A Spa for the Writing Brain

(The only spa here is metaphorical; look elsewhere for massages and LUSH products.)

Last night was another night of stymied writing, shot through with stresses and doubts and more than one self-inflicted distraction of the Interweb kind. I went to bed feeling dejected about the writing experience at large, with that nasty little snaggle-toothed thought deep in me that maybe I should just gave up. Naturally, my genius being a masochist, inspiration chose that moment to strike, and I wound up scribbling notes about my current project until I was literally so fog-brained I couldn't remember them from one note to the next. It happened again this morning.

You know what the secret was? I had given up on thinking about work.

So, it's clear that I am designing a lot of blocks for myself, though they are based on some quite reasonable stressors that I cannot really help in any logical manner. As such, after some consideration, I've come up with a few basic homework assignments for my psyche that I hope will lead to a lowered stress level and an increased inspiration level (the two are only sometimes related, and then I wouldn't call it "stress" any more than I would the feeling of being two hundred feet from the end of a marathon); and because I don't always trust myself, being a creature of immoderate moderation, I'm putting it up here on the Intertron so you can all keep me, in some distant way, honest.
I will:

• Stop talking about work outside of work, beyond answering questions others ask. Adapting to a new job is stressful, but I shouldn't let it follow me home.


• Eat only food that is healthy, energizing, and what I actually want to eat. Forcing myself to eat what I brought for lunch when a craving is upon me is reasonable when I'm craving fried chicken and chocolate cake, but if I have the spare $5 and the Beli Deli is still open, there's no reason not to get a sandwich.


• Avoid drinking before I write; drinking isn't for inspiration, it's for flying the flag of surrender.


• Submit stories on my lunch break; today's was surprisingly freeing.


• Get Microsoft Office installed on Wednesday one way or another, no later than my next paycheck.


• Keep comfy clothes clean and set aside for the night time instead of always wearing them to work.


• Do whatever I have to to regulate the temperature in my house, even if that means a slightly higher heating bill.


• Not force myself to finish Eraserhead tonight. It's entirely possible that movie sucks as much as it feels like and its writing is not writing that seems to be inspiring me to greater heights. I should finish it, but not when my writing time has to necessarily happen on the heels of doing so.


• Follow the advice of expert writers and stand ready to counteract writer's block with very long walks. This is not a bad excuse to grab the occasional bite of dessert.

That may all seem basic, or may all seem insane, but it's all really exactly what I need. Maybe that says something about my creative process. Maybe it doesn't. I leave it to history to judge my shortcomings and achievements, and also to decide which is which.

Right Then

I'm not the firmest believer in astrology; I have my horoscope on my iGoogle page more out of entertainment than guidance, and in my limited experience the personalities attributed to astrological signs are so archetypal that I catch myself identifying with about half of them at various times. However, I do occasionally glean something useful from it, and it's certainly a topic a fantasy author can't hurt himself by keeping abreast of, so it stays there on my homepage.

And then I go to bed after a night of writing that felt a little bit lackluster, and wake up to this prediction for Scorpio:It's time for you to move beyond any logical concerns you have about your creative abilities and just let your natural talent take over. This may require a higher level of trust than you've previously attained, but with five planets in your 5th House of Self-Expression, the only thing that can hold you back is your fear of success. You have the vision and the ingenuity, so get out of your own way and let it flow.And I'm forced to conclude that perhaps there's more more going on with those archetypes than I'm admitting.

An Editor's Dreams

My sense of time is utterly destroyed.

It keeps occurring to me in bright flashes, moments that leave me stunned and doubting and recounting the days: somewhere at the beginning of 2010, I completely lost my macro-scale concept of time. I can still count seconds; still feel hungry at the right times of the day; but when trying to recall how recently something happened, I find that my judgment of such matters is gone.

I just finished a night's writing, working on the manuscript for a short story, and when it came time to save the new version to my rough drafts, I was shocked to see that the story that had "languished far too long" had only been laying abandoned for seventeen days. Every few minutes I find myself having to remind myself that it's only been two weeks since I started at my new job; that I'm only two weeks gone from when I last saw my friends from out of town and only three weeks from my arrival for a vacation in Fort Bragg. This weekend feels like it was all at once four days long and only one day (perhaps helped by having slept very poorly on Friday night). I can't believe tomorrow is only the start of March, on basically any level: this year has had so much adventure already.

Speaking of adventure, I have had the first unpleasant experience with my new job as far as the ways it has leaked into my day-to-day life: I've begun to have copyediting dreams. Both Friday night and Saturday night I found myself dreaming of being at work, hunched over a gray-filtered doppelganger of my lovely and spacious desk, with a manuscript in a manila folder in front of me; and both nights I have found myself chanting and maundering to myself as I go hunting for errors, so desperate to find something wrong in the blurred mess of chimerical page proofs that I would swear dream-me was sweating. Both times I felt defeated, or panicked, like I was not able to find something wrong, but not because there was nothing wrong; and both times I woke up gasping in a way I haven't since the old and indomitable nightmares of attending a final for a class I never bothered to attend.

I like to rant about the lack of strong, challenging rites of passage in our modern world, but I think I may have found one. Maybe I'll get a tattoo to commemorate surviving it once I'm through to my ninety-day review; or just go all the way and get scarification on my face.

To make this germane to the blog again, I will say that the good news is that the new job has not impacted my writing (though I find myself uninterested in talking about the nuts and bolts of it). This year has actually been fantastically productive, and my slip-ups in scheduling have been unnoticeable, in the sense that I have not found myself kicking myself when they occur. The biggest snag I have struck is the technical limitation caused by Wednesday (the new laptop) being in some senses a large netbook—notably, thus, a machine that lacks a CD drive. This had made submissions to magazines difficult, as I cannot easily edit my writing files into tarted-up .doc files and get them sent out, and I in fact am behind on submissions for this very reason. I plan to attempt to fix this issue this week and address the backlog, because the truth is, without submission, this career is going nowhere; and the the longer I wait, the more awful and looming the world of rejection and judgment is going to seem when I do get stuff out the door.

And now, this post is long enough; and my attempts at further prose have been so purple I think they might be leaving the visible spectrum. Suffice to say that life is anxious, and busy, but good; and that this blog and all its trappings, Randall and company included, are firmly anchored as part of my life.

Whoa.

The first week at the new job is done, and the title is all I have to say: "Whoa."

The culture and ethic here is very, very different from my old job. I don't want to engage in bashing my old proofreading position, so I will say that it was what I needed when I was at it; but this new copy editing job is definitely the right next step up. This includes, as a mixed blessing, the fact that this new job is actually a serious, forty-hour-plus work week: I have spent my first four days embroiling myself in the style guide and various secondary sources dealing with the kinds of certification exams we produce material for*, without many more breaks than those mandated by law and the occasional need to take two minutes to reset my brain. It's challenging, it's new, and it's exciting; but this does mean that I am not able to take much time online during the day, which in turn has meant that I haven't had much time for blog updates.

Fortunately, this is in part because I am spending large portions of my evenings writing. Book Three of Not Providence is as of now about a quarter of the way into its rough draft phase, and I have finished 1.9 short stories already this year, with a third about halfway done. I'm back in that place where I find myself getting jolted at random with bits of inspiration and new possible twists in my stories, which is honestly a lovely place to be. I'm trying to get the energy together today to deal with a magazine submission, but something—I suspect fear—is making it feel like a mountainous ting to surmount, so I may have to cleanse my brain with an episode of Lost before I do that. And yes, in a more mundane context, I am finally watching Lost; see earlier in my blog for why I'm allowed to be behind. (Please take that sentence in the spirit of good fun.)

Lest this whole post start with the letter "I", I (damn!) would also like to bring everyone's attention to a recent bit of entertainment and enlightenment—the Guardian's ten rules for writing fiction, in which a variety of authors give their ten rules for, well, being a writer. I reacted to being sent the link with a burst of skepticism, but the sender is someone I trust, so I clicked it, and was pleasantly surprised, even uplifted. Out of all the advice, the only one I disagreed with much at all was Elmore Leonard's Rule Three, and even that I don't take much issue with—I do think using a verb other than "said" can be a good thing, especially in terms of avoiding adverbs after "said" (in my eyes a much worse crime), but I agree that "said" is a much more transparent word than many writers will admit. I particularly love Margaret Atwood's and Neil Gaiman's lists of advice, but other particular gems of wisdom include:

Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said". (Roddy Doyle)

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue. (Helen Dunmore)

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. (Geoff Dyer)

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand. (Anne Enright)

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money. (Jonathan Franzen)

And the one I most needed to hear:

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity. (Anne Enright)

All of it is that pithy, that insightful, and that valuable; if you're looking to write, this is an article to read. Though do have the courage to disagree with them sometimes; the only thing I think is an absolute for all writers, always, is the one piece of advice all of them seem to repeat endlessly, and the one that I found, in its Zen way, most enlightening:

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. (Anne Enright)

Write. (Neil Gaiman)

Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style. (PD James)

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go. (AL Kennedy)

So, I'm going to go just that—write, in my own voice and as close as I can get to without fear—and try not to worry about how I'm coming up on the end of my projected break from Not Providence, or the fact that I'm getting on a train in a couple hours, or the possibility that all I'm going to do is receive face-stinging rejection letters for a good, solid while.

As soon as I eat some breakfast and finish an episode of Lost.

(And thus was the Great American Novel left to die...)

