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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.

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?

cross-pollination selling your work writing

Social Media as Formal Poetry and Other News

on August 18, 2014August 18, 2014

Today, the sun rises on a glorious time here in the Bay Area, a holiday I like to call the first day of school. Today, I lose my unpaid interns to third and fourth grade and gain five hours a day of quiet work time. Gaudeamus igitur and laborare est orare.*

So here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately (and yes, the Latin does enter in). In addition to editing manuscripts and articles, I’ve been picking up odd jobs maintaining website content for others. The most recent of those jobs involves a social media management component, including Twitter.

How can Twitter be an effective social media marketing tool and a source of entertaining and thoughtful content? Well, as one example there’s this guy, who is promoting his book using Twitter, not in the usual way but by releasing a short story one tweet at a time: a free sample in serial form.

I’ve written before about how formal constraints can help a writer focus, so I’m approaching this Twitter thing the way I would take on the task of writing a sonnet: use the rules as scaffolding, not obstacles. A single Twitter resembles haiku, whereas an ongoing feed would be more like an epic poem, or like this (if you like Victorians—seriously, every stanza would fit), or this (for those who prefer the moderns). I may be approaching the task sort of like this.

Digress? Me? Anyway, that’s the challenge that will occupy my quiet hours this fall. Content generation is easy, but how to make it both promotion and poetry? Not obviously either, of course, but delayed reaction poetry, an afterimage that blossoms in the reader’s memory.

* “Let us rejoice” and “to work is to pray.” The organization that has hired me for the tweeting is spiritual in nature—told you there was a reason for the Latin.

science writing

Science and Poetry: Dog Days Edition

on July 27, 2014July 27, 2014

Sirius A, overexposed so you can see Sirius B (lower left)

My latest favorite phrase from technical reports is method of moments. There are actually two definitions, one from statistics and one from probability theory, and the thought of explaining either of them is making me sleepy right now, so instead I present to you what I think that phrase should mean (hey, if it can have two quant-related definitions, it can have a literary one, too).

Got a story in your head? Some people do a traditional outline, some go for less linear processes such as spider diagrams, and others like to sit down and type it out from start to finish. Nothing wrong with any of these methods as long as they work.

Here’s another way. Most stories start with a seed: an overheard phrase, a road sign, an earring, a dog tied up outside a store. Call them moments. What if you laid out the entire story as a succession of moments? Put them on index cards, either physical or virtual, so you can shuffle them around until they tell your story the way you want to tell it.

Two reasons why this works: One, it’s an organic method of recall; when you try to remember something that happened, it usually comes to you as a jumble of events, not always in chronological order. Once the pieces are collected, you can assemble them in the most effective way to relate the experience, which, again, not always chronological. Two, and closely related, the story changes with the sequence of moments and how you choose to connect them. Like a constellation.

Try it sometime, whether you’re writing fiction, memoir, or sampling techniques. You know you’re going through life filching moments like a ferret steals socks; now you can put them to some use or at least string them all on a narrative cord so they don’t get lost under the sofa with the cat toys and spare change.

Still wondering why there’s a photo of stars at the top of the page? The Roman phrase “dog days” (diēs caniculārēs) refers to the hottest part of the summer, which coincided, at that time and location, with the period when Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, rose with the sun. It was considered an unlucky time, rife with disease, and the Romans sacrificed a red dog to Sirius to keep off the worst of it. This astronomical coincidence no longer happens (and red dogs are safe to chase Frisbees and pant in the shade), but the name lingers and still signifies torpid, sweaty weather.

Enjoy the dog days. Don’t forget to collect some good moments.

cross-pollination writing

What I Learned on My Summer Vacation

Updated on July 8, 2014July 8, 2014

I try to get out from under the laptop occasionally to do things that have nothing to do with books, words, or getting money in exchange for books or words. Try it sometime, seriously.

Anyway, the following suggestions may be helpful in your writing process or your general pursuit of happiness.

