Joe Biden as you've never seen him...

*SNORK!*

"The Gonzales Cantata"

(H/T to sdlorac)

I got nuthin'

I've been under the weather the last few days due to all the ash and crap in the air from the latest horrific LA fire. I'm too tired to even rant. I've been working on a new website (coming soon!), a synopsis for a screenplay project and the WIP, that is, when my head is clear enough to think a little. I hope everyone's having a good, productive week. Stay safe.

Friday Cat Blogging!

I've got too many choices for cute this week...here are a few!

Guess where I am?

The online "me," that is. I'm at Sia McKye's wonderful blog, "Over Coffee." You'll recognize the first part of the post, if you read this blog, but the second part is new stuff - I answer a few questions from Sia. Stop on by! She runs a great blog, with regular writer interviews, book reviews and tips about promotion and marketing.

Back to work...

On the topic of "showing up..."

I have a short project to finish and a WIP to get back to—which, if it pleases the Muses who may or may not exist, I am hoping actually makes sense and will not collapse in a steaming pile of...rubble...before I get to the end—anyway, I have work to do, and the sudden realization that I don't have all that much time in which to do it. Gulp.

My WIP is set in Mexico and is another tale of existential suspense — I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I like the way it sounds. I am at that just over midway point where I honestly don't know if it will hold together or not. Which I guess is part of the suspense, right?

What are you working on?

Some thoughts on getting published...

Writing a novel is a lot of work. Okay, I've known that for a while. I've written a few. This last one, the one that got me an agent and then a deal, took so much time and effort that I'd joke it was written in dog years. And that it was trying to kill me, I was pretty sure. That last bit might not have been a joke.

The part that I'd only previously known on an intellectual level is that getting published is also a lot of work. I mean, this should be obvious, and I sort of knew it, but until I went through it, I didn't actually know it.

All of the sudden, you're getting paid for your work. And people are depending on you. Your agent. Your editor. Your PR person. An entire infrastructure. You've signed a contract, and you have to deliver, quality work, on time. There are hard deadlines. Publication schedules. Catalogs for the upcoming season. I think that's the first time I really absorbed that the whole thing was real, when I downloaded Soho's catalog, read all of the book descriptions, the author bios. Wow, I thought. I'm going to be in one of these. Me and my book. Shit.

There's the book itself. Editorial revisions. Line edits. A galley proof yet to come. And then there's everything else that comes with being an author in the modern world. A bio. Photos. A new website. Marketing ideas. Where am I known? Who do I know? How can I help my own chances of success?

It's that whole notion of thinking of yourself and your work as a product, as a brand. Most of us writer types are introverts, and we can all fulminate against this cultural trend of marketing uber alles (and I have), but this is the reality. It's a part of our job, as authors. And if there's one thing this whole experience has brought home to me, it's that being a published author is a job.

Well, duh, right? And I've taken that sort of workman's approach to my writing in general for the past few years. A writing book I've often recommended to people suffering from creative blocks is Steven Pressfield's The War of Art. It's a little repetitive and has its metaphysical aspects which may or may not be helpful to a lot of people. But one of the basic messages I appreciated very much is, you have to think of your creative work as a job. Meaning, you can't wait around for the Muses to inspire you. Because what's the first rule of a job? You show up. Whether you're inspired or not. Whether you want to or not. Eventually that kind of discipline rewards you with productive output.

It worked for me, anyway. I'm not one of these writers who has to write, who churns out thousands of words at a sitting. It takes a lot of effort for me, a lot of the time. Ultimately I'm happier when I'm writing than when I'm not writing, so I make myself do it, whether I feel like it or not.

You can carry over a lot of other things from thinking of your writing as a job. You have to work with other people. At times you have to put aside your ego and listen to what others have to say about your work and accept their criticism. You have to distinguish between trivialities and the things that really matter to the integrity of your work.

This experience has given me new sympathy for publishers—and agents—and the reluctance they might have to take on debut authors. Though I think if you write a good book, it's pretty clear that you have some discipline, still, there's always that risk that a new novelist isn't going to be able to work to deadline, or work and play well with others, that she might be a big pain in the ass, and not worth the investment of time and money. Because that's the other thing you need to understand, if you don't know this already: agents and publishers are making a significant investment in you, of their own time and potential income.

