I just found out this morning that one of my favorite editors, Kate Duffy, passed away.  I’m very sad. Dean and I worked with Kate off and on for years. She was always fun, always outspoken, and a great champion of her writers.

Here’s a great tribute to her on Barnesandnoble.com. The world has lost a good one.

Kris

With this, I officially catch up from the computer meltdown in June. Next month, I’ll post September’s list.  Here’s August.

August was the longest month on record. I have no idea why. It just seemed to last forever. I’m rather startled that it’s over.

I started a lot of books in August, and am still reading most of them. Because of all of our commitments, I lost reading time—or I was too tired to focus on words when my day ended. I can only see more lost reading time ahead. What I did read, I enjoyed, as you can tell from the recommendations below.

August, 2009

Buzbee, Lewis, Steinbeck’s Ghost, Feiwel and Friends, 2008. Last year, well-known mystery bookseller, Sheldon McArthur, who retired to our little town in Lincoln City, read this book and loved it. He brought a copy to the weekly lunch to give it away to all of us, and no one wanted it. Finally, he pushed it into my hands. “You have to read this,” he said.

So I set it on my to-read shelf, and one particularly stressful night when I was out of YA novels to read, I picked up Steinbeck’s Ghost. The cover said middle grade to me. In fact, it said skews young, but I remembered Shelly’s rec and decided to give the book a chapter or two.

I finished it in one reading. Shelly was right; the book was excellent. It’s about libraries and Steinbeck and losing friends and pursuing money instead of family and California and all kinds of things, but mostly it’s about the importance of books. Good books. (It also has a great lesson for writers tucked in the book’s yummy ending—although that lesson isn’t want the book is about. You’ll know it when you read it.)

The book doesn’t skew young. It doesn’t skew too old either. It’s just right, and it made me want to go back and reread Steinbeck—not just the school stuff, but the haunting stories as well. (It amazes me how much of Steinbeck I remember, even after thirty-mumble years. I can even tell you where I was when I read The Pearl.)

A neat added feature of the book is that it has a bibliography at the end, so if the book inspires you to read about California or Steinbeck, you have a handy-dandy guide. Highly recommended—and I’m sorry, Shelly, that I waited so long to read it.

Gopnik, Adam, “The Last of the Great Metrizoids,” Through the Children’s Gate, Vintage, 2007. Gopnik is probably the only writer I know who can combine football, the Met, and dying into one heartwarming essay. The title refers to a friend of his, an art historian who used to play football, who is dying of cancer. In his last year, he coaches a football team for eight-year-olds. I don’t want to say much more, because that will spoil the essay for you, but let me just add that the part about the Hail Mary pass is priceless in and of itself.

Gopnik, Adam, Through the Children’s Gate, Vintage, 2007. A fascinating book, particularly after reading Paris to the Moon, which ends in 2000. That year, Gopnik and his family move back to New York City. The following year, on his daughter Olivia’s birthday, the terrorists strike the Twin Towers, and everything changes.

But the book isn’t about 9/11. Instead, it’s about raising a family in the most complicated city in the United States. The mood shifts from happy to destroyed to hopeful. Each essay does stand alone. (I’ve pointed out two, but there are others that I liked as well.) This book and Paris to the Moon should be read together. They’re marvelous.

King, Stephen, “My Screen Addiction,” Entertainment Weekly, July 31, 2009. Oh, I resemble this column. I identified with it, perhaps too much. King read that the average American spends 8.5 hours per day in front of various screens, and then he decided to see if he fit into that category. Courageous man, he did the math. I’m afraid to. Because I loves my screens. And I have even more of them now than I did when the column came out. Check out the column and see if you recognize someone—maybe even yourself.

Larsson, Steig, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Knopf, 2008. I’ve had this book since last summer. I meant to read it when I got the ARC (from Shelly, natch, after he finished and reviewed it), but I didn’t get around to it. Then the book started racking up award nominations and stellar reviews—and, honestly, that sort of thing intrigues me but also turns me off. You see, it activates my inner critic, the one who is determined to make sure I argue with conventional wisdom.

