I had to make this one up all by my lonesome, but I’m sure it exists out there somewhere. Still, I plan to tag people annoyingly at the end of this, just like it was a real meme. Hah. So, without further ado, my not-very-imaginative Thanksgiving meme, 10 Things I Am Thankful For. The only restrictions here are that every even numbered item must be about writing in some way. Considering what month it is, and how tired most of us are of writing at this point, I think that’s enough of a pain in the ass, yes?
1.) I am thankful for 
Mr. Midnight Cowboy here, otherwise known as The Husband, who makes amazing borscht, nearly always does the dishes, and without whom the bed is wrong-shaped. I’ll spare you the more worthy details; he knows what they are, and I am sure you don’t want to.
2.) I am thankful for Papermate Gelpoint pens with blue ink. I firmly believe revising would be impossible without them.
3.) I am thankful for Her Dogginess, who is always thrilled to see us, even if it has only been 15 minutes, and who prostrates herself on the bed and groans so loudly when telling us about her difficult day that I feel certain the neighbor thinks we’re total pervs.
4.) I am thankful for pistachios and espresso. That’s two things, actually, but they go together so well they ought to be permanently paired, and I could not do my half-day writing marathons without them.
5.) I am thankful for good friends, without whom life would be much less interesting, and far too sober.
6.) I am thankful for this fabulous heated ergonomic footrest thingy my feet are planted on right now. It’s much easier to park my ass in front of the computer for hours at a time when I can keep my feet at a toasty 100 degrees. January is a much more bearable month now.
7.) I am thankful for my family, without which I would not know how to play drunken volleyball, how long it takes to get through a 15 piece game of dominoes, why karaoke should be outlawed in the United States, or how to write real, honest characters with lots of snark, complicated relationships, and very odd personal quirks.
8.) I am thankful for my beautiful new laptop, which allows me to write in any room of the apartment and in various cafes in Brunswick. Amazing what a change of setting can do. Plus, it’s so shiny.
9.) I am thankful for Raymond Carver, who wrote the first story that made me think, reading it, I want to be able to do this. And for Mr. Klofas, for teaching the AP English class where I read it.
10.) I am thankful for all my writing peeps, on AW, Twitter, Facebook, and various blogs and writer’s groups – who give great advice, work hard at what they do, and have saved my sanity more than once. Writing is hard. Trying to get what you write published is harder. Doing any of that without the support and sympathy and honest feedback of people who are on the same crazytrain would be, well, impossible.
/sap.
Now for my victims:
Gretchen, circus-opera-singer-YA-writer-extraordinaire and secret mistress of Daniel Craig
The amazing Laura and Lisa, cowriting authoresses with a fabulous book coming out in 2011
Tracey, queen of snarky MCs and UF
Debra, mistress of sarcasm, badass YA characters, and creator of the top tem reasons why revisions are better than sex
The marvelously hilarious Jan, author of some of the best Sarah Palin fanfic out there.
Tag, ladies. Kill Thank me later. 
Dear mom:
I am tired of all this stupid paper you’ve covered your office in. It smells funny, and I am very bored.
I have tried to remind you that I am also very cute,
But you just keep staring at that big square thing on your desk and making clicky noises with your fingers,
Until I can’t even sleep.
I am afraid I had to take drastic measures.
I will give you the new password to your computer after we go for a Very Long Walk, and I get 100 marrow bones.
Also, please don’t forget that I am cute Ever Again.
Your Dog,
Rosie.
Ps: I would like a cat for Christmas this year please.
I haven’t done one of these in a while. And it’s Friday the 13th, so I’m going to go for a relatively mortifying memory, because why not? I can afford to. I’m so much more sophisticated now, yes?
Anyway. How The Hell I Got Myself Into This, part –um, whatever.
I am 12, a prickly 7th grader in too-tight clothes, too much eyeshadow, and fashionably gigantic hair that takes 30 minutes and half a can of aerosol hairspray to achieve. (No, mercifully, I will not be posting pictures of this.) I have written what is apparently the best story from our English class assignment, titled Ollie the Alley Cat, a strange cross between Beverly Cleary’s Socks and Oliver Twist, only much shorter and with English bulldogs.
It never occurred to me I might be asked to read it aloud.
Had it, I probably would have refrained from the plaintive meows and waows that my scintillating dialogue is composed of, and I definitely would have avoided the full-line, all-caps screech in the climactic scene where brave young Ollie defends himself and a helpless little human girl from the evil chain-smoking bulldog gang. But alas, I had no idea I would be forced to sit in front of the class, flashing too much leg in my too-short skirt, my shellacked hair catching a faint breeze from the hallway and moving more or less as one piece, with all those eyes on me.
