[fiction, instead of lies]

Stinson Beach. What a perfectly blissed out day.

Sorry for the muzak reference. Bad Seventies Things have taken over my head today. (I guess I should a.) look up what the real song is, b.) who sings it, c.) and thus get it stuck in my head for life? No. Just remembering my mother’s flirtation with Easy Listening when I was a kid is bad enough, thanks.)

I recently passed along a piece from the blog Write For Your Life to my writing group. The piece on “morning pages” was based on the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and according to this piece, morning pages are “three pages of stream of consciousness writing that you do every morning. The intention is to clear your mind of all the annoying claptrap that buzzes around, getting in the way of your creativity.”

Right.

So, I asked my writing group — three of whom are published writers, one a journalist, one an award-winning short story writer — what they thought of that. I asked if they used morning pages, or something like that, to clear away their cobwebs before they set in to writing.

The response? A wincing, “every single day?!”, a disbelieving, “why would I do that?!,” a rather polite “sounds like an interesting idea,” and my favorite response, hysterical laughter.

Um, yeah.

I have to say I love it when my writing group is in sync with me.

We bounced the idea around of freewriting and what it does for us, but none of us could face the idea of doing three pages of writing like that, every single regimented day. The idea – even for the promised goal of improving ourselves – felt confining and a lot like the crappy busywork we got assigned in the fourth grade when our teacher had a headache.

I have a hard time with regimentation of any kind. I force myself to the gym a minimum of three days a week. I have to remind myself to brush my teeth. I sometimes remind myself that at least things like deodorant and putting on something beneath a t-shirt ::cough:: are automatic now, but boy — I really remember fifth grade when my mother despaired of me. I just can’t seem to get into a groove very easily. At least, not doing things that are supposed to be routine; I often can’t even be bothered to eat lunch until 3:30 or so.

Sadly, I tend to run up against this same feeling of put-upon confinement when I encounter …well, any writing advice. When I graduated from college, my favorite professor gave me a copy of a book called, If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. In it, I read that she subscribes to the theory of moodling along, coddling creativity by happily doing nothing in particular. Okay, I can agree with that. Unfortunately, she advocated doing that “moodling” by taking several long walks a day.

Hm.

I like walking all right, but I don’t think it makes me more creative. Walking usually makes me hot, unless it’s nice and windy out, and then I enjoy the sensation of being all sweaty with a cold face. (It’s actually quite nice, and we get 70 mph gales here – that’s actually a lot of fun to walk in, and yes I know I’m weird. Hush up.) If I took several long walks a day, I fear I would never finish anything much – including simple things like laundry and making meals. While I’m find living on toast and wearing wrinkled sweats, I’m not sure how successful a writer that would make me, not really.

The proof should be in the doing, yes? I mean, I manage to write because I enjoy sitting down and writing. And when I don’t enjoy it, I frown a lot and mutter, and do it anyway — because I know I’m just at a spot where things aren’t working, and if I backtrack a half a chapter or so and change a few things, usually things turn out all right.

Would that kind of insight be easier with a walk? Or morning pages?

I don’t know. The reason I bring this up is that I’m planning on re-reading all the writing books I have. If they don’t actually contain any helpful information — avast — to the library they shall go. Maybe someone else will be able to get something out of them.

(Why is it that people give writers books on writing advice? Besides the Ueland, I have Bird by Bird, a few more text-book-y types, and a bunch of Annie Dillard, too.) It’s time to make some space on my shelves – past time, with another Cybils coming up – and so I am doing An Almighty Weeding.

But, tell me about you: what do you do with your early morning hours? What writing books have you found useful? What daily practices – if any – make sense to you and inform your writing? Where did you donate all of your unwanted writing books??

Okay, maybe not the end of all things. But… summer. Dude. What happened?!

The warm days I so looked forward to only ever tentatively came to pass — much of my summer has been a bit of a wash – literally. Rain, rain, rain, and more rain. And yet, I can’t really complain. Although I’m not a person who keeps track of words-per-day writing, I’ve been slogging along – and am three quarters of the way through one novel, a third of the way through another, and just finishing the preliminary research for a third. This is not to mention all of the reading I’ve been doing, or the editorial letter I’m awaiting next month. I’ve gotten a lot done, and there is yet so much more to do!

