An expected reaction

Posted on January 23, 2012 by

Today I’m feeling anxious. I expected to feel anxious. Although I wouldn’t necessarily have pinpointed today as the day for it, I knew it was coming this week.

I have a reading on Friday in Sudbury. I’ll be one of two authors billed for this event – the other being songwriter and poet Mark Dunn. I’m anxious about this event on several counts.

Silly as it may sound, I’m anxious about what to wear. I have several nice outfits, but I need to do a couple of things like buy some nylons, the short ones to wear under pants or long skirts, and decide what to do with my hair, and whether or not to wear lipstick. I haven’t worn makeup for thirty-some years, and a year or so ago my friend Angie coaxed me into putting on lipstick. She said it looked good on me, and actually gave me the lipstick in question. Other people remarked on how nice it looked. This was astonishing to me, because I feel like a clown in makeup. But does how I feel about it matter? I’m performing, and clearly the audience likes lipstick.

Perhaps some of you would say, “They’re not there to look at you, Elizabeth, they’re there to hear you read.” Maybe you’d think this would help the anxiety, but you’d be wrong. See, I have thirty minutes all to myself up there in front of a bunch of literary-type people, and I write short things. This means I’ll be reading several pieces.

Obviously I’m going to open and close with something from “Shepherd in Residence”, because Laurence has arranged this in part as a way for Mark and me to do a little pre-release promotion for our books. In between, however, I figure I’ll have room for two pieces. I want to read something from “The Swan Harp”, and I want to read a free-standing story. But what from “The Swan Harp”, and which story? Should I go funny, or serious? Fantasy, science-fiction, horror? Something published, or something new? And for that matter, what should I read from “Shepherd”?

Those of you who know me well, and who know what an attention hog I am, might be surprised that I’m anxious at all about performing. I’ve done it for years, right? Radio, craft shows, retail – it’s all performing, being “on” for the audience. I’ve even done Open Mike nights. I’ve MC’d for Stories in the North.

My guilty little secret is that, yes, I do get the butterflies in the stomach, the fear that I’ll forget my lines or lose my place, or stumble, or do something horrible and socially unacceptable. My chest might get tight and make my voice squeak – that happened the very first time I was recorded for radio. On radio you can re-record – there are no do-overs in live performance.

I know that in the end I’ll do a good reading. If I make a mistake probably nobody will know but me. For now, however, for the next few hours, the butterflies have me.

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Going up! The elevator pitch

Posted on January 20, 2012 by

I’d never heard the term “elevator pitch” until my friend Angie came out with it at a meeting of Stories in the North. I’ve used it for years – I just never knew what it was called.

I’m saying “elevator pitch” like I have one. In fact, I don’t have one – I have several. Chances are that you’ll have several, too. I have an elevator pitch for each of my novels-in-progress, one for short fiction, one for non-fiction, one for the Writer’s Dominatrix and one for Poet-for-Hire. I have one for my work as a bookmaker (the kind with pages, not the kind with ponies) and one for pottery, although I use that one much less now.

The elevator pitch is your synopsis, your mini-resume, your thirty-second chance to tell someone what you do and, with any luck at all, impress the hell out of them. It needs to be short and pithy, catchy, and absolutely something you can follow through on. The one I use depends on my focus and my audience. My non-fiction elevator pitch goes something like:

I write local events for the Sault Star and pet-related articles and blogs for print and online. I have pieces coming out in Canadian Living and Old Farmer’s Almanac. I also used to do folklore and humour for CBC; I was “Shepherd in Residence” on Richardson’s Roundup.

This is the script – more or less. It’s under fifty words – short enough to get through in two breaths. It mentions genres and specialties, clients and the fact that I work in print and online. Of course, delivery depends on who I’m speaking to at the time and whether I think they might be interested in hiring me.

The main points are that I’m versatile (news, humour, pet-related, folklore) but focused (I don’t say “I can write anything” and I don’t tell them everything I write). I’m internet-savvy enough to write for online (nobody needs to know I’m a technophobe), and can still handle traditional venues. I have clients known locally (Sault Star), nationally (Canadian Living) and internationally (CBC, Old Farmer’s Almanac). A surprising number of people still remember the “Shepherd” gig.

