While working on Finding Your Sense of Place I wrote about my first critique group, the Alternate Historians, who pushed me to first understand the importance of emotion and description in my own stories. They pushed me understand a lot of things, and they were the first people to consistently show me what was wrong with my writing and how I could improve it, instead of just telling me how much they liked my stuff, the way my family and friends and teachers mostly had until then.

I was so grateful for finally getting that deeper feedback that for a time, I thought every writer was looking for exactly what I was—someone to tell them what wasn’t working and how to improve. So when shortly after joining the Alternate Historians a friend asked me to read her poems, I dug right in. I was proud of the detailed critique I was able to give her.

My friend, however, was appalled. “I just wanted to know what you thought,” she informed me icily.

Hadn’t I told her what I thought? When it became clear my friend had only expected positive comments, I dismissed her in my mind as someone who wasn’t a serious writer and didn’t want real feedback the way serious writers did. After that, when others asked me to look at their work, I was more careful, and asked them what kind of feedback they were looking for—but truthfully, I was doing that as much to protect myself as them. I didn’t want to waste my time giving what I thought of as “real” critiques to those who wouldn’t appreciate them.

I was a new writer. New writers can be harsh, as we take our first stumbling steps toward making our writing a deep and serious part of our lives. We can be judgmental, and we have a bad habit of trying to turn our new-found personal truths into universal truths.

I don’t know when I first began to understand things were more complicated than that, but now I know that they are, in so many ways.

For one thing, there are many ways to be a writer, and writing for publication is only one of them. There are things I’ve done as hobbies that others do professionally: bookbinding, working with rescued wildlife, running, countless other things through the years. If writing is someone else’s hobby—if they just want to have fun with it, and share for the joy of sharing, without don’t want to push their limits in the same ways I happen to want to push them, that’s fine, and more than fine.

And there are many ways to be a professional writer, too. Or, to put it another way, different professional writers need different things.

Years after I met my first critique group, in another critique group and another city I was delighted when a writer who’d mostly just filled her critiques of my work with smiley faces finally told me why a story of mine didn’t work for her. I’d had a nagging sense something was off about that story, and I was genuinely grateful for her comments. Yet when I told her so, she was baffled. “I don’t feel like I really gave you anything useful this time,” she said of the first critique in ages where I felt she finally had given me something that felt useful.

She told me that to her, a useful critique had at least as much positive feedback as criticism, at least as much focus on what was working as on what wasn’t. I was the one baffled this time, because while positive comments felt good to me and while I did want to know what was working so that I could keep doing it, some part of me was always waiting for that part of the critique to be through, so that I could get to the “real” feedback.

Some weeks or months later, this same writer commented more quietly that sometimes new writers just need for other writers to believe in them and tell them their work is worthwhile, because maybe they don’t have anyone else in their lives who believes their work matters. It took a while for that to sink in, just like it took a while for it to sink in that my friend probably wasn’t really talking about other writers, but about herself.

One of the things that sank in—one of the things I now understand—is that not every writer already has someone who believes in them. Those family and friends and teachers who told me my work was awesome without helping me to improve it gave me more than I knew. They gave me something I needed more deeply than I’d understood: the deep belief that my work was worthwhile and worth pursuing. That belief would later help me get up the courage to show my work to others, to ask for deeper feedback, to be able to listen to that feedback and make the most of it, and to send my work out into the world. I don’t know if I would have eventually found the belief and courage I needed on my own, through brute force, with time. I do know that I didn’t find it on my own, but with help and support. And I know that without that basic foundation—a foundation so basic I hadn’t even fully realized it was there—I could never have moved forward.

Thank you, supportive family and friends and teachers who I took for granted. Thank you so very much.

I still ask, now, when I’m giving a critique, what writers are looking for. But I no longer think there’s a right or wrong answer to that question. If I have a chance to tell someone else that their work is worthwhile, to play some part in building their foundation and confidence by pointing to the sparks that are worth pursuing—why wouldn’t I want to do that? Now, I see it as an honor.

Indeed, in the years since my harsh early writer days, I’ve handed manuscripts to others, from time to time, too, and told them truthfully, “I just want to know this doesn’t suck.” It’s easy to be full of confidence in the early years of a writing career, but through the years and decades after that, well, we all need a confidence boost, some years more than others. Long-term writing careers are complicated, after all.

There’s more than one way to be a “serious” writer, and serious writers—all writers—need many things to move forward. We need people who will push our work to the next level, yes, absolutely. But we also need people who believe in us, as we work to internalize that belief for ourselves, and as we work to hang on to it after that. If the push to improve is missing, our work may never sell. But if the belief that the work is worthwhile is missing, that work might never get written in the first place. We need both things, belief and challenges. It’s not an either/or and never was.

Writing isn’t that simple, after all. Few things are.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

Today I’m blogging at Christine Kohler’s Read Like A Writer about the ways writers learn.

Put that way, it seems simple. Read enough, go to enough conferences, show our work to enough outside readers, get enough advice, and most of all, simply write enough, and slowly and surely, our stories will get better, improving incrementally as we put in our time.

But it doesn’t work that way, does it?

At least, it doesn’t work that way for me.

Read the rest of Learning in Leaps here.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

I’m happy to announce Finding Your Sense of Place, a new ebook based on my talks on emotion, description, and setting. Finding Your Sense of Place shares some of the early insights that helped me uncover what was missing from my work, allowing me to begin producing professional work more consistently, as well as providing other tools for bringing settings and their characters to life.

To order your copy, go here—or see below for more details.

Find Your Sense of Place

Use setting and description to bring your characters to life and increase the emotional impact of your stories.

Setting is about much more than providing a few scene-setting details and moving on. Discover why the descriptions that seem to get in the way of your stories are actually the most powerful tools you have to bring characters to life and make readers care about their stories.

