2009 Debutantes

In response to my last post about phases of being quieter online, two people (one on Blogger, one on LiveJournal) commented about feeling guilty when they withdraw from social media. The second time someone mentioned guilt, I decided I want to say more on this subject.

Why should anyone feel guilty for stepping back? I wondered. After all, blogs and Twitter feeds and Facebook pages are all optional; most of us are not paid to do them and make no promises about when we'll post. Nobody's going to die over whether we post or not. (OK, if you see a tornado coming and tweet about it, you might save someone's life. But that's an exception!)

But entering the online world is entering a community. Most of us interact with a core group regularly, as well as with whomever else clicks on by. We have a horror of being thought of as the writer who became "too good" for her old blog buddies once she signed a book contract. We hate the idea of losing touch with friends once we tie the knot or have a baby. We don't want to disappear when we change jobs.

We like our friends and don't want to lose touch with them.

There's also the fact that sometimes when people disappear, it's because they've had a crisis, and we know people may worry. I can think of one writer I used to see on LiveJournal. Our relationship was at the "acquaintance" level, and many people migrated from LJ to other platforms, so it wasn't until I heard of her untimely death (from another social-media site) that I remembered her and realized I hadn't heard anything about her in a long while. It made me wonder about all the other people I used to see online but don't anymore. I assumed most of them just got tired of blogging or moved over to Facebook, and I know some of them went back to school or got new jobs or simply got so swamped by book promotion that they stepped back from the blogosphere--but now I wonder. Are they okay? I may never know.

So in one sense, I understand the desire to explain our absences from social media. And I think it's a nice idea to say, "I'm going offline for a while" if that's what we're doing. But I don't think we owe anyone an explanation. I don't think we have to justify our absences. Although I've been disappointed when my favorite bloggers stopped posting, I don't believe they owed me anything. They put up a bunch of free content that I enjoyed; we had some fun interactions; how can I complain about that?

Most of all, I don't think social media should have to be a chore. I do think it's important for writers to have at least one place online where readers can find them if they want, one place that provides a bio and author photo and a list of their books. But that can be a single page and doesn't have to be updated too often. Beyond that, it's all icing on the cake. It's about having fun and connecting with people, and if we're not getting that fun and connection here, or if we simply need to focus attention elsewhere, it's natural to step away. The Social Media Police will not come after us. :-)

Dear Ms. Creech,

This is a thank you note mixed with a confession. Read on, and you’ll understand.

First, I have to say that I loved your talk at the New England SCBWI Conference and was thrilled to finally meet you in person.

So thank you for that. But that’s only part of the thank you.  Before I get to the rest, I have to do the confession part.

So…you know that poem you have on your website? The one that explains to teachers why you can’t accept any more invitations for school visits this year?  It starts like this:

My phone is ringing

and the fax is going
and sometimes I am sick

(I hope you are not sick!)
and my car needs fixing

and I have to go
to the grocery store
and do the laundry

and clean up messes
and I am supposed to be
writing a new book
which takes a lot of time
to think about and
to write all those little words…

 

(The rest of Sharon’s why-I-can’t-visit poem  is here,  for those of you who are not Sharon and don’t know how it goes.)

You might not remember this, but a whole bunch of years ago – maybe nine or ten – you got an email from a teacher begging you to requesting that you consider making an exception to your no-more-school-visits-this-year policy.  It was written as a poem, too, because she thought you might like that, and she figured it was worth a try.  She doesn’t have that exact poem any more, but it went something like this.

We know that you are busy

Answering your phone

And buying food

and doing laundry

and sneezing

(Bless you)

And writing books we adore..

But we love-love-love those books so much

And wondered if you might sneak away

To visit us anyway.

It would just be for a day,

And then you could go back

To your grocery-shopping

Laundry-doing, phone answering, sneezing life

(Bless you)

To write more magical stories

For us all to love.

 

That teacher figured it was a long shot. (She used to be a reporter and understood all about deadlines.) But your poem inspired her poem, just like that, and before she knew it, she’d gone and hit the send button.

Your schedule was too busy to visit.  (She figured it would be.) But you made time to write back. You told her you loved her poem, that it made you smile.

And that made her whole teacher-day.

That teacher was me.

And that explains why I had to sit down when you tweeted this picture last week, saying you found your book in good company at the bookstore.  There’s your book on the left, and beside it, Grace Lin’s book, and then mine. Roald Dahl and Karen Cushman are there, too, just for good measure.

 

Thanks for making my day.   Again.

.

Yesterday I got to take part in the Festival of Trees for the first time, thanks to The Way We Fall‘s White Pine nomination. Such a fun day!

