Archive for the ‘Writing Process’ Category

It finally happened. I can make up all sorts of plausible excuses for why it happened. I can imagine all sorts of circumstances that have nothing to do with me.

None of that changes the bold faced truth. At my last author appearance, no one showed up. Nobody. My husband and I sat in an empty room for fifteen minutes, switching our lines of site between the clock and the front door. After twenty, I started to cry. We packed up and left.

I suppose breaking down and bawling like a big baby was unprofessional of me, but it’s cheaper than getting hammered and being hung over the next morning.

Regardless, every artist must deal with rejection because it’s inevitable. It’s also necessary. I certainly don’t like that it’s necessary. I hate criticism. I take my work very personally. My skin is translucently thin (literally and figuratively, but let’s stay on topic). Rejection is necessary because you can’t learn if you don’t fail.

Life has kicked me in the teeth on several occasions. When it does I cry. I grieve. I have my little pity party. I swear and curse people’s names. I lament the ignorance of the rest of the world to my creative genius (“stupid bastards”). The one thing I cannot allow, however, is debilitation.

It is very tempting to take rejection as some sort of cosmic sign that I am suppose to stop what I’m doing before I get rejected again. There are so many other, easier things that I could do with my life. I wouldn’t have to expose myself to criticism, or worse, indifference.

That’s not who I am. I’m the creative weirdo with alternative universes running through my head at any given moment. I’m the smut peddler who has the audacity to write a mystery series in which my characters swear and get to have sex. I’m the naive idealist that believes deep down in my soul that my self expression is meant to be shared with the world.

I’m a writer. Deal with it.

As a writer drawn to the motives of murder, you would think I have an analytical bent on the atrocity that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut. I don’t.  I’ve let my mind wander into some pretty sinister crevices in my own brain to create the murderers in my books, but I’ve never found this particular monster.

And unfortunately, Adam Lanza chose to leave the world as a monster. He most likely didn’t start out that way. It’s actually quite difficult to look at the emaciated geek in the fuzzy black and white snapshot and picture him hurting anyone. I think that’s a good thing.

When writers dramatize murders, whether it be in a play, book, movie, or TV series, we make it a point to hide who that murderer is, but once that person is revealed, the motive is clear and reasonable at least to the murderer. An audience needs the motive for closure. Somehow, it needs to make sense.

But how do you make sense of an anonymous killing spree? What’s the motive?

Take your pick; Columbine, Virginia Tech, Arora, Portland, Newtown; these horrible acts of mass murder were committed by marginalized young men who no longer valued the sanctity of human life, including their own. If I had to sit down and come up with a reason, the only one I can think of is pretty damn sick: a need for attention.

However petty it may seem, we all want to matter to the rest of the world in our own small way. If you’ve been marginalized by the community that you were born into, that need can start to mutate into something off center, sometimes culminating into a positive force, sometimes negative. The catalyst that shoves your own personal pendulum one way or the other can come from just about anything or anyone.

We can all sit on our high horses and say, “I would never do that.” Yet, we all want a motive. We all want it to make sense and be easy, so we can feel safe again about the world around us. The problem is, though, we only want our understanding to be shallow. We don’t want to look inside ourselves and search out the monster within us.

So I ask, who are you? Are you the marginalized or the marginalizer? I honestly believe that if we as a society can’t or won’t answer that question, we will only perpetuate what is becoming a painfully glaring problem.

Every region has them. They are cultural touchstones that  happen around the same time every year and have no religious, scientific or civic relevance attached to them. If you are writing a regional-centric book (or series) you better know them by heart.

Here in the good old heartland of the upper Mississippi River Valley, we have several. Spring beckons Construction Season, Garage Sale Season, Fishing Opener, Cabin Season, and Gardening and planting time. Since our actual spring is so God-awfull short here, all of these seasons persist through the (usually) hot summer and into our equally truncated fall. Fall is the breather to get the harvest in and hit the last of the small town festivals (the ones that don’t celebrate cold and snow). Tourists and locals alike drive aimlessly along the back roads, oohing and ahhing at the pretty leaves.

Then, usually around Halloween, it gets cold. Temperature changes are almost never gradual here. We can easily have 40 degree differences in a matter of a few hours. When winter starts marching in, new seasons start.

First there’s Deer Season (technically it’s Hunting Rifle Deer Season, not to be confused with Bow Hunting Deer Season) in early to mid November. For nine days, blaze orange folks of all shapes, sizes, ages (over 12), genders, races, and political affiliates march through woods and fields looking for that bouncing white tail. It’s a time when those who don’t hunt know to pretty much stay indoors for the duration.

Deer Season trumps Thanksgiving, Football, and Black Friday in Wisconsin. Large brown carcasses hanging off of car roofs and out of truck boxes are a badge of respect and honor. A buck with a huge rack of antlers is especially impressive, despite the fact that the meat on it is so old and tough it’s relegated to stews and hamburger. “What’d ya get?”, “An eight-pointer.”, “Nice!”, “Yah.” That conversation will be repeated several thousand times during Deer Season.

After Deer Season, if there’s enough snow, you get Snowmobile Season. After Christmas, when the scientific winter is underway, Ice Fishing Season will start. For those of you in far off tropical realms, like New Zealand or San Diego, ice fishing is the act of sitting on a frozen lake, cutting a hole in the ice, and fishing. It’s like regular fishing without a boat. Most lakes up here will form a crust of ice around 3 feet thick. It’s thick enough to eventually drive a full size truck on and actually leave a small structure called a fish house behind for months at a time. If there’s not sufficient snow on the ground, people will snowmobile on the ice.

The coming of spring here is not heralded so much by flower buds and migrating birds as it is by the removal of the fish houses from the ice. That’s mid March. It can be 60 degrees or 10 degrees outside. The ground, which will be frozen at least 3 feet down, may or may not begin to thaw and expand from the release of frozen water, a phenomena called “the frost heaving.”Then the cycles of cultural seasons start all over again.

Cultural seasons, like the people who mark them, are steadfast and consistent. They persist through temperamental weather  patterns, shifting political climates, even disasters and wars. They mold who we are and where we come from. And they align us as a region like nothing else can. What are your cultural seasons? How do they affect you?