RockStories

What I've Learned about Kindle Publishing Thus Far

2012-01-13T10:15:00.001-08:00

Over the past few days, I've been paying close attention to whatever data I could gather regarding sales and ranking. Though this is conjecture based on incomplete data, it appears to me that of the 478,000+ books currently available in the Kindle store, nearly 400,000 don't sell any copies on the average day and another 40,000+ sell about two copies.

On the first day Homecoming was listed, I reached the top 8% in terms of sales ranking after selling just five books.

In a sense, this isn't surprising. We know that most self-published books, even in these days of easy and inexpensive self-publishing, don't make money. We also know that most people who write books and put them out there haven't given much thought to marketing and don't really know how to promote their books (or don't have the time to invest). And finally, not every book is going to sell copies through this one outlet every day.

This cuts both ways for those considering self-publishing to Kindle. On the one hand, it appears that you're not really in competition with 478,000 other books--at least, not if you plan to do some strategic promotion of your book rather than simply relying on browsers finding it in the Kindle store. On the other, it means that the vast majority of books--particularly fiction books that fall into broad genres like Romance or SciFi--will never be seen by the typical shopper. Even the edge that should go to new publications is lost because sorting by publication date yields several pages of not-yet-released books...so even if your book was published two minutes ago, it's likely to be several pages deep in the listings.

It's early in the game, and I will be doing quite a bit more monitoring and playing with different variables, promotions, etc., but thus far my conclusion is very similar to the one I offered about self-publishing in hard copy back in 2008: it can be successful if you have a niche topic that people are searching for, if your audience is concentrated, if your name or brand is already known or if you have the time and skills (and possibly cash) necessary to conduct your own marketing campaign. If not, only one element of the analysis has changed: if you use a system like Kindle Direct Publishing, it won't cost you anything to test it out.

Self-Publishing Fiction Revisited

2012-01-10T10:01:00.001-08:00

Back in 2008, I wrote a long post about self-publishing fiction, why I'd always been against it and why I was nonetheless considering it.

In the intervening years, I never did self-publish that novel (despite a very successful history of self-publishing non-fiction) and I also didn't make much of an effort to get it published through traditional channels.

Usually, ignoring things doesn't make them better, but in this case that turned out not to be true. For authors considering self-publishing, we're living in an entirely different world from the one we lived in four years ago. That's true for a number of reasons: the growing popularity of e-books, the increasing availability of POD arrangements that don't require a huge investment from the author up front and, most recently, Kindle Direct.

So, I decided last week to take that old romance novel and make it available on Kindle Direct. The process was unbelievably easy; I set out to get it done mid-afternoon yesterday and it's live on sale right now.

In the next couple of weeks, I'll be writing a lot more about the process of uploading, marketing, and whether or not I'd recommend this route for publishing fiction--right now it's too early to tell anything except that getting a book formatted and listed is a breeze.

Raising a Writer

2011-06-19T11:28:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, my daughter has been telling me that she's not a writer. I have a friend who believes that she is; she asks Tori about her writing and Tori says, "I'm not a writer." My friend laughs because she is herself a writer who wishes she weren't, and also because she's a little bit psychic and she believes otherwise.

The thing is, writer or not, she's got words in her head. Not just words, either, but paragraphs, chapters, characters' entire lives.

Each morning, she shares her plan for the day. And every morning, it begins, "I'm going to write until noon, and then..." This evening, she wrote her first guest post for one of my blogs, though she already has a couple of blogs of her own. She's got the bug, whether she wants it or not.

This makes me wonder whether having words in your brain is genetic, or a function of all that early reading, or grows out of the way you relate to language in childhood or something else I haven't thought of. Somehow, I created a writer, but I have no idea whether I did it by reading to her or talking to her or teaching her to print at three or simply by sharing my DNA.

Re-Made in the USA

2011-04-06T16:16:00.000-07:00

If there's one thing readers of this blog know about my writing, it's that it's eclectic: fiction, legal analysis, parenting articles, music bios, local newspaper reporting--for me, it's all about the words. Sometimes, though, it's also about the message.

Last fall, I had the amazing opportunity to work with author and international businessman Todd Lipscomb on his book Re-Made in the USA: How We Can Restore Jobs, Retool Manufacturing, and Compete With the World.

I will admit that before I started reading Todd's drafts and talking with him about the issues addressed in his book, I didn't give the trade deficit much thought. Sure, I knew it was a problem, but it was a problem that seemed a bit far removed from day-to-day life and the more immediate issues confronting the society I lived in. I couldn't have been more wrong about that disconnect, and I came out of this book truly wishing every American would read it before it's too late.

Wiley & Sons will release the book on April 12, and I couldn't be more excited. Work like this really drives home the fact that we're all given our talents for a reason, and there's nothing better than being able to put our natural abilities and acquired skills to work in service of a good cause. That's what the author did when he left a lucrative career to found a business selling only goods made in America, and I'm delighted to have had the privilege of helping him get the word out.

Bestselling Author Seeks to Reinvent Herself Again

2010-06-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

If you're a regular reader of this blog, then you know that Jacquelyn Mitchard is one of my favorite authors. You may even know the story of how she set out to write her first bestseller, The Deep End of the Ocean, after she was widowed and left without a means of supporting her children. You probably don't know that thanks to a clever investment scam artist, despite having 8 bestsellers to her credit (or perhaps it's nine, now), Jackie has to work for a living just like the rest of us.

But that's okay, because once again she has a plan. She's set out to reinvent herself as a television talk show host. And reinvention will be her theme--people well-known and people unknown who have faced challenges, fallen (or been knocked down) and gotten up again to choose a new direction and carry on.

I'm sure it's much easier to pitch this sort of thing when you're a bestselling author, but Mitchard is approaching her idea just like anyone else and putting it out there for public reaction. You can watch Jacquelyn Mitchard's audition video at MyOwn.Oprah.com

You might be thinking (as I did when I first heard this idea) that Jacquelyn Mitchard has already had her "break" and it's someone else's turn. But as I've read more about her idea, I've become more convinced that she'll be delivering an important message--the same one that she delivered when she worked her way out of personal tragedy with a debut novel and that she's delivering now by identifying another road as yet untraveled and lacing up her boots. Check out the video, and if you agree please take a moment to vote for her.

Literary Choices

2010-06-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a fan of lightweight fiction. It's true that The Sun Also Rises is my favorite book and that I adore C.S. Lewis. I'm currently reading a book of short stories by Shirley Jackson, and I recently bought a collection of Updike stories and two of Orwell's novels to revisit. But the kind of books I've just described make up, perhaps, 10% of my reading. I devour disposable fiction at the speed of light. Despite the fact that I have a full time job and a child to raise, a new Janet Evanovich or Robert Parker novel will be devoured in two days--one if it's a weekend. I'm not above stretching out a bubble bath long enough to finish an entire paperback.

While I've occasionally felt a little guilty about buying these $8 candy bars, I've never had any qualms about reading them. A well-turned phrase is a well-turned phrase regardless of the complexity of the story, and sometimes you just don't want to work at it. But this week I started trying to update my Shelfari shelf and I was in for a surprise. Since I started reading adult books in my early teens, I would conservatively estimate that I've read 3,000 books. There have actually been long periods of time during which I averaged about five books a week, but I calculated using an average of two per week. And after a lot of work, I've managed to get my Shelfari list up to roughly 400. And it's those little books I've been inhaling on the fly all my life that I can't seem to recall.

I know exactly which of Orwell's novels I've read; I remember the misplaced commas in Atlas Shrugged and the way Jane Austen used apostrophes in "hers". Ray Bradbury springs to mind, along with Salinger and Steinbeck. But do I know which James Patterson novels I've read and which I haven't? Can I even tell when I read the descriptions which of Lisa Scottoline's books I actually read and which I just scanned the jacket copy? No.

As a reader, that raises one set of questions, but as a writer it raises another. What is the goal in publishing a book? To make money? To gain fame? To achieve critical success? To bring people enjoyment? To change the way people think? To leave a lasting impression? Some authors, I suspect, would say "all of the above", while others (myself among them) might say that it was none of those things. The more important question in my mind is, "Does it matter what we set out to do?" That is, does the author who writes the kind of fiction that slides across my brain and then is gone set out to provide a delicious snack? Can one decide to write something more meaningful, or is that a question of insight and talent and whatever other intangible factors might have an impact? Should we even be asking these questions, or is it better just to write and take the result for what it is?

So the Thing Is...I'm a Novelist

2009-12-31T20:52:00.000-08:00

Let me begin with apologies and a hat tip to my favorite blogger, Barb Cooper, who would have a trademark on the phrase "So, the thing is..." if it weren't too common to be protectable. I've really endeavored to avoid that phrase in my writing over the past six or seven years, since I was first introduced to Barb's funny and enlightening column. But the truth is, I used it a lot before I met Barb, and sometimes it's simply called for. In this case, I think it's especially appropriate because Barb's column was all about underlying truths, and this is a big one.

I've made my living in a variety of ways, from making salads to practicing law and virtually everything in between. I've taught, trained, consulted, written curriculum and I've answered phones, placed calls, run cash registers, poured coffee, sorted mail, typed letters and even fried eggs. And, for many years, I've been fortunate enough to make my living writing.

I've written for newspapers, magazines and websites. I've written educational materials, consumer legal information, parenting articles, musician bios, writing and publishing advice, local histories, and profiles...and those are just some of the things I've been paid for writing. I even wrote a book. And the fact that I'm able to make my living working with words is an unbelievable blessing.

But here's the thing: I'm a novelist. I wrote my first novel at 10. I wrote most of another one in college and finished one while I was practicing law. I finished another one during NaNo six or seven years ago and a third during the same period three years ago. I also have a fourth half-finished and a fifth barely begun but which I'm entirely in love. Whenever I get a free minute, I write a novel...and I almost mean that literally, since two of my novels have been written in less than a month while I was working full time.

Here's what I don't do: I don't sell them. It isn't that I CAN'T sell them (or at least, if it is that, I haven't found it out yet). It's simply that in almost two decades of writing novels, I've sent out exactly three submissions. And guess what? The only novel I've ever submitted is the one that I care least about, the one that I'm not invested in.

Sounds like fear, I know, but I think it's just laziness. See, a funny thing happens to me when I write a piece, whether it's a book or an article or a blog post. I finish it, and then it's over for me. I move on. I don't look back. I've never read most of my articles in print; I don't even have copies of most of them. It's all in the writing for me.

But a long time ago I had to make a decision about writing. I never needed anyone to read what I wrote and so I didn't bother to publish for a long time...and then I realized that so long as I didn't sell my writing, I was always going to have to do something else for a living. I realized that publishing was the ticket to having time to write. For some reason, it's taken me another decade to realize that that principle extends to novels, too...and it's novels I really want to be writing.

So this is it. It's purely coincidence that this realization dawned on New Year's Eve, and I don't make New Year's resolutions. But this year, I'm going to start acting like a novelist.

Putting NaNoWriMo to Work for You - Even if You're Not Participating

2009-11-01T18:06:00.000-08:00

November is national novel writing month, and for many people that means signing up over at the NaNo site and gearing up for the challenge, receiving pep talk emails and following the progress of your fellow writers online. The challenge has inspired many aspiring writers to push beyond their previously perceived limitations, but it's not for everyone.

I've discovered, however, that NaNo doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. For those who want to start a new novel from scratch and knock it out during November...you go girl (or guy). I'm rooting for you. But if you don't think that's realistic, set your own goal and calculate your own pace and use the energy and buzz surrounding NaNo to help you keep your momentum going, whether that means writing for an hour every day or aiming for 20,000 words in the month or whatever works for you.

I think that the greatest value of national novel writing month for aspiring writers is that it says "Do it now." What "it" is turns out to be far less critical. This year, I'm finished up editing on a novel I wrote a couple of years ago and have been letting sit, and then I'm returning to work on one that I started in 2003 and never finished. Neither qualifies for NaNo and there won't be any new, complete work when I'm done, but the fact that it's November is important for me anyway. It's important because I can classify it in my mind as the month I'm "supposed" to focus on these things, the month it's okay to take time out and immerse in my writing.

You can, too. Whether it's editing an old novel or finishing one you have in progress or cranking out a few short stories or writing some non-fiction articles for submission or focusing on your research for an upcoming non-fiction book or even just blogging every day, this is the month to make writing your priority and see what you can get done...and the fact that thousands of other people are working alongside you can be very motivational, even if you're not working exactly the way they are.

So what are YOU going to do for national novel writing month?

Writing and Memory

2009-10-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

A question that pops up in my search stats fairly often is "Does writing really help you remember?" I've even answered the question generally, on my search engine question blog. I think it's clear that, in several respects, the answer is "yes". But today, I've been thinking more specifically about how writing helps memory as a writer.

I've been an avid journaler since the age of 9, which means that much of my life has been documented and remains available for review. That's not really memory, I know, but it has an impact in a way I might never have learned to capitalize on but for a conversation with another writer in a dive bar in Champaign, Illinois back in my early twenties. Over an unbelievably cheap pitcher of beer and quarter fish sandwiches, I mentioned my journals and he told me he was jealous.

I didn't look back at my journals much, and so his meaning wasn't immediately clear to me. When he elaborated, it forever changed my fiction writing. "You know what it was like," he said. "It's right there down on paper. You can look back and think you remember what it was like to be 17, how you felt about something in the moment, but you don't really know. But you...you have it right there...you know what it was like because this is what you put down right then." And just like that, I held in my hands the key to getting inside the head of a young character.

But today, I started thinking about memory and writing in a whole new way. I remembered, today, the first time I met a certain young man. Though it was more than twenty years ago, I remember what he was wearing. I remember my reaction. There are many possible reasons, including randomness of memory or the momentary import of that meeting, but I think that the reason I recall his sweater, the jeans he wore, even where he stood is that I wrote it down. Where I wrote it, what happened to those words, I have no idea. If I ever re-read them, it was many years ago and I have long since forgotten. But I have an image in my mind that I don't believe is the real one. I have an image in my mind that I think arose out of my own words. I have seen it happen with the most insignicant of moments, the turning of my gray moccasin on pale concrete after midnight, things I would never have had cause to recall decades later.

But what does this mean, this memory of the record of a memory? It is not unlike, I think, the way we sometimes believe that we remember long-ago scenes we've seen in photographs. But what is its impact, really, on memory? Does it enhance, or does it alter? And does the ability to see that moment forever as we saw it in the moment somehow eliminate some other memory, the one we would otherwise have seen through the filter of time?

Submission Guidelines...Take 'em or Leave 'em?

2009-10-09T21:08:00.000-07:00

I've written before about the rules an aspiring writer can ignore and the ones he can't. Some of the ones that can't be ignored may seem pretty silly (in fact, they may be pretty silly), but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. If your excellent article is never published because the editor didn't like your paperclip, perhaps the editor was unreasonable..but that knowledge won't get you a paycheck or a clip. In the simplest possible terms, it would be pretty damned stupid for you to miss out on a paying writing gig because you couldn't be bothered to read the guidelines and find out that the editor preferred that pages be folded in half (or in thirds, or not be folded).

There are always those writer-hopefuls who say indignantly, "Well, if an editor is going to throw out a submission just because it's stapled, I don't want to work with her anyway!"

Really?

You'd rather remain unpublished? Well, okay then.

But for those who want to make a living writing and are willing to invest a little effort to get there, paying attention to guidelines is important. No, not every editor will toss a submission because of a minor technical violation, but you don't know which will.

I've been giving this a lot of thought recently because about a month ago, I posted an ad on Craig's List seeking submissions for my webzine. The posting brought a flood of traffic to the site, but only a fraction of that traffic made it to the submission guidelines page. The ad also brought a flood of inquiries. Maybe, given the fact that so few of the visitors from Craig's List had made it to the submissions page, it shouldn't be a surprise that the guidelines posted on that page were roundly ignored.

I received submissions approximately half the length of the pieces we publish. I received satirical pieces, though we don't publish satire. Perhaps most perplexing, I received dozens of emails and resumes with no information whatsoever beyond publishing history...although the very brief ad text said directly "we don't care about your publishing history or your credentials".

I did, I must admit, dismiss those inquiries fairly When (several times) I came across a blank email with nothing but a resume attached, I didn't even open it. quickly. I even got a little annoyed. But what really jumped out at me were the submissions--and even just email inquiries--that clearly indicated that the author had been to the site, read the guidelines, looked around at our other articles, and then attempted to submit a piece or make a pitch that FIT OUR SITE. Those submissions, because they were so few and far between, made an impression on me. Enough of an impression that if for some reason a piece didn't fit, I responded personally, explaining why and inviting the author to edit and resubmit or to submit another article.

In a nutshell, all those sloppy writers mass-submitting without reading guidelines, tailoring their pitches, or removing their paperclips are creating an excellent opportunity for the rest of you. You can make your submission stand out just by doing what you're told. Of course, the quality of your work will have to stand up to a closer look, but getting the closer look is easier for the conscientious among you when the careless so outnumber you. Make the most of that edge.

What if Writing Happened Out Loud?

2009-09-26T21:46:00.000-07:00

This evening, I took my daughter and a number of her friends to see the remake of Fame, and during the movie something crystalized that's been nagging at me for quite some time: writing is the only art that occurs almost entirely internally. When a musician picks up a guitar or sits down at a keyboard to practice or to compose, for instance, that experience is to some degree shared with anyone in the vicinity. Notes and chords, ready or not, reach nearby ears--even if the musician is unaware.

Visual arts are quieter, of course, but anyone who walks past a painter or sculptor at work catches at least a sense of the creation, can see what kind of work is in progress, what colors dominate, what feeling the piece conveys. Writing alone is different, isolated, hidden during its creation. Certainly someone could peek over the writer's shoulder as he scribbled on his pad or tapped away at his keyboard, but it would take effort, very close proximity, focus on the work before him. Nothing meaningful is, or could be, communicated at a glance, across a room, through a closed door. The writer's art exists in his mind alone until the moment someone turns to his work with the sole purpose of reading or hearing his words.

How does this change the process, I wonder, the fact that a musician creates out loud, that an artist's work is readily visible while it is in progress, but that a writer's product can only be absorbed with effort?

Self-Publishing Revisited

2009-09-25T21:58:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I considered the pros and cons of self-publishing fiction. As I mentioned then, I'm not against self-publishing in general; I did quite well with a self-published book several years ago and definitely think that in the right niche with the right marketing plan, self-publishing can be lucrative.

However, I had (and have) reservations about self-publishing fiction. Quite by chance this evening I ran across a post that led me to a blog about this very process. As if self-publishing fiction weren't challenging enough, this author has self-published a children's book and is handling his own promotion--a tough job for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the inability to price competitively. He has a clear plan, though, and I'm watching with interest; if you're toying with the idea of self-publishing in a non-niche area, I strongly suggest that you follow along and see what you can learn, too.

Writing for a Living in the Internet Age

2009-09-21T19:29:00.000-07:00

Recently, a friend started a discussion on Facebook about whether this was a good or bad time to begin a career as a professional writer. The question, which referenced both the decline of print media and the proliferation of unpaid bloggers, seemed to contain the assumption that it was not.

It’s an issue that’s ripe for discussion, both because there are valid points on both sides that bear consideration if one is embarking on a writing career and because the insights of the people who see opportunities in today’s market may be useful to anyone who hasn’t yet worked out how to make the most of the changes.

Those changes are sweeping: a shift away from print to online media, international competition that impacts pay scales, the ever-growing volume of free content available online, shifting publishing and distribution models for longer works, and more.

Writers and New Media

Print media is declining. That’s not up for discussion. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that professional writing opportunities are decreasing. The market is changing, and those jobs many think are disappearing have actually just moved out of our lines of vision. The answer may be as simple as looking over your left shoulder or off to the right, rather than staring straight ahead at the spot where the work used to be.

The Decline in Print Media is Matched (or Outmatched) by an Increase in Online Opportunities

The first step toward building a successful writing career in the digital age is understanding the opportunities. The new opportunities aren’t just web-based versions of the old ones. Web writing looks different, and writers must bring new skills to the table, and market themselves effectively by showcasing those skills.

For example, most paid web writing gigs require:

-faster turnaround

-lower word count

-Google-friendly text

-shorter paragraphs

-more visual formatting

Those aren’t difficult changes to make, but they require consciousness of the differences. A web publisher is looking for writers who can create web-friendly copy in a format that works for both search engine spiders and Internet audiences. It’s up to the writer—new or seasoned—to let a publisher know he can produce content that’s competitive in that environment.

This can be a problem for seasoned print writers; someone who has spent years writing feature articles for magazines may have a portfolio full of high-profile clips that simply don’ t reflect the skills a web publisher is looking for. The copy is typically too long and too dense; the paragraphs are probably too long and there are undoubtedly too few headers. Headlines and subheaders aren’t written with search engines in mind, and the visuals have most likely been handled by someone else.

If your name is big enough and your credentials rock-solid, someone will see past that…but if you’re a mid-level writer you should be prepared to prove yourself all over again in a new arena.

Results are Measurable Online

The goal of most paid writing has always been to sell something, whether it’s copies of a magazine or advertising space or a specific product. Online, though, it’s much easier to measure how effective those efforts are, down to the individual article. Whereas a print publisher knows only the number of copies of a particular issue sold and some rough information about the demographics of those purchasers, a web publisher knows exactly how many people opened your article, how long they stuck around, where they went when they left, whether they came back, and who linked back to you.

That means that where you’ve been published is no longer the primary credential; instead, a writer must build and be conversant in his stats. Some writers will have to learn a new language in order to sell themselves: hits, unique visitors, bounce rate, time on page, click-through rate and inbound links. These are the currency in which online value is measured, and if you have no idea what I just said, it’s time to learn.

When You Land the Job, It Won’t be the One You’re Used To

Thus far, we’ve only talked about landing writing jobs in the new world of web-based publishing, but that’s only the first step. Once you get the gig, of course, you have to do the job—and the job is a somewhat different one than most writers are accustomed to. (See, just look at that. I REGULARLY end sentences with prepositions, and I have no trouble getting writing work in this brave new world. Nothing is sacred.) And, of course, pay scales and compensation systems are different, as well. More on all that in future posts; for now, please share your thoughts and experiences on making the switch from print to cyber-publishing.

Jacquelyn Mitchard's No Time to Wave Goodbye

2009-09-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

The sequel to Jacquelyn Mitchard's first bestselling novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, came out yesterday...and I don't have it yet. Of course, I wasted no time in ordering No Time to Wave Goodbye, but I ordered it through Amazon--not because I didn't want to or have time to run out and pick it up at Borders, but because it doesn't take all that many sales in a short period of time to make the various Amazon lists that boost publicity and, in turn, more sales. Now that it's in transit, though, I'm having a hard time getting interested in reading anything else.

If you've been here before, you know that I am a constant admirer of Mitchard's writing. I love her style and, above all, I love the truths that are dropped into her writing like surprise chips of chocolate in a creamy vanilla ice cream. As I've mentioned before, her novels always make me nod. "Yes, that's true...that's exactly right." Even though, of course, I might never have consciously entertained that thought before.

So I haven't even had the opportunity to start No Time to Wave Goodbye, and I can't comment intelligently on it. But the book's release does have me thinking about character development. It's been thirteen years since The Deep End of the Ocean made its splash, and we've all lived a lot of life in the interim. My daughter was an infant when I read it, and now she's teetering dangerously close to high school. We've all lived, laughed, cried: some of us have married and divorced (or divorced and married), some of us have had children, graduated from college, watched parents die, moved across the country. We are, most of us, in some way different people than we were in 1996. And yet, we care what became of this fictional family.

That's what we have to do, as writers, isn't it? Create stories and people so rich and deep that we forget that nothing actually happened to those characters after the book ended and feel as if they're somehow out there continuing to live their lives and their struggles?

The Worst Book I've Ever Read

2009-08-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that's not really what I'm going to talk about. If you've read my post about the best book I've ever read, you probably won't be surprised to discover that I'm not going to try to pick an all-time low. But earlier this evening, I was reading a thread on Blog Catalog where people were nominating worst-ever books, and it got me thinking about what bad writing can mean to us as writers.

First, and perhaps most obviously, it can teach us what not to do. Many writers and editors and writing teachers suggest that the best way to develop a good sense of the language and improve your own writing is to read good writing on a regular basis. Sometimes, that provides direct lessons--sometimes we note a particular device that works well and adapt it to make it our own. But more often, we simply absorb the flow of good writing and it helps, almost unconsciously, to tune our ears. Reading too much bad writing, of course, could have the opposite effect; we don't want to immerse ourselves in badly-written prose to the point that it starts to sound normal.

But those clunkers jump out when someone else gave birth to them, don't they? The occasional tour of some poorly-constructed text can be an excellent lesson in What Not to Write.

More importantly, at least in my personal experience, bad writing creates perspective.

I was about sixteen when I read The Novel that would change my life. Though I'm not inclined to award the title of "worst book I've ever read" to anything, this book stands out in my mind as having been the worst book I'd read up to that point. It struck me how bad it was; it was hard to focus on the story because the writing was so very questionable. And that made it the most fascinating book I'd ever read.

You see, at sixteen I'd already known for years that I wanted to be a writer. I'd already been filling volumes--journals, short stories, bad poetry--for five or six years. But "writer" sounded a bit like "astronaut" or "rock star" back in those days. And then I held that paperback novel in my hands, published by an imprint of a major house, and thought, "I can do better." Not even "someday"--right then and there, in that moment, I was confident that I was a better writer than that published author.

