New Serial Short Fiction Up!

I've started participating in a fun, interactive writing project with my fellow 2012 Golden Heart Finalists (aka The Firebirds).  Today, my first contribution is up on the Firebirds blog.  It's an interactive serial short story in which readers pick what happens next, and the next segment will be written by Darynda Jones, RITA-winning author of First Grave on the Right (and the whole, excellent Charley Davidson series).  Darynda has a hilarious voice with a dark edge to it, and I'm thrilled (and more than a little humbled and nervous) that she's going to pick up the story.  The rest of the series will be written by a team of talented Firebirds from all over the world (from Australia to India to South Carolina) with all kinds of awards (including the Golden Heart and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery).  It's going to be a blast seeing where our team takes this story.

So...go check out Part 1 of Pray for Night.  It's a short, fun read for your Friday coffee break. There are zombies.  There are nuns.  There are phone numbers on cocktail napkins and drunken debauchery at charming pubs.  And I have no idea what will happen next, so go vote and help us out!

Burn the Boats

4028mdk09 / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0

When the Spanish conquistador Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he burned his ships on the beach.  There was no going back.  It was survive—conquer—or die.

I’ll put aside for the moment my moral argument with the Spanish conquistadors, and the fact that this story is utterly false.  (According to Wikipedia, he scuttled the ships to prevent a mutiny.  But whatever.)  Sometimes, it’s a pretty useful philosophy for living your life.  Choices, second chances—these things can be paralyzing.  If I can always go back, how can I move forward after a decision?

This is how I’ve been feeling revising my latest book.  It needs work.  I need to make some big changes.  But there are multiple ways I could take the story, and I’ve been stymied in a swamp of possibilities for weeks.  The only way to get out, I think, is to pick one boardwalk out of the marsh and burn the rest of them to the ground.

Usually, when I’m revising, I save every deleted word.  You never know when you’ll need it, right?  But not this time.  I’m hitting delete on tens of thousands of words and not looking back.  The only way out is to write my way out.

How do you force yourself out of tough spots?

Booklovers Anonymous

I own too many books.

I recently moved, and there’s nothing like moving to force you to face facts.  There were six large Rubbermaid bins full of books in the storage unit attached to my old apartment.  That’s in addition to the books stacked rightways, sideways, and any way they’d fit on my six bookshelves.  I own more bookshelves than dining room chairs.  I’m not sure this says anything good about my priorities.  I had to cull. 

If you're being forced by circumstances to reduce your book collection, I'm sorry.  And here's a handy, book-by-book flow chart to help you out!

How do you decide which books to keep?

In Defense of Language

I wrote a lot of bad poetry in college.  As part of this literary rite of passage, I went to a handful of poetry readings hosted by the English department, and at one of these, during the question-and-answer period, the poet on deck said the following when asked what advice he had for aspiring poets:  “Just sit down see and what you can do with the language.”

Until that moment, I hadn’t really grasped what language is.  A lifetime of schooling didn’t teach me that language isn’t just a set of vocabulary and usage rules:  It’s both tool-kit and rule-book, enabling and constraining, frustratingly insufficient and transcendently beautiful.  We struggle to express ourselves within its framework, but it never stays still.  It mutates constantly, and even words we thought we knew shift in meaning with every new reader and every fresh reading.

The more I use language for everything from text messages to novels, the more I’m struck by what a miraculous and versatile thing it is.  Which is why I’ve been dismayed by a few conversations I’ve been reading on a handful of popular blog posts discussing the quality of certain books.  There’s a recurring theme that it “shouldn’t matter” if a writer uses proper grammar or makes good decisions about words as long as “the story is good.” 

I understand the premise that in a novel, it’s the story that matters.  And if a bunch of misplaced modifiers and faulty parallelisms bug me, I don’t have to read it.  The trouble is, the misuse of language doesn’t just screw up a single story.  It has a reflexive effect on language itself.  A writer who uses words carelessly chips away at the integrity of our man-made, culturally negotiated system of expression, and that definitely, absolutely matters.

All of us who use language have the power to change it.  If enough of us adopt new slang or use new rules, those elements will be assimilated.  I love this about language.  I love that we can create new words and expressions that convey emotion and meaning (“jump the shark,” the verbification of “Google”).  But a writer is not just a consumer of language.  A writer is a caretaker.  A text to my mom about my new pair of black suede slouch boots (OMG so CUTE u gotta c them!) doesn’t have nearly as much power as a book meant to be read by the public.  People are gonna read that story, and it’s going to influence them, however subtly and imperceptibly.  Using words carelessly is like leaving soda cans on the ground at Yosemite.  It’s offensive when everyday visitors do it.  When the park rangers do it, it’s destructive.

Misusing language blurs the boundaries and crushes the nuances we could have used to do something interesting and fresh.  A new word creates a sharp, startling, useful new image (unibrow, agritourism), but a misused word just gets conflated with other words.  Take my (admittedly nit-picky) pet peeve: comprise.  Many folks use “comprise” just like they use “compose,” when in fact its meaning is closer to “embrace” or “enclose.”  To borrow Strunk & White’s illustration from The Elements of Style: a zoo comprises animals; it is not comprised of animals.  I see “comprise” misapplied so often, I think it’s probably already lost.  Just one more precision tool turned into a blunt object.

God knows I’ve been guilty of some pretty appalling abuses of language (see above: bad poetry), but I try to treat it like the commonly held commodity it is.  I don’t think that means we can’t take liberties to get our points across.  Taking risks, breaking rules, trying new things—that’s part of how language evolves, and that’s a good thing.  It’s great that language can change to accommodate the pressures applied to it by culture.  It just shouldn’t change because we’re too lazy or careless to use it well.

Big News!

You guys! I got some great news on Monday.  My book, Figs From Thistles, is a finalist for the 2012 RWA Golden Heart ® award!  I got the call at eight a. m., while breastfeeding The Small One.  I got very excited; The Small One got very confused. Ten minutes later I got pooped on.  Ah, the glamourous life of a writer.