Conferences

The first conference I attended was the Whidbey Island Writers’ Conference. The first year, I didn’t meet with an agent or editor because neither of the works I had in progress felt far enough along for me to discuss with anyone. Also, I was just getting the lay of the land and was learning what these conferences were all about.

My first conference experience was everything I wanted it to be.

First, I got to spend an entire pre-conference day in a memoir writing workshop with Maureen Murdock. I felt so in step with her when I read The Heroine’s Journey because of her friendship with Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell turned my life in a new direction when I met him. Maureen proved to be a sensitive and insightful workshop leader, and the eleven other women (only women signed up for this) just added to the overall experience.

The keynote speaker that year was Sara Paretsky. I was so excited at the thought of meeting her. V.I. Warshawski is my all time favorite sassy female dick.

The official conference began on Friday, and that evening, a local pub and bookstore hosted a couple of great ice breaker events. Conference attendees gathered at the pub over pitchers of beer and an open mic where writers could read poetry or flash fiction or selected excerpts. The bookstore set up tables for board games. One of the games was a cross between creating crossword puzzles and scrabble. The game was played in teams, and agents, editors, and writers of all descriptions grouped together to extend their word play agility. I opted for the bookstore games. Between rounds, conversation flowed in a relaxed atmosphere, free of expectation. Acquaintances were formed that lasted through the weekend.

As I attended subsequent conferences, I noted that, for many of the writers in attendance, the expectation was high. They wanted to be discovered or found. However, there was a not-so-invisible line between those in the professional, established positions and the wannabes. Those who had the coveted power to discover and snatch the quivering wannabe from the dregs appeared to have other things on their minds. They tended to group together with other agents or editors, the established writers formed their own huddle, flashing smiles as they autographed books, only to return to eye-rolling amongst the other real writers. Once I sat down at a table where Robert Ferrigno sat alone. I knew that he and I had come from the same town in California and wanted to ask him several things, like how living in Belmont Shore had contributed to the writing of Horse Latitudes or how long he’d lived in Washington and what had brought him up here. He literally rolled his eyes at me, and answered in monosyllables until a romance writer came over and rescued him from me. “You look bored,” she said. He growled and nodded. Okay…time for me to move on back to the corner with the other nobodies. I learned my place right and proper.

That’s not to say they’re all like Ferrigno. That experience stands out in my mind because he was just so openly affronted by my disregard for his position at the conference relative to mine. I’ve had some great conversations with writers as well. Nancy Kress is a wonderful writer to have at any conference. She’s a great teacher and workshop leader, and she likes talking to writers of all descriptions. I felt as though she honestly enjoyed visiting with us. Sara Paretsky, Steve Martini were also a pleasure to spend time with. My all time favorite writer event was with Leslie Marmon Silko at The Room of Her Own writers retreat for women. That week-long retreat stands alone among events for writers as the greatest thing a writer can do for herself.

After I finished my YA novel, I made two appointments at the Whidbey Island Conference. I wanted to meet with an agent of YA material. And I wanted to meet with an editor of a major publishing house to discuss the premise of my memoir. The agent said that the story line of my book sounded intriguing and asked for a partial. She returned it within the same week I sent it with a standard rejection note. The editor sat with her arms folded across her chest, obviously wishing this morning would end. The expression on her face said, “What.” Not a question. Since I knew from the moment I walked in the room that she felt the entire process of meeting with unpublished writers was a waste of her time, I found myself at a loss for words. Without unfolding her arms, she said to me, “Adoption memoirs have been done before and are boring.” I thanked her for her time and waited for her to thank me for my thirty dollars, which she didn’t.

Overall, the game night stands out as the most productive event I’ve encountered at a three-day conference. The biggest obstacle conferences have to overcome is the tension formed by the fledgling writer’s desire for a break, versus the established folks aloof and guarded posturing.

