BACK! in the saddle

It's been a rough couple of weeks, blog-o-buddies. Work, family, holidays, working on holidays, I've had my fill. But this weekend was the first weekend in a long time that I actually didn't have a whirlwind of plans to steal my time away. Which meant...oh, yes, that's right...WRITING TIME!

I'm in a weird writing place right now. I'm editing the current WIP, but doing some pretty major overhauls to the two MCs and their interactions with each other. I got excellent feedback from the P-i-C and my first beta reader, and I'm working to incorporate their suggestions into a bigger, even more awesome manuscript. Which means creating new scenes, completely scrapping the dialogue from existing scenes, and copying and pasting huge chunks of other scenes from one Word doc to another. Fun!

But it felt sooooo good to make some headway again. I even took the train this morning for the first time in two weeks and got a solid hour of uninterrupted writing/editing time. It's like I'm becoming a real girl, lovelies! Plus, if I want to avoid that sophomore syndrome, I better start shaping up my timelines!

What about you? What are you happy about on this blistering Monday morning?

STOP GIVING AWAY AWESOME STUFF WHEN I'M TOO BUSY TO ENTER!

Dear Blog-o-buddies:

We've had good times together, I know we have. You've said some funny stuff, I've said some funny stuff, we've laughed, cried, cringed, eaten way more ice cream than the FDA recommends. We're buds, I believe that.

So I can be real with you. Life has been, in a word, CRAZY. Crizazy. Which unfortunately means I've been too busy to make the desired rounds of my favorite blogs. But I try to check in on the Google Reader and see who's saying what around the hinterwebs. And I'm noticing a disturbing trend.

You're having contents. Cool contests. With fun things like ARCs and pretty books and maybe a fun doodad or two. Okay, I get it. Contests are fun. Contests make people happy. Heck, contests make me happy.

But you know what doesn't make me happy, blog-o-buddies? When you have awesome contests that I can't enter because I'm too mother-fudging busy. It's like you all got together and decided to pass out all the fun books when I was out sick from class.

I'll kindly ask you to cease and desist with the awesomeness until I'm at a point where I can enter your fabulous contests again. I think this is a perfectly reasonable request, don't you, gentle readers?

Sincerely and with much love and hope of fun cool things coming her way,
JEM

P.S. ALL YOUR BOOKS ARE BELONG TO US.

Why statistics work 60% of the time, every time

I read a great post on Maggie Stiefvater's blog yesterday about the odds of getting published in this industry. She makes the very good point that many of the submissions literary agents receive are unsuitable for public consumption, and while some of her younger admirers despair of ever being published in such an environment, she thinks the odds are greater than the numbers we're seeing.

I took a statistics course in college and learned all about distributions and average means and mean averages and  margin of sampling error and all that somewhat math related stuff that makes my brain cry. I also studied marketing and market research, focus groups, etc., and so I'm inclined to agree with the great Maggie. The basic feeling about statistics is that you can make them say whatever you want.

With that in mind, I have some very useful Friday statistics:

1) I enjoy Fridays 100% of the time
2) 75% of people who don't work on Fridays are on my "to hate" list
3) 36.2% of this Friday will be spent slacking off
4) 100% of that last comment was a lie
5) Fine, 52.6% of this Friday will be spent slacking off

See? Math is fun!

Happy fun Fridays, everybody!

On baseball, writing, and life

The partner-in-crime is borderline obsessed with baseball (the borderline is just my way of being nice, he's full on crazy), and while I lovingly tolerate the 70 some-odd games I'm subjected to during baseball season, my post last week about statistics got me thinking. I'm not sure how I feel about him loving a game that encourages under-achievement.

Take their batting averages, for instance. When someone says they have a "3-0-0" batting average, they're not talking about 300. They're talking about POINT three zero zero. Which, statistically, equals 30%. Which means they hit 30% of the balls that come their way. And that's a good batting average. You're getting into the A-Rod/Big Papi/Pujols range with that one.

But think about it. What other job on earth would reward 30% achievement?

"Scott, you found over 30% of the safety violations in our nuclear plant. We're giving you a promotion."
"Jane, you've landed 30% of your commercial flights successfully. We'd like to double your salary."
"Bob, 30% of your students passed this year, we're making you Teacher of the Year!"

This leads rather nicely into writing as a profession. Because as soon as I thought, "What kind of profession would reward such low achievement levels?" I had my answer. Writing. We're all crazy enough to keep at it even though the statistics are against us. And I'm not just talking about the statistics of getting an agent or getting published. I'm talking about the statistics of sell through, statistics on a second/third/tenth book, the statistics of making a living as a writer.

The bald truth is, the odds are MAJORLY against us. Spell check doesn't want to give me majorly, but it's clearly never seen Clueless. And yet, with the deck stacked against us, we're all here. Yeah, we know the odds. Yeah, we've seen the numbers. Yeah, we've gotten the rejection letters.

