Tag: adventures in the writing life

Imposter Syndrome, in Full Cry

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

To be a writer is to have imposter syndrome.

It’s not surprising, really.  Our vocation, and often our livelihood, depends upon convincing people whom we will most likely never meet to put credence in things which we have cobbled together out of our experiences and the experiences of others (if we have not, in the case of us genre romancers, made them up out of whole cloth – having first also made up the cloth as well.)  Small wonder, then, that we tend to lie awake in the grey hours before dawn, fretting that this time will be the time when our knack fails us, and the readers will see us for the shameless fakers that we are.

(The Anglo-Saxons had a word for that sort of grim insomnia: uht-ceare, meaning “the care or worry that comes in the period just before dawn,” or as a modern-day shrink might put it, “pre-dawn anxiety.”  Smart people, those Anglo-Saxons.)

This is why literary writers worry that they are writing for a narrow and diminishing audience, and their works will never find the wider recognition that serious writers got in times past; and why writers of popular and genre fiction worry that nobody is ever going to see anything in their work except the surface of it, and all their thematic and, yes, artistic concerns will go forever unnoticed and unappreciated; and all writers, everywhere, worry about money.

(This post brought to you by the short story rejection that arrived in yesterday’s e-mail, and by the concomitant necessity to nerve myself up for picking another potential market and sending it out again.)

Clash of the Titans

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

If anybody ever wants a reason (besides brain chemistry or childhood family dynamics) for why writers can sometimes be a depressed and paranoid lot, they need only to look at the latest round of hostilities between major publisher Hachette and major online seller of damn-near everything from books to baby booties, Amazon.

The two entities are currently in the midst of negotiations over terms, and Amazon – not content with such ploys as tweaking discount policies and dragging its feet on things like delivery and restocking – has now removed the preorder button from the listings of a number of Hachette titles.

I’m not wasting my time on sympathy for Hachette; they’re big boys, and presumably knew what they were letting themselves in for when this dispute started.  Besides, they are a major publisher, which means that they’ve played plenty of hardball themselves, and presumably have built up the calluses.

No, my sympathy is all for the authors, whose books – which is to say, their livelihoods – are currently being stomped on and tossed about in this battle between two giants.  Because in the end, Amazon will continue to make money, and Hachette will continue to make money – and a whole bunch of authors will have lost potential sales (and money) that they’ll never get back.

Road Books

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

I’ve blogged before about the kind of audiobook that makes good road-trip listening: as I put it at the time, “a book that isn’t so complex you’ll lose track of everything else you’re doing, but with enough stuff going on that you’ll stay alert and not succumb to highway hypnosis.”

Our most recent road book discovery has been the Victorian mystery novels of Wilkie Collins.  Not only are they full of interesting characters and incidents, they’re also long and full of enough plotty goodness to beguile a couple of eight or ten hour round trip journeys each.  We started out with The Moonstone, which involves (among other things) a mysterious gem stone stolen from the eye of an idol, and have moved on to The Woman in White (which after only about a dozen chapters – out of sixty-two – is already promising us a Bad Baronet.)  The former is available for free from Librivox, and in several for-pay versions; the latter is available for free from Lit2Go.

An unexpected (by me, anyhow) bonus:  For a Victorian male novelist, Collins does some excellent female characters.  He’s definitely better at them than Dickens, whose female characters usually make me want to slap them silly.

Then I’ll Write it Myself, Said the Little Red Hen

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

There are all sorts of different reasons for writing, some of them more refined and elevated than others.  Sometimes the impetus comes in the form of a book laid aside (perhaps vigorously) in disgust, as the writer says, “Dammit, I  could write a better book than than one!” and then goes and does just that.

At other times, the book begins with a hunger for something – a plot twist, a story element, a certain flavor to the prose, a particular slantwise way of looking at the subject matter – that none of the books in the reader’s chosen genre has been able to provide.  Lots of readers experience this hunger; a few of them go on to address it by telling their own stories to satisfy the desire.  “I wrote the book I wanted to read that nobody else was writing” is a sentiment often found in authorial memoirs and interviews.

Which reminds me of the time when I decided I wanted a pork pie like the one that sometimes showed up as a lunchtime special down at Howard’s Restaurant.  This was a pork pie of the French Canadian, not the English, variety, because the small New Hampshire town I live in is about fifteen minutes south of Quebec and the local foodways reflect this sometimes.  Because this is the twenty-first century, I turned to the internet for help – and discovered (to nobody’s surprise, I’m sure) not just one, but dozens of recipes, all slightly different.  I ended up conflating several different recipes, and tweaking the result – much as a writer tweaks story elements and plot lines – until I got the dish and the flavor I wanted.

