Sacred Naptime

I'll be blogging over at sacrednaptime.wordpress.com from now on.  I've loved writing THIS IS NOT MY DAY JOB and it's crazy to see the almost 300 posts (and over 2k comments!) from the last few years. But I want to begin blogging about some different things. Writing exclusively about, well, writing has become too constraining. And I hope that soon writing will be my day job, so how about that title becoming extinct?

Meanwhile, I do all my writing, both freelance and commercial, during nap times and after baby bedtime -- hence the new title. Nap times really are sacred to me!

I hope I'll see you over there!

~Guinevere

It's hard to type with one hand

I'm a mom now.

She's the smooshy-mouthed, kissable-cheeked, red-haired (where did that come from?) little light of my life.

I am very happy. 

It's hard to type with one hand, though. Someone needs to be held at all times. But we're figuring things out, and I'll be back to it soon. :)

The Year of the Many Changes

One of the benefits I've found of being pregnant? Everyone has thoughts on pregnancy and children they're eager to share with you. There's always something to talk about.

One of the worst things? Everyone has thoughts... 

For the most part, I love being pregnant. I even love being "huge", as one of my coworkers often points out I am. I so many horror stories about the terrible, insensitive things people say to pregnant women, but I am either surrounded by thoughtful people or blissfully immune to insensitivity (except for the huge thing. That can stop anytime...). There was one conversation that was kind of funny, though. 

Me: "It's going to be a busy year. Leaving the Marines, having a baby, starting a new job..."

Friendly but random person with opinions: "No, that sounds like too much. You don't want to change three major things in one year."

Me: "Erm...."

The baby thing is pretty much a done deal now.

It's time for me to leave the Marine Corps, much as I love it. We aren't moving yet again (if I stay in, we'd move again this summer). Most of all, I'm not dropping my munchkin off in her dad's arm and getting on a plane to Afghanistan, so it's definitely time.

If I leave the Marine Corps, I sort of have to do something else with my life. 

So what exactly am I supposed to drop off the list?

Besides, I'm okay with a hectic, crazy year.  I'm pretty much okay with anything that isn't 2011 all over again! 

So bring it on, 2012. You're looking pretty good so far. Maybe I should be stressed about changing everything about my life, my finances and our family... but I can't focus on my worries with a baby kicking away in my belly, the cat snoozing alongside me, and spring blooming outside. 

The Joys of Short Fiction

Like so many writers, the ultimate dream I'm chasing revolves around the novel. The agent, the book deal, a long-running multi-book career. But I also love short story writing, for two reasons:

1. It's a great way to try out a technique without committing to a book's worth of that technique. I've re-written novels to change POV and tense, because if it has to be done, it has to be done, but I'd rather do my experimentation on something under 5000 words, please.

2. It's a great way to try out submission and rejection. I don't say this to sound pessimistic, but the short story markets are very, very crowded, especially in the professional and semi-pro pay scales. I've had some poems and short stories published in pro-paying markets I'm very proud of, but I've also received my fair share of rejections*. It's all served a purpose in thickening my skin, though, in my opinion.

I know there are those rare writers who receive offers of representation from their first set of carefully-targeted queries, and whose agents then sell their book their first week. That's not me. I've collected some rejections on my first novel and, as I'm preparing to query my second, I'm grateful I've learned not to take rejection personally. I want the agent I eventually sign with to love my work, and I'm okay with all the rejections along the way from agents who aren't going to love it (as long as I can be proud of my product and secure that I've done my homework before querying, of course!).

Of course, there's a third reason I write short stories, which has nothing to do with the practical, which disregards the thin markets and the probabilities, and whatever career benefits short stories may carry, and even the bittersweet feelings of a "close, but not quite" rejection, and the joys of an acceptance.

They make me happy.

Sometimes, it's nice to just go back to that.

Halfway Through

Someone told me that the nine (and a half!) months of pregnancy drag by.

I do not understand this, not one bit. I'm almost five months pregnant now, so half way through. These are the glory days of pregnancy, and they're fleeting. 

I finally look pregnant, not fat (for a while there, I seriously considered having t-shirts made that said that very thing).  

