When You Can't Write

For a long time, I used to joke that I couldn't afford writer's block. I began writing professionally when my first child was a baby and I learned to use very small amounts of time. This involved "pre-writing," going over the next scene in my mind (while doing stuff like washing the dishes) until I knew exactly how I wanted it to go; when I'd get a few minutes at the typewriter (no home computers yet), I'd write like mad. I always had a backlog of scenes and stories and whole books, screaming at me to be written. The bottleneck was the time in which to work on them.

I kept writing through all sorts of life events, some happy, others really awful and traumatic. Like many other writers, I used my work as escape, as solace, as a way of working through difficult situations and complex feelings. I shrouded myself with a sense of invulnerability: I could write my way through anything life threw at me!

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

I hit an immovable wall during a PTSD meltdown following the first parole hearing of the man who raped and murdered my mother. For weeks at a time, I battled flashbacks and nightmares. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't stop crying. Also, I couldn't write. That creative paralysis added another dimension to the crisis. If I couldn't write, who was I? Where were my secret worlds, my journeys of spirit and heart where people healed and things got better? Gone...and I didn't know if I'd ever get them back.

I was fortunate to have a lot of help, professional and friendly, during those dark weeks and months, some of it from fellow writers. No pep talks, just friendship, constant and true. Eventually, as I recovered, I was able to return to fiction writing as well, although by then, I found myself a single working mom and had a new set of demands on my time.

Writers stop writing for all kinds of reasons. In my case, it was personal and emotional, part of a larger crisis. Other times, however, the well runs dry when the rest of life is going smoothly. Quite a few years ago, I ran into a writer I greatly admired (at an ABA convention), and I'd not seen anything from this writer in quite a few years. I introduced myself and asked when the next book would be coming out. Only when I saw the change in the writer's expression did I realize how difficult the subject was. I was probably the hundredth person that weekend to ask. (Eventually, this writer came out with several new books; I wonder now if the appearance at the ABA wasn't a way of trying to get the head back into writerly-space.)

Sometimes, a writer feels they've said everything they have to say. Or that one book or one series is it; there are no new worlds begging to be explored. They can rest on their laurels with a feeling of satisfaction and closure. For the rest of us, though, not writing is anywhere from excruciating to devastating.

I  think it's not at all helpful to try to "cheer up" a writer in the middle of a dry period. The specific reasons--creative paralysis, personal crisis, discouragement--vary so much. I think it's safe to say that each of us has to find our own way through. For me, it's helped immensely to know I'm not the only one to go through it--and that's the operational term "go through it." Come out the other side. Talk about what happened, in the hopes of being the light in the darkness for someone else.

The Green Skies of Mars and Other Astronomical Wonders

Astronauts on Mars may see a green sky, eerie new study suggests

Using the European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), scientists have observed Mars' atmosphere glowing green for the first time ever — in the visible light spectrum, that is. The effect is called airglow (or dayglow or nightglow, depending on the hour). Nightglow "occurs when two oxygen atoms combine to form an oxygen molecule," according to ESA. On Mars, this happens at an altitude of approximately 31 miles (50 km). Scientists have suspected Mars to have airglow for some 40 years, but the first observation only occurred a decade ago by ESA's Mars Express orbiter, which detected the phenomenon in the infrared spectrum. Then, in 2020, scientists observed the phenomenon in visible light using TGO, but in Martian daylight rather than at night. Now, we've seen the phenomenon at night via TGO.

Moon is 40 million years older than we thought, tiny crystals from Apollo mission confirm

The moon is at least 40 million years older than we once thought, a new study reveals. Scientists confirmed our cosmic companion's new minimum age after reanalyzing tiny impact crystals from lunar samples taken by NASA's Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old. So based on the newest study, the zircon crystals were formed around 80 million years after our planet formed. However, the collision that birthed the moon could have actually happened even earlier. After the Earth-Thea crash, the infant moon's surface would have been covered by a magma ocean due to the intense energy of the collision. Therefore, the lunar zircon crystals could only have properly solidified into their current state once the magma ocean had cooled down.

