If you had only one year, what would you write?

A THANKSGIVING REFLECTION

Today is turkey day for many people, including my huge and wonderful extended family in Mexico City, Detroit, and all over the western world. I am so grateful for them. I wish I were with them.

I am grateful for friends.

For self-publishing. Even for Amazon.

I realize how grateful I am for the ability to write, however slowly, but I’ve been feeling lately it is slipping away.

Part of that is the normal losses of life: the last chick has left the nest (we hope, for her sake and happiness, for good). I am in the middle of a huge effort to downsize. And another huge effort to walk properly again. Both these efforts take a lot of energy – and the energy has to come from somewhere.

A big part is chronic illness; it demands more than anyone can afford.

But part is also aging, and the thought that if I slow down much more, I will be at a standstill.

Time is finite – will you be happy what you do with yours?

So this morning I asked myself the title question: If you only had one more year to be a writer, what would you choose to be your legacy?

Many writers have had this question thrust on them. Some have quit writing – they’ve said what they want to say, and the work is getting onerous.

Others, like Sir Terry and Iris Murdoch, were taken from us by the disease no one seems to be able to fix except in mice – Alzheimer’s Disease. I hope AD also removed from them the pain of knowing they were losing it, because it is the most awful feeling.

But still others – and I hope to be in this group – use this question to focus, to re-prioritize and re-aim their writing, and to ask themselves if they really are doing everything they can – and whether the work is important enough to warrant the expenditure of so many chits.

I have a very short professional list:

I have to finish Pride’s Children: NETHERWORLD, and Book 3, tentatively subtitled LIMBO & PARADISE. Or maybe just PARADISE. And get them both published on Amazon.

I want to put the prequel short story, Too Late, up on Amazon.

I want them read, and I hope they will have an effect on people who consider the disabled ‘other,’ and not worth considering – or reading about.

I think I can accomplish those things IF I focus. Tempus fugit.

It is nice to consider that I have all the time in the world. But nobody ever really does. Life can strike the writer at any age.

Note that I’m also asking this question of people who don’t consider themselves writers – is there someone you should write to, or something you could write, need to write? That letter to your children? The one where you tell someone how much they’ve really meant to you?

What’s on your list?

My morning walk through my Internet village

SURFING? OR FREEDOM FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T GET OUT MUCH?

What other people do so easily, would be impossible for me: I’m technically retired now, though the last 25 years of my working life were spent on disability, and I can’t just ‘go out for a walk’ like healthy people my age.

I’ve recently gotten to the place where I can walk more, but it isn’t easy or fast or convenient or unassisted, not like when I used to go out the front door, turn left (or right if I wanted to add an extra bit around the cul-de-sac), and just go, walk wherever I happened to decide, and come back when I’d had some exercise.

But I do something similar when I get on my computer in the mornings, and, while I’m waiting for the morning’s caffeine to decide if there are going to be working brain cells today, I walk around my Internet neighborhood – the sites on my navigation bar – and see what’s up.

Procrastinate first, except for the rare days when there’s something my limited brain can do in the writing department before it is warmed up. I’ve tried – nothing seems to work – so I’ve decided to enjoy my morning walk, do it as efficiently as possible, and not fret about the time wasted/spent. Angst is not helpful, so I don’t bother any more. And I almost never add any new stops to the navigation bar.

HOME COMPUTER: Email first – well Duh!

I check email several times a day, and make sure to deal with what I can asap, as friends write, and several newsletters show up with something new, and often a quick response saves much time and effort later.

Plus, as you can tell, I like to write back. Gets the brain moving and the fingers wiggling.

Sometimes I find responses I needed from missives I’ve sent out to friends or other sources, and know I’ll be able to move something forward.

Occasionally, I have to do something, such as go to the basement and read the numbers on the meter for the solar power system, near the first of the month. They can’t do their paperwork until they have my input, so it gets a high priority.

