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Archive for Writing

Life Cycle of the Common Parking Lot Sandberg

When I was a boy, I loved the archipelagos that formed in parking lots towards the end of winter and the dawn of spring. Murky, sand-drenched snow-islands accreted around every lamp post, existing in defiance of air temperatures thanks to their composition of half grit, half ice.

They seemed towering, ephemeral Everests that demanded conquering. Often my siblings and I would try to climb them to the chagrin of my parents who only wanted us to get in the damned car so they could get home after a long day.

As spring bounded on each year, the islands wore ever downward, the warming tide against their shores, until nothing remained but a sea of asphalt left pocked by potholes. But for a brief few weeks, there they dwelled in the K-Mart lot, a temporary geography ripe for imagination, calling to be explored and to be dreamed larger than they really were.

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Meditations/Some Crap On Writer’s Block From France

I’m still on vacation, but I’ve chosen to live mostly in the moment and have not been keeping to any kind of blog update schedule. Much of what I’ve been doing is lounging, reading, and doing a little work on Clockpunk business stuff.  We’ve had a few interesting day trips to places like Avignon, but the experiences, while deeply fascinating to me, don’t seem like the kind of thing anybody else would want to read.  I’ll probably do more photo dumps in the future, but the only place anybody engages with any of this stuff is Facebook.  God, how I hate Facebook for that.

I’m actually nearing the point where I don’t really care if anyone reads this blog, and in fact, I suspect that the fewer people read this post in particular, the better, because this is going to be me digging  into the reason I haven’t been able to finish a short story since something like February of 2017.  If you don’t care to read a bunch of random thoughts as to why, then jog on, dear reader. No worries.

So, yeah. Just when my fiction career seemed to be getting back on track, it all came crashing down on me. After finishing and selling my first real novella, I expected I’d take a short break before diving into more short fiction or maybe a novel. And then Trump took office, and Congress began a dedicated assault on our healthcare, which I purchase through the ACA exchange.  My entire way of life felt under assault for the first half of 2017. I lived in a constant state of high anxiety and depression.  I started seeing a therapist for the first time in almost ten years, because the kinds of thoughts I began to wrestle with scared me.  I started to wonder, on a regular basis, if it would just be better to die than to live with all the stress that I was putting up with. I began to obsess over money, and worked harder than I have ever worked before, having a record year, but certain, in an oddly delusional way, that I was going broke.  It got really, really bad, and while I didn’t attempt suicide, I found myself thinking about it. A lot.  And I was just self-aware enough to know that I had to do something about it. So, I went on some meds again and started up therapy.

I don’t think I really started to level out until early this year. I expected that once I had my mental health issues under control better, the writing would come back. It hasn’t, and while the anxiety is more manageable these days, it’s still present and still higher than it was in, say, 2015.  I still feel a higher state of vigilance. I still find myself, at times, seeking out bad news to validate my inherently negative world view. I still spend too much of my free time examining the increasingly plausible doomsday scenarios about how the United States will either destroy the world in nuclear fire, launch a global economic depression, or merely turn into a fascist dictatorship and start rounding up and gassing people of color.   How can I write science fiction when every day I feel like I’m living in a ever-worsening dystopia?

There’s some of that at play. Some of it is that work has kept me increasingly busy, combined with parenting and such, so I don’t find myself with as much free time as I once had.  But I still find time to try, and what seems to be completely lacking is any sense of excitement or driving will power to finish.

I’ve started a dozen or so stories since the block began, but I don’t think I’ve gotten more than 1200 words into any of them.  I write for a single session, and then all the excitement is gone. I don’t feel any motivating force to take it up again and begin to do the real work of structuring a story, figuring out a plot, or sketching out characters.  When I think about all the things even a basic short story must accomplish to be satisfactory, I feel overwhelmed, and the task seems impossible.  Yet it’s something that I’ve done a few dozen times at least partially successfully.

