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If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.

—Mark Twain

I hate your aluminum spiderwebby window frames no one sees but me. Webs be damned, they let in wasps, delicate monsters sipping from glasses. I hate your pipes that offer water grudgingly and that one broken tile in the pantry. I hate the layers of paint in the kitchen defying removal, winning a war of attrition.

The plants in your yard mock me with their fecundity and shame me in their unruliness. They were garden once. The grapevine over the door discourages visitors but welcomes raccoons with succulent fruit.

House, your southeastern side resembles the shacks people abandoned in the Dust Bowl in search of a better Bakersfield. Your boards show too much weather; your bricks not enough. Jasmine and honeysuckle in overplus, but will it cover over your nakedness? Not enough, not enough.

The poorly executed addition you cast off like a failed transplant, every earthquake driving a wedge. How is anyone supposed to get writing done under a ceiling crack like that? Why, house, did you not fight back harder when unscrupulous contractors came to graft it on? Why do you fight me at every turn?

House, if you were someone else’s story I could fix you, edit and polish every little part until all that was unnecessary and nerve-jangling and cross-purposed was gone. All mouse holes closed, windows and walls as crisp as a fresh page. I could see the meaning and the verbs and rearrange them into history, into what happens now. I don’t know how to work with paint and chisels and wrenches. My tools don’t do much of anything to anything that is.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant should not apply to your roofline. Tell me a different truth than that one.

It’s true that you were once a whole and perfect structure, back in 1930-whatever. I was like that too, at birth. I am truly sorry for all the abuse you have endured and would undo it if I could. People occupied you carelessly, taking you for granted or trying to make you into what you are not. But that is no reason to invite water into your basement while miser-hoarding it from the showers. The peril of the stairs; that’s not fair.

I regret removing your gracious, outward-flung windows to keep my children from tumbling into the sky and blackberries and fennel, but I can’t put them back now. The children, they will get out one way or another, but flying is not the preferred way. Parents like doors.

The lathe and plaster, bone and flesh—it had to go, because it was rotten. That happens when you let the rain in for dozens of years. Sealed up in the walls we found relics: a jump rope, a doughnut in a paper bag with a handwritten receipt. What artifacts will we leave behind for the time-travelers to come?

Is there future tense for you, house? Will your end be fire or flood or greed? Or will you stand on, unseemly and shored up, wrong incoherent things hammered on, defying all attempts to make you clean and safe and curated? What is your long game? Do you shake us off—or issue a challenge? Is this a three-refusal kind of tale, a hero’s journey of tests and wrong turns? Do I eat the biggest frog and move on to the next and the next? If I fix you, will you let me work in peace?

freelance writing

The Real Freelancers of Contra Costa County

Updated on March 26, 2017March 4, 2016

Work from home? Tired of all those chirpy articles about how to maximize your productivity written by thought leaders and lifehackers? Read on.

So you might have noticed I have the Twitter now. (I know, I know—just pretend I live in some remote, picturesque nation where tech innovations, social media, and the hot new TV shows are not allowed.) Since I started tweeting, I’ve been getting dozens of links to articles about how to work from home effectively. Now, maybe you’re a freelance writer or editor who finds the advice in these articles helpful, and if so, that’s great. You can skip this post and get right back to prioritizing your to-do lists in your business-casual pants that probably don’t even have any cat fur on them.

For everyone else I have the following to offer, gleaned from many years of working at home and actually getting paid for it. Forget about keeping regular hours, dressing for success, and any other rules that make you wonder why these people bother working from home in the first place. The key to a successful freelance career is to find a routine that works for you and ignore the lifestyle fascists who want to shame you for it.

Take a shower every day

And then put on something you can wear in public without having to explain to everyone you meet that it’s laundry day. This won’t make you any more productive or organized, but it will increase your self-confidence if you have to open the door to sign for a package.

Breakfast is the most important meal

This is absolutely true, and it doesn’t matter what time you eat it or what it is, as long as it’s not beer. Alcohol for breakfast will seriously inhibit your page count; even Hemingway knew that.

Screen everything

Your phone, your email, your front door—breaks are essential, as I will discuss next, but they need to be on your schedule. Unless you’re expecting an important call/email/visitor, ignore everyone while you’re working.

