In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. John 1:1*

If you sort of ignore the actual intention of the quote and take it literally, man, that’s a sexy egotistical concept for even the most humble wordsmith.

I’ll say it, I’m a devotee of the Word.**

I have hymnals floating all over my house. Bird by Bird is sitting in my bathroom right now. Two copies of On Writing float around the house, though both are right now in my dining room. I have books on structure and genre piled up next to my bed and there are more then a few editing books in my living room. I go to these books when I want to revel in my faith, but I also go to them when I find I have a crisis of faith. Picking up a good one, flipping through for inspiration, generally fills me with fervor and suddenly I want to get back to practicing my faith.

I’m not clergy, though, I spread the faith casually, I have neither the vision nor the dedication to teach The Word to others. I have to live with it, practice my religion in the real world outside of the safety of many churches devoted to The Word. I envy clergy their solitude to contemplate The Word, but I guess if none of us were laity, there wouldn’t be much of a faith to discuss. I honor the men and women who devote their time to the Word as an idea and something to study, but I’m not smart enough to do much more with it then live it.

But this isn’t some hippy religion with guitars and a lot of forgiveness. As far as I know, confession exists, but it’s generally something you can only do if you aren’t successful and even there, there isn’t really anyone to absolve you.

To add it it’s cult-like mystique, it’s usually something no one practices in public. You can’t go to an open service on Sunday or see us spreading the Word in a public park on at an airport. Sure, you’ll see the rare anarchist sitting in a coffee shop with their alter pieces; laptop and moleskin notebook and hymnal. Sometimes they’re actually practicing, but more often then not it’s just set dressing to control how people judge them. “Oh, they must be Wordists, you can tell by the props they carry. They must be really faithful. Look at all their stuff.”

I admit, I am sometime guilty of putting the alter pieces before the worship and get so lost in the rituals, (I must have silence or the right music or the right candles,) that I neglect the Word. Here, I’m confessing.

Anyway… We don’t often do it in public. We tend to have to do it in dark places, under rocks and in closets and away from eyes that judge. It often alienates us from people who don’t understand the Word the way we do. Hell, it tends to isolate us from each other. Almost like and anticult. We have to form elaborate excuses to gather in hotels or convention centers or coffee shops or online on forums just so we feel a little bit less alone, and yet service to the Word is still done so inside the self that it has to be done in private.

And of course, no one worships the Word right so far as anyone is concerned. When my worship is done, the first thing I want is to find other worshipers to tell me what I did wrong. Like the  gathers, we construct elaborate ritual around critiquing the way others celebrate the Word and what they did wrong and right. Sometimes we gather around the works of Worshipers long dead to decide if their work is still relevant or how it’s so much better then anything out today.

Plus there’s the blood sacrifice.

No, really. Sometimes you’ll be in worship, have say, 10,000 words down of a 60,000 word novel when the Word speaks to you and you realize that about, say, 5,000 of those words don’t actually fit in this novel and without them another 3,000 don’t work so I’m pretty much going to have to start over.

So, I’m cutting and hacking and bleeding all over and the Word is appeased. Hemorrhaging word count on the alter is sometimes the only way to reconnect with the Word, and that’s why so few people really stick with the church for long. I don’t have a problem with those who lapse, they’re probably smarter then me, less brainwashed by their faith. I almost envy them too.

I’ve probably stretched the metaphor, but since my form of confession is a one way street anyway, I’ll just have to live with that.

*You know who’s fantastic? Cherie Priest. You know why? Apparently, she has that phrase it Greek tattooed on her lower back. I love her so very much!

**Not to be confused with any actual religious figures, spirits or ideas. The faith represented here is purely fictitious. Probably. Unless you want to give me money.

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So it’s a year since I started keeping track of this sort of thing. Despite last years cynicism, I don’t actually feel particualry bad about what I have to report for this year in told. What I said last year still holds– Tell me what you did this year and what you hope to do next to keep it public to add accountability.