Some writers, upon being told about my problems, suggest that I’m simply growing as a writer and when I am able to write again, I’ll have “leveled up” to write new, deeper stuff.  Others seem to shy away from discussing it like I’m some kind of linguistic leper.  A lot of people have meat-and-potatoes suggestions for ways to try to tackle it, and many of them, I’ve tried, but to little effect.

Around the same time that I started feeling blocked, I was also making a conscious decision to give up on my dream of ever growing into a full time writing career.  My family relies on me exclusively to generate income to provide for us, and writing is a notoriously income-poor profession.  The simple math dictates that writing is at best a slightly lucrative hobby for me, and the chances of me replacing my web design income with writing income, even over time, is about the same chances of me winning a moderately sized lottery.

I resigned myself to finding other reasons to write, but truthfully, all the other reasons pale, at least motivationally, to writing for coin. Money is the great motivator for me.  Realizing that no matter how good I get as a writer, no matter how much I do of it, I’ll probably never earn anything close to enough to replace my substantial web freelancer work required to pay our bills, that seems to have broken something inside me.  I always knew it was really risky to ever think that, but somehow I kept at it with the dream that I could defy the odds.  But as I turned 40, I realized I am not the kind of person who ever really defies the odds. I don’t have any breathtaking talent at what I do.  I’m the author you find in the middle of an anthology who mostly delivers a competent and interesting tale that you don’t remember a few months later. And I’m okay with that, I guess. At least, I thought I was, but maybe accepting who I am and the realities of my situation sucked all the motivation out of things for me.

It’s probably some kind of perfect storm of awfulness, these past couple of years.  I should be patient with myself, or learn to live with my new state as a non-writer.  But some part of me desperately wants to keep doing it. I’ve invested twenty years of my adult life into trying to be a writer, and it seems like a waste to actually go and give up now.  Especially when I’m starting to see some measure of success in selling my work, and heck, one of my stories is a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella, so it’s not like I’m not seeing any acclaim.

So what gives? Am I a psychological casualty?  An economic one? Does it really matter? Fuck yes, it matters. I want to know what makes me tick.  That’s a big part of the reason I write, when you take money out of the equation.  Writing helps me understand myself better.

Once upon a time, I didn’t even believe writer’s block like this existed.  What a fool I was.  Here I am, fifteen months since a completed story, frustrated and wondering: if I’m not going to keep writing, then what the hell am I even going to do with myself?  What now?  I’ll keep trying for a while still, but it’s hard to be optimistic about it.  Twenty years, and I’m not sure I’ve ever had this much difficulty putting down words — any words.   Blog posts roll off the finger tips, but those don’t matter in the scheme of things.  So maybe that’s the problem?  Maybe I’ve put too much importance in my “serious” fiction work.  Maybe I just need to write some deliberately awful garbage, or fan fiction I couldn’t possibly sell?  That seems even more pointless though, especially because it’d be trying to make pointlessness the whole purpose of the work.

I don’t know. I just don’t have any idea what the problem is.  If you think you do, let me know.  I’ll try just about anything now to get through this patch.

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The Sunday Shift : Serving Up Great Chicken With a Side Helping of Ass Kickin’

While getting ready to tackle my day this morning, I came up with a TV show or comic book series pitch. It’s called : SUNDAY SHIFT.  The proper names are mostly placeholders right now, but the general basic concept was too much fun not to share.

JAMES HERO (JIMMY) is your typical disaffected 19 year old dork; he loves playing video games and looking for love, and mostly he’d rather be doing either of those things than working his day job for the pious fast food chain, WWCD (Winner Winner Chicken Dinner). WWCD is known to all for making pretty tasty chicken, but their reputation as a company owned by self-righteous Christians drives Jimmy to lie to his friends about where he works. Still, he’s a hard worker with a mysterious family history, perhaps even a legacy.  His commitment to a job done well catches the eye of his manager, MACE SOLOMON. Mace looks less like a fast food manager and more like a grizzled war veteran, and speaks very cryptically in strange, half-mangled aphorisms.   He’s missing a hand, which everyone says is due to a fryer accident at his last job.

