As a writer, I spend a lot of time in my imagination. It’s one of the reasons I also consider movement to be so important, and am not physically satisfied unless I’ve had some exercise on any given day. It’s easy, if I spend so much time in my head, to neglect the rest of me. But I digress.

I spend plenty of time making up stories, translating them to the page (or computer screen). And then I spend some more time reading and watching other people’s stories, and sometimes re-reading and re-watching them — the book and TV versions of comfort food. And then I make up all sorts of things I never write, or if I write them it happens much later and I’d be hard-pressed to recognize the reappearance of a former daydream. My life would be much poorer without all of this imagining.

There is a certain point at which fantasizing for the sake of fantasizing becomes only a means of escape rather than an exercise of creativity (and, yes, those two can be and often are the same thing, but the difference I’m talking about here is in degrees). If all of the energy is hurtling towards escape and none of it towards creation, then things are out of balance, and I’d best drive myself to Nia and cook something succulent for dinner. And write.

The main point of the article that people experience lives and situations different from their own through imagination, and that although we know rationally that what we’ve imagined (or what the TV producers have dreamed up) is not real, some part of us believes that it is. The term the article uses to differentiate that state is “alief.”

For instance, some fictional characters have become so real to me through re-reading or re-watching that their stories have become part of my personal mythology on some level. To name a handful, Stuart Redman and Nick Andros of Stephen King’s The Stand and the characters of the Joss Whedonverse from Buffy to Mal. While this is interesting to me, this alief as regards these stories and characters, what I find even more interesting is the way the alief translates to or informs my own philosophy of living. I’ve said several times that certain stories have completely changed the way I see the world, and certainly the way I act within it.

The part of this translation the article makes me think of most is something I’ve also written and talked about — I wrote an entire novel based on the premise that a society that loses its stories ceases to exist. A society that continues to create its stories, and to evolve them, thrives.

Based on the quality (in any way you choose to interpret that word), what kind of society are we?

Over the course of six days, we each produced six novel proposals in various mystery subgenres — cozy, PI/detective, police procedural, hardboiled, and noir. We also wrote two noir short stories. And we, of course, read all the work each other produced.

Peppered in among all this for me were good conversations with folks I don’t often spend much time with and walks on the beach — except for Tuesday, with its overlapping deadlines. No walk. I almost started killing people outside my fiction. So, lesson learned and applied on Friday, the other day of overlapping deadlines.

Bonus: On Saturday, Scott William Carter signed his debut novel The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys at North by Northwest. If you haven’t got a copy already, you want to buy one. It’s a riveting read, and often laugh out loud funny.

I learned a ton at the workshop. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to have taken the workshop from such an amazing teacher and with so many great writers.

The stories are already out in the wide world. Now to add chapters to all those novel proposals and get those out as well.

On your mark. Get set. Go!

So, danger. What makes a topic dangerous? Risk.

It doesn’t have to be risk to life and limb, although for some people — reporters in war zones, people who tell the truth to power under repressive regimes, those who blow the whistle on wrongdoing in the wrong place at the wrong time — it is. Sometimes it’s a risk to livelihood – take the Dixie Chicks, for example, and their comments about George W. Bush at a time when those words evoked outrage in a politically polarized environment. I know, I know. These days, is there any other kind of political environment around here? Let’s face it, for writers like me it’s not any of those things. There is no danger, grave or otherwise, to me in the act of writing a story.

Now that that’s out of the way, I want to move on to what I mean.

In my personal experience, living the life of privilege that I do with mostly plenty of everything I need and some things I want, the risk is in revealing myself. In letting air and light into the family skeleton closet when those old bones and sinews have influenced me down to my molecules. Or worse, showing myself parts of me I don’t want to know about or examine, or possible didn’t even know existed in the first place.

To be clear, every piece of fiction I write is meant to be submitted into the wide world of markets for publication, so I’m aware that no matter what my experience is in writing a story or a novel, the goal is for somebody else (and hopefully a lot of someone elses) will read it. Am I worried about baring my soul (and the souls of my characters) to the world? No. Not for a second. What scares me is the act of baring my soul to myself.

I’ve had lots of practice doing it. It never gets old. And I never quite get used to it, especially when I draw back the curtain of my inner recesses and there’s some unexpected, gut-wrenching feeling or idea that demands to be explored in words.

