Subdued Intrinsic

Well, okay, maybe not, "You suck!" verbatim, but something at least along the lines of "Uh, you might wanna rethink this," or, "Sorry, not feeling it."

That person is hopefully someone whose input you've actually asked for, like a critique partner, or a beta reader. Sometimes, if you don't have someone to tell you when you suck, your have a harder time feeling good about the times you don't suck.

It has been a very long time for me to have a person to tell me when I suck. A. Very. Long. Time. It's no one's fault, because life happens, and the people who used to tell me when I suck are terribly busy with the life happening. Starting new careers, reproducing humans, reproducing more humans, surgeries, education. It's tough enough (though worth it and never impossible) to keep up with being friends, let alone getting told I suck.

I'm busy, too. I went back to school. *pauses for applause*. I'm literally a soccer/basketball/band mom to three fledgling male humans (sometimes more, depending on whether or not any of my "might as well be half mine, anyway" kids are over--right now I have at least one of them every day between 7AM and noon). I have a husband who works hours that suit us, but would seem wonky to the rest of the world (We often get up at 6 or 7, send off small people to school, and then go back to bed until 10 or 11). I study Korean on the side. I have a metric crap-ton of creative hobbies--knitting, origami, watercolors, illumination, doing weird things to my hair.

Point being, I have a lot to distract me from writing, and not a lot of people to harass or encourage me when I slack--not writers who have an insider's idea of how that can be problematic.

BUT! Recently, I got one (yes, I make her sound like a scarf I found in a shop). We agree on about 92% of the stuff we talk about, which is great, but I think that 8% we disagree about is more helpful, because it means I have to look at something differently, and that's what I need. I need a point of view that can clearly say, "You suck," when I need it (J doesn't ever actually say I suck, and she's much more tactful than am I, but you get the idea). Sometimes she gives me a little poke and virtually whispers, "This sounds too formal," or, "You're trying too hard, here." I'm finding that invaluable. She also says lovely things, things that make me feel wonderful, but it's the troubles she points out that almost make me feel better.

Because would she highlight the bad if she didn't believe in my ability to improve upon it? Probably not. I wouldn't. I say evil things to her all the time. I question things in her writing mercilessly. Why? Because I'm pretty sure she's got the gumption to figure out the answers and apply them.

Yeah, it's hard to accept our own suckation, and our first instinct is to resent being called out on it. I am a generally aggressive, defensive, prickly person, I know, but it's a serious leveling up in your maturity game if you can begin looking at constuctive criticism as a positive thing.

Think of it as someone's faith in you.

Personal Note: No lady, that's not Sebastien Solis; that's my kid.

Hello, 13-year-old supermodel.

As often happens as I fell asleep one recent night, I presented myself with A Question.


If The Doctor (of British television and science-fiction adoration) were to regenerate as a Disney Princess, or for that matter were to have a Disney Princess become his companion, which lucky royal prospect would get the nod?


So, in the interest of satisfying my own curiosity and having a bit of a laugh I present:*

Personal Note: My husband’s pretty freakin’ awesome.  Just sayin’. Also, I finally got around to organizing all my playlists by the character(s) each song applies to. I had all my very favorites kind of grouped together for a little while, and now they’re in different lists. I told N. it was like sending off my babies to different foster homes. He laughed at me and called me weird. Because he knows he’s cute enough to get away with it.

I’ve decided my writing style is a lot like my hair; there’s a lot of it, but it’s very long and thin, and it takes many, many steps to get it anywhere near manageable. Now, with my hair, this means anywhere from two to four hours (are we coloring it, because if we are . . . well, you know). With a book, my experience is that it takes closer to two years.  I’m not sure this will always be the case; I dealt with quite a learning curve for the first one.  The point is:

Step One: Grow it. Either several inches or several thousand words, this part takes a large chunk of your time. For some people it’s not the step with the longest span, but it can be. I can’t get my hair to grow quickly to save my life, but I can pound out 135K words in two and a half months.

Step Two: Wash it. Get all the yuck out of it. Scrub it for hairspray, over-used phrases, conditioner build-up, adverbs, oils, and typos.

Step Three: Rinse and repeat. Once, for you Michael Kelso fans.

Step Four: if you’re not coloring, Condition. Put a good timed repair creme on there and wait. Put your manuscript in a safe, child-proof, moisture-proof, plagiarism-proof drawer and wait. You’ll gain softness. You’ll gain subtlety.