Five handwritten pages in the moment arrives. I hesitate for a few seconds, staring at all those vowels strung together in extra-dark blue ink, underlined for emphasis, and wonder what the hell I was thinking when I wrote this. How strange will it sound if I just skip this part? Can I somehow screech quietly? But it’s too late to back down now: they know what’s coming anyway. I’m trapped. Balls to the wall, I decide (though I’m sure it was a slightly less graphic phrase that went through my hairsprayed head) and utter the amazingly stupid REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW I wrote for stalwart Ollie with –well, probably not the enthusiasm it would take for a 2 lb kitten to scare off a pack of bulldogs, but definitely enough to startle Jody Mertzel out of her mid-morning doze and make Jason Maxim drop his notebook. Jaws drop. There is much laughter. I finish the last paragraph grimly, through a chorus of giggles, and sit to applause that I understand is purely for the entertainment value of that moment.
Lessons learned:
1) always read your work out loud before turning it in, and
2) there are moments when tell vs. show is not only an appropriate choice, but a necessary one.
To the gay community, in Maine and in all of America:
I apologize for my state. I apologize for the groundless fear that apparently still lives in so many of us: fear of what isn’t like us, fear of what we don’t understand or were taught is wrong, or never gave enough thought to. I’m sorry that there are still people living here who believe that those who are different are a threat to be put down and hidden away. I am sorry that the ignorance of the majority and the deliberate and very loud malice of a certain few has resulted in a terrible mistake: that somehow, a mere 52% of 50% of the registered voters in Maine have chosen to not only believe in their hearts that you are less than they are, but to deny you the same rights as they enjoy.
Most of all, I apologize for our federal government.
I am sorry that it doesn’t slough off the criticisms of the prejudiced and stand up for you– because this should never have been an issue brought to a popular vote. We don’t get to apply majority rules to civil rights, and somehow, through the bigotry of some people and the cowardice of others, we have allowed that to happen. The days when the word marriage had nothing but a religious connotation are long gone, if, in fact, they ever existed at all. Now marriage means the ability to raise a child together without fear of challenge to your parenthood; it means you can sit by the bed of your partner in a hospital without worrying that someone will tell you you’re not allowed to. It’s taxes, and health benefits, retirement, social security. At its heart, it’s a social recognition of your commitment to one another, and it is your right, as citizens of this country, a right as inalienable as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I am sorry that the blindness and the ignorance we saw win in my state this Tuesday are so obviously echoed –and encouraged– by some of the people we elected to protect the very rights that they’ve chosen to deny you, and to uphold the very principles they’ve violated by that denial. And I am sorry, so sorry, that those in power who do not believe that there are different classes of citizenship based on personal attributes did not have the courage to stand up for you. I voted some of these people into power myself.
I also voted on Tuesday. I could tell myself that’s enough, that I did my part– but it’s clearly not enough. There’s more to do. All I can say is that the fight isn’t over, sorry is not enough, and one day we shall overcome.
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever put anything flagrantly political on this blog. And I’m probably going to regret this later, because I think that was a deliberate choice on my part: but I just read an article saying that the voter turnout for today’s referendum election is predicted to be a whopping 35%, slightly more than usual for a non-election vote.
What the hell?
That’s the best we can do, Maine? 35% of our 1,316,456 people give enough of a damn about participating in the political process to stand in line for 20 minutes and color in some lines with a pen? A little under 461,000 people are going to decide the fate of excise tax, school consolidation, voter approval of government spending limits, bond matching, medical marijuana, same-sex marriage and a constitutional amendment? Are you kidding me?
Please vote, people. I’d love it if you’d also vote No on 1, because I’d like to think that we’ve crawled far enough away from the uglier parts of our history to finally stop denying our fellow humans the same rights as we enjoy for no other reason than because they act and believe differently than we do –but really, whatever you’re going to vote, just go vote. Take the time. Find a babysitter or bring your kid with you: you can. Lose a few bucks for a long lunch. Stand in line with your fellow Mainers, quietly or arguing the whole way, give your name to the tired-looking person at the desk, hunch over in that flimsy plastic booth and pick up your felt pen and take part in the process. Don’t give me that crap about how it doesn’t make a difference: the difference between 35% and 100% is pretty fucking important.
Here’s what you’re voting on. There are links in there to the actual legislation, and they’re not that long or that confusing: you should read them. Frankly, I think many of the campaigns on both sides of the issues are probably counting on the fact that you won’t.
Here’s how you can figure out where to go. Enter your address and hit GO. It will tell you where the polling place for your area is. It’ll even give you a map of it.
Here’s how you register, if you haven’t. In Maine you can register and vote all at once, so no excuses!
And, because I do have an opinion on 1 –a very strong one– here’s an article I think you should read.