Two decades ago, acclaimed novelist Janni Lee Simner took her writing to the next level and began selling her work when she realized that emotion and description are, ultimately, the same thing. In Finding Your Sense of Place she shares insights and techniques to help you:

• Understand why different characters see the same places differently—even if they walk side by side
• Craft descriptions that help readers connect with your characters on a deeper level
• Make room for descriptive passages that won’t bog your story down
• Select the most powerful scene-enhancing metaphors
• Research your story’s setting—whether your story is set close to home or far away, in the present day or a thousand years ago
• Choose the descriptive details that best convey that setting to readers

Finding Your Sense of Voice is available wherever ebooks are sold. Order your copy from:
- Kobo and their independent bookstore partners
- Barnes and Noble
- Amazon
- Smashwords

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

The last weekend of May I’ll be speaking at Tucson’s Pima Writers’ Workshop about Finding Your (Sense of) Place As A Writer.

I’ll also talk about emotion, description, and how they’re ultimately the same thing. This is the single realization that most transformed my work and turned me into a professional writer, one that continues to inform my work to this day.

Other conference faculty include Cynthia Bond, Monica Drake, Mike Harvkey, Nicole Walker, agents from the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency and John Hawkins & Associates, and more.

Download a brochure for a full schedule and faculty list—and to register.

Here’s my schedule for the conference:

• Thursday, May 28, 7 p.m.: Meet-the-Authors Reception
• Friday, May 29, 2:15 p.m.: Finding Your (Sense of) Place As A Writer
• Friday, May 29, 7 p.m.: Reading (with David Ellis Dickerson, Mike
  Harvkey, Johanna Lane, Janni Lee Simner, and Nicole Walker)</p>
• Saturday, May 30, 2:15 p.m.: Writing Exercise: Creating Emotional Landscapes

Hope to see some of you there!

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

This weekend is the next Tucson Festival of Books! After six years, it’s hard to believe this event hasn’t been part of Tucson forever.

I’ll be there this Sunday, signing with Mostly Books from 12-12:45 p.m. (booth #148), and then moderating Ally Carter and Sarah Mlynowski’s Twitter and Trailers: Using Social Media to Promote Your Book panel from 4:00-5:00 p.m. (Education Bldg., Room 333).

And both Saturday and Sunday I’ll be on the UA Mall of course, enjoying the Festival. Hope to see many of you there!

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

When it comes to picture books, not understanding the natural world inevitably leads to tragedy.

A cautionary tale about the dangers of relocating wildlife.

An old man removes an entire population of cats from their native ecosystem, only to discover he lacks the knowledge and resources to care for them on his own. When the cats grow hungry he offers them each a mouthful of grass, unaware that these obligate carnivores cannot subsist on such a diet. “What are you doing?” the old woman he lives with cries when she sees the cats, aware, as he is not, of how unsuited the creatures are for their new environment. Her fear proves well founded, as in their desperation for meat the poor felines ultimately resort to eating one another.

Only a single small kitten survives, young enough to live on the milk the man and woman are able to provide, but it faces an uncertain future as it grows “nice and plump” and nears adulthood.

Little Owl Lost by Chris Haughton

The tragic tale of a good-hearted squirrel who lacks the skills to survive in the wild. Unable to tell the difference between a bear, a rabbit, a frog, and an owl, our hero’s lack of discernment proves fatal when he cheerfully accepts an owl’s invitation into her nest for “cookies.” The final details of the squirrel’s inevitable demise are, in a bold yet necessary move, left to the imagination of the reader.

“Uh oh,” indeed.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

My ebook collection, Unicorn Seasons, is now available!

From a mythical time before the winds were fixed to the corners of the earth to a present-day forest where unicorns are not—quite—extinct, this ebook exclusive brings together four magical tales about unicorns and the humans who are forever changed by them. Written over the course of two decades, these stories reflect my lifelong fascination with the mythical creatures.

Learn more about the collection and read excerpts here.

Or order your copy now from any of the e-tailers below:

- Kobo (and their many independent bookstore partners)
- Barnes and Noble
- Amazon
- Smashwords
- Apple (to come)

If you know any unicorn-loving readers who might enjoy these stories, please spread the word.

And if you finally meet a unicorn one day, whether in the heat of summer or upon the winter snow … well, I won’t say to run away, not exactly.

But be careful. Be very careful. Mythical creatures are, after all, chancy things.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

One day back in college, I declared myself through with unicorns. I pulled a childhood’s worth of accumulated unicorn posters off my walls, fully convinced I was finally growing up and moving on.

I was wrong. I never did move on, not really, not for good. I gave up my unicorn posters, but I never stopped telling unicorn stories.

Which is why I’m thrilled to announce that my ebook collection, Unicorn Seasons, goes on sale Monday and is available for pre-orders now.

A unicorn for every season.

From a mythical time before the winds were fixed to the corners of the earth to a present-day forest where unicorns are not—quite—extinct, this ebook exclusive collection by acclaimed fantasy writer Janni Lee Simner brings together four magical tales about unicorns and the humans who are forever changed by them.

In Lost or Forgotten, a unicorn sacrifices his mortality for the woman he loves, leaving their descendants to mourn the loss. When sisters Sara and Amelia hear the trees calling to them one spring night, they have to decide whether to take on an ancient sorrow—or accept an ancient magic.

In Unicorn Season, Megan’s small-town summer turns more interesting when a local boy offers to help her find unicorns in the nearby mountains. But why is Josh so interested in the elusive creatures? Megan may not know as much about unicorns—or Josh’s motives—as she thinks.

In Tearing Down the Unicorns, Stacey is furious when her older sister tears the unicorn posters from their walls. Then she sees a real unicorn dancing in the autumn night, and she discovers there’s more to the mythical creatures than those rainbow-and-butterfly bedecked pictures show—and more to herself, as well.

