Crossposted to Deadline Dames.

Today, dear Reader, I will get philosophical. My apologies in advance.

Last night I was working on the third Strange Angels book. I’d revised as far as one of the hidden hinges in the story–let me make an instructive little detour here.

In every story there are visible and hidden “hinges”–places where the particular bits of the story “hang,” for structure. The visible hinges are crisis points and revelations, easy enough to spot. The hidden hinges, however, are harder to see. This is partly because the hat-trick of writing depends just as much on what happens behind the curtain as it does on the visible excitements that make up the outer story.

It is also partly because the hidden hinges mean more to the author, if that is possible, than they can to the reader.

Okay, detour over. This particular hidden hinge was one I knew I had to expand on, but the first time around, in the heat of creation, I hadn’t known what to put there. I was going along in the particular, fierce but relaxed concentration of revision, and I suddenly reached the place where there was a “hole” in the manuscript. And I knew what to put in it. So I did, which just happened to bring me to 60K on the total wordcount, my goal for the night.

And then, sitting there and taking a deep breath, I burst into tears. Because the hidden hinge in this particular scene means a great deal to me, and touched a raw place.

The funny thing is that a reader will maybe spend a second or a second and a half reading this particular line, with no consciousness of how it affects me-the-writer. Their eyes will pass right over it, and that’s okay. It’s a hidden hinge, and not meant to be decorated to draw attention to its little self.

Here’s the important thing, though: I was terrified of writing it.

So much of writing is going where the fear is. Fear is power, and a lot of writers don’t want to go there. It’s absolutely natural. Who, after all, wants to be afraid or hurt? Feelings of fear or pain exist for a reason. They are warnings, and quite effective ones. They’re like the reflex that pulls your hand back before you realize you’ve touched something hot. (Gom jabbar notwithstanding. Ha.)

Harnessing that power, going where the fear is, writing even though your hands are sweating and your heart is in your mouth, is the very least you owe your readers. You have a bargain with them–you tell the truth, they keep reading. Lie, bullshit, pull back or cop out–and they sense it. They smell it. It will get your book thrown across the room faster than anything.

Your method of telling the truth may not work for some readers. They may not like how you do it, the words or the themes you choose. That’s okay. For the ones whose reception matches with your transmission, the ring of truth is what fulfills the bargain and keeps them coming back. It is far, far easier to find those fans who will love your stuff if you’re not bullshitting. Bullshit and punking out effectively close the gate before your horse has even left.

It breaks your legs before you can begin the race.

The temptation to punk out is huge, especially when it comes to hidden hinges. Why put something in that makes you cry or hurts you, reminds you of a failure or a heartache, when you know the reader’s eyes will pass right over it?

Because you’ll know. Because they’ll sense it. Because even if nobody knows you welshed on that part of the deal, you will and it’s still f!cking welshing. It betrays the Muse, it betrays your readers, and you betray yourself. If you don’t care about the first two you should care very much about the third, because you are the only person you will have to deal with 24-7 for the rest of your life. You will know.

Yes, the fear is there. It is overwhelming. Committing yourself to writing is just like committing yourself to anything worthwhile.

It will be painful. There will be blood.

I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory — they’re all blood, you see.

That’s Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And it’s also true.

Art is the transformation of the world. Transformation don’t come easy and it don’t come cheap, honey. Nothing worthwhile ever does. The fear will try every trick in the book to keep you from writing truly, to keep you “safe” and in the kiddie pool. It’s like the Internal Censor–it will not go away, and it thinks it’s helping you. It is–it’s helping to show you where the power is. But it does not help you if it makes you punk out or look away, even on the hidden hinges.

Find that fear. Face it down. Keep your eye on it and let it snarl at you all it wants. It’s only fear, after all, and with the Muse as chair and grammar as whip you can make it do all sorts of tricks. Commit yourself completely. Let there be blood on the page. Don’t stop. Don’t punk out. Run the fear, don’t let it run you.

Yes, it’s hard. But if this job was easy it wouldn’t be half as heart-in-mouth, adrenaline fun, now would it?

And now, excuse me. I’ve got to go bleed a little more.

Have fun.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

I have been working all morning, but it seems like I’ve gotten nowhere since that work is all of the invisible maintenance variety. Ugh.

* First, the serious: NPR won’t use the word “torture” when Americans do it. But when anyone else does, it’s fair game.

* Charles Kaiser pronounces the Washington Post dead, writes obituary.

* Now the geeky-cool scientific: the Sarychev volcano eruption seen from space, and the “volcano sunsets” it’s causing.

* Last but not least, the utterly freaking hilarious: the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Contest winners are announced. SO WORTH the half-hour I spent reading them. (Hat tip to Kat Richardson for the link, and also for noting the winner hails from Federal Way, WA. Washington state rules!)

And that’s all, folks. Back I go to plugging away on the manuscript…

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

You know, dear Readers, that I don’t comment on reviews for a variety of reasons. I’m the first to tell a fellow writer to buck up, ignore the effing reviewers, and be professional.

I saw Alice Hoffman’s Twitter fail the other day, where she called out a Boston Globe reviewer. I winced as I read it. Hoffman was irate because the reviewer had completely given away the plot of the novel–”spoiling” in a major newspaper. She called the reviewer a moron and posted the reviewer’s public email and publicly-posted phone number. Since Hoffman was new to Twitter (fifteen hundred followers when I looked, but I could be wrong and her Twitter account’s been deleted) the reviewer wasn’t deluged. But still, plenty of people have been gleefully trashing Hoffman since. Including people I used to follow on Twitter.

And you know…even though I think Hoffman was a noob for getting angry publicly, I understand.

One disclaimer: I am a big fan of Hoffman’s work. Seventh Heaven and Here On Earth are two of my favorite books EVER. She’s an autobuy for me, and I think she deserves the terms “genius” and “magical realist.” Plus I’m a fellow writer (though just a hack, and not in her league at all) and, well, I feel her pain. I’ve been tempted to sound off many a time, even knowing what a bad f!cking idea it is.

Here’s the thing: we are awash, on the Internet, with people calling themselves “reviewers.” Pretty much everyone’s got a dog in the fight. There’s Amazon reviews, which are a sinkhole of comments that may or may not be about the book or item in question. There’s Internet “review sites” that do follow Sturgeon’s Law–many of them are there to stroke the “reviewer’s” ego, and end up being crap. There are group review sites where the group dynamic has more in common with the locker room or a Plastics clique.

