author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I'm finishing up my writing night at Loaded Joe's. The only event listed was "free games," but as it turns out there's live music tonight too. It's a little louder than I like, and the performance can most kindly be described as "unstructured," but what the hell. I was stalling out in the hotel and I needed some stimulation. So I came over here, bought a cup of darjeeling tea and a pastry, and made a small but meaningful bit of progress on the new opening to Iron Wheels.

It's weird. You'd think that "introvert trying to get writing done" would require being alone somewhere quiet. But sometimes where I really want is to be alone is somewhere out in a noisy, happy, rowdy public place. Hence, writing in coffee shops and bars.

Writing in coffee shops has come to be generally accepted. Sometimes I hear people mutter all disgruntled about how no one ever goes to a coffee shop to talk to their friends or just think--no, they always have to be on a computer. Kids these days! My lawn, get off it! But for the most part, writing in coffee shops has become the norm.

But sometimes--not tonight! Not so far, anyway. But sometimes--I get bothered in bars.

I'm not talking about getting hit on. Fortunately, I've been more or less spared by the lamentably common "woman! alone, in a bar! must be available!" phenomenon. I suspect it's a combination of my not performing femininity particularly well, so that I'm not the first woman whom That Guy wants to approach; and my failure to pick up on the subtle openings of the flirtation game, so that I inadvertently signal "Not interested, scram." Which is exactly what I'd want to signal if I knew flirtation was going on, so, great.

(I also have a tendency to shut down some forms of gendered approach with the verbal equivalent of a tactical nuke. Somewhere along the way I decided that if someone else fires the first shot in the rudeness wars--by, say, physically grabbing my arm or acting aggressively entitled to my attention--I will have no compunction about firing the second shot, and it will damn well be big enough to be the final shot. Ain't nobody got time for that shit.)

No, what I get subjected to is better described as, "woman! alone, in a bar! must be lonely. I will remedy this!"

Last year I was at Loaded Joe's on karaoke night and, as often happens, I was here alone. With my laptop. And to the woman sitting at the booth next to mine, this was obviously a tragedy. So she took it upon herself to relieve my loneliness by chatting with me.

Now, this could have been enjoyable if I hadn't really just wanted to play on my computer and rock out to the music. And even then, it could have become enjoyable if what she had to say was interesting. But it was bog-standard drunk person chatter. And every new volley in the conversation began with her practically punching me in my shoulder and shouting, "Hey! Hey!" in my ear.

(At one point she noticed my computer, a Dell, and began trying to convert me to the holy church of Mac. Only she kept framing the comparison in terms of Mac versus Dell, rather than Mac versus PC or Mac versus Windows. It was disorienting.)

I remember being a little irked that, while she chatted at me relentlessly, she never took the opportunity to say something like "Hey, nice job up there," after I took a turn at the karaoke mike. (I think she didn't care for karaoke in the first place, and considered it a necessary evil to be endured in the acquisition of booze on a Friday night.) It's not that I needed her to compliment me on my singing; it's more that she declined the opportunity to turn the conversation in a direction I'd actually demonstrated interest in.

The other version of this when someone--either a man or a woman, it's been kinda 50/50--leans in to scold me: "Hey! You are in a bar! You're supposed to be having fun." But thankfully this type of interaction tends to end after I say, "I am having fun," or, if they're being particularly rude about it, "Who the hell do you think you are to tell me what I'm supposed to do?"

Anyway, despite the pervasive narrative of "you're doing being-in-a-bar wrong," the above examples are more exceptions for me than they are the rule. For the most part I do succeed at carving out my Circle of Protection: Intrusive Extrovert (please, someone design that Magic: The Gathering card for me?). Which is awesome. I get to enjoy the atmosphere--and a drink--without giving up my alone time. I get to have my cake and eat it too. Tonight is, happily, no exception.

So why am I thinking about it? Well, I am at Loaded Joe's, and I'm even sitting in the exact same booth where I was last year when Generous Chatty Woman talked my ear off. But also, earlier today I was reading this Captain Awkward post and its subsequent comments about men acting entitled to women's attention, and this related Doctor Nerdlove post. Particularly, I was reacting to the Doctor Nerdlove post asserting that it's generally OK to approach a woman in a bar because that's a social context in which being approached is expected. And I thought, "Well, yes, usually, but not always..."

