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Blogging, Creative Insanity, Friday Thoughts, Writing

Here Be Dragons, And Bookworms

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Yes I still blog, yes I’m still alive, yes I’m still playing with my imaginary friends and writing about it. And yes, I still read what other authors are going through in their own journeys in hopes that it helps me through mine, and I hope that my scribblings might at least encourage a few others to keep going.

Today’s topic: In Search of the Unknown. (+10 Internet Awesome Points to anyone who gets that reference without using a search engine.) A little backstory is, like in most good fantasy novels, necessary. Last December, I began writing an epic fantasy trilogy, after writing eight or nine mostly modern fantasy books that never went anywhere past my desk. I began the process by sitting with my notebook, visualizing The Writer, The Muse, and three or four actor-characters on an empty stage, discussing what project they were going to come up with next. And even though I had a lot of fun with this method, I finally lowered the curtain, took their notes, and began writing Part One, Book One, of a projected three or four book epic. Sorry, E.P.I.C. There would be competing systems of magic. There would be an old religion and an upstart. There would be Knights and young men and women and armies and riots, all caught in a string of events beyond their control. And most of all, there would be a Dragon, unlike any I had ever read about before. And so, pen and laptop in hand, I charged on in, writing 2000 or more words a day, with just about as much of an outline as what I’ve given you already.

I finished Part One at around 100 pages or so, took a breather for a day, and charged on to Part Two. By this point, the cracks were already showing up in the edifice that I’d tried to build on my ideas, but I was nothing if not determined to finish this. When I wasn’t writing, I would daydream in numbers… 60,000 words a month, 360,000 words in half a year, maybe a little more, then editing, revising, and finishing before the same date rolled around a year later. So what if I didn’t know WHY things were happening in my world? or WHY certain religions had issues with each other? or WHY the government was trying to consolidate its power, or what the Knights were doing, or what my three young protagonists were to do next after being pulled adrift in the seas of fate? I was a writer! I could push through and fix it later! I was…

Yeah, I was stuck. Hard. I fell into the type of writer’s block that resulted from me overwriting my plans and imagination, and refusing to stop and ask for directions, or to plot out a new path. Part Three sputtered and faltered a few times, and I finally found myself spending the spring and summer working on another project. The few times I looked back at Parts One and Two, I could tell that there were serious issues in my story from Day One. I felt like a traveler on the side of the road, wondering why his car just broke down in the middle of a road trip, and ignoring the fact that he had never changed the oil, checked the tires, or paid attention to the warning lights and unusual handling or shaking or braking of the vehicle for the entire trip. Yet the story, like the concept the driver had of the cross-country road trip, would not leave me alone. My characters felt like they had spent a lot of time making up the story for me, and they weren’t going to let me off the hook.

So I decided to back up and start over, something that is ten times harder for me than starting in the first place. I was inspired by either a Tweet or a Facebook Post by my writer-friend Davide Mana (link goes to his blog, though I highly recommend his books, which you can and should buy on Amazon) in which he said he was committing to writing a 100,000 word novel between September and the end of the year. He even pointed out that he would be able to write it at less than 1000 words a day to hit that goal. And the whole time I’m thinking, “Book One of my Trilogy is supposed to be 100-120,000 words… hell, I could do this. I should do this!” And that was why, after a few days of reorganizing my Scrivener folder into a Draft, an Old Draft, and a World Book, I set off on 20 September 2017, along the old pathways but heading for unknown country.

I made the decision to type everything from scratch (Scrivener’s split-window worked really well for this), which was difficult, but I think essential… copy-editing would have left all the problems I had noticed when I reread the thing, and these problems were ones that went down to the very foundation. The other decision I made, perhaps the hardest one, was to only write 1000 words a day. Understand… I wrote my first novel at that speed, my second at 1500, and from then on, 2000-2500 words a day, so it took me a little while to get used to that snail’s pace. And it took me even longer to get over the irrational conviction that I was failing by writing too slowly, or not writing the way I knew I should be writing. That took a lot more time and mental energy than I’d like to admit.

