I love reading Reuter’s Oddly Enough column. (And A.P. News, when it comes to that. Sometimes it’s equally odd.) I find myself laughing out loud and semi-shocked at the real-life stories that seem ripped from the pages of a romance novel or film.

For instance, two machete-wielding robbers breaking into a club without realizing 50 bikers were meeting in a private room. One ended up hog-tied, the other leapt over a balcony and was chased down by the cops. Can you picture it? Balaclava-clad robbers burst into main room - shock, horror on patrons’ faces. Weeny bartender pokes head into private room: we’re being robbed! Cut to shot of fifty leather-clad bikers engaged in some Roberts-rules-of-order-type activity rising slowly from long benches, fists clenched. “Oh, yeah?” One thief flies over balcony, the other disappears in a pile of Man. But for real! It happened!

Or the 39-year-0ld man who dressed up in a school uniform and wig and tried to pass himself off as a Japanese schoolgirl, only to have all the little schoolgirls run shrieking from him everywhere he went. (I like to imagine they also flapped their little schoolgirl hands over their schoolgirl heads.) This guy didn’t stand a chance.

Who needs fiction? Honestly.

Get your definitions on. FreeRice.com.  My highest level so far is 50 but by god I’m not stopping until I hit 55. Even if that takes the rest of my natural life. Which it might.

Just before leaving my day job, I went down to our local wonderful bookstore-that-sells-tarot-decks, BookPeople, seeking out a new, you guessed it, tarot deck.

I didn’t really need one, but I wanted desperately to spend money.

It’s hard to take your time browsing the tarot decks, because they’re all locked in a glass case, and if you want to see anything other than the fronts of the boxes you have to pull over a busy salesperson who will open the case and wait, staring at you with a faux-cheerful “jesus christ if she looks at one more tarot deck I’m committing seppuku” twinkle in her eye.

So I didn’t take my time. She opened the case and just as the glass swung an inch past my nose I saw the a wonderful thing:

The Fantod Pack by Edward Gorey.

Instantly the theme for the PBS Mystery series popped into my head and I grabbed it. $9.95. Cheap for a tarot deck! I’d be able to buy something else, too! I hugged it between my breasts and thanked the blinking salesgirl and walked away.

Only after I’d reached the car, Fantod Pack and mandala coloring book in hand, did I realize what I’d really purchased. Not a tarot deck in the traditional sense, oh no. Something far, far better. A deck filled with Horrors! 20 cards, each unique to the Fantod Pack and each associated with its own list of Evils That May Befall My Characters. Instructions for reading the pack: “Stand in the center of a sparsely furnished room and close your eyes. Fling the pack into the air. Keep your eyes closed. Pick up five cards from the floor, keeping them in order.” And then lay them out and interpret them.

The cards are backed with a morbid drawing of a - thing - riding an ornately decorated unicycle, carrying above its head a serving tray holding a skull, hourglass and candle. Their fronts depict each subject in Gorey’s inimitable style. No Wheel of Fortune or Nine of Rods here, no thank you - these cards include such subjects as The Limb, The Effigy, The Insects, The Blue Dog, The Ladder and The Waltzing Mouse. And each has its own hint-list in the accompanying booklet. This is the hint-list for The Limb - the interpretation, of course, rests with the reader.

The Limb
February
miscarriage of justice
gapes
a forged snapshot
morbid sensations
a useless sacrifice
alopecia
a generalized calamity
broken promises
ignominy
an accident in a theatre
fugues
poverty

Delicious! MUAHAHAHA! If I’m ever stuck for something horrid to do to my characters, I now have a Plan. Who can resist a generalized calamity? And what character would ever want alopecia? I will never be too nice to my characters ever again.

It’s always the first question I get when I tell people I’m writing a novel: What is it about?

I cringe, and describe the basic high level plot. Ah, oh. Vacant nods. It must be hard, it must be fun, it’s so admirable that I’m even trying.

I smile and say thank you and crawl away, wishing I knew what the hell my novel is “about.” I don’t even know what that *means*. How can I possibly define it? What could I have said that would have boiled a 400-page manuscript down into something not only digestible but tasty?

Well, now that I’m working full time on revisions on this blasted manuscript that I’ve been living with for nearly two years, I think I’m beginning to get a clue. This should not have been news to me: “What is it about” is a question of theme. My interragators may not have meant it that way, but that’s what *I* needed to know.

Theme. I didn’t have one, and my plot suffered. My characters suffered. My brain suffered. The theme ties the whole together, and I couldn’t see it until I had every plot point, turning point and character motivation top of mind, until I’d questioned everything from inciting incident to final resolution and thrown out all my safe assumptions about what the hell I’m doing writing a book. And now that I have a theme, I’m going to have to rethink everything again. But it will be worth it. Now I know what I’m going toward, and my characters will become more passionate and my plot will deepen and I’ll write a book I can be proud of. Goddamn it.

