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The lovely Carol Burnside presented me with this award on Monday because– well, maybe because I was somebody she knew with a blog who hadn’t received it yet. I’m not sure what it’s an award for. Oh, I know!

It’s for Being a Great Person! (If I present it to you, you can make up your own reason for receiving the award–or you can use mine.)

The conditions that come with this award are that I must tell you seven things about myself that you may not know, and I must send it on to seven more people.

So, without further ado, here are my seven things.

1. I am an oldest child, and despite my disorganized nature, have a tendency to want to organize others.
2. I have two-toned eyes. Really. Yellow in the middle, and blue around the edges.
3. I am BONE lazy. Alas. My ideal day would be sitting around, reading books all blessed day long.
4. I wrote my thesis for my master’s degree in history on Baptist missions in China from 1911 to 1945. Really.
5. I sing alto. I really prefer singing the harmony, and not just because I can’t hit those high notes.
6. I once had the Hallelujah Chorus memorized. (Alas, no longer.)
7. I played the flute (not very well) in marching band from junior high through college. (I mimed the piccolo part on Stars & Stripes Forever.)

Now, who shall I present with this lovely award??? I am presenting it to you because you are ALL Great People!!

1. C.E. Murphy (of Urban Shaman fame) at the essential kit.
2. April at In The Face of Dragons (like she needs more to do)
3. Kristen Ethridge, my Baylor Buddy
4. Robin D. Owens the Rita Award winner and Book Cover award winner (Congratulations!!)
5. Nalini Singh, of the new Guild Hunter books and the wonderful Psy-Shifter stories. (I love to say “I knew ya when.”)
6. The fascinating Arwen Lynch at her blog Tarot by Arwen
7. Anne Marie Novark who is hugely supportive to writers at Just Write!

(Feel free to ignore me, but it’s a nice picture to put on your blog.) (And hey! It’s an Award! For whatever you feel you need an award for!) (Also, if you can’t think of anything to blog about–which is not a problem for some of you, but sometimes is for me–this gives you something to blog about. Bonus!)

So. There it is. My award. And my awardees.

No, Mardi Gras did not cause my mania. That came from an entirely different source. But Mardi Gras was a whole lot of fun.

Last weekend was the first weekend of Mardi Gras. Galveston celebrates it too, on a scale commensurate with a town only 1/4 the size of New Orleans. There were three parades along Seawall on Saturday, one at noon, one at 3 p.m. and one at 6 p.m. I was going to ride with the fella in a convertable in the noon parade and toss stuff for the college, but the convertable owner/driver busted up her right foot recently enough that the doctor wouldn’t let her drive (Maybe just the night before.) I didn’t think there would be room for me on the float (besides I would have had to stand up), so I sent him off to fling beads on his own, and walked down to Seawall with the boy. (The picture is of the arch downtown, at one of the downtown parades. They’re next weekend.)

One of his friends had set up a flatbed trailer in front of the grocery store, with a grill, and he and his family were grilling all sorts of things. Chicken, venison-cheese-jalapeno sausage (Yum!), brisket, ribs, boudin–you name it, they were cooking that stuff on that grill. Ate a sausage and a chicken leg, hollered for beads during the Aquarius krewe parade, got sunburned, then walked back to the house. At 6, some more of the son’s friends showed up–for the parking. Our house is closer to the seawall parades than a lot of people have to park. So we all walked back up to the grill trailer to watch the Gambrinus parade. Including Dolly the granddog. She was very good for the parade. The Budweiser Clydesdales fascinated her. The drums in the bands scared her, the first few of them. She ate lots of rib bones and snackies, (I had another half-sausage & a Mojito cooler) and she met a dog that looked almost exactly like her. The other dog had the same shade of brindle coat, same white face, same patch over the left eye–the main differences were that the other dog is 11 years old, and Dolly is 3, Dolly is a little bigger and heftier, and she has a white tip on her tail.

