Working the balance

 Saturday I went to the women's march in Portland. Sunday night I settled in to read a chapter or two of a book I'd started and finished it at 5 a.m. Got up at 9:30 rested and satisfied.

Those two acts are related.

I got drunk Saturday night -- not on purpose, but because I hadn't eaten much all day and had wine when I got home. It felt like a good celebration for accomplishing something I felt I ought to do with all the mixed feelings it engendered. 

There was disquiet: I wanted to share in the emotional excitement that many of my fellow protestors had, an "old home week" sense that "Yay! We're pulling together to fight again!" I do not begrudge people obtaining the positive emotions they need to stay active. 

But it felt almost indecent to me, given the stakes. 

I didn't see that happiness in any of the faces of the women of color I saw. With some exceptions, they all looked grim, determined and tired. That disparity jarred me. They have so much, much, much more to lose than I do. 

I took a vacation from political work (which involved many acts and songs borrowed from the civil rights movement) after the anti-gay activists were defeated in Oregon. Very few women of color felt they had that option; they have been busy protesting police violence and other nearly-as-lethal forms of discrimination without such a break. 

So I also felt guilt mixed with a determination not to let other women down: an echo of the sense I didn't do enough during the election, including dealing with the racism among fellow white women; and a reaction to the "where the hell have you all been" and "I hope to hell you all show up again" feeling I got from some other protestors. (I know some white women have been involved all along. I haven't been).

There was exhaustion: I juggling those emotions on very little food in the cold, and more wearingly I spent a full day surrounded by other people. (Had I been carrying a sign, one side should have read "So bad even the introverts are here.") 

Finishing Ms. Cherryh's book early Monday morning left my brain with a very settled, satisfied feeling. Everything was in order, the plot points and all its characters were accounted for, and the bad guys had gotten their comeuppance -- all in a way that allowed for future novels. It was *complete.* A good novel is a very satisfying thing. My brain felt like it had had a delightful meal complete with dessert. 

Very little is settled or satisfying in my life right now. Political action can bring a certain satisfaction, but it also carries vulnerability with an backwash of futility and despair. I have to manage that, deal with it so I can continue to act. 

Writing feels almost exactly the same way. I'm writing better than ever, when I allow myself the focus and the time. But there's also a sense of futility: I'm aging faster than I'm completing anything and who knows if I'll ever publish? (And how can I if I don't finish and submit?)

Political action feels like an endless long-term project in which I can easily make mistakes I can't fix, AND I can never see how much headway I'm making.

Reading and cooking give me a sense of completion that is short-term and stabilizing. 

Crafts and hobbies bridge the two: most are longer-term projects that result in a concrete end product I can hold and enjoy, or at least a finish line such as a concert (ready or not). In the choir I sing with, we aim for 80 percent or better as individuals. At that level we can carry each other to a beautiful and moving performance. A too-narrow focus on perfection can actually detract from performance.

In my writing craft, much of my struggle with lack of completion is the sense that what I currently have isn't good enough. If I want a sense of stability and accomplishment around my writing I need to give up the sense that it needs to be perfect before I send it into the world.

And I need to maintain a balance in my life in other areas so I can continue to act politically, consistently and over the long haul. 

I need to fix the holes in MY work so I can do THE work.

Lessons from a science-fiction murder mystery Grande Dame

Not a review; notes about what I'm reading that might help me improve my own writing.

I cannot believe I've not read anything by Kate Wilhelm until this recently. She's a grande dame of Science Fiction and an Oregon treasure, and apparently many of her thriller/mystery novels are set in the Pacific Northwest. I recently read Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, about cloning and the nature of humanity, and last night finished Death Qualified.

Death Qualified is a Barbara Halloway mystery (she's written a baker's dozen, I believe) published in 1991. At 25 years old,  it is in many ways a period piece: the use of floppy disks, the lack of easy communication, the reliance on land lines, the science gaps (at one point a mathematician dismisses the possibility of reliable weather predictions), the villain's motivation, all set it clearly in a bygone decade. That said, it is damn well written and quite compelling, and if people can read novels set in WWII with glee there's no reason not to read something set in the decade I graduated from high school.

Strengths
Sense of place. This was in part because this is set in my home state, not far from where I live, so  I could see many of the places she refers to. That's always fun. But she went deep into the SENSE of important settings, both the sensory input for the character and the emotional resonance that character felt for that place, and that worked at a very deep level.

 It uses chaos theory, which I find fascinating, as a metaphor and plot device. Hell,  I'll read almost anything that has fractals in it.

One thing I thought was a weakness was the lack of transitions in some places, but now that I've thought about it a bit, I realized that in the beginning, there were long gaps of time without clarity, intended to make the reader feel what the "lost" character was feeling. Years-long gaps in the narrative slowly became shorter and shorter until we were month by month, then day by day, then meal by meal, and finally in the hair-raising last few pages, second by second.

At the halfway point, I looked at how much book was left and said, "how?" but Wilhelm took the plot in a slightly different, and finally darker, direction than I expected. I had by that point correctly figured out who the killer was (not tellin') which of course makes a nerdbody feel good.  I gulped that entire last half of a 440-page paperback in one evening, and that pacing is largely to "blame."

She created compelling to reasonably compelling characters, all of whom felt true to me as someone who's lived in this state for most of my life.  Because of the plot, she created some evil academics, but balanced them with good ones, and the rural characters are all for the most part real people, which I appreciated. The far-off college campus and the academic realities of the bad folks seem tissue-thin, however.

Reveal: Wilhelm sets nearly all her hooks at the beginning, instead of the usual "set one hook, pay it off, set another hook" plotting, although new hooks got added here and there. There was *so much* hidden from the readers at the beginning that some readers I know would have dropped the novel, but I love that interlaced depth. Everything was unknown, including the opening POV character's real name, because HE didn't know who he was, where he was, who he could trust. And as it went on, the mystery around why he'd been kept essentially a prisoner and never discovered deepened. (This is also a weakness; I had a lot of trouble believing that they could change his name and keep him on the same campus and NOBODY would notice, but that detail doesn't become clear until one is so far into the novel that it's easy to slide on by).

Weaknesses
Some of the science feels weak,  but that's an age-of-book thing (and a "I wasn't aware of that" thing --- apparently there is a theory about object boundaries and brain injuries I didn't know about).

Bad guys not fully fleshed out: One villain is painted clearly, but his/her (not tellin') motivation is muddled, and not strong enough to justify the crime/s committed. Perhaps that's also a 25-year difference in culture, but I think it's more a 25-year difference in what the reading public would *accept* as a reason for murder. In that glaring error, the book has aged very badly. Can't even explain that without ruining it, but let's just say LGBT readers might that aspect upsetting. Motivation for someone else is unclear and that character *is* a cardboard villain.

What I can learn for my own writing
Relax and take my time. This may have been published 15 years ago by an established author (she first published in 1963, and she's got more than 50 novels to her name), but the pages of detail she lavishes to build that world painted those characters, created that sense of place.

If I want that depth of richness in my own prose I need to quit pushing short-story brevity into novel-length works.

Make your villains 3-D and not just heroes in their own minds but acceptably comprehensible at some level to readers. As in, "wow, that is screwed up rationalization, but I get how she got there" instead of "who thinks like that?" or worse, "Uh, no. That's not happening. S/he is too sane for that." Which, you know--I can't grok why anyone sane who isn't a neo-Nazi would vote for Trump, so--maybe I should expand my definition of acceptably comprehensible. Real life, however, is not an excuse for flimsy fiction.

That sense of place and emotional evocation of place (and people, for that matter). I might do that exercise where you copy a few pages of someone's fiction and then rewrite a scene of my own in an attempt to get the same feeling/style. Need to do that with James Lee Burke and NK Jemisin and Bradbury and LeGuin.

I'm not going to write much about Where Late The Sweet Bird Sang because while it is a classic, and I'm very glad I read it, it has not aged as well.  I should also be honest that short books that leap generations annoy me. I spend all that time with an initial cast of characters and I turn a page and now they're all dead and I'm supposed to instantly care about their offspring because, "humanity?" *boots book out airlock* Yeah, I'm not a fan of that concept.

There's a message about the reality of plans to survive climate change which I find very apropos despite the book's age. It feels like an entirely different style than the book above -- it's nice to see that in an author's collection of works.

But it also reads like a book that wouldn't get published today, and I'm not sure why. I'm certainly not qualified to say that, since I've read so little of what's coming out, but ... just reading it evoked my middle-school library, where I checked out so many of the sci-fi books I binged on and then forgot I'd read. There's a bright through-line in a lot of that fiction that's not character but idea; idea excitedly explored. You have to handwave so many variables to buy into the premise that the only thing you can do is cling to that idea and hurtle along with the author to his or her conclusion.

Which is the novel's sole weakness; its strengths are many--description, concepts, sense of place, emotional evocation among others. So what could I learn from it?

To make generation-spanning fiction work for me it has to be obvious from the get-go that's going to happen.

Don't dismiss idea fiction--it can be a powerful story form.

Again, taking some of the sections of emotional evocation of place and dissecting the text for what works.

Tone and style matter. And I need to learn more about how to use and create both.

Name change in the offing

Well, shit, I need to rename the blog. Just realized it's *way* too close to the blog name of one of my idols/inspirations (who I follow on Twitter, Facebook, but apparently have never actually looked at her BLOG). *headdesk, headdesk, headdesk* She's had "Epiphany 2.0" since 2008, it appears.

