No guarantees

It’s midnight and the best thing I can say about Wednesday is: it’s over. This was one of those days when the frustration and stress level got so high, that I actually began to think I might have done something truly evil and was being punished by an Avenging Spirit. Most likely, I’m still reeling emotionally from the blow I was dealt by my agent when she rejected my last novel. It’s hard to recover from a thing like that. And I began thinking today about my career and how it isn’t going the way I’d like it to.  Hold on, I’m not whining. I have a point. Here it is:

In a creative career, there are no guarantees.

My husband works in corporate America and over the years, I have watched him climb up the ladder, working hard, being consistent, and earning his stripes, the money that comes with the stripes, and even the headaches that come with standing at the top. And though I know I work equally as hard, and that I am as skilled in my field as he is in his own, in a creative career there is no ladder. There is no certain path. Working hard and long isn’t all there is. There is natural ability. There is confidence. There is luck and timing. And after all of that, there is even more luck.

Lots of people want to work in the arts: writers, actors, painters, musicians. Of these the only group that has a prayer of a guarantee that their hours working has direct correlation to how well they do as artists, are musicians. At least according to Gladwell’s Outliers. So what’s the thing that keeps artists going? Is it sheer force of will? Is it self-confidence, despite the worry of being delusional? Is it the feeling of I-was-meant-to-do-this?

I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that on days like yesterday the thing that comforts me is knowing that what I do, I do for my family and for that little-girl part of me who always wanted to grow up and be a writer. I do it because on most days, it makes me happy.

Plug in your book

Last night I got an email from B&N advertising the Nook. It’s due to come out in November, so loyal B&N customers got a preview. Um, that thing is hot. I never once considered getting an e-reader, but I definitely considered it after getting a look at the Nook. While I’m sure Wired magazine will have a comprehensive and exhaustive comparison of all the e-readers out there, here’s my less-comprehensive one.

THE LOWDOWN

1) Cost: Nook $259, Kindle $259 (reduced from $359 earlier this year), Sony Reader $299.

2) Pretty: Nook, Kindle and Sony Reader below, in that order.

 

 

 

 

 

3) Visuals: The Nook is advertised as an easy-to read screen. Some Kindle 2 owners downgraded to Kindle because the K2’s screen gave them headaches. I’m not sure about the Sony Reader. Both Kindle and the Sony Reader are grayscale screens, while Nook has a color touch screen. Color!

4) Nook has a variety of covers to choose from, some from fancy designers like Kate Spade. You can also switch out the back of your Nook for 4 different back cover options. Sony has 3 color options: silver, black and red. Kindle has none. On Nook, you can also upload pictures to use as a screensaver.

5) Sony Reader owners can get expandable memory through a Sony memory stick. The Kindle has no card slots or expandable memory. Nook comes with less built-in memory than Kindle, but with a card slot, the memory far outlasts both the Kindle and the Sony Reader.

6) Sony Reader and Kindle will last 14 days on a single charge. Nook lasts 10.

7) You can sync your Kindle with your iPhone and iPod Touch. You can sync your nook with your iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, PC, or Mac OS computer.

You can mark pages and make notes on your Nook. You can even loan your books to friends.

9) Kindle has Digital Text Platform which allows authors to upload their books directly to Kindle and set their own price for purchase. Authors get 35% of their list price for every book sold. As far as I can tell, neither Sony Reader nor Nook have this capability. However, I don’t think you need to own a Kindle to be able to do this, but anyone you’re planning to sell your book to needs to have one.

EBOOK READERS FOR SCHOOLS

All that is fine and well, but they’re all missing the obvious: a school application. Every day my daughter struggles home with several textbooks, workbooks, etc. How great would it be if all her textbooks could be on one reader? Then she’d have a lighter load, and all her work would be in one place. Smaller and lighter than a laptop (which has become de rigeur in cutting-edge education) and possibly much cheaper if it’s only limited to a few titles. Students can borrow the Readers at the beginning of the school year, use them, and return them at the end of the year for the next class. Even if I had to pay to rent one at the beginning of the year for my kid, I would. Happily. In any case, many textbook companies are trying to embrace online content so that they can update textbooks, especially Social Studies/History and Science books with the latest information. Wouldn’t it be great for kids to get the news every day? The news! Imagine! Right in their classrooms!

So let’s get on that, guys! Corner the educational market and make parents happy and students’ backs less strained.

It makes me want to get back in the educational publishing game. Whoops. Nope. The feeling’s gone.

Oh well.

Hi Ho! Hi Ho!