I am past the morning sickness, but not yet into the huge-and-uncomfortable phase.

I've passed the scary bits early in one's pregnancy, and am not yet facing the imminence of the scary bits at the end.

Pregnant shopping is fun. I still love my maternity clothes - will I ever want to wear jeans with a real waistband again? MJ and I are buying cute crib bedding and adorable gender-neutral onesies, trying to pick out a crib (we've narrowed it down to 5 styles that are essentially the same, but right now this seems SO IMPORTANT), and arguing bickering discussing whether or not to cloth diaper (spoiler alert: we are going to cloth diaper). 

Everyone is excited for us and not yet able to criticize our parenting choices. 

Even labor and delivery still seems like an exciting prospect. 

Everything right now is so much fun. And it's going by too fast. 2012 is a big year for us: we have some major home renovations under way, there's that baby en route, I'm leaving the Marines in November, and I have to find a new job. It's a lot of upheaval all at once, especially for someone like me who doesn't exactly appreciate uncertainty.  

Don't get me wrong, I'm beyond excited for all these big changes in my life. But I remember when nine months seemed like a long time, and now it seems like the end of this pregnancy will be here in the blink of an eye. Baby, you'd better stay in there for the full 38 weeks. I've got things to do, and I'm going to need all the time I can get!

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (spoiler-free)

I'm always fascinated by book to movie adaptations. They so often feel wrong, of course, to the reader. But they're so much fun, too. And I usually feel like half the fun is analyzing where the movie altered the story (the other half of the fun for me is popcorn, Cherry Coke and Sno-Caps).

MJ and I recently went with friends to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Now, I loved that book, even parts that others hated -- the in-depth explanations of financial fraud, the descriptions of sandwich combinations that don't commonly appear in the U.S., even the laundry list of items that Lisbeth bought at IKEA.  I know it wasn't perfect writing, that perhaps the novel could have done with some good editing, but it made me feel like I was there in Sweden, a place I've never been to, and I valued that.  And it was also just a heck of a story; there was no way I could have stopped reading. So I had very low expectations for the film; how does a movie adaptation ever compete with a book you thoroughly enjoyed?

The movie is brilliant. 

It's a long film, but it does a great job of compressing the book: simplifying a storyline here, changing a location here to reduce the timeline of Blomkvist's investigation, wrapping up all that financial fraud into a few quickly explained sentences. Sure, the latter is a huge simplification, but no one but me and a few other financial geeks cared anyway. The acting was spot-on, and the cinematography striking (though there is a James Bond reminiscent series of opening credits that didn't jive with the movie at all, but that's quickly enough forgotten).  

There were some funny little differences from the book, one of them being the substitution of Lisbeth's beloved pan pizzas for McDonald's happy meals. However, given that Stiegg Larsson based her character on a dark Pippi Longstocking grown-up, I thought this was sort of a fun nod to Lisbeth's child-like side: the dangerous, brilliant hacker with a little red-and-yellow kid's meal.  

All in all, I'm glad I read the book. I'm glad I saw the movie. And rarely do I appreciate both at once.

Away We Go

My world just changed again.

For the better.

(and for those of you who followed my whole miscarriage saga... we saw (and heard!) the heartbeat at the ultrasound. Which, besides making me cry in relief, means that my chance of miscarriage is now down to 1%.  I'm leaning on the statistics for my peace of mind).

Hang in there, sweetheart. We can't wait to meet you.

My current sweetheart

My current foster cat looks like a bit of a tough tomcat (but it's a lie -- he's a playful, purring sweetheart). He survived on the streets of D.C. for a long time. He used to beg at back doors to come inside where he belonged.

Now he's inside.

 Waiting on his forever home.

Looking handsome while he waits..

He was a little bit wild at first.

But not anymore.

What Can't Be Red-Penned

One of my stories was recently published in Daily Science Fiction (a fantastic sci-fi flash fiction magazine delivered to your e-mail inbox each morning -- I highly recommend subscribing if you like sci-fi). There's a funny phenomenon that I have realized occurs for me, at least, when your story is delivered to its public forum.

