Category Archives: Favorite Posts

Downhill on a Brakeless Bike
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Starting into the NEW new schedule today, realized that at some point I’m going to have to get my income tax stuff done to send to the accountant, have the usual housework piling up.

Narrow, twisty mountain road. Downhill on a bicycle with no breaks. Can’t get off, can’t fall off, must reach the bottom safely and on-time, while still paying bills and doing laundry and all the other stuff.

I have become a Woman In Sweatpants. I’m on a mission; don’t get in my way.

<sigh> <summoning the spirit of Medwind Song, who also got me through my last childbirth>

STARTING WORDCOUNT: 15167

Running Water
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I’ve discovered this morning that I have a thing in my writing for the miracle of indoor plumbing. I am terribly fond of figuring out ways to include flush toilets, hot showers, and taps that turn water on and off.

I am grateful for hot running water and civilized sewage handling. It comes from my childhood, where on and off, I got to experience at first hand life without these wonders. They aren’t conveniences. They are SO much more than conveniences.

When I lived in Alaska, we pumped water in from the Kwethluk River, which ran by our front door, and stored it in a giant cistern. We treated it with Clorox — the smell still takes me back to a time when that was the primary smell of drinking water. When the river froze over, my father and some of the boys from the boys’ dorm, where my family and I lived, would go out and chip a hole through ice that was sometimes six feet thick to get down to runnig water.

And when it came into the house, it ran through our taps to the kitchen sink and the bathtub, but in one flavor only. Cold. If we wanted hot water, we got to build a fire in the wood stove, set pots and kettles onto its cast-iron top, and waited for them to heat up. Then we poured them into the old porcelain claw-footed tub and added just enough cold to make the water bearable. It chilled quickly enough on its own. Showers came only in cold; I was nine, and did not shower.

Our toilet was the euphemistically-named honey bucket — a big galvanized bucket hidden inside a plywood box that had a standard toilet seat affixed to the top. Clorox replaced flushing as the way to keep down smells, and once a day my father had the privilege of carrying the honey bucket out to the dump downstream from our little cluster of houses. The boys in the dorm had the plywood outhouse — and when I was at the girls’ dorm, I used their outhouse. We had old Sears’ catalogs for toilet paper. And in an unheated plywood outhouse at forty degrees below zero, these trips were short and desperate.

Later, in Guatemala, we lived in Chiquimula, which I loved. It was a beautiful old town full of kind people. I was less fond of our shower. The shower drew its water from a bitterly cold mountain aquifer. We had an amusing little arrangement of black plastic pipes up on the roof that was supposed to create solar heat and that in fact did nothing whatsoever. At fifteen, I mastered the sixty-second shower, including washing and rinsing a head full of long hair.

You don’t forget these things.

So now I discover that plumbing makes its way into my fantasy novels with startling regularity. My folks might be primitive, but by God, they find ways to have hot running water and flushable toilets. Some of the time, anyway.

Promises You Make
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Claire liked "C". Robin e-mailed me yesterday, and mentioned that she wanted to know about a couple of changes to the basic premise, though.

Throughout the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve made plenty of changes in previous premises, rewritten whole vast chunks of books, never quibbled because in every instance I could see how the changes would make the story better and how in making them I could still keep the story mine.

But every book has a heart, a kernel that is the thing about that book that makes you love it, makes you have to tell that story, meet those characters, live those lives.

And this time, for the first time, Claire needed changes that would have taken my heart out of the book. It would have been a good story her way, and marketable as hell, and I could have written it. But "C" would have been dead.

I’ve always promised myself that if the time ever came that I had to choose between saving the story and taking the money, I’d pull the book. The time you have to make good on a promise like this, is, of course, never when you’re flush with money and everything is cozy. But who you are, as a writer and as a human being, is never about the promises you make, but about the promises you keep.

I pulled "C". It’s out of consideration, and the three alternate ideas I worked up yesterday when I stalled on LGD — all of which are exciting and tight and strange but not too strange — went out to Claire yesterday.

And "C" will return to its life as my new "PR", which was PHOEBE RAIN, which eventually became MIDNIGHT RAIN.

Mind-Boggling Question
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Reading this entry from Sheila’s blog, I confess to a moment of jaw-dropping, mind-blowing disbelief.

No. Not at Sheila’s continued, mysterious fascination with George Clooney. My tastes run much more to Vin Diesel and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. (I do not attempt to explain my tastes. I simply report them.)

But no. That one or more of her readers would ask if we were the same person.

