Writer Fail

It's the last week of school, my friends. Do you know what that means? You all are thinking finals, but this is creative writing, silly, tricks are for kids.

I'm having writer fail.

Fortunately, all of my freelance jobs have wrapped up this week, otherwise I would be saying really dumb things (not like "Tips on How to Wear a Classic Black Jumpsuit" is eloquent, per se).

Here is the list of things I've caught myself doing in the last week when I should have been writing:
-Google: What do Tina Fey's kids look like?
-test my cup of pens to make sure they all work
-Link: 16 Different Pictures of Underwater Aquariums
-Google: Are apples good for dogs?
-change the hardware on my desk while my Microsoft Word patiently blinks
-Link: Baby bump pictures of Mila Kunis
-reorganize the box of sticky notes by color

This is true, my friends. Does this mean that I am not a writer? Nope. This just means that I am a tired and honest writer.

What are some things that you've caught yourself doing instead of writing?

The Time I Found a Body...

The day started off weird, unless it's normal for your friend to pick up his shirt and have kiwi-sized spiders to boil out.

The trip had already been going differently than we'd planned. We had been camping at the top of Mingus Mountain over a weekend in July last year, Saturday afternoon through Monday morning. The spot we selected had a fantastic view and it's always fun to get away to camp with your friends. But with the fire restrictions what they were, we had gone all weekend without one of the quintessential elements of camping: the crackling of embers that you can't not look at, or the lazy, stinging smoke. I adapted all of our campfire recipes into recipes that could cook on a propane stove (so cooking meals turned into a 6 hour affair), and we spiced things up by going swimming in the Verde River on Sunday afternoon.  On Monday morning, we began clean-up, and Dan picked up his shirt from the rock that he'd tossed it onto the day before to dry. The shirt was dry, alright, but as he picked it up, a countless number of the biggest Daddy Longlegs spiders I had ever seen boiled out of the arms and neck of the shirt in a fashion that could only be compared with Harry Potter. (They had nestled in it overnight to drink the water, and I may or may not still have nightmares about that image.)
And as if screaming and sitting on top of the cement forest service table wasn't exciting enough, we discovered that my car wouldn't start.

All of these things aren't nearly as weird as finding a body.

When we left Mingus Mountain Campground, we drove downhill for a while on highway 89a, characterized by it's steepness and hairpin turns. It was at one of these hairpin turns that we stopped at the pull over spot, because Sean wanted to take us across the highway for a hike to look at petroglyphs. I was tired from 3 days of camping so I asked him how long the hike would be. "Oh, it's about fifteen minutes." Sure, it was about fifteen minutes, if we jumped into a time-warp and fifteen minutes turned into an hour. Exhausted, we finally made it back to the cars.

And then my car wouldn't start. Again.

As Michael hooked up the jumper cables and began to repeat what we had done earlier, Sean kicked around in the wash alongside the highway. He found the routine garbage, and nothing you would really consider out of the ordinary. But then something was out of the ordinary: a broken piece of sandstone with a man's name on it and the image of crossed tomahawks with the years of his life underneath. You would think finding a headstone would make finding a body less unusual.

But signs that finding a body is unusual:
1. It's off the side of the highway.
2. Not only is it off the side of the highway, it's buried in an unseen wash off the highway, seen now only because an animal clearly dug up part of it.
3. Not only is it buried in a wash off of the highway, but it's in a black plastic bag.
4. And the bones were cut with intention.
5. And now I want to throw up. Or investigate. Whatever comes first.

(Warning: Images are closer than they appear.)

So, I would by lying if I said I wasn't excited about the find. I would also be lying if I said I didn't think of every crime show or movie that featured CSI-like people excavating similar bodies with brushes and tools that look strangely familiar to my dentist's. 

Yes, I continued to have car trouble, and at one point I was coasting down the steep 89a with no power steering and no power brakes, but even then I couldn't get my mind off the find. When I contacted the Sheriff's Department to report the found evidence via email (so that I could attach the picture), I offered to take the responding officer to the location, whereafter I actually popped onto ABC's shop website to see if they sold the bullet-proof vest that says WRITER.

Alas, the officer's reply said that he would go out there himself to check it out, and could I please provide a mile marker or a detailed description of the location? Because I didn't know the mile marker (dumb automotive distraction), I described the pull-off location, something that he later described as "shockingly detailed and accurate." He also said that the spine of what he now called the carcass was cut with a band saw (something a butcher would have done) and the size of the scapula (shoulder blade) was so large that the carcass couldn't have been anything other than an elk. The fact that the body was in a trash bag and thrown off the side of the highway was not only common in this area, but evident that it was poaching or unapproved hunting. In other words, thank you, ma'am for overreacting at garbage, but we have it under control. 

