DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 78

Author Fest Recap 2012

Recap schmecap.  I didn’t take notes, I just went.

Getting me to go to a new public event is a big deal.  I kind of feel bad for the people who got me to go: who invited me to speak.  Because I had to have been whining and digging in my heels, at least subconsciously.  But, having worked with writers to get them to give me the information I need to post their good news on the blog, I shouldn’t be surprised.  You don’t think of yourself as an ornery cuss on a day-to-day basis, but dealing with all the crap of being an “author” comes as a bit of a shock.  What?  Me?  Have a book out?  It can’t be so, and thus your request for more information to help promote my book therefore also can’t be so.  Writers don’t really invest experience points in not making an ass of themselves.

I went.  Ruh was there.  I have to admit, this being the first time that I’ve seen him since he had his leg off for cancer, that it was startling.  It was like being in the Matrix.  Unless you knew, unless you were watching for it, it didn’t seem like he was missing a leg.  I could look at the stump, just look right at it, and so not want to see it that I felt like it was deja vu or something, a living illusion.  There was a leg there, I just couldn’t see it.  I sat down next to him and gave him scritches, getting down into the skin.  While I was doing it, Chris, his owner, said that he’d been losing weight, every time he went to chemo, he lost weight, but until she said it, I couldn’t see it.  His skin was loose, and his harness seemed like it was too big for him, but I just couldn’t see it.  I ended up putting a film of dirt and dog hair all over my black pants, and I had to use Chris’s de-linter roller to get it all off.  She just carries that kind of stuff around with her.  Normally, Ruh doesn’t make all that much eye contact with people, but this time: he was staring at me, not teeth-bared or anything, just staring at me like a little kid would do, to get you to come here when they had to be quiet.  Come here and be with me.

I talked at a class for indie book publishers; it went fine.  Deb had been talking the hour before, so she didn’t talk much.  Ron Cree talked about getting screwed over by his publisher, and explained (it seemed logical) why he wanted to go indie (he hasn’t yet).  He’s still keeping his options open.  Bob Spiller talked about getting screwed over by his publisher, and explained that indie publishing was kind of fun.  I talked about…well, being petty and jealous about a friend who was indie publishing as I was in the middle of the “get as many rejections as possible” challenge.  And about getting a book rejected because publishers had too many similar things in their lists.  I could have talked about getting screwed by my publisher, too, but–them’s the breaks.  Newbie writers = sheep.

Barbara Samuel/O’Neill gave this shining beauty of a speech asking what, as a writer, you believed in.  She stood up there in teal flip-flops, a housedressy-looking thing, and a long, white sweater that went all the way down to her calves, which look strong and ropy enough to run marathons with, and looked exhausted.  Part of me hopes she doesn’t read this, but she did, she looked exhausted.  I’ve never seen her other than polished up to a high sheen, looking like she loves life and is beautiful without trying.  But there she was, looking exhausted, and giving one of the most inspiring speeches I’ve ever heard.  I’m tearing up over it now.  That was Friday.  On Saturday, she looked more like I’m used to.  It was like an illusion, except I remember that it really happened.  I feel like she gave me a gift, that she bent over backwards to show up to give it to me, and I think I’m more grateful for it, because she didn’t have the juice to do it that day, and she did it anyway, and I needed it.  It also made me realize that, no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be Barbara Samuel, and that even to try would be a kind of eye-rolling stupidity.  She does the best Barbara Samuel there will ever be; I just have to let that go.

But, here’s a starter list of things I believe in:

I believe that none of us are wise enough;
I believe in soft blankets, in shirts that are soft on the inside, in secret, so you can wear them when the days are hardest and nobody will ever know that you’re surrounded by softness;
I believe that kids don’t cry in grocery stores because of brattiness, but because of an essential injustice of someone not listening to them;
I believe that it’s bullying to threaten to throw away your kids’ toys if they don’t behave;
I believe that being among trees or in a garden or in any place is different than seeing a picture of it, that it’s important to go;
I believe that sometimes I love the idea of mice invading the house in the winters, and sometimes I hate it, and it doesn’t make me two different people;
I believe in the power of putting things in order, but not in any old order, in the order that they were meant to have, even when that looks like chaos;
I believe in cleaning in order to make room for a new mess;
I believe in cleaning in order to get my head on straight;
I believe that people will tell you all kinds of shit to get you to behave, even if you tell them that you have special dispensation not to have to behave the same way they do, and they won’t even know it;
I believe that I like to follow rules more than I like to disobey them, and that scares me;
I believe in the power of comfort, not so much of comfortable–I’ll refuse to eat, to drink, to get up to pee, to take a Tylenol, all kinds of things, when I’m busy–but when I’m hurt, where I go is for the chocolate and my husband’s big arms.
I believe that there’s an art to babble, but not a craft; you just have to let go and try it;
I believe in stories, although I often find that movies are too slow;
I believe in knitting, and how it makes movies go at just the right speed, which amazes me;
I believe in laughing when someone makes an ass of themselves, not because they’re ridiculous, but because it makes me feel like we share something in common;
I believe that editing might be the opposite of LSD, that it anchors you so hard in reality that it becomes painful to be there, like when Terry Pratchett describes Vimes as being two drinks too sober and whatnot;
I believe that writing has to invoke the power of babble, that you can learn all the craft you like, but you still have to get to the point where it all just runs out of you, without…stuttering;
I believe in cracked sidewalks with tree roots under them being better than new sidewalks;
I believe in trees;
I believe in looking at the world as though you could break everything into bits and pieces and use them to make something else, or that you could use what’s there as the basis for pasting something else on top of it; the world as balanced between a wrecking ball and decoupage;
I believe in being a smartass;
I believe in doubt as a type of belief, as a calling, as a craving, as a beautiful embrace that forgives just about everything;
I believe that I have something inside me, that everyone has that thing inside them, but that we don’t know it for what it is;
I believe in walking my daughter to school;
I believe in telling her the truth, even when she’s not ready for it, even when I quail in fear that she might ask;
I believe that my memories are full of holes and re-recordings and scratchy remixes, but for all that, they are all I have to truly remember with;
I believe that it’s good to take naps, to drink tea, to stare off into space and make people say, “What?  What?”;
I believe in cats and guinea pigs, and I believe in some dogs but not all of them; they’re too human;
I believe in the power of boredom and of brainstorming log lines while in meetings;
I believe that sometimes when you meet someone, you really do fall in something with some of them, although it’s not necessarily love as we normally think of it;
I believe that good hearts are inheritable, and that what some people think of as bad hearts are really good hearts that have gone too long inside a fortress, trying to keep from getting hurt, being bored, being railroaded into something they didn’t want;
I believe that yes, when the little kid brings you the plastic ringy phone and says it’s for you, you answer that shit.
And more, but I’m bored of typing this stuff up now.

