So I recycled the card into something better.

1. You really need to write every day.

Or at least frequently. Good writing is all about voice and momentum, and they're hard to maintain when you're working in fits and starts.

You're working hard to learn a skill, just as a musician practices the violin. Don't jeopardize all you've learned--both consciously and not--by leaving it unused too long. Writing talent atrophies just like musical talent.

Of course, your career isn't over or doomed if you don't write every day. And it is never too late to start again. But you'll need to remind yourself that the first few days (or even weeks, depending) of writing after a lull are going to suck while you ramp back up.

2. You really need to read your work aloud.

In my experience, there is no better way to review my work than to read it aloud. Problems seem to pop from the page when I do, far better than when I'm reading silently.

Prose that reads well aloud generally reads well in print, too.

3. You should outline novels and stories to see how they're put together.

You don't have to be insane and outline the Song of Ice and Fire; pick a short book you like that seems to operate with all the precision of a Swiss watch and outline it.

I make a multi-columned table with these headings: Chapter Number, Scene Number, Action, Information Revealed, and Page Count. That way I can see just how many scenes are in a chapter, what happens in each, how long they are in relation to that action, and just what information gets revealed about the characters or plot or mystery. Sometimes I'll add a column for point of view, too.

That sounds like a massive pain in the ass, and it probably is. It took me probably three hours to outline Mystic River, but I'm so grateful that I did. Seeing how Lehane introduced his characters, developed the situation, paced the tension with chapter and scene length, and slipped clues to the mystery into the narrative wouldn't have been possible if I didn't actively chart it out.

Maybe you're a genius who can see that all in your head. But probably not.

4. You should type or handwrite passages you like from books or stories, just to feel the flow of the words.

Again with a musical metaphor: you need finger exercises to hear how notes should sound together.

No, you don't lose your own voice or individuality by doing it; you're just getting into a linguistic mode of narration and description and drama unlike the one you normally use.

5. You really need to read every day and pay attention to how words and sentences and paragraphs work.

All the Writers Digest books about pacing in the world aren't as useful as reading four good books and listing the actual words and techniques you see the authors using to control it. What words do authors use to get us inside the head of a third-person point of view character? How long a sentence does it take to describe a gunshot? A kiss? A walk across the street?

Yeah, these aren't always fun tasks and I resisted doing them as long as I could. Yet when I caved and tried a few, they changed my work for the better.

That's just my kind of luck. Cops will find a dead jogger stuffed into a storm grate and they'll discover all these documents I've written with lists of crimes to commit, reasons to do them, and methods to get away.

Then there's the blog entry I wrote as camouflage, showing my self-awareness of being suspicious and laughing it off. And the line in that blog about being aware of the self-awareness...

The good news is that it's a tough economy. Who isn't plotting a bank job to pay off the house or imagining the vengeful murder of a mortgage agent?

Of course it sucks that Realms of Fantasy is going out of business. Of course it is depressing to read the annual "magazines-are-shriveling-like-an-old-man's-balls" issue of Locus magazine, with those handy charts showing declining sell-through and subscription numbers. It is even worse that the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror will no longer be published, at least in its present form.

What keeps me as a writer from jumping out of a window?

• The short fiction "market" has been dead for my entire lifespan and long before it, punctuated only by the occasional reflexive twitch. Few if any writers have made anything above a meager living writing short fiction for half a century. I have never had any expectation of living off my wages as a short fiction writer.
• If you write short stories for any other reason than you love doing it, you're out of your fucking mind.
• Magazines should exist for readers, not writers. All this talk about "markets" and "exposure" and "acceptance equity" all too baldly exposes the common attitude that magazines are for getting writers into print, not for entertaining readers. I've long worried that there are more aspiring writers than readers, and I'm getting more evidence by the day. How intriguing that there were six magazines for writers at my Barnes and Noble and only one genre magazine--with no empty spots.
• Though there are many reasons that good magazines don't get in front of appreciative eyes, there's still the real possibility that those eyes are seeing the magazines after all and not appreciating what they see. In other words, at least some magazines are failing because readers--even the few that find them at all--just don't find them appealing.

I don't mean to imply that the genre "deserves" to lose its short fiction venues; good magazines die as often as bad ones and I'm sad to see them go. I'm just saying that none of it surprises me and little of it saddens me because, frankly, I've kept low personal expectations for publishing short fiction.

At least in the case of short fiction, I see publication as a happy accidental by-product of writing something awesome that I loved enough to do well. I approach my work professionally and I take my career seriously: I just have no reason to assume that anyone else does.

I'll likely keep doing what I'm doing: writing the best stories I can, sewing them into little books, and trusting my sister Lavinia to publish them when I'm dead.

Emily Dickinson sure outlasted all her era's magazines, too.

My goal? To understand how a good crime novel is put together, how someone encodes a mystery across 160,000 words complete with multiple points of view, misdirections, and developing characters. It's sort of like taking apart a car and labeling all the pieces to figure out how it works: tedious but very educational.

It occurs to me that doing this process in reverse might be helpful in writing such a novel.

You start with the big ending revelation in the last row of your table: the big explanation of how and why the crime took place. Then, in each row moving backward, you list each conclusion required to lead up to that final revelation, piece by piece, scene by scene. You design each scene to best reveal its clue, hosted by the character whose point of view is most interesting or informative or emotionally powerful (or misleading, if you need a good red herring). You move backwards in your novel from the specific to the general, from the truth to the near-truths your characters are likely to believe in the meantime.

I'm not saying that is how Lehane did it necessarily, though I wouldn't be surprised. My guess is that he thought of a traumatic situation for his characters as youngsters and wanted a crime that would collide the three of them as adults defined differently by that same situation. Then, for the investigation, he could easily have worked backwards from what really happened through each of the clues the characters follow to figure it out.

Or the poor bastard just hacked through from beginning to end, throwing away a lot of his own blind alleys and false starts.

I'm sure it isn't that simple. Between that outline and Mystic River are a lot of well-chosen words, subtle characterizations, and human insights--flesh on the bones. But without those bones, Lehane would likely be too busy figuring out the mystery himself to do the rest as well as he did.

Essentially a laptop word processor, the NEO has a four- to six-line LCD screen, a full keyboard, and some 300 hours of battery life per charge. It is also light and durable, boots up instantly, saves several large files, and even has a spell check.

Better yet? No Internet, no e-mail, no archives. Just pure writing.

It seems to be designed for schools, enabling students to write papers and even take tests(!) via a wireless network. That seems a great use for these, especially given how the Internet can be a huge time sink for the procrastinator.

It's a great first draft machine. Like a driver at night, you're focused just on what fits within your headlights--in this case, those few lines on your LCD screen. You see just enough to keep going.

I thank Paul Kirsch for showing me one at the winter Stonecoast residency. I also apologize for calling it a Speak and Spell.

Though I'll admit I could sure use an old fashioned game of Hangman.

Barack Obama isn't a bad Jedi name, come to think of it.

I'm well on my way, five hundred words in. I've got the detective and milieux already, and all I need now are a crime, a criminal, a victim, a motive, and a title.

On the plus side:

• I've met a lot of smart, insightful, conscientious people for whom writing and imagination are of prime importance. They've been very welcoming, too. The staff and faculty have been great, too.
• The presentations by both the students and faculty have been excellent. I've especially enjoyed the ones about dialogue, psychic distance, and unreliable narrators.
• I've survived my first critique relatively unscathed: many of the suggestions will certainly improve the chapter, and the readers seemed to enjoy it.
• I usually dislike readings, but I've heard some extraordinary writers and poets at them here: Tim Seibles has a poetic style mixing Barry White with Jack Kerouac, Ted Deppe's quietly poignant verse moved me, and Boman Desai read a wonderful piece.
• Maine, even in winter, is beautiful. Country snow is much nicer than city snow, and my daily drive to the Stone House through along a winding forest road makes a great transition to imagination. Last night, though, one of the administrators made a pointed announcement about speeding on that road which probably had to do with me.

On the minus side:

• When I arrived, the residency hotel had no record of me! Worse, the hotel was full for the whole week of the residency and they could only take me in for the first few days of it. I've been moved to a more distant hotel which, though nice, isn't at the center of the action. It's harder to meet up with people to go to dinner, for instance. Not that I've done that, yet.
• I participated in an open mic reading but ran out of time to finish "In Search Of"! It turns out that the story really isn't that good when you can't read the last three paragraphs. If you were at the reading and you wondered what the fuck it all meant, read it here.
• The next summer residency conflicts with Readercon so I won't be able to attend my new favorite convention!
• It's hard to be away from my girl and dogs for this long, and not just because I worry they'll somehow burn down the house together.

So far, so good. The relentless pace is both a positive and a negative: it's wonderful to find such stimulation all day long, but my daily napping schedule has been hopelessly ruined.

More importantly, there were many things I didn't do, and thank God: I didn't attend a PhD program outside of the state, I didn't move to DC for my job as I'd feared I might have to, and I didn't stop writing for any period longer than a few days.

I name all of my years, mostly as a trick to remember what happened during them. 2008 was the Year of Momentum when I learned to conserve and channel my energy on the things I find really important. I've spent decades of my life making elaborate plans for a back-up plan in case writing doesn't work out when I could have been using that energy to increase the odds that it would.

When I tip back some egg nog and Bailey's Irish Creme tonight to toast the new year, my best wish is that it will be close to as good as this one--that the rolicking changes in politics and economy don't intrude upon the comfortable shell of imagination I've built around myself. It took me thirty years to feel at home again in my own mind, and I hope I can preserve that no matter what comes.

I hope the same for all of you. May we all enjoy and instantiate our noblest delusions!

First, Twisted Sister brings the joy:

Second, and more seriously, The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl sing about the true meaning of Christmas:

That latter song really is my favorite Christmas tune: it's real and redemptive.

Here's hoping your holidays are, too.

I'm guessing that some charity or another encourages local businesses to decorate a tree for display in the library's resplendent lobby. Some businesses, like the hospital, decorate their trees with the accoutrements of their trade: teddy bears with surgical masks, in that case. Others, embarrassed about decorating a tree with, say, colostomy bags from the local GI clinic, opt to decorate along the theme of a book, usually for children.

We walked around them today, making sense of the weird shit hanging from the branches, and it occurred to me that nobody asks me to decorate a tree based on a book.

And for good reason.

My Zodiac tree? Sewn black hoods and Matchbox car doors (the latter being Aimee's idea). The Bell Jar? Mink stoles and pill bottles. There's nothing for Alive but deflated soccer balls and beef jerky, of course. At the Mountains of Madness demands Chinese lanterns and calamari.

The less you know about the Madame Bovary and The Hot Zone Christmas trees, the better.

Suffice it to say you'd never forget yuletide at my library, that's for sure.

True, there are now what I call the "filter" rewrites, where I go through repeatedly looking for one thing at a time: an adverb filter, a character name filter, a detail filter, and so on.

I'll be returning to the novel to do that in February.

But for now, it is a Thing. A living thing that I've spent a year creating, the most productive year writing-wise so far in my life.