I’m still not writing as much as I would like in a sitting, but I’m writing more and it’s consistent in that it’s happening every day, now. Cold Streets is back on the front burner and bubbling away nicely. I know I will have to go back and do a bunch of editing and rewriting. But I need to at least get the concepts, scenes, and beats out of my head and on to paper before I can properly mess around with them. And there’s only one way to do that!
In the hopes of keeping people interested in my work and with an eye towards better promotion, I’m happy to announce the following: for the rest of 2012, until January 2 2013, Cold Iron is on sale at Amazon for $0.99. If you haven’t already, you can get it for your Kindle right here. If you have already downloaded and read Cold Iron, tell a friend, leave a review, send me a comment, something along those lines.
I’ve gone back and forth about how to approach the former fantasy novel, and whether or not it will be a trilogy. Looking over the story, the complexities, and the things I want to discuss through and with the characters, I think that yes, breaking it up is probably the way to go. It is my hope that, as winter goes on, I can put together more notes, form more thoughts coherently, and finally take the red pen, scalpel, darling-slaying shotgun, and all-important flamethrower to my original manuscript to craft the first novel of the Godslayer trilogy.
Last but not least, I still believe that science fiction stories do not need to be constrained to a single type within their own narratives. There’s no reason a good character-driven story can’t begin life as one thing and slowly become another. The Fellowship of the Ring has a whimsical, homey start in the Shire, but by the end, darkness and peril are all around and it’s hard to imagine how things can get worse. It is that grounding in whimsy that makes the end, and the next two books, so powerful and resonant. It has been done in fantasy many times; why not in science fiction?
I’m not comparing myself to Tolkien by any means, I just think that it might be an experiment worth trying.
I used to do a regular feature I called “Pen Training”, or “PT” for short. In lieu of anything else, as I’m running behind and did not write up a post beforehand like smart people do, here’s a quick look into what I was yammering on about three years (!) ago in this very blogspace. Enjoy.
Maybe you got a letter. It could be something you received electronically. One way or another, a submission or entry upon which you’ve spent time and energy has been rejected. Now, I’m not talking about receiving constructive criticism. That’s always a good thing to get. Iron sharpening iron and all that. What I’m on about is the cold shoulder, either in the form of a bland photocopy of a generic letter or a complete and total lack of recognition for your efforts. It’s like fancying yourself a comedian, telling a joke and waiting for the laughs which never come. It breaks the heart and erodes the soul.
If you’re anything like me… well, you might need a shave. But in terms of this sort of thing, after a few rejection letters or seeing a publication for which you wished to contribute which doesn’t include what you sent, you probably went back over your submission with a fine-toothed comb. What did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? The questions inevitably leave to negative emotions. Maybe you’ll feel put out by the rejection, thinking your work isn’t good enough. There could be some frustration at the difference that ended up existing between what you envision and what you submitted. And maybe getting rejected for whichever time you’ve just been brushed off just pisses you off.
Good.
Not to re-tread old ground, but I’ve said over and over that negative emotions do not need to lead to negative outcomes. There a lot of things you can do with your feelings. One thing you should not do, however, is sit on your ass. There’s work to be done.
Pop the hood on your work. Strip out parts that rattle or shake. In other words, take a look at your creation and figure out the parts that work. Maybe you have a character or two that really connect with readers, or you’ve gotten some feedback telling you that a particular passage really hammers home the good things about your writing. Maybe there’s that one shot in your portfolio that really jumps off the page.
What about it works? Why does it connect while the rest of the work falls away? Step back and examine the situation, the environment and the construction of the parts that work. Once you recognize what makes those portions successful, strip out everything else and rebuild the work around that core of goodness. This might mean you only need to make a couple small changes, or it might mean you need to all but start from scratch. Don’t fret, though: declaring a do-over could very well be a step in the right direction.
One thing you don’t want to do is rush. There’s no need. Take a deep breath. Make some cocoa. Instead of tearing down what you’ve done and smashing it around with a wrecking ball, lay it out and take a scalpel to it. In the course of doing so, you’ll find things that you’re proud of in spite of the rejection and you’ll also likely find something that makes you smile and shake your head in that “What the hell was I thinking?” sort of way.
It might also be the case that you can’t bear to look at the project that’s been so callously rejected. That’s understandable. But you still have a bunch of bad feelings that need to get vented. You have the old stand-by responses of games, movies, booze and cocoa but the best thing to do, in my opinion and experience, is to do something in the same creative vein to get you thinking about what your next step will be. It could be back to what caused you to feel this way or it could be in a new direction entirely. You won’t know, however, until you take that step.
Whatever you do, no matter how many things you find wrong with your work, no matter how much cocoa you drink, no matter how many rejections you’ll have to deal with in the future, don’t give up. You’re trying to do something new and different. Creative people are inevitably going to face a great deal of opposition because the environment out in the world is one where creativity is seen as a secondary concern to efficiency or profitability, if creativity is acknowledged at all. You want to be fast in your process, efficient in your use of energy, but it can be difficult to bang out work promptly if you’re wrestling with bad feelings or unsure of where to go next. Don’t worry about that. Worry about getting from bad to good first. Then worry about getting things out quickly.
Don’t quit. Especially if your ideas and the need to express them get you out of bed in the morning and motivate you to expend your time and energy of turning them into reality. Screw the rejection and the idea that your creativity doesn’t matter because it doesn’t help you file TPS reports more efficiently.
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Harold Whitman
Drinking your cocoa from a mug of Shakespearean insults doesn’t hurt, either.
I originally wrote this post over a year ago. However, it feels more relevant now than it did then. Maybe because I’m still struggling to carve out time to write, maybe because I know I’m not the only one writing less than I’d like, maybe because it’s close to the end of the year. Who knows, maybe me from the past wrote out this post as a reminder to my future self that writer’s block is something of a fallacy and needs to be dealt with head-on rather than worried about in a quiet, hands-wringing fashion. Anyway, here’s what I had to say about it, and I feel it’s still true:
I’m finally starting to catch up on the writing. It’s not a great deal, only a few hundred words here and there, but it’s something, and it should continue improving in the weeks to come. Unfortunately, the stress and fatigue of the season is also catching up with me. I’m sleeping less when I should be doing it more, and the eye I’m keeping on my diet and exercise is not as close as it could be.
The urge to drift off is strong as I sit here typing this, as a matter of fact.
The thing is, the whole idea of ‘catching up’ in such a way is a fallacy. The time that I could have spent writing or sleeping is already lost. I can’t get any of it back. The best I can do is make the effort to better sort my time in the future.
I think I’ll do that after I get done with my shift today. And possibly take a nap.
This marks the one thousandth post on my blog. I really don’t know if this should be a big deal, or not.
On the one hand, a thousand is a LOT. It means that, for almost three years off and on, I’ve been blathering my thoughts out into the nothingness of the Internet. Occasionally, this drivel gets into the faces of people who appreciate it, and I don’t know if I’d still be doing this if it weren’t for you. Yes, YOU, even the person who stumbled across the blog with a Google Image search (which, according to my dash, is how I get roughly half of my traffic). It also helps that I flat-out enjoy writing, even when the writing feels somewhat arduous. More on that in a bit.
On the other hand, all I’ve done is blather for a thousand posts. I mean, it’s my hope that someone somewhere found something of value in a couple of my posts, but from my perspective, half of the time I’m just brain-dumping into a text window. As much as I’d like to think that the right words in the right order perceived by the right person can save the world, my opinion of myself is not so high to think that I have those words, that order, or such a person that reads this. I could be wrong, though. There’s also the fact that, after a thousand posts, I still only have one actual publication of my own out there and it’s sort of stagnant at the moment. Which is probably due to a lack of promotion. Time to schedule some tweets!
I certainly can’t make a career out of blogging, at least not with just this thing unless I do something like sign up with Project Wonderful for ads and find a way to explode all over Tumblr, so let’s move on.
The dayjob has been stressful as hell lately, but I’m making time this weekend to feng shui the living crap out of the apartment, or at the very least arrange the bedroom in such a way that, regardless of where my other half is, I can isolate myself and write. I have OpenOffice, DropBox, and little else on what I’m calling the Craptop (it’s an ancient Dell Latitude I got from the dayjob office when they were giving away old crap), and it’s portable to the degree I can sit at either the ‘kitchen’ table next to my desk or the writing desk that will be in the bedroom and be free of my major distractions. No Steam, no other games, no chat clients, no Twitter, no Tumblr, no Skype. There will eventually be a nearby shelf with board games, Magic, and other such things, but cracking those things open requires more physical effort than clicking on a link. They won’t interfere with the focus I’ll have when I get that writing groove back.
I’m going to keep the desire to write foremost in my mind, and am mostly looking towards the new year as kind of a fresh start. If I can nail down more of a routine for writing, and meet word goals I set every day, I can be much more prolific, and will finally get around to the rewriting and new writing I’m craving. Pushing forward with Cold Streets by comparison feels a bit sluggish. Maybe it’s a general lack of energy due to how much I’m pushing myself at the dayjob, and I just need a readjustment, which is why stuff is getting moved around.
The most important thing is not to quit. The second most important thing is to fucking write. Third is, I don’t know, generally being awesome? Basically you just have to keep yourself going and making sure people know you’re still at it, and eventually things will click. Or so I’ve gathered.
Anyway, thanks for hanging around, especially if you’ve been here a while. If you want to how far I’ve come, I recommend the Wayback Machine. I’m sure Mister Peabody will happily take you to any number of embarrassing anecdotes in the growth of my blog. And if you get that reference, we should totally hang out.
