Revelations and Revisionism, Mythology and History

One of the great things about being an author is the ability to choose any story you want to tell, whether you're fictionalizing a great event in history or creating the most fanciful fantasy or developing a love story that resounds with everyone that reads it. I'm working on a project right now called Revisionist--I'll tell a bit about it in a minute. First, though, I want to share a few revelations I've had in the past week about revisionism and Revisionist and the people who revise things. 

I love the SyFy channel. I'm an unabashed fan of several of their shows--Dominion and Defiance are great, Ghost Hunters I've been watching for years, and Face Off is a tie to the theater life I loved and now miss. But when SyFy makes a goof, they really make a big one. Their new show Olympus is an example of what I'm talking about. 

I know more about Greco-Roman mythology than just about anyone in the universe. In fact, I was a state and national champion in Mythology at Junior Classical League conventions when I was in high school, and my first fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle was a blend of traditional Greco-Roman mythology with standard epic fantasy elements. One thing I've learned as a writer with a strong classical background is that you can't "improve" the original. Clash of the Titans is a good example of this. Perseus didn't ride Pegasus the flying horse--Bellerophon did. In fact, Pegasus was born after Perseus cut off Medusa's head--for when her blood met the waters of the ocean (ie Poseidon), the god's spirit impregnated Medusa's essence and *poof!* Winged horse. 

And there's no such thing as a mechanical owl named Bubo perched upon Athena's shoulder. 

So--Olympus. I was excited that SyFy was doing a show based upon mythology, but last night when the premiere came on I was horrified within the first couple of minutes. Why? Because the Cyclops had one eye--which is mythologically accurate--but that eye was in his MOUTH. Why the change? Because a giant immortal with a single eye isn't scary enough? And think about the logistics of it. If the Cyclops's eye in in his mouth, then can he not see unless he's shouting? And what about eating? Is it really a good idea for a creature's only eye to be right there with his teeth? Not to mention the ewwwwwwwwww factor. It's just nasty. 

I could go on and on about the other "improvements" that wrecked Olympus, but that would be my longest post ever. I won't do that to you. Suffice it to say that about the only similarity between Olympus and Greco-Roman mythology are some character names and a few of the costumes. And that got me thinking: why the need for the changes in the first place? Mythology is full of amazing and relatively unknown creative elements that supersede almost anything since. 

I know what you're thinking. And I quote: My first fantasy series The Asphodel Cycle was a blend of traditional Greco-Roman mythology with standard epic fantasy elements. 

Yep. But I didn't change the basic elements of mythology. Instead, I built upon them as a foundation--made mythology into history. Asphodel has Amazons and centaurs and minotaurs and harpies and tons of other mythological creatures, but I didn't try to "improve" them. Instead, I kept their mythological roots intact. How do you figure you can make a harpy more terrifying than it actually is? A harpy is basically a bird of prey with a woman's face, what Homer called "swift robbers". They were sent by the gods to snatch things away from the earth, and were blamed for any sudden, mysterious disappearances, and anything they touched they befouled. So when a mortal named Phineus revealed some of the secrets of the gods, Zeus sent the harpies to punish him. Anytime he tried to eat, they would snatch food from his hands and befouled--yes, harpy poop and other various bodily fluids--everything else on the table. 

I'm pretty sick, but I can't think of a way to make THAT any worse. 

All that being said, as writers it's important for us to make the stories we tell our own. So I'm not saying that any story based upon Greco-Roman mythology has to be a regurgitated version of the original myths. For example--the Percy Jackson & The Olympians YA series. Author Rick Riordan brings Greco-Roman mythology into the modern age, creating a protagonist, Percy, who is the demigod son of Poseidon and a modern, mortal woman. The way Riordan drew Percy and his world up, it's very much in the line of classic Greek or Roman heroic tales. Percy's powers and abilities would work easily with those original tales. He's credible; as a son of Poseidon, for example, it's believable that he would be able to breathe underwater or talk with sea creatures. But what really makes the world and character work is the seamless integration of classical mythology and modern fantasy. Riordan doesn't "improve" mythology. He embraces it in such a way as to enhance not only those stories but the world he's created.

Something I wish the writers of Olympus had done, instead of serving us such a confused, ass-backwards mishmash of crap and loosely labeling it as mythology--and it's a lesson for me, one I learned as I work on my newest project, Revisionist.

We've all heard of revisionist history--when a people or a state change what really happened into something that bolsters their current agenda, like when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that the holocaust never happened, calling it an American fabrication of a "myth of the massacre of Jews." My Revisionist concept is a bit more specific. I focus on the story that might have happened if one single historical event had been changed. For example, what if JFK hadn't been assassinated? Or what if Issac Newton had decided not to sit under a tree? Or if Benjamin Franklin had been electrocuted when he flew a kite in a thunderstorm? What would change? What would stay the same? What different routes would history have taken from that pivotal moment?

Sir John Squire collected a series of alternate history essays in 1931 entitled If It Had Happened Otherwise. That volume included an essay by Winston Churchill that envisioned a world in which General Robert E. Lee had won the battle of Gettysburg, and that in turn influenced Ward Moore's Bring The Jubilee, a novel in which the Confederacy had won the Civil War in 1953. So alternate history has been around for a while, and my idea is neither new nor groundbreaking.

And alternate history is hard to write. You can't effectively change history without having a thorough knowledge of what really happened. For example, if JFK hadn't been shot and killed, what would have been affected? Well the 1964 presidential election for starters, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964--would it have been pushed through as vigorously as Lyndon Johnson did, or would the JFK administration have gotten it passed earlier? Or later? Or at all? Would Robert Kennedy have been assassinated? Or would he have been elected president in 1968, or would he have pushed back his run for the White House until 1972 or '76? One of the main reasons he cited for running was to continue his older brother's work. So if his older brother had lived to get his agenda completed or if he'd been unable to do so, when would Bobby Kennedy have felt the need to run? And how many subsequent presidents would have actually held office if that one fateful day in Dallas had never happened?

If a butterfly flaps its wings in Ohio, can that cause a typhoon in the south Pacific?

So Revisionist begins with that butterfly, and tracks the currents of history from there. The concept is intriguing to me, and because I'm studying the historical events on my particular timeline so thoroughly I am discovering all sorts of things I never knew before which is always good. I'm having to trace out my storyline adjacent the historical one, determine what events would have happened regardless and what might have been changed, and then tracing out the effects of the events that were changed and so forth. It can get very involved. I have long strips of butcher paper up on the walls of my study, where I'm plotting everything out. But it's also fascinating because I have to make sure that any changes I make to history occur in such a way that they can be seamlessly integrated with what really happened in that time period and after.

But the lesson I learned from Olympus was extremely valuable. I don't need to "improve" history. I don't need to make such wholesale changes to what we know as historical fact in order to tell a great story. I don't need to make JFK a Republican, or Issac Newton a spelunker, or the Civil War decided at Gettysburg with the swift defeat of damn Yankees to tell the stories I might want to tell in an alternate history novel. As long as I make the integration between history and fiction as smooth and credible as possible, I don't have to "improve" anything.

And man, do I wish the creators of Olympus and the SyFy channel had been able to learn that lesson before they ever put Olympus on the air.

What's that? What is the tiny change I make in the first Revisionist novel?  *evil grin* I'm not going to tell you.

But the working title of the novel is The Mother's War. 

Following a Well-Worn Formula For Success: Manufacturing Snake Oil With A Poison Pen

I've been watching the uproar that has ensued following Clay Travis's outrageous post on his sports website/blog Outkick The Coverage in which he claims that the Kentucky-West Virginia Sweet Sixteen basketball game tonight will pit the "two dumbest fan bases" in college sports. I'd post the link, but he's already made enough money off of clicks on that stupid 'article'. Let's not help him increase his bank account if we can help it. Do me a favor and don't run off to his site to look. Let me give you a sample:

It's an upside down world when it comes to Kentucky and West Virginia -- fans in single wides cheering for coaches in mansions, basketball fans without teeth cheering for basketball players with teeth, fans who have no hope of being admitted to academic powerhouse universities like Kentucky and West Virginia living or dying to the beat of a basketball's dribble. Like canaries in a coal mine without oxygen, these two states are where intelligence goes to die.   

