A Writer's Last Sanctuary

I'm think I'm on a roll, and no, I'm not talking about an onion kaiser here, although I must say that a grilled ham and swiss on a kaiser really does sound yummy right now. Yes sirree, I'm either on a writing roll, or I have jumped into the deep end of OCD.

You see, I decided a while back that come hell or high water, I was going to write at least ten pages per day on weekdays and twenty pages a day on weekends. Typed and double spaced.

Today's events have sorely challenged my resolve.

First off, Mom called today. Now I'm nuts about my mom--always have been, always will be. But, mom--well, she likes to talk, in spite of living like a recluse. Specifically, Mom likes nothing better than to talk to me. No, not talk to me. Warn me.

I was blazing myself a torrid trail across page three when mom rang me. Yes, I do have caller ID, and honest to God, I do know how to use it. But my parents are getting up there in years. So much so that when their number comes up on the caller ID, I answer, fearing the worst.

Now, understand that my mom calling is, at best, a three-hour adventure, assuming that life is going good in mom world. Which actually happened once in 1997. If life is not good (meaning Days of our Lives was pre-empted by a major news event, or Dad threw out the Enquirer before she was done reading it, or some ungrateful relative has committed a heinous act of relative ungratefulness), then mom can truly occupy an entire morning telling me about everything in the world I need to be sure and avoid. Like E-coli infested Spinach. Hotbeds of terrorism such as 7-11. Those Goddamn Democrats. Oh, and serial killers. I live in Florida, where my mom is convinced that a serial child molester/murderer lurks on every suburban cul-de-sac.

Mom simply cannot rest unless she has run through her litany of worries for me, my kids, my dogs...so I listen, theorizing that keeping moms heart rate down is a good thing.

Today, after inquiring about my regularity, mom expressed her deep concern that I had become quite lax in protecting myself from the horrors of date rape.

Thud.

I'm no spring chicken. I'm more like a hot-flashing hen in the blaze of Indian Summer. I've been married since the dawn of time. I've had kids running around for so long that I can't recall what I did with spare time when I actually had it. I swear I don't date. Well, not unless Harrison Ford comes begging. Which hasn't happened lately.

But, believe me when I say that this body has been dragged around the block a time or two--face down. Even if a date rapist decided to give it a whirl, he surely would run the other way as soon as he pried me out of my Lipo in a Box and daylight exposed the remnants of what I once called a waistline.

It took some doing, but I finally convinced mom that I wouldn't take drinks from strange rapist-y looking men that I might be unwittingly dating. Especially the ones of Dutch descent, given Florida's proximity to Aruba on the Mom Map.

Mom let me go with a reminder that washing my bananas in a five percent bleach solution might be prevent a world of salmonella. Banana spiders poop on bananas, you know.

So, I sat down, cracked my knuckles and my diligent fingers re-attacked page four. No sooner had my dashing hero rounded first base when my doorbell sounded. Of course, Mr. You're So Vain was expecting a Fed ex. Natch, I had to answer. And since my front doors are composed of nothing but bevelled glass, I can't very well pretend I'm not home once I've stepped into the front room.

There on my front porch stood the Born Again Botox Babe (BABB) from across the street. Now ya'll, I see this gal every three months at best as she's always in some stage of recovery from some variety of cosmetic surgery. Today, BABB traipsed all the way over here to show me her scar revision stitches from a botched breast re-re-augmentation.

Now, I don't know about you all, but when a woman in the later stages of body dysmorphic disorder is standing on my front porch doing the Girls Gone Wild booby flash, I'm going to drag her inside until she comes down off of her pain pill high. So, I lost another hour and half to gawking over BABB's battle wounds and getting saved. Ohhh, how deftly I held my barbed tongue when BABB insisted that she couldn't imbibe in a cup of caffienated coffee because her body is her temple which must remain sanctified to receive the Lord. Morphine drips, general anesthesia, and fake boobies, God's cool with these. Wine, caffiene, white sugar, Harrison Ford fantasies--one way ticket to Hell. Gotcha.

The BABB Boobie Revival Meeting ate up another hour. Two teacher phone calls later, child number one got home from school, and the other two soon followed. No, you can't sell children on Ebay. I checked. No flesh peddling allowed. Not even on a temporary basis.

So much for my word count.

No, I thought. I'm serious about this writing thing.

So I put on my Mother From Hell hat and parked my kids in front of the tv, armed with every sugary snack known to man. I convinced them that if Mommy did not get a shower this very minute, she would stink so reekfully that they would surely hurl at the very scent of me over dinner.

And I grabbed my laptop, and ran back to my bathroom. Locked, the door, too.

