The Need for Christmas

One thing about being a Stranger in a Strange Land, you get an outsider's perspective on pretty much everything. Stuff you took for granted in your homeland and stuff the locals take for granted where you are.

So why a post about Christmas in June?

Here in the southern hemisphere, it's winter. The days are short, and the nights are long. The trees are bare, and icy winds come howling up off the polar ice caps with depressing regularity.

For the human psyche, this is a time of death.

In the northern hemisphere, our holidays ease the sting. Halloween (and then in the US, Thanksgiving) celebrate the harvest and turn nature's great dieback into a happy occasion. And right around the solstice, when the nights are longest and the sun may never come again, we light up that eternal night with Christmas.

Before there was a Christ there was a Roman Festival of Lights. Done with candles instead of lawn displays, but the idea was there. My father, a former Catholic priest and lifelong religious scholar, happily admits the theft. He contends that the date of Jesus' birth isn't the important thing, it's the death.

(OF course, when the subject of pagan roots of the festival of Oestre comes up, the discussion gets a bit more heated, but that's another story...)

Before the Festival of Lights even, there were blood sacrifices to ensure the return of the sun. Of course, the 'sacrifices' were (and sometimes still are) livestock too sickly to last out the winter. That way, folks got a good feed to help *them* last out the winter, and the surviving animals had more feed to keep them healthier so that *they'd* last out the winter too. Common sense and religion sometimes do run together.

Until our culture moved below the equator. Suddenly, these festivals, deeply important in our collective and individual psyches, were happening at the wrong times of year. Christmas becomes a midsummer beach party (Beltane, anyone?), which is great.

But summer doesn't need another excuse to party. And now winter has no relief, no promise of rebirth. I never realized the power of surrounding ourselves with twinkling lights and affirming our tribal bonds with gifts and communal food until it went away.

I don't get the Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I do feel the pull of those long nights. Since I got rid of my car, I bike everywhere, and even winter doesn't stop me from hitting the trails at Bottle Lake, or walking around Travis Wetland or Styx Mill Reserve. (Stalkers take note: an important clue to enacting your paranoid delusions!) I also ski and skate when I can, but dammit, I want my bloody festival, and I want it lit up!

Writing, a Tale told in Allegory

39,400 words (with good reason)

Today was the Tiny Dynamo's birthday. By ancient and venerable tradition, she got to pick the Honored Activity.

Being both Tiny, and Dynamic, she chose to haul our asses up the side of a damn mountain.

I'm not out of shape (certainly not for someone who remembers steam-powered zeppelins), but when my most recent brithday rolled around, my choice of Honored Activity involved a well-made coffee and a big slab of cheesecake. A visit to a bookstore followed.

There were inducements. At the top of the ridge sat a volcanic-stone camping shelter abandoned in the 1920's and only recently renovated. It sits in a desolate place, and no roads reach it.

Damn it, I wanted to see that hut.

It started out sweet and lovely. A pleasant lark on a summer's day. We passed over sunlit pastures and sparkling streams. It was a little bit uphill, but then, I knew it would be a climb, right?

Then the climb began in earnest. The land slanted up, and further up. The wind stopped, and the sun beat down on the land. Everywhere I stepped, I hit sheep shit.

I slogged on.

Here and there we came across a tree. Those lovely bits of shade, those chances to look out over what I'd done kept me going. Sometimes, the view up the trail ahead made me despair.

A couple times, I gave serious thought to giving up. Just turn and go back down. But, one does not draw so beguiling and wondrous a creature as the Tiny Dynamo to one's side by being faint-hearted, cowardly, or giving anything less than one's best. Giving up simply was not an option.

Besides, I wanted to see that damn shelter. I wanted to see how the walk ended.

And just when I was thoroughly shattered and wondering if I really could walk until I collapsed (again), a roofline came into view. A surge of energy ran through me, and the pack I carried didn't seem so heavy.

The surge to the end was quick. The view from the top was incredible. I was up in the clouds, on top of the world.

It was totally worth it. And on the trip back down, the walk up didn't seem like it'd been that bad.

It struck me then. This was *so* like writing a novel.

***

Except now I can't quit thinking about the axe on the chain...

Feeling Pregnant

26,500 words

Not a bad day's work, but there's a lot of flailing in there. In fact, if I look at the last book, I wrote 140,000 words and pared down to 85,000. Agent Anne wanted to see more of the soft side of my protagonists, so that brought the count back up to 90,000. In a way, I could still be twenty-odd thousand words away from anything usable!

Except it doesn't work that way. Not exactly. We'll see how much of these early days makes it in, though...

Feeling pregnant. Yes, indeed. Heavy. Full. Like something big's about to come out of an opening too small. And like I'm going to get more and more uncomfortable until this whatever-it-is comes out.

It's that feeling I get when the story's about to take one of its sudden left turns. And I think it might have to do with my villain. Right now, he's just too nice a guy. And there's stuff missing. What stuff? I don't know.... stuff!

John Ramsey Miller hates this seat-of-the-pants way of working. Elmore Leonard likes it. All I can say is, I've tried to work with outlines. Really, I have.

An outline is part of the reason Poison Door took 140,000 words. I had an outline, character sketches, all that stuff. But all the fun of discovery got used up in the outline. Sitting down to write the book, I got thirty thousand words in before everyone turned wooden. Then balky. Characters kept doing things I didn't want them to do. I started feeling heavy. Full. Uncomfortable.

I threw everything out and started over. Same names, close to the same premise. Totally different story. It flew.

Until the next time I started to feel heavy. And full. And really, really uncomfortable.

I pity the Tiny Dynamo at these times. I'm not the best company, whether or not I've got the keyboard in my lap. BUt I've learned to recognize the signals. The story is about to tell me something exciting...

Midnight in Gethsemane

status: 16,200 words (lost time made up for)

Doubt seems to be the topic going around. No wonder. The work is mentally and emotionally grueling, the rewards scant or nonexistent, and to friends and loved ones it looks like we're just sitting on our asses. On a bad day, this path can look long and cold and lonely and hard: forever uphill under a stormy sky, paved with the bones of seekers who failed before you and the painful knowledge that you were a fool to even try.

When it gets that bad, read the last two words of my blog title. Then sit down and write.

To keep it from getting that bad, here are a few mental tricks I've used to keep the demons from my door. Just little things I tell myself when doubt wants to nibble at the edges.

1. Doubt is a liar. One thing I notice reading biographies is how many truly great people went through periods of intense doubt and self-examination. Sometimes while in the middle of their best work.

2. Doubt is part of any process. It's the flip side of ambition. Everyone hoping to achieve anything worthwhile will spend a few long dark nights in Gethsemane.

3. Doubt might be right. This is a great way to keep it from gnawing deeper until it hits bone. Admit your doubts might (*might*) be valid. I do this to ways. One is almost a mantra for me, has been since I was a little shaver with a sketchbook and a dream.

I may not be the most talented, but no one will work harder.

Because the fact is, hard work will often take you places where lazy talents will never reach. And hard work *with* talent. Sky's the limit. I can't control my talent (and don't always believe I have any), but I can control my work.

The other tool is my deadline. I'm going to write ten novels. (This one is number four.) If I can't get published in ten novels, I'm out. I'll write for fun, and keep up the good work with the graphic novels (where my scribbling makes up for any soft spots in the words), but that's it.

Of course, I got the fantastic Agent Anne with number three, and she's pretty sure POISON DOOR has what it takes. But if she's wrong, the new book's coming.

And lastly...

4. Can you come back later? I'm busy writing just now.

That one's my favorite.