Love, Power & Fairytale Endings

Story Intrusion

2011-09-01T08:09:00.001-06:00

I'm popping in here at the old blog - it seems so much smaller now - to let you all know that I moved. http://jeffekennedy.com or click here.

Moving on Up

2011-08-08T10:15:00.003-06:00

I'm not sure how this will work, but I'm officially moving my blog to my New Website!

Hopefully all the follow stuff will still work.

(Please don't leave me...)

*Sniff*

Writing Space

2011-08-07T08:41:00.001-06:00

I'm over at Word-Whores today, with photos of my writing space.

Sapphire Cover!

2011-08-05T07:41:00.006-06:00

Sapphire has a cover! Woo hoo!!!

I think it's very pretty. And, um, no that's not me on the cover. I only wish I had that figure.

In the story, I envisioned the fur throw being brown or black. I mean what guy has a white fur rug in his library? Perhaps Kirliss is into polar bears...

Yeah, I know - I'm teasing you. and the book isn't out until October 24.

You know how much I love to tease.

It's been kind of a crazy week, for no good reason. My mom was here visiting, which was very fun. Work has been this weird uneven waiting for other people, punctuated by furious hysteria. And I'm transitioning this blog to my new website. Eeep!

I'm off to Oklahoma City next week for the day job. But I'm hoping Monday you'll be directed to my blog on the website.

It'll be grand, I'm sure of it!

Happy Book Birthday!

2011-08-03T13:51:00.002-06:00

I have a post up over at Word Whores to celebrate the release of Feeding the Vampire today. My new website is supposed to be going live, but it's not up yet. Soon, I hope!

Waiting for Godot

2011-08-02T07:45:00.003-06:00

Here's a pic of grandson Tobiah with my mom and Stepdad Dave, who is helping Tobiah open his birthday presents. A little catch-up here, since I posted a pic of granddaughter Aerro last week.

So, I was at a bit of a loss on what to write about this morning. It's kind of that tip-of-the-tongue feeling, like I had a topic in mind, but can't quite recall what it was. Tomorrow is all about Feeding the Vampire's book birthday. But I had *thought* I had a plan for today.

Then I remembered.

Oh yeah, I totally thought I'd talk about my agent and my new book deal today.

But you know what? She promised to get back to me by Monday (yesterday) and she hasn't. Everyone keeps telling me to give her more time, but it's been officially one week now. I'm not necessarily in a hurry. Still, I don't see much reason to sit on my hands any longer. Publishing is absolutely about patience panties and waiting for people to get back to you. When the ball is in my court, however, I don't see much reason to wait.

It was kind of amazing, really, how people popped out of the woodwork with advice when I announced that I had a contract offer. Everyone was full of the advice to contact every agent I've ever kibbitzed with and let them know I have an offer on the table. This is the moment, they urge me, to hook an agent.

I feel vaguely like the girl who's gotten pregnant and is looking to bag her man with it.

The thing is, like that knocked-up girl, I'm feeling a bit like, if they didn't want me for myself and my work before, then I'm not sure I want them just because I've got a bun in the oven. Frankly, I'm not convinced I want an agent at all. Kristine Rusch, who posts the very insightful Rusch Reports on the publishing business from the writer's point of view, recently laid out really good reasons why unagented writers not sign with agents. (The post contains a fascinating history of how literary agents came to be in the first place - well worth reading.)

Her post came at just the right time for me, because she echoed what I've been thinking, from all the reading I do about the huge changes in publishing.

Now, I'm not so concerned about the agency clause. The gal I've been talking to has a boutique agency, so I imagine she doesn't have anything really bearish like that. But, more and more, I'm wondering what agents can do for writers that we can't do for ourselves. A bunch of agencies are now announcing that they're assisting their authors with self-publishing, or even developing epublishing branches. They're clearly doing this because their traditional revenue streams are drying up. Indeed, several of my friends who have long-standing relationships with agents are not seeing new sales to publishers right now. Except maybe in Young Adult.

It's a difficult time for agents. I totally get that.

So, right now I'm not convinced having an agent would really make a huge difference for me.

I'm still the awkward girl at the prom. My work is still the kind that the big publishers frown at, with worry on their faces, unable to clearly envision where they'd put me on the bookshelf. I truly believe the key for me lies in building readership. (Thank you, all you lovely readers who read and say nice things to me!) People out there do want to read my books, but no one will know it until I have some numbers.

I'm at peace with that.

What I'm not at peace with is waiting. I don't want to be like Vladimir and Estragon, eternally distracting myself while I wait for something I might not even recognize when it arrives.

No point in reaching for that brass ring if they're dismantling the Carousel and converting it into the Zooming Horses Racetrack.

(Wouldn't that be a cool ride?)

So: no announcement today. See? Here you are, waiting along with me. I may yet sign with this agent or another, on a future project.

But, on this, I'm ready to move forward.

Let's do this thing!

Morning Glories

2011-08-01T08:35:00.004-06:00

When I planted these morning glory seeds, I had a vision of the wisteria vine taking off and climbing up the portal, with the purple morning glories winding through. Gardening is a lot about grandiose visions that reality sometimes can't quite catch up to. Our dry winter and even drier spring slowed things down. But, now that the monsoon rains have started, look! I have a blossom. With more promising.

It thrills me to to see it.

Saturday, at the local post office, the guy there was saying to everyone, I can't believe summer is almost over! Someone else - not me - piped up and pointed out that we're just heading into August and that we have at least two more months of warm weather. Really four, because we don't get freezes around here until around Thanksgiving. Post office guy shrugged that off. "But the kids start school in two weeks!"

You all know this is the part I find interesting.

This week at Word-Whores, the theme is made-up holidays. Already Linda and Laura have said interesting things about Holy Days and traditional holidays vs. special and intimate ones. We have all these layers of schedules in our lives, rhythms dictated by the turn of the seasons, the ebb and flow of work, the divisions of school breaks, the intensive celebrations that require tons of preparation. We plan around these things, always looking ahead to which train is coming down the tracks.

Never mind that the school schedule is changing. We set up summer break originally to correspond with labor-intensive planting and harvesting schedule. Now schools go through summer, start early, have longer winter breaks. But still we associate school starting with harvest ending and the onset of winter.

There must have been something about Saturday, because the woman at the gym - not Crazy Gym Lady, a different one with her own special, gentler brand of nutty - was telling everyone who came in that Christmas is only four months away. Someone else - not me - pointed out to her that it was really almost five months. Which, when you think about it, is far closer to being half a year away than actually looming. Still, she was undaunted, keeping her gaze on that Christmas train.

The Taoists say that the key to serenity, to real spiritual understanding, is to keep ourselves in the present as much as possible. In their view, only the present is real. Being awake and fully aware of what's happening right now allows us to enjoy our lives. No anticipating the future, for good or ill. No dwelling on the past.

After all, how can you enjoy summer when you're thinking about it ending?

So I'm enjoying the transitory bloom of my morning glories. I have them now, and that's all that matters.

Amusing Dreams

2011-07-29T07:42:00.005-06:00

I had what I think of as my Water World dream last night.

It's one of my standard dreams - you know the familiar ones you repeat over and over. Like the being on stage and not knowing your lines one. Or taking the final exam without ever having gone to class. Or being naked in public except for some feathers and a beak.

What, you don't have that one?

At any rate, Water World is a water park in Denver. No, this has nothing to do with Kevin Costner. It's one of my very favorite places to go, though I haven't been in the last couple of years. I love riding the donut tubes down all the different swirly slides. It makes me feel like a kid again, to spend the day in my swimsuit. At the end of the day, my hair is wet and snarled, I'm sun-baked and water-soaked, deliciously exhausted.

Damn, now I want to go!

My Water World dream is one of those "going there but never quite making it" dreams. It's not a a bad or frustrating dream. We just spend the day going through the admissions turnstile and getting different color wristbands. We get distracted and have to go save people or find treasure. We spend a lot of time in the parking lot, seeing the rides from a distance. Elements from Elitch Gardens, the amusement park of my youth, which has since been relocated and transformed into a Six Flags conglomeration, find their way in. The giant rise of the wooden roller-coaster always figures prominently.

It's actually a fun dream, full of the anticipation of arriving. I'm eternally poised to have the best day ever. It's also familiar and, in an odd way, comforting. It's part of who I am. The sum of so many experiences.

These are the kinds of qualities it's difficult to give characters. Someone recently told me that common wisdom is that novels about dreams rarely work well, because dreams inherently have no structure, which gives the story a "mushy" feel.

I can totally see that.

In fact, one of the "rules" writers like to cite is that you should never have dream sequences. That editors hate them. I suspect this is the "mushiness" coming into play. Usually if a character has a recurring dream, it's a nightmare, as JD Robb's heroine, Eve, experiences. Of course, she has the marvelous latitude of an ongoing series to use that dream as a theme, a device that reveals where Eve is emotionally.

Now I totally want to do something like this. Damn the rules - full speed ahead!

Obsidian Win

2011-07-28T07:34:00.002-06:00

Isn't this cloud a great metaphor? Sailing along, giving rain to a very select portion of the landscape.

So, yesterday was a pivotal day for me.

I received a contract offer on Obsidian.

This is the novel that started it all. That took me from nonfiction to fiction. My red-headed firstborn. This is the one that everyone told me they didn't know how to market, because it's hopelessly cross-genre. One famous author friend who graciously read it said it's like I wrote an epic male fantasy from a very female perspective. She also said I was forging a new path with it and that it would feel like wading through waist-deep snow.

Boy did she call that one.

So, yesterday, after 3.5 years of wading through waist-deep snow, I finally broke through.

I can't even tell you how it felt. I sat in stunned silence for quite a while, just exploring the feeling of not STRIVING any more. All those feelings of hope and grief and anger and determined outrage I'd been piling on all that time, just let go. I giggled. I burst into tears when my mom sent flowers. What a ride.

I have to admit - I wouldn't have felt this so much if it had happened right away.

Now, I've let (Possible) Agent who has Obsidian know that I have an offer, as she asked me to do. I'll wait to see what she says and then move from there. But no matter what, Obsidian will see the light of day and I'm just so, so grateful.

Rain for everyone!

Agency Publishing and Conflict of Interest

2011-07-27T07:32:00.008-06:00

Bows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air. And feather canyons everywhere.

For those of you old enough to remember this song, you're welcome for the ear worm. You know, aren't we due for a really good cover of Both Sides Now? Someone should really get on that.

So, it's been an interesting week in the publishing world, vis a vis agents and electronic publishing.

On Monday, much-sought agent Jessica Faust announced on the Bookends, LLC blog, that the literary agency would be developing an epublishing arm. At the time I'm writing this, there are 152 comments on the post. See, they're not the first agency to announce that they're partnering with their authors to assist them with self-publishing their backlists. Bookends, however, is taking this one step farther and plans to establish an entire epublishing arm, which would involve them screening submissions, editing books, electronically publishing them and marketing. For this, Bookends would receive an unspecified split of the revenue.

This is a huge move, from agenting to publishing.

Yesterday, Courtney Milan, romance author and lawyer, posted an excellent breakdown of the situation in An Open Letter to Agents. Now, she does not specifically address any agency in particular - I'm the one drawing this correlation. Courtney lays out the situation in a clear and logical way. She promises a second part today, which I'm interested to see.

What it comes down to for me is Conflict of Interest (COI). Now - full disclosure - COI is a fairly large part of my day to day considerations. I work for a private environmental consulting firm, funded largely by government contracts, primarily EPA. We have meetings about COI fairly often, because we owe it to our clients to do so.

For example (and you can totally skip this part if it's too boring), a company that analyzes water samples contacted us. They've developed a database system for wastewater plants that processes the results of their water tests, compares the data to EPA's regulations and tells the plant operator where they are in compliance with the law. This company would like to develop something similar for drinking water. They came to us, because we're the drinking water experts. All fabulous, right?

Well, no. Because one of the things we do for EPA is assess water system data and their determinations about whether they are in compliance with the law. I'm essentially an auditor. So, if I were to help design a program to determine compliance, while I'm also assessing how well a system using that program does it, then I have the appearance of a COI. Because I could skew the results in my favor.

Now, I would never do that. I'm an objective scientist with strong personal and professional ethics. None of that matters - our company could lose multi-million dollar contracts if there's any chance of COI. Because my client, EPA, awarded me this contract to be their agent and no one else's.

We had several meetings on this issue and eventually decided any role we'd play would have to be one step back. I can explain the federal regulations and the nitty-gritty of compliance to the program developers, but how they set it up is up to them.

So, let's look at a literary agent publishing her clients' work. A writer engages a literary agent to represent her work to publishers. The agent has the contacts, the sales experience and the business savvy to get her client the very best possible deal. The agent represents the writers' interests.

If the agent becomes a publisher, she now has an interest on the other side of the fence. To my mind, this is more than even just the appearance of COI. Arguably, agents who are also writers have this same conflict. Breezily declaring that, oh they have no COI and, besides, they have integrity simply means nothing at all.

In fact, that some agents fob off COI as irrelevant says to me that they haven't seriously considered the issue.

I'd believe that. It might be that you only really think about these things when you have to go through three meetings investigating all the possible COI ripples for each new project, that it becomes a serious consideration.

The thing is, it's only a consideration for them if it becomes a problem in their contract with their clients: the authors. Just like I would be in trouble if I violated my contract with my client, EPA, an agent would be in trouble for violating the terms of their contract with their client, the author, only if the author came down on them. Now, EPA and the federal contracts office can come down on us like Armageddon. Will an author come down on her agent in the same way?

I think we all know the answer to that.

I venture that this is why literary agents aren't terribly concerned about COI. There's really no reason for them to be. The only people hurt by any COI on their part is the writers.

It remains to be seen whether we'll do anything about it.

How Not to Revise

2011-07-26T08:04:00.006-06:00

This monsoon season has been a tease. The clouds loom, promising rain, and then evaporate. I watch it on the weather radar - the greens condensing, flashing orange and red - and then it dissolves away again.

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been in revision mode, refining The Body Gift. Actually, now that I think about it, I've been in revising/editing mode for quite some time now. Between revising Obsidian for a revise & resubmit, working on developmental,, line and copy edits for Sapphire and Feeding the Vampire, and now adding to TBG to send to this agent, I haven't done any real drafting since March.

Sure, some of this has involved adding new words, but really, working on a story that's already *there* is a different process.

You know how sculptors (it might be a specific one, but I forget who and I'm feeling too lazy to try to find it) say that sculpting is carving away the extra stone, to find the shape that already exists within? (Maybe it was Michelangelo?) I've always loved this idea. This is how writing and revising often works for me.

Once a draft is complete and the story is pretty much *there* (this is a technical word I've used twice now. feel free to borrow, but use carefully - it's a powerful term), it's like a block of marble. Maybe it's like a rough outline. Or like the horrible, globulous beings that are what remains of people when the transporter malfunctions. Kind of shaped like something, but not really discernible. Not alive, for sure.

I think it works this way for me because I don't really plan my stories. It's more like I download big chunks from elsewhere. Unlike A.S. Byatt, however, I don't get mine in perfect dictation. So there I am, with my amorphous thing, that has some really lovely bits and some pretty damn icky ones. That's when I begin carving.

Revision is an acquired skill, I believe. It takes care and judgment. You have to be brave enough to knock off big pieces that must go, but also patient enough to do the detail work. Over and over, you have to step back and see how you're doing. It takes objectivity and precision.

And, oh yes, you can ruin it. I truly believe that.

There comes a point where, instead of refining and polishing, you're hacking it to bits. Sure, with writing, you can always add it back in. This is the advantage the writer has over a sculptor who accidentally whacks off the nose. The story, however, that brilliantly alive creature, can slowly suffocate, wither away and die if pummeled too much. You're left with a corpse. Maybe a pretty corpse, but a dead body nonetheless.

I know no one wants to hear this. We all want to believe that, with enough crit, enough time and dedication, we can make the book PERFECT. Maybe a truly practiced writer can. But, just as with sculpting, it takes skill and experience.

This is what I'm learning about revising: it's important to keep the final image in mind.

We all start with a seminal image or idea. That changes as we go along. But, at some point in the process, (yes, yes, I know you pre-plotters claim you know it before you even start writing) you have to decide on what you want it to look like when you're done. All revising should be directed to that idea. Don't get halfway through polishing your Running Dog sculpture and then think, hey! a Running Cat would be way cool! Write down the Running Cat idea and go back to working on the DOG.

Having editorial notes helps with this, because you can keep going back to the line where your editor says "do this." I've started keeping a list of what I'm revising towards. To remind myself of that final image.

I imagine that few sculptors create a perfect sculpture on their first try. This is why most writers I know have at least one novel under the bed, maybe several. Those are the corpses.

Like clouds promising rain, sometimes they don't produce.

May they rest in peace.

Recalibrating

2011-07-25T07:21:00.006-06:00

I caught a bit of sun on this one, but I love the happy look on Granddaughter Aerro's face.

We spent the weekend with family, celebrating David's birthday and Tobiah's a bit late. It's fun to do these things, to see everyone, but I ate lots of food I don't normally eat, got no writing done and got all out of my routine.

I know - I'm cantankerous.

I think this is why so many people dislike Mondays though. It's much easier to stay with a routine than to start it up again. My folks are retired and they don't notice the days of the week so much, except for planning events. Sometimes I think that's the best way, just to let the flow of time be even. When I'm home for the weekend, though I sleep a bit later, it's not by a huge amount - maybe an hour - and my exercise and writing schedule is pretty much the same. Then Monday isn't so much of a shock.

This morning, though...

So I'm gearing up. Lots to do this week. I'm almost done revising The Body Gift. I've been strengthening the hero and it's working. I found myself mooning over him the other day, which is lovely, because he's been very difficult to get to know. I'm 70% done, with 15 chapters to do over the next 7 days. Totally doable, right?

(There is the small matter of adding an entirely new scene where my characters end up in this very particular image I have in my head, but I don't really know how they get there or what happens. The story magic will fill that in, right?)

Then I send it off to my (potential) agent who is enthusiastically (I like to think) waiting for it.

Okay, off I go to catch a wave. Wish me luck!

I Like My Way Better

2011-07-24T08:08:00.002-06:00

I'm over at Word Whores today, talking about being assimilated. Or not.

Really Published

2011-07-22T08:03:00.006-06:00

I find this really amusing - my Kindle is now dog-eared.

I don't mind a bit. It seems right to me that my Kindle should look like my paper books - well-used and a bit tattered from being carted about hither and yon. I've had it for coming up on three years now and I still love it.

Last night we did drinks and dinner with another couple to celebrate David's birthday and the gal was asking me about my experiences with e-publishing. She wanted to know if I *could* get paper copies of my books. I told her it varies with my contracts, but I vaguely recall that the Carina contract promises me some bound paper copies for promotional purposes, but I'd have to look at it again to be sure. And, if the book sells well or seems likely to do well in print, they have the right to do that. Which is why they call it "digital-first" publishing.

"But if you ever decided to have these books published, you could, right?" she asked.

"They are published," I tell her.

"Right. But if you wanted to have them really published, so you could hand a copy to your mother or something - could you do that?"

I didn't mention that my lovely mother has a Kindle of her own.

It will be interesting to see how long this notion of "really published" lasts. She seemed to think I'd be longing for the validation of a print book. And, to be fair, I know plenty of authors - especially ones looking to get their first book published - who really want that. They make what I think are dubious decisions between publishing houses, because they want print books, too.

This is not something I care about.

I have a print book. (Wyoming Trucks, True Love and the Weather Channel) It's very pretty; it has many stars on Amazon. Book resellers will nearly pay you to take it. I've sold in the neighborhood of twice as many copies of Petals and Thorns, which apparently doesn't really exist, as they ever printed of Wyoming Trucks.

If that sounds like I'm bitter, I'm really not. It's all well and good to have a hardbound university press book and have people say lovely things to you about it. But having people actually read what I write is far more rewarding.

It doesn't get any more real than that.

Birth and Death

2011-07-21T07:56:00.005-06:00

Today is David's birthday.

This has become a dual anniversary for us, because it was two years ago today that we arrived in Santa Fe, in a pouring rain storm, to start house-hunting here. Amazing to us that it's already two years. And now just one more until he's done with school.

We always say it, but time flies on by.

The days rush past, with all our little ups and downs, until something reminds us that this isn't a given. On Tuesday, one of my college friends died. I've long had his blog on my blogroll there on the sidebar. The title is now ironic: I'm Not Dead Yet. He'd been battling pancreatic cancer with courage, humor and determination for several years. He hoped to beat the truly terrible odds of this devastating cancer, and did for quite a long time. Eventually his body gave out. He turned 45 in March; I'll turn 45 next month. I'm still here and he isn't.

Life - and death - are strange that way.

A few days ago, the young woman my cousin is engaged to posted to Facebook that her grandfather has cancer and we should pray for him because cancer is caused by sin. She's a Southern Lutheran and he's now a Lutheran minister. I wanted to comment that my cat died of cancer and I'm pretty sure she wasn't sinful, but I refrained. There's no arguing with that kind of belief system.

I think we'd all like to know why. Why one person gets pancreatic cancer young and another does not. Why some live to be very old and others don't live to see their children grow up.

The one thing I do know is, I'm glad to be alive. I'm happy to be celebrating another year with my friend, partner and lover. I hope never to take this for granted.

Happy birthday, my dear!

Feeding the Vampire Coming Soon!

2011-07-20T07:28:00.002-06:00

Two weeks from today!

Yeah, I know it's fast. See it's a "Quickie" (har har) because it's a short - only 7K words. And Ellora's Cave turned it around really fast. Their editorial process, in face, is very slick. My editor, Grace, is very sharp and delightful to work with, too.

You didn't really know I'd written this one?

Well, see it's my post-apocalyptic vampire erotica. I know, right? My critique partners just shake their heads at me. But it's not like I*plan* these things. Sometimes I think it would be cool to be one of those writers who plans what they'll write, but I'm just not.

Here's the blurb:

Feeding the Vampire

Jeffe Kennedy

Through good luck and healthy cowardice, Misty has survived the earthquakes that have torn the world apart, but has no skills to speak of. Or so she thinks. She does have blood, and someone must feed the vampire who has offered his protection and strength in exchange for sustenance. Feeding Ivan is a priority, and Misty finally serves a purpose.

But when she awakens tied to his bed, an unwilling gift to Ivan from the townspeople, she discovers he has hungers other than blood. Hungers he expects her to satisfy in the most carnal manner. Under his seductive persuasion Misty discovers she has the power to sustain Ivan in all ways, while experiencing unspeakable pleasure herself.

See, they all come from dreams. Sometimes daydream-type images, but this one is an honest-to-god full-featured dream. In fact, the excerpt below is pretty much what I dreamed and I built the story from there:

I was compelled to feed him. I had no choice, really.

Earl cleared his throat. “Thank you.” Our town administrator looked around for agreement, but they weren’t meeting his eyes either. Like kids ducking the teacher’s gaze. “Thank you, Misty. We all appreciate your…” He trailed off uncomfortably.

Sacrifice? Surely no one wanted to hear that word aloud. Martyr to the cause? No, not much better.

Earl shuffled the papers in his lap. Waiting for me to get to it, I supposed. Well, he had just said that feeding Ivan ought to be the first order of business. We couldn’t very well make plans for our community while the guy in charge of our defenses wilted before our eyes, especially since we needed him alert and focused. Me? I was pretty damn expendable. I hadn’t brought much to the table so far, except my survival, which really was accidental. Right place at the right time. Turns out stolid New England was just the right place to be for the particular form this apocalypse took. Granite bedrock and all that.

My boring hometown was a safe haven and everyone wanted in on our resources. The people turning up every day were let in or turned away depending on what they offered. I counted my lucky stars I’d been grandfathered in simply because my neighbors didn’t have the heart to kick me out. Excellent keyboarding skills and a customer-friendly personality didn’t count for much in this economy. Especially without, um, customers or working keyboards.

I couldn’t afford to be a useless mouth to feed. Their hearts would harden—they already had. Tonight was pivotal. We’d acquired a vampire of our own for defense. Everyone felt better about our future—if we could keep him happy. At least I knew how to make blood. You could say I was a natural.

And yet, the certainty that had propelled me to my feet seemed to be bleeding away, frightened off by Ivan’s fixed intensity and everyone else’s obvious relief. They waited, restless, for me to just get on with it. Uncomfortable silence.

Hi, I’m Misty and I’m a Fool. I haven’t done anything really unwise in twenty-seven days. Kind of a record for me really. Apparently I was due.

The vampire just stared at me.

I set my yellow pad on the chair and made myself walk across the circle to where he sat in the tacky folding metal chair. My sandals slapped lightly on the tiles, making tinny echoes. Ivan’s roving gaze sent tremors of anticipation up my thighs.

A few murmured conversations resumed. They probably didn’t like the creepy silence any more than I did. I appreciated their polite attempt not to gawk. I’d never seen a vampire feed—probably none of them had either.

I stopped in front of Ivan. He leaned back, long legs sprawled out in careless indolence. He tilted his head at my hesitation and held out his hands as if to help me down from a carriage.

“Perhaps we should step out of the room?” I tried.

“I haven’t the strength to stand.” His grave eyes watched me with avid intent.

If I ran, he would definitely find the strength to hunt me down. After all, he’d walked into this room. Heck, he’d arrived at the bridge leading to our sleepy town only last night, offering his protection in return for our shelter and sustenance. He had to have gotten there somehow.

He wrapped his long fingers around my wrists, cuffing them with bands of steel. Exerting steady pressure, he drew me closer, parting his lips. White fangs gleamed with fluorescent highlights. My heart thumped in panic, hot fear filling me.

“Will it hurt?” My voice sounded thready, weak.

Hunger flared in his eyes at the question. “It always does.”

Ivan snapped me against his hard body. The sharp movement splintered any second thoughts. He pulled me astraddle his lap. My cheap cotton dress hiked up alarmingly. The chafe of his dark denim jeans sent tremors up my fully exposed thighs. Shame and terror flashed through me.

Then all thought and emotion burst in flame, immolating me through the fierce violence of his teeth sinking into my throat. The agony of the deep puncture, fear feeding pain, fired through my blood. I struggled like a wild thing, without thought. Animal instinct screamed at me to flee, to escape by any means possible.

The vampire held me trapped. There was no escape for me, the mouse flailing under the cat’s paw.

My will, never my strong point, snapped. The fight ebbed away with the tide of my blood. The steady drop of pressure left me enervated, without resistance. Darkness filled my brain, prickled with sparking stars. I wilted, becoming a bit of detritus washed upon the shore of Ivan’s body.

Pain filled my veins, pumped through my heart. It replaced my blood, spiraling through my body from the insistent penetration of Ivan’s teeth in my throat. Helpless against the crashing waves, I relinquished my last hold on consciousness and sank into the hot, tarry sea of oblivion.

Yeah. Now you know why I remembered THAT dream so clearly.

I really kind of love Misty. She's different from my other heroines, not as sharp or capable. But she has a different sort of confidence that comes from knowing her limitations. If this story does well, I'd like to write more about her. I suspect she has a lot more to offer than she thinks.

At any rate, you can see the story Here.

Drop Me a Line Sometime

2011-07-19T07:48:00.003-06:00

David asked me to stop at the grocery store after the gym this morning.

This is easy to do, because the gym is just up the road and the grocery store is right across the street. On my weight-lifting days, David usually stays home and does his own work-out. Apparently shapely thighs are not a high-priority for him.

Go figure.

Oh! And many of you have asked why there haven't been Crazy Gym Lady stories lately. At first I stopped telling them, because I thought it wasn't healthy to take notes on how much she irritated me, just so I could regale you on the blog. Then she got fired. Yes, she did! There has been much rejoicing in Mudville ever since. Incredible difference for us. We go to the gym, work out, nobody bugs us, we leave. Ah, blessed peace.

At any rate, this morning I paid my dues to the Gods of Shapely Thighs, then stopped at the grocery store. This woman was walking in who looked very familiar. This is our local store and we've been here two years, so a lot of people are looking familiar now. I knew she was out of context, wearing a shapely black skirt and jacket. But she's very tall with tousled curly hair that's quite distinctive. So I'm studying her as she walks in, trying to place her. She stops, just inside the door, at the greeting card carousel and starts flipping through them, frowning.

In trying to place her, I'm thinking she usually looks relaxed and happy. This morning, she was anxious, stressed. It was a bit after 7 and she looked like she would be heading into town, but had to stop to buy a card first. As I did my shopping, I thought about who the card might be for and how pleased they would be to get it. Or she was dressed to attend a funeral and the card would be for sympathy and would likely make the person weepy to read it.

Regardless, whoever gets that card likely never will think about the effort it took for my familiar lady to stop, pick one out and buy it on the way into town. A matter of minutes, but it cost her a bit of stress.

People in our lives do so many things for us, large and small, daily and annually. Some we expect. Some we don't. But they all feed into the vast blood supply that supports and nurtures us.

I'm giving a bit of thought to that today.

Art or Smut?

2011-07-18T07:34:00.005-06:00

The fire near Los Alamos (the Las Conchas fire, officially) is confined enough now to look like a giant train, steaming ahead on the horizon. I hope it gets where it's going soon.

Last week, I received the quarterly newsletter from the Ucross Foundation. This is a really wonderful group that supports artists of many varieties. They sponsor a residency program where you can go stay for two to six weeks and, well, create full-time. I particularly like the Ucross take on this because the 8-10 residents at any given time can be writers, composers, photographers, painters, sculptors, etc.

Getting a residency is competitive and you have to pass several stages of admission. Once there, they give you a room to sleep in and a study. I had this amazing study that was like a library, with a little deck off of it. We were on our own for breakfast, which we pulled from this amazingly well-stocked kitchen. At night, we all convened for dinner and always fascinating conversation. For lunch, they would creep up outside your study door and leave a sack lunch. I never heard anyone come or go. It was like we were curing cancer.

This was an incredible experience for me and something I highly recommend to any writer.

This was the first time for me that my identity, and sole purpose for two whole weeks, was entirely about writing. It was a huge transformation for me and will always be an experience and memory I treasure.

They follow their former residents and include news of their careers in the newsletter. The five writers who had stories in Best American Short Stories, the gallery showings, the concerts. All pretty fabulous activities.

I wasn't in there.

And I'm not saying this as a Poor Me thing. The reason my news isn't in there is because I haven't sent it to them. So this got me thinking.

Why haven't I told them about Petals and Thorns, or the upcoming Feeding the Vampire and Sapphire? I don't think I'm ashamed. However, clearly I'm not proud.

Or I would have told them. Right?

I know some of this comes down to the eternal battle between literachur and genre. I noticed that a couple writers I know reported fairly minor journalistic publications for listing. I probably would do that, too, before I'd send out notices about my very naughty novellas.

It surprised me that I think this way and I haven't decided what to do about it. I did a little Twitter poll on the topic and most people said to own it, be proud and send in my info. One gal told me she wouldn't do it either, but then, she was still "festering" about the people in grad school. Something I totally get.

So, I haven't decided. Am I eternally seeking approval from the academics? Do I trumpet my work, which is selling far better than anything else I've ever written, and spread the good word about careers in digital-first publishing?

What would Anais Nin do?

On Being Driven to Write

2011-07-17T08:23:00.002-06:00

I'm at Word Whores today, talking about what happens when I don't write.

Thunder Moon

2011-07-15T06:59:00.005-06:00

I had to catch the full Thunder Moon at dawn this morning, since last night, appropriately enough, thunderclouds obscured the moonrise.

Love those thunderclouds. Rain all you like!

Yesterday, Angela James, Executive Editor of Carina Press and savvy social media maven, tweeted this:

@angelajames Angela James

Me to agent: "I'm going to pass on this author. She's had occasion to be very rude to me & others in the past." #pubtip : Be professional

14 Jul via TweetDeck

This is noteworthy because we've all suspected it's possible for this to happen. The publishing community is quite small, often insular, occasionally incestuous (and I mean that in the nicest possible way). Whether at conferences or online, we are in each other's laps much of the time. There are no secrets. When questioned, Angela followed up with:

@angelajames Angela James

To clarify previous #pubtip, I've never met author, but she's been VERY rude to me re: past rejection letters. & to readers online as well.

23 hours ago

and

@angelajames Angela James

@salys I didn't look at her writing this time.I'm not interested in working w/someone who has no respect for anyone else, readers or editors

23 hours ago

and

@angelajames Angela James

@salys if I know up front that's how she acts, and she's already destroyed her online rep, her writing is irrelevant if she won't sell

23 hours ago

and

@angelajames Angela James

@salys also, my stress level is high enough. I don't need to purposely add something to work situation that would make it worse

23 hours ago

This is pretty much what I would have predicted. Angela is at the helm of a digital-first imprint of a major publisher. She knows that online interactions play a huge role in this world. The days - if they ever really existed - of a writer getting to play the diva and curse anyone who crosses them are well and truly over.

It reminds me of the small town thing.

When I moved to Wyoming for grad school, I went from living in Denver and St. Louis, to a town of 26,000 people. Functionally the population is half that if you only count the year-round population. Now, I was an *ahem* aggressive driver. Not rage-driver, but definitely big-city driver. Other cars were never about people to me - they were simply "traffic." Nothing personal.

Imagine my surprise when people called me out for it.

"Hey, you cut me off this morning!"

"Geez, how fast were you going down Grand yesterday afternoon??"

"You tailgated me all the way to Safeway - what's up with that?"

Oops.

Once I got over the fact that these people actually looked in my car and recognized me, I discovered I was now accountable for my driving behavior in a way I'd never been before. No longer anonymous, I had become part of a small community, for better or worse. I had to change my behavior.

I suppose you could argue this impinged on my freedom to be obnoxious. Small towns can be oppressive because they do limit freedom of thought and action. The social mores can be restrictive. But, there's always the option to leave that community. If the reasons to stay are compelling enough, you'd better learn how to get along with your neighbors.

And if you want them to hire you or elect you to city council? Find a way to be congenial.

It can't be said often enough: watch what you say in public. Imagine that everything will be heard and remembered, and absolutely held against you in the court of public opinion. People will forgive you the odd slip, but a pattern of continued bad behavior? No no no. My writing buddies and I have the Cone of Silence. All snarkiness must occur inside the Cone.

Make sure it's really on, too.

What was most amazing to me about yesterday's exchange was an author replied to Angela saying:

Oh, shit, I said I was *sorry* I called you "picky."

and

I'm crying now. You're such a b*#$ch.

I didn't include her tweet info here, because I think she's an idiot for posting those and I'll save her this extra bit of self-induced humiliation. The tweets are still up, though, for anyone who cares to see... and to track that her data matches up to Angela's author-in-question.

Perhaps it all comes down to learning to take criticism. Live and learn.

When you do get called out for something, like I did? It's an opportunity for course-correction. Apologize and fix the problem. People will forgive. They'll eventually forget.

But not if you keep behaving badly.

Hummingbird Delight

2011-07-14T07:14:00.003-06:00

Last night one of my old high school friends came over. Her husband is in town for a conference, so they and their three kids came out to see the house. Then they dropped off the kids to make spaghetti and the four of us went out to dinner at Pink Adobe.

We probably didn't need to order that second bottle of wine.

But it was fun to show off the house. The evening turned out to be just lovely, so we were able to sit on the patio and enjoy the view. It's good to have new people come visit, to remind us of just what a lovely spot this is.

So, today, in honor of too much wine last night and by way of counting blessings, I'm sharing this hummingbird video.

They never cease to delight me.

Shaken Baby Syndrome

2011-07-13T07:25:00.005-06:00

Here in Santa Fe, our clouds have a golden lining.

Snazzy, eh?

So, when I was in Memphis a few weeks ago, talking to the River City Romance Writers (many thanks to LaTessa Montgomery for inviting me!), we had a long and winding conversation. I asked them what they wanted to hear about from me: career path, digital first publishing, writing erotic, writing short, writer's life? They said, yes.

We ended up talking about all of those things, which made for an interesting conversation.

The thing about being a professional writer, and by that I mean, wanting to make money from your work, is that most discussions about it naturally include both aspects of creativity and considerations about the market. Neither aspect can be escaped. Stories must come from our creative selves. I know there are some authors who say they care nothing about art and treat writing entirely as a business. I suspect they simply view their creativity in a different way. And, no matter how much other writers cling to the purity of art over commercialism, we'd all like to be paid well for our stories. The demands of the market cannot be ignored.

However, I'm a believer in making sure these things occur in the correct order: creativity first, then market. If you put these two things too close together, guess what results? Yes. Shaken baby syndrome.

See, our new stories, or even story ideas, are like infants. They have soft spots in their skulls. Their plot backbones can't hold up their heads. They can't stand alone, much less feed or defend themselves. When we have a new story, we must cuddle it close and nourish it. Lots of quiet. Some silliness and fun. Maybe long walks and wordless humming. It's a special, intimate time.

When your story is new, you can maybe show it to a few special people. The ones you know will coo and tell you how beautiful your baby is. They might cuddle it too and speculate on what a fabulous future your baby might have. Choose these people carefully.

Because there are other people who won't be so careful. There's the selfish love-interest who'd just as soon kick your baby into a closet, all the better to have your attention. There's the careless teenager who criticizes your baby. Worst of all are the industry professionals.

It's their job - and they're good at it - to take your baby and shake it. To shake it hard and see if it's neck snaps. Then they'll hand it back to you with a sorrowful look and suggest that it might be brain-damaged. They'll tell you your baby can't hack it in the market.

Of course it can't - it's just a little baby. And now they've damaged it. Perhaps fatally.

Now if you grow your baby up, feed it the best nourishment, work with it to make it strong and smart then, when it walks into your agent or editor's office, it can take a bit of slapping. And likely give back what it gets. Then they give you the happy smile and say, yes! Now this kid has got what it takes. Let's send her out on the town! She'll take the city by a storm!

I know this can be difficult, especially when you have an agent. After all, an agent's job is to look over your babies and tell you which ones might make it and which she thinks you should just smother in their cribs. This happened to a friend of mine. She took her new novel idea - that she was tremendously excited about - to her agent and the agent said, Meh. She said there were too many other kids out there like it. Don't feed it, she said. Let it die.

My friend isn't working on it. But I know she still has that baby tucked into a back room and she's feeding it on the sly. She can't let it die. She loves it.

I'm totally behind that. I think she should grow this kid up, like the princess hidden away in the deep, dark forest. Then, when she's sixteen and more beautiful than anyone else in the kingdom, she can trot her daughter out and say, see? Look at *this* kid! She could be Queen of the realm.

So, my point is, baby your new stories. Realize how fragile, how vulnerable they are. It might take a lot of time for them to be strong enough to take the vicious blows of the marketing end. Don't expose them to that. Protect them. Be good to them. Love them.

Then bring out the tough love and put them through the wringer before they face the world.

Your stories will go on to lead brilliant lives. I just know it.

And Then It Rained

2011-07-12T07:33:00.004-06:00

Rain comes to the Galisteo Basin.

I know a lot of you out there have had WAY TOO MUCH rain, but we so have not. In fact, the first six months of 2011 made for the driest year on record for New Mexico. And for a place that's already a desert, that's saying something.

This has been a dry like I've never known. Now I know where all the buried soaker hoses run, because only the plants right next to them stayed green. Our skin has itched like crazy with the dry, which no amount of lotion seems to affect.

Then there are the fires. Blazing on the horizon, filling the sky with smoke. Filling our lungs with particulates from Los Alamos that are nevertheless, we are assured, perfectly safe. It's difficult not to feel the press of the Apocalypse under these conditions.

But, ah, the rain.

This storm filled our rain barrels and soaked the ground. We've been hitting 95 every day and having to run the AC through the afternoon, but the rain dropped the temperature to 58. I put on a sweater because the windows had to stay open, to let that sweet, clean, moist air fill the house.

This morning we walked out of the house and David said he smelled smoke, still. I said no, you're smelling petrichor.

He said, "what the hell is petrichor?"

I scoffed at him. "It's the smell of rain on dry eart h, duh." (This is only one of the delightful features of living with a writer.)

But it's a real thing and once you know what that smell is, you'll always remember how it feels when the rain returns.

Take Back Those Metaphors!

2011-07-11T08:11:00.004-06:00

We went back to Wyoming for the first time in nearly two years, to go camping with David's family. The landscape felt immediately familiar. Not like going home again, but like recognizing a part of your own body. I suppose Wyoming will always be a large part of me.

I hadn't realized that before.

A lot of the things we do day-to-day are reflexive. We don't really think about the influences that shaped us, the expressions we use.

A little while back, I was on a conference call with my boss. She lives in New Hampshire, but grew up in the South. The call was set up by a guy in the company who usually moves in different circles than we do. He brought us together with another company, which planned to bid on a project and needed the expertise my boss and I have. So, most of us don't know each other - and Laurie and I are the only two women on the call.

He starts off saying, "Why don't you lead off, [Dan], since this is your wheelhouse."

She and I are on IM together. So I type to her "Did he say wheelhouse? Is that a boating metaphor?"

She says, "Isn't it trains?"

I say, "No, no - that's roundhouse."

From there they talked about us being in a huddle, running the ball down the field, shooting from outside and loading up the bases. I kept playing "try to guess the sports metaphor." It took some effort, because I am just so not a sports kind of gal.

The guys didn't mean to be exclusionary, of course. If we'd pointed it out to them, they'd have been abashed and apologetic. We've told this story a few times and a number of men have said that half the time they don't know what the sports metaphor means either.

But my boss and I have decided to Take Back the Metaphors. It's time that those of us who did not grow up playing team sports introduce our own views of success. Some possibilities.

"Let's run that one down the catwalk and see who snaps a picture."

"With shorter hemline and some creative accessorizing, this could be a whole new project."

"All we're doing is slapping a fresh coat of cosmetics over the wrinkles - we need a full facelift here."

And, offered by my niece while camping in Wyoming:

"That lipstick will never last 12 hours."

So, please, join our movement. Use the metier of your choice and Take Back that Metaphor!

Book Boyfriend

2011-07-10T09:16:00.002-06:00

I'm over at Word Whores today talking about Book Boyfriends and real life love.

(Oh, and I got my cover for my Ellora's Cave story!)

With a Little Help from My Friends

2011-07-08T07:41:00.005-06:00

The first morning at the RWA conference saw us playing. There's not much going on that first day, until you get to the Literacy Signing that night. (There's a great video of the madness that is the Literacy Signing here, if you care to see.)

So, with no need to attend the business meetings, we took off on a long walk with my roommates. The lovely Tawna Fenske already did a blog post (she's so efficient) about me and Marcella as bunk mates. The thing is, we had a great time together. I wanted to see Rockefeller Center, Tawna wanted to see Central Park.

Of course we did the carriage ride.

Our driver had a lovely Irish accent, too. Amusingly his patter consisted of him pointing out sites where movies had been filmed. Most of which we'd never seen. I finally asked him if he's a movie buff and he admitted that, no, it was just part of the job. He seemed surprised to be carting around a carriage-full of romance writers, particularly when I told him what I write.

More and more, conference for me is about spending time with friends like this. People I usually only "see" online. Laura Bickle is one of those. She arrived later that day, with just enough time to tie a little wine on before I had to work the registration desk before the signing.
Turns out that's a great time to work the desk, because a lot of the big authors arrive right before the signing. The best part? They're all registered under their REAL names.

So when Eloisa James stepped up and I couldn't find her packet, I had to ask her if she has another, legal name. At this point, they look abashed and glance around to see who's nearby. She leaned over the desk and said, "..." See, I swore not to tell. But I learned at least five secret identities. And yes, it's totally enough just to know that I know the secrets.

The other funny thing was that the big speakers, like Diana Gabaldon, were done the great favor of having their registration stuff put in their rooms. Only a lot of them hadn't BEEN to their rooms yet. Ironically, they couldn't enter the signing without a name badge. When I told Diana her stuff was in her room, she gave me the terrified puppy-dog eyes. This was half-an-hour before the signing. She was afraid that, if I sent her to check-in and go to her room, she'd never make it through all the people in the lobby.

I ranted once before about how writers will never be rock stars. But Diana Gabaldon at a huge gathering of romance writers and readers? Totally a recognizable rock star.

We printed her up a special name badge. She was charming and grateful.

As I do every year, I also attended the Secrets of the Best-Selling Sisterhood seminar with Jayne Ann Krentz and Susan Elizabeth Phillips. This time I asked how they've maintained their friendship over all these years - if they have strategies. They seemed taken aback by the question and I wondered if maybe it wasn't always easy. Finally they said that they don't live near enough to irritate each other.
See? Just another reason to value those online friendships.

But it was really lovely to spend some in-the-flesh time with them, too.

Stealing My Own Thunder

2011-07-07T07:27:00.008-06:00

Okay, so, yesterday I told you all about my Attack Cupcake at the Harlequin Party.

I know you're all still waiting to hear how the big outfit went over. You know, the one I angsted about, that took the combined efforts of at least five people to figure out?

Meh.

I don't really have any good pics of it, but I'm posting this one that I don't like for posterity's sake.

The outfit was fine, I think. It didn't quite gel, I wasn't Katy Perry in Gautier, but it was good enough.

Or it would have been, except for Cat Woman.

See, I dressed as Cat Woman for the FFP Gathering (lead pic with the ever vivacious Michelle Miles). It was a crazy evening for me. I made sure The Gathering was set up, went to the Carina Press cocktail party, then back to The Gathering. So I just brazened it out and wore the Cat Woman outfit to the Carina Press cocktail party.

It was a total hit.

I thought I'd get some funny looks and snide remarks, but no. Everyone seemed to think I was making a fabulous statement. I kept explaining I was double-booked - they didn't care. Angela James said she had the urge to grab my ass, but thought it might be sexual harassment, even though she's not technically my boss. Thankfully I managed to persuade her that she has ultimate power over whether Carina accepts my work and she refrained. She did, however, attempt to talk me into wearing the Cat Woman costume to the formal Black and White Ball later that night.

"Um, this is not a formal outfit by any stretch," I said.

"Those are totally formal ears!" they assured me.

The upshot is, I put on my very fancy, extremely complicated, layered outfit, that really did look pretty close to what I'd imagined and everyone was disappointed. Over and over they stopped me saying, "Oh no, why did you take off Cat Woman??"

I would respond, "hey, I worked really hard on this outfit!" And they would say it was nice, but I could tell they didn't care.

They only wanted Cat Woman.

One woman said to me, "you should have worn that costume - then no one here tonight would ever have forgotten the name 'Jeffe Kennedy.'"

There's a moral to this tale, though I'm not sure what it is. Any guesses?

Would you have worn Cat Woman to the formal ball?

The Tale of the Attack Cupcake

2011-07-06T07:49:00.006-06:00

Thanks to the hysterically funny Victoria Dahl for this pic of me at the Harlequin party. Yes, this was well after midnight. I still like it.

I talked a little bit about the RWA Conference on Word Whores on Sunday. I'll keep filling in with the stories this week. But since I already started with the Harlequin party on Word Whores, I'll finish telling you all about that.

So, I headed over to the Harlequin party late. This is because I was at The Gathering through the PRISM ceremony. (Petals and Thorns took second place - alas no trophy for me! It was still a way fun party.) I dashed out of there, changed clothes, and went down to the taxi stand. The bell captain was loading another group of gals into a cab, so I waited. This pretty young woman walked up to me and asked if I was going to the Harlequin party and would I like to share a cab. We laugh, because we're both dressed in black and white, so the "going to the HQ Black & White Ball" is such an obvious flag. I am, of course, delighted to share the taxi ride.

She introduces herself: Nalini Singh.

Yeah - way famous, mega selling author Nailini. And, it turns out, nicest person in the world.

We chat on the ride. When we get to the Waldorf-Astoria, she sticks with me and introduces me to people. I got pulled away at one point and lost her. Later I ran into her again and I apologized for poofing. She laughs and says that's how these parties are. Then she asks if everyone is being nice to me.

Everyone was so great to me.

This party was AMAZING. The DJ played every girl power song you can think of while everyone danced barefoot or in our party-favor Harlequin footy socks. I had a mini-chocolate eclair with gold leaf on it. The coffee stations had bottles of liqueur lined up to be added to your cup at will. I drank flute after flute of champagne. There were stations manned by handsome young men where you could build your own ice cream cone or cupcake.

After lots of dancing, I decided I deserved a cupcake. I chose a red velvet cupcake and the handsome young man swirled cream cheese frosting on it with a pastry bag, then added my choice of chocolate shavings. It was a thing of beauty.

Proudly I carried it, and my champagne up to this balcony area. There I see Candy Havens. We hug. We chat. I feel my plate wobble. We both watch my special cupcake tumble from the plate and splat, icing-down, on the carpet.

We start to giggle. Yeah, who invited us to the fancy party?

I recover and reach to pick it up, but even as I do, this woman facing away from us, taking a photograph, takes a step back to position herself. Candy and I watch in impotent horror as her stiletto heel impales the crumpled cupcake, then rides off with her as she strides away.

We totally lost it. Gasping with laughter, we are unable to stop her, to tell her. She disappears into the crowd.

And, of course, because we were laughing so hard, I hadn't picked up the frosting splat before another bare-footed guest stepped squarely in it.

Alas.

Oh, and I did get another cupcake. After I cleaned up the first.

I sat down to eat it.

Then and Now

2011-07-03T08:00:00.006-06:00

I'm at Word Whores today giving a bit of time-travel convention recap. I promise to go into the cupcake incident later. Really.

It involves stilettos.

I've Seen Fire and I've Seen Rain

2011-06-27T07:25:00.004-06:00

A new fire started yesterday, just south of Los Almos and this morning is a mile away from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Amazing how the smoke plume casts a shadow across the sunlit clouds.

After night fell, we could see the flames along the ridge. From our porch 35 miles away, we could see the flares rise and fall.

Just incredible.
I'm frivolously off to the RWA convention now. So I might not be posting much this week. Internet charges are rumored to be $17/day. We'll see.

The good news is, the weather might be turning. Pray for rain for us, and less for those getting flooded!

Could you do it?

2011-06-26T09:59:00.001-06:00

I'm over at Word Whores today, talking about, um, exposure.

Antisocial or No?

2011-06-24T07:40:00.004-06:00

Here we are, at that place when we realize the 4th of July is next week and we feel like summer is already half over. It's a false perception. We still have all of July and August. Really September, too, though emotionally that feels like fall, not summer.

Anne Lamott, a writer I've liked for some years, wrote an essay recently on finding time. I'm usually a huge proponent of making time for the important stuff and I often agree with Anne's take on things. However this time I found myself disagreeing.

Oh, yeah - don't watch the news. It just makes you sad. House-cleaning isn't important in the grand scheme, sure. But she makes a basic assumption that meeting with a "close friend" for a couple of hours is more meaningful and nurturing than all the Twitter and social media "noise."

Frankly, I'm getting tired of hearing this.

If you read this blog at all regularly - and I know many of you do, which means a great deal to me - then you know I greatly value my online community. I believe these online contacts are indeed real, actual friends who play meaningful and nurturing roles in my life.

And *now* I have data to back my opinions up!

I know - we should mark this date on the calendar.

A recent study of Facebook users shows that they "are more trusting, have more close friends, and are more politically-engaged."

So there!

I absolutely see this. Social is social and the idea that one on one physically present interaction is the only "real" kind is just splitting hairs. Would it be nice to spend one or two hours a week with my close friends? Sure it would! But with KAK and Laura off in icky Ohio, Kerry and Tawna up in the Pacific Northwest with Marcella sailing around god knows where, that gets a little difficult. That only scratches the surface. I went to Memphis last weekend partly to see my friend Karen, who was my sorority sister in college and is one of my oldest friends. When I can't do that, I talk to her on Twitter and Facebook. I talk to Kev, another lifetime friend, on IM.

I won't even try to list all the people on Twitter I chat with day in and day out, whose insights and feedback form the watercooler of my days.

Please don't tell me that's not meaningful or nurturing, that communications with these people is noise to be eliminated. How poor and silent my life would be without them.

One of my college friends, Felicia, commented on Facebook that she doesn't know how she would have coped for the last year, facing breast cancer, without her Facebook community. This is someone I would have long fallen out of touch with, if it wasn't for the online interaction.

Yes, make time for what's important, but make it wisely. One person's noise is another person's lifeline.

Good Business - Please Don't Be Difficult

2011-06-22T07:35:00.006-06:00

The longest day of the year comes to a close. The sun is now at its most northern point, shining into the Secret Garden. The pendulum hits the end of its arc, hesitates, and swings back.

So, I've been talking to people about redoing my website. Yeah, it's old. I've bastardized it over the years. I *ahem* rarely update the thing. I kind of hate even looking at it and the prospect of dealing fills me with this formless sense of dread. Nevertheless: the site needs help and it's time to do it.

Always an interesting thing, when you step out into the world with your fistful of money and say "hey, I'd like to purchase this service." You'd think, especially with the economy as it's been, that people would love to have your money and provide that service. Odd that it doesn't exactly work that way.

I'm totally not counting all the people that suddenly followed me on Twitter the second I mentioned web design.

The first guy I talked to didn't get my first email. Then, when he got my follow-up email, gave me a lot of complex feedback. As the astute Laura Bickle says, "I don't want to know how sausage is made." Don't tell me about code, please. If I cared about that stuff, I'd be doing, um, web design. He charges by the hour, wasn't sure how many hours it would take, and seemed to be going in directions that confused me. I expressed my confusion and he never replied.

Guess I was difficult.

After a week, I asked for other recommendations yesterday. KAK gave me one, and a Facebook friend gave me another. I filled out the form requesting proposals on both sites. One of those I still have not heard back from, which I wouldn't think too much of, except that the other called me within about 1/2 hour. This gal chatted with me about what I wanted, didn't treat me like I was crazy and explained in exact dollars what it would cost me and what I'd get for that.

THANK YOU.

Later in the day, the company owner emailed to tell me they were enthusiastic at the prospect of my business. She will be at RWA National next week and wants to meet with me. The fact that she runs her business this well makes me think that she will represent *my* business well, also.

My feeling of formless dread has transformed into enthusiastic hope.

Which is exactly what I'm hiring someone to do. Handle this for me, please.

I think it's good to pay attention to how people handle their businesses, both good and bad. As writers, we are necessarily business owners, whether we want to be or not. More and more I think the key to running a good business is to make it easy for people to do business with you.

In short: Don't Be Difficult.

I could wax on with specifics, but I'm sure you all know what I mean. Be easy to communicate with. Be clear. Know your price points.

Oh - and have a good website.

Ahem.

How to Get Everything Done

2011-06-20T08:40:00.005-06:00

Yes - it's the moment you've anxiously awaited. The beaked yucca bloomed!

Isn't she pretty? Or he. We're not sure how to tell.

If you haven't been following the slow progress of the yucca bloom, you can see it here, here and here. Yeah, it's been a long, slow process. Delightful result.

I mentioned last week that I went to Memphis this weekend to talk to the River City Romance Writers. It's always a real treat to talk to other authors about the industry and process and writing time. They asked me to talk about writing novellas, then we worked into epublishing, do you need an agent and which epubs are the best these days and why I think so. We talked for two hours.

One thing that struck me was they wanted to know how I get it all done. This is always the hard question. It's an easy answer, but no one really likes to hear it. I've talked about prioritizing before, so I won't wax on about it right now. However, one thing that occurs to me is this old adage:

The more you do, the more you can do.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how the writing fuels us, rather than the reverse. I think it's a fallacy to say "oh, I'll write when I have more time." Or "I'll start exercising when I have more energy." The thing is, time and energy don't just appear on their own. It's kind of a "if you build it, they will come" proposition. If you insist on having the time to write, the time will be there. If you exercise, you'll feel better and more energized. Just talk to anyone who's retired or has been laid off from their jobs - they'll tell you they don't know where the time goes. I've been this soldier many, many times. When I have plenty of time to do something, I fritter 90% of it away. If I have only a short space of time? Boy, do I pile on the effort and get it done.

When I was in college, the president of the sorority was awarded most improved GPA. The former president leaned over and whispered in my ear, "that proves it right there: the more you do, the more you can do."

The best thing about getting all those things done?

The rush of energy, baby!

Now git 'er done.

Playboy Bunnies and Grown-Ups

2011-06-19T07:51:00.001-06:00

I'm over at Word-Whores, as I am every Sunday, talking about the time I said I wanted to be a Playboy Bunny when I grew up.

Oh yes - I did.

Turn, Turn, Turn

2011-06-16T07:20:00.004-06:00

Yeah, it's that time of year again. The time when grown women camp out on the living room rug and play with ribbons, hole-punches and silk flowers.

Being a writer is a pretty good gig.

Last night I assembled these, so I can ship them off today. No jump drives this time - just little bubble bottles, which is fun. And considerably less expensive, especially considering I've got 240 of the little cuties. (I was going to call them "suckers" and changed my mind.) The labels also say that Sapphire is coming soon.

It ended up being a family effort. David helped me wrap the labels around the tubes and attach the ribbons. At one point he informed me there is no such thing as an incorrect job, only unique ones. The kitties helped, too. If you get one with a ribbon that looks a bit gnawed on, well, that makes it extra special.

Zip didn't help because there was a thunderstorm in the movie we watched, so he had to take cover.

It's funny thinking about that Petals and Thorns has been out for nearly a year. July 13 is her one-year birthday. Last year, the RWA convention was a month later (actually this year is a fluke and is occurring a month early) and so I was there about two weeks after Petals and Thorns released. Once there I thought, golly gee whiz, I should have done some promo, but it flat out didn't occur to me.

Part of is was that I didn't get my cover until about a week before the release date, so it would have been tight.

But I also think that I didn't really value this little book. It wasn't a Big 6 book deal. It wasn't one of my novels. It certainly didn't compare to what some of my friends were going to convention with.

Comparisons - such invidious things.

Now, a year later, I've seen how well Petals and Thorns has done. The reviews, the private messages, the sheer enthusiasm of the readers - well, it's all been just lovely.

So this will be my last big push for her and it's really mostly to scatter rose petals for Sapphire's debut. Hopefully Petals and Thorns will win some prizes this year, receive her tiara and have her promenade down the cat walk.

It's been a good year.

Strawberry Moon Interludes

2011-06-15T06:59:00.008-06:00

I was so het up to discuss my fashion emergency yesterday, that I forgot to mention that I skipped over to Karen Katchur's blog, to talk about fitness and writing.

No, I haven't gotten one of those treadmill desks. Mostly because I think it would look ugly in my office. Priorities, people!

The other thing I've been forgetting to mention is that I'll be in Memphis this weekend. The River City Romance Writers are hosting me on Saturday and we'll be talking about novellas and "writing tight." Should be very fun. The rest of the time you'll likely find me wandering Beale Street with a frozen daiquiri in my hand.

If all goes as planned, that is.

Today I find myself between projects. I remember this feeling, from when I was only a reader. I'd finish a novel and, still swimming in the lovely world the author had created, try to decide what to do next. More often than not, I'd turn back to the first page and start over again. Or go through and re-read my favorite bits - which usually morphed into a full second read anyway.

Then I'd choose the next book. Sometimes this would be dictated by school, or by what was due at the library soon. But every once in a while I enjoyed the luxury of spreading out all the waiting books and selecting whatever seemed most exciting.

I'm kind of there right now.

I've sent off all my "supposed to's." All my deadlines, internal and external, have been met. I'm holding off until after the RWA conf on one novel. The other is out. I'm all caught up.

Work is quiet, too. I'd really pushed to finish things, both in work and writing, because I anticipated this month would get crazy. But the projects haven't come in yet. They're still hovering on the horizon, like storm clouds that will eventually gain enough momentum to swoop down on us.

But for now the sun is shining and I feel like I should be making hay. Instead I'm kind of lying in the grass, lazily eating strawberries.

The Strawberry moon is a gentle moon, isn't she? Full and sweet, serene in the twilight sky.

I might sit here and enjoy it, just a little longer.

Village Fashion Assistance

2011-06-14T06:59:00.009-06:00

Why, yes, that is Katy Perry dressed in Gautier from the June 2011 issue of Vanity Fair. And there's a very good reason she's there for you to admire.

Let me tell you the story.

See, I'm going to the RWA National Conference the last week of June. This will be my fourth time. This year I knew I'd be invited to the Carina party, as one of their authors. Author cocktail party? Pretty much a slam dunk in fashion-planning department.

Now I had a bit of an additional complication, in that I discovered the Carina cocktail party would be right before the FFP Gathering. Not a big deal, right? One party to the next, stick to the same drink, all is fine, tra-la tra-lay.

Only there's one little hitch: the FFP party is a Superhero theme and I have my heart set on being Cat Woman. I don't think I'm ruining any surprises here by leaking that, especially since I fully expect to be far from the only Cat Woman at a Superhero party attended primarily by women. In fact, I figured I'd just go to the Carina party in my Cat Woman outfit. It's pretty demure, since I'll be more of a Michelle Pfeiffer version than the Halle Berry iteration since, hello, I do not have Halle Berry's vicious body. Dress myself only in black leather straps? I don't think so. My costume looks like this (sorry it's so small) and I figured I could be brassy and just wear it to the cocktail party, too.

But, and this is a big "but," then I was happily invited to the Harlequin party, too. I wasn't expecting to, but since Carina is a Harlequin imprint, they included us questionable digital types. It's after the FFP party, so that's fine. And, hey, everyone says it's THE party to go to, so woo hoo! Except, I get the invite and it's a rooftop Black and White ball, formal dress.

I've got nothing.

Clearly I'm not wearing the Cat Woman outfit there. Even if it wasn't an outfit that can't be worn outside of air conditioning (lemme tell you, that thing does NOT breathe), it just ain't formal, by any stretch. I look in my closet - nothing. You know what that means, right?

~FASHION EMERGENCY~

I'm going in a couple of weeks, have practically no time to shop, and no inspiration.

So, I'm getting my hair done - my carefully planned pre-conference beautifying appointment - flipping through Vanity Fair and whining about my fashion emergency to a sympathetic Larry. I get to the above Katy Perry pic and say, this! This is what I should wear. Larry peers over my shoulder. "That's perfect," he says, "that's exactly what you should wear."

I say, "Um, Larry, that outfit is Gautier and out of my league on so many levels it's not funny."

"Oh no," he waves the scissors in the air, "you could totally fake this outfit."

He outlines how I'll do it. Do I have a black skirt I could slit up the front? As a matter of fact, I do. I have a black pleather pleated Jones New York skirt that would work. Put a white lace slip or skirt under it, black heels, black leggings - I love how he never once considers putting white stretch lace on my thighs - with a big white blouse on top, belted with a fabulous Santa Fe belt.

I'm sold.

Of course, this is not so easy as it sounds. (Did it even sound easy?)

Once I left the salon, clutching my pic of Katy Perry in *my* outfit, which Larry thoughtfully tore out of the magazine for me, I began to lose heart.

"Just find a little black dress," my mother counsels. "You don't have time for this."

I went shopping Saturday morning and nothing, just nothing lit me up. I began to despair. Sunday I hit the consignment stores and Goodwill thinking I could cannibalize a wedding dress for the white lace underskirt. Big goose egg.

Then, in Dillards, of all places, I found a big white jacket - spunky, sheer and shimmery. It's the last one, and I make the sales gal take it off the mannequin for me. It's a large, turns out, but that works perfectly. I find some black leggings with black lace edging at Kohls. Already bought funky black heels for the Cat Woman look. I'm rolling now.

Back at home, I start Googling for wedding slips. KAK is helping me via IM. But even her Google-Fu, which is very strong, fails. She does, however, find me this fab black corset to wear under the white jacket.

Now we just need the lace skirt, which totally should not be this hard. But it is.

She's combing eBay. Laura Bickle comes on IM and I catch her up on the Story So Far. Almost immediately, Laura finds this skirt on eBay. It's perfect. It's in Hong Kong.

BUT, they have express shipping and it's not that much overall.

Win!

So, all the parts are acquired or on order. Yeah, we'll see how it all works out.

I think it will be fabulous. I'll try to post pics of the final product.

Could never have done this without my pals.

Beaked Yucca Lessons

2011-06-13T07:56:00.007-06:00

Update on the yucca flowering:

Not so much?

If you haven't been following along with the Blooming of the Rescue Yucca, it started sending up a spire here and was much bigger here. I should have done an update last Monday, but I clearly had important ranting to do about appreciating the role of serendipity and chance in life.

So, you'd think there would be actual flowers by now, that there would be fragrant blooming. After all, it's been weeks and weeks. Surely that's enough time and effort? But no - the buds are covered with some kind of sticky stuff that the bugs seem to like. It's all alien-looking and kind of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

The moral here is obvious.

Not all stages of growth are pretty. Things progress on their own schedule.

It always seems like a long time, when you're waiting for the blossoms.

A few of my own flowers opened this weekend, though. Ellora's Cave is making an offer on a short story tentativley called Feeding the Vampire. That's right - it's my Post-Apocalyptic Erotic Vampire story.

What?

Hey - I don't tell the dream faeries what stories to send.

Also, Petals and Thorns finalled in another contest - More Than Magic - for best novella! I'm so pleased to see P&T getting some love.

I don't even mind the little bugs.

In Pursuit of Trivia

2011-06-12T08:34:00.001-06:00

I'm at Word Whores today. Guess what I'm talking about.

Is Writing a Really Good Book Enough?

2011-06-10T07:18:00.003-06:00

I did a chat with the FFP gals last night and for the first time I was tempted to say one of the things I hear authors say that really annoy me.

One of the gals asked how to get published with Carina Press, because they're really difficult to get in with. I wanted to say, well, they're really picky and are pushing for a high-quality brand, so write something very good.

As regular readers know, I hate it when authors give publishing advice along the lines of "write a really good book."

I dislike this advice for three reasons:

1. It's self-evident. OF COURSE you have to write something good. Nobody tries to write bad stuff. Sometimes we don't push the story or the characters as hard as we should. Sometimes we don't revise enough, or polish enough. But everybody wants their stories to be good. This is akin to the advice to send in your best, most polished work. It implies that there's some kind of external, quantifiable standard for that. Wouldn't it be nice if writing was like chemistry and the document changed into a different color when you hit the correct amount of revision? Bing! Now it is GOOD.

Yeah, dream on.

2. It's pompous. I know I've been on this tear lately, but it's obnoxious when authors preen and suggest to the questioners that, to follow in the author's footsteps, the would-be just needs to gain that level of awesomesauce. If you say "to do what I did, you need to write a really good book" implies that your talent and skill just rises above everyone else's like it's ensured by the laws of physics.

And it's not true, because:

3. It's not enough to write a really good book. It has to be the right story, told in the right voice, that pleases the right editor, who convinces the right marketers that the right readers are out there to buy it.

So, I restrained myself from popping out the easy answer. Instead I told them what kind of stories Carina likes. I told them what my editor looks for and what my process was. I offered some leads to research their acquisitions editors, because I believe knowledge and networking always gives more power.

And I'm going to work on that answer.

Wild Kingdom

2011-06-09T07:38:00.010-06:00

Not the moon, but the sun, seen through the smoke haze at about 7pm.

Today we have some video treats from the wildlife camera. It's not lions, tigers and bears, but these are some of our daily visitors.

This is a Towhee. They're very friendly, happy birds. They love to get inside of things. If you open the garage door, they fly right in. They get inside the Jeep when we have the bikini top on it. Funny little birds.

The rock squirrel is what David really wanted to get on film. They're difficult to photograph because they're fast and suspicious. You can see this one watching the camera. We think they have babies because it looks like this one is filling up its jowls with water, to take back to the nest.

This looks like just a bit of Towhee, but if you wait for the 5 second mark and watch the upper right quadrant, you'll see a lizard go by *really* fast.
Leezard!

Why Writing Is Like a Forest Fire

2011-06-08T07:43:00.004-06:00

One thing about forest fires - they make for dramatic sunsets.

A lot of people here are bemoaning the fire. For those not up on Western news, the Wallow Fire is now the third largest in Arizona's recorded history. The fire covers 486 square miles, has been burning for over a week and firefighters have zero containment. Fortunately they've been able to keep it away from the towns so far and let it burn away at the dry forested hillsides.

But people have been saying things like "why do there have to be forest fires?" And I hear them blaming oil companies for global warming.

They really don't like it when you point out that forest fires are part of nature and play an essential role in the cycle of the forests and fertilization of the soil. Nature isn't always a pretty, happy place with serene lakes and chirping birds. Sometimes it's ugly and violent. Plants and animals are consumed and remade. Flames and smoke boil through and overcome everything.

We've had to seal up the house, to keep the smoke out. The other night it was so thick, it was like night fell hours early. I worried about the birds, with their tiny lungs.

But in the morning, the hummingbirds were out as usual, feeding in the clear morning air.

David pointed out something to me the other day. He says I said it to him, but I don't remember it. We'd watched Creation, a really excellent movie about Darwin, with Paul Bettany (yum!) and Jennifer Connelly. In the movie he struggles with Parkinson's disease, the death of his daughter and a spiritual crisis that threatens his til-then strong marriage. Writing his manuscript is a huge effort.

David used that as an example and said that, when we have an art or a pursuit we're passionate about, it nurtures us. It's wrong-headed to think we live our lives to nurture it. Rather, it's when people lose their passions that they falter and waste away.

I don't live to support my writing. My writing is what keeps me alive.

It's all part of nature.

Digital Publishing - What a Long, Strange Year It's Been

2011-06-07T07:50:00.005-06:00

Today is Carina Press's one year anniversary. Word-Whores is hosting one of Carina's executive staff, Aideen O’Leary-Chung, Director of Digital Commerce for Harlequin and Carina Press. If you hie over there, you stand to win some pretty fab prizes.

It's funny that it's been a year since Carina launched. So much has happened since then. Reading through the various posts (there are 20 in all), it's interesting to hear the reminiscences of the Carina folks. It makes me remember how it all appeared to us, from the outside.

Today is the anniversary of Carina's launch - when they debuted their first books to the world. But we first heard about Harlequin's new digital imprint quite a bit before that. The news astonished everyone because, *gasp* Carina would not be offering advances.

This sent RWA into a frenzy. The Romance Writers of America non-profit corporation is one of, if not the most, powerful writers organizations in the world. The venerable standard of RWA has been, for decades, that to qualify as an approved publisher, they must give their writers advances. This has been a non-negotiable standard that, really, any legitimate publisher could meet. It was a low bar for a very long time.

And then the world turned and times changed.

With the advent of electronic publishing, paying the author up front no longer made so much sense. Instead epubs offer authors much higher royalties (~35% for most as opposed to 8-10% for print). Carina chose that business model.

Well, this turned into a BFD, because Carina was an imprint of Harlequin, which means just a subset of the overall company, and Harlequin has been the queen of romance publishing for longer than RWA has been in existence. And boom! Harlequin could no longer be an approved publisher by RWA.

At the time, no one could understand why Harlequin was doing it. They were accused of vanity publishing (where authors pay to get published). People thought they were completely nuts to potentially compromise their publishing empire for, what? some stupid ebooks??

They sorted it out. I believe (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) Harlequin satisfied RWA by legally separating themselves from the Carina digital arm. Harlequin is approved. Carina is not.

And look what the last year has wrought.

Ebooks are now the only part of the publishing market that's growing instead of losing money. More and more people have ereaders. Everyone wants to digitally publish. I'd love to see a list of all the epubs started in the last six months.

I set my sights on Carina because they have the forward-thinking excitement and savvy of the electronic market founded on the Harlequin rock of excellent business sense. I'm so pleased that Sapphire will be published by them in October.

Happy One-Year Anniversary Carina Press!

Why Me?

2011-06-06T07:41:00.007-06:00

David had a classmate, Marjorie, who died of cancer this last winter.

I never got to meet her. Not for any particular reason. At first we just weren't in the same place at the same time. Then her tumors came back and she finally withdrew from the acupuncture college. Because I wasn't a friend, I didn't go visit her when everyone went to say good-bye. It just didn't seem right.

But I felt like I knew her, because David liked her so much and often related to me the things they talked about.

One thing that stuck with me - she told David that she finally had to get over the idea that she was a bad or negative person because she developed the cancer, because it ultimately defeated her. See, when you're in the natural healing world, there are strong ideas that your mental attitude governs your health. Negativity or bad emotions promote chronic disease states is the thinking. Positive thinking creates health and healing.

All of this success stuff comes from similar philosophies. "I create my own success." Your life becomes what you envision it to be. Anything can be yours if you simply envision it, be positive and make it happen.

The flip side, of course, is that if you don't get what you want, it's because you failed. Failed to envision enough, be positive enough, what have you.

Like with Marjorie. She failed to cure her own cancer. But she ultimately decided to refuse to accept that as a personal failure.

She lived ten years past her initial diagnosis of terminal cancer. She enjoyed her life and continued to follow her passions. Part of that meant coming to terms with not seeing herself as a bad person because she got sick. How she dealt with the disease truly showed her strength of character. And she died surrounded by friends and loved ones, both animal and human.

This is what I was trying to get at on Friday. I'm not sure I did a very good job.

(Either that or everyone was out enjoying their summer weekend, which is all to the good.)

I absolutely believe we have a hand in our own successes. But I think there's danger in believing we can control fate. It would be nice, sure. Tempting to try. Ultimately, though, the universe goes where it goes and takes us with it. Sometimes beautiful summer days fill our weekends. Sometimes tornadoes hit. The weather falls equally on the good people and the bad people, the positive thinkers and the bitter, angry ones.

The differences show in how we handle it.

We love to tell stories about grace under pressure. The heroics, large and small, that shine when disaster hits. We rarely talk about how well someone handles success.

My favorite religious studies professor, David Hadas, who I quote often, pointed out to me that, when tragedies occur, we look up to whatever gods we follow and ask "why me?" Rarely, he said, does anyone look at some amazing bounty they've received and ask the gods, "why me?"

It's easy to believe that, when our efforts are rewarded with success, it's because we are so wonderful and deserving. But that's as much of a trap as believing that we deserve cancer. Or tornadoes.

The true test is how we handle it.

Under the Influence

2011-06-05T11:02:00.001-06:00

I'm over at Word Whores today, attempting to list the authors who've influenced me.

It's, um, kind of a long list.

On Fires and Hubris

2011-06-03T07:14:00.006-06:00

Smoke in the valley today. There's a 60,000 acre fire near Alpine, Arizona. The smoke and ash blew in on us last night. Our patio cushions have ash all over them.

Apparently it's worse in the valleys. People in Albuquerque were calling 911 to report fires. They were broadcasting bulletins to tell people to knock it off, that the smoke was from Arizona.

Where there's smoke, there's not necessarily fire.

Not right *there* anyway.

It's a funny thing, how what happens to our neighbors affects us. We forget that things are different for people just a state away, the weather, their politics, disasters. Until it spills over into our own lives.

A friend of mine is up in Yellowstone right now and it's been snowing. She'd asked me for advice on the best route home. Then she found out that one direction isn't a possibility because the roads are still closed due to snow. I lived in Wyoming for over 20 years and already I've forgotten that early June can still mean snow there.

How quickly we adapt, focusing on our immediate world.

I think it's easy to fall into this pattern, thinking that how things are for us is how they are for everyone.

Maggie Stiefvater, who is a very successful author of young adult novels, and at quite a young age herself, wrote a blog post the other day that kind of took me aback. I agree that jealousy is a worthless emotion and something to be overcome. However, the relentlessly self-congratulatory tone is a bit off-putting to me. It can be a trap, I think, to believe that your own success is a direct result of your awesomeness.

Clearly, if the juice is lacking, you have little to go on. Still, success in any endeavor is made up of many factors. Timing, serendipity, personalities. It's like wondering why one woman is able to have babies easily while another is infertile. Is it because fertile woman is a better person? Because she deserves it? Why does one guy develop pancreatic cancer and another live to be 106? We like to try to trace cause and effect, but there isn't always one.

With producing art, we're talking about something that necessarily grows out of the deepest parts of ourselves. Sure, a writer can try to target what sells, but if the story isn't genuine to her in some way, it's not going to work. Not everyone has the story that becomes a phenomenon. That's just how it is.

We all follow different paths in life. Our joys and sorrows, failures and successes are part of that. In the end, it doesn't really matter what hand we're dealt, but rather how we play it.

Not everyone gets to be a bestselling author. Not everyone gets to live to be 106. Some people die young. Some can't have babies. Some artists are discovered after they die.

I sometimes wonder if I'd take Jane Austen's lot - to be so revered long after my death and never get to enjoy it myself.

Maybe so. Hubris is a poisonous thing. Not getting too excited about one's own awesomeness can be dodging a bullet. Hard to control a raging ego, once its been overfed.

More and more I've come to believe the real test in life is not how well we do, but how we handle what happens.

Remembering that not everyone sees the same thing when they look out the window is part of that.

Craving the Pain

2011-06-02T07:26:00.007-06:00

We bought rain barrels. Plastic ones that won't, oh, fall over and shatter. Not as pretty, but far better for the long term.

We've realized that last year, our first year in Santa Fe, spoiled us terribly, with all the snow and rain. This year is far more dry and we fell behind on watering. We're catching up now, and the flowers are coming along. Fortunately, as children of the West, David and I are both habitual water-savers. We just need to adjust our thinking, take it a bit further.

I am thinking longer-term in many ways.

I mentioned yesterday that I'm not willing to take The Body Gift to self-pubbing, or even digital publishing yet. See, I have a Plan. This is a Plan suggested to me by a lovely agent-friend who can't take me on as a client right not, but offered me unlimited advice. (I'm not sure if that's just her very gracious way of saying no while remaining friendly and supportive, but I don't care. She also told me I seem to be doing just fine on my own and you know where flattery will get you with me. Hey, I'm a Leo - I can't help it!)

At any rate, she suggested that with each new novel, I shoot as high as I can, walk it through all the Big Show venues and then, if no one bites, offer it to digital. I like this plan. I know many scoff, because it's still clinging to the traditional route, which so many are forsaking. Why put myself through the pain of the Big Filter when I could just skip all the rejection and waiting, go straight to Smashwords or one of the innumerable start-up epresses that seem to snap up all and sundry.

Why?

I want the filter.

I want the writing I put out in the world to be the very best it can be. Even though I hate the pain, I want my work to receive ruthless editing and the stern eye of marketing. I know NYC can have a narrow view. I also know traditional publishing has been putting out incredible books for my entire life.

I want that to be my books.

And I don't know about all of you, but I've been reading a lot of less-than-stellar stuff lately. Digital publishing is coming up in the world and some of the digital imprints seem to have pretty high standards. Others.... erm. Not so much. As much as I would love someone to embrace my book and publish it, I don't want it at the price of quality. I'd rather revise.

I know it's hard to know these days, what a press's standards are. But if you look around, you can figure it out. Read their books and you'll know. The ones who haven't put out any books yet are a bigger gamble. Every publisher has some lemons, or books that you hate. More than once I've wondered what Ace was thinking, or who is reading some of what Kensington puts out. I also know they have exhaustive acquisitions processes, so I figure I'm not their reader.

So, I don't want to be the person who doesn't want to belong to any club that would stoop to admitting the likes of me, but I do want to make the grade.

I want to be part of the Big Show.

And I won't stop until I get there.

Anger Management

2011-06-01T07:45:00.005-06:00

This is a Cinco de Mayo rose. I just love the subtle lavenders in with the brighter shades. I bought this rose at Santa Fe Gardens, which is the local bricks & mortar presence of High Country Gardens. If we weren't on water restrictions that forbid new plantings, I'd go every weekend and pick out just one new friend to take home.

It feels good to me to garden again. To spend some time with the earth and the plants.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote on Word Whores about how I've given up so many hobbies, to make time for writing. I don't regret that choice, by any stretch. The last couple of years have been very productive for me. You folks out there might not be able to tell, because it's mostly going to yucca juice right now, but I've been writing these fabulous novels that will be published ANY SECOND NOW. I've got a good root system of several series going. When I look at my portfolio, it feels good.

Hell, I feel sexy just saying I have a portfolio.

Yesterday, I mentioned to the fabulous author Laura Bickle that I'm trying not to be angry that I'm going to RWA this year with the same novel I pitched last year. She told me she thought I should be angry. That it's healthy to express that anger, rather than tamping it down and seething over it.

She's right.

I am angry and that feels good, too. It makes me mad that no one has fallen in love with this novel like I feel it deserves. It pisses me off that so many agents tell me they love it, the premise, the writing, the characters - and ask me to send them the very next thing I write. I'm angry and that fires me up.

Yes, I know I could self-publish. Or submit to a press directly. I'm choosing not to at this point.

I see so much dithering in the publishing world right now. So many of the industry professionals are hunkered down waiting to see what will happen. I hear many editors have been instructed not to acquire anything at all. I see agents making what seem to be desperation moves, selling clients' work to epresses with no track record. Established authors are turning down NYC deals to self-publish. (Courtney Milan is the latest news that way.)

We all want to make the thing happen. To get the stories to the readers, to make a living doing what we love. Everyone seems desperate to get rich and terrified of going under.

So, I'm coming back to the idea of balance. I'm spending more time in the garden, hand-watering and adding mulch to retain moisture.

I let myself be angry and it felt good, too.

It's good to want things.

Blooming

2011-05-31T07:26:00.004-06:00

Our yucca spire continues to get taller. Some days you can almost SEE it grow. Just amazing. You can compare it to a week ago.

Sometimes I think writing success can be like this. Your life can go on with no apparent change while you work away at something. Every day you add a little bit. You extend the novel by another 1,000 words. You refine the story, make the character arcs stronger. You take in what you are fed and you grow, by infinitesimal amounts, day by day.

Often it may look like nothing at all is happening.

Then one day - it all pours forth. The work comes to fruition.

This is the overnight success. Where suddenly someone bursts forth upon the scene, in full flower, towering above everyone else. Never mind the years in the desert, the months without rain. The flowering unseen.

In this era of full-disclosure, it's hard to imagine anyone flowering unseen. Everyone out there seems to be yammering away at top volume to declare their wares. In a crowd like that, it's easy to fade to the back, to be just another yucca.

Just wait. Keep adding to the roots. Enjoying the sunshine.

When that spire shoots up, oh yeah - they'll notice then.

My Heroes Have Always Been Close By

2011-05-29T09:09:00.003-06:00

I'm over at Word-Whores today, talking about my heroes. Yeah - you can probably guess.

Pin Head

2011-05-27T08:09:00.005-06:00

So, last night I received cosmetic acupuncture.

David is taking the class this semester, as part of his Doctor of Oriental Medicine degree. It's an elective, though. As far as the school is concerned. The way it went was this: David was vacillating on taking it, since it's a Thursday evening class after a full day of classes. I said if he loved me, he'd take the class.

Fortunately the man loves me.

He might also have been swayed by my argument that he could make potloads of money giving people surgery-free facelifts and breast enhancing treatments that can increase you by AN ENTIRE CUP SIZE. That's what they say.

I know, right?

So, I went in to the class last night to be a test-subject. David is the only guy taking the class - and he says the other guys are missing out on this opportunity. First, he put a few needles in my wrists and ankles, and one just below my belly-button, to bring up that cool and dewy yin energy.

Then he put needles in my face. They sting a bit, but are mostly tingly. Besides, the body needles had already made me sleepy and relaxed. If you look closely, he put tiny little hair-thin needles in the lines on my forehead. Those are laugh lines, by the way. I don't want to hear any of you saying different.

You can also see how my face is flushed and looking kind of shiny. Amazingly, the treatment did bring a dewy freshness to my skin. And this morning, my skin looks smoother, with the fine lines much less noticeable.

I also slept really well last night - a blessing since I'd a stressful week.

Two enthusiastic thumbs up!

You Can Pick Your Nose

2011-05-26T07:22:00.007-06:00

We had brunch with friends, Krystal and Jonathan, at Blue Heron last Sunday. The photo isn't great, but we had a fun time. Terrible service - the place is newly re-opened and the lone waitress was completely overwhelmed that people actually showed up. An hour after we ordered, food finally arrived, but my glass of Chardonnay never did. Fortunately the spot was lovely, the sun warm and the company excellent.

The next day, Krystal sent me a bottle of Chardonnay. Now that's a friend.

I posted Tuesday about making choices. Never mind that not one of you commented. Blogger has been messed up for a couple of days, so I'm blaming that. Tip: don't use Firefox. You can get in better with other browsers right now. But I can't comment in any browser, so I figure that's the deal.

Not that it's making me crazy or anything.

At any rate, one of the things I mentioned is how we don't get to choose our families and we often don't really choose our friends. Our friends very often tend to be the people who are doing the same kind of thing that you are at the same time. So, in this case, Krystal is in David's same class at Southwest Acupuncture College, fondly known as SWAC, which always makes me think of swatting flies. Jonathan is Krystal's sweetie, so he and I roll our eyes at each other while David and Krystal complain to each other about classes.

Will we remain friends after graduation? Hard to say. Depends on where we all end up, what we're doing.

One thing I've learned is that friendships come and go. People naturally come into our lives and leave again, like the changing seasons. And that's okay - not everyone is meant to be a lifelong friend.

However, we can also carefully choose our friends. I learned this skill from one of my sorority sisters, Karen Koonce, now Weesner. She knew how to cultivate friendships. She picked out people in class who said interesting things and invited them to lunch. She paid attention to who knew stuff she wanted to learn and charmed them into letting her pick their brains.

This skill has served me well over the years, so that I have a life rich with interesting and supportive friends.

Thank you, Karen!

Live by the Sword

2011-05-24T07:07:00.005-06:00

I hope this threatening sky promises rain -we desperately need it.

David's been talking about some of the patients he sees and how the ailments they come in with so clearly reflect how they live their lives.

I think it's easy to see that those who choose a violent path stand a greater chance of dying a violent death. Live by the sword, die by the sword. It's a simple matter of percentages. But I think it's less easy to see that, if we choose to spend our lives in service of our children, then that's how our lives will look in the end. If we choose not to accept responsibility, then we'll have no control over anything. My stepdad Dave loves order - thus he's been in the military and prioritizes creating order.

It's that aspect of choosing that's most important. Stepdad Dave doesn't spend every minute of every day making lists and planning for the future. It's just his priority. It's what creates the foundation under everything else. And it's characteristic of him - enough that we all tease him about his lists.

Kristen Lippert-Martin mentioned on her blog that Virginia Woolf wrote only one hour every day. Not all that much time, out of her 24. And yet, we think of her as a writer. The quintessential writer, for many. That's because being a writer shaped her life, more than anything else. She made all her choices around that idea and it became her salient characteristic.

I think that's the key: what we choose to live by is what defines us. The warrior who chooses to live by the sword might retire from the field between wars, but she remains a warrior in her thoughts and actions.

We spend a lot of our lives with things being chosen for us: our families, where we live, our friends, often our professions. In the hustle of day to day, we tend to fall into what other people declare is most important. And we often have to abide by that: children must be fed, paying bosses must receive deliverables. Still, those things don't have to define us.

Even if we spend only an hour a day writing, we are writers by definition, if we choose that way of life.

Live by the word, die by the word.

New Beginnings

2011-05-23T07:17:00.006-06:00

Look, our beaked rescue yucca is sending up a spire!

We figure this means it's happy and getting established. Either that, or this is a last-ditch effort to reproduce before dying. We were concerned, after the very cold and dry winter and very dry spring, that it wasn't doing well. It's lovely to see this sign of vigor.

We prefer to focus on the positive.

I'm back home now. New England was lovely (damp) with many beautiful forests and waterways (cold), but it's so good to be back in my home landscape with my at-home routines.

No, I didn't get any writing done while I was gone. I finished out my first round of line edits on Sapphire on the plane there and then promptly failed to get anything else of a writing nature done, besides a few desultory blogs.

I just never do.

And I'm not totally sure why. I know part of it is my ritual is blown all to hell and gone. Even if I try to recreate it, I can't. The other piece might be that I'm traveling for work and so I'm in work-brain 24/7. I never quite seem to shift out of it, even over the weekend. Of course, I was with my boss and we talked about work a lot, so that could be a contributing factor.

So, it's good for me to sit at my writing desk again, with my storyboard beside me and all my little talismans of creativity. I like to think I've been storing up the writing these last few weeks and now this vigorous spire of creativity will pour out of me.

Me and the rescue yucca.

Banishing Hobbies

2011-05-22T09:29:00.002-06:00

I'm over at Word Whores today, talking about banishing hobbies.

PRISM Final

2011-05-21T10:22:00.003-06:00

You'll note this trophy has someone else's name on it. That's because I haven't actually WON. But Petals & Thorns is a finalist in the 2011 PRISM awards for Best Erotica and Best First Book. I'm so delighted and thrilled.

And I really want one of these trophies.

Pretty.

Shiny.

And congrats to Marcella, for finalling with Enemy Within for Best Futuristic. She might also be up for Best First Book. If she knows what's good for her, she won't get her dirty fingerprints on MY trophy!

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

2011-05-17T19:59:00.002-06:00

Over the weekend I got to attend a Regatta.

Don't you love how that rolls off the tongue?

Regatta.

It was just that styling, too.
Laurie's daughter, Catherine was rowing with her schools' team. She's the ripped blonde in the red cap.
Here's her team rowing out for their race while the boys prep.
Steaming to the finish line. They won handily.
Love the synchronicity.

Almost made me feel athletic, just to watch.

Sweet Life

2011-05-16T05:48:00.005-06:00

On Saturday, my hosts took me on a hike on the Sweet Trail. Madison is a big fan of hikes, too.
All of this is freshwater estuarian marsh. Teeming with nesting birds of all types.
So lovely. The still water makes for great reflections.
If you look sharp, you can see lots of heron nests here.
The trail leads to the Great Bay. There's a memorial there. Laurie's husband, Bob, felt quite contemplative. For those of you keeping notes, this is what I want - a bench and an engraved marker in some beautiful spot.

A Work in Progress

2011-05-15T08:32:00.001-06:00

I'm over at Word Whores today, talking about perfection and lack thereof.

Forget-Me-Not

2011-05-14T07:12:00.002-06:00

I'm at my boss, Laurie's, house this weekend in Durham, New Hampshire. All the flowers are in bloom.
I love the natural rock walls. And every opening looks like a lane into an enchanted forest.
The pond near their house. (Though the huge place in the background is not theirs.)
On the drive here, I wound through rolling hills and small towns. All along were small and ancient cemeteries, edged right up next to what used to be narrow lanes in dense woods.
Forget-me-nots all over their garden.

Always a special blossom.

Handsome Hanover

2011-05-12T05:51:00.000-06:00

After work last night, we went up to Hanover, reputed to be a very pretty college town.

It was.

Nice little burrito spot for the students.
Weather vanes are big here.

Another snazzy eating establishment.
All the Dartmouth students were out on the grass, enjoying the sunshine and warm weather.

(You're welcome.)

White River Junction

2011-05-09T19:12:00.002-06:00

It's interesting being in New England, in such a different landscape from my home. As soon as I landed in Manchester yesterday evening, I smelled the ocean. Not the sun-warmed southern California surf, but the damp spring brine of the northeast sea coast.

There is SO much water here.

I'm staying in White River Junction, which is at the meeting of the Connecticut and White Rivers. They're celebrating their 250 year anniversary this year - which seems funny to me after Santa Fe's 400th. But it seems old to me here. Quiet at night, industrial on the edges, renovating nicely.

I took a walk this evening and saw these neat lofts with lovely glass balconies that overlook the river.
Neat sculpture in the Veteran's Memorial park along the White River.
Road bridge crossing the river. I love how these staid little New England churches have been repurposed - this one into a Zen studio.
The White River itself.
This is a railroad town from way back and the Welcome Center is in the old depot.

Very pretty weather, but all this damp makes me feel chilled!

Petals & Debates

2011-05-09T02:28:00.007-06:00

I'm on the road again. Well, on the air, really.

At one time, I traveled pretty much nonstop. Like one to two weeks out of every month-type nonstop. I've gotten spoiled since that project was canceled. It felt traumatic to pack up and leave home for this two-week stint in New England.

Alas.

I'm hoping for some good photos. And pithy observations. Hey, it could happen.

Meanwhile, there have been interesting developments with Petals & Thorns. It was reviewed on Dear Author. I was simply thrilled. This is a major site - one I really like and respect, for the honesty of the reviews. Janine, the reviewer, only gave it a C+, because she was bothered by some of the aspects of the story. She talked about her reactions in depth and it stimulated great discussion. I loved having this kind of thoughtful review.

In turn that stimulated another thoughtful post on the topic.

I commented briefly on the first and really wanted to on the second. I might still. But so many reviewers complain that author commenting has a chilling effect on reviews.

Still, many of the issues raised are those that prompt me to write these stories, to explore these power issues and darker emotions. I feel a bit, what, deprived that I can't leap into the discussion.

We'll see how long I last.

My POV

2011-05-06T07:16:00.006-06:00

In working through my Sapphire line edits, I've learned something new about myself.

I know - who'da thunk it?

And yes, the line edits have been dead easy. I'm sending them off today. I don't know why I was so worked up on Tuesday about it - thanks to all of you who said supportive things.

At any rate, one of the things my editor, Deb Nemeth, picked out was phrasing that kept the reader out of deep point-of-view (POV). The reader, instead of feeling like the reader she is looking through the character's eyes, feeling what they feel, can get yanked out by these filter words and phrases. So an example would be "she saw the cat prancing through the cactus" instead of "the cat pranced through the cactus." The second takes out that step of observation.

It's been pointed out to me before that I do this. As an essayist, this writing style is no problem. Actually, it lends itself, because the art of the personal essay largely relies on being able to take that step back and observe your own life. But for fiction-writing, especially genre fiction, which is all about sweeping the reader up in the whirl of a new world, you don't want to do this.

I'm learning.

Deb is an excellent editor and quite deft at pointing out where I create this objective distance. What I'm discovering is why it's been hard for me to lose this kind of lens.

It's because that's how I see my own life.

Ever since I can recall, I've kind of narrated my own experiences. My first memory, back when I was in diapers, watching my parents drive away with all the abandonment grief that goes with it (they, um, were going to a movie), was also accompanied by a sense that, hey, here I am in a body and isn't this interesting? There's always been that part of me that steps back and observes objectively. Yes, I sometimes refer to myself in the first person. Sometimes I give my remarks dialogue tags. All in fun, but I might IM to a friend "bitch!" and then "and I mean that in the nicest way possible, she added hastily."

Thus, for my characters to step back and observe, to have "she said to herself" absolutely reflects how I see the world.

It's good for me to understand this. On the Meyers-Briggs personality test, I come out as an INTJ (introvert-intuitive-thinker-judger). One way they describe INTJs is:

... many INTJs do not readily grasp the social rituals; for instance, they tend to have little patience and less understanding of such things as small talk and flirtation (which most types consider half the fun of a relationship). To complicate matters, INTJs are usually extremely private people, and can often be naturally impassive as well, which makes them easy to misread and misunderstand.

All very interesting to me - and helpful in understanding why I behave in relationships the way I do. But it never occurred to me to examine how that influences how I *write* also.

In the end, it's just another acquired skill in the craft of writing. It's easy to say "that's just how I write" or "that's my voice" or "that's how I see the world." But, depending on what you're trying to accomplish in a story, you may have to alter those things, to maximize the effect for the reader.

Which is, after all, the point of it all.

Pressing the Sheets

2011-05-05T07:58:00.006-06:00

This begs a comment about all reproductive activities following certain patterns...

I took this pic near my folks' house in Tucson. The agave plants are sending up their spires, with varying kinds of blooms. Some of them will use up all of their resources to make the spire and flowers, much like a spawning salmon, dying to reproduce. That's my biologist lens coming into play.

Tawna Fenske would undoubtedly find a rude joke to make, perhaps even run a contest about it.

Marcella Burnard would undoubtedly buy a huge textbook on agaves and write a mini-dissertation on them.

Linda Grimes would find an array of dirty pictures derived from cactus to share.

We all see these things differently because we all have different ways of processing the world, particularly sexual matters. Even if it's plant sex. Sex is a deeply personal and intimate thing. It's also one of those things where what we SAY about it doesn't necessarily match what we DO. Because the doing, except in certain circumstances, is usually done privately with only one other participant, or maybe several, plus the dog.

(Had to throw that in, for my CPs!)

At any rate, this is on my mind, not just because of the prodigious agave spawning we witnessed, but because of this article. The author's intent is to make the argument that if a married man isn't getting satisfactory sex at home, then it's better for him to pay a professional than to have an affair.

It also has the, perhaps unintended, effect of illustrating how the author feels about sex in general. To sum up, she finds it normal that she declined sex with her husband so as not to mess up the nicely ironed sheets.

Worse, *all* her friends that she polled agreed. They don't like sex, don't want to have it. From this she extrapolates that women don't like sex.

See, I have a really different circle of friends.

Most of whom still have their mouths hanging open, muttering "she IRONS her SHEETS???"

This is, of course, why I love you all. And hey - if you're a sheet-ironer out there, you can still hang with us. Then you can explain where you find the time!

I once went to one of those Chippendales shows, back in small town Wyoming. You know the thing - the male dancers take over the bar, women patrons only, they strip and strut about, dancing sometimes an overstatement. I went with this group of gals I worked with. Over the evening, they transformed. Some of it was the drinking, sure, but there was more. These usually demure wives and mothers, who would be disgusted if some cowboy in a bar stripped his shirt off and grabbed their hands to run over his chest were screaming in delight and tipping guys to do this.

You could say it's a power thing, which could be true, but I suspect it's more that it's how they thought they should behave. After all, the guys like that kind of thing. Men are openly honest about enjoying sex and sexual things, whereas women range over the spectrum in how frank they are.

There are lots of reasons for this. But it's not that all women don't like sex.

In fact, my main response to that article was a fervent wish that the author would seek counseling. You don't have to be that woman, screaming with desire and pawing young dancers, but if perfect sheets are more important than being intimate with your life partner, then something likely needs revisiting.

Actually, if perfectly pressed sheets takes priority over anything at all, I think you need to come sit on my patio and have a glass of wine.

We'll talk.

Detritus Returned

2011-05-04T07:29:00.003-06:00

David snapped this pic of me on the Pacific Beach boardwalk. I like how relaxed and happy I look.

And slim. *note to self: wear those black capris ALL THE TIME.

So, remember back in mid-March when we heard that car wreck? I picked up the things the next morning and photographed them. I had a number of conversations with people about it - in the comments, but also on Facebook and Twitter. My friend from college, Felicia, urged me to try to find the gal because of the Prada reading glasses - the thing Felicia herself would have been most sorry to lose.

I tried tracking the name on the receipt. No luck. My Google Fu is usually quite strong, but not in this case. A couple of prolific local tweeters even took it up to no avail. Nothing in the local news about it. So, I called the police non-emergency line.

Yes, the dispatcher acted like I was nuts for asking.

Finally, I managed to convey my non-stalkery desire to simply return this gal's things (I didn't mention follow-up articles on this blog - really hard to make that sound non-stalkery.) The dispatcher said she'd give my information to the Sheriff's Deputy who was on scene and he'd call me.

He finally did, nearly a week later.

He also proceeded to interview me on precisely what my deal was. He asked what things I wanted to return to "the young lady involved." By this time I've managed to glean that she survived. Totally unimpressed by my catalog of her detritus (I could practically hear him thinking "eye-pencil? she thinks this is important??), he finally says he'll give my information to the young lady and, if she was interested, she'd call me.

Yes, he absolutely made this sound unlikely.

And she didn't, for a really long time. By now it's April and I've kind of forgotten about it, except that I have a little paper bag of her things in my office. I start to think about what I should do with it if she never calls.

Then, one day my cell rings and it's her.

She's young. So young that her thoughts kind of zing from one topic to the next. She tells me they rolled the car three times. When I tell her we called 911 when we heard the sound, she receives this information with wonder, somehow not processing this. When I say it's a miracle she survived and wasn't hurt, she says oh yes and how they were going 75 miles per hour. (It's a 40 mph zone.) I wonder how she knows this, if she was driving, who "they" were, but she's already flown past the subject. She wants her things, but - oh - she has no car now, cuz - duh - she wrecked hers! She'll have to talk her dad into giving her a ride. I tell her where my house is. She says she'll call when she can come by.

Which she doesn't.

I think about calling her back, to tell her we'll be gone for a week. I think better of it. If she calls while we're on vacay, I'll just have to say so.

She doesn't.

Then, yesterday afternoon, my cell rings. A female voice says "are you home?"

Um?

She hastens to fill the silence, "this is Carrie, the girl who was in the car wreck? I can get a ride to your house to get my things, if you're home. Only I don't know where your house is."

So, I tell her again. Five minutes later, a shiny Honda Element pulls into the driveway. I walk out to the patio with the bag. I nearly bring my camera, but - it just seemed wrong. She's younger even than I thought. Awkward. Shakes my hand and grabs the bag. Reaches in and grabs the Prada reading glasses case with a triumphant squeal. "This! This is what I really wanted!"

Nod to you, Felicia.

I'd envisioned our conversation when we met. How I'd tell her I wrote about her wreck on the blog and all the nice things people said. I think she might say something more to me, but she just bounces and says good-bye. She runs back to the car, opens the passenger door and brandishes the bag of things, doing this little hip-bobbing dance for her mother. The mother, by her unmoving silhouette, seems unimpressed. I'm kind of surprised she doesn't get out of the car to meet me.

A moment later, they're gone.

I'm left today thinking about stories and connections. About non-lethal life lessons and whether this carefree girl has learned anything.

I wonder, too, what I learned.

Let's Go Fly a Kite

2011-05-03T07:13:00.004-06:00

People fly these enormous kites on the beach around Mission Bay. Really neat to see them. Like fantasy creatures in the sky.

Vacations are kind of unreal anyway. We sleep until we wake up and then do things I don't normally do, like walk across the street to Starbucks while the surf pounds in the background. Even though I spent some of my mornings checking in with work (big proposal going out) and keeping up with other email, I didn't track twitter, or the blogs I usually read, or the comics, etc., in my dailies bookmark folder.

It felt good to be out of that swim for a bit.

Instead, we walked the boardwalk, paddled in the surf. We enjoyed long wine-filled lunches with fresh seafood and lolled by the pool. We did crazy, non-real-life things like toured an $8 million beachfront house. My normally full days emptied out. I didn't work on any writing projects. I read several books. Emotional tension over things I'd been worrying about bled away.

The ocean is good for that.

The coming back, though, that's always the bite. Even in the car I started revising my To-Do list. I received an email from my editor during the drive with line-edits on Sapphire. Meanwhile I still haven't finished the two Revise & Resubmits I'm working on. The big proposal is still teetering on the edge of going out and now I'm being sent on a two-week jaunt through New Hampshire and Vermont starting next Sunday.

Yesterday was crazy full, jam-packed.

It's tempting, sometimes, to think that it's better not to do vacay at all. So I don't notice the contrast. I also know this is the opposite solution to the problem.

Instead, I need to find ways to let every day have a breezy feel. To let the emotional tension, the relentless drive for more, bleed away. I want long walks and bird song. Less multi-tasking and more reading.

Maybe I need to fly more kites.

Enemy Games on Tour!

2011-05-02T07:47:00.004-06:00

Look what arrived in the mail last Saturday, just in time to join us on our road trip! Yes, Marcella Burnard's Enemy Games! As I mentioned on Word Whores yesterday, she's a frisky and flirtatious sequel. Her big sister hit the bestselling charts, and is short-listed for the RITA awards, the romance community's highest honor and has been listed as a book your boyfriend would like, too. Enemy Games wants her piece of the action, too. She officially comes out tomorrow and she's ready to take on the world.

She started out with some pool time in Phoenix. Rumor is she was spotted at the bar drinking margaritas and flirting with the cabana boys.
She spent a bit of patio time in Tucson, checking out the flying pigs.
Then she headed for Pacific Beach in San Diego!
Some surfing lessons got her revved to try the water.
Testing the surf. A bit cool.
Sometimes wallowing in the sand is enough.
And cuddling with the pelicans.
Then a bit of sedate pool time.

Now she's tanned, rested and ready to hit the shelves!

Hit Me with Your Best Shot

2011-05-01T03:05:00.001-06:00

I'm back from vacay and over at Word Whores today, talking books and getting hit on. Normal day at Word Whores.

Road Trip!

2011-04-24T22:40:00.007-06:00

We went on a road trip on Sunday.

Headed for parts unknown, but desertish.

One has to be careful with those unknown desertish parts, because here there be dinosaurs.
And something that I first thought to be the Easter Bunny, influenced perhaps by the Easter Sunday stuff all over the car radio. On second thought.... no, I'm not really sure what it is.
But you can buy a lot of petrified wood. Just in case you wanted to.
We escaped the dinosaurs, weird monuments and petrified wood lots and dropped down out of the mountains.
First sign of warmer weather? Saguaros!
Followed by palm trees!
The view from our balcony. Yes, it's a gorgeous warm evening. Lovely.

The Fur Family

2011-04-24T08:21:00.001-06:00

I'm over at Word-Whores today, introducing the Fur Family.

Standing on the Shoulders of the Little People

2011-04-21T07:31:00.005-06:00

The lilacs are just now starting to pop. The air is warm and still. Spring at last!

This morning at the gym, the 7am Zumba class was well under way when we left. Lots of people show up for this class - easily thirty every day. Possibly more. We walk past the windows and they're in there, dancing and smiling. It's clearly an exercise people love to do. Always a good thing, I think.

Not everyone does.

I used to teach a Tai Chi class at the Senior Center. People loved that class, too. At least, at first.
They glowed and smiled, learning the movements, practicing the graceful form. Then my teacher, the head of my school, would come visit and tell them Tai Chi wasn't good for older people. That studies have shown that *anything* that gets a person up and moving around improved their health. Tai Chi Ch'uan didn't have anything special, he'd tell them, unless they did it right. According to him, they could never do it "right" because it's a martial form and unless they learned it for combat, it wasn't real.

If you read martial arts magazines (which I don't recommend in the least), you'll see a lot of this kind of attitude.

As you can imagine, many of the seniors would not return after these lectures. My teacher said that was good, weeding out the weak. He took pride in his school, his students and himself by elevating us in comparison to everyone else. Himself most of all.

The last couple of days, people have been abuzz about Jennifer Egan winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Lovely to see a woman writer win such an honor. However, the excitement quickly turned sour following this interview in the Wall Street Journal, where she said:

My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them. Look at “The Tiger’s Wife.” There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models?

As one of Egan's erstwhile fans, Jamie Beckman points out:

When she says “the Harvard student,” she’s referring to Kaavya Viswanathan, a very young novelist whose first young-adult work of fiction, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, plagiarized veteran chick lit authors Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, and Megan McCafferty. The book was pulled from the shelves by publisher Little Brown and Company, and Viswanathan’s contract for a second book was canceled. It was ugly.

The remarkable part of Egan's exhortation - the thing that has the literary community beyond dismayed - is that Egan seemed more bothered that the young woman chose "banal and derivative stuff" to plagiarize.

This attitude is far from new. There has always been, and perhaps always will be, a contingent of writers who seek to elevate their work from the banal and derivative stuff - however they might decide what that is. Usually it's by dismissing entire genres, completely disregarding that there's good quality and poor quality in everything. Usually the person doing the dismissing has never sullied themselves by reading any of that "stuff."

I suppose this is part of our society, that we seek to validate our own choices by dissing others. Zumba isn't *real* exercise. The way I do Tai Chi is better than yours - I don't care if you enjoy it. My books are far more elevated than yours.

I hope Jennifer Egan enjoys this tremendous honor. She just disappointed an awful lot of readers.

Missing the Moon

2011-04-20T08:19:00.004-06:00

I missed the moon this month.

Back in September, I promised to do a post each month on the full moon. I've hit them all until this month. I don't really know what happened. The Planter's Moon rose on schedule Sunday night. At first I was too early to catch it, then I was too late. I tried to photograph it setting in the morning, but the light was wrong. Here's one of the landscape shots I took while trying to capture the faint moon at dawn.

Some months it's just not meant to be.

I can say that it's been ferociously windy lately and so I haven't been lingering outside. It's a good thing we haven't been planting, because the 40- and 50-mile per hour gusts would have ripped the seeds from our hands. Springtime here is windy. I think of it like lake turnover - all that cold air warming up and rising, a turbulent transition. It will settle soon.

In promise of that, this morning is gorgeous warm and still. Everyone is loving it.

Besides, it's not like any of you called me on it. The full moon. All the blogging advice says you have to keep these contracts, to satisfy your readers. "They" also say you have to keep the same schedule. Then there are the massive exceptions like Allie Brosh at Hyperbole and a Half. She has only posted three times so far in 2011. Her third post, which went up last night, already has over six hundred comments. The love is not lagging.

Instead of the exception proving the rule (how I hate that line), the exceptions prove there are no rules, I think.

And that, every once in a while, it's okay to miss the moon.

Silver and Gold and Cautionary Tales

2011-04-19T07:30:00.003-06:00

I've been thinking about the Gold Rush lately. And Baby Doe Tabor.

I grew up in Denver, so this is a natural metaphor for me. We spent a fair amount of time in school studying Colorado history, the modern piece of which pivots around the arrival of all the people chasing gold and silver in them thar hills.

One of my favorite stories was always Baby Doe Tabor. Horace Tabor ditched his first wife, the very severe-looking Augusta, for the very beautiful Baby Doe, whose mother would never let her do manual labor, so she could keep her hands pretty and land a genteel husband. They lived a rich, high-spirited life and many opera houses, banks and other edifices bear the Tabor name. One of my favorite bits of the story is how Baby Doe commissioned her dressmaker to dress the nude statues on their property, because the neighbors were offended.

It's a cautionary tale, too. When the country moved to the gold standard, their silver holdings lost their value. Horace died a poor man and Baby Doe lived out her days in the cabin next to the Matchless Mine, which had once fueled their fabulous fortune.

There's a decent summary of the story here, if you're interested in details.

Those are the gold rush stories - the dramatic ascensions, the terrible crashes. Denver grew from a muddy mining supply camp into a major city with diverse industries.

The whole ePublishing thing has put me in mind of that.

There's this wild scent in the air that there are fortunes to be had. Everyone is scrambling, in their own ways, to stake a claim. Some are panning the streams, some digging their own mines by hand. People are forming groups, new ePubs popping up all over, mining the writers for their talents. Is gold the way to go? Silver?

I'm sure some people will make lots of money - that's pretty standard for a gold rush. Others will be the colorful tales, the ones who slog away in the hills alone and trudge into town for supplies, not noticing the gold dust on their boots. Others will be like the Tabors, with a glamorous and prolific burst of fortune that fades into nothing. Such is the nature of all cautionary tales.

It's easy to look at the Tabor's story and make judgments. If only they'd invested better. If only Horace had listened to his friends' advice and diversified. If only they'd seen the money wouldn't flow in forever and made plans accordingly.

Someone asked me for advice the other day and then ignored it. Their prerogative, I suppose, but I won't claim it didn't bother me. I worry about what some of my writer friends are signing up for, dazzled by the promise of riches. It's true that big gains require bigger risks - but that doesn't mean the risks should be ignored.

Here are my cautions, for what they're worth:

1. Track record is more important than ever

This feels like an iconoclastic era, and perhaps it is, but anyone can declare themselves an editor, anyone can set up an ePress in their living room, anyone can have a book printed. The only way to predict the future is to examine the past. If there's no track record, your risk goes up, fast.

2. Anyone can have a book printed (see #1)

Writers want to see their books in print. We grew up holding books, loving books, seeing them stacked around us on the shelves. There's a legitimacy to print that we long for. But because anyone can have a book printed, and even carried by a legitimate distributor, that does not mean books will get into the stores. Major publishers are struggling with getting books into stores. Major bookstores are collapsing under their own fiscal weight. Print books are doorstops if they're not getting into readers' hands. Pretty doorstops, maybe, but nevertheless.

3. Multi-book contracts are not always good for the writer

For years now when people ask me what I want for my birthday or Christmas I've been saying "a lucrative, multi-book contract." We all want it. It's the brass ring. In this dream, a publisher promises to publish my next three books and gives me a chunk of money up front, theoretically so I can feed myself while I write them. Now there are ePubs offering multi-book contracts, which has that lovely guarantee, but without the advance. So, now you're committed to the publisher, without money up front, and possibly no track record. (See #1) What happens if your book doesn't do well? What if the publisher runs into issues - personnel, financial, legal? (Back to track record.) Now your next three books are tied up, possibly for years. There are plenty of cautionary tales on this one. *cough* Dorchester *cough*

4. Easy come, easy go

Okay, this is the one none of us wants to hear, but that fabulous ePub who loves loves loves our baby novel that everyone else says is unmarketable? They could be wrong in that love. We *want* to believe they're seeing what everyone else missed, but it's also possible that the new ePub simply doesn't have the industry experience to see that it's not marketable. Also, they might not care. More than one start-up has employed the "throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" method of defining what's profitable and what isn't. It's hard to look at this objectively, but bears considering why they want what everyone else turned down. Maybe they're brilliant visionaries who alone recognize your true genius. Maybe not.

5. Think long term

A writer told me the other day that she would never again publish with a particular ePress because her profits weren't as good as with another. Sure, this is a legitimate business choice. However, that less profitable ePress has a lot going for it - personnel with established industry track records (I know, I'm harping on this), strong financial and legal backing. I see them as ramping up in a steady, fiscally conservative way that promises much for the long run. Sure, you might not be picking gold nuggets up off the ground, but for a lifelong venture, maybe you don't need to fill your pockets with gold right now.

As writers, we don't always like to worry our pretty heads with business. It would be lovely if we didn't have to. I wonder sometimes, how Baby Doe saw things. Did she try to give Horace business advice or did she while her days away in play and dressing sculptures? Was she bitter that she died poor when she'd once lived so glamorously? I imagine her hands were cracked and gnarled in the end, chopping her own wood, digging through the rocks for silver.

It's tempting to chase the gold. Without the dream, no one would pack up their lives and head for the hills. Some will strike it rich.

Just remember the cautionary tales.

Good Wishes

2011-04-18T07:18:00.004-06:00

Yeah, I get why people are sick of the royal wedding hype.

Yesterday I saw someone on Twitter mention that they'd looked up the date of Prince William's wedding to Catherine Middleton, just so she could be sure to keep the tv turned off for the entire day. (It's Friday, April 29, at 11am, if you wanted to know.)

And no, I'm not planning to watch it. It will stream over the interwebs, I'm sure, so I could theoretically watch the wedding at 4 am and the build-up during the night before that. After all, I did last time. A lot of us did. I suppose that's what has us all conflicted.

Charles and Diana married one month shy of my 15th birthday, back in July of 1981. Like so much of the 80s, everything about it was over the top. The dress, the romance, the freaking glass carriage. That royal wedding was Xanadu and Sixteen Candles rolled up into one giant puffy-sleeved confection of glam.

Yes, I stayed up all night. I had a slumber party, even. My stepdad set up a tv in my room and my best girlfriends and I stayed up, ate junk food and mooned over how princesses really did exist. It was lovely and perfect.

And all a lie.

I think that's what gets us now. We knew that we didn't get to be princesses, really. Despite what Disney told us, we learned that no one really got to marry the prince and live in the castle. We were cool with the reality of it. Sure, fine, whatever.

Then Diana did. And she was all we could want in a princess. Pretty, demure, fabulous dresser. They offered us the fairytale ending and we gobbled it up. We gobbled up the Happily Ever After, too. I think, on some level, at 14 I believed Charles and Diana would be forever a part of my life. They'd become King and Queen and have little princes and princesses, an ongoing fairytale.

Instead, we all know what happened. Maybe what's most surprising is that we ever fell for the fairytale at all.

So, here we are, almost exactly thirty years later. We carry our cynicism like an armor in an uncertain world. The glam of the 80s looks tinny compared to the realities of our polarized country and economic woes. Sure - let William and Kate get married. More power to them. Maybe it will help that they seem to like each other, that they picked each other out, that she's not a sheltered 20. Maybe they'll form a good union and become the leaders we hoped for.

Maybe, they too, are cynical and sorry to be that way.

No, I won't stay up to watch.

(But I will look at pictures of her dress. The giddy 14 year-old in me demands it.)

Hi, I'm Jeffe and I'm a Shoe Whore

2011-04-17T09:52:00.001-06:00

I'm over at Word Whores today, confessing that it's not just about the words.

Magic Circles and Experiments in Physics

2011-04-15T07:55:00.004-06:00

We've been hiking on the weekends lately. Doesn't always make for panoramic photos, but it's lovely and familiar to be up in the mountains and woods again.

The other day on Linda Grimes blog, she listed lessons learned the hard way and encouraged us to share. I mentioned one of my most salient in the comments and thought I'd share here. A bit of a Friday cautionary tale.

Not that any of you would do this.

Back when I was a kid, I went to this open-space elementary school, meaning we didn't have classrooms or desks. We had chairs and tables for some activities, otherwise we sat on the floor a lot. Every day started with Magic Circle. We sat on the floor in - you guessed it - a circle, and went around discussing the topic du jour.

One day, one of the girls was all scraped up and bruised. She'd wrecked on her bicycle. She didn't give many details except to say that she'd been riding her bike back from the pool and her hair was wet, so she shook her head to try to dry it. She finished with "Believe me: never shake your head while you're riding your bike!"

Now, you have to understand the kind of kid I was. Something would never let me take anything anyone told me at face value. I always had to know why. Or how the person knew.

Yes, I drove my mother crazy. She sent me to school a full year early so someone else would have to answer my questions.

Very shortly after that, I'm riding my bike back from the pool, my hair is wet and I remember this story. Why, I wonder, would shaking your head make you wreck your bike? It made no sense to me.

So, I tried it.

And I can tell you the answer: when you shake your head while riding a bike, you lose some of your balance and you twist the handlebars. This drives your bike into the concrete curb, launching you over said handlebars to faceplant on the sidewalk.

Now we all know.

I don't know if I ever explained to my mom just how I came to wreck on my bike that day.

Really, I blame it all on Magic Circle. Damn sharing.

Resurrecting the Dead Elephant

2011-04-14T07:24:00.005-06:00

I might have to revamp my writing file organization system.

Yes, gasp if you will. After 15 years of using the same system, I'm now discovering it doesn't quite fit the writer I am today. I've kind of outgrown it, which is both thrilling and daunting.

Okay, you all know I'm a fiend for organization. It's that little bit of Virgo easing up on my Leo cusp. If you're just reading so you can make fun of me, well... okay. But if you don't have a bit of Virgo, you might get bored.

I keep email folders and then organize my files on the computer into folders with the same names. For lo these fifteen years, I've been using three major categories for my writing work: In-Progress, Ping-Pong and Published. In-Progress is divided into Incomplete and Draft, and all have further sub-folders for individual works. My Ping-Pong folder is for works under active submission. I read an article in Poets & Writers when I was first starting out that suggested viewing the submission process as a game of ping-pong. You hit the ball out there, they reject it and pop it back, you send it right back out again. When the ball doesn't return? Score!

This system worked great when I started out because I mainly wrote essays and short stories, submitting them to popular and literary magazines. It was a fairly straightforward process that moved at a lightning pace compared to the geologic time of submitting novels.

This might be spreadsheet TMI, but I keep an Excel workbook, called Progress Count, which has a tab for each manuscript I'm actively working on. I also have a Submission workbook. When I finished drafting and polishing something, I transferred that one spreadsheet to the Submission workbook, where I'd then track the submission process. And I'd move the folder for it, in both email and on the hard drive, from In-Progress to Ping-Pong.

And yes, it made me happy. I'll even confess to a special thrill when I moved the folders to Published.

Well, now it's not so clear.

See, for my first novel, Obsidian, it moved nicely from the Incomplete folder to the Draft folder to the Ping-Pong folder. After being kicked around the gutters of NYC, it came limping home, a battered and dented ping-pong ball. It needed rehab, in a big way.

I should have moved it back to the Draft folder. But I didn't. I never had gone backwards. It stayed in the Ping-Pong folder, but - and this is a big BUT as all your organization fiends will recognize - I had to move the working spreadsheet back to Progress Count, so I could track the revising. You all recognize the problem here, right?

Right. Non-synchronicity of the filing system.

You can pause to steady your breathing - I totally understand.

I revised. The word count changed hugely. I gamely sent Obsidian back into the volley again. I think someone in NYC stepped on the ball because it just stopped coming back. No score.

Sad, I just left it all in the Ping-Pong file, when really I should have moved all the files to some kind of Elephant Graveyard folder. I started a New and Better novel. I put the past behind me.

Well, now someone is interested in Obsidian. (I know - tentative yay!!). I have detailed notes for revision. I hauled the files out of all the various folders I'd left them moldering in, but I feel like I have no place to put them. Resurrection folder, perhaps? Frankenstein's Lab?

It lives!

I know this is likely all a bit much, but the upshot is that I'm finding there are more gradations to being a published writer than draft, submission, published. And there's a certain maturity in recognizing that.

I'm off to create a few new folders.

Yeah, no one knows how to have fun like I do!

How Old Is Too Old?

2011-04-13T07:37:00.005-06:00

This New York Times article annoyed me yesterday. Oh, it's an interesting article (thanks to @wolfsonliterary for tweeting it!), about the inspiration for Suzanne Collins' young adult Hunger Games series. It's fun to read as a writer because, no, Suzanne didn't spring from Zeus's forehead as a full-grown bestseller. She's been honing her craft and working as a writer for years.

No, what annoyed me was a toss off sentence in regards to Collins' first book: "When it was published, Collins was already 41."

The implication being, of course, that omigod! She was already really old!

I looked up the staff writer of the article and she's not the fresh-faced 20-something I'd imagined. Perhaps some of her own angst leaked in there. It happens. She might be feeling the passage of years, wondering how much time she has left to do everything she dreams of.

It seems I know a lot of young writers. Perhaps because more young people tend to use the interwebs than older ones. Many of the hot new YA writers are young, too, so that could be part of the surprise with Collins. I hear a pervasive restlessness from the younger crowd, bemoaning the loss of their twenties, lamenting that they've hit a milestone birthday without reaching their publication goals, watching the approach of OMG 40! with horror.

The thing is, we're not football players or ballerinas. Our careers aren't over at 28. Most writers write their entire lives. And, writing is the kind of pursuit that improves with age. In fact, a number of studies show that the average age for writers to have a bestseller is 50.5.

(No - I have *no* idea why that article is on a golf cart website. I've read lots of studies/data like that and that was the first I found. Perhaps they think retirees searching for high-end golf carts might also want to finally write that novel? Could be.)

I went through a stack of notebooks and journals last night, looking for some information for author and writing buddy, Laura Bickle. I don't really journal extensively, but starting in about 1993, I took notes from writing classes, visiting authors, martial arts and philosophy classes, and wrote down story ideas and research in bound journals. It kind of makes for an interesting chronological mishmash of what I was thinking.

One thing that struck me, though, from those early writing notes, is how much I've grown since then. Confidence as a writer, yes. But also in perception, craft and skill. I *know* so much more now than I did at 27. That might seem self-evident, but the novels I write now are not ones I was capable of writing then. It's exciting to think of what I might be capable of in another twenty years.

By then they'll have really good voice-recognition software, too. I'll just lay back and dictate. While handsome men feed me grapes.

What were we saying about fantasy yesterday?

Fantasies and Determinations

2011-04-12T07:26:00.006-06:00

When I submitted my first novel to an agent, I spun this whole fantasy around it.

Yeah, you publishing types out there are rolling your eyes and you writers are cringing and nodding in sympathy.

You know the kind of fantasy I mean. The agent calls you up, all thrilled and excited to have discovered you. I'm embarrassed to admit, part of my little fantasy was that not only would they offer me a lovely advance, but that they'd ask me how much more I needed to quit my day job and write the sequel as fast as possible.

Yes, you can laugh now.

I wasn't all that naive, either, relatively speaking. I'd had my essay collection published with a university press, which meant no advance, small print run. I'd published in magazines for ten years. I had a pretty decent idea how publishing worked.

This still did not prevent me from imagining they'd go into a frenzy, exclaiming "She's the next Stephenie Meyer - we must pay this woman to write!"

It could happen...

At any rate, it didn't. I got the polite thanks, but no thanks. David took me to the bar and bought me a margarita. Since then I've had more rejections and some maybes and some lovely yeses. But no one is begging me to quit my day job.

One of the things I've come to realize, in my newfound maturity, is that no one ever will.

At RT I noticed how many authors referenced their day jobs. Even award-winning, best-selling authors with name-recognition and sizzling cache. Courtney Milan, for example, still works full-time as a lawyer. A lot of us would like our books to be doing as well as hers. A number of other authors have a spouse who pulls in a decent salary, so the writing money is gravy on top of that.

The reality of it is, a day job provides a number of things that advances and even decent royalties do not. Things like health insurance, 401Ks, and a reliable salary. Advances are finite. You get a chunk of money and you might not get another for six months or a year. An author doing really well might get a $10,000, but if you compare that to half your annual salary at your day job, not counting benefits, it's not so much. Royalties fluctuate and are impossible to predict. In order to rely on writing income, you have to have enough of an established backlist - books that keep selling more or less on their own at a steady rate.

I'm obviously not the first person to point that out. But it recently occurred to me that this is much like the scenario laid out by people like Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame. You gradually build your passive income - money from investments that pay out without you having to actively work on them, e.g., already published books vs. writing new books - until you reach a level of comfort. For many of us, this level of comfort includes being able to pay for health insurance and save for the future.

It's back to the whole "slow and steady wins the race thing." It's not the glamorous fantasy, no. It's good to have those dreams, I think. They keep us revved and excited. It's also good to recognize the reality, and plan accordingly.

Wait! Is that the phone?

RT 2011 - the recap

2011-04-10T09:49:00.011-06:00

In no particular order, because it's all a blur at this point. I really thought I'd keep up, but no. I blame Twitter this time. So easy to tweet pics in real time.

At any rate, this is me (duh) at the eBook eXpo signing. (No, that's not their capitalization, it's mine - but wouldn't that be cool?) I went with roses, for the Petals & Thorns theme. One guy stopped and told me I'd done a great job and that he does product placement for movies, so he knows of what he speaks. This is what you get when you have a gig in Los Angeles.

Still I was pleased and it went great.

I love this pic of Tessa Dare, Victoria Dahl and Courtney Milan, who kept cracking up while posing.

I put in a little pool time and, sweet serendipity, there just happened to be a shirtless photo shoot for Mr. Romance.
My toes, for verisimilitude.
Marcella received her trophy for Best Futuristic Romance. The trophy is super-sexy.
And here she is, chatting it up with readers and booksellers at Club RT.
Allison, doing likewise.
Marcella in Faerie mode, offering advice.
Here's Danielle Poiesz, formerly of Pocket Books, now with the Sekrit Projekt at Penguin, which she revealed at the conference to be xxxx. Oops, I can't say online yet. If you'd been at RT, you'd know. Just saying...
Here she is giving a demo to a bunch of potential beta testers.
She arrived at the Vampire Ball as Buffy.
And demonstrated her mad staking skills.
Danielle met up with agent Suzie Townsend for dinner. They both had to finish urgent tweeting before they could be fully social.

Bollywood

2011-04-07T15:05:00.002-06:00

Jane Litte at Dear Author was good enough to snap this shot of me, Marcella and Allison at the Bollywood party. Jane is just as sharp and engaging in person as online. Great chatting with her!

Reconaissance Photos Are In

2011-04-06T10:51:00.002-06:00

The Word Whores reader basket! For more, check my post on the Word Whores blog.

Brass Ring

2011-04-05T07:11:00.005-06:00

As some of us shuffle off to the RT Convention today and others stay home to actually get work done and live their lives, it's probably worth giving a nod to the business end of writing.

A big reason people go to conventions like RT is for business. They go because their publishers tell them to, because they think they'll sell books and "connect with readers." I've heard people say they won't go until they have a published book to sell because it's wasted time otherwise. I've written before about how going to writers' conferences is an opportunity to learn from the big sellers in the field. But one of the very most important reasons to go is to connect with other writers.

Over the next few days you'll see a lot of photos from RT. Partying, hanging out, lots of smiles for the camera. The business-oriented will call this networking. Another phrase for it is making friends.

The support network of other writers can't be overvalued. People often mention the very supportive online community. Getting to meet those people in person is even better. And there are - *gasp* - writers out there who aren't on the interwebz (yet). They must be found and indoctrinated, I mean, coaxed into the virtual world.

This is on my mind this morning, not just because I'm packing up to go see some of my friends, people I see maybe once a year or once every couple of years. It's on my mind because of a couple of recent articles. This seems to be the season for jealousy and meltdowns. There's this rant, from a self-pubbed author who's "retiring" from professional writing in a rage at the lack of support her books have received. Then there's this honest and heartfelt letter on book deal envy (via Galley Cat - thank you!).

Both stand out to me as examples of writers who've let the inevitable disappointments of this very competitive business breed into bitterness, anger and jealousy. These aren't writer problems so much and human being problems. I think "Sugar" puts it well in saying the author of the letter is conflating "book" with "book deal."

We all do this. We all want to be Cinderella at the ball or Michael Jordan on the ball court. We want to be King or Queen and have all the specialness that entails. We want the pick of the babes, to marry the prince, to be loved, admired and, and, and...

I suspect part of why we want these things is because we believe our lives will be better once we have them. "If only I had.........., I'd be happy."

But the deal is, happy comes from within. We repeat the adage that "Money doesn't buy happiness" for a reason. (Though I still love David Lee Roth for saying that money does let you buy the big yacht that you can park right next to where the happiness is.) The point is, how happy or how bitter we feel doesn't depend on whether or not we have these things we want. It's just easy to pick those out as substitutes.

The other thing that struck me about both of those articles is the relationship with other people. Both with the "jerks" and the "true friends." Despite the wildly different grips on reality, both writers saw their circle as competition or customers. Which I found troubling.

So, today I'm off to see my friends. To spend some time with people who love to talk about what I love to talk about.

It doesn't get better than that.

Unreal Books and Sales Figures

2011-04-04T07:12:00.007-06:00

Our spring here is being a lion one minute and a lamb the next. The grape hyacinths bloom in serene splendor even as the wind whips away the patio furniture cushions.

Yesterday I went to this costume shop to get a few things to supplement the RT wardrobe. I went in Saturday and the gal said most of her stuff was at home and she'd bring in possible pieces and meet me with them on Sunday. When I got there yesterday, she had a friend there waiting to meet me. I'd explained I'm a writer, about the RT Booklovers Convention and the costume balls. In the course of introducing me, the shop owner said "And you write real books, too, not those ebooks, right?"

I said I write both. Technically true.

It amuses me, though, that I've now sold more copies of my unreal ebook, Petals and Thorns, than were ever printed of my real book, Wyoming Trucks, True Love and the Weather Channel. I know it will still take time for the concept of ebooks to permeate through the population. The shop owner also asked me to bring in photos of the convention and, since she already had my card, I told her that I'll be posting photos all week, if she wants to look at my blog. She said she'd have to get someone to show her how to do that.

Meanwhile I flipped through my alumni magazines for my sorority and my alma mater last night. I might be a few months behind. Both magazines are glossy, full of rah-rah articles and hopelessly boring. They seemed to focus on things that I simply don't think about much. Such different worlds we can live in now.

I know that people will adjust their ideas about what a "real" book consists of. They already are. Over and over I see people comment online that they received an ereader for a gift, weren't sure about it at first and now love it.

I haven't shared stats on Petals & Thorns in a little while. The numbers keep going up, which continues to astonish me. Each month I open my royalty statement expecting a crash like back in October or January. But no.
As you can see from the percentages, Fictionwise has sold the most copies. It looks like All Romance eBooks and Loose Id are neck and neck, but that's a bit of artifact - most of those Loose Id sales were back before October. In fact, all sales through October were Loose Id's. The All Romance sales were after that. It will be interesting to see what happens from here!

Posting will be sporadic this week, but I'll try to throw up photos, at least, from the convention.

Welcome to RT Week

2011-04-03T09:50:00.002-06:00

I'm at Word Whores today, introducing the upcoming week, which will be all about the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention. Forecast for this week: blog posts maybe scattered and manic, with a chance of babbling. I make no promises.

The Strangely Dramatic Tale of Miss Hieber's Victorian Wardrobe

2011-04-01T06:00:00.000-06:00

A special treat for Friday - another Day in the Life!

This time our special guest is not a book, but an outfit. For those of you who know author Leanna Renee Hieber, you'll know that her fashion sense is larger than life. In honor of her newest book in the Strangely Beautiful series, we have a special dispatch - a day in the life of... a dress.

~~~~~

Greetings. I am one of the company of Miss Leanna Renee Hieber's late-19th-century finery. She utilizes the likes of me to celebrate and promote her novels, the Strangely Beautiful series, set in Victorian London, and her upcoming Magic Most Foul saga, set in Victorian New York City. She has obtained the like of me from places like Gallery Serpentine and Gothic Renaissance. She is a professed "goth girl" as she calls it in this day and age. Please note she does not call me a "costume" for if she had the means and ability, she would wear me every day of her life, having loved my style since she was a child.

I begin my journey in my lady's closet, where she places me in the fore.

I then move ignobly into this pile (she does so hate to wear the same regalia two days in a row, thusly one mere weekend at a convention requires practically a steamer trunk)

I then take this horseless carriage - or, at times, magic of magic, I fly in an enormous metal bird!

I then arrive at any number of destinations. This time, it so happens, is New Hampshire, where my lady is in state as the Literary Guest of Honour at the Steampunk Industrial Revolution. I relax for a moment on the luxurious hotel bed before the bustle (pun intended) begins.

She has chosen me for her featured reading this evening, I'm very pleased. (I received many compliments)

And then I return home, rather exhausted and in need of a good press. But she'll have me back out again on release day of her prequel in the Strangely Beautiful series, The Perilous Prophecy of Guard and Goddess, on May 3rd. In the meantime, while reading the first two isn’t required as this is a prequel, if you’d like to join in the series… Visit her webpage and interact with her via the following venues: Twitter, Facebook, her blog (with a psycho bunny pic!) (She’ll also be wearing the likes of me a great deal in the fall when her Gothic Victorian Paranormal series Magic Most Foul, a classically spooky, romantic tale of trapped souls and black magic, releases from Sourcebooks Fire!)

How Does Your Garden Grow?

2011-03-31T07:05:00.004-06:00

Order and chaos have been on my mind lately.

What, you too?

See, I've been thinking about writing methods, because last week on Word Whores was all about pre-plotting versus misting through a novel and this week is about writing rituals, or lack thereof.

What I'm discovering is that these things have a whole lot to do with how we set up the rest of our lives. This should be no surprise to me. I'm a fan of tesseract theory and how a small piece of one thing reflects the overall thing. I've talked before about how the structure of one day can be the pattern of your entire life. (This is an over-time concept, so don't panic if you just had a nothing day.) So it makes sense that your overall life affects the pattern of a single day.

We all plan our lives differently. We have different amounts of pre-plotting or misting to our days. Some of us have structure thrust upon us in the form of jobs that require us to be behind our desks from x o'clock to y-thirty. Some jobs change daily and, though you might apply a tentative structure in the form of To-Do lists, this can change completely depending on phone calls and what hits the In-Box. I expect we find our way to jobs that suit us this way. I love my day job for an environmental consulting firm because all that matters is the quality of my work and that I meet deadlines. No one particularly cares what the clock says when my butt is in the chair, just so long as I get the work done and get it done well.

This suits me. I had one of those "be there from x o'clock to y-thirty" jobs before and hated it.

A friend of mine once told me she'd read a psych study that showed that people with very orderly internal lives have wild and disorderly gardens. Likewise, people with more chaotic internal lives tend to produce orderly gardens. She said this while looking at my untamed cottage garden. The photo above shows my usual gardening style, though we'd only been in that house a few years and I hadn't had time to completely convert it to a jungle-tangle. If I were to show you a picture of my friend's garden, you would see her neatly bordered rows, with bunches of plants set an exact distance apart. Very pleasing to the eye.

I was forever wanting to sneak over and plant a stray something in the wrong spot.

At any rate, I've discovered that, though I'm an orderly person in many ways: ritualistic about my days, methodical in scientific work and my love for spreadsheets is near legendary, there's another side of me that loves to fling order to the winds and embrace chaos.

I may never plot simply because I love the wildness of an unplanned novel. Oh yeah, later I'll go back and thin it out here and there, tweak the plantings for maximum effect.

But first I'm tossing my seeds into the wind. Just to see what I get.

It's a New Dawn...and I'm Feeling Good

2011-03-30T07:19:00.005-06:00

There's this song we sang in Girl Scouts that went

Why sleep when the day has been called out by the sun
From the night? Cuz the light's gonnna shine on everyone.
Why sleep when the sleep only closes up our eyes?
Why sleep when we can watch the sun arise?

It goes on from there in a perky fashion. And all you former Girl Scouts out there? You're welcome for the ear worm.

Now, I've mentioned many times that I am not a morning person. Never have been. At girl scout camp, when they programmed us with the song and then encourage us to go on the sunrise hike? I opted out. (Actually "sunrise hike" is a misnomer. It was a pre-dawn hike UP the mountain to then watch the sunrise. One girl in my group got hit in the face with a backlashing branch that split her eyelid open, so I felt totally vindicated.)

I used to make smart remarks like, why bother to watch a sunrise when the sunset is the same thing in reverse.

Over time, however, I've taught myself to get up early - not to hike up mountains in the pre-dawn dark, which still sounds insane to me - but to get all the things done that are important to me. And I've found that sunrises do look different.

I kind of like seeing them. I like how the sky goes from dark to day. It is like the fulfillment of a promise.

My friend, the fabulous writer and blogger, Tawna Fenske, let everyone know last week that her marriage is breaking up. Then she went on to mention conversations she and I had about her next husband, Xavier. I made him up for her partly to make her laugh when she was sad.

But also, I believe it's important to remember that there will be new dawns. It's easy, in the depths of despair over a breakup or loss, to think that you'll never meet anyone ever again. Building the fantasy of the possibilities is part of dragging yourself out of that mindset.

Why not imagine the fabulously wealthy man with a chateau in the South of France who learned sensual secrets in Thailand? Dreaming something wonderful lifts us up and opens our eyes.

I learned this from my mother, who's been widowed twice. And married three times. Always she looked beyond the dark days of grief to sunlit days ahead.

That's probably even worth getting up early for.

Got It for a Song

2011-03-29T07:40:00.006-06:00

I did lower body weights at the gym this morning.

Usually when I weight-lift, I don't listen to music. The treadmill absolutely requires my aerobic track to keep me distracted. For weight-lifting, though, I'm counting and not fighting the certain despair that I'll never catch my breath again.

Today though, Air Force Guy had the TV up really loud with awful news about Libya. Since I have a strict policy about not depressing myself with news about events I can't affect, I jumped up from the adductor machine and grabbed the headphones.

Since I was mid-count, rather than searching out my weights playlist (why do I have one if I never use it? Hmm) I just clicked play. This one song that my long-time friend, Kev, sent me came on.

Because I could, I played that one song over and over. I love to do this. I can listen to the same song probably 50 times in a row. Something, I've discovered, the people around me don't enjoy so much.

Go figure.

Its an emotional song that strikes me on many levels. As some songs do, this one makes me want to write a story about it. I've never actually written a story from a song, but I think I might this time. As I kept clicking the back button to hear it just one more time (there's a way to put it on repeat, right? one day I should learn to maximize my iPod use), the story played out in my head, snippets of conversation. I could see the opening line, the penultimate scene.

It could be a great book.

Yesterday, I worked on two projects. If you follow this blog, you'll know I've been musing over whether I can move two writing projects forward at the same time. I'm a monogamous gal by nature, mainly because I'm simply not inclined to cheat. The thing I'm in love with is fine by me. It occurs to me now that this is the same aspect of my character that likes to listen to the same song over and over and over. Apple pie for the rest of my life? Sure! Still, with writing, I'd like to get more going.

So, yesterday, I clocked off the Internet for my usual two hours. (Yes, I'm weak and cannot stop myself from clicking if it's there to be clicked.) I wrote my 1K on the new novel, The Middle Princess. For the remaining 45 minutes, I worked on Sapphire revisions, from the editorial notes that came in this weekend.

And it worked!

Normally I'm not allowed to deviate from a current project, but since that experiment worked, I might try writing up a little of this morning's story - just enough to keep it alive and kicking.