In my latest of writers' self-help books, the author says, "Get your work out there."He means sharing something every day on some type of social media platform. And he's right, I guess. "Tell people about your process, but don't tell them everything." Hmmm. I may have already done that in my first blog post. Bankruptcy? Foreclosure? Do those come under "Too much information?" Grist for the mill is more like it.
Here's a bit of my writing "process:" Because it took me 30 years to finally "find" a morning meditation regime, I hold to it. "Regime" sounds strenuous. Meditation has been the biggest gift I've ever received and I gave it to myself. But it took a very long time, saying I was going to meditate, trying to meditate, giving up. But one day in 2008, I was in despair. Here's where that bankruptcy and foreclosure come in.
I was in an MFA program, but it wasn't going well. I had been banjaxed by a woman professor who used our workshop to practice Evil Queen. It took me out at the knees in confidence and self-worth as a writer. A relationship was tanking, my work had fallen off due to the economic crash and it felt like the four walls were closing in. The house had been lost and people didn't like not getting paid, even though it was legal. My livelihood had been gutted by the fall of the refinance market.
I had taken Buddhist vows four years earlier, and borrowed Lama Surya Das' CD called Natural Radiance. And I put it on after my darling high school aged daughter went off to school, but before the rest of the house was awake. I had coffee and looked out at the ocean, right there, where I could almost touch it.
"Just sitting, just breathing, just being..." Surya Das says, in his Queens, NY accent. Lovely. Someone was telling me that "...just being rather than doing..." was okay. I have other meditation CD's now, but that one is my favorite and got me "on the cushion" every day.
Now, the writing. Lots of books will tell you to start writing first thing in the morning, forsaking all else. But the other day, I discovered how meditation helps my writing, and again, it took a very long time.
I did a wonderful Surya Das meditation, about 30 minutes, and the house was quiet: husband still sleeping, dog and cat quiet, candle flickering and Buddha smiling, closed-eyed, keeping me company. And instead of journaling, as I usually do, I thought, "This is a very soft moment. I can write now with confidence." And I wrote on my little netbook, which is easy to open on the kitchen table. I wrote 500 words in a novel I sometimes think will never be done. But that awareness and my noticing that there was a "soft moment" that I could create in, has stayed with me.
So I do want to journal, as Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, encourages us to do, but I find it okay to journal in the evening too, when everything is winding down, and I can recapitulate my day.
Meditation is a huge part of my process, and it's soft and easy and makes everything else so much more pleasurable.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Writing mysteries is addictive
This morning, I created this blog. I've got a couple of other blogs out there, one about cooking and the other called "What's Brewing in Maine" for my beer book in progress. But I thought I'd have a blog about the process, my process, of writing mystery novels. Or not writing them.
It was a long time ago, sometime in the early 1980's, that I began writing in the first person. I'd read a bunch of Robert Parker's Boston-based mystery novels, and since I'd lived in Boston attending college and law school, I loved knowing exactly where Spenser was going in his beloved city.
I'd always wanted to write creatively, and when I'd "heard" Spenser's first person narration enough, I thought, "I can so that."
Not so easy, cupcake. But I slogged away at it, beginning with my first novel, Like Tears Over a Cheek (a line from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa), a fictionalized version of a real murder that took place at my alma mater, Colby College, in the early 1970's. It took me awhile...I was having three kids, failing as many Bar Exams (failing sounds easy, but in order to take the Bar exam, you have to study for months, and wait for months for the result, and worry your head off the entire time). I remarried and moved to Harpswell, Maine. I found Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and through that saving grace, found my first writers' group. I was in heaven.
That recession of the early '90's forced me back to the workplace, a law firm that almost drove me crazy. I swore I'd finish the novel before returning to work. And I did. I had a local print shop print out fourteen copies, mailed them out after studying The Writer's Market to find appropriate publishers, got several rejections, some of them encouraging. I took another Bar Exam, this time in Maine, and came within 1.9 points of passing. The Board of Bar Examiners in Maine was run then by a person whose response to, "Can't you review my answers?" with, "Just take it again." This person will be a victim in a novel....idea!....how about my current work in progress!
I digress. I went to work for Shipyard Brewing Company when they had just opened their Portland brewery. An agent then told me, "Write a beer book, then it'll help get your fiction published." With big Bambi eyes, I said, "Okay!"
I wrote What's Brewing in New England, which was published in 1997. During the editing process, which I thankfully didn't have to do, I began writing a second book in my Griffin Kane series, and at another agent's advice, I changed the setting from a restaurant to a brewpub. I worked with this agent for a year, but found I was writing for her, and not for me. So I went back on my own. I also got divorced, moved with my three kids, two of them teenagers. I went to back to work in another law firm doing title searches, and with the divorce drama and busy real estate market, the fiction writing came to a halt.
It took another five years, when I decided to get a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, to get No One to Bury (a line from a T.S. Eliot poem) going again. I was also going through a bankruptcy, then, the most dreaded thing: a foreclosure. My kids were getting to be young adults, but needed me more than ever.
Several years later, here I am, writing regularly, writing another beer book due out in 2015, and finally after 30 years, attending writers' conferences, albeit local ones, co-sponsoring a reading series in Portland, Maine and getting that second novel finished.
Yes, it's set in a brewpub, now located in Portland in a former Catholic church. When will it be done? By the end of this year. I'm going to Crimebake, a conference hosted by Sisters in Crime, and am determined to come back with an agent. We shall see.
It was a long time ago, sometime in the early 1980's, that I began writing in the first person. I'd read a bunch of Robert Parker's Boston-based mystery novels, and since I'd lived in Boston attending college and law school, I loved knowing exactly where Spenser was going in his beloved city.
I'd always wanted to write creatively, and when I'd "heard" Spenser's first person narration enough, I thought, "I can so that."
Not so easy, cupcake. But I slogged away at it, beginning with my first novel, Like Tears Over a Cheek (a line from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa), a fictionalized version of a real murder that took place at my alma mater, Colby College, in the early 1970's. It took me awhile...I was having three kids, failing as many Bar Exams (failing sounds easy, but in order to take the Bar exam, you have to study for months, and wait for months for the result, and worry your head off the entire time). I remarried and moved to Harpswell, Maine. I found Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and through that saving grace, found my first writers' group. I was in heaven.
That recession of the early '90's forced me back to the workplace, a law firm that almost drove me crazy. I swore I'd finish the novel before returning to work. And I did. I had a local print shop print out fourteen copies, mailed them out after studying The Writer's Market to find appropriate publishers, got several rejections, some of them encouraging. I took another Bar Exam, this time in Maine, and came within 1.9 points of passing. The Board of Bar Examiners in Maine was run then by a person whose response to, "Can't you review my answers?" with, "Just take it again." This person will be a victim in a novel....idea!....how about my current work in progress!
I digress. I went to work for Shipyard Brewing Company when they had just opened their Portland brewery. An agent then told me, "Write a beer book, then it'll help get your fiction published." With big Bambi eyes, I said, "Okay!"
I wrote What's Brewing in New England, which was published in 1997. During the editing process, which I thankfully didn't have to do, I began writing a second book in my Griffin Kane series, and at another agent's advice, I changed the setting from a restaurant to a brewpub. I worked with this agent for a year, but found I was writing for her, and not for me. So I went back on my own. I also got divorced, moved with my three kids, two of them teenagers. I went to back to work in another law firm doing title searches, and with the divorce drama and busy real estate market, the fiction writing came to a halt.
It took another five years, when I decided to get a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, to get No One to Bury (a line from a T.S. Eliot poem) going again. I was also going through a bankruptcy, then, the most dreaded thing: a foreclosure. My kids were getting to be young adults, but needed me more than ever.
Several years later, here I am, writing regularly, writing another beer book due out in 2015, and finally after 30 years, attending writers' conferences, albeit local ones, co-sponsoring a reading series in Portland, Maine and getting that second novel finished.
Yes, it's set in a brewpub, now located in Portland in a former Catholic church. When will it be done? By the end of this year. I'm going to Crimebake, a conference hosted by Sisters in Crime, and am determined to come back with an agent. We shall see.
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