He handed the jar to me, a small glass container with a fluttery light inside it, some kind of hybrid between electricity, butterflies, and lightning bugs. The glass lid clattered a little as there was nothing sealing it to the jar itself.
For all of its importance Jayman pressed it into my hands without much care, not waiting to see if I had a firm grip on the thing before he headed back off toward his cubicle. I almost dropped it, and that would have been a disaster.
I went back to Whidbey Island yesterday to hear Corbin Lewars give a presentation: How to Persevere with Your Writing. One could argue that driving four hours round-trip was in and of itself “perseverance,” so why even drive out there? But then if one didn’t go, then they wouldn’t exactly be persevering and well, I think I just found a paradox. Or an alignment of truth. Whatever. I only passed that logic class in college because the TA took a shine to me, I’m sure, because there is no way that 50 points on each exam equals a C. Read More…
A couple of weeks ago, Johanna Harness on her blog talked about literary rejection as not unlike the experience of learning to walk. We humans, we learn to stand, then take small steps while holding onto something sturdier than ourselves, and we fall down, a whole hell of a lot. Somehow when we’re toddlers, without all of this cumbersome self-reflection and analysis, we don’t really mind the hiccups that are part and parcel with the learning process. But sheesh, get a couple of “I’m just not the right agent” letters, decades later, and it can be an unraveling worse than seeing your favorite baby blanket in tatters.
Something happened in the meanwhile, Johanna posits, that changed how we feel regarding the negative side of the learning process. And it behooves people trying to write for a living to retain the totality of experiences related to getting work published. Read More…
This story is old. Old, old, old, like nearly two decades worth of mold growth old. But as I’m otherwise occupied today, with writing something new and inventive and much better than this, I thought I’d share. The story here today is not entirely based on a new story, but it certainly has elements of early 1990s Syracuse. Enjoy!
It’s about the size of a typical urban efficiency apartment, with a faded certificate of occupancy stuck on the wall by the front door, probably with some bouncer’s chewing gum, announcing it is fit to house 35 people legally. Thirty-five dyke pygmies, maybe, but not 35 wide-assed people. Smoke hangs next to the low ceiling, hovering around the light over the small and slanted pool table, a cheap but efficient way of adding a dramatic atmosphere to both the serious and poseur sharks who swim underneath it. Most of the patrons use pool-playing as a tried and true method of picking up dates, but this usually leads to them slamming the stick into the cue ball too hard, ricocheting the shot out of the hole and ending in a staccato set of swears as they express their “disappointment.”
My friends and I have just entered the place for the third time in five days because one of them has a new crush on a townie who usually hangs out here. Usually, however, being the relative term that it is, has not included any of these three nights, and has led directly to my frustration at winding up in this dump once again, cheap beer or no cheap beer. Read More…
He watched the activity around him: fruit salesman, old woman selling goat cheese, some loud man pulling people aside to show them silk scarves. Teddy was a little afraid of the scarves man.
Walking around seemed better than standing here waiting for Sophie to come back. The last he had noticed her, she’d been counting out change to give the woman from the dairy, two rows over.
“…Twenty-three, twenty-four, and twenty-five cents,” she’d said, standing up straight and running her hands down her skirt. She didn’t like touching money, she’d told Teddy. It was very dirty, probably the dirtiest thing a person would touch all day, except for live chickens. Read More…
This is a section of my memoir from chapter 28. It runs about 20 minutes long. If you like zombies and gross anatomy, this chapter is for you.
There is nothing that fazes the Seattle barista. She is self-assured, extremely well trained, and fearless. Every possible additive, custom request, and black market good has probably been mixed into brewed coffee in this city. I bet I could even find a barista to take my order in Klingon. (Not that I know Klingon.)
There are as many kinds of coffee shops in Seattle as there are permutations of coffee drinks. The sit and work shop, with loads of sturdy tables and electrical outlets. The drive-through shacks that look ready to fall over. Fancy, plush shops with comfortable seating but few places to hook up a laptop. Evil shops that make patrons pay for the wifi. Well, we all know I don’t spend any time at those.
