Something to show you

I wish I had something new to show you — a rough draft of a scene, a short story — but I have been exiting and polishing for so long that I haven’t written anything new …

Wait! I could show you an edited, polished scene! This is the beginning of Prodigies, the book I currently have out in queries:

The Journey

I peered out the window of the train as we sped toward the Krakow train station, and I understood why the Polish government chose Krakow as the site for the Prodigy Assembly. I noticed more history in the town than I saw in all of the United States. Old-looking churches with intricate, weathered facades nestled against modern buildings with brutally straight concrete lines barely softened by budding street trees. I felt the city as a breeze, but with a hint of sharp edges. Just like chamber music — light and delicate until the cellos muscled in.

I held onto the architecture as something real because nothing else about this trip seemed to be. How likely was it that a high schooler would be offered an all-expenses trip to Poland to showcase her (and others’) talents? If I thought about it hard, I would begin to doubt this adventure, so I turned myself back to sightseeing.

I worried on the train because of something my mentor Dr. DeWinter told me, that there were far fewer black people in Poland than in the US. The train bore this out — as the only black person in my car, I noted a few curious stares. The train eased into the station; the sullen teen who had ignored me the whole trip started to stir, murmuring something in Polish as he tried to glance around me at the window.

“Tov Krakóv Goovneh?” he muttered in my direction, glancing over his sunglasses. I could barely figure out what the boy meant, so I reassured him that we arrived at Krakow Głowny. He wrinkled his nose at my answer but headed toward the train exit after shouldering his battered army backpack and his skateboard. Just another skater boi, posing as a jaded man past his teens.

I grabbed my suitcase and viola and followed him out of the train. Outside the station, I stared at the taxi line hoping to find a cabbie with just enough English to tell me how to get to my destination. As I dithered, I felt a breeze slip by as the skater blew past me and murmured, “Good luck” in English. Shithead.

A cab stopped before me, with a dark-haired, pale man behind the wheel.

“Palac Pugetow,” I said as he jumped out and helped me load my luggage in the trunk.

The cabbie corrected me with an amused smile. “Palace Pugetov?”

“That’s the one,” I shrugged.

We climbed in the taxi.

“Do you know how to say ‘hello’ in Polski?” the cab driver asked.

“Isn’t that ‘dezien dobry?'” I ventured. That was how I’d pronounce ‘Dzien dobry’, anyhow.

“Close,” he chuckled as we climbed into the car. His pronounciation sounded closer to ‘jean dobry,’ but not quite.

A whirlwind taxi ride later, the driver dropped me off at the offices of Palac Pugetow. I realized that it wasn’t so much a palace as a massive building of French Renaissance style like I’d learned about in history class. It stood tall and white with grey accents like a avant-garde wedding cake, surrounded by tall straight poplars marching in a row. I walked up the stairs into the main entrance, and spied a sign on one room labeled “Biuro Zarzadu”. I grabbed my cell phone and plugged the words into my translation app and came up with “Management Office”. Out of curiosity, I pressed the icon for the pronounciation in Polish, and it sounded like “byuro zarzandu” as pronounced by someone with marbles in his mouth. I knew I couldn’t pronounce it that way, marbles or no marbles. So much for that goal of learning Polish.

I walked into Biuro Zarzadu without knocking. My mistake — every person in the office stared at me from grey metal desks. I hoped they stared because I had done something gauche rather than the fact that I sported a brown complexion.

“Shim mocha sludgewich?” a middle-aged woman with incredibly pale skin and blonde hair smiled as she stepped up to the old wooden counter. I shook my head and glanced at the door.

“Oh, yes. American?” she asked, still smiling. “May I help you?”

“Oh, yes, thank you! My name is Grace Silverstein, and I’m looking for the prodigies — “

Again, the four people in the office — three women and one man — stared at me again. “Prodigies?” the helpful woman asked.

“The Minister of Culture invited me here?” I breathed.

A beat, then another, and then “Oh, yes, I’m pretty sure you’ll find them at the Second World offices, down the hall, third door to the right.”

As I thanked them and walked out, I felt a prickle at the back of my neck.

Luckily, I found the Second World offices, behind an austere door on which a polished bronze sign read “Druga Swiatowy Renasans” with a masterful male hand holding up a globe. When I looked closely, I saw a star-shaped cufflink at the wrist. Shades of Soviet Realism, I thought, remembering a lecture on Russian history sprinkled with art. My translate app yielded a translation of “Second World Renaissance”, which meant I arrived at the right place. This time I knocked on the door —

A frazzled woman with curly black hair, dark eyes, and a black dress that flattered her white skin answered my knock. “Oh,” she gushed in accented English, “you must be Grace Silverstein, yes? I am Dominika Vojchik, and — Nastka, not right now, I’m busy talking to the young lady!” A dark-haired child of about nine who tugged on her mother’s arm ran into the other room, and Dominika led me there, to a small waiting room.

If these were the prodigies, there weren’t too many of them. As I glanced around an opulent sitting room, all dark antiques and dark red upholstery and Oriental rugs, I saw the aforementioned Nastka with her long, coal-black hair and a dress like Dominika’s; a worn-looking blonde woman with curly-headed twins who sat in their chairs wide-eyed; and an Asian woman sitting next to a black-haired young boy who tapped at a smartphone. I assumed she watched over her son..

Dominika stood in the middle of the room and raised her voice, speaking in English. “Hello, I am Dominika Vojchik, and I am the coordinator of the Prodigy Project, where we wish to develop friendship between our countries through cultural exchanges. We have a — uh, small program right now, as you can see, but we thought that we would expand it if our initial forays succeeded.” She punctuated her speech with sharp hand gestures; the blonde woman whispered to her children, presumably to translate.

I waited for introductions —

“So, I would like to show you around the place, which has an amazing amount of history … “

We stood and stretched and followed Dominika out of the room. I looked at the mother of the two blonde children. Her eyes darted around at the sitting room, the rest of us, and particularly at Dominika.

“The Puget family originally came from France, hence the name Puget — ” which Dominika pronounced in the French manner as she walked us down interminable halls with carpets, dark wainscoting against pale cream walls, and doors, many doors. “In the 1800’s, Benedict Joseph de Puget became a member of the Polish nobility and the family settled down in Poland to do business. The Palace was designed by Joseph Kwiatowski for Baron Konstanty de Puget and built in 1874-5 in the Parisian Neo-Renaissance style.” I suspected that Dominika read off the plaque next to her to get the history, but I couldn’t read the Polish on the plaque.

The Asian boy jostled up next to me and whispered, “The current name of this place is the ‘Donimirksi Palace Pugetov Business Center’. Less impressive.” Just as quickly, he slipped away to stand by his — mother? Chaperone?

“I will now show you to your rooms –You will stay in private suites in this building on the next floor. We assigned each of you and your families a suite; your luggage has been placed there. I will pick you up at 1700 to discuss the assembly tomorrow night.”

Thankfully, I located the elevators.

I sat on the bed in my airy white-on-white rooms, staring through the bedroom door to a sitting room that looked just like the photo on the brochure I had received.

At least the room fulfilled my expectations. Not so the shaky appearance of this assembly I had been invited to.

Nobody had met me at the airport. I myself figured out, with help from a conductor, which train I needed to take. The black-haired woman with the staccato hand gestures appeared to be our lone host. And we hadn’t been allowed to introduce ourselves. I had never seen such a disorganized event in my life, and I hoped that our orientation fared better.

Then I heard a knock on the door. I freaked out — I don’t know why, just the strangeness of the situation. I decided to ignore the messenger until they gave their name and purpose — and then they did exactly that: “Please, I’d like to talk with you. It’s Luitgard Krause.”

I opened the door to the blonde woman and her two cherubic tots. I let them in to the sitting room, where the mother — Luitgard — sat in the overstuffed chair and her children, who were no more than seven, sat on the floor next to her. “This is Erwin, my son, and Mitzi, my daughter.” Erwin eyed me up and down sternly, then relaxed. Mitzi nodded at her mother, and walked up to me. “What’s your name? You have pretty hair.”

“Why thank you, Mitzi. My name is Grace Silverstein.”

