If a butterfly flaps its wings...

I’m sure we’ve all played some version of the butterfly effect, but I am constantly amazed at how often tiny things like that come up. There’s a book I doubt I’d have read except for a choice I made, a small choice. A name.

This book is now very famous, but I wouldn’t have sought out a copy and bought it early on. When I read this book, I was amazed. I didn’t realize that these kinds of stories were allowed. I’d skipped MG and YA as a YA. I went straight to Adult fiction, and this book wouldn’t have stood a chance in the publishing market place of my youth. Well, maybe it would have, I’ve no idea why lightning strikes one location and not another.

One summer, I took a job as a horseback riding instructor at a camp. For those of you who have never done this sort of work, it’s about the craziest job you can ever take. Most of the children who show up have NEVER seen a horse in person, and the first time they do, you put them on one. Then the instructor (read: crazy person) stands in the middle of the arena while rank beginners attempt to ride horses inside the arena. Yeah, really not a bright idea, as most of the kids don’t know the whole pull back on the reins and they stop thing. Seriously scary as the person on the ground. 

At this camp, the instructors all go by false names, and I chose Draco (after the star constellation). All summer long the campers would ask “Wait, like in Harry Potter?” Then I had to describe the stars and constellations, and they’d be disappointed. They wanted my name to have something to do with this Harry Potter fellow. 

After a summer of “Like Harry Potter?” I went and bought the book. 

I’d say that book changed my life. Before, I’d thought all the stories in the world had to fit a particular mold, but Harry Potter shattered my preconceived notions of what I can write about. 

And did I mention I’m very excited about the last installment of the movie? I’m going to go read through the series one more time (cause I’m a nerd).

What am I?

I’ve been sort of swallowed by a crisis in faith about my writing. I know we all go through them, so I thought I’d share (see, here I am sharing more than maybe I should, but oh well). 

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m really suited to being a YA writer. 

I’m strange. I started reading adult books when I was eight. I read Celery-Stalks at Midnight and then Starship Troopers (great book, sort of strange movie with major physics issues). I read Silverberg, Heinlein, Asimov, McCaffery, and for my ‘light reading’ I read Lackey. I read every Star Wars book (including the Han Solo set, quality literature there), the whole Conan series, and even parts of the Kane series (out of print, but one helluva ride). In my family, we would read everything, no matter how unfortunate the book—we had contests for who could find the most unfortunate passage, yeah, my family was weird. I blame my mother; she reads 20 novels a month. I don’t, for the record (I’m lucky to log 10 in a month). 

I got to thinking about all of this because of the WSJ article that claimed there was too much darkness in YA. I started thinking about the young adult books I’d read, you know when I was a young adult, and: nothing. I didn’t read in that genre at all as a teenager. I think I read one book, and I don’t remember the title. It was about a vampire (surprise!) who made dreams come true if only the protag would give in to his will. 

Right, one book. I just skipped the whole genre, I went from Encyclopedia Brown to Alan Dean Foster. I suppose a lot of Sci Fi/Fantasy of the time could have been considered YA, but there just wasn’t a market for it. Most of the people I read about were young, of course, but the writing was thick, and meant to appeal to adults. I’ve been reading a lot of YA more recently, and I think that I decided my work falls into that category because of the age and the type of story I wanted to tell. 

So, now I’m wondering if all those books I read as a tween and a teen would now be considered YA. Many of them starred teenagers. They took on some pretty big topics, but that's pretty typical in YA. I've had ideas more appropriate for YA, and I've had ideas that definitely fall in the Adult category. Strangely, because the competition is so tough in YA right now, I feel like I’m supposed to be 100% committed to being a YA writer. The more I think that, the more I think that’s ridiculous. I’m me. I’ve never fit into categories, so why would I suddenly start to fit in with my writing?

I'm me, that'll just have to be enough. 

Fire

Last week, I whinged about how air conditioning in Albuquerque doesn’t work out. About four hours after that post, the smoke from the Wallow fire set in, and we weren’t allowed to use our paltry AC at all. I guess the moral of that story is don’t complain, things can (and will!) get worse. 

And honestly, it’s bad here. I really feel bad for the people who are near this, and impacted by this terrible fire. It’s big. There’s ash on my house, not so much that I have to go clean it but ash from a fire 200 miles away. That’s a big fire. They aren’t landing planes at ABQ today. 

I grew up in California, and wildfires are just part of the summer there. I’ve seen this a lot, but I’ve never seen a fire like this. I know that most places in the world just don’t have this sort of thing, so I’m going to take a crack at describing what it’s like to live near a fire.

Right now, here in Albuquerque we have most of the hallmarks, but we lack the biggest part of living near a raging fire: fear. 

At night I would watch the fires as they ate their way down a hillside, or into a canyon. I could see the towering flames. At night, a fire looks like an army of demons marching through the lands and laying waste. It destroys everything without regard for feeling or sentiment. A grove of the world’s tallest trees? Just more fuel. The place where your daughter was born? More fuel. The land where your family has lived for five generations? More fuel. 

We would pack our belongings and wait, scared to leave, terrified to stay. We waited. We waited for the phone to ring, for the fire chief to order an evacuation, for the fire itself, whichever came first. We lived in a rural part of California, and we worried they wouldn’t remember to tell us when it was time to leave. In my part of California, the sheep outnumber the people. 

Then the morning came, and it was only slightly better than the night. The sun rose blood red, and our shadows were like red devils tagging our every movement. Our eyes stung, and everyone coughed. But daybreak is a mixed blessing: now we can’t see the fire. By night, at least the demonic red glow signaled the distance to the blaze, but by day, the brown and black smoke blotted out the flames, obscuring everything.

Everything stinks. When we would finally send someone to town to get groceries, we brought the fire with us wherever we went. The car, the store, work. We smelled of fire. 

I remember going to the pizza parlor once while we waited on one of these vigils. There was a CDF truck out front, and inside there were firefighters. There were two of them, a man and a woman, both young. They had the swagger of people who’ve stared down death and found themselves indestructible. Chiseled, voluptuous, they were what the Greeks talked about in their ideals of beauty, and they were wearing firefighter uniforms. All the guys in the pizza shop wanted that woman, but she only had two questions: “How old are you?” and if the answer was over 18, “Do you want to make some money?” 

They were so desperate for firefighters, they were literally pulling teenagers out of a pizza parlor to go fight fire. I was seventeen at the time, but I’ve often wondered about what happened to the people who took them up on their offer to fight the demon by night. Eat pizza at noon, fight fire by dusk? 

And when the sun does set, the world is bathed in yellow and orange, backlit from the very smoke itself. Sunset in smoke looks like the worst kind of thunderstorm, the kind that make tornadoes, but there’s only the fire. The loss of the sun is one part terrifying and one part relief. The world is dark again, but you can watch the demons march.

Irony

Right, so there are a number of things in the world that make people say something like “huh, really?” Somewhere along the line a really smart, crafty person decided they had a great, toxic-free way to bring air conditioning to the masses and thus the swamp cooler was born. 

For those of you who don’t know how this works, here’s the process in a nutshell (I know, I’m all sciency every now and then, just hang in there). It takes energy to evaporate water. It sounds simple, but it’s a big deal. In a swamp cooler, the water evaporates, and the energy needed to evaporate the water comes from the air which then cools, having lost some energy to evaporate the water. 

Swamp coolers work best in deserts, and other arid climates. Basically, if the ambient humidity is lower than 40% they work great, chilling the air by as much as 15 degrees (Fahrenheit).

Except for one little problem: the monsoon. 

See, in Albuquerque, we have nine months of the year with a humidity that hovers between 15 and 5%. In short, perfect for a swamp cooler. But those nine months of great swamp cooler humidity? September-May.

So, in Albuquerque, the only time we use our swamp coolers are also the only months where the humidity can regularly spike into the 90% range, effectively disarming all air conditioning. 

Huh, really? Who came up with this idea?

At least we usually get an awesome lightning storm to go along with the suddenly sweltering in our houses effect.

Patience

But first:

I’ve entered Weronika Janczuk’s contest for an autographed copy of MISERERE: AN AUTUMN TALE, Teresa Frohock’s debut dark fantasy. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/lL7kFw.

It looks like a great book, but as I haven’t read it yet, I don’t know. I’m definitely going to buy a copy if I don’t win this one.

And how fitting that my post on patience got interrupted. I think I can sum up my entire relationship with the virtue of patience in three words: I have none. 

Oh sure, I can wait my turn in the grocery store, and I never, ever hurry waiters, checkers, clerks or service people of any kind. That kind of patience I have in spades. No, I’m talking about the patience one needs in writing. That’s what I lack. 

I have these stories, and I so desperately want to tell them that I just can’t wait. I can’t wait to jump right in and get to the action of telling a story. I hate setting up the world, but I love the stories I get to tell there. I actually go through and read books where I think the author has patiently set up her(his) world to best execute a story. I read them as a constant reminder of what I should be doing, and I have the full knowledge that I’m not. I can’t wait to get to the good stuff in my story. I’ve gotten better over the years, and strangely, this is one of the areas where academics has really helped. It’s not enough. I want to get to the end of the book now. I’m inpatient. 

I’ve had another strike of lightning, a whole book has leapt into my head (Title, characters, everything, and I’ll put something down about this book when I start writing it), and I can’t wait to get started, except, here I am in the middle of telling another story. So I’m biding my time trying to be, you know, patient with myself. I’m trying to give my WIP the time and space it needs, because it’s a great big story with lots of fun and wonderful characters. I have to describe new places all the time because my scenes are happening all over the place, and I need a stage for my stories. Still, I have this other story that’s beating down the insides of my skull. Talk about tearing out my fingernails one by one, it’s complete torture. 

Then, because that wasn’t enough to tax my sad little abilities of waiting to getting around to telling my SNI, I changed the first chapter of my query bait. That means I have to go through the whole thing to make sure it’s consistent. So, the ‘free’ time that I usually use to write, and would be using to write this story that’s currently occupying my time, I’m reading through a manuscript I’ve nearly edited to death. 

So, all my writing is on hold while I make sure I have an internally consistent manuscript (it’s a really big deal in academics to have internally consistent models, so much so that I can’t bring myself to query without a read through to be 100% certain that I don’t have a blatant mistake in there now. It’s that important to catch the two references to the different first chapter). 

Before I can get to my shiny new idea, I have to finish off reading through my query bait, finish my first draft of my current project, then I can begin to think about putting my SNI to paper. I’m going to go bald with the anticipation to tell this story. 

Okay, probably not. I’ve managed to hold myself in check before, but this feeling like I can’t wait to start writing something is a good sign. A really good sign. 

“Patience, yeah, yeah, yeah, how long will that take?” –Tae Kwon Leap, the Frenetics