Want to Guest Blog for Writing About Writing?

We seem to be down a guest post today, so let me remind everyone that I would love to publish your work.  While "meaty" posts, weekend posts, even two posts a day will be returning to Writing About Writing soon, Tuesday is always a day for guest posts.  

Got something to say about writing, art, inspiration, creativity, motivation, process, craft, literature, reading...or possibly cheese?

Got something that writers or book lovers REALLY need to see?

Want to respond to something I've written, even if it's to completely disagree with me and tell me I smell like soup? And not that I smell like the good kind of soup that reminds you of childhood winters, but something with weird goat cheese, too much salt, and seasonings that make you wonder if it hasn't gone a little off.

Want to take advantage of my (currently) 200,000+ page views per month and advertise your own online endeavors in a thinly veiled self-promote-a-thon wrapped in the "sheep's clothing" of an article?  (For which I will only demand a shoutout in return.)

Want to put an article or three out in the world, be read by lots of readers, but without having to start your own blog and do all that self promotion? Or just want to try blogging on for size a few times before you start one of your own?

Want to even make a couple of bucks?

Then I want you!

Hey, I gotta get a book written. I need a day where someone else can do some of the heavy lifting.

Bring it!  Drop me an e-mail.  (chris.brecheen@gmail.com) As long as what you want to write is mostly coherent, at least obliquely about writing, no more than 82% horribly offensive to white males, non-abusive to other readers, doesn't make me cry (except in the good way), contains at least one vulgarity, innuendo, or salvo of F-Bombs to maintain the lack of decorum I steadfastly maintain around here, I will consider your article.

Now paying people and having the traffic I do, does mean that I usually get about fifty or so replies to a post like this, and I get to be a little picky, so please put on your Sunday best.

I can't promise that if you write an article on why I'm wrong about everything ever in my face that I won't write some kind of rebuttal, but all opinions on writing are welcome--even ones antithetical to mine. (I do reserve the right to refuse a post for any reason, but I promise that reason won't be because I disagree with you about daily writing or you think NaNo is awesome or whatever.)

And...if you're one of my regular guest bloggers, I'll even give you your own link on The Reliquary (unless you'd rather I didn't).

Here are some guidelines so we don't waste each other's time. If you don't at least get through them, this isn't going to go well:

• If you send me offers to do web content, I mark your mail as spam. I know when I'm looking at a legitimate offer for a guest blog.
• If you are a robot I will mark you as spam. Unless you can do dishes. Robots that do dishes are welcome.
• If you can't figure out what this blog is about, and offer to do articles about steam roofing or something, I'll mark your mail as spam. I'm not just web content here; this blog has a theme and everything. Make it about the inspiration and creative process of steam roofing AT LEAST!
• Please read the paragraph below the bullet points very carefully.
• Your writing is yours. I'm going to ask that you let the post run on my page for a while before you cross post it, but ultimately I respect that as the generator of the creative effort, your writing is yours. If you ask me to remove it, I will. If you repost it somewhere else, that's okay.
• There are no author passwords to Writing About Writing–you'll submit your articles to me. I will post them if they are good enough to post.
• If you skipped all that dull text up above, this blog is about writing, art, inspiration, creativity, motivation, process, craft, literature, reading, and maybe cheese. Don't skip the paragraph below though.
• Right now I'm not publishing fiction other than my own. I would be willing to publish fiction of any of our regular guest bloggers but getting that distinction takes some doing. If you have something more creative (like someone mentioned poems about writing) run it past me. I might be up for something like that.
• I will be as liberal as I can about gatekeeping, but you do have to be able to write a little. I am going to get a lot of responses. I'd love to publish them all, but I have to pick one a week. An incoherent rant about the tyranny of grammar or something you slapped together in ten minutes probably won't be approved. But don't get too nervous. I mean I can't write that well, and I post all my stuff. 
• You don't have to agree with me, particularly about writing stuff, but I'm not going to post wildly divergent social positions, humor that punches down, or deeply problematic phrasing. Anything I post here isn't an "I agree with this 100%!" endorsement, but if I hit publish on it, I'm going to be the one to answer for it. If you want to write about how the PC police are agents of "Obummer the Mooozlim," and they won't let you even use the word "tard" anymore, go start your own blog.
• I won't make any content changes to your writing, but I may make some copy edits. If a proofreading change might change your meaning, I will run it by you.
• Please fucking read the paragraph below.
• When I say "I will make some edits" I want you to understand that I'm not a copy editor and wouldn't be good at it even if I wanted to be. I'm not here to fix up a post from scratch that you didn't have time to proofread. Clean it up.
• You may link out as much as you want (even self-promotional links), but I'm going to check them all--if they go to spammy shit, I won't publish your article.
• Please, for the love of all that is holy, and in the name of Poseidon's left nipple, read the goddamned fucking paragraph below.
• If your post is a giant ass commercial for some product, then you need to be paying me for advertising space. (I offer very reasonable rates.) And if your product isn't awesome and something I totally believe in, that's not going to happen anyway since WAW is generally ad free. Thinly veiled self promotion under the auspices of something that at least resembles an article is totally okay though–just know that it might not get a lot of hits. I only get about 1500 views on articles that aren't liked or reshared through some social media. If my readers don't like something, it does NOT do very well. If they do, well they know where the share button is.
• Be aware of, and at least passingly comfortable with my politics and social justice posts. I absolutely do not require guest bloggers to agree with me–certainly not about every issue. However, there is nothing more desperately unprofessional than writers so happy to be published anywhere that they turn around and are shocked to see their medium throw out a social position they can't abide by. 
• Seriously, read the paragraph below.

