I was watching Downton Abbey the other night, and there’s a scene where the Dowager Countess, played by the wonderful Maggie Smith, is trying to work her wiles on a bureaucrat via telephone, and at one point looks at the receiver and says something* like, “Is this a a communication device or a torture device?”

This is a perfect line in the show, because the Dowager Countess has already expressed her distrust of new things, shielding her eyes from the imagined rays of electricity emitting from the chandelier in season one. But it also made me think of how communication has changed in my own memory.

Without wanting to sound ancient, mumbling “In my day, things were different” in a querelous voice, still … things have changed. When I was born, the Beatles were still together, and I’ve always been rather pleased that my first summer here on earth is known as the Summer of Love. (I mean, how flattering!) We had color television and polyester clothing. Telephones, but the long distance charges were a killer. If you wanted to contact someone, you had basically three choices: see them in person, call them on the phone, or write them a letter.

Fast forward several decades, and oh, have things changed–with a speed that would leave the Dowager Countess reeling. Now, there might be telephones in every room in the house … or there might be none at all, because people choose to use the one in their pocket instead. Everybody has a cell phone, and long-distance charges might as well be non-existant, but that doesn’t matter because you can always get around them by using Skype to video chat with your friends, a la Jane Jetson.

Everybody has email and text messages available with a flick of the finger. You can ask questions of your social network and get answers, virtual hugs, moral support within seconds of a plea for help. You can watch television being broadcast half a world away and then discuss it with friends scattered around the globe, all while sitting in your footie-pajamas on your couch. All the world’s information is available with a quick query to Google.

It’s EASY to keep in touch, make contact, make friends.

But … is it necessarily better?

How many times have you posted something on a forum and had it misunderstood because your audience didn’t know your wry sense of humor? Is a quick text message exchange of “R U feeling better?” “Yes, lots” really as satisfying as a friend stopping by when you’re sick, or sending flowers to brighten your day?

The old-school methods of communication took EFFORT. You had to devote the time to picking up the phone and then standing there for the entire conversation because the cord kept you within 6 feet of the wall the whole time. Handwritten letters involved nice stationery, a pen, and legible handwriting. (Remember that?) Getting together for drinks or coffee might not be an enormous amount of effort, but it does show you’re committed to the conversation.

So many of our modern, convenient, effortless methods, on the other hand, are almost too easy, too diffuse. Why write to one person when you can post a blog entry for dozens to read at once? Why ask one friend for advice, when you can ask hundreds of your Twitter followers with just 140 characters? We no longer connect with each other on a one-to-one basis. It’s all multiples. We tell ALL our friends that we’ve had a bad day. We ask ALL our friends for advice.

The very essence of communication is being diluted.

People have always had group, interpersonal activities. Politicians have always given speeches. Friends have always hosted parties. Groups have gotten together to sew a quilt or raise a barn since time began. Well, okay, maybe not exactly sewing quilts, but you know what I mean–groups gathering to do tasks too big for one person, and throwing in some socializing for good measure. As Elizabeth said to Mr. Darcy, “No one can get acquainted on a dance floor.”

But group activities aren’t really about communication so much as socializing.

I just wonder if, by having so much of our socializing–especially the virtual kinds of forums, emails, text messages, and so on–combined with the communication needs of sharing ideas, asking for advice, spreading news … I wonder if we’ve lost something.

Sometimes when things are too easy, you take them for granted.

But when they’re so easy, you forget that, sometimes, easier isn’t the same as better. (Is a frozen dinner out of the microwave better than a home-cooked meal?

Where did my Mojo Go?

Have you seen it? I’ve been looking all over for it.

For whatever reason, I seem have lost all my motivation to write. I put it down before the holidays because I was so busy with other things and now I can’t remember where I left it.

It was a modest little Mojo–more the warm, cozy, satisfying kind than one of those bright, jangly ones that you have to mind all the time. It didn’t squeal, “Look at me” every time I tried to turn my attention to something else. It just snuggled up and made me feel good inside when I played with it.

So far as I know, there aren’t any lost-and-found shelters for forlorn Writing Mojos. I suppose it’s possible that it went looking for some other writer to feed it and love it and spend time with it. Maybe the 2-year old next door has suddenly blossomed into a prolific scribbler to the delight and wonder of her parents. That would be lovely for her, and all, but I confess that I want it back.

I blame myself. I neglected the poor thing. I admit it. I let circumstances get in the way of my daily writing. My knitting blog broke (I have yet to figure out how to fix it), so my first outlet of writing suddenly wasn’t available. My freelance assignments dried up so I felt funny posting here, because it felt somehow hypocritical to write about writing when I wasn’t actually writing. My day job, which already blocks all sorts of file-sharing websites, suddenly made it impossible for me to plug in a thumb-drive so I couldn’t carry my novel back and forth to work on in spare moments. (Because oddly enough, spare moments at my day job have always been some of my most productive fiction-writing time.)

So this is all my own fault.

I let myself be gagged. I allowed my favorite writing outlets to be shut down or made difficult to access because I didn’t fight hard enough to keep them or to find alternatives. I thought about restarting a regular journal, like I kept years ago, but there are some serious penmanship deficiencies to deal with there, and trying to write with a pen sounds even more difficult than it used to.

The less that I wrote in the outlets still available, the less I FELT like writing.

It’s true what they say. You really do have to WRITE. It’s like any other muscle–if you don’t use it, you lose it. I’ve been struggling to get mine back. I think about writing all the time. I think about freelancing jobs I could be chasing. I think about my unpublished novel and think about sending it out again to agents (or about trying the self-publishing route). I think a lot about my poor, broken personal blog that I truly miss but have no idea how to fix.

But when it comes down to it, thinking is not the same as writing. In fact, it’s often the antithesis of writing because, the more you over-think things, the more you block the route between your head and a piece of paper.

Which brings me to the sad realization that the only way I’m going to get my writing mojo back is to COAX it back. I need to make it feel welcome. I need to make it feel safe and loved–and the only way to do that is to let it know that I’ll use it.

The only way to get it back is to act like I’ve already got it.

But, really, if one of you has seen it and can point it home, I’d appreciate it.

Has writing gotten harder?

In those halcyon days when you were younger (last month, maybe?), it all seemed so easy. You sat down with your computer or your notebook, positioned the cursor or the pen at the ready and … words flowed. You didn’t have to work at them, you didn’t have to struggle to get them out, they just ran out of your fingers and onto the page in a steady stream. If anything, it was hard to keep up!

So, what happened?

Have you been reading too many “This is How You Write” blogs? Maybe you’ve been so diligent at reminding yourself of the rules, the dos and don’ts that you’re afraid to commit anything to paper because it might not be good enough.

But, “good enough” for who?

Don’t ever forget that first drafts are supposed to be crappy. It’s getting the words out of your head that’s important. The minute you clench up and worry about whether you need a comma before the ‘and,’ you’re just asking for trouble.

Maybe you’re afraid of what will happen AFTER you’ve written. The minute you finish your novel, you’re going to need to send it out, right? Who wants to deal with all that rejection? Whereas, if the writing’s not done, you’re under no obligation to do anything with it at all. You wouldn’t send a child out on its own, would you? No, so you can’t send out writing that’s not ready … it wouldn’t be right!

Perhaps you’ve got too many ideas in your head. You can’t decide which to work on, and so the words all bottleneck in your head and can’t make it down your arm to your fingers. In which case, pick one–whichever idea is jumping up and down and wavings its hand like Horschack used to on Welcome Back, Kotter. THAT’s the idea you want to work on. Any idea with that much energy deserves some attention.

Or maybe you’ve got the opposite problem–no ideas at all. Your brain is an empty wilderness, like one of those 1960s performance art exhibits of a completely white room with a battered shoe in the center of the floor. So, you know what you do? You write about the shoe. Describe its scratched and cracking leather, the limpness of its laces as they dangle on the floor. The way the tongue is lolling to the side, like a dog’s on a hot day. Imagine what kind of life that shoe has led to be in such a state.

And that pesky, tempting internet with its social networking sites, multitude of blogs, and websites galore tempting you and leading you astray?

…Um, I’m still looking for the answer to that one!

The point is to WRITE.

You know the old saying, “Fake it ’til you make it?”

I’ve gotten distracted by the three million other things I have to do each day, along with temptations like lounging with a good book or summer television, or just the sheer bliss of sitting on the couch with my dog and my knitting. Because, of course, one of the “advantages” of making my living with a day job is that while I might be tired when I get home at the end of the day, it affords me the luxury of not having to write–and therefore making goofing off far too easy. If I were depending on my writing to pay rent and food, I’d have more incentive for diligent behavior.

But all the while I’m sitting there happily curled up with a good book (written by someone else and therefore stress-free), my conscience is nagging me.

“You can’t be a writer if you don’t write.”

What do you do when you don’t FEEL like writing?

Do you know the trick to getting a good photo of yourself? You don’t just smile with your lips, you smile with your eyes. If your eyes don’t have that certain warmth, that indefinable twinkle, your smile is going to look fake, as if it had been plastered on. So what you do is, as the photographer is aiming the camera, you think of something that makes you want to laugh. Or you remember what it feels like to want to chuckle–your eyelids crinkle, your lips twitch with a smile, and your cheeks lift ever so slightly. Most important, everything about your face warms, lightens, brightens.

The best part is that you can fake this. If someone is pointing a camera at you in one of those forced moments where you have to stand next to someone else and smile for posterity–trick yourself into believing you’re happy to be there. Think about making your eyes look warm, happy, friendly and there you go … suddenly YOU look warm, happy and friendly. It’s all in the eyes. And in the convincing yourself that at that moment, you’re happy.

You have to convince yourself to act the way you want to be.

When I was a kid, this was easy. Nothing easier! I pretended things constantly, all day long. I didn’t just ride my bike–I was actually riding a beautiful stallion with a flowing mane and smooth gait. (Side-saddle, naturally, like a princess. I got remarkably good at riding my bike side-saddle, pedalling with only my left foot, using the toe to help pull the pedals upward.) I had imaginary friends keep me company in boring classes. They’d even walk up to the teacher’s desk during tests and peek at the answers for me. I didn’t just go for walks, I went on adventures like Frodo Baggins.

I was very seldom just my own, mundane self when I was a kid. Everything had more savor when I brought my imagination along. It was a life-saver during boring things like grocery shopping with Mom or stupid assemblies at school. And if I pretended I had magic powers to help me clean my room? It made the cleaning that much more fun.

So, why not pretend to be a “real” writer?

I finally decided that I was going to need to take extreme measures. I was going to have to take definitive, mature action and force myself to write.

I was going to have to Pretend.

