Mardi Jo Link's Blog

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It’s been more than a week since I filled in the ovals, front and back, at the township hall, but the “I Voted!” sticker is still stuck on my jacket. It’s right where I put it last Tuesday, when I was so high on democracy that I grabbed the red,...

I love the fall - pumpkins, apple cider, harvest. But those things happen in October. By the time November arrives in northern Michigan, the pumpkins are carved, seeds toasted, and the harvest is over. November means endings - cutting back the perennials, catching a last glimpse of the frogs in...

I'm a dog person. And at various times in my life I've had labs, poodles, sheepdogs, huskies.

But nothing, and I mean nothing, prepares you for a corgi . . .

Brain of an engineer, heart of a German Shepard, legs of a caterpillar, soul of a poet.

Meet Friday, our 11-year-old Pembroke Welsh Corgi, and my favorite dog of the week.

 

Fall is here in northern Michigan which means it's time to winterize. Time to put away the window air conditioners, time to cut back all the perrennials, time to add Stabil to the lawn mowers and the tillers, time to store the fishing boat.

Winter can be scary here along the 45th parallel if you're not prepared. Being prepared is a good way to fight that fear.

Watching my husband hitch up the boat trailer and move Moby Dick into the barn, it reminded me of what happened when he brought it out last spring. It was early May when he pulled off the tarp, swept off the cobwebs and dust, and rolled Moby -- an 18' Starcraft decked out with downriggers in the stern, fish finder, drink holder, and ship-to-shore raidio next to the steering wheel, and a big cooler bungie-corded at the bow -- into the sun.

I stood nearby and watched his grin spread. The man loves to fish. Then, something odd. Interrupting this annual ritual was an unexpected sound. Mewing. Mewing and hissing.

A barn cat had kittens over the winter and one of them was hiding deep in the boat's motor compartment. My husband spent more than an hour taking the whole back of his boat apart, but the kitten just kept squirming deeper and deeper. Eventually, the black bag of fuzz lodged itself into a recess too small for my husband's hands to fit into, and too far back for my arms to reach. We couldn't just leave it there but we couldn't get it out, either.

Enter my middle son, Luke.

His arms are long and thin, his hands dexterous, and his heart brave and kind. Which was all good, considering that this kitten was wild, afraid, and fully aware of the power of its teeth and its claws.

(It might be tempting here to remind me of the importance of spaying and neutering. It would be in vain. My pets have always been spayed and neutered but accomplishing this on a barn cat is tantamount to capturing a small panther.)

Gloved and resolved, Luke pried the kitten loose. Just after this photograph was taken, it spit in his face and shredded his gloves in appreciation of his heroism. She didn't trust him; she had no idea he was just trying to do the right thing. These days, trust seems just as rare in the human world. 

I was reminded of that this past weekend at the Grand Rapids Public Library's Book Fair. After giving a talk on "Funding the Writer's Life," a small line of people gathered to chat. I've found myself in such a line when I've gone to hear a writer speak, so now that I'm sometimes the one at the podium, it's interesting to experience it from the other perspective.

I was anticipating questions about literary contests, agent searches, and Kickstarter. I certainly wasn't expecting questions about copyright, but that's what I got.

The first three people in line asked me versions of the exact same thing: "I'm worried about editors stealing my idea. Do you copyright your work before you submit it?"

And it occurred to me that while trust is unthinkable for a kitten stuck inside Moby Dick, it can be just as difficult to master for a new writer trying to get published.

My answer to these three writers was probably not all that helpful. I told them that I'm a trusting person by nature, and so I send my work out, cross my fingers, then start a new project. I've published two books, I told them, plus hundreds of articles, essays, and opinion pieces, and I've never had anything stolen.

"Not that you know of," one writer said, walking away scowling.

I've spent some time thinking about this issue since then and here's how I wished I would have answered the question.

Which brings me, the long way round, to my Five Reasons to Fight the Fear:

1. Being afraid is no way to go through life. Think of the joy you're missing out on if you're constantly afraid, constantly thinking the worst of people, constantly expecting the scary to come true. Expectations are reality. If you expect the publishing industry to be a scary place where everyone is out to cheat you and no one values your work, you'll act accordingly and surely find the one bad seed in the sunflower. Try focusing on how happy the whole flower is instead. Try a positive attitude. That might sound hokey, but try it anyway.

2. Being afraid is no way to gain readers. Think about the books, essays, magazines you like to read. Is it all paranoia all the time? Of course not. Even peoople who like to read horror or thrillers enjoy them because of the contrast between safety and danger. If all they had was fear, they'd be boring. Your attitude permeates your work. And if you come to your work from a place of fear, your work will be one dimensional and boring. Fear comes from a sense of scarcity. Ask yourself, is what you're really afraid of that you don't have any more ideas?