The insidious shame of regret. (“Ashes,” just completed and mailed, about a runner-inner who rescues women and children from house fires as penance for not having rescued his own family, and the washed up theater janitor who learns to live by his example.)

Unexpected depth of outrage. (“Outcast,” published in Chizine, created from outrage over the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.)

Grief and loss. (“The Truth According to Margot Williams,” published in Fantasy Magazine, exploring grief over the loss of my grandmother.)

Or I could talk about the novel I’m percolating now and about to start work on, which story I won’t discuss because I don’t discuss works in progress. But I can say about it that the initial impulse of the book stems from the almost subconscious unwillingness to face certain kinds of loneliness in myself. “Almost” because, while it remained subconscious for a long time, I managed to unearth it with the help of a friend who poked me in the eye with a spear. After all, what are friends for?

You could say that all of these things are run-of-the-mill emotions, or just that everyone has them or some variation on them, and you’d be right. But it’s not acknowledging the emotion that I’m talking about here. I’m talking about digging into these things until what I’m feeling when I write is risky.

The common writing advice is “write what you know,” which most people take to mean “write about subjects you know.” That’s not it at all. If every writer wrote only about subjects they’re experts on or have experience with, there’d be a lot of stories that would never have been and would never be written. I don’t know anything about mountain climbing but I could make up a story about mountain climbing with a few details and I could make it riveting and vital because the story isn’t really about the mountain or the climbing. It’s about the people. Writers make shit up. Some of us make shit up with varying levels of research. Either way, it’s still creating a story out of whole cloth.

The more distilled version of the advice I’ve heard is “write what you’re passionate about,” to which I say, yes, absolutely. But I don’t think passion is entirely what I’m after when I write either, at least not all the time.

I want the occasional risk and the discovery, and the subtle and sometimes not so subtle shifts that come from them.

I don’t need it for every story. I don’t even want it for every story. That would be exhausting, as much as I’m writing, and frankly unnecessary. But having it pop up every so often reminds me that story can be a great revealer and changer of minds and hearts, especially my own.

I did run myself into a wall of busy and have taken a few days off my regular writing. It’s time to get back to it. I have the start of a strange western hybrid, a sort of Firefly-flavored bounty hunter story. Since as usual I have no clue what’s going to happen yet, I’m excited to see where it will go.

I’m also neck-deep in reading for the upcoming Mystery workshop in May. My bookmark is somewhere around page 155 of Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo, which I’m enjoying the hell out of.

Other, non-reading happinesses:

1. The new season of In Plain Sight. This show hooked me half way through last season and hasn’t let go yet. Witness Protection marshals, you rock.

2. King Arthur Flour’s new gluten-free cake mixes. I’ll be making a couple of these in the next week for birthdays — mine and several folks in my immediate family (a ton of April birthdays).

3. The catalog that came with the King Arthur Flour cake mixes, from which I’m going to choose some really frivolous seeming birthday gift. Fun! In the kitchen!

4. The new Runaways movie opens in my town this weekend, and Sunday is popcorn in the dark with Joan Jett day. I can hardly wait.

Happiness!

First up, novel workshop. I’ve been to these before, but this time there was a new method, moving from traditional Clarion workshop round-robin critique rules to more targeted comments about the marketability of the novels and spiffing up the proposal packages so that they really shone. It rocked. I found the whole experience eye-opening and very useful. And such a treat to read so many really great books.

I took The Heart of the World to this workshop. So well-received. And then mailed to editors, one of whom requested the full manuscript so far. Good stuff.

Next up, a couple of days off, which I mostly spent reading the first round of stories sent in for the second workshop and walking on the beach. Great reading, strenuous walking on that loop down to the beach and around to the inlet near Mo’s, then back up through the neighborhood via the Hill of Hell. Sunshine even graced us some.

And then the anthology workshop with Dean and Denise Little. This one, too, went as usual above and beyond my expectations as far as learning and networking. I wrote my first ever noir for the overnight short story at this workshop. What a blast! And I got to read and learn from the excellent overnight batch of stories and all of Denise’s and Dean’s comments.

Both my first and second story are out to markets.

