It's Getting Sappy Up In Here...

It’s that time of year—time to deck the halls, fruit the cake, steamroll the mannheim, and nog the egg. We’re simplifying this year—buying fewer presents, spending more time together, and recognizing the inherent joy in the smallest of things. Decorating gingerbread houses. Bumbles and Yukon Cornelius (who came up with that name?). Singing in the church choir. Linus on national television reminding us what Christmas is all about. My son putting only the following three items on his Santa list: "a real live parakeet, 200 bucks, snow falling in my backyard." Trader Joe’s sea salt caramels (you've heard me talk about yin and yang...don't get me started on salty and sweet. Perfection in a cello wrapper). Peppermint hot chocolate and snowman Peeps. Not hearing that awful Christmas Shoes song. Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. The Star Wars Christmas Album (what do you get a Wookie for Christmas, when he already has a comb?). Cousin Eddie’s dickie, Aunt Bethany’s jello mold, and Clark Griswold demanding we have the “hap-hap-happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby danced with Danny [bleeping] Kaye.”

There is also joy to be found in honoring your craft. The best gifts we can give ourselves cost nothing—time to write amidst the frenzy of the season, stolen moments with our characters, juicy plot developments all wrapped up with a fat bow. And grace. Grace to accept that 1,000 words a day may not happen until the New Year, but each sentence, each word, each thought related to your work is a small treasure. This season, may you receive presence, along with your presents.

(And, because I can’t resist, for you Twilight fans . . . an extra special gift, courtesy of the LOLcats. It makes me giggle!)

Riding the Climb or Climbing the Wave

What do Miley Cyrus and Ursula K. Le Guin have in common? Presumably, very little. Okay, probably nothing. But its been a bit of a rough spell for Jayne Lynne. Not the one-of-us-has- taken-seriously-ill or-something-like-that kind of rough spell. But the kind of rough spell where the writing isn't coming and the time that should be spent writing is commandeered by annoyingly superfluous things like our jobs, our families, our friends, the holidays, and, admittedly, the occasional red wine hangover. I know what you're thinking. The economy is in the tank, no one has a job, its crazy cold in California, Tiger Woods is no longer the Golden Boy, and this is your rough spell? Well, yes. Everything is relative.

It seems that we let our new book, Done Fell Out, sit for a while. And it turns out that an unfinished manuscript is not unlike cheese. In some cases, it needs some age; in others, it just gets rank. And its pretty rank up in this beeatch, if you know what I mean. We recently took on Chapters 9 and 10 and proceeded to wrestle with them for the better part of a month. And I mean alligator mud pit wrestling. And, much like alligator mud pit wrestling, the outcome wasn't so pretty. And to make matters worse, I read through the first eight chapters and had to look around the house to find the person who had written those words. I knew Laura had written her parts, but mine? I couldn't find that woman anywhere. And I'm a little worried she's not coming back. I've talked often lately of hanging up the keyboard and have been prone to indulge in other bad, overly dramatic metaphors indicating I might just be done with writing.

And then this weekend I received a gift from The Writing Loft - a thank you for speaking at Artoberfest. It was a book by Ursula K. Le Guin entitled The Wave in the Mind, and it struck a chord I worried had been rendered inert-an inspired, creative chord. And later I was organizing my son's room, pulling out forsaken toys and unidentifiable pieces of plastic, when Its the Climb came on the radio. I was singing at the top of my lungs, in resonant frequency (high school physics anyone?) with that inspired chord (although, notably, cleaning my son's room and not writing), before I realized, with shame, that I was singing Miley Cyrus. I rationalized that she most certainly hadn't written the song, and then I silently thanked those who did because they reminded me to worry less about the destination and just enjoy the climb, or, as Ursula would prefer, ride the wave.

