Decisions, Decisions...

I'm the decision maker in my family. If too many people try to make decisions, no one makes them. Instead of living in complete chaos, I simply made myself that person, and so all decisions get made and acted upon. That's been happening for almost 20 years... until this one. 

A big decision needed to be made about one of our kids, and my husband freaked out about it. He didn't want any decision made without his say so. He was so distraught about this happening, that I turned this issue over to him completely, even though it would affect me and the kids greatly but him not so much. I told him to decide and to let me know by Sunday night (tonight).

On the first day, he had no idea how to proceed. I told him that we needed to create a full list of options that he would pick from. He didn't know what the options were, so I made the list for him. Then, he didn't know when the decision needed to be made and put it off for another two days. Then, when I pressed, he freaked and said he'd already made it but that we must not have been listening. I told him to write it down, and then we'd all know what it was and wouldn't forget. He threw his hands up, ran around yelling and locked himself in our bedroom like I did when I found out J.J. Abrams was going to get involved in Star Wars.

It has been fascinating to watch. He really thought that someone would just come along and make this decision for him, and then he could be mad about the decision without having to have made it and without taking any blame. The more I watched this, the more it dawned on me that this is exactly what happens to those people who always say they "want to write" but don't have time and don't know what to write about.

I've always wondered about those people, as there are so, so many of them. Why would you want that but then not do that? But this made me see a little more clearly. Is it just that I married a whiny man-child? Actually, no. He is delightful in virtually every other situation than this one. He is readily able to handle pretty much anything, and he takes my weird crap in stride. So, why freak out about this?

I think that making a large, and final, decision is probably scary to a lot of people. I don't have that fear anymore, but I have to remember that many people do. When they say they "want to write" but don't have time, we shouldn't immediately get annoyed. What they're really saying that no one has told them to write. No one has given them clear expectations about what they should be doing.

So here's the thing- no one is going to give anyone those expectations. You know all of those shows and movies and other shows, and probably plays, where someone demands that a woman write for their newspaper/magazine/website because they are such a delightful person they will obviously be good at it? That never happens. Ever. It will never happen to you. If you think you want to write, no one on the planet "has time." The only thing you can do is to make a firm decision that this is what you will do, and this is where any leisure time you have will go. Make that final decision, and then act on it. That's what every writer does, and there's really no other option. 

What Can Writers Do to Fight Nazis?

Nazis are out there. I don't mean people who seem off or who say things that can be compared to Nazis. Actual. Nazis.

I couldn't sleep last night thinking about them being out there, not knowing how many of them are, not knowing where they are. They're all over.

Out and about yesterday, it struck me that POC can't know whether the people they come across are Nazis are not. Anyone they see could be one of these white nationalist, white supremacist, unapologetic Nazis. I literally wanted to hug every POC I saw and tell them I wasn't a Nazi. Thankfully, I restrained my weird self. But the thought was horrifying. That is no way for people to live in this country or any other.

Using Your Skills

I searched for things to do about this much of yesterday. What can everyday people even do about this? It isn't enough to send money to organizations who fight this. I don't have all that much money to send. I have a bunch of offspring and pets and teenagers eat so much it's seriously unreal. They NEVER stop eating. Hopefully the ACLU can buy some office supplies with what I sent.

But in reality, both sides have money. Both sides have resources and people and money and office supplies. It occurred to me that to really do something, people have to analyze their skills and figure out how they can apply them to fighting Nazis.

Unfortunately, I really have only two skills, if I'm being honest. I can write and I am good at staying organized. That's pretty much it. I kept thinking last night there was little that someone with those skills to really do anything.

But waking this morning, it occurred to me that writers can do what they've always done to fight wrongs. They can write. That's more powerful than sending money, and it has the power to reach further than attending a rally. That's what I have to bring to the table.

Days Off Are For the Weak

For many, many, many years I worked seven days a week. Hey, I love my job. And hey, I do have a bunch of offspring. But beginning this year, I decided to take Sundays off. Sundays have been for catching up on crap like laundry and organizing the offsprings' rooms. But starting today, I'll be taking on something else.

I'm starting a website to keep tabs on neo-Nazism. I've started the content today and am searching for a good domain name.  Sundays can be devoted to laundry and fighting Nazis.

It's what I can do.

Maybe it will go nowhere, and maybe it will change a mind or two. Hopefully, it will help a few people recognize this evil for what it is. If you're a writer, write about this scourge. Get your voice out there. It may make a difference for a few people. It may just put your thoughts out there amongst the other voices. Either way, it's better than doing little outside reading about the problem.

Why Is It So Stressful Here? I'll Tell You Why.

So, this came out a little while back. I live in the most stressed-out state in the country. Normally I don't really care that I live here. Wtf do I care, really? I work from home, my friends are cool, non-redneck types. My area is full of scientists and engineers. Whatever. You can afford a lot of house here, and I can have as many big trees as I want.

So, why is it so stressful? I'll tell you exactly why. Because no one WILL EVER DO THEIR JOBS. I spend a good bit of my time trying to get other people to do their jobs in between doing my own. Today is a great example. I had a rabid raccoon in my yard. It stared at me. For FIVE HOURS. You'd think the city or county or state or Superman or whomever would come right out and get it, right? Oh hell no. No one wanted anything to do with it.