FIREFOX: First stop on the Internet are my own blogs

I refresh the page, and the thingy in the top right hand corner will tell me if I have visitors, and if they’ve commented. New comments on the blog always get first priority

First stop after 9AM – TPV; if much earlier, do this later

I stop by The Passive Voice for the morning publishing news (and several times more during the day because Passive Guy puts up five or six posts every day). It’s like a visit to a cafe where you get good commentary, and rude people aren’t tolerated. We mostly stay on topics related to publishing and books and such, but David has an interesting mind, and gets stuff from lots of places.

Extra points if posts have a comment at the bottom from our gracious, handsome, and intelligent host – his wry humor and delicate satire are things for joy.

People send him stuff. He is a good host, posting an excerpt – and a link to the original. He is careful not to ruin the original post, while giving you enough to decide if you’re going to visit it.

On most blogs, comments need supervision, and are often not worth the time to scan them; if you don’t read the comments on TPV – and subscribe so you get the late ones – you’re going to miss things. Useful things.

WU – ‘about the craft and business of fiction’

I stop by Writer Unboxed most mornings, at least to get a quick look at the topic and the post’s byline. I skip Flog a Pro – kind of hate the idea of people feeling they can freely trash work they couldn’t produce; mean-spirited and negative some times. Not me. Other bylines or topics I know I won’t respond to from the title or a bit of the post, I skip; otherwise, I read the post.

I consider whether there’s anything I’d like to add to the discussion (there’s usually a question or two at the end of the post as a prompt); I leave my little addition to world literature or my (usually different) take on the subject, read those of other people I recognize, and maybe pop back later; I like posters who bother to come back and join the discussion better, but not all of them have/take the time.

FB – for friends and support groups

You get out what you put in on FB. You are a contributing member of a community – or not. Since one group is a support groups for people I know have extremely limited energy, that group’s members get a pass – some can only afford to post when desperate, and we all respect that.

My group of friends is small, and I don’t sell or proselytize much – that’s not what friends are for. My blog posts automatically on my personal FB page; if there’s anything that the groups might find useful, I cross-post them on the group page. A little goes a long way.

I check out any friend requests – most are obvious spammers – easy to tell (and block permanently) if I take a peek at their page. I’ve even reached the point of checking with the ‘friends in common’ if a friend request is odd and unexpected in any way.

I have no author page – yet. It would be one more thing to maintain – maybe if it seems a good idea later.

CHROME: GR and my British friends

A daily stop, maybe several times, is a nice bunch of people on Goodreads in the UK Kindle group who have made me feel welcome. I’ve read enough British authors in my life to practically qualify on that alone. Occasionally there will be something in my inbox from a GR friend.

I usually save those for later response, but almost always read them right away.

The notifications function provides a quick way to keep track of the threads I comment on or read.

The comics – and Dear Abby

And I’ve had my bit of entertainment for the day; I have them set up for easy refreshing on the Chrome browser, and can update and read and pass on good ones to friends with a few minutes’ effort. Doesn’t that happen to you? A comic just makes you have to send it to a particular friend?

Extra points when the friend later emails back that it was especially appropriate or welcome.

The daily brain puzzles – measuring brain speed (if any)

Usually the last stop on my little trek, I set up a few hard sudokus, maybe do one or two, to gauge whether my brain is starting to work the way I need it to work for writing fiction.

I’m looking for a completion time below seven minutes; and I monitor, with a partial brain, how the math processing is going. I can literally feel it when I’m not tracking – I can still do them most of the time, but they feel like slogging through mud, and take forever. The CFS brain fog is clearly at work here; sometimes it won’t go away. I can work a bit, but it almost isn’t worth it without a brain. I’ll get ten minutes worth of writing done in three hours.

Yahoo news

If it makes it to Yahoo, I take a quick scan; other news items will show up in paper (The Economist and other magazines), or someone will boost them on FB, so this is really a desperate measure to find SOMETHING to read before I have to (want to/have to) get to work.

