Wonder Woman: A review without spoilers

First up, this will have no spoilers aside from Wonder Woman is an Amazon, though I do talk about all of it in terms of story beats from a plot structure stand point. 

To start off, I loved this movie so much that it’s hard to be objective about it. I feel like I should get something else out of the way because there are plenty of people who will tell me that “oh, you only liked it because you were a big fan of Wonder Woman before you saw it, so of course you liked it.”

I haven’t read a single Wonder Woman comic ever. Not one (unless you count Crisis on Infinite Earths, which NO ONE DOES). So I didn’t go into this movie as a great big fan of Wonder Woman, and I always thought her character was a little ridiculous (though, I definitely enjoyed the Lynda Carter series as a kid).

I came out of the movie ready to go buy all the things.

Characters:

The characters were done really well in this movie. A ragtag team is brought together to take on a mission of great importance. Through the movie, I kept looking for the weakness in characterization that’s very common in thrown together movies. It wasn’t there. They stuck to their characters, no asides, no “why would they have done that?” moments.

The only weakness in the characterization is that Captain Trevor only has one line that hints at his past, specifically the past that he clearly feels the need to atone for. With the addition of this one piece, his character would have potentially stolen the show, so it was a delicate balance. I feel like the choices in the movie were made perfectly to keep the light shining on Diana and not get overburdened with any inter character subplot (i.e. romance).

I do find myself wanting to write fan fic about the aftermath though.

Setting

WWI is a great setting. The stakes are prenuclear, and weapon featured is very believable for the time (though not from a chemical stand point, alas). The backdrop for much of the action is damaged and destroyed villages in Germany, and the German forest.

A story in Three Acts:

Act I: The early part of the film has some excitement and lots of women doing super amazing badass things, but the stakes are very low which causes for a disconnect between the action we’ve been promised and women talking about things. The conflict here is very low. This section has some great humor gags to ease that feeling of could we get on with it, but it still does a great job of introducing our characters and calling the hero to action. This is a pretty typical Act I complete with the secret, the question of whether our hero can really go to war, etc. This part feels a little slow, but only because we know there’s some amazing action coming.

Act II is both super funny and awesome. There are no pacing problems here, and I love how it very matter-of-factly addresses the inequality between men and women. In Act II we get the midpoint of the movie commonly known as “the bad guys move in” beat, and it is both brilliant and spectacular. Highly enjoyable and visually stunning.

Act III

To be clear, I loved this Act as well, but I have spoken with people who did not. Act III features all the same beats we expect in any Act III, “team falls apart,” “the whiff of death,” “the dark night of souls.”

For those of you who don’t study story structure, the dark night of souls is when the main character is made to feel alone and as though the fight is, perhaps pointless. In Harry Potter, the dark night of souls is when Harry realizes that he carries a piece of Voldemort in himself and he has to die for Voldemort to die. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the dark night of souls is when Henry senior has been shot and Indiana has to go along with the bad guys to get the one thing that will save his father. In Wonder Woman, the dark night of the soul beat comes right where you expect it, leading into the final battle, and some people don’t like Wonder Woman’s dark night moment because it seemed out of character to them. I didn’t see it that way at all. It made sense from a character stand point, because she was an amazon and she gave up so much to go on this quest. It makes perfect sense that she would Doubt in that moment. Then there’s the final confrontation which maybe lasted a little too long as our main character has her epiphany.

I loved this movie. I’m super excited about getting to buy the DVD when it comes out. 

Thoughts on Comics Part 2: The Prayer

Can I just level with everyone here? I'm super duper amazingly excited about Wonder Woman. I see all these article filled with hate, and I just want to shake people and say "Shhhhhs! I haven't seen it yet--AND NEITHER HAVE YOU!!" Then I calmly mutter under my breath "please be good, please be good, please be good."

I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but Star Wars the Force Awakens had a lead woman. An honest to Kenobi Jedi, and it smashed the box office (and was a good movie). But when we went to buy the merchandise for Rei, it just didn't exist. Nobody thought people would buy action figures of a girl.

