Sorry if l33t hax0r nonsense arrived in your feed from this site. That’ll teach me to pay closer attention.

I am suddenly doing a lot. Most of it is short-term, all of it is voluntary, and it’s all time-consuming. I’m doing some volunteer web-work (just data-monkey stuff, copy, paste, and reformat) while a Very Useful Organization moves their existing site to WordPress. I’ll write more about that after their new site goes live, (I don’t want to send people to the old one when the Shiny will be up soon!) Frankly it’s been a little bit thrilling to work with this Organization and this data, in ways that are hard to articulate.

I’m also taking the first steps toward getting involved with an existing podcast, which I will plug the hell out of once I’ve established whether I’ve got the gig or not. Right now it would feel like jinxing it to name it here.

Lastly I’ll be pitching a podcast idea to a Very Useful Organization that is actively considering doing one. This weekend I need to put together a proposal that demonstrates sufficient foresight and convince them that it’s doable and sustainable in the long-term. This is the one where I really need to keep my ego in check and not get my hopes up too high. It is possible that I could pitch it, and they could shoot it down (that happened a couple of months ago with a different organization.) Or they could proceed to do everything I suggest without me. No matter what, I need to go into this with a mind set of being of service to them, not to myself. Success is always more satisfying that way anyway.

Oh, and there’s that whole ‘writing’ thing.

There are not enough hours in the day, but it’s all good stuff. It’s all about branching out and connecting with people of a like mind; about being part of a community. It’s about not sitting on the outside looking in anymore, and thinking ’some day.’ Some day is here.

Working hard. It feels good.

I spent Friday in a Starbucks working over an old story, trying to get it done and out the door. After five and a half hours it still wasn’t there, and two days later it still isn’t. I’m not giving up on it, it’s just not as close as I thought it was.

My goal today was to just finish the draft. As a sort of ramp-up to productivity today I went through some inactive folders, where I keep ideas that aren’t yet ripe and drafts that petered out. I stumbled across a folder that I didn’t even recognize. I opened it up and read what was there, and was surprised to find that it was complete.

I don’t even remember writing it, but it was written in October 2006 and is about death, which was a germane subject at the time. It even kind of makes sense that I don’t remember it.

But it was sitting there, done, all this time. It just needed a little bit of tweaking, a lot of formatting, and a destination. So instead of finishing the Slog Through Draftdom I edited and submitted a story. That’s two in as many weeks, exactly what I wanted, just not the way I had intended for it to go down.

I noticed yesterday that Forward Motion has a Facebook group now, which I joined, and then I dropped in to say hi to the folks in chat for the first time in a while. I need to get more active with them again; I need more writers in my life.

Anyway. Life is good. Productivity is good. Having lots of things submitted is good.

(Selling one of them would be better.)

“You must, on really lousy days, remember that you have a dream you are trying to make come true.” – Holly Lisle

In the summer of 2002 two things happened within weeks of each other: my then-husband and I both lost our technology jobs, and my youngest daughter was born. For those who have had an infant around, you know that sleep is precious in those first few months. With both of us out of work and with no bites on the resumes he was sending out (shaky-fist at burst dot-com bubble) we found a solution to the sleepless nights and exhausted days: we slept in shifts. He slept at night, and I slept in the morning, and we were all awake together in the afternoon and evening.

A lot of World News Tonight was viewed.* A lot of lame reality t.v. ate away at my brain. A few books got read. And then I started writing again.

I say ‘again’ because — like most of us — I had always written when I was younger. When I was little I would make up stories to tell my friends during sleep-overs. I don’t remember much about those stories, except that they involved a fox. I started keeping a journal when I read Harriet the Spy in elementary school. I entered a novella contest in 7th grade — my dad had saved it all this time and gave it to me a couple of years ago; it’s embarrassingly bad, and only qualifies as a short story in length rather than a novella, but it won the contest for me. A friend and I began and distributed an anonymous newsletter in 10th grade, which invariably featured my (still terrible) short stories and poems. I took a stab at a few novel ideas in my early 20s, and a couple of friends took an interest and encouraged me to keep going. I will always be grateful to them for that (Shelby and Colin, where ever you are. Shelby bought me my first copy of Writers Market, and Colin provided my first critique.) I wrote fearlessly all those years — I dumped the contents of my imagination onto the page and admired my own turn of phrase, and the voice that I thought was my own, but was really borrowed from this writer or that one. I filled pages taking myself way too seriously, and learned nothing.

Then I’m not sure what happened — life changed a lot, I guess. For whatever reason, around the latter half of 1998, I stopped writing.

And on one of those long nights in 2002, between tending the baby and reruns of something vapid and soul-crushing, I started again. This time I wasn’t just going to make words, though. I had acquired some degree of humility by then, and was no longer in love with everything I wrote. I knew it was not as good as it could be. I knew it wasn’t as good as what I liked to read. I wanted to know how I could make it that good, and due to other circumstances in my life I had discovered that knowledge cannot be acquired in a vacuum. It requires other people, other examples, other perspectives and experiences. I was ready to learn.