“Are you one of them?” asked Erwin from his perch in the chair
; Luitgard bent over to shush him.

“One of whom?” I asked him just as I heard another knock on the door. Erwin shook his head, suddenly pale.

“May I come in?” I recognized Dominika’s voice and accent. Then she let herself in to my locked room.

My spine prickled and I felt lightheaded. Dominika had access to my room? Why? I spied a chair I could move in front of the door at night.

I couldn’t shake the feeling of wrongness.

About Snowstorms

We’re supposed to get snow, maybe a lot of snow, this weekend.

Now that forecasting weather has advanced as a science, our preliminary forecasts have mentioned anywhere from 0 to 23 inches. I’m not kidding — although that was on Monday, and weather models get more accurate closer to the event. The latest models appear to predict 1-4 inches, but it’s only Wednesday and it’s early days yet for a Friday storm.

How people deal with the snow in the US depends on where they’re from. In southern states, one inch of snow will shut everything down because it’s such a rare occurrence that cities and state highway departments have no snow plows. In the Midwest, if we see someone stuck in a driveway, we go help push them out. Before a major snowstorm (and what constitutes “major” depends on whether one is a Northerner or a Southerner), people stock up on toilet paper and milk.

Talking about snow is a bonding experience. People discuss how much expected snowfall, preparations, and (at the college level) hopes that school will be canceled the next day.

It looks like school won’t be canceled this time, but the forecast could always change. It’s early days yet for a Friday storm.

A writing prompt

I woke up early (4:45 AM) and sat at my computer waiting for inspiration to strike.

It hasn’t.

What’s a writer to do? Write, of course! Here lies the value of writing prompts. These exercises limber up your mind by providing a no-pressure idea for you to write about. By no-pressure, I mean that you’re not writing on your manuscript, you’re not going to screw up your manuscript if you do poorly — it’s pure writing without motive.

So, my prompt for this morning: talk about a missed opportunity:

This is a true story. I learned this story when I was growing up. Children being what they are, my classmates started calling me “garbage truck” because my last name — Leach — was emblazoned on the front of the hopper of all the garbage trucks in town. I lamented to Dad, “I’m not related to the garbage trucks, am I?” He laughed and told me this story:

My grandfather, when he was fifteen, was sent off to work that summer. His father gave him two choices: work with his one uncle on the farm, or work with his other uncle, a bachelor who owned a factory. Grandpa chose the farm.

Had he chosen the factory, he may well have been taken in by the bachelor uncle to succeed him in the firm. As it was, the bachelor uncle died with no successor. However, you can find his name on garbage trucks everywhere — the factory now makes hoppers for garbage trucks. This, my father said, is why we’re not rich.

****
I already had this story, sure, but it popped up because of the prompt and not vice versa, Prompts might provoke an old story to tell, or might lead you to the kind of impromptu writing that becomes a story.

Happy writing!

Just Write

I can’t get my thoughts to coalesce.

I’ve tried three times to write on topics — the beginning of the semester, growing older, expecting more from people — and the topics keep winding around in circles until I don’t know what the topic is anymore.

It could be because I haven’t had my coffee yet, I suppose.

Ever have one of those days? “There’s something … bothering me … but I can’t for the life of me figure out what.” It’s that sort of feeling. There’s an elusive topic, something my heart needs to write about, but I don’t know what it is and my brain’s having none of it.

Now I have my coffee — home-roasted and fresh-ground, so you can feel jealous of me — and I’m still not sure what the topic is.

The ideas to write aren’t always there. At five in the morning, I’m not always there, either.

The idea, though, is to write and keep writing. Even if the words aren’t flowing, even if you don’t know if you’re making any sense, keep writing. Keep your pen ready, keep your fingers warmed up. Write something.

You’ll have to go back and edit it anyhow.

Dreaming of Green Again

I’m starting to plan my summer garden. As anyone who gardens knows, this consists of getting glossy catalogs with beautiful and fascinating plants, ordering the seeds. planting them, and becoming disappointed that one’s results are not the same as in the catalogs. In my opinion, all catalogs should have “Your Results May Vary” in fine print next to the pictures.