The main character.

This is why the market is having such a hard time tapping the female market. People are under the impression that women will not put up the numbers that men will, but it's because we've been given scraps at this feast. It's been 13 years since Elektra. No one wanted to try a female superhero because that movie did so poorly, so my new mantra is "please be good. PLEASE BE GOOD."

So yeah, I'm absolutely looking forward to Wonder Woman.


Please be good. Please be Glorious!

Also, Chris, I'm counting on you to turn in some funnies, but leave it to Captain Kirk to accidentally find the island filled with women...

Thoughts on Comics, part 1

I love--LOVE--me some comics. I read every X-Men comic I could get my hands on as a child, and let me tell you, living in a rural town where I literally rode my pony to the store, the selection wasn't exactly wide. Today I'm watching the great DC TV shows (knocking it out of the park with Flash), but I have a hard time with this one common thread that crops up in comics.

It goes like this: Woman who is friends with main character, but sort of not showing any actual agency gets powers, and not just a little bit of power, but a whole crap ton of power. The power changes her into something evil, and just as she becomes super powerful, she turns on all her family and friends, killing them even.

Did you think I was talking about Caitlin Snow?

This is actually the original plot for Frozen, but Idina Menzel made Let It Go too amazing.

But this is the story line for Sarah Lance, Jean Grey, and Carol Ferris (bonus points to Sarah for coming back from the literal dark side, but that show really liked to drive its issues). All comic book ladies who get powers and suddenly go into killer mode because their powers made them do it. This is a pretty troubling trend because there are a huge number of plots where these things happen to men, but they can be helped. But women? Nope, once a killer monster, always a killer monster.

I suspect this is an issue of the fears of the demographic. Comic books are mostly enjoyed by men (search the Hawkeye Initiative, and you might figure out why comics are less read by women), so does this mean men fear women with power? I think it does. I think specifically that men fear women becoming more powerful than them, and to combat this fear, they take women with powers and turn them into these monsters. Women with power are scary. Anyhow, what's your take on the ladies getting powers only to be subsumed by them?

And while we're on the topic of the DC shows, I want Cisco to wear nerdy T shirts again...

Both too much and not enough

At this point it’s pretty cliché for a writer (or anyone on this planet) to talk about how they’re soooo busy. If you Google search Time Management, you’ll get page after page of relevant, fantastic time saving advice. It ranges from basic math—if you have 24 hours in a day, try cutting a couple hours of sleep to do more—to cutting things out of your life.

So I made a choice a while back to not visit as many blogs. I chose to stop engaging as much in social media—why is it so addictive?—and I chose to take more time to breath and relax and be a human being not constantly driving myself into the dirt.

Then starts the anxiety, have I abandoned the world of writers? Will they all hate me for not going around to all the blogs like I used to? Will they think I’m a snob for not jumping in on every blog hop or offering up discussion on the political hot topic of the day?

And what would anxiety be without the flipside?

Does my family still think I put too much time into online promotion? Am I being a bad Mom? Should I cook better dinners? Clean the house more? Spend more time doing activities with my family? Do I write or do I spend time with my family?

It’s really easy to see why there are life coaches dedicated to time management. I know this is a pretty common subject, but I really want to know how people manage full time jobs, full time families, and full time writing careers? Everyone tells me it’s a balancing act, but I sort of look at it like putting out fires. Everything is on fire, and you pick the fire to put out. Once that one is done, it’s on to the next, but by the time you’ve put out the second or third fire, the first pile is back on fire again.

Anyhow, that’s what I’m insecure about this month, am I doing a good enough job putting out the fires (did I mention, I’m also on fire in this analogy?). So how do you manage it? I've started a thing where I post pictures on my social media feed when I get too negative or whiny about publishing and time management. Here's a recent one I posted to twitter: 

Don’t forget to visit the Ninja Captain Alex and his team of cohosts: Nancy Gideon, Tamara Narayan, Liesbet @ Roaming About, Michelle Wallace, and Feather Stone!

Being skilled doesn't mean you'll get an agent, but it helps

One of the most important things I’ve learned about writing since I released a book with Curiosity Quills, is that Publishing is subjective.

When I queried the book that became Acne, Asthma, And Other Signs You Might Be Half Dragon, agents said they loved it, just not enough to represent it. As time went on I came to learn that there was a book very similar to mine that apparently flopped, and so my book was relegated to the back burners for a ton of agents because of a business happening.

At the time, what I thought was that all these agents were being nice. The invitations to sub again with a new project? Just politeness.

I had come to equate skill in writing with getting an agent. To a certain extent, that’s true. If the writing is really terrible, it’s very unlikely to be the one that lands an agent. On the other hand, even if your writing is spectacular and impeccable, if there’s something fundamentally not matched to the agent, or your story is in the unsalable category, it’s very unlikely to be something agents are after.

From the writer’s side, there’s a feeling that if my book is just good enough (great even), then I will have crossed that magic threshold of skill and be on to the realm of agent land, and it’s just not true. I really wish I had understood this earlier in my writing, and, to be honest, I still suffer a bit from this misconception. But today I’m here to remind all my writer friends that there’s something else, something more than skill when it comes to finding an agent. It's fit. It's passion. It's all the things you have about your book, the untranslatable bits that make you love it. If your agent doesn't have those feels too, it's not going to work. And I've seen enough writers part with their agents to know that process isn't always a walk in the park, but it's often a hit to the self confidence. They tell me it's worth waiting for the right one. 

What do you guys think? Do you feel like rejection is an indication of low skill and quality?

I have to remember things sometimes

Sometimes, I forget to enjoy writing.

Which is a funny statement on the surface, because writing is very much my passion. It's definitely the thing that keeps me up at night and drives me from my bed in the morning. It's sort of an impossible task, and I like that about it too.

My troubles with writing all stem from the difficulties associated with Publishing. Publishing has a unique way of making your craft a consumable product that you sell. For us writers, we spend way too much time making sure we are palatable to as many potential readers as possible, and I'm no exception. Before I tweet, I try to remember that a large chunk of my fanbase is very conservative, and I think that's wonderful. Everyone gets to be who they want to be. But knowing that definitely makes me hesitate before posting something polarizing and political--and considering how political my social media feeds have been, that should say something--I have sort of whitewashed many of my stances and beliefs on social media. I definitely don't talk about my family with the kind of candor I would if you were to meet me in person.

As well as combing through my public appearance, publishing has also sort of driven many of the stories I have tried (and sometimes failed) to tell. And that's simply no good. I have driven a story one way to be more on point, and then it suddenly wasn't. I've tried all kinds of things to make my stories fit into the buckets made available (or maybe more appropriately, known) by the market, and it just hasn't worked.

This has been a constant battle for me, and only recently have I come to understand some things about my work. When I have a project and it doesn't sell, or it doesn't get an agent, or it doesn't immediately have a huge selling, I used to think it was the writing. Now, to be clear, poor writing will often kill opportunities, so all writers should spend a lot of time absorbing craft. However, the idea of fit is starting to be a real concern.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that I qualify as an odd duck. No really. I'm a little off. I see the world differently, and that informs my writing. Some people like that, some people don't. And that's okay.

What isn't okay is when I try to write my stories to fit in. That's a no go. And I know I've talked about this before, but it's way better to fail as yourself than it is to succeed as a fake. Good luck out there, and some big news is coming soon (sorry, I'm such a tease).

Queries are more fun than usual, IWSG

After a lengthy hiatus, I've returned to the world of querying agents. I have to admit, I did not miss all the anxiety and crazy feels I get when I'm querying. I hate that I'll attempt to tweet something, you know, to interact with an agent then fret over the interaction for hours. I hate that feeling of "Whelp, now that agent thinks I'm a crazy person, auto reject in 3... 2... 1..."

Generally, that doesn't happen, but the feel is there.

The funny thing is that I didn't worry about these things when I wasn't querying. I interacted with agents (various reasons) while not querying, and it was amazing. I didn't worry about how my emails sounded (other than sounding professional, but not written by a robot), and amazingly, finding agent email in my inbox didn't fill me with one part hope and three parts demon riddled anxiety. They were normal emails saying they could or could not do a thing.

My point is that all the insecurity I've been feeling lately is wondering if an agent will love my work. After publishing, I thought I had crossed some magical landscape and found myself in the valley of self confidence. Alas, that wasn't the case. Even as I'm getting super good news, I'm still struggling to feel confident in my work.

When I was first starting out, I didn't have much feedback for my work. Now I have reviews for published works to give myself a counterpoint to the inevitable rejection, but the last time I queried, I didn't have that, so I wanted to offer up some quick thoughts.

I have hundreds of requests for a sequel to my book. People FB me all the time and ask if it's going to be a thing, and I still get down about rejections.

In short, anytime you put yourself up in a situation where someone could reject you or your work, it's going to mess with your head. Your writing is probably good, maybe even great, you just haven't found your lobster. That doesn't make you a bad writer, that makes your work not what those agents are looking for right now.

Okay, I could talk about this for a very long time, but I want to know how people manage to handle the feels that come with querying. I art. (yes, I verbified it).

Also be sure to stop by the Ninja Captain Alex, and to thank this month's Cohosts: Christopher D. Votey,Madeline Mora-Summonte, Fundy Blue, and Chrys Fey!

Doubt Colored Glasses: An Insecure Writer's Support Group

Oh Insecure Writer’s Support Group, you’ve taught me things. When I first started down this journey, I was so very jealous. I was trading manuscripts with people and our work seemed to be on par. Then, very quickly, those people all got agents. Then they got book deals. They were suddenly the shit, and I was twiddling my thumbs (if you count writing five more books twiddling).

I was so jealous of those people. I assaulted myself with all the feels because I couldn’t, or wouldn’t understand my own jealousy. I let myself think the terrible thoughts: I’m not good enough. I’m completely delusional about my talent. The world is out to get me. It really is about who you know. I thought those things and more, my jealousy festering inside me. It was dark, but those times were tinged with another darkness that had nothing to do with writing. Doubt fogged every pair of glasses I used to view the world.

I went on to publish my first book, and I’ve written about how I didn’t think it was a really real success. In fact, it’s been the problem all along. I can see the success of others, but never my own. I think that all the success I receive is part of some participation award, and everyone else was living the highlife. Better published, better written, better agented. Everyone seemed to be posting their Agent call, or their call with their editors—somehow, all of my success came with an email, never a phone call. Was I defective? How come my success looked different? That’s right, because my success wasn’t really success at all.

Then, publishing turned, as it always does, and those people I was jealous of started to be ground under the wheel of publishing. I had thought those people had made it. I’d thought their dreams were coming true. And for many of them, it did. But for others, Publishing did the thing publishing does, it moved on. Agents left. Books died in editing. One of those people had a whole writing career—agent, books, big promo—and then said peace out and deleted all of her social media profiles. She no longer publishes. (Odd side note, there are three people who fit this description, five if you relax the circumstances a tad to just let those sites go dormant).

Which is to say, Publishing is hard. It takes people’s dreams and destroys them on occasion. I don’t see their paths as successes anymore. It must be hard to get an agent and then lose an agent in the span of a couple months. I know more than one person whose book died in editing at a major house—these are the stuff of nightmare—but I coveted their place and success because I have always had a hard time seeing other paths as successes.

It’s been hard to learn to look through my doubt colored glasses and see the world. There’s more ways to success, and it’s important to remember that what looks like success on the outside might actually be a complete pile of dog poo on the inside. Doubt changes what you see in others and yourselves.

Be sure to visit the Ninja Captain, Alex and to thank this month's Co-hosts: Tamara Narayan,Patsy Collins, M.J. Fifield, and Nicohle Christopherson!

Happy Writing, everyone. (Psst, did you know next month is A to Z??? Where has the time gone!)

The Envelope Please: Son of a Pitch

Now it’s time for my votes.

I can’t even begin to tell you guys how hard this was to choose. I read through every pitch and there were 12 that based on the query and first page, I would have bought the book, so Go forth and get published so I CAN buy your book! There were more books that were just *this* close to being ready to go. Guys, I’m serious, you have to polish the spirit gum out of those manuscripts (note, though, if you aren’t one of my picks, that doesn’t mean you need to go through your manuscript—THERE IS ALWAYS ROOM FOR ONE MORE POLISH!). If I didn’t pick yours, it’s not that it wasn’t super awesome, but I only get five slots. It’s like being in a book store that only takes cash and only having a twenty. This was brutally hard to pick. The writing was amazing, the concepts: awesome.

It has been an honor to host and participate, and I really don’t like that right now, people are scrolling through and being disappointed that they weren’t my top five. I feel you. I’ve been in your shoes. My only hope is that you got good feedback on your query and your first 250 and that you can now move forward to make your writing better and even more amazing than it was before. Good luck out there, and keep your chins up! Publishing is a rough business.

And now my picks, in no particular order:

Virtual Space: I picked this one because I loved the concept and the writing. LOVED. I really enjoyed all the numbers in it. They made me laugh because I do stuff like that.

On The Edge: Oh, I love me some figure skating/hockey player drama! I loved the concept because, among other things, it reminds me of some of my favorite themes that come up around the rink.

The Bookshop: I love this concept so hard, and the writing made me so sad when I got to the end of the words. I wanted more words!

Light Witch: I loved the premise and the writing blew me away. I loved the protag the moment he started sneaking out.

Scales: I loved this one because I seem to really fall for the slacker turns it around and starts putting in the effort stories. And then the writing was really strong too! Ah, love!

So there you have it, my five picks. The biggest thing I can think to say after this is that it’s pretty clear I picked stuff that sort of got under my skin. There were other pitches that were amazing, maybe even better, but these ones had me thinking about them long afterwards. Good luck to everyone, and I want to hear from you guys in the future. Please let me know what happens with you and your books! May the Force Be With You! 

Welcome to Son of a Pitch! #TeamRebels

Welcome to my blog! This week, I’m happy to host some writers and their queries. For those of you new to Son of A Pitch, the only people who should be commenting on these posts are the approved judges and the author of the piece. All other comments will be deleted by me. (don’t make me do it!)

Other than that, look around, read some entries and have fun.

#TeamRebels

Revise and Resubmit

I have a lot of hard feelings on revise and resubmit. I had a book that everyone thought they could rehabilitate into the book they wanted. Alas. This never worked out. Many times tried. Many times failed. Many near misses.

As you might imagine, enough tries and fails makes me think this is a classic case of me not being good enough. They keep giving me a chance, and I keep not being enough. I don’t know if you guys have gone out and read what agents and editors look for, but they want you to be able to make magic with a revise and resubmit. Agents talk about how they want to be surprised in a revise and resubmit. They want the book to go someplace magical.

They want magic.

Right, so I have tried slavishly doing the things I thought were asked. Close, but not enough.

I have tried taking a new direction (as suggested). Oh, that changed the story in a way we didn't like.

I’ve tried fluffing up the world building. I’ve tried cutting out the world building.

I drew the line at completely rewriting a story to take all of the important parts of the character out.

Since they all ended in various shades of “nope,” I’m sure you can imagine that at this point, I think it’s me who sucks at revisions. Here I am with another revise and resubmit, and all I can think is “NO! Please, please, please! I want this one to work.” I’m riddled with doubt and insecurity. I want this one. But I had wanted the other one, too. I’m really worried that I’m the one the agents talk about when they say “I don’t want to work with someone who can’t take direction.” Because I worked REALLY HARD on those other revise and resubmits (I rewrote 75 of the 90,000 words for one of them), and it was still, somehow not what they were hoping for.

But what else can I do? And I really agree with this one. It really resonates with me, as they say. Oh boy. fingers crossed.

That’s my insecurity quotient for the day. Have some art:

Watercolor brush pens on watercolor paper. ©Rena Rocford

As with every IWSG, be sure to go jump on the link and hop around. Thank our cohosts,  Misha Gericke, LK Hill, Juneta Key, Christy and Joylene Buter and most definitely thank Ninja Captain Alex for hosting an awesome idea for so many years. 

The Face of the Resistance

Life is sometimes really hard. I’ve been in what can best be called a rough patch for the last few weeks, and no I don’t plan to talk about it here. But I will say that for me, when things get too hard, I revert to art.

When my master’s degree started to kick me in the pants, I wrote a novel. When my defense came and there was nothing else that could be done--I was literally just waiting for the day to arrive--I started painting again. I hadn’t painted since high school.

After these bursts of art, I always “settle back down” again—as if the pursuit of art is some sort of uppity, agitated state. As if the act of expressing ourselves is somehow a threat to the establishment.

One of my coworkers was looking at my art and asked me “why do you work here?”

Good question (more on how I like to live in a nice home and having electricity and heat at the bottom). It made me think, What does the world gain by me toeing the line and coming into my day job day after day? What would I do if I weren’t going to work all the time? Well, the last time I wasn’t going into work, I wrote two novels in just a couple months. I advanced my craft in writing and I took up dancing. When I started working again, I didn’t write as much and I’ve almost completely stopped dancing.

I stopped making art. I stopped doing the things I wanted to do to make sure I could do the things I HAD to do. Imagine if I’d stayed in that heightened state of making art? I’d have ~10 more novels. I’d have too many paintings to even fit in my house (well, I already do). At this point, I’d probably be making real money with my art. Probably not enough to live on alone, but there’s a potential. It makes me wistful to think of that life free of having to do the daily grind.

Free of the daily grind. Ah, there it is.

Then it dawned on me: art is a form of resistance. It is a threat to the establishment. If enough people make art and make art a way of life, it disrupts the drudgery work required for the oligarchy to function. The rich men in the world don’t need art. They need someone making their stuff that they sell to other people for double the price. They need the middle men. They need art to not compete with the products they sell, that they tell us we need in order to live the lives that they tell us we need to live. They don’t want you spending your money on that cute dragon you saw on etsy. They want you to buy the products out of the big box stores, the ones that are made overseas by the thousands and cost them pennies on the dollar.

Art is a threat.

Let that seep into your brain for a second. Art is the threat in the world of oligarchy. Art is the resistance.

Welcome to the resistance:

And about paying the bills: You have to do what you have to do. In general, there’s room for doing the things that make you feel alive. I have a day job, and it’s not something I’m giving up anytime soon for reasons of practicality. But just because I’m working a 9 to 5 (or more specifically, a 6 to 5), doesn’t mean I can’t be dedicated to making art as well. Do the things that bring you joy. That saying about the only real revenge is to live well? That’s the truth. 

Fill the box

Art has this funny way of being really hard on beginners. I think most people have heard the quote from Ira Glass about how a lot of artists get into the creative business but drop out when what we envision isn’t something we can manifest into reality. This is the most frustrating thing.

With drawings, if you take every sketch you’ve made, and you put it in a box, once you’ve filled the box, you’ll have improved your drawing skills. It’s simple, the more sketches you do, the better you will be at making sketches.

On some levels, we think this should work for writing, but it isn’t that simple. With visual arts, it’s sometimes easier to judge it because you have this sort of third eye in your mind. You can see it in your mind and compare it to the thing you make in reality. When you start making the paintings look the way they look in your mind, you know you’re close. But how do you do that with a novel?

 Encompassing an entire novel in your mind isn’t an easy thing to do. There are parts, ideas, feels, but the whole thing? Not so much. With a sketch, the whole thing can be judged in one moment, but it takes hours to read a novel. Even though they don’t compare to paintings or drawings, one thing remains the same: the more novels you write, the better you will be at writing novels.

Does this make them good? Being competent at an art form does not make a person good at it. For instance, I’ve been watching Bob Ross painting shows. That man is amazing at how he takes shapes and boils them down quickly into things that can be put together into a painting. He’s got composition, and the colors go together very nicely. I have enough craft that I could probably reproduce his tutorial pieces by following along and being stubborn.

I could do that with novels, too.

I could (and have!) sit and diagram out my favorite novels. I’ve studied the way the plot unfolds, the way the characters are presented, and I could reproduce them if I were to go painstakingly through them. Bit by bit they could be remade. But you know what that makes? It makes a sort of puppet novel.

And that’s why paint by numbers offends some people. You can do what Brandon Sanderson calls the cook method, “Oh, I need a mentor and he needs to die so the main character can grow his wings and fly.” Those are perfectly acceptable forms of novels. Some of them even do very well, but if you’re in writing because you had a vision about the kinds of stories you wanted to tell, making your book according to a recipe isn’t going to work out.

Which brings us to the problem of going from competent to great. I am certain that anyone with enough dedication can reproduce something they love in the same way that a photograph reproduces the view from the top of half dome. But the view just doesn’t compare to the way the wind slips up the cliff like it’s going to suck you off into the void. I doubt the photograph makes you feel as if your life is in danger by standing on that razor edge between two feet firmly on the ground and the better part of mile drop to the valley below. The picture is beautiful, but being there will change your soul.

With novels it’s harder to know if we’ve lost someone in the woods, or the path took a wrong turn until we’ve gotten to the end of the novel and had others read it. They didn’t get to the mountain top, or they felt like it was more of a mole hill. Always so vexing when our vision isn’t understood, but those attempts have given us something. At least the reader felt the rise. Maybe they saw bits of the view between the forest of melodramatic metaphor (such as this bit here). The point is, you have to put in the effort. You have to fill the boxes with your art.

Oh but Rena, my best friends, sister’s ex-girlfriend wrote her first and only book and it sold a bajillion copies. She had ten agents offer her representation—the only ten agents she sent her query letter to!—and she now lives in Scotland with a castle and a staff to see to her mandatory hiking breaks.

Wow. Welp, that’s super awesome for your best friend’s sister’s ex-girlfriend, but I also heard about this guy who got struck by lightning 19 times. I don’t use that as a reason to assume the first rumble of thunder is going to nail me in the back of the head (though, to be clear, I definitely practice lightning safety as I am a coward!). My point is, yes, some people are really lucky and everything falls into place perfectly. For the rest of us mere mortals, the way to making the art we envision is through practice.

You will have to write more than you ever dreamed, and before you think about how you’re done with that nicely polished novel and its three major edits, just wait until you get an editor and they ask you to rewrite most of the end… and most of the beginning… and maybe we could do something different with that middle bit?—but that’s a discussion for another day.

It's Friday the 13th, and there's nothing scarier than politics

If you’ve been paying attention to US politics, you know the US is currently pretty strongly divided. I don’t think it’s a controversial statement to say that our marginalized people—the artists, the LGBT, the disabled, the children, the freelancers and entrepreneurs—are going to suffer under this administration.

I am a very lucky person. I currently have my health and a full time job. My full time job is something I don’t talk about because most of it is confidential in nature, so it doesn’t come up. My job is largely underpaid, but it comes with my favorite feature: healthcare. It comes with healthcare for myself and my family (to the tune of ~500 a month out of my pocket). Until I meet my deductable (500!) I have to pay everything out of pocket. I went to the doctor for pink eye (that I got from my job, no less), and it cost me $100 to speak to the physician for 5 minutes before he gave me a prescription and sent me on my way.

I don’t tell this story because I think people want to know the perks of my job. I’m telling this story because that’s what it costs to treat pink eye. Conjunctivitis. This was at the local, rural health clinic. When a kid goes to school and they have pink eye, they get sent home.

Right now, with the ACA is still going (they have voted to repeal it, but it will still take time to trickle down to the home front as it were; besides, people already paid their January premiums), so many people have coverage, specifically the working poor. I’m talking about your nearly full time employees of Walmart, McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc. These people are supporting their families, their sick spouses, their three kids from a traditional marriage. Very soon, when their kids get sick, they won’t have health insurance. Very soon, when their kid gets sent home with pink eye, they will be looking at a $100 doctor’s visit plus the $35 dollars to get the drops (and the time off work to take care of their kid who can’t go to day care because they have a highly contagious disease).

A bit of math, if you’ll hear me out. So this person makes minimum wage and works, oh, let’s say 30 hours a week (because 32 hours and their employer would have to provide health coverage), so they are making 300 dollars a week. If this is in my home town and they have a one bedroom apartment, that means 800 dollars is going just to rent. Let’s say this person is super frugal and is able to feed their family on 200 dollars a month. That means there’s only 200 dollars left for EVERYTHING ELSE: electricity, car, gasoline, clothes, toilet paper, diapers if there’s a baby, babysitting/child care costs. And they have to come up with $100 to take the kid to the doctor and the school won’t let the kid come back to school until they’ve been to the doctor.

Before anyone tells me these people, these working poor, don’t exist, let me assure you all that they do. My entire job is going through the earnings of people who have applied for medical aid, temporary aid for needy families, and food stamps. Yes, I am an eligibility worker, and I have yet to meet a welfare queen, but I’ve met plenty of people working multiple jobs who don’t have coverage for themselves or their children through their work. And before anyone tells me “but wait, they qualify for food stamps!” that’s not how it works. Food stamps is a supplemental program based on income, which means, the more they earn, the less food stamps they get. I picked a 1200 a month job on purpose. If this person has one kid and 1200 a month in income, they are going to qualify for roughly 50 bucks of foodstamps. Sure, it’ll help, but not much. With the repeal of the ACA, those margins for people receiving medical assistance gets even smaller. Fewer people will qualify, including people making about 1200 a month. For real, if you are making minimum wage and not quite working full time, you do not qualify for state based medical assistance.

Or my personal favorite, you have two part time jobs and you work a total of 50 hours a week. Neither job provides you with health coverage, and you now make enough money that No One in your family qualifies for medical assistance from the state.

These are the people who will not be covered now that the ACA is gone. People who are working their butts off. People who are crushed between just trying to make ends meet, doing the right thing and being told on every side that they are the lazy ones destroying the system.

Without health coverage, more children will be sent home from school for contagious diseases and not go to the doctor. The parents will wait a couple days and send the kid back to school, infection still raging and still contagious.

Children will not be treated because it is too expensive. Children will die.

Children.

They didn’t ask to be born into a poor family. Literally, their only crime is that they came from a family who was too poor. That’s it.

We, the citizens of the United States live in an oligarchy, and we are too stupid to realize it. The insurance companies wanted out of the ACA because they weren’t making enough profit. Not that they weren’t making profit, but that they weren’t making ENOUGH profit.

And children will die from this because their parents can’t afford to take them to the doctor.

Children.

I am so upset, I don’t even have words. More on that soon.

I'm waiting for Vicini: an IWSG post

Wow, it’s been four long years since I started Insecure Writer’s Support Group---wait, hold on, I can’t count. It’s been FIVE YEARS!

Five Years.

It seems impossible that so much time could have passed since I decided to jump in on these Insecure Writer’s Support Group. When I started on this journey, I imagined I’d be farther along by now. Little did I know, publishing is VERY slow.

Did I mention slow? Glacial would be more accurate.

It takes forever to hear back from agents. Then it takes forever to hear back from acquisitions. Then it takes forever to hear back from editors. Always the waiting. When I remind myself of how much time I spent just waiting to hear back, it doesn’t surprise me that it’s taken me this long to get a book out into the world.

So, if I could give any new writer one piece of advice, it would be to not wait. Write more, wait less.

That doesn’t mean skip directly to self publishing—that can take a long time too! What I mean is that while you’re waiting for responses, don’t just sit on your thumbs. Get back to the writing, it is the only thing that will help your career as a writer that you can actively work on while you are waiting. #LearnFromMyFail

Don’t forget to visit the Ninja Captain, Alex, and this month’s co-hosts: Eva @ Lillicasplace,Crystal Collier, Sheena-kay Graham, Chemist Ken, LG Keltner, and Heather Gardner!