A sense of impending doom . . . .

Today -- Friday, 10 January 2020 -- has not been one of my better days.  Maybe that's why I'm back here, after a long and not entirely voluntary hiatus.

I wrote a long time ago that I wouldn't be doing book reviews here.  I thought about setting up a separate blog for reviews, and in fact so much time has passed that maybe I actually did that and have just forgotten about it.

The truth is, I don't write a lot of reviews of current fiction.  Most of the reviews I do write and post on BookLikes are of books I didn't like, didn't finish, didn't get past the first few pages.  There's a reason for that, and it's not a good reason.

My budget is severely limited.  More or less retired, I live on Social Security and some supplemental self-employment income from my writing and from the sale of various arts & crafts products I make.  My Social Security benefits are reduced because I elected to start them earlier than full retirement age.  The supplemental income is not reliable, and it has been made even less reliable by my inability to shake off various stressors.  Anxiety is not profitable, but it is pervasive.  I do not write as much as I should.  I do not make as much jewelry as I should.

I do not make as much money as I need.

Therefore, my reading material tends to fall into certain distinct classifications:

1. Physical books I already own, which number about 5,000.
2. Kindle books, mostly freebies and therefore many self-published
3. Non-fiction library books, whether physical copies or digital borrows.

It's that second category that ends up being "reviewed" on my BookLikes blog.  Sadly, many of those author-published books just aren't very well written.  But I did try them.  I really did.

My longer, more analytical reviews were saved for those favorite personal classics, books like Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar and Leslie Turner White's Lord Johnnie.  I loved these books when I first read them more than 50 years ago; rereading them for the purpose of close analysis was just as much fun.

The past few weeks have been filled with the drama surrounding Romance Writers of America, a scandal of sorts with its roots in racism, lack of diversity, and lack of transparency in dealing with those issues.  I'm not going to rehash any of that, or bring up my very tangential involvement, except to say that my fifteen or so years of active membership in RWA meant I made a lot of connections with other writers.  Friends? Um, not all of them, and only a tiny few of those connections have survived.  But it still means that reading a book by someone I knew back then brings in an automatic bias.  So I haven't posted reviews of many books by people I know or knew.

Let me be clear:  I would never, under any circumstances, direct an author to a review I had written of their work*.  Reviews are for readers.  But I don't have any way of knowing, unless they post it in front of me on Twitter or something, which authors routinely search for reviews of their books.  It's not likely that I'd post a really bad review of a book by someone I've had a positive personal relationship with -- whether in person or just through social media -- but even minor criticisms might be taken the wrong way.  I really do appreciate my online contacts, and I would rather not review a book written by a cyber-friend than risk that friendship.

(*I did recently inform an author with whom I've interacted on social media  that I reviewed one of their books 30+ years ago. I no longer have a copy of the review.)

But BookLikes has become more problematic today than it has been for a while.  I think I started to take it for granted again, but it's been down for 24 hours now with only a brief Facebook notification that they're working on it.

So, what to do?

Well, I have a website that I haven't even looked at for a year or more.  It's due to renew in February, and I actually thought this morning that I might let it all lapse.  Could I convert it to something more attuned to books and book blogging?  I don't know.  That's not my area of expertise; I wouldn't even know how to start.

But it's been six and a half years since the Great Purge at Goodreads, and so many of us have found a home at BookLikes.  We like the freedom, even if we don't like the spammers.  We like the platform, even if we don't like the silence from the operators.  Most of all, however, we like each other.

If the platform returns, I'll be backing up as much of my material as I can.  Some of it may end up here.  Comments may be lost, but at least the core will be saved.  Again, that's if the platform can be resuscitated.  And I'll add links to it for this post, too.  If it comes back.

I'm committed to doing what I can -- within the constraints of time and budget -- to keep the community alive, regardless.



 

Where the words came from

Very, very, VERY long background on the project that has occupied me for the past two months (and four days).

Let me start out by saying once again that I am NOT superstitious and I do NOT believe in "omens." I do think, however, that our brains latch onto things from deep in our subconscious that trigger connections we sort of forgot about until that subconscious throws them in our faces again.

That's what happened back in April with a shared Facebook story about a duplex in Toronto that was basically unchanged from the time it was built in the 1950s or so.

It looks like a typical '50s duplex, very similar to the one my aunt and uncle built shortly after my cousin was born, which was 1956. The three of them lived in the downstairs unit, and my aunt's widowed mother, whom we called Aunt Petie even though her real name was Gertrude, had the upstairs. 

 

My Uncle Dick is my mother's brother, so Aunt Shirley was only related to me by marriage. Her dad, Cornelius Stryker, was a commercial artist, a career my aunt also followed. She was an only child, and in turn only had one child, my cousin Connie. Connie also went into the arts; she and her husband Paul have a graphic arts and printing business in the Chicago suburbs.

You'll understand all these details . . . . eventually.

We were a very small and geographically close family, so holidays were spent at the in-laws' homes as much as the family's. My dad's family, the Wheelers, also lived in Edison Park not far from the Strykers, and his sister, also Shirley, was friends with Shirley Stryker who married my mother's brother. In fact, the Wheelers' house on Owen Avenue was not more than a few blocks from the Strykers' on Olcott. My dad and both Aunts Shirley went to the same grade school, Ebinger. Thus I was relatively familiar with the Stryker house, where Aunt Petie lived until 1957 or so, when I would have been nine years old. And that's old enough to remember things.

As the oldest of the five cousins born in that time period -- my brother and sister are half a generation younger -- I was eventually granted special privileges when visiting the Stryker house, the biggest of which was to use the upstairs bathroom. It was a marvelous, mysterious blue, totally unlike any other bathroom I had ever seen. The stairway was beautiful polished dark wood, with a large landing in the middle where it turned 180 degrees. On that landing was a glass fronted case containing my aunt's collection of dolls from all over the world, gifts from a family friend. I was also the only one of the children allowed to sit on the landing and look at the dolls.

I loved the house. And over the years, even after Uncle Neil Stryker died and Aunt Petie moved in with my Uncle Dick and Aunt Shirley, certain details of the house remained absolutely crystal clear in my memory, as clear as the crystal knobs on the interior doors in the house. I remembered the very modern chrome and glass end tables in the living room, the dining room, the closed-in back porch where we kids played, the white painted brick fireplace with its never burned white birch logs. The back yard with all the tulips -- the Strykers were Dutch and the yard had hundreds of tulips -- and the kind of creepy basement, too, all stuck in my memory.

 

 

 

There was another creepy thing about the house.

