A Busy Visitor

We're having work done on our yard and have an assortment of plants still in their containers arrayed about the landscape. This bumble bee, after having inspected every plant on the lot, found only the lavender to his liking. He visited each flower on the plant exactly once and then left the premises.

Hope Is Not A Strategy*

As tight-fisted as Mother Time is, those of us who pursue writing as a sidelight have some particularly hard decisions to make.

In my writing life, I've tended to shoot for the moon, writing spec scripts and novels in the hope of inducing heady auctions that end in six figure deals and an ocean view home in the hills of Malibu.

The difficulty with such a strategy, if you can call it a strategy at all, is that it carries the stench of desperation, much like the dreamers among us who will be saved by the big lottery win.

Even ignoring the financial aspects, the external rewards for novelists and screenwriters are very few and far between. It's possible, even likely, that a writer will labor for months and years at a time without having any real sense of whether he's doing publishable work (or even work that has any drive, makes any sense, deserves to be written).

Another strategy, one that's making more and more sense to me in recent days, is to take a more balanced approach, writing both long and short-form fiction, submitting to markets both small and large.

The benefits, on the feedback side, are immediate and obvious. If you're doing good work, you have an opportunity to be told so, and to be rewarded in the short term. If, on the other hand, you're crafting dreck, you'll know that soon, as well, and won't have wasted months of your life chasing something that has no prospect of publication.

Another nice side-effect of chasing the smaller story is that this kind of writing demands precision of craft that you may well not develop writing only longer stories. The efficiency necessary to telling a good story in 500 words forces a level of craft that few people who've only written novels can understand. And this skill ultimately extends very well to the longer forms, when the backbone, high-pressure scenes require all the craft you can muster.

I have no idea, yet, how to ballance the work on my novel with the shorter forms. For now, I'm probably leaning too heavily toward the latter. But I am utterly convinced that a solid balance between the two will give me the level of feedback I need from the world and will improve my craft.


*This is the title of a book on sales. While I am not a salesman, the thoughts implied by the title alone nearly convinced me to buy the book.

Summer's First Plunge

My son and I both love the water. At the age of four, he was swimming reasonably well, but by the age of five, he was a demon in the pool.

In recent days, it's finally gotten warm enough to enjoy.

During summers and falls, there are days when we blissfully ignore time... swimming, playing, laughing for hours on end. It's the purest joy we have together.

Water is the only tranquilizer we need.

For A Song

by Renee Holland Davidson

Kayla slouches in the passenger seat, staring out the bug-splattered windshield. The newly tarred highway stretches in front of the Buick, the afternoon heat steaming from the road in shimmering waves. For hours, they have passed nothing but scrub brush and the hard dirt of the desert.

Her mom is singing along with the radio, her voice cigarette-smoke husky. The last few notes dissipate into the stale air-conditioned air, and almost immediately another one begins.

"Honey, listen, here's our song!"

Our song? Her song, she means. The one she auditioned with--the one that won her the job with the band. The band that is leaving tomorrow for a three-month tour of the South.

Kayla's mom reaches over to squeeze her knee, then frowns when her daughter's body stiffens. "Come on, Kayla, don't be like that. You'll have a great time at your Grandma's. You love her, don't you?"

"Yeah," Kayla says in a bare whisper.

"You know how much she spoils you."

"Yeah," she says again.

"This could be my big break, Kayla. You know that. I might never get another chance."

Kayla sighs. "I know, Mama. I know."

"Okay, then. I'll be back in no time, just you see." Kayla's mom pats her leg, then turns the radio louder. Her voice blends smoothly with the woman crooning over the airwaves.

Ahead of them, a red mini-van pulls onto the highway. A small mountain of duffle bags is tied to its roof and a complicated-looking carrier holding four bicycles rises up from the trailer hitch.

The Buick catches up to the van and Kayla peers inside as they cruise side by side. The family looks like it belongs in a corny commercial--the dad behind the wheel wearing a fishing hat, lures dangling from its rim, the mom in the passenger seat, a red bandana tied around her neck. Behind them, sit two little kids--a blond-haired boy and his freckle-faced sister.

Kayla can tell they're singing The Itsy Bitsy Spider because their fingers are crawling through the air in front of them.

The mom isn't half as pretty as her own mom, Kayla thinks. Her hair's frizzy and her bare arms jiggle with each spider step. But she's got a pretty smile and her eyes sparkle behind round glasses as she turns in her seat to look at her children.

Even though Kayla can't hear them, she knows they're singing loudly because their heads are thrown back and their grinning mouths are open wide.

Kayla's fingers move in her lap. She sings under her breath, stealing a glance at her mother.

Her mom's singing loudly too, a wide smile covering her face. And her eyes are sparkling, just like the lady in the mini-van.

Except Kayla's mom isn’t looking at her--her eyes are staring straight ahead, focused on a place far beyond the cloudless desert sky.

"For A Song" was originally published in the Summer 2006 edition of flashquake. www.flashquake.org

Begging for Help For 'Beg the Question'

For reasons I couldn't begin to explain, I'm hearing people (from journalists, to fiction writers, to co-workers) use the phrase 'beg the question' with numbing regularity. Or rather, I'm hearing people mis-use the phrase 'beg the question' with numbing regularity.

