Category: On Writing

A year later

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We’ve been here at our new home for a little over a year now, and it still seems like we just moved in. We all settled in quickly, even the cats, making a few adjustments and creative additions along the way, and it’s become a home of our own. My desk still sits against the wall in the office, with the black bookcase squeezed into the corner, full with music, reference books, toys and stuffed animals, art supplies, and yes, even snacks. Up on the wall are a few prints by the always amazing Ukiyo-e Heroes, who I highly recommend. When I’m home, Cali likes to interrupt my work by jumping up onto the desk and sitting right there in front of the main monitor, demanding attention. (Juli tends to be more demure, sitting on the floor next to me and plaintively poking at me with her paw in hopes that I’ll take the felt ribbon toy out of the desk.)

The view out the big window to my left isn’t as grand as Spare Oom’s was, but instead I get a great view of the surrounding neighborhood, and on a clear day I can even see Mount Tamalpais poking up in the distance. I get to hear the whoops and hollers of the little kids during recess at the elementary school across the way. Both cats love looking out those windows and watching the cars and pedestrians, and they really love it when the crows and ravens fly by.

We might not be as close to retail and coffee shops as we used to be, but we’re still within walking distance. We’re also close to the Big Famous Park, which we visit a lot more now than we used to. And I’m still a short work commute away that gets me there and back in about ten minutes. It’s a much quieter neighborhood, but it isn’t remote, and it’s still in my favorite part of the city. We’ve been here in San Francisco for twenty years and change and we have no plans on going anywhere else anytime soon.

I still remember that day in 2002 when my mom told me about a travel show segment about the city, and thinking man, I would love to visit someday. Little did I know that three short years later I’d be flying out of SFO after a few days of apartment hunting, and looking out the window at the city’s skyline and thinking yeah…this is going to be my home.

Owning a home is definitely a new thing for me; I was absolutely certain we’d be forever renting. For the first couple of months I would get this sense of urgency that I really needed to write and mail out that rent check, only to remind myself that it was a mortgage payment now. That sense of permanence is not something a lot of us Gen-Xers got to experience throughout our years to this level, and we’d gotten used to it to the point that it was just another thing to grudgingly accept. It’s made me rethink a lot of personal things in my life, and it’s also made me learn how to fix and adjust things on my own instead of calling the building owner. [One funny side note: I never realized how many quarters I spent on laundry until we owned our own washer/dryer unit — one of only two must-haves on my want list, the other being a garage — and all those coins just started piling up instead of being used.]

In a way, this office has become to me what the Belfry used to be at my parents’ house: it’s where I clock in for an hour or two to work on my creative endeavors. Whether it’s writing, playing a bit of guitar, journaling or even doodling, it’s the one place in our home that’s completely dedicated to that and not much else (other than curating my music collection of course). I can focus here, despite the occasional distractions (cat and otherwise). I can also keep my creative work in here, leaving the other rooms for other things in my life.

I’m still getting used to this place being ours in the ownership sense, but I’m glad we made the decision to make it happen.

The Decline and Fall of Western Massachusetts

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This is a project that’s been floating around since my high school days in the late 80s. It’s gone under different names over the years (Belief in Fate is the one I’ve mentioned the most, dating back to 1988-89) but Decline and Fall was the title I came up with in late 1995 after the dreaded move home from Boston. It’s a title that maintains a certain Gen-X flair: it’s a riff on Penelope Spheeris’ documentary series about rock and roll excesses, The Decline of Western Civilization — itself a riff on Edward Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — but it’s also a riff on the frustration and ennui of growing up in a run-down small town that one desperately wants to escape. It’s not that I hated my hometown, I’d just outgrown it yet had to wait my turn to leave. It’s jaded humor because that’s what we Gen-Xers do best.

Mind you, this was never a project like Isaac Fitzgerald’s 2022 memoir Dirtbag, Massachusetts — interestingly a book about my same hometown, though I’ve never read it — as that is not the kind of book I want this to be. It was never going to be about partying and taking drugs and underage drinking because there’s fuck-all else to do. Sure, that definitely existed then as now, but that wasn’t my life. I did my best to avoid that because I’d seen firsthand where that road led and I was just too damned stubborn to give into it. It’s a big reason why I latched on so tightly to college radio and writing at that age; if I needed that escape, music and creativity was where I went. The depression and confusion and frustration ended up on the page, always with a soundtrack.