*For those not wholly in the know on this one, my new position a copy editing gig for a company that makes a variety of books, but mostly review and study guides for various licensing exams; I am choosing not to name them mostly because I do not want to even for a second seem like I speak for them as a company.

The Day-to-Day

This keeps coming up of late, so I felt like I should blog about it. It is this logic which supports 50% of the the Internet.

When meeting new people, or when people discover for the first time what I'm trying to do with my life, I get a lot of the same questions: what are you writing? Have you ever been published? Why are you bothering with genre fiction? (I won't dignify the last question with a response.) These questions are all fine and good. But I get other questions that people don't seem to realize are related to those questions (well, the two worth talking about). Questions like why it's so hard to get me to come out on weeknights; why I sometimes take a while to watch or read things they've lent me; why I sometimes get depressed or angry or excited, or why I just suddenly stop talking for an hour or two during a conversation on Instant Messenger.

Here's the thing: I don't work 8 hours a day. I work more like nine or ten.

My writing regimen is not even the strictest I've seen, derived from the "beginner's" writing regimen laid out by the inimitable Stephen King in On Writing (the single best book on writing I have ever read). That regimen is 1000 words a day (about 4 normal word processor pages, ish, depending on how often I break paragraphs), 5 days a week. Sometimes I will cheat and count an hour or two of editing as "equivalent" to 1000 words, so that I get editing and submission done without killing myself in the process. And of course, I allow for unique situations (depressed friends, birthdays, weddings, emergencies, etc.) to make me miss an extra day or so a week, and tend to take a vacation around about Christmas, like everyone else does.

What this means is, my average weekday starts like everyone else's: get up, groan about how early it is, rob the coffee maker of its payload, etc. The middle of my day is pretty typical, too—though I guess I exercise more than the average American. But my evening is wildly divergent.

I get home later than most, because I take the train. So call it 7. Most nights, I have to cook; call that about an hour's worth of time. That's 8. I eat dinner then, usually while watching an episode of something on DVD, or part of a movie. We're at 8:30, 9pm. Then I go and write.

This is where things get nebulous. Sometimes, I'm done writing by 9:30, all's well, nothing odd to report, no concerns whatsoever. Some nights, I'm still staring slack-jawed at the computer screen come 10, wondering why I can't decide which of the characters in this scene will catch all the stray bullets coming at their conversation. Once in a while, usually due to forgetting to turn off Digsby or daring to click on my TVTropes bookmark, I wind up there all the way until 11. And then, I'm spent.

Sometimes, if I was in the middle of a movie, I'll watch the rest of it; sometimes I'll watch another episode of whatever show I'm watching. Maybe if I feel really good or I reached some important milestone, I'll have a Jameson's (neat, please), or walk down to Cost Plus or 7-11 to get something sweet. But usually, I'll just get in bed and read.

I do get two days off in a week, but you'd be amazed how fast those disappear. Am I playing D&D that weekend? One left. Do I want to go out on a date? Oops. What if I want to go out on a date and I have guests for the weekend and there's a new movie out I want to see? Well then, I'm glad I only visit the gym at my office every other day, because I need to get some writing done on my lunch break.

So, if you lent me a book and I keep deflecting whether or not I read it, that's why. If I've had a DVD of yours for eight months, that's why. If I keep vacillating about whether or not I want to come out to the bar tonight...well...you know the answer. I'm tightly scheduled, a lot of the time, and there are weekends where all I want is to get up in the morning, curl around my coffee, and get some of this beautiful work done. Writing is the world's most delightful thief, grabbing onto my time and my life and not letting go; and I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.

The Power of the Blank

Old writing wisdom (read: the Internet) holds that one of the most fearsome things a writer faces is the blank page. This is, supposedly, why one of the most tired little chestnuts a new writer can trot out is a character waking up in a blank white room with no memory—a manifestation, so say the experts, of the writer's deep fear of the blank white page/screen that they have to fill, day after day, with words.

Somehow, I didn't get that. For me, the most terrifying thing is not the blank page; it's the crowded page. When I'm having writer's block, it's rarely because I don't know where to start (not depending on my writing for food and clothing does alleviate that pressure somewhat; it's usually because I don't know how to continue. So I dread the end of the work day, when it comes time to head home to that page full of words, all crammed together in neat little rows, and I am not sure which word should come after that; and then which one should come after that, and after that, and after that...

So sometimes, I just open up a new document. Even if I'm working on the exact same story, somehow the whiteness and the expansiveness of it gives me the breathing room I need to move forward with the story. This has gone on for as long as I can remember, honestly; back in the days when I thought about being a Very Famous Cartoonist I remember that any drawing session I sat down for was best fueled by the presence of a big stack of blank white paper right next to me, as though somehow I was going to produce 300 pages of Artistic Genius right there at my family coffee table. And even beyond direct inspiration, I have always been surrounded by blank paper and unused or nearly-unused office supplies—even my desk at the office has an unopened ream of paper sitting on it, near my Inbox. (admittedly, that was because my makeshift ergonomic adjustment was one ream of paper too high, but I haven't bothered to move it yet, either.)

So, I do not doubt the fear of the blank page—I think I've ever experienced it from time to time—but I do have to say that a blank page can do a lot of good, too. Blank pages are just another little bit of magic in the bizarre spell that is art, a symbol that can be channeled in one of several directions; for right now, I'm just going to be grateful that my particular corner of the mental landscape seems to view them in a positive light. After all, at least when I get hit by the inevitable Writer's Dread, I've already written something; though then again, that does mean I have something to focus on when it comes time to hate my own work...

Isn't writing fun?

(The answer is yes.)

The Trouble with Stopping

Sometimes, it's hard to make oneself stop editing.

A manuscript can spring from you, full-formed and with all its sentences in order; but inevitably, when reading it over a second time, one finds those places in which the muse was not speaking quite as loudly, those little sentences put there because they had to be, those sections that clearly meant something deep in the beginning but were lost along with some alternate plot or characterization. And these finds are good; these rough spots are there to be planed down, to be transformed and perfected.

Except that one will find more of them on the third go-through.

And the fourth.

And the fifth and sixth and so on.

A piece of writing is rarely perfected; rarely brought to that sort of shimmering silver Ur-place that it existed in when it was conceived. Rarely are the turns of phrases as witty, the characterizations as deep, the thought processes and philosophical conundrums as bone-deep and challenging as they were when the ideas lumbered into ones' forebrain, demanding to be written down.

Aldous Huxley has gone on record as saying he wished he could re-write the ending of Brave New World; Franz Kafka demanded his writings be burned rather than published. Neil Gaiman catalogs this agony practically every time a new book is published. Every writer feels a certain amount of ecstasy in the act of creation, but every writer is also unsatisfied with what they have wrought. It's never quite what was imagined; never quite what was expected; and in some ways, that's the most exciting part, but in other ways, it makes reading one's own work a terrifying disappointment.

Me? I'm editing Done with Mirrors for what has to be the fourth time, forcing myself not to make too extensive a set of changes. I am going through and checking for a common grammar error I make (or rather, checking for those places in which "grammar error" is the operative word rather than "stylistic choice"), and in the process polishing up a little thing or two I see on the way.

After that, though, I refuse to let myself read this draft again without someone else's input; refuse to let myself revise it again; because if I don't stop, I will be some character from some terrible British comedy, revising for the thousandth time a novel that will never be published.

I'll never be perfect; but damn if I won't kill myself trying.

Not Providence: Restate My Assumptions

There are approximately five reasons I am willing to miss a Not Providence update (assuming I don't individuate all the different reasons I or a loved one could be having a medical emergency). One of the good ones just happened.

It may take a person involved in the creative life to understand why this is exciting, but, I have rather unabashedly been pitching a novel while I work on Not Providence and my magazine submissions. So far it's been exactly what you'd expect: a whole lot of digital slammed doors, the words "not for me", and the whole time the thought that, you know, maybe a guy could be happy with a career in Account Management...

And then, because God is the biggest of bitches, I got an email back that was a bit rosier.

I of course won't go into details, but the bottom line is that I was asked to submit sample chapters and the rest of the usual novel proposal rigamarole (details to come when it isn't late and the details aren't boring). This does not, I must stress, mean that I have representation; and I am braced with a heart full of wonder for the strong likelihood that I will still get a "No". But this is farther than I have gotten yet, and after the way this year has destroyed me in terms of my artistic aspirations I really can't be grateful enough to know some of the effort mattered.

But, that happened this morning; then today was the 9-5; then tonight was getting the query packet together, and dinner, and getting the query packet together, and telling my parents so they didn't hear it entirely via the Internet. When I got off the one it was 10:01, and I had not even touched tomorrow's update. And tomorrow night I'm busy.

So, that said, it looks like this week's update is to be pushed to Thursday, and today's "writing work" will have consisted of prepping for tomorrow's query submission. This may seem like bad news for you Not Providence lovers, but the truth is that work on the serial was begin to become wearying, and having a week off in which I got to undertake such a major hurdle for my (shall we say) mainstream writing career was probably just what the doctor ordered.

So, no Randall in Mudville tomorrow. But at least now I'm upbeat enough to believe he'll continue to thrive.

A Research Request

Dear Intertronic Communicator,

A writer (that's me) is beginning a Research Phase and is requesting Real Stories of True Horror.

