What Fuels The Words

I've been talking the past few weeks about driving forward, about the endurance, doing the hard work. That's really the only way books get written.  So then when the next question comes and it's, "So what drives you to do it?", I have a hard time answering.  Because, to me, it's almost like "why are you breathing oxygen?"

In the latest episode of Westworld-- without giving serious spoilers, when confronted with why he's done the things he's done, he answers, "I just wanted to tell my stories".  I feel very much the same way.  I know the stories I want to tell, I'm never plagued by writers' block, at least on a macro level.  (On a micro level, I sometimes don't know how a scene is supposed to work, and that's frustrating.  Sometimes a project isn't quite coming together and gets put to the side... but there's always more projects in the works.)   

Of course, right now I'm in a position of privilege.  I'm writing books that are already under contract-- doing work that I know where it's going to go.  Back when I was writing books without an agent or a publisher?  There I was fueled just by the fire in my gut-- that I had to tell the stories of Maradaine, and get it out there in the world.  Someone once told me that writing novels was a thing you only did if you can't imagine not doing it. I think that's about right.  And I'm still not satisfied.  Each novel, I'm hungry for.  

And I bet you are as well.  So get down to those word mines, and get to work.  No one else is going to do it for you.

Inner Drive

Last evening, my family went to the movie theater to watch the filmed version of the National Theater's production of Hamlet, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. (Amazing. Go see it if you have the chance.)

It was not a live feed, but it lost none of the live theater vigor and momentum that a film simply cannot reproduce. Film is distanced by editing and changes of scene and setting, but in theater they do all that right before your eyes, right now. The actors and crew work magic and transport you from your seat to another time and place. They sing, dance. They deliver lines as if they've just revealed their deepest heart and you weep with them. I've worked around theater. I've been to some big productions. I used to play in a rock band. Live performance can transmit an enormous amount of energy between performers and audience and back again.

My son, who was a good kid drifting through his youth as many kids do, decided a few years back that he wanted to try acting. I encouraged it. He landed a decent role in the smaller of the local theather's next production. He was amazing...line delivery, at ease on stage. And that kid blossomed. Grades went up, confidence increased, and he stopped drifting. He had realized he had a motor and could decide exactly where he went and how fast. He learned he was in control of his life.

Much has occurred since and now he's about to embark on a role in a web-series. He is beyond excited. So am I.

I knew seeing this stage play (even tho filmed) would be good for him. At intermission we talked and it became clear that he had just realized the bar could be set much higher than he had previously thought. Do you have any idea how awesome it is to see a kid's eyes sparkle because he's humbly admitted to you that he knows he has a lot of work to do--and is eager to get started?

That kid works out regularly. He eats right. This has influenced me; I've lost fifteen pounds so far.

I recognize his inner drive. It brings joy to my heart. All I have to do is encourage and support him, scope out the next steps, shine the light on them and get out of his way. He wants to do it. He is willing to work. He is willing to learn. He makes every effort to be prepared for the next opportunity as he climbs.

I was like that once. I'd drifted.... Good at art. Good at writing. Really good at playing music. I decided to focus on the band. As a seventeen year old girl who had been playing guitar for a year and could rock on-par with local fellas of twenty-one to twenty-five who'd been playing for six or seven years, a chick who could play the solos but tended toward more melodic emotive notes than the blazing jibberish so many did...I had something. I had talent and drive inside me. I played for hours and hours every day because I wanted to.

But I didn't have parents who understood how good I was or who had a clue how to help me be what I wanted to be, even if they had wanted that life for me -- which they didn't. They permitted me to be in a band and rehearse and play in the bars, but they set up road blocks as well. Eventually, my fire for that turned to embers. I allowed it, influenced by family ties and a near-deadly experience with electricity. Besides, too many people (read as too many attitidues + too many decision-makers + not enough of my interests) needed to be involved and it wasn't sustainable without total support.

But words...I didn't need three other people to be on board with the story to write it. I didn't need to use the car to go write. If I was up late writing, my folks didn't have to wait up for me.

