Elisabeth's Writing Ramblings

I knew real life was getting in the way of my blogging (drat you, Real Life!), but I had no idea that I had missed a season and a third of Live Journal updates. Wow.

Okay—Real Life and a novel revision. A pretty dang successful novel revision. (At least, that’s what I intend to believe until my critique partner flings his editing tomahawk at my perfect little MG fantasy. Sigh.)

So, in the spirit of the season (and in the interest of not letting another blog-free day go by), I present a few holiday-themed observations.

1. No one should let James Taylor sing Christmas songs. Ever. (I would not have believed “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” could possibly sound more lugubrious.)
2. It may be better to give than receive, spiritually speaking, but it can also be a cartload more stress. (None of my near and dear suggested a belt-tightening gift-free Christmas this year.)
3. Rain is as close as SoCal gets to a white Christmas, which is fab. Spinning out on a freeway offramp, however, can be the not-so-celebratory result of said seasonal weather. (On the plus side, I missed the pole and didn’t crash into any other drivers. Go me!)
4. The 24-hour Wal-Mart may be my own special province at 5 AM usually, but I should perhaps not have been shocked to find it pretty darn packed at 5 AM the day before Christmas Eve.
5. Don’t textile manufacturers believe boys ever wear scarves? Because all I see are lacy fine-knit things that no 14-year-old guy would be caught dead in. That, and stuff with pink stripes. And even for me, it’s a little late to start knitting now. (Especially since more than one scarf is required.)
6. Even though I may secretly have considered entertaining such a sentiment one millisecond here or there, it is such a mood-crusher to hear people say, “I’ll be glad when Christmas is over!” (Wasn’t it Scrooge who said something about holding Christmas in our hearts? So, in theory, it’s never over? Wait—is that mood-crushing, too?)
7. I hate disease. Especially when I am on the receiving end of the germ onslaught.
8. Unfortunately, I also hate medication. (Seriously—why can’t someone invent a cough syrup that doesn’t make people want to retch?)
9. Baking three batches of cookies in one morning may be overdoing it. Okay, is overdoing it. But it’s kinda worth it when you come in hours later from out in the rain and spinning out on the freeway offramp and the welcoming scent of gingerbread is still in the air.
10. Yes, it’s a bunch more work and sometimes a bunch more stress, but this is still such a fun, warm-and-fuzzy time of year. Doncha think?? (Plus, imagine how wide-open your schedule will feel come New Year’s! Well, after you exchange all the presents you don’t want. And put the decorations away. And haul the tree to the curb.)

Happy Holidays!

Lo, the many reasons I hate the unnamed phone/ internet/ sadistic company that will be henceforward referred to as SatanCo.

Many moons ago, when I first began using email for my budding freelance career, I was such a novice that one of my editors actually had to teach me how to attach documents to a message. (That was after he explained to me what attachments were.) Still living with my parents, I used the family email address, blissfully unaware of the many advantages of establishing an independent address.

Okay, that was like more than a decade ago, and up till this week, I was still using that dang address. I just loathed the thought of trying to tell everyone I had a new one. I mean, late last year I got an email from a Cricket editor about a story I’d submitted two years before. What would he have done if I didn’t have that address anymore? He would have had to Google me, or whitepages.com me, or actually pick up the phone to try to call me.

The horror!

Well, now that silly address (it was a silly one, but we didn’t know any better when we created it) will be no more, as of tomorrow. I discovered this fact last week, and after gearing myself up (a process that required several days and significant tequila), I called the phone company to see if I could get that addressed transferred to me.

Oddly, their technology does not stretch that far.

The rep did mention that I might be able to keep the old account—the number had been disconnected a couple weeks before—as a dial-up, just to maintain the address. This appealed to me mainly because it would allow me to pursue the new-email-address-notification-process in a very leisurely fashion.

The catch: I would have to call back and talk to a sales rep.

Yesterday I tried to do that, and the poor girl had no idea what I was talking about. After a few rounds of logic-defying conversation she went to talk to her supervisor, who straightened her out. We were on the same page. She felt my pain. She transferred me to the sales department—who I had dialed directly, I thought, but the first rep had given me the wrong number—and somehow my call got waylaid, and I ended up in the clutches of their voice recognition system, which apparently takes me for some sort of alien species that communicates only in grunts and clicks, because it never understands me, even when all I say is “No,” or “Sales,” or “LET ME TALK TO A REAL PERSON BEFORE I SHOOT SOMETHING, I’M SO NOT KIDDING!”

So I made a very mature decision. After letting fly a few choice words, I hung up the phone. I leafed through all 3457 emails in my trash file (I spent all week cleaning out email folders), built a contact list (being somewhat untrusting, I never allowed Yahoo! to build one for me), and emailed everyone the new address. Everyone except the zillions of editors who have received unsolicited submissions from me—and have not yet replied.

But, despite my near-despair in the clutches of SatanCo and Yahoo! (which will not allow me to do trueswitch, carrying over my old emails and contacts—the few I did create—despite the fact that my old email address was for a company absorbed by Yahoo!. They make my ears bleed, you know?), I am of good cheer this morning. And why is that? Because I have faith in Google. It has never betrayed me. Yet. 

(Do you ever feel a spark of envy for Dickens, writing longhand in the poorhouse? No email? No spam? No phone company? Those were the days.)  

It took me a long time to submit to Anne of Green Gables, mostly because the cover declared her to be “the best-beloved heroine of all time,” or something, and I just don’t cave to such overpromotion (not even when I was 12).

