Don’t worry, the blog probably won’t turn into this. Probably.

So The Art of Thor will come back next week, when I’m not so out of practice with StarCraft 2 and am back to my normal schedule of writing on the train and not wasting two hours in the car screaming at douchenozzles driving BMWs who think they bought the road along with their pretentious Bluetooth headsets and designer shirts monogrammed with the initials BIYM,

In other words, it’s on hiatus.

That strikes me as a somewhat dirty word for fiction writers. Going on hiatus means an interruption of the story. It means your audience is left hanging. And unless they’re deeply invested in your narrative or the characters, they’re going to go elsewhere for their entertainment, and you may have some trouble bringing them back.

The alternative is delivering a sub-standard product.

Think about it. If you don’t have the proper preparation, breathing room and time to edit and revise what you’re working on, if you shove it out the door just to shove something out the door, there’s no guarantee it’s going to be any good. And if you want to hold onto your audience, you’ll have to deliver quality, not just quantity. There are approximately 1.34 bajillion blogs, story sites and author portals on the Internet, and most of them aren’t dispensing anything all that new or interesting. Now, this isn’t to disparage any of the authors whom I’ve read and even worked with in the past. But it’s a fact, and here’s an example off the top of my head. The law of averages states that for every Chuck Wendig or Machine Age or JR Blackwell there’s between 5 and 5000 substandard hacks trying to push their schlock onto the teeming masses.

Hell, I might even be one of them, but that’s beside the point.

The point is, you won’t get anywhere or hold onto an ever-growing audience if you don’t give them something worth reading or watching. Doing that takes time. Time isn’t going to just saunter up to you and sit in your lap for you to take advantage of, either. You have to go after it. Chuck goes into detail about this and in a way that probably isn’t quite so indicative of his libido. Although one never knows.

So you need to take time to go about your entertainment the right way. And sometimes that means taking time away from other endeavors like ‘regular’ blog features or playing video games or training yourself to be the next dog whisperer. Given my schedule and the ways in which I’m trying to change & take charge of it, that’s meant getting some things in order and working around other events, and while the dust is settling and the end of a touch of darkness is in sight, there’s still going to be chaos here for a day or two.

In other words, the hiatus isn’t necessarily bad and Art of Thor is taking one til next week.

There are things we can’t control, and things we can. For example, we as individuals can’t control the price of gas, the degree to which our water pipes rust or the behavior of elected officials. We can, however, change our commuting patterns & schedule to consume less gas, adjust our behaviors to use less water per day and vote for different people in the next election. Things that we can’t control may frustrate us now, but when we consider what we can control instead of what we can’t, things become more clear and less stressful. Normally.

Case in point: you can’t control the expectations and tastes of an agent, but you can control your writing and its presentation.

It’s not up to the whims of a muse or the machinations of fate or the trends of the industry. You control your writing. If you don’t write something, nobody else is going to write it. Period. Schedules are going to change and even get thrown into upheaval, writers get distracted by issues large and small, and when the day is winding down and you finally make it home, sometimes you just want to vegetate in front of some rapidly-moving brightly-colored images. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, it’s part of life, but you must keep in mind that the only person who can write what you want to write is you.

For example, I can see the next few months of writing laid out in front of me but I know I won’t get there if I do nothing.

By the end of July I want to be finished with Cold Iron. The outline tells me I have about six chapters to go. I’m getting started on Act 3, so to speak. I should be able to maintain the momentum of the narrative if I can carve out more time for it around everything else that’s being held together with chicken wire and duct tape.

August is when I begin the rewrite of Citizen in the Wilds. There are at least three major changes I need to make, and there will be more than that as things take shape. I may adjust the ending to reflect a different or more coherent line of thought from our hero, even if it ends up making him less heroic. The goal is to make him more human. If that means he does something that pushes him away from the shining ideal of heroism, so be it.

I may drop the current working title for something else. Not just for marketing purposes. The title of the book should tell you more about its contents, and I don’t know if Citizen in the Wilds works when our heroes are only in the Wilds for a portion of its action. There’s also the fact that when I’m done with the rewrite, the book will be different. I want it to be more unique in its content, more driven in its narrative and more immediate in its appeal. Like a prime cut of meat, it’s at a decent starting point but needs a better marinade and proper cooking time.

After that I begin editing Cold Iron. The pruning shears will stay out. I’ll reload the darling-slaying shotgun. I’ll vivisect the thing and ensure the characters dance on their strings exactly how I want them and look human and three-dimensional while doing so.

That’s the kind of thing you need to do as a writer, I feel, from time to time. You must assume control of your work and push yourself to improve it. Otherwise, you might as well not bother, or at most try to sell yourself as a novelist for a collectible card game or a scriptwriter for Michael Bay.

“Peace, however comforting, is stagnation. Conflict, however messy, is life.” – Bob Chipman.

Sooner or later, you’re going to run into difficulty. It’s a fact of life. Everything isn’t always hunky-dory. A tire goes flat, a check bounces, a bone gets broken, a job market tanks, a lover cheats, a bill gets skipped, a chore gets neglected, a payment gets forgotten. It happens. There’s no way around it.

Even when you do everything right, even if you put yourself onto the rails of a carefully-laid plan for moving forward, someone or something is going to put a penny on those rails and you’ll have to respond accordingly to the subsequent disaster. That’s life. It’s a mess. It’s conflict.

Why should the lives of our characters be any different?

It’s fantasy, you might say. It’s fiction. We can have our characters exist in a consequence-free world if we want. It’s our world so it’s our rules, right?

This will work in a video game like Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause. But can you imagine the world of Harry Potter as one without conflict? Or A Song of Ice and Fire? Or hell, Jersey Shore? Yeah, I said Jersey Shore’s fictional. Those might be people in a reality show, but I challenge them to be ‘real’ in any sense of the word in person. I mean if they look fake, sound fake, act fake and give out fake expectations…

Yeah. Conflict. Let’s have some of that.

We want to live vicariously through our fiction. But fiction without conflict and without consequence is ultimately boring. The stories we truly enjoy, the ones that stick with us and pull is back in just by glancing at a title or cover, are the ones with deep conflict, long-lasting consequences for the characters, the sorts of things we dive into fiction to escape from. Why?

Because we empathize. We understand. And in the end, we root for the characters who are just as under the gun and behind the 8-ball as we are.

In writing one draft and preparing to revise another, with a tip of my hat to the brutally honest people of Book Country, I’ve realized that with this conflict comes passion, even if it’s dark and often misdirected passion, and that passion is an emotion onto which readers can also grab hold. Or, in other words, it’s something that will grab the reader and pull them bodily into the narrative.

I was wondering where my hooks were. I think I answered my own question.

Without conflict, there’s no passion. Without passion, there’s no hook.

Therefore we must begin with conflict. And we can’t let up on it until the end.

The conflicts may change. One may end as another begins. Or multiple conflicts may intersect or even collide with one another. Good. The more conflicts and chaos, the more deep and nuanced the story becomes. The challenge for the writer is to keep all of this chaos straight, at least in their mind, to keep it from becoming a jumbled mess of angst and post-modern darkness.

I’m not saying to open with something exploding or a big gunfight or a little spaceship being chased by a bigger one. You can, but it’s kid’s stuff, really. Open with a deeper, inner conflict. One set up by society rather than bullets. Find the deep things that bother your character, their fears and what pisses them off. Tap one of those veins right at the start, and you’re more likely to suck in a reader within your first page.

Conflict should suck for our characters, and be as prevalent and relentless, as it is for us. Otherwise, what’s the point?