People tell lies about writing.  Writers lie to themselves sometimes, or sometimes people tell us lies about our work.  We get over these lies with help from our friends and mentors.  Sometimes we have to get over the same lies repeatedly.  What in the hell am I talking about?  Below are the first two lies that leaped into my head, that I’ve heard professionals tell me over and over are lies.

Writing isn’t a physically strenuous career…

LIE.  This should be an obvious one, though the strains on your body aren’t of the football or construction kinds.  By now probably everyone with a computer has heard of Repetitive Strain Injury, of which Carpal Tunnel is probably the most famous.  There are a whole host of them, and they’re all nasty.  Focusing on a monitor glaring at the same distance all day is bad for your eyes.  Sitting still in a chair all day is generally not good for your body.  After a while our bodies will tell us about the strains in hateful ways.

Read up on ergonomics and apply it to your writing everywhere we reasonably can.  Particularly true in my case, where nerves in my arms and hands remind me almost daily that they’re screwed up.  Do not break your body if you can possibly avoid it.

Along with ‘sit down and write’, many professionals have said, is a need to find some form of exercise and DO it.  Sounds fabulous and easy.  If we don’t have this as part of our life, shoehorning it in can be a challenge. I struggle with this one.  I stopped horseback riding years ago.  Right in the wake of that, I ended up with a series of open-body surgeries that put me in bed for weeks at a time.  Now, getting my butt up to exercise takes some motivation because I stopped exercising.  I’m supposed to ‘Just Do It’?  Are you freaking kidding me?  I need a reason to do it, because I have just piles of reasons not to exercise.  I don’t feel too good today, and maybe I’m sore from trying to exercise once already this week, and I’m way behind on (task du jour) so I don’t have time today… whine grumble, bitch moan.  Words to live by from Jenny Gibbons to her husband – “But babe!  You need to do cardio!  You don’t want the zombies to catch you!”  Those excuses back there?  The ones dressed up as reasons not to get off your butt?  They’re the zombies, and they’re coming to get you.

I need to be inspired to write…

LIE.  Evil, evil lie.  If we seriously think a Special Snowflake Fairy is going to make us into writers all of whose work is birthed only in the Flow of Artistic Inspiration, we need a slapping.  A brisk stinging slap the first few times.  Further infractions qualify the writer for a ‘clue x 4′ to the back of the head.  Writing when we’re not inspired may well result in a page full of crap, but in the immortal words of Kath Nyborg - “We can edit crap.  It’s impossible to edit a blank page.”

Realize that no one ever has to see our crap but us, and we can edit it.  So face the fear of writing crap, take up the implement of your choice, and bloodily chop this lie to bits every time it crops up.  Like fixing the first lie (or like fighting zombies, come to think of it), this is not as easy as it sounds.  There’s a gajillion ways to get over this, and I sure don’t know them all.  Here are two I’ve used.

If you have no idea where the plot is going, and you’re looking out at a directionless sea, and you have no friends to go to lunch and plot with, there’s always the most dreaded advice I’ve heard a professional give to me.  “Just write a (expletive deleted) synopsis.  It’s not going to kill you.”  It didn’t kill me.  In this case it took me to the gasping edge of death by boredom… and hey, wait… where did I get bored again?  Oh!  Right around there!  So what’d be more evil there…  Go to the beginning and just make a list of what happened in the story so far.  It’s distressingly mechanical.  It has NOTHING to do with inspiration, but sometimes it helps to get some distance on a project so that you can see where you’re actually going with it.

If you have some idea of where a plot is going, you can just recognize that the next bit’s going to feel like slogging through the Sea of Crap, pull up your hip-waders, and head in the general direction of that far off shore ‘The End’.  Try to find as many hummocks of decent ground as you can along the way.  You might have to double back a lot to find the right direction.  You’ll probably have to come back once you’ve blazed a trail to ‘The End’ and cut out stretches of crap and replace them as needed with better stuff.  You might very well find the Flow of Inspiration again, hidden below the surface somewhere along the way.  You darn sure won’t find it unless you wade in.

I’m sure I’ll think of some more lies that professionals have, over the years, told me were lies.  I’m sure I still tell some to myself, because I’m not perfect.  What are some of the lies about writing that you’ve fallen victim to?  How do you try to fix them?

Tags: process, writing
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As I’ve explained to a host of doctors and physical therapists over the years, my desktop work station really is ergonomic. Like, I’ve measured with a ruler and a protractor (seriously – my son marked the angles of my arm at the elbow on paper, and I borrowed his school protractor to measure) and had the numbers assessed. I can work here quite comfortably for a fairly solid chunk of time (solid for me. Your mileage will vary). Go me! So now… in the words of the song from ‘Dick Tracy’… I want more!

I’d really like to be able to take this show on the road. To coffee shops, to friends’ houses, etc, and be able to get solid amounts of work done. I have a rather elderly laptop, and a spare plug-in ergonomic keyboard that I can use, but it’s a weird lot of luggage to tote about. It’s not a ‘oh, look, I’m early to this appointment maybe I’ll pop into the coffee shop’ kind of set up. The keyboard alone is bigger than most laptops.

This is significantly better than not being able to write at ALL, which is a possibility that I’ve looked down the barrel of more than once. It’s a big old caliber barrel, too. I still have days where I don’t consider myself able to drive safely. These days usually coincide with a lot of whining and self-pity. It’s just not pretty.

Solution the First – I’m only able to write on computer at home.

Solution the Second – I’ve found ergonomic travel keyboards (Goldtouch makes it, and they have a travel laptop stand also)… which at least breaks down into smaller parts that can all go in one backpack. This is not an inexpensive solution, but I’m going to try a similar keyboard this weekend. That’s what birthdays and Christmas (/Yule/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah) are for, right?

Solution the Third – Well, heck. I don’t have a third solution. Do any of you have a third option I haven’t considered?

[edited for a heck of a lotta hecks!]

Update!  Sadly, solution the second doesn’t work out, as it has no ‘palm rest’, and I need that feature to avoid ‘sharps’ in my elbows.

Tags: arms, netbook, travel, writing
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At last year’s World Fantasy Con, I had the good fortune to hear Ken Scholes read his work.  One of the questions asked was  “What books are you currently reading?”  Ken’s reply was that, in his case, writing used the same brain muscles that reading did and since he was deep in a writing process he wasn’t really reading anything at that moment.  I was intrigued by that answer, heard the ring of potential Truth there, and started to pay more attention to what I read.

Everyone who’s a writer in a serious way will tell you – if you want to write, you need to read.  This is true.  When I’m not neck-deep in romancing a manuscript, I read voraciously.  Lately, I’m almost always neck-deep in writing, so I’m not as currently well-read as I’d like.

When I’m actively working on a manuscript, I make time to read works by friends (a way big enough pile that I’m always behind anyhow) and sometimes reread favorite books.  I can pick up those, read one page, or ten, put the book down and go back on my merry way until I have another ten minutes.  If I start up reading a NEW story?  Six will get you ten it’s start to finish, baby, and if I get four hours of sleep and feed my family around the edges it’s a great day.  I have to block out ‘works by friends’ time, because otherwise not much of my own writing gets done.

Then there’s research fiction I read while writing.  It’s usually in the narrow spectrum of what I’m writing.  What the hell is research fiction?  Well, while I worked on Bone Orchard (written in between surgeries and the nerve condition in my arms/hands), I tended to read books like ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley, and books by Edith Wharton and Anthony Trollope.  They’re ‘research fiction’.  In those cases they were books I’d read before, but I needed to be thoroughly reacquainted with Gothic (in the classical sense) and Victorian writing and I chose books whose tones had commonality with what I was writing.

Then there’s reading for research of facts.  For my current project, I read Her Majesty’s Spymaster, by Stephen Budiansky, which was a fun read, because I find Francis Walsingham in all his type-A hyper-intelligent fanatic Protestant anti-glory to be fascinating.  Then there’s some nice light stuff like ‘The Revolt of the Netherlands 1555 – 1608‘.  ‘Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England‘.  ‘The Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century‘.  Sometimes research reading is Really.  Not.  Interesting.  Unless you’re me, and sometimes not riveting even if you are me; and if you are, would you fold that load of laundry?  Thanks.  Four books here, out of about three dozen quite dense historical reference works and I’m trying to get hold of more even as I move forward in my writing this manuscript.

For me, it’s not necessarily about how many cycles I have to devote to reading vs. writing.  Quite a lot more sharply it seems to be reading time vs. writing time.  If you don’t read, you probably won’t learn to write really well.  If you don’t do the keyboard time, you don’t get anything written.  The time I spend reading, I’m most often reading toward my writing.

Writing vs. Reading.  If you do both, how much of each?

Tags: process, reading, writing
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At the outset, I feel it only fair to warn you that this is and will remain a ramble.  I recommend fetching a cup of tea or some other beverage.  Over on my friend M.K. Hobson’s site, she coined the term Bustlepunk.   I found this to be singularly cool at the time, and I still do.  Somewhere in the back of my head I can hear a teacher/panelist/writer/editor (I’ve heard it over and over and probably so have you.  In fact, say it with me…) “Science fiction is fiction about science.”  Whiiiiiiich isn’t really correct.  I may have to break out a fire extinguisher around here, but bear along for a few more sentences.  In fact, go and have a look at the bookstore shelves.  Even the virtual ones.  Are all the novels that come up when you go looking for science fiction about science?  NO?  I’m shocked.  SHOCKED, I tell you.  No.  I’m not shocked and neither are you.  Science fiction may be about science, but mostly it is about the effect of science, or a device, or a future and about people who live in that situation.  If it thinks like a people, it’s a people.  Don’t even go there. I intend to ramble quite enough without that particular devolution of the conversation.

Now… I like derivatives if they’re polite and play nicely.  Prosecco is high up on my list of preferred grape derivatives, for instance.    Bustlepunk is all about the polite.  Or the lack thereof.  It takes place in a technological derivation from the norm.  Cyberpunk takes place in a futuristic technological derivation from the norm that deals in the interface between wires and nerves, between flesh and computers.  Steampunk has as its effecting setting a deviation from the technological norm a bit earlier.  Victorian era.  People never really stopped writing it, though they may have skipped a bit in the middle between Vern, Burroughs, et al and the last 20 years.  This isn’t about a timeline of Steampunk, but I’d very much like to see one!  Where was I… ah yes, Bustlepunk.

Bustlepunk is such a lovely, evocative word.  The era of the bustle (and the hoopskirt, and right up through the Edwardians… but the bustle is a good middle point) evokes Merchant Ivory dramas.  Masterpiece Theater productions.  Weird thoughts of dear Miss Marple who never WORE a bustle, but who certainly evoked the high ideal of good manners and who certainly should have possessed a lovely broach with clockwork that spun backward for no reason whatever that she would reveal.  Don’t believe me about the manners?  Check out the Gibson Girl hairdos on the covers of Miss Manners some time. The bustle and its era are symbolic.  Much as steam and cyberwear are symbolic.

Bustlepunk, of course, being a speculative fiction genre, is neither a regency romance nor an Edith Wharton novel.  It has more to it than only manners.  It has aspects of Steampunk, certainly.  Zepplins may be present.  It has aspects of Victorian Gothic aesthetic.  Vampires or werewolves or zombies might haunt the gas-lit streets.  However, it seems to me that Bustlepunk, while it sets a gracious tea table at which one or both of those distinctions may have a pleasant repast, sets itself apart with the importance in the turnings of the plot and within the gears of any society… of manners.  It serves this somewhat dainty and sometimes bland repast along with the greatly appealing aperitif observation that social norms may be broken provided one does so with sufficient aplomb and grace.

Bustlepunk need not lack in action, nor indeed in bloodshed and violence.  Good gracious, people, there is such a thing as a duel and also such a thing as a serial killer and even such a thing as that ghastly boor Lord Whateverhismutziz who’s treading down one’s botanical reseach without the slightest notion that it possesses the keys to a lost kingdom, eternal youth, and you will certainly need a zepplin at this point to go off and conduct your field research.  Or else you’ll need a gold mine in Arizona from which you may transfer yourself to Mars.  Did I not mention that this was a civilized tea table, and as such it necessarily hosts the most interesting of guest devices?  Of course I did.  The Low-Techs are such dear, accommodating people once you get past their xenophobia.  And the drooling.

Waaaait a minute, I hear you say.  That’s Cyberpunk pure and classic there!  Trot off and find your copy of the SHORT STORY ‘Johnny Mnemonic’.  It’s a brilliant piece in its folding together of elements.  The science creates the situation.  It is certainly science fiction.  It deals with direct computer interface in human beings and with advanced body alteration unknown to then-medical-science and in direct rebellion.  Certainly Cyberpunk.  All good and fair.  Cyberpunk is a subset of Science Fiction.  Madam has clearly lost her tiny little mind here, eh?   The climactic resolution deals, in part, with the intersection of two social situations, and the hero’s ability to span both worlds.

You see?  And you didn’t think he even owned a waistcoat.  Oh dear.  How extraordinary of me.  Here I asked you to bring tea and completely forgot about to ask – do you take lemon, or milk with your bustlepunk?

Tags: books, bustlepunk, ramble, steampunk, writing
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Someone asked me recently what I thought it was that made me a writer.  The quick and obvious answer is that a writer is someone who writes.   I’m a writer because I write.  Yep.  Heard it a hundred and forty seven thousand times.  What is it that makes me into a me who writes?

Hunh.

I considered this question in great depth for about a second and a half and up blinked the word ‘curiosity’.  It isn’t the only thing that makes me a writer, but it’s certainly a solid cornerstone.  I’m curious about people.  My husband is endlessly amused and wry because I talk to people that I don’t know.

I converse with the lady at the meat counter (her dog has squeaky toy issues).

I chat with the dry cleaner (the roofer recommendation?  Awesome.).

I listen to nervous people on airplanes (one lovely young lady was studying casino management).

So why does that make me a writer instead of nosy as all get out?  Okay, so I am ALSO nosy as all get out.  I’m curious about people, about things, about history, about virtually everything.  Well, maybe not Nascar, but possibly I just don’t know enough about what makes that interesting to people.

I’m curious about people, about what makes them do what they do, how they think what they think.  I wonder what would make them change.  What would they do if some situation radically changed the world in which they live and how would they respond?  How do people respond to challenges in their lives?  What kinds of responses make someone, maybe even a very broken person, into a hero?

Do you write?  Why?  I’m curious.

Tags: writing
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Today is the 80th birthday of one of the grand dames of science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin. Happy birthday to a great and gracious lady.

It’s also the 40th anniversary of ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’, so if by some cruel twist of fate you have missed out on Le Guin’s work up until now, this might be an appropriate place to start.

Tags: birthday, writing
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First, and most importantly, this page was the work of the utterly spectacular M.K. Hobson, whose site you’ll see in my links.  If you like the design here, drop her a note over there and let her know.  While you’re there take a look around her site too, because both it and her books are dead cool.

If you’ve found this page – and I must assume you have or you wouldn’t be reading it – I should start out by saying ‘Welcome, I hope you’ll stay. Or at least come back to call regularly.’  What you’ll find here is me talking about my writing, about things that I stumble on that interest me, and about minutiae that may or may not be interesting to anyone but me… and I’m interested in just about everything on one level or another.

I think all writers must have a certain fascination with blank pages.  Most writers tend to have a blank page at least within a couple of seconds’ reach.  If they don’t have one, they make them up out of other things.  Napkins.  Receipts.  Envelopes.  Paper towels are wonderful things (Air dryers are an invention of pure frustration.  They’re clean, eco-friendly… and only good for drying stuff.).

There’s something about a blank page that teases.  It invites us to fill those two dimensions until we stretch them out into something more.  A picture, a word, a story… there’s no limit of possibility in a blank page except those on our own eyes, our hearts, our imaginations.  It’s a place we can fly as far as we can, as fast or as slowly as we wish.  I’m looking forward to filling up a lot of pages here.

Objects in the mirror may be stranger than they appear.  Welcome to the ride.

Tags: welcome, writing
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