But once I started reading, I was hooked. And one of the things that got me was her focus on her identity. Sure, she was an orphan—but she was also Anne With An E. As An Elisabeth With An S, I so identified. Elizabeth is a completely different name, people! Take a look:

Elizabeth – all business! no-nonsense! pointy!

Elisabeth – soft-hearted. kinda cuddly. always ready for a nap. (Doesn’t S just look like it’s about to topple over onto its side?)

Today, in the office I occasionally grace with my presence, someone called my name and asked me a question, and another person, who goes by Liz, started to answer.

“Oh!” she exclaimed when she saw me. “I thought she was talking to me!”

“You’re not Elisabeth,” I responded. “You’re Liz!”

She denied this, claiming that she was indeed Elizabeth. (Of course, we weren’t spelling at the time, so the conversation you’re reading actually has a lot more going on than our oral conversation did.)

Honestly, I think they need to establish an Elis/zabeth moratorium, anyway. We’re forever getting the wrong emails and voicemails—because even though she goes by Liz, her email address is elastname. The “Elizabeth” pops up in Outlook, and off the sender shoots the email, leaving poor Liz to forward it to me with a note indicating that she thought it had been intended for me.

Fortunately (for me), Liz is a lovely, easygoing person (despite the no-nonsense, pointy Z). We have made peace with the occasional misidentification.

It is, however, quite different when one of my editors misspells my name. Not only because he should know better, and I sign a lot of emails directed to him, and my email return address has my full first and last name, and my column always has my name at the top when I turn it in---but also because he’s an editor¸ for Pete’s sake. One of my readers brought the misspelling to my attention and asked if I wanted her to write him an angry letter about it. (She has an easy-to-spell name, pronounced in an unusual way, and is thus sensitive to such name-related issues.)

On the other hand, the very very worst thing is when one misspells one’s own name, as I occasionally do when typing a very fast email. I always correct the mistake before clicking send… except when I don’t notice it. Which is why today I received a very penitent email from someone who wanted me to know he was sorry for spelling my name the right way… because he’d noticed the way I typed it in my email to him last week. The email in which I’d spelled it wrong. (Although it does look a little more elegant Deffnre—like theatre. Plus it has the added benefit of looking incredibly complicated to pronounce. I may consider making it permanent.)  

Children’s writers! Children’s illustrators! Editors! Agents! Bookstore!

How I love the SCBWI national conference. And I want you to love it too. So without further ado, here are this year’s Top 10 Best Things I Heard at the SCBWI National Conference. (Potential alternate titles: The Niftiest Things I Heard Come Out of Bruce Coville’s and Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Mouths, Along With Some Neat Stuff From Other People.)

11. “Dig cliches up like nits.” –Bruce Coville

Not only is this excellent advice, it’s onomatopoetic in its own way—for very, very few people are lice references common enough to be at all cliché. So advice plus example in five succinct words. Niiiice.

10. “Every day doors close in children’s hearts. Our job is to help them kick those doors back open.” –Bruce Coville

9. “Books must make the world a better place and heal the things that aren’t right.” –Dianne Hess

There was a lot of discussion on this topic, with much elaboration going on inside my mind. It seems to me that children’s book writers are in two general camps: representing life the way it sometimes is, hairy oozing warts and all, because kids need to know they’re not alone—and representing life the way it sometimes gloriously is, so they have the hope that things will get better.

Everyone has dark stuff to deal with; everyone goes through hard times. I’m not the least bit exempt from that. But not only do I not feel qualified to cover (constantly and in depth) those dark, hard times, I don’t wanna.  

8. Desperation can be a benefit, according to Margaret Peterson Haddix. “It’s like diving into a pool. In the middle, you’re just kicking against water. But if you’re all the way down, there’s something nice and solid to kick off of, so you can come up really fast.”

When you’re right, you’re right.

7. “In writing for kids, we’re all writing about a homeland we’ve been banished from.” –Margaret Peterson Haddix

How true! And yet, how unexpected, coming from an author whose youthful protagonists face cloning, time travel, jail time, and re-youthening unto babyhood. My kiddy homeland was never like that.

6. “I think it was done either by a woman or a nun.” –Anonymous (because that’s the sort of kindly soul I am)

Choices are important, it’s true. So why be both a woman and a nun, if you could be just one instead?

5. “Willing suspension of disbelief starts with the author.” –Margaret Peterson Haddix

And that pretty much sums up the problem with my last project. Thanks, Mags.

4. When I was reading Judy Blume at way too early an age (like second grade), and asking my mom to define terms she figured we wouldn’t need to deal with for years and years, I finally made a young executive decision not to ask her for any more definitions of words I didn't understand in Judy Blume books.

Then there were terms I figured I didn’t need help defining. In Deenie, the title character likes to like in the tub and touch her special place with a washcloth. Like her knee? I wondered. Or maybe the faucet? It didn't seem to matter much to the plot as a whole, so I just let it go. (I think I was in high school before I figured it out.)

But I wasn’t the only one perplexed by that term. YA novelist Rachel Cohn figured Deenie had a blanket like she did (it was her special place!). So fascinated by the book that she actually tried to give herself scoliosis so she could be more like Deenie, Cohn told conference-goers about the time she met Judy Blume and confessed her chronic not-quite-scoliosis-inducing bending and craning. Her anecdote concluded:

“[Judy Blume said] ‘If you wanted to be like Deenie, you could have just touched your special place,’” Cohn said. (I almost missed her next words, I was laughing so hard.) “[I thought] ‘Oh, my God—I just discussed masturbation with Judy Blume. I am the coolest person ever’.”

