Oh, the agony

My mama is spinning in her grave like a chicken on a spit, and Martha Stewart is clutching her chest, moaning, “This could be the Big One!”

Before I launch into this story, I should preface it with this: there is no “right” color of Christmas lights. I know that, in my head at least.

However, in the South, if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, and that’s how it was at our house when I was growing up. My mother, may she rest in peace, had dozens upon dozens of “rules” that she applied to life. I had no idea just how many rules she had (and that she had inculcated in me) until I got married to a perfectly nice perfect stranger to my family’s ways and traditions.

Some examples? Sheets aren’t on a bed properly unless you have neat little hospital corners. A present isn’t properly wrapped unless you can’t detect a smidge of tape (that one alone nearly sent me to therapy.) Don’t use the same utensil in the jelly jar that you just used in the peanut butter jar. Don’t get crumbs in the jelly. Never wear plaids and stripes at the same time.

There are also strict rules about which way the toilet paper goes on the roll, and how you fold a napkin, as well as a whole canon on the proper way to handle thank you notes. But if you think those were a lot of rules to learn, Christmas outstripped them all. Yep, you could fill an entire set of encyclopedias just on Mama’s Rules About Christmas.

The one absolute immutable law, though, dealt with lights. Christmas lights were to be dainty and small and, well, white. Preferably NOT blinking, but she could take the blinking as long as they were white.

The way she taught this law was simple. From the earliest age I can remember, if I ever admired multi-colored lights as we were driving by someone’s Griswoldville, she’d tutt her tongue and hiss, “Looks just like a jook-joint.”

For those of you not from my neck of the woods, a jook-joint is slang for beer joint, and the worst sort, the kind that the bartender might have to break up three fights in one evening alone.

Fast forward to now. The Kiddo and The Husband had long planned to string Christmas lights along our front fence. It never occurred to me to tell them to get white lights. I just sort of, er, assumed that they knew that. I mean, The Husband has been married to me for how many years? Yes, 20. And never a colored light has been lit on our hill.

But what do we have on our fence? Rainbow hues of lights. Brilliant, garish lights – that, gasp, blink. Yes, my Mama is spinning in her grave. But she was a mama, too, so here’s hoping she can understand that I had nothing to do with it.

And they crawl back out

All over the world this morning -- okay, this afternoon -- writers are crawling out of their caves, blinking, yawning, stretching. They mumble something like, "Gee, where'd all the leaves on the trees go?" and "Got any more turkey left over from Thanksgiving?"

Yes, it is the NaNo crew, coming out of its annual hibernation. Hats off to all of you who managed to do it, who managed to plug your ears and forget about November being the kickoff for the insane rush of holiday madness, who managed to turn thought into kilobytes.

Now if you'll just tell me how you dispatched your internal editors, I'll use the scientific method to see if I can replicate your results on my own Internal Editor, AKA the Demon Muse in Stilettos. She's been busy muttering things like, "Ya didn't even have to cook the turkey, so what's up with the no-writing biz last week, huh? Care to explain THAT?"

But enough about my long, ongoing battle with the evil twin of Fran. In addition to death and taxes, Evil Twin Fran is a certainty, unless I can get her sidetracked on the possibility of doing a makeover on me or on closet organizers to manage an impossibly large collection of feather boas.

No, I'm sympathizing with that time warp that NaNo writers are experiencing right about now. I've had to do massive writing projects where turnaround time consisted of days, not months, and upon surfacing, I found the following to be consistently true:

1) I have lost all track of time and season. It's true. If my crash writing episode happened to fall during a season change, I was as confused as a bear after his first hibernation session. You go to sleep and it's fall, and you wake up, and the crocus buds are poking out of the snow. (Not that we have snow down here in Georgia, but you know what I mean.)

2) My spoken language skills have regressed to grunts and moans. It's as though I'd drained all language skills into my writing. Even a two-word sentence that sounds anything more complicated than "Me want" is often beyond me at times like that.

3) I get the mother of all colds. Doesn't matter that I haven't been around human beings besides immediate family for the better part of a month; the first day I venture out into the world, it's as though I was Bubble Boy and the bubble burst. It must have something to do with stress and the immune system.

4) I never want to see a computer again. OK, this is short-lived, but for a day or so, the urge to surf the web or tweet or do ANYTHING that remotely involves a keyboard? It's dead, dead, dead.

5) After 48 hours, the relief I feel at finishing turns into euphoria and a huge burst of self-confidence. I'm at my mountain-top, shouting, "Huzzah!" (Yes, I know, that's so not a cool exclamation, but I've always wanted to say it.)

So it's okay, my NaNo friends, if you grunt with surprise at the lack of leaves, and you wave your hand in the general direction of the Kleenex box. I'll know exactly what you mean.

Nope, the printed word's not doomed

Technology is terrific, isn’t it? At least when it works.

I don’t have much time to read these days, at least not the “sitting down and turning the pages of a book” kind of reading. That’s hard for a girl like me, who used to scarf down three or four or even five books a week back when life was saner.
As a kid, I’d always read at least two books at a time – that way, if Mama confiscated one book when she caught me reading instead of doing my chores, then I’d have a back-up. I also learned, by sheer necessity, that if I were going to read at my house, I needed to speed read.

But even speed readers need time to finish a book. Way back when my to-do list started pushing my reading time out the window, I realized that I was cranky and grouchy and just plain hard to live with when I didn’t ingest the printed word.
So I picked up an audio book from the library to listen to in my car. Back then, the books were on cassette tapes (yes, I do realize that tells you that I am old enough to have driven a car with a cassette tape deck.) It took me a little while to get used to the weird transition of having someone read to you – it’s not as passive as TV, but I did miss the interaction with the printed word.

But at least I was “reading” after a sort, and doing it during a time when I wasn’t accomplishing much else. I hung on through bad narrators and shredded tapes, because at last I was getting my “fix.”

Fast-forward through CDs – much better than cassette tapes – and onto to the lovely, lovely leap of an iPod and free downloads from the library. No more CDs to worry about, no more having to leave the story’s characters hanging off a cliff – now I could just unhook my iPod and take it in with me, to listen to while I folded clothes or cooked supper or vacuumed. (Ha, you say, that’s a lie, because we know you hate to vacuum.)