It took me those five hours to get someone to agree to come out and get it, and that's after contacting the state and getting a state game warden to beg the local animal control to come and get it. Did he get it? No. He tried, but it scampered away somewhere. I helped to look for it, but we never found it. If it comes back, well, it'll be back. That's it. No one will help, and I'll get rabies. It's fine.

The Tale of the Materials

Another case in point: when my father passed away recently, I inherited some materials. That's all I can really say. Some materials. These are not materials that should really be in a house or even a lab, really. So, you'd think someone would want to take them. Um, no. No one in the city, county or state would take them. The local university wouldn't take them. Freaking Oak Ridge wouldn't even call me back. Even local hazmat companies said no.

Does it matter to anyone that I could basically build a specific type of device in my garage if I wanted to? Oh good God no. It does not. After weeks of calling and emailing various agencies, organizations and people, I've given up. Those materials just live in my garage now. What are they? I'll never say. I just have to keep them safe and live with them. If you want to report me to the authorities- PLEASE DO. Maybe they will do something about it. But, don't bet anything on it.

Today Has Been Awesome

In between staring at a rabid animal and calling everyone in the world to see if they could do something about it, I've been trying to make an appointment to get a passport for one of my kids. Guess what? They won't do their jobs, either. I have been calling for almost seven hours, and they refuse to answer the phone. Once they even picked it up and hung up. I guess it was irritating to hear the phone ringing at work.

I don't know if this is how other states work. I don't know if anyone else has a garage housing materials, a rabid animal in their yard and no way to get a passport, but I'm guessing that most other states run more efficiently than this. It's tough to write anything at all when you spend so much time begging other people to so the simple jobs they're paid to do. I get up and do my freaking job every day, and I don't even have a boss.

What's really odd to me is that people rarely take freelancers seriously, like we don't have real jobs. And yet, I work every day, usually excluding Christmas, and get more done than any of the seven people I talked to on the phone today about rabies. Maybe this state should be run on a freelance basis? Maybe people who don't need a boss could take matters into their own hands and get stuff done?

Loss, Strength and Ben Kenobi

I didn't blog in 2016. I didn't have the time. I didn't have the strength. 

First, my mother got cancer, then my father developed terminal cancer suddenly. Then I got cancer, and then my brother got cancer. All of this happened in a six-month span last year. The day I found out that my brother also had cancer, I started screaming and screaming and couldn't stop. I think I continued screaming in my mind for a long, long time. 

All four of us, my entire family of origin, were dealing with our own cancer treatments, appointments and surgeries. Mine is thankfully gone for now. Mom's is gone for now. The same is not true for my brother or father. My father died on Thanksgiving Day with me holding his hands and my brother and mother on the other side of him, watching those last breaths. 

After that, I ran out into the woods and sat alone for hours. I spent the next four days high on pain pills, sitting in the woods by myself. I knew what this was. I knew exactly what I had to do and what life would be like. My father had been the cornerstone of us all, the one who taught us all everything, who knew everything and took care of everything. Anything you wanted to learn and anything you really needed came from him. All of that was over. I was now the man of the family. 

Ben Kenobi had to die to make Luke continue on his own, to learn and grow and take care of his own sh*t. Gandalf had to die, for a while, to leave the hobbits on their own to discover their own destinies. Dumbledore had to die to make Harry Potter a man. That's what this was. I had to take care of everyone now. Unfortunately, I couldn't leave the woods. I couldn't comfort anyone. I didn't speak to anyone for about a month and didn't write a word. 

But, strength always resurfaces. If it's there, it doesn't go away. Despite three surgeries in less than a year, I'm coming back. I've written three stories this year, and I'm discovering what it really means to be the cornerstone of a family. It means sometimes not being liked, sometimes being rebelled against and taking a hard line when needed. I've had to tell the family, Rick Grimes style, that this is not a democracy. My kids, jokingly, asked whether this was a Ricktatorship. 

You're goddamn right it is. 

Critiques, Complaints and a Sale

Since I last blogged, I've sold another short story and attended a meeting with my local critiquing group about literary magazines. The story I sold was a straight sci-fi piece, bringing my sold genres to: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, mainstream, YA fantasy and a weird sci-fi/fantasy mashup.

Critiques

I've always sought out critiques from the people around me. In high school I made my friends tell me what they thought about stories I was working on. In college I made my roommate do it. In the past few years, I've made my kids and a friend do it. But earlier this year, I branched out into an actual critique group where you have to get dressed and do your hair and drive somewhere. 

The process of it was just like what they did on Girls; everyone sat around a big table and discussed each work in turn with each person talking about what could be improved and anything they liked about the work. It was actually the most fun I'd had in a while because I'm a giant nerd and talking about plot points, tones and character creation for hours was super fun.

But here's the thing, because isn't there always one? It occurred to me over the next couple of days that having my work picked apart and every little part of a line that didn't work and every little plot point that people didn't agree with kind of aggravated me. It wasn't that I wanted people to like the story more or that I didn't like it being critiqued. Quite the contrary- I know very well that not everyone can possibly like the same work (I actually know someone who hates Harry Potter and found the books to be awful.), and I do want to know what can be improved in any story. 