To wit: I am seeking information on gunshot wounds—actual gunshot wounds, not the strangely survivable scratches that occur in films. I need detailed info on GSWs that have been non-fatal to the victim (a vegetative state does not count for my purposes); any details you can provide, or resources you can point me to that I would understand with only basic understanding of the human body, would be appreciated. Yes, gore is absolutely acceptable, even invited, so please do not be afraid to shock me; I just want to get my physics right rather than trust either Hollywood or TVTropes to be steering me in the right direction.

And before there is concern about spoilers: no, this is not for a specific project; a specific project triggered it, but mostly it stems from my realization that I'm not sure what kind of ballistic punishment a piece of meat about our size can sustain and survive, nor what sort of state it'll be in afterward.

Your assistance in this most important and grisly matter is appreciated.

Sincerely,
He Who Posts

An Artist's Lunch

I've been thinking a lot lately* about the curious alchemy that goes into my writing. Not necessarily all my writing, but all my really good** writing: that weird mix of inspiration, time, timing, energy level, environment, and mood that is magical when it all clicks together but is often only knowable by its absence. Specifically, I've been wondering if I can develop a mind hack (or hacks) such that I can, if not call up the writing mindframe on command, at least jumpstart myself on days when the Muse is giving me grief***. What I'm finding is that some things are relatively easy for me to control, but others border on the unstoppable and the ineffable.

I can deal with the relativity in issues of temperature, and I can certainly work harder on the issue of sleep (too little and I can't work, no matter how surreal a passage is supposed to be). I can handle the idea that I need to manage my stress. But then there are problems like how inspired I am in the morning (let's not discuss how many times I've tried to scrawl notes on a rocking, creaking bus), or how playing too many games can render my creative mind down into pudding, or how easy it is to miss the key two minutes of inspiration and wind up with aborted words smacking against the inside of my face instead of sliding out onto the paper. I can even deal with having a relationship to the English language that some might argue should be corrected with surgery.

What I can't deal with, or rather, can't currently figure out, is my literary relationship with food.

I'm an eater; anyone who knew me when I was younger can testify to that. Exercise and my stomach are at a constant war with each other, and I can be tricked into overexpenditure by the mere hint that I might get to try some new and unexplored food. For all I love the image of the starving artist, it's not me; food and emotion are inseparable in my mind, from the airy joy of well-made salad to the lust and decadence of a plate of calamari. Food is the fastest way to engineer a mood shift or a downfall—nothing makes me grumpier than the sensation that I've eaten too much, except perhaps the feeling of spending too much time hungry. This may be why one of my dork icons is Dean Winchester.

I've been trying for a month or so now to understand the effect of food on my mood in general and my writing moods in particular, and it's been a seriously stop-and-go process. At first I thought avoiding greasy was the key, but then I wrote one of my favorite shorter pieces after eating a Jack-in-the-Box hamburger; then I thought the key was just not eating too much until I found that hunger destroyed my writing too. I've tried eating local, I've tried eating fancy, I've tried eating fried and dairy-free and even almost tried South Beach. But nothing about my stomach is so simple that I can narrow it to one category.

Except for this morning, when I sat down with a cup of Red Rock coffee and a bag of dim sum, and just enjoyed the grass and the trees at my local park, and realized the ticket: I am happiest and writiest when I am eating "like an artist".

This doesn't mean starving, obviously; nor does it (always) mean decadence. It means home-cooked meals in my lovely little apartment; it means local restaurants whee I feel like I can talk to the servers. It means weird little dishes I've never seen before and seeing the night streets out of the restaurant's windows. It means putting hot plates in front of people who smile about it; it means a tray on my knees while I watch whatever I got from Netflix, and the chill of the kitchen as I try to make Indian food happen. It means experiments and failures, mise en place you're almost proud of, trying to add more adjectives to your dishes. It means I want cooking and dining to be as adventurous and wonderful as writing; it means I want to leave the meal with a story or else leave the meal feeling like I'm part of the metanarrative of being an artist. A recipe is like a magic spell.

That's what it means.

Maybe I'll find I don't have this right; maybe I'll find my categories are too complex, too simple, or too broad. Maybe an artist's lunch is not as easy as I want to make it, and maybe more of it has to do with the process than the end product. But one thing is for sure: I'm now off fast food, barring desperation; and I'm pretty sure I'll be needing a way to moderate my intake of bacon.

Oh, and in case you were wondering: I ate dim sum in the park after I wrote today; and before tonight's late-night editing jag, I'll be joining a friend in the city**** for Burmese food. So today, I think the magic will work; and thus today, I think I will do some editing.

Hooray for food.

*Read: Always
**Read: Really good relative to my own work and certain writers whom I will not name for political reasons
***Come on. We've all had them.
****San Francisco, for you non-locals; also, why did I get so asterisk-happy?

The Longest Year

This past weekend, I played host. To celebrate and "break in" my new apartment (how the birthday party didn't count I am not sure, but I guess this completes the ritual), three of my closest friends came over and joined me in a game of Dungeons & Dragons (yes, really). In the midst of our rolling of dice and insistence we were half-demon warriors from an alternate reality, my phone let out its little electric buzzsaw noise that tells me I have a text message. Two seconds later, I was staring at the reminder that in one month, I would be celebrating my one-year anniversary with the girl who dumped me in February.

My second thought was "Jeez, how did I forget to delete that?"

My first thought was "That was this February?!"

Here it is, November 2009. A month and a half and the decade rolls over, which would probably be a big deal if I had not been eighteen at the turn of the millennium. But despite a shift in number sets being underwhelming, I'm still looking at the year in confusion, because I have trouble believing this year has only been a year long.

No matter how I look at it, the year feels crowded. On a macro level, my country inaugurated its first black President and took some major steps in overhauling how we live our lives and govern our people, and the Internet really started to visibly change How We Do Things; on a micro level, I entered and exited not one but two relationships that were theoretically long-term; lost touch with people I had considered best friends; made new best friends in unexpected places; moved to living on my own for the first time ever; and really started to dip a toe in this Professional Writing thing for real. The friends I talk to at work were first met no earlier than last October, but my brain insists I have known them since about 2004; I was stunned when I realized that the friends whose highly-embarrassing (for me) wedding I stood at was one year ago this past Halloween. Time has dilated this year, and I have no idea why.

Some of it, I think, is because this is the year I have most seriously started using the Internet: I am much more active on the Webbertubes this year than ones previous, and so much more aware of goings-on in the world, with the end result that it seems like more is happening. Technology is connecting us and allowing us to live in new and broader ways, such that even when we're working we're probably doing something, and it is a world I, for one, look forward to without too much trepidation (the issues of privacy, copyright, and attempts to control information are too big for the scope of one little blog post).

Some of it is because this year has been crowded: new home, new lifestyles, new and resurrected friendships. I have not had a weekend that wasn't already full up with social engagements since October 16th. I am working out more, taking more walks, watching more movies (I suspect young film buffs will grow up denying that Up, District 9, Where the Wild Thins Are, and Inglourious Basterds all came out the same year). I am trying out more new things and trying out more new people, and I think the end result is that this feels like four years because I've probably lived more in the past year than I did the last four.

But some of it, and you all had to know I was coming to this, was how much I am writing. I spend so much time at the Internet because I spend so much time working at the computer; because social networking will, I think, be key to eventual success as a writer; and because bursts of procrastination, like it or not, are part of the creative process.

While this should probably wait until December, my posts will be full of Christmas and winter by then (and if we're lucky the outcomes of Super-Sekrit Projekt Mark II), so I'm going to say it now: Writing is making my life longer. Thank you, to all my readers, of this blog and of Not Providence; thank you to the people who tell me to keep at it; thank you to the people who understand when I choose the company of a keyboard and a whiskey over anything outside the house. You'll be thanked again when real, paper-and-ink publication comes my way; but for now I want you to know you are appreciated. You have, in a small sense, helped make me immortal.

Miscellany

(Because there were too many of these to just spam you with them on Twitter.)

• Something about this winter has me flashing back to Christmas season '06, and the events in my life are mirroring it a bit too: Good friends, a rocky romantic situation, Warhammer 40k and Jasper Fforde novels fresh in someone's mind. (In case you didn't think I was a nerd before.) This isn't entirely a bad thing, but it has me slightly melancholy, like maybe things were simpler back then. Because as everyone knows, things were always simpler back then.


• The moving process is all but complete. On Saturday I drop my keys off at the old house, and then I just have to wait to see how much of the deposit we get back (that we can't fight to get the whole deposit back is a portion of our deposit agreement that I was never privy to—you can guess how I feel about that). The new house is to the "Box a Day" phase, where if I unpack one box a day I will have things all put together by mid-November. Things I have learned: I own a great many notebooks, and need to re-organize my personal files. Hence, those books will be saved for last so I don't feel like I'm making more work for myself. Life is all about tricking your own brain.


• I appear to be sick. This is not how I wanted to be. Though I do have to say, watching the director's cut of Legend with a raging fever is a real experience.


• Speaking of the director's cut of Legend: watch the director's cut of Legend. Seriously, it is almost a completely different movie, and a much better one; I tried to watch the U.S. theatrical release and after 10 minutes my wrists ached from clenching my fists. I'll have to rant about my hatred of test audiences later.