I’d noticed though that sometimes in the downloading, though, that the last little bit of a chapter would get chopped off. No problem. I could usually figure out the last little bit as I listened to the first part of the next chapter.
But then I outlasted my odds. I came to the end of a book, and bam! The last little bit, when I was supposed to find out whether the guy was going to get the girl, it was all gone.

That just about drove me crazy. Still, I can’t knock the fact that I’ve gotten loads of good books – complete books with no glitches – downloaded from the library. I guess, though, that tells me that the printed book will never die, as at least it doesn’t require batteries and the page isn’t dependent on kilobytes cooperating.

Not Dead, Just Buried

Nope. I'm not dead. Just buried.

I know the blog-stage has been darkened for a bit, and this is not even a proper blog post in and of itself.

But it's been a crazy roller coaster ride, what with me getting used to the new dayjob, and the holidays, and trying to find my way.

We've all got the same 24 hours in a day. We may not have the same amount of money, we may not have the same amount of talent, but we've ALL had EXACTLY 24 hours in the past day. That being the case, I'm really wondering what I blew my 24 hours on, because I honestly can't see that I've done much besides survive.

Sometimes, though, you get a gold star for just surviving, just treading water until the Coast Guard can scoop you out of the murky deep. And that's how I've felt lately. Sooner or later, though, just surviving isn't enough.

I read something once that made me realize how useful priorities were in making life decisions, no matter what those decisions involved: family, money, time, stuff. I believe it was a Dr. Phil book.

I'll roughly paraphrase here: say you wanted to go to Miami, and you started from DC. You're tooling down the interstate, and you take a wrong turn. Instead of going down I-95, now you're heading west. You go about two miles down that road, realize what you've done, and say, "Self, I've got to turn around."

Now a flashback to your dreaded word problems in math class. Just how far off course have you strayed? Nope, it's not just the two miles ... it's the two miles down the wrong road, the two miles back to the initial wrong turn, and the fact that you could be at least four miles further along your path and closer to your goal if you hadn't made the wrong turn in the first place.

The thing about priorities is that they make you ask this question: Is this choice leading me closer to my goal? Or further away?

Theoretically in a perfect world, we'd never choose a priority that takes us away from our goal. But we aren't computers. We don't make calculated choices. Our choices are steeped in emotion -- which is not all bad. We don't even, sometimes, recognize that whatever the choice is DOES affect our priorities.

But it's back to those 24 hours in a day. Like my "stuff" in my closets, only so much can be jammed into those 24 hours. I have to figure out what I want to get accomplished long-term. And then I have to be disciplined about using my time wisely.

That's what I'm doing now -- my brain is busy cogitating the top three things I want to get accomplished in the next year. After that, I'll be able to give a flint-hearted, cold-eyed stare to a decision and say, "Yup, that's gonna help me get there," or "Nope, that's taking me west when I wanna go south."

Fore!

I'm tossing again.

Back when I first started claiming home office expenses related to my writing on my income tax, I had a lightbulb moment of why my house was so cluttered. In order to claim expenses, you have to provide what proportion of your home office is of your total heated square footage, right?

So I did. And I was aghast to find out that my heated square footage was about 1, 100 square feet. No wonder I was walking around piles of stuff with no home. I joked with The Husband that I had 3,300 square feet of junk crammed in 1,100 square feet.

Maybe we don't have quite 3,300 square feet of junk, but we have way too much stuff for such a little house. So since then, I've been going through spells of decluttering, with the hope of one day getting down to a Zen-like bareness.

To that end, I checked out a book from the library called IT'S ALL TOO MUCH, by my hero of decluttering, Peter Walsh, the guy from CLEAN SWEEP.

It's more of the same message -- you can't put three cubic feet of junk into one cubic foot of space -- but I like the way Walsh puts it. Sometimes I'm so dense that I have to hear the same message in about a million different permutations before it really sinks in.

His big push is that form should follow function. A person or family should decide what the mission is for a particular space, and then subtract out everything that doesn't promote that mission.

It was so basic and fundamental a principle that I put the book down and tackled the top of my bureau, a no-man's land of stuff that didn't really have a home. And I thought, as I did it, about life and writing.

Why is it that we tolerate so much clutter in our lives -- not just real, physical clutter, but "issue-type" clutter? We tip-toe around it and make what my mom used to refer to as "pig-paths" around the heaps. We can't do A because someone's feelings might get hurt, and we can't accomplish B until we accomplish A. We need X, but first we have to stop doing Y, just so we'll have the money or the time or the space for it.

Same thing in writing: it was such a lightbulb moment, a better way to look at it than the "kill your darlings" old saw that writing teachers always talk about. Instead of looking at your darlings, or as Peter Walsh calls clutter, your stuff, look at what you want to accomplish. What's keeping you from it?

So hopefully from now on, as I'm writing a scene or a chapter or a book, I can look at the purpose of a scene, the mission of it. What's that purpose? What am I hoping to accomplish? What do I need to get rid of to make that path clear?

In the meantime, I am back on the tossing wagon at home, so if you're hanging around my house, consider yourselves ordered to duck!

Beyond perfection

The Kiddo has a Perfection Complex. I know this because I have to avert potential thermo-nuclear meltdowns on more occasions than I would like. She thinks she needs to make a 100 on every test. She thinks her hair has to be perfectly straight and glossy every day. She thinks her clothes need to match not only in color, but also to the exact temperature of recess -- never mind that recess is clocking in at 72 degrees, while school drop-off is clocking in at 39 degrees.

I swear, we don't push her. We don't nag. We don't even fuss. We don't have to. She beats herself up far more severely than we ever could.

But her perfection complex is not completely value-less for me. It provides me with a continual life lesson for me and my life and my writing.

When I was in middle school, I never worried about grades. I got what I got, which except for math were usually pretty good, at least a solid B.

Then a fateful moment occurred. A fellow student who had eeked out an A- was bewailing her grade. I glanced from the 83 or so that I'd scored on the same test and asked what the big deal was.

