Tag Archive for: Linda Rodriguez

Movie or Book? Which Kind of Imagination Do You Have?

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
Hi!
My name is Linda, and I am a bookworm. I’m the kid who constantly
heard “Get your nose out of that book!” and “You’re
deaf, dumb, and blind when you’ve got your nose in a book!” I
was the kid who carried extra books to school beyond all the heavy
required texts. I’m the kid who read ahead in the reading books to
get to the end of the story.

Now,
as an adult, I open a good novel at my family’s and my to-do list’s
risk. I will disappear into the world of the book. My kids call it
“Scorpio-ing.” (I’m a Scorpio, and that sign is noted for
its powers of concentration.) My youngest son has been known to jump
up and down in front of his book-immersed mother, flapping his arms,
to demonstrate to visiting friends how weird I am–though he and his
sister inherited that ability to be swept up in an enthralling
novel’s world.
When
I’m reading a good novel–classic, literary, mystery, science
fiction, fantasy, makes no difference–the author’s world and the
people in it come alive for me, and I am living the book’s story with
them. I am experiencing that world and that story in a visceral way
that is sometimes more real than the way I experience the
quite-wonderful world of my daily life. I suspect I developed this
ability as a survival mechanism in my dire childhood (which made
“Mommie, Dearest” look like a fairy tale). Pouring myself
into the book I was reading and the world it created in my
imagination allowed me escape from some very scary times for a little
kid. Novels kept me sane and allowed me to know there were many other
ways of living in the world beyond the one in which I was currently
caught.
That ability to live within the story I’m reading has served me well, though. It brought me whole, if scarred, from the kind of childhood that routinely tosses people into drug addiction, crime, mental illness, and suicide. It turned me into a writer at a young age. It allows me to experience my own stories while I’m spinning them in that same real way. 
I
enjoy movies, as well, but I have to say, no movie has ever given me
that same total immersion into a different reality that a book does.I
think that’s because watching movies and television is passive while
reading a book is active, drawing your whole brain into a co-creation
of the world and people of the book. My oldest son can’t do this.
He’s totally a movie person. His brain is wired a different way, very
analytical, a whizz at math and computers where he makes much more
money than all of the rest of us combined. So I know this isn’t a
given for everyone. I think it’s a function of the type of
imagination we are born with. 

When
I have had injuries and illnesses involving great pain and
discomfort, reading novels has sometimes been the only way for me to
gain some relief. For the hours I am caught up in the book’s world
and away from the pain troubling my body. I am living elsewhere and
involved with other things. Mysteries and fantasy novels have helped
me get through miserable nights when no medicine that I could take
would do it for me and the equally great pain of grief. The Lord of
the Rings movies are wonderful, and I love them, but they don’t take
me out of myself in the same way as the original books do.

What
about you? When you want to wander in a new story’s world or seek
relief from emotional or physical stress, do you turn to movies or to
books? When you read your books, do you become completely involved in
the story’s world?


Linda Rodriguez’s book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel is based on her popular workshop. The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
an anthology she co-edited was recently published. Every Family
Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee campus police chief,
Skeet Bannion, will appear in 2017. Her three earlier Skeet
novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and
Every Last Secret—and her
books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as Malice
Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina
Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira
Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo
fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,”
published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been
optioned for film.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
This photo sums up how I’ve been
feeling lately. It’s an internet meme that’s really all about the
political chaos and turmoil we’re all facing every day in 2017—or
so it definitely feels. And while it’s absolutely appropriate for
that part of my life and everyone else’s right now, unfortunately it
fits just about everything in my life at this moment.

National politics completely
aside—which is definitely something to say since it’s been such a
dumpster fire this year–the new year came in mean and rough in my
homestead. We’d decided a month and a half earlier to downsize our
lives, sell our big old house, and move to a much smaller, newly
renovated with new everything, single-floor dwelling, and I was
excited about it, although I dreaded the necessary trial of purging
42 years of family life and possessions. For that month and a half
things went well. It was exhausting, and my husband and I weren’t
happy to realize that it was going to take even more time and work
than we’d originally thought—where did all this stuff come
from?—but I had scheduled our necessary work, step by step and room
by room, and we were making good progress.

