New story up at Entropy Magazine

It's called "Better Than Ever," and it's about a woman who flies (for a while).

I first started workshopping this story with my writing group in 2014. I sent it to 23 places before it found its home.

So this is also a story about not giving up.

Episodes 10-12 are up!

All episodes of Bigfoot and the Baby: an audiobook in podcasts are here.

Bigfoot and the Baby Episodes 7-9 are up!

All episodes available here.

Episodes 6 and 7 of Bigfoot and the Baby: The Podcast are up!

Links to all episodes here.

Episodes 4 and 5 of Bigfoot and the Baby: The Podcast are up!

Episode 4.
Episode 5.

All episodes are free, 7-10 minutes long. No registration required.

Episode 3 of Bigfoot and the Baby: The Podcast is up!

Listen here.

Episode 2 of Bigfoot and the Baby: The Podcast is up!

Find it here.

Bigfoot and the Baby is now a podcast!

Since Bona Fide Books went out of business late last year, I'm turning my book into a podcast. This is an effort to find a new audience for the book, and to reconnect with readers who already love it.

The first episode is here. 

Health update with glass-half-empty / glass-half-full news

After my cancer surgery, I was waiting for another shoe to drop. Maybe I felt I got off too easy, since I didn't need chemotherapy. Maybe I was still beating myself up for whatever mistake(s) I might have made that led to the cancer.

Anyway, last month, there was a shoe. I hope it is the last for a long time. I decided to have a hysterectomy, mostly to prevent other kinds of cancer I could be more vulnerable to (the Angelina Jolie plan), and also to deal with a fibroid problem. This was supposed to be very easy, laparoscopic, minimally invasive. Except. There were complications, as they say. I won't go into details here, but instead of a two-hour procedure, I was on the table for over ten hours. I was in the hospital for two days, and then came home for a much longer and more uncomfortable recovery than I was expecting.

I'm now about 2/3 through that recovery, feeling better every day. I've been working, taking walks, and pounding out a series of especially creepy short stories.

But I'm going to postpone the breast reconstruction surgery I had scheduled for June. And I have about had it with what has become my mantra: "It could have been worse."

So here's a better mantra, I think:

New flash up at Ellipsis Zine

Please enjoy my slightly creepy love letter at Ellipsis Zine.

Health update with good news

I met with my oncologist today, and the verdict is that chemo is not necessary for my breast cancer treatment. I also do not need radiation. The cancer I have is not especially aggressive, according to the genomic test results, and my lymph nodes were found to be clear during the surgery--meaning it didn't spread beyond the breast. I will be taking a drug called tamoxifen for the foreseeable future, and it has some unpleasant (and potentially dangerous but preventable) side effects, but it is certainly easier to deal with than the alternative. With tamoxifen, I'm told the likelihood of recurrence in 9 years is 5%. I don't know how they can determine this, but I'll take it.

At the moment, I don't feel as relieved or overjoyed as I thought I might--more like tired and wary about what's next. It's been a ride, which is not quite over yet. But things could certainly be a lot worse. I'm grateful for all the wonderful support and care I've received.

I need a nap and a drink, in either order.

Some health news

I've been debating whether to share this news on my blog and social media, but it seems like it's going to be part of my life for at least a little while longer, so here goes.

In early December I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Last Monday, I had a mastectomy, and was told the lymph nodes were clear, meaning the cancer hasn't spread to other organs--the official stage is 2, which is usually very good news in breast cancer world. The margins were also clear. My oncologist told me this is a "very curable" cancer. We are still considering chemo or radiation; because I am (relatively) young and healthy, we have the opportunity (let's call it an opportunity) to try some more aggressive treatments as added protection. We will learn more next week.

I feel extremely lucky to have good health insurance, good care, and very supportive friends, family, and colleagues. I am going to get through this.

I will also try to write something more enlightening about this experience, perhaps after I have some distance on it. What I can say now is the usual: Don't skip your mammograms. If you have risk factors, try to mitigate the ones you can. Reduce your stress. And don't be afraid. There's been huge progress on this front in just the last few years, and treatments can be very targeted.

Also, I'm still me. I'm still writing and working. At the moment I'm a little more tired and short-tempered, though you might not even notice a difference there, and wearing button-down shirts for the first time in decades. But otherwise I'm the same as I ever was, and will continue to be.

Most of my current obsessions on display

...in my new flash, "The Selwyn Place," at the beautiful Lost Balloon.

You Can Be a Winning Writer

I have a little piece on commitment in this new book. It's full of short inspirational and educational pieces that can give you a boost when you need it.

New flash up...

...at 100WordStory (actually a 100-word essay).

