Ideal Writing Day

The e-mail list for authors of one of my publishers had a fun discussion thread last week: What would your ideal writing day be like?

I envy the kind of writing day some of those apparently prolific, enthusiastic authors envision. I don't think I've ever experienced an ideal writing day. I'm a very slow, laborious writer, and when I have an uninterrupted day to myself, I'm the sort of person who will suddenly find a usually tedious household chore of compelling interest.

However, on a good day I typically plan two stretches of writing time, a short one in the morning and a longer period in the afternoon. On an ideal day, each of those would last longer than it does in real life. Also, I would start the afternoon writing session earlier instead of falling into the trap of waiting until late afternoon when everything else is done -- because everything never gets done. As a book on housekeeping I own points out, you will never "get it all done" because it is infinite (that is, unlike most "real jobs" one gets paid for, its limits are undefined). So writing time has to be defined and adhered to if one wants to produce words on a consistent basis. If I didn't have the distractions of a house to keep up, a dog to take care of, and a spouse to feed (simple breakfasts and dinners on weekdays), my ideal writing schedule would comprise a couple of hours each in the morning and the afternoon. Without dawdling, each of those time spans would produce at least 500 words.

Marion Zimmer Bradley used to say writing was the perfect job for a stay-at-home houseperson because it can be dropped and picked up for brief stretches of work anytime during the day. My reaction was "speak for yourself, bestselling author." :) In recent years, however, I've gotten better at using those fifteen-minute blocks. Several hundred words can be churned out in that amount of time, if one doesn't let one's mind wander. Preliminary outlining definitely helps in that respect.

Along that line, Mercedes Lackey has stated several times in her Quora posts that if a writer can dash off 500 words of a blog post in a few minutes, he or she should be able to produce a similar volume of words on a story or novel in the same amount of time. But, darn it, nonfiction is much easier to create than readable fiction. Or maybe I feel that way because I spent so many years mainly in academic writing.

Caffeine and/or alcohol (in moderation) can help the words flow. Of course, they'd need editing later, but so does everything to some extent. However, indulging in those substances as writing aids on a regular basis would eventually become routine and therefore undermine their effectiveness as a stimulus.

What does your ideal writing day look like?

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Facing a New Year

Happy New Year! -- even though it is an arbitrary date. Why not the precise day of the winter solstice instead of over a week later? Or, better yet, the spring equinox? The ancient Romans originally set the beginning of the year in March, the debut of spring, which has a certain fitness. That year contained ten months of 30 or 31 days each. Wikipedia has a detailed article about the changes and reforms in the Roman calendar over many centuries:

Roman Calendar

Earth's movement through space has the inconvenient feature that a full revolution around the sun (year) isn't evenly divisible by the moon cycles (months). So having twelve months in a year doesn't work properly; days are left over, making each month, except February, longer than a moon cycle. The original Roman calendar had "intercalary" clusters of days or even whole "extra" months, depending on which era we're looking at. According to Wikipedia, "winter was left as an unassigned span of days," later replaced by January and February. Moreover, in the early calendar, weeks had eight days, a figure that doesn't fit properly into the phases of the moon or divide equally into 30 days.

To make matters worse, the solar calendar doesn't have an even number of days, requiring insertion of "leap days" at fixed intervals.

In ancient Rome as well as some other societies, the intercalary days were considered unlucky. Is it unlucky to be born on February 29? Even if leap year babies, like the hero of PIRATES OF PENZANCE (who got trapped by that technical point in his apprenticeship contract), have far fewer birthdays than the number of years in their lives, I suppose they still get annual birthday celebrations. I sort of like the idea of a cluster of "unassigned" days in a year. They could be holidays with no obligations of any kind.