I wavered over putting in the humour reference, but I’ve found that many people think humour is difficult to write, and are impressed with the fact that I do it. They’re even more impressed that I do it to schedule. (I write five humour columns every month; two biweekly for each of two online clients and one monthly one in print.)

If someone asks, “So, you’re a writer – what do you write?” you don’t know whether or not they’ll follow up with, “I need X written – are you up for that?” But if they might, you want to impress them with what you can do.

Your homework for this week, class, is to think about what it is you do, and how you would tell someone in fifty words or fewer. “Um”, “Uh”, “Sorta” and “just” are forbidden words. Make it snappy, catch my interest. My floor is coming up.

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So what’s wrong with shameless self-promotion?

Posted on January 16, 2012 by

I had coffee with my writer friend Pauline today, and we talked about how hard it is to sell, not to sell anything specific, but simply to sell people something.

I can’t sell anything I don’t believe in, and I can’t do a hard sell. Frankly, if someone tells me they can’t afford something, I empathize with them, because there have been lots of times in my life when I haven’t been able to afford luxuries, either.

At one of those times I had a job selling vacuum cleaners. The vacuum cleaners weren’t the only thing about the job that sucked; I sucked at it. Actually, they were quite good vacuum cleaners, but very pricey, and when someone said they couldn’t afford it, I believed them. I couldn’t do the hard sell the office demanded, and I sold very, very few vacuum cleaners.

The main problem was that I didn’t believe the hype that went with the product. I knew there were flaws in the logic, such as the company’s assertion that dirt causes tuberculosis. (They seem not to have ever heard that the tuberculosis bacillus causes tuberculosis. A dirty environment doesn’t help things, but it doesn’t give you tuberculosis in the absence of the bacillus. When I raised this point I was asked if I thought I knew better than the doctor who had made the assertion.)

On the other hand, I can sell my own work, because I know it’s good, and I believe in it. I still don’t do hard sell, but when I tell a customer what to expect from an article or a piece of pottery, I know I can deliver on that promise. Selling pet products was the same – I knew what I had, I said what it could do and demonstrated it where possible. I sold what I believed were good products, and I think my own certainty about the product convinced my customers.

When you write an article, a book, a poem, you bring to it all your skills and knowledge, and often you research what you don’t know. If you’re confident of those skills, you can sell your work. This doesn’t always mean selling a specific piece of work; sometimes it means selling yourself. “Yes, I’m the one who can write that for you.” or “I’ve noticed this gap in your website/magazine/newspaper/publication list and I’m the writer who can fill it.”

It’s not all straight chutzpah – there’s a lot to learn about how you present yourself, whether in writing or speech. Two of the things I’ve learned in the last few years are how to do an elevator pitch (when someone asks you in the elevator, “So, what do you do?” and you have one floor to summarize and make yourself sound fascinating) and how to write a pitch letter to an agent.

The first quality you need for either of those things is confidence in yourself, the ability to sell yourself, even if you can’t sell anything else. Believing in yourself and your own work is the first, and most essential, step.

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Let it bubble

Posted on January 13, 2012 by

One of the reasons I haven’t been ripping through this draft of The Swan Harp at lightspeed is that this is the one where I’m putting in subplots and dealing with the excellent suggestions that I had from the agent who read my second draft. In a page and a half of comments she cut out quite a bit of work for me. This led to my cutting up the story and pasting it together differently, which I called the Frankenstein draft.
When I hit a serious pothole this summer and began to panic about the amount of work there still was to do and whether I’d ever get it untangled, I had a couple of other good suggestions from friends who read the Frankenstein draft While these suggestions ultimately got me started again, they were also quite a bit of work, in part because “you need to create an incident where…” was part of the suggestion.
The thing about a well-written book is that it looks like it flowed unimpeded from the author’s imagination to the page. This is good. It’s also an illusion, as I know, because there have been lots of impediments to the completion of this third draft. “Creating an incident where….” was a huge pothole. I knew where my character was, and where I wanted her to be, but I wasn’t sure how to get her there. My initial solution was too easy, and also not true to the values of my world.
Knowing that and solving it are two different things. What I had to do – and believe me, this wasn’t easy! – was leave the idea to bubble gently on the back burner like a pot of soup. I tried not to worry at the problem or think about it much – instead I worked on other things in the story and just left a hole where that incident would have to go. (That in itself was harder than it sounds, because much of the story is still in the rearrangement process, so holes tend to move.)
In the last week the critical incident has come to me in bits and pieces. Part of it was due to the new job, where my coach is a guy who is in the Society for Creative Anachronism. The SCA is a recreationist group – members re-imagine parts of the Middle Ages and re-create them more-or-less authentically, but with only the fun bits left in. Yes, it’s a game, but like any game, it’s quite serious about the rules.
Talking to Dan reminded me of my own time in the SCA, and everything I learned about fighting, tactics, leadership, strategy and so on. These are all things my character needs to know. I’d forgotten I knew them, and thinking about them led me to the incident I needed to write. It was the last ingredient in that bubbling pot. This week or next I’ll frame and draft that incident and the things around it, and I’ll be through one more roadblock on the way to finishing this draft.
I once heard someone say in an interview that when she came home from work, the first thing she did was cut up an onion and put it in a frying pan on low heat. Her family would patiently wait two hours for supper if they could smell that something was happening in the kitchen. Patience is a hard lesson for me, but knowing that the bubbling pot is there, and that it will eventually produce something, helps a lot.