What, I asked myself, would a “real” writer be doing? Would she be coming home from work and goofing off? Or would her computer be pulling her toward it constantly, like a planet pulling its satellites? During her boring day at the office, would she be browsing the internet looking for distraction? Or would she be taking every possible minute of spare time to surreptitiously type away at her article?

I decided that I was going to Pretend, just like when I was a kid, but this time I was going to pretend that I was a dedicated, driven, diligent writer. How could I let myself be distracted if a Real Writer wouldn’t? She wouldn’t have time to goof around, so why should I?

In other words, I was going to make-believe I was everything I already want to be … just, without the publishing credits I don’t have yet.

Fantasy and reality have more in common than you think.

The amazing thing? It worked. It turns out that, unlike a child pretending to play piano and just generating dissonant noise, it’s hard to pretend to type without actually producing, well, words. And producing words is what writing is, isn’t it? The more that I pretended to be this successful writer who just happened to have an inconvenient day job, the more I found myself wanting to write. Like a kid playing Detective who stumbles across a real mystery (one of my favorite kinds of books when I was younger), I found myself stumbling across interesting phrases, intriguing ideas. The characters in my novel sat up, yawning, and suddenly started calling out ideas about what they wanted to do next. My non-fiction became more engrossing and invigorating.

The best part? This little trick works for all sorts of thing. If you fake something convincingly enough, you might just find yourself doing it for real.

Oh, and while I was at it? I pretended that my Real Writer had great handwriting and perfect posture, too. I mean, why not? You never know.

You might not know, but I have a site where I review knitting books. So, imagine my surprise when I got this co-written email the other day.

As a “LYS owner” we are thrilled to read your messages about upcoming books and your reviews. It helps us to stock our shop. However, we STRONGLY OBJECT to your policy of linking to Amazon. Until Amazon starts supporting the small merchants instead of taking our local business, we will be forced to unsubscribe from your blog. We hope you understand.

Now, it’s a polite enough email, I suppose. Not profane. Not obscene. Not outright rude. Except…

Pick Your Battles.

Now, KnittingScholar.com is a labor of love and, except for getting some review copies, entirely unpaid. The only income stream the site has is the Amazon.com affiliate links that help defray the cost of the webhosting, and I tell people right up front. “Please, if you’re thinking of buying any of these books, please consider using the links here at Knitting Scholar–I’ll get a couple dollars from Amazon.com to go toward the cost of this site. My grateful thanks go with every order!”

Now, I can understand people who have independent bookstores wanting to shake their firsts at the internet behemoth for taking business away from them. I understand that there are people out there who object to Amazon.com on principle because it is so big, it’s so corporate, it’s taking over the universe, et cetera, et cetera. But this is a yarn shop, we’re talking about. One that presumably sells knitting books along with their yarn and needles, yes, but books wouldn’t be their primary income-maker.

Direct Your Anger Properly

Protesting that I am using links to Amazon because it takes away their business seems, well, absurd. It’s not like I’m the only place their customers would hear about these books. In fact, in this day and age, heading to an online store is almost a reflex, if only to hear what other people think about books you’re interested in. It’s not like people aren’t going to think of Amazon.com without my help.

Most people who go to yarn shops want to look at the yarn. They may definitely browse through books while they’re there, and of course they might buy some, but you can buy most of those books at bookstores, too. You can check them out of the library. You can borrow them from friends. Did these two email-writing shop owners send a protest to their local Barnes & Noble, too, for selling books that people could be buying in their shop? Or protest to the local library for letting people see them for free?

Business is Business

I hate the common excuse that “business is business,” because it’s too often used to excuse heartless strategies, but still … everyone has a right to earn a living. The line in their email that truly gets me, though, is “Until Amazon starts supporting the small merchants instead of taking our local business…”

Um, Amazon is in business to make money, just like you. I don’t think they’re deliberately trying to put small shops out of business (thought I agree they’re not helping). But why should any big store “start supporting” you? To think they owe you anything is absurd. These ladies might as well be complaining because A.C. Moore sells yarn and is taking their customers. I’ve even seen yarn at Walmart and at Target, and I’m quite sure those shops aren’t worrying about the little yarn shop down the street. And I’d bet these ladies haven’t written to them to complain–or to other local yarn shops for taking their customers, either.

Examine Your Own Behavior.

Here’s the other thing: They say in their email that they are “thrilled” to see my lists and reviews and that they “use them to stock their shop.”

Couldn’t I argue that they are profiting from my hard work? And taking “business” away from ME?

You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to take advantage of my time and effort, that’s great. It’s exactly why I run the site, but you can’t then turn around and complain that I make a few dollars a month off of it. (Maybe I should be complaining that they’re not buying their store inventory using my Amazon links?)

Spreading Inspiration is ALWAYS Good for Business.

Ultimately, they’re forgetting the most important thing.

Selling knitting books means selling yarn. Sometimes knitters will buy the yarn first and then look for the pattern to match, but they just as often start with a pattern that they need to go find the perfect yarn for. That pattern could come from anywhere–a book, a magazine, a designer’s blog, a website. But putting inspiration in the hands of knitters is just going to sell more yarn. I understand that they’d rather people bought the books from them, but ultimately, that’s not the point.

Information Should be Free.

The modern world is requiring all of us to rethink things, but freedom of speech should not be one of them. I would never insist people buy books only using links from my site. I would never tell them that they must buy from Amazon. I would never discourage them from buying them in person from a bookstore or a friendly yarn shop.

What I AM doing, though, is trying to spread the word as far as I can. I tell people about the books to catch their attention and whet their appetites, and then I send them to (1) someplace where they can buy it, and (2) someplace they can read other people’s opinions before making a decision. I’m not providing restrictions. I’m providing options–and making sure people know about books they might not have heard of.

People are Free to Make Their Own Choices.

At the end of the day, people can and should make their own decisions about where they buy things. Buying local is good for the environment. Buying from a big-box store is good for the wallet. Buying in person is good for browsing. Buying online is good for convenience … you know all the arguments as well as I do.

The point is to let people make up their own minds. Heaven knows I’m not pressuring anybody to use my Amazon links–I’m just grateful when they do.

And if these shop owners feel they have to unsubscribe to my blog feed out of protest for my using links to their “competition?” That’s their choice, too. But trying to limit the dissemination of information, or to direct it in only the direction they want it to go? Especially on a website that they admit they’ve found useful but are not remotely connected with? It rather smacks of small-mindedness, narrow-vision, and censorship, don’t you think?

Am I crazy, that this email bugged me so much? What do you think?

I was reading an interview in Time with David McCullough (the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, if the name doesn’t ring a bell), and this question caught my attention:

Q: We don’t write letters on paper anymore. How will this affect the study of history?

The loss of people writing–writing a composition, a letter or a report–is not just the loss for the record. It’s the loss of the process of working your thoughts out on paper, of having an idea that you would never have had if you weren’t [writing]. And that’s a handicap. People [I research] were writing letters every day. That was calisthenics for the brain.

Calisthenics for the brain. Isn’t that a fantastic image?

Because it’s true. Just like my body feels sluggish if I don’t at least get out for a walk with the dog every day, so does my brain on days it doesn’t do much.

Granted, every brain deserves a lazy Sunday curled up with a book or settled on the couch watching sports or a cheesy movie. But … you can’t forget that it’s a muscle that needs to be used, too.

Lots of people realize this already. They do crossword puzzles or play sudoku online. They read everything they can get their hands on, or watch documentaries about obscure subjects on television. They take classes at the community college and visit museums, and learn about new technology on the internet.

I mean, not everybody turns into a couch potato watching reality-tv after dinner every night, right?

But, I love McCullough’s point about the importance of working things out on paper, and how it can lead to ideas you might not have had otherwise.

There’s something to be said for the simple hand-brain coordination of moving a pen across a page. Think of all the notes you took in classes at school when the teacher’s lecture went in one ear, down past the shoulder and out the hand onto the notebook without ever pausing in the brain. And then, haven’t you ever had the experience of doodling, jotting down random, crazy, silly thoughts and then looked at your page and realized you’d just solved a problem, or done something brilliant without consciously thinking about it?

As much as I love typing on a keyboard these days–if only because it’s legible which you can’t exactly say about my handwriting–it’s still a different kind of “writing” than the kind you do with a pen. No matter how good a touch-typist you are. You can’t doodle in a word-processing program, after all.

Mind-mapping is all the rage these days, too–putting all your thoughts and ideas about a project in one place in a seemingly random order so that you can line things up and visually SEE those connections. Everybody’s brain works differently. Some of us are visual thinkers who need visual aids to understand things. Some learn best by hearing, some by reading … but ultimately it comes back to getting the ideas on our heads down on paper.

Whether that paper is made from tree pulp or pixels on a computer screen doesn’t matter, not really. It might matter to historians down the ages who are using Windows 2703-B on their brain-embedded computers and can’t access our lame attempts at digital “permanence” any more, but we can’t be concerned with them. For the moment, what matters is that we not only THINK but that we take our responsibility to record it in some fashion seriously.

Because our brains deserve the workout. Calisthenics for the brain. And the best part? Unlike heading to the gym for an hour of sweat and calorie-burning, at the end of an hour of writing–of drawing connections and getting words and thoughts on paper–you’ve got something solid to show for it.

Now, go and exercise that brain of yours. Write something!

(And, as an interesting side note, I saw this post linked on Twitter today–about the differences between writing by hand or writing by keyboard, which I thought particularly interesting as I mulled over this blog post of my own.)

What do YOU think?

Do you love what you do?

I mean, sure, some people jump out of bed every morning, a happy whistle on their lips, in anticipation of the day of joy and satisfaction ahead of them. I think we can all agree that most (normal) people don’t do that.

Most people drag themselves out of bed at the last possible moment and trudge off to 8+ hours of drudgery, hating every moment.

Or, well, hopefully not MOST people.

Chances are, you come in somewhere in the middle. I know I do. I LIKE my day job. I like what I do, I like the people I work with, and I’m blessed with a 10-minute commute. I admit the idea of staying home with my dog on snowy, rainy, whatever- days is appealing, but getting out of the house for eight hours a day isn’t the most dreadful thing in the world.

I can’t help but wonder, though, why so many of us put up with jobs we hate. It’s a challenging economy, of course, and you need food in the pantry, clothing, heat, somewhere to live–all that. You can’t afford to give up a regular paycheck for a pipe dream. But still.

That old cliche “Life is too short” is true.

Very few of us have the luxury of spending our days lolling around by a pool, or curled up with a book for hours at a time. Unless there’s a sugar daddy involved, or some handy inherited wealth, we can’t afford it. So work is necessary.

But, that doesn’t mean we have to hate it?

Spending most of your time doing something you hate is simply unhealthy. It drags you down, raises your blood-pressure, and sends all kinds of negative vibes into the universe. So, what can you do?

