Merry Christmas!

One of my favorite moments of Christmas is proceeding into a candlelit sanctuary on Christmas Eve, singing "Of the Father's Love Begotten" accompanied only by handbells. That moment encompasses the mystery and hopefulness of Christmas. May you all have a day filled with many blessings!

Of the Father's love begotten,

Ere the worlds began to be,

He is Alpha and Omega,

He the source, the ending He,

Of the things that are, that have been,

And that future years shall see,

Evermore and evermore!

O ye heights of heaven adore Him;

Angel hosts, His praises sing;

Powers, dominions, bow before Him,

And extol our God and King;

Let no tongue on earth be silent,

Every voice in concert ring,

Evermore and evermore!

Christ, to Thee with God the Father,

And, O Holy Ghost, to Thee,

Hymn and chant and high thanksgiving

And unwearied praises be:

Honor, glory, and dominion,

And eternal victory,

Evermore and evermore! Amen.

Words from “Corde natus” by the Roman poet Aurelius Prudentius, translated by John Francis Neale in 1851, sung to the medieval plainchant melody “Divinum mysterium.” Nativity of Christ window from the Chartres Cathedral.

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Writers Behaving Badly

Years ago, when I first started writing, I bought a copy of Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, a collection of scholarly essays about the appeal of the romance novel edited by bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz. You see, reading romances was bad enough. Wanting to write them was tantamount to spitting in the Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey and betraying all my hard work as an English major. Reading dreck like romances required that I turn over my Mensa card immediately and scurry back to the respectable fiction aisle.

But what exactly does “respectable” fiction look like? Having read my share of literary fiction--prizewinning literary fiction, at that—I can’t say that I’m consistently impressed. Considering how snide serious writers are about genre writers (read about the kerfuffle when the National Book Foundation folks decided to award its annual medal for distinguished contribution to American letters to Stephen King here), I find it vastly amusing when a genre writer gets a good jab in at the literati. Like King’s acceptance speech. Or even better, this excerpt from British romantic novelist Mary Wibberley’s book To Writers with Love. Not long after being asked by a woman at a literary society when she was planning to write a “real” book, Wibberley attended an Arts Council presentation in which several women novelists read excerpts of their work. During the presentation, she writes,

A fleeting—but scathing—reference to Mills & Boon and romance in general was made by one of them during the question session. I kept silent, oh foolish me, but afterwards went and read the blurbs on the covers of the books these authors had brought for sale. One was about an eighty-seven-year-old woman who decides to commit suicide and locks herself in a cupboard to do so. I wasn't sure why. Another concerned a gorilla that is bred from a human ovum and goes to public school. So that's literature. I had so often wondered. One day (when I have time) I am going to write a book about a one-legged Armenian transvestite who is forced to flee (well, hop, I suppose) to a Tibetan monastery after being seduced by his lesbian dentist. I'm quite confident I'll get an Arts Council grant to write it. So, yes, lady from the literary society at which I spoke, I would like to write a real book. And that will be it. Or I might just build a pile of bricks.

*snort*

But one doesn't have to get snippy to get a point across. Bless author Maya Rodale for this gem of a response!

Check out more here.

Image from http://casserbs.tumblr.com/

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Thanks and Giving

I’m sitting at my kitchen table, the smells of fresh bread permeating the air. Nearby are sleeping dogs and a happy family. In a bit, we’ll drive over the river and through the woods to one of the grandmother’s houses (my sister’s MIL). We will have plenty to eat today, plenty to laugh about, plenty to share. This weekend will bring the Florida-Florida State game, Wicked’s Chex Mix, my Daddy, dinner with my sisters, and a meal with the men at the Fresh Start ministry downtown. If we’re lucky, we’ll also have some quiet time and even a nap.

Back in the 1950s, my aunt brought a special Thanksgiving blessing home from school. My grandfather liked it so much, he adapted it for everyday use. Here’s to blessings, both spoken and experienced.

