Protecting the Writing: a Quick How-To

I'm hard at work writing THE ORCHID THRONE, the first in my new trilogy for St. Martins Press. So, naturally, I had to impulse-buy this gorgeous orchid from Trader Joe's. It's my new desk ornament, following the USB-plug in Christmas tree, cherry blossom tree, and foaming cauldron. This one notably does NOT require electricity, which seems appropriate for the world I'm writing. However, it does require attention to be kept alive. So far my record with orchids is pretty abysmal. (Don't tell this gal!) We shall see. Any tips for keeping orchids alive in a desert climate?

Last week I traveled to Phoenix to give a presentation to the Desert Rose Romance Writers. This one was "A Taoist’s Guide to Staying Sane in the Writing Business." I talked a whole lot about how the relentless push to get rich can make us crazy, and how to find a peaceful place of sane creativity in the midst of that. But, during the great discussion at the end, one gal asked if I had advice about family who don't believe in your career, who actively interfere or dis what you're doing, or who won't approved of your eventual story.

This is, of course, not an easy question to answer, though several gals in the room had advice for her, too. It's also our topic at the SFF Seven this week: How much space do you give non-writing emotional labor - or how do you save mental space for the work with a head full of mortgage and other people's expectations? I'd call this a coincidence, but I'm a Taoist I know it's not.

Everybody struggles with this. It's an issue that affects everyone, not just writers, and not just creatives. Unless we're hermits, life is a balancing act of what we do to please ourselves and what we do to please others. At one end of the extreme, we have the sociopath (or hermit) who cares nothing for other people's needs or is completely isolated from them. At the other end is the doormat, that abject individual who lives as a metaphorical slave to the needs of others, to the point that they have nothing of their own.

The answer - as with all things of the Tao, since I'm already coming at it from that angle - is finding the middle way.

This is easier said than done. Like so many aspects of finding the middle way, it takes constant re-evaluation and adjustment - and honest self-examination. What we can depend on is that things will always change. Sometimes people in our lives honestly need us more than other times. There are illnesses and emergencies - emotional and physical - and times of crisis.

The trick is to differentiate the real crises from the over-dramatized kind. Because we all know those people, right? The ones who have daily crises, if not more often, and for whom EVERYTHING is a MAJOR HUGE DEAL SO YOU MUST PAY ATTENTION TO ME RIGHT NOW.

And I'm not just talking about cats!

So, how do we deal with this? By drawing boundaries and sticking to them. Make your writing sacred and build a fence around it. And a big stone wall. Maybe add a lava moat, too. Post the rules for entry clearly. If someone fakes their way in, then they get stiffer rules and penalties going forward until they prove they can be trusted again. Treat it like a game if you have to, but erect that fortress and defend it vigorously!

This goes for your own worries, too. Give those distracting thoughts names and identities and make them obey the rules, too. They don't get to come into the fortress. Everything and everyone gets their time and place.

Under heaven some things lead, some follow, 
some blow hot, some cold, 
some are strong, some weak, some are fulfilled, some fail.

So the wise soul keeps away
from the extremes, excess, extravagance.

Chapter 29, Tao Te Ching
by Lao Tzu, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin

That's how you do it: draw the boundaries and know that you'll have to defend them. And also know to keep from the extremes. Find the middle way.

Ideas Are Butterflies

For me, ideas are like butterflies – everywhere and of the moment, so if one flutters by that I like, I write myself a note with enough detail to jog my memory later. I can’t tell you how many ideas have escaped me because they were so cool I was sure I’d remember them…and then I didn’t. Only the fact that there’d been an idea…which is beyond frustrating. So write them DOWN is my advice!

Now some story ideas are HUGE and I won’t forget them, like writing a scifi novel based on the Titanic sinking, but set in the far future. That one I mulled for a long time before I actually wrote Wreck of the Nebula Dream and I had no trouble keeping it in the forefront of my mind. Titanic was a fascination of mine since I was a little girl (family lore, which I now actually doubt, was that we had a distant relative in Second Class who survived) and so it was no great surprise that I eventually wrote my own version of the shipwreck story.

But most of the little sparks or seeds that could turn into a story, or an interesting wrinkle in a story come to me while I’m reading magazines, either online or in real life, or looking at fashion magazines (some photo shoots are really edgy) or just going about the duties of daily life. I have a huge file of notes and articles torn out (or printed out) but you know what I’ve found? I almost never actually go back in and look at that file. When an idea inspires me, it’s usually a new idea and it’s so shiny or so enticing I just have to get right on it and develop a story around it. If an idea stays in my backlog for too long, it gets eclipsed by the newer stuff.