Once I saw the snail leading my book along take its time to step around all the obstacles and dead ends in my book, though, I fell in love with this new writing regimen. On the days when I had the time and inclination to write more (which was usually five or six days a week) I spent that time in my World Book, writing about the characters, their cities, their culture. My model was the World Building Leviathan from KittySpace, but my energy came from a drive to tell my story and a need to have more material to work with. I still had dark memories of not knowing why things in my complex fantasy world worked the way they did, or stumbling in the middle of a scene because I didn’t know what was inside my characters’ heads, or especially what the supporting characters (NPCs for you fellow gamers out there) were up to, and that made me plan and outline and write background information like never before.

That brings me up to this weekend. My rewrite, up until now, has added more depth to my story, along with at least 10,000 more words, but after this last chapter, I will be at the point where my story stalled before. And even though I have a rough outline of the entire trilogy, and a five-page synopsis/ outline of this book, I feel like one of my own characters, clutching a scrawled map in one hand, a guttering torch in the other, and facing the dark, impenetrable forest that stymied my efforts at crossing it once before. I know that this time, I’m better prepared, though I’m still concerned that all of the gear in my backpack is stuff I’ll use once over the month-long journey ahead, and the stuff I really need is back at the base camp. And I can see things in the dark trees and undergrowth, the scrub jungle, telling me to walk around, or maybe travel another day.

But, my team of adventurers behind me depends on me to forge a path, and write about it. Hopefully, I do it in such a way that makes them proud.

Good luck with your weekend, and the next few weeks, everybody.

READING:  Two books… finishing up David Copperfield (which is decent, but really testing my commitment to being a hardcore Dickens fan… I might have to go back and reread Bleak House as a present to myself, afterward), and a Victorian Ghost Novel called The Uninhabited House. The latter is not frightening at all (indeed, I suspect it wasn’t written to be frightening), but the characters are fascinating and enjoyable. This book I also tried to set down after 25 pages or so, but they (especially Miss Blake) kept stepping into my head and telling me to read the rest of their story. I’ll be back with full reports once I finish them.

 

Blogging, Book Recommendations, Inspiration, Reading

Monday Memories of Memory

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It’s Monday. We made it through the holidays, though to be fair, our small, mostly-self-contained family usually does that pretty well. Let’s see if I can make it through a day of writing as well. I did a few errands and such first, and the most important of these was perhaps sitting in Coffee Culture in Gainesville with Rena the Partnerloverperson, drinking a peppermint white mocha and plotting out my writing for the week. (Well, the UPS store was closed, because apparently, 26 December is ALSO a holiday… God forbid federal workers don’t get a free day off if Christmas lands on a weekend. And Rena seemed to recall that she had wanted to call the UPS store that was holding our package and see if they were open. She also seemed to recall that I had said, quite loudly, “Of COURSE they’re open. UPS isn’t a government organization.” Buying her the Nutcracker Latte at the coffee shop down the road was my way of saying “I’m sorry, don’t hate me.”)

Today, I have 2000-3000 words to write and I think I might be able to make it through. I feel like there’s still a little bit of a block there, but I can see daylight through it, and I’m sure that once I pick up a few of the rocks and shift them around, I’ll be able to find the story thread where I left it and follow it into Chapter Eight and beyond. So before I strap on my industrial-strength thinking cap (complete with ergonomic neck support, environmentally safe padding, and a headlamp capable of seeing into all realms of the Aether where my Muse and her friends are wont to hang out) I’m going to tell you a little bit about what I’m reading. I’m cross-posting over at The Book Date this time, another blog that I recommend you check out some time.

This week’s book is somewhat of a reread. Back when I was in bootcamp, 26 years ago, I found myself with a little bit of time to read. We’d graduated about ten days early because of the Christmas Holidays (our Graduation day should have actually been the day after New Years) but we still had to stay there until our eight weeks were up. (That was an early lesson in Navy organization and the Sacred Rite of Following the Schedule, Even if You Had Doubled Up and Got Everything Done Early. Fortunately, things got a little better after that.) (A little.) (Very Little.) Anyway, a friend of mine had the Tad Williams book The Dragonbone Chair with him, and since I was even more a devotee of epic fantasy fiction than I am now (now, I read other types of fantasy and weird literature) I jumped at it and devoured the book. Not literally, though I might as well have. It was different from a lot of post-Tolkien literature I’d read, in that the author spent a lot of time just exploring and playing in the world and the folklore of the place (much like Tolkien) and the quirky-but-made-to-seem-normal people that inhabited it, rather than just throwing a quest or a dragon or a villain at the Chosen Farmboy, and the introduction of far-north mythology also tugged at my brain and told me that this was something special.