"My mama says that an A- is nearly a B, and a B- is nearly a C!" she explained.

I looked aghast at my 83, which was indeed numerically cheek-to-jowl with a C+. Quietly I folded my paper, tucked it in my messy book bag and vowed never again to have a B, save for math which came with a lifetime exclusion from any such blood oaths.

Fast-forward to high school. By then, even with a C in math (hey, that was a miracle for me, believe me!), I was making honor roll. Most of my grades were in the mid-90s.

That memory of the lowly station of an A minus, though, haunted me. If A minus was cheek-to-jowl with a B, then a 95, was neighbors with an A minus. That would not do.

My grade inflation slowly ratcheted upward, where no grade below a 98 in any subject save math would satisfy me. Oh, yes, I know. I was a tightly wound child.

It was college that saved me -- a psychology lecture on the Bell Curve. Suddenly I realized that statistically I was an aberration. Most people would fall within that heretofore hated C grade.

It was a lightbulb moment for me. No, I didn't start slacking and earning C's. But I stopped beating myself up about it so badly.

That's why seeing The Kiddo go down this same road is so painful for me -- especially when she started down it so much earlier than me.

Writers in particular can be just as severe on themselves. They kick and scream and wad up paper and let their internal editors convince them that any word they put to paper or commit to kilobytes is worthless.

Remember this, however. For most of the world, the prospect of writing a brief note to a teacher or a boss is only slightly less terrifying than having to speak in front of people. If you are a writer -- even a greenhorn newbie who still leans on adverbs and the passive tense -- you are already head and shoulders above most of the world.

So I give you the same advice that I give The Kiddo and myself: be kind to yourself. Be forgiving. Cut yourself a little slack. If you're doing the best that you can, it's all you can do ... and all anybody can expect of you.

Unfathomable attraction

So just what IS the attraction of the UnDead?

Vampires and zombies have been so common for these past few years on deal announcements for book sales that I know someone out there thinks they're sexy -- lots and lots of someones, actually. My hat's off to any writers who can pull it off, that transformation of stinky zombies with falling off body parts or blood-sucking bats with legs into the guy you'd just die (pardon the pun, I just couldn't resist) to have a date with.

When I first started seeing the announcements, I thought, "Hmm, this is the new chick-lit fad." But vamps and the zombies that followed closely on the tails of their sexy black capes have hung around a lot longer than lattes, high heels and gripes about the workplace.

It's not that I'm judgmental. No, not at all. It's kind of like the "yawn" I feel when I see the blond-haired surfer god that some of my friends would drool over. Give me Pierce Brosnan over the newish James Bond fellow any old day.

Same thing with the UnDead. I simply cannot wrap my head around a concept like loving up on a dead-ish body, at least not long enough to suspend my disbelief and get into a book to give it a fair shake.

All of which makes this an amazingly good thing that I am not an editor -- boy, the sales I would have missed these past few years. And it seems that vamps and zombies have taken hold of the general population's consciousness, kind of like great white sharks did back in the JAWS days. For instance, a digital traffic sign in Arizona was reprogrammed by a zombie lover recently to warn, "Caution, Zombies Ahead."

I am reminded about the wisdom a furniture store owner shared with my parental units many years ago, about how he chose his inventory. "I pick a quarter of what I absolutely love, a quarter of what I absolutely despise, and the rest?" he said. "It's stuff I feel 'meh' about."

If editors chose it the same way, then they've certainly hit the jackpot with vampires and zombies ... and I would appreciate anyone who could educate me on the finer points of what makes the UnDead irresistable.

Forward, MARCH

Lots of folks are hopping on the NANO bandwagon this month, and I wish them well. The whole spirit of NANO is to write a novel (or at least a good start) during the month of November, which requires you to fire your internal editor (or at least give her a month-long vacation if she's like my internal editor and won't be fired).

I've written the first draft of a novel in a month -- a full length, 80K word novel, so I know it can be done. Frequently the best approach for me in writing IS to write in a blitzkrieg session, getting it all done down in a month. Only then do I go back and tear it apart and revise it.

This month, though, it just doesn't seem doable, so I'm standing on the wharf, waving goodbye to all those aboard the NANO ship. I wish them bon voyage, but, what with a new dayjob and getting settled into a new dayjob schedule, I've just got too much baggage to go trucking across the gangway onto Good Ship NANO this year.

Still, I highly recommend it. Even if you can't do NANO in November, with the rest of the nation, take a look at your calendar, pick the least busy month (preferably one with 31 days), and set that aside for YOUR NANO.

The thing about writing, the thing that I've experienced first hand many times, is that the process of writing a novel bears a striking resemblance to walking in thigh-deep muck. As long as you keep moving, you're fine. The going can be slow, your steps frequently inelegant, but progress is assured.

Stop, though, and you sink. What's more, the mud locks you in a body cast sometimes so tightly that not even Houdini could break free.

I experienced that with every single novel I started way back before I finished my first one. I'd get to a place where I was full of doubt about where to go next, and I'd stop -- usually about Chapter Three. There, my poor project would die a death of starvation and neglect.

I'm not saying I march through the muck all the time now. In fact, I feel that muck clinging to me just now, as I've had to stop writing to adjust schedules and routines with this new dayjob. Maybe then, I'm preaching more to me than you.

Whatever the case, I know if I'm struggling with something, at least one other writer is also battling the same demon (those demons are fantastic multi-taskers.). My faint hope? That it will be of some use to you, O Struggling Writer, that I, too, have to point a stern finger at myself on occasion and bark, "Forward, MARCH!"

Money, Money, Money

The one thing The Kiddo loves more than spending money? That would be making money.

The Kiddo has always been a saver, and a strategic spender: she spends other people’s money and saves her own. She’s probably got a career in politics ahead of her, no?

Her usual standard operating procedure is to put most of her money in the bank, while leaving a little mad money in her piggy bank at home. But sometimes the piggy bank oinks out a red alert signal.

