Happy Mabon! We welcome autumn in with a revival of the guest blog post. We’re starting off with a wonderful and informative blog from my friend and fellow writer Michelle Belanger. Enjoy the magic of the day and of the words below.
-Laurell
Tag: books
Crimson Death, the book that would not end.
I wrote this weeks ago, but was so busy actually writing, and living that I forgot to post it. 
It’s raining here today. The kind of rain that settles in like a guest before the cozy fire with a cup of hot tea and a good book. It’s that kind of day, but I can’t curl up with someone else’s book yet, because I have my own to finish. Crimson Death is written, but now it’s page proofs which are the last chance to catch any small mistakes. If you find any large ones that would require pages to fix, or even paragraphs, you are out of luck. The book has been to the printers and these are the finished sheets, so small changes like the fact that I keep trying to give Cardinale green eyes to match Damian’s, when she is introduced books ago with blue eyes, that can be caught and changed. You can add, or cut a sentence here and there, but beyond that the book is the book – it’s done. But like so often in publishing, it’s done, but it’s not. Crimson Death is almost set in stone, but here are page proofs to show that the stone can still be polished a bit more.
I have now read and reread this book so many times that I’m having to fight not to change things just to change things, so it will read differently. I’m somewhere between bored with it and terrified that I’ll miss something that will haunt me later. Today is the last day though, tomorrow the page proofs MUST be in New York. My editor, my publisher, the entire long suffering production team, everyone who has touched this book and helped it along are waiting for me to finish this one last pass through the manuscript, which now looks like the final typeset of the book. It’s still loose pages when printed out, but it is now set like it will appear between the covers of the book. The art department has that lovely cover waiting to go around these pages like a lover’s hug to hold it safe, warm, and made to feel pretty. The book is done, but it’s not.
Crimson Death more than any other book in memory has been done, until I realize it’s not done – yet. That first ending that didn’t work at all. That second climatic ending that in retrospect didn’t seem all that climatic. My old editor retired happily, and I’m happy for her, but my new editor and I are still finding our feet. I think I may owe her flowers after the grueling literary slog this book has become on our end. Or maybe we just need to meet at a bar somewhere and have a drink, or three. I don’t normally drink, but on the research trip to Ireland for Crimson Death, I finally learned to appreciate it. So cliche that I had to go to Ireland to learn to drink. This book is leaving me thinking that I might curl up in front of the fire on a rainy day with something a little harder than tea. Maybe some Glendalough whiskey shining amber in a crystal cut glass, while I finally put my feet up and get to read someone else’s book, but not yet.
Searching for the Perfect Pub Date and Happy Beltane!
Okay, the date for Crimson Death has changed again to October 11, 2016. I’m 99.999% sure that is the final on sale date. My editor at Penguin Random House told me days ago that they were changing the date so I could announce to all of you before they put it up on line. Media Minion Jess and I had a great idea to do a sort of Alton Brown explanation with a white board and props, but I’ve been trying to actually finish writing Crimson Death. So the cool announcement didn’t get made on our end. Jonathon says that we’ll make it on Monday if we want to try to do the cool props and such. If I’m still writing furiously on Monday then maybe that won’t happen until after this book is complete and the fun video will be more a “how this part of publishing” works. Until I was a bestseller and hitting #1 on a semi-regular basis I had no idea that a publisher plans placement of a “big book” like a general plans a battle. What other big books are coming out at the same time? What other books that are similar are coming out and when? The Publisher’s reps talk to the bookstores about physical placement in the stores. If the author is doing a tour, especially a big one, what other authors are on tour and what stores are they doing? We routinely follow each other around the country on tour just like musicians follow each other, and for many of the same reasons. That’s just a few of the considerations that go into picking a release date for what the publisher calls a “big book,” which seems to mean a book that they think will sell lots of copies, have a chance to hit #1 on The List, and has a wide audience appeal.
Also, this blog is going up on May 1st which is May Day, or Beltane. Think of it as Wiccan Valentine’s Day except without a saint having to give up his life to name the holiday. So Merry Beltane, everyone! Sadly, Hallmark does not have a card for this holiday. Wiccans’, and most pagan faiths, have eight major holidays a year – eight! Think of all the cards we’d send and merchandise we’d buy if corporate America embraced us as viable consumers. But I think that is a blog for another day. May the day be full of joy for you and everyone that you love in your life! That includes yourself, because love begins in your own heart and then spreads outward.