• Lastly and most importantly: I started writing again last night. Naturally, it sucked, and I don't want to use any of what I wrote; but after a night's sleep the corrected, improved version came upon me in the shower, and now I'm taking my lunch break (which would ordinarily be spent getting exercise that the Internet recommends against while sick) to get that down on paper. Tonight I will do more writing, and unpack a box, and maybe, if there's time, spend some quality time with a DVD. The old rituals are starting to come together alongside their new and improved counterparts, and I cannot begin to say how much this excites me. Now if only my upstairs neighbor would stop morphing into an elephant every night...

Providence!

I'll leave a quick note here for those of you who don't follow me on Twitter: I did it.

I have packing to do; I have moving to plan; I have things to deal with in real life; but more important than that, more powerful and more tensing than those, was the need to write. So I wrote.

Or edited, anyway. Part Twelve is now edited, and coded, and all set to go; and in the interests of keeping the math on my tardiness nice and even, I'll be putting it up tomorrow morning for your reading pleasure.

Unfortunately, Part Thirteen is not even fully written yet, so it is likely next week will be another skip week; but hey, this is why I said the break would be brief and inconstant. Right now I am focusing on how good it felt to pour some words over my poor febrile brain, and remembering that yes, this stuff is as important as breathing to me...it's just also ten times easier to give up.

A Nice Night with the Crickets

I was going to write about what I cooked for dinner tonight (Hunan "tacos", and the pitfalls of grating English cucumbers). I was going to write some of Not Providence. I was going to write about the important passing here in my home country.

But tonight, where words should be, I have fog. And the best part? That's kind of okay.

I don't have a deadline looming. I don't feel I've been unsuccessful this week. I don't have a weekend crammed with engagements looking to keep me separate from my keyboard.

I have a night to rest. And a great book to read. And so I think that's what I'll do.

P.S. The Hunan tacos were terrific.

Input Output

In a small way, I have to lean back here and say "What a night".

This evening I was the recipient of that staple of the writing life, the rejection letter; this one for "A Million Stories", from a magazine who for the sake of etiquette will remain unnamed (no sense saying who did and didn't reject me in my early career, at least until the tell-all memoir). It was good news, in the twisted way a rejection can be good news; they read all the way to the end of the story before they rejected it, which means I have promise. And I guess I do.

Of course, timing being what it is, tonight was also the night I had set to put the finishing touches on "Family Ties", my piece for the anthology whose exact name I may or may not be supposed to discuss. I saw the rejection in my inbox, and considered that maybe I shouldn't be making myself deal with writing tonight.

Except no. That's exactly what I should be doing after a rejection.

So I did; and the final fixes turned out to be exactly what I wanted. I see my influences in this story, but I also see me, maybe a little more so than I have in previous works. Will it make the cut? I don't know. But tonight I got 14 pages edited, and wrote a cordial cover letter, and got to mark one thing off the massive checklist of "To Write" and "To Edit" that hangs over by my bed. Up next is Not Providence in spades, and novel queries, and several pieces that have been gathering in my head since the invitation came through; I already started on "A Question of Faith" and felt liberated.

But for now? For now, I think I need some proto-celebratory booze.

Who wants Bushmill's?

Shoveling Cultural Snow

It is amazing sometimes how much of a head of steam I can build up over absolutely nothing.

It's Friday here in my slice of the world, and the weather is mild (or so says our building's climate control). Work is pleasantly slow, the office quiet on account of BlizzCon. I've got no concrete social obligations until Sunday. So my mind is wide open, and all I want to do is write.

But sometimes that imperative is damaging. I am sitting here at my desk, feeling the urge to do something constructive toward my writing career; but I don't have any thing specific I want to do. Past experience tells me that writing on my lunch break results in cramped prose, and I don't have the materials together to send out that novel query I want to deal with next week, nor does my thumb drive appear to have the finished version of this month's story submission. But still, there is the burning need to Accomplish. And so I blog.

This isn't accomplishing anything, you say; and you're right. You're absolutely and totally right. But there is something about the act of blogging that scratches the proper neurons—something about the fingers bashing the keys, the primal-quick decisions of word choice and pacing. It's methadone for the soul. It's jumping jacks in the kitchen during the commercial break.

Tonight, there will be writing. Oh how there will be writing. I can already taste whatever I shovel into my mouth to keep myself going. But for now, I just need to get through the day.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the tendency to characterize themselves as a puppet of outside forces is common to both artists and junkies.

The Alchemy of Words, or Everything's Role in the Process

More stating the obvious by me

Our job is not easy.

I say that of writing right now, but I mean to encompass every job on this planet. There are easy jobs in practice—the ones you hear bitched about by those of us who don't make six figures, by those who don't consider Monaco within our price range—but even they take their toll in stresses and worries, and in the simple fact that no-one who hears what you do likes you.

Writing, though—all art, as a subset of work—is one of few jobs that feels like alchemy.

So much goes into writing; and so much affects it. Writers, like all artists, pour their experiences into their writing (hence some of the recurring tropes one finds in writing, given the experiences that tend to lead to the creative life). Writers are students of life, collecting all the little bits around them. Unfortunately, life can also easily get in the way.

I don't just mean the workaday grind; I don't just mean the stress of the deadline. I mean little things, things you wouldn't think would affect it. Things like the temperature of the office; the angle at which you're typing; the extra weight of the book in your book-bag today, or the pile of laundry waiting to be sorted. One drink, or two drinks, or a few too many potatoes at dinner time, or that one high note in "Stand By Me" that keeps drilling through the wall and into your skull. The book you're reading not being that interesting. Or the argument you had this weekend with your best friend, and the way their eyes keep scowling up from your memories. Or fifteen missing minutes of sleep.

This weekend, I slept poorly on Saturday. I indulged my childlike impulses and I stayed up far too late. At the time it seemed insignificant: a day of heavy muscles and gummy eyelids, in trade for a few extra hours clustered around the digital campfire with my friends. Perfectly fair. Except that all week I've felt put upon to even leave my bed, and the day has been a slow slump to the left, and writing…God…that I've gotten work done three days out of four is a miracle, and I think I'm going to see serious revision to what came out on Wednesday.

Writers never fail a little; we always manage to fail a lot. We tell ourselves this is it, we stomp, we shout and proclaim. We're Dustin Hoffman as Hook, telling Smee that this time he shouldn't try to stop us. As I have been this week, wondering if I'd be happier without the pressure, happier without the thinking, happier if I could see a sentence without considering how it could be better ordered and kept. Happier if I didn't dream this direction; happier in a tie and a fashion plate haircut.

I wouldn't be. I know that. I'm just tired and off-center. I need a foggy sky and a warm breakfast and Will Ferrell telling Maggie Gyllenhaal he brought her flours. I need enough sleep that waking up is a joy. And I need a drink that tastes like came from an actual living organism.

Then I'll be happy. And then I'll Make Things.

I just wish people would pay me.

Well-Tempered versus Well-Made

or: Tyler States the Obvious

I have a curious relationship with grammar.

On the one hand, grammar is part of the package of rules and skills by which I currently pay the rent on my apartment. If there weren't rules I'd have a much harder time in this line of work. (Whether or not that's a bad thing is an entirely different topic.)

On the other hand, in my own writing...I sometimes have trouble staying within the lines. Sometimes nouns want to be adjectives; sometimes sentences need to end halfway through. Sometimes I will sense that in a list of items, they need to go in a certain sequence that has nothing to do with any logical way of ordering it. Recently someone told me a section of Not Providence looked wrong, and I fixed it by shifting one sentence up a paragraph, against all laws of grammar or the order in which things would have happened in the world of the book.

This is not to say I hate grammar. I love grammar. I need grammar. Not only does it pay my bills, but sometimes bad use of punctuation marks is precisely what's wrong with a crippled and ugly sentence. And it happens quite often the rules of grammar are all at the separates me from flogging your eyeballs to death with a legion of semicolons and commas.

But sometimes literature feels like poetry, regardless of how many zombies or over-angled horrors are in it. Sometimes Kerouac is right. Forget the well-tempered sentence; I'll settle for one that's well-made.

Drudgery vs. Insanity

This won't be long. I promise. For one thing, I have to do some work.

The days in Foster City of late have been what I think of as perfect San Francisco days: fog banks like cotton, high grey skies, marine air just cold enough a sweatshirt seems like reasonable wear. Work has been mellow enough I can really focus on the challenges of proofreading, individual odysseys instead of a gauntlet. So of course my mind has time to chew on itself, and of course I'm thinking about San Francisco, and my five years living there.

And I find, in a weird way, I am missing it. It's a lovely place, honestly, full of the kinds of quirky people I really love, full of the sort of wild creative energy and youth I sometimes find my life lacks. But I think, like my homesickness for Santa Cruz (detailed in a far more personal journal), I am not so much homesick for the place as for a perspective on that place.

When I lived in San Francisco I was a grad student and a bookstore clerk, neither of them full-time jobs in the sense of cubicles and offices. I worked hard in both cases (well, as hard as a faltering business allowed), but that hard work came in small bursts—an hour of rushed register work here, a night of thesis-writing there—that left plenty of time for playing, and plenty of energy for it, too. And then when the thesis was done and the monumental accomplishment over, that time I spent on school could be spent on...wait for it...writing.

Something in San Francisco inspired my writing; I was productive there in a way I have trouble being in Mountain View. Of course, on reflection a lot of what I wrote there was also deeply immature—Done with Mirrors is the best thing to have come out of that era of my writing, with "Live from the Serpent Room" perhaps a close second—but there was a sense of freedom there, of exposure to ideas, of experimentation and learning.

My point in all this, which is not as short as I'd hoped, is the deep effect space can have on writing. It's perhaps a trite point, but writing really is a lot about perspective. Something in my Mountain View life injects a doubt into my writing process I did not have before. In some cases, that's good; it keeps me away from some of the more trite plot elements I might introduce, makes me think about my characters more deeply. But doubt it is; and for the time being, "doubt" is the word I will associate with Mountain View, while San Francisco will be connected with "vitality". At least until I spend some time doubting myself in San Francisco.

Speaking of which, I'm house-sitting next week, coincidentally at my old place of residence...let's call it an experiment.

Keep Showing Up: Elizabeth Gilbert on the Creative Life

I am not usually one for mumbo-jumbo; I have difficulty getting behind religion as something more than a fascinating outlet for human belief, and while all mythologies are equal they still all feel like a veneer over the truth of what is weird about life. And then there's creativity.

It is hard not to approach creativity from a spiritual standpoint. There is something about it that is so elevating, so strange, so genuinely immortal, that the idea it is simply chemical reactions bouncing around my head is hard to believe. It's not something I can articulate beyond the usual words "inspiration" and "writer's block", if for no other reason than that other efforts at articulation make me sound totally insane.

And then Elizabeth Gilbert did this talk at TED. And I stopped feeling quite so insane.



I could write an entire essay echoing what Gilbert has said here; but the bottom line is, I think she's right. And I am no longer going to be ashamed to say it.

Writing Weather Again

This morning, I had a bagel with lox, as per my standard Saturday operating procedure, and set myself to work organizing my room. There was supposed to be assembly of an IKEA bookshelf, which given my collection is sorely needed; but every time I look at the box, I find myself remembering what a pain my current shelves were to put up, and making a mental note to plan for someone to come distract me while I assemble. Or possibly assemble for me, depending on the someone.

So now, I turn my thoughts to a shower, and I look out my window, and I see that it's writing weather. Gray in a cottony way, just enough damp to make the cement reflective, a refreshed but belabored look to the trees; the kind of weather that makes me think of first grade, walking around the side of the school building, the way my triceratops eraser smelled (I never did erase anything with that...). It's weather that makes me want the energy to write for eight hours, weather that calls to me to do something with my time.

Today's plan is to see Wolverine with my mother, who is in town whilst my father plays the devil's music for a mass of idolatrous fans; and while I doubt I will find any deep or resonant inspiration in Hugh Jackman's abs, I think it will be a welcome break from routine to see an action movie and spend time with my mother. And then, tonight, I will find something tasty to eat for dinner, and drink a glass of wine, and make the writing magic happen. I hope.

You see, this Not Providence thing has been excellent for my writing discipline; but Not Providence is a work of warm summer nights, of that dark heat that feels just a little bit crazy; it's a work of misspent youth and regrettable life decisions, of actions taken now you'll know you'll regret later. This means that my brain has an excuse to not try for the story tonight, to drink a second glass of wine and watch a second movie and let sleep crawl in behind my eyes. But despite that, despite the story's resistance, I know that today's weather will refresh, and that today's activities will end with me accomplished and inspired; and for that, fog, I am glad you came.

Sacrifice

Having finished today's bout of writing early (I force myself to keep expectations low; I can't afford and don't want to react to my job like a burden), and having no plans until 4 p.m., I found myself browsing TV Tropes, my favorite site for killing some time. And I found myself on the page for Enforced Method Acting, and reading some of the both hilarious and horrifying stories of things done to and by actors to get scenes just right: Mark Hamill not who Luke's father was until just before the revelation, William Friedkin discharging guns on the set of The Exorcist, the voice actor for Ikari Shinji literally strangling another actor while recording dialog for a violent scene. The list goes on and on and actually gets pretty absurd in places. And as I sat here reading it, I felt a little twisted, because I couldn't help but feel kind of jealous that they were pushed that hard.

I'm not a proponent of true art being angsty, or nonsensical, or indeed any one thing by default. But I do think art is something worth gambling on and worth doing right, whatever that means. Creative works mean more to me when I know that something about them pained the creator, that they really challenged themselves and pushed their boundaries doing it. There is a place for comfortable art, but it's not the art I'm interested in. Research topics that disgust you; show up drunk for a scene where you're supposed to be miserable; spend an hour staring at your grandmother's ashes before you try to write a biography of her life. Much as it's done to death as a joke, tears really do season art, and I am at my happiest with creations when they take me a little out of my comfort zone.

So again, I'm kind of jealous, because I don't have a director to do that to me. I can't show up drunk to my keyboard (well, I can, but I am one of those rare writers who writes total crap when intoxicated); I can't have someone fire off a gun at me; I can't actually strangle a character before I write a scene where I kill them via asphyxiation. These are impossibilities, and it makes me wish I'd found my calling somewhere else.

A little. There are stories about writers taking it that far--writers who buy cow tongue from a butcher to see what it feels like to cut it with scissors, writers who did a drug just to find out how to describe it, writers who deliberately base characters they're going to kill on people they love to get that proper wrenching feel out of the death scene.

I won't do drugs just for research purposes, given a nasty experience with hospital morphine, but I try to follow in their footsteps. I try to push a little, try to strain myself, try to find my boundaries and give them a good swift kick. Here's hoping that it really does give things some added flavor. And here's to all the artists who bled a little for their art.

This Week's Writing Rubrics

I am right smack in the middle of another week where I have no latitude about my days off from writing, for all the right and fun reasons, which means of course that I am wishing I had that flexibility. However, inspiration seems to be relatively forthcoming so far, so I am hoping that I can maintain this with a little luck and some better sleep (a quality of life issue I have been noting has not been well-addressed in my existence of late). Anyway, without further ado:

Day 1: Complete. Second round edits on Part Four of Not Providence, plus some work on "Recess".
Day 2: Complete. Finished the next chapter of Not Providence.
Day 3: 1,000 words in "Recess".
Day 4: 1,000 words in "Recess" (or to completion if the narrative's ready to close).
Day 5: Edit Part Five of Not Providence.

I am finding the publication of a serial massively enlightening, if scary and occasionally frustrating; and even if this proves to not be as good for PR as I might like I think it will prove to have been a useful exercise for me personally, and that's reason enough to spend my time on it. My only problem is that I need to focus on Done with Mirrors--I am hoping to devote a night or two next week to that, but I may juggle Day 4's assignments to instead be to finish getting a query package together for the novel and get it sent off to an agent.

And now, I am off to drink some water, for I had wine with dinner and believe in not working hungover; and then to take a walk and perhaps purchase the next night or two's dinners. If only I didn't have to cook to feel healthy...

Day 2: Ain't Easy

Day 2 of this week's 5 Days of Writing, and it was like pulling teeth. I ran into a major plot blockage on one section of Not Providence, of the "let it steep" variety; I just want to let it sit for a couple days. Luckily I have "Recess" to work on, which has things pretty clearly laid out, so that'll allow me to focus. I'm sure some of this has to do with being sick, and when writing while sick, I do best with either total delirium or rigid structure.

Please, continue to tell me what you think of the serial; if something about it is really sucking I want to know before I am too mired to do anything to reverse the process.

These are the days I dislike being a writer. Hopefully, the days when I love it will come tomorrow.

I really want to work in a KMFDM reference here...

Whatever bug I caught in Nashville is now at its breaking point. The sore throat is gone, the sneezing is mostly gone, and the cough has settled in but is sporadic; what I am left with is a sense that something is wrong with me, a sort of rubbery feeling in my head and a sense of everything happening a little faster than I can handle. I am hoping exercise helps me focus and does not just kill me; thank God today's meals are rich in vegetables.

This feeling began last night, which is why Day 1 of this week's writing projects was not as productive as I would like. I finished edits on Part 4 of Not Providence, but that was all I could do before my capacity to concentrate was severely hampered by a combination of the wobbling-brain side of the illness, the side effects of Alka Seltzer Plus, and new books.

To comfort myself and to increase productivity a little, I decided to bite the bullet last night and submit "A Million Stories". That's my February and March magazine submissions done, and my New Year's resolution maintained.

Also, I fixed the error with the link in yesterday's update post, and appear to have fixed the desynchronized fonts; however, I have been hearing rumors of a "main page" for Not Providence that has links to the as-yet nonexistent Book 2 on it, and that's a problem. Can anyone confirm this or give me a screenshot?

I'm sure I had something more eloquent to say, but the tar pits living in my mind have eaten it.

The Fog Behind My Eyes

It's curious how much a time change really does mess with you. I'm never truly aware of the ways my body reacts to light or temperature or the cycle of the sun until it's a truly dramatic effect, like being wide-awake at 11 o'clock at night, or the first week this year of commuting home in the daylight; then, my eyes are filled with fog, and my mind is half-buried in a tar pit, and I just cannot function beyond the basic levels needed for survival.

I console myself by remembering that I have felt this before, and that I have fought it off with more sleep, a better diet, and just plain toughing it out; that everyone has rough patches; that not all writers write all the time. Then I force myself to still feel productive, lest I fall down that hole of Never Writing that can claim so many brains.

All this is to say that this week's schedule has been a bit disrupted. Monday was me editing Chapter 2 of Not Providence, and writing about 650 words for Eyes of Stone, which was its own kind of refreshing (though that new section needs a serious sandblasting). Tuesday, then, was me editing both Chapter 3 of NP and doing the second-round edits on "A Million Stories", both which, I feel, need to be printed out and brought on the plane with me for perusal during my trip to Nashville.

