On the plus side, getting a new operating system has also forced me to degunkify my desktop, which also serves to clear my head via a process of sympathetic magic. Being gone for seven workdays (eleven calendar days!)* has also helped with the head-clearing. And now I get to learn some new computery stuff about the operating system and new versions of various software tools I use for work (Windows 7 and Adobe CS5).

The head-clearing quality is especially welcome as I dig into novel rewriting before and after hours (I’m changing the ending as well as continuing my previously planned rewrites) — about 9 weeks of work.

When I arrived in Kansas, I learned that they set the grasslands on fire here on purpose, typically early in the spring, to clear out the dead stuff and make room for new growth. It’s called a controlled burn. It’s a useful concept, and beautiful to see in real life: both the sweeping flames and huge columns of smoke (DON’T try to drive through the smoke) during the burn itself, and later the lush new green that makes the hillsides look like they should have hobbit children playing on them or maybe riders of Rohan thundering across them.

But maybe that’s just me.

*I was at the CSSF2010 Repeat Offenders workshop (for science fiction and fantasy writers, not convicts), which was a worthwhile endeavor, BTW.

On the plus side, when I looked at the place where I might actually start my novel in the next draft, I discovered that it’s only 20 pages in. True, these are twenty pages that I have already slashed and burned and then lovingly rewritten at least three or four times (probably more, since they were part of the chunk I initially wrote and rewrote several times to go to the novel-writing workshop last summer), but still, it could have been worse.

So now I’ll do more slashing and burning and will use my jedi-ninja mind tricks to insert the necessary information from those pages elsewhere in the story as exposition and possibly a flashback or two.

Also on the plus side, almost every scene I’ve written in the second act is a keeper–I just didn’t bother to write the connective transition bits that would keep the narrative flowing and keep the reader from stopping and saying, “Huh?” So that is the task of this draft.

And finally, it’s day two of Daylight Savings Time, and I am up writing at my customary time, which is sort of miraculous. Hearing the little birds chirping outside my window helped with that tremendously; I figured if they could get up and get moving even without the benefit of hot running water and electric coffee machines, then I really had no excuse.

P.S. – Although I didn’t touch the manuscript, I did spend time thinking about it, and doing some related research about desert survival and medicinal plants, which was fun. My next research task is to go back to Hank Reinhardt’s Book of Swords and take the notes I should have taken the first time through. I have lots of people carrying around metal implements (copper and bronze) and want to make sure I don’t have them driving their dagger points emphatically into solid wood tabletops or anything like that. (Hint: bronze is softer than iron; copper is MUCH softer!)

P.P.S. – Currently listening to: The Weepies, “Painting by Chagall” (“Sometimes rain that’s needed falls…”) from their Say I Am You album. Also Iron & Wine, The Shepherd’s Dog. Highly recommended.

I appreciated this list because, like the author, I find that any productivity strategy that works for me does not work forever — the work-avoidance part of my brain is far too clever for that.

Re-reading Stephen King’s account of his long, painful healing process after the infamous hit-and-run accident that nearly killed him really makes the self-pity evaporate (if you want to skip to that part, it’s in the postscript, which is titled “On Living,” but then go back and read the whole thing). His lower leg was broken in nine places; his hip was fractured, and so was his femur; a gash in his scalp required twenty or thirty stitches. Here’s a passage about his recovery after surgery:

“A large steel and carbon-fiber apparatus called an external fixator was clamped to my leg. Eight large steel pegs called Schanz pins run through the fixator and into the bones above and below my knee. Five smaller steel rods radiate out from the knee. These look sort of like a child’s drawing of sunrays. The knee itself was locked in place. Three times a day, nurses would unwrap the smaller pins and the much larger Schanz pins and swab the holes out with hydrogen peroxide. I’ve never had my leg dipped in kerosene and then lit on fire, but if that ever happens, I’m sure it will feel quite a bit like daily pin-care.”

King was still in a wheelchair and recovering from the accident when he wrote the last half of On Writing.

“The first writing session lasted an hour and forty minutes, by far the longest period I’d spent sitting upright since being struck by Smith’s van. When it was over, I was dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair. The pain in my hip was just short of apocalyptic. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying–it was as if I’d never written anything before them in my life. All my old tricks seemed to have deserted me. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones. There was no inspiration that first afternoon, only a kind of stubborn determination and the hope that things would get better if I kept at it.”