We can all read Miss Snark. I don’t need to have someone stand at a podium and tell us about all the annoying things we do to cross over. I may be alone in saying this, but I am not the kind of person who excels in acting like a simpering puppy in need of a pat on the head. I don’t like to kiss ass. Sure, I want to be published, but I want it to be because my book is something someone wants to represent and not because I pant and shake like a Chihuahua any time someone with New York connections crosses my path. Maybe I’m still extremely naïve. I do know that getting published is sort of like getting struck by lightening. As a writer who workshops my work, I’ve read a lot of work by unpublished writers, and there’s just a whole fucking lot of unbelievably good stuff out there. There’s also a lot of drivel. I understand the challenge agents and publishers face in finding the right manuscripts. I know that there is a lot of great work out there that will never see a bookstore shelf. Where conference are concerned, though, ice breakers like the game and pub night and small groups where people sit around a table and talk about some aspect of writing with a single professional are the two most valuable activities a conference can offer.

Smokelong Anniversary

The new issue is out and full of fun, friends and surprises!!

E-pubs, OMG

I'm seeing so much buzz and fear about e-publishing, as in the Kindle vs. other devices and how is the publishing industry ever going to keep from dying. I think this all started with the recent BEA. I have a feeling this has happened before...I don't know, maybe when...

Natsuo Kirino

Natsuo Kirino has a new book coming out in July, Real World. I added her to my list after reading Out last fall. I know. The title, Out, sounds like a political thriller about a gay hazing. After reading the book, I never figured out what the title, Out, meant in relation to the book. Must be one of those times when east doesn’t quite translate into west. But the book was fascinating.

I’m struggling to figure out how to describe it. Out is a complex, feminist thriller in the Conradian tradition. How’s that for a description? The book tells the story of four women friends who work the graveyard shift at a box lunch factory. Their personalities are so different I wondered how they ever hooked up, but they work well together. The story takes off when one of them, a sad waif of a woman, steps out of her passivity and accidentally murders her husband during a fight. The women work together under the leadership of Katori to dispose of the body. The narrative is omniscient, giving us a “too much information” view of each character’s thoughts and activities around the events. And Kirino crosses taboos which make us cringe while they compel us to read on.

Even with the omniscient point of view, the story belongs to Katori. She’s the instigator, the one who is both driver of and driven by the events in the story. She has a grim double who haunts her and moves ever closer until they meet at the climactic conclusion.

I see Kirino as a rising star. Her work is deceptively hiding within the current boom of female crime fiction writers in Japan. I predict she’ll trace the same path as Raymond Chandler and remain obscured within this pulp fiction genre until someone discovers her significance. She’s prompted me to do two things. I want to check out other Japanese women crime writers, and I can’t wait to read Real World.

Is E-Publishing an Option?

Today, I did a little research about e-publishing. Specifically, I wanted to find what firms publish YA and whether they looked like stable businesses or shingle on-a-fireplug operations.

After taking Maya Reynolds’ class about the publishing business, I decided that I may have been too hasty about e-publishing. I lumped it in with all the vanity presses and self-publishing scams as a route that would do more harm than good. But Maya explained that, although she had gone the traditional route, with her book being published by an imprint of Penguin, two of her friends started out by having their books e-published. The e-pubbed authors earned a much higher royalty than those who go through the traditional houses. Traditional houses pay a royalty of 12 – 15%, whereas e-pubs pay an average of 45%. Maya said that, while she was toiling in search of an agent and a house to publish her book, her friends were enjoying royalties from their e-published books. In the long run, they were picked up by traditional publishing houses and ended up being published in print copy at about the same time as Maya’s book.

