 1-star? Harsh.") This is as it should be, really.

Wherein I ponder the sophomore slump

Over at Untreed Reads—which has published two of my short stories: New Normal and Maternal Instincts (the one I like to describe as "a desperate housewife with fangs")—they've been shining the spotlight this month on authors from the Show-Me state (that's Missouri for those not in the know), and while I'm not from Missouri, I'm certainly in  Missouri. Today I'm blogging over there on my fear of the sophomore slump, and while I'm slogging away on chapter seven of book #2, I seem to be settling into the long dark teatime of the novel's soul.

Oh, and in case you haven't got them yet, those two stories and a lot of others are on sale this month, 30% off. (Cheap and easy, that's me.) You've got another day to get them. Just sayin'.

Uncomfortable realizations

If you haven't listened to Mike Lawson's podcast, What Some Would Call Lies, I recommend this week's episode, even though it's a fucking Debbie Downer (those were his words, by the way). It was about a city council meeting he had to cover when he worked at a newspaper, and it got me thinking.

I had to cover a hospital board of trustees meeting when I was a reporter in college (our university ran the morning daily for the city, and I sometimes felt kind of bad for the people who subscribed because we were definitely still in training). By the end of the meeting I realized that there was absolutely nothing newsworthy to write about. The guy running the desk that night, a graduate student, told me I'd better start pulling copy out of my ass.

That's when I realized I wanted to kill every fucking graduate student who was ever an asshole to me. At the Mizzou Journalism School, that would have taken a while.

In any case, I wrote my required copy on how basically nothing happened and it ran in the next morning's paper. Before I even left the newsroom, I realized I never wanted to be a reporter. That was freeing as well as frightening: I'd wanted to be a reporter ever since my parents mentioned it as something I could do to support myself while I was writing fiction. First of all, while that sounds like a great idea in theory, it just doesn't work, at least for me, because the last thing I wanted to do once I got home was write any more. Second of all: now what? I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life, and I was almost done with college.

Fortunately, I did keep writing fiction. I also discovered that I was a pretty darn good copy editor and a competent graphic designer. But I realized I would never win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

I'm okay with that.

Don't hate the playa, hate the game—but love the Game Night Guys

Hey! I got a shout-out on the latest episode of the Game Night Guys podcast. I left them a review in iTunes and also sent them a game that neither Michael, I, nor our friend Mikey could figure out. Seriously, the instructions were longer than most short stories I've written. They say they're going to play it in a future episode, but I predict five minutes of game play and fifteen minutes of "What were the creators of this game thinking?"

If you're not listening to Curtis and Brian, the hosts of GNG, I highly recommend their show. Before I started listening to them, my podcast choices were almost exclusively NPR broadcasts I didn't have time to listen to when they aired. But Game Night Guys is like a gateway drug, and now I listen to What Some Would Call Lies (which is the creation of former Game Night Guys cohost Mike Lawson) and How Much Do We Love. They all make the time at the gym pass much faster.

See, guys? You're helping me stay fit.

Life as an undercover Amazon

My friend 'Nathan wrote a blog post on privileged invisibility last week, and it got me thinking about my childhood hero, Wonder Woman. Which, of course, provides a perfect excuse to post this amazingly awesome video:

No, really, I do have a point. Stay with me here.

I think one of the main reasons I liked Wonder Woman, apart from the bullet-deflecting bracelets, the superhuman strength, and the patented Exploding Disco Spin®, is that she was a woman with a secret—what gay kid can't relate to that?—and she was able to fly under the radar as an ordinary working woman, whether she was a junior naval officer in wartime or a special government agent. (Admittedly, neither of these are ordinary jobs, but still.) When she needed to, though, with just a turn on her heels, she could be something—someone—amazing.

Wouldn't it be nice to see ourselves that way?

Admittedly, I'm long past the time when I was so deep in the closet I could see last year's fashion trends. On the other hand, I can easily imagine circumstances where I might not make quite so big a thing about it (hello, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Iran, among others). I also think about people who can't hide their secret—people of color, women, transgendered people, or the kid who is just so gay that it's simply out there for the whole world to see.

Whoever he or she is, I really love that kid, by the way.

Some secrets have power over us, and some secrets, like Diana's, are our source of power. Which identity is the real one, though—the one you show, or the one you hide? Diana told her sister that her secret identity allowed her to be in the right place at the right time, where she could help fight against the Nazis. Maybe, even if we don't realize it, our secret and our power are one and the same.

There was a quote I read once from this guy who said, basically, I believe the world would be a better place if we all put on tinfoil bracelets and spun around every day and pretended we were Wonder Woman. Me too. I like to think there's a hero in everyone, even the most unlikely of people. Even you.

Even me.

(By the way, don't forget the wind-up. It's the most important part of the spin.)