Kelly McCullough – Page 83

Writing With Pets = Imagination Insurance

I write full time at home with five cats who provide me with companionship and imagination insurance. I’ll discuss that in brief after a round of feline introductions. Meet my feline overlords:

‘Belle – don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, hate me because you’re not
Meglet – who is a very small animal
Ashbless – poetry in motion…Limerick
Leith – I’m old dammit, show some respect (RIP: Dec 11 2009)
Jordan – I used to be a cute kitten, now I’m a big thug
So, how is this a writing post?

Well, because pets and writers seem to go together like fire and smoke or some other equally trite pairing. Part of this is of course due to us human types being social apes. We’re wired for group interactions and pets provide people who work in solitude with the illusion of having coworkers, or a pack if you prefer.

That’s a part of it, but not the most important part, at least not for writers. For us they provide imagination insurance. What’s that you ask? Well, pretty much by definition fiction writers are endowed with overactive imaginations.

We are prone to wild flights of fancy, especially those of us who are speculative fiction types. In shadows we see ghouls and imps. Dragons hide in our garages, and trolls demand tolls when we take the laundry to the basement.

This is by and large a wonderful way to live. Except, of course, when it’s not. Like when the house settles with a horrible screech at three a.m. or when the bats start crawling about in the walls just after sundown. At those times, it’s all too easy to people the shadows with things of malign intent.

That’s where the cats come in. With five, there’s always at least one who’s out of sight somewhere. In a house with cats you don’t need to imagine what’s making that noise. You know. Any horrendous sound anywhere in the house, no matter how horrible or loud, was made by a cat. No trolls. No dragons. No axe-wielding maniacs. Just cute fuzzy creatures who can be safely ignored while you finish that paragraph.

(Originally published on SFNovelists, March 11 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Self-Promoting Authors Anonymous

With apologies to the original: The Twelve Steps for self-promoters:

1. We admitted we were powerless over sales—that our careers had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that surrendering to a marketing machine greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity–our publisher’s publicity department.

3. Made a decision to turn our books and our careers over to the care of the marketing department as we understand it.

4. Made a searching and fearless sales analysis of our self-promotional efforts.

5. Admitted to our readers, to ourselves, and to another author the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have marketing remove all these defects of shameless personal promotion.

7. Humbly asked our publicists to gloss over our marketing shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all the readers we had disappointed* and became willing to make amends to them all**.

9. Made direct amends to such readers wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were marketing ourselves again, promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through blogs and other direct means to improve our conscious contact with readers as we understand them, asking only for knowledge of their will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a promotional awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other authors, and to practice these principles in all our impulses toward self-promotion.

*by promoting ourselves when we should have been writing

** by writing instead of trying to do the jobs of our publishers and their marketing departments

Hi, my name is Kelly, and I’m a self-promoting author.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 27 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

The Affordable Care Act & Making Your Living In The Arts

Despite Republican politician feet being stamped and Republican politician breath being held and Republican politicians shutting down the government, Obamacare begins to go into effect today and a lot of people who had no insurance or junk insurance are now going to have the opportunity to sign up for real insurance.

The Affordable Care Act will almost certainly save the lives and/or livelihoods of people who are my very dear friends. Lives is obvious. Livelihoods a bit less so. Let me elucidate: medical bankruptcy, like all bankruptcy, treats copyrights as assets. Get too sick without proper insurance and you lose control of your life’s work. Further, I have friends who have died because of things that might not have killed them if they’d had this level of insurance.

I am a very fortunate artist in that I am married to a women whose insurance carries us both. If I were not, I would not have functioning knees, and I’d be down a number of teeth. That or I would have had to give up on writing to find other work. This isn’t an abstract partisan argument for me. This is personal and it is life and death.

Done

Yesterday (February 25th 2008) I finished MythOS, the 4th WebMage book. This one felt like it was taking forever, even though it really wasn’t, and “the end” felt so very sweet to write. I’m going to go off and run around in little circles now. Big errand-encompassing circles, actually.

There’s 40 lbs of prescription cat food waiting for me at that vet. Five cats, two with slight health issues means KD in bulk. I also need to drop the old toner cartridge at UPS for recycling–I go through a terrifying amount of toner and paper with each book, about a cartridge-and-a-half and 10,000 pages (which works out to about 6,000 sheets since a lot of that is double sided). I might grocery shop in there, if I’m running ahead of schedule. Then it’s into the Cities for paperwork for the Scotland trip in May.

BTW, does anyone need a few hundred cubic yards of snow? I’ve got lots. I like winter, but this one is wearing on me. It’s not actually the snow–snow means x-country skiing–it’s the cold and the being trapped inside. My winter office faces south, which would be great if I were a painter and needed the light. I’m not, I’m a writer and the light makes it hard to read my laptop which means that the drapes need to be closed if I’m going to work and that gets dreary after a while.

I’m going to stop free associating now, and wander off to run errands.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 26 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

More Story Dreams

The first was a typical fantasy quest dream except for a detail which I am totally putting in a book. My weapon was a length of rope with an unbreakable, intelligent, talking, immortal box-turtle on one end–a magical, talking morning-star, and a remarkably cynical one to boot. The turtle had not volunteered for this mission, thank you very much, nor had it signed up as a companion and mentor to heroes. Nope, it just sort of happened that way because it had all of the above-mentioned qualities and a remarkable inability to run away whenever the next damn hero came along. …Must write.

