Category: writing

Not Just Plucky Underdogs

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Most of us are suckers for “plucky underdog” stories. I say “most,” because I assume bullies aren’t into them. I notice that the grifter’s administration referred to itself as “Goliath” in one of its communications to Canada, which gives me some indication that whoever wrote that line was not paying attention in Sunday School.

But the rest of us love them. The first three Star Wars movies were colossal hits because the resistance fighters were plucky underdogs who eventually won.

For me, part of what makes the original Star Wars movies so satisfying is that the plucky underdogs are the good guys and they win.

The winning is important. It’s not just that they’re plucky and right; they succeed.

When The Force Awakens, the first of the last Star Wars trilogy, came out (We will draw a veil over the second trilogy), my first reaction was “Wait a minute. The good guys won in Return of the Jedi. Why are they the plucky rebels again?”

Now don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the movie, even enjoyed the complexity of the good guys that got worked into that whole series. But my question stands.

Why weren’t the good guys fighting from a position of power? The implication is that even if the right people end up in charge, they can’t hold onto it.

Now there are certainly plenty of historical examples of the good guys winning only to be overthrown soon after. It happens. It happened here in the United States in November 2024 when the January 6, 2021, insurrection, which we all thought had failed, succeeded.

You can argue that we needed better good guys and that the United States needs some changes and I won’t disagree with you, but we are dealing with the destruction of our country right now, including a lot of the best parts of it. I come down on the side of clean air, equal opportunity, safety, antitrust enforcement, and retirement protection every time.

You can also tell me there was an election, but I will counter that the 14th Amendment bars insurrectionists from office. The failure of our institutions to protect us from this debacle will keep me angry forever.

Anyway, the plucky underdog story is a classic, whether the underdog wins or loses, and we the people of the United States do seem to be in the underdog spot right now. (I assume some of the people who voted for the grifter are still under the illusion that the leopards aren’t going to eat their faces, but they need their social security checks and their highway repairs, too.)

But unless the underdog wins and holds onto the win, it is so not the story I need right now! I need stories where the good people not only succeed, but figure out how to keep things going well. I want stories in which people develop a good society – if not a utopia, at least something on the path to one – and keep it going.

Continue reading “Not Just Plucky Underdogs”…

The Pretty Past

personby Madeleine Robins
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I am working on spiffing up and making small revisions to my first three Sarah Tolerance mysteries, preparatory to reissuing them before I bring out #4 (title still in discussion watch the skies, etc.) One of the things I want to do is add a brief essay to each book about some aspect of the setting (and how, since these are books set in an alternate version of the English Regency, I might have changed it). This had led me to a whole lot of distracting but fun rumination, as well as an examination of why I wanted to write these books in the first place.

One of my favorite bits in the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility is a throwaway line: as the Misses Dashwood and their hostess, Mrs. Jenkins, leave a carriage to attend an evening party in London, Mrs. Jenkins says “Mind your slippers, ladies! The horses have been here.”

Why do I love this? The line doesn’t appear in Austen; it’s there to remind the modern audience that this is a different world. It’s not just that social mores have changed. The day-to-day process of life has changed. We don’t get around using horses and carriages, so you don’t have to worry about horseshit soiling your nice dancing slippers. I love it because it’s a very mild antidote to the sorts of romances I grew up reading, which zipped right over the physical difficulties of life in the Olden Days. When I was writing Regency romances I would occasionally be asked (breathlessly) “don’t you wish you lived then?” To which my answer was always “Hell, no.” No painless dentistry, no antibiotics, no central heating, no reliable refrigeration, heating with wood or coal fire… Add to that my certainty that I would not have been the daughter of a wealthy peer, but more likely a maid or factory girl, dying early from a disfiguring disease (although in fact, dying early, particularly in childbirth, could happen to any woman up or down the social scale). The sanitized past of the Regency romances I gobbled by the ton began to annoy me.

