Plotting

Today I am plotting.

Not just plotting a story but plotting a writing career. Hmmm, doesn't that sound haughty and arrogant? Plotting a writing career. As if I have a writing career. As if I have a career of any sort.

Sigh. Such thinking does not help. Back to arrogance. Yes, I mean a writing career. You just don't wake up one morning and say you're going to go out and have a career. You start training, then you serve an apprenticeship and then (hopefully) you get on a rusty, creaky, lurching wooden escalator to success: taking on more responsibility, honing your skills, expanding your network, all that stuff. And then you retire.

Hmmm ... the word career doesn't sound all that great does it?

But put writing in front of career and suddenly the words perk right up. Yes, you write, you get better, you get rejected for years, you gain a little traction, you maybe win some awards and place some stories and maybe ... just maybe get published.

Sounds inspiring and sort of soul-sucking at the same time, actually.

Okay, then so where do I start. Well, I start by writing, which is what I'm wrestling with right now. I have a ton of ideas and difficulty concentrating. I spent years of my energy on a financial memoir, which has lapsed into a coma despite regular attempts to resuscitate it, so I'm going to let that project steep in failure for a while (dramatic much?) and look at some other projects:

I have a collection of short stories, called Lunch is So Hard,
a middle-grade fantasy novel
an idea for a mystery novel

And well, that's it. So I'm plotting what to do next. Every plot has peaks and valleys, right? A continuous line of reversals until everything looks hopeless? Well, I've got the hopeless down, so it's time to climb back up.

Time for plotting, which of course makes me think of villains. Heroes are easy to create; it's the villains who provide the true magic. Ben Bova writes:

In the real world there are no villains. No one actually sets out to do evil... Fiction mirrors life. Or, more accurately, fiction serves as a lens to focus of what they know in life and bring its realities into sharper, clearer understanding for us. There are no villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds. There are only people with problems, struggling to solve them.

David Lubar adds:

This is a brilliant observation that has served me well in all my writing. (The bad guy isn't doing bad stuff so he can rub his hands together and snarl.) He may be driven by greed, neuroses, or the conviction that his cause is just, but he's driven by something not unlike the things that drive a hero.

My middle-grade novel needs a good villain, one who thinks he or she is the hero of the story. Makes me wonder sometimes, in my own life -- am I the hero or the villain?

First Short Story Submission -- Ever!

Today I submitted a short story to a literary journal for the first time. You'd think I'd passed this particular milestone earlier, but I've always worked on book-length projects. This year I've returned to the short story, which I haven't written since college. I forgot how fun it is.

Now I'm working on a short story collection, tentatively titled Lunch is So Hard. I've got five stories already, all in various stages of completion. They all revolve around the workplace:  toxic coworker; a malevolent vending machine; a temp employee's heaven; a magic planner; and an efficient woman striving to get ahead by being incompetent.

The story I submitted today is not one of them. It's for an online journal that asked for creative work around the theme of "frantic." It's called Genius At Work, and even if it isn't accepted, just finishing the exhausting process of submission is a victory in itself. Yay!

Beginning Again

Yes, I'm starting another effort to write regularly. The three pillars necessary for me write on a regular basis are:
- time
- space
- stamina

This year I thought I had these three factors under control. I had the time, since I'd cut my newsroom hours to two days a week. I had the space, because Fog City Writer and I had rented a studio. And I thought I had the stamina to travel to the studio regularly and sit for hours at my makeshift desk.

But I didn't.

I injured my neck last December getting out of the car and immediately began having headaches. I basically had a severe headache for six months. Everything ground to a halt: work, home, family and, of course, writing. I barely kept my two-day-a-week job. Social events were an act of sheer willpower. My nadir was a lovely April trip to a Sierra Nevada cabin with friends where I spent most of the time flat on my back in bed, or sitting around pretending to have fun. It was awful. We ended up canceling our vacation to Michigan in June, partly because I knew I couldn't do it.

Muscle relaxants and medical treatment helped, but the pain dragged on for months. Only in the last few weeks have I seen any real relief. Motrin helps, wearing a brace helps. I'm starting to write again and today I'm in my studio for the second day in the row. That hasn't happened since June.

The gods apparently wanted me to write today, because Killer Robot Kid's animal camp is only a short drive from the studio. Fine, I thought, I'll come for an hour, since all the long-term parking spots nearby would doubtless be taken. But then I found a 4-hour parking spot. Obviously you can't fight the universe, so here I am, beginning again.

My current project is a short story for Rollick, an online literary magazine. They want creative work on the theme of "frantic." After a frantic week of trying to write about frantic, I finally decided to write a story about a writer frantically trying to write about frantic. It's very meta.

So here I am, in my sunny studio, beginning again.

Prompt -- Mind Games

1.   There is a magic talisman that allows its keeper to read minds. It falls into the hands of an ambitious politician…

 MIND GAMES

The cat by the toaster purred so loudly that Marcie couldn’t think. Stirring her tea, she left the kitchen and stepped out onto hotel balcony, looking at the sunrise over the Hilton parking lot below. She might be in Indiana, or Illinois or Iowa … some “I” state, anyway. She’d lost track of all time or place on the campaign trail. Her family was far away, having breakfast in Kalamazoo, Mich., and the only constants in her life these days were her immediate staff and one spoiled Maine Coon cat.

Actually, Tom had wanted to join her on the campaign trail, but 3-year-old Tilly had been feverish, and her husband hated politics anyway. He’d wanted to take Tilly to his parents’ farm north of Detroit, but her campaign strategist loved the name Kalamazoo, its goofy, small-town vibe and worked it in whenever possible that Marcie’s family was at their home in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Tom had sent her a present, though. The package lay on the kitchen counter and she hadn’t seen it until she poured her tea. Tom loved old things; their Michigan home was overflowing with rickety furniture and faded photographs, none of the usual politician furnishings with the fresh flowers on the mantle. Their mantle was crowded with old clocks, each keeping slightly different time and ticking in its own flamboyant, stubborn way. Her aide Fred, the one who loved the name Kalamazoo, also loved the clocks.