Years later, I had a similar revelation looking at a short novel by a best-selling author. It wasn't that this novel was bad, but that it was so concise and simple. I was convinced that it couldn't have taken more than two weeks to write. That changed my perspective on the likelihood that I could write fiction while working full time, and the new perspective turned out to be correct: I've completed two separate novels in just about exactly 40 hours each, something I would never have undertaken without that flash of insight.

If you're an aspiring writer, read good literature. Study your heroes. There's no substitute for immersion in well-turned phrases. But every once in a while, make sure you look up and look around. Make sure you're aware of the full range of what's out there, and develop a realistic view of where in that spectrum your own work falls.

The Conundrum of Successful Characters

2009-03-11T19:12:00.001-07:00

Like most writers I know (perhaps most HUMANS), I am a fan of Robert Parker. I'm not particular, either. Naturally, I started with Spenser, but I love Sunny Randall and I'll take Jesse Stone. Since Parker published his first Spenser novel when I was 8 and seems to have put out a new book approximately every 14 minutes for several years, I still sometimes discover novels I haven't yet read. I'm always delighted when that happens, and I couldn't have been more delighted when I discovered that I'd never read the very FIRST Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript.

I brought it home, dove right in, and....didn't like it.

Now, this happens sometimes: I'll read one or two books by an author and get all swept away, and then I'll pick up another and be disappointed. But I'd hazard a guess that I've read between 25 and 30 Robert Parker novels, and I enjoyed them all.

The thing is, in The Godwulf Manuscript, Spenser wasn't yet the character he is today. He didn't HAVE the character he has today. When people told him that he wasn't as amusing as he thought he was, they were right. And he drank too much and didn't make very good decisions. I didn't like him all that much.

Obviously, over time, his character evolved; undoubtedly, when Parker turned out that first novel, he didn't know that Spenser would become a cultural icon. If I hadn't been 8 years old when this book came out, if it had been the first Spenser novel I ever read, I'm not sure that I would ever have discovered the others.

But something else jumped out at me that made even more of an impression than the evolution of the character. Spenser described himself, in 1973, as "approaching 40". That was 36 years ago, which has the man currently "approaching 76". Of course, that's glossed over--his character remains perpetually middle-aged, as he must if Parker is going to continue to crank out those books (and I hope he does). But an author gets into a bit of a bind when he announces an age like that. It's important to character development, sure, but who thinks, when he's describing a character, "I'm going to have to have this guy viable in a street fight 36 years from now"? I'm guessing no one--and suspecting that if anyone did, it would paralyze his writing and pretty much ensure that his character didn't have this kind of longevity issue.

But it raises an interesting issue for fiction writers. Should we expect our characters to take on lives of their own and move beyond the plans we have for them? And if so, how do we keep their options open while still fitting them into the stories we've woven?

Moral Clarity: A Review of 36 Pages

2009-01-10T09:36:00.000-08:00

I'm jumping the gun, I know, and this can't rightly be called a review. I was jumping the gun last week, too, when I emailed several friends and suggested that they buy this book, even though I hadn't yet reached page 20.

Some time ago, I wrote about why I can't ever answer the question "What's the Best Book You've Ever Read?" "Best" is just such a nebulous term. There are most entertaining books, and best written books, and the books that touched me the most, and books that made me think.

But in the end, I favor the books that make me think, even when they're novels. My favorite experience with a book is barely being able to get through it for the need to set it aside and write about the ideas that have sprung into my head while reading it. When I'm torn because I need to keep reading and I need to stop reading to write, that's my idea of a good book.

With that standard in mind, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists may be a great book. And I may never finish it, but I'll have reams of new writing by the time I get to the end.

It's true that points of disagreement, holes in the presentation, are part of my motivation to write and extrapolate and expound, but Neiman herself points out that the book isn't and can't be an exhaustive analysis of the philosophers and philosophies she incorporates.

Even now, I'm resisting the temptation to slip in a little paragraph or two on the oversight in the treatment of religious philosophy on "good", and I really want to analyze Socrates' assertion that loyalty and good can be at odds, but I'll bite my tongue. Err...um...fingers. Or something. If that all sounds dense and intimidating to you, don't be fooled--it's easy reading and I'd probably be done with the book right now (instead of on page 36) if it didn't keep sending me off on these tangents.

If you think, if you like to think, if you'd like to start thinking, I can't recommend this book enough. At least the first 36 pages. I don't hesitate to make the recommendation on that basis because I've already gotten my money's worth out of those 36 pages.

It Was Funny the First Time...

2008-11-17T17:25:00.000-08:00

We've all known people in the real world who come up with a line that gets a laugh, and the next thing you know, they're using it everywhere. Their spouses start to roll their eyes, and then the neighbors do, too. I suppose it shouldn't come as any surprise, then, that writers can fall victim to the same trap, enamored of their own cleverness or the response they once got...but what about editors?

For illustration, I'm going to pick on Janet Evanovich--but before I do, I have to say that I REALLY enjoy Evanovich's work. I particularly enjoy the Stephanie Plum series, but I'm partial to Alex Barnaby as well. In fact, I like Janet Evanovich's books well enough that I recently took the outrageous risk of checking out Fearless Fourteen from the "Quick Picks" shelf at my local library--a shelf full of books that are due in SEVEN DAYS and carry a fine of $1 PER DAY if they're not returned on time. Since I haven't returned a library book on time since 1976 unless my mother called me up and reminded me, this was a serious gamble.

So I mean no offense, truly. And, of course, if I did, Evanovich certainly wouldn't care, since she has millions of readers and millions of dollars.

But here's the thing: one day I was reading one of the Stephanie Plum novels and Stephanie took Morelli's dog out for a walk and walked around "until Bob was empty". I remember the first time Evanovich put it like that--it struck me as mildly amusing, and as a writer myself I have a solid appreciation for a fresh expression of a mundane concept. The second time Stephanie walked Bob until he was empty it clunked a little, but I decided (consciously) that it must just be the way this character thought. Walking a dog until he was empty was just something Stephanie Plum did.

And then...

You know what happened, don't you?

Alex Barnaby took a dog for a walk. It was Hooker's dog, Beans, of course. I was willing to overlook the whole "female lead walks boyfriend's dog, whose name starts with a 'B' thing". I mean, you stick with what works, right? But when Alex walked the dog until Beans was empty, it put me over the edge. If your neighbor's husband had used that line as many times, you'd be wondering why she didn't divorce him.

Now, you're probably thinking (and you're quite right) that Janet Evanovich is doing just fine. You're probably thinking that it's likely the reason her editor didn't point this out is that MILLIONS OF PEOPLE KEEP BUYING HER BOOKS. And you're right. She can get away with it.

But unless you're someone I'd be shocked to find reading my blog, you and I can't. And if a writer as accomplished as Janet Evanovich can become so enamored of her own turn of phrase that she doesn't notice when it starts to clank, imagine what risk the rest of us are at.

Dumbledore is Not Gay

2008-08-23T07:56:00.000-07:00

I know it's been almost a year since J.K. Rowling announced that Dumbledore was gay, but that's okay--because this post isn't really about Dumbledore, or even Rowling. Not specifically. It's about the nature of literary characters.

Dumbledore, of course, is a creature of fiction. J.K. Rowling made him up. He exists only in the pages of her novels. While many literary characters touch our hearts and minds and thus weave their way into our cultural consciousness, there is one thing they cannot do: grow outside the pages of the novels in which they are born, live, and die. As a character, he is fully formed within those pages or...he remains incomplete.

I couldn't care less what Dumbledore's sexual history is like, except for one thing: he doesn't have one. At least, not one we know anything about. And Rowling's "revelation" doesn't change that. It's a cheat. The shot at developing a character comes WHILE YOU'RE WRITING THE BOOKS, and you either take it or you don't. But if you don't, you can't make things up later.

Of course, no character's entire history can be revealed, detail by detail, in the course of a single novel--or even in a series. But the pieces that define the character are revealed through his actions, his interactions, his reactions, his backstory, the things other characters say about him. Sometimes that information is subtle and incomplete, and when a "revelation" like Rowling's makes the rounds, we readers say, "Ah, yes...THAT explains why in book three...." or "So THAT was the big secret in his past that he kept alluding to." Even those seem a little cheap to me, a kind of literary easy way out. After all, it's much simpler to announce a new detail about a character in an interview than it is to weave that characteristic or piece of history subtly into the story itself.

But even that didn't happen with Dumbledore. The announcement was "bombshell". Why? In part, perhaps, because some groups had a moral opposition to the idea of a prominent children's character being "outed", but it was more than that--it was because no one had ever suspected. I don't doubt J.K. Rowling's contention that she always thought of Dumbledore as gay, but she didn't convey that notion to her readers. Dumbledore is a man without sexual identity. Kind of rough on the guy, perhaps, but that's the way he was made. And coming back later with an "oh, and by the way..." doesn't change that.

Sometimes our Language is Just So...Apt

2008-08-01T16:41:00.000-07:00

I saw a subject line on a discussion board this afternoon about "pet peeves", and it suddenly hit me that I'd never really thought about the phrase before--something that surprised me, because I think about words a lot. Sadly, though, there aren't enough hours in the day to think about all of them, so sometimes I have to wait until something like this hits me out of the blue.

Pet peeves. PET peeves? As in, ones that we choose and like to keep close to us and feed and nurture?

Now why would we do that?

I don't have any pet headaches, or pet car problems, or pet financial problems. I have no foods that I love to hate or television shows that I turn on just to annoy myself. So why would I want to keep those peeves as pets? Why wouldn't I choose to turn them back into the wilds and go on with my life just a little LESS annoyed?

Blogging as Journalism, Part I

2008-07-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

I've seen a lot of discussion in online forums (especially blogging forums, of course) recently about whether or not bloggers should be treated as journalists. There are almost as many views on this subject as there are blogs, but mine is pretty straightforward: if you're conducting interviews, finding credible, first-hand sources and generating original news and feature stories, you're a journalist. If you're rehashing what you've found on someone else's news site or in the newspaper or telling us about your experience with the auto mechanic this morning and how much you're dreading your visit to Great Aunt Sarah, you're not acting as a journalist in that moment. That doesn't mean YOU'RE not a journalist, but that particular action isn't journalism.

This is a big topic that I expect to span several posts, but this morning I wanted to focus on someone outside the usual debate. We're accustomed to hearing from bloggers who want (demand?) to be treated as journalists, but it seems that all the while there are bloggers out there quietly acting as journalists without ever thinking to stop and fuss about what they're called.

I ran across a great example this morning, in the form of a recent interview with Lisa Smith-Batchen. This kind of thing is unfortunately relatively uncommon on blogs--the blogger conducted and published an actual interview...an interview with a woman who happened to appear this morning on the Today show. She didn't have a media operation or a budget or a press pass...she just went out and found the information, directly, and shared it with her readers. If more bloggers--especially those who purport to be dealing in news--were to take that initiative, maybe the perception of blogging and bloggers would improve on its own and we wouldn't have to spend all this time debating whether or not we should be considered credible.

The Tiffany Retrospective

2008-06-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

Today is my 42nd birthday. This is a comfortable place for me, because I've always thought of 40 as sort of the last landmark. I'm comfortably past the midpoint now, and no more concerns. I've been blessed with the ability and opportunity to do almost everything I ever aspired to--even the things that once seemed outrageous.

Of all of those amazing opportunities, there are four things that stand as corners of my life: motherhood, social services, teaching and writing. Today, I'm looking back, and since this is a writing blog, I'm thinking about writing here. I'm going to share a few words from my past and present. They're not necessarily the ones that paid the best or were highest profile or anything like that, but just a handful across the spectrum that I'm glad to have as part of my history.

None of them will include my adolescent poetry or college fiction writing. (I know how disappointed you are, but I'm firm on this.)

Who Stole My Phone Booth? I've always been partial to this piece because I wrote it about the phase of my life when I was doing the most high profile (and in some ways, most exciting) writing of my career--and discovered that it didn't change a thing. I think that anyone who has ever tried to wear multiple hats simultaneously can identify with this. It appears in a newsletter, so you have to scroll down to see it.

Math Made Manageable is one of my favorite pieces about my daughter--and about the quick and easy little things we can incorporate into life that make a big difference.

The Most Profitable Thing I Ever Wrote for Free : This was my first in-depth bio of Rick Springfield. I wrote twelve drafts, spent more than fifty hours on it, and obtained photo permissions from numerous people/organizations, including Buena Vista International and Rick himself. If you're a regular reader here, you know where that ended and how profitable it eventually became (which is part of the reason I come down so hard on the case-by-case basis side of the writing for free debate).

The File Folders in Your Mind Are Filled With Information You Can Sell! (As evidenced by the rest of this list) If I've had a thought, chances are that I've written an article about it.

Just a Bunch of Newspaper Articles - But these hold a special place in my heart because after many years of digression into things like practicing law, the editor at the Aurora Beacon News took me on as a stringer when I didn't have a clip that was less than ten years old and not a single one that was relevant. Without that foot in the door, I might still be working in another field. (Thanks, Char!) McGruff the Crime Dog was the first one, and it took me HOURS to write and rewrite.

Why Web Writing is Different: This three part series helped me land my first full-time, salaried writing job. It's several years old, but still useful as a basic primer for print writers making the shift to web writing.

PayDay Loan Stores - In the two years that I worked full time as content manager for a legal internet marketing firm, I wrote hundreds of articles and pages of consumer information about the law and legal issues: collections, bankruptcy, DUI, divorce, consumer protection, personal injury, insurance companies, tort reform, criminal defense, constitutional rights and more. The really great thing about it was that I had the opportunity to get paid to write and promote information that benefitted the public.

Although they're not available online, I wrote a number of articles for Austin Family Magazine, which I wanted to mention purely for personal reasons: my very, very, very, very dear friend Barb Cooper was editor of the magazine at the time, and more than once she wrote one of the lead stories and I the other; I just loved seeing my name and hers side by side in that box, especially given that we'd met in a writer's group back when both of our credentials were quite a bit lighter than they are today.

I'm beginning to think this list could go on forever, because there's some reason that every piece of my writing career holds a special place in my heart, whether because of the subject matter or the relationships or the stepping stone it provided or any of a dozen other associations. Here's the important point, though: very few of those publications were huge and dramatic; very few paid large sums of money. But together, they've added up to a career in words. It can happen to anyone, if you build it piece by piece.

Bloggers Unite for Human Rights

2008-05-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

As anyone who regularly reads this blog knows, I'm an active member of Blog Catalog. One of the best things about Blog Catalog is that virtually from the moment the current ownership took over, the community has been looking for ways to use blogging to make the world a better place. Part of that effort is the Bloggers Unite campaign.

Today's issue is human rights, and it probably won't surprise you to know that I had a hard time deciding what to write about. There are so many human rights issues around the world--and even at home--today that it's almost impossible to decide where the spotlight should shine most brightly. Some of critical topics my fellow bloggers have hit on already this morning include:

Free Tibet

Capital Punishment by Stoning

The Blocking of Life-Saving Supplies the International Community Would Like to Offer the Citizens of Myanmar

Congolese Women

Sadly, this list could go on indefinitely. We haven't even mentioned Darfur, or the human rights abuses perpetrated by our own government at Guantanamo Bay, or any of a hundred or thousand situations in which people around the world are living in fear, being jailed, murdered, deprived of basic necessities like food and medical care and more for no reason other than that they were born in the wrong place or into the wrong race or practice the wrong religion or have the courage to speak their minds.

But you know all that, don't you?

A month or so ago, I had the opportunity to see Paul Rusesabagina speak at a local college. Rusesabagina is the heroic hotel manager portrayed by Don Cheadle in movie The Hotel Rwanda, and seeing in person this seemingly ordinary man who saved the lives of more than a thousand people by sheer persistance was an amazing reminder of what each and every one of us could do if we were so inclined, and believed that we could make a difference. It was also a troubling reminder of a line from the movie that had always haunted me: after Cheadle's character suggests that once video footage reaches the west, someone will have to do something, the cameraman tells him that people will look up at the television and say, "That's horrible" and then go back to their dinners.

That's the choice we make today. Bloggers around the world are uniting to bring human rights issues to light, but are we then going to go back to our dinners? Regular readers of blogs about parenting and poodles and writing and jewelry-making and making money online and humor and a thousand other topics are seeing, today, a slice of what's real and raw and bleeding in the world...but are you then going to go back to your dinner?

I'm not here to tell you which human rights issue deserves your attention. I'm not here to show you horrific photographs--we all know what's going on out there. I'm simply here to ask you to do something about it. Just something. Tell someone, write an article, send a check, join a group, attend a protest, send a letter to the editor, blog about it, write your Congressman, vote your conscience, sponsor a child...if you're strong and healthy and have the resources, ADOPT a child, go on a mission, rebuild a house. Just something. There are a lot of us, and a million somethings, no matter how small, will make a difference.

UPDATE: Here's a great round-up of just some of the posts from around the world today: http://focusorganic.com/bloggers-unite2/

Somewhere in Huntsville, Texas...

2008-04-10T21:57:00.000-07:00

an English teacher made an assignment.

That's no surprise, of course.

What is a surprise is that I, a 41-year-old legal editor in Illinois, know this (and only this): a group of students in Huntsville, TX were given an assignment related to the last line of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

I know this because on this very blog, I have a post about the last line of The Sun Also Rises. Earlier this evening, I got a couple of visits to that post from different IPs in Huntsville, Texas, and both came in on Google searches for strings like "Sun Also Rises last line" and "what is the last line of the sun also rises?"

Those visitors were, undoubtedly, disappointed. My post about the last line of the novel doesn't reveal the line itself, although if--as I suspect--they're high school students, they may have picked up some insights that might sound impressive in the classroom. And, of course, I'm not exactly sure what the assignment is.

I'm pretty sure, though, that it's due tomorrow. As it got on toward ten and eleven o'clock tonight, that search traffic from Huntsville, TX really picked up.

Rational Outrage Launches on March 17!

2008-03-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I mentioned in a post that there were just too many projects and not enough hours in the day (a feeling I know is familiar to many of you).

I'm excited to announce that despite all of the competing priorities, my webzine, Rational Outrage, will be launching on March 17.

The March 17 issue is set, but we're still accepting submissions for the March 31 edition until March 24, so check it out and let us know what you're outraged about. This is a paying market, though it's not MUCH pay at this point.

5000 Words is About 20 Double-Spaced Pages

2008-03-09T08:37:00.000-07:00

I suspect that most regular readers of this blog know that. I also suspect that most regular readers of this blog know that things like margins and even fonts can impact that number considerably, and so it's just a very loose guideline.

So do you find yourself wondering, "Just why did Tiffany decide, this morning, to make a gratuitous announcement about what 5000 words amounted to in terms of pages?

I'll tell you (you knew I would, didn't you?)

Some months ago, I found this question in my search traffic: "5000 Words is How Many Pages?"

Because I have another blog dedicated entirely to answering questions I find in my search statistics (though some more seriously than others), I wrote a post with that title.

Now, I get about a dozen visitors a day on related search strings. It's ALWAYS 5000 words. Here are a few of the recent searches that have landed people to that post:

5000 words how many pages
How many pages is 5000 words?
How many pages is 5000 words double-spaced?
5000 words = how many pages
5000 words = ? pages
5000 words in pages
5000 words double spaces
5000 words pages
How many pages in 5000 words?

All of these examples have been pulled from the past three days, and most of them appear multiple times. I found this a bit surprising and a little entertaining when it first started happening, but then I came to a couple of conclusions:

1. There are a lot of people out there who don't know how many pages 5000 words works out to and wish they did; and

2. Those people are much more likely to find other information of interest and use to them on THIS blog than on my search statistics blog.

The Evolution of Punctuation

2008-03-08T10:58:00.001-08:00

I am not a fan of the evolution of language. The idea that misuse of words ultimately develops into "new meaning" makes my brain explode, and I was dismayed about a year ago to come upon a line in St. Augustine's Confessions that seemed to suggest that this kind of distortion had been going on as early as the third century.

For the past few years, though, an ugly suspicion has been growing in my mind: a suspicion that the language and grammatical structure that I know and love and think should be frozen in time forever is itself the product of evolution. It all started when I noticed that C.S. Lewis used semi-colons in a manner inconsistent with proper usage. Or, I should say, CURRENT proper usage. It seemed unlikely to me that Lewis failed to grasp the appropriate use of a semi-colon, but after a bit of research failed to turn up anything conclusive, I decided to comfort myself with the assumption that the English used semi-colons somewhat differently than we Americans used them. I'd already learned from Lynne Truss that there were minor variations between British and American punctuation.

Sheldon Vanauken was American, and he'd used them in the same way, but he was a disciple of Lewis, and had studied at Oxford as well. It seemed reasonable that he might have adopted the British style; it seemed equally reasonable that he might have adopted Lewis's.

And I was untroubled, later, to discover the same format--the use of the conjunction "and" in combination with a semi-colon--in Jane Austen's work. British. Very British.

But Austen did something else that troubled me deeply: she used apostrophes in her possessive pronouns. "Her's" was disconcerting enough, but just a few pages later to be confronted with "their's"! I nearly swooned, and most certainly should have required attendance had there not been comfortable seating and clean air at ready access.

And, I am afraid, none of my excuses about British custom or emulation could explain the curious use of the semi-colon in the SECOND SENTENCE of the very first of The Federalist Papers . After a period of steadfast resistance in the face of all evidence to the contrary, I find myself forced to consider the possibility that semi-colons have not always been limited to the artful attachment of two otherwise independent sentences, and that they have instead been applied in a variety of circumstances in which their only function seems to have been to keep a sentence from going on too long without division.

I find myself unequal to the circumstances.

Know Your Audience: It's Easier Said Than Done for Bloggers

2008-03-07T14:55:00.000-08:00

Last week, after a discussion thread on Blog Catalog about all of the "make money blogging" blogs out there, I wrote something I planned to post here on RockStories. It was a parody of those posts that many of us run across ten times a day on blogs and in forums, titled "I Made $XX Online in January!" and filled with helpful tips on how you could, too. Except that the "XX" was my actual January online income and my helpful tips included things that have helped me earn a living from home, like obtaining an advanced degree from a first-tier school and securing the assistance of a rock star at a critical point in your career development.

Usually I draft my posts right here in blogger and post them immediately, but I had some reservations about whether this one would be recognized for what it was, and so I sent it out to two friends and asked them if the point was clear or if it sounded condescending. Both are mothers with professional backgrounds working in creative fields. One felt strongly that it sounded condesceding and braggy, and that there had to be a better way to make the point. The other said it was funny and not the least bit condescending and I should post it right away.

Naturally, I did nothing. But I did start thinking about an issue that's bigger than whether or not that particular post would be well received: "know your audience" is a standard in the writing profession, but that's not as easy in the blogging world as it is when you're writing for other kinds of publication.

If I'm writing for a parenting magazine, or a humor magazine, or a writing website I have a pretty good idea of who my readers will be. Just as important, they have a pretty good idea of what to expect when they type in that URL or flip open the magazine. And that's true for some bloggers, as well. It's true for bloggers who write within a narrow niche, and for those who have a strong regular readership. But the vast majority of traffic to my blogs comes from search engines, which leaves me with little information about those visitors. And even the regular visitors come, I think, more for something about my writing style or perspective than subject matter--I think that because I have a writing blog, a dog blog, a personal blog, a Catholic blog, a social commentary blog and a search engine humor blog, and a surprising number of those who subscribe to or regularly read one read several (or all) of them.

There are some broad perspectives out there, depending on which blog they started with. Even these two good friends of mine, who know my style and my perspective well, had two very different takes on the same piece. With a little reflection, the reason was obvious: one of them works online and daily encounters the kind of posts I was parodying, so that the format and intent were immediately recognizable to her. The other doesn't frequent the kind of blogs and forums and such where those posts appear.

But what about the rest of the world? I just don't know. I'm certain that if I posted that piece, I'd have readers who thought it was hilarious and dead-on and cheered me on for it. I'm equally sure that I'd have readers who weren't familiar with the format and thought I was bragging about my income and my education and my connections. And I'm suddenly concerned about just how many other topics and approaches and perspectives might trigger exactly this kind of conundrum.

Publishing Pitfalls for Parents

2008-02-13T18:37:00.000-08:00

In addition to maintaining six blogs, I've done some writing for parenting magazines and websites and written some essays for writing publications that touch on family life, and I've always been very cautious. I see a lot of articles and blog posts that make me cringe on behalf of children, because having made my living in Internet marketing for a time, I know that those little stories, those vents from mom or dad, those blow-by-blows of the struggle with the school system are with those kids for life.

I took down my website in 2002, and at least three versions of it are still readily available online. I've personally seen situations in which people weren't hired for jobs because of information online, and read numerous news stories of others whose blogs or facebook photographs or any of a dozen other e-media sources cost people jobs--even jobs they already held. And I question whether we have the right to make those decisions for our children.

I'm not talking about those cute little stories that might embarrass your high-schooler but that we all have and ultimately won't impact anyone's life. I'm talking about doing real harm with the best of intentions.

It seems to me that the most seemingly innocuous posts and articles can come back to bite them in ways we'd never anticipate. Twelve-year-old daughter has a learning disability and you're Not Ashamed Of It? Great, but does that mean you should decide for her that her future prospective employers should be able to Google her and find that information? It's easy to do now, and indexing is getting more sophisticated every day.

Even subjective comments with the best of intentions could hurt. Maybe you son goes out and puts on a brave and poised front in public, and you're so very proud of him because you know that in reality he's having major anxiety attacks and he comes home and collapses from the stress of keeping up that together front? Praise him for it online, share your pain as a parent watching him struggle...and then maybe you'll get the chance to do it again five years down the road, when the interviewer who was so impressed with his poise and professionalism reads the archives of your blog and starts to think maybe he wasn't quite as together as it looked, to wonder whether maybe he's STILL putting up a brave front when he's really cracking underneath.

Think I'm paranoid? Maybe. Maybe the cases I've seen and read about in which people who never thought their private profiles or blogs or web pages would be discovered lost jobs and custody and lawsuits are all flukes. Maybe the dizzying advance of technology that's making it easier and easier and easier for the average person to find information on the Internet will come screeching to a halt, and maybe those popular archiving services will stop archiving and delete their files. Maybe.

But is it a chance we want to take on behalf of our kids?

I don't.

And, in fact, this week I got a lesson in just how careful I have to be. I've always thought about the posts and articles that might have a long-term impact and avoided them, but those cute little stories seemed harmless to me. After all, my daughter is in middle school, and the chances that her friends were reading my blogs or parenting magazines or writing newsletters seemed pretty slim. And so far as I know, none of them are.

But the other day, I wrote two posts about buying my daughter tickets to the Jonas Brothers concert for her birthday. There aren't any secrets in them...at least, nothing that would seem like a secret to use grown-ups. And we're the only ones reading my blogs, right?

Well, that was true. That is, until the news aggregator at a Jonas Brothers fan site picked up my posts, and a small flood of click-through traffic from teenyboppers began.

We really do live in a different world, and whatever we put online we're putting out there forever, for the world to do with what it will. For some of us, that's an acceptable risk, but is it one we should take for our kids, our parents and our friends?

Torn Between Two Projects

2008-02-11T11:51:00.000-08:00

Okay, for most of us it's usually more than two...a lot more than two. But I couldn't resist the backhanded allusion to some old country song I don't even know who sang--my daughter likes to say that I have a song for everything, and she doesn't seem to mean that in a good way.

I suspect that the story I'm about to tell is a familiar one to many writers out there. I'm in the process of launching a social commentary webzine. I'm taking submissions, but even so I expect to do about half of the writing for launch myself, and I'm very eager to launch.

Which is fine: I'm a fast writer and I'm excited about getting this new venture off the ground.

The only problem is that I have a slightly-more-than-full-time day job, where equally exciting things are going on.

And I have a romance novel that's been done for more than a year that I have to figure out what to do with.

And I have a novella in progress that a friend of mine is eagerly waiting to film.

And I have a novel in progress that I'm personally very invested in.

And...well...six blogs.

And my sister just handed me a new magazine that my work would fit right in with.

I've heard writers talk about starting a lot of projects and then losing interest, but this isn't quite that problem. I'm entirely interested in all of this, and a few more things that I have in the works but aren't quite so pressing. There just aren't enough hours in the day--and then the world seems to want us to interact and pay bills and mop the kitchen and shower and stuff on top of it all.

What's a writer to do? How to prioritize? I haven't quite figured that out yet. Obviously, paid work comes first, but after that? Usually, it's the fun stuff that comes next, which is why I'm starting a new webzine and working on a novel when I've got a finished book sitting around that I can't find time to submit.

The Controversial Writer's Meme - at Long Last

2008-01-26T20:19:00.000-08:00

About two months ago, Dane Morgan tagged me for a very interesting meme. No, really. It's a unique meme that promises to offer a lot of useful information, particularly if the right people are tagged. The meme originated with Sam Freedom, a blogger I didn't know before Dane tagged me for the meme, but whose blog I've since visited several times.

This is what Dane said when he tagged me: Tiffany Sanders at RockStories is a professional writer, meaning she earns her living from writing. She tells us that anyone can become a writer, and that many of the things we uninitiated see as insurmountable barriers are myths, or at least not as fierce as commonly believed. I’d love to read some secrets from her on writing and getting more from your writing online.

I have to admit that I found the assignment a little intimidating. Dane is definitely correct in suggesting that I think the idea that it's "impossible to break in" as a writer is a bunch of nonsense, but most of the secrets to success aren't secrets at all--or at least, that's how it looks to me. A lot of people seem to hit that wall, though, so I decided that whether or not my tips are "controversial" enough, they'll undoubtedly do someone out there some good. The lines between online and offline writing may be a bit blurry; they're not necessarily two separate animals.

1. Guidelines are critical; job requirements are not. You've undoubtedly heard horror stories about busy editors and agents tossing manuscripts in the trash unread because they're folded incorrectly or sport a colored paperclip. Many of these stories are true. Not every agent or editor screens that way, but enough do that you should take the warnings to heart and follow their guidelines to the letter. But don't confuse submission guidelines with job requirements.

As a writer, you're not selling your background or experience--you're selling your ability to write. Companies, be they magazines or newspapers or corporations building content departments and web development teams, care more about your writing than anything else. They advertise criteria because it helps them screen, and some enforce those requirements. But many people hiring writers skip straight to the writing samples. Excellent writing can overcome a lack of professional experience, so if you're confident of the quality of your writing, take a chance and try to get it in front of the decision-maker.

This is more likely to succeed when the applications are routed straight to an editor or creative director than when they pass through an HR department or agency, so look for that information in job postings and target the people who have the priorities and experience most likely to let them appreciate your abilities before they even see the gaps in your experience.

2. Apply for jobs that don't exist. Many years ago, a mid-size circulation newspaper in my area advertised for a full-time reporter. I didn't have the credentials and I didn't want a full-time job, but I did want to do some newspaper writing. Fortunately, a friend of mine made a very astute observation: if they needed a full-time reporter, they were short-handed at the moment. I called the editor and asked if they needed stringers (newspaper lingo for freelancers) and within a week had kicked off an association that lasted for three years and led to work with three other newspapers.

Around the same time, a writer friend came across submission guidelines for a new magazine that hadn't launched yet. Instead of submitting to one of the listed departments, she took a chance and pitched a monthly column--and became one of the publication's first regular columnists. With Internet publications, the flexibility is even greater because it's much easier and less expensive to add columns and special features without incurring additional production costs or sacrificing ad space.

Make sure, though, that you're taking the time to understand the publication and its needs and not simply trying to sell an existing market on something you'd like to write that doesn't really fit there. Both of the situations described above (and many others like them) worked out because they were targeted to observed gaps.

3. Good content is not enough. Back when the writing profession revolved exclusively around print materials and traditionally-published books, people used to say, "No one is going to knock on your door and ask to see what's in your filing cabinet." There's a popular misconception that this is no longer true now that it's possible to upload your filing cabinet to the web and make it available to anyone who wants to read it. That's entirely backward. What the mass upload of filing cabinets to the web means is that there's a lot of garbage readily available, and you can't possibly expect anyone to plow through it page by page looking for the gold. The Internet has become a slush pile millions of manuscripts deep, and if you want to get yours read, your goal is the same as it's always been--figure out a creative way to get it in front of the right person. And the way to do that is the same as it's always been--work your ass off.

4. Don't let just anyone publish your work. I'll admit that I'm cheating a little with this one, becuase it's not really controversial. Any successful writer will tell you the same. But I felt the need to slip it in anyway because it seems to be something that ONLY successful writers know, whereas aspiring writers have a lot of crazy ideas like "any clips will help".

Some clips will not help. In fact, some clips will hurt. Before you consider submitting to a publication, whether it's online or in print, read it and make an honest assessment of the quality of the work. I don't care how much the publication pays (or even, in some cases, whether it pays at all). But some publications are known for accepting anyone, and that's often simultaneous with being known for bad work. That means mentioning them in a cover letter or submitting clips can be worse than having no publishing history at all; it can create a negative association before an editor ever looks at your work. And I use the word "before" loosely here, because many editors are so busy and so inundated with submissions that they're simply not going to look any further once something has created a negative impression.

The goal is not, and cannot be, simply to "get published". And it's critical that a writer sending out cover letters and clips understands what it means--and what it does not mean--to be published. A cover letter inviting me to look at someone's "published" work on Associated Content, for instance, tells me that person is an amateur. First, I know that there's a lot of garbage on Associated Content. It's not all garbage, but there's enough that having been "published" there doesn't tell me anything about your writing skill. Second, I know that you don't have any more significant publications to mention. And finally, I know that you don't really have a solid understanding of the industry (if you did, you'd know better than to offer Associated Content up as a writing credential).

The bottom line: Don't sell yourself short. For the purposes of breaking into better and better paying markets, one solid clip is better than twenty lousy ones (and when I say "lousy", I'm talking about the source, not your writing). The same concept that keeps you from wanting to link your blog or website to a "bad neighborhood" should keep you from wanting to tie your writing to a bad publication or website.

Now, to pass the torch. I'm going to start with Barb Cooper at So the Thing Is...
Barb wrote an email six years ago or so that turned into a column with hundreds of subscribers, and that led to being invited to write a humor column for a parenting magazine, and before long she was editor of that magazine, so I'm sure that she'll be able to supplement my writing and publishing tips.

Next up, Margo at Margo's Meanderings. Margo will probably kill me for this, because she blogs VERY sporadically, but she has years of marketing and public relations experience in a wide range of contexts and a charming way of waving her hand and saying, "Oh, no...you just..." when the average person thinks it will be difficult to reach the right person or get onto an airplane or whatever the moment requires.

Finally, Don at SkinnyTie.com. Don's a developer who does things that not only make my head spin, but have the same effect on people who actually understand technology and coding. He's also an independent filmmaker, and has an uncanny ability to talk his way into almost anything. I'm frankly not sure whether he'll be willing to share his secret(s), but it's worth a try.

TheWAHMMagazine

2008-01-14T09:10:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago, I posted about a very smooth freelance transaction--I saw a posting about a new magazine, I had a great idea, I wrote it up and sent it off and they accepted...all in the space of a weekend. The sample copy of the inaugural issue of that magazine is now online: TheWAHMMagazine. My article isn't actually included in the sample section, but from what I've been able to read so far it looks like it's going to be a very nice publication for those working from home--especially those relatively new to the special circumstances of working from home and those trying to balance family obligations with an at-home career.

And, of course, new publications usually aren't quite so inundated with submissions and might provide a good opportunity if you've got something relevant to say.

A Brand New Blog

2008-01-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

You will all undoubtedly be delighted to know that I've started a new blog for al of those things that don't quite fit within any of my niches...which means that readers of this blog will henceforth be spared memes (unless they're directly writing related), rhapsodizing about my child and photographs of my shoes.

The new blog is Tiffany Talks.

The Last Day of the Soon-To-Be-Previous Phase of My Life

2008-01-11T20:52:00.000-08:00

One of my writers said this week that the old platitude "today is the first day of the rest of your life" was kind of stupid, because it was always true. Of course, in a way that's the point, but it undermines the concept a bit, too. After all, even if you're sitting around eating potato chips and watching reruns, it's the first day of the rest of your life. Sick in bed and unable to do anything? First day of the rest of your life. You get the point.

Tomorrow, I guess, will be the first day of my new phase of life. Today was the last day of the old one. The day when it becomes not-exactly-accurate to use the phrase "one of my writers" in the first paragraph of this post.

For the past two years I've worked in a place that some of my friends have referred to as "the Gulch" after Galt's Gulch. The kind of place that you probably think only exists on television: imagine one huge, open room full of energetic, creative, talented (and mostly gorgeous) young men and women. Add an interesting mission and a healthy dose of ethics and humanity coming from the top, bottomless coffee, the occasional bout of loud music, a dog wandering through from time to time and an invading army of tiny glow-in-the-dark zombies and you either have a very successful sitcom or a utopian work environment.

Unless this is a Truman Show kind of thing and I'm the last to know, my office was the latter.
Sadly, it was inconveniently located. By "inconveniently located" I don't mean that it was in a bad place. On the contrary (of course) it was in a section of the loop surrounded by activity, dining opportunities, parks, convenient banking and a large number of jewelers. It just wasn't anywhere near my kid. If you're a regular reader here, you may have gathered that I'm pretty attached to my kid.

Still, parenting is a balancing act, especially when you're doing it alone. I wanted to see more of my daughter, but (as she told me once when she was four or five) "you have to feed your kid every day. It's a law." So we got by. The days were long for both of us and I ended up in the hospital a time or two, but if you have to work for a living it might as well be in The Perfect Job, right?

And then, out of the blue, another perfect job appeared. (Yes, I'm well aware that my good fortune is far beyond what I could possibly deserve.) Like my current (past) job, this one made use of all of my varied past experiences: editorial, legal, educational. Like my current (past) job, this one involved working with quality people. Unlike my current (past) job, this one allowed me to work from home--and thereby solved every problem in my life.

That sounds absurd, I know, but every identifiable problem in my life related to the time I spent commuting. The days were too long for my daughter. I didn't get to spend enough time with her. She didn't get enough sleep. I didn't get enough sleep. We were both getting sick a lot. My house was getting out of control (okay, had been out of control for a long time). I hadn't seen my friends in months. I'd lived in the same place for a year and a half and not gotten around to hanging curtains.

So really, what choice did I have?

And yet, I don't want to sound like I'm taking a job I don't want just to cut out the commute. No, the new job is very exciting. Exciting enough that when my future (current) boss was describing it to me, I had to get up and pace around the room while I talked to him. I simply couldn't sit still for it. I'm very eager to get started.

So I left behind a cluster of talented young writers that had melded into a team of laughter and moral outrage and mission--that, I might dare to say, I had melded into that team. I left behind the close proximity of friends and the certainty that someone within ten feet would always share my outrage at the metamorphosis of language or the abuse of an apostrophe, traded it for dinner with my daughter and sleep and a brand new mission, for the possibility of vacations and the ability to help with homework and the chance that I might one day host dinners and volunteer again.

But I didn't quite believe it, even over a cake that said I was leaving (a cake dented, ever-so-slightly, on the trip across town, served in a kitchen stocked with everything up to and including a martini shaker, but nothing with which one could serve cake). I didn't believe it because the unity in the room made it seem absurd that separation was possible, let alone already in progress. I'm still waiting to see what it will look like Monday morning.

Self-Publishing Fiction

2008-01-05T11:19:00.001-08:00

I've probably said here before that I think self-publishing fiction is a Very Bad Idea. I've certainly said it in forums and writers' groups and publishing workshops and anywhere else I happen to have been that the issue might have arisen.

It's not that I have anything against self-publishing. If fact, I once had great success with a self-publishing venture. But most statistics I've seen suggest that 95+% of self-published books lose money. That doesn't surprise me. They're harder to distribute, you lose a bigger chunk of the revenue when you try to distribute them, you don't have the marketing and network support of a publisher...there are many, many reasons that it's harder to make money with a self-published book.

Another reason is simply that most writers don't know the first thing about marketing their work. Self-publishing a book, setting up a website, listing it at Amazon and expecting people to discover it and buy it in numbers that will make it generate a profit is just an unlikely sequence of events without a lot more push.

That's one of the reasons that self-publishing seems to be an especially bad idea for fiction. If you self-publish a book about money management, you can set up a website and blog with financial tips and links and calculators and budgeting software, and the visitors to your site will learn to trust you on the subject and will be exactly the kind of people who might want to purchase your book. You can go out and do personal finance seminars in bookstores and community centers and park districts and make your book available. You might be able to get interviewed on local television stations or covered in the local newspaper, and all of these things will open up new markets full of people who might buy your book.

Fiction doesn't lend itself quite so well to that kind of thing. Even if you can generate some press you don't have the kind of "hook" you do when you're offering advice in conjunction with your book and the book promises to offer more.

And then there's pricing. The typical paperback novel costs about $8--at some stores they're routinely discounted by 10-20%. But a self-published novel will probably cost you about $7.50 per book to produce. If you sell it through Amazon, they'll keep 55% of the purchase price, which means that you have to price it at $13.64 just to break even...and I'm assuming that you'd like SOME profit.

There have been a couple of notable cases of self-published novels selling so well that they resulted in contracts with major publishing houses, but those authors had both great products and a full-time commitment to selling their books.

Now, having set forth every reason that I firmly believe self-publishing fiction doesn't work, let me get to the point: I'm thinking about self-publishing the romance novel I wrote last year. Thus, I'm very interested in hearing the thoughts of anyone with mainstream and/or self-publishing experience. I'm also interested in hearing from readers about whether or not you purchase self-published novels in places like Amazon, LuLu and others. If not, why not? Does the pricing issue play a bigger role, or simply the fact that a self-published book is more of an unknown quantity?

Here's why I'm thinking about doing something I'm pretty sure doesn't ever work:

I have three other novels in progress that I feel more strongly about, and I'd like to focus on those in terms of writing and seeking an agent or publisher;
I don't have a lot invested in this book--I wrote it entirely during my commute over a period of one month--and I won't be heartbroken if it goes nowhere;
I DO have a background in successful internet marketing, and I'm interested to see how much difference that makes and whether or not I can make it work;
I'm asked a lot of questions about self-publishing options, and the one book I self-published was very niche and not representative: I think it might be worthwhile to experiment with the process;
Given my tendency to move on to another project once something is written and lose interest in it, the chances that I'm going to persist in looking for an agent / publisher are pretty slim.

So what do you think? Should I try it? Any thoughts on presses or POD publishers or anything that you'd like to share? Would you be interested in a blog or maybe even a short book chronicling the process and what did and didn't work? Anything else you'd like to say?

Family Portrait with Llama

2008-01-04T04:59:00.000-08:00

I'm not big on posting pictures, but the holiday season offers such opportunities...

...and, of course, so little time for substantive posts. Next week, I hope to get back on track, starting with the meme that I've owed Dane Morgan for a hundred years or so...the one in which I'm going to tell you how to disregard conventional wisdom and get a writing job regardless of your past experience.

Today, however, all I have to offer is a quick llama on my way out to work.

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-25T09:58:00.000-08:00

Enough With the "Just Write Good Content" Nonsense Already

2007-12-20T08:18:00.001-08:00

Yeah, I said that out loud.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you might be surprised to hear me challenging the "just write good content" mantra. After all, I'm a writer. I believe in good content, I try to maintain high standards and I'm a very vocal proponent of the idea that artificially constructed obstacles should be roundly ignored.

I know where the "it's all about content" school of thought came from, and it was an honorable place. In the early days of search engine optimization (SEO)--or what once passed for it--there was a theory that things like writing meaningless strings of relevant key words would do the trick. Eventually, someone noticed that it didn't do a lot of good to bring people to your website if there wasn't anything there for them when they arrived, and search engine algorithms started to take that kind of thing into account, and the next thing we knew, you needed to actually have something to say if you wanted to run a successful website.

Thank God.

And then the pendulum shifted. Thousands of people came out of the woodwork to declare "content is king".

And it's still going on.

The problem is, something like realistic balance has come into the world and no one noticed.

There are still people devoting full-time hours to gaming the SEO system instead of producing content anyone wants to see. And on the other end of the spectrum there are people spouting platitudes about how "all you have to do" is write good content.

The fact that you need worthwhile content to keep bringing people back to your website is a no-brainer. It's not even worth talking about anymore. I don't use language like this lightly, but...well, duh.

Is that enough?

Well, let's look at some other scenarios. If you're a great mechanic, do you print up business cards and put an ad in the local newspaper and commission an attention-catching sign for your shop, or do you say, "All you have to do is do good work" and then sit around and wait for people to notice that you're there?

If you're a writer in a context besides blogging, do you produce good content and then save it to your hard drive and move on with your life, confident that since you're writing good content, agents and publishers will eventually find you?

The backlash against promotion without substance has gone too far, into a kind of "popular wisdom" that advocates substance without promotion. And that brings us back to my initial point, to the headline on this post: NONSENSE

You need good content. But the best content in the world won't do you a darned bit of good if you don't know how to--and don't make the effort to--get people to look at it.

Another Rerun

2007-12-05T15:48:00.001-08:00

I'm re-posting this post from April of 2004 because...le plus ca change...

Just a few minutes ago, I happened upon a discussion on Blog Catalog about the credibility of people blogging about making money when they weren't making any money and I recalled this post that I'd written three and a half years ago. Only the forum, it seems, changes.

Writing about Writing about Writing (April, 2004)

I've found a cutting edge way to make money as a writer. After generations of writers struggled to make a living, the current generation of professional writers has found a steady stream of income in writing about writing--instructional and inspirational articles that tell other writers how to write, how to sell, how to choose markets, how to query, how to land clients, and how to get rich and famous. At the relatively small-scale end are magazines and websites upon magazines and websites offering advice to beginning writers, often purchased from writers just one small step up the food chain from those beginners.

Many of these, especially the online versions, pay $25/article. This leaves me asking myself: Do I want to accept career advice from writers who are still selling their work for $25?

After all, at $25/article, a writer would have to sell 20 articles each and every week of the year in order to earn $26,000/year. That's more than a thousand articles a year. For those thousand articles, the writer would earn the equivalent of $12.50/hour at a full time job--assuming that she could crank out those 20 articles in a 40 hour week.

Of course, there's bigger money marketing tips for writers on a larger scale. Writers like Peter Bowerman have seen great success marketing books like The Well Fed Writer. However, Bowerman, a successful copywriter, openly admits that the bulk of his income comes not from marketing copywriting services as he describes in the book, but from sales of the book.

If these writers are making their livings not so much by writing alone but by writing about writing, I've discovered a pure and untapped market that is sure to bring me fame and fortune: writing about writing about writing. That's right, I've decided to write a book explaining how to make big money writing books about how to make big money writing. Between you and me, though, I wouldn't buy it. After all, no one paid me to write this article at all, and at that rate you'll never hit the six-figure mark.

Once in a Very Great While, I Wish that I Had a Personal Blog

2007-12-05T06:40:00.000-08:00

I've got a writing blog (you're there), a dog blog, as social/legal commentary blog, a search terms humor blog and a Catholic blog, but I don't have a personal blog--that blog where people include photographs of their children after they've managed to fingerpaint the household pets and such--and I rarely have need for one. But every once in a while, something happens that I want to write about.

It's never something big and compelling. It's never, frankly, something that WARRANTS writing down. And that's a good thing, because if it did, I'd probably start another blog...that's what I usually do when I have something to say that doesn't fit any of my existing blogs. Fortunately, so far, it's always been something you really don't want to hear about.

Yesterday, for instance, I was halfway across the parking lot at the train station when I noticed that I was wearing two different shoes.

Now, I'm not especially fashion conscious and it's not all that unusual for me to get to work and realize that I never changed into the shoes I planned to wear--my basic black flats see a lot of action no matter what I'm wearing. But this...well, when I showed them to my 11-year-old last night she said, "How do you make a mistake like that?"

Darned if I know. I was in a hurry. It was semi-dark in my bedroom when I put my shoes on. That MIGHT explain how I failed to notice that they were two different colors. And that one was plain and the other had a little pattern stamped in it. And that...you know....THEY WERE TWO DIFFERENT COLORS.

But what about the fact that one of them has a bit of a heel and the other doesn't?

Yep, that's right. My shoes weren't just two different colors and styles,but one was flat and the other a low heel.

But don't worry. I noticed as soon as I got to the train station. After I'd, you know, walked out to the car (bright sunlight), cleaned the ice off the car, driven my daughter to my mother's house, walked up to the house, walked back to the car, driven to the train station and walked the block or so to the train station parking lot.

This is what I saw when I finally looked down:

Of course, the moment I noticed, it became difficult to walk in one flat shoe and one low heel.

Although I hesitate to admit just how far outside the fashion loop I am, had it just been color I would probably have ignored it and gone on with my life. But the whole not being able to walk thing was starting to bug me, so on my way to work I stopped in Old Navy. I didn't really think that Old Navy sold shoes, but it's down the block from my office, and Macy's doesn't open until ten.

I bought some little black canvas ballet slippers that were too flat for the pants I had on and not really seasonal, but matched my clothes (and each other) and had the added advantage of...um...being the same height. The fact that they were lightweight canvas slip-ons didn't seem to be a big deal...

While I was at work, this happened:

Rick Springfield: A Lifetime in Music Ltd. Collector's Edition

2007-12-01T09:35:00.000-08:00

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I'm not really interested in turning my blogs into money-making ventures. I'm posting information about and an opportunity to purchase the small number of remaining copies of the limited collector's edition of Rick Springfield: A Lifetime in Music here for one reason: I still get emails from people asking how they can get it, and I haven't gotten around to getting a website set up. That means that currently the only option is ebay, and I don't like to offer things for sale exclusively on ebay because people end up paying too much in auctions.

I've included a little (and hopefully discreet) Buy Now button on the home page of this blog, simply to have a place to direct people who inquire. Not, of course, that it will break my heart if the occasional other visitor decides to purchase one.

Having done that, though, I realized that there wasn't adequate space to provide any real information about the book, so that's what this post is all about.

The limited collector's edition of Rick Springfield: A Lifetime in Music is a small (100 page) spiral bound book formatted for display. It's printed on 80 pound paper and contains numerous black and white photographs, many of which had never been published before. The book is based on interviews with many musicians, music writers and music-industry professionals who worked with Rick over a period of nearly four decades, including:

Rick Springfield

Beeb Birtles (founding member of the original Little River Band and former Zoot bandmate)

Darryl Cotton (former Zoot bandmate and Australian musician and television star)

Keith Howland (Chicago guitarist and former Springfield touring guitarist)

Michele "Mitch" O'Driscoll (Go-Set Magazine correspondent)

Jeff Joseph (former Zoot manager)

John Kennedy (former Icy Blues bandmate and inspiration for the 1983 song "Me & Johnny")

...and many more

So I've Probably Suggested a Time or Two...

2007-11-28T17:36:00.000-08:00

That you check out Barb Cooper's So the Thing Is... blog. Today, I want to suggest something entirely different. Today, I think that you should visit The Rising Blogger and check out Barb's award-winning post there. Then, of course, you are free to click through and read the rest of Barb's blog, as set forth in my earlier promotional efforts...erm...um...objective posts.

Seriously, all this warm, fuzzy "look, my friend won this award!" stuff aside, The Rising Blogger has a great idea, picking out individual posts rather than blogs and shining the spotlight right on the best writing. There's some other good stuff there, too. After Barb's post.

Oops, Make that Four...No, Five...

2007-11-17T20:01:00.000-08:00

I just discovered yet another meme I'd been tagged with during my brief (at least, *I* thought it was brief!) absence, and this one is a double from PetLvr. It's actually ten days old, but since I just found out about it this evening it should really be at the end of the list. I'm bumping it up because, frankly, it's the easiest one.

Dane Morgan tagged me with a great meme about a week ago--one of the best I've seen and one that definitely goes beyond the fun "share a little personal information" of most memes. But it's taking more work--I've actually been working on my answers during my evening commute. And Peter's meme itself isn't hard, but he put me to shame with his illustrations and made me want to invest a little more--and I definitely lack the technical skills to follow his example. So those are still to come.

So on to today's double: First, three things I couldn't get through the day without. Interestingly, I saw this meme on someone else's blog a few weeks ago and thought that there really weren't THINGS I couldn't get through the day without, but as soon as I saw PetLvr's post this evening, the first item on this list flashed into my mind.

1. 51 minutes of extra sleep on the morning train. As a single mom with a somewhat-more-than-full-time job and a 3.25 hour a day round-trip commute, it's pretty rare for me to consistently squeeze out five hours of sleep a night. That extra almost-hour on the morning train is critical.

2. Bathing. The instructions specified that we were to overlook the obvious, but this isn't about being clean. Water is essential to my psychological well-being. I can take a quick shower if I have to, but half an hour in the bathtub with a novel is as restorative for me as a week at a spa--I can't fairly say I couldn't get through the day without it, but you'll like dealing with me a lot better if I get it.

3. Hugs and kisses from my daughter. I know...I know...she's almost twelve and I'm going to have to get over this one pretty soon. But I've been lucky so far and I'm holding on for dear life.

The second piece asked about the music in our "players". Since I'm old and not technologically inclined, that means a CD changer or my computer--no i-anythings or MPwhatevers here. Rick Springfield's 1999 CD, Karma, is definitely at the top of my "most listened to" list (and I'll bet you didn't even know it existed). Other frequent appearances include Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, Olivia Newton-John's Back to Basics (but I always skip "Physical"), Bruce Springsteen's The River, The Very Best of Rod Stewart, Maggie Brandon's You Come to Me , U2 War and Bruce Cockburn's Stealing Fire.

I'm holding off on tagging for the moment because I've got a few more of these to get through in the next couple of days, but keep an eye out...I'm going to shuffle and send them right back at you!

While I was Away...

2007-11-17T07:44:00.000-08:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks, and now that it's Saturday morning and I'm sitting down at the computer with a little sliver of time on my hands for the first time in many days, I discover that most of my friends and acquaintances have made good use of the intervening weeks by...um...tagging me with memes right and left.

I'm going to answer them all. Really, I am.

The most recent one comes from Barb at So the Thing Is..., but she gets to cut, so I'm starting there, even though this looks like a LOT of questions...

1. What were you afraid of as a child? Spiders. When I was about four, I told my mother there was a spider on her back and she told me to knock it off; I was too afraid to touch it, it bit her, and she went into anaphalaxis and nearly died. Ironically, this created in me a fear of spiders that ran so deep that my allergic mother had to run around killing them for me. It was so paralyzing that if I saw a spider on the wall, I was a virtual captive unless someone could hear me calling, because I could neither kill it nor let it out of my sight.

2. When have you been most courageous? Generally, I would not say that I'm a courageous person. The few instances I might point to are, alas, confidential (as they arose in my legal practice). I did once pluck a spider off of my daughter's shirt with my bare hands, though.

3. What sound most disturbs you? Sadly, the human voice. I can get used to almost anything regular--my daughter has mentioned more than once that I don't seem to hear things like her mice running on their wheel or the noise my computer makes, and it's true--but the constant variance in tone and volume that comes when people are TALKING intrudes into my brain like knives.

4. What is the greatest amount of physical pain you’ve been in? Unbelievably, it's a toss up between labor (wherein I screamed at regular intervals for fourteen hours) and when I broke my molar. Actually, I think the broken tooth was worse, because the pain level was pretty similar, but contractions come and go and that just went on and on and on.

5. What’s your biggest fear for your children? (or children in general if you don’t have some of your own.) Some sudden harm from an uncontrollable outside force. There's so much to worry about with children, but the nagging fears-out-of-nowhere are always random accidental violences that might occur outside my presence: What if she gets hit by a car? What if she falls from the top of those monkey bars and gets paralyzed or brain damaged? What if those chemicals they're using in science splash in her eyes?

6. What is the hardest physical challenge you’ve achieved? I don't do physical. Seriously. So I guess it would have to be childbirth--though I tried to wuss out of that, too, and tell them that I couldn't do it and they'd have to find another way.

7. Which do you prefer: Mountains or oceans/big water? Oceans. Or lakes. Or ponds. Or streams. Or large swimming pools. Or my own bathtub. Mountains are pretty, but water is essential to my mental health.

8. What is the one thing you do for yourself that helps you keep everything together? I'm too busy keeping things together to do anything to help me keep things together.

9. Ever had a close relative or friend with cancer? No. My best friend's mother died of cancer, and she was a gutsy, fun, energetic and generous woman whom he loved like crazy and it was hard as hell to watch her deteriorate and the toll it took on him, but I can't even begin to imagine what it's like that giant step closer.

10. What are the things your friends count on you for? Rationality, I think. I can usually put things in perspective. People who are not my friends often see this as a major character flaw--I'm not likely to get caught up in the emotion of the issue--but those who choose to hang around me seem to appreciate my ability to cut through the...um...fringe issues.

11. What is the best part of being in a committed relationship? How the heck would I know?

12. What is the hardest part of being in a committed relationship? See above.

13. Summer or Winter? Why? Winter. Snow. Clean, clear air. Snow. Christmas decorations. Snow.

14. Have you ever been in a school-yard fight? Why and what happened? "Fight" would be the wrong word. I knocked a kid down and hit him once, but he never got a chance to fight back. I was 13, and I was walking across the school yard with my 6-year-old sister when a 12-year-old boy hit her in the head with an ice ball. She cried. I tackled him and slugged him. His mother stood by and watched with her arms folded and didn't say a word.

15. Why blog? Before there were blogs (or personal computers), I used to write whatever came into my mind down on paper and toss it in my desk drawer (and, for the most part, never look back at it). Now I do that here instead.

16. Did you learn about sex, and/or sex safety from your parents? No, I don't think so, but I don't recall there being much mystery or being in any way disadvantaged by having missed that.

17. How do you plan to talk to your kids about sex and/or sex safety? In ongoing dialogue. I don't think that there's much value in "the big talk"--I think it makes kids edgy and they don't take in a whole lot and it's too much information (especially such potentially disconcerting information) to absorb in a lump. I try to address little pieces naturally as they arise in life or books or movies or whatever opening I see, so it's easily digestible and so that it seems a natural topic of conversation that doesn't have to be momentous if she has questions.

18. What are you most thankful for this year? Money. I hate to admit that, and there's a huge irony in it because I don't care all that much about money or material things--I drive a seven-year-old car and still have the stereo my mother bought for me when I was in college in the 80s, and I wouldn't even have a television if someone hadn't given it to me as a gift. But as a single mother who has seen so much in my work (representing victims of domestic violence, attempting to collect child support, running a welfare advocacy clinic) I know how incredibly fortunate I am to be in a position where I never have to say to my daughter, "No, we can't afford that." Well, at least not to any REASONABLE requests.

Associated Content - It Isn't the Only Option

2007-11-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I see an "advice" post encouraging bloggers to submit articles to Associated Content or an article bank. Associated Content makes some payment for the articles, though it's very small and largely dependent on traffic; most article banks do not.

Now, before I go on, let me just say that there are sometimes good reasons to use outlets like GoArticles or Associated Content--as I've clearly spelled out before, I'm in favor of the dreaded "writing for free" when there's a clear benefit to the writer. You're not going to hear the old arguments from me like, "They make a lot more money than they're paying you!" This isn't a word I use often, but let me say it clearly now: DUH! Magazines make a lot more money than they pay for articles and restaurants make a lot more money than they pay their cooks and if the didn't, they wouldn't be in business.

There are two big issues, though, that bother me every time I see someone in a forum or on a money-making blog or in any of a dozen other places encourage readers to "submit" to Associated Content or article banks. The first is that Associated Content seems to be set up as something to aspire to: if you're a good writer and you have knowledge on a topic (etc., etc.) you should submit to Associated Content!

Maybe it's just me, but I think that if you're a good writer and you have good knowledge to impart and you want to take that beyond your own blog, you should be submitting to established markets that will simply cut you a check when they accept your article and won't expect you to do your own promotion.

I recently posted about a quick sale I made after discovering a new online magazine. As I mentioned then, it wasn't a high dollar sale by any stretch of the imagination. Still, it would have taken tens of thousands of views to achieve the same income from an Associated Content article, and I wouldn't have come away with a published clip for my portfolio.

There have always been far too many reasons (read: rationalizations) for writers not to submit their work, and the Associated Content compromise looks like just one more. If you write well and you know what you're talking about but you're not a "real writer", here's a great option for you! Nonsense. If you write well and you know what you're talking about, you're a real writer.

Again, that doesn't mean there's no good reason to use Associated Content or article banks--there are some good reasons, provided you have clear goals and know how to use them effectively. But if you're producing good content for your blog and want to "get published" in other forums, there are many other options. If you're not so sure, just Google a phrase like "online magazine writers guidelines". That one (without the quotes) returns more than 1.8 million results--and many of them are direct links to submission guidelines for paying publications you probably don't even know exist.

If you are going to submit to Associated Content or a similar outlet, make sure that you have a clear vision. That vision should include not only your goals for placing that content, but your plan for achieving them. Understand that simply submitting an article to Associated Content or an article bank is very unlikely to drive significant traffic to your blog or to generate significant income for you. Your article will be competing with thousands of others, likely many others on the same topic. No one is going to market it for you--if you want it to pay off (in links or cash), you must be prepared to promote it yourself. You can do that, and do it very effectively if you do your homework and plan ahead, but don't think that simply submitting an article to Associated Content or an article bank is going to magically produce results for you. Whatever marketing approach you choose, someone has to do the legwork...and with outlets like these, that someone is you.

Freelance Writing Like It Should Be

2007-10-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

The truth is, I'm not even a freelancer anymore. I made my living for many years stringing for newspapers and selling articles and copywriting for the occasional small business and writing curriculum for the occasional very large one, but those days are gone. I have a fabulous day job now, where I write / edit / manage content full time.

Still, a writer is a writer is a writer, and so sometimes writing and editing fifty hours a week at my day job and maintaining four blogs just ain't enough. That's why I always have a novel or two in progress, and also why I sometimes still bang out the occasional freelance article in my (non-existent) spare time.

Last week was one of those times. I was browsing writing blogs when I happened across an online magazine that was unfamiliar to me. It had a regular column in it that sparked an idea. I checked the submission guidelines and discovered that it was open to freelancers, and that the pay was acceptable (though by no means earth shattering). The publication accepted both queries and full submissions.

Now, I've heard many a seasoned writer turn up her nose and say, "I don't write on spec," and it's a reasonable position. Once you've established yourself, there's no reason to do the work if you don't know that you're getting paid, and most editors won't expect you to. Personally, though, I prefer to complete the article before submitting wherever that's feasible. The writing is the good part for me, so I don't have any fear of "wasted" time if it doesn't sell--and odds are there will be another market, anyway. What's more, my writing often takes unexpected turns. I can control it if I have to--if I'm writing an assigned article with a particular focus, for instance. But I'd rather let it flow naturally, and writing the article up front ensures that I'm not pitching an article that turns out not to be the one I want to write.

It was late on Thursday night when I had the idea, and I forced myself to go to sleep even though that idea was just bouncing around inside my brain begging to be written down. On Friday, I wrote the article out by hand on a legal pad during my morning commute. Friday night, after my daughter was asleep, I typed it up and submitted it by email. I got an acceptance by email on Sunday night.

Is it always that easy? Of course not. It happened that I had a story waiting for an opening and the magazine I ran across had the perfect forum for it. Certainly, my previous publications helped. But the thing is, sometimes it is that easy. And sometimes we worry and agonize and question whether this is really exactly right and list ideas and write and rewrite query letters when the thing to do is really just to write it down and send it off and see what happens. Will it sell every time? Of course not. But sometimes it will.

Writing: Whatever Works for You, # 1

2007-10-20T16:14:00.000-07:00

In one of the most popular items ever posted on this blog, I offered the opinion that we should all stop listening to the "rules" about what you absolutely must do if you want to be a successful writer and accept that the only thing you absolutely must do is find what works.

The flipside to that, of course, is that no one can offer you the magic formula. You can cheerfully ignore seasoned writers who tell you that you have to outline everything twice, or that you can't write meaningful fiction unless you answer to your character's name for six months, or that if you speak the title of your book aloud, the spell will be broken and you'll have to scrap the whole project and start something entirely new. On the other hand, you also have to invest the time and effort to figure out your own formula for success.

A lot of new writers, however, are reasonably uneasy about ignoring advice from the experts. The "Whatever Works for You" series aims to chase away that fear by demonstrating how consistently the experts disagree. My purpose isn't to show that the experts are wrong--quite the opposite. It's to point out that for every wildly successful writer who says, "NEVER try to write while wearing black socks!" there is another who says, "I'm helpless without my black socks. Couldn't form an English sentence without them."

And guess what? The guy wearing the black socks and the guy making sure there aren't any black socks in the room where he writes both go on to sell their books, get tons of fan mail, and rake in a boatload of money. You can too--even if you never give a moment's thought to your socks.

As I mentioned in an earlier post (or two, or three), I saw Jacquelyn Mitchard speak at the Midwest Literary Festival earlier this month. Despite my constant harping on (um, I mean, commitment to) the idea that no two writers are alike, I was stunned to hear her say that she works out the plots of her novels by talking them through with people in detail.

"What helps me is either to outline it or to tell it to someone."

That one line was enough to leave me aghast. I'm no fan of outlines, but to actually talk about your story before it was written?
I was kind of sputtering internally and mentally saying, "But...but..." while she described how she bounced plot events and character actions off of other people during the creative process.

You see, if I tell a story before I write it, it weakens the story. Once upon a time I wouldn't have been able to write it at all. Time, practice and professional discipline have changed that a bit, but the first telling is the truest, for me, and if I talked a novel through with someone before I committed it to paper, that lucky soul would be the only one who ever heard it in its finest form.

But Jacquelyn Mitchard has written eight best-selling novels, so she must know what she's doing. Does that mean I'm wrong? That maybe if I were a bit more practiced and professional, I'd be able to chat about my novels and incorporate feedback into them while I worked?

I can't rule it out, but in any case I'm in good company. Here's what Louis Sachar, whose young adult novel, Holes, won a Newberry Medal and a National Book Award, has to say:

I never talk about a book until it is finished. It took me a year and a half to write Holes, and I never told anyone anything about it during all that time. I do this for a variety of reasons, but mainly motivation. By not allowing myself to talk about it, the only way I can let it out is to finish writing it.

Sachar's statement shed a little bit of light, for me, on the possible reason that I need to keep a novel to myself until it's actually a novel. Alice Hoffman's explanation is a little bit different. She told the New York Times:

Sometimes I have the urge to talk to Faith [Hoffman's editor], to tell her what I'm thinking, but unless it's down on paper, I don't think I have a strong position. Without writing, without style, what is it? Plus there's a certain point where I feel I wouldn't want to be too influenced by someone else, even Faith.

Just one of the many ways, it seems, that successful writers differ in their process. I believe that's true for virtually every area of writing. I do. I REALLY do.

But it's still something of a relief to me when I discover that an author like Louis Sachar sees it my way.

This Tagging Thing is Getting out of Hand

2007-10-19T20:22:00.001-07:00

To be fair, Barb DIDN'T tag me for this one. No, on her blog she made the kind, understanding declaration that she wasn't tagging people because she knew how busy we all were. And then she discretely left a comment here letting me know that I was "on". Actually, the comment came before the disclaimer, but that's probably not pertinent to the story.

The questions are about books, though, so how can we go wrong?

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why? Paperback to read, hardcover to reverence.

2. If I were to own a book shop, I would call it... probably The House Bookstore, which would probably be trademark infringement or something, and isn't even a very good name for a bookstore. The thing is, there used to be this coffee shop in DeKalb, Illinois called The House, and it was everything a bookstore should be. They served tea in glass pots and had worn sofas and shelves full of donated books, and my sister started the very first House journal, which grew to book after book of notes, random journal entries, sketches and poetry by anyone who passed through the place. If ever you read a book of mine and there's a coffee shop in it, it's The House, even though I'll pretend otherwise, and it will always be warm and softly lit inside and raining or snowing outside the window.

3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title)... oh, man. I don't know whether I should say it. It's the last line of The Sun Also Rises, and I love it because it puts the whole book in a different perspective, but that also makes it a huge spoiler. Everyone already knows it, right? Well, I'm not taking the chance. If you know what it is then you know what I mean and don't need me to write it down. If you don't, it wouldn't really mean anything to you anyway, right?

4. The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be... Sheldon Vanauken. I discovered Sheldon Vanauken's writing several years after he died, or I would have...err...I believe the phrase "introduced myself" is probably preferable to "stalked him until he consented to converse with me". He was friends with C.S. Lewis, another of my favorite authors, and he'd be MORE than welcome to join us, but if I only get one, it's Vanauken.

5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except for the SAS survival guide, it would be… I answered this question once before by choosing a volume I own that has 49 of Hemingway's short stories and a complete novel in it, but I think that's cheating. This time, I'm going to pick Atlas Shrugged, because it's long, I've read it a couple of times without getting bored, and it might inspire me to remember that I could figure out a way to either get off the island or make it work for me if I remembered who I was. As an added bonus, if I did get bored I could occupy myself endlessly by removing or shifting around the randomly placed commas.

6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that… I would not love someone to invent any bookish gadgets at all. I would like everything but old fashioned books to be abolished.

7. The smell of an old book reminds me of... oddly enough, a stranger's basement. When I was in high school I needed a copy of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and couldn't find one at the library or regular bookstore. My mother called a used bookstore listed in the telephone book and it turned out to be a book dealer with aisles and aisles of books, many of them antique, in her basement. I still remember feeling like I'd stumbled into a treasure vault.

8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title)... Dagny Taggart, of course.

9. The most overestimated book of all times is… That first Anne Rice vampire thing.

10. I hate it when a book… ends. Well, not any book, but when it's a really good book I really don't want to come back up out of it, and it's almost impossible to find something to read next when I've just done a full immersion thing with a book.

I'm not going to tag anyone in this post since it's only been a few days since I hit up 8 people, but watch your comments...I might stealthily come around and invite your participation....

Eight Things

2007-10-13T13:16:00.000-07:00

I just discovered that I'd been tagged to tell you all eight things about myself. The writer who tagged me, at Chitchat and All That, listed this as one of her eight things, and I loved it. This is my favorite kind of statement to see from writers!

2. It has always been a dream of mine to have a writing career that would financially and emotionally support me. Recently, I have moved that dream into the goal category and have begun to make an action plan and timeline for it.

I have to warn you, though--unlike my predecessor and her predecessor, I'm not going to try to figure out what I can tell you about myself that won't bore you to tears--my theory is that if you're the sort of person who is bored to tears by the details of someone else's life, you probably aren't reading this.

The struggle for me, though, is that I'm a pretty simple person, and so it always seems likely to me that everyone already knows everything there is to know about me.

Here goes:

1. The most expensive car I've ever owned cost $10,200. That's worked out very well for me. My $10,200 Cavalier and my $8,000 Neon both lasted more than 275,000 miles.

2. I have no interest in strange dogs. I miss my poodle of 17 years like crazy, and my family's various dogs have been like members of the family, but I'm not apt to stop and pet someone else's (or even notice it) on the street.

3. I babysat well into college and was in hot demand because I actually spent all the time doing stuff with the kids and enjoyed it. When I was a teenager, I cut pictures of babies out of magazines. When I was a single adult, I took my friends' kids out to parks and playlands and anywhere else their parents didn't feel like going.

4. I never get rid of anything. I still have clothes I haven't worn in 20 years, shoes that haven't fit me since my daughter was born eleven years ago, and 500 purple envelopes from a project I completed four or five years ago.

5. I love standardized tests.

6. The thing I love most about my job is being in a position to give people the opportunity to write.

7. I lose interest in what I've written as soon as I'm done with it--so much so that sometimes I don't get around to trying to publish it. I don't even have copies of most of my published articles.

8. Every Monday morning when I'm lugging my garbage cans up the hill behind my house at 6 a.m., I wish I was married.

Now, I'm supposed to pass this along to eight other bloggers:

I'll start with my friend Margo at Margo's Meanderings, though I only need seven from her because I just discovered by reading her blog that she went to Gettysburgh, PA in August (we live in Illinois) and I somehow missed the whole thing.

I will SPARE my friend Barb (unless she wants to play) because I don't think she's recovered from coming up with 100 things yet, and because she is as we speak creating gift bags for more than FIFTY children for her daughter's seventh birthday party.

I'd love to hear eight things from Gerri at Absolutely True, because she's such a together person writing about such bizarre events that anything she has to say create a compelling juxtaposition...or she'll surprise me.

Next, Theresa at Sleeping Kitten, Dancing Dog. Theresa has quietly done almost every interesting thing I can think of.

I hope that Writing True will play along, because I'd be very interested to see what sorts of true and interesting tidbits he can share while preserving his anonymity.

I'd also like to invite the author of I Don't Know Where I'm From, But I Do Know Where I've Been, because readers of her blog know a lot about what she's been through but not so much about who she is today.

Then, in an unprecedented move, I'm going to take a crack at my sister. Since she doesn't read my blog and she hasn't updated hers since December of 2006, I doubt that she'll ever see this or respond, but she's on the list.

And finally, Ramblings of a Longtime Procrastinator, because she had the (misfortune?) to be the last person to have signed up for my Writers and Writing Group at Blog Catalog, and I don't know anything about her yet.

Synchronicity II

2007-10-06T21:39:00.001-07:00

Just a couple of hours after my post about taking risks, my daughter and I sat down to watch The Ron Clark Story. On his first day teaching in Inner Harlem, Clark hung two handwritten signs: Dream Big and Take Risks.

Honestly, I'm starting to wonder if there's more going on here than confirmation of what I've always preached to other writers. I'm starting to wonder whether someone is trying to tell ME something.

But that's not what I came here to talk about tonight. No, tonight I want to talk about ordinary people in fiction. This one started nibbling at my brain a few weeks ago, when I visited Regina Doman's website. Regina Doman is a Catholic writer whose books were recommended to me in a comment on my Catholic Blog. She writes grown-up, novel-length stories based on fairy tales, and on her website, she has a quote from G.K. Chesterton:

The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling: they startle him because he is normal.

My initial interest in the quote, I must admit, stemmed from the use of a semi-colon and a colon in the same relatively brief sentence. Secondarily, I was personally pleased by the concept because my latest novel-in-progress has as its protagonist a young man who works on an assembly line in central Indiana. But finally (by which I mean, after two minutes or so), I started to think from a writer's perspective, and to think about some of my favorite fiction. Could, for instance, anyone be more ordinary than Nick Adams? Hemingway's Nick Adams stories were among the earliest fiction to dig its hooks into me and really make me think about the art and craft of creating characters, but Nick could have been the boy next door to any of us.

Doman clearly took the words to heart--and I don't say that just because they appear both on her website and in her book. The two heroines of her first book are high school girls living with their widowed nurse mother in an apartment in New York.

Today, Jacquelyn Mitchard referred to the main character in her latest novel, Still Summer, as "the most ordinary of mothers". In fact, she pointed out that most of her characters are "people we already know". That definitely rang true to me, and it got me thinking about some other popular phenomena, too. Seinfeld, for instance...the show that became famous and wildly successful for being "about nothing".

We've all long known that identifiable moments were an important part of drawing in a reader, so it should come as no surprise that identifiable characters work. After all, the people who live lives much like our own, like those we see around us, are the most likely to have experiences that we identify with, to think in ways we'd think, to react in ways that we can understand and empathize with.

On one hand, this isn't much of a surprise--it's common to most of the memorable books I've read, and it's something I've apparently been leaning toward unconsciously myself. Still, I always find that it makes a difference when something has been consciously identified, that examples and opportunities begin to present themselves from all directions when a new consciousness enters the picture. I'm not sure yet how it will affect my writing, but it will be turning over and around in the back of my mind, awaiting its opportunity.

"It's Okay to Take Risks"

2007-10-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

As any regular reader of this blog knows, synchronicity happens a lot in my life. Today is no exception. This morning, I was involved in a discussion online about aiming for goals that might seem unrealistic. I'm a fan of the principle, but like so many good ideas in the world, it seems to me to have become a bit blurry. The idea that it was good to reach for unrealistic goals like publishing a novel or starting your own business or becoming a concert violinist seems to have somehow become lumped in one category with unrealistic goals like "I can make six figures with my blog, and I won't have to write any actual content!"

I'm also a much bigger fan of the "I can achieve any goal if I'm willing to sweat blood to do it" school of thought than the, "If I just think positive Oprah Winfrey will knock on my door and ask if she can help me get the book on my hard drive published because she's eagerly waiting to feature it in her book club" approach.