Then a bit later: “There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz–not that day–but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good. I’d gotten going, there was that much. The scariest moment is always just before you start…. After that, things can only get better.”

If that seems like a naive pronouncement, read the rest of the book. The writing advice is all solid, and some of it is inspired. Even the advice that seems like it ought to be common sense is not commonly practiced. The parts that stay with me, though, are the object lessons King provides from his own history, from the rusty spike under the eaves on which he impaled…wait for it…his early rejection slips (he’s really a pretty mild-mannered guy; what did you think I was going to say?) to his clear-eyed recollections about his alcoholism and recovery (even less self-pity here than in the postscript). Writers have to be uniquely courageous to do what they do, as King illustrates.

This is not just a book for horror writers, or genre writers; it was recommended to me by a successful narrative nonfiction writer with half a dozen respected books to her credit, and has popped up on many others’ bookshelves. (Never mind that the title as it appears on the paperback cover appears to be scrawled in blood on a wall, reminiscent of a certain novel about a haunted resort hotel. Really, it isn’t about how to write horror fiction specifically.)

Find this book at a nearby library or purchase it.

If you read a lot of books and you’ve never used WorldCat, do yourself a favor and go bookmark it right now.

There are citation and bibliography-building tools for students and other researchers, tagging and list-making features and plug-ins of various kinds, but the reason I love WorldCat is that you can look up any book or magazine title and find the closest libraries that have it. You can also search for music and movies, too. Even if I’m not planning on taking a road trip to K-State or Kansas City to get it, it gives me some idea of how quickly an interlibrary loan (ILL) request might get filled if I request it at my own library. (One book I requested through ILL at my library had to come from Australia, so I figured in some additional wait time for it!)

That’s about 1% of the features available, but it’s what I use most. When you find a nearby copy of an item,  one click takes you to that library’s record of the item, where you can request it, jot down the call number, et cetera. All in all, it’s a simple, free tool that makes life easier for readers and writers.

There’s also a mobile phone version at www.worldcat.org/m/, if you’re fancy like that.

This week, I’m recommending a book to all those tired and bedraggled writers who are now more than two-thirds of the way through National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). If you need balm for your weary souls, this is it: If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. This book was first published in 1938, but is absolutely relevant today. The current publisher is Graywolf; I have their 1987 edition, but there is a 2007 edition with an introduction by Andrei Cordescu (which I haven’t seen).

Ueland taught creative writing at a YWCA in Minneapolis for several years, and also rubbed elbows with a bohemian New York City crowd that also included Eugene O’Neill. Carl Sandburg was a friend and, not given to half measures, he told her that “This is the best book ever written about how to write.”

Her first lesson is this: “everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.” Oh, a dewy idealist! the snarkier among us might say — but Ueland came to this conclusion after teaching writing at a YWCA for three years. So idealist she definitely is, but more of a hard-boiled one, if that’s possible.

Her whole purpose, I think, is to get the reader into the best possible mental state to write: fearless, honest, and optimistic. Someone who is already half-wincing, waiting for the blow of criticism to land, is not going to do the kind of fiercely original writing that Ueland (along with most readers, I think) hopes for.

“Though everybody is talented and original,” Ueland cautions, “often it does not break through for a long time. People are too scared, too self-conscious, too proud, too shy…. Another trouble with writers in the first twenty years, is an anxiety to be effective, to impress people. They write pretentiously. It is so hard not to do this. That was my trouble” (63). That’s the bad news: it takes work, a lot of it, for a long time, to “break through.” On the plus side, if you follow Ueland’s advice, it will be an adventure, not drudgery; the preceding quote came from her chapter, “Be Careless, Reckless! Be a Lion! Be a Pirate! When You Write.”

She has much to say, too, about the rest of life that intrudes on one’s creative endeavors, so for those who are continually battling guilt — thinking they aren’t living up to their various duties when they are writing, and thinking they are not living up to their art when they are being dutiful — this book is essential reading.

Find If You Want to Write at a nearby library or purchase it.

Mom laughed and said she remembered me sweating and staring at my own dreaded admissions form. That was in 1989, so it was a paper form — typed? handwritten? I have no idea, but I think I hand-wrote it — no internet, no web sites, no word processors (I had used a Mac IIe at my high school newspaper, but didn’t have one at home). Very old school.

Mom said I was driving her crazy because I just sat there, staring at the box where I was supposed to provide my answer. She thought I was merely freaking out (a reasonable suspicion, considering me at 17). Then, after the better part of an hour, I wrote the thing, in ink on the form. She read it and was amazed to see it had a beginning, middle and end, and precisely filled up the space available. “I would have written it out on a scrap piece of paper first,” she said. I shrugged. My process worked.