Such is this case this weekend. The Kiddo wound up falling in love with one of the new “jelly” watches that all the kids are just in love with. It’s a great big man-sized watch, encrusted with rhinestones and graced with a red and black rubberized “jelly” band. She picked red and black because, unlike her dad, The Kiddo likes the Georgia Bulldogs … but she was quick to point out that it was our high school’s team colors, too.

The only problem with her watch (besides the fact that I say red and black DON’T go with everything) was that it absorbed all of her mad money. That being the case, The Kiddo quickly launched a fund-raising campaign.

Before breakfast on Sunday morning, the child had already drafted a menu of awesome opportunities, designed to part pocket change from whomever might wander past. Examples?

Well, she’d sweep three rooms (no carpet, as she hates to vacuum) for 50 cents, six for a buck. She’d trade five minutes of raking leaves for three dollars (she hates raking leaves almost as much as she hates to vacuum.)

A back or shoulder rub for a minute and a half (strictly timed) would set you back just two thin dimes – and she hooked you with free five second samples. Do you have only a dime to spare? No problem. She’d write you a very short story for just ten cents.

If you were of the female persuasion, you could have your toenails and fingernails painted for just 20 cents – you can tell that she likes painting nails, right?

The artistic stuff was the high priced items. She’ll draw a picture of your face for a dollar, and even two people for the same price. But if you wanted your wiggly pet tarantula in for a portrait with you? That will be a buck and a half, thank you very much.

I remember doing much the same when I was her age. I wonder if my mom and dad got as much of a kick out of it as I did when The Kiddo approached me with her first five-second free shoulder rub sample.

So far, she’s got a quarter out of me … that would be for the blue-light special shoulder rub she gave me – 50 seconds of pure bliss for the princely sum of 25 cents. I hope as she goes through life, she won’t forget her willingness to work hard to earn money – and to realize that some things are so fun (those fingernails and toenails, again) that they don’t even seem like work.

The Times, they are a changin'

Except for the early dark evenings, I never mind saying goodbye to Daylight Savings Time, especially not this year.

Not only did I get an extra hour of sleep (or goofing-off time, actually, as I didn’t REALLY sleep), but this year, because Standard Time starts so late, it’s barely more than a month before the days start getting longer.

I’ve long had a running feud with the otherwise sensible Benjamin Franklin – or his ghost, more accurately – because he decided that fiddling with the clock would make us think we had more time.

Maybe back in the day when the sun ruled the way people lived, Franklin’s idea would have merit. But now? With Wal-Marts open 24/7? And each Wal-Mart having more lights than two or three football fields? Nope. Thomas Edison’s light bulb made Daylight Savings Time pretty much useless.

In years past, the time change was not something that netted a whole lot of discussion from The Kiddo. She just took it at face value that the grown-ups in the household knew what they were doing.

This year, no such credit was extended. The Kiddo needed an in-depth explanation about what the time-change was all about, why we did it, how we knew when to do it, who told us what time we should set our clocks to … in other words, the works. She sounded a lot like she does in the backseat whenever I’m mumbling about where I should turn if I’m in an unfamiliar area. Her question then is, “Mommy, are you sure you’re not lost?”

Getting to stay up an hour later did mollify her a bit Saturday night. Still, she kept stopping in her playing and coming to ask me, “Now, the reason I can do this is because of the time-change, right?” It was again as though she didn’t quite trust the grown-ups in the household to get the rules right.

I let her stay up because I knew that the Sunday morning after we bid adieu to Daylight Savings Time is the only morning that I ever wake up early, night owl that I am. I wanted her to sleep in, in the vain hope that if I did wake up, nothing would keep me from rolling over and indulging in a little lie-in. After all, it’s the only day of the year that I can honestly escape being called a slug-a-bed for sleeping late.

Indeed, I did wake up early, the early light bright and shining on my face at 6:45. The Kiddo slept like the log she was impersonating and seemed quite disappointed that the whole time-change ordeal had gone by painlessly for her.
Over our Sunday morning pancakes, she scrunched up her face and asked, “So Mommy, when do we get the REAL time back?”

Leave it to The Kiddo to think of Daylight Savings Time as the “real” time.

Cold and writing do not mix

Let’s face it. I am strictly a sub-tropical variety.

I thrive under conditions with balmy weather, with temps hovering around the 85 degree mark, clear skies, white puffy clouds, and the gentlest warm breeze (I don’t like drafts at ALL.)

Any hotter, and I can tolerate it. Not happily, but I can tolerate it.

Any colder? Forget it. My feet turn into size 4 foot-shaped ice blocks. Forget that old wives tale about keeping warm if you keep your head covered. Me? I must have warm feet to feel any smidge of metabolic activity.

And if it’s below the mid 50s, with a gray sky and a chill wind? I start exhibiting definite signs of hypothermia.

My intolerance to cold has generated all sorts of responses over the years, from the mild eye-roll to the gnashing of teeth as my own teeth chattering disturbs someone in their peaceful enjoyment of the thermostat set on 68 degrees in the summer time. In my previous dayjob, I always took a big ugly fleece jacket that I zipped over whatever suit blazer I was wearing. The hideous thing evoked all sorts of teasing, as I wore it year-round: indoor climes of hot-natured office staff generally hover in the mid to upper 60s.

The Husband and The Kiddo are both hot-natured, and I have learned how to wrap up just short of looking like a mummy in order to survive their ceiling fans and preferred chilly temps.

When it comes to writing, it’s almost impossible to think creatively while one is shaking uncontrollably. So as I wrote the book that wound up being my first sale, I would wrap up in warm fuzzy socks and a big old jacket that The Sister had accidentally left at my house.

But then my computer became so old that I couldn’t upgrade the browser any more, and I moved operations to my laptop and my bedroom. There, ensconced in layers of warm fluffy blankets, I wrote in comfort. Not so for The Husband, as the light from the screen kept him awake.

So I cleaned out the office of all the detritus that had landed there upon my abandonment, and it’s a great place to write. Except for my cold feet. And my cold body.

I’m now in the midst of plotting the stealthy retrieval of the aforementioned big old jacket from The Sister’s house, because it was warm enough to thaw my brain, but light enough in weight to allow me more freedom of movement than a mummy, and of course, it also led to a sale. The combo of warmth and good luck is hard to beat!