Me, I take a lot of pride in my craftsmanship, and as I've gone through this process, I've realized that I also take a lot of pride in doing a good job. In getting the work done right, on time, or even ahead of schedule. This is a job that I really enjoy. One where I show up. One that I might even be good at. I like that.

My cover!!!!!!

Which I happen to think is pretty freakin' awesome. Click on the image for a larger view!

Best "Writing A Novel" post ever!

Just go read it. I'm still laughing!

"Writing a novel, a love story..."

So close...

It's another gorgeous day here in Venice CA, and I really really really want to get outside and enjoy it. Or failing that, procrastinate and find more interesting blogs to read. But I am almost done with my line edits for the book, and I really really REALLY want to finish today.

So please excuse me. I'll be back soon.

Profoundly stupid

And incredibly depressing. Via The Peking Duck come this news from Evan Osnos of the New Yorker:

Imagine, for a moment, how it might sound to turn on the news one day and hear that the head of the A.C.L.U. had vanished from his home in the predawn hours. Or, think how America might be different today if a pesky young Thurgood Marshall had been silenced using an obscure tax rule and kept out of the courts.

At around 5 A.M. on Wednesday, Chinese authorities visited the home of Xu Zhiyong, a prominent legal scholar and elected legislator in Beijing, and led him away. He has not been heard from again. Unless something changes, he is likely to stay away for a long time, with or without formal charges. Anyone with an interest in China, its economy, its place in the world, or the kind of future it will fashion, please take note: This is a big deal.

Xu might not have reached Marshall status yet, but he is as close as China gets to a public-interest icon. He teaches law at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. He has also run the Open Constitution Initiative, a legal aid and research organization that worked on many of China’s path-breaking cases. He and his colleagues had investigated the Sanlu milk scandal, in which dangerous baby formula harmed children’s health, and assisted people who had been locked up by local officials in secret undeclared jails. All of those activities are emphatically consistent with the goals of the Chinese government, even if they angered the local bureaucrats who were caught in the act.

I hardly know what to add to this, beyond the usual, "go read the whole thing."

I remember the first time I was in China learning about what the risks of dissent were, how omnipresent the surveillance, how easy it was to cross the line (I will never forget one of of my students, who was sent to a reform camp for "riding in a car with a foreigner without a hat"). Things are very different in China today. The bargain has been, you can do what you want, as long as you don't organize and pose a political threat to the established order. But when things like this happen, when people like this are detained for following the Chinese Constitution's own laws, I wonder what the future holds for China. If there is a monopoly of political power, if a press is not allowed to serve as a watchdog, if public interest groups are not allowed to serve the public's interest...are Chinese people simply supposed to trust that the government will do the right thing? Particularly when many Chinese regard their local authorities as hopelessly corrupt? What's the remedy here?

Of course I'm in a pretty bleak mood about government in general these days, when our own "democracy" has reached such a state of paralysis that the media devotes endless bandwidth to "beer summits" while the President and Congress are unable to craft a decent health care bill — unless your definition of "decent" is a bailout to the insurance industry, which seems to be where this is heading.

But I digress.

Back to work.

NOW I get Palin...

...Thanks to William Shatner!



(H/T to BillyB!)

Year of the Lurkers, baby!

For a number of years I've been involved with a small online writing group. Like many of the more profound aspects of my life, this came about in a nearly random way. I'd gotten an invitation to join an online "writer's workshop" which turned out to be a huge, unmoderated group that I suspect was used as a source for the group owner's paid seminars and publications. I found it frustrating and fairly useless. At one point I posted, "Is anyone lurking here working on novels?"

Thus began the Lurking Novelists.

I'm the only original member, but the core of the group has been the same for such a long time that as far as I'm concerned, the group didn't really exist before it. We're a small, tight group these days. We critique each other's work, but we also spend a lot of time sharing and bitching about the stuff of our everyday lives.

Which lately has included a helluva lot of success!

I'm overdue posting on some of this news, so let me bring you up to date:

Dana Fredsti, with one published mystery novel under her belt, has been writing for new ePub Ravenous Romance under the name Inara LaVey (she'll have to explain the derivation of that nom de plume for you). Her debut novel for RR, Ripping the Bodice, has been one of Ravenous' top-sellers. It's also very funny, with dead-on parodies of the old "bodice-rippers" of yore. I don't laugh easily, and this book made me laugh out-loud.

