I am a writer. I can’t help it. Don’t judge.

Cover art is here! (as is a finalized publication date.)

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I was going to write a nice, well-thought-out post about what I had finally decided to do about my New Years resolutions, but instead I’m just going to post these two things.

First, the publication of Beware The Hawk, is set for Tuesday, Jan. 17. Vagabondage Press will be releasing it as an e-book as you know.

Second, the cover art is here! I couldn’t help myself – I had to share. I am  disproportionately excited about this art. Knowing that someone else read the book and designed the cover based on what she read makes me feel like part of a team, and it also makes the fact that the book is being published that much more real. Maybe this is just a first-time author thing, though. Probably seasoned writers don’t lose their minds when they see the cover art for their latest release. I expect that Stephen King probably greets his new cover designs with a yawn and a shrug.

I’m not Stephen King, so I reacted to the unveiling of the cover art the way my dog reacts when she hears the word “walkie.”

Without further ado, here it is:

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In which I bite the bullet and say what my upcoming book is about.

I often deliberately forget that I am having a novella published (in e-book form) in January.

The book is called “Beware the Hawk,” and it’s being published by Vagabondage Press and I really am very excited, but you’d never know it because over the Christmas holiday, I didn’t talk about it unless someone else brought it up. (Publishers, if you’re reading this, I am aware that this is not a viable marketing strategy.)

I think part of the reason that I push the book from my mind is this: people ask me what it’s about and – like Eminem in the opening scenes of 8 Mile – I choke.

I stammer something like “It’s about a girl, and spies. It’s funny. Well, I think it’s funny.” This is hardly the enthused, informative pitch I was taught in grad school to make. “What is it about” is a perfectly reasonable question; I’m the author and ought to know. But the question trips me up, maybe because I rarely think of a piece of my fiction as something that other people will read. For the most part, I doubt that the figments of my imagination will actually leave my hard drive and move out into the world.

I do have a couple of projects that are my golden children. If any of my work is published, I tell myself, it will be these privileged novels. I groom and prep them for publication. I submit them to my writers’ groups. I prepare myself to let them go.

“Beware the Hawk” was not one of these. I began writing “Beware the Hawk” when I was 23, worked on it with my very first writers’ group, and then – five pages from the end – abandoned the project when I was 25. I left it unfinished until this year. I was caught off guard by its acceptance this fall. To bring it back to the children metaphor: I expected it to grow up to be a drug dealer, but it’s surprised me by going to med school on scholarship.

Also there’s this – the characters and plot have been marinating in my brain for a decade. I’ve unconsciously built unmentioned back stories for each character. Like my houseplants, I neglected them, and they grew. The idea of summing up all of these thoughts and associations is daunting.

But not is not the time for such timidity. Now I must plot-summarize as if the devil himself were at my heels. The publishers tell me that the book will be out in the next three to four weeks, either on the 17th or on the 24th, and if I’m going to market it at all, I should learn how to describe it. The publishers have categorized it as a spy-satire, but I’ll need to be armed with a summary as I do the virtual book tour. With that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of ways to describe the contents of my novella.

“Beware the Hawk” is about:

i. …a young pink-haired Brooklynite who is a courier for a secret anti-government group, called the Resistance. She’s sent up to Boston to pick something up one night in winter, and everything goes wrong from the moment she steps off the Fung-Wah bus.

ii. …a young woman who desires to live outside society and its rules and who learns that this is not possible (particularly if one is fond of life in the city.)

iii. …making choices young and having to live with them.

iv. …failure.

v. …50 (virtual) pages long.

vi. …a girl, her iPhone, an inept co-worker, a hot mechanic and a leg injury.

Put all those together and that’s what it’s about, although I feel like a lot is still left out. Which is funny, since the book is only a 50ish page novella. No wonder J.K. Rowling unveiled her Pottermore website this year. Seven books and eight films and she still feels like she hasn’t adequately described the contents of her Harry Potter universe to us. Not that I’m going to be unveiling any “Beware the Hawk” web portals anytime soon.

