Why I don't drop links (A blog for Ferns)

I’m shy about dropping links because I’m worried people will think I just want them to buy my books. I enjoy participating in discussions on blogs, but I totally do want people to buy my books. More than that I want people to read them and enjoy them. I want people to love them. I want those people to bury me in emails and ask questions and tell me their thoughts and opinions, their feelings. I want them to show up at my house like they know me. I want to invite them in and let them play cards while I cook for them and feed them, and I’ll eavesdrop and hope discussions about my books erupt like flash flood rains. I want to hear which parts made them laugh, which parts made them cry, and which parts made them cum. I want to be in the blood streams of my readers and explore while they read to see where they tingle. I want them to tell me when Kimberly gave them a cute look or said something funny and I want to return to the exact moment I discovered her giving it or saying it to me, and I want to sound completely removed from my writing of her, and simply marvel at her, with them. And I want them to tell me they love her, and I want them to listen while I tell them I love her, too.

But that would be pretty needy, so I usually don’t drop links.

Was Dr. Seuss A Fraud?

I learned recently that Green Eggs and Ham was the result of a bet. His publisher bet Dr. Seuss couldn’t write a story in 50 words or less. Green Eggs and Ham uses exactly 50 words. I had an initial jaded reaction to that news. What the hell? That was one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books. Come to find out he wrote it under restrictions just to win a stupid bet!

I’m embarrassed to say I ranted about that in my head for several minutes, before I realized we do things like this all the time when we write. When I used to write a page a day about any random thing, I recall often limiting my parameters just to see what I might get. One that stands out is I wrote about a guy pulling over at the side of the road and peeing. That was it. I decided not to let anything else happen. I was just going to fill a page with the description of the action. There was no greater meaning to his peeing, there was nothing he contemplated while he peed. No one drove by and caught him. Now the results probably wouldn’t be interesting to read to anyone but me (and they certainly wouldn’t make for a bestselling children’s book!) but it turned into an inspired piece of writing memorable to me. How dare I even consider that Dr. Seuss wrote that dizzying, fun story with any less than his usual zing?

More likely that bet was just a fun gag between them, but Dr. Seuss got to thinking about it. Maybe he started Green Eggs and Ham and his instincts already had him using a small set of words and repeating them. What if I did try to write a book with only fifty words, what would happen? Far from that book being a contrived work designed to win a bet, in the mind of Dr. Seuss, that silly bet led to inspiration and gave us a classic children’s book.

I don’t have many examples as extreme as the peeing one, but the more I think about it, a lot of what I write is the result of eliminating options and tightening my parameters. In Courting Her, I wanted Kimberly to reveal her dominant nature not until their third date, so I had to have their first two dates in the book but I also had to get through them very quickly. So I limited myself, not to an exact word count, but I definitely strived to keep those first two dates extremely brief on the page without letting them feel too short. They ended up three paragraphs. Anyone else have personal examples? Also wondering if there are other famous works anyone knows of that were written under similar types of restrictions?  

Coin Toss!

Little doubt, this year, that the most exciting part of the game will be the coin toss! The odds of winning a coin toss are always 1 in 2, but the odds of winning successive coin tosses rise exponentially. The NFC has won the last fourteen coin tosses in a row, the odds of that are 1 in 8,384. The odds of the NFC winning fifteen in a row are a mind boggling 1 in 16,768, but the chances of that happening during tonight's coing toss? 1 in 2! Enjoy the game, tonight, but pay close attention to the coin toss because a streak like this doesn't come around often.

Actually, I think my novelette, Bottoms in Love, which involves a couple using a coin toss to determine which of them wins having to play the dominant role when they both wish to play the submissive role, probably came from my fascination with this superbowl streak of the NFC winning coin tosses. Watch, though, they barely mention it before the game. Maybe this year it will get more air time, since the streak is growing. Go NFC! Win that coin toss! (I also want them to win the game, but I'm way more interested in the coin toss.)