Add to all this mix a shopping trip to North by Northwest Books and my first trip to Mo’s (no chowder for me unfortunately because of the glutens, but it smelled heavenly; and Mo’s surprised me with a bang-up bowl of chili) and lots of time with so many other professional writers and editors, and you have a recipe for amazingness.

So. Reading back over what I’ve just written, it strikes me that there is no real way to describe what I get out of these workshops and what it’s like to experience them. Because I’ve written about the logistics and mechanics, and that doesn’t include the way it feels to be among people who write professionally, who love it, who love story, who love learning. Or how it feels to completely immerse myself in writing and writing culture for at least a week. Or how it feels to bump up my craft and business knowledge in a way that fuels my work once I return home. You just have to have been there.

I’m betting you have a similar experience that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been there. Feel free to substitute words and phrases.

I take “vacation time” from work to do all this, usually a couple of times a year. Everyone, including me, knows that it’s not a real vacation. Not in a million years. I work my butt off. I get very little rest. It doesn’t matter, though. What does matter? Doing what I love. That feeds me in a different way than sunning on the beach or curling up in front a peat fire on a rainy Irish night. Without all those different kinds of nourishment, I feel like a starving woman.

Do what you love. Find a way. That’s my prescription.

Breathe in . . . breathe out . . . BUT WHAT IF X HAPPENS? . . . Breathe in . . . breathe out . . . THEN Y!?!

and so on.

I’ve had a lovely Yule season, and I hope you have, too. There have been some amazing gifts of the material kind and more valuable ones of the not-so-material kind. I am reminded to be grateful for all the people in my life, and for all the love. And also for movies that knock my socks off. I’m not so enterprising (nor do I have so much time; see above re: *almost* end, and the need to actually write it) as to attempt a 2009 gratitude list at this point. And I’ve occasionally written these sorts of lists at other times of the year. So to prevent a case of supreme redundancy and time eating, here’s today’s top eleven list.

1. The people in my life who I happen to know. I love you. You know who you are.

2. The people in my life who I have yet to meet. Same goes.

3. This morning’s walk in the cold rain with the Doggie Ranger, replete with morning prayers and connectedness.

4. An awesome wiki article on Kabbalah that I actually had time to read.

5. Avatar. Still heavily on my mind since I saw it on Sunday morning. I’m going to have to catch it again, this time preferably at the IMAX which will NOT be sold out the next time I want to go.

6. Tea. Preferably Barry’s Irish, Gold Blend.

7. Blueberries, fresh and huge and bursting with juicy flavor.

8. Surprises.

9. Calvin and Hobbes.

10. Plenty of time to write.

11. That I get to take my lunch hour at 9:15 tomorrow morning to go to Nia. There will be dancing! And Queen Latifah!

Best wishes, everyone.

Oh, I know — those aren’t the only choices. But they’re the ones I’ve adopted. That said, here’s my short list of things to be thankful for this holiday season, in no particular order.

Family and friends. There are so many wonderful people in my life who I feel blessed to know. There’s nothing as precious as time spent with someone you love. In person is best. Phone or virtual is good, too. I have so many friends hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Writing time. Four glorious days off for Thanksgiving weekend. 6,500 glorious words. Over the 300 page mark on the book and into the last 100 page light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel sprint. The coolest thing by far is figuring everything out at the same time my characters do.

Dance. Four glorious days off also means three mornings spent at the Nia studio — one with a mix of music honoring one of the founders of Nia, Carlos Rosas, and two instances of Sting’s Brand New Day, which choreography and music makes my whole self sing. Through thick and thin, during times when I felt comfortable and sometimes worried in my own skin, Nia has nourished me, body and soul.

Food, Glorious Food! ‘Tis the season to be baking, fa la la la, la la la la. Fig cookies, banana bread with chocolate chips and crystallized ginger, and sometime this coming week: gingerbread. I love the feel of dough in my hands, the warm, spicy, sweet smells wafting from the oven to fill the whole house, the dance of flavors on the tongue. Many thanks to Gluten Free Girl for a website of glorious gluten free recipes, ripe for the making.

Story. For great books and movies and stories spoken from the mouths of friends. This weekend, I’ve been New Moon-ed, which I liked just fine, and the company was awesome, too. Really love spending time in the Bella-and-Edward ‘verse. I’ve also been reminded of my great love of all things Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Monk, NCIS, and of course Sons of Anarchy. On deck: the honkin’ huge novel on my coffee table, just itching to be opened and read. Could this book be by Stephen King? Why, yes, Virginia. It is.

