Where Am I Going? How Will I Get There?

Nothing big going on, just wanted to drop in and say hi. I started writing down ideas today, not stories, but just anything that would get me writing. Besides story ideas, I’m toying with all sorts of ideas on where to go next with the distribution of my writing, meaning the regular mags I’ve been submitting to all along, oddball mags and sites that don’t pay but get the story in front of someone’s eyes, more stuff on my website (which I haven’t updated for the better part of a year, shame on me), or something rather punk and subversive which I won’t go into. A lot of the decision making process depends on whether I’m currently looking for money or exposure. Wouldn’t both be nice?

51

Number fifty-one is in the can. It’s A Girl in Crisis and it’s on its way to an editor as you read this, assuming, of course, that you’re reading this as it’s on its way to an editor. Next up is Process Five which I’m hoping will become number fifty-two by about this time next week.

I’ve found some motivation, suddenly, because my wife wants to stick a ridiculously large addition onto the house. An addition that I can’t afford to pay someone else to build, and therefore must build myself. I don’t like to build things. If I did, I’d already be building them instead of doing what I am doing, which is not building things. Then it hit me: if I could make a reasonably steady income by writing, maybe I could farm some of this work out. I’m not looking for huge amounts of money, just some. Some is more than I’m getting now. So I’ve spent more time with my keyboard this past week than I have in a while and I’m hoping to keep that trend going.

From the incredibly nifty department, I have to recommend Connie, Maybe, a January podcast of a story written by Paul E. Martens on Escape Pod. Not only is it a good story, but it’s read by the wonderfully voiced Wichita Rutherford. It’s a joy just to bask in the synergy that these two gentlemen have created. I’m done here, so check it out now.

GIGO

I bought two books on Sunday. The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike and The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois. I plan to read these books cover to cover and glean what I can from them. If you’re going to design a car do you want to study a Dodge Dart or a Ferrari? I have a theory that you can pick up writing ability better by reading lots of good stuff than by reading lots of how-to articles and books. It’s like learning through osmosis. My writer sister disagrees. But everyone believes in GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out), right? So why not GIGO (Greatness IN, Greatness Out)? Exactly. So from now on instead of thinking GIGO, think GIGO. And go read some good stuff.

Second Drafts

I recently finished the second draft of A Girl in Crisis and I’m about to begin the second draft of Process Five. Process Five is actually a text-only story based on one of the stories in my Unity comic scripts. Just checking in, as I haven’t for the last three weeks.

Finally 50

No, not fifty years old, but fifty stories! It came about thusly: A couple years back I wrote a script for the first issue of a comic book series I was creating called Unity. Unity #1 was story number thirty-one for me. Anyway, I shopped the script around to a couple of places with no luck and then I was stuck, because other publishers wanted to see a whole comic book with art and the whole thing, not just a script. I didn’t know any artists and I didn’t want to go out of my way to meet any, so that was that. Fast forward to last week. I was hanging out with my comic shop owning compadre, Capt. Joel at Big Dog Comics and he sez he’s got artists coming down for an event, so I sez, if I give you my script will you show it to ‘em? So he sez, he sez, sure.

So I figured, I had enough notes for issue two and a couple days to work on it, so I write a few scenes and viola, I’ve got Unity #2 and story number fifty. Nifty!

I think there was already a comic called Unity, so if I’m right, I’ll have to find myself a new title, but such is life.

A Bad Couple of Weeks

I’ve had a bad couple of weeks, not wanting to write a thing. I thought I wanted to write. I’d sit down to write, I’d even make some horrid little belches of thought on the computer screen, but it was not in me. I forced it for a smidge and then I just gave up and gave in. I’m hoping I’ll be kicking in to normality very soon rewriting my sad draft of A Girl in Crisis. And then I can feel a couple of quick ones coming over the horizon. I know my productivity has been ridiculously poor these past few months. I have not given up on my goal of one-thousand stories by my fiftieth year. I know what you’re thinking. Just you wait. I’ll show you. I’ll show you all! (Maniacal laughter as he rubs his hands together and finalizes his design for a machine that will give the cheerleader prom queen that stood him up all those years ago the head of a yak and the football player she ran off with a nasty infection where he makes pee-pee.)