The end of the walk – home again, home again, higglety pen

After a final quick check of the emails, and possibly TPV depending on timing, and a superquick and usually pointless visit to Amazon’s pages that show book sales, I grit my metaphorical teeth and start up Freedom or Anti-Social to block the internet for my available writing time.

Then have chocolate protein shake, and take First Nap (sounds counterproductive, but isn’t – search for ‘mental dialysis’ posts), and when I wake up again and come back to the computer, the writing is sitting there ready to go, I’ve checked out that the whole world is okay until I have time to look again, and I don’t even think about all my friends for hours.

Turning into a routine makes it much more efficient than it used to be.

Keeps me sane.

And productive.

And connected – the most important part of all. My internet friends are REAL friends. I just maybe don’t really know how tall they are.

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Thanks to Stencil for images I can create or edit.

Do you have a morning computer routine?

Pride’s Children: PURGATORY now collector’s item

FOR THE AMUSEMENT OF MY READERS IN PRINT

You have to love Amazon, and the people who sell there (caveat emptor), but treat them with care.

I keep track of things (okay, I look too often at the sales pages), and notice the oddities.

Which today included MY book, USED, for sale at $319.93 (plus $3.99 shipping and handling – sheesh! You’d think that at that price they’d throw in the shipping and handling for free).

So if you bought the paper copy, you can amuse yourself with the thought that it is now ‘worth’ (here defined as ‘being offered for sale at that price’) almost 15 times what you paid for it.

And I’m not even famous yet!

And if it’s one of the few paper copies I sent to reviewers, and the offer were real (which I highly doubt, being of a skeptical nature), someone just made some real dollars off me as a writer. I wish them the best of luck!

I’m sure if I pursued this ‘sale’ past the cart at Amazon (which I got to), something would go wrong, or someone at the other end would quickly buy a paper copy and have it sent to me, and there would be laughing all the way to the bank if it actually went through.

But it’s a funny little bit in a world which has turned funny, too, lately, so I got my five cents worth of chuckle out of it – and pass it on to the loyal fans.

I’m sure you writers out there have had this happened – it’s just the first time for me.

BTW, NETHERWORLD is coming along nicely – maybe it will be worth even more!

Hope in NIH research budget commitments for ME/CFS?

OCCUPY M.E. FOLLOWS NIH RESEARCH ON CFS

This is a CFS blog as well as my writing blog. There are much better CFS bloggers, so I don’t do much with it here, but I read and follow developments, as we all wait for some kind of answer.

Jennie Spotila does a lot of things, and in particular, runs a blog called Occupy M.E., where she analyzes what the information actually says.

She’s been running a features for almost a year now, called ‘The NIH RFA Ticker.’ With it she examines every week how the NIH allocates research grant money. In her words in the initial post:

“RFA” stands for Request for Applications, and it is an announcement from NIH saying, basically, we will fund $X amount of research on Y topic. This is different from regular funding opportunities, because the money has been set aside. If enough meritorious grants are received, that money WILL be awarded. That’s different from tossing your application into the general pool and hoping it floats.

NIH last issued an RFA for CFS research in 2006, and we’ve been begging for another ever since.

The weekly update post

Every week she sees how much money has been allocate by RFA by the NIH, and every week since she started, the RFA money for ME/CFS research has been ZERO.

From the Nov. 7, 2016 post, the totals for fiscal year 2016 were:

352 RFAs issued, $2,840,680,617 committed to RFAs, and ZERO RFA money for ME/CFS. Yup. That’s over 2.8 BILLION dollars in your tax money and mine.

The latest update (Nov. 14, 2016) showed how much money is committed so far in FY 2017:

51 RFAs issued, $252,167,563 committed to RFAs, and ZERO RFA money for ME/CFS.

We’ve been promised research, and attention, and money for about thirty years now. MOre recently, with activists holding protests, the promises have been made that they’re going to figure out what’s wrong with us.

Jennie just posts, every week, that actions speak louder than words, and, so far, the actions tell us we don’t count, and there is no one interested in studying us (they have to apply for those research grants), and we should stop bothering them because they’re trying.