But we're Still. Here.

Which leads me to life. And more specifically, the human condition. Because let's face it, life ain't easy. The more we progress as a society the more existential our struggles become. It's not enough to have a roof over our heads, it has to be a nice one. It's not enough to have food on the table, it has to be organic and rare and maybe imported. We set the bar high, my friends. But it's helped us achieve great things as a species. And some of the best and most successful books have risen out of the ashes of an author decimated by struggles life threw at him or her.

Which is why, odds or no odds or against all odds, we keep trying. Baseball players keep stepping up to the plate and writers keep stepping up to the keyboard. We know the numbers, we  know the odds, we know the likelihood, but we're all still here, typing and swinging away. Dreaming and hoping and revising and crying a little and triumphing. Because we all know what greatness can be achieved by beating life at it's own game.

Baseball, obviously.

Don't forget to register!

For WriteOnCon, of course! Registration opens today, go here to join in the awesomeness with a side of awesomesauce.

If only someone had EXPLAINED beforehand...

So, I don't know if many of you know this or not, but revisions are HARD. Like, WAY hard. To which I say: what the what, man? I did all the hard work of plotting, writing, replotting, rewriting, moving stuff around, holding imaginary conversations with myself in the shower. Isn't that enough, great write whale of a muse? Isn't that enough?!? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

Apparently more character development and a stronger relationship between the two MCs. Siiiigh. Fine. But now I have to go back through ALL OF THOSE CHAPTERS again and tweak and add and delete and stand back and tilt my head to one side and then shake my head and erase everything and then throw my computer against a wall and have some vodka. I'm good at plotting, I'm good at moving a story forward, I'm good at adding in little mini-stories that keep the main story interesting. What I'm not so good at: character motivations and romantic interactions.

Don't get me wrong, I know what makes a guy hot (uh...sorry if you're reading this, Dad). But putting that down on paper...way harder than I thought. And what's even harder to guess is how other people will react to a character. Obviously you shouldn't write to please other people, but it helps if you want to sell any books. And figuring out how to get your story from "pretty good" to "holy crabcakes I couldn't put the durn thing down" is nigh upon impossible.

So I've been in kind of a revision funk. Not sure where to take my characters, not sure I'm doing enough, not sure I'm not doing too much, etc. If you're in revisions, how do you move yourself out of the rut?

Some things I still don't understand about life

Thanks for all the supportive comments on Friday. Our friends are home from the hospital now and are taking a few days together to recuperate and start the healing process.

There is a concept that with age comes wisdom, and while I haven't reached an age ripe enough to give me total wisdom, I can't help feeling like I'm behind the eight ball on being smart about stuff. I'm not sure if technology is to blame because we're not all sitting around reading books to keep ourselves entertained (and therefore learning whether we like it or not), or if some people were always this dumb and we just don't remember or celebrate the dumb ones. But there are still some pretty basic things about life I think I should have a better grip on that I DEFINITELY don't.

1) How to address work frustrations. I'm not a confrontational person by nature, but I've been in the working world long enough that I should know how to tell someone to piss off without pissing them off. Instead I gripe about the person/situation/email/lack of fruit baskets to everyone but the offending party.

2) Paparazzi. I don't understand how to spell it, and I don't understand how they make a living out of what they do. You catch a picture of Brad Pitt frolicking on a beach with Angeline Jolie while he's still married to Jennifer Aniston? Sure, fine. You take a picture of Halle Berry in mom jeans at the supermarket and I'm supposed to pay you? Yeah. No.

3) Why people don't recycle. I'm not even going to get on my compostable soap box about this, but when it's readily available and it helps make the planet a little cleaner for your present or future kids, and you still don't do it? Now you're just spitting in Mother Nature's face.

4) The stock market. Period.

5) Why so many people choose the parking lot of a Wal-Mart to air their family drama. Usually after 10 p.m.

6) What I'm doing at a Wal-Mart after 10 p.m.

7) How this whole being a grown up thing works. I mean, really, I have to pay the SAME bills EVERY FRIGGIN MONTH?!? Do they understand how EXPENSIVE that is?

8) What was my teenage self so angry about all the time?

9) If cupcakes are so bad for me, why do they taste SO. DELICIOUSLY. GOOD? That seems like some kind of cruel trick.

10) Life.

When the universe sends you bad stories

I've settled on a new mantra for myself: if you open your heart to the universe, it will fill your soul with stories. I shared this mantra with the P-i-C on our nightly casing of joints and he liked it.

"But what do you do when the universe sends you a bad story?" he asked.
"No such thing. You might have a bad telling, but there's no such thing as a bad story. Stories just are."

