Know thy self

As it turns out, many of us don’t get those clarifying moments in our lives when we can label ourselves with any sort of accuracy, but I was granted one such day. While on summer field (an intensive six week course on mapping), we had the privilege of mapping in a region of Nevada with deep, rumpled valleys. The floors of the valleys were at 7000 feet, the rims: 9000 feet. We, of course, were out in the middle of Nevada mapping in mid July. While most of Nevada is a very dry kind of desert, this region is prone to the occasional summer thunderstorm (Ely, Nevada for those who care). As always, the most interesting things are always the ones hardest to get to, and the rocks in this valley were no different. All the interesting rocks were at the top, along the rim, and that’s where we would all be hiking.

As per the normal routine, we got out of the vans and listened to the days lecture on the rocks we were about to map, and how we needed to determine the structure in the area and what forces had folded the regions rocks like the front end of a Toyota camri after a head on collision. Then, to our surprise, the TAs moved on to give us a talk about safety. They described the effects of lightning (as if we’d never been through a lightning storm before), and finished off by saying that if we found ourselves in an ionized column we should throw all the metal on our person as far away as possible while crouching down in the fetal position and balancing on our tip toes. No joke, and this is still the recommended stance if you’re caught out in the open.

Of course, we all looked around, sort of nervously inspecting our boot laces. I used the awkward moments to take stock of my metal objects: Cell phone, rock hammer, compass, carabineers to clip stuff onto my back pack, belt buckle, metal eyelets of my boots… the list went on and on. I came to the conclusion that I was a walking conductor with no actual hope of shedding all this metal in time to dodge out of the striking lightning. But the sky was clear, so when they ended their rousing safety speech, I, like everyone else, headed straight up the side of the mountain to get to those tantalizing rocks at the top.

That was at 7am. By 10 am, enormous billowing clouds were forming at 8,000 feet. That’s right, I got to watch thunder-boomers forming from above, nice perspective that. At noon I ate my sandwich while dipping my feet in the clouds, feeling like some great god toying with nature. By one, lightning was striking all around. I hadn’t finished mapping, and I’d be damned if I caved in before the boys. There was a bit of rivalry between the ladies and our male counterparts who seemed to have lost the ability to talk about anything other than mapping naked—it was that remote.

Determined to stay the course, and make the world’s greatest map, I played chicken with the clouds. I told myself that I’d stay on the ridge until the lightning was really REALLY close. I decided that anything under the 4 second mark would be a little too close for comfort. And so I walked along the ridge counting between the flash and the boom to determine if my life was yet in danger. I know this is a terrible way to do it. People can be struck by lightning as far as twenty miles from a storm. And here I had lightning on all sides: Grade A dumb.

Then one particularly bright flash happened and I opened my mouth to count (turns out I talk to myself while mapping the great wilds). The percussion wave knocked the air out of me before I could say “One.”

At that moment in life I knew something very valuable about myself: I am a coward.

With no conscious thought, my legs propelled me right over the edge towards the valley floor and presumed safety. I leapt bushes, rocks, and cacti. Nothing would slow me. I have never—before or since—moved as fast as that day. I descended 2,000 feet without falling in only a few short (terrified!) seconds. I really have no idea how I managed it, but by the time I made the valley floor, the gods had sent hail stones to ensure I’d learned my lesson.

And boy did I ever. I’m mortal. A mortal coward.

And what does this have to do with anything? Well, I’m about to send out the query letter, and I feel like I did at 3:30 that day, hiking back up to 9000 feet.

The Crazy Dream Department is open for business

Okay, so we all have anxiety, and without turning this into some sort of my-life-is-harder-than-yours contest, let me just say I’ve got a lot on my plate, and I worry about all of it. My short list:

Am I being a bad mother to my 2 year old?

Will I ever actually graduate? Seven years seems extensive…

Will any of my writing endeavors actually lead to something more than “I loved your book, honey” from my mom?

After I do graduate, how will I get a job?