In Windwood Rose, Miranda has been haunted all her life by strange music and uneasy dreams. When a unicorn appears in the snow one winter afternoon, it may have the answers she longs for. But will it be willing to give her all that she seeks?

Unicorn Seasons is available most places ebooks are sold. Read excerpts here, or pre-order your copy from any of the e-tailers below:

- Kobo (and their many independent bookstore partners)
- Barnes and Noble
- Amazon
- Smashwords
- Apple (to come)

And of course, if you feel inclined to spread the word, I’d be grateful!

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

Somehow the latest writing for the long haul post got removed from my lj feed (it's back now), but you can still read April Henry's terrific post on rejection, dry spells, and tenacity here.

As always, the post is also on my wordpress blog here.

New York Times bestselling author April Henry started writing in 1989 and published her first book a decade later. She joins the long haul series today to talk about rejection, career hard patches, and the one thing she believes long-haul writers need more than anything else: the tenacity to never stop writing.

Do you want to be a writer for the long haul? I think the key is tenacity. Tenacity is at least as important as talent.

In 1989, I had a dream: to write a book. I didn’t know a single writer.

Two years later, I had a finished book and a new dream: that it would be published and I could quit my day job. Instead, I got a ton of rejection letters from agents. Was my career over before it had even begun?

I wrote a second book and sent it out to agents. Agent after agent rejected it. Finally, an agent told me the book was one of the best she had ever seen. It was so good, she said, that she was sure I hadn’t shown it to any other agents. I did not tell her that over 50 agents had already rejected it.

A year later, it was clear my second book would never sell, despite complimentary rejection letters from editors. So I wrote a third book. Which got nothing but ho-hum rejections.

I could have given up, but instead I had been keeping busy writing a fourth book. Circles of Confusion sold to the first editor who saw it. The advance was certainly not “quit your job” money. We bought some new furniture.

But at least I was a real writer, right? I thought the hard part was over. I didn’t realize that just because you have been published once, it doesn’t mean you will be published again.

Circles of Confusion got nominated for several awards and got good reviews. I wrote a second in the series and then a third. I was on a publisher-paid tour for the third book when I learned they were dropping me because the sales of my second book hadn’t been double that of my first (an idea they hadn’t shared with me, although I’m not sure what I could have done about it if I had known). Would I ever be published again?

My heroic agent managed to move the series over to a different publisher for less money. I put out two books with them. The new publisher put very little effort into promoting them. One did great. The other not so great. We came to a mutual parting of ways.

Somewhere in here I wrote a few books that didn’t sell. One was on the chick lit side, the other really didn’t fit into a category.

In 2004, not only did I not seem anywhere close to quitting my day job, but my day job was starting to suck. I worried that I would never be published again. But that did not stop me from writing a new book, one with a 16-year-old main character. It was a YA according to my agent. (I had just thought of it as an adult book with a young main character.)

After that first YA, Shock Point, came out, I hit another hard patch. I had written another YA, but the release date kept getting pushed back and my editor had pretty much stopped answering my emails. Not only had my dream of quitting my day job faded, but my job had actually gotten worse. There were frequent “emergency” meetings in which I would realize one or two co-workers were missing. Then the meeting would turn out to be about how they had just been let go. It felt like everything was falling apart. But I didn’t stop writing.

I finished writing a YA book I really liked, about a blind girl who is accidentally kidnapped when someone steals her step-mom’s car—with her in it. My editor didn’t like it, saying that books about kidnapping were overdone.

In late 2007, I got approached about partnering with a TV legal analyst on an adult mystery series. When we made a four-book deal, I knew I would never again have such a biggish chunk of money at one time. So I quit my day job in 2008. It was the scariest thing I have ever done. A few months later, I sold the book about the blind girl—Girl, Stolen—to a new editor, Christy Ottaviano at Henry Holt.

In 2009, that first adult coauthored book, Face of Betrayal, hit the New York Times bestseller list. And I learned that Girl, Stolen would be a lead title for Holt the next year.

Girl, Stolen, which was originally turned down by my first editor, has since been on nine state lists, named a Quick Pick, and is on the recommended curriculum in Ireland.

From 2010 on, I have published two books a year, one adult and one YA. And I’ve managed to continue to make a living as a writer. I think the key has been being tenacious. Even if—and it’s probably when—I hit another dry patch, I will keep writing, keep trying.

April Henry knows how to kill you in a two-dozen different ways. She makes up for a peaceful childhood in an intact home by killing off fictional characters. April had one detour on her path to destruction: when she was 12 she sent a short story about a six-foot tall frog who loved peanut butter to noted children’s author Roald Dahl. He liked it so much he arranged to have it published in an international children’s magazine. By the time she was in her 30s, April had come to terms with her childhood and started writing about hit men, drug dealers, and serial killers. Look for two new books from her in 2015: Lethal Beauty (written with Lis Wiehl) and Blood Will Tell.

Previous Writing for the Long Haul Posts

- Kate Gilmore on perseverance and writing at midlife
- Kelly Bennett on Quitting Writing
- Pete Hautman on the book that will save us
- Elena Acoba on touching reader lives
- Steve Miller on building a writing life
- Sharon Lee on remembering we're not alone
- Betty G. Birney on always challenging ourselves
- Nora Raleigh Baskin on making deals with the writing gods
- Sean Williams on unpredictability and luck
- Deborah J. Ross on writing through crisis
- Sharon Shinn on managing time
- Marge Pellegrino on feeding the restless yearning to write
- Sarah Zettel on embracing ignorance and writing your passions
- Uma Krishnaswami on honoring unreasonable exuberance
- Jennifer J. Stewart on finding community and support
- Sherwood Smith on keeping inspiration alive
- Mette Ivie Harrison on defining success
- Jeffrey J. Mariotte on why we write
- Judith Tarr on reinventing ourselves
- Kathi Appelt on the power of story
- Cynthia Leitich Smith on balancing business and creativity

Department of revising my Long Island childhood: ranking all 121 Billy Joel songs. (Via lnhammer.)

“The Falling of the Rain” gets a bad rap (for all that it’s not like anything else of his and very not Long Island), and “Only the Good Die Young” an over-generous one (good-kid me used to hate that song, and adult me still thinks Andrew Marvell did it better hundreds of years earlier), but he’s dead right putting “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” at number one, as well as ranking the post-apocalyptic “Miami 2017″ in the top ten.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

My review of Goodnight Moon, as posted to Goodreads:

A heartbreakingly spare story about the heat death of the universe. One by one the things of the world are bid adieu. Beginning with small losses–clocks, socks, a young mouse who will never reach adulthood, the stakes rise relentlessly until the loss of the atmosphere, stars, and sound itself. In the end the illustrated moon shines on, a reminder of things lost, but the protagonist–and the reader–are left sleeping in the dark.

I’ll confess it took me a few (hundred) readings to fully understand this book, but aren’t the best works of literature like that?

For further commentary on Goodnight Moon, I recommend God-Night Rune, a translation from the original Old English; and Goodnight Room, a look at the inner workings of the Great Green Room.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

Toddler was up before well before dawn this new year's morning. We encouraged her to go back to sleep (and succeeded), but if we hadn't, we realized later, we just might have seen snow falling to the desert floor.

As it was, what we saw was still more than worth getting up a little past dawn for.



Any year that begins with desert snow has to be all right. Here's to a good one for us all.

So there’s a strange thing that’s been happening since I became a mother. Specifically, many people seem to have more trouble hearing me than before parenthood.

I understood my time would be tight for a long while, of course, and that I wouldn’t have as much time to speak up, online or in person–most of my writing time is saved for fiction these days. What I didn’t understand is that when I did speak, many people would hear my words–even my words that had nothing to do with parenting–only through the lens of motherhood, and not through the lens of, well, me.

It works like this. I’ll either talk or post about A Thing. It doesn’t really matter what I say specifically–it could be a critique, a complaint, or simply an observation. What matters is that if there’s even the slightest hint of discontent in my comment (and sometimes even if there’s no discontent at all), someone or other will too often proceed to utterly fail to hear me.

Not only fail to hear me, but proceed to tell me how happy they are for me. Even if I was speaking about something I was either unhappy or neutral about.

So maybe I’ll mention my writing time being tight now. Along with sympathetic comments, someone will say something like, “Isn’t parenting wonderful? Enjoy!”

If I mention some parenting challenge (usually in person, because I tend to keep most the actual details of my family life offline), someone will say, “Oh, I’m so happy for you!”

“How wonderful!” “Isn’t it great?” “What really matters is that you’re a parent now!” It seems that if post-motherhood I also express any unhappiness, even passing, trivial, daily-life ordinary-griping unhappiness, even if that unhappiness has nothing to do with my child, someone will often assume what I really need is for them to tell me how happy they are about, well, my unhappiness.

Before I was a mom, those were moments that called for sympathy or empathy, as I recall.

I do get it. This is lovingly done, for the most part, these cheerful responses to less-than-cheerful statements, an attempt to express love and support. I appreciate love and support. But when the words I have actually spoken get ignored in an attempt to remind me to be happy, what that says is not I love and support you but I don’t hear you.

Having my voice heard truly is tremendously important to me. It’s why I write.

I’m guessing I’m not alone. I’m guessing there are at least some other moms–writers or not–who feel the same way, which is part of why I’m posting now.

Parenting is awesome. I love my daughter, I love watching her grow, I love seeing our family and household grow and change too. There’s a lot that’s amazing in my life right now, and I am genuinely and deeply and beyond-words grateful. Maybe I don’t say it enough, especially online where my focus is more on the professional than the personal, especially when I assume that everyone of course knows I feel that way. So I’m saying it again now.

But the rest of my life didn’t cease to exist the moment I met my daughter, and the rest of my emotions and observations and the whole of my me-ness didn’t cease to exist the moment I became a parent. Being a mom is an addition to and expansion of who I am, not a replacement for who I am. I am not some generic what-a-mom-is. I am me and I am a mom. There’s a difference.

As mothers, part of our job is to learn to listen to our children. It’s a wonderful part of our job.

But I don’t think it’s too much to ask that those who care about us don’t forget how to listen at the very same time that we’re learning it.

For many new parents, now, more than ever, is the time that we want and need to be heard and seen truly.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

So. There’s a trailer online for The Force Awakens, aka Star Wars episode VII. And I have thoughts.

Those thoughts begin in the summer of 1999, on the release date for The Phantom Menance, I was hiking through Capitol Reef National Park, miles from any movie theater. And at some point, staring out at a 360 degree panorama of some of the most stunning geology out there, I found myself thinking that I was missing something amazing, for all that I knew I was surrounded by things even more amazing that I’d consciously chosen over opening night of Star Wars Episode I. Still, I wondered if I’d made a mistake, choosing to go camping instead of waiting in line that week.

I hadn’t made a mistake. When I finally saw the movie a few days later, I knew that.

Still, I was an optimist. I saw both of the remaining prequels. The second time, I genuinely hoped I’d see something better. The third time … well, the third time, I saw the movie at a local drive in theater some days after release, mostly for the sake of completeness, but also “just in case” that something amazing might turn up after all.

Because the first three Star Wars movies, episodes IV through VI? Pretty much changed my life.

Teen me imprinted on The Empire Strikes Back hard, and from there there was no turning back. I practically memorized that movie. I practically memorized the novelization of that movie. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words of self-insertion Star Wars fanfiction. Han Solo became at once my hero and my crush object. I did wait in line for Return of the Jedi, and while by the end of the movie my teen self was just beginning to understand how that movie–and the trilogy–weren’t perfect, I did not regret it. At all.

For me, the first trilogy was always about characters, not special effects. In many ways, although I was a voracious reader, it was the screen-based Han, Leia, and Luke who occupied the space for me that for later readers would be occupied by Harry, Ron, and Hermione. I loved their interactions and interplay, I loved the whole good-boy/bad-boy vibe of Luke and Han, I loved Han and Leia’s romance, did I mention I especially loved Han? (Later, I would think about the problems of Leia’s becoming an increasingly non-character over the course of the trilogy, and my decreasing engagement with her. But I was young, and my understandings were still growing, and I was unsubtle in my expectations. Characters who were larger than life and cast in broad–if problematic–strokes were still what I was looking for.) I loved, too, the sense of epic struggle, and being able to straightforwardly hate Darth Vader with all his straightforward villainy. (The flip side of this being that I was never sold on his redemption … but that’s a subject for another post.)

When Leia told Han she loved him, I cheered.

Years later, when Amidala told Anakin she loved him, I looked at the friends I was with, and we all mouthed the same word: WHY? (Jedi mind tricks, we later decided. Only Jedi mind tricks could explain that romance.)

It wasn’t just that I was no longer my younger, less subtle self by the time the prequels came along, though a couple decades of idolizing and being shaped by the original trilogy did mean that any new movie would have struggled to live up to the originals.

But the prequel trilogy, it didn’t even come close. For me, the heart wasn’t there, the soul and the characters weren’t there, and if the effects were pretty, well, unlike many the effects had never been what drew me to the Star Wars universe. Like I said, I enjoyed the novelizations as much as the movies. I was looking for character, and I was looking for story, and I’d probably have found those somewhere else if I hadn’t found Star Wars when I did–would probably have happily obsessed over something else instead–but Star Wars came along first and filled that space for me.

Star Wars shaped me as a fantasy reader (you didn’t think those movies were really science fiction, did you?), and it shaped me as a fantasy writer.

So. There’s a trailer for a new trilogy online. And it sure looks pretty.

I don’t care about pretty. It looks like it has characters too, but I can’t tell much about them from the trailer. And it looks like it has the Millennium Falcon too, which of course makes me smile, but the Millennium Falcon is not, by itself, enough, not unless I knew I’ll care about whoever’s piloting it now.

And maybe I will. The trailer, it doesn’t give me enough to know either way. And while I know there are in-depth analyses of every last detail of that footage out there, I haven’t read them.

Because I’m not getting my heart broken again. I’m not waiting in line opening day or opening week or … probably ever … for this one. I’m not thinking of it as the start of–or a return to–something amazing this time.

Unless. If enough people who I respect and whose story buttons are similar to mine tell me it actually is amazing–and not just visually amazing or tech and battle scene amazing–I’ll … think about it. But this time around, you all can take the opening day/week/month/maybe-forever hit for me.

I’ll be here at home with a novelization of The Empire Strikes Back, and several hundred thousand words of fondly remembered fanfic.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

From October 31-November 2, I’ll be Author Guest of Honor at TusCon, one of Arizona’s longest standing science fiction and fantasy conventions! Here’s where to find me there.

Friday, October 31

7 pm: Mingle with The Guests
Ballroom (Copper Room)

9 pm: Doing What You Love – Professionally (solo talk / q&a)
Panel Room 2 (Garden)

Saturday, November 1

10 am: Is YA trapped with teenagers in a dystopia?
Panel Room 1 (St. Augustine)
Yvonne Navarro, Janni Lee Simner, Sharon Skinner, Jill Knowles

1 pm: Hour with Janni Lee Simner
Ballroom (Copper Room)
From coffee cans to Faerie Bones, get to know our Guest of Honor

5 pm: Mass Autograph Session
Ballroom (Copper Room)
Janni Lee Simner, Sarah Clemens, Ernie Reyes Jr., Geoffrey Notkin, and more

9 pm: Congratulations! You finished your book – Now the hard work begins
Panel Room 1 (St. Augustine)
Frankie Robertson, Janni Lee Simner, Catherine Wells, Bob Nelson

Sunday, November 2

9 am: Should adults be embarrassed to read YA?
Panel Room 1 (St. Augustine)
Cynthia Ward, Janni Lee Simner, Jim Doty

11 am: Don’t quit your day job – The struggles of making/creating a profession
Panel Room 1 (St. Augustine)
Eric Schumacher, David Lee Summers, Janni Lee Simner, Liz Danforth

3 pm: Character Conflict
Ballroom (Copper Room)
Anna Paradox, Thomas Watson, Catherine Wells, Frankie Robertson

See the complete TusCon schedule here!

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

In Jewish tradition, not only is every seventh day a day of rest, but every seventh year is a year of rest–for the land, anyway, which is supposed to be allowed to lie fallow for that time. This year, it turns out, is a seventh year, a Shmita.

I only recently realized this, and I’ve been thinking about what it means, not only literally but also metaphorically. I do take Saturdays off from writing (though not from speaking or from many other things that are also considered work), and this has been a good decision for me on many levels. Yet I find I’m not willing–not brave enough, perhaps?–to take a year off from writing, even outside of the business concerns that brings up. Writing’s defined me and been a part of how I process this world and this life for so long, after all–though I can see how good things could likely arise out of stepping back for a time, too.

So instead I’ve been thinking about this: if I can’t let everything go, what are the things in my life that could be allowed to lie fallow this year, that could benefit from a rest, from some time away, from my giving myself permission to let them lie, without guilt and with deliberate intentions, for a time?

I don’t have any quick or easy answers to that. But it’s an interesting question to contemplate, and one worth, I think, keeping in my sights for a bit.

I do know this: it’s not only Jewish tradition that’s found that planting the same seeds in the same soil, year after year, isn’t good for the land or the harvest. Do the same thing over and over again and eventually, nothing will grow. If we can’t bring ourselves to give our work a complete rest, I still think it’s worth remembering to–and finding creative ways to–rotate our crops.

That’s something worth thinking about in the year ahead, too.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

There’s so much I want to tell you about our daughter. Small things, big things … for more than two decades I’ve been sharing and processing life experiences online. Doing so has become pretty instinctive for me, and becoming a family is pretty much as huge a life experience as there is.

I could probably do a pretty decent job blogging about this new journey. Writing is, after all, the thing I’ve spent the past couple decades living and breathing and learning. If I chose to tell our family’s and our daughter’s story online in the years ahead, I would do it well. A part of me wants to do just that.

But there’s one thing I can’t do well: tell that story in my daughter’s voice. This journey isn’t just my journey, after all. It’s hers.

There are parenting bloggers out there doing a good job, bloggers whom I’ve read and learned from, so I can’t quite take a hard and fast stand against all parent blogging. Many of these blogs work hard to maintain anonymity, too, which I think is the very least one must do when talking in any depth about children too young to give informed consent. I also know that there’s a difference between sharing trivial surface observations about things common to most children and sharing the intimate details of of a specific child’s specific life, and I’m not drawing so firm a line as to say I’ll never do the former.

It won’t be often though, and when I err, I hope to always err on the side of protecting my child, rather than of entertaining or bringing insight to readers. This post is, on one level, a simple reminder of that commitment. A young child can’t weigh in about what she does and doesn’t want shared, so it’s up to us to hold her experiences close and safe for her.

There’s also a larger issue here that’s more adoption specific: that adoption journeys are already too often framed in terms of the perspectives of adoptive parents instead of those of adopted children. I see this in adoption picture books that emphasize parental longing over the child’s emotional journey. I see when people tell adoptees they’re “lucky” to be in a family (as if complete strangers have the right to tell them how to feel or where their gratitude should be placed), or worse, that they’re “lucky” to be loved (as if adopted children don’t have the right to take love as much for granted as any other child, and also as if they didn’t receive and give love before they ever came to their final families). I see it, as I work to become a better and better listener, in the communities where adoptees are speaking up with increasing frequency about feeling like their own voices are far too often considered the least important voices in discussions of their own lives.

There are so many reasons to err on the side of protecting all our children and their stories until they can tell them for themselves, especially when speaking in public places–and a blog is just about as public as it gets. For more than two decades, I’ve been living a part of my life here and in other online places. Now, I’m reminded that there are parts of life that need to be lived offline, too.

So that’s what we’ll be doing.

While posts about writing, the Arizona desert, and any number of other things will, of course, continue as they always have.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

Some things are too big for a blog post, but also too big to not be posted about.

And also, well, jet-lag and sleep-interrupted nights have this way of interrupting posting of any sort.

But.

We’ve spent the past couple weeks in China, first in Henan province, then in Guangzhou, getting to know our daughter.



And just a couple days ago, we welcomed her home.



We are, needless to say, glad beyond words that she’s here.

(ETA: we've chosen not to share our daughter's name online for privacy reasons, do if you do know it, please don't use it in comments. Thanks!)

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

So a few weeks ago, I was truly hating this book I’m working on now, and wondering if I ought to just give up and work on something else. I did give up and work on something else–several something elses–and along the way got the opening of at least one future project just far enough along that I can now let it simmer in the subconscious for a while. But I’m back to my original new project this week, and today, I found myself writing this bit of dialogue:

“The universe is larger and more wondrous than we know, yadda yadda yadda.”

“You used to take this story more seriously,” I told her.

“Yeah, well, my personality is shifting,” she said. “We’re all still figuring out who we are. This is the first draft, after all. Anyway, where was I?”

And that is so utterly like what I would expect from the exploratory rough first draft of any of my books that, well, I’m beginning to think that this story–which I’m no longer hating at all–just might be exactly where it’s supposed to be at this stage of the process.

Dear Formerly Tertiary Character I Haven’t Seen in Fifty Pages or More,

I always thought you were more interesting than your minor role in the story had room for. I just didn’t know how interesting. Until now.

You’ll be getting a retroactive upgrade to Secondary Character, effective immediately.

Just don’t tell the other Tertiaries. They’re totally going to be giving up speaking lines to make room for you.

Welcome to the story,

Me

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

I remember, not long after moving to the desert, coming upon a broad, sandy dry gully that was labelled a “river.”

I believe, at the time, that I laughed.

After two decades of living in the desert, I don’t laugh anymore. The desert may save her rivers for special occasions, but when they come out (generally after a good hard rain), they come out in force, and don’t hold anything back.

So a couple nights ago, after a good soaking downpour, we walked down to one of the local washes to visit the river. We weren’t the only ones, because walking to the wash one of the things you do, after it rains.

(Best viewed in HD / high definition.)

The video didn’t catch the thick palm trunk, or the tree branch as tall as I was, that were both tossed downstream as if they were styrofoam-light. Or the tire that came rolling down the wash on its edge, as if it were surfing the river, until it was thrown back onto its side. Lots of flotsam and jetsam came floating by too, soda cups and water bottles and the like.

But always, it’s the water itself that most draws the eye and the ear, all that power roaring downstream.

By the next day, the wash was once again dry.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

CAPITOL CITY (PANEM) — Capitol University sophomore Jayden Sanderson studies a 3D simulation of a lush forest. He zooms in on a river that flows placidly through the trees. “There.” He points to a spot where the river’s bank broadens out. “It doesn’t look like much, but there’s just enough mud here for a Tribute to camouflage himself. The gamemakers didn’t count on that. The probabilities and projections always change once you add the human factor to a game. That’s the challenge.” The game design student smiles, making clear that as a hopeful future gamemaker, it’s a challenge he welcomes.