My questions:

1. If elk are at minimum two hours away and to the north or the east, why would the bones show up on Mingus Mountain?
Assessment: Either dumb poachers who don't plan ahead, or an elaborate method of disposal.

2. If the body as I still call it were evidence of poaching, why would it be buried off of the highway, and not merely thrown out of the back of the truck onto the side of the highway as is the more common poaching disposal?
Assessment: You may have something there, Watson.

3. Maybe the body wasn't buried, you say, but flooded or covered by mud due to natural sediment in the wash? Okay, we'll play your game: even if the entire wash flooded with mud in Noah-level proportions, do you really think all of that mud could cover an animal that normally weighs 700 pounds and stands up to 5.5 feet at the shoulder? Even if you take all of the meat off of those bones, and even if the poachers were to take a couple of souvenirs like the skull and the rack, there would still easily be a volume that is way too large to merely assume that the mud would naturally cover the whole thing. Maybe it's only half of the bones? Still, it's in a wash, which means the volume of Noah-level flooding automatically has a current to it, something that a wash is naturally designed to redirect. Therefore, the entire wash would have to be filled in with mud for the bag to completely submerge, whereby filling said wash. It would take years worth of rainstorms to erode that mud back out to create the wash again, and it's unlikely that the bag would not likewise be uncovered in those multi-year monsoons. It took an animal to dig into the mud and carve the bag and the pieces out -not 1 million years and a paleontologist.
Assessment: Weather-related burial ruled out.

4. If the elk was cut with a band saw commonly used by butchers, you would naturally assume that the lying poachers would have taken the carcass (okay, I give in) to said butcher, thus displaying not only their non-repentance but also a lack of fear of getting caught, right? So if they weren't afraid of getting caught, why would they have buried the bag?
Assessment: Burial doesn't match the behavior of other poachers.

5. Here's a what-if for ya: What if the bag contains not only the remains of an animal such as an elk, but also the remains of a human? After all, wouldn't a sociopath know that the cops would identify the large scapula and thus decide that investigating the bag wasn't worth his/her time? After all, doesn't it take taxpayer's money to deeply investigate such things in a time when each expense needs to be justified? Wouldn't the killer -yes, killer- know this?
Assessment: I watch too much Sherlock Holmes.

How to Handle a Hit-and-Run as an Amateur Detective

Someone has hit your car. There it was, the yellow plastic from the other person's taillight housing, the fragment of yellow plastic embedded into the bumper from his/her apparently severe velocity, and a witness -Nick, the mail guy, who said that when the car was "tagged," the whole thing rocked. What happened to the perpetrator? He/she vanished -no note, no admission, not even a suspect in a somewhat vacant lot.

Did I mention that you signed up for Introduction to Forensics on Coursera this week?



Even though your most secret dreams involve becoming Sherlock Holmes's best Watson, you hate to admit that you're a little excited. Does this make you certifiable, you wonder, the enjoyment that comes from your car having just been hit, this thrill of a case to be solved?

You decide to:
a) Check your taillight housings.
b) Pick up the fragments of the perpetrator's taillights and keep them for investigation.
c) Assess the damage, including approximate size of vehicle, color, velocity, and clues from the fragments.
d) Call the college Campus Police.

Answer:
Everything but d. After all, why should you call Campus Police when you want to solve the mystery yourself?



You finally call Campus Police the day after the event only after you've written a short story about a somewhat psychopathic college instructor sitting on the hood of the car of the perpetrator. (True story.) The officer on duty recommends stopping by the next time you're in town, which ends up being Saturday morning. You take Officer Loyd out to your car in the parking lot and you show her the damage.

Do you:
a) Tell her about the plastic from the perpetrator's taillight that you kept, but not show it to her?
b) Tell her about the plastic from the perpetrator's taillight, and then show them to her for photographing?
c) Keep the taillight fragments secret from her so that you can continue your own investigation.

Answer:
Though c is tempting, you go with b.



Officer Loyd doesn't seem to think there's much of a report to make (she doesn't say so but she doesn't object when you verbalize it). You want to prove that you're not just a fuddy-duddy adjunct instructor but instead someone with crime-solving superpowers, so you tell her about the size of the vehicle in proximity to the ground, the approximate velocity of the vehicle for the plastic to be embedded into the fender, and when she wonders about the color of the other vehicle, you say, "Well, it could be a black vehicle considering that the speed of the collision would have rendered paint transfer." You hold out the plastic fragments (thankfully allowed to remain in your possession), "And the smoothness of the taillights indicates that this was a somewhat new vehicle because the plastic doesn't indicate much outdoor weathering."