As I've mentioned in the past, I don't make "resolutions" anymore. I do set "goals," modest, mainly short-term ones. My immediate goal in January, as usual, is to finish my annual vampire fiction bibliography update and send it to interested parties before the end of the month. In terms of writing goals, I have two more "orphaned" (by a company that went out of business) erotic paranormal romance novellas to revise slightly and submit to my new publisher who's been re-releasing them. I plan to re-release on my own a spicy, humorous paranormal romance work with Lovecraftian elements that consists of a linked pair of stories from the same former publisher. With a different publisher, I have one older paranormal romance novel, non-erotic, awaiting re-release. Although I have no new fiction in mind at present, that situation could always change later in the year.

In other areas of life, I aim to get back to riding my stationary bike a full 29-30 minutes in each session rather than slacking off to barely above 25 minutes, as I've done too often lately. Also, I tentatively agreed to sign up for the coffee hour duty roster at church, and I plan to follow through with that activity. I'd like to declare a goal of catching up with the dozens of manga volumes in my to-read stack, but that's probably a fantasy under the category of, "If I can't die until I've read all these, I'm destined to live forever." The collection is infinite, because several new manga are added every month. There is, however, some possibility of catching up with the prose books in the pile before they multiply beyond control, because I usually manage to keep up and got behind only within the past couple of months.

Wishing you the best of luck with your goals for 2023. And, to repeat one of my favorite quotes from MASH, "Here's to the new year. May she be a durn sight better than the last one."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Emotional Intelligence

Here's another self-help article that may offer useful suggestions for the writing life:

How to Control Thoughts and Emotions

The author, Justin Bariso, writes frequently on this topic, and his many online essays about emotional intelligence include a variety of "rules" and behavior patterns related to it. The article linked above, which appeared in our local newspaper last Sunday, lists five "rules of emotional intelligence."

The Blue Dolphin rule targets the bad habit of obsessively rehashing thoughts we'd prefer not to fixate on. It counteracts the familiar problem inherent in trying not to think of something, e.g., a white bear. The harder you attempt to banish that polar bear from your mind, the more persistently it looms. Instead, replace the unwanted thought with a different one, such as a blue dolphin.

The other rules deal with (1) Awkward Silence -- don't leap in with an answer to a tough question instantly, but take a long, thoughtful pause; (2) Scope -- before you start, define the details of a task, what's involved in it, and the amount of time and effort it will require, important for authors mapping out how much time they'll need to complete a writing project without rushing and getting overwhelmed; (3) the Diamond Cutter -- use critical feedback to transform the diamond-in-the-rough of your work into a polished gem (as in Karen's post last week); (4) Recentering -- "reaffirm your primary goals, values and key principles," in other words, in writing as in any endeavor, creative or otherwise, clearly set your priorities.

To me, these five principles focus more on cognitive than emotional habits, even though they're labeled "rules of emotional intelligence." As hinted by the title, they seem more like methods of managing one's thoughts and thus, maybe, controlling emotions as a byproduct.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Beginner's Mind

This week I watched a video lecture on creativity delivered by Kermit the Frog. It started with a celebration of the Big Bang as the original creative act (although without references to a Deity). Kermit gave inspirational advice on ideas such as inspired craziness and thinking outside the standard rules. He speculated on why we're put in this world and declared our purpose is to be creative, for everybody is creative in some way. Here's the video in case you want to listen to it. (It's fairly long.)

Listening to a Talking Frog

One of the concepts discussed in the talk, "beginner's mind," particularly struck me.

The Beauty of Beginner's Mind

As I understand it, this means approaching experiences without being bound by preconceptions, as far as possible. The short essay on this page (a teaser to lure the visitor into deeper exploration) says the "wisdom of uncertainty frees us from. . . the thicket of views and opinions." As a result, "When we are free from views, we are willing to learn." The person in this frame of mind is compared to a child, who sees the world with fresh eyes.