I absolutely loved the book, its characters, and its imagery, and a few months later, during my tech school training and before shipping off to the West Pacific, I picked up the sequel, Stone of Farewell, as soon as it was out in paperback. I never got around to reading it, though, and I’m still not sure why. Perhaps it was the Gulf War getting in the way, or the mix of bipolar and my lack of adjustment to Navy life that kept me from ever cracking its covers. Eventually, I gave the book away to a shipmate who had read the first one, and while I remember staring wistfully at the third book when it came out, and frequently told myself that I needed to revisit Osten Ard someday, I never did, until now, some twenty-six years later. During the few months of researching northern German and Lithuanian and Slavic mythology for my own book, Tad Williams’s book kept showing up as a good example of a modern interpretation. The bittersweet guilt that I kept feeling at never having finished the series became nigh-unbearable. Once I started my project I finally broke down and ordered the first book for my Kindle, and I tell you, I am so happy I did. The things I remember… long passageways, strange yet lovable characters, dangerous magic, and especially the healthy skepticism of the main character, are all here. I’m not flying through it as fast as I did in Boot Camp, but part of the reason for that is that I’m trying to savor it a little, taste it, roll each scene around on my tongue before swallowing. I only have vague memories of the book as well, and often, I only recall something as it’s happening. (Once, I realized that a scene I’d recently thought about, involving Doctor Morgenes and Simon as Simon sets off on his travels, actually came from that book; I’d retained a stark image of the scene but could never recall the book it had come from.)

The lesson here is that it’s never too late to go back to a book you loved, and the sooner you do it, the better you’ll feel. My recommendation is to look for a book you started years ago, and give it another shot. Perhaps you stopped reading because you just couldn’t connect with the plot, or you couldn’t find the sequel when it came out, or your cat ate it. For whatever reason, pick it back up, get it out of the library, do something to get it back in front of your eyeholes, and see if the book speaks to you this time.

Blogging, Reading

The Weight of Words

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Today’s the day that I like to talk about random subjects related to the world of reading, writing, critiquing, and maybe even occasionally mathing. (I’m sorry, but that should be a word.) And one thing that all of these things have in common is that they involve the use of characters, symbols, and words. While we might think of words as being ephemeral, they are in fact quite weighty.

Trust me, I just moved about fifty boxes of them.

As I sit here drinking a mug of tea, surrounded by boxes of my packed-up life, and get ready to hit the road again, I’m thinking about my life in words. Writing them, thinking in them, learning different ways to say them in many different tongues, and reading them. I wonder if I have too many of them. I wonder if I’ll ever read all the ones I want to read, and what will happen to the boxes of words I haven’t read after I die.

One thought keeps cropping up more and more, and it bothers me:  I’m less likely to take a chance on a new untried book as I get older.

This is alarming to me, since I’m a barely-published author who is trying to convince other people who haven’t heard of me to read my work. But how can I expect others to do the same when I have a phobia of not reading as many classics as I want to while I’m still on this planet? I’ve already read two books this year that I would rate as “abysmal,” and one of those was independently published. I have several long book projects to get through, too… War and Peace, The Expanse, The Wars of Light and Shadow…

I’m going to try to work more and more independent books into my reading, though, since I find the best way to confront a partially-rational phobia is to confront it head on. This worked for brussels sprouts, long distance hiking, and karaoke. (The latter caused everyone around me to develop a phobia, but that’s another story.) I’m especially looking for recommendations. If you have or know of a good indie book I need to read, tell me. But don’t just tell me “You HAVE to read this. Tell me why. Tell me what it’s like, and tell me what it did for you.

I’m still going to be selective… at about 60 books a year and probably more than halfway through my lifespan, I have to be… but I do want to widen my selection process. The good ones I’ll review here, and maybe ask others to review as well.

Time to leave. See you in Florida.

Blogging

Things I learned after eleven months of not blogging

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  1. Creating things is hard. Being a creative person is hard. Trying to create things as a creative person while not doing much creating is foolish, not to mention impossible and probably a violation of several laws.
  2. Books are more fun when you share them with friends. Even if your friends occasionally bend the cover back 2°  more than what is preferred by the book owner, the pleasure of having someone to share ideas and concepts with is nearly as essential to being a book reader as having access to books.
  3. Most publishers aren’t interested in stories that have been published elsewhere, even on blogs. Makes sense.
  4. I’ve been missing an essential part of my life. Granted, eleven months ago, I was holed up in a corner of the house and either reading or knitting or doing little else, and now I travel the east coast and hike and travel with my family, so my life is complete in ways I couldn’t dream of before. (And trust me, I have some pretty bizarre dreams.) Still, I’ve been missing this outlet, and I think I realized this when my Facebook posts (original and comments) started to stretch out over multiple screens. Consistently.