Lies our English teachers told us

We writers learned from an early age to revere our English teachers. After all, our English teacher was the one teacher we could count on to beam at approval when presented with our work.

I for one couldn’t count on that during, say, algebra, or ye gads, chemistry. My history teacher gave essay exams, so I could count on a beam on occasion from him, provided I didn’t confuse any dates. My high school Spanish class was the last class of the day, in a room with no air conditioning. That, combined with the sedative effect of conjugating irregular verbs, lulled me into a slumber so many times Senora sent a note home, so no smiles there.

But my English teacher … ah, I could count on her. When everyone else groaned about essays and themes, I hid a secret smile. When the rest of the class seemed completely flummoxed at the prospect of diagramming sentences, I could diagram a compound/complex sentence complete with gerund phrases and appositions.

So it is with a heavy heart that I tell you the truth. Many English teachers lie. Well, not lie, exactly, but certainly teach you habits that don’t translate into marketable fiction. And no, I’m not talking about how they crooned over THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE as a wonderful example of literature.

Thus follows a list – not a comprehensive one, but a good start – on the lies your English teacher (may) have told you.

Never write a fragment. This sounds like a wonderful command that should always be obeyed. However, try writing dialogue in complete sentences, and at once you’ll discover that your characters sound like stuffed shirts. Even in the narrative, a judicious use of a fragment is sometimes required.

Never end a sentence with a preposition. You remember the old grammarian’s favorite comeback after you ask, “Where’s something at?” She will (and I confess, I do this, too) invariably snap, “Behind the at!” and then cackle maniacally. But such a rule leads to some mighty convoluted wordsmithing. For instance, your character is asking, “Which bin should I put this in?” and suddenly, from the dusty recesses of your brain, you remember Mrs. English rapping her ruler at such a question and correcting with, “In which bin should I put this?” Like I said, you listen to Grammar Grouch and your characters will sound like stuffed shirts.

Adverbs are our friends. If there was one thing I wish my English teacher had told me, it was that the exact opposite is true. She had the right idea, of course: we need to use description and crisp imagery. But the beams that I got from Mrs. English came in response to essays and compositions larded with the hateful –ly family. I had no idea, when I first started writing toward publication, that adverbs were inferior crutches used to prop up lazy verbs.

So there you have it, just a few of the misguided notions that English teachers might possibly have let slip over the years. Yes, they were technically correct, but alas, when it comes to fiction writing, sometimes you have to bend the rules.

Honey-darlin' and other atrocities

One thing I had to get used to when I was writing for the Non-Southern World?

Having my characters call each other by name.

I know. For you Above-the-Mason-Dixon-Line folks, this sounds kind of weird. But we Southerners don't always refer to each other by name. In fact, about the only time we do is when we want to indicate that little Sarah Mary-Kate Johnson or William Joseph Baines (usually referred to as Billy Joe), is in hot water up to their eyelashes.

The rest of the time? Lord bless us, but we fall back on endearments.

Each Southerner, you'll find, has his or her particular pet "fill-name" for anybody younger than 16 or so -- and sometimes younger than 60. (Hey, when you get to be a certain age, you experience a lot of those "Some-timers" moments.) A common one in the south is Sugar.

We get teased about this quite a bit, us calling every man, woman and child "Sugar." But down here, it's an efficiency method, not meant to be sexist or insulting. We can concentrate on what you're actually saying, rather than trying to frantically recall just what your name is.

You have to remember that, at the same time we're carrying on this conversation with you, we're also juggling a double-handful of etiquette rules and regulations. For instance, most every conversation requires some reference to a person's mama, and how she's doing, which requires us to recall at an instant whether (a) someone's mama is actually still on this earth and (b) whether the person is currently on speaking terms with her mama (in the south, never a given, although we do revere our mamas).

This is generally covered by another short-cut, a simple question of, "How are all the folks doing?" Such a short-cut can backfire, as in the situations where we are treated to the wholesale discussion of someone's horrid sister-in-law's daughter's antics and Great Aunt Mabel's hemorrhoid surgery. It can even touch on how Buster, Big Willie Joe's bird dog, is sorrowing away since Big Willie Joe has had to take a night shift job and is no longer able to go bird hunting.

When you start bumping around someone's family tree, the limbs of said tree are apt to knock you a bit loopy. Thus, rather than accidentally insulting someone by calling her the wrong name (God forbid the dreaded sister-in-law), we just resort to Sugar.

I could have sworn I didn't use this method, that I never called anybody by a nickname that hadn't been earned by some cute little action he or she'd done while still in diapers. However, in the wake of my classroom volunteer experience, I was dished up a nice plate of crow.

Nope, I didn't call all the little people "Sugar." I called them "Sweetie." Boy, girl, or spotted giraffe, didn't matter. They were all Sweetie to me.

And I understood then the use of such an endearment, either Sugar or Sweetie or some other similar name (I've been called Honey, Darlin', Sweetie-Pie, and even Sugar-Foot, and those are just the ones I can easily remember). It wasn't just a memory device. It was another time-saver, a contraction of language.

What we might start out saying would be: "Be sweet as sugar and do X, Y, or Z for me." We Southerners have all heard that from our mamas or our grandmothers or some person acting in a parental way. Pretty soon, as slow as we talk, that got to be way too time-consuming, and it was truncated to: "Sugar, would you ..."

Translated? That meant, I'm going to assume you're going to be sweet as sugar and do X, Y, or Z, and if I call you that, you'll hopefully live up to your name. Since Southerners are always asking people to do something for them (not commanding or demanding), and since we're always juggling an arcane set of rules and regulations about social deportment, the use of the blanket endearment was born.

Back to my problems with writing. I went to the Wal-Mart School of Dialogue, where I soaked up dialogue and regurgitated it on the page. That gave me authentic Southern dialogue, complete with all the honeys and darlin's and sugarfoots that people might (and did) insert into their conversations.

Of course, when non-southerners like my critique partner Tawna Fenske or my editor would read such lovely appellations, they recoiled in horror. How COULD I allow my hero to be so sexist as to refer to my heroine as "darlin'" or "honey" or "sugar?"

