Month: April 2013

When You Have Non-Writers in Your Life

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Let me start off by saying our first annual SWAG Writers Book Fair was fabulous! Great fun talking to local authors, and of course I blew any “profit” I made on book sales in buying their books. We’ll be doing it again next year, and I’ll post info in time for everyone to make vacation plans to attend. Just kidding. Not really. 😉

One of the great things about the Internet and social media is finding writers from around the world or writing-inspiration web sites. One recent find is Writers Write of South Africa and New Zealand. They offer online courses, but it’s their WordPress blog and Facebook page which provide amusing or downright hilarious sayings and cartoons about the writing life. I saw one such offering over the weekend: “Top 10 Tips: How to Survive a Relationship with a Writer.”

I was very lucky that my most recent ex was not only an advocate for my writing, but he absolutely understood the need for me to have a notebook and plenty of pens or a laptop on vacations. He accepted the fact I needed writing time and never begrudged me that time. He’d even tell relatives not to bother me while I wrote. Of course, his eyes glazed over as I talked about whatever I worked on, but he never asked me to choose between him and writing. That was one of the things I loved about him and miss.

But we all have a significant other, a friend, a relative who just doesn’t get what we do or, in an attempt to look as if they’re being supportive, who do all the wrong things. Here, courtesy of Writers Write is a little primer (with some commentary from me) for those non-writers with whom we share our lives.

How to Survive a Relationship with a Writer

TOP TEN TIPS

1. Never ask when the book will be published.

Ah, yes, this is always a vexing query from someone who doesn’t understand traditional publishing. I think our best response could be, “It’s so good, it’s worth waiting for.”

2. Do not ask a writer if he/she wished he/she had written the latest best-seller.

This happens to me when a new Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum comes out. Yes, I write thrillers, but I’d probably be less cranky if you’d compare me to John le Carre or Alan Furst.

3. Never say to a writer that you’re thinking of writing a book. Never say you’d also write a book if only you had the time.

The reason we don’t like the first statement is there’s usually a follow-on question: “Wouldn’t you like to have a look at it?” or the equally painful, “Why don’t you give it to your agent?” The second part of number three is vexing because the speaker implies that whatever it is they’re doing, it’s far more important than your writing–or that writing is so easy anyone could do it.

4. Don’t call the police if you happen to see a writer’s browsing history. The average writer is not planning to poison you, hire a hit-man, or move to Afghanistan. It’s simply research.

One day, several years ago, I happened to forget to put away multiple issues of “Soldier of Fortune” and gun magazines, which I’d used for research. That caused quite a stir with some church ladies who came over for tea. In a post-9/11 world, I’m concerned that researching bomb-making instructions and/or “how to weaponize” anthrax will get me a visit from DHS. Oh, wait, is that someone at the door?

5. Leave a writer alone when the writer is actually writing. You have no idea how difficult it is to enter the zone.

Sometimes when you vacation with family, you don’t always get a lot of privacy, but you do always get Uncle Bob or Cousin Shelly hovering in the doorway of whichever room you thought you could hide in. He or she observes you hunched over the laptop, your fingers flying, and they’ll inevitably ask, “Are you writing?”

6. Don’t pick unfair fights with a writer. Writers do get their revenge in print.

A couple of former colleagues and bosses will find themselves casualties in my stories and novels, as will a couple of neighbors who are being pretty obnoxious. What catharsis!

7. If you do want to fight, make it memorable. The writer is always looking for material.

A couple of former colleagues and bosses will find the stupid things they said/did/proposed in my stories and novels, as will a couple of neighbors who are being pretty obnoxious. What payback!

8. If your writer wanders off at a party, don’t panic. Writers love to inspect the host’s bookshelves and medicine cabinets.

Let’s face it, we piece our characters and settings together from people and places we know, and what better places to discover whom a person really is but his or her bookshelves and medicine cabinets? At least, that’s the excuse I’ll use if I’m caught.