So, we’re back. I’ll still talk about books and my programming projects and my writing, and I’ll still welcome the readership of the blogosphere to tell me where I’m wrong and exactly how wrong I am. I’ve missed that as well.

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Sunday Thoughts: Three Questions

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What do cats think about when they wake up in the morning? More importantly, what do they think we think about? I have a story coming out in a few days that will offer my answer, but I really want to know what the rest of you think.

What’s the best long book you’ve read? What’s your favourite? Remembrance of Things Past is always toward the top of any list I make, though The Lord of the Rings and Ulysses are up there as well.

What’s the best short book you’ve read? Something that is too long to be a story, but short enough to be read in a day or two? I’m a fan of Passing by Nella Larsen, Call Me Joe (most likely the uncredited inspiration for Avatar) by Poul Anderson, and The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet by Stephen King. Oh, and The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood. It’s a damn creepy story in its own right, but if you’re a long distance hiker like I am, it has a few special bad places set aside just for you.

Have an awesome weekend, everyone. If you’ve done anything bookish this weekend, from reading something amazing to talking to other writers to just getting purposely lost in a library, leave a comment. I would love to hear it.

Blogging, Book Recommendations

Book Beginnings Friday

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Most of this morning has been taken up in writing another story, one I hope to share in at least rough form soon. Also, if you liked yesterday’s flash fiction, there will be more of those to follow. I’ve always been a fan of vignettes and short-shorts and such, whether by Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, Robert Walser, or other such writers, though until recently, I haven’t written many. If you’re a writer, and you haven’t, try it. It’s a fun form, and it’s also challenge to create the impression and image of a complete story in only a few hundred  words. Since I’m about to take the plunge into novel country again, I feel I need the practice at making every word count.

This morning, I’m also cross-posting at Rose City Reader, where Book Beginnings Friday is hosted. The object is to post the first sentence (or so) of the book you’re reading and share what it means to you, if necessary. Here’s mine, from a diptych of novellas by the excellent Michigan native Jim Harrison. (Many of you might recognise the name from Legends of the Fall. That’s a great novella collection as well, but the rest of his work is equally worth checking out.)

Clive awoke before dawn in a motel in Ypsilanti, Michigan, thinking that it was altogether possible that every woman in the world was married to the wrong man.

This is from “The Land of Unlikeness,” the first novella in The River Swimmer. I picked up the book because I liked his work, but the first sentence sucked me out of the stacks in the Atlanta-Fulton County Central Library, and into a world that was thrust into being in less than thirty words.

I’ll share my full observations of the book, and possibly a recommendation, later.

 

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It’s Oh So Quiet

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First, I need to apologise for the light blogging. Unless, of course, you hate the blogging, in which case, you’re welcome. Between travelling to Long Island, and the start of hiking season, and the 52 Story Project placing a well-aimed foot in my tuchus, I’ve let the daily blog chores fall by the wayside. That will stop as of today, though.

In various bits of news, the great HR Giger passed away a few days ago, after injuries sustained in a fall. Or perhaps one of his sculptures ate him. No disrespect intended, of course. Then again, any time an artist passes, I picture something like the final scene in Eternal Gaze. At least, that’s what I hope happens to me.

Tomorrow’s story is also finished, though this is more of a flash vignette and character exploration than an actual story. “Aces” (one of my recent favourites, and I don’t feel arrogant at all about saying that) and last week’s story took a lot out of me, though hopefully you can expect more in the vein of the former than the latter.