Within a couple of months I had found the website of a fantasy author named Holly Lisle. Holly took a pay-it-forward approach to writing and success: she had wonderful mentors who had offered her their experience and encouragement and she was determined to make her own available to all of us. She had created an extremely supportive community of writers based around that idea. I became a member of the Forward Motion community, and when the baby slept I filled my nights writing fiction and talking with other writers in the Forward Motion chat rooms.

I devoured every article on her site. (If you’re a writer, I recommend that you do the same.) I got more insight into the craft of writing and the state of SFF publishing there than all of my other resources combined.

Did I mention she also writes great books?

Holly continues to leverage technology to help new writers, (and seven years later I am, alas, still a new writer.) She has followed her remarkable essays and articles with free online courses in plot and character development, and now she even has a videocast called Think Sideways Writer Crash Tests, (not Chrome-friendly.)

If you have ever wished you could attend a conference or workshop, or wished you had a mentor, someone to take your hand and help you hone your craft and cheer you on, you will find it on Holly Lisle’s website. Forward Motion is under different ownership now, but the spirit of it remains. She continues to ‘pay it forward,’ though I can’t imagine that she hasn’t repaid her own mentors a dozen times over by now.

I have started her free Plot Development course, (out of which will surely come some blog posts, so stay tuned.) I owe her a lot. I will likely never be able to pay her back, but maybe some day I’ll be able to pay it forward. Thank you, Holly. May we all be a little more like you.

* This entry has been edited since its original posting, due to flimsy cultural recollection of the blogger.

From the blog of Tessa:

What really resonated with me, however, was the comment that writing made them feel like a better, more functional, person.

Writing makes me not want to kill myself quite so much.

Yes. Exactly.

I did it. I said I would, and I did. I finished Devotions, which I started in 2005, and I submitted it.

It is not a great story. It is also not the worst story ever. It is a finished story, and tonight that is what counts.

I’m not sure I ever explained the Poppet thing. Lisa Snellings makes these tiny little sculptures she calls Poppets. You can (and should) buy them in her Etsy store. A while back I decided that I was going to give myself one Poppet for every story that I sent out into the world, either by way of submitting to an editor or posting here on the website. They serve as a visual reminder of my body of work, a reminder that I have Finished Things in the past, that I have stories out there trying to make their way in the world and that part of me went with them.

I now have five. That is not a lot for someone who has been at this as long as I have. That’s part of why I’m dredging the backlog right now, because those five Poppets are not representative of the amount of effort I have put into this over the past few years. I should have more to show for the hours, the words, the workshops and critique, for the editing and cutting and tweaking and rewriting.

Interesting thing though: no sooner did I finish the housekeeping that accompanies the submission of a story than the next story started working on me. In the past hour I have come up with an ending that has eluded me for five years. So now my commitment is to get Red Carpet out by next Sunday.

I am a happier person when my mind is occupied making things up about people who don’t exist. I breathe easier when I know that there are Poppets on my desk, reminding me and encouraging me, and telling me that this is the right thing to do with my time. I think and daydream, write and rewrite. I rearrange my Poppets, perform my devotions, and I can smile.

I started putting together a little book of inspirational quotes about writing that I’ve collected. It may be a little gimmicky, but reading those words of encouragement helps me to feel better, and having them all in a handy little embellished notebook makes them easy to find. Maybe I’ll share it here some time.

Anyway.

I kept coming across quotes about Finishing Things, a topic discussed here before, probably several times and at length.

The admonition to ‘finish things’ cross-pollinated with something I took away from the recent Dreams With Sharp Teeth special on Harlan Ellison, in which he talked about the incredible body of work he produced just in his first year of selling stories. Then the wind shifted and another spore of wisdom blew in from the SWFA website, in 50 Strategies for Making Yourself Work. Switching metaphors briefly, the specific tip that got its chocolate in my peanut butter was “keep five manuscripts in the mail at all times.”

“Body of work,” my mind kept whispering. “Finish things.”

I wrote recently about that enormous backlog of files I was organizing. What I realized is that I have not been moving on to the next story; I’ve been beating the old ones to death because they are not perfect. Well, of course they’re not perfect, or possibly even good — I started them years ago. But by hanging onto them, trying to perfect them before I release them into the wilderness of pending rejection, I am preventing myself from moving on to the next thing, which will be better.

There are stories that I have started, labored over, finished, deemed completely unworthy, rewritten, work-shopped, cut up, pieced back together, and generally abused and mistreated for a very long time. My obsession with them is preventing me from working on the new stuff, because I feel guilty about having unfinished things. I tell myself that I shouldn’t work on the new, shiny story when I’ve got this other stuff on my back.

So finish them, says I. Finish them, send them the hell out, and get on with it. That is how one builds a body of work.

