Staying motivated, part 1

Looking back to those early years in which I had one book contract and two very small children...

Imagine having one baby who’s barely weaned and her ten months older sibling who is walking and whose main interest in life is destroying the interloper. Imagine being an aging mother who, to be honest, enjoys kids much more after they learn to talk, coping with sleep deprivation, mopping up orange juice, and picking up little bodies all day.

You can’t write “while the baby naps” because the Murphy Twins from Hell don’t even nap at the same time.

You don’t write after they go to bed because by that time you’re asleep at the dinner table with your face in your plate.

It’s a pretty clear choice: either you bring in absolutely no income by writing, or you bring in some income minus whatever it costs to hire a sitter for four hours a day.

So the morning goes like this:

The baby wakes up screaming. Feed her while prying your eyes open.

The toddler wakes up jealous because you’re holding That Other One. Placate her with Cheerios.

Your husband brings coffee. Put the baby back in her crib and skedaddle to throw some clothes on before the sitter arrives.

Return to find that both infants are throwing a fit because Mommy disappeared. Your husband, bless him, brings more coffee. Feed, console, and distract the offspring until –

Hallelujah! The sitter is here!

Retreat to study with a third cup of coffee. Close door. Put on music to drown out noises from outside.

Consider the fact that what you really want is to lie down on the floor and go back to sleep. Or read something light and undemanding. Or go to sleep sitting up in front of the computer.

Time for the motivational speech.

“You’re a writer. If you don’t write, you’re not a writer. If you’re not a writer, you don’t need and can’t pay a sitter, so you can jolly well go out there and resume taking care of your own children twenty-four hours a day.”

Begin typing like a bat out of hell.

On passing for normal

I've been reading an old post on Sarah Hoyt's blog in which she opines that if you're a writer, your friends and family will think you're insane, and if you write science fiction and fantasy, that just adds another layer of weirdness. Had to laugh because this is almost the exact opposite of my experiences!

If you want people to think you're insane and/or terminally weird (not that I can imagine why anybody would want that, unless you're Odysseus avoiding the draft), just try taking your writer's mind through graduate school, university faculty, and a couple of software development companies and trying to pass as normal. Try as I might to be careful, I kept having these conversations in which the other party would eventually stop and say, "You have a really interesting fantasy life, don't you?"

And it wasn't a compliment.

In the last such job I made an all-out effort to pass. No more obscure rock band T-shirts. Gray suit, check. Good shoes, check. Makeup, check. Toothpicks to prop my eyes open during meetings. Refrain from screaming when the tech writer rearranges your sentences to make them euphonious rather than true. All that and I still blew it.

I'd been taking the Visiting Professor to give his talks at two universities in the area. I had to drive him because he didn't like the car the company had rented for him. I forget what make it was, but he claimed that in his country only pimps drove that make of car. He kept making heavy-handed, unfunny jokes about this and calling it "The Pimpmobile." This got old quickly.

All I said, on the way back to Austin that night, was, "If you like, I can drop you off somewhere on East 11th and you can get an up-close look at some American pimpmobiles while you're trying to persuade a taxi to come down there for you."

Couple of days later I heard that one of my colleagues had asked him, "What did you think of Dr. Ball?" And he'd answered, "She's very intelligent, but kind of weird."

By contrast, once I came out of the closet as a science fiction & fantasy writer, the normal people around me relaxed considerably. Because now "weird" was just what they expected of me. I fit into a group they thought they understood and everybody was a lot happier.

Sometimes the road to "normal" is very, very crooked indeed.

They can smell fear

I've been doing some minor surgery on Awakening - cutting some irrelevant scenes, moving others around, and so on - and now I need to read the whole MS and reassure myself that it still makes sense. And being a 20th century troglodyte, I cannot evaluate my own book just by looking at it on a screen: I need that stack of printed pages so I can read the MS the way I've always read MSS.

My Epson spent day before yesterday coming up with new and creative ways to make printing the MS a major PITA:

"My heads are clogged, you have to waste ink cleaning them."

"I'm out of yellow ink. This has absolutely nothing to do with printing black, but I'm going to sit here with my arms folded until you get me a new yellow cartridge."

"Paper jam!"

"I did 10 pages. Now I'm out of black ink."

"Ooh, you touched my plug. Don't you remember you have to insert it just so to actually get electricity from this wall outlet?"

"Say, how about I print everything after page 82 in red?"

Actually, I think the red ink was caused by a mistake I made in Word, and I think it's fixed now, but I coulden't risk testing that hypothesis until I recovered from the urge to pick up the printer and hurl it out the window. Now it's time to find out. Wish me luck.