Take breaks

Take a lot of them. You cannot give fair treatment to any manuscript if you’ve been staring at it for hours. Every ten pages, every chapter—whenever you come to a natural stopping point, stop. Get up out of your crouch and move around. You don’t have to go to the gym (you’re welcome), but you do have to reacquaint all the parts of your body with blood flow.

Enjoy some bonding time with the animals or plants in your home.

They will appreciate it, and so will you. Bonus points if you can do it outdoors.
Make a snack.

Nothing good to eat in the house? Take this opportunity to go shopping. You have to do it anyway, and the middle of the day is the best time to go because almost everyone else is at work.
Spend 20 minutes on household drudgery.

Almost every article about home-office productivity counsels against letting yourself get distracted by housework, but I say they are dead wrong. First—once more, with feeling—you have to do it anyway. Second, mindless, repetitive tasks like folding laundry, putting away dishes, or pulling weeds allow the creative part of your brain to roam free. A good writer never passes up an opportunity to daydream.
Catch up on electronic ephemera.

Now you can check all the email, tweets, and whatever else you’ve got going on, but watch your time, and don’t let anything derail your goal for the day. Did we talk about goals? Right, we didn’t, because your goal for the day is to get stuff done. If whatever you’re doing on social media or email will take you longer than 20 minutes and does not qualify as an emergency by adult standards, stop doing it. Because your goal for the day is not “Read all of the Internet, solve everyone’s personal drama, and cure ignorance.”

Switch rooms

Sure, I have an office. It’s that place where the printer and the hard-copy style manuals live. As far as the IRS is concerned, that is my place of business, but I don’t do any actual work there. Moving to another room can help you see your work with a fresh perspective, and not just because the sun was in your eyes in the kitchen.

Reward yourself

It’s how everyone from CEOs to SAHMs to those dogs that dig people out of earthquake rubble keep it together. Had a great day? You deserve a treat. Had a crap day? Yep. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, and you can use the 20-minute rule for rewards, too. Lately, I’ve been streaming episodes of Portlandia and 30 Rock (see previous statement about backward nation, three to five years behind on TV) to get me through some long projects. Regardless of your genre, you can learn just about everything you need to know about timing from talented comedy writers.

Whatever you use as a motivator, enjoy it. Give it the same guiltless focus you bring to your work, and when it’s done, get back to the salt mine.

A word about to-do lists

Use them if and however they work for you. Some love paper organizers with a near-pornographic intensity; others are happy with scratch paper. I like to keep lists on my phone and on the Sticky Notes program on my laptop. Something about not just crossing off completed tasks but deleting them like a cranky Cyberman appeals to me.

The lists can get you into trouble in two ways. One is if all your tasks are monumental or depend on someone else getting something done. Try to narrow the list to items that you can complete in one day. Break items down into reasonable, non-terrifying microtasks if necessary. The second is if you aren’t using the list as a focus for the day’s efforts but as a repository for memoranda. Put that stuff somewhere else, with the understanding that, if you have to write it on a list to remember not to forget about it, it’s probably not all that important.

Possibly the best part of working freelance from home is that you don’t have to behave the way you would in an office full of other people. Instead of wasting time trying to recreate the office environment at home, bring that energy and creativity to your work. Wear what you like, eat when you like, keep the volume level where you want it. And delete the bossy purveyors of lifehacks from your Twitter stream to make room for something useful, or at least fun.

cross-pollination writing

Everything You Need to Know about Success

on February 16, 2016February 16, 2016

…as explained by musicians on a red carpet

Last night, for entirely professional reasons, I was fact-checking quotations from people on the red carpet at the Grammys. Just for you, writers, I am repeating two of them here because I think you need to read them.

You have to make sure that you have a reason for why you do things. You can’t just do things just because you want people to know your name.

—Zendaya

Don’t know who Zendaya is? Me neither. Go look her up; it’ll help her hit count. The point is a solid one — if your sole goal in pursuing a writing career is to become famous, you have missed a turn somewhere. And if you are approaching any writing project with that intent and no other, it will fail.

Believe in yourself, and don’t let nobody throw you off your game.