9. Buy your writer notebooks and cute pens as gifts. Do not buy flowers. Chocolate is also acceptable.

Some of my favorite gifts from friends and family have been blank journals, especially the ones that fit in my purse. Oh, and the chocolate? I wholeheartedly agree, though for me, I’d never turn down Irish whiskey.

10. Leave your writer alone when a rejection letter arrives. After the deadly silence, screaming, crying, moaning, and muttering have subsided, offer your writer a cup of coffee or tea. And a cupcake. And a hug.

Best advice of all. Don’t get angry along with me. It’s my rejection; let me vent. Then, talk me down off the bridge. And the cupcake needs to be chocolate. The hug is mandatory.

If anything, sharing this with the non-writer in your life will result in either a tender moment of mutual laughter or one of those epic disagreements which will form the basis of your next novel. It’s a win-win!

Ladders to Friday Flash Fiction

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Friday Fictioneers LogoBy some sort of odd coincidence, both Friday flash fiction exercises I participate in (Friday Fictioneers and Flash! Friday) have ladders in their photo prompts today. One is commonplace; the other unusual, and both different enough that one story won’t fit both. Not that I’d do that anyway. Both brought lots of interesting thoughts to mind.

Friday Fictioneers’ photo prompt brought back to mind a favorite episode of mine from the classic Twilight Zone series. I’ve mentioned before that watching that series and seeing the stories penned by not only Rod Serling but people who became some of my favorite writers (Bradbury, Matheson, and many more) made me want to write.

Serling was an amazingly erudite man who had such a grasp of human frailty, and he reflected that in his tales of the other worldly and macabre. Almost single-handedly he made the term “speculative fiction” credible in a literary environment that dismissed such writing as pulp. (That, unfortunately, still happens to a certain extent.) He wrote or adapted to a screenplay ninety-nine of the original 156 episodes, including the one I’m paying homage to in today’s Friday Fictioneers offering, “Reincarnation.”

If you’ve never watched the original offerings of Twilight Zone, give them a try. Ignore the black-and-white presentation and the sometimes cheesy special effects and pay attention to the stories, the words, which are masterful.

As usual, if you don’t see the link on the title above, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, then select the story from the drop-down menu. If you want to read the story for Flash! Friday, which features a ladder as well, click here or click on the Flash! Friday tab above and select the last story (Escalera del Jacobo) on the list.

Heading in a New Direction

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Off and on for the past fifteen years I’ve been working on my magnum opus–a multiple book series on an actual event of domestic terrorism. Fifteen years may seem like a long time, but for twelve of those years I had a full-time and demanding job plus an actual social life. That, and the research was not only extensive but sometimes mentally taxing.

I composited real people into fictional characters but stuck to the history as it’s known in public records. I changed the names to protect the innocent–and to disguise the guilty. I filled holes in the historical record with fiction, but fiction extrapolated from the research. In all that time, the only thing I didn’t change was the location of the event of domestic terrorism.

Until now.

I’ll digress a bit to again recommend that writers participate in critique groups. Not only do you get an honest appraisal of your craft, but you get the reactions of readers–both needed before you think about publication. Locate a critique group and join one. You’ll find it useful beyond measure.

Book one of this series is going through my critique group, and the comments and suggestions have been just what this series needed. And a key comment was about keeping the location historically accurate. When the critique group members started making suggestions about plot, I kept having to respond, “But the reality is this or that.” My critique group quite rightly pointed out that by sticking to the actual location, I was boxing myself in.

At first, the thought of changing all the references to the actual location was daunting. Book one isn’t an issue; it doesn’t even come up in that. It’s book two and three where the first veiled hints get dropped, and in book four that particular setting is critical. So, I debated long and hard with myself about whether or not to change it and came to the only logical conclusion.

I changed the location, moving it one state north then one state east. Sounds simple, right? Not. There are hundreds if not thousands of allusions to this location, including physical descriptions of buildings, locations of streets and landmarks, and dialogue. Doing  a global search-and-replace won’t cut it. It means yet another methodical and thorough edit.

And maybe that was the point all along.