When Googling the search phrase, e-publishing, I came up with a bunch of questionable hits. The top hit, e-publishing.com, is a business selling services to ecommerce businesses. In other words, it sells internet marketing tools. Most of the sites I found focus on Romance novels. Some offered a mixed menu, but all focused on Romance or Erotic Romance, with Sci Fi coming in a distant second. Finally, I modified my search phrase to be “e-publishing YA” Here are some of the ones I found:

• Samhain, - not accepting ya right now. Mostly romance

• Ellora's Cave – Erotic Romance

• Loose Id – Erotic Romance

• Awe-struck – once did YA but not anymore

• Wings e-press – Guidelines discourage books with sex (which would rule my YA novel out). I didn’t see anything to indicate that they were a Christian publisher. They may have been just trying to discourage erotica. They also have a problem with anything to do with alternative lifestyles, which I take to mean anything gay. That kind of put me off, and certainly eliminates my other novel in the works. Overall, they are the best option I found for my YA novel…well, the only one, really. They’ve been around since 2002 and have a full staff.

• Writers Exchange – This looked like an established publisher. Again, mostly romance, but they publish a variety of genre. They didn’t list YA but had a note on their submissions page stating that writers could query about anything they don’t list. Their web site also has samples of the contracts they have with authors and a lengthy essay about the difference between them and vanity presses. They pay 60% in royalties.

With all of the e-pub sites, I was concerned by the sort of fly-by-night appearance of the web pages and their merchandise. The book covers were the sort of thing you’d find on the cover of an Ellory Queen magazine. Covers offer lots of torso shots and scenes of women being swept off their feet. The web pages all looked like they’d been put together with Frontpage on someone’s home computer. I didn’t see any web pages that looked as though they had been professionally developed.

All-in-all, I’m taking a step back. I think that e-publishing is going to explode in the next 2 – 5 years. It’s not there yet. My guess is that, way after the barn door’s closed, the traditional publishers will realize that this is a viable, low-risk method of selling books and will include it in their fare. It might make getting published a lot easier, but will include a whole lot of material that will never see a marketing dollar.

I’ve got my ear to the ground, though, for that break-out e-publisher who gets it right and bursts free from the crowd with long strides. Someone’s out there developing it right now. I can just smell it.

In the meantime…just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. I’ll continue to shop for an agent via the traditional route.

First Sentences

We’re told that first sentences are supposed to hook the reader. In a short story, especially in flash, the first sentence is critical. I’ve been going through some of the short story anthologies I love and looking at the first sentences of some of my favorite writers. I’m not trying to make a statement or anything. I just found this an interesting exercise. I can see the differences in style just by looking at the different sizes of the sentences. I would have included Henry James or Garcia-Marquez, but I didn’t want to make this entry too long. Here are some of the ones I looked at:

Raymond Carver:

In the kitchen, he poured another drink an dlooked at the bedroom suite in his front yard.

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house.

Vera’s car was there, no others, and Burt gave thanks for that.

John Cheever:

There is no sense in looking for trouble, but in any big, true picture of the city where we all live, there is surely room for one more word on the diehards, the hangers-on, the people who never got along and who never gave up, the insatiables that we have all known at one time or another.

You may have seen my mother waltzing on ice skates in Rockefeller Center.

The last time I saw my father was in Grand Central Station.

Mary Gaitskill

When he saw her on the way to work in the morning, he ignored her, even though he hadn’t seen her for four years.

Stephanie wasn’t a “professional lady” exactly; tricking was just something she slipped into, once a year or so, when she was feeling particularly revolted by clerical work, or when she couldn’t pay her bills.

The typing and secretarial class was held in a little basement room in the Business Building of the local community college.

Jhumpa Lahiri:

The noticed informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M.

Eliot had been going to Mrs. Sen’s for nearly a month, ever since school started in September.

They discovered the first one in a cupboard above the stove, beside an unopened bottle of malt vinegar.

What Led You To Your Novel

Someone on Zoetrope posed this great question..."What has led you to your novel?"

The first novel, the one I've finished, Giving It Over, lots of things. I was adopted, and I was a teen mother. My first daughter was conceived the same year that abortion became legal. I gave birth to her when I was fifteen. Those elements of my past give me a great interest in adoption, as an institution, and teen pregnancy.

I was grappling with some ideas for a YA novel and had a whole idea formulated in my head, but I couldn't seem to get into it. I don't remember what led me to this realization, but I discovered that my problem resided in the fact that I didn't care about my protagonist. I didn't love her or hate her, so I couldn't breath life into her. I asked myself what kind of character I could care about.

Around this time, Lynn walked out of the mist and started telling me about herself. By mist, I mean that mysterious place where characters come from when writers least expect it. Lynn was fifteen, pregnant, and was living in a house for pregnant girls who were going to give their babies up for adoption. She talked, I wrote. The story was just there. All of the characters were just there.

I get pissed off when people assume that this story is autobiographical because it deals with the subjects of adoption and teen pregnancy. The stories of the girls at Harbor House are not my story. Yet each of the girls is a facet of me in some way. Lynn the whimp, Melody the sassy jr. dyke, Lupita the silent one, Rebecca the hard-assed slut, Jenny the healer. They're all me. They're all teenaged girls who are pregnant and are among the first to make a choice about whether to terminate or complete their pregnancies. They're all part of the big County system that existed to harvest babies before abortion became legal.

So, I almost feel like I can't take credit for that novel because it didn't feel like I wrote it...it was just there, waiting to be plucked from the branches.

The biggest part of me that's in both of my novels is my idealism, or hope maybe. I want to believe that love is a force underneath all the bull shit, and that it can prevail in our lives if we just summon up the courage to let it in.

Self-centered day...

Ever read the posts on PostSecret and wonder if they were sent by someone you know....

...and that the message is written to you?

Hospital Corners

Yesterday, I took stock of all the pieces I’ve written for the 2^nd YA novel (working title now Hospital Corners). I was surprised to find that I was further along than I realized. I mean, I’ve known that a great many details were in my head. I just had no idea how many of them I’d written down. My goal this week is to type all the pieces that are hand written in all of the notebooks and organize them into some kind of order. Then I need to figure out where the gaps are. I’ll be like Emily Dickenson stitching together her poems, written on little pieces of cloth.

I wrote a partial outline last week, and I need to finish that as well, take it out to the end.

I hope I can get through a draft of this thing before I have to go back to work. Still looking for a day job and, as much as I need to find one before money runs out, I am really digging not working right now.

Giving It Over to Giving It Over

I’ve just completed Maya Reynolds’ online course on Everything You Need To Know About The Publishing Industry, and it was a well spent twenty bucks! Maya broke the course into the three branches of the industry, publishers, book distributors and agents. Her insights and research helped me to regain the confidence I needed to relaunch my efforts to find a home for Giving It Over, my YA novel.

For a while, I’d been thinking that I should just scrap GIO, and chalk it up to a first effort. But several things converged to push my ass off the seat. Maya’s class gave me information about approaching agents, and it offered information on a branch of publishing I had poo-pooed in the past. I want to look into the option of e-publishing. Marie contacted me and told me that she wanted to read GIO again. Out of the blue, she sent me an email saying that she hoped I hadn’t thrown it on the shelf. Okay. Then Papercuts blog had this entry today. Burning bushes.

The Plan:

• Give it another once over. It’s been a while since I’ve read it. I am betting that I’ll see it a lot differently now that it’s had time to settle.
• Post it on Zoe for a critique.
• Look into agents and e-publishers. I tossed e-publishing into the same bag with vanity presses and POD publishers. I thought that going that route would damage my credibility as a serious writer and close doors to ever seeing my work printed or distributed by the biggies. Turns out I’m wrong. I need to give e-publishing a closer look.
• Create a package, including a cover letter and synopsis and have those critiqued.
• Remember what Maya always says…EVERYTHING TAKES LONGER THAN YOU THINK.

Memoir Reading and Writing...

I started reading memoirs back when I decided to try writing one. I love memoirs. Good ones seem as though they were easy to write. They seldom reveal how difficult it was to put those words down on paper. My own efforts at writing a memoir have taught me that they are very difficult to write.

