)O( Tea Witch's Musings )O(

In her book for writers Reclaiming the Magic Lorna Tedder suggests that writers work on a Sunday book as a way to counteract stress and writer's block.  Last year I adopted the technique by starting a fantasy novel Sea Witch to write on Sundays.  I hadn't written fantasy in ages but I needed an occassional break from the intensity of plotting a mystery novel where all the elements have to connect up to a final "who dunnit."  Sea Witch is fun and I get to play at world building instead of clue planting.  But this has been one stressful month.  So instead of just working on Sea Witch on Sundays, I've found myself coming home to it each night and even working on it some at work.  Not that I've had any time for fun at work, but there were a few times where I needed to distance myself from the situation before I said something I shouldn't.  Today, Sunday, I felt the urge to get back to the third mystery novel  When the Ghost is Clear.   So Lorna's advice is right on target, except during particularly stressfull times, I need a month of Sundays.

Or too far back.  I love gardening and theme gardens.  I'm even thinking about a moon garden for the back corner near the bedroom window.  But tonight's theme garden on DIY seems to prove that it can be hard to keep coming up with themes for TV episodes.  The theme - a Jurassic garden.  Yes, jurassic as in dinosaurs.  The garden included ferns, a bog and even a t-rex skull.  No, not a real t-rex skull.  Umm, that would have made this theme more interesting.  I do have a shady area I plant ferns in.  Never thought of adding a dinosaur.  I wonder what the doggie monsters would make of a giant t-rex bone in their garden.  Hey, at least they wouldn't be able to drag the dirty thing into the house.

A member of the Sisters In Crime Guppy group was asked by a potential agent to decribe her writing career goals.  So we've all tried answering that question.  I think, well, should I give a BS answer that I might give to an agent or the real answer because my writing career goals have changed over time.  Oh, when I was in high school and college, I wanted to become a writer and earn my living writing fiction.  There was the Masters program where I thought it would be great to become a creative writing teacher at a college and write fiction when I wasn't teaching.  It took only a couple of semesters to realize everyone in the graduate writing program shared that goal and there weren't enough colleges to go around.  Things got a bit ugly during the "Teaching Creative Writing" class which was a combined English program and Education program class when the Education program students said they wanted to get jobs teaching creative writing at the college level, but didn't want to bother with the actual act of writing.  Forget genre writers versus literary writers.  Suddenly there was a unified front insisting that non-writers should not teach writing -- and take up those jobs we all wanted. 

But throughout all this, I had to earn a living, so I worked.  I picked up some webskills.  I got a couple of promotions.  Suddenly I was making more money in my corporate communication job than I was likely to make teaching creative writing at the local colleges.  No, this isn't a lot of money.  Most of the local colleges pay somewhere in the $20,000 range if you can even get a full-time job. Tenure is hard to come by.  I make more, have benefits and have been at my job long enough to get about as much vacation as a college professor.  I make much more than the average paperback writer does.  So, I no longer needed a writing career to be my full-time job. 

But I still love to write.  That's the key to writers.  We love to write.  We need to write.  I still want a writing career.  But my goals changed in the last few years.  They became  "I want to be published so I have a valid excuse to keep doing this."  Not money, not fame (okay, won't turn them down if they're offered), but just to be able to say "oh, I write" and not have the other person give me one of those condescending looks that striving writers so often get.  When they say "oh, what have you written?"  I want to be able to give them a list of books.  I want my characters to live and breathe.  My writing -- simply to be able to keep writing.

The reality of publishing the first book creeps a little closer.  I just finished editing the galley's for Tea and Witchery.  The only problems seems to be a formatting one where a paragraph break vanishes on occassion causing two lines of dialogue from separate characters to run together.  The first time it happened one of Patrick's lines of dialogue bumped up into Alex's dialogue.  It confused me because it's been a few months since I've seen the book and I kept thinking "why would I have had Alex say that?  It's way out of character."  Then the realization that the problem was a missing break which meant I knew what to keep an eye out for through the rest of the galleys.  Tomorrow I send the corrections back to the publisher, then the book should be on Fictionwise soon and in print about a month after that.  Of course all this means I need to fix the website and devote some time to marketing ideas and arranging book signings.  So do I work on the website today or work on writing book 3 When the Ghost is Clear?  Because tomorrow is back to the real job that pays the bills.

A question posed by one of the Sisters In Crime guppies after watching the American Idol auditions that showcase the worse of the worse - are there wannabe writers out that who are as bad as the American Idol auditioners?  Writers so bad that that all writing implements should be taken away from them?  Cringe-worthy writers?  Well, yes there are.  I've taught and worked with enough writing groups to have experienced a few.  No, I don't mean mediocre writers or beginning writers.  And I'm not talking about the difference between James Joyce and the average writer of popular fiction.  After all, most of us don't spend our weekends reading James Joyce.  No, I mean writers who prove writing isn't all subjective.  That there is a point when the work is wrong, oh, just so wrong.  (note: in all the examples below the students were adults with college degrees.)

