A week away

Posted on June 18, 2013 by

For the first time in a couple of years I made it to Wild Ginger, the Ontario witch camp. I drove down on Wednesday, attended the four days of camp and came back on Monday.

I believed that I would write while I was there – I knew the two days of driving were a dead loss, but I thought I could find some quiet time during the days at camp to get at least some of my words in. The only day I managed to write anything, I realized that campers are, in a way, like cats. You know how your cat comes and sits on your keyboard? Or starts nudging and purring at you the minute you begin something? Not that the campers sat on my keyboard, but when I set up in a relatively quiet corner with an electrical outlet, suddenly everything that was happening seemed to gravitate to that corner. It is the way of the world. I decided to forgive myself for the time I was at camp and just get back to work when I got home.

In the meantime, in the midst of everything going on I got some wonderful inspiration for my third book. Making up a culture is hard work, and trying to make different cultures different enough is also tricky. Some of the things that happened at camp created such vivid images for me that I thought I could probably use them – or variations on them – in the third book, where I need to introduce another culture. There are few Iron Age images in a twenty-first century life, so you take them where you can get them.

The four days of camp, being with other people who follow the same spiritual path I do, more or less, was refreshing and relaxing. There’s usually some sense of being braced against opposition when what you do runs counter to the prevailing culture. I’ve had that sense for most of my life, as an artist and a witch. Wild Ginger is one of the few places where I feel it’s safe to let my guard down and be myself. It’s also the one place where I meet many of my friends, or, indeed, where some of those friends were made.

There was a lot of good talk, a lot of good worship and ritual, a lot of laughter and a profound sense of relaxation. Nothing seemed very much worth getting exercised over. I’ve spent a lot of my life tense and concerned about money, time, what other people think and so on. You know the stuff, I bet. At camp, none of it seemed that important. It was easy to push an incipient worry away. That was very, very good for me.

So I’m home again, refreshed, inspired and rewired, and ready to get back into the regularly scheduled schedule, where there are only cats sitting on my keyboard.

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I can’t believe I did that

Posted on June 8, 2013 by

So here I am, living the dream, and suddenly I’m not happy with my novel.

I’m doing everything right – right? Writing every day, getting the action going early, bulling on through with my usual spit-it-out-and-fix-it-later approach. Although I don’t do outlines, I do have a list of things that have to happen. Why do I suddenly get the feeling that this novel isn’t working?

Yikes!

First, I panicked. (Look, I know I’m going to panic sooner or later, so best to get it out of the way.) What if I was wrong about being able to write a second book? Why is this so lame? What am I doing wrong? What if this is like the modernist painter, who didn’t like the nose on his latest portrait, but couldn’t fix it because he didn’t know where it was??!!

Then I distracted myself by bathing the dog. She needed it anyway, and why the hell should I be the only one who was miserable?

Then I stared at the back of the fridge for a while to see if anything interesting was going to grow there. I am barely past a week of My Summer of Writing, so I haven’t switched into the need-food-at-home phase yet. We don’t have a corner store in Wharncliffe, and the impulsive-eating-of-three-bags-of-cheesies becomes less impulsive after you’ve driven twenty minutes into town to buy them. There are always eggs. I could bake a batch of brownies and eat the whole panful. Fortunately it was a hot day, so I settled for making lemonade.

I shovelled the catbox. Yes, I did. And cleaned the bathroom. This was the nadir. I am not a writer who avoids writing by doing housework, or anything resembling housework (aside from baking brownies).

Whether it was the hose-and-soap, the fridge-staring, the shit-shovelling or what – maybe it was the panic after all? – it came to me. I needed to switch two events around. That was all. That was it. The one I was writing now had to come before the one I’d written earlier. I found the nose – it was on the chin and just needed moving up.

So I’m happy with my novel again. Actions make sense. Motivations are convincing. Plot rules. Writing is happening, and the dog and the bathroom are clean. The bathroom, at least, has stopped sulking. I’ve avoided eating a whole pan of brownies, bonus.

I really hope it was the panic that did it and it just needed time to kick in. If it’s doing housework that makes things shuffle into place, that will completely suck (although not as much as Sky will think it sucks if it was the dog-bathing thing).

On the other hand, my bathroom will be clean. And the writing will work. That’s the point, isn’t it?

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Two kinds of people

Posted on June 6, 2013 by

I love the old joke that goes “There are two kinds of people in the world – those who divide people into two kinds, and those who don’t”.

(I also love “There are ten kinds of people in the world – those who understand binary, and those who don’t.” but that’s a whole other joke.)

I do, however, divide writers into – well, writers and wanna-be writers. Or maybe writers and sorta-kinda-thinking-about-being writers. And here’s how I divide them: writers write, and the others don’t.

Harsh? Hmmmm – maybe a little, but only if you’re one of those who says, “Yeah, I have a book in me but a) I can’t find the time b) can’t get inspired c) have a day job and inspiration only hits when I’m at work or d) any other excuse for avoiding picking up the pen and setting down your butt.

Since I got this grant, I’ve met a lot of wanna-be types. Many of them say to me, “I get the inspiration when I’m at work, or just going to bed, or I wake up in the middle of the night, and of course I can’t write then. You know how it is, you have to write when you get the inspiration.” They nod their heads and assume my agreement.

I don’t argue with them. I mean, what would be the point? They have it partly right – you do have to write when you get the inspiration, if at all humanly possible. Okay, even I have not hung up on a call-centre customer to go write, but I’ve scribbled the idea in my ever-present something-to-write-on. And I have postponed bedtime or, yes, got up at three a.m. to write, draw or whatever.

But that’s only half of it. The other half is what you do with the inspiration when it’s not around. That’s the work of writing, and that’s what differentiates a writer from a non-writer. If you can slog through a scene or an edit, if you can sit at your desk and pull on your hair and not quit even though the Muse has packed her bags and gone to Bermuda, if you can meet deadline regardless of whether or not you’re in the mood, you will get your poem/short story/novel/humongous seven-book multigenerational epic done. If you can’t, you won’t, because you’ll always be waiting around for the Muse to do her – or his – little magic thing.

Look, the Muse isn’t the bread-and-butter. The Muse isn’t even the cake. The Muse is not – and this may be hard to believe – the icing on the cake. The Muse is coloured sprinkles and silver dragees and royal icing roses. Imagine a cake made entirely of coloured sprinkles. I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t stomach it.

No writer can make an entire oeuvre of coloured sprinkles, or even a whole book. A short poem, maybe. But quite a lot of writing is bread-and-butter, cake, or, if you’re really rocking and rolling, icing.

If you write only when the Muse is in the room, you will have a really, really tiny portfolio. If you can’t make some cake and some icing to hold those coloured sprinkles, they will fall apart. And there’s nothing wrong with a good slice of homemade multigrain bread with butter, even without sprinkles.

You just have to make it, even – and especially – if the Muse isn’t around, if the mood isn’t on you. If you can do that, and do it regularly and consistently, you are a writer.

If you can’t, or don’t, or won’t, you aren’t.

 

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Facing the fear

Posted on May 30, 2013 by

I’ve reached a point in the second book where I’m no longer sure what’s going to happen, as in, what will happen when my protagonist takes her next step, and I mean “step” quite literally. It’s making me nervous, fearful, even. What if I walk her into this situation and – nothing happens?

I don’t really think that nothing will happen, but I don’t know what will. This is, in every sense of the word, a discovery draft. It’s one of the reasons I need three months to write it. As I said in the last post, I thought about The Swan Harp for nearly twenty years before I started to write it, and while it is a far different story than the original one I imagined, it retains some similarity to it. I knew where I was going, and where my protagonist was going. Now I don’t, not as clearly.

