Category: Uncategorized

PS: Tis the Season to Have Writing Woes

I am less than 30,000 words away from a rough draft of a novel, and NOW I’m struggling to write.

Yes, I’ve said that before and I’ve gotten over it. I still want to talk about it.

It’s the most stressful time of the year:

Fall semester ends soon, and do you know what that means? End of semester projects in three classes! Final exams! Finalizing grades!

Stressed-out students! Stressed-out professors! Stressed-out people driving cars!

My house has become Christmas Music Central! (All I Want for Christmas is Yoooooooo!)

What should I get Richard for Christmas?

Am I doing Christmas right???

So with all of this on mind (and more), I sit down with my work in progress and say “OMG I know I’m not doing this right! I should have done more of this, that, and the other! It’s too long! It’s too short! It’s too complicated! It’s too simple! I haven’t even finished Prodigies!”

What to do?

1) Think about the book before I sleep. Some of my best plot ideas come from dreams.
2) Sit down during my usual allocated time (after I publish the blog in the mornings and before work) and GO FORWARD, not look back.
3) Drink coffee.

A NaNo Success Story

As you noticed from the title, today’s post is called “A NaNo Success Story”. But it’s not my story, which you’ve already heard — more than once.

This is my husband’s story.

For those of you who don’t know my husband, his name is Richard Leach-Steffens, and he looks like this (the person who isn’t me):

We were both a bit chubbier then.

He is universally regarded as the sweetest guy in the universe. He has a couple quirks, but so do we all. One of his more obvious quirks is that he has trouble finding words, and instead of a stammer, he uses grand arm gestures to try to coax the word out of hiding. (In the fashion of married people, I have picked up this habit, except I also say “uh … thingie” while trying to remember).

Richard has always wanted to write. When I asked him what job he dreamed of when he was younger, he said, “I wanted to be a traveling restaurant critic, but I have writer’s block.” I thought he had the perfect job idea, by the way: travel, eat, write, get paid. I’m still wondering why I didn’t come up with this.

When I started participating in NaNoWriMo, I invited Richard to participate with me. “But I don’t have ideas!” I knew that Richard had ideas, because he helped me with ideas all the time. Many a car ride and coffee hour has been spent bouncing ideas off him, and him bouncing ideas off me.

Richard, like many, dipped his toes in writing through Camp NaNo, a less strenuous version of NaNo, where one could set their own goal. Richard’s first project was part 1 of a novel based on one of the characters in my series of novels, Arnie Majors, the D.B. Cooper of draft resistors. His second Camp project was part 2 of the same book. He felt comfortable writing in an established world, because although he’d gotten comfortable with his writing, he didn’t feel comfortable with his imagination.

Last year, Richard started (and completed) his first NaNo book. Again, it was based on my Archetype world, but he took a character mentioned once in passing and created a book around her story. It’s clearly his book and not mine — yet it’s true to the universe. He made his word count goal in time, so he won.

This year, Richard wrote a book with his ideas, his imagination, start to finish. It’s soft Science Fiction, very conceptual — in other words, his kind of book. (His Master’s is in history, specifically military history; my PhD is in Family Economics, with a bunch of sociology and psychology thrown in).

Think about this — Richard had writers’ block. He didn’t trust his ideas, he didn’t trust his imagination, he didn’t trust his writing skills. He now has one book to finish and then three to edit in case he wants to publish (and torture himself the way I torture myself trying to get published).

He’s a NaNo success story.

Proposal: A Real February Holiday

We need a holiday in February.

In the US, we have Thanksgiving in November, Christmas a month later, and New Year’s Day a week after that.  So we greet the darkness of midwinter with a vision of a glowing fireplace and wassail and Santa in the Coca-cola red garb and the reality of stolen moments of togetherness in-between the Christmas crowds and the ugly sweater office parties. But fantasized versions of Christmas are good; our movies reflect the family Christmas we need, and instruct us to make our own families and love the people we have.

Then there’s the time from after New Year’s until spring, the hardest part of the winter. Ice and slush smeared with cinder and mud, with no red ribbon or colorful lights breaking the monotony.