During the Depression, Cornelius Stryker worked as a window dresser for some of the department stores in downtown Chicago, and he supplemented his income by making plaster of Paris figurines which he then painted and sold. I still have a set of five little puppies that my aunt gave me after he had passed away. But one thing that he had made scared the crap out of me. It was a head, maybe of a person or maybe of a frog or maybe of something in between, and it was painted green and it had its mouth wide open. The inside of the mouth was painted red. The whole thing was about as big as the palm of your hand. It was used to hold a pot scrubber, such as an SOS pad or whatever, and it sat on the counter in the kitchen, and I was terrified of it.  Absolutely terrified.  I can still see that thing in my mind's eye, creepy as hell.

I have other memories of the house that may not be quite as clear or may not even be memories so much as they are products of my imagination.

On the other side of the kitchen from the counter where the plaster thing was, I recall a little breakfast nook, pretty much like a booth in a restaurant. The two benches and the table were painted bright red enamel, and there was a window overlooking the back yard and garden. That window faced east, and to block the morning sun at breakfast time, there was an ordinary pull-down window shade. The pull on the shade was a little red plastic charm of tulips growing in a wooden shoe. I have no idea why I was so fascinated by that red plastic shade pull, but I was, and I remembered it with absolute clarity.

As I said, Uncle Neil died in the mid-1950s, and Aunt Petie sold the house in Edison Park and moved in with Uncle Dick and Aunt Shirley and Connie, somewhere around 1957.

Fast forward 40 years or so, to 1997. My career writing historical romances was in the process of dying, but I am a compulsive writer, as you may have noticed, and so I kept on even though I knew I would never publish anything again. I got an idea for a contemporary gothic -- similar to what Barbara Michaels wrote -- involving a house modeled on. but for various reasons not identical to, the Stryker house. As I began to write it, the details I remembered about the actual house came more and more and more into play. I hadn't originally intended to be quite so exact, but it seemed as if my subconscious was writing parts of the story around some of those details.

Unfortunately, there were certain things I didn't remember. I thought I'd just write around them, or make up something, but nothing fit right. So one Saturday, I called my aunt to see if she could refresh my memory. She had, after all, grown up in the house.

This was in the days -- 1997 -- when long distance calls still cost some real cash, so it was quite an investment for me to call from Arizona to Illinois, but we had a long and delightful conversation. She was pretty surprised at how much detail I did remember, especially the crystal door knobs, the evil grinning scrubbie holder, and the plastic shade pull. She offered to draw me a floor plan and send it to me, so I'd have the details of the layout, in particular of the second floor, since I had never been up there very much. (Only the bathroom!) The floor plan diagram arrived a couple weeks later, along with a most truly bizarre extra.

To my surprise, the floor plan did not include the breakfast nook that I remembered so vividly, but, well, I apparently misremembered.  To this day I don't know where that pseudo-memory came from.

I continued to work on the novel, incorporating some of the details she had told me about, but 1997 was a traumatic year for me for a wide variety of reasons. It was also a financially troubling year, more so even than all the other financially troubling years I'd been through. In 1998 I put virtually all my fiction writing aside and made the bizarre decision to return to college; I got my BA in 2000, then stuck around for a master's in 2003. Those five years were filled with more trauma, emotional as well as financial, but I got through it. Just when things should have been leveling off, my husband was diagnosed with lung cancer, and died 10 weeks later in 2005.

I've dabbled with fiction through all this, but haven't really done much. I have gazillions of files on the computer, plus notes and sketches written longhand and filling a fat folder in the file cabinet. Every once in a while I get the folder out and transcribe some of those notes in an attempt to put everything in digital format, but I usually get discouraged and quit.

Several years ago, I picked up that particular novel and thought I'd work on it again. Self-publishing via Amazon's Kindle had given me the opportunity to put some of my historical romances out there again, and I thought it would also allow me to bypass all the trauma of dealing with editors and agents and the attendant bullshit, and I figured what the heck. I hit up good ol' Google to see if I could get some exterior pictures of the real house just for inspiration, and as luck -- or omens? -- would have it, the house happened to be for sale at the time. One of the real estate sites, Trulia or Zillow or whatever, had a whole portfolio of interior pictures as well, and I greedily gobbled them up and tucked them in the digital file folder. One of those photos was of the kitchen counter, exactly as I remembered it except for the grinning mouth figurine. The breakfast nook with its window and shade and plastic tulips was nowhere to be found.

But alas, for whatever reasons I never went any further than collecting the photos. The book itself continued to languish.

Until this past April.

The article about the Toronto house, frozen in time, brought all of that back, for some reason or other. Maybe it wouldn't have except for the fact that my daughter in New Jersey bought a house last summer that in many ways resembles the interior of the Toronto house. There's a lot of pink in Rachel's house, a lot of decor left from the 60s and 70s which the original owner from whom they bought it never changed. Ultimately, though, those subconscious connections all led back to Aunt Petie's house in Edison Park and the gothic novel I had started 20 years ago.

Again, I do not believe in omens, just odd coincidences. But maybe that's what it took to start me writing again, writing on that particular novel, writing until 1:00 a.m. and then dredging up the original text files -- still dated 1997 -- and going back to work on it.

Because there was that little bonus gift, that bizarre little extra in the envelope Aunt Shirley sent me back in 1997.

She told me that the house had been sold again a few years before our conversation, and somehow the new owners had contacted her to try to put everything back the way it was structurally at least when Neil Stryker built it. So the white paint had been removed from the red brick fireplace and the chimney opened to make it functional again, and the two stained glass windows that flanked the chimney had been uncovered. (They were boarded up sometime in the 40s; I never knew they were there.) The original kitchen cabinets had never been changed, though the blue bathroom was gone and there had been other alterations over the years.

As far as I know, she never went in the house again after our conversation, but I don't know that for sure. Still, 1997 was 40 years after her mother had moved out, and insignificant little things don't usually last 40 years.

What she had included as a gift with her drawing of the floor plan was the red plastic shade pull from the kitchen nook window. There was no way she could have known in 1956 or 1957, when the house was sold, that such a tiny thing would have any meaning to me at all. Maybe it did to her as well; I don't know. But why, of all the things in the house, did she still have THAT? And why, of all the things in the house, did I remember THAT??

That first night last April -- it must have been the 25th -- I wrote about 1000 words on the book, and the following evening I compiled all the separate chapter files into one document on the computer. It desperately needed proofreading and there were other details that needed to be fixed. The whole timeline had to be brought forward 20 years, and the technology as well.

But I was amazed as I skimmed through a brief synopsis I'd written that there were certain very creepy details, things that I had planted in the plot of the novel that foreshadowed events in my own real life over the course of the subsequent 20 years. I've wanted to go back to writing -- gee, can you tell? -- for a long time, but life seems always to intervene. I'm not at a point where I can financially devote myself to it fully, but my anger and frustration over certain other things need an outlet.

And the little plastic shade pull with the tulips and wooden shoes was still in the file cabinet, along with the floor plan of the house in Edison Park.

