the ugly teenage phase

I'd mentioned on Twitter and Facebook that Ben gave me a pep talk during today's lesson. Several people asked me what it was about.

For background, during this lesson, we were working on an etude and a minuet. Both involve moving in and out of a lot of positions. This can be tricky with an instrument that doesn't have frets on it. You have to go by sound alone. You can cheat a bit and use a tuner to tell you if you're too sharp or too flat, but eventually, you play so many notes over and over that you start to recognize when they are too sharp, too flat, or just right.

The etude focuses on going from first to fourth position and back again. I thought I'd been doing fine in my practice sessions with it, but when Ben played the second cello part along with me, it was obvious I was playing a hair too sharp in first position and a hair too flat in fourth position. This really threw me, and I got flustered with how to fix it. (I did figure out that since the width of the fingerspace in positions narrows as you go down the fingerboard, I'm overcompensating for it when I change positions.)

I've been working on this etude for awhile, and I was starting to doubt my ability to improve on it, ie, I wasn't sure what to work on anymore, sharpness and flatness aside. I can play the right notes at speed, and my shifts are a lot better (no pausing to get from one to the other). However, it's nowhere near the joy-to-listen-to point. In fact, nothing I play gets to that point.

Ben said that I'm at that stage where the novelty of learning to play the cello has worn off, and I'm not satisifed anymore with "it's okay to sound bad since I'm a beginner anyway," but I've also not had anywhere near enough experience with the instrument yet to show deep mastery of anything. What he sees and hears in my lessons is that I'm in the thick of rolling up my sleeves and working at fundamentals and details so I can eventually get to the I-sound-and-feel-like-I-know-what-I'm-doing stage.

I heard a similar statement from one of my art teachers years ago. She said all creative works go through an "ugly teenage phase," where the shiny new project enthusiasm fades, and you have to work and develop the substance that turns it into something worth looking at (or in the case of music, worth listening to). That can be a long and tedious slog that requires the P word.

Patience.

I've never minded doing the work to get good at something, since I am more process-oriented than product-oriented when it comes to creative endeavors, but there comes a point where it gets hard to sit down every day and do the work when it seems like I only see a drop of improvement every once in awhile. (My latest drop was getting a quick eighth-note run in the minuet to sound and feel accurate, smooth, and comfortable enough that even I thought it sounded good.)

I suspect that's why Ben makes me keep a cello journal. He's forever pointing out how many pages I've filled and saying, "look what you were working on a year ago that seemed impossible, and now you can do it easily." It's his way of saying that I may be good about not resting on my laurels, but I suffer from a serious case of not acknowledging what I've accomplished.

His advice was to "keep being consistent and organized." Practice every day, no matter what, and continue to write down what I do. Approach a piece in layers so it's less daunting, which results in less procrastinating about even starting it - focus on one thing until I have it, and then add another layer, and then another - pizzicato to get the left hand comfortable, then bow in rhythm on open strings, then add the left hand back in, then add slurs and dynamics. It's the least stressful way to learn a piece thoroughly and not get permanently hung up on any one thing, and it sneaks patience in there at the same time.

Now he's assigned me a frenzied, someone's-had-caffeine-haven't-they scherzo to work on for the next few weeks. I've overcome tripping over eighth notes. On to sixteenth notes.

"You'll get there," he says. "And remember, we're doing this because it's fun!"

Never underestimate the power of others having faith in you when you run low on your own reserves of it.

a novel debut

Finally! My first novel is out in the world!

I've been sitting on the announcement for weeks because of the time it takes for the upload and distribution process.

You can now find Tempus House on iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Smashwords, Sony E Reader, and Kindle. Getting it from Smashwords is probably easiest - it's available in all formats there.

Even if you don't have an e-reader, many of these vendors have e-reading software for desktops and laptops. The book is the same price on each vendor's site. (It's $0.99, so if you don't like it, you're only out a buck.) You can download a sample for free.

The teaser:

Jillian Luell is a photographer with an unwanted habit of seeing things other people miss, even when she’s nowhere near a camera. When she inherits a house from her aunt and uncle, she discovers there’s more to her inheritance than just a creaky place full of a lifetime’s worth of other people’s stuff. A long-buried story of tragic young lovers requires an ending from beyond the grave, forcing Jillian to wrestle with reality giving way to impossibility in her new home. However, a mysterious man with connections to the lovers is doing his best to get in the way and keep the secret hidden.

This book has been six years in the making. (I cringe writing that.) I wrote the first draft in October 2005 for my first attempt at National Novel Writing Month. I put that draft aside for a long time, not sure what to do with it. I brought it out again and revised it for my master's degree thesis in 2009. I shopped it around to agents and publishers for more than a year with no bites.

I decided to try self-publishing since I was hearing and reading so much about it. So far, I've found Smashwords to be a decent e-pub site. They have a detailed style guide to help you format the final manuscript and cover image, and they can distribute it to all the major e-readers (and even to some I've never heard of). Within an hour of going live on Smashwords, people started downloading the sample and actually buying the book. That floored me.

The only bug I've encountered on the site is the cover image issue. You have to upload an image file, which is used for the book blurb, and is also automatically inserted into some, but not all, of the e-book formats. They insist that having a cover image makes the book look more "professional," and that if you want to be sure the cover image shows up in all formats, you should insert the image on the first page of your manuscript. This makes sense, but it also means that some versions will show the cover image twice, depending on if the software auto-inserted it or not. Can't really win that conundrum.

I've only had two hiccups with self-publishing this novel:

First, I had to change the title. There's a film that came out recently that had the same title as my original one. For such an unusual word, this surprises me. Since they "published" first, as it were, I had to come up with a new title. It was hard to let go of the old one, seeing as I'd been carrying it around with me since 2005 when I first had the twinkle of an idea for the story. My fault, though. If I'd published it sooner, I could have kept the original title. However, the current title will do. It's easier to pronounce and spell at least.

The second reason is also my fault. Due to the title change, I did a mass search-and-replace in the manuscript, and then went through the final draft to make sure the house name didn't read weirdly anywhere. As I did so, I started editing, and therein lies a trap. Every time you re-read something you wrote, you get the urge to revise it. I changed a lot more than I intended to. And then when I formatted the manuscript and went  through it again to make sure nothing wonky had happened, I did yet another edit! You'd think I'd learn...

Also, because I'm so good at overthinking, I started doubting whether I should publish it at all. Maybe I should re-write the whole thing. Maybe some of the descriptions would work better as scenes or journal entries. Maybe this. Maybe that. In the end, I reminded myself that trying to tell three generations of story in a novel without slowing the story down too much isn't easy, and in all my drafts I was trying to do that by balancing full-on scenes, quick descriptions, and journal entries. Some days, I think it more or less worked. Other days, well, we won't talk about those days. A benefit of finally publishing this story is that I can't revise it anymore. I've had to let go of it once and for all.

Over the many versions of this book, I've learned a lot about novel writing, and it's clearly showing in the upcoming books that I'm going to release. More detailed outlines to work from (I've tried pantstering, and it just doesn't work for me; I need some structure to start with, darn it), more scenes, more conflict, and less description, for starters.

Go read it. I hope you like it. I have more stories in me. They are coming soon. (The next one is a children's story!)

P.S. If you do find any typos or wonky formatting, please let me know and I will do my best to fix them. Since Smashwords distributes the manuscript in various formats to accommodate all the different e-reader platforms, things can obviously go pear-shaped in one format or another, despite their auto-vetter, which tries to catch errors before the manuscript goes live.