Happy Birthday to Me.

My birthday is on Sunday. As usual, nearly everyone I know and love is out of town for Memorial Day Weekend.

So - I decided to throw myself a Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armageddon party. Coincidentally, my friend and fellow Columbia MFA classmate, Sonoko Kawahara (a mom-director, which is as hard as being a mom-writer), is directing a play by this very name at La Mama (yes, the irony continues)...

Anyone who wants to celebrate with me is welcome to join us at La Mama on Sunday, May 26th at the 2:30 pm show. Buy a ticket. Show up. You will recognize us because we will be wearing all black with a splash of a bright color. If you would like to join us at the after-party, you will, too. There are kids tickets (10 and up) available for $10 with the code MATKIDS. Your kids are welcome.

If you aren't into live-manga, but want to add to the general feeling of assassin carnival joy around here, you can always make a tax-deductible donation to Pen Parentis. When you click submit, make a birthday wish.

It could very well come true for you.

Ghost writing, blogging, and writing a novel in a year

As writers who have to support little hungry mouths, we are (well, like everyone else) always searching for a way to make money.

So what about ghost-writing?

Articles like this one from the BBC, make it sound so easy - write two or three books a year, put your kids through private schools. Live in a fancy house. Meet celebrities who love you. Done.

Of course, no one knows who you are.

But why do we write, exactly? I mean, none of us can stop, right? Whenever we think to throw the pen out the window we are haunted by ideas, gripped by the fear that we have tossed away our talent. When our PTA asks us to write for the newsletter we squirm, as angry as the doctor who is asked to "just take a quick look" at this weird blister-thing on Sybill's back during a Fourth of July barbecue.

We want to be read, and really, we want to be paid for our work.

So how important is it that people know we are actually the author of that work?

Interesting question, isn't it? How would you feel if you wrote a whole book and it became a best seller -- but then some dipstick actor who could barely focus thoughts into a verbal sentence, much less in an email, gets credit for writing that fascinating book and gets to talk to Oprah, Ellen, and Jon Stewart about how gripping their story was to read. Would the money be enough to keep you satisfied?

If it's just about the money, why aren't we all writing creative ad copy? I can find a million job offers for blogging about random things. Here's my position on this:  do whatever day job you have to do to keep your kids fed and your rent paid, but leave time for your own creative work.

Ghostwriting can leave you drained. Yes, you are using your craft (writing) to earn a living. But you are also asking your inner artist to draw a picture that did not rise from your own soul.

Writing is of two parts: the story is the art, the writing is the craft. A great novel has both, and both belong to the author.  Ghost-writing is a good way to pay the bills, but don't let it be the only writing you do. Make time for your own story, even if it's not as marketable as Angelina's.

Better still: make something up. Write a story that has not yet been lived.

If you can't find time to work on your own creative stuff, then you have to give something up.  You can't (and shouldn't) give up your kids. You probably should exercise a little and leave at least a few hours for your spouse and for eating and sleeping and, let's be real, a few hours for detox with your favorite addictive TV show. But what you can give up is a day job that makes you feel like you are writing without actually letting you write. You can stop pretending your low-paying blogging job is really what you want to be writing, and instead you can take a stupid-mind-numbing job where you are being paid GOBS of money and then you can take that extra money to hire a sitter so that you can actually work on something creative.

And if you just yelled at this post, then maybe you are secretly happy at what you do and you need to JUST ACTUALLY WORK ON YOUR NOVEL. Here is a kick-in-the-pants blog (warning: really colorful language) I found to help you write a novel in one year.

Good luck & get to it.

Inspiring article - read it and WRITE.

Had to share this inspiring article by Shawn Vestal, sent over by our newest advisory board member, NYC-based literary agent Renee Zuckerbrot.  Shawn's debut collection, Godforsaken Idaho, was published earlier this month--check out his wonderful essay on The Quivering Pen (link below).

Did this ever happen to you? I will admit, I was frantic about my writing while I was pregnant the first time - thought for sure that I had to make it all happen in those speedy nine months.

Follow this link for some wonderful inspiration: "My First Publication as a Father" by Shawn Vestal.

And write something wonderful today - even if it's only a paragraph. Make something happen.

How to balance a creative career and an active family life

I was asked to guest-blog on Kidville's blog on the topic of balancing a creative career and parenting responsibilites, and I share with you the post. One day, perhaps we will also be fancy here with images and so forth. But for now: stay creative. Balance your life. Please comment on their blog in response to the tips - let them know this is a topic of interest in the virtual world!

And - we at Pen Parentis extend heartfelt strength to the families suffering in Boston. As New Yorkers with offices a block from Ground Zero, we get it. Gather strength from your loved ones, and remember that writing can also be therapeutic.

Crossword Poetry - guest blog by Brooklyn poet, Peter Valentine

Not every writer who is a Pen Parentis Author has four novels and an NEA grant. A lot of us are writers with day-jobs to support a family, who simply can't live without our creative outlet. Here's a guest-blog from a terrific poet, Peter Valentine, whose daily crossword-poetry is a wonderful example of threading a hobby into your creative writing - to ensure that you keep at it! He writes in the six hours that his children are in school, and here he describes his process for us, in hopes of inspiring others to discover their own forms. It's important to stay in the game, no matter your tools. 

