Living more mindfully

Excuse the rare personal post!

I move too fast. I want to move more slowly, with spaces for breathing between all I do.

While I’m not a Buddhist, I’ve read about their concept of mindfulness. You do one thing at a time, and you attend to it. In so doing, you learn more. You relax more. You enjoy chores you used to rush through because you are there, in the moment, fully present, your hands immersed in warm dishwashing water, noticing how that actually feels good (rather than mentally cursing the chore, as we so often do.)

How did I get to the decidedly unmindful place I am right now? Five years ago, when I lived in the motor home in the deserts and woods of Arizona, I was fully mindful. I was utterly relaxed. Most days were blissful. I was so at peace that birds came right up to me and sang along with me when I sat outdoors, sang and played the guitar. I’m a million miles from there today.

The problem starts with the business of being a full-time author. Amazon’s algorithms favored books that came out every 3 months back in 2016. This year, you’d better be releasing one per month to get that monster’s approval and have any chance of being discovered by readers who don’t yet know your work.

Truth: I can’t write a good book in a month. I can’t write one, revise one, edit one, proofread one, run it through more than one pro proofreader in two months, even, and be happy with the result. I don’t even count the hours--years sometimes--of research that goes into all of my books. (I like learning, so it’s not a burden, and it’s hard to convince myself to track it or count it as work, though it is.)

I could write two pretty good, pretty error-free books per year, I think. I can’t do that and remain a full-time author, of course. Amazon's rules won't let me. So the choice is between better books and paying my bills this way.

This rush then extends its ugly claws out into other realms. That kind of productivity, plus the necessity of paying attention to whatever “innovations” Amazon is up to this month that affects authors requires a lot of social time online with other authors so I can stay abreast of this gossip. Authors do each other small favors, and those take time. The online time starts to pull at you, as it will (social media is terribly addictive), and if there is anything less mindful than staring at a screen and feeling irritated a lot, I can’t imagine what that might be. (Perhaps being forced to listen to jackhammer all day comes close.)

And soon, eight hours per day is taken up, just as with any office job. (Except I have to work Saturday and Sunday as well. I almost never take a day off. That wears on a person.) And so there’s not enough time to mow the lawn, clean the house, or make really good scratch meals as I’d wish. (I’m a good cook--seems like a skill I’m wasting most days.) I end up in real in-person conversations that I wish would end so I could go back to whatever is next on my list. In another mental state, I might really enjoy those conversations.

I bought a new house last year, and the yard was a mess, and there were several broken things, and my personal to-do list has been long. I’ve nearly worked my way through it, and am on to the “improvements” list now, but instead of enjoying this work--and I could, under other circumstances--I’m still in a rush-rush-rush mode. It doesn’t make the job get done any better, and it makes me resentful while I'm doing it. Truth is, there are tasks I enjoy like scraping paint and pulling weeds that relax me to a deep level, if I’m only able to commit to a solid two to four hours at them and do them carefully and with attention and without a rigid goal that starts out "I have to...."  Weeding or sanding can be like a meditation. But not if I’m trying to rush through the list to go back to check my sales because I’m running an ad and then checking emails and dealing with the day’s pile of them again.

I should be loving my life. I should be thrilled at living the dream of being a full-time writer. But I don’t and I’m not. I sigh far too much. I enjoy the small moments far too little.

And I know the answer to this discontent. It’s to slow the heck down. :D I want a to-do list with three things on it, not three dozen, every day. I want to stop and smell the roses--or the paint, or the compost, or the red peppers frying up in the pan. I want to plunge my hands into a sink of hot sudsy water, look out the kitchen window at the birds and squirrels, and just stand there for a full minute, feeling and seeing what I’m feeling and seeing.

I know most of us feel this way during our working years. I'm not special in that sense. What's rare about me is that I get to be one of the 6,000 or so people making a living as a writer, a position I'm well aware 500,000 other writers covet deeply and would think me mad for risking by slowing down this year.

