I'm Too Lazy/Scared/Untalented to Write a Novel...

...but I did it anyway.

Yes, friends, the Secret (not a secret at all if you follow me on Twitter!) is out. Yesterday I wrote "THE END" on what may one day become the last page of my very first full-length novel.

It's not finished, of course. After letting it rest for a month to clear out my brain buffers, it will need considerable revision over the summer, and then it'll go to some beta readers who, I hope, will criticize it mercilessly and prompt another round of revisions. I'm looking at a time frame of late 2010 to send query letters to a handful of carefully chosen agents, in whose inboxes they will sit until said agents get round to reading them, which due to the huge number of submissions agents seem to receive will take several weeks. So I'm expecting to receive my first rejection letters in early 2011, setting off a new round of revisions and queries, and so on until I either get lucky or give up. And that's just to get an agent! Getting published is a long, hard road.

I've always dreamed of writing fiction, but as the title of this post suggests, I had a lot of mental blocks:

Lazy: OK, I'm not technically a lazy person. A friend once told me I had more energy than God, which was such a wonderful exaggeration that I've never forgotten it! But the sheer discipline of writing something that may never see the light of day just because... I had no idea if I could do it.

Scared: believe it or not, I'm a shy little thing at heart. As a young woman I had several experiences where people laughed at me/my writing/my pretensions to be a writer, and those were enough to drive my writing back into my head for years. It's only in the last ten years that I've grown a hard enough shell to put my writing out there professionally and as a student (the M/LS program at Lake Forest College was a HUGE help) and, of course, the more your pieces get picked over the more you begin to appreciate how lovely and helpful criticism really is. And that it really doesn't matter, because you can always rearrange the words to suit the occasion.

Untalented: who doesn't have the Yousuck Monster on their back most of the time? 'Nuff said.

[At this point in the original post I started droning on about how I got started, how I continued, and how I finished. I then realized that the post itself would almost be novel-length, so I threw those words onto my desktop and saved them for later. Because I want this post to go in this direction:]

Dot dot dot, blah blah blah, OK here I am and I've finished the first draft. Time to announce it to the family. Ah, yes, the Secret. I had a little bet with myself that I could write an entire novel without my family noticing. And I won, pretty much. Felsted, on being given the news, remarked that he'd noticed my tendency to close my laptop whenever someone walked into my office, and that he had WONDERED. Ya know, questions like "why do you always close your laptop when I walk in?" would only elicit an unpleasant response about three days out of the month, so I really do feel he should have tried the experiment. Still, like most men he never seems to be able to figure out when those three days are (why are women born with radar and men not?) and this karate mama's temper can be a bit hair trigger at times, so I guess he just chose the easier option.

As for Orangina and Wasabi, well I'm Mom, right? So I never do anything interesting. Having received the news, their reactions were typical. Orangina's head currently looks something like this: Prom Prom Prom prom dress hair for Prom boyfriend Prom Prom Prom hair Prom Prom ooo! cookies! Prom Prom Prom, so the novel kind of bounced off her and ran away to wherever completely lost thoughts go. Wasabi, on the other hand, asked several intelligent questions and wants to be a beta reader. I had already thought of asking her as she reads slowly and meticulously, takes careful note of plot and character, and will give me her honest opinion IN SPADES. And will probably laugh at me a few times. Come to think of it, parenting teenagers has also contributed to toughening my skin to its current rhino-hide consistency.

Oh yeah, what's the novel called and what's it about? For many reasons, I have to decline to discuss those points until a much later date. I did run through the plot for Felsted last night, and his eyes kind of glazed over, and then crossed slightly while his backgammon-game-playing fingers twitched repeatedly towards his computer keyboard. It is NOT the kind of novel I'd expect him to read, so I wasn't hurt. I can tell you the genre, only I'm a little confused about it myself and need to do some research. It's sort of literary; or upmarket women's fiction; the pinnacle of my aspirations is that book clubs might like it. There are NO vampires, NO witches or wizards, NO Greek gods, NO castles except a very small pseudo-one and NO sexy bits. It is definitely not YA or fantasy or anything trendy like that.

What's next? Well, write another book, of course. I'm going to get down straight away to outlining my first NaNoWriMo project, and fortunately I have a pretty solid idea...

TO BE CONTINUED but not without a big shoutout to all the wonderful fellow-writers (some published, some beginners like me) I've met on Twitter over the last three months. They are an unbelievably generous, helpful, upbeat bunch of people and I intend to keep following their adventures assiduously!

Voilà, a little rant

OK, Gentle Readers. It's a gorgeous spring day and yet I'm feeling a little rant coming on. This mood could have been caused by the Salami Incident at 6:15 this morning (a three-act drama starring Orangina (aka Screamer Queen) and Felsted (Salami Rat) which resulted in Somebody having to wait OUTSIDE for her bus and Somebody Else getting the evil eye from his wife for oversnacking). Or it could have been the Thai Leftovers Disaster which took the form of seeing my lovely Spicy Eggplant splatted across the carpet, the delicious juice soaking slowly into the shag pile. Oh, woeful moment of inattention and clumsiness! And how long it took to clean up! Rice goes everywhere, did you know that?

This little rant has deeper origins, though. I can't help noticing that the American language is becoming increasingly oriented towards the spoken word. Even with bookstores the size of small towns, it is evident that people are not reading all that much. How do I know this? Well, when words DO get written down, there's a sort of Chinese whispers thing going on that results in the oddest spellings being generally accepted as correct.

I open this salvo by referencing Writers Market Deluxe Edition 2010, an august tome that sits on my bookshelf and very usefully sings to me of publishers and publications and how much to charge my clients for types of writing with which I'm not familiar. This is not an isolated example by any means, and I'm not trying to throw brickbats at Writer's Market; I just found it amusing that I discovered this example in a publication aimed at showing writers how to go about their business. In one of the often fascinating essays that precede the reference portion of the book, a writer is having lunch with his possible future agent and does a sort of spit-take with a mouthful of sandwich when she compliments him on his writing. Here is the fateful line: "'Look,' I continued, trying to divert my gaze from what appeared to be an entire crushed baggett clinging to the front of the poor agent's Ann Taylor dress suit."

Baggett. Surely you jest. "Baguette" is spelled correctly in every supermarket I observed in the admittedly brief research phase of this rant. HOW did this get past the managing editor and, presumably, copyeditor? (Incidentally, the punctuation is also incorrect in this sentence. My own punctuation is a bit confused but if I'm editing something for print publication I use a style manual. Just sayin'.)

Sticking to the French language, abuse thereof, how about voilà? This highly useful word can be inserted in a sentence to mean all sorts of things like "how about that?", "lookee here", "there ya go", "and then", and many more. It's the Slap Chop™ of French words (do NOT click that link unless you have high cheesy commercial tolerance). It has degraded to "wala" or even "wahala" in 90% of the places in which I spot it on the internet. The entire Académie Française, past and present, is spinning in its grave in distress, not unlike mine when I dropped my lunch.

As I edit materials for my church, another particular dislike of mine is "tenants of the Christian faith". Are we talking about people who pay rent to live at the church? It's so common a mistake that I googled it and voilà, (sorry couldn't resist) it is present on an alarmingly high number of church websites. Lovely people, you mean "tenets", i.e. a doctrine or belief, often strongly held. It's an easy mistake to make; it's from the same Latin root; and spellcheckers don't spot it. Just know that you add a gray hair to my head every time I see it.

I could go on and on. Someone on Twitter mentioned seeing "banging the gabble" on his website where what the commenter MEANT was "banging the gavel", and I've seen a lot more examples. Now I'm not a language pedant; I can cope with the verbing of nouns, I use a ton of compound nouns myself, and I defer to Fowler's Modern English Usage on such matters as the way Americans put a period after Mr. and Mrs.* Living languages evolve, and English stretches itself in all sorts of interesting ways and I'm glad of it. But all these evidences that words are going in through people's ears and not their eyes makes my literary soul want to put its thumb in its mouth and whimper.

I am quite worn out, and were it a Friday would head for the nearest bottle of wine. Alas, it is Thursday, so I must be content with a glow of self-righteousness. Thank you for caring.

*They are contractions, not abbreviations, and therefore, strictly speaking, should not be followed by a period. BUT Fowler's accepts the period as a usage, and so must I.

Darn Tweetin'

Yes, yes, abject groveling apologies for writing about Twitter AGAIN. If you've started chewing the carpet because you don't see the point of Twitter, just close this page and go chew a nice toffee instead. I'm the same about things I don't get, like Glee. (Although I suspect that one day Wasabi, who IS a fan, will find some Machiavellian way to make me watch an episode and I will be hooked.) Or Farm Town on Facebook. You know, all those otherwise sane friends of mine who would really like me to accept a blue pig and send them something in return. That's strange: my carpet is starting to look really chewable.

Any, retournons à nos moutons, which was Twitter. I've fallen prey to the serious disease of Follower Count Obsession (FCO). It started a few weeks ago when, for no apparent reason, my follower count started climbing by several people a day. So I started looking every day to see how many more I'd "got". Then more than once a day.

And then, of course, we hit a plateau in the follower count department. Just as many people--to my horror, sometimes even more--were unfollowing me as were becoming new followers. My self-esteem plummeted. What must I do to placate the gods of Twitter? Sacrificial retweets? M-m-more hashtags on the fire? Major sucking up to @prodigaljohn until he says something like, "dude, you should really follow this @janesteen person because she's like SO funny" and instantly transfers the power of his 15,000+ followers to ME?

Friends, there is no cure for FCO. Once you have it, you must learn to live with it. One of the reasons I'm losing people is, I think, that I'm not following them back. I do look at new followers and follow some of them back IF I really like what they're saying on Twitter and/or if they have a really good blog. Sometimes I follow the blog, too, but my blog reader is beginning to resemble the Sunday New York Times in volume so I must exercise discretion.

Sometimes I follow people because they say something I find funny. The Irish woman who just tweeted "Dear Iceland, we said "send CASH", can't you read?" got investigated and followed because she made me laugh out loud. It's a bit like making friends at school--you either like people or you don't. I wouldn't follow people just because I thought they'd be USEFUL, any more than I wanted to make friends with the brainiacs at school because of their Rapid Homework Answer superpowers. There has to be something I like there first.

Anyhow, I have resolved NOT to follow people back if I don't want to, even if that means I risk losing them. I am really, really tempted to tweet "I am a Christian" and watch the unfollows in real time, as a sort of spiritual Twitter discipline, but I think I'll save that until I have a few more followers.............

I Didn't Break Into Writing; It Broke Into Me.

How did I get here? No no no, not onto this planet; I've already got the answer to that. And I can trace the tortuous route by which I traveled from deepest Surrey to the outlands of Chicago. No, my rhetorical question (I always wax rhetorical on a Friday night*) pertains to how I got to be a freelance writer.

I've had an interesting variety of jobs. Inevitable, I suppose, for someone who's had to start off in a new country twice (the first time by choice, the second time by marriage). On the non-writing side I've done everything from database development (I still can't believe that one, but the other guy left suddenly and I was the only one who was willing to give it a try) to designing closets. On the writing side I've done so many different things: from drafting contracts to acting as the editor for a large law firm where most of the lawyers weren't native English speakers, from writing reports on big committee meetings to being THE English version of an aerospace magazine (I'm not kidding, 100% of the articles were originally in French). I've written for pan-European organizations and mom & pop businesses. There are jobs I've quite literally forgotten about, my career path's been so weird.

And yet... I never thought of myself as a writer. I don't come from the sort of background where you aspire to be a writer. I was a reader, sure, but writing? It was just part of my day, albeit a major part. Just another skill, like typing or speaking French or being good at organization. No biggie.

It was only quite recently when I'd left a full-time job and, for once, allowed myself the time to think about what I wanted to do rather than take the next offer (I rarely apply for jobs, they just happen) that the lightbulb went on. The head was smacked, the wineglass was drained. I realized that all the points of satisfaction and success in my working life had been connected with writing, editing, or translating.

I sometimes wonder why I was so blind for all that time. Why I had to wait for nearly half a century before figuring out what I wanted to do when I grew up. A book I've been reading, Acedia & Me, sparked off a train of thought recently that gave me a clue. I realized that back in the day when I let my creative self be creative, I couldn't handle the emotional fallout. If I'd tried to be a writer back then, I'd have crashed and burned. Ruthlessly squashing my creative side under the sofa cushions and sitting on it was a survival tactic that allowed me to get through my 30s and 40s much more peacefully than my 20s.

But like some sort of rather fat Sleeping Beauty, I forgot who I was. I hid myself so well that I couldn't see myself. With the re-emergence of Jane the Writer comes a certain amount of danger, of course, but I'm feeling pretty sanguine about it.**

I'm also old enough to regard all of this as fun rather than some big soap-opera trauma. And I know I can always fall back on designing closets if I can't make a decent enough living by writing.

What about you? Was writing a lifelong vocation, or has it also taken you a while to get here?

*Because I don't drink Monday through Thursday. Friday after 6 pm marks my first glass of wine, and my capacity for rhetoric jumps 500%.

** Sanguinity is also probably a result of looking upon the wine when it's red.

I Woke Up Thinking About Matisse...

Yesterday I had my first ever tweetup, with Heather from the Fumbling For Words blog. Meeting in person someone you only know from their online persona is both exciting and daunting, carrying with it overtones of all the things you tell your children about the internet--the chief of which is "never meet up in person with someone you meet online". But having survived to the venerable age of 50 I'm confident in my ability to spot insane axe murderers BEFORE I agree to meet with them, so off I went.

We had agreed to meet at the Art Institute, Heather being in Chicago for a conference. Our destination was the Matisse exhibition that's here for the spring, the focus being "radical invention 1913-1917". I've never been a huge Matisse fan, but the exhibition was captivating. Another friend had told me that she didn't think the exhibition was well documented, and she's an artist so she probably knows a lot more than I do about it, but I did learn an awful lot about why Matisse is an important artist--so I'm thinking the exhibition achieved its purpose as far as my (unartistic) brain is concerned.

What I loved--and what I woke up thinking about this morning--was the fact that, on the huge canvases in particular, you could see so much of the process of the work. Matisse left behind, or deliberately scraped back paint to reveal, his earlier attempts on the same canvas, so that the work was, incredibly, four-dimensional! You could see lines and bits of paint from where, for example, he'd painted over some leaves or changed the position of a leg. When we went on to the Impressionist galleries a bit later, the Monets and Manets actually seemed, to me, a bit too pretty and finished by comparison.

I've seen this done in literature--it's not unknown for editors to collect together more than one version of a story or poem--but the nature of writing makes it necessary to read the versions sequentially, whereas in painting you can see them all at once in the same spot. I suppose it's possible on the internet to give an idea of variations in writing, and I expect it's been done, but could it possibly have the same impact, I wonder?

The other thing about this method of painting is that it gives an impression of deep honesty - Matisse was saying "look, I didn't get it right first try, here's the proof, and giving you this truth is part of the picture". In this age where writers are urged to polish, polish, polish before sending out their MS, rough versions are decently hidden on hard drives somewhere (only to see the light of day if the writer becomes mega-famous and worthy of academic research, I suspect. Will the computers of famous writers be preserved for posterity in the archives of universities?)

Blogs are probably more honest - if most bloggers are like me and chuck their lines out at the world after a couple of quick proofreads (OK, on some blogs after NO proofreading, but I tend to stop following those). Some bloggers are very willing to allow themselves to be vulnerable, and frequently post the details of their private lives (see, for example, Kiss My ALS which is a warts-and-all portrayal of a woman afflicted by terminal illness - I think I read it just because it's so brutally unedited). Heather, in my opinion, does much better on the honesty front than I do.

Maybe it's because my background is in commercial writing that I hide so much of myself away. Having started to dip a toe into fiction writing, I'm now discovering that I can put bits of myself into fictional characters, like Harry Potter's horcruxes, but I find writing directly about my "feelings" a bit distasteful. Maybe that's a British thing. Even in my journal I think I've always got an eye on the possibility that someone may actually READ what I write.

So where do I go with this thought? Should I be more "touchy-feely"? Some writers, when they start writing about themselves, get all bitter and twisted and ultimately offputting. Or do I give away more than I realize already?

Oh, and take another look at the photo of Heather, by the big Seurat, not a Matisse because you can't take photos of the temporary exhibitions. Don't you just LOVE the woman looking snootily at her as if to say, "look at that tourist actually POSING FOR A PHOTO while I am absorbing the beauty of the painting like a True Art Lover"? And Heather is, I feel I need to say, not an axe murderer at all but a perfectly sane and interesting person (as I had gathered from her blog). My first tweetup was a success!

Hang on - did you see what I just did? I directed you away from my feelings. Yeesh.

When It's Just Not Funny Any More...

I'm going to get serious today. I generally keep the tone of this blog light, and use it to talk about the quirkier thoughts that pass through my noodle. And then I go back to my real life, which is just like anyone else's: joy and pain, sometimes in the same day, and lots of humdrum stuff in between.

Only just before Easter, a woman was murdered. She was 50, like me. She was an immigrant, like me. She lived less than 5 miles away from me, in a very similar suburb: unexciting but nicely kept houses, full of people who work hard, care about their families and mow the lawn on Saturdays.

Like me, she had a developmentally disabled child. Who, for a couple of years, was Orangina's* friend and classmate, although they are no longer friends. They often hung out together at school, went to the movies, and so on.

So I'd met the murder victim a couple of times, at parent meetings or school socials. She was pleasant, ordinary, well-liked. She was beaten to death with a baseball bat in her own home. At the time of writing, after being picked up in Montana, her daughter is being held as a material witness and her daughter's boyfriend has been charged with the murder.

I've always been a big fan of murder mysteries. But real-life murder, I'm finding, is a deeply disturbing phenomenon in ways that I'd never even thought of when I entertained myself by reading about imagined ones. I'm not going to discuss the case itself, because I don't know the facts. These, no doubt, will come out as the process of law is set in motion, and it's set to be a high-profile case that will be widely reported. It has already attracted the attention of a defense attorney with, hmmm, an impressive client list.

I could say a lot about what this killing is doing within our school and community, but I won't. The school staff are doing an excellent job, and the many issues that are being raised in its Special Ed. population are being given appropriate attention.

What really bothers me--and others I've spoken with--are the gratuitous opinions of people who see fit to comment on the articles that are appearing online. It's hard enough to be the parent of a developmentally disabled kid. The challenges that Orangina has brought to our lives started before her birth and, although they've changed over the years, will never go away. What we've been through as a family would fill a book, and believe me, unless you've gone through this experience I will NEVER be able to give you full understanding of what it's like. And I'm one of the lucky ones; I live in a great school district, with abundant resources and activities available, and can afford the medications Orangina needs to keep her free of seizures, obsessions and tantrums over which she has no control.

So when I read or hear the opinions of people who make snap judgments about the parents and the young people involved in the case, even about the murder victim herself, I grind my teeth. Interactive news sites have their strong points, but the crass remarks of drive-by commenters are not among them. I have read some things that have left me open-mouthed with outrage. A few commenters have tried to protest against this invective, but they're drowned out by the self-righteously ignorant.

This is a tragedy of the kind that provides no glossy National Geographic photos of destroyed buildings, grieving fathers and maimed children, no call for aid, no organization set up to put things right. Just one home with no mother in it, and another home devastated. And the millions of us with a family member afflicted with developmental disability or mental illness will continue to put up with the judgmental looks from people when our autistic son has a tantrum in public. The sideways glances at our kids with Down Syndrome or other disorders that make them look different. The criticism when we don't medicate, and the criticism when we do. The exasperated sighs from the woman in line behind the intellectually impaired man who is taking five minutes to find the right change. The roll of the eyes by the guy watching as my daughter struggles to find the words to order her food. The use of the words "retard" or "retarded" as a term of abuse.

Don't judge, guys. Pray that justice is done for the woman now lying in her grave. And if you and your family all have brains that function as they should, be thankful. You're more unusual than you realize.

*For those of you who are new to the blog, my code name for my husband is Felsted, and my daughters are Orangina and Wasabi. I try to keep them off the blog as much as possible, as it weirds them out to be written about.

Hold On To Your Hats, Girls

I'm going to talk about, well, you know. S*x. I daren't write it out in full lest I receive even more generic comments in Chinese with links to naughty Asian sites. Sigh. A blogger's life is tough. I get all excited (no not in that way, I haven't got to the nub, oh dear, the point of this post yet) because I've received a new comment and then it turns out to be an open invitation... oh for heaven's sake. You know what I mean.

You see, I've been listening to Diana Gabaldon's Outlander (it's called Voyager in Europe) on audiobook, in the hope of finally being able to get all the characters straight in my mind. This is a very, very long-running series of time travel romances, for those of you who don't know, and I have quite enjoyed them for their fast pacing and general historical accuracy. Only now I'm listening to them, I suddenly realize that when I read books with s*x in them I must skim those bits. I definitely don't remember the Outlander books as being so, er, action-packed in the bedroom. Field. Haystack. Whatever.

When you're forced to sit and listen, those scenes go on. For. Ever. And of course the author has to raise the stakes, so to speak, with every fresh scene. Serves me right for reading a book that has one leg in falls into the romance genre, I guess, as "romance" now seems to be, in publishing parlance, synonymous with "let's get it on", albeit often in the context of married love. Of course, Gabaldon's books aren't strictly "romance" books, as they do not feature hunky, square-jawed men and heaving-bosomed women on their classy covers. And they're, like, 800 pages long. So you can read them on the train without anyone thinking that you're lacking a bit in the brain cell area. I predict that e-readers are going to do wonders for Harlequin sales, by the way.

I'm not a prude. Really. It's just that after more years of marriage than I care to mention, I don't need an instruction manual. No, not even a refresher course. Helpful hints? Nope. It's a little bit like being forced to watch someone cook a dish that's your specialty and that you know you can do just as well, if not better, yourself. Like reading: "Claire cooked spaghetti, and she did it like this. First, she filled a pan with water..." and on and on through every imaginable detail until you arrive at the limp noodles five pages later. (Have you notice how this subject gives rise to causes euphemisms to appear on nearly every line? I must be more susceptible than I think.)

And some people love reading about how other people cook spaghetti, and if they do then of course they'll enjoy the long-winded description and possibly the book will fall open at those pages. I prefer the old-fashioned method of stating that "Claire cooked spaghetti" and then leaving the rest to my imagination. Which functions perfectly well, thank you. And I wouldn't have to worry about Felsted walking in on me just when the water's on the boil and criticizing my choice of, um, cookbook.

Is this just me getting old or prudish? Or do you, like me, page rapidly through the frisky bits, anxious to get on with the plot? If you're a writer, have you written s*x scenes? Do you enjoy them? Be honest, now.