I scored some good beads. The fella threw me a string with harlequin jester heads, and never saw me waving at him. But he got me good beads anyway. And I got a strand of beads with beer mugs on them that night.

Then the next day I was packing up to travel to check on the Alzheimery parents, and got a phone call from my mom that my dad was in the hospital. So I hurried up to get here–He’s home again now. He caught a stomach bug that he needed an IV to recover from. It’s been pretty hectic. Haven’t been able to write, for taking care of folks. But things just worked out okay. Now to get all their tax stuff together…still missing a couple of 1099s. Sigh.

If you’ve got ten minutes, you can write a book. Ten minutes at a time. (You will need lots of ten minuteses, depending on how long a book you are writing.)

Okay, maybe not you, and definitely not me–but it is possible. There are those who are able to write in 10-minute increments. Then there are the people like me.

It takes me a while to get into the story. I need to re-read what I wrote yesterday, so I can remember where I was and what the dominant mood was for this particular scene. I need to have my Coke Zero (preferably Vanilla), and my pen, and the right number of sheets of paper. Then I need to have at least an hour of uninterrupted time to accomplish much in the way of writing.

Some days I can write 2 pages in that time. Some days, I can get 3 or 4. If I have another hour after that, I can get even more done. (My handwritten pages usually translate to 1.5 typed pages–on average.)

Thing is, those ten minute “power bursts” can still help me get the writing done, even if I can’t actually write much of anything in ten minutes.

I don’t know about you, but lots of us who are working as writers have lots of other, non-writing stuff we have to deal with. It’s that other stuff that usually leaves me overwhelmed and stressed out. But I can take a ten-minute break when I’ve been sitting so long at the writing that my knees are whining at me, and go pull a load of laundry out of the dryer. I can take ten minutes and call my dentist for an appointment, or call the parents and make arrangements to come see them. The dentist’s visit will take more than ten minutes (alas), but once the appointment’s made, it somehow ceases to hang over my head as Something I Have To Take Care Of.

I can even group all that stuff together and make myself do it in my less-productive writing time (afternoons, I tend to fall asleep over the writing) in order to free up my more productive hours for the Real Work. I got really good at grouping errands when I lived up in the panhandle, and had to drive 60 miles just to go to Target, or the cleaners. Now that I live in lovely Galveston (we have a Wal-Mart AND a Target! On This side of the Causeway!), I group visits downtown to the post office and library, and maybe even have lunch on The Strand. I save trips off the island till I have more than one reason to go. And I try my very best to protect my good writing time.

When I was talking to a friend about taking a leave of absence from the dayjob to finish my book due last fall, she scoffed and said “Do you really think you’ll use that time to write?” I told her, “No, but I can use that time to do all the other stuff that eats away at my writing time.” My dayjob was only part time, but I spent an awful lot of my best writing time doing things like getting my hair cut and teeth cleaned.

So, even if you know a technique someone recommends won’t work for you–see if you can turn it inside out. Maybe it will work another way.

Try a 10-minute burst of work–whether writing, or that other stuff. See which way it might work for you.

I had a doozy. I tend to have rather standard dreams–like the one where you signed up for a class in college and somehow never managed to go, and now it’s the final… Or the one where I’m walking to class and realize I’m still in my pajamas.

However, this one was REALLY weird. I blame it on my New Dog Fever.

I was teaching–either substituting or doing some kind of presentation in a class at a high school. (I do not teach high school, and never have.) I was on the third floor of this high school, which was build with wide balconies around an atrium, and the dog had apparently come to school with me, but stayed outside. Mostly, the dog was Dolly the granddog, but sometimes she morphed into Pretty, the other granddog (that doesn’t live with me), and for a while there, we had two dogs. Anyway, That was just the set up to the dream.

The actual dream–the dog got into the school, and climbed up to the third floor to find me. I came out of the class, thinking “Oh, no. I have to get this dog out of the school without anybody knowing it’s MY dog, and without her causing too much disruption.”