The very important paragraph:

W.A.W. isn't making very much money article per article. I can't offer more than a couple of dollars (currently $5 for an article that does on average as well as the ones I write and more if it does better). Most guest bloggers ask to fold their payment back into W.A.W. as a donation, but that's never expected, and I'm happy to pay you for your writing. If your article brings in heavy traffic, we will figure something extra out so I'm not taking the hard work of a writer with nothing but the promise of "exposure." Plus of course if someone sends me a donation earmarked for a guest blogger, I will pass the money onto them and even cover the Paypal fee–that's for them, not me. It may not add up to much (unless you get millions of hits or write for me a lot) but if it came from your work, I'll make sure I'm not taking advantage of you.

Less important paragraph, but you probably should keep paying attention if you don't want to be frustrated:

When you email me, I star the email as "important," and then wait until I get a few dozen interested pokes. Sometimes it's as many as seventy. That usually takes a week to ten days. I then send out a mass reply to everyone who didn't spam me or pitch steam roofing articles with the next step (which involves either a sample or the article you'd like considered if it's already written). I usually get half a dozen responses to the second email. Most people just ghost me after not getting a reply immediately. Of the dozen left maybe three or four end up sending me something I publish. Now, just so you know, while I do get submissions that aren't ready for publication yet, it's actually uncommon. Most people who don't end up with a published article don't follow directions. I'm not even talking about anal retentive directions that you get from most publishers like single spaced or page numbers. I mean they don't reply to the first email. Or they reply to the Facebook post but never send me an email. Or they link me something and never tell me if that's their sample or if that's what they want me to publish. Or I ask about a biography and a pic and don't hear back. Or they send me six emails in a row wondering if they can write ten to fifteen articles a day because they need money. And most of the writers who do get all the way to the publication point send me between four and seven articles and then lose enthusiasm. So if you're serious about this, the best thing you can do is read everything carefully (like this post and the e-mails I send you), and stick with it.

Just like writing itself.

Peak Orangosity

If you peel away the first five or six years of my existence (when my memory was pretty sketchy), I've had a little orange friend with me for nearly half my life.

I first met her in 2001. My ex spouse had left me for the second time and this separation involved several months, so I was living on my own. My coworker approached me and asked me if I wanted a cat.