She and I have speculated before that we were twins separated at birth. We have lived painfully similar lives; emphasis on the painful part. But …

Sheila does well over a million words a year. I expect her to make a breakthrough to a million words a month at some time in the not too distant future. I do … two books a year. Two. One really broke year, I did four, but those were short, and I was really broke. If Sheila and I were the same person, I would not be perpetually getting stalled and stuck and flummoxed by LAST GIRL DANCING. I would fly through it, because as best I can tell, Sheila has never, ever been simply, totally bollixed on a book. I plod, Sheila soars. I single-task at the (comparatively) stultifying rate of around 300,000 words per year. Sheila explodes with these amazing ideas; talking to her, you get this feeling that new universes are being born, fully formed, behind her eyes at a rate of about one per minute. Me? Not so much.

So, though no one has ever asked me that question, I will answer it. We ain’t the same person. But sonuvaSONUVAbitch — I wish we were.

About Cartania
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Cartania –This is an odd, lyrically beautiful, hard-to-pin-down site, and it’s in the writing sites section because sometimes writers can learn a lot from seeing something done spectacularly well.

The writer who put it together has done something amazing here. You won’t find rules for writing on the site, or links to pages that will help you fix your grammar or plot your next novel, but you’ll find something that you can keep a lot longer, I suspect.

Heart? Passion for excellence? A literate view of a universe that is by turns dark and magical? All of the above, I suggest, and more.

Please take the time to visit the site, wander through its links, read its essays, soak up its atmosphere and its energy. Cartania is a gift from John Cartan to the rest of us.

Yesterday, Today
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Finished with fifty-eight pages of revision done yesterday, which pretty much kicks ass. That included about three thousand new words added … and about the same number removed. Ended up with a net loss of three hundred words and change. But that’s okay. I have a few scenes that I’m going to have to add in — I’ll make up the loss.

And killing people I like got put off until today. I’m not expecting another fifty-page day. Or even a forty-page one. Twenty would be good.

Heard back from one of my exotic dancer consultants; she went into deep detail and came up with some amazingly useful comments. A couple of offhand remarks she made will allow me to fix a persistent plot problem I was having. Nice serendipity on that. And everything else either validated my research or corrected areas where I couldn’t FIND any research.

I swear, one of the best things about being a writer is that people will TALK to you, honestly and in great detail, about their work, their lives, the struggles they’ve gone through and their hopes and dreams. I had the same experience to a degree as an RN, but there is always this barrier, because as an RN, you’re the person who sooner or later may well claim the need to physically invade your patient’s privacy, inflict pain, or be the bearer of horrible news. And patients lie to nurses only slightly less often than they lie to cops. "Honesht to God, just two beersh." "No, I haven’t ever taken illegal drugs." "I couldn’t be pregnant: I’m a virgin." "He just fell down those stairs." "She was playing with the cigarette and burned herself like that."

People tell the truth to fiction writers because fictions writers aren’t going to expose them. Or hurt them. Or do anything with that truth except disguise it as more fiction. And when people tell the truth, they’re wonderful.

Most of my faith in humanity, what of it there is, has been restored by getting out of nursing and becoming a writer.

Playground Rules
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When I was a kid, I got moved around a lot. I was the new kid in school in third grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, and ninth grade. It was not fun, it sucked, it was lonely and hard, and every time I made a friend or two, we moved again and I got to leave them behind. Most times, I never heard of them again. (Where are Karen Hughes, Kay Beadnell, Laura Leonhard, Mark Nacci, Carl Rapaport, Sinka Crane …)

As much fun as it wasn’t, however, it was … educational. I learned that the majority of other people’s children, when dumped into public schools and “socialized” in packs, are vicious little bastards, school-feeding pirhanas who like nothing more than a bit of fresh meat thrown into the water. I learned playground survival the hard way, year after year — I got to refine strategies that didn’t work and come up with better ones because no matter how well or how poorly I survived one year, I’d be pretty sure to get the chance to do it all over again the next.

I learned because I had to. And these are the rules I learned.

1. There are some people who are simply assholes, and no matter what you do, all they want is to draw blood. You cannot make friends with pirhanas, nor do you want to try.

2. The first people you meet are the pirhanas, because they are looking for fresh meat, while the decent kids see the assholes circling you and hang back out of fear. In a new situation, the people closest to you are probably the ones looking for weakness.

3. Negotiation is futile with playground pirhanas. They get nothing out of making peace. They want your pain, and only your pain will satisfy them.

4. Pirhanas cannot be ignored. I pity kids whose idiot mothers tell them to “just ignore the bullies, dear — they’ll go away.” No, they won’t. They’ll nibble away at you a piece at a time until you bleed to death.

5. Playground pirhanas can be joined. But only if you want to be as big an asshole as they are. I never wanted that, and never chose that path.

6. Playground pirhanas can be beaten. But it ain’t fun. If you do not want to spend the rest of the school year dealing with these bastards, your options are limited. To one. You have to make such a horrific example of the first shitwad to take a bite out of you that the rest flee in terror.

This means:

A. You commit to hurting. The playground pirhana derives his power from fear as much as from combat — but first he had to derive it from combat. He is going to hurt you. You have to face that, you have to accept it.

B. Having committed to fighting, you cannot then cut and run. Once you’ve realized that you’re going to have to fight your way out of this mess, you have to be in it for the long haul. If you quit at any point, you only set the scale for the next beating you get. It will start where the last one left off, because the pirhana knows that he has to commit that much effort to your pain to keep you in line. And he has to keep you in line to keep the rest of his victims in line. If anyone breaks free from his tyranny, everyone will see that it can be done, and the trickle will become a rout.

C. You commit to hurting back. Having accepted that fact that you are going to get hurt, your objective is to hurt the pirhana worse than he hurts you. You cannot be squeamish. You have to intend to draw blood, leave bruises and teethmarks. You’re probably not fond of fighting, but too bad. You do this, or you live in hell. This is what you do to buy a year of peace and quiet, and an umbrella. (More on the umbrella later.)

D. To hell with fighting fair. Your only objective is to win — big and loud. Screw the Marquis of Queensbury. You want to make sure that not just the bully, but the bully’s friends, have proof that if their hands stray within three feet of you in any direction they’re going to lose fingers. Do everything you have to do to hurt the bastard, and then throw in a couple of flourishes to scare the piss out of his friends. They have to know that the consequences of screwing with you are so dire that they never even consider it again — because if they doubt, they will test. And the next time they test, they’ll come better prepared.

E. Make allies. Watch each others backs. If you made a big and loud enough example of the first bastard, you’ll win not just peace and quiet for yourself, but for people who can legitimately claim to be your friends. This is your umbrella. After all, friends watch out for each other, and if anyone messes with your friends, they’re messing with you. Right? Right. Gather in the nice kids you wanted to be friends with all along, watch out for them, let them watch out for you.

F. Never mistake your friends for your enemies. Your friends are the kids who will fight to protect you. Period. If they won’t put themselves on the line for you the way you will for them, they aren’t your friends. Your enemies are the ones who will stand there making excuses for the kid who is trying to beat you up, or for why they aren’t stepping in to help you, or who will cravenly stand there and kick you once you’ve fallen to prove to the bully that they were really on his side all along. Never abandon your friends, and never turn your back on your enemies.

I learned how to fight when I was a kid — how to get hurt and keep fighting anyway. I learned never to start a fight, but to by God finish the fights others started with me. I figured most kids learned these same things.

But now I’m realizing we weren’t all playing in the same part of the playground.

For those of you who never had to learn to protect yourself, who were never the new kid, who had a group of friends you hung out with from kindergarten through college who made the world nice and safe for you, I’ll just note that the cloistered lives you lived are not the whole world and the rules you learned there are useless outside of safe walls. The corner of the playground where children were admonished to play nice is only a very small and sheltered part of a much bigger and nastier environment.

And the playground pirhana bastards who didn’t get the shit kicked out of them as kids grew up to be grown-up pirhanas. We’re fighting some of them now. The same damned playground rules, unfortunately, still apply.

We aren’t fighting a couple of holdout cities in Iraq. We’re fighting Islamic fundamentalist terrorists all around the world, because they’re shipping into Iraq from all over the world. We are fighting a fight without borders, and even though we’re going to get hurt, we cannot quit, because the only thing these shitwads want is to see us dead. That is the only way they win. They have defined the stakes, and we can either match them or trump them — except in this case, matching and trumping are both the same. We have to kill them. And we have to do it with a ruthlessness that will stop this shit now — because if we stop without killing them off, we will have only defined the entry level for the next round.

Welcome to the playground. It sucks, and nobody gets to leave. We all have to stay and play.

You’re Joking, Right?
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More from the mailbag, this one in the category of “Excuse me, but which of these questions have I not already answered on this very site, AT LENGTH?”

“Hello, my name is [withheld]. I’m doing a project that requires me to interview a person of my topic. I hope you get this and e-mail me back soon because I need it on Friday, November 7, 2003 at the latest. Please answer these questions:

1. How did you get into this area of interest?
2. What kind of training or education was necessary for this interest?
3. Is there an income? and if so…what range? and if not… what keeps you interested?
4. What are some things you had to do to get into this area of interest?
5. Are there any requirements needed for this area of interest?
6. What are some of the challenges you may face if you pursue this area of interest?

Please answer these soon.

[name withheld again]“

I remain amazed at A) the astonishing laziness of some people, and B) their breathtaking rudeness.

Yeah, I “got back” to him. Five points and a gold star for the person who comes closest to my reply. (HINT: It was printable.)