Well apparently I was wrong. Today we found out the unthinkable news: some good friends of ours lost their first baby girl in childbirth. For all of our shock and devastation, there was no possible way for me to think of this story as anything other than bad. Every time I told someone new and felt that awful pit of grief, I knew this story wasn't some emotionless, blameless thing. And the P-i-C's question came echoing back to me.

What do you do when the universe sends you a bad story?

My thought: you make it a good one. Because sweet baby girl was a fighter. She fought to spend a few precious moments in her parents' arms, to say hello to the world and let them know they were loved, that she knew they loved her, and that even if the universe saw fit to take her out of it, she was going on her terms. She would have been a joy to watch grow up, but I didn't have to see her whole life to know what kind of person she was. She showed us in the twelve minutes she was here.

I won't look on what could have been, I'll look on what was and know we were blessed.

Apparently I don't heed good advice

One of my aunt's is a prolific writer (she's had more than 12 books published) and editor, and when I told her that I was writing a manuscript she gave me one piece of advice: don't let anyone else read it until YOU think it's perfect. They'll never be able to get that first version out of their minds, and their feedback won't be as helpful.

At the time I thought "yeah, sure, good. I'll make it perfect." And I set out with the best of intentions, childrens, I really did. I figured I'd write a rough draft, go through an edit or two, and then when I couldn't find anything wrong with it anymore, I'd turn it over to some beta readers. Right? Right.

There were things I wasn't prepared for, gentle readers. Things like TIME and IMPATIENCE and HOW MANY FRIGGIN TIMES DO I HAVE TO READ THIS CHAPTER type things. Or the THIS WHOLE BOOK IS CRAP I'M SCRAPPING IT thing. Don't act like you've never had that thing, I've seen your computer files. The manuscripts you'd rather burn than let someone else read. Some of them are there for a good reason, but some of them are there because you just got tired of looking at the same words over and over.

So I thought, ahhh, I'll let the P-i-C read them. He can give me constructive feedback and then I don't feel like I'm huddled in a corner scratching stories onto the wall for six months with no return. And so I handed some chapters over. And then some more. And then it was the whole book.

The whole first draft.

Let that sink in. I let someone read a first draft. Does he know that's a first draft? Sure. Does he know all the things I intend to fix later? No. Can he ignore them if I tell him to? No. It's like on TV, when lawyers will slip in some sentence they know they're not supposed to say so that the jury hears it even though it's stricken from the record (I'm pretty much a lawyer, so I know these things are true). A reader won't ignore something just because you tell them to.

So I finished the first draft of the current WIP and immediately went into character revisions. My two MCs weren't strong enough, and they didn't create enough of a spark together. So I SLAVE over a revised chapter one and swagger over to the P-i-C with lappy in hand.

"There you go, shiny new revised chapter one."

"Oh, cool." Pause for reading. "Wait, this is just the same thing."

"WHAT?!? This is TOTALLY different!"

"What's different?"

"There's...dialogue. And description. And I made her less whiny and I made him cooler. It's STREETS AHEAD of the original first chapter."

"Oh. Seems the same to me."

Frustrated tearing out of hair.

And that's when my aunt's words came echoing back to me. I couldn't take back what he'd already read. I couldn't take back that he already knew the plot line and so any added mystery was lost on him. I'd put words out there and now I couldn't take them back.

The truth is, I'll keep bugging the P-i-C to read my stuff. I need some kind of instant gratification that I'm headed on the right path, and I've pretty much corrupted him anyway. But I've learned a valuable lesson about when to hand over a piece of work to an outside audience: you better be darn sure you can't think of a SINGLE THING to fix anymore, because you can't take those words back.

Some things I've noticed

1) There is an alarmingly high number of people who go mental right outside my office window. Usually toothless and/or homeless and shouting obscenities. Perhaps this is what I get for working next to the homeless shelter.

2) I will not find the concept of gazpacho alluring no matter how you try to spin it.

3) Coffee is better than a high five from Michael Phelps.

4) Sometimes the difference between the way I think I look and the reality that faces me in the mirror when I go to the bathroom is heart attack inducing. Especially after having watched a movie with a bunch of pretty people in it.

5) Women who look really good in monokinis have no soul. I've fact checked this one.

6) I thought all of my shows being over for the summer would free up more time for other things, but it turns out it just encourages me to watch previous seasons of random shows on Hulu and Netflix streaming.

7) This is hilarious. So is this.

8) Having now surpassed five, I feel compelled to carry on to ten.

9) The school zone light still blinks near my house even though school is out. This angers me. Twenty miles an hour is not a good speed to drive while angry. Highly dissatisfying.

10) I got to ten!

11) That last one was kind of lame, so you get a bonus one. I'm finding that being myself is both terrifying and rewarding. And involves lots of embarrassing pictures of me on people's iPhones.