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler died on Saturday. As a reader, I’m generally hard to please and I probably couldn’t name fifteen writers whom I love, but I loved Octavia Butler. She was her own niche: a black, female science fiction author and because of that she brought things to the speculative fiction table that no one else could. She wrote of the nature of power and the struggle of the dominated against the dominator. She wrote of some truly weird alien sex with not altogether willing humans. She wrote of horrible, miserable futures and pasts and the people who fought tooth and nail for freedom from them.
Please go find her books and read them because she was a great writer who never got enough attention while she was alive and it would be shameful if she and her work were forgotten in death. I absolutely recommend Wild Seed. The book has a great premise as well as a conflict and an ending that I can’t imagine any other science fiction author writing.

A Random Thought

I was thinking about a life’s work last night. We all have our life’s work, whether or not we’re conscious of it. Our life habits contribute to it because whatever we do consistently is going to become enormous over the course of a lifetime. And maybe your life’s work is nothing more than shaping your mind a certain way or collecting a certain type of knick-knack. It ain’t deep, necessarily. It’s what we end up with at the end of our lives, the results of what we’ve done more than anything else in the time we had. Maybe that’s twenty albums we’ve recorded or a collection of rare computer parts and maybe that’s also clogged arteries or impacted colons.
We build more bone tissue on our skeletons in the places upon which we place the most stress. Where there is less stress we actually lose tissue. It’s just like muscle. We’re sculpting our very bones with our day to day actions. We’re sculpting not only our bones and muscles but our other organs as well. We’re sculpting our minds, our bank accounts, our families, our homes, our jobs, our world and our lives, among countless other things, not as much with the big unusual actions we occasionally take (although those can be important) but with the things we do consciously or unconsciously day after day after day. Think on that, because it’s with us in every moment like a heartbeat but how much attention to we ever give it considering how important it is?

Shoot for Magnificence

I’m looking at a couple of different things I’ve got going on at home, my self-review at work and helping my daughter with her science project (something for which neither of us has any enthusiasm), and although these things as well as many others in my life are thrown together in a slapdash way, they always come out okay. They’re not great, but they’re decent and they’re acceptable to other people.
This begs the question: What would I be capable of if I were really trying? I think great things. I also think the same applies to a lot of other people. So often we’re required to do things we don’t want to do and just make an effort to get past the problem. So I want to do something great and I want to do it deliberately.
There’s a school of thought which says that you’re not going to get greatness if you force it. I can understand this, but I also know that the truly magnificent things in this world weren’t created accidentally. Someone was shooting for magnificence. I want to create something incredible before I shuffle off, like an epic novel. I don’t necessarily want to tie myself up with an outline or anything, because I’ve always had trouble working from an outline, but maybe a real skeleton of a first draft to which I could add a lot in subsequent drafts. I’m going to get started.
By the way, if any of you out there have a lot of unfinished drafts hanging around, go finish them. Maybe they won’t turn out to be great art but you’ll get some experience in finishing things, not to mention writing. This all goes toward mastery of your craft. Stop reading now and get to work.

Dare To Write Crap

I hit a wall like I always do after I finish work on a big story. Most of us do hit walls and the reason is that we’re trying to write too well. After I complete a story, it’s in pretty good shape and usually much different than the sad looking first draft I had. Somehow my ego convinces me that I’m capable of cranking out this final draft quality all the time and when nothing that good comes to me I freeze up.
The ultimate goal at this point is to get something, anything onto paper. We have to have the guts as writers to put any garbage that comes to us on the page. Dare to write crap. It’s the only way around writer’s block. Write the silly things that you wanted to write about when you were a kid. Write the silly things that you want to write about as an adult but never dared. To drop all pretension, aim to make it the worst piece of writing you’ve ever done. Do this for as long as you have to in order to loosen up again. And some of the crap may actually turn out to be pretty good and worthy of a second draft. When we’re relaxed, good stuff sometimes leaks out without us realizing it. The words flow and the writing seems natural.
The very best book on this subject is If You Can Talk, You Can Write by Joel Saltzman. Read it, throw perfection out the window, and go write.
Finally, this: I had an art teacher way back in elementary school (Mrs. Hinchie, I think her name was) who told those of us who were complaining that we couldn’t think of anything to paint that the problem was not that we didn’t have any ideas. The problem was that we had too many ideas. Just pick one. You can get to all the others later.

Back From Beyond

So what happened to me for the last month and a half? The holidays, for one, the wife and kids on Christmas vacation, visiting in-laws, the whole nine yards. I wrote next to nothing in December. What else? Well, about halfway into the month, I got a call from a very prestigious magazine whose fiction department was interested in one of my stories, but wanted to see a longer version. So the first week and a half of January was dedicated to rewrites. It turned out great and hopefully they’ll love it so much, they’ll buy it and you can find it on your newsstand sometime in the future. I’ll let you know how it goes. Unfortunately even though the new version of the story is about sixteen times the size of the original, I don’t count rewrites as new stories, so my count hasn’t changed.

However, besides having a great new story that I’m proud of, I’ve had a breakthrough in the way I work. I’ve had problems plotting for as long as I’ve been writing. I try to figure out where a story should go and then try to squish the action up and funnel it in that direction. What I end up with is characters who do ridiculous things for stupid reasons in order to come with an ending that sounds cool. It sucks and I’ve always known it but I’ve never been able to do anything about it. With Keys to the Yellow Kingdom (#43) and this story I just rewrote, I now know how it’s supposed to be done:

Once I get an idea, I don’t try to figure out the whole story from the get go. I don’t even try to write everything out at once. Instead I imagine scenes that might be interesting that are related to the idea. I don’t try to think them up in order. As things come to me, I try and flesh the thing out in my mind. I’ll write each scene or bit down as it gels in my mind. This happens over the course of days. When that’s dry, I’ll try to put the scenes in a logical order and then see if I need any other scenes to connect what I’ve got. I’ll think about those and then put them in. Somewhere along the line, the ending will come to me. So there’s a lot of thinking involved. That’s a lot of time that seems like it’s not writing, but it actually is. It’s just writing in your head. It may not be the fastest way to do it, but the plot comes out naturally, unforced and most importantly, it doesn’t seemed contrived. This all adds up to a much better story. Try it and see what you think.

A False Jazzing

Here I was all jazzed because I thought I had just completed story number 50. A landmark in my opinion. I was ready to add it to my list and saw that it was actually story number 49. Sigh. Hopefully I will feel even better when 50 does occur and will not have spent all of my jazziness on this pretender. Number 49 is called If We All Get Together. It’s no 50, but it is silly and was fun to write.

No progress on A Girl in Crisis yet.

Where the Heck Have I Been?

I’ve been not writing, that’s where I’ve been. This past holiday week, everyone has had the same days off I’ve had. While that makes for nifty holiday fun, it also makes for stinky holiday writing. But fear not, phase 2 of my master plan has already been set into motion.

Phase 1 was getting the forty hour a week job, which I had done shortly before beginning this blog. Originally, phase 2 was to get a laptop. With that laptop, I could then steal away to the backyard or the car or the bathroom or whatever and get some work done away from distraction. The price was a major stumbling block. I couldn’t stand the thought of spending that kind of dough on a machine that I only planned to use for writing. After a failed attempt at a good deal on Black Friday, I resorted to searching for word processors online. Not a whole lot has changed in word processor technology in the years since I last saw one. They still use daisy wheel printers! I cringed, imagining myself trying to track down replacement wheels and ribbon. Then my son, who was trying to pry me away from the computer so we could play Magic: The Gathering, suggested an Alphasmart which his friend uses.

The Alphasmart 3000 IR is a keyboard with a memory and a little screen. According to the website, it runs for hundreds (!) of hours on 3 AA batteries (!) and stores about 100 single spaced pages of text. You can use it anywhere and then upload your work to your PC. It auto-saves every keystroke and turns on and off in a couple of seconds. This thing sounds great and I talked my wife into getting me one for Christmas. We ordered it yesterday.

I’ll let you know if it lives up to the hype. If it does, I think my output is going to seriously increase. Not only will I be able to bring it wherever I go and crank out the words at a moment’s notice, I won’t have the distractions of the Internet and e-mail or anything else. The only thing you can use this thing for is writing.

Why don’t I just use a fifty-nine cent notebook and pen, you ask? I do, for ideas and quick notes, but I hate using them for work of any length, because I have to type it all into the PC anyway. Besides, I type a lot faster than I write.

It’s still going to be more than a week before I get a day off by myself. Whatever I can sneak in between now and then will be a bonus.

Something to Read

I can’t believe I’ve been away for a week! To What it May Concern is now up at Antipodean SF issue 90, so go check it out.

I finished the first draft of A Girl in Crisis the other day (It’s been sitting around for a couple of years, waiting for a decent ending) and I think it’s going to take more work than I thought. It’s a decent enough story, but the writing is pretty clunky. That’s to be expected for a first draft. I just remembered it as being better than it actually was.

Scifiction is being given the ax along with one of my favorite editors, Ellen Datlow. Please make sure you visit the site while it’s still up and dig through the archives to read some great speculative fiction.