This is our last school year in Scotland. How odd it feels to say that — when I am still getting used to the fact that I been IN Scotland at all! Nevertheless, it’s almost over, Tech Boy is writing up the dissertation which will earn him that coveted PhD, and my time in the isle of mists and moss and mold is almost at a close. I keep feeling like there’s so much to do before I go. I should be racing around trying to see one last castle, one last loch, one last… something. Instead, I’m sitting in my window seat, sipping my tea, looking out at the neighborhood like everyone else on a Sunday afternoon.

There’s just no accounting for laziness.

In any event, I’m still mildly chagrined at the whole seasonal thing. September! No, really!? Wasn’t it just July?

The days are creeping up on me. A sign of old age or insanity…

“I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.” – Ms. Dorothy Parker

Four feet, eleven inches of snark, razor-sharp sarcasm, biting wit and witticisms. And sappy sentimentality — let’s not forget her screenwriting It’s A Wonderful Life, or A Star is Born, all right? She reviewed for the New Yorker, wrote poetry, and tried to find what it is to be human. I loved her Resumé in high school, and realized she was also painfully lonely and bitter and altogether too brilliant for her own good.

I felt I’d found a kindred spirit – not that I was any or all of those things. But I aspired.

She would have been 117 today – and I wonder what she would have made of this modern world? Of the President? (She left her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr.) Of Twilight? (she was a big fan of the “love-’em-and-lose-’em” school of relationships — from what she wrote, anyway; her poetry reflected painful bloodshed and carnage in the war between the sexes. On the other hand, she married the same man twice, so maybe “losing ‘em” is harder than she thought), of the number of lasses in glasses getting passes? I cherish her bitter, zingy observations, her funny, heartbreaking and wistful poems, and even her soppy movies. Today, I shall think snarky thoughts for her.

Good grief, these soldiers! Always sassy, that 6888th.

I thought I’d posted this about a year ago, but found that I never did! So – enjoy. And imagine Mare…

For these guys, it started with Weeatabix.

Well, not really. Weeatabix is some kind of British cereal [and why is it that so many of the cereals from the olden days sound like some kind of mechanical invention or cleaning product? I mean, Weeatabix? Shreddies? Ruskets? I somehow imagine robots. But I digress. Badly.] that looks like hay bales, and as every company in the world seems to do, they had a contest — in this case, it was a straw (hay) bale contest, in support of British farming. £5000 went to the winning farm, and basically all they had to do was create art.

These mammoths are the winning design by farm folk Nikki and Paul Grant and David Sharpe, and were a big hit for obvious reasons. They won the money, and celebrated, I’m sure, and that will probably be a great story they can dine out on for years.

People frequently ask me how I come up with ideas for stories. Truthfully, it’s a question that gets posed to every author, and I will join the chorus in saying that I don’t really know. A lot of stuff churns through the subconscious and leaks out in dreams, but few of those ideas ever hold up to the rigorous light of day and the process of writing and revising (okay, that worked for Stephanie Meyers, but I’d have to ask what she’d been eating before going to bed). I have a suspicion that everyday life is what gives writers most of their fodder. Like Nikki Grant’s mother, who found the whole Weetabix art contest inspiring. She’s now written a children’s book about Mambo the Mammoth. (For obvious reasons he can’t be Manny, though he looks a lot like the Ice Age cartoon character.)

Mambo has a Facebook page, even.

Sometimes just being on the sidelines while something happens is enough to fan a creative spark. Wonder what that spark will be for you?

Some of the titles of the books just now on my coffee table/trunk: The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930, by Charles Tilly, The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was poisoned at home, work, and play, by James C. Whorton, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy, by David Gentilcore, and on reserve Poison, detection, and the Victorian imagination, by Ian Blumney,

Oh, but this is way too much fun. If you can get your hands on a copy of The Arsenic Century, do. It’s one of the most engaging nonfiction reads I’ve dug into in awhile. Fun, fun, fun, and all in the name of work! Woot!

I love my job.

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, and who is going to make amends.”
                                                     ~ Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

And the real truth is, wherever you go, there you are.

Greetings from the Writing Bunker! I’m pulling ahead with my middle grade WIP, and having fun with it, and still pondering how to get everyone out of the jams I put them into in my YA SFF novel. It’s a lot harder than I thought, to have High Adventure going on. People spend a lot of time being chased and running away, I notice.

You might notice that I have a “in case you need book report fodder” note on the right hand side of the page now. That’s because I’ve been asked for another interview, and one of the interviewers first questions was, “What are your books, and what are they about?”

–??!!???!!

No, seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.

So, to avoid feeling humiliated and/or taking a flamethrower to well-meaning but basically disinterested people who have been assigned to interview me, I’ve gathered some information to which I will point those kinds of interviewers so they don’t have to actually talk to me, if they’re inventive. I think I can safely declare us charter members of a newly formed Mutual Disinterest Society.

Bah.

In mid-July there was a lot of chatter going on – at least on this side of the pond – about a series of books written by Enid Blyton. The publishers and the estate of Enid Blyton are going to update the language in the books from Archaic British English to Modern British English, in hopes of exciting a few more readers and widening the readership of a series of books, most of which were first published in the 1940′s, and contain pejorative phrases like “dirty tinker” to describe travelers or gypsy people, and “an awful swotter” to describe someone who liked to study and read.

The furor was distressing to me, because so many people raved about “preserving” this series, and the language of the time, and how awful it was that the books were losing their special, uniquely British touch to be bowdlerized into the ordinary and the average. While I understood the preservationist point of view, and the fact that the books reflect the values, language and social mores of a bygone era, and that Children Should Be Made to Read Up, and Great Literature Ought Not To Be Brought Down To The Common Level, the fact remains: living, breathing kids in the now could use more good books (and I view Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series, with its racist, sexist and classicist language as “good books” with only the most skeptical eyes) to read, and the publisher, of course, wants to make more money, as do Enid’s heirs.

The mindset of “children should read up” reared its ugly head again recently when I read a discussion of The Novel: An Alternate History – Beginnings to 1600, by Steven Moore. This is a massive and allegedly scholarly tome, being deconstructed by a thoughtful, well-spoken woman, but the book itself and her subsequent blog post is not the point — what the author says in his introduction is what struck me.

“Do you want to know a secret?”
“Literature is not for everyone… when it comes to fiction, there’s a democratic assumption that anyone with a basic education should be able to read and enjoy any novel… Hence some feel it is reprehensible to write a novel beyond a high school reading age. … Why this bleeding-heart concern for ‘the mass of readers’, ‘the common reader’? They have more than enough to satisfy them, as the best-seller lists indicate; most of the publishing industry caters to their tastes. Why this intolerance for the minority of readers with a different textual orientation who prefer an alternative kind of fiction… Such fiction is challenging and unconventional, granted, but the fact that it’s not for everyone doesn’t make it elitist, snobbish, pretentious, arrogant, or wrong-headed. It’s simply not for everyone.”

That really both blew me away, and really grieved me all at once, because I AM that “everyone” who was not raised and polished to special literate status, who didn’t study Greek mythology or Roman Classics or histories or Shakespeare, even, until college, or anything which would have propelled me along toward the shining towers of the Ivy Leagues. I AM that everyone, that nobody to whom Moore directs this, sneaking around the edges of what Other People read and thought, and how Other People lived, and sampling bits and pieces of that through literature.

How else was I supposed to become? And he thinks to criticize me for being the common reader!? Really? If you are not tied with a silver bib and fed Plutarch with a platinum spoon, how else are you supposed to arrive at these Big and Lofty Thoughts and ideals he espouses as especially for that “minority of readers”?

Perhaps what bothers me more is that there are people who found his statements obnoxious on the surface, but somehow true at heart. They felt critical of his tone, but indicated that literature which “pandered” to our “escapist childhood instincts” should really be avoided, and that we are a world of indiscriminate readers who need to elevate and raise ourselves, or else we get what we deserve in this world — the low, the inauthentic, the common and the trashy.

Or, you know, popular culture.

Read UP, children of the world! Be better than you are, be more worthy of the literature you’re supposed to love…

Mr. Moore attempts to justify the deliberate manufacture of a work which is only accessible to a few, not to make the work better, but simply to engage in an exercise of writing which somehow says that the people who read the work are better. This, to me, is “elitist, snobbish, pretentious, arrogant, or wrong-headed.”

