Talk Thursday: We're Not In Kansas.

The praying hands sculpture
outside Oral Roberts University. Eesh.

And we're not in Dallas, either.  Or we weren't for the weekend, anyway.  I was supposed to go up to Tulsa to be in an outdoor swim race, using the term "race" as loosely a possible.  I mean, you've seen Michael Phelps.  And you've seen me.  And you know I look about as much like Michael Phelps as Paul Ryan looks like Heidi Klum.  So when I say "race," here, I'm talking about "making it to the finish line under my own power," as opposed to, say, "being hauled along by a guy in a canoe while somebody calls 911."  Extra bonus points if I manage not to be last.  But about three days before I was supposed to leave, I realized this whole "race" thing wasn't going to happen.  I was having knee issues and fear-of-sunburn issues and if-I-have-to-swim-this-thing-in-the-burqini-I'm-going-to-be-even-slower-than-the-slowest-one-there.  So I quit.  Bailed on the race.  Said to hell with it and drove up to Tulsa with no intentions whatever of jumping into a lake.

So what did I do instead, you ask.  Well, I had dinner with an old friend.  

If you've been following me around for long enough, you might remember my somewhat ill-fated trip to New Orleans for the Pen to Press Writer's Retreat.  While I was there, I met somebody in one of those I've-known-you-my-whole-life sorts of ways.  His name's Rhett, and he lives in Tulsa with his wife and extended family.  We were going to have dinner anyway, back when I was swimming in the race, but, yeah.  I drove 500 miles round trip to have dinner with Rhett.  And you know what?  I felt a lot better for having done it.  

Let's face it, I haven't been having an easy time of it the last, oh, six or eight months.  It's gotten bad enough that I've had to See Somebody about it, and up until I got back from Tulsa I didn't have much hope of things ever improving.  I feel different now.  Well, kind of like things might improve after all, even if they haven't, yet, exactly.  The most important thing Rhett told me is that I have to keep going.  I can't stop mid-novel and just not pick it up again because it's, you know, gotten all difficult on me.  Nor can I stop pimping the one I've already finished to everyone and God.  I've only sent it out to about 107 people.  That means there's 6,999,999,893 people I haven't sent it to yet.  My God, I really have to get moving.  That's a serious lot of emails.  

Speaking of Seeing Somebody, the New Guy said something to me the other day that just about knocked my socks off.  I was describing my fits of anxiety with writing query letters, which, just incidentally, were bad enough a few years ago (when I still drank) that I had to get drunk to write them.  He said he wouldn't be too surprised if a lot of writers had problems with query letters.  There might be a question of degree, what with needing Scaley and Fang framed in my kitchen and so on, but seriously, what I'm trying to do (he said) is very hard.  Writers are superstitious creatures.  Probably most of them have some sort of query-letter ritual they go through when they send one of those horrible things to somebody who might or might not read more than the first six words.

Again, I had to hold on to my socks.  Seriously?  Not only am I consumed by anxiety, but I'm not even unique?  Holy cats. I don't even know what to do with that.  Except to keep going.  To keep going is easier than stopping.  If you don't know that, you've never driven back from Tulsa to Dallas on a Sunday afternoon in a beat-up '98 Corolla.  

Yep, I came full circle on that one.  Without stopping at the Choctaw casino, even.  

Talk Thursday: So Here's Where I'm At.

I'm at Afrah.  No, I'm just kidding.  Well, I am at Afrah, but I'm almost always at Afrah when I'm writing these things.  Something about Mediterranean food is conducive to column-writing.  To say nothing of free wi-fi.  Currently snarfing down an akkawi pie with fried kibbe and wondering how life could get any better.  Well, I mean apart from everything I'm about to tell you, which is kind of sucky.  Into every life some suckiness must fall.  Some things are just more sucky than others.

To begin with, I crossed over onto page 101 this morning in my slow-but-steady work-in-progress.  This is a milestone, to be sure.  Your Average Novel turns out to be between 400 and 500 typed pages, so 100 pages is one-quarter of the way there.  Or one-fifth.  If I like actually took more time to work on it, I'm sure it'd be moving along faster.  Right now it's getting squeezed in between getting up in the morning and hitting the pool, which is not a lot of time.  But it is moving.  It still hasn't told me what in hell it wants to be about, which I'd really liked to have figured out by now, but maybe it'll get to that before page 200.

(I might also add, I got stuck for a few days.  My protagonist was attending a funeral and as he was sneaking out the back--since he wasn't supposed to be there in the first place--somebody put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Your Honor." [My protagonist is a judge.]  I was three days figuring out whose hand it was.  I think I pulled it off, but, you know, time went by.)

So there's that, and then there's query letters.  I've also passed 100 query letters for Mindbender, which, to quote Wayne from Wayne's World, "is both bogus and sad."  Now this was interesting: No. 100 was actually a lot harder than 101, 102, 103 and the happy-go-lucky ones that followed.  Something about the symbology of those double zeroes.  100 pages, 100 letters.  It's annoyingly close to looking for a job when you don't have one.

Okay, nobody said this was going to be easy.  And Stephen King wrote six thousand query letters while he and his wife lived in an unheated trailer in Edinburgh in the winter and he wrote the first six Harry Potter books on scraps of construction paper he got from his job at an industrial laundry or something like that. But still.  At some point you start asking yourself if you've written something that's basically unpublishable.  Should you give up and write something else?  Or would that be quitting?