Maybe it should feel like work

After a predictably rough holiday season, with more personal and political gloom in the air, I've started writing a new story. For the past several weeks it's seemed like I didn't know what I wanted to read or write, so this feels like a breakthrough of sorts. We were driving past a house that had a widow's walk on the roof, and that made me think of "The Turn of the Screw," though a brief search of the text suggests the strange man in the story appears atop a tower, not on a widow's walk as such. Anyway, that, in turn, made me think of the framed narrative, in which the narrator recounts a story someone else told him. It's also a device H. G. Wells and other old-school science fiction authors often use, and I decided I wanted to try it to tell a ghost-type story.

Also, checking my records, I saw that I had received some rejections recently that included invitations to submit something else. I used to get so excited about those; now I sort of think, "meh, maybe, if I get around to it." But today I responded to a few of those. (It also depends on whether I have something to send, but in this case, I did.)

My point here is that I do not feel particularly inspired or energized by any of this. It feels like something I have to do, or ought to do, because I'm a writer.

But maybe that's how it's supposed to feel. I should know by now that inspiration and joy and energy are only sometimes part of the writing experience. Just as often it feels like going to the dentist. And maybe that's how you know that you've truly taken on this vocation.Whether you're rewarded or not, you do it, because that's what you do.  

It's a new morning...meh.

From 20 minutes a day to 68k (almost) words

Today I finished the first draft of my new novel. It's on the short side, but my first drafts are always short. Next draft will likely be too long, and then we'll do the accordion thing for awhile and then some people will read it and I'll fall apart and then pull myself and then the novel back together. 

Then we'll see.

The point I would like to make today is that I started this novel back in late January (I think) by writing 20 minutes a day. At the time, 20 minutes seemed like an eternity. Like it would never be over. I didn't even make myself put words on the screen, though usually I did--I just had to sit there and think about the novel.

At some point late this summer, I realized I could finish a draft by the holidays if I wrote 500 words a day. That seemed doable, so I did it, and sometimes did 1,000 with two writing sessions per day. 

As many, many people have observed, writing in 2017 was goddamn hard. And I'm as inclined to beat myself up for low productivity as anyone. I'm here to say that even little bits and pieces, created and assembled on a regular basis, can come together quicker than you might think.

Catfternoon

New (to us) kitties, Bennie (top) and Jett. Adopted last Saturday from the Peninsula Humane Society. We went catless for too long...

The bigger picture

From the Meiss Trail near South Lake Tahoe.

Even in tough times, it's always worth renewing and recharging.
Happy midsummer.

Yet more proof that there is no single process for writing a novel

While I was writing my first novel, I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for books on "how to write a novel." Most of them concentrated on the early stages, like getting inspiration, while offering tips on how to find time and/or make a habit of writing, so you could produce the seemingly vast quantities of material required to constitute the finished product.

This was well and fine, but I already had inspiration. And, at that time anyway, I had enough time and self-discipline to create enough material. What I wanted to know was something like--how do you build a plot? Do you outline or not? What if the outline changes every day? How do you know if some thread is worth pursuing or not?

The short answer to all these questions, I discovered later, is "Don't worry about it." Not only does everyone have a different process, I suspect that everyone has a different process for each book. There are many maps; all can get you home.

For example, in the past, I've thought it a bad idea to show my writing group (or anyone) chapters as I wrote them. I thought it best to wait till at least one full draft and probably one revision was done, so that I knew what I was doing before receiving critiques. I didn't want to spend all my time second-guessing and revising; I needed to keep moving forward.

But now, here's why I think the opposite can be true. When you are still planning and plotting and inching forward, chapter by chapter, showing people chapters as you go can give you a good idea of what's coming across, what's interesting, what's likely (though not necessarily) going to cause trouble, which characters they "get" and which they don't.

The risk with this approach is that you may want to immediately start revising the previous chapters based on this feedback. And then you'll never write more than fifty pages--rather, you'll write the same 50 pages 20 times and then (if you're me) collapse in frustration. 

But if you can just *take note of* the feedback, say in something called a "notebook," and keep going, that feedback can provide guidance for moving forward. Not absolute direction--you are not handing control of your manuscript over to anyone else--but guidance. What do you need to keep an eye out for as you move forward? What *might* this interesting but still-unformed character turn into and contribute? What plot twist might readers absolutely never accept unless you do it extremely, extremely well? In the early going of my latest venture, this has proven extremely useful. Maybe it wouldn't have been for another novel, but for this one, I think it's only helping. And the encouragement to keep going is damn essential.

This is all to say, as many have said before me, there is no one way or right way to write a novel. Whatever keeps you moving forward is what you need to do.