I will however, be sharing the cover art with you. I got a peek at it tonight and I’m excited. The publishers will be sending the image to me just as soon as it’s finalized.

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Putting the “me” into “meme.”

I’ve been tagged in a meme by the estimable blogger Erin C., and while I don’t like to participate in memes because – like the chain letters of old – I hate passing them on to others, I feel I must acknowledge this one. Why? Because Erin is wonderful, I have a lot of respect for her writing and her work with social media, and because I am not going to Enders Island tomorrow and she is,  and I will miss her and all the other people who are still students with my MFA program. Also because I can’t resist the lure of answering personal questions.

The meme asks each blogger to post 11 things about themselves, to answer questions set by the blogger who tagged them and then to pose 11 questions of their own. So I’m going to meet it half-way. I’m going to list 11 things about me and then have done it with.

Fellow bloggers, if you read this, and you want to participate, consider yourself tagged:

11 Facts About Myself

  1. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time attending and participating in poetry slams.
  2. I’ve lived with  trichotillomania since early childhood.
  3. I once interviewed Bill Cosby and will tell that story to anyone who will listen.
  4. I cannot choose between dogs and cats. I don’t think anyone should have to.
  5. I swear I have a psychic link to world news. Sometimes I think of an event or a person and a story about the event or the person breaks within 24 hours. Unfortunately, I never know which premonition will yield a story.
  6. I hate macaroni and cheese.
  7. I was once in a band. You’ve ever heard of it. With any luck, this is the last you’ll hear of it.
  8. I have an e-book coming out next month.
  9. I have practiced beginners’ yoga for a decade.
  10. I used to speak Spanish. Todavía hablo en español a veces. But not well.
  11. My students spent a semester trying to teach me how to use “swag” in conversation.
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NaNoWriMo – Lagging behind

Like a runner in a marathon who stops for a drink of water handed out by some nice volunteer and then decides to stoop and tie her shoes, only to realize that she’s looking at the backs of all the people she was previously in front of, I am falling behind in my bid to complete a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November.

I haven’t worked on my project in two days. It couldn’t be helped. I have a few other projects that need to be attended to this month. And, you know, life. Not that any of that is a valid excuse; I’ve known since the beginning of the month that I was going to have to halt word production a few times in order to keep other, more important, projects in motion.

What could be more important than a NaNoWriMo novel, you may ask? Let me tell you – a novel (novella, actually) that’s really, truly, honestly, going be published next year and needs edits. A class which I’m designing for my employer. My freelance income. A dire shortage of socks that’s been plaguing O’Connell household for a good week or so. Phyllis.

Still, all those seem like thin excuses for not novelling. The few thousand words that haven’t been written this week plague me, and tomorrow I catch up. I may try to type a little bit before sleep tonight, just to see if I can get a jump on tomorrow’s word count.

Actually, no. I just want to see if I can duplicate Saturday night’s sleep-typing incident.* Which, by the way, is actually a thing. In the comments on that post, two of my former roommates reported similar sleep-typing incidents (neither happened while I was living with either of them, unfortunately.) Check it out. One of the incidents is NaNo-related.

*By the way, I’ve worked a little more on that passage I wrote in my sleep. If you’ve been following these posts, you’ll be happy to know that Ted has resolved his gender issues. I still haven’t managed to figure out what a truck’s “babing” is, though.

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Nanowrimo, or typing with my eyes closed.

I’ve been behind in National Novel Writing Month.

I don’t have a list of my worst sentences from each day for you, as I did last week, because I haven’t been able to write every day this past week. I have, however, mostly managed to write enough words to fulfill my daily word count. I’ve done this by harnessing my undiagnosed ADD and writing in short sprints. I give myself 15 minutes or 30 minutes or even an hour to write as many words as possible, and usually a couple of those will generate the 1667 words I need. Or I’ll bring a notebook with me to class and write by hand, then type it up when I come home. I usually find that 100 handwritten words will generate another 400 while I’m typing. I’ve also been writing very late at night, which has helped my creativity.

None of that, however, kept me from falling behind.  Yesterday I had to hustle to catch up.

Last night, I got home from a party, put on my pajamas and set out to type 2,000 words before bedtime. I almost did it, but not quite. Instead, I fell asleep at my computer when I was 28 words shy of 20,004, which was my goal. For the last 100 words before I fell asleep, I was apparently typing with my eyes closed.

Because I have no worsts for you, I’d like to share the paragraph I wrote with my eyes closed. It’s barely in English. Heck, it’s barely in broken English. One character, Ted, who I didn’t even remember this morning and who I apparently invented while I was sleep-typing, changes gender mid-paragraph. There is also a marked lack of punctuation. Enjoy. Or don’t.

Ted is covered in sweat. He’s been running from the over turned jeep. Athough it only takes a large saupods to cover th =e diance between  jeep and barn, it has taken Ted much loner to do so. He’s out of break and covered in sweat. When He’s allowed in the babing of the truck, he stinks of fear.

“We have a problem,” he says

“What problem.” Dalena is sympathetic to his workers who have to work in the hot sun.He has no idea what she’s talking about.

Ted wipes his sleave aganst the dress ode. Rgiht.  The problem is, he says, that there are more instances of the same

More of the same what, you may ask? And what is a “dress ode?” Will Ted ever get to the bottom of his gender issues?  All valid questions. We’ll never know, because I fell asleep before ending the paragraph. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this. I may pretend that I just never wrote it and move on. But I won’t be deleting it. I need the 110 words.

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NaNoWriMo is like a fairy tale, and there are some scary fairy tales out there.

After 7 days of writing, I am 11010 words  into my National Novel Writing Month project. I’ve learned some things about myself in that time. Mostly, I’ve learned that I can’t really write for Nanowrimo until it’s past my bedtime.

Example: I spent a good part of the day on Friday trying to write my 1600+ words so that I could have the evening free. I think I might have squeezed out about 300 words. As soon as the clock struck midnight, I became a rampaging word machine. This happens every night, like one of the Grimms’ more sadistic fairy tales. I’m tired. I want to go to sleep. I’ve spent four hours trying – and failing – to focus on writing. Then – bong, bong, bong – it’s midnight and I can’t stop typing.

This sounds like a good thing and it can be, but remember in the original “Snow White?” (Not the Disney version, the real one that medieval people used to terrify  their children back when cable and the Paranormal movies didn’t exist .) The evil queen didn’t – oops – accidentally fall off a cliff in that version. No. That was too humane. She was the entertainment at Snow White’s wedding reception. The dwarves and the good people of the kingdom put a pair of red hot iron shoes on her feet and made her dance until she fell down dead.

This is kind of what my post-midnight writing is like (without the torture and death and dwarves.) I’m exhausted. I can see that I’m not writing good stuff. But I can’t stop until my eyes start closing all by themselves. It’s weird, because when I’m writing what I consider to be my “serious” writing, my best work happens between 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. I do revisions  and careful, slow writing then. But when it comes to inventing bizarre plot points and to  spitting words out at a furious rate, I must need to be half-asleep. Possibly my internal editor is no longer functioning at 1 a.m. Who knows?

It’s kind of fun to know that different times of the day are good for different kinds of writing.

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Weekly worsts – National Novel Writing Month

I think I might have mentioned in my last post that National Novel Writing Month is not about quality; it’s about quantity.

A group of friends and I celebrate this, by exchanging our best and worst sentences at the end of each day of National Novel Writing Month. We started this years ago, when most of us worked in the same office and after we sent the best-worst email, you could hear the others laughing at their desks. I am aware that it’s Saturday, and not many people check blogs on the weekend because they’re away from their computers and out living their lives, but I thought I’d extend part of the tradition to the this blog.