3. “There’s no reason not to use humor, no matter how serious the situation.” –Bruce Coville

Including lovemaking, he pointed out. (It was a very comprehensive conference.)

2. “Aim Low! They wouldn’t call it bottom-feeding if there wasn’t food down there.”—Adam Rex

Okay, he’s an author and illustrator—but he’s also a great example of why this writer so enjoys the illustrator presentations at SCBWI. (Plus he brought along the best Powerpoint I’ve ever seen. And he thanked us for standing in line so long for his autograph at the autograph party, which was unnecessary and very, very sweet.)

1. “If your book is only about what it’s about… you’re in trouble.” –Michael Stearns

I think I have an agent crush. But I’m going to play it cool… for a while, anyway.

When I was in college, I worked at Kinderfoto. It was a job rife with challenges: how hard is just hard enough to blow in a baby’s face to make it smile? Once you’ve made it smile, how fast can you nip back behind the camera, to make sure it’s focused and take the picture, without tripping over the tripod legs? When the family returns to view the printed photos and choose their package, how do you con them into convince them to buy the biggest one, so you can get Two Whole Dollars in commission?

I didn’t really have an answer to that one. So my modus operandi was pretty simple: I laid out all the photos, explained the packages, and then stepped back and let the family discuss among themselves.

I didn’t sell a ton of the $139.95 packages (and very, very few of the larger ones!), but I made a fair commission. (Seriously—who needs that many photos? Especially when you’re going to come back in 90 days to take the six-month-old commemoratives?) And one day my manager said to me: “You know, I’m really learning from you. You don’t do a hard sell—you just step back and leave the customers alone. And it works.”

Perhaps I should write a fable, immortalizing this little moral tale, to be distributed amongst conference vendors.

I’ve been on the far side of the table. I’ve stood there, studiously looking friendly, while streams of people flow past, carefully avoiding eye contact. When that happens, it means they’re not interested. If they pause about a yard away from the table, and glance at your wares but not at you, it means they don’t want to chat.

I was at an event this weekend where there were some exhibitors. Some of them observed these unspoken rules, smiling pleasantly, even saying, “Good morning”—but not ambushing.

Others, however, are evidently unfamiliar with these rules. One man—with whom I had not made eye contact—thrust a book at me and requested (oh, he had good manners—just not good convention manners) that I at least read the table of contents before I left. (I did. It wasn’t scintillating. But then, in my experience, few TOCs are.)

Then there was the Booth of Doom. I paused before it, chatting with my companion and glancing over the book covers on display. Then the woman I hadn’t noticed on the far side of the table came to the near side of the table. Smiling, she pointed at a chart on the wall that had inspired her book series. The MC started to read off winning raffle numbers, and I half-turned away to focus on my mittful of raffle tickets—but the woman came closer.

Soon she was close enough for me to smell the tuna on her breath (if she’d eaten tuna, I mean), giving me a plot rundown on each of her five books. My companion melted away. I was trapped. Ensnared. Cornered. And trying to listen to the raffle numbers while appearing to be politely attentive to the Ambusher was making my brain hurt.

How did I ever manage to escape, you ask? In a near-tragic turn of events… another convention-goer approached the booth. The Ambusher lunged—I am not exaggerating here—and without so much as a “Thanks for your interest,” I was free once more. My companion re-apparated, and we fled in terror of further run-ins with exhibitors.

On the plus side: I did learn a lot about the art of lunging. And what with the SCBWI national conference next weekend… I think I may just be up to attacking approaching a few victims agents.

I interviewed a painter the other day—a nice guy I’ve interviewed before, apparently 10 (!!) years ago. (It does feel strange to be able to say I’ve been at anything for 10 years!) I admire his work for its well-researched subjects (historical aviation pieces, they are), for its technical proficiency, and most of all for its sharp, photographic quality.

He said a lot of interesting things during the course of our conversation: that he tries to do something new with each painting, so he’s always learning and doesn’t get bored with the process (I do the same thing with quilting. Oh, yeah—and writing); that he sets mini-goals for each painting day, so the process doesn’t overwhelm him; and that he paints, first of all, to impress himself.

I wouldn’t have phrased it quite that way—I have only on rare occasions impressed myself—but I think the philosophy is a sound one for a writer, and I think it’s one I follow. I write to please myself—and it’s not always easy to do. So if I feel the plot of my final-final-REALLY-final draft of my MG (unless it’s YA) fantasy novel is stronger now, I know it must be. (Of course, this cockiness is pre-CP-reaction…) If I feel the manuscript of my very first novel, which is next on the re-write agenda, is infused with humor—I know it’s pretty funny. If I read one of my features out loud, and nod at my computer monitor before hitting “send,” and shipping it off to an editor, I know the piece is pretty strong.

But it’s important to remember that—muses willing—I’m not the only one who will be reading what I write. Luckily, I have a couple of gigs that remind me of that with some regularity.

One of them is my newest editing gig. I’ve been in charge of publications before, and am in fact in charge of one right now that’s considerably bigger (in pages and circulation) than this one—but never has my work been so closely read. (Okay, maybe by fact-checkers… but that’s a different type of reading.)

I recently wrote a piece I knew would be controversial. I wrote it with the blessing of the editorial council, and with a thorough vetting by someone in the know. So far I’ve only received one angry email and one phone call, which is waaaaaaaaaaaaay less than I was expecting. But the phone call cracked me up: the woman wanted to know who wrote the piece (I don’t take bylines for stuff I write for this publication, since my name’s so dang big on the inside front cover, haha), because she felt it was misleading because certain information was omitted. I’d like to know what she plans to do once she has the writer’s name. (I’d really like to know if I plan to call her back and tell her it’s me. I’m on the fence at this point.)

