Beyond the Naivete

When I first started writing, I felt the world needed to hear my story. Now I recognize the many thousands of stories out there and know not all will be heard.

I mistakenly believed my technical skills precluded the need for thorough editing; despite my considerable score on the SAT many, many years ago, I found that I not only needed to edit, but I needed an editor to point out the many places I made errors.

I believed my writing would rise above the other queries out there; however, I like so many others have not found an agent yet.

Optimism or arrogance, I do not know. Naivete? Certainly. I do know what remains is that writing is a lot of hard work with no guarantee of return other than the satisfaction of creating.

I still have my dreams of being published, hopefully with a traditional publisher because I feel ill-equipped for self-promotion. I have my dreams of being read by others and being well-regarded, and I admit that I would love to sign books for readers. But those are dreams, and the reality is that I need to keep trying, keep improving, keep losing my arrogance if I’m to get published.

Self-doubt

I am re-editing Apocalypse, which originally was two novels until I realized the first novel would fit into the second one nicely. I intended this to be the next developmental edit until I got swamped with self-doubt during the editing:

Is the premise asking people to suspend disbelief too readily? Is the plot evolving too fast? Did I lose too much in the edit? Should I just give up writing?

Any writers who read this will understand self-doubt, the plague of writers everywhere. Or is it?

If self-doubt becomes the cloud of negative self-talk with generalizations like “I can’t write”, “I’ll never get the hang of it,” and “my work sucks”, self-doubt is a plague that should be banished along with overcooked green beans and day-long meetings. Cognitive distortions (overgeneralization, all or nothing thinking and name-calling in the example presented) provide no real information to help us improve and only serve to make us feel bad.

But there’s healthy self-doubt, the part that helps us edit the self-indulgent pieces out of our writing, the ones that help us bridge gaps in plot, flesh out characters, and make our books better than we thought they could be.

May we only have good self-doubt.

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Today’s weather (snow and ice) has left me with an unscheduled writing retreat at home. I’m not complaining at all.

For my cat Stinkerbelle

Stinky bit me in the nose last night.

Stinky — Stinkerbelle in full — earned her name as a kitten by crawling up my chest and sweetly punching me in the eye. Adopted as a feral kitten out from under a friend’s porch, she hasn’t mellowed in her fourteen years on earth.

Stinky has not come a long way since we adopted her. She chooses to stay upstairs, mingling only with our other five cats when wet food is served. She hogs the food and now rather resembles a soccer ball — black and white and round. She hisses at the other cats, at us, at inanimate objects. She likes to have her back scritched — until, suddenly, she doesn’t, hence the bitten nose. All in all a disagreeable cat.

But Stinky will sit on the bed sometimes, close to my head, purring just out of the happiness of being near me. She will rub up against my hand ecstatically when I pet her and eventually bliss out into a cross-eyed state. She doesn’t hate — she just doesn’t know what to do with herself.

So we love Stinky in the way one loves their problem children. Awkward, unbeautiful, cranky, at times lashing out. She reminds me of me as a child — roly poly and uncoordinated, unaware of how my intelligence put off people. I did not believe myself lovable, and told the school psychologist only the monsters were my friends.

I study Stinky and find my inner child, runny-nosed and crying, yet still worthy of love.

My Relationship with Coffee

I grew up with the same coffee served across the country in the 1970’s and 1980’s — coffee in a can from the grocery store, left to oxidize once opened to the air, brewed in an automatic drip machine which made a weak, brown, bitter brew that I doctored with lots of cream and sugar as an adolescent.

I discovered real coffee late in high school, when I spent the weekend with my dad in the college town where he’d been assigned to install some electronics for AT&T. I was sixteen then; he took me to a coffeehouse called The Daily Grind, and we sat down to some coffee. I took one sip of that cup and decided two things: I would go to school at the University of Illinois, and I would drink more of that coffee. Both of those things would come to pass.

When I arrived at college, I had a yard-sale percolator and a can of Folgers among my belongings, but I quickly abandoned them for coffeehouse brew. One day, I realized that one could actually buy beans at the coffeehouse and take them home to brew. I bought some for myself and for my parents, and although my parents proclaimed my coffee “too strong”, they appreciated the difference right before they went back to canned coffee from the store.

Once I left college 11 years later with a Ph.D., the coffee renaissance had begun. When I had started college, Champaign-Urbana had one coffeehouse; there were at least 5 when I left. Starbucks had not opened up the corporate coffee scene, but it was lurking in the wings. I ground my own coffee and brewed it in a press pot; this attention to detail (and deep, bold coffee) marked me as a coffee snob.

