The Four Virtues of Expert Procrastinaters

Virtue 1. Cats. Thai does not approve of typing. It's okay if she's lying down in front of the monitor and behind the keyboard (though the way I keep pushing her paw off the top row of buttons can be annoying), but when she's in my lap, one hand is supposed to be available for tummy rubbing at all times. Have you ever tried to type with one hand rubbing a tummy? It's exponentially harder. Bruce doesn't care if I'm typing or not - he just doesn't want me to be at the computer at all if there's a bidding of his I'm supposed to be figuring out. So he'll walk up and down on the keyboard, headbutt me, meow fretfully, and so on, until I get up and try out all the possible things he might be wanting me to do.

So if you need an excuse not to get your writing quota done, by all means, let the cat into the room and spoil her rotten. (The funny thing is - if you spoil fruits or vegetables, they get nasty. The more we spoil our cats, the sweeter they get.)

Virtue 2. Neatness and order. There is always something that needs organizing, straightening, dusting, recording, filing, or throwing away. If you start your writing time by taking care of all those things, odds are good you won't have to write at all.

Virtue 3. Communication. People who always answer the phone on the second ring, answer e-mail as soon as it comes in, tweet promptly, and meticulously maintain their websites, blogs, and social networking sites can be busy as bees all day and never get one thing done.

Virtue 4. Generosity. If everybody knows that you are There For Them, they will have all sorts of occasions to call on you. You can't write and deal with a crisis at the same time unless you already have a committed work ethic and sufficient discipline that writing poetry in hospital rooms is second nature to you.

These are all good things in themselves - especially the cats. But the thing they have in common is: that if they are allowed to overlap with your writing time, they will eat it all up. When Virginia Woolf said we needed money and a room of our own in order to write, this is what she meant. Time and space, dedicated to the writing (or whatever it is you do), which everyone understands is dedicated to the writing, during which nothing else gets done.

Nothing else does the trick.

Communicate. Be there for your loved ones. Maintain your tax records and keep your house sanitary. And by all means rub your cat's tummy.

But not during the fifteen minutes, or hour, or two-hour block of time that is set aside for your writing. That's for writing. Only. Not for talking about writing, not for thinking about writing, not for writing business. Butt in chair, hands on writing implements, just writing.

You've heard this before. You'll keep hearing it till you start doing it.

Texas Archeology Month!

It's almost upon us - the state's very own Idea Garage Sale, when museums, archeologists, historical sites, and chambers of commerce open history up and shake it out for public amusement. I don't care how uncreative you think you are - the more you learn about Texas history, the more inspired you'll get.

Here's a smattering of upcoming events, with an emphasis of course on the things that interest me most.
Oct. 1 - Tour of Archeological Ruins of Rancho de las Cabras, Wilson County but within the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.
Oct. 8 - Archeological Information and Civil War Symposium, Gainesville - Topics at the symposium include "forts, funeral practices during the Civil War, fashions, cotton, and plantations." Also child-centric activities.
Oct. 12 - Face to Face with the Son of America, Huntsville - Forensic artist presents her facial reconstruction of a 10,000-year-old skull found in a cave on the Brazos River.
Oct. 14-16 Rock Art Foundation Annual Rendezvous, Val Verde County - A tent campout with tours of remote prehistoric art sites; only one of several events centered on the hard-to-see Pecos Valley art; plus nature walk, of course. Action! Adventure! Romance! (Well, you'll have to bring your own romance, but tell me you don't see an opening trailer in your head right now, based on knowing such an event exists.)
Oct. 17 - "How Texas Won the Civil War," Lecture by Dr. Donald. S. Frazier of McMurry University, Abilene; Houston - hosted by the Houston Museum of Natural Science, laying out the ways Texas benefited by the late unpleasantness.
Oct. 22 - Gault Site Tour, Bell County. Preregistration required, openings limited, but they also do it on the third Saturday of every month so if you miss October, don't despair.
Oct. 29 - Murder Mayhem and Misadventure Walking Tour at Oakwood Cemetery, Austin - to "highlight the lives and dramatic deaths of local early citizens."