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Me and Popeye

Posted on January 10, 2012 by

I’m not exactly a spring chicken, even if you leave out the fact that I was born in the winter. That winter was fifty-eight years ago, less a few weeks, so I’ve been around the block a time or two. Heck, I remember back in the good old days when there wasn’t even a block here. We made our own blocks to go around in those days! Made ‘em out of mastodons. Caught the buggers ourselves. Humph, grumph….

While I’ve been a writer a lot of my life, I haven’t worked at writing until the last three or four years. I’ve come a very long way in that time. At the business-of-writing meeting last week Pauline said, “Look at you, in Canadian Living! I want those markets, and you’ve got them, because you went after them!” There’s no reason Pauline couldn’t have those markets, too. She’s had way more practice at journalism and article writing than I have, and she has more connections. I just knew what I wanted.

I won’t say I didn’t have qualms, or that I didn’t wonder if they’d turn me down flat and laugh at me in the staff room afterwards. I had a friend in university who had worked for a publisher, and she said she’d never submit a book for publication because of the things said in the office about work that was rejected.

My big advantage is that I knew what I wanted when I was very, very young. It still amazes me that people come out of high school without any idea of what they want to do with their lives. I’m not saying every body has to have a lifelong commitment to a particular career already in place before they get that diploma. I just wonder: how can you not know what you love to do?

I see so many people who hedge and haver over their commitment to art. Anything can distract them. They can be guilted or convinced or sidetracked out of doing it, or out of trying to sell it, or even out of learning about it. My big advantage is – I can’t be.

In the rough time that happened this past fall, I never wavered from wanting to write, and, indeed, from writing. This is no particular virtue in me – it’s the way I’m made. It saves me. Art is how I express myself; maybe it’s rotten art, if I’m having a rotten time with my life, but it’s still art.

In the old cartoons, Popeye used to say “I am what I am and that’s all what I am”. He knew what he was. There may be more to me than art, but what I am is an artist, be it printmaker, potter or writer. I am what I am. I have that in common with Popeye. When you know what you are, and what you love, you can go after it. It’s an enormous advantage.

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Time management

Posted on January 8, 2012 by

I’m finally getting back into my writing/editing groove. It’s been about two and a half months since I decided to take on part-time outside work, and about two months since that work was kicked up to full-time. The new routine has been harder than I thought it would be.

After yesterday, though, I think I’ve got it worked out. This week I did all the edits for Shepherd in Residence in two mornings before I went to work, and got the MS sent back to Laurence, my publisher. On the way in to work, while David drove, I read submissions for Aurora Wolf, the ezine for which I’m an editor, and made decisions on accepting or declining pieces. I make notes at work for columns I need to write. Come Monday, when I get a day at home, I’m going to get the three columns I need to do written and submitted.

I have friends who are big fans of time maps, actual diagrammed pages of when they have work time and when family time and so on. They spend a fair bit of time putting these together, with different coloured sections to tell them what they’d planned to do when. It seems to work for them, which is great. I think it would drive me crazy.