So go. Participate. If it turns out the way you hoped, you can say you were part of it; if it doesn’t, you know you tried, and you were heard.
There’s a pretentious title for you, eh? Sorry, I’m feeling slightly ugh today, and this is all I got.
I was catching up on Nathan Bransford’s blog this morning and read this piece on writers and sensitivity. It was such good subject for a post that I felt like doing my own about it. Nathan’s post was interesting for the same reason many agents’ twitter feeds and blogs are interesting to me: it gives me a glimpse of what a day in the life of an agent is like, and the more of those I read, the more it sounds to me like agents take a lot of abuse from querying writers. Or, at minimum, some abuse that’s fairly memorable.
And this isn’t a surprise, is it? Anyone who was watching the fascinating mass-hissyfit that was #queryfail and then #agentfail got a pretty good look at what frustrated, rejected writers + public feedback + internet anonymity can add up to.
(In some cases, I should say. Not in all cases, or even most cases. I think the majority of We Who Query know how to take it on the chin without flinching: but the few who do have something angry to say often say it so loudly that the rest of us are kind of invisible by comparison.)
So here’s where I’ll just come out and say it: I get it. I’m sensitive about my writing.
That’s a no-brainer for me. I care about these characters. I spend endless hours thinking about word choice, theme, plot, you-name-it– I come up with a plot I like and an MC I love, and I jump in heart-first and I don’t look back till I hit THE END. I take it personally. I can’t not: if I didn’t care this much, I just don’t see how I could expect anybody else to. Now, I don’t think that’s a requirement to be dubbed a writer, and I know some very good writers who don’t feel this way… but it does seem to be a pretty common stage in the process, one that maybe some of us don’t ever leave.
And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Frankly, I think I work best this way.
~And now for the but!~
But... I do think there’s something wrong with letting that get in the way of 1) your learning curve, and 2) your career. If you can’t take a critique because to you it feels like a personal attack, then not only have you just wasted both your time and somebody else’s, but you don’t have much hope of getting better. If getting a rejection from an agent or editor is as painful to you as getting dumped… well, then maybe you should think about another way to pass the time, say stamp collecting. Because once other human beings are allowed into the weird little world(s) you built, you’re going to get kicked in the teeth at least a couple times. It’s inevitable. Get used to the idea. Pitch a fit about it and you can expect people will remember that about you first, and your talent second.
Care. By all means care: care till your eyes pop out and you bleed ink. You may get over that after a while (well okay, if your eyes actually pop out you may not), or it may stay with you forever. Just remember that when you move out of the messing-around-with-it realm into the I’d-like-to-get-paid-for-this realm, you’ve got to check your ego at the door. Out here very few people have time to make you feel better: out here honesty and bluntness are virtues, and if you listen long enough you will come to see them that way too. Because there’s always room for improvement, and for every fifty people who say no, if you’re lucky and patient and serious about your work, there may be that one who says yes. And that one is all it takes.
The lovely Lisa and Laura posted a challenge on their often hilarious blog (which if you haven’t yet visited, you definitely should) — post something online about a book you’ve read and loved. That seemed like the sort of throwdown I could get into, since I do it every now and then anyway, so I decided to take it a step up and list two I loved. These won’t be recent reads, because I’ve been saving my money for Christmas presents and whatnot: I’m going for books I’ve read in the last decade or so that really stayed with me.
Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey. And pretty much every other book in that series. Serious, detailed world-building, serious, detailed historical research, and serious, detailed sex. Carey’s heroine, Phedre no Dealaunay, is a servant of Naamah, otherwise known as a prostitute anywhere else in the world but in her beloved Terre de Ange, where the profession is sacred. She is also about the only person in the country in a position to save it when treason and ambition threaten to overthrow the new queen. Carey’s lyrical prose and intelligent, complex plot are only outshone by her amazing characterization –and yes, the detailed sex scenes. I learned a lot about writing those from reading this book.
Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh. It’s hard to know where to start describing this: not least because any summary invariably involves a major spoiler; so much of the book hinges on it that there’s no way around mentioning it. So I’m going to be ridiculously vague and say that this book is set around 200 years in the future, when humans have ventured out into space and come up with, invariably, a system of trade and a few wars. Cyteen takes place in a sector opposing Earth, where growing humans in labs and building them to be whatever you need is considered acceptable. There’s so much experimental psych and sociology in here I felt like I’d taken a college course by the time I finished the book, which wouldn’t necessarily sound like much fun — but believe me, it is. Cherryh weaves politics, psychology, betrayal, love and morality together flawlessly, her characters are all utterly believable, and her world-building is second to none. Combine that with a muscular, fast-moving plot and well, you get many happy hours of reading.
So there’s that. If you haven’t read them, do so: and spread some book lurve around today!
