Sunday Musings

I have a lot to share with you today. So much, in fact, it feels like I’ve neglected to say much for too long – but that’s not true because I did do my musings last week.

A lot has happened in a week, I guess.

The Canary Review

A while back I sent a revised version of the pitch I’d made here earlier to get some feedback from the canaries over at The Canary Review.

They handle pitches with a different sort of eye and I wanted to offer my own up as example and suggest that you might be interested in getting more in-depth crit from them one day:

http://thecanaryreview.com/2012/06/01/pitch-slapped-you-only-get-three-seconds-to-make-a-first-impression/

What we get on my blog is reader perception. What they give is editorial perception. They’ll be talking more about what agents and editors look for in pitches (I believe) this week on Friday.

If you follow me on FB or Twitter, I’ll post the link whenever I see the post or you can keep checking their blog too so you don’t miss it.

Tuesday Spotlight

This week Mitch Haynes will be in the spotlight to talk about a writer’s conference taking place in Denton, TX next month.

The LEXICON WRITERS CONFERENCEwill be held on July 21 – 22, 2012 in Denton, Texas but we have special events set up for the 19th and 20th as well.

Publicity

I know it’s just a little paper.li deal, but still. Publicity is publicity, ha. My awesome spot on the Science Fiction Daily: http://paper.li/AmyJoywriter/1333728136 (well darn. I’ll leave the link up in case you want to look at the paper, but content is different daily and I was only there on Sunday.)

Frontier Tales Anthology

Last evening I attended the standing-room-only release party for Duke Pennell’s Frontier Tales Anthology. Several of my local writerly friends were there to give readings or insight on the stories behind their stories. My role there also sort of morphed into being the ‘event photographer’ which I rather enjoyed.

The lovely Kim Pennell

Future topics

I want to start sharing some of the background to Symbiosis. Not sure yet which day of the week I’ll use to do this, but probably Tuesdays when I have no guest lined up.

When anyone writes a novel they’re drawing on things that they find interesting, topics that for whatever reason they enjoy. Mine run the gamut from philosophy, Jungian psychology, ancient history, ancient to modern religion, origin of myth, sociology (especially patriarchy vs matriarchy – is it indicative of anything that the word ‘matriarchy’ isn’t even in WP’s spell-check database, but ‘patriarchy’ is? – and pecking orders), balance of nature, herbalism (which bleeds into religion and fear of witchcraft), how fears drive societies (which bleeds into or really underlies many of the topics that interest me) and kundalini, karma, sexuality. Oh. I forgot to add that I love twisting the concept of thermodynamic’s first law…the one about conservation of energy. Some physicists might be appalled at the liberties I’ve taken with that one in Symbiosis.

Even fiction writers need a platform, things to talk about if invited to be a speaker or to present. Since all these things underly my passion for writing, any one of them could potentially become topics that segue with talking about my books. And not just Symbiosis, because my interest in these things influence everything I write in some way.

Me in cowgirl getup for the Frontier Tales release party.

Writerly Goal Check – Throwing in the towel

There comes a point when it’s time to throw in the towel and re-evaluate the goals.

I am at that point on two of my struggles.

First, I am having no success at all consistently getting up earlier than 0500. So my new goal is to get up consistently at 0500. Ha. If I *happen* to wake up earlier than that I will get myself out of bed and consider it a treat. I’ll stay up as late as I feel like staying up in the evenings if I’m working on my writing. If I’m just goofing off on the internet, I’ll go to bed by 2130. There is no television (well, there’s the unit, but no service) in my house, so  no worries there.

As for finishing my manuscript before August. I don’t see it happening. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for my rate of editing. I’ll continue at the pace I’m currently going, and barring unforeseen circumstances, it should be done in time for the Plan B date in October. I’ll use my Chicon experience to network and make contacts and learn from the workshops. Originally I’d wanted my ms to be ready for spontaneous pitching opportunity at the conference.

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Taking Reading Recommendations

One new thing I’m adding to my goal list is to read more. I need to find some comparable titles in my genre because I’ll need that info when I’m pitching.

Do you have any favorite books (traditionally published, that would be known to agents/editors) to recommend in the genres I write? A blend of urban fantasy and magical realism I think is closest to what Symbiosis will likely be categorized.