My current plan is to start work on "Recess" tomorrow night (tonight being dinner with my aunt), and work on that over the weekend. I also plan to send out "A Million Stories" in the next handful of days--normally I'd say "by Sunday", but I'm not setting any kind of deadline during a vacation--and to try to get Done with Mirrors out to an agent next week.

On some level, it bothers me that this feels like an unproductive week, given that my schedule still has an hour or more, on every day save two, devoted to forwarding my career. I think every writer starting out tends to compare themselves to people who are doing this professionally, and I'm no exception--it just so happens that the yardstick I use is productivity. (I come up lacking on prose sometimes, too, but I just as often come up feeling superior, and I feel like it's a dangerous game to measure myself against others' prose lest I wind up slipping back into my fanboy phase.) Such is life, I suppose. At least this week, I get to do some of the worrying in a different state.

Time Wins Over Discipline

As disciplined as I generally am about writing, this is to be one of those weeks where I only managed 4 days of writing-related activities. The time change between Saturday and Sunday destroyed me, partially because a late-night romp through Milpitas turned into an early morning romp suddenly, and I found myself forced to wake up ass-kickingly early in order to have a productive day. Add to this that today was the day when I had to press buttons to see how many men the government was sending to take away my lunch money, and I am afraid that today was destined to be one lacking in forward literary progress.

The map for the next couple of weeks is interesting for me. I am far enough ahead on updates for Not Providence that I do not feel bad starting or restarting other major projects, but the idea of returning to Eyes of Stone is still daunting. I think this is me learning a valuable lesson in when to not let a project sit, though my interest in finishing it is still high enough that I shouldn't wind up paying too steep a price for this break.

So, currently, the plan is to continue apace with Not Providence, finish edits on and submit "A Million Stories", begin and complete the editing and rewriting process on "Recess", and meanwhile start to review Eyes of Stone and make sure I still have the thread of it. When "Recess" is done, I will focus in on Eyes of Stone, Not Providence, and the care and feeding of submissions until such time as all three of those stories are published or one or more of them clearly needs to be run back through the Belt Sander. Such is my life. Luckily I'll have a plane flight or six this week to prompt me to get things done.

This concludes your writing update. Up next in my little corner of the world: my thoughts on Nashville, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and acceptable breakdowns in reality in the fantasy novel. One thing I never run out of is opinions.

Progress Notes, 2/23/07

I did not update mid-last week, or if I did, I am too tired to remember it currently; but the bottom line is, I successfully wrote and edited 5 days last week, and made my February submission goal with "Those Who Don't". Go me.

This week is another week of tightly proscribed days off; I am trying to use editing work, which is simpler if no less important, to bolster me on weeks like this, so I am making forward progress without having to blow off any social engagements.

Day 1: Apparently, finish a new short story (looking like longish flash fiction--"lightning fiction"?), tentatively entitled "Contempt".
Day 2: Sekrit Projekt.
Day 3: Sekrit Projekt.
Day 4: Edit "A Million Stories".
Day 5: Edit "A Million Stories".

Stories on deck for editing: "Recess", "The Boys of Summer", "The Color of Your Money".
Stories hypothetically on deck for editing but possibly destined for my files: "Admit One", "The Bottle", "A Day in the Life".

Eyes of Stone continues to loom, but the Sekrit Projekt is my priority for the moment. I think that taking a slightly more mellow approach to the novel--two to three nights a week on it, with editing and the Projekt on the nights I am burnt--might actually prove to be a more useful way of going about this, at least until I some day wander into the realm of deadlines.

I am still being terrible about my reading habits, however. I know it is not for a lack of love of the book I am reading, and I need to examine what the trouble is. More on this later.

Sub. Huh huh.

Today contained several accomplishments, but foremost among them was my submission of "Those Who Don't" to a magazine. This marks the completion of my February goal--only 10 more subs to go for this year. (And at least ten more dirty jokes about the word "sub".) Now, I celebrate with a tragically hip beverage, and try not to let myself get too nervous.

Progress Notes, 2/10/09

This week kicked off with me taking my first "pass" right away on Monday. This is standard behavior when one's significant other comes into town; I'm fairly certain that's written down in a manual.

The plan for this week is as follows, with the focus continuing to be on "Those Who Don't".

Day 1: Complete: Edit the aforementioned. I'm trying out a new narrative style for the story, I'm not quite sure if it gets its point across yet but I think it might. See Day 3.
Day 2: Work on Sekrit Projekt.
Day 3: Go back to "Those Who Don't" with somewhat fresh eyes. Edit to fit new narrative structure.
Day 4: Projekt Time.
Day 5: Projekt Time, or finishing "Those Who Don't".

Naturally this means that my goal of having TWD done by Valentine's Day is unlikely, unless I get a bolt of inspiration (or a good peer review) and swap Day 4 and Day 5. But I will accept having it ready to go or ready for the scrap-heap as of early next week, really.

Working on "Those Who Don't" is proving a fascinating challenge, as it has evolved so much since I started editing it; I'd almost call it an entirely different story than it was at this point, though with the same root ideas. There are things about my flaws and talents as a writer that it is revealing to me, and I think that it will both prove to be a solid story on its own, and a good lesson for future writing. But for now, I think I hear late-night Trope surfing calling my name.

At the Refinery

There is really nothing like the sensation of editing a story you hope to publish. No matter how much distance you've put between yourself and the story, there is some connection to it—or if this is unique to me, I can't imagine what the alternative feels like. There are the exultant sections of the story, where spark of magic managed to get past your own deep need to abuse your vocabulary, and there are the parts where you can't help but shake your head and say to yourself "You really thought you were clever there, didn't you?"

But riding underneath all of that is the knowledge that your changes are, in a larger world sense, both permanent and unnoticed. No-one will see the minor character you edited out. No-one will know about the cute running gag with the toilet paper. That old version of the story might have been excruciating and unreadable, but it is the original; and the parts that disappear are gone forever, and no-one knows they were there. They go down the tubes into the junkyard of stories, and if they're very luck, stored for some future use.

This used to pain me—you know, during that ugly hotshot phase where I was convinced of my destined place among the Literary Elite (which to be fair still rears its head now and then). But now, I kind of enjoy it. I have private stories, private versions, little secrets between the sentences. I have stories that are all for me, things that don't have to be amazing, that don't have to be good, that don't have to hook an audience or carry a narrative; all they have to do is interest me.

I like keeping those unedited little dreams. I think some day they might help keep me sane.

Progress Notes, 2/4/09

I failed to update on the end of last week (very successful, actually), or to provide my notes for this week. So instead, we get to start with the mid-week update. I guess that's kind of like time travel, or something.

Day 1: Complete. Wrote 1,000 words for the aforementioned secret project.
Day 2: Complete. Wrote 1,400 words for same.

Day 3: Edit "Those Who Don't".
Day 4: Edit "Those Who Don't".
Day 5: Edit "Those Who Don't" or write 1,000 words as proclivity dictates.

Goals: To get the Project into working order for editing, and to get as close as possible to finishing "Those Who Don't". The hope is to have the story ready for submission before Valentine's Day, but I naturally won't push that if it means making the quality suffer.

Pretty soon, I will have to go back to Eyes of Stone, but I want to have good headway on the Project first. I realize I'm being cryptic, and that this is in danger of causing a serious case of Hype Aversion; but I don't want to say too much now, because if this idea tanks I don't want to have gotten hopes up too much. Regardless, my point is that this longer project is why I have not gone back to the novel, which is ultimately fine with me--it's giving me a chance to get my chops back together and venture into some wholly new territory before I get back to traveling a path I've mostly already paved.

There is a man named Warren Ellis. Warren Ellis plays at being a psychotic drunken lowlife who happens to have a gift for prose. You probably know how this joke ends.

This man writes a great many things. Among them is a free thing, entitled FreakAngels, which will be getting a starring role in the Fictions and Curiosities menu perched to the right of this post. I will not trouble you by linking to everything about FreakAngels that is excellent, but I will say that when it comes to reasons for writing, Warren Ellis has got it in one.

Mr. Ellis is absolutely on the money with that one. I am envious.

More thoughts about Mr. Ellis and his tenuous connections to one Art Spiegelman to follow soon. After the post I claimed at the end of last year would be "next".

Seizing the Means of Distribution

I wonder. Specifically, I wonder about the distribution of entertainment media.

Joss Whedon, master that he is, showed us via Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog that a creative work can be distributed via the Internet, free, and yet still break even (if not profit) from sales of that creative work in other media. Warren "Hyperlink Terrorist" Ellis is doing something similar with Freakangels, distributing the comic for free online but garnering revenue via trade paperbacks. And then of course there are the multitude of webcomics and entertainment sites--Penny Arcade, Questionable Content, Homestar Runner--that manage to provide for their creators purely through merchandise and advertising. All this gives me some hope that self-published, creator-owned content really is viable now; that an artist or a writer could make some, if not all, of their income via this sort of model.

So really, I guess this is less about self-publication as that term is usually used, and more about the use of the Web as an alternate means of distributing media that has been controlled by the facilitators and distributors (publishing houses, record labels, what-have-you). It seems like it is getting to a place where this is really viable, and where companies are beginning to look long and hard at the issue.

A part of me wants to try it. And a part of me doesn't.