“You don’t think it makes me look like a batty eccentric?” Marcie had asked. She was 43 now, and never would have asked that question even five years before. Women aged quickly in politics and the public would never believe the clocks were Tom’s.

“No, the clocks are good, they make you look warm and homey,” Fred said. “Clocks are big in Pottery Barn catalogs.”

Fred loved Pottery Barn catalogs; privately he wanted to make her the “Pottery Barn candidate” without anybody but the two of them actually saying it. Marcie was steeped in science, with degrees in chemistry and astronomy, and anything Pottery Barn, Fred felt, brought her down to earth.

Well, Marcie thought, then Fred will love Tom’s latest gift. It was a small clock on a golden chain, lovely, really, delicate. She could hear the soft ticking as she held small gold disc up to her ear, a low, motorized purr like the cat’s. She’d have to tuck it under her clothes so Fred wouldn’t see it. He’d either pronounce it all wrong and never allow her to wear it, or he’d love it and she’d never be able to take it off. A man of extremes, that was Fred.

She pulled her reading glasses out of her pocket, the ones she never could wear around Fred, and looked at the clock more closely. Odd. Instead of numbers, there were four arrows: up, down, left or right. Great, she thought. Only Tom would send me a clock that couldn’t tell the time. Since putting it on, though, she’d felt a low hum, almost like words she couldn’t quite hear. Then, one word rang out: her own name, and the phrase “… better be up.”

The knock on the door startled her so badly she dropped the clock on the balcony floor and hastily picked it up and strung it around the neck. It was Fred, of course, she knew his knock, and she hurried into the room and to the door, tucking the clock inside her Silk Blouse of the Day. Marcie wore nothing but suits and silk blouses these days; her staff delivered racks of them wherever they went, all with labeled boxes of shoes and accessories and whisper-thin stockings that kept that secret that her legs weren’t perfect.

“That damn cat needs to go,” she heard Fred say as she opened the door. Marcie was surprised, Fred never spoke to her in the morning without an elaborate greeting.

“What’s wrong with Mr. Boo Boo?” she asked. Tilly had named the cat, when they found it abandoned in their yard with a bleeding ear and nose, and they all just had to live with it now.

Fred looked startled. “Why, nothing. Good Morning, Dr. Powers and future Madam President.” That was how Fred always greeted Marcie. He believed in positive visualizing and beginning the day with the proper internal identity. “I mean, is the animal all right?”

“He’s fine.” Marcie turned her back and tucked her reading glasses into her “man bag” like a guilty child. She was forbidden to wear anything with pockets or carry a purse. Items in pockets created bulges and purses were too “Queen Elizabeth.” Nothing like comparisons to an 80-year-old great-grandma to make you feel good about yourself. She was only 43 for chrissake. Anyway, that meant her personal aides had to carry a small briefcase around for her constant access, like walking purse holders, except it couldn’t be a purse because all her aides were men. So Fred had procured a small but manly bag that aides took turns carrying. Marcie called it her man bag and she knew that her aides played constant games to determine the loser who had to carry it.

“Why do you always have to have that damn bag?” Fred asked.

“What?” Marcy spun and stared at her aide. This was very strange behavior from Fred. He never swore and now twice in five minutes? Was he going senile like those sweet little old ladies with dementia who started cursing like sailors? Fred was 55, thin and slightly grizzled and got to wear his reading glasses in a jacket pocket like a normal person. Marcie sometimes called him her Cassius, with his lean and hungry look.

“I need this bag,” she snapped.

“Of course you do, Dr. Powers,” Fred said. The funniest look came over his face and he shook his head.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Tip-top,” he said, pulling out his phone. “It’s 6:43.”

That meant nothing to Marcie, who never knew where she was going or what she was doing or when she needed to be there. Fred had arranged her wakeup call, and she always popped up right away, no matter how tired she was, so she would have a minute or two to herself before the day began. She zipped up the bag and handed it to Fred.

“Shit, I have to carry this,” he said, which was true, it was just them and Mr. Boo Boo.

“Well, you won’t let me carry anything,” Marcie pointed out, shrugging on her jacket and buttoning it up. Fred was apparently cracking under the strain and she decided to play along. She actually liked the swearing, it reminded her of Tom. Of course, Fred looked nothing like Tom, who’d been a football quarterback in college and still maintained his broad, intimidating figure. Plus, Tom had never worn that startled deer look that Fred was wearing now. Her aide opened his mouth, shut it again, and meekly took the bag.

“Donor breakfast with entrepreneur Vinlas Morgan at 7; meet and greet with Girl Scout president at 7:30, staff meeting at 7:45, photo op with celebrity chef Colette Caramel at 8:15 …”

“Why are you telling me this?” Marcie asked as she crossed to pet Mr. Boo Boo goodbye. She never liked knowing her schedule ahead of time; it was too depressing. She and her staff went over the day’s, week’s and month’s priorities every evening and the schedule reflected that. The schedule was the execution and she didn’t need the execution in her head.

“Telling you what, doctor?” Fred asked, hitching the bag on his shoulder and opening the door for her.

“I don’t need to know what I’m doing at 8:15, she said.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Fred protested.

“But you …” Now Marcie opened her mouth and closed it again. She was still hearing the schedule in her mind, in Fred’s voice, on a relentless loop: “luncheon with Indiana Patriots for Safe Streets at noon, national security briefing at 12:45 …” but Fred’s mouth wasn’t moving, he was just looking at her with concern now, as the voice churned on. “Stop it!” she snapped at him.

“Doctor?” He stared at her baffled, the droning schedule suddenly halted. “Are you all right?”

His mouth definitely moved that time. “I’m fine,” she said carefully, watching him closely.

He nodded and turned to lead her down the hall and she could hear, muted now, the schedule starting up again: “Presentation of donor campaign pins at 3:05 …”

She followed, her head spinning. He wasn’t saying the schedule out loud, but it was his voice. “Fred?” she asked.