I wish I had a warm greenhouse to spend the winter in. Instead, I have a magnificent grow room in the basement with shelves and fluorescent lights and heat pads. Not quite as nice as a greenhouse, but it’s mine. I sometimes worry that I’m going to have my tomato plants confiscated by DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency, for my foreign friends). I’ve already been visited by an agent of the USDA (US Department of Agriculture, for all my foreign friends), who confiscated some seeds I could have sworn were legal in the US.

I’m just beginning seed-starting season. It’s too early to start most seeds, but I have a few seeds with — well, advanced skill requirements, such as “Violets: warm stratify for 60-120 days, then cold stratify for two weeks, then plant.” I hope 60 days is enough warm stratifying, because I don’t want to have to wait till September to plant them. So the cold stratifying seeds (yucca, semi-wild rose) are in the refrigerator in dampened peat moss, the warm stratifying seeds are in the grow room, and I’m waiting a couple more weeks to plant my first seeds.

If past years are an indicator, I will have everything from abject failure to stunning success to “why the heck did I do that?” An example of the latter was the perilla that I planted in a 72-cell mini-trainer (which I will not use again, even though I’ve used them for years) –they got nine inches tall in a root ball that grew out the bottom of the one-tablespoon sized root pot, and all the roots tangled. So I had One big 72-stemmed perilla that lacked leaves on the bottom six inches of the stems and that I coiuldn’t get out of the pots. Note to self: You don’t need that much perilla. Also note to self: bigger start pots and transplanting sooner.

I’ll tell you more about the secret of my garden later.

Writing Every Day

I have been writing this blog for 21 months on nearly a daily basis, and in a few cases, more than once a day. I’ve missed a week at a time during times I was fighting depression, but for the most part I’ve stuck to this blog. It’s become part of my being, part of my definition as a writer.

Writing this blog wasn’t always part of my definition of myself. Neither, for that matter, was writing in general. What it took was a discipline of writing every day.

Writing every day is not an easy thing. First of all, one has to commit to an action that may not feel natural. I write every morning, generally between 5:30 and 6:30 AM (today is an exception; I didn’t get up at my usual 5 am because it’s a snowy weekend). I can guarantee that, at first, writing a blog first thing in the morning was not something I felt moved to do. Now, because of the scheduled habit, I write my blog almost every morning.

Writing in general wasn’t a habit at first. But after a NaNoWriMo or two, I discovered that 2000 words a day (most days; I think my average per day is more like 1500) wasn’t difficult. So I ended up with somewhere around six novels to play around with, and I’ve been writing for seven years.

Right now I’m not writing because I discovered editing time is as important as writing. So I have the goal of editing at least an hour a day, and so far I’ve been pretty successful (but I have about 5000 more words to add to Voyageurs, and this will be a bit tough. Whee.

Habits aren’t very sexy. It’s much more compelling to be that writer who does nothing but write for days, forsaking everything but coffee (or in the case of Coleridge, some prime hash), who shuns responsibility while feverishly writing. In reality, most writers are not that person, nor can they be. So writers need habits to take the slow, sure course of writing.

Although writing binges, within reason, are a good thing, because it’s fun to feel like the crazed stereotype at times.

Trusting the Process

I have been trying to lose the last twenty pounds of weight for over a year.

I’ve lost 65 pounds so far, doing it responsibly with well-balanced eating. No go; I’m still 20 pounds heavier than I want to be. After a year of eating a well-balanced 1350 calories a day and seeing no progress, I talked to my doctor, who sent me to a healthy lifestyles educator. I met with her last week, and she hooked me up to a machine that measured my metabolism.

The conclusion: I wasn’t eating enough calories. She put me on a well-balanced 1633-calorie diet. In a week, I lost three pounds — and gained it right back again.

I could, at this point, give up because of the lack of quick results, or I could trust the process and keep going. It’s early days yet, and I haven’t truly lost any ground, so I’ll trust the process.

