The Unreliable Narrator - Love or Hate?

Another photo from Meow Wolf. Nnedi Okorafor and I fell in love with this crazy kitchen and had to photograph each other in it. One of the most fun aspects of this "immersive experience" is not only being able to touch and enter the exhibit, but in a way to become part of it as well. I felt like part of this kitchen and wanted to seem like it, too.

Art of all mediums is interesting in the way it interfaces with reality. It's impossible to recreate reality in art - and maybe not even desirable to do so - but art necessarily reflects and at best deepens our understanding of the real world. Our topic this week is the unreliable narrator - whether we love them, hate them, write them or avoid them.

An unreliable narrator is a point-of-view (POV) character - or characters who delude themselves in some way and thus misdirect the reader. They almost always occur in first-person or deep third-person POVs, though I've read one book where the omniscient narrator turned out at the very end to be deeply unreliable, making the reader realize the entire story was slanted - which was a terrific twist. Recent examples of unreliable narrators are the heroine of The Girl on the Train, who is drunk and emotionally traumatized, with memory gaps, or Gone Girl, where both POV characters are hiding who they really are and keeping secrets from the reader.

Me, I love an unreliable narrator. In fact, I'd make the case that all of my POV characters are unreliable, because I think human beings cannot escape being subjective about their experience in the world. There's no such thing as objective reality. A character will always interpret the world according to their own emotional landscape - which includes denial of some truths about themselves.

Reading a story with an unreliable narrator requires the reader pay close attention, because you can't just believe what the characters tell you. You have to be alert to subtle cues. I love reading an unreliable narrator in the same way I enjoy solving puzzles. I like writing them, too, though I've been sometimes accused of inconsistent characterization by those who don't understand that my characters are sometimes lying to themselves.

Now, a close friend of mine - and one of my critique partners - hates unreliable narrators. She wants to know what's real and what isn't, with very little tolerance for the gray areas.

What all do you think - love or hate an unreliable narrator? Any great examples?

What Really Matters When Balancing Your Life?

This week’s topic is how we maintain work/life balance…or whether or not you have a standing desk, a treadmill desk, believe in “butt in chair” or some other mantra. Hmmm, plenty of room there to write a post!

On the micro level, I sit at my writing desk, which is actually my great grandmother’s desk, a fact which pleases me for the continuity. I don’t think she wrote anything other than her own diary (which I’ve never seen – who knows if it even exists but didn’t every woman of her time keep some sort of journal?). My grandmother used the desk for her correspondence and I believe may have written some poetry. Then the desk came to me and I bang out science fiction romance and ancient Egyptian paranormal romance and probably both ladies would clutch their pearls at some of my scenes, but I believe they’d be supportive.

I sit in a cheap Amazon ergonomic chair at the moment, and before that had a cheap Walmart ergonomic chair that was actually better than the extremely elaborate and price-y ergo chair NASA/JPL provided me at the old day job. I used my Walmart chair until it literally fell apart after about eight years. (To be fair to the JPL chair, it had too many levers and controls that I could never figure out. It was probably extremely ergonomic if I’d ever mastered the amenities.)

I (mostly) write for a timed thirty two minute stint and then I get up and walk around, do housework or other activity on my feet for at least ten minutes before resuming my place at the desk. Why that exact time frame, you ask? Well, I used to do forty two minutes but that was too long to sit in this one spot, and thirty minutes feels too short. Go figure! Ten minutes of activity isn’t long enough to kill my creativity if I’m doing well. If I’m in the flow of writing, I never even hear the timer and I just keep writing until I realize my whole body has gotten cramped and stiff.  Forget time limits!

I have a trackball mouse, wrist braces if needed for a bad week, a lower back support and an ergonomic foot rest.

I try to walk a certain number of steps every day and to avoid sugar. Don’t ask me how I do on those goals.

And a cat to supervise my writing. Did I mention Jake?

I TRY to write at least a little bit every day, but most days I can do 2-3K words. Yes, I spend too much time on social media.

