School’s in Session

Posted on September 2, 2012 by arwenbicknell

Well, more or less. School starts Tuesday for my kid.  I reckon if he’s stuck back in the grind, I should restore some rigor and discipline to myself, if only out of sympathy.

I’m not sure what this blog is going to turn into this year. Writing about writing is kind of boring. (Although I got a new job this summer, and I will confess to having allllll kinds of opinions about the Oxford comma, and about en-dashes.) But I’m sure even when I have fun writing about writing, that makes for boring reading. We shall see.

For now, it’s more fun to write. And again, discipline. So I’ll reboot by using this space for writing exercises.  Sort of a self-directed creative writing course, but with nobody grading me, unless someone stumbles over a post and wants to comment/criticize/parse.

I’m going to California on business this week. So my first project will be to try some travel writing here every night, starting Monday.  What I see, what I do, using all five senses and focusing on both big picture themes and minute details.

OK, then. Here we go….

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Low Tide

Posted on May 15, 2012 by arwenbicknell

It’s warmer now.  That means more doing, less writing.

Also, less desire to write.  Also also, less desire to write about writing.

I’ll be back at some point, when Real Life settles down again, or it gets too hot to be outside much.

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Killing Time

Posted on April 24, 2012 by arwenbicknell

I got paid for my Cliff’s Notes thingie. And the check didn’t bounce.  I have no idea what happens to the thing now, since nobody has been in touch since then, but whatever.  I suppose I should choose a new topic to truncate, but I’ve got too much Actual Reality stuff going on to embark on another project.

The kid’s play is kicking into overdrive. Fortunately, the stuff I have to do is now all well in hand, so I can sit for long stretches and just read my book. (Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, thank you very much. I find this a suitable complement to Fiddler on the Roof. Snort.)  Work continues to be work.  I’m developing an unhealthy obsession with one of those silly games on Facebook.  I haven’t emailed my dad in a while because I have, quite literally, nothing to write home about.

This is not to say I’m not busy — or will be. I have several plans lined up, but can’t act on any of them just yet. I always seem to be waiting for One More Thing to happen before I kick off a massive roller-coaster like chain of events.  I’m waiting for the play to end. For school to get out. For Congress to recess. For the neighbor girl/babysitter/right hand to get her college diploma and figure out what SHE’S going to do and if I can hire her for the summer. I’m waiting for the phone to ring or the alarm to go off or until I get paid or who knows what.  Who says procrastination isn’t an art?  Meanwhile, I’m getting four or five hours of sleep a night, I’m almost never home, and I’m not entirely sure where all the time is going. Maybe I need to sit down and chart an hourly schedule….  orrrrrr, maybe just a little nap.

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Spring Cleaning

Posted on April 17, 2012 by arwenbicknell

I took off work last week, and spent the time … well, working.  The house hadn’t been cleaned in ages, and the dog hair was practically doubling as wall-to-wall carpet.  All of us were sneezing from dust and dander and I don’t know what all.  So as soon as the assorted back-allergy-etc. drugs kicked in, I went at it — OK, not hammer and tongs, but certainly vacuum and dust rag.  Oh, and mop.

And once that was done, I attacked the outside.  Mowing, weeding, planting.   $100 worth of flowers that Lowe’s assures me they will refund when everything dies in this 92-degree heat.  (Speaking of which: Can I finally put away my winter coat? Or is it going to drop back down to 40 next week?)

Thursday was our religious holiday, a day of rest,  also known as the Nats’ home opener. Lovely, lovely.

The one thing I Forgot to do? Take pictures of all this stuff.  Actually, that’s not entirely true.  I took pictures.  With my “real” camera. Which is on my dresser, and nowhere near a computer for me to transfer the photos where someone could actually look at them, like, say, this-here blog.  Perhaps there will be an edit forthcoming.

The one thing I Did Not do? Write. It was just too nice outside, and then I was too lazy, and then I had movies to watch, and and and … yeah. I’m in a trough.   I am blaming it on vacation and upended schedules and child musicals and other assorted stressy stress, but really I just don’t feel like it.  I have heard — and occasionally experienced — the adage that Writers Have to Write.  So maybe I’m not really a Writer, because while I definitely have those stretches where I feel the need to create something, I also have long, LONG periods where I don’t feel compelled to do a single damn thing with words, aside from observing how other people string them together.

But!  I did get paid for my Quicklet Cliff’s Notes thing, and there was practically zero rewrite! I suspect the lack of rewrite is a failing on the editor’s part and if I can’t get my esteemed eagle-eye hubs to look it over before it goes anywhere I will doubtless be horrified when I look at it in days to come — but in her defense I guess she was more focused on the formatting than the writing. Anyway — payment! I’m so excited.  If this is ever produced and formatted and for sale somewhere, I will post a link.

