On being a full-time writer
Current mood: chipper
Category: Writing and Poetry

I am often asked about what it's like to be a full-time writer.  The last statistics I saw on the matter stated that only one writer in 5000 registered with the Author's Guild makes more than $10,000 a year from writing and a mere 500 authors actually made their living from it.  One of those authors is me.  Unlike most people who undertake other kinds of work to support their writing habit, I have spent the last 25 years supporting my work with abused, marginalized and deprived children and adults for various UK charities by being a full-time writer. 

I know several of you following my blogs are doing so because you are interested in writing and are working hard on becoming a published author yourself; so I thought I'd share some little pearls of wisdom I've picked up along the way.

The reason my mind is focused on this at the moment is because I am currently lambing.  To put it succinctly, lambing is Dante's Seventh Circle of Hell as designed by Precious Moments.  Unknown to most people, sheep are actually sophisticated agents of torture whose primary technique involves complicated variations on sleep deprivation.  While to a casual onlooker they appear to be doing nothing all day by lying out there in the field chewing cud, they are, in fact, sharing telepathic information that ensures all strong lambs will only be born during the day, whereas the ewe with the high-risk triplet pregnancy will commence lambing no sooner than ten minutes before the 11:30PM bed check.  The resulting triplets will then only survive if looked at every two hours through the rest of night.  Indeed, many sheep regularly carry out Schrödinger's Cat-type experiments with their offspring.  Lambs only truly exist if an overtired human claps eyes on them.  The said triplets, for example, will be alive if checked every two hours.  Should one of these checks be accidentally slept through, however, one, if not all the lambs will be dead.

With my mind thus focused on these existential matters this week, I have not got around to blogging.  Perhaps you have missed me?  No, I thought not.  But you, Dear Reader, are here on MySpace for fun.  Not so, the lot of the full-time writer.  And thus we come to #1 on the list of What Fun You Will Have as a Full-Time Writer.  (Yes, bulleted lists again, the Full-Time Writer's friend.)

1:  Things other people do for fun, you will now do for work.  Other people come to MySpace for fun.  They come to network, to meet new people, to hear cool music, to hang out.  The Full-Time Writer comes here to work.  "We think you should have a presence on MySpace", says Publisher #1.  "We think you should blog five times a week," says Agent #1.  "We think you should be 'out there' so your fans can interact with you," says Publisher #2.  Full-Time Writer points out that sheep have been keeping her awake all week and her mind is like jelly.  Publisher/Agent/etc. think  Full-Time Writer is making a hilarious joke about sheep, who are normally associated with sleep-inducing fence jumping.  Doing things other people do for fun as your work sounds like it is going to be fun.  Actually, it is still work.

2: Write more, do other stuff less.  I have often been asked my best piece of advice for would-be writers.  This is it.  This is 100% it.  "Write more" varies from writer to writer, but the Full-Time Writer lives it.  Bank managers exist to ensure this.

3. No one else believes you work.  Because writing is not a really obvious activity, people do not believe a Full-Time Writer is working.  Sadly, the nearer and dearer they are to you, the greater this sense of disbelief.  In other words, everyone will assume the Full-Time Writer is free to let in the washing machine repairman, pick up the dry cleaning, phone about next-door's dog pooping on the sidewalk, speak at the Women's Institute luncheon, take part in the high school career day and go to lunch with friends. 

4. Not all work is visible.  This is one of the reasons everyone is believing the Full-Time Writer is not working.  Because you don't look like you are working.   You look like you are playing computer games or lambing sheep.  We've all heard the old saying about creativity being 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.  Truth is, it's 10% inspiration and 90% marination.  That's the part other people can't see and, indeed, you often can't see yourself.  But it's there.  You know it's there and for a Full-Time Writer, it is a major part of the day.  Then comes the 90% hard work part.  Yes, I know, that adds up to 190% total.  Which is just about what you need to give over to do this.

5. A social life or a writing career, but not both.  You can try, but it is like trying to juggle best friends in fifth grade.  Sooner or later either your social life or your writing career will end in tears.  Or have cooties.

6. You are not the scintillating conversationalist you imagine yourself to be.  Perhaps this accounts for the social life problem.  Sitting alone in a room with a word processor for several hours a day does not generate a lot of fascinating tidbits to share over dinner, in e-mails or on the phone.  "Hi, what did you do today?" "Wrote."  "And what then?" "Wrote some more."  Albert Einstein put it most succinctly when he said "If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z.  X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut ."

7. Everybody works differently.  There is no magic formula. One Full-Time Writer's "I must write 2000 words every day," is another Full-Time Writer's "I'll walk the dog eight miles today and write 10,000 words on Friday."  The secret is not in knowing how other writers work.  The secret is knowing how you work.  Bank managers exist to help Full-Time Writers refine this bit of self-knowledge.

7. Writer's block is for wusses.  Bank managers also exist to ensure Full-Time Writers understand this.

8. The buck stops here.  There are a dearth of people to blame when things go wrong.   Only the Full-Time Writer can say whether writing three books, lambing 50 sheep and  writing a MySpace blog three times a week is possible.  Only the Full-Time Writer can say no. 

9. "Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music."  (Angela Monet)  While it would be nice to have people to work with, knowledge of what you are going to do tomorrow, respect for doing an honest day's work, a happy bank manager and a social life without cooties, to the Full-Time Writer none of it compares to the sheer magic of that which no one else can perceive.  This is the mark of a driven individual. Possibly also, as mooted, of an insane one.  The Full-Time writer accepts this as a fair trade off because quite simply you could never imagine doing anything else. 

10:57 AM - 7 Comments - 9 Kudos - Add Comment

On dulce de leche
Current mood: chipper
Category: Food and Restaurants

I am often asked about dulce de leche.  Dulce de leche is an incredibly well-kept secret of Mediterrean and Latin and South American countries.  It is a confectionery made from sweetened condensed milk and is utterly delicious.  Recently I've been seeing jars of it turning up in the local supermarket, but they are expensive and don't taste nearly as nice as the real thing.  And the real thing is so easy to make.  So here is a weekend project:

Take a can of sweetened, condensed milk (NOT evaporated milk) and put it unopened in a pan of water deep enough to cover the can completely. Bring the water to a proper boil, then turn down the heat until it is just simmering.  Simmer it on low for two hours if you want it the consistency of thick icing and up to four hours to make it more solid.  When the time is up, take the can of condensed milk out of the boiling water.  Set the still unopened can aside and let it cool. (Opening the can when it is warm can cause it to spray out, which is not a nice experience.)

When you open it, you will find the condensed milk will have turned to a thick caramel with a silky texture.  It has a mild, sweet toffee flavour and  it's delicious. It's good straight out of the can but there are some suggestions for other things to do with it further on down.

Do note: because you are cooking this without opening the can first, you are essentially pressure cooking it. Contrary to what your mother told you, the can will not automatically explode and kill you and all your loved ones.  But do be sensible, because if you are stupid, it just might.  You do need to bring the water to a proper boil, but then turn it down to the point where it is just bubbling.  This keeps the pressure from building up too fast inside the can.  In other words, boiling it hard will not cook it faster, so don't try.   Also, do always make sure the can is entirely covered by the water.  This not only ensures that the milk is cooked evenly, it helps keep the pressure inside the can stable.   And finally, the can shouldn't bulge more than the tiniest bit during cooking or not at all. If you notice a discernible bulge at any point, stop cooking it, take it off the heat entirely and allow it to cool completely without handling it. 

Here are some suggestions to help things along:

• put the can in first, then add the water, then bring it to a boil.  Don't add the cans to water after it's hot
• if you turn the heat down too low, it won't be hot enough to cook the condensed milk and this will result in its being too light-coloured and runny.  So make sure it is simmering – i.e. there are little bubbles forming in the water
• don't leave the heat too high either.  Even if you don't go so far as to explore the world of milk-based explosives, you will still end up with burnt milk.  It might look okay but it will taste scorched or, in other words, nasty.
• if you need to top up the water during the cooking time, bring it all back to the boil before turning back to simmer.

Dulce de leche is wonderful:

• straight out of the can
• as a base for banoffee pie
• as a dip for cut-up pieces of fruit, such as apples, pears, nectarines, peaches, bananas, etc.
• as a spread on toast
• dolloped on pancakes
• as an ice cream topping
• as an indulgent sandwich filler
• as a super indulgent meal or dessert if the sandwich is dipped in egg and turned into French toast/ a toastie
• equally indulgent sandwich/toastie that's slightly healthier if sliced banana added
• as a great filling for home-made sandwich cookies/biscuits

And as these things go, dulce de leche is even vaguely healthy.  The amount of milk in it provides a significant amount of calcium and a reasonable amount of protein for a sweet.  And it is additive and chemical free.

Disclaimer: If you are too stupid to follow these instructions, it's not my fault!

11:15 PM - 9 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

On having your book made into a movie
Current mood: chipper
Category: Writing and Poetry

I am often asked what happens when your book gets made into a movie.  Two of my books have received this treatment.  Not great big blockbuster movies, mind you.  Just TV movies.  Maybe it is different if you have written Harry Potter, although I suspect not.  I suspect even J.K. Rowling could probably tell some hair-raising stories about the book-to-movie experience.

This is the tale of ONE CHILD which was turned into a TV movie that was aired on the Lifetime channel for the first time in 1995.  I'm going to refer to everyone as 'Actress' and 'Scriptwriter', etc. because it is all water under the bridge now.  I don't want to hurt or antagonize any of the people involved because I know these people were all actually doing the best they could.  I know they really did want to make a successful movie and I know they genuinely did want me to like it.  Which is sad, considering what happened.

How the process starts is this way: someone who is interested and has some ability to make a movie out of it (a producer, an actor, a screenwriter, etc.) has to buy the legal rights to do it. To do this they contact your agent (usually you have a special drama agent for this) and negotiate what is called an 'option fee'.  It's also sometimes referred to as 'optioning the rights'. This means that they agree with the agent and you on an ultimate price - say $100,000 for the rights to make the movie out of your book - but then they pay 10% of that price for the 'option period'. This is normally a year but can be longer.  There's lots of flexibility in the negotiations. For that $10,000 they have the right to develop the book into a movie - i.e. come up with a script, find backers, distributors, a network (if it's TV), cast, etc. - everything necessary to make a movie from it. If they don't manage it in that time period, they have to option it again for another year or however long and you are paid another $10,000.  If they decide not to do that, the rights revert back to the author. Which means I, as the author, get to keep the original $10,000 and now have the right to sell it again to someone else. On the other hand, if they do manage to get their act together and write the script, find the backers, hire the cast, etc., then the moment they start to actually make of the movie, I am paid the rest of the money (in this example,  other $90,000 of the agreed $100,000.)

All the above stuff is agent stuff.  Your drama agent negotiates it with the person buying the rights and, by and large, you as an author have little to do beyond saying 'yea' or 'nay' to whatever the buyers and your agent come up with.  However, it is important to pay close attention to this 'optioning' process, because this is actually where quite a lot of money can be made for an author.  It is really common for people to option books and never actually develop them. Indeed, I've heard, the odds are about 35 to 1 that the rights will revert to you and the movie won't get made, as there are many places along the way that movie-making can fail.  So most options fall through, but this doesn't really matter much to the author, because you can just sell it again to someone else.

ONE CHILD has always been popular in this regard. Clear back in 1979 before it was even in print I had it already managed to see the option to Company A. That one failed and reverted to me. It was optioned again in 1981 by another company, Company B. These people really tried hard  and I made some close friendships in Hollywood as a consequence, but after renewing the option for an extra year, they failed too because of various insurance problems and a lot of in-fighting among lawyers. In 1984 a new company, Company C wanted to option is, this time for a specific actress, Actress A. A bidding war broke out between this producer and one of the lawyers from the previous bidders, Company B.  He broke away from Company B, formed his own company and wanted to make the film himself. Nothing pleases an author more than a bidding war!

To make a long story short, Actress A's company won.  They won by paying a truly incredible amount of money just for the option. We will not be vulgar here and say how much, but suffice it to say, my agent and I laughed all the way to the bank. Because of this large amount of money is more usually paid for actually making the movie, the concession was that Company C was given a very long option time to make the film in - ten years.

Dead silence followed.

This was a busy time in my own life.  My husband and I moved to a new house; I had a child; I wrote five more books.  I didn't think any further on it. Years passed. No word from anyone. I still didn't think further on it, because I had my money.  Moreover, for ten years - until December 1993 - the rights were out of my hands, so there was no point worrying about them.

Then in the spring of 1993 in the middle of the night - 12:30AM to be precise - the telephone rang in my remote Welsh farmhouse. As I was getting ready for bed at the time, I had just gotten out of the shower and so, swathed in a towel and a bit drippy, I went down to answer it. 'Hello, this is The Actress,' says a voice on the other end.  I had heard of The Actress, just.  But she was certainly not the person I was expecting to find on the other end of the telephone line at 12:30 in the morning.  However, I couldn't get a word in edgewise. She started to explain that she had come across a copy of ONE CHILD at her dentist's office and became so engrossed in it that she'd actually stolen it.  At home she'd devoured the rest of it and knew she HAD to make a movie of it. So she'd ferreted around Hollywood until she found out who had the rights.  She then managed to persuade Actress A to sell these rights to her.  Then she went and found a producer, then found backing, then found a network. So she was phoning to ask my approval to go ahead and make a movie.

I was touched.  There was no need for my approval, as she already had the rights (I was also dripping wet and very cold by that point, so would probably have agreed to anything!) I said fine.  It was kind of her to want to involve me.

Thus started what can only be described an intriguing relationship. For a while I spent a lot of time with The Actress, who was incredibly motivated to do this project.  She had come out an abusive background herself and had also been 'rescued' by a caring teacher, so she identified closely with ONE CHILD.  As a consequence, the project had profound meaning for her. She threw herself into it wholeheartedly. I was introduced to The Scriptwriter, who had a very good reputation, having written an Oscar-nominated film script.  He and I also spent a lot of time together, which was great. We really 'connected' and talked about doing other projects together. All in all, some really fun times were had in Hollywood.

In a couple of months The Scriptwriter came through with the goods. He produced a wonderful script for ONE CHILD. It was not exactly as the book - movies never are, because it is an entirely different medium - but it was the story I would have written had I not been constrained by the boring old truth.  But even if it was more fiction than nonfiction, The Scriptwriter had managed to keep essence of ONE CHILD.  It still very much had the feeling of my classroom and Sheila was definitely Sheila. The minute each of us read it, we were overjoyed. It was SO good.

So, we had this really wonderful script. GREAT script. Everyone is saying this is fantastic.  This is Emmy material. This is really meaningful. And it was. I thought so too.

So did The Producer. What we didn't realize at that point was that The Producer was also thinking: "The Actress is sweet but she isn't really a very good actress. If we have such a good script and we want to collect Emmys and things like that, then we also need an equally good actress to carry it off."

So, there I was in my remote Welsh farmhouse, getting another middle-of-the-night call from someone I will not even slightly identify.  This person said to me that The Producer had decided that she did not want The Actress to be involved with the movie any longer.  This was a tricky problem because  1)The Actress owns the rights and 2)The Actress is an executive producer. (There is a very complex hierarchy of producers, executive producers, etc. in Hollywood and I don't want to get into all of that, as I don't have the faintest understanding of it myself.) In this case The Actress was an executive producer because she had organized and arranged everything but The Producer was the person actually responsible for making the movie. (See how this gets complicated??)

Anyway, The Producer's plan was to give the script to a Famous Oscar-Winning (FOW) Actress who was already known to have an affinity for my work, but they were going to be sneaky about it.  They would give it to FOW Actress under the guise of asking her to direct the production. This avoided the sticky problem of offering outright a part that already belonged to someone else. The Producer was gambling that the moment the FOW Actress saw the fabulous script, she would want to act in it, not direct it. And because she was powerful in Hollywood, this would be a possible, 'backdoor' way of shunting The Actress off the project and getting a better actress for the part.

Now, I felt terrible when I heard this. I had spent a lot of time with The Actress and while she admittedly was not God's gift to the acting profession, I did know how very much this whole project meant to her. She was profoundly committed to it and she had invested an incredible amount of time and money in every part of it.  However, she obviously was doing all this with the ultimate goal of acting in the movie herself. I do not have the killer instincts of your average Hollywood power player, so this all struck me has completely morally indefensible, because I knew The Actress would be devastated to lose the project she had started and had invested so much of herself in. And it was just plain underhanded. I did not see how I could agree to helping The Producer take this piece away from The Actress and I resented being put in a complicit position.

But the hard part was that The Actress wasn't a very good actress - certainly not on par with the FOW Actress - and it was becoming increasingly clear that if we wanted this "wonderful, Emmy-potential production" to live up to its potential, The Actress probably couldn't carry it off.

Another aspect also began to factor in that affected me. By now we had reached autumn 1993. After the long ten years that ONE CHILD had been optioned, the time was almost up.  The rights would revert back to me on the 19^th of December 1993. This meant that whatever was happening had to actually be in production by the end of December or else  it couldn't continue without re-purchasing the rights from me.  I was good with this! Because the original rights had been bought for so much, the precedent was already set for a nice new sum of money to come my way. We had superb bargaining leverage because they were so close to going into production. They would not want to waste all this effort by losing the rights, so it was really in my favour financially if a lot of time was wasted sorting out this The Actress vs. the FOW Actress situation.

Everybody was phoning me. The Producer was trying to get me to agree to sending the script to the FOW Actress. The Scriptwriter, who desperately needed a new hit movie for his own career also wanted to see it go to the FOW Actress, as that would make a better credit. And, of course, The Actress was starting to get suspicious that something was going on and was becoming more and more distressed.

The weird part in all this is that at that point I was actually not a responsible party. I had not been hired to consult on this production, so it wasn't MY decision to make. But somehow I was the person everyone was lobbying. I reached the point where I hated having the phone ring because it was going to be one of these people, arguing the merits of his or her side of the case.

The penny finally dropped for The Actress.  She phoned in tears. Please would I back her up? The Scriptwriter phoned. Please can I talk to the FOW Actress and encourage her to do what underhanded things are necessary to make this a successful movie? A lawyer representing The Producer phoned to say that the FOW Actress has accepted. The Actress phoned in tears yet again. I consider ripping the phone out of the wall.

The Actress, now fully aware of what had been happening, was NOT going to take this lying down. She was made of sterner stuff. So she issued a writ and took The Producer to court to make them keep her in the part. A nasty court battle ensued. Lots of hideous allegations were made about things like who is sleeping with whom and that being the reason A is supporting B, etc.

Meanwhile, it had reached October and the date for expiry of the rights drew closer and closer. The Scriptwriter and I conferred about what we would do if the rights reverted to me. We thought we might forget the whole bunch of them and take off on our own and make our own movie. We debated the merits of involving the FOW Actress. The Scriptwriter thought she was a sure thing, because of her high profile. I was still feeling terrible for The Actress.

Without going into who was sleeping with whom, suffice it to say, The Actress won the court case.  But by now it was November and there were only six weeks left before the rights reverted to me. The Christmas season was fast approaching and Hollywood usually shuts down entirely for about three or four weeks and does nothing. The Actress was in a panic because she had no director, no cast, nothing ready for production and to meet the rights deadline and Christmas season shutdown, she had to start production by December 19^th.

She tried several different directors, starting with the good ones. No one was available at such short notice. They all had other commitments. She tried the B-list directors. None of them was available either. By this point I was starting to get a little fed up with The Actress because she was so demented about getting this into production that she was starting to overlook common sense. All the good stuff we talked about was falling by the wayside because she did not want to spend any more money on the project.

My feeling at this point was that The Actress was running scared. The court case and all the brouhaha that surrounded that had caused a lot of bad feelings and no one was trusting anyone anymore. It was clear that The Actress did not seem to trust the Scriptwriter or me much anymore either. She stopped calling and telling us what was happening.

In early December The Scriptwriter phoned me and told me that a director has been found - very much a C-list fellow - and this director and The Actress have become thick as thieves. The Scriptwriter was sounding mournful because there had been word that The Actress and The Director were revising his script. They can do this in Hollywood. The director and the actors can often change what they want without the approval of the scriptwriter.  Writers are usually pretty far down the pecking order there. The Scriptwriter knew the script was being changed but he wasn't allowed to see how. No one was talking to him any longer.

No one was talking to me any longer either, except The Scriptwriter. And my agent. Everything was being conveyed to me via my agent now. He had been sent really elaborate requirements for consents to portray the children. I had already disguised all the children when I wrote the book. Now they were disguising my disguise.  Inadvertently, they managed to make several of the children much closer to the real kids than I'd had them in the book. This caused lots of legal wrangling. There was a sour atmosphere by this point. My agent spent his time talking about what we would do if the rights revert to me. The Scriptwriter spent his time praying they would revert and he and I could go off together and resurrect this thing. I was just feeling disheartened because everything that had looked so promising a few months earlier was now looking bleaker and bleaker

Things continued to tumble downhill. The Actress decided not to use the "Little Prince" excerpts which are so integral to ONE CHILD  because the copyright owners of the "Little Prince" were asking a $400 fee for 20 years' use. Somehow The Actress believed that this movie was going to last forever and, thus, she would get caught in an endless cycle of having to pay $400 every 20 years. In addition, my lawyers were uncomfortable granting permission to use Sheila's poem at the end of the book because the insurers worried it would identify her too much; so they weren't going to be able to use that either.

The Scriptwriter continued to phone me, increasingly closer to tears with each call. He knew they were murdering his script and there was nothing he could do about it, so he was contemplating having his name removed from the credits.  The poor man was between a rock and a hard place, because if his name remained in the credits, he was credited with a now-horrible screenplay that had been largely re-written by The Actress and The Director. But if his name wasn't in the credits, he then had a hard time career-wise establishing that he had actually done any work in the last twelve months and would be perceived by the Hollywood 'Powers That Be' as not gainfully employed. Which would be hell for his career.

Finally, on the afternoon of December 19th, production started. It is a skeleton crew and cast, because it was so close to Christmas and everyone else in Hollywood had packed up and gone home. But The Actress made the deadline. The rights did not revert to me.
 

After that I was no longer involved in anything. I suspect The Actress knew better. The Scriptwriter also had been sidelined. We cheered each other up with a call on Christmas Eve, promising to do something together in the future, as we really enjoyed working together.  That was the last I've heard from the Scriptwriter, whom I've never met again. 
 

Meanwhile, production carried on until even God finally got fed up. The set - and the entire school being used for filming - were destroyed in the major California earthquake in mid-January 1994.

The resulting film has been titled "Untamed Love". The Scriptwriter's name is still on the credits, but unfortunately, the script does not even faintly resemble the wonderful "Emmy-potential" script he originally wrote. In his script there was none of the junk about Chad, about the "friendly lion" or the marble. All that was added without his permission or mine. As was all the 'home-spun' philosophy that is occasionally a mirror opposite of my own philosophy, as expressed in ONE CHILD. The 'poem' at the end that was substituted for Sheila's real poem was written by The Actress. The conclusion to the movie was written by The Director. I have never seen or talked to The Actress since, although she sent me a nice little statuette to commemorate our experience together.
 

And so there you have it.  What really happens when an author goes to Hollywood.

9:26 AM - 10 Comments - 11 Kudos - Add Comment

On sheep
Current mood: chipper
Category: Life

People often ask me about sheep.  Yes, that's right, sheep.  This is because I am owner of a flock of 20 Black Welsh Mountain and 30 cross-bred white Welsh Mountain sheep.  I am their shepherd.

This is all very germane at the moment because it is lambing time.  My ordinary life of writing, of working as a counselor, of doing all the things that usually absorb my time has had come to a complete halt.  Lambing takes precedence over everything.  Lambs won't wait.  Neither will death, and as every shepherd knows, being with the flock is the only safeguard against the many easily preventable deaths that would otherwise take place at lambing time.  So there simply isn't an option of my being elsewhere.