A Story and Six from Courting Her

The first thing I knew I didn't want to do, when I decided to write about Kimberly and Alex, was to write them meeting. I didn't want to write about a courtship. I didn't want to write about him courting her. I wanted to open with them in a committed, female-led relationship. Books begin all the time about people already entwined in their dramas, why not a femdom book? I opened with them years in, and I had a story to tell, but in the course of getting to know them, the backstory came out that Alex had Kimberly over to his apartment for dinner on their third date. Up to that point, Kimberly had been subtle about her dominant nature. After dinner, they sat on his couch to watch a movie and Alex made the mistake, not of putting his feet up on the coffee table, and not of not taking them down when Kimberly said, but of not taking them down swiftly enough to satisfy her.

I realized that while I didn't particularly want to write "a story about a courtship," I had a burning desire to write "the story of their courtship." I wrote these words in a random notebook that were the beginning of my writing of Courting Her:

"Why didn't you put your feet down when I said?"
"I did put them down."
"Did you do it right when I said?"
"No, but..."
"Why didn't you put your feet down when I said?"
"I don't know."   

The Ending

When does the ending come for you? I had the incredible experience, when I finished Protégé Mistress after a marathon writing session of about 8,000 words (I realize that’s a fairly typical session for some writers but for me that’s a marathon), of writing the ending at the ending. That moment of finishing a book and coming up with its ending will always be a top writing memory, and likely not one I’ll have again. I was so affected by that moment that I actually cursed the ending for my WIP (work in progress), which came to me the other day. No, dammit, I’m not to that part, yet.

Sacrilege! How dare I question the muse? You have to go with it when it comes, and it’s an exciting part to write but it is also something of a relief when you have an ending. I think that’s a typical stress for writers. We get excited enough by characters or a scene to start writing, it starts to develop into a story, and at some point we think, Oh Crap! How is this going to end? I think it’s, for the most part, an irrational worry. The story ends when you’re done telling it. The more rational worry is writing an ending you like and think works well, but to carry this vague stress through a WIP of it just “not ending” doesn’t really have any logic to it. Of course, that doesn’t prevent it. I finished my first short story more than twelve years ago and after an hour long intense writing buzz finally began to fade, I thought, Oh Crap! What if I never think of anything to write again? I still write with that worry, but I’m mostly numb to it.

Like a lot of things in writing, you have to have a good balance. I try to write without worrying about how a story will end, but I do press a little, which keeps my mind working on it, and I think that’s why possible endings start coming to me, sometimes soon after I start a story. Usually I’ll discard them or they’ll turn out to be scenes but not ends. (I think I have a tendency to tighten the framework to keep me focused.) Good possible endings will start to come around two-thirds through, usually. Coincidentally, right about when my irrational Oh Crap! How is this going to end? worry gets ratcheted up.        

What to do with a To Do List

There are two types of To Do Lists. The workday To Do List and the day off To Do List. The workday To Do List shouldn’t be loaded up. If you made a reasonable amount of progress on your most recent day off To Do List, your workday To Do List should be manageable. It may only have a couple unfinished items leftover from the day off one. Make a new list. You don’t want to be staring at a To Do on Tuesday List on Wednesday. It’s discouraging and humiliating.

I should back up and wax philosophically on the nature of To Do Lists. Aristotle invented To Do Lists in ancient Greece. Tragically, the world’s entire store of To Do Lists burned in the library of Alexandria. Along with a lot of plays by Aeschylus burned a lot of To Do Lists. Word spread through the ages, though, and Shakespeare was extremely well known as a user of To Do Lists. You didn’t know that, did you?

