I’m crossing my fingers and knocking on wood (ow) in the hope that the worst of 2013 is behind me, and that the new year will not open with bad news. Cold Streets is still getting tested, and I’ve got a decent idea of what to shore up, what to cut, and what to expand. I’ll wait until everybody’s chipped in, though, before I get started on that.
In the meantime, I’ve been getting more ideas about Godslayer. Specifically, how it should begin. My recent foray back into TV-watching has had me taking in some cracking good pilots, and they all have a few things in common. They hit the ground running with their stories, they get the audience invested in their characters and worlds pretty quickly, and they don’t over-complicate the opening of a long narrative. I think a lot of genre novels can have trouble doing this, and I would rather not be counted among them. Especially if I want to gear Godslayer towards a younger audience.
Let’s see, what else? Got some local projects cooking. Keeping up with Flash Fiction. Still not sure if Fantasy Flight would be interested in a novel set in the Twilight Imperium universe.
This week was a good news/bad news week in terms of writing. The good news was that I banged out some work for a project I’m not quite comfortable discussing yet. I need more details before I do that! The bad news is, I’ve been working the dayjob too hard to do much else. Hopefully, the next few weeks will calm down, and I can return to a more reasonable schedule of things.
You can’t see it, but I’m knocking pretty furiously on some wood.
I was going to write something about writing when you can’t write (which I may still do), but due to time constraints I couldn’t quite get it together. Here’s a similar bit of advice from earlier in the year. Today I’ll do a better job of carving out writing time than I did yesterday.
Writing, as a creative endeavor, has a lot of advantages. You don’t need special equipment to write – at the bare minimum you just need something to write with, and something to write on. You can write about literally anything you want – fiction or non-fiction, on any subject or in any style, you can even write about writing itself! And you can write just about any time you like.
This is, however, the biggest potential problem writers might encounter. Delayed writing is writing that suffers. It’s better to write right now.
Chuck recommends writing in the morning. In fact, he recommends a lot of things that writers should pay attention to. But one point he hammers home like ten-penny nails your skull didn’t know it needs is Writers must be writing. And the sooner you write, the better.
Unless you completely shun human contact and seal yourself into some kind of bubble, things are going to come to your attention that interrupt your writing time. Spouse. Children. Chores. Tumblr. Any number of items that you are compelled to contend with vie for your attention, and you will not always be able or willing to resist their call. And you know what? That’s okay.
What matters is, you learn what works and what doesn’t, and you refine what works until you’re pounding out the words as immediately and completely as possible.
If you need to get up earlier in the morning, do that. Gotta rearrange your schedule? Do that too. Discuss new divisions of chores with the other humans you live with (if you live with any). Stock up on things that motivate and energize you – coffee, Clif bars, Oreos, booze, whatever. Make yourself a plan to write more, and do everything you can to stick to it.
Because, let’s face it – we’re at war.
Time wages a ceaseless battle against us. Every day you’re vertical is an act of defiance in the face of inevitability, even moreso if you write. Which means, to me, that every day you don’t write is losing ground to the enemy. You can fight to get that ground back, but it feels like running uphill. It’s more trouble than it should be. You do much better if you simply write right now.
So stop reading blogs on the Internet, and go do that.
To paraphrase a line from Terminator 2, the future is like driving down a long highway in the middle of the night.
Even if you know your destination, the road right in front of you is shrouded, dark, and uncertain. When there’s enthusiasm and hope, the darkness doesn’t matter as much as the destination, and it’s easier to do things like sing along with the radio or look for interesting landmarks that appear out of nowhere – generally, having a better time. But when the driver’s tired, the car rattles, animals wander out onto the road, and the Check Engine light comes on, there’s little a driver can do but keep their eyes on the shadowy road just in front of their headlights.
I say this because I have no idea what’s going to happen next. I’m doing my best to handle things day to day, and stay on top of everything that’s happening. Cold Streets has been getting pretty good feedback so far, and I have other projects I am embarking upon, all while giving the dayjob as much attention as I can so details are not missed and communication is clear. One way or another, I will be relieved when this holiday season is behind me. Q4 is always a rough time at the office, and this one in particular has taken a toll.
But I’m not going to give up, nor am I going to pull over. Too much is at stake and too many people are putting faith in me for me to turn back now. I honestly believe that I used to be a lot better at quitting things. In the past, if something didn’t work, I’d give up a lot sooner and then wonder why I felt like such a shitheel. I’ve come to realize that successful people aren’t necessarily more talented or more devious or even luckier than I am; they’re simply determined and stubborn. And, of late, I’m doing my utmost to be determined and stubborn, as well.
For me, there’s no other way to see this journey through to the end. And as dark as the road may become, daybreak is coming. It’s inevitable. No matter what happens in my little life or how dark I feel things have gotten, the sun will always rise again. If I can at least face the dawn knowing that I’ve done everything I can, I can face it without shame. And, at the end of everything, that’s all one can really ask for.
I realized last night, putting a few things together, that it’s been over six years since I started blogging. Granted, it began in a very different form. I’m sure that there are some of you out there that remember a little blogging site called LiveJournal. That’s where this – *gestures vaguely at the current blog* – all got started.
Back then, blogging was more about catharsis and reflection. I mostly wrote about day-to-day activities as I would in a pen-and-paper journal. Some of the stuff was pretty deeply personal, and other times was incredibly, eye-rollingly inane. People do change over time, thankfully, and I eventually wised up about what I should spend my time writing to share and what should stay either in my head or on paper for my eyes only.
Still, it can be difficult to self-edit. One can’t always read over the words that have just spilled out and know for a fact that some sentences don’t work and some others just need a little tweaking to really shine. That’s why I’ve asked for test readers for my works to be published; that’s why I trust the editors with whom I’ve worked and to whom I’ve spoken; that’s why I never take the first draft of anything significant I write straight to a venue for publication. That’s knowledge that’s only come with time and experience. You can teach a lot of things, but you can’t always teach someone that their shit does, in fact, stink.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about failure lately. How I’ve failed, why I’ve failed, what I’m failing in now and when I’ll fail next. Failure is inevitable; I’m not always going to get everything right the first time. But, in my mind, it’s pretty difficult to fail at blogging. I think that involves having nothing to say but making tons of noise anyway (see: filibustering), terrible grammar or formatting, and an obnoxious site or personality. I still have posts that could arguably be called inane, and possibly fall into the “nothing to say” category, but I do try to at least make what I’m writing interesting to the anonymous reader.
Taking all of that into consideration, I consider the blog to be relatively successful. It doesn’t always get a ton of hits, and I struggle at times with maintaining the schedule, but it’s still going. People do still come and read it. And all of it – from comments to contributions, from failed experiments with ads to the eventual end of IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! – has been and continues to be good experience.
Thank you for being a part of this so far. I sincerely hope you’ll stick around to see what happens next.
