I smell things that no one else does. When I was thinking about buying our house 20 years ago this month, I walked into the basement and instantly smelled mildew. Nobody else did: not my husband, not our realtor (and of course the sellers didn’t, wink, wink). What a surprise! Every time it rains, it pours in our basement. Years before that, I mentioned to a boyfriend that his car engine smelled off when he picked me up for a date. He was very glad for that date later when he found a problem in the engine upon examination.

Smells can trigger migraines for me (so if you ever gave me Youth Dew, Cinnabar, Giorgio or Red Door — sorry, it made me sick). Smells also trigger very strong memories: every now and then I get a whiff of the exact combination of cedar, mothballs and magazines that made up my grandmother’s attic, where we sometimes had to sleep when we visited her. I’m still hoping that someday I will find the same dishwashing liquid she used. I adored my grandma.

Beginning writers often (OK, even experienced writers sometimes) forget to invoke other senses besides sight. If they think of feeling, they don’t think of how things feel; instead, novice writers spend too much time on how their characters feel rather than thinking of what objects might feel like to those characters.

By now, some of you might be thinking, “Hey, she’s right. I might need to incorporate some senses into my writing.” I want to make it a bit more challenging than where  your first instinct will lead you. Take a look at whatever you’re working on now.

Current draft: Possibly describes how things look.

Next try: Might describe what things smell like: “My grandmother’s attic smelled like mothballs and old wood chests.”

Second try: Invokes the smells through metaphors, verbs and other techniques, but the word “like” might not even appear: “My grandmother’s attic greeted my nostrils with its trusty cedar hope chests and naphthalene packets hung like ‘No Trespassing’ signs between aging woolen suits.” (OK, I didn’t say it was good; I said it was a “try.”)

So think about your writing. Does it make sense?

June 1: Women Writing for (a) Change

For intermediate writers (and those who have taken any of my other introductory writing courses), I offer the next step along your journey to publish your writing. In “Writing for Publication” we will examine fiction and nonfiction genres/subgenres in depth; learn how to prepare query letters, synopses and proposals; and evaluate where to find the markets to publish your work. Suggested text: The Everything® Guide to Writing a Book Proposal. Open to women and men. The cost is $125 for this all-day workshop. Register at Women Writing for (a) Change.

June 4: Reading at the Wild Fig

Some of you know that while I have been happily earning money with my freelance writing and authoring five books of nonfiction, I have been working on a novel for years. I will now come clean publicly: I’ve been working on this book for 20 years. I have good reasons and bad reasons for the delay.

Fiction doesn’t make money until you finish it and sell it, so every time I got a nonfiction project I put the novel manuscript aside. OK, call me short-sighted. Another reason is that I workshopped it too much. I let too many people have opinions on it. One professor, in particular, had way too much influence on me, and before I knew it four tertiary characters had become primary characters with sex scenes and everything. I never intended anyone to have sex in the book in the first place. It was no longer my book; it was her book.

So I put the manuscript under my bed and let it sit there for three years. I took it out, dusted it off, and took five pages to the Antioch Writers’ Workshop where Katrina Kittle read it and loved it. She asked for more, but I said all I wanted was just a sanity check to see if the book was still worth pursuing after all that time.

But I digress.

My novel, River City Talent Showcase, is finally nearing completion after two complete rewrites in the last two years. I don’t know if it’s ready for prime time, but I’ll never know until I give it a shot. So I will be reading from my novel, and I will be joined by two friends of mine: Tina Neyer and Mary Beth King.

The Wild Fig Bookstore in Lexington, Kentucky, is a bookstore that sells gently used books and hosts readers and literature lovers. It is owned by artist Ron Davis and his partner, the lovely Crystal Wilkinson. Ron had a recent health scare, so I am lifting him up as I write this and sending him healing light from the River City.

September 15: Sisters in Crime of Columbus Ohio (SiCCO)

This event is in the planning stages and (I believe) you will need to be a SiCCO member to attend. (I know lots of sickos, but they’re not card-carrying mystery writers.

For this cool event, I’ll be receiving participants’ manuscripts ahead of time, editing them, and then giving each participant the results of my critique. Many of the members have never worked with a professional freelance editor before, so this will be an opportunity for them to get the beginning of their manuscripts edited before pitching them at Bouchercon 2012 a month later. Keep checking my blog or the SiCCO website for more details.