That’s just the most recent story. The best one comes from last month, when I ran a big piece on local high school graduates—a nice story by one of my trusty freelancers, profiling half a dozen happy teens. I wanted it for the cover story, but didn’t have a cover photo—just the senior photos of the profiled kids. So I turned to the wire service we use for this pub, found a great, bright and lively photo of some high school graduates from Maryland or somewhere, and used that. The caption beneath the cover photo ran something like this: “Across the country, high school seniors are looking back on their completed high school careers, and looking forward to new challenges, blah blah. Pictured here are Student X and Student Y of Generic High School, blah blah. Turn to page 10 to get to know some of our local graduates, blah.”

And I got an email from one of the readers.

“I’d just like to know why you put a photo of kids from Maryland on the cover,” she wrote.

I’d just like to know how much dang time she has on her hands. I mean, I’m not sure I read captions that closely. Ever. Even the ones I’m supposed to proof. You know?

But hey—at least I’ve got readers.   

Oh, the many reasons to love this little market chain.

The Greek-style yogurt.

The fresh flowers that stay non-dead in the vase for at least a week.

The pita chip rainbow: sesame, sea salt, cinnamon sugar.

The hummus! The dried cherries! The two-buck chuck! The hilarious and blog-provoking commercials!  

And now I add to that list: the laugh-inducing literary catalogues!

I quote from the Trader Joe’s 2008 Summer Guide:

“Lemon Tartes

“$3.49 for 2 tartes

“This dessert is such a tart, we almost called it Lemon Hester Prynnes. But then we’d have to put an ‘A’ on it, and it all sort of unraveled from there. So, we arrived at Lemon Tartes. Not as literary perhaps, but far more simple.”

I remember reading The Scarlet Letter when I was in sixth grade or so. The last 50 pages had me lying on my bed, crying so hard I could hardly see the words on the page. I thought it was the tragicalist, romanticalist story ever written. And now Trader Joe’s has appropriated that tween tearfest and made it a laugh riot.

Thanks, Trader Joe’s. You just make everything better!

I do.

And one of the things I remember is that there were loads of things I wanted to do that I couldn’t do.

I wanted to drive a car.

I wanted to find a secret passage to Narnia.

I wanted to wear makeup.

I wanted to see fairies.

I wanted to get locked in a grocery store overnight. (Which would have inevitably led to death by overdose of Reddi-Wip and Hostess cupcakes, in which case you would not be reading this entertaining blog entry. Sometimes it’s not bad when dreams don’t come true.)

Needless to say, I learned pretty early on that just because I wanted to do something… that did not in any way mean I would end up getting to do that thing.

This lesson I have retained. Recently it has come to my attention that there are many people who have

1. not learned this lesson or
2. not retained it.

I have a couple of editing gigs where I answer to other people. It is my misfortune that among these people are some who fit category a and/ or b above.

So when I was being taken to task by a committee for not covering a major event, and I told the committee that I had planned not only to cover that event, but to make it the centerspread of the publication in question—only no one would return my phone calls! So then I bumped the story back to a photo essay on page 2, only—literally—no one returned my phone calls. So then the major event ended up a series of photos on the back page… As I was saying, when I told the committee this chain of events, you should have seen the shock! The dismay! The incomprehension!

It never occurred to them that I might want to cover a story—but be unable to.

Same thing yesterday. After tearing apart the story budget I’d worked on for months… had made assignments for… had edited for… had virtually brought to fruition (two pieces—that’s right, TWO PIECES were not yet turned it; everything else—you read it right, THE ENTIRE PUBLICATION was otherwise FINISHED), my boss suggested a handful of new story ideas to fill in the blanks that our recent meeting had just created in my formerly beautiful budget.

Story ideas that had occurred to me, too.

Story ideas I’d tried to pursue.

Story ideas that had fizzled into non-stories.

In many ways, writing features is easier than writing fiction. You get to mix it up with other people, and they provide you the material; all you have to do is shape it into a pleasing form. But I feel compelled to point out, for those of you who suspected otherwise, that fiction has its benefits, too—not least of which is the fact that if you want to write something, you can. Let’s hear it for fiction! (Also tequila. But that’s another entry entirely.)

Having recovered from the crotchety incidents of recent weeks (including, but not limited to, evil email, cranky voicemail, a broken stove knob, earwigs (how do they grow so big? And why are some of them albino? They are just the creepiest, creepiest bugs ever), and discussions of death, I set to work on the revision of the revised rewrite of my MG (unless it’s YA) fantasy novel yesterday.

This is a manuscript that has been in flux for a few years. (I would tell you how may if I knew. Maybe four. Maybe six. I’m not at all sure. But I wasn’t working on it chronically the whole time.) And I always liked the world I created, and I always felt kindly toward my characters (not the villain, of course), and I always, always had trouble with the plot—mostly because there wasn’t enough trouble in it.

That has changed. There’s an old boyfriend, and an old friend who might become a boyfriend. There’s a natural disaster. There’s a tyrant. There’s a Mean Girl (and brother, is she mean!). There are thoughtless parents. There’s a murder. There’s a riot.

This plot is hopping!

And yet… it seemed to me that there was still more trouble my MC could get into. After all, she’s a short-tempered girl on a short leash, and the world around her is rockin’ and rollin’ (sometimes literally, sometimes less so).

