Even though we’re entering our second full week of 2010, many of us are still thinking about what we hope to accomplish during the New Year. Whether we set resolutions or frame our year in the context of goals met, it’s this initial push that shapes our experience of the next 350+ days.
. . . And I want to save some of you a bit of heartbreak.
During the recent holidays, I met many people who told me their goal for this year is to “get published.”
That, along with a series of blogs on motivation (read all of them from 12/23 on) at Dean Wesley Smith’s site – and my time at the Master Class – make me think we should discuss the distinction between dreams and goals here.
To me, dreams are hopes and wishes. They should be grand, marvelous, BIG. They should make you feel good when you think of them, smiling with the giddiness of magnificent possibility.
Do me a favor. Right now, before I continue, I want you to think of some of your dreams. Go on. Knock yourself out. I’ll watch the following video while I’m waiting.
Goals, on the other hand, are the nuts and bolts. They are the steps that help you walk toward your dreams. The key here is that YOU have total control over whether you achieve your goals or not. No one else does.
So . . . I have a real problem with the idea of “Getting published” as a tangible goal. At least when it comes to traditional publishers (paying markets: novels, magazines, ezines) because, basically, it’s out of your control.
Someone else judges your work and decides.
I can hear you now: “Pari, you’re being a real downer here. Are you saying I don’t have control over my own writing career?”
Not at all. In fact, you’re totally responsible for your career. Yep. It’s all you.
But “getting published” as a goal is setting yourself up for incredible disappointment for all the wrong reasons. We’ve all read enough really crappy books to know that just about anything has a chance of publication no matter how awful.
So getting published isn’t necessarily a measure of your work, your effort, or your abilities.
NOT getting published doesn’t tell you anything either, except that you’re not getting published.
The problem is that we humans spend a lot of our time inferring. Writers are particularly bad about it. We parse rejections for hidden innuendos. We take book reviews to heart. And we’re prone to embrace the negative far more quickly than the positive.
So why set yourself up for that kind of pain? It’ll just shut you down or make you angry or bitter (when you read one of those shitty books). And, I bet, it’ll hinder your productivity and the quality of your writing, too.
Even though it scares me to go public, I want to share my professional goals for this year with you too:
Write at least two pages of fiction daily.
Write and mail at least one short story/month.
Write (and market) at least two new novels this year.
Reach 10 items in the mail/email simultaneously at least once this year.
Right now, those don’t seem particularly difficult. By the end of the year when, I hope, I have a full-time job AND am working intensely on Left Coast Crime 2011(why don’t you register while you’re checking out the website? Then I can work on my own goals a little more easily.), they’re going to be doozies.
So, what do you think?
Have you mistaken dreams for goals? Is my framework useful to you or did you already know it? Am I overreacting to the “getting published” meme as a goal?
I hate having to title fiction. Titles drive me living batshit (sans clutch) and honestly, I’m terrible at them. The only title of my own that I ever really loved was the first title of my first book: BOBBIE FAYE’S VERY (very very very) BAD DAY. When I sold that book, there were three more verys in that parenthetical, and I know for a fact I drove the marketing people nuts with those. They cut those three out, and then changed the title altogether when we went into reprints in mass market, because the length of the title plus two names (Bobbie Faye’s and my own moniker) was just too much for the mass market sized cover. I was tickled as hell at first to get to keep the title, until had to type it for a bunch of different reasons, never remembering to make a macro keystroke setup so that I wouldn’t have to type something so long. You would not believe how I managed to misspell her name. (Well, maybe you would.)
What I thought we’d do was keep the (very very very) for each book. My editor was on board with that… only… I couldn’t think of anything that worked with the story. And then it occurred to us (duh) that if every book has the (very very very) parenthetical, people weren’t going to remember which book they already had vs. which book was new. So we set out to change the parenthetical, and come up with something akin to the rhythm of the first. That effort ended in BOBBIE FAYE’S (kinda, sorta, not exactly) FAMILY JEWELS. Which I sort of hated for a while and then grew to not loathe. (My poor editor came up with a thousand titles–we just couldn’t find one we liked and honestly, this was the one that bothered me the least. But she tried. My God, did she try.)
It still confused people. You wouldn’t believe the email I got asking me when the new book was out, in spite of the fact that they had seen JEWELS on the bookstand… they thought that was the one they had. Not entirely the effect we’d hoped to have.
The only other title I’ve liked is my short story title in the Killer Year Anthology: Stories to Die For. Its title? A Failure to Communicate — but that’s because I fractured time as well as communication, and that fracture was the point… plus, that’s a line said to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke… a line he liked so much, (so the apocryphal story goes), he had it written in to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (In my story, Trevor has nicknamed Bobbie Faye “Sundance” because they are about to die. At the end, she calls him “Butch.”)
Everything else I’ve had published in fiction has been titled by others. I’ve managed the blog entries more like a drunken game of dice… sometimes I’m on, sometimes not. (Cornelia, I think, wins the memorable title aware around here. Seriously, tell me you do not think of the PILGRAMS! SCREE! SCREE! SCREE! title every time you see her name on Saturdays.)
Which, honestly, is the point: titles should be memorable. They should give you some idea of the kind of book you’re picking up, the genre, but most of all, you should be able to recall that title when you’re in the bookstore and are suddenly faced with thousands of choices… many of which sound so similar to one another, they all start to blur.
A good title will make me pick up the book, even if the cover art is so-so. I’ll flip over to at least read the back cover. An average title that sounds like every other average title would have to have really eye-catching art for me to stop, unless I already know the author’s work and therefore know whether they’re an automatic buy.