So I gave the book that proverbial single chapter, and I couldn’t put the damn thing down. The story’s structure is odd—more like the structure of a fantasy trilogy (over-arching story, with a lot of little conflicts and resolutions [which in a fantasy trilogy make up the individual books])—and the ending even odder. It shouldn’t work, and yet it does.

In fact, nothing about this book should work. The girl in the title has Asperger’s Syndrome and should be utterly unsympathetic, yet she’s marvelous. Reviews mention her all the time. But they ignore the other balancing point: the crusading journalist who decides to hire her. The journalist has to be based on Larsson himself, who was a crusading journalist before he had a heart attack and died much too young. Fortunately, he finished three of these books. I plan to read the next one as soon as I pick up a copy, and the third when it gets released.

Rayner, Richard, A Bright and Guilty Place, Doubleday, 2009. I bought this book on its topic alone which is, as the dust jacket says, “Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age.” Then I saw reviews, which were none too kind. They called the book a poorly written mess, disorganized, and hard to follow.

And, yes, they have a point. The organization isn’t a standard non-fiction history organization. Rayner’s writing style is odd to say the least. (Occasionally I actually had to stop to parse a sentence.) Yet the book is extremely compelling. It reads like a novel and sent me on a long-overdue quest to read all my other books on L.A. My office is now stacked high with them.

In addition to all the scandal, there are some nice bits on Raymond Chandler and Earle Stanley Gardner. Fun and dishy about people long dead. Read and enjoy.

Spinrad, Norman, “On Books: What Killed Tom Disch?” Asimov’s April/May, 2009. Norman and I don’t always agree on things, so when I saw the title of his book review column, written shortly after Thomas Disch died, I put off reading it. I figured I knew what it said—that science fiction killed Tom Disch or publishing killed Tom Disch. And in some ways, Norman makes that point. But to say that’s what this compassionate and heart-felt essay is about is to cheapen what he has does here. He writes an excellent memorial to a friend who committed suicide and explored what led up to that death, with clarity and insight. And I can’t agree more with his point of view. Read this. You’ll be moved even if you never met Tom Disch (or even if you have).

Stabenow, Dana, “Wreck Rights,” Wild Crimes, edited by Dana Stabenow, Signet 2004. A story about car accidents in which nothing is as it seems. Set in Alaska and featuring her detective Kate Shugak, the story doesn’t feel like part of a larger piece. It has power and an intriguing mystery at its core.

Stabenow, Dana, editor,Wild Crimes, Signet 2004. Aside from the two stories I mentioned this month and last, there are no real stand-outs in this volume, but there are no duds either. Not a one. Every story has power and every story is worth the time it takes to read it. All are set in “the wild,” usually meaning the west or Alaska or a little explored part of the United States. Worth picking up if you can find it.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Failure

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Since I’ve been dealing with setbacks, I suppose I should go all the way, and talk about failure. Failure isn’t something I’m fond of, but not for the reason that you think.

I happen to believe in failure. I think that we learn by failing. Watch any child learn how to walk and you realize that it’s all about failure. No child gets up and walks the first time he is set on his feet. Children pull themselves to their feet, then fall on their butts. Then they pull themselves up, take a tentative step, and fall.

We as adults know that it’s only a matter of time before the child starts scurrying across the living room toward the collectible books (better move them to a higher shelf now), but the child doesn’t know that. Still, he tries, and tries, and tries.

I’ve watched my siblings and my friends raise their children. I’ve seen a lot of kids in this stage, and I’ve noticed something. The parents who comfort the child when he falls especially if he’s not crying actually impede his development.

One afternoon in the early 1980s, I was at my grandmother’s house with my mother and a cousin who had a year-old boy. (I think it was my cousin; it might have been a neighbor. I’m hazy about whose child I actually was watching that day.) The boy was pulling himself up and then falling, and he was making his way around the dining room, standing, taking a step, falling; standing, taking a step, falling.

