Robot T-shirts! And, when good novels misbehave

Awesome Not a Robot apparel is now available at Jim's Cafe Press store. I love them! They come in a bunch of different styles, so check it out. (Jim says the "heat transfer" ones are best.)

Meanwhile, the Sunday Scribblings prompt this week is "First Job, Worst Job, Dream Job" so if you have something to say on that, hop on over there and link up. It's a great week to start scribblings if you've never done it before.

Thoughts on writing this morning as I flex my fingers and gear up for a day of hammering out new scenes (swimming upstream!) I belatedly discovered this post by Patry Francis, who was one of my first blog discoveries. Her first novel was coming out a few months before my own this past year, so I hungrily read about her experiences in advance of my own, and though she's not blogging as much as she used to, I find we still have much in common. We are both slaving over our third books, and find we have not joined the secret "writing is easy once you're published" club. It's still hard. It's still really hard. Novels misbehave. They're wayward teenagers; you think you've got them on their path, and then they up and join the circus, or a cult, or something! Okay, this metaphor not so good, because when it comes to a book that's veered wildly off course, the thing to do is let it go and start again, and I suppose the answer to a teenager who has joined a cult is not necessarily to let them go and have another baby. Not necessarily.

I've been hearing a lot of writers admit lately that it is only due to mulish stubborness that they finish their books. So keep that in mind if you're working to finish your first. Plus, according to Patry, muses like to eat blueberry pie, so you might try to keep your muse happy with food. Me, I would eat my muse's pie myself and then she/it (I think my muse is a goat with wonky assymetrical horns and a nonplussed look on its cud-chewing face) would head-butt me and tell me to get back to work already with my blueberry-stained teeth.

Quote, found on a new blog discovery:
"The real writer is the one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved."
-- Marge Piercy

Er, I had to look up "phlogiston" and it's really cool: it was, in the middle ages, a "hypothetical inflammatory principle" believed [falsely] to exist in all combustible matter. It was, like, an imaginary gas assumed to be an essential principle of fire -- the way this imaginary thing "talent" (or whatever) is assumed to be essential to writing. I do believe in talent, but I believe it's something we build while working. So, off I go to work. It's devils on the menu today. Wicked, wicked devils (and one sweet one). Tally ho!