Category Archives: writing

Martian Death Flu

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You know how working out is supposed to boost your immune system, and make you strong and all that smack?

I have a case of the Martian Death Flu.  You know the one, where air molecules  bumping against your skin hurt like crazy and your joints are on fire and you have a hacking cough and a fever that trips up and down teasing you so that you think it’s gone away until you get the shivvering chills again and your head aches and the idea of food is appalling and you feel yourself getting weaker by the hour and…

Yeah, that one.

I don’t get sick often so this is getting on my nerves.  I want to train, but… Well, Rule One.  I’m weak enough I’m not sure I could squat with an empty bar and keep my balance.  So, I wait.

Not only that, I think it would be a bit inconsiderate to go to the gym and pass this along to other people.

But I’m feeling cranky and ill and moody and want a mood lift.

And I have work to complete for a client.  Thank God I’m disciplined about research and outlines.   But writing when your think is broken and you can’t brane?  I know there’s this famous idea of people turning to writing when they weren’t well enough for other work, but I guess I’m a crap writer.   I write best when I’m well.

Oh, and open message to all you macho assholes who go to the gym and train while dripping snot into tissues and horking lung butter into your hands:

STOPPIT!!!!

It’s really inconsiderate.  Just sayin’.  Use a mask if you’ve just gotta train, please? (You wanna hurt your own body, go for it.  It’s spreading your illness around to other people that’s my concern).  I’m right up the road from a fancy, schmancy research hospital that’d be delighted to give you a mask if you ask for one.  Really.  But you can buy ‘em cheap in drug stores, too.  I know they’re dorky lookin’.  But I’d respect it.  Honest.

Writing, Books and Marketing

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There’s a fantasy writer who has put out a series of courses on how to write, get published — the whole round of business stuff.  Her name is Holly Lisle.

I’ve found her work valuable.  (Thanks Holly!) I’ve never managed to do what I’d like with my fiction, but her advice and the stuff she’s put out there has definitely been instrumental in me being able to earn a large percentage of my living as a freelance writer.  Since many of my favorite writers got their starts as journalists, I can only hope the the rigors of producing good copy to a tight deadline will hone other skills and improve my fiction.

She mentioned in one of her Q&A emails (one you have to sign up to get and can unsubscribe from!) that she’s come under criticism for mentioning her own work as examples for stuff she’s talking about and shame on her for “advertising”.

Sure, there are times when promotion becomes irritating and probably isn’t going to get you a customer.  Joining an internet discussion board that has a social or community aspect to it only to discuss a book you just wrote might irritate people.  But I think it’s unrealistic to assume that a writer who is spending time teaching about the craft would refrain from mentioning her own work in a newsletter she writes and owns.  It’s very clear from her site that she’s interested in making money from writing and from teaching about writing.   And what in the name of God is the matter with that?

This rant comes from two places for me.  I make part of my living as a writer, and part of it as a teacher.  Developing a course, even a minor one, takes time and energy.  If you have a quick example that will prove your point about something quick to hand, that’s what you’ll use.  It would be inefficient not to.

The writer part.  There are writers who don’t promote their work.  You’ve never heard of them because… they don’t promote their work.   See, making a living as a writer isn’t just about sitting at the keyboard pounding words out in a flood of prose — though those moments do feel a bit godlike.  Which, I suspect, is why many of us do it.   It’s about research, it’s    about development.  It’s about finding someone who’ll pay you to do it, and that’s no trivial task.   Of course you’re going to mention your work!  If you don’t, you stop having work.

Have I ever been irritated by someone promoting their work?  Yep.  The poly community, ferinstance, is loaded with people who write a book, then join online communities for the basic purpose of promoting that work.  They’ve forgotten a very basic premise of networking.   You have to have an established relationship — you know, maybe made friends before that sort of informal marketing works well.  Otherwise it’s gonna backfire.

But if someone owns a site, has a mailing list for which on can sign up for, and then you do?   Yeah, it’s only reasonable to expect the person is gonna mention his work!  That’s not crass.  It’s only sensible.

A Really Fantastic Book for Free

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American Gods by Neil Gaiman is available as a preview copy online for free.

Yep, you can read it online for free.

Now, I loved this book so much that not only do I own a hard copy, I bought the audiobook. It’s one of my favorite books to come out in the last few years.

He has encouraged people to put this link around, saying that if it was popular, he’d “be able to” do this again. I’m not entirely sure how this is really going make a profit, (other than if they’re like me, this book got me hooked on Mr. Gaiman’s work), but I’m willing to spread the word.


Browse Inside this book
Get this for your site

Musing

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My job is to learn stuff and tell people about it — more or less, anyway.