One day after a particularly painful failure of an attempt to ask out the cute girl next door right after learning that he’s at risk of flunking out of college, Jimmy stops by to pick up his next week’s work schedule. To his confusion, he learns he’s been scheduled to work the Sunday shift… only everybody knows WWCD is closed on Sundays.

Mace tells Jimmy to show up at 11:59 PM on Saturday night, and not a minute later, claiming that they take the night to clean the store from top to bottom.

When Jimmy shows up to work his first late shift, he learns that not all is as it appears at WWCD. At the stroke of midnight, a gong sound rings out, and Mace rips off his fast food uniform to reveal tactical body armor. Hidden panels spring open to reveal weapons where there should be condiments. And a horde of demon-possessed zombie people fill the parking lot, screaming for Mace and Jimmy’s blood.

The entire building is weaponized and trapped.  Playground equipment emits jets of flame to roast baddies.  Straw dispensers turn into mini machine guns firing weaponized tubes of plastic at the horde.  Mace tosses Jimmy a shotgun and tells him that his only job now to protect the walk-in freezer with his life.

At one point, Jimmy’s cute girl neighbor nearly rips his head off, before Mace blows her away. “You killed a girl I kind of think I love!” “Don’t worry about it! She’ll get better!” Or patter to that effect.

Together, they fight off the waves of evil until, as the first slivers of dawn sunlight creep over horizon, the horde become normal people again, the dead rising as if never wounded, and they confusedly wander home, wondering what they drank last night.

Mace takes Jimmy for a diner breakfast where he explains the true nature and reason for WWCD. The founders of the company aren’t fundamentalist Christians. They’re actually an ancient order of druids, responsible for protecting the sacred places of power all across the United States and the world.  WWCD is a front that alllows them to buy up property and build defensive structures on these locations to protect them from the attacking forces of evil.

Sunday being the day that the Gods rest throughout many religions, this is the day that evil strikes.  So WWCD are closed on Sunday to the public so that they can do their “real” job which is fighting the evil.  That doesn’t mean that evil rests during the rest of the week… Mace and Jimmy have to keep a careful eye on things, as evil resorts to sneakier ways the rest of the week.

Mace has been there since the beginning, but he’s getting old, and he lost a previous WWCD to evil forces, which is now a Burger Hut (the evil forces operate their own fast food cover chain too).  He’s not got much longer in this game before they finally take him down, so he’s decided to train Jimmy to be his assistant manager.  Together, they will take down the evil across town at the Burger Hut and he will pass the torch to Jimmy.

Jimmy’s going to need help if he’s going to make it as the new assistant manager, so his first job will be to recruit co-workers to help him on the SUNDAY SHIFT.  How will he balance his school life, love life, pretend work life, and defender of the world life?  He’ll be terrible at it, and it will be hilarious to watch.

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2017: Year’s End Review

I measure three aspects of my life separately: my day job professional life, my writing professional life, and my personal life. It’s important that I compartmentalize these very different aspects of my existence because if one of them is doing somewhat poorly, I can usually count on the others to lift my spirits.

On whole, 2017 has been a profoundly strange year, perhaps the strangest since 2008. I’ll get into the details below for each section.

Web Designer / Day Job Professional Life

We’ve had another record year at Clockpunk Studios in 2017, but I over-worked considerably to accomplish it. I took on too much in limited time frames, and my mental and physical health suffered for it. If we had seen something like 20% growth, that might have felt worthwhile, but it was something more like 3%. It felt like seriously diminishing returns this year.

I still enjoy Clockpunk very much and have no intention of stopping. In late 2017, we added a new major support client, Monte Cook Games. I’ve long been a fan of the man himself, and their new Cypher system is quite enjoyable to play and run. I’m very excited to see what things we will accomplish together.

