Petrified

I’m going to this writers’ conference this weekend, and I’m petrified.

I shouldn’t be. I have been to many professional conferences, presented my work in front of other professionals in my field, taught 25 years of classes — but I’m petrified of going to this conference.

I can count the reasons:

Because now I have to admit I’m a writer
Because I don’t know how I come off in person
Because I’m going to be around real published writers, of which I’m not one
Because I have handed off ten pages of Prodigies in an editorial review and I don’t know what ELSE I’ll be expected to change.
Because I’ll be giving a verbal pitch to real people instead of just online
Just because

I have no choice but to go. This is going to be a learning experience for me. Probably not my big opportunity, but a learning experience.

Deep breath.

Riding the Struggle Bus with my Novel

I’m struggling with Gaia’s Hands again.

I just don’t get a feeling of cohesiveness. I feel like I’m blobbing paint on a sculpture randomly and it’s not smoothing out. I’m not sure what to do about it.

If ever a novel needed to be burned in a bonfire, this is the one. Or is it?

Sometimes, my negative notions of a book I’m writing are based more on how I’m feeling at the moment than the book itself. So I have to ask myself if the book is really as bad as I think it is, or whether I’m just feeling discouraged. Conversely, I have to ask if the book is as good as I think it is, or whether my opinion is being buoyed up by a bubble of optimism. I don’t come up with many answers, which frustrates me.

My husband is not much help. No matter what I write, he says it’s good. First draft, good. Twenty-times edited manuscript, good. Never great, never bad.

So I have to go back to that beast of a novel and try to smooth the random lumps:

Does the relationship between Jeanne and Josh (given the 25-year age difference) make sense? (This is a fantasy novel; suspend your disbelief.)
Are their connections with Gaia developing at a reasonable pace and/or precipitated by plot factors?
Is the plot with Growesta/her department (the bad guys) developing?
Does anything feel just “stuck in there” for no reason except to pad out the word count?

I didn’t understand what editing was all about for the longest time. I copy-edited (proofread) and considered it editing. Now that I know what real editing is like, I understand why editing takes longer than writing the book. It’s challenging, and often bereft of hope.

Wish me luck, folks. I’m considering building that bonfire.

Interrogating my characters: Josh Young

I arrived at my favorite chair at the coffeehouse to find Josh already there, mug in hand.

“You’re looking for me, I take it?” I asked, setting my things down.

He looked up at me, brown eyes laughing. “You were looking for me.”

“You are going to give up my chair, right?”

Grinning, he moved to the other chair. “You have some questions for me, right?”

I study him — a slight young man with brown-black hair barely long enough to pull into a tail; big brown eyes, slightly oblique; a long nose, a full lower lip, a fey smile.

I cut to the chase: “Why Jeanne?”

“You make the assumption everyone does, that there’s no sane reason I should be in love with someone old enough to be my mother. Is there a sane reason to be in love with anyone?”

“Probably not, come to think of it,” I muse.

“So, let’s look at the insane reasons,” Josh continues. “No woman has ever stood out to me the way Jeanne does. It’s like walking through a forest in a fog, and you can’t see any of the trees clearly so they don’t seem real, and then there’s one tree you see with perfect clarity, and you realize that’s the tree you’re looking for.”

“Except the tree is a woman, and the woman is Jeanne.”

“Exactly. And she wasn’t just a good enough tree — ” Josh chuckles. “Enough of that metaphor. When she said we should just be friends and see what happens, I couldn’t be mad because that’s what needed to be said. And that’s another insane reason — we balance each other. Like the taijitu — the yin and yang. My yin, her yang and vice versa.

“And then there are the visions …”

“Visions?” I ask.

“When I first met Jeanne, I had a vision of her as the tender of a riotous garden with vines and plants and trees laden with fruit. More greens than I could put a name to, and she, a voluptuous woman, stood in their midst. How could I not engage with such a woman?”

I consider telling him he’s not the typical twenty-year-old male, but that goes without saying. “What do you think the vision is about?” I ask.

“I think,” he reflects, “it’s about Gaia.”

Bonus post: Interrogating Jeanne Beaumont

(For those of you relatively new to the blog, “interrogating” is when I interview a character in my novel to get insight into their character and motivations.)

I sit on my favorite easy chair at the coffeehouse, musing. How do I explain a relationship — a solid relationship? — between a twenty year old male and a forty-five year old female? Is that even possible? The biology is against it …

A sturdy woman with greying chestnut hair in a ponytail sits down at the chair next to me and sets her latte on the table. “You want an explanation, don’t you?” she shrugs. “What if there is no explanation?”

