Here we are, second day of 2017. The writing whiteboard has been updated, the blogs have been updated, plans have been made. Sure, January 1 is an arbitrary First Day of the Year, but that hasn’t ever stopped me from the ritual of taking stock of the past and making plans for the future.
So I say this: Bring it on, 2017. I’ve got plans for you.
As you can see above, I’ve reinstated the daily 750 Words to the whiteboard. I’ve also added a second day for ‘art’ — which is actually a catch-all for multiple platforms, including photography, drawing, and more. The blog schedule remains the same, as it’s been working quite well.
But I also have plans that aren’t on that whiteboard. Longer-term plans that are currently in my head, waiting to be sketched out on my normal calendar (this year’s selection is lovely paintings my Hokusai). The release of The Balance of Light, the scheduling of new writing projects, the planning of future ones.
Will this work, in reality? Well, I have to make it work. Sure, I’ll be juggling all this with the Day Job and IRL stuff, but I’ve done it before. I kind of let most of this get away from me near the end of 2016, though for an honorable reason: I had to do some serious longhand surgery on TBoL before I could attack it digitally. And once that’s taken care of (current deadline: end of this month), I’ll have a lot more time to work with.
I’m also in a good frame of mind to be able to focus on these goals with little distraction. That was a long time coming, with a lot of false starts and frustration, but I believe I can even further this year. I’ve got a lot more clarity and focus this time out. And as mentioned previously, I’ll be attacking the business end of my writing career with gusto this year as well. It’ll be tough, but I’ll do the best I can.
I plan to be busy, in a good way. And I’m looking forward to it.
This is what happens when I’m trying to balance a superbusy Day Job (woohoo yay Q4…), editing a mammoth book, bingewatching the Great British Bake Off with A., and other life stuff. The last thing on my mind is usually what day it actually is.
My week has been filled with numerous small Day Job queries that definitely pile up and get really irritating after a short time, as well as a computer refresh, which for the most part only took about an hour, but I spent the rest of the day fending of more small queries while trying to get said new computer’s software correctly set up. [Noted, a lot of these queries are what you would expect at the end of Q4…lots of “I need this yesterday btw on vacation until 1/4 kthxbye”, lots of “OMGWTFBBQ I need this delivered on Monday but the file isn’t here yet what do I do O NOES” and so on. Your bad planning is not necessarily my problem, folks.] The good thing is that the last week of the year is often the slowest for us, so that’ll give me time to finish things up and maybe have some time to breathe and more things sorted out.
ANYWAY.
What about the writing stuff, you ask? Well, yes, I am still plugging along with the edit of Book 3. I’m closing in on the halfway point, so despite my feeling that THIS IS TAKING FOREVER, I’m actually making good time. I’m still on schedule for a January release. Yay! Then we’ll have a few other Mendaihu Universe-related surprises coming in the spring of 2017, and then we’ll see where we go from there.
So now what? What am I going to do on this upcoming last week of the year? That’s a good question. I’ve already written my wistful Year End/Year to Come post earlier this week, so I don’t need to do one of those. We shall see!
Until then, hope everyone has a lovely Christmas weekend!
Most of the time was spent focusing on releasing the first edition of The Persistence of Memories as well as cleaning up and releasing the next edition of A Division of Souls. And once those were taken care of, I focused solely on the Big Galley Edit of The Balance of Light. As of today I am about one third of the way through transcribing my manual edits to the digital document, which will then be formatted to both e-book and trade paperback.
[Side note: I’m worried that TBoL is still going to be quite a long book, so while it’s going to remain a single e-book, I may have to split it up into two trades just to keep the price and size down. More on that when I get closer to finishing this portion of the project.]
The Persistence of Memories had an official drop date of 15 April of this year, about six months after the first book. I haven’t nailed down a specific release date for The Balance of Light yet, but again, the closer we get to the end of this edit, quicker I’ll be able to do so.
All that said, I had to make do without a few other projects in the interim. I put aside any actual work on future Mendaihu Universe books until this one was finished. I also put aside any non-MU ideas that have been brewing; I haven’t trunked them, they’re just on hiatus. In addition to that, I’d also put a temporary stop on my Daily 750 Words exercises. I wanted to clear my desk and get rid of any extraneous assignments and deadlines so I could focus completely on finishing the Bridgetown Trilogy.
