Thought Patterns

I am a rabid fan of the comic strip, For Better or For Worse. I read it every day and miss it when I don't. I've followed this strip for, like, ever.

Just before I was off-line back in late December, the son's (Michael) house burned. Everyone got out fine, though. He had just finished his book and had gone downstairs when he smelled the smoke. After getting his family out, he went back up to the attic to get his laptop.

They just got some more stuff from the house that was salvageable and they are living at his parents house. So, it's not been long since the house burned and he said "The End" on his book.

Then, in yesterday's strip, he hears back from a publisher. They want to publish his book. Oh, and he's getting a $25,000 (Canadian) advance.

WTF? Unless he submitted it to an indie publisher, there's no way he polished it and sent it out and heard from them.

Yeah, it's not real, Paula, it's a comic strip. But it bothers me that the publishing seems so…easy. The writer of the strip did a good job of describing the writer's life. I liked that. So where's the waiting for the mail? Where's the first rejection? Where's the reality? I know, I know, it's a comic strip.

Gads, I feel like Quayle bitching about Murphy Brown.

The writer, Lynn Johnston, has a page where Mike talks about his book and the writing process. It explains why it was so easy for him. Still, it doesn't sit well with me, and that's weird. I sent my book off to the first publisher and they bought it just under three weeks later. I still feel as if I've cheated somehow since I've got a book for sale and other writers I hang with online, and are better writers that I will ever be, still are not published. This is where being a queer can come in handy. With such a direct readership, it is easier to get published. Not that GLBT publishers will publish anything. It's just that my book was able to go through the process faster.

I've reached the conclusion that writers are insane. We really are.

Think of it this way, we are job hunting from the moment we first decide to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. We job hunt with an 80,000 (+/-) resume that we spend months putting together, editing, re-editing, and re-re-editing. We send that huge honkin' resume to one job opening at a time. Not to a bunch at a time, but to one. And we wait. And wait. Not two weeks, not four weeks. But often 6 months (+/-). When we are turned down, we send it out to another job opening. But did we learn our lesson the first time? Nooooo. We send it to just one.

Some writers send the huge honkin' resume to a head hunter. With those, for some reason, we send to several at once. We keep little spreadsheets and/or databases of who has the resume when.

To further prove that writers are insane, we often have more than one resume going. And yes, it can be as large as the other.

We spend a lot of time and effort (and eat a lot of chocolate) while we job hunt. One good part of this adventure is that moonlighting with the job we are pursuing is not only perfectly acceptable, it is the norm. Maslow's hierarchy of needs actually demands we moonlight. (How else do we afford our chocolate?)

Then there are those writers who are not too insane. There are those who write for their own pleasure, a form of catharsis. The concept of getting a job doing this is gravy on their potatoes for what they are already doing: writing.

Does pursuing publication take away the pleasure of writing? Does the reality of it take away the joy of it?

Lorna wanted to run her own campground. For several years, she researched, attended classes and workshops on how to run a campground. But the more she found out about it, the less appealing it was. It was work! Running a campground is a far cry from vacationing in one. She would have been so busy running it, she wouldn't have been able to enjoy it.

Does writing with the goal of publication steal that joy? Do deadlines and contracts kill the fun?

An on-line friend, Irysangel, talked about being a "momentum writer".

I'm totally a momentum writer. Someone pointed that out to me the other day, and it's sooo true. The more I work on a book, the more I want to work on it, and the more I get done. The more time I spend away from said book, the less I do, the less I'm interested in it. The less story reveals itself to me. Right now I'm back in the thick of things with THE ISLAND, and it's fun and I can't wait to write more tomorrow. I think this explains why I have a hard time with 'orphaned' books. Where I leave off somewhere in the middle and then somehow never get back to it. It also explains why I like to edit immediately upon turnaround of the completed manuscript — I like my ideas fresh and jumping around in my head like jumping beans, not cold on the page in an outline.

link to her post

I am the same, except for one part: editing as soon as the manuscript is finished. I can't do that. I have to set it aside and separate myself from it. Else, when I edit, I am overly critical and hash and slash whilst playing "kick me". By putting distance between The End and The Edit, I am better able to see the story for itself. Hard to explain.

Other than that, yeah, I am a momentum writer too. I get started and if I stop for too long, I lose all interest in the story. I've had it happen before. I was hell bent for leather (whatever that means) on what became known as BG2 when I stopped for NaNo two years ago. That's when I wrote BG1. When NaNo was over and I spent a few more weeks saying The End, I tried to get back into BG2. Blech. Couldn't do it.

What about the rest of you?

There has been a conversation on the Golden Crown Literary Society list about pseudonyms. Someone posted links to two sites that can help you find all of the people in either the US or the UK that have your name/pseudonym.

There's the "How Many Of Me" site for the US and the "You're Not Me" site for the UK.

Folks will be relieved to know that there no mes in the UK and only 5 in the US. Phew. Can you imagine if I were spreading across the pond? shudder at the thought! Oddly, the pseudonym I briefly considered is just as rare.

It was suggested that if you want to know if any of the "yous" out there who are writers, do an Amazon.com search. If anyone knows a website that lists every writer out there, let me know!

I didn't realize how long it had been since I did a backup of my writing files.

My laptop has been acting wonky lately due to some goofy software I think. Anyway, one of the files that was not wanting to open was my wordcount spreadsheet.

A quick check of my backup files told me I hadn't saved the WIP folder since APRIL!

So, guess what I am doing?

I've been wanting to invest in a super duper keyboard but the cost, which is also super duper, has prevented me from it. That and Lorna nearly has a heart attack when she sees the prices.

I wrote an article a while back (Alternative Keyboards) for Vision. I pulled that back up today to check out what had changed and were there any new keyboards out there.

There's the Ergoflex, a three piece keyboard and its positional counterpart, the ErgoMagic. Another three piece is the Comfort keyboard.

The two-piece Evolution keyboard has been on back-order everywhere for quite a while now. Sad, since that's the one I was leaning toward. The Goldtouch isn't really a two piece but it does split fairly far apart. Similar to the Goldtouch is the Maxim and the Pace keyboards.

Then there's the weird shaped ones such as the Maltron, Kinesis' Contoured keyboard, the very weird Safe Type. The Maltron look-alikes are the Essential, the Advantage, Advantage Professional, and the Classic keyboards. The DataHand looks interesting, although I doubt my small hand would fit it.

Then there's the one-handed Bat keyboard and Maltron's one-handed version. There are small keyboards for one-handed use such as the FrogPad, the aptly named Half-Keyboard, and the Half-Qwerty. Oh, and there's the orbiTouch, a very very weird keyboard alternative.

When I visited my friend Elena the other weekend, I got the opportunity to handle her Bat Keyboard. Ha. It was too big for my hand, especially with my crooked little fingers. The Bat, and most other one handed keyboards, rely on "chording" (just like guitar or piano chords) to select the key you want. I don't think my hand would be able to span wide enough.

But Elena had a good idea and I am trying it out. She said to get two keyboards and use one for my left hand and one for my right. Duh. So I got two el-cheapo USB keyboards from Cyberguys. Since I touch type, it really is not difficult.

Okay, there, now I am typing with two keyboards. The biggest problem is putting my hands in the correct position when I reach for the backspace or enter keys. It will take some practice to get to my normal writing speed. I am sitting on the couch, my particle board lap tray across my legs. The left keyboard is at an angle to make room for the right keyboard. This hand works the shift key and tab. The left hand does the backspace and enter keys as well as the space bar. My right thumb is the weakest but I just can't seem to get myself to use the left thumb for the space bar.

I opened one of the keyboards up the other day to see how I could disable some of the keys so that I could lean one on the other. It is easy enough, but I am not sure if I want to do that just yet. When I am net surfing or gaming, I use just one keyboard. When I need to type longer text, I use two. This enables me to position my arms to wherever each needs to be and be independent of the positioning of the other arm.

I should get my new armrest doohickeys Thursday or Friday which means I can get back to figuring out my wheelchair desk. At that point, I will decide if I will disable half of one of the keyboards.

Later tonight I will try to work on my WIP and see what my speed is.

I was catching up on my friends' sites/blogs today and of course went to Sophia's LiveJournal blog. She had a post about the Bulwer-Lytton contest. The winner this year did great!

I'm still skimming down through the winners of the various sections (dishonorable mentions). I about wet my pants over this one:

Winner: Children's Literature

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe who had so much equity (because our story, dear children, is set in Miami's hot real estate market) that she upgraded the exterior to blue suede siding as a tribute to her idol, Elvis, moved her kids to a bootee out back, and then reopened the place as the "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" motel (but you'll have to wait until you're 18 to read any further).
Barbara Bridges
Sierra Madre, CA

Then I came across these:

Special Salute to Breasts Category

As she sashayed out of the police station, her high heels clicking a staccato rhythm on the hard tile floor, like a one-armed castanet player in a very bad mariachi band, her ample bosom held in check only by a diaphanous blouse, and bouncing at each step like a 1959 tricked out Low-rider Chevy with very good hydraulics—she smiled to herself as she thought of the titillating interrogation from Detective Tipple about the Twin Peaks Melon Heist.
Wayne Spivey, Major, USAF Retired
Huntsville, Texas

When she sashayed across the room, her breasts swayed like two house trailers passing on a windy bridge.
Stan Higley
Fairport, NY

Although Brandi had been named Valedictorian and the outfit for her speech carefully chosen to prove that beauty and brains could indeed mix, she suddenly regretted her choice of attire, her rain-soaked T-shirt now valiantly engaging in the titanic struggle between the tensile strength of cotton and Newton's first law of motion.
Mark Schweizer
Hopkinsville, KY