Nov. 18-20 - 2011 Hot Rocks Cook-Off in College Station, "demonstrations and scientific experiments using Native American earth-oven cookery and stone boiling." (Are you smelling a cookbook? I sure am.)

Yeah, I think that's a pretty representative sample. Go look at the calendar - there's something that intrigues you. I need to start planning my month - October's not that far away and I know I can't do more than a fraction of what I'd like to, but that's no reason to miss what I can do.

Idea Garage Sale: This Thing About Dwarves

(Note the technically incorrect plural. If it's good enough for Tolkien, it's good enough for me. The man wrote the Oxford English Dictionary, for crying out loud.)

I've always liked dwarves. My first favorite movie was Disney's Snow White. Elves and fairies lost a lot of appeal for me when they got human-sized in pop culture. I like how a dwarf is a dwarf whatever book you go to - short, hairy, set in their ways, pragmatic, slightly cranky, craftsmen. The word "dour" crops up when fantasy writers and gamers are describing dwarves, but in fact they are often comic characters - sometimes because the guy with no sense of humor is the funniest guy in the room, and sometimes because his sense of humor doesn't jibe with other people's, but does with mine. Gimli is the only non-hobbit member of the Fellowship of the Ring who cracks jokes, but he only makes them with a grumpy face and at times of tension release. "Here's a pretty hobbit skin to wrap an elfin princeling in!" "Where did you come by the weed, you villains?" He's also the one who initiated the grim kill-counting game with Legolas at Helm's Deep. I wonder how many stoic middle-aged enlisted men Tolkien knew in service? I'm certain they informed the writing on this character.

Anyway, I have a vision of dwarves and their lifestyle that dates back to at least my first reading of The Hobbit, but probably predates it, as I think I read Ruth Nichols's A Walk Out of the World before then. Certainly I'd been reading Tolkien derivatives before I made it to Tolkien, and I feel like I absorbed his dwarves into an existing vision rather than adopting his and grafting details onto it. Dwarves live in mountains, obviously; they have a highly structured society centering on notions of duty; craftsmanship is one of their highest virtues; they believe in emotional restraint; their doors are tapestries (the hivelike nature of the dwarf community probably contributes to the emotional restraint, now I think of it); they love deeply, quietly, and epicly; and the tradition is that only sorrow ever came of romantic relationships between dwarves and other intelligent species.

Yes, I cast dwarves as romantic leads.

I actually tried to make a story around this core concept several times in high school, but I kept getting sidetracked by the necessity of world-building. It wormed its way in as a subplot of the dormant story I discussed here awhile back, but I haven't tried to put it at the center of the story since high school. Not because I didn't want to; but because it gradually became clear that neither high fantasy nor romance is my natural genre, and to tell this story I'd need to do both.

Which is a bummer, because you can make decent money off both those subgenres, especially when you combine them, but life is rough.

The central problem of doing it is, first to create the high fantasy world in which the dwarves and the other races are acceptable and logical, but not boring and cliched. We have enough straight Tolkien-derivatives, thank you. Once you have that world, you need the conflict - which, being high fantasy, almost has to be a macro-conflict, war famine pestilence mystical threat you know the drill - that brings the disparate couple together.

I have one really convoluted plot that starts off in a desert community with the heroine being expelled, with her old adoptive mother, during a witch hunt; and as they cross the desert the adoptive mother gets more and more senile, and finally the dwarves rescue them and that's when we find out about the princess who was spirited away when the usurper killed the rest of her family and all the signs point to our heroine who gets help from the dwarves including the improbable and forbidden male romantic lead - but in fact she's the decoy and the real princess is still in her kingdom getting old enough to ascend the throne, and sacrificing the decoy may be necessary, and...yeah, I kind of bogged down in plot there.

