To collect or to novel?

When fiction writers get to the end of their MFA they're expected to produce a project that is "book length," but they face the decision: do I make a collection of short stories or do I write a novel?

The short story collection tends to be the favorite in practice while the novel is what everyone says they'd like to do until they face having to do it.

There's points in favor of each.

Short Story Collection
The reason I say the short story collection tends to be what most people do is because it's what MFA workshops have set you up to do. In workshop you write and submit short stories, you get feedback, you find things to change and you make them better. Now, all you need to do is edit those stories on your own and you're halfway to a collection.

For people whom revision is easier than drafting, this is a the option of choice.

For people who can't get their minds around the length or structure of a novel, then the collection is, without question, the way to go. Often MFA programs don't have coursework on writing novels, or it's not as in depth as the course work on writing the short story.

Often, the collection seems like the ready-made option. Particularly when you have that moment of realization where you realize that the path of least resistance to your degree is to brush off a group of desperate stories whose only connective tissue is that you wrote them and call them "collected." It seems like a cop out to me, but a reasonable cop out. Particularly if your style/subject matter hasn't changed much while you've been in the MFA program. Then your stories are probably much more cohesive than mine as I tried a bunch of different styles and then switched gears from realism to fantasy.

Also, the "MFA project" asks you to present the fruits of your education. It is not specifically designed to ask you to produce something that anyone would ever want to publish as a book.

Which brings me to: short story collections are hard to sell.

There are three main ways to get a short story collection sold. (1) You win one of the short story collection contests that have publication attached to them like the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, or the AWP Award Series (there are a couple others but they don't come to mind). (2) You get a contract for a novel in which your agent convinces them to buy your collection as a "bonus"--mostly this is a "bonus" for the writer and a grudgingly accepted ultimatum for the publisher, and another reason why agents are so cool. (3) You get 3-12 stories published by The New Yorker and some publisher wants to collect and reprint them. There are other ways, but those are the three big ones. All other ways are extremely hard sells.*

Now consider how many MFA thesis collections are out there in the world and you're suddenly wondering why you'd want to put energy into a collection when you could be putting it into a novel -- or at least that's what I'm wondering.

The Novel
The big thing the novel has going for it is that it can be sold. That is, it's likely that (all prose being considered equal) someone will want to publish it. All that time, effort, and editing will result in a bound, typeset version of something with your name on it. Even if the cover sucks it's still your book.

The big downside to writing the novel as MFA thesis is that the MFA is not geared toward getting you to produce a novel. As mentioned above, it's the short story that's the perfect size and shape for weekly workshops, not the baggy monsters. Therefore, you'll likely be generating new material and editing it in a shorter span of time.

Then there's the whole has anybody taught you how to write a novel? question which seems to trip people up. I've heard quiet a few people say that they won't try to write a novel (including well published short storyists) because they just don't know how to put one together. Although if you look outside your MFA you can almost always find someone to teach you or materials to use to teach yourself. (Screenplay structure, as I understand it, is where to start looking.)

Then there's the not to be overlooked notion of having an idea big enough to fill a novel.

Where I'm at
See, I thought I had a plan (a novel). Then I had another plan (a story collection)--a plan I put in writing this time! And now I don't know if that plan is as good as the new-new plan (a novel, different from the first novel which I now know I couldn't sustain).

The new-new plan is, albeit, new and shiny. But I might be in the throws of saying hey, if my short story collection idea is going to be as much work as my novel idea then why don't I write the novel, have more fun, and end up with a more viable product at the end?

My advisor recently asked me to crunch numbers and find out where I'm at so that we can think about how best to spend my time. She didn't commit to one side of the debate or the other, but the mere suggestion of number crunching had me thinking all weekend.

The question is not as easy to answer as one would think. I've known a lot of people who said they were going to write a novel for their thesis project. It was only logical, and when it came down to it, logic changed and the logical thing to do was a collection. And now I don't know where I'm going to land with four months until it's due.


*This, of course, makes me laugh. Like any of those three are particularly easy.

Retro Ad of the Week

A 1937 ad ... though what's with the park at the beginning?