They should give out a trophy to whoever wins this game.

It should be a gold basketball with a chin strap beard on it.

And this inscription: "Your number one!"  

Aside from the use of egregious generalizations for shock value, a time-honored tactic of zealots and bigots, as a sports fan I have to ask myself: what's Travis's angle here?  

Travis isn't really all that original. He's agitating with purpose. He has an agenda. His purpose is singular: he's manipulating the vast pool of sports fans in order to drive hits to his website by using the lowest common denominator he can envision--in this case, an absurdly arbitrary list of the "stupidest" and the "smartest" fan bases in college sports that he wrote about a year ago. So he uses that list as a reference and restirs the pot. In the process, he riles up the fans, who all immediately rush off to click on the darn website to read his bile for themselves, makes some appearances on sports talk shows--I heard him on the Paul Finebaum show this afternoon--which riles up more fans who click on the website and make him more money, then goes onto social media to talk about how awesome he was in insulting the fans of these two respected institutions, which, of course, makes him even more money. Rinse and repeat. Millions and millions of hits at a per-click payment rate, and every infuriated Kentucky or West Virginia fan is ringing Travis's cha-ching bill today. 

I know what Clay Travis is. I know where the Clay Travises of the world are coming from. Especially, when they come from Tennessee. 

Clay Travis is a pseudo-intellectual who feeds his voracious ego by belittling others. He makes himself feel smarter by stepping on others.  Although it's hard to believe that anyone who'd go on a 'pudding strike' to try and force Direct TV to add the Sunday Ticket to the US Virgin Islands available channel package is any sort of intellectual, bear with me for a moment and think about this. 

We have some things in common. Clay Travis, like me, grew up in the state of Tennessee. Clay Travis, like me, knows the sports world, and especially the fervor that fans of the Southeastern Conference have for their teams. Clay Travis, like me, understands the power of the written word. 

But here's where things start to get different. 

I am a product of the public school system in Clarksville, Tennessee--a town that Travis insulted specifically when the wife of a retired US veteran who lives there called the Finebaum show this afternoon. That education enables me to insult the Clay Travises of the world in three languages, including Latin. Caligas mater tua in legis gerit. (That's Latin for "Yo' mama wears combat boots in bed" in case you wondered.) I attended a small liberal arts college in Tennessee, where I paid for my education thanks to scholarships from the university forensics team. (Forensics meaning public speaking and debate, not CSI.)  

Unlike me, Travis attended the Martin Luther King magnet school in Nashville, and after a bachelor's degree from George Washington University, came back to Tennessee to get his law degree from Vanderbilt University. 

I married an IT security guy; he married a Tennessee Titans cheerleader. 

I am the author of 16 novels and novellas; he is the author of 2 nonfiction books about sports (I don't count his misogynistic Man: A Book as a real book, to be honest. Amazon lists it as 'humor', but it's only funny to the random Neanderthal or poison-penned sports columnist.), But those books are well-written and engaging, and--this is the important part--about sports in the south. 

There is no quicker way to garner the attention of any SEC fan than to call them stupid. Travis knows that. He comes from SEC stock. He was a sports radio talk show host in Nashville. He's made a fortune off the backs of SEC fans. He makes a living off of what he pretends to despise. He looks down on his roots and the people who represent those roots. 

And right now, he's sitting in his office, furnished with money he made from the American sports fan, tweeting about his brilliance, seeing the posts that come up on his search engine feed, and counting his money as the click count rolls up and up and up. 

And just to make it MORE fun, by referring to last year's stupidest fan base list, he got DOUBLE the clicks because, of course, anyone who read his Kentucky-West Virginia article had to click on that post to see which schools were named. If they cruise around the site and check out other articles, he could be looking at 5-10 clicks per unique viewer. That's bank.

Clay Travis isn't a snake oil salesman. Clay Travis is the man who makes the snake oil out of toxic waste and various unidentified substances and then writes blog posts in which he blasts his own product just to create interest in it. He knows that the more people who google "snake oil", the greater the likelihood that he can peddle his poisonous wares to the unwary. 

Ever hear this old saw? "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it." Apparently Clay Travis lives by this motto. It's made him millions of dollars, and today made him even more. The formula is simple: take a stereotype, like the ones today where he personified Kentucky or West Virginia sports fans as toothless, homophobic, uneducated bigots. Repeat said stereotype frequently from your platform. Travis has made a living stomping out that tired old generalization. For example, in July of 2014, Travis said in an interview with Nate Rau for The Tennesseean :

I take pride in ridiculing stupid people for being stupid regardless of what their beliefs are...My bigger issue is there are a lot of stupid people. And I feel like in our culture today we coddle stupidity quite a bit. And so I don't particularly care what your opinion is, but if it's a stupid opinion I think you deserve to be lit up for it.

Full transcript for the interview is here. 

So here's the question: who made Clay Travis the arbiter for what is stupid and what is not?
Realize, too, that in this context, Clay Travis's definition of 'stupid' is actually 'different than mine'. 

Every time we click on his site, read his articles, buy from his advertisers, buy his books, and patronize Fox Sports, we empower Clay Travis and other snake oil manufacturers to keep on twitching their poison pens. This isn't a big secret--master manipulators have been doing this crap for years, and we let them. Why? It's entertainment. It's funny to call the fans from your team's arch-rival names. We've all done it. God knows I've heard more about Michigan in the last twenty years than I thought possible. Thousands of people walk around Ohio with "Ann Arbor is a whore" t-shirt.  Sports figures egg that on, like Steve Spurrier's infamous "You can't spell Citrus (as in Citrus Bowl) without UT." Clay Travis is just that little bit smarter than Spurrier, though. Spurrier gives out those quotes for free. Travis charges us for them, one click at a time.  

It doesn't matter what Clay Travis believes. Frankly, some of what you find on his website is entertaining, and he has broken legitimately important sports stories over the years. In the end, though, what matters are Clay Travis's motives. His motives in this case are clear. 

It's the first day of Sweet Sixteen games in the NCAA basketball tournament. Kentucky is riding an unprecedented wave of success, undefeated and, if they make it through the tournament, a shot of being the greatest college basketball team of all time with 40 wins. The situation is unparalleled. There's a lot of excitement around the tourney this year as a result--more interest than usual in March Madness, which is a mainstay of American sports--and which makes a lot of money for everyone involved except the fans. So if you're a snake oil manufacturer, and you want to capitalize on the situation--if you want to get your share of the March Madness pie, what do you do? 

You insult every single person with a vested interest in the game. You belittle them. You make them feel stupid. You make them angry. And then you watch as they self-fulfill your prophecy and run off to leave comments on your blog, not knowing that every time they do they are putting money in your pocket. You make those fan bases so angry, that on the day of this huge basketball game you divert focus away from the game and onto your site. You go on sports talk shows, where you insult fans who call in because they disagree with you, knowing that every single person who expresses their outrage online about your post affects hundreds or thousands of people who didn't know about your article--and they run off to look and the clicks keep on coming. 

Snake oil. 

And the dollars he makes off this snake oil enables him to keep doing what he's doing, something he freely admits. 

Two girls get in a fight at Steeplechase, a cat fight, I think it's the best. It's awesome. The butt-chugging press conference at UT – almost all of our most popular stuff is not really technically sports. Our top-10 dumbest fan bases, millions of people read that stuff. It's entertainment and most people get it. I would equate it is running a site is a lot like on a tiny level being a movie studio. If you're going to do 'Shakespeare In Love,' what gives you the opportunity to do that is that 'Godzilla' is going to do $4 billion in revenue. It's not like 'Godzilla' is redefining what is possible with cinematic art, but it makes so much money it gives you the opportunity to do whatever you want.