French-Canadian Pork Pie

Ingredients:

  • Pie crust sufficient for a two-crust pie (I used pre-made, but if you’ve got a light hand for pastry and the patience to go with it, you could make your own.  Sources I’ve read say that for the ultra-traditional, a lard-based pastry is the way to go; I’ve never bothered.)
  • 2 large yellow onions, chopped fine (I ran mine through the food processor)
  • 1.5 pounds ground pork
  • 3 medium-to-large white potatoes, cooked (you could boil them; I steamed them) and coarsely mashed
  • 1 cup beef stock (I used stock base from a jar and made it up double strength)
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1/2 teaspoon allspice
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1/4 teaspoon thyme
  • dash of nutmeg
  • dash of cinnamon
  • two or three grindings of black pepper (the stock was sufficiently salty that I didn’t bother with adding more salt.)

Directions

Cook the ground pork and the chopped onions together in a frying pan until the pork isn’t pink any longer.  Drain off the fat.

Add the pork and onion mixture to the mashed cooked potatoes and mix them up.

Then add the beef stock, the beaten egg, and the spices, and mix them up some more.

Have your pie pan ready with the bottom crust in place.  Put in the filling.  If you’ve got a pie bird, this is a good time to get it into place.  Put on the top crust, and crimp it down.  Cut slits in the top to facilitate the escape of steam.  (At this point, I suppose one could do one or another of the various things one does with egg or milk to put a glaze onto the crust; again, I didn’t bother.)

Bake in a 375 degree oven for 20 minutes, then turn the heat down to 350 and bake 45 minutes more.  (It’s probably a good idea to put a foil-lined baking sheet on the rack below, in case of spillover.)

When it’s done, remove from the oven, let cool for 10-15 minutes, then serve.

Given that Howard’s Restaurant is now closed, and also is in danger of collapsing into the river, it’s a good thing I worked out the recipe for myself.

Radio Silence from the Northland

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

This hasn’t been much of a week for posting stuff, for which I am sorry.

Then again, it hasn’t been much of a week for doing anything. I’ve had one of those springtime bugs that only make you feel really lousy for about a day or so, but spend about two days creeping up on you beforehand and leave you enervated for another three or four days afterward, and the next thing you know there’s a whole week gone.

Meanwhile, today’s publishing news:  Harlequin (with its assorted publishing lines) is being sold by its parent company to HarperCollins.  Harlequin’s authors, not surprisingly, are worried – changes in the publishing industry are almost never good for authors, at least in the short run.  Most of us have our survival strategies exquisitely fine-tuned to the present moment (trust us, we’d love to have them fine-tuned for the future as well, but life has unaccountably failed to provide us with working crystal balls), so any sudden alteration of the status quo has the potential to throw all our careful arrangements into disarray.

Writers: Even Their Dreams are Weird

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

So there’s the standard poor-preparation anxiety dream, the one where you find yourself suddenly required to take a final exam in a course you don’t remember having signed up for, or required to give a classroom lecture for a course you don’t remember having agreed to teach, or one of any number of uncomfortable variations on that general unhappy theme.

What they don’t tell you is that when you’re a writer, those variations can get surprisingly elaborate.

Take last night, for example, when I dreamed that I was at a Worldcon somewhere unspecified (it was in the US, but not in any of the places where I’ve ever been to Worldcons in actual fact), where I was scheduled to be on two or three panels.  The first night at the con was the usual good cheer and meet-and-greet and dinner-with-friends, and the next morning for some reason we had to change hotels, and what with one thing and another it wasn’t until midafternoon that I remembered I had programming obligations, and I couldn’t remember when my next panel was – and worse, whether or not I’d forgotten a panel the night before.

At that point the traditional anxiety-dream rabbit-chase kicked in, as I tried in vain to find a copy of the pocket program to check on my obligations, and likewise tried in vain to download the Guidebook app and search for them.  I could have looked on the back of my badge for my list of panels, but my badge was back in the room at the new hotel.

Finally, some kind soul loaned me a pocket program, where I discovered that I had, indeed, missed a panel I was supposed to be on.  (Children’s writer Bruce Coville wandered through the dream at that point, and paused to assure me that I wasn’t the first or the only person to ever forget a panel.)  Further perusal of the schedule revealed that I had a second panel in only a few minutes.

Cue dream-panic, and the hasty solicitation of a ride back to the main programming venue with another con-goer – who was, as it turned out, anther person on the same panel.  She said, cheerfully, that since we were both present in the car, we might as well go ahead and have the panel right there, because the audience didn’t seem to mind.  And indeed, the car was filling up even as she spoke, with far more people than one would think a small sedan would be able to hold . . . .

And at that point I’m awakened by a household member bearing the glad news that the flush mechanism in the downstairs toilet has ceased to function, and on that note, my day begins.

(I wish I could have gone on dreaming long enough to finish that panel, though.  It sounded like it was going to be interesting.)

Goings-On in the North Country

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

We drove over to Bradford, Vermont, today, to special-order a couple of books from Star Cat Books –also, to take a look at the flood damage along the local roads, because we’ve had some lately.  When the first warm weather of spring is followed up by major rainfall, things up here can get . . . interesting.  (Hint:  a place called Roaring Brook Road has that name for a reason, and every few years you’re going to find out why.)

On the heels of the heavy rainfall and flooding came a return of the winter cold, covering the flooded roads with sheets of ice.  The floodwaters had receded from most of the main roads by this morning (for a few hours on Tuesday night, our town was all but cut off from the world), but the reeds and bushes along the sides of the road were topped with little umbrellas of thin ice marking the level the water had reached.

Environmental Change

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

By which I mean, I have acquired a new desk chair and I have rearranged the layout of my desk.

The new chair was a necessity.  My previous desk chair gave me many years of loyal service, but over the past month or so it had developed a forward tilt and a sideways list, making it uncomfortable to sit in.

The new desk layout sprang primarily from a desire to have my monitor not be in a position where I had to crane my neck slightly upward to look at it.  That placement was a holdover from the days of CRT monitors, which were as long or longer from front to back as they were from side to side.  The lower side of my desk wasn’t built to hold an object of that size.  As for the rest of the desk – let’s just say that back in the year when we bought it, the ergonomics of computer use were far from well-understood.

Also, the damned thing is so sturdy I probably couldn’t break it if I whaled away at it with a sledge hammer for a week.

A Good Thing.

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

I don’t make political statements very often, mostly because I’m the civics equivalent of a Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer:  I vote in elections, I pay my taxes (crankily, but the IRS doesn’t care about my state of mind so I don’t feel obliged to be faux-cheerful about the process), I serve on a jury if I’m called.†

 Further than that, I don’t usually go.  If I’m going to make a statement about something, I generally prefer to let my stories do my talking for me anyhow.

So believe me when I say that signing up at Healthcare.gov (which I did, with only a day to spare before the deadline, because I am a horrible slacker when it comes to doing paperwork, even electronic paperwork) caused me to be exceedingly grateful to the President and to the Democrats in Congress, because – like a lot of freelancers – I’ve had to go bare-naked to the wind as far as insurance goes, far more often than I’d like.

†And let me say right now that a writer who doesn’t take the chance to serve on a jury when it comes along is falling down on the job. It’s an invaluable research opportunity.

From the Department of Interesting Stuff

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

An amusing mini-essay in defense of the semicolon, here.

I confess; I am, myself, one of those who love the semicolon, sometimes perhaps not wisely but too well.  Much as other writers need to double-check their second and third drafts for run-on sentences, excessive sentence fragments, and comma splices, I have to go through and make certain I don’t have entire paragraphs where every single sentence has a semicolon in the middle.

And a thought-provoking long article here about the connections between the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Cold War, and the CIA. The whole thing makes me strangely grateful that my writing lineage comes through science fiction, which at least in those days was an inhabitant of the outer darkness and hence spared conscription into the feuds and politics of respectable literature.

I did come briefly into contact-at-a-remove with the academic workshop style, in that I took a couple of undergrad creative writing courses at the University of Arkansas, whose MFA writing program has a certain degree of credibility as these things go.  To which all I can say is, I learned a lot, including just how little respect genre writers got in writing programs back in those days.  My reaction was to go off and get a doctorate in medieval literature and write almost no fiction for the next seven years.

(Things are a bit better these days, or so I’m given to understand.  But if you’re working in fantasy or science fiction or mystery or romance, and have a hankering for the MFA experience, it’s still a good idea to check out your prospects for genre-friendliness first.)