That page doesn't explicitly link "beginner's mind" to the creative process, as Kermit's lecture does, but the connection is clear. An artist or inventor who embraces this mindset can hope to generate fresh, individual work not quite like anything that has gone before. The concept resonates with me because it reminds me of my creative process and emotions when I originally started writing stories. I produced my first writings, aside from class assignments and a couple of allegedly humorous science-fiction skits, at the age of thirteen. Reading DRACULA at age twelve had turned me on to vampires, horror, fantasy, and "soft" SF of all kinds. Because I was limited to the offerings of the local public library and one store that sold paperbacks, I got a solid grounding in Victorian and Edwardian classics and the vintage works of the major pulp authors before I ever read much recent speculative fiction or viewed any horror films—a circumstance I consider very fortunate. This reading inspired me to want to write my own fiction, since I couldn't afford to buy many books and the sources available to me didn't have enough of the kinds of stories I wanted—mainly relationships between human and "monstrous" characters. So I had to create them for myself.

Incidentally, my impulse to start writing didn't spring from internal drives alone. It had a technological catalyst, too: I got access to my aunt's old typewriter, left in my grandmother's house. Finding a textbook from my aunt's high-school typing class, I taught myself the rudiments of touch-typing. Whenever I stayed overnight or longer at my grandmother's, I typed stories (until my parents gave me a portable typewriter of my own, and I could compose fiction at home also without the constraint of handwriting). Similarly, the much later advent of word processing with our first computer in the early 1980s sparked my creativity anew by eliminating the necessity to retype whole pages, or even multiple pages, to correct small errors or insert minor revisions. The computer removed a barrier between my creative impulses and their concrete expression, making it possible to refine my work further. (No more qualms about whether changing a word or two was worth retyping a page.)

When I started producing stories, I had the "beginner's mind." I didn't know any of the conventional "rules" for fiction, only the basic grammar and spelling I'd learned in English classes. In fact, when I eventually submitted my first book to a publisher, I didn't know anything about publishing except that submissions had to be double-spaced on one side of the page and include a SASE. But that stage came later, of course. For the stories I wrote as a teenager, I imitated the elements I loved in the horror and speculative fiction I avidly read, while tweaking the themes and tropes in accordance with my own fantasies. Because I wasn't inhibited by knowing what I was "supposed" to do, the words flowed almost faster than I could get them onto the page. The process of writing itself enthralled me, and I spent as much time on it as I could spare from school, chores, and other obligations. My third completed piece was a single-spaced novelette over thirty pages long, in the form of the journal of a man inadvertently changing into a vampire.

Now that I know the "rules" and have more experience in recognizing flaws in my own writing (and that of others), I work slowly and laboriously. I proceed like the centipede who has trouble walking because he can't decide which foot to move first. I don't often enjoy the first-draft process very much, although I do like brainstorming, outlining, proofreading the nearly-finished outcome, and the fulfillment of "having written." I sometimes miss the "first, fine careless rapture" of my teens and early twenties. On the plus side, my work has grown far better than it was when I had no idea what I was doing. I finish novels rather than bogging down in the middle because I haven't plotted in advance. I produce fairly polished first drafts that don't elicit heavy revision requests from editors. If only one could keep the "beginner's mind" along with the benefits of learning and experience.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Survival in the World of Publishing

Kameron Hurley's new LOCUS essay reflects on her first ten years as a published author:

How to Survive a Decade in Publishing

Her first series went through three publishers, the last of which folded when one of the owners allegedly absconded with the royalties that were owed. She notes that "publishing is weird," a conclusion supported by her examples from her own career and those of some other writers. Knowing "the one thing we can control in this wild business is the words on the page" (and not always even that, where the finished product released to the market is concerned), we have to accept that the "glorious highs" and "very low lows" of a writer's life depend heavily on many outside factors, including luck.