The oldest continents in the Milky Way may be 5 billion years older than Earth's

Astrobiologists think a planet needs to have certain features to support life: oxygen in its atmosphere, something to shield organisms from dangerous radiation and liquid water, for a start. Although big land masses aren't strictly necessary for living things to emerge, Earth's history shows that they're important for life to thrive and exist for long periods of time. So, if an exoplanet had continents before Earth, it follows that there might be older, more advanced life on that world.

This line of thought led Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University astronomer in the U.K., to answer the question: When did the first continents appear on a planet in our galaxy? Turns out, two exoplanets' continents — and perhaps life — may have arisen four to five billion years before Earth's.

Can a Dead Star Keep Exploding?

If the Tasmanian Devil is a type of dead star, it’s not behaving like the others. As a dead star, the light coming from it could signal its transition into a sort of stellar afterlife. It could be a new type of stellar corpse.
“Because the corpse is not just sitting there, it’s active and doing things that we can detect,” Ho said. “We think these flares could be coming from one of these newly formed corpses, which gives us a way to study their properties when they’ve just been formed.”

The Echoes From Inflation Could Still Be Shaking the Cosmos Today

In the very early universe, physics was weird. A process known as “inflation,” where best we understand the universe went from a single infinitesimal point to everything we see today, was one such instance of that weird physics. Now, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Science have sifted through 15 years of pulsar timing data in order to put some constraints on what that physics looks like.

Life Might Be Easiest to Find on Planets that Match an Earlier Earth

When methane (CH4) and oxygen (O2) are both present in an atmosphere, it’s an indication that life is at work. That’s because, in an oxygen environment, methane only lasts about 10 years. Its presence indicates disequilibrium. For it to be present, it has to be continually replenished in amounts that only life can produce.

Short Book Reviews: A Legendary Master Thief on the Trail of the Sirens' Stone

What Song the Sirens Sang, by Simon R. Green (Severn House)

Simon R. Green’s supernatural mysteries and adventures are always a delight, and What Song the Sirens Sang proves a worthy addition to the adventures of legendary master thief Gideon Sable. Actually, Gideon Sable isn’t a person, it’s an office that has been taken over (AKA stolen) by a nameless and infinitely resourceful narrator.

“The original Gideon Sable was a legendary master thief, who specialized in stealing the kind of things that others couldn’t. Like a ghost’s clothes, a photo of the true love you never found and jewels from the crown of the man who would be king.”

At the end of the last episode, Gideon and his partner-in-crime sweetheart, chameleon Annie Anybody, have defeated the most evil man in the world with the help of their team, have acquired (i.e., gotten coerced into taking on) the truly bizarre magical shop known as Old Harry's Place, and have set about replenishing its contents in the forlorn hope that once everything is up and running, they’ll get to enjoy lives of their own. One of the articles of merchandise that arrives on their doorstop is a small stone from the cavern of the sirens (as in “the” sirens from The Odyssey). The last song of the sirens, said to drive whoever hears it to insanity, still resonates in the stone, making it as unique and valuable as it is deadly. All that remains is for someone to figure out how to unlock the song.

Before Gideon and Annie can properly secure the stone, it goes missing and they’re off to gather up another team and track it down. Their team begins with their old ally, The Damned, a man who killed two angels (one from Above, one from Below) and fashioned their halos into armor. Now he joins Gideon and Annie in search of his kidnapped wife, switch artist par excellence, who is now in the clutches of the stone collector, a shadowy figure named Coldheart. They’re joined by a lady werewolf with an unerring tracker sense and an unexpected crush on The Damned.

As in earlier Gideon Sable supernatural heist thrillers, nothing is as it seems and nobody can be entirely trusted (except Annie, who isn’t Nobody, she’s Anybody). The prose is delicious, the characters terrifying but lovable, and the “long con” disguised as a plot has so many twists and turns, it’s auditioning for a Los Angeles highway.

Prepare to be vastly entertained, but beware: the series is addictive.