Having MCG as a major client allows me to reduce the amount of work-seeking I have to do next year. It’s nowhere near enough that I can stop taking on new projects, but it cuts the number of new client sites I have to build to meet my targets in half. This means at the end of the day, I can spend more time working and less time chasing work. It means I can be a little more picky about the kinds of work I do take on, which is important. I had some less than ideal projects this year–not bad clients, but projects for which I wasn’t the best fit, I suspect.

In order to even get to “even” and not lose ground, I also had to raise my rates $5 an hour and the cost of all our support plans. I loathe doing this, because I know if things are tight for me, they’re likely tight for my clients too. But it had to be done, and that’s that. No sense beating myself up about it, and I’m still confident that I’m a bargain.

So in 2018, I expect this area to be a bit more stable, a bit less stressful. A little more 9 to 5, as much as a full time freelance web development business can be (which means, almost not at all). I know I’ll be working on a lot of great new projects in 2018, and I’m looking forward to the challenges.

One last thing – I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I had Jenn Reese on board for nearly project in 2017 as a designer. I’ve worked with subcontractors before, but Jenn stands out in a class all her own. She’s talented, driven, responsible, and just a lovely person. It is a delight to work with her, and I hope we’ll continue to do so well into 2018.

Writing Life

I can safely say that 2017 was the best year so far in my writing life. I’m just going to break this one down by bullet points, as there’s a lot of ground to cover.

  • My personal horror-ish/fantasy novelette “The West Topeka Triangle” appeared on Lightspeed Magazine.  This story is eligible for nominations, should you be so inclined.
  • I sold “The Dragon of Dread Peak”, my first novella, and the second Dungeonspace story, to Lightspeed Magazine. It was published in October to considerable fan mail. Dungeonspace seems to have connected with more fans than anything else I’ve ever written.  This story is eligible for nominations, should be ever be so inclined.
  • I sold “The Dissonant Note” to Analog magazine. It looks to be appearing in the February issue. I’ve seen some initial luke-warm reviews, but I’m not too bothered. I’m really happy that the vision for the story that I’ve tinkered with for a decade finally came together, and Analog is a new market for me.
  • I sold “We Mete Justice With Beak and Talon” to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Charles Coleman Finlay has been a teacher to me for years, and to sell a story to him has been a dream come true. This story is the one I am most anticipating the reaction to in 2018 or whenever it is published. I haven’t heard yet, and it could take a while.
  • My story “Wet Fur” appeared in reprint on Escape Pod. I had an early streak of appearances in Escape Pod back before every online magazine also had a podcast feature. Most of my stories appear in podcast format on Lightspeed, so I haven’t been able to return there until recently. I love getting a chance to be read by their listeners. Also, I felt like this story didn’t get much notice when it first appeared, and I love it dearly. My one and only story to come to me with ease in a dream. It feels like something someone else wrote, more than anything else I’ve actually written.
  • My story “Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass” was selected for and appeared in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by John Joseph Adams and Charles Yu. This was also a dream come true and a bingo space on my card. This marks my first Year’s Best reprint.

So all that is the good news. The bad news is that, due to personal life stuff, I haven’t written since March. I hope to spend the winter and spring banging out the next Dungeonspace story and a few other ideas I have ping-ponging around. It’s frustrating that in such a good year of publication and sales, I haven’t had time to keep up the work. A lot about being a writer is building momentum, so I’m determined not to lose what I’ve managed to regain in the last couple of years.

Personal Life

My family life couldn’t be better. I have an amazing wife and a now three year old son who is hilarious and kind and just the absolute light of my life. Every day with them is a genuine blessing and no matter what else happens, as long as we have each other, I think we’re going to be okay.