Update:

After another 45 pages it has now decided that it cannot continue printing black text unless I give it a new blue ink cartridge. Pfui. Blue and magenta cartridges now on order.

Strange attractors and snakebots and Madame Defarge, oh my!

Niraja Lorenz is just one of the talented and innovative fiber artists whose work will be exhibited at Highfield House June 25-September 6.If you're in New England, or plan to be there this summer, don't miss this exhibit on Cape Cod. (Hmmm. Cape Cod. Ocean. Coolth. Wonder if I can convince the First Reader that we should vacation in New England this summer for a break from Austin's hundred-degree heat marathon.)

Next up is a video of a snake robot, no kidding! Watch this little guy tackle the stairs at the Spectrum office. And if that's not enough for you, try this extremely cool video of an amphibious snakebot from Japan. I am so having one of these in the next book. Well, maybe not in Survivors; it would have to be forcibly injected into the synopsis. But there is a definite place for a snakebot in the urban fantasy that's coming up after I finish the Harmony trilogy.

Remember Madame Defarge knitting at the guillotine? I never realized that she was emulated during the two world wars by knitting spies who encoded train schedules, troop movements and other secret information into innocent-looking scarves, hats, and sweaters.That might be trickier to pull off today, since you rarely see women knitting or doing any other handwork in public...but I'm already thinking about a quilt. Hand quilted. In Morse Code. Now, how to use this?

And finally,the stupidest thing I've seen this week: intersectionality meets quantum physics. Oh, good grief. I've been waiting for somebody to tell me this is a hoax. Apparently, though, it's for real.

Finished!

I typed the last scene of Insurgents a few days ago, proofread the draft and sent it off to my one beta reader. Now trying not to breathe down her neck just because I'm in the process of scheduling it with a cover artist and formatter. If she persuades me that major surgery is needed, I'll have to put my preferred dates back; but I'm pretty sure that won't be necessary.

Pro tip: never try to proof an entire book, on the computer, in one day. It's bad for the eyes and worse for the temper.

And, of course, it's not like I'm twiddling my thumbs while waiting. I'm proofreading the follow-on, Awakening, and plotting the third and probably final book in this series (working title Survivors), which I hope to start writing at the beginning of July. This is going to be a tricky one. I need to show a collapsing society (Venezuela is giving me plenty of inspiration here) but I don't want to write a grim, depressing dystopia. Actually, I don't think I can; the funny keeps breaking out. I'm working on a sort of comedy of manners against the background of collapse and failure. There will be some grim bits - it's never fun when a society starts consuming itself - but I hope to balance the sadder parts of the story with scenes of my characters coping with whatever I throw at them.

Jury's still out on whether I can pull this off.

The predictable demons

It usually happens when I'm about 3/4 through with a book. I wake up one morning knowing that this particular book doesn't even deserve to go on a slushpile, it's a farrago of nonsense, it's boring, nobody will ever want to read it.

This time it's happening when I have only a chapter and a half to go on INSURGENTS. Possibly because this book is shorter than my usual, the internal demons were goofing off and thinking, "Oh, we don't need to attack until she reaches 75,000 words." Unfortunately, it seems that somebody blew the alarm whistle: "She's not going to get to 75,000 words on this book! Fire when ready!"

So here we are again, and the only way forward is through the Insecurity Demons. Arguing with them does no good; I simply have to get my head down and adopt the attitude that I don't care what they say about quality, I'm going to finish this thing. Today I've done 1600 words in that mode. It's not fun. But sometimes it's necessary.

The demons usually STFU after it becomes clear that they're not able to stop me writing. But this time I'm so close to the end that they may be able to keep it up for the rest of the book.

Full speed ahead. And damn the torpedos.

High velocity

At least for me, it is. INSURGENTS has started coming into my head in significantly larger chunks - 2,000 to 3,000 words a day. It's exhilarating to feel the story taking off like this, and I'm grateful for it - much better than being stuck and unable to see the way forward - but these intense writing sessions do leave me feeling like the village idiot for the rest of the day. I may not have anything much to say until this pace slows down or I finish the book. Writing fiction has this in common with raising children: I'm nowhere near in control to the extent I expected.

Reaching a tipping point

I have to write a certain number of words before a book really 'comes alive,' for me. Part of it is getting to know my main characters better; part of it may simply be that it takes a while to persuade my brain that it really does have to turn itself on and generate a certain number of words every day.

It seems that I reached that point on INSURGENTS yesterday, at 9000 words. Today's 1,000 words were effortless; I could see and hear what was going on in the chapter, and all I had to do was type at top speed trying to get it all down. I love it when this starts to happen, not only because writing is no longer hard work, but also because writing in this mode seems to smooth out something in my brain. I become a nicer person, kind to children and small animals and actually willing to cook for the First Reader. I shouldn't be surprised if this actually alters something in my brain chemistry, generating endorphins like exercise or playing chamber music.