This is when I think about things like where story comes from. Many years ago I had a friend who espoused the multiverse concept long before it became fashionable. She said that if you told a story as fiction, it had happened, would happen or was happening somewhere in the multiverse. There is no fiction, was her point. There’s just history – just maybe not ours. I believe it was Harlan Ellison who wrote about a writer writing the history of the Good Folk as fiction, with theri collaboration. Again, it’s all fact somewhere.

Or maybe not – on alternate days, I wonder if it isn’t all just made up out of whole cloth, which makes me wonder if there’s enough on my bolt, so to speak, to finish this story. Or any story, come to that.

Making Kiar take that next step scares me a bit. Right now I don’t have to do anything about it, because David has a wicked head cold, and I’m doing all the driving for these last few days at work. Come Saturday, he’ll have to drive himself back and forth both, and I’d like him to get a chance to rest and heal now. But Saturday – ah, Saturday I will not be able to put it off any longer. I’ll have to face the fear and take that next step.

Wish me luck!

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Planning the work

Posted on May 25, 2013 by

“Plan your work and work your plan” – has anyone besides me ever rolled their eyes at this business dictum? I do like a bit of planning, but perhaps it’s because I’ve spent most of my life in art that the “work your plan” half of it sounds overly optimistic for me.

For example, the Year of Fiction Sales – 2010 – I originally planned to submit 100 pieces of fiction or poetry in a year. I actually sent in 250, which stunned me. Wow – who knew I had that level of energy for what is, essentially, sales? Okay, maybe some of my friends are shaking their heads, but I wasn’t aware I had it, okay?

On the other hand, my plan to collect 100 rejections for “The Swan Harp” this year has ground to a halt because someone is interested in the novel. I don’t feel I can send it out to anyone else when there’s interest expressed by someone I know and trust not to say such a thing lightly.

At the moment I’m doing more planning than is my wont for a novel. I thought about the first book of the trilogy for nearly twenty years before putting pen to paper. I haven’t had the same amount of time to think about the second and third books, and perhaps that’s why I find myself making more planning notes about those stories.

This isn’t an outline, or anything like it, really. It’s more a list of things that I think of that need to happen, or to be included. For example, I have notes about language, clothing, weaponry, names and social structure as well as plot notes. When the final book comes around, I’ll have four different peoples involved, and I need to make them all – for lack of a better phrase – autonomous and convincing. I read, I think, I look at pictures, I imagine scenes, and I wonder “where would they get…” whatever it is I think they should have.

I’m also planning conflict. There are two kinds of battle in this series; magical ones and physical ones. I feel I have a considerable advantage in writing both. First, I’m a practicing witch and I’ve also spent many years reading fairy tales, myths and legends, and fantasy both good and not-so. I know how to construct a working magical system, and how to build in the cues that let the reader know why something did or didn’t work. Second, I spent many years as a fighter in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and in playing war games with miniatures on sand tables. This gives me a better-than-average working knowledge of weaponry, tactics, strategy and how it feels to be in a sword fight. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s way better than nothing.

In June – when I’ll already have been immersed in my book for several weeks – the hard-core binge writers are having another weekend of eat-sleep-and-write. The notes I’m making now will help me forge ahead with the second book. Perhaps I’ll even write a scene or two on the third.

That’s the plan, anyway. We’ll see if it works.

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Slave of the Muses

Posted on May 21, 2013 by

I’m down to my last two weeks of day job before my summer of writing. Almost every day someone at work asks me when my last shift is, or if I’m excited about the whole thing, or what I’m writing. Every now and then, someone says, “I wish someone would give me money to write!”

I’m pretty sure that most of the people who say this don’t really mean it, at least, not in the sense that I would mean it. First off, I’m not aware that any of them are writers, and in order to be given money to write, you have to be writing already. Second, I think that many people have the idea that writing isn’t real work, just as art isn’t real work, and that they, too, could write if someone paid them to do it. My grant looks like incredible luck to them. Hell, it looks like incredible luck to me!

When I said that on a forum I belong to, my friend Ted Remington replied, “No, you are a dedicated, hardworking slave of the Muses. Luck hadn’t a thing to do with it.”