1. Go see these guys at your earliest convenience. They spread joy wherever they go like brilliant, tub-bass-playing, dirty-minded bees.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/qp2bdSxZGDA?rel=0-A&w=320&h=240]

2. Lost your smart phone? Borrow a friend’s phone, and text your own phone asking the finder of your phone to please call or text the number of your friend’s phone. It shows up on the lock screen. Most people genuinely do not want your lost items and would prefer to see you reunited with them.

Writing process? Totally getting to that.

3. Step outside of your own field. Having a community of writers is invaluable; in fact, I’d have to say it was one of the highlights of my graduate writing program, and I’ve made efforts ever since to keep in contact with such a community. However, and I’ve said it before, you need to get out and talk to people who view books as entertainment commodities at best and don’t give a rat’s ass about semi-colon abuse, plot structure, character development, or synecdoche. Your daily page count? They don’t care about that, and neither should you, ultimately. This is a transitory success.

4. There are people out there making gin from wild-harvested roots and berries, and if you don’t see a connection between that and writing it is possible that you are in the wrong field (or don’t drink enough, which amounts to the same thing). Whether it’s hillbilly moonshine or gourmet spirits, make something out of the abundance available to you.

5. Excellent advice I heard from a musician: when learning something new, be prepared to suck for awhile. Beginning musicians require a room of their own for entirely different reasons than writers do, but the impetus to study a new instrument or take on a new writing project is the same. Relax and let the process develop at a natural pace, like small-batch, handcrafted mountain gin.

Enjoy your summer break in whatever form it takes. Don’t have one scheduled? You might want to revisit your priorities.

selling your work writing

Notes from the Field: Special Fiction Edition

on June 17, 2014June 17, 2014

It’s summer vacation time, which means school’s out and my office hours shift toward the nocturnal because during the day I am surrounded by people who are boooored. What do we do when we’re bored? Read a good book, obviously. Or write one. For those of you struggling with drafts of your fiction, here are the top three problems I run across in novel manuscripts and what to do about them.

1. throat clearing

By this I mean taking the first two or three chapters to find your voice, to really get your story rolling. Guess how long an agent will read a book that doesn’t grab her by the eyeballs in the first paragraph. About as long as it takes to read that first paragraph, possibly less. Skipping the whole agent thing and self-pubbing? Most prospective readers of fiction will give you even less.

This is one of the easiest problems to fix, however. Simply take everything that precedes the scene in which everything starts happening for your main character and delete it. You might have to add a sentence here and there for exposition. That’s it. “But—” No. You don’t need it. Listen to your inner 7-year-old moaning about the second week of summer vacation, and jump right into the action.

2. low stakes

You’ve set up a story, some characters, some situations and obstacles, and everything is going great, except that nobody’s really sure why the MC has to do whatever it is he has to do, or else. Or else what? In a good story, there are stakes clearly outlined in the beginning of the second act, and then, as the action continues, the stakes go up. The screw is turned. Your hero doesn’t have to save the world, but in a way he does. He has to save his world as he knows it or have a fantastic reason to let that world go straight to hell to save someone else’s.

This is a harder fix because if the stakes aren’t there, you’ve got no story. Get it done in your storyboarding/outline stage and save yourself a lot of heartache and liver damage.

3. I hate this guy

A corollary to the one-dimensional hero/villain problem in fiction is the character that is profoundly and thoroughly annoying, so annoying in fact that your annoyance yanks you right out of the story. There’s “Dude, I totally know someone like that,” and “OK, that’s like my old boss, but worse!” and from there you drift uncontrollably into “No! No one is like that, and if anyone were, someone would lock that person in a construction site portable toilet and drop it off a bridge. Into a dry ravine. That’s on fire.”

Go on and write that guy. Get him out of your system. It’s one of the great joys of being a writer: the ability to lambast jerks in print. Then take a few days off and go back and add a little realism, even and especially if you’re working in genre fiction. There is no room in a book worth reading for someone whose sole purpose is to be the human equivalent of a Claymore mine. All your characters need to pull their weight, and none of them should be upstaging the primary movers.

Enjoy the long (so very long) summer days, and when the editor in your head says, “I’m bored! This is boring,” pay attention and do something about it. If you have real live children telling you this, pat them on the head and tell them they’ll make fine literary agents someday.