Request

While I’m stuck on I-29 due to an accident, I have a request to make …?

I put together a digital mix tape of appropriate soundtrack music for each book I write. For this year’s NaNo, my book title is Whose Hearts are Mountains. The synopsis:

When the United States has crumbled after attacks from within, traumatized anthropologist  Anna Schmidt chases an urban legend. Taken in by an unusual commune in the desert, Anna   discovers the secret from her unusual upbringing and finds she holds the key to stopping a pandemic.

Moods: 
Chaotic
Placid but wary
Disoriented
Grateful
Really disoriented
Pensive
Driven 
Sorrowful 
Grateful
Determined
Content

I welcome suggestions for songs, actual song tracks, and fan letters. My email is lleachie@gmail.com 

Have fun!!

Something I learned at Archon — how to write a query letter

I learned many useful and encouraging things at Archon, including the fact that many published writer I saw on panels had upward of 100 and even 200 rejections before getting an agent or getting published. (Whew! I have so many more to look for!)

The most helpful thing I learned, however, was how to write a query letter. I’ll write my first-draft letter to illustrate the process. What I learned, above all, was that a query letter writes like a business letter. This will be a query letter to an agent — most people start with getting an agent, because most publishers won’t look at a manuscript unless an agent hands it to them.

The first paragraph is a brief introduction and where you found out the agent was available:

My name is Lauren Leach-Steffens, and I am interested in finding an agent. I saw that you were accepting new clients on your website, http://www.xxxxxx.xxx.

The middle paragraph — here is twist #1 on the business letter — is devoted to a synopsis of the book you are emailing a sample of. This synopsis should be the sort of thing you’d put on the back cover. It should give an idea of the main characters and plot, without giving up the ending. In other words, the sort of thing I put on the back of my business cards:

       Josh Young, an aspiring writer, envisions a mystical garden, which becomes real in                              horticulturalist Jeanne Beaumont’s hands, and they become targeted by a shadowy cabal that                puts their visions and their lives in danger.

I think it could be a little, but not much, longer, so let’s try this:


       In the current day, Josh Young, an aspiring writer, sees a mystical garden in his visions. Permaculturist Jeanne Beaumont finds herself threatened by forces inside and outside academia for reasons she can’t decipher. Joining hearts and forces, they create a gestalt to turn one of Jeanne’s permaculture guilds into the Garden of Josh’s visions, and they become targeted by a shadowy cabal that puts their visions and their lives in danger.

The third paragraph is where I introduce myself:

Lauren Leach-Steffens, the author, has published several academic articles in the field of family economics, and has recently decided to write contemporary fantasy novels. Her work reflects themes of identity, pacifism in wartime, sacrifice, and ordinary heroes. 



If you think this needs something, please suggest! Richard thinks the word “gestalt” is pretentious; I think it’s entirely accurate given the circumstances. 

One size does not fit all

Here I am, at St. Louis Bread Company in Collinsville, IL,  just on the Illinois side of St. Louis, about to spend my second day at Archon. My takes on the convention:

1) Few places are as much fun for people-watching as science fiction conventions, with a myriad of people in quirky and somewhat mismatched costumes, women who can talk at length about how medievalist Europe is the basis of many science fiction novels, and many indie authors. (“Indie” = “self-published”, and I don’t have the time to go that route.)

2) The writer’s panels vary in quality, but that may be my observation as a college professor who has gone to many professional conferences. Good example: the highly informative and entertaining panel on writing happy (or at least satisfying) endings. Bad examples: the presentation where everyone gave examples and counter-examples of religion in science fiction and came to no actual points. I would have loved this as a small discussion over coffee. Or homemade hooch.

3) It is NOT a good place to meet publishing representatives and hand them instant queries. At least not if you go about these things the way I do. The friend who told me about it makes it work for him. For someone just breaking into the system, who’s Midwestern polite, and who can’t tell the publishers from the non-publishers, it’s not going to work.

Meeting writers at parties, I believe, is how he makes it work, but this is not a good path for me for several reasons: 1) I can’t drink because of medication; 2) I have just enough of a hearing problem that I need someone to yell in my ear, making negotiations difficult; 3) I really am an introvert, although my students would never believe it; and 4) the party setting is problematic for women for a couple reasons, which I will detail next.

Why are party negotiations (aka schmoozing) so difficult for women? First, because men tend to dominate women in conversations through interruptions and changing subjects (both documented by Deborah Tannen and others), making it hard for them to actually talk about their novel. Women end up feeling frustrated and ignored, and may give up too soon.

Second, women avoid alcohol-fueled events alone, because of the volatile mix of alcohol and expressions of sexuality — i.e. unwanted advances, non-consensual sexual encounters, and subsequent accusations that they slept their way to success (see Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate.)

In other words, I will not be able to make my friend’s method work.

The good news is that there are other venues. One is the one I keep trying for authors and publishers, mailing queries. Just as I work on improving my writing, I work on improving my queries. In fact, I’m attending a session on writing better queries this morning.

Second, I found out there’s a conference in St. Louis every year in June called Gateway to Publishing, which gets you in touch with agents and publishers both by phone and in person. One-on-one, the way I work best.

Thank you, friend, for introducing me to Archon. I would never have found my way otherwise.

Interrogating the dream and the characters:Open questions

For you creatures of habit, sorry this entry is late, but I’m at Archon in St. Louis (actually Collinsville, IL) waiting for it to start and prepping my networking skills, my manuscript excerpts, and my wardrobe for three days of being an author looking for a publisher.
**********************

I almost have the plot synopses to Whose Hearts are Mountains completed. The process has given me insights into the plot, including some delightful twists (actually, they’re rather grim) at the end. Now I need to further develop my main characters.
I’m going to try a technique case managers and social workers use in interviewing their clients — the open-ended question. To explain open questions, it works best if I explain closed ended questions as well. A closed ended question is the typical question we ask every day:

Me: What is your name?
Character: I am called Daniel.
Me: Where are you from?
Daniel: A commune called Hearts are Mountains.
Me: Where is that?
Daniel: In the Owahee Desert.

What’s wrong with this picture?  First, it will take forever to ask all these questions and have them answered. Second, the person interviewed will feel literally interrogated with rapid-fire questions. Third, I’m not getting Daniel’s story, only facts.

If I want to get Daniel’s story, I have to ask open questions. These generally start with “Tell me about” or “Could you tell me about” or “Tell me more about” — I’m not being funny; these are all good leads. The key to open questions is 1) there are no words that close the question (who, what, where, why, how, how often, how many, how much); 2) because they set up a story, the questioner learns a lot more about the interviewee than they would otherwise.

So open questions work with Daniel as follows:

Me: tell me about yourself.
Daniel: I am called Daniel, and I live in the commune called Hearts are Mountains in the Owahee Desert.
Me: Could you tell me a little more about yourself?
Daniel: Okay. It’s a strange story.  I feel comfortable telling it to you, because you’re the author.
Me: Thank you.
Daniel:

Using Facebook to Sharpen Writing Skills

Before I had a blog, I had Facebook. Strangely, Facebook helped me with my writing a great deal.

There are rules for writing in Facebook: conciseness is the number one rule. You might never have seen a conciseness rule written as such on Facebook, but you have seen the condensed version: tl;dr. Too long; didn’t read. Messages have to be short and to the point.

Second, grammar and spelling. There’s a lot of misspelling, all caps, no caps, and errant punctuation, but at the same time, people get ridiculed for it (unless they speak a foreign language, in which case all is forgiven.) If the misspelling or punctuation is humorous, it will become a joke, as is evidenced by this exchange in the pre-Internet system called PLATO:

F. Ortony: You can’t win Wessing.
E. Wessing: How does one ‘wess’?

The third rule is: Use your words wisely. One is less likely to tl;dr if one avoids repetition and uses more evocative words like action verbs, descriptive adjectives, and concise nouns.

The fourth rule is: make them care. Facebook can be overwhelming, and vague arguments and insults either don’t interest people or get their attention in the wrong way. What gets attention the right way: Sound arguments, sharp humor, language that evokes the writer’s emotions and leaves room for the others’ emotions.

It doesn’t hurt to insert all of these in regular writing as well. Poetry puts the most meaning in the least number of words; the writer can’t get as descriptive as in a novel, but conciseness really matters in poetry. Grammar and spelling and logical setup benefit all forms, but especially prose. For those non-fiction writers, these skills are equally crucial.

And to think I can practice these skills every day while critiquing cat videos!

Prepping the Next Story Part 1

I will be writing for NaNoWriMo this November. I think I explained this phenomenon before, so jump to the next paragraph if you’ve read this before: NaNoWriMo is a worldwide writing committment, where the participants commit to 50,000 words — which is well on the way to finishing a novel. In thirty days, 50,000 words equals 1,667 a day.

I started participating in  NaNoWriMo because I’ve been known to easily abandon hobbies and free time activities. It runs in the family — my mother had an attic full of bolts of material, often purchased on sale, and scraps of velveteen and brocade that she planned to use someday for a Project. Mom’s projects, like mine, were never small,  and like me, Mom expected to start a project at expert status. As an illustration, the scrapbook for my wedding sits unfinished, and Richard and I just celebrated our tenth anniversary.

NaNo changed that for me — primarily because it gave me a Big Audacious Goal. I could say “I’m going to write a 50,000 word book” to my friends and they’d say “OOOOH!” And then, having committed to the goal, I had to actually write it to save face. And then, at the end of the month, I had a book I had to take seriously and start learning how to edit — that, as you know, has taken a while. And now I have the discipline to write over and over.

This year for NaNo, I’m going to start writing the “dirty commie gypsy elves” book that I’d conceptualized twenty-five or so years ago, which has neither gypsies or elves, nor are they dirty.
How do I start?

I’ve done this before — I start with a loose outline of major plot events, which looks like this:

On the left-hand side at the top is the outline for the book. I have the chapters added, with six titled, and the first chapter with its subchapters named and visible. The cards in the middle are the synopses for each section.  There are some commands at the right I will set up later.

That’s what I will be doing for the next couple of days, so that my book has some time to percolate in my mind in October after I edit another book.   Wheeeeeeee!

Metamorphosis

Sometimes a story tells you what it’s about, and not vice-versa.

Gaia’s Hands, my thrice-edited novel, is my case in point because I am not privy to the revision process of other authors. When I first interrogated the dream and wrote the story, I wrote a light-hearted, unconventional romance between an older woman and a younger man who just happened to have unusual talents. It was, in other words, humorous and bland. It didn’t “grab” at the reader. It was, in other words, the same sort of fantasy/romance story I wrote in sixth grade, only with a chance of intercourse.

Being the new writer I was, I felt dissatisfied with the story, but I couldn’t figure out why. What was the problem? The story had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had a resolution. What took me the longest time to understand was that the story had a resolution, but it wasn’t resolving anything of substance.

After a couple other books under my belt,  I tried writing Gaia’s Hands from the viewpoint of the four characters most involved in the action of the plot, which had grown to involve a small miracle and more menace from a corporate cabal. I laid in subplots for the two other characters, and they’re fascinating enough that they may deserve their own short stories — Eric tries to find his surrogate mother, and Annie is revealed as a refugee for a surprising reason.

However — four viewpoints in a novel is painful for a reader to follow, and the novel seemed fragmented. What I figured was “avant-garde” was actually confusing. Not only because of the four points of view, but because of the fact that four subplots doesn’t compensate for a less-than-solid main plot. Reading the book reminded me of watching hand-offs in two-person juggling.

After a couple MORE books under my belt (there are five completed now, although one isn’t good enough to revise), I reviewed Gaia’s Hands and decided the following:

  • I could go back to the two points of view — Jeanne and Josh, third person limited — because they are most important in the plot and subplot. I love those two oddballs.
  • I needed more plot, more menace — if for no other reason, to illustrate why Jeanne was being persecuted by a corporate cabal. It couldn’t be just because her research supported alternate forms of agriculture — not even I found that believable under scrutiny. Could it be that the corporate cabal was goaded by a third party with his own vendetta about Jeanne? A mysterious figure that would tie this book into the later ones that it’s a prequel to? Yes! And so that character, immortal and mercenary, brings with him a lot more menace than the shadowy cabal alone could.
I’m almost done with this (hopefully final) edit, and then a quick once-over, and then I hand it to beta-readers (HINT: You too can be a beta-reader. Just ask!) 

To summarize the metamorphosis from what I’ve related over several entries:

  • Dreamed a weird dream — I will not tell you how weird, but suffice it to say it involved a much younger man and a kitchen, followed by wandering through a subterranean city with white glossy walls, lots of whiteboard, and really bright fluorescent lights. (To my current readers: The young man wasn’t you, so don’t panic.)
  • Interrogated the dream (“Young sir, why were you in my dream and why were we — ?”) I used a Gestalt dream interpretation tool.
  • Wrote my imaginary interrogation as a play snippet. (It comes off like high school angst)
  • Wrote two short stories to flesh out the play snippet. 
  • Husband suggested I write a novel.
  • First draft of what then was called “Magic and Reality” (referring to magical realism). Mainly a love story. Not much tension, except between the two characters about their age difference.
  • Second draft, renamed “Gaia’s Voice”. Emphasized the role of Gaia, the Earth-Soul. Brought in JB94 (see “Not all my characters are people”).
  • Third draft, named “Gaia’s Hands” — the four-way point of view
  • Fourth draft, still named “Gaia’s Hands” — two way point of view, more menace

Whew!

What if a Much of a Which of a Wind …

Appropos of a followup to my last post, I read something today that harkened to that alarming era of nuclear proliferation that I grew up with and which traumatized me greatly: Apparently our mentally deteriorating president has vowed to utterly destroy North Korea. The moral sickness that would allow this, in my opinion, would be unprecedented — with no excuse from Trump other than he can’t deal with them and thinks he’ll be a hero.

I felt moved to write this on Facebook and copy it here:

If the end of the world ever approaches and I’m still alive, I will likely seek comfort from a divine being. But it will not be the judgmental god who condemns the unbaptized, the unchurched, the people created with fluid gender and fluid spirit, the ones who love their own gender. I will not seek comfort from a god that runs a country club and keeps a checklist of who to exclude, or one who requires a secret password to enter the clubhouse. I will not seek a god that requires servility — that sounds too much like the Devil.

I will seek out the God who forgives even those who pushed the nuclear button, wise enough to know how fallible Her creation was. Who appears as a God, Goddess, or multiple deities to different people. A Being so pure that all visages are His/Hers. A Being who will take my soul and others, and the remaining particles of our bodies, and create again.

Note: I know some of my friends are atheists, and I don’t want to exclude you from my dream. It may be that my God is your rationality, or you think I delude myself with this fantasy. I will accept this as a possibility, and thank you for bringing up this possibility.

Note 2: I know some of my friends are conservative or fundamentalist or evangelical. I am not saying that your God doesn’t love you. But your God doesn’t love me, because your religion may call me apostate because of my acceptance of my LGBT, pagan, and atheist brothers and sisters. I will always choose the God who loves us all unconditionally and does not exile any of us to eternal torment.

Peace.


I still think, as the poem above (written by ee cummings) later states, that “… the single secret will still be man”. That maybe we can find a way out of the messes we get ourselves in, and change hearts and minds in a way that shares the riches of the world rather than hoarding them.

Writing as Therapy

“I tell my story over and over in my head, over and over to my readers, struggling to make sense of it …”
— The Repentance of Nicholas, Lauren Leach-Steffens
I wrote the story from which this quote was taken some twenty-five years ago. The story was a Gothic tale of heinous deeds, sacrifice and redemption, or that’s what I told myself. In reality, the story was about an unreliable narrator who survived an attack by an incubus and suffered from Stockholm Syndrome, falling in love with her attacker in the aftermath. This scenario happens all the time, and is part of the reason it’s so hard to leave one’s abuser. It mirrored what I was experiencing at the time, and my denial. I will not post the story here because it glorifies Stockholm Syndrome.
Writing therapy, however, has legitimacy. Psychology uses the tool extensively as a therapeutic tool, although they utilize it more as writing sprints (short exercises) and journaling. However, it’s not a large leap from that to working out events and feelings in a journal to fictionalizing them, either directly or symbolically, through specific scenes and general themes.
Writing as therapy can yield bad results. There’s an often derided phenomenon called the Mary Sue/Marty Stu story in fan fiction, where someone inserts their fantasy of competence, fame, and winning the (insert desired gender of love interest here) into an existent world. It reads predictably ridiculously, defying characterization of other members — after all, they’re props for the fabulous main character — plot, and logic. (Note that many women in fanfic and science fiction have had their legitimate works derided as “Mary Sue” simply because others can’t imagine female characters as anything but the prize. I’m not talking about that.)  For a glimpse of Marty Stu, watch the first movie in the Star Trek reboot. Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk takes over the Enterprise when he should have been smacked into a high-security military prison for trespassing, and the fun (?) begins. Every little thing he does, as they say, is magic. Credulity is stretched thin.
My favorite theme in my writing is therapeutic: ordinary heroes can save the world from the Apocalypse. I guess I write pre-Apocalyptic fiction. This likely comes from being a tween/teen during the Reagan Administration, where our president joked about bombing Russia on a hot mic and Russia and the US stockpiled weapons to up the threat. (To my Russian reader: If you’re old enough to remember, you remember this differently. That’s okay.) During that time I had near-constant nightmares where I was separated from my family as the sirens raged, and the only place I could find to shelter was a toilet stall. Because I have a sick sense of humor, think: flush and cover. I didn’t realize where this theme came from until this morning because the subconscious is a wonderful thing.
The therapy we do in writing is transformational. We create solutions, or wishes, or a worst-case scenario that moves people to act. We heal ourselves, heal our readers, and tell our story, over and over, struggling to make sense of it.