I allowed their path for me to become mine. It failed. After I'd tried it their way, twice, I did what I had originally wanted to do. I went to college, but I did it as a mother of four and still managed to graduate summa cum laude. I've had six novels published by a major NY house.

I'm not done yet.

My drive is still on. My motor is churning hard and there's fuel a-plenty to burn.

Recognize that thing you do that gives you some joy. You know, that thing you do for you, the thing you're passionate about, the thing you've worked hard to nurture your talent around. That thing you willingly give your 'free' time to, it's your thing. Like the energy transferring from actor to audience and back, when you do your thing, you feed your fire and that fire feeds you. Be willing to work and learn. Be willing to fail and try again. Make every effort to be prepared for the next opportunity that comes. Never give up. The pursuit gives you not only joy, but personal character. 

Motivated Writing: Embrace Your Weird

What motivates me to put words on the page? All my glorious and sundry weirdness. Oh, I know some of you think I'm a stickler who doesn't need to buy diamonds because I can poop my own. That's...occasionally true. However, being an introverted control freak does not limit my very special brand of odd. It fuels it, dear readers. It totally fuels it. How so? ~cackles~ Allow me to list the ways:

1. Many of the conversations I have with myself are awesome and need to be inflicted on the world.
2. After I've properly organized all the items on a store's shelf, I pay for my goods (when the cashier asks if I want paper or plastic, my answer is usually "you too"),then go home to pen total chaos inspired by shampoos in the conditioner rows.
3. When invited out to dinner, I order pie. Preferably cherry, though apple will do in a pinch. 5-course meal? Lovely. Bring me a new slice each round. Oh, and add ice cream for the main course. In my worlds, that's no reason for a date to leave. It's how the protagonist levels up her magic. 
4. Thanks to anxiety attacks, I will randomly get up and walk away, out, around, through...whichever direction keeps me in motion and distracted. Yes, socially, that's considered beyond the pale of rude; though, it is a fascinating character study in diverse reactions to a single unconventional action. Once I make it home--safe within my refuge--writing the revolt and abandonment scenes are rather easy. 
5. Finally, control. Complete. Total. Mistress of the Universe control. I have a plan, a list, and a timeline. Life is perfectly under con--wait, what the hell is that?  When did the sole of my shoe start flapping like a duckbill? The dog has ten minutes to do his outdoor business, why is he taking fifteen? The niblings are invading two days early and one has the bubonic plague? I have the next five pages word-for-word ready to roll from my mind, why is Windows taking thirty minutes to update?  ~shakes fists at sky~   KHAAAAAAAAAAAN! Godsdamn life. Full of plot twists.

Embrace your weird, dear readers. It's all the motivation you'll ever need.

What Motivates Me?

I haven't written much this week. It has nothing to do with the election and everything to do with the fact that I am busy.

I have a day job. We had a discussion, me and the management. The thing is the coffeeshop is understaffed. I appreciate that. For the last two weeks it's been just at 40 hours per week. As of today, I'm back to around 25-30. That is acceptable.

Along with my frequent partner in crime, Christopher Golden, I am teaching a writing course that's taking approximately fifteen hours of research and editing each week, plus three hours each Sunday for the actual class itself.

Now and then life gets in the way and there goes a few more hours lost to contemplation as a widower freshly on the wrong side of fifty. We can file that one under "shit happens and get over it," but that doesn't stop the way my life changes and I have to deal with it.

I'm starting the second book in a trilogy. It's fighting me. That, too, goes under "shit happens and get over it."

I have a lot of friends who are positively reeling from the election results. I mean staggering emotionally as if Rocky Balboa unleashed a few hundred blows on their souls instead of their bodies.

We are reaching that time of year when I tense up. I'm aware of it. I know it will happen. There is nothing I can do about it. Saturday night at World Fantasy fell on the 29th of October. That would have been my twenty-eighth wedding anniversary. The 27th was the thirty-first anniversary of my first date with the woman who shared a very large portion of my life with me.