But when I came out onto the big balcony, the dogs (there were 2 at this point) were barking. At A COW. On the third floor of this school.

The cow was apparently supposed to be there. In the hall, on the third floor. It was on a leash, and a student was leading it. The dogs were not supposed to be there barking at the cow. (There may have been another animal, but my vision was pretty much locked on the Cow. And the dogs.) I called, without using Dolly’s name, hoping she would come to me and I could act like she wasn’t really my dog (she’s not, after all)–you know, the “come here, puppy,” and making kissy noises. She came, and I started walking away, around the balcony, and she followed, jumping up and licking my fingers and such.

Here, things got a bit muddled into the height dream (walking across very high dangerous places without a railing) and getting out of the school–but that was basically my dream. Dogs at school, and a COW.

I know. It must be part of the vivid imagination thing. (I dreamed a couple weeks ago that we were house sitting for Michael Jackson–he hadn’t died, apparently, and was living just down the street from us…) Dunno. (When we first met Michael Jackson, he was wearing a dress, much like the one Kiefer Sutherland wore on the Late Night show…) Maybe it just means that I’m warped. Sadly, deeply, warped.

This is the time of year the media tend to talk a lot about New Year’s Resolutions, because (duh) it’s the beginning of a New Year. I’m beginning to think that more people don’t make resolutions than do make them, because most seem to feel that making resolutions simply sets them up to fail.

I agree with the anti-resolution people. I mean, just think about the word. It has the same root as “resolute” which means (wait, let me look up an official definition) “Determined; set in purpose or opinion,” or alternately: “characterized by firmness and determination, as the temper, spirit, actions.” Anybody who knows me knows that while I might be determined, my determination is pretty soft and flabby. I intend to do the things I’ve resolved, but too often I just don’t get around to it. I get sidetracked. Or I forget. Any number of things can happen.

That’s why I set goals instead. Goals are targets to aim for. If I miss, the target isn’t irretrievably broken. It’s still there, ready to be aimed at, waiting for me to get around to reaching it. Somehow, it’s easier not to beat myself up for not reaching a goal just yet than it is for breaking a resolution. (Again, look at the words. You Break a resolution. You just miss the goal.) (Okay, missing isn’t good, but it’s not as permanent-sounding as breakage.)

Setting goals fits right in with the lists I make every day of my life. I’m low tech (as seen by my writing first drafts in longhand…), so I have a little 4X6 fat spiral notebook, and each page is a new day’s list. On that page, I write down all the stuff I a) Have to get done that day and b) Hope to get done that day.

I don’t always get everything done, except for those things like doctor and haircut appointments, but that’s okay. I just move them to the next day and try again. Of course, if they’ve been moved to the next day for, say, a week or so, I start drawing giant arrows at them and putting exclamation points after them. And then I usually remember to get them done. These are items like “Call your sister.” Or “Mend beaded purse.” Because if it’s not written down, I often forget that I intended to do it. I have that type of mind that thinks “If I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.” And sometimes, if I see a thing too often (like that beaded purse), it stops registering.

Anyway, my daily list has evolved. As part of a “career plan” class I took a while back, I have started setting all sorts of goals. See, you can’t achieve the career you want if you don’t know what it is you want, and if you don’t know how you’re going to get there. So apparently career planners are real big on setting goals.

I start with the Yearly goals. These are broad, generic goals. Things like “Finish mainstream historical novel” or “Travel more.” Then I set some quarterly goals. Here, I get much more specific.

I look at each of my broad annual goals and think of what the next step is. In Goal #1 (finishing that novel), I need to get pages written. But I also have a goal of getting a new book contract. And I have a partial almost ready to submit. So that goes at the top of the list. “Revise chapters, write synopsis & submit by 1/15/10.” It’s specific, concrete, and it has a time limit. One I think I can make. Then for Goal #1, my quarterly goal is to “Write 150 pp. of novel by 2/28/10.” That one could be a bit of a push, but that’s good for me. Pushing. And because I need to leave things flexible, I have a goal of continuing to write on the novel through March if I don’t have anything else I need to do. Then I set a goal for each of the other annual objectives. Some goals fit more than one annual thing–like going on a trip with the fella works both for the “travel more” goal and the “spend quality time with family” goal. (At least I would Hope it would be quality time.)