At the time she went by "Mercedes" and had a bit of a reputation for being loopy and overly energetic. "That cat is crazy," was an oft uttered phrase when she came up as a topic of conversation in the service area. She'd passed through three other owners, including two of my co-workers who just couldn't hang with her...exuberance. I wasn't particularly excited about having a pet at that time either.

But then my coworker explained the situation. She was pregnant. (The coworker, not the cat.) And the man she was pregnant with was abusive to Mercedes. Not just unpleasantly anti-cat or callous. He was downright sadistic. He would smack her around. Put her out on the balcony and dump a pitcher of water on her. Chase her under the bed and reach under it for her, and if Mercedes scratched his arm in her terror of self-preservation, he would pull up the whole mattress up, grab her by her scruff, and toss her into walls. He was never in a million years going clean up the cat box after her. And with my coworker pregnant, she couldn't risk getting toxoplasmosis. Would I please take the cat?

[Edit to add: a number of people have asked me about this relationship since people who abuse animals seldom stop with animals. I'm happy to report that she got out of that situation and is with a great guy now.]

She was an orange tabby. Female tabbies are pretty rare...kind of like male calicos, but she defied the odds. In more ways than one.

At first, I was not thrilled. She shed her white and orange fur all over my new black futon. She scratched up the leather recliners that were on loan to me from a friend. She bolted around the house at all hours meowing like she was in combat with nine or ten invisible rabid wombats. And she was anxious from her abuse. She wouldn't really let me pet her, and if I so much as sneezed she would run out of the room in terror. Skittish beyond functionality. I found food in weird places and the water dish knocked over. And she kept knocking shit off of high places.

I had made a huge mistake saying yes. I was not ready to be responsible for anything, let alone this unholy orange  I even asked about seeing if the coworker would help me rehome her.

It was the third or fourth night when I fell asleep in the couch form futon without pulling it out into a bed. I drifted off feeling vaguely sorry for the train wreck my life had become. Long after I was sound asleep, in the deep quiet of the wee morning hours, I felt a tiny body curl up into the small of my back. If I moved, she bolted. If I reached out, she bolted.

But if I held perfectly still–just perfectly, perfectly still–she started to purr.

The next day it was as if nothing had happened. She was gone with my first morning twitch and spent the day caterwauling through the apartment at cheetah speeds. But the next night she jumped up sooner. And the next morning she left later. Four days in, she let me pet her. At first it was a gentle touch, but within a few minutes, she bunted my hand for the first of about a gazillion times.

She was a cat and I was a person, but slowly we came to some kind of detente. She stopped running around late at night. I calmly picked up after her whirlwinds. She never really warmed to being in my lap, but she was always curled up next to me. She learned I would never hurt her, and her jerkiest moments of jerkitude barely got a raised voice, and in return she stopped running out of the room every time I shifted position or sucked in breath to cough. Eventually the tiniest touch would get her purring. I leaned in one morning–something that would have spooked her earlier–and with her eyes barely slitted in trust she extended her nose towards me.

Boop. We bumped noses.

"I found someone who might take her," my coworker said the next day.

"No!" I said.  Then after a pause: "No....I think that's okay. I feel like we make each other....less broken."

She was the first pet I ever had that was definitively "mine." She was the first one who picked me to snuggle in a line up. She was the first one to come to me without prompting and the first to make sure I knew it was time for some pets. She was the first pet that went beyond a passably affectionate chore and stole my heart right through my rib cage.

She decided she needed a new name for her new life. Obviously I had nothing to do with such a decision, but Mercedes would simply no longer do. The high energy, bullet dodging, jumping and leaping exploits of Princess Mononoke from the Miyazaki film decided her name almost without my help. I was watching the movie. I looked over. And she nodded in agreement.

It was decided.

Of course as soon as she heard she was a princess, she decided it was time to act like one. And of course that had nothing to do with me spoiling her. Nope. The Mononoke part was mostly remembered as an afterthought as she demanded most of the bed, dinner exactly when, and my loving attention no matter what I was doing.

Jumping onto my computer and lying down on the keyboard while I was writing was a daily occurrence.

