The Novelty Girls

RG talked yesterday about karma in regards to helping out other writers. I think most of us have been on the receiving end of a more advanced and skilled author’s generosity, but let me tell you a little story. A couple years after I started submitting my work, I joined a writing community founded by a print-published author. She frequented the boards quite often and taught workshops and classes. She was a mentor to many people, but ultimately withdrew from the community.

Why?

Instead of making her daily word-count, she’d find herself spending more time on the boards trying to help people. She’d lost focus on her own work in the process of trying to help others — something detrimental to her already rocky career.

The point being, while it’s great for authors to help out new writers, it shouldn’t be their primary focus, nor should they be obligated to do so. There are many print-published authors who work to a strict deadlines, and this is even worse for those published in multiple genres and houses. (Some e-pubbed authors write to a deadline, yes, but most — key word: most — don’t do so under contract.) Add that to whatever real-life obligations they may have, like a job and family, and they may not have the time to take someone under their wing.

(I’m tempted to go into writers who can’t seem to learn even when you explain concepts in terms a six-year-old would understand, but I won’t.)

I’ve had my own issues with this, as well. Most of you know that I used to admin the writing community Evolution. I stepped down earlier this year after realizing that for the past three years, I had been pouring my heart and soul into the community — and with some very rare exception, I didn’t get anything back. I would sit in chat and help people, day after day, but when it came time for me to ask for help? Almost nobody did. I was giving so much that I had nothing left for myself, and why do that for people who are ungrateful and unwilling to give back or pay forward? (It wasn’t just an issue of me; most of these people wouldn’t help anybody, but were leeches to anyone active in the community.)

Also, I recently offered to help mentor for the Romance Divas mentor program, but truth be told, I’ve been pretty sucky at it. Between real life shit hitting the fan and my plethora of health issues flaring up, I haven’t been able to give my apprentice the attention she deserves and needs. I should’ve been more honest with myself about my realistic time and energy. I can barely write most days, much less manage to help anyone else. It becomes one or the other, and that’s not fair to anyone. While my apprentice has been very understanding of the situation, it still leaves me feeling pretty rotten.

Bottom line: Keep your priorities straight. Even if you would like to help out someone else, ask yourself if it’s realistic. Don’t let yourself get sucked into the pattern of constantly “giving” when there’s nothing you get in return, especially if it takes a huge toll on your time. While writers in the romance community are often pressured to be the good girl and help a person in need, remember that you and your writing come first.

(And if someone tells you otherwise, let me know, because they’re in need of a serious bitchsmacking.)

Karma: the law of cause and effect. Or as Justin Timberlake so wisely and yet so funkily put it…
“What goes around, goes around, goes around,
comes all the way back around-yeah.”
{Dont mock me Crystal. Yes I quoted JT}

It’s a doctrine that spans the spiritual world. As you sow so shall you reap, to receive you must first give, etc etc. Basically it means be nice, try not to hurt or judge anyone, don’t just do things for people expecting something in return but because you want to and its right and it feels good. If you do this than good things will come back to you.

Sounds easy. But it isn’t always. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the concept. Conversations that have recently come up pertaining to fair treatment, exclusion, hierarchies, stratums etc in the writing world have directed me to the unsavory underbelly of this-well of every really-career or community.

We’re only human. Of course we think of ourselves and how things affect us personally first and foremost. On the specific topic of being a writer, we are in it because we love it yes, but it is also a business we would like to succeed in.

Would I like to be successful? Yes of course I would. I would like people to enjoy the stories I’ve enjoyed telling, pay off my mountainous debts and bills, maybe even go on a vacation once in a while. That’s all really. I don’t need to be La Nora {although I wouldn’t turn it down}, I just want to do well.

Being where I am now, I cannot imagine not trying to help my fellow writers succeed. It’s a big banquet, more than enough to go around, and everyone deserves a plate. I do not understand why we have to quantify and box everything as better than, less important than. I do not understand why higher up on the path it gets harder and harder to turn around and give the other guy a hand up.