The staff that ran the catering was incredible: I heard that two days before the event, the original caterers dropped the hell out.  I ate and ate and ate and tried to stop eating, oh, but the chicken soup, oh, but that salad, oh, but those cookies.  I had to leave the gluten-free stuff alone.  Everyone was like, “Oh, that gluten-free stuff is great!” But I was trying so very hard not to be selfish with it.  I know that the people who need it, really need it, and it’s hard to find a replacement.  I felt like I would be denying someone else a snack, just because I like to try everything.  But I broke down and ate some of the GF cookies anyway.  They were delicious, mostly better than the regular ones.  There were figs on the cheese plate.  I tried to explain to someone–Deb Courtney, maybe?–that figs were the fruit that made me realize that still lifes with fruit weren’t just completely idiotic.  She wanted to know–yes, it was Deb–about kiwis.  I explained that they were the wrong color.  Then, afterwards, added that they wouldn’t have been contemporary for the still lifes I was thinking off, the 18th-century masters, I think.  The sepia tinge, the anatomical exactitude of detail.  Nope, couldn’t have been kiwis.  Kiwis are an Andy Warhol kind of fruit.

I stayed for the last session to listen to Deb Buckingham talk: about turning hobbies into nonfiction books.  She’s having a new book come out, Dishcloth Divas. For some reason, the way she explained how to go from one to the other made sense, and I felt like lo, the heavens opened, I can now conceptualize how to write that kind of thing on my own, instead of following other people’s outlines.  It was a nice moment, but probably more complex than that: I’ve been going, “Could I come up with a class for that?”  lately, too.  Plus, talked about craft stuff.  Apparently, I should be able to listen to nonfiction–podcasts–on audio, but I shouldn’t expect to be able to both knit and listen to fiction; it seemed to throw most of the group.  More people knit than you know, I guess.  I’m looking forward to the book, but I want to get it in print, because it’ll be so pretty.  Deb talked about using Pinterest to store pictures with good color design, so she could design projects around the colors: I love that.  I just love it.  I wanted to ditch the next day of Author Fest at that point and go knit shopping, but I knew that that would be an irresponsible thing to do.  I’m going to pick up mats for my next project before next weekend, though, so I’ll have something soothing to do in the middle of stressful times.

And then I went home, because.  Other writers can throw themselves into the maelstrom of art and other people at the same time, but it drains me.  For example, when I come home from Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference, I’m exhausted and depressed.  I feel like I’m not a real writer, not even a hack, just a wannabe, just an idiot.  Emotionally drained.  But here–I came home tired, yes, but still able to function.  ”Oh, you have a family to take care of,” people said.  Now, days later, I have the better response: “They can take care of themselves.  I need to take care of me.”  But then, I kind of just stumbled throug it.  It’s hard to resist peer pressure wittily; at least I resisted it and went the hell home.

Okay, I’m bored writing posts now, so I’m off.  (The real reason I started writing this was that I’d burned out my editing eyes on two current editing projects today, and I wanted to try to wait it out so I could get more work done, so really, I should jump back in and finish the current section.)  More later, maybe tomorrow if I get stuck on something.  For some reason, that kept coming up this time, too: “Do you work on multiple things at the same time?” Everyone wanted to know.  Is it in the water?  What?  I kept telling people: “I do, but it’s not like that’s a good thing.  I just work on something until I get so stuck I feel like I can’t go on, and then I work on something else.  Sometimes I come back–I always promise myself I’ll come back–but sometimes I don’t.  It would be better to just be able to focus.”  It would, but I run out of one particular type of attention, and I just have to switch gears or give up for the day.

–Lee’s truck door slams with a content kind of thump.  Now it’s really time to go.

 

 

 

The story I didn’t want to write hasn’t gone away yet.

So, the story I didn’t want to write hasn’t gone away yet, and it still feels like world-building for it is one of the hardest, slowest things I’ve had to do for a Very Long Time.

So far: it’s an epic fantasy about the power of belief.  Wow, which sounds…completely the opposite of what I mean.  Because when most people say something like that, they mean, “Faith will save us all!  Put your faith in XXX!!!” and it turns into a big preach-fest.  Some things that I’ve loved that went into my idea were John Scalzi’s The God Engines, where faith has power but can kill; the Thomas Covenant books, where a lack of belief can be a survival trait (if, admittedly, an ugly one); the Mistborn Trilogy, where the good faith of the characters usually made things much, much worse (but had to be done).

A few things that I know:

The name of the “home” country is Jerradyn, named after the scout who first “found” the place.
Some of the history, mostly that of the gods.
The main character, who’s named Grist and likes to say things just to piss people off.
That the world is flat, but not one-sided; it’s called the Coin, with Jerradyn on the “new” side, the Reverse.
That good storytelling can create a temporary, phantom image of the world, an eidolon.

I know more than that, but I can’t say all of it.  That would just be silly.

The official story about the gods, by the way, is that the One God existed for all time, and that the One God of the East and the One God of the West  are just other aspects of the One God, duh.

But there’s a second story, that the three One Gods are brothers, sons of the Creator, who, having birthed the world, moved on to create other things: She was a busy woman, after all.  The inhabitants of the Coin can never get to those other worlds.  Also, the One Gods have names that they only share among themselves.

–Oh, but I forgot to mention that there’s more than just the One God; there are helper gods, demigods that embody this or that particular thing, and people tend to ally themselves with one or another of them, which gives them certain advantages, usually related to their occupation.  And, if you were to go out for beers with one of those gods and ask them what the real story is, they would admit that they have no idea what the truth of the matter is, only that belief has a demonstrable power, and that they have never seen any evidence of a Creator god, but that the One God certainly exists.  Probably.

Grist, who starts out as this torn-up skinny shit with anger issues related to failing as a mage, tells people, not that anyone asks, that the world is a pimple on the Creators ass (that is, on Her fundament), or that everyone is trapped in a long, convoluted story told over a game of dice, or that the inhabitants of the Coin are the descendants of a better, worthier world, that have been kicked out for being useless twats.  That seems to be Grist for you.

I have this feeling, when I’m building things for stories, that you’ve found a good piece of the story when it clicks and you start spawning sub-stories off it.  The story behind the One God (not telling) was one piece; the different cosmological stories and Grist’s addition to the canon was another.

Speaking of stories…

Right now, I’m just finishing up The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, by Laura Miller.  It’s such a relief to hear things that I’ve been saying for years, said much more intelligently, with a lot more research.  When I was a Christian–Narnia was part of the reason that I stayed.  When I stopped being a Christian–Narnia was part of the reason that I left, not because I saw through it, but because it just pointed out how hypocritical and repugnant the religion had become to me.  If Christianity wasn’t going to be as good as Narnia, why bother?  But Laura Miller says it better.  She also provides several inconvenient facts about Lewis himself that made me just about snort tea out my nose: ohhhhh myyyyyy (no, he wasn’t gay, but just as inconvenient for people who want to reduce Narnia down to a parable instead of a story).  Anyway, I highly recommend it.  I’ve also torn through The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simmons (fun); How to Be a Mentalist: Master the Secrets Behind the Hit TV Show, by Simon Winthrop (not especially deep but some nice techniques at the end); Sleights of Mind What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions, by Stephen L. Macknick and Susana Martinez-Cond (very nice).  I just started How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallability of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich, and it’s just painful to read, because I go, “I do that” over and over again–like the idea that scoring points runs in streaks (it doesn’t; it’s just that actually random behavior doesn’t look random), or that punishment is more effective than reward (if you base punishment/reward on an extreme behavior, the next case of it will likely be less extreme–thus, it looks like punishment works, because the next case likely isn’t as bad, and reward doesn’t, because the next case likely isn’t as good).  I’m pretty sure I’m going to be broken down in tears by the time I get done with that book.

I also read Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase (loved it!), the first two books of the Belgariad (old favorites–why do I like them so much?), the last two books of the Dragonlance chronicles (ditto), A Week to be Wicked by Tessa Dare (hrm, okay, but a sense of sex scenes stuck together by a slather of plot rather than an actual romance), and I tried to read Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer but just about fell asleep.  If there’s a better Heyer book to start with, let me know; it seems, with my affection for that period, that I should like her stuff.  I also started Lord Foul’s Bane again, which, I just realized, I’ve read more often (and enjoyed more) than The Lord of the Rings books (although not The Hobbit, not by a long shot).  A lot of people can’t get past the rape scene: who wants to read about a main character who’s a rapist?  And yet–I can’t get over how much I like the book.  I got a thrill out of just reading the phrase “Leper outcast unclean!” It’s been probably a decade since I last read these, if not longer–I go back to the Mordant’s Need books more often, though.  And thinking about the different stories about the cosmology just makes me think of The Gap series.   Siiiigggggghhhh.  PLUS I have all those kids’ books to review.  I just keep feeling that, the mood I’m in, it’s probably better if I don’t; kids just don’t need to hear about some of this meta/neuroscience/con artist/brainwashing stuff, and it’s creeping into everything I do.

I also started on Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Body.  Whew.  This guy is a nut, a total geek, like the way Terry Pratchett describes his da Vinci analogue, Leonard da Quirm, who is constantly bombarded with ideas.  It really doesn’t matter to me whether the ideas in this book are accurate or not: I just love reading what he writes, the way he looks at things.  Admiringly, I repeat it: what a nut.

 

The LOOK Challenge: Guinea Pig Apocalypse

The “look” challenge goes like this: take your current work in progress, find the first instance of the word “look,” and post its paragraph and the surrounding paragraphs as an excerpt. Then, of course, you’re supposed to tag five other authors, but I’ll leave that as optional.  My friend Liz Barone tagged me.  Sooo merciless.

My current WIP is “Guinea Pig Apocalypse,” a story I started at Ray’s request a few months ago, then got derailed on as I got stuck on the plot.  Well, I have a better grasp of plot now, and am fixing…

—

“Mom?  Pop?” Galileo yelled over the almost electronic noise of hundreds and thousands of guinea pigs squeaking at each other, but nobody answered.

A bunch of the guinea pigs bonked into the table at the same time, shaking the top of it.  Galileo’s stuffed squirrel toy, Taquito, who he had been pretending was helping with his homework, slid toward the edge of the table, and Galileo dropped his sandwich and grabbed Taquito before he landed in the big moving wave of pigs.

The pigs pounced on the sandwich with squeaks of starving delight, and it disappeared in seconds.  He wasn’t sure what would happen if he dropped Taquito (or if he put his foot, which was only protected by a dirty sock) on the floor, but he didn’t plan to find out.

Galileo drank the rest of his milk and climbed onto the table.  The pigs were still pouring out of the basement.  He heard a crashing noise from upstairs:  they had found their way upstairs.  He yelled for his mom and pop again and didn’t hear them.

He took off his socks, stuffed them in his pocket, squished Taquito into his shirt so just his head was sticking out, and jumped from the kitchen table to the counter.  He skidded in a puddle of water and teetered back and forth above the carpet of guinea pig bodies–he was going to fall and crush the little guinea pigs!

He grabbed the cupboard door just as he started to fall backwards, and all the dishes in the cupboard rattled.  He looked around the corner of the door just as a heavy glass started to slide off the shelf…

Update:

I should say, if you liked that, check out my kids’ stuff as De Kenyon.

The Idea I Didn’t Want to Know

I was having this feeling the other day that a new idea for a project was coming toward me: I could see a pattern to the things I was seeking out.

I have a stack of books checked out (some overdue, because I’m having a hard time letting go of them) that are about magic, illusions, brainwashing, stereotyping, con men, how we fail to perceive really obvious things, the idea of “evil,” and hypnotism.  And poisons, but that book is more about how forensics got started, and how forensic tests for poisons were developed–the mental processes that people had to go through to get to the solutions.

In The Artist’s Way, the author talks about how you’re going to receive inspiration from God – well, she does say that in place of “God,” you can use whatever word you like to indicate something bigger than yourself, an orderly flow in the universe – an inspiration that feels like it comes from outside of you.

Well, I had my first one today.

Note – after I’d finished the 12 weeks.  Not during my pass through the book.

I was out on a longish walk and the point of all the research I’ve been doing hit me.   Bam!  It was like someone held an intervention to tell me something I didn’t want to know:  ”Here is what you’ve been thinking all along, the idea that you’ve needed to know but didn’t want to admit to yourself.”  –I won’t go into detail about the particular idea; it’s not ready to be talked about yet (as soon as I had the idea, it started getting pushed back down, harder to think about, harder to think clearly about).  But when it hit me, I burst into tears to the point where snot was running out of my nose.  I did not want to know this, I did not want to think about it, I did not want to admit that it might make for a decent story.  NO NO NO NO NO.

I’ve never had that kind of reaction before.  It really did feel like someone walked up behind me and said, “Look, you’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’m tired of waiting for you to admit that it’s what you’re thinking about, so I’m just going to tell you.”

And, as the idea faded, and the emotional impact of what it meant lessened, I saw that it was a good idea.  I should be writing about it, when it gets fully developed into an idea, instead of just a flash of awful insight.  It’s not a new thought; I can think of a dozen writers off the top of my head who have played with it (including Neal Stephenson; you know it’s a good idea if he’s gotten to it first).  But this is a new way of approaching it, in a new genre that you don’t usually see it in–but has been poking around the edges of this idea for awhile.  The new incarnation of an old idea, whose time has come.

Neat.

–But, as I’ve been observing lately, awe isn’t just awesome, it’s awful: it’s so big that it can’t help but be horrible and wonderful at the same time.

 

The story you tell yourself, as a writer.

On the other side of finishing The Artist’s Way, here’s something else I can see: writers are down on themselves.

A lot.

I mean, I was.  And I can see it in a lot of other people.  But now I feel like skipping, I’m so not-down on myself.  Not flying, because I have stuff to do, but, you know, walking around with a little extra spring to my step.