If coffee shops are the standard bearer for commercial space in Seattle, then there are a few set uniforms one wears within their confines. The options, it appears to me, at least in my first month here, include:
The Very Serious Not Happy Rather Intense Intellectual—Ninety percent of these folks are men, because women have difficulty becoming quite this pretentious. Black hooded sweatshirt, rumpled jeans that, if one were to venture close enough, would smell of the carpet from the wearer’s bedroom, and black sneakers. At the height of summer the footwear could be flip flops, but only because the sneakers couldn’t be found under yesterday’s jeans. Optionally this person may be wearing thick black glasses, retro styled. It is questionable whether his eyesight warrants correction, however. But be quiet around him, because he’s writing something very important, and he doesn’t want his craft interrupted.
The Hat-Wearer—Also mostly of the male persuasion. We’re not talking baseball caps, either, since those are so omnipresent as to be unremarkable in every way. We’re talking either the old man’s wool cap like the one here, or the plaid Fedora hat, like the kind popularized by Jason Mraz. They’re definite statement-makers. Nobody puts on either of these head toppers without giving a good stare at themselves in the mirror before leaving home. Should it be cocked a little to one side? Tilted back? Pulled down low? Hmm, so many options to consider for one item. They’re clearly just accessories, as neither does anything to say, keep one’s ears warm in the winter.
The tech geeks—They have walked so far from their office, maybe even three-quarters of a block. They shield themselves from the bright lamp in the sky the rest of us know as the sun. They keep their work badges clipped tightly to their clothing, lest some non-techie refuse them reentry into their natural environment. These are the folks from Yahoo! or Amazon or Microsoft who felt some need to get caffeine from some place other than the 14 Starbucks in their office building. Nevertheless, all they talk about out in the real world is work. Fortunately for the rest of us in the coffee house, they never stay long. Their badges may self-destruct if they’re too far away from their computers for long.
The Shoppers—Lest everyone think I’m sexist, I do admit that this species comes in male and female versions. Few coffee shops in Seattle are all that far from some other retail establishment, zoning being what it is. They’ll sit down with their bags from REI, or Anne Taylor Loft, Sur La Table, or Banana Republic, drink up some brew, and head back out for round 2. We should all thank them for keeping up their end of the economy-consuming bargain.
The Holders of the Blackberries—At first, they look like good friends. Old friends. People who are out in the world, enjoying each other’s company. But then, almost with no warning, the small electronic devices are drawn, like guns at high noon, and then there they are, cramping their thumb muscles, scanning for some tiny typed email that they’ll care about for the next 18 seconds, however long it takes to scroll through, whichever comes sooner. Unless whatever missive is of interest to both of them, they’ll fall silent, typing and scrolling, clicking and chewing on their lips, lost to all of us in their hyperspace environment. And just when one forgets about them, up they’ll pop, back in our shared universe, giggling and tittering, or guffawing about the stupid spam their friend just passed along to them. Oh, those LOLCats are funny!
Despite all of this, I cherish the coffee house as a place to write, because as the youngest of many, I need external stimulation to tune out just to get in my groove. There is nothing worse to me than being able to hear a pin drop. So it’s a wonder why I went with Sprint for my phone service, but that’s another story.
Several writer’s groups in town meet in coffee shops, presumably for their ample flat surfaces and their stimulant-laced beverages. I finally made it to one yesterday, having been flummoxed in my first attempt by evening commute traffic. It was great to meet other science fiction writers, even if there were only two of them, and even if they gave me, individually, conflicting advice. I’ve signed up for a few more meet ups, and overall, I’m sure I’ll have some strong comprehension about how to rewrite my novel in progress. And if I don’t get that, at least I’ll have met some fellow lit geeks along the way. As long as the blackberry people stay away.
Just to note, Everett Maroon owns a black hooded sweatshirt, black plastic glasses, an a Kangol hat. But not a Blackberry. Note #2: Scott Perkins has decided to take some kind of offense to my blog post and make it all about him, but at least he had the courtesy to offer a defense of his hat-wearing, which, cleverly, is apparently for the protection of the people around him, and not his own laziness at styling the hair on his head. Well done, Scott!
Here’s the stereotype: the serious writer, a man of some undisclosed age, forehead pressed into wrinkles of determination, a bottle of almost good Scotch on the desk next to his trusty typewriter, pounds away on the keys creating the Next Great American Novel. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air from the three packs of unfiltered goodness that were previously consumed. He writes in isolation, lost in the characters, nuance, and craft.
Nobody wants to know this guy. This is the prat at the cocktail party who puts down everyone else’s work, deaf to the echoes of his own conversation. This writer is isolated because he can’t relate to anyone, and nobody wants to deal with him.
In reality, at the risk of sounding cliched, writers come in all shapes and sizes. We write all kinds of things, attesting to the more than million books published just in the US last year. And while I may not enlist a Greek chorus to sing behind me as I make words happen on the screen, I definitely need community. I’m not the only one who longs for other writers around me, either. Dozens upon dozens of writer’s lists and hashtags abound on Twitter, there are tons of groups on Facebook, and specific sites for writers on the interwebs, like the blogs and forums on Writer’s Digest, and places like WriterFace. Squidoo has a huge list of online communities, for further reading.
A couple of weeks ago, writer’s helper and publishing pro Jane Friedman interviewed Johanna Harness, a YA author seeking, like many of us are, an agent for her work. Harness started the #amwriting hashtag on Twitter, something used daily now by more than 2,000 writers, myself included. We do this because we want and need community. In her response to the interview, Harness said:
. . . as writers, we often don’t have the resilience of toddlers. A single rejection is like a stumble. “How many stumbles?” we ask. And, of course, the answer is, “as many as it takes.” Do toddlers stop and analyze and blame the floor and the furniture and the people and the dog for their fall? Not in my experience. They may wail, but they also adapt with equal passion.
This is a great analogy, one that the mean, bitter, isolated writer would spare no effect to mock, but it shows the importance of community: a reminder that we face the same struggles as unpublished (and even published) writers, and we all sting when we get another rejection or have another challenging writing day. Community is vital because we can put our few data points together and see patterns—everyone starts somewhere, everyone pours energy into writing well, everyone comes up against what looks like impossible resistance. And everyone thinks of giving up. It’s only when we see that others have been in these positions before that we figure out this is the topography, this is the process. We need to get backed into corners because then we fight for our work. We need to look at our writing and stay humble, willing to revise, always, but not let the bottom fall out and crumple it into the trash or, for 21st Century folks, delete the file and light the laptop on fire. So knowing other writers we have a built-in stop gap to keep us from our most desperate acts when we’re in the throes of self-loathing. Part of the process, part of the process, that frustration.
More pragmatically, community helps set us up as stronger writers. We know where the next contest is about to pop up, who just started a new literary journal, which agents are looking for that werewolf novel one wrote three years ago—but couldn’t sell because the market was all Team Jacobified—that may be just the thing to send in now. Many writers are forthright and helpful, sending out notices about scammers, peppering the Web with links of interest, and the like.
Fellow writers are also great critics. We know weak writing when we see it, but we’re not apt to rip it apart because we have empathy for our colleagues. Writer’s groups may not always be the most effective way of rewriting—sometimes people can’t see past their own creative choices when giving or receiving feedback—but only rarely are they disingenuous. And people who contribute to writer’s groups via a line of invective don’t last long.
I’d been a part of writer’s workshops when I was younger, and there really is nothing like the quickfire exchange of ideas around a room, when one can barely scratch out story ideas because they’re flying in so fast. We all need some amount of quiet time to just write and draft—except those of us who are true co-writers—but it is critical to have a coming back together to re-root ourselves before we forge ahead again.
Maybe people will find these sentiments cloying or over-reliant on others. Writers still need to get their work done, have their own stories to tell, their own voices come through in the work. But it’s a harder thing, for me at least, to pretend to be an island in all of this. I prefer acknowledging my colleagues.
Everett currently writes speculative fiction, memoir, and commentary in Seattle, Washington, and is eager to join a few writer’s groups there.
Over on Twitter last Monday, folks were conversing about the concept of confession—in 140 characters or less, which is more demanding that it might seem at first glance. It got me thinking, as good conversations do, about confession. According to Merriam-Webster, confession means:
1: an act of confessing; especially : a disclosure of one’s sins in the sacrament of reconciliation b : a session for the confessing of sins <go to confession>3: an organized religious body having a common creed
Confession can sure be hokey. Or absurd and unbelievable. It seems to me that confession is a pretty good barometer of how well one’s plot is holding together; if the confession seems funny when it’s serious, or causes eyerolls for the reader, it’s a bridge to far, and that means the plot has gone too far on its own out of solid story territory.On the advice of some guy who makes a lot of money blogging and has sold books from podcasting, I made a podcast. This is chapter 1 from Bumbling into Body Hair: Tales of a Klutz’s Sex Change. If it’s something people like, I’ll make more. Otherwise, let’s just pretend this never happened.
Trans/plant/portation 