No, the problem was that it started occurring to me that this is the only branch of the arts where every little thing is picked apart and a work isn't considered a good one if there is any little thing that people don't like. Consider the world of music. Are there critique groups that pick apart songs and tell the singer that a note near the end wasn't very good or a line didn't sound sincere? Do directors solicit critiques about every scene they create and find out which shots aren't perfect? Do painters have their brushstrokes critiqued and have people tell them which parts of the painting didn't work? So, why then do writers do this?

I do like being critiqued. I  am actually going back this week to be picked apart again and this time with a story that isn't as good as the one they saw last month. I'm looking forward to telling them that I sold the story I submitted to them last time and hearing what they think of the latest weird offering. But I am annoyed by the idea that this is the only branch of the arts that is so savaged and so willing to have its minutia combed through. Sure, it may make your work better to hear what's wrong with it. Maybe. I'm not sure. I think any improvements that I've made over the years, though, have been because I read what I'd done and it didn't have the desired response from me. I rewrote items until they did. In the end, that may be the only real way to improve- write until you have something you enjoy reading. 

I Literally Forgot I Had a Blog

I haven't blogged in a while, and the title tells you why. In addition to this being the roughest market for finding content work that I've ever seen, I've had the novel monkey on my back as well as trying to shop short stories.

I do love crafting a short stories, but there are a few problems with doing so. I am considering not creating as many of them to focus more on the two novels I've been working on for the last couple of years.

Here's the trouble with short stories:

• They pay crap. It's unbelievable how little most publishers will pay for a short story. I generally won't submit to a market that pays like five bucks (yes, there are tons of those). There are actually a lot of them now that pay nothing at all- and they are still choosy and demand your best work. Nope, not subbing to them either. I always sub to the high payers first, get rejected by them and then start subbing to the mid-paying markets. Those markets, however, are still going to be low paying and not truly worth the time it took you to write the work and submit it out from a monetary standpoint. I have bills, man. Lots of bills.
• The submissions process is grueling. Speciality magazines, ezines and fancy literary magazines are the markets that I have primarily been submitting to with short stories. They are so specialized in both topics and voice that it's tough to get on with most of them. This has made it necessary to submit most of my work to dozens of them, and that takes dozens of hours. This has further reduced writing income by keeping me from doing my paid, non-fiction work to spend hour after hour querying, signing up for every site's submission system and altering cover letters to suit each. Again, bills, man.
• It's been a distraction from my novels. Since I've been writing and subbing out short stories, I've sold five or six and have another four or so that I've been subbing out. That is a significant amount of time that has been taken away from the novels that I need to finish. One of them is a strong edit away from being done, and the other is still just an adolescent learning to walk in high heels. They both need time and attention.

Once I get my remaining stories either sold or thrown in the trash and lit on fire, I think I may just retreat from short fiction for a while. At least, until all of the rights revert back to me and I can sub them all out again as reprints. :o

I Sold Some Mother@#$#ing Fiction

One of my biggest goals in life has been to get some fiction published. As many writers quickly discover, non-fiction is what pays the bills. With a growing family, I've been highly dedicated to writing the non-fiction that buys shoes and calamari (seriously- I am all about calamari). But with a milestone birthday this year (no, I won't say which one) and still no fiction sold, I took it upon myself late last year to get into high gear with getting fiction out there.

I started submitting short stories to publishers in my late teens, and in those days you had to physically print the stuff out and mail it in. It was tough for me to afford as a student, and I didn't grab much interest from publishers. I gave up in pursuit of non-fiction, and I haven't submitted any fiction again until last last year. These days, it is so much easier with electronic submissions. I had two short stories that I shopped for months, and I kept getting rejections for them over and over again.

One of the stories I believed in with all of my heart. I just believed that it was worth my time and trouble and the dozens of rejections it was getting. I got comments from publishers that it was basically useless, and one publisher actually said "No one wants to read about vampires anymore." I got several rejections because my protagonist wasn't some kind of warrior woman. No, she was just a regular woman without any super powers or astonishing strength. Isn't there any room for that in fiction, I started to wonder? Do all female protagonists have to be warriors or superwomen? Really?

But I believed in that story because it was intricate and extremely detailed and full of truth. I believed in it because I felt it and because I saw something in it that was rich and full and engulfing. I submitted it to various publishers for 10 months and finally gave up. They weren't seeing what I saw. I wasn't going to submit it anymore.

Bam

Then, one day, after I had given up, a publisher sent me an email that made by throat catch. I was sitting down with my laptop when I saw what I thought was the third rejection I'd get that day. It wasn't. It was the most amazing email I've ever gotten. It was from a publisher who went on and on and on about how amazing the story was and how lucky they'd be if I sold it to them. I had to get up and walk around because I couldn't tell if I was breathing. Someone else saw what I saw, and they wanted to pay for it and put it in print.

What?

Within a few days, the second story I wrote was accepted by another publisher. Then, two little flash stories that I had submitted were accepted by still another. All four acceptances happened within about a week.

One of the more interesting things was the reactions that people had when I told them the news. When I first start telling people that I had sold some fiction, the first question every single person asked was, "For how much?" I wasn't selling a lamp on eBay. Selling fiction isn't really about the amount you get. To put it in perspective, the other day I wrote an article about how to write fiction, and that sold for more than any one fiction story that I've sold so far. Non-fiction may pay the bills, but it's amazing to know that publishers believe in your fiction so much that they will pay for it and foot the bill for publishing it.