The more I think about it, the more I realize he’s right. I started working seriously at my writing in 2007. That means I dedicated time every day to it, either to writing and editing my work, or to finding markets for it. One year I made over two hundred and fifty submissions of fiction and poetry, and landed twenty-five sales, which is a really good acceptance ratio. The next year I sold over seventy pieces of non-fiction, mostly newspaper articles.

Currently, in addition to holding a full-time job, I’m writing three humour pieces every month and working on the second book in the Swan Harp trilogy. I blog here and at Stories in the North and write a guest post every month for The Portable You. I’m also a contributor to Our Homes magazine.

I write in the car, on my laptop. I realize not everyone has the stomach for this; trying to read in the car makes my husband carsick. In that, I am lucky, and it’s made a world of difference to my ability to maintain my street cred as a writer.

I worked for this grant, and for every grant I’ve won. I developed a style and honed my tools. I found my story, as my friend Angie puts it, and I told the story. I told it six times over, the last time in one-hour stints in the car on the way to my day job. When the opportunity came to go for the grant, I was ready. Perhaps the most important thing is that getting the grant was not simply an end in itself, but a means to another end – going on writing.

As hard as I worked to get this grant, I’m going to work harder now that I have it. I plan to finish book two and perhaps even start book three. They gave me money to write, and damn, I’m going to write.

Just another hardworking, dedicated slave of the Muses.

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A day with Susie Moloney

Posted on May 14, 2013 by

On May 4th (which is, incidentally, Star Wars Day – “May the Fourth be with you!”) self-described horrorista Susie Moloney was the guest writer at Stories in the North.

It was a good day, even if I am a member of the SiN board. Susie led two workshops for writers, one in the morning on creating backstory, and the other in the afternoon on the six rules of writing. (For the curious, they are: read, read, read, write, write, write.) Both were well-attended, and I at least found them both inspiring and helpful.

Susie’s a great advocate of reading for writers. She says it doesn’t really matter what you read, as long as you read, and that you should, at least once a year, choose something you would never normally read (and which possibly is a bit of a struggle) and read it. Reading, she says, prepares you for writing, and she makes a habit of reading for half an hour every morning before she starts writing. I may take this up, just to see if it works for me.

I love writing to prompts, and I found the prompts Susie provided interesting and easy to work with. She called them “old” and “ham-handed”, but for me they opened up some new ideas. Perhaps they were just so old that they were new to me – I’ve only been a seriously obsessed practicing writer for about five or six years. It was fun hearing what everyone else had done with the same prompts – we all responded so differently!

The evening was also fun. I love jazz, and I love listening to stories being read to me. Susie is a good reader, easy to listen to, clear even when her voice is soft, expressive and vivid.

As a practicing witch, I had some concerns about The Thirteen, which reminded me a lot of Fritz Lieber’s Conjure Wife. When I asked Susie if The Thirteen was a send-up of the suburban-women’s-secret-devil-worship-society trope, I opened by saying that I was a witch, and her response was, “I know – everyone in this room told me!” She admitted that it was a send-up, though not of the Craft. She’s had angry letters from Wiccans who hadn’t even read the novel. I at least had read it, and I wasn’t angry so much as curious. Her answer satisfied my curiosity, and also set to rest my feeling that she might have been making mock of the Craft. She wasn’t.

In addition to being such a good reader and workshop leader, Susie is also warm and kind, funny and sympathetic and candid. She gave me some advice about publishing, which was wonderful because I have nobody in my circle with her level of experience in the publishing world. She loves Thessalon as much as we love her – if she hadn’t just got recently married, we might have been able to persuade her to stay on permanently. Alas, two weeks before her date with SiN, she married playwright Vern Thiessen, and moved from Winnipeg to upstate New York. Never mind, maybe next time she’ll bring her husband and he’ll fall in love with Northern Ontario, too.

All in all, a wonderful weekend. I have new ideas about writing, and a new writing friend.

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