One thing I knew when I started writing Point of Honour, the first of the Sarah Tolerance books, was that I wanted it to be largely set in London, and I wanted to at least nod to the physical rigors of life in the Olden Days. T0 the smells, particularly of the Thames, which was breathtakingly polluted, and particularly in the summer had a stench that penetrated to the city, even in the nice neighborhoods. To the waste and the necessity for crossing sweeps (hordes of little boys who haunted street corners and would swee the mud, dust, fecal matter and urine out of the path of a pedestrian willing to pay). To the darkness: gas lamps were installed in Pall Mall in 1807, and there was an ordinance that every house must have a lamp or torch outside the front door, to dispel a little of the darkness. In poorer neighborhoods this law was largely ignored, and the streets could be pitch dark.

Regency romances don’t mention the outhouses, but I wanted to. I wanted to get dentistry (and its lack) and medicine (and its well intentioned and often wrong-headed notions) and to at least reflect the difficulty of daily life for the people who are not in the top tier of society. See, I knew, given the premise of the book, that I would be playing with the social conventions of Regency London. If I–or my Fallen Woman protagonist–was going to spit in the eye of social norms, the least I could do was give her a milieu that was equally brave. And un-sanitized.

And I admit that I have a small frisson of delight in detailing the dental shortcomings and smallpox scars of my characters, and in writing a scene where a “gold finder” (a slang term for the guy who cleaned out your privy when such was needful) disrupts the orderly working of a household. It’s not that the past wasn’t pretty: it’s just that that’s not all it was.

 

 

 

 

 

The Right Way to Be a Writer

personby Madeleine Robins
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TLDR: There isn’t one.

I once auditioned to teach a writing course on the community level for a place that offered a bewildering array of classes in everything from becoming a real estate tycoon to becoming a high-end chef. It was pretty clear to me that they syllabus the program wanted was based on the 5- or 7-beat plot (which are essentially the same thing, but the 7-beat-plot breaks the stages down a bit more). So I put together a class outline and taught a sample class and lost the gig. Why? As near as I can tell, it’s because at the end of the class I said something like “Of course, this is only one way to write a novel, and it might not be the one for you.”

Apparently that was heresy. True, in my opinion, but heretical in that situation. Oh well.

I think many satisfying books have a glancing relation to the 5- or 7-beat story (there are many different terms for each beat–one man’s “introduction” might be another man’s “exposition,” etc. But the writer may get there without once thinking in those terms.

These days a lot of the writing advice I see is not about writing at all, but about the business of being a writer. And a lot of that advice is such that I, for one, would never have put pen to paper if I had seen it as a young and tender human. If you are the sort of person who likes to write, but writes slowly, or sweats over crafting a sentence, or thinks in a quirky, non-linear fashion, some of the rules could stop you dead. If you’re the kind of introvert for whom having a Social Media presence gives you shudders the rules could stop you dead. And rules really shouldn’t stop you dead, honest.

I was confidently told last month by someone who I assume is living up to her own dicta, that if I couldn’t publish a book a month–more would be better, but a girl’s got to sleep–then I would never make it as a writer.

Um.

It may be fortunate that I don’t make my living by writing, because I flunk many of the Right Way To Be A Writer tests. The fastest I have ever written a book was a little under three months–from turning in the outline to the editor  (I never outline, but it was a media tie-in book and such was required) to dropping the manuscript on said editor’s desk. Approval of the outline, by the way, came in a week after I delivered the book (the book was needed urgently, as the writer whose work had previously been scheduled for that slot had had to drop out–publishing schedules are sometimes inexorable). So: I am not going to be putting out a book a month, under any circumstances. I don’t, as noted, outline (actually, sometimes I outline when I’m about 2/3 of the way through a book to make sure I know where I”m going). The 5 or 7 steps in my plot are observed only when the book is done and I can say “hey, look! Rising action! I did that!” All in all, in terms of the Right Way shibboleths, I’m a pretty bad writer.