So yesterday I sat me down with my printed pages and my spiral-bound notebook, and I wrote in some angry villagers (don’t worry, no pitchforks!) who had been in previous drafts, and really, really needed to come back. And they wrought havoc. And my MC was beyond distressed. And you know what? I felt great.

So here’s my new theory:

While I do not seek out conflict in real life, it is sometimes necessary to face it in order to decimate it.

While I plan to resolve conflict in my fiction, I must introduce it at every opportunity (and where there is no opportunity, I must create one).

All this, without a therapist! (I think I’ll save my money for professional help with the earwigs instead.)

After the Evil Email Incident of last month, I foolishly thought I had met my quota for trouble gettingintoness. (Laugh along with me, dear reader.)

Yesterday I got a crotchety email on the same subject (and I thought I had trouble letting things go!), not from a colleague—but from the second-in-command. (The first-in-command, whom I had seen just the day before, had just told me what a nice job I’m doing on the organization’s publication. Good thing I had that to buffer me, eh?) Most of the crotchetiness appears to have stemmed from a meeting attended by the third-in-command, who drives me mad and was seriously irked that I had not jumped into my dancing shoes the minute she decided to start piping.

The original Evil Email Incident made me so mad my fingers shook. (Which prevented me from shooting off an equally snarky defense, so that was probably a good thing.)

Yesterday’s email just made me chuckle and shake my head. After all, when you’re in trouble that deep, you kind of build up a tolerance to it, you know? I mean, why bother getting all worked up about it?

So watch out, world. Now that I am feeling so at home in Trouble, there is no telling what mischief I will get up to.

And an added bonus: if I have to put up with all this crap, you should see what my MC is going to have to go through! I have never been a fan of conflict—which generally leads to peace (with the potential for ulcers) in real life, but to somewhat-less-than-thrilling plots in fiction. Well, those days are over! No more Ms. Nice Author! Bring on the firing squad and the natural disasters and the stupid teenage boys—and watch my MC taken them all down!

I don’t often consider the fact that big laughs are one of the perks of my job editing a magazine for a particular patient population… until an especially big one (laugh—not patient) rolls along to remind me.

This morning in my inbox, this message was waiting for me:

Hello,

I am not a member but, would like to possibly become one. My name is [name] and I am [age] and have had [disorder] since [age].  I recently, a couple months ago wrote a poem on [disorder], it really speaks to people who know exactly whats going on who have it.  I literally wrote it in 10 minutes.  Could I possibly have it in your next Magazine??

Allow that one to roll around inside your mind for a while. Appreciate the creative comma-ing. Ponder the missing apostrophe and the sudden capitalization. Consider the writing books you have read, and the advice that they all contain about how not to approach an editor—by sharing unimportant information (like age), mentioning how long you worked on a piece (perhaps especially if it is a shockingly short period of time), and not knowing the market (like pitching a poem to a publication that does not print them).

Now—don’t you feel better about yourself as a writer? (You’re welcome!)

The same person has cut my hair for a few decades now. I call her Mom. (Mostly because she’s my mother.)

I’m just not a salon kind of girl.

Which isn’t to say I haven’t, on occasion, visited salons for various services. The trip is usually worthwhile just for the comedy value. Where else can you hear such calm, objective statements about all your flaws—with (and here’s the important part) an immediate follow-up about how they can be rectified? (Example: “Your eyebrows are too thick. … Want me to fix ’em?”)

So I was a little nervous, but nevertheless ready to laugh, when I headed to a salon very, very early Saturday morning in preparation for a day of bridesmaiding. And, dear reader, I was not disappointed.

I started out getting my hair done. There I learned that my hair was a) tangled; b) fine; c) in need of a hot oil treatment; d) too short. Which is pretty funny to anyone who’s seen my hair (although it’s considerably shorter now (i.e. not waist-length) than it was for a couple of decades. It was even funnier when I realized that the hairdresser thought my bangs were too short because she wanted to put them up with the long part of the hair—and then she took some of the long hair and made ringlets alongside my face, when she totally could have used the already-naturally-ringletty bangs that she had scraped back from my face and shellacked to the everlasting damage of the ozone layer.

Interestingly, though she spent 45 minutes curling and spraying and ratting the long part of my hair into a tower of curls, she determined that the best look for my bangs was pointy and superflat. That took considerable spray, as my hair really doesn’t do flat. Her bangs, however, do. (I was not surprised when she concluded that superflat bangs were really the best look for all the bridesmaids.)

Later I discovered that the hairdresser (who was kind, though perhaps more objective than she absolutely needed to be) had used about two dozen black bobby pins to hold my tangled, fine, damaged, short hair in place. My hair is considerably lighter than black.

But that was good preparation for the makeup lady, who had very, very firm ideas about feminine beauty (and my distance from that ideal). I escaped the false eyelashes by warning her that my skin is pretty sensitive, and often reacts badly to substances (which, given the itchy and watery eyes of the other bridesmaids, was an incredibly clever move on my part). I also escaped the torture device known as an eyelash curler by cringing away from the makeup lady so dramatically (and, I might add, unconsciously), that she calmly set it down and said, “We’ll just skip that too.” She made up for it, though, by jabbing my eyelids rather more violently than necessary as she applied about eight different colors of eyeshadow. And, though I had brought my own eyebrow pencil in case there was any difficulty matching my hair color, I allowed her free rein—after all, she had like a watercolor palette full of colors, and she mixed three of them to get the appropriate eyebrow hue. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be black.

All this, naturally enough, made me think of writing. (Well, not right then. But eventually.)