Imagine that the language being discussed in these works wasn’t the language of archaic Britain, and wasn’t language “beyond a high school reading age,” but was something like African American Vernacular English – or as it was called when I was an undergrad Black American English, or BAE. It’s not for everybody, certainly. Nobody panders to people who would read works written in dialectical English primarily used by inner city African Americans, certainly not the mainstream publishers. Would people be concerned about preserving a work (by not altering it), if it were written in “ebonics?” (Remember all the hysteria over that?) Would they find the work “elitist, snobbish, pretentious, arrogant, or wrong-headed?” Would they feel the need to defend the language used?

Hmm.

Something to think about this breezy Wednesday morn. Or not. This one might give you a headache.

Remember that bit in MARE’S WAR when she meets the little girl who stares at her? Later we read that she was also supposed to be working a bit in the garden –? Well, I’ve just found a museum celebrating that gardening effort — the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, England is having an exhibit that shows just what all those kids had to do during WWII. The museum is supplying a “genuine 1940′s farming experience,” to anyone who comes along to visit them, as well as an exhibit which highlights the Ministry of Food, which is the British equivalent of the FDA, and which passed out food stamps and recipes in an effort to help people cope with the food they had and make do with the foods they couldn’t have.

Much like American 4-H Clubs, there were British kids in Pig Clubs and London transplants living on farms and in small villages, competing about who had the largest hens and the best egg yields. And best of all, they both had fun and kept their country fed and self-reliant.

Which is just awesome, of course.

Happy August! I’m looking up from the world of juggling writing projects and trying to convince myself that researching in dull academic volumes for historical fiction definitely means myriad cups of tea under fleece blankets — but not necessarily myriad cookies. I see I need to pack up a box and visit the neighbors, quickly.

Other than the recipe for these pretty little faux Oreos (yummy, but Oreos aren’t quite this sweet. Shall cut the sugar down again for the next batch), you know what makes me happy about the picture below? The fact that the plate and the cup almost match. One is melamine, and was cheaply and recently purchased, the other was (also cheaply — c’mon, people, you know me) purchased when we first moved here, and is by a well-known designer… and yet, they go together. Serendipity!

For everyone who says that YA bloggers are categorically unable to write incisive, intelligent, negative reviews, please think again, and check out The Book Smugglers. Intelligent bloggers – with strong opinions they’re not afraid to share, eliciting lively conversation. And their blog header is just adorable. Go, Smugglers.

When I was a kid, we had chickens. I had no idea they could swim, but it’s so hot in parts of China this week that some of them have decided that’s a great idea. And should it surprise me that in the UK — home of Very Bizarre Festivals and things like cheese rolling — that there are hen races? No, it should not. And yet: I remain somewhat baffled and amused.

All righty, then. Back to my tea and cookies. Oh, and my “research.”

Way back in January (because I am, if nothing else, completely on top of all trends and kidlitosphere conversations) quilting author and blogger Kyra blogged about who actually wins the Coretta Scott King Awards. It was an interesting bunch of statics, and a good post, and it reminded me of an observation I made about the CSK winners this year — all of them were awards for historical fiction.

Someone mentioned that historical fiction is always what wins — and I’d have to suspend comment on that until I could see some type of statistical compilation that backed that up. But I did remember wondering if that’s just the pool the CSK jury had to dip into, or if there’s a preference by the ALA juries and committees to award portrayals of African American history over other topics. Anyway – just an idle thought that I’ll look more into, when I have time. When I am not writing three books at once.

(WHY am I doing that? Because… it’s summer, the light [please note I did not say the sun - we're having the worst gray overcast weather] still comes up at 4 a.m., and I am overflowing with twitchy, nervous energy — usually at two or three a.m., but energy nonetheless. We’ll see if it’s coherent energy, or just the blathering sort.)

Via Tor.com, Prolific paranormal/true crime/vampire writer L.A. Banks scares herself. (Is it wrong of me to snicker loudly at that?) I’d scare myself, too, if I wrote what she writes, in a darkened house, at 3 a.m…. L.A. Banks is one of the very few REALLY successful writers of color in the SFF community, and while she doesn’t write YA fiction… I’m hoping she might someday.

Meanwhile, art continues to flourish in my neighborhood. These are two of a series of toothy computer monitors and TV sets, just down at the corner — in the “back” yard of the same crescent I’m in. And I have no idea why there’s always art in that corner, but it’s usually Banksy-esque and always thought-provoking. This one is a cross between the Little Shop of Horrors Audrey, Jr. plant and those 70′s “Kill Your Television!” bumper stickers.