And then there's the one where there's some sort of interspecies war on and the heroine is a prisoner, and she Knows Something, and the political situation is such that the hero (who is her captor) is under pressure to Do Terrible Things but he won't because he's got standards, dammit, and this war is eroding the dwarves' cultural standards and this couple who have to be enemies are the pivot point on which the future of both cultures turns. Which could be pretty epic if I could, y'know, work out the specifics of what the war's about, what information the heroine has, how to get them both facing 90 degrees away from the problems they understand themselves to have at the start of the story to be facing the same direction and agreed that they have a common, totally different problem. I believe I wrote some scenes that were reasonably brilliant for a 14-year-old, but that's a low gate to get over and I trust none of them survive. Without context, a scene is meaningless, anyway.

There used to be others - romances are the easiest stories to mull over during insomniac nights in adolescence, and I was a hell of an insomniac back then - but I have mercifully forgotten most of them. I still think somebody, somewhere, could do - something moving and atmospheric and heck, just different from the human-draconic-elvish centric high fantasy we all know so well.

But I'm afraid it's not likely to be me, so - fly free, vague epic idea! Find a good place to land!

The Query Grind

You know the worst thing about agent hunting?

The way you lose faith in what, six months ago, was a book as good as any you've ever been paid for.

I am so sick of the first ten pages of The Astral Palace I could scream and it's impossible to imagine anyone else wanting to represent me based on them, either. I should start trolling with the lesbian western instead (only Damon's not reading it very fast and I begin to think I'm having pacing problems, which is a good sign - it means I should be able to go back and revise it properly instead of merely basking in Len's voice, soon).

I can't sell stuff if I don't keep it in the mail, but I can't find people to mail to when I'm hating the work, either.

This is the kind of thing that makes teen-agers eat entire gallons of ice cream and declare their lives over. Thank goodness I'm old enough to tell the difference between perception and objective reality. But I still can't match the project to a prospective taker like this.

Maybe I should give up and work on the emotion recycling story instead.

The Obsession Questionnaire

Our culture is suspicious of enthusiasm. A kid who is crazy about dinosaurs or a game; a teen who is always on social media; an adult who spends all his free time perfecting his imaginary world - all are likely to be told that they're overdoing it, that they're obsessed, that they're wasting their time and should be doing something else.

And, okay, sometimes that's true. We've all heard the horror stories about the couple who let their real baby die while they looked after a virtual one, the gamers who died because they couldn't get off the game, the artists who starve or sponge off their relatives, the writers whose marriage breaks up because writing takes precedence over the marriage, the little old ladies who cannot stop crocheting doilies.

But think about Professor Tolkien, using his spare time to create, first imaginary languages, then vast complex worlds, mythologies, and cultures to provide the context of those languages. Could The Lord of the Rings have become a global phenomenon if he hadn't built it on this foundation of apparent wasted time?

No. No more than Michael Jordan could have been paid to play basketball if he hadn't played and played and played for years before he ever went pro. No more than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could have become the perfect dance duo without dancing till their feet bled.

Before you sell a book, you have to write one. Before you get hired to illustrate, you have to put together a portfolio. And before you do either of these things, you have to spend a lot of time doing things with no obvious relationship to reality. Things that look, to people who aren't doing them, like obsessive time wasting. And you have to do it knowing that there is a very good chance you will never be paid for anything related to what you're doing, even if you get very good at it indeed.

After all, the demand for doilies will always be less than the supply churned out by people who like to crochet.

So how do you tell when you're crossing the line?

Well, look around you.

Is your family healthy? Can you remember their names? Do you know who their friends are? Have you spoken to everyone who shares a residence with you in the last 24 hours? Did any of these conversations involve subjects other than your Project?

Is the cat happy?

When you hear a loud crash and smell smoke, do you get up and take steps to understand what happened?

When did you eat last? Was it real food, or junk? Who prepared it?

Can you see the floor of your house or is it so covered with dirt and junk that you have to follow little paths through it?

Did the work you are contracted to do - either as part of paid employment or as part of your obligation as a member of your household - get done? Was it done well, or did someone have to come after you and do it over?

How many projects, of any kind, did you in fact complete during the past year? How many did you start? How much of this ratio (which is bound to be depressing in and of itself) is due to your own choices?