The other question I kept getting when I announced subsequent sales is whether it was the same publisher who was buying it all. I don't know that people understood how insulting that was. No, family and friends, there are multiple publishers willing to pay- not just one guy somewhere who wants to buy it all. WTF?

Being able to sell some fiction has given me a serious boost of confidence for the two novels that I've been working on. It's shown me that believing in a work is a real force, and that if you have a strong piece that you really believe in, it's possible to find a good home for it even when that home seems unlikely.  It's possible to find a publisher who sees it for exactly what it is.

Hoping I'm Not a Crazy Person

Ok, so I have a serious issue with self-promotion. Like, a serious issue. The thought of it makes my skin crawl. However, increasingly, I am having to skip over jobs, potential agents and even potential publishing houses because they demand a Web presence. They want you to whore yourself out like you're wearing 8" heels. Get out in the streets, writers, and tell every passing car how good you are.

I can't do it. I can't even tell people in person that I would be good for their projects. I have had two new projects locally in the past month, and both times I just gave them a couple of sentences about my experience and let them make up their minds. I can't bring myself to do more than that to promote myself. Sooooo, rather than be stopped by the discomfort and nausea that comes from self-promotion, I'm going to start promoting someone else.

I chose a kick-ass pen name that totally sounds like a real person, and I started building a Web presence for her this week. She has a Twitter account now, and she actually has a decent number of followers already. I will next get her a Facebook page, and then I can start shouting into passing cars. By the time I'm finished with the two novels that I am almost finished with, I will be able to point out "my" Web presence and show that I will be able to market the material. I don't know how I will feel yet about actively promoting her and telling my followers to read my stuff and all of that, but I think I can do it if I pretend that I am promoting someone else entirely. I've never had a problem promoting others through PR writing, press conferences, etc., so it should be a lot easier and less nauseating.

I hope this means that I'm not a crazy person. It seems a little schizophrenic to do things this way, but I don't really see an alternative at the moment. Plus, it seems like it will be kind of fun. And if I am a little crazy? Eh. Everyone interesting is.

UPDATE: It just occurred to me that she should have a blog! What should she blog about? How awesome she is? How much fun is to buy books and short stories? I think she'll have seven dogs and enjoy hiking or some other outdoor crap.

New Year, New Sensation of Death

I had a pretty good handle on my New Year's resolutions. I always take them pretty seriously. I put a lot of thought into them, make lists and sometimes even get them laminated. Seriously. This year's resolutions, other than to stop eating stale Cadbury Eggs and such for breakfast, were to keep my income more even and to sell some fiction this year without fail. I can't count how many nonfiction pieces I've sold over the years, but I've never actually sold any fiction. I've been paid for editing fiction. I've been paid for writing about fiction. However, I have very rarely put fiction out there, and so I've never actually sold any. I think that by working on my fiction slowly but steadily instead of binge writing it, I can keep my pay-the-bills writing going well, keep my income more steady and still finish some fiction pieces.

Then, just a few days into the new year, I got sick. This wasn't the cough and/or throw up kind of ill- it was an unexpected reoccurrence of a life-threatening infection that I've had twice before. I spent almost a week in the hospital, and now I'm out with some gross tubes in my arms. It's almost like the fiction gods were telling me to stop planning crap and to give up because I'm obviously never going to get anything done. Well, I spit in the face of the fiction gods!

Plants Vs. Characters

When I realized I'd be in the hospital for a few days, I quickly realized that I wouldn't be able to write a thing. For the first two days, I could barely lift my phone. However, I figured that if I couldn't write, and I had a few days to lay around and think, this would be a great time to just think about my characters. I could think about what they were doing, whether their dialogue was working, think about new adventures for them, etc. It would be a restful way to consider my work in-depth and to perhaps make some slow progress. The thing about that is that it's insane and wrong. After a day of IV drugs, the thing I was most thinking about was OMG, what if leaves could move around by themselves! That would be SO CREEPY!!!!11!

Inspiration Comes From Macabre Places

Ok, so no character development, no new characters, no in-depth inspection of major plot points. But what I did come out with was something unexpected. The point when I absolutely knew that the infection was back and it was what was causing my fever and chills was when I noticed that there was an ever-so-slight veil between me and the rest of the world. I'd noticed that the two other times this sickness came on, and I noticed it getting much worse as the illness progressed. I was a part of the world but not fully in it. I imagine that if I hadn't made it that first time (and it was actually kind of close), that sensation would have continued until I was simply no longer a part of the world. I think this will actually come in pretty handy when I eventually work on a novel I have planned that will feature an outbreak of a creepy, well-known disease as a major plot point. Thinking about that feeling of being removed and separated from the world is actually kind of inspiring. It gets me inside a character in a much more intimate way than before. Inspiration can come from absolutely anywhere, so never stop looking for it no matter how unappealing or weird the situation may be.

DragonCon, DragonCon!

For the past few years I've been hitting DragonCon, a hard-to-describe con that is broken up into about 20 tracks that allow anyone who isn't boring to find stuff that fascinates them. The writer's track is full of panels that include writers, editors and agents. Some of the writers are pretty well known, others are low-level novelists who are still pretty interesting to hear from. I got to see Mercedes Lackey and other assorted writers who were fascinating to hear from and to grab little bits of advice from. Adding to the fun of DragonCon is that a large percentage of people dress up in costumes of every possible description from Spock to dinosaurs.

