Check It Out!

I'm a featured writer today on the Helium front page! Go check it out!

What do you know. My cloth diapering obsession might actually pay off eventually...

It's NaNo Time Again!

So National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) starts up again in 24 days. And I want to try it once again.

What's wrong with me? I've tried for three years, and the farthest I ever got was half way to goal. I couldn't do it last year when I was pregnant and building a house on top of my job and usual pile of "other stuff to do." This year I'm a new mom and we'll probably be moving sometime during that month, which means packing, unpacking, and cleaning two houses rather than one. Oh, and I'll virtually double my commute once we move. There's no chance that I'll finish NaNo this year. No chance at all. And, yet, I don't know how to do Thanksgiving anymore without also trying desperately to write a novel and failing miserably. That's what Thanksgiving means to my insane little brain.

I'm trying to think about it like this weekend's Chicago Marathon. You get everything all ready to go, and then Mother Nature brings you record-breaking high temperatures and people keel over trying to reach the finish line. Why would anyone choose to run a marathon anyway? It sounds like torture. But isn't that what NaNo is, too? You decide you're going to give it all you're worth, and then life deals you a hand that interferes with your progress, but you keep on pushing ahead until you keel over. Just in time to start your Christmas shopping.

So, yep, I'll be doing NaNo again this year. But this time I have no visions of sugarplums dancing around the words "The End." I just really want to see how far I can get.

Another Writing Outlet

I've come across a cool new writing outlet perfect for an opinionated loudmouth like me: Helium. Head on over and check it out. It's a community of writers who post articles on various topics, and depending on the quality of your writing and the traffic generated by your post, you can actually earn some money. Check out my opinionated rantings.

NaNoWriMo 2006: The Abyssmal Failure

OK, so it's long past time for me to comment on my abyssmal failure that was NaNoWriMo 2006.

Previously, I posted about my excitement over the event and publicized plans to blog my novel, The Wrong Target. Obviously that never materialized. Life is funny. Only a few days after I released that post, the hubby and I learned that our lives will be forever changed, and my energy reserves were struck by a little whammy known as the first trimester.

That's right folks, the opinionated stubborn loudmouths of the Ropers and Ruane clans are reproducing. I think all three of my readers have already heard the news, but the warning bears repeating: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Anyway, it's been interesting trying to balance work, building a house, writing a novel, and being pregnant, not to mention everything else that goes along with ordinary life, all at one time. I've learned to say "no." I've learned to delegate. And I've learned the meaning of "good enough." Those last two were tough, me being a perfectionistic control freak and all. (Not that you'd know this from the state of our townhouse. Go talk to the FlyLady about her theories on perfectionism and housecleaning.)

So I said "no" to NaNoWriMo. I'd already resumed work on The Accidental Stalker for my writing group, and couldn't fathom finishing it in time to make a solid effort on The Wrong Target in the month of November. There was also no way that I was going to manage 50,000 words in a single month while simultaneously holding down a full-time job, being banned from caffiene, and suddenly being ready for a three-hour nap every day around 2:30 pm. Remember that in 2005, when there was no house or kid on the way, I survived on pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks and still didn't quite reach half the word goal.

So now there are two new goals: get ready for baby and build the house. Sure, I'll be writing and knitting along the way, but who knows what life is going to look like five months from now? Certainly not me...

My First Writers' Conference

This weekend I attended my first writers' conference, Love Is Murder (LIM), in Rosemont, IL. It was an extraordinary experience. LIM is a relatively small conference compared to the ones I've attended for educational publishing, but that's probably a good thing. I think I would have been overwhelmed by something bigger, such as Bouchercon. Perhaps it was divine intervention that scheduled our logs to be delivered the same weekend that Bouchercon came to Madison, WI -- only an hour or two's drive from our home in the far northern suburbs of Chicago. My inability to attend that conference prompted me to find this smaller, more local conference.

I've started surrounding myself with writing culture, hoping that doing so will get me into the right mindset and make me a more productive writer. It seems to be working. I started with writing podcasts, then joined a local writing group, and recently started reading writing-related blogs. This weekend at LIM was the icing on the cake. I was surrounded by immensely successful writers, writers who have just sold their first novel, unpublished writers (or "pre-published writers," as they encouraged us to consider ourselves in the closing pep-talk session for writers like me), and fans of the genre. I left the conference with one helluva high and my brain literally buzzing with ideas. And I learned a lot.