My grandmother had a non-intervention policy with her children and her children’s children. She gave her opinion when asked, but didn’t volunteer much. Or maybe she did, but certainly not in front of others. When I got married the first time, she supported me. When I got my divorce, she was there for me (even though she was getting frail). When I met Dean (my current husband, whom I’ve been with for 23 years now), she pulled me aside and said, “This is a good one. You keep him.”

Not only was that the best advice she ever gave me on my personal life, it was one of the only direct pieces of advice she ever gave.

So what I’m about to tell you remains clear in my memory because of my mother and my grandmother, not because of that little boy trying to walk.

We four women were talking and keeping an eye on the boy, when suddenly he pulled one of the chairs over. It knocked him down, but didn’t hit him. He sat in the middle of the floor, unhurt but startled, with that lovely expression startled toddlers get: Do I cry? Should I cry? Did this really bother me?

He had already decided it didn’t bother him and had reached for the next chair to help him stand up as my mother ran to his side, checking in a great panic to see if he was all right. The boy’s mother, seeing my mother react, hurried to the boy too.

The boy started to cry. He didn’t just cry. He wailed and sobbed and it took them nearly fifteen minutes to calm him down.

When the drama was over, my grandmother looked at my mother. “Marian,” my grandmother said, “if you had left that boy alone, he wouldn’t have even noticed that he had fallen.”

“But he might have been hurt,” my mother said.

“He wouldn’t have noticed that either,” my grandmother said, and then changed the subject.

I was startled at two things. First, that my grandmother had spoken up. As I said, she had a non-intervention policy. But second, her insight from (by that point) almost seventy years of child-rearing and child-watching struck me as true.

Children, raised in loving homes with parents less nervous than my own, fail easily and rarely notice. They take spills, and then they get up. They drop a ball, miss a catch, or trip over a crack in the sidewalk, and they laugh as they try again.

We let toddlers do this. In fact, we let children do this up to the age of three or so. We know that the try-and-fail method works, and that the child will eventually speak and walk. We gently guide our children by telling them no when they get near a hot stove, by steering them away from an aunt’s favorite cut glass vase, by holding their hand as they cross the street.

But we accept the try-and-fail model.

And then the child goes to school.

I don’t know when this happened, but it happened after I graduated from college but before my friends started sending their children to school in the 1990s. Suddenly, everyone got gold stars and encouragement. Kids didn’t fail classes and rarely got Ds.

College professors I know started complaining about this, because these kids often got their first D in college. Or, god forbid, their first F. And you’d think the world had ended.

My sister, a professor, visited me in Oregon last year after her semester ended. A few nights into the trip, she was still dealing with a student who was protesting his less-than-stellar grade, a grade she said he deserved. (And I believe her. She’s the tough but tender teacher who taught me how to read and gave me some of my most favorite novels.)

Why am I going on about this? Because failure is something we need to practice. Handled well, failure leads to success. In fact, I know of no long-term successful business person who lacks a failure in her background.

Don’t believe me? Check out this very short video on YouTube. Still don’t believe me? Then look at this even shorter video (you have 30 seconds, right?).

If you’re too lazy to click those links, let me give you a few heads-up. Henry Ford went bankrupt five times before starting Ford Motor Company. Walt Disney’s first cartoon studio went bankrupt.

Read the biographies of successful people. Some of these biographies will focus on the failures, and show them for the learning experiences that they were. The show Biography on A&E skips over the failures by mentioning them and then saying, “Five years later…” or placing a commercial break between the failure and the next success. Your job, as someone who studies how successful people do things, is to find out what happened in those intervening five years and figure out how that person who is famous enough for A&E to waste an hour of airtime on them turned that failure into a success.

That’s why I was initially reluctant to title this post “failure.” I don’t believe in failure. Not really. I know it happens. I know that it’s part of life. But I also know that failures are opportunities.

Opportunities to start over. Opportunities to make changes. Opportunities to learn.

