Three for Thursday

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1) In about an hour, I’m going to have a yearly performance review for day job. Good thing I’m posting to the internet right now. (Update: not fired)

2) I wish I could find the spot in WordPress that would let me capitalize the first letter of my name. It’s so annoying seeing it that way. Of course I find it as soon as I post about it. Of course I do.

3) Last night, I asked my wife to sit down next to me and I said “I have to tell you something you’re not going to like.”

For most husbands, the next line would be something like “There’s this woman at work…” or “I spent the grocery money on a new Playstation” or whatever. My wife knows better. She knew it would be either about our son’s school or something I’d done to cause pain to my own self.

In this case it’s the latter. After being fine for 10 years, I’ve started having wrist pain again. When I told her, she immediately grabbed my arm and started working on me.

(Digression: One of the physical therapists in town has started telling people that my wife is one of the best massage practitioners in the state. The boy and I had the same reaction, separately: “Only the state?”)

She started to traction my wrist immediately, turning it this way and that, and the way it cracked as it released startled the hell out of me. Wrists shouldn’t do that. She also worked on my forearm for a while, and lemme just say that shit hurts. Yes, I’m a big wimp, but it still hurts like hell. She just about had me ready to confess to anything she wanted.

It’s better today, but I can still feel it. I see ice in my future.

“These are actual magazines”

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My self-directed training to learn to be insufferably condescending continues today, and the variety of texts to choose from is astounding. Thank you, internet!

For instance: A woman who has apparently never heard of slash fiction writes an article about m/m romance novels targeted at women readers. I knew I was sitting at the feet of a master when the lede began “The romance novel, a static and predictable genre…” but it was the quote in the subject header above that really taught me the most.

I must say that I share Ms. Harris’s bemusment over the appeal of this subgenre. As a hetero male with an internet connection, I had no idea a person could thrill to same-sex carnal urges of their opposite gender. How baffling!

“Bow before me, peons!” (a cautionary tale)

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I don’t talk very much about writing here, except to whine about how hard Man Bites World is kicking my ass, but I’m going to make an exception, considering.

There is certainly more than one way to succeed as a writer. You can start early or late in life. You can hit the best seller list with your first attempt, or struggle for years to find a groove. Whatever.

But for every way there is to succeed, there are a thousand more ways to fail. You can never start, never finish, never revise, never submit. You can act like a crazy person on your blog, or send query letters that give off such a creepy vibe that the paper might as well have a watermark that reads “Stalker.”

Or you can be convinced that your setbacks are someone else’s fault.

You can see this attitude at various places around the web, especially someplace like the comments at Writer, Rejected (no link, sorry–life’s too short). Other message boards and blogs do their best to squelch this stuff as soon as it pops up, but there’s just no killing it.

I decided a long time ago that I would never blame a rejection on anyone but myself. If my query was dinged, it was because I needed a stronger query. Never because the rejecter was having a bad day, or was a fool who couldn’t recognize my genius, or could recognize quality but only wanted something that would be a bestseller.

That attitude is poison. I wanted to be published, and I wanted readers. Blaming other people for my rejections was never going to get me on the bookshelf, because the only thing I could change was myself.

So I pretended that hard work was the only thing that mattered. I know it’s not really true–there’s also luck, and the changing markets, and talent–but hard work is the the only thing I can actually control. I was determined to improve, and the only way to do that was to find fault with myself.

So my book will be coming out in a little more than three months. If it flops, I will not be blaming readers. I will not be blaming cover art, or publicity, or the recession, or another writer who released a new book at the same time. As far as I’m concerned, the real cause will be that I didn’t write a book readers wanted to recommend to their friends.

If the book does not flop? If it’s a success? Still, I will be looking for flaws in my work. I’ll be working hard to get better, and any setbacks I face will have one remedy: the book I’m currently writing. This is a promise I make to myself. It’s not for anyone else, just me, because anyone, at any time, can find themselves stranded and struggling. And when that happens, an egotistical conviction that my problems are caused by other people will ruin me.

Hay-zeus Marimba

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If my WIP suddenly lunged through my computer screen and started strangling me, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Christ.

My head is too full of other things right now. Some of it is other people’s business, which I can’t talk about. Some is my business that I don’t really want to go into. It’s frustrating and infuriating, but this is the process.

I just wish I had more time. I’m struggling with a really difficult scene, and it keeps wanting to go in three directions at once. I’d be happy if I could find something true to the characters, and I’ve just realized I should have spent an hour or two yesterday on research.

More time. I need it.

Because we wish our expectations to be clear

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(Taken at the Barnes & Noble)
Please respond appropriately.

How I feel, sometimes

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#Agentfail II, Return to April

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Back in April, I posted about and linked to Mary W. Walters, the writer who couldn’t find an agent and considered them all horse-riding snakes who were ruining publishing for everyone else.

Well, last night I upgraded to WordPress 2.8, and it promptly pinged her website. She posted in the comments, putting up her query pitch and first chapter for my comments.

Maybe it was the shock of seeing an actual comment on my website (as opposed to my LJ), but I thought I’d give it a swing.

I don’t write this note because I want folks to rush over and give her advice. She asked me, specifically, and while I suspect it was as much of a “let’s see what you’ve got” request as “how could this be better” I hope I was useful. If you want to post a comment disagreeing with something I said, that’s great (in fact, I really really want people to disagree with me–if we can be polite to each other, I may learn a little something). But please don’t offer a crit unless the author specifically requests one.

No, I write this note because damn, that took a long time, and I didn’t even clean up the crit after I wrote it. I keep forgetting how much energy those take. I don’t think I’m going to be doing a lot of that in the future.

Quotes of the day

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“Camping in South Central Los Angeles is not like camping in a forest in Virginia. I know they sound the same, but they’re totally different.” — Emily Blake

“Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers.”

and

“The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it…”

both from a New Yorker piece by Louis Menand. I wish I had time to read the whole thing.

Stuff.

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I hit my goal again today, which means I’m back in the groove (last Monday not withstanding). I wish I could do well above my groove, but such is life.

Meanwhile, have some links:

1) Back to the Future 4: Escape from Guantanamo. Marty McFly is in serious trouble.

2) Pediatricians address the effects of bullying on victims and bullies. My son’s two schools so far have done a good job of dealing with bullying incidents, but I don’t know if they’re this sophisticated.

3) Nick Mamatas on making money off your fiction. I’d always heard that novels are where the money is, but he offers an interesting counterpoint. Not that it matters to me, since my productivity crashes as the word count shrinks. It’s not that I can’t write short stories; it just takes me longer.

4) Finally! A plan to help people compare and contrast insurance plans.

5) How to make big money fast as a novelist… in Sim 3.

This makes me happy

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Remember a couple days back when I said my wife was painting behind me? Well, she has a commission. It’s not finished, but I’m estatic to see her working on it.

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Oh, and I fixed WordPress. I even got rid of those faint gray links.