Waiting for Antlers

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

When I was a teenager, I watched a lot of Star Trek. But recently I was persuaded to subscribe to Netflix, and I’ve been watching Doctor Who…

…and I have to say, Doctor Who is much better than Star Trek.

-JM

This week has been a delightful one. First of all, my new Metloef bodhran (Irish drum) arrived in the mail on Monday, and I'm so looking forward to recording with it.





Secondly, the Old House of Stiefvater is getting pretty empty, and the New House of Stiefvater, two hours away is getting pretty empty (as is evidenced by the above video). Our move in date of the 31st, right before I head off to BEA, is looking actually plausible.



Thirdly, I have those two Virginia events (Fredericksburg and Alexandria) with John Corey Whaley tomorrow and the next day, and I adore Corey, and not just because I love his book and he looks like Samwise.



Fourthly, I am working on the sequel to THE RAVEN BOYS and it is going well, so everything in the world is rosy that can possibly be better by being rosy, and all things that are bad when rosy are not rosy at all. 



Anyway, all this delightfulness and rosiness reminded me that I haven't addressed reader questions in awhile, and there was one question that multiple readers asked in multiple ways, both in my blog and at last night's chat. Here it is:



Is your office in your home? If you are alone in a very quiet house all day with no children or husband underfoot, how do you get yourself going each day and stay motivated to write without dropping everything and putting in a load of wash? These are the kinds of things I wonder about my favorite authors... 




I have a question! Though I don't want to infringe on your privacy, so if you'd rather ignore it I totally understand. I'm just wondering how you balance young kiddos and writing - do they get to go on tour with you? :)




I do indeed have children, Thing 1 and Thing 2. They predate my writing career by a very little bit, but not my art career, which had a lot of the same demands. Namely, that my office was in the house, there was a lot of travel, my hours were theoretically amorphous and flexible. I had the Stiefvater Things pretty early in life, so I basically have always had both children and a career.



Here's something that I should put right out front: both of those things are very important to me. I'm not going to do percentages or a pie chart, but I should tell you that I always knew I wanted a creative career and that having children was going to complement that dream, not crash it. I firmly believe that if you don't believe the same thing — that you are entitled to a career same as any other human of any other gender — you will not accidentally fall into an agreeable parent-career balance. 



 Now that that's out of the way, the practical nitty-gritties. Part of this question is really about time-management. I've blogged about this before. In some respects, kids, laundry, day jobs, cat litter boxes, lawn mowing, college courses, and freelance fighter pilot lessons are all the same: they are all demands on your time. And so it just comes down to prioritizing and being clever and honest about the time you really do have.



Next, the womb warts themselves: Things 1 and 2 have known for a very long time that my writing and art are important career things for me, and so they respect quiet time when I'm on deadline and they're home from school. And before they knew about careers and paying the rent, they had an established "quiet time" — at first they had a nap from 12-2 every day, and then, when they no longer napped, they knew they had to watch a movie in their room with the door closed or play quietly with the door closed or devise evil plans that will eventually come back to bite me with the door closed.



Next, next, Lover: My husband has always been supportive of my career, because he knew I took it seriously. If your Lover doesn't feel the same way, I highly suggest you get an upgrade.



Next, next, next: Last year, I was away from home more than I was home and I wrote two novels. Lover quit his job to help with the kids, and I brought all of them or some of them along when I could. But it's important to point out that before that, I was writing and touring and Lover was working full time himself, and we still pulled it off. We have a good parental network within an hour's drive, so that definitely helped, and we also were equally committed to each person getting down what they needed to get done. We wanted it to work. So we made it work. There is a way, I promise. I wrote Lament on Wednesdays only, from 4-6 p.m., because I was working such long hours with my art show stuff. It took me four months. It can be done, I PROMISE.



Next, next, next, last: Women. There is a lot of guilt associated with taking time for your career versus spending time nurturing children. Every time you leave the house and the kids have a babysitter or a substandard dinner or no bedtime story, our culture screams at us for being bad mothers. But guess what. Working mothers are not bad mothers. Women who have a sense of self-identity, either through a career or through a home-based activity, are women that kids respect. My father was on an air craft carrier for six months out of the year when I was a kid. I adored him and still do, and what's more — I'm pretty much just like him. So it's not the amount of time you spend sitting in the presence of your kids. It's how you use that time.



