How to Terrify the Crap Out of Your Significant Other Through Selective Book Choices

I am currently undergoing a bit of a research kick into health and wellness. As the Farmers' Almanac predicted, it has been a rough winter in North America, and a few gross events in my personal life have led me to feel pretty much like twenty miles of bad road. Lately my old long term friend anxiety started knocking on my door. (We're not really friends. I hate that fucker.) (Addendum: since I wrote this paragraph a week ago, things have cleared considerably and I'm feeling much like my old self.)

Through serendipity I came across Dr. Carolyn Dean's work on magnesium and its significant role in 800 body processes, including adrenal health, mood, and generally being able to find your inner cool. I started taking magnesium and wow. Then I started using transdermal magnesium (you put it on your skin, it soaks in, and YOU SEE LEPRECHAUNS NO JOKE).

This is all great, and wonderful for me, but for the ever-patient Dave it has been yet another process of watching the kitchen and bathroom fill with strange elixirs and new potions. While he's not especially interested in any of this he's not opposed to it either. He just accepts that this is something I am doing.

In the name of fully researching what I'm doing I ordered a copy of Dr. Dean's The Magnesium Miracle (highly recommended) and have had it sitting on the dining room table and various surfaces for a few days now. I guess Dave has just gotten used to seeing this book and taking it for granted that most of my reading material is wellness oriented right now.

Magnesium Miracle shipped with the other item I ordered at the same time. (I was trying to make the Amazon free shipping threshold...not book greedy at all, no.) This is the back of that book (sorry for the crappy photo....I was trying to take pictures with a potato).

Looks like another, uh, health book, right?

Without giving any context at all, I started telling Dave about the ideas this book is based on. See, every once in a while, in my quest for interesting medical factoids, I come across an article on "helminth therapy," aka Helminth Induced Immune Modulation, aka deliberate infection of oneself with worms (pig whipworm is especially popular) in order to correct diseases. Yes, this is happening.

Besides being incredibly gross on its own, I've long thought helminth therapy would make an amazing foundation for a science fiction / horror story. I was explaining to Dave, quite happily, that I'd wanted to write about this, but awesome Mira Grant has already done it, and I was looking forward to reading her book.

When Dave is concerned about something he goes silent. A long pause followed. He stared at me.

"This isn't something you're going to try, is it?" He's patient enough that he didn't add "I don't think I can get behind that."

I guess I should have led with the fact that Parasite is a work of fiction.

A to Z in Under Two Minutes

Are you doing A to Z this April? I think I am? I am. I didn't do it last year and I was sad about that. The signup list is already HUGE, so, you know, should be a great month.

That Page / Day = Novel Thing: Update

Okay so earlier in the month I wrote about this thing I'm trying, this page a day writing experiment which should, if all goes well, result in a short novel draft by the end of April. The plan in case you are opposed to clicking that link and reading my previous post is to write a hundred pages in three months, one page per day with the occasional two-page day thrown into the mix (12 two-page days total, so I'll be done drafting before the beginning of May), which will give me a 50-60k manuscript.

Rule to keep it interesting: stop at the end of the page (or two pages on two-page days). Stop mid-paragraph. Stop mid-sentence if the sentence isn't over at the end of the page.

The idea is inspired by the Graham Greene Challenge and by the numerous cheery observations made in sundry books of writing advice that if you just write a page a day, by the end of a year you'll have a novel! Well I'm not looking to go all Stephen King with my length here, and one of my handwritten pages is quite a bit more substantial than the average typed page, so three months will do.

So, how is it going?

AMAZINGLY. I cannot emphasize this enough. It is AWESOME. Here are some reasons why:

It is so easy to write this way. I've written 20 pages, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 11k words, so far. I'm twenty percent of the way through my story, and I am not worried about it. I'm not worried about what's going to happen next. I'm not worried about whether my stamina will crap out. I'm not even worried about getting my daily page done in between finishing this post and heading out for the evening to teach tai chi. I will have time, because it will only take me about twenty minutes to write that page, a bit more if I dawdle or pause to Google something. I'm especially excited about the next page because there's a big reveal coming that will be nice and juicy to write about and cause my main character plenty of distress.

I don't hate my story and I'm not doubting my story. This could be coincidence: sure, maybe this particular story is especially strong. I tend to think I still like and trust my story because I have plenty of time to think about the long game, the short game, what will happen in the current scene, what will happen by the end of the first act, what will happen in the rest of the sentence I left off writing yesterday. Vast oceans of time. Not-writing is as important as writing. Or something similarly Zen.

I have time and energy for other projects, even though I'm writing a novel! Right now I'm combing through my back catalogue of short stories, editing them to the best of my ability, and prepping them to send out. I'm talking about correcting some pretty serious story flaws in stories I wrote before I had a good handle on structure and craft. I'm slowly working my way through edits on a (deeply flawed) novel draft I wrote a few years ago. I've also spent time writing some flash pieces, prepping April A to Z, blogging, and working on my craft. And reading.

I want to work on other writing tasks. I'm excited about working on other writing tasks. Committing to that one page a day is just enough to dip my toes in the writing water. Some days, that's all I have time or energy for, but most days, it whets my appetite for those other projects.

I feel like I'm achieving a much better balance of raw word count and editing. I've long theorized that I need to do some raw first drafting on a regular basis to keep my attitude toward writing fresh. I find that if all I do is edit, I end up feeling a bit jaded. On the other hand, I also find that editing a story can take much longer than drafting. The page a day gives me something to work on that's fresh, while keeping me interested in editing and leaving time for editing.

A lot of people who I've told about the page a day project have had strong objections to it because of the challenge it poses to flow. The objection goes, that if you're about to have a brilliant moment, you simply CANNOT! DAHLING! STOP! (STAHP!)  What if you forget that EXACT RIGHT word between today's amazing writing sesh and tomorrow's?  What if you forget what you were going to say? What if? What if?

I am wondering at this point what it is about we writers and our precious precious words. What makes us mistrust our amazing minds and talents so much, that we can't imagine that we will know exactly the right way to finish that sentence tomorrow? Or at least a close enough way that we can fix in revision? At the beginning of this experiment, I did make some marginal notes about what I wanted to include in the next day's writing if it seemed important. I stopped doing that once I realized that my brain would happily squirt out some solution to what I had written the day before, whether I remembered exactly what I had intended to say or not. As my friend Chris put it when I was first talking about doing this experiment, "What if the word you come up with tomorrow is much better than the one you would have written today?"

I am learning to trust my mind to do the right thing, have the right word, know what to do tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. I don't know if that is making me a better writer, but so far it is making me a happier writer.

Teddy Has An Operation

If you're a creative type, you should probably know about Ze Frank's An Invocation for Beginnings. (Seriously, go watch it now. Watch it every day before you start work if you need to.) He's done a lot of awesome stuff with his YouTube account, including the hilarious "True Facts" series. (True Facts about Morgan Freeman is one of my personal favourites.)

Lately I've been finding myself returning to watch Teddy Has An Operation. Basically, it's a tidy little horror short that mixes adorableness with grossness. Warning? There is gore. And candy. And plastic toys. And silly string. And gore.

Women Destroy Science Fiction

No wait: they destroy all genres. Perhaps you've heard it before: women can't write insert spec fic genre of choice. We make it all unmanly like. Or something. I believe it is a minority of old guard weirdos and embittered geriatrics who still think this way, but the fact is that this attitude has had a lasting impact on science fiction, fantasy, horror, bizarro fiction, and other sundry spec fic genres. The fact that we are still having to talk about this at all is...well, it is what it is, and what are we going to do about it?

Here is something you can do.

Contribute to this fabulous Kickstarter campaign:

Donate $5 or more to get some goodies and help this along if you're so inclined, and help Lightspeed publish an all-woman-authored special issue chock full of science fiction. Now that the campaign has reached $28k, funding will also go toward the release of an all-woman-authored issue of Nightmare Magazine, Lightspeed's horrible sister (and my favourite). One more major stretch goal remains: if they reach $35k before the campaign closes on February 16, they'll release an all-fantasy issue. I would love to see that.

Read more about it in this essay by Christine Yant, guest editor of the Lightspeed special issue. If you can't donate, you can always signal boost. Bless your little heart if you do.

ETA February 13, 2014: The reason why this Kickstarter is so important might not be evident to some of you. In the comments I've pointed to some of the more recent events that might have inspired this campaign, but the best place to go to learn more is the Women Destroy Science Fiction update list, which contains many amazing essays by women about their experience writing and reading science fiction. (You don't have to contribute to the campaign to read the updates.) Like horror, science fiction is considered by many to be a man's domain. The attitudes of many who create, publish, and consume these genres is often hostile to women.

If you ain't got time for that, please just take a look at Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's essay in which she discusses the reception of some of the fiction she published in Analog. Here's an especially salient bit if you don't want to click through:

ANALOG’s longtime editor, Stan Schmidt, has told me he’s lost subscriptions over my work. I knew this before I attended my first Worldcon in 1992 and was still gob-smacked when a couple of fellows cornered me at a party and explained, at length, why I had never written a word of real, hard science fiction in my life and, therefore, did not belong in the pages of ANALOG. This was after only half-a-dozen stories. I’m at two dozen and counting.

I don't want to be in the business of accumulating proof that this Kickstarter is a wonderful reaction to a sad, longstanding problem, but I get it if you've never encountered this issue and you don't know how to research it, I do want to help. As I writer, I'm all too familiar with how just the act of writing alone is hard enough, without worrying about how your stuff will be received or if it will be perceived as less valid because you fall into a certain category of personhood. As a reader, I am very invested in reading genre fiction that expresses a diversity of opinions. I already know what I think, and we all know what sort of story a male-dominated industry thinks is good (hello, Hollywood filmmakers). I want to know what you think. Yes, you. If your stuff is being blocked for being "too different," that's a tragedy as far as I'm concerned. I'd like to see that changed.

One Page / Day = Novel

In the crazy history of crazy ideas about how to get your stuff done, this is not the craziest: writing your novel one page a day.

I have always been a NaNoWriMo style sprinter when it comes to first drafts: my style is to stock up on caffeine, plan to get much less sleep than usual, pick up my pen, shut my eyes, and run screaming down the paper track until it's done.

This has worked beautifully for me in terms of getting out a first draft. It has also left me wondering if there isn't some way to do a first draft that doesn't leave you physically devastated at the end. It has also made me wonder what happens if you write a first draft much, much more slowly, taking enforced pauses at various times.

Writing at breakneck speed is a great way to create a sort of frenzied intimacy with your plot. You can see the whole thing really well because you don't have very long to go until you hit the end. I typically have very intense dreams involving imagery, if not themes and characters and plot points from my novel. Again this is great but I wonder if there's a more subtle way for a book to be present in your mind.

(Sidebar for the woo woo crowd: Last July during Camp NaNoWriMo, this intensity was so powerful it transferred over to Dave: one morning on our regular commute he told me about this bizarre dream he'd had. It was the scene from my novel that I'd written the night before, while he was sleeping. I hadn't told him about the scene ahead of time.)

So I'm trying this other thing. Something similar to this. Here's the infographic version of that very important and swear-word filled piece of gloriousness, courtesy also of Chuck Wendig:

So I'm doing a modified version of this, although I love the plan, and it looks ideal for someone who is just having a really crappy time fitting any writing at all into a week. I'm writing a page a day: a nice, tidy unit of variable word count. I draft by hand, so this works for me. One of my hand-written pages is 500-600 words, most of the time.

I'm not giving myself weekends off. Saturday is my busiest workday in terms of my teaching, and almost always will be, so a weekend isn't a weekend in my week. I'm planning a shorter book - novella? novellette? No idea of the designation - 100 pages in first draft. I started writing February 2, and I'm planning to finish on the last day of April, so I'll be doubling up on pages twelve days between now and the end.

Here's the really experimental fun part: I plan to stop at the end of a page, regardless of whether I'm mid-scene, mid-paragraph, mid-sentence, mid-murder, mid-kiss, mid-shenanigans, or what.

What do I expect to get out of this? Darned if I know, but when Sarah Van Den Bosch did a similar challenge (precisely 500 words per day, or "The Graham Greene Challenge"), this is what she had to report:

Forcing yourself to stop before you feel you’re finished keeps you thinking about the story and when you’re thinking about your story, you can’t help but to keep pushing it forward even if it is only in your mind. Not only that, but I found myself scrutinizing more over word choice. What would be the best fit for that sentence? Is that really what I want to say?

So far (three days in), I'm finding the writing a wee bit hitchy. Putting in an artificial stop, especially at the beginning of a story when there's so much stuff to work in, feels a little like a lurch, a little harsh. During my non-writing 23 and a half hours a day, I do feel my story churning away in the background, a sort of low-key hum, even when I'm not actively thinking about it. I'm looking forward to having energy to keep working on other projects at the same time as the novel develops. I'm curious about how much brainspace the story will take up, and I'm wondering about the potentially magical full-sleep / novel-writing combo.

I'll let you know how it goes.

A Different Kind of Research

The last part of 2013 was a whirlwind of writing goodness for me. After ten months' worth of false starts and personally upsetting events, I abandoned myself to the NaNoWriMo gods and rebooted my writing habits. Although I have and continue to put a lot of energy into short stories, I've been working for a while now on writing novels. I know a lot of you writers are working on longer pieces. All I can say is you have enormous volumes of respect from me. Novel drafts have always felt like an intimidating investment to me, especially given how much you can learn about different plots, character development, techniques, etc., etc., from short stories.

Nonetheless, it's good to be well-rounded. After multiple tries, I guess I feel as though writing a novel is becoming a lot easier, in the sense that I don't feel as inclined to race around, arms flailing, yelling "I don't know what I'm doing!" the entire time.

In preparation for November (and, as it turned out, most of December), I built an idea loosely based on this post on the Siberian Ice Maiden. I did a bunch of reading about Pazyryk art, I constructed a soundtrack, I brainstormed back story, and I mapped major plot points.

I also worked my way through Where the Spirits Ride the Wind, an amazing book by Felicitas Goodman. I stumbled across her work while I was researching the history of standing meditation postures (that's a thing). Goodman was an anthropologist who experimented with using ritual postures, found ubiquitously in ancient art, to induce trance states and allow the participant to experience trance journeys. This is done both with and without the use of drugs. Goodman's experiments proved that it was possible for people to feel and visualize altered states solely through the ritual posture and the use of rhythm instruments (drum, rattle) played at a certain interval. (In her book I think she suggests 200 beats per minute.)

Not content to merely speculate about the potential meanings of different postures, she decided that the thing to do was to try them and see what happened. She gathered volunteers (readily accessible - this was the '60s), took them through a simple breathing exercise to induce relaxation, had them assume whatever posture they were working with, and played a rattle at them for fifteen minutes.

The results were pretty remarkable: not only did people experience visions and feel that they were travelling outside of their bodies, but different postures created different experiences for the participants. Not that everyone saw the exact same thing, but there were trends among the imagery the participants experienced. Each posture, it seemed, attuned the person to a different mode of consciousness.

There is substantial debate in Goodman's field about the validity of this research, primarily because by necessity her work with postures and trance was performed outside of the context of the cultures that originally created the postures. (Some of the postures she worked with were originally part of cave art, so it wasn't her fault, really.) I can understand the problems any science has with incorporating subjective experience into its data set. Fortunately for me that has no bearing whatsoever, since I decided to use Goodman's results personally. It seemed to me that the ideal way to do research for a book with heavy Shamanistic themes was to do something Shamanistic.

Assuming the Bear Spirit posture might win you new and larger friends.

I've got about twenty years' meditation experience, enough to make me interested in just about any non-drug related way to blow my own mind. (Nothing against using drugs to achieve altered states...just I've found I personally don't need them.)

There's something a little bit...extra, I think, about writing and reading fictional narratives all the time that helps with things like guided visualization. When you're a writer, you're used to the images flowing non-stop into your mind. When you do a meditative exercise like a visualization, the process can be similar although the goal is different: rather than telling a story or reading someone else's story, you're opening yourself up to imagery for the purpose of understanding yourself better, receiving guidance, or even healing.

Partly through meditation, I've learned to no longer think of the images, plots and ideas that spring forth with writing as simply generated by my own psyche. I haven't read enough Jung to know if I understand the Collective Unconscious correctly, but I do believe that we float in this pool of ideas, any one of which can express through any one person at any given time. (I think there's more going on than a collective idea pool, but that's a post for another time.)

One way to look at the mind-body is as a receiver for signals from outside. In the ancient world, this was such common knowledge that it barely required mentioning. Psychologist and Princeton Professor Julian Jaynes famously wrote about this state in his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in which he pointed to abundant evidence that, up until about 1000 BC, all people experienced a constant influx of messages (orders, points of strategy, insights) from sources that they personified as the Gods. (Jaynes thought this was an inferior state of mind, and also a delusion. Everybody's entitled to an opinion, Julian.)

Many writers will tell you that they've experienced writing-as-trance. "I don't know where that came from" is a common experience following a particularly intense or focused writing session. (Or the related notion: "Where the hell did that come from?") So why not induce trance and see what comes up?

Because one of the aesthetics I'm working with in this book is Pazyryk culture, I went on a search for traditional music from this region. Through the Free Music Archive, I found Siberskya Vichora, a highly listenable group that researches, performs, records and preserves traditional Siberian music. A couple of their songs are on the soundtrack for my novel.

A little further poking revealed Russie Sibérie: Musique de la Toundra et de le Taiga. The first track on this record is a sixteen-minute jam by people playing the Khomus (more commonly known in the English-speaking world as the Jew's harp, mouth harp, etc.). If you haven't heard what it's possible to do with this incredible instrument, here you go (stick with it to 3:30, especially you like techno). The Wiki page notes that "since trances are facilitated by droning sounds, the Jew's harp has been associated with magic and has been a common instrument in shamanic rituals."



I decided to listen to Russie-Sibérie while sitting in bed and planning my novel. I wasn't planning to trance. In my mind, I thought I still had to find the right piece of music - preferably, a repetitive rattling or drumming piece - before I could try it.

A minute or two into the Khomus track, I felt my entire energy shift and knew I was going out. I stuck with the novel planning for a bit, making a few sparse notes on my main characters and thinking about what kind of future setting I wanted to create. By the time I was done with that, it was very clear to me that I was going. I wasn't sure where I was going, mind you, but I knew I was going. I didn't keep my mind on the music: I just let myself flow with it, and let the imagery that came to me present itself in whatever way it wanted to.

I don't remember moving into the landscape, but shortly I was in an area of flat grassland with a grey sky overhead. A small animal, walking on its hind legs, approached me. In my mind I was calling it a badger but I have no idea really. It handed me a small, glittery object. I held it for a moment and looked at it. It seemed to be a sort of prism in which lights shifted constantly. It shone with an interior light. I knew just what to do with it: I parted my rib cage and placed the object inside my torso. I had the sensation of the object unfolding, and a liquid warmth racing down my limbs. I saw streams of light running in tiny rivulets all throughout my body.

"That's your novel," the badger said. "It's in your nervous system now."

I felt it was time to go, so I climbed up through a hole in the sky. Just as I got back into my body, the music stopped.

Okay so that happened.

What also happened is that I had a really smooth writing experience. Opposed to my usual drop-down-dead effect at the end of November, I felt okay by the end of the first 30 days of writing. It was a lot of work. It's always a lot of work. It was emotional. It's always emotional. By November 30th, I was about 70k into the draft. I was tired but I had enough juice to keep going through most of December. I finished the draft 'round about December 20th, at about 108k. I won't say that anything especially magical happened while I was writing. It's always magical. I will say that I didn't worry as much as I usually do about how it's going. I trusted.

Badger power.