On the last day of the year, however, I
was scheduled for my regular six-month chemo infusion. I had planned
for this in my schedule, marking at least a week out of use.
I had come to the point where the chemo only really made life
difficult for me for a week or so. I’d found ways to get around the
longer-term issues and manage to work with them bothering me anyway,
so I only expected to really lose one full week. This time, however,
I had to have an extra infusion because my blood tests weren’t as
good as they should have been, and this new infusion blasted out a
month from my schedule. I was knocked flat for almost 30 days that I
hadn’t anticipated losing. I rescheduled with our buyers.

At the end of that month, I started
being able to work on the house again and worked furiously to try to
make up time. In a little over a week, though, I had to leave for
AWP in Washington, DC. I lost a week to AWP and came back in bad
shape, so I lost a few days after arriving home to recovery. Just as
I began to get on my feet again, the illness that had been
circulating at AWP and forcing a number of attendees to spend all or
part of their time confined to their beds hit me, as well. There went
another ten days. So I’ve basically lost the first two months of this
year, and the move that I thought we’d be able to make in March is
more likely to take place in May or early June.

On top of all that, we arrived home
from DC to find that our elderly cat, whom we never think of as
elderly because she’s always been so spry and active and youthful,
was ill. After consultations with the vet, it became clear that she
is probably dealing with a terminal illness. We have opted not to go
with any invasive procedures since she’s not in pain nor likely to
be, according to the vet, but simply weakening and slipping away. She
was a rescue and is terrified of the vet’s office or anywhere but
home (which is why we always make arrangements to have her cared for
in our home when we have to leave). For now, we are trying to tempt
her to eat and spending a lot of time giving her affection, and she
actually seems to be getting better. The vet says she might even
spring back for a while, a month or even a year or so. Either way, when
her time is up, she will go peacefully in her home with the people
she loves around her.

Minnie (short for Mrs. Miniver) is the
best cat I’ve ever had, and I’ve had cats most of my life. She’s the
smartest and best behaved. She knows the rules of the house, and she
never breaks them. She’s a great mouser. She’s sweet and
affectionate. She hides when strangers come—as I said before, she’s
a rescue and had a rough life before coming to us fifteen years ago.
When we brought home our most recent dog, a large, boisterous,
bumptious hound, Minnie quickly established her dominance, and to
this day, she bosses him, who could eat her in one mouthful,
mercilessly.

Thus, slowly and weakly, I’m getting back
on my feet, way behind on my downsizing, and nursing a probably-dying
cat, all in an America run by people who not only don’t seem to know
anything about it, but who seem to be determined to destroy it, with
new reports of possible treason daily. And each morning does seem to
be a major damage report. So I remind myself each day of what the
great Eleanor Roosevelt once told us and demonstrated over and over
in her own life. “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
And get up to start dealing with it all once again.

Reading as Escape and Relief

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez


Like many people, I wake in the morning
dreading the new horrors the day will bring us from Washington, DC.
Last week, I actually had to go to DC for a conference, and while
there, I picked up some nasty respiratory bug. So I’m home now, in
pain, exhausted, and weak from the long drive to DC and back, as well
as the strains of getting around a massive conference in a huge and
inaccessible conference center, and miserable with fever, coughing,
and inability to breathe. I’m in no shape to read about more outrages
against the Constitution and our entire democratic system. So I’ve
been turning away from the media and all news.

Instead I’ve picked up a novel on my
tottering TBR pile and spent the day pampering myself while I read
that book. For a span of hours, I lived in another reality
altogether, one as grim in some ways but with amazing adventures and
fascinating backgrounds that took me completely out of my
sinus-infected, exhausted, and in-considerable-pain self and the
democracy-under-attack world we’re living in at present. For that
span of hours, I found relief from pain, illness, and the depression
that Cheeto Hitler’s accession to power has brought to the entire
civilized world.

I think we tend to forget that novels
can offer a kind of medicine to us, a remedy for the unpleasantness
and despair of politics and welcome relief from pain and sickness. We
often hear genre novels dismissed with the term, “mere escape.”
But there’s nothing mere about escape when it lifts you out of
overwhelming grief or unbearable pain or the miseries of acute and
chronic illnesses. At such times, escape can be a true lifesaver,
allowing rest and healing to take place when both had seemed
impossible.

So I don’t want to hear any more cracks
about the escapism of genre novels. Escape in times of trouble, even
temporary escape, can truly be just what’s needed. If my novels
provide someone with a few hours’ escape from great pain or fear or
grief or stress, I will be happy to have provided those hours of
relief to my readers.

A Heroine for the Ages Meets a Bizarre Loner

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
When a group of writers decided on
Twitter to put together an anthology to benefit our friend Sabrina
Ogden and the Lupus Foundation, I was in on it from the start. After
all, I love Sabrina, and I deal with lupus every day myself. So we
called it Feeding Kate since Kate is Sabrina’s blogosphere
nickname.

https://www.amazon.com/Feeding-Kate-Crime-Fiction-Anthology-ebook/dp/B00B6UMGSM

The two main characters in my story,
“Rivka’s Place,” could hardly be more different. They are a
true odd couple of disparate ages and experiences and yet with great
respect for one another and love. I’m a big believer in courage and
in love.

One, Rivka, is an elderly Holocaust
survivor, a woman who refuses to be bullied as her shop’s
neighborhood becomes more and more dangerous and insists on helping
everyone around her. The other, C.J., came of age many decades after
World War II by killing two men as his father had trained him to do,
only to learn that everything he’d been taught was a lie, a man who
wants nothing more than to be left alone in peace to do his work,
read, and hide from his memories and those who hunt him.

Where did this bizarre partnership of
Rivka and C.J. come from?

I gave Rivka a background similar to
that of a well-known Kansas City woman, who had escaped from the
death camps of Nazi Germany twice as a child and had indeed insisted
on continuing to run her bakery in a deteriorating neighborhood,
feeding many who couldn’t afford to buy her goods. She’s dead
now, and Rivka looks and sounds nothing like her. Rivka came out of
the folds of my brain, but her background owes a debt to this
remarkable real woman I never met. I have always found her story
inspiring. As I have found the stories of so many who live with lupus
an inspiration.

To my knowledge, however, there is no
one anywhere remotely like C.J. He sprang full-blown into my mind and
demanded to be written. I have often wondered what would happen with
a young person who’d grown up in one of these cults or cult-like
families, indoctrinated in fear of civilization and government,
trained to defend the family against that “dangerous” government,
if that young person later learned that everything he or she had been
taught was a lie. C.J., I suspect, arose from these idle wonderings.

Bringing the two of them together left
me in a quandary when I first tried to write this story. Where could
it go? How could it end? I didn’t want to lose either of these
people I had come to value as I created them, but I didn’t see any
way that this could end well. These two characters were on a
collision course with tragedy. Eventually, I wrote the ending scene
through tears. Yet in some ways it is a happy ending because each
person is true to her and his inner self.


Do you like to
read of characters who make difficult choices? Are there people
you’ve known or just heard about who have inspired you with their
courage or their love?

Our Very Own Dru Ann Wins the Raven Award

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
On April 27th at the 71st
annual Edgar Awards Banquet in New York City, The Stiletto Gang’s own
Dru Ann Love will receive the prestigious Raven Award. The
Raven Award
is
a special award
given
for outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of
creative writing.
This award was first given in 1953. People and organizations, such as
Dorothy Kilgallen, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Alfred Hitchcock,
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, Eudora Welty, Angela Lansbury, Bouchercon Mystery
Convention, Bill Clinton, Otto Penzsler, Center for the Book in the
Library of Congress, and Sisters in Crime, have won this award. And
now Dru Ann wins it for her dedication to the field and the
contributions her wonderful book blog, Dru’s Book Musings, has made
to the field of the mystery.

