Category: writing

I Want You To Be Yourself, and To Be Gentle with Yourself

I wrote a blog post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group that I hope you find inspiring!

The Insecure Writer's Support Group in orange and white text over a sepia-tone image of a lighthouse

Here’s an excerpt:

Hi writers! I’m Liza Olmsted, a writer, editor, and publisher at Thinking Ink Press. I’m also neurodivergent* and I have invisible disabilities.

The publishing industry can be really hard on those of us with visible or invisible disabilities … or really just all of us. (This is true of all industries, really, but let’s focus for a minute.) We’re trained to believe due dates are Very Important. We’re trained to believe we should put in 100%, without ever asking “of what”? We’re trained to believe it’s an honor to be published, so we should make all the changes editors ask for, or do a lot of work for very little money.

I recently co-edited and published** a science fiction anthology featuring neurodivergent authors and neurodivergent main characters, The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters, which gave me lots of opportunities to think about those expectations, both as I set them and as I operated within them.

And because it’s me, it has lots of footnotes. :)

Read the rest of “I Want You To Be Yourself, and To Be Gentle with Yourself” at the Insecure Writer’s Support Group

🛸 The Neurodiversiverse Anthology Call for Submissions

My co-editor Anthony Francis and I are so excited to announce we’re looking for stories, poetry, and art for The Neurodiversiverse Anthology, which will explore how neurodivergent folks might have an advantage in dealing with aliens. From the call for submissions:

Submission Deadline: December 31st, 2023⁠

Submit your stories at www.neurodiversiverse.com.

The universe is filled with aliens—creatures with different histories, cultures, and even biologies—who may seem strange to us. But our world is filled with a diversity of people, many of whom find each other strange. One particular group finds the rest of humanity especially strange: neurodivergent people.⁠

Would neurodivergent folks find themselves at an advantage in dealing with aliens?⁠

Let’s find out.⁠

We’re looking for short stories, flash fiction, poetry, and black-and-white line art that showcase and respect neurodivergent experiences. We’re explicitly inviting #OwnVoices and people from other marginalized backgrounds to submit stories. You can find out all the details at www.neurodiversiverse.com.

You may or may not be aware that I’m neurodivergent myself, but I am, and I’m passionate about normalizing neurodivergent brains. I’m so excited to be part of this great project, and to be working with a fabulous co-editor and wonderful publishing team at Thinking Ink Press.

Send us your stories! We can’t wait to read them. 💖

Submit your stories at www.neurodiversiverse.com.

P.S. I totally meant to post this about a week ago, when I published the call for subs on the Thinking Ink Press webpage, but my ADHD brain dropped the ball, so here we are. Good thing you have most of four whole months until the submission deadline! 😅

Verbing Weirds Words

Verbing Weirds Language

A friend of mine shared a link to a Merriam-Webster usage note about how the definition of “literally” includes “figuratively”, and how outraged people are about it. Another friend shared an angry emoji on the topic — lots of outrage!

And friends, I understand the frustration. I, too, am a literalist by inclination. “Literally” means “literally”, how can you possibly interpret anything figurative there?

But I do accept it, because I like how smoothly our brains stretch to accept new meanings.

Did you know that the word “bead” came from “benediction”? Christians would “count their beads” when they said the rosary. All your jewelry comes down to a religious term.

And that “glamour” is a mutated version of “grammar”, because the written word was magical to some set of illiterate English-speakers hundreds of years ago.

How about that “awful” used to have the same meaning as “awesome”? (It seems obvious once you point it out.)

Here are some of my favorite new words:

“Wat”, which means “what” but in a particularly disgusted tone of voice.

“Because X”, as in “the power went out because PG&E”, which assumes you understand all the reasons why PG&E would cause power outages, and creates camaraderie. (For more on this, I highly recommend the book Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch, which is narrated by the author in the audio edition.)

While I’m at it, I recommend the podcast Lexicon Valley hosted by John McWhorter, as well as many of his lectures on the Great Courses and his books. He talks about all kinds of weird language quirks, including why sounds change, why grammar changes, and how Black English is an entirely consistent and regular dialect of English, and not just mistakes.

And by the way, “nice” started out meaning “foolish”, so if you insist on words staying exactly the same for all time, then I think you’re nice.

Speaking with My Self-censorship

I’ve been noticing that I censor myself. I allow myself to listen to my inner critic, who wonders what people (i.e. you) will think about or misinterpret about what I have to say. What if I post this post, and it’s just rambly and not interesting? What if you judge me for not being beyond this already? “I figured out how to conquer my self-censorship years ago,” I hear you say. “Why are you telling me about this?” Or worse, “What else do you think you have to say that no one else has said?”