First, all the nominated authors got on stage with two student volunteers apiece. One volunteer was holding a big sign with our name, while the others went up in turn to introduce us and our books. (My two had come all the way from Ottawa!) And then the authors had to get up and say a few words, mainly about how amazing it had been to be a part of the Forest of Reading program…

After which the winner was announced. Congrats to Jeyn Roberts and The Dark Inside!

Then I did a signing for the many enthusiastic readers who’d shown up. I heard from a lot of teens who’d loved The Way We Fall and were excited about the rest of the trilogy (which I will never get tired of hearing!), and got some great questions. For the many who asked about my tips for aspiring writers, here’s the longer blog post I mentioned to go with the advice I was able to give you in person.

After a tasty lunch, Lena Coakley and I split an hour with two short workshops and some avid writers-in-the-making, and then I got to have a quick chat with a few librarians and industry folk before I had to run off to the day job.

So glad I got to meet so many other authors, and join in the festivities!

(And thanks to my Canadian publicist Melanie for taking the photos!)

Originally published at another world, not quite ours - Megan Crewe's blog. You can comment here or there.

The odds:

1. Weird Dreams had this week:

A. Waking up naked in a skate park covered in caramel corn and having to walk home barefoot in the rain. (Nightmare clincher: I have forgotten where I live.)

B. Living with a couple of women I don't care for and their children in a house where all the furniture blocks the doors and you have to crawl under things to get into the bathroom/bedroom/etc and struggling to keep my children from absorbing the atrocious habits of the other children (and mothers) and failing and watching them live in filth and enjoy eating sugary cereal with dog hair in it for breakfast. (Nightmare clincher: I'm forced to sleep in the laundry room and wake up every hour to shift the washer stuff to the drier, fold clothes, etc.)

C. I am a rear shooter on some kind of helicopter-ish thing in a post apocalyptic hell scape where the animals are all infected with an Ebola type virus that makes their eyes glow red. My comrades and I nearly escape but I keep swinging around to shoot things too quickly and throw the helicopter off balance and we crash and the Ebola critters swarm over our wrecked helicopter and begin to eat us alive. (Nightmare clincher: We are then resurrected so I can have different versions of this dream about three times. And one of the comrades becomes an ex-boyfriend who tries to convince everyone that I am untrustworthy because I was a bad girlfriend twenty years ago. No one else seems to see the flaw in his logic.)

D. I am twelve again. I am really completely twelve and realize I am going to have to go through my teens and early twenties again and I seriously consider jumping off a bridge to avoid it all because those years were so hard, especially parts of 20-26. (Nightmare bonus: Woke up with renewed compassion for the teenagers in my life and the teens I write for. These are hard times, ya'll. Hang in there, you can make it through and if you're brave, you will be better people at the end of it all. Suffering can make you kinder, funnier, and a generally more enjoyable individual. Or it can make you a whiny, self-indulgent, passive-aggressive asshole. The choice is yours.)

Other odds:

2. The garbage truck decided to change its route and now comes by our house at 4:45 and wakes up Leonard the Asshole bird, who cheeps from 4:45 until 8 or 9 in the morning. This makes me stabby.

3. No one is sending me the emails I would like to receive. Let's work on that world, shall we? I need some good emailz.

4. Some people are being not as nice as they should be. Let's be nice people. All too soon some of us will be dead and then we will all wish we'd been nicer. Or at least the alive people will, the rest of us will be dead and who knows what we'll be wishing. Probably that they had coffee in the afterlife.

The Evens:

1. OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI signing is ON!

I am definitely ON for a signing at Square Books Jr. in Oxford Mississippi on Thursday, June 20th at 5 p.m. I desperately need your help getting 5-10 people confirmed for this event (I sort of committed to rounding up people to attend, even though it is summer time and all the kids are hard to connect with that time of year). Know anyone in the area who likes to read YA or adult Urban Fantasy? Ask them if they'd like to come and I will be happy to send them a personal invitation.

I'm going to have my LAST Arc of OF BEAST AND BEAUTY to give away at this signing and some other very cool goodies, so hopefully it will be a fun event for all.

2. My Yelle Pandora station if freaking awesome like whoa and I love it.

3. I have written 7k in two days. Now I'm going to go make that 10k in three days because I'm taking no prisoners. NO prisoners.

4. No one is sending me emails I wouldn't like to receive. Good job, world. Bad emailz suck.

Have a Thursday, I'll be back Saturday with 9's birthday montage (he gave me permission to post it even though he is getting to be so very big and mature *sniff*).

Stacey

There are times when I'm engaging more with the people around me, active on social media, speaking more, writing short pieces. I think of those times as more outward-directed.

And then there are times when I'm reading more, and listening more, and spending more time writing long fiction. Or even just planning, outlining, drafting. In these times, the pull is inward.

I'm in the latter type of phase right now. I've been reading a lot. I've been writing a lot of stuff that is not yet fit for other people's eyes. (Or even decipherable by them, probably.)

