On Writing: ‘Crunch’

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naruto paperwork

Hoo boy.

This article about ‘worshiping crunch’ popped up on Twitter on Wednesday and it’s making the rounds of many of the webcomic and freelance artists I follow.  The reaction to the article is overwhelmingly, this is not only horseshit, it’s unhealthy.

The tl;dr to save you from the flashy prose of the article:  Some creative people thrive on working eighty hours a day plus overtime, working on things due in four minutes, eating microwave ramen and Cheetos and drinking up all those 5-hour boost drinks in one go.  Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbole, but it’s not that far from the truth.  The article is an excerpt from the writer’s upcoming book about the cut-throat video game industry.

[EDIT: The writer has since come out stating that his excerpt has very much been taken out of context; he himself disdains the ‘crunch’ idea, which was lost in translation from the book to the online magazine.]

It really did get me thinking about my own work life, nonetheless.

I get it; some people thrive on the high-speed, high-maintenance atmosphere of certain industries, where most of your waking life (and probably most of your sleeping part of it as well) is spent ‘crunching’, getting a week or a month’s worth of regular-speed work into a short amount of time.

The last time I did the ‘crunch’ thing was at Yankee Candle, over ten years ago.  Five years’ worth of working ‘mandatory overtime’ hours in the shipping department during fourth quarter.  Q4 is of course holiday sales season, so our candle output shot up exponentially during that season.  In 2002 it also included a few outside vendors who would buy in bulk.  [Our team won the MVP award that year for Bravery In the Face of Insurmountable Odds and Success Despite Incredibly Unrealistic Sales Goals.]

Mind you, my hours were already pretty early: 6am to 2pm, five days a week.  When it came to Q4, however, that ended up changing to 4am to 3pm, six days a week, Monday through Saturday.  I didn’t complain, because a) I was getting pretty good pay, and the OT pay gave me a good padding in the bank for my bills, b) I got along with pretty much everyone in my department, so it wasn’t a completely hellish atmosphere, and c) I could still dedicate the early evening hours to my writing the trilogy.

Yes, even after ten hour days on the floor, I still went ahead and hit my 1000-word goal almost every night.

The downsides were plentiful as well.  I was getting up at 2am and driving thirty miles through midwestern Massachusetts before any of the snow plows or sanding trucks were even out of the DPW barns.  I had a half-pack a day smoking habit.  I drank a huge cup of coffee (extra cream and sugar) in the morning and multiple giant bottles of Mountain Dew at work (and usually a can or two during my writing sessions), and ate a lot of really unhealthy convenience store food and snacks.  I was lifting 30-40 pound boxes and lugging heavy pallets all day long.

Suffice it to say, every damn year I’d miss about a week’s worth of work close to Christmas, because I’d either get something like the flu brought on by exhaustion, or I’d tweak my sciatic nerve, or both.  I always felt like shit at the end of the year.

By the end of 2004, I’d pretty much had enough.  I was seeing A and driving down to New Jersey on a regular basis.  I bailed in the spring of 2005 and moved down with her a week later.

*

Anyway, about this ‘crunch’ thing.

I just can’t see myself dedicating that much of my life and health for an industry.  Especially when I’m already fiercely dedicated to my writing career.  Every job I’ve held since then, I’ve told managers that I’m fine with the forty hour workweek with the occasional OT if it’s absolutely necessary.  But I have endeavors outside of work.  I’m quite protective of my writing time, not to mention I do my best to come up for air and be social with friends and family.  Thankfully, all my employers have accepted that without question.

Hell, I don’t even try to crunch a ridiculous amount of writing work into a single day.  Sure, I give myself a busy creative schedule on purpose, but it’s a schedule I can handle and can adjust if and when necessary.  It’s a daily schedule I enjoy and look forward to.  I give myself reasonable writing deadlines.  I might complain that I spend too much time futzing around on Twitter, but really…in the long run, it’s not as if I’m trying to write ten thousand words a day consistently.  My count is more like five to seven hundred lately, and that’s just on the Lidwells project.  Add these blogs and the 750 and it’s more like two thousand or so.  And at the end of the day I’m happy with that, and not absolutely knackered afterwards.

I just can’t see myself risking health and sanity for it.  Life is too short for that.

Meet the Lidwells: Cover Outtake

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Meet the Lidwells Cover B

Keep in mind, yes — this is definitely an outtake.  Not that bad for a first try, though.  I know I’ve got some more work to do on it.  The main focus this time out was for me to figure out the placement of the six main characters and make it look like an album cover.  [In the story, this is actually what the cover of their debut record looks like.]  I have a slightly adjusted version of the six silhouettes so they’re spaced out a lot better and can provide the title as well.  I think I’m going to redo it by putting the image and main title enclosed in a square box to further push that image, and have the bottom segment in black, with the text in white.  I’m still playing around with the fonts as well.

[Keep in mind, I still have the last third of the book to write, but I’ve had this cover idea in my head almost from the beginning.  I’m still hoping to have this one out by late fall, depending on when it get finished and revised.]

What do you think? 🙂

Thoughts On the Long Game

Jon Chaisson3 Comments

book page turn

There’s one part of publishing no one likes to talk about: when the book sales dry up.  Let’s be honest: a lot of us writers go to bookstores and we see all the perennials on the shelves that we can always trust to be there: the books by Gabaldon, King, Tolkien, and Martin (not to mention the 9,485,682nd book by Patterson, Robb or Grisham…how the hell do they keep cranking those out every couple of weeks, anyway?).  We’d like to think we could get in on some of that as well.

The grim, sad truth is that it rarely happens.  We’ll show up on a few shelves for a few months and then disappear.  And we’ll fall so far short of our dream numbers.  Even grimmer that the title stops getting printed due to lack of demand.  Not to mention suffering the indignity of having fans wondering where they can find Book 1 in your trilogy and having to tell them to look in a used bookstore, because your publisher isn’t making it available.

It almost makes one wonder just how antiquated and out of date the publishing business might be, how many of these rules and guidelines no longer work in this day and age.

But that’s another blog post for another day.  Me, I want to talk a little about how I look at this conundrum as a self-published author.  [Mind you, I’m not dissing the publishing business as a whole; I know many authors who do just fine with it, frustrations and all.]

See, I have three books out that I’ve self-released as POD trade paperback (through CreateSpace) and ebook (through Smashwords), and at present they’re just sort of…sitting there, not doing much.  I did sell a few as they were released, of course.  Not that many, more than I’d expected.  And they’re still up there, available and ready for whoever wants to buy them.  I don’t plan on pulling them from availability any time soon.  I might revisit the books and do some cosmetic editing sometime down the road, but they’ll always be out there for anyone to read.

The Balance of Light has been out for what, a good couple of months now?  The e-book was released in February, and the trade a month or so later.  I think it’s fair to say I got as much as I could get out of the three for the time being.  It would be kind of silly to keep flogging these books to virtually the same audience over and over again.

So what do I do with them, then?  One of the things I’ve thought about, in particular is how to let potential readers know that they’re still out there.  I mean, aside from the occasional tweet or blog post or shameless plug?  That’s the rub.  No one’s really been able to figure out how to do that for self-published books.  I’ll put out some of my self-made flyers when I’m at conventions.  There are some websites and platforms I could advertise on if I so desired.  But is it the right time to do that at the moment?

At this point, I’ve been thinking less about the Short Game — flogging the books while they’re still fresh — and more about the Long Game.  And by Long Game, I mean coming up with ways to push the trilogy on new readers in the future.  Plugging the trilogy as an Added Value when I release my next book.  Continuing to join in on the various sales that come up on Smashwords and elsewhere.  Using them as props when I’m on convention panels.

Meanwhile, this also gives me more time and brainspace to focus on writing my current projects and planning future ones.  [Current status: writing one, prepping another, and two, possibly three on the back burner.]

Do I feel let down a bit that the trilogy didn’t do as amazingly as I’d hoped?  Well, sure.  I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me a bit, and that I feel that I’ve failed myself for not following up on publicity as much as I should have.  But what’s past is past.  I also know that the themes of the trilogy are rather dense and they’re not for everyone.  I’ve made my peace with all of that.

My thoughts on this are:  always look forward. Always find the positive.  Always find a way to make all of this work for me.  And above all, learn from my own mistakes and missteps.  The trilogy isn’t dead, far from it.  It’s just in stasis.  I can certainly bring it back to life if I so choose.

I’ve said it before…I’m in this writing gig for the long term.  It’s more than just writing a large body of work, though.  It’s about knowing what to do with it all over time.

 

Coming back to the grind and other notes

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your name comet taki
One of many spectacular shots from your name.

