In which I beg for stars.

Not stars, as in masses of incandescent gases. Stars as in Amazon and Goodreads reviews.

Recently I’ve heard from a few fellow authors who have asked me and other readers to post reviews to the Internet. It struck me that I should probably be doing that, rather than just raving to them privately. Also, it struck me that I should ask my readers to do the same.

So, if you’ve read Beware the Hawk and liked it* please consider heading on over to my Amazon and Goodreads pages and rating it. Or even write a review. Especially write a review. My editor and publisher** at Vagabondage Press would love that, and I would too.

 

*or even if you didn’t. As a journalist, I’m a fan of free speech. Even though some free speech makes me cry.
** or as I like to think of them, the “evil overladies.”

/0 Comments/by

Making time to daydream (or, Aliens are more exciting than anxiety.)

, ,

I need some daydream time, or what Julia Cameron calls in The Artist’s Way an artist date, or what educators now call free play.

Whatever you call it, I need to get back into the mental state I used to occupy as a kid, back when my head was filled with aliens, pirates and pegasi, and I need to get back there pronto.

There aren’t enough unicorns in my life.

I’m writing the first draft of something, and I’m writing it on a deadline. The first 25 pages wrote themselves, but then  – like Wile E. Coyote, stepping off a cliff and looking down – I started thinking.

I started worrying about my deadline. I started fretting about the plot. I started mapping out the intricacies of each character’s individual problems and backstories. I created a complex timeline.

In Hindu mythology, nothing would be created if Vishnu didn’t spend all his time dreaming. (“Shiva Dreaming,” shared courtesy of Alice Popkorn on Flickr.)

That’s when the writing began to be a problem.

Not only did the joy go out of the work, but the plot snarled up. The characters ceased to have direction. I couldn’t get into their heads. In desperation I showed what I had done to people and they asked me what happened to the good work I’d started in the first 25 pages.  I didn’t have an answer for them at first.

But then I started thinking… I haven’t given myself the space to play. I haven’t allowed myself to sit back and daydream, and that’s the space in which I develop my best work.

Aliens are more interesting than triple-digit subtraction.

I think a lot of writers will sympathize with the following statement: I was at my most prolific when I was young.

As a kid I was an incorrigible daydreamer. I enraged my second grade teacher by staring out the window* during every math lesson. I didn’t sleep at night.** I tuned out for the tedium of school bus rides or disappointing recesses.***

At some point, someone gave me a Walkman, and then,from  the time I was a pre-teen right into the first years of college, I spent a lot of time listening to mixtapes, making movies in my head, just imagining characters and adventures.

I wrote them down as an afterthought at first, but by the time I was 16, I had six novels, one screenplay, one collaborative piece and a sheaf of poetry in progress.

When I was in my early 20s, I didn’t have a car, so  I spent a lot of time walking places or sitting on buses or trains or whatever, listening to a CD player, and imagining stories. And then I wrote them down. And that’s how Beware the Hawk started.

Pirates & spaceships are more interesting than that guy you hope will call you,
but in your 20s, you don’t always remember that.

Then I grew up. I got a car, I got a job that required a lot of time and mental energy, and I started dating. My imagination was directed at my love life.† My mental energy was directed at problem-solving. Anxiety took the place of daydreams.

It’s time to bring the daydreams back. I need them if I’m going to be able to work, and honestly, I prefer them to anxiety.

Show me the unicorns!

This is tough. Today I feel like I’m always with people who need me to have my ears open to them at all times, and with the Internet and smartphones, it’s hard not to be available to the world. And honestly, I feel a little guilty putting on a pair of headphones and tuning people out, like a teenager.

But some of my best work has come out of music, so I’ve put together a playlist for the piece I’m working on, written a page about why I chose the songs on the playlist, and told my husband that I’m going to need an hour each day to listen to it. I spend that hour doing yard work, because I thought, well, at least if I don’t get anything out of my daydream time, the lawn will look decent.

Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, because for it to work, I need to enjoy the process, and I’m often keenly aware that what I’m doing is playtime on a deadline.

That can be counter-productive, like trying to fall asleep when you know you have to be up early in the morning: if you worry too much about falling asleep, you can’t fall asleep because you’re not relaxed.

But for the most part, the playlist is working wonders.

For the first time in a while, some of my plot issues are being resolved, and new scenes – scenes of which I’m proud – are being written. I feel like the characters, allowed to roam freely through my head, are growing again. The story is much more sound than it was before.

I’m convinced that when I present this story to my editor, it will be a better story than the one I would have written without this daydream time.

