Tag: Writing

Posted on

Not Dead Yet

I thought my muse was dead. Since November, I’ve had a really hard time writing. I sort of thought my muse had gasped her last. But for some reason, I was able to write an article for the survival/prepper blog I contribute to from time to time. Here is the link, in case you’re interested.

survivalblog.com/2024/12/15/staying-sane-and-happy-in-isolation-by-m-j-e

So, I guess my muse is not dead yet. I suppose I’ll get back to writing fiction again at some point, but in the mean time,  I’m waiting on some works by the writers I do editing for–looking forward to those. And perhaps I will find a publisher for the stuff that’s already done.

Be patient. I’m pretty sure I’ll be back.

Posted on

Vicarious

At a certain age, you’re supposed to make a bucket list–stuff you’re going to do before you kick the bucket. Then, later in life, you start doing the things on that list. Once upon a time, welding and juggling were on mine, but I’m not so interested in those things now. Not to say I won’t give them a try (again) at some point, but they are nowhere near the top.

Also at a certain age, you begin to realize there are things you are just never going to do. Still, you may feel like you’ve made enough of an effort that you can count those things as close enough.  I’ll never be in the Olympics, but I have managed to do all the things that are part of the modern pentathlon; that is to say, over the course of my lifetime, I have been a pretty good swimmer, I’ve been a runner, and a pretty good shot with a pistol, I’ve ridden my horse over some largish jumps, and I was a passable foil fencer in my younger days.  Among  other common aspirations, I’ve acted in a couple of plays, and been on television more than once. I’ve shaken hands with some famous people, most notably to me, a Nobel laureate. I’ve written some articles, novels, and short stories. But the time has come to admit, some things I’ll never do, like through hiking one of the three great trails: the Pacific Crest, the Continental Divide, and the Appalachian (although I have at least set foot on the PCT, a bit of which is pictured here).  It’s not looking good for writing a screen play either, but there’s still time.

My list is pretty long, and some things I may still accomplish, like seeing an active volcano and a glacier (visiting Iceland looks like the best bet for knocking out both of those). Other things just aren’t in the cards. A photography safari in Africa is looking iffy, although if I go to South Africa I can also visit penguins, so two tick marks on the list at once.

The good news is, I can experience a whole lot of bucket list things vicariously. We’re all vicarious athletes when the Olympics are broadcast. Thanks to You Tube, I can join through hikers on the three great trails and more trails besides.  I visit with hundreds of cats on line, solve mysteries through books, do all manner of strange things through podcasts, visit the far reaches of the world through documentaries. But best of all, I write my ambitions, fantasies, dreams.

I always thought I would live on a farm. That didn’t work out, but through my stories, some of my characters have. While the idea of owning a little shop very much appealed to me at one time, I know next to nothing about retail, but one of my characters does and is pretty successful at running her little store.

Writing lets me live my life vicariously through my characters without having to personally suffer all the things I have to put them through to make the story interesting. Researching what I dream of and desire, then living out the fantasy of that life or adventure vicariously through my characters is being a lovely way to round out my bucket list.

Image: The Pacific Crest Trail. By Marilyn Evans

 

 

Posted on

More Bingeing

I’ve said before in these posts that I’m lousy at delayed gratification and that binge watching television programs is a wonderful way to satisfy my intemperate lusts. I just finished watching all sixteen seasons of Criminal Minds over the course of the last year. That is a lot of mass murderers. I’ve slowed to a crawl for the rebooted series, now called Criminal Minds: Evolution. I’m watching television more than usual because I’m not reading much fiction at the moment. When I’m working hard on a novel, I prefer to read nonfiction to keep from stealing too much from whoever I’m reading.

Some of my favorite authors were/are wonderfully prolific. When I discovered Robert B. Parker, I cold-bloodedly found every book he had ever written (at the time), and with the help of inter-library loan and honest to goodness brick and mortar stores, read them in order. When he died, his greatest character, the private detective Spencer, had to live on in the hands of other writers. This seems to happen a lot in science fiction with other writers writing in the style of. Or in the case of mystery writer Dick Frances, his son took up the reins. Fortunately for me, Lindsey Davis, the creator of the Didius Falco and the Flavia Albia mysteries, is still alive and writing. My other current favorite, C.J. Box, creator of the Joe Pickett novels is also writing away, and I have a lot of reading ahead of me to catch up. But until I finish The Siege of Zarmina, no fiction for me.