I generally know what I need to do, and I know the “get’er-done-by” date. I make lists; in the morning I’ll write down what I want to accomplish that day, more-or-less in order of importance. (No, the first item on my list is not “make list”!) Then I pick away at it, as my mother would have said, until it’s all done or I run out of day, whichever comes first. If I’m having trouble with something, I’ll take a break and work on something else, or read, or knit, or throw the ball for Sky.

There’s another reason a time map wouldn’t work for me. If Sky comes up in the middle of my writing-for-money time and says, “Hey, you know, I really need to go out”, I can’t very well show her the time map and say, “See, here’s the green time. This is green time, when I have to make money. This is blue time, which is playing-with-Sky time. The blue time is down here. Now it’s green time.”

I can just hear her response: “Okay, but where do you have “picking-up-poop-in-the-kitchen” time? Because there’s some of that in your future if I don’t get out now.”

I’m exaggerating, of course. For one thing, Sky isn’t that sarcastic. For another, my friends are, of course, flexible on their time if someone is sick, or their daughter wakes up from her nap early. But I also don’t see much percentage in spending several hours mapping out my time when I could be doing something else with that time. Writing. Playing with Sky. Sleeping, knitting, reading, doing something around the house.

All this proves, of course, is that we all manage things different ways. Right now, even if I don’t have a little “writing time” box around 9:30-11:00 a.m. every day from Wednesday to Sunday, that’s still what I do, because I know if I don’t do it then, I won’t get another chunk of writing time until tomorrow. I’m learning to use those little pieces of time, whether I map them or not.

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The ladies who lunch

Posted on January 4, 2012 by

The business-of-writing group (Angie, Pauline, Rhea, me and occasionally Kim) meet when we can to crow about accomplishments, commit to future work, swap ideas and generally cheer and encourage each other. We do lunch. We’ve occasionally done breakfast, brunch or just coffee, but there must be chocolate.

This may sound frivolous but this group is essential for us. We have differing experience, talents, ways of thinking, levels of commitment to other things in our lives. That mix means that we each come away from every meeting refreshed and with new ideas about how to develop the business side of our work.

Yesterday’s meeting was devoted to bragging and resolutions. We’ve all made strides in the last year; started new projects, learned new things, cracked new markets. We all have things we want to do this year. Stating your goals publicly is a huge step to getting them realized. It’s harder to say, “you know, I don’t think I want to finish this novel after all” when you’ve said to a group of fellow writers that you’re going to do it.

We help keep each other realistic. I tend to overestimate the amount I can do. I’ve just taken on almost sixty hours of work and commuting a week; learning to work with that more limited time hasn’t been as quick and easy as I thought it would be. (Translation: I’m not adapting as quickly as I think I should.) When I announced as one of my goals “keeping up the non-fiction writing”, Angie called me on it.

“What do you mean?” she said. “You have a full-time job now – you can’t work on the non-fiction like you did last year. What non-fiction are you going to keep up?” She made me give a more specific non-fiction goal, one I can actually meet.

In complete contrast, we also help each other dream big. Rhea wants to take a trip to the South Seas to research her screenplay. Financially it’s beyond her means, but brainstorming with the group brought up an idea that might earn her the money to do it. Pauline, currently editing a local magazine, wants to spend half her year in Mexico, where her daughter lives. She wants writing work that she can do anywhere. Yesterday’s meeting came up with the seeds of several portable business ideas.

So here are my resolutions for 2012:

Finish The Swan Harp and start another novel
Plan a humour collection to pitch to a publisher
Apply for every grant for which I’m eligible – Canada Council, Northern Arts, Works in Progress, Writers’ Reserve
In non-fiction, maintain my writing for my repeat clients. I won’t seek out new ones, but if new ones come looking for me, I’ll consider taking them on
Get more work for the Writer’s Dominatrix

For January:

Complete the edits on Shepherd in Residence
Complete my archive
Do work for my repeat clients as necessary

That should keep me going for a while. In the meantime, time to head off to work.