Lesson One: The immensely successful writers read a lot!

I used to think that I read a lot, but I've slowed my pace substantially in recent years as my schedule filled up and my life became more complicated. Compared to the normal population, I do still read a lot. But compared to these people, I was a reading sissy even in my heyday. The panels consisted of published authors, and even those authors who are writing 4-6 novels a year (!) would bring up other peoples' most recent work and comment on how they liked or disliked it. And they weren't just reading A-list writers. They were equally competent discussing much lesser-known authors who might only have a tiny handful of titles to their credit. I think I need to get busy.

Lesson Two: The fact that I even attended a writer's conference and have started the first draft of a novel makes me pretty darned abnormal.

Here are some sobering statistics:

• 33% of high school graduates never read another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book after college.

And yet...

• 80% of Americans want to write a book.
• Few of those who want to write a book will ever actually pinpoint a single writing topic.
• Few of those who pinpoint a single writing topic will ever do anything about it, including starting writing or attending a writing conference.
  

Lesson Three: Small presses are pretty darn cool.

I've always assumed that the largest publishing houses offered the best gigs. I thought the smaller presses didn't have national distribution and weren't taken seriously in the industry. But all of that is a fallacy. Small presses are actually doing some pretty cool things, like e-book publishing, that the larger houses are slower to adopt. Small presses do have national distribution and good reputations, and their marketing budget for your book is pretty comparable to large houses unless you're already a bestselling author. Finally, small presses actually seem a lot more friendly to new authors than the bigger houses. I left this conference with a list of houses that I will approach first with my first finished manuscript, and not a single large house made the list.

Lesson Four: Don't play fair. Make your writing goals so small that you're guaranteed to succeed. Beat that goal to a pulp and kick it to the curb.

I literally earned my dog tags in Novelist's Boot Camp based on Todd A. Stone's book on fiction writing, and keeping your goals small so you could kick them to the curb was a metaphor he used throughout the discussion. It makes sense. You have to make your goals small enough that they're easy to accomplish on a regular basis. Otherwise, you won't be able to establish the habits necessary to accomplish larger, more cumulative goals.

Lesson Five: Blogging isn't writing.

OK, so technically it is writing, but it doesn't count as a fiction writing activity. This was a "duh" moment for me. I knew in my head that blogging didn't count, but whenever I'd write a post to this blog (rather infrequently of late, I know, but as you can see, things are picking up), I'd still congratulate myself for writing something. I need to stop doing that. I don't intend to stop blogging, but I need to make sure I'm not doing it in place of meeting my fiction writing goals. Because, let's face it, this isn't going to pay me anything. Most fiction writers, especially beginners like me, write on spec, but at least there's the possibility that someday my fiction will earn me something. That's not going to happen with a casual blog, and I don't intend to spend the time necessary to turn this into a profitable venture.

This conference was definitely good for me, and I think I'll be making a solid effort to attend this one every year. We'll see how long this high lasts, but I have a feeling I'll have made a lot more progress on The Accidental Stalker by the time my writers' group meets next. Watch that word count over in the margin.

NaNoWriMo 2006!

It's NaNoWriMo time again! Don't know what that stands for? It's short for "National Novel Writing Month," a time when writers all over the globe insanely try to write a 50,000 word novel from beginning to end in the month of November. Everyone who reaches 50,000 words wins; quality doesn't matter. This will be my third attempt at NaNoWriMo, and I vow to get to the finish line this time!

Registration for this year's race began yesterday, so head on over to the website and join me in my insanity. Misery loves company you know, and Starbucks is perfectly willing to help us stay awake for those long hours of hunting and pecking. (I'll never drink a pumpkin spice latte again without thinking of NaNo 2005.)

This year I'll be working on a total rehashing of The Wrong Target, last year's not-so-all-that masterpiece. But I think I've finally figured out where my plot went wrong, thanks to Steve Bertrand over at one of my new favorite podcasts, Meet the Writers. His interview with Steve Berry knocked my plot on its a**, and solved the problem that's been bugging me for nearly a year. I've decided to reclassify last year's 25,000 words as a very long prewriting exercise.

