…I have a new book out. It’s under my new pen name, Kristine Dexter.

I know that romance readers often don’t like to buy hardcovers. So if you can’t buy the hardcover, do me a favor and ask your library to order it. If you can order the book or have your library do it within the next month (until 5/15), you will help considerably with something called “velocity” which is one of the main ways that book sales are measured. (If a book sells quickly, that’s better than selling the same number of copies slowly.)

For more information on the book, head over to the Kristine Dexter page on this site.

And enjoy!!!!!

This week, I heard an interview with bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri in which she noted that “Writing is hard.”

She’s not the only writer to say that. I think every writer who has ever been published has uttered that sentence in an interview. I probably have as well.

But it’s not true. Writing is not hard. No one dies if a writer’s finger slips, the way someone could if a surgeon’s finger slips. Writers don’t climb poles in the pouring rain to jigger electrified wires so that some poor person’s power can be restored. Writers never risk life and limb to type a sentence. (At least in this country.)

So why do writers make this false statement? I used to think we did it to justify our existence. The fact that we sit alone in a room and make things up makes us feel a little foolish. We worry that others will think we’re not working, so we tell everyone we meet that writing is hard.

Over the years, though, I realized I was being harsh on myself and my fellow writers. We don’t complain that writing is hard because we’re trying to justify our existence.

We state that writing is hard because we’re being inaccurate. We mean that writing is hard work. We work as hard as someone who spends the day digging a ditch. We just exercise different muscles. And sometimes it’s hard to see those muscles working. We’re not as obvious as the ditch digger, but we put out as much effort.

I came to that conclusion after struggling with one fact: If writing is not hard, like I stated above, then that means this sentence is true: Writing is easy.

And writing is not easy. On some wonderful days when the muse actually shows up for her job, the writing is easy. But my muse is a slacker extraordinaire. Sometimes she doesn’t show up for weeks. I can’t fire her because she’s the only one available muse (and if she isn’t, then someone please tell me how to hire a new one). So I often have to work without her.

And working without her is hard. Um, hard…work. I struggle. I suffer. You don’t know how I suffer.

Wait. I don’t suffer. And maybe that’s where I have the most difficulties with the complaints. Writing is hard work, but how can I be suffering when I do what I love? I show up every single day. I make up stories. I write them down. I mail them. Occasionally someone publishes one—and pays me for it! What can be better than that?

So is writing hard? Of course not.

Is it hard work? You better believe it, baby.

copyright 2008 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I had time to play on the site for Baen’s Universe today. Baen’s Universe is a full-fledged science fiction and fantasy magazine on the web. It costs $6 to read an issue or $30 to subscribe. I’d recommend a subscription. The magazine has excellent columns and some wonderful short fiction. You can also get podcasts of various stories. And the artwork is lovely. Go and look at the previews, and if you like, hand them your money. You’ll enjoy the magazine. I promise.

Here’s the promised sidebar to the “Confessions of an Editor” article. Read that first. Then read this.

How to Write a Perfect, if Flawed, Short Story
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

So, how does one go from a group of three-year-olds screaming “Halleluiah Chorus” to singing the tenor solos in the Messiah on the stage at Carnegie Hall?

Practice, my friends. Practice.

And study. Learning to hear the flaws and to expect them, learning how to compensate, and learning how to avoid the obvious ones. Doing scales, day after day after day. Getting training, and listening to the opinions of others.

Realizing that talent is not enough, arrogance is not enough. Talent and arrogance do not make art. Human beings make art.

But enough of metaphor. How do you write the perfect short story? You don’t. But you strive for it, story after story, day after day, even after you are published, even after you are famous. You strive until the day you die.

And you remember that the best moments in life come from the heart. So give yourself to the page with all the warmth and love and understanding you can bring.

You will never know when you have written a perfect short story. But I guarantee that someone else will.

