The thing is, no teacher ever bothered to connect the dots for us.

“And today,” the teacher would say, “we are going to learn about the romances of King Arthur!”

“So,” we would reply, “like my mother’s romances in the cupboard—hooray! We’re going to learn about sex and happiness!”

“No!” The teacher was always scandalized at this point. “You are going to learn how sex makes people deeply unhappy and all of the life choices made under the guise of true love will ruin your existence forever.”
“Well shit,” we’d think. “King Arthur was a weenie who spoiled it for everybody.”  And then we’d get a big salacious thrill out of watching Arthur, Gwenevere, Lancelot, Tristan, and Gawain completely screw up their lives.

But we didn’t see how it was romance.

But there was still hope somebody would teach us later.

“And today,” the teacher would say, “we are going to learn about the American Romantics!”

“Hooray!” we would reply. “Finally someone to explain to us all of the beautiful and delicious mysteries of mom’s cupboard books and why that gorgeous rich boss always falls for the nineteen-year-old virgin secretary!”

“No! We’re going to learn about wild men going into the woods and living without plumbing and raging alcoholics drinking themselves to death after making $25 on their best work and how foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds!”

“Are you shitting me?” We were sort of pissed off by now. “What’s romantic about that?”

“Well, it was like the hippies in the sixties, everybody believed all you need is love, and expanding your mind, and beautiful songs and here—read The Scarlet Letter, you will understand.”

“Those people were seriously messed up. If I was Hester Prynne I’d move to some place where sex wasn’t illegal and stop sewing, because her kid needed a swift kick in the pants and Hester wasn’t doing it.”

And the teacher would get mad.  “You people are completely missing the point. The American Romantics were a key period of time in literature. It was a time when the self was valued and the collective was suspect and people learned to listen to their own inner voices and—“

“Well that’s all very well and good, but where do we learn about the boy next door turning hot, like Ryan Reynolds and the girl next door wearing red lingerie—where’s the literary era that tells me about that?”

“Eventually,” the teacher says, pushing his/her spectacles up his/her nose, “you will lose the desire to read about that and dedicate yourself only to true literature. It says so in this teacher’s manual I have about the necessity of reading outside the literary canon which is why we give you ten minutes a day to read something of your own choice. Now commence Sustained Silent Reading.”

“Whatever.”  And then we’d all dedicate ourselves to seeing if the hero and the heroine can overcome the big misunderstanding, because then there will be kissing and hugging and maybe even sex, and we can be happy we’re human beings after all.

Eventually, we think, somebody will explain to us why all that other crap is called romance.

But nobody ever does, and although we continue to read the good stuff, the stuff with the love and the kindness and the exciting personal growth and the sex, we feel a vague embarrassment about not reading the stuff our teachers told us was good.  We go to garage sales with our mothers and buy (or learn to make) those quaint little book covers that keep our paperbacks from disintegrating and also hide the fact that we’re not all reading The Fountainhead or Joyce Carol Oates or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The Kindle is invented, and we can throw those covers away—but we still tell people we’re reading the literature so we don’t have to deal with romance reader’s shame—but nobody tells us why we should feel it.
Well, we shouldn’t.

Those original romances—King Arthur etc—were called romances because, instead of just coming in and blowing the bad guys out of the water in “I’ve come to kill your monster,” fashion, the heroes and heroines actually had individual personal lives that had nothing to do with the central military conflict.

There was no rule that said the personal life had to have a satisfactory ending.  Most of the time, it didn’t.

The romantic poets took that idea—the idea of heroes having individual personal lives—a few steps further. They said that not only did the individual personal life of a hero matter– but that the life didn’t have to be a heroic one to have impact. Your average every day shepherd or gardener or chimney sweep had a soul, and a purpose, and a reason for being.  It was this idea that allowed Jane Austen to write about a Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett when Elizabeth didn’t have any title or claim to royalty or even much money. She was an important individual by the grace of her intelligence and her person, and so we cared about what happened to her. So even without the happy ending (and the television viewer’s inner eye continually blessed by the vision of Colin Firth emerging from that pond in that big poofy shirt), Pride and Prejudice would still be a romance.

But thank you Jane Austen for giving us the happy ever after to strive for.

Sadly, the American Romantics didn’t learn as much from Ms. Austen as we did—they continued the idea of the individual, but the writers made this idea political. The individual against society was their favorite trope, because in the new world of America, sometimes the individual could win! Huzzah! Wasn’t that romantic?
Well, it was to Nathaniel Hawthorn and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It was also romantic to Edgar Allen Poe, who took this whole romantic notion of individual importance one step further and made what went on in the diseased person’s mind the end all and be all of their world—but that takes us into Gothic romance, which is another fun essay.

In the meantime, the frustrated student within us is crying out, “But what do all these bozos have to do with our beloved paperbacks! Our seduced heroines! Our larger than life heroes! Our Big Misunderstandings and Virgin Nannies! Why is it all called romance?”

Because the individual matters.

Because the individual’s happiness matters.

Because two people, in an uncertain world, with clashing cultures, life experiences, or belief systems, can touch in the truly cosmic way that only two souls can.

The love, the touching, the sex, the soul gaze—this is all icing on the concept that two hearts, happy, can make the world a better place.

That’s the missing link between what we were learning in school and learning in life.  Individuals and their happiness are important. If all the individuals together can find happiness, you have a happy society. If two individuals have to fight the world to be together, you need to make a better world.

Because true love matters. Politicians may tell us that countries matter. Soldiers may tell us it’s wars.

But those of us reading the paperbacks from our mother’s cupboard know the same thing the great literary geniuses from history knew.

It’s that two people can meet, and touch, and fall in love.

That’s what matters.
​
That’s why we read.

Once upon a time, I was seven years old. My parents had just split up, my dad didn’t get back from work for a couple of hours, and the rule was, I didn’t go out and play unless he was home and knew where I’d gone. Our television was black and white and back then, we got two hours of child friendly programming before the news came on and that was it. (Gilligan’s Island, I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch--this is why everyone my age loves those shows.) I was lonely, bored, and probably hungry.

I wrote.

Not with a pen and paper, or, even better, a computer (God, what I could have done with a computer!) but by sitting my stuffed animals in a circle around me on the floor and telling them a story. They were a very good audience, except for the stuffed dog who kept falling over.

Didn’t matter. I wrote.

Several years later in a different time, I was a young-ish mother who had lost her job and had two children under two on a six-acre spread in a drafty house in the middle of nowhere. My son had a communication handicap, my husband worked and went to school eighty hours a week, and I had no car.

I wrote.

I wrote Harlequin romances, because that’s what I had read through college, and I submitted a couple when I could afford it, using an outdated Writer’s Market and no contacts or common knowledge whatsoever.

Didn’t matter. I wrote.

And still, later, teaching with its pain and glory had been stolen from me. I sat at home, blank and numb with my daughter—the last kid in day care—and tried to rebuild the frame of my life from the shattered boards of my career.

I wrote.

By then, I was writing for Dreamspinner Press, because they’d given me a chance, dammit, had heard my voice, believed in me, and when the rest of my mind was a hapless mess of crossed wires and self-recrimination, the part of me that could write—that opened up and poured words into the universe—still worked like a dream.

Oh, thank you gods, I could write.

Because I am prolific, people assume that the words just come. I always have words, I always have emotions, I always have a story to tell.

Well, yes and no.

There have been periods in my life when I could not write.

My first two pregnancies—there were no words. My third pregnancy, it was all knitting, crocheting, quilting, scrapbooking (for a minute) and craftwork.

My fourth pregnancy we didn’t even have a room for the baby, we had no money, my administrator literally chased me down a hallway as I waddled away from him after a disagreement, and later messed with my class schedule to make it more difficult when I came back from my leave.

Then I could write.

If I have a little bit of personal discomfort, some inconvenience, the first gasp of a wound—all of my effort goes to finding the mental lidocaine to take away the sting. Writing becomes difficult—sometimes, if I allow myself to be weak, it gets impossible.