I am forever reminding my CP that one editor’s or agent’s rejection isn’t really a rejection. It’s just the lack of clickability between a lone individual and a solitary manuscript. (Really, the word “rejection,” which sounds so all-encompassing, shouldn’t even be used in pitching situations. How about, “Aw, man—I got a no-click from that agent I thought was totally clickable!” Doesn’t that sound better?)

Just as the hairstylist believed that the best look for everyone’s bangs was the one she favored for herself, editors may believe that the best manuscript is the one that suits their own tastes. That’s logical, though, isn’t it? Why would they want to spent months or years working on a manuscript that they didn’t enjoy?

The world is a subjective place, filled with eyebrows that some people want to thin and fantasy stories that some editors wish to realismize. The trick is to find the people whose views align with your own, so that your hairstylist really does only trim half an inch when that’s what you ask for, and your editor understands what you’re trying to achieve, and—rather than trying to curlicue hair that should be pulled back and pulling back already curlicued hair—helps you to achieve it… in your own style.

Sometimes people are jerks (for more on this subject, see previous entry). And when you’re a pseudo-semi-public figure, like an editor, it is unfortunately to be expected that readers, and sometimes even contributors to your publication, will be have in an obnoxious manner.

But a colleague?? Someone who’s supposed to be on your side? (Okay, sidebar: exactly how naïve am I? Discuss amongst yourselves.)

Late yesterday afternoon I received an email from a colleague so sarcastic that my computer screen fairly crackled. On and on he went about the fabulous job I’d done on a recent issue, citing specific examples (some of them erroneous, but that’s a topic for another day). He then proceeded to expand his aim, and “compliment” the art department for reasons I don’t really understand (what’s a “modern color?” I know Crayola added some new hues to the big box, but surely that’s not what this person was referring to).

Then he went over the top—turning so sarcastic that he sounded completely sincere. It was baffling. I had to re-read the email, and even then I didn’t get it.

The best part: he copied like eight of our other colleagues, so they would all be well informed about what a loser editor I am.

Kudos, Mr. Colleague. Those years of honing your workplace etiquette skills have clearly paid off.

Seriously... would anyone mind if I just took an extended nap till next week rolls around?? I think that might be safest!

 

If it’s called “foot in mouth” when you say something stupid, into what orifice should we say you have jammed your keyboard when you email something obnoxious?

I am well accustomed to humiliating myself by inserting foot in mouth. Given the volume of my conversation (by “volume” I mean “amount”—although I take it that audibility is not generally one of my conversational challenges), it is probably inevitable that I will say a fair amount of ridiculous stuff. And in fact, I had a rash of conversational embarrassments just recently, so I can assure you that this is not something I have outgrown (or am ever likely to).

But while it is not unusual for me to, say, touch on a hot-button topic, completely oblivious to the fact that I am pushing any buttons at all…  I am not very often rude (and only very, very rarely on purpose).

Lately, though, I have been on the receiving end of some rude emails. There has been a veritable spectrum of evil in my inbox: passive-aggressive (thanks for editing my story that way—I’m sure you did the best you could); emails about me that were accidentally sent to me (I don’t see why we have to jump just because she thinks she wants to run a story on us right now); and outright obnoxious (thanks for not giving me a byline—that’s going to help my business a lot [I should perhaps note that the person who sent me this email did have a byline, which was evidently somehow overlooked]).

Does no one re-read their emails before they send them? Is it—as I read in a recent article about cyberbullying—simply because the writers are not face-to-face with the recipients that people so easily write (and send) snotty emails?

I’ve been in situations where an email I received made me so angry that my hands were shaking almost too much to type coherently. I responded to every issue that upset me, being very clear—and not the least bit polite—about what the truth of the matter was.

And then I put that email into my Draft folder.

A while later, after the shaking subsided, I pulled out the email. Read it through. Deleted most of it, responding only to the core issue. Rephrased it so that, while it might have been chilly, it was in no way rude.

Then I stored it again.

One more read-through, and it was ready to go—and I could be confident that I wasn’t exacerbating an already tense situation.

Revision, people. It’s all about revision. That’s something writers already know. Perhaps it is our mission to take that lesson out to the rest of the world, and cut off Rude Email Disease before it becomes an epidemic.

There are plenty of things I enjoy about sewing. Most of these involve actually stitching things together. The cutting and ironing and pinning and ripping out of faulty seems, I am less enthusiastic about.

But you can’t have one without the others.

I recently started a quilt—my first in a couple of years. (Well—to be fair—they are very big projects!) And I am way excited about it. It’s a maple leaf pattern, with green and gold leaves, and though I went fabric shopping in February, I managed to find a completely perfect autumn leaf fabric for the borders and backing. Despite the hours of cutting and the steamy bouts of ironing I have already undertaken, my enthusiasm remains unflagging.

One of the other things I like about sewing is that when I sit stitching at my machine, my mind drifts free—much the way it does when I’m driving on the freeway. (Do not in any way interpret this as an admission that I am a terrifying driver.) The characters of my YA (unless it’s MG) fantasy manuscript twist themselves into problematic situations, and then together we try to wrestle them free. I work through challenges I’ve encountered in my short stories, and brainstorm query ideas (and sometimes blog entries).

And then sometimes, I go on a philosophical bender.

The most recent one started out as a good ponder about the nature of sewing. I bought yards of a beautiful fabric—picture perfect from the bolt. And what do I do to it? I hack it up into little pieces, and sew it to some other hacked-up picture-perfect fabric, and then I brutalize the seams into delightful flatness, and stitch the blocks to each other, and then sew the resulting rows to other rows, until it looks to me like I am holding nothing more than a collection of tiny rags in my hand. (That’s from the back side, of course. The front side looks very much like a maple leaf.)

