Phyllis Anne Duncan (P. A. Duncan)'s Blog, page 46

In the Mood to Write–or Not

Seasonal Affective Disorder–the “winter blues,” “winter depression”–whatever name it goes by, it’s a motivation killer. In years past, I had only twinges of it, just a day here and there, but lately, it’s become an issue with my writing.

When I was a federal flunky, there were times in deep December and January when I went to work in the dark, sat in my windowless office or in meetings in windowless conference rooms all day, then went home in the dark. That’s when the winter blues were the worst for me.

Science has shown SAD (apt acronym) is real and has everything to do with the changing amounts of light when falls winds down into winter. Spending the daylight hours outdoors and having bright light while you’re inside helps. What doesn’t help is having a solid week of gloomy, overcast, rainy days in the first half of fall, which is how it’s been here in my part of the Shenandoah Valley. The desire to write is there, but the desire to act on it isn’t.

Yesterday, I sat through a marathon of the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, six hours by the way, with an open laptop on my lap, and managed maybe a couple hundred words on a story I started before the gloom descended. You might say that watching the work of Jane Austen was daunting, but I usually find Ms. Austen inspiring. No, I couldn’t get the house bright enough, even with every light available on–Dominion Virginia Power will be happy, though. Though I’d had just over eight hours of sleep the night before, I took a two-hour nap late in the afternoon and woke feeling underwhelmed.

I’m sure today when I go back and look at the little bit I wrote yesterday, I’ll likely hit delete a lot. Given how scrambled my brain was, I doubt any of it is worth keeping.

Somewhat like this blog post, I suspect.

I’m seeing the sky brightening a bit, I have a luncheon engagement to get me out of the house, but, frankly, I’m too SAD to be enthused about any of it. As I posted on Facebook yesterday, “If the sun doesn’t shine soon, I’m going to curl up in a fetal position and gibber.”

Gibbering, now.

Friday Fictioneers Fright!

We’re already nearly two weeks into the scary month of October, and, just as I promised, I have another spooky tale for Friday Fictioneers. I also did a little genre mash-up. If the historical fiction part of it isn’t so obvious–I was raised Catholic and never heard of this particular saint–Google St. Blandine and/or “Amphitheatre des Trois Gauls.” St. Blandine has a direct connection to today’s photo prompt, which is a wonderful photo of the Amphitheatre of the Three Gauls in Lyon, France, taken by Friday Fictioneer Sandra Crook.

My story is called “Martyr,” for reasons I hope are clear. As usual, if you don’t see the link on the story title in the line above, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, then select the story from the drop-down list.

Balancing Reading and Writing

Most any writing instructor worth his or her salt will tell you, “If you want to learn how to write, read, read, read.” In particular, read within the genre you want to write. That’s excellent advice; however, none of them manage to impart how to find the time to do that, especially when you have your own writing in the mix.

Like most writers who love to read, I have a literal stack of TBR (to be read) books and a virtual one on my eBook reader as well. I participate in book-reading contests, i.e., set a number of books to be read in a year. Last year I blew right past the goal I set for myself. This year? Not so much. No matter what I do, I’m consistently four books behind my goal, and the about of time remaining in the year is quickly shrinking.

I can, however, pinpoint the cause. I spent most of the summer rewriting and revising a novel manuscript I had a (self-imposed) deadline for, so reading was one of the necessities I put aside. Now, I’m scrambling to catch up so I won’t perceive myself as a failure for not reading an arbitrary number of books in a year.

There’s an offshoot issue of this. When I go to read books in the genre I write, I find them, well, unhelpful. First, they’re mostly, almost exclusively written by men, and the female characters are stereotypical, again for the most part. So, I rarely read thrillers. I substitute non-cozy mysteries by the likes of Sara Paretsky, or speculative fiction by Margaret Atwood.

Now, it’s not that I won’t read thrillers by the late Vince Flynn or Lee Child. I do because within them is how to structure a good thriller, but I go elsewhere to learn characterization. Even though I write what will likely be considered “commercial” fiction, I want to approach it from a literary fiction standpoint, so I read a lot of literary fiction, also, contemporary as well as classic.

And the ultimate thriller writer for me is Stephen King. Yes, his work often falls into the horror/paranormal category, but the man can write; he can develop amazing characters; he concocts intricate plots; he has the most amazing sense of setting; and he eschews those dreaded -ly adverbs. His books also meet the accepted definition of a thriller, and, along with his great tutorial book, On Writing, his body of work is a writing course in and of itself.

