I’m wishing you all the happiest of holidays, and a safe and bright 2022. I’ll be taking a little time off during the holidays to focus on family, but I’ve got lots of fun plans for 2022, including a new monthly newsletter for one of my nonprofit clients, and the release of a truly delightful video game that I’ve been copyediting scripts for…

My last entry in this blog feels like it could have been written by a completely different person, in a lot of ways. The person who wrote that entry, for instance, had never had 200 mL of formula spat up all over her at three in the morning. She’d never gone six months with only five hours of sleep a night, or watched an entire season of a show before breakfast because the tiny, wonderful person she was taking care of would only sleep if she held him upright. She had never bought a house, or lived through a pandemic.

What feels like ages ago, when I was in college, my friends and I went to a public event that was put on by Clarion West, where we got to hear the three great ladies of Pacific Northwest Science Fiction, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Vonda N. McIntyre, speak on a panel about... I don't remember what, anymore, to be honest. Probably about writing. Mostly what I remember was that all three of them were incredibly well-spoken and clever and interesting, and that Vonda had brought some little plastic desk toys that I remember Ursula spending most of the talk playing with whenever she wasn't speaking. 

As of yesterday, all three of those great ladies are gone.

As a school tour docent at the Seattle Art Museum, I sometimes find myself explaining relatively complicated concepts in art and culture to classes of kids between roughly five and eighteen years of age. For instance, a few weeks ago I ran two tours focused on the use of perspective in art -- one for a class of eighth graders, and one the following week for a class of fourth graders. The pieces of art that I took the kids around to didn't change between those two tours, nor did the basic concepts that I was introducing them to.

The language, however, changes immensely.

Recently, a good friend of my husband's received an email out of the blue from a publisher of software books--they wanted him to write a book on a new platform he specializes in working with. He was a little surprised, and more than a little daunted. He'd never written a book before, and as much as he was excited by the prospect, he wasn't sure what it would mean. He definitely wasn't sure what the publisher was looking for out of the document they asked him to put together: a book proposal. Fortunately, nonfiction book proposals really aren't as daunting as they may appear to the first-timer, and a lot of what they're about transfers to fiction as well.

In writing and editing, we talk a lot about raising the stakes and making sure that there’s enough tension in your story. But how can you do that? One way that I really like is to make your characters choose between the thing they thought mattered most to them and the thing that they’ve now discovered matters more.

If you’re writing a romance, your hero or heroine starts out the book thinking that they don’t need love, they’re doing fine without it, thanks . . .

The last year has been a busy and, recently, a very difficult one as my husband and I dealt with a deeply personal loss, but as I thought about how I could get back into posting here on my blog, I was inspired by the story of an octopus (of course) named Inky who recently made his grand escape from an aquarium in New Zealand. Inky slipped out of his tank after it was inadvertently left ajar after some maintenance, presumably waving a watery farewell to his tank-mate who remained, and hauled himself across the floor to a drain. Lucky for Inky, the drain let out into the ocean.

A lot of beginning writers get discouraged when writing teachers tell them the old chestnut “Write what you know.” They might feel this means they don’t have anything interesting to contribute, because they haven’t lived through the kind of adventures they want to write about. Maybe they’re students, or maybe they’re stuck in a dead-end job, or maybe they’re a stay-at-home parent . . . what’s happened to them that would be worth writing about?

It’s come to my attention that, once again, there are mutterings around the internet about how science fiction absolutely has to be about SCIENCE, with the implication that anything that involves a bit of, shall we say, speculation, is not real science fiction. This is . . . disingenuous, I believe (they don’t call it “speculative fiction” for nothing), so here, have my two cents on the subject, totally off the cuff.

Every year, along with a whole lot of other writers around the world, I spend the month of November trying to write 50,000 words. I’ve been doing this for about ten years now, and most years I succeed, but it’s always a struggle. There’s always something. When I first started it was usually papers and midterms, now it’s more often other projects or stuff at my day job. There’s always something that wants to keep you from writing, especially when you’re trying to write 1,667 words a day. I don’t know about you, but even though I’m in the habit of writing every single day, that’s still about twice as many words as I usually manage on a weekday.

So every year at the end of NaNoWriMo, win or lose, I think it’s important to reward yourself.

Every writer has heroes, other writers who have gone before us and whose work we draw on for inspiration and that little push whenever we feel low or wonder what the point of it all is — it’s not only great scientists who stand upon the shoulders of giants. I have a lot of giants at the top of my beanstalk, but one of the most important to me stands so very tall in my mind only in part because of the writing that she published in her lifetime. The rest of the reason I revere her memory is entirely because of her persona off the page, and the openness with which she interacted with her fans.

I’m a fan of musical theater – not something you’d think has a lot of crossover with interest in writing and editing. But I’m specifically a big fan of Stephen Sondheim, in part because of his lyrics (okay, and in part because “Sweeney Todd” is my current favorite musical, but come on, Sondheim is the master of lyrics). Not too long ago I read the first part of his biography/collected works Finishing the Hat, and I was fascinated by his discussions of word choice as related to lyrics.

I’ve been writing for years, sometimes less and sometimes more, sometimes fannish and sometimes not, but I’ve always been convinced that I have a hard time with ideas. I get a kernel, and then I kind of get stuck trying to figure out how to thread that idea out into something bigger. The times I work best in that department tend to be when I can bounce ideas off someone else – spin things bigger and bigger in the course of a conversation, and feed off someone else a little bit. I always kind of thought that meant I wasn’t any good at the idea part.

Recently I went out of town on a long business trip across the country. The company I work for very kindly paid my way, and for ease of billing and whatnot they had particular vendors lined up that I should contract with for my hotel room, flight, and the car service to pick me up from the airport. I prepared my car reservations and, like a good little netizen, clicked to read the “Terms of Use” before clicking to submit. Oh boy. Typos and misspelled words EVERYWHERE. Now, this was a small local service we were working with, and the two drivers who helped me out during my trip were wonderful, their service left me with absolutely no complaints. But I admit, I felt a moment of worry looking at that terms of use pop-up. “Seriously?” I thought. “Are these guys legit? I mean, I’m going alone to the other side of the country, I’m arriving fairly late… are these really the people I want picking me up at the airport of a big city?”

Most of us, when we learn about writing or even when we think about it, imagine a solitary pursuit. We envision the writer alone in an office (preferably lined with books and a leather armchair, with huge windows looking out on a garden… and why not, we can all dream!). I always felt cheated and cheap when I couldn’t generate all that I needed for a project on my own – I felt like that made me less of a writer. My best ideas came (and still come) from tossing things back and forth with friends. Something about explaining things for someone else and leaping one thought off another really opens me up and makes the waters pour. I still feel a little guilty about it sometimes, though.

Last night should have been my twenty-third straight day writing at least 750 words over at 750 Words. Unfortunately, something that normally makes me happy ended up being the downfall for my current streak – I got into my writing and lost track of time. In the middle of a sentence, while I was trying to figure out exactly how to phrase what I wanted to say, the clock hit midnight on the Pacific Coast, and 750 Words popped up the red flag and froze my text box.