Dead Ice now in Paperback, with Bonus Content “Wounded”
I’ve been so busy trying to finish writing, Crimson Death the 25th Anita Blake novel that I forgot that Dead Ice the 24th Anita Blake novel is out in paperback today! No, wait yesterday, because that was April 26th. I have a serious case of, “writing this book is eating my brain.” There’s a surprise in the back of the paperback, not the usual preview from my next novel, but something different. It’s entitled, “Wounded’, and it’s an outtake scene, or a short story, or a novelette, or a long epilogue for Dead Ice. I’m honestly not sure which to call it, but it is a series of events that we talk about briefly in the denouement of Dead Ice but they all happen off stage. A lot of you told me you missed seeing Jean-Claude dancing at the wedding and wanted to see more about Manny Rodriquez and his family. Well, so did I, and I thought why not? Why can’t I write them out and share them with all of you? Why can’t we see all of it on stage in living color? So I started writing out this brief extra scene and it grew until it was more than a scene, more than a story, and closer to a short novel. At one point I thought it might be as long as my novels Jason and Micah, but it didn’t quite make that word count, thank goodness, so what to do with it? Someone, I can’t actually remember now if it was my agent, my editor, or me, suggested what if we put it in the back of the paperback. Great idea! So for those of you who have read Dead Ice and wanted some more it’s in the paperback now! For those who prefer paperback to hardback here’s your chance and with extra bonus content! But please do not read the extra until you’ve finished reading Dead Ice, because the bonus novelette is full of spoilers. You’ll find out who lives, who dies, who the villain is and how the mystery is solved. No, really, it’s full of spoilers! You have been warned, so if you read the new content before you’ve read Dead Ice the plot will be spoiled for you!!!! So enjoy Dead Ice out now in paperback and I hope the story, “Wounded”, helps satisfy your desire for more from Anita Blake and her world.
New Pub Date for Crimson Death
Crimson Death, the new Anita Blake novel, will be published on September 13, 2016. For those of you who follow my blog, you know I’m still writing the book, what you don’t know is that I finished it once already. I typed, The End, one glorious morning as I watched the sun rise; but once the euphoria of the writing high faded and I got some sleep, I knew something was wrong. I’d known something was wrong for weeks, maybe months, but definitely weeks. I was too close to finishing the book, so I ignored my muse and my characters arguing with me. One character in particular wasn’t happy. Damian, who started life as a Viking until one dark night he and his brothers in arms tried to raid the wrong castle. She-Who-Made-Him, a master vampire that traumatized him so badly he’s afraid to speak her name, held him as a virtual slave for centuries. She let him go, and he still doesn’t know why, but he was allowed to go to America where he became a manager at one of the hottest dance clubs in the country, Danse Macabre. In fact, he first appears in the book that introduces the club. The Killing Dance is the sixth book in the series, and this is Damian’s introduction:
“I TURNED to find another new vampire. He was tall and slender with skin the color of clean white sheets, but sheets didn’t have muscle moving underneath, sheets didn’t glide down the steps and pad godlike across a room. His hair fell past his shoulders, a red so pure it was nearly the color of blood. The color screamed against his paleness.”
Originally, I thought Crimson Death would be a short novel like my books, Micah and Jason, called Damian, but very quickly I realized it was going to be a big book. I believe my largest word count was 300,000 words. I’m one of those writers that writes long and then cuts, but this was excessive, even for me. It was another clue that my muse and I were debating with each other. The original plot had Damian kidnapped and Anita coming to his rescue. It would take me typing to the end, or what I thought was the end, to be willing to listen to my muse, and to Damian. He finally got through to me and not literally said, but basically told me, “I’ve been in the series since book six and now I’m finally getting my own story in book twenty-five and I’m just the damsel in distress. All those newer characters that have come on stage and been heroes, or major love interests, or something more than just the victim du jour, and now I’m just as unhappy, just as powerless, just as afraid as I began. Nineteen books and I haven’t grown at all.” He was right, and it was unusual for me, because I’m all about the character growth and letting my fictional friends have interesting lives, except for him. Damian had been almost static, I don’t know why, but he finally stepped up and threw the gauntlet down.
“You can do better than this,” he told me, and he was right. I turned my plot on its ear and now Damian is going back to Ireland to help solve a mystery. He’s going back to face his greatest fears to save lives as a consultant with the Irish authorities about their sudden vampire problem. Sudden, because Ireland isn’t supposed to have any vampires. It’s one of the few countries on the planet that has no folklore about them. The only dead that walk in Irish myths are ghosts and the shades of heroes. But Damian knows differently, he knows that there is a vampire so powerful and so frightening that to even speak her name is to risk her power seeking you out, even across an ocean. She-Who-Made-Him says the vampires plaguing Dublin are not her doing, and that she’s grown weaker since Damian left her side. U. S. Marshal Ted Forrester, AKA Edward, is already there acting as a consultant. He wants fellow marshal Anita Blake to come help hunt the undead and to bring the only vampire that might know the truth about what’s happening. Anita thought Damian was going home, but Ireland was never home, it was the place where he died.
Perfectionism is an Unattainable Goal
I finished the book and I didn’t. I mean, I finally typed The End. The villains of the piece are dead, the victims avenged as far as possible, short of resurrection and giving them back the lives that were stolen from them. Even my world where magic works far more overtly than it does in ours does not stretch that far. Justice has been served, or at least the public at large is safe from the killers. The mystery is solved. There are a few loose ends that I forgot to tidy up, but there always are in a book this large. Tidying up is what second drafts are for, and therein lies the problem.
Parts of Crimson Death are done, so very done. I got stuck a couple of times in this book, forgetting my own rules of writing and started rewriting before I had a first draft. Some writers can do that, I cannot. If I start rewriting before I have a finished draft perfectionism sets in and I stall. My creative ship gets trapped in the doldrums of perfectionism which leads to doubt, which leads to me second-guessing myself and that is death to a first draft of a novel, at least for me. My first instinct is usually right, after writing over forty books I know this, but still there is that temptation to get caught in making things – perfect.