But a great title will stop me in my tracks when my arms are already loaded down with books and people are waiting on me to leave because we have to be at dinner in less than ten minutes and could I please please hurry? When someone (whether it’s the author or the editor or the marketing department or some combination, I don’t care) comes up with something that riveting that can stop me like that, I will pick up the book and read the back copy and the cover flap and probably the first page or so. If I’m really pressed for time, and that title was great, I’ll buy it, without reading anything. My hunch is, people who are that creative have a good eye for good material. I’m not always right about that instinct, but I’ve been right more than I’ve been wrong, so I’ll keep going by that gut feeling.
Examples of books I bought this past year based solely on the title, not word of mouth or knowledge of the author:
Granted, I heard about a couple of them somewhere, but when I was in the bookstore, I couldn’t remember what had been said–but the title jumped out at me as a “Oh, yes, I’d wanted to get that.” And I haven’t read all of them yet, since I was sidetracked with a couple of other big reading projects.
It is an extremely difficult thing to do, to find a memorable, unique title. I know some writers who cannot move forward with the first page if they don’t have a title in mind–one they hope will be their final title. I felt that way during book one, but since then, I haven’t ever managed to settle on just one, to fall in love with something and know it was it and that it would be memorable. Oh, how I wish I could.
Right now, I’m tossing around ideas for titles for the new book, and it will probably end up being vastly different from my past titles since this book is much darker and complex and set in a different world. I’ve wandered around ideas of things lost and found again, and I’ve played with ideas based off Saints (the name of the fictional town is St. Michaels, a tiny place set just south of Baton Rouge). For an example, I loved the movie title THE BOONDOCK SAINTS, (and I enjoyed the movie, but haven’t seen the sequel)… but obviously, this is taken and well-enough known not to be re-useable. Titles, unlike works, are not copyright protected, but I’d truly prefer not to use something someone else has already fingerprinted. I thought of BACKYARD SAINTS, but I think Joshilyn Jackson’s next book will be titled something like that, so that one’s out. I’ve thrown around war notions and betrayals, but so far, nothing sticks. If any one of you gets creative in the comments and I end up using it, you’ll be mentioned in the book and will get the first autographed copy.
I’m looking for inspiration. What titles have you come across (whenever, doesn’t have to be recent), that you loved and remember? I’m curious, did the book live up to its title?
(Apologies because this is going to be totally random. I’ve flown 12,000 miles in the last couple of weeks and am still kind of messed up from the final redeye. Also, it was a strange vacation. As you will see.)
I remember the first time I stepped foot on Oahu. It was 1967, I was four years old, my parents had just split up, and it had been a damn long flight from New York.
They still had roll-up stairs at the Honolulu airport instead of jetways, and when we walked down them to the tarmac young women in grass skirts placed white plumeria leis around my mother’s, my, and my little sister’s necks. Then someone took our picture, and we walked inside and poured ourselves glasses of fresh pineapple juice out of the complimentary dispensers–the kind of perpetual-waterfall aquarium things they used to have on all respectable five-and-ten luncheon counters.
I remember being amazed that the photograph of us in our leis was waiting for us the following day at the drugstore near my godmother Charla’s house, where we stayed for the first few weeks before we rented our own place on Portlock Road near Hawaii Kai.
(It was apparently kind of a common ritual, which is cool. They don’t do it anymore though.)
We lived there for about eight months, in that house on Portlock. My mom remembers that the rent was $300 a month. We were right on the beach, with a view of Diamond Head, and the house was most excellently funky. It was actually two military officer’s bungalows someone had bought at auction and stuck together, so that there were odd features like interior windows that opened into closets and stuff.
It no longer exists, of course, having been replaced by a McMansion that I believe sold for five mill, the last time out.
Ho hum.
The yard looks like this now–big pool, etc. We used to just run through the sprinkler. I mean, there’s a beach RIGHT THERE behind those bushes, too. But whatever.
I can remember every room, though, especially the lanai (covered outdoor porch, for the uninitiated.) The renters before us had been stewardesses, so the walls of this were decked in vintage travel posters, about ten layers deep: Paris, Venice, Tahiti… all in that swirly mid-century style that JetBlue apes these days along its own jetways.
It’s bizarre to have the 3-D walkthrough of a house that no longer exists in my head–down to what each of the doors sounded like. For some reason I spent about fifteen minutes trying to describe it to my husband when I was in labor with our twin daughters, back in ’94, right before they stopped my epidural and wheeled me into the room where everything got really intensely serious and I was too busy screaming obscenities for any further nostalgic architectural anecdotes.
I was just back there over New Year’s, for Aunt Charla’s youngest son’s wedding. It was really trippy. Felt like home, in so many ways, even though I hadn’t been there in twenty-one years.
There were all these barefoot little blond kids running around the edges of the lawn, in twilight, and I kept wondering what had happened that I wasn’t streaking through the half-dark with them instead of sitting with the grownups inside the tent. Didn’t seem right at all.
I mean, even my daughter Grace is too old for that. But still, it’s imprinted, you know?
I lived in that Portlock house for another six months when I was eight. I learned to swim there, went to my first school (we didn’t have to wear shoes–they’d send notes home if we had a field trip reminding our parents we couldn’t go barefoot.)
I spent almost the entire time wandering around topless in a little yellow-and-white aloha print bikini bottom that tied at the hips, in ’67, though I remember wearing white Navajo moccasins, thriftstore lederhosen, love beads, and a Primo Beer t-shirt with King Kamehameha on it the day I first hiked up Diamond Head.
The first time I ever heard “Light My Fire” on the radio we lived there, and I remember going into the funky old bathroom while Mom was taking a shower one morning to tell her that Hendrix had just died. I think I was eight.