He turned and looked at her calmly, mouth closed, but she clearly heard his voice say, “What the hell is it now?”

“What were you thinking about just now?”

“Great, you sound like my goddamn wife,” said his voice, but his mouth didn’t move. Then it did. “Just running through today’s schedule, Dr. Powers.”

“You were thinking about my schedule,” she said.

He nodded. “Of course,” he answered and turned to walk again. “Crazy bitch this morning.”

“Fred!” she cried, outraged. Her aide turned and stared at her. “Did you call me …” She stopped. Of course he hadn’t. In the 20 years they’d known each other, he’d never sworn in her presence. Either he was cracking up or she was.

“Dr. Powers?” he asked.

“Nothing, go ahead,” she said, purposefully slowing her pace. The droning schedule resumed, but she noticed that the further Fred strode down the hall, the man bag bouncing, the softer the voice grew.

Then she heard another voice, behind her, a deeper voice:

“STARGAZER approaching elevator, clean sweep, only IRONMAN ahead …”

Marcie turned to see her Secret Service agent, Dan, looming up behind her. Usually he was a silent, bulky presence with empty eyes, why was he muttering under his breath all of a sudden?

“IRONMAN?” she asked him. “Is that Fred?”

“Yes ma’am,” Dan said crisply.

“It must be the muscles,” she said mischievously. Fred’s scrawny arms had no muscles to speak of.

“Golf, ma’am,” Dan said.

Ah, that made sense. Fred was an obsessive golf player, always jamming with other aides about nine-irons and drivers and titanium clubheads. A clever Secret Service name, and likely a gentle dig, too.

IRONMAN was waiting at the elevator. “Christ, it’s almost 7,” he said. “She must be there precisely on the dot, not early – she must be in control – but not late, he’ll take exception.”

“Who?” Marcie asked.

“Vinlas Morgan, founder of Planful.com. He’s considering a big contribution, but wants to hear your stance on net neutrality and the level of regulation in the web service economy.”

The elevator door opened and Marcie, Fred and Dan slipped inside. Dan was counting, low, under his breath. Why was he doing that? But she couldn’t ask, because Fred was still talking about Morgan.

“What’s Planter.com?” she asked

“Come on, get it into your head,” Fred said. “Planful.com provides time management experts to plan your day for you, set priorities and …”

Marcie blinked. Something was definitely up with Fred. He was never rude.

The elevator door opened to a gaggle of reporters and Marcie staggered back, overwhelmed by the screaming voices in her head.

Goals and Priorities and Bears, Oh My!

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” Peter Drucker

The first thing when starting a new endeavor is to set goals and priorities. Now that I’m actually sitting in this space, with the freeway humming outside my window and Snapple chilling in the fridge, I have to think about what I want to accomplish here. I can't just sit at the desk and mutter dementedly. I can do that at home.


Here are some neat thoughts on the importance of planning.

MY WRITING GOALS

STEP A
List your top priorities for the coming quarter. What three things to you want to have accomplished three months from now? Is there a conference you want to present at? A proposal you want to win? A deal you want to close?

Name those three accomplishments and list them as your priority this week.

I have three major goals for the next five months, which will take me through the rest of this quarter and through the second quarter. My writing year begins Jan. 1, so the first half ends June 30.  You could argue that June will be kind of a wash, since I’ll be traveling so much, but I can still work on my writing priorities even if I’m spending little time in the studio.

My three major goals for first half 2015 are blogging, memoir and short pieces/stories.


GOAL ONE: Blogging

Post in my Stealth Life blog, Killer Robots blog and California Dreaming blog at least three times a week. I hope to do it every day, but let’s start with three days a week.

GOAL TWO: Memoir

Finish this memoir by June 30. No matter how ridiculous, out-of-date and Frankenstein’s Monster this memoir turns out to be, I will NOT go through another summer without finishing it.

GOAL THREE: Short pieces/stories

I can’t commit to writing another novel until I finish that damn memoir (see above), but I want to keep my fiction muscle working. So I will write short writing prompts and stories. I can work on my mind-reading politician story, but only as a daily writing prompt.

STEP B
List three tangible steps you can take on each top priority to move it toward completion.
If your thoughts run toward the mathematical, you’ll know that having three tasks for three priorities means that you’ve just created nine separate goals for each week. That could sound as if you’re creating work for yourself rather than lessening it. But there’s a reason we’re breaking work down this way, which you will see in section #3.

Blogging three times a week
- Write life blog post for Stealth Life, then revamp it for California Dreaming
- Write writing blog post for Stealth Life, then maybe revamp it for Killer Robots
- Always look for art to accompany it

Finish Memoir
- read through current draft
- plan out how will structure rest of memoir
- read Anne Lamott’s “picture frame” advice when you get scared and try to write a little piece at a time.

Write short pieces/stories
- write at least 1,000 words every day
- Flag prompts that could be developed further
- Write and edit short stories



STEP C
Commit at least two hours on studio days and one hour on newsroom days to your priorities. Newsroom days should at minimum include a 1,000-word writing prompt. If you have time left over, write a blog post, edit a story or do a one-inch picture frame on memoir. 


STEP D
Ask yourself at the start of your writing time, “How will I accomplish this?” Take the direct and precise action that will achieve your goal.

Be specific in your tasks. Rather than “work on funding for next year’s workshop,” instead, work out the steps you need to take to get funding, such as finding sponsors and getting a grant.

Tasks include scheduling a meeting with best sponsorship lead, telling him or her the latest good news about your project, with a request for a meeting; specifying the sponsorship you’re seeking in writing; and completing at least one section of the grant proposal.

Each phone call you make, each page of the proposal you’ve written, is a strike-through on your long list of tasks—a list that is now becoming shorter.

We Have a Writing Studio!

