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Archive for June, 2012

The Practical Free Spirit Turns Two, and a Small Request

Posted in Life, Social Media, Writing, tagged , , on June 28, 2012| 32 Comments »

My blog, the Practical Free Spirit, turns two this week. On Saturday, June 30th, to be exact. This is my 223rd post. I just read my first post, Originality: Having Something to Say. I didn’t know what to expect, but it’s not so bad. It sounds like me two years ago, which isn’t, after all, so much different from me now.

Would you like some more data? I’ve taken time off for vacation a few times, but other than that, I reliably post twice a week. I’ve never failed to post when I was planning to do so, although I’ve come close once or twice. The blog gets an average of 105 comments per month (thank you for joining the conversation!). Probably about half of those comments are from me, although I’ve been falling a bit behind in the past few months.

The highest traffic month in the blog’s life was April 2012. The most popular post is What is a Free Spirit?, which is apparently more of a pressing question than I would think. (Thank you, Google Search.) Other popular subjects include those I was afraid to write about, introversion, and cool Star Wars pictures. I am still on a quest to bring some much-deserved cuteness fame to Nala because what good is having a blog if you can’t occasionally cute-bomb your long-suffering readership?

Storm troopers create new lives for themselves fighting crime.

I don’t know much about my readers, actually, except the ones who comment. I wish I knew more. I wonder about you sometimes. It’s a strange sort of intimacy we have because I suspect there’s a significant part of me that you can get to know pretty well if you read regularly. Not the entire me, of course, but an important part. I talk about what I care about here (really, there’s no point in me writing a 500-word essay about something I don’t care about). I talk about what I’ve been thinking about. I link to the most interesting articles I’ve read. Once in a while I get teary-eyed while I’m writing one of these posts because it matters so much to me.

I read articles about what I “should” be doing with the blog, and then I ignore a lot of what I read, because we are friends, you and I. And a lot of those shoulds sound sleazy or cheap or fake to me, and I can’t bear to do them. Not to the blog, which has taken on a life of its own. It depends on me, after all; I breathe life into it. I am responsible for it. Before I started, it didn’t ever occur to me to think of a blog as a living entity, and perhaps many blogs aren’t. But this one–well, it just might be.

I am going to ask for a birthday present now, for me or for the blog, or for both of us. Satisfy my curiosity, leave a comment, and tell me about yourself. Who are you? What do you like about this blog? What do you wish I’d do more or less of? What are you glad that I don’t do (and you hope I never start)? What subjects do I talk about that give you a burst of satisfaction?

I would really like to know whatever you’d like to tell me.

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Five Happy Things: Birthday Celebration Week!

Posted in Life, tagged , , , , , , on June 26, 2012| 6 Comments »

It’s that time again! Birthday time! My birthday is tomorrow, but I am celebrating all week. Why? Because I can, that’s why. And because I’m happy to be alive. And because I keep thinking of things to do that sound like excellent birthday-related activities. Like playing an epic game of Battlestar Galactica this past weekend, for example. And visiting Ghirardelli Square. And going to a bookstore (any reason is a good reason to do THAT!)

Last year I wrote about Five Happy Things for my birthday, and I think that’s an excellent tradition, so I’m going to do it again.

1. The Academy of Forgetting. Flawed it might be, but it’s also the best and most ambitious thing I’ve ever written. I’m in the middle of an exciting (and at times turbulent) romance with it, and it reminds me of all the best parts of being a writer.

2. The Writing Community. When I went up to Seattle at the last minute this spring, I sent out an e-mail telling local writers I was going to be in town. I expected to spend most of the trip by myself; maybe a couple of people would be able to get together, I told myself. Instead, I got to see so many writer friends, it blew me away. People who went out of their way to spend time with me, help me (especially with the buses), and show me cool aspects of Seattle (the Underground Tour, the Theo Chocolate Factory, the nightlife, the food). And that’s when it hit me down deep: this is what community is. And I am a part of it. How amazing is that?

3. Food. I love food. I was raised on a bland and narrow diet, and ever since I went away to college, I’ve been on a journey of discovery. I am so happy there are spices! And onions! And different types of cuisines from different countries! Heirloom tomatoes exist, how exciting is that! And beets, and baked sweet potatoes, and cherries, and gnocchi, and sushi, and Ethiopian food, and curries, and white hot chocolate, and… You get the picture.

4. My bathtub. My bathtub is a proper big bathtub, like all bathtubs are meant to be. It also has jets, but I never use them. What I like about my bathtub is that I don’t have to bend my knees to fit in it, and I can be submerged in hot water from my neck to my toes. Sheer bliss.