Short Book Reviews: A Lady Adventurer-Scholar Takes on Faerie

Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Book One of the Emily Wilde Series), by Heather Fawcett (Del Rey)

In many ways, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett reminded me of Marie Brennan’s best-selling A Natural History of Dragons and the “Amelia Peabody” mysteries by Ellis Peters: the Victorian lady adventurer-scholar genre. In all of these, the narrative voice (that is, the personality of the l adventurer-scholar) grabs my interest and keeps it for page after page. The stories are as much about the protagonist’s inner emotional journey from adamantly self-reliant spinster to emotionally awakened, relationship-literate partner as they are about external action. Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries fits neatly into this model with a delightful array of plot and character twists. In this case, Cambridge professor Emily Wilde takes her sabbatical in the far North (Norway?) to complete her magnum opus on all things Faerie, particularly the “Hidden Ones,” what we would call high elves. Her tone-deaf social skills alienate the villagers upon whom she must depend not only for the folk tales that will form the heart of her treatise but for sustenance and rescue. She has no idea what she’s done wrong or how she’s going to cope with her insufferably handsome academic rival, Wendell Bambleby, who arrives unexpectedly and manages to charm the townsfolk, muddle Emily’s research, and alternately bewilder and frustrate her.

This book is familiar enough to relax into and enjoy the ride, and a fresh enough rendering to surprise and delight me with the original, often whimsical elements. Footnotes and references perfectly enhance the “scholarly” voice. If there were moments when Wendell felt tempted to grab Emily and shake some sense into her before kissing her, I was right there with him.

The bottom line: Marvelous fun!

Writer's Block: Lowering Standards?

Today's thoughts on writing arose from Sandra Tsing Loh's review of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Amy Chua, Penguin) (about which I may write a completely separate blog post) in the April 2011 Atlantic. Loh wrote:

I follow the old writer's chestnut: "When you face writer's block, just lower your standards and keep going."

Cute, I suppose, and encouraging in its own way, but I'm not sure I agree with the mindset. I had never heard such a thing, and I've been publishing professionally for over 30 years. Maybe it's the difference between mainstream writing (and the expectation of peerless prose?) and genre writing. Or that the mentors I've have and and the pros I hang out with have a more organic approach to writing, an appreciation for story-telling over meticulously "beautiful" language? Or has this writer never been truly blocked, only impatient and self-critical?


Whatever the reason for my not hearing this before, I find its underlying premise destructive: that writing (i.e., composing a first draft) must somehow embody one's highest literary standards. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is nonsense! If you can just "carry on", what's going on isn't writer's block. It's elitist self-indulgent pifflebunk. If worrying about your "standards" interferes with the flow of your writing, then maybe you're trying to write and to critique yourself at the same time, and it might be better to get out of your own way and just write!

You can always edit and polish to your heart's content, but get the story down first.

For a long time in my early career, I wrote perfectly awful first drafts. I mean really bad in almost every sense -- except the passion I brought to them. Grammar, plot, characterization, prose style, you name it, I butchered it. As a consequence, I learned to revise with a vengeance. I learned that all of these things, these "literary standards" things, are fixable. The only thing that can't be changed is inserting "heart" into a story when it isn't there to begin with. (Or maybe some writers can do that, but I can't.) I'd a thousand times rather write--or read--a story with that core of fiery truth than with the most sophisticated technique in the world.

Book Review: Tanya Huff's Into the Broken Lands

 Into the Broken Lands, by Tanya Huff (DAW)

Tanya Huff is a seasoned, multi-genre author whose work never ceases to amaze me with its sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and sheer drama. She’s as prolific as she is versatile, both with her many long-running series and her stand-alone novels. Into the Broken Lands introduces a completely new world and characters. The set-up is familiar to fantasy readers: generations ago, mages intoxicated by their own limitless powers shattered the laws of nature and reality, resulting in their own demise and a landscape of magical impossibilities, The Broken Lands. Since then, the royal heirs of Marsan, greatest of the surviving human realms, venture into The Broken Lands in search of the fuel for an ever-burning flame and their own legitimacy as rulers.

Here, Huff does something both challenging and brilliant: she weaves together two such journeys, one in the present and the other, a couple of generations ago. At first, the two seem disjoint, the past being no more than prolog to the present. As the two sets of characters venture deeper into the perilous Broken Lands, both similarities and differences echo and build on one another. Eventually, the fate of the earlier expedition shapes the present, and the present offers redemption for what has come before. The unifying elements include records kept by the first expedition, taken as reverential gospel, and the discovery of how scholars have selectively edited them, horrendous dangers that are repeated with unpredictable variations, and a single character: the sole surviving weapon of the mages, without which no heir can reach the source of the fuel and return safely. Only the weapon isn’t a thing, an “it;” the weapon is a person, a giant rock-like female warrior who had been enslaved and imprisoned until a healer, a member of the first party, saw her as a person.