When I was a young kid, the professions I fantasized about (Paleontologist and Marine Biologist) certainly had that quality to a degree.

Between the ages of 12 and 15 or so, I wanted to be an actor.

During all of that — say from the time I was 12, I was also writing. I didn’t think of it so much in terms of work. I just… did it. It just felt natural to put thoughts on paper and play with them until they communicated something.

The first “serious” piece I wrote was a script for the Dukes of Hazzard. It was bad. Okay, no…it wasn’t bad. It was appalling. I tried some ten years later to write a script for Star Trek: The Next Generation. My husband at the time still has flashbacks from having to live with me through that.

Not long after that, I got a job — a work for hire deal, writing a manual on how to open a business. I remember clearly writing it and being scared because it was “too quirky” and was wondering if it would work or if I’d piss off my client. This was before the “For Dummies” manuals became as popular as they are, but it was written in that chatty style. In school, I always got fussed at for turning in chatty work. (I know, you can’t write like that academically!) But I used to get mad because it felt right somehow when I would write it. I really wish one of my teachers had pulled me aside and explained that chatty had its genuine and real place.

He liked it.

Why I didn’t pursue that at the time, I do not know. Part of it was that I wanted to write fiction. Honestly? I’m a hell of a lot better at non-fiction — teaching someone how to do something or poking at an illogical thought directly.

I wish I knew why. It kind of depresses me. I feel like Salieri when I read really good, moving epic pieces. And I don’t write epic well.

Maybe I oughta take a page from John Varley’s writing style. He makes it work. I just don’t see how I could write Stoneflower from a first person perspective and make it work.

The first novel I ever wrote was in the style of Heinlein’s Number of the Beast — shifting first person. It was easier to write, but I don’t think there’s any way in hell I could live some of the characters in Stoneflower for the time required to write them first person.

Be Yourself

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Yesterday was fantastic, professionally. I delivered some kick-ass service that’s really helped a couple of clients get to where they wanna be. Projects like that are just plain fun.

I learned an important lesson, too.

You get advice as a youngster starting out in the world that seems conflicting. Goodness knows I always thought it did! You’re told on the one hand to “be yourself”. Then you’re told “be professional.”

Well, “myself” is hardly the image of the professional woman. All suits, sobersides and cool efficiency isn’t me.

I didn’t claim the stuff I did in the poly community on my resume.

I would even tone down my accent in the office1. Now, I did that even when I lived in Virginia, because there is a perception that thick accent indicates a lack of erudition.

When I quit working as an administrative assistant, I was taking a big risk, and I really decided to go whole hawg. I re-wrote my resume as a CV. If I had relevant experience, I claimed it, by God! That means my CV2 shows the polyamory stuff.   And I found out that it worked.  It got me shots at work I wanted.

When I teach?  I let the accent run wild and free.  It doesn’t make me appear stupid.  It makes me appear approachable.  The colloquialisms that come out when I relax my diction are funny.   When you’re teaching something as dry as computer applications, humor is necessary or your class goes to sleep.     Approachability?  That’s even more important.  Students have to ask questions to learn!

Part of it had to do with a misunderstanding of what “professional” means.  To be professional only means you’re delivering a good service in the context of your environment.   If you’re a lawyer, it might mean a suit.  But, I know of at least one lawyer, however, who has her own version of a writin’ chair and probably works in her robe and slippers as often as I do.   Your eccentricities are assets if you take the trouble to understand them.

Being yourself just as hard as you can is really what works, because then you’re centered in the joy of what you’re doing.   As foo-foo and woo-woo as it sounds, the other rewards come when you do it.  Every dollar joyfully earned is worth two earned with grudging effort.   When you’re centered in being you you’re delighted to work as hard as is necessary to get what you want, but it doesn’t feel like work.  You’re just doing what you do and it’s great.

1 Mostly Richmond, VA with overtones of Stafford County.
2A Curriculum Vitae is not only for the academic or the medical professional. If you have a “nonstandard” life of any sort, if you do volunteer work that is experience in something you’d be interested in being paid to do (organizing cons translates into events planning!), if you’ve written a lot… All these things are life experience you can put on a CV. It’s more useful than a resume and gives a clearer picture of what you have done and can do.

Repeat after me: I brought this all on myself! [1]

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My kids are going to be with me this weekend, and I don’t often get a whole weekend to play with both of them. They wanna game. I made up this diceless game based on the Discworld many months ago. I’d call it more interactive storytelling than “gaming” per se, but the kids really enjoy it. I’m just glad I have had the experience of being a GM before so that I knew to take notes. I suppose there are advantages to have a Mama who is a writer.

Speaking of being a writer, this is the weekend that the Universe has decide to gift me with a lot of work. I guess I can scratch the goal of writing an effective proposal off my to-do list. This is my opportunity to make sure I can use effective time management skills, right? Unlike the cliché, I don’t miss deadlines!

However, I am going to be spending a lot of the weekend doing fun stuff with the children, ’cause, well… I have my damn priorities straight! Hello coffee, my old friend…

It’s funny. I’ve sat at the very desk at which I am now sitting2 writing queries to magazines that were (I now know) way the hell out of my league before I graduated from High School, for God’s sake, because this is what I wanted to do. At the time, I’d read science fiction stories that portrayed technology that had… well, more or less the Internet as we know it3. I remember thinking, “God, that world seems neat! Too bad I’ll never live in it.”

Well, I do live in it now, and ya know what? It is neat!

1 RE: the title. One of the attendees of PolyFamilies CampCon 2004 had a habit of saying this. I found it both funny and oddly comforting.
2I have a laptop. I don’t always work in the same place. These are my two other common workspaces:


3Friday, by Robert A. Heinlein leaps to mind.

“Real Writer”

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I remember reading something some years ago about being a “real” writer or a professional writer. It went something along the lines of:

If you write something and you get a check for it, it doesn’t bounce, and then you go pay the electric bill with it, you’re a professional writer.

I think it may have been Stephen King. I’m not a fan of his fiction particularly, but I’m very fond of what he has to say about being a writer.

Well, I’m a professional writer. It’s weird to wrap my mind around that. I don’t earn all of my living writing, but I don’t earn all of my living doing any one thing. I teach, give advice… buncha stuff. I was asked in the gym a couple of days ago where I worked. When I said I was self-employed, she asked me, “Doing what?”

Um… Everything?

I didn’t self-identify as a writer the first time I earned money as a writer1. To this day, I do not know why. I think I had the idea that “real” writers saw their work in bookstores. It bothers me, sometimes, that I did not embrace the label. I think I might have been more serious about my career. But I only saw it in terms of big magazine sales or book contracts.

I remember all the pre-Internet advice on getting started freelancing. What no-one said, and I wish someone had was, “Don’t sell yourself short, but don’t be afraid of the chump change assignments at first. Everyone pays their dues in a profession.”

I’ll be the first to say that the skill of good writing is shamelessly undervalued. A “real” published author of my acquaintance cautioned me that she could have earned more per hour working at McDonald’s than she did on a book I had been rather fulsome in praising.

True enough, but you cannot flip burgers from your writin’ chair, either! I mean, this is my office!

My Office

Honesty forces me to point out that this pic is somewhat neater than my office at present. There’s a sweater I am working on at the foot of the ottoman, and there is a coffee cup on the table as well as some balls of yarn. Oh, and there’s a phone and iPod cable on the arm of the chair. But, yeah, that’s where I work (cum laptop) unless I’m offsite for something. I don’t teach from that chair! No, I’m bouncing around the classroom throwing erasers and telling people clip art is the tool of the Devil2.

This is something I’ve wanted since I was in my late teens. Now, when I was sixteen or so, laptops did exist (they were invented in 1982), but hardly commonplace, powerful tools they are today. If I wanted to write somewhere besides a desk, I was writing on paper and in longhand. The internet as we know it really didn’t exist, either, so the virtual office or hiring people thousands of miles away wasn’t as common as it is now. I may do most of my work in that comfy chair (and god is it comfy!), but I could do it in an airport or on a beach just as easily.

Ain’t modern technology grand?

1It was a book on how to open a mailing business for a course my client intended to teach on the subject. I’ve since made extensive use of the research I did for it for my own business work. The fringe benefits of the profession can be amazing!

2 Don’t ask me why. This guarantees a laugh and a good review from the student.

Pondering on the writing

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I was re-reading At the Foot of the Throne today in preparation for re-writing the  query letter and putting together a better promotion package for it.

It’s better than Stoneflower, even though I did write it with the intention of being a potboiler.  I mean, the pacing and plot is better, and the characters are pretty cool.  I wrote it with the intention of just being this piece that isn’t Meaningful Writing.  You know, Just Telling The Damn Story.

I think maybe not caring about how damned profound a story is worked for me on that one.  It’s decent work.

I’m finding the ending a bit unsatisfying though.  I’d intended it to be a trilogy, but I’m beginning to think I could take 20,000 (it’s 90,000 words right now) words or so and just turn it into one fairly long book with a much more satisfying, well-rounded ending and screw the idea of a series.

I  could actually do with some feedback on it, if someone would like to read it.

Getting Things The Fuck Done

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Getting Things the Fuck DoneI said I would stick to my goals, so I have not planned to swim today. Original plan was to swim 900 yards every week day until the end of the month, so that’s what I am going to do.  I may cheat and use the hot tub, though. <grin>

This does not mean, of course, that I do not have a metric assload of things to do.