If you don't want to join me this year, then cheer me on from the sidelines. I'll be blogging my novel this year in a separate blog. More information on that site will come as the kickoff date nears.

In the meantime, I'm taking suggestions for a new title. The Wrong Target is too boring, and reveals too much of the plot before the reader even gets through the first chapter. So here's a blurb to get your creative juices flowing:

Ralph's wife dies unexpectedly and he refuses to believe the coroner's official ruling that her death was due to natural circumstances. Can he learn the truth and keep the same thing from happening to his eccentric mother? Follow Ralph from midwestern suburbia, through Salt Lake City, and on to Las Vegas, as he digs through his family's past and gets to know a whole new side of his late wife's personality.

If you haven't guessed yet, it's a thriller. And, yes, the original title is a clue to something of a plot twist. Post your title suggestions to the comments section of this post. If I like your idea, maybe you'll earn yourself a dedication if the book ever gets published and the editor actually likes the title, too. (Yeah, right. Good luck with that!)

On Copyright Infringement

What is it about the digital age that makes everyone think that copyright has disappeared?

As scanners became more commonplace, my late uncle, a professional photographer, found himself having to defend his work from being illegally duplicated and used without any payment or attribution.

I subscribe to an email list for free ebooks (i.e., public domain books), and we constantly receive "I'm looking for" posts regarding free ebook formats of popular modern books still covered by copyright. Think Tom Clancy and John Grisham. Do you really think that these guys would make their works available for free?

Plagiarism was a minor problem when I was going to school, but today it's big business, with whole web services devoted toward helping teachers identify plagiarized material.

This morning, a friend just informed me that one of her poems was illegally reprinted in an anthology and is being sold by someone who never sought her permission.

Copyright doesn't just protect the big guys, like major record labels and Tom Clancy; it also protects the little people like you and me. I work hard to create my blog posts, fiction stories, and knitting patterns, and while I may choose to make some of them available for free, I expect my rights to be respected. No one has the right to use or make money on my work without express permission from me.

The law supports me without my having to lift a single finger -- technically I don't even need the copyright notice that I just added to the bottom of my blog. Any original material created since April of 1989 is automatically protected under U.S. copyright law, although my copyright footer strengthens my case, and official registration strengthens it even more. There's even a pretty cool concept called creative commons copyright that any creative person should look into.

Now I'll be the first to say that some of the copyright laws in this land have gone too far. As far as I'm concerned, if I buy a CD, I bought the music and should be able to listen to it in any form I want as long as I'm not broadcasting it or making money off of it. And the idea that the term of copyright gets extended every single time Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain smacks of big business interfering in Washington politics. But the founding principles behind copyright are good ones, and should not be infringed just because some idiots in Washington have attached a helluva lot of pork to them.

Creatives as Extroverted Introverts

In one of my first few weeks at college, my new roommates and I decided to order pizza. There were three of us, so negotiating toppings and crust styles was a challenge, but eventually we agreed and the time came to call in the order. "Oh, I don't want to call," S. said. "Me neither," T. added. They both looked at me.

Prior to matching us up as roommates, we'd had to fill out a personality profile. The housing service then attempted to match up people of similar temperaments. It was clear that they were a little too good at their jobs when it came to us. I didn't want to call the pizza place either.

Maybe it's because I was an only child and had become accustomed to fending for myself, or maybe it was because there is a small part of me that really is extroverted, but either way I volunteered to place the call despite my discomfort. My desire for pizza trumped my fear of calling a strange pizza place in a strange town. I swallowed my fear and got the job done.

My whole life has been like that. There's nothing I would like more than to curl up at home and work solo, rarely, if ever, interacting with others outside my small circle of close family and friends. I've always had the impression that dealing with other people takes extra energy that would be better spent on creative endeavors. And yet, I keep finding myself in positions where I need to interact with other people in order to achieve my goals, and I make myself do it. So does that make me an introvert or an extrovert? I never did know how to answer those questions on the Meyers-Briggs. (Although somehow it still manages to peg me as an INTJ each and every time.)