I honestly didn't expect anything to come of it. But night after night, morning after morning, afternoon after afternoon, I continued to add words to it. What began as something like 13 chapters and 44,000 words grew, and grew, and grew. I hit horrible snags in the plot that I thought would put an end to the thing, but somehow they seemed to get worked out. A subplot that I was very fond of couldn't get itself resolved because it meant veering off from the main thread, so I made the painful decision to just do away with it.

 

The fictional location is not, of course, Edison Park. And I've made some major alterations to the floor plan of Aunt Shirley's house to better fit the story. None of the characters are based on anyone I actually know.

I haven't decided on the title. It has always had a working title, and I happen to like that title very much, but it may be too much of a spoiler, and I'm not sure if it will be commercially viable. There's plenty of time to worry about that, however, while I do the editing and rewriting needed for a project that went on hiatus for 20 years.  And I have to find cover art, one of the tasks a self-publishing author has to take over from the vampire publishers.  (Can you tell I don't like them?)

 

When I hit 100,000 words, I could hardly believe it. My first complete novel, written when I was 15, ran to about 115,000 so it wasn't the raw number that surprised me. It was that after all these years I had stuck with it that far. I honestly thought I had lost my touch, that I was too old, that my other books had been flukes.

A couple days ago, I hit another snag, one that was looming as insurmountable. I didn't want to take a day off from it, because I literally had written every single day since the bug bit me. Most days I added around 1,000 words, but sometimes it was over 2,000. And it was so much damn fun. So I made myself write, made myself think, made myself create, and the block passed and I got through the insurmountable problem.

By Sunday, 26 June, I was down to the last "action" scene. I had hoped to get through at least half of it that day, maybe finish it the next, then write the mop-up denouement. In the middle of this last scene, my mind went blank. An absolutely crucial detail just plain wasn't there. I was well over 134,000 words by this time and I couldn't believe the final confrontation was going to fall flat.

I've always been one of the writers who plots everything out, writes a detailed outline/synopsis to start, and who doesn't like surprises. This book has been a surprise from the very beginning, or at least from its "new" beginning two months ago. The sketch has always been very clear, but details have seemed to fall into place on their own. So why was this one detail not showing up?

I don't know. I don't know where it was or where it came from, but it finally made an appearance and made everything make sense.

It doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be finished.

It's far from perfect. In some places it's not even good! And it wasn't really quite finished just because that scene worked out. There were more small revelations to be made, but those were backstory details that had already been worked out. On Monday, 27 June, I finished the last action scene, and on Wednesday, 29 June, I wrote the final lines.  There is still a lot of editing to do, but it's finished.  It's the first novel I've completed since 1995.

And I'm damn fucking proud of myself.

Words of Joy -- Cartwheels, Alan Alda, and me

This blog post was original drafted in February 2015, more than a year ago.  I had completely forgotten about it until I logged in this morning to post some actual writing updates, since this is, after all, a blog about writing.  I will have another post for tomorrow, but I think this one was just sitting here in draft mode waiting for the proper moment.  I'll check the links to make sure they work.



Life gets in the way.  Dreams get put on back burners.  And then something happens.

Something like someone mentioning cartwheels, and my replying that someday I should tell my cartwheel story.  And the very next day the whole thing starts into motion.

It all happened a few weeks ago.  I was getting ready to log off the computer when an email popped up, a notification that my daughter in law in Seattle had posted something to Facebook.  It turned out to be something innocuous, but when I logged in to Facebook, there was this weird picture on the right side of my screen, some paid ad or link or whatever.  The pic was of Alan Alda from 30-40 years ago, fatigues costume from M*A*S*H.  Now, you know how I am about omens, which I don't believe in.  But my first thought was, like, is this some stupid non-omen trying to tell me I need to tell the story of the cartwheels? 

Anyway, here's what happened with the cartwheels, Alan Alda, and me.

Way way way back in October of 1968, I was living in a girls' residential club at 435 W. Surf St. in Chicago.  (The building is still there, now converted to luxury condos.)  A group of four or five of us decided to head downtown one Saturday evening to see a movie.  We picked Finian's Rainbow, with Petula Clark, Fred Astaire, Tommy Steele, etc.  I was wearing a Black Watch plaid kilt (which I still have) and a black V-neck sweater borrowed from my then boyfriend Randy.

On the bus going downtown, we chatted about how uptight people could be, in general, and afraid to let go every once in a while.

Finian's Rainbow is one of those "feel good" movies, so when we came out of the theatre on Randolph Street around 11:00, I was feeling very "up."  The sidewalk was crowded with people coming out of and going into the theatres and other places.  I told the other girls I felt so good after the movie that I could almost do cartwheels down the sidewalk.

Oh, horrors!  They were adamantly against that idea.

"No, no, no, don't do that.  Don't do that!  Don't make a spectacle of yourself!  Don't embarrass us!"

That was all the encouragement I needed.  I set my purse on the sidewalk.  I did three or four cartwheels down to the corner, three or four back to where my purse was.  The other girls were mortified.  The people around us laughed and a few clapped.  On the bus going back up north to Surf St., I wanted to sing songs from the movie.  We were the only passengers on the bus the whole way, except for a woman sitting right behind the bus driver who was probably his wife or mother or some such.  No one else sang.  I did.  The other girls were furious with me, even when I reminded them of our earlier conversation.

Jump forward about ten to 15 years. 

Somewhere back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, when M*A*S*H was consistently wiping up Emmy after Emmy, Alan Alda tried his hand at directing and then at writing.  One year he was nominated for an Emmy for writing the script for an episode.  We happened to be watching -- I rarely watched awards shows but my husband was an addict -- and as I remembered it, though incorrectly, Carol Burnett was presenting the award for comedy writing.  She opened the envelope, scanned the name, and burst into hysterical Carol Burnett laughter.  She was barely able to read "And the winner is . . . Alan Alda."  (In fact, according to YouTube, it was Penny Marshall and Cindy what's her name from Laverne and Shirley who presented.  I think there may have been a later interview or conversation between Burnett and Alda where he said he had told her what he was going to do.)

The camera pans to Alda.  He has this huge shit-eating grin on his face.  He bounces up, stops for a second, and turns a cartwheel, on camera. 

At that point I was half hysterical, and then I had to tell my husband about my Randolph Street/Finian's Rainbow cartwheels.  He just rolled his eyes.

Fast forward again, now to early May 1998.  I was going through some severe emotional crises at the time and had been stabbed in the back by some people I thought were my dearest friends.  My editor at Pocket Books had destroyed my writing career and I was on the verge of total meltdown.  I had gone to a writers' conference -- which in fact I had organized -- where just everything that could go wrong had done so, and in terms of my writing and my career and my personal life, I was getting nothing but horrible advice -- shut up, don't complain, don't stand up for yourself, do whatever it takes to get along even if it means sacrificing ALL your creative integrity.  I was emotionally devastated.  Even being in the Crowne Plaza in NYC and getting all the perks of being the organization's president and conference chair didn't help.

From my journal, at the time:

    Sunday, 3 May 1998  (Morning entry)
    A strange evening last night, and now awake at 5:15 to a foggy Manhattan morning.  I was up here reading through the old letters yesterday evening when T*** called and asked if I wanted to go out to dinner with H***** L****.  It would have been rude to decline even though I couldn't really afford it.  So we went out, to a nice little restaurant a half block from the hotel.  H***** is very much into horse racing, so we had an interesting little talk about Arlington Park and horses and Round Table, of all things.  I indulged myself with an amaretto. After dinner – I loosened up a little, but I'm still very furious at both T*** and K**** – we came back to the hotel and chatted with P** K**, B**** D****, B**** [H****], M******* B*******, C****** K*********, etc.  Somehow the subject came up and I told the little story of my cartwheels down Randolph Street in 1968.  Everyone thought it was funny.  Then someone mentioned tarot, so I came up to the room to get my deck.  While waiting for the elevator, I tried a cartwheel in the hall.  Once downstairs, in the lobby, in red skirt and red silk blouse, sans brassiere, barefoot, I did two very nice cartwheels.


Everyone of course was scandalized and humiliated, though the swanky wedding party going into their reception in one of the ballrooms off the lobby thought it was terrific and applauded.

I continued to turn cartwheels every once in a while, usually in defiance of something or other.  In the lobby at Walmart when I worked there and someone didn't believe I could do them.  In the parking lot at another job in 2005.  At my 40th class reunion in 2006.  I'm not sure if I've done any since then, but I probably could.  It's not like you forget how to do cartwheels.

Separation of words and self

The past several weeks have been rather, shall we say, challenging for me, which is why I haven't kept this blog up quite as regularly as I would have liked.  Two separate writing projects have demanded my time and concentration, as well as other aspects of real life.  Right now, however, I am facing the prospect of about a week tending a dog recuperating from surgery, so I'll probably have a lot of time at the desk and computer to catch up on some of the blogging.

One of the issues that's been brought home to me in some rather startling ways is this whole issue of writers wailing that their books are their babies.  They seem to use this claim as a justification for both outrage over negative book reviews and outright attacks (usually verbal rather than physical) on the reviewers. 

This is not a new phenomenon.  Writers have been dissing critics just about as long as there have been writers and critics.  My own experience goes back just around 30 years to my early days in Romance Writers of America and judging RWA contest entries.  In face-to-face critique groups and online groups, along with one-on-one evaluations, responses to criticism ranged from "You're right; I need to fix that" to "It's my book and I'll write it the way I want to!  Who are you to tell me how to write my book?"

After this more recent brouhaha over critical reviews which escalated to the point of reviewers receiving death threats, I wondered what is it that makes some writers react to criticism of their writing with such intensely personal outrage.  The reviewers don't know the writers; all they're doing is commenting on their reaction to the book.  And yet the writers take it so very personally.  Why?

I'm not sure why I happened to think of my old writing buddy EK last night, but I did, and I began to see a connection between her reaction to criticism 20 years ago and this current wave of battered egos.

EK was in her early 60s when I met her, a delightful, cheerful woman with an infectious laugh and a constant smile.  Nothing about her demeanor suggested she had been through some very, very hard times.  Her first husband had deserted her with two small children; she had at one point lived with the children in the basement of an abandoned church.  Her second husband was abusive, and in and out of jail for various not-so-petty crimes.  After two more children she divorced him, but he hounded her for years and years afterward.  He broke into her home, stole from her, made so much trouble that she was evicted from several apartments.  The problems with him only stopped when he beat her so badly -- because she didn't have any cash in her home for him to steal -- that she ended up in the hospital and he ended up in jail for a much longer stretch.

She had lived in or near poverty most of her life, unable to hold a job very long because of the issues in her personal life.  One child died of AIDS in the early days of the epidemic; another disappeared into the streets.  There had been other, serious problems, the kind none of us wants to have even one of but EK had several.

Two other writers and I had formed a critique group, and when EK asked to join we welcomed her.  At our first meeting she described her work-in-progress as a contemporary romance featuring a high school math teacher recovering from a bitter divorce and a firefighter who had just lost his young wife to cancer.  Given that this was the late 1980s, EK's characters were way ahead of their time in terms of the contemporary romance market.  The rest of us warned her about this, but she insisted this was the story she wanted to write, and these were the characters she wanted to write about.  Okay, fine.

The book began with a Prologue that provided almost all the backstory for both characters in a classic "Write Chapter 1, write Chapter 2, throw away Chapter 1" fashion.  EK politely accepted our suggestions that she weave backstory into the narrative, but continued to insist it was her story and she would tell it her way. 

At our next meeting, we critiqued her Chapter 1 (which was effectively her second chapter), which served to introduce the firefighter hero character. Though it was competently written for the most part, we three readers found some continuity and consistency flaws and a few other mistakes.  EK graciously and sometimes self-deprecatingly agreed with almost all of our assessments and said she would fix the errors.  My personal feeling was that she had a workable story in process, and if she continued to accept advice as well as she had, she would probably end up incorporating her prologue's info-dumpy contents into the story and ditching the Prologue to produce a viable book manuscript.

Our third meeting should have brought us to Chapter 2, but instead EK brought her revised Chapter 1.  She had reworked the sections where we had found problems, and she had made some other revisions and additions.  The new material revealed some other errors and weaknesses; she didn't argue with our comments and agreed these things needed to be fixed.  We specifically told her to let them go for the time being and bring us the next chapter.

She didn't.  She brought yet another revision of Chapter 1.  When we asked her why she hadn't brought the next chapter, she explained that she hadn't written it yet.  "I have to have this chapter absolutely perfect," she said, "before I go on.  This character is my hero, my hero, and to tell the truth I'm reluctant to share him even with the other main character in the story."

At the time, we all kind of laughed and teased her about falling in love with her own fictional creation, but as a few more meetings went by, she brought only the first few pages of Chapter 2 along with more revisions, more additions to Chapter 1.  It became clear that EK really had fallen in love with this fictional firefighter, and she wasn't about to share him.

For a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with EK and her book boyfriend, the critique group dissolved after about five months.  I stayed in contact with both EK and one of the other members for a long time afterward, long enough to learn that EK never did write any more on her book.  The other writer, who went on to be traditionally published, and I agreed that EK really wasn't writing for publication.  She was writing to create the kind of man and the kind of romance she had never had in real life. 

We further agreed that there was nothing wrong with this.  If EK had been pushed to finish her book, if she had found a publisher for it, she would have had to share her hero; and sharing him would have broken her heart.  She wasn't writing for readers, she was writing for herself. 

In at least one of the recent explosions of writer over-reaction to negative reviews, the writer had made it abundantly clear that she was writing the kind of story she loved.  As in EK's case, there's nothing wrong with that. 

