I like helpful, encouraging people, especially if they're funny.

I have found a blog whose writer is not only very successful and very funny, but very encouraging to other writers. And that sort of generosity of spirit should be applauded. The writer is J.A. Konrath (he writes mysteries, it seems, although I'm not familiar with his work), and the blog is jakonrath.blogspot.com. Here's a sample of the guy's writing:

How do you as an author define success?
Piles of money, so high you can make forts out of them, but you never would because you'd want to sleep in the fort and when you woke up the next morning you'd have a wad of twenties stuck up your unhappy place.

What's the biggest mistake that authors make when it comes to promotion? What's the biggest mistake that you've made when it comes to promotion?
Lots of authors think that once they sell a book, the hard work is over. The fact is, no one cares about you or your book. Sending out a few postcards and doing a signing at the local Barnes & Noble won't make you a best-seller.

The biggest mistake I've made would have to be the Hug a Naked Author Day at the Schaumburg library. But that's only because the cops busted it up.

When he's not joking around, he takes the trouble to give good, no-nonsense advice from the perspective of someone who KNOWS. (And he manages to be funny even when he's not joking, which is really hard to do.)

Post-Festival report

Lotsa food. Lotsa people. A few homesick Americans (including one, from Baltimore, who was thrilled with the sweet potatoes roasted with an ersatz Old Bay spice mixture), and a ton of Aussies who either remembered barbecue from the first Festival or were meeting it for the first time last night. EVERYONE loves barbecue -- once they understand it. (Provided they're not vegetarians; I made sure there was plenty of vegetarian and vegan food available.)

I must say that, despite some traumatic moments during the smoking process (I guess last year's smoking, which went off pretty much without a hitch, was beginner's luck), the actual smoked meat turned out just right. The sauces were great, too, if I do say it myself (even the experimental mango sauce). The only disaster was the pumpkin tarts, which annealed to the bottom of the muffin pans. Phooey. (Still, that gives Houston, Margaret, and me two muffin-pans' worth of pumpkin tarts to attack with spoons....)

Despite how stressed I got, I really love making tons of good food and feeding it to tons of good people. The Greater Meaning of yesterday is how blessed my family and I are with good people in our lives, and with the the fact that we can offer them hospitality.

The Second Illawarra Festival of Southern Barbecue

Preparations for the Second Illawarra Festival of Southern Barbecue are well underway. It's a bit smaller this year -- the inaugural festival fed about 40 people, and the logistics were extraordinarily demanding -- but I'm excited about the menu.

Carnivore items

Smoked pork with Kansas City sauce or experimental mango sauce

Smoked beef with Texas sauce

Baked beans

Vegetarian items

Stewed apples

Saffron rice biryani

Corn muffins

Macaroni and cheese

Rolls

Mini pumpkin pies (It is Thanksgiving weekend, after all -- and many thanks to Kelly and Tim for bringing me the cans of pumpkin! You can't really get the right sort here in Australia.)

Vegan items

Roasted Old Bay sweet potatoes (I use a copycat recipe for the Old Bay, and I blush to say I actually prefer it to the real stuff)

Meatless chili (it gets its heft from walnuts and red beans)

Only a few days until the Big Day. Pretty much all of Friday will be spent smoking the meat. Saturday will be the final setup, baking the cornbread and mini pumpkin pies, buying the soda and beer, and figuring out what to do if Friday's smoking session hasn't gone according to plan....

I'm learning about sound plots.

Over the last few days, Houston and I have spent a large number of hours going over the script to Foul Play in Dapto, identifying all the places that need sound effects and/or incidental music. We spent a couple of hours listening to sound-effects CDs and choosing exactly the door-slam sound (among dozens of variations) we wanted, exactly the scream (among hundreds of variations), exactly the freaked-out-cat sound, exactly the thunderclaps and rain sounds. (We went with the rain on a tin roof, as it's an iconic Australian sound and very apropos to the time period of the play.) We (that is, Houston) pasted sounds together the way we wanted for each cue, figuring out which sounds could go in the same file and which had to wait for their own cue.

Houston's done this sort of thing before, and knows what he's doing. Me, I'm just learning. I'm hoping that this is part of the apprenticeship that will make me a better playwright....

Writing muscles

Now that I am a stranger to full-time employment, I'm writing a lot more (and good thing, too, because it's my excuse for not going out and finding a job). Each day, I'm writing faster and with fewer fugue moments (you know, the ones where you stare into space pretending you're trying to puzzle out a temperamental plot point).

My writing muscles should be in pretty good shape by Clarion....

A remarkable experience

Yesterday the Illawarra Choral Society (which my husband conducts) performed, among other works, two Christmas carols on which Houston and I collaborated. The first, for soloist and piano, was written from the point of view of one of the wise people from the orient -- what that person, for all their wisdom, might have been yearning for that drove them to seek out the child in Bethlehem, how they might have felt on seeing an at-risk baby from an at-risk family in a disgusting hovel, and what happened when the wise person looked a little more closely. The second (for choir and piano) considered what it means to us, the masses, the billions of people on this planet, that there is a new way to be, and all the old rules demand a radical reevaluation.

