On Baseball and Hope

I attribute my absence directly to the existence of March.  March, you see, is Spring Training, and the beginning of Baseball. I wasn't raised to be this way, though my dad and I voraciously watched Tokyo Giants games because it was on TV all the time, but when I lived in Japan, my relatives there sucked baseball up (if an IV was possible they'd probably have used that).  More importantly, being in Japan introduced me to the world of baseball manga....man, H2 and Cross Game are something else.

But I digress.  Baseball, for all its warts, is about hope.  Well, it's about a lot of things, but for the purpose of this blog, it's that you still have a chance to win as long as you have at least one out left.  

So the odds of a chasm-wide comeback victory in baseball are slim - 12 run deficits were only overcome in only a handful of games - but a "regular" comeback victory, those are much more common in baseball, especially since, again, it's theoretically possible to win until the last out is recorded.  Watching a 1-0 game is excruciatingly tense, and groan-inducing if your team comes out of that with a loss.

Here's where I segue into writing.  Of course, like many writers, I'd love to be published by one of the big five and make enough money to be able to to quit my day job (just so you know, working for an indie publisher does squat for your writing career unless you write what they're looking for, though it DOES give you insight into how the slush pile works...and you'd better have an amazing social media platform because they don't have the marketing budget to be able to support you as much as you'd like), but the odds are pretty slim.  Say what you will about needing to edit, and find beta-readers, and editing again to have a polished manuscript... after you've done all those things, you still have to find the right agent to send the right query letter to, at precisely the right time (ie not when s/he's tired at the end of the day, and you're at the end of the queue for the day) they've opened their email inbox.  And then, you have to resonate with said agent two more times: the partial (kudos to the agent that asks for up to 50 pages at the outset, it saves us both some time), and the full.  Sure, you can have a polished manuscript waiting for a home, but if it doesn't resonate you're going to get the "Thanks, but this isn't for me" letter.

It took me a LONG time to take those letters as a compliment.  You truly want someone who believes they can sell your work to represent it.  Someone who loves it but who can't think of a place they can sell it will not be able to help you (and these were, IMHO, the most heartbreaking rejection letters I've received - they genuinely liked my manuscript).

Back to baseball.

These days, I spend some time working on my current project, working my day job (I'm going to be real honest here and say I'm going to keep working a day job for as long as I can... I can't think of any other way I'd have enough social interaction on my own to be able to come up with new novel material), and sending out queries for my previous project.  The querying, especially, is a slog, there's no other word for it.  After my requisite time spent in front of my computer I turn on the TV and watch some baseball.  Because a come-from-behind victory tastes especially sweet after an hour of slogging through form emails; it reminds me to hope, and to Never. Stop. Writing.

On Oil-Filled Space Heaters

It's been cold lately. 

Oh, I suppose it's all relative; for example, the weather here is an Unmentionable, comparable to the likes of Valdemort, when speaking to my East Coast Friends...though I suppose in this case I'm not afraid of one of the Unforgivable Curses, and instead... the pity.

"Oh, honey.  it's 37 degrees over there?  Well, we just had a blizzard and sleet and it was raining muskrats and also the kids had a day off from school because insert random apocalyptic event here.  You Californians are too cute!"

And if I mentioned that to my friends in Hawaii they'd be zipping up their parkas just thinking about it.

But I digress.  Today's blog topic is about procrastination.  

I've received a lot of writing advice over the years, and by far the most common, and the most irritating to hear is, "write a little something every day".  Irritating because you know. Obviously you won't get your project finished if you don't work on it.  DUH.   It's like someone standing next to you at the train stop pointing at the sky and saying, "it's blue", (DUH) when what you really want to know is, What type of cloud is that?  Is it actually Karl?  Strange that that murder of crows just flew across the sky.  Is that a sign? When's the train coming, because this person just randomly told me the sky was blue and I want to sit far, far away from him on this train.

These are my thoughts as an example.  You probably won't have the same thoughts, nor would some random person speak to you in this manner.  Best to gauge the situation and move away from said person if you're not comfortable, by the way.  Be safe and aware!

But yes.  That Advice.  So you see that piece of advice is incomplete, because it should actually go like this: "Write every day.  DO NOT STRESS if it's only a sentence, a word, or an idea, you are NO LESS OF A PERSON for not having written enter insanely large number here pages today because you are working on your project! AND DON'T EXPECT IT TO BE PERFECT!  It will not be, so there. That's what future edits are for."

I'm still trying to follow this advice, every day.  It's rough going, because there are days where my mind will come up with any little excuse to avoid imperfect writing, like cleaning the house, or OH that new recipe in the latest Bake From Scratch magazine I've been meaning to try, or that paint drying on the wall is so fascinating or... Squirrel!

Or fingers being too cold to write.

37 degrees, my East Coast Friends. 

It sure feels cold to me.

I live in an old, drafty house, and we are saving money by not turning on the central heat because well, it's expensive.  And ineffective.

But my mind has a point about the cold fingers.  So I'm waiting for my oil-filled space heater to come in the mail, and in the meantime I'm getting to work early to write, because there's central heating there.  Yesterday I wrote a full three paragraphs and it was glorious.

Perhaps, sometime in the future, I'll go deeper into perfection and how your mind will never think it exists in your writing, and so you have to distract it with things, otherwise you're working on that same project for years.  It's wasteful, and your mind has a habit of making you feel discouraged and ready to throw in the towel.

But this is a blog post about procrastination and cold fingers.  So we'll save that for another day, hopefully when my oil-filled space heater arrives.

On Soundtracks - and Ursula K. Le Guin

On occasion, I see song listings in the back (almost forgotten) sections of novels I read, usually what the author was listening to while immersed in their creative flow.  And I admit as a reader, I usually gloss over this.  As a writer, of course I have songs that capture the mood of my character, scene, or even the dialogue, but I assume there's a disparity between what I get out of my Work in Progress (hereafter called WIP for the sake of convenience) and what the reader gets out of it...

Let me explain.

Last year (this is me, so you should expect random tangents that end up not-so-random.  This is your final warning.  TURN BACK NOW), it would be safe to say that my musical childhood died.  I listened to Wham in middle school (Whatever happened to Andrew Ridgeley, anyway?), David Bowie in high school (fueled by Labyrinth, of course, but my favorite Bowie phase was when he teamed up with Brian Eno), and I got into Prince late - in college.  Towards the end of 2017 I maniacally scoured the obituaries for any other names - one or both of the Johns from They might Be Giants, Sting, et al - thankkfully all still alive - and I breathed a sigh of relief when the year was over.  

And then... Ursula K. Le Guin last week.

Social media posts abound mourning her passing, and I won't go into depth about the box of tissues that was sacrificed as I re-watched her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards.  But The Wizard of Earthsea was the first book I found in the adult Sci-Fi/Fantasy section at the bookstore (there was no YA sci-fi/fantasy section back then, and I happened upon Anne McCaffrey, Tamora Pierce, Diane Duane, Jane Yolen, and Madeline L'Engle purely by chance in our school library), so it holds a special place in my heart - the ADULT section!!  Like a grown-up!!!

There was, of course, no soundtrack listing in the appendix, just a map, a story, and a glossary.  When I first read it - I read it in a day, earning a stern reprimand from my math teacher when I fell asleep in her class for lack of proper rest the night before  - it was me and my flashlight, under the covers, reading until the sun came up.  No music at all - the prose was enough.  I read it again, two days ago, and as an experiment put on some Austin Wintory in the background, just loud enough to not be obtrusive.  I was just as immersed in the story as the last time I'd read it a few years ago, but when I got up to take a break (thanks, Fitbit for the reminder), the music lingered where the end of the chapter left off.  I'm going to make the bold claim that Wintory is our generation's Nobuo Uematsu, but it's also safe to say that Le Guin wasn't listening to his work when she wrote the first book in the Earthsea Cycle since he wasn't even born yet.

So my opinionated and highly irrational stance on soundtracks at the end of books is this: if a novel is good enough to read again, I'll have my own music in the background during the re-read, because in most cases I'm not really "listening" to it.  The experience an author has writing his/her novel and what the reader gets out of the same work can't possibly be the same, because the human experience varies from person to person.

And from a purely practical standpoint: I'm listening to an awful lot of old-school Chicago and Ed Sheeran for my current WIP, and my last project was written to Pink's entire music catalog.  I wouldn't want force any of that on any unsuspecting souls. It's best to leave it for this blog, for folks who seek it out, I think.

And for Ms. Le Guin, just this: Perhaps, one day, when she's taking a break from exploring new worlds wherever she is now, she could answer my call for a muse, or, more likely, she'd come down and slap me across the head, maybe knock the writer's block out.

Wouldn't that be something?