• Find a new job. This seems the most obvious answer. Even dishwashers can presumably find nicer, friendlier places to clean if their current job is horrible. In this economy, though, finding any job may be difficult.
• Smile. Sometimes all you need to do to improve your relations with people is to smile at them. If you look pleasant and approachable, they’re less likely to be nasty.
• The glass is half full. If you look at things from the right perspective (“At least I have a job; it pays the bills; it could be worse”), your dreadful job may not seem so dreadful.
• Get a better attitude. It can all come down to attitude. If you schlump around with a dark cloud over your head, expecting the worst, you’re going to find the worst. I’m not talking that new-age stuff about the Theory of Attraction, here, just … you tend to get what you expect out of life. If you expect that every person you meet is going to be nasty and selfish, that’s all you’re going to see. You’ll then act accordingly and be selfish yourself which will put them in a nasty mood (even if they weren’t to begin with) and it all becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Be positive. Like clicker-training for dogs, you can accent the good things just by acknowledging them. Did another driver let you merge in ahead of them? Did someone hold the door while your hands were full. Was the customer service rep on the phone helpful? Take note of the good things you see and ignore the bad ones.

What other suggestions have you got?

I’ve been watching the BBC series of “Sherlock,” a modern update of the classic Holmes and Watson stories. (It’s fabulous, by the way.)

One of the hallmarks of the Sherlock Holmes character has always been his relative arrogance. He has such absolute confidence in his abilities and has such a hyper-observant way of viewing the world he simply notices things the rest of us miss–but can’t quite comprehend WHY we don’t see what he sees.

In one of the episodes, Sherlock makes a pronouncement to a room full of blank-faced stares and, in sheer disbelief that the solution is not obvious to everyone else, asks, “What must it be like in your funny little brains?”

I don’t know about you, but this is a question I’ve occasionally had myself. Not because I’m more brilliant than everyone else I know. (Quite the contrary!) But because nobody else THINKS in quite the same way I do, so there are things that are obvious to me that are mysteries to people I’m talking to.

We are all unique, of course, and while there are some things that are fairly obvious to everyone (“When you drop something, it falls to the floor.”), there’s a certain blend of brains, personality, experience, and awareness in each of us that cannot be exactly replicated.

I have a co-worker, who is a smart woman but clearly thinks in directions that are unique to her. As an example: a few years ago, one of our co-workers returned from paternity leave with a pile of photos of his newborn–you know the collection: baby with Mom, baby with Dad, baby with Grandma, and so on. Well, she looked at the pictures and asked, “How many babies were there?” She just assumed that each photo was of different kids. This is an intelligent woman, she just looks at the world in a unique way.

This is one of the things I love about writing.

If I’m writing fiction, I get the opportunity to (try to) explore the way other people think and react to situations–and sometimes the hardest part is dealing with a character fundamentally NOT like me. If being charged by a bull, I’d dive to the side and try to get out of the way, but what if my character would grab a chair and attack the bull? Clearly he doesn’t think like I do, but he’s going to be fun to get to know.

If I’m writing non-fiction, differently-thinking people provide a different challenge–that of getting my message across to people who may think more emotionally, less logically than I do.

Have you ever tried to explain something to a friend until you finally give up because, no matter how many times you try to say, “I turned right because it was the shortest route,” they keep saying things like, “But why wouldn’t you go straight?” Sometimes explaining things is the hardest thing in the world because what’s crystal clear to you is obscure to the other person.

So, the trick … and it’s a hard one … is to put yourself in their place.

• Are you a super-genious to whom everything is clear? Slow yourself (or at least your explanations) down so the poor, normal folks can keep up.
• Are you eminently logical but talking to a group beset with emotions (like, say, sleep-deprived new parents)? Force yourself to remember that all they want is to get some sleep–they don’t need to know the scientific reasons for the baby crying, they just want it to STOP.
• Are you good at mechanics? Excellent–you can break those “how to” instructions down into individual steps, but don’t assume that your readers will know what a flange is if you don’t tell them.
• Are you sympathetic and deeply compassionate? Just remember that the CEOs reading your brochure pay attention to the bottom line and stories about abandoned puppies might not have the same affect as a statistic about how much stray animals cost the town.

Nobody thinks exactly like you do.

This is both your challenge and your greatest gift.

*WWSD: What would Sherlock do?

It’s National Grammar Day. How are you going to celebrate?

• Turn all the extra apostrophes you find into little winky emoticons.
• Parrot back the word “like” whenever it gets misused in sentence (“like, you know, a Valley girl).
• Carry your blue pencil with you so you can correct incorrect commas.
• Say “Whom” with your most snooty, nose-up-in-the-air kind of voice everytime someones uses “who” instead.
• Leave comments at all the blogs that incorrectly capitalize their post titles.
• Wear your “It’s/Its, Your/You’re, There/Their/They’re” t-shirt everywhere you go.
• Mentally correct all the radio and television commentators who speak badly during their broadcasts.
• Curl up in a cozy chair with your favorite grammar book
• Sing the song.
• Link back to our Mangled Monday features to help out your grammatically-needy friends.

Or, do you have some other festivities planned?

Thanks to the handy-dandy random number generator (known to my friend Jenny as “Randy”) … comment #10 wins!

sprite

I love reading interviews with people that actually make me feel like they’d be interesting to talk with. Thanks for asking great questions, Deb!

So, Sprite, come on down and claim your prize!

(Or, well, you know, you could just send me your name and address and I’ll send it to you.)

And, if you didn’t win, don’t forget you can buy your own copy of Sara’s “Learning to Swim” this week! In fact, I recommend it! I know I can’t wait for my own copy to arrive.

Sara, thanks for the interview and for offering the ARC of your book (that I got to read in advance).

And thank you all so much for playing. Now, hie you to your nearest bookstore-slash-website and get yourself a copy.

Welcome, Sara! I’m so excited to have you here—not least because I’ve been looking forward to your book for months, and I’m delighted for your sake that it’s finally here.

Q: If I’m this excited, how must you be feeling about your first book being published? Are you going to haunt your local bookstore on publication day? (February 22nd)

A: Nope, I’m going to be in New York, getting ready to launch at Partners & Crime in Greenwich Village on Feb. 23! (Anyone in New York, come on down.)

Q: The advance press has been almost overwhelmingly on the “we love it” side—does this make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, or is it somehow intimidating?

A: It is an indescribably odd feeling.

Q: How do you describe your book when people ask?

A: I see agents who emphasize learning to “pitch” and conferences with “pitch sessions” and I can tell you if my career depended on me pitching my book to someone, I’d be in trouble. Once a writer asked me what my logline was and I looked blankly at Janet Reid (the beloved Query Shark agent) sitting beside me, and she, having read the book a year earlier, promptly impressed the heck out of me by rattling off a cogent and coherent description. If I absolutely had to, I would mumble something about a woman on a big ferry on a huge lake seeing a small boy plummet off a deck of the opposite ferry, rescuing him, and discovering he speaks only French and was thrown off the ferry to drown. But honestly, Janet did it much better.

Q: Your main character, Troy Chance, is wonderful—independent, athletic, puzzle-solving—how much is she like you?

A: See, this is the question I can’t answer, because if I say she’s a lot like me, it seems I don’t have enough imagination to create a main character out of thin air. But if I say she isn’t at all like me – I’m lying.

Q: Was Troy your favorite character to write?

A: Oddly, I think Jameson was. He was the character who sprang fully formed on the page, and said just what he wanted to say when he said it. I seemed to have very little to do with it.

Q: I was impressed with how well Troy handles speaking French to a frightened little boy. (I’m guessing her high school was better at teaching it than mine was, or that she worked harder at it.) How well do you speak French?

A: Realistically, Troy’s French would have been clumsier (although she had been practicing with those Pimsleur CDs, which are marvelous), but the problem with writing faulty French is that readers who understand French will deluge you with emails complaining about mistakes. So while Troy may not have idioms right, her French is reasonably accurate. And I speak enough to bumble around France.

Q: Do you have a favorite scene or chapter in the book? One that was the most fun to write, maybe?

A: Yes, probably two – they both give me chills whenever I read them. Which I know seems odd, considering I wrote them. (When readers hit them, they’ll know: near the ends of Part 1 and Part 3.)

Q: One of the (stellar) blurbs at Amazon.com refers to this as “the first in a projected series.” Does that mean we’ll get more of Troy’s story? Or is your next book about something else altogether?

A: It’s a series, for sure – I’m finishing the sequel now, and have mentally roughed out books 3 and 4.

Q: I pretty much read the entire book in one, big gulp. As a writer, which do you prefer—a reader who devours the whole thing at once, or a reader who takes her time and savors every hard-written word? (And, no cheating and saying you’re happy just to have readers.)

A: I honestly don’t care how people like to read – of course it’s nice to hear back quickly from someone whom I know read the book.

Q: And the follow-up—when you read, which extreme do you lean toward? Devouring or savoring?

A: I read fast, even when I read slowly. My father showed me the basics of speed reading when I was small. I suppose I devour and savor at the same time.

Q: In general, what kind of books do you best like to read? Favorite authors? (I’m always looking for recommendations.)

A: I like books with realistic inner dialogue and strong characterization, and I tend to lean toward somewhat quirky books. Two favorites this year are by personal friends: A.S. King and Reed Farrel Coleman, PLEASE IGNORE VERA DIETZ and INNOCENT MONSTER. I adored THE MEMORY OF RUNNING by Ron McLarty; I recently read and loved FALLING UNDER by Danielle Younge-Ullman; I’m mad about the new series by Jodi Compton, who shares an agent with me (clearly my agent has wonderful taste) and a book called BENIGHTED by Kit Whitfield, and I read everything by my Australian friend Michael Robotham. Oh, and Daniel Woodrell, who is simply brilliant. Start with WINTER’S BONE, and don’t stop.

Q: According to the book jacket, you’ve had a variety of different kinds of jobs. What has been the most interesting job you’ve had—and would you ever want to go back to it?

A: I loved being a sports editor. I did everything: interview Gordie Howe, photograph community softball games, watch Mike Tyson fight, cover Olympic kayakers, freeze my rear end off at ski jump events. What I loved most was the passion of the athletes and the community spirit of these small towns – but I’d never go back: it was exhausting and round-the-clock work. If I had time, I’d still be a bicycle mechanic part time – I do love working on bicycles.

Q: Your favorite part about being a writer?

A: Not having to sit in an office 9 to 5 all day or wear decent clothes.

Q: I love your living-in-Vermont stories on your blog. What’s your favorite part of living there? Least favorite?