Bryn Greenwood recently signed with agent Robert Brown of the Wylie-Merrick Literary Agency, on the strength of her fabulous urban fantasy, Ugly. Bryn knows how much I love her book; I can't wait till it's sold and published so the rest of you can read it too.

Annnd....you won't have too long to wait to discover Elizabeth Loupas' wonderful historical mystery/romance, The Second Duchess—because it's just been sold to Penguin/NAL!!! Here's where I get to indulge in a little "I Told You So" — I bet "Duchess" would sell before the end of July. Neener!

Lurkers RAWK!!! Just sayin'...and I wouldn't be surprised if I have more news from this talented group to post in the months to come...

(P.S. And no, my Wombats, I have not forgotten you! A subject for its own post!)

It's not procrastinating when...

I take a quick break from line edits for a belated personal plug — if you haven't seen it already, check out this lovely post about yours truly from my favorite agent, Nathan Bransford.

No, procrastinating would be, oh, taking the time to reorder my links on the right because I've met all these cool writers lately and discovered hilarious, informative blogs like The Intern and need to separate "writers" from "writing" because it's sloppy and unwieldy the way it is now.

That would be procrastinating. So I'm not going to do it. Right now.

After the celebration...

...comes the line edit.

Mystic Yeast

This is how my life is.

I somehow ended up in China thirty years ago. I can't really explain right now how profound an impact that nearly accidental choice had on my life, in part because I am both jet-lagged and buzzed. Jet-lagged because I just returned from Beijing today. Buzzed because, well, because. It's still hard to get decent wine in China, and I crave it when I get home.

My Chinese isn't that great, but when I'm in Beijing, people comment on my Beijing accent, and I assume the status of an old Beijinger, because I was there before the profound changes that transformed the city nearly beyond the recognition of anyone older than, say, 35 or 40. I often have great conversations with taxi drivers, and this trip I had pretty much the Ur conversation; a man a few years older than I, who asked me what I thought about the changes in Beijing. Some aspects were good, I replied diplomatically, others, not so good.

What did I think was good about Beijing, he asked?

Beijing culture and Beijing people, I said.

This launched a torrent of opinion. Beijing people, real Beijing people, are the best, but these Waidiren, these outsiders, they have no culture, they don't understand. And this modern market society, it's not fair. Bugongping. The old days, in the 70s and 80s, when we were in this all together, when the competition was not so extreme, that was a good time. There. Do you see, over there? Those big buildings? That's where I grew up, in my childhood, for seven years. There was a river there, before. Do you remember? Do you remember the old traditional businesses (there's no good way to translate this expression; I had to hunt it up in my dictionary)? There weren't many businesses in the Beijing of 1979. Most had been destroyed by the Cultural Revolution.

Quanjude, the original Peking duck restaurant. The Foreign Languages Bookstore. The Number One Department Store. They survived, among others.

We exchanged memories.

Anyway, I'm not exactly sure what that has to do with my latest news, but it somehow feels relevant to me, in my buzzed, jet-lagged state.

When my plane landed at LAX today, the moment I turned on my phone, I had an email from my agent, the amazing Nathan Bransford. The ink on the contract is dry, and I can now announce that my novel, Rock Paper Tiger, in part inspired by some of my surreal experiences over the years in China, will be published by Soho Press in Spring/Summer 2010.

To say I'm happy about this is a huge understatement. I've had a great time working with the people at Soho, especially my editor, Katie Herman. I'm thrilled that they've taken a chance on me and my book. I'll do my best to reward their faith in me, and I hope I've written a book that you'll enjoy, and maybe you'll even learn a little about a country that isn't mine but that I still love, despite its flaws.

That goes for my own country too.

(POST EDITED 7/19 due to a sentence that was really misleading when I reread it and not what I'd meant. I blame the aforementioned jet-lag)

Wombat in Beijing

Mmmm...beer....

Greetings from behind the Great Firewall

Howdy all. Tunneling in via proxy to send greetings from Beijing. Richard aka The Peking Duck and I are about to head to Qingdao, Home of Beer. What more reason do I need to go?

It's been a packed trip, and I'll put up a more substantial post when I have some time.

Friday Cat Blogging!!!