  • I want to write a timeline for getting stuff done for the PolyWorks Fund group to tear apart. I’ve been procrastinating horribly on this, and I’m not entirely sure why. Must… Get… Done… Today…
  • I want to write a much better query for At the Foot of the Throne and find another publisher to whom to send it.  My book let me show you it.
  • I’ve got some projects I wanna bid on.
  • I need to re-do my Polyamorous Misanthrope dragon image to clean up the header.  Write a whole new theme for the blog would be favorite!  Not sure exactly what I’m going to do with that, as I’ve tweaked the present theme all to hell instead of creating theme independent widgets.
  • I’ve gotta write a new page for the Polyamorous Misanthrope  that links to books and stuff I think are poly-useful.  I have a feeling some people are gonna take exception to some of my ideas. (At least, I hope so <EG>)
  • Must write more on That Damned Book.  I’ve gotten a lot of good ideas and imagery for it on my morning swims.  I think that while listening to audiobooks to try to kill off lap boredom is useful, there’s a lot to be said for using that time to let my mind roam free.
  • Gotta record greetings for a couple of listings on my advice line.
  • I really want to get the house cleaned up.  It could  use some Loving Care, maybe even mop the kitchen floor.  I’ve been working downstairs, so the clutter in the bedroom is not giving me the visual reactive cue of “Clean me up, dammit!”

I’m finding myself listing all this stuff I need/want to do, and I’m really having to discipline myself to make sure they’re congruent with January’s Goals.   If they’re not, I just make a note for next month to decide what February will look like and will these things lead me to the final accomplishment of Goals 2008?  I know it sounds goofy, but I’m good at getting excited and sidetracked, so this really helps.

I can has work and I swimmed!

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Ya! Got some freelance writing work. This makes me happy.

Every dollar I earn from my writin’ chair is worth two (emotionally) dollars earned leaving the house. Yeah, I know, I’m a weirdo.

I was also a Good GirlTM and swam this morning. It felt good. Thing is, I’m still having a hard time getting over being the heaviest woman in the gym at a given time. Early mornings are harder because it’s all the sleek athletes and hard-cores in then. Then here’s me. I know I need to bloody well get over myself and be done with it. No-one really cares but me and I know that, too.

I’m thinking about saving up to get my life guard certification, or possibly even my WSI. I’ve checked over the requirements, and I’m plenty capable of passing them, though it’s been over twenty years since I was last certified. I actually did use my training once, about ten years after I’d gotten my certification.

A mother with two kids (all of whom were inexpert swimmers) got into rough surf I would hesitate to swim in. As a matter of fact, I’d just been griping about the dangerous surf red flags and the fact I’d be spending the day on the sand instead of in the water.

The mom was playing in the surf with the kids, holding their hands, and lost a grip of one of them. He was being pulled out. I was nearby and charged in to grab the kid. The lifeguard was about six seconds behind me and according to my parents, was shouting at me (I couldn’t hear it. I was busy) when she saw me use a standard lifesaving technique to get the kid in — the reach and grab. It’s a method of getting someone without getting too close to a panicked person who can drown you, but is a very firm hold. The guard got the mom and the other kid in and started chewing her out for getting in the water during red flag surf. (You really should stay on shore when the red flags are flying). The guard thanked me and told me that even though she was glad I was able to get the child in, I should be careful with that sort of thing. Well, okay, she was right. I’m not ocean rescue trained.  That’s some specific and rigorous skills and I know it! Still, the kid was being swept away, the mother and other kid were in trouble and the lifeguard would have had to choose who to help.

I hope I would have had the sense not to try to swim out after the kid if we both got swept off our feet and out into the deep water.  And that’s why ocean rescue is a different sort of training than your standard Red Cross Pool lifeguarding.  Conditions are harsher and change a whole bunch faster.  The reach and grab in a pool when you’re on deck and there’s someone flipping out within your reach?  No biggie.  You’re on steady ground, there’s no current or waves to deal with, and you can focus on getting the person out of the pool.  In the ocean?  Different story by far!   Waves are a lot stronger than people, and you can be knocked down while you’re trying to use that very simple technique.   Combine that with rough surf, a lot of wind and an outgoing tide (the exact conditions of that particular day), and things change fast.

When I was a kid my dad told me something that I’m not sure if he actually knew the stats on or not, but I’ve never forgotten it:  Strong swimmers drown more often.  Why?  They get cocky and take dumb risks.  I don’t know if this was to caution a little girl quite prone to get cocky about her own physical skills or if it was a real statistic.   But I figure the caution is fairly useful.