All fine and good, but when you’re planning to publish the series so that book four appears in the month of the twentieth anniversary of said event, it’s not so convenient. Convenience, however, isn’t a consideration. The art and the craft of writing are the major considerations, so I’ll do it. I’ll grumble a bit–well, a lot–but I’ll get it done, in the knowledge it was the right decision for the story I want to tell.

Friday Fictioneers with a Sting

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Friday Fictioneers LogoThe influx of some spring-like (and summerish) weather doesn’t combine well with putting your butt in the chair and writing. The lure of outside is too strong. Yes, yes, I know I can take the laptop outside and enjoy the weather while writing, but what can I say. I’m easily distracted.

And this has been a week where we needed distraction from an all too intense reality. Boston has always been a city after my own heart. I loved the time I’ve spent there for work and for pleasure. I was just there in March for AWP, lamenting the fact the snowfall didn’t allow me to play tourist in Boston’s fine museums and art galleries.

So, take an intriguing photo, twenty-four hour news reporting about terrorists, and you get something pretty dark, even for me. So dark, in fact, I’ve impulsively decided not to post it. If this hadn’t been a week where the face of the inhumanity of terrorism was a smiling, eight-year-old boy, maybe the story would have been appropriate, but today it’s not. And I never censor myself or my writing; however, it’s a matter of sensitivity.

Instead of the first thing that came to mind, you have “Empty Nest Optimism” instead. If you don’t see the link to the story in the title, scroll to the top of this page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, then select the story from the drop-down list.

Life Gets in the Way

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Last week was a slow writing week. I didn’t even get a chance to sit down and compose until Friday morning. Some spring clean-up, some things I’d been putting off around the house, babysitting, and other obligations intervened. That’s life, but by the time Friday rolled around I not only missed writing, I kicked myself for not making the time to write.

And the weekend of April 5-6 was certainly inspiring. I attended the Tom Wolfe Seminar at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA. Wolfe, a 1951 W&L graduate, is so admired by his classmates that they endowed an annual seminar in his name, which pairs Wolfe and another author for a weekend of panel discussions of the author’s work. W&L faculty also present a scholarly address on a particular work of the featured author.

This year the featured author was Jennifer Egan, a Pulitzer winner for A Visit from the Goon Squad. I’d read “Goon Squad” right before the Pulitzer announcement because I’d heard it was a novel in stories, something I was interested in exploring. Some of the stories intrigued me, though the PowerPoint story gave me a flashback to working days and countless, bad PowerPoint presentations. I wasn’t entirely sure what I thought of the book as a whole, though the writing was excellent.

Turns out Egan never intended that book to be a novel, in stories or otherwise. She knew she had this cast of interrelated characters, and she had decided to write a story for each character; but she wasn’t calling it a “novel” in her own head. Nor did she call it a collection of short stories, though that’s what she intended it to be. It wasn’t until the paperback edition came out that the words “A Novel” appeared on the cover, but that, Egan stated, was likely at the publisher’s instigation–as if “Pulitzer Prize Winner” wouldn’t boost sales.

In truth, I read the book over a period of several weeks, and I think it’s a work you need to finish in a single sitting or not over a protracted amount of time. Otherwise, you tend to forget the connections and the fact that a minor or barely mentioned character in one story is featured in another. So, this seminar, then, along with the two scholarly explorations by W&L professors Christopher Gavaler (“Goon Squad as Pulp Fiction”) and Jasmin Darznik (“The Art of Discontinuity: Time and Memory in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad“), brought the characters back to mind. And the connections clicked. “Goon Squad” is a book I recommend.

Egan’s speech–“Journalist as Novelist; Novelist as Journalist”–was thought-provoking as well. She admits she’s an “accidental journalist” and took advantage of a job offer from The New York Times Magazine to conduct research for her novel Look at Me. The emphasis on research as a journalist improved her lot as a novelist, Egan stated, and she lauded the recent trend in writing non-fiction along the lines of fiction and vice-versa. In all, a very inspiring talk, and Egan was self-deprecating; no swelled-head Pulitzer diva in the house.