But the real tell in his interview with Nate Rau can be found in this comment: 

It doesn't matter what it (content) is. If it's something I would want to read. It could be anything. We do a weekly "Bachelorette" column. I do a "Game of Thrones" review every week. It's just something I think people want to be entertained by. There's a higher quality to it hopefully. How big can it get? That's the question.

How big can it get--that's the question. Well, Travis knew the answer in advance. He was counting on it. 

Pretty damn big. 

It would be interesting to see exactly how much money Clay Travis has made just today from those click rates before he salts it away in some offshore account. Probably more than I could even imagine. But there's a benefit to today, a silver lining in the snake oil smog. Proof that some formulas for money or power still work, proof that Adolf Hitler was right when he said the maxim I quoted above. 

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

The only way to end media manipulations like this stunt Clay Travis pulled is to hit him where it hurts. He can't be fired, since he owns his own site. He has just as much right to say what he did as I do to call it snake oil. First amendment and all that. I will steadfastly defend his right to be an asshat, because I, too, am a writer. His right. 

No, where you hit a snake oil manufacturer is his wallet. That would be his licensing with Fox Sports and his advertisers. As I said and Clay Travis gloats--he can't be fired from Outkick The Coverage because he's the boss. 

I just have to wonder, though, whether his opinions would change if he wasn't making any money off them. If, for example, people actively campaigned within the sports fandom to not patronize his site, to not patronize Fox Sports, to not purchase products from his advertisers and to publicize why that is, how long do you think Clay Travis would have the time and energy to devote to his elitist shenanigans? Because I don't think that his crusade against the stupid really needs to go much further than his own desk, his own laptop, his own behavior.  Anyone would can produce this jewel in an interview: 

It did well for a sports book. It was a regional best-seller in the south. It was a direct-to-paperback. It was a work of literary genius or anything. It sold well.

 Bolding mine. Lord help him, those Tennessee genes are starting to bring him down. As Forrest's mother used to say, "Stupid is as stupid does..."

Hope there's a cure.

The Culture of Pain

Chronic pain is an issue I feel pretty passionate about. Aside from a debilitating back injury I received in a 2002 car accident, my body is now wracked with arthritis in all my major joints. I've already had one total knee replacement and am due for another. So yes--I deal with pain every single day, and I do my best with the cards I've been dealt. No matter how bad my pain gets (and some days it's very bad), I try to keep in mind that there are a whole heck of a lot of other people out there whose daily battle with pain is far, far worse than mine. So no--I'm not lying on my couch, eating bonbons and watching soap operas and whining about poor little me with enough metal in my back and knee that I have to carry a special ID listing all my titanium if I have to go through any kind of security checkpoint. I have fairly ambitious physical plans for this spring and summer that will hopefully result in me being able to walk at least 2-3 blocks, which is something I've not been able to do for a couple of years now. 

Today was my bimonthly appointment with my pain management physician. If you're not a chronic pain patient, you may not know that we have to sign a 'pain contract' with the doctor who prescribes our pain medication. The contract is usually pretty standard--can't get pain meds prescribed by another doctor, random urine testing and pill counts, can't get refills for 'lost' or legitimately lost medication, etc etc--all of which I've signed without blinking. Makes sense to me on all levels, especially with malpractice issues, the potential of accidental or intentional overdoses of narcotic medication, and the plethora of pill mills like this one in east Tennessee that was busted recently and included a former police chief on the arrest list. 

But understanding a physician's need to not only protect himself legally and to effectively monitor pain management programs for his patients doesn't make the life of a chronic pain patient any easier. For example, unless a bone is protruding from my skin, I'm not going to go to the emergency room if I hurt my back worse than it already is. Especially not the *insert name here* Medical Center in this town. Why? Because even though all my medical records are available instantly via the computer network that links all medical facilities in the area, if I go to the ER complaining of pain, I am treated like I am a drug addict looking for her next fix. Seriously. It's a humiliating exercise in futility, so why even bother? A friend of ours who is also a pain patient went to the ER with a serious illness, and they assumed he had overdosed on his pain meds and pumped his stomach! And God forbid your slow-release pain medication is something like methadone, as both our friend and myself are. Pain patients take minuscule doses of methadone--as in as little as 2.5 mg per dose up to 8 or 10, whereas addicts using methadone for withdrawal will take four to sixteen times as much. And yet, chronic pain patients are treated as if they are just like those recovering addicts, sometimes before they are even evaluated for new injury or illness. 

The reason I'm with the pain management doctor I'm with right now, despite the fact that his office is an hour away, is because at my first appointment with him three years ago he sat down with my husband and I and said--and this is a word for word direct quote--"You are not an addict and should not be treated that way. You have a serious pain issue, and as your pain medication physician I must respect that as I try to find a way to alleviate it." 

Hard not to like a doctor who talks to you like that. No condescension, none of the holier-than-thou aren't-you-exaggerating tone. Even harder to find a pain management physician who thinks that way. Although he's an immensely busy young doctor with a full practice, he still takes the time to sit down with me every single appointment and find out what's been going on since the last time I was there.  So singing his pain contract was no big deal for me--it was standard, and he knows I'm not the kind of patient to violate it. 

So back to today. 

Today, there was an addendum to the contract that absolutely blew my mind. The addendum is a warning that if a patient is loud, aggressive, threatening, or abusive to anyone on the practice's staff, they will be 'fired' as a patient. 

Wait a second. 

What? 

Seriously?

The situation I related above is 100% accurate--not just in Ohio, but in a lot of states--and understandably so. Even though it's a pain in the wazoo if you do something stupid like I did once and accidentally knock five days' worth of pain meds into the toilet, a pain contract spells out the requirements for a mutually respectful and positive relationship between the doctor and the patient. And as chronic pain patients, we NEED that respectful and positive relationship with our pain management doctors, nurses, and staff. 

So exactly how stupid do you have to be to jeopardize all that by yelling at the staff, bullying the physician's assistants, or cussing out the young lady who answers the phone and makes appointments? Apparently pretty darn stupid, and evidently there are a lot of those stupid people who seem to think they are entitled to their physician's time and attention. When I knocked my pills into the toilet, consigning myself to multiple days with no medication on hand, I didn't call my doctor's office and scream at his assistant, or bully his nurse, or demand that he drop what he was doing and write me a prescription to replace what I lost. It wasn't his fault that I'm a clumsy idiot. Nor was it his problem to solve. Instead of demanding replacement drugs, I called his office and asked to speak to a nurse, calmly informed her of what had happened (due to those random pill counts that contractually they are entitled to ask for), and calmly asked her for advice on how to deal with those medication-free days--what might help, what to avoid, what OTC medication would prove effective. 

Yes, a lot of chronic pain patients resent the culture that's grown up around our medical care. Yes, we have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to get the treatment we need just to get through the day--and no pain medication or regimen eliminates chronic pain, believe me. But we also have to remember why things are the way they are--the "patients" who were pill shopping, seeing multiple doctors and getting multiple prescriptions for narcotics, selling the pills for profit, going to pill mills, lying about the severity of their pain and going to the ER for a pain shot on a weekly basis, "losing" their prescriptions and asking for replacements. THOSE people are the reason I can't go to the ER when my back is so seized up that I cannot sit or stand for assistance. THOSE people are the reason why I have to sign a contract with a physician I trust and who has no reason to distrust me. 

And one thing I know for damn sure--I'm not going to be such an idiot, such an ungrateful asshat, that I'm going to abuse the people who are doing everything they can to HELP me. When I was tending bar, I occasionally had to let people know that they were not entitled to be served alcohol at my bar. Drinking was a privilege, and not a right. As patients with an ongoing medical problem, we are entitled to health care and we get that from our pain management doctors. However, we are NOT entitled to anything above and beyond what that doctor has already prescribed for us. We are NOT entitled to act like jackasses and bully that doctor and the caregivers in their practice. We are NOT entitled to anything other than what is laid out in our pain contracts, and to jeopardize that by being abusive makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

You'd think that adults would be capable of realizing that without being told. But since some cannot seem to figure that out on their own, another layer of contractual responsibility has been laid down upon the rest of us. Once again, medical care for chronic pain patients like myself is being impacted by people who don't know how to act. Our physician is one man, dealing with hundreds of patients, and the rules have to be the same for everyone. No exceptions.

I don't blame my doctor for adding that stipulation to the pain contract he requires his patients to sign. Not one bit. I'm just shocked that it was necessary to do that at all.

Thanks, ungrateful and abusive asshats. Thanks for your ridiculously idiotic behavior and choices.

...I can't wait until you're fired...

Getting The Writer's Mind Back on Track

Coming off of what I sarcastically have dubbed my "brush with death"--yes, I'm doing just fine save for the fact I got all of the pain resulting from any invasive procedure but none of the benefits considering my nerves were never ablated--I'm back in the writing studio today watching a new litter of kittens from our rescue mission and staring at a blank page. 

Writers share that experience daily. At some point, all of us sit at our computers and stare at a blank page.  It may be a new story, or a new chapter, or even just a break in the storyline rolling through our minds. And while some authors may not experience a hitch at the sight of a blank page, I'm willing to bet that most of us do. 

And why not?  We all have lives...bills...family and friends...near death experiences due to anesthesia--why is it so strange that occasionally the sight of a blank page can throw us off-track?

(Darn page is still blank) 

With all of the distractions in everyday life and the ease of burning an hour or two on the Internet, it's a wonder that writers get anything done at all. And we do--once we get past that blank page staring us in the face. 

Over the years, I've developed a system of refocusing my writing energy that seems to work for me. I'm a pantser, not a planner; my stories play out in my head and I just type what my imagination dictates.  I always know where I'm going--the conclusion of the story. I just never know how I get there,or even how many chapters/pages/books it'll take me to do so. So when that blank page stymie happens to me, this is how I combat it. 

1--Stare at the wall. I can write anywhere, including poolside in the summer, under a tree in the fall, and in the kitchen during the holidays. I've even written while tending bar. But if I'm suffering from a momentary case of writer's block, I always go to my study and sit at my desk. My desk is in a corner of the room, facing the wall. The only things I see are what I have deliberately placed there--timelines, research, scene ideas, pictures that remind me of the plot/characters or inspire my world. There's no TV in my writing study, no books aside from research materials, and the only music available would be on my non-verbal classical music play lists--which I put together specifically to invoke a certain mood. The idea is to shut out the external distractions and immerse myself in  the world I'm creating. Nine times out of ten, this works for me. 

If you don't have a designated writing space, I recommend that you create one. You don't have to use it every single time, but if you have a no-interference spot where you can retreat, where there are no distractions and no opportunities to distract yourself, that blank page won't stay blank for long. 

2--Cleanse your writing palate. Sometimes, a major story needs a few days' rest to percolate, or that blank page is reflecting the blank spot in your story--one you can't easily surmount. If that's the case, instead of pressuring yourself to WRITE ON THAT DARN STORY NOW, take a trip somewhere else. Write something completely unrelated--a short story, a poem, a letter to an old friend, a blog post *coughcoughAHEMcoughcough*. Even a grocery or to-do list can shake things up enough in your mind to get you working again.  In the end, it doesn't matter what you write as long as you write something every day. 

I use my blog as a jump start to my writing blocks--kind of like a warm up exercise. Once the fingers are moving easily on the keyboard and the words are rolling out onto the new post page, I usually find that I'm priming myself to return to whatever writing task I'm working at the time. 

3. Research doesn't count as a distraction. That old writing maxim--"Write what you know"--? It doesn't mean that all your fiction must be based upon your personal life knowledge. What it means for spec fic writers is "Know what you're writing about." For example, I was watching an online documentary from the UK about a haunted inn, and the host of that show referred to Lady Jane Grey as Henry VIII's wife. 

What? 

Since Lady Jane Grey was ten when Henry VII died and his great-niece, and since she was literally in the nursery while he was still alive, how could ANYONE present themselves as an expert on ANYTHING if they make a factual error that egregious? 

Same thing goes for your writing. Sure, it's great to have two moons for your home world, but you'd better have a good idea of how that would affect said home world. Tides. Calendars. Seasons. Orbits. Giving your hero a six foot long broadsword sounds good and all, but if your hero isn't physically superb, he/she is going to have issues waving that sword around for hours--especially in full plate armor. And while it's fantastic that your heroine is a woman of power, you can't save her from the guillotine in 14th century Scotland--since the guillotine wasn't invented until the late eighteenth century in France by a doctor named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.

So if the words just aren't coming, turn your mind to some other part of creating the best story you can. Research. Flesh out your world-building. Fact check what you've already written. Because believe me--at some point during this work (which is essential anyway) an idea will probably spark something in your mind, and words will go onto the page--whether those words are corrections of previously written scenes or a brand new scene doesn't matter. You're still accomplishing something positive for your WIP. 

4. Sometimes you need a break... Not everyone has the luxury I do, of having the ability to write at any time of day or night. Most of you have day jobs, kids to ferry around, hectic and agitated homes to deal with. And while your writing time might be sacred--mine was when I was working, ferrying kids, and dealing with a hectic and agitated house--sometimes you're just not able to turn your brain off and get down to putting words down on that awful blank page. 

Don't be so hard on yourself. 

The easiest way to suffer a serious case of writer's block, one that lasts for weeks or even months, is to beat yourself up over it. Sometimes, you just have to take a step back and recuperate.  So if you have to step back, what do you do? 

That's easy. EDIT.

Start on page one. Pull out your grammar book or website, and get rid of all those grammatical errors. Trust me--they're there. I would say that easily, 98 out of 100 submissions I received in the past six years was grammatically unacceptable. Some submissions were unreadable. I'd say that fully half of the submissions I received were deleted before I had read the first chapter for poor grammar/spelling. And as editors go, I was pretty lenient. (Reading abnormally fast is a big help.) Doesn't matter how great the storyline is, if your submission is riddled with grammar, syntax, usage, and spelling errors, your story will hit the recycle bin. Editors get so many submissions these days--they're overwhelmed with them. An editor may have 100+ manuscripts on their desk when they open yours. And that they're/there/their error on page one is probably enough for most editors to toss your book. You need to go through your story with a fine-toothed comb if you want an agent or an editor to bother with reading it. 

DO NOT RELY UPON SPELLCHECK OR GRAMMAR CHECK SOFTWARE. For one things, they're incapable of spotting homonym errors like they're/there/their or won/one or accept/except. Know when to use farther and further, or effect and affect. Believe me when I tell you that it doesn't matter how proficient you were in high school or college English. I've been a professional editor for a decade, and I will still find errors in my manuscripts to correct. You will too. 

Well, I think I've written away my blank-page-itis. I'm ready to start my second writing block of the day at 5 pm--so I have fifteen minutes to check on newborn kittens, get my bottled water, and pull up the research I've done on this particular chapter in my WIP. My writing blocks are four hours, twice a day--sometimes more if I'm on a roll. Today feels like a rolling day to me. And if you're not having the same luck, take a deep breath and figure out what might work best for you. Just remember--no page stays blank forever. 

You'll get there. I promise. 

Something Funny Happened On The Way To...

Something odd happened to me on Wednesday, something that shook both me and my husband to the core. Something that's left me wondering about a lot of things.

Something that's hard to face. 

I was having a regular (for me) back procedure as an outpatient on Wednesday. No big deal, but  I would need to be sedated for the procedure. I remember being in the operating room, watching as the anesthesiologist slowly pushed on the big syringe of medication that would keep me sedated during a lumbar radiofrequency ablation. ( A LRA is when the nerves are destroyed around the injured section of someone's spine. For many people, destroying those nerves also kills off the pain. Since nerves regenerate, though, patients usually have to have two procedures a year for maximum pain relief. For me, this is the second round attempt of ablations, and the first didn't really help all that much. But I digress--) I woke up in the recovery room, confused and kind of panicked, only to have a nurse tell me that my doctor had cancelled the procedure because I'd stopped breathing and turned blue.

Yes,you read that right.I stopped breathing. WTF? 

On top of that, I was hurting like hell. I apparently was breathing long enough to get the painful part, but not the pain relief part. 

Best I can figure from what the nurses and my doctor told me, mere sedation doesn't keep me from reacting to pain while on the operating table. The past few procedures, dead unconscious, I would tense up and try to move away from all the sharp pointy things. So it seems that the anesthesiologist might have over-sedated me in an effort to keep me from moving. 

Bad decision. Apparently, it worked only too well. I certainly wasn't moving. 

Or breathing. 

Now, obviously, the last two days have been extremely unpleasant. Pain aside (because that, at least, I know how to handle) I've had to ask myself what in the world happened. I don't like anesthesia in the first place. I don't like sinking into blackness and waking up somewhere different with no memory of having gotten there. So now when I have a procedure--and this one we're going to try to repeat on next Wednesday--what am I going to be thinking about? Not writing, not football, not kittens, not my family---no, I'll be thinking about not BREATHING. And not having any control over how to rectify that situation. 

So I spent today doing all the stupid little things that people do when they've had a close call, or what they perceive as a close call. I looked over my will, my insurance policy, my living will--all that stuff. And,for the most part, I've not suffered any adverse physical effects aside from, strangely, a numb tongue and a sore throat. I don't even want to know why THAT would be; my imagination is supplying enough possibilities that I am trying to forget.  

I also realized that despite the seeming normalcy surrounding modern medical care, every time you go under the knife, you're seriously risking death. For real. Death. People die during wisdom teeth removals, and colonoscopies, and breast augmentation. And, apparently, lumbar radiofrequency ablations as well. 

My doctor and I discussed how we'd proceed on the second attempt on Wednesday. Apparently, I get to experience this next surgery while awake and under a local. To be honest, I'm not sure if that's any better. I've had discograms before, which are performed without any anesthetic at all, and they suck. My doctor was always so shocked that I could go through them without moving or yelling or cussing. Of course, he had no idea that I spent the whole procedure reciting the Aeneid to myself in Latin to keep my mind focused on something other than the sharp pointy things, but I guess Vergil is preferable to turning blue while having no control over what is happening to my unconscious body. 

And, to be frank, I'm kind of leery about going under any type of anesthesia right now. Yes, I've always hated waking up somewhere other than where I went to sleep.

But I think I hate turning blue even more. 

The Avengers Age of Ultron aka Celina Gets Her Geek On

Guilty as charged. I am a MOVIE geek, and particularly a Marvel Universe geek since the first Iron Man movie came out. I only watched it because I'm a fan of Robert Downey Junior and have been since he played an incredible, method-laced, Oscar-nominated Chaplin at an incredibly young age. Iron Man was his coming out party in his only-still-too-good-looking middle age (which I can say because he's older than me) and I loved every minute of the movie when Gwyneth Paltrow wasn't onscreen.

So the past few months, I've been in Avengers mode. I was stoked that James Spader would voice/act Ultron, and the Scarlet Witch was a character I loved when I was a wee little comic book geek girl back in the day. Every single teaser trailer that Marvel has released has done exactly that--teased. But today I discovered that some smart ultra geek on YouTube had dissected the trailers and put them back together--in chronological order. 

The result is a five-minute-long glimpse into what's in store for us on May 1, because I will be right there, standing in line with the much younger geek-contingent for the midnight showing of the movie. 

The great thing about this compilation is that we get a couple of actual scenes from the movie--but not one that gives the whole darn plot away. The 'are you worthy' drinking game involving Avengers and Thor's hammer has a couple of very telling moments--if you know what to look for. The Hulk vs. Hulkbuster Iron Man fight becomes extended--and way cool. And the Avengers' reaction to Tony Stark's experiments in AI crystallizes once Ultron crashes the party. 

Plus it looks like the Black Widow gets a more prominent role, continuing what began in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I think it's a great wrong on the part of the MCU that she doesn't have her own feature film, but maybe an apparent relationship with Bruce Banner/the Hulk plus what appears to be some of her backstory (courtesy of the Scarlet Witch) will give her character the screen time she deserves. Especially since Scarlett Johannson, who is one of the best young actresses around, has the acting chops to take that character wherever she wants to go. 

There's a reason that 2015 is going to be a banner year. Potentially two, if Disney doesn't screw up Star Wars 7. And since Star Wars was my very first movie in the theater, I can honestly claim or blame it for everything I am now--geek girl, spec fic writer, and even my interest in the paranormal/supernatural. All of those "odd" interests that my parents deplored back in the day stemmed from two things--Star Wars and comics. 

How awesome that I am still geeking some *mumblemumble* years later. 

At any rate, I'm going to do something I NEVER do. Here's a link to johnnyB2k's Age of Ultron chronological mashup. Go check it out and tell me what you think. 

Oh...and around 4:30-ish there's a very brief glimpse of something unexpected--a quick blurp of video that clawed its way into my consciousness. I wonder....

Isn't that what's great about anything in speculative fiction, be it book, story, comic, or film? It makes you wonder...

I don't know about you, but I like wondering.

My Latest Guilty Pleasure

Nota bene: If you're not fond of college sports, this post might not be your cup of tea. However, if you're into smartassery, this is the post for you--

So every afternoon at three, my television automatically tunes into the Paul Finebaum show on the SEC Network. For people who didn't grown up in the America Southeast, fair warning: basketball is second only to football, and our college teams are MUCH more important than the professional ones. Living in Ohio was familiar to me from the beginning, because Ohio might as well be an SEC school judging from its *cough* occasional successes and rabid fan base.  But even Buckeye fanatics have no clue what a Saturday down south is like every fall. 

Football is king. Period. Until March, when basketball takes over for about four weeks. Then it's back to football. 

At  any rate, last year when I was recovering from back...no wait, knee surgery, the SEC Network was about to debut, and ESPN put Paul Finebaum's show on one of their channels for a couple of weeks before the launch. Due to the paucity of entertainment to be found at 3 in the afternoon in Ohio, I started watching the show. 

And I got hooked. 

I knew who Finebaum was, of course. Any child of the South knows about Paul Finebaum--UT grad who worked as a journalist in Alabama, including a call-in radio show that became a staple for any SEC fan once it hit Sirius. The asshat who poisoned the giant, lovely old oak trees at Toomer's Corner at Auburn University called Finebaum to confess his crime. (Talk about hanging yourself! Confessing to that sort of crime on a nationally syndicated radio show? Dumbest move ever!) But having Finebaum on TV? In Ohio? Surely the football gods were on my side! Took me a few months to call in,  but once I'd called once that was all she wrote. Now I call in frequently. Not daily. Hell, some people call in more than once per day and STILL have nothing to say that's worthwhile. And that's what got me hooked. 

Ever hear the word "deadpan"? If Paul Finebaum's face isn't by the definition in the dictionary, it should be. He has mastered deadpan to such a degree that I'm not even sure the man blinks. But none of that matters next to his encyclopedic memory of collegiate sports, and especially the Southeastern Conference. After two decades trapped in the Big Ten swamp in which I currently live, the prospect of daily SEC talk was alluring. 

I never reckoned on the callers though. Or the Twitter wars. I've been blocked repeatedly by some good ol' boy in Alabama for pointing out the illogical nature of calling in to a radio/TV show and saying it's 'unwatchable'. I mean...if it's unwatchable, then stop watching. Stop listening. Stop calling. Stop monitoring Twitter. Just go watch the People's Court or some less challenging programming instead of tuning in every day to a show that bothers you so much. 

 Well, maybe that old coot doesn't like the show, but I sure do. I'm learning a lot--about other programs, other players, other traditions besides the familiar and beloved ones at UT. I enjoy hearing the debates between callers, the sweet, soft voices of Southern ladies that call up just to talk to Paul, the interviews with other journalists as well as coaches and players. And you gotta love a man who, after a couple of weeks commenting on how Ohio State was going to be trashed by Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, turned around the day after and took a plethora of calls from Buckeye fans, eating his crow pie with a dash of Old Bay sprinkled on top and never losing his cool. 

That makes it especially fun when he DOES lose his cool. Words of advice: don't try to challenge Paul Finebaum on anything having to do with Alabama's legendary coach Paul "Bear" Bryant unless you are dealing with facts. Because if you do, he will verbally eviscerate you in a manner that impresses the heck out of me. 

Since verbal evisceration is one of my favorite hobbies. 

Today that same good ol' boy that thinks the show is unwatchable called not once, but twice. Both times, he was lamenting (read: yelling) that Paul Finebaum has changed. He's lost his purpose. He's apushover. He's a mouthpiece regurgitating the ESPN line. *sigh* Finebaum tried to explain the difference between TALK SHOW HOST and COLUMNIST, but that went right over the caller's head. After all, yelling is more fun, especially when you're watching a show that is allegedly unwatchable, right? 

But here's the thing. `The platform that Finebaum provides on his show is designed to embrace callers of all sorts: men and women, young and old, Tennessee and that other school whose name I will not mention. Sports fan and sports fanatic. There's a slew of regular callers that have been associated with Finebaum since his show was a local show in Brimingham. And yet, he is courteous to first time callers. He also doesn't suffer from the delusion that many sportscasters have of thinking that women just don't understand sports and certainly can't comment intelligently upon them.  Sure, he has a stable of cheerleader callers, but in the Finebaum forum they're always entertaining on some level. And when Finebaum turns serious, it's impossible not to respect the man for what he's done and for what he's trying to do. 

So in the end, the choice to have the Paul Finebaum Show on every afternoon for four hours wasn't a difficult one for me. I enjoy listening to whatever might turn up, and no one--not even Paul or his producers--is ever quite sure what that might be. Yes, I've gone back to writing full time, and I'm getting in my eight hours a day every single day. But I have that four hour block every day that take me home again--without the heat and humidity. Paul Finebaum can make me nostalgic for the South, and optimistic for the future. That's no mean feat. Straddling that line between entertainment and education is difficult for any journalist, and the fact that Finebaum can do so with the grace and class he exudes on camera speaks volumes for not only him, but his staff as well. 

So between 3 and 7 pm, Monday through Friday, don't call me, don't come by my house, and don't expect me to Skype unless you want to talk UT offensive lines and the respective values of the spread offense or 3-4 defense. I'll be back home, listening to the voice of the South, and getting mentally ready for football season. 

Thanks, Paul, for bringing me home.

Welcome Back! And Goodbye...

That welcome is not just for you. It's also, in many ways, for me. After over ten years, I am finally back on the writer's side of the publishing desk. ONLY the writer's side. 

And it feels good. 

Oddly, although the closing of Musa Publishing was heartbreaking for me on a personal level, I still feel a level of success. Heck, we NEVER missed paying our authors and staff. We NEVER had to make up bogus cover stories for why royalties would be late. And we NEVER shut our authors out of the process. Thanks to the Delphi system created by Musa (specifically Kelly and Micheal), our authors knew their sales numbers within minutes of our knowing them. We published good  books by great writers at all stages of their careers, from novice first-timers to NYT bestsellers and major award-winners. Unfortunately for Musa--and for all of e-publishing--the atmosphere in digital publishing has changed. The market is glutted with self-published books, cluttering up search engines and third party sites and making it impossible for a casual reader to just find a book. Browsing through titles on a virtual bookshelf is a thing of the past because there are just too many titles. Authors have to market themselves now, instead of their books, and not all authors are good at that. We had a great plan at the wrong time, which sucked for Musa. But I am proud of what our authors accomplished, I am proud of our outstanding staff. And regardless (note this: irregardless is STILL not a word) of our decision to close Musa's doors, I am proud of the amazing experience I shared with the other directors. 

And I will personally stand behind every single book we published. 

Honestly? Felt good to get that out. It's been a monster on my shoulders for the past few weeks, but the grieving process is over and now it's time to move on with my life. And my writing career, which after four-plus years on hold is in need of some recharging.

I have to admit--my study looks strange now with all my publishing/editing materials packed away and nothing but my laptop and printer on the desk.  The publication schedules are gone from my wall, replaced by storyboards and outlines.  The desk isn't facing the window anymore, since for some reason looking at trees always helped me to think my way through an editing passage that just wasn't reading right. Now it's facing the wall, because when I'm writing I don't like distractions and trees are, in the spring, able to pull my attention away from just about anything. The comfortable editing chair is gone with its upholstery and cushions, and the straight-backed antique parson's chair is back, with its hard wood and lacquered lattice work reminding me sternly to get my mind back in the game. 

It all feels weird. But it also feels good. All these stories that have been beating me in the face for the past few years will have their opportunity to breathe. And maybe I will too. 

So, Elf Killing lives again, and I'm sure some of those pointy-eared little twerps will be biting the big one before too much longer. In the meantime, you can expect what you have always expected from this blog: writing and publishing thoughts, sports, politics, the strange and unusual, rants (you know there'll be plenty of those!), cats from our ongoing commitment to rescue and foster abandoned cats and litters, and whatever else might strike my fancy. 

In the meantime, it's just good to be talking to you guys again. Let's do it again. Like...tomorrow.

Rejections and Dejection and Objections

Rejection.

Harsh word. Harsher reality.  And, unfortunately, a part of every writer's life.   Here it is, early on Wednesday morning, and this has already been a week where rejection has played a huge part in the life events of all kinds of writers at all different levels. For me this week, rejection has been the catchphrase.  So, I wanted to address rejection in this blog post. I kind of feel obligated to, because not only have I had to reject writers this week, but I've been rejected myself as well.

Strange, isn't it?  That I can deal in rejections after receiving my own?  And sure--there's a part of me that thinks, "ANY writer, given the proper chance, training and editing, can succeed." I honestly believe that. That's part of the Musa creed, in fact.  We take writers and build authors.  It's our mission.

And yet...

And yet...does that mean every writer RIGHT NOW is ready to take advantage of that creed? 

No, it doesn't.

Let me tell you a story.  The first draft of The Reckoning of Asphodel that I wrote was in 1983.  I came back to it in 2003, when I had to quit work after my car accident.  We were poor---POOOOOOOOOOOR--and I was stuck at home all day by myself while my husband worked two jobs.  And after rent and food and medicine and doctors' bills and gas and car insurance and utilities, there was nothing left for cable or internet or even books.  So, just to entertain myself, I dug out this old story from my memory--not even the paper manuscript--and set about writing a story to keep myself sane.  And after that story was written (and the other three as well), it took me three years and multiple rejections before I finally found a publisher. 

Twenty years.  And don't get me wrong--that manuscript was rejected back in 1984 and 1985 when I was a dumb college kid who didn't know the first thing about how to submit or what even made up a good story.  My writing career was born of rejection, just like every other writer out there.  My study wall is papered with printed up rejections--the helpful ones, that steered me in the right direction; the painful ones, that almost made it; and even a few stupid ones. You know--for the wrong manuscript or the wrong author name. So every time when I look at a new manuscript from my slushpile, before I write that rejection letter I'm confronted with literally hundreds of my own failures.  I try to take into account how each rejection made me feel, what it made me do, and if it helped or hurt.

This week so far, I've had a writer attack one of my editors online because she rejected his manuscript--and this after I wrote him probably one of the gentlest and most encouraging rejections I have EVER written.  I was concerned upon reading his manuscript that he wasn't quite mature enough as a writer to work through the editing process successfully.  And, within 48 hours, my lack of conviction in the writer's maturity was borne out.  

I wonder. Will he take that manuscript out in a couple of decades and look at it again?  Or will he move on to another project and submit to us as we advised and encouraged him to do?  Or, will he instead play the victim card, and fritter away his talent and promise?

And will I ever know?

Then, less than twenty-four hours later, I got probably one of the most crushing rejections I have ever received. Crushing--not because it was a rejection, but because against every instinct I have to the opposite, I very foolishly allowed myself to think that maybe one of my agented manuscripts had found a home.  

I knew better than to do that, and I paid for it. 

But...I have to admit, as crushing as the rejection was, I find myself thinking in an entirely different manner about the repercussions.  I'm not sitting here dwelling on *manuscript A* rejected by *insert Big Six house here* after having *manuscript A* for well over *insert number higher than 8 and lower than 12 here* months. 

(okay--maybe a little bitter about the months thing. I'll admit it.)

Instead, within the same email to my agent after she delivered the news, I was already thinking about the NEXT publisher. I was already processing the COMMENTS of the editor who'd taken the book to committee and had lost.  I was already thinking AHEAD.

Not BEHIND.

The thing about publishing, and writing, and all the intangibles involved in the submission process is that any work is malleable.  Any opportunity lost can become an opportunity gained.  And the author who wishes to succeed in publishing, to gain all that they hope for and have worked for, must keep their focus AHEAD.  Sure--it's okay to be depressed for a bit.  I muttered a few choice...verbs at my computer screen when I woke up to that email.  But then pick yourself up and move on to the next house on your list.  Or, if the rejection includes comments that resonate with you, take a look at the manuscript. If the comments don't jingle any strings, though, just move forward.  The last thing I want to encourage any author to do is to change their manuscript every time they get a personalized rejection.  All you'll get out of that is a confused mess of changes that don't enhance the story.  

Regardless of what you decide to do with the manuscript, the real course lies only in one direction.  Ahead.  Anything else will throw you off course for years.  And if you reach the natural end of the line for the manuscript, wrap it up carefully and store it away.

Every story, every novel you write is a jewel of accomplishment and dedication and education.  The more you write, the more you learn. Never let one manuscript, one rejection, one publisher be the end all-be all of your writing career. Take a day--a week--to get your pouting and sulking out of the way. In private is best, and by all means don't run off to the editor's Facebook and leave a snotty comment on their Wall.  But get it out of your system if you need to and then move the heck on. Because the only way to prove that rejection was a bad idea? Is to get that manuscript accepted somewhere else.

Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind.  J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Both great classics.  Both manuscripts, rejected scores of times before someone bought it.  Stephen King. John Grisham. Madeline L'Engle. All authors who were rejected--famously--multiple times before they were published. Hell, Anne Frank was rejected.  Who could be mean enough to reject Anne Frank? If you talk to any of our great writers, our famous and revered writers, they all have one thing in common.  Rejections. 

Getting rejections is a part of the growth experience of every writer.  We have to get rejected in order to know how to improve ourselves and our work.  We have to be told 'no' before we can really appreciate the 'yes.' And just like with every other writing milestone, we have to learn to take these things in stride.  

One thing that being an editor has taught me is that it's never easy to reject a writer whose manuscript is almost there.  Believe it or not, it's hard.  And while I was muttering some strong...verbs at the computer monitor this morning, I wasn't saying them to or about the editor.  My verbs had to do with what comes next.

Your verbs should try to do the same thing.

And the adjectives?  Well, as with all descriptive terms they should SHOW, not TELL.

Let your work do the job for you.  You'll be better off watching the spectacle from the high road, than dragging yourself, your work and your reputation down into the gutter. 

Things these days...

...are strange in the wonderful world of Celinaland.  Besides being busier than a three-legged cat in a room full of mice, lots of changes are on the horizon. 

My totally wonderful and awesome agent, who is the tiniest object of universal fear in the publishing industry, now has three of my manuscripts in hand.  I'm very happy about this--I like knowing that I have three fish swimming in the barrel.  A little over a year ago, I would have been thrilled to have ONE.  But now, since all three manuscripts are the first stories in series, those manuscripts represent much much more.  In those three series I have eleven manuscripts written.  Not too bad, eh?  So I feel that last year, despite all the craziness, I managed to get a lot of good work done towards my writing career.

And we shall see how that goes.

On the Musa front, we just keep getting busier and busier.  Our submissions inboxes are up to date--a very good thing considering how many subs we get--and our release schedule is already stretching its timeline tentacles into the autumn of this year. Penumbra just assumed the electronic submissions for the stranded subscribers to Realms of Fantasy, so I'm working my rear off on that too.  With the addition of two columns, one by writer/editor/blogger/aikido bully Lori Basiewicz on folklore, and the other by writer/comicist/educator/Writer Beware guru Richard White on worldbuilding, our content is not only increasing but improving.  And, of course the February issue of Penumbra is Shakespeare.  That always helps.

Life at home, surprisingly, is quiet.  With both kids grown and out of the home, it's just me and the cats most of the time.  Very conducive to getting a lot of work done.

What is NOT conducive to getting a lot of work done, however, is the ongoing purgatory of my back.  Yes...that's still going on.  Last week, I was admitted to Ohio State; there was a suspicion that the area around the artificial disc in my lumbar spine was infect.  That was not the case.  However, what IS the case is that the artificial disc is dangerously displaced and has been almost since the day it was put in.  In fact, some displacement was already visible six weeks after it was put in.

Did my then-surgeon tell me about that displacement?  Nope.  Did he let me know that the surgical screws were already visibly protruding?  Nope.  Did he ever let on--during the months after that artificial disc replacement--that maybe perhaps the continuing pain in my back and the horrific sciatic pain in my leg might have been caused by a problem with the surgery that he, himself, performed.

Not once.  In fact, he discharged me six months after the operation and never saw me again. Funny how that works, huh?

At any rate, I'm now with one of the top orthopedic surgeons in the country for this type of failed hardware correction.  He told me today I'd become a 'back surgery celebrity' since I was discharged from the hospital last week.  He had communicated with some other orthopedic surgeons he knows and given them the details of my case.  And every single one of them agreed with his diagnosis.  

Yippee.

At any rate, I'm really glad I have my writing stuff squared away; that's one less thing to worry about.  But now, I need to get Musa and Penumbra set for my absence, and that's not quite as much fun.  Regardless, though, being able to walk without pain,, to drive down to see my parents or daughters, to be able to do SOMETHING...ANYTHING again is something that not even my fertile imagination can conjure up.  It's been so long since I've been able to say that--I really can't let myself think I might be able to travel again, go boating, go riding, just be NORMAL for a while.  

Because if this falls through and it doesn't pan out, I don't know that I'll be able to stand it.

Until then, though, I'll distract myself with work.  There's plenty of it to go around, that's for sure.

Today Feels Like a Thousand Days Before

December 1 is never a good day for me. Never.  Today is World AIDS Day and a day when not only do I remember, but I sit back and think about how things are different now.  If they are.  And since today is the 24th World AIDS Day in a year in which it's been 30 years since the first reported case of AIDS, it's a day for people of my generation to reflect.

And reflection for me is not easy.

When AIDS first came to my notice, I was a teenager.  In the early days, the media called it 'gay cancer' -- straight up, on television news programs and magazines.  And as a kid in Tennessee, the concepts involved were at first hard to understand.  When I graduated in 1984 from a still-small Tennessee high school, I was unprepared for what the next few years would bring.

At first, AIDS and HIV were problems in the cities with big gay communities and freer moral standards.  I learned about it like many kids my age did--through the media.  But as I matured and moved into professional theatrical work, AIDS was no longer so remote.  Insidiously, it crept into my world--first by rumor, then by implication.  Then kids started getting sick, and straight women and then all of a sudden there wasn't any more talk about the 'gay cancer.' All of a sudden, there was a lot of hatred. Bigotry. Torture--mental and physical--and while the government and the generations ahead of mine tried to ignore the growing crisis, my generation could not. Would not. 

And the gay community, which had been in hiding and underground, mobilized into an army.  And I, and other people like me, who skirted along the edges of it because of occupation or relationships, mobilized right along with them.  

Being a youngster in the AIDS fights made me stand out on many levels--not only from within the community, where I was an anomaly by benefit of gender and orientation--but from without.  It's hard to understand now, probably, but the fear and hysteria surrounding the crisis tainted everyone involved. The pressure was incredible.  And I, who'd joined up with this events almost passively, buoyed by some sense that I, a straight girl, could somehow shield my friends from the horrific punishments they faced from the general population, found myself supported from within--by the people I, in my arrogance, had though to 'protect.'

