Christmas Life Swap Dreams

Blessed Solstice and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. Yes. That is a cat in a Christmas tree. A little throwback to Autolycus's youth. He was at the 5' mark - my eye level. His tree climbing days are over. He prefers a warm lap and a comfy pillow these days. I hope your holidays are as fun and filled with laughter as this one pictured above was for us.

As it's Christmas morning and I hope you have lots of lovely things to do today, I'll keep this short.

Which pre-1950s author would I trade places with and why: Weeeeeell. See. Here's the thing. Mighty addicted to my modern conveniences. So trying to whisk me back in time would have to involve some coercion.

But. If that were to occur, it's a tough call. Mary Shelley comes straight to mind because how cool would it have been to have written one of the first science fiction novels known, not to mention Frankenstein's monster? (Thus spawning an entire genre of horror stories, movies, and plays.) However. Corsets and dresses and no modern medicine? Nonstarter.

The other writer vying for my time traveling/life swapping story would be George Bernard Shaw. 100% because I love his writing. His plays are among my favorites. I love the sly sense of humor, the impression of great intellect (which I have always envied) and his views on equality and matters politic. You may thereby deduce my own political leanings if you've a mind. But. The man suffered horrific migraines in a time before any sort of effective medication. His choices were days in a dark room or opiates.

So, no. I want to stay very firmly in this time and place. Where I can ring up my local 24 hour pharmacy and end up with a tiny pill to swallow that stops a migraine in its tracks. Like I said. Modern conveniences.

So while these writers have done work I admire and envy, I think I'll stay right here, put my nose to my own grindstone and see what kind of work I can produce.

Peace. Remember. It's not a holiday unless there's a body to hide. And yes. That's so going in a story.

Dr. Frankenstein's Novel - Why I Have No Buried Books

Last week, just as the sun set and a rainstorm passed through, a perfect rainbow formed to the east of our house. I stood barefoot on our front porch and took this with the panorama function on my phone. It makes it clear how the rainbow is the rim of a big lens, focusing light. So unearthly, too. Perfect for our blog of assorted spec fic types.

This week's topic in the Bordello is The Book You Buried: The Terrifying Tale of Your Horribly Written Novel.

You have to give KAK props for her Halloween slant.

So, you all know the old saw this references. How all writers have a book or ten or twenty "under the bed" lurking like the formless monsters of our youths, muttering darkly to themselves and destined never to see the light of day.

Except me.

I don't really have a book that's buried and I've been thinking about why that is. I think some of it has to do with this story.

Way back, Oh Best Beloved, when I was first struck with the awesome, glitteringly huge, transporting and terrifying dream of becoming a writer, I entered a writing contest. As you do. Now, I have never been one to put in my bio that I've "been writing stories since I first picked up a crayon." I wrote stories as a kid, yes. I tend to think all kids do. I also drew pictures and made embroidered silk saddle blankets for my model horses. Which says a lot about childhood hobbies and future occupations right there, I think. I won a poetry contest when I was 12 and contributed angsty anonymous poems to the high school literary magazine. My AP English teacher taught me I didn't know how to write my senior year and I became much better at it but, though I got a 5 on the exam - a high score that let me test out of Freshman Comp in colleg e and put me in a special lit course - it never really occurred to me to be a writer. I was going to be doctor, then a scientist.

Only later, in my mid-twenties and while I was buried in getting my PhD in Neurophysiology, did I have the epiphany that being a writer would be my perfect life. I cut bait on the PhD, took my Masters, got a job as an editor/writer with a petroleum research group and starting playing with what the hell I wanted to write. One morning in my office, NPR told me over the airwaves about a contest sponsored by the Wyoming Arts Council. There were two and I don't recall which this was. They had a Fellowship for Literature that rotated each year between Fiction, Nonfiction and Poetry, and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award for an outstanding woman writer in any genre.

You must understand that, not only did I not have a book written at this point, I barely had a concept. However - and this is an enormous caveat - I had fragments and a vague idea along with this shiny newly formed ambition. Though I should have been reasonably mature at that point, especially carrying the battle scars of grad school with a bipolar Hungarian for an adviser, my enthusiasm and hopeful faith in myself so exceeded the strictures of reality that I submitted a page and a half to this contest.

I know.

Do I need mention they asked for 25 pages? Yeah.

You're all wincing for me, I hope. I'm so embarrassed for myself that it took me YEARS to tell anyone this story.