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A retrospective

Posted on December 31, 2011 by

I’m in a retrospective mood this morning. I got home from work just before 1 a.m. to find that I’d made one last fiction sale for the year. There in my inbox was notification from Uncle John’s Flush Fiction that “The Feminine Mystique” had been accepted for the anthology.
That brings my total of fiction and poetry sales for 2011 to fifteen pieces. I’m very pleased to have sold so many, even if it wasn’t the twenty-five sales I did in 2010. I didn’t work nearly as hard this year on short fiction and poetry submissions as I did in 2010, but my publication ratio was about the same.
When I look back on the year, I’ve accomplished some amazing things.
I made enough money to get me through the year. Granted, if I hadn’t taken this job at the call centre, I’d be out of money now, and Christmas wouldn’t have been much to write home about. But I’d have paid the bills for the year solely on writing- and editing-related income. That’s almost two years of financial independence as a writer.
I’ve built a small list of repeat clients for non-fiction and humour. As anyone who does anything for pay knows, it’s easier and more efficient to work several times for the same client than to have to keep finding new ones. I’m really happy to have that little list – six clients so far, but I’m working on more.
I’ve made great strides with The Swan Harp, including having the interest of an agent. There’s still a ways to go before I’m anywhere near ready for publication, but I feel greatly encouraged. I’ve had good readers who’ve made tough, constructive suggestions that have improved the work no end.
I’m beginning to get work as an editor. I invested in some advertising for the Writer’s Dominatrix, which got me a little notice. I think I’m going to have to do it again. I signed on as editor for Aurora Wolf, a job I’m enjoying very much.
I’ve also begun to get work as a poet for hire. I had several commissions for custom poetry, and the people who commissioned the poems were happy with them.
I survived the chaos which was November this year. That was a hard month, full of trials both financial and personal. Through it all I kept writing. I’m proud of myself for that.
My publication list now includes some very recognizable names: Chicken Soup for the Soul, Canadian Living, Old Farmer’s Almanac, Ladybug, The New Quarterly. What I learned this year was that if you are persistent and patient, you can get assignments from publications you really want to be in.
I signed a publishing contract with Scrivener Press for Shepherd in Residence. That was so exciting! The publication date of April 15th is fast approaching, with a cover done and advanced reading copies in production. I said when “Erik the Viking Sheep” was published that if I never published another book, I’d be happy knowing I’d done it once. Now I’m double happy!
That led to another first – I’ve been asked to read for Stories in the North this year. This is my very first time as a guest artist for a literary festival.
I’m writing three humour columns right now, which is hectic and fun.
Sometimes the money worries this year made me crazy and made me wonder if I had what it took to make a living as a writer. I think I do – and I also think that sometimes part of making a living as a writer is knowing when to scale back and get that steady paycheque from a job while you recoup and regroup.
It’s felt like a long, slow year sometimes, but when I look back I can see I’ve done some amazing things. I’m looking forward to a productive year in 2012, too. My goals are: The Swan Harp completed and, with any luck at all, in the hands of an agent; continued work for my repeat clients; a second novel started; more poetry and short fiction; more editing work.
I’m looking forward to the new year, and all the delightful possibilities for me in my chosen art. I wish all of you that joyful anticipation for 2012. Thanks for being part of my writer’s journey in the Scriptorium this year; see you on the other side of midnight!

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Plus ca change…

Posted on December 28, 2011 by

This time last year I had finished putting together my archive book of all the fiction I’d written, and I was looking back on what I’d accomplished in 2010. This year all I’ll say is this – I’ve been thinking about getting my archive book together.

I need to do it, because I mistrust technology, and having an archive of my year’s work in print is the only way I can be sure that it won’t float off into cyberspace. This came home to me again last week when a browser I’d used for years and still had on my computer (because there were a bunch of bookmarks, addresses and emails on it that I hadn’t copied and dragged over to the new browser yet) simply – disappeared. The shortcut didn’t work, the mail isn’t there, and the programme itself seems to have folded its tents and stolen away into the night without my having done anything to offend it.

It’s annoying. A bit spooky, but mostly annoying. Who knows what else might decide to pack up and take its leave in the middle of the night, departing for the unexplored reaches of cyberspace? Just when I think I’ve gotten a handle on how this whole thing works – just gotten a handle, mind you, not acquired an intimate understanding – I find out that I haven’t. Even my resident geek (aka husband) – doesn’t know why or where the browser and its contents have gone. Galley west. Into the blue. Where the woodbine twineth, and left no forwarding address, e- or otherwise.