A: My favorite part is probably that I can wear my torn overalls to the grocery store, and no one blinks – and of course going down to the river in the summer time. Least favorite is how often the power goes out – sometimes for days. I will probably always hoard food and water and batteries, and keep flashlights and lanterns scattered about, with the power company’s phone number inscribed near every phone. Although I’m hoping to put in a back-up generator.

Q: Pets? My dog Chappy always loves hearing about people’s pets and insisted I ask.

A: Emma, age 14, golden retriever/Lab/greyhound; Lucy, 12, Australian cattle dog/Australian shepherd; Bridget, 10, Australian cattle dog; Monty, age unknown, but maybe 6, an affectionate but somewhat OCD Newfie mix. Yes, this is far too many dogs. Yes, I think it’s ridiculous to allow dogs on furniture. Unfortunately, they don’t.

Q: Because I also write a knitting blog, I have to ask: Do you knit or do any kind of crafts?

A: Ha! I have a very crafty sister who can knit, crochet, weave, make jewelry – and who makes her own yarn and strips pieces of wood off trees and quills off porcupines (deceased ones only, as far as I know) to make intricate and lovely baskets. Me, I’d rather scrub a floor with a toothbrush. My dad showed me how to knit, and I like the rhythm of it and the click of the needles, but don’t have the interest to actually do it (sorry). I like painting walls, and I’m an ace with a spackling knife.

Q: What’s one skill you wish you had? Aeronautic ski-jumping? Perfect hair styling? Chandelier repair?

A: Wiring – I think I’d like to be able to do electrical work.

Q: What’s one thing you would say to a new writer?

A: Learn to rewrite and revise.

Q: If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

A: To be able to stop people being mean to their children. Or spoiling them abysmally.

Q: Favorite breakfast food? (Hey, it’s the most important meal of the day.)

A: Rice and black beans.

Sara J. Henry has been a soil scientist, sports writer, correspondent writing school instructor, book editor, freelance writer, magazine editor, bicycle mechanic, and webmaster. Her first novel, Learning to Swim, has been called “emotional, intense, and engrossing” by Lisa Unger and “an auspicious debut” by Daniel Woodrell. It’s available for pre-order and will be in stores Feb. 22 – you can read the first chapter here.

To be eligible to win a signed copy of her book, just leave a comment on this post!

The deadline for entries will be in one week, so be sure to comment before next Wednesday!

(Scene opens to show Deb curled up in a red chair, eyes on the book in her lap.)

COMPUTER: Psst. Deb! Over here!

DEB: What? I’m reading.

COMPUTER: But you haven’t written anything in days.

DEB: Sure I have. Don’t you remember that email? And I wrote a couple posts on Ravelry. Now, be quiet. This is a good part.

COMPUTER: But what about your blog posts?

DEB: Oh, blog readers are patient. They don’t expect a post every day, or anything.

COMPUTER: No, but one a week isn’t too much to ask. And, what about your book?

DEB: Yes, I’m trying to read my book, and this is a crucial scene, so if you wouldn’t mind….

COMPUTER: Not that book. The one you’re writing. Sara and Adam trying to build an orphanage/school during WWI, all while Sara keeps a deep dark secret from Adam about his father?

DEB: I got stuck on the timeline and haven’t found the time to work it out. But it’s 1917, a gentler time. There’s really no rush. It’s not like I’ve found a publisher for the first book, after all, so nobody knows who Sara and Adam ARE yet, anyway.

COMPUTER: Yeah … that’s another thing. If you don’t send out queries and find an agent, how will anybody know about the widow and orphan who survived the Titanic disaster and decided they wanted to become their own family?

DEB: Nag, nag. You just want to torture me and make my eyes hurt looking at your screen for another several hours. Didn’t I just spend 8 hours on my computer at the day job? Don’t I deserve a break? My eyes are killing me and reading is just what they need.

COMPUTER: That’s what touch-typing is for, Deb. Now put the book down and get over here.

DEB: I suppose I could see what’s happening on Twitter….

COMPUTER: Oy.

Here’s a special opportunity for you!

I’ve got an ARC  (that’s Advanced Reader’s Copy) of Sara J. Henry’s new book, Learning to Swim and YOU COULD WIN IT!

Not only that, Sara is going to be coming here for an interview on her blog tour. I read her blog all the time and I couldn’t be more excited.

How about you? Excited yet?

Here are some of the quotes from Amazon:

• “Learning to Swim is a thriller of the most thrilling kind—a smart and crafty story with whiffs of Rebecca that insists from the first sentence that you sit down and not stand up again until you’ve read the last word. Tell your loved ones to take care of themselves.” —Quinn Cummings, author of Notes from the Underwire

• “If The Usual Suspects and a Jodi Picoult novel had a love child, it would be Learning to Swim—a thought-provoking, evocative, and thrilling read.” —Steph Bowe, author of Girl Saves Boy

• “A mesmerizing confluence of mystery, intrigue, and suspense, with undercurrents of deep personal drama…Learning to Swim will hook you from the first page.” —Jamie Ford, bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

• “From the grabber beginning to the heartfelt conclusion, Sara J. Henry’s Learning to Swim is an auspicious debut … Fresh setting, well-realized characters, cleanly written, with a mysterious and suspenseful story – just what I was looking for.”  – Daniel Woodrell, award-winning author of The Death of Sweet Mister and Winter’s Bone

• “Impressive…Henry adroitly handles Troy’s exposure to new emotions as she re-examines her life and relationships.” - Publisher’s Weekly

So much praise, and the book isn’t even out yet!

Stay tuned for Sara’s visit–and your opportunity to win this copy of her fantastic new book!

Okay, here’s a wonderful example of great marketing.

This box from SitStay.com arrived at our house today.

They have the BEST shipping material.

Really.

Check out what it says on the top:

“WARNING: For your own sake, please do not stand between this box and your dog. Dogs have been known to go through just about anything to get to their SitStay box. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

Then, on the side:

“NOTE TO DELIVERY PERSON FROM DOG: The humans that live at this house haven’t figured out that I can use the computer. I couldn’t wait any longer for my favorite treats from SitStay.com. Please place package where I can get at it. There will be an extra treat for you during the holidays if you follow these instructions. –The Dog.”

The marketer in me is in awe, really. I’ve bought goodies for my dog from these folks since 1999, and have always been happy with their service, and the cute confirmation emails “written” by their dogs. It shows a sense of fun for what they do.

I’d never noticed these notes on the delivery boxes, though. What a fantastic idea!

Not only do these clever, witty, funny, creative, entertaining messages make me, the buyer, want to order from them again–if only to encourage them to be this creative all the time–but think of all the people who see them? Delivery people, folks at the post office, neighbors who see your delivery outside your door, or waiting at the curb with the recycles.

• This is the kind of eye-catching, smile-inducing thing that makes you want to tell your friends so that they’ll order from them, too.
• It makes you want to support the business that is working so hard at providing not only good products, but an enjoyable experience.
• And … it costs almost nothing. Specialty boxes with logos and websites aren’t exactly uncommon. (I can spot an Amazon.com box a mile away, how about you?) So, if you’re going to pay to have custom boxes made … why not have a little fun to make them memorable? To make yourself memorable?

It just makes my tail wag.

And look how happy it made my dog, too!

It’s not writer’s block.

I’m not not-writing because I don’t know where the story needs to go, or because I’ve lost interest. It’s not because I’ve grown to hate my chair or my keyboard, or that I needed a change of scenery. The symptoms aren’t really in line with writer’s block.

No, what I’m suffering from, suffering with, is Writer’s Avoidance.

I can’t quite face my manuscript. Every time I try to look it in the eye to reread recent paragraphs or to add new ones, I find my eyes skimming away. You know, in the way you do when you’re trying to avoid a delicate conversation, when you’re about to lie to a friend.

Every time I look at my document, I find my eyes just automatlcally skipping past the monitor to look at the clock, the weather outside the window, or the really fascinating faux-woodgrain in the desk.

I can’t look my manuscript in the eye.

I find this an intriguing dilemma, really. Writing is like any other relationship—you need honest, open lines of communication for it to work, and apparently ours are blocked.

• Maybe I’ve been doing so much reading lately that I’m feeling unfaithful.
  (“I know, darling, I read another novel, but it meant nothing to me! You’re the one I love!”)
• Maybe my conscience is guilty.
  (“Really, I meant to get back to you sooner, but I’ve been busy. I had other things to type.”)
• Maybe we’re growing apart.
  (“You said you’d always be there for me, but sometimes you feel so distant, I can’t reach you at all.”)
• Maybe we know each other too well.
  (“I feel like I know you so well, there’s no excitement, no new surprises any more.”)
• Maybe we’re bored with each other.
  (“I think we should see other manuscripts.…”)
• Maybe we’re not popular enough.
  (“We got turned down by the cool kids again (aka literary agents) for the “After Titanic” book.”>
• Maybe we don’t have a future.
  (“Why should we bother working on the sequel if we can’t get anyone interested in the first book? We should just stay home and wash our hair and pretend we don’t care.”)
• Maybe the timing is bad.
  (“What? I said I’d be back and here I am, ready at the keyboard, and you won’t even look at me.”)
• Maybe the past is getting in the way.
  (“It’s just that, there are so many things in the draft we’re going to have to get rid of, I can’t bear to move forward.”)

I suppose the take-away lesson here is that writing is like any other relationship.

There’s more to it than just showing up—you need to work at it, beguile it, woo it, coax it, flirt with it, flatter it … and when all that charm doesn’t work, sometimes you just have to really face what is and is not working in the relationship. Clear away the cobwebs of over-familiarity and do something different, something daring to bring the magic back.

Obviously, you can’t take your writing away for a romantic weekend of autumn leaf-peeping, but you can throw something expected and new into the mix. Shake your characters up. Take THEM someplace new. Work on an area you haven’t seen in a while—make the manuscript feel special and loved, as if it is the only one that matters to you.

And above all, don’t let its evasiveness beat you. If it won’t meet your eyes, just stare it down in a loving way until it gives in and says, “What?” That’s your opening to jump in with a burst of brilliant prose that will make it weak in the commas and fall in love with you all over again.

I just read this quote on an Amazon book review:

“Although the point of view shifts between many characters (with even the Coleman’s maid and cook getting their say, sometimes unnecessarily), Falling Angels is essentially the children’s story, since it is their lives that are most open to change. ”

(My added emphasis.)

It immediately made me think … more and more adults are reading books geared towards younger readers. (And, conversely, more and more YA books are expanding to include an older audience–think Harry Potter and Mockingjay.)

Speaking as an adult who has enjoyed reading MG and YA books since I was MG and YA, and has never actually given them up, this quote piqued my interest.

Why DO adults enjoy books for younger readers so much?

They’re safe, for one.

Even the books that acknowledge that The World can be a Scary Place aren’t usually too graphic or too consistently awful in the scope of the story. People might die, but not usually right in front of us. Or if they do, it’s not described as graphically as might occur in a book geared toward older readers. Ditto for sex and bad language. They appear, both of them, because they are part of Real Life, but not necessarily to the same, described to the last detail, degree as in, say, an adult romance novel.

The worlds in YA and MG (even the post-apocalyptic ones like Lois Lowry’s The Giver) tend to be real, but not quite so hard-edged as daily existence can be. It’s like the reader is standing in the doorway watching the harsh realities, but hasn’t quite entered the real world yet. You know, like television.

Nostalgia.

Those of us who have grown up, left school, and are just trying to make our livings, put food on the table, clothes on our backs, raise our kids, blah, blah, blah may well enjoy a look back to those halcyon days when the worst that could happen was that we’d get a failing grade in school, or that the bully might embarrass us during lunch. Even acknowledging that school isn’t the pastel-tinted wonderland we think we remember, as a rule, the consequences for most teen-aged mistakes don’t come with the same consequences as adult-aged mistakes. Teenagers aren’t usually responsible for the family finances, or for making the mortgage payments. (There are those that do, and certainly there are teenagers who are forced into being adults before their time because the adults in their lives aren’t cutting it. But, you know, generally speaking.)

But … other than that … that review has that line about “Essentially a children’s story since their lives are most open to change?”

Sometimes I think that … gritty and harsh and devastatingly real though YA is these days … there is an element of possibility that’s not always available in adult fiction.

It’s a simple fact that, as you grow older, your options get smaller. I’m not saying that you can’t decide at 20, 50, or 80 to do something completely new. You can quit your job and join the circus; you can tell your family you’re stepping out to the grocery store and run off to Taiwan for a week. People remake themselves and their images of themselves all the time.

The difference, though, between doing it at 16 or doing it at 66? Two differences, actually. (1) Baggage and (2) Time. The older we get, the more memories and experiences we gather–good and bad. You might be less likely to bungee-jump off a bridge now if you’d had a bad experience years before. This, of course, is the point of wisdom–you learn from your experiences. The problem is that that wisdom can weigh you down, especially if you’ve found a good place in your life and know that one wrong step could demolish it.

And, of course, older people have less time to explore options than younger people. You can decide to become a neurosurgeon at 72 if you like, but it’s going to take time to learn everything you need to know, and the years you’ll be around to practice are (presumably) going to be fewer than someone in medical school at 23. Nobody knows for sure how much time they’ve got in their account, but we all know it’s going to run out eventually, and like any other resource, the rarer it gets, the more precious it becomes. Old people don’t have time to mess around, darn it!

Which makes books for children and teenagers particularly appealing. When you’re young, almost anything is possible. You can’t change who your parents are, or the situation you were born into, but you can almost always change your future if you try hard enough. When you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, you can change almost anything about your life. Maybe not your skin color, or your obnoxious little brother,or terrible things that might have happened to you, but … where you’re going, what your destiny is.

I’m an optimist, folks. I like to believe that anything is possible. And too many books written for adults are just bouncing from one disaster to another. They’re depressing.

Optimism is worth it.

I like books written for younger people because–even the post-apocalyptic, gritty, life-is-awful ones–tend to have at least a hint of faith that, no matter how bad things get, there’s always a chance they’ll get better. The good guys usually win, people are redeemed, life changes for the better. Not every adult-geared book does that. I can think of any number that left me feeling depressed at the end. A book that makes me feel hopeful for the future? A Godsend.

You know, it just goes to show that you really can’t separate your own life, your own time, your own thought-processes from your historical research.

I was reading a book about the first two decades of the twentieth century (Pivotal Decades by John Milton Cooper), and came across this photo of General Pershing from WWI. You know, from around 1917-1918 or so?

See the man in the background?

Even knowing that this photo is over ninety years old, the posture was so familiar, so ever-present …

… My first thought was that he was texting someone or checking his email or tweeting, or something.

Yes, this makes me a momentary idiot. (Or at least, I hope it was just momentary.) But it also stopped me mid-chew as I ate my lunch.

How many other things do we take for granted just because they seem familiar to us … even when they’re not. I’m not sure what this soldier is doing–tying a knot? Checking a bullet? Folding a vital military order? Picking at a hangnail? Doing some obscure 1917 thing that has disappeared from usage in the last century? But I’m pretty confident in saying that he is NOT scrolling through music on his MP3-player. You know, unless he was a time-traveller who wasn’t paying attention to the photographer.

The point, though, is that no matter how hard we may try not to, we’re always going to perceive the world through what we KNOW.

History, religion, table manners … everything. We can know that Amish people don’t use electricity, but can we really understand what that means on a daily basis? We can know that a couple centuries ago, it might take months to deliver mail across country, but that seems impossible to people who mostly communicate instantaneously. And who can’t really imagine what a difference the telegraph made when it spread like wildfire around the world.

People say the only way to know another person is to walk a mile in their shoes–even if just in your imagination. The trick, though, is that those shoes aren’t going to fit, no matter how well they’re made, because your feet are used to the world you walk. Anything else is too unfamiliar for secure footing … and it’s when you make assumptions that you’re going to get into trouble.

Spammers, this is NOT the way to win my attention.

I think we can all agree that spammers are, well, annoying–like telemarketers used to be. They clutter up your comments and email with links for products and sites that usually have nothing to do with what you’re blogging about.

To be fair, some spammers at least try. They leave a legitimate comment about something you’ve posted–it’s just that their website link goes back to some site trying to sell you something. They’re at least trying to blend in, contribute, and aren’t being obnoxious about it. Spammers like that are okay in my book, like any poor wage slave just trying to make a living. Would I rather they weren’t passing out business cards in my living room, yes, but as long as they’re polite and don’t stand on the furniture, we can get along.

But, how about this comment I got recently? (Misspellings and grammar left untouched. The only thing I removed was the hyperlink because I’m not giving this person free advertising.)

Why have you taken out my post? It was very helpful information and i assure atleast one person found it helpful unlike the rest of the comments on this site. I’ll post it again. Sick of getting low amounts of useless traffic for your website? Well i wish to let you know about a fresh underground tactic that produces me personally $900 on a daily basis on 100% AUTOPILOT. I could be here all day and going into detail but why dont you just check their site out? There is a excellent video that explains everything. So if your serious about producing quick hard cash this is the website for you _______.

Oh, where do I start?

It’s rude. First, while I don’t remember seeing the person’s name in my spam filters before, it’s possible their comment got past the Akismet wall and that I saw it in the spam filter and thought, “Yep, that’s spam,” and deleted it myself. But, that’s my job. I certainly hold the right to delete any comments I wish from my own site–especially if they’re spam.

What does this person think they’re gaining by outright scolding me for deleting their comment?

Oy, the nerve!

Which, of course, is the number one rule for selling anything, isn’t it? DON’T BE RUDE. You never know who might be a potential customer. You never know who has power and who does not. There are countless fairy tales with fairy godmothers in disguise, testing good intentions.

But more than that, a comment like this is essentially hijacking my site for their own purposes (and doing it nastily).

If there’s anything I hate more than spam, it’s RUDE spam. No way on earth I’m letting this person’s comment through now, ever.

So, who is this person hurting? Me? I don’t think so. They’re only hurting themselves by burning bridges. Am I likely to ever have let one of their badly punctuated comments slide? Probably not, but I’m happy to have well-intentioned conversations. If they had tried to fit in or been a little nicer, there wouldn’t have been an issue.

Why … I mean, seriously, WHY … do you suppose they thought a comment like that was a GOOD idea? “Why have you taken out my post? It was very helpful information and i assure atleast one person found it helpful unlike the rest of the comments on this site. I’ll post it again….” They insulted me for my management, and insulted all of you, my readers, for allegedly leaving unhelpful comments.

Sheesh.

I wish I really were a fairy godmother in disguise so I could smite them with some nice, genteel curse like warts or bunions or something really inconvenient like chronic writer’s block.

Okay, thanks for letting me vent! Please come and leave REAL comments and share your opinions!

I’ve been talking about the difference between gathering information for specific reasons or for general information, because sometimes you need to know specific things and sometimes you just want a big, general overview.

Digging into archives to dig out a specific name, a particular fact can be satisfying. Like a detective looking for clues, you know you’re looking for one, certain thing that can prove your hypothesis, or that you can hang your entire story on. It’s like solving a puzzle, and that can be very, very satisfying. But I find that there is as much pleasure in just doing general background reading. The beauty of that is—if you’re not trying to get to a specific place and are just meandering through—you’re going to see so much more, be open to new possibilities.

Okay, say you need to drive from New York to California, you’ve got two possibilities. You can plot the quickest route, climb in the car and head out to the highway and cruise at 70 m.p.h. for the next 10 hours with a couple rest stops. If you persevere, you’ll be there in a week.

Except, you will have missed the chance to see any sights on your way. The Great Lakes? Oh, was that the gleam I saw on the horizon on the way by? The Mississippi River? Well, it was dark when we crossed it. The Rocky Mountains? Oh, I remember those, the car really had to work to get up the incline.

Research is often blinkered—you get so focused on the one piece of information you need, you forget to look around.

Or, maybe you take the Tourist’s approach. You need to get to California, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime journey, so you decide to take advantage. You swing south to stop at the nation’s capital and then head down toward New Orleans, cruising along the Gulf Coast, stopping at the Grand Canyon, and generally just meandering your way across the continent, stopping when you see something interesting, and just taking in the view.

The beauty of reading for general background (as opposed to specific research) is that all the possibilities are open to you.

Just in the last week, I’ve found a few details that have made my creative juices flow.

• Like, for example, after WWI ended, Britain had 2 million more women than men, having lost so many soldiers in the war. One headmistress told her graduating class that only 1 girl in 10 of them would ever get married because there simply was no one left for them to wed; they would have to find something else to do with their lives. For a generation raised to believe that marriage and motherhood were the pinnacle of feminine abilities, that is a terribly frightening statistic.

…I immediately started to wonder, what do you do if you would like to get married but there literally is no one to marry? They’re not just hard to find or “the good ones are taken.” They are dead and gone, and your entire generation, sorry, is out of luck. But, in the meantime, you’ll excuse the rest of us if we look down on you for being a spinster and are reluctant to give you a job because the men need those, can’t you sit in a corner somewhere out of the way? All 2,000,000 of you?

• Or, I needed to know the name of the Governor of New Jersey in 1917 for my main character to shake hands with. It turns out that Walter Evans Edge—a man I’d never heard of—was governor not only during World War I but World War II as well. In between, he served in the U.S. Senate and was ambassador to France until the outbreak of WWII led him to re-enter politics.

… This caught my attention. He must have been a remarkable man. He must have done a wonderful job leading the state in World War I, if the electorate was willing to vote for him again 30 years later. So, why have I never heard of him? Is there a monument somewhere? A plaque? Something that honors a 70-ish year old man for taking up such a hard job again in a time of war? What kind of governor was he? What kind of man?

• Did you know that in 1917, King George V changed the family name from the German-sounding House of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha to the House of Windsor? This goes way beyond calling Sauerkraut “Liberty Cabbage.” Your name defines you in so many ways–whether it’s the name you were born with, or one you married into (or away from). It’s not something most of us change lightly.

…At a time of war, when hundreds of thousands of young men (and some women) were being slaughtered … what made the British royal family decide to completely change their sense of identity? To cut themselves off from years of German-related pride? Kaiser Wilhelm I was the first-born grandson of Queen Victoria, after all.

But, see? This is the point.

If you’re busy focusing on the one thing you need, you’re not going to have time to take these little mental side trips. And isn’t that what creativity is all about? Visiting the lesser-seen spots, pointing out the inspiring views and interesting history along the way?

(This is part 3 of a series. Read Part 1 HERE. And, Part 2 HERE.)

So, what’s brought this subject up, anyway? (Read Part 1 here.) I’ve been reading about the World War I era to get a feel for it for my Titanic-book sequel. I’m skimming my way through books and websites, picking up ideas and tidbits of (possibly) useful information, but I’m not looking for anything specific.

At this precise moment, I don’t even know what I need to know.

I haven’t worried about the dates of the battles, or the names of the generals—they are not really necessary to my story. My characters don’t know all the details of what was happening at the front, and they don’t really care. They are busy just trying to live their lives.

Background is all about color.

I’m reading these WWI books for an idea of the world my characters lived in. Without some general knowledge of life in 1917-1919, my book would be like a pencil sketch of a person, detailed in itself, but which has no background, no real setting to give it perspective.

When you’re writing—no matter what you’re writing—you want a full-blown painting—rich with color, and with a complete background.

You can’t get that with just a few facts. Anybody who ever sat through a boring history class in school knows this. Bare facts are dry, but stories are interesting. I might know that the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3, 1917, but it doesn’t tell me the reasons—the debates at home about German submarines, or trench warfare, the economic involvement with Britain and France, the debate over the draft. My characters might not be busily debating these things in meaningful chapter-long dialogues, but they’re reading them in their morning newspapers, worrying about them when they toss in bed at night.

I don’t need to mention them, I just need to KNOW them, just like I know that my vacuum cleaner sucks up dirt and dog fur, that my cellphone can send text messages, that there are 50 states in the United States of America, and millions of other little bits of information that set me in MY place in time. I know these things that inform my world, but they don’t necessarily have an immediate impact on my daily life.

Research is for when you are looking for something specific.

On the other hand, if I want to describe what my main character wore to meet the Governor, I’m going to need an idea of what fashions were like in 1917. That’s research.

If I need to know the name of the Governor, that’s research.

Did she ride in a car or in a horse-drawn carriage to meet him? Research.

Could he have received an important phone call while she was there? Research.

See? Knowing that telephones are fairly common in 1917 is background, but the minute I need to know for a specific reason, it becomes research. Knowing that there was a governor my character could meet is background (because, of course New Jersey had a governor), but learning his name was research.

Mind you, this distinction is entirely my own personal definition. A lot of the time gleaning background information and doing research are exactly the same—sitting with a book or a handy search-engine, looking for knowledge. But you can read a car’s instruction manual out of pure curiosity and you’re a responsible car owner, or you can read it because your engine is leaking fluids and you need to figure out why right now … the NEED is different.

(This is part 2 of a series. Read Part 1 HERE.)

I’ve had a few thoughts about research rummaging around my head lately, and thought I’d turn them into a blog post, but it turned out to be way too long, so I thought I’d try a series, instead.

There’s a cozy mystery by Alisa Craig with a character famed for writing historical fiction, whose “research” involved randomly flipping a reference book open, sticking a pin into the page, and inserting whatever factoid it skewered into her book. She couldn’t be bothered with real research, she just wanted a few, random things to make it look like she knew what she was talking about.

I think we can all agree that research can be important for writing. Fiction or non-fiction doesn’t matter.

If you’re dealing with facts, they need to be right.

Inaccuracies reflect badly on us, the writers, whether it’s a statistic in a marketing piece, a quote in a blog post, or a historical fact gotten wrong in a piece of fiction. But, still, I feel there’s a difference between “doing research” and “gathering background.”

If I’m writing a piece on air purifiers, I need to know some facts about how they work. I need to know, in general, what they do, why they’re beneficial, and why you should have one. That is not the same as talking about the specific air purifier I might be trying to sell, or what makes it better than its competition. It’s more background-gathering than real, heavy-duty research.

What’s the difference?

The objective.

Research, to my mind, has a specific purpose. You could be looking for the date a war ended, the year a gadget was invented, the name of a company founder, the causes of cancer. These may or may not be questions that have ready answers, but they are specific information needs.

Background, on the other hand, is more general. At what time did having a telephone in the house become common? What was life like in the 1500s? What sort of town was Bath during Jane Austen’s time? Why is going to the dentist important? Is marketing really that useful to my company?

No matter what you’re writing, there’s a certain foundation of knowledge you need to have.

If you’re writing a marketing piece to sell vacuum cleaners, you can probably assume that potential buyers already know what a vacuum is and why they want one—your objective is to tell them why they should by THIS one. But, if you’re selling something that you have no personal knowledge of (say, professional-grade harvesting equipment, Zamboni machines, obscure medical devices), you’re going to need some background first.

You need to have at least a general idea of what you’re talking about if you want to sound even remotely convincing.

If you’re writing fiction, you need to know all sorts of things that might not find their specific way into the text. A story set in 1860 Atlanta will have all kinds of things in the background—the outbreak of Civil War, slavery, Abraham Lincoln’s election, tobacco, the latest hoop skirt fashions, the scent of magnolia blossoms, the tart zing of lemonade, what a hot, Georgia summer feels like without air conditioning, what it was like to travel in a carriage on bumpy roads … you get the idea. Will all of these things have a role in the story? Not necessarily, but they’re THERE. They are things that even a character solely focused on bringing in his cotton crop knows is happening in his world.

Okay … that’s enough for this installment … please share your thoughts below!

Did you know that Writing has a lot in common with any good Fantasy? You know the kind, where a hero faces enormous odds to go on a quest to save the world?

• Skills and Talents: Obviously every good hero needs a skillset. In fantasy, that would be sword play, great strength, nobility of heart. In writing, we’re talking grammar, vocabulary, a talent with words. Before starting your quest, you need to make sure you have the equipment you need.
• Magic: The best part about writing—that magical moment when everything comes together perfectly and you get that “Oh, that’s good” glow of accomplishment. It’s one of the best feelings in the world, and only happens when all the pieces fall precisely into place.
• Wizards and their tricks: Have you noticed how many nifty tools there are for writers these days? We don’t just have just pen and paper, now we’ve got computers, and even they aren’t limited to basic word-processing any more. There are online dictionaries and thesauruses. There are timers to help you focus for blocks of time. There are spelling and grammar checkers. Voice recognition software for when you can’t type. Recorders on your MP3 players for interviews and random thoughts. Organization software to help you keep all your pieces in order. Plus dozens more that I’m missing.
• Quest: Every good fantasy needs a goal, and for writers, it’s that perfect document at the end of the journey. It might be a magazine article, a blog post, a novel, a poem, a piece of perfect sales copy, a spot-on web page … anything, really … but you want writing that is perfect. Strong, clean, noble, brave … all the things a fantasy hero needs to be.
• Apperances can be deceiving: You can’t always believe what you see, though. Just like heroes can look like small, incompetent weaklings, and villains can be handsome and strong, you can’t assume that what you find is what it is. Good writing digs past the surface to explore the true meanings.
• Luck: As important as skill can be, don’t underestimate the importance of luck. You might keep your sword meticulously sharpened, but it’s not going to help you fight a battering-ram. Sometimes, all the skill doesn’t matter if you don’t have the luck and wits to think on your feet. Keep your eyes open to possibilities.
• Danger: Look out! There are distractions trying to pull you from your path! Time-sucks eager to delay you and keep you from your goal! Don’t let yourself be deceived by the innocuous distractions, the ones that make you think, “I can always finish this later. What’s wrong with a little recreation?” They could be evil, trying to prevent you from reaching your goals. Beware!
• Determination will win the day: The only way to successfully complete your quest is if you don’t give in, you don’t give up. Keep your eyes focused on the prize and don’t let yourself be distracted. It’s the only way to win the day.
• Happy Endings: The best fantasy stories always have a happy ending. The article gets published. The book hits the bestseller list. The sales piece sells a million units. The trick is to traverse the dangerous path to get there, but if you’re brave and strong and focused on your goal, you will succeed. That’s what happy endings are all about.
• Sequels: Don’t forget the sequels. Always be ready for more … this could be an actual sequel, as in another piece to follow up the writing you’ve done, to continue the story. OR, it might be an All New Adventure … publishing. If your successful quest is finishing your piece of writing, the obvious next part would be the quest of getting it published so other people can read it.

So–what’s your writing fantasy?

How do you feel about deadlines?

Personally, I’ve never been a fan. Not of tight deadlines, at least. The thought of being a journalist working on a 24-hour cycle of researching and writing stories gives me nightmares. Even when I was in school, I’d write down the due-date for papers a day or two earlier than they were needed, just so I’d have a cushion built-in for catastrophes.

Deadlines aren’t all bad.

Still … even I have to admit that there’s something to be said for deadlines. They give you a reason, a time frame for getting things done. You need to get things ready for the printer to have time before the magazine goes to press. You need to get your copy to a client so he can get his marketing promotion out on time. An editor needs your work to show her publisher.

When you have no deadlines at all … “I’ll finish my novel someday.” … it’s amazing how long the work can be stretched. You take breaks to chat on the phone. You’re tired after a long day, so you decide to skip writing for now. You’ve got errands to run and decide they are more pressing. Suddenly, it’s been months, or even years, and you’re still working on the same thing, tweaking commas, nit-picking adjectives, and your manuscript is never going to be done.

Deadlines can provide incentive.

One of the reasons challenges like NaNoWriMo have become so popular is that they impose specific deadlines on the writers. Get a whole novel written in 30 days? Well, suddenly there’s no time for dawdling! You chain yourself to your desk chair and suddenly are amazed at how much you can get done when you actually apply yourself.

Sometimes the clock provides its own deadline.

Are you trying to get your article done before your toddler wakes up from her nap? Are you tapping away at your novel at 11:30, trying to squeeze out a few pages before your eyelids insist on shutting for the day? Or maybe you’ve got fifteen minutes before your train leaves and you pull out your notebook to draft out your next blog post.

Sometimes, the only deadline you need is the knowledge that your precious, free moments are ticking away. You’ve been frittering away your time on Twitter or Facebook, reading your RSS feeds, browsing websites, and you realize you’ve only got half an hour before you need to turn off the computer. Cripes! Hurry, you can get at least a few hundred words pounded out before then.

This is what happens to me, I find. I can dawdle my way through my day, wasting way too much time checking my email or curling up with a book, and then bound into action like a superhero at a cry for help, simply because the precious resource I’ve been wasting is almost gone.

(We won’t discuss the occasional slow afternoon at my day job, when I sometimes open up Word and type away, just because it’s stolen time and must be used as if it’s extra precious, extra valuable. Because, of course, doing that would be wrong.)

How do you feel about deadlines?

How about you? Do you love deadlines? Dread them? Find a difference between external ones from clients and ones you’ve given yourself?

Image by Jenny. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenny_twum/

I was reading a book the other day … a highly educated, informative tome with dozens of pages of footnotes and an index as long as your arm. It was written, needless to say, by a well-educated person, published by a well-known publishing house and, no doubt, read over by many a skilled and critical eye for typos and errors.

However, it’s a fact of life, though, that errors slip into even the most carefully produced books.

In this case, it was the “yolk of oppression.”

Instead of the bright yellow center of an egg, the author meant the wooden yoke that harness oxen and other animals to carts, plows and other labor-intensive vehicles.

But there it was, glaring as bright as ever a sunny-side up shone from a dish.

Do I think that the author didn’t know the right word? Of course not.
Do I think he mistyped it? Possibly, or it could have been the type-setter, or any person along the line who made a small little goof. I don’t doubt that the people involvedwere well-trained and attentive to their work, but this was a big project. Huge, in fact. The book is 688 pages (including the back matter). One or two small errors are bound to happen. In cases like these, you more or less just hope that they’re small ones.

The thing that worries me, though, is not that mistakes happen, but that we’ve become so oblivious to them. And, worse, that they happen so often … careless mistakes, misspellings, slips of the fingers, momentary brain-freezes … that we start expecting them.

I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, but it’s a rare day that I don’t see someone making stupid mistakes when they write. (Sometimes it’s me.) Tweets, message boards, blog posts, emails … But it’s one thing when somebody in a rush types “then it’s leg broke” when describing the titanic crash their curio cabinet made after their bloodhound tried to chase the cat over the top. They got caught up in the story, it happens.

It’s a different matter when you stumble across these kind of mistakes in “formal” media like newspapers, magazines, and books. Headlines, for example. Titles on published books. Billboards. You know, places where professional people put together something for the public to see and made a stupid, glaring mistake.

Mistyping “yoke” for “yolk” is minor. Yes, it caught my eye, but I remembered it mostly because of the humor–the mental image of an angry egg cracking a whip over a group of oppressed people. I’m honestly not holding it against the author or publisher (which is why I’m not publicly outing them).

What worries me, though, is that the more we grant free passes for honest mistakes like these, the more we shrug off the they’re/there/their mistakes and people confusing your for you’re, it means the more we’re simply accepting the new, lowest common denominator.

I realize this makes me sound like a crank with nothing better to worry about. There are wars and famine, disease and despair rampant out there in the world, and I’m worrying about typos?

Except… if we can’t be bothered to look after the little details, how can we be sure that we’re looking after the big ones? How can we be sure that society isn’t being as cavalier about the Big Issues that really do come down to life and death when they regularly disregard the simple, little things like spelling, punctuation and saying “thank you?”

Life is made up of small moments and minor details that add up to a life lived with grace and strength as opposed to one that’s careless and slovenly. You don’t need an immaculate home to be a good, worthy, wonderful person. You might even excuse the mess by saying you’ve been too busy saving the spotted owl and trying to solve the problem of world hunger … you’re focusing on bigger things.

But, when you’ve got a potential donor, or client, or anybody you want to impress at all, appearances matter.

You might not think that one, little typo is the end of the world (and I agree), but stop and ask yourself if it was an honest mistake or something that slipped through because you just didn’t care. The answer can make all the difference between a simple, legitimate mistake and the beginning of a slippery slope covered in eggshells and albumen because we were too darn lazy to clean up the yolks when we dropped the first egg.

Okay, not really. I’m exaggerating. I AM a writer. I enjoy it, I’m good at it, I even make some money from it, in the perfect blend of vocation, hobby, and inclination. I’m the first one to admit that the joy of easily flowing words is incomparable. That blissful state may not happen all that often, but when it does, it’s magic, and one that only another writer can truly appreciate. (You could make an argument for other creative folks, I suppose, but I’m telling this story.)

Anyway, there’s no question that I’m a writer and proud to be one. I can get as caught up in weaving my web of words as the next writer. I find myself drawn to my keyboard periodically through the day for no other reason than to tap out words for a story, an email, or a blog post.

But, my little, guilty secret is that, as much as I enjoy writing, I love reading more.

Reading was my very first addiction, and it’s still my strongest. I can forego chocolate. I can give up television or music. But books? The sheer pleasure of curling up with a good book–especially the rarest of rare things, a brand-new book by a favorite author? Nothing else compares. And with that kind of temptation, I am weak, weak, weak.

This was brought home to me this weekend when I did almost nothing but read.

This started Friday night after I got home from work … after I baked a lemon meringue pie and did all the supper-time kinds of things and checked email and did some knitting … after all the things that have to be done. I stayed up until 2:30 to finish the first book (Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s newest Liaden book Mouse and Dragon). The next morning, I started the next (Allison Winn Scotch’s new The One That I Want. I stopped reading for about five hours to celebrated my sister’s birthday and have a little nap, and then I finished that book and started the next (Joanne Harris’ Runemarks). That, I finished around lunch on Sunday, and since it reminded me of Diana Wynne Jones’ Eight Days of Luke, if only because of the Norse god similarities, I pulled that off the shelf and polished it off before supper. Then, because it’s a favorite, I took out Sean Russell’s Beneath the Vaulted Hills.

In just over two days, I read over 1,300 pages.

The thing that amazes me is how easy this is. Reading is my first love. Even when it’s a book I’ve read multiple times, I still get drawn in, still get caught up in what’s happening. Fiction or non-fiction doesn’t matter. Nor does time–I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning with no trouble whatsoever, simply because I wanted to know what happened next. I can spend an entire day doing nothing but read. In fact, curling up in a comfy chair with a book and a cup of tea is practically heaven–especially if my dog is sitting with me.)

I’ll confess, as much as I love writing … it doesn’t pull me in this strongly.

Does this worry me? Do I fret that I’ve missed my calling? That I should somehow have arranged a career that allowed me to read for a living?

No. And I’ll tell you why.

Most of the writers I know became writers because they loved reading.

There are some writers, of course, who write because it’s their job, or because they got into it from the marketing or business side. But most of the writers I know started off as kids with their noses stuck into books, just like me.

So many of us ARE readers, which is exactly what draws us to writing. We may have thought “I want to do that,” when we read a story we loved. We may have read something so appallingly bad we told ourselves, “I can do better than that.” We may have started writing down the stories we had in our heads simply because nobody else seemed to be telling the stories we really wanted.

Being a Reader first and a Writer second only makes me stronger as a writer.

Being an inquiring person, I’ll read almost anything that comes recommended highly enough. I have a wide variety of interests and like to know about things, or to be entertained in new and different ways. I read fiction and non-fiction; books and magazines; websites and blogs.

And–even without thinking about it consciously–this has made me a stronger writer.

By continually reading new things, meeting new ideas, discovering new authors, I have broadened my own horizons and at the same time have developed an eye and ear for “good” writing rather than “bad.” I can appreciate writing styles that are wonderful yet completely different than my own. I can pour withering scorn over the styles that are out-right bad. But … most importantly … I am keeping my love of writing alive by feeding it good things to read.

Like any other skill or talent, writing demands nourishment.

There are writers out there … writers of all types, writing marketing pieces or cookie-cutter novels … who basically write the same thing over and over and over again. I was watching the wonderful “Jeeves and Wooster” series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry the other night, and in one episode, one of Bertie’s friends is reading a series of novels to his uncle to soften him up to the idea of him marrying a waitress. Every time the camera stops by Bingo and his uncle, you hear “Scornfully she tossed her black/blond/red curls as, eyes snapping, she replied…” The hair color changed from book to book, but the sentence remained the same. Every time.

Now, Bingo’s uncle enjoyed them, and all, but obviously this writer wasn’t doing a damn thing to expand her writerly horizons. She just stuck to what she knew and left it at that. My guess is that, after publishing her first book, she never picked up another book that wasn’t her own again. She never primed the pump or did anything to try to improve or do more. Nothing to generate new ideas.

My contention is that, while curling up with a book or four over the course of a weekend may not seem immediately productive … and I admit that it doesn’t … in fact, it serves a dual purpose. Not only does it give the Reader Me a relaxing visit with somebody else’s words and story for a change, but it reminds the Writer Me that new and different are good, possible, inspiring, and downright fun.

It’s all too easy to get caught in a rut. especially when things are going well, but you owe it to yourself to let that conscious mind relax once in a while while you pull out some fresh flavors, some new ingredients and let it all stew in the background with a dash of inspiration. You never know what might grow out of it.

I’ve recently turned my attention to an old manuscript of mine. It’s been sitting on the hard-drive of the last several computers I’ve had, minding its own business, being patient.

It’s the first novel I ever wrote, and while I sent it out numerous times, I wasn’t able to find an agent for it, got discouraged, and tucked it away to focus on other things.

But I figured it was time to give it another look.

The idea is simple—I rewrote the story of Cinderella, but I gave the stepmother and stepsisters a fair break. I also didn’t stop at the usual, prince-finds-the-girl spot, but used that as my half-way point. Haven’t you always wondered how he brought home a girl with dishpan-hands to be the next queen?

Well, I have to say, re-reading this recently, I’ve come to a couple conclusions.

• My writing has improved. The writing from ten years ago isn’t dreadful, but my writing now is better, tighter. (Knowing my tendencies towards wordiness, this is a shock to me, too.) It’s just good to know that, even if I haven’t noticed it, improvement has happened.
• A good story can transcend less-than-perfect writing. Reading this again, I am as enchanted by the story I put together as I was when I wrote it. It doesn’t matter that the writing isn’t always perfect, I enjoyed reading it and rediscovering the story.
• Write what you love. I’ve said for years that the reason I wrote this book in the first place was because it was a story I wanted to read and nobody else had written it yet … so I did. And, still, I would plunk my money down for this book in a heartbeat if I came across it in a store.
• Editing older work is easier than newer writing. Once a manuscript (or blog post, or article) has marinated for a while, it’s not as painful cutting or changing things. Gaining a little distance make it easier to be impartial, easier to make the changes that have to be made without sentiment barring the way. I removed entire chapters, and cut out over 30,000 words. (Yes, I know. I don’t know what I was thinking, that my YA manuscript was 121,000 words, but now it’s a comparatively trim 86,000. And the chapters I ruthlessly cut? Well, I kept copies, for old times’ sake.)
• Patting yourself on the back is healthy. Because, yes, there were some chapters that I read with a smile on my face because I was so darn happy with the way they came out and how well they’ve held up.

All in all, letting this manuscript rest all these years worked well for me. Re-reading it now is like moving back to an old home that I loved—all the fond memories, but I get to give it a complete makeover to bring it up to date.

Do you do your best writing in the morning? Or at night?

This is one of those topics that can raise strong opinions.

People who write in the morning say that their brain is fresher, more creative. Their energy level is high, and they can crank out their best work before they’ve had their morning coffee. Or, at least, before lunch.

People who write at night say that their best work comes when their brain is tired after a full day, too tired to snipe and criticize at every sentence. They can focus on their writing with the satisfying knowledge that everything else they needed to do that day is done, and they can get words down on the page while the overly critical portion of their brain naps, dreaming about lists of tasks to do tomorrow.

Personally, I have trouble writing first thing in the morning. I like my sleep too much, and have difficulty enough dragging my eyelids open to get to my day job. The idea of waking up an hour earlier and pulling open the laptop and writing before I’m even out of bed (as I hear some writers do) seems almost obscene, and way too energetic for that hour of the day.

Could I go to bed earlier so I could wake up earlier without grumbling? Maybe, but then I’d lose the time I get some of my best work done. I find when I write later in the day, my inner critic is too busy napping to interfere with my getting words on the page. I like her awake and alert when I’m editing things, but dragging the words for a first draft out to my keyboard? She just gets in the way, trying to be too helpful. “Shouldn’t you have a comma there?” “Is that really the best word to use?” “You forgot to mention the strongest selling point.” It’s like trying to cook a Thanksgiving dinner with a toddler underfoot. She means well, but really isn’t helping a bit.

But, if I wait until she gets tired and nods off? I find I get so much more done, and then I welcome her help with the actual editing process. “You’re right, that spot really does need a comma.”

How about you? Morning? Or Evening?

Of course, maybe you split the difference and write in the afternoons…

In case you’ve forgotten, here’s one of the cardinal rules of writing:

Don’t Forget Your Audience.

This should be obvious. If you’re writing for children, there will be language or graphic scenes that you don’t need to detail. If you’re writing romance novels, on the other hand, you can go into (ahem) a lot more detail.

If you’re writing an article geared toward an elite group of highly educated people in a particular field, you can use a lot more jargon and industry-specific language than you could if you were writing the same article for the general public.

Newspapers are usually geared toward adult readers who presumably have a running knowledge of current events. Magazines and periodicals aim for people with common interests, such as photography, cars, fashion, their home town. Blogs can be directed toward general readers (everyone who thinks dogs are cute!), or focused on very specific people (fans of Holst’s “The Planets,” writers trying to get published, knitters who love making socks).

The point, though, is that you almost always have a specific audience.

But, how do you write differently for different groups?

This is harder to define, but I’d say it comes down to three elements. They’re all related, and the borders are fuzzy, but here’s how I think of them:

Tone.

Friendly. Cool. Informed. Gracious. Intelligent. Condescending. This is your tone of voice.

Think about this. When you get a phone call from a stranger and only have their voice with which to judge how capable they are, how helpful or convincing … it’s their tone that’s going to have the most impact. Do they sound tired? Bored? Excited? Interested?

You could have two marketers call you with the exact same pitch, but one will turn you off, and one will pique your interest … it all comes down to Tone. You’re going to be drawn to the one who sounds friendly and capable, the one who sounds interested in what she is doing and eager to help you.

The same thing goes with writing–it’s your choice how you sound, but that old saw about catching more flies with honey holds true … let your tone of voice show that you care about what you do.

Voice.

This seems similar to Tone, I know, but I think of Voice as how you use the language. A person addressing a conference of etymologists, for example, is going to dust off the fancy vocabulary, like bringing out the good silver for Christmas … but a GOOD writer is going to make that presentation interesting and entertaining, regardless of syllable count. A bad writer? Um, you remember those dense, dry, incomprehensible text books from school, don’t you? The ones that were so darn educated you couldn’t understand a word they said?

Writing can be made more or less accessible simply by the complexity of the language. Are the sentences long or short? Simple or complex? Are the paragraphs long, solid blocks of text? You get the idea. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t sound “smart” and “friendly” at the same time. Or that, if you’re writing for a professional journal that you can’t let your humanity show.

Vocabulary.

All the writing mavens love to tell you to keep your vocabularly simple–that the high-falutin’ words are just going to make you inaccessible, or confusing, or whatever the reason-of-the-week is. Not that I’m denying the truth of this, mind you–too many people simply don’t know what to do with one of those high-priced, fancy vocabularies, any more than they can drive a Lamborghini perfectly on the first try after a lifetime of Chevys.

My point, though, is that sometimes you have to gear your vocabulary to your audience. When talking to a child, we tend to downshift the vocabulary level to make it accessible. “Why don’t you go out to play?” instead of “Perhaps you would care to consider transferring your recreation to an outdoor venue?” Is your vocabulary held to a reasonable level that makes it accessible, yet not so “dumbed down” that you sound like you are constantly talking to a toddler?

I’m all for stretching people’s vocabularies–the more the better–and it never worries me to use a word or two that my readers might not have met before. I’m happy to provide the introduction. But there’s a difference between being in a room filled with familiar faces with just a stranger or two, and a room filled with strangers. If you fill up your writing with words that your readers probably don’t recognize … they’re going to ditch the party and decide to go hang out with their friends, instead.

There’s the built-in censorship element, too, of not using certain types of language in front of young, impressionable ears and eyes. Of writing in a gentlemanly or ladylike manner in such a way that your grandmother could read your work without blushing.

Don’t forget who you’re writing for.

What do you think? Do you write differently for different audiences?

As instructed as part of Weronika’s Page-A-Day Challenge, I’m setting up one post to track my progress.

My “victim” for this challenge is an old manuscript I’m resurrecting. If you don’t already know, I’ve got three novels written.

My first, “After Happily Ever,” was finished back in the mid-1990s and is a retelling of Cinderella, but one which gives the stepmother and stepsisters a fair break and then goes on to tell what happens after the prince finds the girl. It was finished, it is finished, but I recently chopped 30,000 words out of it to make it better, stronger, faster, so … still finished, but much improved.

The second … well more about that in a moment.

The third is “After Titanic” which tells about a young woman who lost her husband on the Titanic on their way back from their honeymoon, and has brought back an orphan with her. He was handed to her as her lifeboat was lowered, and she felt obliged to look after him. Little does she know, though, that the child is enormously wealthy, which brings up all sorts of interesting problems for her as she tries to deal with her grief and restart her life in the midst of gossipy neighbors, a distraught mother-in-law, and nosy reporters poking around, looking for a good story. This one stood unfinished for years while I tried to figure out the legal ramifications of her trying to adopt a rich orphan, on her own, in 1912 when women still couldn’t even vote. But, as of a month or so ago, it is done now, too.

The thing is … my second novel got bumped to the wayside by the Titanic story, and so it has languished even longer, even though it’s about halfway done. 48,000 words, in fact, with a rough outline as to what has to happen in the second half. Not only that, it’s a sort-of sequel to the first book. Not a direct sequel, but one that follows the great-great-great-whatever granddaughter of the couple in my Cinderella story, here in modern day New York. (Or, kind of modern day New York. Judging by the dates I put on each chapter, I started writing this in 1997, and the occasional anachronism regarding cell phones or internet access is kind of amusing. But I’m digressing.)

The thing is, rereading what I’ve got, I’m still pretty intrigued by this story. I like Cynthia and John, the main characters, and I’m tickled by the side-story I squeezed in based on Sleeping Beauty. (Hey, don’t mock the fairy tales.They’re classics for a reason. The originals are far more fascinating than the Disney versions, too.)

So.

For this page-a-day challenge, I’m going to work on finishing this poor book, stuck in limbo for over a decade. I’m a pretty monogamous writer, in that I like to focus on one thing at a time, if I can, and it’s irked me for years that this incomplete novel has been sitting in my “works in progress” folder. For my own peace of mind, I need to at least get the first draft done.

The beginning: 179 pages, 48,358 words.

Let me ask you a question.

Do you like being told what to do? Or do you prefer making your own decisions?

I wrote recently, when discussing the “Show, Don’t Tell” rule, that writing is about taking the reader on a voyage of discovery

The minute I typed that, my fingers paused on the keyboard in a “That’s really profound” moment. (Okay, kind of profound.)

I don’t know about you, but the things I most enjoy reading are not posts, books, or articles that simply tell me things. I don’t so much enjoy the bullet-post lists, or the informative articles that sound like lectures. They have their uses, and I’m not saying they’re bad … and certainly, I’ve written them myself … but they’re not my favorites.

The things I enjoy reading are the things that take me along for a ride. It can be a story, a murder-mystery, an article explaining why certain types of red dye are so valuable, or why a certain shampoo is the best for my hair–the genre doesn’t matter.

What makes a difference, what makes me enjoy reading some things more than others, is the EXPERIENCE.

When a writer frames an article  by asking a question at the beginning, and then leading me through the quest to find the answer, I get swept up in the adventure.

When a writer presents me with a mystery and then helps me, step by step, discover the solution, I feel involved.

When a writer takes me to a place that feels real and makes me ask the questions I need to ask, I feel like I was there.

It’s easy to lecture. (I’m doing it right now.) But there’s a reason those old J. Peterman catalogs were so popular. They didn’t just tell you “This is a silk blouse with a flower print.” They wove an exotic story that took you to a place, an image, an idea. They drew you in and let you explore the image of an Arabian bazaar, or a British country house on a warm summer day.

The best kind of writing takes the reader on a voyage of discovery. The kind where you find a better world, or just a better shampoo. The kind where you see the person you want to be, with the lifestyle you want to have.

The kind that reawakens that little child you used to be who looked at the world with wide eyes, asking “Why?”, back when everything was new.

Isn’t that the kind of writer you want to be?

Taking people along on the journey is so much better than just showing them the photographs after you’re back home.