Even after all the positives of reading to aid in writing, I still feel guilty when I devote a day to reading–I should be writing. I also feel guilty when I devote an entire day to writing–I should be making a dent in that TBR stack. To put in contemporary social media terms: I have a #firstworldproblem.

For every writer friend I have who gets the fact you have to read to understand how to write, I run across someone who declares he or she has no time for reading, “I just want to write.” One of the writers I follow on Facebook is Anne Rice, probably an icon for a successful writer. She is always posting about the books she has read and what about writing she has learned from them. So, I think you can balance her approach against the “writer” who doesn’t see the need to read and gauge which one is a writer, not a scribbler.

So, I’ve been writing long enough. Off to do some reading–Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep, by the way.

The Friday Fictioneers of October

Pumpkins have started to pop up everywhere. Leaves have begun to display color. The air is crisp… Well, our dog days of summer here in central Virginia arrived a bit late. We’ve been in the 80′s the past few days. Richmond hit 90 degrees a day or so ago. Eighties wouldn’t be so bad without humidity, but it’s the south. We have humidity.

Still, this is my favorite time of year. It’s as if I’ve been running all out up until this point, then I take a breath and wind down–as much as one can do that with Thanksgiving and Christmas looming. Something about the fall makes me begin to reflect on the previous part of the year. So, let’s have a look.

I entered a bunch of contests and made a bunch of submissions. I placed third in one contest, and all the submissions were rejections save one; but its notification date is March 2014 and could still be a rejection. (There will be twenty to twenty-five works in the collection, and the editor has already received more than 200 submissions; the odds aren’t great.) I’ve revised and rewritten a novel which a workshop instructor believes has definite promise for being picked up by an agent. I’ve edited and revised other manuscripts, participated in two weekly flash fiction events, and again amassed enough espionage short stories for another collection. I’ve been to ten writers conferences or workshops, participated in two on-line workshops, and taught one on-line workshop.

A busy writerly year, and I can’t even describe how fulfilling that is. As the go-to analyst/tech writer in my government job, I probably wrote a lot more than I do now on a daily basis, but the key difference is time. The deadlines I had in my job were rigid and often capricious, the whim of some congressional staffer with an overblown ego. Though the feedback was always good about a white paper or a report or a Q&A I did, I never felt as if that work were polished enough. I’d always come up with a better way of saying it. Now, thankfully, I have luxury of time to make certain what I write is the best it can be.

And I don’t take that for granted. I have too many writer friends with full-time jobs and families they juggle with their writing. I know how precious it is. I admire these writer friends so much for being dedicated enough to their writing that they make it a priority among all the other priorities they have. After all, that was I not that long ago, and I’m glad to have them in my writer life to keep me humble.

October is also a spooky month–it culminates in Hallowe’en, after all. So, it’s not surprising that today’s completely innocent-looking Friday Fictioneers photo prompt sent me into Stephen King-land. The fact I’m reading his sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, may have something to do with my story, “White Noise,” as well. I’m going to see if I can’t make every Friday Fictioneers story this month have a little bit of horror going for it. Bwahahaha!

As usual, if you don’t see the link on the story title above, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, then select the story from the drop-down list.

The Places We Write

This past weekend I spent a brief time in a place where I used to spend a lot of time–eastern Connecticut. My ex, before he was my ex, and I spent as many weekends and holidays as we could on a small lake that spanned the Connecticut/Rhode Island border. The lake is called Beach Pond, and up until a few years ago it had a small beach on the Rhode Island side; hence, the name. Our lake house on the Connecticut side had a small lakeside yard and dock, a large deck, and a great view, which looked across the lake onto the Acadia State Park in Rhode Island.

On the drive from Providence Airport to Preston, CT, where I stayed at my ex in-laws, I have to pass by Beach Pond. I’ve only done this three times since I was last there in 2005 before the ex became the ex. For some reason, last Friday on the third time, I recalled that I wrote most of the rough draft of what’s now a four-book series at the little gray house on the lake.

Now, I’m not much of a water person. I’m a pool swimmer, and bodies of water with fauna in it make me a bit nervous, but sitting beneath some good-sized oak trees with a beer at hand, and notebook or laptop with me, I was in writer heaven. On the weekends, the place was very active in the afternoons–water skiers, JetSki-ers, canoers, kayakers–but in the mornings, the place was quiet and still.