The Problem
Of course there was a problem. It's me. Usually when I go out of town, I worry about getting sick. Something about leaving town always makes me sick with sinus infections, colds and other assorted crap, but that wasn't even on the radar this year. I was just hoping that I'd be able to walk and stand well enough to get through the con. Waiting in line, walking from panel to panel and just standing around looking at costumes seemed like insurmountable obstacles after spending months unable to walk and then more than a month in physical therapy.
I told my physical therapist that I'd need to walk around for several hours a day, stand in line and make a long trek down an uneven street just to get my con badge and OH MY GOD I WILL HAVE TO WALK ALL DAY AND MY MUSCLES DON'T EVEN WORK!!1!!!1!! He thought it would be difficult, but he started me on various machines and recommended walking down the street every day to try to get used to it. I trained daily for more than a month and even went to the mall to ride the escalators to get ready for the multiple escalators at the con. The escalators are always crammed with people and if you can't jump off in time, OMG, the carnage!
So, I get there, trying not to limp and walking like a cartoon character, and was all set to take my walk down an uneven street in a crowd and then stand in line on an ankle that was still slightly broken. I told a friend that I had been training for this for a while and that I was confident that I could make it. She looked at me like, well, like I'd just said I'd been training for a month to walk down the street. The line was more than an hour, but all of that training helped me to do it. And all the vodka.

Mercedes Lackey Gives Me the Eye
Two Days
Once that obstacle was over, I had a lot of confidence that I could get through the con, listen to the writers I wanted to learn from and not look like too much of a freak doing so. I lurched around the con dressed like Edina Monsoon and saw amazing writers, a startlingly realistic Spock, two inexplicably naked women dressed in body paint, about 45 Khaleesis, some Tenenbaums(!), more superheroes than I ever care to see again, one of the Ghostbusters and a guy dressed like Sharknado.

I met Julian Sands and impulsively said, "I liked you! Like, a lot!" to the seventh Doctor as he rolled past me on a Hoveround.

Then I got sick.
I got two and a half good days in before I was hit by bronchitis and had to severely medicate myself in order to function. Then I got to hear "Why do you look sad?" every four minutes because apparently I looked as spacey as I felt. If you've ever had to suffer through bronchitis while being woken up all night by drunken roommates who thought they were whispering as they philosophized about life and then get told about all the fun you're missing downstairs, and who hasn't, you might understand why I was ready to leave when the day came. Usually I hate to leave and get back into the normal world where absolutely everyone is wearing clothes and no one is dressed up as anything, but this year I was pretty fine with it.

Because I'm Brilliant

Ok, so perusing the job listings this morning, looking for boring projects that I could use to expand my client base, I found a small listing for an online publishing company looking for short vampire stories. Scary stories, it asked for- no romance or sparkling. Kick ass, said I. I think I will comply.

Aside from my obvious poetry skills, I like putting together short stories that would have a hard time finding a market. But as soon as I read the description of what they wanted, a vague outline of an idea began to form. In three hours, I had written the complete story and edited it, and I was ready to submit.

It's then I saw that the deadline was yesterday. I submitted it anyway with a plea for deadline leniency. Will they even read it? You have to wait six weeks before you can even ask them about it, and no simultaneous submissions are allowed. In six weeks, I'm relatively sure that I will have forgotten all about it, and I can't submit it anywhere else right now if I want to keep them as a potential market. They may just delete it outright because it's past the deadline. I may never know. Good times, writers. Good times.

The Sleeper Must Awaken

So, I broke my ankle. I have no excuse for doing so. No one was negligent. No one left junk lying around for me to trip over. There wasn't even an incline to make walking difficult. I was walking along a gravel road staring at some bees and I fell over sideways. I literally just fell over like a dumbass.

It's been seven weeks now, and I just now feel like I'm waking up from it all. I wasn't able to walk at all until a few days ago, and even now my walking is pretty limited. I was high on pain pills for a few days after it happened. Ok, it was a few weeks. It was painful enough that I wasn't able to function well without them, but then you get the dizziness and weirdness that comes with them.

Writing has mostly been perfunctory SEO mill junk up until last week when I finally started to feel like myself again. There have been several times when I felt like I was asleep for long periods of time. Every time I've given birth it's been about two months until I felt like I was fully awake again. When I almost died from a staph infection two years ago, it was about the same amount of time. Writing during those asleep times is always in the back of my mind, but meaningful words are hard to get out.

Luckily, I've been doing content writing for so long that I have been able to do product descriptions and SEO stuff through mills pretty much the whole time, so we won't starve. People dump on the mills all the time, but I for one am glad they're always there. Sometimes, writing has to just be about money and making words appear in exchange for it.

A New Year

I struggled at the beginning of this year to come up with resolutions that would be useful instead of damaging and reasonable instead of completely insane. I started looking over the past few years and trying to think about what would really be helpful. And in that looking, I discovered that every year seemed to have a distinct theme.

Some years were all about work. Expanding my writing business was really all that I cared about for the most part. Some years I struggled to find a balance between paying writing work and fun writing work. Some years I struggled with confidence. I stumbled a bit under the weight of everything I was doing. This year is about me getting my power back. Starting a couple of months ago, I really started to see how much power a handful of people had over me. I started seeing that to get my power back, I would really, really have to fight. I'd have to step outside my comfort zone and teach others how to treat me. I firmly believe that we train everyone around us how to treat us, and sometimes that training goes woefully wrong. Not having your own power can shake your writing confidence and give you less force to thrust at the page. It was simply time to get it back.

And so I took a stand. I stopped going to BS events that I didn't want to attend, and I stopped making excuses. "I don't want to go. That sounds stupid," is an acceptable way to turn down an invitation to something that shouldn't exist. And if there's something that you hate, that represents oppression and upset and everything unpleasant to you, giving it to the thrift store isn't enough. You should really just take a rubber mallet to it and smash the living hell out of it.

My only resolutions this year are to trust my own judgement and to finish the novel I've been working on for the past year. Those two things are really enough. I may query magazines, I may finish a couple of short stories and I may decide to start smoking cigars, but whatever I do this year will be on my terms.

Kinda Hate to Do This

I see a lot of questions about where to publishing things, like a LOT. Like, every time you say what you do they say, hey, where would I publish this weird thing I haven't actually written but want to write? I get it in person and every third question on writers' forums is this very question.

Now, I have spent waaaay too many hours writing online publishing articles for Suite101, but I don't really want to direct people there to answer their questions. It's not because they suck or anything, but they kind of do.

So last year I took all of the articles that I have written about online publishers and put them on a site of my own because I thought that would be easier. I have repro rights on everything, and anything a year old or older can be put anywhere I care to put it. I then kind of forgot about it. It occurred to me today that I probably have repro rights to more now, and I totally do. So I put a bunch more of them on the site. Almost all of them are royalty-paying publishers, and two or three are self-publishing sites.

The site is dedicated to online publishers only- and a lot of them you've never heard of. Since I wrote the originals, some that I wrote about have gone out of business, so those aren't included. So, no dead ends. Some of the articles are overly SEOd, as that's what Suite required at the time, so try to overlook that. But overall, I think it's a crazy useful site for anyone who wants to go the online publishing route, but I never marketed the site, so no one knows it's there. So, here it is:

Book Publishing Online

Don't be too intimidated by the award-winning Web design. I know it's hard not to be jealous of such beauty, but you'll be a better person if you try to get past it.

I hate marketing myself. I have a Kindle book and so far I haven't created a single link to it or marketed it in any way. That's how much I hate self-marketing. But, I do feel like this information would be useful to people, so I am dealing with the skin-crawly feeling just this once.

Novels

I am working hard on a novel right now, not blogging much because any free time I have is being driven into the story. It's hard to think straight most days because I'm thinking of backstory or coming up with the next step in the plot. It's what I've always wanted to do, but time will tell whether it's worth it monetarily.

I wrestle a lot with whether to spend time on work that pays now or working on a novel that may pay in a year. When I work on paying work I think how it will pay the bills now, but if I spend too much time on it I'll spend the rest of my life doing content and PR work. It's a delicate lime to walk, and I'm not always convinced that I'm walking it the way I should.

I've been researching agents for a few months, and I have one picked out that I really, really want. I have to assume that she will reject me completely and I'll have to keep applying to agents to find one that will handle all of this. That seems to be what people do, and I'm certain that I'll be no different. Ick.

Book Channels, Writing and Rejections

It's been a while since I blogged. One of the offspring has been very sick for about three years, and that has been taking an increasing amount of my time. It's odd how things crop up and grab your time when you least expect it. I've also been questioning the nature of blogging lately. I've noticed ego taking a serious toll on blogs that I once liked, and I wonder whether that happens to everyone who pours out their feelings in a blog.

Someone at a Kansas newspaper checked my book out of the local library and mentioned it in her column. I thought that was neat. Super neat! I had forgotten that libraries were one of the distribution channels. It's a good book to have in libraries, I think. It might be useful. Isn't that what non-fiction writers want? To be useful? Unfortunately, I don't want to be a non-fiction writer.

As for fiction, I have had difficulties in working on my novel lately. Everyone who has read it, at least, the first 20 pages or so, liked it and had been telling me to finish it. For some reason, I don't have any doubt that it will be published. I've never had that feeling before. I have been writing stories and novellas since I was in grade school, and all of them were fun to write. They got out my aggressions, my anger, my disappointment or whatever was boiling over the surface. They were fun to write, but none of them felt particularly engaging to read. I started submitting fiction works and non-fiction queries when I was a teenager. Oddly, whenever there was interest I froze completely. I had two publishers interested in my queried ideas at one point, in my early 20s, and both times I freaked and didn't respond to them.

I still have this problem. I was powering along this novel when the spouse copied it onto a flash drive and threatened to read all of it while I went to the beach two months ago. That froze me instantly. I couldn't write a word, wondering what he thought of it. I called and/or texted every night, wondering what he thought of it. He hadn't had time yet. The next night, he hadn't had time yet. It must not be that engaging, it must be stupid and an abomination to fiction itself.

I found that I couldn't write a word of it anymore, it was stuck in the purgatory of haven't-been-read and couldn't leave until I was either told that it was terrible or that it was thrown away. I insisted that it be thrown away. I finally succeeded in getting it thrown out this month. I am working on it again, easing back into it. Unlike my other fiction, I enjoy reading it. It isn't just a good experience for the writer, I think it will be a good experience for the reader. Something about the work feels different from any other that came before. I can't think of anything else. I can't follow conversations. It's just there. Always.

I was never afraid of publisher rejections before. I thought they were neat. But when this work is sent in, I will take it personally. I will bristle at every generic little slip of rejection. However, I found this rejection generator that may ease the trauma a little. By reading all of the possible rejection types, you can become immune to their power. You can choose the kind of rejection you want- I chose all of them. My favorite:

Dear Writer,

The void awaits us all, but your prose was a gaping hole of premature death. From your submission darkness seeped, the groaning collapse of the inept, in throes. It shocked us into brain-dead spasms, and we only recovered when a cat happened to jump on the keyboard and hit delete.

We kindly ask that you not submit again.

But one thing remains to be known: what rough beast slouches at your keyboard?

Don’t answer.

The Editors

Kindle Publishing

With all the talk over the past year about self-publishing on Kindle, I finally decided to delve into it in January. I finished up a short ebook that I'd had on the back burner for a few months and submitted it. It was accepted and published in less than a day. The process wasn't hard, but there are a lot of formatting specifications, and I had to reformat it twice to get it to go through. Being so used to Web writing, I hadn't done any tabbed paragraph indents. Who knew?

The niche I chose isn't over-saturated, but it isn't totally wide open either, so I didn't really have much idea about how sales would go or what to expect from any of it. It's been out for about seven weeks now and has sold exactly eight copies. However, sales aren't the only way to do things through Kindle publishing.

If you publish through them exclusively for 90 days, you can join a program they have that makes your book available through their lending library. With that, Amazon Prime members can check it out for free. Why would you want to do that? Good question. The whole idea sounded kind of stupid at first, but I did some research and found out that it's actually a pretty good way to market the book. When people check it out, you have a better chance of getting some reviews, and if you ever buy from Amazon, you know how important reviews are.

And, you don't go without royalties when it's checked out. There's a monthly fund that Amazon keeps for authors who offer their books through the library program, and you get a small percentage of it each time your book is checked out. The amount you earn for it depends on the total library checkouts on the site as well as how many of yours were checked out over the month. Last year, the Authors Guild wasn't happy about this program, but that was a month before Amazon actually started paying authors whose books were checked out. I don't know how much my meager two checkouts have earned, but I'm glad that it's getting out there. My Kindle book may not be sweeping the site by storm, but with zero, and I do mean zero, marketing, it is still selling about a copy a week as well as being checked out. It may sound backward, but I wanted to test the waters a little before putting time into marketing it.

I don't see anything at all wrong with self-publishing non-fiction ebooks. Non-fiction, particularly practical information, changes so quickly that it's actually a pretty good idea to do so in a lot of cases. However, this hasn't changed my mind about self-publishing fiction. Unless it's a short story or short novella that just can't find a home elsewhere, I think it's kind of a cop out. Over the years I've read so many times about writers who were rejected again and again and took that opportunity to make their manuscripts better. The woman who wrote "The Help" was rejected several times, and it made her go over the book again and again, rewriting it and trying to make it something publishable. Apparently, the first drafts were wretched and had little to no actual plot. But by taking months to rewrite, submit, get rejected and rewrite again, she came out with something that was as good as she could make it and that has won her worldwide acclaim. Now imagine if she's just said, "Screw it, I'm going to publish it myself. They just don't appreciate me!" Yeah.

Blogging: What the Heck Is It?

I've been thinking about blogging a lot lately- the nature of it and what it is really about. I've been a big fan of a funny, fantastic blog for a long time, but in the last few months it has turned the narcissistic rant of someone telling its readers how to think. It isn't the first blog that I've seen go in that direction. Getting popular and gaining legions of followers can give bloggers a sense of importance that I frankly hate to see. I think that becoming popular destroys a blog, and I started to wonder whether blogging is nothing more than a narcissistic enterprise.

I actually started this blog because I was doing a lot of guest blogging a few years ago and I wanted some sample blog posts to show to potential clients. It worked pretty well, but I found that I liked blogging for myself so much that I soon made it for myself. It was my place to talk about whatever the heck I wanted to. It isn't SEO'd or marketed. It isn't what the client expects or what will sell a product. It's just me.

It's the tornadoes that I saw last Friday, a day that crushed me utterly. If you've never watched a relatively big tornado pass about two miles from your house, you might not think it's a big deal. But the fact is, it changes you. At least, it changed me. Since last April when I watched an EF-4 pass by, I haven't taken much for granted. Seeing what I think was an EF-3 a few days ago really, really bothered me. Luckily, I have a manuscript that I can channel all of it into. I've created someone who can fight against the elements. Since last April's tornado terror, it feels like the sky is trying its best to kill me. But, my heroine can fight against such things, even if I can't. Channelling your feelings into your work is the only real reason to write, in my opinion.