Mother Knows Best (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Technology)

Kris and I recently gave a talk about how we write together. Like an old married couple (think the vignettes in When Harry Met Sally, finishing each other's sentences, saying the same thing at the same time), we told the story about how we met at the firm (a very pregnant Kris interviewed me), how we discovered we both loved writing (talking late one night while working at the firm, wine in hand), and the genesis of The Pecking Order (a particularly long, pointless, billable-hour-sucking meeting that ended in a decision to, yes, have another meeting). We praised the benefits of having a writing partner to share in the struggle, the disappointments, and the joys, and we also explained our process. And it goes a little something like this (hit it!): we loosely outline two chapters; Kris writes one chapter, I write the other; we switch and edit; we switch and edit again; and so on and so forth. And we do this all over email, putting our edits and thoughts in bolds and brackets, so our drafts end up looking like this (note, real live excerpt from early working draft of The Pecking Order): “You’re right. A little harmless flirting never hurt anyone. I should let myself have fun. I work hard and I deserve it,” I say [uncorking our first bottle of wine] [delete – we have a lot of champagne going on….popping the cork on our first bottle of champagne.]

Then we each put the latest version in our respective running documents (on our respective laptops), which may or may not match each other at any given point, depending on whether I remembered to email the most recent draft to my work account or Kris could access the document on vacation or the planets aligned and the heavens smiled on us, making all things domestic and career-related run smoothly. Goodness gracious, it's a lot of work just to type our process . . .

Some time back, my mom (who is ridiculously more technologically advanced than I am) questioned why we weren't using google docs. She might as well have asked why we didn't have the robot prepare dinner or why we didn't drive to work in a hovercraft. We ignored her. For years. Until we finally tried it last week. And people, let me tell you, google docs is all that. You can store documents online and choose who to share them with. Much like a yahoo or gmail email account, you can access your document from anywhere with internet access. Now, we have a single running document and anything we write, be it a single sentence or entire chapter, goes into that document. No more passing bolds and brackets back and forth through email - one of us can open the document and make edits that the other can see simply by logging in. It's genius, I tell you, and not just for writing teams--it's a good back up system for any writer, and ensures you have your manuscript at your fingertips anytime, anywhere.
So, yea, I guess I should have listened to my mother the first time.

A Haiku

Steady rain grey skys
Lovely Seattle hotel
I forgot to blog

Unplug

You know MTV Unplugged--that show where a major musical artist sits on a cozy stage with only a guitar or piano or ukulele (or whatever instrument he or she uses), plays, and sings without benefit of amplifiers, background tracks, or bubble machines? It's just an artist and his or her craft, and more often than not it is moving and raw and real. Well, guess what fellow writers? We need to unplug every now and then, too. Not from sound enhancers or the whammy bar (thank you, Guitar Hero, for my current state of musical literacy), but from all those things that are necessary and helpful, but often get in our way. I'm talking about you, Facebook and Twitter and Writing Blogs (but feel free to finish reading this blog before heeding my advice).

I don't know about you, but when I sit down to write, my process usually goes something like this: Make tea. Sit on chaise with laptop. Open manuscript. Read the last paragraph. Check email. Open Twitter. Log on to Facebook and read multiple status updates from friends stressing out about their NaNoWriMo word count. Open http://www.gofugyourself.com/ and wonder, once again, why these girls aren't my best friends. Read Inkygirl's latest blog and comic--if there's a new caption contest, spend the next few minutes trying vainly to come up with a witty caption (girlfriend is hilarious, btw . . . I know I'm telling you to go offline, but you really should check her out.). Maximize manuscript. Write a few lines. Send email to Kris telling her I'm writing. Refresh gofugyourself. Refresh Twitter. And so on and so forth . . .

Sound familiar? Sure, I've read all about how we need to cut the electronic leash--heck, my pastor literally wrote the book on simplifying our lives, on saying yes to the important things and no to meaningless distractions. And yet, I rarely put it into practice. But this past week was different. I attended a legal conference at a lovely hotel with lovely, child-free rooms and lovely, squishy, crumb-free beds . . . and wireless internet access priced at $9.95/day. I've mentioned I'm a public sector lawyer in California, right? And you've heard of a little thing we like to call CALIFORNIA'S MASSIVE BUDGET CRISIS, right? So, yea, I can't rationalize ten bucks for internet access when words like furlough and pay cut and phasing out are bandied about my office the way we used to talk about American Idol contestants and how Jon and Kate seemed like a cute couple. (Of course, I tried every unsecured network that showed up on my laptop to no avail. . .curse you kittyboy17 and your weak signal). So I sat in bed, ate a $3.00 bag of cheese crackers for dinner, and wrote. I wrote 500 words in about 40 minutes. I nearly finished an entire chapter in one evening. I unplugged and, oh my gosh, it worked.

And then in the morning (after discovering the lobby has free internet) I read a tweet from @inkyelbows (InkyGirl's twitter alter ego) announcing, "when you're reading about writing, you're not writing." Amen, sister.

The Red Baron Lives.

I really like champagne. Okay, that has nothing to do with this blog, other than that its Friday night, I should have written this post this morning, and now I'm reveling in a lovely bottle of bubbly supplied by my parents who, fortunately for me, happen to have fantastic taste in champagne. The apple doesn't fall far and all that . . .

Anyhoo, its Halloween. The time for trick or treat, candy and costumes, ghouls and goblins. As I dressed my son in his store-bought "Golden Dragon Ninja" costume today (an early victim of precisely targeted marketing, my son. He has two other very viable ninja costumes), I felt sad I hadn't made his costume, that we hadn't culled together random pieces of fabric, poster board, old jewelry, and make-up to come up with some fabulous iteration of Sponge Bob, Anakin Skywalker, or Caillou (yeah, I know I could just shave his head and call it good on that one. . . .what's with that kid having no hair?). But, for better or worse, that's not how we roll in the Blanco house. A homemade meal, for sure. Homemade costumes, never going to happen. But does that mean I have to forsake all sense of tradition and authenticity? Well, perhaps. On Tuesday night, when I cleared my schedule and set the whole house up for an Its the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown viewing, they just wanted to watch Goosebumps and then the Monsters vs. Alien Halloween special. They begged, they pleaded, but I made them sit and watch Its the Great Pumpkin and I'm not ashamed to say I issued several threats during that half hour. I repeated Lucy's jokes, highlighted Schroeder's talent, but you know what? They didn't care. I guess I can only hope that one day my son will fake complain that his mother made him watch The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown every year and that he'll meet people later in life who have the exact same story.

So I'll ask the same question I always do. What does this have to do with writing? Well, not much. But it has something to do with reading. My book club has recently read some great new books - The Selected Works of T.S Spivet being one of them. What a book, what a character. I would recommend it to anyone. But now we're reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and I can't help but think of Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin and Snoopy as the Red Baron lost in France during WWI, and ask where would we be, who would be, without the classics.

And the Student Becomes the Teacher...

I had the pleasure of helping edit some short stories today for a writing class. The assignment was to write a story in 10 minutes or less, in the spirit of a Native American legend, explaining something we take for granted in our modern world. The stories had titles like, "Why the Sun is in the Sky," "How Snakes and Legless Lizards Came to Be," and, my personal favorite, "Why Women Talk So Much." (In case you're wondering, a lovely, handsome man wooed a young maiden and they would have lived happily ever after, except she ran around the woods and proclaimed her love to all who would listen and he was hounded day and night by curious and annoying woodland creatures until he had enough and sailed away, leaving the maiden with only her own voice for company. I probably would have titled it, "Why Women are Better Off Alone Than With Some Tool Who Can't Express His Feelings," but that's just me...)

I must say, I was impressed. The stories were only a page or two in length, but fully formed. The students were instructed to use their senses, so the stories were engaging, but also to the point. There was no digression, no backstory, no sentences requiring more than one breath, no cramming of words where they don't fit just because they sound pretty. Sure, given more time the authors could have rounded out their stories, but the exercise reminded me that, at its core, writing is about the story. The plot. The point! So often, I find myself stumbling over my words, trying to craft something beautiful, publishable, worthy of a table at Barnes and Noble. I've stared at a blinking cursor, trying to sift literary gold from the muddy recesses of my brain for longer than the time it took these students to write an entire story. Maybe, in those instances, I should try to just write what happens. After all, once I lay the foundation, I can build upon it later. Like Maria von Trapp always said, the beginning (the very beginning) is a very good place to start. So, thank you, Mrs. Sloan's fourth grade class (yes, fourth graders!) for helping me get back to basics.

And, in that odd, inexplicable way that everything seems cosmically connected these days, I stumbled upon this link on InkyGirl's website (helpful blogger for writers, and ridiculously hilarious literary cartoonist). It's called "One Word," and each day it provides a different one-word prompt. Writers have 60 seconds to write about that word. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like it would help those of us (you know who you are) with the tendency to look far too long before leaping.