The unprecedented decision, however, was to stop writing poetry. I’d come to the realization that it had stopped being something useful to me some time ago. I’d used poetry as a personal experiment for a good few decades: a creative release for my personal dreams, irritations, ponderings, or whatever. But it hadn’t been that for at least two or three years; it has become less of an outlet and more of a chore, and thus less enjoyable. So I wrote one last long poem, closed that composition notebook, and filed it away. I haven’t written one since. Will I ever pick it up again? Who knows. Maybe, but I think I’d need to put some real thought and dedication into that form and do it right this time, instead of the way I used to write it.
*
So. What’s up for 2017, then?
Aside from releasing The Balance of Light sometime in the early months, who knows. It’ll be the first time in decades where the Mendaihu Universe (and in particular, these three books) won’t be weighing down on me. The slate will be fully clean. For the first time in a LONG time, I’ll be able to fully focus on a completely new project.
I’ll be able to start in on one or more of those Possible Ideas I have on hiatus. A few more stories in the Mendaihu Universe, for starters. I don’t have any concrete plans at the moment, where New Projects are concerned, but once I’m ready, I’ll be planning like a fiend.
I would also like to return to the Daily 750 exercise again. Over the past couple of years it has been a great Word Playground for me, and at least three possible future novel project ideas have come out of it. And of course, I’d like to return to a stable blogging schedule. Those things go out the window for everyone at the end of the year, so I’m not beating myself up too much over them not being timely. Come next year, however, I’m going to make the best effort to stick to it.
I’d also like to practice more on my book cover artwork. As I keep saying, doing the covers for my Trilogy was an unexpected joy for me, to the point that I could see myself doing cover art as a possible career step.
I do have some Big Plans regarding the business side of my writing career. In the next year I’ll be making some very big, very important steps towards raising the bar. [Yes, I know, that’s a business-speak phrase and I can’t stand that kind of talk, but it fits the situation.] I don’t want to share them just yet, but I’ve been thinking about them and planning them in my head for at least a few years now. I’d promised myself that 2017 would be the year they will become a reality. I’ve started giving myself a soft schedule to work with, and will soon be spending some offline time making this business plan work.
And yes, as soon as I’m ready to release these Big Plans upon the world, I’ll let you know!
*
All told, I think 2016 has been a stellar year for me, creatively. One of the best I’ve ever had. That’s not to say I wish I’d spent more time and dedication learning how to best sell my creative wares online and make money off it, but I’ve certainly reached goals that have been on my bucket list since I was at least ten years old. I’ve rarely looked at my sales numbers, but I’m not taking them too seriously for the moment. I scored a good number of downloads of both books during a month-long sale on Smashwords — a LOT more than I expected to get, to be honest — and while I earned no money, the fact that I did get that many hits meant quite a bit to me. It meant that I was doing something right. It meant I was closer to my goals as a professional author than I’d expected. I now know where I stand, what direction I should head in, and what to expect when I get there.
Which means that 2017 will be the year I step up my game and start making money off of the Dream Job I’ve always wanted since I was a kid.
This number’s going out to American Telephone & Telegraph.
So for most of Friday, I was without the internet due to incompetence and aggressive sales bullshit via AT&T. [I’m just gonna come out and say that I’ve had little to no problems with them since 2005, but this past week I’ve gotten what has to be the worst customer service I’ve ever had in my life. We are planning to leave them as soon as it is technically possible.]
I won’t go into too much detail, but I will say that I know exactly what went wrong. Several things, actually, including:
–Lack of smooth transition. One would think that going from DSL to fiber optic lines would consist of making sure the wiring was correct, and that your customer has the needed hardware (in this case, the router) before the transition takes place, yes? In this case, the internet was turned off on Monday morning at 7:30am PT sharp, and the router was not to arrive until late Tuesday afternoon via UPS 2nd Day.
–Call centers with the minimal amount of training possible. I feel for you, call center people. I do. I worked in the same position for a year when I moved out here to San Francisco, and it SUCKED. Not only are you trained minimally, you’re trained to stick to a script (I have no idea how many times I’ve heard the same confirmation questions asked of me verbatim over the course of all those hours). And when you get a situation like mine, where the script is not going to work, you end up stuttering, trying to steer the conversation back to said script, and the customer will only get more pissed off.
