Category: Uncategorized

Alpha males.

I’m beginning to hate the phrase.
This morning I got a friend request on Facebook from someone who is most certainly an Internet scammer. Tipoffs: He’s pictured in military uniform with a military background. He lists his home as three different places in Africa so he’s apparently doing something dangerous, and to sweeten the deal, he’s widowed.
In other words, he’s the perfect romance novel hero.
I once got rejected by Harlequin because my story needed a hero who was 
  1. older than the heroine; 
  2. richer than the heroine and 
  3. more powerful than the heroine.
In other words, an alpha male, and the female protagonist is his dazzled (and subservient) woman.
Is this what I, a female, am supposed to fall for? If this supposed to be my fantasy? As a highly educated female, and one who lives in voluntary simplicity, my male won’t be alpha, but egalitarian. He might be dark and brooding, but smart enough to learn how to manage his own feelings. He might be an entrepreneur or a college professor or a social worker, but what he contributes is complementary skills.
It’s not sexy enough, where sexy is defined as a female so desirable the lone wolf tears off her clothes and pledges to change (but not enough to get a social work job). The female is thrilled to find her needs will be taken care of and she won’t have to be challenged at work anymore.
I probably will never write a romance novel again.
And I rejected Alpha Military Man for the third time. Who falls for these guys anyhow?

Wrestling with my Problem Child, part 2

Through a series of edits and rewrites, the novel Gaia’s Hands (about 90,000 words) has been reduced to a tight novella with a feeling of impending doom — and impending resurrection.

I do not know where that novella came from, except that I think it was lurking at the edges of the novel I wrote, with the symbolism pointing in that direction, but my not having the guts to go there. I think there’s a tinge of my mood in the middle of Trump’s presidency and its unrestrained pro-business stance. My story has become in many ways dystopian, where fear and threats rule the day for those who are different.

The source material is almost five years old. I’ve been struggling with it for years — as my first novel, it probably lacked  voice. After some serious, intense editing and a painful and beautiful ending, I don’t know if it has its own identity yet. But it’s a lot tighter, a lot more poignant, and I hope it’s a good story.

Wrestling with my Problem Child

I have always struggled with Gaia’s Hands as a story.  If you’re having trouble keeping track, that was my first novel that emerged from a series of short stories which arose from a very strange dream that had nothing to do with the story. That’s the way dreams work — you dream of (*censored*) and all of a sudden you’re writing a book about environmentalism and plant diversity and love and sentient beanstalks.

Being my first novel, it has its flaws, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix them. Did it want to be a mystical story? A grounded story? I was trying for magical realism, but I ended up with a book at odds with itself. It had plenty of themes, but what was the plot, anyhow? Which plot was the plot?  Did the plot need to be longer? Did I need to talk out the segments I added in? What could I fill in that actually assisted the plot?

Then yesterday, I heard that Tor/Forge (a major science fiction publisher), is looking for novellas to publish. A novella is between 7500 and 40,000 words according to Wikipedia and between 20,000 and 40,000 words according to Tor. It is, as the name implies, a short novel.

Given that I had just edited out all the parts of the novel that weren’t bare bones plot, the tug was clear — Make Gaia’s Hands into a novella. I’ve cut more out of the plot (there are a lot of subplots) and completely changed the ending — and now I have to add some more flow and description and cranking up of the plot (and get back to 20,000 words).

I don’t expect to get published. As I said, this manuscript is like the kid with the runny noise who you wish would quit crying. His own mum thinks he’s precious; everyone else wishes the kid would quit whining. Time for me to take care of the kid.

Love, Lauren

What Happened with the Blog

Remember when I said I was moving this blog over to Wix?

Wondering why I’m still here?
Don’t get me wrong — Wix is a beautiful blog, glossy and important looking. But it’s not a blog for words as much as for pictures. Wix optimizes for the quick attention span — big pictures that dominate the scene — and for search engine optimization. That’s fixed by this Blogger template — a front page that lists Every. Single. Hashtag. on it.
I think the biggest reason for my disillusionment with Wix is that you weren’t there. According to the high-tech statistical analytics, none of you were there except one person in El Macaro California, one person in Fort Worth Texas, One in Minooka IL, one from Gilbert Arizona, one from Toronto Canada , one from the middle of nowhere Indiana (not sure who that person is), and multiple hits from bots — Wix in Ashford Virginia, Google in Mountain View California, and Suddenlink (my internet provider) in Tyler, TX.
I know more of you read this blog. I know not all of you are bots, even if you never say anything. I can’t zero you down to city, but I know you by country. There are not many of you, but you are precious.
And I will remind you of my Wattpad serials:

PS: To My Friends

If I base a character on you, it is not you. Seriously, if that were the case, I wouldn’t be able to kill off any of my characters.