I think a review site that does low-bullshit, high-quality, and scorchingly funny reviews is Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Looking at it and comparing it to other sites of its ilk, you might be tempted to see the foul-mouthing and the bad grades and the cover snark as all alike. But I have always found the Smart Bitches to stand out from their contemporaries for two reasons: honesty and professionalism, both in short supply when we’re talking about “reviewers.”

Candy and Sarah have reviewed some of my books. They put disclaimers on the reviews because both Candy and Sarah have a personal (well, in Sarah’s case, as personal as emailing a little bit over personal questions etc. can make it) relationship with me, and they put that up front for other readers to be aware of. They savaged the books on some points (rightfully so, I might add) and noted their good points too (which I was grateful for.) I did not feel like the reviews were personal attacks, or that Candy or Sarah had anything to “prove” by the reviews. I was happy with them, even if they stung.

Such is not always the case. I’ve read reviews where the reviewers obviously had a personal problem with something I’d said on my blog, or something they thought I said, or even something someone else said or a bad hair day or something, and they took it out in the review, on my book. I’ve read screeds that don’t even spell the characters’ names right, where it was obvious they didn’t even read more than the cover copy, spoilers galore, and a whole host of inappropriate and highly inflammatory reviews. They stung, yes. They were out there on the Net for everyone to see. And in some cases there were the usual blog swarm of Yes Men piling on to show how cool they were by trashing the subject du jour. Which just happened to be my book on that day.

Yeah, it made me mad. Yeah, I’ve bitched about it to the Selkie over drinks. Yeah, I’ve written private, flaming responses and deleted them lest I be tempted. Hey, I’m only human.

This is why I understand Hoffman’s frustration. We are literally drowning in reviewers, online and off. The Boston Globe reviewer did give spoilers, and did clunk through an embarrassing (and in my opinion, unwarranted) bad review. (The review reads to me like the reviewer wanted to cause a bit of ruckus by panning the book, for her own reasons. But that’s just me.) The seduction of the easy response was there on Twitter, and Hoffman took it. When you’re mad you don’t think straight. I’m pretty sure that at some point in the future I’m going to be mad enough to break my own rules and cause an Internet kerfluffle. The flesh, alas, is weak.

But still, I’ll say it again: I understand and share Hoffman’s frustration. Being a writer means getting rejected and judged over and over again. We’re judged by agents, editors, publishers, and finally reviewers and readers. Every time we turn around we’re told our manuscript could be better with X or isn’t good enough because of Y. The prevailing attitude in our culture that devours the content we produce and kicks us in the teeth in myriad ways for being “artists” and producing it does not help. “Don’t be such a big baby! You chose to be a writer, you gotta have a thick skin!”

Just because I have a thick skin doesn’t mean someone has to attack me to prove it, and it doesn’t mean I need to put up with inappropriate crap. It also doesn’t mean inappropriate crap hurts less. And just because a writer chooses to write those books you do or don’t love does not make them your bitch, your property, or your punching bag/whipping boy. A lot of people, however, did not get that memo. A lot of people will never get that memo, and dealing with it as a writer is wearying.

“Wait!” you could say. “Alice Hoffman is (that magic thing) a NYT Bestseller! She doesn’t have anything to prove! Why couldn’t she just keep her mouth shut?”

You know…I try to feel better when I read reviews by people who obviously read and loved my work, people who got it and liked it, who maybe had some quibbles but overall liked it. The problem is, we’re trained to accentuate the negative, so to speak. We’re trained–and I don’t know if this is writers in general, or women writers because we’re women and taught from the cradle to make nice–to give greater weight to criticism, warranted or not, than to praise. Praise seems evanescent, while the hurt lingers.

I don’t think a writer ever feels like they’ve proved themselves. If they do, they tend to go down what I call the Anne Rice Road–I’m thinking about her famous comment (I can’t dig up a link, so this is as best as I remember it) about how she’d worked her ass off for many years to get to the point where she didn’t have to let an editor touch her beautiful prose. If you, as a writer, understand the danger of that line of thought and choose not to go there, the alternative is to listen and be vulnerable over some things. Including a crappy-ass review that dumps, for reasons that do not seem to you to be justified, all over work you spent years producing and agonizing over while it’s in production.

Which brings me back to the Internet. A lot of writers from even just-slightly-older generations do not get that the Internet is a huge effing echo chamber that isn’t ubiquitous even though it seems like it is to everyone on it. About the fiftieth time I saw a review site where the dominant tone was “we’re too smart for anybody, especially the writers whose work we’re gleefully insulting” and saw the long line of Yes-Men comments, I flashed back to high school and though, haven’t we f!cking outgrown this?

I think that a lot while reading a lot of reviews–and not just reviews of my own work, thank you.

No, we apparently haven’t outgrown high school. When I worked retail I was pretty sure 60% of the population never does. Since I’ve been on the Internet I’ve modified that slightly–I’m pretty sure 75-80% of the population never does. (What can I say? I’m an optimist.)

So, while I winced when I saw a writer I adore and consider a class act losing her sh!t a little on Twitter, I understood. God howdy, how I ever understood. The thing that comforts me is the cyclical nature of such things–in fandom, for example, you stick around for a year or two and you start seeing the patterns. “We’re having this argument again?!” is a cry I’ve heard many a time in fandom, and it seems to repeat itself on the Internet ad nauseum.

It doesn’t take the sting out of a vendetta-review, or even out of mildly bad reviews that hit on a really bad f!cking day and make the top of my head fly off. Still, it provides a grain of salt that keeps one from losing one’s mind some days.

That is, I’m afraid, the best I’m going to get. I am not resigned to it, but I am a realist. I don’t know if it’s ever going to get better, due to the nature of the Internet as a nondiscerning echo-chamber. But I do know that in a couple weeks it’s going to be something else, someone else losing their sh!t on Twitter, and another crop of reviews flooding around the bilges. There will be ones that hurt, and ones that don’t. In the end, the ones that hurt are just like every other voice in your head or elsewhere that picks at one’s self esteem and tells you to quit. You can’t let it get so loud it drowns out the story.

The trick is to just keep writing.

Play nice in the comments, folks. Thanks.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

And I’m breaking my afternoon silence to note two things: there’s an interview with me over at Drops of Crimson, where I answer the Dean question and the Lipton questions, and there is a new Secret Life of Dolls. If you don’t read SLOD, you are so missing out. I got to “tiny Fay Wray” and totally, completely lost my sh!t laughing.