I'm not gonna answer that, mainly because I have no idea.  It probably wouldn't hurt to be pushing two, maybe three projects at a time.  Let's hear it for tracking software, otherwise I don't know how I'd do it.  I'm not sure how I do it even with tracking software.  I can say, though, that since that drawing came into my house, Scaley and Fang are doing a great job of not bothering me.  I attribute part of that to my big cat, Caesar, also.  His job around the house is to keep dinosaurs out of the kitchen.  He's very good at it.  Even when he's napping on the job, you won't see a dinosaur for miles.

Luckily, I have a Team.  Well, more of a Committee.  That's the gang of folks that makes your life easier, whether they know it or not.  Head of the Committee is Joan, of course.  Rhett, my friend from the writer's workshop in New Orleans, is a close second; he sent me the nicest email when I started complaining about Query Letter 100, and then told me to shut up and get back to work.  Then there's Tammy and Tracy and perpetual dinners out, wherever they may be, and everybody at my office who makes the rest of my day halfway normal.  (I need halfway normal.  I am never, ever going to quit my day job to write full time.  It is just never going to happen.  I need the normalness of an office.  It's like heroin.  I also need health insurance.)  And then there's my writer's group.  That chummy bunch of like minded folks who--

--uh, haven't met in three months.  In fact, it may have been longer than that.  According to my BlackBerry calendar, it might have been as long ago as January.

Scheduling conflicts.  Big church holidays.  Work getting in the way.  You know how it is.

So here's what I did.

I cheated on my writer's group.

Yep.  I went and hung out with a bunch of other writers.  And amongst the group I met one guy that would be awesome to have in a writer's group.  I emailed him and told him I was interested.  He hasn't written me back yet.  Don't know if he will or not.  But really, that would be awesome.

Anyway, that's where I'm at.  Smacking up against 100, committing literary adultery with a bunch of total strangers, and not so incidentally about to turn 43 in a couple weeks.  Oh, and at Afrah.  And since this was not an Official Talk Thursday Topic, I'll probably be cranking out another column here in the next couple of days.  Maybe I'll tell you all about the new roof, water heater, plastering work and paint in our library.  I hope so, anyway.  Because I've been waiting a long bloody time for items two through four, and really, I'm ready to have them installed any day now.

Talk Thursday: How To Avoid Doing Laundry

You know, sometimes I get tired. (Imagine. Six and a half hours of sleep on an average night and sometimes she gets tired.) Seriously, I haul myself up to the keyboard every morning--well, most mornings--and I try to at least churn out a paragraph or two of whatever the fuck I'm working on--and don't ask me what that is, it changes frequently. I also try to crank out at least one query letter, if only to prove to Scaley and Fang that all their freaking out at the drop of a hat, or a sock, has been so much wasted energy and I have no intention of giving up. Then I get up, go to work, and ponder on the drive there why I'm trying to impress cartoon dinosaurs and whether or not I should give up.

Look, I'm not going into a full-on whine here, but this isn't easy, what I'm doing. Try it sometime and you'll see. It's kind of like looking for a job when you're unemployed, with the added bonus that it won't pay anything. Well, not for a long time, anyway. I have to admit that so far everybody's been very nice. I keep waiting for that reply that says quit wasting my time, you illiterate moron, but it hasn't shown up yet. Instead they typically say, I'm afraid I'm going to have to pass on this project, but thank you for thinking of me, which, I guess, is supposed to make me feel better. Um, it doesn't. Just in case you were wondering.

Anyway, when query letters get old, there's always laundry. Today's Talk Thursday topic is about laundry, which is pretty funny if you know the division of labor in our household. It's very simple: I do laundry, Joan does grocery shopping. Reason: I cannot stand grocery shopping. When Joan had a hysterectomy and couldn't leave the house for six weeks, we almost starved to death (or maybe cholesteraled ourselves to death; there were a lot of pizzas ordered) because I didn't want to do grocery shopping. I finally dragged myself to the grocery store that we referred to as the Dysfunctional Ralph's, where I promptly had a meltdown in the pasta aisle because there were too many different kinds of rotini. Seriously, there were about 47 different kinds. Who needs that many different kinds of rotini? The manager had to come over and talk to me. It was a little embarrassing.

By contrast, laundry: Sort, wash, dry, fold, put away. Simple. I'd much rather do laundry than grocery shopping. So the best way to avoid doing laundry is to marry me, but unfortunately you're too late there. I'm a wild'n'crazy kinda gal, but a polygamist I'm not.

Technically speaking, I should be throwing in a load of laundry every night after work, so that when the weekend rolls around, there's only sheets and towels to take care of. In real life it rarely goes that well. Half the time I'm lucky to remember to clean the cat boxes (which are in the laundry room), never mind do the laundry. I guess you could say I'm avoiding the laundry, but at least in part I'm shying away from baby-sitting the washing machine. Its automatic balancer went on the fritz about a year ago, and ever since then it sometimes gets off balance during the spin cycle and goes whappita whappita whappita at top volume until somebody runs downstairs and fixes it. This is supremely annoying, especially when all you have to do to balance the silly thing is like move a sock or something about three inches. Eesh.

When it's sunny out, and not too cold, I like to hang sheets outside. Joan says it makes them smell like sunshine. It also saves dryer electricity. I'm not kidding, when I started hanging laundry outside our summer electric bill dropped by about half. Not only are you saving the electricity that runs the dryer, you're also saving the air conditioner from having to cool the house back down after the dryer's been running. Plus, I think hanging clothes outside annoys my idiot neighbor. Added side bonus. (Says the Buddhist.)

So that doesn't really tell you anything at all about avoiding laundry. It does, however, tell you how to avoid query letters. Laundry, after all, has to be done at certain times. (Emergency panty loads come to mind.) Query letters, on the other hand, can be put off indefinitely. Or at least until you start feeling guilty about not writing them, which for me never takes very long.