Now, as you may know, I'm a big fan of Jacquelyn Mitchard. I had the opportunity to see Ms. Mitchard speak this afternoon at the Midwest Literary Festival. It was very interesting for a number of reasons (many of which will undoubtedly be the subject of future posts), but the thing that really reverberated with me--perhaps because of that discussion earlier in the day--was her description of her decision to write a book instead of pursuing more conventional employment after she was widowed.

She said, "People had offered me real jobs," and that people kept asking her why she would "want to do something so stupid and so unlikely to succeed". And her response was that she wanted to show her children that it was okay to take risks.

She said a good deal more on the subject of pursuing your dreams and not being beaten down by life; she'd been widowed and her children had lost their father young, and she said that she'd always wanted them to know that no matter what life dealt you, it didn't give you permission to become small. It's a lot to think about, whatever your profession, but that one line is still ringing in my ears: "I wanted to show them that it was okay to take risks."

For anyone who doesn't know, Mitchard's "risk" was to write and send out a book called The Deep End of the Ocean. If you haven't read it, perhaps you've seen the movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer? The book was not only a bestseller, but was named by USA Today as one of the ten most influential books of the past 25 years and was Oprah Winfrey's first book club selection. Since then, she's written seven more novels, and they've all been bestsellers.

If it sounds like I've digressed for a moment into tooting Jackie Mitchard's horn...well, maybe I'm guilty. She's the writer I want to be when I grow up, even though she's not too much older than I. But my real point--the point that's relevant to all of us--is that she could have listened. The naysayers who couldn't see why she didn't just get a "real job" aren't so much different from the people who lie to novice writers that it's "almost impossible to break in" these days or those who claim to have the only formula that could possibly work for a successful writer.

And if she'd listened....well, that's the thing. We never know, do we? The world is full of people who listened, people who look to us just like every other clerk in the grocery store or finance manager or carpenter, and we never know about the song or the books or the invention they might have hiding inside them.

Huh...Turns Out There IS Such a Thing as Too Much Writing

2007-10-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, I'm a prolific writer. I'm always dismayed when I read an interview with some author or other and she says "if I can get 500 good words a day..." or something like that. I averaged more than 1,000 "good words" a day when my only writing time was my 50 minute train ride and I was writing in pencil on a legal pad. Well, I suppose "good words" is open to debate, but they were as good as any of my other words.

It's not unusual, when I'm wrapped up in a project, for me to write 5,000-7,000 words a day. I've written two novels in less than a month each, one while working full time.

I say this not to annoy those of you who are striving for five hundred good words a day--that pace works well for a lot of very successful writers (most, I suspect). No, I bring this up because I want to let you in on a little secret: I always secretly thought that there was no limit. I thought that, left to my own devices, with no "real life" to intrude, I would just write until I fell asleep at my keyboard and never tire of it.

I wrote, by my best estimate (I'm too freaking tired to go back and count), 16,000 words today.
I do not know where the magical line between "total immersion" and "I'm going to die if I write another word" is, precisely, but I now know this: it comes somewhere BEFORE 16,000 words.
I'm 41 years old and I've been writing since I was six; this is the first time I've ever walked away from writing feeling worse than I did when I started. And I feel like I've been hit by a truck, physically. My body aches. My fingers are numb. My typing skills have taken a nosedive to some point just slightly lower than during the period when I was typing with my arm in a sling.

I'm a huge proponent of the idea that nothing is absolute when it comes to writing, and that no writer should ever say to other writers, "You HAVE TO..." or "Don't EVER..."
But listen. Don't EVER write 16,000 words in one day.

For the first time in my life, I got up from my desk not wishing that I had time to write a little more, but desperately craving a nice long break from writing.

That was four hours ago. I guess "nice long" is open to interpretation, too.

National Novel Writing Month

2007-09-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

That time of year is right around the corner, when writers everywhere begin asking one another, "are you doing NaNo?" That is, the National Novel Writing Month challenge to complete a novel during the month of November.

I'm not "doing NaNo", and I never have, but it's had a profound impact on my writing, anyway. I first heard of NaNo five or six years ago, when I was participating in an online writers group for women. Honestly, I thought it sounded kind of gimmicky, and I was pretty busy with non-fiction projects at the time, so I paid it no mind. For about a week. By that point, I'd heard so many people talking about word counts and hours invested and the possibility of reaching the goal that I got curious. I wanted to see whether or not I could write a whole novel in a month. I didn't sign up, but I started writing, and I knocked out just over 40,000 words, edited and with submission materials, in three weeks. I sold it off for a kind of packaging, under someone else's name, and didn't give it much more thought.

At least, not until last year, when a friend of mine announced that she was going to give NaNo another try and I remembered just how quickly that other book had gone. It so happened that I'd started a romance novel a little earlier (okay, okay...it was THREE YEARS earlier) and stopped cold at about 9,000 words. Surely that couldn't take any time to knock out. The big difference was that I'd been freelancing the first time around; last year I had a full time job.

Still, I managed to finish the book during November, primarily by handwriting it on the commuter train.

And then...well, you see the pattern, right?

Here we are rapidly approaching November again, and I haven't even made any serious efforts to sell that novel I finished last year. I do, however, have another book that I wrote a few thousand words of and then let fall by the wayside, and I'm game to pick it up and see if I can polish it off during my November commute.

I just hope that I can squeeze in some time somewhere along the way to...well...market some of these books that are piling up on my hard drive!

The Internet is Ruining My Brain!

2007-09-27T23:56:00.000-07:00

That may be a bit too strong, but it IS changing the way I read. And that comes as a big surprise to me, because even though I'm well aware of the differences between the way people read online and the way they read print materials, I don't do a lot of reading online. I'm one of those people who shudders when it's suggested that e-books or something similar will one day replace books you can hold in your hand and flip through, and if I have to read anything that's more than a page or so long online, I'll print it out.

So I was very surprised this evening when I found myself looking for text links in a book.

I'm reading the first of Regina Doman's books, on the recommendation of someone who posted a comment on my Catholic Blog in response to my post about C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces. I'm only on page 31; I can't give any kind of conclusive view of the book yet. But in the first chapter, there are several snippets of poetry and literary allusions, and let me tell you...I wanted hyperlinks.

I've always thought that the proliferation of links in text shortened people's attention spans and encouraged skimming or reading a paragraph or two and then jumping to something else. In fact, I've seen quite a lot of data that supports that idea. But my own inclination (another surprise) ran in a different direction. I wanted more context. I wanted to dig deeper. I wanted to stop after a character quoted a line or two from a favorite poem and read the rest of it. A G.K. Chesterton novel I'd never heard of was mentioned; I wanted to have a look at it.

Of course, I'm free to look those things up before I move on (the Internet is still here, after all, even if I'm reading a regular book), but it was an interesting realization, that reading online provides the context to read more deeply if that's what we choose to do, to put things in context and understand the allusions that give a work another layer of texture.

Perhaps that shouldn't have been a revelation--that is, after all, one of the key purported benefits of links in online text. But it's so contrary to the net effect that I see as people become accustomed to reading online that it came as quite a surprise to me--all the more shocking because I'd apparently adopted the habit of clicking on links for context and then returning to the main text without any conscious awareness.

So maybe the Internet isn't ruining my brain, but it seems that it is changing the way I gather and assimilate information.

Join my Writers and Writing Group at Blog Catalog

2007-09-23T08:02:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to invite any of my readers who are also writers to join my Writers and Writing Group at Blog Catalog. The Groups function is new, but there are already a number of very promising groups moderated (if that's the right word) by people who know their fields well and are engaging writers with a history of thoughtful interaction on the general discussion boards.

You'll have to join Blog Catalog in order to sign up, but if you're a blogger you probably want to do that anyway--the community and discussion there is far superior to any other directory or network I've found.

Characters and Character Traits

2007-09-22T17:28:00.000-07:00

Recently, a passing comment in a discussion about favorite characters triggered some big questions in my mind--questions I don't think I'd ever considered in all my years as a reader and a writer. Another writer in the discussion seemed to indicate that the same characteristics drew her to a character as drew her to real-life people.

I was surprised, not so much to hear that that was true as to realize that I'd never thought about whether or not it was true for me. I quick mental scan revealed the high probability that it was not.

The writer who made the comment blogs about conversations overheard; perhaps it makes sense that the line between character and real person would not be a very bright one in her mind. She has a real knack for spinning people into characters after hearing only brief conversations.

For me, though, I think the things that make a character interesting and compelling are often things I wouldn't in a million years want to encounter in real life. Popular fiction alone is replete with examples. In fact, I think that the very thing that makes what I think of as "throwaway fiction" so appealing is the taste it offers of a life we'd never live.

Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum is a walking disaster--and that's exactly what makes it possible to whip through the novels in which she stars in a couple of hours, with a recurrent smile. The sexual tension she maintains with two men, alternately or simultaneously depending upon the book, keeps things interesting. But in real life? She blunders into things she doesn't understand, keeps the people around her constantly worried, and lives her entire life on balanced on the praecipice of infidelity. NOT someone I'd want to hang out with.
Robert Parker's Hawk is one of my all-time favorite characters in popular fiction. The contrast between his erudite literary tastes and his unfortunate choice of profession (hired killer) is compelling on paper--and to the string of educated professional women his character dates--but in real life? Hello...he KILLS people? A bit of a stumbling block, anyone?
My daughter is quite intrigued by the character of Bellatrix LeStrange in the Harry Potter series. Bellatrix is, outside the primary villain in the series, perhaps the closest thing to pure, unconflicted evil presented in all of those 3,000+ pages. She has a certain attitude, a certain voice, that's a bit entertaining in that "love to hate" way...but one that would certainly (I hope) inspire disdain in real life.

The same is true, in less blatant fashion, in more literary fiction. One example that springs to mind is the character of Ole, the old man, in Ernest Hemingway's short story, "The Killers". Ole, when advised by teenage Nick Adams, that men have come to town to kill him, he simply rolls toward the wall. There's little to admire either in his implied past or in his resignation, but his few simple actions speak volumes.

Often, in fact, it's the things that are most reprehensible about a character, or saddest, or most lacking, or that the character himself is unable to see or to learn, that allow us to learn the most from him. Piet Hanema, in Updike's Couples, provides an excellent illustration.

Granted, these aren't necessarily the things that make a character likable, but they are often the things that make a character memorable, interesting, educational or critical to plot.

From a writer's perspective, that means that the characters we design to be heroes aren't necessarily going to be the ones who hold a reader's attention, or that it might be the flaws and dichotomies as much as the admirable traits that make a character memorable. Is that important to keep in mind? I'm not sure. I've been writing for more than 30 years, and the whole question came as something of a shock to me--but in retrospect, I find that hasn't affected my character development or kept me from creating characters who might not be the people I'd want living next door or working in my office.

Just for Fun

2007-09-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

I went looking through some very old files this evening, and I came across the piece that I think of as my first blog post ever. I didn't have a blog at the time, but writing this and having no purpose for it inspired me to create a section on my old website called "The Odd Word from Tiffany", which functioned pretty much like a blog except that it was a static page and my poor husband had to update it for me every few days when I had something new to say.

Stark Raving Mad?

I saw a call for submissions today that made me laugh out loud. There is much controversy within the profession about writing for free. My position on that issue can be summed up in one sentence: My first book came about as a direct result of an article that I wrote for free.

There’s a difference, though, between writing for free and paying for the privilege. There’s also a difference between writing for free and writing for free at great length while naked in front of a camera.

Yep, you read that right. The call for submissions I saw this morning was a request for poetry. Poets were asked to submit 3-4 poems for consideration. In the happy event that the poet’s work was accepted, she would then have the privilege of sitting—naked—for a professional photographer. With the poet’s original work and nude photos in place, the poet would then be required to write another poem about being tricked into posing nude…uh…er…I mean, the artistic experience of posing nude.

The publication might or might not choose to publish that poem along with the original poem and the nude photographs. In return for the right to publish the original poem, the nude photographs, and possibly the second poem, the poet would receive…a copy of the publication.

Sorry, guys. Anyone who wants to photograph me in the nude—and I readily concede that this is a very small percentage of the population—has to at least buy me dinner. If they want me to write about it afterward, I am definitely going to need more than the right to buy additional copies at a discounted price.

I believe—and my own experience proves—that there are logical, practical reasons to write for free. If, however, there are logical, practical reasons to write for free, then pose nude for free, then write about posing nude for free for free, I have not yet discovered them.

Okay, the moment has finally arrived...

2007-09-13T19:03:00.001-07:00

when you get to find out what in the heck I was getting at on Tuesday.

I know you've been holding your breath.

The thing is, as writers we paint images with nearly every line, and the best of us do it in such a way that the reader feels like he's right there in the scene, seeing it happen instead of reading words on a page. But sometimes, the images we evoke aren't the ones we intended. Sometimes, they have more to do with associations in the reader's mind than the pictures in our own.

I really was barefoot in the kitchen making coffee on Tuesday morning, wiping the counters with an orange sponge and waiting for the coffee to brew. And I really was in a gold-trimmed building in the Chicago Loop, and the coffee I was brewing was in an urn provided by our coffee service. There's a health club in the basement and an underground pedway to Macy's, and I really did pause for a moment and wonder whether it was legal to be walking around barefoot.

But when I had that thought, a funny thing happened. I thought the first line I wrote in that last blog post: At 10:56 on Tuesday morning I was barefoot in the kitchen, making coffee. I think like that; it's a hazard of being a writer, I guess. I often hear people comment on the difference between the way people talk and the way they write, but for me it's different. The way I write is the way I think, and I sometimes have to translate into more casual, less image-laden language in order to converse. And condense, of course. I tend to think in paragraphs.

And the crazy thing was that when I thought that sentence, I pictured myself barefoot in my kitchen at home, mid-morning, my daughter at school, wearing a sweatshirt on a just-turning fall day.

I was at work. I was wearing a skirt. My high-heeled shoes were under my desk. But the image that sentence evoked in my OWN mind was entirely different.

I read that last blog post to my daughter who, though only eleven, is also a writer. She knows where I work and what it looks like. She knows that I was at work on Tuesday morning. And yet she, too, pictured me in our kitchen. When I got to the orange sponge and gray counters--things we don't have at home--she started trying to picture some previous apartment I might have had, and when I said that I shared the kitchen with a hundred people, she wondered about my college dorm. It wasn't until the last paragraph that she realized that I was at work.

Barefoot in the kitchen making coffee evokes home, apparently--at least for some of us. Even when we know better.

That's an important thing to be conscious of when we're writing--not the coffee thing, but the way that associations we may not even be aware of can color the images our readers will conjure up at our words.

It's a challenge, but it also has great power, if we know how to use it to evoke the images and associations we hope to convey.

Many years ago--I think it was 1986--I went to an art exhibit in the Student Center at Northern Illinois University (NIU). I didn't plan to go, and I didn't know anything about the artist. I was just passing through the Student Center on my way back from class, saw a painting that caught my eye, and walked over. I liked the exhibit, but twenty years later I only remember one painting. It was a small painting of an old pipe sticking out of a wall. Just that.

The wall, if I recall correctly, was that pale green halfway between malt and mint, a shade that hasn't been seen since lead-based paint went out of style. It reminded me instantly, overwhelmingly, of my grandmother's house. I'd never seen such a pipe at my grandmother's house, and she had nothing I could think of in that color, but the association was as clear and strong as if the painting had been of dotted swiss curtains blowing in the breeze over a flower garden or cracked red and black floor tile.

Later, I mentioned the show to my roommate, who was an art major. I thought she might want to see it, but it turned out that she already had. When I told her there had been one painting that had reminded me powerfully of my grandmother's house, she put her hand to her mouth and said, "Was it just a pipe sticking out of a wall?"

Turned out she'd had the same reaction.

My grandmother lived in an attic apartment on the south side of Chicago. My roommate's grandmother lived in Italy. Imagine that. This artist...this stranger...painted a piece of pipe sticking out of a wall and, with an image unfamiliar to both of us, evoked the same childhood memory from two people with very different childhoods. Two decades later, that's still vivid in my mind. That's the goal, isn't it?

Or was she thinking of a pipe in the alley behind an abandoned public school building where she hung out with her boyfriend as a teenager?

Image Association (or Barefoot in the Kitchen)

2007-09-11T19:13:00.000-07:00

At 10:56 on Tuesday morning, I was barefoot in the kitchen, making coffee.

Can you see it?

At 10:56 a.m. on Tuesday, I was barefoot in the kitchen, making coffee. I wiped down the counter with a bright orange sponge while I waited for the coffee to brew.

Do you see the sponge? The counters were gray.

At 10:56 on Tuesday morning, I was barefoot in the kitchen, wiping down the counters while I waited for the coffee to brew. I looked absently out over the busy city street, not really seeing the people rushing by. I just heard the muted, delicate ding of the small, gold elevator in the hallway.

Do you know where I am?

At 10:56 a.m., my feet ache already. My black high-heeled shoes are in the other room, under my desk, and I'm barefoot in the kitchen, making coffee. I glance toward the doorway, suddenly wondering whether it's legal to be walking around the kitchen in my office barefoot, a kitchen shared by nearly 100 people, a kitchen in a building trimmed in gold and glass and equipped with a full selection of water and wine glasses, coffee service, and a dishwasher.

I think this post is going to come in two pieces--the NEXT one will explain why I'm posting this (unless, of course, that's perfectly clear to you...)

2007-09-08T12:29:00.000-07:00

A while back, I posted about my inability to control my mental red pen, and how I tend to see grammatical errors as if they'd been pre-highlighted for me.

The premise of that post was that it's not any more fun for me than it is for the people around me--the ones I sometimes can't quite help correcting. But sometimes...well...sometimes it really is good fun.

A few days ago, a friend who is neither a blogger nor a reader of blogs sent me a link to a blog: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks
I'm not afraid to tell you how much fun I had there. You already knew I was a geek, right?

I immediately forwarded the link to my friend Barb, former editor of Austin Family magazine, and started wondering whether I could start a similar blog about the misuse of apostrophes. Dave Barry's comment that apostrophes are primarily used by small business owners to signal that an "s" is forthcoming remains one of the funniest things I've ever heard, and if you haven't read Dave Barry's book on grammar, you must.

But I digress. Barb wrote back right away and said she was linking to this blog immediately and did I think we could start a sister site on apostrophe abuse. It turned out, though, that it was already covered here: Apostrophe Abuse

So I'm taking it all back. It's fun. It's a lot of fun.

There are some other really good links on that "blog", too, and I'd love to tell you about them, but I have some thing's to "do".

Help, I Can't Cope with My Stats Program!

2007-09-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

It's not the mechanics that are giving me trouble, or interpreting the data. The problem is the search strings. Maybe it's because I'm a teacher, or maybe because I've spent so much of my career writing consumer information (or maybe I'm just obsessive-compulsive), but I have a deep need to be able to RESPOND to searches.

Today, for instance, someone visited this blog based on the search string "Rick Springfield's daughter".

Rick Springfield doesn't have a daughter; he has two sons. See, it's just such a quick, easy little answer. I want to drop a quick email to the person searching for information on Rick Springfield's daughter and let her know. But I don't know who she was, and she already didn't find what she was looking for on my blog, so she probably won't be back.

It's even worse on my Catholic blog. Over there, I get search strings that are questions, search strings like, "Can a Catholic marry a non-Catholic?"

Well, see, I HAVE the answer to that, but it's not on my blog. And it's a shade more important, I think, than whether or not Rick Springfield has a daughter. But there's nothing I can do about it now.

I'm actually in the process of putting together a Squidoo lens on Catholic marriage purely in response to the number of questions about the subject that are landing people to my Catholic blog. And I'm glad I was inspired to do that, but...um...see...it's not quite good enough for me. Because, after all, the PERSON WHO ASKED THE QUESTION might not see it.

Okay, it's much clearer now. It's definitely the obsessive-compulsive thing.

Rick Springfield is Going to Sing on General Hospital....Let Me Tell You Why I Care

2007-08-22T21:36:00.000-07:00

Did you arrive at this post through an image search for "Tori and Rick"? Are you wondering how on earth you landed here? If so, you're not alone...there are so many of you that I'm sitting up nights wondering who this famous Tori and Rick might be and why you're all looking for their picture. Please leave a comment and let me know who you were looking for!

If you were (as I was) a teenage Rick Springfield fan in the 80s, you probably know that he declined to make music on the soap opera during the height of his musical popularity. "Jessie's Girl" was just breaking onto the charts when Dr. Noah Drake appeared on the GH set, and the cross-promotional opportunities were impossible to ignore, but Springfield said something along the lines of, "UM...my character is a doctor??"

A quarter of a century later, Springfield is set to perform on General Hospital for the first time this Friday, and that's fun and brings back memories, but it's not headline news.

"So," you may be wondering, "why are you telling me all this?"

It's because several years ago, I found myself in the odd position of approaching Rick Springfield while perched on the precarious line between grown-up-who-used-to-be-a-hardcore-teenage-fan and professional trying to do a job. I was writing a book; my research was exceptional and my writing was solid. My credentials, though, were a little weak for the job I was doing.

I learned a lot about interviewing, about publishing and about copyrights and licensing. I learned a little bit about the music industry. I learned some great stories that I'll never tell on the record. And I learned that Rick Springfield is the kind of man every teenage fan wanted to believe he was 25 years ago.

I have very probably written more about Rick Springfield than any other writer. I've been cited and quoted and consulted by other authors and editors. I've done articles and bios and album reviews...and, of course, that little book. But what's below is the best thing I ever wrote about Rick Springfield, and for five or six years I haven't shared it with anyone except a few close friends and family members.

I've written nearly everything there is to say about what Rick Springfield has DONE. The story below, I think, is the one about who he is. Maybe it explains why it makes me happy to see him still rocking on network television the week of his 58th birthday.

Stars in Her Eyes

At 6:45 a.m. I have slept for only four hours and am feeling the effects of the rare two drinks I had the night before. I do not want to get out of bed. I look at my tiny daughter, sleeping in the center of the giant hotel bed. She’s tired too, and I can see that her father didn’t give her a bath last night.

I think, “She’ll never know. I don’t have to wake her up.” My head is pounding from lack of sleep and the tensions of the past two days. Very softly I say, “Tori.” There is no response. “

"Tori Linn,” I call, a little more loudly, but still she doesn’t stir.

“Tori,” I say, “you don’t have to get up. But if you want to, we can go down and see Rick before he leaves.”

Instantly she’s sitting up and nodding frantically. Then she asks, “Does he want to see me, too?”

Never, even in my wildest moments of teenage adulation, have I loved Rick Springfield as much as I do at that moment, because I know with absolute certainty that I can look into my six-year-old’s shining eyes and say “yes,” and he will not disappoint her.

We sit in a chair in the lobby watching early-morning businessmen checking out of their rooms and I can feel the tension in her little body on my lap. I’d still rather be in bed. I wrap my arms around her waist but she does not relax against me. Her back is straight and her eyes wide.

I watch Rick’s road manager, and then his engineer, and then his band come into the lobby one by one. I watch his road manager check them out and then make a call on the house phone, a call I know is intended to get Rick out of his room and into the waiting car. I watch them pace, and I warn my daughter that he is going to be in a hurry, that she will have only a moment.

She wants to take a picture of him with her new Barbie camera, being used for the second time on this trip. I tell her to be ready. Suddenly my confidence, so strong only half an hour earlier, is gone. I’m nervous for her. The elevator door opens and he steps through, ducking slightly, dressed in black.

It has been a long time since my heart stopped beating at the sight of him, but this morning it misses a beat for my daughter, waiting so eagerly. He looks toward the crowd of people waiting impatiently for him to leave and I nearly stop breathing. I put Tori down on the floor, but she clings close to my leg, suddenly shy in his presence.

He goes to her first, and in an instant is kneeling on the floor of the hotel lobby next to her. He is so tall, and she so small, that even on his knees he towers over her. His first words are, “I haven’t seen you in a long time.” My child, who talked in complex sentences at 15 months, is unable to speak.

I tell Rick that she just got her first camera and she wants to take a picture of him, but he misunderstands and moves to pose with her. I say, “Do you want Mommy to take your picture with Rick?” and she nods, still unable to speak. I take the pink plastic camera from her hand and, when she makes no move to help, unlace it from her wrist.
She’s glowing as he pulls her in close to him, his hand covering her entire midsection. I’m nervous about the Barbie camera. There is nothing to focus. There is no light meter. I know she will be devastated if this picture doesn’t turn out.

As Rick kneels on the floor holding my daughter, Matty Spindel, his Grammy-winning engineer, asks if I’d like him to take the picture so that I can get in it with them. I thank him, but smile and shake my head. This isn’t my picture.

Rick kisses her before he gets up and then moves to hug me. This takes me by surprise. It would never have occurred to me to approach him—this isn’t my moment. The zipper on his leather jacket presses into my shoulder as I rise up on my toes to whisper “Thank you” in his ear. He may not know what I’m thanking him for—there has certainly been plenty over the past few days. I had come to do an interview with a man I had admired for twenty years, and whose intuition let him clearly see both sides of that coin. He was the consummate professional during the interview, then hugged me and tousled my hair when it was over, understanding that the tape in my left hand and the gift for my daughter in my right were of equal value.

“Thank you” seemed to be all that I had said to him for two days. Thank you for the personal commentary that would change the texture of my book, although I already had all of the information. Thank you for free front row seats, for backstage passes, for inviting me to the sound check. Thank you for remembering Tori and that she would want to see him…he may not have known, in that moment, what that last “thank you” was for, or how heartfelt it was.
There were many things to thank him for, but looking over his shoulder into my daughter’s eyes, I knew that nothing this man could do as a Grammy-winning vocalist, as a gifted songwriter, as a sexy entertainer who held audiences in the palm of his hand, would ever impress me the way that it did when he took the time to kneel on the floor of a hotel lobby at daybreak and make a six-year-old feel that he did, in fact, want to see her too.

Ran Across a Blog this Evening....

2007-08-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

that's asking the tough questions like, "Just why can't people (and major corporations) say 'iced' when that's what they mean?" and "Should use of 'their' with a singular noun be punishable by death?"

Okay, maybe I exaggerated the second one just a little bit, but if you enjoyed my Accidental Grammar Police post, One Step Forward will definitely make you laugh...and curse under your breath.

And while we're talking blogs, I nominated So the Thing Is... for the Blogger's Choice Awards. If, like me, you have the good sense to really and truly enjoy Barb Cooper's humorous and heartfelt presentation of...life...please consider clicking here and voting for her: Vote "So the Thing Is..." Best Parenting Blog!

I Just Watched High School Musical 2

2007-08-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

No, really.

I'm not a fan of Ashley Tisdale or "Baby V", and teenagers "spontaneously" breaking into choreographed dance in the middle of the kitchen don't do much for me, either. But I'm a big fan of this 11-year-old girl who was very excited to see the sequel, and so we planned dinner around the broadcast and I have to admit that there was a bit of spontaneous dancing in my living room. Some of us were more spontaneous than others--the over forty crowd might have required a little "Come on, mom!" type prompting.

I can sing "The Year 3000", too, and have some opinions on the various hairstyles of the Jonas Brothers.

No, I am absolutely not one of those "cool moms" you might remember someone having from your teenage years (though I have been so accused by my daughter's friends). I'm 41. I drive a Neon by choice. I'm a hardcore Catholic and a safety-precaution junkie.

Thing is, I like to talk to my kid. Of course, we talk about things besides teenage pop music. We're reading To Kill a Mockingbird together right now. We're both sort of information geeks. And we both always have a couple of novels in progress. Many of those interests she developed by my side. Writing may be a natural inclination, but it was undoubtedly also fed by the days when she sat by my desk with her V-Tech "laptop" and worked on spelling while I freelanced, and by the stories we wrote and illustrated together long before she started school.

Now, she's developing her own interests, and frankly, some of them don't interest me all that much. But SHE still interests me, and I guess it's my turn to look at things through her eyes instead of just showing her the world through mine. Sometimes, that means dancing in the living room during High School Musical 2. Sometimes, it means learning to differentiate between six or seven female pop singers with mediocre voices whose songs all sound the same to me. But it also means that when my daughter names the song she wants to sing in the talent show, I know what she's talking about, and I know whether it's a good fit for her voice and her range, and I know other songs to suggest she try out if it seems like maybe it's not. And it means I'm in a position to comment casually that Hilary is looking a little too thin, and I hope she's not letting the star image thing get to her and making herself sick when she was already so very pretty as a normal-looking teenager.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe quite a bit more than The Simpsons, and I wasn't that excited to see that Fantastic Four Silver Surfer thing at all. I'd rather play Scrabble than the Harry Potter edition of Scene It! I suspect, in fact, that sometimes she makes the same kind of concessions, that sometimes she plays Mancala with me when she'd rather be playing Spyrosomethingoranother on her Play Station 2...but that's what relationships with other people--even those little people who so rapidly grow into individuals who are far more than extensions of ourselves--are all about, isn't it?

Parenting - The Fun Never Ends

2007-08-11T06:52:00.001-07:00

No, really, I mean it. When my daughter was a baby, I decided to stay home with her for the first couple of years. But then she just kept staying so small that I decided to stay home with her until she went to school. But kindergarten was less than three hours a day, and when I walked her there the first day and told her where I'd be when she came out after school she said, "But first will I see you at recess?" By then I was freelancing and teaching in the evenings, and it was the easiest thing in the world to push it back another year or two. Finally, changing circumstances made the decision for me when she was nine.

There were a lot of wonderful things about being home with her during those years--Mommy & Me, going swimming every day in the summer, hundreds of walks and hundreds of stories, and getting to be the one who pushed her on the swings and then who taught her to pump, who held up the back end of her bicycle and then let go. One of the greatest things, though, was seeing the world through her eyes. Things I would have walked right past required inspection--an unusual flower on the river bank, a stick that looked like a boat floating downstream and had to be named. I've never been a "stop and smell the roses" kind of girl. I know what roses smell like; let's move on. But if I didn't have a lot of interest in the rose, I was purely fascinated by the way my baby's eyes changed when SHE saw the rose, or the way she reached out for something new and interesting without even seeming to realize that she'd done it.

As so often happens to me, two things converged this week to bring all of this back to mind. The first was that a woman on discussion board referred to early childhood as "this wonder filled time". The second was that I took my daughter to register for middle school.

Let me admit right up front that I'm not thrilled about this middle school thing. The middle school is BIG. And it's a public school in a very socio-economically mixed area. I went to middle school, and even thirty years ago I was offered drugs and suddenly activities were being suggested that I'd never heard of before. This is where we find out just how much influence our family and the church has had on her decision-making processes, just how secure she is in her own values, just how she processes new and possibly not-yet-welcome information...and maybe it's not good parenting, but I'd put that day off for another decade or so if I could.

So, we arrived at the middle school gymnasium (at least, it looked like a gymnasium to me...they CALL it a "cafetorium") and I wrote checks at several different tables, and at each one she got something new...a planner, her locker assignment and combination, her schedule (as we walked away from that table she said, "I have a schedule!"), her gym suit. Then we went out into the school to look for her locker and her classrooms, and an amazing thing happened. The hallways were filled with children on the verge of adolescence who were still filled with wonder at the ordinary--it was just a different ordinary. They showed each other their (identical) gym suits. They compared schedules and jumped up and down when they found out they had classes together. They asked questions like, "Did you SEE the tables in the science room?!" They checked out all-important issues like "Can I work my lock?" and "Can I fit inside my locker?" (These seemed to be of approximately equal importance.) And I realized that watching my daughter work her first combination lock on her first official locker with barely controlled excitement was just as much fun as watching her discover her first butterfly, even if she did insist on trading in those cute little dresses for torn jeans and t-shirts somewhere in between. I suspect there are a lot of new discoveries still to come

The Best Book I've Ever Read? "BEST"? What Exactly does "best" mean?

2007-07-28T12:47:00.001-07:00

I saw a posting in a forum this afternoon asking that question--"what's the best book you've ever read?"

As always when presented with questions that are at once subjective and categorical, I became paralyzed by questions and clarifications. It was an interesting question that got me thinking, but it wasn't one I could answer with the name of a book.

The roots of my inability to answer might lie in my internal dichotomy; when I was a teenager and the most important place in my life was a little wooden desk with a blue plastic Smith-Corona typewriter on it, the walls above that desk were adorned with two black and white posters: Rick Springfield and Ernest Hemingway.

But it might be more complicated than that, too. It might simply be that "best" means something different in one moment, in one context, in one shade of light, than it does in another. What is it that makes those books stand out in our minds as "best" and stay there for years to come? I don't know. But as writers, if we can figure it out, it can only help.

The first book I can remember really falling in love with was Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door. I think that I was thirteen or fourteen when I read it, which might explain a lot--teenage girls do seem to have a penchant for good-hearted bad boys. But maybe there was more to it than that: the book was set in Chicago, the hometown of my heart; it highlighted the way the criminal justice system often does more harm than good, a topic near and dear to my heart long before I became a criminal defense attorney; maybe the character development was very strong--Nick Romano certainly seemed a flesh-and-blood person to me then, though I haven't read the book in many years.

But then, if you asked me for my favorite book, I'd probably say The Sun Also Rises without even stopping to think. The stark, unemotional revelation of some of the hard realities of human nature couldn't be more different from the tender-hearted expression of Knock on Any Door. Hemingway made me nod sagely; Motley made me reach out unconsciously and plead with Nick not to take the next step.

Were either of them the best book I ever read? I think, at least at one time, that I'd have awarded that designation to A Severe Mercy. A Severe Mercy is the only book I can recall having sent me on a truly obsessive quest for all of the author's previous works--I even tracked down Sheldon Vanauken's master's thesis! But when someone asks for the best book I've ever read, I think there's a bit of a request for a recommendation in there, a recommendation that isn't entirely subjective, and Vanauken's best-known book is a biographical account of his conversion to Christianity and the death of his young wife, interspersed with correspondence between the author and C.S. Lewis. Not for everyone, I suspect. Which also keeps me from giving the title to The Life You Save May be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. It was a huge hardcover book, but I carried it with me on the train, anyway. I balanced it on the edge of the sink and read it while I brushed my teeth. It seemed endless and ended too quickly. It was the most artful blending of tangentially-related stories I have ever seen anywhere in literature, fiction or non-fiction. But it's a mingled biography of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy. Again, not necessarily targeting a broad market.

So what about some normal books, hm?

I'm in love with Jacquelyn Mitchard. I want to be her when I grow up, but it's a problem, because I'm already 41. Jacquelyn mitchard writes books that fit into the category I'd usually call "throwaway novels"--and I don't mean that in a bad sense. I've been known to write one or two of those myself. They're simply books that we probably aren't going to buy in hardcover and keep forever on the shelf in the den. They're a good read and then you move on. Except Mitchard does something a little bit special in hers, at least for me. Whenever I read one of her books, I find myself nodding at various points and saying, "Yes, that's true. That's exactly right." Sometimes it's something I've observed before, and sometimes it's a bit of a revelation. But in every book, I find myself recognizing larger truths in the actions and reactions of Mitchard's characters. I'm still not enshrining leather-bound copies of her books, but I do keep them, and sometimes I re-read them, because they're quick and easy novels full of not-so-quick-and-easy thoughts, and some of those thoughts bear revisiting.

And I see that I've neglected to mention here that C.S. Lewis is my favorite author.

I think, though, that there is a common thread. For me, it seems that what makes a book memorable is the truth it uncovers, the layer it peels away. Hemingway did that without adjectives, without emotion, with a matter-of-fact depiction. Sheldon Vanauken did it by revealing his own aversion to the truths, and carrying the reader along his own confused and reluctant path. Willard Motley did it by painting rich emotion. Jacquelyn Mitchard does it subtly, with a sentence here and an observation there, woven so tightly in to the story and the dialogue that you're free to gloss right over those truths if you want to. But for me, I think the presence of those truths is what makes a "great book". I still don't know which one is BEST.

The Things We Don't Know about the People We Know

2007-07-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

I don't have a personal blog, and so every once in a while when I have some random revelation, I write it here...and feel vaguely guilty. This post is not about writing, at least not directly, so if you have no interest whatsoever in my general life observations, stop here.

Wait, wait! Not THERE actually. First let me point out that there is SOME relevance to writing here, both because the things people don't know about themselves is a big theme in my writing, and because the different slices of a person that show in different areas of life is a character development issue as well.

But all that (valid) rationalization aside, this post is about my father's retirement. My father retired at the end of June after 24 years with the same company and nearly 50 in the construction industry. At 69, he was still installing custom stairs and rails, the kind you find in upscale new houses where the staircases alone cost tens of thousands of dollars. After his 65th birthday party the company newsletter featured his picture with the caption "the world's oldest living installer", but his more common nickname was The Legend.

Today, his company had a gathering, and one of the events on the agenda was recognition of his 24 years of service. The men put on ties over their t-shirts in honor of the occasion. One of his co-workers pulled out a guitar and performed a song he'd written to commemorate the event--complete with slideshow--and then he presented my father with an oddly shaped block of wood, painted gold. The block of wood, he explained, was something my father had invented, something they all used now. It was named after him. I'd never known it existed until that moment, but one of his much younger co-workers said later that my father had given him one the day he'd started, and that was several years ago.

Now, it might not seem so surprising that I'd missed a detail like that. I am, after all, 41 years old. But I live less than a mile from my parents, and they babysit for my daughter a couple of days a week. We usually have dinner with them one night a week, and I talk to my mother virtually every day. I know several of my father's co-workers and some of their wives. And I knew the reputation he had at work--both for the ability to work out almost any construction problem and for his tendency to ask the new guys he was training, "You ever think about quitting?" But I didn't know about this funny little piece of wood that several of his friends stepped up to have autographed.

There were a few other surprises in the stories as well, but the details probably aren't significant. What seemed significant was the fact that there's a big difference between what we know and what we see, between what we know and what we can really understand. I think that on some level we all know that the people in our lives are "different" in other places and with other people than they are with us. I think that's true of virtually everyone, not because we're insincere or hiding things but simply because different circumstances and different people draw different things to the foreground.

We may even have descriptions of those differences in our minds. A husband may know that his gentle and feminine wife is a high-powered decision maker at work, but knowing is often different from seeing. The mother of a soldier may know that he is of necessity harder and colder and more calculated on the job than she's ever seen him in her kitchen, but knowing the fact is often different from knowing the person that someone becomes under those other circumstances.

What if we did have to write them as characters? If you had to create a character based on your husband in his office or your grandmother with her bridge club or your son teaching Sunday school or your daughter when she's jumping out of an airplane, could you do it? Do you really know who those people around you are in those moments, or would you only, without ever realizing it, take the "character" you know at home and drop him or her into that place or activity? Are we doing that now, in our minds, without ever realizing it?

It's All in the Telling

2007-07-14T00:42:00.001-07:00

Not long ago, I decided to read a book. That in itself may not come as much of a surprise, but the book was Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, a book that promises to be filled with oddly spelled names and cities and more that its share of kings and sorcerers--in short, all of the things that characterize one of the only two genres that I absolutely never read.

So why did I decide to read Rothfuss's book? It's simple. I read his blog. In fact, I so enjoyed his blog that I began the patchy-and-definitely-not-daily custom of Quote of the Day posts on my What's Wrong Around Us? blog. And it occurred to me that if the man could spin the saga of spending time in a bookstore when he should have been writing into interesting reading, I was pretty confident that he could hold my interest in a novel, even if his main character did have to begin his narrative by explaining how to pronounce his name.

A similar thought came to me recently when I read C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces. The story is a classic myth (that of Cupid and Psyche) retold, somewhat altered, but not so much so that there's much question about what's going to "happen". It doesn't matter, because Lewis has that way of creating prose that slips through your brain like sand through your fingers, requiring almost no effort, feeling warm and pleasant as it passes through, and leaving tiny traces that you'll be finding long after you've moved on.

This reminded me of how often I've heard novelists and would-be novelists debate the value (and even necessity) of outlines. You already know that my answer to the outline question is "write in the way that works best for you", but suddenly the outline question seems to me to run deeper than just whether or not they're necessary. The outline question raises the issue of whether we might be focusing on the wrong thing altogether. I've heard and read at various times that there are only 7 plots and that there are only 5. Undoubtedly, readers and writers could quibble all day about whether certain plots were subplots of other plots already described or each was unique, but the point is that there aren't a thousand plots. There aren't ten thousand. And there certainly aren't new plots created every day.

In fact, in some genres (romance springs to mind, but it seems unlikely that it's the only one), the plot is nearly identical for nearly every book in the genre. But some are better than others. Some make their authors wealthy while others are on the shelves only for a few weeks. Some keep us up late turning pages while others are returned to the library unfinished. Why? It's not the plot...it's the telling.

You'll be the very rare writer indeed if you come up with a totally unique plot, and you won't necessarily be a successful one. But come up with the right turns of phrase, the authenticity of expression, the writing that carries the reader from one line to the next like she was floating along on a gentle wave barely noticing the forward motion, and you will make a compelling story of whatever tale you tell.

The Little Book of Plagiarism

2007-06-30T20:22:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Posner's The Little Book of Plagiarism. "Reading" may not even be the right way to put it, since the book is so small (109 pages and pocket-sized) that I nearly finished it in one round-trip commute. (Don't worry--I take the train.)

I'd definitely recommend the book to any writer, publisher, editor, or even blogger. Aside from the fact that it's a quick and interesting read and not at all like the legal treatise it could be (and haven't we all wanted to peek inside the comparisons between Kaavya Viswanathan's writing and Megan McCafferty's?), it's full of things that we should be thinking about as we make writing and publishing decisions. Plagiarism isn't quite so straightforward as it might seem, as evidenced by some of the respected authors and scholars who've been called out for it.

For instance, did you know it was considered plagiarism to cite a source you found referenced in another source without citing the place you found it as well? Poor practice and risky, certainly, but plagiarism? Frankly, I didn't know that, and I'm both a writer and an attorney.

It's good information, and it only takes a minute (well, a couple of hours, then) to read. And if it gets you interested in all issues plagiarism, you'll also want to check out Jonathan Bailey's Plagiarism Today blog. I don't know Jonathan, but he happened to leave a comment on my post about Eggs, Milk, Vodka last week that coincidentally had me checking his blog on the same day I checked out Posner's little book. It was a happy coincidence and he went straight into my bookmarks.

One Hundred Things

2007-06-26T21:34:00.000-07:00

A hundred things is a lot. My friend Barb was working on her list a couple of days ago, and having a hard time with it, and I mentioned that I was pretty sure there WEREN'T one hundred distinct facts about me. So she started writing them for me. I think she was up to 27 or so when I decided to give it a go myself, but I suspected that it was a diversionary tactic designed to keep her from having to work on her own list...or maybe a warm-up exercise.

Anyway, I decided to give it a shot and I was surprised by how easy it was. After I finished the list, three or four additional things occurred to me that probably should have been on the list. I thought about looking for things I could replace, but that seemed like too much attention to give this kind of exercise. It's surprisingly interesting to do, though. I recommend it, even if you're not going to post the results.

1. I prefer old-fashioned film to digital photography.
2. I never look back after I've written.
3. It's hard for me to think sitting down.
4. I'm more from Mars than I am from Venus; it's often very difficult for me to understand what women are thinking and why.
5. I'd kind of started to believe that my dog was going to live forever, and I hate that I was wrong.
6. My health problems make me angry.
7. At 16, I described the child I wanted to have in great detail, and at 29 I had her.
8. I can't sing.
9. I sing all the time.
10. I am English, Irish, French and Danish in nearly equal parts, but I only feel Irish.
11. I am not as good a Catholic as everyone in my life thinks I am.
12 I've only had two jobs I didn't like in my whole life, and they were both part-time summer jobs.
13. I carried my dog in my book bag around my law school campus years before anyone had heard of Elle Woods.
14. I am friends with nearly all of the men from my past.
15. My first paid article was about McGruff the Crime Dog, and it took me hours to write.
16. A similar-length article now takes me about 20 minutes to write.
17. I can do well on any standardized test, even if I know nothing about the subject matter.
18. My left and right brains are nearly perfectly balanced, and I shift back and forth as to which is slightly dominant.
19. I love math, but I didn't know it until I was 30.
20. I recently lost my best friend, and it still hurts every day.
21. I have a hard time turning off my "work brain" and focusing on anything else.
22. I am happiest and healthiest when I go to mass every day...but I usually don't.
23. I am very messy.
24. I love blank paper, to the point that I keep buying it even when I have stacks of different varieties already at home and am doing most of my writing on the computer.
25. I have very little curiosity about other people's business.
26. I am very uncomfortable in situations in which there is nothing productive to be done.
27. My daughter is 11.5 and her beauty still catches me by surprise on a regular basis.
28. Tea is an important ritual in my family.
29. I've been saying that The Sun Also Rises is my favorite book for so long that I'm no longer sure whether it's true.
30. When I was in law school, I hung out with a bunch of guys who thought I was cool because I'd drink cheap whiskey straight from the bottle with them, but a lot of times I covered the opening with my teeth and didn't really drink.
31. I skipped a day of my bar review class to take my sister to see the Grateful Dead at Soldier Field.
32. People are often surprised to learn things about me that I thought were right there on the surface.
33. I write very fast--5,000 to 7,000 words a day if I'm mostly focused on writing, and with very little editing required.
34. I hate milk, but all other dairy products (ie: ice cream, milkshakes, cheese) are my favorite food.
35. I made yogurt in a high school microbiology class and have consequently never tasted it.
36. I miss my hair.
37. I had "morning sickness" all day every day for four months, and came home from giving birth two sizes smaller than I'd been when I got pregnant.
38. People mistakenly believe me to be social.
39. I have kept every drawing, craft, and note that my daughter has created in her lifetime.
40. I also have a box of drawings, crafts and notes my sister made for me when she was a child and I was a teenager and in college.
41. I am not sentimental.
42. I love infrequently, but completely.
43. I do not know why I blog.
44. The song "Hang on Sloopy" always makes me smile.
45. I love semi-colons.
46. I love water, whether it be in my bathtub, falling from the sky, or filling an ocean.
47. I pay for and start watching a lot of movies I don't end up finishing.
48. When I was writing my book, I listened to nothing but Rick Springfield's music continuously for nine months.
49. I have three full filing cabinets and I don't know what's in them.
50. I have storage units in two cities and I still can't fit everything in my house.
51. I get excited about mathematical patterns.
52. I can't help noticing grammatical errors; I don't want to nitpick, but they stand out to me like flashing neon signs.
53. When I see words in isolation, like on a street sign, I automatically read them in different directions and scramble the letters.
54. My bookshelf is full of books I will never read again, and the books I cherish are packed away in boxes.
55. I keep a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church near my desk for quick reference.
56. I once wrote 273 pages of a novel in three weeks, but then took years to write the ending.
57. I used to do a lot of writing on the train back and forth to work, but now I can't stay awake long enough.
58. I am surprised that I like my daughter's mice.
59. I prefer not to think about people reading what I write.
60. I don't care much about stuff; I have a painting on my living room wall because my sister brought it over and hung it up, and I'm still using the stereo my mother bought for me in 1985.
61. When I read, I skip over descriptions of rooms and locations entirely.
62. I love lightly salted rice cakes--not as a diet food or a "lesser evil" or anything like that...I eat them on purpose.
63. I didn't get my driver's license until after I graduated from college, and then probably only because my parents bought me a used car for graduation.
64. Two years later, I'd driven across at least ten states alone (but for my poodle).
65. I hate volleyball with such an all-consuming passion that I am suspicious of anyone who plays it.
66. I still collect Hot Wheels.
67. I still have the teddy bear I got just before I turned two, in 1968.
68. I was a political activist in college.
69. I once ran a welfare advocacy clinic.
70. I worked three jobs simultaneously while going to law school full time.
71. Once every couple of years or so, I suddenly think of my best friend from law school and really appreciate anew the friendship that we had and the fun and mutual support we shared...but I don't get in touch with him.
72. I miss paper letters. Email is okay, but I loved writing and receiving handwritten letters in the mail.
73. I gave up voting after GWB was elected for the first time.
74. I love soccer, but I haven't been to a game in years.
75. My library books are always late.
76. I like to read in the bathtub. If the water would stay hot and life didn't intrude, I'd stay to finish the whole book.
77. I hate meeting new people with my hair short because I feel it gives the wrong impression of who I am.
78. I improvise.
79. I say what I mean--it's a big waste of time and counterproductive to try to read between the lines and figure out what I "really mean"--I really mean what I said.
80. A nurse tried to "hold back" my birth until my mother's doctor arrived to cover her own mistake, and without the intervention of a young intern at Jackson Park hospital in Chicago, I might have been brain damaged.
81. I haven't really given any new music a fair listen since the late 80s or early 90s.
82. I tell my daughter every day that she's exactly who I always wanted.
83. Getting caught in a downpour makes me laugh out loud.
84. In high school I got physically ill whenever I had to give a speech.
85. I've made a good part of my living as a teacher and public speaker.
86. I do not like poetry.
87. I love to discover people who are better/stronger/faster than I am in intellectual and professional arenas and work to keep up with them.
88. In my teens and early twenties, I avoided shorts because I thought my legs were fat; now that they really are I couldn't care less and wear what I want.
89. I didn't go to the dentist for 22 years.
90. I love to throw things away; I check my coupons hoping that they've expired so that I can clear them out.
91. I only own one pair of jeans, and that only because my mother insisted that everyone needed at least one pair of jeans and bought them for me.
92. I have as many vacuums as I have carpeted rooms in my house.
93. I am afraid of spiders to the point of possible phobia, but other bugs don't bother me in the least.
94. I love Neons. I can't think why anyone would want a whole, real, grown-up car when we could all have these friendly little high-mileage, easy to maneouver, practically free cars.
95. Every Monday when I'm dragging my garbage can up the hill behind my house at 6:00 a.m., I wish that I was married.
96. I have had two dogs who were well and truly mine throughout their lives, and I feel disloyal to both; each of them deserved to be the best dog a person ever had.
97. I don't have an artistic or decorative bone in my body.
98. I don't care in the least if you dislike me for who I am, but being misunderstood makes my brain explode.
99. I have been a lawyer, a receptionist, a hostess in a restaurant, a business college instructor, a curriculum developer, an author, a journalist, a salad prep girl, a telephone solicitor for the American Heart Association, a teacher trainer, a stay-at-home mother, and a night auditor in a hotel.
100. I'm madly in love with my kid. That probably sounds trite and overlaps with half a dozen other things I've said, but anyone who knows me would probably agree that it's my defining characteristic.

Gee, No One's Ever Called Me "Rockin'" Before...

2007-06-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

Much to my surprise, the lovely lady who runs The Accidental Environmentalist (I'm never sure whether or not to use people's names if they don't have them posted on their blogs, so I'm erring on the side of caution), nominated me for this award:

I was surprised not only because the designation was new to me, but because the nomination came from one of the brightest faces on Blog Catalog--a place full of interesting, nice, and knowledgeable people. She's always one of the first to jump in with encouragement, words of advice, or just a friendly greeting, so a nod from her is a compliment indeed. (Always cooler when the cool kids think you're cool, right?)

Now, if I'm understanding the rules correctly, it's time for me to pass on the mantle (or this nice fuschia logo, as the case may be) to five other Rockin' Girl Bloggers. I would appreciate it if you would all agree in advance to pay no attention to the fact that TWO of my nominees (or 40%) have photographs of their bathrooms on their blogs. I assure you that it's purely coincidental.

First (as always), my good friend Barb Cooper, who manages to spin both a life lesson and laughter out of everything from a trip to the grocery store to knitting a sock. You'll find Barb's blog at So the Thing Is...Blog, but I can't resist pointing you to her website, as well, where she's archived humor columns dating back to 2001.

Gerri at Absolutely True has a humorous (and sometimes cynical) take on news from around the world, and she rounds up some of the most outrageous occurrences from every corner of the (round) globe. You're bound to find something that incites laughter, moral outrage, or a war between the two.

ExtraordinaryGirl is an Augusta, Georgia native living in a village in England. She's an engaging writer no matter what she's writing about, but I especially enjoy her posts describing her new home and the surprising differences (and samenesses). Pay no attention to that giant "BATHROOM" tag in the left margin.

I generally enjoy Thorn's Novelish blog, but even if it weren't on my regular reading list she'd deserve a nod for her excellent (and highly successful) post on duplicate cover art last week.

Finally, a new acquaintance but a great find--Theresa at Sleeping Kitten - Dancing Dog! This is a lady with a kind and encouraging word for everyone who is nonetheless not afraid to speak her mind when there's a wrong that needs to be righted. Her blog includes everything from movie reviews to recipes and food safety tips--truly something for almost everyone.

Can a Grocery List be Copyrighted?

2007-06-25T21:02:00.000-07:00

A new book by the founder of the surprisingly popular grocerylists.org proves that there's an audience for everything. Milk, Eggs, Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found is a collection of...grocery lists. Yes, that's right--a hardcover book priced at $19.95 and made up of "found" grocery lists.

Now, it seems unlikely that anyone slaps a little "(c) 2007" on the bottom of his grocery list (though I'm starting tonight), and once upon a time that would have been the end of the issue. But--although the news has been surprisingly slow to spread--copyright notices have been unnecessary since 1989. Now, any original expressive work is automatically copyrighted as soon as it is committed to "fixed format". The definition of "fixed" is extremely broad, including both digital and "hard" copies, sound recordings, handwritten drafts, and more. In essence, for the written word, as soon as you write it down. Or type it. Or word process it. Or blog it. You get the idea.

That means all kinds of things we don't usually thnk of as copyrightable are not only copyrightable, but copyrighted. Email, for instance. I've been told that in Austraila, forwarding an email without permission has been construed to infringe copyrights. That may seem extreme in our free-forwarding culture, but is email forwarding really any different from photocopying someone's handwritten letter and distributing it? Profit, remember, is not a necessary element of copyright infringement.

So what about your grocery list? We know copryight notices aren't required, so the issue seems to be whether a gorcery list is the kind of "creation" that can be copyrighted at all. I assume that the author and publisher considered this before bringing out Milk, Eggs, Vodka. It's entirely possible that the "authors" of those grocery lists aren't protected, because for a work to be copyrighted it must have some degree of originality; there must have been some creative effort. The line isn't clear. Telephone book style listings of information are definitely not copyrightable; stories are. There's a lot of ground in between.

A grocery list seems like precisely the kind of thing that couldn't be copyrighted--just a list of ordinary items.

Except...except...except...if there's nothing unique or interesting about the form of expression--whether it be a comedic combination of items, an outrageous abbreviation system, or the scribbled notes in the margin--then why is there a book?

Read in a hundred thousand disclaimers here, because I haven't read the book, but it seems to me that the author and the publisher have effectively disproven their best defense simply by publishing the book.

So...anyone missing a grocery list?

(c) Tiffany Sanders, 2007

Begin at the Beginning

2007-06-24T12:54:00.001-07:00

Well, after a couple of days of good news (writing the way you write naturally is just fine, thank you, and even an assignment without a paycheck might pay off), a reader named Julie left a comment with a very important point. It's a point that I might have been treating as self-evident, and upon reflection I realize that it's probably not--so many thanks to Julie for pointing it out.

You have to do the work.

Making it as a writer first requires writing. I know that sounds silly, but I can't tell you how many people I know walking around with hypothetical books in their heads and big plans for the success of those books and their tours and television interviews and all that but who...um...don't write. You have to write.

And writing isn't enough, either. Writing for a living is a business like any other, and that means parts of it aren't that much fun. It also means that parts of it cut into your writing time. If you want to write and be published you have to research markets. You have to send out tailored queries and submissions. You have to track what you've sent where and what kind of response you've received. You have to think about what rights you're willing to sell and then keep track of that, too, so that you don't end up selling or reprinting something you don't own.

Sometimes, in the beginning, you have to take on assignments that just don't thrill you.

About eight years ago, I had a conversation with another writer. I'd just taken on my first assignments as a newspaper stringer, and was writing a scintillating article about McGruff the Crime Dog. I suggested to her--a recent graduate of a respected writing program--that she might want to contact my editor. She sort of wrinkled up her nose and said that she didn't really care for that kind of writing. She's an excellent writer--far better than I--and she has great contacts, but she's been holding out for her "Oprah's Book Club book" all these years. I've never for a moment doubted that she has the ability to write one. But she didn't. And she didn't accumulate clips, and she didn't use her contacts. Eight years later, I have (without a related degree or any contacts to speak of) published two books, written a third that's out to an agent right now, started a fourth, made my living as a newspaper stringer, a copywriter, a curriculum writer for a national corporation, and now have a full-time, salaried writing job.

It isn't, any of it, Oprah's Book Club. And frankly, I don't care about that--I care about making enough money as a writer that I don't have to eat up writing time earning a living some other way. But what if I did? Somehow, I have a strong suspicion that most best-selling authors have a few regional magazine articles and $50 short stories in their past.

What Does "Free" Really Mean, Anyway?

2007-06-22T16:10:00.000-07:00

Imagine that you are an up and coming music writer. Music writing is your dream, and you've had a little success. You're writing music reviews for a few websites and a regional magazine, perhaps, making anywhere from $10 to $100/review, depending on the market.

One day, without ever really entertaining the thought that it might be accepted, you pop off a query to Rolling Stone. Much to your surprise, you get a call almost immediately--the magazine loves your proposal, and they're willing to run it as a cover story. But for whatever reason (this being wildly hypothetical), they can't pay you for the story. Do you write it?

It seems to me that there are only two possible answers to this question:

1. Yes, of course, because once I've written a Rolling Stone cover story I'll have hundreds of markets available to me at good rates that might have been out of reach only yesterday.

2. No, I never really wanted to make it in the music writing business anyway. Better $10 from Ralph's Obscure Newsletter of Indy CDs than nothing from Rolling Stone!

For as long as I can remember, a debate has raged in the writing community about "writing for free". Many writers say, "Never write for free!" while others (myself included) can point to lucrative opportunities that came about as the direct result of something written for "free". It suddenly occurred to me today that we've been asking the wrong question and debating the wrong issue all along. The question isn't whether or not we should write for free. Of course we shouldn't. The question is what "free" means in the context of writing and publishing.

The world is full of publications proclaiming that the only "payment" they offer is the opportunity to "see your work in print" or offer a link to your website. If all you want is to see your work in "print", start a blog. Publications with low quality work and low readership don't provide clips that are going to be of much use to you in advancing your writing career. But what about that link to your website? Is that payment?

The answer is that it depends entirely on where that link will be placed. If the link is on a site with no page rank and 50 visitors a day, it's not likely to benefit you in any meaningful way. If you're a music writer and the link is on Billboard's official site, it's worth a heck of a lot more than the $10 or $100 you might have gotten for a paid article on a lesser site. For one thing, it's likely to bring a lot of relevant traffic to your website. Just as important, it's a link that screams "important music resource this way!" to Google and the other search engines.

People and businesses shell out hundreds of dollars per month to have a single link on a relevant, highly-ranked, high traffic website. So you might not be getting a paycheck, but you may be getting something of much greater value in return.

Sometimes, the "payment" for your work can be even further removed from an editor cutting a check; sometimes, the value truly is in the clip. In the Rolling Stone example above, they "payment" for your "free" story might well be skipping over another two or three years of writing for indy newspapers and regional magazines and moving into the big leagues. It might be commanding much more respect and higher rates that the publications you're already working with. For some, it might simply be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream to write a Rolling Stone cover story.

The right question, it seems to me, is the same one I was suggesting back when we were all asking the wrong one: What's in it for me? There are many, many, many opportunities for "free" writing that not only won't help you or your writing career, but might do it some harm. But the question to ask in making that determination isn't, "Are they going to cut me a check?" but "Is there a tangible benefit in this for me.?" Very often, I think, the answer is yes.

Writing is Easy

2007-06-20T06:41:00.001-07:00

Yeah, you heard me right.

I'm sick to death of hearing published authors carry on about how writing is a grueling task on a level with working in the coal mines.

Of course, your experience may differ.

But that's the whole point of this post, really--your experience may differ.

I think it's an important point to make, because novice writers are so quick to believe anything that an experienced writer says. I've been making my living primarily as a writer for about a dozen years. If I can get in a focused 5-6 hours of writing, I generally turn out about 5,000 words in a day, which may require light editing later.

Obviously, it's not like that for everyone--there are very successful writers who claim to hate the process of writing. Even Dorothy Parker said she didn't like writing, she liked "having written". I know writers for whom that's dead on. For me, I have no interest in "having written". The magic is all in the process for me...I lose interest in a work pretty quickly when it's done and only have eyes for the new blank page in front of me.

The single most important thing that a new or aspiring writer can know is that it's DIFFERENT FOR EVERYONE.

If writing is a lot more work than you expected it to be, don't get discouraged--many very successful authors describe the writing process and arduous and even painful.
If writing flows out of your fingertips onto the page as if the words had just been waiting, already in order, to be released, don't assume you're a lightweight--many successful authors report that they feel like the words and stories "come from somewhere else".
If you rely on outlines, great--write an outline. Many authors depend heavily on them.
If you prefer to just sit down and write and see what happens, go for it. Regardless of what outline-dependent authors preach, you'll be in the company of several wildly successful authors--including Stephen King--if you opt to let your characters lead you.
If you like to edit each day's work at the end of the day, or first thing the next morning, and that works out for you...do it. If it's more comfortable for you not to look back until you've reached the end...fine.
Some writers do well with a very disciplined schedule, and some "binge write". As long as you're producing quality work and meeting your deadlines, it's no one's business but your own whether you write for two hours every morning or for twenty straight hours on Saturday.

The bottom line is that virtually every piece of writing advice you hear from a published writer is based on what worked for that writer. You are not that writer. Your mileage may vary. There is a lot to be learned from successful writers, but only if you have the strength and confidence to take what works for you and leave the rest. If you're a free-form writer and that's always worked well for you, it's entirely possible that buying into someone's proclamation that you "can't write a coherent novel without an outline" is going to cripple your writing. If you're at your best in the early morning hours, the fact that some other writer has great success staying up all night writing shouldn't influence you.

Be the writer you are. That's the only "writing tip" that works for every writer.

Cover Art Expose at Novelish.com

2007-06-17T22:07:00.000-07:00

I really, really, really need to be asleep, but I couldn't resist a quick note to share this fascinating post about duplicate cover art at Novelish.com. Seems stock photograph has its downsides, and one of those downsides is prominently on display right now, with side-by-side images of various novels with some...err...familiar-looking images on the front!

It's definitely worth a read purely for entertainment value, but it raises larger issues as well. Are these publishers getting sloppy, or is it okay to duplicate cover art? Does the association with one book help to sell a later book that uses a slightly altered version of the same photograph? (And if so, might some of these duplications be calculated?) As authors, how do we feel about stock photography that might be recycled again and again becoming the "image" of our books?

It's a topic we could explore all night, but I'm going to keep it brief for tonight in hopes that some others will weigh in

We're Not Big on Celebrity News Around Here

2007-06-16T11:14:00.001-07:00

But we've had enough stories of child-star self-destruction to last several lifetimes, and this story provides a very encouraging counter-point...especially for me, since my daughter keeps asking when her next movie is going to start filming!

Math Wonder

The Sun Also Rises

2007-06-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't some big philosophical post about how better days will come. It's literal.

Aw, man. Even that sounds like a pun, in context.

Forget the whole titling thing. I want to talk about The Sun Also Rises, the Hemingway novel. If you've never read the novel and you think you might someday, then I suggest that you stop reading right now, because the rest of this post is about how the last line of the novel changes everything that came before.

That's quite a device today, especially in film. Kevin Spacey suddenly walking upright in the last frames of The Usual Suspects springs to mind, for instance. But in the twenties? It seems to me not so much. Maybe some literary scholar will read this (because all the top literary scholars read my blog, of course), and step forth to tell me how wrong I am and provide a list of other examples--I think I'd be fine with that, and probably run straight out to read those books and analyze the trend. Because what fascinates me is that Hemingway seems to have done it decades before it became a common device and no one seems to have noticed!

I've read a lot of essays on The Sun Also Rises, and engaged in a lot of discussions, some in college classrooms and some over drinks late at night and some on the truly incredible Lost Generation forum, where the knowledge base is dazzling. There's always a lot of talk, of course, about the significance of that last line, but it's always presented as a change, a learning moment, character development.

Nuh uh. I don't think so. (This is the part you won't want to read if you haven't read the book and think you might someday)

I think he knew all along.

I think that famous last line is so very powerful precisely because it shifts the context of everything that came before. He was never fooling himself! He accepts what he accepts and he makes the decisions he makes without buying into the illusion, without believing that if it weren't for his injury, it would be happily ever after.

Even Brett seems to buy into that illusion, and she's the reason it could never be. She'd be the one to find some other reason to stray, to walk away, to come and go, to hold back something...and yet she thinks, "if only". Jake, it becomes clear in that last sentence, doesn't think "if only" at all--or if he does, it's a very different "if only" from the one that's tossed in front of us throughout the book.

I love the book, but that's the thing I love most about it. The thing every other student of Hemingway I've encountered seems to think I've made up.

Easy Options for ESL Writing

2007-06-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

A solution fell into my lap this week, not for a problem I have but for one I hear about all the time.

I work in a major metropolitan area with--like any major metropolitan area--a mix of people from all over the world. Just a few weeks ago, in making small talk on the way to the train station, a cab driver asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I was a writer, he asked me how he could improve his writing skills; English was his second language and he said that he was much more comfortable speaking and writing, but he was working two jobs and didn't have time to take a class.

The conversation wasn't a new one for me, but it's one I've always hated, because I'm a "fixer", and I didn't have an answer. Today, I learned about an online ESL writing class that looks like it might be just the kind of flexible and affordable solution I've never been able to point to before. Best of all, I'm acquainted with the teacher through Blog Catalog, and given the level of energy and willingness to help she shows in that forum (where she has no official obligation to anyone and no one is paying her), I'm very confident about the level of service and attention this program will provide.

I think "meme" is the French word for "same"

2007-06-07T21:23:00.000-07:00

Actually, I know it is, but I'm not sure whether or not that's the origin of "meme" to mean something like this thing below. It seems logical, since what you do is take the same questions from someone else, but I'm making this up as I go.

I've never paid much attention to them, but my friend Barb posted this on her blog and she said that everyone who was reading it should do the same. Her instructions were very specific...she even pointed out that we should erase her answers (I can't be sure, but this may have been intended specifically for me, since I would have thought it funny as hell to just repost her questions AND answers if the instructions had been less explicit). There seemed to be no wiggle room, so here goes:

1. Are you taller than your mom?

Oh yeah. And so is everyone else.

2. What color is your car?

Well, white. But I didn't choose that. It's otherwise an exact copy of a RED car I once had, which was much more to my liking.

3. What is the closest thing to you that is red?

Other than that long-lost car? My blouse.

4. What is your ringtone?

Ringtone?

5. Are you sick?

Sadly, yes. But I'm optimistic that a simple surgical procedure is going to fix me right up and change my life.

6. What color is your favorite pillow?

Aquamarine.

7.What is your favorite video game?

Bust-a-Move

8. Had a nap today?

No. I never get naps anymore. I'm always willing, though.

9. Gold or Silver?

Silver.

10.Is there an animal that creeps you out?

Animal? Not really. Spiders aren't animals, right?

11.Who was the last person you rode an elevator with?

If this means people I know, Joel Newton. If it means random people who stepped into the same elevator I did...some random woman who works on the 34th floor.

12. Did you go ice skating as a kid?

Yes, but not often. More on ponds than at rinks.

13. Ever have stitches?

Yes, in my chin when I was three years old.

14. Favorite non-alcoholic drink?

Coca-cola with a lot of ice.

15. How long ago did you kiss someone?

I need clarification of the question.

16. What's something you want to do before you die?

Nap.

No, just kidding.

Well,not kidding exactly. I do want to nap. But I'd like to do something worthwhile, too. After my nap.

17. Have you ever caught something on fire?

If it's my own kitchen, does that really count?

18. Have you ever seen a ghost?

No.

19.Have you ever seen the northern lights?

No. Once when I was very young, one of my neighbors was outside yelling that he could see them, and he woke my father up, but my father called him some choice names and went back to bed instead of waking the rest of us up to share.

20. Do you know how to use chop sticks?

Absolutely not.

21. Name something good that happened today.

I ate Mexican food in brand new white pants and they're still white. (My mother suggested that they must be magic, as this couldn't possibly be attributable to me)

22. What room are you in?

My bedroom.

23. Are you worried about something you can't control?

Yes.

24. Do you take daily medications?

Yes

25. Ever been in a fight?

Fight? As in two sided? No. But when I was 13 and my sister was 6, I knocked a kid flat on his ass after he hit her in the head with an ice ball. His mother stood patiently by and watched.

26. Are you wearing nailpolish?

Yeah, right. I don't even OWN nail polish.

27. Favorite color?

Bright, Irish green, like the green crayon or green poster paints in pre-school.

28. Innie or Outie?

I actually don't believe that anyone is an outie. I've never seen one.

29. Ever used a Ouija board?

Yes, back in my youth, before I remembered that I was Catholic.

30. Sweet or Sour?

Yes.

31. Sun or Moon?

Moon.

32. What shoes did you wear today?

White sandals.

33. Favorite eye color of the opposite sex?

Brown.

34. Most important quality in any relationship?

That inexplicable thing that makes you want to do better and be better even when the other person is perfectly happy with you as you are.

35. Favorite zombie movie?

There is more than one zombie movie?

36 Time of day you were born?

10:41 p.m.

37. Do you know your blood type?

I did once.

38. What would you spend 5000 dollars on right now if you were handed it?

I'd prepay my rent and utilities for as long as that would stretch.

39. Name something annoying in public transit?

Can't. I love it.

Oh, wait. This isn't public transit's fault, but I HATE when the train is so crowded that people are standing in the aisles and there are always those obnoxious few who keep their one little bag on the seat next to them so that no one else can sit down, and stare straight ahead and pretend they don't notice the people searching for seats. I think they should have to buy tickets for their bags.

40. Did you grow up in the city or country?

City, but I thought it was the country. My parents were from Chicago, and my mother always referred to our town (population roughly 80,000) as "out here in the sticks," so I grew up thinking it was a small town in the middle of nowhere.

41. Would you ever consider going on a reality TV show if offered a large sum of money?

I was actually on reality tv once, for a very small sum of money. But I hadn't given much thought to reality tv then. Now that I see how it's contributing to the downfall of western civilization, I don't think I'd do it again.

42. Have you flown in your dreams?

I don't believe so.

43. Hugs or kisses?

No.

44. You have 10 dollars to spend in the dollar store..what do you get?

Cleaning products and paper towels and stuff.

45. Slurpee flavor?

Blue raspberry.

Once Upon a Time This Was a Writing Blog...

2007-06-04T21:09:00.000-07:00

So I thought, in honor of those partially-lost days, I'd share this link with you:

Writing Fiction Crawford Kilian has a way of digging right into what someone's written (even if that someone was him) and gutting out what could have been done better in a way that we can all use it to hone our crafts.

Many thanks to Jerry Russell at Please Don't Feed the Writer for outing this little gem.

New Genre, New Territory, New Worries

2007-06-01T16:54:00.000-07:00

As a writer, I don't suffer from any kind of angst. I've heard many writers say that writing is hard and painful and it makes me wonder why they write. I write because whenever I pass too close to a keyboard, words start spilling out of my fingers unprovoked and spreading themselves across the screen.

I've written three complete novels (one published under a pen name, one being considered by an agent, one still in the filing cabinet) and two halves. I've written more biographies of Rick Springfield than any one person should be able to make a career of. I've written entire websites covering complex areas of law.

Today, I'm writing something that is either a long short story or a short novella. It's futuristic. It contains no dialogue. It is, in short, entirely unlike any of the many varied things I've written before.

And I'm a little worried about it.

I know it sounds crazy for someone who has been writing since elementary school, but that's never happened to me before. I don't know what this thing I'm writing is, whether it has a genre, whether it's supposed to be dark and dense and more descriptive than active like this. It's almost as if I've found myself giving birth to something that doesn't quite seem like it's going to be a baby.

I keep writing it. But I'm afraid of it. I don't think that's ever happened before.

Featured Blog Catalog Donors Choose Challenge Project of the Day

2007-05-30T08:53:00.001-07:00

A teacher in Indianapolis reports that her white boards are literally falling apart. Her modest proposal to replace them has been more than half funded, and a mere $170 is needed to fulfill the project and provide these basic teaching materials.

Please drop by Donors Choose and make a contribution. As this example demonstrates, very small contributions add up to big differences in the lives of our elementary school children across the country. If just 17 people donate $10 to this project, it will be complete. Think about that--you and 16 friends can kick in just $10 and provide white boards for an elementary school classroom. I've paid more than $10 for a single mixed drink! (And I'll bet you have, too)

Yesterday, Total Divorce stepped in with a contribution that matched all of the donations made during the first day of the challenge, but there's still a long way to go...and we can get there one $10 donation at a time, if everyone will take just a moment to participate!

Blog Catalog Community Comes Together to Raise Funds for Education

2007-05-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

Bloggers across the country are posting this weekend in a joint effort to turn attention--and dollars--toward Donors Choose, an organzation that brings donors together with public school teachers across the country who are looking for funding for projects and supplies their school budgets can't support.

Because most public schools are funded by property taxes, those in the poorest districts are often lacking in the most basic supplies and equipment, and can't even entertain the possibility of field trips, enrichment programs, or things many of our children take for granted, like a computer in the classroom.

At Donors Choose, teachers describe exactly what they need funding for, and donors can contribute to the specific projects they feel are most important.

Of course, I'd advocate making a donation to Donors Choose at any time, but a donation today will carry the added benefit of demonstrating how effective viral marketing can be in soliciting funds for charities so that similar projects in the future will assist worthy charities in spreading the word for free.

Big thanks to Tony at Blog Catalog for organizing and publicizing this, and to YOU for whatever your contribution might be--donating to Donors Choose, spreading the word through your own blog, or whatever seems right to you.

Home Sweet Home

2007-05-23T20:23:00.000-07:00

This evening, my daughter and I walked to the bank. There's nothing spectacular about that, except that my bank is in the very same shopping center that my mother and I used to walk to almost daily back in the late 60s (when I rode in an olive green stroller) and early 70s.

The ice cream shop with the wrought iron chairs and tiny paper cups of sherbet served alongside every sandwich is long gone. So is the Circle E steak place that served a "wranglerburger" I've never tasted the like of anywhere since, and an artificial Christmas tree festooned with balloons "for the little plate-cleaners". And the corner drugstore with its ice cream freezer filled with banana and root beer popsicles, and the grocery store...in fact, there's not one business left in that shopping center that was there in my childhood except for a tiny barbershop with an old-fashioned pole mounted on the wall outside. They've been replaced with Blockbuster and Radio Shack and a big empty space that was a hardware store and then a furniture store and now just serves as home to a childishly optimistic "for rent" sign.

But the sidewalks are the same. The night air is the same. And even though I'm sort of famous for being unsentimental, there's something about walking the same sidewalk with my daughter that I walked with my mother almost forty years ago that puts the world in perspective. I don't know why this struck me tonight, when I've walked that shopping center with my daughter a hundred times, with my daughter and my mother TOGETHER more times than I can count. But it brought back a slideshow of other moments when the past and present have suddenly become overlaid for a moment:

Walking at the drive-in, carrying my daughter and hearing my feet crunch in the gravel as we walked and remembering walking beside my mother as she carried my sister along that same path to the concession stand;

Lifting my daughter onto a picnic table in front of Dairy Queen and remembering taking my sister there--and sometimes a handful of other kids--when I was babysitting for her the summer I was thirteen;

Sitting sideways on the front seat of the car with the door open, pouring a drink for my daughter, and suddenly SEEING my own mother's sun-freckled arm doing the same in Lake Geneva during the summer of 1977.

And now, I suppose, it's time to get to the point, but I don't have one. I'm just enjoying the feel of fitting my sandals into my mother's footprints on an early summer evening.

This is Not a Parenting Blog

2007-05-22T16:26:00.000-07:00

This is not a parenting blog. This is not...

Really. I promise.

But sometimes the little everyday moments are so simultaneously dismaying and entertaining that they call out to be shared.

My daughter is 11, and she often goes to my parents' house after school. It's not unusual for friends to visit her or call her there. Today, however, I was working from home and so she wasn't there.

About half an hour after school got out, my mother called and asked, without preamble, to talk to my daughter. I told her she was in the shower and she said, "Well, there's this little boy at my door..." I took the phone into the bathroom and put it on speaker. Turned out the boy had come to my mother's door hoping to find my daughter in order to ask her where another girl lived.

My mother had offered him our phone number, and he'd asked to use her phone.

So she was calling, with this boy she'd never seen before in her kitchen, looking for my daughter's friend's address...which my daughter didn't know.

"Just give him her cell," my daughter said. My mother said okay.

Um. Wait. "Mom, do you HAVE her cell?"

And she said, "I have it written down somewhere." Then she hung up to let the boy use her phone to call my daughter's friend's cell and find out where she lived--but not before she'd plucked our phone number back out of the boy's hand and said, "I'll just take this back in case she doesn't want you to have it."

A short time later, she called back. She said the girl's voicemail had been full, so she'd described to him as best she could where the girl lived. My daughter said, "Ummmm...she's going to kill you."

And then my mother said, "Anyway, I just called to say that whoever this boy is, he's much cuter than the one who came over yesterday."

Now that I think about it, I'm not at all sure whether this is a parenting story or a story about parents.

Do We Really Need to Go FASTER?

2007-05-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

I started this as a writing blog, and I hope that it mostly remains one, but every once in a while I have a thought. Well, I have thoughts frequently, but every once in a while I have a thought I'd like to make in public, without having to write a query and seek an appropriate venue, and I think that's mostly what blogs are for.

So here's my thought today: On the way home on the train this evening, I saw a sign advertising Chase's new feature that allows one to set ATM preferences so that you can "get cash twice as fast".

How long does the typical ATM transaction take? I'll admit that I've never timed it (although you can be sure that I'm going to), but I'm guessing less than ninety seconds. So. Yeah. I REALLY need to shave that 45 seconds off my cash withdrawal time. It's going to change my whole day.

I know it sounds like I'm being sarcarstic, but in fact I think that it IS going to change my whole day--and yours too--and the change isn't for the better.

Remember when you had to go to the library and sort through drawers for the right roll of microfiche and pop it into a machine and turn and turn and turn and focus in order to find an old magazine or newspaper article? I'm talking 1988 here, not the forties.

Okay, quick show of hands: how many of you have complained out loud about how long it takes a newspaper article or other resource to load online? We cut out the travel time, we cut out the sorting through the cabinets, we cut out the scrolling, then we even cut out the dial-up delay, and now we're groaning, "this is so slooooowww" when it takes 30 or 45 seconds for a web page to display.

Now, I'm not a stop-and-smell-the-roses kind of girl by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to say that I think maybe driving to the library was much healthier for us, as individuals and as a culture. I say that in part because we interacted with live people more, and were less rushed when we did. I say it partly because downtime like that you spend driving alone gives you time and space to think. And I say it partly because I think there's something inherently unhealthy, mentally and physically, about feeling the need to shave that extra 45 seconds off our ATM transactions.

I don't mean to lay this all at Chase's doorstep, though I do think Chase is the root of all evil (we'll talk about that another day). I see it at the gas station where "Speedpass" promises to save me the time it takes to actually INSERT MY CREDIT CARD, since I just have to wave it at the machine. I see it at the grocery store where "one touch" payment is so "convenient" that we've all conveniently overlooked how creepy and 1984 it is. Saddest of all, I see it in the parents who can't let their children tie their own shoes or zip their own jackets because that extra minute or two seems so critical to whatever it is they're rushing off to.

So here's my plan. I'm not signing up for one touch payment. I'm going to write checks just like we did back in prehistoric times, and if that takes an extra 30 seconds I'm going to use that time to wish the clerk a nice evening and smile at the person behind me (whose brain will probably be exploding because I'm writing a check). I'm going to leave my ATM preferences unset and go ahead and take that full 90 seconds to withdraw cash from the machine. I'm never, never, never going to say "let me do that for you" to my daughter just to speed her up. And I could be wrong, but I suspect that all those "wasted" seconds are going to add up and reappear at the end of my life, when I live a lot longer without the pressure of having to complete all of my transactions in under a minute.

Seven Unsolicited Surprises

2007-05-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

I just happened to be reading my friend Barb's blog, where she responded to a challenge from another friend to post seven things about her that the friend didn't know. It reminded me pleasantly of a post I'd made several years ago on another blog called "twenty answers". It was simply a numbered list of random information. That post, honestly, began life as an email to a man I probably shouldn't have been telling quite so much about myself, but it ended up on my blog and started a little bit of a trend for a minute or two...twenty answers, no questions.

This one is tougher, though, because it's supposed to be things "you" don't know--whomever you may be. Since I adopted the challenge unsolicited, I can't focus on things a particular person won't know, and have to think about the things that may surprise the world at large.

1. My favorite song is by Aerosmith.

2. I pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet every night.

3. My first paid piece of published writing was about McGruff the Crime Dog, and took me more than three hours to write, with a lot of help from my younger sister.

4. I watched General Hospital for years, even taped it when I was working during the day--and NOT when Rick Springfield was on it.

5. I cannot swim, but I love deep water.

6. I finished my first novel in 1993, but I've never shown it to anyone.

7. I like to fish: dig up my own worms, bait my own hook, feel the simultaneous slip and scrape of the scales against my hand--but I always let them go.

A Whole New Can of Writing Worms

2007-05-06T16:02:00.000-07:00

Last week, I wrote this post about what makes a writer in response to another blogger's comment on her blog about another blogger's comment on her blog about....well, we've covered all that already. But then a comment to the original post raised yet another question: we've all agreed (I think) that you don't have to be published to be a writer, but does being published make one a writer?

Again, I think it depends wholly upon usage. If "writer" is a state of being, then no, it does not. Or at least, there's a fair argument to be made that it doesn't. But if "writer" denotes a person making a living in a particular profession, then I don't think quality counts. There are good and bad doctors and good and bad lawyers and good and bad waitresses and good and bad mechanics, but we don't quibble about their titles. We don't walk out of a restaurant after getting bad service and say, "she wasn't really a waitress!" Crappy service or not, she's a waitress because it's her job title. The same can be true of a writer.

I don't necessarily think that talent is a prerequisite to becoming a writer by trade. Perhaps there is a line that one can't cross without talent, but with thousands of publications and tens of thousands of Internet outlets and hundreds of thousands of small businesses in need of copywriting services and websites, it's certainly feasible to make a living as a writer without crossing those lines.

In fact, I strongly suspect that many without what some of us would term talent HAVE crossed those lines. I'm not going to name any names, but I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this can quickly call to mind a wildly successful writer that he or she doesn't think can write. I'm not talking about someone whose style you don't care for, someone who doesn't suit your tastes, but someone you truly think is just a BAD writer.

You know you can.

So...if you're a writer...a writer who wants to be published...a writer who wants to make a living writing...maybe even a writer who secretly yearns for fame and fortune...what does that writer have that you don't?

Seriously.

The Great Yahoo Conspiracy?

2007-05-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

I recently used the (free) Google information bar to find out how recently Google had spidered a friend's website. Good news--they'd visited just a few days earlier, less than a week after the previous visit.

I cut and pasted the date and time of the visit into an email and sent it to my friend--and that's when the intrigue began. You see, my friend uses sbcglobal as her ISP, and SBC, as you may know, is Yahoo! (or owns Yahoo!, or is owned by Yahoo! or some such--I can't keep it all straight)

SBC sent me an autogenerated email telling me that my email was undeliverable for "policy reasons".

I puzzled over this for a moment, experienced a moment of gratitude for gmail (however creepy it might be that ads relating to the subject of my email pop up up in the margins) and considered sending my friend an invite to get a free gmail account. Then I re-sent the email to another of my friend's accounts.

She replied from her SBC account. That got through fine, trailing my cut and paste along with it, but when I tried to respond, I got another bounce message...policy reasons again. No explanation as to what policy I might have violated, of course. And I can't rule out the possibility that there's some code under that Google information that innocently set off some kind of screening. But I also can't rule out the possiblity that the policy I violated was one against consorting with the competition, and that idea leaves me decidedly uneasy.

The Accidental Grammar Police

2007-05-02T22:27:00.000-07:00

Rest assured, I am aware that my grammar is not perfect. Sometimes I make mistakes in haste. Sometimes--though I tremble a little to admit this--I know the proper usage and reject it. For example, I use the word "can" when I should say "may". Every time I do, I hear a taunting little grade-school voice in my head saying, "I don't know...CAN you?", but I do it anyway because "may" sounds so prim and 1950s Miss Manners to me that I just can't bring myself to use it. It's as if my whole paragraph will freeze up, cloak itself in a crisply ironed dress, and start vacuuming the living room in pearls and high-heeled shoes.

Still, I identified with Lynne Truss and fully understood her need to carry spare apostrophes.

There are, really, only two schools of thought about this issue: "Grammar as Religion" and "Oh, Lighten Up--Don't NITPICK"

I'm a nitpicker, and I'm here to tell you, it can't be helped.

Sometimes we can suppress the urge to comment out loud, although if there's another nitpicker in the room it's hard to resist a quick, shared, significant look (a la Charlie's Angels), but we can't help noticing. No, really. I don't mean, "I couldn't help noticing that you've included an apostrophe in 'car's' even though you clearly intended the plural and not the possessive," but we REALLY CAN'T HELP NOTICING.

We don't look for grammatical errors. We don't analyze text. They stand out as if they were a thousand feet tall and flashing neon, surrounded by fireworks...and not just any fireworks, but ARROWS pointing directly to the word or phrase in question.

Twice a month, an email goes out to everyone in my office, and it says, "Paychecks are ready, if your hours are complete."

Twice a month, I think, "Well, no. They're ready whether or not our hours are complete--you just won't give them to us unless our hours are complete."

I like the woman who writes the email. She's nice and she's professional and she seems quite intelligent. She's very pretty, too. I don't WANT to criticize her emails over a little technical point like that "if", and I don't do it out loud. But I can't read that sentence without noting that it's not factually accurate. It doesn't express what she meant. It COULD be factually accurate, but it's not; I know that all of the checks are ready. And so my brain issues the correction, every time. And it's every bit as annoying to me as it looks from the outside, but no more avoidable. Less, in fact, because the vast majority of those observations are never spoken.

Writing about Writing (Wait...Have I Used That Already?)

2007-05-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

Well.

There's a whole new state of affairs around here, and I don't know what to do about it.

You see, I've been happily writing along assuming that no one was reading a word of this and I could say any damned thing I pleased, and then suddenly, Barb Cooper blogged about one of my recent posts (in the same post where she showed us the scars from the reconstructive surgery on her foot--I'm just sure that was a coincidence. Really.) and then this lady I don't even know apparently read Barb's post and followed the link to my post...and the next thing you know it's like BLOGGING or something.

It got me thinking about terminology. "Writer" is a funny word, because it can denote both a profession and a state of being. Other professions aren't like that; I was a writer long before I was published, but I wasn't a lawyer or a teacher or even a hostess in a restaurant until I was hired into those positions. I certainly thought of myself as a writer back in the day when no one--and I mean no one--ever saw a word that I wrote. Back in the days before email and blogging, before I was making my living as a writer, I just wrote and wrote and wrote, and when I finished something I tossed it in my desk drawer (I didn't even have filing cabinets back then) and started something new. And I defined myself as a writer not because I made my living that way--I didn't even have a living to make, back in high school and then college and then law school. I thought of myself as a writer because it was who I was, how I thought, what was most natural and elemental about me.

All I really wanted to do in life was write. That's what made me a writer. I'm also a writer by profession now, and when I wrote this post about blogging being dangerous for writers, I meant (though didn't specify) writers who wanted to write professionally. It's hard for me to imagine that any writer wouldn't want to write professionally, but that's not because I have any desire for fame or fortune or to be "heard" or anything like that. It's simply because I forget that some people have the luxury of time to write WITHOUT using it to support themselves.

I've been writing since I was six; I started publishing because it was the only way I could buy myself time to write. I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that most writers are like me in the sense that there's virtually nothing they'd rather be doing than writing, and that a lot of other necessary activities in life feel like time stolen from writing. Since the realities of life required me to be doing something lucrative 50 or more hours a week (feeding my kid wasn't one of the things I was willing to sacrifice in order to find time to write), I had a choice--give up the vast majority of the time I could be writing, or make writing pay. I'm no more a writer today because I have a full time writing job and a few freelance gigs on the side than I was when I was seventeen and I was writing short stories no one has ever read to this day. But I'm MUCH more a writer today than I was when I was practicing law 60 hours a week and didn't write for months on end, and I'm much more a writer today than I was when I was teaching and training and doing admissions consulting around raising a child alone and I didn't write for months on end.

For anyone who has the luxury all the time he or she wants to write without having to make a living at it, I can't think of a reason in the world that publishing is better than not. But for anyone who, like me, has to make a choice among giving up writing, giving up sleep, or finding a way to make it pay, I stand by my original thoughts. Put your effort where the opportunity is. There will be plenty of time to blog when the money is rolling in.

The Downside to Blogging

2007-04-28T20:54:00.000-07:00

Two things I saw this weekend converged in my mind and set off some flashing lights and sirens about the danger of blogging.

One of them was the description section on a blog I tripped over through my Google alerts. As is often the case, one of my alerts took me to a blog that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject I'd set up the alert for, but had somehow by chance combined the right words to get tracked. The author of the blog, the name and location of which I've already forgotten, said that she (or maybe he) was a writing teacher, and encouraged students to write often and dig deep, and the blog was an effort at doing just that. Or something similar.

The other was a very long poem on a blog with no page rank, one I never would have seen had a friend not sent me a link. Here's the thing: it was good. I don't like poetry all that much, and you've already heard my thoughts on how scintillating blogs are--I'm convinced you're not even reading THIS, because who would, and why? But this poem...I didn't do anything else while I was reading it.

If I haven't mentioned it before, I'm a chronic multi-tasker. When I'm emailing or IMing with a friend who says, after a time, "I have to get off of here and get something done" or some such, I'm always surprised. That might be a sign that I'm a very slow learner, considering how often it happens, but there it is. I'm shocked anew every time. Because I'm ALWAYS "getting something done" while I'm at the computer. I screen Google alerts and print articles for work between emails; I fold laundry and sort papers and pay bills while I IM; I have thirty or forty windows open on my computer at all times. So when I say that I sat here at my computer and read this whole very long poem without doing anything else, with a basket of clean laundry at my feet, without clicking the send/receive buttons on any of the three email accounts I had open or taking a quick peek at my bank balance to see whether the book order check had gone through yet, it means something. Nothing empirical, of course, but something about the impact of that poem on me, personally.

And that made me think that it didn't belong buried on a blog that wouldn't be easy to find if you didn't know the author. And that combined in my mind with that writing teacher's comment and made me think that maybe having such an easy outlet isn't such a good thing, not if you're a real writer. Because if you have a place where you can just write, straight into the template, and "publish" and be done with it, doesn't that sort of decrease the incentive to seek out a wider audience? Isn't there something more gratifying, in a backward kind of way, about just posting something on your blog than there might be about sending it out over and over again in hopes that maybe, six months down the road, someone will buy it and then publish it another three or six or nine months later?

There's definitely something to be said for writing more, in whatever forum. It's definitely habit forming, and the more you write the more it feels natural to write and the more you WILL write--or so I believe, anyway. But suddenly I'm wondering whether blogging doesn't provide something of a disincentive to publish, an easy way to dash off one's thoughts and make them available to the world without any extensive editing, without worrying about word counts and fonts, without research and rejection and (maybe most of all), without waiting.

Show of Hands...Who Remembers Bruce Cockburn?

2007-04-28T10:43:00.000-07:00

I know that opening line is going to bring some angry commentary--or would, if anyone were reading this--because I remember how I felt when people made similar comments about Rick Springfield while I was writing my book, even though Rick Springfield HAD, in fact, taken a few years (or maybe it was a decade or so) away from the music industry.

Rick Springfield played something like 188 live shows that year, and the world seemed to believe he'd drifted away after "Jessie's Girl". Even now, I'm having a hard time steering myself back to the point without telling you all just exactly how many Top 40 songs Rick Springfield had after "Jessie's Girl".

Rick Springfield is a fairly prolific musician--I've lost count now, but he has 114 or 15 albums, I think, not counting comps.

Bruce Cockburn quietly blows him out of the water with 49. Yes, 49. So, "I remember him!" is a strange reaction, even to my own ears. But it's the one I had. You see, Bruce Cockburn is a landmarker in my life. I think that many musicians play that role for us. Bruce Cockburn isn't just a great musician and political activist, he's a symbol of vinyl LP's on my roommate's stereo after dinner in college and political debates far into the night, of speaking on campus and--just once--closing down a state highway.

He's a symbol of the instant connection I felt when my ex-fiance (a man I dated for five years but have now been friends with for 19) said women didn't know anything about music and I said, "My college roommate knows more about music than any man you know" and he said, "Does she know Bruce Cockburn?" I'm pretty sure I yelled "Bruce Cockburn is my favorite musician!"

I only saw Bruce Cockburn live once, at a little theatre-style place called The Riviera on the north side of Chicago. I was in law schoo in Champaign at the time, and I was in a little street-front record store (remember record stores?) buying "Big Circumstance" and the clerk said, "We're going to have tickets". Champaign was about 150 miles from Chicago, but I went right home (or back to the tiny twelfth story room that passed for hom at that point) and called my college roommate. It was an amazing night...the first concert I'd ever been to, I think, that made me turn to her and say, "I don't think I would have changed anything." She responded that she wished he'd done "Nicaragua," and he came right back out and did it.

That was life in the Bruce Cockburn days. Singing by the lagoon at night, covert political meetings, dinner always ready in the cafeteria and pre-paid. Even now, if you ask me at the right moment I'll name "Stealing Fire" as my all-time favorite album, but it's not in the CD player in my car.

And then last night, I sat down to watch a movie with my daughter--some cute little movie about a bunch of teenagers who set out to save burrowing owls from an evil corporation--and with the opening credits they served up "Wondering Where the Lions Are".

"This is 'Wondering Where the Lions Are'!" I said.

My daughter said, "Oh."

I sat up straighter, scooted toward the edge of the couch. "This is Bruce Cockburn!" I said.

She said, "Oh."

"Bruce Cockburn used to be my favorite musician," I tried.

She nodded.

"He's a big political activist. That's probably why he's in this movie." My daughter is all about charity and animals--I thought that might impress her. She nodded again and looked meaningfully at the television, where the movie had started.

"Tomorrow, I'll play 'Stealing Fire' for you," I promised. And she said, "Oh, good."

Googling, Alerts, and Our Own Personal Clipping Services

2007-04-26T17:42:00.000-07:00

Google is not a verb...Google is not a verb...

Sorry. Just felt the need to atone for a moment, for using Google as a verb RIGHT IN MY SUBJECT LINE.

Google hates that. And they're so right. As a lawyer, a person who makes her living based on intellectual property rights, and a staunch opponent of evolution in our language, I'm entirely, 100%, completely, without reservation against the misuse of Google as a generic verb. So much so, that I'm willing to commit radical redundancies in the previous sentence.

Here's my excuse: I really meant "Google", not "search" in a generic sense. And I always really mean Google, because the one and only occasion on which I lowered my standards to use a different search engine was the day my company's server couldn't access Google for a few hours, and then I complained loudly and often about how I couldn't Google and was forced to use Yahoo's search engine instead.

And, of course, I also share the same excuse employed (usually implicitly) by the rest of the population. "Google" is just a much cooler, clearer, more concise, more to-the-point term than "conduct an internet search".

Anyway, I do it a lot for work. All the more, I work to make sure that when other people do it, they find the many websites for which I write, edit, and plan content. I've also recently been encouraging a friend who has a very popular email humor column that she archives on her website to start thinking more about marketing and about getting her website noticed and her column more widely circulated.

With my mind so thoroughly in that groove, it came as a great shock to me the other day when my stepdaughter Googled "Tori Sanders" and "Switch" together and popped up a film trailer starring my daughter (this is great stuff! I know it's an unlikely combination of terms, but no one even TRIED to optimize this!) and my daughter was...outraged.

That's right. No one said "they could put her on Google!" She was dismayed to find that any old person could type in your name and FIND you. She knew the movie trailer was online, and that was fine, because no one saw it unless you sent them a link...or so she thought. The very thing that keeps most businesses from operating successfully online had apparently been her unconscious safety net.

And it is, indeed, a different world when you can "Google" an eleven-year-old and turn up results. I had another taste of that same "different world" phenomenon when a friend recently suggested that everyone should have Google alerts set up in his or her own name. With all the time I spend thinking about internet marketing and search and...well...Google...THAT had never occurred to me. I have several dozen Google alerts set up to come to my mailbox daily, still others as the items appear throughout the day. But none of them had my name on them.

I listened to all the reasons I should have a Google alert in my name. They made no sense to me. I couldn't see why anyone would need a Google alert with her own name on it.

But I set one up anyway.

So it Turns Out My Sister Likes Us

2007-04-24T18:43:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure for a long time. I'm not sure why. It might have been the way she walked around singing that old Juliana Hatfield song, "I hate my sister" under her breath. And not so under her breath. It might have been the way I'd send her email back when we were both on AOL and you could see whether or not mail had been opened, and it would eventually drop off her her "new mail" list after thirty days without ever having been read. It might have been that comment she made to her ex-boyfriend about how she didn't want to hang out with me and my friends because we "talked about square roots and laughed".

I'll have you know that radicals can be very entertaining in their place.

Anyway, she started a new job a few months ago, and this past week it happened that she needed a ride to pick up her paycheck. Imagine my surprise when I saw a photograph of her and my daughter prominently displayed on her desk. Imagine my even greater surprise when her co-workers asked my daughter knowledgeable, targeted questions like, "How did your speech contest go?"

Okay, okay--I realize that all of the evidence thus far indicates only that she likes my daughter, but trust me. It's close enough. And she showed us all of the best art, the sacred old books (sacred not because it's a Catholic college library and many of the books actually ARE sacred, but because they're more than a hundred years old and demand reverence in handling even if they happen to be about the newly discovered health dangers associated with the common house fly), and the window from which you can allegedly see Chicago on a clear day. It wasn't a clear day, but it was a spectacular view nonetheless.

It was a little reminiscent of...well, actually I can't say exactly what it was a little reminiscent of. Was looking out the tower window into the distance a bit like climbing the art building on my old college campus twenty years ago? No, not at all. And yes. Did the old first-edition Mark Twain (who knew there were OTHER Tom Sawyer stories?) remind me that I'd put the first "classics" into her hands while she was still in elementary school? Not really. And kind of. Did watching her show my daughter her domain remind me of touring my own undergraduate campus with her? I'll bet you can guess the answer to that...or both of them.

I guess most of all it was a little reminiscent of being sisters, something we don't do enough of these days, while she's busy being a librarian and a girlfriend and I'm being a writer and a mother and the world keeps moving at such an amazing pace. But the truth is, I like her, too.

What Exactly IS a Good Deed, Anyway?

2007-04-22T08:18:00.000-07:00

It's a funny question, I know. We probably recognize good deeds in other people all the time. But it's a nebulous concept, at least in my mind.

Recently, I was charged with "doing a good deed for someone". The open-endedness of the mission troubled me from the outset.

That was more than a week ago, and I still haven't done it. I think.

You see, since that day I have given money to at least one homeless person, driven my sister 25 miles to pick up her paycheck when she was having trouble with her car, given away a reference card I've been carrying in my purse for years to a stranger, taken someone else's child to two half-day events at my own expense, bought clothing for a friend of my daughter's, and made a pie for my father. There may be more, but the problem is, I was going to do all of those things, anyway. Or at least, I didn't do any of them with the conscious thought of doing a good deed.

I think an actual "good deed" requires conscious thought, though that troubles me because I think the people who do the most good deeds are least conscious of them and find them almost automatic. And I don't seem to know how to plan one. I don't know the definition. I don't know where the line is. Does family count? How much time and effort does it have to take? Is it measured by what you put into it, or what the recipient gets out of it?

It seems to me these are exactly the kinds of things we're not supposed to be thinking about--and yet, catchphrases like "do a good turn daily" are with us as early as Brownies. Why didn't anyone ever tell us what a good turn WAS?

Why I'm Madly in Love with My Kid, Part 7648.3

2007-04-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

After reading the comment to my post from a couple of days ago, I realized that I did, indeed, have something worth saying, "Listen up, world!" about.

It's not about my daughter's speech-giving abilities, though I'm more than happy to talk about those. It's about the "all I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten" kinds of lessons that came out of my daughter's speech team experience.

You see, there was no "speech team". It was a competition. First, the competition took place in each classroom, and then the winners went on to compete against each other to see which one child would go on to the district speech competition. Only one of them would go on to the next level.

The very wise teacher who was in charge of helping them prepare not only worked with them on research, writing, and presentation skills, but she chose to work with them in a group. Before long, the kids were referring to themselves as "speech team", although no one had used that phrase TO them, and in fact, they weren't on the same team at all...they were each other's competition.

My daughter didn't win. She did a great job, but she didn't win. When one of her friends was announced as the winner, my daughter put her hands over her face and screamed liked the winners of the Miss America pageant used to do (is that still on?). When one of her friends walked away crying because she didn't win, my daughter followed her and came back holding her hand.

The principal gave a nice speech at the end about all of the skills these kids had learned--research and public speaking and all of that--but later in the evening my daughter said to me, "I thought of something Mr. P didn't mention about what we all got out of this. The best part was how we all became so much better friends and we all wanted each other to do good."

I was so overwhelmed I didn't even say "do WELL."