From: “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”

"And one day we will die,
and our ashes will fly
from the aeroplane over the sea,
but for now we are young:
let us lay in the sun
and count every
beautiful thing we can see."

Neutral Milk Hotel

From: The New Yorker

The cartoon on my New Yorker flip calendar yesterday cracked me up:

PS: Cartoonist Robert Leighton created this gem and a gajillion others. Check out his work. (BTW, you can always click on my images to see bigger, clearer versions.)

Writer by Day/Writer by Night: The Good Side of Writing for a Living

We meet again, blog readers.

As promised yesterday, I have some fresh-baked optimism for you today. Ah, writing: the cause and solution of all my problems. I love words so much I write them all day at work and then all night at home while I gaze lovingly at the shiny red cover of Catching Fire on my end table.

If you want to catch up you can read yesterday’s post about the bad side of writing for a living. If you want to skip to the good stuff, here you go: the very best parts of getting paid to write:

• I get to write off books as research. Other write-offs: felt-tip pens, writing classes, and laptops (basically, my favorite stuff).

• My co-workers love stationery and coffee and poking fun at the unintended hilarity of bad grammar just as much as I do. An office-mate stumbled into my office early one Wednesday with a freshly printed manuscript and said, “I love the smell of toner in the morning.” Two. Shea.

• Writer’s block is for amateurs. I can just imagine my boss’s face if I told her that I couldn’t write a thing today. It wouldn’t be a nice face; I’ll tell you that. When I was a waitress, I never had server’s block. As a teacher, I never had instructor’s block. Paid writers learn not to block their writing, not if they want to get paid anyway.

• Seriously, the best thing? You just learn things when you write, edit, and are edited on a daily basis. We all learned a few things just by listening, and I guarantee that you are harboring some incorrect belief. Maybe it’s the difference between stationery and stationary, or principal and principle. It’s not your fault. I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to know everything about the English language, but I also know that you pick up a lot of knowledge about craft when it’s your bread and butter.

So the good side is that my whole world is words. I see punctuation and margins and fonts EVERYWHERE. When you dedicate your whole life to something, when you immerse yourself, you can’t help but remember names. You can’t help but wake up and think, what will I write today? It’s not about work-life balance anymore; it’s about work-life blend. Writing day and night is extreme multi-tasking.

So how many of you write by day and by night? What do you absolutely love about getting paid to write?

Writer by Day/Writer by Night: The Bad Side of Writing for a Living

I am a writer/editor by day and an aspiring novelist by night.

Does it matter what I write by day? I don’t think so. It just matters that I am working with words. I went into this line of work because of Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. This is all their fault.

See, I like biographies of writers. And I notice that a lot of great writers got jobs writing before they were great writers. Capote worked at the New Yorker. Carver edited science textbooks. And I have no idea if this is true, since I read it on Wikipedia, but this tidbit about Vonnegut sounds believable:

In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and left. On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Hilarious, right?

Does writing for pay make me a better writer? Without a doubt.

Does it occasionally suck? Without a doubt.

So here’s 5 downsides to being a paid writer by day and an unpaid writer by night:

• We need to come up with a name for the thumb cramp that comes from using a laptop mouse 18 hours a day. It’s not carpal tunnel; it’s more like claw thumb. My right hand goes into the awkward backwards C position it needs to be in to click my laptop mouse all the time. Like this weekend, when I left the couch to spend time with human beings and eat pork barbeque and compare the United States to Panem, I looked down and my hand was resting in my lap in perfect backwards C, mouse-clicking form. The term “writer’s cramp” is already taken. Blogger’s cramp? Post-modern writer’s cramp?

• When I read a character name, my mind cannot always distinguish between work and home. Everything tends to blend in my head. There are always at least two narratives playing in my mind. Sometimes when reading at night, I think, but what happened to that young boy character? until I remember he is safe and sound in chapter four, on my work computer.

• My gluteus maximus hurts from sitting all day. My body is all, let’s go to the gym! and my mind is all, but we can’t write there! Might be better for my heart if I spent my day rock-climbing or extreme skateboarding or something.

• Writing is a lonely business. It’s hard to be in a cocoon all day and come home to a cocoon while friends and family go out to socialize. You have to be quite content with being solitary if you want to be a writer by day and by night.

• Other people’s ideas are wonderful, but I like my own ideas best. Five days a week, I use eight of my best hours to write flawless copy that gets a product out the door—somebody else’s product. Sometimes my name doesn’t even come close to my work. Writing for pay means getting cash, but not always credit.

Not that I'm complaining. Writing for pay is not all bad; in fact, the upsides outweigh the bad stuff by far. Stop in tomorrow for part two, and I'll tell you about the good stuff.

In the meantime, tell me writers: what do you think sucks about writing by day and by night?

Red, White, and Bleh

I have a secret friend who has secret news that I'm not allowed to share yet, but it's sooooooooooooo exciting!

She knows who she is. Congratulations, honey! I am super proud of you.

In other news, I am writing...

...a government proposal. Boo.

Happy Labor Day!

Another Writerly Use for e-Readers

Reading my manuscript on the Kindle is enlightening. It looks just like Handcuffs or Bloom--which makes me read it differently than when it's in Microsoft Word or even printed on plain old 8.5 x 11 paper. The Kindle version also boasts some weird formatting issues--proof that I’m unsure when to use hard returns and when to use soft returns, and furthermore, to be honest, proof that I don't know what the hell hard and soft returns are.

Since so many agents are reading our manuscripts on e-readers these days, it’s probably a good idea for all of us aspiring authors to learn these formatting rules. You don't want your beautiful manuscript showing up on an agent's e-reader looking sloppy.

The one hassle of reading your manuscript on an e-reader ends up being a good thing. I have a problem with reading my novel the way an outsider (read: not me) would read it. I keep wanting to stop and change "quiet" to "calm," or now that I’ve been reading the editing blog edittorrent, take out all of the PPPs, or just rewrite the page (the book?) altogether because bleh, but I can’t do it on the Kindle. I’m forced to keep reading.

I'm happy to report that while reading, I feel tension and wonder what will happen next, even though I know damn well what will happen. So in that way, I’m more in tune with how a reader receives the story. Totally valuable.

So tell me, how do you get distance from your own writing?

From: Bloom

"I think the way I feel when I look at Evan comes from her. In pictures taken the day she married my dad, she was reckless, laughing, spinning around in circles. She looked like her world was him. She looked a kind of happy I can't even imagine.

I don't want that. I don't want to be like that. I don't want to feel the way she did because I know what happens when you do. You love with your whole heart, with everything, and you wake up one morning and kiss someone good-bye the way you always do except you mean it as good-bye forever."

Elizabeth Scott

P.S. I've been reading books on the Kindle, and I cannot believe the number of typos. Is this the standard for Kindle books? Were these mistakes most likely in the hard copies too?