• I guess the big one is I had another baby. That’s two. We have replaced ourselves with smaller, more beautiful and probably more intelligent hybrids of our combined DNA. I’m already a more recovered and happier mom than I was, but a lot of that is because I didn’t have major sugry with this birth and I’m no longer a first time mom. (Duh.) I’ll call that a win.
• Tina gets smarter and more beautiful everyday. We’re talking about getting her a desk top next year because she’s already so computer literate. Every time she shows me a craft she’s done or a picture she’s drawn on the computer I tell her, ‘just beautiful.’ Every time I say it, I’m really saying it to her.
• I’m still getting paid to write, and now I’m starting to eek out a qualified career making enough money to get by.
• I think I’ve sold about another 15o,000 words this year, writing about 170 to 180,000 in total. Next year I’ll have a better count. (HA!)
• I’ve spoken at at three Cons this year and helped David land similar apperances, which boosts both of our careers and rocks pretty hardcore.
• I’ve actually seen physical copies of books I’ve worked on, three of which are on my shelf as we speak.
• I wrote for and got accepted in my first anthology. Buried Tales of Pinebox, TX is awesome and you should buy a copy if you haven’t already.
• I’ve been published on The Escapist and now have a regular blogging job at Altern8.com.

Looking over last year, there’s a few things I didn’t get to I wanted to this year, but I’m not too down about it.

• I didn’t hit 250k this year, but I did have a baby so I’m just going to have to live with that.
• I didn’t write and produce any radio drama. I just… forgot about it. What a damn shame. Maybe this year, assuming they go to a 36 hour day all of the sudden.
• I did not get Unhero out, but I’ve come to terms with the rewrites I’ll need to do first so that’ll just have to happen over time instead.

Plans for this year?

• I hope I can get more personal writing done, fiction and the like. I have a few creative writing classes this Spring so I don’t have much choice on that, but after the classes and in terms of novel writing we’ll see.
• I am dying to see Maschine Zeit finished up. I love it so much and believe in it it’s just a matter of time, like everything else.
• I’d like to speak at more cons this year. I have a few lined up, but really any excuse to travel and get out of the house is better than the last.
• I want to read more books this year.
• I want to get back to learning Italian. This entirely novel-writing related.
• And how about a totally arbatrary goal? I want 500 twitter followers by 2011. I have no control over that, it sees like a pretty random thing, so that should be fun to look at next year.

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…I call it procrastination. It means your heart isn’t in it, you haven’s sucked it up enough to do it anyway, or you actually don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing. (What, you didn’t outline? Well now, whose fault is that? Certainly we’ve all warned you about not outlining.)

All over the intertubes there are about a million pages worth of advice on how to ‘get past writer’s block.’ I don’t need to rehash any of that, mostly because I don’t believe in writer’s block. (Why? Well, Chuck Wendig said it far more succently than I feel like right now.)

So what do I do when I’m procrastinating instead of writing because I’m having trouble making words go? About a million goofy things, but the only thing I’d actually recommend is getting up and cleaning.* No, really, step away from the desk and clean the office, go do the dishes, get some laundry out of the way.

Why? Because you need to do it anyway, so it’s way better than three and a half hours of computer solitaire. You might not have the wordcount you want yet, but at least you won’t have roaches leaning over your shoulder giving advice on sentence structure. (You know what house/apartment I’m talking about. You KNOW that artist/writer friend. Weird how they’re rarely productive despite their clear lack of procrastination-cleaning. Correlation?)

It gets your blood going, and as Chuck reminds us in his post, your brain actually needs blood to function. (Not to mention the fact that as a writer, if you don’t get blood in your legs pretty regularly you risk getting blood clots AND DYING! You heard me. Clean or die.)

You probably don’t want to clean, anyway, so after a while, getting back to that writing project will be preferable to scrubbing the toilet, and before you know it, your writing a million words a minute just to avoid cleaning the garage.

Your spouse/roommate/family will be way less likely to give you a hard time about ‘getting a real job’ because you aren’t playing another round of World Craft of War and instead making their home nicer to live in.

Messes are distracting. No really, you might be used to living in a hovel. Many are, but at the end of the day most human brains get cluttered in cluttered environments. (Note: I have no scientific data on that, it just figures.)