That said, the state of our country and the world sent me into a deep, terrible depression in mid year that lasted months before, after finding myself near-suicidal, I finally sought out a professional to help me work through things. I’ve been seeing her for a few months and I’m in a much better spot, but there’s a lot of stuff to work through. I’m by nature a bit of a negative person, and I’m trying to change that.

I don’t think I’ve ever struggled with the levels of rage and despair that I have in 2017. My own life is mostly fine, but I’m terrified of the direction things are headed in. It’s almost like the external world is reflecting the interior state of my body, too.

I started the year with a diabetes diagnosis which, with diet and exercise, I’ve been a little bit able to limit the damage there, at least for part of the year. Unfortunately, due to the sheer number of hours I’ve had to spend behind a keyboard, I’ve done significant damage to my back and posture, to the point where I’m in considerable nerve pain for most of the day. My insurance, as a freelancer, is fairly terrible, and I’ve been spending over $100 a week on physical therapy, which works some weeks, and others not so much. Typing in particular aggravates things, which may be playing into how little writing I’ve managed to get done. This is all compounded by weight issues that I’ve struggled with my entire adult life.

It’s been hard, given my negativity and the problems, to not see turning forty as the start of a decline in health. I’m determined to stay in the fight as long as I can, but it can be discouraging when the activity you need to do to make a living becomes so painful on a day to day basis. I have my pain mitigation methods, but if physical therapy doesn’t start to show more consistent results, an MRI and surgery may be in my future in 2018.

I don’t even want to look at my reading and writing goals from last year this year. I’m trying to stay positive and I know my low success rate with them will likely drag me down some, and I’m trying to wrap up the year with a more positive spirit than I’ve had for most of it. Let’s just say that I did as much reading and writing as I could given the circumstances.

Finally–a good chunk of my leisure time this year was spent trying to bring a professional DMing company called the Level Up Guild into the world with mixed success. My time and my partner’s time has been limited, and we missed most of our end of the year deadlines. I’m hopeful that in 2018 we’ll find a way to get it up and running, at least in a reduced capacity. I really hope so, because I invested a rather large sum of money and time into things. I’ll talk more about that when/if it’s ready to launch.

I hope you’ve had success and joy in your 2017 as well. I hope we continue to fight the good fight together in 2018. May the Force be with you, and all that jazz.

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Gaming, Personal Life, Writing

Return Of the Nebula Weekend Conference: Part Three, The Pittsburghening

For the past three years, I’ve been attending the Nebula Awards Conference in a semi-official capacity as SFWA webmaster. Last year, I even gave a talk on author website best practices. This year, I learned I was going a little to late to make it onto programming, but I still have a little official meetings business to attend to, and I had some thoughts that I wanted to note for myself while the memories are still fresh.

It was disconcerting to realize that I’m no longer one of the youngest people in the room at a science fiction-related gathering. A lot’s been said about the graying of fandom, and it’s something I’ve picked up on since my first convention in 2002. This may be true of fandom, but writers run the full gamut of ages. I met writers as young as 25, and as old as… well. I’ll omit the specifics. The future of the writing of science fiction appears to be handing down to younger generations just fine. I still wonder in my darker moments if there will be anyone left reading it who doesn’t also write it.

Each year that I’ve attended, the conference itself has been better and better executed. The team of Steven Silver, Terra LeMay, and Kate Baker really bust their asses to make this a premiere event of the year. Sean Wallace deserves special mention for his work to organize the book room where many attendees could sell their books on commission. Prior to discovering the Nebulas conference, my convention of choice was WorldCon, but thanks to this amazing events team, I’m content to mostly attend the Nebulas each year and not much else. It really is one of the best conventions for my interests and needs. I don’t get to see all my awesome friends there, but I do see many of them. Please, come hang out in 2018. I’m pretty sure I’ll be there.