What seems to be more and more apparent in each of these emotional outbursts in response to negative criticism of the writing is that the writers are equating that criticism to attacks upon themselves.  They claim, sometimes in explicit language, that their books are their babies and criticism of the book is therefore a personal affront. 

They claim that they don't mind low ratings (1- or 2-star ratings) or negative reviews, provided the review is constructive, is kind, is helpful.  Again, they want the review directed toward them, as the writers, not toward the readers for whom the review is intended.

Which all makes me wonder if in fact the writers were never writing for readers in the first place.  They were writing for themselves, with really no thought to the fact that other people would be reading, people who did not have the same passion for that particular book that the writer had.  Unable to separate themselves from their stories, the writers are unable to put themselves in the position of "mere" reader.

Very often there are other specific details about the writer's experience that raise some red caution flags. 

The writer who over-reacts to negative reviews often has a group of fellow writers for mutual support.  Most of them will have very little if any experience or knowledge of the writing/publishing business.  They are writing books based on personal experience or personal passion with the intent of sharing the writing as a direct extension of the self.  There is much less emphasis placed on how the resultant work will effect or impact or be received by the reader, and more emphasis placed on the personal expression of the experience or passion.  In other words, the writing is writer-centered rather than reader-centered.

The group is not, in fact, a critique group directing its attention to the writing, but a support group directing its effort toward the writer.  The writer is encouraged to write, but the writing itself is not critiqued.  Or if it is, the critique is more encouraging than critical.

Even after the writer has self-published the book, there is an entire community of writers who refuse to offer critical reviews because of their identification with the writer.  They admit they do not want to hurt the writer's feelings.  They refuse to leave a negative review or low rating because to do so would be to minimize the effort the writer put into the product.  They defend other writers, even when the writing is shown to be objectively sub-standard, and admit they fear retaliation if they even point out mistakes.  In some cases, these writers' works exhibit the same mistakes, suggesting they themselves are not qualified to provide the kind of writing-criticism the original writer needs if she wants to write for readers.

It's easy to make the leap from this to speculate that many of these hyper-sensitive writers have never been voracious readers.  They don't exhibit any kind of empathy with readers, but only with writers.  They seem unable to recognize the writing flaws that distinguish their writing from "good" writing, or at least writing that fits the standards generally accepted for successful popular fiction and non-fiction.  Even when they do admit, however reluctantly, that their writing mechanics may fall short, they offer a common set of excuses and/or justifications: They can't afford an editor, or the reader shouldn't complain about a free/inexpensive book, or the writer is a beginner and shouldn't be held to the same standard as professionals.  Again, the writer and her feelings always have priority over the quality of the product and the reader's expectations of it.

Anyone who disagrees with them is a bully, trying to kill their book and their writing career.  I'm not sure, at this point, that most of those writers ever really contemplated a writing career.  They have exhibited little to no professionalism in the production of their books that would indicate they've studied how to write and how to publish.  Instead, they have simply poured their "heart and soul" into words on electronic paper and uploaded them.  That's not a career any more than my buying a set of golf clubs would make me a professional golfer.

A common response to these meltdowns is that the writers need to develop thicker skins, and I've certainly expressed that feeling often enough myself.  After some of the most recent events, however, I'm beginning to think that's the wrong advice, simply because for these writers, growing a thicker skin is simply not possible.  Their books were really never intended to be shared with a wider audience than friends and family and supporters who would be encouraging and uncritical.  Their books really are their babies, part of themselves, created for themselves, even if the writers insist otherwise.  There's no indication that the writers did any kind of research to make sure they were producing a work that would be well-received by the reading public.  There are many more indications that they were simply writing for their own enjoyment.

And again, there's nothing wrong with this.  The problem arises when the writers forget -- and perhaps they never knew -- that when one writes for other people's enjoyment, one has to take their considerations and expectations first, not last.

Those of us who are avid readers long before we are compulsive writers know almost viscerally that books are not their writers.  Books are a creative product put into a public marketplace for consumption, discussion, comparison, and review, quite separate from their creators.  The conversations we readers have with each other about those books that fall short of our expectations as readers are not about the writers -- unless and until the writer inserts herself confrontationally into that conversation.

Words that fill unusual needs

Once again, I need to remind myself that I do not believe in omens.  Really and truly, I don't.

Coincidence?  Yes.  Even serendipity and luck.  But omens, with their implication of supernatural manipulation of human events?  No.  Just, no.

On the other hand. . . .

Several years ago, a rather unusual sequence of events put me in possession of a faceting machine.  Though I have played around with rocks and stones and gems for a very long time, I had never considered faceting.  The equipment was too expensive for my budget, for one thing, and I had no clue how to go about learning the craft.  But the machine was offered to me for free and would have ended up in a Dumpster otherwise.  So I took it.

I subsequently found out what it was worth and was more than a little astounded.  Flabbergasted is probably a better word.  I also learned that a few small and inexpensive but absolutely essential accessories were missing.  They were quickly and easily replaced and the machine was fully functional. 

As I wrote in Really Neat Rocks, faceting is one of the lapidary arts that requires significant investment.  The basic machine can cost several thousand dollars, but then there are the accessories -- laps and dops and transfer jigs and so on -- not to mention the rough rocks.  Facet-grade rough is a lot more expensive than the agates and jaspers that can be found out in the desert for free.  The machine I acquired came complete with all those expensive accessories and with a modest supply of rough as well. 

I should have been all set.

I wasn't.

The machine came with a little booklet of maybe 60 pages, Facet Cutter's Handbook, that purported to be all one needed to learn how to facet.  For me at least it was woefully inadequate.  I already had an old edition of John Sinkankas' Gem Cutting: A Lapidary Manual, which was likewise inadequate as well as out of date.  I needed a well-illustrated, step-by-step manual.  If I have that kind of guide, I can usually figure out how to do just about anything.

The books that might have filled that niche were, unfortunately, long out of print and subsequently priced way out of my budget.  I played with the machine a couple of times, and managed to achieve some results, but I didn't really know what I was doing.  So I quit.

But I did join an email discussion list sponsored by the U.S. Faceters Guild.  Almost every day I receive emails from the other participants, most of which comments are way above my head because I know so little about the craft.  There's never been a temptation to unsubscribe, however.  Though I delete most of the emails -- they're archived should I ever decide to revisit any of them -- I do read them all.  Now and then there's something that either adds to my store of knowledge about other aspects of lapidary or is something tucked away for an indistinct future when I will actually get to use the machine.

As I recorded yesterday, I gave notice two weeks ago to quit my day job.  Just a couple days after I made that rather scary decision,  one of the members of that USFG email list posted that he had published a book.  Two books actually, because two volumes were needed to contain all the information. 

I bought the books.  Immediately.  They arrived yesterday.  I've read the first chapter of the first book, and I'm very, very impressed.  Tom Herbst has done an excellent job, and if the rest of the books live up to the promise of the first chapter, they will fill a huge need.