3. Your writing is already copyrighted. According to copyright law, your original work is copyrighted the second you put it into print. Note I said "print," not "publish." You own the rights to your work until you give them away or sell them.

4. Editors are your friends. Chances are, the editor you're sending your work to has spent years honing his or her craft. They live for the day they find something fresh, something helpful, something entertaining to publish. Finding good work is a reflection on them, on their taste, their eye, their connections. Editors see hundreds, sometimes thousands of ideas a week. Theft is a product of scarcity and scarcity is not an issue for editors. They'd like nothing better than to open your submission and find something publishable.

5. Fear is an excuse not to write. It's easy to say that you haven't sent your work out because you're afraid it will be stolen. It's much more difficult to spend the time crafting something of value, revising it, researching markets, following submission guidelines and sending out work you care about and worked hard on. Fight the fear with preparedness and hard work.

So then, about that kitten.

After Luke freed it from the boat, he put it into a plastic bucket, I covered the bucket with a towel, and carried it, scratching and hissing, back to the barn. Once inside, I took off the towel and gently tipped the bucket on its side. The kitten fled into the dark. A few weeks later, a sighting. It was running behind it's mother in the field, hunting mice.

I have always thought that online nit-picking was silly.

I mean, Twitter wars? Facebook fights? Grow up, people.

I enjoy social networking, mostly for keeping up with friends and family, funny one-liners from my favorite writers (Moms Who Drink and Swear!) and photos of picturesque places around the Midwest. But if I want bickering, I can just tell my sons to mow the lawn or clean the bathroom in the real world. I don't need the internet for that.

But then I stumbled on a seemingly innocuous question (it's always the innocent looking conversations that get me into trouble . . . ) in the Book Publishing Professionals group on Linkedin.

"I was accepted into an M.F.A. in Creative
Writing program, at a senior stage of my life, but a junior stage of
my writing," asked a group member named Phillip F. "I feel I am starting at the right time; others say I'm too
late. Ideas?"

Bring on the warm fuzzies, I thought to myself, and the responses were almost all encouraging. "Sometimes it takes a lifetime of experience before you have something worthwhile to say," was a standard reply. 

Then, this reply showed up in the discussion: "DO NOT PAY FOR AN MFA," someone named "Amy Charles" lectured. (Amy, lowercase letters are your friend.) "Unless you really
want to make a gift of money to the university and the professors in the
writing program, who make more money than you likely ever will from
writing."

About this same time, I clicked over to some blabbering in the London Review of Books that advised writers considering an MFA to get a real degree.

And I am here to tell you, I nit-picked. And I bickered. Since when does someone named "Amy" know what's right for every single writer? Since when does the London Review of Books get to compare Master of Fine Art in Creative Writing programs to "Stuff White People Like" and get away with it?

Not here and not now. I'm paying for an MFA, I'm white, and you know what? I don't like that stuff. Not at all.

Blanket statements get me riled up because no matter how well intentioned, they are the voice of the oppressor. Do as I say, or else.

Well, my life to date is practically a living, breathing monument to doing the exact opposite of what people in authority have demanded. And you know what? Things have turned out even better than I could have hoped for. And, unintentioned side benefit? My struggles have made a half-way decent story.

Looks like I've made it this far; there's no reason for me to start listening to bad advice now. Guess what, Amy? I'm currently a tuition-paying MFA student in Queens University of Charlotte's low residency program. When I graduate in another couple of years with my MFA degree, I plan to be a Maelstrom of Future Action. If I really apply myself, Marshal of Funky Authority is not out of the question. And maybe, just maybe, if I keep up with all the required reading, this intense and devoted study of writing will truly make me a Master of Frigging Anything. 

You don't earn a title like that by paying attention to blanket statements that begin with "don't," "can't," or "won't."

Hey, stranger things have happened. And you know what? Most of them have even been good ones.

 

 

   

Lately I've been busy mourning the passing of two bad seeds: Breaking Bad's Walter White and Gone Girl's Amy Dunne.

Walter is a high school chemistry teacher who learns how to manufacture meth, and Amy is the "cool girl" every man dreams of but who actually seethes hot lava on the inside.

So why do I mourn them, you ask? Because I miss them.

I miss Walter's descent into his worst possible self and I miss Amy's attention span for revenge. Having arranged my weekends so that I could watch the AMC television series, and having read the Gillian Flynn mystery novel in one neck-cramping sitting, I can say that I no longer exist in the pre- Walter & Amy world, but must muddle along in the post.