Actually Business Week has been a good source of ideas for me. For example, my Star Cruise: Songbird story was inspired by an article I read in BW about rock stars doing theme cruises for their fans. And the fact that one of my characters who appears in several scifi romance novels is connected to the Sectors spice merchant guild through her family connections started with a BW article on the real-life exotic spice trade.

To give another example, Mission to Mahjundar was inspired by a perfume ad and a calendar photo. I don’t own the rights to either photo so I can’t share them here (although I still have my somewhat tattered copies) but the backstory is as follows: One day I saw a photo of a windswept, abandoned temple, standing alone on a plateau, somewhere in the Middle East. The image remained with me and I pondered – as one does – what adventure would bring people to this remote location and what would happen to them there. What would they be seeking? Would they find whatever they needed? This became the inspiration for the temple of the Mahjundan Ten Gods, where Shalira must go on her wedding journey, to seek a key to her mother’s long-closed tomb. It also established in my mind that the planet Mahjundar was going to be loosely based on Middle Eastern themes. I’m not sure how much the completed novel carries that intent out since after all, the planet is not-Earth, but there was influence as I pictured the daily life Shalira might lead.

But the key thing that put all the other elements together in my mind and set off the plot came when I happened across a perfume ad in a magazine. The illustration was very dark in tone, with a woman in a purple-and-gold hooded cloak holding a beautiful crystal bottle that glowed golden. The light from the bottle illuminated her face. And I thought, that’s it! That’s Shalira inside the tomb. Then I needed to know who  would be there with her…and of course my Sectors Special Forces soldier, Mike Varone, told me he would be!

Ideas for the details of the book itself may also come from the same sources but once I have the big concept locked in, I'm more likely to be sitting at my dining room table, brainstorming with myself and saying, well if there's going to be an epidemic on an interstellar cruise liner, what kind of disease can it be? And off I go to research ebola and norovirus and a few other exotic things I can't mention or else I'll give part of the Star Cruise: Outbreak plot away.

So there you have it but this is only a partial discussion of where my ideas come from, because they literally come from everywhere, all the time. Only a few make it to the stage where I’m actively working to incorporate them into a novel. So many ideas in that flock of butterflies and so little time!

Story Ideas Versus Contest Entries

Tis the season for conferences and their contests again. Thus it is also the season for volunteering to judge for a few of those contests. This plugs neatly into this week's topic.

I will observe, as Marshall did - ideas are not the problem. At least not often. There IS a contest entry this year that is deeply, deeply problematic but none of the judges are sure whether it's an idea problem or an execution problem. The take away is that if this entry is meant as satire, the writer didn't have the chops to pull it off. But outside of that, none of us has yet run across an entry over years of this contest that has resembled any other entry we'd ever read. It doesn't matter how simple an idea is. What matters is the idea twisted through an author's unique perspective. That makes the story.

Where contest entries seem to run into problems is exactly where KAK pointed. Execution. You'd think you could come up with an idea for a book and then faithfully follow it from beginning to end. You'd think. Take a poll among authors. Find out how many of us end up losing sight of the ball and wandering in the weeds trying to recall what it was we were supposed to be looking for in the first place. The critique for most contest entries tends to be about lack of narrative drive - the author losing the through line and/or not giving the protagonist enough drive. The protagonist has to want something and want it badly enough to sustain 75-100k words. It's easy to say, tough to do.

I suspect this is why writing courses will never go out of business. It's easy to be convinced you need narrative drive. It's totally another to figure out how to execute that, assimilate the information, and then turn it into execution so effortless that it becomes a natural part of your voice. I get to say this because it's still a -- let's say -- development opportunity for me.

My as yet imperfect strategy for narrative drive is to ask character questions:
1. What does the protag want?
2. What does the protag need? (This may not be known to the protag - it often isn't at the beginning of a book.)

If I can answer those questions, I figure I might be on the right track. To somewhere.

It's not where you get your ideas, it's how you fuel your tank

"Where do you get your ideas?" is the question put to authors a lot, and it's fundamentally the wrong question.

The ideas are always out there.  They are almost irrelevant.  If you're looking for them, if you're thinking creatively of how to integrate them to each other, you'll find them.  What matters is how you turn that idea in to a story.