But as the Capitol gears up for the 100th annual Hunger Games, not all citizens share Sanderson’s enthusiasm. Many question whether, in this era of unprecedented prosperity for Panem, the games have outlived their usefulness.

“Sure, the Games held Panem together during a tumultuous period in our history,” says District 7 mayor Raymond Mason. “But I think it’s safe to say no one’s thinking of rebellion now.” He laughs as he gestures to the living room of his spacious townhouse, as if to prove his point. Such luxuries, a generation ago unthinkable for even the mayor of this once-impoverished lumber district, have become increasingly common among all District residents. “The Games have served their purpose. It’s time to move on.”

Hortensia Cooper, however, says Mason makes the mistake of assuming the Games’ benefits are purely political. “The economic benefits are undeniable,” insists Cooper, who serves as acting director of the Capitol Chamber of Commerce. “The prosperity we see today is a direct result of the Games, and stopping them now could propel us into a fiscal depression the likes of which we haven’t seen since the dark days of the rebellion.”

Quintillian Booth, chair of the nonprofit advocacy group Panem Remembers, counters that running the Games has a cost, too, one that can’t be measured purely in dollars and cents. “We must also consider the cost of 2,302 young lives lost since the Games began.” That’s 23 Tributes a year, plus an additional 24 for the 50th Quarter Quell. “And who can forget the 74th Games, which didn’t have a winner?” Booth asks.

It was after the 74th Games—the same Games Sanderson now studies in his classes—that this debate began. That was the year District 12 Tributes Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark shocked viewers by taking their own lives and leaving the Games without a victor. “Yeah,” Sanderson admits with an uneasy laugh. “The gamemakers didn’t count on those poison berries, either.”

“If you weren’t alive then, it’s hard to understand the horror of that moment,” says Madge Undersee, mayor of the coal-mining district Everdeen and Mellark hailed from. “When we realized what Katniss and Peeta had done, well, it changed the way we thought about the Games forever.”

Graecina Sand agrees the way we think about the Games has changed. “We’ve taken the lessons of the 74th Games very much to heart,” says this year’s Head Gamemaker, “and we’ve made quite a few changes since then. Those changes include relying solely on trained volunteer Tributes, nanobots that see to it the slain die instantly and without pain, and a ban on poisonous plant life. “We’ve moved well beyond the barbarism of our ancestors,” Sand says. “The Games today are quite humane, and taking part is a choice and a privilege, as anyone who watches the Tribute interviews can attest.” That watching those interviews is now optional is another, more recent, reform.

Yet Cooper insists, “Today’s Tributes have less choice than we’d like to believe. The sums paid to the families of those who enter the Tribute training pools is quite substantial. For young people whose families are struggling to put food on the table, there often isn’t any other choice. In the old days the process was at least somewhat democratic, but today’s Games target the Districts’ most vulnerable residents.”

Still, with recent Games budget increases and new scholarships focused on mentoring promising game design students from outside the Capitol, the Games don’t seem set to end any time soon. Recent legislation seeks to open participation to immigrants from beyond Panem’s borders as well.

“The Hunger Games are a defining part of who we are as a nation,” says President Coriolanus Snow, who like Undersee personally remembers the 74th Games. “They have a long and storied history that I see no need to apologize for. Indeed, it is an honor to be a part of it.”

Written after coming upon a fanvid with its own take on the 100th Hunger Games.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

Kate Gilmore had already had careers in theatre and as a legal secretary before she came to writing fiction in her fifties. She joins the long haul series today to talk about her winding path that led her to a professional writing career—and the ways in which that path has continued to wind since then.</span>

Although I spent much of my time in college writing plays and vaguely planning a life in the theatre, it was not until my 52nd year that I saw myself as a professional writer for the long haul. The idea arrived suddenly and took root in what most people would regard as poor soil.

My husband, Jack, was taking a vacation from tedious, annoying work as a high level programming consultant and writing a book about the early days of computers. I was sort of supporting the family as a legal secretary. This was a specialty I had acquired during a previous hiatus in the family fortunes—the time when I finally decided I would have to do something to make money. I was a terrific typist who could spell and construct a grammatical sentence, so temp work led to law offices and more substantial jobs. Thus at 52 I stood on the threshold of an actual career. There was still a lot of drudgery and much to learn, but I found the law interesting, and my final group of lawyers loved me.

So what happened to derail this attractive scenario? Well, I was in Central Park and, I think, contemplating a poem, when I realized that all I wanted to do was write and write and write, whether paid and admired or ignored and periodically impoverished. I have no idea why this happened but suppose it must have been bubbling along in my subconscious for some time. Obviously, I would have to give up my job, a major (and exciting) decision.

On an impulse, I asked an old friend to help me make up my mind. “Sally,” I said, “Jack has accepted a new and very well paid consulting job, and I am longing to stop working and write. What do you think?”

This query had a predictable outcome. Sally, who had known us for some years, pointed out that the consulting job would not last forever and said I should stick with my new career. “Think benefits,” she said, “and perhaps even some modest old age security.” I thanked her warmly and the next day gave notice to my three well-loved lawyers, one of whom actually shed a few tears. I was off to write for the long haul.

Did I ever regret this decision? Not for a minute that I can recall. Jack and I continued our chicken-feathers existence (chicken one day, feathers the next), and I began a novel that I intended to publish. I wrote, pretty much through thick and thin, using temp jobs to stuff in the cracks.