So. I haven't changed it yet because I don't know what to change it to -- but a name change is happening soon. And this time I'll freakin' google variations instead of just the word.  *shuffles off, annoyed at self*

2016 in writing review: I did not totally suck, again.

Year in review post of sorts. Since January of last year, I:

• wrote 38K new words (plus Feb/March, which I didn't record)
• did 53 skill-building sessions (roughly one per week; better than I thought I'd done)
• finished one novel revision and
• sent that manuscript to beta readers (and read and took notes on all feedback)
• read 21 books, 15 of them novels (though novel analysis was more miss-than-hit)
• did 110 critiques (two novels) as part of my participation in two crit groups
• submitted short stories five times
• wrote four blog posts
• took three writing classes (WTO, RW, and NKH ss class*)
• went to one writing conference
• hosted a writing retreat.

Huh.

New word count is really, really low (I usually top 100K but I didn't do NaNoWrimo this year and I didn't track any of the manuscript rewriting as "new words") and I really need to submit more. But  ... maybe I don't totally suck.

Really, that's the reason I do an insane level of hashmarks and spend part of every day recording time spent on activities that I'll never be paid for -- to remind myself that I'm not twiddling my thumbs eating bonbons every day. Because next week I won't have any idea how I spent today; next month I won't remember this blog post; by the end of the year I won't remember whether I spent the entire month writing or shoveling snow or reading incendiary anti-Trump rants on Twitter. (For the record, I did spend some time doing the latter).

But I'll *assume* I wasted my time and accomplished nothing in every case, because that's how I'm wired. If I don't write it down I forget it, and if I don't write it down or check what I wrote down I beat myself up for not getting anything done. Of that list above, all I remembered without looking at my records was I'd read a few books, finished the novel revision (hard to forget that milestone, yay!) and took a class. Oh yeah, and that retreat. And I did a blog post in there somewhere, and was that other class this year or last -- maybe I should check?

Keeping track keeps me from burning myself in effigy for incompetence and uselessness Every. Damn. Year. As a depressive person to begin with it's a worthy enough cause that I keep it up.

This month, I'm experimenting with bullet journaling, because it's essentially what I've been doing, only ORGANIZED.  (Organized is good. Hell, organized is the holy grail. I'd post a picture of my box-and-paper-piled office to show you why, but I'd never recover from the shame).

I use People System's uncalendar and I love, love, love it. I keep mine in a big high-school zipup binder and call it my Brain and if I lost it, I'd cry for a very long time.

Uncalendar's clunky website (they seem to be unwilling to post images of their pages anymore)

It's an incredibly flexible and integrated (as much as you want it to be) system and I've been using it for decades. It's already a diary/planner/organizer/taskmanager/journal in one place, which is the cool thing about a bullet journal. I use the monthly pages to track what I did every day and keep track of my goals.

But as I've done more and more with the uncalendar over the years, I hadn't figured out how to organize the pieces, so I was wasting a lot of time flipping through finding the right pages. Just the concept of adding an INDEX -- yeah, yeah, I know -- was a light bulb moment for me. My index was in my highly scattered frontal cortex, but having an actual page is... helpful, okay?

And the idea of doing fun arty things to leaven what has become crammed pages of solid text just cheered me up. I added a bookcase drawing for my book list, for example, and tore out an adult coloring book page to illustrate my "rewards" page (because I'm not much of a skilled doodler but I like the idea of breaking up all those lines of text with fun and colorful images). 

If you're not familiar with bullet journaling go visit these pages and some of the links:

shannagermain's bullet-journaling-for-writers

or

Something delicious on bullet journaling for novelists

 and you'll see what I mean by arty journals and designs-incorporated-into-goals-and-tracking. AWESOME but a little beyond me for starters. It took me half a day to draw a bookcase page I liked. LOL.

But I'm already way beyond some of what they're doing for *tracking* (daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal tasks and goals) and I want to keep that because maintaining it gives me a good continuity of comparison. Some of what's not working, though, I could shift to their visual system-- it could be faster and less repetitive. Just need to experiment a bit.

2017's writing goals will be similar.

• Need to finish the beta manuscript SOON and send it out to agents (I'll give it a year of submission, and then if no-one bites I'll self-publish, I think). 
• I'd like to read more books this year *and pay more attention* to what made them tick.
• I'd like to write more fresh fiction but I'm discovering as I get better I have less tolerance for what feels like "junk/crap" stories with no point (but I don't know if it can be more than junk until I finish it enough that it can be revised, now do I?) More skill-building sessions--writing just to practice--might help me get past that.
• Submit more short stories! I have nearly 100 short stories. I should have more than one sale. I can't sell if I don't submit!

How was your year? What are you planning on for 2017?

*
Writing the Other (Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford)
Revolutionary Writing (Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due
Joy of Short Story Writing (Nina Kiriki Hoffman)