HOPPING THE CRAZY BRAIN

Hopping the crazy brain.

Sleep writing.

Dream writing.

Whatever you want to call it. I usually say tapping into that dream state, but I'm sure there's a scientific term for it.

But anyhoo, this might be my most important writing tool. Dream writing. I use it ALL THE TIME. At events, whenever the question of writing method comes up, I speak with great enthusiasm about tapping into the dream state to solve plot problems. Some people look puzzled, but most nod in agreement. But I'm never sure if they realize the extent I go to in order to use this tool. I never get out of bed. For three months straight.

 Kidding. 

I can say this: It does not work if I'm not actually working on the book. What I mean is that I need to be actively producing material and pages for the sleeping-prophet thing to work.

Right now I'm working on a sequel to Play Dead, and I'm excited because I've never had dream-state writing work so well. Ever.

I normally wake up in the morning, and, before getting out of bed, I think about whatever plot issue I'm dealing with at the moment. Often in that half-awake state I can solve it.  But I wanted to share what happened with this current book, something I've never experienced before. I got up in the middle of the night. Bathroom break, then went back to bed. My brain started thinking about the book, and, before I knew it, I had ten pages of plot written.  And the next morning, it didn't suck.  I always think of little snatches of things in the middle of the night, usually dialog and description, but never what amounted to almost an entire plot. So I got to wondering… what would happen if you set the alarm for 3:00 a.m. and wrote for a half hour or whatever.  I'm too lazy to do this, so please report back if you try it.  

But anyway… This morning I woke up and was doing my lying in bed thing, this time not even thinking of my book AT ALL. Thinking about Christmas, and an application, and weather, and would roads be bad on Saturday. Sometimes drifting back into a weird dream I'd had where I broke into someone's house because I thought I was Mary Poppins, and suddenly the coolest major plot point for the Play Dead sequel came into my head, something that would never, ever, ever have follow-the-dots evolved from my current plot. It just came out of nowhere. Nowhere. And now I can't wait to write it.  It's unique. I don't think it's been done before, but it's not so far-fetched that it would turn off readers.  And it meshes perfectly with the existing plot.

 I don't know where it came from. Yes, writers are always saying that, but this was like a bolt of lightning.  "Where do you get your ideas?"  Not a clue.  It seems like magic.

MEMOIR WRITING CAN BRING CLOSURE

 Dread of writing The Orchard was a cloud that hung over my head for fifteen years.  I knew I had to write it, but I kept putting it off. I didn't want to go through it, revisit it, but I felt a certain duty to tell the story since I'd lived it and I was a writer. I felt an obligation to document farming culture in an anthropological way. But I didn't want to write it. I suppose I could say it was on my bucket list if the bucket list contained things I didn't really want to do.  But now that all of my appearances and talks and events are over (except for two in April of next year), I've been rewarded with something unexpected.

Closure. 

I was never after closure. I never considered closure, and I've never heard memoir writers mention it. Some people have asked if writing The Orchard was cathartic, and I have to say not in the least. Quite the opposite. It was horrible and it was torture and it was awful in every way. And once it was published, I had to go around and talk about it. More torture.  I can now admit that while making public appearances I often regretted writing the book because I had to keep reliving it at each event.  I was like a cutter who traveled place to place and cut myself in front of an audience. Oh, that's so melodramatic.

But now... NOW, it's like a door has slammed on that old world. It's over over over for me. I did my job. I no longer have to remember and hold it in my head because I've written it down. I no longer have it looming before me, this book I have to write, this life I have to revisit.  This duty. I never expected to get anything out of writing it, nothing for myself, so the closure has been such a surprise.  Right now I'm wondering if closure ever uncloses. I suppose it does, and I still have those two gigs next year, but I don't know... I feel that it's truly behind me.

Maybe.

SOME NICE REVIEWS THIS WEEK

I'm always so grateful for reviews, whether they're left by readers on Amazon and Goodreads, or posted on blogs and review sites.  Reviews are hard to write. I don't think I've ever written a decent review in my life, because it's so hard for me to capture the story along with my response to that story. So when someone goes to the trouble to write a thoughtful and often powerful review, I'm kind of blown away. For one thing, I could never write that well. And here they are, WRITING about my WRITING.  It hurts my head to think about it very much.  :) 


Reviews are gifts. That's how I think of them. And this week I received two wonderful gifts, one for The Girl with the Cat Tattoo, and one for Made of Stars, both 5-star reviews, and both wonderful and wonderfully written. Both stories are very dear to my heart, so I think when you get this kind of response to them...well, it's extra special. 

The first review is from Short Fiction Spotlight, a site that reviews short stories. Like me, a lot of writers love to write short stories. Unfortunately, the short story format isn't embraced by readers. I hope that changes at some point, and I still keep thinking that short stories would be great for reading on phones while people are waiting in line, or waiting in the dentist office. Some sharp little phone app that you can open and read a sharp little short story.  I think price is one of the issues with short stories. We have to charge .99. Can't charge less, And .99 might sound like a lot for a short story, but the writer gets .35.

The review for The Girl with the Cat Tattoo is from Romance Around the Corner. 
This is the book that horrified the two agents I sent it to. One agent said it was the weirdest thing she'd ever read. I still scratch my head about that response, but I think when any idea slams into such resistance, it's always especially nice to get such positive feedback once the book is finally made available. Because how can a writer not be full of doubt when a story gets slammed by the gatekeepers?  But as soon as someone tells me I can't do something... that just makes me all the more determined to do it. I suppose it's childish, but I basically want to prove them wrong and prove myself right. 

ADVENTURE PUBLICATIONS OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS

I wanted to let writers know that my friend Pat Dennis has taken a position as acquisitions editor for Adventure Publications. They will be publishing four wilderness/outdoor mysteries per year, and they are now officially open for submissions.

 Here's a bit from Pat and Adventure Publications:

"My new job is the fiction acquisition editor for Adventure Publications! Please feel free to share the following. “Adventure Publications, an award-winning publisher of outdoor guides  is accepting fiction manuscripts for its new series of outdoor/wilderness mysteries. We are looking for mystery fiction that will appeal to both the mystery reader and the outdoor enthusiast. The books will be produced in both print and e-book format. Example of authors we love are: Nevada Barr, Victoria Houston, C.J. Box, William Kent Krueger and Beth Groundwater. Currently, we are seeking novels set in the Midwest, Southwest, Northwest, Northeast and Rocky Mountains. Email your submission to: fiction@adventurepublications.net. Email queries sent to any other address will not be read. We do not open email attachments, unless we request them. Your entire submission must appear in the body of the email and not as an attachment. The subject line should be “QUERY” along with the title of your manuscript. Please email the first chapter and a synopsis along with a cover letter. Also, in your email, please include the number of words in your completed manuscript, as well as a bio, and pertinent writing and/or outdoor wilderness experience. If you prefer, you may snail-mail your query, along with your first chapter and bio to Fiction, Adventure Publications, 820 Cleveland St S, Cambridge, MN 55008.”

ADVENTURE PUBLICATIONS

Personal note:

I must confess that I flaked out on Nanowrimo due to some unforeseen circumstances, but I'm back working on the sequel to Play Dead and am about 1/3 of the way done with the first draft. ( 

You can see by my little tracking thingy up on the right that I'm just over 20,000. Will probably hit 25,000 by the end of the Nano. Half of my goal.) I should have the whole first draft completed by the end of February.  I'm enjoying the process so much that I've decided to write a sequel to Hush once Play Dead is finished. Hush is still my bestselling title, and I keep getting requests for a sequel, so it only makes sense since there's a demand. Plus I do love writing sequels because the characters are already developed. There is no question about what a character would say or do or think.  Both books will feature the same characters and settings. 

Wait, that's not all!

A new indie press called Forty Press is going to be reissuing Before I Wake.  The trade paperback will come out this March. More on Forty Press and the reissue later.

Photos

Minneapolis

LAST APPEARANCE UNTIL APRIL 2013

This Wednesday will be my last public appearance until April of 2013. 
If you are in the south Minneapolis suburbs, please join me for a presentation where I will talk about writing The Orchard.  I will have trade paperbacks on hand if anyone wants a signed copy. I will also have trade paperbacks of The Man Who Left. These sold out in a matter of minutes at my last event, so I plan to bring more this time!  

Where and when: 

 Wednesday, Nov. 7, 6:30 p.m., Elko New Market Library, 50

Church St., New Market, MN

Elko New Market Library

My grandmother, Doris Ahlberg Mitchell

Love this photo. And really, could a person look any cooler?  Those boots? That hat? That attitude? When I was eight, she and I took a trip to Ohio to visit my aunt.  On that trip, my grandmother (mother's side) died... Unknown causes.  She was fine...and then she wasn't. I like to think of her like this. I actually wanted to publish The Orchard under her name. I think that would have been so cool.

PICKING THE SCAB

I'm retiring.

Because I was a writer who'd lived through this uniquely American experience, I felt an obligation to write The Orchard. My goal in writing the book was to document and capture a farming era in an anthropological yet personal way. At the same time, I didn't want the book to be about me, or about one family. I wanted it to feel like every farm, and every family. I wanted it to be a parable. Which is why I used my name but once in the book. I didn’t want to intrude upon a story that I didn’t feel was my story, but was rather everybody’s story. Maybe America's story.

The Orchard is a book about one farm, but it’s also a book about every farm. It’s a story about our children and our children’s children.  It’s a story about a young girl who falls in love, marries an apple farmer, and never sees the world in the same way again.  And it’s a story about one of the deepest and most profound loves of all: the love of a parent for a child.

My hope is that people will still be reading The Orchard in fifty years, or even a hundred years. That it will become a doorway to the past. That people a hundred years from now will pick up the book, or more likely download the book, and say, "This is what life was like on a farm in the 1980s.  And this explains why the world is the way it is today."

But right now I can't talk about it anymore. I wrote it. I didn't want to write it, but I forced myself to do it because I thought it was important.  And I'm grateful to all of the independent booksellers who embraced and hand-sold the book. I'm grateful to the people at Grand Central Publishing who embraced the book, who felt it was important. I'm grateful to my agent, who felt the same way. I'm grateful to the reviewers and the book bloggers and  and the people I will never know who passed the book to a friend or relative.  But now that the release of the paperback has come and gone, I have to move on.

Every time I talk about the story…it's like opening a wound that's just begun to heal. It's not too bad when the events are one on top of the other, but once there is a gap of a few weeks… that's when it's tough. That's when I have to go back there all over again after starting to feel like myself again.

 I really thought I would get used to talking about The Orchard.  But it doesn't get any easier. I think the reopening of the wound over and over and over…that's not healthy.  

So for now, I'm retiring. I've committed to some events in April of next year, but at this time I'm not accepting any new speaking invitations.  I feel bad about that, because it's  such an honor to be invited to speak, but I'm retiring from public speaking, at least public speaking about The Orchard. Of course, like so many people who retire…  Well, we know how that goes.