Decline and Fall might have started out gloomy, but as I got older and wiser — and calmer and happier — I started realizing that this story would benefit not as a dire memoir or a gloomy roman à clef focusing only on all that bad stuff (which it originally did during its Belief in Fate phase), but as a story about finding a way out of all that. Thus it’s about that brief time when I discovered college radio (and myself) and found friends that changed my life considerably. [Come to think of it, this might explain my current obsession with the manga The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity which has a similar plot, in which Rintaro’s life is changed for the better when he finds his own solace of love and friendship.]

I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about finally taking it off the back burner to give it another go. Hell, I’ve even made multiple playlists for it recently! It’s become somewhat of a companion piece to Walk in Silence the book project which focuses on the ‘college radio’ music of the mid to late 80s. It’s a story idea that’s never quite completely left my mind, even despite being trunked a few times. That tells me that this isn’t merely an obsession with a half-baked idea, but an idea that needed a lot of time and distance (and maturity) between now and the time it took place. It’s no longer just a story based on vibes but one that speaks of a deeply personal moment in time.

Now, I’m hoping that it doesn’t stall again, but I’m going to be optimistic.

Theadia: So what happens now?

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Soon after I wrote last Friday’s post on Thursday evening, I thought I’d give the duology idea a try.

As soon as I found a perfect cut-off point a few chapters previous, I cut everything after that, typed out ‘to be continued’, and pasted those into a new Word document and saved as Theadia II. The change was palpable: I no longer felt that sense of constriction, like I needed to bring this story to a conclusion now. Just like I’d expected: it gave me breathing room, and also gave me more space to come up with what comes after answering the defining question of this project: if you could…would you do the right thing? I’d always felt that while I could conceivably wrap up the novel with our heroes winning the day yet still dealing with the fallout that comes after, I was always constantly worried that I wouldn’t give it enough time and space to happen. Like I’d said previously: I wouldn’t be happy with the ending.

So where am I at now? Well, considering that one of the main plot threads was the growing dread of Nima Federation forcibly reannexing the world and station of FairIsle and taking away their hard-earned freedom, I now have the ability to examine that a bit further. Perhaps they reannex, perhaps they don’t, but that threat has lingered in one form or another since FairIsle gained their independence. And now the threat is about to enter local space. This opens up a lot of interesting ideas, and not just one regarding near-space battles. This project has always been about the civilians and not the military, so it suggests all sorts of things: levels of patriotism, grief and loss, fear and uncertainty, compassion and bigotry. And those are extremely important reasons for Theadia (the collective) to exist. It’s what has driven them all this time, and continues to drive them into this second book.

I’m still not sure if turning this into a duology will work, but I will say that I listened to my instincts, and I’m glad I did.

Theadia update…?

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I’m still floating in a stasis on this project, mainly because I’m having an issue with these final scenes of the book. Rereading the novel-so-far is feeling more like a distraction than a help. I’m almost thinking that perhaps I should start in on another project in the meantime, just to take my mind off it for a bit, and come back to it when I feel more refreshed and ready to approach it.

However, the other day I was also revisiting those perhaps this is actually a duology thoughts I’d had off and on throughout this project. While this could conceivably be a standalone, at the rate I’m going it feels like I’m rushing the ending, or alternately I’m tying up all the plot threads a little too cleanly. And it occurred to me: if I stop where I am now in this book and follow through with said thoughts about a duology, that would give me the space and the breathing room to work on the rest of the project. And it’s a perfect cliffhanger at that.

To be honest, this is close to how I’d decided to finish A Division of Souls back in the day. That book is different in that I’d already decided it would be a series and not a standalone, but all the same, by the time I got to that final scene, I actually had a much better sense of where I actually was in the entire trilogy’s layout. Souls was all about Denni coming to terms with being the One of All Sacred, and her final ritual in that book was her acceptance. That meant that the next two books had to be about what she had to do next and how she had to bring it all to completion.

So, back to Theadia: I’ve said before that this book is indeed about taking responsibility when it’s needed, even when it goes against the rules. But it’s also about a bigger story as well: what happens when one’s way of life is threatened for the most dangerous (and frustrating) of reasons. And in the context of this story, I don’t think it’s one that I can successfully tell within the confines of one book. There’s a much bigger story being told in the background, and that is the story that needs more room to breathe.

Perhaps it’s time to make this duology idea happen.