After much procrastination yesterday, I woke up this morning determined to get things done. I got my daughter to school, took my son with me to the grocery, dropped him off, came home, forgot the groceries in the trunk, wrote about half of the Introduction for the Sharon Creech biography, picked up my son for his flu mist appointment, returned my reluctant preschooler to his class, came home, forgot the groceries in the trunk again and got a little more done on the intro.

Pretty good for about 2.5 hours.

Of course now I have a headache, but that’s mainly from the cold my husband passed off on me before he left for Boston yesterday.

I say it’s time for a yarn break. Last week when I found the robot pattern, I immediately started to cook up my own. (You know I can’t follow a pattern, right? That would be logical and easy!) I made a little red robot foot the same day, thought it was too big, but never got around to ripping it out, or starting on a new one. It looks like this:

I also have just a couple of days to read Ellison’s Invisible Man before casting my vote for the National Book Awards. Know what else is up for a National Book Award? Laini Taylor’s Lips Touch. I had the pleasure of meeting Laini a few years ago at an SCBWI conference, and we’ve kept in touch. A little. Kind of.

I also have passages to write, laundry to finish, the beds to make, and later, dinner.

Guess that robot will have to wait a little longer.

Make lemonade

The end of last week was rough. Comically bad, even. I summed it up for a friend over IM this morning, and it turns out to be great as text. Lots of description. Lots of action. Lots for her to react to.

The worst occurrences make the best stories. And the stories get even better if the hero is actively involved in trying to make things better but only makes them worse.

Things to remember while writing.

As soon as I get over last week.

Domo arigato

My whole life people have told me that I am extremely hard on myself. In the last few months, I’m finally beginning to recognize that. Maybe it’s the fact that perfect strangers are taking me to task. I’m working on it though I’m finding it difficult to be kind and gentle to myself when I’m used to giving myself the hairy eyeball and a barage of negative thoughts. I’m a work in progress, but I’m progressing nicely.

To further be kind to myself, I’ve been repeating the mantra: I am not a robot. And to make myself feel even more warm and fuzzy about my non-robotness, I decided maybe I’d knit myself a toy robot. Not one for either of my children. For me. My very own lovey. So I found this pattern this morning. Cute huh?

Since I’m not knitting anything this Christmas (a huge load off my mind and fingers after last year’s Santa’s workshop knit-fest) I figure this can be my present to me. I didn’t actually knit anything for myself last year and you know what? I deserve it.

I totally do.

Organized writing

My husband is a fancy schmancy CTO and uses a lot of fancy schmancy technology in his life. His belt loops runneth over with gadgetry. When he talks tech, my eyes glaze. It’s ok to tell you this. He knows. And as a result of his technological prowess, I know next to nothing. I can’t even put music on my own iPod. By the way, has anyone seen my iPod?

So a couple of weeks ago when I was starting to think about beginning my research for the Sharon Creech bio, I looked at him organizing one of his (many!) presentations. He was using One Note, and it had all these sections and sub-folders and stuff that allowed him to be nice and organized. He had given me a tutorial a couple of years ago on how to use it, thinking it would help me be better orgainized for my non-fiction work. At the time it was too overwhelming for my creative and easily-frustrated mind, and plus I hadn’t asked for his help then, so my ears and eyes resisted all information even though my head nodded at the appropriate times. I’m really good at that move. I stubbornly clung to  my trusty (handy dandy?) notebook for the last five non-fiction books. But finally I was ready to learn something new.

Anyway, I made him stop working and show me how to use the program again.

And man, that thing is handy. All the information is in one place AND I can organize it however I want. The program really forces me to think about how I want to organize my notes, and by extension, my book, which is frustrating for my loop-d-loop mind to get used to, but being able to have all the research, my own typed or handwritten notes (this is why I love tablet computers), electronic article clippings, photos, etc. in sections with sub-folders means that I don’t have to flip through countless notebook pages looking for that note I made about that thing she did back in whatever year that was. And since I can rearrange the information and copy it, it’s easy to keep chapter sections together even if I’m using clippings of the same article for different chapters, or to completely reorder things as I get a better idea of my outline.

Ahhh! Sweet organization. It’s a relief to be able to find things with the click of a mouse. Between this and YWriter, will I ever use a notebook again?

Maybe for the grocery list.

This skirt

I have this skirt that I love but I don’t wear it very often. It’s not beautiful. It’s fuzzy. It sheds. But I love it anyway. Every time I wear it, I feel good despite its relative ugliness. (The picture does its ugliness NO justice.) And every time I wear it, my husband’s eyebrows go up and he says, “that skirt!” or something like, with a little grin on his face.

