Yesterday, I received my third rejection email on a manuscript. Actually, this project has had much more than just three rejections, but this was the third rejection on this draft. A draft I thought would be the final draft. However, the rejections were “good rejections,” in that they actually contained great feedback. I guess I’ll be working on at least one more version.

I didn’t feel like incorporate any of those edits yesterday though. I felt like throwing the stupid stack of pages across the room, hopefully hearing a satisfying thud as they hit the wall and fluttered all over the room. Before I lobbed the thing through the air, I opened one more message in my inbox. A non-writer friend had forwarded me a link to an article she thought I’d find inspirational.

I’m a sucker for inspirational quotes, photos, stories, and whatever. My friends forward a ton of them to me, bless their hearts. This one was an essay by the author of The Help and exactly what I needed for a little cheering up yesterday.

You should read the whole article Ms. Stocket wrote for More. It’s worth it. But for the CliffsNotes version, here are  some passages that gives you the gist of her story: Read more »

In 1982, San Jose State University sponsored the first Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. To enter, you have to compose the opening sentence of the worst of all possible novels. The contest was created by Professor Scott Rice after he found the source of the line “It was a dark and stormy night…,” which is the opening sentence of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford.

For 2011, Sue Fondrie penned the shortest ever winning sentence:

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

According to The Guardian, Fondrie tweeted that one of her students wrote her: “I knew you were awful, so it’s great that you’re finally getting recognized.”

Two of my favorites are from the Romance category. Read more »

My home office. Hijuelos and Lamb could work here.

The Chicago Tribune recently featured five writers talking about where they write, what their routine is, the equipment they use, and why their writing space is ideal. Oscar Hijuelos and Wally Lamb both mention the importance of proximity to water. Lamb also talks about the importance of “good-luck tchotchkes” and jumping jacks. Jodi Picoult also needs water, but the kind that comes in a bottle. Tayari Jones only uses yellow legal pads with “really sharp pencils,” but understands the importance of being adaptable. Elin Hilderbrand rides her bike to the beach to write during the summer and uses a friend’s library during the colder months.

In preparation for some future newspaper article taking in interest in my setting and routine, here are my answers to what the five writers described:

Setting: My home office is an awesome writing space, but works best for revisions. I tend to get sidetracked by email and social media when I’m there, so when I’m cranking out first drafts I prefer to sit on the couch in the living room or in a coffee house somewhere. That way I can just pound out the words and worry about research and fact-checking later.

Routine: An ideal writing day is basically just getting in some hours of solid prose. I’m a binge writer and do much better with long open-ended periods of writing. If I know I only have an hour or two to write, I end up just messing around and doing a lot of “research” (i.e. email, random Google searches, and Facebook).

Equipment: Always on the computer. I might outline a piece using long-hand, but I rarely use pen and paper for anything else.

Why the space is ideal: The office is ideal because it’s my space. Nobody else comes there so I can leave a project in the middle and make the space as messy as I’d like. When we first moved in together, my husband (then boyfriend) and I shared a desk. I hated the extra time it took to pull all my stuff out and put it away again. We then graduated to sharing an office, but separate desks. Now we actually have separate offices, which feels very luxurious.

Where and how do you like to work?

Or, maybe you don’t. When I read Carol J. Adams’s article in The Washington Post I discovered a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about Jane Austen. I also found out that some of the things known about the author are actually not true.

Here are the five Austen myths that Adams busts:

1) Jane Austen led an uneventful life.
Only true if you call accepting a proposal of marriage and retracting that acceptance the next day, living next door to a sadist-necrophiliac, and seeing your aunt charged with grand larceny as uneventful.

2) Austen novels are chick lit.
Her readers Tennyson, Churchill, Kipling, Amis, Davies, and Twain would disagree.

3) She didn’t take her writing seriously.
She had an extensive revision system, critiqued other writers work, experimented with different forms of the novel, and negotiated the publishing deal for Emma when her brother Henry was ill.

4) Her books are escapist fiction.
Only if you like to escape into “the crisis of poverty and downward mobility (Miss Bates in Emma), the slave trade and emotional abuse of a child (Mansfield Park), disinheritance and parental manipulation (Sense and Sensibility), Britain’s near-constant state of war (Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion), unwanted pregnancies, and men who practice a double standard in relationships — references that sound ripped from the headlines of today.”

5) For all her popularity, Austen’s literary influence was limited.
If by limited you mean being credited by creating the modern novel through her usage of “subtle characterizations, social irony and beautiful architecture,” inventing free indirect speech, and writing the most paraphrased sentence in English literature (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”), then yes, her influence was limited.

For more Jane Austen myth busting by Carol J. Adams, read this chat transcript of a live Q&A that took place this past Tuesday.

Austen means a lot to me both as a reader and a writer. There are so few women writers in literary history and Austen’s tenacity and success is inspiring and humbling.  My favorite book of hers is Persuasion, because of the main character Anne Elliot. Although her protagonist is very quiet and unobtrusive, Austen creates great tension in the novel and provides fantastic social commentary through Anne.  Something I’d like to be able to do in my own writing.

What’s your favorite Austen novel and why?

Last month, Portland author Matt Mikalatos guest blogged for the Editor’s Blog on Guide to Literary Agents on “5 Lies Unpublished Writers Tell Themselves (and the Truths That Can Get Them Published).”