She always seemed to know she was orange. She would always sleep on blue things that brought out the orange, and she actually acted sort of unimpressed before by other things that were orange even knocking over cups and such. The oranger something was, the more she hated it, and the bluer it was, the more she wanted to be on it as much as possible. It became a running joke that she would not suffer anything that failed to acknowledge or dared to upstage her Royal Orangosity. Acknowledging how orange she was became sort of a thing, and my friends humored me her.

Her kitten energy wouldn't last forever, but there were bird heads aplenty at the threshold while it did. After she shifted into cat middle age, there were cranky meows when I would come to and fro, turn on lights, get into bed. Anything that disturbed her got me a cantankerous "Meyehhh." But as irascible and crotchety as she got, she always booped my nose, curled up next to me, and started purring.

Seventeen years we kept each other company. Partners came and went. Friendships sparked and died. I quit my job as a manager of restaurants and went back to serving, then quit that job too. I went to school and got a degree. I became a teacher. I started writing in earnest. I started getting paid to write. Homes were moved into and out of. I was asked to leave my family and moved out. Through it all, we were each other's support. No matter what happened, eventually we'd boop noses, curl up next to each other, and she would purr while I scritched her cheeks and pet her back.

The kidney disease made life harder. There was more routine. Longer instruction manuals for whomever watched her when I was out of town. Lots of concern about getting enough water.  But she was actually doing quite well for how long she'd had it. That is to say her blood panels looked pretty good when I took her to the vet two weeks ago. But she was not actually doing quite well.

All the water in the world added to her expensive special diet didn't stop the tumor behind her eye. Steroids gave us another couple of weeks, but they just reduced inflammation. Cancer's inexorable march was only postponed.

Or as I like to think of it, she saw that our new president was an anthropomorphic cheeto who was even oranger than she was, and that was simply not okay. "Fuck this shit," she meowed at his orange countenance. "I'm out."

We talked that last day. Not long, for there was some urgency, but for an hour or two. I told her that we found each other broken and we helped each other heal, but also that my scar was always going to ache without her. Cats like to hear these things about how they'll be missed, you understand. I wasn't being maudlin or anything. Purely for her benefit.

But then it was time.

I tucked my breaking heart into my pocket, and held her through her last journey.

"It's okay, baby girl," I said. "It's okay."

The weirdest things totally get to me right now. The quiet. The gaps. The spaces between. I miss the nose boops and falling asleep petting her purring body, but it's the tiny moments of null energy that thunder through my heart.

Shutting off the lights in my room to leave, I thought to myself that I should leave one on for—

Oh.

Saturday I walked into my room and no one yelled at me. You know....for having the temerity to open the door.

The pressure sensitive cat bed (that I swore I'd never get) sat on my bed (where I swore I would never put it). Her food was uneaten in the bowl next to the door. The thought that I need to fill the water bowl and clean the box turned into a lancing ache.

Getting into bed and not hearing her objecting "Meyahhh" that I'm shifting her sleeping zone.

The quiet is the loudest part.

You were a very good girl, Princess Mononoke. You brought light and joy to half my life. You were my cat.

And you were very, very orange.

Write What You Know (BS Writing Advice That Isn’t As Trite As It Seems) [Arielle K Harris]

Write What You Know (BS Writing Advice That Isn’t As Trite As It Seems)  

by Arielle K Harris


I used to think that one of the least helpful writing maxims was “write what you know” – especially in writing fantasy.  I thought, “Why would I want to write about what I know when the whole point is to write about the unknown?”

Then I wrote my recent self-published novel and found that writing what you know doesn’t need to be a transposition of straight facts.  It can be interpretation, the use of ideas taken out of context, or knowledge of one subject used as the basis for another.  (Having written this out it sounds pretty basic, but for the longest time this epiphany eluded me.)

My novel, Bestial, is a fairytale retelling which reimagines Beauty and the Beast.  I thought about how I wanted to portray my main characters, my female Beast and my male Beauty in this reinterpretation, and how to write the relationship between a man and an inhuman creature.  Then I realized: I know this!