Have you ever heard someone say that they want to write but they don't know what to write about? I can't fathom such a thought. My feeling has always been that I have to write because I have to channel feelings into something constructive. Most blogs update twice a week or so. But, do they really have anything to say? My posts may be erratic, but I can't post unless I actually have something to say. I guess what I have to say right now is that any day that you don't see this from your living room window is a good day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOSG-P1EjfU

Troubles and More

Hi all, I've been away for quite a long time, but I do have a few reasons. I mean, not good reasons, but reasons nevertheless. Since I've been gone:

* I wrote about 8,000 words of a novel during NaNoWriMo. So, I was quite the loser, but I did write more fiction during that month than I did in the rest of the year combined. So, I was perfectly pleased with it. That novel is now about 12,000 words and I actually showed it to a living human. I'm still working on it steadily, and I hope to have it completed entirely by the beginning of the summer.

*I spent part of December in the hospital. That makes three hospitalizations during 2011. Up until last year, I had only been in the hospital to pop out various kids, so it was kind of shocking. I even spent Christmas in the hospital. They were unfestive there, but I did get some killer drugs, so it was merry in a life-threatening kind of way.

*I wrote and published a Kindle book. I started it last year and really got serious about it at the beginning of the year. It has been published for about four days now, and it has made exactly one sale. Promising start. I think.

*My dear, beloved Mac died. He was my best ally and like one of my offspring. Except, he made money for me instead of costing me money. I got a new Mac that doesn't look much like my old friend. It's silver. Why????

*I had a truly disastrous trip out of town for Thanksgiving. It was seriously the worst trip you can imagine and several people who I never thought I'd need to cut out of my life are completely and permanently cut out. Through the disastrousness, though, I learned a bit about myself. If someone messes with one of the offspring, I found out that I am capable of shanking them in the face, and I am not above shanking the elderly. I suppose that's unfortunate in some ways, but it's who I am.

*I started smoking again. I can usually quit for a few years at a time, and I hadn't smoked regularly this time for three years. I thought I had it beat and had reached the occasional-social-smoker phase. I was utterly wrong. I am now trying to beat this, but the events in November pushed me into it. It's up to me to get out of it.

*I redesigned my business website. I put together a complete site that doesn't just rely on samples pasted here and there. Based on what I see others making for articles and copywriting, I really should be making more than I do. We'll see if the new site helps make that happen.

In 2012, I'm going to have to find a lot more private clients. The 2011 Google insurgency collapsed almost every content mill out there and lowered my residual income by about 2/3. It's been icky. About 85 percent of my work last years was for mills because I'm quick at it and make a good hourly income doing that. I got lazy about finding new clients and now have less than a handful. I still have enough mill work to keep me going, but if just one more fails, that's pretty much it.

I had forgotten how difficult the marketing aspect of freelance writing really is. Craigslist is totally useless, and most of the sites that put together writing gigs are scraping the bottom of the barrel right now. I may actually consider going out and getting a corporate writing job if things online don't get a little better. Things are more precarious now than I have seen them in the 10 years that I've been working online. We'll see how 2012 treats freelancers.

NaNoWriMo and Fear

Wow, I've been away from Ye Olde Blog for quite a while, writing like crazy and wishing that I was writing something other than whatever I'm writing at the time. I went to DragonCon and attended a number of fascinating writers' panels. I had been planning a long blog post about it but never quite got to it. To sum up, I:

Met Wil Wheaton - twice
Heard a number of interesting sci fi and fantasy writers speak about their craft
Dressed up like Tom Baker and danced to classic rock of some kind
Talked with other writers about publishing, short stories and copywriting
Squeaked oddly and yelled "holy crap!" at Gates McFadden
Made some concrete plans about writing fiction and getting onto those panels some day
Got my picture taken with Wil Wheaton
Demanded a business card from Brent Spiner
Apparently got my picture taken with some guy in a Boba Fett costume
Took notes on publishers that the panel writers talked about favorably
Stalked Wil Wheaton
Listened to a bagpiper

Now that the con is over and life has returned to normal, I have NaNoWriMo to contend with. The concept is to write feverishly without editing along the way and to get a novel of at least 50,000 words at the end of November. Last year I threw my hat in the ring and got to a miserable two pages. This year I am determined not to slink away in shame when November is over. To get myself motivated to really work on my fiction, I did something unprecedented.

I went out in public and talked to actual people. I went to a local NaNoWriMo meeting and discussed my novel with other aspiring novelists. The basic goal of the program is to write at least 1,667 words a day. It's now early into day two, and I have about 950 words.

Thinking about 1,667 words seemed like such a ridiculous goal. I can write 1,500 words for clients in about two hours. I once wrote a 10,000 word ebook for a client in one day. Piece of cake. I write all day, I can handle it.

I can't handle it. The words are coming so slowly, with every new paragraph staring at me with teeth bared. This is the writing that I have always wanted to do. All of the non-fiction that I've been doing for money was just until I could write fiction. I could pretend to be all into product descriptions or corporate writing so that one day fiction would be my living. Except, I haven't been pretending for a long time. Non-fiction has taken over so much of my life that fiction seems strange and unnatural.

When you write non-fiction, you put up a wall and write with a bit of a veil in front of you. You aren't inserted into the text at all. When you write fiction, your soul slips into it and says whatever it needs to. And if what is written isn't good enough, I don't know if I could stand it. That's the fear that's kept me back for a long, long time. I'm still not sure how to get over it. People write novels every day, and they don't put their entire identity and self worth at stake. Do they?

This first couple of pages in front of me is just the start. I'm going to push this beast until it can't push back, and I'll have a novel at the end of the month. I hope.