The memoirs I enjoy tell stories of lives lived. The good ones offer a balance of story and lessons learned. I do not enjoy memoirs where the author is so full of himself that he just can’t bear to let us go through life without knowing just how great he is. James Frey and Augustan Burroughs are two such memoirists. Their memoirs don’t display people who are learning anything in life. Rather, they present themselves as the ones from whom we could all stand to learn a few things. They’ve landed on this planet with all the answers. Now, if only the rest of us would recognize that. After all, they’ve generously supplied us with their brand of truth.

I read in an article on Critical Mass that Lillian Hellman’s memoir, Pentimento, possesses a questionable story line. However, the writer of the article said that she is worthy of forgiveness because the memoir is written with such beautiful prose. Pentimento is next on my reading list.

Some of the memoirs I enjoyed are:

• Color of Water
• The Glass Castle
• The Woman Warrior
• Lucky
• The Unreliable Truth
• Jill Kerr Conway's memoirs
• Mary Carr’s memoirs

My favorites, though, are:

• Autobiography of a Face and Truth and Beauty, which must be read together in that order.
• Out of Africa, because I adore Isak Dinesen.
• Living to Tell the Tale by Garcia Marquez. Either his memoir is a total fabrication or all of his fantastic fiction is based on his real life. I can read any paragraph in that book and see a wholly developed story within it. He's the man!
• Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir for people who love books. I read it and Lolita and The Ambassador and The Great Gatsby as part of the journey, and it was a wonderful experience.

I feel gratitude for these memoirists for the way they've shared themselves with me, whether the events of the story are fact or not.

I've tried writing a memoir, and it ain't easy. I kept returning to the question of, "What's my point?" Okay, so I’m an adoptee from the 1950s, when adoption records were sealed. I don’t know much about my origins, and never will. So, the theme could be what? Living with the unknown? It’s so not Hollywood. Then again, there is that Hollywood element, because of the circumstances. I was a foundling, discovered when a woman opened her car door one October morning. The car was just a few blocks away from the entrance to Paramount Studios. In fact, you can see the gates of the studio from the apartment building. In the other direction, the Hollywood sign looms above like a voyeur.

The Hollywood sign gave me the idea for writing the memoir as a sort of hybrid. Yes, there’s the story a girl’s life from childhood in southern California through her teen pregnancy and marriage at age fifteen. But what’s the point, Nancy? And beyond? But sprinkled throughout are the fictional stories the girl creates to give herself a sense of origin. These stories are all called Fade to Black, and each one is a flash of how she might have come to be in Mary Couch’s car back on that frosty morning in October of 1957. But what’s the point? And what’s so interesting about what or who I’ve become?

We all think our stories are interesting. When I was working my freelance writing business full time and marketing the heck out of myself, I can’t tell you how many people approached me with the pitch, “I have an incredible story, and I want you to write it for me. We’ll share the royalties.” So many people out there want to tell their story. But what I came up against writing mine is that it is hard to tell a truthful story.

None of us want to cast ourselves in an unfavorable light. We all want to tell the story of being a victim or of prevailing over adversity, where we are in the right and evil oppressors hold decks stacked in their favor. Does anyone want to read a story about a girl who grew up to believe that no one belongs to anyone, that family as we see it is an illusion. That we all must find our own families and sense of place in a world that tells us to be loyal to blood no matter what? Does anyone want to read a story of a girl who has babies very young and then leaves them to pursue her education? Can I ever find the heart and the courage to tell the real story? I left my husband in 1984 to find my own way, and I left my daughters with him. When I left, I watched my husband and mother close and lock the door behind me, effectively keeping me out of their lives. If my daughters were to read this, they would scream that it is a fiction. They believe that I abandoned them. They will always believe that I didn’t want them in my life. Believing that holds up the structure of the myth and drama they’ve created around their own lives.