Don't get me wrong: succeeding in this way would be welcome relief. It sounds so nice after the rejections, the editors, the hoop-jumping, the little song and dance that is any creator's effort to get themselves noticed and funded and God help us actually able to spend their time and energy wholly on the business of creating. But then there's the stubbornness, and doubtfulness, and fear.

Ellis and Whedon have advantages I don't: they're famous. Joss Whedon's creations have fanboys before they're anything but a rumor on SciFi Wire; Ellis could scrawl outlines on napkins and make a profit. And Penny Arcade is a media juggernaut—they are a part of the nerd zeitgeist in a way that I could only pray for. They have built-in P.R. machines, Internet enclaves that will rush to digest whatever they put out if for no other reason than to say they were there first. I'm lucky when one of my blog posts generates a comment.

Then there is the stigma of self-publication, not unique to novels, but certainly endemic. The combination of Internet self-publishing scams and abysmal fan-fiction communities means that anyone who isn't going through the "accepted" channel of a magazine publishing house, and thus through a gauntlet of slush piles and editors and other systems for filtering out bad taste, is almost inevitably going to be judged more harshly, if not dismissed outright; and the usual methods of getting attention to a web original like this (banner ads and the like) are just going to drag them down further.

And finally, there is the dogged desire to stay the course; the feeling that being published via the "usual" route will be in some way a victory, a validation of my capacity to produce "real art"; and there is the simple love of the symbolic content of seeing my work in print, of having real paper in my hands with real ink shaped into my words, an artifact I can touch and hold up and smell and, maybe if I'm lucky, put my signature on. This is partially about a need to be vindicated in my struggle and partially about a fear of the roulette wheel that is trying to succeed on the Internet, and it is born of very little reality, given my constant complaints about the low quality of some of the books being produced.

But then there's John Dies at the End, linked in the sidebar; David Wong is best known purely on the Internet (as the progenitor of this and the term "monkey sphere", and of course his editing work on cracked.com), but this book appears to have been a cult success. So it is doable; there are companies that will publish you after a web publication (though a cursory search suggests J.D.A.T.E. is not still up for free on his site, which may be contractual); and people will take Web writing seriously. So it comes back to stubbornness, and the fear of taking that big, bold step straight into a thirty-foot drop.

All this is to say that I am considering the idea, and researching it, and wondering how best to get my name out there (on top of the now-mandatory monthly submissions). All this is also to say that I may have a new project brewing, with multiple levels of utility and at least one level of entertainment. In short: stay tuned.

Weaponized Schedule, 19 Jan 09

This last week saw one of my occasional setbacks; a variety of factors (read: excuses) led to a low energy level and a late start on Wednesday night that saw absolutely nothing getting done; this coupled with a bit of a chaotic schedule over the weekend meant I only got 3 days of editing in instead of 5, and did not make my deadline for a reading draft of Done with Mirrors. However, much as kicking myself might sound good, that doesn't do me any good, especially in the wake of some serious doubts; all I can do is forge ahead, set the plan for this week, and stick to it.

Fortunately, this week is a bit easier--I only have one day on which I am absolutely spoken for, so there is a floating day off I can use when my energy level tanks. Without ado, this week's 5-day plan:

Day 1: Edit Done with Mirrors: Touch-ups and conversions
Day 2: Edit Done with Mirrors: Character descriptions, quirks, further conversions.
Day 3: "A Million Stories": +1000 words.
Day 4: "A Million Stories": +1000 words.
Day 5: "A Million Stories": +1000 words.

Forced Day Off: Saturday; my parents' anniversary trumps writing, at least until they go to bed. Not a good day to plan doing anything.

Deadlines: "A Million Stories" must be 4000-5000 words by the end of the week, and if not finished be at least firmly in the denouement. Done with Mirrors goes out to beta readers before I go to bed Sunday.

My projects and hopes for the year remain unchanged; I do, however, have to add in more care in planning these things, and with that, an inspection of my life for places I could get more efficient and flexible.

There. Scheduling done. Show this off next time someone claims writing is easy.

Back At The Desk

Right. New year. Symbolic fresh start.

This is in theory a chronicle of my writing career, such as it currently is. So, you might ask, what am I working on?

That's both simple and complicated. I am about 52% of the way through Draft Zero of Eyes of Stone, and ideas for what to include next keep tumbling out, so that's a continuing project. But one of the goals for this year is to be more free-flowing with the submissions, which means editing some of the short works I've completed in the last year and doing a few new short pieces. One piece is currently off with a friend of a friend and an Actual Published Novelist, another is about to be dusted off and given a run through the Belt Sander. I have two or three ideas for short pieces bouncing around in my head, as well; it's funny how a well written short story collection can cause that effect.

Then there's Done with Mirrors, which needs to be pounded mercilessly with a hammer until all the first novel goop is squeezed out and its prose is less like it was written by me when I was 23. There are elements of fanboyism present there, for various authors I'd both be flattered and horrified to be compared to, and some of that can't be helped (a rant on the Fanboy Author is up and coming this year, I promise you), but there are cartoonish attempts at others' styles clogging up some stylistic elements that need to just be shed. It's nice to see this relic of me finding my voice, but I want to get it more firmly situated before it goes out to agents again; and go out to agents it shall, as this is one of my primary projects for this year.

In short, it is going to be a very busy year.

Bring it on.

Witty Post Title, 11/29/08

It figures that after a late-night dose of link salad and an early-morning bout of writing (and the concomitant internal chant of "don't go back and read it yet, don't go back and read it yet..."), I come across yet more links worthy, if not worthier, of inclusion in a link salad. So, prepare to distend your intellectual bellies!

• Yes, you read this video's title correctly: Wii Remote theremin. This is the intellectual equivalent of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.


• Eliezer Yudkowsky, of Overcoming Bias, has some fascinating things to say about the creative process. You all know I'm a sucker for this subject, but I really mean it when I say that this is a fascinating way of thinking about it. I can't get enough of hearing very smart people talk about the process.


• And because it was referenced in the above article: The Mind Projection Fallacy as explained via old sci-fi movie posters. Again, two worlds collide; I think this one is more like an intellectual Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, with the Wii Theremin standing in as the bacon chocolate chip cookie.

Real post to come after I finish laundry.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One...

I ramble.

I don't deny it; it's true. I suffer from an automatic mouth with no muffler. I relate ten-minute anecdotes, I derail conversations with sentences that are more like plots. I play with emphasis, with timing, with facial expressions and pauses. I am told that my interlocutor has heard a story only to go ahead and tell it anyway, or at least quote part of it just to satisfy myself. I will ask if people have heard "this one" even if I know they have, in the hopes that they will forget, and my heart flips over when I make reference to one of my old, tried-and-true verbal narratives only to hear the response "Wait, what?"

I acknowledge these as character flaws, or at the very least, occasionally irritating quirks. But I still do it (this is one of the great mysteries of life--our capacity to do incredibly annoying things with both awareness and verve). The question today is: why?

And the answer is simple: practice.

Think seriously about the stories you've heard. The archetype of the boring guy with the endless, pointless, totally unengaging anecdotes is strong, and it's on every street corner and living room couch. People drone on without pause or reflection. People add detail to their anecdotes that isn't needed, or misplace it such that it destroys the timing. People emphasize the wrong parts, pick the wrong audiences, and generally botch stories. For every truly good story every related to me, I can pick out three that have left me wanting to interrupt someone just for their own sake. I can also count at least twice per good story that I've been silenced via loud interjection or bemused stare. I know that the signal to noise on anecdotes is bad--I hang out with gamers, who are especially terrible about this--but yet I still contribute. And it's because I consider it practice.

I am not a skilled storyteller; my ability to grab a room depends a lot on the page. And I don't like that--I like a good story, I like a speaker who can lead me along, who can paint a picture, who can make me laugh so hard my lips curls back and my sides hurt. A lot of what is involved in telling a story out loud is also involved in telling a story on paper, especially when, like me, one writes by the seat of one's pants. I want to work toward that, even if it's unattainable. And so I talk. I talk and I talk and I listen and I listen and then, three times over, I analyze. I watch for where detail was overused, where it was underused, where a transition was clumsy, where the timing was off; I watch for where a person stumbled over a word and lost the thread, I watch for where a person took too long to remember a crucial point; I watch cadence and tone and the way these affect things, and the difference between a person laughing with the room and a person laughing so the room knows it's time to do so. And I, of course, do all these things for myself, and I analyze how I could do them better--and also, for the purposes of dialog, how my failings are natural and what they might say about me.

I ramble; but in some ways that rambling is valuable to my art. So if I'm conversing with you, and I start telling a story you've heard; or if you take it turn to tell a story and I seem distracted at the conclusion, please don't be offended. And if I start in on something you don't want to hear, something you do remember and didn't find funny the first time--just tell me that we're at dinner/church/a party/tennis, and this isn't the time to practice.

An Outline of an Outline

Apparently Thursdays are cursed; even with a power failure at work and an enforced vacation I still find myself unable to post on time. Such is life.

In lieu of further venting about Eyes of Stone, let me instead give you these thoughts re: outlines.

Simply put, I have previous to now not outlined stories very much (there; one of your classic author Q&A questions, answered before I ever have an author Q&A). A lot of this is for the same reason that I have trouble posting on time: inspiration does not respond well to structure. It responds well to discipline, certainly; if I set out to write every day or 5 days a week and really force myself to do so I find my ability to tap inspiration on demand does improve. But even that strain sometimes causes a collapse--I've had plenty of weeks where the mere thought of writing sets my eyes to straining and my forehead to aching.

And so it is with outlines. Often, when I do decide to outline a story, I find myself quickly blasting off straight into Crazytown; the whole process ends with a few bursts of swearing and me stalking away from my computer to go watch some old Mutant Enemy productions and pray for salvation. At the risk of sounding like some kind of Beat pretender, I work much better when I don't script myself and just see where things take me.

How many of you shuddered just there? Or winced? Yeah. I've been there.

For those not "in the know": "just winging it" will only really get you so far a lot of the time, unless you are well-practiced or absurdly talented. For every story that goes beautifully and flows into a fascinating ending there is one story that gets to around 10,000 words with no end or even middle in sight, one that follows a formula so trite it makes my mouth pucker when I read it, and one that has some great bits in the middle but just suddenly ends. I'll go back through manuscripts and find myself inserting no end of nauseating twists and twirls, pretentiously sly winks, and inventive but unnecessary characters who mostly serve to prove what a great and detailed world I have developed...for a 10-page story.

Of course, writers fail sometimes. Pick your famous creator and imagine the attic full of crumpled paper or dried lumps of clay or half-smeared canvas, and it's undoubtedly true in most cases. And this was my little mantra for everything that got rejected, everything that needed rewriting, everything that even editing couldn't save. Just keep winging it, just keep letting the inspiration come in whatever doses I can get, and don't worry too hard about the failures. And then there was Eyes of Stone.

I've said here before, as well as in more personal settings, that Eyes of Stone is proving to be a chore, if an often-enjoyable one. And really, yesterday, as I sat there at my desk wondering how to use up eight hours that are normally slotted for proofreading, I finally hit on the truth that differentiated the rockier path taken here from the straighter (if still bumpy) ride of Done with Mirrors: when I started Done with Mirrors, or at least about 20,000 words into it, I had some idea how it would end.

Not so with Eyes of Stone. I knew I wanted drama, and personal conflict, and big changes to my main character's life (but not too big, just first steps in mostly right directions). But the reason I got frustrated with trying to outline this story was that doing so raised questions, and one of the primary questions was, where did I really think this was all going? That was what was lacking; that was the positive charge that my inspiration failed to have.

Well, I think I have it now, and that's a good feeling (if somewhat diluted by me being concerned with, of all things, my page count...that's for the editing phase, buddy, don't get ahead of yourself). And more importantly I think I learned a basic truth here, which is that I am not ready to write something until I know how it ends. I can wander all around in the middle, I can even arrive at a totally unexpected destination (God knows I didn't expect what I got in Done with Mirrors), but I need to have a point on a map, or else I wind up steering straight off the edge.

It's sometimes painful, but it's still progress.

One Broken Promise Deserves Another

I said I wouldn't talk about politics, and I did. Now, let's also talk about my personal life. I promise it's writing-related.

These past few weeks, and particularly these past few days, have seen an explosion in my social life. Sara's wedding reminded me of some of the fantastic people I have not gotten to see of late, and my own birthday saw me remembering what wonderful friends I've got right in my own backyard.

Last night seems like it was at least a week ago, so twisted and inside-out is the tunnel of my perception; I got a chance to visit with an old friend and his new girlfriend, and play some board games and chill out free of any other responsibility. Then there was a couch in the dark and a few hours sleep, an overcast morning, and a sleepy train ride with a very strange, very chatty man with golden-brown skin who insisted he worked in chemical engineering and was about to commit domestic abuse (I would have called someone if I wasn't certain he was either hallucinating or kidding). After that was breakfast and dinner with my mother along with driving all over the Bay Area, to books and IKEA and to various other places besides, ending with my domesticity increased and a whole evening to relax. Then I went upstairs, and finished making plans with a very old, very dear friend from college, and took some time for TVTropes, and proceeded to discover that it was 9:45pm, that I had indeed slept on a couch last night, and that I was hoping to attend the farmer's market in the morning--which reminded me to go withdraw cash and pick up the few things I could afford at Safeway but not from the farmers--and which then brought me around to 10:15 or so.

All of this is to say that I am happy, but have also done no writing today, nor indeed yesterday. I have also eaten somewhat poorly, or at least to excess, and that is a problem; and as I sit here, playing a video game and contemplating sleep, I consider that life is too short and that playing video games will never be my career. Tonight, I am drained, and I should accept drainage; but tomorrow, I need to get back on track with writing.

1000 words a day, as often as I can--try to take no more than two days off a week, and try not to write only for the sake of word count. Submit more stories. Talk to more agents. Be louder. If it's this easy to lose track of what day it is, I could easily find myself discovering I've turned forty--and I don't want to have let my passion die on the vine.

NaNoWriMo Killed Bambi's Mom

It's November, which, for those of you who pay attention to such things, mean it is National Novel Writing Month. Those of you who pay attention to such things may have also noticed that this is the first mention I have made of NaNoWriMo, five days into it, and that I do not appear to have conceptual lava boiling up out of my head. This is because I am not participating in National Novel Writing Month. And now, unbidden, I will tell you why: because I do not think it is a good idea.

Now, hands off the keyboard; don't get me wrong. I think that NaNoWriMo is a fascinating exercise, and I can imagine that it dragged many people off the couch and away from their fan forum of choice to discover that they have at the very least a power to commit to something large and difficult, and maybe even that they have a bright creative spark within themselves. I participated last year and had the privilege of crossing the finish line; if it were not for NaNoWriMo I may never have written "Somewhere in Barstow", currently ensconced on my Selected Writings page and being considered for rewriting into something larger. However, having crossed the finish line, I do not think I will cross it again.

The majority of the reason is personal, to do with the somewhat fragile and dare I say it fickle nature of my creative process. When I did NaNoWriMo my words flew fast and loose; I spent the majority of the month ahead of schedule and I finished with days to spare. I seem to recall drinking fairly heavily. Then I recall one of the deepest, nastiest, most bleak stretches of cement-gray writer's block I have ever experienced. I don't think I met my writing goals for two months after I finished NaNoWriMo; if I hadn't moved out of the apartment I'd been living in and shaken up my life a bit I am not sure I would have written again until November and despair struck me over the head. I'm not saying NaNoWriMo killed my ability to write, but I am saying that it put me in entirely the wrong headspace for my regular writing.

And this, you see, is what I consider the NaNoWriMo curse: it strongly values quantity. Writing a book for NaNoWriMo requires 1,667 words (you'll wind up with change on that schedule) a day, which is only 300 words shy of what Stephen King expects of himself daily. You may have heard of Stephen King--the man who is a multi-bestseller and who has the fortune to write as a career? The man who thus has 16 or so hours in a day to devote to writing? You see where I'm going, math-wise.

That this is an enormous task is not my point--I think accomplishing something slightly insane in one's life is a perfectly fine goal, and I applaud it as a form of creative, well, recreation. My problem is that there are plenty of people who think that these 50,000 word projects make them novelists, a thought process that is in no way dissuaded by offers, some of them perpetrated with the help of the NaNoWriMo staffers, to print up bound copies of these books. Though the mission statement suggests that this is meant to be a fun challenge, when you get into the process it is easy to believe that what you are doing is writing a serious book.

A serious book, for most people, does not take a month. And a serious book is, with rare exceptions, more than 50,000 words long. Period.

I think NaNoWriMo is a great game and a fascinating creative exercise; and I think it can even be a good launchpad, if you are aware it is a launchpad. But I do not think it is a good tool for a career writer, as it encourages a way of writing that, for most people, is not going to be useful.

I know that sounds elitist, but writing is a skill; unfortunately, creativity and taste are both highly subjective, so it is hard for me to quantify my argument more than I already have. Think of writing like exercise: running that hot for that long will leave you too exhausted to do it again the next day. Jog a little. Walk sometimes. Stop to have some water. Don't expect writing to happen every day, and certainly don't expect it to happen in such large increments. If you do, in the long run, I suspect you will be disappointed.

All that said, I reiterate, NaNoWriMo is great fun; I salute those making the journey this year, and if you've never tried your hand at writing, give it a try. But if you try to tell me this makes you a novelist, I am not responsible for my actions.

Eyes of Stone, You, and Draft Zero Point Five

This is another process post; if you find those boring you are welcome to move on.

For those who don't know, I'm back at work on my second novel, Eyes of Stone, which I consider proof of both hubris and a strong streak of masochism. It's a rewrite of a novel I wrote when I was much younger (read: five years or so ago), which I realized had great potential but some elements that were, to put it bluntly, complete dreck.

To say the process is being beastly is an understatement; it has been a long time since I found myself working under this strong a mixture of confidence and doubt. I keep thinking I need to start over, and I keep telling myself I shouldn't; and rather than spiral downward I'll just be throwing this out here, because everyone knows that posting it on the Internet will make it real.

I am christening my current work on Eyes of Stone Draft 0.5. It's enough of change from the original to constitute a whole new draft, but it is not making the full jump from Draft Zero to Draft One that I had hoped for (and that, I am accepting now, it was ridiculous to hope for).

So the project now, to put it simply, is to allow the story to write itself out; to tell the story with all the characters, all the twists, all the turns and toils and triumphs; and to allow it to sit the way I let Draft Negative One sit for a while, before I bust out the bone-saw and the cautering iron.

I can do this. I mean it. I can really, truly do this. But as I will often say: this is why so many authors drink.