–Interdepartmental conversation consisted of calls cold-transferred and work tickets not cancelled. After finally fixing the problem after six hours (and talking to far too many people and explaining my issue from the beginning at least twenty times), I got my DSL internet back.
Until Thursday night, when it was turned off again.
The original work ticket to turn off the DSL, which I’d asked them numerous times to be cancelled, was not, and I was without internet for sixteen hours this time.
–And instead of turning it back on this time, they aggressively stated that they could not do so because DSL was going away and I’d need to go to Uverse whether I wanted to or not. No emergency fix, no admittance of fucking up. The only reason we gave in is because by that time, we’d signed up for a new carrier (which should hopefully become a reality within the month), and that the both of us needed the internet so we could do our Day Jobs.
*
So. Why is this on a writing blog?
Because, dear reader, this is what happens when you force yourself to write passages that are doomed to failure and refuse to admit that the story is Just. Not. Working. The more you try to force a story to conform to flawed logic, the more it’s going to fail. It doesn’t matter if it’s the best prose you’ve ever written…if it sticks out like a flaming tire fire, the reader is sure to see it the same way. And you really don’t want that.
I’m guilty of doing this, I’m sure you are too.
But remember: that doesn’t mean that you’ve failed the entire project. You’ve just failed in one segment of a much larger plot you may be able to save. Sometimes you have to fail that one really incredibly frustrating, aggravating time…but that also means that you can now restart from a much safer, much stronger and stabler foundation, and that means that if you’ve learned your lesson and move in the right direction this time, you’re bound to come up with something that will make your story a hell of a lot better than it already is. Sometimes you need to take that one step back to make the two steps forward.
Lesson learned: Don’t give up completely. You did not fail. And if you can see all the places where you went wrong (just as I can see all the places where AT&T went wrong), then you’ll know exactly what to avoid when you start moving forward again.
Go ahead and get pissed off. Get it out of your system. But get back up on your feet, dust yourself off, and be that damned thorn in the story’s side until it works for you again.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially with all the different news (both good and bad) being thrust at us willing readers over the past few weeks. It’s easy to get lost in the maelstrom, easy to get frustrated and scared and react the only ways we know how in such situations.
As a writer, I’ve tried to train myself to be a bit distant from it all. Not exactly indifferent, mind you. Just detached enough so I can keep a calm and open mind. Too much information and I get overwhelmed. Too close to the information and I let my emotions get the best of me. But at the same time…being aware of the multiple threads and knowing how to use them in a positive and/or creative way.
The same can be said with writing novels. There are quite a lot of moving parts, so it requires a lot of attention. This is not just about the detail, but how it all interweaves. Plot Point A causes Plot Point B to take place. Character 1 is affected by Plot Point B and has to take action, causing Plot Point C to unfold, which affects Character 2. And so on. However it works for you: index cards, Post-Its, spreadsheets, reams of paper, or your own brain.
Some writers only want to use the barest of detail. Just enough to tell the story. And that’s just fine; not every novel needs all that minutiae. At the same time, there still needs to be attention to detail by the writer. There has to be that continuity of not just the plot but the characters and the setting.
The downside is that writers can often fall into their own hole of that minutiae. Getting too lost in the maelstrom of the world building or the overly convoluted plot. Making every single scene, action or no, the Most Important Event Ever in the story. I’m guilty of all of these, of course. I’ve been known to obsess over sections of my work that really don’t need much detail at all. Sometimes my blog posts go the same way. Heh.
But anyway, my point is that the trick is to find the balance levels that work for you. Pay attention to what needs paying attention to, and remember that there’s rarely need for obsession. Use just enough to create a stable and navigable web where every point has a reason and a destination. And once you’re done?
Then pull back and view it as a whole. If you’ve done it right, you’ll have created that much larger piece of art you were aiming for.
Obviously you know how I feel about the Fuckwit winning.
But that’s not what I’m going to talk about.
Let’s talk about other writers, other artists, other musicians. The creative people out there who inspire us, entertain us, move our spirits.
I’m looking pretty far ahead at the moment. I dearly hope that I am 100% wrong in feeling this way, but I would not be the least bit surprised if over the next four years, life for creative people starts getting harder. And that life for people who want to be creative — the students and the kids who dream about being writers, artists, knitters, sculptors, musicians and so on — gets harder as well.
You already know how I feel about this; it’s always aggravated and annoyed me that the arts is always the last on the budget list and the first to get axed when the economy starts tanking. You can get financial help if you’re a football or basketball player, but you’re not worth much if you sit around trying to create something (that is, of course, unless you create something that’ll make tons of cash for everyone). Too many people I know are held back from doing what they do and love best because of the Real Life of having to get a secondary job to supplement their income.
I should know. I’m one of them. Sure, my wife and I are reasonably okay financially, but if I could contribute as much to our combined income using just my writing, I’d drop my Day Job in a heartbeat.
This is precisely why I love this recent vibrant era of DIY creativity. Self-publishing, pop-up galleries, personal online stores, webcomics, boutique startups, Bandcamp. It’s more, a LOT more than saying to hell with the establishment, more than saying ‘wouldn’t it be fun to put on a show in the barn’. It’s saying “I know exactly what I want to do with my life, and I’m going to make that a reality.” It’s not saying ‘fuck the rules’, it’s completely rewriting them.
So.
I ask all of you now, do me a solid:
Look at your social media timelines. Look at those webcomics you read every day. Look at those bands whose music you download from Bandcamp. Look at that necklace or pair of earrings you bought off Etsy. Look at those artists whose painting you picked up from their tiny booth at the local pop-up gallery down the street. Look at those creative people, and realize that this, their creative work is what they do best. This is what makes them happy. This is what lifts their spirits. Your purchases and downloads and reviews are there to say “I love what you created.”
Do me a favor: in the next four years, if any of them have a Patreon, are running a Kickstarter, or are doing some kind of of fundraising so they can stay in business doing what they do and love the most in their lives, please donate. Even if it’s five dollars a month.
What you’re giving them is more than money. You’re giving them a chance to live the life they’ve always wanted to live. And that is one of the best things you can do for someone.
*Note: – Yes, my subject line is in Anjshé. It means “brothers and sisters.”
It’s probably obvious by now that I don’t write about politics in my fiction, at least not as a major plot point. [Governmental shenanigans do make a few cameos in the Bridgetown Trilogy, but they’re not used for political intrigue. It’s used to show how bureaucracy and adherence to rules over logic can cause a hell of a lot of headaches.]
That isn’t to say that I haven’t come close to writing a few politically-tinged stories. The close I ever got to doing so was an short story idea I’d called “Noah and the Schoolyard,” in which the titular character witnesses a breakdown of order during recess, in which several cliques are formed and eventually start to fight each other. It’s a too-obvious allegory of the present political weather and I found myself really not wanting to write it after maybe a few hundred words. An interesting idea, but something I know I’d hate writing, let alone reading later on. Lesson learned.
This also ties in with my decision during the last election cycle to disengage myself publicly from the peanut gallery. I’d be contributing little except more white noise to whatever was already out there. I have my opinions (and they’ll still leak out occasionally on Twitter if I’m all het up about something in particular), but for the most part I keep them offline now.
Are there any other subjects I won’t/can’t/would rather not write about? Sure. That’s not to say such things are beneath me, of course. My main reason for not writing about certain subjects is simply a lack of interest in wanting to do so. [This does not include stories or plots about gender or race — I’m interested in them, I just don’t want to write them half-assed. I haven’t used them as plot points, but I have tried to be inclusive to some degree.] I don’t often write what I love reading. I’m fascinated by hard SF like Cixin Liu’s current trilogy, but I can’t write that genre to save my life so I’m not going to try.
I guess what I’m saying here is that I know my boundaries. I’m not beholden to them, and if I so chose, I could figure out how to move beyond them. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I taught myself early on not to hold back, either. There are a few scenes in the Trilogy where I pushed myself past my normal comfort zone, because it was needed in the story. But I wouldn’t do it if there was no reason for it.
Now–on that note, I’ve already voted via early ballot here in San Francisco this past weekend, so all I have to do now is wait out all the damn robocalls that are flooding my answering machine and the fliers that I’m sure even the mailperson hates at this point, and let Tuesday do its thing. I’m not sure if I have the stomach to sit through the coverage tomorrow night (or to read all the live-tweeting for that matter), but we shall see.
[And for the record, if it isn’t already obvious, I’m definitely 100% With Her. I have some…issues with Trump, which I’d rather not go into here.]
See, I’m not entirely sure what I should be posting about. I’m worried that I’m starting to blog the same things over and over again. On the other hand, I’m at the back end of the Bridgetown Trilogy project, so I’m worried I’ll run out of fresh blog ideas. I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT TO WRITE, DAMMIT.
See, I’m writing this at 7:30 on a Sunday night, and thanks to my horrible homework habits as a teen, this means that I’m making a right hash of this entry. Instead of focusing on writing something of interest, I’m thinking of what my Day Job workload will be like now that I’m back from vacation. I’m thinking about what I’ll need to do for most of November since A will be away on her own work-related trip during that time. Half of me is thinking, technically…I did say I’d return in November, but tomorrow’s October 31, so I don’t really need to write this. The other half is thinking, WILL YOU JUST STFU AND WRITE THE DAMN THING ALREADY?
So let’s pull ourselves together here a bit, shall we?
Don’t get me wrong…my writing habits are a hell of a lot better than they used to be. I’ll give myself a bit of a pass tonight because this was my first day back from a week-long trip (and a night flight that got us back to our apartment near midnight). I spent most of Sunday afternoon cleaning up a few hundred personal and work emails. We had to do some grocery shopping today, considering the refrigerator was embarrassingly bare. And the weird San Francisco weather was sunnycoldwetwarmovercastrainywho the hell knows and the humidity gave me one hell of a migraine. Not to mention the irritation of the recent news cycles. So I’ll forgive myself for being half-assed today and slipping into distraction mode. My brain has no idea what time or day it is right now.
That said…
What usually happens come Monday morning is that I’m rested up, focused, and ready to go. The frustration and the stress of Sunday night has been dropped and forgotten. What remains is renewed dedication to forge ahead and a bit of embarrassed acceptance that all this stress was a bit of a waste of time.
Hey gang! Sorry to let you down, but both blogs are going on a brief vacation for a few weeks.This next week is probably going to busy, between Day Job stuff and preparing for an actual trip (we’re heading back to New England to visit friends and family).
We’ll be back fresh and ready to go in November! Until then, don’t eat too much Halloween candy!
Not the one I worked at, but very similar in size and shape.
It occurred to me that twenty years ago as of the 23rd of September, it’s been twenty years since I’d started what would be one of my favorite jobs ever. Never mind that it was a fifty-mile, hour-long commute one way. Never mind that it didn’t pay enough for me to quickly get caught up on all my bills.
Dude: I was working in a record store. That’s all that mattered.
But I’m not going to go into detail about the store too much here; I’ll be doing that over at Walk in Silence tomorrow.
No, instead, I’ll talk a little about the food court, which was across the way from my store.
Solomon Pond Mall food court: where I had my initial interview, where I ate far too much fast food, and where I wrote a novel.
The mall was built around 1995 into 1996, so it was still shiny and new when I started working there. HMV was the first and only music store there at the time –not to mention this was before the file-sharing boom — so in those few years I worked there, we did pretty good business. We were in a good spot as well, so kids were always stopping in on their way to meet their friends elsewhere.
The last time I was at that mall was ten years ago, when we went to visit a few people in the area and had some time to kill. It hadn’t changed in the six years since I’d left the job, other than that the store closed up in 2001 and a Hollister was put in its place. A brief visit to the mall’s website shows that a lot of the original stores are still there.
HMV was the first long-term job I started after I moved back from my ill-fated stay in Boston a year before. After the short-term stay at the Leominster Sony theater, a six-month stay at WCAT, and a temp job at my mother’s bank downtown, I had to get hired somewhere, most likely out of town. I loved my hometown, but I’d long grown out of it. I needed to figure out a way to live in the larger world.
The western wing of the mall, looking east. There was a Waldenbooks just out of shot to the right. My store was to the left of that ‘Food Court’ sign in the distance.
Writingwise, I’d kind of dried up a bit. The process of writing True Faith had stuttered to a halt for personal reasons. I’d given up trying to rewrite the Infamous War Novel by this point, having finally trunked it. The songwriting and the poetry were drying up as well. It definitely wasn’t that I’d given up…it was that I had nothing to write about.
When I started the job at HMV, I wasn’t exactly sure how long it would take me to get there and back (even though I’d timed it during my initial interview in mid-August), so I would make it a point to get there with time to spare. My hours were from opening to late afternoon: somewhere around 9 to 5. Eventually I timed it so I’d get there about an hour to a half-hour early. I’d sit out in the food court with another coffee and relax. No stress when I started the job proper, then.
It didn’t take long for me to realize this was a perfect time to do some writing.
By late 1996-early 1997 I was out there every morning, working on something. My usual spot was the table closest to the store. [In the food court picture above, it would be right in front of that Dunkies at the far right. I chose that one deliberately so I would see the store’s lights go on when whoever opened got there before me, signalling it was time for me to clock in.]
Similar tables and chairs to the ones I used to sit at. I remember that wave pattern well. The zipper of my jacket would always get caught in those damn chair backs somehow.
I started The Phoenix Effect on 9 March 1997 at that table. A number of personal and creative events had taken place between the start of my job and that date, and that morning I chose to start a completely new story. I had no idea where I was going with it at first, other than the fact that it picked up where I’d left off with the spiritual/new age story ideas of True Faith and expanded on them significantly. It would be less dystopian, that was for sure.
Soon I was writing three to five handwritten pages a day before I started the job. I timed it so I’d get those words done, skip out for a quick smoke (a bad habit I’d picked up in college a few years previous), and then head off to my job.
After about a month of that, I realized it would probably be for the best that I start transcribing all this new work so I could start editing and revising it. I’d already moved my computer downstairs to the basement of my parents’ house and was already working on other transcription projects and whatnot. It seemed like the right thing to do.
The Belfry, circa 1998, with the hand-me-down Windows 95 computer (my second one). The writing nook was named so because of a bat problem one evening. Note the various snacks, notebooks, music, and other distractions nearby. Not shown: my addiction to playing FreeCell before I started a writing session.
By late 1997 and into early 1998, I was finishing up the handwritten version of The Phoenix Effect and working on a good solid revision, and by the end of that year I was ready to try my hand at submitting it to agents and publishers. I was also working on a sequel during my morning mall sessions. And I’d kept up with the publishing field as I went along. I knew what I was doing, and what I wanted to do.
This was the first novel since the IWN that I’d completed and submitted back in 1987, so I considered all this a pretty damn good milestone. Even as TPE was rejected left and right (and for good reason), I knew then I had a chance of making this a lifelong career.
I knew I was a writer at that point.
Alas, by early 2000 the job had become unbearable due to the change in management, hierarchy and schedule. I still made it a point to work on my writing on a daily basis, but it had become close to impossible to keep the same writing habits I’d had just a few years earlier. The most I could do is head down to the Belfry every night and work on revisions. I became stubborn about it. I would not give this up.
By autumn 2000, I’d quit that job and started a new one on the other side of the state. It was a shorter commute (thirty miles instead of fifty), the pay was better, and the schedule was a hell of a lot more stable. By early 2001 I’d switched to first shift, which let me out at 2pm. I had the entire afternoon and evening to write.
And write I did. And I’ve never stopped since.
Spare Oom, 25 September 2016 — still writing, still listening to tunage, still snacking, still distracted.
Twenty years later and that novel went through numerous revisions and morphed into a trilogy and an expanded universe. My music now comes to me from streaming radio stations, ripped cds and downloaded mp3s, and is all stored on two tiny external hard drives each about the size of an index card. I work from home and my commute is one room over. I’ve self-published two books of the trilogy, with the third on the way.
I still think about that store from time to time. I still consider it one of my favorite jobs ever, even if it was retail. Even near the end, when my manager and I weren’t getting along. Being surrounded by music all day kept me happy and entertained.
And most importantly, the job helped me create a solid and dependable writing schedule, and it helped me prove to myself that I could balance a Day Job and the Writing Career at the same time with minimal issue.
Without that, I’m not entirely sure where I’d be in my writing career today.
Welcome to Bridgetown 