 

Blogging, Inspiration

More on the Politics in Writing Brouhaha

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Here is a rant by Sarah Hoyt about more of the culling and potential for discrimination that is taking place in the Science Fiction Writer’s Community. I’ve said here (and I’ll say many more times) that it is possible and nearly always preferable to separate a writer’s politics from his or her writing. Within reason, of course, and I’m not looking to split hairs but to have an actual discussion. I might not like the way Isaac Asimov behaved at conventions around women and specifically about how his hands would occasionally orbit their asses (or even collide), but I enjoy his non-fiction and his shorter fiction and consider them primary influences. (The Foundation trilogy is a collection of novellas and stories. It’s also slathered in awesomesauce.) I think some of the things Orson Scott Card said about homosexuals are absolutely reprehensible, but Speaker for the Dead is one of my two favourite books about xenophobia and dealing with alien species. (The Fuzzy Papers is tied with it, though Speaker does hit me in the gut a little more.) And outside of science fiction, there are a few contemporary authors who have said a few things I find a little ignorant regarding communism and socialism, and I might not ever accept a dinner invitation from them unless they’re willing to debate at length, but they’ve also written some awesome books, books I am not ashamed to recommend.

Here’s the thing:  If Mr Card wrote a book about a gay man who was half a person and couldn’t succeed at his quest or mission simply because he was in love with another man, I would have no problem not reading the book. But to the best of my knowledge, his books aren’t about that. They’re about finding one’s way, or living with guilt, or understanding something utterly alien. Ditto Asimov. His stories were about living in the future and dealing with science, not about occasional gropes and insensitive comments. Of course, such things are reprehensible, but they didn’t figure into his writing.

Since reaching adulthood (and especially after I joined the Navy) I’ve learned to look at complex things in a complex manner, and I used to think that all adults either did so or at least tried to. It’s part of rational thinking, I believe. I might totally disagree with a friend’s politics (and he with mine) but if we read the same books, like the same music, do the same kinds of things on our off-time, we can be friends. I look at writers the same way. I don’t pick up a book thinking “Here’s someone who agrees with me writing things that are agreeable and that furthermore, all right-thinking people agree with.” If the author does work in something that I disagree with, well, hopefully he or she explains why this is done. Then I will either change my opinion or add to it, and give it a little more depth. It’s a challenge to one’s thinking apparatus. An exercise. I suppose if you have no desire to ever grow as a person and never improve your thinking muscles, you might like to read pap that has been pre-approved and pre-screened to have all the right political points and opinions, written by someone who feels the same way. But then again, you probably shouldn’t be reading a traditionally challenging art form like science fiction, a genre that challenges you to think what if this happens. Or what if things were different. Not what if everything were perfectly created in my own image of perfection. If for no other reason, this will make a crappy story, but I hope everyone reading this can see that that will also make for a reader who doesn’t like to think, ever, and that’s rarely a good thing.

Enough of my own ranting. Here’s Sarah Hoyt’s article. Have an awesome night.

Blogging

Back From My Travails

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So the light blogging period is over and I’m back to keeping up with you guys every day, and then some. All in all, it was a pleasant drive to New York, with a stop on the way up with my awesome and artistic friends Joy and Daniel. The way down… well, my first day’s plans to meet someone for lunch fell through, and my plans to spend Monday and Tuesday hiking in Shenandoah and perhaps Mount Rogers in Virginia were greeted with rain and storms and lightning. (I was still thinking about hiking Old Rag Mountain, but something about spending time on an exposed granite summit during a thunderstorm seemed a little silly.) I finally spun off I77 in a huff (I can still do a pretty good huff) and went to the south bank of the New River, which has 20 or 30 miles of good trail alongside. It was sprinkling, but damnit, I’d planned on hiking, and I was going to hike.

The rest of the drive back wasn’t too bad. I crossed the perimeter into Atlanta around 1630, and a few wide turns later, I got my first view of the Atlanta skyline after almost a week away. And apparently, every single car in Georgia (and a few from Alabama) knew that I had missed seeing my city, so they all got together and blocked traffic on the freeway so I had more than enough time to look at it. sigh And the strange thing is, I’m still glad to be home.

Working on an inspirational post right now, along with this week’s story. I’m having issues with one since I’m afraid it’s a little too dark, but eventually I’ll probably put it out. It’s always a little bothersome when you peek into the dark corners of your mind, looking for something scary, and actually find something scary. Or disturbing. Or both.

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Story On Its Way (Go ahead and duck…)

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I’m on the road right now, and on top of that, in a relatively good mood. Waking up in the mountains will do that do you every time, unless of course, you went to sleep in the prairie. Today’s story is slowly making its own roadtrip from my notebook to a blog page. It’s more of a flash piece than a formal story, but I think it says something I’ve needed to say for a while.