“Nothing,” I whisper quietly and slink back into my closet. It’s all been said before.

But you know what? That’s bullshit. Do you hear anyone say, “All there is to say about love has already been said, so you might as well not bother,” and then stop telling anyone that they love them? Of course not.

Well, everything I have to say is just that: “I love you”, but in other words. And that’s probably what you mean whenever you talk, too.

That’s all my censor wants to say, also. “I love you, and I want to protect you. Please don’t say anything that can get you hurt.” It’s very loving, and damaging, too.

I’m choosing to listen to the most important part of that sentence, and ignore the rest.

I love you. I want you to know that.

When not having creative energy isn’t a moral failure

I just read this blog post by Neil Gaiman.

He’s a Real Author, and he’s been very busy, and then he’s been very brain-dead.

His brain-dead is (morbidly?) reassuring to me. I’m an author, and I have a full time job, and I run a small business, and I have health issues, and I have a committed relationship that requires intentional effort to maintain (as any good relationship does).

It’s just lovely to have a reminder that it’s normal to have only so much capacity. Creative people create less when their mental energy is used up. When my day job requires creativity, I have less available for personal projects.

I always have a vague belief that if I cared more, I would create more. That if I were more diligent, I would sit and write every day like they tell you to.

I remember how I allow myself to get sucked into things that aren’t worth my time, like fascinating podcasts when I should be working, or brain-dead games on my phone when my brain isn’t working.

But.

But I spend a lot of mental energy on my day job, and on the other things I must do, and it’s not a moral failure that I don’t write every day. It’s just a fact of time and energy. It’s normal.

I just read Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher1, set in the same world as her Clockwork Boys duology, but it’s about normal life things (and nearly being eaten by magical sky-jellyfish) rather than being about saving the world. I loved it so much.

I tell you this because: I want to be T. Kingfisher when I grow up. I keep ruminating about how to become an author, a person who has hours every day to be creative and inspired, who also isn’t broke. Make it important now. Wake up early2. Write every day. But right now, I don’t have the energy to spend being creative; I’m spending most of my energy in keeping normal life going, eating healthy food, getting exercise more often than never.

Neil Gaiman reminded me that it’s ok to be an uncreative creative person. It’s normal to have physical limits. It’s not a moral failure when I don’t write every day… or even every week3.

Do you have times when you can’t be creative? How do you handle it? How do you give yourself permission to be where you are?

1 It’s a lovely silly book about a woman who doesn’t know her own value, having to fight for her own value, and developing friends who support her exactly the way she is. I loved it so much, you should read it.

2 I hate this advice. Mornings are my nemesis.

3 Not for nothing, I’ve been writing blog posts. That’s creation, even if it doesn’t feel like “creativity”. Maybe my definitions are just wrong.

New blogs, old drafts

I haven’t posted anything here in half a decade. Time flies.

My boyfriend and I are going to be traveling in England for 3 weeks, though, and I decided to set up a travel blog. It’s pretty spare, but I think we’ll have fun posting photos.

Unrelatedly, there’s a decent likelihood I’m going to have major surgery on my jaws in about a year. After I’d set up the travel blog, and was about to go pick up the models of my jaws, I realized that I want to share that process, too. So I started a second blog, which is all about my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. It’s called Body, Mind, & Soul, and it’s even more spare than the travel blog. It may also become TMI… particularly once the surgery starts.

That led me to want to post more on this site, which led me to going through old drafts sitting in the backend. There’s a lot of them, and some of them tell good stories, or parts of stories. I don’t know why I didn’t just publish them… lack of confidence, maybe, or lack of time.

So, I’m planning to clean them up a little and post them, because the prospect of major surgery on my face is reminding me that there’s nowhere to hide from myself. I have zero fucks to give* toward shame, self-censorship, or TMI. If you don’t want to read what I have to share, you don’t have to. I want to write. So I’m planning to share stories from my past several years. I hope you’ll let me know if they speak to you.

* I love when common phrases are rearranged. “Give a fuck” is so 90s. (1790s, if this link is to be believed. I didn’t research it enough to find out.)

Punctuation

I was just reading an essay by Gertrude Stein, in which she says:

Commas are servile and they have no life of their own … A comma by helping you along and holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it.

(You can find it in her book “Lectures in America”)

I basically agree, except that I find them useful for exactly this reason, because usually (e.g. at work) my goal is to transmit information, not to deeply engage my audience’s creativity.