We all learned a lot about ourselves. And about others.  And hatred, pure and vicious, that whipped along every move we made.

But worst of all, more than anything else, there was fear, coiling under the foundations of what we tried to build. Always fear--and part of that fear was split off from everything else, because while we preached testing and knowledge there's still the part of every human being that's afraid to know.

I'm not going to talk about the young people, men and women, I know who died.  I'm going to talk about the young people, men and women, who were left behind as survivors.  Those memories are  raw still, and probably always will be.  Sometimes being a survivor was worse.  So many lovers, upon the illness of their partners, were shunned by the families who had 'legal' responsibility for them--the same families who'd turned their sons out for being gay in the first place. How many parents who only months before had disowned their sons showed up before the end to snatch him away from the people who cared for him in their stead?  How many partners were shut out of the mourning process, forbidden to "intrude" upon the family's wishes? How many victims were hidden away after their deaths, buried without ceremony or notice, so his "shame" wouldn't reflect upon his parents?  I witnessed this too many times in too many hallways--a second death without closure, eviscerating the one left behind.  That's what I'll never forget really--the blankness of that moment, the stare, the absolute stillness of the one left behind.  And there was always someone left behind.

A few times, it was me.

It's hard, I think, for my kids' generation to understand what the period from 1985-1995 was really like and how hard millions of people, gay and straight, worked--not only to fight the disease itself but its complications--hatred, prejudice, ignorance, shame, and terror.  My daughters know more than most of their peers.  I've told them of the bedsides I sat at in hospices, reading out loud to victims who had no one else who cared about their condition. My girls are smart and are blessed with natural compassion. They know. But they don't know how many deaths I actually saw.

Please God they never will.

In 2011, AIDS has touched almost everyone's life in some way.  I know HIV+ patients who have lived long, productive lives with the virus because of medicine, safe practices and sometimes just sheer, stubborn determination and a burning need to tell the rest of the world to fuck off.  (And good for them!)  Now, because the hysteria has calmed because of the ceaseless, amazing work of the gay community to educate the rest of the world about AIDS, most people accept it as just another fact of life.  Something unpleasant to be aware of, but for someone else to deal with the actuality of.

While we are hopefully getting closer to a cure, the fact of the matter is that AIDS is not for someone else to deal with.  WE must deal with it.  WE must continue to fight, to educate, to research. WE must always remember that the only cure for the complications of AIDS rests with us and not some nebulous other.

The responsibility is ours. Still. And until the day comes that the last victim of AIDS is cured, we cannot ever lay down the burden or rest from the battle.

But today, when I think back on twenty-four years of World AIDS Day, I can't think of slogans or catchphrases.

All I see are faces. Hundreds--thousands of faces.

And I know them. All of them.

And so do you.

But today, I think, I'd like for you to meet someone else.  Meet the one who was left behind.  Until this country's willing to grant every American citizen the same civil rights, there will ALWAYS be someone left behind.  Today, I want you to look, to really look at them. The forgotten victims of AIDS.

The ones left behind.

Giving Thanks--It Ain't As Hard As You Think

Let's see--what am I thankful for this year?

I could go through the whole usual litany of "things Celina is grateful for in 2011" but I'm sure you'd be bored.  The list is short and...well, quite frankly, you guys don't read my blog to see what I'm being nice about.  You want to see what's pissing me off.  So let's head to the top of the list, shall we?

I hate divas.

Now, I realize that's strange coming from a girl who worked in theater AND in drag shows for a long time, but it's the God-honest truth.  You know all the awards show speeches that thank the "little people?"  Well, who are the "little people" in publishing?

The cover artist. The content editor. The line editor. The proofreader. The book designer. The marketing people. The bookkeeper. The review coordinator.  The list goes on and on and on.  A whole lot of people go into creating a book.  Sure--the writer is responsible for the lion's share of it; after all, they WROTE the book.  But the steps of the publication process mean that a lot of different people touch that manuscript before it becomes a BOOK and makes it to readers.  

There is a growing trend I've noticed lately, one that I find more than a little disturbing: authors who feel they have the right--and the power--to treat the crew that works on their book disrespectfully.  Authors who talk out of their asses, criticizing...say, a cover artist, for example, for creating a cover based on the author's OWN DESCRIPTION of the theme and plot instead of reading the book and pulling an image directly from the author's brain and regurgitating it onto the page. Last year, as a matter of fact, an editor who is a dear friend of mine was told by an author that he would SUE HER for copyright violations if she "dumbed down" his manuscript by correcting his very (very,very) horrific use of the English language.

At least I assume it was English. It might have been Tagalog for all I know.

In fact, earlier this year PM (pre-Musa) I retracted a contract offer to a writer who took it upon himself to correct the CONTRACT (one that I did not write and didn't have anything to do with) and then expressed concern over the level of editing he would receive if the contract was any indication of the company's standards.  But what made THAT encounter resonate even more strongly (and heads up!  herein lies the lesson) happened a couple of months later, when the same author submitted the same manuscript to the same editor at a different company. 

Guess who didn't get a contract offer from Musa?

And you know what?--it's a damn shame.  The book was well-written, funny, timely--and with a good, strong editor and the proper platform could have done very well.  But that book lingers with the author as far as I know, and probably will for some time.

You see, all those "little people?" They are working on multiple books from numerous authors at varying levels of proficiency.  That artist is making five or six more covers this week.  The content editor has her next two books already lined up.  The proofreader just got done working with the best-known author in the house, who treated her with kindness and respect.  And THAT'S why the best-seller is loved by the staff--because courtesy and professionalism go a long way to greasing the gears of the process. 

So my Thanksgiving post this year isn't about turkey or family or Pilgrims. My Thanksgiving post is about the actual giving of thanks to the people who work with you on your book.  Be courteous. Be professional. Speak to these publishing pros like equals. You don't automatically assume god status when you sign a publishing contract. 

Don't demand. Ask.

There are enough divas in the world as it is.  In the publishing industry, we don't really have divas.  Instead, we have asshats--and that's the last title you want dangling from your name.  Because usually right behind it, there's another tag that's even worse.

Failure.

What To Write, What To Write...?

I just spent fifteen minutes looking for an appropriate quote for my blog today.  

Unfortunately, every quote I considered had something to do with not being able to write. Probably not the best thing to write about--not being able to write--and yet, a strangely familiar thing for me at the moment.  

I've never had any problems sitting down and putting words on paper.  Sometimes, those words even made sense. Frequently, those words formed themselves into sequential stories.  And in the end, no matter whether I have my writer's hat or my editor's hat on, the stories are what drive me in all aspects of my life. 

Which makes my life pretty damn cool.

Except that right now, I'm finding it difficult to make the time to write.  All those 20 hour, 20,000 word days are now 20 hour, 20,000 (slight exaggeration for literary effect) email days. My editing time has taken away my writing time, save for...well, now.  Three a.m.  The house is quiet, my inboxes are clean-ish.  I open up my WIP and...

I've lost the thread of the story.

So I have to take some time to read back through the last pages I wrote, so I can pick up the thru line.  Fortunately, that doesn't take long.  And then...and then...

It's seven in the morning and everyone's alarm clocks in the house start to go off.  

*So, Celina, what's the point?*

The point is that writing is not always some bolt of inspiration.  A Muse doesn't descend from the Olympian heights to inject 100,000 brilliant words in the correct order and then drops a wall to block the same writer from ever producing another coherent sentence. 

Writing is work--difficult, painstaking, solitary work.  The best way to cure writer's block?  Write your way out of it.  Instead of sitting there waiting for the heavenly choirs to hit a harmonized high "C" that hefts you over that block, make yourself write.  It doesn't matter what you write. You can write an extremely creative grocery list.  Just go to your writing place, sit in your writing chair, and WRITE. You may have to rearrange your mind from whatever it is you do when you're not writing--I certainly do--but once you've managed that, then write.

Or--

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time...the wait is simply too long. -- Leonard Bernstein

Thank God for www.quotationspage.com.