—Timbaland

Yes. Listen to Timbaland. He knows. And he wrote a book, so he can stay the course in multiple genres. Also, the group of people you need to prevent from throwing you off your game, I’d like to add, includes yourself. So believe in yourself, but don’t listen when that self is telling you that you suck at this and should probably have just gone to law school like your mom and your college advisor suggested.

So why are you writing that thing that you’re writing (or thinking about writing, or taking just the teeniest little dance break from writing)? Figure it out. It will help. And then get it done, believing that it needs to exist as a completed work, and nothing can replace it, and no one can create it but you.

Need some visual affirmation too? Here you go.

If it feels like this

or this

you’re probably doing it right.

cross-pollination science writing

The Study of Here

on December 3, 2015December 3, 2015

or, How Setting Makes a Story

Editing a good dissertation is like auditing a class, and as a person who was deported from the land of academia for taking four years to obtain a two-year master’s degree, I love that. Last Thanksgiving I expressed my gratitude for the grad students who hire me to polish their dissertations. Not only do they provide an income stream, but they bring me new ideas, lofty academic stuff that I don’t run across in my day-to-day. Bonus: I get the best of the class without having to leave my house or listen to That Guy who monopolizes every discussion. You remember That Guy.

Anyway, this year’s student introduced me to Félix Guattari, Marxist poststructuralist psychoanalyst, and his three ecologies: those of mind, society, and environment. He’s involved with the deep ecology movement, but that’s not what I’m interested in right now. Reading this student’s research made me think about the importance of setting in any narrative.

Let’s break it down freshman style: ecology derives from the Greek roots oîkos, meaning “house,” and logía, “the study of.” It is the science of where we are now and how that affects us. Biology and environmentalism are generally where people go with that, but we can transfer the concept to storytelling.

Creator of Worlds

For me, the hallmark of a good story, fiction or nonfiction, told with print or film or stage, is that it creates a world that lingers in memory long after the story has come to an end. A key element of this world building is setting. One could argue, and I do, that setting is as important if not more so than characters. In a sense, it has to be a character in whatever narrative you are telling. The audience needs to understand its backstory, its traits, and why it reacts in predictable or unpredictable ways as events unfold.

To use a negative example, have you ever watched episodes from original Star Trek or early Doctor Who in which the characters are trapped in some featureless landscape or a tiny room? This may have been edgy in the 60s, but now it qualifies as blunt force trauma. It’s claustrophobic, tedious, and more or less unwatchable unless you’re a hardcore fan. This is what happens when you subtract a sense of place that is connected to an individual (mind), a group (society), and a physical location (environment).

How do I make my setting (and story) unforgettable?

So glad you asked! Setting needs to have a connection to character and events. You can’t just toss your characters into a primeval forest or an overgrown building in Chernobyl or an underground factory in a dystopian future or a ratty apartment in the Lower East Side in the 30s—not without knowing why they are there and why this is either the best or the worst possible place for these characters to be at this time. Note that last word, time. When is part of where. It gives dimension to setting.

Frequently characters arrive in a writer’s brain with their time and place fully intact. If not, you may need to chat with them for a while, observe them as you would strangers in a train station. What are they wearing, how do they speak? What do they carry? Urban, rural, wealthy, poor, from the past, from the future? Sheltered, worldly, street smart? Are they comfortable wherever they find themselves? Are they fish out of water no matter where they go? Do the distinct places from which two characters come create a conflict between them, a disconnect?

If you are working in the genre of fantasy, you have both immense freedom to invent ecologies and immense responsibility to create the perfect place for your story because the limits of our space and time don’t exist. Use your powers wisely, and don’t trap your characters in a box when you have the universe at your disposal.

A Little Bit of Not-Here

A final note on setting: no matter how bleak their current surroundings, characters must all carry some piece of sanctuary, some memory or talisman or dream of a better future to represent the hope they have of getting out of there. That idea or item signifying a better place creates contrast with the present; without it, the setting is flat and offers no connection to the audience or the characters. Just as you need ebb and flow in the steady rise of emotional engagement, there needs to be variety in setting. When you build your house, give your characters light and shadow to play in.

selling your work writing

A Good Problem to Have: Weighing Multiple Agent Offers

on September 14, 2015September 14, 2015

Looking for a literary agent? Ever wonder what might happen if more than one of the agents you queried wanted to represent your book? Hey, it could happen, and it did for today’s guest blogger, Mike Chen. Mike is a very talented writer of sci-fi and someone you will be hearing more about soon. Check out his website and drop him a tweet @mikechenwriter.