I do take my faith very seriously, and so does Houston, which perhaps contributes to the clarity of emotion in both the words and music. It also helps that we genuinely admire each other's work, and collaborate cheerfully (rather than warily). And the singers (soloist and choir) love the pieces (words and music).

All this came together yesterday afternoon when they performed the pieces. The soloist had taken great care to prepare -- analyzing the character who was singing, deciding how she wanted to communicate the character's emotions and thought processes through expression, posture, and gesture, even memorizing the piece. She sang it fabulously, and her accompanist was note-perfect and rock-solid to support her. I was near tears (my daughter Margaret was sitting next to me, and she reckons she could feel my heart pounding). And several of the choir members were affected as well (I found out later that one had to blink the tears away in order to read the music for the second piece!).

Houston had set the second carol as a huge, anthemic work, with beautiful harmonies and great waves of emotion -- and that worked, too. Really worked. The choir grabbed hold of it and just soared.

I can only assume the audience was affected too -- usually this sort of "It's working!" moment doesn't happen unless the audience is with you all the way.

How amazing, to be able to give these musicians words they cared enough about to offer them with such power and grace....

Is there hope?

I tend not to be extremely political -- not in my daily life, and (by design) not in this blog. However, I read something today that really disturbed me. I'm currently reading The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics, a mystery that is fairly entertaining for the most part. At one point, some accomplices get cold feet about the act of terrorism their boss is planning. They fear getting caught, and one of them says to the other, "If the Americans Abu Ghraib us, the entire world will stand up and applaud."

"If the Americans Abu Ghraib us".

The author did not feel that the phrase needed any explanation or amplification. It stood alone as a byword for brutality. My nation now has a global reputation for brutality, inhumanity, and torture. The nation that used to genuinely be the world's best example of the rule of law. All that's gone.

Maybe the new order in the House and Senate can win back some of our honor. I prefer hoping for that to thinking it's gone forever.

Artistic opportunity? Or just unemployment?

Today was my first day for a LONG time where I haven't had any clients, no planned income, no real forward momentum. Yes, I did get some writing done, as well as some volunteer work for my State Emergency Service Unit, and some cooking, and some errands and chores. In fact, I hardly stopped all day. How did I cope when I did have full-time employment?

The hitch is, I'm not earning any money at any of it. This causes me a great deal of anxiety.

My husband is of the opinion that this is lunacy; he reckons it's a great opportunity to enter orbit around Planet Writer before touching down in January, and I should endeavor to see it as such.

Yes, well, I probably should.

Juggling onions

When I was learning to teach (in this case, self-defense, but that's not really important for my point), my teacher said that as you gain experience, you need to expand your perimeter of awareness. At first, you've only got the skills and experience to be able to worry about the techniques themselves and speaking clearly about them. Then you learn about keeping everyone physically safe (avoiding collisions and carelessly applied practice techniques, for example). Then you learn to read the students' reactions and watch how they practice. Then you learn to alter your lesson plan on the fly to adapt to how the class is dealing with the material. Then you learn to guide your teaching assistants so that they can make their best contribution to the learning process. Then you learn to make sure your students stay high-energy and focused; then your assistants. You learn to take in what's happening in the environment in general: who's on the sidelines, who's watching and whether they're supposed to be, whether the room is hot, cold, dry, secure. She likened it to the layers of an onion. (The fact that there are occasionally tears involved in learning to teach well, as in dealing with actual onions, was left unsaid.)

I've found that this metaphor has applied to the growth of my writing skills as well. First came learning to write grammatical sentences; luckily I read unceasingly as a child and picked much of that up by osmosis. Then I learned to form several connected thoughts into paragraphs, and to maintain my focus long enough to connect many, many paragraphs into chapters. I learned some things about plot, and about characterization. I learned quite a few things about how not to overwrite -- that one took a long time to start getting the hang of, and I'm still working on it. As I've become more comfortable with various aspects of writing, my focus has expanded to incorporate some of the more complicated skills.

Unfortunately, the onion metaphor doesn't quite work for writing, because I find I can't ever assume I have any one "layer" under control. It's more like juggling, because whenever I toss a ball exuberantly in the air, confident of my control and skill, it lands on my head.

Ow.

Chapter 13 of the book, possibly because of its number but more likely because I've been lacking in discipline, has been dragging on waaaaaay too long. Looks like I have to resume juggling onions....

Full circle

Now here's something rather eerily interesting: my husband was doing a bit of surfing and found out that the lineage of the Clarion idea goes back, back to something called the Milford Writer's Workshop. Milford, as in where my mom lives. Milford, the one place in America I know as well as I know Washington, DC -- maybe better, because I have spent far more time there recently than in DC. Beautiful Milford, of rivers, streams, and wild woods (really wild: black bears just wander across the road at will).

It's nice karma, really. I've known that Milford has had a reputation as a bit of an artist's colony (and to be sure, both Houston and I have found it very conducive to reflective thought and creativity), but apparently over the years it's been home to many famous authors -- speculative fiction being only one of the genres represented.