Holly Lisle mentions a forgotten writing truth in her blog entry today; that little bits of writing, done regularly, rack up word count.

I'd forgotten that, too. When I started writing seriously for publication, and after publication, my daily goal consisted of: do something every day to move forward. It might be edits, or research, or writing, but the book in progress moved forward every day. Doing this, I was incredibly productive. I didn't stress out over daily word or page count goals. I just kept going forward, every day, and the book would get done. 

Then somewhere along the way I started setting specific goals I had to meet. This in itself is not a bad thing, but it is when you have a life outside of writing that includes small children. Or any other major time/energy commitment. Some days I couldn't get much done. By my previous approach (move forward daily), I'd be in fine shape, because good days balance out the bad ones over time. But with the goal not met, now I had failed. And failure instead of progress became the measure.  I kept trying to change the goal to make it reachable even on the worst day. I kept miscalculating. No matter where I set the bar, nothing seemed to work.

Except that thing I used to do that always works; just move forward every day. That's it. That's all. If I do that, I met my goal. It sounds like it's not enough, but I finished a lot of books very efficiently that way, and I was never stressed about my progress or lack of it. 

I think I need to go back to doing what works and give up more defined goals. Thanks for the reminder, Holly. 

Oregon Senate Bill 767 is going up for a vote. If you live in Oregon, this may eliminate virtual public schools as an option for your child by blocking existing virtual public schools from enrolling new students and new virtual public schools from opening in Oregon.

Taking away virtual school options can only have two outcomes; forcing kids who aren't a good fit into traditional schools, or forcing families who may not be up to the task to home school on their own.

Virtual public schools allow accelerated learners to learn at their own pace under the guidance of teachers in a fully accredited program meeting or exceeding all state and federal guidelines, where the ability to transfer to a traditional school means all their work will transfer with them, for full credit. It means the same for students whose commitment to athletic pursuits or other special circumstances mean that they can't attend a regular school.

Gifted children in K-2 who are not yet eligible for the G&T program that begins in 3rd grade should be of particular concern, since an advanced student who isn't challenged is more likely to underperform.

We enrolled our oldest in Connections Academy, a virtual public school, when the mainstream kindergarten we originally enrolled her in wanted to place her in special education for fear that she wouldn't test well. She has Asperger's. Call us crazy, but we didn't believe an advanced learner belonged in special ed. She proved us right by excelling in her Connections program, where she enrolled doing first grade curriculum and completed her year with straight As. And not only did she test well, she exceeded all state requirements.

Connections provided us with excellent curriculum, a caring and qualified teacher, an easy to follow program, and the ability to accelerate her learning further as the year progressed and she proved herself ready for more. The virtual school also provided social opportunities via the online clubs and forums, field trips, and regular group classes online.

I believe virtual public schooling is an education alternative that's invaluable to students and families, and to the larger communities who benefit from well-educated children who grow up to become volunteers, workers, and even employers in those communities, and whose extra-curricular pursuits bring recognition to those same communities.

Not every child fits the traditional mold, but every child deserves the best possible education. Vote no on Oregon Senate Bill 767 and keep virtual public school doors open.

I spent a little time last night touring Clive Barker's artwork online. This happened because I follow Jo Leigh on Twitter, and she follows Clive Barker. I love Clive Barker's writing, so I said, "aha, wonder what he's up to" and went off to visit his website. Which is where I discovered that in addition to writing amazingly detailed worlds, he also paints them.

His artwork is fantastic in the truest sense of the word, and well worth taking some time to enjoy. I went through images, and read the stories behind the stories; how one painting made him look at what was really important in the picture, and then write about that.

It's always interesting to see how somebody else's creative process works, and how painting and writing can work together. I've never tried to join my visual art with writing, but living here is making me think about it. I wake up in the morning and see my easel. I remember being told my painting had a storytelling style (which amazed me because I didn't think I had any style), and I am wondering if painting visuals will help me write about them, or see what stands out. Since I'm at an experimental stage, it's a good time to experiment. 

 I know that learning to paint made me look at things differently, and that learning that a painting in process is supposed to be messy made me look at first drafts differently. It stands to reason that painting a scene or subject or character from a story will make me see things differently in the writing, too.

Have you ever tried combining writing with another art form? If not, it might be fun to try. And if you have no interest in it whatsoever, it's still very cool to see Clive B's rendering of Pinhead versus the movie.

PBW's annual Left Behind and Loving It workshops are coming up and I'll be contributing again, although I haven't quite decided what I'm going to do. I know I want to talk about creative life, but I haven't decided if I'll do an on-going thing on the same topic like I did last year with different angles covered each day, or if I'll just cover creative living in a day or two. Either way, there will be books given away, because we downsized to move here and the book stockpile must go.

If there are specific areas of creative life you'd like to see me cover, let me know. And I'm open to other workshop topic requests. I may even do a test-run of the chat I'll be doing in October for FF&P on True Lies (making speculative fiction believable and authentic).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QutfN2wb1wc

Happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there.

We've been teaching the kids the art of beachcombing. You have to keep your eyes open and pay close attention or you might miss the perfect shell partially buried in the sand. You have to know where to look; the intertidal zone, close to the water's edge. You also have to watch for incoming sneaker waves, and wade through all the debris left by feeding seabirds and human beach parties.

But if you go early and often, if you keep your eyes open, watch carefully, if you have patience, you find treasures just waiting for you to discover them.

Once found, they must be handled carefully or they break. They must be cleaned, polished, and in some cases left out to dry, and kept out of reach of careless hands or stampeding pets.

Beachcombing is a lot like gathering ideas. You need to know where to look, how to gather them, how to handle them after you find them. Ideas are everywhere, just like seashells near the ocean. Keep your eyes open; you never know what's right in front of you, half-covered with a layer of silt.

First off, in the interests of disclosure, I did not renew my RWA membership this year. I was a member, PAN qualified, yaddah yaddah. But year after year, there were the factions fighting each other and eruptions and I kept asking myself, "What do I really get out of this organization?" And when I couldn't come up with a good reason to give the org another hundred bucks, I didn't.

Previously, I'd renewed solely to advertise in Romance Sells. But I found that to have no measurable effect on sales, especially since by the time I had final cover, I usually couldn't get an ad in early enough to influence bookstore purchases.

I'm not anti RWA, I don't have any grudge, I simply found the organization increasingly irrelevant. My epublishers, Ellora's Cave and Samhain were originally RWA recognized, making their authors eligible for PAN and to enter their books in the RITA. And then stripped of recognition for no good reason I could ever discern, and rules continually changed to keep epublished titles out of the RITA, the organization's premier award. Which, unlike other industry awards, authors have to pay a fee to enter their work in. So I don't see that the RITA has the same quality as say, the John W. Campbell award. But that's a topic for another day.

I am not anti-NY: my publishers also include St. Martin's Press and Pocket Books.

I'm not rabidly pro-epublishing; while I enjoy the benefits of epublishing, I'm also not blind to the downsides.

But what RWA as an organization cannot seem to get past is that if they truly want to fulfill the stated mission, "to advance the professional interests of career-focused romance writers through networking and advocacy. RWA works to support the efforts of its members to earn a living, to make a full-time career out of writing romance—or a part-time one that generously supplements his/her main income"*, it's time to stop excluding epublishing as a valid choice.

Epublishing is not the answer to everything, but consider the benefits, mainly creative freedom and monthly checks. Both of those are worth a lot to me, and I have continued to epublish while also writing for a traditional publisher.

But, says RWA, it's not a valid choice because you don't get a 1K advance. Well, I can release an ebook and make more than that in royalties in the first month, with usually less than a six month wait from turn in to first check. NY might pay an advance, but an author might well end up waiting longer to get it than an epublished author gets for going straight to royalties.

I think the main issue here is fear that advances will be done away with by NY and the way authors have earned a living will be in jeopardy. This fear is somewhat valid, in that NY has begun to experiment in the royalty-only as opposed to advance-paying model. (Not that you get that advance all that quickly; payments can stretch out over 2 years from time of offer to receipt of final payment.)

I understand, from a professional perspective, that not getting a definite amount of money in exchange for sale of rights is...sticky. You might well sell your rights for a handful of magic beans. This is where an author has to investigate an epublisher, know the market, and determine if their work is likely to do well there...and they'd be greatly helped in this if RWA actually provided education about the realities of epublishing. As, you know, part of fulfilling their stated mission.

In the end, there are no guarantees either way, with epublishing or traditional publishing. Your book might tank from Harlequin as easily as it might tank from Samhain. But authors have the right to choose what they think is the best option for them, and informed decisions are much better than ignorant ones based on hype, fear, or myths.

*You can earn a good living epublishing, or at least a nice supplement. I know; I have since 2005. You cannot, however, earn a good living writing one single title per year at a 1K advance unless you live in a box under a bridge.

It's been a while, but today is a good day for Monday poetry.

From TS Eliot's Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages:
" The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices."

So, we moved. It kind of went like this; found right place, said "we'll take it", threw everything we owned in boxes, and a week later here we are. Actually we got here Wed., so five days later, but last night was the first night in the house.

And to make blog fodder of this, ten great things about moving.

1. It makes you look at everything you own and ask, "Why do I still have this?"
2. If you have no good answer, you can donate it and therefore save yourself packing and unpacking
3. You use spatial organization and problem solving skills that are rarely called upon
4. You build muscles that are rarely called upon
5. You start off with all cupboards and drawers neatly organized. It won't last, but it's a nice feeling.
6. You start off knowing exactly where everything is.
7. This is because you just found all the stuff you haven't seen since the last move.
8. You find all sorts of forgotten items. In my case, I found artwork I'd forgotten I'd done; paintings of the Point Wilson lighthouse and the Port Townsend marina outside the Otter Crossing Cafe, where I used to love to eat breakfast.
9. The sheer physicality of moving is a nice break from the mental effort of writing.
10. You really WANT to use your neat, new office when all the boxes are gone.

We're back from five days exploring an absolutely gorgeous part of the world. We spent our time going back and forth between Astoria and the upper Oregon coast and Washington's Long Beach Peninsula, over a gigantic bridge that spans the mouth of the Columbia as it opens out to the Pacific Ocean.

On the Oregon side, you have the quaint Victorian houses of Astoria rising up in the hillside, the Maritime Museum, the Columbia River Walk. On the Washington side, you see signs for "Dismal Nitch" and "Cape Disappointment", which does not encourage the visitor to keep going. But it's worth crossing that bridge and exploring, because Long Beach Peninsula has a lot of natural beauty to offer, and a lot of fun activities for all ages to enjoy, too.

There's the North Head Lighthouse, which has a beautifully maintained path and is easily accessible by foot, and the grounds where you can rent the lighthouse keeper's house for a bargain rate. You can take the trail to follow the lighthouse keeper's route, but we didn't due to time constraints. We only went as far as the grounds, lighthouse, and overlook. The lighthouse itself is open to tours, but wear closed-toe shoes and be age 7 or older! (Our six year old spent a good 15 minutes plotting ways around the age limit and had to give up.) The peninsula's other lighthouse is on coast guard turf, but accessible by walking trail. It's 3/4 mile each way.

The Cranberry Research Foundation is an interesting place, too, if you have an agriculture bent or just want to know how these unusual berries are grown and harvested.

On Long Beach, you can rent a horse and ride on the sand. We didn't do this, but we did have the kids take pony rides so they could get a feel for being on horseback and see if they liked it. (They loved it. We had a hard time tearing them away.) With a little practice, a family ride on the beach is a future option.

You can visit the Kite Museum, fly a kite on the beach, go catch the latest movie, walk the boardwalk along the dunes, stay in a cozy cottage, eat and shop all within walking distance. Long Beach is great for pedestrians. Just down the road is an amazing chef at The Depot, where the food makes angels weep. Ask for the chef's table, and you can sample while he works his foodie magic. (Ask far in advance; that table gets booked!)

You can also take a shovel and bucket and just play, breathing the sea air and listening to the surf and feeling the wind in your hair.

The Long Beach Peninsula. Don't let the place names put you off, it's not dismal or disappointing in the least.