In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, here’s a sample of some of the worst writing this week has produced. Of the 7192 words I’ve produced so far, these are the most unfortunate, and that’s saying a lot.  Normally, I don’t like to share my creative writing online, but since all of this is really bad, none of it is likely to make it into the finished manuscript and I don’t feel the need to keep any of it a professional secret. Some of these sentences are lame. Some are bizarre. Some are just stupid.

Nov. 1 – Amazing how a person can be so afraid of something one minute and so fascinated by it the next.

Nov. 2 – “Steve, what about the kids? No one’s going to want to come here if you’re killing their favorite dinosaurs.”

Nov. 3 –  She removes her purse from between her arm and ribs and gestures toward the window with it. (The logistics of this one boggle the mind.)

Nov. 4  – “I don’t do primates.” (Good. Wait a minute. What?)

A little anti-climactic, I know. But we’ve only been noveling for four days. I’ll try to write really horrifying ones in the next week. I promise  to get back to you all with a full seven days of lame sentences next Saturday.

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National Novel Writing Month (and dinosaurs)

In two hours, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo to those in the know) will begin. In two hours, people all over the globe will start typing furiously in an effort to complete a 50,000-word manuscript by the end of November. So will I. It’s pretty insane; the goal is to write 1667 words every day for a month. You don’t agonize over them, you just type. The goal is not to produce a work of stunning literary genius, but to simply force oneself to start writing.

I started participating in NaNo in 2003, I think. A group of my friends enticed me into it with promises of camraderie and boozy write-ins. It was that during that November that I made two happy discoveries:

1.) I cannot write under the influence of alcohol. One glass of wine invites the muse to come a little closer, but any more than that? She flees from me faster than a reality tv star fleeing a marriage.

2.) Peer pressure is my best friend as far as churning out words. My group had long, hilarious email  conversations. We sent each other the best and worst sentences we’d written each day. We commiserated about our low wordcounts, lack of plots, and work getting in the way of our noveling.

Most Fridays in November we got together for dinner and cocktails and tried to write. That first year was glorious, so we did it again. And again. And again.

I was active until about 2008, after which I went to grad school to study creative writing. I figured that getting my MFA in fiction was incentive enough to write like a demon every day. But now that my writing program is over I’m NaNoing again. My project this year ain’t the Great American Novel. It can’t be – there are dinosaurs. Hell, it’s not even the Great American Novel With Dinosaurs, because Michael Crichton already wrote that book. It is, however, a promising manuscript I’ve wanted to finish for  years. I started it during NaNoWriMo three or four years ago.

This is the year I finish it.

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Play time.

Recently, one of my friends mentioned to me that being a grown-up is no fun.
She’s right. Adulthood can be a mean cocktail of responsibility, mortality and self-doubt. Still, her comment makes my inner five-year-old cringe.

Why? Because that five year-old didn’t grow up to be disappointed by adult life. That five year-old grew up so that she could have whatever she wanted for dinner for the rest of her life.

When I was a kid, I felt that being able to choose your own dinner was one of the two big perks of adulthood. The other was being tall enough to reach things, like bowls and ice cream and gas pedals. These two benefits were extremely valuable to my young self, but they didn’t quite make up for the two big drawbacks of growing up, as I perceived them: A loss of imagination and the inability to enjoy Christmas.

I’m not sure why I thought grown-ups had no imagination, but I do remember overhearing, when I was about 10, an aunt telling an uncle that Christmas is more fun when there are small children around. He agreed and called Christmas a holiday for children. My most recent cousin at the time was three, and was just understanding the concept of Santa Claus. I had recently stopped believing, so this piece of dialogue was horrifying to me.
I thought Christmas was a holiday for everyone, regardless of age. Wasn’t there a Christmas carol about kids from one to 92? Was that song a lie? And if Christmas carols are lies, who can you trust? And also – do adults only have kids so that they can vicariously enjoy Christmas and other holidays?

