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Kitchens and Other Nightmares

I have a joke. It goes like this:

I know why the Biblical time frame for the Creation differs from the geological record. The Great Architect’s original design called for a six day process. The general contractor promised to have it done in two weeks. In fact, it took millions and millions of years. If you’ve had a kitchen remodeled, you know this is true.

I am now into the fifth week of my one week kitchen remodel, and while I finally can cook again, the kitchen is still not done. The microwave is no longer in the living room nor the refrigerator in the dining room, but the woodwork isn’t up, and a few other details are wanting. It’s a bit hard to concentrate on writing when workmen are pounding away. I could have fled to the library or a coffee shop, but sometimes decisions had to be made, so I had to stick around. And in the meantime, I succumbed to the worst temptation–writing nonfiction.

It’s so easy to write nonfiction. It doesn’t require thinking things up, only checking facts. All the heavy lifting has been done by other people. All I have to do is connect the dots and cite the references. Now that the workmen are winding down, surely I can extract myself from the quagmire of nonfiction. Surely I can save myself. But there are all these interesting articles to read and extrapolate from and unite into a coherent story…

Someone stop me! I shall flee to my garden and bark at the squirrels who are making craters in my raised beds. Surely that will inspire me to fiction–something with a theme of revenge against rodents. I feel a story coming on.

Image: After the tear out. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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Instant Gratification

My husband can tell you I’m lousy at delayed gratification, so I keep wondering why I end up in vocations and avocations that are all about delayed gratification. There aren’t too many things on this planet slower than research–something I did for over twenty years. First you do the lit search, then come up with a theory, write the grant, wait for funding, do the experiments (if you have to wait for donors, that takes even longer than if you’re working with something more compliant, like, say, bacteria). Some experiments take days, even weeks to get results. When you finally have the results, you write the paper then try to get it published. Waiting and waiting and waiting.

It’s the same with writing fiction (or even nonfiction) and with gardening. So much time is spent waiting, for the seeds to come out of the ground and the fruit to set, for the publisher to get around to doing what publishers do. I recently suffered another gratification blow. The anthology Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change has reopened submissions hoping to add diversity to its author pool. This anthology accepted my novella “Wasting Water” about a hundred years ago, then kept pushing back the submission deadline. I told everyone I knew to send them something. The publisher finally closed the call for submissions, but recently reopened it. I’m guessing by the time this anthology is published, half of Florida and most of the islands in the Pacific will be underwater. Oh, well, delayed gratification is the name of the game, and I’m nothing if not gamy.

Fortunately, I have coping mechanisms. One is to keep writing. The other is fiber arts. Yes, knitting and sewing are my methods of choice for instant gratification. With needles and yarn in hand, I can make a hat in an afternoon. I can whip up a dress in a couple of days. These mechanisms are less fattening than baking and more fun than cleaning house while serving to satisfy my need for instant gratification. Unfortunately, if I keep at this writing business, I am going to need more closets (to supplement the four I already have).

Image: Captain Jack holding down the fabric for me to cut. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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Writer’s Block? Nah.

I don’t seem to suffer from writer’s block–that horrible time when you stare at a blank page or computer scene and can’t bring yourself to begin. There are times, however, when I can’t write, like this January when I was celebrating my birthday and burying my brother.

Over the last few weeks, I found I had nothing important to say, or at least, nothing that was worth inflicting on others. I can always blather away about nothing in particular, but I mercifully try to keep most of that to myself. Instead, I’ve lately found myself thinking and pondering and struggling with meaning or some form of significance worthy of taking up someone else’s time.

I had another birthday, so I looked back on my year and my life and found I’m the same and different. I reconnected with a lot of long-lost relatives and friends over the past year and found I had been missing those connections. I hope in the coming year to spend more time with those people and to not misplace them again.

And my brother died. My last full brother, the last of the Fantastic Four, the small family that consisted of my father, my two brothers, and me. The time when we were a family I remember through the fog of time as being the happiest of my life. Mind you, this was when I was somewhere between five and eight years of age. In the house my father built with his own hands, I had a bedroom with horse wallpaper and a lamp that was a black knight on a black horse and, pinned to the wall, dozens of pictures of horses cut from magazines or traced from books. Are you detecting a theme here? During that time I spent Christmas with my Great Aunt Sadie in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we all ate popcorn balls and played Monopoly. It snowed, something that doesn’t happy in Albuquerque very often, and the luminaries on the tops of the adobe houses were beautiful. We four camped and traveled fearlessly and celebrated Treat Night every Friday (see my earlier post about that).