When I started querying my latest manuscript, my critique partners told me that this was THE ONE. I didn’t believe them. After all, there was no practical reason why this would work out for me. Surely it’d result in more disappointment and heartache, along with the consolation prize of “Well, at least I learned a bit about plot and character.”

I was wrong. And they were right. I thought I wouldn’t even get one offer. I got multiple agent offers.

After getting over the shock of “this is really happening,” a new question took over all of my thoughts: how could I possibly choose?

Never, ever, ever in my wildest dreams did I think I could get multiple offers. Not only did I have multiple offers, several of them were from my top tier of agents. Turning one of those down seemed like something universally wrong, like eating nachos without jalapeños.

But I had to pick. And I had committed to a one-week turnaround to figure this all out. Here are the steps I took to whittle down my choices. To whoever is reading this, I hope you have this dilemma as well. It’s a pretty great problem to have.

Step 1: Consider your long-term genre plans.

First, I thought about the long term. I write cross-genre stuff, essentially commercial stories in a sci-fi setting. That led me to withdraw from one agent who was still reading, as she was purely a commercial agent with no sci-fi background. Another agent had cross-genre experience, but his primary strength was in literary fiction. Again, no pure sci-fi in his repertoire, and I knew that at some points in my career, I planned to dip more into genre elements. That crossed that agent off my list.

Step 2: See if you get along.

That left me with only agents with strong sci-fi backgrounds. I interviewed all of them and felt like I got along with each of them, so I couldn’t cross any off based on them being a jerk! All had good sales records; all worked for reputable agencies.

Step 3: Weigh their feedback on your manuscript.

So I went deeper. I looked at the non-SF material they represented and read. More importantly, I considered the different feedback they provided. I like to think I keep an open mind to all feedback, and during interviews, I made a point to not question or get defensive with any of the feedback, even if it didn’t feel right.

For the most part, I agreed with each agent’s feedback, and there was a significant level of overlap among them. But there were a handful of moments that made me scratch my head or didn’t sit right with me. I wound up weighing all of the different feedback, considering what mattered more and what was essentially a lateral move from my original vision.

That whittled the list down to two agents.

Step 4: Find the right fit.

This is where background and preference came into play. Outside of SF, the first agent worked with romance and cozy mysteries—two genres I didn’t read and certainly didn’t plan on integrating into my writing. The second agent used to work at Quirk Books, which supported SF crossover work, and as a published writer, his biggest influence is Nick Hornby—the same writer that had the biggest influence on my work.

Taking that into account, I was able to make my decision—those few things gave the second agent the advantage. And after a few days of pondering my decision rather than thinking about my real-life responsibilities, I accepted an offer of representation from Eric Smith of PS Literary Agency.

Now that we’ve gotten deeper into revisions, I can see that this was truly the right choice. Eric’s notes provide smart feedback while demonstrating a clear understanding of what I’m trying to do by blending commercial and SF. The fact that we can also talk about video games and being Corgi owners is just a bonus.

Could I have found success with the other agents? Quite possibly. However, by carefully weeding through deeper factors, I was able to hitch my work to an agent who understands both my influences and my future aspirations. I couldn’t have asked for a better fit—and it took a lot of careful consideration to get there.

cross-pollination science writing

Chase the Words

on July 21, 2015July 21, 2015

It’s been busy around here, which is why I have neglected the blog. And then there was the annual vacation in early July, back from which I traditionally come inspired to break out of the money-driven confines and do some creative work. I do want to get to that, and also I have some things to say about some of the more esoteric, Talmudesque entries in the Chicago Manual of Style, but that is for another day.

Today, I want to consider the tardigrades, microscopic animals also known as water bears or moss piglets. These tiny critters have survived the five major extinction events in our planet’s history; they can withstand temperatures from close to freezing to higher than the boiling point of water. Atmospheric pressure six times greater than that at the bottom of deep ocean trenches, the vacuum of space, radiation lethal to humans—no problem; they can handle it. They can survive for ten years with no food or water and then get right back to the business of eating and reproducing as soon as they are rehydrated.

A testament to perseverance, yes, but when I heard about water bears, the first thing I thought of was not the gorgeous flexibility and tenacity of terrestrial life, but the poor grad students whose job it was to go into the lab every day and try to kill these little buggers. Science is a bitch, sometimes.

What would I know about it, you are no doubt asking. I sit around with a laptop all day reading books. Either the books are good, and I am entertained, or they are abysmal, and I enjoy a deep, satisfying schadenfreude over that. Well, no. (OK, there is a dark sort of joy in exposing and expunging ignorant usage, like “per say”—dude, I know.)

The task that has been wearing on me lately is the repeated exposure to mediocre manuscripts. They are of poor quality not simply because the writers lack vision or talent, but because they have got hold of some idea that all it takes to be an author are several thousand words strung together in a file and a few thousand dollars to PayPal off to a self-pub factory.

This is not a new idea, and people all over several industries have been decrying the self-pub revolution for ages. I don’t care about the dilution of literature so much; no one is reading this deluge of poor fiction, so it doesn’t matter. What concerns me is the attitude, the hubris, that makes fact-checking, revision, the numinous, and honest hard work seem irrelevant. It’s sweatshop work versus craftsmanship.

I recently watched a documentary about this guy, which was well done, but I was most impressed with his use of the phrase “chasing the music.” In music, as in writing, it’s not just daily practice that’s important, or even amassing a body of work, it’s the chasing—the relentless seeking after solutions, hunting the elusive, trying to take down the seemingly unkillable.

Want to write a book? Do it, I implore you. Put the sum of your experience and intelligence into it. Never stop chasing the images and characters in your head. Never give up, and by that I don’t mean the trite advice to push on past naysayers and doubt. When I say never give up, I mean your work isn’t done until it’s polished and awe-inspiring. Write it, fix it, fix it some more. Ask kind souls to read it, and then fix it again after they tell you what’s wrong. If they say nothing’s wrong, get some more truthful readers.

Care about your work. Bring a thoroughness to the job that would make a water-bear-murdering microzoologist proud. No one is going to care about your project the way you do, so put all your passion into it before you unleash it on the world. If you prefer the self-pub route to the agonizing pilgrimage of traditional publishing, that’s fine. Just don’t sign off on something that reads like self-pub, like you wrote it on your phone over your lunch break.

Give your dreams the respect they deserve. Follow your bliss, pursue your excellence, and never stop chasing the words.

books

Elements of Minimalism: A Do Not Want List

on December 29, 2014December 29, 2014

It’s that time of year when writers (and others) feel compelled to sum up, to present the results of the past calendar year as an offset for whatever slacking off or failures mounted up over that same time.

Not gonna do that. Instead, I’d like to present my anti-wish list, my official Do Not Want for 2015, in the hopes of reducing my stress footprint and also possibly optimizing the square footage of my home. Cluttered space, cluttered brain.

For example, there is a hand-me-down telescope taking up the space of an actual human being in my living room at this time. Why? Because I share my space with other people who have different priorities, and by different I mean we live in a part of Northern California where the skies are almost permanently obscured. Morlocks have a better view of the sky than we do. But, science! OK.

For another example, the style guides. Have I mentioned that I love hard copy style guides? The physical heft of their authority, the creamy page stock. I don’t so much love having to get up and fetch one when I need it, but in my experience online guides are often more difficult to use than they should be. CMoS and friends are engulfing my shelf space, however, which means some other stuff has got to go. I already recycled the thesaurus (who the hell uses those anymore?), but I know there are some freeloaders hanging out in the stacks that serve no purpose at all. Norton anthologies? You’re next.

And now, on to the list.

1. Vague jobs. They are so much more trouble than they’re worth, and often the clients who bring them to me without sharply delineated instructions tend to have a very fuzzy idea of what they want as an end result and are therefore never quite satisfied. Do you know what you want and when you want it? Do you have a clear plan for the project after I return it to you? Let’s do business.

2. Guilt-induced pro bono work. I need to make room for some “nos” and possibly a lot more delegation. What makes it hard to say “no”?

3. Control issues. Difficult to avoid those when your job involves making things perfect; my challenge for the coming year will be to distinguish between the handful of things I’m getting paid to polish to a high gloss and everything else. There must be a prayer for that, like what the alcoholics have.

4. Abandoned furniture, housewares, and hardcover fiction. It’s amazing what people will put out on the sidewalk. Really great stuff. What’s more amazing is that I continue to take it in when I find it despite an evident lack of space. I need to have faith that things will find their home in the universe without my assistance, or else start up an eBay shop (like I have time for that).

5. Things that don’t work. My house is filled with items that are slightly broken; they kind of work, if you do that thing and hold them just right. In the spirit of reducing consumption I dislike throwing things away that aren’t completely useless, and that attitude has caused me a fair amount of trouble. When I sort out all the physical objects that aren’t pulling their weight in my household, I’ll move on to the metaphorical slackers.

6. Cetacean time wasters. There are minor time wasters and harmless avoidance behavior, like Buzzfeed and YouTube and organizing the spice cabinet, and then there’s rereading Moby-Dick as a requisite for starting one’s master’s thesis, which has no mention of Melville, whales, or nautical history. Yes, I did that, and I did finish my thesis more or less on time, but that was many years ago, when free time was abundant and mental energy seemed infinite. And I had solid reasons for picking up that book at that time as a palate cleanser before beginning work; I wish I could remember them because they were probably awesome. Or terrible, whichever.

To sum up, yes, there is a pattern here, and it involves saying “yes” to the wrong opportunities and not saying “no,” or “thanks, but I couldn’t possibly,” or “are you freaking kidding me with that?” Therefore, in 2015, be advised: I am saying “no” to all bloated, amorphous, Kraken-sized time sucks without fair compensation. I am saying “no” to what is damaged beyond repair, redundant, or takes up more space than it deserves.

I will be uttering a joyful “yes!” to all challenging but concrete projects, as many as I can fit in (but no more), and to any number of minnow-sized time wasters. Those are beneficial to the creative process and take up no more space than the flame after a candle is blown out.

Happy New Year! May your 2015 be fun and productive.

cross-pollination feminism science writing

Giving Thanks

on November 20, 2014November 20, 2014

Or, All the Pretty Discourses

So it’s that time of year again—the one filled with stress and panic and copious amounts of alcohol. Not for me, you understand, for the doctoral candidates knocking up my inbox to have their dissertations edited in time. I want to take this opportunity to say, “Thanks, grad students!” Not just for the PayPal infusions, although I like those too, but because every thesis or dissertation I read teaches me something new. There’s a reason I give you guys a discount, and it’s not entirely due to my commitment to higher education.

Here’s what I learned about this week: critical discourse analysis and its sassy younger sister, feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (go on, read it—it’s a short paper, and it explains both terms). I waded in Foucault and Derrida in grad school, but that wasn’t the main course of my study, so this was all new to me. The sparkly bit that caught my eye?

FPDA believes in complexity rather than polarization of subjects of study.

What’s that mean? Basically, it means that this method of analyzing discourse (any kind, the weirder the better, apparently) prefers not to divide speakers into powerful vs. powerless, voiced vs. voiceless, oppressor vs. oppressed. The official reason is because power tends to shift, elevating the formerly oppressed into a role of authority. The unofficial but obvious reason? Because complexity is much more interesting, especially for writers, who, presumably, are writing about people and what they have to say. Polarity can be very limiting.

Enough about scholarly analysis of discourse. Earlier this evening I attended a book launch and listened to this woman talk about a character she created for a fictional habitat who ultimately never made it into the book. Most writers do this, but it isn’t discussed often: so much informs a story that the end readers never even know about. There are marginal or interstitial voices surrounding every narrative, fictional or not, and reacting to it, shaping it. We only hear half of the conversation.