Song. I had the good luck (and the determination) to see U2 this year after many years of having missed them when they came to town. Definitely worth the wait. A giant shot in the arm full of love and hope and general shiny goodness. Tomorrow night, I have the privilege of going with a very good friend on a birthday adventure to include Jackson Browne. Doctor, my eyes will be full of Jackson Browne-ness and my ears will be full of lovely tunes.

Sunset Walks. Sunset walks on the block with the Doggie Ranger. Evening breeze rustling the leaves of the oaks, ashes, sycamores, holly, palms, golden raintrees, sweetgums, and magnolias. Crows gliding through the air, calling out to the world. And the way everything must smell really interesting, what with all the times we simply MUST STOP to smell the (fill in the blank).

Love. Needs no description.

Also:
Tea
Hot Chocolate
Christmas fairy lights
Flickering candlelight
Cider
A fuzzy scarf
and
Muppet Bohemian Rhapsody

Mama!

I offer you this bit of warmth on a cold, rainy day.

Sliante!

Mmmm, mmmm, good.

A couple of days after the U2 concert, we had the annual Bosses Day bake-a-thon. My rowmate at work and I treated our attorneys and legal assistants to a smorgasbord of breakfast tacos with homemade salsa, peanut butter cookies, banana bread with chocolate chips and crystallized ginger, and more.

I had fun baking the bread even with my entire lack of sleep. For the curious, the recipe is here. The ginger really gives the bread some wow factor.

There has also been a spur-of-the-moment trip to the store for pumpkin makings, because the season downright demands it. So Sunday night I baked pumpkin custard (aka, pie filling sans crust — didn’t want to deal with the gluten-free crust on a Sunday night). Between that and the cold front that has swept in, it feels like fall around here.

Write On!

Slow and steady wins the race. Or at least it will.

This book looks to be the longest I’ve had the pleasure of writing, which is not to say that it’s ungodly long, just that my novels usually top out at about 350 pages and this one looks like it will go around 450. It’s a bigger book — big world, big worldbuilding, high concept, dual-moving-into-triple POV. It’s still a blast to write and I’m still writing it one 800-1,500 word scene at a time, focusing on the emotion. I can’t wait to see how it comes out.

Meanwhile, it’s fascinating to me that any intention on my part to power through large sections of this book just ain’t working. I can’t pull several hours on a Saturday or Sunday at this point. I don’t know whether it’s me rebelling because I want to be sure to have a life or whether it’s the book rebelling because the story definitely wants to told at its own pace. Either way, as long as there’s steady progress, that’s all right.

Hey — are you gonna read that?

Just finished up my friend Christy Evans’s debut cozy mystery, Sink Trap. So much fun! I can’t wait to read the next one when it’s released. I need to see what Georgiana Neverall has up her plumber apprentice’s sleeve.

Since life’s too short not to have a good story to dive into, I’ve started Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Very interesting so far. It hasn’t moved as quickly as I would normally like, but something about it holds me and it’s getting a might more interesting. Looking forward to seeing what’s in store.

How many miles can a writer run?

Still not many as it turns out. I’m getting some treadmill and/or Nia time in every day and not only do I look better, I feel like a million bucks. A well-oiled machine, even. That’s pretty cool.

The Weight Watchering is going very well, too. Down 11 pounds so far since I’ve started. This is a huge milestone for me on account of how I’ve tried and tried to make this happen and haven’t hit on the right formula — physical, mental, etc. — until now. So, down 11. Only 20 more pounds or so to go with an interim goal of 11 more because a girl’s got to have manageable goals, doesn’t she?

***
There’s more, but that’s enough for now. I’ve got lots to do around here, a bunch of writing, a phone call with a friend later, and after that I’ll settle in for my weekly episode of Sons of Anarchy. Who’d'a thunk I’d fall so hard for that one?

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

All of that is at the top of the list for being and staying in writing shape.  But that’s not all.