Her remark that all her adventures as an author since then have been "measured against that first foray into the publishing world" resonates with me. I had two very different publishing experiences at the start of my career. My first two books were mass-market paperback anthologies, CURSE OF THE UNDEAD and DEMON LOVERS AND STRANGE SEDUCTIONS. The sale of anthologies edited by someone with no prior writing or editing experience to a major publisher was an amazing stroke of luck then and would be impossible now. At the time, I thought I would thereafter (1) make lots of money and (2) sell everything I wrote. It is to laugh. The advances did constitute more money than we'd ever received in one lump before, although they were probably modest even by early 1970s standard. One of them did provide the down payment on our first house. Neither book earned out its advance, though, and the publisher didn't buy anything further from me.

As for the second expectation, my next publication was the first full-length book I wrote myself, a nonfiction work of literary criticism on vampirism in literature. After a couple of years of floundering around, still not very knowledgable about the industry, I contracted it with a small press that proved to be disastrous. They printed the book by offset from my typed manuscript, long before word processing, so the thing looked sadly unprofessional. It had a small print run, as typical for academic-oriented works, and it was exorbitantly overpriced. It cost something like $29.00 in 1975, when the average paperback went for $1.25 and most hardcovers for under $10.00. (I checked those figures by glancing at books from that decade on my shelf.) It's a wonder any copies ever sold. Moreover, after the first year or two the publisher stopped communicating with me, and I eventually resorted to a lawyer's letter to get them to disgorge a meager royalty payment. Years went by before my first professional fiction sale, to one of the early Darkover anthologies, and well over a decade between that monograph and my first novel, to a startup small horror press—which treated its authors well and even paid an advance. So, not forgetting that aforementioned ghastly vampire monograph experience, with later publishers I felt good about the deal when they actually answered mail and disbursed royalties on time.

Hurley reminds us that at every stage of a writing career, rejection will happen, and she recommends an attitude of "grim optimism." For surviving in this industry, she advises writers to "create a strong support network. Get a good agent. Understand that everything changes."

I've read that something like 90% of published authors don't live off their writing, but have another source of income such as a day job, a pension, or a well-employed spouse. Of the other 10%, few support themselves by writing fiction; most depend on occupations such as journalism or technical writing. Anyone whose principal goal in becoming an author is to get rich or even affluent is probably doomed to disappointment. To survive the highs and lows described in Hurley's essay, one has to write for its own sake. As Marion Zimmer Bradley famously said, nobody told you not to be a plumber.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Living in the Moment

Kameron Hurley's newest LOCUS column further discusses the quandary of living in these fraught times.

Measuring Life in Keurig Cups

She describes the joy of creative projects other than writing, endeavors that engage the body and senses such as the backyard pond she and her spouse constructed. She reminds herself and us that we can choose to brood over what's happening in the country and the world outside of our control or focus on what we can control, how we spend our own time.

I especially like her quote from Paul Harvey: “During times like these, it helps to remember that there have always been times like these.” Hurley brings up the example of Monet painting within earshot of bombardment during World War I. I often remind myself that the country and the world have survived much worse and returned to whatever "normal" may have been at the time. Consider the plague-devastated village at the end of Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK or London during the blitz in her BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR. And yet here we are.

A message in Hurley's essay that particularly resonates with me is the theme of living in the moment. She puts it, “Am I physically all right, in this moment? Is everything okay here, in this moment?" This is a reminder I try to invoke for myself regularly, but I tend to think of it in negative terms: Is anything terrible or unbearable happening right now? The answer is usually "No." Of course, it may occasionally be "Yes," as with acute grief or terror or agonizing physical pain. More often than not, though, I suffer self-inflicted unhappiness by obsessing over bad things that may or may not happen in the future. Even impersonal forces such as political trends—sometimes I have to figuratively hit myself upside the head with the reminder that if the party I oppose wins the November election, the apocalypse won't descend upon us in the first week of November or even on Inauguration Day. To paraphrase a quote I came across somewhere recently, worrying doesn't make tomorrow any better; it makes today worse.