When I’ve been gutted by a rusty emotional machete, that’s when I go deep into my soul and pull out the thing that has kept me sane my entire life.

The building of worlds, the building of lives, using tiny blocks of words.

This winter I had a moment of profound writing exhaustion. I wrote through it—because I’ve staked my family’s well-being on this livelihood and curling up in a ball of “I don’t wanna” is not an option. But what got me through that moment was pure professionalism—don’t get me wrong. I’d given my word—to my family, to my publisher, to my friends—and I wasn’t going back on it. That project was the writing equivalent of comfort knitting—it was all I could produce at the time.

And then things got worse. Painful, eviscerating—like those other times, saturated with self-doubt of the most insidious kind.

And without warning, I could write again.

It was like falling through the thin layer of self-protective ice. My heartblood gushed, and the well of my soul opened. The stories within—those were the world, my world, the only safe world in creation, built with the insignificant building blocks of my words.

I love writing from this place—my every waking moment is consumed with my characters. I cannot wait to sit down in front of my computer. These are the times when my husband looks at me sideways and says, “I hope that’s a good story, because you are having a hell of a conversation with yourself.”

Of course—I’m writing!

You can tell when I’m writing from the bountiful place. The kids are late to school, I forget to do the laundry, I spend $300 because I lost my car keys in my yarn bag, I don’t respond to e-mail—you know, human stuff. It suffers.

Forget human stuff—I am a god!

Well, sadly no. Not a god. I have to return to my human life eventually.

It’s a tough transition, that drawing from the deep well of soul to the basic nuts and bolts that make us people. The water isn’t nearly as sweet from the refillable plastic bottle on my desk as it is in the deep place where my imaginative building blocks assemble with almost effortless ease.

But resuming my place among the living is a necessary move, if I’m not to wreck my body, my financial situations, and my family relationships. What I need to do in order to make the transition work is remember the most important lessons I’ve taken from the depths of my imagination.

I control my own reality.

Sadly, not the stuff that happens to me but how I react to that stuff--that I can do something about. I do have a say in not being a victim, in recovering, learning, and moving on. In my first teaching assignment I had a day so bad I left school, came home, and pulled the covers over my head, vowing never to return.

My career lasted 18 years—obviously I went back. The place I write from is the same place of strength I drew from to do that. Revisiting this place reminds me that it’s there, and I’m stronger than I think.

If I’m still living and my family is okay, nothing is insurmountable.

There are stakes so much larger than my job. Even if it’s a job I love and worked really hard to make pay for me–as was the case with both teaching and writing. If that well inside me is still flowing, it’s because there is love to keep it going. Never take love for granted. Ever.

Writing is more than a paycheck for me.

One of the things I wrote this summer—nearly 100K of it, with an option to write more—is a work without a home. Yes—I know. I usually have places to send my work, it’s one of the sweet, sweet reassurances of having a publisher I really love. But this work won’t fit easily into my publisher’s mold—the concept for the first book and the books I’d like to follow it is really too big in scope for romance, and it needs a sci-fi or fantasy publisher. This means I have to step outside my comfort zone, relearn my trade, try to market this thing in another place.

This is scary for me—but not as scary as when I wrote from a purely mechanical place. Writing is more than a paycheck for me (although money is nice and pays the bills) and reminding myself that writing is the thing that has always brought me joy—even when my only audience was a gaggle of ratty, often garage sale stuffed animals—is important if I want to keep doing it.

Writing for me has always come from the heart. Sometimes the words stumble—all building blocks have their flaws—and sometimes what looks like the right block in one context is completely wrong in another—but my heart hasn’t changed. I still want to write what is, to me, essentially romance—the genre in which people do the best they can with what they have to make a better world for people they love.

This is a place of joy. If it has become something different, it’s important that I’m reminded of why I started writing in the first place. Because everybody has a place where they connect their soul to the world around them. For some people it’s math, for others it’s art. For some people it’s animals and for others, it’s machines. For pretty much every person there is a physical concrete thing, a thing they can do that taps into the things they think and feel.

My stepmother is never so happy as she is on the back of a horse. My father used to work on cars when his classwork or his job was giving him hell. My daughter pulls out her art paper and draws.

I write. I’m lucky I’ve been able to make that work for me (so, so, so very lucky). If it ever stops working for me that doesn’t mean I’m going to quit doing it.

Ida Pollack wrote romance novels until she was 105 years old. I don’t think she did it because she needed the money. She did it because the world where the rugged older man rescued the ingénue was the place she went to be happy.
​
If I’m lucky enough to live to 105, I’ll probably still live in the world where mostly working class guys share turbulent first kisses and beat the emotional hell out of each other in the name of working shit out.
If I’m really lucky, it will still be my favorite place to be.
​

You know that moment I’m talking about.

The one where you have eaten nothing but non-fat protein and un-buttered broccoli for going on three days in a row, and suddenly you see it: That perfect combination of butter, refined sugar, white flour, candied fruit and/or marshmallow-swaddled chocolate—whipped cream and cinnamon optional, sin always required.
And you need to make it yours.

Oh… you need to make it yours. You will DAIEEEEEEE if it is not yours. You will mow down with prejudice the poor, well-meaning soul who stands between you and your Chocolate Mephistopheles and screams, “For the love of heaven, remember your diet!” and there will be blood, tears, and no remorse.

For the love of chicken and broccoli, how do you resist such a gut-ripping, life-blood-pumping, necessary to your sanity craving?

One of the most surprising bits of advice from Weight Watchers is… don’t.

That doesn’t mean eat Chocolate Mephistopheles all day every day (and if anyone can create a dessert that lives up to this name, I will eat it all day every day). It just means, on those days when your nearest and dearest are at risk if they intervene, get the Chocolate Mephistopheles—eat it.

Well, not the whole thing.

But, say, get your bestie, order your sin, and eat it with two spoons. Gather the family, take them to the patisserie, and split it four ways. Order it, cut it into eights, and stretch it out over two days.

There are a lot of ways to give into a little temptation without going up three sizes and running away from the gym in shame. Because the alternative?

Even the most controlled of martyrs has a snapping point. The person who fails to indulge in Chocolate Mephistopheles in a safe situation today is the person who goes face first and feral into the Cheesecake Azazel at two a.m. next week and washes it down with a diet coke and pomegranate juice to boot. (Anti-oxidants make up for everything, right?)

So indulgence is not a bad thing, really. In small quantities, it sort of makes us human.
Unless you’re talking about reading.

Reading—especially now that e-readers give us leave to read anything we want, privately—allows us some serious leeway to indulge.

But is there any harm in it? Will our brains become flabby and overloaded with bad prose and stale tropes because we sit down and stuff our faces with a daily calorie wad of badly written porn?

Mostly? No.

For the sake of your average romance reader, we’re talking the reading equivalent of, say, not even Chocolate Mephistopheles or Cheesecake Azazel.

We’re talking the reading equivalent of the cheap chocolate sold by large-eyed waifs door to door in the hopes that they could, please Goddess, get enough money to water their softball fields so they can play this year.

That crap. You know what I’m talking about. The “I would have to be PMS-ing during a break-up before finals week and after I got fired in order to eat that” chocolate.

Do you get fat brain cells from reading the equivalent of that?

Of course not.

What you get—and this is the case for the candy as well—is bored.

Poor quality chocolate is good for maybe a bite. Poor quality reading material does eventually get boring.
When I taught high school, they used to tell us to let the students read anything they wanted to during their free reading time. Yeah, sure, it was painful to watch the fifteen-year-olds walk in with Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, but the fact was, those books are high interest, low difficulty—even if the kid’s reading level was way above that, the thematic content was so good that the student got something out of the book. And reading—anything—often, produces fluency, which gives students a leg up on comprehension when they decide to level up from Diary of a Wimpy Kid to something more age appropriate—like romance.

Yes, romance.

