writer at play
Two nights ago–being the disciplined and determined writer that I am–I sat down to write the last scene of a short story I’ve been working on. This, in spite of the fact I was so tired I was having trouble staying awake. The next day when I opened the document, I had to snort at my last sentence, which read:
[what the heck is going on here???]
Moral of the story: Sometimes, it’s better to just go to bed.
I’m back! Two days of traveling, two days of whirlwind activity, and back to a house that (inexplicably, since I picked up before we left) needs tidying. We got home around midnight yesterday, after being on the road for fifteen hours. I have lots of unpacking yet to do, stories to crit (hi, Jo!) and stories to finish (hi, Jo, again!), kids to keep busy, etc etc, so here are a few notes from the road, scribbled down in my handy-dandy girly-pink notebook while I was supposed to be working on a speech for the reception:
What little snippets, images, random thoughts and fancies have made you smile recently?
The writer mom edition:
Christina Katz on how her writing schedule changed as her child grew up. I’m going to check out her book: Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids. It’s geared more towards non-fiction, but I love the subtitle and I’m ready to see if article-writing is at all my cup of tea.
Literary Mama: An e-zine for maternal units.
Maternal Spark accepts flash fiction submissions. Also see this handy-dandy how-to for writing flash.
As for this writing mom, I’m bouncing between finishing the first draft of a fantasy short and writing up a kindergarten-level minimum course of study to send to the state for my oldest this weekend. Both are fun, and tortuous, in their own ways.
Happy writing.
So. You’re digging up a pumpkin patch. Next to a stone wall. In a patch of earth next door to a place that (for good reason) calls itself The Granite State. What do you find?
Rocks. Lots and lots of rocks.
After a while (say, two minutes), digging up rocks gets very boring. You start thinking about what else might be fun to dig up. Buried treasure. Dinosaur bones. Dinosaur eggs.
Then your brain gives you:
Mrs. Susanna Wiggs, 37, discovered a race of nearly-blind, short, hirsute underground cave-dwellers while digging in her garden. Her shovel broke through the roof of the immense cavern they had dwelt in for centuries, followed shortly by both her feet. Her plummet a thousand feet into their realm earned her the epithet The Shattered Goddess.
Okay, that’s what my brain gave me.
What would your brain like to see dug up in this scenario?
As a sequel to last year’s fall fingerpainting, I had the kids fingerpaint a vase with some cheerful red-and-yellow flowers in it. We are really getting into spring around here. The temperature’s going to be in the upper 60s tomorrow. Bliss!
From Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), pps. 39-40:
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve that level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert–in everything,” writes neurologist Daniel Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers [emphasis mine-admin], ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”
I’ve been writing on and off since early 2003. Six years of calling myself a writer. But as for my actual writing time? Not even close to ten thousand hours, I’ll bet. Recently I’ve been angsting about the lack of external validation of my writing (in the form of acceptances), but really. Who am I kidding? I still need to put in my time. Forget about looking for shortcuts, ways to succeed at writing without, yanno, actually writing (and rewriting and more rewriting).
I need to just write. Put in my 10,000 hours, get out my million words of… compost.
Now, excuse me while I go do just that.
The I-have-too-many-open-tabs edition:
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Archaeology is so fascinating: The world’s oldest life-sized statue? It gives me the shivers. And, 11,000-year-old stone circles. Story fireworks are going off in my head.
And in entirely unrelated news: here’s the latest issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’ve been pretty impressed by the caliber of their stories. Stephanie Burgis’ The Five Days of Justice Merriwell, for one, lingered in my mind days after I read it. Maybe it was just the uncoventional, unexpected twisting of a historical period I’ve always been drawn by. Or the prose. Or the way there are no clear right answers, everything is shaded grey. I can’t say I loved this story, as much as I’m haunted by it, by its world, by all the roads not taken.
I got the latest issue of Black Gate in the mail last week. I love the cover (the winged warrior gal, at least; the handmaidens–not so much). I swear I’ve seen the same don’t-mess-with-me look on my two-year-old daughter’s face.