When I finally got a room of my own as an office, I put a sign above my desk that read, “Perfectionism is an Unattainable Goal.” But I purposefully spelled perfectionism wrong. I believe I spelled it, “Perfactinisom”, or something like that so that everyday as I sat down to write I would be forced to look at the word that represented all my desire and frustration spelled so terribly imperfectly. It drove me mad to have to stare at that sign spelled so badly. But it forced me to stare one of my worst issues in the face everyday, and to begin to let it go. It was hard to get caught up in that perfectionistic cycle when I was staring at that damn sign every day, so it did its job. When I moved from that house after ten years I never had to put the same sign above my desk again, because the lesson had sunk in deep and hard. Though after Crimson Death I may have to revisit the lesson, because I have never fallen into the perfectionism trap so often in a book since those early days.
I’m not sure why that kept catching me again after all this time, but I know one of the other reasons that Crimson Death was such a hard write – research. Now, I’m a stickler for research, so much so that I’ve been told by editors and publishers in New York that I do more research for my fiction than most writers do for their nonfiction. Now, first of all that thought sort of frightened me, because I can’t image how crazy pants I’d go on research if I was doing a nonfiction book, since I go to such lengths for my fiction. I write mysteries but there’s always some supernatural element in my stories, so I write about vampires, zombies, ghouls, werewolves, and shapeshifters of all kinds. Some people think that because I write fantasy, horror, and science fiction that I can do less research, because magic, hand-wavyum, it’s fantasy after all so just making things up is all right, right? No, absolutely not, at least to me. One of my rules is that the more fantastical your storyline, the more solid your real world facts have to be because you have to help the reader believe in your monsters by making sure the real facts are right. The more unreal your world, or plot, the more solid your real world has to be, because if the reader catches you wrong on a fact that they know, then they won’t believe in your zombies or vampires. This is especially true if they are an expert on guns, police work, the military, voodoo as a religion, which are just some of the topics that I’ve used in my books. I’ve had high praise from gun experts and police at the accuracy of my research, which makes it all worth it. Because trust me, someone that will read your book is an expert in any real world fact that you use. If you get it wrong, they will let you know.
The problem with Crimson Death was that a majority of the book is set in Ireland which I’d never visited. So first we went to Ireland this summer, which was amazing and cool and totally not what I expected. In fact, Ireland and its gun laws, its difference in attitude between American police and Irish police, totally threw my plot for Crimson Death into the wind.
I never really recovered from the comparison of reality to my fictional world. Or rather, I didn’t figure out how to balance the two until late in the writing of the book. I’ve never had a book jell so late in the process before, and jell in such a way that I had to add so many new scenes. It’s not like me at all as a writer, so what happened? I messed with my process, my writing process. One of your jobs as an artist is to figure out how you work best, what your muse needs to feel comfortable and happy to play with you. I think I broke nearly every part of my writing process on this book, because I kept saying, that’s silly, I know how to write a book, I don’t need to do that anymore. Yeah, maybe needing an entire wall of my office so I can storyboard the book with sticky notes is silly, but it works for me and has worked for me for over twenty years, but for this book I took down my sticky notes and tried to do it without them. Never again, because it’s part of my process. It helps me think, helps me organize and plot. It works for me, and if it works for me as a writer I need to honor that and use it.
I know I’m a morning writer, but I kept not getting to my desk first thing. I know that when I first get up and head for my desk that it is deadly for me to talk to anyone about anything but the book. I can’t text, call, check email, nothing until I have at least a start on the day’s writing. But I tried to have breakfast before I wrote for the day. It’s healthier, right? Maybe, but it’s killing my muse and me. I don’t know a solution between healthy eating and my art, but I do know that if I take time to eat breakfast with my lovely family that my page count for the day goes down or doesn’t happen at all.
I actually learned something new about my process on the last book I wrote, Dead Ice, and had it reconfirmed with Crimson Death. Where I am writing when the book takes off, and for me that means hitting multiple days when I do twenty pages at a sitting in two to five hours, then I need to stay there until the book is done. Furthermore whatever tea I am drinking, stock up because the taste of it will help me stay in the book and write faster. If there was a scented candle burning early on then I need to keep burning that kind of candle until I’m done. I am a very sensual writer, so taste, touch, temperature, everything about my surroundings gets melded into the writing of a novel. It may not be on the page people read, but it’s in my head and in my muse. Whatever divine spark helps me write, once I hit a certain point in a a book I need to take note of everything I’m doing and just keep doing it. I’ll even eat the same thing over and over towards the end of a book especially. Everything feeds into me staying in the world, the voice, the flow of that book.