Step Four B. If you are coloring (*ahem* picture books), do that first, and then move on to Step Four.

Step Five: Cut. Everyone needs at least a little trim to kill split ends, or perhaps split infinitives. Besides, whatever you had before Step Four, probably a good quarter (inch?) of it looks ripe for the shearing.  Be bold.  You could find just the right look, the right book, for you under there somewhere.

Step Six: Apply heat. Curling iron, flattening wand, crimper, or just a blow-out, you still need to go back and smooth out all those rough edges. Also, this is your chance to really make your style, the verve that’s uniquely you, shine through. Take it to the max!

Step Seven: The Consult. Call up your most honest, most loyal friend (critique group), and have them come over and check out the results. They will tell you if you have lost your ever-loving mind. Listen to them; they love you, and want what’s best for you(r book), just like you do.

Step Eight*: Assuming you’ve gotten the thumbs-up from your pals, add in whatever styling products you need to keep that hot mess in its hot messiness. You want to SAVE, SAVE, SAVE the end result. Sometimes this takes more than one gel, spray, mouse, act of nuclear illegality. For me, it takes a minimum of four (2 Hard drives, one flash drive, and an email record—Or mousse, spray, prayer, and a local de-humidifier).

And that’s why writing a book is like messing with my hair.

*Step Eight should actually be broken up into many fragments over the course of the entire proposition. As in, EVERY FIVE SECONDS.

Personal Note: I have a Tsunami of a headache, and we've completely run out of any sort of Tylenol/Advil/Excedrin/Aspirin for adults. You don't want to know what I ingested to make it go away, but suffice to say the words 'grape flavor' were involved and there was some chewing required.





I took a little blogging break after NaBloPoMo because first, I'm lazy like that, and secondly, it's the holidays; things are all over the place, including my abilities to create a post-worthy, informative blog concept.

Jack, however, is all over this like white on rice.

As you may have guessed, today I'll be writing about truth, and again, on the heels of a fellowess writer also writing on the same subject (maybe there's like a spore in the air and all the blogging writers breathe it in at the same time? I dunno, but if so, I hope they're the cute little fuzzy ones like that thing with the bow on its head in Horton Hears a Who).

Anyway, TEH TROOTH! Ize handelz it!

When you've got your hands deep into gut-rearranging revisions you have a lot of little epiphanies (or at least I hope you do, because otherwise you're basically just rearranging crap . . . pun and disgusting feces reference intended), and sometimes these epiphanies will take a toll on your ego. I don't know if you've noticed, but a writer's ego is a sort of an oxymoron incarnate. On one hand, it is the most delicate, fragile thing, so killing it off should be pretty easy, but on the other it's so vast and enormous you can't ever take it out entirely. It makes me think of those under-ground forests that only look like separate and individual trees, but really is one great big boss fight of a plant. That, my sweet little readers, is a writer's ego.

And that's part of what's on the line when you revise, because sometimes you have to suck it up and admit to yourself a reaction here or a scene there was--le gasp!--wrong. Because admitting you have a problem is the first step in recovery (unless your problem is loss of electronic documents into the ether of extensional limbo, in which case you're just out of luck, because I don't care what Microsoft Word tells you, you're not recovering anything).

The truth I'm handling is that I am sometimes wrong. I sometimes make someone fictional do something, be something, say something they never would in, uh, "real" life. More often than not the imaginary friend manages to get my attention and correct my misconceptions, but sometimes it take a meat-grinder and some scary music to make me see reason. I'm actually having a lot of fun with the mistakes I'm finding this go around, because not only is correcting them making the story ring truer, but it's clarifying some things in later books I was really fuzzy on, because I couldn't make out how to get from Point B to Point C with the path between Points A and B so fuzzy and sort of Plot-blocking me.

So, short moral: Be okay with being wrong. Accept it's going to happen, it isn't as personal as you think, and it means you have the chance to be RIGHT in the future. And seriously, who doesn't absolutely LOVE being right? I mean, dude, come on.
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Personal Notes: Last night I read another chapter of New Moon to my husband, but before I closed the book I saw the title to the next chapter. It was "Paris", and since I couldn't remember anyone going to France I wracked my brain trying to remember WHY it was called Paris. "Oh, riiiight," my brain said. "From Romeo and Juliet." And from there my brain went to Baz Luhrman's version, Romeo + Juliet in which Paul Rudd played Paris, and as almost always, when I thought of Paul Rudd I thought of my favorite role of his, as academic snob former-stepbrother, Josh, in Clueless. Clueless is based on Jane Austen's Emma if you didn't know. So, there you have it, the way my mind leaps from thing to thing.