Since, unlike Hurley, I don't have a creative avocation other than writing, I make a conscious effort to take note of good things happening day by day—e.g., sunny weather, functioning cars, appliances, and utilities, reasonably okay health, Facebook videos of our youngest grandson (age two), the convenience of ordering books and other treats online, the restaurants that have reopened, etc. I've started posting some of these daily on Facebook under the label "Today's Good Things," most of which probably give the impression that my life is rather boring. That's okay; I prefer boring to chaotic. I also keep track of the daily word count on my current work in progress, which encourages me with the sense that I'm accomplishing something, however slowly.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Surviving the Slow Apocalypse

More about the "slow apocalypse" from Kameron Hurley this month:

Of Men and Monsters

Writing about police brutality, serial harassers in the SF field, incompetence and corruption in government, etc., she says, "Monsters masked as men have always walked among us." She deplores the difficulty of making broad structural changes, with the result that the same problems cycle around and continually resurface, "because we punish individuals instead of remaking systems." About the "monsters," she goes on to say, "What ensures their continued existence is the esteem we hold them in, the lifting up of powerful bullies out of fear: fear of retribution, fear of discomfort, fear of what would happen if we did not uphold the status quo." She focuses in particular on the "monsters" in the "professional spaces" of the science fiction community.

In connection with the protests, riots, and assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s, she acknowledges, "There have always been times like these." Learning from the past is a necessary prerequisite for creating a better future.

Therefore, it strikes me as incongruous when, although she concludes with an expression of hope, immediately before that she declares, "It’s been difficult for me to write anything these days that isn’t prefaced with how difficult it is to do much of anything but survive during the final death throes of America as we know it."

Are things really THAT bad? I tend, rather, to accept Steven Pinker's thesis in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE and ENLIGHTENMENT NOW that these are the best of times for our planet, not the worst. Yes, even now. What if COVID-19 had struck in the middle of the nineteenth century, before the germ theory of disease was accepted? Only sixty or seventy years ago, the deaths in police custody that have roused such passionate cries for change would hardly even have been considered newsworthy. Our country has survived worse, such as the Civil War, the Great Depression, and two World Wars. As my stepmother used to say, much to my annoyance when I was a teenager impatient to grow up, "This too shall pass."

Speaking of writing, my personal coping mode is the opposite of Hurley's. I don't feel competent to deal with the weight of the present crises through fiction. In my last few works, as well as the WIP I'm starting now, I've practiced writing with a light touch and hints of humor that I hope will offer readers (along with myself) an hour or two of pleasurable escape.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Adjusting to Difficult Times

Kameron Hurley's latest LOCUS column discusses the stress of coping with a period of crisis:

It's OK If This Email Finds You Well

She writes about the transition—whenever that may occur—from "these difficult times" to "life as we know it" and working through the stages of grief in that adjustment. She confides, "Unexpected change is difficult for me," a reaction with which I can thoroughly identify. I don't like change in general, unless it's completely pleasant, and unexpectedness makes it worse. Hurley brings up a point that had never occurred to me, the difference between traumatic upheaval requiring swift reactions and "slow-moving disasters." If we're continuously "forced to worry about our day-to-day survival," we never get time to do the emotional "processing" a traumatic event requires.

I'm lucky not only in enjoying continued health (along with all the members of our family) but in that my husband and I are retired. We don't have to worry about survival, because our income level doesn't change. The restrictions of the past couple of months haven't altered our day-to-day routine much, although we do miss the few activities we were used to doing outside the home. Because we're exempt from a lot of the stresses Hurley describes, I don't suffer the degree of inability to focus that she mentions. Yet I do feel vaguely stuck in a "waiting" mode, tempted to put things off "until all this is over." Since we don't know when "all this" will end and what "over" will look like, that's not a particularly useful attitude. I'm currently brainstorming a third fiction piece connected to my two Wild Rose Press paranormal romance novellas (YOKAI MAGIC, published in 2019, and KITSUNE ENCHANTMENT, now in the publisher's editing process). The project is still in the early stages, not even up to formal outlining. It's easy to slide into the mindset that there's no point in working too hard on it until the second novella gets nearer publication. Then I mentally slap myself for succumbing to laziness.