To 'beg the question' does not mean to invite the question, to prompt the question, to encourage the obvious question. To beg the question is to answer a question with circular logic (i.e. 'the federal government is inefficient because it wastes so much money.' Wasting money is another another way of saying that it's inefficient; it does not answer the question 'Why?'

See here for a more thorough explanation.


Coming Soon... debunking the myth that ree-la-tors actually exist (and sell houses for a living).

Fleeting Storm

S is for Stupid

Last night, I decided, right before my writing class, to leave my camera at home. No particular reason. Just had that brainstorm.

So, naturually, at our break I looked out to see my oft-photographed tree (you'll find it elsewhere on this site, in a couple different guises, if you roam around) and was greeted with the image above... a partial moon with even the dark aspects visible, and Venus glowing like a bright star above. The sky had a rich, beautiful fade from orange to blue that you don't see here.

All I had was my lousy Motorola phone cam to capture the moment. So I took a few shots and walked away cursing my inexplicable ineptitude.

My Fan Club Shrinks By One

A couple days ago, my wife and I were arguing about something or other—maybe it’s fairer to say we were arguing about everything or other—when she moved on to an editorial of my writing life.

It neither started nor ended on a happy note.

“You’re a failure,” she said. “As a writer you’re a complete failure. You should give it up.”

ahem…

Not exactly the unflinching, hard-nosed criticism* I was talking about in this post.

Perhaps I can get her to go back and re-read my thoughts—a quick refresher course, let’s call it—just to be sure she really gets the gist.

Or perhaps not.




* not really a criticism of the writing, at all. She hasn't read any of it since I came back to writing after a long hiatus.

Underwater Stones

Writing Tip: Put Your Body Where Your Mouth Is

Writing offers us the opportunity to explore locations, emotions, and behaviors we will never experience in life. We get to climb mountains whose continents we won't ever actually touch, turn the tables--in very public ways, if we choose--on lovers who've hurt us, and conduct racy, skillful affairs with near-perfect (but not too-perfect) paramours.

But that's not all the opportunity that writing offers us.

A few years back, I was a member of a small writing group that met weekly for reading/critique. Somewhere along the way, the group of us decided that there were a handful of experiences that might work to our benefit as writers.

Sad to say, torrid illicit affairs didn't make the cut.

One of the things that did make the cut, however, was to witness an autopsy.

One of our members at the time was friends with a recently published mystery novelist and managed, through her, to get us an appointment at the coroner's office, where they agreed to put us through the same scared-straight process that drunk drivers face.

The day of our appointment, we were ushered us into a small meeting room, where we watched a video documentary detailing the adventures of various unfortunate drunk drivers.

In the worst case, a woman at a bar had accepted the offer of a ride from a would-be one-night-stand. Soon after they left the bar on his rocket-like Kawasaki, with her hugging him close from behind, the driver took the wrong half of a fork in the road.

On the good side was a freeway onramp, on the bad, a cul-de-sac. Fifty yards and ninety-plus-miles-per-hour later, he slammed into a brick wall, turning himself into a stew and cutting the top half of his passenger’s head off.

The officer on the tape described the pain of explaining to the dead woman’s husband how she had come to her end.

After the sobering film, we were given white scrubs and masks, which we put on over our street clothes, and then ushered through a cooled room filled with occupied body bags.

For a minute or so, we stood by a steel door leading to the ‘operating’ room. The group of us was nervous, and some of us were actually willing to admit it.

When we entered the large white autopsy room, we came on three stainless tables aligned perpendicular to the wall. Atop them lay three corpses in varying stages of their final physical exam. One was a Vietnam Vet who’d overdosed in his apartment and gone unmissed for several long, hot days. Another was a Santa Ana gang member who’d been shot multiple times and left to die on the beach. The third was an 80-plus-year-old woman who’d fallen in the tub, broken her hip and later died of an embolism.

You might believe that watching CSI or reading bleak horror novels would tell you enough to understand this experience—and perhaps to write about it—but you’d be wrong. If you’ve got even the slightest bit of humanity to you, there is a somber gravity to a room like this and its activities. Nothing about that feeling is effectively conveyed by the carnival act that is CSI and every novel I’ve read that touches on the subject. Even when the basic mechanical details come out right—the behavior and the tools and the smells are described correctly—the feeling doesn’t.

The point of all this rambling, I guess, is to encourage you to use every excuse you can to extend your experience. Let the fact that you call yourself a writer drive you to embrace adventures you might otherwise avoid (or maybe just ignore).

I’m not one who believes you have to have experienced something to write about it sensibly. But there is no doubt that the living of a thing will flavor your writing. And, almost inevitably, that will improve your stories.

A Novelist's How-To That You Should Check Out (after bookmarking this site, of course)

A while back, I stumbled across Crawford Kilian's writing site.

I found it interesting enough to check back occasionally but didn't turn it into what I would call a regular stop. More recently, though, I noticed his Write a Novel site. It's a series of 18 pdf documents he's published defining aspects of getting a novel written and published (ranging from Hard Facts for First Time Novelists to Ten Points on Plotting to Reading a Contract).

I wish the material were presented as HTML as well as pdf. But this is a trifling complaint--a niggling exercise in looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Definitely worth a look if you have any thought at all of writing a novel (and aren't already a wizened veteran).