5. Being able to set my own sleep schedule. I do not like going to bed. However, I do like to sleep and feel well rested. Do you see the inherent quandary? Happily I am able to set my own hours, and therefore I am able to stay up late and still get eight hours of sleep. This is a wonderful thing, and I appreciate it on a pretty much daily basis.

I will leave you all with the adorableness that is Nala. This is maybe my favorite photo of her.

You can see some Jack Russell attitude here. Classic Nala.

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From the Trenches of Revision

Posted in Science fiction and fantasy, Writing, tagged , , , , , on June 21, 2012| 5 Comments »

“So how’s the revising going, Amy?” you might well ask.

Do not be alarmed if your question is greeted with me pulling contorted faces and making strange, growling noises. But never fear; my joy in being asked about what I spend most of my waking hours thinking about will outweigh my need to do an interpretative dance to express my varied ambivalence, sheer joy, and “what was I thinking?” reactions to my current revision process.

To catch you up: At the end of April, I went to Seattle. (Did I already tell you this? I can’t remember.) Bolstered by the excellent company of my comrades-in-arms for many adventures and meals in Seattle, I resisted the urge to play tourist 100% of my time and instead read through the rough draft of my novel The Academy of Forgetting. I took copious notes, rewrote sections, and tried to make sure it was more or less coherent. Then I sent it to my most trusted novel first reader for an opinion.

The magic of revision…oh, who am I kidding? I am totally using this as an excuse to use Trey Ratcliff’s awesome Walt Disney World photo on my blog.

A week later, Daniel sent me his critique, which ran almost 4,500 words long. This was obviously not going to be a small revision pass.

So for the last month, I’ve been thinking. I haven’t wanted to dive headlong into revisions because these changes are complex enough that there is a fair amount to be figured out ahead of time. Plus a few weeks were mostly lost to injury (but oh boy, did I have a lot of time to think) and then I went on vacation, and you know. Life. But I am about ready to start writing new words and begin the simultaneously delicate and destructive task of fixing this book. The prospect fills me with both excitement and dread.

Let me give you an example of one of the changes I’ve been thinking about. There’s a plot twist at the end of the book. It is, in my opinion, a fun plot twist, and one that I looked forward to revealing the entire time I was writing the first draft. Daniel suggested that the twist doesn’t work as it currently stands. It’s not foreshadowed amply enough, for one, but he also suggested the book might be stronger if I completely cut the twist.

So now I have to decide: keep the twist or cut the twist? At first I thought I’d cut it. But then I realized that if I cut it, I’d also be cutting a key bit of information about the narrator and the narrative, which would, in my opinion, take away a large bit of the narrative depth. So then I thought, well, what if I keep it and make these foreshadowing changes, etc.? And I thought about that possibility for a while, but something felt slightly off. And then I had an exciting idea for how I can cut the twist but retain the key insight into the narrative, and I was bouncing up and down in my chair. But then I realized this idea brings up a whole new problem in terms of the plot and how I can make it work…. And on it goes.

I love the revision process because it’s challenging and interesting and convoluted and requires thinking about many things at the same time. But while I think it’s one of the most exciting things ever, it looks like me sitting in a chair and staring into space, with perhaps the occasional spurt of typing or scribbling sentences in my notebook. The writing life is often glamorous in a completely invisible way.

So that’s what I’m doing: getting ready to start a new draft, trying to resist biting my fingernails at the thought that I might demolish something that I actually needed intact, or that I might keep something that turns out to be just an old eyesore. Either of these would be fine in an isolated case, of course, but they can add up so quickly into a manuscript that simply does not work. And I’d like to make this manuscript work, if I can.

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Be Bold and Fail

Posted in Life, Personal Development, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 19, 2012| 13 Comments »

Let’s talk about failing.

Remember Adam Baker, producer of the documentary I’m Fine, Thanks? (The movie, incidentally, has now reached its funding goals, hooray!) He had this to say about how people overcome falling into complacency:

“They started to become comfortable being able to fail. I don’t mean they LIKED failing. Or even tried to fail. But they were o.k. with that being part of the process. Often, the desire NOT to fail was what kept people trapped for decades!”

How often do we hold ourselves back because we’re afraid to fail? Maybe people won’t like our final product (or us, heaven forbid). Maybe people will say no to us. Maybe people won’t buy our book, or listen to our songs, or even know we exist, even when we’ve given it our best shot. Maybe we’ll sound stupid. Maybe we’ll realize a major flaw only after our idea/plan/creative work has already been made public. Maybe maybe maybe.

So in order to protect ourselves from all those maybes, those things that might happen in the future, we fail before we even start, by not allowing ourselves to start (or finish). In this way we can preserve some illusion of perfection, of possibility, of “I could have done this if I’d really wanted to.” Some of us have been taught that failure is an unacceptable and unendurable sort of experience, and thus, we protect ourselves from the imagined agony it will cause.

Except. Failure only has the power over us that we grant it. Failure only causes us agonies if we allow it to do so. When we reframe failure to be okay, to be a learning experience, perhaps even a way of being able to tell that we’re saying yes to our own potential, then it loses its power to wound so deeply.

Even in the hero’s journey, the hero fails before succeeding.

“Boldness is genius.” I read this post by Sarah Peck recently, and it suits my current frame of mind (I even gave a spirited live reading of it, which I wish I had video of so we could laugh about it together). I’ve been trying to be more bold lately. And you know what has mostly happened?

I’ve failed. A lot more than usual. Things have fallen through. People have told me no. Vast quantities of uncertainty have wrapped their tendrils throughout my life. I’ve miscalculated the risks involved. I’ve been disappointed and frustrated. Sometimes I have a sensation not unlike banging my head repeatedly against a hard object.

But you know what? Failure? It’s not so bad. I haven’t disintegrated into a pile of green goo. My sense of self worth still exists. Sure, I don’t particularly enjoy being disappointed or frustrated, but I’m pretty sure I’d feel those emotions no matter what, and this way I’m not giving them power over me in the same way. I feel frustrated? Let’s try something new, take a break from whatever is getting under my skin. I feel disappointed? I’ll only dwell on it until I try the next thing. And if I’m being bold, that means I’m trying the next new thing a lot sooner.

The idea that failure always equals disaster is just plain wrong. Boldness IS genius. Comfort with failure unlocks many doors. And allowing ourselves to separate from all those crippling maybes is freedom.

How are you going to be bold this week?

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Daddy’s Girl: Space! Ice ships! Comets!

Posted in Arts, Science fiction and fantasy, Writing, tagged , , , , on June 14, 2012| 1 Comment »

Exciting news! For those of you who don’t follow me via social media, you may not know that my science fiction story “Daddy’s Girl” appears in this month’s issue of Redstone Science Fiction.

This publication is especially bounce-worthy for a number of reasons. First off, this sale was the one that qualified me to join SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) as a full member. Secondly, while this isn’t the first science fiction story I sold, it is the first one to be published where everyone can read it. And it has shown me that I can write stories set in an awesome space setting and sell them, which is a particularly happy thing to know.

I discovered this story’s seed while I was working on a bigger world building project. I was considering writing a YA novel with a space setting, so I sat down to figure out how my milieu would work. At a certain point I pulled my husband in to get answers to all my burning scientific questions (the immense perk of being a writer with a physics PhD and lifelong space enthusiast at my disposal).

We were talking about water, and the difficulties of procuring water in space. And he said something like, “Oh, you could just mine comets for their ice and haul it back in.”

Comets are beautiful.

Mind you, this was a completely tangential issue to anything having to do with the novel I was considering. But my imagination was instantly captured by the idea of an ice ship and the spacers who lived in it, constantly chasing after comets to bring back that oh-so-valuable resource, ice. (I have since learned, from Bill Bryson’s At Home, that there used to be an important market for ice in the past as well, pre-modern refrigerator and especially for shipping/transport issues, but I wasn’t thinking about this at the time.)

So I decided to write a short story to explore my ice ship idea further. At which point I found my character Lolly’s voice, began to understand her story, and was completely hooked.

For those of you interested in process, I wrote this story fairly quickly, did a quick revision and sanity check with my husband, and sent it off to my friend (and frequent commenter) E.F. Kelley to take a look. He identified an important scene that was missing (thanks again, Eric!), I added the scene while revising again, and then sent it off to market. I did one final revision pass before sending the story to Redstone in order to fall within their 4,000-word maximum length limit. (It had previously hovered just a few hundred words above that number, and I’m very happy to have tightened it further.)

Interestingly to me, the whole process was fairly painless, as has been the case with most (all?) of the stories I’ve sold, although certainly not the case for all the stories I have written. I imagine there is a lesson in this fact.

I hope you enjoy!

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It Is Okay To Say No

Posted in Life, Personal Development, tagged , , , , on June 12, 2012| 25 Comments »

“I spend way too much time worrying about whether I’m okay enough for people.” – An anonymous friend

Right now I’m feeling angry. I’m angry that it can be so easy to feel the way my friend feels right now. I’m angry because I’ve felt that way before. I’m angry because now I understand how many people encouraged me to feel that way.

Jim Hines published a brilliant blog post yesterday about boundaries. Please please please, if you have ever liked anything I’ve written on this blog, go read what he has to say. Go right now. I’m serious. Go even if that means you won’t finish reading this.

No. No no no no no.

I grew up being taught, both implicitly and explicitly, that it wasn’t okay for me to say no. I drew a few lines in the sand, but now it pains me to think of how few, and how much inner turmoil I suffered to stand up for them.

A bit more than a year and a half ago, a person I was close to finally pushed me too far. And I started saying no, the way I wish I had done many years before.

This person tried to punish me for saying no. He didn’t want there to be a problem, so he simply ignored it. He pressured me to pretend everything was fine, to be okay with what had happened, to once more make a huge sacrifice for his own convenience. He sent me manipulative emails and the most passive aggressive birthday card imaginable. He took something he knew I cared about and tried to use it to force me to see him against my will.

I only talked about this as it was happening to a few people. Because I believed that not only did this person think it was not okay for me to say no, but that everyone else–society as a whole–would agree with him. I still think that’s true to a certain extent. Many people are not okay with the idea of boundaries, that we have the right to decide what we will and will not do in relation to other people. I’m sure many people would tell me to suck it up, to be the nice girl, the good girl, and preach the power of forgiveness. Even though they aren’t even involved in any way, they would tell me to go back to being a doormat. (Why? Why does me having power have to threaten the entire world order? I have no idea.)

As an old friend of mine used to say, that’s bullshit. I no longer want anybody in my life who is not okay with me saying no. Full stop. I have drawn my line in the sand and this time it runs all the way down to the earth’s core.

It is okay to say no. Even when people react with anger, hurt, and pique, it is okay to say no. Even if it means people will no longer like you, it’s okay to say no. (These are not the people who will love and cherish you and have your back and support you through good times and bad in any case.) It is okay to take care of yourself, and you deserve to be surrounded by people who will support you in doing that.

Never let anyone tell you differently.

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Contributing Towards Today’s Cuteness Quota

Posted in Life, tagged on June 7, 2012| 3 Comments »

I’m on vacation, so here, look at this cute dog:

 

“Oh yes, you DID just catch me reclining on the sofa. No, I’m NOT going to move.”

Enjoy the rest of your week!

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What does it mean to live a dream?

Posted in Life, tagged , , , , , on June 5, 2012| 5 Comments »

Observation: a lot of people who talk about “living your dream”

aren’t really doing so themselves.

–Chris Guillebeau

I suppose this is a shot at self-styled lifestyle gurus who aren’t practicing what they’re preaching. But as easily as we bandy around the idea of “living your dream,” it isn’t always so straightforward, is it?

Sometimes it is straightforward. Sometimes it is just a case of doing some basic research, of putting together a budget in order to save toward a do-able goal, of deciding to take the risk and go for it.

But other times it isn’t quite so simple.

Do I live my dream? Kind of.

But parts of my dreams have been put on hold. I’ve let parts of them go. Some of them I haven’t yet discovered. And some of them are in the middle of being baked, and I’m not sure how they’re going to turn out.

Part of the inspirational speak is tell people how easy it actually is to live your dream. And then we will all feel all fired up and ready to tackle anything. But that’s simply not true. Sometimes it’s simpler than we think, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s quite difficult. And sometimes we achieve our dreams only to realize we’ve been chasing the wind, and the dream we thought we wanted isn’t actually our dream anymore.

Have you ever had that happen? It’s a real eye-opener.

Perhaps living our dreams is more of a state of mind, an acknowledgment of life’s possibilities. In accepting life’s disconcerting lack of permanence, we can see how that very lack can simultaneously be one of the best and the worst parts of being human. The worst because we have things (experiences, relationships, our own physical bodies) that we don’t want to let go of. The best because now is going to change, so even if our dreams feel far away in that now, soon it will be another now, maybe one in which those same dreams feel closer.

Or perhaps living our dreams is about living an examined life instead of a blind one. Do many dreams exist without a give and take? What are we willing to sacrifice and when do we find compromise impossible? What do we give up in pursuit of our dreams?

Or perhaps, just perhaps, living our dreams is something each one of us has to define for ourselves.

May you live the dreams you wish to live, when you wish to live them. It probably won’t be easy, but it might very well be worth it.

Or, as Theodora Goss says, “When things are difficult? That’s when you know you’re having an adventure.”

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