And that’s the key. Like the toddler who has fallen on his butt, you could sit there and cry and wait for someone to pick you up. Or you can reach for the next chair, haul yourself to your feet, and stagger forward.

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me if I made a mistake when I married the first time. I startled him by saying I didn’t make a mistake at all.

Now, knowing that my first marriage ended in divorce, you’d think that I would acknowledge the failure and say that I shouldn’t have married my first husband at all.

But I would have lost so much. I would have lost several good years of a friendship I valued. I would have lost lots of learning experiences (some of which I’ve mentioned in the guide), and I would never have walked the road that led me to this moment, to this part of my life.

Joyce Carol Oates writes in her essay “Nighthawk” about her failure to qualify as a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin. The essay is a rumination on failure and its importance, but also on the opportunities that it brings.

Most things that people identify as failures aren’t failures at all. They’re setbacks, which I dealt with in the previous three posts. Setbacks turn into failures when you let them defeat you. When they crush you and keep you from achieving your dreams.

That said, I have failed many times in my life. I’ve been failing for the past month. I’ve been trying to write a novella that I have had to restart four times. That’s right. I’ve failed at writing this damn thing four separate times.

But is that going to stop me? No. I’ll keep trying until I get it right.

That’s a small failure. But I’ve had larger ones. I’ve gotten divorced, and in the process hurt the man I loved enough to marry. I’ve been fired. I’ve had two businesses fail. I’ve had two separate people embezzle from me. I’ve had two people whom I thought were close friends actively try to destroy my business.

I count all of those things as failures. I’ve responded well to some of them, and terribly to others. I’ve survived them all. I’m sure I’ll survive many more.

Because that’s the key to failure. Unless the mistake(s) you made actually kill you, you will survive. Whether or not you live with those mistakes is your choice. Whether or not you use them to better your life is also your choice.

In her essay, “Nighthawk,” Joyce Carol Oates says that had she gotten that PhD, she wouldn’t have written the work that has made her one of our most distinguished artists. If I hadn’t gotten the divorce, I wouldn’t have started Pulphouse Publishing, edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction or written one-tenth of the stories I’ve written. Because my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, has been beside me in all of those ventures, and sometimes he’s the one who has dragged my very best work out of my closed fists and given me the courage to mail it.

Did that toddler fail when he pulled the chair down all those years ago? No. He learned that chairs aren’t as stable as he thought and that they could be dangerous. (He also learned that if he gives women of a certain age a watery startled look, he’ll get hugged [whether he wants the hug or not]).

As tough as it is, we all have to learn how to accept failure in our lives. For some of us, we have to bring it back into our lives.

How do you deal with failure? Honestly, that was what the previous three posts on setbacks were all about. At the time it occurs, a setback is a potential failure. It becomes a failure if you never move forward.

As I prepared to write this section of the guide, I looked up the word “failure” in the indices of my business books. Most avoid the topic altogether, which is a shame. Only one deals with it at all.

That single book is, believe it or not, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Rich by Larry Watchka, published in 1996. Watchka has one paragraph on failure.

He writes, “Fear of failure will kill your business. You should always ask yourself, ‘What is the worst thing that can happen?’ Next, you should ask yourself, ‘Can I handle the worst thing?’ If the answer is yes, then don’t worry about it any more. Make plans to handle the worst thing, and then eliminate the fear.”

It sounds so easy, but it’s hard. Most of us had the fear of failure pounded into us. We’re supposed to “get it right the first time.” We should “avoid mistakes at all costs.” We’re supposed to be perfect.

As if perfection is even possible. It’s not. We all know it—at least when we’re watching toddlers. We know that they’ll try and fail. Just like we know that they’ll eventually succeed. Because, unless they have serious health problems, all toddlers learn how to walk eventually. You just have to give them the time and the breathing space to do so.

You have to do that for yourself as well. You have to expect the mistakes and expect the failures. Plan for them, just like I mentioned in the last three posts.