While I enjoy the weekend’s general activities and hangouts, I don’t usually to attend the actual ceremony. I skip formal events with fancy attire. I’m not comfortable around the well-dressed, especially given my slovenly appearance most of the time. Also, by the end of the conference, my introvert energy reserves run dangerously low. Instead, as is my tradition, I sat in my hotel room and listened to the stream while tweeting with folks. It’s a good way for me to not go home completely drained by all the amazing conversations. In my younger days, I’d run into the red badly and become depressed during the convention, but I know how to watch myself for it now. When I start to feel like everyone hates me and I’m a big dumb nobody, then I retreat to my room. I may well be a big dumb nobody, but I’d rather not feel like one.

Every year, I meet amazing new people that leave me in awe of our community. My memory for names is terrible, to suffice to say, if we talked for more than thirty seconds, you impressed me with your wit and charm. I will say that I felt a bit of awe to spend the time I did, brief as it was, with Grandmaster Jane Yolen. And that was only one of a dozen or more conversations in which I learned something new or felt I shared some of my limited expertise or experience with others (I won’t bore you with poorly recounted details). Not being the youngest person in the room means I seem to have some opinions I like to share with those who are just starting out. I tell a lot of people that if they want to write more short fiction, they should read more short fiction.

There’s so much energy and joy at this thing, regardless, I mostly come home feeling pleasant and buzzed. I lately feel a bit jaded about my prospects as a writer, but meeting with fellow writers who still have the can-do spirit inspires me to work harder in the future. Sometimes, the best thing that you take away from a conference or con is the general feeling of good will towards your peers.

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On the Importance (or Lack Thereof) of Revision

I have always valued the clean draft; perhaps because I am innately lazy, or perhaps because my step-father always drilled me on the importance of measuring twice, and cutting once, I began writing by avoiding revision. Some of my favorite writers were one-draft writers, as well, and at least one of my models and mentors, Jay Lake, was notorious about limiting his revision attempts.

I know another possible root cause. I have an odd quirk of intellect, where most of what I know comes to mind very quickly. In school, I was almost always the first person to finish test-taking, sometimes by half an hour or more. I definitely was not the highest scoring test taker always, but upon seeing a question, I always know in a blink whether I can summon the answer or not. And when I definitely do not know the answer, no amount of pondering or torturing myself will reveal it, so it is quite easy to move on take the loss. I call this a quirk because it was neither a help nor a hindrance in life–ultimately, a wash.

Early on in writing, I found it easy to pen first drafts because I didn’t spend a lot of time questioning my decisions in a similar way. The first idea always seemed adequate, and so it was not impossible for me to turn out 2500 words an hour or more. With time, I learned that my first decisions were often inadequate or cliched. This led not to revision, which I still abhorred, but instead to copious pre-writing and outlining. I could prepare a road map for a story that would limit the amount of decision-making on the fly. It kept me with roughly the same pace, but only moderate to limited success in publication.

It wasn’t until I took the James Gunn Workshop at Kansas University led by Chris McKitterick and Andy Duncan that the value of a well-polished and revised manuscript became apparent to me. I brought three adequate stories to the workshop, and received many useful thoughts and suggestions. I’ve always been a big user of critique and first readers, and I’ve often incorporated their suggestions. However, through participating in the workshop, I really had to sit down and revise, reworking entire sections, rethinking my goals, as well as the usual tweaking and polish. I sold two of those three stories, and it’s probably no mistake that the one I revised the least from feedback ended up being the one that didn’t sell. (Incidentally, it was the most comic of stories, and I find comic feedback very hard to come by and to sell. I like writing humor, but finding readers who can critique it isn’t easy, especially given how much humor is subjective.)

These days, I’ve settled into three to five revision passes before I submit work for publication. The last one is usually a line-edit polish pass, but the others often involve structural changes, bigger picture stuff. The difficulty I have with letting the revision process go on too long is that I can start to question perfectly valid decisions. If you were to boil down what writing is, once you get the basics down, it’s making creative and interesting decisions over and over again. Perhaps this is why some writers find it easier to write under the influence — freeing up inhibitions makes decision-making even easier.