That is all.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

You can win a copy of The Eternal Kiss, a YA vampire anthology, by heading on over to Suzanne McLeod’s place this fine morning. The Eternal Kiss is due out July 27 and features stories by a ton of awesome authors, including Libba Bray, Holly Black, Rachel Caine…

…and, well, yours truly has a short little story in there calledAmbition, which almost didn’t make it in. Because it’s dark and nasty. Actually, it’s one of a very few “bilateral” stories I’ve ever done. A bilateral story happens when I take a whack at a short story, I don’t like it, I scrap it and start all over again, and then go back and finish the first start anyway because the second whack at the short story showed me what the first one should have been about in the first place.

Sound confusing? It’s doubly so when I’m working at it.

Short stories are far more difficult for me, because the execution has so little space to move in. Each choice in a novel narrows down further choices, from the very first line. In short stories this is taken to the Nth degree.

And now I have to finish my coffee and get down to getting the third Dru book into reasonable first-draft shape. If I can keep up wordcount and polish at the same time I will reward myself with a sliver of choco tonight. Mmmmh. I can already taste it.

Over and out.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

First off, news! My writing partner the Selkie, aka Nina Merrill, gave an interview to Grace Draven the other day. It might be interesting for readers of my Friday posts about process to see how another writer answers some of the same questions. (You can find Nina’s work here and Grace’s here. Yes, they both work for a small press for the moment, yes, I know about the covers. Really. I do.) I absolutely adore Nina–she’s my writing partner and beta reader, after all–and I love Grace’s kick-ass-and-take-no-prisoners attitude. So, enjoy!

Keri Arthur did a great post yesterday at Deadline Dames, titled Achieving The Dream. It’s chock-full of truth and usefulness, and I’m going to shamelessly borrow the idea and talk a little bit about #2 from it.

I don’t know about your family, but mine never really took my writing seriously. In the early years, it was considered ‘my hobby’ and was not something anyone ever thought would amount to anything (including me, most of the time). So, they never really considered it an inconvenience to interrupt my writing sessions for whatever reason. (Keri Arthur)

Yes. Oh, God, yes. I know this. And Keri goes on to hit the cause on the head:

In the early years of my writing, it was totally mine. My family treated my writing as a hobby simply because I did. I might have been serious in my attempt to be published, but I didn’t voice that. I let myself be interrupted. I didn’t treat my writing as a job, I didn’t give it any degree of importance. So if I didn’t, why the hell would any one else? (Keri Arthur)

I’ve talked about this before, but I want to tell you something different today. Yes, most people will get the hint when you start making writing a priority. For example, my hairdressing friend MakeMe came over the other night to hang out. “I’m under deadline,” I said. “Two hundred more words, then I can talk to you.”

She nodded, grabbed a book, and sat down to read while I finished up what I needed to do. There were two parts involved with this: I was willing to enforce my boundary and she was perfectly willing to respect it. Both sides were reasonable. As soon as I finished we settled down for some serious power-lounging and gossip.

But it is not always this way, my chickadees. There are people who just don’t care what your priorities are, and it is hard to deal with them when it comes to your writing time. It is even harder when those people are lovers, spouses, friends, parents, relatives–you name it.

Now, my children have a perfect right to expect to be more important than just about anything. My priorities as a mother trump my priorities as a writer–but they do so reasonably. Writing is how I make the money to feed my kids, after all, so it is actually kind of a mother priority. My kids know I have to work during the day, and they know Mommy’s writing is how she pays the rent. They know they can break in for an emergency, and they know that, in absence of emergency, my attention will be fully theirs once I get my wordcount in. We manage all right.

But what I’m talking about is other adults presuming you’re on earth just to please them. Which is, when you get right down to it, what a lot of people assume about everyone else, to varying degrees. It’s natural for human beings to think so. It’s also natural for you, as a writer, to put up with no sh!t when it comes to getting your words in–or to be conflicted when it seems that you do have to, after all, take some sh!t when it comes to getting your words in.

Therein lies the problem. There will be tension and various passive-aggressive and (let’s face it) aggressive strategies you will face at least once in your writing life. No matter how blunt and up-front you are about writing being a priority, there are some people to whom this will not matter. It’s a good bet that at least one of those people will be in your inner circle–family, close friends, spouse/lover.

I’ve had parents who told me writing was never going to amount much, the artsy-fartsy stuff wouldn’t put food on the table, I should get my head out of the clouds and do what their unfulfilled ambitions dictated so I would be Safe and they would Proud. I’ve had lovers and a spouse resent my affaires d’écrires and pull every possible emotional (and sometimes physical) stunt to pull me away from the keyboard. I’ve had friends come over and ignore my boundaries while I’m writing. I’ve even had friends who dumped me once I got published. (That’s a whole ‘nother blog post.)

You have to weigh this like you weigh other Important Stuff. If your lover tried to keep you from going to your day job or the doctor’s office, how would you react? Is your writing that important to you? It is to me, but your answer might be different. Is your emotional investment in this person enough to justify the toxicity of their overstepping of your boundaries? Are there other reasons to put up with this sort of behavior?

A lover who doesn’t “understand” or who doesn’t respect my boundaries when it comes to writing time is not a lover I’m going to keep, for a variety of reasons that might have nothing to do with writing. Any relationship isn’t going to last long if the other person don’t understand I write to pay my rent and cannot afford to stop. Cause, you know, I need a place to live. Besides, if that person doesn’t care about something so important to me, is it really a relationship that’s going to last? That would be…no. Nope. Nuh-uh.

A family member…well, that’s stickier, and you have to factor obligation and family duty into the equation. I am actually in a strange position because I don’t talk to most of my family at all, again for a variety of reasons. I’m pretty much only in contact with my sisters, and they understand both that I have to write to pay the rent and also that they can break in with an emergency and I’m all over it. (Because other things come and go, but sisters? That’s FOREVER, man.) So I’m saved a lot of the toxic and passive-aggressive crap I had to deal with back before I was writing for an actual living.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Lots of people who call themselves “writers” don’t write, or allow drama and crap like this to impinge on their writing lives and time. I hit a point, right about the time I hit thirty years old, that I just could. not. take. it. any. more. I became a lot more willing to tell people to leave if they weren’t going to respect my time and my work ethic. A lot more willing to draw the line, ignore, or just plain avoid the toxic. It’s an ongoing process, of course, but one I have to spend time on or I don’t produce and if I don’t produce I don’t get to buy groceries or live in my nice house.