I dunno. Jennie posts the numbers. I am giving them a tiny bit more visibility here. I visit Occupy M.E. for the weekly update. She is very polite – these are public numbers. She is much more polite than I am.

And every week I’m outraged.

I don’t know where she finds the energy. I can only shudder at how disabled people with unappealing disease and conditions will be treated these next few years.

You might click through and leave her some encouragement; it has been a lonely haul for so long, it would be nice to see that number, that ZERO, actually change. Even then, it will be a beginning, not an answer, to fund research. But to start a marathon, you have to cross the line.

Application to fiction

After all, this is my writing blog, too.

When I started Pride’s Children, and gave Kary this disease as something to deal with, I was afraid that the disease conundrum would be solved – and the story rendered moot – before I finished it. It would still be a story worth telling, set as it is in 2005, but the edge, the urgency, would be lost if the reader knew that CFS, like, say, AIDS, had been solved. Historic, but not critical.

I needn’t have worried. It may take me years to finish the remaining two books in the trilogy – but we don’t even have a start in this one important area of funding. NIH funding. Government research money spent for the needs of citizens who would love to be productive again, and would settle for not feeling quite as sick. I’ll probably win this race.

Pray for us. But also be outraged with us.

Comments make for happiness and the feeling of being heard.

There is always a new writing fear

FEAR OF LOSING WHAT YOU HAVE IS PARALYZING

One of fear’s main jobs is keeping us safe: safe from falling, safe from making mistakes – from failing.

But, as many things, it is a more useful servant than it is a master.

I visited WriterUnboxed.com this morning, as I do most mornings, to get my brain in gear, give it time to focus, possibly preload it with something creative.

And I run smack into a blog post by Annie Neugebauer in which she talks about how to overcome the fear of making a mistake.

And not just any mistake, but the fear of falling flat on your face when taking a risk in your writing.

It is possible to miss the source of your fears

I left the following comment:

I have found that what scares you to write doesn’t often get the scary reaction – it’s more likely to be ignored, after all that courage it took to face the fear. In either case, though, you’re absolutely right: taking the dive feels good.

I’m doing that right now, diving into the fears I deliberately planted in the middle book of a trilogy – from the very beginning. I have spent years asking myself if I really had to go this route. The answer is that I do – there’s no way around it, and there’s never been a way around it.

If no one else in the world likes it or thinks it’s essential, oh well.

But now that a small number of readers have said they’re waiting for the second book, and the first one is slow, I just realized that I have been afraid of disappointing those readers! Who didn’t even exist when I started the first book.

What a concept: being able to disappoint readers.

Understand this first: the whole of what will be the Pride’s Children trilogy was meant to be, was planned out to be, a single book.

Due to my plotting with Dramatica, when the story got too long in the telling, the breakpoints to split it up were obvious (one of the great pleasures of plotting thusly), and it took very little to separate the pieces out into three volumes instead of one.

Writing Pride’s Children: NETHERWORLD has not been automatic

I expected it to be easy; after all, I was just going to the next scene in a long list of scenes, and thought I would merely be doing what I always do: gather what I have assigned to the scene in Dramatica, Save the Cat, The Key…Power of Myth, The Fire in Fiction – my go-to books while writing; structure everything into a scene that ‘happens’ in time, instead of a collection of bullet points; become the character – and write.

And I’ve been baffled by how hard it’s been.

I even started a post (in draft) about how hard the first scene was to write (short version: a new kind of scene required some new thinking).

But it wasn’t until this morning, after Annie’s questions:

What scary drop have you been avoiding?

and

And are you willing to accept any bruises or ego dents that may come?

that I realize what was going on: a brand new kind of fear, one I’d been vaguely aware of, but hadn’t fully engaged with.

I may get reassurances on this one, of the “I’ll like anything you write” or “Whatever you’re planning can’t be that bad,” from my friends who really believe that, and have taken risks of their own.

Facing reality may not change it

But those reactions are promises made to a future which doesn’t exist yet. When making the comment – and encouraging writers to take the risks – readers and other writers don’t know what they’re endorsing: they are writing a blank check.

If I blithely accept the recommendation to keep going – it could still turn out to be something my readers hate.

All I can say at this point is that it is built into the story from the beginning, and if you liked PURGATORY, you have already bought into the foreshadowed premise, whether you know it yet or not.

If you don’t like it, remember it was a choice made with full realization that it is dangerous – and that I tried my darndest to make sure it was the best choice. The only choice I have is to write it as well as I can – and to be as accurate as I can be to the mind of the character I’m writing in.

I am trying to sneak it past the reader, which, paradoxically, may require mentioning it early, and then being almost too subtle.

You just gotta trust the writer

I remember being delighted by a comment in a review:

I honestly don’t know how to explain the grip this book had on me from the first. I couldn’t stop reading it, and I wanted it never to end. I’ve read other books that affected me this way, but the authors always hurt the spell by tossing a plot bomb in through the window. Ehrhardt may do that before the trilogy is over, I can’t see the future, but she doesn’t do it in this book.

That’s, of course, one of the readers I don’t want to disappoint, who were kind enough to say I knew how to finish a book.

Maybe, when it’s all finished, I will describe why it must be the way it is.

I hope it will gain more readers than it loses me. If not, I am still writing this trilogy for me.

As a reader, what do you do when the ending of a book doesn’t satisfy you?

As a writer, have you come to this place?

Comments are most welcome.

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Thanks to Stencil for the ability to create ten images a month – for free. If I ever need more, I will be using them.

Also, thanks to Blasty for helping me try to remove unauthorized downloads of Pride’s Children from Google search results. They are looking for more free beta readers to help them finish figuring out their methods. They have removed over 2000 infringements already for me. I mind, because I don’t want my work enticing readers to phishing sites. If you want to read for free, ask for an electronic Review Copy and consider writing a review.

Pride’s Children’s rankings after a year

SALES RANK

KINDLE, CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

KINDLE, LITERARY FICTION

AUTHOR RANK

IT’S BEEN AN ODD YEAR AS A FIRST-TIME PUBLISHED NOVELIST

None of my sales have done much.

Word of mouth has been how most of the sales came about.

I am basically hand-selling to people I meet who also seem to have reading habits that mean they might like PC.

Now that I have a decent, if small, number of reviews (25), with at least one at every star ranking, I will be trying a few Fussy Librarian offers, to try to reach people outside of my immediate circle. If FL will have me.

KU, which I had high hopes for, has been a dud. Being in or out hasn’t made much difference.

The last Kindle Countdown Deal sold two copies (0.99 – so I got 0.67 each). Definitely not worth the effort.

Goodreads has provided friends – one or two sales; ditto FB and Wattpad. I have sent out a LOT of review copies (just ask – I will send you one). Everyone says I’m pricing wrong, but the 0.99 sales do nothing – and you can always have a free review copy!

I’m sure this is the way beginners start; I also spent way too much time watching it happen, as I’m sure many beginners do.

I’m well started with PC: NETHERWORLD, the middle book in the trilogy, full of surprises (if you can trust me).

And it’s been otherwise a very crazy year, so I think I’m going to put my head down (as soon as I can for sure is next Wednesday), and write, and try not to panic. Careers last a long time.

I liked the pretty graphs – and a year seemed to be a good time to review the results.

Oh, and I’ve sold, I believe, 7 paper copies.

I have avoided advertising which focuses on me, and kept it on story and writing (except for the online ME/CFS group where they already know me, and this blog, of course). I don’t know if that’s wise, but it is a one-way street to move into talking about a disabled writer, which does funny things to most people’s minds (such as lowering standards, and expecting inspiration, and just plain not wanting to read) which I’d rather avoid. On the other hand, an awful lot of books come out every year.

Hope this next 12 months works a bit better.

ETA: Author Rank pic.