December 23rd will be the seventh anniversary of the day I came home from work and found my wife dead.

And again, it all files under "shit happens and get over it."

There's not much to say about that really.  I will look at these issues, I will reel from them, and then I will move on, because as Stephen King once said (and I'm paraphrasing) "There are two choices in this world, get busy living, or get busy dying."

I still prefer to live.

And then Tuesday happened and the common sense I expected to prevail did not. A great number of people are staggered, as I have already stated. I am not.

I do not agree with any racist policies. I believe that people who want to have same sex lovers, or who have had that choice removed by their biology, should be allowed to do as they please so long as they do not force themselves on anyone. I believe that any transgender going through a grueling process that is harsh under any standards, physical or emotional, should be allowed to identify as they see fit. I believe that this country embraces freedom of religion, not just certain faiths. I firmly stand by my belief that the color of a person's skin, or the gender of the person in question, is not a significant or proper way to judge them. I prefer to judge the character and actions of a person instead and I expect the exact same courtesy. I believe that we should be allowed to say whatever we damned well please, because of the First Amendment, but I'm okay with each and every proviso added to that Amendment. I believe that green cups issued by Starbucks are just green cups that were meant to encourage unity and not an attempt to corrupt the universe. I also believe the red cups showed up a week or so later.

I believe that once upon a time I had a beautiful, wonderful wife and she died. I believe she suffered a lot in the process and I suffered with her. That partner in crime? Chris Golden? He was my anchor for a lot of that. He helped me get my perspective back. He pointed out, and rightly, that a lot of my time was spent in anger when my wife was at her worst, because her illness was something that I could not fix. It cost me a small fortune and medical bills drove us into bankruptcy. That was medical bills AFTER insurance.

All of the things that I have mentioned are the fuel that helps me write. They are facets of who I am.

My next books starts off with a husband trying, and failing, to save his family. Every event that takes place from that scene on is directly connected to his actions and to the actions that brought him into play as a man on a mission of salvation, redemption and revenge.

Don't think the connection is lost on me. it wasn't conscious when I started writing, but, yes, I am still dealing with the death of my life partner. I'm still looking back from time to time and wondering how different my world might have been if we'd had children.

I still contemplate the fact that I could not help her more than I did. As I have said many times in the Dinner for One essays, it is what it is. These are events that shape my worldview. They are only the smallest sampling.

The next few years could well be some of the worst this nation has seen. We don't know one way or the other. Time will tell.

Now that I've said that, I'll go ahead and point something out to you.

Mostly I'm a happy person. I've cut a lot of the negatives out of my life. The emotional vampires, the people who made me miserable with their attitudes, they are gone. I moved away. I moved on.

Mostly I'm an optimist.

Mostly.

When I am not, when there are things that anger me or make me afraid, I tend to work them out i n my fiction. Not all that long ago a customer pissed me off in the worst possible way. Ratter than drag his ass outside and tune him up the way I wanted to, the way my inner savage very nearly demanded, I let it go.

Then I killed said ass in a book instead. No one could ever prove who I killed in a court of law and the customer in question is alive and well, but I know who I was killing. I still see him regularly and we get along fine. And if he pisses me off again, I'll tear his soul to pieces in another story or book.

And I'll do my best to remain optimistic, regardless of what the world throws my way. I may not always succeed, but I will try.

On Wednesday morning I went to work from 4:30 AM until 1:00 PM. I did not post onFacebook or twitter or anywhere else. I contemplated the forthcoming change in my country and my world.

Instead of going on a rant or contemplating how royally screwed we are as a nation if the man who is going to be our president keeps his words from the campaign trail (he won't, not all of them at least, none of the POTUS do) I thought about it and posted the following advice that I will try to live by while I contemplate the darker anniversaries coming my way and President trump's ascension into the Oval Office:


It's exactly this simple: Lead by example. Be the person you want to be. Be kind. Be thoughtful. Be optimistic in the face of your dread. Hatred solves nothing. Fear is the tool of terrorists, and I will not live in its shadow. Hatred weakens us all. 
Don't fall victim to the tools you find offensive. 
Don't use those tools in an effort to strengthen yourself. 
But, also, be ready to defend yourself if you have to, and to defend those who are hurt or weakened. Do not tolerate bullies.
Be a good person. In the end that is all we have.

It is what it is.

Channel Your Outrage into Art

Can our calendar guru see into the future? If so, I want words with KAK on if she saw these elections results coming!

Maybe it's just me reading in. Our topic this week is: Writing fuel - taking caffeine (coffee and tea) off the table, what fuels your words?

Lemme tell you, folks - I've been writing a lot this week. And it's not because I upped my caffeine intake. It's no secret I was super excited to elect the first woman president of the U.S. I've also long admired Hillary Rodham Clinton and her stellar career. Along with her skin that must be six inches thick, because I don't know how she stands all the muck that's been flung at her over the years. And then she lost to a man who, while I understand he may be the hope of those who've felt silenced, has embodied the worst of human nature. Greed, selfishness, hatred, racism, bigotry. Those who voted for him assure us Trump won't be as bad as he seems, that he didn't mean everything he said, or that it's been exaggerated by the media.

We can only hope.

And keep vigilant.

Also, I've been writing a lot.

One thing about outrage, anger, and other strong emotions - they channel well into making art. My Twelve Kingdoms books started as my answer to despotic patriarchy. The series is the story of the fairy tale three princesses, each more beautiful than the last. They're the daughters of High King Uorsin. This is a spoiler if you haven't read the books, but Uorsin is not a nice guy. In fact, he's a tyrant, and he becomes increasingly unhinged over the course of the initial trilogy.

I found it interesting that some reviews of the third book, THE TALON OF THE HAWK, said that I took Uorsin too far, that he didn't need to be that awful. And yet real world examples easily that awful and worse.

None of that mattered to me, though. He met the sword of justice just as I wanted him to - and by the hands I felt should serve his sentence. And the women triumph.

I may have been working out a few things.

But that's what we do with art. We take that emotion, those experiences, and we channel and transform them. Art communicates a message. Stories do, too.

I've been writing a lot this week. I hope you all are finding an outlet for how you feel, too.

Success Is A Moving Target

Whatever success I have attained as a writer is due to the fact that I write. Daily. I sit in the chair at my great grandmother's desk and I ignore the cats and the social media and everything else (certainly I ignore the dust bunnies) and I WRITE.

I don't have daily goals of any type. I write until the passion of that particular writing session has passed, whether it's half an hour or four hours. If it's a day I really don't feel like writing, I try to at least open the current WIP and get a few hundred words on the page. Usually I end up writing many more than that, once I begin.

This leads to a subpart of the secret to my success - I don't edit and criticize and doubt myself as the first draft moves from my head to the page in whatever mystical fashion this process occurs. I KNOW the first draft will be clunky and have problems and feature inelegant sentences and need tons of revisions. That's the process, folks. But the words have got to get out of my head and onto a page (which nowadays is actually a WORD file) before I can start making them pretty. I've known people who are just paralyzed because they feel like every word has to be a jewel, set into platinum and gold, the first time it's written down. Um no. Not for me at least. That would be great if course, but it's not how books get written in my house.

Additionally, any success I accrue is due to the fact that someone other than me enjoys my book in its final, fully edited and copy edited state, and is willing to spend hard earned money to buy it. I love my readers and am continually amazed and enthralled and excited to have people who want to read my books. And talk about them! And review them!

I qualified the headline that success is a moving target because not too long ago I found a  piece of paper in the filing cabinet where I'd jotted down my goals a couple of years before I actually got published. At that time I pretty much defined success as being published. Period. Thank you, Carina Press, for picking up Priestess of the Nile. Success!

Only to be rapidly overtaken by a new definition of writerly success - get the next book written and sold. Then I wanted to be self published....