We had a young guy who was AWOL from the army, hoping not to get sent back to Vietnam, hide out with us for about a week. We took him to the Honolulu Zoo and he went incognito in a wig and bell-bottomed pantsuit of Mom’s. I thought that was hysterical.
I still speak pretty decent pidgin, it turns out. And feel like a local even though I haven’t been in forever. (When I was little, I thought “haole” meant tourist. Tremendously disappointing to discover it meant “white person,” and that I was one.)
I still remember my local history–that Kamehameha pushed all the opposing soldiers off the edge of the Pali, to unite the islands, and that Captain Cook’s remains were chopped up and laid out on a big rock, from whence he was eaten, some Hawaiians having mistaken him for dog. And good riddance, I say, though that’s not my kind of luau.
I am also well aware that you shouldn’t be carrying any pork in your car when you drive over the Pali, because Pele the fire goddess will con you into picking her up as a hitchhiker and steal it from you, and she is NOT someone you want to piss off.
Meanwhile, Mom met Michael (my stepfather #1) at a cocktail party in Honolulu early in our ’67 sojourn. The first time he took her out to dinner, he asked whom she’d voted for in the last election. When she said “Goldwater” he called her a dumb cunt, and she went to the ladies room and tried to climb out the window, but it was too small so she went back to their table instead.
Years later I asked her why, in that case, she’d married him, and she replied that she felt like such a failure as a twenty-eight-year-old divorcee at loose in the world that he seemed sort of astute when he said that, rather than just an asshole. Live and learn.
They went to see Hendrix on Maui together, and at the Monterey Pop Festival after we’d all moved to California.
They also used to get stoned with friends and then all go down to Waikiki to stare into these giant golden floodlights out in front of some hotel. Apparently when you looked up, everything was totally purple for a couple of minutes. They called this “doing Purple Haze.”
Last week we took Michael out for dinner for his 85th birthday. He was kind of cranky at first, but I got him talking about when he was a press agent for Edward R. Murrow, and about an autographed group photo in his apartment of Betty Grable and Red Skelton and Ethel Merman and Basil Rathbone and a whole bunch of other people that I remembered from when I was little–from some early TV special he promoted (just Googled it. “Shower of Stars.”)
(This would be Betty Grable, on set. Sorry about the watermark.)
Michael’s always been kind of a pain in the ass with a nasty temper, but he was relatively nice to me when I was little so I don’t mind kissing butt a little to assuage his ego.
I also asked him to remind me how to say the Japanese phrase he memorized, back in the day, which I never remember. This time I wrote it down on my iPhone: “Tayo agay detekoy.” That means “Come out of the cave with your hands up.” Michael did five tours in the Pacific during WWII, semper fi.
He also remembers storming a beach one time that the Marines had already won and lost once… there was billboard erected above them in the sand that read “Kill The Little Yellow Bastards!” with Bull Halsey’s signature inscribed below. Michael said the average life expectancy on that beach was seventeen seconds.
This all really made him hate war, especially the Vietnam conflict. He’s pretty much responsible for my political worldview, for which I’m grateful. I learned to despise Nixon and Kissinger and Joe McCarthy from him, and still have a picture of Angela Davis that he took in the Seventies on my desk.
He worked for the U.S. government’s foreign office or something in the field in the late Fifties, during this border war between India and Pakistan. He said he realized pretty quickly that both sides were wearing American-tailored uniforms, listening to American military advisers, and firing American-made weapons at each other, to a bunch of Yankee warmongers’ great profit.
Michael was asked to sit in on a meeting there, considering new titles for US-AID’s magazine (which had been called “Food for the Poor” or whatever up to that point.) The committee wanted his PR expertise, saying they hoped a new name could broadcast the greater scope of work being done by the organization, blah blah blah.
Michael leaned back in his chair and said “so why don’t you call it ‘Guns for Dictators’?” then strode out of the room and resigned. First person ever to do that while abroad, apparently.
Anyway, the kind of guy you give way to, on his 85th birthday, you know?
Meanwhile, the lady we were staying with on this visit–my very favorite babysitter back in the day–was apparently an early lover of Obama’s. She said he was a great guy even in his teens, and confirmed that he did indeed inhale.
Right on, Barry.
I first met this woman when I was five. She and her sisters lived down the beach, hence the babysitting. One of her nieces and I now have the same publisher (curiouser and curiouser.)
We were reminiscing about old times on Oahu and in California (she came and stayed with us in Carmel for a while), when she asked “do you remember the time Michael had a gun and wanted to shoot himself in the middle of the night, so I snuck you and your little sister out to the car and drove you around for a few hours?”
“Yeah,” I replied, though I hadn’t thought of it for decades. I’d been eight, my sister six, and this wonderful lady would’ve been about seventeen, at the time. The Sixties were kind of boundary-free…. So much so that they kept going for a good chunk of the early Seventies, as I recall.
We spent a lot of time on her lanai talking story, as the locals say. It was really beautiful. So is she.
So, I don’t know… my childhood. Kind of surreal. I remember all this stuff and am somehow not surprised I ended up being graced with a somewhat noir outlook.
I’m glad Grace got to come with me, to see all of this. Especially to meet Michael because hey, at 85, that could be a limited-time opportunity.
I did take her to do some wholesome touristy stuff, too, like climbing Diamond Head.
It’s all hollowed out near the top, with all these cool observation posts and gun emplacements and tunnels.
She was a little sick of me taking her picture, once we’d reached the summit.
And I have to say this attitude did not mellow over subsequent days.
When she wasn’t being forced to pose, she was great, though.
Also, I got to do some very nostalgic Hawaii kid stuff, like eat Li Hing Mui and other kinds of “crack seed” (mostly Chinese preserved fruit flavored with sugar, salt, licorice, and saccharine–kind of an acquired taste.)
And have manapua and pork hash dumplings for breakfast in Chinatown.
And now we’re back in New Hampshire, which seems like kind of a lame place to move after your first divorce, by comparison (mine was final on December 13th. YEE HA!)
(view from car windshield at airport bus parking lot in Portsmouth, NH. Note conspicuous lack of palm trees.)
Luckily, I seem to be able to relive stuff in my head rather well. Hope that gets me through February.
Happiest of new years to all you ‘Ratis. May you and yours have good health, good luck, good prospects, and a lot of gentle time to talk story with those you love….
It’s that time of year again. Time to look back on what I accomplished in the past 365 days, ascertain what I did right and what could be improved upon, and using that knowledge, set my goals for the coming year.
I’m not a fan of making resolutions, so when I discovered Chris Guillebeau’s wonderful 2008 Annual Review on his blog, The Art of Non-Conformity, I hitched on to the ride immediately. It’s the perfect scenario for those creative types who are working for themselves but still want some accountability. (Here’s the link to the actual post. Go on over there and take a read. I’ll wait.)
Okay, now that you’ve familiarized yourself with the system…
Last Christmas, with Chris’s template in mind, I set my goals instead of fretting about resolutions. My focus was on Work, Family, Self, Home, Knowledge, Health, Friendships, and an overarching “theme” goal focusing on enhancing my creative time by cutting back in other time consuming areas.
When I looked back on them today, I was pleased to see I’d achieved many of them, especially in the categories of writing, family and friendships. I’ve become much calmer, much more Zen about life in general, and my workflow is cleaner and more productive. I’ve surrounded myself with happy, productive people, worked hard, and played hard. This year was full of ups and downs, and if the goals were anything to go by, I accomplished about 80% of what I set out to do professionally, and 50% personally.
Not bad. It could have been better, but the trick to all of this is to be accepting of what you accomplished and not beat yourself up over the things that were left undone.
The Year of Evolution
This year, I set different goals. I went rather whole hog and named 2010 the Year of Evolution. I’ve altered my categories a bit to match with my current world view: Writing, Business, Self, Education, Health, Home, Family/Friends, and a Five Year Goals section. I won’t go into the nitty gritty details, but I have a lot on my plate for this year, including launching two books, writing another Taylor Jackson book plus proposals for future novels, writing a stand-alone, making my social networking more meaningful, working on my golf game, and taking the final steps toward a real fluency in Italian.
Setting personal goals and setting professional goals are very different beasts. My professional goals are specific, with dated estimates of word counts and draft completions. They are tangible. They guide me when I get off track, and force me to consider where I spend my time.
My personal goals are different, more amorphous. Take golf, for example: I want to drop ten strokes off my score this year. There are steps that need to be taken to make this a reality: join a club, hit balls twice a week, play at least once a week. Join the women’s league so I have accountability. Most importantly, carve those precious hours out of my already hectic schedule to make this happen. Trying to jump into this in a week is a sure-fire recipe for disaster – some goals must be worked on slowly, made supple and amenable.
Therein lies the difference. Personal goals I measure in steps rather than benchmarks.
The most interesting part of my goal-setting came about purely by accident. I’m no math major, but I got it in my head I wanted to know just how I spent my time last year. Push came to shove, I started thinking about word counts, and voila – I ended up with a breakdown, albeit estimated, of how much actual writing in did in 2009. What I found was disturbing, to me at least.
I wrote 505,938 words in 2009.
Only 136,738 were fiction.
A whopping 369,200 were non-fiction. Now, this includes email, but still, that’s insane. Email alone counts for 215,200 words. (I sent 2152 emails last year, so that’s an average of six emails a day at 100 words apiece.)
27% of my writing in 2009 was fiction. To break it down even further, I wrote on average 1386 words per day, 374 of which were fiction.
Considering I make my living as a novelist, I find that horrifyingly low. Granted, all my dates changed for my book releases, and I took a few months off during the summer to deal with some life stuff, so I didn’t do a lot of writing during that period. But that’s still not enough creative work versus business work.
The numbers were enlightening, to say the least. Twitter, which I joined in February, added up to 48,000 words. That’s 3200 Tweets at 15 words per tweet. Facebook must be about the same or even more, so it gets 48,000 too. Murderati blogs* came in at 45,000 (30 blogs at 1500 a pop), and I probably wrote another 5,000 words of original content for the Tao of JT. Add in essays and interviews, and we’re at 156,000 non-fiction words before email.
With the numbers in front of me, I can’t help but see just how much time I spend on non-fiction endeavors.
TOO DAMN MUCH.
A New Chapter
2010 is the year I turn things around. I’m going to make every non-fiction word count, utilizing Artist Data and Tweetdeck to post to Twitter, Facebook and MySpace simultaneously, eliminating over 1/2 of my social networking word count. I’m also going to be a much less frequent visitor to the sites.
My blogging will stay about the same, with 2 posts a week at the Tao of JT and bi-monthly columns at Murderati.
Email is a necessary evil, and if you think about an average of 6 emails a day, that’s not too bad.
Most importantly, I’m going to up my fiction totals tremendously. My word counts really should be in the 250-300,000 range, which I’ve achieved in the past.
My goals are set, my plan is in place, and I’m really looking forward to achieving all that I set out to do this year, and more.
How about you? Resolutions or Goals this year?
Happy New Year!