So for the month of June I will be cleaning out the backlog. This week it’s Devotions. I went back through some old drafts and discovered that I have finished two completely different versions of the story. I also discovered that the first four drafts I have of it were each written from scratch! Seriously? Each time I was so sure that the previous draft was fatally flawed that I started over.

They may yet be fatally flawed, but by the end of the week I will put together something that I am okay sending out to seek its fortune.

Clearly I need to work on consistency of metaphor. So far we’ve been flowers, mushrooms, peanut butter cups, and now the sons of fairy tale kings.

The point being that by the end of June anything that is Almost Done will instead Be Done and off my conscience.

I will need a larger Poppet budget.

Cheers.

Well, okay, that might be a little dramatic. Here’s what happened.

I have been using Open Office for a while. I have a soft spot for open source software — a lot of it is pretty good, and various friends and even one Professional Writer had said that it worked great for them, had all the features they needed, etc. I created my manuscripts, formatted them in 12-pt Courier double-spaced page-numbered and properly headered goodness, and then sent them off into the wilds, to editors.

Yesterday I got a very speedy rejection from one of them. No problem, thought I, on to the next market! I pulled up the submission guidelines for the next in the list, and double-clicked the manuscript .rtf file to format it for the new editor. It opened in Wordpad, instead of Open Office.

Oh. Em. Effing. Gee.

Spaces where there were none, specifically after every closed-quote. Some paragraphs were double-spaced, some were single-spaced, some were 1.5-spaced. An entire chunk of the document was in all caps. How does that even HAPPEN? The title was centered, but the by-line was left-justified. It was a mess. Any editor opening that would have to think to herself, “learn to format a manuscript, kid,” and send an instant rejection.

This is probably also the case with the second story that’s out for submission right now. I’ve been too afraid to look.

It was so bad that rather than trying to strip formatting and fix it, I decided the only way to be safe was to re-type the whole damn thing in Word. So that’s what I’m spending my day doing. Fortunately I type fast.

It was a surprising and very unwelcome speed bump. There was a part of me that wanted to curl up and just ignore it for a while, put those stories on mothballs so I don’t have to feel the embarrassment of seeing what that editor saw. But that’s not how we’re doing things anymore, is it?

So here I sit, hammering out words (and tightening a little bit since I am taking a full pass at it again, may as well, right?) Another hour and I should have this out to the next market. Then I’ll look at the other one and probably start retyping that one as well. Not sure what to do about the existing submission. Sigh.

I need to get this out of the way so I can get back to Devotions. Must keep moving forward. In the immortal words of Ian Faith, “It’s just a problem. It gets solved.”

The short story that I’m working on right now has beginnings that date back to 2005. It has alternately sat in drawers, completely forgotten, or been dusted off, workshopped and reworked. It’s been cut up, put back together, and has changed directions several times until it’s not even recognizable as the story I wanted to tell.

I just read the original opening that I wrote back in 2005. I cut it and discarded it years ago at someone’s suggestion, I don’t even remember whose, and I cannot for the life of me understand why I did that. I like that opening. It says what I wanted it to say. Not having it there changes the whole story. Can it be tightened up and made better? Of course. But I don’t think it had to totally go.

I suspect that I did it because someone else told me to. I think it’s as simple as that. In the process of learning the craft of writing I have eagerly accepted critique, and I have assumed that the people critiquing me know better than I do. Back when I was first working on this one that would have been especially true, because I was just starting to get involved in writers groups and workshops. I believe that it is still true to a great extent — who knows whether a story works better than a reader? And a skilled writer can of course explain why something does or does not work. Input is absolutely invaluable.

But I took that feedback to the point that the story I wanted to tell isn’t even there anymore.

How do we choose what to listen to and what to discard? When we’re told from day one to kill our darlings, and when someone says — with or without a plausible reason — to do this instead of that, how do we know when to trust them and when to trust ourselves instead? I think learning that is a skill just like any other, and it will take practice.

I’m putting this story back together. Fortunately I keep every iteration of every draft, so it’s all in this folder, I just have to find it. There will be some word-whacking needed after it’s reassembled, because it is a very long story, but in the end it has to be my story, not someone else’s.

What is there to say about a week like this one except DAMN it feels good? In the past week, I…

- wrote 5000 words on the novel
- sent Habitat back out for submission with a new opening (and took it off the site in order to do that, sorry)
- finished and submitted Ill Angels (FINALLY)
- pitched a podcast idea (unfortunately to the wrong market – sadness – but I learned a lot just doing that much!)
- posted Sweetwater Kill here on the site

Getting Ill Angels off my back is a very big deal. That story has been eating at me for a very long time. I suspect it will need another round of revision after the first rejection, but for now it’s Somebody Else’s Problem (aka Slush.) And of course it means the others move up in the queue.

Every week should be like this one. And to some extent, every week can be.