My ex had, as one of his many good qualities, an ability to understand what writing meant to me. He knew it went far beyond the fact I did technical writing for a living. He knew what I wanted to do with my writing, and he encouraged it. He never once complained about the fact a notebook accompanied every vacation we went on and that some part of the day had to have writing in it.

At Beach Pond, he would hop into a small row boat and explore all the various nooks and crannies of Beach Pond, and I would write–pages and pages, sometimes by hand, sometimes on a monstrosity of a laptop (This started in the late nineties.) After two years of these getaways, I had a complete rough (very, very rough) draft of a novel.

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that until last Friday as I passed by Beach Pond and felt nostalgia for the happy times I’d had there, but the feeling was something like remembering where you had your first kiss or the first time you made love to someone. The place has an unending significance. This is where I wrote my first, real novel. This is the place whose quiet beauty helped inspire me to do that.

Now, inextricably, that place will always be associated with that particular manuscript. Someday, I’ll turn the pages of the books it has become, and I’ll hear the lap of wavelets against the bulkhead, the rhythmic splash of the oars on the row boat as my ex explored a place he’d known since he was a child all to give me the time to create.

Place, or setting, within a novel is often crucial to its plot, but don’t forget the place where you wrote it. That could be just as crucial–and special.

A Doorway to Friday Fictioneers

I normally post my Friday Fictioneers story on, well, Friday, because it ain’t Thursday Fictioneers. However, bright and early tomorrow I head to the airport for a weekend trip to New England to visit some old friends. I probably won’t get much writing done, but it’ll be fun.

After this weekend, the countdown to this year’s National Novel Writing Month begins, but in October I need to lock down that manuscript I had out to beta readers and get it ready to send off to my workshop instructor. Lots of nerves going on there. And I have two more Spy Flash stories to finish so I can get that next volume in a state to be edited and hopefully ready for publishing at the first of the year. In between all that will be Thanksgiving and Christmas. Oh, and a writing conference.

Yeah, retirements means sitting on your ass and doing nothing. Sure it does. Wouldn’t trade it for the world, or a job.

So, for a long-time Whovian (Google it), today’s Friday Fictioneers photo prompt was just too tempting. Think of it not as fan faction but, rather, an homage with a twist. What else would you come up with after seeing the photo but a story about a door to nowhere, or maybe somewhere?

My story is “Time and Relative Dimension.” As usual, if you don’t see the link on the title, scroll to the top of the page, click on the tab for Friday Fictioneers, and select it from the drop-down list.

Defying a Ban

Today’s writing blog post crosses ever so slightly over into political commentary, so if you have qualms about my protesting the fact people want to ban books, you might want to skip this post.

Written work has probably been banned since the beginning of written communication. I’m sure some Cro-Magnon shaman who disagreed with the way a hunt was depicted on a cave wall forbad his or her tribe to view it. And, as it’s always been, forbidding someone from seeing something usually results in an overwhelming desire to see the forbidden thing.

Religion and political power always seems to raise their heads in these disputes. You can’t read this book because it goes against the Bible. Only if you’ve read the Old Testament do you appreciate that irony. People who look to the Bible as their moral guide in deciding which books you should and shouldn’t read conveniently overlook the fact that particular book is rife with rape, murder, infanticide, lust, political corruption, and incest among other distasteful things, which go largely unpunished. Governments have banned works–Stalin didn’t like the way Boris Pasternak portrayed the Soviet system and banned Doctor Zhivago; the Nazis held massive book-burnings designed to expunge the Reich of anything with a Jewish or Communist taint; Salman Rushdie had a fatwa issued against him by Islamic fundamentalists for The Satanic Verses.

Of course, Pasternak received a Nobel (for his poetry) two months after Doctor Zhivago was published outside the Soviet Union. The Nazis met their inevitable end in the spring of 1945. Rushdie, after being guarded in undisclosed locations for years, has a long (a very long) list of awards, including the Booker. All, as well as countless other examples, are testaments to the power of the written word and the fact people don’t like being told what they can and can’t read.