And let me tell you, post- Walter & Amy land is a much more wide-awake kind of place.

Walter took glee in lying to everyone who cared about him, murdered a drug dealer here, a kingpin there, and even poisoned an innocent little kid for god's sake.

As for Amy, she manipulated things. And "manipulated" is probably too passive a verb; she basically manhandled any and all life forms in her path -- and some inantimate objects, too -- with her crafty brain. (I'll leave it at that in deferance to those of you who still live in the pre-Amy world.)

And yet, I rooted for these characters. I was on their team, on their side, cheering on each of Walter's blue batches of meth, fist pumping every one of Amy's verbal end-arounds. People suffered in these fictional worlds. People exploded, people begged for their lives, people messed up in their jobs, people went crazy.

And there I was, the reader and the watcher, just a howling for joy.

For a while, I couldn't shake the feeling that there must be something wrong with me. I mean, why else would I root for the bad guy? Am I bad, too? Am I, horrors, some kind of mommy sociopath next door???

I thought about my reading and television watching preferences and yup, there's lots a bad guys in there. And girls, too. A whole alphabet of them. Artemis Fowl, Batman, Holden Caulfield, the Dude, Edie Sedgewick, Fritz the Cat, Gordon Gekko, etc. Love. Every. One. Of. Them.

Truly, just the mention of their names gives me the warm fuzzies. So, that means I'm doomed, right?

But then something else occurred to me. Something that probably saved me thousands of dollars on therapy: I root for the bad guy because the bad guy feels real. Often, feels a lot more real than the good guy, who, let's be honest, can be a putz.

And real isn't bad at all, it's good.

It's great, even.

Who's your favorite anti-hero?

 

 

Recently,
presidential candidate Mitt Romney quipped that his wife, Ann, was born at
Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. While the media ignored that quaint little
factoid, focusing instead on Mitt’s next remark, the one where he said that no
one had ever asked him for his birth certificate, the details of
Ann’s birth actually caught my attention.

That’s because I was born at Henry
Ford Hospital, too. And it occurred to me that not only was Ann Romney born in
the same hospital as I was, we have other things in common, too: We are both
the mother of sons, we both like to ride horses, we both color our brown hair
blonde, and we both have Welsh ancestry.

What else, I
wondered, did little ol’ me, an a-political mom, wife, and writer in the
Midwest, have in common with a woman who could become our next first lady?

I
decided to do a little research and find out.

After Ann was
born, she grew up with her family in Bloomfield Hills, one of the five
wealthiest cities in the United States. After I was born, I spent three months
in foster care in Detroit before I was adopted by my parents, who lived in
Battle Creek. Where Purina manufactured their dog food and a
quarter of families lived below the poverty line.

Ann did well in
school and so did I. She at the private Kingswood School, a National Historic
Landmark with forty acres of formal gardens attracting tourists from around the
world, and me at seven different public schools scattered around the Midwest.
My family moved around a lot while I was growing up.

But no matter, because at least Ann
and I both went to college!

She attended Brigham Young, a private religious
university where students follow an honor code forbidding them to consume
alcohol. I attended Michigan State University where I received high marks in
journalism and helped haul trash cans full of sand into the basement of the TKE
House for a January blizzard beach party. A six-kegger.

After college Ann became
a housewife, marrying Mitt in a ceremony at her parents’ Bloomfield Hills home,
then hosting a reception at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club. Among her guests
was our future President, Gerald Ford. President Richard Nixon sent hearty
congratulations to the newlyweds. After college, I worked as a reporter for an
un-unionized daily newspaper, earning $180 a week, then married my long-time
boyfriend in an outdoor ceremony. Among the guests at our wedding was Big Joe, an
amateur bartender who treated guests to his signature cocktail, the “Mountain
Dew Me.” My dog, a shaggy mutt from the humane society, congratulated me by jumping
on my dress.

Now it’s starting
to seem like Ann and I don’t have much in common, after all. But wait, Ann gave birth to five sons and I gave birth to three, plus have two stepsons from my second marriage, so there’s
that. She and Mitt recently celebrated their 43rd wedding anniversary;  my first husband and I divorced three
months before our 20th.

As a wife to Mitt,
Ann has pursued charitable endeavors, many of these aimed at helping
underprivileged children. Ok, so what if my sons were on the reduced school lunch list
for a while. Ann can still relate to me in other ways, right? Take, for example, our shared
love of horses!