My first book was a teenage caper inspired by our fourteen year old son, who was leading a colorful and, to us, alarming life as a graffiti artist in the New York subway system. It told of a small group of middle class kids whose ambition was to paint the word PEACE in glowing, graffiti style letters on an international jet plane. Of Griffins and Graffiti was great fun to write, but I failed to take into account what was then, in the 80s, a rabid hatred of all things graffiti, the art as well as the trash, the people who produced it, and, of course, my jolly little book. This loathing was felt throughout the entire publishing world so far as I could see during a year of sending it around, but eventually it occurred to me that the Brits might not feel the same, and Penguin, at that time entirely British, snapped it up.

I don’t think that manuscript acceptance or rejection is any faster now in the electronic age than it was when my early books were making their stately way through the mail, over the transoms and into the slush piles where they awaited the attentions of a “first reader”. Houghton Mifflin mislaid my second book during this process, but eventually it was found and appreciated by a senior editor, Matilda Welter, who promptly called me. I shall always remember the sound of her voice, which was somehow both silvery and warm, when she told me that Remembrance of the Sun was beautiful, and she would love to publish it. There was only one problem, and I was to do as I thought best. In those days HM had a rule that young adult novels should not be more than 200 pages long. That left me 200 to cut. I gulped and agreed.

I learned a lot from Matilda Welter, not only a lot of clever ways to cut so a manuscript would appear shorter than it really was, but many ways to get rid of stuff that even I, after the initial pain, would never miss. We waged small wars, most of which I won, over what she sometimes felt was my too literate English, and we had increasingly luxurious lunches together as management came to admire my writing and Matilda published three more of my books.
It was a halcyon period for someone who was rapidly becoming addicted to writing. The books were extremely various. Even the research was fun, and I still have all the books I acquired for the ones I didn’t know much about. Two others were rooted in my life experiences—not memoirs but also not from the entirely invented world of the novel.

Remembrance of the Sun was the fictional story of the love affair between an American teenage girl and an only slightly older Iranian boy on the verge of the revolution that overthrew the Shah. I was there at that time with my family; and I had as well an intense, if strictly imaginary, emotional involvement with an Iranian man.

Then, after the admittedly splendid Enter Three Witches was written and published, came Jason and the Bard, drawn on my summers with Shakespeare Under the Stars and, like the Iran book, researched only in my head. This one was fun for me but not popular, having been judged “elitist” because the young actors and stage techs spouted Shakespeare (as I happened to know they would).

The Exchange Student, about a young traveler from a planet that had lost its animals, took me five years to finish what with delightful research at various zoos and the study of many books. Nevertheless, my still faithful publisher gave me a contract and waited patiently.

Matilda, for health reasons I had not understood, retired after the publication of The Exchange Student. The disastrous effect of losing one’s editor is an old story I have since heard a number of times and can confirm. The editor I inherited did not want my next book about an American girl stranded in Venice, so I published it on Nook and, typically, did nothing to sell it.

Then came the recession and a wretchedly new Houghton Mifflin where the idea of two sequels to The Exchange Student was entertained and then dropped. In this climate it was folly to even contemplate writing two unwanted books, but once I had the idea I plunged like a retriever into a duck pond and wrote steadily for another five years.

And now, at last, I have arrived at the theme of this blog. I have had trouble getting my trilogy published and expect to have more, but what a joy it was to write those sequels! Others have said it, and I will add my two cents worth: When I am working on a novel I feel a kind of deep contentment, a self-confirmation. Writing is, I think for most of us, extremely hard work. Yet I am glad to get up in the morning and go to my computer and begin again to do what somehow I feel I am meant to do. Yes, even if there is a problem, a block, a part that doesn’t work, I tell myself that it will resolve. The story will flow on, and the pleasure will still be there.

Kate Gilmore lost her heart to the theatre as a student at Antioch in the 1950s, where she participated in at least 80 theatre productions and took on nearly every theatrical task, from writing to directing to prompting. Along the way her verse play, Dark Wind Light Wind, was performed as the senior project of her friend Niela Miller. After college she went on to write more plays until meeting her husband, mathematician and computer game designer John Gilmore. She spent the years that followed living in New York, Italy, London, Iran, and rural New Hampshire while raising their two children.

She sold her first novel, Of Griffins and Graffiti, at the age of 50-something and has gone on to publish five more books since then, including Remembrance of the Sun and Enter Three Witches. She’s also written a series of science articles for teens for Earthwatch expeditions focused on subjects ranging from Australian frogs and Madagascan lemurs to cocoa farming in Ghana and medicinal plants of antiquity.

Previous Writing for the Long Haul Posts

- Kelly Bennett on Quitting Writing
- Pete Hautman on the book that will save us
- Elena Acoba on touching reader lives
- Steve Miller on building a writing life
- Sharon Lee on remembering we’re not alone
- Betty G. Birney on always challenging ourselves
- Nora Raleigh Baskin on making deals with the writing gods
- Sean Williams on unpredictability and luck
- Deborah J. Ross on writing through crisis
- Sharon Shinn on managing time
- Marge Pellegrino on feeding the restless yearning to write
- Sarah Zettel on embracing ignorance and writing your passions
- Uma Krishnaswami on honoring unreasonable exuberance
- Jennifer J. Stewart on finding community and support
- Sherwood Smith on keeping inspiration alive
- Mette Ivie Harrison on defining success
- Jeffrey J. Mariotte on why we write
- Judith Tarr on reinventing ourselves
- Kathi Appelt on the power of story
- Cynthia Leitich Smith on balancing business and creativity

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.

Dear Book,

So there I was, just about ready to give up on you, when you offer me … that. A reason to write you, and a glimmer of what you’re really all about.

Was it the threat of being trunked that made you give in?

Or did you actually choose to wait until the most frustrating possible moment to give up the first of your secrets?

Just wondering,

Me

P.S. Unless it’s all a lie. We’ll have words if it’s all a lie. And I don’t mean the words on your pages.

Mirrored from Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches.