Rachel Lynn Brody's Blog, page 28

The Importance of Keeping it Positive

In the early hours of Sunday morning, I sat down and wrote in my journal about the elation I felt after the successful completion of the Hot Mess reading and subsequent weekend of running around NYC with some incredibly talented writers. At the time, it seemed silly – almost self-indulgent – to write two pages in my new notebook about how happy I was that everything had gone so well.

After the last of the writers left town, though, a familiar sort of post-holiday malaise started to set in. It was like what my mom says about the holidays: everyone comes together and you go through so much planning just to have some time to do something fun, and then everybody goes their separate ways and it’s over.

I was so glad I’d written those two pages. Everything – from my handwriting to the words I’d written to the brevity of the notes – brought back the positive feelings that accompanied the weekend.

Sare Liz, my favorite priest in the world, makes a lot of noise about the emotion of joy, and the role it plays in allowing us to fully be ourselves and realize our goals in life.

Sometimes, particularly when the day-to-day starts to feel overwhelming, it’s easy to forget the times when that heavy feeling has been transcended and you’re in alignment with your goals in life, working toward the things you feel are important with people who contribute positively to your general sense of wellbeing.

That’s why it’s important to capture those moments. They’re like little seeds of positivity; quick hits that get you chasing a dragon far healthier than the one traditionally indicated by that metaphor.

You know that saying, “Do one thing every day that scares you”? Do one thing every day that delights you, too. (And heck, for some of you, those may be the same thing!)

Seven Roles for the Self-Publisher

Have been giving some thought to the way a self-publishing writer has to handle the different roles required of them when they make their own work, and had written some notes for this blog post on my white board wall a month or so ago. The white board wall is too crowded, now, which meant it was time to write this entry.

So. If you want to self-publish a book,  your role will change from one phase of writing to the next.

Through the experience of  publishing Hot Mess, I tried to track the different roles I played. Several people asked me about the process of putting the book together, so this blog is my first effort at gathering those thoughts.

So here are the seven roles I’m thinking I’ve identified. I’m assuming the cover design is generally farmed out no matter what, so that’s why I haven’t included it here.

1. Project manager. It’s one thing to sit at your computer and write, or post a blog entry or piece of fiction on the internet. But if you want to self-publish a good product (thereby establishing that people should pay attention to, and for, your work), then the ability to project manage – set schedules and deadlines, balance priorities, multitask, and interact effectively with others – is critical to putting out a professional-quality product.

2. Author. If I have to explain this one, self-publishing is not the field for you.

3. Editor. This one, maybe not so much – editing can be hired out, after all. I guess the point here is more that your book should have an editor and should have been edited. Speaking with a friend earlier today, she mentioned her two biggest complaints about reading self-published material: 1) that there were mistakes in the manuscript she was reading – some quite bad ones, and 2) that often as not the author really did need an editor’s guidance on a story’s arc. It was interesting to hear from her, as a reader, just how deeply this affected her decisions to read certain books over others.

4. Proofreader. Once the story is ready to be published, you need to proofread it. Multiple times. And then ask someone else to proofread it for you. You may have to, at some point, return this favor. Lots of self-publishing seems, to me, to work like that.

5/6/7. Press agent/Marketer/Copywriter. I’m putting these three in the same line, even though they’re different roles, because they’re very tightly connected. You need to be able to write copy that will make people buy your book: its Amazon profile is going to be your biggest marketing tool (we’ve sold more copies of Hot Mess via Amazon than we have any other retailers, on multiple orders of magnitude). Get keywords into your book descriptions. Know the tags you’re going to use. Plan your books far enough in advance that you can start making contacts in communities – whether they be message boards, informational resources, or other communities –  that care about your manuscript’s topic and your message, and then build on those relationships to spread the word both before and after your book’s release. Note that, in my opinion at least, PR and Marketing are two slightly different things – one, to me, is more the act of keeping up a conversation about your product, while the other is the process of actively selling. (Maybe two sides of the same coin. Thoughts?)

 

 

Awesome Awesome Amazeballs Awesome

The thing you always forget about performing is how quickly it happens. There’s an interminable amount of stuff that has to take place before a production, whether we’re talking a short film, a play, or a reading involving five performers converging on an old-time prestige venue like the Cornelia St Cafe.

That third one is a little specific, isn’t it.

Yesterday we had a live reading of Hot Mess: speculative fiction about climate change here in New York City. And by “we,” I mean everybody, with the exception of RJ, who wrote to us from New Zealand. Before about 4pm, the day is a blur. Literally a blur. I remember the gist of what I did: mostly sleep, since the night before was a rush of adrenaline and preparation and as with all these things, there never seems to be enough time. (Note “seems” – this is significant.)

A little after 4, Eric and Erin showed up at my apartment. As I barked things like, “DON’T JUDGE ME, MY APARTMENT IS A MESS,” (they assured me they did not) and “SHOULD I BRING MAKEUP FOR THE GIRLS COMING STRAIGHT FROM THE TRAIN” (deemed considerate, but ultimately unnecessary) and “WHICH PAIR OF BOOTS SHOULD I WEAR?” (sooner or later there will be pics on the internet, I’m pretty sure) – peppered with weightier issues like, “WILL THE VENUE HAVE A WAY TO PLAY OUR MUSIC?” (shout-out to Emerald, who is amazeballs, and actually phoned the venue while I slept to find out because I’d sent her an email asking her to remind me about it) –  they sipped water and answered my questions with patience. Updates from Sare Liz and Miranda came fairly regularly, via text, with one stuck on a bus (not that we ever expect Megabus to be on time) and the other stuck in a line 200 people deep at the taxi rank at Penn Station. I didn’t take my blood pressure (ONE MORE THING TO FUCKING DO?) but I’m guessing it would not have been at an all-time low.

The great thing about having a long-time co-writer around in the minutes before a live production is that they kind of get where the freakouts are coming from. As I tore back and forth in my shoebox apartment, as often as not forgetting what it was I was trying to make sure didn’t get left behind, I got reminders of issues that were popping back up that we’d already solved (music is gravy), had someone to check in with when “Wait, this issue is already resolved, isn’t it?” became an issue, and so on. Lots of patience. Plus when it came time to actually head to the venue, I didn’t have to carry everything myself.

The venue. The venue was awesome. The venue was the Cornelia St. Cafe, a West Village institution when it comes to live performance. They’re a cafe/restaurant at street level, then downstairs is a sort of cabaret/performance space. Here is what it looks like before it’s filled up with people.

Looking at the photo, I realize we probably should have had a live piano player, too. BALLS!

So me, Eric and Erin got to the cafe a little after five. Setup was quick, thanks to the staff at the cafe (I admitted having nerves, at this point; they told me everything would be fine and got us all giant glasses of water, and we started setting up.

 

Setting up for a live reading when you’ve never seen a space and don’t really know how many people are coming is weird. Super, super weird. Super weird. I’m so grateful to have had E&E around for this part of the process. Because two of our writers were still missing in transit, a fact which I think I was still in complete denial over until about 5:40, when something (I honestly don’t remember what) clicked and rolled over.

Sare turned up halfway through this part of the preparation, and I can only imagine what she walked into: at this point I was having a very intense discussion with Eric about the order of stories and what the f*ck will we do if Miranda’s bus is so late she misses the reading.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for having Eric for a co-writer in my life. (I say that a lot. The dude’s a fucking rockstar when it comes to keeping a cool head in a tense situation when the person freaking out needs to know WHAT THE HELL DO I DO WITH THIS FUCKING SCRIPT. Which is basically what one wants in a co-writer. And talent. Talent doesn’t hurt. (He’s got that in droves, too.)

So I’m sitting on the edge of the stage in my carefully-styled reading outfit, and I have about four pages of “intro/outro” material for the bits where I have to stand on stage and read and tell a room full of people what’s going on. Except that now we might have to move one of the stories. We ran through a few different options. Ultimately we decided that the only way to accomodate a late arrival was going to be being an egotistical egomaniac and reading from both of my stories (the plan, till this point, had been just to read “Haute Mess”). I was not cool with this. I don’t like reading in public. And I don’t looking like an egotistical egomaniac when it comes to collaborative performances. (She says, using more “I”‘s in a sentence than she can actually count.)

And then the rewriting began. Furious, intense, shit-fuck-what-goes-here-what-gets-said-next rewriting that spanned four pages and I think six individual segments, maybe seven, all of which were going to move, comments that weren’t going to make sense, and so on.

Creatively, I do a lot of thinking out loud. I don’t know if that’s always been the case or if it’s something that’s grown out of playwriting, but having somebody whose creative judgement I trust almost implicitly (and I only say “almost” because, you know, I’m the editor and I’m always right) give me in-a-snap responses to different possibilities is something that seriously shortcuts the frankly awful process of rewriting something for the fifth time, five minutes before you’re going to read it on stage.

And then Miranda’s bus got in, and somehow this woman, who has never been to the city before, dealt with what I later learned was the following series of events:

- late bus (over an hour late)

- flagged her first ever NYC cab, which had a driver who was apparently such an asshole he told her his meter was broken and “how much was she willing to pay” for her trip, and by the way, he’d only take cash, because his meter was broken. (Dear cabbie who did this: FUCK YOU, BUDDY. That’s not me saying that. That’s karma saying that. What goes around comes around and what you did was a shitty thing.)

- Via cab, getting through traffic in NYC on a Thursday in rush hour to the venue.

- Turned up at the venue looking calm, collected, and cool as a cucumber.

(She rocked her reading, by the way. Everybody rocked it, but she deserves a particular shout-out, because I’ve had experience, Sare’s got ten years of public speaking in her pocket, and Eric had a gin and tonic – and none of us had the same high-pressure trip in, and to rock it the way she did under those circumstances is the effing bomb.)

The thing is, that made all the rewriting irrelevant. I didn’t have to read both my stories, the order didn’t have to be jumbled up, and the script-as-written, with the minor edits I’d made earlier when I realized, standing on stage staring out at the empty room (which is sometimes the only place you can realize these things, I’ve learned over the year), could stand.

Except I’d marked up the holy hell out of it.

This is why you always bring MULTIPLE COPIES OF YOUR SCRIPT TO A READING.

The thing was, at this point people were starting to come in. I was sitting at one of the back tables as the room slowly filled up, scribbling and trying to sort out pages and re-edit the unfunny parts back out and be polite and say hello as people walked in, but at one point I distinctly remember flipping out. “I CAN’T FIGURE THIS OUT,” I said.  (“I can’t do this!”?)

Eric stepped up AGAIN. Yes, he said, I could. What did I need.

I swear to fucking god, a calm, genuine, capable “What do you need” is the best question any producer can hear when she’s on the verge of absolutelyfuckinglosingit. It’s quick. It focuses you. It reminds you, in that moment of insanity, that everybody in the room is there to help make this work, and that while you have forty thousand things flying through your head, if you can’t get them out of your head, they’re not going to happen. I needed page two. Whether from nerves, adreneline, or what, at this point I was literally shuffling through pages and unable to figure out which ones correlated. I needed the next page. He passed me that page, I made my fixes.

People were still coming in, saying hello, being wonderful and supportive, and bitchface producer lady (wait, that’s me, isn’t it) suddenly snapped across the table, “WHY IS EVERYONE TALKING TO ME, I CANNOT REWRITE THIS WHEN EVERYONE IS TALKING TO ME.” Bitchface producer lady is not fun to be around. I think she mostly talks in my head, so maybe most people don’t realize she’s there, but she’s awful. She’s good at what she does, partly because she’s awful, but she’s awful. And on this occasion, the bitch got past the mouth-censor, which in turn somehow resulted in two minutes of absolute silence and me actually finishing the re-edits.

All of this going on, remember, while people are coming in and I’m trying to let the other writers know who’s who. This is a fun game when you’re in creative industries, because the connections (particularly with my little collection of talented amazeballs people) are so diverse, and I recognize all my friends’ voices. “Is that a petite brunette with kind of a 1940s air about her?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the page. Got an affirmative reply. “That’s E____,” I said. “She’s the one who helped put us in touch with (super secret fall venue redacted). Another voice. “And that’s a very polished blonde?” Affirmative. “That’s S___, we’re going to her house party on Saturday.”

Sarah, who designed the book cover and poster for yesterday’s reading, who stepped in at a last-minute request to read RJ’s short because (did I say this earlier in the post?) RJ lives in New Zealand), was doing her vocal warmups in the background. Vocal warmups are awesome. And, I discovered yesterday, both relaxing and focusing.

I am probably screwing up some of the chronology of all this, by the way. Hope you’re all okay with that. It’s a blog, not a news article.

The performance is a blur. A blur that ran like fucking clockwork. A blur where every single writer read the fucking shit out of their piece, a blur where I had to keep reminding myself to watch the audience, because watching the audience tells you whether you’re doing it right or not. And they were. You get up on stage and can’t see a damn thing with those lights, but when you’re sitting out in the back you can see every single audience member, and every one of them was listening and engaged in the work being read.

And then it was time to transition into the post-reading discussion, and I had to be a little off-the-cuff here, and felt like I was stammering my way through the whole thing, although apparently I wasn’t. And then the discussion was awesome, because people talked and asked questions and Eric joked about wine and Sare joked about the church, and Miranda joked about forgetting a Jeff Goldblum quote from Jurassic Park, and an audience member knew the exact one we were talking about, and people asked questions, and my dad said the “S” word and I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT, and my mom let everybody in the room know that NONE of her children had gone into biology, and I love them both for it far more than I can put in a blog post. My parents and their support of my career and dreams as a writer deserves its own blog post. It deserves a fucking book. My parents are awesome. No, seriously.

And then the discussion was over and we’d talked about the Whole Earth catalog, and the motivational properties of guilt and fear when it comes to changing how human being live in the world, and the egoism of thinking we, unlike almost any other complex organism, might be able to help make the world a better place. We talked about our motivations in writing the story, and were invited to talk about our future projects. We did.

I told the story of my co-worker, who came in the day after she read RJ’s story and said, “It’s that line about how it’s nobody’s fault or it’s everybody’s fault. I feel so guilty about my Keurig coffee machine now. All that plastic! I’m part of the problem!” (Apologies if I’ve mis-quoted her, hopefully she’ll forgive me.) And she went and bought a re-usable Keurig coffee cup, and her own coffee. Because of this book.

Sometimes, talking about things turns into its own action. One of the things I love about the Occupy movement is that there is a lot of sharing and communication embedded in their technique of General Assembly. Talking – and writing, and art, in my opinion – has the power to introduce new thoughts, help us make new connections, and in turn leads to evolving attitudes and changes in behavior. As I said at the close of the reading last night, I think all the writers involved in this project would be thrilled if people talked about the book and the ideas in it. Even if that’s just to one person.

Because while it’s just a small thing we can do, it’s something everybody can do.

And the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one in the first place.

Amazeballs. Awesome, awesome amazeballs.  Thanks to Eric, Erin, Sare Liz, Miranda, Sarah, the Cornelia St. Cafe, my parents, my  friends who came, my amazingly amazeballs stylist friend who you’ll all have heard of as “@mycoolroommate” (now defunct, sadly), my current roommate, her friend, my downstairs neighbor, colleagues from old workplaces, friends of friends, @CLImagiste, my two cousins-twice-removed from my grandparents’ generation, and the bartenders, who were amazing and whose names I forgot to ask. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This post is now over 2500 words long, so I will save tales of the  wild evening debauchery until another time. Not like you people like to read about wild debauchery, anyways.

But HOT MESS on Amazon, Smashwords, Print, Barnes & Noble and more. Links in the sidebar/bio.

A “Hot Mess” in NYC

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Come listen to authors from HOT MESS read their works, then participate in a discussion about climate change and its potential effects on human society.

Limited print copies will be on sale at the event, which should run from 6pm-7:30pm.

We hope to see you there.

 

 

The Leather Skirt Diet

What’s the Leather Skirt Diet, you ask? It’s the diet that consists of “whatever will make me fit into the leather skirt” I’m wearing for a thing next week.

When I first ordered the leather skirt, I knew I was taking a chance. Getting it off the internet, no clear size guides giving waist measurements. But it fit. Not only did it fit, but the price-per-wear is already, like, a dollar. Because I have not stopped wearing it since it got here.

This has brought a new aspect to the Leather Skirt Diet: whereas the initial plan was, “run was hard as I can on the elliptical every day until the event,” all of a sudden I got scared. Because if there’s one thing that’s worse than a black miniskirt that’s too small, it’s a miniskirt that’s too big. This goes double when the fabric is leather.

A loose leather miniskirt is, how shall I put this, pointless.

So a few days ago, the leather skirt diet changed a bit. Now it was about maintaining. I mean, yeah, there are a few pounds that can go (and in case anyone’s worried, I put back on the weight I lost while sick and then some) and that’s safe, but at least I don’t have to be worried about the skirt not fitting. This was good timing, because it was around the same time the skirt showed up that I got a package of goodies from my mom.

In other words: MILLIONS OF COOKIES.

So far I’m enjoying the whoopie pies, and will bring the other cookies to work tomorrow. Because love them though I might, as we get into the home stretch before the event Thursday night, they may have to fall off the list of “Leather Skirt Diet” food options.

We shall see.

While out with my friend yesterday we joked about writing different kinds of novelty diet books. I’d write “The Leather Skirt Diet,” then she’d write the “Artichoke Dip Diet” (or whatever it was – if she sees this, maybe she’ll correct me in the comments), and then sooner or later (as many of our conversations do) we had devolved to a level of ridiculousness the likes of which I shall not inflict upon my dear readers. Suffice to say by the end of it we were laughing hysterically and a fully-fleshed-out idea for a series of e-books where we would pick goals and write diet books about them, but the diet books would be actual reflections of what we were eating, rather than aspirational “plans” that might or might not work.

Other than that, my weekend involved glorious weather in Manhattan, chilling on the Hudson, and getting a seriously amazing foot massage for like twenty bucks from a place where they thought I had fallen asleep *so they let me keep lying in the chair* till I opened my eyes. My feet feel so relaxed now.

What’s everybody else been up to this weekend?

Upcoming Public Appearances & Signings

Public appearances are tricky for a writer. We’re naturally introverted folks, we like keeping ourselves to ourselves. Nonetheless, I’ve learned over the years that the ability to get in front of an audience and have a discussion about your work is an invaluable experience, both  in terms of public speaking ability and the role it plays in everyday life, and because it offers a chance for more personalized exposure than just an @reply on Twitter.

As an independent writer/artist, too, public appearances are practically a requirement. They help access new audiences and – equally important – get writers out of our garrets and into the real world.

All of which is my long way of announcing that the Cornelia Street Cafe, in New York City’s West Village, will be hosting a reading, discussion and signing for Hot Mess: speculative fiction about climate change on May 17th at 6pm.

Not only is this exciting for me because of – well, the obvious reasons, I suppose – but also because as a venue, the Cornelia Street Cafe has a long and illustrious history of supporting new writing.

We’ll have four of the five HOT MESS authors on hand, each giving a short reading from their work. After a short discussion with the audience about ways in which climate change is affecting us today, we’ll move onto a book signing.

Doors open at 5:45pm and reservations are encouraged – all the info is on the Cornelia Street Cafe website. If you’re available, please try to come – and make sure to say hi afterwards!

Low Sodium Pineapple & Mango Curry Recipe

Did some experimenting over the weekend and liked the results. Here’s what you need for this recipe:

1 pineapple

1 package of chicken (I think I used a little over a pound), cut into chunks

1/2 red onion, chopped

curry powder (spice to taste)

1 red bell pepper, chopped

1/2 bag frozen mango chunks

Ginger (to taste)

1 can chickpeas (optional – these tend to have a high sodium content)

Dump everything in the crock pot and leave it for a while.

Come back when the chicken is done cooking and it will be this amazing stew type thing. You will not be disappointed. And it’s super healthy because the pineapple makes it sweet, so no added sugar, and it doesn’t need any salt at all because that’s not the point of it. I like to eat it just plain like that.

It’s very tasty. I had planned to have it for the whole week, but then my roommate tried some and my downstairs neighbor tried some, and let’s just say I’m going to have to buy another pineapple later this week.

Speaking about Hot Mess on The 99 Report

At 3pm EST today, March 20th, I’ll be speaking about HOT MESS: speculative fiction on climate change on the Earth Day episode of The 99 Report, a weekly podcast. You can access the podcast here.

The show starts at 2pm, and features some interesting guests who’ll be discussing the condition of the post-oil-spill Gulf of Mexico. We’ll also talk about how fiction can inspire conversations about real-world issues.

This is my first podcast appearance – so as you can imagine, nerves are high and your support is appreciated!

Free! Feminist! Robots! SASSY SINGULARITY is free-for-a-day on KDP

Last week was National Robot week, and I really meant to give you all something cool to read about robots. Luckily, I came home tonight to see a note from Sare Liz Gordy, letting me know a promo was about to start on a project we worked on several months ago.

In February, I took part in an anthology titled Sassy Singularity, about the strength of singledom. Most of the writers came from the romance genre; most of the stories reflect the conventions of that genre. All of the stories were written by women, and they cover multiple points of view and approaches to story.

My contribution to the anthology was a little…shall we say…quirky. Titled Sweetheart, and told from the perspective of a former Service Bot (I’ll let you read between the lines as far as what type of service), it’s about a future where a rogue hacker disrupts an artificial offshoot of the world’s oldest profession.

On Wednesday, 4/18,  Sassy Singularity will be on an Amazon Kindle Select promo for one day. If you’re interested in reading Sweetheart, it’s not currently available anywhere else, and you’ll get a handful of other romance stories along with it.

So if you have a Kindle and you feel like taking advantage of one of SASSY SINGULARITY‘s free promo days by downloading a copy of the book…do it.

FOR SCIENCE.

(And if you enjoy Sassy, check out my other Kindle work, including recent release Hot Mess: speculative fiction about climate change, too!)

Remember the time North Korea launched that missile?

It’s been a long day, and I’m tired, so I’ll try to keep this short.

I was meeting a friend at an upscale social club – the kind filled with leather chairs and shelves of old books, not the kind with pulsing music – oohing and aahing at relics from a different age – when I glanced down at Twitter and saw an update from Reuters: North Korea had launched a missile. As my friend walked up to me, I wondered, should I say something? There wasn’t much either of us could do, given the situation. And maybe a stately townhouse on NYC’s Upper East Side wasn’t the worst place in the world to sit out the last few hours before nuclear armageddon. Not that I have an overactive imagination, or anything.

So I put my phone away and we wandered around the club and she showed me some of the artifacts, including things like narwhal tusks and king penguins; old presidents’ hunting trophies and double elephant tusks. Macabre signals of an imperialist age, mementos of the geographic and naturalistic explorations of the club’s members over the decades.

But not just mementos: also memento mori. Reminders of our ever-present mortality.

A strange juxtaposition of moments and impressions. We left, and as I glanced at my phone again to check for updates, I saw that North Korea’s missile had not launched successfully. Nor, from what I can tell via googling, was it nuclear. Small comforts.

Memento mori.