A few bracing quotes from Hurley's essay:

"Humans are resilient creatures, to both our benefit and detriment."

"There is a lot of horror in going through any crisis, and it can wear you down. But horror is not the whole story, and humanity is full of positive acts and examples that we don’t speak enough about."

"There’s good reason humanity has lasted this long, and it’s not because we formed death cults and threw ourselves off cliffs. It’s because we care for one another and our communities."

One of the things I love about S. M. Stirling's DIES THE FIRE and its sequels is that he doesn't dwell at great length on post-apocalyptic horrors, but focuses on groups of people who work together to build new kinds of communities after the catastrophic worldwide Change.

"The comfort I take is that we have been through the times of monsters before. And we will again. The time of monsters is necessary on our way to what happens next. No new world was ever birthed without pain."

As a sometime horror writer with a fondness for "monsters," I appreciate that sentiment.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Finding Time to Write

Marion Zimmer Bradley recommended stay-at-home motherhood as the perfect job for a writer, because writing can be performed in short bursts in the intervals between the tasks required to cope with the house and children. My inner retort upon first reading that statement was, "Speak for yourself, Ms. Bradley." The time it would have taken me to settle into a creative mindset would have eaten up most if not all of each of those brief intervals. The talent for jumping straight into a writing project at a moment's notice isn't given to all of us, although admittedly one can train oneself to shorten the "settling down" part of the procedure. Bradley's advice, however, does highlight one important fact—one doesn't need long, uninterrupted stretches of quiet time to generate readable prose. It took me a long time to learn that principle. My natural inclination was to wait until I had a couple of free hours to devote to a project, hours that came along too seldom. Writing in short bursts can work. Hard as it was, at first, to believe I could produce anything worth keeping in sessions of a half-hour or less, I found that what emerged from my brain didn't turn out appreciably worse than the products of the uninterrupted hours.

C. S. Lewis once remarked that, upon rereading his drafts, he couldn't see any difference in quality between the passages that had flowed with ease and those he'd painfully labored over. The same principle, happily, seems to apply to outward working conditions as well as the author's mental state. In the years since I've taught myself to accept twenty or thirty minutes as an acceptable work period, if that's all I can fit in, I've discovered that 300-400 words can often be generated in those time slots. That's significantly more than zero. A thousand words per day add up to a draft of a typical novel in three months. Five hundred per day would accumulate to novel length in about six months.

Some writers swear by waking up early to churn out one's quota of words before beginning the day's mundane routine. I shudder at the thought, regarding anytime before 8 a.m. as the middle of the night and not becoming fully conscious until somewhat later than that. However, the advice to write every day, at whatever time fits one's own schedule, does make a certain amount of sense. If not every day, at least often and regularly enough to avoid losing the flow of the work. It's hard to get immersed in a story again after leaving it untouched for too long.

A pitfall I've often stumbled into is the impulse to clear the decks before starting. I feel I should get all the routine tasks out of the way in order to free up a time slot and brain space for writing. Unfortunately, that habit can lead to expending most of my allotted computer time on e-mail and other chores, leaving only a short span at the end of the afternoon for writing. In retirement, the truth of the adage that work expands to fill the time available proves itself all too often. It's more productive to start the day's writing first. The other stuff can get done later and usually will. One thing I've learned to do is to open the file of the work-in-progress first, right after turning on the computer. I can tell myself I'll write just a few sentences, maybe a paragraph or two, then come back to it after getting through the routine tasks. That way, I often trick myself into producing a couple of hundred words, so I feel I've accomplished something at least. A sense of accomplishment boosts my morale, encouraging me to generate more prose later in the day. Since I don't usually enjoy the first-draft process (I envy authors who do), I welcome any method of tricking myself into writing.