Yes, it's true.  For years my writing space has been a card table in the corner of my bedroom and I thought the only way to change that was to get a bigger apartment. But  San Francisco has overtaken New York as the most expensive housing rental market, with one bedrooms averaging more than $3,000 a month. That means my family and I will stay in our tiny, rent-controlled space at two-thirds the market rate.

For months my writing partner and I have been meeting in cafes twice a week to write, which has worked well enough (it has kept us writing regularly), but it started to pall. I couldn't afford $8 sandwiches and $3 cups of tea, and often we were shoehorned around a tiny desk with our open laptops shoved back-to-back like two warriors surrounded by a ring of enemies. Then I got a $70 parking ticket for exceeding the two-hour limit, which really frosted my flakes.

So Writing Partner and I started talking about getting our own space, a place where we could commute to like a job. Away from the distractions of home or loud cell-phone talkers and coffee-grinders, we would be more productive. Unfortunately the co-working spaces in San Francisco cater to the tech entrepreneur crowd. These "disrupters" apparently require exposed brick, giant whiteboards, hardwood floors, wired conference rooms, micro-roasted coffee and investors on parade to execute their strategies. All that synergy doesn't come cheap, and at $500 a month for a single lousy desk, such places were way out of our price range.

But my Muse was looking out for me. Maybe she was sick of being squashed into a corner table at Starbucks, too. I found a place on Craigslist, a little painting/office space for $500 a month. It was a wretched little garrett with a single, ground-level window, but we saw the potential. We could paint over the black ceilings and walls, hide that nasty cinderblock corner, cover the pitted concrete floor. Which is exactly what we did, and now we have a tiny studio that I'm beginning to love dearly.

So, here I am: Saturday, February 21, 2015, at 4:15 p.m., typing this in my studio. I’ve had writing spaces before, occasionally whole rooms, but I never had a place outside my home that was just for writing. I feel like I’m starting a new job, which, in effect, was exactly what I was going for. Get in the car or on the bus, travel to the studio, work, then come home. I’ve never had such a clear delineation between writing and home life. I can hear the low, steady hum of the freeway, occasional chatter outside on the street, but I can’t see anything but a patch of blue sky through the white latticework.

It also helps that this place is way cute now. When picking the colors, we wanted bright and energetic rather than subdued and tasteful. This is a creative space, not a serious study. It has a purple door, blue-and-white-striped walls and a pale green panel. Writing Partner has added a gauzy white curtain with drawings of birds and three potted plants. We each have our individual corner.

My corner is pretty sparse for now, which is okay. Just a card table, a chair inherited from the studio’s previous inhabitants and some files in a plastic box. I'm a little underwater with the money right now and I don’t need to spend a bunch. Maybe in a few weeks I can buy a desk. This chair is surprisingly comfortable.

So, it feels like a new job, and in a way it is. I have hired myself to be writer. Here is my office. How do I begin?

We'll see.

How I Started Chapter Five by Freaking Out

I need to write Chapter 5: Recessions I Have Known, but I'm scared. I’ve done everything but write in the last 40 minutes. I’ve posted on Facebook, changed my Apple password, bought a Seal album, helped Benny create a birthday card. And now I'm at my desk again. It's scary.

Who does stuff like this? Who sets their lives against the economy, who strings together the major events of their lives using recessions like fat beads on a string that winds and knots? I’m going to tangle this up.

I’m feeling some pressure. I want to send this out in September. Chapter Five was supposed to be a light revision and now it's a whole new chapter, possibly one of the most important chapters in the book.

 I’m trying to remember everything; the events, the memories, the history, the personalities. I’m having trouble focusing. I'm hyperventilating. It’s 10:52 and I’ve done nothing. I can’t stop thinking about the other things I need to do. I’m in a panic. How do I start a chapter about recessions? I'm in a panic. 

I'm in a panic.

Panic: a a sudden sensation of fear so strong as to dominate or prevent reason, replacing it with anxiety. A Greek word from the shepherd god Pan, who liked to frighten goats and sheep.

It’s also an old-fashioned word for a financial crisis, like the panics of 1857, 1873 and 1907. All triggered by worries over gold, silver or copper. Panic. All the goats and sheep scattered.

I'm trying to write about the 1973-75 recession. But it wasn't a recession, it was a Panic. 

Yay! I'm on my way! An hour later, I'm still typing madly.

There's got to be an easier way to do this.

Beaten and battered, but still fighting.

Journalism and publishing are two very different industries, and the differences go far beyond the whole double-spacing-after-a-period thing.

Journalists work in a fast-paced environment and our jargon reflects this: scoops, headlines, cutlines, pull quotes, banners, leads (or leads), deadlines ... see all those verbs? We scoop, we cut, we pull, we lead and then we drop dead.

If journalism’s time reference is quick and human, publishing’s time frame is more … geologic. An epoch can give way to an era between a book’s conception and publication. At last month’s Pacific Northwest Writers Association’s conference, we were “authors” not “reporters” who wrote “manuscripts” not “copy” to be “published” not “printed.” The jargon was more sedate: advance, slush, pitch, royalty, galley.

But despite these differences, the two industries face similar challenges these days, a clash between the old and the new, as traditional professionals fight to be heard above online newcomers. In journalism, these newcomers are called bloggers or “citizen journalists,” the latter embraced by online newspapers as a cheaper, faster way to get content.  In publishing, those new guys and gals are self-published authors.

In traditional journalism not so long ago, a story was pitched to an editor, the editor followed up on the story’s progress,  the story was submitted and edited, then copy edited, then proofed. Then and only then did the story go public. Errors and typos still slipped through, but the process worked to create the most professional result possible. Ideally, the finished result would be a professionally produced work, the product of a group collaboration, not one single mind, no matter how talented.

Similarly in publishing, for a book to hit the shelves, the writer pitches an agent who sells the project to a publisher. A whole table of people vet this acquisition: editors, marketers, production staff, publicists … they all have to sign off on it. Again, the final product, while not perfect, is professionally produced, the result of a group of talented minds.