“Jeanne,” I caution her. “There’s always an explanation. Even for you and Josh.”

“Look, I’m a biologist. A plant biologist, maybe, but I know at least some of the animal side of things. A sociobiologist would say my relationship with Josh shouldn’t exist — he should be looking for a young thing he can make babies with, and I — well, I shouldn’t bother looking. Older women are obsolete in the biological world.”

“You don’t buy that,” I challenge. “You and I are both here, and biologically, older women notice young men. After all, cougars exist.”

Jeanne burst out laughing. “I’m hardly a cougar. I’m a pretty solid woman who’s grown comfortable with her single life. And then came Josh.” She took a long sip of her latte. “I can’t find an explanation. Society says — those pesky sociobiologists again — that women should have no patience with young men because they don’t know where they’re going in life. But then again … ” Jeanne paused for another drink of latte. “Then again, isn’t the belief that any of us know where we’re going to be tomorrow a bit of an illusion?”

I think of my marriage late in life, my developing career as a writer. “I think you might have something there.”

“Understanding that something, anything can interrupt our trajectory frees one up to look at a situation differently. Stability has to be balanced with resiliency. Although evolution favors the random mutation that happens to work with change in lower creatures, humans can adapt on the fly to changes. So someone like me can be an outlier and maybe that’s a good thing.”

“Enough of the biology, Jeanne,” I chuckle. “Why you and Josh?”

“I have trouble believing in mysticism, you know, but it’s almost something like that. Like, when he showed up at that table that night, we connected. I do alone pretty well, listening to the music and typing on my computer, but when he showed up, I wanted to be in his presence. It was a momentary ego trip spending time with such a beautiful young man, I suppose, but it was more than that. It was like he said to me, ‘I know where I want to go, and I want to go there with you.’ And what he said made perfect sense, if I wanted to tell society to go hang. And I did. I never have regarded what I’m ‘supposed’ to do with much love.”

“So you and Josh were supposed to be,” I teased Jeanne. “Which flies in the face of biology.”

“You would have to say that,” Jeanne muttered. “I feel foolish looking at it that way.”

“But that’s the way Josh would look at it.”

“Yes, it is,” Jeanne mused. “And he might be right.”

Pessimistically optimistic

I miss the boundless optimism of hypomania, that magic feeling when I step out of the house in the morning, and the sun shines just so, and I just know something magic will happen, because I’m blessed that way.

I don’t miss it enough to go off my meds, because without the meds my moods shift from elation to irritability to despair within a few hours. I have rapid cycling bipolar 2, so moods develop fast, like a volatile weather pattern. And that optimism could crash into suicidal ideations with the smallest speed bump in my life. The meds help, but anything from lack of sleep to a major stressor could derail my balance.

As a counter to my hypomanic pixie dream girl optimism, I have how I was brought up in a repressively Germanic family. The motto of my family was “Don’t look forward to anything, or you might get disappointed.” So normal me without the buoyant giddiness or the crushing despair hides in a coccoon of “This enterprise is doomed.”

I have to learn how ordinary people experience optimism. I have a manuscript out to a major science fiction publisher. It’s been there for three months. I expect to hear about it any day now. Because I’ve put so much work into the book I think it has a chance, I feel optimistic — but I don’t trust it because it looks like mania. Because I’ve gotten a number of rejections from this iteration of the novel from agents, I feel I should be pessimistic, but pessimism takes a lot of energy to maintain and optimism feels better.

So I’m waiting for a report on Prodigies, trying to tell myself that I’m going to get rejected and being answered by a bubble of optimism that I don’t trust. My only answer is to hold onto hope and keep trying.

How I started writing novels

Well, I finally wrote/revised for three and a half hours yesterday, fueled by copious amounts of coffee. I didn’t accomplish that much word-wise — maybe 1500 words at most. But I think I’m getting closer with Gaia’s Hands. Lots of work to go, though.

Gaia’s Hands is my first novel. It’s always been a problem child of a story. When I wrote it, I had no intention of writing a novel. I had written a short story based on a dream I had about an encounter between myself and a younger man. (If you think the dream had to do with the fact I was approaching my 50th birthday, you’d be right. And the dream was far more bizarre than anything I wrote from it.)

