Reading and Metronomes

I am as guilty as the next party of pushing reading to a back-burner, feeling that if I take time to read in the middle of the day instead of at night AFTER I've finished the demands on my time as a writer, I'm a horrible author. The thing is, why do we write? So people can read. After several days of pushing hard at Anon, Sir, Anon, and finding nothing is budging, I am going to give myself the day to read, draw, write letters, whatever, and count it as a creativity-replenishment day. We can't always be pouring out without refilling. To take a comment from Jenny in one of her recent letters:

"I was feeling unmotivated to write, which was no doubt due to my lack of fiction in-take."

That is exactly how I feel. The only reading I've done recently has been crammed. Cram down the rest of Bonhoeffer so I can return it on Sunday; cram in Duty so I can review it. Cramming isn't good for the mental digestion. It gives one a stomach ache. I could sit here at the computer toiling out a thousand words that mean nothing to me, or I could read several thousand that will spark new ideas. In our music theory class, Dad was telling us how when he worked at Tanglewood for a summer, certain musicians would wear metronomes around their necks for eight to ten hours a day so they could better internalize sixty-time. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Reading is the metronome for writers. The more we read, the better we subconsciously internalize the talent and creativity that went into whatever book it is we read. That is why reading poorly written books is a waste of time. If we internalize and become what we read, it doesn't pay to fill ourselves with drivel. Nor does it pay to write drivel. If we're writing drivel, we have probably been away too long from our metronome. So today I'm not going to create my own fiction...I'm going to internalize someone else's, and enjoy words for their versatility and beauty. You don't always have to harness beautiful horses...sometimes it's better to let them run and watch from a distance. If we are the let words run today, I want to leave you with this amazing snatch of poetry by Edward Shillito in WWI:

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;

Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;

We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow,

We must have thee, O Jesus of the Scars.

The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;

In all the universe we have no place.

Our wounds are hurting us; where the balm?

Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim Thy grace.

If, when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,

Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;

We know today what wounds are, have no fear,

Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong; Thou wast weak;

They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;

But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak.

And not god has wound but Thou alone."

Thnippeths of Thtory

I am so glad that I held off on a February snippets post until March, because now I'm on time for Katie's Snippets of Story and didn't dart ahead. I got a fair amount of writing done in February, some of it good, some of it middling, and some I know will be operated on severely come rewrites. Nevertheless, I've collected snippets from all of it below, and I hope you enjoy the review. Also, you there are changes afoot regarding the face of this blog--the most excellent Bree Holloway is concocting a new face for The Inkpen Authoress. If you stop by and don't recognize your surroundings, don't freak out. We've simply had a makeover. Now for the real stuffs:

“That was entirely useless,” Farnham hissed between teeth clenched in a faux smile as he tied Belch’s lead to his handlebar. “Of course I expected nothing but nonsense from the man. All that ridiculousness about Miss Bertois speaking with him. He said she wore a silky dress ‘just like the picture’. It was wool, as you plainly recall. What a stupid man. I’m afraid he couldn’t testify at a sheep-shearing let alone in court.”

One of the men hailed Farnham. “Any idea where I might find the scoop on the scandal?”

Farnham’s stomach doubled up and bit him. “What scandal?”

“American Actress Meets Frightful Death.”

“Oh, that. Try the police station--that’s where one usually finds justice and horrors evenly mixed.”

“Right. Well,” Jimmy looked her straight in the eyes. “See you soon, then?”

“Soon.” Vivi smiled in reply to his question, feeling that it held at actual inquiry that wanted affirmation. Yes, she wanted to see Jimmy again. Yes, she wanted it soon. She pulled her bike up and Jimmy steadied it while she got on. She peddled off, thanking God under her breath that she was past the waggle-waddle stage of remembering how.  

The candle-flames bounced in an erratic dance with some unseen spectre of a draft. Two dried petals from the centerpiece of roses fell to the table with a tick like mouse claws, one right after another so it seemed that a ghost hand had drawn its nails over the wood. 

Vivi smiled and folded her hands against her skirt, small, polite, impeccably distant. “My uncle is not at home right now and I’m afraid our butler is away on business, but--”

Michael spread his hands with a free grin. “Butlers on business? What a modernist.”

She bent her head as if into a stiff wind and continued: “But if you would like to wait in the study I am certain he will not be long.”

 “If you’re my gaoler, I don’t mind being imprisoned in a room with a door that sticks.” 

Vivi watched candlelight gleam on the gold of Michael’s ring like a bit of truth caught in a brass lie.

