Can you draw this turtle?

Remember a billion years ago when Art Instruction Schools used to put those ads in the back of magazines? You may have the aptitude to be a Serious Artist, so apply to our school and we'll Make You Famous(TM).

Sometimes that's how I feel about writing.

Can you write a sentence? Have you had a single good idea in your life? Subscribe to this blog/magazine/online course/writers conference, and we'll Make You an Important Literary Figure (or, we'll Make You Filthy Rich, take your pick).

At some point in my life, I thought, wow, I tell a really mean story. I Should Be A Writer.

Then reality hit. This isn't just aptitude. There is a lot more that goes into writing professionally than just telling a kick-ass story. The more I read, the more I learn, the more I realize that I have to learn about the craft of writing.

Oddly enough, instead of making me depressed and discouraged, I find this incredibly exciting. As I pore through the pages of books on the mechanics of producing stories, I find myself more enthusiastic about writing than I have been for years. AND I'm actually writing--not just reading.

It's a good day to be me. It's probably a good day to be you, too. Especially since you were kind enough to read this post. (Yeah, I'll suck up for readers. I ain't shy.)

Glimmers of Hope on the Horizon

And like spring, my mood is poking out of the cold, barren winter and feeling a bit more hopeful and renewed. I've started journaling--three pages a day, rain or shine, sick or well, handwritten in a notebook. This is just to make sure that I don't go a single day without writing.

I've also just about finished my first submission story to a popular fantasy anthology (yay, me!). Since this anthology accepts multiple submissions (submit one, if it gets rejected, submit another, etc.), I am planning on writing another piece as a backup. In the wonderful circumstance that the first piece sells, then I have another to try to market elsewhere. Win-win.

I'm not sure where this journey is taking me, but at least I'm back on the path again rather than cowering in a ditch on the side of the road.

It's been a while.

Snow and poverty and a Saints Superbowl have pretty much kept me busy in the last few weeks. However, I am still writing, submitting, and Living the Dream. :) Okay, at least on weeknights and weekends.

Sometimes it's difficult to keep up momentum, especially when you're doing it alone. Or at least, when it feels like you're doing it alone. My partner is a very good writer who does not write, so while she is great at encouraging me and helping me work out Escher-like tangles in my plot, she does not have that writer drive in her.

There are days when I wish I had an entire room full of writers to sit and bitch with, especially when my prose seems so terribly lame and my characters 2-D and my plot...well, just stupid. There are times i wish I had a room full of people just as neurotic as I am, where we could all commisserate on the absolute masochism of our chosen dreams.

On the other hand, sometimes it's really great to have a girlfriend who just says, you're great, you can do it, and NO you can't skip writing to watch your Netflix movie. Sometimes, that's a really wonderful thing to have.

Now, I'm going to log off the internet (having dutifully sent out the three chapters an agent requested) and get back to Fairville. Poor Mo--I left her in a bit of a pickle, and I guess I ought to just go move things along. Namaste, my peeps.

Positive Thinking

I recently hit the 10K mark on my new book, Fairville. One of the differences between writing short stories and novels is that, with short stories I hardly ever worried about word count. My point was always to write the story. it was just a matter of getting everything done that needed to be done. The word count took care of itself.

With novels, though, I'm constantly stressing about how many words I have, how many words I've written, and how I'm ever going to make this story novel length.

I think I'm going to go back to my old way of thinking. I think I'm going to just tell the story. Put words on the page. Move the characters around on the Monopoly board like the little pewter darlings they are.

Accept that the word count will take care of itself, as long as I take care of the words that comprise that count.

One of the main reasons I quit pursuing a professional writing career back in the 90s was that I just stressed myself out worrying about the details. I worried so much about marketing and querying and publishing that I sucked all the joy out of writing for myself.

Down at the core, it's all about telling the tale.

Down at the core, it's all telling a tale other people want to read.

I can do that, folks. I just have to get out of my way.

Louisiana History & Stuff

I'm trying to find a balance between research and actual writing. Considering I haven't been putting very many words on the paper for Fairville, I figured I should do something towards getting the story done. So I spent a good deal of yesterday researching the history of southern Lousiana, particularly Lafourche Parish (where the fictional town of Fairville is set).

I left Louisiana when I was 27 years old, happy to be gone. And in the 16 years since, I've never regretted that decision. But my love-hate relationship with the state of my birth makes good fodder for fiction, I think. I'm especially fascinated with the idea of coastal erosion, and that much of the land that existed in Louisiana even when I was a kid is now under the Gulf of Mexico.

Course, you know the question has to be asked--what secrets are going to be washed away with the tide? What buried mysteries will be exposed as the land is drawn out to the waters?

My challenge here is to translate those questions into actual story, and to create characters compelling enough and ideas sound enough to sustain a novel. The problem is, how do you write a contemporary novel set in Louisiana without playing into the standard cliches (voodoo, hurricanes, murder, Mardi Gras, political corruption)?

I don't think it's possible--there will be at least one hurricane in my novel, and plenty of corruption. Murder is a strong possibility, too.

But hopefully I can find some aspect of Louisiana history that is overlooked by the hacks and use it as a catalyst in my book. It's just so much more than Mardi Gras and voodoo. Really it is.

The Thing About Pep Talks...

They only provide valuable advise if you actually use said advise.

I did not use my advise from the previous post.

I have not written anything in days.

I know this is one of those Stupid Writer Things you're not supposed to do, but my depression has been in Super Awesome Overkill Mode since last week. I'd pretty much convinced myself that this was not for me, and that I was wasting my own time and my loved ones' patience trying to be a Real Writer (as opposed to the kind who writes hundreds of short stories that are well-received, but completely unpublishable due to their fannish nature).

But I'm not going to give up. I am working on a plan to get the same kind of encouragement I got for my short stories--namely, someone reading as I go along and telling me, "You can't stop now." That's how I wrote the first novel.

Fact is, I do not have it in me to be my own pep squad. There are simply too many insecurities there, soo much self-esteem crap pulling me down and distracting me from the business of putting words on the screen.

So Fey is going to read my pages on Fairville as I write them, and bully me into writing more.

It's sad, but it's come to this. I need a keeper.

Thank god for girlfriends and chocolate. The universe would collapse without them.

How do parents write?

Ever?

I tried to do my usual hour or two at the laundromat this week, and found myself with a nine-year-old boy attached to my aura. He was very nice, very interested in every single thing I was doing, even polite--in a nine-year-old boy sort of way.

And I couldn't concentrate enough to write a thing.

I have a whole new respect for parents who manage to have writing careers.

Just a Metaphysic Monday!

That's right, it's Metaphysic Monday here at Ye Olde Day Job(TM). Time for deep conversations between reports and calls, pondering the depths of corporate philosophy over the cubicle walls. We've decided that our entire center is one big psychiastric experiment, and we're all lab rats used for the sole purpose of data-gathering. We're expected to go about our maze, preferably without the knowledge that we're in a maze, chasing that nibble of cheese and living our little ratlike lives. The guys in the white coats at Corporate monitor our progress, observe our little rodent hierachies, and jot things down in their steno pads. It's nothing personal--we're just rats, and we can't be expected to understand the things people in white coats write on steno pads.

That's a pretty typical Monday morning in my office.

This is why I need to become a full-time writer. At least then I'll know I'm a rat....

A Room of One's Own

I remember back in college reading that essay by Virginia Woolfe. In effect, she said, for a woman to write she must have an income of no less than 500 pounds and a room of her own. I think my modern equivalent of this has become a roll of quarters and a laptop at the laundromat.

Seriously, I get some of my best work done in those two hours a week I spend waiting for the wash cycle to end, or the dryers to go off. Thanks to the invention of headphones and MP3 music files, I don't really feel obligated to socialize.

I love to write at home, and I do for most of the time. But I have a 40 a week day job, a partner I adore (and find it very hard to ignore), and tons of responsibility.

At the laundromat, I'm just that chick with the lap top who doesn't fold her clothes until she gets home.

I can live with that.