That's right, it has all come to this. Man's last sanctuary has now become my secret writer's retreat. I highly recommend clandestine bathroom creativity, actually. There is nothing like the acoustic thrill of clicking keys as they echo around the john. And if you end up writing crap---all you need do is flush.

The Skinny on Amazon Shorts

I received the fact sheet below in response to a query for more information on "Amazon Shorts".

I'd be very curious to hear from other authors considering and/or using the program. I'm looking into it to test market some niche fiction related to persons living with autism. All of my previous pubs have been non-fiction, it seems a safe way to test the waters for autism related fiction as I have a hard drive full of it.

Amazon Shorts Author Fact Sheet

Why Amazon

· More than 50 million customers
· Over $6 billion in media sales (TTM)
· Customer base: affluent, highly educated, sophisticated consumers of media especially predisposed to buying literature in both digital and hard formats.

Amazon Shorts Defined

· Unpublished short-form literature (2,000 – 10,000 words)
· Fiction or non-fiction
· For sale in digital form only
· Sold to readers for $0.49 each
· Exclusive to Amazon.com for a limited period
· Visit the store at www.amazon.com/shorts

What Amazon Shorts Can Do for Authors

· Provide a new outlet to sell short fiction and nonfiction to millions of active readers
· Rejuvenate and actively market authors’ backlists
· Maintain visibility of authors in between published projects
· Introduce readers to unfamiliar writers
· Allow for creative flexibility and innovative experimentation, providing a fertile testing ground for future full-length book ideas or expanding into new genres in a risk-free environment.
· Leverage cross-promotion and cross-selling opportunities between author, author’s publisher, and Amazon.com

What Amazon Shorts Can Do for Readers

· Provide instant reading gratification from favorite authors
· Offer a low-cost, easy and low time-commitment way to sample new writers

Amazon Shorts on the Site

· Amazon Shorts are fully integrated into the Amazon.com website
· Book shoppers are offered relevant Shorts while browsing for books
· Shorts are recommended to book buyers
· Shorts buyers are presented with a full author bibliography
· Full personalization features – customer ratings, reviews, recommendations – are included
· Original short stories
· Essays or personal reflections
· Any materials relating to much-loved fictional characters, especially if it’s been a while since we’ve heard from this character
· Additional non-fiction subject matter such as cooking, business, humor, home improvement
· Author laboratory – testing story concepts and gathering reader feedback
Story Examples
· Stuart Woods writes a humorous account of an obsessive, lifelong struggle to find the perfect travel companion in “A Man and His Luggage”
· Harry S. Dent provides an update to his best-selling book The Next Great Bubble Boom
· “Jakob Wywialowski and the Angels” a short story by Audrey Niffenegger
· Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke writes an original coming-of-age drama set in the Depression Era
· Ann Beattie pens a thoughtful essay on the author’s and reader’s relationship with the written word.
Revenue Share
· Revenue split 60/40 between Amazon and author
· Amazon covers all costs for payment, transaction and customer service
How Do I Sign Up
· To be eligible for consideration, an author must have at least one book currently for sale on Amazon.com
· Contact John Hart at johnhart@amazon.com or 206-266-3103

What would you give to land an Agent?

I'm not normally one to go in for viral marketing, but to help make a cure for breast cancer possible, I'd do about anything. As the mother of two disabled children, I cannot afford to succumb to this illness which runs in my family.

So, I distributed this announcement this morning to my AOL Writer's Cafe mailing list and my old Other Side of Creativity Mailing List:

Imagine if you had the undivided attention of one of the most informative, successful and writer friendly agents in the country for a whole day--all expenses paid.

What would you say? What questions would you ask? Would you pitch your own work, pick her brain, or both?

What if you could help make your publication dreams come true and contribute to making a cure for breast cancer possible at the same time?

What's it worth to you?

Check out this once in a writer's lifetime opportunity by clicking here:

Maybe I'm Amazed

I'd do it myself, but I already got my critique...

Celebrate Good Times, Come on!

OK, the title might be a tad dated, but I'm in a partying state of mind

I've reached two goals on my rewrite....

1) I've got my revision cleaned up to the point where my character falls though the "first doorway" and into the "story world".

2) I did so by 15000 words--less than 15% of the way into the book.

This one is big for me. I hate nothing more than plowing through a novel that takes 25000 words (or more) just to get off the ground. Yet, I am the world's worst for taking five lines to say "it was snowing". Just goes to show that weeding even your most precious prose can make a story that once dragged lighten up and lift off.

I'm proud of me. Let's set off some fireworks, pop a bottle of champagne and toast to the old, faithful delete key.