Recently, I've heard other creative people say similar things: they'd really prefer to be left alone, but either their creative process requires some collaboration with others, or their final product isn't fully realized until it's made public and others can react to it. Our drive to create forces us to become extroverted at least when it comes to realizing our pet projects. Maybe this doesn't apply to all creative people -- Emily Dickinson comes to mind -- but as one published author said recently on one of the many podcasts I listen to, it's a pretty rare writer who actually manages to put words on paper but who doesn't, somewhere in the smallest recesses of her mind, hope that her words will be public someday.

So, could there possibly be a personality type such as "extroverted introverts," people who prefer introversion but who willingly become extroverted for specific purposes? I think there must be, because I don't seem to be alone in the world. Someone's got to have documented this somewhere. Time to surf the web....

Resource-Loading the Muses

It's amazing how the universe conspires to pound you with a particular message when you really need to hear it.

"I want to write" has been my mantra for more than 20 years. Granted, it was a hobby when I was in school, but I've had professional writerly aspirations for at least the last five. And how much writing have I accomplished in that time? Not a whole lot.

But I'm getting serious about it now, and I'm frequenting podcasts and web communities that provide something of a support group for fledgling professional writers. What message am I getting from all of them? "Stick your butt in the chair and keep it there until you've written something." Not very glamorous, I know, but it's the truth.

This principle flies in the face of the romantic ideas others have about a writer's life:

Writers are at the mercy of the Muses, and cannot write until struck with inspiration.

After inspiration strikes, writers scribble out the Great American Novel in one long manic creative episode.

The saddest tragedy of a writer's life is writer's block.

It's all a pack of lies.

In reality, creativity is like the bicep; it has to be exercised regularly before it can reach incredible heights. A "writer" who waits for inspiration before getting started is like a body-builder who expects to bench-press 300 lbs. on his first day at the gym. It's impossible.

If you want to write, then you have to write, even when you think you have nothing to say. Eventually kernels of ideas will form themselves, but you have to be there, in the right mind-set, ready to catch them as they come at you. Scratching your head in the local pub all night isn't going to do it. So write. Yes, it will be drivel. But eventually you will find that you really do have something to say, and then you can chop out those first 500 words of nonsense and have something respectable.

And there's no such thing as writer's block. As Neil Gaiman says, you can get stuck on something. Your innocent bystander may transform herself into a serial killer before your eyes and muck up your carefully constructed plot line. You may discover that azalea nectar is poisonous (It is, by the way. Don't ask me how I know.) and have to go back to the drawing board for your plot surrounding a new designer beverage. In any case, you're stuck on that particular thing, but you're not struck dumb on every writing task in existence. So write your way out of your problem, or work on something else and let your subconscious churn away for a while. Either way, You. Keep. Writing. Otherwise, you'll never have your brain in the proper mind-set to work itself out of whatever it is you're stuck on.

In an earlier post, I asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: How do you resource-load a Muse? The answer is: invite her to the party. She'll always show up, even if she is a little late.

Me and My Treo

I admit it -- I've always loved Star Trek. It began with Captain Kirk and continued to all the different series through the years. I'm probably a borderline fanatic. I'm not as crazy as the fans who follow the conventions around the country and attend in full Federation uniform, but I have attended a convention, I own a bootlegged script of Generations, and a Bajoran earpiece resurfaces every once-in-a-while in my jewelry box.

I was always fascinated by the tablets that the characters worked on, especially the one Jake Sisko used to write his stories. They were highly portable, used a stylus, and seemed to be tapped in to the local computer system. How cool was that? Word processing at your fingertips, plus complete database access, all while loitering on the Promenade.

So when the first round of Palm Pilots came out, I had to have one. Not only could I see myself shedding my big Franklin Planner, I could also see myself doing quite a bit of writing on the run -- all in one small package. I'd finally have my Star Trek tablet.

I got one for Christmas, and was very excited. I started transferring my planner data right away, and found some word processing software to load on it. I learned Graffiti and discovered eBooks. But making the transition was difficult. I had to think differently when planning on the Palm than with paper, and I still hadn't really started writing on it. I fell back to paper planning several times, but eventually the Palm started winning out. Until, one day, I dropped the Palm while pulling it out to reference a shopping list. It never worked again.

I returned to paper, but discovered that I missed some of the features of the Palm -- nearly unlimited future calendars, alarms for my appointments, and a small package. At the same time, I started to find that I couldn't do much productive writing on paper. My writing habits had become too accustomed to word processors, but I didn't have access to a laptop at the time. A little while later they came out with the sleek new Palm m500. I hinted pretty hard, and received one for my birthday, along with a portable keyboard.

Since then, I've been hooked. I stuck with the m500 until work gave me a Tungsten 2 to use. Then we bought ourselves Treo 650s for Christmas shortly after they came out.

I've had short affairs with paper planning, but I've always come back to whatever Palm I had access to at the time. I rely on the alarms to keep me on track during the day. I have a single address book that ties to my cell phone and caller ID, synchs to my home computer, and sits in a periodically updated hard copy next to the kitchen phone. I can plan projects in ShadowPlan on my Treo or on my home computer, and then port the plan to my task list and calendar (try doing that with MS Project!). I have constant access to a thesaurus and dictionary, plus countless other fiction and nonfiction books. My entire recipe book is in Treo memos, accessible when I'm in the grocery store and discover a fabulous sale on some usually expensive key ingredient. The list goes on and on.

But taking notes or doing any kind of extended writing is still a problem. I'm just not quite there yet with the Jake Sisko tablet writing system. And that makes me sad.

I'd gotten pretty fast with Graffiti, but it was still error-prone and the Treo doesn't use it anyway. Then I found a virtual keyboard replacement called MessageEase, and got pretty fast with it on my T2, but it keeps crashing my Treo and takes up valuable screen space. Fold-out keyboards require a table and plenty of fussing before you can be off and running, and the one I have isn't terribly accurate. I'm all thumbs on the thumboard, which is a painful experience for a 100+ wpm touch typist. And the screen is too small to review what I've written before going on to the next paragraph -- a key element in my writing process.

So I still use paper for note-taking, and I try to save up the productive writing for when I have access to a full keyboard and computer. I can make do with the Treo in a pinch, but the technology keeps getting in my way, and doesn't allow me to become absorbed into the writing process like I can on a full-sized keyboard and monitor. And I feel that my writing suffers because of it.

In a way, I think still having a link to paper has been good for me, but that's a whole different post. In the meantime, I'm still trying to find the perfect Star Trek tablet. My dream? A pint-sized tablet Mac. Barring that, I'll take a Palm LifeDrive with a built-in cell phone.

Apple? Palm? Are you listening?

On Being a Wanna-Be Mystery Writer

Sometimes I worry that I'm crazy.

I had an ordinary suburban childhood with no trauma to speak of, yet I'm fascinated by stories of serial killers. I don't think I'd ever have the courage to shoplift a stick of gum, yet my favorite movies include The Italian Job and The Thomas Crown Affair.

While working on NaNoWriMo 2005, I carried around a reference book on poisons -- to find the perfect poison to use in the murder mystery I was attempting to write. My husband's classmates (he was in night school at the time) told him he should be nervous. The irony of it all? My mother-in-law gave me the book as a Christmas gift the year prior.

I look forward to developing IDPA stages to test out my plots surrounding gunfights. A coworker shares a tale about a little-known way to kill a person, and I mumble "I can use that...." And the most fun I've ever had in a role-playing game was when I took the reigns to figure out how we were going to break into a mega-corp to get the antivirus to whatever it was that had infected our decker. (Yes, I've played a few games of Cyberpunk. Am I a geek yet?)

Each time I get a tidbit of information that might be useful down the line in a crime story, I note it in a memo on my Treo. I now have hundreds of these memos, and I've had to develop a keyword filing system to keep them all organized. They have their own category, just like my recipes and knitting patterns. And now blog posts.

Tell me, what normal person carries around a database in their PDA describing all sorts of ways for a person to die? I keep waiting for Homeland Security to bust down my door, or at least commandeer my library records.

But in the last year or so -- since I've gotten more serious about writing fiction -- I've found that I'm not alone. Many other mystery writers, or at least wanna-be mystery writers, think the same way I do. Maybe, could it be, I'm normal?

Naah...

Back in the Habit!

It's finally happened. I'm writing again.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was about 8 years old. It happened after my first experience with ludic reading, or getting lost in a book. Until that time I'd had to split my concentration between decoding the words and comprehending the message. But this time was different. I decoded the text automatically, and was swept off to a new world created by that author.