Dru
reviews a huge number of books every year, and her reviews are all
based on careful reading and high standards. She also hosts a series
called “A Day in the Life,” where authors write a post from the
viewpoint of a major character to give the reader a taste of that
author’s voice and characterization skills. Her book blog is a major
player in the strong field of book blogs that have replaced the
vanished book review sections of newspapers and magazines.

Those
of us who know her know that Dru Ann is a true aficionado of crime
fiction. She loves the field, the individual books, and the authors.
A fixture at the major conventions and a great supporter of the
entire field of crime writing, she’s kind and funny and smart as a
whip and a real professional. She’s also much loved by the crime
writing community, so this will be a very popular choice for the
Raven Award.

All
of her blogmates here at The Stiletto Gang have been very excited
by this news, and we all send her a huge CONGRATULATIONS! We couldn’t
be happier to see her reaping well-deserved recognition for the
important work she does. And on April 27th,
we’ll all be raising a glass of champagne to our dear Dru Ann as she
receives her award. 

Well done, Dru!

Book Excerpt–Motivating Yourself to Write

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
It’s that time at
the beginning of a new year when people make resolutions for
self-improvement. Writers often make resolutions to find time to
write. I posted a blog about that recently here.


Even when this
resolution is successful and the writer creates a workable writing
schedule, such a resolution often ultimately fails because often
writers have more trouble motivating themselves to actually write
during the time they’ve scheduled than in finding or making the time
to write. In fact, one of the reasons we as writers so often find
ourselves over-committed and without dedicated time to write is due
to our procrastination and lack of motivation.

So, as my 2017 New
Year’s gift to all my writer friends out there, here to help with
that problem is an excerpt from my new writing book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, available in ebook and trade paperback
here.



Motivating
Yourself to Write
The
trick is to motivate yourself to actually write in that time slot
you’ve created. Most of us find it easier to disappoint ourselves
than to disappoint other people, so if you can find a buddy or
partner to help keep you accountable, that’s a great way to
overcome that difficulty. Perhaps you two can call, text, or email
each other every writing day with goals before your writing time and
what you accomplished after that time is over. Or a group of writer
friends on Facebook can do this for each other. I know a number of
writers who post their day’s time spent writing or page totals on
Facebook, and get lots of positive feedback from their writer friends
for it—or consolation if they’ve missed their goal.
It’s
also important to set regular rewards for yourself for completing
planned segments of writing tasks. Putting your feet up with a cup of
tea and a special treat. Spending time reading a book you’ve wanted
to read. Buying yourself a book you want. Buying nice pens or blank
notebooks or whatever desk/office gizmo you’ve been wanting or
needing. Buying materials you’ve wanted for a craft project and–as
a later reward–giving yourself time to work on that project. Lunch
with one or more friends. Make a list of small, medium, and large
rewards for fulfilling various writing commitments.
Also,
schedule some creative refill time into each week and month. Take a
walking or library or bookstore or art gallery or museum break every
week, even if it’s only for thirty minutes. Take a nice blank book
(one of your rewards) and a nice pen (another reward) and visit a
lake, park, nature preserve, or riverside, just walking and sitting
and writing with no stated purpose. Describe in writing what you see,
what you feel, what you’re thinking, what you want to write someday
or otherwise do someday.
If
you’re serious about writing, reclaim your power. Would you treat
your car the way you treat yourself? No, you would make sure it had
as much quality fuel as it needed. You would buy new tires for it
when they were needed. You would check its oil and get it regular
tune-ups and other routine maintenance. You would do all of this
because you know these things are important to keep it functioning at
its peak. Show yourself as much consideration as you do your car. No
car will run on empty, and neither do writers.
Make
time to remember how to dream, and make time to bring those dreams
into reality. Visualize your successful life as a writer, and then
plan that change. Exercise your change muscles first by making small,
unimportant, non-threatening changes in private areas. Learn to make
a habit of changing things you are unhappy with—in your job, your
home, your relationships, yourself. Envision the life you want to
lead. Write it down. Check in with it often. Analyze problems. Get
back on the horse when you fall off, and fix the problems that led
you to fumble your plans or work routine. It’s always an ongoing
process. No one’s perfect, but the only way you can truly fail is
if you stop for good.

