A while back I wrote a post called Saying No and Saying Yes, about how hard it is to turn down invitations, whether they’re social or professional.

I turned another one down this past week. It made me think again about why it’s so hard. I wrote then:

An invitation suggests that the sender values you and/or your work, and for that reason alone, it can be hard to turn one down. And when you say yes, you almost always get additional positive feedback: so glad you’ll be able to participate! can’t wait to see you! looking forward to your contribution! Etc.

When you consider turning down an invitation, it’s hard not to worry about the implications of the refusal. If it’s a professional request (especially one with $$ attached) you might face the traditional freelancer’s fear that if you turn down work, you won’t get offered more work ever again. If it’s a social invitation, you might worry about giving unintended personal offense by your absence. But if you keep saying yes to new things, you necessarily limit the energy and time you have left for everything that’s already a part of your life.

While I agree with what I wrote in 2009, I also think I left something out of my analysis. We’re trained — and by ‘we’ here I somewhat mean everybody, but I especially mean the female-socialized subset of everybody — that we should do useful things with our time.

How do you know if a thing you’re doing is useful?

Well, we’re also trained to seek external validation.

So if someone else says they want you to do a thing — and that they want YOU, specifically, to do it, because of your unique talents — it is difficult not to decide that yes, absolutely, you should do that thing, right away. Because you’re needed!

In other words: saying no can feel really selfish. And arrogant. Really? You think the manuscript you’re working on is so important that you can’t (fill in the blank) for this incredibly worthy (person/organization)? Who do you think you are? 

And if you’ve spent a lot of time getting that external validation by doing things other people want you to do, it can also feel scary to say no. Because saying no means turning away from something you know you’ll be rewarded for in favor of doing something that may not feel rewarding for a long time.

So how do you do it? In the case of my most recent refusal, recognizing two things helped:

• how much time I’d already contributed to the entity that wanted more
• how long I’d been saying I wanted more writing time, but then saying yes to doing things that would mean I’d have less

Semi-related: Katie Lane has an excellent post on how to say no to doing things for free: “How to Not Die From Exposure“, and Mette Harrison has wise words about how to define success as a writer (hint: not by what other people think).

But as hard as it is to do, saying no isn’t the point.

You say no in order to grant yourself more time.

Once you carve out time by saying no, you need to fill it with what you wanted the time for in the first place, and avoid the infinite sidetracks that will immediately present themselves; like housework, or blogging.

At the risk of resembling the spring bloom on the bottom right in the excellent botanical guide by Dylan Meconis pictured above, I want to talk a little about how yoga is helping my writing.

I take yin yoga classes. Someone today called it naptime yoga, and it’s true that it’s  almost entirely done seated or lying down. It is challenging, though. You hold each pose for three to five minutes. You definitely feel it.

But as satisfying as it can be physically, and I generally do come out of class feeling significantly bendier, what keeps me there week after week is the way I disobey the instructor.

See, one of the classes I attend is on Sunday afternoon. Sunday has also become the day on which I’m most likely to get a solid amount of writing done. So I tend to show up having spent the time immediately preceding on my manuscript.

Yin classes are quiet. Because you spend so much time in each pose, your mind is likely to wander. The teacher makes gentle comments to bring you back to the mat. One I’ve heard many times: “Drop out of the stories in your head.”

I do the opposite. As I lean back into saddle pose, wincing or smiling depending on how tight my quads are, I drop into the scene I’ve just been working on. As my muscles first protest, then gradually relax, I often find I’ve figured out what happens next.

This is not substantively different, I realize, than thinking about your book in the shower, or while you ride your bike, or when you’re in bed on the edge of sleep. These are all times when your brain can go sideways productively, bypassing the top-level chatter of anxieties and errands to get to wherever the story comes from.

But I love the getting away with something feeling I get when the teacher tells us to drop out of the stories, and instead I drop in.

Lester’s a trainer. And although I am not officially being trained by him, he sometimes trains me anyway.

One day I was doing squats. I really want to be able to squat my bodyweight, so I keep trying to go heavier. But in my striving, I can get a little careless. Lester showed me a couple of ways to improve my form — finding a fixed point to look up at, lifting my toes.

“It’s not just the weight,” he told me. “It’s the technique.”

Another day, a dude came in whom I hadn’t seen before. He gave a very enthusiastic pep talk.

To himself.

“Make it BURN!” Dude said, watching himself in the mirror as he did a few fast dumbbell curls.

While Dude continued his motivational speech, infrequently punctuated by further reps, I was doing a compound exercise: front/lateral raises. Lester admonished me to keep my elbows in close during the front raises. “Oh thanks!” I said, panting a little. “I always find it harder to do the compound exercises.”

Lester barely glanced at Dude as he spoke. “Yeah,” he said, “but you doin em.”

Diana Wynne Jones almost made me miss my flight.

I was so entirely inside FIRE AND HEMLOCK that it was only the final boarding call that managed to penetrate my consciousness.

Are you surprised that I was reading it for the first time? Me, too. But somehow I grew up without discovering her work, and somehow, although I heard many times how amazing a writer she is, was, is — somehow I’d only read THE TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND, which, while excellent, is a different sort of project altogether.

I need to tell you that these days it’s hard for me to fall into books. It’s hard to repress a reverse-engineering, how’d-they-do-that style of reading after I’ve spent years honing my ability to pay that kind of attention.

But FIRE AND HEMLOCK felt simultaneously unpredictable and inevitable; like I wasn’t reading, I was dreaming. When I heard that boarding call I was angry, like anyone would be if you woke them up from a dream. And it was the wonderful kind of dream where you feel like you’re learning important things about life and yourself and the world. Not directly, not by someone telling you flat out This is how things are, but by swimming through experiences like a deep-sea diver.

FIRE AND HEMLOCK tells you, slantwise, how to be a writer:

Things seemed to make themselves up, once you got going.

You mustn’t ask it to bits.

What they mean by ‘iron nerve’ is the same as a thick skin.

You have to learn not to notice how silly you feel.

FIRE AND HEMLOCK is also about memory.

Polly gets her memories back.

Until she does, though, and until she understands what she needs to do, she feels a frantic sense of loss.

I’ve felt that loss again and again the past several years, as I’ve watched both my parents’ memories fail, knowing there’s nothing I can do to restore them. The plane I was waiting to board was going to take me home after a stint of that watching.

You could say that I needed an escape, and FIRE AND HEMLOCK provided it. But like a dream, it was singular and strange and deeply familiar at once. And even though the book seemed to be about other people, Diana Wynne Jones’ skill made me feel like it was for me.

How do we keep our memories? The ultimate answer, of course, is that we can’t. As I was writing this, I found out my childhood home was up for sale. My room,  that was pink and then, when I was a little older, cream, with the maps of Narnia and Middle-Earth and that one poster with the violin and the rose, and the other one with the bicycle, and the bookshelves, and the window that faced the street that made me love the sounds of cars driving by and the shapes their headlights made on the wall — this is what it looks like now:

I won’t be in that room again. But writing about it makes it, somehow, present, even though now all the time I spent in it almost feels like a dream.

It’s exactly that space, between memory and dream, that FIRE AND HEMLOCK occupies, and why it’s so perfectly a book about stories as well as everything else it is. And I haven’t even talked about the ballads, or the books Polly reads, or the stories the characters tell each other.

I’m sorry that I’ll never meet Diana Wynne Jones. But I’m extremely grateful that I can know her, through FIRE AND HEMLOCK and the other books I have yet to read, and reread.

It’s also the day my parents — both librarians — got married.

Their wedding favors? Bookmarks.

Because our house was full of books, because they read to me, because I grew up feeling like libraries were my second home, because they always supported and took seriously my desire to write: all reasons why I’m a reader, a librarian, and an author today.

But a lot of teens are not as privileged as I was.

So I’m raising a glass to my parents’ anniversary, and sending some cash to YALSA’s Books For Teens in their honor. You can, too.

• Remember how I have a story, “Fair Trade,” with art by the fabulous and now Eisner Award-nominated Dylan Meconis in Welcome to Bordertown? Now you can acquire a fetching and affordable paperback edition!

• Remember how I have an essay, “Nineteen Panels About Me and Comics,” in Chicks Dig Comics? The book is OUT NOW! And there will be an EVENT on April 20th at Bridge City Comics featuring several of the contributors. You should come! I will write my name in your copy, and perhaps draw something, although, warning, I cannot actually draw.
• Excited to be a presenter on April 23rd of this year’s Oregon Book Award in young adult literature. Also conflicted, because I know and like all the finalists! Relieved to be a presenter and not a judge.
• But I am going to be a judge — and I’m equally excited — for the all-Portland Public Schools Verselandia poetry slam, April 25th at the Mission Theater. Totally intend to defer to the judges who are poets themselves, however. Extra cool: this will be the very first Verselandia. Read about how it came to be.

Today is my Nerdy Little Workout Notebook’s one-year anniversary.

Now I ain’t tryin to turn this into some kinda fitness blog. But I thought that for comparison’s sake, I’d transcribe both my inaugural Nerdy Little Notebook workout from 4/6/11, and the one I did earlier today, 4/6/12.

4/6/11

Squats 2×15 = 20 lb barbell

Lat pulldown 2×15=70 lbs

Standing overhead shoulder press 2×15=20 lb barbell

One-arm dumbbell row 2×15=15 lb

Bench press 2×15=45 lbs (bar alone)

Calf raise 1×15=90 lb

Crunches 2×15

4/6/12

Bench press (in squat cage, which is far easier than with free weights since the bar itself is stabilized and you’re just pushing it up and letting it down) 1×12=95, 1×10=115, 1×8=135, 1×6=145

Lat pulldown 1×12=70, 1×10=85, 1×8=100,1×6=115

Incline press 1×12=10 lb dumbbells, 1×10=15s, 1×8=20s, 1×6=25s

One-arm dumbbell rows 1×12=15 lb, 1×10=20, 1×8=25, 1×6=30

Seated shoulder press 1×12=10 lb dumbbells, 1×10=15s, 1×8=20s, 1×6=25s

Front raises 1×12=5 lb dumbbells, 1×10=6s, 1×8=7s, 1×6=8s

Alternate dumbbell curls 1×12=10s, 1×10=15s, 1×8=20s, 1×6=25s

Hammer curls 2×12=20s

Triceps pushdowns 1×12=30 lbs, 1×10=40, 1×8=50

#

I try not to pay excessive, obsessive attention to certain other numbers one can track, the ones stitched into pieces of clothing or displayed on a scale. I don’t always succeed, but I try.

But I am totally fine with obsessively tracking the numbers that tell me how much I can lift.

And credit where credit is due: that first workout, and many of the ones that have followed, came from Stumptuous.

• Making oatmeal with a lot of stuff in it. Tips: toast the pecans before you chop them. Use frozen blueberries when fresh ones are out of season. Frozen banana works too, and is actually great with the toasted pecan. Do not stint on the cinnamon.
• Working on my works in progress  in longhand, to see if the different feel of pen on paper will make my brain go different places than it does with fingers on keyboard while grimacing at glaring screen.
• Reading A Different Shade of Blue: how women changed the face of police work, by Adam Eisenberg. Specifically, it’s about the history of women in the Seattle Police Department. Really interesting perspectives on the changing role of female cops and the discrimination they’ve dealt with over the years, sometimes compounded and complicated by prejudice based on their ethnic & cultural backgrounds and/or sexuality.
• Listening to The Modern Scholar: The Second Oldest Profession, Part 1: A World History of Espionage by Jeffrey Burds. A line I liked, on the complexity of managing/handling spies: “Rare indeed is the field agent who is a mere executor of his master’s will.”
• Pondering how not to be a clever writer.

I can’t remember when I first heard the phrase, but now I often hear it in my head. I come home, go upstairs with my bag full of sweaty gym clothes, toss them into the laundry basket. No empty trips whispers my brain. So I pack the now-empty gym bag for the next day and take it back downstairs. If I’m really on it, on my way back out I take out the trash, stopping at the car to throw the gym bag in the trunk. (Thus far I’ve managed to avoid putting the gym bag in the trash and the trash in the trunk, but sometimes it’s a struggle.)

I also think about it when I write. Say I have to get the protagonist from point A to point B. What can she be doing on the way that reveals more about who she is? “Put something into your character’s hands,” Franny Billingsley once advised. No empty trips.

Prose Pros:

– Control. Being totally in charge of the world I’m creating.

– Being free to write about things that are hard to draw without fear that I’ll eventually make an artist’s life hell.

Prose Cons:

– I can’t use silent pages, which can be a great way to create breathing space for a reader and convey moods.

– I can’t use the kind of narrative counterpoint that I love so much in comics, when the pictures convey something different from and perhaps in opposition to the text.

Graphic Novel Pros:

– Collaboration. Getting the insight and talent of another creator.

– A graphic novel script doesn’t take as long to write as a novel.

Graphic Novel Cons:

– The script might not take as long to write, but I still have to wait for the artist to draw it, and the artist almost certainly has other projects competing for their time.

– There are still a lot of readers out there who don’t speak the language of graphic novels, who aren’t confident in their ability to parse panels, or are just disinclined to make the effort.

How am I going to decide? I don’t know.

I can already visualize certain scenes very clearly. But does that mean the scenes will be most effective as comics, or that I simply need to convey them as clearly in prose as I’m seeing them in my head?

Other writers of both comics and prose, how do you decide which format is best for a particular story?