There have been some unintended side benefits of daydreaming as well: I’m calmer and happier, and the yard looks great. Also, although I’m not writing about them, sometimes my head is filled with aliens, pirates and pegasi. It’s nice to know that they’re still in there.

*and imagining that aliens were about to invade the school. Only I could save us!
** because I was telling myself stories about the wall next to my bed opening up so that I could enter a world in which I rode a unicorn through outer space.
***by imagining that spies were hiding in the nearby shrubbery.
† Should have stuck with aliens.

/0 Comments/by

Honor societies, permenant hall passes, and the dangers of not checking your email.

So this week I got a voicemail telling me that I was extremely late (*ahem* two days past deadline *cough, cough*)  in returning my form to accept my nomination to  Alpha Sigma Nu, an honor society offered by Jesuit colleges.

I had no idea what the caller was talking about, but I called her back posthaste. Turns out the university had been trying to reach me for a good month, but I didn’t check my school email* and I lost the form they sent to me in the mail. Kind of embarrassing.

Instead of hiding in the comfortable cliché of the reclusive, flaky writer and saying “why thank you, I’ll get that form in immediately,” I instead made a fool of myself, blurting out something like, “Honor society? Me? Why me?” I didn’t get an answer because after a month of trying to get a hold of me, I’m sure the person on the other end of the line was wondering the same thing. Or maybe she gets this sort of lack of common sense in the honors program all the time.

Permenant hall pass. Oh yes; I still have it. It says “permanent.” Think it’s still accepted?

All joking aside, I’m kind of excited. The last honor society I was a member of was The National Honor Society in high school, and that came with social acceptance, a yellow card that served as a sort of  permanent hall pass and the privilege of not having to attend study halls. After that, nothing. I was a solidly mediocre undergraduate.

So this is pretty cool; it never occurred to me that I could get into an academic honor society by going to school for something I love; maybe in undergrad I should have just majored in English. My grades might have been a lot better.

So, Alpha Sigma Nu, do I get a hall pass?

*Having graduated, and never having been a big winner of awards, I never see any reason to check my grad school email.

/2 Comments/by

Publicity for me and a fellow MFA alum.

Check out the flier created for me and fellow Fairfield University MFA alumni poet (whew, that’s a mouthful) Colin D. Halloran.  The kind people at our MFA alma mater, Fairfield U, put it together for us. Thank you, guys! I will be there on Oct. 10 and Colin will be there on Oct. 19.

Colin’s collection, Shortly Thereafter, which centers on veternan’s issues (Colin himself is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan) will be released on October 12; he will be at the Fairfield University bookstore a mere week after the release, for a reading and signing.

I’ll be there nine days earlier, and as you know if you read this blog regularly, I’m looking for reader input about my talk that night.

 

/2 Comments/by

In defense of Amanda Palmer.

Amanda Palmer (she’s a musician and used to front the Dresden Dolls) has recently come under fire for asking volunteers to play horns and strings at her shows on her Grand Theft Orchestra Tour.

This is one of a series of unconventional tactics she’s undertaken recently. She used Kickstarter to great effect this year, raising $1.2 million from fans to independently create an album that was dropped this week.
On August 21, she posted this on her blog: “WANTED: HORN-Y AND STRING-Y VOLUNTEERS FOR THE GRAND THEFT ORCHESTRA TOUR!!!!”

She’s looking for fans who are “professionalish” horn and string players to join her onstage for each night of her tour. The volunteers are asked to commit to a rehearsal, one performance and will be paid in beer and love.

Professional session musicians are outraged. There are posts about their anger in Spin and The New York Times and the Boston Globe. Last time I checked Palmer’s blog, there were 290 comments on that blog post, many of them angry, and from musicians, some claiming that she’s exploiting musicians.  Writes one:

“I’ve been a professional touring musician for 23 years, and I’ve never heard of you until today. With all due respect, your request for free labor sounds like a promotional gimmick dreamed up by a corporate republican who has no concept of the history of working people in this country.”

Here’s my question, though: What’s the big deal?

Palmer is asking for volunteers and is presumably asking her fan base for volunteers. She’s asking the people who will be at the concert anyhow, not professional session musicians who’ve never heard of her.  People ask for volunteers all the time. Churches and schools are always asking for volunteers. Politicians ask for volunteers to run many aspects of their campaigns. Artists are asked to volunteer their skills for many organizations, for-profit and non-profit. Surely, there is no harm in asking people to volunteer. And surely, asking for volunteers is much different than exploitation.