I won't take you book by book but somewhere along the way I switched goals to defining success as the moment I could leave the day job and write fulltime because the books would be doing so well. Yup, have now checked that box as of nearly two years ago....

But I want MOAR. I want to write a book that sells huge numbers of copies, breaks out and becomes a blockbuster movie! Yeah, being a scifi romance author, which is currently a small niche, that may prove to be a problem LOL. But you never know and that points me back to where I began this post - the secret is to write. I may never see my name in very tiny print on a movie credit scroll BUT for sure I won't if I don't write diligently and keep producing good new books.

Every book completed and released into the wild is another opportunity for good things to happen,  to give my readers a few hours of enjoyment, to find new readers, to maybe find LOTS of new readers and even someday have that movie deal.

Of course then I'll probably want the theme park ride to go along with the movie....and the action figures and....oh, I can stop now?

The Author with a stationary target in high school where her definition of writerly success would have been getting a story published in Analog magazine. (She didn't BTW.)

Success Doldrums

Success and the secrets thereto. I have few of one and the other - well - let's call it a work in progress. You can probably guess which is which.

I do have a vision of what success means to me - a benchmark, if you will. It has yet to be met. In truth, it has yet to get past my second mark (a specific amount earned.) But that's okay. Because while I recognize that I am currently in the doldrums Jeffe described in her post (doldrums she has navigated clear of) I also recognize that getting free of them is up to me.

I told you last week that Dad had a heart attack. The day after I mentioned it, he suffered another. We really thought we'd ended an era there. It was a sucky weekend that culminated in me moving off the boat with my cats and moving into my parents house because my miraculously recovering father cannot be left alone just now.

Dad is the one who fostered and fed my love of science fiction. He's the one who taught me to problem solve - which might not actually be a good thing because engineer and there's always an exquisitely complicated (but fun!) way to accomplish something in weeks what would take normal people a day to do. He'd hike me into the desert and up mountains just so we could break open rocks and see what was inside. He taught me to sail and once I got married to a landlubber, he helped me convert that landlubber into a sailing addict.

At the moment, writing is lost in the honor of being trusted to help him. We manage the ebb and flow of medications. Encouraging Dad to eat just a little bit more. Going for several 7 minute walks a day with my arm tucked through his to provide him a modicum of stability.

Getting to provide for my parents in this way was never on my success radar. It should have been, because it meshes so closely with one of my writing success goals - being able to support my family with writing. So while my writing 'success' is, indeed, very much a work in progress and I freely admit to being really sad right now because I'm SO CLOSE to the end of a novel that I cannot finish on schedule, there will be no giving up. If ever I am to meet my goals it will be solely because I am too stubborn and spiteful to quit.

If you want to win contests, you have to enter. If you want to publish books, you have to write them. If you fall down, you have to get back up again. And you know, if it is possible to develop super powers, that's the one I'm working on - the getting back up part. Over. And over. The novel will get finished. So will the next one. And then the one after that. And maybe somewhere in there, I'll cross another marker on my way to career success.

Knocked Down and Back Up

It seems almost inappropriate to me to talk about things like process and business of writing and writing careers right now.  It feels... well, describing how I feel would probably devolve into a rant of inarticulate swearing.  So when I look at the topic of the week to be "what does success mean to you and how do you define it?", I'm not even sure what I could say about that right now.

But then I also think that art and craft matter.  Especially when things seem bleakest.  Fundamentally my job is to help you, the audience, slip your brain to somewhere else for a little while.  That I can make someone's day a bit brighter, a bit easier... that means so much to me.  I recently heard from a fan who had to spend all day in a hospital waiting room while their daughter had a battery of tests, and they were grateful to have one of my books with them to get through the day.

I take those little scraps of joy every chance that I can, because at the core, that's what it's all about.  This business-- just like everything else in this world-- can grind you down so hard.  It will crack you across the face and not even have the decency to watch you fall down. 

Succeeding, to me, is finding the strength to stand up again, bloody and battered, and giving the world a tiny smirk and asking, "That all you got?"  

And that's what I'm gonna keep doing.