No, of course I didn’t have direct experience with mythical griffin-like Beasts, nor am I now or have ever been a man, but I have long experience with the working relationships between humans and some of the proudest, most intractable of inhuman creatures: I’m a falconer.

This is definitely one of my more unusual hobbies, and something that I can use as a wildcard when desperate making small talk with strangers (because I suck at this) or on an awkward first date (I suck at this even more, because what’s worse than talking to a stranger – talking to one who is judging your worthiness as a potential mate based on your ability to not be socially awkward for a whole two hours at a time.  I’m not sure that randomly talking about birds really helps me with this, however...)

For the last six years I have had the privilege of working with a wide variety of birds of prey while I lived in Scotland, and am currently pursuing the various permits and licenses in order to continue practicing now that I live in the USA.  For much of that time I was employed in this capacity, doing educational displays at a wildlife park, and enjoyed the great amusement of being able to write “Falconer” on the line marked “Occupation” on boarding cards every time I took a transatlantic flight.  It gave me and Border Control something to chat about, and goodness knows they need a bit of entertainment during their day.  But above all, I got to develop relationships of trust with the birds I worked with, and grew to love them all for their fierceness and their independent nature.

Except owls.  Those fluffy wide-eyed bastards are assholes.  (I kid, sort of, but whoever first thought that owls were wise certainly never had much experience with them.  What they lack in intelligence, however, they make up for with utter contrary stubbornness, and I will admit [though not in their hearing!] that I love them, too, for exactly that.)

It began with my educational work, but I was soon determined to experience true falconry – that is to say, hunting with a bird of prey in their natural environment, and since then I’ve hunted with a male German Goshawk and a male Red-tailed Hawk.  When you fly a hawk you cast them off your glove totally unencumbered, apart from the leather anklets and jesses they wear which are designed not to hinder flight and perhaps a telemetry tag in order to track them should they be drawn out of sight by the hunt.  They’re completely free-flying wild birds, and the only thing keeping them from disappearing over the horizon is the trust you have built with them.

It’s an awe-inspiring act to call down the hawk you’ve trained out of the high branches of a tree, and to have him respond to your whistle, glide down with outspread wings and alight upon your glove in perfect trust and partnership.  He trusts that you’ll provide him with the chance to do what he does best; you’ll help him locate his prey, flush it out for him to catch, and help him secure it on the ground.  He trusts that if he misses he won’t go hungry.  He trusts that if he gets injured, you’ll care for him.  Life with you is far more beneficial than life without you.

In return, you trust that he will stay by your side, in a not-too-distant tree, watching your every move, waiting on your word, and allowing you to take part in his wild existence.

So when I sat down to write about a man and a Beast and a love story that wouldn’t choke the feminist in me, I drew from this experience of trust and partnership.  I wrote what I knew.

It didn’t mean that I needed to restrict myself in any way, I could still write about fantastic creatures and unknown places.  I didn’t need to write autobiographically, this could still be a fantasy novel.  Only I could now write my character’s burgeoning relationship with authority and believability, drawing on my own depths of knowledge on the kind of relationship I was describing.

While I don’t believe that an author must always have personal experience in everything they write about, there are some things you just can’t easily pretend to know without true experience, and Google doesn’t replace foot-on-the-ground research.

I’m reminded of a fairly silly romantic comedy movie, The Decoy Bride, set on a fictional island in the Outer Hebrides.  David Tennant plays the character of a writer who set his bestselling novel on the island, but never set foot on it until later events bring him there when he attempts to discreetly marry his famous actress fiancée. Hijinks, obviously, ensue.  His fictionalization of the island becomes a point of tension and comedy between him and the island inhabitants, and he finds that the reality of the island is very different from what he described.

This is a real danger for a writer who might choose not to write what they know or, perhaps more accurately, choose not to know about what they write.  Not only the danger that you might be wrong, but that you might be ridiculous.  But this can be prevented.