Grab-bag: fairy tales, Twilight, and a Ski-doo

It came to my attention last fall that the National Book Award bars fairy tale retellings.  WTF?  As Laura Miller points out they allow retellings of Shakespearian or Biblical tales.  Kate Bernheimer and Maria Tatar are on a mission to get this changed.  Meanwhile, Disney has no plans to make another animated tale -- then again, NPR thinks Disney is going through an identity crisis.

TheOatmeal explains what the Twilight formula is and how it works on so many people

Can a book save your life? Literally.  In the event of a shooting, would you rather get caught with a book or a kindle?


And please, you really have to do this:

1. Go to Google Maps
2. Choose 'Get Driving Directions', and enter (A)New York to (B)China
3. Scroll down to step 31
4. then Step 105

Lessons from the pulp writers of yesteryear

I've been hanging onto this one for a while.  Jason S. Ridler's guest post for SWFA "Work like Hell: Lessons from the Pulp Jungle" talks about what it took to make it in the world of early 20th century pulp fiction and what lessons we can take from that.

Times were tough.  We can all agree on that.

I'm often left raising an eyebrow when writers bemoan how the bottom has fallen out of the publishing world.  They say things like you can't make a living writing anymore.

My eyebrow goes up.  Could you ever make a living as a writer? I want to ask.  At least, make the "easy living" you seem to imply?


Maybe I too often take my sense of context from stories of Edgar Allen Poe barely scraping by, or the pulp writers who had to write a story a day to get enough material sold to pay the rent.  I've recently been enlightened to the fact that for a while in the 90s (and maybe other decades, but this example came from the 90s) a writer could put out a book of literary fiction, get a six figure advance that would never earn out, and still be able to publish another book with the same publisher.

That's the bottom falling out?  Writers not getting inflated advances that never earn out?

I call it publishers coming to their senses.

Now, it sucks if your book doesn't make money and sell lots of copies because you, the writer, won't have a way to make money.  But a business is a business.  Write more.  Write faster.  Get an Underwood and battle the pulp jungle.

Getting my mind around getting it done

I am a slow writer.  At least, I think I am.

I can write quickly if I must.  I usually write 20 page research papers in under 36 hours.  Okay, sometimes I go over deadline and it's 72 hours.  Someone once told me that a good formula was an hour a page plus one to proof read at the end.  Though that formula wasn't true when I was in college, it has been for the master's program.

But for fiction?  I churned out a story, 3000 words, start to finish in about seven hours one night at Odyssey last summer.  It had some problems, but it also had a beginning, middle, and end.  Then I let my subconcious tackle the edits and problems of that story for six months, finally sitting down to redraft.  I've been redrafting for the past 30 days.

I'll get stuck.  I'll take a bunch of notes.  I'll find something else to do (most likely not writing). Then the perfect phrasing or situation to get me unstuck bubbles up in my mind the next day.

It's taking forever.

And I'm looking for ways to make it happen quicker.  There has to be something better than a sentence or single idea bubbling up per day.  Come on, lots of bubbles.  Let's think carbonation here.

It's not just the revisions (although they're worse than anything else).  I've been putting off first drafts as well.  So I started reading Eat That Frog! a self-help book about time management.  Although, as theLiz told me, reading a book about how to not procrastinate sounds like a great form of procrastination.

Just read this interview with Julie Duffy of StoryADay.  It is indeed a month long write-a-story-each-day challenge.  Sounds intense.  Sounds like the pulp writers of yesteryear (but hold that though, it's tomorrow's post).  Sounds like something I'd really like to do.  Sounds like my sloooooooowness would either get kicked out or get me kicked out.  Hmm.

Duffy's advice:

Finish. Finish every story. Even if it's dragging and you hate it, learning how to work through that and get to to the good bit is all part of the craft. Just starting stories will never get you anywhere. Learning how to craft your ideas into finished stories is what it's all about.

I need to get over the starting and get on to the doing and the sticking.  Sticking with the doing.

Bestselling author Jenny Crusie writes:

There is a time before I begin a book that I panic. I can’t remember how I did it before, the first fifteen books must have been flukes, I don’t know everything that’s going to happen in the story, I don’t understand the characters, I’m a fake, the book is going to be a disaster, and my career is over. The fact that I do this before every book is not a comfort.