From there, I thought about writing. Because isn’t the process very much the same?

In my mind, I have an idea or an issue—connecting with other people, or growing up, or figuring out one’s place in life. I have a character in mind, and a path for that character to walk. And what do I do? I pull that issue apart, and spread it over a couple hundred pages; I break up the character’s path from A to B, strewing it with detours and difficult situations and characters. I withhold information from the reader until I reach a place in the plot where the revelation of that information is going to make the greatest impact.

I chew up the truth, spice it with lies (who is it that said fiction is a lie that tells the truth?) and regurgitate it on the page, configuration completely altered—but more beautiful, hopefully, more meaningful to the person who reads it, just as my little quilt blocks are more intricate or interesting than a piece of plain fabric on the bolt.

And what of cooking? We take blocks of perfect baking chocolate and melt them, mix them with milk or butter or flavored extracts, and then combine them with dry ingredients for cookies or apply them to a cake. We chop up perfect vegetables and sauté them with spices, or add them to stews, or mix them in a salad. And painting—all those tubes of glorious color, squeezed out onto a palette, combined with other colors to make still new colors.

I still don’t like cutting or ironing—just as I don’t thrill to outlining a plot, or rewriting wonky manuscripts. But you can’t have a quilt without chopping and pressing, and you can’t have a perfect story (or nearly perfect, anyway) without preparation and revision. Dang it.

I admit it: there have been times my editors irritated me. There have been instances when they requested nonexistent anecdotes, asked for revisions that would introduce inaccuracy into the piece—and even asked me stupid questions. Everybody has an off day, though (plus I appreciate the fleeting sense of superiority thus lent me), so I don’t dwell on these events too much. (Although I do still tell, with great regularity, the story of the editor who made me cry. That will never grow old.)

Now that I am being paid to edit, too (I hesitate to call myself an editor—I do it, but it’s not what I do, if you know what I mean), I find myself saying idiotic things more often than usual.

Because many of the pieces I attempt to edit are of a fairly technical nature, I have made “There are no stupid questions” my mantra. (I know—as a freelance writer, that should have already been my mantra. Ah, well—live and learn.)

But now I understand the value of a new affirmation: “There are no stupid assignments.”

It’s a revelation that’s been building slowly. My first inkling of my assignment-making challenges came when I wanted a piece on “vibrational technology”—I wasn’t sure what it was, but it sounded like it involved a plate of some kind, and maybe electricity. The writer I wanted wasn’t available, and someone recommended another. I was thrilled—until I got the piece, which was about vibrational therapy. Not technological at all. Unless New Age is a technology.

There was a piece I commissioned about sleep disorders that ended up being all about a medication. There was a piece that I expected to be all hands-on tips that ended up being more of a rumination.

And then this week, there was my feeble attempt to assign a piece on “the state of healthcare in the United States.” The freelancer is ever so much on top of this subject than I am. He asked questions like, “Do you mean healthcare legislation, or patients’ access to care?”

Oh, I said to myself—I’m just not sure.

I bumbled through our conversation. (I pitied the guy—it made me think of some of the more tongue-tied interviewees I’ve worked with.) Question by question, he led me to decide what it was I really was asking him for, and so we ended up at last with a still vague, but far-more-sharply-focused-than-before assignment.

This conversation, in conjunction with a detailed revision email from one of my best editors (which included some requests that were impossible to fulfill, because there is no connection between events she suggested I connect), gave me an editory epiphany: just as I don’t always know much about the topics I’m assigning to a freelancer, my editors don’t always know much about the topics they’re assigning me. And why should they? No one knows everything—if they did, we wouldn’t need writers to interview people and tell their stories.

Editors are only human, after all. And next time I make an idiot of myself fumbling an assignment, I’m going to remember that.

You know that most egregious of writers’ pet peeves—when people who are not writers make remarks like, “When I have some time, I’m going to write a book, too?” As though their ability to write a grocery list makes them a veritable Faulkner-in-training?

I confess: I tend to believe that other people should be able to write. If I can do it, I tend to think, surely that person can do it too.

How wrong am I? So, so wrong!

This week I started editing one piece that was, admittedly, on a fluff subject. Unfortunately, the writing was fluff, too. At one point, I found myself reading a paragraph of so many sentences that merely paraphrased each other that when I at last came across a sentence saying something—and something different from its eight companions—I struck it out, a reflex leftover from when I was a kid taking standardized tests that asked, “Which sentence does not belong in the following paragraph?”

Then there was the piece written by a non-native English speaker. That wasn’t the big problem—the grammar was very solid. The big problem was that the writer first referred to a figure in the story as, for instance, “Dr. Peter John.” It was unclear whether “John” really was the surname. Especially later, when the figure was referred to as “Dr. Peter.” He was later—I’m not kidding—referred to as “Dr. John.” And then there was a figure called “Dr. Smith,” who I originally took to be a completely different person.

Guess what? He wasn’t. There was just one guy—Dr. Peter John Smith. Why, I ask you—why?

It must be admitted that this writer does not consider himself a writer (his professional expertise is elsewhere); still, he wanted to take on the piece, and I zanily thought he could do it. There are other people, though, who do consider themselves writers—and they really, truly, simply cannot write well. I’m thinking of one right now; when I read stuff by this colleague of mine, not only are there words that are clear typos (“train” instead of “chain,” for instance), but there are misspellings as well. How much effort does it take to click “spell check?” (And that's not even getting into the sentences that say nothing at all--of which there are plenty. Oh--and then there's the apostrophe issue! Good grief--let's change the subject.)