More specifically:

  • Some characters only look like you. 
  • Some characters have some of your basic characteristics (personality, looks, likes), but not your stories.
  • Some characters have your stories, but don’t share your basic characteristics.
  • Some characters are you from the Mirror Universe. 
Why do I base my characters on people I know?
  • I can’t visualize people. Honestly, if I try to call up your face in my mind, your nose floats off somewhere and I can’t see your eyes. So, yeah, you have hair.
  • Apparently, from what I can see in Wattpad, everyone does this, except they base their characters on movie and TV stars. My characters are quirkier than that, so they look like you.
  • My friends (including you, reader, a friend I haven’t met) have cool stories.
  • My friends (including you, reader, etc), have rich personalities.
On the other hand, I once killed off my ex-husband in a novel after establishing him as a pathetic womanizer. I have a t-shirt that says “You are dangerously close to being killed off in my novel.”  So I suppose there is some danger of being killed off by me. Sorry.

Clawing My Way Out

A friend of mine, upon reading my missives of the past few days, declared, “It’s worse than I thought.”

He’s right. I stepped into a maelstrom of selling myself, and it drowned me. And I’m practically dead, washed up on shore, and I’m the only one there to resuscitate me. 
Ok, the first thing is to claw my way back up the beach before the next wave takes me back out. One dragging crawl at a time. 
Once I’m far enough from the waves, I flop on my back and think: What do I want out of writing?
I want to write well and improve.
I want to be read by more than just my husband.
I want people to enjoy my work.
I don’t want to be big; I just want to be read and enjoyed.
I don’t know how to do this, which is why I waded into what ended up being the SEO maelstrom, the belief that selling one’s work is more important than writing and that quality is defined by how many page hits one gets.
There was a saying once upon a time: “Do what you love and the rest will follow.” I don’t know if I believe this; it assumes that there is a force in the universe that will promote my project over someone else’s.  I don’t want a God who will prioritize my dreams over Flint’s water problem or Puerto Rico’s ravaged infrastructure. I’ll do what I love, but I don’t have faith that the rest will follow. Which is why, I suspect, I walked into the shrieking maelstrom in the first place.

  

Where Did I Get Lost?

Once upon a time — no, I’m not starting a blog with something as lame as “once upon a time”!
Then again, it is like a fairy tale — but I’m up to the part with the swamp, and the rodents of unusual size, and Baba Yaga with her hut on chicken legs trying to put me in her cookpot …
I’ve been writing all my life. My first recognized work was that Groundhog Day poem my third grade teacher posted on the classroom door. I’m not sure my sister, ten months older, has ever forgiven me for a day full of “Did your sister really write that poem?” It was the first time I’d been complimented on my writing.
My eighth grade English teacher kept all the poems I wrote in a folder, and gave them back to me when I graduated eighth grade. She told me to keep them, so I did. If she hadn’t told me that, I would have thrown them out, because I hadn’t gotten any indication from my parents that they were important.
When I was in high school, the people who sat around me in General Business class — well, let these lyrics speak:
John told me he would marry me
Right in the middle of Civics class –
I guess I never believed him;
You had to know how I was –
A girl who hid inside her coat
And startled at shadows, wrote poetry
That Marsha and Tammy read to him –
But I never wrote a poem for John.
John and Tammy and Marsha told me I needed to get published someday, and I realized that getting published would be a way to get the recognition that was so rare in my home life. 
In college, my repertoire for poems (and later lyrics) fit one of two categories: “life sucks” and “there’s this guy.” Nope, I forgot the third — “life sucks because there’s this guy”. My first college boyfriend broke up with me on my birthday because he met a woman at a party he liked better. But, according to his fianceé, he kept all the poetry I wrote him, even though he “didn’t understand it”.
I was once a singer-songwriter, during grad school, until I divorced my guitarist. It was the first time in a long time where I was allowed to bring my writing out in the open for recognition. Those lyrics above were from that era, and time spent in open mic and in jam sessions exposed people to my writing.
It was only a few years ago that I wrote a novel. My first novel exists because I kept writing short stories around a dream I’d had, and my husband (not the guitarist) told me I might as well write a novel, so I did. And then I wrote more, and I improved, and I had a pile of novels on my hard drive. Three things occurred to me as I wrote novel #5:
1) These were novels, which were things that publishers actually liked to publish!
2) Nobody would ever see them unless I published them
3) I was hungry for recognition on my writing, and I hadn’t had any for 20 and a handful of years.
(Recognition, as you might have guessed from reading this essay, is a difficult subject with me. According to my mother, she never complimented me on anything because I was a gifted student who read at age 3 and she was afraid I’d get a “swelled head”. Instead, the school district treated me like a little prodigy and the praise I got from them wasn’t enough because it wasn’t from my parents.)
So I explored getting published. I started the traditional method, which was sending to agents, and I got a bit bucket full of electronic rejections. I wrote to a couple publishers directly, with equal results. I tried Kindle Scout, and neither time were my books ever regarded highly enough to pull into contract.
I decided to try Wattpad after a friend’s suggestion I publish something there, and I came out of terribly disillusioned. It appears that if one wants to be seen on Wattpad, one must carefully calculate how to “sell” the book. I admit that I have no talent for selling things — my pitch tends to sound like “well, if you have to read a book, you might not mind mine.” 
So now I’m at a crossroads. Not as in “Will I keep writing?” but as in “How can I try to be heard/read without losing my humanity?”
Any suggestions welcome.

