Party Day - TLIF

Two weeks ago, one of the account managers asked if I wanted to help plan the work Halloween party. She said they were asking all the girls because the boys weren't going to help so there was no reason to ask them. I said "Okay." Even as I said it, I wondered why - I'm not a big fan of work parties. Making me go to a company Christmas party is probably the highest form of torture you can submit me to. If I go to real Hell - you know, like Catholic hell where I burn and am tortured for eternity - that's what it will be for me. A never ending company Christmas party where I'm seated next to every phoney sales-person I've ever worked with and the chicken is overcooked and the only alcohol is Natural Light and costs $15 a bottle.

But I said yes, we met for all of about half an hour, decided we would wear costumes and have pot luck and publicly humiliate management. And it sounded like fun. This job is so bad for my psyche - I'm going to start thinking work isn't a horrible place.

So this morning rolls around and I'm supposed to bring desert and I promised the girl up front I would wear a costume. I had no desert becasue my grand plans to make it were destroyed yesterday by the fact that I had to pick my kitten up from the vet (we had his balls cut off, he's a little unich now). And the fact that I popped a rib yesterday and was a raging bitch by six pm.

I also didn't have a costume. Fortunately, I used to make costumes as a hobby. I would pick pictures from anime, say "That looks cute", figure out how to reconstruct it from fabric, and sell it on eBay. And I still had one of these costumes, and it's actually kinda pretty. I pulled it off the hanger this morning, gave it the once over and said "I made that? Wow." Yeah, I had a narcasistic moment.

No one will know what it is, but that's okay. I'm only wearing half of it. Off the shoulder shirt and a long white cape. And since I'm only wearing half, I have jeans on and they're really comfy.

And in case you're wondering how I'm going to relate this all to writing...I'm not. I have three bags of candy at home for trick-or-treaters even though in the ten years we've lived together, we've gotten less than 10 total. Because of this, it's the good candy (Twix, Resees, and Kit-Kats), and I will not have to buy sweets for weeks.

What are your plans for the weekend besides last minute NaNo psyching out?

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Don't Get Rejected Before You're Seen

Yesterday at work someone was asking about how to help their customer avoid e-mail spam filters. This is important because we run a lot of legitimate e-mail campaigns for companies who actually allow their customers to opt in to such things. (In case you think I work for the devils that spam your inbox with endowment enhancement ads, I don't. But I do still worship Loki, and he thinks those ads are funny. Conundrum, really).

Anyway...this morning someone was tweeting about their query getting blocked by agent spam filters because it had certain keywords in it. So buckle in for a short lecture that I may have more information on than a lot of people.

Different spam filters work different ways. Some allow you to only receive e-mail from people you've pre-approved. Two things on this:

1. Don't enable this kind of filter if you're querying. You'll piss agents off.
2. If the agent you're querying has one of these, this advice won't help you. I've queried ezines that operate in such a way, and it's aggrivating.

There's another type of filter, though. It's more of a grading or a rating system. Like golf, the higher the score your message gets, the worse off you are. A lot of these filters are adaptive, so it's not possible for me to say specifically what they will and won't look for, but I can give some hints. A pre-determined grade is assigned to a series of phrases, words, and domains. The more of those components a message contains, the more likely it is to be blocked.

Some things (but only a short list) that make it more likely to get your e-mail flagged:

• All Caps, especially in the subject header
• Blind cc-ing large numbers of people
• Words and phrases that relate to male enhancement, sexual performance, or pornography
• Promising the deal of a lifetime
• Your odds are also increased if you're doing any of these and sending from free e-mail addresses (yahoo, hotmail, etc).
• Attachments

Just because you have some of these components doesn't mean you'll be filtered or blocked, but next time you go to query an agent just keep in mind in the back of your head: does my letter read like any spam I've seen recently? Does it contain any of those words or phrases or promise money from a foreign prince if they just give me their bank account number?

I know, just one more thing to keep in mind when you're querying, but this one is easier. It's pretty low stress compared to most of the things you need to know, so if you're message doesn't get filtered, you've scored big with little effort ^_^

What's your least favorite part of the querying process?

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Coming to a Theme Park Near You

When I was twenty-three I visited Georgia for the first time. I also moved there less than two months later, but that's a different story. While I was visiting I got to go to Six Flags.

And I had an amazing time with the wonderful person I would marry three years later. I got to ride standing up roller coasters and lying down roller coasters, and spinny rides that pushed the boundries of survivable G-forces. And there were Looney Toons - which I love. And a Batman roller coaster, and, and, and...

8-D

I was thinking about this whole 'can't summon intense enough emotion' thing. It's not completely true. I have lots of negatives bottled up and it's pretty easy to make anger and irritation explode all inside my brain cavity. Mentally volitile...that's about right. Or just mental.

I pondered this today, because I've been putting a lot of thought into how to get my writing back. I also got the cheap fast food coffee, and I'm just lucky I really needed the caffeine or it would have been a waste of money *is not a fan of cheap coffee*. But I was pondering emotion, and my stories, and how it all intertwines.

And something hit me. Something I've heard said before, but has never quite impacted me in this way. A story can't be all lows. Even a dark story has to have something in it somewhere that's not bottom of the pit. Even if it ends with all of the good people dead, at some point you have to give your reader a chance to breath.

Sweetie calls it pacing, and compares it to a roller coaster.

Almost all roller coasters start the same way: that slow creep to the top of the first hill. To me, that's the most terrifying bit of the entire ride. Why? Because you know at the top of the hill you're going to be plunged into a gut-wrenching downfall. Kind of like reading a good story where you know the underlying tension is about to make things explode, but you're not quite there yet.

So the car reaches the top of the hill, it crests the peak, and then it plummets. Some people scream, others throw their hands up in the air, and pretty much everyone feels their gut jump into their throat as it tries to escape the negative G's. The car reaches the bottom of the peak, and you have a moment to catch your breath, but not a long one. That moment is important, though. That little pause in your story allows the reader to get their bearings and process that their gut has returned to home base.

But if the car just sits there after that, the ride is over. You can't let that happen. The roller coaster is heading back up another hill. This one is probably shorter, and doesn't take as long to get to the top, or back to the bottom. Same result, but at a faster pace. Now you've hooked your reader, and they can't wait for the next bump of conflict. But you've got something up your sleeve - the next gut-defying chapter isn't a hill, but a spiral. A twist. Something in the plot that no one saw coming, but should have becasue all the clues were there. And in your roller coaster you're tossed to one side and then another (my favorite part of the ride, by the way. Goes back to the love of spinny rides).

And as things draw toward the close, there's going to be another one or two giant hills. Something that takes you to new highs sends you plunging far and fast. The biggest spike in the entire ride. Story climax, anyone?

And you plunge down, screaming and knowing it's all going to be over soon. Maybe a little ill, but still right there through all of it. And when the car reaches the bottom of the hill, the ride doesn't come to an abrupt halt, just like a story doesn't end right after the big climax. It has a little bit of track to slow itself down.

And when everything, book or roller coaster, come to a screaching halt at the end of the line, you're left feeling a little disappointed. But if the writer has done their job, you're standing in line again as soon as you can.

And what this has to do with me? I think I've forgotten how to have fun, and no one wants to read a story filled with characters not having fun. It would be like a ride where you had to climb the steps to the top, get strapped in, and dropped one-hundred feet. Ride over, do it again. Bleh. Time to find a good roller coaster instead.

Are you ready for the ride to begin?

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Drink Until You Can't Think

The last year has been tough writing-wise for me. I know, I talk and talk like I'm all prolific and stuff. Truth is, 75% of what I've had published this year, I wrote before this year. The other 25% - flash fiction I wrote in about fifteen minutes. I'm not completely proud of that, but I like both the flash stories so it could be worse.

I wrote my 50k last Novemember and then just ground to a halt. I've been struggling with block ever since. I've been reading and soul searching and watching people and staring at blank documents on my computer. I've even got 1/4-1/2 finished stories littering my USB drive.

Part of the problem was Old Work. It pretty much sucked the soul right out of me. The last two years of my life all the way up to July were pretty much the worst depression I've ever suffered. I'll come clean now and say that the number of times I thought about killing myself was too many to count on my fingers and toes. This was something I never said aloud (except to my wife), because I'm really not big on calling that kind of attention to myself. I like to call other kinds of attention to myself.

When I was twelve I made what I thought at the time was a brilliant statement, but turned out to be not so smart. I told the other girls at church that I'd learned how to get compliments. "The best way to get someone to compliment you is to put yourself down. 'I'm so fat'. To which everyone responds 'No you're not.'". It turned out they didn't like this introspection and it moved me a notch closer to outcast.

But Old Work is gone now. I'm (surprisingly) happy with new work. The last three and a half months have been mental healing time. The depression is gone as are the 18 hour a day/6 day a week work weeks, and the desire and inspiration is starting to flow back again. I've got some mental blocks going on still, though. There are certain emotions I can't reach internally because I cut them off to survive Old Work.

As a second aside - those Forbes Top 100 Companies to Work For Lists? Old Company was on there.

I need them back. I tap my own emotion pretty heavily when I write. It's why I have to isolate myself when I write. I suppose I could learn to do without that, but I kind of like the rush. It's vicarious living, but in my own words instead of in someone else's book or movie.

I'm thinking about getting drunk this weekend. If you're wondering, no I don't do this often. I have a glass of wine with dinner about once every six months. It's probably been five years since I had more than that. But my newest (probably not so) brilliant idea, is that maybe it'll clear the mental block. Not that I want to write while I'm drunk, but that it might be like that final cathardic release I'm looking for.

Or, I could just be woefully repressed and need to get over myself.

Hmm...

Any unorthadox ways you have of clearing the writer's block? You know, the stuff they don't suggest in your typical 'clear the block' lists?

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Different Kinds of 'First Times'

It snowed this morning here in Salt Lake. I kind of expected it because

1. It almost always snows the week of Halloween
2. They've been saying it would on the radio all weekend, and the weather didn't argue.

This meant that I got to bring out my leather jacket - which I love. This act reminded me that I've had this coat for eleven years now. I bought it the night of the Depeche Mode Concert (one of the best shows I've ever been to - soooo high energy, regardless of the fact that they're not top on my favorite list). The following summer I moved to Georgia, and was so bummed because I thought I might not be able to wear it again that winter. The snow and ice storm we had over Christmas/New Year proved me wrong ^_^

But why did it matter? We put some thought into this memory stroll this morning and figured it out. It's because it was my first leather jacket. I bought it myself, I had wanted one for years beforehand. It was like one of those signs that I'd finally come into my own. It didn't matter that I owned my own car, or had a good paying job - I could afford the frivoloty of a coat that cost three times what a non-leather jacket would have.

Which is what makes this such an appropriate occasion to pull the coat after storage for its eleventh winter. Another first
Daily Flash 2011: 365 Days of Flash Fiction. This is the first anthology I've appeared in that's listed on Amazon.com ^_^. I'm on Decemeber 22, for anyone who wants to read ahead. The story is called "Dying for Immortality". But I've seen the pre-press copy so I know you should read them all. Don't skip anything.

Amazon says there are no copies in stock - so go order it directly from the publisher, Pill Hill Press.

Makes a great Christmas gift for that hard to shop for person - a 500 word or less short story for every day of the year.

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