But it's OK. Doctor Nerdlove has that covered too:

People who are uninterested in talking to people – especially people they don’t know – will often make a point of signaling that they wish to be left alone through non-verbal means. ... Similarly, someone who is engrossed in a book, her laptop, her phone, an iPad or a sketchbook is likely not interested in talking to a random person at that moment.

There is an order of operations here, and, alas, some people get it wrong. Just remember: the non-verbal signals trump the locational context, 'k? K.

Today's post is difficult to write. It's heavy, emotionally, for me. It'll be too easy for me to come across as defensive. And there's also a sticky matter of confidentiality, in that the conversation that moves me to write happened in a private space. But the opinions and thoughts it inspired are my own and I would like to express them. I can only hope I have succeeded at doing the latter without violating the former.

It's a mess, is what it is. I hope you'll bear with me.

Monday, a dismaying event happened on the national scale. A grand jury announced its decision that a white police officer who killed an unarmed black boy need not go to trial, and that the killer's demonstrable racial prejudice was somehow a mitigating factor and not evidence that the a police officer was unfit for his job and not to be trusted with a gun. The grand jury made this announcement at 7:00 PM Mountain Time, 8:00 Central. The announcement and its implications have dominated national and online discourse since then.

Here are other things that happened Monday:

• I had my last regularly scheduled farm day for 2014.
• The Saints played the Ravens to a disappointing loss.
• I did some more work on the Refurbish the Closet Doors porject
• I blogged about the farm work and the closet doors.

Now, I have a TwitterFeed account set up such that anytime I blog, that blog post gets announced on Twitter. Which means that in the middle of a Twitterstorm about injustice in Ferguson, I not only blogged about something that had nothing to do with that outrage at all, but I committed a self-promotional tweet telling people to go check out that blog post.

Which is something I would not have thought twice about--except that in the course of the aforementioned private conversation, I became informed that such a tweet makes a person look self-absorbed, tone-deaf, offensively oblivious. It would have been even more offensive, apparently, if I'd live tweeted my reactions to the football game (as I sometimes do), or promoted my Patreon campaign (as happens on those Fridays when a fictionette goes up). But my one self-promoting tweet was bad enough. As a responsible citizen of the internet, and especially as a writer with a Twitter account, I should have gauged the online climate before allowing such an inconsequential tweet to go through. Given what an important conversation was going on, I suppose I should have turned off automatic Twitter announcements of my blog posts for the night. Or, better still, not blogged at all unless it was about Ferguson.

Except... well, no.

There's a difference between disrupting a focused conversation on someone else's blog (like, say, the comment thread at the above-linked Slacktivist post) and, well, using Twitter for what Twitter is for. It's a grave misunderstanding of any social media to think that there is only one conversation going on at any time, to which you either contribute appropriately or shut up. Twitter is a microblogging platform on which millions of people have hundreds of thousands of separate conversations at any one time. And different people are listening to different pieces of that conversational storm depending on whom they follow. It's not unlike a huge version of a party where you can talk to your friend about whatever, and other people can overhear you or not as they choose. You can still abuse the venue by interrupting someone else's conversation--for example, at-checking someone inappropriately with your book-promo tweet--but simply talking to someone else about something else while in that room is not an abuse of the venue.

So I blogged Monday because I hold myself to a Monday-through-Friday blogging schedule, and I'm damn proud of myself when I succeed at keeping to that schedule. I post a Friday Fictionette every first through fourth friday because that's the committment I've made to potential Patrons. And someday I hope to be able to tweet that my first published book has become available in bookstores. If something globally awful happens on a day when I'd be blogging, fictionetting, or book-promoing, I'll probably still blog, fictionette, and/or book-promo, though I may choose not to. I may or may not have anything useful to say about the globally awful thing; that too is entirely up to me. One thing I know for sure: My tiny "off-topic" tweet is not going to make the globally awful thing objectively worse.

There is room on the internet, much as there is room in a single mind, for many things at once: raging at injustice, conversing quietly about the changing season, complaining about how long it takes to sand a paint-stripped door, and wondering when the national sportscasters will get tired of their love affair with Jimmy Butterfingers Graham and turn some of their attention to, say, players who are actually catching the ball tonight (or running it for 70+ yards holy fuck Joseph Morgan you are my hero).