Then change your attitude. You could focus on the failures. I didn’t have to marry again. I could call myself a loser because my first marriage failed. Or leave publishing because my first publishing company failed. Or quit writing because my first novel got rejected (many, many times).

Instead, I deal with the failure, call it a setback, and move on. That’s why I hate the word failure. It has such finality to it. A failure is only a failure if you let it become one. Otherwise, it is an opportunity.

Or, as Winston Churchill once said (Churchill, who lost most of his fortune in the Crash of 1929 and had to go back to work), “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

Yep. And if you do lose your enthusiasm, you struggle to regain it. I’ve had that happen too.

That’s why I insist you should only freelance at something you love. Because there will be times when the only thing that gets you through the day is the fact that you love the work. Not that you love the fame or the money or your co-workers. But that you love the work itself.

This post is deliberately short because I don’t like to dwell on failure. I like to figure out what went wrong, and then move right past the difficulty, heading to the good stuff. I reach up to grab the next chair so that I can toddle on my merry way.

So toddle on, my friends. If you keep that in mind, you will become a success.

My business stays afloat by the work I do, work I generally get paid for (half up front, the rest through royalties.) I’m stepping outside the system with this Guide. I’m putting it on the web so that people can have access to it in these tough times. Please forward the Guide (and the contents page in the post below) to groups who might be interested, and people who need it because they’re starting their business in the middle of a recession. If you can afford it, please donate a little something—maybe what you’d pay for an hour long seminar or for a paperback book. Thanks in advance.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Failure” copyright 2009 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

“E-Male” and Two of the Deadliest are also available on Audible.com. Download here. With thanks to Dave Hendrickson, who is not as lazy as I am and actually looked this up. (And e-mailed [correct spelling] me about it.)

I’m still behind in posted the recommended reading.  I hope to catch up by mid-October. Wish me luck!

I taught a weeklong workshop in July, reading a lot of excellent student manuscripts. But that took much of my reading time. With that and moving and my own deadlines, I felt like I hadn’t read much. But as with the past few months, what I have read I’ve liked a lot. And it shouldn’t work that way. I shouldn’t be enjoying myself because when I teach I get into critical mode so bad that I usually can’t see the good in a sunny day. Obviously, the things I found this month were spectacular, or I wouldn’t have liked them at all.

July, 2009

Armstrong, Michael, “Following the Quarters,” Wild Crimes edited by Dana Stabenow, Signet, 2004. Dana Stabenow should edit more anthologies if for no other reason than she gets Michael Armstrong to write short stories. Michael, who got his start in science fiction and is a reporter for the Homer News in Homer, Alaska, writes the best mystery stories. Unexpected, filled with great characters and a marvelous Alaska setting. This one also adds compassion and a bit about newspapers that most folks don’t know. The best story in the collection. Find it if you can.

Beckett, Chris, “Atomic Truth,” Asimov’s April/May 2009. As usual, by this time of the year, I realize that I’m getting behind in my magazine reading. I’m not sure I’ll catch up, but I’ll give it a valient effort. There are some interesting stories in Asimov’s April/May issue, but the one that haunts me is Chris Beckett’s “Atomic Truth.” Some of it is the way that he presents the future, but most of comes from the viewpoints. He manages to write sympathetically about a schizophrenic—and make that man the heart of a compassionate story. One of my favorite sf stories of the year so far.

Boodman, Sandra G., “The Right Hospital For You,” AARP The Magazine, May/June, 2009. The May/June issue of AARP The Magazine is truly excellent, from the interview with Dolly Parton to the two articles I mention here. I’m filing this article with all of our medical information. It tells you the things to look for in a hospital as well as resources to find out which hospital is best for what ails you. I remember being stunned at 18 that my doctor in Northern Wisconsin couldn’t recommend a good doctor in my college town in Southern Wisconsin. Things are slowly starting to change—and this is one sign of it.

Butcher, Jim, Small Favor, Roc, 2008. A very compelling installment of the Dresden Files. I couldn’t put this one down, which I haven’t been able to say about the others, much as I enjoyed them. I’m not sure this book would be a satisfying read if you haven’t been following the series, but if you have, buy it now. It’s the best so far.

If you haven’t been following the series, then you might want to start a few back, with either Dead Beat or Proven Guilty. If you’re one of those anal people who must read a mystery series in order, then remember that—like most series—this one improves as it goes along. (And Butcher clearly visited Chicago after Book One.) It’s worth the time commitment to read them all if that’s your bent. I suspect the series will simply get better and better.

Child, Lee, The Persuader, Delacourt, 2003. Again with the first person. Most of the Jack Reacher novels are third person because of the complex story lines, but this one—which relies on duplicity and a lack of understand of the full situation on Reacher’s part—can only be told in the first person.

I seem to prefer the first person Reacher novels. The voice is stronger, as is the writing and the details. I felt everything, from Reacher’s confusion to his remorse to that freezing cold swim he takes in the middle of the novel.

Because this novel does rely on several reversals, I’m not going to say much about the plot. But I did like this one very, very much.

Gopnik, Adam, “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli,” Through the Children’s Gate, Vintage, 2007. I love this essay. I first read it years ago in The New Yorker, and was pleasantly reminded of it when I saw the title in Gopnik’s collection, which I ordered after reading Paris to the Moon. Then I reread the essay, and remembered why I loved it so much.

First, Gopnik’s love for his children comes through, but mixed with that knowledge that our children aren’t ours, really. They belong to themselves. His daughter who is three at the time of the essay has an imaginary friend named Charlie Ravioli. Only she never sees him. They keep making appointments to meet, or they occasionally bump into each other for lunch. Gopnik thinks it’s a very New York response to the world, but I think it’s more than that. I think it’s a very modern response. His daughter is only imitating what she sees around her, after all.

A wonderful essay, worth the price of the collection all by itself.

Kristof, Kathy, “How to Get Ready for The Worst That Could Happen,” AARP The Magazine, May/June, 2009. Another good article from the May/June, 2009, AARP The Magazine. This article, which I’ll also point out for you Survivor’s Guide folks, does make you examine your preparedness for serious emergencies. Check it out and analyze your priorities accordingly.

Silverberg, Robert, Dying Inside, first publication 1972, Fictionwise.com edition, 2002. I was recently invited to contribute to Robert Silverberg tribute volume. Even though I’ve read a lot of Bob’s work (and edited some of it), I had never read his classic, Dying Inside, and I’d always wanted to. This was as good an excuse as any.

I thought Dying Inside won every award in the business, but as is often the case with awards, what’s common knowledge isn’t quite true. Dying Inside had been nominated for every award in the business (quite a feat all by itself) and it won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. People talk about Dying Inside as one of the seminal works of science fiction—and while we might argue over whether or not the book is sf (I think it’s fantasy)—I think it’s a stunning work, that still holds up, decades later. (Yes, it has some dated passages, but then, the book was written in 1972 about 1976 [does that make it sf?] and Bob got most of the details right. The attitudes are appropriate to the character and the time period.)

I read the book quickly. The middle is a bit trippy—on purpose—and because I got interrupted while there, and because I’m not fond of LSD stories, I considered not going back. But it’s not fair to call Dying Inside an LSD story, and the trip is an essential part of the time period and the book itself. I went back, because I found myself thinking about the book even when I wasn’t reading it—something that doesn’t happen to me often—and I had to see what was going to happen next.

Not much happens in the book at all. It’s truly a character piece, and a good one, but I do wonder if it would be published at all as a new novel in today’s market. As a mainstream literary novel, yes. As sf, probably not. And that’s a shame, because this is a powerful work, resonant and wonderful.

From what I’ve seen, the book will be reissued in the next year. That’s a good thing, because right now, Dying Inside is out of print, except in electronic version. I ended up reading it electronically because we’re reorganizing our book collection—and although I know we have more than one copy of the book, I couldn’t find any of them. It was fun to read an old sf novel on an sf tablet (my Kindle). Kind of trippy all by itself.