I’ve spent the last three days off in the company of my family, having Christmas and Boxing Day mostly, although not entirely, free of writing and related work. I think my next two days off, which will come in 2012, will have to be devoted to getting some kind of printout of my current crop of writing, because I can obviously not trust what I’ve put into cyberspace to stay where it’s put, no matter how well I anchor it.

When computers first made their grand entrance into the world of us non-geek types, it was bruited about that they would create the paperless office, where all information would be kept electronically. In the last ten years e-publications, virtual communities and online-only businesses have abounded. But I gotta tell ya, however handy it is not to have to retype a whole freakin’ page for one typo or grammatical goof-up, there is nothing like having a printed copy. The technology for reading the printed page may be so fifty million years ago, but it’s never gone out of date, had to be upgraded for a different language, or made the book completely disappear out of your hands.

Most of what I’ve written in the last year has been non-fiction, but even that needs to be archived in the only way I can trust it. I’ll be doing that bright and early in the new year, you betcha. Mock me if you will, you advocates of paper-free. I’ll be the one who can still read my work when the black hole of cyberspace gets the munchies and slurps up the entire contents of your e-reader.

I think I’m going to get a T-shirt printed. “Archaic, paranoid, and proud of it!”

Posted in Fumbling towards competence | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

One word

Posted on December 21, 2011 by

I have serious problems with politically-correct speech.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for inclusive language. I prefer “humankind” to “mankind” and “people” to “men” – at least when you actually mean people, and not just men – because it’s clear and inclusive. But sometimes things just get plain silly.

The policy in Ontario is now to use the word “holiday” instead of “Christmas”, and this year that’s made a huge ruckus in Thessalon. See, the annual concert at the public school is being called a holiday concert this year, instead of a Christmas one.

I don’t think it would be as big a problem for Thessalonians if Thessalon were actually a religiously diverse community. We have five churches and a practicing Buddhist group. As far as I know, there’s nobody Jewish, Hindu, Muslim or pretty much anything else around here. Okay, there’s me – I’m a practicing pagan, but we’re pretty tolerant of others’ faiths, and anyway I like Christmas carols.

The fact is that whatever you call it, the winter festival that’s celebrated here is Christmas, and you can tell from the way it’s done. Are people building bonfires on the 21st of December to welcome the sun back? No, they are not. Do they hang up their stockings for the Hogfather on Hogswatch Eve (also the evening of the Solstice)? Nope. Are there menorahs in the windows of houses in Thessalon? Not that I’ve seen. The decorations are all the usual suspects – snowmen, Santa Clauses, wreaths, angels, trees, stars and the occasional crêche. If anyone has Diwali decorations or a Kwanzaa tree up, it’s not apparent.

I worry that so-called inclusive language is, in practice, exclusive. I wish people Merry Christmas – that’s the social holiday that’s celebrated in Canada, broadly speaking, and for most of the people I meet it’s also the religious one. If someone were to say to me “and a Happy Hanukkah (or maybe ‘Divine Diwali’) to you!”, I’d be delighted, not insulted. But that insipid white-bread-with-margarine “Happy Holidays!” doesn’t tell me anything about the person saying it, except that they’re busy trying not to be offensive. And it leaves out all the interesting stuff, the chance to ask – since someone said “Joyous Kwanzaa!” – just what that holiday is about, what its decorations and delights are.

I know that there are all sorts of winter festivals. One friend of mine writes “Sol Invictus” on the card he sends this time of year. Some of my friends wish me a good solstice, some a merry Christmas. I’ll take one of each, please – celebration is good, and the more the merrier, whether it’s Solstice, Christmas or whatever.

I just wish that we were more concerned with actually learning about each others’ festivals, and not about making them all into one homogeneous, anonymous, get-it-cheaper-at-Walmart “holiday”. In this case, politically correct language isn’t inclusive – it’s exclusive. It locks me out of knowing about you, and you about me. It doesn’t bring all the festivals together – it suppresses them, instead.

In the interests of mutual respect and joy, I’d strongly suggest that if you have a holiday you celebrate, you wish people a happy one. If you get “Merry Christmas” and can give a “Divine Diwali” in return, everybody gets something new. I think that’s a pretty good gift.

Happy Hogswatch, good Solstice and Merry Christmas to you, and a happy 2012 to come.

Posted in Going on About Words | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments