Apparently I'm a wimp.

I hate the phrase "Don't take it personally."

I received a rather harsh critique of The Wicked Instead recently. The critiquer wasn't wrong about a lot of things, but the way the comments were presented, heavily colored by the critiquer's personal biases, put me on the defensive. After I was done being pissed, I was devastated. I felt hurt, invalidated, attacked. The critiquer made some points that were valid and that I agreed with, but I had to sort through a lot of emotions that those words brought up. I'm still sorting through them, in fact. I wanted to get right to work fixing what was wrong yesterday, but I couldn't because every time I looked at my manuscript, I felt a crippling sense of dread and knew I couldn't handle it that day. A lot of writers act like this makes me a wimp. I should just push through the pain, walk it off, don't let them get to me. I agree with this to a certain extent. I won't let those harsh words cripple me forever. I won't let that critique make me stop writing, because it's something I love to do. Something I have to do. That doesn't make those words any easier to hear, though, and doesn't make my emotions any easier to get over.

Isn't it doubly invalidating to tell yourself you aren't allowed to be hurt by something that's hurtful? Writing is an incredibly intimate, personal thing. Yes, writers need to have thick skins, but the fact is, we also still have emotions and pushing aside those emotions doesn't help us as people. I am a goddamn expert at invalidating myself and my feelings (just ask my partner), but I can't ignore them forever. It isn't healthy and it doesn't help me as a writer. It builds resentment against myself, and what kind of writer am I if I despise myself?

People affect other people. If your parent/significant other/friend (or hell, even a stranger) says, "You look like shit in those pants," it's going to hurt. You can choose not believe the remark or use it as "critique," but doesn't it still sting? Shouldn't we be looking to examine the causes of our upset rather than pushing it away?

I'm not saying that either you take the critique whole-heartedly with a smile or sulk and don't use a bit of it. A broken clock is still right twice a day. A person who is generally full of shit can still speak the truth. You can still use harsh critique if you can come to a point where you can separate emotion from the remarks. And that's what's difficult.

It's not all on the writer to be the strong one and to push through it. An effective beta/editor will keep in mind that s/he is talking to a person with feelings. Some people just don't "get" it (tell me you've never had this feeling) because they don't read between the lines to grasp an author's intent. This isn't me being a special snowflake--when I critique, author intent is golden. My job as editor/beta/whatever is to help the reader reach his/her vision, not mine.

That's not to say that the editor should tiptoe around an author for fear of hurting his/her feelings, but there's a way to frame a critique, even a difficult one, in a way that doesn't automatically put the writer on the defensive. When people are defensive, they don't listen. It costs nothing to be diplomatic. Think of it this way: an editor wants the writer to take his/her advice. The writer wants that advice. But when the writer is feeling too defensive to take it, everyone loses.

My point is, writers, you're allowed to have emotions. You're allowed to be defensive. It's your choice whether you push those comments away or use them to your advantage, but that doesn't mean your feelings aren't valid. Figure out what's making you defensive. Is it the critiquer's tone? Are you feeling insecure/caught out at something? What is it? Is it something within the story that you need to fix, or is it some other factor? I think writers often forget that life influences writing and life is full of emotions. They're too intertwined to separate how you feel about life from how you feel about writing a lot of the time.

Fuck "Don't take it personally." Writing is personal. We can't avoid taking things personally. It doesn't make people wimps. The question is whether we can deal with those emotions in a healthy way so we can go on with the business of writing as better, stronger writers.

Spring-summerish

I am absolutely convinced that I have a weather curse. When I travel, or when I move somewhere, there will be severe/unseasonably severe weather. When I moved to Arkansas, they had the worst winter anyone could remember. When I moved to Ohio, the university closed for snow days for the first time in 13 years. When I moved to Baltimore, they had the hottest, driest summer in years. When I moved away from Baltimore, I was followed by a tropical storm and wandered back into the hottest, driest summer there had been in Arkansas in a long time. Most recently, I moved to Minnesota and we had the longest, coldest, snowiest winter since 1991. I was also told that tornadoes almost never happen here, yet we've had two tornadoes touch down in the area in the past two weeks. I happened to be out on the balcony watching the storm come in when I saw the rotating wall cloud Weather.com mentioned. Fortunately it never produced a tornado in this area.