It's all good. But I feel as if I've been relatively quiet lately. So this is me just poking a hand above the surface to wave hello.

In January, I decided to go away. To take a deliberate step back from the Internet and all its voices. It’s worked out well in some ways, a little weird in others.

Overall, I feel a lot better going into the release of THE ELEMENTALS and DEFY THE DARK than I have on previous books. They’re going to sell how they sell, and no amount of review-reading is going to change that. Yes, I still see the trade reviews, but there are only a handful of trades. Even when trade reviews aren’t glowing, there’s the (tiny) satisfaction that they noticed the book at all.

So I feel better on that front. And the ideas I’m having, I’m not pre-rejecting them. I have no idea what people are chattering about trend-wise, popularity-wise, fail-wise. I’m free to just wonder about things, and follow an idea where it leads. That’s really nice, because that hadn’t been the case for a long time.

But I do miss chatting with other authors on Twitter. I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of books that I would have read, if I’d known about them. I need to make a better effort to keep up on new releases. While I thoroughly enjoy the non-fiction I read, fiction is my first love and I feel like that’s gotten away from me in the last few months.

Overall, I think the going away has been good for me as writer. And I think my family would agree it’s been good for me as a person. They’re a lot happier when I’m not mired in self-doubt and constantly struggling against myself. The job requires a certain amount of selfishness– it feels good to be able to mitigate some of it.

Have you stepped back from social media? Have you considered it? How’s it working out for you?

Originally published at MSUFaL. You can comment here or there.

A first draft is like jigsaw puzzle pieces spilled onto the ground. There's a lot of material there, but it's hard to believe it will ever fit together, that it will ever make sense.

So...

Last week I was doing an exercise video in the living room and my 4 year old decided to join in. He stuck with it a lot longer than I thought he would (probably around fifteen minutes), long enough to show me his adorable take on a jumping jack and make my jaw drop with his full-on, knees-off-the-ground, perfect-form push-ups. It was like exercising next to a mini Navy Seal. I'm in pretty good shape: I do strength training 2-3 times a week, get my cardio on, do ballet, and can lift heavy objects like 40 lb children and large rolls of tag board at my pattern-making class, but I can't do push-ups without dropping my knees to the ground.

Neither can my almost 9 year old, at least not with good form, the way 4 was doing his push-ups. But then, 9 takes after his bio dad and is petite of bone and body and has had some other issues that have put him behind the curve when it comes to athletics, whereas 4 is built like a little bull-dog, with wide shoulders and a predisposition to be muscle-y all over. (He has calves that would make many a grown man weep with envy.)

I've known since 4 was very little that he would probably be an athlete of some kind. With 9, however, there was a time when I didn't know if he'd be able to do simple things like catch a ball more than once or twice in a row. We went to many an occupational therapy appointment where I fretted as I watched him struggle to master simple, everyday tasks most people take for granted.

But that's the thing. He struggled. He arrived at his appointments ready to work and gave each session everything he had. He worked on his hand strengthening exercises, he forced himself to learn how to swallow foods that once set off his gag reflex, he worked and worked, and now, only three years after that first day at OT, he eats a wide range of foods and has become a good little soccer player (he prefers defense) and has a better shooting average at the basketball net than I do (and I've got two feet in height and a certain degree of alleged natural coordination on my side).

So I have no doubt that if 9 should decide he wanted to do push ups like his little brother, he would put his mind to it, and work and work and work, until he achieved mastery of the push up.

Later last week, I had the chance to read part of a 20 year old manuscript by a writer I really respect. She's the type who writes blog posts with language so beautiful it makes your heart ache and her books are even better. She's a real talent, and I guess I'd always assumed she must have been born eloquent. (I assumed she was a 4, not a 9.) But when I looked at the old manuscript, I could see how far she's come. The old book was still good, don't get me wrong, but the growth in her craft after twenty years was impressive and abundantly clear.

Long story long, these two experiences reminded me that it isn't always the naturally talented (or only the naturally talented) who write beautiful books. Hard work, dedication, and perseverance can and do make a difference. Sometimes all the difference.

I needed that reminder last week. I blogged about it today in case any of you needed a reminder, too.

Have a lovely, productive day,

Stacey

"... I'm always complaining about how hard it is to write or how much I suffer when I'm writing--that almost every song I've ever written has been absolute torture. .... I always think there's nothing there ... this is garbage ... and even if it does come out, I think, 'What the hell is it anyway?'"

Reading these words from an interview of John Lennon (as reported in Jonathan Cott's Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono), I had to laugh. Lennon had one of the most successful songwriting careers of all time. It's somehow comforting to know that it didn't come any more easily to him than writing comes to the rest of us. That even with legions of adoring fans screaming when he sang and longing to tear the very clothes from his back--he still struggled with self-doubt, still wrestled with the muse.