Maybe that’s the issue. Maybe I’m not a writer but a deadline addict? Linda Ellerbee (I think, I’m pretty sure) wrote this great thing once about how her editor breathing down her neck was the best incentive for housecleaning, whereas the impending arrival of overnight guests was the surest way to get her to sit down and write 20,000 words.  Maybe I need to invite my grandmother out for a visit. She’s the queen of fastidious and my house could never be clean enough in my eyes to do her justice. Seriously, this is a woman who neatly folds plastic grocery bags before stacking them in precise right angles in specified kitchen drawers, y’all. If the idea of her visiting can’t spur me into writing-as-cleaning-avoidance, nothing can.

Or maybe I should just get back to my day job.  Break’s over!

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Crazy Week.

Posted on April 5, 2012 by arwenbicknell

This is Amy Pond:

Her hobbies are time travel, adventure, centurions and fish fingers.

This is also Amy Pond:

Her hobbies are barking about being left alone, running off after deer, and injuring her owners — albeit inadvertently.

What does this have to do with writing? Not a damn thing, except the dog is why I haven’t been. I gave her a bath last weekend and was bent over for so long (and am apparently so old now,) that for the first time in my life I hurt my back to a point where it just seized. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t stoop lower.  I basically keeled over to one side and lay there banging on the floor for my husband to come haul me to the bed. He was thrilled, because earlier in the week he had cracked a rib chasing after the dog in the dark.  (And don’t even ask why that was necessary. Or which Amy Pond he might have preferred to chase.)

However, I think we are all on the mend now. We’ll be back to business as usual next week, I reckon.

The good news is, before all this mayhem began, I finished my Erik Larson recap assignment.  Still waiting to hear what the editor thinks.  Wonder how long that will take…

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Write What You Know.

Posted on March 22, 2012 by arwenbicknell

This is my kid, about five years ago, on the fence at my family’s farm. I don’t remember what he was looking at or why his face is so worried, but it’s one of the images that sticks in my head when I’m writing about that place.  I’m not back there during the winter months as much as I used to be, but a vision of stark branches and wincing at a breathtakingly sharp wind are still my knee-jerk reactions to the word “Illinois.”  Why doesn’t that boy have a coat on??

 

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Foward Gear!

Posted on March 21, 2012 by arwenbicknell

After a scramble to gather my material from assorted backup drives and email, polish it up and create a synopsis from scratch, I have sent my stuff to the agent I met at the conference. (Did I mention the best part about meeting her? She told me what genre my book is. And she didn’t even laugh at me when I asked. Love.)

And thus it begins again.  All excited and nervous and maybemaybemabye.  Does this boost the metabolism? WIll it be good for my diet?

Meanwhile, I’ve been signed up to write something called a Quicklet for an outfit called Hyperink.  They say if I do well they will pay me, so here goes nothing.  I hope they are not a big scary scam, as I gave them all kinds of W-2 info. At least it’s an enjoyable assignment; it’s basically a glorified book report on Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts — a book we already owned, even!

So. Back to the scribbling!

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Rallying Enthusiasm

Posted on March 20, 2012 by arwenbicknell

So, I have decided that the last couple weeks were the nadir and that I had to start utilizing the Internet for its most useful function: providing anonymous outlets for my vitriol and defeatism, thus sparing those around me from having to hear and read about it ad nauseam. So far it’s working. I’m having a lot of fun with my new You Suck feed on Twitter. And no, you can’t see it.

The weather has also conspired to make me feel better.  70s and 80s! I’ve actually been ditching the office to go for walks around town. Of course, this doesn’t make me want to write. It makes me want to pitch my laptop down a well and go to the beach.  But, hey. Everything’s a tradeoff.

During my big self-pity party, I talked to my friend in publishing. She told me that I need to keep writing because writing is what I like to do.  Well, yes.  But, see, I also like making money. So I think before I embark on any new time-sinks, I should really try to figure out how to increase my odds of doing both at the same time. I reckon I’ll keep shopping my existing stuff around — but maybe I need to write the quintessential nonfiction guide to … I don’t know what. Anyone got a magic secret to share?

My pal in IT says she might be able to resurrect the stuff off my desktop. This is good news.  Three steps back, maybe two forward?

The writing conference was Saturday. The biggest news out of that was that the agent I chose to pitch to asked to see three chapters and a synopsis.  I’m frantically getting the synopsis in order now — as usual, I wrote long and now I need to halve it.  But the chapters are, I think, in decent shape.