I’ll have a book coming out soon. And I’m writing another. But instead of rushing it to publication to sate the maw of Amazon, when I’m done, I’ll put it aside and let it rest for a month before picking it up for revision. I’ll enjoy the process more. It’ll be a better book for that rest. I’m not going to release five or six or seven books this year (my totals for the last three years). I’m going to release three--and one was actually written last year. Next year, maybe that’ll only be two books released. Odds are, my business will crash as a result.

I am so happy I have readers, and I write for them as well as for me. But I don’t think I’m doing any of us a favor by rushing as I have been. I often ask myself, why is Gray so much more popular than everything else I write. These books come from the same mind, the same fingers. Gray was released one book every six months and the editing and release came NINE YEARS after I first wrote it. I think that’s the answer, in part. I took more time. I revised more mindfully. I had down time during which I did other things mindfully, which made me a more balanced person when I returned to writing the book.

That’s my theory, at least. If I’m wrong, at least by slowing down and paying attention to the world, I’ll be doing myself some good, if not anyone else or my books. I won’t feel as if I’m living in a bubble, locked in a wrestling match with Amazon, with the world an irksome distraction, which is how I feel most days now. I will eat better, rest better, feel better.

The birds might even come near again. And that would be lovely.

Review of 2018 + plan for 2019

It was a busy December of catching up with tasks I'd wanted to do for some time or should have done years ago, but I caught up and am proud of what that means. Soon there will be an omnibus edition of Books 1-2-3 in both the Oil Apocalypse series and the Dawn of Mammals series. (I'd do a five-book collection, but Amazon's rules about pricing makes that impossible.) They'll be out within a few weeks.

My newest novel is a World War II Spy thrilled, called Code Name Beatriz. It too will be out within a few weeks.

Because I have an older relative with vision problems, I know about the need for more large print books, so I've had Storm reformatted and made into a large print paperback. As soon as the cover is re-done for that, it'll be out too.

And finally, I revised and found a cover for a novel based on the life of my great-grandmother as a child. Her mother was so poor, she had to give her to an orphanage around the year 1900. I just released that under the pen name Rosellyn Sparks. Its name is The Long Road to Home. I drafted this in 2011, and my relatives have wanted to read it for some time, so this falls under "it's about time!" from their perspective. :D

That's a lot that came to fruition and was caught up on all at once.

I moved 1500 miles in 2018, and I bought a house for the first time in years, so the fact I got four books published last year is something of a miracle. Two were Lou Cadle novels, and one was a fantasy under the pen name LC Bard.

And now I'm in the middle of writing the 31st book I've written (I've not published all of them) in a new post-apocalyptic series. It should be out in May if all goes well.

Simple tech ain't so simple

My new series is going to be set long after the apocalypse, and the world (or at least continent) as we know it will have fallen back to a 17th or 16th century world. Wheels, for instance, will be carved, wooden, and "tires" will be of salvaged metal strips. Someone has to do the salvage work. Someone has to carve the wheels.

Not that there will be gasoline engines to pull the contraptions the wheels are on, mind you. Horses or people! Or people just drag the plow or ard themselves, roped into it, rather than like this guy who apparently has some deer-dalmation hybrid pulling his. (Egypt. interesting place. 😏)

My book is partly set in a wooden windmill, where grain is ground for the community. I've been educating myself on the history of windmills, and how complex they grew with people adapting them using nothing but quite simple tools. Lubricated by bee's wax, these machines sawed wood, ground grain, made Holland habitable, made paint, and all sorts of other items for use or trade. I enjoyed musing about the innovations, who came up with them, how long it took to get it "right," and the sort of person who could innovate. Honestly, it took me a week of studying them to figure out the basics!

Consider the design of a millstone, carved by a stone carver or millwright by hand. They must have started with just two stones, millennia ago, and came to this point.The more you think about the design--and read up a little on it--you see what an astonishing bit of technology the design is. It grind the grain, it pushes the grain out, and it doesn't pulverize the grain. The stones are further apart near the center and closer at the edge. The design controls the movement of the grain (eventually down into a hopper.) Most rotate about 2 times per second. Here's one design, but most look something like this.