Suddenly any flaw in the writing stands in stark relief, to an exent it didn't on the computer monitor or even printed on the page and being red-penned. No matter how critical I can be of my own work in creation, it has nothing on how critical I feel of it when there's no more opportunity to alter it.

Don't get me wrong; I believe in that story, and I believe it had to be good for DSF to publish it. I love the stories they select, and therefore have a lot of faith in the editors - and their decisions. When my insecurities set in I took a deep breath and told myself to stop being a nutcase. I always feel this way about my work in print, which is pretty terrifying when I think about these entire novels I write and hope to publish (and also, reason no. 1 why self-publishing doesn't seem like a good option for me, personally).

We writers are funny people. Self-confident enough to create and share our own worlds, but sometimes with our own hang-ups along the way.

(And, if you're curious, you can read my short story, Ten Speeds at the End of the World, here)

New blog design!

Like everything else in my life, my blog is a work in progress. I'm in the middle of a redesign. So please forgive my blog for being monumentally ugly and frequently illogical while we transition. :)

Wine and reminiscing for the win

My best friend visited me this past weekend.  We've been friends since college, and she's one of the few people I feel totally comfortable with. I know I can share any random thought with her, without being judged (she's like a cat that way, but a much more satisfying conversationalist). We watched trashy TV, drank lots of lattes and raspberry wine, and talked about our lives.

The ways our husbands piss us off. The ways they make us melt.
Our jobs and our schedules and our co-workers. Our medical issues. Our parents.  She let me go through the story of my miscarriage again, in grisly detail (though we were in a booth at Panera at the time and I had the car keys, so I guess she didn't really have a choice on that one...). We talked about Cam, how he died, the funeral.

We reminisced about the past -- the time my car died in an intersection and we hung out with a cop in his patrol car until AAA came two hours later, the parties, the boy-troubles, the psycho roommate who stole our stuff when she moved out. We still both really hate her, by the way. We talked about where we'll be in ten years and where we'll be next summer. We made plans to see each other in Boston and to visit Indonesia and to road-trip through the Midwest neither of us have ever seen.


And somewhere along the way, between talking about all the good times in the past, venting about the hell life's been lately, and planning the good times for the future, I really started to believe I'm going to be happy again soon. The power of a best friend is an amazing thing.

What's okay for us to say, as writers?

This question's for all of us who are trying to make it as writers.  What's okay for us to say on our blogs and Twitters?  I'm not talking about bashing other writers, or publishers, or even the ZOMG-Let's-Not-Go-There-Again book review debacle that washed over blogs & Twitter a while ago.

I've been pretty open about my recent life issues on this blog, though I haven't posted half the posts I've written.  I worry that an agent won't want to sign someone who sounds, well, miserable (For the record, I am still really normal in person. Well, my version of normal. I will never call you up and cry wordlessly into the phone, even if you send me a rejection letter, promise).

We always try to be so happy and upbeat about writing and publishing, even though sometimes the industry drives us nuts, doesn't it? So does that just apply to when we talk about writing and publishing specifically, or should we keep relationship woes, illnesses and general suckage out of our blogs -- even though those are the very things that can inform our writing?

I have no idea. I'd love to hear what you guys think.

Remembering 9-11

Ten years ago, something terrible happened that changed the world we live in forever.  Today, I think we're all hurting for the families that lost loved ones.  Our country was changed, and with it the course of many of our lives.

But people also came together, on that day. There was some beauty amidst all the horror, selflessness and concern for others and love for our fellow Americans. In the aftermath, we've pulled apart again, divided by political lines, war, security measures versus civil liberties, religious prejudice, different concepts of patriotism and nationalism.

But let's remember when we came together. We can disagree, but we're still Americans together, still stuck facing the same challenges. We can never have our country back the way it was ten years ago, but we can try to come together and keep rebuilding the one we have now.

A Thought on Fostering

These guys.

They're not mine.

They think they're mine. Pepper - the little white one on the right - follows me around the house and cries most piteously when he loses me. Most of the time, he's on my lap or laying draped over my shoulders like the most alarming fur stole. Nacho, the handsome boy on the left, likes to grab my hand with his paws when I pet his head and will show no signs of ever wanting to let go. Channeling the Beatles, that kitten is.