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Update 1545: Just found this excellent post at Tor.com about the differences between Fantasy and Magical Realism:  http://www.tor.com/blogs/2008/10/magicrealism

Losing My Zen

Did you notice there was no pitch post today?

That’s because I lost track of time yesterday and didn’t get it pre-loaded. If I don’t do that the night before, then I don’t have time to do it in the mornings unless I put aside my editing time. Can’t do that or I’ll backslide too much on that project.

I’ll bet you’re just hopping with curiosity to know what preoccupied me the day before.

No?

Too bad. I’m going to tell you anyway, haha.

I stopped on my way home at the park. This in itself seems an odd thing for me to do because at my own house there’s enough land to make it feel like I’ve gone to a wilderness preserve (which is the sort of ‘park’ I prefer to frequent anyway).

But by the time I get home, I’m tired of the drive and just ready to take off my shoes and relax. The park I stopped at isn’t too far from work, it’s fairly wild in habitat and has a nice trail to hike. So I hiked.

While hiking I noticed the herbs (Ozark medicinal plants, not the chillin’ kind). It was like visiting old friends I hadn’t seen in ages. They captured my attention the way they used to do before I got so busy all the time. Plus, I didn’t have my camera with me, so I wasn’t trying to take their pictures. We just socialized. Me and the plants. And the trees and some unknown critter who wouldn’t come out in plain view but kept making noise just out of sight.

When I left to head home it was later than I intended it to be, but I’d thoroughly enjoyed myself and I realized something. I’ve been losing my connection to the world around me while I’ve been busy trying to get my book edited.

This felt like an important discovery. So what to do?

I’m still going to work hard at getting the book edited. But sometimes I’m going to stop at that park and commune with the plants and I’m going to ride my horses more often. Even if it means missing a scheduled blog post once in a while.

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What do you do to get back into your groove when you’ve lost it? I don’t necessarily mean a *writing* groove. What I mean is your synchronicity with your *self*. Nature and horses help me stay connected in that way.  What keeps you connected?

Not yet back

This post is aimed at the guys over at the 451st in Kandahar, Afghanistan… Just in case you happen to check here to see if he’s on his way back out there yet. I’m still debating We’re supposed to head over to the airport in a few hours but I’m thinking I might rather not.

For the rest of my regular blog followers, I’m sorry for this cryptic message that went to your inboxes!

So the title of this post applies to me too. I’m not yet back in the land of the writerly living. Maybe tomorrow. Life is taking precedence right now, but it won’t be much longer. I’m already thinking in terms of what needs to be done next, calculating how much editing I’ll have to do each day in order to have my ms ready for my self-imposed deadline of late August, and getting the gears moving again.

Sunday Musings

My week of solitude has drawn to an end and life is gearing back up to return to somewhat normal.

Today is a day of cooking, cleaning and mingling with friends. Tomorrow marks the beginning of a new work-year with my day job.

It’s going to be difficult to focus on my job, though, because next week  Rob returns for his two weeks of R & R and I’m terribly excited about that. So life is going to go on a brief hiatus for me while he’s here.

I’m sure the two weeks are going to fly by even as I’m digging in heels trying to slow it down.  I’ll be back to writerly and mundane business on the 25th of January.

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I’m not sure when the Chinese New Year began, but 2012 is a Year of the Dragon. I was born in a Year of the Dragon. Seems like that combination surely ought to mean a powerful year is ahead for me, so that’s the mind-set I’m going forward with.

For a while now I’ve felt on the edge of something big, the cusp of great change. This is the year. I feel it in my bones.

Edit: According to the information at the website Janet gave me in her comment, not only was I born in the year of the Dragon, but my DAY of birth is a Dragon day, and since this year is also a Dragon year – I will be having a TRIPLE Dragon year.

That means really, really, really good! (at least by my interpretation)

Sacrificing Part to Save the Whole

This has been a week to savor.

I’ve only had to go into work for 1/2 a day on Wednesday, the kids have all been down south visiting their dad’s family for the holidays and I’ve had the house and land to myself.

Mostly what I’ve done with my time is write and edit Symbiosis.

But I’ve also savored the solitude, allowed the hermit in me to enjoy the quiet pleasures I don’t ordinarily get to do without the rush to go to work. Like collect the egg and tell the hen who laid it how much I appreciate her contribution to my diet. Ordinarily it’s after dark when I do this, or before dawn if I check eggs and feed in the mornings on my way to work.