So: Prioritize. Educate those close to you. Surround yourself with like-minded people. And kick some ass.

Book View Cafe is a consortium of writers, as I've mentioned before. The last four months, several people have worked really hard on completely redesigning the book store from scratch. This is what companies pay big bucks for, but since none of us have big bucks, it's all volunteer labor.

If you have the time, we'd appreciate it if you would try this link and poke around. There is a place for comments, if something is buggy, confusing, you think something would be better.

If you choose to buy a book, great! Let us know how that goes, but just poking around is a big help. Here is the comments link where the designers will actually see them. (I don't think any of them read my blog, so I am going to try to close comments here.)

Thanks!

I'm alive. Sort of. Lots of time sick, sick pets, computer issues and many RL sucks.

Meanwhile, the Avengers movie is pulling me slowly but steadily back into fandom again. My brain keep getting snippets of never-will-be-written-epics, like: 

The Avengers, the UK version.

 - I have an army.

 - We have a Time Lord.

 ... and a cunning plan. (Blackadder FTW!)

 (Throw in Harry Potter Severus Snape, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and there you have it).

Someone needs to write that yesterday.

Since I did recently graduate, a number of family and friends gave me gifts. They didn't need to, at all, and I'm actually kind of embarassed at what they did.

If I do say so myself, I'm very good at sending thank you notes for monetary gifts, thanks to a little trick I picked up from an etiquette-conscious aunt:

I won't deposit the check or put the gift card in my wallet until I have written a thank-you note to the giver. It's a solid reminder, especially for cash.

Now, thank you notes for *things* often get forgotten. I'm really bad at that. I don't mean to be, and I feel bad about it. But sometimes you get to the point where it's been so long that the act of sending a note seems like it would only draw more attention to your atrocious lack of courtesy, and that the gift in question is likely forgotten. I can only hope that family is understanding about that.

(No, this is not a passive-agressive post directed at someone else. I'm just working through the piles of stuff on my desk, which includes a number of gift cards)

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

Be sure to congratulate Melissa Mead and Michael H. Payne, who also sold stories to Sword & Sorceress 27.

-JM

kith_koby sent me this link. As you're watching, see the effect of personal history on the map, and other elements. At least I found it mesmerizing.

That’s all for today.

Originally published at Jodi Meadows. You can comment here or there.

Lyda is one of the returning authors, having had a story appear in Northern Lights. Lyda is always a joy to be around at conventions and writer events: a bundle of energy and enthusiasm coupled with a sharp wit and keen mind.

I picked "Tutivillus" because it is a fine tale, delving deeply into temptation and redemption without being heavy-handed, I placed it first in the anthology not only because of its strength as a story, but because I wanted to hit the reader hard and let them know this anthology was going to be full of surprises.

“Tutivillus” originally appeared in the chapbook Tales from the Black Dog.


Sky-Tinted Waters is available from Sam's Dot Publishing.

Today the stork CPS delivered to us a nine-year-old girl. We spent the rest of the day enrolling her in school, buying some furniture, conducting an inventory of her clothes for the adoption agency*, and beginning the long slog toward bedtime.

Agent F, as I will refer to her until I get the foster care privacy rules figured out, spent much of the day trying to speak cat. She seems to be picking it up fairly quickly. Siggy--always glad to have more monkeys to dominate--seems to have taken her under her iron paw.

I already have many OPINIONS about the medications some genius put her on. Luckily, we see her new psychiatrist on Thursday, and perhaps he will join the litany of WTF that has been uttered today.**

I'm also very glad we only have two weeks of school left, because the hour of 6:00 a.m. and I are not friendly, but will be forced to get to know each other very well for those two weeks.

I'll probably keep further posts about this under f-lock, but if anyone has any questions about the process, feel free to email or message me. If I'm not dead of exhaustion, I'll try to answer.

* How many pairs of socks does a nine-year-old need? A lot, apparently.

** Two caseworkers, both of us, and three different people at her new school all looked at her list of meds and made emoticon faces, including o.0, O.O, and >:(.