That’s where I am right now.

I am supposed to be revamping an existing story to fit it into a new set of story circumstances. I know, I know! Why would I do this?! Because the core story is worth salvaging, but the skin surrounding it cannot be used.

And the idea that I have come up with to salvage this thing is really…passable? Ok, here’s where my question to myself comes in: the set-up is good, not groundbreaking but so what? I want solid, for once in my life. I always wanted to be deathly, archly, pretentiously original, but Hell and Halleluiah, I’ll settle for solid now. Must be a maturity thing.

But…I don’t want my work to be pedestrian. I don’t want bubbles to burst, because they always burst. Circumstances can be finite, but the way we experience circumstances is what makes all of our stories unique and fascinating. Not everyone will defeat the killer ostriches and save the 7^th Planet of Yahurgada. But everyone who does it will experience it in a completely original and personal way. The trick, I think, is getting into character enough so that I can communicate the character’s original and very personal experience.

Ooo, the unoriginal insights.

But maybe not. What I’m getting at is this: to a certain degree, writing is acting on paper. At least, for me it is. When I write from a character’s point of view, I need to experience only what that character experiences. Anything else and I have broken character and therefore broken point of view. Building my skill set involves using that restriction to my advantage. It’s not a leash. It’s a tool. How can I use the tool?

And why is it easier to think about and talk about this, than to actually do it?  Not that I’m not writing anyway.  I am.  I’m just not making the progress I used to make, because now it’s Important.  Now I’m supposed to shop the final manuscript to agents, once it’s done.

And I just admitted I’m freaking out. *sigh*

I keep torturing myself with this: what if I reach for that great original phrasing, and instead I just write like a pretentious twit, and I can’t even see it?  Maybe I’m only mentioning this because I refuse to believe I’m alone in this.  The writers I admire most must sit at their screens or paper sometimes, with their own fistfuls of sand, and think, “None of this is original, and I’m writing like a twat, and screw this.”

The fistful of sand must be universal.  I have to reach anyway — the hold the sand long enough to get the job done.  I suppose, at the end of the day, that I will write like a pretentious twit until I learn not to write like a pretentious twit.  And therefore, it’s the reaching that separates.

First, Happy New Year to you all!  I hope everyone had a fabulous holiday!

Myself, I spent a lot of time in late 2011 thinking about how to get myself organized, since I knew that once the new year started, my schedule would be exponentially more complicated.  Both girls start after school activities today, which first of all means that my lazy dinner making approach has to immediately stop.  I have to feed these kids a 4pm dinner now!  Cuts into my writing schedule something awful.  Or I have to switch things around.  Or something.  I’m still figuring it out.

So mostly this is not about resolutions, but goal setting, which I think makes more sense anyway.  Did I already say this in another post?  Hold up, lemme check — and that’s my problem, right there.

I’ve been looking at my tasks as big things, simple statements like “I’m going to lose weight!”  But telling the world, “I’m going to lose weight!” is like telling you all I’m going to grow tusks: great, but how?

This year I want to break everything down into steps, milestones, and goals, so that my life increases in meaning and accomplishments, and not just speed.

The problem is, being able to create a meaningful and useful system for doing just that.  This involves, I don’t know, a clean enough house so that I have a place to work.  That sort of thing.  Initially, I have to set the smallest of goals: finish tidying the kitchen.  That must get done this morning if I’m to move on to anything else.  One foot in front of the other.

I’ve also started to make minute use of gmail’s calendar, which I hope will help.  It’s not just so I can stay organized, it’s also to give me a realistic idea of where my time goes.  I think that’s probably the first thing: where is my time going, that I feel like I can’t get anything done.  I don’t even know right now.

So yeah.  This is disjointed and I’m sorry, but I’m still getting it all worked out on paper, on the calendar, and in my head. And, I have dishes to do.  Tomorrow morning, it’s back to work on the story — I know, because it’s right there on the calendar.  9:30-12:30, Storytime.

Which tomorrow actually means, setting milestones for getting that done.

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.
And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tinny reindeer.

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!

“Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid! on, on Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!”

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of Toys, and St Nicholas too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler, just opening his pack.

His eyes-how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself!
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose!

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

If you’d like to see the original publication, you can here at Project Gutenberg.

And if you need NORAD’s Santa Tracker, you can find that here.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy…there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

You can read the editorial at the Newseum’s online site here.

Namaste.
xx mm

Well, not really. It started out about the relative merits of fanfiction, and what focus tends to garner one the most readers. I was saying that while I had created a passable story (more on why just ‘passable’ in a minute), other competitors had created winning stories not because they were technically more skilled than anyone else, but because they delivered on The Dream.

It’s been my experience that no one really reads fanfiction to be challenged as a reader.  We can kid ourselves all we like, but no one’s looking for discomfort in all this mess. The majority of people read fanfiction to have their own dreams brought to life by someone else. It’s Daydreaming-by-Proxy.

This is not a bad thing. I want to emphasize that right now. I don’t think this is a bad thing, to want someone else to articulate for you what you feel but have trouble expressing or imagining.

The tricky part in a fandom is guessing the right dream. Not everyone at the party has the same ideas about it.  In the particular fandom I was writing for, the stories I know will win evoke the idea that the Canon Couple’s True Love never dies, never falters, and is actually vital to the Couple’s very survival.  This hits three ideals at once: 1) True Love is its own lifeforce; 2) True Love never fizzles out, or has to worry about things like the laundry or what’s for dinner and did somebody empty the trash; and 3) the reader’s One True Love + Happy Controversy-Free Ending may be out there too, just waiting for the reader to show up at the right place and time — just like the Canon Couple.

These are powerfully romantic ideals, and they are ones a large number of readers (fanfiction or otherwise) are invested in, even if they can’t admit it.  And it actually does work that way for a lot of couples!  It’s an enthralling dream because it’s actually attainable.  Against this kind of romantic pull, an adventure story with romantic elements – and not the other way around – probably doesn’t stand a chance.  It’s just how fanfiction (and a lot of romance fiction) works.  Losses goeth before The Fluff.

I know this, and I knew it going in.  This is not to say that I’m competitive.  I most certainly am!  But I did not enter this competition to win – for once! LOL I entered it to get other people to enter it. This is a true thing about competitions: the more who enter, the more who will enter. In order to get people to enter, I entered. It’s a favor to the friend running the competition. And that’s why the story is only passable. I made sure it was coherent, but I’m not here to compete and I’m certainly not in this one to win. Not this time. My point was to entice other writers to enter and get some experience and some kudos.  So I’m ok with a horrible loss this time.

And that’s not entirely relevant to this post anyway. If I did not write to what my audience wanted, then my loss is all my doing. Conversely, if I didn’t design a tale to hit those dreams, then it’s because the story I did choose to write is one I believe in more passionately. Other people’s boundaries are not mine. And that’s far more valid, to me at least. I can’t write others’ stories, nor could they write mine. And if I don’t passionately desire to see nothing but fluff in a story (and I don’t, really, I’m weird that way), then I can’t write 250-5,000 words of fluff. I can only write what fires me up, and I like men with weapons and women who are capable and justice being served and all that good stuff. I want buckles swashed and villains vanquished. Anything less is no fun! To me, at least.

And if I get no play out of what I write where I am currently posting it, then the audience might not be the right one for me – and this is no insult to either one of us.

I ended up liking the story I wrote. It’s only a first draft, mind. But it’s fairly good. Needs some work on the plot, the actual locations, and a lot of ‘knitting’ sentences – the ones that clue the reader in that the characters are more than cardboard. A story never needs many of those, but it certainly does need them. I’m thinking I’ll work on it for a few more drafts and see what I can come up with. Without the extra-tight word count restriction (250-5,000 words) I might be able to get it fleshed out to something I really like. I only need about 150 more words to do this. I’m not asking for much.

Which got me thinking about word length and skill – as in, how much I still don’t have. Again, I’m not whining. If I don’t have it, then I need more practice. This is a long way of saying with a few more drafts, I might be able to keep it at 5,000 and still have the emotional depth that the current draft does not have. It’s not enough to complain that I ran out of time, or the word length requirement is too tight.

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration.  The rest of just get up and go to work.” –Stephen King, On Writing

He’s right.  So have a great day!  I have to go to work.

xx mm

The Gangs of New York, Herbert Asbury, published by Vintage (Reprint edition, July 1, 2008)

So I’m reading Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York, and I’m having an enormous amount of trouble getting through it.  Given that it’s such a celebrated book, this is making me feel like a moron.

It’s not that it’s dry.  It’s anything but dry; it fairly sings.  Characters leap from the pages, and you can almost smell the filth in the streets.  The chapter on the river pirates was riveting!  Parts of this book I really love.

And yet — and why am I such a Push Me-Pull You that I end up with so many ‘And yet’s?  *sigh*

While it does include a bibliography, it does not include individual endnotes or footnotes, and I don’t know why exactly, but I’m getting mighty annoyed by that.  Perhaps because Asbury’s writing style is so superlative-heavy: every man a Choicest Thug, every woman a Most Brazen Harlot and Bruiser.  I get that New York was wicked, when She was wicked.  But I’m also just exhausted from it, if that makes sense.  Surely someone in this mix was only competent enough to get by, right?  Just a couple of ‘em, thrown in for comparison purposes?  Maybe let’s just mention they existed?

The Dead Rabbits Barricade New York

It’s the extreme nature of it that’s tripping me up, I think.  For better or worse, whether it’s pretentious of me or not, I doubt extremes.  Encountering them makes me argumentative.  Are we absolutely sure every single Dear Rabbit ever in the history of forever was that good with a cudgel?  Really?

See?  I get peevish.

I’m really trying to read this.  It’s been listed as halfway finished at my Goodreads accounts for months now; truth is, I lied about my page count.  I’m not even that far into it yet.  I just felt stupid that I can’t get through this thing, which is supposed to be so fantastic-like.  So fantastic that in 2008, The Library of America selected an excerpt from The Gangs of New York for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime!  That’s fantastic, right?

It is, and I know it.  And I will get through this thing.  Somehow, I will stop being such a big baby about it and pull myself through it, even if I have to make up a story to go along with it, just in my head.  After all, I did start reading it to familiarize myself with 19th Century New York, as I had a plot bunny drifting about in my head.  Maybe it’s the same reaction that leads people to turn a blind eye to other miseries.  I keep thinking, was it really that bad?  And no one even cared?

Maybe that’s what’s really tripping me up here: the insanity of the situation he describes.  Perhaps, I’m so shocked I’m still processing it.  I mean, to hear Asbury tell it, it’s a wonder New York lived a day, much less several hundred years.  And I do know there is scholarly doubt about some of his claims, a suspicion that he embellished his accounts just a wee bit.  I’d be inclined to believe it, really.

Am I the only one having this kind of trouble with it?

But, discipline!  I shall discipline myself, because lost in all the comparisons are fun people like Sadie the Goat, who lost an ear to Gallus Mag and then got it back again, after a career as a pirate along the Westchester County coast.  It’s absolutely (err, most possibly?) true that neither Asbury nor anyone could have made Sadie up if he tried.  Or Gallus Mag (is she where Tyson got it from?).

But it’s going to take me some time.  I just know that I have to read a little, go away for a while, then read a little more, go away for a while, read a little more…I’ll let you know when I finally manage to finish it.

Happy Reading!
xx mm

*giggle*

Here in the US, because we cram 4 major holidays into 3 months, it’s a juggernaut of shopping, decorating, dressing-up, partying, dismantling, shopping, decorating, eating, cleaning up, dismantling, shopping, decorating, gifting, playing, partying, dismantling, cleaning up, shopping, dressing up, partying, and then!

I don’t know about you people, but I drag my exhausted, cranky self into January, where I am fairly useless until Valentine’s.  This is really not the most productive way to go at it, and you know what else? It takes a Puritan mindset to even look at it that way. Did I mention Thanksgiving just happened?

Anyhoo, enough with the orange and brown, it’s red and green time. What to do?

Christmas has got to be one of the most high pressure holiday in existence. I’ve already been the Ghost of Christmas Past, if you’re curious enough to click.  Suffice it to summarize: I have spent 25 years hating Christmas, and I don’t want to anymore.  So I’m needing to decide what I want to do instead. Like Hitchhiker’s Guide: How do people want to use Christmas? Do they want to use it nasally?

In all seriousness, I have some decisions to make.

I think Christmas, in large part, is a call and response between our own impulses and those of our parents’. In my family, Christmas has always been very much about the cookies. My mother based a lot of her personal Christmas score – you know Christmas can be a contact sport, right? – not only on the type of cookies she had available, but on the sheer variety of them. Long after she stopped giving trays of them to the neighbors she baked like mad, as though any minute all of Guam would show up on her doorstep, in dire need of Orange Tea Cakes, Scandinavian Fruit Bars, Gumdrop Cookies, and at least three other kinds.

You need to know this: I am an only child! There were only three people in this household, and she’d bake 3 dozen of each variety! They kinda stacked up some.

It sounds funny now, but the cookies meant Christmas to her. It’s important, this baking thing. It wasn’t Christmas until she’d baked – not to her, and not to my father and I. As a child I thought she was nuts, breaking her back like that. But I get it now. All my years scattering myself across the country, and how do start the season? I bake. By Halloween each year, I am planning cookies. It’s in my bones.

Beyond the baking, I don’t quite know yet how I want to remake Christmas for us. Part of my struggle is that Mr MM comes with his own Christmas traumas (another post, another time) and is more resistant to it than I am.    The cookie thing is easy to absorb and remake as my own.  Other ideas, like the pressure to make the house perfect, the meal perfect, the gifts perfect — when nothing is ever perfect — this is harder.  My mother ached for Norman Rockwell every year, and got stuck with real life instead.  My take-away from these moments was the pervasive sense that it’s all not worth it — I’ve only just realized that this past year.  I’ve gotten past the ache to realize underneath is a sense of futility.  And I don’t think the futility is my own.  This is when the call and response can become more like a cat fight.

I want my own Christmas now, made my own way.  So I’ll begin by baking the cookies I want, and hanging the wreath on the door, and letting myself let go of the need to respond to the call of the past.  Some traditions really aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.  I don’t have to hate the holidays, because I think maybe I’m actually an adult now and can make my own decisions?  You know, another one of those embarrassing realizations that’s not so embarrassing I won’t tell you about it.  But yeah.  Christmas 2010 I was still struggling with being imperfect, with the holiday being a contact sport.  But I actually kind of like it now.

I do.  I think I can like Christmas after all.

Namaste.
xx mm

Old Books, by William Hoiles, Basking Ridge NJ USA

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.  –Maya Angelou (In other words, let your kids read comics and manga — hell, let yourself read them!  They’re fun!  This is supposed to be fun!)

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.  –Oscar Wilde

The book you don’t read won’t help.  –Jim Rohn

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.  –Saint Augustine

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.  –John Steinbeck

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.  –Ernest Hemingway

All I’m writing is just what I feel, that’s all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.  –Jimi Hendrix

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.  –Alice Walker

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.  – Neil Gaiman

Rule #5: Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”  –Jim Jarmusch

And finally, my favorite:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.  –Ira Glass, This American Life

Namaste.
xx mm

“See those bags?” she asks.

We’re passing through Bellevue, hurtling towards an underpass that 90 years previous was a dirt track through strawberry fields.  Now it’s a sea of office buildings, hotels, shopping malls swallowing older strip centers, and a lot of road construction.  The far right hill is dotted at perfect intervals with dusky brown bags, wallowing in the dusky brown mud.

“Yeah, hon,” I respond.

“Those are full of ducks.”

“They are?” I ask.

The first thing any mommy knows about her toddler/preschooler: do not correct.  Not only is it no fun to make them see reality too soon, but you squelch their spirit when you do.  Which means: ducks.

“Yep,” she says knowingly.  ”Ducks.  They’re dead.”

“They’re what?!”

“Dead.  The worker-guys beat them with hammers.”

The hill is also covered at perfect intervals with the Worker-Guys, a mobile flock of orange safety vests.   They do not appear to have hammers.

“In the bags?”  I ask.

“Yeah,”  she says calmly.  I hear her turn the page of her book.  We could be discussing Caillou or chicken nuggets.  She is completely unaware of what she’s actually describing, because, you know.  At 3 what does ‘dead’ actually mean, that ‘not here’ doesn’t?

“Ummm…” I venture, breaking my own rule about discouraging imaginations, because I’m a little wigged out anyway, “do you think maybe those are sandbags?”

“Oh, no,” she assures me, suddenly The Mommy.  ”They’re dead ducks and the worker guys beat them with hammers until they’re dead.”

Okay.  ”Why?” I ask her.

“Because that’s where they live.”

“The ducks?”

“Yes.”  Another page turns.  ”Can I have a snack?”

For the next year, sandbags are in fact bags of ducks beaten to death by worker-guys, because that’s where they live.  And then, at age 4 1/2, Pickles moves on to asking me if when my mother died, did she then become a zombie.  Why?  Because she didn’t want a rotting visitor who is also her grandma, because that would just be weird.

And there you have it: Bags of ducks, no zombie grandmas, please.  Soon enough, I’ll tell you about the rare Spaghetti Trees of Lake Sammamish.

xx mm

In this fiction challenge I’ve entered, we’re all dealing with a stable set of characters.  Each of us threw several elements into a common pool — a character, something common at Christmas, a book title, etc — and then the person running the challenge switched our lists around anonymously.  We get someone else’s list and then build a story around that, between 250 and 5,000 words.  And the story can be set anywhere and anytime.

I got the same character I’ve gotten for the last three years.

Worse, no story suggested itself from the list.

So I’ve been telling myself for a few days that it’s just boredom and the story will come to me and it’ll be all right.  But I’m also wondering if I’m allowing myself to defocus.  The other side of familiarity is deep understanding.  I know this character, and I know what his deepest motivations are, what he will withstand and what he won’t.  How far he’s willing to go.  What he truly wants.  That’s nothing to sneeze at.  And I have been offline from the writing for a while, for reasons I’ve talked about too much already.

So I don’t know.  Am I defocusing and hesitating because I’m scared of what’s going to come crawling out of the woodwork?  Am I that rusty that I can’t even imagine a simple plot?  Or is it just what I said above, that I’m avoiding because I hate being bad at things?

I think it’s all of the above, actually.

But at least I thought of a storyline finally, so I’ll be going with that.  It’s solid, and I can even tell it from the villain’s point of view, which might be fun.  At least I would be in someone else’s head and then I could see how the hero is seen from the rest of the world’s point of view.  It’s always very useful to remember that in a villain’s own mind, he’s the hero and the so-called hero is actually the villain.  In fact, I’m kind of liking this idea.  I have until the 25th (ok, 5th January actually) to post it, so I have time to mess it up.  But I like it.  It’ll lose horribly, mind you, telling it from the villain’s point of view.  But I like it anyway.

Yeah.  Onwards.  I’m going with it!

Namaste.
xx mm