But my story is my story. I can hear Ginger saying, “It’s always all about you, Mom.” Well, yes. My story is all about me. The good, the bad, but my truth. The things that allow me to get up in the morning and face another day, and the things that haunt me at night. The things that make me dance and the things that make me pull the covers over my head. Life takes a lot of courage, even for the most ordinary of us. No one’s going to knock on my door and say, “I’m your mother. I’ve finally found you.” The UPS truck isn’t going to pull up with a notice that I’ve been written into the will of some famous producer from the 1950s who knocked up the wardrobe girl so long ago. But the fantasies continue. I’m a fiction writer, so the fantasies will continue. That’s the easy part. The truth part is what’s hard. Maybe I’m making it more complicated than it is. Truths are often simple.

I just signed up for an online workshop on Everything You Need to Know About Publishing. The workshop is presented by Maya Reynolds. I’ve followed her blog sporadically for the past year or so. She’s a consistent great source of information about things happening in the publishing industry.

The workshop will cover the three branches of the industry:

• Publishers
• Agents
• Booksellers

I’ve done some research on my own, but I still feel that I have a long way to go.

On the short fiction front, I’ve been submitting something each day to the e-zines and have started tracking submissions and rejections. I think that it might be a good idea for me to create a couple of databases, one to track short fiction submissions and one for agent queries for my YA novel.

Actually, I am having a total geek-fest today. I started a subversion repository through my web host and downloaded Eclipse. Now, I'm backing all my writing up using this version control software. This was prompted when my laptop sort of wheezed the other day. I realized that I haven't been backing it up. Yeah. Me, not backing something up. So, I tried to ftp the major folders to the server where I have my shell account. The ftp software they use, well, she don't work so well. Then I noticed that they have subversion. Heh, heh, heh. I thought, that's how I'll do it, treat it like a software development project. Well, it is a development project of sorts. So, there's nothing to compile. It's a pain setting it up, but I'll always be able to keep the lastest versions backed up now, and I'll be able to revert if I need to go back to an earlier version. Cool beans.

Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming…

The Problem Turns Out to be My Head…Again

I’m having a little problem concentrating. Whenever I sit down to write, I’m all over the place. The one place I’m not is on the page. I can’t seem to go into The Zone no matter how much I want to.

So, typical me, I try to analyze why this is so. If I could just figure out the source of the problem, I could break through and get back to the bliss of writing.

Yesterday in my meditation class, the topic centered around being in the Now. As I was meditating and sat firmly centered in the Now, it came to me. My head, as usual, is the source of the problem. It thinks that it can solve problems by going into the past or effect outcomes by dancing off into the future. Oh, gee, Nancy. Stop struggling with publishers, and write the friggin book. That struggling with publishers part is purely in my head. I haven’t had any real exchange with publishers. Sometimes the focus is on finding an agent. Slow down, partner.

I’ve written one novel, which is now languishing. The YA one. I’ve decided that I need to let it settle for a bit. I think it may have some sex scenes that are too explicit in places for a YA audience, but I’m not ready to turn it into a mainstream novel either.

In the meantime, I have a new novel to work on. The outline is semi-complete. The characters are starting to talk amongst themselves, and I am missing it because my head is spending time anywhere except here and Now. When Marsha said yesterday that our creativity resides in the Now, I thought, Oh.

I shouldn’t be surprised to find out that my head is the source of the problem. It always is. I once heard a speaker talk about it and say that his head is convinced that it can kill him and keep on living. Anyone who understands that, as I did, knows how dangerous it is to let the head be in charge.

Okay, so time to regroup. As always, the answers come when my house is in order. Being here Now, not in the future, not in the past. Here Now. Proceed.

The Meaning of Sun Day

It’s a beautiful day outside. What am I going to do about it? Here in the Seattle area, a blue sky is something we catch like surfers catch waves. Especially this time of year, we go through our days, waiting for our set. Rain, rain, rain, rain, sun, rain, rain, sun, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, sun, sun, rain…. When the sun comes out, everyone gets perky.

