Leaning Out

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

Yesterday was the first day in forever that I didn’t have to work.  It was wonderful.  I cleaned the house and made a lemon chiffon pie.  Then A and I took a drive down toward Coney Island, stopped at Spumoni Gardens to grab a pizza, and came home to watch Game of Thrones.

It was pretty much a perfect day.  The kind of day that made me think, I’d be happy doing this every day.  Except that would mean I’d be pretty much a stay at home wife.  And wouldn’t that mean I’d somehow failed?

I feel like women of my generation are supposed to want the high powered career, to become the Fortune 500 CEO or the partner with the corner office or the next Secretary of State.  Between the Anne-Marie Slaughter article and the Cheryl Sandburg book, it’s starting to seem like even though we were told we had choices, we were expected to go down the career path.  Which, in its own way, is as strange as telling women their place is in the home.*

I’ve seen a bunch of theories lately about how to keep women in the work force.  They range from tax incentives (treat child care as a fully deductible expense) to work/life balance suggestions (don’t schedule meetings after school hours).  The problem is that all these suggestions go toward disguising the fact that the American workplace is inherently un-family-friendly, rather than implementing the kind of structural value change that would give women – and men – the ability to have both meaningful careers and rich family lives.

Maybe, then, we’re looking at this the wrong way.  What if women are leaving the work force because they aren’t interested in playing by the same rules that men do?  What if women would rather opt out of the system — some by starting their own businesses, some by staying home with the kids — because they don’t buy in to the corporate ethos in this country?

What if the solution is not for women to lean in, but to drop out?

Let the men run the rat race if they want to.  Let them pile up money they don’t have time to spend.   Let them miss the baseball games and the school plays.  And maybe, by the time I have daughters who are the age I am now, the question won’t be why women can’t have it all.  It will be why it took men so long to figure out that there was a better way for everyone.

*If this sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve written about the subject of women in the workforce before.

The Monster in the Maze

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

Plot is not my strong point.

If you’re looking for beautifully written language, for characters with depth and knowledge and humanity, for a voice that’s all it’s own, I’m your girl.  But plot?  I’m terrible at twisting the threads of my character’s fates, at telling them where and when and how to move.  I can give them motivation, but I stink at placing obstacles in their way.

You remember how, in Sim City, you could chose to subject your city to earthquakes or fires or alien invasions?  I was the kid who always disabled that option.  I liked all my Sims.  I didn’t want to see them destroyed.

It’s the same with my characters. I don’t want to make them go through the Fire Swamp, falling into the quicksand and battling Rodents of Unusual Size.  I don’t want to put them into situations they can’t get out of themselves.

The result tends to be that scenes which should be filled with tension end too early.  In my current WIP, one of the characters goes into the forest, gets a little lost, but comes back half an hour later, unscathed, and with strawberries.  In the next draft, she’s going to disappear for more than thirty minutes, and there will definitely be Consequences.  Problem solved.

The harder thing to fix is that feeling of drag around the 2/3 point, right about when the bad guys should be starting to close in.   This happens in my current WIP.  Where there should be several chapters of nail-biting, page-turning, edge-of-the-seat tension, I end up with several chapters of world building instead.  My notes to myself, after I read back through this, were something along the lines of “WTF??”

Fear not, though.  I have a plan.  I’m going to create a page in my Scrivener for the novel titled “Very Bad Things.”  And I’m going to write down all the bad things that can happen to my characters.  All of them.  Everything from death to dismemberment to imprisonment to torture.  When I’m done, I should have enough disasters to keep the plot moving and the pages turning.

Whether my characters forgive me for it is another matter entirely.

 

 

Reaching Up

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

Last week, I emailed Brian White from Fireside Magazine and told him I wanted to help with the Kickstarter.  I offered to match pledges, up to $1000, for an hour.   Truth be told, I’d kind of been kicking myself for not trying to get on board with Fireside earlier.  I backed the first three Kickstarters, but that was the extent of my support.  When it looked like the third one wasn’t going to fund, I shrugged and was a bit sad but figured that was what came of trying to use crowdfunding on an issue by issue basis.

In the year since Brian started Fireside, though, I’ve been doing a lot of writing, and even more thinking.  For better or worse, the traditional publishing market is dying.  Within the next five years, there’s a good chance that people will be able to trade and sell used e-books the same way they trade and sell (and give away and leave in motel rooms and bus stations) paper books.  There are so many, many books being published each year that the chances of any one standing out from the crowd are even slimmer than that of finding the proverbial needle.  And this market, where people no longer believe that a new book is worth $25, where people will be able to sell books for pennies, where each book is competing with millions of others, is the market I’ll be publishing in.

So how does Kickstarter fit into publishing fit into trying to make a living off my writing?

Connections.  I think, more and more, we’re moving back to a place where the artist needs to come down from the ivory tower and be accessible.  This means connecting with people.  Yes, connecting with fans and readers is important, but it goes beyond that.  It’s connecting with the people who read and/or write the same kinds of things you do and with the people who’ve never read a word you write but follow you on Twitter and the people who pass by the blog and leave the occasional comment.  Because over time, the connections start to matter.

It also means supporting other artists.  It’s no good to go out, hat in hand, if you’re not willing to chip in a bit when someone else comes asking.  Because Fireside funding another year means more than having another literary mag that pays above market.

It means there’s a community of people out there who think that stories are worth supporting.  And that’s a community I want to be part of.

The Month That Very Nearly Wasn’t

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

February is starting to feel like a lost month.

It started off with such promise.  February is letter month, of course, and it was going to be the month that I finished my application to a writing workshop that’s taking place this summer.  I had thoughts that I might try and write a story to submit to Glitter and Mayhem.  Not to mention getting a renter in upstairs and starting work on the basement.

Thus far, the only thing I’ve managed to do is log a ridiculous number of hours at work.  I’m going to get the application finished.  Partly because it has a hard deadline of March 1.  Mostly because dreams take a certain amount of chasing before they can come true.

As for the rest of it, I’m pretty much operating in triage mode.  So if you don’t see me blogging or on Twitter, if you’re waiting for a letter that hasn’t arrived yet…  That’s where I am.  Hunkered down, waiting for the storm to blow over and the sun to come out.

 

“I know it when I see it”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings5 Comments

One of the questions I’ve seen floating around blogs and #askagent sessions is how you know when it’s time to put a manuscript on hold.  The answer, it turns out, is rather like Justice Stewart’s definition of pornography:  you’ll know it when you see it.

After 3 contests, several requests for fulls, and a little bit over a year of querying, with no offers of representation, I’ve decided to put Pomegranate House on hold.  The fact that this doesn’t seem like a tough decision at all is part of what’s convinced me it’s time to do so.

The feedback I’ve gotten has been remarkably uniform, almost always along the lines of “I love your writing, but I’m not connecting with this piece.”  Several agents have mentioned they’d like to see my next novel, once it’s ready.  My takeaway  is that I could keep trying working on this one, keep trying to coax it into something the market finds palatable – or I can work on the next thing.

I’m choosing the next thing.

I’ve got a novel in progress that I’m super excited about.  It’s set in the near future.  Bronwyn, the heroine, used to be the First Lady, but now operates a stop on the Railroad, an underground network that smuggles dissidents and members of the Resistance out of the former U.S.  Then there’s the coming-of-age story I want to write, the one that chronicles three generations – son, mother, and grandmother – as each one leaves home and sets off across the country.   I also have a story tickling the back of my mind about a teenager who goes to visit an uncle on a dig in northern Iraq and gets pulled into the Persian empire.  (That one’s going to take some serious research.)  And if I ever get time, there’s a summer camp novel I’ve been wanting to write…

And who knows.  Maybe, after I’ve written a few more books, I’ll take Stephanie out again and find her a home.