There are writer’s who follow the Pay it Forward code. I love them. Without them I would not have had a clue what I was doing after I wrote The End on the first draft of my manuscript. Authors like Eden Bradley, my fellow Novelty Girls, and many others on the Romance Divas forum. I have been blessed.

This is a business. We are here to entertain others, and the definition of what entertains and what is acceptable etc., changes regularly. But I think what has made this such a hot button topic, is acknowledgement. Everyone I know who is following their literary aspirations has sacrificed, struggled, and been amazingly courageous in order to make their dreams a reality. The only difference in most of these creative women/men is that they send their partial submissions in an email rather than through the Post. That is not enough of a difference to justify the snubs many of them have received. I may not be able to change the system that makes this true, but I can work on my little corner.

So I will promote other writers on my blog. I will rave about the stories I love, I will not rush to find fault with the works of others, and I will work on my jealous twitches every day lol. If I know an answer-which is still rare at this point-I will share it. And I will argue with any system, no matter how “practical” or “logical” it seems, that seeks to separate and exclude authors from each other and any kind of positive acknowledgement on the basis of finance or genre.

That’s just Good Karma.

R.G. Alexander woke me up to the weird wonder of Poetry Monday. While her poetry is actually poetical and stuff, mine is so not. I can’t do poetry. Not even a little. Hence the joy and love I now have for Haiku. It’s the poetry for people who can’t write poetry. How awesome is that?

So, I’ll give you one or two of my Haiku, and a couple from a crazy site called Porno Haiku. It’s even weirder than it sounds, and I’m not linking to their site. If you wanna check them out, go Google it.

Without further ado…
This one is sooo wrong, but my sick and twisted self laughed anyway.

Sweetly making love
Holy shit she’s waking up
Need more chloroform

Wow. Just wow.

She don’t move around
She don’t make a single sound
Necrophilia!

This gives a whole new (and really unsettling) spin to “Oh, my God!”

Catechism says
masturbation is a sin
Confession again

And here’s my much less creative one:

Smut is good for me
I love to write it always
I’m ever its slave

For many of us, it’s just a long, well-deserved weekend complete with camping trips, backyard barbeques with friends and family, and for some, there’s an obligatory trip to the cemetery shoe-horned in.

My childhood was full of trips to the cemetery. But there was one trip I remember vividly. We’d travelled almost an hour to my father’s hometown, and pulled into the circular gravel drive. The speed limit was 5 mph, and the crunch of rocks under the tires was so loud I had to call out names of familiar stones as I marked off the distance to ‘The Coon Plot’. Once there, we put flowers on all the graves and straightened stones that had shifted over the winter. And then my dad told me stories about the men and women commemorated by those grave markers.

One of these stories was about my Uncle Herman, who served in WWII. After the ship he was serving on sank in the Pacific Ocean, he spent time on the same island as the infamous “Pappy” Boyington. Now, I loved “Pappy” and his ill-fated group of Flying Tigers. I watched the show every week where he was played by Robert Conrad on the television series, Baa Baa Black Sheep.

So, at that tender age, I became a romance writer. The stories my dad wove that day at the cemetery that day fired my imagination. In numerous notebooks, I wrote about tropical islands, valiant men, and the women in their lives. Okay, I’ll admit, in all those stories I was the lovers they left behind and the nurses who dressed their wounds and undressed their bodies and their hearts.

At two o’clock tomorrow, when my parents are making a trip out to ‘The Coon Plot’, I’ve asked them to drop an extra rose on Uncle Herman’s grave to say thanks. I think he’ll get  a kick out of the fact that because of him I write romance, and “sexy” romances at that. . . the best kind!

Becauase rest assuredly, if your family is anything like mine, you’ll rarely get any alone time, or a chance to sneak away to your computer to post like you’re supposed to. So, I’ll blame them (*smile*) for my total slackiness in not posting yesterday. So, let’s just run down my day.