Some of you might consider that to be a macabre thing to tell a hen when I’m essentially eating her ‘babies’. But that’s not true. When a hen isn’t broody, nor any of the hens in the flock are, they won’t set on the egg to make it hatch. They’ll walk away from it and it never grows into a chick.

When the hens are wanting to hatch out their eggs, I let them. However, here, too requires discernment. When one hen becomes broody they’ll all lay eggs in that hen’s nest. Soon the poor mother is sitting on a pile of eggs so high she can’t possibly keep them all warm enough to hatch.

If I take none, they all die. If I take some, those will of course not become chicks. But the ones I leave behind will have an excellent chance at becoming new life to carry on the endless cycle.

In nature there are predators to fill my role.

You might wonder how all this has anything to do with writing. Maybe it doesn’t to an average passer-by. But the concept of sacrificing part to save the whole has everything to do with the core concept of my work-in-progress, Symbiosis.

Sunday Musings: A Writer’s Business Plan

A Writer’s Business Plan – Part I

Work In Progress

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You might wonder why I’m bothering with my blog on Christmas day. Well, my family did Christmas last weekend so this weekend feels less like Christmas and more like a nice, peaceful opportunity to write and think.

The kids are all out doing their own things with other family members, so I’ve got some spare time to indulge in whatever I want.

What want is to up my odds for success at a writing career.

The musing I’m engaging in here today will ultimately be a gift I’m giving myself. The sense of control-of-my-own-destiny I get from it will lead to be a more relaxed me, so it’s going to be a gift to those closest to me as well. Everyone knows a happy, relaxed momma and mate is a great thing. And a controlling woman who at least is enjoying a delusion about being in control, well, that’s a good thing too.

I’m designing my writerly business plan. I’m plotting my career, not just a book.

Sounds a little tedious and over the top, I’m sure. That’s okay. I’m thinking in strategic, long-term view today and deciding how to plot the course of my future career in writing.

Optimistic yes?

Well, I’m feeling rather on top of things right now, so it’s a good time to plan.

For the first several weeks of the year I’m going to blog on Sundays (once I return from vacation) about this plan I’m devising and my progress in following it.

For today, the takeaway is this: A business plan is about the foundation of the business, not the product or service.

So to translate that to writerly terms: A writerly business plan is about the foundation of a writing career, not the stories.

How many of you have a plan? If you do, I’d love to know how you came up with it, what points were important to you. If you don’t you’re welcome to follow along with mine to see if it’s something you might like to do for yourself.

This is a trial and error endeavor since I haven’t found much on the net to help with my research. We’ll see in a couple of years whether it has done me much good to go to all the extra effort

Work In Progress

Writers on board:

• Sarah P. Berling
• Jeannie
• K.D. McCrite

Sunday’s musings…A plumbing parallel :) Mayhem in the story lines

My little plumbing project went well yesterday. Things like that always take me longer than it might someone else because I can’t just do it and get it over with.

I think about things too much. Always, always I bring my camera along if I’m working a job of any sort on the mountain. If I don’t I end up regretting it. So it’s not a straightforward start-to-finish thing when I do a project. There are detours.

Aside from nature-type photo opportunities, there’s the job itself. I know you wanted to see a photo essay of my plumbing project, lol. So I’m going to take you along with me. Why? Because a new parallel occurred to me. This is one that draws a comparison between some aspects of my plumbing job and my synopsis.

First I hiked up the mountain to look for leaks. This is what it looked like once I got past the first bench and looked back down toward the house. Click on it to enlarge so you can truly appreciate the view:

Mayhem. That’s what I had after I finished the first draft of my WIP, too. Total, chaotic mayhem. I had story lines flowing everywhere.

So I hiked up to the tank to shut off the flow. That’s essentially what I did the first time I made a read-through after letting the story sit in my files for a few weeks. Shut down the flow of ideas and let the pressure off so I could get to work fixing weak spots.

The first time I worked on repairing the draft, I focused on the most obvious weak links. I did that, too, with my water line.

But as soon as I turned the water back on and the pressure to hold water was on again…

Dammit if there weren’t new leaks springing up in the weak spots I’d overlooked. Which is exactly what happened with my draft when I began working on my synopsis.

I think now I’ve corrected all the weak links, both in the water line and in my story line. The pressure is going to mount in the coming days, weeks, and months and we’ll see just how good a job I did.

Here’s a few more pics from yesterday I thought you  might enjoy:

And this last photo is a perfect example of why it often takes me so long to do a project around the homestead. I spend a lot of time on the ground, whether I’m stumbling around on rocks and busting ass, or crawling on the forest floor planting seeds for ginseng, or just observing interesting things that catch my eye.

Like this:

What an intimate view of a new beginning this is. So much can be inferred from this image and I’m quite sure that one day this will feature as a Friday Fictioneer photo prompt. Hint, hint…

I’d love to hear from you about your synopsis woes or anything else that you feel inspired to comment on after reading this post.

Homestead update, indirectly ‘writerly’

This past weekend was an extremely productive one for me on the homestead front. You’d have to understand the conditions under which I’ve been living to know just how exciting these improvements are, but I’m going to list them anyway because it makes me feel good to see them collected all in one place. They’re all infrastructure related, and what’s interesting is that the main writerly progress I’ve made this weekend was also infrastructure related.

• Buried water lines to the horses water
• Attached heat trace to exposed water line to horse’s trough
• Installed heated bucket  with automatic waterer (to be shared by horses, chickens, cats and dogs) (built a set of rock steps for the short guys)
• Installed thermostatically controlled outlet for heat tape and bucket
• Installed wall-mounted, thermostat-controlled propane heater in our house

These five things will make my life during winter exponentially better. It was so nice last night to stand in front of the heater and warm our ourselves and then walk over to the window and see the orange glow of the little indicator light on the heat trace telling me that the water line was being kept above freezing.

For the past six winters we’ve lived in near survival mode, the first four in an old uninsulated house with only a woodstove for heat. One year I actually had an ice stalactite and stalagmite in my kitchen sink from where the water froze while it dripped.  The past two have been spent in a new unfinished house with no reliable efficient heat other than electric space heaters. When the power went out during ice storms we used emergency propane heaters.

As I’d said during my Thanksgiving list of things I’m thankful for, heat is a big item on that list – heat for the house, and the water for washing dishes and bathing, and heat to keep the lines from freezing down at the horse’s water. Of course, when the power goes out this year I’ll do without heated water but it will be oh so nice to be able to heat the house without worry. So grateful to my son for helping with the work and to Rob for footing the bill. Garrison learned some new skills along with me. He’ll surely need them in the future if he chooses to live in a rural propane dependent area when he grows up.

All these improvements affect my ability to focus and get things written. The project I’ve been working on all weekend aside from the physical household improvements was my novel synopsis. That’s a major infrastructure item for a novel. I realize that now. Until I did this, I had no idea how hard it really would be to do and like the propane heater installation, it was exceptionally challenging. But also like the heater installation, having done it feels incredible!

Now I’m going into the next phase of editing with a renewed confidence in the story and with a much clearer sense of direction. Onward ho!

 

One of my early writerly influences: Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73

Obit: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/science/lynn-margulis-trailblazing-theorist-on-evolution-dies-at-73.html

Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: November 24, 2011

Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.

She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Dr. Margulis had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988. She drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.

The rest of the obit can be found by following the link given above.

When I was in my early 20′s I went to a lecture given by Dr. Margulis. I think it was at LSU or maybe SLU. At the time I was attending classes, but her lecture wasn’t a requirement, it was just an opportunity for me to hear someone talk with authority about the Gaia hypothesis.

I remember being surprised that such a woo-woo topic would be taken seriously at university – and that excited me, because at the time, I was all about the woo-woo in life. Her lecture, not surprisingly, wasn’t heavily attended. But that only gave me the better opportunity to speak to her afterwards and tell her how much I enjoyed it.

Of course I was young and not seriously studying the material. Much of what she said is lost. What influenced me, what stuck behind, was the concept of symbiosis and how it has affected evolution.

The concept of a living earth as organism. It may not be what she intended. I don’t remember her saying anything to that affect, but that concept has affected how I think about a lot of things, maybe everything. And I started thinking it after I’d listened to her lecture.

My imagination takes that simple concept a bit further and underlies everything I write into my fiction. That’s how an evolution scientist became one of my early influences. It’s no coincidence that the title of my novel-in-progress is Symbiosis.

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