And that goes into how you're keeping your tank full.

By which I mean, as a writer, you should always be taking in input while you're making output.  That doesn't necessarily mean Read All The Books--- but you should be reading, of course-- but any other thing that can fuel your imagination: movies, television, music, art, anything.  That's what's going to give you the little bits that weave together to become new ideas. 

And you need that.  You can't keep driving on an empty tank.  It never works.

Don't be distracted by the shiny! It isn't story.

Regarding ideas and where to get 'em... Did you read KAK's post yesterday? What she said. I'll just add a tiny bit to it.

I get ideas from science news feeds and web sites, the brain-crunchy books of pop-science geniuses like Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk's Twitter feed (which is crazysauce, have you seen that thing?!), re-watches of TV shows that stoke my fangirl imagination (Farscape, Firefly, X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, Deep Space Nine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fringe, etc.), documentaries, vacation photos and journals, those people in the Starbucks who look tense and clearly have some drama going on, and, when all else fails, the disco black hole of YouTube.

The problem with ideas is that they aren't a story. Yeah, I know there's such a thing as an "idea story" ("What if we were all living in the dream of some dude name Jack?"), but the format has never worked for me. Maybe my ideas just aren't juicy enough to drive a whole story, I dunno.

For me, ideas are gems, scattered out on the bedspread. I pick up a science article here, a TV character's gesture there, and a dead language there, and I slip all those jewels into a velvet bag, give it a little shake, and start drawing them out, hopefully in an arrangement that appropiately bedazzles my story.

And I mean story in the Lisa Cron sense: "A story is about what the protagonist has to learn, to overcome, to deal with internally in order to solve the problem that the external plot poses."

So, as sparkly and beautiful as all those ideas are, honestly, they're just vehicles for telling a story. They aren't the story themselves.

Which is good news, right? I mean, you can get ideas from anywhere, and they don't even need to be good ideas. The trick is use all those shiny idea gems to to tell a story that means something to you.

Story Ideas: Problem Isn't The Concept; It's The Execution

Where Do I Get My Ideas?

For the high-concepts of stories? From my over-active imagination that is stimulated by life. The mundane morphing into the unusual, the ordinary that could shift to extraordinary with one tweak, the existential questions with practical answers, and the immediate concerns forgotten with a greater crisis; it's all fodder for a novel. An idea shortage is not a problem. An excess of ideas? Now there's a problem. Choosing which one(s) to pursue next? Choosing which ones to smash together into a new thing? Choosing which ones to abandon and which ones to beat into submission? Which ones get the investment of time and money? Which ones get pushed to the back of the queue? Which ones can be written in a timely manner and which ones will be long labors of love?

For the details of the story? Oh, now, this is the problematic part. The execution of the Great Concept. Again, abundance is the root of the trouble. Which path to trod? Which is unique without being alienating? There are drafts with whole tangents that seemed like a good idea that ended up not being compelling, that failed to develop the character, or that developed the character in such a way that the character is quite unlikeable. Sometimes, it's a lot of stabbing at shadows until one coalesces. "Would she really...?" is frequently uttered. Would my protag really react like that, go there, engage in that manner, solicit help, endanger that group, etc. How is my protag vulnerable without being weak? How is she competent and inclusive? How does she empower others to succeed? What is it she fears and how is that going to manifest? How does she deal with fear? How does she grow across the series without outgrowing the series?

Strangely enough, I can make a pretty swift command decision about which high-concept project I'll pursue. The details? Thems what makes writing a book a real challenge. Yet the magic happens when the brain is allowed to think, to truly muse and ponder. 

And bourbon, bourbon helps too. 😈

A Better Answer to: Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Last week I attended SFWA's Nebula Conference and got to meet our 2018 Grandmaster, Peter S. Beagle. I legit teared up when we talked and he signed my battered old copy I received forever and a day ago. I felt like a teenager again and all those feelings that led into my early love of fantasy rose up and swamped me.

The conference in 2019 will be at the Marriott Warner Center in Los Angeles. I highly recommend it! It's become my absolute favorite gathering of SFF writers and industry professionals.

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is "Where do you get your ideas - the least popular question ever."

Whoever suggested this topic added the subtitle because a) writers get asked this question a LOT, and b) it's really hard to answer. One reason is because we don't actually KNOW where we get our ideas. We often laugh off answering it, or glibly say something like "Getting the ideas is easy; it's having the time to write them that's the challenge."