Peter lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children. Visit his website here.

Take it away, Peter!

-----

About 11 years ago B.C. (before children) I was sitting in my apartment, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette over the crossword. I had just gotten up, so it was probably 10:30am.

 

On this particular morning rather than speeding through the answers, I was staring at the words and letting my eyes play over them. Soon I found myself putting lines together -- first in my head, then on paper.

 

My first crossword poem consisted of two distinct parts – each created from the words in the clues and answers respectively. Later I evolved the form to 3 parts: across, down, and answers. For the title, words are drawn from any part of the puzzle.

 

The rules: 

1. Words in any section may be repeated

2. Punctuation may be altered in any way

3. No word may be used in a part of the poem that is not found in the corresponding part of the puzzle (if there is no “the” in the across clues, then “the” cannot be in the “across” part of the poem)

 

I wrote these poem daily for three years until I became a father. After three kids, I stopped reading the paper entirely.

 

Now, six years have passed and things have gotten easier. Today, with the kids in school six hours a day, I have been able to pick up the project again.  And it continues to be an extremely fun and satisfying occupation. Each day I look at a fresh batch of words from a different crossword puzzle constructor and never know where it’s going to take me. I’ve also added a new element – images. My wife, who is involved in social media (check out her blog here), urged me to include images -- a must if you want your stuff to get passed around the Internet. My initial snooty thought was that images diminish the words. Now I love them. It’s fun to see what pictures come up when you google things like, “soldier shakes hands with squirrel.”

 

Also, social media was not around six years ago, and I’m finding that there is nothing more motivating than the “like.”

 

It’s amazing how much has changed in only six years – both in the world-wide world and in me. Many of my older poems leaned on absurdist humor and at times cynical invective. Today, I can barely take cynicism. I still love funny, but I also feel more compelled and less embarrassed to write about real feelings and real things – surely the influence of kids. So while I may not get to sleep until 10:30am anymore, I may be a better writer.

Dystopian Future of Publishing

I'm reeling.

I was at a cell phone service store today, chatting with the staff while waiting to deal with a billing question and my guy noticed my email address. "Are you a writer? Carlos is a writer," says my guy, "Well, not exactly a writer. A publisher."

"Carlos" (name changed, obviously) is a heavyset, laughing, youthful man in his late twenties, with short dreds and really nice shoes. "Yeah. I don't write a word. I make books. I'm not exactly a publisher, though," says he. "More of a market research guru."

Intrigued, I asked for more details.

"Well, I have an Amazon imprint, you know? for eBooks. And I take a look at what's hot - like what's being Googled a lot, what books people are searching for, you know?--and then I think of a title and a pen name and get some cover art, come up with a table of contents, do some graphic design and then I get my writers to do a 'report' for me. Each report is a chapter of the book."

I am now trembling and appalled (and despite myself, really impressed at the nerve and cleverness of this scheme). "Do you pay the writers?"

"Sure," he says, "I pay them $50 or $60 for a ten thousand word report. Then I throw it all together with good graphic design and put it out on Amazon as an ebook. They sell like crazy; no work for me."

"Sleep money," says my guy.

"Yup," Carlos proudly nods. "Sleep money. I just started, and it's going great. The guy who told me about this? He makes 60K per month."

Let me repeat that last bit. The guy makes sixty thousand dollars per MONTH. I hope you weren't trying to eat while you read that. I nearly choked.

On the good side, this can only be done in non-fiction, where people search by keyword and where people don't really care who wrote the book, just that it's by "an expert."

In fiction, we are still...so far...safe.  So get back to writing your novel, people. Or, hey - pool together with your writing group to each write a short story on a very popular, contemporary topic - self publish the collection, and promote it on Twitter using the popular hashtag. It might not be a bad way to fund the annual party!

--

There is still time to submit to the $1000 Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship for New Parents. All writers at any level with a child under ten are eligible. Follow this link for guidelines.  Deadline April 17, 2013.

What AWP taught me

This is going to be an unusually personal post - I went to AWP (the massive, twelve-thousand writers in a single event space dance-with-your-editor party that the Association of Writers and Writing Professionals puts on annually in various cities). First let me say that it was....amazing.  There were thirty panels for every time slot - each one hour and fifteen minutes long. There were six official time slots in a conference day, for three days. Do the math. You could spend a whole session just debating what panel to attend--!  Simultaneously, there was a two-floor book fair at which indie presses and literary magazines, MFA programs and writing retreats all had their tables. Down there, you were likely to run into people who did readings with you, who attended your grad school, or who had been standing in line for the bathroom with you for fifteen minutes the day before. In other words, those two floors were all about socializing and making connections. As if that's not enough, there were evening receptions (up to ten on-site per night) plus a score of offsite readings and social hours, dance parties and dinners.  It was...amazing.

So let me get personal. I am, first and foremost a mom. A writer. I just spent two whole minutes deleting one and replacing it with the other. I honestly don't know which I am first. If the kids need me, I'm definitely a mom first. But if they are at school, there's not a chance in hell I will choose voluntarily to create a felt-board so they can learn their spelling words if I'm in the middle of a writing session. So what comes first? Whatever needs me most, I guess. And yes, there's guilt in that.  But that's not what this blog post is about.

I also balance running Pen Parentis with the writing and the momming. And at AWP I realized that a lot of the time, I place the Directing higher on the scale than either of those things because it feels like a job. It can get tedious. It can be frustrating in an administrative "we just ran out of ink in our printer and need to put up flyers for tomorrow's event" sort of way. And it gives us the kind of pride that only a job can give you: a sort of legitimacy in the universe.

And what's hideous is that it means that even I, who run this organization, tend to subconsciously negate parenting and writing as legitimate. And I'm crushed about that, because it's preposterous.

If you could have seen the work that was being done at the conference to learn and innovate, to get inspiration for the next page, the next sentence - the people sitting on each other's feet (quite literally) to be able to fit into a very-full panel discussion on Traditional & Nontraditional Structures in the Novel, or Surviving and Thriving without an MFA or Borrowing from Literature to Create for the Screen...you too would have said, these people are not being self-indugent (a criticism I often hear about writing as a profession--yeah, it irks me too). I doubt any gastroentereologists at conferences at the Hynes Convention Center would stand through a whole session with one elbow in someone else's face and another on the water cooler, just to see a panel speak about a new surgery technique. Maybe they do, I've never been to a medical conference. But I have seen the suits that doctors wear to their conferences, and that sort of high-end costume doesn't encourage crowding.

But not even every large-scale literary event is this exciting. The difference between this conference and the BEA (Book Expo America that happens in June in NYC annually, and is the publishing industry conference) - is where the passion lies. At BEA, it is passion for the book: as a product, as a collaboration of author, agent, editor, publisher and distributor, and as a valuable, thrilling piece of art (or at the very least a valuable, thrilling commodity that sells like hotcakes). There are a lot more suits and a lot fewer panels, and nearly all those panels feature powerpoint. At AWP, the conference celebrates WRITING. The creation. The editing. The decision to sell or sell out or change or not. The teaching of writing. The collection of writing into anthologies. The transformations of writing both style and content. The impetus to write and the things that block it or fund it. This conference is all about the craft.

What did I learn? I learned that I actually wear three hats; which isn't all that surprising, given that my nickname in grad school was "Chapeau"... Here are my three hats: when I'm a parent, I feel guilty I'm not writing, but also I feel like I'm doing the exact correct thing by giving my all to my kids. When I'm a writer, I feel guilty I'm not doing more for my kids, though I feel personally most fulfilled. (I was surprised to discover that when I accomplish something great in writing it gives me a huge amount of personal, if fleeting, pleasure and makes me feel like yes, I've made the right choices.) And when I'm the executive director, all the doubts and fears and guilt fall away, to be replaced by hope and encouragement and I find myself acting like that tree in The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. You know the one? "And the tree was happy..." When wearing the hat of founding director, I will scrape bottom to ensure that every writer/parent who is pushing to keep a writer hat on -- even part-time -- while wearing their parenting hat the rest of the time, gets rewarded and encouraged. You guys -- and you know who you were -- who attended that conference bringing along your kids? You were my heroes. I could see the suffering you felt as others looked askance "really? you couldn't get a sitter?" -- and wanted to shout on your behalf: it's frickin' impossible to get a sitter for four days!! And then I want to give a public shout-out to the many, many writers who are devoted to their craft, are working full time day-jobs and/or just don't have the funds to go anywhere for four days with or without their kids. They deserve celebration as well.

(as a side note, our Writing Fellowship for New Parents was created specifically so that you people whose only impediment to attending conferences or residencies like AWP is a financial one could finally do so. It's open for application until April 17--do spread the word, please.)

I kept thinking, between panels and meetups and waiting in coffee lines, that there were 12,000 "literary"-genre writers that attended this event, but that meant that there were probably a million writers who were actually WRITING while the rest of us were taking in panels, not to mention the writers in other genres who have other conferences to inspire them! That's a pretty miraculous and astonishing number of people who are faithful to the word as an art form, and I hope that all you guys, the guys who stayed home as well as those who made it out to AWP, I hope that you all find inspiration in the livetweet feeds, that blog posts, and all the Facebook posts and articles that resulted from this massive conference. Also I hope that you all keep writing and fighting the good fight. Give your all; change hats as often as you possibly can. Hats are awesome.

I'll likely write some specific things that I picked up at AWP on my next post. I attended a huge number of panels, and why not spread the wisdom? We can all be better at what we do - but for now, what's important is to remember to also enjoy it. A bestselling author on a panel about getting your book into the world says that she still to this day has to remind herself every day that it is amazing that we are able to do what we do - the work is hard, but oh, is it ever rewarding.