Naked on the Page

Warning: Explicit Language Below


One of the elemental rules of crafting story dictates that a protagonist must grow or change as a direct result of the story's action. I guess it could also be argued that the protagonist could choose *not* to change as a result of the story's action, as well. Still, shit happens, or you don't have a story.

In order to transport a reader into the story world and hold them there, the story's movement must also result in some incremental and potentially dramatic shift in your character's sense of self awareness as she struggles to reset her world's equilibrium.

I swear to you that I would never dare to soil the field of women's literature with another tired plot revolving around a middle-aged love triangle. (Yawn. Lived it, don't want to read about it) However, an episode of same-sex marital infidelity does provide the fuel that sets my protag's journey into the realm of the (mostly) dead into motion.

As of yesterday's revisions, my protag had not yet realized yet that her competition for her husband's affection is another man. I kind of dreaded returning to the scene, because during the original draft, my words felt "episodic", and the character's reactions to her plight wooden.

During the rewriting, the most amazing thing happened. Lo and behold, my main character's prissy little personality decided to dig in to the plot and pull her own weight. That stuck-up garden party belle stood up off the page and taught herself how to cuss. She'd have done any sailor proud, too.

Watching the little lady perform represented one of those moments when it felt as if I was taking dictation as opposed to writing fiction. You see, there are just some words that a woman of a certain age and upbringing will not allow to soil her fair lips, but my protag broke all of her former rules of decorum as she prepared to catch her husband and her competetion "en flagrante"...

(Dear God, please tell me my Mom doesn't read blogs...the hot flashes, yes, we'll blame it on those...)

excerpt:

...Then, I remembered that I wasn’t dressing for a dinner date. It could well be that trail of years stretching out behind me and Byron would go for naught by the end of this day.

Tears sprang to my eyes when I realized that I was donning armor for the fight of my life.

"That two-bit trollop,” I cursed. Somehow, my choice in swear words didn’t feel quite as vindicating as I’d hoped.

“That hussified jezebel,” I tried again.

Nope, not quite the word I was looking for.

“Fuck?”

No way, I thought. I’ve already used that word. Twice.

“CUNT,” I dared.

Oops. Now there’s a word. Outwardly, I recoiled in shock, lest Momma roll over in her grave.

But if the word fits…

“Just who the hell does that cunt think she is, moving in on my life? Over my fucking dead body!"

“There,” I said as I topped my ash blonde chignon with a black straw hat whose broad brim boasted a discrete sprinkling of linen flowers. “Cunt was exactly the word I was looking for.”

Momma would just have to get over it...

Back to the first rule of fiction--the protagonist must grow or change as a result of the story's action. Hmmmm. The belle formerly known as the lady with the stick up her backside says the dread C word. In doing so, the reader might actually BELIEVE it when she rebels against the status quo and breaks every single one of the rules of Deadiquette.

I think we're getting somewhere. Its about (fucking)time.

*please excuse the lack of italics when presenting the characters internal dialogue above. Blogger beta sucks toads and seems to be refusing to do its job of recognizing html 101.

**If you're thinking of switching to Blogger beta, don't. At least not yet. I can't comment on original Blogger blogs without making up a whole new identity, and folks on the old Blogger can't comment on mine most of the time. Its getting quite lonely out here in beta land...

***if the blogger beta police come after me as a result of my public blasphemy, please send cakes with embedded hacksaws to starmuse23@gmail.com

Today was an awful writing day.You see, the back porch roof on my less than a year old dream home collapsed the other day, necessitating that the nice builder people come and build me a nice, shiny, new porch roof.

Today, my house sounded like the entire cast of Riverdance was clogging in army boots on my rooftop. Since noise is apparently not in my muse's contract, I decided to do some research that I'd skipped over for the sake of staying focused on story during the first draft of The Book of Deadiquette.

Ever the diligent author-to-be, I busied myself learning about Gullah magik and herbal teas so that I could clear up one of the many "research this" notations scattered throughout my first draft.Good thing I did decide to look into these things, as I darned near poisoned my protag with a lethal mixture of jasmine and columbine. Granted, killing the protag off with a nice cup of herbal tea might have been an effective way to reduce word count--no protag, no story.

Anyhow, during my research, I came across a nice little bathtime potion that promises to ease the path to publication, fame and glory for the aspiring author. It's called the FAME AND GLORY BATH, and is the reported brainchild of sorceress Lexa Rosean (author of The Supermarket Sorceress series of books).

Fame And Glory Bath

Cut an apple in nine pieces, or alternately throw nine whole shiny apples into the tub. Use green and golden apples if you want your fame to come with some money attached. Then add nine bay leaves. Get in the tub and immerse yourself for exactly nine minutes, and then get out.

Supposedly this little Calgon moment is supposed to be particularly powerful for artists and writers.

Now I've long been a fan of the power of nine--the holy Trinity times three and all of that. Nine-ite that I am, I'm wondering if maybe it would behoove me to augment this nine-minute bath by doing it nine times for extra luck? Perhaps at 9am on the 9th day of the month, even? Or perhaps even internalize the magic and eat the apples in nine bites each after I'm done marinating? Ewww.....nix that.

Who said research is all about procrastination? Pfffffffffffffft.

Labors of Love

For most children, the beginning of summer represents a long season of possibilities. Early in June, my thirteen-year old daughter (who writes circles around me) tagged me to a NaNoWriMo Duel. In a nutshell, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Every year, in November, would-be novelists from all over the country challenge themselves to craft a novel in a month (50,000 words) and keep track of their progress on the NanoWriMo website.

I spend an awful lot of time worrying whether or not my daughter is "okey-dokey" with life. Her upbringing has never sailed an often navigated course. For those of you who don't know, Gina has two little brothers with autism. She's grown up inside of an often frenetic life that requires a whole lot of giving from her and precious little take. So I not only stop to relish the rare events she asks to "take" a little--I dive in head first.

That my daughter wanted to train for such a monumental event *with* me spoke volumes. She wanted to celebrate her artist within, and she wanted to do so with me. For once, here was a place where I could serve as my daughter's role model. So we spent our summer stealing bits of time a long walk to talk plot, or to sit by the pool allowing our imaginations to run wild. We'd invent obstacles and motivations, and develop dimensional characters designed only to delight ourselves.

On days when walking was not an option, and the boys needs would not allow us one moment to sneak away, we'd have a writing party after Gina's brothers had finally fallen asleep. Some days, we even employed instant messaging to share our thoughts from her upstairs lair to mine downstairs.

If I am to be truly honest, my effort to feed my daughter's muse was not only for her benefit. I needed this time, too. The often bitter advocacy wars related to autism can consume my every waking moment. As a writer, I needed to be challenged, because I'd allowed life obstacles to lock my daughter's favorite part of me away. Instead of working my way out of my quagmire, I stirred myself into a major writing funk. I poured out my writer's angst to anyone who would listen to me (the garden statuary, mostly). I bemoaned my utter inability to craft more than one page of coherent words in a week's time. If I pushed myself to create more, my cold-hearted bitch of a muse left me high and dry.

In short, I was one burned out super-mom. And my daughter saw right through me. I accepted her challenge so that both of us might learn that much of our life's course is based on the choices we make.

We chose November.

As the summer drew to a close, and NaNoWriMo loomed ahead of me, I chained the evil bitch muse to my bedpost and ball gagged her. ( Kinky, yes, but highly effective). Freed from obsessing about creative inspiration and large blocks of free time, I put myself on a word count "stamina building" program. I decided to I extend my writing by a half-page per day, even if that extra half-page meant laying words on paper in fifteen minute chunks. I did this by working on my blogs, writing meaningless dribble, or writing a story to read to my kids (one of them which I actually LOVE).

Yesterday I met my pre-Nanowrimo goal. I wrote twenty typed, double-spaced pages in one day, on the same story. I even solved a plot problem in the process. I laughed a lot. I had scads of fun. My daughter and I crawled into the center of my bed last night, and she hooted and howled as I read my work to her.

"Mommy, I want to be like you when I'm grown. You're so cool."

Here's to November, baby girl.

The Baron of Balls or How Living Hard Makes Writing Easy

There's nothing like writing what you know. And I, for one, have to know first-hand the man who holds the esteemed title of "Baron of Balls." I have no doubt that this year's Testicle Festival will find its way into the pages of one of my books. Held every year in Clinton, Montana at the Rock Creek Lodge, the "testy festy," as it's locally known, is a five-day extravaganza devoted to consuming mass quantities of Rocky Mountain Oysters. That's bull testicles, folks.

Yet, the most muse inspiring portion of this ballsy event is not bovine in nature. Reportedly, the old "Testy Festy" has earned a rep for getting a tad out of hand. Local mountain men and women use the festival as an excuse to get rip-roaring drunk, shed clothing and engage in naughty testicular competitions.

Woo-hoo, sounds like my kind of party! Care to join me in a little up close and personal inspiration gathering? Rumor has it that field research is tax deductible.

Rewrite Progress--4900 words. Thinking of auctioning my family off on e-bay. :)