In her free time,
Ann enjoys horseback riding and I did too. Although I ride Western, she competes in dressage and
earned medals from the U.S. Dressage Federation. And she
has a California trainer to help her import new stock from Europe. And one of her
horses, Rafalca, not only won a spot on the U.S. dressage team, but even competed
in the 2012 Olympics. While I got a second job as a waitress and saved my tips to buy
a pole barn kit, fencing and two mixed breed horses. Maybe Ann and I could have
gone riding together, except that middle class people like me can’t afford to
keep horses anymore. Or get our hair colored regularly, either.  

But at least we
still have our Welsh ancestry in common, right? Ann is proud of hers and I’m proud
of mine, too. According to the New York
Daily News, Ann’s grandfather emigrated from Wales to Detroit in 1929 and
went to work in the car industry. It was a pretty good decision, too, considering
that her family’s personal fortune is now about $250 million.

I contacted the
adoption agency and learned that my birthmother’s ancestors also emigrated to
Detroit from Wales. But that’s really all I know. At least it explains my
freckles and my good attitude in the face of adversity. And by adversity I mean
my checkbook: My personal fortune varies month to month, depending upon my
balance. Right now it’s $1,847.

For a minute there
I thought that comparing myself to Ann was an exercise in futility. That the
only thing we really had in common was that we were born in the same Michigan
hospital. I don't begrudge her her wealth; far from it. I'd love to have access to that kind of dough. I just think that people who live in the White House should be able to relate to the people who don't And I'm not sure she can.

But then I learned one last thing about her. When she was
Massachusetts’ First Lady, the Boston Globe criticized
her for being, “largely invisible.” 

Geez,
Ann, I know exactly how that feels.

I
guess there is one more thing we have in common, after all.

 

There are five of us and we meet behind the muffins.

It is early evening when we hurry into an ordinary grocery store, fresh from our jobs and our families, from the weather and from our obligations.

We are adult women with mortgages and pets and degrees and assorted people like students and children and bosses and husbands who count on us, so our obligations are not insignificant.

But we are also writers.

And in the previous month we've either started a young adult novel, finished a personal essay, drafted a new chapter of a memoir, or revised the tricky part of a literary novel. And so we show up, smiling, excited, often confused by our own work but every once in awhile, dare I say it, almost proud.

Mostly, we're ready for what's next. The carnage. Loving, tender carnage, but carnage nonetheless.

Because we are, though surely you've guessed this by now, a writing group. We are the Powerfingers, a name we didn't choose but that chose us after someone's keyboard mangled the title of Neil Young's dark ballad. But that's another story.

Back then I was just happy to be in a writing group that was truly working -- that met regularly, where the members brought new work and offered useful critiques and revision ideas.

When we started in the summer of 2010, it felt like all five of us had been riding separate waves of writing and language, of publication and rejection. Then somehow, after years of swimming alone, those waves randomly aimed us at the same beach.

Now, after two years of getting together in the grocery store's cafe every month, after two years of (lovingly) tearing into each other's work and offering up our own, I know it wasn't random at all.  Yes, we were lucky to find each other, but each of us had already been swimming for quite a long time.

Here are five tips for organizing a writing group of your own:

1. Choose Members Carefully

You probably don't want your best friends in your group, even if your best friends are also writers. Drinking wine together and making catty remarks about arrogant writers or the latest NYTB's cover boy can be a worthwhile way to pass the time, but won't do your writing a whole lot of good.  Instead, find writers who are actively working on a long term project, who are willing to devote time to the group, and who have both manners and opinions. That may seem easy at first but I've found this to be a rare combination of personality traits. When you have your group just right, don't feel guilty about turning new members away.

2. Meet in a Neutral Place

When the Powerfingers first got together, we met at my house. Which meant I spent the whole week before our get-together worrying about how messy my house was, and then the whole day before, cleaning it up. I spent more time cleaning and thinking about cleaning than I did on considering the other members' writing. Which did give me an occasionally clean house but wasn't fair to the other writers in the group. Now we meet in the grocery store cafe, which is cleaned and mopped regularly by teenaged bag boys. Who, by the way, seem to have no interest at all in five grown women discussing their writing. Imagine.

3. Share Work in Advance

You'll receive the most valuable feedback, and be able to offer it yourself, if you have at least a week to read members' work before you meet and comment. The Powerfingers email each other that  month's submission a week in advance, then we come to the meeting with printed copies on which we've written notes, jotted ideas and suggestions, and asked relevant questions. Take this deadline seriously.