Which is a really terrible way to answer an earnest question. People who ask this get nothing from us assuring them that ideas are common as grass. They want to know where we get GOOD ideas. How to know which ideas to run with. What story to tell when they're looking at a blank page or screen. They also want to know how they can get an idea like Twilight, or Harry Potter, or Hunger Games.

Something we'd ALL like to know!

I recently listened to an interview with Neil Gaiman where he talked about this very thing. (Yeah, it's a few years old. So what? The internet lives forever!) He was asked to talk to a group of schoolchildren and one asked this question. And Gaiman said it occurred to him that it wouldn't be fair to give them the usual non-answer, because kids deserve better than that. Really, anyone who asks this question deserves better than that.

So, where do *I* get my ideas? Here's three.

I pay attention to my dreams and write them down. If there's an image/feeling powerful enough that I remember it clearly when I wake, I know there's something to it. THE MARK OF THE TALA, the first in my Twelve Kingdoms/Uncharted Realms series started with a dream. So did ROGUE'S PAWN from my Covenant of Thorns trilogy.

I enjoy my daydreams and give them time to spin. As we grow up, we're talked out of daydreaming, like it's a bad thing. We're told to pay attention and engage with others. But daydreaming is where a lot of my stories come from. They entertain me and give me good feelings, so those naturally become stories I enjoy writing. This works especially well with erotic fantasies. PETALS AND THORNS, SAPPHIRE, and UNDER CONTRACT came from erotic daydreams.

I get a lot of ideas from reading other people's books. No, it's not plagiarism if someone inspires you. I once heard a Famous Author on a panel proclaim that she doesn't read. (She called it a dirty, little secret of authors and seemed to think others thought the same way. Spoiler: we don't.) She believed reading somehow spoiled her own creativity. In the bar after (where all the best writer conversations occur), another author said "We're rich because we steal from the best houses." And, no, it's not really stealing. Art inspires art. Good books - and great movies - suggest ideas to me all the time. Don't go and replicate someone else's plot, but if something inspires you, run with it!

As much as we may riff that we get ideas all the time, most writers are always looking for new and better ones. They may be common as grass, but there's a lot of grass out there. We're all looking for something more special than that. Don't let any writer convince you otherwise.

The WIP and a New Release

My favorite thing about the current Work in Progress (WIP)?  Well the central theme of the book, entitled GABE, involves a major plot development in this ongoing series, which is fun to write, but I’m not talking about it yet LOL. I did foreshadow this once in book two, so readers may or may not be surprised. It’s a fun thing, I think.

In general my favorite thing about any WIP is just the fact that it's the book I'm writing and thinking about right now. I can't wait to read whichever book it happens to be when it's all done and to share it with readers.

My other favorite thing about the current WIP is that it’s book #5 in the series - book #4 is at the editor -  and I just released book #3 this week, so if you’ll forgive me, I’m now going to share the deets on my new release!

The book is JADRIAN: A Badari Warriors SciFi Romance (Sectors New Allies Series Book 3) and here’s the blurb:

Taura Dancer has been pushed to her limits by alien torturers known as the Khagrish and is ready to die when suddenly the lab where she’s held as a prisoner is taken down by an armed force of soldiers.

The man who rescues her from a burning cell block is Jadrian of the Badari, a genetically engineered alien warrior with as many reasons to hate the Khagrish as Taura has. This set of shared past experiences and the circumstances of her rescue create an unusual bond between them.

Safe in the hidden base where Jadrian and his pack take her, Taura struggles to regain her lost memories and overcome constant flashbacks during which she lashes out at all who come near. Only Jadrian can recall her from the abyss of her visions and hallucinations.

As the war against the Khagrish continues, it becomes increasingly critical to find out who she really is and how she can help in the fight. Until she can control her terrors and trust her own impulses, Taura’s too afraid to pursue the promise of happiness a life with Jadrian as her mate might offer.

When he’s captured by the dreaded enemy, will she step forward to help save him, or will she remain a prisoner of her past?

This is the third book in the series and each novel has a satisfying Happy for Now ending for the hero and heroine, not a cliffhanger. Some overarching issues do remain unresolved in each book since this is an ongoing series but romance always wins the day in my novels!

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My cover artist Fiona Jayde has given me another gorgeous cover, if I do say so!