Then she found god collaging.

Hmm. Thanks -- tempting -- but no.  I'm already waist-deep in unfinished arts-n-crafts projects, I really don't need another excuse to buy and/or collect more of that stuff.  Although the whole panic notion does put me in mind of this absolutely spot on cartoon.

Is it really as simple as Ann Aguirre makes it out to be?  Find a group of people who want to write five thousand words a day and then you all write five thousand words a day?  She makes caveats that finding the right group of people is important -- and lordy do I know that: those groups where we all slacked off and secretly rejoiced that we'd failed together instead of failed alone, yeah, those groups weren't very helpful.  But she's big on there being no magic in the system.  There's no magic time, no magic aura, the stars do not align.  She just goes.  Does.  Is.

I guess I just need to go. Do. Be.  Get off my stupid starting block and keep going without tripping on it.  Of course, Aguirre's method is for the first draft, not the revisions.

Does your style slant toward slow or fast?  Slow and steady or (worse) slow and sporadic?

What processes and advice have worked for you?

Flashback pros and cons

Not long ago, Writer Unboxed had a "Flashback Feud" (read parts one and two).  They lay out some interesting  points.

Flashbacks, when people ask me about them and where I stand on their usage, are one of the things that make me sigh.  There's no short answer.

Well, there's a very short answer -- don't use 'em unless you have to -- but it leaves a lot to be desired.  For instance, what "you have to" means.

It's also a matter where my training conflicts.

My academy based education has a certain love of what I call strange usages of time, which encompasses the flashback, nonconsecutive parallel stories (like the one discussed in part one of "Flashback Feud"), the nonlinear story (i.e. a bunch of really fucked up flashbacks).  And then there's all the time bundles that people often declare their love for.  I love that it all happens in the span of one day / hour / year!  

The notion here is that if manipulating time adds to the cool factor, then dude, you've just added to your cool factor.

My Odyssey Writing Workshop education taught me that a writer should be wary of the flashback, like a person with acid reflux is wary of the hotsauce.  That it's one thing to sneak in the past via dialog or through a carefully placed line of exposition (go easy on the exposition or it'll give you heartburn too), but if an event is important enough to put into scene, then it's probably important enough to put into scene chronologically.

There are really extremely interesting, beautiful mindfucking things an author can do with well-developed, well-placed non-chronological scenes.  (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which I just read, is a great example of this.)

But for most stories, jumping around in time is doing the story a disservice.

Life unfolds chronologically (unless you've got a suped up DeLorean you're not telling me about).  Therefore it's the story form that has the most verisimilitude.  So the distinction then becomes whether the story serves the artistry or the artistry serves the story.

If the work showcases the story, then don't do something that draws the reader out of the immediacy of the story like flashing back into another time in place.

If the story's purpose is to showcase the writing technique, then do whatever you want.

In the past year, I've had several people (people who've never met each other) say to me why not just put it in chronological order?  It was like a little light bulb went on.  Or perhaps a whole series of them.  Suddenly I was not walking down a dark and twisty path, but hanging out in a well lit neighborhood.  Things were nowhere near as daunting to write (omg, the where do I put that scene? factor drove me nuts when I went un-chronological), but they also appealed more to my readers.

As far as my own writing goes, I try very hard not to include flashbacks these days.

Never interrupt me when I'm reading a book

Ever spend a week simply reading? I have. It was great. Now I'm behind on life. But the good news is that I lost a few pounds because I kept forgetting to eat.


found via Small Beer Press

Jane Austen Fight Club

found via ElizabethTwist

And you thought the Bronte Sisters Action Figures were bad ass.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and Bloodfever, in review

We had a long weekend here for MLK day and that meant I got to read not just one, but two books this weekend. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin and Bloodfever by Karen Maire Moning.

It's been a long time since I read a second world fantasy*.  Probably a year or more.  And it took me reading Hundred Thousand Kingdoms to realize that.  I used to consume these kind of novels and only these kind of novels in a near gluttonous fashion, but lately I've been on an urban fantasy  and old science fiction kick.

Anyway, back to the book.  There's something about it that really puts me in mind of Sara Douglass's Wayfarer Redemption books.  I think it's the closeness of the world of the gods with the world of men and that notion that the distance between gods and humans is vast, but the line that divides them is thin and porous.  The spends a great deal of time learning about her own world, getting sucked into political intrigue (some of it a generation old, some of it millennia old), and trying to decipher what people's true natures are -- a worthwhile task as all is not as it seems.

The writer has an incredibly successful and unique, if abrupt, way of structuring the narrative.  She mixes the more immediate storytelling method of being "in scene" with the characters, with recapitulation of history and need-to-know information which interrupts the scene with section breaks to deliver the knowledge, with sections of conversation not enclosed in quotation marks.  And for probably four fifths of the book we're not allowed to figure out who the narrator is talking to in those sections or if she's talking to herself.  The narrative also stops and starts as the narrator remembers things, which made the first chapter feel jerky but intriguing.  The narrative intrigue however, doesn't start until two or three chapters in once the narrative style has been established.


It was a good read.  It kept me up through most of the night on trying to finish it (I didn't succeed), and then awake midmorning the next day, trying not to nod off before I could get to the end. Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was put out by Orbit, and I have to say that every fantasy novel I've picked up with their little orbiting orbs logo on it has been really good.  This series goes on, but it's main characters change, so I'm not running out to get the next one just yet.

I needed something to pick up immediately or I was going to be thinking about and rehashing Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for the next few days.  So I went and grabbed a copy of Bloodfever.  Bloodfever is the second book in the "fever series" of five books, starting with Darkfever and ending with Shadowfever (which comes out today coincidentally).  This is an urban fantasy series (shelved under paranormal romance because that's where Moning's career is most stable) set in contemporary Dublin and an extension of Moning's Tutha De / sidhe-seer world.  The series stands on its own, but by the end of book two you can already see that it's going to come crashing into the plot lines left open with her previous characters.  And news is that she's writing another series set in this world with different main characters.  Hey, whatever makes you comfortable.

One of Moning's books was the first romance novel I ever picked up -- it was on assignment for my feminist theory class.  I picked up The Highlander's Touch because the cover (the original cover) had no nudity (male or female) and no compromisingly positioned anything.  There was no way I was going to bring in something embarassing to a college class that was (at the time) way above my head.  Meanwhile, some of the students not struggling with the theory aspect of the class had gone for the attitude of the-trashier-the-better.  In the end the class had a good conversation.  I was annoyed because the book sets up one supernatural premise -- time travel -- and then 4/5 of the way through introduces the thing that will save them all!  Not time travel, but a fairy.  Major WTF moment.  I despise books where the author establishes a premise, solidifies it, then changes it when it's convenient for her.  (JR Ward, I'm looking at you.*cough*ghosts?srsly?*cough*)

But with the fever series, Moning has a world that is fae-centric.  Of course a fairy's going to show up, they're here to destroy the bloody world!

These novels are good enough that I keep reading them but I'm coming to think that I may have learned many of the habits Odyssey tried to break me of from one author.  Particularly that of having a character alone thinking about her life.

I went Monday night to buy the third book and they didn't have it.  Poo!  But they had dozens of copies of the fourth one because it just came out in paperback.  And the helpdesk chick was a fricking fluff head who didn't understand the layout of the fiction area.  Why the hell is the person who doesn't understand how the store is laid out manning the help desk?  Shouldn't she be shelving and shelving until she realizes that the "new arrivals" are face out under the sign "new arrivals" and the "regular" books are spine out in a different section? Whereas she told me that only two sections of the "regular" books are "regular" and then proceeded to be confused with why the "regular" books section ended with J-named authors.

I am calm.

So I went home and downloaded the nookbook version.  I like the nook-for-iPod software much better than I like the kindle-for-iPod software.  I figure I'll try it out on the computer as well.  Nook also has the advantage of retaining the original page numbers no matter how you change the font, and it doesn't reconfigure the page ever time you go to your bookmarked page -- hey, finding where I was  has a lot to do with visual/physical memory.  I remember where I left off spatially because that's the way paper has trained me to be.  And you're supposed to work with my paper-trained brain.

Heh, paper-trained.  :)

In other news this weekend, I changed the blog layout.  As you may have noticed by this point.  The old look had begun to feel too cluttered.  I'll be updating and tweaking this look in the near future; for one, I'm definitely redoing my header graphic so it centers.  Though I love that it's updated, and cleaner feeling right now, I mean to find an interesting -- simple -- photo for the background.  I looked through Blogger's options but just wasn't feeling any of them.  I thought about making it the old school washing machines but then decided not to go there no matter how semi-amusing I find that.  But I've got a few ideas, so we'll see how it works out ... unless anyone knows of some great coffee mug stock art.

*Second world fantasy is the term for fantasy located in a world that is not our own.  So Lord of the Rings is a second world fantasy, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not.  Actually, I think "second world fantasy" might be a term coined by Tolkien, or at least one he used in his seminal essay "On Fairie-Stories."

I'm cold and I want a cookie

Yes, my needs really are that simplistic.

Ad of the Week

(Not) Writing to the trend

Advice to genre writers is always "don't write to the trend."  Teenage wizard goes to wizarding school is hot? Don't write it. Teenage vampire romance is hot? Don't write it. At least, don't write it if your heart's not in it 100%. Don't write it just to hop on the bandwagon because (a) your book will suck if you're not in love with it and (b) the bandwagon might be gone by the time your book comes to market.

This advice is readily available to writers seeking instruction in commercial fiction, so why is no one saying it to MFA students?

I've become aware lately that many of the "rules of good writing" spouted off with great authority by students in writing programs are, in fact, trends. Faculty tend not to spout as definitively or level as broad, sweeping statements about the art and artifice of writing. Faculty tend to encourage experimentation. Students, however, encourage sameness in their peers: Trendiness.

In their written critiques of my work, I've had fellow students deliver "reminders" to not experiment. Remember: followed by some supposed rule of narrative. To which my faculty member asked, Why? Why does that have to be? and could not get a satisfactory answer from the students.

Certain pieces of craft like grammar and clarity (sentence level and story level) are tools not trends. But just about everything else -- prose styling, subject matter, and point of view included -- is a trend.

Particularly smacking of trendiness is the desire of today's American MFA student to write like Hemingway -- the idealized version of Hemingway, not the actual one. Trend.

Fiction goes through trends. "Highbrow" fiction goes through trends more slowly -- perhaps because fewer people write or read it, and therefore the impetus to change and innovate isn't as strong because the field isn't as deep -- but it's still changing. Look at fiction from 50 years ago, compared to today, or 100 years ago or 200 years ago: the high minded fiction of any given time period is different. It changes based on trends.  It changes based on what today's readers expect and what they're willing to accept.

I refuse to believe the New Critical notion that there is such a thing as "imperatively "good" writing that is "good" without taking into consideration the context in which it was written. If that was the case then no one would still be studying Shakespeare (his language is wordy and obtuse and the plots are unoriginal [even back then] and melodramatic) or Hawthorn (his novels crawl along like a dull snail in order to get to a few poignant and beautiful passages). Their work is not inherently "good art" yet there are myriad other reasons why we study those writers and why their prose endures, most of which can be appreciated contextually.

Don't believe me?  Try taking a piece that shifts between free verse and rhyming pentameter to your MFA workshop.

Perhaps the slowness of trends in supposedly high minded fiction has as much to do with the depth of the field as it does with the training of writers moving into academia.

Precisely when writing attached itself to the academy is debatable. It depends which self-important entity you choose to believe. Was the first writer's program at Bread Loaf? Harvard? Or was there no creative writing in the academy until Iowa? (all of them claim the distinction) Where it started doesn't really matter. What is certain is that after WWII, writing programs began appearing more and more regularly at colleges until there was a boom of them in the 80s -- a boom which has not yet slacked off. In fact, it might be in a second boom with the 21st century improvements in communication that allow for long distance and low residency MFA programs.

The MFA allows for a single style to be perpetuated and touted over all others. For a trend to be codified into the rules of fiction. For the production of the McPoem, as Donald Hall called it, ten billion served.

It's true that there was no way the peer who wrote to encourage me to Remember the "rule" could have known that I had already considered said "rule" and discarded it in order to serve my purposes. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a prime example of the rules of the trend being touted as the rules of all fiction.

And there have been other examples -- okay one example -- from my experience where my peers said fuck the rule, you should really run with it. 

You could probably show up to an MFA program and learn all the trends, be praised for your ability to recreate fiction that fits the trendy comprehension of the genre, graduate, and never challenge yourself to experiment. And, given the glacial pace of literary fiction, you work wouldn't date itself until the tail end of your life. However, the data shows that it's much more likely that you'll leave your MFA and never write again.

Modern Myth Making

Two words: Pheonix Jones



He and the Rain City Superheroes are a PhD dissertation waiting to happen. Or maybe just a Good Morning America segment.

And Joseph Campbell says that we live in a society with no myths? That our society is too much in flux to develop myths we can believe in and interact with? Pheonix Jones is nothing if not an example of a modern myth believer and interactive.

I'm working on a grad school statement of purpose along these lines. I was just going to look at speculative literature/film/comix and fandom as examples of modern myth, but these Real Life Superheroes go beyond fandom. And I might just need to modify that statement of purpose.

Not Moving, but moving on

Okay. Not moving to New York. Next item of business/thing to be morose over?

I really wanted to read Elizabeth Bear's novel Hammered, except the copy I got from the library was a bit smelly. That's okay, I could deal with that. Except that whenever I held the book close enough to my face to read it, I got stuffed up and sneezy. Sadness. So back to the pound it went.

Monday was the first day of spring semester here. I'm teaching at eight AM. (!)  Oddly enough, staying up all night then having a two hour nap from 4-6 AM puts me in tip top shape to chat away for a couple hours starting at 8 AM. No sleepy cobwebs to bat away! Of course, I wanted to sleep standing up by 11 AM and by 12:30 PM I had crashed on the couch having fallen asleep without my head on a pillow and waking up when it connected with the wooden arm of the couch.

I'm no longer waxing quixotic about resolutions and changes and plans for the new year (though I didn't post much of my quixotic notions on the blog, know that I entertained them just like everyone else does). The mountain of tasks I should have done before semester have become the tasks that I must do now. Guess it's time to move on and stop thinking about the what-if of internships and just think of the get-it-done make-it-work stuff.

I don't want to move to New York

Say you want to be a teacher. You can do that just about anywhere in the country. And you might have to go just about anywhere to get the position you want.

Say you want to be an author. You most certainly can do that wherever you already are. The days of "you must move to the New York literary scene" are far, far behind us -- and those who think there's any residual truth to that, really need to catch up with the times.

But to be an editor or a literary agent? You really need to get as close to New York as possible. At least at first. To intern with them? To start out and learn the ropes? For that you need to go to the city and work for free (or college credit).

Nope. Don't wanna. I protest: So why does all of publishing have to be in New York City? I stamp my foot: Why are all the internships there? This sucks. I do not like the city, no i don't. I do not like it in a box. I do not like it with a fox.

Ad of the Week

This just cracks me up. Especially after sending lord knows how many hours of my life watching TV shows about modeling.

Grab-bag

Iconic face of Rosie the Riveter poster died recently. I really wish I'd known this story, ya know, before she passed away.  She was a Michigan factory worker and seeing as her service is being held in Lansing, I'm betting she lived in Michigan all her life.

Odyssey Workshop has a new podcast up online from editor David Hartwell's 2010 Odyssey Workshop lecture on titles, titling, and using pseudonyms (Podcast #43). It was great because I find that a lot of writers worry about how to title or when to use a pseudonym and it seems like something the knowledgeable people in the industry don't want to talk about--perhaps it is more tedious than other aspects, but here we have a guy who's been an editor in the SF/F industry for over 40 years and he's willing to talk seriously about the small stuff.

The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop is now open to applications. As is the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop (early admission deadline: Jan. 31; regular deadline: Apr. 8). Both are great workshops.

One of my Odyssey workshop classmates (or Odfellows, as the alums are called), put out a novella (40,000 words) for Kindle titled Nocturne: Son of the Night.  I haven't read the whole thing, but my understanding from the first chapter is that it's a high fantasy vampire world.  40k is an awkward length to sell to a publisher -- it's about half as long as a novel and a about 20k too long for all but a couple magazines to deal with (though as I understand it, it might be the kind of thing BlackGate would serialize).  You can read the first chapter on Smashwords or buy at amazon.com.  And maybe even buy at Samshwords if you need non-Kindle formating.

I got my cats a "cat bed" so that they would stop sleeping on top of my cloth suitcase. They seem to have mixed feeling about the bed, so I doused it in cat nip and now Rosie's all about it. Ash is currently sleeping in the old box lid on my desk. I guess they'll never be happy until they have the ultimate house for cats.

Kristen Lamb has had a great series of posts of the last week about dealing with "Crappy Excuse Trolls and Procrastination Pixies." The posts are long, but it's worth scrolling back to her Dec. 31 entry to catch the entire week's notions of how to behave better beyond the New Year's Resolution.  This awesome picture is from her blog as well.  It's a "Rare Photo of Actual Procrastination Pixie Disguised as a Hamster Cage that Needs Cleaning Instead of Doing Edits on Novel."   Love it.

Over at Third Coast, Nathan Norton posts his thoughts on Resolving to Remain Resolute with Regards to Writing Resolutions.  Nathan's post, as always, is insanely witty.

Speaking of which, my New Year's Resolutions are sorta holding. I've already finished reading one novel--another freebie download from eHarlequin. What can I say? I'm a sucker for free books that you can read quickly. And the writing 500 words a day goal? ... well I have written everyday, which is a start. Haven't really broken the 500 mark every day though and that's worthy of a demerit.

In the spirit of all of the writing is what I love posts I've read and *ahem* written myself, I bring you this from The Onion:

I guess you could say I have always had a love affair with the written word. The simple, solitary act of contemplating the white expanse of the blank page, and then putting pen to paper and seeing where the words take me, is my one constant solace in an otherwise turbulent world. Yes, I must admit it: I am only truly happy when I'm writing.


Or if I'm having dinner with family and friends, or a new and interesting acquaintance I happened to meet that week and hit it off with. I'm pretty happy then, too.


But for me, it always comes back to the writing: the discipline, the stamina required, the unrelenting determination to give voice to my innermost thoughts, thoughts that illuminate the cracks and crevices of the human condition. That is my only satisfaction. That and watching a really good movie on late-night TV, like Suddenly, Last Summer. That's a great feeling, especially when you haven't seen the film in some years, and you discover anew just what it was that you loved about it in the first place. I also enjoy canoeing and windsurfing when I get a free weekend down at the beach.


And Frisbee. I love Frisbee. (read more)

The more I read about the publishing business the more I think ahead. This is good, right? Maybe. It's hard to tell when your tell your friend, "hey I'm thinking about this and this, what's your advice?" and her advice is to stop thinking so far ahead and write the damn book. Then there's things like this very interesting guest post about author branding on Sierra Godfrey's blog. And the post says yes! think about it now!

I know, I know. Those of you out there who are plugging away at writing your book or maybe just sticking your toe in the writing waters are probably thinking...look, I just need to get this book written, find an agent, get a book deal, etc. etc. and then I'll worry about a public image. I've got time for that. Publishing is a slow business.


You're right. The book should be priority number one and publishing IS slow. I got my book deal a few months ago and my book won't hit the shelves until 2012. But let me tell you, when all the good stuff starts happening, it can happen fast. And you'll be thrust from "writer" to "Author" with a capital A in a moment's time.


That's great news. You won't really feel any different (though you'll be excited) and writing will still be just as difficult (believe me.) But the change means your blog, website, twitter, facebook, etc., you know all those things you've been doing to build your platform/presence, are now your brand.


So if you've spent your time on your blog bashing books you don't like, cursing like a sailor, or only posting pictures of cats in doll outfits (or even *gasp* not blogging/tweeting/pick your poison at all), you may have to do a major overhaul or start from scratch. You don't want this stress when you're going to be facing the new stress of being contracted, editing and writing against a deadline, and figuring out all it means to be a paid author. So why not get your brand in place NOW?

And then I'm like, aha! gotcha Roni Loren, I comprehend now. (read more of her guest post).

Lastly, I am in love with Lightspeed magazine!  All SF, all online (although they have other formatting options if you're interested).  They have a really intriguing layout/look--both clean and enticing.  And they're publishing a range of writers, lesser known folk and then, last month, Ursala Le Guin.  Though I could tell it was a Le Guin story because I finished it and went huh?

What I learned over the holidays:

Ann Arbor, Michigan, the city in which I grew up, has become the land of the Prius.

In the mile between my father's house and the house of one of my high school best friend's, I encountered three Priuses.  Priusi.  Prius. Pri'i.

Three Prius per square mile--not to mention all the Yellow Cabs in town have gone Prius.  I think Ann Arbor's officially the Land of the Prius.

New Year, New Frenzy

I'm the kind of person who's never happy with just one project. So it's not just at New Year's that I feel overwhelmed with a slew of things I want to do and want to do now.  Yesterday, it was novels.  Writing them.  Today it's academic papers for conferences.  Because I just got word that my portrayals of little red riding hood proposal was accepted for a conference on heroines in science fiction and fantasy conference.

I just need to get something finished.  I'll be very excited if I do.

Finishing means that all the piecemeal work I've been doing here at my desk, goes off into the world and interacts with people as it was intended to do, instead of growing the mountain here.  I should explain the "growing the mountain" reference.

I multi-task like a computer does. Say you ask your computer to perform five tasks at once: playing music, opening a file, IMing online, downloading something and you've also got a spreadsheet open.  The computer does not perform all those tasks at once.  It instead puts them into a cycle, performing a small bit of music playing, then a small bit of opening the file, a small bit of your chat conversation, a small bit of the download and a small bit of spreadsheet whatnot.  Then it cycles back.  It performs the bits so quickly that you (usually) don't notice when it's off performing another task.  However, when you have the computer doing five tasks and you ask it to open a file, that file is going to take longer than if you had the computer performing no tasks. I work like this too--except not as fast.

I'm always working on ten projects.  I think that's a conservative yet realistic number for what I'm doing.  I have four novel projects on the "this year" list. Ha. Other novel projects are chillin in the bread box.  I'm writing one academic paper, editing another.  I'm actively editing two short stories, and I've got another few who are patiently waiting their turn.  And then there's the teaching projects.  So ten seems about right.

The end result is that it seems like nothing gets done.  I work bit by bit, accomplishing a little bit more on each task daily.  But then I get frustrated for not finishing--much like I get frustrated when I over task my computer and slow it down.  (This was more of a problem on computers a few years back, but it's still been known to happen, especially when I'm in the Mac labs on campus.)

I'm beginning to think I need to streamline my process more.  Multi-task less.  Produce more finished items rather than switching projects.  Though I'm afraid this may not happen unless I re-wire my brain.  Hmm.

Non sequitur: And then I had store bought perogies for lunch. Which are never as good as homemade perogies. Of course, the only perogie recipe I have could feed an army or a small polish family.  Guess it's a good thing I had awesome Thai food for dinner.

Ad of the Week

After a short, end-of-semester-rush-of-the-holidays hiatus, Ad of the Week returns!



This little guy is just too cute.

Happy New Year!

I'm rather at peace with the notion of the new year.  Not bursting at the seams with resolutions and notions and ambition, but neither am I grouchy and jaded about it.

I feel ready for this year.  I've already spent a lot of time thinking and planning about 2011--perhaps this is why when I went to write 1/1/11 today, I didn't flinch.  It took me ages to learn to write '10 instead of '09.

Then again, in early 2010 and very late 2009, I was working off anger and frustration.  I said I'd achieve various goals to "show" certain people.  All n all, a poor attitude for actually achieving anything.

In 2011, my goals are about me, not impressing (or surpassing) others.

My only New Year's resolution?  To read 52 books or more in 2011 and to write 500 words or more each and every day.  No matter what, I can always eek out 500 words (even if they're just planning words) once I get in the habit of writing.