Remember when I said that Crimson Death was set in Ireland? I did research there, but I also started writing the book. In Dublin I hit multiple days of fifteen to twenty pages, but we were scheduled to go over to England and then home. I hadn’t budgeted time to sit for months in Ireland. I hadn’t planned on writing the book there, or dreamed that it would kick into high gear in the middle of the research, but it did. I know I am a sensual writer and very entwined with my environment, so it was logical that a book that would be largely set in Ireland would want to be written there, right? Well, yes, in retrospect it’s logical for the type of writer I am, but it caught me completely off guard when it happened. I had my first English convention to attend, and my first signing in England, and I was researching another book which would be set in that country. I was trying to research two different books at the same time, and that would have been fine if I hadn’t started writing the first one while I was still researching both of them. It was wrenching to stop writing on Crimson Death so I could do all the planned events in England. I had a great time doing them, but I never wrote in England on the book as well as I had in Dublin. I believe that if I could have stayed there and just kept writing that the book would have been finished in record time, or at least long before the deadline.
I’ve never tried to do this much research on a book that I was writing at the same time. If I could do it over again I would do the research, let myself think on it and make notes for a year, and I’d be publishing a different book this summer, one that was set in America in places I know very well and have written about before, but that was not what I’d planned or told my publisher. This was going to be the Damian book, the Irish book, and by the time I realized I’d bitten off more research than I knew how to digest in the time I had allowed to write the book, it was far too late to back out. I was committed, so I did the best I could, but I have more research than any one book can hold. I’m already making notes about another novel of some kind set in Ireland because I’ve learned so much and am still mulling over some of what I learned.
If I go to another country I can do research, but I can’t start writing the meat of the book unless I have planned my life so I can stay in that country until the book is complete. If I go to that country with a plot already in my head and the research doesn’t match it, then write a different book. One of the things that slowed me down was that I tried to do as much of the original plot as possible with the new research mingled in, which didn’t work at first. I was nearly done with the book before I figured out the mix of fiction to fact that worked for the plot, the characters, me, and my muse. Oddly, I wrote very well in Dublin, but I’ve never written well in London, or New York. I write very well by the ocean, or a large lake, or with a stream or river running by my office. My muse likes water. She also likes mountains, though I have yet to be in the mountains long enough to write an entire book. I hope to try someday. My muse also loves a view of trees, so forest works, too. I think an older style orchard would work just as well, but again I’ve never had a chance to write looking out at an orchard, so maybe wilder trees work better for her.
I know I write better with an office animal. I wrote my first novel with my cockatiel, Baby Bird, on my shoulder, and subsequent books with our pug, Pugsley. I have had at least one pug with me for over twenty years. We are between pugs having lost our last pug, Sasquatch, at age fourteen, but we have two Japanese chins and two mixed breed dogs that are much bigger than the chins. Three of the dogs are sleeping around my office as I type this and I write better with animals around me. This is the first book I’ve written without Sasquatch and I missed him terribly. I think it was actually one of the reasons Crimson Death wrote so slowly. I’d have to check, but I’m wondering if some of my past books that wrote slower than normal followed the death of a long time pet that came to work with me everyday.
I didn’t break my writing process apart on purpose, but I’m always a big believer in trying new things. Sometimes it works amazingly well and I can scale to new heights, but sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Sometimes trying the new thing makes me crash and burn, never pleasant, but I learn from the crash as much or more than I learn when I soar. For instance, I never want to write another book on a MAC computer, this was my first time attempting it, and I want my PC back! Though I love my iPad and wrote most of Dead Ice on it. But let me add that I haven’t enjoyed working on my iPad as much since they forced me to upgrade and I couldn’t find a protective cover for it that allowed me to orient it vertically and not horizontally while plugged in and charging. I hate working on the screen in the horizontal position and mourn my vertical screen, but the protective cover I got for it is not easy on and off, and the more often I skin my iPad the more chances I have to break it. Think I’m being overly cautious? I killed four iPhones before I got a LifeProof case for it. Now the cases break before my phone, which is fabulous! I’d get a LifeProof case for my iPad, but it doesn’t prop up for work easily enough for me. This is also the first book I’ve written without my big desk against the one wall. I’d stopped using it, and learned last year in the tropics that a very small desk did me just fine, but that was with a view of the ocean and a very different work space, here in St. Louis maybe I need that bigger desk? But now I have more shelves for research books in my office, which I needed. I’m beginning to wonder if we changed too much of my office around while I was trying to write this book. I like how open the room is now, but now I know to leave my physical environment absolutely static until a book is finished.
So, I’ve learned a lot of what not to do while I write a book. Some of it I already knew, but a type of arrogance, or boredom sets in if you do any job too long, and you begin to think I don’t need all these bells and whistles. I know my craft. I got this! I do, but writing is a mysterious job and once you find a process that works for you and your muse, you probably shouldn’t screw with it. I’ve learned it the hard way more than once, and now I’ve learned it again. I still have to rewrite/edit Crimson Death and make my deadline which is so close I can feel it’s hot breath on the back of my neck. I have made my job exponentially harder by trying to change so much of how my writing process works. I have not recovered from it, but the book is somehow limping towards the finish. Whether you call your muse a divine spark, inspiration, talent, genius, or you think that certain lover is what you need at your side – honor it. If you write better in a room with blue walls, paint your office blue. If a water view helps you create, find a place with that view. If you need a dark room with no windows because isolation feeds your muse, then find that dark corner and write. If you’re a morning writer get up and get going. If you write best late at night then stay up and do that. Whatever time works best for your muse figure it out and guard that time like it’s the secret formula to the secret sauce, because for you as a writer it absolutely is the secret to your productivity. Whatever feeds your muse and helps the words flow, own it, remember it, and once you get the process down stop fucking with it.