Furthermore, both journalists and book writers have a formal apprenticeship, years of writing before you get the plum assignments or the book contracts.

The Internet has changed all this, of course. Now traditional newspaper writers compete with bloggers and “citizen journalists.” Traditional book authors compete with self-published authors. These nontraditional writers often display great creativity and talent and are formidable competitors not to be underestimated.

But with the barriers to entry in both industries partly dismantled, readers are flooded with books and articles in various stages of professional development. It can be difficult for readers to distinguish between a professionally sourced news story and an amateur blog post. Book readers surfing on Amazon’s wave of titles may lump together the professionally agented, edited, marketed and designed books and their self-published counterparts.

At the PNWA conference,  I repeatedly heard speakers say today’s books have to “break through the noise.” I hear this phrase in online journalism too. So the question for both journalists and book writers becomes, how do we uphold the traditional standards of  our industry while still innovating and accepting change?

One thing is for sure, looking down our noses at self-published authors and citizen journalists may make us feel better but won’t help anyone. My newspaper recently wrote about San Francisco International Airport’s crackdown on those newfangled ridesharing companies. In an effort to protect the taxi drivers who take passengers to and from the airport, SFO has conducted citizen’s arrests of Lyft and Uber drivers for trespassing.

Well, as a taxi passenger who has waited an hour for a taxi, endured baffling, circuitous routes to my destination or has had to scrape up cash because the taxi driver’s credit card reader was mysteriously broken, I say the traditional taxi industry in San Francisco has left a gaping customer service hole large enough to drive a gleaming, black Uber car through. Ridesharing companies are filling a need, or they wouldn’t be so successful, and taxi companies ignore this at their peril.

Traditional journalists and book writers can’t be like those taxi drivers. We can’t close ranks against the newcomers. They are now part of our culture and our dialogue. I believe in traditional publishing; I choose to prepare my memoir for agents. But I believe in self-publishing too, although it is not for me.

There is one word I don’t hear much of in either the journalism or publishing industries, probably because it was so self-evident. That word is “risk.” My newspaper is currently making enormous changes and taking huge risks. Publishers take big risks every time they acquire a book.

Bloggers, citizen journalists and self-published authors are considered the risk takers these days. But as bookstores and newspaper stands close every day while my own articles and book manuscript inch along the longer path to readers, today’s traditional journalists and book authors remain the biggest risk takers of all.

PNWA Conference: Killer Robot tips

Well, I'm back from the Pacific Northwest Writers Association conference in Seattle. I've been to exactly one writer's conference now in my adult life, so of course that makes me an expert.

So here are the Killer Robot's Top 10 Tips to a Successful Writing Conference:

1. Fly in the night before the event begins.

Everybody is boring the first two hours after they get off the plane. I could immediately spot the folks who flew in Thursday morning, staggering around all haggard in wrinkled clothes. I met a nice man that day with an undoubtedly fascinating novel, but he'll forever live in my mind as "The Guy Who Spent 40 Minutes on the Tarmac."

2. Want to make friends? Drop your registration packet while standing in line for pitch session registration. With any luck, you'll scatter the detritus at the feet of the host organization's president. It worked for me, although I lost two pens and an event ticket.

3. Don't wear a bright color or a vivid pattern on the first day. I met a woman who's writing a paranormal romance with pirates. Unfortunately, she was wearing a lurid orange shirt on the first day and I never caught her name or memorized her features. I never found her again.

4. For the love of God, figure out what to do with your business cards. First I had a special pocket, then I tried a special baggie, then I wrapped a rubber band around them. Finally I used my brain and stuffed a bunch into my name badge — problem solved. Then I could look on smugly while new friends ransacked their pockets and bags looking for cards to give me.

5. Linger after sessions. This is how I nabbed three of the four agents I pitched before my official pitching session. It's slightly more dignified than pouncing on agents on the elevator or in the bar. Plus you get to eavesdrop on the people in line in front of you.

6. This is a trick from my days covering board meetings as a reporter:

Draw a little map of panel participants first thing. That way, when the Question and Answer starts, you know who said what.

7. Never abandon a muffin to get to a session on time. You’ll end up surreptitiously crunching peanut M&Ms from the bottom of your purse at 8 in the morning just to survive the 90-minute session. Crinkly candy wrappers can be very loud in a hushed conference room.

8. Crash different genres at the Writer’s Café, where there’s a Memoir table, a Romance table, a Literary Fiction table, etc. I always like to know what’s going on in the galaxy at the Science Fiction table. Gene manipulation and artificial intelligence are apparently very hot this year.

9. The plot of your book should be a closely guarded secret. Plots take forever to spin out, and pretty soon people’s eyes start glazing over. If you start describing the climax of your book, and a certain person named Christine goes off to get another drink and look at the appetizer menu and she gets back and you’re still in the climax, it’s time to tighten up your book pitch.

10. If an agent you’ve pitched says “Fine, send me something” or better yet, gives you his or her card, this is your cue to disappear. I’d read this advice already from the fabulous Anne Mini, but that didn’t stop me from babbling some more to the first agent I pitched. Some people just can’t take yes for an answer!

Pretty Nervous Writing Aardvarks Speak Out!

Now that I'm back from Europe and life has settle down somewhat, it's time to think about my next trip: The PNWA Writers Conference in Seattle on July 25-28. That unpronounceable acronym, by the way, stands for the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. I call them the Pretty Nervous Writing Aardvarks so I can keep the letters in the right order.

I hadn't planned to attend the conference; it seemed like an indulgence so soon after Europe. But on Memorial Day I received a call from the Writing Aardvarks: My unfinished memoir, Too Small to Succeed, is a finalist in the Nonfiction/Memoir category. The PNWA lady (I was so amazed I now can't remember her name or hardly any other word in the phone conversation other than "finalist") asked me if I was attending the conference in July. Well, I am now, I wanted to stay, but mustered my manners and said I would very much like to attend.