1) We think we suck at writing.  Even when other people look at our writing, or listen to us talk about writing, and say that we must know a lot.

2) We think we’ll never find success as writers.  Even when other people are praising our writing (and not just to be nice), or in the face of publication (“sales will suck, I’ll never get in the markets I really want to get into”) or winning prizes (“so?”).

3) When something good does happen to us as writers, we undermine it.  We freak out, stop sleeping, get sick, and believe that any minor road bumps are the real forerunners of The End.

4) We rip the holy shit out of other writers who do have success, because of minor flaws, or because their work doesn’t fit our tastes (“they sold out”).

—

So here’s how the ripples of going through the book are changing me:

Look, these are not your thoughts.  These are other people’s thoughts.  These are…society’s thoughts.  I mean, take racism.  Do you know racism as a baby?  No.  You only learn racism from other people; it’s like a virus that you pick up.  It’s not a naturally-occuring part of your brain.

1) Student doctors, student lawyers, student managers don’t go, “I suck at being a _____.”  No.  They’re students.  Before you’re a professional, you’re a student.  To think that you suck at writing because you’re a student at writing…really?  It’s irrational, and it’s non-creative disciplines don’t have to deal with it.  Why is that?

2) When other people praise doctors for saving lives, do doctors go, “I’ll never be a doctor.”  No.  When people praise your writing and they’re not trying to be nice, you did your @#$%^&* job.  You engaged them: you did your job, you did your job, you did your job.  You can’t say, “I’ll never do the job” at the exact moment that people are saying thanks for doing your job!

3) Is it really you that doesn’t want to succeed?  Or is it that you’ve been told, over and over and over, that creative work is a waste of time…and that you’re afraid that you actually are good at it, and that you might have to waste your time for the rest of your life? Because that’s all you’re good at?  Because it’s not as good as being a doctor?  Or a janitor?  Or a horse trainer?  Or a teacher?  Or a politician?  Why are you judging your profession so negatively?

4) Is the important part of a creative work…the bad parts?  Is it better to make fun of something you don’t like?  Is it okay to think that people who are a little too enthusiastic about some creative work…are crazy?  Are there barriers between you liking any kind of story?  Girls are told that horror movies are too scary for them.  So are kids.  Boys are told that romantic comedies are something that you get dragged to on date night, and you have to secretly roll your eyes all the way through them.  Upper-class, well-educated people are supposed to read literature.  Boys aren’t supposed to read…they’re supposed to play video games (despite the fact that all kinds of parents and teachers are trying their best to change this).  Society pushes our buttons about what kinds of creative work we’re supposed to like or not like.  And it pushes our buttons to tell us that being creative, and enjoying creativity, need to take a back seat to devoting yourself to your non-creative job, supporting (or raising) your family, and learning how to do same.

Be a robot.  Make more robots.

(Yes, They Live!)

In an era when nobody wants to hear anybody else’s opinion, and they certainly don’t want to risk changing their minds, creative works are encouraged to be insular and divisive.  Creative workers are encouraged…to stay within boundaries.  Or quit.  But the function of creative workers is to broaden, to share perspectives, to heal, to reveal hypocracy, to illuminate mercy and love, to mock power…

Are you a crappy writer? Could be.  But these thoughts will hold you back from becoming a non-crappy writer, so…ditch them.*

You’re not a doctor.  That’s okay.  You’re there to make sure that doctors remember that they’re doing it for their patients, not the insurance companies (thanks, Julie).  You’re there to make sure lawyers remember what it’s like to defend the innocent instead of chasing dollars (just picked up a copy of The Lincoln Lawyer, finally).  You’re there to remind people of…all the lessons that you’ve lived, that people forget about.

Think about the creative work you love.**

That’s your job.  Yes, it’s possible to learn your job.  It isn’t genius; it’s learning your job.  The way to not suck at writing is to learn your job, not to give up.  The way to succeed at writing is to learn your job, not to dismiss yourself as not really having any talent.  The way to enjoy your success as a writer is to think about what other writers have given you, and know they’ve felt as attacked by success as you have.  The way to nurture creativity in yourself is not to rip other creative people down, but to see what they did well, even if it doesn’t push your personal creative buttons…so you can do your job better.

I’ve done everything all wrong. And I’ll probably do it again, because we are just battered by people telling us how worthless we are–and the worst ones are the other creative people who buy into this crap.  ”Don’t share your process.”  ”Act like a professional and keep your failures to yourself.”  ”Enjoy it while you can.”  ”It’s just part of the business.”

Bullshit.  Here’s me, not giving up.  Not putting up, not shutting up.

Nyaaa.

You don’t have to, either.

—

*No, it’s not that easy.  I recommend The Artists’s Way, but do what works for you.

**”Anybody want a peanut?”

The End of The Artist’s Way

This is my last week of The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron.  Or maybe it’ll turn out to be the last week of my first time through.  I’m considering doing it again, because of the things that I didn’t really commit to, the first time through (in the weekly exercises).

If you haven’t been following my journey though, in short–it’s a book for creative types (including writers) who are stuck, and leads you on a twelve-week program for getting unstuck.  You spend about 30 minutes every morning freewriting (the “morning pages”), read a chapter a week, go on one “artist’s date” every week, and do exercises listed at the end of each chapter.

I thought I’d had trouble with the other weeks.  But it turns out that it’s this week where I don’t want to do the morning pages, because I don’t want to think about the things that I’m digging up.  It’s this week that I’ve been making excuses.  The last week.  Sheesh.

I don’t want to know the things I’m finding out this week.  I want to delay them.  I want to pretend to think about them before dismissing them, so I can feel like I gave these things “fair play” without really having to do so.  I’m even having trouble nailing down the timeline for all this, because my brain keeps trying to move things around so I can’t find them.  I feel it happening.

–And you’re going to laugh.  I mean, I have to laugh about it.  It feels like a life-or-death situation, and it’s just not.  That’s the way I feel; I don’t deny it.  But I’m tripping over myself to deny the things I’m figuring out.  Maybe I’ll change my mind, and it’s all just a cloud in the sky that blows away.  On the other hand, maybe I’ll bury something important.

My awareness of the dominoes tipping started with Lee’s Jeep, on Saturday.  The power steering went out in such a way that the whole power steering unit (whatever that is) was rattling around in the engine making horrible noises.  This was Saturday.  It had been getting worse, and Lee just hadn’t talked to me about it, so it came out of the blue for me.  I think he was in “I can fix it” mode until then about it, so didn’t bring it up, because it wasn’t a deal.  But Saturday we were going out for a Ray Day for Christmas in July (a “Ray Day” is where  she gets to pick out whatever she wants to do), and I was scared to ride in the Jeep, it was that loud and awful.

So we took my car: front windshield is cracked, front wheel well still shattered from an accident, uh, almost two years ago.  Driving along, a guy behind us in a traffic yelled that our tire was going flat.  It was low.  We drove to a station and added air.  A lot of air.  To a completely bald tire.