That football game it would have been tone-deaf of me to tweet about Monday? A significant subset of both teams' players were a hell of a lot more personally affected by the Ferguson outcome than I. Some of them have sons who could have been Michael Brown. Some of them could have been Michael Brown. I don't know if they got to hear the grand jury's announcement when it happened, or if they were shielded from the news until the game was over. In either case, they had to know the announcement was coming. They probably predicted the way it was going to turn out, while hoping it would turn out otherwise.

And they still played that game, because Monday Night Football happens on Monday night. They participated in post-game interviews and they talked with their coaches and teammates about what tonight's game means for next week.

Normal life doesn't stop for tragedy. Sometimes we wish it would--sometimes it seems downright malicious that the world should keep spinning and gravity keep tugging as though anything could possibly be the same again. And sometimes we're grateful that normal life just keeps driving on regardless, because a veneer of normality can make the difference between coping and spiraling into a black hole of despair.

What you need right now, at this particular moment in American history, is a story that doesn’t stoke your feelings of rage, depression and moral exhaustion. And I am here to give it to you.

--Mary Elizabeth Williams, "The Ferguson library gives a lesson in community"

Monday we learned, or had our suspicions confirmed, that we have a lot more work to do as a society than we might have hoped, that the road toward justice is a lot longer than it has any right to be in 2014. And yet we still have to cook the next meal, earn the next paycheck, write the next story. We may not have to tweet about the latest football game or converse with friends via at-replies, but small pleasures and human interactions can make the hard work easier to bear. It certainly can't hurt.

And metaphorically wearing sackcloth doesn't materially aid the cause of justice any more than finishing your lima beans did a damn thing for the children starving in Ethiopia.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: There are things going on in my life. I'm going to talk about them. I may use Twitter to do it. I'm not going to preemptively gag myself on subjects that aren't objectively as important as the latest breaking national news. The conversations I choose to have aren't subject to anyone else's sense of propriety. That I choose to have one conversation doesn't mean I'm incapable of caring about other issues. The game of Prove That You Care is rigged, and the only way to win is not to play.

You don't have to be in those conversations with me. You may judge me harshly for having those conversations at all. But you can't reasonably expect me to always make the same choices you would about which conversations to have and when. If the choices we make differ enough to make you unhappy with mine, by all means disconnect from me on social media. We'll probably both be happier that way. But I think maybe composing nastygrams about How Dare You Tweet Banalities While Ferguson Is Burning isn't a positive contribution to any situation.

What might be a positive contribution? Well, if you're so inclined, you can donate to the Ferguson Library, because they need it and because they are awesome. Change.org has a petition demanding that Michael Brown's killer be prosecuted in the Missouri Supreme Court; the petition has nearly reached 150,000 signatures tonight. And this HuffPo article has more suggestions for activism in addition to these.

That's (some of) what's on my mind tonight, so that's what I'm choosing to blog/tweet/FB about.

That's how this works.

Confession: I'm not going to win NaNoWriMo this year. I'm not even going to try. My current word count means I'd have to write 8,689 words every day to reach 50,000 on November 30, and that includes today. That's not going to happen. Even if I didn't have other things taking up my time this week, I'm just not sure it's worth the blood, sweat, and tears. Which isn't to say NaNoWriMo isn't worth it, in and of itself, but this year, given my current situation, it's not worth it to me.

My novel draft is at a point where madly producing word count by the thousand isn't really the next step. The "rediscovery drafting" I've dabbled in this month has helped, certainly, but in the way of a kind of brainless blunt instrument. I'd be better served by nuance and planning. Planning! Heresy! But there's so much that I don't know about this novel. I could get lost, nibbling away at it one scene at a time, producing huge amounts of material that may never get used at all--because the scene doesn't end up making it into the book, or because the voice I've given my character is all wrong, or because I haven't actually figured out exactly what Mr. Greenbriar's political aims are or what Old Mack is really scheming or the exact nature of some other large-arc game-changer...

Argh.

Meanwhile, November 30th is the deadline for two different calls for submissions to which I want to send stories. Getting the stories ready to email by Sunday is doable, but not if I'm using all my time trying to navigate a changeling protagonist through the day-to-day intrigue of a fictional Wyoming high school.