It’s amazing how one’s priorities shift once it becomes “write-or-be-homeless.”

You might not be at this point, and your priorities may be different. But if you want to write, do yourself a favor and think a little bit about this issue. Think about what will happen when someone decides their emotional needs are more important than your writing and you don’t agree with them. Think about what might happen when and if you say, “Busy. Got wordcount. You can have my attention when that timer rings.” Think about just how far you’re willing to go, how much you’re willing to make writing a priority. If you want to make a career out of it, these are questions you’re going to have to answer sooner or later.

If you don’t, it’s better to know that sooner than later, right?

Over and out.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Three things I just wanted to note before my Friday Writing post:

* Pharyngula, on why faith is at odds with science and why this isn’t a bad thing. Why it is reasonable, and normal, and why science is better.

* Keely Kolmes, on whether therapists should Google their clients. Good stuff.

* And Cleolinda on Michael Jackson. I’ll just point at that, because she says everything I want to say.

And now, Friday writing! Onward!

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Good news! Night Shift, the first Jill Kismet book, is now part of Hachette Book’s Open Book program! (There are other cool books you can read for free, including Jeff Somers’s most excellent Digital Plague, here.) Go, read, enjoy!

I finished the zero draft of the third Strange Angels book last night. It’s bitty, weighing in at about 54K, mostly because there are significant chunks of it that I had to have the ending before I could go back and fill them in. So now the book can rest for a little bit, and I can start (probably in a week or so) at the very beginning and get it into reasonable first-draft shape. Which is the last huge push before I send it off to the editor and start chewing my nails while thinking they’re going to hate it and hate me and oh god oh god oh god!!!!!)

In other words, business as usual.

I really should not have bombed out to the store to get milk and bread before having my coffee today. Not only do I not deal well with the world while I’m precaffeinated, but there was a whole swarm of overentitled people on cell phones–I counted five while driving all the way to Trader Joe’s, seven in the store, three in the parking lot, another two driving to another store closer to home for other stuff, four inside THAT store, and another two on the two-block drive to get back home with my trunk full of perishable purchases. WTF, people? It’s like some sort of disease. PUT THE DAMN CELL PHONE DOWN WHILE YOU DRIVE, MMMKAY? And furthermore, don’t stand blocking a whole grocery aisle while you discuss every. goddamn. item. with. your. significant other. Just don’t do it. And I really don’t need to hear about who got the clap from who at what party. (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.) It is just insane.

All right, I’m going to take my Ranty McRantypants self elsewhere. Which is a huge relief for everyone, I suspect.

Over and out.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Yeah, when you stumble to the front door to let the cats out (because, of course, they will DIE IF THEY DON’T GET OUT THIS INSTANT) and see the sunshine, hear the birds singing, and even the thought of a bowl of Cheerios is too much effort…

…then, my friend, you know you stayed up too late last night getting your heroine in trouble.

I used to be able to pull all-nighters and be fresh as a daisy afterward. Then I hit a long jag of nothing but all-nighters. (It’s called early parenthood.) And when I surfaced from that at 30 I found out I had lost that ability. My body says, “Stay up all night and expect me to work the next morning? HAHAHAHAHA! You’re joking, right?”

Of course, it could have something to do with me staying up to write fiction instead of getting into trouble myself. Perhaps my body would be happier if I was out dancing or something. I do miss dancing. However, I do not miss the boozed-up jerkwads or some DJ’s idea of “cool” music shattering my eardrums with feedback when all I want is a beat. Oh, or my ride getting drunk and leaving me stranded.

Guess I’ve just gotten old and boring. I’d rather be hitting 50K on the YA and getting my heroine shot. You know, doing actual work.

Guess this means I need to turn in my “cool mama” card. Where does one mail those things back to anyway? If I can’t find a mailing address I’m going to have to keep it and just impersonate a cool mama.

Yes, I’m in a silly mood today. Can you tell? Here, have my morning earworms: one is Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died In Your Arms Tonight” and the other? Murray Head’s “One Night In Bangkok.” The mashup inside my head is a thing of beauty and wonder, but I can’t share it because video and audio editing software is not jacked into my brain yet. Sorry. You’ll just have to imagine.

The Internet has been all over Roger Ebert’s deliciously cranky review of the new Transformers movie. His review actually makes me want to go see it MORE, because my complaint about Transformers 1 was “Less girlfriend, more FIGHTING ROBOTS!” I don’t want fricking plot in a Transformers movie, for Chrissake. I want ROBOTS. LOTS OF ROBOTS DUKING IT OUT. I want 99.9% PURE ROBOT BATTLE. Plot is for, you know, actual stories. Not for marketing machines built on a Hasbro line, for Chrissake. (Were Transformers Hasbro? I forget.)

Okay. All silliness aside, it’s time for me to make another lunge at finishing up this book. See you around, chickadees.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Since I finished proof pages last night and the third YA is burning a hole in my head (as in, MUST GET BOOK OUT OF BRAIN WRITE WRITE MORE WRITE NOW DAMMIT), you get three random things that make a blog post.

* Are Bookscan numbers inaccurate, or worse, just plain wrong? (Hat tip to Diana Peterfreund for the link.) On the one hand, lowball Bookscan numbers do provide a publisher with more leverage against author and agent demands for more money–natural and normal on both sides. But wrong by 100%? I don’t know if this is widespread or just with this one particular author. Industry peeps, what say you?

* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: authors overwhelmingly have no control over cover copy or cover design. (In some cases this is a good thing.) Please, please, don’t blame us when the cover doesn’t match the book. We’re probably more mortified about differences between the cover and the content than you can ever imagine. We’re sorry about it, but that’s the way it is.

* I can tell I’m about to begin another creative burst. The symptoms are all there–sleeplessness, restlessness, weird reactions to emotional upheaval (my irrational relief at getting some furniture moved is a prime example) and an itching to get one project done so I can begin to work on another. The Sekrit Projekts are beckoning like mermaids. Part of it is avoidance–two-thirds of the way through a book is where I start having all sorts of Bright Shiny New Ideas, and I have to really buckle down so I don’t get distracted. That’s one thing I had to learn–the Shiny Idea when I’m trying to finish the Contracted Idea is a Bad Idea. A lot of writers get seduced by the shiny in the mid-novel slump and have difficulty finishing. There’s no cure for it that I can see other than discipline, which is why I call discipline the #1 quality a writer should cultivate. (Habit being the best of slaves and the worst of masters, and all.) It is a quality that can be learned, and is therefore within a writer’s control. When so much isn’t.