What about Valentine’s Day? you ask.  Valentine’s Day,  as long as I have lived, has been a show of lording privilege over others. In grade school, the children all decorate boxes for others who stuff valentines in. If the teacher doesn’t require kids have valentines for everyone, then the popular children get valentines and the unpopular ones do not. If the teacher requires that children give everyone valentines, then the unpopular children get ugly, uncomplimentary, and sometimes literally snotty valentines. As adults, the haves display their Valentine’s booty on social media, and the have-nots — don’t.

Maybe we should make Valentine’s Day a real holiday, where we show love by giving? Gather our friends and have a good lunch before we put red bows on the dogs at the humane society and walk them; give manicures and pedicures to the women at the senior home; clean out our cupboards for the soup kitchen and give our old dishes to the women’s shelter.

And those flowers? Give them to someone who would not get a flower otherwise.  A friend of mine gave me a white rose in my office one year, in a time when I hadn’t dated for years. The best February ever.

The Beginning of a Great Romance

I’m aware that many of you live in countries where Christmas starts Christmas Eve and ends on January 6th. In a way I envy you, because the Christmas season here starts on Black Friday (day after American Thanksgiving) and blares on with endless advertising, Santas everywhere, Mariah Carey wailing “All I want for Christmas is Yooooooo”.

I’m not a traditionalist. I’ve never watched “It’s a Wonderful Life”. I want to see people make their own traditions — I’ll have a post later on about that. I want to see a thousand little Christmases with endless variation and stories that are honestly emotional.

I tried to write a Christmas romance novel. but Harlequin turned it down, because it didn’t have what people were looking for. For example, the male protagonist was short. And he ran a toy store — he wasn’t an ex-Navy Seal become millionaire with a warm heart but a steely gaze. The female protagonist — you might recognize her; her name is Marcia (I didn’t realize I’d done that till today).  Not gorgeous, a little absent-minded professor with the heart of a child. The couple was split apart by mistaken notions, which you’d expect in any romance novel, and they get together in the end. But you couldn’t give it a Harlequin title: “The Santa Claus’ Frightened Elf”.

I came up with this scene when I was fifteen. Yes, at fifteen, my idea of a hot guy was a short redhead who ran a toy store. It’s obviously been brushed up, but I remember getting an A on it in Creative Writing class. Enjoy:

********

Marcia stood in front of a store she had somehow missed her first time down the block. She wondered how she could have missed it, as she could see through its windows well-crafted wooden toys and children’s furniture, not to mention dollhouses, rocking chairs for adults, and small carvings. Perhaps, she thought, she had dismissed it because of the “Closed” sign that hung on the door.

As she stood there, nose pressed against a misty show window, she heard the jingle of keys. Her reverie broken, she turned to see the flannel-shirted man, a short, rugged-looking redhead with a close-cut beard, turn a key in the lock.

“Sorry I wasn’t here,” he said pleasantly as he pushed the door open. “I had to get some – hey, weren’t you just in the Book Nook?”

“Yeah, I was the one chatting with your Santa friend.”

“My Santa friend – oh, yeah, Jack. He’s actually retired Air Force, believe it or not, but he comes out of retirement every year to play Santa for the community.”

“He does a great job. So, is this your store, or do you just work here?”

“This is my store.” He indicated the door with a flourish and stepped behind the glass counter full of small wooden sculptures.

Marcia stepped through the door he held open and instantly gravitated toward a wooden car that sat on a glass shelf, a cut-out with wheels. Of plain, unpainted wood, the car showed painstaking craftsmanship in the smoothness of the finish, the pleasant contours that comforted a hand. Marcia pushed it, feeling the “clack-clack-clack” the wheels made as it traveled down her invisible road. “I bet little kids really like this.”

“Not just little kids, apparently.” From behind the glass counter, the man grinned at her, a grin that removed all mockery from his words. Marcia realized that he was not as young as she had thought in the coffeehouse. He had the slightly weather-worn look fair-skinned men get in their thirties, with laugh lines around the eyes. The faint freckles and red hair, she thought – those must have thrown her off. 

“Oh, wow,” she breathed as things clicked in her head. “When you said this was your shop, you meant this was your shop.”

“Well, yes?” One of his eyebrows quirked.

“I mean – you make this stuff, don’t you?”

“Absolutely.” 