All right, I won’t back up that far. Also none of that is true. I wanted to blog about To Do Lists near the New Year because I think of New Year’s Day as To Do List Day! There are those who refuse to make New Year’s resolutions. Their reason? They never last! Wow, I can’t even wrap my brain around how illogical that is. Those people are really missing the point of self-improvement. I have to have a really bad day before I will let an uncompleted To Do List get the best of me. After all, I made it. One thing I like to remember that I tend to forget, which is kind of nice because I do enjoy remembering it, is that the pressure I put on myself as a writer is self-induced. It was like that long before I got anything published and it’s still like that now. When I have a day where I wanted to write this and edit that and send one thing and research where to send another, if I finish the day and got half that done, that’s twice as much as nothing! No one else cares what I’m getting done. They don’t even know what I’m doing. They haven’t seen the list! That’s where I think the people referenced above go wrong. They make a resolution for the year, and then say, “Man, I only made it for a week, I suck!” No, you made it for a week, you’re awesome!

I make my day off To Do Lists the night before. These things are extravagant, they fill a page. First thing I do in the morning is pare it down. If I put that I wanted to mail out five stories, I change it to two. If I wanted to query two agents, I change it to one. I get realistic. There’s only so much time in the day and a lot to do! (I know because it’s all on my huge list!) Now, I put everything on my To Do List, even fun things. After all, I’m doing them, aren’t I? If you want, you can even put “pare down To Do List” as the first thing on your To Do List, do it, and cross it off! (I don’t do that. I take myself a little more seriously than that, but you can.)

My friend, during a recent To Do List discussion, said he didn’t understand why his wife needed to make a To Do List to clean their house. “It had three things on it. We weren’t going to forget three things.” Remembering to do the things on your To Do List is only one tiny part of the point of To Do Lists. It’s at least as much about organizing your day or your next month or, in the case of New Year’s resolutions, your next year. It’s about focusing on your goals. Even the items I cross off in the morning have served a purpose. It keeps me in touch with those goals and good chance they’ll show up on future To Do Lists and actually get done.

Last thing because this is getting kind of long and I have a lot to do, today. Never throw a To Do List away. To Do Lists are like little time capsules. If you’re as disorganized as me, you’ll find them in random places, months or years later, and shudder with amazement that these things, at one time, needed done and that you did them. Last December, just before Bottoms in Love released, I randomly came across a crumpled To Do List with submit Bottoms in Love to OC Press written on it. And it was crossed off.     

Sentence Fragments in Stories.

I had an odd experience after finishing The Road by Cormac McCarthy. A book I loved. I have that book in my top five. (My top five has way more than five books in it, but still, that's saying a lot.) I read the second half in one sitting and soon after got online to read what others thought about it. Which actually isn't something I do that often, but I think that book made me want to connect with people. Most people loved it as much as I had, but a few people complained about how it was filled with sentence fragments. Now, to each his or her own, I didn't have a reaction to people having a different feeling from the book, but sentence fragments? I hadn't noticed any.

I told a friend about that, who'd read it, and he said. "You're a writer. You didn't notice all those sentence fragments?" I was so sucked into that story. I guess I was just way too far gone to notice any potentially annoying stylistic quirks.

Sentence fragments are tough, especially in this day of word processors that point every one of them out to the writers in the first draft. I try to go by feel when deciding on a sentence fragment, but I think those ugly colored lines in my word processor make me weed them out, for the most part. I still try to go by feel, but I end up using them almost as rarely as I use exclamation marks. I use them when not using them feels awkward, for instance, if I have a string of descriptive sentences that I feel need to be there, I'll make the last one a sentence fragment because it makes the rhythm feel right. And, in at least one instance, I used one for effect: a key moment in Courting Her happened in a fragment. I’m not going to include it here, not as a teaser, but because I want it, for any readers of the book, to stand out as a key moment but not to stand out as a sentence fragment. A sentence fragment, like anything else, shouldn't pull a reader out of a story, but also like anything else, because a sentence fragment pulls a certain reader out of a story doesn't always mean it shouldn't have been there. It just means it didn't work for that reader. 

How do you feel about sentence fragments when you come across them as a reader, and how do you feel about using them as a writer?