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Breaking the Rules and (Maybe) Winning. Yay!

On this quiet Boxing Day, please let me announce that my entry in the CWOW Phoenix Rattler Does Your Story Have Bite? contest has made the finals. My first contest!


I found this out on Christmas Eve, the day before my birthday, and how grateful I am! Glory to God for every victory.


I agonized over this entry back in October, up to the night it was due. I was supposed to submit the first ten pages of my unpublished novel, and I had a beginning that was...possibly...in the wrong place.


It's an agony felt by artists of all kinds: How can we bear to delete the bits we love so much, even though they're not entirely successful or in the right place, and re-start the story (or painting or score) somewhere else?


In the end, I took a deep breath, ripped out the questionable passage as if ripping out my heart, and trusted that the new hook was strong. Further, I chose to leave a huge flashback sitting smack in the first ten pages---which, ask anyone, is a humongous no-no. Forty pages too soon, they'll tell you. It's what all the books say.


The fact that I made the finals anyway highlights two wonderful points.


First of all, it pays to bite the bullet and do what you think is best for the work, no matter how in love you are with this bit or that. Second, if the flashback (or yellow tree or A-flat) is necessary, leave it in, no matter who tells you to take it out.


In other words, trust your gut no matter what.


Granted, I haven't won. But making the finals tells me that the story and writing dominated all else. As, of course, they should.


I have an advantage, I think, in that I haven't read the how-to books yet. I have them and I leaf through them periodically, but for the most part I've been too busy writing to study them. Well, good. Winging it isn't a bad thing after all.


The Internet offers a rainbow of possibilities for learning how to do just about anything, most of all write. There are books and courses and gobs of advice, both reliable and unreliable. With all these resources, we can quickly lose sight of our own intuition. There are times to take advice, of course, and humbly. But still, it's easy to get bogged down in how-to's. Gut decisions are most often right, and I for one am gratified to see my story advance on the basis of choices I made listening to the quiet voice within.


Contests are important for professional writers and I'm delighted to have debuted with this small success. It's a good feeling I can carry on to the next contest, already in progress.


Unfortunately, there's no snow in Baja to rejoice in, but what we do have are mariachi bands. I throw my paws in the sunny air and give thanks!

God bless you on this Holy Night!

May the light of Christ and the will of God illuminate your life.

I wish you peace, love, and joy,

today and always.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE!

And a Merry Band It Is

I never thought it would be so hard to write a simple essay on why I write. I mean, we all know why we write. Right?


As you can see, I've enlisted the whole band.


With the flurry of homemade Christmas gifts, life has been colorful this last week and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. But my laboriously won writing plan is out the window. In fact, the entire framework I so carefully set up before Thanksgiving is sagging under the weight of the last few weeks. Well, every message from Above starts out the same these days: "Take a deep breath, child, and relax. No stress!"


So this is what I'm doing. I refuse to worry about generating income or rewriting my plan until January, and I pray by then I have a new take on worry. Instead, I'm focusing on setting up my tapestry loom and writing this confounding essay.


And in that spirit, you might enjoy a peek at the world of tapestry weavers. Here's a link to the Canadian Tapestry Network, the Desert Tapestry Weavers, a fun blog called desertsong studio, and some pieces by one of my favorite tapestry artists, Silvia Heyden.


I hope that your holiday preparations are joyful and relaxed. I'm still finishing Christmas gifts, so no weaving or loom building today.


But dreaming, certainly. And, I hope, more writing. In the meantime, happy holidays!

Just Your Ordinary Extraordinary Life

Sometimes life is so extraordinary that no amount of theory can make it do what you want.


These last weeks of my life have been extraordinary. Illness and hospitals, rain storms and floods, lack of sleep and absence from work---well, from looking for work. We've all had times like this, powering through a tunnel with all our might, doing what's needed because we must, and emerging fragile and spent when the task is done.


I wish I could say that I stayed strong, creative, and joyful throughout, but I didn't. Powering through was all I could do. Now that I'm resting my aching heart and limbs, I feel rather like this little bird: delicate, tentative, and solitary.


As I began putting my life and home back together, I surprised myself two days ago by rummaging around in the weaving shed, pulling out projects that need finishing. I found strips of a brown, black, and white woven rag rug that need to be joined, and a fuchsia rag runner in a similar state.


The work was done long ago and I remember doing it. Holding these pieces of my past in my hands was a wonderful comfort and finishing them will be a delicious domestic act, like building a nest. After weeks away from myself, it's a way of saying, "This is who I am," and then finding out, one piece at a time, what that means. 


Christmas is less than two weeks away. Short on cash this year and a terribly wasteful spender in the past, I'm enjoying learning a new way of life. I bought wrapping paper and ribbon for pennies in my village, and I'm giving gifts made from what I already have here at home. I suspect I'm not the only one celebrating a homespun Christmas this year. It makes me smile. This is how it should be.


This post, and my other blog Foghorn , mark my first writing efforts in weeks. Encouraged, I think tomorrow I'll work on my entry for the Editor Unleashed essay competition, "Why I Write." First prize is $500, and the top fifty entries will be published in a collection. Not bad as contests go! Editor Unleashed is an interesting site with an active forum. If you're a writer, it's worth a visit.


Please take care and enjoy your own Christmas preparations. Now that I'm back, I'll be here, building my nest.


Chirp.

Couching the Golden Thread

Since I started spending my time creating a day job, I haven't touched brush to paper and hardly strung a bead. In other words, I'm missing color. 


I love working with words, but there comes a point where I feel like grabbing a crayon and coloring in the O's. Fortunately, it doesn't take much to bring the color back.


There have been other times in my life when I've been estranged from my art. During those times, I made a point of devoting quiet moments in the morning to a small black sketchbook and some paints, writing a few words and finding the first colors of the day.


A fifteen-minute ritual each morning works wonders. It's not meditation, which works its own wonders. It's just a very private moment--no editing, no censorship, no expectations. It reminds me of couching. 


In embroidery, couching is a technique whereby a thick thread, often gold, is tacked at intervals to a piece of fabric using very fine thread. To my mind, each fifteen minutes in the morning is like one fine tack holding the design thread in place.


If you find yourself going through a time when your art is hard to get to, you might want to devise a little ritual for your own mornings. A regular quarter of an hour noodling on a guitar or pirouetting around the living room before work can uplift your whole day. 


Now the writer's tip of the day: Confused by the publishing industry? No wonder. It's confusing, and undergoing changes that make it more baffling every day. I just discovered the SFWA site--that's the Science Fiction Writers of America, in case you didn't know. They offer an excellent series of articles in their feature Writer Beware . There, you'll find clear explanations and opinions on electronic publishing, vanity presses, unscrupulous agents, and more. Have a look.


And, whatever else you do, keep that thread running, however you can.

It's About Time

Today, I wrote a writing plan.

Somehow that just doesn't communicate the complexity of the thing, or the difficulty. Allocating dates and times to tasks a half-year in advance is not easy. There are so many variables, so many unknowns.

Now that it's done, my plan looks good and it just might work. Unfortunately, I can't pass on any how-to tips because I honestly don't know what I did or how I did it. It was like walking up a black-iced hill in old cowboy boots--which I've done, by the way, and barely lived to tell about it.

There was precious little I could find on the Internet to give a bird's-eye view and help me find a place to put my feet. 

There's plenty on setting goals, of course, but whatever there is on outlining professional freelance writing goals is well hidden. Setting these goals demands a deft touch because of the unique nature of freelance writing. The spectrum is broad and, if you're anything like me, you're trying to move forward in ten areas at once, each of which has its own particular rhythm and requirements. And unreliability.

Writing-World.com offers a series of general articles on the business of writing, which includes a handful on writing plans. If you're wrestling the same octopus, you might find something helpful there.

Finally having a plan written down, even for just the next few months, certainly eases my mind. I'm relaxing now after a hard day of climbing ropes. There's enough time to start checking off boxes.

Tomorrow.