And yet I’ve written more than a dozen books, published 11 of them (I’m polishing #12 as we speak). So somehow, despite the rules, I appear to be a writer.

All this is to say: you are a writer if you write. You may not be an author (I tend to think of authors as persons who have written, and perhaps published. Authordom involves past tense). You may structure your work rigorously according to one metric or another, or wander, as I do, over the landscape of your plot until you find yourself at a satisfying destination. The rules are really just there to help you, not to grade you.

Okay: maybe there is one rule I would say is inviolable: Be yourself and have fun. If you’re having fun, even if it’s the stare-off-into-the-middle-distance-and-swear-under-your-breath sort of fun, then you’re doing it right. If you’re having fun, it’s far more likely that someone else–like the audience–will as well (all things being equal, and the book being written in sentences and stuff).

You can tie your own hands by following the rules; that may make you feel safer. But remember that art is by its nature a risky business.

Endings and beginnings and food and drink

personby Gillian Polack
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Tonight my mood shifted dramatically. I like to think that this signals a better year for all of us in 2025. For certain, it signals that a friend had a birthday and that I got to taste a yuzu saké (light and slightly fizzy and perfectly delightful) and am maybe a little drunk. I seldom get drunk. I used not to be able to (trust me, friends tested this, many times) and now that I can… I don’t care to any more. Tonight was an exception. I avoided the wine and only emerged to taste the various types of saké. I like the sake gin, but I adored the yuzu saké and so I drank two glasses.

All I got from drinking was being very relaxed and talkative (and I am often talkative, so even that was nothing new) and a very enthusiastic discussion of the foodways of Japan and South Korea. I was also given two small bottles of cooking saké. I am supposed to be writing up a literature study now, but my mind is fixated on the best dishes to make with cloudy cooking saké and clear cooking saké. Australian-made. I am thinking chicken. Maybe using the same technique I use to cook chicken with verjuice. Maybe something different. I shall put my dream-brain on the problem and emerge with something wonderful for my first dinner next year. I shall eat the chicken and rice with tabbouli (my grandmother’s recipe).

Quite obviously, me slightly drunk is not a lot different from me slightly sober. I think about food history, pop culture, and what food I should be cooking with cool ingredients. I might do some shopping for more cool ingredients tomorrow, for delivery in the new year, just to provide continuity of thought. And I shall finish my literature review tonight and put the books away so that the friends coming to dinner for Chanukah tomorrow have chairs to sit on. I will be offering them tortillas with various fillings and much salad. Also cherries and apricots and iced tea.

This is maybe the best way possible to spend the second last and last nights of the old year. With friends, having enjoyable conversations, not a single racist in sight, and dreams of what to do in 2025.

May you also have a very fine last two days of a not-so-good year, and emerge into a far more delightful 2025. I know it will be more delightful because I have publications emerging. One of the stories that will emerge is exceedingly sarcastic. This is another very good continuity between two years. I like the thought of all of us dumping the bad and enjoying the good.

Happy 2025!

Melted Brains

personby Gillian Polack
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These last few days I reacted to all the not-so-good things in my life by writing a story. The trigger was being told about six different interpretations of Dickens’ Christmas Carol in far too close succession. I’m not quite finished the story yet, but I had such a strong reaction to my small reveal that I am sitting back, bewildered.

The tale is set in a world I’ve used before, the same Jewish Australia that provides the setting for The Wizardry of Jewish Women. Judith, one of the protagonists of Wizardry has a boyfriend that people who read my short stories will know. Secret knowledge. Rather important secret knowledge. The story read with that knowledge is quite different to the story read without it. That’s not what my readers were reacting to. I didn’t tell them about Ash, who happens to be the Demon King and to be an outstanding student of Torah.

I still don’t know why these small words elected any excitement at all, I talked about writing “a Jewish Arthurian story, and the narrator is drunk.” The thing is, it being me, it’s not an adventure story. It’s a cosy tale set in the Middle Ages and is full of rabbis and people who think far too highly of themselves. Judith has opinions about everything and most of her knowledge is borrowed. Maimonides and Rashi are both mentioned, far too often and… trust me, this is not the story most people think of when they dream of Jewish Arthurian matters.

There is much Middle Ages in my life again, which is why it intrudes into my fiction. My next novel (the much-delayed one) is partly set in a Middle Ages. Not our Middle Ages, but close to it. It’s not our Middle Ages because I wanted to break away from the standard way we talk about history and bring people to life using… actual history. I always get into such trouble when I do this.

My non-fiction also contains the Middle Ages. Both of them have so much more than the Middle Ages, as does this little story. I think I might be living irony. Or is that sarcasm? We are in the middle of a heat wave in Australia and when the heat melts my brain the difference between irony and sarcasm melts along with it. This means my short story is the product of a melted brain and has a drunken narrator.

Pity my supporters on Patreon, because they will read it sometime in the next week. If they like it, I might consider editing it further and seeing if anyone wants to publish it*.

*I send all my new fiction out to patrons in a private newsletter. For some publishers this still counts as first publication and for others, not. In any case, I never send it out before it’s been given a thorough going-over, based partly on my patrons’ reactions to it. It’s the difference between a good first draft and a story ready to be shown to the world. My patrons get to see who I am as a writer, not just who I am when I have the help of amazing editors. I do not know what they will make of the drunken narrator nor the melted brain.

Words and Movement

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Movement and words. For me, those things are the basics, the two places where I find my core being.

So when I saw a workshop called Writing From the Body, I pretty much had to sign up. It was taught by Joe Goode, a long time dancer, choreographer, and movement teacher in San Francisco.

I admit to having been a bit nervous. The main way my body reminds me that I’m old is with physical limitations. I ache in some spots and have lost range of motion in others.

And, mind you, mine is a body that was never designed for most of the movements associated with dance of the performing kind. I could not do splits or backbends even when I was six.

Fortunately, while there were dancers in the class, the focus was not on those skills. We started with a series of exercises Joe calls “Movement for Humans” that did not require perfection but that, in fact, did wonders for my physical being.

We ended with an exercise that included a motion of throwing things away. And that led us into writing, starting with a thought about what we were throwing away.

This workshop addressed two things that I sorely need.

First of all, I always need movement and these days in particular I’m looking for new movement practices.

Secondly, I need to do things that open my mind to new possibilities. You might call this sparking creativity though I suspect it’s much broader than that. Continue reading “Words and Movement”…

Predicting the Future?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Over twenty years ago I wrote a story about a young man who gets arrested on a trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras because a blood test shows he has XX chromosomes even though he appears to be male. The Louisiana of that story’s time – which was more or less right now – had passed a law making it a crime to present yourself as anything but your “natural” gender.

He ends up in a jail cell with drag queens, a lesbian wearing male clothes, a trans person who is taking steps toward transition, and a woman not unlike himself – someone born with all the appearance of a woman, but with XY chromosomes.

I told it from his – very clueless, in the beginning – point of view because I wanted the story to be about someone who had never even considered the possibility that he was anything other than a cis man being forced to confront the situation.

It was a great story, but I was never able to sell it. I’ve looked at it over the years and seen a couple of things I’d change as I’ve increased my understanding of these matters, but it’s still a good story.

It’s just too late to publish it, at least as science fiction. It’s basically real life now. It’s obvious that many places are going to be punishing people for being trans or even – shades of the past – for dressing in a way that belies your assigned gender.

Maybe I should make the revisions and try it on a non-genre fiction magazine or anthology. Isn’t realistic a hallmark of literary fiction?

I’m not usually someone who writes science fiction that can be seen as predictive, but it was clear to me more than twenty years ago that there were places in the United States that might well pass laws against people for not fitting into prescribed gender roles.

Of course, I wrote it as a warning. That’s why most people write dystopias, after all. However, given the current fetish of the broligarchs for stupid takes on science fiction and fantasy, it’s easy to believe people would have taken it as a good idea.

I don’t want to live in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead or William Gibson’s Jackpot, but apparently a lot of people do. Continue reading “Predicting the Future?”…

NaNoWriMo Thoughts

personby Deborah J. Ross
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National Novel Writing Month is upon us. It’s an international month-long event in which

folks pound out the first draft of a novel, posting the progress, getting lots of cheers every step of the way, and exchanging writing advice. Lots of friends will be doing it, many of them regular participants.

Alas, or perhaps not alas, not me.

I always have specific reasons. This year, I’m very close to finishing a revision of an on-spec novel that I’ve been working on for some years now, in the time gaps between contracted projects. I’m on the brink of the climactic scene, which spans 4 or 5 chapters and brings together everything that has gone before with a bang and a few nifty twists. If I nail it, the book works. Needless to say, this book not only haunts my every waking hour but has inveigled itself into my dreams. Not the story, mind you — the writing and revising of it.

I began this book back in 2013 on a lark, one of those what-if ideas that just takes off on its own. It had been a long time since I’d embarked upon an unoutlined, unplanned, seat-of-the-pants story, especially one of novel length. I had not realized how much my creative spirit needed what I call taking a flying leap off the cliff of reality. Working on my netbook, I continued the draft while taking care of my best friend as she died of cancer. The story, with all its open possibilities — and it had quite a few surprises for me — gave me an emotional refuge so that I could return, “batteries recharged,” to be present with my friend and her family.

Am I going to set this aside and lose all the momentum I’ve regained during this revision?

Don’t get me wrong. I think NaNoWriMo can be a wonderful thing. I’ve done writing challenges before, way back when, and learned a lot about JustKeepWritingNoMatterWhat. I also think I could use a reminder course from time to time, when I slog through a period of stopping every 5 minutes for another round of online Scrabble. The community support, the exhilaration posting each day’s progress, is wonderful.

But every writer works in different ways, and I feel my hackles rise — not a lot, just a tad — at the “everyone’s doing this, don’t be left out” feeling. Maybe I’m creating that in my own mind, or it’s an echo of being in the “out” crowd during my formative high school years. I need to remind myself to pay attention to what works for me, and that posting daily word counts does not fit most of the time. For me, daydreaming that leads to a deeper story, a connection between characters, a surprising turn of events, is time well spent. Sometimes, a single insight means a solid day’s work, even if no words appear on the page. Other times, if I force that daily page or word count, I end up with something superficial and green, which is not necessarily bad as much of the real work for me happens in revision. But by working well, no matter how slowly, I can nurture that depth as I go along and be sensitive to the openings and connections that I might miss in my haste.

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, more power to you, and may its many gifts be yours! But if not, join me in writing “deep and true and slow.”

Continue reading “NaNoWriMo Thoughts”…

Mondayitis

personby Gillian Polack
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Do you ever have a week when you’ve got more to do than you’ll ever fit in and there’s not a lot of time and it’s all the best work, then fun stuff but you don’t feel well and the world world becomes too much so you sit down with a big cup of tea and watch Captain Scarlet? That’s me. Today. I’m not well and I’m busy and it’s all stuff I want to do…

I have until Thursday afternoon to finish the conference presentation. It’s about how I used my ethnohistorical self to devise a perfectly formed lost culture of magic for one of my characters. I get to talk about magic! And history! And my own writing! I’m talking about the cultural contexts of the magic in The Wizardry of Jewish Women. Demons in lemon trees. Home made amulets. That sort of thing. Except that it’s not ‘that sort of thing’ – I created a complex magic system based on the history of magic, specifically, Jewish magic that my character would have inherited. You can trace where her family lived for about 3000 years if you look at the crumbs of magic I left along the path of the novel. I’ve learned a lot more about the history of Jewish magic since then, and could now create more characters with quite different family heritage and give them all equally Jewish magic.

The truth is that I’m not well. I used to simply take time off to get over the illness-hump, because I get them all the time. Right now, though, I’m busy. I’ll be busy until next June. I love being busy, but I’ve not had to handle so much work alongside the illness since pre-COVID. That’s why I’ve been watching Captain Scarlet. I used to learn new ways of dealing with things by taking long walks or by dancing for two hours. I’ve learned that watching certain types of TV gets me that same thinking, the sort that will change my world because it must. What has Captain Scarlet done for me today? I know I shall include a reading in my presentation and that I shall record the reading for Patreon. I shall also give my patrons some of my coolest research photographs this month, which means I don’t have to write the new fiction I have no time for. And I shall write 700 more words tonight and my new book will reach 50,000 words. I have to finish with all the books on my table (about 40) and have them away before I need to use the table for anything but cups of tea, and those 700 words are the first step in this process. They will also free my brain, because I have 3 essays and that paper t write tomorrow.

Another way I deal with illness is by rewards. The days shopping is delivered, I have potential treats, which I cannot open until I have done the essential work. Tomorrow is such a day, and so IO shall write 6,000 words. Captain Scarlet taught me all this, so it must happen… after a cup of tea. One of the difficulties with my illnesses is staying hydrated, so tea comes first, and stretches and the gentle exercise that will get me back the mobility I had until I tried dancing last week.

It will all work, one gentle step at a time. Until I took that time and admitted just how unwell I am this week, I felt as if the world hated me and as if nothing would ever be finished. This is the single biggest reason for admitting things are impossible and for sitting down in front of the television with a big cup of tea. Light watching and big cups of tea help me find the distance I need to handle the otherwise impossible. Wishing life were kinder is not nearly as effective.

More on returning home

personby Gillian Polack
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Do not return from abroad. Not returning to a messy everyday is now a fixed star in the constellation of my life journeys. Of all my returns, the recent one is physically the most arduous, and also the most difficult to juggle. Yes, my everyday involves the equivalent of juggling while on a high wire with no shoes and no net.

I’ve been home over a week and I’m still juggling. What am I juggling? The theft of my purse (and its ongoing ramifications), the impossible flight home (things went wrong – not too seriously, but I left my flat in Dusseldorf at 10.30 am on Thursday and arrived at my flat in Canberra at 10.30 am on Saturday) and lots of little things that have gone not-quite-right or completely wrong since then. My favourite today was when I needed to speak to my doctor over the phone because they closed down my bus stop while I was away. It’s temporary, but I couldn’t walk to the next stop and still have the capacity to walk at the far end, see the doctor, run messages, and then everything in reverse. If I’d known the bus stop was closed, I would have left much earlier had a halfway chai at my favourite cafe.

Lots of small things add up. The last two weeks were more exhausting than the previous six weeks, which says a lot, given what I spent the previous six weeks doing.

Also, I was not wrong when I posted last week. Western Germany was easier to be openly Jewish than Australia is currently. A major political party supported a pro-Hezbollah rally in Sydney, for example, where Jewish deaths were threatened, but the party claims to not be antisemitic. I already miss talking about politics openly and easily.

My trip to Germany brought together so many things I’ve been thinking about for years. The book is writing itself at the moment. I will reach a stage soon where I will hit the research brick wall, but I have the first set of research materials all ready for when I reach that stage.

This book is on contemporary German views of their own Jewish history prior to 1700 and has become a place where a lot of things I’ve learned over my life come together. When the current Australian Greens metamorphosed into a small case study in the book, I found myself able to handle things a bit less fretfully. I need to understand and I need to help others understand… and I’m very lucky to have the luxury of a few weeks recovery time (because of my health, this time has been budgeted for) where the main thing I do is sort out the messes life produces, rest enough so that my body recovers from it all… and write.