Things changed. My dad married and suddenly our family included a stepmom and two stepbrothers and, later, a half sister. Meanwhile, my mother had remarried and had a son, a half brother I’ve only come to know over the past few years. Time has been taking these people away from me, one by one. I still have one step brother, my stepmom, and the two half siblings. Over the holidays I visited my half sister and was delighted to see my father alive again in her mannerisms and turns of phrase–there was so much of him in her.

So instead of writing, I have been thinking. But enough of that. Time to write again.

Image: Birthday flowers. By Marilyn Evans

 

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Happy Birthday!

My blog is now a year old! I’ve been having a lot of fun with it, and I hope my faithful readers have, too. I’ve posted 37 times (this will be 38), about three per month. That doesn’t hold a candle to Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds blog or the always wonderful Sandra Boynton’s daily output on Facebook, but for a rank amateur, I’d say not bad.

Blogging is far more satisfying for me than, say Twitter. I have never gotten to love Twitter as some people have. I appreciate it, but it’s just not my medium. I need to be able to ramble more than you can in a few letters. That’s probably why short stories, especially flash fiction, are not so much in my wheel house as long fiction, at least according to my rejection letters.

My beloved spouse has tried on occasion to convince me to write nonfiction, and I have from time to time. I’m not so very bad at it, but, as they say, been there, done that. Time to learn something new. In truth, there are some nonfiction projects I’d like to take on, but I feel I owe it to the novels who have been waiting patiently in the wings to finally give them their chance. They may flop spectacularly, but I’ll write them down and let them fend for themselves.

The hardest part of writing for me so far is the book promotion. I love people, and I love talking about my books and the writing process, but selling myself is hard for me. I am much more shy than anyone would guess upon first making my acquaintance. I can bluff pretty well, but I’d rather not say to a total stranger, “You really must read my fantastic book! It will change your life! You will see angels! Puppies and kittens will flock to the shelter of your enlightened mind!” It smacks too much of religious proselytizing and Amway salesmanship. Still, it is part of the process, so I must grit my teeth and have at it, at least to some extent.

I doubt that I will ever “make it big” in the writing game, but the past year has been a great joy for me. Today, I will again do as I did one year ago, brace for the cold and snow, fire up the tea kettle, snuggle down with cats, and write.

I thanks to each and every person who has read anything I’ve ever written. I hope you’ll enjoy what comes next.

Image: January 2019 snow. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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A Christmas Story

My Christmas story “The Man Christmas Hated” is my gift to all of you. Go to the Stories tab at the top of the page, and you should be able to access it.

I hope you enjoy the story, and that the holidays, however you celebrate them or not, bring you and all yours happiness and prosperity in the coming year.

Image: Yule Log, by Jonathan Hutchins.

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Brain Full of Poetry

I suspect my muse is an insomniac. For decades, I’ve kept a pencil and pad at my bedside for those nights when my brain is so full of poetry that I couldn’t sleep until I write it down. Poems that come to me in the night can never be retrieved as completely as when they first appear. I don’t really write poetry any more, but story ideas still come in their place–characters, plot lines, scenes, turns of phrase–they come to haunt my hours between waking and sleep when the muse is restless and pacing, when my mind is most vulnerable to her.

My poetry was pretty bad, doggerel, probably, but that didn’t keep it from being relentless. Just the other night, after a long silence, a poem came to keep me awake that was an ode to camping. I love camping in spite of ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, sunburn, poison ivy, thunderstorms, and raccoons that steal my food and try on my clothes (long story). I even broke my foot on a camp out–full disclosure, there were darkness, uneven ground, alcohol, and flip-flops involved, so possibly inevitable. In spite of all this, I love camping, but an ode to it keeping me awake seemed a bit perverse. Who writes odes to camping? Who would read it? Yet, there it was, tapping its foot and waiting impatiently to be acknowledged.

Some writers, I’m told, sit down and write. Others write in their minds for a long time before pen ever touches paper or fingers rest on keyboard. I’m of the latter school. I think about characters, plot lines, scenes, turns of phrase for a good long while before committing them to print. When I’m stuck, I take a walk and wait for my muse to stir  herself from her nap and get back to work inspiring me. I don’t mind so much that she is erratic and unreliable, that she parties at night and snores during most of my waking hours, as long as she’s there now and again. And sometimes, without my asking or thinking about it, she comes in the night to fill my brain with stories and poetry. Most of the time I dutifully write them down.

Image: My brothers, Paul and George, and me on a camping trip in 1957. Photo by John P. Evans (Yes, my family included John, Paul, and George. No, you may not call me Ringo.)

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Sex Scenes

Warning: Content possibly unsuitable for minors and nervous persons

Sex in fiction is tricky.

The Marquis de Sade writing Justine and Juliette or Pauline Reage (the pseudonym of Anne Desclos) writing The Story of O, did not exhibit much restraint in how they wrote about sex, pushing the boundaries past what many (perhaps even most) would call acceptable. But these authors knew what they were writing and why: the sex didn’t contribute to the story, it was the story. Fifty Shades of Grey, a financial success but generally regarded as poorly written and uninformed, used the expectations of its audience to deliver what they wanted–not reality, but a fantasy. Successful romance writers have a keen sense of what is appropriate to their audience and the type of novel they are writing. There are subgroups within the romance genre that prepare the reader for how much or how little sex the novel contains and how graphic the descriptions will be. This is true of other genres as well. We might expect a graphic rape scene in a hard-boiled mystery, but never in a cozy.

In a series, we might expect a character to change their relationships over time, but we don’t expect them to go too far off the rails. Laurell K. Hamilton started her Anita Blake series as really good urban fantasy with a solid core of mystery. Unfortunately, a few novels into the series, the plots disappeared, and the books because vehicles for paranormal porn. This wouldn’t be a bad thing in and of itself, except I was expecting a good story, not endless sex scenes. Some of her fans liked where the series went. I wasn’t one of them.

Sex in a work of fiction (including it, leaving it out, dialing it back) has to be appropriate to the story and to the audience. When it goes wrong, sex scenes can be jarring and distracting, taking the focus off the story being told. In his book, Jaws, Peter Benchley included an affair between Chief Brody’s wife and the shark expert. It contributed nothing to the story and was wisely left out of the film version. The legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins, persuaded Ernest Hemingway to remove from For Whom the Bell Tolls the scene of the hero masturbating on the eve of battle. Hemingway felt it showed the character’s humanity. Perkins knew it would be a distraction.

I find writing sex scenes hard. It’s not that I’m a prude–quite the contrary. But I know if it is not done well, it can be the undoing of a novel. I know that the sex scenes can go too far, that badly written scenes are laughable, that expectations not met can disappoint the reader. I know that a sex scene not expected and anticipated can derail the readers opinion of a character.

Sex is important. It’s how nearly all of us got here. Most of the time, most of us like it. It usually makes us happy. But bad sex in fiction can serve a purpose as well–for example, what better way to show a failing marriage than through the demise of intimacy? In the end, what sex should do, as every other element of fiction should do, is serve the story.

Image: Priapus, ancient Roman wall mural in Pompey, Rome. Photo by Marilyn Evans.

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Using All My Brain

Two movies I really like and have watched way too many times are Lucy and Limitless. They have a similar premise: humans use only about 10% of their brains, and if, by way of some miracle drug, we could access more of our brains, we could do amazing things. The film Phenomenon and the book Brain Wave, by Poul Anderson, had similar ideas about what we could accomplish if only we were smarter or had better access to full use of our brains.

Who hasn’t struggled to access information we knew that we had but couldn’t pull up, like the name of that song or that actor, until it finally comes to us in the middle of the night or, perhaps, days later? If only we could have a snappy comeback for that insult, but we don’t come up with it until hours later. If only we could learn those Spanish verb declensions or that Kreb’s cycle in an hour.

The problem is, the 10% thing is a myth. We actually use most of our brains most of the time. The second problem is, there are no such drugs–so far–and no short cuts, although there are techniques and methods for improving learning, retention, and recall. The thing is, doing most of the things in these stories I like so much, if they can be done at all, takes time. We can learn amazing things, we can recall what we have learned, we can create, we can do amazing things, but it takes time. That is the way to fully use a brain: to use it every day and for many days on end.

November is National Novel Writing Month. Writing a novel is an amazing accomplishment, and I think everyone should do it. In November, anyone who writes 1667 words a day for 30 days will end up with a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month. It only takes time and using an existing brain that is full of ideas and experiences and a language that we already know.

My first NaNoWriMo book is still unfinished because I realized it was too good a book to continue to work on until I became a better writer. I think I have the skills to work on it again and have been doing so since my most recent book went off to a publisher. But I’ll be putting it aside once again during November to work on a different book–one that has been haunting me for a couple of years. When I have the 50,000 words, I’ll put it away and go back to the first one until I think it’s worthy of submission. Maybe by next November, one book will be done and another will be ready to set aside while I do another NaNoWriMo.

I don’t think I could write at the rate some authors do, several books a year. I take too long to polish and ponder and worry and rework. But I can write the bones of a book in a month, if only I will. It doesn’t take more brain than I currently use. It only takes commitment. And time.

Image: A pile of cogs. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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Inspiration

(This post contains spoilers).

Last weekend, my husband and I attended the Kansas City Symphony. Jonathan was especially taken by Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor and pianist George Li’s wonderful performance. I myself am always a sucker for Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 in A major, especially since its stately second movement was used in the Nicholas Cage movie, Knowing, as the world ends in a solar flare. But the real surprise in this concert was a newer composition: Michael Kurth’s A Thousand Words.

Mr. Kurth was there in person to talk about the four movements of his work, each a musical picture worth many words that described the emotional experiences that inspired them. The first was a sunrise, the crescendo lasting as long as it takes the sun to rise above the horizon. The second was an amazing piece invoking with industrial zeal both the cliffs at Reynisfjara and the Sloss Furnaces of Alabama. The third movement paid tribute to his late mother, and the fourth was a carnival-like dance party.

Having tried my hand a couple of times at composing, I always wonder, where does all this really great music come from? The Muses, of course, the Gods, Heaven, Nature, but apparently it also comes from art. Later this year, the symphony will be performing Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky’s tribute to the art of Viktor Hartmann.

Last week I also was listening to a collection of Stephen King’s short stories as I drove from place to place on errands. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams includes an author’s introduction explaining his inspirations as well as comments afterward about the writers who might have been on his mind at the time he wrote the stories–his mentors, to some extent. None was more obvious than the story written in an approximation of the voice of Elmore Leonard.

For all that Nature is a powerful inspiration, I think the art of others may be a more powerful stimulant. Fan fiction arises from this but need not stop there. I have been told that the wonderful Lois McMaster Bujold began what was to become the Vorkosigan saga as fan fiction, but it became something whole, huge, and amazing all by itself. Just as there is nothing new in this world (a debatable point, but one often stated), there are no two things exactly alike. Infinite ways of telling stories, interpreting feelings, creating art rise and fall. How many interpretations of Shakespeare’s works have there been? And Shakespeare was inspired by older stories he borrowed freely but made his own.

I think we need never fear being derivative if we put our own soul into our works to create our own art. Art begets art no less than living creatures beget their own replacements. My works may never achieve the heights of those of King, Bujold, Mussorgsky, or Shakespeare, but wallowing in great art is its own reward, even without the bonus of inspiration.

Image: White Iris by Vincent Van Gogh. Print, from the collection of Marilyn Evans.

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Does Writing Make You a Better Writer?

Does the simple act of writing make you a better writer? I’m of two minds about this. Here’s my reasoning.

I’m usually reading two books at the same time–one in the day time from which I may be taking notes or by which I am otherwise fully absorbed, and one book for pleasure during which I don’t mind falling asleep mid-paragraph.* Depending on the combination of books, this can make for some interesting juxtapositions.

I just finished re-reading Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass. When I first read this book, I hadn’t yet published my first novel. Now I’ve published one, written another, and am deeply immersed in writing more. The second time reading this, the information made far more sense. I could better understand what the author was getting at and how to apply it to my works in progress. By writing, I was learning not only how to write, but also how better to learn to write.

The other book I’m reading is Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward. I have no issues with Mr. Woodward’s exhaustively researched content, and who am I to argue with a man who has received nearly every major American journalism award and written or co-authored eighteen nonfiction books, all national bestsellers? But the thing is, Fear isn’t a very well written book. At times I couldn’t tell whether the statements made were hyperbole or facts–he doesn’t tell me. Sometimes he jumps around in time to give an example and loses me in the transition. In other places, I can’t tell who’s saying or doing what. It’s all a bit sloppy.

Maybe Woodward is one of those guys that people don’t dare edit. Anne Rice got unreadable when that happened to her. Or maybe Woodward is a better researcher than writer, and no one cares how he delivers the goods as long as he does. But it seems, if you write that much you ought to get better and better. In fairness, maybe he has. I haven’t read his earliest books.

So my opinion, if anyone cares: writing might make you a better writer over time if you take advice and listen to your advisers and editors. Writing alone won’t necessarily improve your craft unless you’re getting feedback as you go. Perhaps our president could learn from that. Do you suppose he reads my blog?

* My best ever bedtime book was Principles of Biochemistry by Albert I. Lehninger. I loved biochemistry, but for some reason, every time I opened that book at night, I would fall asleep.  There was something solid and comforting about the book and its content. When Dr. Lehninger came to Kansas City for a lecture, I was going to take my copy for him to sign, but it was an early edition with hand corrections, and I thought he might be insulted. Yes, I am a nerd.

Image: The Capital and I, in different times. By Jonathan Hutchins.