On the other hand, on November 29th I get on a Greyhound bus for Vail, in which region I'll be staying for a week, all by myself, just me and my laptop. I'll be there a glorious six more days after meeting my November 30th deadlines. Which means I can dedicate my solo writing retreat to digging this novel out of its rut and putting it on track toward a publishable state.

I've done NaNoWriMo every year since 2002. Do something for a decade or more, and people expect you to do it forever. Heck, I expect me to do it every November. But, honestly, I'm sitting on a lot of novels in rough draft form, and I'm tired of it. I want to publish novels, and that's not going to happen until I rewrite, revise, polish and submit. That's work. That's work I don't actually know how to do yet. I need to spend time doing that before I crank out another 30-day 50K monstrosity.

So that's my Vacation From NaNoWriMo Manifesto. Hopefully it will lead to Interesting Developments!

Bear with me a moment. I've had an epiphany. (Yes, another one.)

The other day I was, once again, doing my daily freewriting exercise. I was using for a writing prompt the dream I'd had that morning, which had posited some fairly out-of-character behavior on the part of a friend of mine. In the dream, she was reviewing a list she'd had me write of near-term personal improvement goals; upon reading the item "explore my religious/spiritual growth" (or something like that), she muttered something like "Well, this one's clearly bullshit." I decided I wasn't going to just politely let her spit all over an important part of me. I told her, "Well, I am religious, and you're just going to have to deal with it." Then I woke up.

It was terribly banal, as dreams go, but I thought I'd scribble on it anyway. Which seemed foolish. I mean, I'd already written the dream down once. What was I going to do, write it down again?

Apparently, I wasn't. I instead found myself writing a story about two sisters, the older one trying to replace their missing parents for the younger. Why was the younger sister putting up with it at the age of twenty-one? What had growing up been like for the two of them, that the older sister's intrusive, nosy micromanagement was just par for the course--and where did she get all those unhealthy ideas about age and beauty? Also, why were their parents missing? Well, they were in Alaska when the whole state went missing. Wait--the whole damn state of Alaska? Disappeared? When was this?

By the time my timer went off, I still hadn't reached the actual incidents from the dream. I was still writing a family history, figuring out some worldbuilding backstory, and feeling my way into the younger sister's idea of normal.

Here's the epiphany: There's always more to write beyond what the writer sat down with the idea to write. Which means writing isn't just about taking what's inside one's head and spilling it onto the page. The act of writing actually adds to that initial supply.

Why, it's almost as if writing were a creative act...!

Obvious, right? Except, oddly, not. There's talk of creativity and imagination, but there's also a tendency to say "I don't know what to write" as though it were reason enough not to start. That old metaphor about "opening a vein and bleeding onto the page" makes it sound as though words were simply (if painfully) poured out like water from an existing reservoir. It's like the creativity is supposed to all happen quietly, behind the scenes, long before the pen hits the page. Even that evocative image of driving a highway by night, such that you can only see a few feet ahead at any one time but you're always moving that illuminated area forward to reveal more, can be considered to fall into that camp: It's all in there, you just can't see it all until you start to write it down.

I have to insist it's not so. At least, not for me. I don't think the rest of that highway actually exists until I start to drive. I think the writing causes it to come into existence.

Which means that "I don't know what to write" is never the last word. Which is glorious. It doesn't matter how lost or ignorant or out of ideas I'm feeling; it's always worth it to just start typing. I will never find that reserve empty; the act of tapping it actually causes it to refill.

Realizing this, or, if you prefer, coming to think about it that way clearly for the first time, was like finding my faith. It was practically a religious epiphany. ("I am religious. You're just going to have to deal with it.") And, like a closely held religious faith--which I think I'm going to say it actually is--it gives me great comfort to think about.

So that's what was on my mind this morning.