Copyright © 1994 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Why is this dated? Well, I’m not an editor any more. I happily retired from that job in 1997. I am a writer first and foremost, and I was even in those days. Only people forgot that. They liked my editing and wanted me to edit more. They wanted me to spend all my free time on someone else’s work instead of my own.

There is a sidebar. I will post that tomorrow.

Confessions of an Editor
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I write these things of my own free will. No one has coerced me; no one has placed me beneath a single swinging lightbulb in a dark, cramped room; no one has pushed pins beneath my fingernails. I tell you these things not to change you nor to get any sympathy, but simply by way of explanation. You see, in the course of my life, I have been called “difficult,” “opinionated,” “unreasonable,” and “harsh.” I have been called “rigid” to my face, and “bitch” to my back.

I am all these things and one more. I am a woman with a vision. In my mind, I hold the model for the perfect short story…and it is flawed.

Before we get to the model, let me explain the other terms. I was the little girl who always had to get her own way, the friend you never invited to the movies because my opinion — expressed during the closing credits — ruined what had been a satisfactory viewing experience. I am the woman who wants to know why parking meters no longer take pennies, and the employer who expects her employees to put in at least as much work as she does. I bow to the God of Deadlines, and I know that producing an issue for 80,000 people to read each month is more important than the Martian Death Flu that has me shivering with cold.

I believe in the power of Fiction the way some people believe in the power of God.

So I serve my Deity in my own way, and find it ironic that the very qualities that make me unbearable in life made me a candidate for editor of F&SF. And it is that editorial job which acts as both my personal heaven and my personal hell.

Heaven exists in the perfect story — in that piece of fiction which grabs me by the collar, pulls me from my desk and takes me to a new world. Sometimes that world is grim, and sometimes it is bright. Sometimes the world glitters and sometimes it gleams.

Hell is knowing I cannot buy the story. In my haste, I bought too many similar but flawed stories, not knowing the perfect story awaited in my mailbox. Or the story has little to say to the readers of F&SF who expect, after all, a bit of F or SF in their tales.

Hell also exists in the slush pile. Remember this: I am a woman who loves fiction, who believes in fiction, who lives for fiction. The perfect short story is an aria sung by Luciano Pavoratti, a home run flying straight and high against a blue summer sky. It is a moment captured forever on paper: a first kiss, a rootbeer float on a hot July afternoon, a baby wrapping its fingers trustingly around your thumb.

The stories in the slush pile share none of these things. They lack the sincerity of those moments. They are pale imitations. They are Handel’s Messiah sung by three-year-olds or batting practice on the first day of kindergarten. Slush pile stories lack distinction: an unwanted peck on the cheek, the fifteenth blueberry pie eaten in a pie-eating contest, the cold unbending hands of a china doll.

For my sins, I spend most of my time in hell. But that time makes heaven all the more sweet.

But what I have learned in this place is that no story is perfect. Beneath the emotional moment, beneath the beauty of the aria, behind the shadow of the baseball, lie tiny imperfections. The kiss is too short, the float too sweet, the baby’s hand sticky against your skin. Yet it doesn’t matter for those imperfections add to the moment, reminding us that we are human and that fiction is a human product no matter how divine we believe it to be.
In my difficult, opinionated, unreasonable way, I can — and will if dared — find a flaw in any manuscript, from Shakespeare to John Donne, from Toni Morrison to Ray Bradbury. But I will take no pleasure in it. The pleasure exists in the moment — in the trill of a high clear soprano above the cacophony of three-year-old voices, in the crack of a bat as a tiny ballplayer connects with his first pitch. I spend my time in hell, hoping for those moments, and I find them, although not often enough.

Being an editor is a difficult job for a person who is not afraid to be rude. For if I were not rigid about most things and bitchy about the rest, my opinion would not matter at all. When I find something I like, I praise it, I pay for it, I publish it if I can. I defend it as a little piece of the faith. And I only share with the readers the good moments. I see no reason to share the bad.

Copyright©1994 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch