I’ve been finding it difficult to write lately. I have a ton of ideas chasing themselves around in my head, projects to complete and new novels to start, yet I’m running into some serious roadblocks. I have to assume that I’m not alone: a lot of writers are pre-occupied with many things, from life events to other endeavors to all sorts of personal issues. You should be writing – we all should – and if you’re not writing, something has to change.
If nothing else, you have to change your scene. A lot of writers have a particular area set aside for their craft. Away from foot traffic, secluded in some way, or just portioned off from the rest of a room, it is their fortress of solitude. When I move, I will be taking my writing desk with me, and it will be in a different corner from my computer desk. Even if it’s just across the room, that separation is crucial.
When life gets tossed into upheaval, it can be difficult to maintain the things that are essential to both our futures and our happiness. There’s a great deal of immediate tasks to deal with when changes occur in life, and not everybody has the same reaction time. To get back to the good places from where we can be productive and happy, sometimes the scene has to change.
I’m going to keep working on getting myself to that place. That’s how I’m going to beat back the dark things and stay on track with my goals.
Reality’s a stone-cold bitch. That’s why I mostly write fiction.
I identify first and foremost as a writer, not necessarily a programmer or a social media guru or mediocre gamer. As such I’ve come to accept several truths about myself.
Any emotional problems from which I actually suffer will be exacerbated by the short-sighted stubborn sociopathy inherent of being a writer.
If I take up writing as a full-time profession I am going to dodge debt collectors and utility bills even more than I do now. (Don’t panic, family members, my knees are unbroken and will remain so. I’m just not dining on steak and drinking cognac. More like dining on pasta and drinking cheap pop.)
The longer I do not write full time and cram writing in whenever I can into the nooks and crannies of a packed schedule, fueled by whatever energy I can spare, the more my writing is going to suffer for it and the less likely I am to get published before I’m facing off against Gandalf and Dumbledore in a long white beard growing competition. Which I’ll win because they’re fictional.
While writing is an evolutionary process that requires several drafts, torrents of trial and error, and accepting that one’s final effort might still be a flaming pile of poo, processes in the professional world are very different, and being writerly will rarely be tolerated long in the face of clients who want what they want yesterday for less than they want to pay. If you don’t get something right the first time, there’s the door, don’t let it hit you on those fancy pants you thought you were wearing.
I am never, ever, for as long as I keep breathing, going to give up writing.
Sure, I’ll be miserable more often than not. Who isn’t? I’ve learned to seize and capitalize on my joy when I find it. The smile of a loved one. Pulling off a win in Hearthstone. Meeting fellow geeks in person instead of just over the Tweetsphere. The open road on a sunny day. Enforcing. A decent movie or video game with a coherent story and three-dimensional characters. My mom’s cooking and my dad’s laughter. Good pipe tobacco.
And finishing a story.
That’s the hidden beauty of writing. If you do it right, you get to finish it multiple times. After your first draft, you go back and edit it. And when you get through the edit? Guess what, you finished it. Awesome!
In my experience it’s not a case of diminishing returns. The next round of edits might not be as heady in its completion as the last, but it’ll be different and it’ll still be good. And let me tell you, it’s a long hard road to get there.
Even if you do write for a living, you still have to produce. Instead of the aforementioned clients you have looming deadlines, a constant and gnawing doubt that your writing just won’t be good enough and the cold knowledge that at least a dozen younger, hungrier and more talented penjockeys are just waiting for you to fuck up so they can take your place, and your paycheck. Pressure from clients or deadlines or those lean and hungry wolves becomes pressure on you, pound after pound after pound of it, and when you go home at night with even more words unwritten, you’re going to feel every ounce of that pressure on your foolish head, and every word you haven’t written will pile on top, each one an additional gram of concentrated dark-matter suck.
It’s a love affair with someone who never returns you calls when you need them but always calls just when you think you can’t take another day of this tedious, soul-eroding bullshit.
I said earlier I mostly write fiction. This, for example, isn’t ficton. I wouldn’t mind writing more recollections like this, but guess what, I’m not getting paid for it (I could be if somehting hadn’t gone wrong with my ad block, thank you SO much for that, Google Ads). My movie & game reviews, short stories, commentary on geek minutae, Art of Thor series, IT CAME FROM NETFLIX!, the Beginner’s Guide to Westeros? Not a dime. I don’t write any of that because I get paid for it. I do it to entertain those couple dozen of you who cruise by here every day. I do it because I feel I’ve got something to say that hasn’t quite been said this way before.
And yes, I do it because I love it.
It’s in my blood and my bones. It keeps me awake at night more than bills or code or politics or Protoss cheese or ruminations on the Holy Ghost. And since I doubt I’m going to be getting rid of it at this point in my life, I might as well embrace it and make the most of it.
I’m going to suffer more hardship. I might have to move, or change jobs again, or go through some embarassing procedure because I tried to hock my words at passers-by on the train and had made one of the first drafts of my manuscript into what I felt was a fetching kilt (nae trews Jimmy) and a matching hat that may or may not have been styled after those conical straw numbers you see atop badass samurai in Kurosawa movies.
So be it.
Say it with me, writers.
I will not whine.
I will not blubber.
I will not make mewling whimpering cryface pissypants boo-hoo noises.
I will not sing lamentations to my weakness.
I am the Commander of these words.
I am the King of this story.
I am the God of this place.
I am a writer, and I will finish the shit that I started.
A question that I’ve seen asked of those in my profession is, “How do you know if you’re a writer?”
To answer, let me give you a real-life example of what it feels like.
The last few days have been, for me, alternating exercises in fatigue and frustration. Difficulties I’ve been dealing with for weeks are so tantalizingly close to resolving themselves, and I find myself both wanting to push harder to get the results I’m after and holding back for fear of being a selfish prick. Add the dayjob workload and maintaining things around the apartment, and you get a recipe for wanting to do exactly zero when you finally have a little time to yourself.
This is incredibly frustrating to me because I know that should be my time to write.
Disapproving voices would tell me to write anyway, regardless of how tired or worn out or seethingly furious I might feel. I know. I’m one of those voices. I need to bite that bullet, make more coffee or chai, put on good tunes that shut out the world, and plunge into the word mines. There’s no other way they’re going to get written. It’s down to me, no compromises, no excuses. If I write, I write; if I don’t, I fail.
The gnawing, growling, nigh-constant feeling of irritation at my own inability to maintain high energy levels is how I know I’m a writer. If I cared less about it, if I didn’t have faith in my abilities, I’d cut the stressor from my life and stop worrying about it. But I can’t. I won’t. The need to tell stories and give people the gift of escape to another world, other lives, a new experience or even just some distraction from what’s in front of them is too great to be ignored, set aside, or discarded. The spirit is willing, and angry, and full of notions and dreams. The flesh is weak, and flabbier than I’d like, and smells funny if I don’t bathe often enough.
I’m going to try and turn this around. I can’t be on the bad end of bullshit forever. I’m sharpening my knives and inking my pens.
I was up rather late last night, and I think the best way to illustrate why is the following song. Hum along if you know the tune.
And who are you, the proud lord said,
that I must bow so low?
Only a cat of a different coat,
that’s all the truth I know.
In a coat of gold or a coat of red,
a lion still has claws,
And mine are long and sharp, my lord,
as long and sharp as yours.
And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
that Lord of Castamere,
But now the rains weep o’er his hall,
with no one there to hear.
Yes, now the rains weep o’er his hall,
and not a soul to hear.
I love the Internet. I love all the things a free flow of data can do. It’s how I’ve met some of the most important people in my life. It’s how I not only got to PAX but became an Enforcer. It’s how people bought my writing for the first time. The Internet is awesome!
There are those, unfortunately, who want to make it less so.
This is the Comcast building, just down the river from me in Philadelphia. It’s a titanic construct. It’s an interesting architectural design.
It’s a massive middle finger to fair business practices and net neutrality.
Let’s leave aside how Comcast muscles out smaller potential ISPs, and how atrocious their customer support can be. Our focus has to be on how this powerhouse of a provider wants to deal with ‘net neutrality’, a term that encapsulates the idea of all data on the Internet being treated equally the way electricity and phone calls and telegraphed messages have been treated in their wires for decades.
Basically, Comcast wants to eliminate this concept so it can make more money.
Along with Time Warner Cable and others, Comcast has been working to create a two-tier system of Internet service in the United States. They call it “fast lane” or something. It’s a woefully inaccurate moniker: in essence, what they would do is put speed bumps all over the current lanes, and the un-bumped parts become faster by comparison. And if you’re trying something new in a field they don’t want any competition in, they will slow down your data so much that your idea will fail before it even gets off of the ground. And even if you’re an established brand – like, for example, Netflix – an ISP in this situation will have every right to throttle your data’s speeds, especially if the service does not pay the premiums. Comcast has already done this once to Netflix, and if the initiative to preserve net neutrality fails, it’ll happen over and over again.
Don’t believe me? Think this seems far-fetched? Operating under the belief that United States anti-trust laws limit evil, ruthless, throat-cutting monopolies to game boards with little metal tokens?
Try this video on for size.
Or this one.
The icing on the cake, though, is here.
This is the link. You can click the Proceeding number (14-28) and leave a comment on why this issue is important to you. I’ll send you there with two caveats:
Don’t be intimidated. The form is unfriendly to users and demands your name and address. Don’t worry about that. These systems are in place to prevent you from posting. They want to have people leaving as few comments as possible so they can ramble on without oversight from the people. Don’t let it stop you.
If you can’t get through, keep trying. Unlike other things I’ve said, this is unsubstantiated: a rumor is going around that TWC and Comcast are slowing down connections from their users to the FCC website. This is (a) a massive pile of bullshit that clearly illustrates why this is a bad thing, and (b) what a character in Blazing Saddles called “the last act of a desperate man.” Keep trying. Keep posting until your comment is taken. Let your voice be heard!
I’ve left a comment. I’ve given a finger right back to Comcast. Won’t you do the same?