This past weekend I attended a two-day workshop on Speculative Fiction by Edward M. Lerner and hosted by WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA. It wasn’t so much a craft workshop as an in-depth explanation of what speculative fiction is, the elements of speculative fiction, its place in the current publishing market, and its related fandom. Lerner, who has co-authored with Larry Niven in addition to publishing several “hard” sci-fi novels on his own, is very knowledgeable of the topic and gave an excellent presentation with plenty of opportunity to ask questions. In truth, it was more of a refresher for me because I’ve read spec fic since I was a teen, but it did inspire me to give writing sci-fi a second (or third or twentieth) chance.

Why? Well, Lerner himself is a physicist, but he has written sci-fi books on nanotechnology, medical thrillers, and other non-physics topics through research and contacting subject matter experts. That approach doesn’t put it out of my wheelhouse, even though I’ve always thought I didn’t have the science chops to pull off writing sci-fi. However, the first story I had published in eFiction Magazine was sci-fi–“Without Form or Substance.” It was about time travel, but, unbeknownst to me until Lerner’s workshop, I used time travel as a trope. It was there and central to the plot, but the details of how it worked were unnecessary.

So, a great workshop for inspiration or, rather, renewing inspiration. If you live near Charlottesville, VA, give WriterHouse a look. In addition to providing space for actual writing, its workshops are always top-notch.

After all that, here’s hoping this week is more productive. I’d cross my fingers, but I need them to type.

Friday Fictioneers – How the Week Flies By

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To call this a slow writing week for me would be an understatement. As a recent Facebook meme states, this was my week: “Writer’s Block–when your imaginary friends stop talking to you.” That’s exactly the way it felt, and I’m not really sure what I did to piss them off so they’d spend the week sulking in silence. I guess it’s like marriage–you’re expected to read minds and know what’s bothering the other person.

In reality, spring cleaning–indoors and out–was the culprit. Unlike many writer friends, gardening is not a chore I like. It doesn’t free my mind to be creative. It just makes me mutter about how much I hate it, but I figure the neighbors would get upset if I allow the flowerbeds to go au naturale. I did get a certain amount of satisfaction from reorganizing my household filing system so that, next year, when I take everything to my accountant he won’t quirk an eyebrow at the pile of paper I hand over.

Bottom line: Not much writing or revising done, and two blog posts missed (including one on the Tom Wolfe Seminar I attended and will write about). It’s been a while since that happened (probably the same time last year). Though all was not lost. I did manage to come up with some decent ad copy for a radio spot to promote the SWAG Writers Book Fair later this month. (See the first item in the column to the right). Somehow, thirty seconds worth of words is little compensation for a week’s worth of missing creativity.

On Wednesday I look a brief look at the photo prompt for this week’s Friday Fictioneers and literally said, “WTF?” (Well, I didn’t use an abbreviation.) As this week’s pattern Friday Fictioneers Logoplayed out, I sat down yesterday to write something, and, even though I had a concept, I couldn’t force the words onto the screen. I even switched to pen and paper because sometimes that gets the creative juices flowing, but zilch, nada, nothing.

I must have fallen asleep last night with the concept in mind because, boom, I woke early this morning with the story in my head. I got up immediately and got it into a Word file, and, whoa, 121 words. On first glance, I figured there was no way to cut twenty-one words, but I did; and the concept is intact. This is what I love about Friday Fictioneers–I’ve reached the point where not doing a Friday Fictioneers story would mean letting myself down, and that’s great inspiration.

Today’s story is “Siblings,” and you’ll see a dedication at the beginning of the story. I didn’t lose my only brother in Vietnam, like the story’s protagonist, but I did lose him in another war–one called Type One Diabetes. As usual, if you don’t see the link on the title, scroll to the Friday Fictioneers tab above and select it from the drop-down list.

April’s First Friday Fictioneers

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Friday Fictioneers LogoA short post today because I’m off to Lexington, VA for the annual Tom Wolfe Lecture series. Legendary author Tom Wolfe introduces another author of note, and faculty from Washington and Lee University provide scholarly lectures on the author’s work. This is all interwoven with great food and interesting company, and this year the featured author is Pulitzer prize winner Jennifer Egan. Her featured work is A Visit from the Good Squad.