In writing to the second half of Bestial, I decided I needed to draw from a greater canon of fairytales, especially those of the Grimm’s Brother’s collected folktales, because I couldn’t face either a moral conclusion in the style of the original tale, or a Disney-style happy ending.  I didn’t know these fairytales yet, but I knew I needed to.  So I studied them and their history, drank them in, read every tale I could find in every spare moment I had until I did know them.  I made myself an authority on a subject where previously I could only profess ignorance.

But, above all else, you need to be an authority on your book itself, your book’s world and those living within it.  This is especially true for fantasy, science fiction and other speculative fiction because, as your world’s creator, if you aren’t the authority on it who can be?

So don’t be too quick to dismiss the trite advice often handed out to writers.  Sometimes you may find that there’s a reason why a tired old idea is so old and tired, and that maybe, just maybe, it’s right.

[Ed Note: Leela Bruce has some similar things to say about "Write what you know" here.]


Arielle K Harris is the author of the novel Bestial as well as the ridiculous steampunk time travel drama short story The Adventurous Time Adventures of Doctor When.  She is responsible for one very opinionated toddler as well as a writer, poet, falconer, knitter of many half-finished scarves, drinker of tea, enthusiast for wine and sometimes has been known to have wild birds in her spare room.

She can be found online at her own website: www.ariellekharris.com as well as on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/ariellekharris/ and her published work can be found on Amazon here:https://www.amazon.com/author/ariellekharris

If you would like to guest blog for Writing About Writing we would love to have an excuse to take a day off a wonderful diaspora of voices and you can even make a couple of bucks. Take a look at our guest post guidelines, and drop me a line at chris.brecheen@gmail.com.

Saying Goodbye

Last year. 

Folks, it looks like the steroids we put my cat, Princess Mononoke, on only bought her a couple of weeks.

I'm going to spend the day saying good-bye and watching for any signs that she might improve. But I think it's time. We knew the steroids would reduce inflammation around a brain tumor (one of the likeliest suspects) but obviously that improvement would be temporary. We were hoping for a clot that caused a small stroke because then she would get better.

Twas not to be.

I have a guest post I can put up tomorrow, but this is going to need my full attention today. Apologies if posts get spotty until next week.

Worst Page Turner (Quarterfinal 4)

What is the worst book that you just couldn't put down...no matter how hard you tried?  

We've finally made it to our fourth and final quarterfinal round. It'll only run a week, so don't delay. Remember that the poll is not about terrible books that you hated or that were so poorly written that you couldn't finish. It is about books you couldn't stop reading despite yourself. Books that were train wrecks but you kept turning pages. Books you scoffed at twice a page, but finished in one feverish, scoff-filled night.

Everyone will get three (3) votes. The top four titles will go on to the semifinals.

The poll itself is on the bottom left of the side menus, below the "About the Author." 

Worst Page Turner (Quarterfinal 3)

Just a quickie here to post the results of our third quarterfinal for the Worst Book You Couldn't Put Down poll.

Text version of results at the bottom of the post.

I've gotten some questions, so just to clarify, the "winners" (at the top of the poll) are the worst page turners and will go on to the semifinal rounds. The "losers" (the bottom three titles) have either been deemed not terrible enough or not addictive and irresistible enough.

Stay tuned!  The third quarterfinal will be going up just a little later today.

Divergent Series- V. Roth 64 34.97%
Eragon- C.Paolini 56 30.6%
Bridges of Madison County-R.J. Waller 15 8.2%
White Gold Weilder-S. Donaldson 14 7.65%
The Girl on the Train P. Hawkins 14 7.65%
Under the Dome S.King 13 7.1%
Name of the Wind- P. Rothfuss 7 3.83%

Worst Page Turner (Last Call for Votes–Semifinal 3)

What is the most terrible book that you just couldn't stop reading? 

Today is the last day to vote in our third quarterfinal for worst book you couldn't stop reading. Tomorrow the results will go up along with the fourth and final quarterfinal round. From there we will go on to the semifinals.

So today is your last chance to vote. Don't forget you get three (3) votes, but that there is no ranking, so using as few votes as possible is better.

The poll itself is in the lower left at the bottom of the side menus.