This amuses many people, especially among my colleagues in literary and publishing circles and in the media.  They have been gone a long time from the world of life and death.  That I return once a year to this ancient existence of days framed by sunrise and sunset, of muscles hardened by labour, of dependence and ultimately subservience to Nature seems quaint and eccentric to them.  That I am unavailable for publicity and other activities "because I am lambing at this time" is an entertaining reason that always provokes a good-natured laugh.  That I am the actual shepherd of this flock and do it all myself instead of hiring someone else to do it always provokes gasps of amazement, as if this were remarkable thing.  Very few people, however, actually ask me why I do it.  I suspect this is because if we examine deep down in the recess of our hearts, we all know the reasons why.  None of us is so far removed from the land that it does not call us.  Even if we have reached that place where we can no longer hear its voice, we still sense its echo.

However, to be a writer is, in essence, to be a compulsive articulator of things. A native-born explainer.  So, I thought I would share with you some of my reasons for keeping sheep. 

One of the simplest reasons is to provide me with much-needed exercise.  I work indoors at a desk most of the day.  Keeping sheep is more interesting than going to the gym.  First of all, you have to do it.  You can slope off and miss the gym, if you aren't in the mood.  The sheep don't have anyone else to hoist that bale of hay into their feeder, so you get right out, even when you aren't in the mood.  Second, you get a total work out.  After hoisting bales, there's hauling buckets of feed, walking the fields to count them, chasing the little blighters down and flipping them over to cut their toenails, remove burrs or check the fiddly bits.  Believe me, at the end of it, you're exercised.

Two: because it provides balance.  I spend most of my day in a very intellectual  and abstract environment.  Most of the time I am working in my head, constructing worlds that are similar to but not actually the real world.  I spend the rest of the time with people who are trying to clarify, promote, sell or exploit these alternate worlds.  Sheep are very firmly grounded in the real and concrete. 

Three: because I can indulge my love of animals.  When I was eight, we were asked to write about what we were going to be when we grew up.  I wrote that I was going to grow up to be an 'authoress' and live on a farm with lots of dogs, cats and horses.  I've missed out on the horses bit, possibly just because I didn't know about sheep in those days.  Sheep are incredible creatures: intelligent, personable and annoying by turns.  I have learned a huge amount from spending time with them and much of it extends well beyond the sheep pens and into the rest of my life.  Animals teach us to be good readers of nonverbal behaviour because they can not talk.  They teach us to be patient because hurrying just makes everything take longer with an animal.  And they teach us to be humble, because it so quickly becomes obvious that it's not a matter of how much they are like us, but rather, how very much we are like them.

Four: because I want to be part of ethical choices in farming.  I am not a vegetarian.  I eat the lambs I raise and I have no problem with that.  I hold no truck with those who believe it is more ethically acceptable to eat a lettuce than a lamb.  I don't buy the kind of thinking that says a plant is less worthy of its life simply because it doesn't look like me.  The fact is, we don't have the right to kill anything, plant or animal.  Where we need to remember that is whenever we are wasteful with food. Something has given its life for us, whether it is a plant or an animal. We should always be respectful of that and use it all up without waste, because waste means a pointless death. But death itself is a completely ordinary part of life.  It's simply the degree to which modern culture has divorced our lives from this reality that causes such fear of it. The truth is, we kill because we need to in order to stay alive, whether we are vegetarians or carnivores. That's simply a straightforward, unavoidable fact of life. Because, as humans, we are capable of self awareness and have the ability to understand what we are doing, we should be respectful of what we kill - i.e. use it right up so its death wasn't in vain - and we should be compassionate with what we kill - i.e. cause it as little suffering during its life as possible.  Raising sheep myself allows me to ensure they live a life that is natural for them and respectful their needs and a death that is swift and as free of pain and fear as possible.

Five: because caring for the sheep ensures I spend a regular part of my day in a natural environment.  Desks, offices and even houses are largely artificial environments.  It's easy to lose track of so many important things when you spend most of your time in an artificial environment and to inadvertently elevate unimportant things in their place.  My experience is that it is especially easy to lose sight of beauty.  This is possibly because in artificial environments we tend to speed up and then shift our orientation towards achievement, goals and the future and beauty can only be experienced in the present.  Time spent in a natural environment always reorients and normalizes my perceptions.

Six: because interacting with the sheep teaches me to stay focused in the present and to take responsibility for my current actions without justifying them by past or future outcomes.  Because of the limited way in which we can communicate with animals, we can only relate with them in the present.  They can only perceive what we are doing now.  So if I must do something to one of them that will hurt, even if it is for an eventual positive and necessary outcome, I must stay present to the pain I am causing because I can not explain what the future holds.  This makes me more compassionate in what I do.

