Step into your power

(Song by Ray LaMontagne)

Hello friends,

I hope you are hanging in there. The news cycle continues to be stupid nazis, which is exhausting. I’ve had to cut back to reading the news once a day, because I realized it was distracting me and taking up all my brain space that I need in order to write a novel.

Finding sources of independent news and progressive political commentary continues to delight me. This week it was the Substack “Chop Wood, Carry Water” by Jessica Craven. In Jessica’s words, her newsletter is dedicated to “saving democracy, addressing the climate crisis, preserving our freedoms, electing better lawmakers, and, in general, creating a better country—one simple action at a time.”

Here, here!

Other things that made me feel great this week were going to the gym every day and dry January/February. It turns out weightlifting is good for mental health! Who would have guessed?!?

Writing news

Shoutout to Elizabeth and Leslie for helping me edit my query letter this week! If you haven’t read Elizabeth’s novel The Ocean in Winter set on the North Shore yet, check it out. (Goodreads calls it, “An unforgettable story about grief, love, and what it means to be haunted.”)

Here’s how the plot section of my query currently stands:

“Six-foot-two butch Ronnie Peterson (she/her, 26) has one regret—an assault charge and years in juvie. Exactly ten years ago, when she was a pregnant soccer star, Ronnie committed home invasion at a farm under the orders of her criminal wife, which led to a violent altercation with her wife. Now a soccer coach paying child support and living in a trailer, Ronnie works as a farmhand for the gentleman farmer whose house she burgled, helps her daughter with homework and quietly fights to rebuild her life. Police harassment hits like a sucker punch, prompting her to petition for equal custody of her nine-year-old daughter. If the judge grants her equal custody she can finally stop living in fear of her ex-wife and the state.

Farms collect broken things, and tough-as-nails stone butch Nev Bickerman (she/her, 56) reckons she has had a soft spot for at-risk kids ever since her work as a photojournalist with the UN Peacekeepers in Rwanda in ’94. Now she runs Upsend Downs, a sheep farm on a plateau between the rainforest and Lake Tinaroo, teaches job skills, visits Dr. Whiskey, feels guilty for things she can’t control, and lives vicariously through her larger-than-life young protégée. Nev wants what is best for Ronnie, which bloody well isn’t here, and isn’t with her. When Ronnie buys the farm next door and flood damage from Cyclone Marcia threatens to bankrupt Upsend Downs, Nev’s carefully-erected boundaries might be doomed. What would it look like to have a partner again?

Ronnie uses the adrenaline rush of sex with men and women, sports, and surfing as distractions from the humiliating uphill slog of her life, but at the end of the day it’s Nev who saves Ronnie when she faints and falls off the roof of the house she is building. Surgery forces Ronnie to slow down and spend quality time with her daughter. Now if only she can stay out of trouble with the police, her daughter’s secret bio dad and her terrifying ex-wife until after the custody hearing, her boss might teach her one final lesson: how to love herself.”

This week I finished plotting/planning book two in this series with 97 index cards using the method Robert McKeee recommends in “Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting”. This book blew my mind and changed my life. Seriously. Go read it if you write fiction. It describes how to have a climax at the end of act 1, act 2, and act 3, and how to braid two subplots around your central plot.

I wish I had read this book twenty years ago. It would have prevented me from writing an embarrassing number of meandering books lacking dramatic tension, drive and suspense.

Storytime: In previous years, agents and editors gushed over my writing style but complained that my books were not “book shaped.” I cannot tell you how frustrating it was to know my books all had a fatal flaw (something to do with structure?) but not know what it was. Flash-forward to today: I know what it was! It feels like solving a puzzle and finding a skeleton key.

Democracy Book Club

This month our Democracy Book Club (Anti-fascist) is reading “How to Be an Anti-Racist” by American author and historian Ibram X. Kendi. There’s still time to read along! Paid subscribers can post reactions in the comments.

I’ll write about it here in two weeks on Wednesday, February 26th with my reactions and reflections.

Next month’s March read-along is “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder.

What’s new on the farm

Not much. The dog found half a dead rabbit this morning. Perhaps a gift from a fox or coyote? Unclear. Which half, you ask? Just the hind legs, sticking out of the snow. The seven-year-old braved the snow and ice to feed the chickens yesterday, which we’ll call a parenting win.

Ten clear plastic boxes of dahlia tubers in wood shavings sit in the basement, quietly doing their thing. Every time I go down to check on them I hope they don’t all rot, shrivel up, or sprout prematurely. This has never happened before, but every year is different, so anything is possible. That’s the magic of farming. Nothing ever happens in exactly the same way, year to year. Weather and climate are unpredictable. Increasingly so, due to climate change. It’s an experiment in which we don’t control all the variables, and that’s also the fun of it.