Anyway, if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving next week, enjoy it and any related days off. While you’re sitting around the table, imagine what scholars would do with your family conversation. How would they quantify it? What roles would they assign? Whose voice is absent yet still profoundly shaping the discourse?

books

It Happened in the Library

on November 5, 2014November 5, 2014

Or, Share Your Books

After a punishing couple of days (OK, weeks) getting projects off my screen and back to their authors, I found myself at loose ends and therefore suggestible this morning at my kids’ school. Does this happen to you? Anyway, another parent took advantage of my fragile state and talked me into helping put stickers on books in the middle school library. Doesn’t matter why—something to do with standardized tests.

So I stuck the stickers and talked to the librarian, who recommended this book. A lot of my clients write YA, and I live with some people who are or shortly will be reading books in that category, so I’m always interested in YA books outside the standard “my life sucks and here’s why” trope. Yes, Little Brother is ages old but still relevant, which is what makes good SF great. If you clicked the link (go on, click it), you found out that the book is free to download. I may still ask my fourth-grader to get it out of the library for me because I dislike reading on screens for entertainment. Ironically, the author of that book that you haven’t clicked to yet is the first person to clearly explain to me why I hate e-readers and why my parents’ generation thinks they are the greatest invention since the remote control.

Basically, it’s because people who use computers as part of their livelihood are doing a lot of things on them at the same time. We click back and forth, running programs in the background, taking email/Twitter/YouTube breaks. Some well-meaning anthropologists, psychologists, and alarmists have undoubtedly written articles on why that’s bad for us, but the real problem is that in front of the computer screen is not a place where we feel comfortable reading for a long stretch. Now a book made out of paper, that’s a signal to the brain to sit still and focus on the words until we get bored or someone interrupts us.

Those who grew up in a simpler era known as the Age Before Microwaves, however, have an easier time of it because an e-reader screen does not put them into a multi-task, short-attention-span mindset. It’s a book. Also? They’re retired, the lucky bastards, so they can sit around all day and read for fun. Much like fourth-graders.

Download the book, or buy a paper copy, or seek it out at your local library, but do at least read the introduction to the digital version, which is about the difference between sharing and stealing, between disseminating and violating. It’s about lighting a spark and the great feeling you get when someone comes back to you and says, “I freaking LOVED that book! I’m going to buy my own copy and everything else that person wrote, like ever.” Which is almost as great a feeling as finding such a book in the first place. If that’s not a good enough reason, consider this: giving away a book these days is an act bordering on subversive.

Leave the politics and rhetoric of intellectual property for the attorneys, who are the only ones making money from the argument, and go share your favorite book with someone in whatever way you see fit. Especially if that someone is a kid—that spark is the most likely to start a lifelong fire.

cross-pollination selling your work

Go monkey, choose monkey.

on October 19, 2014October 19, 2014

Or, yet another way writers earn money besides writing

So, it’s been a while. In addition to the usual hail of deadlines, I’ve been occupied with maintaining websites and blogs and handling related social media activities for other organizations. This has taken up most of the energy I ordinarily siphon from my editing and writing work to pontificate here. Yes, dear friends, I am now officially a web monkey. I’d put that on my business cards (if I had any): writer/editor/monkey.

It’s not a bad gig: it encompasses ghostwriting, a small degree of scheduling expertise (think of it as pacing a narrative), and troubleshooting code (not unlike filling plot holes). In my case, troubleshooting usually means typing questions into a search box or emailing someone more proficient. If you know people like that, proficient coders who haven’t blocked your address yet, be extra nice to them. Bring them cookies.

The hardest part of the monkey gig so far has been extracting information from the owners of the blogs so I can then translate it into welcoming copy and upload it. I have no advice for that. Cookies again?

The best part? That would be surveying my creations and starting each day nerding out about stats. Oh, the other best part? It takes very little time and makes for a nice break between or during book-length editing projects. Let me rephrase: it’s a more lucrative form of avoidance behavior than Buzzfeed.

If you have tolerable WordPress skills, give it a try. Extra income is always good. What’s that you’re thinking? You don’t have tolerable WordPress skills; in fact, WordPress gives you fits? And you were just wishing that some magical fairy monkey with outstanding grammar would appear to help you keep your professional blog or site up to date? Hey, you know where to find me.