Phyllis Anne Duncan (P. A. Duncan)'s Blog, page 41

January’s Penultimate Friday Fictioneers

Just a brief post today since I’m headed to my first writer conference of the year! It’s only about an hour and a half away in Roanoke, VA, and will have perhaps 100 attendees compared to the 12,000 at AWP next month. In Seattle. I haven’t been to Seattle since 2008, when I had to go there to conduct an investigation into a whistleblower’s complaint, so it will be great to go with no pressure.

Once again I took an idyllic photo prompt and went to the apocalypse, but, hey, that’s what I do. What can I say? I see something beautiful and I can’t help but wonder about the ugly underbelly. “Keep Calm and Carry On” borrows its title from a British slogan during the Blitz of World War II, but the story is about accepting inevitability with grace.

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

The Year of Writers Conferences Redux

A new year brings a new round of writers conferences and workshops. The first for me is the Roanoke Regional Writers Conference at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. I tried this one-day conference last year and was amazed by the depth of the too-short workshops, but I’m back for more this year.

Hollins University is also the site of the week-long writing workshop I attend, Tinker Mountain, but this one-day event is rather like an appetizer for that.

The keynote speaker is Virginia novelist Sheri Reynolds, and among the workshops are ones for non-fiction and fiction, YA, self-publishing, marketing, and getting an agent. Yes, some of these are topics you see at any writers conference, large or small, but sometimes it’s the different perspective on the issue which is most helpful.

I’m looking at attending Dan Casey’s “Telling Stories: The Greyhound Bus, the Swedish Gal, and the Flophouse in Seattle” first thing on Saturday morning. Casey’s workshop last year was hilarious and educational, so I’m looking forward to this presentation.

Next I think I’ll attend Sheri Reynolds’ workshop, “Dreamwork for Writers: Using Your Dreams to Deepen Your Story.” I love incorporating my odd dreams into my writing, so this workshop should be fascinating.

I’ll close out the morning with some non-fiction work in Bill Kovarik’s “Who Killed the American Newspaper and Where do we Go from Here?” Since I’ve done freelancing for my local paper, and I’m still enough of an old fogey that I start the day by reading two actual newspapers I can hold in my hands, I think this will be an interesting and topical discussion.

After lunch, and because I’ve never thought of doing a YA novel, I’m going to attend Tiffany Trent’s “Science Fiction and Fantasy in YA.”  This is a growing genre, and, who knows? Maybe I’ll get inspired, even though I think with The Hunger Games and Divergent series, we may be reaching the apex of this trend.

I’ll end the day with “The Rebellious Essay,” a workshop hosted by Cara Ellen Modisett. I do some political blogging I consider a bit rebellious, so maybe this will move it to the next level.

A full day of workshops, networking, and connecting with writer friends–I’m looking forward to getting back into the writer conference groove.

 

Friday Fictioneers Comes ‘Round Again

This is the time of year for me where the time seems to fly by, and I look back on a week and wonder how it got to be Friday. Of course, this never happened when I worked in an office. I’d get to Wednesday, and Friday seemed a million miles away; and there were never enough hours in the day to get done what had to be done.

By the way, there was a significant anniversary this week for those of us who work or worked in aviation, namely the fifth anniversary of the “miracle” on the Hudson. I wrote about it in my other blog, but some might find it interesting. Click here to read “Serendipity on the Hudson.”

We had a very lovely photo prompt for today’s Friday Fictioneers, but a couple of days ago I watched a documentary on the history of the Celts and had human sacrifice on the mind. So, there you go. Once again, a pretty picture evokes a dark story. Oh, yes, my various therapists over the years have had a field day. Today’s story, “Grasping for Straws,” is both topical and historical, with a dash of speculation. As usual, if you don’t see the link on the 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.

Writers–Gluttons for Punishment?

Let’s face it, writers are masochists on some level. We create and submit our work, knowing the likelihood of its being accepted is minimal, but we keep doing it. The actual writing is the pleasure; the inevitable line of rejections before an acceptance comes along is the humiliation we endure for those fleeting moments of vindication.

And then we do it all over again.

Rejection is never easy, whether it’s by a potential lover or friend or an agent or editor. I’ve heard so many writer friends–not to mention myself–say, “I just sent a story to [insert name of literary magazine here]. I know I have a snowball’s chance in hell, but at least I’m submitting.”

Why, oh, why do we do that?

Because when you get the acceptance email or you check Submittable and see the “accepted” note, it’s the greatest feeling in the world–for a millisecond it’s better than seeing your children the first time, better than orgasm, better even than a paycheck. It’s affirmation, you see, that you really are a writer; you aren’t just a hack throwing words on the screen, and all your suffering is worth it.