Just the Facts, Please:  Yes, writing is about fiction and making things up.  But writers are expected to get certain existing facts correct.  Writer S. had a problem with that.  His main character was an Australian zoologist, though S. was neither Australian nor a zoologist.  This became apparent when his character spent the night out on the Australian plain observing the native rhinos.  The class explained that Africa and Australia are different continents.

 Too Much Star Trek - Writer L. ended his modern day novel in a scene where a nuclear reactor was blown up.  This included his character, who was sitting in the control room of the reactor, entering the "overload sequence" then turning to a colleague and stating "you have two minutes to get out of here before this blows."  They ran out as the reactor exploded, in exactly the way that nuclear reactors don't (but dynamite might).  The class explained that nuclear explosions were very big and that humans do not run at warp speed.

 But it really happened that way - a phrase most commonly heard by college students trying to turn a real life event into fiction.  A fairly common phase that doesn't normally faze me.  Writer P. was a middle-aged woman who used that phrase a lot.  But in this case we were a few chapters in to a story where her main character had fallen of a ship doing oceanography experiments, grabbed onto a giant sea turtle and been taken to a deserted island where she was in the process of discovering Atlantis.  Her response to any criticism was "but it really happened like that."   The class wasn't sure how to respond.

 But what about the average "wannabe" writer?  Well, frankly, the basic techniques of writing aren't that difficult to learn and use effectively.  It isn't really that hard to become a decent writer.  It does take work and practice, but the worst mistakes can be avoided by writing about subjects you are familiar with.  Unless you were abducted by a giant sea turtle and hauled off to Atlantis.  In that case, yes, truth really would be stranger than fiction.

It was my first semester teaching creative writing and we left the classroom after discussing Pat's first chapters.  A couple of other classes were ending, so the hall was crowded when Pat turned to me and said "so you think I need to kill him off sooner."  Traffic in the hallway stopped.  Pat continued on discussing the methods of "killing him off" completely unaware of the stares she was getting. 

Well, my own words are coming back to me, though fortunately the back garden isn't crowded with students.  I've been working on book 3 and realized that yes, I need to kill off my victim sooner.  I've been concentrating too much on the ghost hunting aspect of the story.  It's a fun aspect because when I send Patrick ghost hunting, he's going to find a ghost or two.  But I need to get the murder in there.  The problem at first was how to murder someone off and still have Patrick and his fellow students continue their ghost hunt.  I've solved that. The early murder means the students don't get to meet the victim first.  This doesn't affect the flow of the story.  That's always a sign that something can or should be changed - when what should be a major change doesn't affect the story line.  Things seem to be flowing better now, which is a sign that the change might help unplug the flow of the stuck parts of the storyline.  Well, back to writing.

I guess my winter muscles weren't ready for a weekend of moving plants.  Oh, not 4 inch pots of impatients or a few geraniums.  Nah, this is about the only time the sprawling climbing roses have been small enough for me to move and Hurricane Charlie left plenty of sunny fence for them to climb over.  So I dug up two roses, the big purple potter plant, the coral vine and cleared half the fountain.  I'm still fighting the papyrus in the fountain and the coral potter plant in the front bed.  Spent three days feeling very sore but the back garden is now at the point where I can plant pretty things instead of just digging up dead stuff. 

Last night was writing group night.  Got an Florida Writers update.  Acaysha won by just 3 votes.  There were four of us at writing group and all of us members of FWA.  None of us voted.  Not even L who I was sure was going to.   M would have been upset if she'd known because she assumes I'd vote for Dan and GOD not Acaysha and her Angels.  Funny, one of the judges for the FWA contest felt my mystery novel with its psychics, tarot card readers and Lisle, who channels angels, was not very believable.  WAKE UP - you just  elected a president who legally changed her name to one given to her by the angels who write her books. 

Sometimes I need a really bad and boring meeting to jump start my writing.  Trapped in one today I got some work done on chapter 5.  It was fun.  This is the reason writers should have Pocket PCs or Tablet PCs.  I can take mine to meetings and people think I'm taking notes or perhaps catching up on other work.  Okay, those who know me don't really think that, but it's a convenient excuse.  I may not get much actual writing done, but surprisingly good ideas creep into my brain when it's been lulled into a state of surrender by a boring meeting.

I set up the solar fountain again and I'm pleased with the results.  I bought the foutain over a year ago, and it's simply a solar panel with a cord leading to a small fountain pump.  It only works when it's sunny, but it can go almost anywhere.  I disconnected the solar panel and brought it inside for the hurricanes.  Well, I brought it in for Charlie and for awhile it seemed like it would never be safe to put it out again.  Then there was so much to clean up in the garden.  But it's a new year and I'm getting things back in shape.  So I set up the fountain.  I put it in the large green ceramic pot that someone at work tossed out since that pot doesn't have drainage holes.  That worked okay but it needed something.  So after some thought, I got the left-over gazing globe from the light that I bough at Walmart.  The light part doesn't work anymore, but the globe is a pretty glass swirled with blues and purples.  So I put it on another pot so it hovers partly above the green pot and then positioned the fountain nozzle so the water cascades over the globe.  I love the effect.  At first I didn't have enough nozzle pieces to make the water go up far enough to cover the globe but when I was clearing one of the planting beds I found another nozzle piece.  Hmm, garden fairies at work?