I knew it was bald.  I knew it.  And the other tires, well, let’s just say I need new ones before winter.  It being Colorado, that means I better get them before September, because who the @#$% knows, you know?

We got through the day.  I was just getting a cold, so I was headed downhill, so I pooped out before Ray did.  We went to Which ‘Wich, then to Brunswick Zone to play video games, and watched Ice Age 4, which I liked, because evil monkey pirate on an iceberg, and “Any questions?” “WHEN YOU DRINK OUT OF YOUR TRUNK DOES IT TASTE LIKE BOOGERS?!?” “NO!  Well, okay, sometimes.”  Ray wanted to do laser tag at Brunswick, but I just didn’t have it in me.  I want to do that with her sometime soon, though, so tell me if you’re up for laser tag next week (before school starts), and we’ll do it.

And we went  home.

And…all around me, I could see things running down.  Because I’m a freelancer, and I’m not making enough money at it.

I’ve started making more money at it.  But not enough, not by a long shot.  I’m always making just a smidge more money at it. Not enough.

And then Lee and I talked about what to do about the Jeep.

This Jeep…a 1996 Jeep.  Lee was describing what his buddies thought would have to be done to fix it, and he ended that story with, “And they said it would be easy to do.  But…”  Or something like that.

I said, “I think you should get a new car.”

And we talked.  We talked and we talked, and not just about cars.  What came out of my mouth, before I really even knew it, was, “I feel bad for not helping support this family.”

And he said, “I promised you five years, and I won’t go back on that.”

And I said, “I know.  I know you support me.  I know you’re okay.  I feel bad. I’m setting myself a deadline.  If I can’t make this profitable by next year about this time, I need to stop freelancing.”

In my memory, I remember him just freezing at that point.

I said, “It’s not the writing.  I love the writing.  I feel like I’m learning a lot and growing and growing.  I’m never going to stop writing; I can’t.  You don’t need to worry about me giving up on my dream, not like that.  But I don’t love the freelancing.  If it paid enough that the pain in the ass parts were worth it, then…I’d love it.  But it doesn’t, and I can’t seem to make it work that way, and it’s a lot of pain in the ass for not enough money.”

But that wasn’t the end of it.

On Sunday, I read the last chapter of the book (“Recovering a Sense of Faith”), and…

…and I started saying, “What if…what would I want to do?  For a job job?  I have a year.  I don’t have to take just damned anything.  I don’t even have to take a technical writer position.  What do I want?  What industry do I want to work in?”  Because if I don’t think about it, I’ll end up back out at a military base again.  Not that that would be horrible; it’s just that the running joke was whenever someone left, you made bets for when they’d be back, and a lot of people did come back, in a year or two.  Contracting for the military is comfy and stable, no matter what it looks like from the inside.  Your position gets cut?  They try to find something for you.  You’re family.

And I love that family, but I realized it wasn’t my first choice, because the next step from being a technical writer is either getting into management or re-tracking into another area.  You can’t expand as a writer in that environment.

So I asked Lee to come and talk to me: he went through the ritual of Internet and espresso, and when he actually woke up, I asked him if it would be okay if we moved in order for me to pursue some kind of dream job.  I didn’t have anything in mind, just…a hypothetical situation where I could a) make money at a job and b) feel excited about the job itself.  It was…just an impossible idea.  There couldn’t be a job-job that could be a dream job that wasn’t “professional writer.”  Just asking, you know, hypothetically.  He said, “As long as I can find a job, okay.”

I, of course, started leaking at the eyes.

Lately, Colorado Springs has been headed downhill.  I don’t want to say that, either, but it’s easier than everything else.  When we moved here, there were tech jobs all over the place, new cars, lots of hope.  (And then: everything closed up shop.  Just as we moved in, in 1999, and the tech jobs were all flooded with applicants.  THAT was the economic collapse, for us.  It was so, so hard.) And I loved the people: Look, I may not agree with most of them due to one reason or another, but that doesn’t really stop people from being friendly with each other.  It didn’t.  I come from the Midwest, and everyone says it’s friendly, but no.  Not like this.  People just talk to you.  Because.  There you are.  And they look at you, and they notice the odd things about you, but they don’t glare at you.  Example.  After a while, I started wearing colored Crocs out at the base, because they were comfy, and the hell with it.  OH, how they freaked out (especially ex-Marines hee hee hee) about those Crocs and how ugly and unprofessional they were.  But nobody, nobody ever expected me to actually not wear them.  I got a weird kind of respect for continuing to do so.  Nobody gave me the Iowa Glare, that implied I was insane for being just that little bit different.  They gave me the “Young Lady Marines Don’t Dress Like That and If You Were My Daughter I’d Make You Change Those” looks.  And then I just became that chick with the Crocks, go on, tell her the dirty joke and see what she does, ha ha, she made you blush, didn’t she?  Nobody ever stopped talking to me.  Until lately.

But now–the roads are full of holes, and traffic is backed up at non-rush-hour times in weird locations, and funding is always being cut for schools and firefighters and cops and streetlights and everything but the @#$%^&* churches on the north end of town, and everyone picking sides and getting too pissed to give each other friendly crap about their politics.  They’re letting the grass die out in the parks.  Because of politics.  I wanted to spend the summer exploring the town by bus with Ray, but it’s too far to walk to a bus stop in 100-degree weather this summer, too far to make it fun, because of all the bus stops are closed.  Because of politics.  I’m too pissed to talk about politics.

So we’ve been talking about moving to another town nearby, so Lee can stay at his current job.  But so we can live in a town that’s not just…letting itself fall apart.  Just to be stubborn.  A place where streets get plowed after blizzards.  And where the YMCA doesn’t own the public swimming pools, and lets them fall to pieces.  I just about cried the last time we went to the pool.

You see the theme, there?

Stuff falling apart, because you’re trying to eke things out just a little bit longer.  Just push harder.  It’ll work out.

But I’m sucking myself dry, and this town’s sucking itself dry, and maybe it’s time to stop participating in that.

Monday, we got a new car: a Mitsubishi Endeavor (2011, 35K).  I’m really proud of Lee for…the way he did the research.  One of the things we’ve been talking about lately is jumping into things because some damned salesperson talks us into them, and the inordinate amount of money that gets wasted that way, because you not only have to buy that crap, but you have to go back and buy what you really need later, too.  I told him to look at the top 5 of the things in the classes that he wanted, and he ended up with a bunch of bullshit that he disregarded.  So I had a mini-meltdown about it: not the screaming and the yelling, but the, “I can’t give you step by step directions for what you need to do, so if you didn’t get the information you needed following my directions, that doesn’t mean that you can stop looking, because you still don’t have the information you need, so don’t just go, ‘I’m going to get another Jeep,’ because the word ‘Jeep’ is just some damned salesman trying to sell you what you don’t really want.”  I was so frustrated.  But…he listened.  He really did.  He went out and came up with his personal top five, based on features and numbers, not on brand names.  (Jeeps were still in there; they aren’t bad for what he wants, not at all.)  And then we went and looked at them, and the salesman at Carmax (which I recommend, because the only pressure that guy put on us was the pressure that anyone who is obsessed with a subject puts on people who are less obsessed, not the pressure for BUY IT NOW O GOD O GOD LET ME PUSH NAMES ALL OVER YOU UPSELL UPSELL) made some other suggestions, and Lee had enough information to…assess the suggestions.  Calmly.  Rationally.  With emotion, but not led by illusion.

We’re getting better at this, I swear.  Or at least Lee has.  And when it’s my turn, I expect him to nail me down about it, too.

And that was Monday.

And on Tuesday I thought, “What if I could get a job editing at Amazon?”

One of my blue-sky dreams is to start an ezine, so I can edit it.  Not just copyedit.  But pick things out and make sure they shine.  It’s part of the reason that I’m self-publishing, because I want to…I mean, come on.  When you start listing editors as your heroes, you have to start admitting to your conscious self that you’re not just a fool for wanting to be a writer, but a fool for wanting to edit.  I dream of running a kids’ magazine for kids who hate reading.  KID PULP.  But part of me treats that like a trip to Scotland: a nice dream, but hardworking freelance writers don’t have the money for that.  I shut myself down about it.

But.

If I have permission to stop freelancing.  And I have permission to move.  And I have permission to go after a dream job.  Then.  I could ask the people at Amazon to take me, get my foot in the door, find a way to learn editing, learn more about marketing and publicity and sales, and and and!!!!!!

I couldn’t do it well yet.  I know that.  But I know…I know in six seconds or so whether a slush submission is worth reading or not. I know that it’s about the market, not the writer.   I don’t know how to make the final call yet, of what gets paid for and what doesn’t, but I’m paying attention.  I’m getting better at book descriptions.  Better at genre covers.  Better at saleable ideas.  I’m not there.  I feel like if I knew all that, I’d be selling pro markets right and left and making more money on my self-published books, and I’m not.  And there are thousands of small considerations I don’t even know about.

But.  Give me two years in that environment, and I’d be good at it.

I was trying to explain why editors tend not to send personal rejections to writers yesterday, to a writer.  She was upset.  She wanted me to be nice.  Instead of professional.  Eh, writers will suck you dry, the n00bs will.  They just will.  But give me the ones who have written a story that I like….I get depressed when the issue comes out, and it wasn’t them, it was someone else.  I love those stories.  I can’t even be jealous of them.  It’s a bit sad, but I can probably go to bat for something I truly love even harder than I can go to bat for my own stuff.  I have editor brain that can wait until it’s time to edit.  That can step into another writer’s shoes and see what the writer is trying to say.  I can mediate between the writer and the reader, not just get involved in power struggles and insist on Commas Where I Want Them (on various levels not just involving commas).

So here I am, going, “So, in a year, I might rip my family out of everything we know for a job that I don’t think I can do yet.”  And then I just shut down, trying to keep myself from really thinking about it.

I’m sure there’s all kinds of stupid reasons for not thinking about it.  And I’ll work on finding them out.  But posting this…I can’t just erase it out of my head.  I have to at least think.

So thanks for listening, and I’ll have more later.  When I’m calmed down enough to actually think instead of pretending to think and really just trying to convince myself the answer is what I think it should be.

 

The Great Dream Market Submission Project

Okay, I was doing my morning pages this morning and realized that I am a research writer: not a writer that does research or writes up research, but a test-to-fail writer.  A crash-test-dummy writer. I quit writing a short story a week so I could focus on novels, but now I feel deprived.  Wherrrrre are my short stories?  Obviously I need another project for writing short stories, one that isn’t quite as heavy (so I can still focus on novels), but where I can play with new ideas more often. Here’s what I’m noodling around:

Pick my top markets that I want to break into (aside from Apex, because I’m still getting a lot from slushing).
Make sure I always have a short story in those markets.

However, because Clarkesworld and Lightspeed are on my list (and that would be 2+ stories they could go through each month), I’m going to have to say that if I submit something to each of them per month, I’m good.

Here’s my list (very, very personally chosen; shooting for somewhere between 10 and 15 markets):

Asimov’s (sf, 39 day avg. return, up to 25K, but 7500 or less seems preferred)
Beneath Ceaseless Skies (fantasy, 31 days avg. return, secondary-world setting, under 10K)
Black Static (horror, 50 days avg return, up to 10K)
Clarkesworld (fantasy/sf/horror, 4 days avg return plus 1 week waiting before next sub, preferred length 4K)
Daily Science Fiction (fantasy/sf, 18 days avg return, up to 10K but 1K or less preferred)
Fantasy and Science Fiction (fantasy/sf, 13  day avg. return, up to 25K)
Interzone (fantasy/sf, 54 days avg return, up to 10K)
Lightspeed (fantasy/sf, 2 day avg return plus 1 week waiting, 5K or less preferred)
Nightmare (horror, 1 day avg return plus 1 week waiting, 5K or less preferred)
Weird Tales (weird tales, 100 days avg return, up to 5K)

For example, right now I have stories at:

Black Static
Interzone
Lightspeed
Clarkesworld

And a lot of the stories that work for one market will work for others.

But now I get to go, “Asimov’s.  I need to write a 3-6K story, SF.”  I like constraints like that.  Not too lose; not too tight.  I’m going to shoot for about a short story every other week, until I get caught up.

 

How to change the world: grocery stores.

My mind wanders.  Lately, I’ve been pondering a grocery store concept that I want to see.  I won’t start a grocery store.  I love to shop in them, but I wouldn’t want to run one.  So: aether, here’s your sign…

Name: Cornercopia.

Concept: Small grocery stores sized to fit in strip malls; the general idea being an ethnic grocery store that people not of that ethnicity would be comfortable going into.

Market: Gen X and younger.

Plan:

What goes into a Cornercopia would fit into one of three categories:

1. Stuff that you need to cook healthful 10-minute meals from around the globe.

2. Curious snacks.

3. Local favorites (wait for it).

So you could walk in, pick up fresh produce, bread, and proteins,  plus the one or two dry goods you needed to make something for supper, plus a weird-sounding milk soda that tastes quite delicious.  Recipe cards provided; a small fridge next to the door with “What’s for supper tonight” including all the fixings (and cooking instructions), prepackaged for two servings each: two hamburger patties (raw), two buns, two sets of sliced onion, tomato, lettuce; packages of catsup and mayo to the side (all 10 minutes or less recipes).

The secret heart of the business, though, would be a set of instructions on how to find out #3.

What is McDonald’s?  What is fast food?  It’s a set of instructions that tell each store how to make everything the same.  It’s a set of policies on how uniform food gets delivered and prepared across a planet.

So what would Cornercopia be?  The corner grocery store where, for about as much brain power as you use to obtain fast food, you can eat non-uniform food.  Local food, global food – a variety of food.  Food that you will probably like, because someone bothered to find out what you’d probably like.

 

1.  Find out who your market is and how far it goes.

Start with a definition of the range of the market.  Say walking distance is about a mile (primary customers).  Locate all public transportation stops within walking distance (secondary customers).  Define easy driving distance as about five miles (tertiary customers).

Locate all competition: bars and restaurants (including fast food), grocery stores (supermarket, ethnic, hippie food, etc.), health food stores, gas stations, convenience stores, big box stores (with and without groceries), bargain stores that sell dry goods (Ross’s, bargain grocery stores), meat and other specialty markets, liquor stores, vitamin stores, street food/food carts, soup kitchens, plus anything odd, like hardware stores that sell weird sodas (there’s a place in SoDak that Lee ran into–Mac Tools?).  Any place that sells groceries, food, meals, drinks, or even just snacks in a case by the checkout counter.

Identify demographics: income, age, number of children, education, ethnicity, how many people per household, religion, orientation, subculture, etc.  How to gather this information is something I’m pondering, because what’s obvious to a local isn’t obvious to a newcomer (and even vice versa), and it needs to be quantifiable.  I need to work out methods that can be done easily, biannually.  Define demographics separately by primary customers, etc.

Identify when demographics will change: is a college nearby? A tourist spot? Is there nightlife (and therefore different tertiary customers coming into the area at night)?

I’d want the Cornercopias to be adaptable enough to plunk down anywhere there’s a strip mall – but part of the point would be to serve people who can’t get decent food within walking distance, which, ironically, includes large sections of suburbia.

 

2.  Find out what  your market wants.

There’s a difference between what people eat out of convenience and what they would eat, if it were as convenient as the convenient food.

How do people eat?  (Convenience food, restaurants, cooking at home.)

When do they eat? (Shift work, during a commute, everyone sits down at six, children and parents together or separately.)

How much time do they spend eating? (Five minutes, several hours.)

How many people do they eat with? (An entire family, alone, in couples, in dining areas at work/school.)

When do large groups of people get together to eat, and what do they eat when they do? (Church potlucks, fish fries, pancake fundrasiers, wine tastings, fairs, birthdays.)

What are considered special occasions, and what is/is not eaten? (Birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s Day, Ramadan, Lunar New Year, retirement, housewarming.)

What are the boundaries of gift-giving? Should you bring gifts when visiting? On special occasions?  What kind of food gifts are acceptable/traditional?

Are children/elders fed different foods?

How conscious are people about eating healthful, organic, or local foods?

How conscious are people about trying new foods?  Is trying a new food seen as positive or negative?

What foods are not allowed to be eaten, and when?

What is the best way for the market to provide individual feedback (Internet, survey cards, talking to someone)?

 

5. Find out what local food is being produced in the area and assess producers.

Contact farmers, meat/fish/produce markets, farmers’ markets, competition (to check for products).

Determine how much they produce and when.

Determine the quality/safety of the products.

Determine how much the products fit with what the customer wants (this won’t be the sole factor in getting it on the shelves; a high quality might be worth offsetting a low “want”).

–This will have to be repeated on a business-wide level, too.  Plus shipping.  It might be a good idea to have procedures in place to assess local sources of items and cost to transport, too, but that wouldn’t be a store-level thing.

 

6. Find out what is/is not being provided, that your market wants.

I would love to have about a year to work on a way to do this at a company-wide level.   Like, “If people report that they like to eat Italian food to celebrate a first date, but there are no stable, well-known Italian restaurants in the area, then add Italian night to the ‘What’s for dinner’ rotation +1 per month.”

“If a college/university is in the primary customer area, stock hot plates and provide microwave instructions on recipe cards.”

“If a Wal-Mart is within the primary customer area, reduce stock of major-brand sodas.”

There’s probably a nice way to set up an algorithm to pick products, too, that combines price, quality, and reliability (including ethics), with weight towards local producers and weight against sheer bad-for-you-ness.  The stores would send in their data, and the head office would send back a suggested order sheet for the manager to check.  When I worked at Panera, one of the big annoyances was being told just to guess on the ordering, or to copy last week’s order.  This resulted in shortages and angry customers at least once a week – over a loaf of bread dough that it would have taken us $.35 to order, and that we donated if it didn’t sell.

 

There would be things that I’d like to have as core items that would be the same from store to store.  I’m guesstimating 50% of the store would be core items; 40% would be locally-adjusted items, and 10% would be test items, to see if they go viral.  For an example of a viral item – Korean cookies.   There’s a bajillion types.  They’re tasty, cheap, and just different enough to be new without being challenging.  Like sesame cookies.  Delicious, delicious sesame cookies.  Give me a week of passing out free sesame cookies with coffee for people to pick up for their commute in the morning, and I’ll have a nation of people with sudden cravings for sesame cookies.

And something wider that I’d want to check out:  these are all great ideas, but what would the larger impact be?  I’d want to see more variety in what we eat, and less dependence on prepared, unhealthy, and tasteless foods.  But will that cause problems on a large scale?  We have a lot of people to feed.  If you’re trying to get a culture change to go viral, you need to take into account how that culture change will affect the globe, in a best-case scenario.  Will it cause people to spend too much money on food (a la Whole Paycheck)?  Should people spend more money on food?  Should a nutritionist be on staff at the head office to assess the diet we’re pushing on people?  (Hm…probably.)  Will fast food/big agra come after us?  What if policies encourage complete jerkwad nutcases to become our employees, in a culture of self-righteousness instead of good eatin’?  What if the standards set for local producers force them to jump through unnecessary hoops?  And so on.

It’s a good idea, with plenty of extra ponder to it.

The Last Voyage of the Mermaid now free on Smashwords.

I’m rotating “free” short stories.  So pick up “The Society of Secret Cats” ASAP, if you want a free copy (it’s $.99 Smashwords & B&N now, with the rest to follow).  And expect to see “The Last Voyage of the Mermaid” flip free at other sites soon.

Pick “The Last Voyage of the Mermaid” up at Smashwords for free here.  If you can’t wait, you can find it for $.99 at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, Apple, and more.

The Last Voyage of the Mermaid

by De Kenyon (aka me!)

Arnold had always wanted to know about a) pirates and b) death.  But his mother would never let him find out.  Now Arnold is grown up, old, and tired of being both…so he goes on an adventure to find out the things that he was always supposed to never find out about:  Murder, mermaids, and the deep, dark sea.

When Arnold was a boy, he wondered about two things: what would it be like to be dead, and what would it be like to be a pirate. Being the kind of boy who first asked his mother about things, he received a lecture saying that a) being dead was something that would happen in its own time, and he was forbidden to try to find out early and b) being a pirate was not at all as nice as it seemed in Peter Pan, there being no such things as mermaids, pixies, or alligators with clocks in their stomachs. Whether he should have listened to his mother or not remains to be seen.