I wanted to know more about the dream, so I started doing a Gestalt dream analysis method where one tells the story from the viewpoint of the different characters, and even the important inanimate objects of the story. (I didn’t go that far). During this set of writing exercises, a story developed. And then another.

After the third story that developed from the dream, my husband Richard looked at me and said, “You’ve got all these stories. Why don’t you write a novel?”

I had never written a novel before because I think in terms of short stories — small plots with big twists, big themes. Novels have big twisty plots, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to plot those. I wrote Gaia’s Hands anyhow. Its original name was Magic and Realism, and it was heavy in theme and extremely light in plot. It was basically a love story, and although I have nothing against love stories, the characters did little more than hang out together.

And then I wrote more novels, some of which collapsed into each other (For example, Magic and Realism became Gaia’s Hands, and then it subsumed another novel during the same time period called Gaia’s Eyes and that’s the novel I’m currently re-editing) and somehow I got better at writing big twisty plots.

It’s been a lot of hard work editing and re-editing, and then getting help editing from a developmental editor and re-editing, but I’ve learned my goal has shifted from getting published to getting good, then getting published. I don’t want to grow to regret anything I’ve published.

I guess now I can call myself not only a writer, but an author, because I have devoted myself to growth. And it literally, cliche notwithstanding, started with a dream.

Questions I ask myself

Questions I ask myself while writing:

Do my characters ring true?

Do their emotions and actions fit their character?
Does their trajectory make sense?
Do I care about my characters?

Does the plot deliver?

Does the plot build in suspense?
Does the action make sense as it unfolds?
Do consequences logically follow actions?

Does the story flow?

Is the time and scene progression clear?
Does it avoid getting bogged down?
Is too much going on at once?

I feel discouraged looking at all these questions — how can I manage to do all this? Much of this happens subconsciously, or by trial and error. Sometimes it’s hard, because I don’t (obviously) write the whole book at once, but by bits and pieces. A lot of this I miss with my own tired eyes, which is why I have a dev editor and I let others read my stories.

So in actuality, it’s a matter of trusting myself, trusting the process, and just writing.

Time to Write?

Did I mention I’ve been really busy lately?

Monday through Wednesday have been dominated by doing moulage for a National Guard/FEMA training exercise called Vigilant Guard/Shaken Fury (I don’t name these exercises). My husband and I contracted under Human Domain Solutions. It’s an odd thing for me, a Quaker pacifist, to work with retired military and current Guardsmen, but they put up with me. We learned a lot about moulage from a fellow worker who has been doing this thing for over 20 years.

Then last night I had to complete my latest class assignment because classwork comes first. And I managed to put in another 2000 words (some of it a re-add of a subtracted part) into the edit of Gaia’s Hands. And submit my revised Apocalypse to my dev editor.

This morning I meet with my TA who’s helping me organize and move around my office for greater efficiency, and then — then I get to write again on Gaia’s Hands.

And then I’m going to a writer’s convention next (not this) weekend…

DIscombobulated

I really want to write today.

But so far, my calendar seems to thwart me from all directions. I have (another!) dental appointment* this morning, followed by a meeting with the outfit that is sponsoring the National Guard training which my husband and I will be doing moulage** for. And, depending on how long that will take (too long, I suspect; I have no patience with dawdling) maybe then I’ll have time to write.

I had great ideas last night for my rewrite/character development of Gaia’s Hands, and of course I forgot some of it and I’m trying to piece the rest of it together with Richard***. I need a good stretch of time to write with more coffee to fuel me****.

I’ve written today’s blog and I have promised myself at least an hour on Gaia’s Hands. Hopefully, I will feel inspired.

* I was born with an enamel deficiency and rather soft teeth; I have all my teeth crowned, but one or two of my teeth have broken off and require further work.

** Casualty simulation; making up volunteers to look like victims for training purposes. This run-through is an earthquake simulation to train the local National Guardsmen. For the first time ever, we’re getting paid for it. Woo hoo!

*** Richard is the husband previously mentioned.

**** We’re currently drinking our way through a coffee blend that is supposed to taste like chocolate; no matter how we roast it, we aren’t getting any chocolate notes, just something that tastes like really good commercial coffee. Sigh.

Help! I’m so BUSY!

I’m sorry I didn’t get to write yesterday, but I had work to do for my online class (taking, not teaching) and got some writing on the novel rewrite. And I had more work to do this morning for the class. AAAGH!

I will get some writing done today. I will. I will …