What the coffee renaissance really opened up, however, was home experimentation. Ways of brewing coffee thought previously lost — cold toddy brew with its smoothness, the aforementioned French press coffee, moka’s near-espresso richness, the fullness of vacuum pot coffee — found their adoptees. Home coffee roasting –using everything from air poppers to expensive drum roasters — appealed to the most experimental. Single-origin beans followed, and coffee drinkers became connoisseurs much like wine drinkers

Today, I drank a single-origin Malawi coffee that my husband roasted in the basement. It was as fresh as could be drunk; coffee is best if given a two-day rest after roasting. As precious as this sounds, the coffee beans are cheaper than those already roasted in the stores, and the nuances between coffees make each cup an exploration.

I don’t know if my relationship with coffee could get any better with this.

beans are cheaper

Becoming My Own Muse

What is the nature of a muse? A muse reaches into a creator’s soul and pulls forth the creator’s best work. As such, the muse is both the supporting angel and the demon lover, illustrated by the character of the Phantom in the musical Phantom of the Opera. Of course, all of this is in the mind of the creator; the muse himself might be a compelling person at the coffeehouse who asks about how the work in progress is doing and actually cares.

I had a muse once. Kind of a crazy thing, but he was an artistic type whose work appealed to me. And it didn’t hurt that he was beautiful in an ethereal way. He inspired me with his verve and his persistence, and my mind went on flights of fantasy and ended up in very vivid stories.

I had to give him up eventually. The problem with flights of fantasy is that they make one beholden to the subject. I had given the fantasy so much of my thoughts that I craved something back, even if it’s something as simple as recognition or support or friendship. Recognition, support, and friendship themselves feed creativity — anyone who creates needs connection and support, for creating is hard, lonely work sometimes. The muse remains a muse by being there.

My muse never made the transition.

In reality, though, people — even muses — will always disappoint us. In reality, people will not always be there when we need them. They will not understand what we need if we ourselves can’t articulate it. They can’t read our minds. They may not be able to see our beauty.

This is why I need to become my own muse.

Is it possible? The nature of a muse is intrigue and unpredictability and challenge, love and danger. How does one give that to oneself?

The Beginnings of a Novel

The outline for the new book is going very slowly …

Let me explain the general idea of the book. This is in the Archetype series, none of which has gone to developmental edit yet. A little background: Archetypes are near-immortal beings who are tasked with holding humanity’s cultural memories. If the Archetype for an ethnicity dies, all of the people whose patterns they hold die, so that an entire ethnic group (and, more likely, a large group of people of mixed ethnicity that includes that group) die. This is why Archetypes have been held apart from humans and each other.

My series covers the interactions between one particular renegade family (unique in that Archetypes don’t generally have family bonds) and humans. The humans have their own uniqueness in that they have been gifted with abilities by (depending on who you ask) Gaia, the Maker of the Archetypes, God, or genetic enhancement.

The story I’m writing, tentatively called Gods’ Seeds, involves two threads that will come together as the story develops. But here’s a first attempt at synopsis:

The Council of the Oldest, the ruling body of the Archetypes, has announced that humans’ genetic and cultural memories will be gradually divested back to their humans, as humans have been found fit to retain them. Meanwhile, a young woman on Earth named Leah Inhofer sees horrific visions of Archetypes battling each other, with thousands of human casualties resulting. The Archetypes grow restless, knowing that their reason for existence is being taken away, and they will take desperate measures to keep this from happening. The conflict draws battle lines between Archetype and Archetype, and Leah must find the strength to stand between the two — or watch the decimation of humanity.

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There’s a lot of writing in-between this paragraph and a novel. There’s character, there’s subplots, there’s relationships between characters. And there’s a lot of words — about 80,000 words on average. That’s why I’m going to write an outline, to help me find my way through the plot of the novel.

Wish me luck, and let me know if you’d read this novel!

Dear Reader:

Thank you for reading this blog.

I know you as data — what country hits come from. I know what posts are being read (but not who is reading what posts), and I know what times random people are posting. Here’s what I know about my readers:

1) I have about thirty hits a day on average. About half of those are from the United States. The rest are from a variety of countries, with Germany holding second place. Other regulars have been from France, Canada, Ukraine, Portugal, and Unknown Region are the most regular.

2) Some of you find me through Facebook, which means I probably know you. Some of you find me from Twitter, and I don’t know if I know you or not. Some referring links are from bit.ly and IFTTT. I’d love to know how the IFTTT link works.

3) Some of you are probably bots. For example, I get about three hits a day from a web address that specializes in “web cam girls”. I don’t follow those links anymore.

4) I don’t know WHO you are. I would love to know who you are. If you’re a regular reader, you know I have said this before, because I mean it. I’m the sort of person who would not only like to sign autographs for readers someday, but chat with readers.

Please, if you know someone who would like this blog (writers, readers, my aunt Edna*) please amplify this and pass it on to them!

Love, Lauren

* I don’t have an Aunt Edna.

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.

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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!