For some reason she was upset and he thought it quite likely the fault of that young god-like creature in the chair. His chair. He stared at the fellow, unwilling to initiate an acquaintance with a man who could sit in another man’s wing-chair with a smile like that upon his face; Farnham felt he knew the discomfort of dispossessed lords when seeing Americans purchase and dwell in their family castles as if there weren’t years of blood spilled and blood shared connecting a man with his ancestral home. 

He prayed he wasn’t one of those tee-totallers who caused such trouble in the world when you wanted to get them out of the way by offering drinks all round.

They had come to the diningroom, so Farnham shook off her arm and set the candletree on the table. The flames gleamed in reflection on the glassy wood  like the whirring golden beetles one could sometimes find in the back garden in summertime.

“Look,” Farnham said before he could stop himself, “fairy-lamps.”

He felt the red rush  into his cheeks. He ground his jaw. He’d not anticipated how silly it would sound aloud.

 She arranged the wedges on a baking stone and slid them into the oven without speaking. Not that she wasn’t going to speak, Farnham thought, but she hadn’t quite decided what she was going to say. He liked that about Vivi: so many women rattled on as if words didn’t cost something; as if people actually had time to listen to three sentences where one coherent thought would have done the job.

“Fifteen for Lillian to arrive at Holly Triad. What would you give him...five minutes to kill her?” Vivi’s face turned red. “I mean, let us presume she was a bit late and he was already in an ill temper. She does or tells him something that sets him off. It mightn’t even take that long.”

“Three minutes, let us say,” Farnham agreed. “What next?”

“Ten minutes for carrying the body the half mile between Holly Triad and its final resting place, do you think?” Vivi asked.

“I’ve never lugged a dead body cross-country,” Farnham admitted.

 She was glad he had his hands in his pockets, for then she didn’t have to see his strong, supple fingers--fingers that could close with ease on a woman’s throat and extinguish the life from it. But would he?

His lips trembled as if he was about to speak, then warmed into a chiseled smile. “I suppose you didn’t come to speak about us either.”“No,” she said flatly. “We’ve exhausted that topic.”

 Vivi shook the woman’s plump, sweating hand and a pair of keen eyes raked her up and down.“Woy up, then!”

“How do y’do?” Vivi answered, figuring the woman’s odd words were a like manner of greeting.

“Well she don’t look like a fiz-gig and ent that a relief!” Mrs. Froggle said with a wink at Farnham. “Lord knows we’ve got enough of ‘em in the world.”

March's Chatterbox: "...then we shall see face to face."

Happiest of all happy Marches to each of you! It's a new month which means a new page on my calender, a new writing space, newly painted walls in the hall (the soles of my feet are speckled with paint), and I'm sure many adventures to come. This month I hope to be able to purchase a ticket to Romania for our missions trip in May. I am so excited about this opportunity and cannot wait to go back to all the places and people from last year. It was such a privilege to share in their lives for two weeks. Want to see some photos? Here's an album. Anyway, I digress. It's time for Chatterbox again! It's funny how uncalculated all my choices of topic are. A friend asked me what the next Chatterbox topic was going to be and I hadn't even thought of it. I threw around a few ideas and finally settled on one with which I expect you to have fun:

Mirrors

Such an ambiguous topic, isn't it? Do I mean literal mirrors? Do I mean two people imitating one another? Do I mean reflections, or a reflective spirit? Do I mean an absence of mirrors, or perhaps a superfluity of them? Do I mean a robber baron signalling to his band with flashes on a mirror, or perhaps I mean something more like The Picture of Dorian Gray.  There is ample room for speculation as to what I mean by assigning you mirrors. That speculation is your job and I am certain you will come up with brilliant ways to apply the topic to your own stories. Mirrors are always a bit mysterious, always changing what one thinks one sees into something just a little different. I recall walking through a house of mirrors are our county fair and losing my breath to laughter over how deuced hard it really is to find your way...until I looked at the cracks at the floor and was able to see where they led. Because of the properties of mirroring, you aren't really seeing exact reality...and that opens up a slew of ideas for me. Can't wait to read the entries. You can add your links to the link-up below as usual. Have a lark!

Indie Publishing: What you Didn't Know You Were In For

"Letters of business. How odious I should think them." 
-Caroline Bingley

What most people think of when they think (at all) about an indie author is probably some entirely erroneous picture of a weird kid in a washed out denim jumper who never bothered to get braces for her bucked teeth, wears her hair parted straight down the center of her head (and tucked behind both ears) and doesn't really have all her social graces pegged down. That, or they think of some really awesome person who spends their week literally choreographing sword-fights and practicing fencing with frequent interruptions to run to the desk and type out what just happened.

Indie Author = Rachel Heffington

What people don't realize, is that the moment he hits "approve proof" on Createspace, that indie author has suddenly become a businessman. I didn't realize it, going in. Yeah, I knew marketing was a bit part of getting your name out there and getting your books read. I realized that I would be required to juggle social media and pay attention to other blogs, authors, and book releases. I didn't think that I'd suddenly find myself with enough PR work to effectively employ someone like Callie Harper herself to help me keep afloat of it all. Thanking people/replying to tweets, replying to Facebook messages, replying to emails, writing blog posts, tweeting, writing Facebook posts, sharing links, arranging and answering interviews, reading blogs, puffing other books I enjoyed to begin to integrate into this wild world of self-pubbing, keeping up with Goodreads, reviewing books I've read to help other authors....the list is enormous and I have to write myself a daily to-do list to keep track of any of it. And still things slip behind the desk and I dig them up a week later, feeling terrible I forgot to reply to that pretty much imperative email from that author. There are reviews to read, respond to, and share and you must keep your book in the public eye, too, which means sharing the purchase link tactfully and sweetly and trying to self-promote (good business) while not being annoying and pushy (good friend).

Indie Author + Publicist = Rachel Heffington

That's not all. See, now that I've learned to add publicist to my growing list of talents, there's yet another side of the Indie business I didn't see. That is, quite literally, the side of business. There are books to be autographed, packaged, and shipped. Shipping means going to the store and buying bubble packages, carting them home, addressing them, taking them all to the post office the next day and explaining to the astonished Post-Master than not every one in the towering stack is going overseas and needs a customs form. (Thanks, Mama) Hosting giveaways means that the giveaway winners must be contacted and their addresses procured, their prizes purchased, and their packages shipped. Then, as if that wasn't enough to remember, Paypal withholds payments until you've entered shipping information. I could have done that on Monday if I'd known. Now my payments are all a week behind because I failed to enter the information till this morning. Createspace pays you once a month (provided your royalties add up to at least $15.00) but did you know that your Kindle royalties don't begin for sixty days after the first day of the month in which you made your first sale? Now you have cash flow issues, because you didn't factor the wait in while thinking about your expenses. So you borrow money for shipping/handling and new blog design and other things off your (rich) younger brother and promise to pay him when your royalties finally come around. Then you find out that you forgot that Barnes & Noble actually does carry your book online, so you go around tooting your horn about that and wondering how you managed to overlook that pertinent piece of information. And, yeah, in the middle of all this, you somehow remember you're an indie author still and ought to be working on your next book instead of retweeting articles about how to market effectively.

Indie Author + Publicist + Business Manager = Rachel Heffington

The life of an indie author is far more complicated than I anticipated, but I find the business exhausting exhilarating. All decisions are in your hands, yes, but that means you get to decide. All the PR is up to you, but that means you get to interact one-on-one with your readers, which is precious. All the money has to be juggled and transferred and waited on, but it will be yours in all its littleness someday. And all the writing is up to you...but isn't that why we became writers in the beginning? Don't be discouraged when you publish your novel and realize that it was more work than you anticipated. Every indie author deserves a reward for wearing three hats (or more) at once. There's a community of authors who have done the exact same thing as you, many for several novels. Ask questions, work hard, and you'll get it. I was discussing the subject of this post with a friend recently, and she verbally recoiled, saying, "This is why I plan to publish traditionally." I get that feeling. Sometimes I have looked at my to-do list, the crumpled receipts littering my desk, the blank chapter of Anon, Sir, Anon waiting for words to be poured into its memory, and I think: "Dear God, why didn't I stick it out?" But if I had stayed with the idea of traditional publishing, I wouldn't have learned everything I have so far. I wouldn't trade all the PR, business experience, and hard work for the (comparative) ease of having a major publishing house do it for me. Maybe someday, when the market has changed, I will stick my neck back out into the traditional pubbing world. Maybe not. I do know one thing, though: this experience of indie publishing has taught me so much already, and I'd like to shake hands with the first brave man who cast off from the main wreck and paddled to sea in his own little row-boat. To the stubborn over-achievers: we few, we crazy few, we band of indie-pubbers.

(also, digital Fly Away Home is $2.99 through the weekend, so get your copy if you haven't already.) 

And a quarter cup of frustration...

Frustration.

That's a word with which most of us are very familiar. Frustration is a natural part of life. We don't always get things our way and often times it can seem that, to quote Anne Shirley quoting someone else: "'The stars in their courses plot against me.'" Frustration in real life can be horribly annoying. It can be something as small as a trip to the DMV where everyone and their brother smells of cigarettes and can't remember their middle name, to something as big as a coworker purposely framing you as the genius behind the office arguments. Okay. I haven't been the victim of the latter form of frustration, but you will probably understand the sensation.Writers always talk about adding conflict, adding tension, adding lots of negatives to a scene to make it dance. In a dreary sort of way, the more negative elements you pour on your characters, the more positive the effect. Some authors take this advice and go all out with illegitimate births, jealous half-brothers, more and more villains, twists of fate, etc. That works for many authors and I think that it is an excellent maxim to add some of those elements (and preferably many others) to your plot. What you don't always need to drag out a long-absent brother or an abbot who knows your character's dubious background to ratchet up a scene. There are subtle ways to make your character miserable. Can you guess the simplest, easiest way to add realistic conflict?

Frustrate your character.

Life hands us seemingly coincidental incidents that pile up in in our favor or against it. Play out this concept in your characters' lives and see how well it works. In the current chapter of Anon, Sir, Anon, Vivi is in a certain social setting, wanting to use this chance to observe and ask questions of the locals. If I let this scene be, it would probably fall out as a sort of dull triumph for Vivi. She'd probably get her information and move on to the next dull triumph and so on and so forth, amen. But you can't do that and expect to win friends and influence people. In the same vein, I didn't need to bring in the villain to stir the pot. He is better left till called for via the dictates of the decided plot. What I did, was construct the setting so that the room was over-crowded, noisy, and confusing, giving Vivi a silent migraine. This has nothing to do with any villain, conflict between other characters, or anything of that nature. It is very simply a natural, very frustrating occurrence. (Believe me. I get a silent migraine every time I try to go contra-dancing.) The migraine debilitates Vivi by cruelly lifting away her capacity to think, digest information, or otherwise use this very good chance to work on the murder case. A frustration. A natural one. This is the same technique filmmakers use when they add rain to a scene. There are two reasons for rain in scene: one; it frustrates the characters further, or two; it makes the mood romantic...somehow...(picturing dripping wet Mr. Darcy hair and wondering where the attraction lies). A natural frustration is going to cause your reader to, in Stephen King's words, "prickle with recognition". Why? Because your reader might not have a snarky, murderous half-brother but he probably has dealt with the hiccups in a professional interview, a distraction in a moment of concentration, locked his keys out of his car (which would foil a getaway in a genius and simple way), or experienced some other small (or major) frustration.

Make real life work for you. Most of you are coming up on two centuries (or at least a century and a half) of life experience. Some of you have lots more. Surely you could draw up a lengthy list of naturally-occurring frustrations to add to tension in your plot.

Vivi’s eyes flickered over every face one by one but there were too many people. Far too many.  A hundred grinning mouths became two hundred, two hundred smiling eyes became four-hundred. All five of her senses protested against the overload. The living heat, noise, and colors swirled in a twist of confusion. A vague, disquieting sensation of falling asleep and rising above the rest of the room filled the front of her head, and she struggled to make it back to the shore of reality. Fresh air. She wanted it as a thirsty man craves drink. She moved toward the now dark square of the doorway, flickers of alarm shooting through her chest at the idea that something might impede her freedom, or that she might stumble head-long into the crowd before she made it to the salvation of the outdoors.

-Anon, Sir, Anon

The Nameless New Lair

By ten-thirty yesterday morning, I was fairly certain I'd never feel organized, tidy, or able to think again. My Lair was no more, my bedroom looked like the aftermath of Armegeddon, and Sarah and I had both inhaled so much dust that she, at least, had begun to crack puns. And we both hate puns. We were getting loopy. There's a fair amount of brain power involved in combining two stuffed bookcases into one, toting out a heavy hopechest stuffed with letters, favorite books, and things from my childhood, moving another hopechest into that spot, finding where on earth my art supplies was to go, and carting in a desk and all my trappings. We did it, though, and fled downstairs to find there was nothing to eat but salad. After having nothing to eat all day but yogurt. That sent us packing to Starbucks where I bought an Izze and buried myself in Stephen Lawhead's Tuck between three different groups of our friends descending on us by chance. (This is what happens when there is only one coffee shop in town, apparently.) An Izze and friends do minister to a mind diseased (unlike plum puffs) and I returned home in a far better mood than I left. Soon after my return, the UPS man came with two boxes stuffed full of copies of Fly Away Home which I then promptly autographed and packaged up. Mama is sending them this morning after Sarah tests for her license. So those of you who ordered copies, SO sorry for the wait; you will receive them soon and I hope your enjoyment won't be lessened by the unfortunate wait.

Today, after waking up properly, I decorated this new writing space with the old things (small wall-space meant things like the illustrations for Cottleston Pie had to go into the hope-chest) and stood my sign from Wyatt Fairlead above the door. That is always the final measure in designating a new writing space: does my Author's Study sign adorn the lintel? If so, I really have moved in.

The longer I spend in this corner, the more I think it will serve well. I think I will be comfortable here. I haven't found the perfect name for it yet, but it is a pleasant, more public writing space that I think I will grow to enjoy quite a lot. Public? In your bedroom? Darlings, if you knew how much mine and Sarah's room stands as a family hang-out, you'd laugh. Levi is now playing matchbox cars on the floor, and Leah and Anna are traveling back and forth from the hall, through my bedroom, through the bathroom door, into their bedroom through the bathroom. They've decided to go with a travel-theme as soon as Abby moves out. The little girls painted my Lair an astonishing shade of pink. They love it, but I had to laugh because it literally makes the room glow. Hopefully as soon as they have furniture in it, the color will tame. Currently it is quite...energetic. Anyway, I thought you'd probably like to see pictures of the new scene of all crimes. Let me know if you have any brilliant ideas for a name!

I decided to display our antique books in the tea-cup cabinet near my desk.

There you have it! Do you have any idea what it ought to be christened? I suppose that will come with time. For now, I'm just blessed that Sarah is in support of letting me commandeer a whole corner for my work. :)

Lessons from Cell 92

I am sitting tonight with a heart full of poetry and no words. Not terribly productive, perhaps, but beautiful. Deep thoughts have been stirred within me by reading Bonhoeffer's biography; I dread the approaching final chapters, for I know he is executed and it aches me. I dread it, and yet he was so brave a man, so noble a man, you can't help but feel it was a fitting end. I know that sounds horrible, but it's not, when you realize a martyr's death--a crucifixion--is the sort of death Jesus died. And the lives of those who share in that manner of death seem to echo in deep, holy tolls throughout the rest of history. Would the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer rattle us so poignantly if he had lived to be an old man and died of congestive heart failure? I think not. No, people like Bonhoeffer, Sophie Scholl, Peter and Paul and so many others are the people who have left beautiful legacies. It is still sad, though, this approach to re-living a great man's death. Reality and history have been meshed inextricably in my mind, what with the Ukraine Crisis and reading about World War II in Bonhoeffer, and generally being in a thoughtful mood. So I read slowly, savouring the lessons in peace and patience given to me across the years by this kind, extraordinary man, and approach the end of the book a different girl than I began. It is times like these I know I've read a book worth reading.

The day has been beautiful and mild, feathered with sunlight and warmth and the peaceable kiss of Winter's surrender. I would fair say with Browning's Pippa: "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world"; and so it is, in these moments. To live by moments rather than years is such a richer existence. You might say, "That was a bad year", but you could never say, "Those were a million terrible moments." Perhaps that is the key to living under the Mercy: taking life as it is given us, which is breath by breath. More beauty is captured and held and inspected, living this way. There will be room for three hundred and sixty-five sunsets in the twelve-month. I'm nearing my twenty-second birthday; I'll have seen eight thousand and thirty sunsets by the time I've had my birthday, but is that any reason I ought to miss a single one more? I think not. I have kissed the baby's dimple a thousand times if I have once, but is there a reason I oughtn't to kiss it again today and yet another time tomorrow? Someday he'll grow too old for such nonsense, but not for a while yet. I've seen the sun shine through my window every morning (more or less) since I was born, but is that a reason the fire-dart of sun flared through a falling dew-drop shouldn't astonish me as much as it did when first I saw it?

We take too broad a view of things. We've forgotten how to appreciate minutiae. While imprisoned, Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents of a thrush that sang in the prison courtyard every morning, and again in the evenings. He wrote of the gift of solitude and how he was happier he'd been imprisoned, being accustomed to and liking solitude, than another of his friends. This wasn't a Pollyanna triviality: this was a man in tune with God's ways, pressed into the heart of God, living with borrowed and sustained courage and joy in knowing his life was not his own. To be given examples like him and gifts like these, I feel keenly the call to a higher existence and a nobler life. How can anyone not realize we were destined for eternity when they feel these things? I should make a terribly morose Atheist, for I think I would always wish there was an existence beyond this life and always trying to look for it, hoping against hope. Thank God I have access to the same peace and courage as Bonhoeffer. I can live under the Mercy; I can listen for thrushes. Life, lived in step with God's heart, is never truly complicated on His eternal level. Hands fixed on earth, heart fixed on heaven; that's the way to live this noble life.