I face a similar thing in my writing. I have learned to use dynamic words when writing, lessen my dependence on is/was/were/has/had, read my draft out loud while editing, found beta readers and developmental editors, learned to write a better query letter, organized my queries using Query Tracker, sent more queries than I can count, and I haven’t found an agent to latch onto me. For now, I’m trusting the process of writing well and marketing well through queries. This might change — I’ve set my date to self-publish at January 2, six months after I sent that first three chapters to Tor in a fit of bravado.

Trusting the process is hard. I want instant results. I want my reward for working hard and utilizing new skills. I want this twenty pounds gone and I want to be published. But sometimes, I have to sit back and trust that the process is working its magic behind the scenes.

6000 Words

I’m in the difficult position on figuring out where to put 6000 words back into Voyageurs.

This is harder than it sounds. Or, rather, doing it well is harder than it sounds. More dialogue might be a good thing, but it has to be the right dialogue — developing character or plot without sounding like the words were crowbarred into the text.

Adding words, to me, is harder than editing. I’ve edited my professional papers for years — the real challenge in academic writing is editing a synopsis of the paper to fifty words, which reads something like this:

Researchers hypothesized that subjects would be more likely to buy the pre-owned car than the used car. One hundred and twenty-three students in a convenience sample received either a used car or the pre-owned car catalog entry. Subjects viewed both cars with equal likelihood of buying.

There’s so much more I could have said about the research this synopsis came from. This, by the way, is the type of writing one has to do for the summary a book in a query letter. You get one, maybe two paragraphs in a query letter (but more than fifty words) to describe your book. If the author wants to participate in #pitmad on Twitter — a big event where authors pitch their books on Twitter — you get one sentence to sell your novel, a statement called an elevator pitch.

Well, back to adding words. I’m really apprehensive about adding words. I did add some descriptions throughout and one whole chapter, which is why I only need 6000 words. That’s the equivalent of two-three chapters, which is what I cut out by advice of my developmental editor. I can understand why those chapters got cut — they were action-packed chapters in a story that had quite enough action. My dev editor is looking for places where I can add stuff, so I may have to patiently wait to see what she has to say.

Getting from goals to accomplishments

Sometimes I write in this blog when I don’t seem to have a lot to say. It’s not because I love to hear the sound of my “voice”, although some would argue I do. Rather, it’s to keep a routine going so I don’t lose a good habit.

Routine is what helps us develop good habits. That, and a reward for doing them, since in the short run doing what we’ve always done feels better. Habits, as unglamorous as they are, are what turn long term goals into accomplishments.

As a professor teaching positive psychology and behavioral economics, I have an interest in the whole idea of how to change habits. The behavioral economics idea behind behavior is that we’re naturally going to choose the immediate reward over the long-term benefit. There’s proof behind this; behavioral economists (including my favorite, Dr. Dan Ariely) do research to support their hypotheses, like any good professor.

I am trying out a program called Fabulous, which helps people develop good habits. It is based on behavioral economics, and Dan Ariely is one of its driving forces. The program uses environmental cues (such as putting your sneakers by the door if you’re training yourself to exercise), social cues (reminders on the app and encouragement), repetition, and rewards (praise and leveling up). I’m not necessarily going to recommend it, because membership costs $50 a year, but I think the reasoning behind it is sound, having read some of the research myself.

To go back to my blogging habit — I have writing on my daily to-do list, along with one hour of writing activities daily. I set aside some time each morning to write; my computer is my environmental cue.

And my reward? Reading the stats on my Blogger page to see people from many different countries reading this blog.

A good rejection

Yesterday I got another rejection, but I didn’t feel too bad about it.

I sent the query out for Mythos at least a year ago, and since then, I’ve learned a lot about writing. I’ve learned about developmental editing and beta-reading and about taking out the cherished bits that don’t do anything to further character or plot.

In fact, Mythos as a book doesn’t exist any more — part of it has been cannibalized for the book Apocalypse, which is the next book to go into dev editing. There’s been lots of editing there already. So I’ve gotten a rejection on a book that no longer exists.

Every time I think I’ve learned nothing, I can look back on what Mythos was before its editing and incorporation into Apocalypse. In effect, Mythos was an idea with a lot of character development and a plot driven by nebulous bad guys and disconnected portents. The bones, however, were good enough to develop into a different story.

So all in all, this was a good rejection.