Under what circumstances do you choose The Project over:
Your health?
Your loved ones' health?
Making money?
Spending time with your loved ones?
Housework?

Does the way you conduct The Project allow you to do so in conjunction with the above priorities?

Answer those questions, and be honest with yourself.

If you actually have a problem, the answers will point you straight at it. But you probably don't. You've probably just internalized the idea that if you like it, and you're not getting paid for it, it must be bad for you.

Also, feeling guilty is the least fun and constructive way to procrastinate.

Get over it.

The Happy Media

In one way, I am a fortunate individual. I always knew, and so did everyone around me, that I was going to write stories. And by always I mean, always. I was a writer before I could write things other people could read. This was so plain and obvious that everyone around me conceded it as a given, too. This or that individual person may not have thought I'd be any good, or that I'd make any money, or that it was a worthwhile endeavor - but nobody ever disputed that I would do it.

Not all writers know their destiny so well, or manifest it so clearly, from the git-go like that. They flounder in search of their purpose, or they are actively discouraged from it by those around them, or they mistake their calling and do something else for half their lifetime until the day they wake up and start writing, or realize they've been writing all along and it's time to take that somewhere.

I didn't, however, always know that I would write for young people. For a long time I thought I'd be one of those novelists who's also an academic (that was before I experienced academia and how little I am suited to it), or I'd write science fiction and fantasy, or - something. I had a leg up on my period of experimentation because I knew my medium and my skill, but I still had to find my subject and my audience. My niche only became clear after I had - first of all - realized that I prefer books written for young people to books written for adults, for the most part (and once I realized that most genre fiction is "really" YA, in that the qualities I enjoy in it are the same as the ones I enjoy in YA literature); and - second - that I did in fact write well enough to produce them.

This is another way in which I am fortunate. These two discoveries were easy enough to make, since I already knew what form my artistic expression would take and I could focus my experimentation on finding my niche within that form. A lot of people have to experiment on their form, their subject, their audience, and their genre all at the same time. Even more people are raised with the idea that they aren't creative, or that there's some qualitative difference between messing about with creativity, and actually being an artist, a writer, a musician, a dancer, or whatever.

Some people even have to muddle along without access to their form and audience. The world has more essayists now than at any time in the past, if we concede that bloggers are essentially essayists, freed from the limitation of needing someone to pay them to write essays for a periodical. The first people with a talent for programming computer games were born before computer games were invented. The modern world contains far more talented actors, scripters, costumers, prop builders, and effects artists than the related drama industries could ever support; hence the existence of historical recreation societies, cosplayers, and gamers. I've known many people for whom their game of choice is their creative outlet - on tabletop, playing field, or computer, they flower.

This is why fandoms proliferate. People who for one reason or another cannot use their native talent professionally can find it avocationally, in the company of a sympathetic audience, in the context of a fandom. Some of them pass through their fandom and come out the other side as a professional, and good for them (Cassandra Clare being a prominent current example, but hardly the only one). But many, many people do professional-quality work in the context of a fandom and never get paid; either because they never think of going pro, because they try and fail, because they're afraid they'll fail, or because they decide that the effort of going pro would spoil the activity for them. Sometimes it's because their talent lies in a niche so narrow that professionalism is unlikely, or unlucrative, or unacceptable - many gamers reject the restrictions that would be placed upon them, were they to enter the corporate structure of the gaming industry.

I happened to think about this in the context of poking around simblogs in an idle moment. (Okay, idle afternoon. Look, the floor's going to get clean; I was just a little giddy and needed a break. Of several hours.) People document their games online, with pictures, dialog, and snarky asides; make their favorite sims available for others to play; create new clothes, objects, even modifications to game code, investing hours not even playing their game, but playing with it. Their only audience is other players, but that's all right. They like it that way.