Linda Rodriguez Bio
Linda Rodriguez’s book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel is based on her popular workshop. Every
Family Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in June, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as Malice
Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina
Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira
Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo
fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,”
published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been
optioned for film.

A Time for Giving… Away

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
It’s 10 days until Christmas—days
when people are shopping and buying presents to give to people who
don’t really need any more stuff to cram into their overcrowded
homes. I have informed my family that I absolutely forbid them to
give me any stuff this Christmas. It’s not that I’ve turned
into Scrooge or the Grinch this year. It’s just that I’m in the
throes of downsizing out of a big old house with three full stories
plus attics and two-car garage, all packed with the stuff of 42 years
of living and raising kids, plus the inherited belongings of several
generations before us.

I have to keep driving past the small
yellow house where we will move once we have cleared out this big old
money pit and sold it to our oldest son, who wants to make the
repairs we can’t afford and rent it out. Seeing the cheerful little
casita to which we’re eventually moving, which has no stairs and
everything brand-new and working just the way it’s supposed
to—plumbing, wiring, cooling and heating, flooring, windows,
appliances—fortifies my will and sends me back to work on my own
version of the Augean stables.

I have sorted out the too-numerous sets
of fine stemware and china, taking boxes of it to my daughter, my
oldest son and his fiancé,
and my sister. Youngest son has driven up to the city to help me pack
boxes and gone back with his car packed to the gills. He’ll return
this weekend to help and take more back with him. I’m on a first-name
basis with the driver for Big Brothers, Big Sisters, since I’ve been
on his pick-up route every week for the last three and he sees I’m
scheduled for weekly pick-ups well into 2017.

The
biggest problems are the books and papers. This is the house of a
writer/editor/teacher and a publisher/editor/scholar. We are drowning
in thousands of books and pounds of papers. My solution, as I try to
move methodically through the house one room at a time, one floor at
a time, has been to start with the books and papers and carry on that
sorting and discarding process every day on a continuous basis while
packing up the things in each room which must go. Ideally, by the
time I’ve finished all rooms on all floors, plus the finished
basement, two attics, and the garage, I will also have finished the
books and papers. (Please don’t laugh at me like that. Allow me my
illusions. They’re all I have to keep me going.)

I
have tried to make lists of what to keep and what to give to family
and what to give away or discard, but I keep finding new things that
are not on any of those lists and having to make decisions all over
again. This leads to odd philosophical questions, such as, How can I
never have anything appropriate to wear when I have so many clothes?,
or What kind of misspent life results in three huge boxes of cups
with the insignia of universities, conferences, and bookstores?, or
How is it that we have four of those huge scholarly collections of
Shakespeare’s plays and poems with essays and footnotes that are
designed for 300-level university Shakespeare classes?, or Where did
all of these old shoes come from?

I am determined to make it easy on us.
I’m doing a first pass through each of the downstairs and upstairs
rooms, packing up and moving out everything that we know we won’t
take with us, thus, no hard emotional decisions right off the bat,
just hard labor. Then, we will have to tackle the difficult
choices—Which of these wedding gifts from dear friends, many of
whom are now gone, will we give away? and Which of the teapots, many
hand-painted or handmade, that my youngest son started giving me
every year from the age of six will I part with? and Which pieces of
furniture from my husband’s grandparents and great-grandparents will
we give up, surely not the china cabinet and rocking chairs that his
great-grandfather made himself?

Surprisingly, I have found that each
box I move out of the house leaves me feeling more positive and
energetic about this massive undertaking. I realize that may change
when the time comes to make those tougher decisions, on teapots, for
example, but right now, I’m feeling great satisfaction every time I
close and tape a box and set it to go to one of the kids or my sister
or to set out for my pal, the Big Brothers, Big Sisters driver. So
wish me luck.

Linda Rodriguez’s book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel is based on her popular workshop. Every
Family Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in June, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as Malice
Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina
Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira
Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo
fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,”
published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been
optioned for film. Visit her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com.

Book Excerpt-To Find Time to Write Your Novel, You Must Make Time to Write

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez

This is an excerpt from my new book on writing, Plotting the Character-Driven Novel. 

https://www.amazon.com/Plotting-Character-driven-Novel-Linda-Rodriguez/dp/097912915X

I wanted to give you a taste of what it’s like. As I explain on the very first page:  “Writing a novel
requires several things—time, motivation, the willingness to keep
learning the craft of fiction, and an ability or process to access
your creative thoughts. We’ll deal with the first two in this
chapter briefly since they’re mostly beyond the purview of this
book, and the rest of the book will concern itself with elements of
the craft of fiction and a process for accessing your own inner
knowledge of your novel by freewriting, brainstorming by yourself,
and thinking on paper. I will be including samples of actual work
documents I have used with this process to create published novels in
order to give you examples of how these techniques and tools work—and
also to show that behind those perfect books you pick up at the
bookstore lies a great deal of hard work, messy process, and flailing
around. This book is designed to help you keep the flailing around to
the minimum.”


So, this is from the first section of the book.


To Find Time to
Write Your Novel, You Must Make Time to Write

How
do you find time to write the novels which are your vocation in the
midst of job and career demands, family and housework demands,
community and societal demands? When everyone else expects so much
from you that there’s nothing left for your own dreams, what can
you do about it?

First,
we have to change our terminology from “finding time to write” to
“making time to write.” The sad truth is that no one finds time
to write. There aren’t big pockets of time just lying around
waiting to be picked up and used in most of our lives. For most of
us, we’ll have to give up some comfort or pleasure to make real
time to write—in some cases, to make any bits of time to write at
all.

The
first step is to make the decision to own your own life. Time is not
a commodity–the time we’re talking about is the substance of your
life. When it’s gone, so are you. If you want to write anything,
you have to claim your own life and find out what you want.

How
do you find those pieces of time and the regular schedule for writing
that leads to a body of work? The trick is to create order and make a
tourniquet for a time hemorrhage, but first you must destroy all of
those ‘shoulds’ and ‘what will people thinks’ that are standing in
your way. Make it easy on yourself by asking for help and accepting
help when it’s offered to you. Take the time to de-stress. When
you’re not frazzled by stress, you’ll find it easier to set
limits and boundaries and hold to them.

Whenever
you find your desk or day becoming chaotic, take time to reorganize.
It will repay in more time that you can steal for your illicit love
affair with the novel. To make sure you stay on track with those
things that absolutely must be done, make a brief list of the way
your time was spent at the end of each day and week. Check it for
places where you abandoned time reserved for writing or other truly
necessary tasks to engage with lower priority urgencies or comfort
activities. After a disastrous day, sit down with a notebook and
figure out how to handle things differently if you face the same
situations again. Review the situation and just what happened step by
step, pinpointing the spot(s) at which you could and should have made
a different decision or taken a stand against someone else’s urgency
with your time. Figure out a strategy for dealing with this situation
when it next arises, and write it down. Then forget the day and
relax.

Worrying
about the myriad things, some great but most small to tiny, that we
must take care of wears us down. When you find yourself doing this
rather than being able to write or revise the passage you want to
work on, keep an ongoing master list and write down each task or
obligation the moment you think about it. Get it out of your head and
onto paper to free your mind and stop the energy drain. Then, later,
you can decide which tasks can be delegated to someone else and
arrange the remaining tasks in the order that will allow them to be
done quickest and most easily.

We
can also free up energy by developing habits and systems to take care
of the mindless stuff. We already do this every day, brushing teeth,
driving to work, without having to make decisions for each tiny
action that comprises these tasks. Develop a system for handling
things that recur, and stick with it for twenty-one days. Then it
will be a habit, and you can forget it and set your mind free to be
more creative.

Much
time use is sheer habit. Work smarter. Find the ways in which you
want and need to spend time. Steal those minutes and hours from
low-priority tasks. Break down everything on your to-do list into
small tasks and estimate the minimum time to accomplish them. (Double
all time estimates!) Schedule into your calendar. If they won’t all
fit in the time allotted, then something must go. Nothing is fixed in
stone–renegotiate and eliminate whatever you can. Of the rest, what
can you successfully delegate? It pays to invest time (and money, if
possible) in training someone to do it.

Become
assertive. Don’t be afraid to approach someone with a request, and
don’t take it personally if they refuse you. Learn to say ‘no’
kindly and firmly and to receive a ‘no’ without letting it affect
your self-esteem or your relationship. Be secure.

Author
of many published novels and teacher of writing, Holly Lisle, says it
the best way I’ve ever seen it. “Realize that real writers who
write multiple books and who make a living at it have systems they
use. A process for brainstorming, a consistent way of outlining a
story, a certain number of words or pages a day, a way of plotting, a
way of revising, a way of finishing. Writing is work. It doesn’t fall
out of your head by magic. It doesn’t just happen because you want it
to.”


Linda Rodriguez’s book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel is based on her popular workshop. Every
Family Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in June, 2017. Her three earlier
Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust,
and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as Malice
Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina
Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira
Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo
fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,”
published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been
optioned for film.

An Editor’s Joy

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
I
hold in my hands a beautiful book, an important book. It’s been a
labor of love to put this together, struggling with the herding-cats
nature of organizing a number of writers to get their work, bios, and
contracts in to meet deadlines. To carry a project from the first
bright idea through mounds of paper and emails to the final finished
book is always a thrill. Now, I hold an ARC of this anthology in my
hands, cover glowing.

I’m
truly proud to announce that this anthology I co-edited with the
wonderful Diane Glancy, The
World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East,
will be published in February 2017. We have a fabulous list of
contributors: Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, LeAnne Howe, Jim Barnes,
Kimberly M. Blaeser, Natalie Diaz, James Thomas Stevens, Bojan Louis,
Allison Hedge Coke, Travis Hedge Coke, Kim Shuck (who also did the
gorgeous beadwork used in the cover design), Trevino Brings Plenty,
and Craig Santos Perez. All of these highly regarded Native poets
have written poetry about their experiences of the Middle East and
the land and people they encountered there.

We’ll
have a panel about the anthology at the huge national conference of
the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Washington, D.C.
in February 2017 and an offsite reading, as well. There will be one,
possibly two, New Letters on the Air national public radio programs
about the anthology, and we’ll have a local launch in Kansas City
with Haskell Indian Nations University and the Kansas City Indian
Center involved, as well as local library systems and universities.
Just the beginning of things we’ve got planned for this important
book.

The
World Is One Place
will be an excellent choice for teaching since each poet has a work
note, discussing the creation of the work by that poet in the
anthology, plus there are informative essays at the beginning and end
of the book. The book as a whole brings the reader a picture of the
people of the region as human beings, not solely as victims or
refugees or participants, willingly or unwillingly, in warfare. The
contributors to this book underline the connection between the
experience of many citizens of the Middle East and the Indigenous
population of the United States.

The
concept for this anthology was originally inspired by the firestorm
that surrounded Joy Harjo’s decision a few years ago to honor her
commitment to visit Israel, hoping to spark a dialogue, in spite of
the movement to boycott Israel for its appalling treatment of the
population of Gaza. Even as she flew across the ocean, people texted,
emailed, and messaged her, calling names and threatening her for her
decision. We wanted to gather a range of Native voices and
experiences with no prior selection or restraint of what attitudes
they should take to the tragic violence in the Middle East.

We
could have ended up with a bunch of political screeds and rants—and
we weren’t sure that we wouldn’t—but fortunately, all of our poets
chose to focus on the spirit of the land and the people. In essays at
the beginning and the end, the editors address some of the political
situations and provide some facts about the United States’
relationship through the decades with the Middle East. But the
overwhelming focus of the book is the poems and the portrait they
paint of families and individuals.

As
I say in my closing essay, “Are Our Hands Clean?,”

“Song
has always been central to Indigenous culture and is one aspect that
is found in all of the more than five hundred nations. We sing to
pray because we believe the world was created to be harmonious and
balanced, and we seek to bring it back into that harmony and balance.
We sing to communicate with our Creator. We sing to heal and to
celebrate. We sing to give honor to those who have traveled on before
us. We sing to ask for their help in our own journey and to ask those
whom we leave behind to remember us and what we tried to do.

“This
book is our song.”

Linda Rodriguez Bio
Linda Rodriguez’s book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, forthcoming Nov. 30, is based on her
popular workshop. Her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee campus police
chief, Skeet Bannion, is due in June, 2017. Her three earlier Skeet
novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and
Every Last Secret—and her
books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as Malice
Domestic Best First Novel, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014,
Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe
Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short
story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas
City Noir, has been optioned for film. Woven Voices: 3
Generations of Puertorriqueña
Poets Look at Their American Lives, the poetry anthology
she edited, received an International Latino Book Award. Her newest
anthology, The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the
Middle East, co-edited with Diane Glancy, will be published in February 2017.
Rodriguez is past
chair of the AWP Indigenous/Aboriginal American Writer’s Caucus,
past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, a
founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers
Place, and a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers
and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community.

Turning to Other Writers for Inspiration

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
Periodically, I get a little burned-out
from working too long and hard without a break. I start to face
resistance when I sit down to write. I have developed several
techniques for dealing with this, but the first one I always try—and
one that usually works—is to turn to what other writers have
written about the trials and tribulations of writing.

So I look at what other writers have
written about resistance, about finding themselves reluctant to sit
down and write, even when that’s what they most want to do. Many
writers have written about this topic because this state is one that
every writer finds herself or himself in sooner or later. As I go
down the long list of writers who have written about this miserable
place to find yourself, the first thing I encounter is a very wise
statement from science fiction writer, Kameron Hurley.

“If
I quit now I will soon go back to where I started. And when I
started, I was desperate to get to where I am now.” –
Kameron Hurley

I
realize, as I read, that the problem at bottom is always fear, no
matter what else is also involved. Yes, I’m tired and need a little
break and some recreational reading or activity that will help
restore and replenish my well of creativity, but always, lurking for
moments of exhaustion and weakness, is the writer’s bane, fear. And I
find a great writer there before me, as well.

“The
work is greater than my fear.” –Audre Lord

So,
for the next time you find yourself burned-out and exhausted and
coming up empty when you sit down to write here are more helpful
quotations from writers about the process.

“Discipline
is simply remembering what you want.” – Judith Claire Mitchell

“Start
writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is
turned on.” – Louis L’Amour

“Work
is the only answer.” –Ray Bradbury

“A
word after a word after a word is power.”–Margaret Atwood

“The
first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry
Pratchett

“The
most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters
except sitting down every day and trying. ,,, This is the other
secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we
sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us.”
– Steven Pressfield

Have
you got some favorite quotations from writers that help you in such a
situation?

Linda Rodriguez’s book, Plotting the
Character-Driven Novel, forthcoming Nov. 29, is based on her
popular workshop. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery
featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, is due in
June, 2017. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear,
Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and
her books of poetry—Skin Hunger
and Heart’s Migration—have
received critical recognition and awards, such as Malice
Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina
Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira
Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo
fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,”
published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been
optioned for film. Find her on the web at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com.