One commenter felt that it was insulting to ask musicians to play for free simply because it’s wrong to assume that working musicians will play just for the love of music. I can kind of relate to that. A while back, I wrote a post about the writing equivalent of that feeling; that I get sick of having to provide copy for birthday cards, poems for anniversaries or whatever simply because I’m a writer.

I think Palmer’s request is different, though. For one thing, she’s not targeting specific musicians and asking them to play for free. Secondly, I think some of her fans will want to jam with her.

Why? Let’s look at a slightly different situation. Say her husband, Neil Gaiman, put out a call on his site for “professionalish” writers to collaborate on a book project for free. I’m a writer. I make my living off my art. But would I do it for free?

Hell yes, I would. I would get right in line. I would do it because I could then say I’d been published with Neil Gaiman. I would do it because I was once a huge fan of his work. Even if he were getting paid for the collaboration and I wasn’t, I don’t think I’d complain, because I would have known, up front, that I’d volunteered.

I should probably mention at this point that I’m not a fan of Palmer’s music; I’ve never given any of it – from the Dresden Dolls to today’s solo projects – a try. But I do feel some affinity with her.

Maybe it’s because when I worked at the Boston Herald, I spent a lot of time in Cambridge, and I think I saw her when she was busking there as the Eight-Foot Bride. Maybe it’s because, at the same time, I grabbed a review copy of American Gods (by Gaiman, who wasn’t married to her at that time) off the features desk’s Free Stuff Shelf and later became obsessed with it. Maybe it’s because I knew a lot of people from Lexington, where she grew up, or maybe it’s because her alma mater was the rival of mine. We didn’t exactly roll in the same circles, but we’ve had a lot of places in common, and probably more than a few people in common. Or maybe, because, as a small author with a small press, I admire her for using the Internet to connect and collaborate with her fans. It’s something I try to do on a very small scale and it’s nice to see her crowdsourcing with such success.

So I’m coming to her defense because I feel like a member of my tribe is under attack, and I don’t feel the attack is just.

/4 Comments/by

Help me decide what to talk about at my Oct. 10 appearance in Fairfield.

Have I mentioned that I’m going to be reading from and talking about Beware the Hawk at the Fairfield University Bookstore yet?

I will be there on Wednesday, Oct. 10, and instead of doing my regular reading from Beware the Hawk, I thought I’d try something that was suggested to me by author Matt Dicks. I thought I’d discuss the process of writing and publishing the book, then read a little, then answer questions. I think this might work better for me than just reading from the book for a very practical reason:

My book is a 40-page novella, and so there are really only two 20 minute readings I can pull from it without a) having to explain too much or b) delivering any spoilers. Also, I’d hate for anyone who’s been kind enough to come out to see me twice have to sit through the same excerpts. That would be mean.

Because of this, I’m thinking that I’ll probably talk about how Beware the Hawk sat unfinished in a drawer for nine years before it saw the light of day.

Or I can talk about how I got the idea for the novella and how that idea evolved over a decade.

Or I can talk about novellas in general.

Or I can talk about e-books.

I’m turning to you to help me decide, my friends. The reason? Well, the name contest  was wildly successful, although I cannot reveal the winner until the next book comes out. So I’m going to post a poll here and on my Facebook page, and hopefully you’ll help me decide. Scroll down for the poll!

[polldaddy poll=6532091]

/1 Comment/by

A clean office is a bad thing for a writer.

Anne Lamott, the author of Bird by Bird, opened one of her lectures with this: “I used to not be able to work if there were dishes in the sink. Then I had a child and now I can work if there is a corpse in the sink.”

I don’t have a child, but man, does that hit home.

My office has three states:

  1. Hot mess – If the office usually looks like it’s exploded, like it does now,  I’ve been busy working in it. The closets are open, the desk is surrounded by paper, pens, packages of Kleenex, chargers and a few unidentifiable objects. Things (plants, books, papers, cats) are hanging off my bookshelves. My closets are open and things are falling out. That’s what it looks like now.
  2. Cold mess – If there are a lot of boxes and laundry baskets in the middle of the floor and it hasn’t been vacuumed in a long time, I’ve been avoiding it – and my novel – for a long time. I’ve just kidnapped my laptop, closed the door and fled. This is what it looks like after the holidays.
  3. Clean –  Have you ever seen Poltergeist? Remember the little psychic lady who says “This house is clean”? If so, you know how creepy “clean” can be. It is the worst state for me office by far. Everything is tidy. Spotless. Dusted. Everything’s been filed. The carpet has been cleaned, the laundry is gone, and worse, the desk is immaculate. If my office looks like this, it means something’s wrong; I’ve spent a lot of time in there but all I’ve been doing is cleaning.