This shift is also why I had to have a sitter when the children were small. I'm really not safe to watch over small children in this mode, because I stop hearing and seeing what's going on in the outside world.

There's a temptation to go on and shoot for 2,000 or 3,000 or more words. I've done that in the past, when faced with deadlines, and it really doesn't work out very well for me. I can push it for maybe a week, but then I pay the price with several days of staring at the air and feeling like a total idiot whose brains have just been scooped out with a spoon. It seems my personal story-generating mechanism works at a rate of 1,000 words/day and that's that; if I speed up one week, I stop altogether the next week, so I'm not really that far ahead. And before anybody says, "But look at John Ringo," I would like to point out that I don't have the use of John Ringo's brain and his inexhaustible, high-speed story generator.

In any case - Hallelujah! Good Friday has been very good to me.

Washing garbage

I hate it when I have to throw written words away. Hate, hate, hate it. I try to get it generally right the first time, and if that doesn't happen, I'd rather delete a passage when revising the complete first draft, by which time I have forgotten just how much work it was to write that scene the first time.

Sometimes, though, there's no reasonable alternative. I've been struggling with the first three chapters of INSURGENTS (working title). At first I thought it was just the pain of starting to write again after several weeks off; when I start a new book I always mope around the house for the first few days complaining that I've forgotten how hard it is to write. So I didn't immediately recognize the Second Law of Writing, which is that if you are agonizing and struggling to write a scene there is probably something wrong with it. After all, these opening chapters did everything I wanted them to: show a rebel raid on an outpost, bring my two main characters together, set up that they're going to have to stay together for some time whether they like it or not, and create a new problem for the rebels arising from the raid.

The only problem was that it wasn't believable. The outpost was seriously undermanned for no reason, my secondary character had no good reason for being there, the ruse that made the raid possible wouldn't work, even if it did the raid would only succeed if the invaders did a whole slew of stupid things... Well, I fixed this and explained that; asked my First Reader to take a look at it; he pointed out some new problems; while he was reading I noticed some other problems.

Then I realized that I was putting patches on top of patches to save a structure that was unsound in the beginning.

That's when you're "washing garbage." When, no matter how much you change words and dialog and insert explanatory background, you're still working with a fundamentally flawed idea. And it's still going to smell like dead fish and coffee grounds no matter how often you wash it.

So, this weekend, eleven thousand words went into the recycling bin and I spent most of my time reading books on guerrilla warfare and IED's in the hope of shaking a new idea loose. (If anyone's interested, the book I found most useful was The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War and the least useful was Mao's Guerrilla Warfare.

Now, I hope, I've got an entirely new surface plot with the same deep plot (those things I wanted to accomplish in the opening chapters) underlying it.

Let's see how hard it is to write this version.

Two years later

It has been almost exactly two years since part of my spine collapsed and with it, much of my life. There's nothing so boring as other people's back problems, so here's the executive overview: months flat on my back because I could neither stand not sit without excruciating pain; trying every remedy suggested until my last hope was surgery; months looking for a surgeon who would tackle the problem; more months in bed recovering from surgery; physical therapy; pneumonia setting me back months in the recovery process.

No, not a fun time. But I am extremely grateful for the miracle that is modern American surgery, without which I would have been a permanent invalid. Now, thanks to the insertion of a new spine segment composed of titanium and cadaver bones, I'm just a grouchy old lady who ought to get back to doing the PT exercises regularly. (Yes, the corpse bones thing is kind of creepy. But just imagine how much creepier it must feel to get a heart transplant!)

A funny thing happened on the way to recovery. For some years I had felt burned out as a writer and was doing nothing but fiber arts and other craftsy stuff. Now the stories are starting to bubble up in my head again.

And the world of publishing has changed since I drifted away. The Kindle was just a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eye back then; now e-books are everywhere and my bookmarks list overfloweth with advice for writers who want to try indie publishing. I've always been a little bit curious about how my books would sell if they weren't printed and distributed by somebody who had decided in advance something like "midlist, not worth pushing." Not that I have any gripes with any of my former publishers; I'd just like to try this indie thing and see how it works out. This seems like an auspicious time to start.

This is, of course, assuming that I can not only write the books but also deal with cover art, blurb, formatting and all the other details that a publisher handles for you. I think I can. But that may be a degree of optimism bordering on hubris, given that I've been fiddling with Blogger for over an hour and have not yet persuaded it to show a blogroll in the sidebar.

Whoops... Preview shows text and blogroll; when I hit publish, neither appears. Time to save this draft and try again tomorrow, I guess. t