I'm reading widely, not quite knowing what will be of use. And some of this is based on TV shows I watched years ago, like "Life After People," where they explained how the buildings, bridges, and monuments of our culture will fall apart quickly in the absence of our keeping them up (and having the petroleum to do so). Articles I've been bookmarking for over a year might apply--like the "fruit walls of the 16th century" article I found that shows how to grow fruit by using the heat-storing capacity of southern-facing clay or brick walls to create a warmer microclimate that ripens the fruit sooner and allows you to grow figs in Montreal. (I may not need this, but it's the sort of thing I bookmark and may or may not use.)

My writing process is, as I do this research, it starts to come together for me, characters begin to pop into my mind (Who does the windsmith interact with most often? What is her role in the community? What kind of person could carve millstones for a living?) I simultaneously gain the knowledge I need to make details correct and (I hope) vivid and get to know my cast of characters. When it feels ripe I begin to outline a series or book, though I also have self-imposed deadlines, so it darned well better ripen up on time! :D

Jan 1, I plan to type the words "Chapter 1" and get going on the new series. It's a little unusual for indie post-apocalyptic, as the apocalypse will be rather far in the past, but there are similarities in how it's a survival adventure, and new sort of apocalyptic events will spring up for the characters to deal with. As a minor point, climate change may have been nasty for the Oil Apocalypse characters, but when it changes back for their descendants to a colder world, a new kind of climate change will be just as difficult to adapt to. There are other problems they'll face, but I won't spoil it for you. It's coming in 2019.

The Pain of Writing Violent Fiction

It is hard for me to live in a world of violence, cruelty, and grief, even if that world is only imaginary. And yet fiction is about struggle and conflict. Often the conflict escalates to violence.

Yes, a few genres, like cozy mysteries (with the murder safely off-stage) and sweet romances (with the conflict about what’s keeping the lovers apart) don’t have that level of conflict or risk or resulting pain. But the ones I read and the ones I write do.

Amazon has, over the 4+ years I have been self-publishing there, made it harder to sell books if you write two a year. You have to write five or six a year to stay visible in the charts, and that’s extremely difficult to do. Readers can read a book in a day or two and think it feels “too short,” but the 75,000 words I wrote took to provide that experience took me considerably longer than a day or two to write. After closing a book of mine, you get to hug your kid and dog and cook up a nice stir-fry. Day after day, I'm mired in my creation.

During the writing, and the editing, often without vacation time between, I’m thinking about pain and terror and loss. With post-apocalyptic fiction, I’m glancing off: “oh right, and six billion other people are dead too” but I notice it. It wears on me, which is why I don’t write only post-apocalyptic with its endless fight to just survive, which I have to feel too in order to make you the reader feel it.

Right now, I’m writing about Nazis in France in 1944 and the brave spies of the Resistance and SOE who worked against them. The research alone is horrifying. I was not even looking for horrors one day a couple weeks back (sometimes I must, but not that day) and found a list of known SS officers on Wikipedia. If they knew what atrocities each had committed, they listed it in a simple sentence.

Glancing through them (I was only hunting for a rank!) was like being smacked in the gut with a baseball bat. One Nazi concentration camp doctor who had literally hundreds of recently dead Jews (disease, overwork, shot trying to escape) available for study had 86 relatively healthy ones gassed so he could study their skeletons. And briefly, there was a museum of them. (I didn’t follow up, but I know the Nazis pretty well by now and am guessing it was to “prove” they were an “inferior race” through some nonsense about bone measurements, and the museum was provided so other Nazis could walk through the horrific display and nod about how "right" they were about that. Spoiler alert: they were wrong, dead wrong. No group of humans is inferior to some other group. Period.)

mass grave #3 at Bergen-Belsen

This research actually hurts. It hurts worse because I worry about the state of the world today. It hurts because I must think about very real dangers and terrors and possible outcomes for my characters, who I come to almost believe are real, must become them with their terror, must witness what they witness--and then describe it all. And then edit those words. And then proofread those words. Day after day after day.

I’m glad I’m writing this book, and I think it will be a page-turner and moving to read. But I’ll also be glad to see the end of it.

Sorry to complain. I know I’m not digging ditches during the hot summer for a living, that I sit in air conditioned comfort and type, but there are other strains than back strains. I’m feeling more than a bit strained right now.

Thank you for listening.

Camp Nano

I take part in April and July in Camp Nano, a social writing event that was created by the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) folks. It is a chance to hang out with other writers struggling as I am, feeling the same highs of the good days when a cascade of words effortlessly flows from you (and it feels like merely through you at times), and frustrations of the days when either life intervenes and no words are possible, or the days when, despite several free hours to write, you have to squeeze each syllable out as if lancing a painful boil.

In virtual “cabins” we drop by and post, as if on any social media, and respond to other people posting. As the de facto leader of this months’ cabin, I make sure to drop by twice a day at least. (I really am not the leader in any sense but I know how to work the interface and was willing to take on the extra few hours of administrative tasks. We're equals there.)

I know writers know all this, but readers don’t, so let me describe some of what gets posted.

• One person doubts her ability to write at all
• Another person doubts the project she has committed to is the right project to be working on
• Another is in love with the research but admits loves the writing less
• To that, someone responds that they always like having written but don’t love writing
• The next one says she loves drafting but hates rewriting
• Someone pops in to announce that house guests have stayed two days too long and she can’t get rid of them and wants to strangle them for taking up her writing time
• Someone writes more than that day’s goal
• And even the people who are fighting for every word congratulate them
• In week three, someone who has been writing effortlessly inexplicably grinds to a halt
• Everyone sympathizes, for we have all been there.
• Someone makes a joke about the concept of this being a summer cabin, perhaps offering to make camp stew or s’mores for everyone to cheer us up "out by the lake"
• Two people drop out quietly, possibly because they are ashamed they aren’t meeting a goal as everyone else seems to be -- or maybe we somehow offended them, but we’ll never know
• Someone pops in to ask a question of craft
• Someone else asks a research question. As we’re an international cabin, sometimes we can help each other understand our language or food or other parts of our home culture.

Writing is a solitary, sometimes even lonely, occupation; as a result, I keep some social connections alive with other writers to share the joys and pains of the work.

2017 Year in Review

I'm back!

Today I'm reviewing what I hoped to accomplish in 2017 and what I did accomplish.

My goals were:

• Publish Dawn of Mammals 5, Mammoth -- I did that (but forgot the paperback for months! Oops!)
• Write two Oil Apocalypse novels -- I wrote three, so A+ on this item
• Finish and publish Crow Vector -- I did that
• Revise my pen name historical novel about my great-grandmother’s childhood and get it out there. Oops again. I didn’t so much as read it.
• But I also wrote a short fantasy novel, which I’m finishing revising right now, and a half-dozen short stories in various genres. 

In terms of work load, I did more than I set out to do, so I'll give myself a passing grade.

Also, two audio book companies approached me and so two of my series are out in audio now--though I can't really pat myself on the back much for that, for all I did was sign some papers!

This next year, my goals are:

• Revise and publish all those short stories and the short novel in two volumes (one fantasy, one mixed genres, including tie-ins to Gray and Dawn of Mammals and the world of what will be Oil Apocalypse 6 or 7)
• Write two more Oil Apocalypse books
• Write more short stories during times I'll be busy with non-writing work
• At least read my poor, neglected great-grandmother novel, which I've had drafted for seven years.If I can revise it great, but I'll lower my expectation and merely ask myself to read it.
• Exercise more because I’ve been tied to my computer now for two years (11 novels written, edited, and published) and need to take care of myself, no matter what Amazon’s algorithms are demanding of me.

That's it! I hope you accomplished all your goals in 2017, saw a dream come true, and are enthused about life in 2018.

Happy New Year to everyone. I'll be back on Sundays with non-fiction articles again, these next two posts about some aspect of disaster recovery I've not yet addressed.

Advice to those who would like to be full-time writers

One final word this NaNoWriMo month to newer writers.

If I could give you one piece of advice only, I'd skip over the craft advice and the excellent advice about writing every day and the advice about persevering in the face of rejection and say only one thing:

Get rid of your TV.

donating it would be better than doing this, I suppose

What? Why? Because it wastes time?

Not primarily that (though you are right!--it does waste time.) It will try and sell you crap you don't need, and that will cost you money you should be saving. And why should you be careful with your money? Money is freedom. Freedom is time to write. Time to write is the sine qua non of first getting good enough at your craft to have a shot at being a full-time writer, and then, once you start selling, of producing more stories or books to sell.

Time is like gold--more than gold. It's like air to a writer.

Every single shiny object which is advertised to you, that you fall prey to the lure of, that you buy? That's a piece of a book you tossed away. Convincing yourself you need a Mac and iPhone? Sorry to be blunt, but that's at least a full book you just wasted--because you had to earn a living at some straight job to buy that, even if you don't lose more time to playing around with their time-wasting apps.

Maybe you came from money. Hey, congrats, then buy all the Apple products and Lamborghinis your heart desires.

But if you're working class or close to it and if you want to be a writer--really and truly want it; it's the most important goal you have, and you're not just playing at this--that's my advice. Get rid of your TV.

Live simply. Quit acquiring things you don't need. Quit believing the lie that you need to acquire more things than would fit in a panel van. Things take up your time and then they take more time at a day job to pay them off and if they are expensive things, now you have to work more to insure them.

Use your time like the precious, finite resource it is.  Every object you buy is flushing that time down the toilet. It's therefore flushing the books you'll never have time to write down the toilet. I promise you that as arrive at my age, you'll wish you had more precious time ahead of you to finish writing all those book ideas in your file. Guard your time sooner--rather than regretting the spending of it later.

And then, for a bonus, when you do quit your day job and go full-time as a writer, you'll have learned the lessons of frugal, simple living, and when there is a lean year (and there will be lean years. If you're so new you're still thinking everyone who writes ends up King or Rowling, and swims through money right into the grave, you're probably not in the audience for this post), you'll know how to cut back when the income drops and be able to stay full-time as a writer.

If you say that writing is important to you, act as if it is. Make it important. Prioritize it. Don't throw away your time on shiny objects. You're not a magpie. You're a warrior of words. Remember your goal of being a full-time writer one day. Stay strong and focused.

Remember: you don't need more things. You need more time.

Lou Cadle plans for 2017 book releases

Here's the plan for 2017.

New Releases:

• February 10: Dawn of Mammals 5 (last in series, up for pre-order soon)
• April: a very different novel in a pen name, historical fiction, possibly titled Nellie
• May: the pandemic thriller that I drafted back in July 2016
• July or August: a thriller that begins a new series and world. (It’s our world, but a few years in the future)
• October or November: a novel that follows the last one, set several years later, as things go from bad to worse.

Audio books of the Gray series (date of release not yet set), more paperbacks as they are ready, and a Gray omnibus e-book edition will also be released. I'd also like to write sufficient short stories to put together a collection of them. Whew! Another busy year planned.

However, a caveat: authors are human beings. (I know! It’s a shock to hear this news, but you’ll adapt shortly, I’m sure. 😜 ) Stuff happens to human beings sometimes. A grown daughter shows up on the doorstep with a baby and leaves him with you for a year. A heart attack. A house fire. Being kidnapped and held for ransom for six months. Being kidnapped to Tau Ceti to be in a terrible alien experiment on Earthlings. And, to be more positive in my predictions, winning an all-expense paid trip around the world! If any or all of that happens, it could change the schedule. (Do you think I could get a wireless connection from Tau Ceti?)