A writer friend of mine recently posted on Facebook that writing her novel required more concentration, more focus, more work than anything she’d ever done. I responded that was what made it so painfully fun. Yes, at times writing is like constantly putting your tongue on a sore tooth, but when the pain goes away–ah, bliss. It’s why when I encounter a non-writer who says, “Oh, well, it’s not real work. You just make things up,” I usually respond with a smile and suggest he or she should give it a try. “Oh, I have better things to do with my time.” Well, good, I’m glad, because you don’t have what it takes to be a writer.

Writing has brought me some of my biggest disappointments, but it has also brought me some of my biggest joys. For years, I’d seen my non-fiction in print, so when my first fiction story was accepted by eFiction Magazine a couple of years ago, I didn’t think I’d have much of a personal response. When the issue with my story showed up on my Kindle, I had the most visceral reaction I’d ever experienced–and I used to be a flight instructor, so I’ve had gut-wrenching moments. There’s nothing quite like seeing your words on a page with your by-line, knowing it’s a story which is the progeny of your imagination, that you “just made it up.” Not only did you make it up, but someone else liked it. Others will read it, and because there is an internet, your story will out there forever. How’s that for immortality?

Now, excuse me. I have to go humiliate myself for some perverse pleasure.

Post-Freeze Friday Fictioneers

The recent deep-freeze from the errant polar vortex this week froze more than water pipes and noses. It induced a brain freeze–in me, at least. I couldn’t seem to coax a single word from that cold-addled brain onto the computer screen. All I really wanted to do was sleep and eat soup.

I’ve already written about seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and how the shortened periods of daylight get me down, and, well, never mind that the intervals of daylight are actually increasing right now, when it’s mind numbingly cold and gray, my brain decides to hibernate. None of my usual writing pick-me-ups seemed to work. I looked at today’s Friday Fictioneers prompt (which comes out on Wednesday) and went “meh.” I scanned the news outlets for a topic for my mid-week political blog and went “ho-hum.” (Thank goodness Gov. Chris Christie is a perfect foil for a knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberal; otherwise, I’d have skipped the political blog this week. So, thanks to the Jersey guy, my column was only a day late.)

Today dawned (I’m sure it did because it’s moderately light out there.) rainy and foggy but also with an idea for the Friday Fictioneers prompt, one that was at least satisfying. However, I managed to roll over and go back to sleep. My luck is improving, though, because when I woke again, the idea was still there–and ended up being 121 words, way too long for a 100-word story. Snip, snip, cut, slice, and lo and behold “Siren’s Song” met the word count with idea still intact.

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

Now, I’m going to catch a nap or eat a bowl of soup. Whatever.

Non-Fiction in a Fiction Critique Group?

Sounds like a contradiction in terms, doesn’t it? A couple of years ago, I started an off-shoot of my main writers group, SWAG Writers, for critiquing fiction. We began with six people, and after the first meeting we ended up with three regulars. One person was accepted into a graduate program and moved. One indicated she really had nothing prepared to critique, and the third didn’t take well having her grammar and punctuation corrected. But they were all writers of fiction.

The three of us stumbled on for a while, but it wasn’t working well, so we disbanded. Two of us continued to exchange our work online, but we became so accustomed to each others’ work, we realized we couldn’t give it that “other eyes” assessment.

Fast-forward a year, count in some new additions to SWAG, and, huzzah, we have six people again. I learned a bit from the earlier experience. Before we met for the first time, I asked everyone to submit to each other a couple of pages of their work, so we could all decide whether the experience would be beneficial to us; then, we met to critique those two pages. That’s when we discovered, gasp, one of the members is writing a biography.

SWAG is open to all writers in the area–poets, lyricists, fiction writers, non-fiction writers, even crossword puzzle designers. But, clearly, the poets and fiction writers outnumber the non-fiction writers. A few of the poets get together informally, and here we had the re-constituted fiction critique group. There is, however, nowhere else for the non-fiction writer to go. So, we thought, what the heck, let’s give it a go.

A couple of us have experience with non-fiction. In fact, since I got a job as a publications assistant with an aviation insurance consortium in 1976, most of my editing and writing experience has been in non-fiction, specifically in the technical aviation safety area. I was a reporter on and editor of an aviation safety magazine, and for a little more than a year, I wrote non-fiction feature articles for my local newspaper. I have a lot of experience editing non-fiction, not the least of which is my degree in history. Another member of the critique group is a newspaper editor. (She is in the group to have her fiction critiqued, however.)

No problem, you say. Not a problem exactly–editing fiction and non-fiction have similar approaches (grammar, punctuation, etc.), they both tell a story though one is strictly fact-based and has to have the references to substantiate those facts. Now, yes, if you write historical fiction, you have references out the wazoo. The difference is you don’t have to cite them. Yes, you can put a list at the end of your book, but, trust me, the readers hardly ever look there. In a non-fiction piece, particularly a biography, just about everything you say has to have a citation.

When I review or critique a fiction piece, I involve myself completely in the story and characters. In a biography, you can do that too, especially with the current fashion in non-fiction writing, which is to make it “read” like a work of fiction–good characters, action, conflict, etc. Non-fiction writing is still scholarly, but now it just doesn’t sound like it.

Still, and I can’t quite put my finger on it, critiquing fiction and non-fiction is different. When I read the fiction pieces for the upcoming meeting, I was caught up in the characters and the conflict in the stories. When I read the non-fiction piece–which is a rough draft with references listed but not cited–I found myself making notes like, “how do you know this,” “how can you prove that,” etc. I needed the citations, even though I recall from writing my own monographs and senior theses that you usually put those in on the final draft.

I’ve been focusing on my fiction the last four years, the writing there of, that is. It’s a bit of a head-shake for me to break that habit and get back into reviewing and evaluating non-fiction, and unrelated to aviation at that. I just hope I can be of use to that biographer, that my fiction brain can make the abrupt adjustment.

Still, it’s a diverse group of writers, and I’m all heady with anticipation.

Happy Friday Fictioneers New Year!

At some point this year Friday Fictioneers will be three years old. Pretty amazing to stay around this long. We’ve had vets leave and come back and a lot of newbies come and go as well, but the stories have always intriguing and thought-provoking. I guess that’s what makes us stay and write every week.

With my other online writing group, I set my writing goals for the year, to include participating in Friday Fictioneers, so I’ll be around as long as Friday Fictioneers is around. However, writing a story for Friday Fictioneers isn’t merely to check a box. Paring a story down to 100 words improves not only your writing skills but your editing/revising abilities as well.

Here’s an example. When I first started writing these 100-word stories, my first draft was typically 300-400 words, which took a lot of editing to get to 100 words as a coherent story. As I became more practiced, first draft began to drop in word count–200 words, 150 words, until now when a draft comes in at 105 or so words. Makes the editing easier and quicker, too. Plus doing these flash fiction stories has inspired me to participate in other flash fiction exercises with different word counts. Yep, I’m very versatile.

Another way I’ve used Friday Fictioneers story prompts is to hone my dialogue skills. I’ve written several stories, which consist solely of dialogue. Today is one of those exercises. The story is “Did I Tell You the One About My Talking Dog?” As usual, if you don’t see the link on the 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. It’ll be easy. After a purge of 2013 stories, it’ll be the only possibility there.

Pre-Solstice Friday Fictioneers

We’re one day away from Winter Solstice and the least amount of daylight for the year. However, I walked outside to get the mail this afternoon and thought I’d been transported several months into the future to April. It could be close to 70 on Winter Solstice this year–but climate change is a myth, so some say.

There’s been very little writing going on this week because of holiday baking and cooking and gift-buying, but I’ve managed to add a few scenes to a new project I’ve started. It wasn’t easy to get them out of my head, where they were enjoying a fine old time bouncing around in my imagination, and onto the computer screen, but I managed to do it. I’m not entirely happy with what I’ve written (who is, the first time around), but it’ll get fixed.

One of my favorite stories as a child was The Little Mermaid–not the Disney movie but the story by Hans Christian Andersen. Mer-people absolutely fascinated me, and like most kids, I was sorely disappointed when I discovered they weren’t real. Today’s Friday Fictioneers photo prompt brought back all the mer-people stories I’ve read over the years and inspired this week’s story, “Fish Out of Water.” As usual if you don’t see the link on the title, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, then select the story from the drop down list.

Happy holidays to all, however you celebrate, or not.

Gifting Writers

If you have a writer on your holiday gift list and haven’t a clue what to give him or her, let me help you out.

We love books, even ones besides our own. The path to being a good writer begins with being a good reader. Writers read books within their own genre, but if you’re like me, your tastes are eclectic–I’ll read almost anything, even if all I take away from a book is, “I don’t want to write like that.”

We love journals because when we’re without a computer, we need something besides a cocktail napkin to capture an inspiration. Smart phones with their built-in recorders go a long way, but there’s nothing better than a sweet little notebook you can carry in a pocket or your purse.

We love pens, too, and not just to write in those journals (or cocktail napkins). We’re always looking for just the right pen to use for book signings so we can make a statement. I’m partial to fountain pens myself (with cartridges, not ink bottles; I’m far too much of a klutz for them).

We love reviews of our work. Good ones, of course, and even bad ones–IF they’re constructive. The new trend in giving books you’ve never read a bad review hits a writer where it hurts. We’re all pretty sensitive creatures anyway, and we know better than anyone words do hurt. So, if you can’t give the gift of constructive criticism, cross me off your list.

We love it when our friends and family give us space to write, when they put aside their demands on our time and don’t make us feel guilty about taking the time we need to write. I recently told someone the sexiest thing my ex ever said to me was, “I know your writing is important to you, so I’ll just go row around the lake for a couple of hours.” That was a gift whose significance missed me at the time. Now, when I have different interests conflicting for my time, I wish others were as understanding that sometimes I need to retreat to my room, wherever that is, and write.

We love it as well when family and friends, even perfect strangers, give us fodder for our fiction. Some people don’t understand why writers live for the family get-togethers others dread. Easy. We know we’ll come away with a half-dozen new ideas for stories and/or snippets of killer dialogue. So, thanks. Really.

There you have it. Some great suggestions for the writer in your life. Oh, wait. I missed one. A great gift for a writer is to just say to them, “I’m proud of what you do.”

Friday Fictioneers – After a High Note, a Low Note, and Another High

The life of a writer has its inevitable ups and downs. Compressing them into a week is hard on the nerves, though.

This week started off with an email from a writing instructor of mine who said he would shop my novel (Sudden Madness of the Carnival Season) to some agents he knew. I also found out my story, “The Dragon Who Breathed No Fire,” had made the top twenty-five in a contest I had entered. Man, I was feeling good, no, spectacular, about being a writer, about having what I thought were good stories confirmed.

Then came Tuesday.

The contest story didn’t make the top ten in the contest. I couldn’t believe it. I read the top ten list twice, three, four times, just to make certain. Now, it wasn’t arrogance which stunned me that my story wasn’t there. That story was good. Beyond good, it was one of the best things I’ve ever written. It came to me in a dream, from the voices of Vietnam vets I’ve known, and I worked it and reworked it for the better part of twenty-four hours before I submitted it. It was real, it was gritty, it was disturbing, and it was good.

A friend of mine, who is a Vietnam vet, emailed me and said it was the best depiction of PTSD he’d ever read in fiction or non-fiction. That was exactly what I wanted. And that beautiful, disturbing story lost out to fluffy dragon stories and happy endings.

(BTW, I love the people involved with the contest, but I’m not apologizing for my characterization. I’m entitled to a bit of a whine. Sour grapes? Maybe, probably, but if you’re a writer, you’ve been there; don’t deny it.)

I was astonished, “bummed” as I told a writer friend, whose great story had also not made the top ten from the top twenty-five, and we commiserated together. Truly, it made me want to close the laptop forever.

The other good thing about being a writer is that you have a cadre of writer friends who won’t let you get down on yourself. “You stop that right now, young lady,” said one such friend (also the mother of a teenager; hence, the tone of the language). “You send that story somewhere else.” And she was absolutely right. I spent Wednesday on Duotrope, selecting some publications where this story might fit. That mitigated the disappointment but didn’t completely eradicate it.

Then came Thursday.

I came awake to my phone indicating I had an email arriving. I fumbled for the phone and my reading glasses to see who had woken me up so early. An email from my writing instructor: “So-and-so from such-and-such agency is reading your manuscript and is considering representing it.” I read it twice, three times, four times. I cried like a little girl and was as giddy as a kid (of any age) at Disney. Now, it’s not a done deal–and when and if it is, you’ll hear me shrieking “Ermagerd!” from just about anywhere in the country. It’s the farthest a manuscript of mine has ever gone; that, in and of itself, is a reason to celebrate.

A typical week in the life of a writer.

Today’s Friday Fictioneers photo prompt creeped me out. For as long as I can remember seeing empty shoes in an odd location has terrified me. I can see them in closets with no problem, but let me see a single tennis shoe on the side of the road and I’m gibbering. I went to an exhibit of photographs taken after 9/11 and never blinked an eye at the shot of a human spine atop some debris. However, the photo of a lone high heel in the middle of a street made me leave the gallery. I have no clue why this is the case–some deep-seated childhood trauma no doubt, but at least it gave me some great inspiration for “Big Shoes to Fill.” Yeah, I don’t write happy endings about fluffy dragons. I write real-life crap. So deal.

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