It used to drive me bananas when my all-male staff room would bitch and whine about how the kids were all reading romance during Sustained Silent Reading—weren’t they supposed to be reading something more challenging? More quality? Better than romance?

Weren’t they supposed to be getting bored with the low-quality reading?

Of course, the disconnect was in the assumption that all romance was the crap-chocolate. It never occurred to those men that the crap-chocolate got abandoned in the corners of the room, while the Chocolate Mephistopheles and Cheesecake Azazel got passed from student to student like the single spoon at the table of a multi-breakup pity-party dessert fest.

Because even high school students (sometimes especially high school students) know the difference between crappy literature and the good stuff that they can really sink their brains into.

And often, the good stuff was even better than Chocolate Mephistopheles. At its best, romance is the entire meal—it’s Satan Steak, Prince of Darkness Potatoes, and Broccoli Beelzebub.

And Chocolate Mephistopheles.

And Cheesecake Azazel.

What it’s not is boring.

So it’s okay to glut your brain on whatever you’re craving. If it’s bad for you—or just plain bad—it will bore you soon enough. Even if it’s not bad, your brain knows when to move on. How many amazing series have you needed to step off from—not because the series was bad or the author failed, but because your brain just needed a different taste? Got bored with steak, moved on to chicken? Decided green beans were tastier than broccoli—especially with bacon. (Mm—those really are the devil’s green beans, aren’t they?)

So let’s go back to our original metaphor.

When I was teaching, I’d always start the summer absolutely certain I was going to read a “health food” book during my two-month hiatus. A whole nine or ten weeks to spend with the kids? I could sup full up of novels of the highest order. I could read Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates and John Gardner.

I could eat the high-grain bread, bean sprout, sautéed eggplant sandwiches of literature and come back with a fit and healthy brain fed on only the highest quality ingredients.

I would have the Olympic athlete of brains.

I forget when this idea died—I’m thinking it might have been around the year Goblet of Fire was released and the family took turns locking ourselves in our rooms for twenty-four hour stretches while food was brought to us and we only left to pee so that we could finish the book and pass it off to the next person before we resorted to stealing the thing while the reader snatched scant hours of sleep.

But the more I try to remember, the more I think this idea was destined to fail earlier than that.

I think my resolve to develop a low-fat brain was doomed when I discovered the first twenty books of J.D. Robb’s In Death series. Or maybe the first nine of Anita Blake. Or was it earlier? I would make the resolution afterwards, but I was probably destined to ignore the beansprouts and gorge on Cheesecake Azazel from the moment I went on maternity leave with my oldest, and my mother-in-law snuck me big bags of Amanda Quick and Julie Garwood for my recovery. Or maybe my downfall came earlier than that, when I was reading college textbooks and slipping Harlequin Temptations in front of them so my parents—or later my husband—wouldn’t accuse me of skivving off when I was supposed to be studying?

Maybe it was earlier than that.

Maybe it was when I was a kid and my parents shipped us off to our grandparents with only a scant couple of books available to pack, and I stole grandma’s Harlequin Presents.

Maybe it was when I was in preschool and I would read street signs on long trips to avoid getting bored.
Whenever it was, however the idea got started, I will stand by it.
​
If the literature you are reading fills you up, makes your dendrites tingle and your neurons dance, it’s not bad for you. While Chocolate Mephistopheles is best only eaten at special occasions, the literary equivalent can be read every day of the week.

Teague was driving. He came up to me as we were loading up, holding up his iPod, which was loaded just like mine.

“Bleed it Out?” he asked hopefully, and I grinned. I don’t know what I looked like, but his grin back was ferocious and bloodthirsty, and nobody had better fuck with us because we were bad fucking business.

“Bleed it out!” I answered back. We bashed closed fists together and got ready to roll.

I don’t know when we had started the tradition of listening to head-banging music on the way to our ass-kicking runs—I think I just started co-opting the stereo and playing stuff that got me pumped. It didn’t matter, because when Teague joined us in November, the tradition became locked in stone. Now we even had a couple of playlists culled from iPods full of every metal, rock, or alternative CD produced in the last twenty years.

Without a doubt, the vampires’ favorite was Adrian’s favorite—Linkin Park—and their hands-down, love-it-forever, rhythm-pumped-in-their-veins favorite kickass song was “Bleed It Out.” We’d built a four-hour playlist around that song, and on nights like this, it felt good to thunder that shit through our veins.

 —from Rampant, Part II, out in November​


About ten years ago I was standing outside of my classroom, welcoming my fifth period in, and wishing I was dead.Or in hell.

Or anywhere but in front of that classroom.

Because my administrator hated me—this is not an exaggeration. He designed this class to make my life miserable so I’d quit.  It was a class of thirty-two juniors at the beginning of the year. Fourteen of the thirty-two students were bound for continuation school.  Twelve of those continuation school students were male.
When I say, “bound for continuation school” this doesn’t mean I was meanly assessing their future. It means they were in their third year of high school and had passed fewer than three classes in two and a half years. They were going to continuation school—they’d been looking forward to it, and at the end of the first semester, they could get the hell out of regular school and go to a place where they could work on packets undisturbed. If they didn’t just drop out completely.

These kids had nothing to lose, they hated authority, hated school, hated female teachers, and I got them after lunch.

As they stomped up the walkway, swearing loudly, I waved them inside, humming Get Set Go’s “I Hate Everyone”. 

I didn’t actually hate everyone. In fact, twenty of the students in the room were really wonderful. I just had to send everybody else to the office before I taught the kids who weren’t there specifically to cause trouble. (The school secretary loved me this year. She was like, “Really? You have all those kids in the same class? I mean, I’m used to seeing them in here all day, but you have to refer them all, every day!”) And as the students filed up, one of the quieter girls, a sweet, big-eyed C-student who worked her ass off for every point, heard me singing and started laughing.

“I know that song,” she said, and we both giggled.

It got me in the door.

As I was leading eighteen out of thirty-two kids through warm up, I started humming it again. My co-conspirator whispered to the girl next to her, and they both burst into giggles.  I hummed it as I wrote referrals, hummed it as I waited for the chaos to die down, and the kids who were tired of the bullshit—and who, in fact, had seen these twelve boys bring down a lot of the classes they’d been in—joined me in my small musical rebellion.

For that class, thanks to Get Set, Go, we were a united front.Fast forward three years later.

I haven’t been in my classroom for a year and a half, and now it’s time to retrieve what I left when I was pulled unceremoniously out of it for giving a student a book.

It’s been vacant for six months, a dumping ground for unused desks. With the exception of over a thousand dollars of resource books that were taken by other teachers, all my stuff is shoved into boxes, with trash and pencil shavings, the remainder of fifteen years of dedicated service to this school.

I am angry and grieving.

A friend has (against my wishes, actually) insisted on accompanying me. I don’t want to talk, and I plug my iPod into the stereo I brought—I’ve loaded the iPod for this occasion.

“Bleed it Out”, “Numb”, “Seven Nation Army”, “Let it Rock”, “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn”, “I Hate Everyone”, “Thunderstruck”, “Seeds”, “Little Suzy”, “Turn Up the Radio”—the list was over seventy-five songs long, and every song had a part I could scream at the top of my lungs.

My friend tried to get me to bring home student projects, misguidedly thinking I was there to retrieve stuff of practical value. I couldn’t argue with her—I turned up the volume of the stereo and screamed “Bleed it Out” until my throat was raw.

It was the only narrative I had.

I used to tell my students—and I still tell my children and young writers—that music is the closest thing mortals get to time travel.

The melody evokes our emotion, the instrumentation stimulates our reason, the words give us language and narrative, and the rhythm embeds it in physical response.  It’s the perfect memory stimulator, and one auditory prompt can take us back to an exact moment of our past with heartrending clarity.

In short, you can be forty years old and working in Michigan in the winter, but one half-heard bar of the song that came out in the top forty of your senior year, and you are suddenly seventeen and walking barefoot on the hot asphalt of your hometown, wondering what the future will bring after high school.

For me, it was “Boys of Summer” by Don Henley, but I’m sure you have your own summer songs.

So music is a powerful storytelling element, and one I find myself going to—sometimes consciously and sometimes instinctively—again and again.

I have two entire books--Mourning Heavenand Racing for the Sun--that were inspired by Bruce Springsteen songs. I get frequent pings on social media telling me, “I heard ‘Gypsy Biker’ today—oh God—Michael!”  or “’Racing in the Streets’ kills me every time!” I wrote an entire book (it almost counts as two, given the length!) about a rock star named Mackey Sanders, and that playlist can crack a heart wide open. In particular, “In One Ear” by Cage the Elephant, Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt” (where the title, Beneath the Stain, comes from) and “Wish You Were Here” from Pink Floyd hit people right in the solar plexus.  “The Ocean” by The Bravery has a few hearts breaking too.

Music has the power to brand a character, a mood, a moment, indelibly on the minds of the reader. It has the power to unite a group of readers around a book to say, “Yes! That moment right there! That moment is part of the human experience and we claim it as our own!”

It’s an intoxicating sensation—and one ripe for the taking—but it does need to be used with care.

I spent an awful lot of time as a teacher begging students to listen to the songs they were dancing to.
“What’s it saying?” I would demand. “Do the lyrics say something the music doesn’t?”

I used music a lot when I was studying American Romanticism, and one of my favorite exercises was to play Bruce Springsteen’s My Hometown and Bowling for Soup’s My Hometown and make the kids fill out a chart that looked something like this for each song:

Topic:
Mood:
Tone:
Summarize one of the stories told in the song:
What was the moral of the story:
Underlying message of whole song:

When we got to the end of the exercise, the kids were compelled to admit it—the same title did not the same song make. Then I would ask them to bring in one song that they would use to teach with one of the poems or stories we’d covered—and the results were, often, inspiring.

But they had to do the headwork first.  They couldn’t just grab Tupac or Green Day of the shelves and come in singing, “We did our homework!”  They had to think.

And as writers, if we’re going to reference a song, one we think will brand this story in so very many ways, we need to think.

In 1985, Ronald Reagan called Bruce Springsteen a patriot because he wrote a song called “Born in the U.S.A.”.  The song was an anti-war, pro-veteran benefit song that pretty much opposed most of Reagan’s cherished political hot buttons. The press didn’t let him forget it.

Not getting a musical choice right in a book right might not be that dire—or that memorable—but it does pull the reader out of the work. Instead of having someone say, “Yes! That song and these human beings! They are together twined in my heart!” you might have them say, “Well, dude. Worst D.J. EVER.”

So, within the bounds of acceptable use (which, for those of us in the indie presses means we can reference a song but not quote it, chapter titles being the only exception) a memorable soundtrack can give a work incredible depth and resonance.

But while you’re playing D.J. to your characters, never settle for the easy song, or the song everybody’s listening to at the moment. Be as careful with your song choices as you are with your character choices—if it’s a song you might be embarrassed to love ten years down the road, maybe go for something more classic. If it’s a song you find yourself screaming while dreaming of your enemy’s blood, maybe not for a sex scene, unless it’s hatesex, and that’s a whole different thing.

Music is the ultimate in communication. It’s time travel in a sound file, an instant mood-in-a-box with a single line. (Bruce Springsteen once established mood and ironyin a song by mentioning another song in the lyrics. Damn.)

It’s a powerful tool in a writer’s imagination—as long as it’s wielded with grace and love.
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And a little bit of homework when studying the lyrics, so the song says exactly what you want it to, in the moment when it counts the most.

I’ll be honest.  My first warning usually comes when a friend or a colleague says to me, “Oh, you’re so brave!”

Sounds like a compliment, doesn’t it?  Uh-huh. Brave—we all want to be brave, right?

It might be, but “You’re so brave!” for me is usually followed by an Amy Lane sized crap-bomb that could spatter a city block. When my nearest and dearest are saying, “You’re so brave!” they are not infrequently edging away from me, reaching into boxes for rain ponchos and checking to make sure their kaiju shelters are stocked for the shitstorm to come.

For example, when my bestie and beta reader got to the end of Immortal, she said, “Oh, Amy—you’re so brave to kill off both main characters and have their happy ever after happen as they wandered the forest around their homes after death.” This translated into, “People will hate this ending. They will loathe it. They will .gif bomb the crap out of you on Goodreads, and you won’t understand and cry on me until my cornflakes get soggy from 3000 miles away.”

And because I was me, I put my little tin hat on, grabbed my broomstick, mounted my dying pony and galloped right into that windmill and got knocked right on my ass.

Because “You’re so brave!” actually means “You wrote out of the box again, dumbass!” and there are consequences for writing out of the box.

The fact is, people often read genre fiction for comfort. It’s one of the (unfair!) reasons romance readers get smacked around in the press: for a romance reader, the happy ever after is a requirement of the game. This doesn’t mean we don’t have solid or uplifting prose, or beautiful themes or social relevance—but it does mean that by the end of the book, people had better, by God, be comforted about their world, about the importance of love and the importance of the individual heart versus the heartless society, or people are going to be solidly pissed off.

Which is unfortunate, because many of us weren’t that fond of boxes to begin with—that’s why we became writers.

Now, a writer doesn’t have to go all homicidal with his or her main characters to be considered “out of the box”—sometimes, it’s as simple as changing subgenre or using a different style for a different series.
The change may feel organic and natural to the author—but again, people read genre fiction for comfort. For someone who adores the rhythm of paranormal romance—the same world but a different couple with each book—having the series expand into urban fantasy might put some people off.  If an author dances the prose arabesque in Regency historical novels, switching to a clipped, dialogue-esque style for a WWII drama might be a challenge for established readers as well. Moving from contemporary romance to romantic suspense might be the one thing that turns off an otherwise staunch fan for life.

It’s a risk.

And it’s a tough one for an author to make.

Reading the first reviews after a change like this is enough to make an author—any author—go fetal with writer’s remorse.

My Mate and I have had this conversation more than once.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“I thought you’d gotten up?”

“I’m going back to bed.”

“For how long?”

“Forever.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m crying so hard I can’t breathe!”

“But why?”

“Because they hate it! They hate it! Hate it! Hate it!”  (Imagine the machine-gun rhythm of deep chest sobs here.)

“Oh, come on, they can’t hate it that badly.”

“They said it was a shitty knock-off of a Nicholas Sparks novel.”

“But you don’t even read Nicholas Sparks!”

“I KNOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW…”

So, no—not so easy to deal with. So why do it?

Well, there are a lot of reasons an author might make a genre or subgenre switch.

Sometimes it’s evolution—I know there is more than one author who has started out with a paranormal romance and had it sprawl into urban fantasy. Some authors start out writing strictly heterosexual romance only to find other couplings or triplings occur with side characters they originally hadn’t planned to speak much more than a walk-on line.  It is very possible for an author who started in fantasy to find that the mystery or the quest in a contemporary setting is just as exciting, and then we have an action/adventure romance.

For some authors it’s philosophy. The author who gloried in horror and the ironic ending in her youth may want the sweetness of romance as time progresses. The author who once swore loudly that vampires were never going to be her thing might see a movie or a TV show and realize the poignant possibilities of dating a societally shunned member of the undead.  A contemporary author can become interested in genealogy, and boom! You have a fledgling historical romance writer in your midst.

Sometimes it’s just wandering attention. (Guess—I dare you. Guess where Amy belongs?)  I’ve read and loved paranormal romance, historical romance, urban fantasy, fantasy, science fiction, contemporary and suspense.  For the last couple of years, suspense has been my candy—starting with Karen Kijewsky and Sue Grafton, then moving to J.D. Robb, Lee Childs, Kathy Reichs, and Karen Rose.

Fish Out of Water is a murder mystery—and I know that’s going to put folks off. (Okay, yes—that conversation with Mate? I had that this morning. But it wasn’t the first time. He knows the drill by now.) For me, a murder mystery is still a romance—but it’s got the added excitement of shit-go-boom before you see pecs! (And peen. Yes, I do like writing my peen.)  But it all comes down to that original idea about writing outside the box.

What’s the worst that could happen if you step outside the box?

Well, some folks might scream “Get back in there! The box is now deformed and it scares me!” As a species in a constantly evolving world, we are remarkably intolerant of change.

But some folks might squeal, “Oh my God! I love the shape of that box! It’s my favorite shape! I’ve been waiting for you to assume that shape the entire time!”

And some folks might laugh. “I knew it was your box. Because it’s your box. An Amy-box might be square or oval or dodecahedronal—but it is still an Amy box, and I love those boxes!”


You just never know.

In fact, the one thing I do know is myself. I have a wandering brain, and it gets bored in the box. If I am going to keep fresh, if I am going to continue writing because it is the thing I love most, I need to get out of the box once in a while and maybe change its shape.

So I guess my advice for a writer wondering about stepping outside the established genre box is to imagine that whole “crawling back in bed” scenario I presented at the beginning.

What if it’s you, and you’ve read your first reviews and you’re doing the fetal curl in your bed with your boo-boo bear and your dogs and your Mate and a giant box of Oreos as you sob.

What next?

Do you call your agent or your editor and say, “No. No more. I refuse. I will never step outside the box again because my nose just got cut off and it frickin’ hurts!”

Or do you finish your Oreos, wipe your nose on your Mate, pat the dogs on the head and crawl back out to try again?

When I was a kid, I had to take the driver’s test four times. Four. The first two times, I blame the car. It was a push button shift with bad power brakes and it yawed like the Titanic.  The third time, it was just killed confidence. That was time my dad got into the car and I was sprawled on the bench seat of the giant Chevy truck, sobbing.

My father is not as compassionate as my Mate.

“What’s wrong with you? Get up!”

“I FAAAAAIIILLLLLLLLEEEEEDDDDDDDD….”

“So the hell what—no, I’m not driving. You’re driving home!”

“I’m never driving AGGGGGAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIINNNNN…”

“Bullshit. Now stop making that noise and get behind the wheel.”

I still cried all the way home—but dammit, I drove!  Because we live in Northern California, and there was no public transportation near my parents’ house, and the only way I was going to grow up, get a job, and get the hell out of Loomis was to get my damned driver’s license.

Even then, I was desperate to get out of the box, right?

And I passed the next test. Because we do what we gotta.

So it’s scary—very scary—sticking your neck out. And sometimes, you’re gonna whack your head on a pole or the sidewalk or a car or something.

But eventually, if you keep trying, being outside of the box is going to feel natural.  It’s going to feel comforting. It’s going to be a new, improved box, and you can live there as long as you want.
​
Until you look outside again—and remember you’re tough enough to do it this time. And it’s worth it, because you like the view outside the box.

Daisy

​by Amy Lane

I live a tiny life—most of us do, unless we’re traveling.  But for most of us, work is a thing of routine. Even writers, whom many people assume simply write when the “muse” moves us, set hours when we write for a living. “These are the hours I work. This is when I have to be productive. I can quit when these tasks are done.”

And outside of work, the rest of our lives are often circumscribed. I swear, I could put my car on an electric track that went from the gym to one kid’s school to the other kid’s school, to Del Taco to the grocery store, and 80% of the time, those are the only places I’d need to go.

But in spite of having a predictable tortoise life, I have a rather hoppy rabbit mind, and if it doesn’t have new places to hop to, I shall go simply mad.

Books are my escape—but reading time is limited to in my car as I’m waiting for my kids to get out, or a few precious pages a night before I fall asleep. On the whole, most of my brain travels happen from talking to other people.

Talking to strangers is my gateway to the world.


One day, as I was pushing for a deadline and thinking, “Oh God, what do we have to eat? The kids are going to want dinner, what am I going to feed them? It’s sort of a job requirement!” I heard a knock at my door.

The teenager waiting there was adorable. Curvy, pretty, and Latina, with a slightly crooked smile and apple cheeks, Daisy’s first words were her sales pitch: “Hi, I’m Daisy, and I run a business where I make and deliver tamales. I was in your neighborhood making deliveries and I have extra and would you like to buy some of my overstock? It’s ten dollars per dozen, I have pork, chicken, and beef, and I’ve been selling tamales for five years, and I helped my mom buy a house, and now I’m trying to raise money for a car so I can go to college next year after I graduate.”

I mean, wow.

Wow.

It was like, here I was, my rabbit mind dying to go hopping anywhere but my computer, and Daisy dropped a giant load of carrots, personality and dinner on my doorstep.

Of course I had to talk to Daisy.

Daisy had learned to make tamales from her mother, who had learned from her mother and so on. One of my best friends in high school had a tamale making family—it’s often a part of Hispanic culture—and I’d been there to help what was usually a family endeavor. I asked Daisy about her family and found out that she was one of the first people in her family to go to college, and that her grandparents were from Mexico and that selling tamales had been Daisy’s idea and her mommy (her word) helped her. Daisy went out into the world and sometimes her uncles helped her deliver and sometimes her brother did, and now that she had a license she borrowed her uncle’s car.

She was going to college. She wanted to run a catering business because she loved cooking authentic Mexican food and she wanted to do it right, and make money, and do something she loved.

I loved talking to Daisy—and the tamales were seriously some of the best I’d ever had. I told her to visit the next time she had overstock, and she did. That time I talked to her about business cards and schedules and publicity. The next time we talked about filling out college applications and which junior college she wanted to go to.

Every time I opened the door to her, Daisy said, “HI, it’s the tamale girl again. Would you like to buy some tamales?”

Once, when I was gone on a business trip, Mate told me that “The girl came by—“

“Girl?”

“She said she was the tamale girl.”

“Daisy.”

“Okay. Daisy.” Mate is always puzzled by the small talk that allows me to know people’s actual names. 
“Anyway, the kids told me I should buy her stuff because it’s good, but I don’t remember what you do to it.”

I walked him through—salsa or tamale sauce (we go with canned stuff because I’m not a cook) and cheese. Take them out of the wrappings first, even the cornhusks, layer the sauce and cheese and bake. Mate’s not stupid—he can cook with some direction—and the tamale girl became a blessing. It felt like serendipity—every time I thought, “Oh Lord, I am so timed out, I am so tired of fast food, and I would really like to cook for my kids!” Daisy was there.

The last time I talked to Daisy she told me that she was starting college and she might be too busy to keep up her little cottage industry. I was sad for me because I would miss out on her tamales, but excited for her, because all of that energy, all of that initiative—this kid needed to go somewhere, somewhere awesome. Somewhere besides my front door, which is just as much of my tiny life as it has always been.

That was the time I told Daisy that I’d written her in a book. (Coming out in January.) I told her that I wrote gay romance, so I’d needed to give her a gay older brother who took over her deliveries and found a prince, but the inspiration had come from her.

She was so excited she teared up and hugged me. She didn’t think she was very interesting. She didn’t think her story was cool enough to be in a book.

I thought she was awesome.

And her lesson is invaluable.

My restless, hoppy mind is great at wandering off by itself. I will be plugging along on my actual work and suddenly my brain is bouncing in a faraway locale with exotic companions—sometimes even off world surrounded by people more humanoid than human.

But the most fascinating people don’t always exist off world or far away. Very often the human struggle you understand the most, with the human beings you wish most to portray, originates in your back yard.  Yes, even in the space of that that same old circuit sweep between the gym and the schools and the store, life and death and love and loss are dancing delicate arabesques that can sustain your attention for hours and leave you feeling better for it.
​
Sometimes the best characters are the ones who knock on your door.

So, in my past life I taught English—and loved it. I still make forays back into a classroom as a volunteer, but I do miss the familiar greeting of my friends in the giant English anthologies. Their work in my life—and their words in my mind—were as regular as the seasons, and I got great at making their lives interesting and relevant for my student body.
When I started writing, I realized that I had learned an awful lot about fiction and publishing from the greats—their lives and words had been there all along. Here are some of my favorite lessons, passed on to you:

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), American poet. Early portrait. Image by © Bettmann/CORBISEmily Dickinson--I’ve learned a lot from the Belle of Amherst—this is only a tiny corner of what she had to teach me.
Lesson: Your editors are not evil—they really do have your best interest in mind.
How I learned it: Much has been made of Emily Dickinson’s editors, and how the six poems she published during her lifetime were horribly maimed before they were printed.  Those editors were trying, in their way, to get Emily’s work out to the people. The changes they made—though not literarily awesome—were there to help for public consumption. But Emily wasn’t looking for fame, she was looking for greatness (undoubtedly achieved) and the changes hurt her heart too much to continue. After her death, editors who saw that literary greatness went through her preciously tied bundle of poems and edited them with the delicate, precise cuts of that guy who carves masterpieces on the head of a pin.  The results were the fey, ethereal, profound works that we teach high school students today.



Walt Whitman--Walt Whitman is often remembered as a weathered elderly man, and I’m pretty sure he was given the epithet of “The old gray poet”.  (It was close, dammit—I don’t have that textbook anymore!)  But while we all age, it’s unfortunate to forget Whitman’s youth, which was spent as a very hale, sexy, bisexual man with a voracious appetite for life.
Lesson--Don’t crave instant fame.  It’s the body of work that counts.
How I Learned It--Whitman spent much of his career—and his life—revising his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass. The book—which suffered four editions during his lifetime—started out as a booklet of around twelve poems. By the time he died there were nearly 400. Whitman’s style was cutting edge when he started—raw, visceral, sometimes erotic, celebrating the human body as well as the spirit and intellect. At first, he was considered porn. He was not considered a poet. But he kept writing, kept revising, kept adding to the brilliance of his work.  I’m not sure when he caught on, or when he began to sell, but eventually, it happened for him. Of course, by the time it had, other poets who emulated him were The Next Big Thing, and Whitman wasn’t.  His time to be The Next Big Thing had passed. He became known as a grandfatherly sort of man, caring for his ailing mother, communicating quietly with his fellow artists—but not for breaking ground as a brilliant new voice. Which sort of sucked, because he spent his life fighting, fornicating and living in a grand and illustrious way and our poetry would not be the same without him.
But his work continued. It endured. Whitman is the reason to keep writing, to keep adding to the body of my work, to know that there may never be the giant cataclysmic bestseller in my pantheon—but there will be a pantheon.

Anne Bradstreet--One of America’s first female voices, Bradstreet was a devout Puritan who lived simply and wrote poetry. Her work was first published without her permission—her brother in law, I think, took her poems to England and published them as a surprise. (Surprise! People are dissecting your entrails at dinner parties—how much are you loving me now?)
Lesson--Eventually, no matter how unprepared you feel, you have to let your work go.
How I Learned It--After Bradstreet’s small volume of poems was published, she asked for a chance to revise them for re-release, and when she did, she added THIS POEM. The poem calls her work  “Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain” and talks about the pain of having her work subjected to prying eyes before she was ready. And the conclusion (one could argue) is that our words are never enough. Our editing is never enough. That the divine (in her case, the Christian God) can produce perfect work, but Anne Bradstreet was only human and a simple woman. She would have to be happy with what she could manage. In the simplest of verse and the purest of humility, Bradstreet breaks down what it means to be a writer and to share the most intimate parts of ourselves, no matter how unwillingly. She also states, in no uncertain terms, one of the greatest of human tragedies: Words are not enough. Words are never enough. But they are all we have, and we must love them as the children of our minds.

Washington Irving--People remember Washington Irving for The Legend of Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and The Devil and Tom Walker--but he published those works under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  They were his most successful works—and though Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollowwere from his well-received first book, his second book, the one with The Devil and Tom Walker in it was not nearly as critically acclaimed.
Lesson--Don’t let the bad reviews of one book stop you from believing in yourself.
How I Learned It--Irving was convinced that the book containing The Devil and Tom Walker was some of his finest work—and it didn’t sell badly. But the criticism he received was harsh—and he doubted himself. He closed down the Geoffrey Crayon pseudonym, and while he published some other pieces after Tom Walker, he allowed his disheartenment to cripple his fiction.
That’s too bad. He was right--The Devil and Tom Walker is brilliant political and social satire, and scathing in its denouncement of what are still some of capitalism’s least attractive qualities. This is a piece that pulls high school students from their boredom and makes them realize that the same evils are being performed in the same ways.  It makes them very cognizant that although the technology of the world has changed, some of the basic truths about mankind remain. In short, it’s everything we love about fiction, and its capacity to capture humanity in all of its flaws and glory.
So it’s important to learn to lick your wounds from bad reviews—and then come back from it. Imagine what Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman, could have done for American literature if Irving had been able to overcome his initial hurt.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--A professor of poetry and one of the “Five Fireside Poets”, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was known for his lyrical poetry with intense, dramatic stories. The Song of Hiawatha and The Midnight Ride of Paul Reverewere in America’s top ten, and in spite of his personal tragedies, Longfellow finished out his life as a beloved and well-respected writer.
Lesson--Don’t let your image get in the way of your greatest work.
How I Learned It--Longfellow lost his first wife to miscarriage and his second wife to a fire—that he witnessed. His correspondence all points to a true love and a truly broken heart. A few months after his death, the sonnet “A Cross of Snow” was discovered.  In the poem we don’t see the gentle lyricist who gave us beautiful rhythms and charming rhymes. Instead we see the embittered husband, betrayed by death in the most painful of ways, raging against the God who subjected him to this pain.  It’s a brief, searing piece of literature.  I could have taught Paul Revere a thousand times and not have my heart moved as much as one reading of “Cross of Snow”.  Longfellow didn’t want anybody to see it—he hid it from his family even. His family didn’t want it published. This was not the man they wanted remembered.
But in remembering the man who wrote that poem, we remember a complete man—a talented poet, a devoted husband and father, and a living breathing person who could rage at the stars with the rest of us humans.
He’s a man worth remembering.

Oh man—I could do this all night. I could talk about Beowulf and Gawain andFrankenstein and… And maybe I will.  This is definitely a topic worth revisiting.  But in meantime, what’s important to take away here is that it’s easy to think that in the new era of instant information, we invented literature, genre fiction, and the problems of the modern writer.
It’s important to remember that there is nothing new under the sun.
Great writing lasts, and the lessons of great writers carry on as well. Their lives can be as inspirational as their words, and as educational.  The one thing that’s changed with the advent of the modern age is that we don’t have to go back to our giant twenty-pound English lit tomes in order to remember their lessons.
Today, it’s available at our fingertips.

I was sort of taken aback by the question, and I shouldn’t have been.
“How did you research the book Selfie, and what steps did you take to make it authentic?”
My first thought (and I have had this one since I started writing) was “I am a terrible fraud!” because I couldn’t remember doing any research for this book.
And then my actual brain kicked in (as opposed to my panic brain), and I realized that I’d been researching this book before I started writing.
When I was a kid—eight, nine, ten—my parents made three trips to the Pacific Northwest. Oregon, Washington, Canada—I fell deeply in love.
When I was a teenager, I was one of the deciding voices to send my marching band to Victoria, Canada for our trip in my senior year, because my burning passion never dimmed.  As an adult, I’ve talked Mate into taking me up there twice—for our 10thanniversary, and as part of a business trip—and that area and I renewed our affair.
Oh yes, from Goose Mountain to the Seattle Fish Market to Puget Sound, I have researched that area simply by being in love.  Now, that doesn’t mean I didn’t have to look up some maps—because my head for directions is limited to three coordinates: Pure Fucking Magic.


“How did you get to Vancouver, Amy?” “Pure Fucking Magic.” “How did you get to the airport, Amy?” “Pure Fucking Magic.” As far as I’m concerned it’s the only way to travel.  But just because I need a map doesn’t mean my heart doesn’t live there, so I’m good with PFM as a means of transportation.
The real research, the research that informed my descriptions of how much I love the fog or why someone would want to be a fisherman when it’s backbreaking work—that was already done.
The same applies for Connor’s profession—actor.
Well, the internal work was done as a kid.  I wanted to be an (picture this word in lights with decorations and glitter) actor.
Junior high, high school, college—it was all I could think about. My parents convinced me I could never do it—didn’t have the looks, didn’t have the talent, didn’t have the willpower to stay away from cookies—all of which was probably true. I became a teacher instead, which was even better because not only could I act out the books but the kids were required by law to be there. It was glorious.
So I understood what made Connor tick—but what about his day to day? Amy, the closest you’ve been to a television set is Universal Studios—how could you possibly know what his day was like?
Well, this goes back about twelve years, and a little show—you may have heard of it?Supernatural.
Yes, I’m still somewhat obsessed.
Anyway—back when I was teaching and the administration was killing me and the kids were ungrateful and I didn’t know how my teeny paycheck was going to feed my children much less send them through college, I would sit at my computer and pretend to write.
And I’d watch anything related to this show. This included gag reels, interviews with the cast, convention footage, outtakes, interviews with the directors, “making of” clips, interviews with the writers, anecdotes, the makeup trailer, film schedules, the producers talking about casting or story arcs—you name the angle for the production of a small network television show, and I was all over that. I just wanted to know.  I had actually done similar things for a lot of the movies and shows I’d loved—I wanted to know whyFirefly was canceled, or the logic behind Buffy’s death at the end of fourth season, or how the dog escaped immolation in Independence Day. Knowing how real life and imaginary life collide and change the shape of the other has always been fascinating to me—and I was more than ready to explore that on the page.
When it came time to write Connor’s day-to-day life in Wolf’s Landing, I was there.
So what research did I do?
My whole life has been research.
And that brings me to my point.
Writers are often told, “Write what you know.”
I think we need to refine that idea a little bit. If all I wrote was what I know intimately, I’d have to keep my stories incredibly small–not that I don’t sometimes, but we’re talking a tiny house and a relatively circumscribed set of destinations in my day.  I wouldn’t write comedies because real life has no punch lines. I wouldn’t have writtenThe Locker Room because I’m not an athlete. I wouldn’t have written Keeping Promise Rock because I was never in the military and I tend to fall off horses and break bones.
As much as I love music, I never would have written Beneath the Stain because as many songs as I’ve sung until my throat was raw, as many “Top 500” lists as I’ve read, as many interviews and biographical movies as I’ve seen, I’ve never been up on the stage, screaming until my heart explodes.
And as much as I love movies, the theater, and TV, I never would have written Connor, because Connor is beautiful, and I am not. Connor is talented in ways I am not. And Connor is heartbroken in ways I pray never to be.
But I love knowing about music, about sports, about the military and horse ranching. I love knowing about visual storytelling. I love studying these tgubgs. I love watching standup comics and romantic comedies and situation comedies. I love watching 30 for 30and Invincible and Wimbledon and I even love working out. I love stories about soldiers and stories about horses and God, Goddess, and other, do I love music and movies and TV.
These are the things that inform my writing. These are the things that light the passion in my blood.
So I think maybe, instead of “Write what you know,” we should think about it more as “Write what you love.”
Love isn’t always rational. My love of Puget Sound defies description. I can’t tell you why I can listen to “In One Ear” sixty-thousand times, or why three paragraphs at the end of Exile’s Gate have changed the way I think about writing and character and good and evil forever.  I can’t tell you why I’ve watched eleven seasons of Supernatural even though I’ve had to stop in the middle of the last five seasons and catch my breath until the show no longer hurt my heart.
Nobody can tell you why they read the same books again and again and again, until they know every word, know every nuance, can imagine every moment.
It must be love.
Write what you love—and like with real love, you will come to know the object of your affection better with every word.

I love words—most writers do. There’s something magical that happens when both sides of a writer’s brain conjoin.  The language centers and the imagination centers–which are in opposite hemispheres—work together to create a reality that did not exist before phoneme and morpheme collaborated to paint a picture.  Suddenly words shape the things we imagine, and the things we imagine search desperately for…
Words.
Words equal ideas.
In a lecture about Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language and his book 1984  I used to do the following exercise with my classes—everybody follow along.
Okay, everybody think of the word “color”.  What comes to mind?
Now everyone think of the word “red”.  What do you think about?
Now think about “dark red”.  What do you think about now?
Now think about “candy-apple red.”  What images do you get?
Now think about “crimson”, or “vermillion”, or “burgundy”.  What do you think aboutnow?


You may notice that the more specific word gets the more specific image in your head. The more specific word gets the more specific idea. And the more vague the word, the more amorphous the idea.
So what if suddenly, one day, we were told that in order to “simplify” our discourse, in order to make it so everybody could understand what one person was saying, we had to eliminate the words “crimson”, “vermillion”, and “burgundy” from our vocabularies?
What would happen to our mental images of those things? Where would they go? Would there be another combination of words that could bring them back?
Probably not.
In Orwell’s 1984, the hero worked for the Ministry of Truth, which (among other functions) was in charge of eliminating all but government approved words. One of the first things the Ministry of Truth went after was the word “bad” and all of its synonyms—so anything from “undesirable” to “catastrophic” to “devastating” to “heartbreaking” was all labeled with various degrees of “ungood.”  Sure, there was “plus ungood” and “double plus ungood” and “double double plus ungood”—but think about it. Think about the things that our brains do when someone uses the word “heartbreaking” as opposed to the word “double plus ungood”. Think about the emotional layers we’ve removed, the moments of the reader’s or listener’s experience that we’ve taken out of the equation, by taking away the word.
I know that in modern publishing it’s important to go for clean and uncluttered prose—to not allow ourselves the luxury of rolling around for too long in the glory of the words. I’ve recently been forced to go back into my own writing archives, and have cringed at the raging bouts of purple prose that I fed with bullshit and watered with my own self-gratification and ego.  So yes—an overindulgence in words can obscure our meaning, can blunt the edge of the emotion we’re trying to use like a blade.
An overindulgence in words can become ungood.
But if we’re paring down our prose, honing our verbal knives, let’s never forget that the precise word can do what a paragraph of vague explanation cannot. Be leery of trying to appease someone—even a beta reader or an editor—by eliminating a precise, perfect word because it has become rare or little used.  As the people who traffic in words, it’s our job to occasionally wander off of the freeways of the basic, workaday words like “rotting”, “wonderful”, and “chill” and into the little used footpaths of delicious words like “minatory”, “exemplary”, and “coolth” (which really is a word, my editor assures me so.)
And never, ever let someone tell you that we need to “eliminate a word from our vocabulary”.
Even if it’s a bad word. Even if it’s a word of such horrible implications that we wish mankind never had the capacity to think this word.  Even if the word will never rattle from our keyboards or be uttered from our lips—it needs to stay in our vocabulary.  Because if we have no word for that kind of evil, then we have no concept of the evil itself. And if we have no concept of the evil—we have no way to fight it. If words are our weapons, we need to know the weapons of the ideas we abhor, so we can hone our words.
If we have no words to express an idea, to cut to the bone, to heal with a thought, to right a wrong, to fix a broken thing—we are left as inarticulate as apes, flailing our fists in the air, wreaking physical destruction when the appropriate words would have made angels of us instead.
Writers—yes, genre writers too—are the keepers of words. We are the ones who plant them, nourish them, watch them grow into great and wonderful—and hopefully diverse—fruit. It is our job as gardeners to grow and appreciate the various trees—even if it is a fruit we cannot stomach and will not eat. If we cannot see the tree, understand the tree, we will not know it for the evil it is when it springs up as a volunteer among our midst. To raze that tree down and burn it to the root will only make us blind and ignorant of the harm it can do.  We need to be smarter than that. If the fruit of the tree is bad, we need to grow better trees, trees people want to eat from in order to feed their hungry minds.
We mustn’t let anyone—politicians, critics, parents—carelessly prune and decimate our words.
If words are our calling, our vocation, our faith, this is, in its way, something sacred. It’s a trust our future generations place in us to not let ideas die.
​

​Space
 
By Amy Lane
 
 
So, my husband, Mate, has attempted one home improvement project in the last six months: He has moved my desk from the kitchen table to the dump--I mean what used to be the dump but what is actually the computer desk in the corner of the living room.
 
He cleaned it out (mostly) and dusted it off (well, there are some nooks and crannies) and set my computer up on it with my chair and everything. He even remembered a coaster for my ever-present drink. 
 
I approached this new setting cautiously and weighed the pros and cons. 
 
Pro? I no longer have mail crushing down upon me as I work. Con? It keeps sliding off the kitchen table anyway because although I do the initial triage, Mate still doesn’t go through the mail often enough.
 
Pro? I am no longer “the voice from the kitchen” to my family when I am working and they are watching television. Con? If they are watching Bob’s Burgers, say, a show I usually forego watching and just listen for the funniest parts while I’m working, all I have to do to ditch out on work is to turn around.
 
Pro? If I get up to “think wander” I am no longer in the kitchen and food is no longer right there and hopefully snacking will get a little less commonplace when I’m home alone with the computer. Con? The dogs still need to snack at every hour of every day, so I need a bag of dog treats in my personal space whenever they decide to waddle over and bully me into overfeeding them. 
 
So, yes. Change isn’t easy, even when it’s for the best—but this whole move does have me thinking.
 
What exactly makes up a writer’s space? Some people can just pick up their laptop and work in Starbucks or Panera, I am aware, but that’s so the stuff they need for writing—like papers, pens, post-it notes, small humans who both serve as inspiration and need attention to live—does not interfere with the writing itself. Some people work sparingly. Computer, coaster, beverage, writing is a GO!
 
But in between coffee shop writing and those who are Sparta, most of us need some sort of balance between nonstop beverage service and surviving off of bare white walls and universe juice, so the question remains. 
 
What essentials do make up the place where we work and hopefully do our best thinking and cook up the words whereby we make our living?
 
Let us start with working computer—not always a given. One of the most heinous violations of my workplace was when Squish—my youngest—was fourteen months old and she watered my laptop then closed it and sat on it to make it grow.  Mate eventually fixed it, and recovered the 240K manuscript I was in the closing stages of editing, and I eventually recovered from my swoon on the kitchen floor, but the incident left me with a deep and bitter appreciation of electronics and backups. I now have a multi-terabyte external hard drive that saves all the things whether I remember to hit save or not. So, yes—we all have our electronic security blankets to keep writing, and that’s a big start.
 
Next we have mouse or mouse pad, if we don’t run off a touch screen. My mouse is really expensive because my Mate bought it for me and he said, “This! This is the one! It shall be your mouse!” so it must work.  My mouse pad is a picture my daughter drew at school, and as a fundraiser it was made into a mouse pad. Those fundraiser people know what they are doing, I am not shitting around.
 
This next thing is a must—it’s as important as the computer. It’s an ergonomic chair. Seriously. Think about how much time your ass is going to spend in this thing—it should feel like you’re parking your bum on an angel’s wings for a massage of tiny cherub fingers, tickling your muscles with love. Like the computer, this is a thing to go into debt for—you cannot be creative if your back is screaming at your central nervous system and hour neck is threatening to sue.
 
A printer is probably what some people consider a must have—and I would be one of them. The irony here is, that until the recent move, I sat at the kitchen table with a printer that I could not actually connect to. Mate has fixed that now that I am restationed, but suffice it to say, sending stuff to my son and saying, “Print this for mommy because electronic reasons,” got really frickin’ old.
 
An office supply station. Now I admit that with the recent move, my old system—one of those plastic sets of drawers—has broken down, but seriously, this is a plus. It doesn’t have to be in your space—just near your space. Because sometimes you rely on snail mail or you need a safe place to put your packing tape, or goddammit, you just want a frickin’ sharpie, is that too much to ask?  Seriously—an office supply station near where you work can come in so handy, I’m actually thinking of moving a yarn box here to accommodate my old station in my new place. (If you knew how much I loved my yarn boxes, you’d understand what a big furry deal this is.)
 
Now, after teaching for eighteen years, I had my office supplies down to an art form, but here is a bare minimum for a packrat such as myself:
 

• Ball point pens—good ones
• Sharpies, all colors
• Scissors, at least six pairs, because your children live in your house too, and they steal such things.
• Colored pencils
• Paperclips (I like mine in multi-colors too!)
• A small stapler because once a year something must be stapled.
• Envelopes
• Bubble mailers
• Stamps
• Tissue paper (for whatever you’re sending in the bubble mailers)
• Return address stickers (If you have these in your writer name and address, they can help you keep straight which packages are work related and which ones are socks to your bestie whose toes are freezing in the wilds of Kentucky.)
• Multi-seasonal blank note cards—for condolences, apologies, and thank-you-very-muches
• Printer paper and lined paper—you just never know!
• Packing tape
• Masking tape
• Regular tape
• Hole punch
• Three hole punch
• Ruler  (These last few items are especially helpful if you have little people or a spouse who needs stuff.)
• Reference books you don’t keep online—I have a naming dictionary and a book about world building that I glance at periodically.
• Tissues
• Hand Sanitizer
• Advil
• Band-Aids (I actually don’t have band aids, and I worry.)
• Fill in the blank with your favorite office product here—because if I could remember and organize everything I needed, I would not have so much random crap floating on top of my office supply organizer. I am very aware that I am not the authority!

 
So, again unless you’re from Sparta, these are what I consider the essentials—but what about non-essentials? What about books, hair products, a place for both pairs of glasses and colorful ceramic bowls of things-that-make-you-think?
 
That stuff’s up to you—both how much room you have and how much you can stand of it to be around you.  I personally need some clutter. If I don’t have a few things to focus my attention on, I go deep in my own head for a brain-break. Frankly, it’s a lot harder to come back from my brain than it is on the purple alpaca in the blue ceramic yarn bowl.  For me, the clutter helps me feel in control.  I’m sure you Spartans have a totally different way of looking at nonessentials—I keep flashing to a single lotus blossom in a long black vase—but usually people need something to break up the strictly utilitarian space that can be a business office, and your choice of mild clutter really can help you relax. 
 
The same goes for music. Some people swear by writing to music, some people prefer background television, and some people are just thrilled to have the silence of their own head—but some sort of music generator is often helpful. Most of us have iTunes or Spotify, but I do have happy memories of a big library of CD’s and one of those giant sound system cabinets. Alas, those days are gone, but a healthy idea of what you like to listen to does help.
 
Oh—and one more thing. This is entirely optional of course, but some of us follow the school of thought that needs a dog at your feet and a cat in your seat—or, you know, something similar.  For important a-writer-is-not-an-island reasons, these can be your best writing accessories.
 
If nothing else? They usually demand doggie treats or to be let outside just when you start to nod off at your desk. Yup—your cat can save your life.
 
Or at least your deadline!
 
So, this has turned into one of those columns in which I give advice on organization, a subject upon which my nearest and dearest suspect I have no knowledge whatsoever. This doesn’t really bother me—last year I wrote a column on cooking that people swear by, and most of the people in my life think the idea of me giving cooking advice to be ludicrous in the extreme. 
 
You never know what your own writing may teach you.
 
In this case, it’s taught me that a little mindfulness about my surroundings makes me want to continue to improve them. I can see more places in this little desk that I can take over, things I can make mine. I can see a place I can fit my office supply station, and another spot for a dog bed, because right now I’ve got two dogs in one bed, and the bigger one keeps poking the smaller one in the eye.  I see making this place the comfort zone that I could never achieve in eight years of parking myself at the kitchen table while my family ate in the living room.
 
Oh my word—a little change can be a good thing!
 
And a good desk can spark our creativity.
 
And our creativity can prompt us to change.