“Wow, you have a real talent!” She looked at the walls, the shelves with toys, the dollhouses, the hobbyhorses all glowing with warmth. “I mean, I used to play with trucks like this, but they never felt so good. I bet your dollhouses have stairs that really go up to the second floor!”

“Where else would they go?” The shopkeeper chuckled, and Marcia sighed happily.

“I’ve always hated dollhouses that you can’t really walk through. And dollhouses that are all out-of-proportion to themselves.” Marcia talked rapidly, breathlessly, then stopped. “Listen to me get so worked up about toys!”

“And what’s wrong with that?” He casually strolled over to where she stood by the car, still idly pushing it.

“Nothing, I mean …”

The flannel-shirted man cut her off with a question she hadn’t expected. “Are you from around here?”
“No, I’m on sabbatical here till the end of the month.” She was relieved to talk about something she felt comfortable with instead of babbling. “I’m a grant reviewer for a private foundation.” 

“Sabbatical, eh? That means you’re a professor?”

“Got it in one. Just got tenure last year, and the college thought they could spare me one semester of leave to recover.”

“I should have guessed you were a professor.” 

She glanced over her shoulder, and saw that he played idly with a pen. “Why?”

”Because you don’t miss anything. Luckily, though, you’re not one of those stuffy arrogant types.”

Again, his smile, the raised eyebrow, took all potential sting out of the words.

“Because you still know how to say ‘wow’.”

“Wow – er, I mean, thank you!” She felt her cheeks grow warm.

“See what I mean?” He grabbed the truck and said “Beep Beep!”

Marcia’s cheeks grew even warmer. Fortunately, as she glanced up at a simply elegant mantel clock, she found an excuse to flee – “Oh! I’ve got fifteen minutes to get back across town!”

“Here, take this with you.” The man handed Marcia the pen he had played with, and she discovered that it had a business card tied to the end of its smooth, curvy, turned-wood body.

“Kris Kringle’s,” Marcia read aloud. “How odd … but this shop is yours and not the Santa guy’s?” She looked around at the blond wood and the toys and the dollhouses begging for interior decoration.

“My shop. I’m Kris.” 

“Kris – oh, no, not Kringle, is it?” Marcia laughed.

“Nope,” he chuckled, “Kriegel. But you can imagine what it was like for me in grade school. I decided to use it to my
advantage.”

“I know all too well. I’m Marcia Wendt – as in ‘Marcia Wendt to Hell?’”

“Oh, dear,” Kris Kriegel said sympathetically. “You do understand, then.”

“Well, nice to meet you, Mr. Kriegel, but I do have to go. This pen – it’s too nice to give away, isn’t it?” Marcia felt torn – the pen was glossy and fat and entirely too pleasant to the hand. 

“No, really. It’s yours.” He curled her hand around the silky wood with both his hands, which felt warm and calloused.

“But why?”

“So you won’t lose the business card, of course.”

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px; font: 12.0px Courier} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px; font: 12.0px Courier; min-height: 14.0px}

Marcie’s Thanksgiving

Hi, my name is Marcie, and I just turned 8! I spent Thanksgiving with my Aunt Laurie and Uncle Richard at a big hotel called The Elms. It looks kind of like a castle until you go inside, and then it looks kind of like a castle inside, only not in the big stone sort of way. They haven’t decorated for Christmas yet, and they play old music — really old music Aunt Laurie calls Sinatra.

Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful, but a bit strange. They had the turkey and the stuffing and the cranberries and the mashed potatoes and the gooey yams, but they also had salads and shrimp and this smoky undercooked salmon. I tried everything — including too much pecan pie with lots of whipped cream. Real whipped cream.

I sat in the lobby by the fireplace for a while — people brought their dogs indoors, can you believe it? I petted a big dog with stripey spots on it, and he leaned against me so I had to keep petting him. I tried to pet a little fluffy dog in a vest, but the owner said it was a service dog. Aunt Laurie said that the dog should have said “Service Dog” in big letters so you could see it.

They have hot tubs, cold tubs, and a place where you can walk in circles in the water. Aunt Laurie calls that a lap pool. That water’s cold!  I walked two laps in it and then got too cold and hopped into the hot tub, which was hot! I guess that’s why they call it a hot tub.

