Today I give you the “people are amazing” grin, courtesy of the Axis of Awesome.
 

Muchas gracias a Karina, mi hermana de corazon, quien sabe cómo me hace sonrier!

“Don’t marry the one you think you can live with; marry the one you know you can’t live without.”– Dr. James Dobson
 
(paraphrased, because he should have said it this way. Where was his editor?)

I never expected to be married. But it turns out that my life is full of surprises, and this is one of the very, very best.
 

 

Enjoy your day.

Apologies for the annoying popup annotations. To turn them off, mouse onto the little up-arrow at the bottom right of the player, and then click the triangular icon to turn off annotations.
 

The context is that ABC Primetime set up an experiment in how Americans are responding to prejudice. Do watch it all the way through; there are some amazing moments.

(click though here if the embedded link doesn’t work; YouTube’s being unpredictable).
 

 
Of all my many fears, one of the greatest is that my courage will fail me when I need it, or when someone else does.

Well, here we are (big grin). I’m very pleased.

These are first-draft words. Some of them are stinky-bad, but you know, some of them are pretty damn good. And this particular goal wasn’t so much about “finishing” as it was about beginning. I’m glad I have.

Thank you so much to all who have supported me! The fact that you gave money to Clarion West to encourage me to write has made me feel quite humble and, hmm… well, it’s what made me so determined not just to reach a number, but to begin a journey. Going somewhere scary and wonderful, somewhere on the border between familiar and new, that place where we all intersect and story is the line between us. It means a lot to me that people care about a story I might tell. Thanks for helping me begin.

There’s a particular synchronicity that happens for me in writing: as I start to go deeper into my story, the world around me begins to bring small potential story-things to my attention — some bit of behavior that might work for a character, or a phrase that leads me into a new scene, or… well, it could be anything. My brain knows this work is important to me, and so it points me toward things that might be related. This is actually a well-established brain mechanism (the reticular activating system), but it never fails to surprise and delight me even after all these years. I have learned to trust it as a fundamental part of the writing process and to follow these “twitches” of my attention.

Last night I was flipping through an issue of The New Yorker, past the fiction, because I never read the fiction — I find too often their tastes lean toward precious prose coupled with poor storytelling, and life’s too short. But last night I stopped. And flipped back. And read the whole story because of a phrase that caught my eye. I noticed the phrase because my RAS nudged me, and the story (which was actually pretty good, that woman can write) has given me lots of little pieces of setting, and evoked memories of my own that I think will serve me well in my own book.

Being open in this way is a huge part of being a writer, for me. Then comes the challenge of deciding what to keep of all the shiny things the world brings me as presents. That’s another huge part.

And of course, I’m also finding things on the intarweb and in the real world (not that there’s much difference these days) to amuse me. I may be the last person online to see this video — or maybe I’m the second-to-last (grin). I don’t think there will be any Jane Austen in my book (although there is some fighting), but this is just the ticket for today!

Enjoy

Happy birthday, Maxfield! Thank you for your work that has become such a part of me. Isn’t it amazing, that we can do that for each other?

Write-a-thon running total: 10,540 words out of 12,000. This is the last week of the Write-a-thon, and my goal is in sight. Thank you to everyone who has sponsored me and all the other writers. And we’re not done yet — if you know anyone who wants to support great writing in the world, please send them to Clarion West to make a donation to encourage any of these fine writers to keep heading towards the finish line. So many amazing novels and stories are being born right now because of your help!

And how I love the unexpected gifts that stories bring me. The out-of-nowhere metaphors that open up new ways of feeling the story, the moments that are beginning to snick together like gears, the sudden rush of a path forward that widens rather than narrows as I follow it. Happy times for this writer.

I cannot help but fall in love with my characters, and these early days are like the first wild phase of romance when the goal is simply to dig into another person, to learn their body and mind and history and heart. For me, writing starts with wandering around inside character. Which is fine — but it’s not a story. In stories, things happen, people collide, the world turns sometimes too fast.

So it’s always a relief to move from finding characters to finding scenes, and I’ve enjoyed this last week writing actual scenes in which actual things happen (grin). We need it all — plot and character, event and feeling, choice and consequence, the external story and the story inside the character. They are like a contra dance, weaving in and out. Do you know contra dance? It’s based on folk dancing, but it’s not a square dance — it’s done in lines, and by the end of the set, everyone in the lines has danced with everyone else. Now there’s a metaphor for story…
 
This one starts a lot on the band (which is fine, they are great) and then moves into video of the dancing:
 

 
And here’s a whole new movement in contra dance. I promise the sparkly bits stop quickly, and I could do without the MTV editing, but it’s a very cool combination of music and dancing:
 

 
Enjoy your day.

Enjoy your day.

Although I understand the benefits of writing events like NaNoWriMo or Script Frenzy, it is really not my way to blow past sections of story that I know in my bones aren’t working just to meet a wordcount goal. In my experience, glaring wrong turns just lead to dead ends in the story. Wrong turns can be fixed, but not (at least for me) by “writing my way through them.” I actually just have to go back and find the better path. I admire and envy the writers who can simply switch gears from one scene to the next and “act as if” what came before has led them unerringly to the new place. But me, I find that jumping track that way just leads me to make new mistakes rather than rectifying old ones.

I’m enjoying it. And I’m finding it difficult, like all writers with other jobs, to make the brain switch back and forth between writing, editing, board-chairing… One of the essential eternal wrestles of this culture, no? One part of this brain-switching challenge that is hard to explain is that writing brings up all sorts of things from the tunnels within the writer; some of those things are fun to feel/imagine/live, and some of them are not. It might just be “a story,” but parts of it come from deep and sometimes unexpected places, with sometimes unexpected results. And it affects my moods, and sometimes colors my perception of the “real world” (whatever that is). I feel things as true that are not actually true for me right now, even though they may once have been (or will be again). I feel old fears and old losses and old confusions, and sometimes I don’t know where the fuck they come from until I’m on the other side of them and can see, Oh, it’s a writing thing.

Sometimes it’s damned hard to step away from the story world without bringing the story along. In fact, I think it’s mostly impossible. Learning to make the brain-switch anyway, in spite of it all, is a necessary skill, and I have no idea how to ‘teach” it because I’m still learning it myself. But I’m lucky to live with another writer and see this happening to someone else enough that I understand it’s an actual process, an actual feature of being an artist. Otherwise I might just think I was nuts.

Now I will go do something else and see if I can glide back into the rational world. Enjoy your day.