At work, I’ve become known as a hyphen/dash expert. Enough so that someone pinged1 me this week to ask about what kind of dash to use to indicate no answer in a form. 😆

1 Do normal people use this word to mean “messaged in a generic chat app”?

Housecarl

I’m in love with the word housecarl.  It’s a very old word, and I stole it from Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel books.  I’ve been looking for a word to refer to men in a medieval noble household who aren’t in the family and aren’t knighted, but also aren’t necessarily servants.  Lois McMaster Bujold uses “armsman”.  Carey uses housecarl in her Viking-ish culture.  The other word I’ve come across is armiger, which applies to a military guy who works for a knight and is entitled to his own coat of arms, but isn’t knighted himself.  I have no idea why you would have a coat of arms without being a knight, so I was thinking of using it to mean anyone who carries weapons and isn’t knighted.

To me housecarl seems like the male version of “house maid”, except not implying “servile”.  I’m not sure I understand the nuances of relationships in a medieval household would be.  Does servile mean a slave, or also someone who works for money?  Or who works for room and board?  Would I be using it wrong to refer to male servants in the King’s Castle?  (Can I use it that way anyway, under the assumption that most people reading the book will either not already know the word, or will understand that this is my own world and I’m stealing words and repurposing* them?)

This came up because I’m looking for Germanic & Old English terms to use in LFG, as opposed to French, Latin, or Celtic.  Does it matter much, since I’m still writing the first draft?  Nope.  But looking for the right words to use helps me get into the feeling of the world.

——

* Firefox doesn’t think “repurposing” is a word.  Wikipedia doesn’t either, but several articles use it as a word.

Meta Blog Post

My notebook - entry from Jan 13, 2013

I’ve noticed that I like my writing voice better when I’m talking to myself, pondering to myself, stream of consciousness (though it usually is in complete sentences… cuz I’m funny like that).  Why is that?  I’m more authentic with myself.  I also don’t have to fill in as much back-story, cuz I already know the background, so it’s a faster, more immediate train of thought.  (“Wait for me!” she shouted, running after the train.)  Also, I have more random asides and quips, because I’m amusing myself.  :)  Sometimes they’re inside jokes, where you really had to be there on that one day in the 10th grade when…

And then, do I edit my train-of-thought stream-of-consciousness blurbs after I’ve reached the end?  If I edit inline, then I’m clearly too self-conscious and not really talking to myself (cuz duh, I don’t need to censor when *I’m* the audience, cuz I’ll be hearing all the extra crap whether I edit or not).  But what about afterwards?  When I realize that I looped around back to repeat something I’ve already said, and why on earth would you care about all the meanderings and thoughts I’ve been having?

Also, that means that once the moment has passed, once I don’t feel the need to tell myself the story, then I won’t be able to recapture it for you, either.  But then, if I don’t feel the need to tell myself the story, maybe that means I don’t need to tell you, either.  (And who is “you” in this sentence?  Is it me, because I’m writing to myself?  Or is it the imaginary audience out there who probably isn’t reading this post anyway?  Woah, my head is spinning.)

I want to post more.  (I hate reading blog posts from inconsistent bloggers [like myself] who post saying “I want to blog more!  But here’s my excuse why I haven’t… or here’s my plan for doing better!”, when really you could just SKIP the post saying “I’m gonna blog more” and instead just start blogging more.  Duh.)  But anyway, I do want to post more.  I also know that this is pretty low on my list of priorities.  (Given my previous parenthetical, where is this paragraph going?  I think I had a point when I started it, but I got distracted by my own aside, and now I don’t remember what the next sentence should be.  Oh right…)  It’s an effort to write up a blog post, and disappointing to reread it and realize I sound lame, or I’m not telling an interesting story after all, and so I should just scrap it as not worth* the ones and zeroes it’s printed on.  (And I’m still doing that lame thing I hate from others: sharing my lack of self-confidence.  Sigh.)  But the point is that when I’m writing to myself in my notebook, or on paper, then I like my voice just fine.  Maybe I read it differently when it’s only to myself?  Maybe I write it differently?  Nah, I’ve lost the voice, now I’m telling YOU instead of telling myself.  My self has already moved on to another subject, which is the point of my footnote… so I’ll just leave you with the footnote:

——

* I mistyped “worth” as another word that’s like “wrote“: wroth.  It’s the verb of “wrath”, I think.  “She was wroth with him.”  Could just say “angry at”, but “wroth” sounds cool.  And it’s just one letter off from “wrote”… which is the only thing they have in common.  :)

Whew, third draft rewritten.

Today being the first day of my holiday vacation, I just finished editing the third draft of my vampire story, “The Organville Vampire”. It’s a lot better now, nearly a real story!

When I type in the changes I’ll call it the fourth draft, and I’ll know how long it is.  And then I’ll print it out for my beta readers!  Should be ready by the new year…

(Now I need to go buy Christmas presents… at least my priorities are in order?  :-/ )