But wait! There’s more! Now, I set weekly goals. Stuff I want to get done this week. Those goals fit within the quarterly goals, but are broken down further. Like, before I can get this synopsis written, I have to clean off the top of my desk, so that’s a big goal for this week (and has been on my daily list 3 days this week).

Then, to help keep myself on track, I have two goal coach partners. We’re Internet acquaintances/friends who have agreed to e-mail each other once a week with our goals, and how we did on last week’s goals, and encourage each other and sometimes nag. I had already started working on my goals for this year, quarter and week when one of the others sent a “Let’s get back on track” e-mail this week. (We all sorta fell off the wagon during the holidays.)

I tend to make one big long list, with the more important things at the top, and the lower priority ones at the bottom, and if I don’t get something done, I don’t sweat it too much. One of our partners makes a very short list, with only her writing chores, or maybe the Really Big life goals on it. And the third likes to categorize her list with Priority 1 and Priority 2 and If There’s Any Time Left groupings, because if they’re all on the same list, she feels equally bad for missing any of them, even if they’re not so important. (I told you my “determination” was soft and flabby. Sorta like my arms. Or any other part of me… I don’t sweat much of anything–even getting to doctor appointments so late, they make me come back another time.) (Yes, I have done that.) So, see–you can adjust the process to Work For You.

I write everything down, because if I can see it, I’m more likely to remember what I wanted to do. I also Really enjoy marking things off my list. I will write things on my list (especially the daily one) just so I can mark them off. I feel like I have accomplished something. Because I have.

So there you have it. The forgetful procrastinator who is easily sidetracked person’s plan for getting things (like writing books) done.

No, I’m not writing yet. But it IS possible to see the top of my desk.

Ian would get me if I capitalized anything but the first word in that title. He’s the (English) editor I work with at my mini-p.t. dayjob at the newspaper, and I spend a great deal of time knocking down capitalization before I send stuff to him. So I will try not to overcapitalize out in the world of blogging as well. (By English, I mean that he is from England. Not that he edits English, which he does but…oh, never mind.)

My last blog was about writing stuff, and I’d like to have readers read this blog too, and since I am also a reader (Big Time), I thought I would write about something related to reading. Then I thought I might write about the books I read recently. Except…

While I liked those books, a lot, and read them both on the same day (stayed up too late to finish the second one), I did have some quibbles about them. (I’ve read one of them a second time already.) And I’ve found that when I talk about quibbles, they seem to overpower the fact that I really did enjoy the books, and my discussion winds up saying that I didn’t. But I did. So, this time, since I want to talk about the quibbles, I’m not going to name the books. You might be able to figure out what they are, but I’m not going to mention the titles. Because, really. I liked the books. I enjoyed reading them.

So, here are my quibbles. The book I read first is book 7 or 8 (I haven’t counted) in an ongoing fantasy series. It is one of my favorite series, I own all the books, and have them in hardback. As said, I liked this book–but it’s not one of the better ones in the series.

A lot of writers talk about how–now that they are writers, it’s hard for them to read a book as a reader. I don’t generally have that problem, and I think it’s at least partly because I read so fast. (See above, read both these books in one day.) My process, I read the book, then I have to think about it, and decide why it pushed whichever buttons it pushed. Why it grabbed me by the throat, or felt more like an intellectual exercise (though I can usually figure that one out while it’s happening). So after I finished this book, I thought about why it seemed to be a “second tier” book (as compared to the top-tier books in the series).