On a sidenote, while I’m sounding all high-falutin’ and grand and motivated and thematically sound, I’m simultaneously making resolutions, like: I will never start a manuscript without knowing its theme ever again. Which follows the many other resolutions I’ve made, such as “I will never start a manuscript without a thorough undertstanding of all my characters’ inner and outer motivations again, or without an outline, or without doing my research, or without a map.” I don’t know how much of that is actually possible, though. How much can a writer realistically know before starting a manuscript?

How would you end the sentence “I will never start a manuscript again without…”?

Anyway, to return to where I started. That’s the first question I get: What is it about? The second question varies, but so far my favorite has to be:

Will it have pictures?

You are The Wheel of Fortune

Good fortune and happiness but sometimes a species of
intoxication with success

The Wheel of Fortune is all about big things, luck, change, fortune. Almost always good fortune. You are lucky in all things that you do and happy with the things that come to you. Be careful that success does not go to your head however. Sometimes luck can change.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I love tarot. Astrology, numerology, I-Ching, you name it - I’m a sucker for all of it, but tarot is especially lovely. It has pictures! I got this site from my friend Nicole, who got it from our friend Catherine, who’s brilliant and knows her astrology - and, apparently, tarot. I like the card I got, and its warning is well founded. I definitely tend to let success go to my head. No matter how big or small or lasting or temporary, I bounce and swoon and thrill and generally enjoy the hell out of success. I always think I’ve done something no one else has done ever! and I truly believe I’ll be able to repeat whatever the success is indefinitely.

No matter how many times that proves not to be true.

Ah well. Eventually I hit the jackpot again and whizbang! my head lifts off my shoulders and floats grinning up into the stratosphere. I know I should stop the cycle, but hey… I’m the Wheel! Of! Fortune!

- Michelle, about to go successfully off to bed. She hopes. Must - shut - down - com.pu.ter…..

I’m having a hard time staying focused on Panty Snatch today as I had an exciting idea for the premise of Booby Trap last night that’s just not leaving me alone. Great problem to have, right? I’m getting it all down in SuperNoteCard while I have it in my head and it’s flowing like butter down the side of a volcano. And the premise for the third book in my head, Tail Gate, is beginning to bubble as well…

I’ve also been thinking about yesterday’s post where I listed a couple of the things I fear about embarking on writing full time, and I realized that I said I feared I’d never get published. But I don’t. I’m not really scared of that at all - I think I wrote it because I’m expected to feel that way. It’s a trope: Aspiring writer fears she’ll never be published.

Actually I fear low-quality publication or my own loss of enjoyment in the act of writing far more than not being published. I *know* I will be published - it might take ten years, but if I keep learning from criticism, improving my writing, and never give up, it will happen. My writing career has already begun. It’s just the course of it that’s up in the air. Will I be published next year or in 2014? Will my first book sell well, or poorly? Will my second be published at all? Will I shift genres? What new tricks will I learn once I start hearing feedback from a wider audience?

All interesting questions, but not really scary. The only scary questions are: will my writing suck? Will I know when “good enough” is actually good? And will I ever be happy enough with my work that I’m willing to stop revising it to death?

Yes, that’s deliberate - adieu, not au revoir. I left my day job at a wonderful marketing agency on February 1 and haven’t looked back since.

It is simply delicious not working full time for someone else.

For the first time in six years, I’m determining what I do with each moment of my day. I map out my own plans, stick to them or not, and pat myself on the back - or not. When I feel inspired to do something out of the ordinary, often as not I can go ahead and do it. Need to watch Pride and Prejudice for the fifteenth time at 3pm on a Wednesday afternoon? Go for it. Want to exercise at eleven in the morning? Hell, yes. Create a new recipe and cook it at 4pm? Sure!

Not to say work doesn’t come into it. I have a schedule - first revisions on my work-in-progress Panty Snatch, then writing a draft of my next manuscript (tentative title = Booby Trap). All in a few months, which means long hours and almost no time off.  Sometimes keeping my ass in the Aeron (yes, I bought myself an Aeron, I’m so not used to being poor yet) takes more willpower than Weight Watchers. I get discouraged and tired and fear I’ll never get published. Or worse, I’m afraid I’ll get published with a book so execrable I’m ashamed to tell anyone I wrote it.

But it’s all worth it. This is something I’m doing for me. I’m opening channels in parts of my brain that haven’t been used since college, as as those channels get cleared of the muck and dead animals  accumulated over all the years of non-use, the creativity will flow faster and faster like shit shooting through the sewers of my brain. Right out onto the page.

Now who wouldn’t want to do that for themselves? I ask you.