Seven: because I want to be a participant in Nature and not an observer.  We can't actually get outside Nature, because we are part of it.  We're trapped in the cycle ourselves, but when we lose track of that, we tend to create dissonance in our lives.  For example, we suffer seasonal affective disorder, a condition that can be largely cured by being in natural daylight 90 minutes a day, every day.  The sheep keep me in tune with the seasons: tupping, lambing, weaning.  They keep my eye on the weather.  The forecast, yes, but also what is happening in the sky over my house, which birds have arrived when, what stage the grass is at.  They make me look at the moon, because a full moon will bring on a cluster of births.  Living as part of Nature gives a meaning to what I need to do that is greater than any importance I can assign to it as an individual.

Eight: because sheep don't give a damn who I am.  They not only don't care whether or not my book made the best seller list, they also don't care what my colour, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, occupation or ethnic origins are.
 

Nine: because they do care, however, about what kind of person I am.  They quickly discern artifice, shallowness, cruelty and cowardice.  If I am living my creed, they will respond to me.  If I am mouthing it, they will run from me.

Ten: because they keep me real.  I don't really matter.  It's nice to pretend that isn't so, but it is.  In 200 years, it most likely will not matter to anyone who I was, what my name was.  Even if my books were to live on, I wouldn't.  Look at even the greatest writers.  Shakespeare, for example.  All the defining factors of his life are gone and this is because they are not important.  What will matter in 200 years is simply that I lived, that I was part of life.  That when it was my turn on the stage, I supported life, that I was part of it. 

And so it is.  With each infant bleat, with each eye bright with life, with each eye opaque with death, I feel the great bloody river of Life flowing and know I am part of it.  Each spring when the lambs come, when I become drawn into this onward current that I can not control but which I can choose to flow with, my understanding of the meaning of life is renewed and with it, insight into my own purpose for being here.

And now that isn't shabby teaching from someone who can only say, "Baa."

(Anyone interested in life on my farm, there is an on-going diary of lambing on my website here: http://www.torey-hayden.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=97825&page=0&fpart=1&vc=1&nt=3)

7:17 AM - 12 Comments - 17 Kudos - Add Comment

On becoming a published author
Current mood: chipper
Category: Writing and Poetry

I'm often asked about how I went about getting ONE CHILD published, once I'd written it.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I spent my formative years writing one very long 'story' chronicling the long-running imaginary world in my head.  I never tried to get any of this published because I always knew it was unpublishable.  It didn't really matter anyway.  I was writing it for myself.  I loved  writing.  I loved the way it allowed me to slip into other perspectives, to see the world through other eyes, to see other worlds, to experience and understand things I could never manage, if I were always trapped just being me.  So being published was never really a goal for me, although "being a writer" was.  "Being a writer" gave legitimacy to what I was doing, particularly in light of the fact my family didn't really approve of my writing.  It was seen as too solitary, too full of flights of the imagination, not "real" enough.  "Being a writer" would make it real to them, I reckoned.  Moreover, it would mean I could write all the time and not just in the moments I stole from doing other things.

I did write more than just the long fantasy story.  I didn't keep a diary per se, but I enjoyed keeping what I called 'anecdotes', which were recordings of my experiences with the children in the classroom: things they said, funny occurrences, episodes that moved me.  They tended to be between about five and fifty pages long, and again, I did these only for me, only to 'capture an emotional photograph' of my time with the children I worked with. 

Then that one night, driving home on the freeway, the opening line came to me:  "I should have known."  For some time I had wanted to capture Sheila, to take 'an emotional photograph' of her because she had had such an impact on me.  When I went home and started to write, I assumed that was still all I was doing, just writing one of my little 'anecdotes'. 

Four intense days of writing followed, then a weekend, which I had to spend working away, and then four more intense days of writing on my return.  When it was finished, I remember looking at the pile of paper.  It wasn't the usual forty or fifty pages.  It was 225.  Astonished, I realized I had a book.

And 'astonished' is exactly the right word because that really hadn't been what I'd intended, and now that it was there, I didn't have a clue what to do with it.  I remember my feelings being somewhat akin to the day I'd found the possum in my basement – a mixture of surprise, uncertainty and very definite delight.  And as with the possum, the only thing I could think to do was call in an expert.

I didn't actually know any writers, published or otherwise, but I was working at the University of Minnesota at that point and I knew there had to be writers around there somewhere.  A bit of fishing unearthed a creative writing course being offered as a night school course in the Minneapolis suburb where I lived.  It was being taught by a "real writer" – Marion Dane Bauer, who writes children's books – so this seemed a good place to start.

So I turned up the first night, announced I had written a book.  Looking back on this from the perspective I now have, I'm mortified!  Poor lady.  She was probably thinking, "Yeah, okay, you and everybody else in this class." But she was very poised and kindly suggested I go buy a copy of the Writer's Market, which lists agents and publishers.

Immediately I did, brought it home and pored over it.  It said that the best way to approach publishers was to go through the list in the book and choose five that published books similar to the one I wanted to sell.  Then to write a query letter and attach three chapters and send that in.  I combed through the list of publishers.  There were a lot of small ones listed, including two right there in Minneapolis that sounded promising for my book.  But then I thought, no.  If I'm rejected by five small publishers, I'll feel really bad and know the book's not any good and won't want to keep trying.  However, if I submitted it to the five top publishers and they rejected it, I would't feel so bad because I'd know I was just batting out of my league.  And the small publishers would still be left.

So, I wrote my query letter and appended my three chapters.  My first-choice publisher was the then G.P. Putnam's and Sons because it was the largest publisher at the time.  They didn't have anything on the list that looked like my book, but they had so much that I reckoned I had to fit in there somewhere. 

That was a Monday.  On Friday I received a letter back from an editor named Rob Fitz and he asked me to send the rest of the book.  So I packaged it up.  If I tell you this was back in the days of manual typewriters (Posh people had electric.  Poor teachers did not.) and that my typewriter was missing the letter 'L' such that I had had to go through the entire manuscript and gently pencil in all the 'L's, you can see what a miracle was taking place here.

Two weeks later Rob phoned me and made an offer of $7500.  This sounded like a fortune to me, a grad student and teacher, in 1979.  Of course, I said yes.  I was ecstatic!  Absolutely over the moon.

The weird bit of all of this is that it happened so quickly.  It took 42 days from the moment I rolled the first piece of paper into the typewriter that January night to signing a contract with G. P. Putnam's Sons.   Other than Marion Dane Bauer in the creative writing course, I'd never told anyone I was writing a book, mostly because I didn't realize I was writing a book until it was written.  I hadn't even told Marion I was actually submitting it.  I can remember coming off the phone call from Rob and feeling wonderful and then suddenly thinking: Who can I tell?  Because there was no way to shout "Hey, they bought it!" without first going through a whole lot of explaining the "Hey, I wrote it!" part first. 

So that was it.  The rest is history.  And I'm here today as living proof that, yes, query letters do work.  Yes, you can sell something without an agent.  Yes, you can sell something over the transom.  Yes, you can even sell something without ever getting a single rejection letter.  It does happen.  As for the dark side of all this, such as the fact I was now in a position to make $10,000 mistakes at a whack because I didn't have an agent or how not getting all those rejection letters meant I had never had the chance to learn the trade before the $10,000 questions came along, well, we'll save those for another story.

11:43 AM - 6 Comments - 7 Kudos - Add Comment

On tolerance
Current mood: chipper
Category: Life

I am often asked about tolerance.  How does a person become more tolerant and accepting of others or of differences?   In my experience the following are crucial concepts in developing tolerance.

1) SELF AWARENESS:

Self awareness is the ability to know ourselves, to know our traits, our temperament and experiences and understand how these relate to how we act and react to things.  It also means we are aware that these things are unique to us, that other people do not necessarily experience the world the way we do.  Also that they are unique in the same way and have their own traits, feelings and behaviours, which are different  to ours but which influence their actions and reactions.

Self awareness also means having the ability to step back from our emotions enough to be able to tell what we are thinking and feeling while we're doing it, and to understand that these thoughts and feelings influence our actions.

One reason why self awareness is important to learning to be a tolerant person is because it helps us understand why we have the reactions to others that we do and helps us determine if these are legitimate reactions or not.  For example if we really dislike someone because they have a haircut just like the bully from school, self awareness allows us to understand that this reaction is in us, is our problem, not theirs, and so we can choose to change our behaviour.

2) OBJECTIVITY:

Objectivity is the ability to understand things have other perspectives than just our own.  The opposite of objectivity is subjectivity.  Subjectivity simply means seeing things from our own point of view.  Subjectivity is not wrong and sometimes it is the right way to look at things, but it is important that we always understand it is never the only way to look at things.  

One reason objectivity is important to learning to be tolerant is because it helps us recognize that our own perspective on a situation is always limited.  It reminds us to consider how other people see things and how their own subjective experiences influence what they are doing. 

A second reason is that objectivity also helps us remember that there is a bigger picture.  We're hard-wired to be self-oriented, to look at the world in a way that puts us, our thoughts, our motivations on centre stage.  Objectivity helps us understand that what can feel very important, very major is actually only part of a much bigger world.

3) COMMONALITY

The person who is learning to be tolerant has to balance two different – and fairly opposite – ideas in his/her mind at the same time.  One is the idea about self-awareness and objectivity, which shows us that what we think, feel and experience is personal and other people may think, feel and experience differently.  The other idea, however, is about recognizing that we are all, in fact, alike.  We are all much more alike than we are different.

This is a tricky thing to consider because at first glance it looks like we're being required to hold two apparently opposite truths in mind at the same time. On different levels, however, both things are true.  And  they both need to be held in mind in order to be a tolerant person.  While we each have our own subjective realities and we need to be awar