To keep my brain busy while I’m between writing sessions, I’m indulging my new addiction, podcasts. Between If Books Could Kill and Maintenance Phase, along with a few others, these keep me company when I’m walking around the neighborhood getting in my steps or when I’m sweating away in the garden. As for nonfiction reading material, I’m currently enjoying The Way of the Hermit: My Incredible 40 Years Living in the Wilderness, by Ken Smith with Will Millard.  It’s a wonderful book, but I had a hard time acquiring it–the publisher can’t seem to keep it on the shelves, and the library didn’t even have it in yet but already had seventeen people on the waiting list. I did finally get the last copy at my favorite Barnes and Noble. Ah, to have a book so successful.

With any luck, Zarmina*, my third novel, will be done and ready for beta readers before the end of July. That’s the goal. In the mean time, I’m still waiting for the contract to come from the publisher who expressed interest in The Gingerbread House.  After that, a short break–probably to read a whole bunch of mysteries–then on to finishing Wickham’s Daughter, then starting the sequel to The Gingerbread House. Then maybe finish Head of the Family and take a serious stab at Jocasta of Thebes. Ambitious, I know, but I’m not getting any younger.

*The working title for The Siege of Zarmina has always been The Iliad in Space.

Image: Bingeing on nonfiction and podcasts between writing sessions. By Marilyn Evans

Posted on

The Late Winter Optimist

Once again I have succumbed to the siren song of the winter seed catalog. In spite of my optimistic post of the past, I really was teetering on the edge of full surrender to a life free of the agony of gardening. But that little bomb that came in the mail, in the bleakest time of the year for a Midwestern gardener, sucked me in. I perused. I made selections. I inventoried my existing stash of seeds. I ordered new seeds. I counted back from the days for the last projected frost, days to germination, best days to plant by the moon according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac. I have a three page blueprint for the layout of the garden beds with an eye to companion planting. I’ve evaluated my fences and acquired new posts to keep them upright. Of course, the weather, beasts, weeds, and all will conspire against me. I imagine the chipmunks in their underground bunkers laying plans for their spring assault. There must be some kind of twelve step program to help people like me, the gardening addicted. And yet, the leek seeds all germinated, spreading their tiny contagion of optimism.

Even in the deepest darkest throes of winter, there is room for optimism. There has to be. Otherwise we’d give up, shrivel up, and…well, you know. Recently a family emergency called me out of state. My cat sitter, who spoils the kids so mercilessly that when I come home I get the, “Who are you and what have you done with Aunt Laurie?” treatment, watered my little starter seedlings. Not only have the leeks survived, but they are thriving. I made it home just in time to plant the other seeds on schedule: tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and my eternal overachievers, the cucumbers. They may or may not come up in seven to fourteen days.

More dead-of-winter hopefulness has reared its lovely head: a publisher has expressed interest in The Gingerbread House.  Add to that the news from an editing client that his book has been accepted by a publisher, and things are looking pretty good. But to keep me grounded in reality, a flash fiction piece got rejected. Review, possibly rewrite, submit somewhere else.

I have discovered that sitting on a plane for several hours contributes to my optimism. I managed to do a first draft of a short story that has been tickling the back of my mind, and got down pages of notes on the various novels that have need of my attention. In fact, most of this blog post is the product of flying through the air in a metal tube. Perhaps if I become a world traveler I’ll get a lot more written.

Unfortunately, I may be headed back out of state in the near future. Probably all of the plants will die while I’m gone. I don’t care. I’m hopeful now. And that’s a good place to start.

Image: Optimistic leeks. By Marilyn Evans

Posted on

Write What You Know and Other Bad Advice

Most books, web sites, and instructors that are trying to teach you about  writing have some tired old saws that they trot out  and are certain, and think  you should be too, that they are the gospel for writers. Baloney, say I. Here are some of my quibbles with conventional wisdom.

Write what you know. The problem is, this implies you should write only  what you have personally experienced. Agatha Christie, as far as I have been able to discern, never killed anyone. But she knew about village life so Miss Marple has all the right moves. J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t personally know any elves, orcs, or dragons, but he knew a lot about ordinary folk facing extraordinary times from his experiences during World War I, and he had a deep and wide knowledge of European languages and mythologies all of which informed his writing. He did write what he knew, but in ways unrecognizable from his own personal experiences. Early on, Dick Francis wrote about the horse racing world that he knew so well, but he and his wife loved researching new and interesting worlds, and these filled his later works. I have written before about the importance of research. So the questions is, what do you know? You know what you’ve experienced yourself, what you’ve learned from many sources, what you can imagine, dream, create. But if you’re going to write something you don’t necessarily know personally, you can ground that in what you do know–family relations, small town or city life, love, unhappiness, all the rest of human experience. That grounding will make it real. And it never hurts to find a reviewer who has experience with your topic, if you can find one. But if you created the world you are writing in, you are the expert. Use your expertise to know and write about that world.

Another morsel of universal truth,  get a copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White and adhere to it religiously. Hogwash. The book was published in 1935 by Oliver Strunk and E. B. White who was at the time a student in Professor Strunk’s class at Cornell. That’s the E. B. White of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. Problem is, writing has changed a lot since the 1930’s. There is actually a 4th edition published in 1999, and it may have been sufficiently updated to make it more relevant to today’s styles, but the best place to find guidance for how to write is from the publishers you are trying to get to publish your work. They will often cite on their submission page a reference for their preferred style. By all means, get a copy of Elements and read it, but know what you’re getting into. Be aware that times change and so do writing styles and the rules of engagement.

No head hopping. This is the idea that you have to tell the story from one person’s point of view for any given scene. It is not bad advice because it’s less confusing for the reader, but honestly if you are careful, you can tell us what more than one person is thinking in a scene if that is required to tell your story. Jane Austen was able to pull this off, but if you’re not as good a writer as she is, you might avoid, if you can, jumping from one point of view to another within a scene. Still, if it works for the story you are trying to tell, give it a shot.

A million times you will be told: show, don’t tell. Have the action tell the story, not someone telling you what happened. It’s usually good advice, but sometimes you gotta tell folks what is going on and showing them is too darned complicated. But you can tell using clever devices, like Holmes explaining things to Watson. The trusty sidekick or the Everyman who has to have things explained to him (and to us, the readers) is a common device for telling what’s going on. Yes, telling, not showing.

We’ve already discussed Don’t Kill the Dog. But sometimes you have to. You just better have a really good reason. But, you are told, kill your darlings. Killing your darlings is when you have to get rid of some part or character or line in your work that just doesn’t fit or is jarringly out of place. It might have worked at one time, or maybe you worked really hard on it and you’re really proud of it, but it sticks out like a sore thumb and detracts from the rest of the story. The thing is, you don’t necessarily have to kill your dearest. You might just need to rehome her. Write a story where she fits in, where she makes the story work around her. Or give her a makeover so she fits in as she should in your existing story. In the end, it might be that she simply won’t cooperate. Then, by all means, murder her.

There are a lot of other writing rules that might not necessarily be bad advise, but you really should think about them and challenge them if that is essential to your creative process. My point is, advice is not law. If your way of telling the story requires you to ignore, bend, break, mutilate, or otherwise commit outrage on the rules of writing, by all means, give it a try. If it’s bad or your editor becomes apoplectic, you can reconsider and rewrite. But pushing the boundaries can lead to new and innovative  creations. You have my permission to push the boundaries. But maybe not your publishers’. They, for good or evil, have the last say.

Posted on

Keeping Heart

I had a good time at Reroll Tavern last Sunday for a novelists night. M.S. Chambers and I were the guest authors, and there were readings of works in progress by some of the attendees. I must say, these folks were impressive. I sincerely hope they continue writing and share their talent with the rest of us when they finish their works. I want to read the final products.

After my talk, one gentleman asked how do you keep from getting discouraged. My response was that I had a husband, two cats, a horse, and a garden. Also, I sew a lot. But he really deserved a better answer than that. Here is something that I hope will address his question.

If you submit, you will very likely get rejected–a lot. There are probably millions of submissions to various places every day. The chances of everything you write getting accepted the first time is minuscule.  Plan for that. The story goes that Stephen King had a spike where he impaled every rejection he got. It was really, really deep in rejections early in his writing life. His wife, Tabitha, famously retrieved Carrie from the trash can. You will reject things, editors will  reject things. There are reasons for this. It helps to know what those are.

You may reject something because you think it isn’t good enough or you’re sick of it or you think it’s too much trouble to fix. That’s giving up. Don’t do it. Set it aside, sure, but come back to it and make it right. Then submit it.

Editors reject things for a lot of reasons. Some you have control over. Some you don’t. If the story or book is wrong for that magazine, anthology, publisher, you’ll get rejected. Prevent that by knowing what the magazine or publisher wants before you waste their time and yours. They will clearly tell you on their website or their call for submissions what they are looking for, even sometimes what they will reject outright and what will be a hard sell. The happy accident happens when you have written a story that you like a lot and for no particular reason, then you see a call for submissions that is an exact fit. This happened with my short story, “Heart and Minds”.

Sometimes the work just isn’t good enough. You can rethink, rewrite, rework it until it is. Sometimes the market has changed. If you’re not keeping track, you may get left behind. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has changed so much in its 74 years that my husband, who subscribed for decades, no longer reads it. He’s gone elsewhere. You can too.

Some things you have no control over. Because we are all so connected by social media, television, books, movies, and in a thousand other ways, there is a zeitgeist that may inspire similar ideas in writers at the same time. When an editor gets three submissions of very similar stories, and they’ve already accepted the first one, you’ll be left in the dust, not because your story wasn’t great and a finger on the pulse of the universe, but because someone got there first.  Try somewhere else. Sometimes submissions will close because there are so many that the editors have stopped accepting new ones. When a call for submissions on a theme for an anthology rejects your specially written work, let it rest a bit, reexamine it, see if it needs some tweaking to make it less specific, and send it someplace else. This happened with “Between”, a short story I wrote for an anthology but wasn’t a good fit for that group of stories.  It has now been accepted by another anthology. Mind you, I rewrote it and submitted it several places until I found just the right fit.

You’ll notice a theme here: keep submitting. J. K. Rowling sent her first Harry Potter book to about a million publishers before it was accepted. Persevere. Somebody somewhere will want that story, if it’s well written and interesting.

When I worked in a research lab, sometimes our experiments would take years to get us to the point we could write up the results. Talk about delayed gratification. My way of dealing with that was to have hobbies that gave me instant gratification. I still have those hobbies.

You will get discouraged. Commiserate with family and friends and other authors, get back to work, if required, and keep submitting. You probably won’t get rich or famous, but you’ll have done something you (hopefully) love, and eventually, someday, you’ll see your name in print.

Image: Novelists Night at Reroll Tavern. By the manager, Russell.

Posted on

Brevity, the Soul of Wit

I just found out one of my flash fiction pieces has been accepted for publication. Mind you, it’s probably going to be a really long time before it shows up, like a year and a half or so. Still, as they say, any publicity is good publicity. The publisher is Vine Leaves Press. They electronically publish a story every day–they call them 50 Give or Take, and the stories are, you guessed it, 50 words more or less.  In Novembers they publish an anthology of the stories from the past year or so. Mine apparently will show up in the 2024 anthology, but maybe not. It’s story number 1436. As of this morning they hadn’t broken 1100. I don’t mind, really. Getting published is a waiting game, decidedly not for the impatient.

I sometimes wonder why I like writing short stories and flash fiction. I suspect it’s because I’m lazy. Still, writing a good story of whatever length takes work. My novels, Beloved Lives and The Ginger Bread House (the latter currently being reviewed by a publisher), aren’t epic 100,000 word tomes. Wasting Water wasn’t even a novel.  I’m suspecting Wickham’s Daughter is going to be a lot longer just because there is so much story to tell, but it’s not my usual modus operandi. The other novels still in the doodling phase of development may or may not be longish. It’s hard to tell at this stage.

The cool thing about writing short stories and flash fiction is that you are creating a little jewel, self contained and concise. The characters don’t take a lot of side streets and get lost. They go where they need to and do what they need to do. You tell their whole story in a snapshot.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a flash piece, usually less than a thousand words, shows a moment in time, a significant event contained within a careful word count where each word matters.

During this National Write a Novel in a Month November, I’ve taken a little detour from writing my current novel to jot down a flash piece that has been stirring around in my mind for more than a year. Just because flash pieces are short doesn’t mean you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them, developing them, writing, rewriting, and visiting them again and again.  I am pretty lazy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t work at writing when my muse pokes me. And she can be a real pain.

Now, back to the novel.

Image: Small things. By Marilyn Evans

Posted on

Where the Heck Have I Been!

People who read my blog: So, Marilyn, what have you been up to (instead of writing blog posts)?

Me: Grab a beverage, sit down. This might take a while.

First and foremost, sometimes I feel like I’ve got nothing to contribute to the world of literature at large. Other times I have lots of ideas but don’t seem to get them down and in the ether before they slide away. Either way, there can be a long pause. I apologize to my teeming masses of adoring fans.

Of course, there are other things in my life than writing blog posts. There is the eternal struggle with my garden, for example. Cloud, our opera singing cat, has taken it upon himself to keep the bunnies and chipmunks in hand (paw?) which my growing things much appreciate. At least those of the growing things that could be bothered to come out of the ground. I have discovered that our house is too cold in the winter for seeds to germinate. Maybe next year starting in February or March we’ll all snuggle together under the electric blanket. Then in the spring, out of doors it was first too cold, then too wet, then too dry, then too hot. The seeds stayed in bed. Not sure I blame them. But there is always one showoff—the cucumbers are going berserk. I have so many that pickles are inevitable. As for the rest? The tomatoes keep losing focus, the radishes have forgotten that they exist for roots, the cantaloupe and watermelon have all the vines in the world but not much else. I may have potatoes some day, but I’m afraid to look. I’ll just believe and hold out hope until I’m forced to dig them up. Schrodinger’s potatoes.

In other adventures, when I couldn’t get glasses to make things pretty and clear, cataract surgery it was. Since the worse of the two eyes is always done first, for a week or so you get to walk around switching eyes and saying, “Holy mackerel! I had no idea I have been looking through pond water!” Now I get to see without glasses for the first time since first grade, except when I want to read. Putting on glasses instead of taking them off to read is sort of weird.

And finally, what have I been writing instead of blogs? Query letters, synopses, cover letters, the things I hate most in the world. I know Stephen King says he loves all aspects of writing, but honestly, these are harder for me than anything. I’ve now sent off my father’s memoir to a publisher and The Gingerbread House, as well. I should be getting rejection letters in a few months, and then I’ll do it all over again. But now that those odious tasks are out of the way, on to the fun stuff.

First, I get to write a blog post moaning about my garden and the agony of trying to get things published. Next I’ll start working on my very first screen play, which I’m pretty pumped about. Mind you, I haven’t a clue what I’m doing, but that has seldom stopped me in the past. Between the scenes, I’ve started working on a nonfiction book. I’ve written way more nonfiction than fiction, so this should be easyish. Maybe. Perhaps. We’ll see. After those, there is probably going to be a Gingerbread House sequel, I need to finish Wickham’s Daughter, there is still The Iliad in Space (working title), and Jocasta of Thebes hasn’t even loaded into the starting gate. If I have a great time with the screen play (I’m doing my friend, Dennis Young’s, Mercenary because the tutorials say you should never do your own adaptation first), I will go on to do a screenplay for Beloved Lives.

So that’s what I’m doing on my summer vacation. You?

Image: Cloud taking a break from bunny wrangling. By Jonathan Hutchins.

Posted on

For the Child I Was

I was one of those little girls who was mad for horses. And ponies. And equine creatures generally. On my fifth birthday, I blew out the candles on my cake and ran to see if my pony was standing in the snow. My father couldn’t get me a pony, of course, but that didn’t stop me from wanting and dreaming and loving, and it didn’t stop him from trying every way he knew how to make it up to me. When he built a house for himself and my two brothers and me, the wall paper in my room had horses, the lamp on my dresser was a black knight on a black horse, pictures of horses cut from magazines and traced from books covered the wall by my bed. When we went to the Kansas City Zoo, I always got to ride the ponies, a slow plod up and down a narrow track, once when we first arrived and once just before we left to go home. I must have been a strange figure, sitting completely still, holding on to the little bar on the saddle, solemn in the moment of bliss that had to last me until the next trip to Kansas City.

Fifty years after blowing out those candles, I finally got a horse. She was slender and delicate, a lady’s horse, copper colored like a bright new penny. I loved her more than I can say. When, after years of great adventures together, she developed severe laminitis, a terrible and painful affliction, she had to be put down. My heart was broken.

My husband still has a horse, and we ride her one or two times a week. I no longer fox hunt or go over jumps or even really gallop. But the little girl I once was needs to ride a horse sometimes. To have wanted something so much for so long, it would be wrong to deprive myself of that. On a cold day when it would have been easier to stay home and read than to go out to the stable and brush all the mud off of the horse and clean her feet and tack her up, I realized that the little girl I had been would have done nearly anything for the opportunity to brush that horse and ride her. That made me wonder what other things she had longed for, prompted me to try to remember what that the girl I once was longed dreamed about. I’m a grownup now and can fulfill her wishes. I can see an ocean, walk on a mountain, write a book, visit friends late into the evening. I can have a pet who sleeps in the bed with me. I can paint and learn to play the piano and write poetry. No one says I have to do any of it well. But she can. I can do that for her. For me.

Image: Amish Honey and me, by Jonathan Hutchins.

Posted on

Adventures in Editing

There are certain times in your life when you go back to visit old ideas and adventures that you’ve put on hold. Currently, besides all the other stuff I’ve been doing, I’ve gotten interested once again in backpacking and editing. The backpacking is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never seemed to get around to. The editing I’ve been doing in one form or another for a long time, but never really did a deep dive until now.

I blame my friend, Dennis Young, for seducing me into editing in a focused sort of way. I’ve been putting in my two cents worth on his Blood Lines series of vampire novels for some time now. That indirectly got me connected to someone who, sadly, wasn’t really ready for writing novels. Not that he was a bad writer–he just couldn’t make his story go in an orderly fashion toward a coherent whole. I wished him luck and ran.

When I was a lab rat, I wrote, edited, messed about with grant proposals and articles. When I was a corporate weenie, I wrote, edited and messed about with SOP’s , quality manuals, audit reports, and other such stuff that makes the pharmaceutical world go round.

This summer I got down and dirty with editing my father’s World War II memoir. I hope to have it up as an e-book sometime this fall or winter. I had a really good time doing that. It was like having a sit-down conversation with my late father. I got to hear his voice in my head, laugh at his humor, live some of his doubts and fears. The thing I probably learned most clearly in reading and correcting the typos in my dad’s book was not to change his voice. He spoke a certain way. That comes through in his writing. I’ve said here before that it was his voice I used, unaware, for the voice of my young heroine in “Wasting Water”, my novella in the anthology Undeniable: Authors Respond to Climate Change.

As I always do when faced with a new adventure, I hit the library. There I found a book on editing for journalists, The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists, by Arthur Plotnik,  that I wish I had read before or even during the time I was editing The Rune, a small-circulation, local magazine. Editing, I am finding, is a great opportunity to see how other authors work, help them avoid some of the pitfalls I hurled myself into, and encourage good writing. And it’s an opportunity to catch the homonyms, malapropisms, misplaced modifiers, and other stuff that makes you crazy when you’re reading an article or a book. To borrow from Jeff Foxworthy, if you make corrections to nearly everything you read, you might be an editor.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for my summer vacation. Now it might be time to get back to writing.

Image: Once again, my catastrophic desk. By Marilyn Evans.