Holly Lisle has the submission guidelines for her upcoming Rebel Tales.
I finished A Suitable Boy early in March. Immense and sprawling, this book meandered from storyline to storyline, rich in detail, at some points suffocatingly so. While the descriptions of Hindu rituals and customs were fascinating to me, the pages devoted to political speeches and legalese were not and I had no qualms about skimming those (skipping about 50 of them altogether, not too much of a dent in this 1300-page monster!). This is not a tightly-focused book, but I didn’t mind too much. I normally shy away from books such as this one, but something–nostalgia? literary quality? the strange blend of familiar and alien?–kept me turning pages till late several nights. It’s definitely one of those novels that I had to brace myself to plunge into, but once I did, I had no problems getting back into it (barring the yawn-inducing speeches!).
So that was my literary read of the month.
I tore through Lady Friday and Superior Saturday, which (argh!) ended on a cliff hanger. The stakes are high, secrets are being uncovered, and the mysterious Lord Sunday and the end of the series are just within reach. Ohmigoodness, when is the last book coming out again??
Tamara Siler Jones’ Threads of Malice and Valley of the Soul were my Florida vacation reading. They’re grislier than what I’m normally comfortable with, but I’m such a sucker for crosses between fantasy and other genres. Forensic murder mysteries in fantasy settings? I’m all over them, in spite of my internal squick-o-meter going off at an alarming rate.
Besides, I read these for the character arcs. Really.
I also picked up The Cipher by Diana Pharoah Francis on a whim on my last visit to the bookstore (40% off coupon in hand). And, wow, it reminded me a lot of my own Season of Rains. Not as in, “Argh, someone else already wrote the book I’m writing!” but as in, hey, I see a lot of themes and plot devices that I like to use in here. Now I have to get her other books to see if its a one-time thing or what.
(Also, can I just say how nice it is that the main character in a fantasy has a real job? Not Princess, not Mage, not Warrior, but Customs Inspector. I love it!)
Next up, my non-fiction read of the month: Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, a quick, engaging read. Some of his findings were fascinating (like the strong correlation between athletic success and birth dates); others common sense (wonderful musicians practice a lot more than mediocre musicians–who woulda thunk??). Many of his findings could be distilled down to the luck of the right people being in the right place at the right time–interesting to analyze for common traits from the vanatage point of the future, but not something one can duplicate.
And that brings my book count up to 22. Somehow I get the feeling that hitting 52 books this year will not be a problem.
Yes, I know this is a writing blog, but you really are not all that interested in my revision angst or my sullen moping about what an untalented hack I am.
Instead I give you:
Bread! Since we got back from Florida I’ve baked bread three times. We haven’t had to buy a single preservatives-stuffed loaf from the grocery store. Hooray!
Chocolate cake! I haven’t made a chocolate cake from scratch so long, I’d almost forgotten the primary purpose of cake pans is not to heat frozen convenience foods in. This was a double layer chocolate cake with homemade frosting. Mmmm.
Also continuing with the yummy food trend, I made those chocolate chip scones twice and crepes with strawberries and maple syrup for lunch one day.
Gardening! The kids and I walked down to town and bought sugar snap peas, bush green beans, lettuce mix, carrots, tomatoes and (due entirely to the persistence of Sir I.) pumpkins. I planted four rows of peas, two squares of lettuce and one square of carrots. I have never had luck with carrots, so this is one of those hopeless long shot sort of things. I also started digging up a place for the pumpkins. I found a cool tool that tells me what to plant when, hopefully cutting down on my Indifferent Gardener tendency to kill my plants.
On the other hand, my house looks like three hurricanes have torn through it—make that two hurricanes and one slowly-creeping glacier since the baby is just scooching, not crawling. I’m behind on laundry and every flat surface (including, darnit, the poor piano) is buried under a blizzard of paper.
What cosy domestic activities have you been up to?