Life, Death, and Fiction
I’ve been having fits with the current book I’m writing. I’m over 500 pages in, over 200,000 words, and usually by this point in a book I’m writing as fast as I can, just to keep up with myself, but not this time. I’ll get a productive day, and then the next day it’s like all my momentum is gone. It’s like throwing a punch at the heavy bag without rotating your hips. You’re still going through the motions, but you’re leaving most of your energy somewhere else. Today I figured out what was wrong, someone is going to die.
I’m a writer of mysteries, police thrillers, with relationship growth and a huge dose of the supernatural thrown in, so there are usually dead bodies and a villain to stop. I like my fiction neater than real life, so the good guys usually triumph and the bad guys get punished, sometimes they get punished to death, which works for me in fiction. Like I said, it’s neater and more black and white than real life, at least in some areas. I try to make my vampires, zombies, and ghouls as realistic as possible, so there are also huge gray areas where my characters struggle with moral dilemmas and balancing work and relationships. Crime busting can be very hard on couples, or threesomes, or fourples, or any family arrangement.
I love my world and my characters, so why is this book dragging its heels? Because I have a character on stage that is in the hospital. I know what’s wrong with him, and I’d planned on saving him, but . . . I realize now that it may not work. He had another close call a couple of books back, though anyone reading the book wouldn’t have realized it because the moment in the climatic fight scene where he might have died didn’t make it into the final draft. When push came to shove, I couldn’t do it.
I’ve had this problem before where I’d planned on killing off a character, but we realize that I, and my main characters, would miss him. The most famous example of this to me and my fans is that I planned to kill Jean-Claude off at the end of the third book in the Anita Blake series. That’s right, the sexiest vampire on the planet, and now king of them in the United States in my world, though I didn’t see that one coming either, was supposed to die at the end of The Circus of the Damned. But when the moment came, I couldn’t do it. Anita and I would have missed him. I wanted him dead because he was taking over my series and stirring it in directions I hadn’t planned on, but I let him live. I was right on him taking my series to places I hadn’t planned on, or wanted to go. He was a very strong character with very definite Ideas about what should happen, and when, and with whom. It would be a very different series if Jean-Claude had died so early, and maybe I wouldn’t be writing the twenty-fifth book featuring him and Anita. Who knows what would have changed if I’d followed my original plan; so I’ve had this happen before, but never twice to the same character.
I knew he was slated to die at the end of a novel, and I flinched. He’s a good guy, we like him, what harm is it that he’s still alive? Well, he’s changing the game on me, not as profoundly as Jean-Claude did, but he is impacting my plans for the other characters and the world in general. If I leave this character alive, will it have as profound an effect on my series as Jean-Claude’s survival did? If so . . .do I want that? Or do I want to stay with my own over-arching plot line for the series? How much freedom do I give my characters? How much do I play god? He’s destined to die, should he get a reprieve?
I find myself regretting every time I kill a character off. I miss them. I miss writing them. I miss what the rest of their story might have been. It’s not even just major characters that I miss, even the minor-major ones, make me think, “If only . . .” I hate regrets, and unlike real life I have so many chances to undo it. I could write the death scene and then get up tomorrow and rewrite it so that he makes it. It’s one of my favorite things about writing fiction, I can always fix the mistakes tomorrow. In real life there aren’t take-backs, or do-overs, at least not for death. That’s about as final as we get in real life.
I’m going to break for lunch, but when I come back I have to decide. Does this character live, or die? Do we lose him forever? Or do we save him a second time? It’s bugging me a lot that this is the second time he’s come up on the chopping block. It must mean something to my subconscious that this same character keeps almost dying. Does it mean I’m uncomfortable with him? I was with Jean-Claude back in the day. Does it mean I don’t know what to do with him on paper? That he’s getting in the way of other characters that are staying? Maybe, maybe not? I don’t know, I really don’t. All I know for certain is that when I get back from a late lunch it’ll be go-time, and he will either live, or die.
This is why I write
I stepped into my office today with dawn like a knife slash in the east, the light seeped through like pale orange and yellow blood. The crescent moon hung shining silver in the black branches of the tallest tree, as if night and day hung poised, so that it was both at the same time. It was both beautiful and terrible, somehow. I’ve thought that the last few mornings that I’ve seen my office this early. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why I write this blog. Initially, it was to grow my audience, my brand, to sell more books; but I think most of what I gained in those areas has happened already. The blog probably did most of its original purpose years ago when I was trying to do one daily for a year. So, why do I write this blog? What’s it for? Honestly, I’m no longer certain, but I know one thing that hurts me as a writer in every area, and that is not writing about things. The more secrets I have to keep, the more editing of my life I do, the harder it is to write the blog (which makes a certain sense) but also makes it more difficult to write anything.
My personal life is very separate from my fiction and yet there is some mystical connection that, even after all this time, I don’t understand but I know that it is there, and I know when I do not honor that connection my ability to write suffers. So what haven’t I been saying publicly that’s clogging up the creative pipeline?
Jonathon’s mother, Mary, had cancer this year. She’s gotten a clean bill of health now, but it took chemo to get her there. If you’ve ever seen anyone go through chemo, you know it will take time to heal the effects of the cure. I got her permission to talk about her illness a while back, but it somehow seemed too personal to her to put it here, but if she’s okay with me talking about it, then why has it been something I didn’t want to talk about?
Jonathon buried his Aunt Sweetie just before Thanksgiving, so about two weeks ago. She helped raise him, and when he talks about her it’s more like a second mother than an aunt. She lost her battle with cancer after over twenty years and several remissions. The family is devastated and still reeling as they deal with it. I will miss her, but I don’t have the decades of connection to her that they do. She was not my sister, or my childhood hero, so my loss is seen through the patina of theirs, and my major worry is for those left behind and how they are dealing with it. Aunt Sweetie was ready to go, and her faith gave her peace, so there should be no tears, and yet there are.
Today we will be going to another funeral for a friend’s father, who died suddenly, but his health had been poor for most of the time I’d known the family, so it seems both sudden and inevitable. Our friend is forty, which seems young for burying your father.
The attacks in Paris, the attacks in California, people killed, and for what? To terrify people? To terrify the world? Because that’s what terrorism is, it is literally an attempt to frighten us all, to make us insecure and unsure of our safety. It is a war that kills a few people at a time in the hopes of demoralizing the rest of us. Don’t let them win. Live your lives, be happy, and keep moving, because to do anything else gives them a victory. They haven’t won anything, don’t act as if they have. I’ll admit it’s unnerving, but be hopeful, keep faith that good triumphs in the end. Dark times come, but they do not stay, history teaches us that.
There have been a lot of tragedies this year, both personally and in the larger world. There’s more, there’s always more, but somehow the theme of death and loss seems a thread this year that I can’t shake. But Jonathon’s mother is going to be alright, and that is a miracle of modern medicine. There is good among the bad, wins and not just losses, but sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on the positive when so much negative keeps happening. I know I’m not the only one feeling a bit overwhelmed right now.
Why do I write this blog? Why do I write at all? In part, it’s to reach out to other people and say, “It’s going to be all right.” It’s a way of saying, none of us are alone. We’re in this together. I write fiction to help me make sense of the world and to share a good story, so that as you read my books you can forget the news headlines for a few hours. You can get lost in a good book, where the heroes usually triumph, the villains are punished, and the world is saved. Yes, fiction should make you think, but it should be first and foremost an escape from the mundane world. It should let you slip into a world more fantastic, and more openly magical than our own. That’s why I write my stories and novels. The blog is part explaining how I make that magic happen, and a glimpse into my own reality, so that the magic and the reality of my world brushes up against your own.
I am a storyteller. It is an ancient art. We used to sit in caves, huddled around the fire, listening to noises in the dark, afraid of what they might be, and someone would say, “Let me tell you a story,” and everyone would gather closer to the fire where they felt warm and safe, and they would forget the noises in the dark, listening to adventures. Now, I sit in my office and write words on a screen, that I’ll share with you soon. I’ll finish writing the blog, and continue to work on the latest novel, because you need a good story, and I need to be able to say, “Come, sit by the fire where you’ll be safe and warm, and let me share an adventure with you.”
My Three Best Pieces of Writing Advice
My best advice about writing is – write. Writers write. The more you write the better you’ll get at it. Writing is a skill and like any other skill from basketball to knitting, the more you practice the actual skill the better you get at the game, at making sweaters, or at writing stories. People treat writing as if it doesn’t require as much practice and dedication to craft as other things; why? I believe it’s because anyone can write. Anyone can sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and write. Anyone can sit down at a computer and type. The physicality of it is available to everyone who is literate and can read. If you know how to read, you can write something. It may not be a great piece of literature, but it’s words on paper and they’re right there in front of you. See – anyone can write, but not everyone can write well. That takes practice, dedication, and a lot of perseverance.
The above is the primary piece of how to be a writer, without it nothing else matters. But I’m about to give a second piece of advice that I’ve never put in a writing blog before because I didn’t realize how big a problem it was until recently. What is this new piece of advice? Stay off the internet. Yes, you read that right, stay off the internet. It’s a great tool for building a social network and promoting your work, and can be a good jumping off point for research. Never use other people’s websites as your only source for research, because most sites have no one policing them for veracity. Start on websites if you must, but don’t end there. That’s lazy research, which leads to lazy writing. It’s obvious that too much social media is like talking to your friends on the phone or having too many “business” lunches. It may all be helpful, even talking to friends can refresh you so you go back to writing with renewed vision, but if you do too much social anything it can hurt your productivity. Most writers can avoid picking up the phone and making a call, or going out the door to see people in person, but online socialization is harder to resist. It’s so easy to tell yourself, well I’ll just get on line for a few minutes; half an hour later and you’re still on line. I’ve done it myself. I’ve found that Pinterest and YouTube are especially time consuming for me. Twitter is easier, because there is a limit of 140 characters and then I’m done, or that’s how I felt at first. Now, I’m not so sure, because it’s also easy for me to think Twitter isn’t that big a time use, because of the individual messages being so short, but if I do too many short messages in a row, then it can add up to a lot of time. But what about promoting yourself and using social media as a business tool? It can be a very effective business tool, but not if you’re so busy trying to promote yourself and gain a larger online presence that you don’t get time to actually write. FaceBook was such a problem for me that I hired a media minion to post there, because I felt FB was too important to ignore, but it was also a huge time use that took away from my actual writing. I still do my own Twitter, but I’m trying to police myself better, because if I think its also taking too much time and attention, I may have to stop posting personally, which would be a shame since I enjoy Twitter.
I said time and attention above, and that second part is the other danger of the internet. I have found myself thinking, this, or that, would make a great tweet, or that would be a good blog. Now that’s all well and good, but if I find myself thinking about how to tweet, or Facebook, or blog, etc . . . and not about writing my novels, then something has gone wrong. The online media is supposed to support and promote my writing, not be more important than the writing, and if my first thought is what I’m going to tweet, Facebook, or blog, and not the novel I’m writing, then the social promotion is taking too much of my subconscious, and that part of my brain needs to be concentrated on writing my book. One of the most important tools for any writer is their subconscious. I know I’m in the zone for a novel when the book wakes me up early loud in my head with notes and the first few lines of the day. If I wake up thinking about any of my social media instead, then it hurts my ability to immerse myself in my novel, and immersion is what I need to be productive and make my deadlines. This leads me to the third piece of writing advice: Protect your prime writing time.
It will take some trial and error to figure out what your prime writing time is, and bear in mind it may change as you get older, or even with different books. Most writers have a time of day, or night, that they work best, once you find it, treat it like gold, because it is the time when your muse is talking the loudest to you. I work best first thing in the morning, let me add I wasn’t a morning person when I started writing like this, but over the years I’ve become one. I need to wake up and just go straight to my desk, if at all possible. I’m one of those writers that needs to not have anyone talk to me, or distract me in any way before I sit down at my desk in the morning. Anything more than tea before the first pages hurts my page count for the morning. The smallest interruption can disrupt me, and hurt, or even ruin, my morning writing session. I knew to avoid actual, in person people. I even wait to feed the dogs until after I’ve got a few pages for the day because if I take the time to take the dogs out, feed them, and then wait to take them out again, then I’m derailed. It’s the difference between sitting down at my desk ready to set the keyboard on fire, and sitting down at my desk with some of my energy spent, wasted on mundane things that could have waited for a few minutes. The dogs get a treat in my office while they wait for actual breakfast, and the dogs think that the office treat drawer is awesome. I’ve found that most of the mundane things that distract me from my desk first thing in the morning are all happy to wait until later; after I get my morning pages done.
So, in a nutshell: Writers write. Stay off the internet. Don’t let mundane things interfere with your prime writing time. Now, stop reading this blog and go write stories that only you can write.
Missing Ireland
This week we had one of the hottest days of the summer so far, which means over 90F, very humid, and miserable for running outside, but I came downstairs with a jacket over my arm. I was convinced I’d need it. Why? Because the book I’m currently writing is partially set in Ireland and I’d have needed the jacket. In fact one of the working titles for the book is simply, The Irish Book. We actually flew to Ireland to research it. We were there for almost two weeks and then we flew to England to research another book. I’d never tried combining research on different books before; it was a little odd, especially because the book set in England isn’t the one I’m working on, or the one after that. It was especially jarring to have to take my head out of the Irish book, which I am currently writing, to a book so far down the road. It made sense to piggyback the research since the two countries were geographically so close, but as a writer it was harder than I thought it would be to try to juggle such different projects and different kinds of research.
The ferns in Ireland were almost as tall as I am.
England was having a heatwave while we were there: 70F with some days reaching 80F, unheard of there. Ireland ran between 40F to mid-60s. I don’t think it even reached 70F the entire time we were there. It rained, at least a little, every day in Ireland. The sun would come out and it would feel warm but if you stepped into the shade it was suddenly much cooler. We had to buy rain gear because our good rain coats were at home. It was wet, drizzly, and very autumn there every day. This was high summer, and the locals assured us this was summer weather for them. It was even a little sunnier and nicer on some days than typical for the season.
Lough Tay in the Wicklow Mountains.
Air conditioning didn’t work well the entire time we were traveling this trip, except for one room in England. In Dublin we left the windows open and ran fans, sometimes it was okay, but one night it was so hot and muggy in the room that it gave me a migraine. There are no screens on the windows, so if you sleep with them open to help with temperature you have to risk wildlife flying in, and if on a low enough floor, people maybe creeping in – not very comforting. In fact, when I first realized the window challenge I was quite unhappy with it, but once I was up and writing at the desk the damp and autumnal chill worked for me, worked for the book. One morning in Dublin I wrote 18 pages. The book was going well, and then we had to leave for England.
This is my fourth trip to England, to London, and I can finally say that I’m not a city girl, not even for London. Unfortunately all our business kept us in the city, and we only had one day to escape to Somerset, Glastonbury in particular, which is my favorite part of England. But I didn’t escape to the countryside until after I’d been a guest at my first European SF Convention, done an amazing 4 and half hour signing at Forbidden Planet, and finished the research for two books down the way. I’ll probably be blogging in more detail later about the convention and the signing. Thanks to everyone that helped make both a great experience! When work was done we could take a day to truly play, and we did, but one day didn’t make up for nearly three in the city. Though the research at the British Museum did its best to make up for anything and everything. Its my favorite museum on the planet to date, and the wonders on display take days to see. I felt very privileged that it was part of my job to roam about in such a magical place. There will be a blog just about the British Museum, but it will have to wait until this book is complete.
A tankard carved from amber. Just one treasure from the British Musuem.
I made notes and outlines for the book that will be set in England, but I was still trying to write on the Irish book. I’m not sure I wrote more than five pages at a sitting the entire time we were in Britain. Partly I was having to think of a different book altogether to do this research, and partly . . . a lot of things, but I only figured out one problem this week.
Do you remember where I said I wrote 18 pages in a morning in Dublin? When I hit that kind of page count the book is set and going well. Its very unusual for me to hit that high and then fade down to almost no pages. We were traveling, and that can make it challenging to write, and I was still making progress on the current book. We got home from Europe and I was making pages steadily, but never to the point I’d been in Dublin. Then, two weeks later we had DragonCon in Atlanta to attend, and though a wonderful and fun event, it was too soon after a month away from home. So tired, not even DragonCon could really fire me up. I enjoyed it, but not like usual. I wanted to be home for longer than two weeks. I have never been so tired of staying in hotels in my life. It ranked right up there with the 26 cities in 28 days tour of Narcissus in Chains in October of 2001. Yeah, not a great time to be flying. Hands down the hardest tour we’ve ever done.
This week Jonathon and I had to drive out of town and stay in yet another hotel, because of family illness. The family member is out of the hospital and back home, but it was serious, and accordingly stressful and scary. Normally, that kind of event derails me for days on a book, but not this time. I got up the next day and wrote ten pages. Yay! I did it again the next day, and the next, and the next. It’s not eighteen pages, but ten is a good daily page count. So I’m finally back into the swing of the book after nearly a month. I know I am, because I brought my jacket down to wear on a day that was so hot I didn’t need it. I brought the jacket downstairs with me because I was thinking about Ireland. I’d have needed the jacket there.
Stream in the Wicklow Mountains. Flower is a wild foxglove.
I’m missing Ireland because the book had settled into being written there. When a novel hits a certain productivity for me I need to stay put. I need to finish writing it where I am. Which means I should have stayed in Dublin with the rain, and the autumnal mist, and the trips to the mountains where everything was so green and lush, but not a tropical kind of lush. Ireland is different than I thought it would be in some ways, and in others exactly as I’d dreamed. Maybe if I wasn’t writing a book set there, and reading tons of books I bought there for more research, I wouldn’t be missing a country that I visited for less than two weeks; but all the above has combined and I’m homesick for a country that isn’t mine.
When I explained that to Jonathon he offered to bring a hose to my office, so I could have the constant rain. I said, thanks, but no thanks. *laughs*
When I type ‘The End’ on this manuscript I think this strange nostalgia for an alien land should pass, but I’m already making a list of things I didn’t get to see/experience in Ireland, so maybe not. It didn’t feel like home when I was there, Glastonbury, England feels more like home, but it’s not Glastonbury that keeps calling me back.
I have stood on the Hill of Kings and touched the Stone of Destiny at Tara! Amazing energy, amazing moment! I have walked inside Newgrange with its swirls and spirals, which is hundreds of years older than the Great Pyramids. We saw both on the same day, and it deserves a blog to itself soon. I have seen the mummies of St. Michan’s Church in Dublin, which was probably one of my favorite things we did there. I’ll talk more about St. Michan’s in a different blog. We walked around Dublin until we began to know the city and were able to find our way around. I kept mishearing St. Stephen’s Green, as St. Stephen’s Gallows, which gave the beautiful park in the middle of Dublin a very different meaning. I’ve seen Irish deer and watched two tiny, spotted, fawns play fight as if they already had a rack of horns atop their heads. I’ve seen lakes, forests, or what’s left of them, peat bogs, moors, and more streams and waterfalls than I’ve seen in my entire life. I’ve stood on the cliffs above the Irish sea, and found caves there, and then watched the tide fill them back up and make them too dangerous to enter. I could not have written this book if I hadn’t gone, or I would have gotten it wrong, and every person who knew Ireland would have known I hadn’t walked the streets, eaten the food, drank in the pubs, listened to the stories, seen the people, touched the bullet holes in the post office. Ireland isn’t something you can fake. It’s not the travel ads on television. It has nothing to do with American St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not sure how to explain it all, but as I write the book I’m figuring it out, because part of why I write is to discover, to clarify, to understand, and finally to share the adventure.