He acknowledges right at the beginning that self-publishing is the way to go for this kind of specialty books.  Digital print-on-demand allows authors to create the special-interest volumes that just can't be commerically viable for a traditional publisher.   Are these POD editions lacking the glossy full-color photos that many of us in the arts-and-crafts fields are accustomed to?  Yes, they are.  Though Herbst's books are loaded with black and white drawings and photos, there are no color pictures.  Because I've researched it myself, I know that the cost of including color printing in a CreateSpace product shoves the cost into the stratosphere.  In a way, these new books are a step backward in terms of the illustrations.  They're more like Sinkankas' 1963 hardcover than James Mitchell's 2012 Gem Trails of Arizona.

But today we have the internet and the www and Google images and Flickr and if we need color images, we know where to get them.  We don't need the glossy color photos; we can get more and better pictures online.

Tom Herbst's books arrived, in more ways than one, just when I needed them.  A few weeks ago, I probably would have ordered them but maybe not.  A year ago the probably drops down to possibly, but not very likely.  But last week there was no question.  Everything came together at just the right time.  I have the equipment, I have the time, and now I have the books.

What does this have to do with writing romance novels?  Ah, I'm so glad you asked.  ;-)

We never know, as readers or as writers, how our words are going to impact other people's lives.   We never know, as writers, how our product is going to be received.   It behooves us, then, to make sure our product is the very best that it can be.  I'm not an expert faceter.  Hell, I'm not even a beginner yet!  So you can bet I'm going to be watching the reviews, even the informal ones, that show up on the USFG email list.  And I'm going to pay attention to what those people have to say.  Because they are the experts.  I've seen the kind of work they produce and I know they know what they're doing.  As reviewers, they may not have perfect grammar or spelling, but that's not the expertise they're utilizing.

And they won't hesitate to criticize if necessary. 

The first words of the rest of my life

I do not believe in omens.

Really, I don't.

What I wrote a few weeks ago was a tale of connections and coincidences, nothing more. 

At about the same time as I wrote that blog post, I gave notice of my intention to quit my day job.  The reasons were many, some practical, some irrational.  I had been doing this work for six and a half years, and that is longer than I had ever remained at any other paid employment.  My tenure was not due to the lavish pay (I can't even laugh at the absurdity of that notion) or working conditions (I worked at home); I stayed as long as I did because I needed some income and because this was a job where I never had to interact directly with real people.

I do not always get along well with real people.

Perhaps that has been one of the attractions writing has always held for me, too.  In the world(s) I create, I can control the things that are uncontrollable in the real world, and I do not have to deal with the frustrations that sometimes overwhelm me here.

So today was my first day after the end of the day job.  I still feel overwhelmed by how much there is to do in my real life that I had not been able to do because of the day job.  I feel as if I want everything done, right now, today, and yet I know that isn't remotely possible.  One day at a time, I remind myself, because I'm no longer rushed, no longer trying to squeeze ten hours of productivity into two hours of free time.

I began this morning much as I always do:  Rising early and checking the email.  But early is no longer the crack of pre-dawn.  I got enough sleep and didn't feel the pressure to get right to work.  I did have an Etsy shipment to take to the post office, so I packaged the orders and set out shortly before 9:00 a.m.  And because the post office is just around the corner from the local municipal complex, I finally -- eight and a half years after moving here -- got a library card.

My personal collection of reading material is more than enough to keep me occupied.  What I've lacked, though, is the time to read.  It doesn't matter that there are 2,500 books in the house, 3,300 more on my Kindle, another 800 or 1,000 in boxes stored in the workshop.  There is no such thing as having enough books, let alone too many.

But it takes time to get a library card, time to go to the library, time to browse the books, time to check them out, time to read them and then return them.  I didn't have the time.  Now I do.  So I got my library card and checked out two books.

Then it was home to the work of having a life again.  I had more listings to post to Etsy -- that will be a major on-going project -- which meant photos to take and edit.  I didn't have to rush through the process, however, because there will be more time tomorrow, too.  I can experiment with light and backgrounds, indoors or outdoors.  I can edit the descriptions of my wares rather than slap something together and post it as "good enough."

Did I address the cleaning that needs to be done in my studio?  No, not yet.  Maybe tomorrow.

Did I even look at the mountain of sewing that awaits?  No, not yet.  Maybe tomorrow.  Or the next day.

Did I read?  A little bit.  Not much, but I'm in no rush.

Did I write?  Ah, that's what the evening is for!

On the trail of words connected in twisted circles

There is both blessing and curse in capacious memory, but more blessing I think than curse.

Based on the information I've been able to dig up -- for which I have to thank Google in part -- I must have read the story in the spring or summer of 1959, when I was roughly ten and a half years old.  It appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, one of several large-format, heavily illustrated magazines my parents subscribed to.  I don't think I actually read the story more than twice, and perhaps only once, before that issue of the magazine went into the trash.

I did not, however, forget it.

Why one particular story would stick with me, I don't know.  But it did.  The story did, but not the title or the author.

Science fiction was never my favorite genre, and this was science fiction, so perhaps I didn't remember the peripheral details simply because I never encountered the author again, never had the footnote of that particular story brought to my attention again.  It didn't matter.  The story was there.

I do remember that at the time, when I was hardly even a pre-teen, the cleverness of the ending was eye-wideningly superb.  Nothing else impressed me so much as that ending.

Years later, when I was much more of a budding author, I went in search of the story.  I was in high school then, and had started or perhaps had already finished my first complete novel.  I have no idea what prompted me to go searching for the tale but I did, at the public library.  Again, I did not know the author or the title, and the passage of five or six or seven years since childhood had somewhat dimmed my memory of which magazine and which year, but I began the search anyway.  whatever indexes -- the search engines of the mid-1960s -- were available then, I used them to advantage and finally identified the story.  To my delight, it had been reprinted in an annual collection.  To my further delight, the library had a copy of that collection.  I found it on the shelf and sat down to devour this much-remembered story.

And of that reading I remember almost nothing.

Was I still as impressed with the ending?  I don't know.  Did I glean any other kernels of story-telling skill from the rest of the tale?  I don't know.  Had the story lost its magic with my own maturity, or whatever maturity it is that a teen-ager has?  I don't know.

What I do know is that I remembered the title of the story.

More years passed.  Many more.  I left the community of that public library, married, had a family, wrote and published more books than that horrible adolescent thing I called a novel.  Walked away from writing, went back to college, was suddenly widowed, and life changed.  And that ending did not leave me.

Again, I am not a great reader of science fiction.  I have a nodding acquaintance with it, and I have read some.  I have probably read more about science fiction than I have actually read in the genre itself.  (Fantasy is another matter entirely.)  I watched Star Trek TOS more in syndicated reruns than the original broadcasts, and I've seen a few of the films.  I caught perhaps one or two episodes of TNG, but no more than that.  Star Wars, yes, the first/middle three chapters, and some of the similar films of the '70s.  The three novels I remember most clearly were apocalyptic: Larry Nivens' Lucifer's Hammer; Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon!; and Max Ehrlich's The Big Eye. 

A few short stories -- aside from Rod Serling's Twilight Zone collections -- stuck with me in a fashion similar to this one.  Poul Anderson's "The Light" was one, and again it was because of the ending.  The same with Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" and "The Star."

As I began the journey back to my own writing, I knew that I had those stories, long and short, in my personal vault of memory, and some were also within easy reach on the bookshelves in my home.  But one was missing.  Title known, ending still astonishing, but I did not have the text.  In 2010, perhaps 40 years after I rediscovered it the first time, I went on another search.  This time it didn't take flipping through paper indexes to find it; Google brought it to me in mere fractions of a second.  I had only to key in the title.

Now I had the rest of the information:  author, publication data, even the reprinted annual collection from Saturday Evening Post.  Within a week, I had a copy of the collection, purchased for one cent (plus shipping, of course) from Amazon.

It was not a short story but a novelette, so there was more on this 40-years-on reading for me to absorb and analyze.  The basic premise was exactly as remembered, and of course that ending, but except for that I might as well have been reading it for the first time.  Nearly everything else had been forgotten:  Details, motivation, circumstances.  Reading with a more mature experience and more critical eye, I found flaws that had not been apparent to my 10-year-old self or even my teen-aged incarnation.  I also found something else, however, that transcended the flaws and brought them into the perspective of that still awesome ending.

This was more than an adventure story, a treasure-hunting story, a character-versus-monster story.  Like all truly well-constructed stories, this contained more than one conflict.  Character versus self, character versus society, character versus fate/the gods, even a bit of character versus technology.

I wondered how it would have been written differently, if some of the flaws had been addressed and revisions integrated to highlight the other aspects of the deeper story.  I began to play editor, but only for a while.  There wasn't time to do more.

But I also wondered what had ever become of the author.  I had never heard of him before, nor had I ever encountered him during my various travels through science fiction and fantasy.  Again, I turned to the Great Google and learned more.  Much more.

"The Tale of the Fourth Stranger" was written by Australian Anthony Coburn and published in the 4 April 1959 edition of The Saturday Evening Post.  On the surface, it is a treasure-hunting tale, sparked by an oft-told legend of a monster guarding the riches.  And that is enough.

Coburn, born in 1927, had left Australia and gone to the UK, where he worked for the BBC as a screenwriter and producer.  Just a few years after writing "The Tale of the Fourth Stranger," he wrote the script for what would become the first serial for the Doctor Who program, "An Unearthly Child."

I have never seen a single episode of Dr. Who.  I know virtually nothing about it.  Coburn's IMDb page does not include a credit for "The Tale of the Fourth Stranger."  Further reading suggests there are other things, including some related to Dr. Who, for which he has not received credit.

Following words and following ideas can take one into unusual territory, sometime enlightening, sometimes frightening.

A Kirkus review of that collection of Saturday Evening Post stories is such territory.  The entire review is but a middling-long paragraph, yet it contains one of those sentences that can have more impact than expected.  Not all the stories included in the anthology are mentioned, but Coburn's is:

.. . . and the adventure of a hero of mythological proportions -- his battle with a sea monster, discovery of buried treasure and his realization of the self-deception of the cynical -- in Anthony Colburn's(sic) The Tale of the Fourth Stranger.

Anthony Coburn died in April 1977, not yet 50 years old.  At the time, he was the producer for the BBC series Poldark.

I do not believe in blessings or curses.  I certainly do not believe in omens.

And yet, and yet. . .

Secret Places, Secret Words

This one is gonna ramble.  Sit back and relax.  ;-)

After a particularly stressful week, I finally got a good night's sleep and feel almost human again.  Last week-end was our local Artists' Studio Tour, which I participated in, and while it's a lot of fun and I actually make some money at it, it's also exhausting.  Monday was back to the day job and all the other routine, so I'm just now really recovering.

One of the first chores on my List of Things to Do Today is calculate my annual budget.  As I contemplate the very real possibility of quitting the day job and trying -- trying -- to enjoy a productive retirement, I need to know if the finances will permit it.  I can tell you right now, I won't be surviving on the strength of my book sales! 

Well, at least not based on past performance.  But when I came back to the writing something over three years ago, I had no illusions about that anyway.  I came back to it because I had always loved it . . . and because I needed the creative respite from the stultifying boredom of the day job.  Though I've not been as productive directly on the writing in that time, it has given me the creative balance I'd been lacking.  And that's a good thing.

Quoting Martha Stewart is also a good thing for reasons somewhat connected to yesterday's post about the cultural silencing of women, especially women perceived to be uppity or just more successful than men. 

Martha Stewart doesn't have to worry about a budget; most of the rest of us do.  Many of us are so caught up in the daily grind, plus a constant cascade of mini-crises, that we don't have the luxury of even thinking about how to find a way off the vicious carousel.  Even if we did think of a way, we don't have the time or the energy to implement it, let alone the financial means.  In our frustration and desperation, we blame everyone and everything else for why we can't have nice things, because we just don't seem to be able to do anything else.

Many of us also have responsibilities to others that can't be shrugged off.  Sometimes it's very difficult to maintain any kind of balance when there are contrary demands that simply cannot be ignored.

So today I am grabbing for myself the luxury -- and it shouldn't be luxury but it is -- of sitting down and examining exactly where I stand financially and what I need to do going forward.

I know that I have certain assets that have lain idle because the day job has prevented me from putting them to work.  Though I have no way of even beginning to calculate how much income these assets might generate, I do know that they are not generating any at all right now.  One of those assets is, quite literally, a box of rocks.  And that's not as dumb as it sounds.

Something over twenty years ago, my husband and I sort of stumbled upon a rock hunting location that apparently hadn't seen very much activity.  We had actually gone looking for a different location and ended up more or less lost, in the sense that we knew where we were but it wasn't at all where we had set out to go.   Having neither cell phone nor GPS nor even a good topographical map to figure out if we had made a mistake or the information that had been given to us was wrong, we decided to explore the area we were in rather than get more lost, then retrace our route home.  The particular type of material that we'd gone in search of was nowhere around, but we found a few pieces of something else that looked promising. 

As it turned out, those few pieces produced some very nice cabochons that I made into jewelry and ended up selling.  Life being what it is, several years passed before we had the opportunity to try to find this place again and perhaps acquire more of the material we'd found there.  I felt confident that I remembered the roads we'd taken.  It was just a matter of whether or not the roads had changed!  For once, my confidence was well founded; I navigated us right back to the spot without a single wrong turn.  We turned off the road exactly where both of us remembered having turned the first time.

What we found, however, was not what we expected.  We didn't find any of the material we'd gone in search of, which we'd only found a few pieces of before anyway.  Instead, we were amazed at the abundance of another type of rock, not only in quantity but quality.  Why hadn't we seen them on the earlier visit?  They were literally just lying on the ground!  Everywhere!  Despite the temptation to pick up every piece in sight, we took only those that looked most likely to yield jewelry-quality cut stones. 

Over the next several years, we cut and polished a lot of those rocks.  I made them into jewelry and sold them.  And we went back for more. 

We never told anyone precisely where they came from.  "Somewhere in Arizona" was the extent of the information we gave out. 

As far as I've been able to determine, the site is not listed in any rock hunting guidebook nor has it been written up in any magazine articles or on any websites. 

I still have a box of those rocks.

Last week-end, during the Studio Tour, one of the visitors to my studio wanted to buy one of the rocks.  I have certain pieces that I use for display to illustrate the original material from which the jewelry is made, and those pieces are not for sale.  The lady tried very hard to get me to sell it, but I wouldn't.  In a way, it's one of those "nice things" that I do have and don't want to part with.

But it's also more than just a "nice thing."  It's a part of me, a part of my personal experience, my memories, my knowledge.  The secret of its source is my secret, even if someone else has by now been to that particular place and found those particular rocks.

I could drive out there now, today, and probably find more of them.  Google Earth tells me the roads are still where I remember them.  No Panoramio photos have been posted, which suggests few people have gone out there even to take pictures.  I see no new dirt bike, four-wheeler, or hiking trails so indelibly etched in the desert that they are visible from satellites.  Perhaps, my husband being gone almost ten years now, it's still my secret.

Does that secret have a value that can be part of the budget calculation?  Can I use that secret, that knowledge, that experience, to break free of the daily grind and crises?  At what point does the secret lose its value simply because it's a secret?

At last week's Studio Tour, I sold two pieces of jewelry that had been especially dear to me.  I'm not sure why, except maybe it's that "nice things" syndrome.  I hated to part with them, but I also knew that I myself was not personally ever going to wear them.  They might as well provide me with a little bit of income and provide someone else with some enjoyment.  So I let them go.

One of the issues I've railed on frequently throughout this blog is the failure -- at times I'm tempted to call it the refusal -- of the writing community to set and then enforce some kind of quality control standards regarding digital publication.  I know that it's difficult for some people, maybe even most people, to stick their necks out and be critical, even when they know the criticism is warranted.  Their reasons are many, and often valid.  My own experience this past week may have reinforced some of their caution.

Back in the days when writers were scrambling for the limited number of spots on publishers' lists, there was a sense on one hand that those of us who had made it owed it to our fellows to help them up the ladder, and yet on the other sense that we were foolish if we trained our own competition.  As I've said before, I served my time as an RWA contest judge; I saw the horrible writing, the flat characters, the transparent plots.  I bit my tongue at critique group meetings where other members just plain didn't get that they had to learn proper grammar and basic writing skills.  In the end, though, it didn't matter.  Those writers were never going to be published.  They were never going to be my competition.

Today they are both.

Today, as I work on my budget to find out if I can even begin to survive without the day job's income, I understand that certain secrets will lose all value if shared, but certain others have no value unless they are shared.   Last night I completed a book review that I had started over a year ago.  I have no illusions that my review is going to make this particular novella any better.  Even though I pointed out very specific problems with it, others have done so, too, and the book remains in digital print.  It also remains an example of some of the worst writing imaginable.  I read three pages and that was more than enough.  The review is not kind.  It is honest.  It is brutally honest, because the book is brutally bad.

Is it possible that the author will read that review and be hurt?  Yes.

Is it possible that the author, her friends and family and fans, will be angry with me and seek revenge?  Yes.

Is it possible that some other writer will read that review and learn something?  Yes.

Is it possible that some reader will read that review and learn something?  Yes.

I'm willing to risk the first two for the sake of the second two.

I'm never going to be the kind, gentle, nurturing soul who pats the author of a badly written book on the head and says, "But you tried and that's what counts,"  and then slaps a big gold star on it.  (Yes, "it" may refer to the book, the author, or just the author's head.  Take your pick.)

Nor am I going to give hours and hours and hours of my time to angry, self-entitled authors who think I owe them free editorial services to ameliorate the effects of my scathing reviews on their tender egos.

But I will share my secrets, my knowledge, my experience, with those who are willing to learn and then willing to work with what they've learned, because now they are in my marketplace and they are competing with me.  I owe it to myself to contribute to the professionalism of my profession.

Just don't ask me to tell you where the rocks come from.

11,932 words

 

It's done.  Almost

 



 

I'm going to leave it alone overnight, then give it another full read-through in the morning, when my eyes are rested and so is my brain.  I've already seen a few places that need tweaking, and some of the photos need to be re-sized.  One may come out altogether, and another may be replaced.

But it's done.  All 11,932 words of it.

As some of you know, I'm a crafter as well as a writer. I participate in six to eight local art shows every season, starting in October and running through April.  Most of what I exhibit is jewelry, though I actually play around with other media as well.

But I've always been a rock hound, and Arizona is a great place to be one, so that's what I do.  And at every single show, people ask about the rocks.  They want to know if I really go out and find my own stones out in the desert.  (I do, some of them at least.)  They want to know if crystals are really made out of glass.  (They're not.)  They want to know what kind of glue holds the wire on a wire-wrapped stone.  (None; there's no glue used at all.)

As much as I love talking about rocks and gems at art shows, I also realize I'm sharing my 30 years of experience for free.  A few weeks ago I decided to stop doing that.  Or at least put some of my expertise in book form and give people something they can buy and take home with them.  I am, after all, a writer.

At first about all they'll be taking home is a card or flyer with the information about how to buy the Kindle edition, but I'm hoping to have an inexpensive (black & white photos only) CreateSpace paperback ready by the second big show of the season, which is our annual Artists' Studio Tour in early November.  I'm not sure about the price yet.  Color photos on the interior can quadruple the price on CreateSpace, but I'm not even sure how many pages this would come out to be!

Really Neat Rocks isn't a how-to manual, or a guidebook with maps to all the neat rock hunting places in Arizona.  It's just an overview, a casual introduction, designed and written for the person who doesn't really know much about rocks but still thinks they're really neat and would kinda like to know a little bit more.

From the Introduction:

One cold, snowy, gloomy afternoon in March of 1981, my husband asked me, "What would you think about moving to Arizona?" 

We were standing in the kitchen of our house in rural northeast Indiana, fixing supper.  The house was less than two years old; we had built it ourselves and hadn't even finished all of the interior yet.  Moving anywhere was about the furthest thing from my mind.

Yet my reply wasn't really an expression of surprise.  It had nothing to do with our particularly miserable Midwestern winter.  Nor did I think about leaving family behind or even the logistics of packing up and moving 2,000 miles to somewhere I'd never been before. 

Instead, the very first words out of my mouth were, "Well, they have really neat rocks there."