My short list sure makes me think I wouldn’t win any of those my-life-is-harder-than-yours contests, and you know what? That’s great news for me. Still, I spend a lot of time worrying that I’m wasting my life on things that have marginal value. And so much of my life is out of control. I perceive I have little control over major, career affecting moments in my life. And like any good homo sapien sapien, when my back is up against a wall, out come the crazy anxiety dreams.

When I have bad dreams they come in exactly three flavors: snakes, nuclear reactors and natural disasters (usually volcanoes, but earthquakes and tsunamis are a close second). What spawned this tour of my crazy-@55 dream factory was a dream I had two nights ago. Most of my dreams are pretty easy to interpret, from a psychological standpoint, and I won’t waste anyone’s time on the easy ones. No, the ones I find intriguing are the weirdos, where I wake up and shake my head. Did my mind really just make that up?

Two nights ago, I dreamt I was typing on a type writer that spit out words in 180 point type. Only the type writer made objects out of the words. A sentence was larger than a 2 by 4. As I typed out my novel (literally), the words filled the room. I noticed water was coming in from under the door, and I thought, “Oh my god! It’s a tsunami!” I leapt from my chair and headed outside to find higher ground, but it was already too late. The tsunami was approaching, and instead of debris and cars like we are seeing out of Japan—my most sincere condolences to all who are suffering there—my novel rushed towards me in a jumble of giant words. To escape, I climbed aboard an apostrophe (not the punctuation mind you, but the word) thinking that it would float better than other words lying about. The reason for this line of thought is that there are numerous closed circles, as anyone who has ever used the paint bucket tool to color in will notice right off the bat: two Os, two Ps, an A and an E (in lower case in my dream).

Yeah, weird, I was saved by apostrophe. 

Then there was the time I had a dream where someone stole my printer. At the time it wasn’t much of a printer. In fact, it was free after the mail in rebate, and I had printed more on it than any other printer previously. I’d printed and bound six books from that printer. In my dream I was riding on the train from the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you know, the circus train? Well in my dream there was a passenger car on the train. Sitting in my seat, I noticed someone carrying a printer. I realized it was my printer and I jumped up, yelling, “Hey, that’s my printer!” The guy carrying it turned around, and I saw he wore a gorilla suit. But it wasn’t a good gorilla suit with real hair, or anything, he was wearing a felt gorilla suit. Yeah, I know, I can’t even have my stuff stolen by a classy gorilla suit wearing dude. I take off after him and a chase scene right out of the Indiana Jones movie ensues. Mr. Gorilla suit did make it off the train and into the wilds with my printer.

An interesting side note is that my printer, which had been long in telling us of its eminent demise, died the very next day. I guess the gorilla got it after all…

And then there’s the agent dream. I’ve almost written about this one before just because it gives me a feeling of empowerment over the process. In that dream, I’m standing before an 8’x8’x16’ block of marble. In my dream, I know that it’s marble from Pietrasanta, the quarry that Michelangelo got his marble for statues such as David.  And then I begin to carve. I carve out 7 figures from the marble so the top halves are almost free of the rest of the marble. They are carved in the neoclassical form, and after a while, I realize that the seven people are actually literary agents with offers (ha! Seven agents with offers, what a gas!).

Again, I like that one because, while it is strange to carve ones offers out of stone, it made me feel like maybe I could. Sure it would be hard, but everything worth doing is hard. Yes it would take a lot of work, but in the end, maybe I’d have David.

Getting back into things

On the eve of leaving for my evil scientist convention (Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, for those of you who want to know), I finished a major edit of my WIP. I decided that I'd give myself some time off, because conferences are sort of draining, kind of like walking from California to New York might take a while. How conferences go for me is, well, a mystery that I won't go into, but I will say that I got a total of six hours of sleep over a 72 hour period. Yeah, not pretty.
When I got back from the conference, I went to work on the dissertation, and because of that, the last chapter has been completely revised, and now I have to go through and redo all 39 figures (39?! what's wrong with me?), so that's taking up more than the usual amount of time.
Why do I talk about this stuff? Well, Newton was right, Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, while objects at rest are likely to remain at rest. In short, there is momentum in writing, and once broken, it's hard to build it back up again. I know that I need to give my brain a break from the work I just did, but now I'm sort of at a crossroads, what do I work on?
Do I do more editing, or do I plunge into first draft land? 
And no, for the record, the dissertation doesn't count.
Up next, by popular demand, mind: Crazy Dreams ("Was it that one where you're standing on a pyramid in sun god robs, while naked women through pickles at you? Why am I the only one who has that dream?"--Real Genius). And for the record, I don't take credit for my crazy dreams, but one of my novels (one that I'm thinking about redoing, but not for a long while), came from a dream.

Who knew?

I've done it. I'd give in to my baser desires and unleash the mad scientist evil laughter here--it really does sound like Daffy Duck--but I'm at an evil scientist convention.
I have, however, completed a round of edits on my WIP, and I'm astonished at myself. I've already edited this piece a number of times (four to be exact), but this is the first edit that really improved the prose. And that's what this one was, an edit to take out the bad words (See George Carlan's skits for more on bad words), passive verbs, and awkwardness in general. The amazing thing for me is that without changing any of the scenes, barely tweaking the flow of information, I found 10,000 extraneous, useless, and other wise redundant words (Yes, I am a card carrying member of the the Redundancy Department of Redundancy, why do you ask?).
Ten thousand. That's a whole ton of was/were/had/have/been/would/could/that. In fact, that was a full tenth of the novel. Okay, to be fair, I cut a lot of adjectives and adverbs to (how many times can I use beautiful? don't I have any other words?), but still, ten thousand words is a lot. Also on the chopping block was my personal favorite line from the book, but it had to go because it was actually out of character (and a little too mean).
So, one more read through for typos and flow, and I'm golden...


Right?

Not Subtle

I went to Borders yesterday. The store closest to my house is closing. I feel bad buying books at a reduced price because I wonder if the authors still get their royalties. But who can afford new books all the time. Well, not me, and it had been a little over a year since I'd purchased a new novel. The reason that I stopped buying new books is because I went through a phase where I bought and read a lot of books, just not books that were healthy for me.
See, I'm a research scientist, so when I was part of a writing group I did as much research on writing and how to write as possible. Let me just say, reading a book about writing is as close to reading beauty magazines as I'll ever get. I just can't handle the way those books make me feel. I've compared it to buying a book on walking, then finding out that all these years you've been walking all wrong! Who knew! For me this is the moment when I try to change how I walk, carefully following the instructions in my 'walking' book. Then I fall flat on my face, usually in front of someone important. Instead of going back to walking the way I walked before, I buy another book on how to walk. This cycle continues until I can't even walk down the street. Then I stop and say "What the hell is wrong with me? I know how to walk!" This is what writing books do to me. But I can't stay away from them.
I have to admit that eventually, reading all those books on writing I've learned the one thing that has helped me: process. Mine is, sadly, redundant (us science types prefer efficiency). It turns out that I have to write my first draft full of to be, adverbs and cliches. Then I have to edit for plot issues. Then typos. Then I have to go through and clean up my prose. Then I have to clean up the prose again. Then it's the cliche edit, and lastly an edit just for typos at the end. After that, well, it's starting to seem like a pretty good manuscript.
So as I'm closing in on my final (ha! what a laugh, final) edits I perused the writing section at Borders. I've been down that road before, and I knew as I stood there that no book in that section should make its way home with me. Then a book stood out from the others. One I'd never seen there before: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Mastering Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
I blinked, really? I mean really?
I know writers are a little... off, but really, that's just mean. Yes we obsess, but we obsess because we love writing. And seriously, in a process that involves going through a manuscript seven times (cutting my very favorite line mind you--it was out of character *sigh*), how can writers not be a bit OCD.  Sometimes I loose sleep over whether my opening chapter has too much dialogue or too much exposition (everyone recommends something different in all those books on walking). 

SNEs

Okay, I promise (as in cross-my-heart-hope-to-die promise) that this blog will not descend into the darkness of "my baby is *so* cute."
Having said that, I just needed to share (uh-oh, not another inappropriate sharing event), but my daughter has a new skill: disrobing. She's getting better at it. In fact, she does it well enough that we've coined a term for it: Spontaneous Naked Events or SNEs (bonus points to those of you who thought this post was going to be about the second generation console from Nintendo).
So the other day, while talking to my mother on the phone, my daughter ran into the room, buck naked, swinging her shirt over her head--I swear, I don't know where she get's this from--and laughing maniacally.
I said "Mom, I've gotta go. I've got an SNE."
"SNE?"
"Yeah, spontaneous naked event."
"Oh," then in a hushed whisper, "oh. Good luck, honey."

Yup, that's my life in a nut shell, just one step away from an SNE at any minute. Ah, to be two again.

(and of course I have an acronym for it. I get paid through grants from NASA, the acronym names are made of!)

If you do it too much, do you go blind?

I was cruising around the Lucy Carson Blog when I came across this blog. It's all about casturbation. Never heard of it? Well, let me tell you, not only have you experienced it, you probably enjoyed it too. Casturbation is the act of dreaming up who will play which characters in the movie based off your book.
I used to play this game with a whole group of people; it was our favorite thing to do. (Is it Cax if you do it with more than one person? Is it a Corgy when you do it in a group?). Of course, I should explain and give some context. At the time I was fencing a lot, and no, I don't mean black market goods, I mean honest to goodness swordplay. Fencers tend to round out the field left of middle. Oh hell, they aren't even in the ball park, they're casing the cars in the parking lot for random D&D books (though they might break in for a nice bit of anime, or a tome on medieval French art). The point is, fencers are strangely educated and diverse. Despite that they are easily categorized, but they are notoriously difficult to pin down in any meaningful way when it comes to real characterization. I think the nicest term I've ever heard was elegant nerd. One of the less nice terms I heard bandied about was murderous. Both fit. It's hard to capture that in a character who, at best, gets a slice of 90 minutes in a screen play.
So we'd sit around and try to dream up how a movie about our escapades would go. Inevitably we'd get stuck in casturbation (corgy?).  Man I loved those games.  I think our favorite cast included the likes of Christian Bale, Lucy Lawless, Jeff Goldblum (yeah Ethan, that's at you), Charlize Theron, Brad Pitt, and of course Angelina Jolie. In short, the beautiful people.
But that was fun. We knew better. It was fun. But like all addictive things, you have to be careful. It's habit forming, and it's a bad habit for writers. It's even worse when query letters involve casturbation. If you read the link, you'll know I'm not even joking.
Yowsers, I thought everyone knew not to casturbate in public.

Good advice, But how?

I came across a great post today by Janet Reid. The basics are don't talk about being in the query process. As some of you might imagine, I'm of two minds on this advice.

One: Oh, yeah, I see where she's coming from. Crazy, delusional, writers complaining about waiting for the queries to be answered. Obsessive writers who analyze every word of their form rejection letter. Writers who are having dreams about the query process (did I mention I had another crazy query letter dream? Why do I have an overactive Crazy F**ing Dream Department?). I can see that we aren't putting our best foots forward when we complain about long waits and "what the hell does 'not right for me' mean?" (And for the record, I do have a clue--Thank you Miss Snark!--I don't like some books that I should love, so I'm betting its exactly the same for agents!).

Two: I can see that we writers are shooting ourselves in the foot by putting this stuff out there, but I have a confession. Every time I've held a secret close to my heart, letting it fester for years, the first person I tell it to says "Oh My God! I thought I was the only one who felt that way!" Strange, but it's happened to me a lot.

The query process feels like this one big question to the world for validation. I know it isn't, but it feels like it. It seems like writers need some form of acknowledgment from an agent before they can feel like a real writer. And for all of us amateurs (yeah, one master's thesis, a dissertation languishing in revision hell, three utterly unpublishable books, three manuscripts I'm still hopeful for, and I'm as amateur as they come), querying is a step towards this mythical validation. I know that querying isn't the biggest step, but it sure is the first step on the yellow brick road. It feels like the biggest step (oh, yeah, that's my amateur speaking, see how it doesn't even know the big steps from the little ones?). The funny thing is that we've been trained nearly from birth about the first step. How many times has Bugs warned Elmer about that first step. You know, the one that's the dosy?

Clearly, I've said too much. I've mentioned that I'm querying. I've even mentioned that I'm on hold pending a really real edit that should help me feel like my work is ready--whatever that means. Shoot, the whole reason I started this blog, you know using my real name and everything, was to talk about the process. So how can I maintain that and not talk about queries?

Why is life always full of these kinds of damned if you do, damned if you don't moments?

So, I guess, I'll just have to use a regular old paper journal for a while and I'll talk about the process after I've been through it.

Thanks again Shark!

Doing the write thing

For fun I often write out equations for common phenomena. Yes, yes, I'm nerdy. Really really nerdy. I've actually been praised for my construction of the Laziness Factor in graduate students. The third postulate of the graduate student Laziness Factor (I can't be bothered to look up the first two), is that given enough time, all deadlines converge. Much like perspective makes the incredible light display look like all those incredible sun rays converge just behind the clouds when in fact they are parallel, given enough time, deadlines that appear to be parallel will, in fact, converge. I know readers from my other blog will recall my detailed hypothesis and testing phases of this postulate, so I'll not go into them here.  But a classic example is when a student takes two classes. At some point, the two midterm papers appear to be due weeks apart, giving the student some measure of control of their life, but then the prof in one class gets ill. Material is missed, and, to be nice, the prof pushes back the due date. If you haven't experienced this, then it's likely you haven't been taking a lot of classes.
This happens in the real world too, and I don't know how or why, it just does (and really, why is the speed of light 3 x 10^8 m/s?).
So now, I know how to beat the system. I'm working on my dissertation. Yeah, I've been working on it forever (it is currently longer than a novel, and so are my adviser's comments), and it's really starting to look like it'll come to a head any week now. I'm also working on my novel. I had thought it was completely ready (oops). So this time, I'm going to do a double full edit plus a read through. That should get the manuscript into the realm of shiny. Then I'll be able to query, confident in the knowledge that an agent could ask for a full on the same day my adviser tells me that he wants my whole dissertation reformatted and the last chapter rewritten from start to finish, and I can manage both.
That would be the write thing to do... right?

Ah well, I can dream big, but even I know that something will happen before I've been through my book enough for me to think of it as done.

The conundrum (not to be confused with corundum)

I hate the query letter. I'm always working on the query letter. I don't know if I'll ever get it right. I have an impossible time walking the line of interesting versus "Come on down to Bob's used car lot." Yeah, I sound like a cheap cable commercial. I got one partial request based on a query letter, but subsequent queries with same said query haven't drummed up any love. So I'm thinking that I need to redo the query (and maybe make a sacrifice to the query shark).
My problem is that so many agents have an idea about what a query summary should be, and they're all conflicting. Some agents want every scrap of the 250 words, while others think that more than three sentences is a waste of their time. My only request came from a three sentence query, and that came back so fast it must have been sent priority email (it had an evil typo in it--Khaaaaaaaaan!--so I'm not surprised it got kicked back). But as I'm going through my edit, I know it's time to pull my query back out and start brushing it off. And since all advice from the agents in blog land is riddled with conflicting suggestions, I'm torn. It makes me want to jump off the gimmick bridge and query with a letter that reads something like,
Three tips for being a faerie godmother:
1. Take off your high heels when chasing wizards through the streets.
2. When looking for your wand, try to remember that you already put it away.
3. While fighting the evil wizard in your dragon form, be certain to chew carefully. Evil wizards will give you the worst gas.

Yeah, that's not going to make agents ask for a partial. It'll make them ask for a restraining order.
So, there it is, boring or gimmicky, the conundrum.   *uses forehead to test the tensile strength of desk*
I guess the real answer is something that's humorous (the tone of the book),  yet captures the essence of the book.
Too bad I can't make essence of book by boiling it down in a cauldron...

(oh, and for those of you who don't know Corundum is the mineral name for sapphires and rubies, which can sometimes be found in CAIs, which is what my dissertation is on)

Editing

I would have thought that after all these years I might have bought a clue along the way. So there's this word that agents use in their blogs when referring to a novel worthy of sending out on query: Polished. Now at first I thought that the word polished meant that my chapters shouldn't have any major issues or typos (I'm dyslexic, I thought the typos would be the hardest part. Ha! Wrong again). Then I thought polished meant a rewrite followed by a single edit. And then, because it's hard to be that stupid that long, I realized that maybe they meant polished like what you do to rocks and metals to make them shiny. Shiny? Huh, a shiny manuscript? Oh yeah, I've got some work to do. So, being the kind of proactive I like to be, I'm not sending out any new queries until I'm confident that my shiny manuscript will start knocking off some socks (because stealing all the socks in the world is one of the steps to ruling the world!).
And I'm glad I've done it. My beta readers are all pleased with the changes I've made. It makes me wonder if I didn't start editing while I was still in the honeymoon phase. Now that I've made changes, I have to go hunting for that ever elusive typoe (seen here in it's natural habitat).  So it's back to the wild lands of editing for me. Now all I have to do is go over it another 200 times and I should have a shiny manuscript.

And to think, I used to worry that I might edit something to death (only one of many illusions shattered by actually trying to get an agent).

Double Agent

Ah the quandary of it, no one I do science with wants to hear about my novels, and none of my writing friends want to hear about my science.
It's gotten bad in the last few weeks. As I go through the process of figuring out how to make a query work, I'm excited about my writing. Admittedly, my science of late has been... slow. Dry. Dare I say it: boring. I don't usually get to this point in my research, but my adviser has been taking his sweet time giving me revision requests on my dissertation (I actually go through xboxes faster than he goes through chapters), and I haven't had new data for 18 months. It's not pretty. 
Now that I'm on the brink (and by on the brink, I mean I have another 23 miles to go in this marathon), I really want to talk to people. It's hard to draw a line down the middle of me and say: these friends who are also my colleagues, don't want to hear about how I got a partial request for my novel. Mostly they think my novel writing is an unfortunate phase that I'll grow out of when I graduate. All of us go through some crazed times when finishing, and they just think my crazies are more eccentric than other scientists they know.
And  so I don't tell them. All my coworkers don't know that I'm in the last chapters of my third novel (first drafts only, of course) in 18 months (hmm, a correlation to the lack of new data perhaps?). I'm walking around with this 310,000 word (yes that's all three) secret in my pocket.
I'm secret agent writer. Scientist by day, fantasy writer by night.

Ah well, I guess most people have hobbies they try to hide from the people they work with.

So that's what they mean by all consuming...

I am currently in the land of Query. I know everyone who's read my blog knows that I'm in the process of querying for The Accidental Godmother right now. And while hunting around for more agents, I found an agent's blog that totally rocks. (That's BookEnds, LLC for those of you who don't hit the link) I've been reading through it, gleaning what I can from the pages, and I have to say it's definitely on par with the Query Shark. So I read through quite a bit of the blog then sent my query off. And then I started to worry. It seemed like she (Ms. Faust) really has her act together, and for a while I could just feel the form rejection letter would be sitting in my inbox when I got up in the morning (I query at night because I'm usually working on my dissertation or teaching or watching the wee one during the day).
After querying (an e query, with no sample pages mind you. It really doesn't get easier than that) I had a dream where I was painstakingly making pottery vases. I'd collect the clay, put it on the wheel, mold vases into existence. I sent my wet clay vases to a kiln, and while they were being fired, I went out and collected seeds and bugs that I then crushed into inks. When my vases were returned to me, I then painted the inside (the inside?!) of the vases with my query letter, carefully using all the calligraphy I've ever learned in an attempt to make them as beautiful (again, this is the inside of the vase) as possible. Then I cut out corks to fit the tops of the vases and stoppered them. Then, I drove with my car full of vases (it was an old style VW wagon from the seventies like my grandmother used to have) to the ocean (I currently live in New Mexico, but I recognized the bit of sea as being from the Mendocino coast line south of Albion), and I threw my beautiful, painstakingly rendered vases into the sea.
So, today, I'm not looking at querying anything or anybody. Clearly, I need a touch of a break from that. I'll work on EXILES, because I need to get that rough draft off my plate and move on to the next one: THE BETTER HALF.
Oh, and did I mention, I've never worked with clay before? and I can totally feel how my hands would be sore after throwing vases now. Well, I guess I can fly in my dreams to, so why not a little pottery.

A post from the past.

Here's a re-post. Yes I wrote it. Yes, it's all true. (and no, I'm not resting on my laurels here, I thought a little humor would brighten up my day).

How Halo has made me a better Mom.
No, I'm not even kidding. Halo really has made me a better mom. I think I'm going to have to explain that a little bit.
See, in video games there are really two types: the kind where your character gets better through upgrades and leveling and what have you, and the kind where your character never gets any better. In the second type, the only thing that ever improves is your own personal skill at the game. You are ultimately the weakest link in this sort of gaming environment and to quote Yahtzee for a moment "They hurt us 'cause they love us." Yeah, it's hard, yeah sometimes you spend more time fragging hairy apes than you meant to, but you learn to be a better player or move on. With each death you learn about how to evaluate situations and make snap decisions (do I shoot the grunt in the head or the groin? should I hit the big dude first, or the dude who's closest to me first?). All these decisions have to be made in a split second or your character dies and you get to replay the scene all over again (not much fun).
And some of you may be asking yourselves how this has *anything* to do with raising children. Well let me tell you, when you're raising kids there are no upgrades, and there are no do overs. So, in light of this strict environment I'd like to propose these simple rules that have, over the past few months been honed to a fine edge (molecular even).
Baby rules from Halo
1. Know where the enemy is at all times. This quickly translates to diaper changing, especially as M becomes more adapt at deciding what she picks up. For some reason she has become fascinated with diapers. And, of course, her favorites to get a hold of are the ones full of poo. I'm not sure how she can tell, but rule number one of all diaper changing situations is know where the poo is (preferably out of the reach of the child).
2. Always be faster than your enemy. Translation: pick it up before the child does. If it's something she can have, hand it to her, but in case it isn't, just be in the habit of picking it up first. This is particularly helpful around cutlery and wineglasses.
3. Encourage confusion in the enemy. Translation: if the child is enthralled by a popping noise you learned how to make in junior high she might open her mouth and stare at you. For you rookies out there, that's a good time to insert the peas into your child's mouth.
4. Distractions are your best friend and worst enemy. Translation: don't become distracted by something anyone is doing unless it is your child. The second you aren't paying attention to your child is the moment she'll grab slimy dog food (preferably from the dogs lips, as my older sister did in her youth) and attempt to swallow it whole. On the other hand, if your kids in a terrible mood a little distraction goes a LONG way. Of course, in Halo, I use grenades as distractions... less useful around small children, but the premise is the same.
5. Team work is always more effective. In Halo, Ravenna and I team up for a crushing victory over the covenant when we need a little down time. Similarly, M stands little chance against our combined might. Though I'm not sure exactly which prophet she'd be, especially considering that all they do is whine and get carted around by mechanical things... oh, and they have english accents...Well, if she has to be one of the prophets, I'm going to go with Truth, he's the one with the great monologue.

I know better, so why am I an idiot?

I've been researching literary agents. Yes, I know I already have queries out, and yes I know that I shouldn't send to every agent in North America at once. Still, to have a real clue about the agent I'm attempting to woo with my query, I think it's only fair that I put a little leg work into it first. Besides, if my queries don't land any love, it's good to have a back up plan. That way I don't just sit around wallowing in self pity and doubt, I already know who I'm going to query next. It's unusually proactive of me, but  research is one of those things that I just do. Yet, there's this problem with researching literary agents.
I pull up their blog, and there they talk about the people they've signed, and they often have links to those author's blogs. Normally this is great, but then, like TV tropes, I find that I've been reading other writers' blogs all day without writing. And what's worse, I start to feel intimidated about writing, as though their successes diminish my ability. It's like reading these blogs erodes what little confidence I have about my own writing.
And I know better. I know that their success does not make it harder for me to have my own, so why do they scare me? Why does reading a great book always convince me that I'm the worst writer on the planet? And then I go back to writing, still convinced that my stuff is never going to sell and I'm never going to get an agent.
I guess one of the prerequisites for being a writer is to have a masochistic streak.
Well, I've got that covered.