And lest you think this is a thing of the past or only occurs in regressive dictatorships, think again. A county in North Carolina recently banned 1952′s The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Considered one of the best books about racial identity and prejudice, The Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953 and has been a mainstay on high school reading lists since. Just not in a particular county in North Carolina, where a school board member said, “I didn’t find any literary value.” (Translation: Our precious white boys and girls do not need to read about the problems with racial identity; it might make them tolerant.) After that county’s decision, sales of The Invisible Man shot up, for which, I’m sure, the Ellison estate is truly grateful.

When we write–at least when I do–we don’t think about whether or not our work will be banned by some religious prig or overbearing politician. Self-censoring is just as bad as government or church censorship. It inhibits our craft. Do my fingers hesitate over the f-word when I’m writing? No, because if I drop the f-bomb, it’s because it’s central to the character using it. We have to write the story that’s in us. Anything we do to alter that means it’s not the right story and that we’re not truly writers.

This last week of September is the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week. Libraries around the country highlight books, which have been banned for various reasons, putting them on display and encouraging people to check them out. Librarians are quite often at the forefront of complaints about books, and it’s the courageous ones who stand up to the book-burners, whether literal or figurative. (Click here for a list of ALA’s most challenged books from 2000 – 2009. Some won’t surprise you; others will shock you.)

If you don’t want your child to read the Harry Potter series or R. L. Stine or Toni Morrison or Ralph Ellison, then don’t buy those books. Tell your child they’re not to be read. (Understand, though, that forbidding something makes it ever so much more desirable.) You’ll end up with an intellectually stunted child who won’t be able to handle the real world, but that’s your choice.

However, don’t tell me I can’t read them or that my child can’t read them. Is that limiting your First Amendment rights? No, because you’re free to opine all you want about what you find objectionable about a particular book, but you can’t force your narrow-minded opinion on others whose minds are open to knowledge.

There is no irony in the fact that the books people seek to ban are the ones which expand our knowledge, which challenge facts we shouldn’t accept on face value. Trust me, I never would have learned about the real facts of life (and not the confused mess my mother told me because she found sex disgusting) had one classmate not circulated a much-thumbed copy of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. I never would have learned to question authority without Animal Farm or 1984. I never would have understood the horrors of war if not for The Red Badge of Courage or All’s Quiet on the Western Front. I never would have learned about the negative aspects of letting money rule your life if not for The Great Gatsby or Bonfire of the Vanities. I would have followed my family into intolerance had I not read To Kill a Mockingbird or, yes, The Invisible Man. And, I never would have learned about the dangers of banning books if I hadn’t read Fahrenheit 451. Somewhere in America, at some point, all those books I mentioned have been banned, and, thank goodness, those bans didn’t work.

Even now, when I hear some puritanical school board has banned a book, I want to read it. I want to know what they’re afraid of so I can emulate the author. Yes, that’s how I’ll know I’ve “made it” as a writer–when some troglodyte bans a book I’ve written.

Celebrate Banned Books Week–read a banned book in public and piss off a book-burner. You’ll feel better for it.

Fall Friday Fictioneers

Sunday, September 22, is the first day of fall. Fall! Fall? How did that happen, I mean, besides the obvious motion of the Milky Way, our Sun, and our planet? Wasn’t it just January?

Fall happens to be my favorite time of year. I like the crisp, cool air and the wonderful colors. I like the shift of light and the constellations predominant in the fall-to-winter sky. I love it when my BFF Orion returns. The season just seems to energize me physically as well as creatively. National Novel Writing Month comes up in the middle of fall, and I’ve never had a problem coming up with those 50,000 words.

Fall makes me nostalgic as well, remembering Thanksgiving and time spent with my Dad. When he was still in the Army, I counted the days until he came home for the holidays, and I had some disappointments when politics meant he got deployed to West Germany too often.

I think nostalgia came to mind when I saw today’s Friday Fictioneers photo prompt–a second-hand store, an out-of-date wedding dress, an elderly man. They led to the story, “Reminiscing,” something a little fluffier than I usually write. Yes, I can do fluff! As usual, if you can see the link on the story title, then scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, then select the story from the drop-down list.

And a wish of happiness and love to Friday Fictioneers original founder, Madison Woods, for her wedding this weekend. Gotta love those happy endings.

Time Flies When You’re Having Fun

When you cultivate a group of writer friends and ask them to read and critique stories and manuscripts, an important obligation as a good writer friend is to reciprocate. So, when one writer friend who gave me excellent feedback on my work in progress asked me to do the same for hers, I jumped at the chance. I’d seen the first two chapters of her WIP in my last two workshops at Tinker Mountain and had been eager to read more.