It took awhile, but I learned that (a) either Non-Southerners have the thinnest skins in the known world, or (b) we Southerners, for all our hospitality, can be a bit dunderheaded. Since I"m Southern, I'll just blame myself and do a search and destroy with Word's find command on all my "sugars" and "darlin's" and any combination there-to.

First Day Jitters

I write this BEFORE my big day ... my very first day of my new dayjob, after I've been out of a dayjob since August. I cannot tell a lie: I'm a puddle of nervous jelly.

Firsts are always hard for me. I always dreaded the first day of school, the first day on a job, the first time I had to do anything new by myself. Over the years, I've made a conscious effort to turn that negative energy into something more positive. Sometimes it works and sometimes, well, it doesn't.

Authors have a lot of firsts, just like anybody else. I still remember the weeks following my first sale -- I was a complete noodly wreck when it came to how I should approach something as simple as a talk with my editor. Should I call her? Should I email her? If I called her, was first thing in the morning better, or should I wait until after lunch?

No worries -- my editor turned out to be a complete doll who exchanged emails and jokes and was just the absolute dream editor a newbie writer could have ever wanted. I've been really blessed that both the editors I've worked under were open to me calling them up and saying, "Uh, dumb question, buuuut ..."

Then of course came a whole series of firsts: my first book on the shelves, my first book signing, my first book club talk, my first you-name-it. I got myself through those "firsts" by telling myself it wouldn't all be fresh and new the next time, that I would know what the heck I was doing.

Errrr ... not true. Everything changes. And everything stays the same. That feeling of nervous jelly -- the idea that you are a complete and total fraud and that if your editor/publisher/readers ever take a good look at you, they'll figure it out? Well, it's a friend for life -- or maybe I should better classify it as a long-lost relative that attaches itself to you and won't shake loose. It's you -- but not you, if you know what I mean.

The one thing that I've learned over the years is that "firsts" of anything are just plain nerve-wracking. Knowing that, I give myself lots of prep time, so I won't do what I did on my first day of teaching 20 ga-jillion years ago -- leave the house without brushing my teeth. Yep. I forgot to brush my teeth. Lucky for me, it was just pre-planning, so the only people I subjected to Gorilla Breath (freshened with Doublemint gum bought in a hurry at a convenience store) were my fellow teachers.

I'm hoping that my first day, which I'm experiencing as you read this, turns out okay. And I'm SURE hoping that I remembered to brush my chompers.

Welcome to the bouncy season

And so begins the “bouncey” season.

The Kiddo came home this Friday before Halloween with a sackful of candy and a wiggly body bouncing with excitement. It wasn’t just the wind-up of Red Ribbon Week (with its opportunities for her to go to school as a rock princess and a scary witch), but Halloween.

Halloween officially kicks off the holidays – and it gives the carte blanche to kids everywhere to eat tons of candy from then until the last Valentine’s Day sucker is gone. I swear, retailers have gone in league with dentists, and between the two have created a Faustian pact.

Even though I let The Kiddo eat her fill of candy for the first 48 hours after Halloween, and I dole out small judicious amounts every day after that, we never seem to get finished with the Halloween candy until just in time for Christmas – which brings more candy. We don’t get through with THAT candy until Valentine’s Day … and that supply lasts us until Easter. You get the picture. Summer is about the only time her poor tooth enamel gets a break (uh, no pun intended).

But the excitement is more than sucrose-based. Halloween also signals that Christmas is coming at us with the unforgiving speed of one of those oncoming locomotives in math word problems. The Kiddo realizes that she has to make the very big, very important gift decision: what is the one BIG gift she wants for Christmas?

Oh, just so many reasons to bounce.

Years ago, I had the pleasure of knowing a woman who had all her Christmas shopping done by Halloween. (No, she is still alive and well as far as I know. I did NOT dispatch this paragon of virtue to the great Boutique in The Sky.)

Me? Christmas shopping? Isn’t that something to be done after Thanksgiving? You’re not considered a slacker unless you’re in Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve buying something besides batteries, right?

But I have learned that if I don’t take advantage of all The Kiddo’s excess energy, and focus it with laser-like precision onto the one gift she might like, she’s going to be bouncing from one big gift idea to another all the way up to Christmas Eve. And we all know that Santa’s elves need some lead time to get those special orders onto the sleigh.

So even though it’s not even Thanksgiving, and my body is resisting all impulses to the contrary, Christmas-time, it is a-coming. That being the case, I’m geared up for the bounces.

Different (can be/is/might not be) good

Back when I was teaching a million years ago, I had this cute little poster (that has long since gone the way of Goodwill), with a group of stodgy penguins standing apart from one obviously doing-a-jig penguin in a loosely tied, striped necktie. The caption? I just gotta be me.

I thought about that this morning as I sent off The Kiddo to school. It's Red Ribbon Week, a week dedicated to teaching drug abuse awareness and helping kids hopefully make the right choice. Each day, the kids can dress up as something ... today it was Dress Like a Rocker and Rock Out to a Drug Free Life.

All weekend, The Kiddo has been planning her outfit. She's been looking up (with my help, of course) pictures of Madonna and the girl-bands of the 1980s. She was thrilled with her ensemble -- black glittery leggings, a hot pink tank-top - black net tutu skirt combo, gobs of jewelry, her hair twigged up in a Bam-Bam ponytail and decorated with a long glittery scarf. I even helped her finish off the ensemble with a plenteous amount of purple eyeshadow.

(And no, I didn't get a picture. Had to do the makeup and the hair and that meant we were lucky to get out the door on time. I'm praying that I can get one this afternoon.)

But when we pulled up to the school, The Kiddo hesitated. Most of the kids she saw climbing out of cars were wearing the usual kid-camo of tee-shirts, hoodies and jeans. "Mommy, are you sure it's rocker day?" she asked.

"Yep."

A long silence ensued from the back seat. Finally, in a very quiet voice, she announced, "I'm gonna wait to see if anybody else is dressed up."

A backwards look into my own experience of these particular types of dress up days told me that the tardy bell might ring before she saw another kid with her daring. "I tell you what," I told her. "If you get in there, and you are the only one dressed up, you can always call me and I'll bring you a change of clothes."

That was enough of a guarantee. She hopped out of the car and headed up the walk to the door. It's 9:11 as I write this, and so far, my cell phone and the house phone has remained silent. I think I'm past the danger point.

What does all that have to do with writing, or for living, for that matter?

Different can be/is/might not be good.

Take your choice, because every permutation of that sentence is spot-on true. We writers want to know the exact "rules" of a genre or a sub-genre -- the exact mix of romance to mystery in a romantic suspense, the right time-span between The Meet and The First Kiss in a romance, the proper amount of sizzle in an inspirational, the maximum amount of tell we can have before we're no longer showing, the genre that is selling now, so no agent or editor will immediately single our way-too-different query out and file it in the round file.

Like The Kiddo, we want to blend. We want to swim along in schools of similarly-colored fish so that we don't stick out. And while that camo will protect us from getting laughed at by agents and editors and the publishing biz, it also keeps us hidden from agents and editors and the publishing biz.

It's the old saw about risk: the risks are in direct proportion to the rewards. Your way-out-there idea? Yeah, it might get laughed out of an agent's office -- maybe even fifty agents' offices. But then again? It might be the Next Big Idea.

So rocker-up, like The Kiddo did this morning. Go on out there and dare to be different. Just make sure your mom's at home and able to bring you a change of clothes if worst comes to worst.

A-Mazed

This weekend, I spat in the face of my directionally-challenged self. So what if I can't tell north from south, if you don't even have to spin me around to disorient me? I didn't care. The Kiddo wanted to go in a corn maze, and I was going to take her.

Admittedly, the first maze of the afternoon set me up for some false confidence. It was easy-peasy, whereas the Phase 2 Maze was anything but. Filled with dead-ends and endless loops, the maze led us around our elbow to get to our nose.

But the sun was high, and way above the corn stalks were scaffold platforms with event staff making sure nobody got terribly lost, so we soldiered on.

I thought about a lot of things while we plowed through the trails in our very slow trek through the maze. I thought about what a terrible lab rat I'd make. I thought about aliens and Mel Gibson and crop circles. I thought about what a fabulous setting a corn maze would make for a television show like CRIMINAL MINDS, where a killer lurked in one of the dead-ends of the maze. (You can tell, can't you, that my claustrophobia was setting in toward the end, huh?)

But mostly I thought about something I've long been convinced of. The big decisions in our life are pretty much already decided by the time we get there. No, I'm not talking about pre-destination or anything like that, and I truly believe that no matter where you are in life, you can do a 180 and go the other way.

Still, every turn that carried me deeper into that corn maze was preceded by a turn before that one. And it's like that in life. The little decisions I make, decisions like, "Oh, I won't write tonight," or "I'll write that errand on my to-do list later," well, those are the very decisions that make the big decision ahead of me almost a fait accompli.

For instance, say I choose to NOT write an errand down on my list, thinking that surely I'll remember it. But of course I don't, and then at the last minute, I have to do it in a very inconvenient, inefficient way. That in turn steals the tiny sliver of time I have to write, which then puts me further behind on my goal to finish the current project.

Before we enter the Big Rat Race called Life, then, we need to think like a well-educated lab rat. What do we want? The cheese, of course. And when do we want it? ASAP. That being the case, whatever our priorities in life are -- and for me, that's my family and my writing -- we need to be single-minded and let every decision guide us closer to those things.

How do you handle life's little decisions? Do they stack up like bricks and wall you in? Or are you able to jump over the walls they build before you're completely boxed in?

How to make the lightbulb moment a long-lasting light source, and other lies I tell myself

My Twitter friend and fellow writer Julie Weathers asked me to join in with an impromptu blog tour about my process. I've written about my writing process before (it involves Excel spreadsheets, chapter outlines and plotting out the wazoo.)

But since I'm on a mission to achieve both World Domination and to turn the pantsers of the world into plotters, I'll wax eloquent about it all over again. I'll try to take it from a slightly different angle -- more about how I turn an idea into a workable novel that I can then rip apart.

Take for instance, the story behind WHERE LOVE GROWS, my second pubbed book. This story is just so incredible that few people actually believe it. It says something about writers that they hear it and INSTANTLY know it's true.

Writers will tell you that there's no shortage of good ideas. But really, the trick is to take those good ideas and tweak them into something unique. It doesn't have to be a totally new wheel that you invent ... just a SUPERIOR wheel to those currently in the Bedrock City Tire Emporium.

The story germinated from a single irritant, yes, like a pearl does from a grain of sand annoying a poor old oyster. The Kiddo, then three, was in love with Kenny Chesney's music, especially SHE THINKS MY TRACTOR'S SEXY. I would pick her up from daycare and she would want to hear that CD ad nauseum. Don't get me wrong: I think Kenny's a pretty cool dude ('specially from the neck down), but every day? The same CD?

Shortly before I applied hot pokers to my eyes to see if THAT torture was more entertaining, my mind made that weird leap it sometimes does.

What kind of girl would think a guy with a farmer's tan, who makes a living driving a tractor, is sexy?

My writer's mind noodled that thought through the 100-gajillion times I listened to the song. You have to admit, Chesney's lyrics will create vivid images in your mind, and already I had a vision of a few scenes called for in the song. But a farmer? As a hero?

Then, NPR ran two different stories on Morning Edition, one about this ew-inspiring leafless vine called the giant dodder vine, and the other on crop insurance scams. The dodder vine, at first, didn't do a thing for me, except make me glad I wasn't a tomato in Texas (where the dodder vine actually lives.)

But then I heard the crop insurance scam, and I thought, Hmh. That would be a neat job for a hero, a crop insurance investigator.

My brain stubbed its toe on one problem, though: male investigators were more than a little cliche.

I kept working at that problem in my head. That's how I do things: once presented with a problem, I chew on it until I get it solved.

So picture this. I'm driving in from work, The Baby Kiddo singing "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" at the top of her lungs in the back seat, the insistent beat about to drive me out of my mind. Not to mention, I'm still worrying the twin problems of how to make a male investigator un-cliched, and how to make a farmer sexy.

I pull up into the garage. The song's still playing. My brain makes another leap. "Bet that farmer was never into crop insurance fraud." It was like nuclear fission after that. Farmer - crop insurance fraud - weird vine - make the GIRL the investigator.

The big pix in place, the huge leaps leapt, I started in on my usual process. For brevity sake's I've done it as a list.

- Write a movie synop -- if it won't hold together for the few minutes long enough to tell a friend about a movie, it's doomed to fall apart like overcooked pasta left too long in a pot of warm water.

- Write a character arc synop -- this is a longer synop, one where I take the characters through their growing pains. After all, if my farmer doesn't learn and grow, just being sexy won't be satisfying for my fab female investigator. Likewise, the fab female. Spunky's fine, but it's got a short half-life.

- Write a chapter by chapter outline. No big, just a sentence or two summary of the major plot points.

I'll send these off to my CPs (Tawna Fenske, for one), and they'll poke about a thousand holes in it, and then I'll fix it, and then I'll start writing. And yeah, I pretty much DO stick with my revised chapter outline, along with my Excel spreadsheets that I use to be SURE there aren't plot holes or loose plot threads or under-done character arcs.

Why, yes. I HAVE been told I'm an anal OCD woman. Thanks for the compliment!

Oh, happy day!

I have a biiiig announcement -- no, not a book deal, but something just as important to Reese Family, Inc.'s bottom line.

I. Have. A. Job. Offer.

A good one. With a good company. Making what I was making with my previous employer.

Oh, and did I tell you the BEST news? The office? It's five minutes from my house.

Of course, my REAL office would be mostly in my car, but that's something I've grown accustomed to over the years.

I HAD planned to write about how the job hunt process was remarkably similar to the Great Agent Hunt, especially after Jeffe Kennedy had announced her very interesting post today about the same thing. I trust serendipity, trust timing, and after my good news this afternoon, I can't ignore such big smoke signals in the sky. Maybe someone somehow will get some encouragement out of what I have to say.

Before I embarked on this job hunt, I hadn't actively pounded the pavement for a job since 1992, during the middle of another recession. It was hard then -- nobody would believe an ex-teacher would STAY an ex-teacher. I looked, on and off, for about a year for a job, but I was able to be picky then. I only applied for the jobs that sparked my interest.

The job changes I've had since, for the most part, were jobs that sort of fell in my lap. I never was out of work between them. And then .. boom. Right outta left field, I found myself without a job, without insurance, WITH a family who depended on me.

I cried. And I don't cry that often. The Husband says that I'm the sort of person who would join the cockroaches after thermo-nuclear war, scrabbling out from under the wreckage, saying, "OK, let's make the best of it." But this just socked me in the gut.

But like the roaches, I soldiered on. I found a job opening or two, and I read them, and I thought, "Huh. Sounds like something I could do. I'll apply." Repeat, repeat, repeat.

In the real world? No response means no for prospective employers, too. The most discouraging times were when I'd sent in my best polished resume and my best cover letter and my best list of references, and I'd wait for a call to interview ... only to have a silent phone, and a few days later, see the job posting quietly disappear from the website.

That's remarkably how it was with me pre-pubbed (or even post-pubbed) and writing. I'd think I nailed it, only to, at best, get a "meh" response.

Like Jeffe points out in her blog, the query letter is your cover letter, the resume your partial or your synop. The request for more? Well, that's the interview in job-hunting terms. And the competition? It's just as stiff. One job that I applied for had over 100 applicants -- and it had only been posted on ONE website for two weeks. I felt like a winner just getting an interview for that one.

The one thing that I kept holding onto throughout this process is the fact that so much of the time, either in writing or job-hunting, agents, publishers and prospective employers are right when they shrug and say, "It's not you, it's me." Just as I don't ever want to write for a house or an editor or an agent that feels tepid about me, I didn't want to work for someone who was just using me to fill a hole. I wanted them to love me, to feel excited about me. And if they didn't feel that way, then that wasn't where God wanted me to be. Same with you -- DON'T sell yourself short.

These folks? They like me, they really, really like me! Fingers crossed that everything works out -- for you in your publishing dreams, and for me in my prospective dayjob.

Some unexpected wrinkles

You know how I blogged about straightening out my office so that I could house my laptop? Well, it's been marvelous for my work ethic -- amazing how much more business-like you feel in an upright position as opposed to a semi-horizontal one with your covers up to your chin.

But it has had one unexpected development that I didn't plan on. I now have company. Scads of it. Loads of it.

Yes, my lovely, loving family wanders in and peers over my shoulder. They share. They talk. They converse about their day. They ask me, "While you're on the computer, could you look up ..." They remind me that the water is boiled out of my beans. They remind me that the beans haven't even made it out of the freezer yet and INTO the water. They make dire predictions about the fate of the universe if I don't get up and liberate the beans from the deep freeze and plunge them into said boiling water.

In the spirit of Linda Grimes, I have done little to make things hospitable for them. The one extra chair in the room is the way station for The Kiddo's puppy blanket that we never finished, and I haven't made any effort to provide additional seating.

But that's okay. My fam, they're understanding. They bring their OWN chairs. Or they simply pull up a square of carpet.

Maybe it's the proximity of the room near the heart of the house -- kitchen as the right ventricle, living room with flat screen, left ventricle. Or maybe I just look more alert and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed sitting up at a computer.

All I DO know for certain? It's flat driving me crazy. And now that the cat has gotten into the act, well, I may be shopping for a strait-jacket sooner than I thought.

Yep, the cat. The other day, when I was blissfully alone, hard at work searching for gainful employment, in walked Max. He was not taking no for an answer. He sat by my chair. He stretched one paw and tapped on my thigh. He cleared his cat throat and gave me a polite, "me-row?" which I ignored the first dozen times. Then when I tried to take his picture, he abandoned "kitteh haz huge appetite" wide-eyed appeal, and instead went for the brass tacks -- the fierce feline stare.

With Max, that makes a full count of the household census laying siege to my sanctuary. What IS a writer to do?