There are a lot of books out there.

In the days of Dickens and Hawthorne, writers were worth far more than a dime a dozen (a whole dollar, at least). It was a romantic profession, revered by many and envied by more, so much so that many an impoverished author had a benefactor or two to support them as they honed their craft.

Even taking into account the ones that have gone out of print, time alone has grown the number of books in existence exponentially. Digital publishing has doubled that exponent. Many well-to-do writers aren’t as well off as you’d think. We have to get things like day jobs to support ourselves. As for benefactors…well, there’s always Kickstarter.

What kills me is when an author–I won’t name names, but I will qualify that these authors I’m referring to make enough money to be only authors and nothing else–releases a new, eagerly-awaited shiny hardcover full of cliches and coincidences that seem so totally preposterous that you wish you didn’t have an e-reader so that you might have the satisfaction of throwing said book against the wall. I can’t believe the publishing industry is rewarding all this pathetic laziness.

But let me qualify:

Lazy writers are writers who can’t find the time to get their Butts into Chairs and Write. (Not counting this blog, I would currently be classified as a lazy writer. Trust me, it’s driving me as insane as it’s driving my editors.)

Lazy writing is when an author pulls a lot of crap out of their butt and puts it down on paper to keep the story moving along, or to affect a response from a character, or both. One wonders if they meant to go back and change it later, or why the editor didn’t catch it and fix it, or both.

Here are two of my favorite, real life examples of lazy writing:

Exhibit A: Paranormal Romance. Our heroine is a shapeshifter who own a bookstore. She meets a mysterious guy who asks her out on a date on Mother’s Day. He has her meet him at an airstrip where he whisks her away to a private Caribbean Island. While walking on the beach, she says to him, “I wish I’d known; I would have packed a bathing suit.” He says, “Don’t worry. My maid has picked one out for you. It’s in your room.” The woman goes back to her room to find the bathing suit: a perfect size 6. She tries it on and it fits beautifully…and I threw the book across the room.

I can forgive that 1.) she would leave her bookstore on one of the busiest shopping days of the year and 2.) that her very rich boyfriend would take her on a secret date out of the country. It’s called suspension of disbelief for a reason, and I was more than willing to disbelieve. HOWEVER: If you are a woman who has ever tried on a bathing suit, you know that A.) you have to try on 5,000 before you find one you will settle for and B.) No woman on earth has the ability to pick out a bathing suit for another woman and have it be just perfect. None. No where. No way. No how.

The reason I call this lazy is because the heroine is a shapeshifter. It would have made so much more sense for her to shift into the ill-fitting bathing suit to make it fit. A simple solution, had the author cared to think about it for more than five seconds. I ding both the author and editor for this one.

Exhibit B: Mystery/Suspense. Heroine runs into hero on the street while he’s walking his dog. Right at that minute, a cop drives up to tell the hero that his partner is in the hospital. Heroine offers to take his dog home while he goes with the officer. Heroine drops dog off at the hero’s house right when the hero’s ex-wife has decided to drop in for a visit. Wackiness ensues.

Now, while I would believe this story if my friend was telling it to me over coffee, the average person would not believe all this coincidence in fiction. It’s a funny, backwards thing. I’ve actually known writers basing a story on fact to omit things, so as to make the fictional tale seem more realistic. Because no one would believe all those coincidences. Know why? All those coincidences look like lazy writing.

I wrote my first novel when I was twelve. The summer before high school, I went back over the manuscript, made comments, and rewrote the whole thing. In one scene, the heroine is trying to get out of being captured. She asks the guard for some yarn so she can knit to pass the time. The guard agrees, leaves his knife and his rope, and goes to fetch the yarn. In the margin I wrote, “How convenient. FIX THIS.”

Have you ever found yourself muddying the waters to make things move along? Cheating a little bit because you’ve written yourself into a corner? Or are you the type that will stew for a week making sure you get out of that pickle logically and efficiently?

Either way, I urge you all to fight laziness.

If necessary, I will mail you all post-it notes that say, “FIX THIS!”

Hello, world, and welcome to June!

It doesn’t feel like this year should be half over yet. I know that the older we get the quicker time flies, as each second becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of our overall lifespan…but six months into 2011? Really?

And even more incredibly than that…how on earth did I manage to interview 30 authors on my website in the month of May?

It all started out innocently enough: I had a laundry list of authors on my to-do page that needed to be addressed, and I had my fairy goddaughters for Bring Your Child to Work Day. It was a match made in heaven. We came up with a list of fun and silly questions and decided to send them to everyone.

Yes, everyone.

Within a week I had twenty sets of answers from fiction authors whom I’ve known and respected for a very long time. Add to that five authors from the Magical Words Blog, and I was left with only a week to fill on the fly once I got back from the Nebula Awards. Easy-peasy-Japanesey.

What I didn’t realize when the girls and I came up with those quick and silly questions was how incredibly insightful they would be. (More than few of them were turned into Mermaid Profile Questions.) The interviews weren’t only fun to read, they were intriguing and inspiring. They were everything Barbara Walters hopes she can get out of her victims and more. (You can see the full list of interviews here.)

In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams told us that the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42. What we don’t know is the question. There is much wisdom in asking the right question.

I learned some very interesting things last month. I learned that I am not the only author who chooses coffee or tea depending on the situation, or who is afraid of really silly things. I learned that writers dream big…but also realistically. When asked to list three things they wanted to do before they died, most people listed incredibly attainable things. When asked how many words they wished they could write in a single day, most people’s goals were easily reachable. (Only Avery Mermaid and I really went crazy on that one.) And I found so many more things to put on my Princess List.

Writers are clever. Writers are funny. Writers live to experience things. Writers thrive on a sense of community. Writers love answering questions (but often hate choosing between two things). But most of all, writers are real. We build our castles in the sky, but we know our foundations must be planted firmly in the ground.

Last month, I learned things I never knew about friends I’ve had for…well, for some, around a decade. It is amazing how much you can find out about a person by asking a silly question. What’s your favorite word? Your favorite dessert? Your top 5 desert island albums? What schoolyard songs do you remember? How about your favorite board game as a child?

What are some other great silly questions? Go on, ask them.
If we’re lucky, we might just stumble upon Life, the Universe, and Everything.

I blame Saturday morning cartoons.

Even my teenage fairy goddaughters agree: cartoons today stink. The mid-eighties were the best time to be a kid on Saturday morning. Jem, Kid Video, Dungeons & Dragons, The Gummi Bears, The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo, Strawberry Shortcake (the original, non-crappy version)…the list goes on. You have a favorite. You know which one. (Feel free to post it in the comments!)

Even our commercials were cooler. McDonald’s pulled a Weird Al Yankovic on “Für Elise,” the Schoolhouse rocked,  and Fruit Wheats was the “in” cereal. Nowadays, all the fairy goddaughters know is which horrible prescription medication can get them a piece of a civil lawsuit and how much they can save on car insurance.

My little sister and I ate up those cartoons. We’d watch for hours on the weekends. After the VCR was invented (yes, shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs), we taped them and watched them over and over again during the week. Sometimes we even just watched the commercials over and over again. We got the dolls and the records and the happy meal toys, and we’d color in our Jem coloring books while we watched more shows.

Looking back now, I realize what a lot of those cartoons had in common: a family. Not just a blood-related family–sometimes it was simply a band of mismatched misfits (and in Jem‘s case, literally) who were thrown together and, using their combined forces, became awesome. My sister and I wanted to be a part of something like that, a club, secret or not, that was even cooler than our already-cool family who went on infamous European vacations and threw the best parties. And we weren’t alone.

So we rounded up the kids on the court–Me, Soteria, Devin, Megan, Chris, Allison, and whoever happened to be at our houses that weekend–and we made teams. Secret societies. Clubs. There was one where we all had posh names like Clarissa and Penelope and “Mudd; James Mudd” and we’d run around the yard talking to each other in falsetto British accents. One time, Devin and Megan had so many cousins over that I couldn’t remember all their names, so I called them “Spike” and “Jeremy” and “Webster Poom”…and then I made up new names for the rest of us.

One of the best clubs was the Thundercats Club. I designed colorful ID cards with our names on them and then laminated them in clear shelf paper, the same way Mom laminated her recipe cards–one of my greatest ideas EVER. I made a lot of ID cards for a lot of clubs that year. One of my friends from Elementary School contacted me on Facebook a while back and told me how proud she was that she still had hers.

Deep down, I think we all want that in some way: to belong. To have a family. To be part of something bigger and much cooler than yourself (and it always helps if you have superpowers). To be in a circle of likeminded misfits that just want to make the world a better place and plan to have fun doing it. This desire doesn’t stop as we grow older, it just turns into quilting circles and dart leagues and actual families we create from our wombs. The only difference is, nobody takes the time to make painstakingly hand-illustrated ID cards anymore.

Last month, I attended my very first Washington Romance Writers retreat here in Leesburg, VA. My number one goal? To make friends. I mean, not only were all these women also writers, but most of them also lived within coffee-drinking distance. There were roughly 110 attendees (we got a list). By the end of the weekend, one of these women was going to be my new best friend. Or else.

But I noticed something as I smiled my dazzling smile and introduced myself to one and all: a lot of women were also first-timers. A whole lot. Like, more than ten percent. Every time I turned around, I saw a new badge with a little blue “1st” ribbon sticking out of the bottom. Like me, these women were also beautiful and enthusiastic. They were a diverse group who wrote about diverse topics in a range of genres. Each one was at a unique stage in her writing career, but we all had the same goals: to have a writing career. And to make friends.

That weekend ended far too soon. I didn’t want to say goodbye and let it all go. And the minute I started my car in the parking lot I had one thought: I had to make a club. I needed to dust off those wild, impulsive instigator impulses and find a way to keep us all together. The coolest thing about this little epiphany was realizing just how far we could take it. This is, after all, the twenty-first century. Code names have become avatars and ID cards turned into website pages and lapel pins. We’ve come a long way from the eighties, baby.

And so, without further ado: World, I would like to introduce you to The Waterworld Mermaids. You guys are gonna love this.

Please enjoy your Saturday morning.