I was so eager, in fact, when I picked up the MS yesterday morning, I didn’t put it down all day–which is why Monday’s post is happening on Tuesday. But it’s great when something lives up to your expectations. When my friend’s book gets published–and it will–this will be my first experience with the evolution of someone’s work other than my own, and it’s a humbling experience. Humbling, in that I felt honored she asked me to read it, that she values my opinion.

Here’s the thing. She doesn’t expect sycophantic raving about how good it is. (Trust me, though, it is that good.) She wants a writer’s eye and honest criticism, which she’ll get from me. Again, I got that from her, and I’ll return it in kind. And I’ll get a little thrill when I buy my copy, knowing I helped in some small way. So looking forward to that.

And new topic. I’ve been working on the next set of stories for Spy Flash 2. (In case you didn’t know it, last year I published a collection of my espionage short stories, Spy Flash. To read all about it, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Published Works tab, then click on Spy Flash from the drop-down list. You can click through to purchase it from Amazon.com, and, oh, by the way, if you buy the paperback, you can download the Kindle version for free. Commercial over.) One thing which has stood out for me is the way odd words unconsciously work their way into a story.

One story had an inordinate use of the word “just” and not the adjective, as in a “just cause,” but the adverb, as in “at this moment” or “in the immediate past.” Okay, one or two usages, maybe, but I found this usage in a couple of sentences per paragraph. I don’t remember typing them; it was as if they “just” appeared. Of course, that’s not the case. The word popped into my head–quite a few times, apparently–and I wrote it. In most cases, there was no need to substitute a better word; deleting “just” made the sentence stronger.

A few weeks ago, I had the same thing happen with the word “always.” Ack! Where are these crutch words coming from?

I suspect because I do a lot of “pressure writing,” i.e., meeting deadlines and word count goals I’ve mostly set for myself, they filter in, and I let that happen because subconsciously I know they’ll come out in the wash, or edit. What surprises me, though, is how often they show up.

And now I’ll bring this back around to the original topic. This is why having a group of writers who’ll critique you with honesty is important. They won’t let you get away with “just” and “always” or whatever crutch word creeps into your work. If you don’t have a group, find one or create one. Social media are great for this. Part of the joy of writer conferences is meeting and networking with many different types of writers from all over. Social media allow you to form critique groups without having to be face-to-face, and, even then, there’s FaceTime and Skype.

Don’t fear the critique. Embrace it. And watch out for those crutch words.

Friday Fictioneers and Icons

We use icons in our writing all the time, especially so when place is critical to the plot. A cozy mystery set in London, and a mention of Big Ben or the Tower of London is obligatory. What would a Cold War thriller be without a mention of The Berlin Wall or The Kremlin? Central Park is the venue of many a murder in a crime procedural set in New York City. I’m sure you can think of many others.

Mentioning an icon is the quick, easy way to put the reader into exactly where in your world the action takes place. Trust me, say “Central Park,” and the average reader knows exactly where the story takes place. Even if he or she has never been to New York City, a reader has seen enough pictures or TV shows to be able to place the locale.

Writers who invent new worlds or use more obscure locales have to do more description of place and setting so the reader can “see” it. Especially if you make up your own town or city, you have to provide just the right balance of back story to make the place believable.  For example, The Lord of the Rings trilogy or The Hobbit wouldn’t be the same without the vivid, rich descriptions of Middle Earth or Mordor. We need to see all those different kingdoms in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice books because they are just as crucial to the story as any of the characters. Striking that balance can be difficult, because you can bog the reader down in minutia.

The photo prompt for this week’s Friday Fictioneers is one of those icons where just one glance at it, and you know exactly where you are. You may even know “when you are” by the type of picture or the other items in it. Juxtaposed as it was with the twelfth anniversary of September 11, 2001, it will likely evoke many emotionally charged 100-word stories this week. That’s a good thing, because we must never forget.

The picture prompted one of my rare forays into poetry, probably a good thing, the rarity, that is. We recently lost the great Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, and his poetry always had a strong sense of place, even for an American one generation removed from her Irish roots. His poems could put me in a peat bog, on a battlefield, in a thatched-roof hut, even though I’ve never seen those things with my own eyes. I’ve tried to do that in “The New Colossus.” As usual, if you don’t see the link on the title, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tag, then select the story from the drop-down list.