One school of writing advice suggests discovering your natural "chunk"—the amount of time you can comfortably write at a stretch—and devoting several sessions per day (depending on the time available) to those chunks. Once you've learned how many words you typically produce per chunk (comprising however many minutes), you can estimate how long, in total, it will take you to compose a draft of any given length. Any method that harnesses one's own natural inclinations can boost productivity.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Why Does Writing Get Harder?

Kameron Hurley's latest column tackles the question of why writing fiction gets harder instead of easier with experience:

Why Does Writing Get Tougher?

Some reasons she suggests: With greater experience, we can more easily identify the flaws in our works. With this realization, we recognize the need to edit more meticulously. "There was a time when I could burn through a writing session on full steam without pausing to review." Now, though, she explains that aspiring to create novels with more complex structures makes it impossible for her to write that way. "Leveling up" in writing skill also becomes harder the longer we've been doing it for a reason that's obvious once it's pointed out: The first improvements can be made in giant leaps. As one's skills grow, one runs out of large, obvious ways to improve them. Later stages of growth come in smaller increments. The closer one gets to the ever-retreating goal of perfection, the smaller those increments become. So of course the process feels more arduous. "Holding oneself to a high standard makes each subsequent book more difficult." Hurley connects the craft of writing to the ability to recognize patterns. As we get better at that task, we can have confidence that even if the work gets harder, producing a better book is possible, because we've done it before.

Her answers to the question, "Why does writing get harder instead of easier the more we do it?" can be collectively summarized in her concluding statement, "Writing books gets tougher because we become better at it."

My own feeling about this problem roughly corresponds to Hurley's answer, although she doesn't frame it in quite the same way. I think writing has become harder for me than in my teens and early twenties because then I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't notice when my characters behaved unrealistically or the plot fell off the "because line." My story ideas excited me (it probably helped that I didn't realize how not-original most of them were), and words flowed as fast as I could get them onto the page, whether by typing or handwriting. (Now I shudder at the thought of the latter; my fingers and wrist cramp with pain after scrawling a page or two.) Now that I have a computer to minimize the physical labor and make it easy to correct typos and insert changes, my writing should have become even more fluent, shouldn't it? Alas, no.

I do think my writing has improved over the years, not only from practice and passage of time but because the word processor enables me to make revisions, including very minor ones, without no worries about whether they're significant enough to justify retyping a page. The whole process has become slower and more painstaking, though, rather than easier, as Hurley says she's heard from every writer she has discussed this issue with. Like the centipede who's paralyzed when he stops to think about which leg to move first, I now know too much to compose with the "first fine, careless rapture" of my teens. I can't escape noticing my errors and weaknesses or recognizing the problems in plotting and characterization that need to be solved. It's a bit like hearing from my physical therapist that, since I'm doing all right with the current exercises, she plans to add harder ones in the next session. "Leveling up" does make creative work tougher.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Perky Author has Run Out of Perky

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

It's more than deadline brain. My beloved cat, Daq, goes for a tumor (bladder) biopsy Wednesday. Daq is "Tank the furzel" in my GAMES OF COMMAND. He and his little buddy, Miss Doozy, are my constant companions, but where Doozy is stand-offish, Daq is on my desk, at my feet, by my side, 24/7. I can't imagine how parents cope when their children face a diagnosis of cancer. The past few days have been, quite honestly, horrible. And since it will take over a week for the pathology report to come back in, it appears as if horrible may hang around for a bit yet.

Yes, I'm still writing the book on deadline but it's really not much more than throwing words on the screen. I just keep plowing through it and hope by the time edits happen, things will be better.

So that's the scoop. Daq-cat is in for a rough haul the next few weeks and my primary focus is to be by his side as he's been by mine. Which means the creative muse has taken a hike. Perky author has run out of perky.

But prayers are good. Hugs all, ~Linnea & Daq & Miss Doozy

www.linneasinclair.com