And it sure feels like they're mine. No matter how much I tell myself I'm just holding on to them until they find their forever home,  I'm so in love with my SPCA foster cats. I'm going to have a broken heart when it's time to bring them to their new home.

But I believe in animal rescue and fostering most passionately, and if there's one thing I've gotten out of this awful summer?

A broken heart's almost always worth it, for the love that came before the breaking.

Carry Your Heart

I spent this past weekend at the funeral of one of my best friends.

Cam was incredibly smart. There was nothing he couldn't figure out how to fix. He had a dry, wicked sense of humor.  We teased him about looking like a young Wesley Snipes (or maybe Welsey Snipes looks like HIM). When I went to Iraq, he sent me a Blade DVD because he knew I'd miss him.

And now I always will.

We trained for and ran a marathon together -- 26.2 miles. You have to like someone a lot to talk through seventeen-mile training runs on the beach and a marathon itself, but we never ran out of things to talk about. He was my adopted big brother. He called me kiddo. Even though we'd moved to live far apart, we still tried to find times to talk and to get together. He was one of the first people I told that I was pregnant, and when I lost the baby.

He was the first person to read GODDESS. He gave me great feedback even though he wasn't a writer himself -- but then, there really wasn't anything he couldn't do. Except maybe teach me how to make an ethernet cable. I never quite got the hang of that.

And he was an incredibly loyal, dependable, thoughtful friend. Kind and giving, underneath his tough exterior.  He had a great heart. There's a poem by E. E. Cummings that I love, and it ends--

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)

It just seems so crazy that he's gone -- at only thirty - and that the world is going on without him. A world that's a little sadder, a little lonelier, a little worse, because he isn't in it. I hate that I have to go on without him, that his family, his wife, his other friends have to go on without him. But I'm going to try and carry his heart, to be a better person for having know and loved him, and been loved in turn.

A... finished project? And other miracles.

I can't believe what a slacker I've been on this blog. Sorry! Truth be told, I felt a bit antisocial after the miscarriage (and exhausted - a natural miscarriage is not a quick or easy process).

But.  I'm now back to normal (my version of normal, anyway). I'm done with the revisions of The Goddess of Vengeance Wore Pink Galoshes, which is now absolutely the best book I can make it. I know in two or three years I'll re-read it and there will probably be things that make me groan, because I'm not done growing as a writer yet, but it's so much better than the earlier drafts. It's so much better than my writing used to be.

Honestly, I'm starting to learn to love editing. It's neat to see how much my writing's improved from just a year ago when I wrote the rough draft of Goddess. It's exciting to work my way that much closer to the story I set out to write and to telling it effectively.

So now it's time to sub Goddess, and really focus on the next things -- editing my YA novel, Recovering Sara, and rough drafting the next novel (Too. Many. Shiny. Projects).

I've been reading some fantastic books, too. I just finished Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which is not just a beautifully written modern fantasy, but an adult picture book. The author, Ransom Riggs, collected weird vintage photographs of children that form the basis for his characters. The photos and text work together beautifully, and there's something about the novelty of pictures (especially these intriguing, sometimes unsettling photographs) that I found very winning. But only because the story itself is so well told. Now I'm reading The Left Hand of God, by Paul Hoffman. I have mixed feelings about it in some ways --the religious aspects of it, the omniscient point-of-view that I sometimes find intrusive, personally -- but I'm so invested in the characters, the pacing is so quick and the story so interesting that I can't put it down. Though parts of it may not suit my personal preferences, I think it's a terrific book so far. (And I'm also reading the Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend, but that's not really so much for fun...)

What've you all been up to while I was gone?

Salve

I self-medicate with cute and furry.

Meet Nacho. Nacho is a four-month old kitten rescued by the SPCA, waiting with us for his forever home.

And, in case you couldn't tell, Nacho is adorable.  We picked him up last night and he's super friendly, the only cat I've ever seen go immediately to sleep in his carrier. Which is the only time I've seen him sleep. He is a go-go-go cat, and with all the playing we did last night I still couldn't wear him out.

I've been at a little bit of a loss for what to do with myself lately. Nacho is helping. He knows exactly what I should do - I should throw his ball again.

Gone

I lost the baby.

The almost eight hours in the E.R. seemed interminable until I found out, but really, it’s nothing when you consider what was undone when I finally left. 

Seven weeks of dreaming about the baby because even when I was asleep, he or she was on my mind. Seven weeks of telling him or her to hang in there with my hand on my tummy. Eleven weeks with this child nestled in my belly. Or the seven years now MJ and I have talked about someday, when we’re ready, when we have a baby.

The midwife who came in after the ultrasound told me, “You’re only twenty-seven. You’re young, you’re healthy, there’s no reason you can’t be pregnant again in a few months.”

Maybe in a few months, that’ll seem like something worth saying.

Right now, I want my January baby.

My walked-in-commencement-with-me baby.

My we’re-not-ready-but-we’re-ready baby.

My calling from the top of the stairs, “Um, babe” with an edge of panic in my voice and a pregnancy test in my hand baby.

I want that baby.

If you're not a pantser...

I still think 'pantser' sounds like a dirty word. But for writers it means someone who writes by the seat-of-their-pants. I'm a reformed pantser; not that there's anything wrong with it, but it's not the best method for me personally. Like most of us, I learned that from trial and error.

But. If you're an outliner, there's so much more to figure out after that. So far I've found a combination works best for me - I do a rough outline, then a detailed outline as I go, a few chapters ahead. I just can't plan everything at the start. At least, not yet. I'm still learning!

So I was looking at different outlining methods. Just like with writing as a whole, I don't think there's a good or bad process, just what works best for you.

• For a very high-level outline (that even Pantsers may find helpful), there's the 9-box or Rubik's Cube outline
• Justine Larbalestier talks about spreadsheets (though she actually uses Scrivener now, which I'm curious about). I am a finance dork and love Excel. Spreadsheets tempt me.
• There's the Snowflake method, which seems... exhaustive... but I'm interested to experiment with.
• Or you can outline primary plot points and characterization in half an hour.

I've mentioned, of course, that I already have a method that seems to work for me. At least, it's getting me to the finish line of a rough draft - a few of them, now. But I'm still curious to try these other methods.  Maybe something will make my life easier. Maybe something will make my life easier in revisions. If anyone can make revisions easier for me, I will bake you cupcakes. I'm pretty good at cupcakes. I promise.

But if that doesn't happen, well, I'm sure by the time I've ten or twelve drafts done I'll have found the perfect method. For me. This is an every-man-for-himself sort of thing.

WSJ controvery awesomeness

So I'm sure you guys didn't miss the hoopla about YA; the WSJ posted yet another ill-advised and under-reserched piece about young adult novels this past weekend. To summarize: books for teenagers are too dark nowdays! Also, there was an appropriate reading list divided into "boy books" and "girl books", which I have to admit I was stuck on myself...

Anyway, there was an appropriately irritated response from the kid lit community which included a Twitter trend of #yasaves - some of the responses are here as well as on Twitter.

There's no need for another outrage filled post, so I'm just going to say... I'm so glad we're even having conversations like these.  When I was still searching the YA section for books to read in the '90s, there was so little there. Too old for Babysitters Club and Nancy Drew? Well, there was a handful of issues books like Are You In the House Alone?, A Wrinkle in Time (which I loved) as well as L'Engle's other books, V.C. Andrew's bizarro world and... well, I remember a bunch of romances about terminally ill girls featuring prominently in the tiny YA department of the local bookstore. Slim pickings, and the reason why most of us moved straight on to reading adult fantasy or horror or whatever.

Teens today don't have to skip straight to King and Heinlein right away, though, the way I did (a point which I think the original WSJ article missed -- kids aren't stuck in the YA section, which encompasses such a wide range, from fluffy romance to violent dystopian to gritty issues, that it can now compete with the adult shelves, at least for a while).  There are YA books to hook every reader, including the ones who might not make the jump to adult fiction otherwise.

And while that might be causing some unrest in various parental camps, that's also pretty awesome.