I’m in a complete fit of excitement and stress because there are so many places I want to go while the weather is nice, and I just can’t decide. I want to go somewhere and write. It can’t be too far out there because clouds could roll in at any moment and obliterate the sun. But it can be somewhere away from the sound of traffic.

• Spenser Island?
• A bike ride to Redmond for lunch and a sit by the fountain?
• Bike ride to Snohomish for a sit at Wired and Unplugged?
• A jog around the lake and a trip to the pool before sitting lakeside with a notepad?
• A hike up to lower Wallace Falls to sit near the roar of the water at the covered picnic table?
• A drive to Deception Falls for a walk in the dewy woods and a sit on the bench in a fairy forest?
• That bike ride Terri told me about that runs between Gold Bar and Index, where there are flat rocks by the river to have a picnic?
• Those cliffs by Deception Pass with a view of the San Juans and all the way to Canada?
  
• That cafe by the water on Whidbey Island with the wonderful lobster bisque?
  
• My back yard?

Okay. Gotta go. Writing to do.

Does It Ever Get Easier?

Okay, time to break out the big guns. I’m not working at a day job right now and so have all kinds of time to write. But am I writing? I’m doing a lot of thinking about writing, but not much actual work. I have the idea, the outline, the characters are starting to whine, so what do I do?

Here’s the deal. It comes down to making a commitment. I’ve written a novel, and now I know what it takes. I know that a big piece of myself went into my first novel. I’d love to see it published, but, even if it never is, I am so glad I wrote it. The novel was a journey into my imagination and was full of magic. But it’s also a piece of me.

This next novel will command an even bigger piece of me. I already know it. I’m frozen because I am afraid. Can I tell this story? Can I tell it honestly, without regard to the audience? Can I bind and gag my internal editor long enough to let it flow and get it out?

Quite simply, I must.

I need to keep moving. I need to do two things. First, I need to finish cleaning and organizing my house, create a space to write. I realized today that the clutter around here contributes to my inability to concentrate. Or am I just making another excuse? No, I think it does.

I was having my hair done today. For me, hair dressers are all better than the best of therapists, and they’re only about a third the price. So, I was having my hair done today, and I was trying to explain this to her. She didn’t get it, but she listened. I said that to start a novel and not finish it would be like starting to build a structure in your backyard but never finishing it. Every time you go outside, the friggin thing is out there. You have to walk over it every time you go to get in your car. It’s big, it’s messy, and it’s loud. As I was talking, I suddenly had a flash in my head of the clutter of my house. There are papers everywhere. I’ve started to clear it up and organize it, but I haven’t finished. It’s in exactly the same state as the outline of my novel. The outline is well underway but it’s lying in files and in my head like the fragments of paper all over my house.

I told Terri to cut my hair short, and I resolved to go home and move through the tasks in front of me. Debbie Strom always used to tell me to just do what's in front of me. Amazing how simple that is and how well it works.

Boycott Amazon

Because of the Amazon/Booksurge ultimatum, I have elected to boycott Amazon. Here are some great places where you can order books online and live an Amazon-free life just like me:

Third Place Books
Elliott Bay Book Company (also a great site for book browsing)
Powell's

I know that there are tons of other private bookstores in the country that warrant our business, have userfriendly web sites and will ship books anywhere. These are the ones I know and have used. I am pleased by the thought that Amazon may just be the force that prompts us to return to the small, private booksellers. I know, I'm a daydreamer. Nice thought, though, huh?

Infamous

I came across a film telling the story of Truman Capote’s research and writing of In Cold Blood, Infamous. The film was excellent and had an incredible cast. Signorney Weaver, Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rossellini.

Sandra Bullock plays a wonderful Harper Lee. The movie is sprinkled with documentary-style interviews. She has two is serious, tear drawing monologues that are the best performance I’ve ever seen of her. She isn’t staged to look beautiful or glamorous, but, of course, she still is, with those clear eyes that will make anyone believe anything she says.

Toby Jones, who has played small parts in so many countless movies, is a picture perfect Truman Capote. The movie is geared to show how the writing of In Cold Blood broke Capote’s spirit, and Jones makes the perfect model for this. He begins light and caricature-like, but finishes as a tragic, broken, but very real figure.

It’s impossible to see this movie without comparing it to Capote, which came out just the year before. I, personally, liked Infamous much more. The cast, the acting, the depicting of the story, the focus on Capote were all better. Both were wonderful, but Jones comes in with no need for a photo finish. Combined, the films show us that there is more than one way to render horrific vulnerability.

But why did they make this movie on the heels of the other? There must be some kind of bizarre Hollywood story behind this. I didn’t know about this film when it was in the theaters. Yet, Capote had excellent press. Strange.

On the Road Again

Life can turn a corner any time. Mine just did. My contract job has ended, and now I have time to write and read and do some of the things I love to do. I also have to find another job. The challenge is keeping the wolves at bay well enough so that I can write and make some progress. I have millions of things that I could do with this time, and I can’t afford to let fear of the future take over and rule my thoughts and energies.

Ideally, I’d love to find a job that doesn’t take 50 – 70 hours a week of my total focus. The last one did, and my personal life and interests fell off the edge.

While I’m looking for a job, I can also work on the following:

• New novel
• Queries for agents for completed YA novelSubmit flash pieces and short stories to various pubs
• Write flash
• Create application package and curricula for teaching writing to WA State schools
• Book reviews
• Blog

No shortage of work. I want to maintain a healthy daily schedule to include the list items above, as well as exercise and organizing my home. I’ve already started with my office. I have a mountain of paperwork to organize. I can’t use any of the information I have unless I can find it. Once my office is organized, I can revisit things like the information I gathered from the retreat I attended last July in New Mexico. I have contact information for the people who’ve dropped off my radar, and lots of good direction on a variety of things.

I sense that this could be a turning point for me and my career. I can see it as an opportunity rather than a hardship.

24-hour Short Story Contest

I’ve signed up for the 24-hour short story contest, put out by writersweekly.com.

http://www.writersweekly.com/misc/contest.php

The story topic is announced at noon, central time, April 26^th, and we’re off! Only 500 applicants are allowed. There’s a $5.00 entry fee. The 1^st prize is $300 bucks and publication on writersweekly.

Why am I doing this? Because it’s my idea of fun, that’s why. I can’t resist the challenge of writing to a prompt. Being prompted or pushed is sometimes the best way to get something on paper. I love thefirstline.com, which has a quarterly prompt of a first sentence from which writers must create a story. I’ve only submitted one, which was summarily rejected. But I’ve written stories to several of their prompts. I love that they say their inspiration for the first line prompt is from the movie Out of Africa. In the movie, Meryl Streep/Isak Dinesen says that she likes to tell stories but someone must always supply the first line, and it can be absolutely anything. One of her dinner guests concocts a twisty, incongruous line, and she runs with it, mesmerizing them with the way she can create something of beauty from something meant to stump her.

This 24-hour short story prompt will either be a romp or a pile of rubble, as these things to. We’ll see.

Candy Store

Oh, happy day. I’ve found the candy store.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

This is the place to go for all of those books I’ve always meant to read but have never gotten around to. I’ve always meant to read Jane Austen. I’ve never gotten around to reading Little Women, either. And I can always revisit some old favorites like Jayne Eyre. Good stuff!

I’ve noticed that the Gutenberg project frequently comes up in searches for references from books. For example, the other day, I was googling around to find the passage from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio about the sweet, twisted little apples. Google handed me the Gutenberg copy of the book. Whereas Google’s own online book project hands over only portions of books, Gutenberg consistently provides the entire text.