Such is my weather curse. If I ever move near you...I'm sorry.

Aside from the severe weather, though, it's finally spring in Minnesota and it's quite nice. The only other problem is that I'm allergic to something here (probably some kind of tree) and my seasonal asthma has returned. I'm back to being surgically fused to my inhaler and doped up on allergy drugs galore. This is not, unfortunately, helping my current state of mind. You see, I lost my job a little over a month ago. It's a long and sordid story, but the fact of the matter is, I now have to move somewhere by the end of July, and I have to find out where that somewhere is ASAP. I'm certainly not without options even if I don't get another teaching job, but I sort of need to know, like, last week. The interviewing process takes time, which is something I don't have much of.

And yet, I have too much of it. Kate of Candlemark & Gleam and Tiger are coming to visit at the end of June and we're all going to CONvergence, and I start online teaching at the beginning of July, but until then, the unstructured time might just do me in. I am really bad at relaxing and having too much time to myself. I am getting stuff done, primarily revising On a Twisted Tree again and editing Natania Barron's Pilgrim of the Sky, and I've been leaving the house for a while every day, but I've still gone a bit stir crazy this week. Part of that is because I managed to upset my bum foot on a six-mile hike along the river, and now I'm unable to walk for long periods like I'd prefer.

It seems like everything has piled up on me at once like a big wet blanket of suck. I could use a break from it. But, I am getting revisions/edits done, and I found all seven seasons of Big Cat Diary on Netflix Instant Play. I used to watch it whenever it was on Animal Planet as a teenager. Yeah, I'm totally nerdtastic.

It is an Editing Day

I've been pecking away at some edits of On a Twisted Tree after Tiger had a pass at it. Today I got into the first substantial ripping apart of scenes, where Tiger noted some pacing issues. I spent a good two and a half hours on two scenes, complete with much screaming and hair-tearing. Fortunately these scenes seem to be the biggest issue in the entire book, so if I get them patched up, the rest should (might) be a bit easier.

There are some issues with some secondary characters, and I don't know if I'm too mentally tired to deal with them or what, but I just can't figure out how to fix them. There's one character in particular who's kind of featureless. He's always been that way in my mind, so I have a hard time figuring him out enough to put him on paper. I'll have to come back to him, I suppose. I hate when that happens because characterization is one thing I'm generally very good at.

So, now that I've exhausted myself with my own edits, I'm about to dive into Natania Barron's Pilgrim of the Sky. I saw a very early version of it but haven't seen it in quite some time, so I'm excited to get to read it.

Revision finished!

Today I finished the revision of On a Twisted Tree. Or at least, the first major revision. It comes in at around 117k, which is 6000 words longer than the original draft. Most people trim. I end up expanding. Ha.

I'm trying not to sink into the post-novel "aww, man, what do I do now?!" blues. Because I have another novel to plot and other projects to work on. The sequel to Tree is still very amorphous in my mind, but so was Tree when I first started out. I just have to tease out that one major thread of plot that needs to be solved. It's very hard not to sit down and go at it immediately, but I honestly could probably use a mental break, and my work semester isn't 100% over until next Thursday.

I have another blog post of substance brewing in the meantime. I just need the first line, which, to quote Thomas Tallis from The Tudors, is almost everything.

Writing patterns

I write really good beginnings, I must admit. Understand I'm not bragging when I say this, because beginnings are about the only part of writing I'm really good at, ha. It's a rare project where I've actually needed to fiddle with the beginning too terribly much--in fact, I can only think of one project in which I actually changed the beginning substantially. That project is still on the shelf because I can't figure out what the hell to do with it. Happily, On a Twisted Tree's beginning is still very strong. Aside from some inconsistencies, I really didn't have to revise much in the first third of the novel.

Yes, beginnings are easy for me. Part of the reason is that a story sits in my head for a while before it ever comes out. I have to know what the first scene involves and even what the first few lines are before I can start. I try not to make that one of those lame writer crutches, but it kind of is. Even the novel that's still sitting on the shelf still bears the original opening lines. I think it's because I have to capture my own interest before I can capture anyone else's.

Another part of the reason that the first part of Tree in particular turned out well is a combination of half planning, half pantsing. I tend to plan a little before I start writing these days. In the first third, though, I pants quite a bit. One scene inspires another, one character inspires another, etc. Building up a project is easy, and in my typical projects, pretty successful much of the time.

And then I get to the middle, where I actually have to do something with all of those doors I've opened and all of the plot threads I've begun. I can start making connections, weaving the threads together, seeing what's behind the doors, cliche cliche cliche. The middle, though, usually takes anywhere from three to ten times as long as the beginning. I wrote the first 30,000 words of Tree in about a month, IIRC, between sometime in May and sometime in June. The middle took me until probably January. I get to that point where I'm like, "....Fuck, what do I do with this?" Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Here's the funny part. I write good beginnings. Middling middles. Disastrous endings. It's not that they lack in quality as far as writing or plotting goes. The plot is actually pretty tight in the ending of Tree, because I'd finally figured out where the hell I was going. And that's just the problem. Almost a year later, I'd figured out a number of things I didn't realize/didn't bother figuring out in the middle. I figured out at least half of the world building /character/plot loose ends in the last two weeks of writing Tree. The last 10,000 words or so. What results is a hot mess of exposition and development that should have happened a hundred pages ago. I had about a week of constant crisis writing that last 10k because I finally had to deal with some gigantic soul-swallowing plot holes. They were fairly simply resolved, but that means that, in the revision stage, I'm now doing an awful lot of cleaning up after myself in the middle.

I'm not really complaining. I write these blog posts because my own writing foibles amuse me in an ironic kind of way and I tend to write in hyperbole. I'm thankful for my analytical brain and my ability to solve my own problems. Er. At least as they relate to writing. Sometimes I wish I was more patient, though, so I could work this stuff out before I had about 70,000 words that look like a kaleidescope of scenes that I have to make into a real picture. But, in the words of a hypocrite who hates it when writers say this, that's not really how I work. So it's back to self-janitoring.

Revision progress

I have an insanely ridiculous amount of work work to do this weekend. I have to draw up a proposal for my division meeting next week, which will then go to one of the administrative bodies on campus if approved (eek), I have to organize student papers for workshops for one class and grade two sets of papers for three other classes.

So what am I actually doing this weekend? Revising On a Twisted Tree. Natch.

I've only managed to pick through about 30 pages in the last week, but today I hashed out a revised outline for the whole novel, noting where I need to add scenes from whole cloth or revise the ones I have to fit the breakthroughs I made in the last couple weeks of writing. One of these days I will develop a more efficient writing process that does not involve pantsing the first two thirds and then figuring everything out in the last third, in the most agonizing, frustrating way possible, complete with OH MY GOD THIS SUCKS I HAVE RUINED EVERYTHING I AM AN INCOMPETENT LOSER I SHOULD BE DRAGGED OUT AND SHOT BEFORE I BUTCHER ANOTHER WORD moments.

In the last couple of months, especially, while Tiger (http://tigergray.blogspot.com) and I have been half-seriously futzing around with our future crossover, I've solidified a lot of ideas about Tree and the world and characters I'm working with. I'm eternally grateful and tickled that Tiger found my initial suggestion of, "Hey, let's throw our characters together!" intriguing enough to do this, because the book definitely would not be the same without him. And by that I mean it is totally more awesome because of him.

In other cool news, be on the lookout for a character interview with Amara (http://amaras-place.blogspot.com) and the Delaney boys sometime within the next few weeks (time permitting for all parties involved), as well as an author interview with Tiger and a character interview with his protagonist too. If you'll allow me the shameless plug, Amara runs a really great m/m book blog, which you should check out immediately. She did an author interview with me in March, and she's just awesome.

I am writing two different blog posts at the same time. Please save me from myself.