". . . you've given up on writing anything important. . ."

I'm comfortable with my identity as a writer, but there's often a moment of hesitation before I answer the question of what I write.

When I talk about writing genre fiction in general and science fiction/fantasy in specific (and that's even before I mention working in young adult. . . ) I often get a dismissive response.

As if the kind of stories I write aren't 'important' enough.

So I was thrilled that I got linked to this video of Mike Wallace interviewing Rod Sterling in 1959 about the show he had in production: The Twilight Zone.

It's a 20+ minute interview, and well worth watching in its entirety. The beginning deals with censorship and sponsors. But it's somewhere past the 10 minute mark where Wallace starts to throw his zingers.

He says about Sterling's production of The Twilight Zone:

". . . you've given up on writing anything important for television."

 And Sterling rejects that assertion. He also goes on to reject the notion that something commercial can't also be artistically strong.


When he talked about the importance of never being ashamed of what one has created, I wanted to stand up and cheer.

Thank you, Mr. Sterling. Thank you. I am proud of everything I have written--all the work of fantasy and imagination I have created and have yet to create. These are important. They matter.

And I will not let anyone dismiss them.

Serial Woes

When I serialized my first draft of DERELICT on Wattpad and on its own blog, I had no idea what to expect. My first draft process is generally a very private one. If I show it to anyone, I may share a scene or three or use my husband as a plot sounding board, but beyond that, it's between me, my strange subconscious, and my laptop.

But I'm never one for complacency in my process and I saw this experiment in public accountability as a way to shake up my writing a bit. Plus, DERELICT was something different than I'd been writing and I saw the serialization process as sending up a trial balloon.

All in all, I really enjoyed seeing readers get engaged and really enjoy the story.

(Aside and an update: It's been revised and is currently with my agent, in preparation for submission. An editor at one of the big SF&F publishers I met at a recent conference asked for it--not saying more than that, lest I jinx things!)

Which brings me to my problem.

I have a 'trunk' novel (e.g., the early novel you stuff into a trunk under your bed because it should never, ever see the light of readership) that I'm now completely renovating. (No, that's not a typo or wrong word. Have you ever done a gut renovation of an old house? That's what this process is like. Tear down to the studs. Rebuild.)

I have an entirely new first 25% and a solid plan for integrating what worked of the original storyline. And I'd love to serialize the story as I rework it.

BUT, I don't have a title.

Well, I had a title, but I never liked the title. It didn't fit when I first drafted the novel and it doesn't work now. I can't serialize an unnamed story. The 411 on the fantasy-story-with-the-unsatisfying-name:

Lilliane Tor, a renowned empathic healer from Rimland, learns the cost of keeping her oath when she saves the life of Jahnissim Hal Zev, a member of the nomadic and insular Tisreen and becomes entangled in a diplomatic nightmare. A fugitive from her own land, and in search of her missing sister, she escapes to Tisreen with Zev and enters a bewildering world of a rigid religion and culture, where women's roles are tightly controlled and political disputes are settled on the edge of a blade. And where hudessh, or The Divine Obligation, is as binding as any healer's oath.

That Zev owes his life to a woman, and one who doesn't follow his beliefs challenges the foundations of his identity. When he finds evidence of an illegal slave trade poisoning the heart of both their countries, Zev must learn to trust Lilliane, working with her against a common evil. Their quest to unravel the truth, rescue Lilliane's sister, and expose the trade threatens their lives, the stability of two governments, and the core of their own beliefs about one another.

A few questions:
1--would you be interested in reading it?
2--what do I call this blasted thing???

Why Continuum is my new favorite TV show

It's a rare thing, indeed, to find a television show that is smart, morally complex, surprising, supenseful, and entertaining.

It's even rarer to find said show revolving around a female lead who has power and agency and is emotionally resonant as a full human being.

That is why I love Continuum.

Here's the pitch on the show's 'about' page:

When a group of fanatical terrorists escape their planned execution in 2077 by traveling back in time to 2012, they inadvertently take City Protective Services officer Kiera Cameron with them. Trapped in a more “primitive” past, Kiera infiltrates the local police department to try to track down the terrorists before they change the course of history.

But this only tells part of the story. The brilliance of this show is in the moral dilemma it presents. 2077 is a world where the corporations have won. They control world governments and make all the decisions. It's not quite a Hunger Games dystopia--we see snatches of life from 2077 where people live the way people have always lived, but democracy is a quaint idea whose time has essentially come and gone.

The terrorists (Liber8) are people who fight against corporate control and while we clearly don't sympathize with their methods, it's hard to argue with their desperation and beliefs. They believe they are fighting for democracy and freedom.

When Kiera lands in 2013, her goals are to apprehend the escaped terrorists and try to find a way back home, both for her own sake (her husband and young son are in 2077) and for the sake of bringing the terrorists to justice.

But (and here's where the show edges into uncomfortable and important territory), she starts to see where their ideals and hopes are not necessarily the evil she has fought all her career.

The show doesn't make it easy to sympathize with Liber8. The group's members include amoral killers and manipulators, but the line between fully right and fully wrong isn't so easily drawn.

The other reason this is on my must watch list? Kiera, the lead character. She's resourceful, smart, skilled, brave, and thoughtful. Many of her actions are morally ambiguous (lying, stealing, taking liberties with her future tech to get answers) and yet we root for her. She's struggling to make the best of a difficult personal and societal situation. Plus-a-million to the showrunners for NOT doing the typical love interest story around her 2013 police partner.

So, if you're looking for a new show, you could do a lot worse than Continuum. I'm just not sure you could do a lot better. And it's been picked up for season 2. Yay!

Transitions, or why I dislike Spring

Up until a week ago, our back yard was buried beneath a layer of grimy, churned up snow, courtesy of the two dogs and multiple rounds of freeze/thaw/freeze. After several mild and sunny days, the yard turned into a muddy mess and a mine-field of dog poop.

Sadly, it comes with having two dogs, a fenced in yard, and a dog door. While my husband takes care of nearly all the yard maintenance and gardening, keeping the yard clear from our dogs' gifts is my job.

I braved the field of battle earlier this weekend and let's just say that if dog leavings were worth money, I'd be a very wealthy woman.

This is not an entire post about dog excrement.

It's about the coming of Spring and change in general.

While I was scouring the ground of subtle and not-so-subtle land-mines, I noticed that one entire garden bed is an explosion of tiny purple crocuses. They are 'volunteer' flowers. We didn't plant them and they've been spreading and returning each March. Depending on the year and the vagaries of the weather, I might not even see them because they are in a part of the yard you can't see from the kitchen door and it's usually too cold and damp for me to want to tramp in the slush to look for them.

But it is a sign that Spring is coming, despite the upcoming French Toast Emergency declared for Monday evening into Tuesday here in the great Northeast.

Despite what everybody around me seems to be saying, I am not a huge fan of Spring--especially not in New England. It's fickle. It changes its mind on a daily basis and just can't settle on its own identity.

It is a season in transition.

I much prefer the middle of winter. It's resolute. It's stark. It's dependable.

Not so early Spring.

I don't trust Spring. We turn the clocks and all of a sudden it's light later. But it's not like there are suddenly more hours of daylight. No, the light is simply shifted. It's a trick.

Change is hard for me. It always has been. I don't do temporary or uncertain very well, but for the most part, I am able to cope. After all, the world is a series of jarring shifts and changes and it's not like I can keep them at bay.

But something about Spring batters at my ability to deal with other uncertainties. It's the time of year I always feel the most vulnerable. It doesn't help that I'm waiting on word from my agent about the manuscript she's reading now. She's only had it for a week and my rational brain knows she'll get to it when she can give it the attention it needs. If only my rational brain were the side of me in complete control.

So don't mind me. I'll just be curled up in the living room watching it sleet tomorrow, thinking evil thoughts about ill-behavied crocuses, mud, and dog poop. 

Writer's Block: You Shall Not Pass

"You Shall Not Pass"
Photo cropped from original by somegeekintn, under cc license

Every couple of months, I see a blog post or a conversation on FB or G+ on writer's block and what to do about it.

To be honest, I'm not sure I believe in it as an individual entity. To believe in writer's block is to believe that we are akin to factories, with a scheduled amount of creativity and that if we don't produce to that standard, we must be blocked.

I think there are essentially two circumstances that underlie what we think of as writer's block: Exhaustion of one kind or another or a flaw in the work at hand that makes the subconcious stumble. The first is a general issue and will interfere with a broad range of creative expression. The second is a specific issue and may respond to shifting gears to a new project.

The WIP (work in progress)-specific problem is the simpler of the two to handle and it's where so many of the common 'cures' for writers block focus: morning pages, exercise, change of scenery, shift in genre, shift in mode of expression, writing prompts and exercises, etc. The trick here is to shake up your subconscious a bit in the hopes that what is stuck will become clear and the work can continue. 

The more general problem of creative exhaustion is probably more common than we admit. In order to create, we must care for ourselves: body, mind, and soul. Our full self is the well we draw on when we create art, and as a dear friend reminds me from time to time, if we are to harvest the tree, we need to water the roots.