Another colleague brought me an essay that she found fascinating, along with a suggestion that I commission a similar piece. The topic was indeed fascinating—but the piece was downright depressing: it started with a lengthy anecdote featuring people named “Dr. Wilson,” “Mrs. Jefferson,” and “the intern.” Who are these people? Did the writer whip them up? Are they real? If they’re real, which of them provided the writer with the information about the anecdote? How did this bit of non-journalism end up published in a medical journal? How could anyone suggest I commission something similar for a nonfiction publication?

In a week that has not included much revision on my finalfinalREALLYfinal draft of my middle-grade (unless it’s YA) fantasy novel, because I’ve gotten to a sticky point and am fairly immersed in that wearying feeling that I only have two ways to describe emotional upheaval (“her stomach churned” or “her stomach turned”), I am left with the satisfying (if simultaneously terrifying) revelation that it is something of a gift to be able to string a coherent sentence together, to build a logical paragraph, to take decent notes from which juicy quotes are selected. If you can do any or all of those things, recognize yourself for the writer you are, and remember: not everyone can do what you do. 

 

I have a problem. (Okay, I have lots of problems, including the fact that I sorta forgot the start of Lent and hadn’t decided what to give up and so had to make a very-last-minute-not-very-well-thought-out-decision to sacrifice snacks. Okay, certain kinds of snacks. At certain times and on certain days. I may be regretting it already.)

But this other problem, the subject of this entry, is this:

I don’t like my characters to have problems.

Why should they be so lucky? you may ask. But aren’t problems the hub around which the plot turns? you may sputter.

Yeah, yeah, I know. And I try. And in the finalfinalREALLYfinal draft of my MG (unless it’s YA) fantasy novel, my MC did get into some trouble. She had some near confrontations, even. And she had a showdown with the villain. (Well, there’s been a showdown in every draft—but I feel compelled to list it here, anyway.)

But this week’s chapter-in-revision has been problematicker than most, by which I mean: instead of doing a deep revision, clean-up, add-in… I appear to have gotten stuck in a re-write. It’s a good thing (see previous entry). Except that my MC really needed to get in some trouble on her way from point A to point B, and somehow, that just wasn’t happening for me. Us. Her. Whatever.

So yesterday I got close: she and her companion spotted someone that they suspected might be trouble… but I knew otherwise. And probably an objective third-party reading the scene would have known otherwise, too.

My re-write trickled to a halt.

Today I woke up just feeling plain exasperated with myself. Why can’t they encounter someone who really is trouble, for the love of Dickens? Why can’t they get a little battered? How can she be a hero if she doesn’t have anything to hero about?

So this afternoon, it’s back to the notebook, pen in hand, trouble on my mind—and in my MC’s immediate future. The muses alone know where this could lead.

I am waist-deep in revising my finalfinalREALLYfinal draft of my YA (unless it’s MG) fantasy novel. And I’m handling things a little bit differently this time around. Literally. Like, with a pen.

Here’s how it works: I go through the printout of a chapter, make some changes, and then print out that version—double-spaced. (I am a FREAK about conserving paper, and double-space only on the rarest occasions.)

Then I take that printout, open my spiral-bound notebook, and hunker down to work. I am basically re-writing the entire chapter, by hand, but super-slowly (I’m a pretty quick typist), which gives me time to ponder. To set the pen down and stare out the window and consider how a particular argument (er—discussion) ought to go. To visualize the countryside, and remember that I have not picked up a particular narrative thread in a while, and this would be a good place to draw the reader’s attention to it again.

It’s working great. (Although I am not excited about inputting all the hand-written stuff. If I wasn’t on the path to carpal tunnel before…)

It was working great, anyway, until the latest chapter. I wasn’t that thrilled with it in draft one; it felt like I had thrown in some pointless backing-and-forthing just to fill time. Or pages. But the way the re-write is going—was going—I felt sure I’d be able to nail it down in much better shape.

And I did! My MC, who has been speaking much more coherently inside my brain now that I’m inking, rather than keyboarding, snapped to attention and said something so in character, I stopped and stared at the page.

Great, right?

But there’s a problem. All that perhaps unnecessary backing-and-forthing is now absolutely unnecessary—and that left me without a way to get the MC’s brother where I needed him to go. Plus I wasn’t sure how or why my MC was gong to go where she needed to go.

Yesterday was supposed to give me a Big Working Afternoon. But I was really feeling dreadful about the direction of the chapter. (This is supposed to be a Revision Round, after all—NOT ANOTHER RE-WRITE!)

So I thought I’d lie down for a spell and just let my mind wander across all the possibilities.

Within about eight minutes, I’d come up with the perfect reason for my MC to get on the road. And it’s waaaaaaaaaay better than what happened before, because she’ll have a companion, and that will give the romance (which is far better represented in my head than on the page, I think) a chance to really get going.

The idea came so abruptly, I almost heard  “click” as everything fell in place.

But I still didn’t know how I was going to get her brother where I needed him to go, so I stayed on the sofa, snuggled under my scratchy Scottish wool blanket.

Two hours later, I awakened to the drone of lawn mowing. And I was still so, so not in the mood for working. Plus that dang brother was still in the wings, waiting for some direction from me. I mosied into the kitchen to set up some coffee, and the thought slowly tiptoed through my brain: maybe he doesn’t need a reason to go. Maybe he just goes.

I like it better when ideas come with audio (“click!”). But the quiet ones can be pretty satisfying, too.