She looks at you with somewhat amazement. "Wow. Were you a cop before?"

You blush. "No, I just watch too much Sherlock Holmes."

Now you're both embarrassed.



When you get somewhere with the case, your story will continue. In the meantime, you can just take comfort knowing that you're a mystery novelist that has just been confused as a cop.

Banagrams Revision

You know how sometimes when you're playing Bananagrams, there's only three tiles left that don't fit in anywhere, the clock is ticking, your competition is getting closer to figuring out his/her own crossword, and you make that brave choice -you know, the one where you choose to dismantle a few words so that you can make new words out of them?

I hate that feeling.

It does have its purpose: I've won games that way. But the risk of dismantling words makes your skin crawl as those seconds tick by, as your opponent's eyes flit from one word to the next, and you ask yourself, "Is this really worth it?"

Welcome, my friends, to the feeling of revision.

I'm currently revising a part of my novel for the Amtrak Residency. It's a perfectly okay scene where Constantine walks to Denny's after finding a dead girl by the dumpster at the Outback in the middle of the day. After he gets to Denny's, he meets Kimy, who will be come -as she says- "the Sherlock to his Watson."

But I don't want a scene that's just okay. Publishers don't publish okay. Readers don't do okay. So here I am dismantling paragraphs that I liked, paragraphs that were amusing and now are falling "to the cutting room floor," as it were.

 Kill your darlings.

Mars, My Muse

Is it weird that I watch something contemporary and think, "This could make for an excellent noir mystery."

Case in point, Veronica Mars. I had started watching it with a friend after a conversation about mysteries and strong female detectives, and then -just as several viewers, I've learned- I became hooked. I love TV series' that use the story arc of the season to solve a mystery. It transcends a show from mundane sit-com-edy and is a little easier to believe than my beloved Miss Marple who -let's face it- must be killing the victims in these big houses because no one just happens to stumble upon murders this often -even if you are on a first name basis with the constabulary.

Taking aside for a second the Mars Detective Agency has a Raymond Chandler feel to it, I've been even more enthused with the idea of amateur detective going into places that no one would expect her to, and I love the idea that she isn't an Ice Queen (all the time, at least). And let's face it: who wouldn't want to be the quick-witted-and-occasionally-snarky girl who always has the perfect comeback?

Today is a special day: Veronica Mars is back after (as Logan put it) "nine years of radio silence." After nine years, the movie is out, it was privately funded through Kickstarter (every artist's dream), and my friend and I are off to an AMC theater to go see it. See it, my friends, and you'll see a timeless character that transcends her surroundings -a muse-worthy character, indeed.

Setting Goals, For Realsies

Do you remember human development classes in middle school? It was in that class that my frizzy-haired teacher passed around half-sheet-sized card stock paper emblazoned in Comic Sans: My Goals. When no one was quick to write any goals down (because, yes, we were in middle school), she gave us a statistic about how middle schoolers with goals were far more likely to graduate high school and not do drugs. Maybe none of us intended on (in my case) reading every Nancy Drew book that had ever been written, or intended on (in their case) skateboarding in every public park in Phoenix, but we rushed to write stuff down because we didn’t want to be seen as ne'er-do-wells (not that we would have known that word). 

Not much has changed. Aside from the fact that I graduated high school and read every Nancy Drew book up until number 40, it has become increasingly clear in the last few years that you need to have writing goals. Your frizzy-haired human development teacher isn’t going to give you half of a page of card stock, and she’s not going to call you a drug dealer if you don’t fill it out (I hyperbolize, but I seem to remember a joke like that).

A writer needs goals, and it can’t be something like, “Finish novel someday.” You need to constantly work toward putting yourself out there, constantly work with at least one project, and constantly have a goal in mind for that project. Again, this goal doesn’t count: “Publish with a big publisher and make it big with little to no effort so that I can make money like James Patterson and hog as much space on a bookshelf as possible, and also possibly afford a vacation in the Bahamas with my tanned girlfriend who only wears Gucci sunglasses that I buy her.” Okay, that may not exactly be your goal, but if we’re being honest, here, you would love it if that happened, and you would love it if you didn’t have to do much work for that to happen. Can I just say now that while dreams are important, unrealistic dreams are crippling?

At the risk of using a cliché, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. (Except I would never eat an elephant, but that’s not here nor there.) Start small, work big.

So in the vein of good intentions, here are my goals:

1.     Finish editing last scene of dialogue. Send finished draft out to publisher I met at AWP.

2.     Finish 3^rd prose poem. Send collection of 3 prose poems to different publisher I met at AWP.

3.     Write short piece on writing. Send to yet another publisher I met at AWP.

4.     Long term goal: Finish novel by the middle of the summer.

5.     Reading goal: Read at least one Agatha Christie for plotting, and read at least one John Green for voice.

Make some goals, my friends -and not goals that just involve you rolling in the dough.   

How a Platform Works for Writers

How a Platform Works for Writers

We’ve all pictured it: writers sitting reclusively in a cabin in the woods, sometimes handwriting a novel (yeah, right), sometimes using a typewriter (okay, it’s been a while), or sometimes using a Macbook Pro (that’s more like it). Outside of any sexism, we often picture this writer as a man with a beard and in his pajamas because we romanticize the notion of a writer who has been in seclusion for so long that it’s okay to lose a few social norms, and he’s writing in such a fury that he’s even absconded basic hygiene. Even cynic writers embrace this image because all writers –all of us- love this idea that the novel is so intense and so important that we must get it out, must get it on paper or typed before the idea fades, before the potential for the Pulitzer or the Nobel Prize for Literature gets lost into the folds of our gray matter, only later to come back as vaguely as a wisp of smoke. We love the idea that a human –bearded male or not- can be rewarded for sacrificing relationships and “real work” to the idea that he or she can write something beautiful and amazing, that this person can get a hefty advance, a spot on the New York Times Bestseller list, a promotion from Oprah, and a gaggle of awards –and then recede back to the cabin in the woods to do it all over again.

But these days are gone.

The extinction of the reclusive writer is something that is lamented, because writing is hard. No one tells you that when you see images of a writer sitting down and typing out “It was a dark and stormy night…” No one tells you that it doesn’t just flow from you, that it’s like a long-term relationship that you need to work at and commit to, even when it’s not interesting anymore. No one tells you that writing your novel has to happen around life –around potty training, writing assignments for school, and around the pressured, unrealistic deadlines your boss gives you. Every writer wants to be the reclusive writer because that means that you can shut out the rest of the frustrating world to do the thing that you want to do. That is a dream, my friends.

Some writers blame technology for the death of the reclusive writer. After all, because of technology, the publishing world demands more now of a group of people who would rather be left alone, thankyouverymuch. But let’s look for a second about how the market is changing: readers are busier than ever. Why do you think eBooks available on smart phones and iPads have done so well? Readers are busy people, people who –if they read at all- need to get their hands on a book fast.  There are fewer and fewer bookstores and libraries, and there are more and more technology-savvy readers who will read whatever they can get their hands on –and sometimes that isn’t just the book. Readers –just like many users in several categories- demand information immediately, which could mean lower-quality books being written faster (rare) or permission for the writer to take longer writing higher-quality books as long as the reader can indulge themselves with other information about that writer –often that writer’s life.  

You might ask how this affects the writer. Well, with the book world changing, publishers are far more selective about who they pick up as new talent and who they keep as old talent. They want their writers to have something called a “platform.” For established writers like James Patterson, a platform is Facebook, Twitter, a website, and a blog (though we’ll discuss other technological platforms here in just a minute). A platform for a big writer like James Patterson is important to keep the readers engaged between books. But that’s not all a platform is essential for: it is life-giving for the new novelist.

A new writer cannot be picked up without a technological platform. A platform is an online presence that not only engages readers, but it’s also something that the publishing houses see as (near) guaranteed buyers. For example, if you have 300 friends on Facebook, the publisher sees this as okay, but not great, because that’s only 300 books sold. It might sound like a lot, but publishers would really like to sell tens of thousands of copies of a book title, and if only your friends on Facebook buy that title (and, of course, you know that you’re not going to get all 300 to buy your book), it’s just not enough. It might be nice that a big writer like James Patterson has a Facebook, a Twitter, a blog, and a website, but the new writer must have these. Say you have 300 friends on Facebook, you have 500 followers on Twitter, you have 50 readers a week on your blog, and you have 10 readers a week on your website. That’s nearly a thousand people a week that you have potential access to –and nearly a thousand looks much better than merely 300 first time buyers.

Whether you’re a new writer or just new to the technology game, you’ll find that a blog, a website, Facebook, and Twitter are excellent engagers –and you can even throw in Instagram and Tumblr. Your readers, now, feel somehow connected to your life. You might be posting an Instagram photo of you writing at a coffee shop, share it on your Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and you followers will get excited. In the Information Age, your readers don’t want a prickly, reclusive writer that doesn’t connect to his or her audience: a reader wants to feel like a follower, to feel like a supporter, to feel important to a writer’s career. What many writers of today don’t realize is that those supporters really are essential to his or her career –in fact, the fate of your novel could depend on something as seemingly unrelated as how many people “like” your Facebook page.

If you're compelled to help a girl out, be sure to like my Facebook page: there's a link to it on the sidebar :)