When I finished that book and returned to reality, my first response was not to think that it was cool and that I needed to do it again. Not me. Instead, I thought it would be really cool to be the person who created those kinds of experiences for other readers. Yeah, I've always been a little weird.

Anyway, since then I've considered myself a writer. I wrote my first short story in second grade, not long after that first ludic reading experience. The story was about how my red wagon (no, not my station wagon, but a pull-cart style kid's wagon) rolled down a hill to the other side of the street. The conflict was how I was going to get it back, because I wasn't old enough to cross the street yet.

This first story, by the way, is another reason why I titled this blog "Red Wagon Musings."

Since "The Red Wagon Conflict," I've done all kinds of writing. There were school essays, of course, plus poetry, drama, and fiction for creative writing classes, articles and opinion pieces for the school newspaper, and a teen romance novel that never found its way to "The End." I've filled boatloads of journals, and done plenty of technical writing for my job. And then there's my recent interest in mystery writing -- short stories as well as a stab at a full-length novel during NaNoWriMo 2005.

The problem is that publishing my own stuff has rarely been a priority unless it was a school assignment, job task, or some other piece of writing that someone else expected of me. And if publishing isn't important, well, then, there's no rush to get any writing done. As a result, my non-work-related writing had devolved into nothing more substantial than journal entries. And journal entries were of no use to anyone but me. Didn't I want to write because I wanted to give someone else that ludic reading experience? I started to wonder if I could still call myself a writer if I wasn't writing for those ends.

I tried setting a daily quota, like Stephen King recommends in On Writing, but that didn't work. A daily habit is hard when there's so much else going on in life, when I come home after frying my brain all day at work. Then I tried outlining a writing project according to my Franklin and Project Management training. I figured that would give me the flexibility to work in bursts, like on weekends. But my weekends were horribly busy, catching up with chores and friends after neglecting them during the week. Besides, there were no repercussions for missing my self-imposed deadlines, so I blew one after another.

I began to feel like I just couldn't write under my current circumstances, that my lifestyle had to change in order for me to fulfill my lifelong dream. I thought I had to quit my job, but I couldn't do that because we needed the money, and because I couldn't bring myself to abandon the products I'd been working so hard to develop. I felt like I had to choose between my lifelong dream and the career path I was already on. But having to choose between either one of those loves was depressing.

Finally, I gave some serious thought to starting a blog, and it wasn't long before I followed through. No, it's not fiction writing, which is eventually where I want to be, but it is writing, and that's the important thing. I'm happy to see that it's working, too. Two weeks in a row with three posts each -- don't they say that you're supposed to start an exercise habit 3-4 times per week? I'd say I'm right on track. I'm happy to say that I now have no qualms about calling myself a writer again, and I look forward to mastering this habit and moving on to the next one.

Introduction

So what is this blog all about? There are so many out there, after all...

This blog is a place for me to publicly explore some of the ideas that come to me during my long daily commutes and at other times during the day when I just can't turn my brain off. I drive a little red station wagon, so that's where the name of this blog originated. If you must know, my car's name is Lola, but that's a little off-topic isn't it?

And yet, that's part of my point. My mind wanders as I drive, no matter how I try to keep it on track with music, audiobooks, podcasts, phone calls (hands-free, of course!), etc. It wanders, too, when I'm sitting in meetings at work, having dinner with my husband, working on a knitting project, or at other times when it's just not convenient to give a good idea its due attention. So I write it down or leave it in my voicemail so I don't forget it, intending to explore and write about it later.

But later never happens. Maybe I'm too busy. Maybe I'm too scatterbrained. But, most likely, I'm just not in the habit of doing anything with these miscellaneous ideas other than collecting them. And it's time to start doing something about that.

I make no promises as to the content of this blog or to the frequency of my posts. Let's just see where this goes over time. And yet, in an attempt to give you a preview, I'll tell you that my interests range from educational publishing and product development (my profession), to creativity, personal productivity, writing, knitting, the shooting sports, alternative religions, Macintosh computers, and so much more.

So welcome to my wandering mind. Please fasten your seatbelt, because there are sure to be a few u-turns along the way.