You have to have a little bit of confidence that the decisions you are making go somewhere interesting. That’s the trick. Spend too long staring at something and you go blind to both its faults and its strengths. So it’s important to know when to move on. You can work on a piece over a longer period of time, I find, only by taking long breaks from it, to remove yourself a bit. Sometimes, the best drafts and revisions come years later when I’m so far removed from the words that they hardly seem like something I wrote at all. This would definitely be a bad practice to institute across all your work if you value alacrity of career. Sometimes, the thing a story needs most is time. But too much time, and they rot.

With longer work, I find my revision process has shifted. Rather than taking multiple passes on a work after it’s complete, I have the habit of re-reading the entire work and revising as I go each new session. This results in a manuscript that has had the first half revised endlessly, and a very rough ending. I haven’t quite figured out a way to improve on this method, but for writing that takes me weeks or months to complete, I find it necessary to review the previous session’s work just to remember what in the hell I was doing. Often, I feel like the proverbial goldfish in the bowl. What was I saying?

I’ve often heard it said that you don’t learn to write books. You learn to write this book. With short fiction, each project might not be so dissimilar, and my novel-writing experience is thus far fairly limited, but I think there’s a lot to that statement. Primarily, as writers, we have an enormous toolbox available to us of methods. As we develop as writers, we experiment with many of these tools. Some we take to, and some we don’t. Would you listen to anyone who told you that the Phillips screw driver was superior to all others in all cases? Why would you do the same about writing tools and techniques?

Get the work done. Make it the best you can, regardless of how. Show it to the world if possible. At the end of the day, it’s not so complicated. And yet somehow, it is also the most complicated thing you’ll ever do.

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Putting Writing First and How Much Time to Spend Doing It

Our lives are a series of competing priorities, and for a while now, I’ve wondered what it would be like to put my writing first, at least chronologically in the day.  I can’t prioritize its importance in my making a living, but the one thing I could do is try carving out some time at the start of every work day for writing before I jump into my freelance business tasks, chores, and the like (barring emergency exceptions).

I’ve been at this with relative success for a couple of weeks now.  I am averaging about 1500 words per day in a two hour block.  It’s pretty easy to see the advantage of building this kind of habit.  Figure 250 writing days a year, at an average of 1500 words a day and you end up with 375,000 potential words per year.  That’s three novels, a novella or two, and a few short stories.  It’s likely to be less than that if you spend this time editing some days, but I tend to try to do my editing in the evenings, after my kid’s down.   Even at half that rate, it’s a pretty good way to carve out a side-career on top of your main one.  That’s where I am these days.  I’m not determined to be a full time writer at the moment.  The odds of me supporting my family with that money are pretty slim.  But I can supplement, and that feels much more achievable.   If I were to become a full time writer through chance, I wouldn’t complain.  But it’s unreasonable to expect!

I have found myself writing ahead of what I have banked away, I will say.  The relentless emphasis on pure words on the page means I sometimes  forget to stop and think and plan.  Having an hour somewhere in the day where I disconnect from everything and just think through ideas in total privacy is almost as valuable.  My notion of what constitutes “writing time” is shifting with age.  I think for a good chunk of your career, you can count on an idea surplus you’ve built up, but after a certain point, you might empty that bank.  It takes time for good ideas to accrete.

The wide variety of ways to accomplish being a professional writer can be disconcerting.  How much of your day should you work at writing?  If I was a full time writer, would I write 8 hours a day?  Almost certainly not.  There’s definitely a law of diminishing returns for me, where the longer I write in a session, the worse the quality of writing can get.  And there are many other business tasks that need to be performed.

For me, ten hours a week feels good right now.  I’m working on one novel and about to start co-writing another.  I still have some short stories to work on when I’m stymied on the bigger projects.  And so far, novels have so much more space to breathe that they can absorb a 1500 word session a lot more easily than a story.  I’ve been exploring decompressed vs. compressed storytelling for quite a while now, learning the limits of short stories and where you can cheat with a little compression.  Novels feel very freeing so far because you can decompress everything, really take your time.  Eight hundred words of setting description in a short story is usually self-indulgent and gets cut in later drafts.   In a novel, that’s par for the course…?  Although eight hundred might be pushing the limits of patience in some readers.

Ultimately, half of being a writer is experimenting with process and figuring out workflows that don’t get in the way.  There are a million ways to not write.  There are only slightly fewer ways to write.  I’m enjoying finding means that work for me and my life.  It’s something all writers have to figure out for themselves.  What works for you?

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Writing

Upcoming Stories and New Sales

“Taste the Singularity at the Food Truck Circus” has completed revisions and will appear in Lightspeed Magazine in August, I am told.  I’ll be sure to post a link when the story goes live.  It’s a fun story aimed at a cross section of foodies and SF fans.

Additionally, I have sold a new story, “The West Topeka Triangle” to John Joseph Adams for either Lightspeed or Nightmare Magazine.  We’ll be working on revisions to that one to see ultimately where it fits best.  It defies genre categorization, but I will be very happy to see it appear in either magazine.  I believe it is my best work yet, and I think you will love it!

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Writing

On Genuine Gratitude

There is an experience that I need to talk about, because I do not know how to properly navigate my way through it.  The experience is being on the receiving end of a complement regarding my work.  Lately, I’ve received a few in regards to my latest story, and my response to these compliments have felt lacking.

We’re taught from a very young age to say thank you in the most trivial situations but also to give thanks when we experience gratitude on a grand scale.  We use the same words when someone holds open a door for us as when someone compliments our dearest life’s work.  The end result for myself is that saying “thank you” begins to feel trivial, and I search my lexicon for a way to express a deeper appreciation for what has been shared.  I always come up short in the moment.

The greatest gift any stranger can give me is to encounter my work, experience it, and feel positively affected by it.  Taking that extra step to actually tell me about the experience is an even greater generosity.   I know that there are a nearly infinite number of ways for the reader to spend their time, and when someone (friends, family, or strangers) chooses to give one of my stories their time, it feels like a blessing.

When someone thanks me for having read something of mine, I don’t feel like common decency provides me the tools to express my own gratitude.  We writers work in solitude for hours and hours to produce good work that is meaningful to us.  When that meaning is successfully conveyed to another soul, it’s like a lightning bolt.  Everything is illuminated for a brief moment.  Shadows are banished and there is a clarity and a sense of purpose achieved.

I do not go through my life experiencing a sense of constant thankfulness and gratitude, try as I might.  I take so much of it for granted that it’s shameful to even consider right now.  Gratitude is a state of vulnerability that is impossible to maintain for long periods.   Yet still, so many of us crave to experience that vulnerability.  To feel vulnerable is to feel profoundly, deeply human.  Life is often a process of hiding and protecting our humanity.  Paradoxically, it is in unguarded moments of humanity when we truly live.

Lately, I make it a mission of mine to thank the creators that have reached me through their work.  I know how it feels myself.  I want to share that sensation and spread it around.  I encourage everyone to send notes to artists and writers who have created something that has impacted you, even in small ways.  It is a small thing, but so deeply meaningful.  And I suppose there is no reason to limit it merely to artists and writers.  Give your appreciation freely, I say.  It is a renewable resource, and it can power great acts of creation and art.

If you compliment my work, and I say “thank you”, please know that the words are merely a sliver above the surface. A great shadow of emotions looms beneath.  The words do not carry the density I wish they did.  Written, they lack any profundity or intensity; their dullness can only be sharpened so much along the edges of an exclamation mark.

Thank you must suffice, for now.  Thank you and so much more.

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