Working hard on Borderlands

Many days I “start” my writing process with a quick game to get my creative juices flowing. Or so I told myself. But I realized early on that for me, there is no such thing as a quick video game. Unless you can define “quick” as “adj.: less than a full day.” I made a rule for myself that I couldn’t touch the game console until I had completed three major deliverables. So most mornings, I have been able to bypass the Xbox and go right to the computer. But that didn’t necessarily mean I was working.

If I was on Facebook, I usually played any “Words With Friends” game requests that were waiting for me. Unfortunately, I have a lot of friends playing that game. After a good warm-up of two or three hours, I figured I’d get to writing after lunch. But hey, it’s  all about Words With Friends, right? So Julia Cameron would be proud. My “morning pages” were just morning tiles, placed vertically and horizontally.

So sometimes I recognize that I spend too much time playing and chatting with my hundreds of closest friends on FB and go “incommunicado” for a day.

That’s when the HP games icon usually starts calling me. I don’t even have to be online to play them: they’re on my computer itself.

I figured I’d play a little “Cake Mania” or “Farm Frenzy” to warm up my thinking for the day. In the beginning, this did work. The games were easy and somewhat mindless, so I could think about what writing I needed to do, prioritize my writing, think about where I wanted to go next in each piece, etc. I thought it was valuable time spent.

Then the games got hard and I actually had to think about what I was doing. Even worse: I was getting frustrated and uptight. The truth hit me when I realized that my stomach ulcer was acting up and I’d given myself a headache. I took my hands off the keyboard and paid attention to my heart rate and respiration. I was breathing fast and my heart was pounding. And it was all because I couldn’t make my cakes fast enough to serve the customers coming into the circus!

This was going to put me in a frame of mind for productive writing? Who was I kidding?

Me.

Luckily, last month I found a marvelous book of writing prompts. For quite a while, I’ve been looking for a good book of prompts and exercises that I could use with my various classes and workshops. I had concluded that I needed to just write the book myself (I probably still will). Then I found “The Write-Brain Workbook,” by Bonnie Neubauer (Writer’s Digest Books). This book is the first I’ve found with great prompts, and so far I’ve found only one mistake. (One prompt alludes to the story of the little engine that could and she calls it a little red caboose. No, I did not write a response about being an obsessive-compulsive editor.)

Neubauer’s book is great, if you’re looking for daily prompts that will stir your creative juice. Each prompt is displayed in a  colorful presentation, using different techniques to dredge thoughts out of you that you’ll be surprised you had. Already I’ve written two responses that I think I might polish up and publish. Neubauer even created 366 prompts, so I made sure that I wrote my first response on February 29!

OK, this morning I wrote a blog post. Now I need to get to work. I’ll save my “Write-Brain” workout for after work, kind of like stopping at the gym on the way home. After I get my writing done for the day. In the meantime, Farm Frenzy, Cake Mania, Words With Friends, Red Dead Redemption and Left 4 Dead 2 are all calling to me, like Sirens on the rocks.

Call away, you tempters. I need to write.

Remember, also, that Valerie J. Lewis Coleman and I are holding a Write On! Workshop in Dayton on March 31. This is a great workshop to attend, especially if you’ve ever wondered about self-publishing, because Val is the guru of self-publishing! Not often do you get access to someone who can give you so much information and advice on self-publishing.

• Standards/requirements identification documents (S/RIDS)
• Identifying environmental safety and health requirements for the Fernald Environmental Restoration Management Corporation
• Identifying environmental safety and health requirements for an Environmental Restoration Management Contractor

(If you worked for the Department of Energy during this Golden Era, you can find other papers at the Information Bridge of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information.)

What did I learn when writing these papers and in looking at them now?

1. I learned that you can’t always list the authors in order of who really contributed the most, nor can you even list them alphabetically. It’s political. I won’t break any confidences, but there is at least one person named on one of these papers who never added a word and I’ll bet he’s never even read the paper.
2. I learned that sometimes “political correctness” can almost get in the way of the truth. In one of the papers I had referred to all the experts working for me as “he.” The conference editor kept insisting that I should say “he or she.” I kept telling her that this was a report of an actual event and that all the experts had been men. (Yes, there was a problem with that, but it wasn’t with the paper; it was in the hiring, but that’s not the editor’s bailiwick.) Finally in a phone call I said to her very slowly, “There were no women. They were all ‘hes.’” She said that well, OK, she would let me say, “he.” I decided it would be inappropriate to say, “That’s real white of you.” I didn’t think she’d understand sarcasm.
3. I learned that even though I was a good writer back then that I had lots of room for improvement. I look at the writing now and shudder. And I was trying to avoid passive voice!
4. I can’t remember if the problems with the hyphens instead of “em” dashes were my mistakes or theirs, but they sure stand out. Ditto for the two spaces after a period. These papers look very old to me. They might as well have been written in 1894!
5. I’m shocked to find out that I used “Additionally” to start a sentence. I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I have never done that in my life.
6. I also learned on one paper in particular that I could write while on maternity leave. Should I have been working while on maternity leave? Uh, no. For more info on that I refer you to the opening paragraph.

How do you know whether to accept a new client or show that client to the door? Over the past two decades of editing the work of others (and being edited, myself, for more than that), I’ve developed a radar for “high-maintenance” clients.

Cave summus sustentationem Lorem! So what is a high-maintenance client?

• She wants to tell you why she wrote everything she wrote.
• He pushes back on your corrections and wants to explain his logic. There is no explanation needed for putting an apostrophe in “their’s.”
• She sees your meetings to review your critiques as a conversation and does not understand that the meter is running.
• He doesn’t learn from one project to the next and repeats the same mistakes.
• She expects you to be available at all hours, placing her work before any other clients’ and valuing her needs more than your personal time.
• He doesn’t accept your expertise.

How can you tell if your editing relationship is not going to work? It’s better to figure this out up front, before you’ve wasted your time and (heaven forbid) completed a project for which you never get paid. (And that’s happened to me, too.)

• Pay attention to how the person communicates orally. That gives you one clue to his or her written communication skills. They’re not the same: lots of writers can’t talk well, for example. But if someone is arrogant in person, he might be arrogant on paper and when receiving criticism.
• Or the person might have a lovely personality but have trouble recognizing boundaries. Does it bother you if someone from work calls you at home? Do you want to communicate through e-mail and this client keeps calling you? Do you give your clients your business e-mail and one leaves you messages on your Facebook wall? Pay attention to these details.
• Ask for three to five pages on a “trial” basis. Some editors don’t charge for this; I do, usually, unless I’m doing it as part of a workshop. You’ll get to see what their writing is like and they’ll get to see how you edit. You’ll also get to see how they take feedback. The benefit to charging for even a few pages is that sometimes you get to see if the person is a tightwad.
• If the writer is also a college instructor, check out “Rate My Professor” at ratemyprofessor.com. It’s a website for college students to talk very bluntly about their instructors. (If you’re an instructor, you might want to pour yourself a drink before you check it out for the first time.) Here’s what one student said about a potential client of mine: “Not for the young or opinionated. Hard headed and not open minded. You will never be right, ever! Only good thing is makes your brain work harder just to try and shut him up.” A student three months earlier said, “Would not recommend taking his class because he’s always thinks he’s right on every topic.” This is exactly the kind of client I do not want.
• Just because you went out on one date doesn’t mean you’re now in a committed relationship. I give my clients an estimate and ask for half up front. At the end, I bill them for the remainder, based on my time spent. Recently a new client sent me her manuscripts for two books but neglected to send the deposit. Foolishly, I edited them anyway. I should have reminded her about the deposit and waited. When I told her that I was finished with the editing and billed her for the remainder, she had a family member call me to demand her manuscripts back. I calmly told her that as soon as my bill was paid she would get them. “That’s all?!” Well, yeah, just like at the dry cleaner, I wanted to say.

What about you other editors out there? What have you learned?

And writers: read these warning signs and take heed. Don’t say to yourself, “Yeah, but I’m different. She knows I’m just kidding….” Or “But my book is really good, so I want to make sure they read it.”

Usually the efforts that writers put into “making sure” that the editors read the book would be better spent making sure that the book was written well.

• This past Thursday night I started another six-week session of Writing to Publish: Level II for UC’s Communiversity.
• Starting Monday, Jan. 23, from noon to 2 p.m., I’ll be teaching an eight-week session of Introduction to Writing for Women Writing for a Change. (I’m sorry, but the WWfaC course is for women only.)
• At 2 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 12, we’re holding another Writing Workshop Workshop at Olive’s in Clifton. on Ludlow Ave. Bring a manuscript to share and $5 for the kitty (more if you want to eat).
• Finally, on Wednesday, Mar. 28, I’ll be teaching a new six-week Communiversity Course for UC called Writing to Publish: Level III.