Cleaning can (and in this context MUST) be a finite activity. If you are on a deadline and have no passion for it, now is not the time to paint the nursery and dig up all the infant clothes to put into said nursery for the upcoming baby. (Really. I can’t do that right now, no matter how much I want to.) Now is the time to say, file all the tax information on the desk, and after that, reconsider your desire to write.

While cleaning, you must be sorting through your writing project in your head. You must be thinking about it, batting it around in your head, finding what parts are preventing you from getting motivation. Like Agatha Christie told us, “the best time to plan a book is while doing the dishes.” Dull, idle tasks + thinking = ideas. It’s math. How can you argue with math? That’s right, you can’t.

Now how to stop Cleaner’s Block, that, I got nothing. Sorry.

*Please note, cleaning as a replacement for anything and everything may in fact have something to do with the fact that I am a few weeks at most away from having this baby, nesting is like that, but the advice remains solid. I think.

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Philadelphia is a city of writers who share a spooky written history. Don’t believe me? Well, keep in mind that the father of horror and mystery novels both was a Philadelphia recident during some of his most important writing. There are horror writers lurking in the shadows of Byberry Instiution or Eastern State Pennitentary. To catch up what’s creeping in the shadow’s of Philadelphia I caught up with Brandon Ford while he’s been talking about his newest release Creeping Shadows, including a story with Alan Draven and Jessica Gardner. (See what I did there? Creeping and shadows? That kind of cleverness is why I land the big interviews.) So without further ado, Mr. Ford talking about getting started as a writer, writing, and Philly.

What was your first job related to writing, how did you get it?

First thing I ever had published was “Elmer’s Grue,” a short story I submitted for a contest I found on Writing.com.  At the time, I was quite the active member.  I was always posting my work and swapping criticisms with other budding writers.  I was completely awestruck when I was one of the winners.  Me and about 17 or 18 other writers were chosen to be included in Abaculus 2007, an anthology of science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories.  The book was the very first release by Leucrota Press.

What’s your #1 piece of advice to other writers, getting started or trying to keep the momentum going?
Never, EVER stop submitting your work!  Submit as much and as often as possible.  The only way you’ll ever get your work out there is through sheer persistance.  One of these days, that “no” will turn into a “yes.”  But you’ll never know when until you try.

Where or from whom do you take writing advice?

I network with other writers quite reguarly, so we swap advice from time to time.  And I sometimes contact more established authors and see if they have any words of wisdom they’d be willing to share.  I always keep an open ear for that kind of thing.

What are you working on now? (if you can mention it)

Well, I’m happy to say that my third novel, Pay Phone, is finished and I’m hoping to see it released in March of 2010.  I’m currently going back and forth from a couple of novels and I’m constantly writing new short stories.

What do you have on the shelves we have to read? (yes, this is a bit like asking which is your favorite child.)

Well, I’m always a cheerleader for Jack Ketchum.  He’s my absolute favorite.  Any of his books will do you just fine, but my absolute favorite is “The Girl Next Door.”  Richard Laymon is another author I quite enjoy and I just recently read one of his earliest works, “The Woods Are Dark.”  Very interesting read and if you have the extra cash for the hardbound limited edition, go for it.  I also LOVED “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris, who’s always a crackup.  There are several more I could list, but I’d need a LOT more room.

Who is your favorite current writer?

Ketchum, definitely.  Nobody writes like him.

What’s unique about writing in the Philly area?

Well, it’s a fantastic city, obviously chock-full of history, and you’ll find interesting people around every corner.  And, how many other horror authors can say they live in the same town as Edgar Allen Poe?

You can read this interview at my examiner blog here and comment there or here to join in on the conversation.

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…And then I looked at my word processor screen and realized to my horror that I had already written all of this before!  A repeat! It’s a story/character/theme/technique/whatever that I’ve written before!
Oh Christ. I’m a hack. All I’m ever going to write is the same dripping crapsicles I have written before and I might as well commit ritual seppiku with my laptop. (Don’t think it can be done? Me either but I bet there’s someone on youtube who’s tried.)

So here’s my reality check.

I’m not the first one to do this. I won’t be the last, either. Writing is a thing of development. Everyday we’re developing better habits, better skills, and better methods. But that isn’t the only thing we’re always developing. We’re developing characters and ideas and settings and all of those other things that make up the stories we create.

Go ahead, look back into the history of say, Phillip Marlowe. He didn’t spring fully formed from the pen of Chandler as he appeared in The Big Sleep. Actually, Marlowe had appeared in a number of short stories with a few other names before he hit his stride in the first novel. Some of that was editorial decisions, but I think a lot of it was Chandler trying to feel out the character before he devoted a whole book to the guy. I’m glad he did. The level of character knowledge and detail Chandler had on Marlowe made him feel real. (That will explain my crush on the boyscout, you understand. It’s the quality of the character design, not because I’m a gooey woman.)

Am I saying you should write the same thing over and over? No, obviously that’s bad writing, or at least, dull writing. What I’m saying is don’t be afraid to practice a scene before you implement it. I’m saying try the same setting a few times to see what characters really ought to live there. I’m saying let your heroine go through a short story or two to be sure you really want her to be a punk rock werewolf hunter before you start writing the whole novel. Maybe in writing her, you’ll discover she’s more exciting as a tax accountant. (Okay, I dare someone to write a tax accountant/werewolf hunter.)

The greats have done it, you’ll do it anyway, might as well pretend like you were planning to do it all along.

[For more on recycling, try this!]

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About four weeks ago, I had the pleasure of taking a three-day lecture given by author Gregory Frost at the PWC. Frost teaches creative writing at Swarthmore College, right here in the Philadelphia area. From the his first statement that ‘the first stories were fantasy stories’ to his staggering mental bibliography of books in a number of genres I was blown away by this local writer immediately and have a quarter of a notebook full of thoughts and ideas inspired by his words. I learned about a thousand little things to take into account for my own personal journey as a writer, but I thought I’d contact Mr. Frost and ask him some questions for a more universal audience. Luckily for all of us, he had a few minutes to answer my questions, which I have below.

In terms of pedigree, Gregory Frost is a multiple time published author with eight novels to his name, his work in several anthologies and numerous published short stories. He knows enough about writing to teach at a major liberal arts school and is active in the local writing scene. I can’t tell you how lucky I am to get him at the top of my list of interviews.

What was your first job related to writing, how did you get it?

If you define “job” here as something someone paid for (assuming barter counts), the answer is that around 1975, two friends of mine who were in a TV directing class at the University of Iowa, where I was also a student, asked me to write episodes of a faux sf series for them to direct. We’re talking Christmas tree lights for special effects. I took a short story idea I’d written at the time and bastardized it (and believe me that could only have helped it) and wrote three episodes of a time travel series for them about a college student (duh) who figures out that his professor has discovered how to travel not only through time but through alternate timelines, but who as a result gets pulled into an alternate reality himself and discovers a legion of other time travelers, and so forth.  For this piece of journeyman scribbling I was paid in giant cans (”tubes” in Oz-speak) of Foster’s Lager.  That made for huge incentives to finish each piece.

What’s your #1 piece of advice to other writers, getting started or trying to keep the momentum going?

B-I-C: Butt In Chair.  Not that I take my own advice often enough, but that is all there is to it finally.  If you don’t sit down and write, then you will accomplish nothing.  That does not mean you won’t write one or two or twelve novels that are bad, that don’t work or won’t sell.  But if you don’t write them and get to the one that does work, does sell, the rest is hypothetical. You’ll have a hypothetical career. You’ll be writing a book real soon now. I heard Justin Cronin say once that as he was leaving the graduate workshop program at the University of Iowa he asked his advisor (and the head of the program) what he should do now, and the man replied, “Write for ten years.”  He said it was the best advice anyone had given him, and it took him almost exactly ten years to produce his first novel. You can tell someone young that and it doesn’t sound so daunting.  It’s harder to say it to a fifty-year-old who’s always had a hankering to write but repressed it, didn’t act on it, for decades.  All I can tell you is, I’m sorry, if you’re serious you will have to put in the time.  The rest is posturing, and there are plenty of people who are good at that, who go from conference to workshop to conference and learn nothing.  Don’t be one of them.

Where or from whom do you take writing advice?

Depends on what we’re talking about.  If I am looking for feedback on something I’m writing, that might be someone like Karen Joy Fowler or Kelly Link, both of whom volunteered to take time from their own writing to be first readers for my novel, Fitcher’s Brides.  It might be my friends Oz Whiston and Fran Grote, who both have acted as first readers on my last couple of projects.  I think it’s important to have a couple of good readers (who cannot be family members, I’m sorry, but no) to offer impressions of your work; but it’s also important not to use them too often or too early.  I’ve seen people serve up their very rough first drafts to workshop groups, and I think that’s a terrible mistake because once your first readers have seen this work, they’re tainted. You can’t use them reliably again because they will never approach the work as a reader might again. They’ll have a kind of prescience about it, about what’s going to happen, about whose story this is, and that will truly screw up their feedback. You can ask them to look at some specific revisionary element, but they can’t be your first readers twice.

If we’re talking about advice in general, I take it from a lot of places. From other writers that I talk with about writing; from books like Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page, or Carole Burns’ Off the Page.  There is Janet Burroway’s definitive text Writing Fiction, and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. And then there are teaching collections of stories, like Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design, and T.C. Boyle’s Doubletakes. All of those provide insights into writing, into the relationship of the writer to the story and of the story to the reader.  Anything that makes you think about fiction differently, see your writing differently, is good.

What are you working on now?

I just turned in a short story for a commemorative anthology that Greg Schauer, the owner of Between Books (in Claymont, DE) is doing to celebrate his store’s 20^th anniversary.  And I’m trying out working on two things at once, which I have not traditionally done. One, called Unreal Estate, is a supernatural romance mystery, maybe the start of a series, and I’m final drafting (I hope) that.  And some members of the Philadelphia Stories writing group are doing a kind of hive mind writing collective right now, like a stripped down version of NaNoWriMo, so I’m attempting to push through a first draft in a kind of guerilla “take no prisoners” fashion. No idea what that’ll create, because it’s not the way I work traditionally, but I feel like I want to try it out. I’ve gone through my career that way, trying not to do the same thing over and over, which is somewhat antithetical to what publishing likes.  There is another Shadowbridge book on the back burner but I want to get through these other projects first.  The Shadowbridge fantasies are intricate and very much products of the lizard brain, and they don’t come out quickly.

What do you have on the shelves we have to read? (yes, this is a bit like asking which is your favorite child.)

Well, Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet, a duology, is what’s out and fresh at the moment. Certainly the books I’m proudest of right now (to go with your “favorite child” analogy).  They comprise a large story that flows around and incorporates smaller stories, tales within tales, tales performed on stage, tales that echo something going on in the aspic in which they’re embedded.  It’s probably my 1001 Nights and I don’t expect to repeat that, as it took a long time to develop and emerge.  Some ideas, like the thing I’m approaching guerilla-writing style, come to you with the larger structure in place, comprehensible. Fitcher’s Brides did that. Others, like the Shadowbridge novels, are to me more akin to feeling your way down a flight of stairs in the dark. All you can do is hold onto the railing and hope none of the treads is missing.

Who is your favorite current writer?

I’m right now re-reading and enjoying Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I haven’t read since I was a teen.  I just finished Dennis Tafoya’s extraordinary first novel, Dope Thief, which reads like poetry written in broken glass.  But if forced to pick one, I’ve become terribly enamored of Christopher Brookmyre, a mad Scots writer of mad comic thrillers like Quite Ugly One Morning and A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away.  He’s evil and brilliant, and between him and all the Donald Westlake “Dortmunders” I still have to read, I’ve got my really exceptional popcorn books sewn up for years to come.

What’s unique about writing in the Philly area?

The community of writers around here is extraordinary.  There’s a strong science fiction community, with writers galore.  I’m a member of the Philadelphia Liars Club, which includes local authors such as Jonathan Maberry, L.A. Banks, Kelly Simmons, William Lashner, Jon McGoran, and Merry Jones; our styles and stories are incredibly varied, but what a band of outlaws to belong to.  I’m friends with exceptional local poets like Leonard Gontarek and Nathalie Anderson, and artists and illustrators like Charley Parker and Rich Grote.  So I like the way the layers overlap, and communities aren’t insular.  I think one of the things that I find sad is how few local independent bookshops there are.  That’s maybe not unique in this universe of corporate rapacity, but with a literary community that includes Kelly Writers House and the Free Library author series, I hate seeing my world go to the behemoths.

So, here’s a local gentleman who knows his stuff. I look forward to picking up some of his recomendations and I know the Shadowbridge books have just jumped to the top of my TBR list.  I hope you’ll join me in thanking Mr. Frost for taking the time.

(See this interview also at the Philadelphia Examiner page here.)

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So first of all, go here if you want to read my article on parenting and gaming. Fun stuff to write, neat magazine to have written it for and all thanks (like so much else in my life these days) to Matt McFarland. (Thank you, Matt!)

So I’ve had some time to process the Writers’ Convention I went to this weekend.  I have a notebook full of notes and thoughts and I realize how few of them will actually apply to anything but my own work, this will be ironic soon. (What, ten years of pretending to be a writer, a year or two with a bit of success at it, and NOW I actually think about plot construction for the first time in my life? Yeah, I win the internet.)

The thing that I couldn’t get past most of the time, is how strange the writer is as an animal, especially when it’s free range and face to face with its own species. Curious, occasionally friendly, and by some staggering percentage, utterly unable to think about things outside of the terms of their own needs. (I’m not saying this is a universal truth, just what I observed this weekend.)

Now granted, I’ll give you that all of those writers there spent a few hundred dollars to learn the few things they needed to make their manuscript the next DaVinci Code. I can’t blame them for having their heads pretty far up their own manuscripts. I know I tend to think and relate new information to things I already know or understand, that’s how my brain works, but when I’m in a large learning space I do try to take that information and make it universal. I learn more and others around me do as well. (Did I mention I couldn’t keep my damn mouth shut through most of the workshops? I had a few people, speakers included, thank me, so I guess I wasn’t too obnoxious.)

I also saw a non internet troll. It was fantastic. A grown man in his mid to late fifties. A man who at least pretend to have a real career as a writer, and so you would think he had good things to do with his time and money. Like any internet troll, apparently not. He sat in a class and spent the whole time muttering his side comments to someone beside him. Eventually it got so obvious and irritating that the speaker stopped and asked him what his issue was with what she was saying.  Being a troll, he backed off, saying that wasn’t the time and place. Better still, he spent the rest of the day (at least from what I could tell, he was prevalent in the break room) complaining to any and all how he was ‘yelled at’ by one of the speakers. When, after a while, someone who had been in the first class came in to try and still his belly aching a bit, he got up and left saying ‘they just don’t understand the point.’ Classic troll behavior, and best of all, this guy had never even been on the internet! (He’s a letter writer, he explained, dozens of pages of letters a week.) Funny how it never occurred to me that such a thing could exist outside of the net.

There were questions at panels so narrow and specific to a writer’s work that the panelist couldn’t possibly answer it. Loud personal phone calls in public places. More complaining about minutia then you could shake a complaint form at, and of course all of it coming from people who had been to this conference a dozen times before and would go a dozen times again, age permitting.

Don’t get me wrong, I ran into a lot of people who were just fantastic, people who I hope to some day call peers. There’s one young lady who has, no kidding, ACTUALLY done something new with the standard vampire novel, and I am dying to be her pal when she’s rich and famous. I had a blast and learned things at every turn, but then, that’s what I wanted out of that conference. I wonder if I’d gone into it wanting to ‘fix’ my manuscript or land an agent or find something to complain about, that’s just what I would have found.

Long ramble short, really, ladies and gentleman, have fun if you’re going to go. If not, I’m sure you can find things at home to bitch about.

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One day I watched my almost-eight month old defy death. Nothing tragic really, she just decided to crawl off of the edge of the bed and plummet head first to the ground.

I was watching, mind you, and got my hands on her fat little trunk before she got all the way over the edge, but it was clear her intent. Yes, she wanted to crawl off the bed. No, she didn’t know it would hurt her. She hasn’t any concept of ‘I could get hurt,’ or ‘that might be scary.”

In fact, she really has no real sense of fear. Now, don’t get me wrong, she’ll get afraid after the fact. Also the dark. But things that she can see and reach for, things she can touch or taste, or somehow experience, no, she hasn’t any fear. She just reaches and pushes and explores with little concern for the consequences.

Sometimes, she’ll storm her way across the couch at a full crawling clip towards the desk where my husbands computer sits. The purpose for this? Apparently, her only desire is to grab on to the printer/scanner monstrosity on his desk and hang from it. There’s no where else she could go on the desk. She just wants to hang and climb and challenge herself, and gravity be damned! My husband thinks her suicidal need to hang from the printer/scanner has something to do with scanning her butt like those drunk secretaries do at company Christmas parties.

I’ve even found her attempting to climb my book shelf. Maybe to get at my books, or maybe, more likely, just to climb -something.-

I remember shortly after she was born. She would roll onto her stomach and cry and cry, mostly we figured, in frustration that she couldn’t move. She couldn’t go. It was so sad to watch her little head bob up and down, and her little feet kick no where to get her somewhere. The moment when she first got to her knees and really honestly crawled for the first time, she literally squealed with joy. Joy at being able to move and be in control. The dangers and perils that come of being in charge of your own movements just don’t matter. Moving matters.

Willy Shakespeare says ‘Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.’

What does this have to do with creating, with writing? To be honest, I didn’t know at first, I just watched my daughter and her fearlessness and kept being nagged by a sense that there was something I ought to learn in it. I realized it was trait in her that I respected, and envied it a little. Which is when it occurred to me, of course, I’m a dummy. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of putting my out there that it’s going to be rejected. That after all this time I’m going to find out I was never a ‘real writer’ after all. Whatever that means. I was afraid to take a risk just because there might be a consequence.

In that silly little moment of realization, I put together what my daughter was trying to teach me, unknowingly perhaps, when she tried to crawl off the edge of the bed.

I’ve decided to shrug off fear and doubt, and dive head first into the thing I’m the most afraid of. (You know, other than motherhood, ’cause that’s one I was gleefully thrown into, rather than dove.) So I’m putting my writing out there, out everywhere. I’m biting back my fear and taking a chance, because, like my daughter, I don’t know if I’m absolutely going to fall if I climb up on the scanner, and so what if I do? I’ve got plenty of people who love me and will catch me.

So anyway, thank you Tina, for being fearless, and reminding me how. /gooey mom time.

Also: Updates on the Anthology I was included in, you can download a sneak preview.

Three of my White Wolf titles are out, buy them at your local Dork Store. Immortals, Ancient Mysteries, Ancient Bloodlines.

And, my article for Pyramid Magazine is now out, here.

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The first anthology I’ve been invited to write for is available for preorder now and I couldn’t be more excited. 12 to Midnight’s Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas. Real fiction and everything!

You can read more about it here, including the bios of some of the other writers involved. David Wellington? Are you kidding me!? I’m having a fangirl moment. Shane Hensley might be one of the nicest guys on the internet. Remind me later to tell you what an idiot I am and how it involves that kind gentleman. Who doesn’t love Deadlands? I’m not ashamed to see my name below any of the names included.

So go get your preoder out of the way. I’ll be waiting right here.

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So what have I been doing? Celebrating some holiday fun with Thaumatrope Twitter fiction. (Twiction?)

And

Oh, and did you see the Collection of Horrors? You should, I’ve written two bits of it, and you can download one RIGHT NOW. (Or, if you rather, get a subscription and get a whole bunch of Hunter the Vigil goodness, I can’t blame you. There’s some great stuff in there. Even some great stuff by David, the man from whom my babies come.)

Oh, and did I tell you I’m going to be in anthology? A real book and everything. Why yes, you should preorder your copy now.

Later, more book reviews and maybe some links.

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