Yesterday was one of those mornings where I needed that first cup of tea just to be functional enough to do my morning pages. And that's unusual. Usually it's the morning pages themselves that get me functional: that slow, constant, low-level effort over three pages of handwriting tends to sort of sneak me into awake mode, so that even if I begin with squinting, sleepy eyes and a groggy brain, I get to the end of them fully woken up and possibly even excited about the day ahead. But yesterday, not so much. Yesterday, all I was capable of at first was just drinking that first steeping of milk oolong and staring at the comments of an old blog post that I'd fallen asleep reading the night before. Also waiting for the headache to go away. It's winter, our building has baseboard radiant heating, I wake up dry and dehydrated and with a headache. And really, really homesick for the humidity and mild winters of New Orleans.

Today was better, but not by a lot. I thought it was going to be a lot better! I got up on time, did my pages, put a coat of stain down on a stripped and sanded half of a bi-fold door, and went off to have a delicious lunch with good company. But the afternoon got away from me, the early energy seemed to just seep away, my body suprised me with digestive issues after lunch (I don't even know), and, what's worse, the second half of the bi-fold door that I'd been sanding in fits and starts on the balcony got rained on. (It is now in the bathroom, having been towel-dried, and is awaiting the soothing warmth of the heater. Which will undoubtedly give me a headache in the morning.)

And I didn't post this week's Friday Fictionette. I have missed my first Friday. Oh, I'll get it up there tomorrow, no fear. But it hurts to break what has been up until now a flawless record.

This week, y'all. I don't even know what kind of a week it's been, it's been that kind of week.

I'm slowly realizing that I have days where I'm slow to start and maybe never really get moving, and days where I'm energetic and Do All The Things. Sometimes low-energy days come disguised as high-energy days by front-loading all their energy, but they're still low-energy days. And this is probably biochemical, at least in part. And while I can develop strategies for coping with low-energy days (do your morning pages! create a definite list of things to do! give yourself the gift of staying home tonight!), I can't reasonably expect myself to magically turn low-energy days into energetic days. And it makes no sense to punish myself for it, you know? It only hurts me and annoys the pig.

...You know. The pig that was hanging out in some other metaphor and got dragged into this one for no reason whatsoever. I'd be annoyed too, if I was that pig.

I apologize. This kind of whiny introspection isn't what you come to this blog for, is it? Well, I don't know--maybe it is what you come here for. I mean, if you come here. Maybe you don't read this blog at all. (Hey, who are you people, anyway?)

Quick! I distract you with someone being awesome! Mur Lafferty is doing NaNoWriMo, and if you support her on Patreon, you'll get a message from her every day, and an exclusive daily podcast--just for the month of November--that only Patrons get to listen to! Go! Support Mur on Patreon! There will be more interesting things here when you get back. Like, say, next week.

Apropos of this blog post by author John Scalzi, you are all on notice that henceforth the actually writing blog here will be pleased to employ the non-gendered pronouns whee/whim/whir wherever appropriate.

Singular they/them/their will also be utilized on occasion, but they've got nothing on this new set for sheer fun. Observe:

A visitor to OUT OF THIS WORLD AMUSEMENT PARK is sure to have a good time. After whee pays the admission fee, a mere five dollars, whee can enjoy any of our thrilling rides as often as whee cares to until closing time, which, thanks to the interdimensional nature of the campus, never actually arrives. Long lines will never trouble whim, for each ride has been replicated by a potentially infinite number due to our cutting-edge temporal engineering. Whee can look forward to telling whir future grandchildren about whir stunning day in the park, though--fair warning--they may be disinclined to sit still and listen to whir stories when they could be riding the rides and making memories of their own on the very same endless day.

OUT OF THIS WORLD AMUSEMENT PARK! Bringing countless generations together for a literally timeless adventure!

Wheeeeeee!

My session at the farm today was relatively short, and it was all about sunflowers: removing the protective layers of agricultural cloth from each freshly cut seed head and assessing the seeds therein for maturity. (These sunflowers were being grown for planting-seed, not eating-seed. By the end of the session, my thoughts about sunflowers had fallen into orbit around two basic themes:

1. Sunflowers are huge. I mean, I knew they were big, but it's not often I get to hold one up and compare it to the size of my head.

2. I'm not entirely sure how commercial growers manage to have a crop. I mean, most of these seed heads were picked bare. The agricultural cloth that was supposed to protect them was pecked right through in multiple places. I suppose commercial growers must either grow their sunflowers in a covered space, to keep it bird-free, or maybe they spray everything with magic bird repellent. Or maybe they are eternally vigilant sharp-shooters, I don't know.

So that's the field notes portion of the post.

In the writing world, I appear to have acquired followers on Wattpad whom I don't actually know from my existing writing community circles. They don't appear to have actually read the Friday Fictionettes I post there, if the statistics on each work are to be trusted--but that's OK. I came into this knowing that Wattpad, for the most part, is not about posting teaser excerpts in hopes of attracting readers willing to chuck a buck at my Patreon. The community, by and large, is said to be excerpt adverse. So I totally understand. Read or don't read; totally up to you. No harm, no foul. I'm happy to see the "Followers" count go up for just about any reason. So: hooray for people following me who don't already know me!

However, I can tell you without hesitation what one of those reasons not covered by "just about any reason" is: Apparently, one of these potential future friends who began following me, who clearly hoped I'd reciprocate by following them back and reading their stuff and loving it enough to vote on it... is a plagiarist. No, seriously, I went to read their most recent work, and it was an in-their-own-words retelling of the first chapter of Maggie Stiefvater's YA werewolf novel Shiver. Have you read it? I'll understand if you haven't--in my conversational circles, the novel rather suffers from looking like trying to ride the Twilight popularity wave. Also, in the first few chapters, there are some real factual howlers. That said, it didn't strike me as badly written, and I was actually kind of intrigued by the idea of lycanthropes for whom temperature is a factor.

Anyway, you can read the first two scenes for free. It'll take you all of two minutes. Done? OK. Now, realize that this Wattpad user of whom I speak essentially retold those two scenes in her own words, gave the two characters the same names, and even included the detail that the girl was on a swing in her backyard when the wolves dragged her away. And, look, it's a popular book--it's not like the user ought to have had any illusion that they'd get away with it. *facepalm*

I'm not naming the Wattpad user, mainly because I've already used appropriate channels to report them to Wattpad HQ. (I have also shown my displeasure to them personally by leaving a comment, un-following them, and "muting" them.) And even if Wattpad HQ takes no action, I don't see it as my job to lead an anti-plagiarism campaign against them. I expect they aren't the only Wattpad user trying to get unearned praise (and votes) by plagiarizing popular fiction.

However, they are the first plagiarist I know of to have specifically followed me in hopes I'd follow them back. So I thought I'd just take a blog-style snapshot of the occasion for posterity.

Awww! Baby's first plagiarism experience on Wattpad! How sweet!

OK, so, here's the thought I've been working my way up to: Fiction writing is not like plumbing. Here's why...

And that's where I get stuck. I don't know how to continue that thought without sounding ridiculously woo. But, y'know, what the hell. I am a firm believer in woo, certain flavors of it anyway. My religion, Wicca, necessarily involves a certain amount of woo. So, OK, I get to talk about writing through the woo lens.

The main thing to make clear before I begin is that this is my woo lens. I am not trying to speak to every writer's experience everywhere. I do think that what I'm going to describe is inherent to all fiction writing, but not everyone will have the same relationship with it. So what follows is my thought about my writing experience. I'll insist that it's a valid experience to have, but I won't assert it to be the experience.

OK? We're all cool? OK.

Let's start over.

*ahem*

Fiction writing is not like plumbing, It's not like making widgets or constructing web pages. Something happens in the writing process that generally doesn't happen on the automobile assembly line, or on the operating table, or while doing dishes, or in whatever job the smug know-it-alls inist that real writers treat their writing like. Writing--and the rest of the creative arts--involves something that those jobs generally don't, and that's this:

The writer has to think it all up.

The writer is responsible for thinking that all up.

The writer is responsible for having thought it all up.

There is all sorts of potential for emotional, psychological mess in there. I mean, everything on the page comes out of my very own brain. No one made it happen but me. For one thing, that may invite judgment on the part of the reader: "What sort of psycho/weirdo/pervert/idiot comes up with that?" While I've entertained the thought, "What was that plumber thinking, cementing the hot water pipes right into the wall?" there was no, like, psychoanalysis involved. There was no cause to question the plumber's fitness as a parent, or their being at liberty rather than committed to the nearest mental health facility. Cementing the hot water pipes into the wall shows a certain lack of foresight, but doesn't inspire homeowners to wonder about the plumber's sanity or childhood or whatever.

For another thing, every story I think up, no one can write it but me. If the plumber bails on snaking your drain, you call someone else in to do it. If I bail on a particular story--well, there are plenty of other writers, so there's no shortage of stories for people to read. But that particular story, the one I was going to write, if I don't write it for whatever reason, it simply never makes it out into the world. That's a huge responsibility! I have to make sure those stories survive to adulthood! No pressure, right?

Again, not every writer is going to feel the way I do about these things. But these things are there. They go with this territory in a way they don't go with, oh, newspaper delivery or new home construction.

And here's where things get woo: The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced there's a sort of shamanic aspect to fiction writing. Which is, I am aware, a problematic thing for me to say, being a white woman with no ties whatsoever to any sort of shamanistic culture. But I just don't know what else to compare it to, this process of going into dream space--into the invisible world of symbols, metaphors, spirits, things that do not exist but should, things that do not exist and that we pray remain nonexistent--and translating what one finds there into a form that the rest of the mundane world is able to experience.

Not every writer is going to think about it that way, of course. But I do, though. And I get a little scared about it. And grateful! Because it's an honor, getting to make that journey. But it's also kind of terrifying.

All that said, I agree one hundred percent that the only way to be a writer is to get on with the writing. But I'd like to register a plea for compassion about those avoidance and resistance cycles that some of us experience, that make getting on with the writing more complicated than the know-it-alls try to make it out to be.

Be patient with us. This can be kind of a heavy gig.

And it's really not like plumbing.

Yesterday I blogged about my avoidance behaviors and my anti-avoidance strategies, when really what I meant to blog about was one particular moment in the avoidance/anti-avoidance run-up to revision. That would be the moment when I said to myself, "I should be business-like about my writing! I should treat it like it's a business. It's my job. When web development was my job, did I spend hours avoiding the work because of fear and insecurity? No! I did my job! Writing should be no different."

Which only goes to show that I'm not immune to some of the more toxic memes that plague us. For instance:

Plumbers don't suffer from "plumbers' block."

It's pithy, isn't it? And so self-satisfied. You can top it off with "nuff said," just like putting a cherry on top of a sundae. You could make a motivational poster out of it, with a big black-and-white Hines-like photo of the backside of a plumber hard at work, and attribute it to a well-known grouchy writer, and you could post it to Facebook and get a lot of likes and verbal high-fives.

Some writers no doubt find motivation in such slogans. From time to time, so do I. Sometimes it's exactly what I need to hear; at those times, I say it to myself. I'm not sure I really want to hear anyone say it to me, though. In the transitive case, it becomes a scolding, smug denial of the variety of writers' experiences and vulnerabilities: "The right way to be a writer is my way," it says, and "if you have weaknesses, you ain't no writer." It's all the more toxic for masquerading as a kind of tough-love, "truth hurts" kind of lesson. I mean, yes, the truth can hurt. But the fact of pain doesn't prove the truth of the words that caused it. Lies can hurt, too.

Basically, we're talking about slogans which are used by some writers to assert superiority over other writers. They're dishonest metrics for distinguishing "real writers" from "wanna-bes."

Now, Mur Lafferty has some thoughts about the word "wannabe," and how it really ought to be viewed as a positive term. You gotta want to be before you can be, after all, let alone before you can figure out how to become. And every writer at every level is still a "wannabe," too: they want to be better writers tomorrow than the writers they are today. They want to be the writers who have written the stories that they have yet to write.

But so many people use the word "wanna-be" as a weapon. They believe "wanna-be" and "real writer" are mutually exclusive terms. They say you can either waste time wanting to be a writer, or you can get on with the hard but rewarding work of being a writer. Do, or do not! There is no "try!" Well, Yoda, when you put that way, it almost sounds reasonable... except it leads to the poisonously backwards conclusion that "wanting" precludes "becoming," when in fact wanting precedes becoming. It's a necessary prerequisite.

Shaming wanna-be writers for wanting to be writers sure turns this whole "wanna-bes never amount to anything" nonsense into a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it?

And how do these smug border guards with their weaponized words distinguish real writers from wanna-bes? Easy, they say. Look, real writers don't believe in writers' block. Real writers don't truck with "resistance" and "avoidance" and other excuses not to write; they just write. Real writers don't take weekends or holidays. Real writers know that writing is a job like any other job. You sit down at your desk and you do it. Plumbers don't get plumbers' block; they just get on with plumbing!

Except, in very important ways, writing fiction isn't like plumbing.

Don't get me wrong. It's important to get on with the writing despite fear, uncertainty, doubt, lack of inspiration, not knowing what to write, and all those other things that are implicated by the term "writers' block." This is why I am accumulating a toolbox of anti-avoidance strategies.

But all of those strategies depend on realizing in the first place that the fears, uncertainties, etcetera are valid. They aren't things that only wanna-bes (to use the term in its weaponized sense) experience. They don't preclude being a writer. To a varying extent across the fiction-writer population, they kind of come with the territory.

This is getting long again. So, two final summary-style thoughts before I tuck the rest of my thoughts away for tomorrow:

1. Fear isn't a sign of failing. Fear means what you're trying to do is important to you. (Thank you, Havi Brooks.)
2. Reclaim "wanna-be" as a term of pride! Disarming those who would use it as a weapon!

Another Friday, another fictionette. Read it in its entirety or, if you're not quite ready to chuck a buck at it, read an excerpt on Wattpad or right here.

Despite the aforementioned difficulties, I think I'm getting better at this. Which is to say, getting all the fictionette things revised, posted, and settled still took longer than it should have (I seriously need to simplify the system), but it was my content writing gigs and not my freewriting or my short story revision that paid the price for it. Priorities! I might possibly have a few.

And for a story-like object that had me in fits all week, it didn't turn out all that bad.

Favorite place this week to revise stories: Over a huge steaming bowl of pho at the neighborhood restaurant. I'm told there are better pho restaurants in Boulder, but this is the one I can walk to, and I think it's yummy. The artwork on the walls is kind of creepy, though.

Least favorite place this week to revise stories: On the BV bus, heading from Boulder to Denver, and realizing that the person sitting next to me is actively and unabashedly reading my work in progress over my shoulder. That is in blatant contradiction of public transportation etiquette, y'all. Don't do that shit.

Not counting for the purpose of Amtrak departures and arrivals, I hadn't been down to LoDo in ages. The occasion for this trip was having heard that the Sklar Brothers would be performing at Comedy Works in Larimer Square this weekend, and thinking, "Why not?" So I went. And they were pretty darn funny, so I was glad I did. The opening acts weren't too bad, either. Stand-up comedy can be a bit of a minefield for me, as exemplified by Jackie Kashian's pin-pointedly accurate summary of the jokes that male comedians tell about their wives. When I'm listening to the comedy channel on the radio, and I hear a comedian start in on his wife, or how it was censorship when a venue wouldn't let him use his favorite ethnic/gender/ableist slur, or how violence against women can be perfectly justified, amiright guys, that's my cue to change the channel for a while, because they ain't going nowhere good from there.

I'm happy to report that tonight's show didn't go there. It occasionally went to places from which you could see it, and once or twice it brought out a copy of the map and pointed to key landmarks, but it didn't actually go there, you know? So I left reasonably happy.

Before I left, I randomly ran into a derby skater in the crowd. Well, I assumed she was a skater. She could have been a fan. Anyway, she had on a High City Derby Divas hoodie, so I said hello. I introduced myself by skate name and league and I asked her whether she'd be at the Pikes Peak Derby Dames mix-up on Sunday. I may have been a bit too enthusiastic. I didn't actually say "OMG YOU'RE DERBY I'M DERBY TOO IT'S A SMALL DAMN DERBY WORLD ISN'T IT DERBYYYYYY!!!!!" but mmmmaybe I came across that way? The interaction went all unexpectedly awkward. At least I had enough self-restraint to keep it short.

For a few hours before and a few hours after the show, I worked on the aforementioned Friday Fictionette stuff over at Leela's European Cafe. They're on 15th between Champa and Stout, they're open 24 hours, they have wifi and comfy seating and a nice variety of music, and they serve really tasty hot chocolate. Also beer and cocktails. Heck with coworking--I want to spend my working day at Leela's. Well, sometimes, anyway. Their late night crowd is really interesting.

In conclusion: I should go down to Denver more. There's enjoyable stuff down there.