Won’t you be my dictionary, won’t you translate fun

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I am absurdly gleeful that I finally bought the twelfth edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary! I picked this one up at the Barnes & Noble in Corte Madera, just over the Golden Gate Bridge, on our way back from a visit to Petaluma. The last edition I owned was the tenth, which I bought back in 2003 at that bookstore in Harvard Square that I used to frequent. [This was the one at 30 Brattle Street across from the small plaza, just around the corner from Million Year Picnic. It’s a stationery store now.]

I often think about that store, even though it’s been gone for years now. I found a lot of really great stuff to read there. It was part of my weekend jaunt into Boston and Cambridge in the summer, hanging out near the Pit, people-watching and listening to the street musicians, hitting Newbury Comics and Million Year Picnic and HMV and that store before taking the Red Line back up to Alewife Station where my car was parked. This was back when you could park there all day for a super small fee. It was the perfect place to keep your car during Boston day trips like these.

I’d take these trips every now and again in the mid-90s after moving back home, often on Saturdays when I wasn’t working at the record store, but they became more frequent during the early 00s, at least once or twice a month. This was during the peak Belfry Years when I was writing the trilogy, which meant that those bookstore visits were a mix of revisiting my recent past with a lighter heart, looking for inspiration in the science fiction section, and wanting to learn more from writing reference books. Two reasons I remember buying that book there: a) the price sticker had the store name on it, and b) I bought it in early 2003, and on that day the store was playing Beck’s Sea Change album, which I’d been obsessed with even then. I distinctly remember having it hand while browsing, a customer a few aisles away quietly singing along to ‘Lost Cause’. I’ll think about that store every time I listen to that record.

That dictionary got one hell of a workout over the next several years. Cracked spine, worn edges, dented cover, slight water damage and all. When I heard the latest edition was in fact out late last year, I finally retired the old one. It’s somewhere in the garage with the rest of my writing stuff, having kept it down there when we moved house last year. [This is why I don’t remember the store name off the top of my head. Perhaps if I dig it out at some point I’ll edit this entry.]

And now I have a new one, not yet used, shrink wrap just taken off, already placed on my black bookshelf next to my copy of Kipfer’s Flip Dictionary, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Sure, I could use MW’s website — which I do every now and again if I need a quick confirmation that I’m using a word correctly — but sometimes it’s fun just to pull out this big book and do some old-school referencing without any pesky pop-ups or online distractions.

Slow going

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I admit I am a bit frustrated that it’s taking me forever to finish Theadia. My writing sessions lately have been sluggish and not all that productive, getting only maybe a few hundred words at most, and often quite less. Right now I’m stuck on a scene that’s taking me forever to get through, mainly because I have only the vaguest of ideas of what I want to do with it. [There’s also the fact that I’ve been dealing with spring allergies lately, which have been leaving me with less energy than I usually have.]

As always, the only thing I can do right now is power through.

Meanwhile, what else is happening on the creative front? Well, not all that much at the moment, sadly. I’ve been kind of delaying that more than I really should. Perhaps it’s a mix of not wanting to force myself into anything else at the moment and the fact that I’m still getting used to my recent job transfer. Not that it’s harder or more stressful, quite the opposite; it’s actually that it’s taking time for me to get used to not stress-working through multiple responsibilities (each with constantly shifting priority levels). This change in stress levels means that my body is responding in kind, suddenly realizing wait, you mean I can finally relax? SWEET! I’m sure it’ll balance out eventually and I’ll be back to normal soon.

I remember this happening when I left the Former Day Job six years ago. I had no idea how flipping exhausted I was then, and it took quite a few months for everything to go back to normal. I don’t expect it to take nearly as long this time of course, but I’m still a bit impatient about it.

Like I said, powering through.

Here we go

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Latest revision of Theadia complete? Check.
All needed changes and updates complete? Check.
Continuity and timeline issues fixed? Check.

Now to finish the damn thing already. And I’m nervous as hell. I kinda sorta know how to finish the novel? Maybe?

This feels very similar to sixteen years ago when I finished The Balance of Light after a nearly four year hiatus. It’s not a block so much as there are a lot of moving parts that I need to weave together in a coherent and believable fashion, and I’m a bit nervous about nailing the landing. After all, I’ve never written a story like this before so this is all kind of new and I want to do it right the first time.

I’ll be honest, though — I’m not the least bit worried about hitting any deadlines, because it’ll get done when it gets done. By the time I’m nearing the finish line with my stories, my pace is even and deliberate. I trust my instincts to know when and how to write the final sentence. [And as an aside, to answer the question of how do I know when I’m finished?: I tend to go with an open-ended denouement scene as those are my favorites. This story ends here, but there’s always another new and different one just around the corner. It provides a needed finality for the character and the story (and the reader), but with a reminder that life now and in the future remains in constant motion.]

If I had to guess, I’d say there’s at least five to ten more chapters left. We’re pretty much at the climax of the storyline, I just need to crest that wave and ride it to completion. And since I’ve never written what is essentially a space opera (at least my version of one) before, there’s certainly a lot of unique worldbuilding I have to keep in mind while gathering all the story threads together. It’s deliberately messy and chaotic, but it also has its own deliberate logic that runs throughout the novel. It’s a war story as seen from the standpoint of civilians instead of soldiers (although soldiers — or in this case, pilots — have a major role). It’s more about the war that takes place between citizens and those in charge than it is about the enemy rushing the front lines.

How will this play out in the next couple of months? Who knows? But I certainly hope I’ll be able to pull it off!

Waking up early this week

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I don’t remember the last time I had to wake up before 4am, to be honest. Maybe that one time we were heading out of SFO on a 6am flight or something? I can do it if I have to, but no guarantees that I’ll be fully awake and coherent. Just letting you know ahead of time.

So why am I waking up at stupid:early AM this week? It’s because it’s my first week at the shop I’ve been transferred to, and right off the bat they’re going to train me on the newfangled bookkeeping software and hardware, and I have to be there at 4am. It’s a good thing I only live ten minutes away! And the other good thing is that after an eight-hour shift, this means I’m out by 12:30pm and have the rest of the day to do whatever. And you know how much I love days like that.

So this also means that I may not have the brainspace to get any blogging done this week, but we shall see.

Thinking about it

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The status of Theadia is still in ‘I’m getting there’, but right now I’m thinking about whether or not I want to self-publish it or try my hand at submission again. I haven’t decided either way just yet, but I feel like I should at least keep that possibility open for now.

So why now? Why not keep up with the DIY self-publishing? Well, why not is indeed the question here. I still feel like I could have had a chance with Diwa & Kaffi if I hadn’t sent it out a mere month before a world pandemic strongarmed its way into everyone’s lives. By the time things settled down, I’d wanted to try the DIY approach again. I always hoped that novel could have done so much better, as I still think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.

The problem with DIY is that I’m still not the best with getting my name and my wares out there. Honestly, it’s kind of hard to do so these days when self-publishing has gotten much easier to do. And of course there’s the completely unnecessary interruption of AI-generated slop out there clogging everything up. I’m sure I can rise above that, but the point remains that I’m not all that great at self-promotion. If I’m going to go this route, I’m going to need to seriously up my game.

[There is also the fact that I’m definitely going to need to commission an artist for Theadia‘s cover, because I don’t think the photo database sites are going to cut it this time. I can (hopefully) afford it, but I’m still nervous about getting it right.]

That’s not to say that this novel is going to be a make-or-break situation for me, far from it. I’m going to keep creating one way or another; it’s in my blood and I don’t plan on giving that up anytime soon. Just that I know I can do so much better than how I’ve been previously.

Almost six years…?

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Has it really been almost six years I’ve been working on Theadia…? More to the point, how is it that I’m not freaked out that I’m still working on this one project and NOT feeling like a failure for taking so dang long?

To be honest, however, I think it comes with maturity and patience. The obvious reason I was able to turn around my last few novels so quickly was that it was actually a two-year, two-project schedule: one written while working on the editing and release of another. [It also helped that those novels were not epic projects like the Bridgetown Trilogy or Theadia, but shorter stories that didn’t need several hours of prep, work and so on.] Still, I’m glad to say I’m on the back end of this one and I hope to get it out to y’all on the back half of this year.

It’s interesting, though, comparing it to the time I spent working on the Mendaihu Universe. Back during the Belfry days I purposely didn’t give myself a set deadline because I knew this trilogy would be done when it got done. On the one hand I did kind of feel like I was lagging behind every other writer my age out there who was already seeing their works in print, but on the other hand I often reminded myself that I was doing this for me only. Being a successful (or even semi-successful) (or even having some random readers at that) was a goal, but not THE goal. I focused on wanting to tell the stories I wanted to tell, and allowing myself to do it the way I wanted to do it.

These days I don’t really mind that it’s taking me this long to release this story, because I know that doing it right means not rushing it.