What they don’t have is toys.  That’s okay, because I brought my doll and my writing stuff.  My Barbie’s chubby, and I picked her that way because she looks like my best friend Sara. And my Aunt Laurie. Lots of people are chubby. Barbie danced on the back of the couch (which Aunt Laurie said was leather) and then the wedding party strolled through with white and black dresses, and I thought it would be cool if the big dog was best man and the little dog was the ring bearer. Nope, they had little kids doing that.

Did I have birthday cake and presents, you ask? Nope, not yet. My birthday’s not till Sunday and my mom does birthday things. I think my mom is going to get me art supplies like I asked — not fingerpaint but paper and colored pencils and a coloring book with cats. And a cat! I get to pick her up (all cats are girls, by the way) from the Humane Society Monday.

Gotta go — Aunt Laurie’s walking over to the coffee shop like a zombie — BRAIIINS! — and I want to watch her order coffee!

Writer’s Mini-Retreat

I’ve been at a writer’s mini-retreat since last night, at The Elms in Excelsior Springs with my husband. The Elms is a pretty affordable hotel and spa, with ambience to spare.

We ate Thanksgiving dinner there, and that pretty much precluded any writing last night. We have no family nearby, we have no children, and it’s no fun cooking for two. We’re the people you see escaping to a hotel every year, because the alternative is the Hy-Vee cafeteria. Some years, we do eat at the Hy-Vee cafeteria.

Today, I’m writing for a while, starting with this blog, which I’m writing by the large stone fireplace. The lobby glows with small sconces on the brick Arts-and-Crafts pillars, and windows and woodwork carry on the simple, dark wood lines of the era. The tile floor bears a geometrically arranged motif of the Elms’ logo, a shield.

I confess I won’t get as much time writing as the name “writing retreat” deserves, because as a treat, I will be getting a massage and two hours’ time in the Grotto, which is a comfortable and comforting spa room with dim lights, lounging chairs, and the spa part — a hot tub, a steam sauna, a dry sauna, a hot and cold shower, mint face towels, salt scrubs, and — you get the idea.

Maybe it’s a retreat FROM writing?

Happy (US) Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a day where we express our thanks for the bounties in our lives. Personally, I do that every day (unless of course I’m depressed, which happens on occasion). I open the door of my life to a blur of tumbling colors and laughter and the search for the perfect words. This is why, if you meet me on the street and ask me how I am, I get this silly grin and say “Really good!” and then run out of words.  Thank you to the people I run into on the street who put up with my spaciness.

With the colors and laughter and words comes the desire to make things better for people. I feel so powerless sometimes, what with the ugliness that passes for patriotism and nationalism and even religion these days. My seven-year-old alter ego Marcie believes that if everyone was nice to each other, everything would be better. I personally think that if those who have more would just share the power, the wealth, the love, the dignity, the recognition — things would be okay.  Thank you to the people who passionately work for equality and equity, especially for the culturally and ethnically diverse, the neurodiverse, and those in the LGBTQIA rainbow.

I have been working on giving up things and holding on to people. I don’t do this as well as I’d like — I would just as soon curl up and suck my thumb as talk “small talk”. I’m not an introvert; I just want to exchange stories and talk about what we’re passionate about. Thank you to those of you who have gifted me with those kinds of conversations in my life.

Sometimes things get in the way of life — in my case it’s my neurodiversity (bipolar 2) and side effects of the medications it takes to help me be highly productive. Sometimes I’m weepy; sometimes I stagger and lose my balance, or my hands shake; sometimes I get sick from being too warm or too cold. Thank you to my doc, Dr. Jura, for listening and working with me to get my meds to work for me.

My life includes a career, a house, five cats, the most understanding husband in the world, and an imagination. I’m thankful for that most of all.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my US friends and readers, and to all of you, thank you again for reading!

PS: OOPS!

The excerpt this morning was from my work in progress for NaNo, Whose Hearts are Mountains. I will label excerpts from now on. The list is as follows:

Gaia’s Hands
Mythos
Apocalypse
Reclaiming the Balance (which might fare better as a short story)
Voyagers
Prodigies (halfway done)
Whose Hearts are Mountains (Current NaNo project)

See why I need to get published?

Note: To the person doing translation work, if you’re reading: today’s excerpt is not from the same book you’re helping with translation on.