The other was a writers dream. Big castle hall, young mages squatting on the floor waiting their turn to demonstrate their magics and earn a place at the table of the great. Only, all the mages were writers–it looked like World Fantasy but with a lot more leather. Oh, and I got to follow Bear in the competition. I’m not sure whether I’m happy or sad that I woke up before I got my chance to compete.

This glimpse into my subconscious provided by lack of sleep inc. All opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent any endorsement by the sponsor.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 21 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Friday Cat Blogging—In House Edition

We haz demands!

Demands.

Iz you giving us our stuffs?

If not.

We will hold nap strategicary nap strikes!

With thanks to Matt Kuchta for translating the cats’ whims graphically.

A Day In The Life

So one of the things that I keep getting asked at interviews and appearances this winter is: What does your typical day look like? Since it’s typical for me, I don’t find it very interesting, but in case anyone out there was wondering, here is the ideal version of my typical day.

~7:30 I wake up briefly when Laura gets up and goes off to herd faculty and teach physics. I give her a kiss goodbye and go back to sleep for half an hour to an hour.

~8:00-8:30 I get up.

~8:00-10:00 I stagger out of bed (still not awake) and start infusing caffeine into my system, either diet cola or black tea followed by the other. I do this while putting in an hour-and-a-half on the treadmill reading my email and morning news blogs on my laptop. 2013 addition: I now start the caffeine drip in the hot tub.

~10:00-11:00 I actually wake up. I do all the not-writing work that’s accumulated, like answering the email that I read and prioritized on the treadmill, posting to this blog, any promotional stuff that needs taking care of, breakfast, etc.

~11:00-12:00 I read through and revise the ~2,000 words I wrote yesterday. (Note, this is ideally, as the 8:00-11:00 stuff often spills over, especially if I’ve had a book launch recently and that can mean getting started later or that I wrote less yesterday)

~12:00-4:00/5:00 I write till Laura gets home.

~5:00-10:00 we do couple stuff together.

~10:00 Bedtime. Laura goes to sleep and I do research reading for another hour or two.

Notes:

1) I almost never write on the weekends. Writing is my job. It’s a job I love, but it’s still a job. That means building break time into my schedule.

2) I used to write more of each day and I used to write more words in that time, but I also used to have to do a lot more revision and throwing away of words. These days, first draft is about what a beta draft used to look like.

3) I don’t write every day or follow this schedule every day that I do write. I’m the spouse with the flexible schedule and that means I run life-support activities including the vast majority of cleaning, most of the joint meal cooking, and all of the vet appointments and the like.

4) I can and do occasionally compress everything else or let much of it go by the boards if I’m writing fast or on deadline.

And that’s about it.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 18 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

The Other School Dream

The School Dream

You’ve all had it. Where you find yourself back in school with everything going wrong. Either you’re naked, or you’ve got a test in a class you don’t remember signing up for, or some other horror of adolescence. My recurring variation is one where someone at the St. Paul School Board realizes I failed to take some vital cluster of courses and contacts me to let me know that if I don’t come back and take another year of high school they’re going to revoke my entire education including college. I had this dream at least a couple of times a year from graduation through selling a book, almost always when I was worrying about something or feeling insecure.

After that first sale, the school dream changed. Now when the person at the school board calls me into their office, I will bring a copy of my university diploma and a couple of my books, drop them on their desk and either walk out or offer to teach a seminar or two. I usually have this version after some sort of writing milestone. Apparently getting to the place where I can see the end of MythOS counts.

Last night I dreamed that I was back in school looking for my home room. I was late, but unworried about it. When I finally showed up, the teacher asked me if I was always going to be so late. I told him yes and explained that I was back for the year because it was a cheaper way of picking up some college course I needed for research for my books. The teacher challenged me on the books front and I upended my backpack spilling out something like thirty books under five names, all of which I had written. The pile included the WebMage stuff, several of my books under submission and, for reasons known only to my subconscious a couple of Star Wars tie-ins.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 15 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

15th Publishing Anniversary

I sold my first short story 15 years ago today. The story was WebMage and went to Weird Tales, then edited by George Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer and published by Warren Lapine—I still remember the magazine’s address: 123 Crooked Lane. That short later became the 1st couple chapters of the novel. I started writing fiction in 1991, so in terms of my career, I have now been a professionally published writer twice as long as I was an unpublished one, which is surreal beyond all words.

Dear Feline Collective Follow-Up

Re: ugly development in lapsharing negotiations.

It has come to management’s attention that already today the writer-in-residence has twice had, not one, but two cats taking up valuable lap space normally devoted to the means of writerly production (see laptop, Apple iBook G4).

Further it has come to management’s attention that resolution of which cat retained possession of said lap was resolved through hissing and intimidation. Once, blows were even exchanged. This is simply not acceptable and may actually result in demonstration by writer-in-residence that despite normal dominance protocols, writer-in-residence is in fact a larger predator, one who outweighs said cats by an order of magnitude.

Please take note of the fact that despite being a Cat Softie, with a capital CS, writer-in-residence has a very limited patience for anything that involves potential bleeding, and adjust your negotiating strategies accordingly.

Thank you,
The management

2013 P.S. The comment threads on the original versions of these posts have some really funny responses. See below for links.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 1 2008, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)