So now I'm going, and I haven't been to a writing conference since I was 10, when I won a school writing contest with a poem about World War II. It went like this:

That crazy Hitler, he started a war,

and I have no doubt that there will be more. 

They won't be by him, because he is dead,

but from my point of view he had rocks in his head.

The poem went on for pages, I'm sorry to say, and my mother actually sent me a copy recently. Well, Benny liked it, anyway.

Anyway, this means that Too Small to Succeed is no longer just a Weird Little Project on the Side. I wrote the first two chapters in 2010 and then dropped it for two years, picking it up again last year. I kept working on it even after rejoining the Business Times in January and it's passed the 30,000-word mark now.

To help things along last summer, I joined a local memoir group. You know you're in a heavy crowd when your recession memoir tracing the country's financial collapse is the most lighthearted of the group. The other writers' topics ranged from sex cults to the Holocaust, much to the disturbance of other patrons at the Berkeley cafe where we met. The memoir group's leader ran a tight ship, necessitating a constant stream of emails and long phone calls about my writing purpose after I missed a few meetings.

So I ditched the memoir group, but I still needed feedback, so I entered the memoir's first 27 pages in the Writing Aardvark's literary contest, lured by the promise of detailed critiques from two judges.

Be careful what you wish for, for now my finalist status, the critiques and my preparations for the conference are making me self-conscious. Yesterday I read my 11 chapters for the first time in over a month, and while they hold up all right, writing new stuff has been difficult. I spent six hours writing yesterday, muttering at my laptop while Benny watched Sponge Bob and read his Percy Jackson books, hoping that eventually I'd produce something that wasn't terrible.

The results are not great: Chapter 12 is about September 2007, a month full of adjustments to our new apartment, my new editing job and Benny's new preschool, not to mention a horrifying pile of bills that added up to more than Ron's monthly take-home pay. Shiver. Throw in a Sept. 17 deadline to write 24 Latino Business Awards profiles in my spare time and this chapter makes me want to crawl under the dining room table with the cat. Not so funny. I'm having difficulty maintaining the amused detachment of earlier chapters. That humorous tone the judges liked so much is nowhere in evidence in Chapter 12, so now I must decide whether I've lost my voice or whether the story has simply shifted in a new direction.

This, of course, has happened before and as Stephen King says, sometimes writing feels like you're just shoveling shit from a sitting position. You just have to have faith that something good is buried in there, and if there isn't, that what you're shoveling will eventually lead to something good. In times like these, any encouragement helps and so thank you again, Pretty Nervous Writing Aardvarks.

Picky Picky Picky Contest Guidelines

So this morning I mailed off my entry to a literary writing contest and I’m still reeling.

Contests like those sponsored by the Pretty Nervous Writing Aardvarks, or PNWA, are a valuable way for unpublished writers to get noticed, but I must say that the submission guidelines give a whole new meaning to the phrase “barriers to entry.”

First of all, I’m convinced that the guidelines are a product of years, if not decades, of pet peeves developed by literary writing contest judges, because let me tell you, they are not written with the writer in mind. And yes, I realize that these august personages are donating their time and expertise and any little thing we can do to smooth the path is in our own best interests.

And actually, I suspect that literary writing contests like convoluted rules and submission processes. First of all, they provide a wonderful excuse to reject obviously scrabbled-together, last-minute entries rife with spelling and grammar mistakes. (“Ah, I note this writer did NOT put his category number on the outside of the envelope! Out of the pool!”) Secondly, such guidelines weed out the mediocrities and through natural selection produce the most astute and sophisticated of contestants, those freaky brainiacs who never consider submitting a 5.24-inch by 8-inch SASE envelope when obviously only a 4.125-inch by 9.5-inch envelope is called for. Finally, such guidelines only increase the prestige of the writing contest, implying that due to the enormous volume of submissions, requiring tiny little boxes packed with information on each upper right-hand corner is the only way to preserve the honored judges’ sanity.

It is in this spirit that I offer my own Literary Writing Contest Guidelines. I myself am not sponsoring a literary writing contest (oh heavens no), but it’s fun to assemble those hoops. So I offer this template for any individuals or organizations eager to discover desperate, unpublished writers while garnering a little prestige for themselves, but unsure how to go about it.

____________________________________________________

CONGRATULATIONS for choosing to participate in the Picky Picky Picky Literary Writing Contest. We are thrilled to offer this opportunity for fabulous prizes to American authors. Unfortunately due to shipping schedules, we are unable to accept submissions from states that begin and end with the same letter, but we look forward to seeing our Ohioan friends’ work in next months Less Picky Picky Picky contest.

Participants may submit in one of 47 categories. Unproperly categorized submissions will be discarded. Once you choose your category number, put it on everything: your pages, your big envelope, your postcard, your SAS #10 envelope, your check, tattoo it on your forehead. Own your category.

Your submission must be 4 pages, no more, no less. Double-spaced. Writers submitting single-spaced copy will be shot. The Synopsis is page one. The outline is page two. The author’s bio is page three. The table of contents should take up at least half of page four. Of course that means only a half-page is left for your story, but for our expert judges, 125 words is more than enough.

All submissions must be received by Feb. 29, 2013. Submissions mailed after that date will only be accepted through the Space-Time Continuum and received on Feb. 29, 2013. We will not sign for submissions. REPEAT, we will not sign for submission. We are busy people and have no time to sign for submissions. Teach your envelopes to be self-reliant.

Questions? Comments? We do not welcome them. Sink or swim — that’s the literary world today.

Sincerely,

Picky Picky Picky Literary Writing Contest Luminaries

The Magical Thinking Train

So I just finished the ninth chapter of my memoir, which is now at 20,279 words. The last few chapters have gone pretty quickly, since they hewed closely to my blog posts of that time in my life. We have arrived in San Francisco and fought the first skirmishes to find adequate -- if expensive -- housing and childcare. Although this memoir braids together my personal experiences and the broader economic events of 2007-2008, the last few chapters have been all me all the time. I did manage to tuck in some broader context, specifically addressing our landlord company's appalling business model and the challenges confronting San Francisco families. But basically the last few chapters have watched me ricochet from weird situation to weird situation, gibbering madly all the while. I swear, if this book ever gets published, my readers will probably throw this book across the room in disgust. I almost threw my computer across the room in disgust.

The scary thing was how deluded I was, how Mr. Killer Robot and I indulged in so much magical thinking. We just assumed we'd work things out, just boogie along until a perfect solution presented itself. We started July 2007 with a wretched apartment and no child care and ended August 2007 with a ridiculously expensive apartment and ridiculously expensive childcare. Apparently the only way to solve problems in San Francisco was to throw money at them, and if you didn't have any money, you just put it on the credit card. That's what much of the country was doing in 2007, and even if that made us more typical than we knew it didn't make our actions any less appalling. Much of the country was on some magical thinking train where home prices and credit limits always went up. The Dow hit 14,000 the week before we moved to San Francisco, then the stock market started to wig out a bit and the whole country started its inexorable slide to recession, which began December 2007.

It's very hard, I've found, to honestly lay out all the fateful and wrongheaded decisions Mr. Killer Robot and I made and not turn the whole thing into a pity party. Obviously the situation was kind of impossible, but nobody put us in that situation but ourselves.

Still, I'm kind of grateful to be out of that first week we arrived in San Francisco and I can take a broader look at things again. But a big financial blow awaits our family in August 2007 and I'm kind of dreading that. It's about a credit card bill and I can remember that day as if it were yesterday, sitting on a folding chair with the bills strewn on top of unpacked moving boxes.

But, thank heavens, I'm finished writing for today, so I'll think about that tomorrow.

Dithering

I’ve been reading a blog called “Cup Runneth Over,” or something like that. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a blog name is never just a blog name if the blogger is a literary author. With these guys, every damn thing in life must be delved or chewed or spun out ad infinitum. So there's a little box on the blog explaining the name, something about how reading and writing and loved ones fill the Cup of Life or something.

(Actually, the title and explanation are something different, but while I like to poke fun at literary authors, I do admire them and don't care to use their real blog title and mess up their fun.)

Anyway, this Cup Runneth Over blog has a neat feature that asks writers to detail how they spend a typical day. One day followed this short story writer who's published a book "to international acclaim." She helps get her daughter to school, then spends the day in her nightgown, typing on her laptop, which I think is cool. She admitted to spending a lot of time just messing around with her writing, puzzling out what to do next. She spoke of the process as a conversation between her and her story, back and forth, until both satisfied.

I like that, because I can get so impatient sometimes. (Who, me?) I start thinking that if I really knew what I was doing with a project, I wouldn’t have to change my mind every two seconds about what to do next. (Should I start the next chapter with the medieval legend, or a description of my new apartment's dirty floor? Maybe I should talk about the San Francisco commercial real estate market. Or the sounds of the city waking up, or a paragraph about eating a breakfast orange: "The sweet rind of my old life peeled away...)

Hmmm ... let's try to focus here.

Anyway, I liked how that writer described her process. It helps me give myself permission to dither. Dithering is important. This society doesn’t really support dithering: We’re supposed to be decisive, confident, able to make immediate, well-grounded decisions. I can do that if I have to, but if given the option, I'd rather dither.

The definition of dither is “to be uncertain or indecisive” in Britain and “to be in an agitated state” in the U.S. It kind of means both to me. The word actually comes from the 1640s, where it meant “to quake, tremble” and was a variant of the Middle English word didderen (late 14th-century). The vacillating, anxious connotation comes from the 1800s.

It’s a good word, and it has another connotation for me: I see dithering as a luxury, and you could even argue that it denotes status. After all, dithering takes time, and time is a resource increasingly rare these days. Only upper-class parents, for example, have time to dither over the best playdates, summer camps, tennis leagues or summer camps for their children. Only salaried professionals can dither over the best day to take off for a day trip or whether to visit the gym before or after work.

Hmmm, I’m starting to sound like one of those literary writers, taking a perfectly clear word and beating it half to death. But it’s okay to be little literary — I mean, isn’t the purpose here to write well? There are all kinds of ways to write well — sometimes you’re fast and careless and slapdash, and sometimes you dither and the next thing you know, you’re looking up medieval roots of words. It’s an occupational hazard.

Anyway, it’s time for this lady to end her typical day, and for me to end this post. So she put away the laptop and watched the Daily Show until she fell asleep. And now I'm thinking about how I’d like to spend my days, starting next week when my Robot Kid starts 3rd grade and I hope to begin writing in earnest.

But that’s for another post. I need time to dither.

Reliving That Year

So when you write a memoir about one of the most difficult years of your life, you find yourself — and I can't be the first one to have noticed this — reliving that difficult year in your life. That means I'm reliving March 2007 to March 2008, and let me tell you, it's not doing much for my equilibrium.

Thankfully, of course, I'm writing a financial memoir. There's no childhood trauma, no wartime struggle, no drug use, only a smattering of alcohol use. I didn't live on the streets or sell my body or hike the Mojave ... gosh, now I'm starting to wonder ... will anyone even read this book?

But even though that year's struggles might seem trivial to some, they certainly don't feel trivial to me. When I look back at that year, the strongest emotion I remember is the fear. I spent that year walking on a precipice, convinced that the smallest slip would cast us into financial failure. I choked on that emotion, walking around every day with my chest constricted. It was often an effort just to put a pleasant look on my face, since I often considered other people — even my own family — as unwelcome distractions from my single-minded focus on Getting Us Out of This.

Now, when I sit down at my laptop and fire up the next chapter (I just finished Chapter Five) I must drop myself into that cauldron of swirling feelings again. Every so often I have to come up for air, remind myself that we don't own a house anymore, we're not in debt anymore, we have money in the bank. Not the Suze Orman six-months-of-expenses money in the bank, but a tidy sum. Enough to help me sleep at night, when I'm not freaking out about our credit card APRs in July 2007. Actually, we don't even have any of those credit cards now. Nope, not even one. We had nine cards at the height of our debt in 2008 and now we have two. And neither one carries a balance.

I had to keep reminding myself of that when I wrote a difficult chapter, a chapter with a fight between Mr. Killer Robot and me about our biggest credit card. In July 2007 we went over-limit on that card — a card with a $25,000 balance. And $18,000 on the second-biggest card! It takes my breath away. Exceeding the limit on the bigger card triggered an APR hike from 9 percent to 29 percent. It nearly sunk us.

I hate writing about that month. I hate reliving those days. But I have to because, well, that's the whole point of the book, how we navigated a volatile economy and the consequences of our own choices. How our mistakes made us vulnerable, while the housing crisis and investment banking mess and December 2007 recession almost finished us off. I'm writing this book to try to make sense of what happened, to both my family and a country as a whole. And I can't do that unless I relive the summer of 2007 during the summer of 2012.

Short Play Project

When I'm not working on my recession memoir and having tiny anxiety attacks about it, I'm pondering a submission to 3Girls Theatre here in the Bay Area. The theater is soliciting plays by Bay Area women about family dysfunction over the holidays. They'll pick one to be a part of their Holiday Showcase in December.

So I'm developing a script for it. That sounds impressive, but what it really means is "I scribbled some ideas on the back of a hotel room receipt in Eugene, Ore." But I like writing 10-minute plays — it's a lot of fun — so I'll try to have something ready by the end of August.

Old Mortgage Company Declares Bankruptcy

I haven't gotten to the short sale part of my financial memoir yet, but I plan to detail the horrendous paperwork process with my mortgage company. While doing research, I discovered that AwayGo Financial (its nom de plume until I figure out what will get me sued and what won't) has declared bankruptcy. Ha! I'm surprised it took so long.

Actually, as traumatic as the short sale process was for me, it actually was a lot better than most experienced with AwayGo. I'm guessing it's because it was clear we couldn't keep the house, we were current on payments (despite pressure to default) and it was a relatively small amount.

This news is yet another reason to include an epilogue in this memoir detailing not only what happened to the Killer Robot Family, but to the the other characters and companies in this saga. It will take a page just to list the bankruptcies. I'm just grateful we weren't one of them.

The Perils of Consumerist.com

So apparently I'll be unable to read any mortgage related posts on Consumerist.com while writing this memoir, because I'm sure that the site's take-no-prisoners community will make short work of this book if it ever gets published.

In this post, a young couple moved into their first house a few years ago. Then the husband lost his job and they couldn't make the mortgage payments. They asked their lender PNC Mortgage for help, and we all know how that goes.

They moved out of the house, sold their Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture, and moved into an apartment with some IKEA furniture. They still pay the HOA fees and are trying to negotiate a short sale. PNC is being awful and now calling their relatives about the missed payments. Now there's a short sale under review and the bank's locked them out.

It just seems like PNC has made a bad situation unnecessarily horrible. They're obviously doing their best, though, so why is the Consumerist community piling onto them and treating them like whiny ax murderers? The reasons are legion:

1. They had Pottery Barn furniture.
2. They had Crate and Barrel furniture
3. They signed a mortgage, so tough titties.
4. They didn't have enough savings -- obviously because of the Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture.
5. They bought IKEA furniture.

So I've decided not to read Consumerist posts about mortgages for a while because there's no way I can write this memoir with visions of the Consumerist hive screaming for my blood. But this does remind me to keep the "poor little me" attitude out of my writing. I must never forget that Mr. Killer Robot and I got ourselves into this situation. The recession just made it worse.

Hold the Irony

From First World Problems:

"This screenplay I wrote is so far past post-ironic that it's actually approaching ironic again from the other direction."

April 21, 2012

The Stink of Failure

Writing prompt: Describe a smell that evokes a particular place.

Burned Popcorn

Whenever I smell burned popcorn I think of the first hair salon I visited after moving to Ann Arbor, Mich. Seeking a new hairstylist is always a traumatic experience and after moving from Detroit to Kalamazoo to Prague to San Francisco and now to Ann Arbor, you'd think I'd have a better grip on the process.

I'd read all the magazine tips for finding the perfect stylist — not that I needed the perfect stylist, I just wanted someone who could play up my hair's natural blonde as opposed to its natural gray. The gray had established a beachhead at the crown a few years before and now threatened total conquest and I needed a stylist who could help me fight the good fight.

So I read the magazine tips and they were predictable: ask your friends, ask women on the street with good hair, interview candidates. I found such suggestions ridiculous; I had exactly one friend in Ann Arbor at this point and she had terrible hair.

As for the second suggestion, well, that created a fascinating social experiment. Seriously, I think UC Berkeley researchers should take this up. I found the most friendly-looking women, those most likely to cheerfully respond to my request, had the worst-looking hair, while the beautifully coiffed ladies strolling down State Street looked ready to smack anyone foolish enough to address them.

So I adopted the time-honored tactic of walking down Main Street and picking the salon with the nicest sign. They brought me in and introduced me to Stephanie, a cheerful, heavyset stylist with a nose ring and a henna rinse. All was well until the faint odor of burned popcorn entered the room. Stephanie froze.

"What's that?" she asked.

"I think it's burned popcorn," I piped up, ever the helpful one, although it was obvious what the odor was.

"The new girl did it," whispered the neighboring stylist.

"The eyebrow girl?" Stephanie asked. A quick, grim nod.

"I don't understand that," Stephanie said, dabbing some potion on a lock of my hair. "You have to stand by the microwave while it pops."

"Everybody knows that," said the other stylist.

The smell grew stronger and the culprit, a young Asian girl, scampered out to apologize, but the stylists were having none of it. "You have to stand by the microwave," Stephanie said. The eyebrow girl looked ready to cry.

And that's why, although Stephanie created the perfect soft buttermilk highlights for my hair, I never returned to that salon.