I’m looking forward to some in-depth study of another writer’s work–and to having my copy of Goon Squad signed by the author herself.

Today’s Friday Fictioneer’s story is a prose poem–yeah, I’m a glutton for punishment–in honor of National Poetry Month. Last night we had a great, SWAG Writers poetry reading, so I must have been inspired. Poets, be kind to “Life, a Cliché.” If you don’t see the link on the title, then scroll to the top of the page, click on Friday Fictioneers. You can select this week’s offering from the drop down list.

No Foolin’

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Today, I could have played a major April Fools joke on the rest of you by “announcing” that I’d just been offered a six-figure advance and a multiple-book contract from one of the “Big Six.” I could have, but I won’t because it’s likely the joke would be on me. So, no advance, no book contract; just constant editing and revising and hoping.

I get frustrated at times with the lack of new material I’m producing. I retired to have more time to write, and I have written more and more constantly than before I retired; but it seems at times that I do more re-writing than writing.

No difference, you say. Writing is writing. True, but I miss the mad rush of researching and drafting that comes with a whole new project. Granted, I participate in National Novel Writing Month every November, which means I have created five, original manuscripts in five years.

The first one was a semi-autobiographical piece, which, after re-reading it, I realized was 200+ pages of self-indulgent whining. It has, however, been a good source of short stories.

The second one I have edited, revised, and re-written to the point where it’s as ready as it will ever be for pitching to possible agents.

For the third one, I took a risk and killed off one of my characters, a bold move that turned out fairly well. It also helped me face the loss of my long-term relationship and address the emotions that involved; however, the character wasn’t ready to die and told me so. The good news is, I’m meshing this manuscript with another one I developed shortly after the events of September 11, 2001. So, all is not lost.

The fourth one is one that I really enjoyed writing. It’s the closest thing to a sci-fi novel I’ve ever written–a story about a dire future after the Tea Party takes over the government. Dark and political, it was a rough draft I was very proud of, and, in fact, the first 5,000 words I submitted for critique in last year’s Tinker Mountain Writers Workshop. The reception it received was awesome. (It helps that the workshop instructor, Pinckney Benedict, is a fan of dystopian fiction.) Then, I re-read Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, for a book club and went, “Oops.” It had been two decades almost since I first read The Handmaid’s Tale, but apparently I channeled Atwood when I wrote my manuscript. (Channeling Atwood could be a good thing.) However, since it got such good feedback, it’s definitely something to work on.

The fifth one, last year, was a completely different work for me, a straight-up literary fiction novel that intersects an event in a small town during World War II with an event in the same town in present day. The protagonist is a successful romance writer married to a not-so-successful novelist, and all is just lovely until they find the bones of a baby in the wall of a room they’re renovating. I always put a NaNoWriMo draft aside for six months before I start revising, so next month is when I’ll pull it out and start polishing it.

So, what am I whining about? Well, after an amazing amount of creativity in the late 1990s and early 2000s wherein I dashed out six novel-length manuscripts featuring my two favorite spies, Mai Fisher and Alexei Bukharin, as they work for the fictional United Nations Intelligence Directorate, I haven’t produced a new novel featuring them since 2002. Yes, I’ve been revising and re-writing all those original manuscripts, but I’ve missed creating a new adventure for them. I have been writing short stories featuring them (Spy Flash, published in December 2012), but aside from that, Mai and Alexei walked away from a mission in 2001; and we’ve heard nothing from them since.

You’ve written all you can about them, you might say. No, I feel they have a lot of adventures in them, and I’ve made notes about those adventures. Merely, focusing on improving my craft and establishing a bit of a name for myself as a flash fiction writer has become my immediate focus.

That’s why I need that multiple-book contract, publishers. I’ve always been well-motivated by deadlines, so take a chance. Tell me you want three books, four, or five, and I’ll get right on them.

Don’t forget, this is National Poetry Month. Take a break from fantasy or cozy mysteries and read a poet you’ve never read before.