A Guest Post: The Sane Psychowriter -- Practicing Mindful Detachment

Greetings, all! I recently did a guest post for the lovely ladies at the Laptops and Lingerie blog. Yes, I wrote it on my laptop...while wearing pajamas. An excerpt: When I originally proposed the idea for this post to Cheryl, I thought I had conquered some old fears through the formidable combination of insight and Maggie's M&M talk. Sadly, that is not the case. The problem is that I keep thinking I know where my life is going and where things will end up, and that simply ends up not being true... To keep reading, click here.

The Fun of Changing Web Hosting

I'm back!  Did you miss me?

I originally had my ceciliadominic.com site hosted at a large and, one would infer from their commercials, somewhat misogynistic, company.  We ditched them in July but haven't found a permanent home for ceciliadominic.com, so if you can't find it and wonder what you're doing here, that's why.  We'll likely turn the components of that site into permanent pages here and at the Random Oenophile blog, which is still my most frequent posting site.

I apologize for the confusion and hope to re-start blogging my random thoughts and indie-pubbed book reviews soon!

Goodbye, Ms. McCaffrey!

When I'm asked to name the influences on my writing, Anne McCaffrey is always one of the first names I mention, but I'm not writing this as an author. No, I want to say goodbye to her as a reader.

I first came to Pern by way of Half-Circle Hold and Harper Hall.

It was one of those summer days in Irondale, Alabama when no matter how much Mom ran the air conditioning in the car, my shirt stuck to my back when I got out. We were at the library, and I had wandered from the hardback section and found the round shelves that housed the young adult paperback books. One cover caught my eye, that of redheaded girl who looked about my age and who was surrounded by tiny swooping dragons in different colors. She stood on some rocks by the ocean and held in her hands what looked like a set of wooden pipes. It went into my pile, which would be finished within the week. I don't remember any of the others I picked up that day, but that book was Dragonsong, the first book in the Harper Hall Trilogy.


I don't remember exactly how old I was, just that I was struggling with the things most adolescents do: not fitting in, feeling unappreciated, and general annoyance at the stubbornness of the adults in my life who insisted on silly things like curfews. I escaped through books and found in the Harper Hall trilogy a heroine I could relate to and who did the things I could only dream of. In that pivotal scene, I was Menolly running my feet ragged over a pebbly beach trying to escape from the pressures that wanted to mindlessly devour me, the ones that hissed, "Be thin! Be perfect! Live up to everyone's expectations!"

Then, in the second book, Dragonsinger: Harper of Pern, I understood Menolly the misfit who had to deal with the silly shallowness of the paying female students at Harper Hall. It's tough to be a girl, especially a smart girl. Ms. McCaffrey got it, the struggle between being good at something and not wanting to stand out too much. Oh, and the importance of sassy boots. Finally, in Dragondrums, Menolly finds love, and it gave me hope that a geeky girl like me would eventually find someone. I did, and I didn't need the help of any randy fire lizards.

In spite of wishing hard and taking long walks on the Destin beach to find a deserted-enough spot (there aren't any), I never found a nest of fire lizards. It wasn't until I had cats that I figured out where McCaffrey had modeled her little psychic dragons from. My tuxedo kitty rubs me with his wedge-shaped head and rumbles when he's happy. He gets very persistent when he's hungry, although thankfully his eyes don't turn red.

I did eventually read the rest of the Pern books to get the context for the Harper Hall Trilogy, and I enjoyed meeting Lessa, F'lar, F'nor, Jaxom, and the other dragonriders, holders, and thieves. Menolly will always have a special place in my heart, and if I ever have a daughter, I will give her my well-worn copy of Dragonsong. Maybe she'll be able to relate and find hope like I did.

Happy flying, Ms. McCaffrey! Don't forget to bundle up well – it gets cold between. We'll miss you.

On Process and Progress: Verbal Shortcuts

My heart got blessed when we were in North Georgia a few weeks ago, except I don't think it really did. Hubby and I were checking out at one of the many apple orchards near Ellijay and chatting with a friendly older gentleman behind the counter.

"Where are y'all from?" he asked.

"Atlanta."

"Oh, bless your heart!"

When we got to the car, Hubby looked at me and said, "I think we just got insulted."

That classic passive-aggressive Southern phrase got me to thinking about what kind of language shortcuts we use. As a psychologist, I can't help but wonder what they help us to say without saying directly. Consider the "Bless your heart" above. It was really, "Oh, you poor things! Our quality of life up here in the North Georgia Mountains is vastly superior to what you city folks experience."

Yep, nothing nice in that mound of condescension. The phrase actually means the opposite. Consider these other phrases in common use and what they really (really?!) mean:

"Not going to go there," but by saying this, you prompt your listener to.

"Awesome" can go either way.

"Wicked!" may be a musical, but my Yankee cousins were using it to mean awesome long before Gregory Maguire ever wrote the book the musical is based on.

"Oh, no you didn't!" and I can't believe you did!