There's a person writing an extended fanfic about how a particular iconic neighborhood, with which everyone who plays Sims2 is familiar, got itself into the starting situation for that neighborhood. She writes it in chapters, formatted as screenshots from her game accompanied by blocks of text; and setting up the screenshots is obviously not a matter of playing the game at all, but of performing elaborate maneuvers with custom clothing, objects, modifications, and something called poseboxes to take a number of different pictures of the characters and then discarding most of them. Not too different from the process by which Dare Wright wrote The Lonely Doll and its sequels, in fact, except that this person has nothing tangible to work with, just a game designed for an entirely different purpose.

I can, just about, see how Dare Wright got pleasure out of her process. I can't see how "Skelljay" does; but I don't have to, either. Apparently, this is her medium and she likes working in it. It seems to me she could have finished the story by now if she hadn't mucked about with all those pictures but maybe she couldn't have. And maybe - who knows? How would we tell? - she's building skills in this medium that will enable her to be more profitably creative in another one. But if she's not, and she's satisfied, that should be enough for anybody.

But it raises the question: If you think you're not creative, is it because you haven't experimented enough and found your medium? Is it because, though you've found a medium, it seems silly to you?

I know that voice. Filking isn't really songwriting. Blogging about your hamster isn't really writing. Your elaborate macaroni sculpture isn't really art. You should do something more worthwhile with your time.

Don't listen to that voice. If something makes you happy, it is not a waste of time.

And if it brings pleasure to others, even just a small handful of others, it is a positive boon to society.

(While I'm doing this, let's have a couple of links to my two favorite simblogs, in one of which we get the story of Barkertown, the other of Ste. Margo. Warning: This game is rated T for Teen for a reason! Don't worry, you'll get most of the jokes and follow the story just fine without knowing the game.)

Idea Garage Sale: The (Your Hometown Here) Slasher

We had some nice rain yesterday; at least, in my neighborhood we did. And the fires are finally thinning rather than just shifting their locations. Soon, I will find something new to obsess about. Yay!

Meantime, after all that generalization last week that went on and on and on, I thought I'd do something short and specific today. Also, I'm not much in the mood today and I need to wake Damon up to play the Sunday puzzle soon. So I do what all experienced authors do when they need an idea in a hurry - I opened up some old files.

Seriously, I have a subfolder in my Story folder labeled "Dormant." Stuff I haven't worked on in forever and am pretty sure I can't make saleable, but am not ready to discard, because hey, the idea was sound; I just didn't execute it well enough. And hey, I still have a word processing file for "The San Antonio Slasher." Good lord, there's a blast from the past. Draft 1 was almost certainly typed on my old electric machine.

It was the story of a Day in the Life of a wannabe serial killer and his victim. Jim Seagram is a young man whose ambition is to be a serial killer, a mysterious figure who strikes terror into the hearts of all and whose identity becomes a popular intellectual game. His heroes are Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer. And his victim of choice is little old ladies. It's the day he's planned for his debut, and the story alternates between him - going to his job at a small neighborhood garage, interacting with his co-workers, planning the evening's work - and his designated victim, Persis Morgenroth, going about her little old lady business. Her daughter is a worrywart and keeps calling her, wants her to get a guard dog or something, but Persis has lived in this house for over fifty years and is on good terms with all her neighbors (though that mechanic is beginning to annoy her, the way he glares at her). She gossips with her garden club, makes a carrot cake, runs her errands, goes jogging, and feels secure. Nothing bad can possibly happen to her in the house she came to as a bride, where she raised all her children, where she can still feel her family's love all around her.

Even when Jim breaks in, Persis remains calm; which is more than can be said of him. The reason he wants to kill little old ladies is that he resents the power they exert over him - he was raised by his grandmother, who treated all men as incompetent boys - and he thinks his big knife will reverse that. But Persis recognizes him despite his carefully worked out disguise and she just can't feel anything but annoyance at that rude young man from the garage.

It doesn't end well for Jim.

I realized, writing all this out, that I've gone back to the core idea - the story alternating between the serial killer who kills, or tries to, out of his sense of inferiority and his innocent prospective victim, who really is superior to him - for the often-rejected novel to which I sometimes refer as "The Happy Family Serial Killer Story." I don't seem to have quite made it work there, either.

But if somebody could, I'm positive there's an awesome story to be made of it.