There. Three things, the timer’s rung, and I’m back to work. See you on the other side, chickadees.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Crossposted from the Deadline Dames

Welcome to the Friday Writing Post! Today it’s a short one, because yesterday was the last day of school. So of course the Princess’s best friend stayed the night, and I have promised them cookies. They are champing at the bit to get to the cookies. There is a double batch in the works, between the toffee pieces I bought and and the propensity of Certain People in the house to snitch bits of dough.

I, of course, am innocent of such things. (Yeah, right.)

Today I’ll be answering some questions from my Worldbuilding and String post. Reader Tanya had some questions, and I thought they were reasonable. I realize I don’t talk a lot about nitty-gritty process, and these very simple questions are a good place to start. So, away we go!

1) when you write dialogue…how do you format it while writing the 1st draft. Do you include formatting during the first go round?

Want to know something embarrassing? I didn’t know about commas and dialogue tags all the way through my first two novels. “Hey Lili. When you have a dialogue tag–he said, she said, etc., you need to put a comma before the last quotation marks,” my editor finally said. (Notice how I slyly slipped that in there?) I’d been putting in periods. *facepalm* I have to keep learning about punctuation, or she will bite me.

Anyway. Here’s the rules for formatting dialogue:

* Remember those commas if you’re using a dialogue tag.

* Though I don’t advocate dialogue tags, because they’re deadweight. “I don’t think you want to pull that trigger,” Avery said. It’s okay, right? Serviceable.

But look how it could be better, with action tags. “I don’t think you want to pull that trigger.” Avery yawned, showing white teeth. “It could be very unhealthy for you.” You see? Action tags don’t need that comma.

* Say you have two people speaking, George and Amy. Whenever the speaker changes, you need a new paragraph. DO NOT, FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST, PUT TWO DIFFERENT SPEAKERS IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH. That’s a junior mistake and will get your manuscript tossed.

“I think she’s wrong.” George peered over Amy’s shoulder.

“You try being an editor.” Amy sighed and shut the laptop.

New speaker, new paragraph. It’s that simple. (Can you tell a few “writers” have argued with me over this one? While I was a submissions editor? Can you guess if they got tossed in the slush pile? You betcha.)

* Kill the exclamation points and dressed-up dialogue tags. An exclamation point is like the word “that”–mostly unnecessary and overused. Think very hard about either of those things wherever they show up. And don’t use dialogue tags like “George grated” or “Amy yelled,” unless you have a very good reason to. Action tags first, dialogue tags when necessary to avoid confusion, and exclamation points and dressed-up dialogue tags almost never. Stephen King pointed out that “said” is good enough most times.

2) do you outline or use index cards?

I, erm, actually am a pantser. I don’t outline OR use index cards, though I’ve heard of people using both. Sometimes I’ll do a list in a separate document of characters–names, vitals, statistics.

About halfway through a book, though, the story will grow a sort of halfass outline down at the bottom with big plot events in [bold and brackets]. This lasts from the halfway to the two-thirds point, where the story invariable veers away and I erase everything bolded and bracketed. I find that too much structure kills the story–I need it loose enough to breathe, loose enough to be surprised. Trusting the work is my big thing.

I’ve seen a lot of writers with beautiful detailed outlines…and no story. Outlining can become a timesuck and a way to avoid the actual work of writing. HOWEVER, I also know a lot of productive writers who outline almost obsessively and it doesn’t hurt them any, it’s all part of their process. The acid test is whether or not you’re producing work and finishing things.

3) if you outline – how deep do you go?

See above. I generally know where the story is going in the very first line. The story that I don’t have at least a vague idea of where it’s going is very, very rare. I call the Big Events in the story “wickets” like in croquet, places the ball needs to go through on its journey to the final hoops and a finished game.

4) what type of software do you use, if any? preferences? im a techy so tech is always a consideration for me. (I have a mac and am trying to use scrivener.)

Here’s where I’m sure I’m going to piss some people off.

Novel-writing software seems like another big timesuck to me–a pretty thing whose actual usefulness is outweighed by the “playing with it instead of writing” factor. I think a basic word-processing program is all you need. I can see needing a separate program for scripts–scriptwriting is a totally different beast and you need different formatting tools to do it–but “novel-writing software” looks like a waste of time and money to me.

I use MSWord because I’m familiar with it and the MSOffice suite is good value for my money. I write in 12pt Times Roman, single space, first line indent, print layout, no spaces between paragraphs. Before I send the finished draft to a beta reader or editor I do a global double-space and add page numbers and the title and my last name in the header. But while I’m writing it’s just me and the page. The frills and furbelows on every piece of “novel writing software” I’ve ever seen just look to me like ways to avoid actually writing. I am sure some writers use it and it works fine, but I really think the less furbelows, the better. You can get OpenOffice or a basic office suite and have spreadsheets (I know a couple writers who use those) for keeping track of characters, and all the formatting options for getting your piece into submission-ready shape that your little heart could ever desire.

Plenty of the “tools” I see listed on the packages for novel-writing software are things you need time and practice to master. Themes and character development and structure will come as you get more practiced. You won’t be able to get away from your personal themes–as long as you’re telling the truth on the page, they’ll follow you around like puppies. Character development will happen as you learn to trust yourself and the story. Structure also comes after you’ve finished writing a few books, read many many books, and acquired a feel for what works and what doesn’t inside the confines of a particular form, whether it’s short story or novel. There is no substitute for hard work and practice when it comes to this, and I think the “tools” in novel-writing software might possibly be training wheels for some but are most likely shiny toys to distract from doing that hard work and getting your ten thousand hours in.

Your mileage may vary. But for me, it’s basic word processing. That’s the only tool I need. I am, however, very glad I no longer have to use a manual typewriter. Yes, that’s how I started out writing.

But that’s another blog post.

Keep writing!

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Today I’m over at SF MindMeld with a bunch of other cool people talking about real-life places that inspire worldbuilding. If you want to know where Saint City came from, go take a look!

In other news, just past the halfway point with the book. Now it becomes an endurance contest. I’ve found the way into the labyrinth, now I just need to last long enough to find the way out.

Let’s hope I’ve knotted my string securely enough…

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

At least, not the way we assume it does.

I follow a psychologist on Twitter. Dr. Kolmes is fascinated with social media and how it impacts her clients and her profession, and her views on the professional ethics of using Twitter and social networking impressed me enough that I hit the “follow” button. And I haven’t regretted it–she posts links to papers and articles that make me think about things I haven’t before.

Like, for example, this article on how social networking sites impact the idea of privacy as we know it, and just how easy it is for predators and marketers to get hold of personal information if people insist on putting it on Facebook. Or MySpace. Or what-have-you.

Research conducted by Alessandro Acquisti, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of public policy and management who also spoke at the conference, has found that individuals’ notions of privacy are malleable depending on the context of an interaction. According to Acquisti, people are more likely to divulge key personal information — their photo, birthday, hometown, address and phone number — on social networking sites than they would on other web sites. His 2005 study highlighted privacy concerns such as online and physical stalking.

“People [say] privacy [is] important to them, yet they engage in behaviors that indicate a remarkable lack of concern,” Acquisti told the conference participants. “Privacy decision making and valuations are malleable,” but it’s unclear what factors lead to more disclosure. One of those factors might be a “herding effect,” he said. In one study, Acquisti found that that people will divulge information when they see others doing so. That tendency, he believes, may explain why so many people are willing to dish out personal information on the networks. (from article)

This hits on the other part of it–something I was talking about last Friday. I have Facebook and MySpace and Goodreads (oh my) pages for my readers, yes. So there’s a certain amount of my personal self that I have to make the decision about letting my readers see. But it’s not just readers who are going to have access to that information. You put it out there on someone else’s server, and you’re trusting the server company, the social networking company, and THEN you’re trusting everyone you “friend.” None of these things are private in the accepted senses of the word.

The Internet is public, but we pretend it isn’t sometimes. That pretense can be actively harmful when a predator finds an Internet watering-hole and settles down to wait.

One last chunk from that article:

Hill says a person’s pattern of behavior on various networks can reveal tell-tale signatures, similar to fingerprints — or perhaps “friendprints” — that can be used to solve a wide range of business challenges, from targeted marketing and advertising to fraud detection.

The study, titled “Building an Effective Representation for Dynamic Networks,” originated as an approach to fraud in the telecommunications industry. The authors were interested in the problem of identifying phone service subscribers who repeatedly default on their bills by signing up for service under an alias. The problem is not new. However, the focus of the paper was to show how to clearly identify a customer’s social network signature and match it to signatures created by customers who had previously defaulted. “Repetitive defaulters may be identified despite their aliases over time by their ’social network signature,’” according to the paper. (from article)

Just sit back and think about that for a second. This doesn’t just mean people who don’t pay their phone bill can be tracked. This means YOU can be tracked. Even if you don’t do anything “wrong,” the capability to track YOU down is still there. Who is going to use that capability? For what ends? How is that capability overseen by the social networks, are there guards in place to stop unethical usage?

It’s simple. There just aren’t.

People treat social networks like their friend networks out here in the real world (I almost said “meatspace”), where the tools of human perception and human cooperation evolved over thousands of years keep things (mostly) on an even keel. Networks on social-networking sites do not have a lot of the consequences meatspace (oh, what the hell) friend networks have, like shunning or instant reaction to someone’s bad behavior. It’s a recipe for disaster, and there’s all sorts of personal information floating out there to be taken advantage of.

I don’t point this out to sound alarmist. I do, however, think that a lot of authors should think long and hard about social networking sites and blogs, and decide just what they want out there in the vast public petri dish of the Internet. I also think people are going to be shocked when it becomes obvious how intrusive social networks have the potential of being, especially when their users take a certain amount of privacy for granted and yet give up highly valuable personal information at a moment’s notice.

Privacy on the Internet is mostly in your own hands. But a lot of people don’t think about it. Like sex, they just assume they’re safe. The consequences might not be as dire on the Internet as they are in bed, but is that any reason not to take precautions?

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Andrew Sullivan is doing some of the best and most important coverage of the protests in Iran right now. There’s also Twitter, of course, and the mainstream media is just beginning to catch up.

Why is this important? Glenn Greenwald, Daily Reveille, and my friend RealThog offer some thoughts that illustrate different aspects of why people should care. Laura Ann Gilman makes a good point, too. You can’t stop the signal. Our interconnectedness as human beings is reaching the point of the instantaneous and obvious.

This would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago. It was unthinkable even fifty years ago. It is incredible and amazing that the whole world can be watching this sort of thing go down, that we can have updates of events as they happen from the people actually involved. Wow. Just…wow. And Twitter responding to calls to change its scheduled maintenance and downtime for 1AM or so Iran time so the protesters can keep using the service was a Good Call by a company. They’ve bought themselves a lot of credibility and goodwill with that one move.

I am reserving judgment on a lot of things related to this issue at the moment. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the people of Iran, or a significant portion of them, are protesting peacefully and do not trust the election results. The government has replied with truncheons and jackboots. I don’t think it will go so far as revolution, but I’m thinking Ahmadinejad didn’t win the election cleanly or clearly and what happens now will be incredibly important not just for the people of Iran but in the broader Middle East and by extension, the world.

And I’m thinking, thank God we have a President who thinks before he speaks now.

Wow. Just…wow.

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The title kind of says it all. I’ll be hanging around a little, but most of my attention is taken up with the third Strange Angels book. It’s veered off in a totally different direction, which is good. The point at which I throw even the faintest approximation of an outline out the window and trust solely in the work to carry me is the point at which I’ve found the right path into the book.

Or at least, I hope.

Back soon, but before I go, a question. I’ve been wondering about the true cost of ebooks once one factors in the cost of a computer/ebook reader (or access to one), Internet access, etc. Has anyone worked that out? I’m interested to find out.

See you around. My brain is being eaten by the boooooook…

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Crossposted to The Deadline Dames.

I see a lot of new writers abusing the Internet, or being abused by it, nowadays. So, in the vein of Jordan Summers’s recent Dame For A Day post, I thought I’d weigh in about various pitfalls of that lovely, wonderful timesuck.

I was amused and horrified to read about what Jordan calls “Internet authors”–writers who write around their Internet time, not the other way around. I was even more horrified when I took a hard look at my own Internet usage and…erm, well, yeah. (Truth hurts, doesn’t it, Lili?) So I got out that writer’s best friend, the kitchen timer, and put myself on a strict schedule. Timer rings, I’m off the Net, even if I haven’t “finished.” This forces me to get important correspondence done and the daily blog post out, and leaves me just a few minutes for surfing, say, the Comics Curmudgeon or I Can Has Cheezburger. (Not to mention playing on Twitter…)

There’s nothing like a timer to concentrate one’s mind and priorities. At least, so I’ve found.

There’s something else I want to talk about when it comes to the Net, though, and it’s social networking. No, this is not a paean to the wonders of Facebook or a gushing about how one should really get on Twitter. No, this is about a little thing called asymmetrical follow.

Asymmetric follow happens because on sites such as Goodreads and Facebook, once I am “friended” with someone, I have little control over what gets sent to me. Yes, I can see their profile and there’s good things about being “friended,” but I also have to wade through a bunch of invitations, events, and other stuff on a daily basis. If I followed up on all the invitations I get on Facebook, I’d have literally no time for writing.

This is a bad thing.

I’ve ended up using Twitter more regularly because I can control what I see through Tweetdeck. To put it bluntly, I tend to follow industry professionals, fellow authors, and people I know out here in meatspace. I don’t follow everyone who follows me, nor do I intend to. I am not required to follow anyone who follows me, really; that’s not what I use the service for. I do read my @replies and engage in conversations with fans on Twitter, but if I followed everyone who asked the service would lose a great deal of its usefulness for me. Asymmetrical follow is a fact of life, and the passive-aggressive behavior of some folks who think they’re “owed” a follow or a friending (because obviously I exist to fulfill their needs, not to write books or have a life) just makes me turn away.

I engage on sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, even the Deadline Dames and my own blog, for a reason. And that reason is not to fill up my time or stroke someone’s ego–not even my OWN ego. I maintain a presence on MySpace and Facebook for my dear Readers, on Goodreads because I like to get book recommendations as well as track my reading. I’m on Twitter for two reasons: to have conversations with industry professionals and friends, and to give fans a little more of a “personal” relationship with my public self as an author. At the Deadline Dames I’m supporting fellow authors, centralizing promo opportunities, and enhancing another aspect of my public self as an author.

My personal blog is really not quite that personal. I’m careful what I put up there, because it’s about (you guessed it) my public self as an author. I don’t blog about certain aspects of my personal life. I don’t post pictures of my children or the real names of my friends and family, because that’s an infringement on their privacy and safety. The website is my public face, and I don’t want egg or mud on it.

I see a lot of authors treating their websites like their living rooms. Which would be fine–except they forget that other people come in and look around. The living room is the room you invite guests–fans and the curious–into. You can walk around naked in your living room if you like–but do you want to do it when you’ve got company over? More grief and Internet wank comes from this than from just about anything else.

Authors and industry “professionals” sometimes forget that the Internet is public. Even when you set your posts on Livejournal, Blogger, or your own website to “private,” whatever you’ve written is out there on a server somewhere. It’s like giving the key to your diary to someone else to hold. If you trust that person, fine. But can you trust a blogging site? Murphy’s Law and the nature of the Internet tells me that it’s perhaps not wise.

It’s one thing to make an ill-considered public statement and deal with the fallout. It’s another thing to bare your soul (or your metaphysical boobies) in a public venue and deal with the fallout. I’ve seen a lot of authors treat their blogs, whether on their sites or on a platform like LiveJournal, as if it’s their diary and say things that should be kept behind the vest. Then, when all hell breaks loose, they feel violated. Then there’s the entertaining trainwreck of authors blogging about their sex lives, marriages, personal peccadilloes or vendettas in the industry–and being surprised when it explodes in their face or the fans get disgusted.

One of the most important things I learned in massage school was the principle of dual relationships. When I was practicing massage therapy, my relationship with my clients was simple: client/massage therapist. If a client invited me, for example, to a barbecue, I could make the call whether or not I wanted to add another relationship: friend/friend. It was hardly ever advisable to do so, but if I did, I had to be clear about which relationship I was in at any given moment and what the boundaries were. This saved trouble and heartache, and it was the professional thing to do.

That system of thought has stood me in good stead ever since. When my writing partner is critiquing me, we have a professional and well-defined relationship. When we’re kibbitzing over wine at our favorite Thai restaurant, we have a personal, friendly, and no less well-defined relationship. When I work at the bookstore, my boss is also my friend–but when she puts the “boss” hat on, I have the “employee/volunteer” hat on, and that relationship is, you’ve guessed it, well-defined. We make it clear what relationship we’re in at any given moment, and it cuts down on troubles and misunderstandings.

This is a skill we hardly ever bother to teach teenagers, or tell them they’re going to need. It would do the adults they turn into a world of good.

On my personal blog, I’m paying for the bandwidth and I have a comment policy. But I also have a professional relationship with my readers. I am there to provide content, not just to moan about my cat’s hairballs. On Twitter, I am providing content–or trying to do so, anyway. (My ideas of “content” on Twitter are a LOT looser than on my blog.) But there are well-defined boundaries to the relationship I have with my Readers on my blog, on Twitter, on Facebook–just about anywhere online. Those boundaries keep me intact and reasonably un-embarrassed, though I am just as prone to making an ill-considered statement as the next person. Thinking about, having, and sticking to those boundaries saves me a great deal of trouble and grief.

And remembering that the Internet is public can save other writers a lot of grief.

‘Nuff said.

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I’m over at the Witchy Chicks this morning, guest-blogging about writing paranormal. A big thank-you to the Chicks, especially Yasmine Galenorn, for inviting me!

Today I shall be trying something I have not tried before. No, it’s not rollerblading or skydiving. No, it’s not demon-hunting (done that) or recreational drinking (can’t do that anymore, got kids) or lumberjacking. Oh no.

No, today I shall be making French Onion soup, from a Mastering the Art of French Cooking recipe. Because I am completely and utterly insane. Wish my poor desperate soul luck.

If I may get philosophical…Life doesn’t just throw one thing at you. It throws a bunch of crap at you and hopes something sticks in between long periods of not-much. Since it is in the nature of life, I guess I can’t complain. Or I could, but it wouldn’t do any good.

Over and out.

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Reading Sedgwick’s Between Men has really opened up some avenues for thought. For example, while she’s talking about the tradition of mirror doubles in Gothic literature, I all of a sudden had this brainwave about Jane Eyre, my favorite book. (Tanith Lee’s my favorite author, Jane Eyre my favorite book. Yeah, I’m strange.)

So I started putting together a list inside my head of doubles in JE.