I don't know if you heard (maybe on Twitter, or dA, or Facebook, or MySpace, because I'm pretty sure I told EVERYONE), but I'm changing the book. Again. But I'm not just changing the ending or the beginning, or cutting/adding scenes. The most recent rejection I got shed some really helpful light on weaknesses throughout the book . . . like the fact that it didn't make a whole lot of sense my main character's parents were dead. I know this character, and the rejecting agent was right; she's not a character mired in grief. So, guess what? I have to resurrect some people. Secondly, um, there's not a lot in the way of the heroine and her hero getting together, and frankly now that I've thought about it, the heroine probably wouldn't stand the hero for a good long time, until she got to know him beyond his entitled, know-it-all surface. Sparks of a different variety are to be expected.

But it's more than that. It's asking yourself what the underlying point is in this book, what moral is this story supposed to tell the reader. The old overall theme was shallow and bland. Granted, I do believe love can kick anything's butt, but 'anything' is a very general term. You know what isn't? Bigotry. "Bigot" is defined as 'a person who is intolerant of or takes offense to the opinions, lifestyles or identities differing from his or her own'. In my book (both literally and figuratively) it's also synonymous with "stupid".

I realised all the pieces were there for this part of my belief system to come through, and without preaching or bashing readers over the head with the message. There are outsider characters, forced away by societal norms. Outsider characters who choose a more diverse culture. Characters who feel threatened by these outsiders. Within this sub-culture I've created, bigotry flourishes. Against "normal humans", against "different and outcast", against anyone who doesn't believe there's anything wrong with variety. I mean, yeah, too much of anything, including variety, is dangerous, but wisdom's the watchword, folks.

So, inside my head there are these sort of helium-infused, free-floating tattoos of text on the air, and they drift above me, here and there, waiting (somewhat impatiently) for their turn while I go line-by-painstaking-line through another of their compatriots, making the alterations needed.

I am absolutely terrified, but a very wise woman told me yesterday, and I quote, "And *every* time I've had a major aha moment, it's on the heels of absolute despair that I'll ever think of something." That's the line I keep going back to, because I know great things have happened for this writer (hello, her agent is the Steven Tyler of agents), and I know greater still things will happen for her. So, if she's gone through this rigamarole, survived, and come out of it with a better novel to offer each time, I should believe I can do it.

Personal Note: When I was a little girl we played this imagination game (I dunno, maybe little kids are still playing it?). I really liked it, especially when it worked right. One kid balled up her fist as tight as she possibly could for at least a whole minute while another kid rubbed the clenched fist (now that I'm an adult I understand this has to do with circulation and nerve-endings, but you don't know that when you're a kid . . . probably). After the minute passed, the fist-clencher was advised to AsSlowlyAsPossibleOpenYourFingers! and then the other kid would pinch each of the clencher's fingertips, finally pinching a little skin in the center of the former fist. It was supposed to feel like he or she was drawing a spiderweb--connected to each of your fingers--away from your palm. As a side note, if you're planning on trying it, I suggest cutting your nails first, because, um, ow.

I know me. I know I will passive-aggressively hide from something like there's no tomorrow if I'm afraid of failing at it. I know that's a bigger hurdle to my writing than anything else. It's not the many, many time-consuming needs of my small children, or my slightly taller husband. It's not a lack of knowing what should happen (trust me on this one, my characters are all about blabbing, and giving me WHAT FOR if I fail to write them the way they'd like). Okay, sometimes it's that, a little, but not often. Nope, my biggest creative juice evaporator is fear of failure.

I am a pro at failure, and I specialize in the Half Off variety. As in, I get a project halfway done, and then I'm off it. And I'm flighty like you would not believe. Just a few minutes ago I angrily whispered a four-letter word because I somehow read my eldest kid's basketball form wrong and missed the evaluations (don't worry, he'll still play) this morning. Because I am just that talented. I'm familiar enough with failure to have learned every once in a while you just have to salvage what you can and move on from there.

But what do you do when your failure becomes paralytic? When your fear makes you too scared to move? What combats the fear?

When I was about nine our pastor, a tiny German man named John Lamb who I'm pretty sure endured some rather heinous things, preached a sermon about fear. He asked the congregation, "What do you think the opposite of fear is?" As is my usual answer, I said "love". I'm big on love, if you didn't know. He said good answer, but not the one he was looking for.

The answer was, the opposite of fear is faith. Fear is the power that whispers in our ear of consequences we're not sure we can survive, while faith is the belief we can always get back up again. Faith conquers fear because it takes away fear's power to end us. Or our dreams.

My Sunday school teacher likes to quote John Ortberg when we talk about fear. Here's a Biblical fact, and even if you're more scared of Christians than you are of the bogeyman (or maybe to you we ARE the bogeyman, whichever), it's still kind of cool. There are 366 mentions of fear (and suggestions for combating it) in the Bible, one for every day of the year, and then an extra, for that really bad day . . . like when the very first Full request you ever got comes back as a No.

Personal Notes: I am here to witness to you, my friends. You remember how your mothers begged you to eat all manner of green, possibly slimy things when you were younger, even promising you'd love them once you got older? Well, guess what? I'm older. I love Brussels Sprouts . . . after I drown them in butter.

I have a lot of relatives. By 'a lot' I mean my mom was the youngest of ten kids, and every single one of them took the Biblical directive "be fruitful and multiply" to heart hardcore, sometimes as many as five times. And since my mom was the youngest sibling, a good 98 per cent of my first cousins are old enough to be my aunts and uncles. There is too much Crazy to measure.

But first, about my Aunt Wanda. My Aunt Wanda was one of those hard-working, veggie-canning, produce farming kind of ladies, and most of the time she scared the Hades out of me. To understand this, you'd had to have met her, because part of the Fear of Aunt Wanda was the fact she had these unbelievably feline/Morticia Adams eyes. They were incredible, but super intense, and that made her stern, no-nonsense demeanor especially effective.

Aunt Wanda was not a woman who believed in wasting things. It didn't matter if you were ten or twenty, if you filled your own plate your eyes better be on the same page as your stomach because you were practically going to be licking that sucker clean. You were going to finish. I remember getting way too much for my then-40 lb. body to take in, but I sat there at the table, picking my way over my dish for two hours because Aunt Wanda had given me the Evil Eye and told me to. One way or another, I was going to see that meal through, by God! More, I was going to do it right. Aunt Wanda had three dogs, but did I get to shove off any of my unwanted food on them? Noooo. I had to do clear it myself.

Which brings me to how this has anything to do with writing. This IS a writing blog (mostly), after all. I'm writing my second novel. It's a sequel to my first novel, and by now I'm pretty tight with the mental workings of the Dionadir world. Not long ago I sort of polled my amazing, multi-national, intuitive teen beta readers about what they thought would happen next, and what they hoped would happen. Their answers kind of surprised me. They said they wanted it to get messy. People should end up broken and bleeding, emotionally speaking. The more victims, the better. One reader summed up, "I really want it to go there." She said this with an almost disturbing amount of zeal.

Wait, what? You want me to torture the people we all love? I know we all love them, because we've gushed over them together. Well, blog reader, yeah, they want me to take the characters so far out of their comfort zones they'll need a worm hole to get back.

At first I kind of recoiled at the thought. Then I recoiled at my recoil, because I remembered being a bit self-righteous on the same point when Meyer's Breaking Dawn came out and I thought she totally chickened out at the end of it. Nothing bad really happened to anyone. No one was ever in any real kind of danger. All those characters may just as well been wearing marshmallow puff suits for all the trouble they were facing, which seemed to me to be a total cop-out because the whole thing was set up to be epic.

So, okay, I kind of get it, now. Characters being your creations, you love them, and like anything else you 'birth', you don't want anything really, actually bad happening to them. The idea of causing long-lasting damage doesn't sit well. But I also know a little about forward progress and momentum. I know when a kid first learns to Karate chop a board his sensei tells him to aim for the space on the other side, not the board itself. If he concentrates on his end point being the board, he'll just break his hand. I know when a ballerina spins she must go several inches further around than what she feels is a complete turn, because if she comes out of it too early, it throws her balance off. In order to succeed, both must push the limits of what feels comfortable, and natural, and conclusive.

In writing, it feels wrong to stretch people beyond their limits, to risk snapping them. But following through is important. It's the only way to get where you want to end up.

Sometimes wrong is right.