When I run up against a roadblock in my own work, I first look to shift to a different project. If I'm writing a novel, I read and write poetry or work on a short story. I step away from the piece that has been problematic for a day or two. If nothing changes and if I'm not able to feel any spark in the other kinds of creativity, then I need to look inside and make sure I haven't neglected to care for myself in some way.

Sometimes it's simple self care: getting more sleep or eating more balanced meals, for example. Sometimes it's about the stress of fulfilling other life roles and responsibilities. I've just finished an intensive few weeks of revisions for DERELICT, the SF novel whose first draft I serialized earlier in the year. While I was immersed in it, I let some of my basic household organization fall by the wayside. While I have other deadlines to manage, my anxiety over my real life responsibilities will make it impossible to find the writing zone. If I plowed ahead, I'd feel stuck and frustrated. But I wouldn't call it writer's block.

It's more of an internal tension or wrongness.

When I've stopped to listen to that resistance instead of fighting it, I find that I'm able to return to balance and creativity much, much sooner. There is also a natural ebb and flow to our creativity that I find better to honor at the outset than attempt to override it in a pure effort of will.

If this sounds like I'm all 'loosey goosey' in my approach to writing, that is not the case. While I honor my internal rhythms and seek to find balance and support for my creativity, I also believe in approaching the writing with a discipline. I write nearly every day. I also believe that following a daily discipline of writing helps you train for the work, just as running every day helps you train for a marathon.

Writing is my job and I treat it as such. Before I shifted to writing full time, I had a 23+ year career as a physical therapist. There were days when I didn't feel sharp or particularly thrilled to be at work, but I would never have described it as 'physical therapist's block'. And while there is a difference between working as a therapist ( or a plumber or a lawyer or a computer programmer) and being an artist, I believe there is an element of creativity in all jobs.

So don't let the concept of writer's block be your personal Gandalf at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm moment. (I bet you've been wondering when I'd relate the photo to the post.) It doesn't have to be an epic battle--it's your own creativity you're fighting, not a Balrog of Morgoth.




Today’s post was inspired by Forward Motion’s Merry-Go-Round topic, “Writer’s Block”. If you want to get to know nearly twenty other writers and read about their ideas, then check out the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour.

Every day is an act of faith

photo by me: seen in my travels

This was the sign outside a church near my bank. I had to stop, dig out my iPod and snap a photograph. Something in the saying: "The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf" really spoke to me and it's taken me more than a week to figure out why.

I'm not sure how much of a risk-taker I am by nature. Certainly people who know me would describe me as cautious--a thinker more than a doer. Spontaneous is just not a part of my inborn nature, though I love to have friends around me who are spontaneous.

And yet, I take risks every day in my writing. I risk myself in this blog space, by sharing my inner thoughts, by being honest and open. Anyone could stumble across this blog and read about my life. Surely, there is something of the risk-taker in me.

If a risk is doing something, even if you can't predict the outcome, then every choice is a risk. But I think it's more than that. I think to be willing to take a risk is to be willing to walk forward into the unknown with some degree of joy and anticipation in addition to the fear.

And really, isn't that what we do every day?

I have been thinking of my teenage sons. My eldest, a 19 year old college student, is in the UK for the next two weeks. While he's traveled quite a lot through the US and abroad, this is his first trip on his own. I'm sure he's a little nervous. He's encountering so many things for the first time as he moves into the adult world.

But here's the thing: so am I.

I've never been the parent of a 19 year old before. I don't have a map or a guide to know how to parent an emerging adult. As new as it is for him, it's also new for me. When I realized this, I started laughing. It meant that it was okay if I didn't know all the answers--not in my parenting, not in my writing.

I am doing things I never, ever dreamed I'd be doing. I just finished editing and revising my 8th novel. In the process, I opened myself up to an editorial process that made me feel as awkward and as tentative as a beginner again. It was a huge creative and personal risk and yet I took it, eagerly (though I may have had a few inner tantrums along the way).

Now, having completed the revision and the difficult work with a tough-love editor, not only is the story better, but I am a stronger writer. I took the risk because to choose the safe and predictable course will not lead to growth and change: it leads to creative death.

Children have some great advantages over adults: they don't expect to know everything. They don't expect to be experts. They don't expect to be perfect. But somewhere along the way, we delude ourselves into believing our growing days are over. That all the risk in our lives is outside of us and something to be managed or tamed.

It doesn't work that way. Especially not for artists and creators.

Embracing risk and the possibility of change is the hard work of living. There are no shortcuts. There is only the work and the stubborn insistence we have of taking another step forward into uncertainty.