It was a timely reminder, because this month I’m writing two short stories, and have already spent half of the month working on…stuff…but not exactly writing drafts. I was wondering whether I should start to freak out (I’m still pretty talented at it), but after my chat with Mom, I said, “Oh yeah. Prewriting. That’s what I’m doing.”

That said, methinks it’s time for the drafting now(!). Otherwise, prewriting will have morphed into procrastination.

Also, this kind of thing works for me for short stories, but NOT for novels or screenplays. It’s just too hard to keep the whole thing in my head, especially with all the other stuff competing for brainspace. But keeping a scene in my head while I go for a walk or cook dinner is easy and helpful — I can smooth out the dialogue, ratchet up the conflict (or at least recognize that I need to ratchet it up), and flesh out the sensory details and blocking/action (who does what, when, and what are they doing while they are talking).

I’m a process junkie, and very interested in how other writers do what they do. Tuesday I’ll be talking about Negotiating with the Dead, which is Margaret Atwood’s very process-oriented book about writers and writing. Another good one for process is Stephen King’s On Writing (a book many writers swear by, including a  writer I spoke to recently who has a string of successful narrative nonfiction books to her credit) — you may hear more about that one later as well.

a. I might not get in.

b. I might get in.

If I don’t get in, I will have been rejected and will feel bad about that. (Drat.)

If I get in, I have to come up with the cash and burn some vacation time to attend, but more importantly, I WILL HAVE TO FINISH WRITING THE BOOK. I’ll be committed. (Yipe!) This is actually a big part of the reason I’m applying, to have a deadline that will not push, but it’s still a bit nerve-wracking. In a good way, though.

Anyway, deadlines are your friends, right?

Another good friend of mine is primarily working on one novel, but then she has another novel which is her “cheating” project (the Other Novel instead of the Other Woman). When she gets bored with the main project, she switches over to her illicit affair with the Other Novel.

If we were to extend this metaphor any further, I think I would have a harem of active projects. Couple of screenplays. A novel. Two or three short stories. One radio play. That said, sanity dictates that only two or three of those are “hot” at any given day, but I could work on four or five different things in a week, easily.

Clearly, of the lot of us, I’m the juggler. My one-project friend is more of a bloodhound — single-minded with a single purpose. My two-project friend falls somewhere in the middle.

In the past, I’ve worried that I’m not ever going to finish anything if I have too many balls in the air at once, but it seems the minute I buckle down and make myself choose just one (or two), my sense of joy and inspiration dries up, and I wind up working on nothing. So I’m resigned to be a juggler, but the important thing is, I’ve identified my own individual working style (at least concerning my preferred number of concurrent projects).

Are you a bloodhound, tenaciously going after a single project? Or a juggler, needing to have lots of different projects to switch to in order to keep things interesting? What’s your preferred project mode?

This is from her book, The Freelancer’s Rulebook: A Guide to Understanding, Working With, and Winning Over Editors, which is a great for those writing magazine articles on a freelance basis, but also helpful for insight into the minds and attitudes of editors.

Anyway, the Rule of Twelve is basically that, generally speaking, if you are writing high quality work and sending to places that are appropriate, you’ll get one “yes” for every twelve (or eight, or fifteen, or whatever) queries you send out. Magazine freelancers typically send queries rather than the whole article, and if the editor likes the idea, they’ll ask for the completed story. Poets, fiction writers and essayists send out the completed work for a yes or no, but the principle still holds. Even for literary geniuses.

What this means to you: Set your Expectations Appropriately. If you are only sending out three or four submissions a year, you will get published in…a couple of years. (I know, there are exceptions, but chances are, even if your first submission is a “yes,” you’ll then have a long dry spell waiting for the next yes.)

For poets, fiction writers and essayists, this also means: look for magazines and journals that accept (grudgingly or not) simultaneous submissions. With six-month response times, you could be old and gray (or older and grayer) waiting to hear back to send out that particular story or batch of poems to the next place.

Question for you: If you are actively submitting work and are willing to confess, does the “Rule of Twelve” seem correct (and helpful) to you? How do you deal with the “numbers game” part of getting your work published? (The fact that even with good, polished work, not every editor says yes, and sometimes they say no for reasons that do not have to do with the quality of the work you’ve sent.)