Every Memorial Day weekend my city has Riverfest and because my hubby is in law enforcement, he always gets free passes, so of course we have to go. Riverfest is this big event that stretches about a 2-3 mile long trek along the river (hence the name Riverfest) that has food, games, kids activities, stages for concerts, tumbling, acting, singing - you name it, you can just about see it at RF. Saturday morning we get up, dressed and rush downtown to horrible parking, truck out the car seat, round up the kids and walk and walk and walk. The kids get their faces painted, do tons of arts and crafts, rock climb, bungy swing, watch some singing, and some amazing tumblers, and of course eat. After about three hours, we leave there and go to my husband’s families picnic at the park. Here, there is more playing and eating and meeting family neither he nor I have ever seen before. After that, we leave and go to yet another picnic that my family has every year for more kids playing and eating and catching up with family members I haven’t seen in a few months or so.

Are you tired yet? Because I am. By now, it’s *HOT*, I want nothing more than a bath and a nap. Ha! My day is not even close to being over.

But I do have something to look forward to now - this is the highlight of my day. It’s concert time. Each year at the Riverfest they have concert from national talent. And they really do a good job of brining in something for everybody: country, folk music, gospel, rhythm and blues, funk - a little of everything. Did I mention this was the highlight of my day? L L Cool J. I just melt thinking about him. And no, the husband is NOT going with me. I’m going with my girlfriends. And if, IF you don’t know who L L Cool J is, I have a picture posted on my blog. He’s a rapper, but not one of those you have to listen to scream and yell and not understand one single word he’s saying and there’s no mantra of bitches and hoes throughout his lyrics. He is old school rap with some new flavor. Just awesome!!! And so much male inspiration that I just might have to model one of my hero’s after him.

Well, that was my day. I didn’t get home until after eleven, where the only thing I did was take yet another bath and crash into my wonderful bed. The sweet little one must have realized how tired his mommie was because he didn’t wake up until around 10.

Don’t you just love holiday weekends?

Oh you know what I mean. Those songs in the background that ruin the mood.

Yep, you know. I know you do. Here they are.

10. The Sesame Street Song
It’s a little too happy for the kind of sex I like to write. {Sunny Day, sweeping the clouds away…..}

9. Blues Clues
Seriously, who finds “Joe” (and I mean Donovan) sexy? Complete with the unibrow, he’s kind of a dork. Even more than Steve was but Steve can be hot. He’s rock musician now.

8. Dora The Explorer
The We Did It song at the end. Um, no.

7. The Boobaa Theme song
Anything repeating the word “boob” followed by a sigh just isn’t a turn on.

6. The Spongebob Theme Song.
I don’t want to be thinking about a sponge in anybody pants. Just sayin.

5. The Go Diego Go Theme Song
It sounds dirty, but in a really bad dress-like-a-school-girl way. Ewwwwwww

4. Thomas The Tank Engine
Maybe it’s the total repetition in my house that totally makes me cringe here. And it’s not long enough. It’s never long enough.

3. Thomas The Tank Engine Specialty Songs
For those of you not familiar with this WONDERFUL show, it always has a little song at the end for your enjoyment sung by a choir of seven year olds. It’s a little unnerving. “Accidents Happen” is not a song you want in the background while you’re writing the nasty.

2. Clifford’s Puppy Days.
a. Sung by a former American Idol contestant (notice–not winner)
b. Those weird Caribbean drums. Not sexy really. Could be, but not with a little red dog.
c. I don’t to be hearing music about small stuff when I’m working on something “big”. {_He might be little. He might get stuck in the middle…….}

1. Kid Bopp CD’s
Okay, this isn’t a theme song, but it throws me off when I hear the ads. There’s just something weird about eight year old’s singing “I Like Big Butts”

I will have you know that Dayna composed this over the phone and told me what to write. She did. I swear. Okay, I did add some stuff. Don’t kill me Lori.
Any theme songs that throw your mood off?