On the macro level, two events defined my approach to work/life balance, which that life is too short to waste on things I don’t enjoy or which are stressful, and that life can end at literally any moment so be sure you’re getting the things done you really care about. My family is the most important thing to me and if they need me, I’m there. And of course one has to take the trash out, go to the dentist, have a mammogram, go to the day job to support themselves and their family (before I became a fulltime author)…but life is TOO SHORT to waste forcing myself to finish reading books I’m not into, watching movies or TV shows I’m not into, cleaning the oven, taking on thankless jobs because someone expects me to do so…etc etc etc.

What gave me this attitude? I’ve talked about both things before but briefly, one evening after work my husband went out for a bike ride with his best friend and ten minutes later the neighbors were at my door to tell me there’d been a terrible accident. An athlete and former Marine, he died in the prime of life, in his mid thirties. Our children were 3 and 5. And he was literally hit by a truck, so I don't take that phrase lightly. It happens.

Second, one morning while attending a business conference I came within about 60 seconds of dying (according to the doctors), after choking on food and passing out. Only the fact that I was able to pantomime the Heimlich Maneuver to the co-worker who was at the table with me in the seconds before I lost consciousness saved my life. And the fact he was a big strong guy, who persisted in doing the maneuver fourteen times before the obstruction came loose and my brain got oxygen again. Approximately 5000 people a year die in similar incidents. I would have been done, gone, no more time to write another word or more importantly, to hug my kids.

So when it comes to your allotted time on this Earth there are no guarantees, no promises, perhaps no chance for a few last acts or even words….

I may sound cynical here but I’ve had the experiences to support what I’m saying. It may be an uncomfortable thought and everyone expects to peacefully pass away in their sleep at 105, so they feel there’s plenty of time….

Don’t waste your life on things that don’t matter to you, okay?

NOTE: Photos are Author's own or purchased from DepositPhotos

Balance: The Involuntary Standing Desk

I have a standing desk. My standing desk has a chair. As you can see by the photo at right, whether I sit or stand is not at all up to me. This means that any notion of balancing anything is dictated by my furry masters. 

That probably sounds wrong.

Balance is such a personal thing. Most people with day jobs have to worry about work/life balance. Writers have a set of unique balance requirements in that we have to look after our brains as much (or more in some cases) as we look after our bodies. We're asking a whole bunch of our minds while we live inside our stories and attempt to imbue our characters with emotions we usually evoke in ourselves to some extent as we put them on paper.

Reading books written for laymen by brain scientists has been a thing recently and one of the fun concepts is that emotion in the body defines reality for the brain which subsequently releases chemicals in response to that emotion. Do you get angry remembering how that twit in the blue car cut you off in traffic? If I've understood the biology correctly, the brain scientists are saying that you brain and body can't tell that your anger is about the past. You're angry now. Therefore there's a threat now. Have some adrenaline and a few stress hormones to go with it. Now your body is reacting physically to a threat that's not even present. We all do this. I get that. But writers and actors do it as a living. And writers and actors need to know there's a need to purge the accumulated emotional and chemical baggage. 

Exercise, meditation, changing up and tuning our energy systems - whatever that means to you - they're all tools in the box. Getting out and away - seeing or doing something new, those can also be useful balancers. Sure. I get up at 5AM every day to meditate and do an hour of yoga. It's the single biggest predictor of whether I'll make my word count goal for the day or not. In no way do I recommend it to anyone else. You have to do you. 

I used to think I had to get up at 4AM on a consistent basis in order to make life work. I hated everyone and everything, including myself. All those years I thought I had mental illness and I had to take all those psychoactive medications to function. Turns out it was a major body clock issue. When I finally refused to get up at 4AM anymore, I was cured. So if I have any advice at all to offer here it would be this: Don't fuck with your body clock. Yes. You can train yourself to get up earlier, but if you notice you're getting and staying depressed? Back off. There's only so much play in your body's preferred sleep/wake cycle and a definite mounting cost the farther you deviate from it.

I strongly suspect that balance, like every aspect of health, is something you pursue but never quite catch. It's a work in progress and all any of us can do is keep trying.

Which, according to Hatshepsut, I will do standing.

Balancing Health While Writing

If you've been following me for any length of time, you know that January is a hard time on me, health-wise.  January in Austin is when the cedar pollen starts up, and that always does a number on me.  One year it hit me so hard, I had vertigo for a week. 

Of course, this sort of thing affects creativity, affects the work.  I try not to let it too much, and it does become a matter of powering through and just getting it done.  Which I've been making a point of doing, even if right now I'm highly medicated and a little out of it.  The point is I need to focus on the work, I need to get it done, because... well, not doing it is worse for me, emotionally.  A few days without writing or other creative work, and I get very testy.  That was the worst part of that vertigo bout-- I literally couldn't work. Eyes couldn't focus.  I couldn't do much of anything but lie in bed and watch West Wing.  It was terrible.

So thus I stay highly medicated right now to avoid that.  And keep working.  Which I've been doing: manuscript delivered to my editor this week.  Now onto the next things.

There's always the next things.

In All Things, Balance

Balancing writing with physical and emotional health...well, that's not a subject about which I can claim any expertise. When it comes to "emotional health," my marbles may be dinged and a few have chips, but, for the most part, they stay in their jar. I'm nowhere close to achieving the "physical health" part of the trifecta. I mean, I've a pretty good idea what I ought to be doing to arrest the dreaded "writer's spread" and stop the "chin-per-chapter" growth. Getting off my ass would be one sure-fire way. Alas, I don't have the grace of Jeffe to be able to walk and chew gum, so a treadmill desk is out of the question. Oh, who am I kidding? My list of excuses is longer than an epic fantasy box-set.

I have my weird, but it doesn't impede my writing.

Butt in chair, hands on keyboard works for me.

I have a day job. I'm on my feet an average if at least five hours a day. When I'm done with that, I write, I write by sitting my fanny in a seat and tapping away at the keys. I also make sure to turn off the internet if it's getting to distracting.

I have over 40 novels in print. I got them by sitting the hell down and writing, then repeating as necessary.

That's just me. You do you.

But get the writing done or no whining.

Why I'm Against Butt-in-Chair, Hands-on-Keyboard

I caught Isabel mid-yawn on this one. What I get for disturbing the cozy winter's nap with my photo-taking. She - like all cats - is the poster child for this week's topic, which is balancing writing with physical and emotional health.

There's a catchphrase that writers like to pass around, about maintaining productivity: BICHOK, or Butt-in-Chair, Hands-on-Keyboard. I get that it's a metaphor, meaning that you get writing done by actually writing, but it's one I quibble with because I'm so against the sitting-down part.

Four FIVE! years ago (I just checked, wow) almost exactly, I invested in a treadmill desk. I'm now on my second treadmill - hydraulic desk is still going strong! - and I consider it the best investment I ever made. It takes a *long* time to really ramp up and get in shape for extended walking like this. Even if you think you're in great walking shape, this kind of conditioning takes a while to build as the steadiness and extended times are very different. In 2017, I walked 2,537 miles. A whole lot of that was while writing. I think this the best thing a writer can do for their health, full stop. The only downside is that now I really hate sitting and feel like I can't write as well sitting down.

As for emotional health, I'm blessed with happy chemistry, so I don't struggle with depression or anxiety as some do. I am always working on tweaking my process and work days to maximize productivity, however.

In 2016, I tried to do too much. It was my first year writing full time, and a few things happened. I started writing five days a week instead of six, which compressed that effort into the five days. This isn't a problem except that I really amped up my daily wordcount goals. I had some high wordcount months - in December 2015, I had my highest month ever at 75,000 words - but then I'd have crash periods that followed. The upshot is that my overall wordcount fell off considerably in 2016

In 2017, I worked to remedy this by lowering my daily wordcount goals, but going for greater consistency. As you can see, 2017 words came up again nicely. For 2018, I'm trying to improve on that, and I'm trying something new: incorporating rest periods after finishing drafting a book. 

I've found that I have a down cycle after I've finished the draft of a book. Even if I try to write something else, I don't make much progress on it and I get annoyed with myself. It finally occurred to me to try honoring that rest period - which I seem to take whether I plan on it or not - and program in the down time.

So, this week I turned in book two of The Lost Princess Chronicles, EXILE OF DASNARIA. (These titles may change - more on THAT later.) Because the holidays and the flu got me all off schedule, I worked Sunday, too, finishing late on Monday.

Tuesday, I took the day entirely off, cleaning the house and doing the laundry, de-Christmasing - all the stuff that I'd let pile up. Good purging. Wednesday, I caught up on business stuff, including stuff about the aforementioned title changes. I also dorked around and watched a lot of YouTube videos I don't normally allow myself to squander time on. Thursday I got another book into shape - which I'm 99% sure I'm calling SHOOTING STAR - and sent that to my freelance editor. That just took some tweaking, no real creative investment.

On Friday, I took my car to be washed and waxed - a time investment I rarely indulge in (and my car unfortunately shows it) - and then spent time showing out of town guests around Santa Fe. 

This is me up on Canyon Road with SFF editor Ellen Datlow and fantasy writer Nnedi Okorafor. Ellen is in town for this event at George R.R. Martin's Cocteau Theater. If you're in the neighborhood, you should come! And Nnedi is here to meet with George on her new project that HBO optioned from her book WHO FEARS DEATH and GRRM is executive producing. We had a great time lunching and shopping, which then extended into cocktails and dinner with GRRM and bunch of other folks working in SFF publishing and production.

So, it was a really lovely week. Monday I'll work on page proofs of PRINCESS OF DASNARIA (again, name change pending), which is another non-creative task. Then I'll spend a few days on a new project before launching next week into drafting a new novel. It's feeling like a good thing to do. I'm feeling remarkably relaxed and replete with time.

Also, my house is clean.

Cook and Caravan Master - Tertiary Characters?

Chef Stephanie was first introduced in this book

I write in two genres primarily – science fiction romance (SFR) and Ancient Egyptian paranormal romance. I have a fantasy romance series started but it’s certainly not my primary focus.

Our topic this week is so-called ‘tertiary’ characters and do they ever try to take over a story?

In the SFR, I write pretty lean, with my focus on the hero and heroine and the dilemma they’re in. I might have a few secondary characters, especially if the novel is set on my Nebula Zephyr luxury cruiseliner (interstellar spaceship variety).  The ship has an entire crew obviously, not to mention a rotating set of passengers, but we’ve not met most of them. There are strong secondary characters, like Security Officer Red Thomsill and his fiancée Meg Antille, but they were the lead characters in their own novel  before moving to the Nebula Zephyr. An example of a tertiary character on the ship, I guess, might be the Executive Chef, Stephanie. She’s been in a few of the novels for a scene or two, and was the lead in my special Thanksgiving short story, but for the most part she’s in the background, cooking up those terrific five star meals the cruise line boasts about. Will she get her own plot someday? Maybe…but at this point I don’t have an idea for her. She’s certainly never tried to take over the story.

In the ancient Egyptian series I’m more likely to have tertiary characters because I’m dealing with a powerful Pharaoh and his court, as well as the entire pantheon of Egyptian gods, any of whom could show up in a book at any point. (Ancient deities are like that!) But again, none of them try to take over the book. They might find themselves appearing in other books where I hadn’t necessarily expected to place them but where they fit the narrative. A good example of this would be Caravan Master Ptahnetamun, who first appeared in Dancer of the Nile. He showed up again in Magic of the Nile and just recently in Lady of the Nile. (Yes, I am quite stuck on “of the Nile” as part of my book titles LOL.) He comes onstage for a few scenes where he’s needed and exits gracefully, never demanding his own story arc.

As others have said this week in discussing their characters, I do assume any or all of mine have a full, rich life going on, with all kinds of events and milestones…but none of that detail is needed for my story. Or at least not right now.

Honestly, it’s not something I worry about when I’m writing a book!