4. Be Quiet

French scientest Pierre Paul Broca rocked some serious mutton chops in the mid-1800's, formed a society of free thinkers, and was described by detrators as a subversive corrupter of youth. My kind of guy. He was also a surgeon fascinated with the human brain and one of the first medical scientists to understand why it is virtually impossible to talk and listen at the same time: The same area of the brain, "Broca's area" as a matter of fact, is responsible for both activities. So while your work is being discussed, pipe down.

5. Be Tender and Helpful

No writer wants to hear that their newly finished essay is shallow. Even if it is. Especially if it is. No writer wants to hear that their protagonist is as dull as a mud fence, or that their memoir has no arc. The goal of a writers' group is to encourage each other to keep writing, and to get better at it. Destructive words like "shallow," "dull," and "no" will have the opposite effect. Discuss what the piece is about, what it is trying to do, what it does well, and finally, what it could do better. Don't patronize with false praise, but don't show your teeth, either. Save your fangs for tossing a snarl into situations like this.

The Powerfingers' successes have been both internal and external. We write with more confidence and knowledge of our own abilities and we know we have people we trust to help us work out literary challenges both large and small. Between us, we also have an NEA grant, book deals with two major publishers, a produced play, a semi-finalist in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Contest, and several literary awards.

Not bad for a group of women writing away in the corner of a grocery store.

 

 

For years internet cheerleaders have been promising writers who go digital everything from ebook millions to an instant audience for the the quirky, the how-to, even for monster romance novels.

I can't vouch for the authenticity of any of those opportunities, but I can offer some information on Kickstarter, a newish funding platform for creative endeavors. Including literary ones.

Kickstarter works like this: Creators describe their project, set a funding goal, and submit their project to the site. If it follows the basic guidelines, the project goes live on a specified date and remains open for backers to pledge funds for between 1 and 60 days.

Some recently successful publishing projects from Kickstarter you just can't help but love:

Hannah Stevenson of Lily & Thistle Creative Studio launched a project to publish her paper doll coloring book. Her goal was $2,000 and she received $4,434 from 181 backers.

Novelist Keri Topouzian received $6,556 from 107 backers to get her novel, A Perfect Armenian, edited by a professional editor. It took her seven years to write and is based on historic events and cultural conflicts. The author says, "If it weren't for fiction, I believe we would know very little about our world. A list of historic facts might come and go, but when our imaginations become involved, we learn."

Documentary filmmaker Ron Faiola will turn his film, Wisconsin Supper Clubs: And Old Fashioned Experience, into a book thanks to $3,011 in pledges from 32 backers.

And, yours truly has a Kickstarter project that's live until April 20th, titled, Secret Cuts: A Cherry Orchard Mystery. At the time of this writing, my $2,500 project is 92% funded by 53 backers with 7 of my 30 days remaining. 

So, here's what I've learned about getting a writing project funded in this way:

One, take some time to define the project for yourself before you launch it. I wanted to write an investigative article about a local crime and publish it as a Kindle Single. The more specific you are, the more likely you can communicate your idea to others.

Two, don't skip the video. If you haven't ever made a video before, consider this an opportunity to learn how to work in this increasingly important medium. It doesn't have to win an Academy Award, but it does have to describe you and your project well. According to Kickstarter, 50% of projects with video in the description get funded; only 30% without one do.

Three, you can launch it, but that doesn't mean they will come. Don't just launch your project and expect Kickstarter to do all the work of getting it funded. The site gives you some very easy to use tools to get the word out about your project and to communicate with your backers. Link your project to your facebook page, blog about it, and send an email to friends, readers, supporters, your dog groomer and librarian.

Use tact and retraint when doing this -- don't spam and don't overdo it. There's a difference between letting people know about what you're up to and repeatedly clogging their inbox, their facebook timeline, and their voicemail.

Don't forget to drop a line to the media - Kickstarter is still relatively new, so it's news. As in, here.

A couple caveats: Kickstarter works with Amazon to deliver pledges to creators and funding is all or nothing. If you meet your goal, your backers' credit cards are charged and the money is transfered into your bank account. If you don't meet your goal, all pledges are cancelled. And, even if you do meet your goal, Amazon holds onto the money for about two weeks.

The site only allows projects that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that makes something. You can't fund your trip to Europe unless you plan to create something about the trip too, like write a book, make a film, or paint a series of landscapes.

After identifying a project, making the video, launching it on the site and working to get backers, I can say that for me, this has been a rewarding process. I made a promise to myself that I would use this as a test case and wouldn't do the project if it wasn't funded. The process itself has made me anxious to get going on the real project though, and I'll consider using Kickstarter again.

So, if you've been thinking about launching a Kickstarter project but haven't gotten around to it yet, what are you waiting for?

 Update: My Kickstarter project funded April 20, 2012.