* Jane/Bertha (the mad wife)
* Rochester/St. John
* Mary and Diana/the Reed sisters
* Mrs. Reed/Helen
* Blanche Ingram/Rosamund Oliver
* Mr. Brocklehurst/Mr. Lloyd

Jane is referred to as “fairy,” “elf,” and “angel”; Bertha is once and very memorably described as “the foul German (apparition), the Vampyre.” Rochester is a warmhearted Vulcan, St. John a very cold and bloodless Apollo–one is harsh on the outside and a marshmallow within, the other is apparently passive to the will of God on the outside but harsh when Jane rejects him, and shown to be inwardly nasty. I’m still mulling over Mrs. Reed/Helen as mother-figures–the bad and abusive mother and the “good” but extraordinarily passive mother? I would have paired Mrs. Reed with Miss Temple, but Miss Temple is just not emotionally important enough to the story when compared to the effect Helen has, and Helen’s death frees her to become rolled up in the visitation by Jane’s dead mother later in the book (”My daughter, flee temptation!”). Then there’s Mrs. Fairfax at Thornfield and Grace Poole versus Bessie the maid at the parsonage, who rolls up both their good and bad aspects. Adele is a cipher for Jane’s own childhood, something I saw most clearly in this movie treatment of Jane Eyre (the one I think is technically the best even though Orson Welles’s Mr. Rochester has my heart.)

I could geek on all day about this, but I suspect I’d bore everyone involved except my own sweet self. I really do love that book, and I’ve often thought of doing a homage to it, though I couldn’t possibly do it justice. I know Sharon Shinn did a retelling–I didn’t like it as much as the first two books in her Samaria series, but I liked it well enough. And of course I’ve seen just about every movie treatment of it ever.

Sedwick’s other assertions about women as markers in the gambling game between men (the full title is Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire) is thought-provoking, especially when she treats Tennyson and Dickens. (Selkie, you should at least read the Dickens parts. Fascinating stuff.) I can’t wait to finish it and go back to The Epistemology of the Closet. Most lit crit is deadly dull, but every once in a while one comes along that knocks it out of the park and really informs the way I look at words on a page. It’s good to occasionally pull back and take a look at the forest instead of building a few trees at a time.

It makes me wonder what doubles I put in my work, though I’m sure my stuff is more hack than Gothic. I do think about themes and basic struggles and motivations–I think every author worth his or her salt does, and that thinking informs a lot of what we do when in the heat of creation. Writing for a living is not just the act of putting words on paper. There’s a great deal of work that goes on when a career writer is not in front of the laptop.

But I could talk about that all day too, and time’s a-wasting. I have to get my heroine in trouble again. I think she’s sprained her wrist and I have to get her physically somewhere else before I can set off the next chain of coincidence and action.

Over and out, dearies.

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Day Two of the Painfully-Squeezed Internet Addiction. I got through 3.5K yesterday, a difficult scene of female violence and another difficult scene of reactions. Characters aren’t acting how I thought they would, which is a good sign. Usually when the fire of creation is burning apace, the characters start surprising me. I just have to relax enough to let the Muse tell me how it really is.

I kind of wonder what brainwaves I’m using during intense writing sessions. I am aware of the outside world, but only in a small way–the mother in me keeping tabs on who’s where and what they sound like. The rest of me is sunk in a movie of the store, watching things play out and panning the camera around, making thousands of choices per minute (is that the right word? No, this is…) and generally feeling like a racecar or a cheetah going fast and hard just as it’s designed to. I could probably explain it better, but the timer is clicking by my elbow and I’ve only got a short amount of Internet “time” today.

I suppose I should thank Jordan Summers’s recent article on the Deadline Dames, about how writers are in danger of writing around Internet time and not the other way ’round. It really lit a fire under me to stop the nascent Internet addiction in its tracks. I also recommend Dame Devon’s post on daring to be bad. (There’s a reason I’m proud to be a Deadline Dame.)

And now for something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Not too long ago I was talking with friends about propaganda cartoons–specifically, the WWII Looney Tunes propaganda cartoons featuring Stalin as “Uncle Joe.” I mentioned that I’d heard of a Walt Disney “educate the troops about VD” cartoon from wartime, but was never able to find it. The UnSullen One didn’t find that one, but he did dig up a most awesome one from the 1970s, courtesy of Jezebel. Enjoy. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.

Off I go. Errands to run and wordcount to achieve. See you ’round, chickadees.

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I’ve got a catfight, a run with werwulfen, and a midnight tango with vampires to write, so this is gonna be short.

You know what else kitchen timers are good for? Besides cooking and carving out little chunks of writing time? They’re good when one realizes one is perilously close to an Internet addiction. I’m giving myself an hour of Internet play with my coffee in the morning, then no more for the rest of the day. With a deadline moved up (long story, my fault, ACK!) and parenting to do, refreshing my f-list and Twittering a million times a day ain’t gonna get anything done. And I don’t really need to refresh I Can Has Cheezburger ten times per hour; I can just read it once a week, right? Right. *cries*

That sobbing you hear? That’s the sound of an addiction being murdered in its cradle. Gruesome, ain’t it?

In other news, if you want to buy a signed copy of Strange Angels, it’s easy and you can help out an indie bookstore at the same time. I volunteer frequently at Cover to Cover Books, and you can go to their site and drop them an email. They’ll let you know the price, you pay for the book and shipping, I’ll sign it and they’ll mail it to you. Shipping’s quite reasonable, considering such things, and I will be happy to personalize the book any way you like. Fans get signed books, an indie bookstore gets some dough, and I get to feel like I’m earning all that coffee I drink while I’m down there. (Hey, it’s not often I get to run an ACTUAL COMMERCIAL ESPRESSO MACHINE. It makes me feel…well, manly. Womanly. Whatever.)

Moving on! Reader (and editor) TS made a good point on my Friday post about a good book NOT being all you need:

All of these things are important, not just because of what Lili said above, but also because at the end of the day, it is very hard to be objective about your own work*. So what you might think of as a “good book” might not be for many different reasons. Maybe you’re not as good a writer as you think you are, maybe you didn’t kill your darlings, maybe it’s well-written but familiar or the voice is great but the characters need developing. But you’re just too close to the work to tell.

As Lili said, agents and editors are inundated regularly with everyone’s idea of a “good book” and most of those don’t work out. So those other points are really important and when we find a good book that works for us, you can bet we’ll be jumping to work for you. But if you don’t follow those rules, it won’t matter.

So, so true.

I’m roasting a chicken in the crock pot for dinner tonight, it’s beginning to smell good. And I’m about out of time for blogging. So, have a good Monday, chickadees. I’m gonna see if I can’t get this character in some more trouble…

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