I made it myself.

A few years ago I came across a yarn that was made from the snipped-off ends of old saris, gathered by women, and woven into a multi-hued and irregular string of vibrant colors. It appealed to me deeply. The colors, the recycling, the financial advantage for 3rd world women, the allure of saris. I always wanted my own sari. My father probably would have liked that, but I always thought I’d look ridiculous in one, having not inherited a sufficient portion of his Indian features. People are usually surprised when I say I’m 1/2 Indian, though never surprised to hear I’m part Hispanic although that’s a mere quarter of my DNA.

I ordered the yarn, waited weeks for it to arrive to my LYS, then bought way more of it than I needed for the project I wanted to try. With three skeins left, I wondered what I could do with the remainder and knew that because it was irregular, occasionally had bits of hay in it, and was incredibly unpredictable, I couldn’t make anything I’d wear on my torso, or up near my neck, so a skirt was ideal. In my head it would look like multi-colored tweed when it was finished. It doesn’t.

It’s subdued in low light but really comes to life in the sun when the silk glistens and the saturated hues brighten.

I know it’s silly to love a ridiculous little piece of cloth.

And yet…

Tedium

Today I’m wading through reviews of Sharon Creech’s books. Since she’s such a popular author, there are dozens of reviews of each book, and I won’t use all of them, but I need to stockpile as many as I can so that I can extract all the good lines and weave them together to make a nice, seamless narrative when I do write about her books myself. This is probably the most tedious part of the process because reviews about her books don’t tell me anything about her, so there’s no excitement for me, no discovering something interesting about this author that I can connect to and rework into my version of her story.

But it has to be done.

Back I go.

Nat’l Book Awards Vote

This weekend I got a postcard from the National Book Awards. This one wasn’t telling me who won this year (not me again?), but asking me to vote on one of six books that former winners, finalists and judges had decided on. Interesting that none of them were recent winners. I had to go back to the 50’s to find most of these titles. Anyway, here they are:

John Cheever “The Stories of John Cheever”

Ralph Ellison “Invisible Man”

William Faulkner “Collected Stories of William Faulkner”

Flannery O’Connor “The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor”

Thomas Pynchon “Gravity’s Rainbow”

Eudora Welty “The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty”

I think it’s really hard for single books to go up against someone’s entire body of work and in this case, I think that Ellison and Pynchon have the disadvantage, and you know I like an underdog, so I will vote for one of these two. To be fair, I’ll reread them both between now and October 21, when voting is over, then make my decision.

You can weigh in on your favorite as well.

Happy reading!

Me vs. Mac

I posted a few days ago about Scrivener. After a little research this weekend, I discovered it’s only available for Mac, and after some more digging, I came across a blog by a writer wishing that Scrivener was available for PC, and wringing his hands over the fact its creator has no plans to make it available for PC. The comments that followed include a little puzzlement over leaving out a huge portion of the market and some nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahing from Mac users. Um. No.

Let’s move past the fact that these particular Mac posters were stupidly juvenile. There’s something else going on here that makes me ill. A couple of months ago when Lola was on her way out, and before I bought Zooey, some of my Mac-using friends tried to get me to switch from being a PC to being a Mac. “Come over to our side,” they coaxed. Your side? Is there a wall? Guess what, folks, it’s a machine, not a doctrine.

Look, I’ll give Macs the beauty prize but as far as I can tell, the company operates under an exclusionary and paranoid business model. If you’re not one of us, you’re some kind of idiot. Exhibit A: the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads. I’ve come across enough angry Mac-users blogs to know that the company’s childish mindset has trickled down to its consumers. I thought the two main parties in American government had cornered the market on stomping off to separate corners and shouting with their fingers in their ears. This kind of I’m-better-than-you thinking is bad when it comes up as a natural part of human nature. Do we really need it to be manufactured by a company whose goal is to make money off our dissent?

Anyway, I digress. Scrivener. Not for PC users. Fortunately there are other programs for us PC-users (you know, the other 95% of us).

YWriter is supposed to be excellent and is available for FREE! I watched the online tutorial and this is the one I plan on using.  Then there’s Celtex, SuperNotecard, Zoot, MyBase, Keeper, Liquid Story Binder XE which one reviewer says is the best for Windows users, Mendely, Page Four which costs $34.95 and I hear isn’t as good as YWriter, and finally, Writer’s Cafe.

After completing eight books on evil, conspiring, trying-to-take-over-the-world, monopolizing Microsoft’s MS Word, I’m happy to find some new tools. Can’t wait to see how they pan out.