Quirky Characters I Have Known

I think what drives me to write is the characters. My characters have been known to show up in my imagination during coffee hour. For example:
I sit in my favorite coffeehouse at the moment, a Starbucks in an expansive space at the corner of our college library.  Grzegorz visits — he orders tea and brews it strong. He folds his lanky frame into the chair and cups his hands around his tea as if it was his chance of salvation. His copper hair spills down his shoulders and gets into his eyes.  He speaks with a low, sibilant voice, sometimes halting to find a word. “Did I ever tell you about the time I had to pass as a college professor?”
“No!” I exclaimed. “How did you do that?”
“It’s actually pretty easy. Wear a tweed jacket, put on nerd glasses, wear the hair in a man bun — the bun was so tight it gave me headaches — and explain nonsense in an authoritative manner.”
“Hey! I protested. “I resemble that remark!”
Grzegorz chuckles and makes a defiant face at me.
Kat pops in occasionally — I mean literally pops in, because she’s a hereditary time traveler. This is her “natural time”, but chances are she set a bounce point in her favorite place, Starved Rock 1958, to get here.
“Hey,” she says, standing by the table, gazing with ice blue eyes. “Do you know what the hell that blonde espresso is?”
“As far as I can tell, it’s a light roast put through the espresso machine.”
“There’s no there there, if you know what I mean.” She brushed back the lock of white in her otherwise black hair. “Ian says he wants a blonde espresso — “
Ian pops in, five inches shorter than Kat, his crinkly brown eyes merry in his freckled face. “We were playing hide-and-seek; it took me a while to figure out where she went,”he noted, putting his arm around Kat’s waist. 
“I thought you’d never show up,” Kat scoffed. “I was about to get you a blonde cappuccino. Which is so far removed from coffee I might as well give you chocolate milk.”
“Hey, I like chocolate milk!” Ian protested.
Amarel, their* white-blond hair braided neatly down their back, sits down across from me, smiling with dimples showing. “Lauren,” they say, head propped on knuckles, china blue eyes focused on me, “Tell me about your writing.”
I had forgotten that Amarel was in training to be a social worker. “I’ve been struggling for a while. I’m demoralized because I can’t seem to get anyone to read my stuff.”
“You could,” they said, flexing their long fingers as their hands steepled, “write as if they are reading. And then maybe they will find you. Your words deserve to be heard.”
Maybe Amarel is right — maybe I need to write for my potential audience rather than mourning the lack of hits on this blog or on Wattpad. Moreso, maybe I need to write for Amarel, Grzegorz, Kat, and Ian. And all my other quirky characters.

*************

* Amarel is genderqueer, having been born with male and female genitals. This is a preferred gender pronoun form for them.