What was I thinking? That's the worst part. I had this idea, this utter hubris, that my page and a half was SO FUCKING BRILLIANT that any judge would see in one glance that my talent was one to be nurtured. And yes, I still have that page and a half from so long ago. Needless to say, brilliant it ain't.

But I learned. I learned to write more and longer. To stick with and refine an idea. I went on in later years to win both the Fellowship and the Doubleday award, along with a Fellowship to the Ucross Foundation and other, really wonderful nods that told me, yes, mine was a talent they believed should be nurtured. Once I'd applied enough discipline to actually exercise it.

Thus, one point of this whole story is that, when newbie writers ask for advice and I say that you have to get disciplined, write every day, write a lot and finish the damn book, I know whereof I speak. I know how damn hard that simple advice is to take and implement. It's also the only way it happens. No one wins awards with a page and a half, brilliant or not.

I feel like I should note at this point, the debt I owe to the Wyoming Arts Council. Those contests did exactly what they were designed to do in encouraging aspiring writers. Not by awarding me accolades in recognition of my incipient, as-yet-unrecognized, as-yet-nonexistent ability, but by denying me and making me understand I had to work for it.

The other point, the one that applies to the topic at hand, is that I have no under-the-bed books because I took those early fragments and constantly cannibalized, reworked, recast and revised until I had a book that deserved to see the light of day. That page and a half? Much transformed and revised - perhaps unrecognizably so - is one of the core elements of my Covenant of Thorns trilogy.

Perhaps this makes me more of a Dr. Frankenstein, stitching together and reanimating what seems to be dead or dying. I have no buried novels because I tore them apart before they were done. I do have a lot of fragments in cold storage, waiting for that bolt of lightning and a bit of attention to be brought back to life.

Torture Versus a Slog Through Hip Deep Mud - Editing/Revising

Editing versus revising versus rewriting is a matter of sharpening focus. To my mind, editing is a close up examining surface blemishes - grammar, punctuation, fat finger mistakes and tweak-y word choices. (It isn't your imagination. I've used this photo before. ) While in editing mode, I'm no longer inside a story. The plot and characters stand on their own. Editing makes the OCD part of my heart oh-so-happy. I get to rest story brain and fuss with niggley detail that requires a more rules and detail-oriented slice of gray matter.

 

Don't laugh. When I've been thousands of feet deep inside the belly of my own personal whale of a novel, switching to smoothing the surface of the ocean is a relief. (Like how I did this photo - looks like I'm deep but you can see the whole of the cat who's eye is above? Work with me. Cat and boat photos are about all I have.)

 

Revising requires something totally different: staying a thousand feet deep within the story, while simultaneously pulling the viewfinder out far enough to be able to see the whole of the novel.

 

Never let someone tell you it's easy. There are people for whom drafting is a swift, joyful journey into the unknown and revision is a slog through hip-deep mud. Infested with leeches. Then there are people for whom drafting is torture and revision is a giddy, slippery-slide to THE END (me). But few normal people will shrug off the mental gymnastics required of revision. This is the spot in the writing process where it

feels like you have to see the forest AND the trees. All at once. It's a special mind space, I think, but one that's hard to articulate. I can only say it's far easier for me to know what to say to make something right after I've written it wrong. And I do mean wrong rather than incorrectly. Incorrect is what editing fixes. Written wrong is what revising is all about. Remember in junior high when other kids were making fun of you for something? You didn't know what to say or what to do until at 2 in the morning, the perfect response occurred to you? This is my life. No, no. Not the being made fun of part. Usually. I mean that my brain rarely comes up with the perfect thing to say until long past the point that I needed to say it. This is why drafting a novel is a one way ticket to the pit of hell for me. I drag my typing fingers, hoping the perfect words will deign to emerge. All I ever get is flipped off and an easier revision because THEN things start coming to me. This lack of mental nimbleness makes me a less than stellar Tweeter, speaking of deserving to be made fun of.

Rewrites are a different critter altogether and I won't be providing more than a mental image for your blog reading pleasure. Rewrites require you to stand in the bleeding, steaming guts of your story, pulling out bits of bone and vital organs in order to figure out why this creation you want to see living and breathing on its own refuses to do so. Then you have to stuff everything back inside, sew it all up, and hope the lightning strikes soon. Dr. Frankenstein. Painful? Yep. Gory? All too often. Full on emotional meltdown is reasonably common, too. But once the anatomy is rearranged, there's some fun in finding out whether your monster will rise to then be polished up before being loosed upon the world.