And so Arnold grew up, got a job, got married, and had kids. For the longest time, as a boy, he wondered whether he would do these ordinary things, as he was convinced that girls would always have a terrible antipathy (which is the opposite of understanding) of him, and that he would have to adopt children if he wanted to have them. As it turned out, a number of girls fell in love with him, although there was only one he truly loved back. And although her name was something else entirely, he always thought of her as his Wendy.

He did not think of himself as Peter Pan.

Instead, he secretly thought of himself as Captain Hook.

 

Saying Goodbye to Older, More Serious Dreams

More changes have been happening from The Artist’s Way.

This is supposed to be the week where I feel more connected to higher powers, to my creativity, to my personal dreams.  I’m supposed to feel like…the work just passes through me, rather than I’m “working” on it.

I am not there yet.  I cut loose on a 2K passage the other day and easily hit top speed…but I didn’t have a sense of surprise.  It was a great deal of fun, but I was left with a sense that I hadn’t written anything worth keeping.  I don’t know whether it’s because I have no idea what’s worth keeping or whether I’m looking for an experience rather than a good story.  I kept going, “But I didn’t discover anything” and “I didn’t feel like something outside me was writing this.”  Which has been pretty much par for every other scene I’ve written so far: I go, “Huh.  So that’s why the characters are like that; I feel like someone else is doing this, not me.”  I really didn’t get any insight into the characters in that scene.  Disappointing.

So.  I’m going to head back into the story in a few minutes, and see whether things have changed.  I’ll probably slow down, rather than just letting the words blorp out of me, because it’s the slowing down and making sure I have the five senses in that’s led to so many insights previously in this story.  I may just be tripping myself up.  I’ll have to see how it goes.

Anyway, instead of going through what I’m supposed to according to this chapter in The Artist’s Way, I’ve been feeling more powered.  Not powerful, not empowered, just powered.  Like, I have more of a reservoir of juice with which to go, “And I give a shit because…?”  and just do what I want instead.    ”Hm.  I believe I shall take the day off to pack for an emergency evacuation,” I said yesterday.  And then I had to follow that statement with, “which is probably totally useless and unnecessary,”  because I didn’t have enough stored up in my power reserves to just say, “I wanted to, nyaa.”  Apparently, not giving a damn about what other people think is something you have to build up reserves in.  At least, for an introvert like me.  So when people say, “You shouldn’t care about what other people think,” well, they’re full of shit.  It’s a skill, and you don’t develop it by having people gawp at you and act like you’re just supposed to be able to do it naturally, you retard.

I have used this power…to eat when I feel hungry, rather than trying to sqeeze out one more little bit of work.

I have used this power…to dick around and blog.

I have used this power…to stay updated on the fire instead of knuckling down.

It seems like this power is currently in service of things other than writing.  But.  I promised myself I’d give an honest go at the ideas in this book, and they haven’t done me wrong so far, even the don’t-read-stuff week, so I’m trying to trust a little bit.

However, I feel like I’m not functioning properly.  How will I stay motivated to write if I don’t PUSH, if I don’t FORCE, if I just do what I enjoy? If I don’t work under a blind Midwestern work ethic?  If I have no discipline, how will things happen?  –Maybe there will be a discipline, but if there is, I have no idea what it will look like.  I have previously operated under the idea that in order to have value as a writer, I have to challenge myself.  Which sounds great.  But.  Challenging yourself, setting goals–these aren’t a sense of connection to to higher powers, to my creativity, to my personal dreams.  Goals are the opposite of daydreams, and I keep having to let myself daydream this week: one shiny, flighty little image after another.  Is it that I’ve just gone too far into the GOAL side of things, and too far away from DAYDREAM?  How do people even function when…there are no rules, which is essentially what a goal is?  When I see people without goals, I see slackers.  I see people who don’t do anything, who settle for stupid shit instead of what they really want.  Who go, “Where did the time go?” and “I’ll never be able to X, so it doesn’t matter what else I do, anyway.”

And yet I get these little flashes of insight that say that maybe this week isn’t a waste after all.  I’ve been trying to come up with an epic fantasy idea for a while.  I love reading epic fantasies, yet I don’t actually write them, which seems stupid.  But nothing seems to click.

One of the exercises this week was to write down five films that I love, then try to find the patterns in them.  I wrote down The Princess Bride, Goonies, Kung Pow, Kung Fu Hustle, and RED.  –These aren’t supposed to be OMG THE DEFINITIVE LIST or anything, just five movies you love and can jot down quickly (presumably to show what’s on your mind).  The patterns I pulled out (and you could see others) were: humor, meta, adventure, fantasy, wonder.   Different forms of love.

I’ve been trying to brainstorm…serious, non-meta, adventure fantasies with strong philosophical elements (but no actual meta).  And no friendship, no romance…

It may be that I’m just not cut out for that kind of thing.  I may have to concede that…if it doesn’t have humor in it, I may not be able to finish it, as a longer work.  Maybe what I need to do is write the fantasy version of Every Which Way But Loose* or Cannonball Run.  I grew up on Scooby Doo and The Dukes of Hazzard and Eighties crap like that. Come on. My brain is @#$%^.

Put a sword in that fist and we’re good to go.

But…I think about being a writer, and I want to write Epic Fantasy That Is EPIC, not Smartass.  Not that this isn’t the first time I’ve had to abandon ideas about writing.  I mean, I started out as a poet (and got pretty good at it, nicely controlled dissonance being perhaps my specialty).  And I’ve always wanted to write Serious Fiction.  Because that’s what defines a Real Writer, right?  Buh.  Now I’m trying to fight the good fight against writing nothing but farces for the rest of my life and trying to assert that I Really Can Write Horror, and that I Really Can Write Serious Fantasy.  Instead of writing what’s really inside me, which…may be Smartass Shocking Pulp and Smartass FairyTalesque and Smartass High Epic Farce?

Getting to this point chokes me up today.  I mean…what if it was okay to write what I really wanted to write?  What if it was okay that I’ve been writing other stuff all along, because I had no idea what I really wanted?  What if it’s okay if what I really want changes? What if I can go, “It was all meant to be”?  And, “Learning how to write this farcical romance that you’re working on that makes no sense to you whatsoever and makes you horribly uncomfortable to think about when you’re not writing might be the best thing you’ve ever done for youself”?

It hurts, because…part of me is saying goodbye to something I thought was a dream, but was really just a goal slapped over top of someone else’s idea of success.  I have to mourn, because it hurts.  But I also feel hopeful.  What if…  What could I write if… Wouldn’t it just be a crackup if I wrote…

So.  It’ll probably turn out to be a useful week, even if I’m not yet at the point where I can get out of it what was intended.  Either that, or I’ve been reading too much Terry Pratchett this week month.**

*RIGHT TURN CLYDE!

**I watched Going Postal last night.  Loved it.