The second biggest news is that I learned I’ve been doing this blog All Wrong.  Fortunately, nobody’s really been reading it up to now so I’ve got a chance to correct course.  More photos. More discussion of inspirations and outcomes and maybe some sample copy. Less discussion of the craft and the process.  Well, maybe. Probably. We’ll see.  I’m pretty obsessed with craft and process. That’s how I wound up a copy editor. So you’ll still see a bit of that, I reckon.

OK, then. Onward.

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Conspiracy of Events. Confederacy of Dunces.

Posted on March 10, 2012 by arwenbicknell

For a number of reasons, I’ve been avoiding this blog.  It’s supposed to be a blog about writing, about publishing, about craft.  And I haven’t been doing much of any of that, so I haven’t had much to say.

I’ve had three (very nice) rejections for the book I’m shopping around. I’ve got several more queries that have apparently just fallen into the ether.  Is it wrong to find this irritating? I realize it’s a buyer’s market, and agents can do whatever they bloody well please, but I have to think there’s a special corner of hell for the rudeness and egotism of someone who gets out into social media and exhorts writers to do six hours of research into following the agent’s likes and dislikes on Twitter, reading the stuff they’ve repped before, and then crafting a lovingly customized query letter, and then doesn’t reciprocate by at least sending a form rejection upon receiving said letter.  I mean, really.  I spend six hours doing my homework and you can’t be bothered to set up your email to send a form letter when you press a button you’d have to press anyway to delete my query? Grumble.

In other news, my hard drive crashed.  Because I am lazy and hadn’t trained myself to live out of google docs yet, I lost the latest revisions to both my manuscripts, all my notes and outlines, my query letter, my tracking guide of which agents I’d written and which ones had turned me down.  I also lost a bunch of other stuff, but that’s not germane to this discussion, other than to say: flash drives! Get ’em while your hard drive’s still hot!

What I don’t know is if this is a sign.  I saw the movie Evan Almighty this week — which I thought was pretty mediocre, thanks for asking. But one of the points it made that I found intriguing was how God gives you what you ask for: “If you pray for patience, God doesn’t give you patience, he gives you the opportunity to be patient.”

Well, I ain’t been praying  much lately, so I’m not sure what I asked for here.  Was it the chance to show resilience, re-revise my scripts and keep shopping them? Or was the hard drive crash coupled with the 3 rejections in a week (after dead silence for a month and a half) the chance for deliverance, the message that I can just drop all this shit without guilt and move away and spend my time on more gratifying endeavors? I honestly don’t know. I don’t know what I want to do.

I also don’t know what I’m going to do at this writer’s conference now.  I mean, I still have the slot to talk to the agent, and I suppose I’ll still go — but what will I say? “Hey, yeah, I had a book all set to go, but now I need to make sure it’s all still there, so I’m not sure it’s worth facing your rejection here in person right now… so! Ya like puppies? How about bourbon?”

Blah. Whatever. I’m going to talk to some food about all this.

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When at a Loss…

Posted on February 29, 2012 by arwenbicknell

A friend of mine wrote me last night: “The mind boggles, and when I’m at a loss my new instinct is to make internets.”

I’m right there with him. Making internets is like good-for-you brain candy.  You can siphon off mental stress, you can let ideas gestate until they come together into something more fully formed, and you can feel at least somewhat productive in the process.

The other thing you can do with internets is avoid actual interactions with humans.  I’m a big fan of this. Huge. I’m a misanthrope to the nth degree.

But that’s not really a good way to be when one is trying to make one’s way in a new world, so I have opted to kick my ass outside my comfort zone.  I have coughed up the requisite cash and in two weeks you will be able to find me  losing my writing conference maidenhead in the garden spot of Allentown, Pa.  I’ve got a bunch of seminars I plan to attend, and I’ve got a bunch of questions I can ask and a bunch of gripes I can air, although I imagine I won’t be doing much of that — because, hi, nobody likes the new girl to be all whiny and caustic.

I’ve also got an audience with an agent, and a pitch kinda-sorta-not-really memorized.  I’m also all prepared to ditch the pitch and ask her a zillion questions about the other things I’m working on, including some new internets that I might be ready to share with everyone in a month.

That’s the nice thing about new internets, isn’t it? It’s a little like having a baby but without the obligation and expense.  At the beginning, the sky’s the limit. They could be ANYTHING when they grow up.  After a while, they still bring joy, but it’s a lot more work and some of those hopes and dreams inevitably fade.

I only hope that one of these days, one of these damn kids will make good and support me in my dotage.

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