Over the years, I’ve read a lot of interviews with various different authors. While some talk in detail about the craft, there are other very popular authors who say their characters and world popped into their head mostly fully formed, or that their story “told” itself to them as they wrote it.

Organic writers, or “pantsers.” Instead of plotting and planning, they write the story as it comes to them. For some, planning is even detrimental.

When I first started writing, I had no clue about plotting or the like, and so I wrote organically. (I think that’s probably the case for most writers.) Let’s just say the result sucked like a cheap whore who couldn’t figure out which end to blow. Part of that, certainly, was due to the fact I was a new writer, but not all. Back in 02, I audited a class from a published author that had a strong emphasis on prewriting. I’d been leery of it, because I’d heard so many people say that “Outlining will kill your desire to write the story,” but I gave it a try anyway.

The novel I wrote in that class was head and shoulders above anything else I’d written before. Organic writing resulted in a plot that rambled all over the place because I didn’t know what happened next. Any project I wrote that way needs major revision just because of the plot itself.

So, I’m a plotter. Not a panster. I can sometimes fall in between, but if I don’t have at least some idea of where the story is going, I’m buggered up shit creek without a paddle.

But when I read interviews or talk with authors who have their stories just come to them, like that, I can’t help but feel more than a little envious. I have to do a large amount of plotting and character development work before I can effectively write. And they don’t have to do anything but start. And the way some pantsers talk about it, it’s almost magical.

And I can’t write like that. I wish I could. I wish I could let go, start writing a story, and have it go somewhere without it turning into a wicked twisted cat’s cradle on crack. But I’m a perfectionist. I hate revising with a passion, and I know if I write something that way, I’ll have to do major work (if not rewrite the entire project) to bring it up to my level of quality. As much as I might like to give pantsing another go sometime, I can’t do that.

Even still, I wish…

This is quite possibly my favorite question ever. Always has been. Okay I had a short stint around the age of four when What if? was temporarily usurped by Why?, but soon enough I returned to my old favorite. A much more interesting question that didn’t have to be proven by dull, monochromatic facts.

What if fires up a vastly underutilized corner of our brain. The corner that, usually upon entering middle school, we begin to forget about. The corner that begins to grow cobwebs and show signs of disuse and disrepair as we fall into the habitual daily grind of groceries and workdays and reality tv. The corner that houses our most important asset, our most powerful tool. Our imagination.

As children we created worlds in our heads. Worlds so rich and vibrant that we were sure they were real. No one thought we were crazy when we rode our broom horse through the kitchen as a knight on a quest, or had tea parties in our Sunday best with invisible guests. No one looked twice as we pretended to sink subs or be captured mermaids in our bathtubs each night.

Eventually they told us that imagination has its place, and that we should live in the real world. A very interesting song that really brings this issue into stark relief is “Flowers are Red” by Harry Chapin-a wonderful folk singer that I grew up listening to. In it a young boy paints flowers every color of the rainbow, the grass in every shade, the sun in every hue. The teacher puts him in a corner until he agrees with her way of thinking-that flowers are red and green leaves are green. It’s a song that has always moved me.

I am of the opinion that even if you aren’t a writer, an artist, an actress etc-using your imagination at least once a day is still imperative. Not only is it a powerful manifestation tool to help you achieve your more realistic goals, but its fun and keeps you young.

What if businesses had mandatory daydream breaks? They would increase productivity and that clichéd catchphrase “thinking outside the box” would take on a whole new meaning. What if your mean, grumpy boss was actually a demon? Or a good man under a horrible curse and the correctly phrased intra office memo could set him free?

What if the bus ride home was a perilous journey through an alien land? Or the trip to the grocery store a hunting expedition in a forest filled with strange birds singing in the style of Dan Fogleberg?

I know, it may seem silly. And most of us here certainly use our imagination through our insatiable love of reading and story telling. But sometimes when I am out in the world, looking around at the serious, stressed expressions on the faces of those around me, I think we as a society could certainly use a lot more childlike fascination and joy. That we could really use our old friend imagination. And it may not be true….

But What if it is?