I resolved there and then to keep my imagination and love Christmas while enjoying the benefits of being tall and choosing my own dinner.

And then I grew up and became a wretched, miserable adult, because my child-self had not foreseen things like debt, long workdays, traffic jams and that I would continue to care about what other people thought of me.

I did 10 years like that, pretending to have fun when I wasn’t having fun, and putting off things I wanted to do until my never-ending list  of things I had to do was complete.  I’ve always eaten what I want for dinner, I’ve never been without imagination and I liked Christmas, but adult life still bored me.

Then a few years ago, I decided to start having more real fun.  Adults don’t play enough. So I decided to give myself a little time each day for some free play. That sounds a little creepy, maybe, but I’m not talking about dolls or trucks or blocks. (Although I’m not gonna lie – I could rock some Legos. I think people should have Legos and beer parties, actually.) Playtime could be rough-housing with the dog, or a free writing period, sketching or reading a fashion magazine while shopping in my own closet. Strangely enough, play is almost always creative. I’m finding that most of the things I consider to be play end up being productive in some way rather than a waste of time.

There’s still a lot of stress. There are still bills and there’s still self-doubt. Some days, I drink deep from the miserable well of responsibility and mortality. But it’s not so bad, because I know that at some point, I get recess.

I also try to work at least one thing that I might have gotten yelled at as a child into each day. Because my five-year-old self also didn’t grow up to be good 24/7.

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Published, or Can I get a “yay”?

So recently, this blog’s been a big ol’ mess of me complaining about things. Waah, Irene. Waaah, FEMA. Waaaah, writer’s block. Waaaaaaah, grocery shopping.

No more! I’ve stowed my box of Kleenex and called off the waahmbulance, because I’ve got some fabulous news. On Sunday, I received an email from Vagabondage Press, a small, independent publishing house. They will be publishing my novella “Beware the Hawk” (I think, technically, it’s a novelette) as part of their 2012 catalog!

What kind of book is it? Well, for my literary/MFA friends – it’s genre. It’s a spy thriller told in the first person by a strong female voice, and smartphones play a big role in the story. It’s set in Boston. For my family, I’m sorry – my protagonist drops a lot of F-bombs.

This is a piece I wrote years ago, when I was in my first writing group. One of the women in that writing group is a co-founder at Vagabondage. She asked to see the piece this summer.

I don’t have all the details yet, but I do believe “Beware” will be an e-book release. I’ll write more about that when I have more information.

Good lord. I’ve published short stories and poetry and countless news pieces, but this will make me the author of a book. This has been my goal since I discovered books as a child. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to write and publish a long piece of fiction.

Now it’s about to happen, and I have this weirdly muted excitement going on. I continue to stress about other projects, and every once in a while, I have this burst of hysteria when I remember that I’m going to have a book published. Now it’s not my end-game. Now it’s something that’s going to happen next year.

But what’s weird is that I somehow never looked beyond that final goal of writing a book. As a kid, I never had any plans beyond that. I was going to write a book and then… what? Be rich and famous, I guess. (Ha!) But now, I find myself thinking, wow, I’m going to be published, and still going on with the process of querying, writing, readying my long manuscript for the eyes of an agent and researching. It feels like I’ve pushed beyond the boundaries of my childhood ambition. It’s no longer “I want to write a book when I grow up,” now it’s “I want to write for the rest of my life.” And it feels like I can do that. I’ve spent the last several years writing, and the last two writing very seriously, but being an author feels like an actual career option now.

This is actually the third – and most exciting – piece of good news I have to share. The first piece of good news is that Vagabondage is publishing one of my short stories in their final issue of their lit mag, The Battered Suitcase, which will be available Oct. 1, and also, that another short story, “Final Statements,” will be published by Independent Ink Magazine sometime soon. I don’t have a date for the Independent Ink release yet, but when I do, I will tell you all.

I’m off to go yell “Wooo!” in the middle of my street.

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