An excerpt (again)

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px; font: 14.0px ‘Courier New’}

NaNo writing makes for a very rough draft. I look at this and see that it’s a bit more than a plot outline, but not much more. You can’t tell from this that Archetypes are beautiful but not imaginative, that their decor is very austere a a result — think Shaker or Scandinavian design — or that the only wall hanging is a representation of the community logo — which was designed and created somewhere else.

You don’t know that Daniel is having to process that the woman he brought to the collective has probably introduced the biggest danger to the collective, and that his son tried to kill her.

This is why revision exists.

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

Mari called the meeting to order. I noticed, for the first time, that someone had set up a short platform made in the same blond wood as the floor. Mari and Luke and William sat crosslegged on rugs on the platform, looking more austere and more unsettling than they had seemed before. 

Mari stood up briefly, projecting her usual benevolence, which did not calm me down at all. “We have an emergent situation, one which involves the events that exiled Jude from Hearts are Mountains, Jude’s questions about Annie’s identity, and the whereabouts of Jude after he left us. Other revelations will likely be revealed that cannot be discussed outside of this space. I would like Annie to come up here and tell the story of how she came here.”

I stood up, feeling my legs wobble. Mari motioned me up to the front where I stood, as she sat down. “Do you mind if I ask you questions? You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to.”
I realized that if I left any questions unanswered, I would look suspicious to the Archetypes gathered here, and I realized that I didn’t want them to mistrust me. I wanted their regard.

“Annie, can you tell us your name and background?” Mari inquired.

Oh, we’re playing hardball here, I thought.

“The name I was given when I was — engendered …” I began, and I watched eyebrows go up with the words I carefully chose, “I was named Anna Mîr Johnson, and after my mother married Arthur Schmidt, my identity papers were changed to name me Anna Mîr Schmidt. I remember that well now, and I realize this man — “ I waved toward Luke — “created papers for me at my — engendering —  and at the time Arthur Schmidt claimed me as his daughter. My birth father was William Morris — “ I waved a hand toward William — “but he left me the day I was engendered. I’m still trying to figure out what engendering entails.”

“This makes you Nephilim,” Kirsten called out, petting one of her clowder of cats. 

“Yes, I’ve been told I’m a Nephilim. I’m trying to get up to speed on that, because until today I assumed I was human with a really poor memory of my childhood.”

“Some of us have lived like that,” William breathed. “My parents, Lilith and the Kiowa Archetype, engendered me and left me with the Kiowa to be a brother to them. They didn’t, however, tell me I would outlive those brothers by hundreds of years. It caused me some trouble. If Mari hadn’t found me, I would still think I was human.”

“We’ve been taking Lilly to task since we found you,” Luke reminded William. “All of us have made mistakes, even though we are not human.”

“Anna,” Mari interrupted, “can you explain to us who Arthur Schmidt was personally and professionally?”

I took a deep breath. The stocky, balding man I had called father, Arthur Schmidt, had been my favorite human being on earth — and I realized how accurate the phrase was in this case. “Arthur Schmidt was, for all intents and purposes, my father. I met him two months after I was engendered, and he did not challenge my mother’s cover story that I was my mother’s distant cousin who had suffered from a severe amnesia that had taken my childhood from me. My dad took it upon himself to pull me out of my shell by teaching me about puzzles, cryptograms, and riddles. He was a cryptographer. You would not have known of his work for the government, where he placed his most sophisticated systems. You might have, if you were a burglar, cursed Arthur Schmidt, because his locks were, for all intents and purposes, invincible.”

“How much do you know about his locks, Anna?” Luke asked, rubbing his chin.

“I know everything,” I breathed. I saw everyone in the group I faced — Ivan, Summer, Daniel — study me with interest. “I have his codebooks and his lockbox here in my backpack,” I indicated the pack I had carried up with me. “I have his override, which works as a key and as a code simultaneously. I’m the only person in the world who can currently arm and disarm a Schmidt lock.”

The room was perfectly quiet; I wondered what the others thought. I spoke again: “Would that be enough for someone to try to kill me? Would it be enough for someone to rescue me from certain death? To have me followed? To put a bounty on me?”

Luke uttered one word: “Yes.”

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px; font: 14.0px ‘Courier New’}

I then understood why my situation concerned the collective. They lived in danger by merely sheltering me.