Relationships…the day after tomorrow

Working on a real post that should be ready by the weekend…

In the meantime, the new vacuum cleaner has arrived and OMG, the house was filthy. I found fur in places I never would have thought to look (the ceiling? really? how does that work?).

Plus, I finally finished putting together the second of the three bookshelves (it only took what, a month?), and the goal is to have the third in place and all filled by this weekend.

Plus, I think today on Twitter I promised a manuscript submission to Angela James (Carina Press Exec. Editor) by next month.

So after this weekend, I might not have quite as much to say on the blog for a while. Insert queasy smile here.

Quit. Quit now.

This is both the best and worst possible advice for a beginning writer.

Why the worst possible advice? Because it’s a dream killer. After all, this person is at the very beginning of what could possibly be a long journey, with many ups and downs along the way.

If a certain group of Polynesian people had quit at the beginning of their journey, we wouldn’t have Easter Island. If Stephen King had quit at the beginning? Or Debbie Macomber? All that wonderful work would never have existed.

Ah, but it’s also the best possible advice — it forces the baby writer to make a choice between letting somebody else control her dreams and taking control of her dreams for herself.

If you control your own dreams, you’re responsible for making them come true and that can be scary. But if you let somebody else push you around from the beginning, you’ll never make it in publishing.

It’s too rough out there for the tenderhearted; everybody with the ability to jot down a shopping list will have an opinion on your creations, and most of those opinions will boil down to, “I could have done this better.” This is normally self-delusion, but it’s still painful to hear when applied to your work.

I speak from experience; I’ve had blind critiques where I could tell the person on the other end (a volunteer) spent a lot of time and effort…rewriting every one of my sentences in her voice. Circling every word ending in “ly” — including those in dialog. Telling me I used the wrong font. Since I was a typesetter for ten years, this one particularly makes my eyelid twitch; thank goodness it’s becoming far less common.

And those weren’t agents or editors, just other writers trying to help. It can be brutal out there, even from people who get it and are trying to help. I once had to tell a writer that Nephritis is a bad name for an Egyptian queen, because it means kidney disease (I meant it in the best possible way, but still — ouch).

If the advice to quit now makes you sad and disappointed, maybe you should quit; maybe you don’t have the rhino-hide it takes. But if “Quit now” makes you angry and determined, it might be the best advice for you. Sometimes the fire in the belly needs a match to get started.

Now that I think about it, the advice — and the reaction to it — isn’t just for writers; it’s for anything where there’s a lot of competition and you’re just getting started in learning a new skill, whether that skill is artistic, work-related, cultural, or in extreme sports. Whatever.

Go find a match and get that fire going.

One of the things I like about living in Boise is that the genre writing community is fairly small, so you end up knowing other writers — some published, some not yet.

Here are some of the local people I know (or at least have met more than once) who have written, in my opinion, pretty good books. If I’ve left out anyone, it’s because I’m a ditz and I’ve forgotten them, but definitely not because I think their work is sub-par.

Rebecca Clark – contemporary romance
Rachel Gibson – contemporary romance
Laura Lee Guhrke – historical romance
Jan Hambright – romantic suspense
Robin Lee Hatcher – inspirational women’s fiction
Stef Ann Holm – historical romance
Kathy Hurley – fantasy and science fiction
Kelly Jones – historical art-centered mystery
Jennie Lucas – contemporary romance
Ken McConnell – space opera and computer-centered mystery
Joanne Pence – food-centered mystery
Amberly Smith – gay romance
Charlene Teglia – hot paranormal romance, she moved away a little while ago, but she still counts
Candis Terry – contemporary romance

Check them out.

For Anyone Who Cares…
1. My friend Charli Teglia finally had her baby July 5; Zoe and mom are doing fine. I stopped biting my nails as soon as I saw the first photo — Charli had been on bed rest for several weeks. Zoe is adorable, of course.

2. Last night I put together the first of three six-foot-tall mahogany bookshelves. They are sturdy, and heavy (about 100 pounds each), and the first non-cheap-and-crappy book-holding devices I have ever owned. They also have leashes to anchor them to walls, which I love, since I can just see Stuart (the 18-pound cat) trying to pull one over on himself. I am sore today, but happy with my purchase. Did I mention I got them on sale for 20% off the regular price? Yes, I did (tiny squee goes here).

3. This morning a left-turning bicyclist almost hit me as I was preparing to turn right into the cul-de-sac street where my job’s office building is located. To understand why this is alarming, you need to know that, in Idaho, bicycles are vehicles; the not-entirely-bright cyclist was making a left turn from the left side of the left lane — riding against traffic, which is illegal.

If you live in Idaho and ride a bicycle on the streets, please remember that you’re driving a vehicle. Behave as if you’re a pedestrian and get nailed? Too bad, since you were the one breaking the law. I really, really don’t want this to happen to anyone (even that idiot from this morning, LOL).

4. On the writing front, Sasha from “Getting Lucky” is vexing me. What is it about men — even fictional men — that they don’t communicate, with themselves or anyone else? (Spooky Man isn’t bad about it, but he’s been through VA therapy.) I should have had the first draft of this novella written by now, but no, the main character has to be a pain in the, ah, neck. Maybe I’ll argue with him while assembling bookshelf #2 tonight.

5. The lovely programming folks from Emerald City Writers Conference asked me to have “Plotting the Character-Driven Novel” prepped as a reserve workshop in case of cancellation. Since they’ve already had a keynote speaker cancel due to unforeseen circumstances (Alyssa Day! She’s fabulous and I won’t get to see her!), I’m taking this seriously.

Partners in Crime, the Boise chapter of Sisters in Crime, asked me to give the workshop “This is Your Brain on Love” at their October meeting–which is the same workshop I’ll be giving at Emerald City. They said I could warm up on them, which I thought was very nice of them.

Modern Physics for Writers

All matter is made of strings! Universes are created when membranes collide! Invisible Dark Matter is 80% of everything! Dark energy is blowing the universe apart! There are four dimensions, no 10, no 11 dimensions—no, nine dimensions! Searching for The God Particle!

Sometimes theoretical physics sounds like screaming tabloid headlines, and makes about as much sense. Want to know the truth behind the headlines? Because, really, truth is stranger than fiction—or at least mathematically derived theoretical concepts are stranger than our everyday experiences.

Some of the more esoteric concepts are quite useful in fiction, both for science fiction and paranormal worlds. And there’s very little math; when you get to this level of physics, nobody outside the particular sub-branch understands it, anyway. So let’s delve into the mysterious reality inside the atom and outside the galaxy, look at current theories for tying them together and maybe think about how to use it in our stories.

Topics covered include:
Physics in the 19th and 20th centuries – Inside the Atom and Outside the Planet

• How Einstein ruined everything, with help from Planck, Thompson, Geiger, Rutheford, Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg , and even the grandfather of EMF, Michael Faraday.
• The whole light thing – Particle vs. Wave cage match, including quantum entanglement, leaping, tunneling, de-coherence; this is where reality gets really weird.
• What’s in an atom and why I hate Werner Heisenberg (Schrodinger’s cat, observing is changing, uncertainty, quantum entanglement).
• The God particle (Higgs Boson) and the theory behind it.
• Dark matter, dark energy

The dark secret: General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics don’t work together

• Trying to Resolve the Feud and Create a Theory of Everything:
• String Theory – getting worse before it gets better
• Supergravity and the 11th dimension
• M-Theory, Elegant and Unprovable

What does this mean to writers?

• Solid matter…isn’t; wave theory and quantum phase change
• Eleven dimensions and multiple universes for SF writers: wormholes, FTL travel, gravitons, time
• Implications for non-SF writers: Time travel, ghosts, magic, ESP, mythical creatures

To register, go to the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal chapter of Romance Writers of America:

Okay, these are things that bother one science geek, namely me.

1. Synthetic motor oil. What is it?

Oil is a starting point in organic synthesis, not an ending point. What what is synthetic oil made from? It’s advertised as being better for cars than regular motor oil, but they never say why. Freaky.

2. Digital electric motors. I confess, this comes from a particular commercial for a hand-held vacuum. But I know how electric motors work. They convert electricity (which isn’t digital) to motion (which isn’t digital), where where does the digital part come in?

I’m inclined to chalk this up to marketing puffery. Puffery is a legal term (yes, really) for over-the-top claims, such as the recent Dairy Queen ad stating, “We don’t just blow bubbles, we blow bubbles with kittens in them.”

3. I recently heard some idiot on a cable news channel say that ethanol fuel drove up food prices, because it took corn out of the food supply. It doesn’t, but it takes the sugar that pigs and cows can’t digest out of the 50+% of the corn crop used for animal feed and returns the distillers grain (a better grade of feed) to the livestock food supply.

4. Last weekend, a massage therapist assured me she only buys sugar made from sugar cane, as if it’s not exactly the same molecule that comes out of sugar beets. Sucrose is sucrose, and we all eat way too much of it. The glucose half of the molecule is okay (your body runs on glucose, after all), but the fructose half converts to fat right in your liver. Don’t make me show you the biochemistry equations.

There, I feel much better now. Thank you for letting me vent.

I’ve lived through some…interesting episodes since about Halloween 2004. That’s when my dog stopped eating. After two months (and several thousand dollars) of tests, the vet told us he had pancreatic or perhaps liver cancer. We put him to sleep the day after Christmas.

Why? Well, my mother also had pancreatic cancer and I just couldn’t cope with watching them both die at the same time. She collapsed two days after we euthanized the dog, rallied for a week or two, and then went into the decline that ended with her death on February 18, 2005. My father ended his 12-year battle with ALS (yes, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and yes, 12 years — he and Stephen Hawking are curve blowers) on September 29, 2005.

Two weeks later, I developed a blurry spot in my right eye. I went to the eye doctor, who told me I had optic neuritis (inflammation of the nerve) and sent me for a brain MRI “to rule out MS.” It didn’t rule it out.

By Christmas, I couldn’t see out of my right eye, my feet and lower legs were numb to my knees with tingling to mid thigh, my fingertips were starting to tingle, and I couldn’t close my eyes without losing my balance.

I had a 40-minute drive to and from work with no binocular vision, and I was told I couldn’t telecommute.

In mid-January some bloodwork came back that indicated I have celiac disease, which runs in my mother’s family. My neurologist shrugged and said a gluten-free diet is good for multiple sclerosis, so I began eliminating gluten from my diet.

At the same time I went on MS medication (immunosuppressants) and a steroid pulse (1000mg of Solu-Medrol, a Prednisone equivalent for two days a month). Slowly, sensation came back and my right eye’s vision came back.

On May 2, 2006, I was fired from my job for “poor quality of work,” which is actually a paraphrase of a much longer statement. But it was okay, because I could feel my legs again. And I won a writing contest with the manuscript that would become Blade’s Edge.

Fast-forward to 2009. My medical condition had stabilized; no new brain lesions since 2006, off the steroid pulse and slowly losing the extra weight (look ma, cheekbones!). I contracted my novel with Samhain Publishing. Life was good.

Then I got this funny wart on the tip of my nose, which was very annoying. I went to a dermatologist, who said, “No, that looks like a skin cancer” and took a biopsy.

While I was running the check-in table at the Murder in the Grove Master Class Weekend with Bob Mayer and Margie Lawson, the dermatologist called with the pathology results: squamous cell carcinoma. Not the worst skin cancer to have (that would be melanoma), but not the best, either (that would be basal cell carcinoma).

Because of the location, I was going to need Mohs surgery, which requires less “margin” — healthy tissue lopped off in cancer surgery just in case.
There are two dermatologic surgeons qualified to perform Mohs surgery in the state of Idaho (which is about the size of Great Britain). Luckily, they both practice in Boise.

So I had the surgery on June 24, 2009. That’s right, this is the second anniversary of my skin cancer surgery.

Blade’s Edge came out on September 8, 2009. I was now a published author. There was some drama with my editor leaving Samhain three weeks before my pub date, then her new job vanishing the day after my pub date, but that turned out okay, because Harlequin snatched her up to run Carina Press.

In October, since I’m a woman of a certain age (over 40), I had a mammogram. Then I had to go back for an “extra view” several weeks later. Two days before Thanksgiving, I had breast biopsy. Yes, it was positive, but it wasn’t that serious — ductile carcinoma in situ, considered pre-cancerous or stage 0 cancer.

The lumpectomy was on December 22, 2009. Yes, the year my first book was published I became a cancer double-survivor. Freaky-weird. But it gets even better.

While I was going through radiation therapy (for which I had to stop taking my MS medication, because it makes radiation more toxic), an article came out in the British Medical Journal “The Lancet — Neurology” that basically said, “If you are trying to diagnose for multiple sclerosis you need to eliminate celiac first.”

Apparently, they’ve discovered that celiac has neurological implications, can create lesions that look like MS to an MRI, and has even been linked to dementia (my mother’s father died of Accelerated Senility in a state hospital in 1962; hmmm). In my case, celiac cannot be ruled out.

I didn’t start taking my MS medication again when I finished the radiation treatments, but I remained on a gluten-free diet.

It’s 15 months later.

I’m officially cancer free, I have no MS-like symptoms, I’m working at the best job I’ve had in 15 years. And I finished a manuscript this week, my second complete manuscript since my parents died, and the first one that I actually plotted (the other was a direct treatment of Sleeping Beauty as science fiction; I might fix it sometime, but I might not).

Today on Twitter, I actually stuck my head up and shyly recommended my book to someone who was looking for science-fiction romance. The extraordinary and fabulous Angela James (who was the editor for my first book) tweeted back that she wishes I would write another.

I’m working on it, Ms. James. I’m working on it. I just had to get back from this long, strange trip.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that.