I’ve done that sort of thing for weeks at a time; gone up to work and ended up dusting the room instead, or rearranging the books on the shelves. It’s a habit I started in college, when during my sophomore year, I convinced myself that I wouldn’t be able to work unless my tiny room looked like a glossy page out of Dorm Beautiful.

It was the sort of habit that kept me  – for years – from working on my writing, which is strange, because when I started writing as a child and teen, I was able to write anywhere, under any conditions – it didn’t matter if the room was messy, or the radio loud, or conversations happening around me, or if my mother was asking me to please come downstairs and do my chores. I just wrote for the sheer joy of it. Very little was able to stop me. I think that year in college, is when I realized exactly how badly I wanted to be a writer, and also, that if I sat down to write, I’d have to take the next step and finish something. Then I’d have to show it to someone else. And then they might reject or criticize me, and I could very easily fail at what I most wanted to do with my life.

So instead, I cleaned.

I carried my Clean Desk Rule out of college and into the world with me, and I allowed it to expand. At one point, I couldn’t work until my whole apartment was clean. It’s worth noting that the Clean Desk Rule never applied to my workspace in the newsrooms I worked in; I was always on deadline, regardless of the state of my desk. The work had to be done.

Those days are over. Right now, my office is a hot mess.

Allegory of Music.

The Allegory of Music, by Filipino Lippi.

There is just enough room on my desk for my laptop and my hands. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is taking up half the left side of the desk and threatening to slide off a copy of my manuscript. The bookshelves and tables overflow with tangles of charger cords and craft books. One of the walls is hung with rejection letters. The floor under my feet is strewn with copies of literary magazines. I look like an allegorical painting, only without the flowing robes and hair and classical allusions that you see in Renaissance works like The Allegory of Music. Instead, I’m The Allegory of The Contemporary Fiction Writer, clad in grubby jeans and a tee shirt I got for free somewhere, hair stuffed under a baseball cap from my MFA program.

What changed? I think I started looking at writing differently when I joined my MFA program, but when I left my newsroom job, that’s when things really changed. Writing became my job; not something I wanted to do in a distant, perfect future, but something I was already doing.  Just as I didn’t bother cleaning my workspace in the newsroom before getting to work, I don’t clean my home office before getting to work.

The work needs to be done. Even if there’s a body in the sink.

I’m pleased to report that the office hasn’t been clean in some time.

/6 Comments/by

September: 2012 Goals

September? Already? Normally I like fall, but I’m having a hard time coming back from this summer. Maybe it’s because the last few months has been a blur of activity: I met half my in-laws for the first time, two close friends got married, several had children, I saw my college friends more than once, we camped, I had writers’ retreats and gave readings and signings of my book. I didn’t swim nearly enough. Now fall is staring me in the face and I keep squinting at it and thinking “You again? Didn’t you just leave?”

Well, let’s just get down to it, before I retire to my office to shuffle the papers I will pass out to my students in class tomorrow.  Here’s my progress on the goals I set out for myself in January.

Here’s my progress. (Not interested? Check out this Tumblr full of ashamed dogs. Let me know if you see mine on there.)

Finish the second draft of my novel by April (September.)  I’m pushing this back again, but I don’t feel too bad about it, because I’ve been making  progress on it, revising a chapter every week. I’ve revised a good chunk of the first part, and I’m happy with the work. I will have to stop again soon in order to work on my other project.

Get it sent to agents before summer. This is looking like it actually might happen at some point.

Send out at least three short stories. I didn’t send out a thing, but I did do some research on that front, so I could send things out to editors this month. I also revised an essay.

Read one two novels a month in 2012. I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as planned, then moved on to Ursula Le Guin’s Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu, neither of which were favorites of mine, although I enjoyed reading fiction with dragons in. Now I’m slowly moving through Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. It’s beautifully written, but sometimes I can’t stand the characters, so it’s slow going. No clue what I’m going to read next.

Make at least $20 off a piece of fiction. Done in March. I got my first royalties in July. I can confirm that I made more than $20.

Other goals: I also set to work on two of my big conflicts this year: My feelings about my faith and my issues with anxiety.

My issues with faith were resolved, I thought, two months ago. And then things got a little more complicated this summer. Once, again I have no answers. I’m beginning to think I may never have answers and that I might have to be cool with not having answers.

As for anxiety? Well, it hasn’t been a problem this month. I don’t feel like anxiety’s even been an option for me lately. I’ve just been doing things because I have to.

/3 Comments/by