Into the Broken Lands is understandably character-fueled, although there is plenty of action, escalating tension, and mystery in the story. At its core, however, the story allows us to examine key questions. What is a person—and how does one become a person? What is the redemptive power of love? What is the role of knowledge and is there such a thing as knowledge free from ethics? While an entertaining story filled with bizarre magic and compelling characters, it is at its heart a story of love and grief. Exceptionally well done!

Happy New Year to California: New Laws

 The Golden State rings in 2024 with these new laws (and more):

Tax Increase for higher wage earners

California has a short-term disability program that pays people who cannot work because of a non-work related illness, injury or pregnancy. The program is funded by a 1.1% tax on wages. In the past, this tax only applied to wages below a certain amount, about $153,000 in 2023. But starting Jan. 1, a new law, which was passed in 2022 but takes effect this year, eliminates the wage cap. People who make more than $153,000 per year subsequently will pay a 1.1% tax on those wages.

Protections for abortion pills

Abortion is now illegal in 14 states after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. But doctors and pharmacists in California who mail abortion pills to patients in those states will be shielded from prosecution or fines. The law bans bounty hunters or bail agents from apprehending California doctors and taking them to another state to stand trial. It even prohibits state-based social media companies, such as Facebook, from complying with out-of-state subpoenas, warrants or other requests for records to discover the identity of patients seeking abortion pills.

More sick leave

Workers in California will receive a minimum of five days of sick leave annually, instead of three, which they will accrue once they have been employed for 200 days. Labor advocates say the increase will curb the spread of disease by preventing employees from working when they are sick. But opponents say the law will be another financial burden for employers and claim some workers request sick leave when they are not ill.

Cannabis laws for workers

State lawmakers passed a bill that stops companies from punishing workers who fail drug tests that detect whether a person has used marijuana at all in recent days. The tests relied on urine or hair samples and looked for a substance that can remain in a person's body for weeks after use.

Unions for legislative staffers

With AB1 Newsom signed off on allowing legislative staffers to form unions. The law will allow regular staffers to form and join unions but will not apply to lawmakers or appointed officers.

Minimum wage increase

The minimum wage for fast food workers was increased to $20 an hour starting in April. Newsom also signed a law to raise the minimum wage for healthcare workers. The new law will raise the minimum wage to $25 per hour over the next 10 years.

Child sex trafficking

SB 14 defines child sex trafficking as a serious felony. This would instill harsher penalties for such crimes and require repeat offenders to serve longer sentences.

Social media

AB 1394 will levy steep fines against social media platforms that fail to combat and remove content that depicts child sexual exploitation and abuse. The bill, hailed by child safety advocates, will institute fines from $1 million to $4 million per violation, starting in 2025.

Book bans

AB1078 prohibits public schools in California from banning any books based on gender and race topics.

Security deposits

AB12 is a housing bill that limits security deposits to one month's rent, down from the previous limit of two months. Advocates for the law said steep security deposits were another barrier to housing, effectively forcing prospective tenants to save an unreasonable amount of money to qualify for a place to live.

Business emissions

Large businesses in California are now required to disclose a wide range of emissions that are known to contribute to global warming. The law was lauded as the most sweeping mandate of its kind in the U.S. The law will bring more transparency about how big businesses contribute to climate change through direct and indirect means.

Conservatorship

Newsom signed an expansion of the state's conservatorship system, designed to allow local governments more leeway in forcibly detaining people who refuse treatment for mental illness and addiction issues. This was hailed as necessary to combat homelessness.

LGBTQ youth support

Foster families are now required to prove their ability to meet the health and safety needs of children regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Fentanyl distribution

Prison sentences for criminals convicted of dealing high amounts of fentanyl will increase.

Ebony Alerts

SB673 established the Ebony Alert, which will inform the public when a Black woman or child goes missing.

Gender-neutral toys

This new law going into effect in 2024 requires gender-neutral toy sections at large retail stores in California. This won't do away with the boys' or girls' sections, rather it adds a new section for similar toys to be put side-by-side along with toys that appeal to everyone.

State mushroom

AB 261 established the California golden chanterelle as the official state mushroom.