I think it’s because the whole book felt like a transition. You know those scenes in books that are put in to indicate what’s happening while time passes? There were a pazillion characters in the book, but most of them didn’t really seem to have a purpose, not one that linked to this book. They kinda had a purpose to the whole overall series, but it wasn’t clear why they were in this one. There was an overarching plot–a mystery that had to be solved. But the mystery didn’t seem to link to the story arc of the series. It was just a mystery stuck in to give the book a sort of plot.

Now we may learn later that the mystery does link to the series story, but right now, it’s pretty much a subplot to the series–except that subplots are supposed to drive and link to the main plot. (See, the writer in me comes out when I think about the stories, after I’ve read them.) I kept waiting for the link, and it never came. And the things that did link to the series plot didn’t resolve, which was annoying. Like I said–the whole book felt like “Okay, meanwhile, back at the ranch, these people are doing this, these people are doing that, and remember this guy? Well he’s still around, and he’s doing this other thing. And we’re all waiting for the other shoe to fall.” And that’s what a transition is.

The other book I read is part of a universe, but it’s not part of a series. It begins a mini-series within the universe, I think, (it’s a science fiction novel–I will give you that much), but it’s not like “book 8 about these people with this plot.” It’s not quite a stand-alone, but it’s not really a book inside a series. My quibble about this book didn’t have anything to do with the plot or threads left dangling or story not connecting. It had to do with the conflict.

Writer/story people know immediately what I mean when I say conflict. Reader-type people may not. Conflict is the stuff that creates the actual story. A story is about characters–people–who have trouble and problems, and the story, the plotline, is what they do about those problems.

You can have quiet conflicts–like spouses struggling with their marriage–or you can have big, noisy conflicts–like bad guys trying to do you in. Even those noisy conflicts can be various levels of violence/noisiness. The bad guys might just try to drug you into compliance, or they might want to blow you up. Still, I think that storytellers need to push that conflict–that trouble, whatever kind it is–just as hard as they can push it. And this story didn’t. The conflict felt softened. Eased up on.

Even before I was published, I was telling my friends in my writers’ critique group to grab hold of the readers’ emotions and twist as hard as they could. (I even made wringing gestures with my hands.) I like conflict that goes all the way out there, that hurts and scares and makes me angry.

In this book, several times the author walked right up to the edge of the conflict, the really Bad trouble–and “headed it off at the pass.” It was kind of “Oh look, this awful thing might have happened to you–but these people rescued you and so it won’t happen now.” I wondered if they might have done it because the main character in this book is a child (a teen), and maybe they did–but they’ve pushed the conflict closer to the edge with other young characters. And the book is not marketed as a YA, and YA books have Really Awful things happen to their characters.

In one of my very favorite books, The Queen of Attolia, the author, Megan Whalen Turner, lets the main character get his Hand Cut OFF!! (The story opens that way, so it’s not a spoiler.) And it is Marketed as a YA book. (Apparently a new book in this universe will be out soon. Can’t wait!)

So, I don’t know why the author eased up on the conflict. I still liked the book, but I didn’t like that easing off, that softening up. I want to see the protagonists really have to fight to achieve their goals, and when the author lets them off easy like that, I miss the emotional impact that struggle will give.

And what have I learned from reading these books? 1. If I ever do write a series with continuing characters and an overarching series story line, I will make sure the individual book plots support that overarching series plot. 2. Also, I will not have so freakin’ many characters. I have written books with as many as nine (9!) POV characters. Nine is not too many, but it’s pretty much my upper limit. (Yes, this story had More than that.) 3. I will not soften, or hold back the conflict. I will not “be nice” to my characters. I will put their hearts in the wringer and twist until they weep, or scream, or whatever is in their character to do. And only then will I let up and let them win. (Hmm. Did I do that in the last book? Will have to go back & make sure.)

So there. Have you learned anything from a book lately? What was it? (It doesn’t have to be about writing. It can be anything. Like–I learned from Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man that women have power and they give up way too much of it. But that’s a blog post for another day.)

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