There’s also the part where I have to take care of body.  If the body is unhappy – slug-like from so much sitting, or not getting enough nutrients, or slug-like from so much sitting — then I actually can’t sit at the computer.  Or if I can manage it, I’m not in top form to create.  So that means exercise and fresh air and, for me, actual cooking with, you know, vegetables.  (Like this morning’s big breakfast of egg scramble with kale, ground turkey, and pico de gallo, with corn tortillas.)

So far, so good.  (And so far, so full; just waiting on the tea to steep.)  But wait, there’s more.  If you order now, you get this nifty set of knives and a salad spinner.

Which means there’s another thing that I can’t do without:  sitting meditation.  Yes, more sitting.  Only different.

This kind of sitting involves actual stillness and silence, noticing my breath as it moves in and inflates my lungs and belly and as it moves out, contracting my stomach muscles just a little, lengthening and strengthening my back.  All those stories spinning in my creative imagination come to a rest.

That rest is a re-set button.  It’s a deep breath before the plunge.   Without it, I run out of air.

And then there’s the ingestion of every kind of story I can get my hands on. — first for pleasure and then for studying.  That means books — which, in the last month or so for me, include The Luxe, Duma Key, The Last Templar, Ink Exchange, and The Constant Gardener.  On deck:  Christopher Moore’s Coyote Blue.  It also means movies (last weekend, District 9; this weekend Julie and Julia).  And all those excellent stories on TV, which one I am most anticipating is the second season of Sons of Anarchy.  Not to mention LOST, which after a Netflixed disc-and-a-half has hooked me well and good.

And lastly:  I need adventures.  I need to be around friends and meet new ones, go dancing until all hours of the night, enjoy art wherever I find it, go for neighborhood walks and hikes and beach strolls.

Whew!  That’s A LOT.  But what it really is, is life.  Getting into and staying in writing shape for me is all about life.

I thought I had my problem narrowed down to emotion in structure.  Emotion is one of several author decision points in a story, and it must be balanced with other qualities in order for the story to work.  Writing a blazing hot action scene?  There’s not going to be a lot of emotion, and if it’s there it won’t be written in thick prose.  Otherwise it’d throw a splash of cold water on that blazing hot action and put out the fire.

The issue I thought I had with emotion is what I called “knowing the emotional thread of a story.”  A story’s emotional thread, the way the characters feel and their motivations, their emotional journey through whatever happens, and how they are changed in the end is what makes a story worthwhile.  It’s my holy grail.  If it’s not there in any particular book I’m reading, regardless of genre (and counting, of course, what’s appropriate for that genre), I don’t care.  I am officially Dark-Willow-bored-now and outta there.

I labored under the mistaken impression that I should know all that holy grail stuff before I ever start writing, or at least within the first 1,500 words.  (Cue sinister laugh.)  Because I never really have known it ahead of time (even if I thought I did) I would often write until 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through a story or to about page 100 of a novel and then the thread would reveal itself.  Problem was, I hadn’t laid the groundwork — all the little clues my subconcious would normally place in the front part of the work — to support it.

There is almost always no way to fix a situation like that.  Hence the stories that fell apart and Humpty-Dumptied themselves (they couldn’t be put back together again).  Or all those thrown-away novel pages and re-drafts.

I understand now that that emotional thread in stories always shows up on its own.  It can’t be manufactured.  It can’t be engineered toward.  When I try, it shifts on me like quicksand.

What does work, however, is writing the story one scene at a time or one 800-1,500 word segment at a time.  And in this segment, I concentrate on the emotion.  That way, instead of trying to eat the emotional elephant of the story or the book, I am laying that necessary groundwork for the emotion point of the story, whatever it turns out to be.

It took me all five days of one-on-one work to understand all this.  Literally, to the end of the working period — it all finally clicked into place at that last group lunch.  In those five days I plotted a short story, 800 to 1,500 words at a time, concentrating on the emotion.  And I started writing a new novel, jumping off a dark science fantasy YA short story I’d finished a few months before, that I’d never even contemplated writing.

(The writing was a trip if for no other reason than my roommate was busy writing a very funny romantic suspense in the back room, and whenever the kids in my book were at their most terrified, she would cackle because she’d just written something off-the-charts hilarious.)

I’m still working on the book fast and furious, with my focus on emotion, one scene at a time.  You know what?  I’ve never had so much fun writing anything in my life.