Writers tend to be creative in many areas of life, so it’s no surprise that we can get creative with the truth. Or, as my mother said, “You lie a lot.” This is especially tempting when we are debating why we aren’t published. Before I was a published author, I embraced a few cherished lies because they blunted the pain of rejection. But the road to publication required discarding these lies and facing reality.

The five lies Mikalatos refers to are:

1) The rules don’t apply to me.

2) Agents and editors have it in for me.

3)I’m not a marketer, I’m a writer!

4) I should spend a lot of time fantasizing over where I will be published now that I’ve written two chapters of my novel.

5)I’m a better writer than most published authors. Read more »

I’m enjoying a summer of poetry. Just the two words “enjoying” and “poetry” in the same sentence is new for me. Although I like hearing poetry, it’s not until recently that I discovered the joy of immersing myself in a book of poems on my own.

Summer is when I do most of my writing. I usually don’t sign up to teach summer classes, instead I grade AP tests or review textbooks to collect a paycheck. That way I can create long periods of time during the day when I do nothing but write.

I read a lot during the summer as well, but have trouble keeping my own voice if I read books close to what I’m currently working on. I never write poetry, so reading it keeps my voice true. It also makes me pay more attention to the line level details of my prose.

Currently, I’m reading Kathleen Flenniken’s Famous. She was in Spokane during Get Lit! and participated in a great poetry panel with Matthew Dickman, Lowell Jaeger, and Laura Tohe. I bought Famous because of “It’s Not You, It’s Me,” which Flenniken read during the panel. The book won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was an American Library Association Notable Book. Read more »

I spend way too much time contemplating my characters’ names and personal details. In a spreadsheet, I record with their names, ages, appearance, and other personal details to make sure they are consistent through a whole project. Sometimes a character changes their last name several times in this file, only to never have anything more than the first name ever mentioned in the final draft.

The other day, my friend showed me this cool website called the Fake Name Generator. By entering a gender, name subset, and geographical location, or just choosing “random” for all settings, the site returns a full set of personal descriptions including profession, social security number, password, website, and mother’s maiden name.

If you are looking for inspiration, create a full set of characters for a short story and start writing. My current “writing just to be writing” project is about Asta Mårtensson. She’s a sixty-two-years old small engine service technician from Oelwein, IA. Her blood type is B+ and her mother’s maiden name is Holmberg. The only thing the generator does not return is physical descriptions like hair and eye color (it does do weight and height), but as soon as I saw Asta’s personal details, an image of her formed in my mind. I saw her walking down the street in her hometown. Now I can’t wait to see what’s she’s doing next.

How do you come up with names and details about your characters and how do you keep track of your characters?

A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes words with the picture add unintentional humor. Funny or Die user Oh, News! posts real examples from the news where the headlines add hilarity to a picture. Recently, Spokane’s own KREM 2 News was included in a great slideshow with this shot:

From Funny or Die's 12 Great Moments in News Caption

I get most of my news from NPR and the internet, while my husband prefers the TV. He cruises the twenty-four hour news channels. I get information overload from them because I can’t pay attention to both the scrolling captions and the story that’s being reported. In the end, I absorb neither and end up with a headache.  Maybe I should start looking for funny caption/picture combinations instead and forget about trying to keep up with current events. It seems like a more productive way to watch.

Here’s another unintentional match posted by Oh News!.

From Funny or Die's Finally, Fox News Accurately Labels Sara Palin.

What’s your favorite news source? How do you keep track of current events?

Our latest debate about gender in literature has made me think about who writes the books I like to read. I usually know the gender of the author, but do I know their views on women, politics, race, toilet paper flap over or under? Do I need to?

I used to think I could not care less about an author’s particular thoughts on things unrelated to their writing. If the writing was good, I enjoyed and learned from it no matter who put the words on the page. Then I noticed that if I found out that a particular author had opinions on cultural, political, or environmental issues that were polar opposite from mine, I won’t buy their book. This is silly, of course, but the idealistic activist in me doesn’t want my money in their pocked if they disagree with me on an issue I feel strongly about. (This is also true for other art forms. I haven’t been to see a Mel Gibson movie since he turned completely whackadoo .)

Does that mean that I don’t study masters of the craft like Hemingway and Didion? Of course not, I just don’t run out and buy every single copy of their stuff—which is what I do with people whose writing I admire and whose opinions about stuff I don’t find offensive. I can separate the art from the artist and appreciate their work while fuming at their offensiveness, but I can’t make myself spend (much) money on their work. Shira’s post made me realize that this is a case of me being defeated by my own defeatism, but hey, the first step is acceptance of the existence of a problem, right? Read more »

The last couple of days, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve done since I graduated from EWU’s MFA program. First there was Jaime’s post, which made me think about how lucky I was to spend two years completely immersed in writing. Part of me misses that environment, but another part of me is happy to be a writer out in the “real world.” I like working on my pieces without my internal editor second guessing what my fellow students will say in workshop. Not that I didn’t like workshop, but when I knew exactly who my audience/critics were, I often had a hard time staying true to what I wanted to put on the page instead of trying to please them.

Then there was the Willow Springs release party last Friday. A year ago, I would have been one of the people triple-celebrating the new issue with being done with the thesis and either about to or just finished defending. This year, instead of having read the issue several times through proofing galleys, I enjoyed the fantastic stories, poems, and essays in their finished form.

So overall, I’ve been thinking I’m okay with where I’m at in my writing career/journey right now. Then, I got a Facebook message from my former thesis advisor. Read more »