Category Archives: Writing

Launch party in New York

This weekend I’ll be traveling to New York–barring a hurricane-caused disruption–for the launch of Triangle Square Books, a new children’s and YA nonfiction imprint from Seven Stories Press.

Seven Stories is the publisher of my YA adaptation of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, as well as my new YA adaptation of Ronald Takaki’s history of multicultural America, A Different Mirror. Seven Stories has long been committed to publishing progressive books on politics, history, and social and environmental justice. I believe Triangle Square will fill an important need, and I can’t wait to see what books they will be offering to young readers.

My own writing camp

I wonder if any of my writer friends have done this, and how it turned out.

Next weekend Zachary leaves for a two-week trip with his Italian friend. Circumstances have arranged themselves such that I have no commitments during that time. No pressing work assignments, no tickets to plays or concerts, nada.

When Z is away I revel in having the house to myself. Not that I don’t love the guy, you understand, but even after 18 years together I’m not entirely used to cohabitation. It’s a vacation for me to be home alone when he travels. He feels the same when I travel, in case you were wondering.

My normal practice during these idylls is to sleep late, watch bad Syfy (is there any other kind?) and lots of slasher and horror and Korean revenge flicks (stuff Zachary doesn’t really like). And I go out to dinner a lot with friends, and maybe schedule time with girlfriends whom I haven’t seen one-on-one for a while. Usually I’m working on one or more deadlines, though, so it’s not exactly a free-for-all of leisure.

This time there’ll be no deadline. I am, however, about 30K words from finishing the first draft of the novel I’ve been noodling with for some time. So I’m thinking, “Full-immersion, one-person writing camp.” I’ll stock up with the groceries I need, and plenty of Mountain Dew, and I’ll keep my schedule empty, with the intention of writing every day, as much as I can and whenever I feel like it. Middle of the night? No problem. Want to play that Fever Ray album over and over again until my ears bleed? No problem. If I stick to the extreme version, I won’t leave the house except to go the the gym five mornings a week and take a walk the other two mornings.

The single-mindedness of the plan pleases me, but who knows whether I’ll maintain it.

Have any of you done something like this? If so, did you:

(a) accomplish a ton of writing and feel awesome,

(b) fall off the plan in the first day and spend the rest of the time watching the entire runs of Babylon 5 and Lexx on Netflix, or,

(c) start wearing a tinfoil hat to keep the government and/or aliens from hearing your thoughts?

 

Self-publishing data from Smashwords

Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, talked “Money, Money, Money” at a Romantic Times event earlier this month. points apply to all genres.

Interesting stuff for those who are self-publishing, or thinking of doing so. One highlight: readers appear to favor longer over shorter books. Of course, as Coker is careful to point out, you have to write a good book in the first place.

 

Standing room mostly

I’ve transitioned to a standing desk.

I started thinking about it a year or so ago, after reading about the benefits of standing rather than sitting for desk work. Those benefits include (for a lot of people) increased energy, diminished back pain, weight loss, and–most interesting to me–improved focus and concentration.

I don’t have any back pain, but the other stuff sounded pretty good.

For a long time I pined for the GeekDesk, a hydaulic beauty that lets you raise and lower the work surface in seconds with the push of a button. (The ability to alternate easily between standing and sitting seems to help the transition to a standing desk, and even many long-time standers say it’s good to take a sitting break from time to time.)

But the GeekDesk is pricey, especially when you add the cost of shipping. I could never quite justify it, so I dithered and did nothing. Meanwhile, the awesome Cat Rambo did the opposite, i.e., something. She rigged up a standing desk and started using it. Her FB and G+ posts about the results inspired me, and when she posted that the IKEA Frederik desk can be used or modded as a standing desk, I went out and got one. At $149 it’s hella cheaper than the GeekDesk, although it can’t be raised and lowered, and I did the shipping myself.

I’ll pass lightly over the assembly process, except to say that: (1) this desk is the first IKEA product I’ve ever assembled that did not come with an Allen wrench, and (2) I put the desk together in our living room, while enduring the godawful Syfy movie “Swamp Volcano,” and getting it into my office eventually involved taking a door off its hinges and, when that proved inadequate, taking the damn desk partly apart and reassembling it in the office. So, um, put the thing together in the room where you plan to use it. Duh.

Anyway, I got it set up last night. My old sitting desk is on the left, the new standing one on the right:

newdesk1
olddesk2

My work habits are pretty jumpy; I usually take frequent bathroom, TV, walk, play-with-cat breaks, so it’s not like I’m going to be standing for hours on end in one place, like some literary-assembly-line worker. (Although my publisher might find that an  improvement.) But for sitting breaks at my desk, I got a $20 IKEA bar stool with a padded footrest. I’m also going to take Cat’s advice and get a gel floormat, like the ones chefs use.

I’ve only been at the desk for a couple of hours, but I like it. I’ve gotten some work done: revising an outline for my nonfic publisher, revising a short story, and writing this blog post. Time to down tools and see what that cat’s up to.

Nice start to a New Year

I woke up this morning to find that the January 2012 issue of 10Flash Quarterly has gone live. It contains my zombie flash piece “Base Instinct,” which was fun to write.

Super-short-form writing doesn’t come easily to verbose me, but it was satisfying to pare a story down to its essence–and there are lots of markets for flash. I plan to submit a few more 1000-word (or shorter) stories this year. My main writing goal, though, is to finish the draft of the novel I’m writing, and that right speedily. We shall see.

2011 was neither a bad nor a good year for me. Meh, I would have to say. I would look forward to 2012 with less trepidation if it did not include the specter of a presidential election. Still, I hope it turns out to be a terrific year for all of us, and that the Mayans will have the last laugh and the world will not end.