It’s huge and it’s scary, and I can’t believe I didn’t see until just now how the entire theme and tone of the book was building towards this one precise moment. I’m going to take the rest of the night off to think about the implications of it for future books, because lordy are there going to be some, but but but, it is going to be so cool.

The fact that I’m scared of it means it’s the right thing to do. Right? Right :D

Her utter inability to admit that something’s wrong when presented with an internet’s worth of evidence made it the most compelling Kitchen Nightmare in years — no amount of hidden mold in a not-so-cold freezer can compete with epic trainwreck.

As awful as she was though (and as cathartic as it was to see Gordon realize what was going on, try to break through, and then finally give up), I do have some small amount of sympathy for her. Because to be successful as a writer you do have to know where the line of denial is and then step widely over it.

When you start out so many people aren’t going to believe in you, it’s not funny. Your spouse, your teachers, your relatives — hell, you won’t even believe in you (if you’re me). The only thing that’ll get you through the doldrums of disbelief is one hell of a crazy case of self-denial.

Not surprisingly, seeing as writers lie for money, we lie to ourselves all the damn time. You start off pretending a project doesn’t mean that much to you, or that you’re writing it to learn, or that you’re writing it for art, or that you need to do something during your lunch break. You tell yourself that your book is genius, that you’re a genius, that if not this book, then the next one. You send stories or novels out and start getting in rejections, and that’s the icing on the lie-cake — maybe my protagonist looked like that editor’s ex-wife, maybe I formatted it wrong, maybe space opera isn’t in (again) this year.

Because on some level the self-denial does protect you, and you need it to survive. You may know you need to get better, and can see yourself getting better, but if you don’t give your self-esteem a space place to grow and experiment, you’ll never achieve better. I know a lot of writers who know what level they feel they ought to be writing to, and because they’re not there yet, they harangue themselves endlessly and don’t accomplish very much. They haven’t learned to lie to protect themselves yet.

At the center of each successful artistic career there has to be a seed-sprout of outrageous sheer belief in who you are and what you’re working on right now.

The secret is to use the moments of willful self-denial to benefit and shield that outrageousness — because honestly, thinking that anyone is ever going to give two fucks about any artistic endeavor in this day and age is, just like JEM, truly outrageous.

But you have to be in control of the self-denial, and know that you’re in control of it, in some deep down way — and not to use the lies to become someone with an inflexible worldview with an “us vs them” mentality.

I feel bad for that lady even though she’s clearly awful, because maybe (as I write here from my penthouse office in Projection Central) she had to tell herself some things to get by in the early days starting out as a baker-artist. But she never had nor gained the introspection to realize that there’s a vast gulf between the lies we tell ourselves to get by and the lies we ought to expect other people to believe, which is a pity because those cakes looked pretty damn good.

I know I need the days where I sit around and think and write down blind alleys and delete a bunch of stuff, but it’s so hard not to get demoralized, even when I know that failing (for me) is it’s own kind forward progress.

So relieved now that things are shaking out! And I can’t wait to work on it tomorrow once I get up and crank away!!!

I think this draft of the book is going to come in a hair under 70k, but that’s fine, because I reread it all a few nights ago, and I need to go back and put in a lot of anchoring beats — I know what the emotional significance is of all the Action! Action! Action! but I need to breadcrumb it out much more clearly for the reader, which is going to add words to almost every scene.

Still, if I can use this week off (after I finish tonight at work, and while traveling around a ton locally, more on that on another post when I have more time!) to get down the tent pegs for the ending, I will be in such good shape for editing this book for June, which is awesome because I’m travelling again (don’t ask, oy) and I really need to clear the decks for A) moving and B) this other completely awesome project that demands to be written ;).

Excited yayness and more soon about where in the world Cassie will be this upcoming/week/end! ;)

Nightshifted’s Czech cover!!!!!

Y’all know that gif of flailing Kermit? Insert that here!

This is the Czech version of Nightshifted’s cover. She’s like sexy European Edie, it’s rad :D. I love how her badge is in the picture and glowing, too — and its nice to see that blood bags are international!

However, my friend Ferrett Steinmetz shouted me out on his blog (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer.) for this series because he was ruminating on how you had to structure your life to make a solid amount — a replicable amount of art — happen on the regular, which is something I do. You can click on the “How to write a book in six months” to see more of them, and if you’ve got something you want me to talk about, feel free to email me to request it. I was thinking about this post while my hair-color was setting yesterday, and while I was writing on break at work last night — and then I read this article this morning  that made me want to froth. “I didn’t think art could make me rich but I thought it mighy pay some very cheap rent, nope”

Did that girl ever think about her future? There is so little money in publishing. So so little. Even less in poetry. Dreaming big is great, but every artist eventually hits a wall where they realize, “Shit, it’s go time.”  And either they lack the passion or the drive or the access to drugs or no longer have good health to keep doing what they’re doing and they fade away with fond memories of that one time they were in a band or have that one magazine that accepted that one story on their bookshelf along with a hundred other strangers.

I really do believe in the ten thousand hours of practice to get good at anything. And I believe in the million words of crap theory too — I know I wasn’t publishable until I’d hurdled them. And it wasn’t so much that all of that old stuff was bad, it was that I wasn’t self aware enough in my craft to make it good enough to sell. The layers of skill you need to make a successful go of your art are like an onion crossed with a maze. (Let’s blame that shitty metaphor on the ambien, shall we?) Getting good, getting realized as good, getting paid as good — each of those stages take So Much Time. Time that doesn’t happen before you’re twenty-five, unless you’ve got a wish-giving pony.

Anyhow, juggling my normal part-time ICU work, a book deadline coming up, trying to scrounge some free time for two one off projects, and a massive move that’s flying down the train tracks at mach speed, here’s the latest ways I’m keeping myself writing lean-times.

I love pandora — but when I find songs I like on there, I just buy them, so that I can play them without the temptation of thumbsing up or down songs. It sounds silly, but that 30 seconds of distraction a few times an hour adds up, if you’re me.

I only answer emails once a day, twice at most. Mostly because I’m on mailing lists and I don’t really care what people have to say unless the subject title is within my interests. Getting to delete threads whole — or skimming their entirety if the right wise people have chimed in — is far easier to deal with then deleting or reading peace meal.

I switched to a new little laptop and now I no longer have book marks, nor do I keep any. If — and it has to be a big if, like, so amazing, I will love it for forever — any websites blow me away, I email them to myself with the title of the thing, and then immediately market it read when it comes through. So I know I’ve got it, should I ever need to google search it up.

But I don’t have any feeds, RSS, or any bookmarks at all anymore. And I delete all my cookies all the time. So that if I don’t actually remember that a particular website was cool — whose url I would then have to physically type in — I just don’t go there anymore.

This cuts down on nominal sites that are half cool, because really, why bother, you’re just wasting time you could be writing. If I can’t care enough to type it in — and if I don’t remember it when I’m looking for things to do on the internet while bored — it’s gone. And that’s a good thing. I can’t remember where I used to waste so much of my time online back in the day.

Hope those help some of you get a few more pieces out of your day to write in! (And hooray, this wasn’t that ambieny after all….yet ;))

There were muffins at work last night, however I considered those bribes from administration for going live with our frustratingly complicated electronic charting system this weekend, not holiday related.

I cannot begin to express how worky work has been for the past four nights. Between critical patients, crazy patients, and actually doing this new charting thing, OMG. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a luddite, I love tech. But you know how you don’t know how to use things until you use them? Yeah. There were a lot of little important things that people ought to have told us or made bigger deals of at the time. Like how even when the charting system magically imports monitor data that you have to file it, that it’s not automatic — even though you can see it on your screen. Which one assumes would be the effing point of it importing? But no. There was a lot of scrambling last night as we discovered that all the data from the prior night wasn’t actually going to be saved — it was just there, waiting to be ‘filed’, but actually going to be deleted if we didn’t save it, hour column by hour column. Good thing we realized our mistake before the day of pending data time was up!

Multiple that times five or so, toss in a few huge dressing changes, and needing to call security on an agitated patient, and yeeeeeehaw.

Muffins were not enough recompense. (And I’m still not entirely sure that they weren’t bribes. In which case I expect moar muffins when I go back to work tomorrow night as nursing day tribute, heh.)

It was good to get back into the flow of things though. I’d had almost two weeks off, between classes and Blue Heaven, and it was all too easy to get wrapped up in writing Career navel-gazery. (It’s a career when it’s real, it’s a Career when I stress out uselessly over things I can’t actually control because I’m a control freak.) Realizing that all of my problems are legit first world problems is a great reality check that work always provides.

I’m going to take a nap and then try to regroup and make some progress on Bloodshifted tonight. I left off at 50k, and with this upcoming move it has priority, so hopefully I can get back into the flow of it tonight, and then stay strong on it the rest of this week :D.

I’m also having a hell of a time disentangling the stress from each of them to the others. I keep playing the objective-reality/subjective-reality game, but it’s not helping. I don’t want to take an ativan, because I know that it’s okay to be anxious sometimes (although I will if this goes on for a few more days.)

The biggest thing, that’s overshadowing all the rest, and making them far worse than they should be, is realizing that we’re going to move soon. Away from my quiet awesome little town and out into somewhere north in the Bay, probably Oakland or Berkeley.

It’s the right thing to do for about four million reasons — namely, my husband has a kick ass job up there that’s full time, doing what he loves, with awesome people. He gets to be a freaking paladin of law, standing up for the little guy, using his immense brain power to make sure underprivileged people don’t get shafted by big corporations like AT&T. That is amazing. He loves it. The world needs more people like him in it, with intelligence and strong convictions. I love him for being like that, it’s a huge part of the reason we’re together.

But I’ve lived where I’ve lived now since 1998. This place is my home, in all senses of the word. The majority of my good friends are here. I know not to take that for granted — my friends were all I had when I left my ex six years ago — they made sure I had a place to live, people to hang out with, good advice when I started dating again, and food — I could have never gotten away from him, and become the woman I am now, without their support. Our lives were intertwined before that, and over the years, they’ve only become moreso. I love them — not just ‘love’ them, but deep down bone-level love them. They are, in a very real way to me, my family.

And I love this town. I love knowing where to go out to eat, where to park, the people at the coffee shops I frequent recognizing me, my yoga studio, my hair salon, knowing where the best hikes are, the beaches, the sun.

My friends are irreplaceable. And the thought of starting all over — even the little things, like finding a new coffee shop — just feels so stomach-pit-droppingly awful.

If we move we’ll be nearer the rest of our family, on both sides, which will be nice — while I’m not too into babies personally, I do want to be a part of my niece and nephew’s lives, which is hard when we’re so far away from them now. And we’ll be closer to my folks too, and no one is getting any younger — and we’ll be able to afford the kind of place that has a guest bedroom that isn’t also-also an office, which isn’t something I think we’d be able to afford near the beaten path here.

And we’ll be nearer San Francisco, which could be cool. I’m not sure I’m actually cool enough to hang out there, though, heh.

I want to see my husband more. I want to not live in a studio. I want to maybe get a dog. Starting over could be fun. We can still come down and visit people. I’ll always have rooms to stay in if I want to hang out for a few days.

I know it’s the right thing to do. And I know I’ve felt like this before — when I ran away from Texas way back in the day, and when I left my ex — and it’s still been the right thing to do. I just hate the doing of it is all.

Bleh. Thanks for listening.

I had some travel issues on the way home — my first flight was significantly delayed, and my rebook involves this thrilling two hour layover in Phoenix I’m doing right now — but the bummer of that was that they rebooked all my awesome “i’m'n’a nerd in my corner” window seats into middle seats. Nevertheless, I reread all of Save the Cat and totally wrote myself a huge outline for Project I typing onto my phone screen, which I felt pretty confident my seatmates couldn’t see :P. (I just feel awkward writing where people can see over my shoulders.)

And that’s something I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t spent so much of Blue Heaven talking about structure with other people, which is cool. I looped Daniel in really early in Bloodshifted this time too, after my first ten k, to try and head my tendency to plot off into-the-weeds and I think it’s working out *awesomely*. So if I can turn myself into an outline girl, and write faster, and pull out less hair then that would be amazing. (And if you’re a writer and you haven’t checked out Save the Cat, you really should, it’s rad. I read it first two years ago, and rereading it just now I got so much more out of it.)

I got really good chances to hang with almost everyone one on one this year, at different times, and hot tubbing, late night hanging, and watching Cabin in the Woods and really good food and it was so nice to be in super-writer-mode all the time, talking business and shooting shit. I really miss everyone — my flight was the first one off this AM so I had to drive to the airport alone and I was pretty blue. (I coulda driven with someone else if I’d known how late my flight was gonna be :P ;)).

But I also miss my husband and my cat — and I feel pretty awesome about what I got done, and I’ve got a really firm handle on things going forward, I’m really excited about all the things that are coming up next, even as that means juggling three projects. I think I’m taking tomorrow off of everything, I just want to chill out and stressfree hang, but since it’s hard to relax at the airport I might as well keep working now ;).

So back to it for a little bit longer, and then home homeity home!

Which paid off in spades today — I wrote 5000 words and hit 35k! :D

I knew some more stuff about what was going on next, but 5k’s a pretty high word count for me, and I’ve still got a few days to go here, I didn’t want to burn out.

But here’s to tomorrow (or today, depending on your timezone ;)) being another 5k day! :D

It’s gorgeous here. We’re in a 9000 square foot house which is freaking insane, it’s three floors and everyone has master bathrooms and I have a gas fireplace in my room, and a balcony to see the outside (which was lovely for doing yoga :D).

Getting here was a little long — I took a redeye from SF and then wanted to stay up for the rest of the day so that I could be on EST, which meant being up for about 25 hours straight, but it thankfully worked. (Until i blow it with the hyper tonight. Ah well, at least I’m being super useful!)

Anyhow, I hope this awesome trend of usefulness continues — and it’s so so so fun to be here and hang out with a ton of writing friends :D.