The tricky thing with using these phrases in dialogue is that tone of voice conveys as much of the message as the words. My characters sometimes ask, "Really?" but for clarification, not as in, "I can't believe how stupid that was!"

There's also the timeliness of the phrase. Not everything spans generations like "Bless your heart." I recently read a draft of a Civil War era novel in which a character said, "Don't. Just don't." I marked it as "too modern." It could go the other way. I wouldn't have any of my characters set in a novel in 2011 say, "All that and a bag of chips!" That one always puzzled me.

What are your current favorite shortcut phrases? If you don't have any, well, bless your heart!

What I did with those apples:

What I learned about writing from Bad Movie Day

One of my writing/drinking buddies – yes, it's funny how those go together – hosted a Bad Movie Day at his house yesterday. Apparently his wife was out of town on a girls' camping trip, so she couldn't object. Even better, he home brews, so there was plenty of alcohol to help us cope with the visual and logical carnage that ensued.

Although the festivities started at noon-ish, Hubby and I didn't arrive until later, so we only had the pleasure (if you can call it that) of watching the last four selections. Here they are, with the IMDB descriptive blurbs and links should you care to read more about them yourselves:



Chupacabra Terror (2005): When cryptozoologist Dr. Peña traps the legendary Chupacabra on a remote Caribbean island, he smuggles it aboard a cruise ship with disastrous results.

Creepers (1993; original title Contagion .7): People from a small town are attacked by evil radioactive tree roots growing in the forest.

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (2000): After enslavement & near extermination by an alien race in the year 3000, humanity begins to fight back.

Birdemic: Shock and Horror (2008): A platoon of eagle & vultures attack the residence of a small town. Many people died. It's not known what caused the flying menace to attack. Two people managed to fight back, but will they survive Birdemic?

Movies start as ideas that are turned into screenplays by writers and made visual by producers, actors, and directors. Not surprisingly, the same things that make for a bad story or novel can also happen to movies, but at many different layers. So what makes a bad movie?

1. A single-dimensional hero with ill-defined motivation:

It's not surprising that many of the films that made it into the bad movie day queue are horror films because they tap into the most basic of human motivations: survival. The problem is that a hero needs internal motivation and conflict beyond that to be interesting to an audience.

Apparently Battlefield Earth got universally panned for many reasons, but the biggest problem I had with the movie was that I didn't care about the hero. Sure, he was gutsy and smart and somewhat good looking, but I just couldn't identify with him because he lacked internal conflict. Even his name, Johnny Goodboy Tyler, warns there's not much to him.


2. A single-dimensional villain with ill-defined motivation:

Okay, when you're dealing with murderous mythical creatures, tree roots, and birds, you can't really ask too much, especially when tree roots with their sassy whipping sounds are the best actors in the film. I actually liked the villains in Battlefield Earth better than the heroes because although John Travolta's acting wasn't great, his character Terl had some dimension to him.

With the other films, I wanted to know why these things were attacking people. In Chupacabra Terror, all we know about the creature is that its name means "goat sucker" because it feeds off the blood of goats. Okay, is it hungry? If so, it should've been sated after about two people because it's not that big. Is it pissed or scared that it's been trapped and taken out of its natural habitat? That would've been something that the cryptozoologist could have enlightened us about. In Birdemic, all we get to know are that the birds, which have somehow become explosive (and angry!), have started attacking people, and it just might have something to do with global warming.

Okay, so it's probably a stretch to think too much about radioactive tree roots, but if an author or screenwriter is going to use a device like that, they need to establish both the why and how. Sure, the roots had turned "carnivorous," but we were left wondering how, aside from asphyxiation, the tree roots were killing people. It's mentioned that they've turned into "predators," but how do they suck the nutrients from their victims? That would have made for some more interesting information and added a dimension of scariness.

3. Bad editing:

The best example of this was just about everything in Birdemic: Shock and Terror. You know something's wrong when the whole room is chanting, "Cut! Cut!" at the screen. The lesson for writers is to know or get feedback on what information is extraneous and cut it out. Stephen King in On Writing recommends cutting ten percent of your word count. Birdemic director James Nguyen should have cut about forty.

Another problem is transitions. After watching the Powerpoint-type curtain fade-ins in Battlefield Earth, not to mention the awkward tilted camera angles, we were all seasick. I once attended a talk by Alan Gratz, author of Samurai Shortstop, at the Harriette Austin Writers Conference. He suggested smoothing out transitions by ending one chapter with an image and bringing it back in a different way at the beginning of the next. Perhaps he should consult on films.

4. The preaching – make it stop!

I'm not going to say much on this one. I edited a translation of a book once that had a long, preachy section at the end that the author would not cut out. You have to trust your viewers – and readers – to know what the moral of the film or story is without beating them over the head with it.

I was told several times yesterday that I was thinking too hard about what I was watching, but as a writer, I just couldn't help it. One of my Twitter friends reminded me at the Decatur Book Festival that we learn as much if not more from reading bad fiction than good. These movies were so bad they were good for some laughs, both at them and the audience comments. Sometimes it's good to be reminded about what not to do and to do so in good company.

Metapost: A Little Light Self-Promotion...

In January, I entered publisher Buddhapuss Ink's Mystery Times Ten contest, and in March I got an email that I had been selected as one of the twenty finalists. This meant a lot because my story had impressed the teen panelists, who I figured would be the toughest of all. Then I got an email on a Friday in April that I was one of the ten finalists, which excited me because it meant that, even if I hadn't placed, I would be able to skip the slush pile if I were to ever submit a Young Adult novel to them. The following Monday, I got the very happy news that I'd placed first! Yep, I got a Kindle. This is somewhat ironic after my long debate over what kind of e-reader I'd buy. Between that and my Nook Color, I now have access to just about everything.

The books themselves came out on July 22, and my story "The Coral Temple" is the first one. One of the judges said the following:

"[This story] was fantastic! Seriously, so well-developed with a multitude of characters that come alive at once, a tautly wrapped up mystery, and that wonderful element of a mysterious far off place we’ve never been. The social hierarchy, the setting description, and the emotional pieces all work, too. Plus the characters are teens. Oh joy!"

This is my first major short story publication, so of course I'm very excited. You can order the book directly from Amazon here, or if you would like a signed copy, please email me at cecilia {at} ceciliadominic {dot} com, and I'll send you details about shipping, payment, etc.

On Process and Progress: Playing the Numbers Game

Three years ago, I joined a short story class led by a friend of mine who has published nine of them, but none for pay. I went on the first day, and when the teacher and other students asked what I wanted out of writing fiction, I gave them the honest answer: I want to do this for a living.

"Oh, that's going to be so hard!" one of the other students said, and (seriously!) wrinkled her nose as if to say, "Oh, that's so cute!"

The teacher* was even less encouraging. "There are three hundred million people in the United States," he said, "and less than four hundred of them are able to write fiction full-time without any additional support like spousal income or from another job."


(File by Jim Irwin on Wikimedia, used by general permission)

Well, damn. That means I have such a small chance of actually making it as a full-time, professional fiction writer that my computer calculator doesn't even want to give me the number without using scientific notation with a negative decimal point (1.333*10^-4%, or 0.0001333 percent). Giving that perspective, when I applied to a Ph.D. program in Clinical Psychology in 1998, the acceptance rates for those programs were between six and eight percent, which is, by the way, less than for medical school.

But this got me to thinking. That number is way too low considering the context. Let's break it down...

First, how many people actually want to write fiction? Let's start with how many people want or like to write. Okay, I'm pulling this number out of my ass, but as we all know, 36% of statistics (including this one) are made up on the spot. So, thinking of the people I know, let's say that one third of them actually write, and that's probably a generous representation of the general population considering I tend to hang out with other writers. That brings the starting number down to one hundred million. Forty percent of the book market goes to fiction (this seems to be a fairly consistent number across sources), so the starting number equals forty million.

So, 400/400,000 = 0.1% At least we're out of the scientific notation.

Let's go a step further. Of that four hundred million, how many of them are actually serious about writing? By serious, I mean putting regular time into it (better than I have been about blog posting) and learning about the craft. For guidance, I turned to magazine circulation for the three big writing magazines: Writer's Digest, Writer Magazine, and Poets & Writers. Yes, my assumption is that people who are serious enough to study the craft of writing will subscribe to magazines. Here are the numbers:

Writer's Digest: 110,000
Writer Magazine: 30,000
Poets & Writers: 60,000

Sure, I'm not hitting everyone, but I'm sure there are others like me who take more than one, so we'll make the assumption that non-magazine reading serious writers are covered by the overlap. The total is now 200,000, and thank you, statistics gods, for the nice, round number!

One more step: lots of people start books, but who is serious enough to actually finish a manuscript and go through the agony of submitting it? For this, I turned to the acceptance rates for M.F.A. programs. These are the type of talented, driven people I feel like I'm up against. According to the Almighty Google, who has been very helpful with this process, creative writing M.F.A. acceptance rates are between 2.5 and 5%. So, that brings our number down to a range of 5000-10,000. Going with our initial starting point of 400 successful career fiction writers, the chance of success then becomes four to eight percent. This was actually close to my chances of getting into a clinical psychology Ph.D. program, which I did. And took four semesters of statistics, in case you couldn't tell.



(File from Wikimedia)

Am I making a lot of assumptions with this process? Yes. Do I know for sure what my chances of making it as a fiction author are? No. But I have time to find out, a supportive spouse, and a day job that I enjoy. By the way, the teacher who first handed down that dour statistic has since become one of my biggest supporters who has said that he thinks I have what it takes. I'm going to take him up on his challenge to become number four hundred and one.

The kind of math I like: dessert on graph paper plate at Chocolate by the Bald Man in Philadelphia.