Rough Estimate of Words Written in 2009 (all numbers approximate)
Fiction
Novels
The Immortals
80,000
The Pretender
20,000
The Cold Room
30,000
Short Stories
Killing Carol Ann
4,338
Chimera
1,500
Have You Seen Me
900
Total Fiction
136,738
Non-Fiction
Essays
The Charm School
3,000
Murderati Columns*
(30 Blogs x Avg Words 1,500)
45,000
Tao of JT Columns*
5,000
Interviews
5,000
Total Non-Fiction
58,000
Work
Email
(2,152 Emails X Avg Words 100)
215,200
Total Work
215,200
Social Media
Twitter
(3,200 Posts X Avg Words 15)
48,000
Facebook
48,000
Total Social Media
96,000
Total Fiction, Non-Fiction, Social & Email Word Count
505,938
% Fiction
27%
% Non-Fiction
11%
% Social Media
19%
% Work/Email
43%
* I know most media analysts include blogging in the social media category. But since mine are more columns and essays, I’ve decided to include them in the non-fiction category.
New Year turned into something of a mini adventure for us, as I mentioned in my blog over on my own website last week. And Rob’s almost Zen-like post of yesterday made me realise there was something about the whole experience of being out on the roads in bad conditions that struck me as really, really annoying.
Most people should not drive.
Most people, if truth be known, do not drive because it brings them any kind of enjoyment or satisfaction. They simply need to get from A to B, and the car has become the easiest way to do this. Particularly if you live in a rural or semi-rural area in the UK, when the buses run if they feel like it and regular local trains are something your granny talked about in the days before the Beeching Axe, while modern out-of-town shopping centres have killed the diversity of the high street.
If you want anything, you’ve got to get in your car and drive to get it.
And nobody will admit to being a bad driver. They might say they play a little golf, but aren’t very good at it, but they will not say, “I drive a little – of course, I’m crap, but I drive a little.” And it’s worse over here where automatic cars are not the norm, so for some people clutches are a service item.
The other problem is the car has changed beyond all recognition in recent times. Years ago, when I was heavily involved in the classic scene, I used to drive all kinds of vehicles, including on one occasion a 1920s Bentley. Driving an open sports car from that era was a full-engagement exercise, with no power assistance of any kind on the steering or cable-operated brakes, plus it had a right-hand crash gearbox and reverse pedal layout. The skinny cross-ply tyres gripped every other Thursday, and the suspension was best described as agricultural.
But you had to concentrate on what you were doing, all the time.
Now, however, we sit in our squashy climate-controlled, heated-seat little boxes, listening to high-quality stereos, with our back-seat passengers watching DVDs, waiting for instructions from the sat-nav on what to do next. There’s no manual choke to keep an eye on until the engine warms through, while other niceties of car control are taken care of by cruise control, anti-lock brakes, four-wheel drive, auto-tiptronic gearboxes, and traction control. Much of the time, you don’t even have to remember to turn on your headlights or windscreen wipers, because the car will do it for you, and it will squeak at you if you forget to turn them off.
And, if the worst should happen, we’re held in place by our auto-tensioning seatbelts while a dozen airbags explode in our faces to cushion the impact. And once the dust has settled we whip out our mobile phones to call breakdown recovery. In fact, all aspects of the motor car have grown more sophisticated.
Except one.
The driver.
Drivers, if anything, have grown a whole lot less sophisticated, because now they expect to put less into the experience and still walk away. They’re distracted by their mobile phones (yes, Rob) and their texts, and their email, or surfing the web on their iPhone, or their drive-thru coffee, or burger, or fishing in the passenger footwell for their cigarettes (as the driver admitted to doing when he knocked two friends of mine through a dry stone wall) or even trying to stop their dogs getting to the meat in the cooler on the rear seat (as the guy who knocked down Stephen King admitted to doing).
We recently saw a typical White Van Man on the motorway not only yacking on his phone, but taking an order on a clipboard resting on the steering wheel while working out a quote on a calculator at the same time. Gawd alone knows what he was using to steer … (And WVM, by the way, is not a racist statement. There are just a lot of guys who drive round in white vans – usually Mercedes Sprinters – doing 100+mph in the outside lane of the motorway. It’s a recognised phenomenon.)
But I digress slightly.
One thing that New Year showed us was the people in the UK cannot drive in snow. The first thing they do is turn on their fog lights. Why? WHY? In the hundreds of thousands of miles we’ve driven over the last twenty-plus years, we’ve encountered severe conditions where rear fog lights were actually necessary, maybe half a dozen times. If you can see my headlights behind you, you can turn off the fog lights because I can sure as hell see you, and having that damn bright light shining in my eyes is not only asking for road rage, it also distracts me from seeing your brake lights come on.
So stop it. Stop it now. Do not make me open a can of whup-ass on you.
So, there we were last weekend, sliding around in the increasing levels of snow on one of the highest roads in Britain, watching people slithering off the tarmac and wheelspinning, and I wondered how many times bad driving has featured as a plot device in a crime novel. Or a character’s been rammed at an intersection just when they’ve had an epiphany about the case, which prevents them from telling anyone or catching the bad guy.
Any examples spring to mind?
And what about you, ‘Rati – any driving woes you want to share?
I hope you like the pix I found for this blog, by the way, and I make no comments WHATSOEVER about male versus female drivers. Uh-uh.
This week’s Word of the Week is catastrophe, which not only has the usual accepted meaning of a sudden disaster or misfortune, or a sudden violent upheaval in some part of the earth’s surface (geol) but also a final event or the climax of action of the plot in a play or novel.
Now that we’ve had our season of joy and happiness and good tidings for all, let me tell you about some of the things I hate.
I’m not normally a hateful guy, but there are things that just bug the crap out of me, and after an incredibly bad day recently, I began channeling Denis Leary and came up with this list:
10. Standing in line at the grocery store, with one item to buy, as the person in front of you pulls out a checkbook and proceeds to take five minutes to write a check for two dollars and fifteen cents.
Get a freaking bank card, will you? Checks should be banned.
9. Going to the home water color and discovering that there’s not enough water left to make your morning coffee. Those five gallon bottles are heavy, awkward and a giant pain in the ass.
8. Water cooler again: using the hot water spigot. Because they don’t want to get sued, the manufacturer makes you push an extra button and hold it down as the water comes out at half-speed. Fuck you. I want an opt-out for this mechanism. What do I look like, the McDonald’s crotch coffee lady? I’m not an idiot, thank you.
7. Ants. Especially ants in your kitchen after you’ve cleaned it so well you could do heart surgery on the friggin’ counter (assuming you have counter space — see #5)
The other day, I discovered that the inside of my sugar bowl was crawling with ants. And this was when it was SITTING IN THE DISHWASHER and HAD ALREADY BEEN WASHED with soap and scalding hot water. WTF? Do I need a new dishwasher? Industrial strength ant spray?
6. Piece of shit dishwashers that won’t let you put a decent sized pan in the bottom rack because they get in the way of the rotating spray mechanism. Douchebaggery at its finest.
Advice: take your dishes with you when you buy a dishwasher. Make sure they fit to your satisfaction. DO NOT leave this one up to chance.
5. Not enough counter space in your kitchen. Don’t buy a house in a hurry. And if you must, make sure that kitchen has PLENTY of freaking room.
With the day’s dishes on one side, the multitude of appliances I’ve collected on the other side and a big fat stove top taking up the rest, where the hell am I supposed to cut my tomatoes?
4. When someone asks you to do something for them, then stands over you and tells you how to do it.
If you have time to stand over me and give me instructions (although I’ve done the task a billion times), then you can friggin’ do it yourself. Don’t like the way I’ve mopped the floor? Put that tongue to better use.
3. Lame television commercials. 9.9 out of 10 commercials are inane, annoying and a waste of TV watching time. Which is why I now buy DVDs of my favorite shows, or record them to my DVR.
2. When some idiot makes a right turn directly in front of you, and proceeds to drive at a speed at which no human should travel on FOOT, let alone in a car, forcing you to ease off the gas or even hit your brakes to avoid a two-car pile up. AND THERE’S NO ONE BEHIND YOU.
If they had waited three seconds more, they wouldn’t have you riding their assssssss.
1. People who use cell phones while driving. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOUR KIDS. FUCK YOUR FAMILY. AND all of your friends. Especially the ones who call you while you’re driving. Oh, and get the hell out of my way. I’m trying to get somewhere, not make a doctor’s appointment.
And a special bonus hate:
* Hypocrites. The do as I say, not as I do crowd.
I once worked with a woman who was very strict about company policies and rules — except when it came to HER and the people she liked. Then all bets were off.
If you pointed out to her that “rules are rules,” (as she always loved to say), you jumped immediately to her shit list and she’d do everything in her power to screw you. Behind your back. While smiling sweetly at you every morning.
Okay, I know I risk the loss of attention of some of our male ‘Rati here, but I’m talking about shoes today.
Little girls love them because they’re a physical manifestation of our princess fantasies. Adult women love them because they’re a physical manifestation of all the rest of our fantasies. Big girls love them because they’re the only clothing (aside from gloves) that we can buy in a normal size. Slim girls love them because they make us feel like the ballet dancer on the top of the musical jewelry box.
I love them all. Flat shoes. Fancy shoes. Killer heels. Animal prints. Straps.
I used to date a guy named Tom who bought me shoes for no reason at all. I’d come home from work and there would be a little pyramid of shoeboxes on the bed. Straw wedges. Red canvas sneakers. Strappy sandals with a chunk of turquoise in them. Black ballet slippers. It was heaven.
It takes a special man to know the shape and pressure points of his woman’s foot. A special man to get the right size every time. I’d be with Tom today if it wasn’t for his equally nasty habit of leaving lipstick love letters in baby talk on the bathroom mirror.
I’ve grown older and wiser since my Tom-the-Shoe-Man days and now eschew heels of either the footwear or male variety. And I’ve cut back from the 100+ pairs of shoes in the closet to a measly fifty.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned the passion.
So the day after Christmas, with my shoe jones in high gear, I sneaked off to see my dealer. Zappos.com, that is. From the Spanish word “zapatos” (shoes). They have 1000 brands on hand. Ninety thousand styles. Three and a half million pairs of shoes ready to go.
I gave the secret password and entered into the wonderful world of shoes. Fleece-lined. Waterproof. Thigh-high. Italian leather. Purple.
Did I say purple? For some reason, my shoe jones was screaming for purple and I found just the thing. Puppy-soft leather. A hot-orange sole for flamboyance. An elegantly understated logo across the heel.
Zappos never disappoints. Twenty-four hours later they were in my hands. Er … on my feet.
Except that they were tight. And the flamboyant orange made me look like I ought to be duck hunting. And that understated logo was braying like a tea partier with a megaphone.
They were going back.
When you print out the (free) return-shipping label at the Zappos website, they have this deceptively humble little comment box that says: “What could Zappos have done to prevent this return?” As if it were their fault.
It reminds me of that weight loss ad that on late night TV that starts with: “Unsightly belly fat? It’s not your fault.” Of course not. That bean burrito just jumped right out in front of me at the intersection. And I didn’t even realize I was being rude to that jelly donut until it started crying.
What could you have done differently, Zappos? I’ll tell you.
“Next time please remind me that there’s a whole world of purple out there and the color on these shoes is not going to match any of the lavender, lilac, deep purple or mauve in my closet.
And you could whisper that I haven’t been a size 8 in a closed-toed shoe since I was in third grade.
You could tell me that I bought the same pair of shoes from you in gray last year and they’ll go just fine with all the purple stuff.
You could cough gently into my computer and say that $188 for a pair of faux-leather purple shoes I don’t need is not a bargain. You could even have a little asterisk at the bottom of the page with the credit card info that teases, ‘Are you sure? You’ve got a big credit card bill coming in at the end of the month.’
Like a nurse in a methadone clinic, you could have offered a free pair of those little slip-on satin Chinese slippers instead, with the warning that ‘as a writer, you spend most of your time at the computer and you shouldn’t be wearing screaming purple and orange outdoor shoes.’
You could have cut me off. Told me my addiction was getting out of control. Your pages could have taken longer to download. You could have saved me from myself. But you didn’t.”
I hit Send, then printed out the return label and hot-footed it down to the post office before I lost my nerve.
Unfortunately, the Post Office was in cahoots with my dealer and instead of sending the shoes back to Zappos, they returned the box to me. Like a recent quitter who finds a fresh pack of smokes in her purse, the jones kicked back in.
I would prevail. But now I needed a new return label, so I got on the phone to talk to my dealer directly.
“Zappos, the happiest place on the internet! This is Loren,” he cooed. Oh my, yes. I’ll bet he had blue eyes. I wondered if he left messages in baby talk on the mirrors.
I explained my dilemma.
“Let me look up that order,” he said.
There was an uncomfortable silence as he read my suggestions for what Zappos might have done differently.
“Oh, you’re THAT Louise.”
P.S. The winner of our “‘Rati Holiday Contest” is commenter Sylvia! Ms. Sylvia, if you’ll send me your snail mail address, you’ll have 14 Murderati books winging their way to you!
…You take them both, and there you have … the facts of life. (Sorry, I suffer from a condition scientists have labeled theme-song-monkish-itis, the only symptom of which is an insistence upon finishing a song lyric, especially when it comes from a 1980’s sitcom featuring Tootie, Cloris Leachman,* and, at one time, George Clooney.)
Ahem, onto my post:
My girlfriends and I were on our fourth round of contract rummy on Thursday afternoon when one of them fiddled with her phone and declared, “Hey! RJ Julia is tweeting about you!” Once I recovered from a momentary hallucination that I was famous, I asked for details. Imagine my delight when I learned that RJ Julia, a fabulous independent bookseller in Madison, Connecticut, had tweeted: “Best freebie in an ARC mailing: a cute package of Nutella w/Alafair Burke’s newest.”
As I’ve previously mentioned, I am not one of those authors with marketing savvy. Case in point: For Bouchercon a few years ago, I had bookmarks made for the giveaway table that featured these three fabulous photographs of my beautiful dude, The Duffer. The text read, “The Duffer says Read Alafair Burke.” I was very proud of myself.
Lee Child, unmatched for kindness, yet unflinchingly honest, took one look at my handiwork and declared me unfit for self-promotion. For the life of me, I couldn’t see the problem. Who, after all, could resist the Duffer? “No one,” he explained, “and that’s the problem. These sweet people who like mysteries about puppies and kittens will think you’re right up their alley. Then they’ll read your violent, profanity-laden books and hate you for putting them through it.”
So much for my creative printing efforts. Now my cards and bookmarks bear the typical book jacket images.
Contrast my high-effort bookmarks with the more recent, low-effort Nutella giveaway. A few weeks ago I was in the Continental club at Newark airport, toasting a stale bagel, when I spotted a bowl full of these:
Not quite as adorable as a french bulldog who resembles Stacy Keach, but still pretty cute, right? As it turns out, my character Ellie Hatcher keeps a jar of Nutella and a spoon in her top desk drawer. The galleys of 212 were due to be sent out to independent booksellers at the end of the year. Lightbulb over the head, etc.
Truth be told, I didn’t think of these tasty little treats as marketing – just a shared chuckle with the independent booksellers who have helped me over the years. But I’ll take the shout out from RJ Julia as proof that, as marketing goes, this at least wasn’t an “epic fail,” as my nephew says.
The experience got me thinking about the little and big things we do to try to promote our work. My high-cost, high-effort bookmarks apparently weren’t right; a snack-size trinket I first spotted in the Newark airport earned me some Twitter action.
As publishers cut back on advertising dollars and tour budgets, we’re all looking for personalized ways to thank our most supportive readers and booksellers while searching for a new audience as well. Are you willing to share stories of your efforts, either successful or failed, high-cost or low? Readers and booksellers: What efforts have you seen from authors, both good and bad?
(And, uh, speaking of marketing, if you enjoyed this post, please follow me on Facebook, MySpace, and/or Twitter.)
* Lest you ever doubted Cloris Leachman’s comic talents, watch this (but only if you don’t mind “blue”).
I never make New Years Resolutions or goals or promises.
The primary reason is unattainability–most goals or set too low or too high. If you set a goal too low and achieve it, could you have done more or better if you’d set it higher? Or not set one at all? Essentially, you have an excuse to be lazy because subconsciously you know you’ll meet your resolution and won’t push yourself.
If you set a goal too high, you’ll feel like a failure if you don’t achieve it.
Some goals are simply not attainable, like, “I will sell a book/find an agent this year.” Selling a book is almost completely out of the author’s hands. You can write the book, vow to send out 100 queries to agents, but ultimately you have no control over whether someone offers you a contract or not.
I have enough stress in my life that I don’t need to heap on more worry in the form of a list of goals or a New Years Resolution. I know me, and I’ll glance at that list and either 1) know I’ll be able to do it, but procrastinate; or 2) know the goals are virtually impossible and stress over them.
My good friend Roxanne St. Claire loves setting goals. She calls herself a “goal junkie” and if you, too, love goals, read Rocki’s article from last year at Murder She Writes. And she offers great advice on how and why to set goals. For example, her first point:
A goal is not a dream. It is attainable solely by your own hands and it is in your control. Getting an editor to buy your manuscript or readers to buy your book aren’t goals, no matter how much they feel like they are. Submitting your manuscript to a specific number of editors or finishing back to back books in your fantastic series are goals.
But I still can’t do it. I even have problems writing a to-do list for a single day. People tell me that when they cross things off their to-do list that they feel productive or happy. Not me. If I had on a list, “Write ten pages today” and I wrote ten pages and crossed it off, I’d think, “Would I have written more if I’d listed more on my to-do list?” I can’t even plot out a scene let alone a whole book–and maybe lists make me think I’m plotting out my life. It gives me the willies just to think about it.
Some people thrive on lists and goals. More power to them. I’m not one. They drive me batty.
What about you? Like or hate lists? Like or hate to make New Years Resolutions?
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT . . .
Saw HOLMES last weekend. FABULOUS movie. I loved it. Well worth the $10 (or, for me, $30.75 because of my two teenagers, plus $19.50 for popcorn and drinks . . . )
Fandango sent me a list of their Top 10 2010 most anticipated movies:
Saw the trailer. It looks a little darker than the first (which was pretty dark) but I’ll probably see it. My son wants to because he loved the first one. He’ll be 9 when it comes out. I really like Robert Downey, Jr. HOLMES solidified him as one of my favorites.
I keep going back and forth on this one. I love Johnny Depp. Hated the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Like Burton, but don’t know if I can put aside watching the original Alice and adapt to the non-cartoon version.
When the original Tron came out, I loved it. But that was 1982 and I was 13. I’m sure with the computer graphics of today and the special effects, it will be fantastic on screen, but sometimes movies like this forsake the story for the effects. It’s on my list to see.
4. A-Team
Um, unless someone I know and trust gives it a major must-see thumbs up, nope.
Andy goes to college! He leaves Buzz, Woody and the rest of the gang in a day care center. Tops my list of must-see movies. I can hardly wait! I might even bring the kids . . .
There’s a great line from Bridget Jones’ Diary, the book, which I always re-read around this time of year, that I would quote here verbatim if I had the book with me, which I don’t, as you will understand in a minute, so I’ll sum up: she is ranting about now unfair it is of – whoever – that just as we’ve all gotten used to putting whatever we feel like in our mouths for a month straight we’re suddenly expected to resume work and perfect discipline as if the whole past month’s debauch never happened.
Well, I agree.
Furthermore, I know I am not the only writer in this community who feels I am so off track with my writing after the holidays that I have no idea how to get back on, so I just thought I’d out myself on that subject right away in case anyone else can relate.
I have such a hard time with the week between Christmas and New Year’s in general that this week I impulsively – and perhaps ill-advisedly, given that it’s WINTER – decided to drive across the country with two cats and my Southern California wardrobe, just to have something to keep my mind off this end of the year panic.
Well, it was a little more complicated than that, but still – when in doubt, road trip, is what I say.
Of course, being from Southern California, I still have no real concept of winter, so when I found myself driving in SNOW with two really angry cats screaming at me from the back seat, I started to reconsider the plan. By then of course I was too far along to go back, so, well, anyway, I was snowed in for a day somewhere in Arizona, but we got out of it okay enough. Even without this thing you apparently are supposed to have for snow, called chains. I mean, tire chains. Where do they come up with these things?
So I spent my New Year’s Eve in a hotel in Albuquerque, doing galley corrections. (Did I mention that I got galleys two days before Christmas? Due just after New Year’s? That seems to be when they show up, as I know others here can attest).
Look, there are worse things, and I’m not really complaining. I have two books coming out this year. I have to remember that. And it IS the New Year, now, or really Monday it will be, because this weekend is just strange.
But despite the fact that I wouldn’t really recommend driving anywhere (much less across the entire country in winter) with two cats unless there’s no other way around it, I feel a lot better being on the road. There’s nothing else to do but drive and space out, enforced meditation, and then I did my galleys in the hotels at night, and movement just feels like – movement. Which I needed.
It occurred to me on the drive portion of today (gorgeous) – that my malaise had a lot to do with the fact that I am at the exact same place in BOTH books that I am in the process of writing. That would be – in the first draft, my least favorite part of the writing process, and in the third quarter of each draft – usually my least favorite part of any book or script. So no wonder I freaked out and thought it would be a good idea to drive across the country in winter. I would have done just about anything to get away, and that was the first semi-justifiable thing that came to mind.
But I got my galleys done (finding someplace to mail them in is another story), there was no snow today, and the road trip is having the intended effect of vacuuming out my brain, which it sorely needed after the last year (don’t ask…), and now I can focus in the afternoons on teaching my online Screenwriting Tricks For Authors class, and teaching always makes me remember why I write. I can’t very well coax a class into keeping going on that $#%^&*! first draft without talking myself into it as well.
So okay, this all might be a strange way to start off the year, but it IS a new year, and we all have a chance to start fresh. And I don’t know about you all, but man, do I need that.