For all thy gifts so good and fair,

Bestowed so freely everywhere,

Give us grateful hearts, we pray,

To thank thee this Thanksgiving Day.

Amen!

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I'm a Mean One

Unless you grew up under a rock, you recognize this image from the incomparable How the Grinch Stole Christmas holiday special, characters by the inimitable Dr. Seuss, animation and direction by the peerless Chuck Jones. I am totally feeling the Grinch as he stares balefully down on Whoville right now.

I’m sitting in a Starbucks and getting blasted by Christmas music. Note the date above. We haven’t even, to quote the Coneheads, “consumed mass quantities.” No turkey coma. No football immersion. No Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (best moment from the past few years: Cartoon Network Rickrolling the entire parade with the actual Rick Astley). It’s actually just a normal Saturday, but I’m being forced to endure the twin atrocities of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” and “The Little Drummer Boy.” Ho ho ho my fanny.

Let us just state for the record that we at Chez mimi are not anti-Christmas. We can get downright jovial. But we know how to focus on the season properly, which usually entails buying a tree later so it lasts through Epiphany and attending church throughout Advent, not just swooping in for an annual hit-and-run at the Christmas Eve service, with a followup on Easter Sunday.

What’s provoking this spew of Grinchlike bile? The incessant holiday creep that invades earlier and earlier each year. Starbucks is actually showing amazing restraint by holding off on the holiday music this long. Walmart has had trees and decorations available since just after Labor Day, for Pete’s sake--yet another reason they’re at the absolute bottom of my shopping pile. When you start thinking of praising a retailer for restraint for holding off on the mistletoe until the day after Halloween, something is seriously skewed.

That’s why I’m a big fan of Nordstrom. If I were aspirational in the income department, I’d shop there all the time just as a thank you for their no-Christmas-decorations-until-after-Thanksgiving policy. (Check out a news story about it here.) It’s just too bad that they have to post signs about the policy because people have become so inured to the shopping season stupidity.

It’s gotten so bad that KellyKellyKellyKelly, one of my oldest and dearest friends who happens to work for a major retail chain, told me that the mall where her store is located has demanded that all stores open at midnight on Black Friday. Frickin’ MIDNIGHT. If you’ve ever worked in retail, you know that a midnight opening means someone has to be there earlier, so that means lots of employees cutting their Thanksgiving Day short so they can allow denuded buttheads the ability to worship at the altar of consumerism RIGHT AWAY.

People, the stores aren’t going anywhere. If part of your holiday spirit involves going to a mall in the dark of night to grab bargains and elbow it out with rude, impatient people, then be my guest. I’ll be tucked in my bed. Visions of sugarplums optional.

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Snowed Under

I wish I could claim actual snow--that would be interesting and fun--but alas, no. The blizzard I’m facing is the end-of-term stack of paperwork. Grades are due Wednesday, so I’m full up with whining children who complain about bad grades (usually due to missing assignments) and grovel for makeup work. As I like to tell them, “There’s not enough extra credit in the world to make up for credit credit you didn’t bother to get in the first place.”

I’d feel sorrier for them if a more hard-line stance didn’t help. Just today, I got a Facebook post from a former student. She’s adjusting well to school and has an A in her college English class thanks to her “mean” teacher. It came at exactly the right time.

Now, an evening with friends, and a weekend of grading. Reality bites.

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The Bed List

Took Frack and a passel of her friends to the movies today to see Captain America: The First Avenger. May I just say that Chris Evans is one red, white, and blue hunk of YUM? More, please. Preferably before they release The Avengersnext summer.

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Readin' and Writin'

One thing about summer that I love is the time to catch up on reading. During the school year, most of the reading I’m doing is either keeping up with (or ahead of) my students, which often crowds out any meaningful time to read what I want to read. As a result, I’m usually woefully behind on the new hot books. It takes me forever to get to the old hot books—for instance, I just finally read Water for Elephants. I waited until Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire before I took myself to Hogwarts the first time. I’m like the person in the world to read The Help. And don’t even get me started on the books I’m allegedly supposed to read, the award winners and lauded tomes like Freedom and The Pale Kingand the international sensations like Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Don’t know the girl with the dragon tattoo except what I’ve read in newspapers and such, but I’ll get around to her sometime. But not this week. I have a stack of YA I picked up at RWA National that’s going to migrate to my classroom, and I’d like to be able to talk them up when they get there.

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Downsizing

Four pounds doesn't seem like much when you're hefting it in the grocery store. Heft that thing in a travel bag through a bunch of airports (Atlanta's being a standout problem), up and down elevators and across pedestrian bridges in hotels, it gains mass the way most of us do during Christmas cookie time. Four pounds of laptop over your shoulder starts carving a groove in said shoulder, let me just say.

A month away from home can teach you a lot of things, like how to find laundromats in strange cities, how expensive it is to buy Dr Peppers from a hotel snack bar, and how—no matter how nicely they make it up or turn it down at night—that pretty hotel bed just isn’t as nice as your own. But the one thing all that traveling really teaches you is how heavy that laptop of yours really is.

All that traveling wasn’t for naught, however. I did get paid. And one thing I did with my check was give my back and shoulders a bit of a break. My new MacBook Air just arrived this morning. Two pounds and a teeny bit of change. The screen’s smaller—it’s the eleven-inch model—but I think the weight loss will compensate for it. Especially in the Atlanta airport, which all folks from the South are doomed to roam whether they want to or not.

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Just a Few Notes...

Revision time! My notes arrived from Dream Agent (Longest. Email. Ever.), so now I need to revise. Which is fine. I like revising. Really! The notes themselves aren’t that awful. Fixes here and there that several sets of sharp eyes managed to catch. Validation of nagging worries that I tried to ignore, but which kept creeping in. A roadmap for some progress. Little things. Really! Not at all like dynamiting and starting over. Even if it feels like it.

Okay. Enough whining. Back to work, since nothing else will do the trick.

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Knotwork

Sixteen years ago today, I stood in a custom-fitted raw silk dress (thanks, Mama), hand lightly resting in the crook of my Daddy’s arm, smiling at Mr. Man, handsome in his morning coat and striped trousers. Within a few moments--a few breaths, really--we were slipping Celtic knotwork bands on each other’s hands, promising to be true and steadfast, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The choice of vow wasn’t lightly made. Celtic knots are formed with one solid strand, woven in and around itself, with no beginning and no end. I’ve seen plenty of badly-done, broken knots (usually on cheaply made pretty things) to know the real thing when I see it. When I was a teenager, my mother gave my sister and me Celtic heart pendants. The Celtic heart is the single stranded-knot formed at the intersection of three circles--one strand, eternal; three circles, Father, son, and Holy Spirit. Mr. Man and I thought it fitting symbolism, both in the bands and in the vow.

The ring he placed on my finger that day fits more tightly than it did then, but the knots are true. One strand, woven closely with memories and promises, with no breaks despite sixteen years of wear and the inevitable conflicts of two people forming one life together. The strand of a life, woven in love, sealed in the Spirit.

I know the real thing when I see it.

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New York State of Mind

I’m writing this from my new apartment in El Barrio. It’s nice: One decent-size bedroom, a living area, a full kitchen, and a shoehorned bathroom, parquet floors, natural light. You know, something that would rent for more than I pay for my 4 bedroom, 2 bath house on a quarter acre in the ’burbs because even though I’m in Spanish Harlem, this is MANHATTAN, baby!

It’s worth the outrageous money we’re paying to stay here this week because Frick and Frack have never been to New York. We did the tourist thing in Times Square yesterday and have had enough of that, thank you very much. Today we have tickets to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, starring Harry Potter himself and Dan Fielding from Night Court. We’ll eat amazing food on Restaurant Row tonight and begin the austerity plan tomorrow (spaghetti cooked “at home” instead of one more restaurant meal with ridiculous taxes added on). We’ll do plenty of walking and gawking and photographing and even squeeze in to watch the big fireworks display tomorrow night.

My kids are already in love with The Big City. I appreciate it again--the variety of people, the arts on your doorstep, the vitality of neighborhoods and round-the-clock activity. But after nearly a month of travel, mimi has to admit that flying home to her swamp and staying for a while is sounding mighty tempting. Her Empire State of Mind has an expiration date.

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RWA National: Homework

Met with Dream Agent yesterday for our one-on-one. Thursday’s agency get-together in the Film Center Café was interesting and instructive (how often do you get to talk with agency folk and authors about agent-author relationships, etc.?), but this meeting was the meat of my week at RWA National.

I sit down at our teeny table at the bar, and Dream Agent pulls out the longest email I have ever seen. It’s her notes on the two proposals I sent her. We went over them in detail--and I mean detail. I’ve got plenty to work on ...and that’s not even considering her feedback on the other ideas I sent her, which are in a separate giant email, both of which she’s sending me when she gets back into the office on Tuesday.

We also determined that since I have no problems meeting a deadline from an editor, while self-imposed deadlines get slipperier and more evasive than Frank Abagnale, Dream Agent needs to be a bit of a taskmistress. Don the metaphorical thigh-high boots and pick up the whip, so to speak. I think she enjoyed that a bit, since she gave me a deadline of the third week of July to basically rewrite two synopses and clean up about five chapters’ worth of writing. And I’m spending next week in New York on vacation with the denizens of Chez mimi. So, two weeks, then.

Methinks mimi will be a busy--but happy--girl. She’s always liked school. Even the homework.

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RWA National: The Contemporary Romance Market

Authors Susan Andersen, Robyn Carr, and Kristan Higgins, joined by agent Maria Carvainis and ably moderated by Jill Shalvis, conducted this panel discussion on the state of the contemporary romance market. Here are some highlights from their talk:

1. •Readers are engaged by the intimate worlds that have been created by the author, to the extent that the locale itself is practically a character.
   

2. •Writers distinguish themselves from others through their voice and tone--that’s what differentiates the books.
   

3. •Fewer accounts are buying books in all markets, likely as a result of the recession and changed buying habits, not because of e-books.
   

4. •Weathering the market takes stamina (keep writing!) and a strong belief in self.
   

5. •Each author knew clearly what she offered readers in terms of their individual voices and the tone of their books.
   

6. •Author branding is a good thing if you can express it clearly in a few words, but you can’t identify your brand until you’ve written a few books. Brand emerges from the writing, not the other way around.
   

7. •It’s smart to read extensively in your chosen market to see what readers are buying, however...
   

8. •Modeling your books on what successful authors are writing is bad advice.
   

9. •Find a support group who will be truthful with you. In the case of an agent, seek one who will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.

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RWA National: The Quick-Release Trilogy

Authors Zoe Archer, Tessa Dare, Monica McCarty, Christy Reece, and Stefanie Sloane all know what releasing a trilogy of books can do for a career (launch a debut author, facilitate a change in direction, or take it to the next level), and they were kind enough to share it. Some highlights:

1. • Trilogies are a way to get an author’s name out faster. They also keep books in the stores longer.

2. •Readers like discovering more about characters from previous books in linked series.
   

3. •One challenge to writing linked series books is the gap between the initial sale and the later books, since the author’s enthusiasm can lag and that will color the writing.
   

4. •As the series progresses, the time to work on the books shrinks when you add in revisions, copyedits, and page proofs. Build in a couple of months onto the last book to accommodate this.
   

5. •A second contract might be harder to get because numbers won’t have arrived from the first contract’s sales yet.
   

6. •Promo can be simplified because the promo can be contiguous. It’s also more cost-effective.
   

7. •Keep writing! You’ll want the cushion later.

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RWA National: RWA-WF Mini-Conference

Wow! I started off this year’s RWA National Conference with the first-ever mini-conference hosted by the Women’s Fiction chapter of RWA. RWA-WF is an amazing chapter in itself, and the mini-con did not disappoint. We opened with a two-hour session from Michael Hauge (no details here; you’ll need to visit his website for those since the material is copyrighted). Hauge has melded the inner psychological journey of the characters with the outer plot in a way that made several of us scribble notes frantically so we wouldn’t miss the “Aha!” moment before it floated out of the room.

Next up was an Editor/Agent Panel featuring agents Andrea Cirillo, Kristin Nelson, and Meg Ruley and editor Shauna Summers. Some highlights from their remarks:

1. •There is an indistinct intersection between romance and women’s fiction; many successful WF authors have roots in romance.
   

2. •A beautifully wrought, emotional story well-told is what will sell.
   

3. •It’s important to maintain the emotional drive of the story and the reader’s connection with the characters.
   

4. •Writing to your true voice is vital.
   

5. •All publishers are exploring the emerging electronic markets, but some are running toward the change while others are walking.
   

6. •Electronic markets represent a chance for authors to gain career momentum, change direction, and rebuild careers in addition to providing an entrepreneurial way for authors to be involved in their own careers.
   

7. •Authors who are active on social media see an impact in their sales.
   

8. •There is a place for humor in WF, but it needs to work with the author’s voice. Chick lit-style humor and situations feel dated, but funny first-person can still work if it’s done in a fresh, different way.
   

9. •Playing with viewpoints and narrators can pay off if done well.
   

Following that, the Author Panel stepped to the plate to give us their take on the state of the market. Authors Marilyn Brant, Megan Crane, Barbara O’Neal, Jane Porter, and Therese Walsh weighed in on women’s fiction from the writer’s perspective.

1. •Social media are becoming a big aspect of an author’s career, but beware the time suck they represent. Online connections help increase sales, but guard your time carefully.
   

2. •It took each of these authors several years to craft solid women’s fiction that sold.
   

3. •Music is helpful to several of the authors. One finds that kernels of character can emerge from brooding, angsty pieces, while creating soundtracks for each developing manuscript helps another create the tone for the work.
   

4. •The small dilemmas of the internal world are often a key to the kinds of emotions explored in women’s fiction.
   

5. •Inspiration arises from the beauty in nature, families, food, and relationships of all kinds.
   

6. •The best advice is to remember that your story is your story. Even if others are exploring the same topic, your voice and tone should set your work apart from others’.
   

Alas, I was not able to attend Juliet Mariller’s session later, since I was meeting up with old friends, but what little I did get out of the sessions was well worth the price of the ticket. I can’t wait to see what they dream up for next year!

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Road Warrior

Today, mimi flies home after two full weeks on the road. The days have been a blur of essay reading and presentation, first as a reader for the AP English Language and Comp exam, then as a trainer for AVID. Now, 1,981 essays (yes, you read that right) and four days of workshops later, I am packing my trusty sapphire Lands’ End lighthouse rolly suitcase for the last time.

At first, the travel was quite the adventure. Teachers rarely go anywhere--even less so these days, with school budgets in the shape they are--so initially, all this travel seemed like it would be fun. And it was. Don’t get me wrong; it was fun to visit Louisville and Atlanta and do things I never do that often, like watch the movies I want to watch without any flak from the fams. But the blessed solitude wears off after a while. Cabin fever sets in when you’re the only one in the hotel room and you don’t know a huge number of people. Downtown Atlanta seems downright creepy after dark since no one’s on the streets (guess Orlando’s not the only city with an invisible curfew).

But that’s all in the past. My packed suitcase and I are looking forward to a burrito at Moe’s in the Hartsfield Airport before I board the plane, a quick hop home to OIA, and a smiling family waiting for me at the other end.

But RWA National is next week, so I’ll just have to wash everything, repack, and fly out on Tuesday. How do these corporate road warriors do it?

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