It’s Sunday mid-morning as I write this and both A. and I have been up for a few hours now.  I think we’ve both somewhat adjusted to Pacific Time again, having spent the last few days in a jet lag haze.  We’re both going over our work inboxes to clean them up at the moment, and I’m streaming some new music releases over the last few days.  [Best find so far: Moscow-based Life on Venus with their album Encounters, which I would describe as Slowdive if they had MBV’s volume.  So yeah, right in my wheelhouse there.]

Our two-week vacation in London was quite enjoyable if a little exhausting — thanks to my phone’s pedometer app, I figured out we walked just a little over eighty miles.  Lots of places seen, friends seen, cats petted, and lagers or tea ordered.  And somehow within all of that, I was also able to work a little on some of the index card notes for Secret Next Project!

And if you’re wondering why I chose the above gif from the anime your name., it’s because I watched it on the plane twice (once each way).  It’s become one of my favorite movies on many levels.  This makes three times I’ve watched it — so far — and I’m sure it’ll be one that will get even more views in the future.  And yes, I’ve already decided I’ll be writing a blog post about it here soon enough, as I find it an excellent example of detailed, layered storytelling and how to successfully unfold each subplot and hint of characterization so it all fits together perfectly.

Speaking of writing, I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things as soon as possible.  I’m still feeling exhausted, but only physically, so I think I should be able to get back on the horse with little issue.  I’m particularly excited that I’m about to start the last act of Meet the Lidwells (and working on the cover!), which means I can start up the revision quite soon!  I’m also hoping to get started on further work with Secret Next Project as well.

As for non-writing creative stuff, I finally got the drawing models that I ordered online a short time ago (half off, so basically two-for-one!) that are made by Bandai.  They’re small but they’re detailed and pretty versatile, so I think I’ll be able to use these for future drawings.  Check ’em out:

Taki Mitsuha
I’ve named them Taki and Mitsuha, of course.

They come with some nifty accessories like different gesturing hands, katanas and handguns (because why the hell not), cell phones and tablets, and so on.  The directions are entirely in Japanese of course, but they’re super easy to use anyway.  I’m sure I’ll get more work out of these than out of Wilhelmina, the simple articulated model I got from Ikea for like six dollars. 🙂

So yes…we’re back from vacation, autumn is nearly among us, and I’m eager to get back to Doing All the Creative Things.  Hell, I may even record a few more Drunken Owl demos if time permits!

Now, if I can just shake the remnants of this jet lag…

 

On Writing Advice

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waynes world br

I’ll be honest, the first bit of writing advice I’ve always given to people, especially now that I’m making the occasional appearance on convention panels is this:

Have fun with it!

No, seriously, have fun with your writing!  I could give you stodgy advice like ‘write [x] words a day’ or ‘read so-and-so’s book on writing’ or ‘you should follow these certain rules to be successful’ or something like that, but I won’t.  And I certainly won’t provide pithy quotes you can Photoshop against a picture of your local picturesque creek bathed in sunlight.

I don’t necessarily dismiss those things; if they work for you, by all means, keep using them!  They may have worked for me in the past, but I realized they really didn’t do enough for me.  It was a bit of cheerleading, but didn’t necessarily give me the drive.

No, I realized my drive came from having fun with it.  This isn’t just about breaking grammar rules, though.  I’m talking about all the parts of it.  Go places you (and your readers) wouldn’t expect to go.  Write something a bit outside your comfort zone.  I’ve said it before, my default reaction to writing rules is often: well, why not?  And then I’ll see if I can pull it off.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but I’ll have learned something out of it either way.

I’m not saying be a rebel for the sake of being a rebel; this is more about making the process of writing enjoyable for you, the writer.  Go for what excites you about the craft, no matter how big, small, epic or esoteric.  Whether it be fan fiction, memoir, expanded universe, or experimental, it’s all about whatever enthralls you while you’re writing it.  The canvas is a hell of a lot more welcoming than you might think.

Point of View

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jupiter io pov
Timelapse of Jupiter from Io’s POV, December 2013.  Credit: user ‘bubbleweed’ on Reddit

Recently I’ve hit a few tough patches in Meet the Lidwells, where it just feels like I’ve slowed to a crawl and the story’s not going anywhere.  I know what story I need to tell, but for some reason it’s been like slogging through mud trying to get there.  I know this is a problem because when I as an author feel the sluggishness, I know my readers will feel the same thing.  And I don’t want to do that.

So in this instance, I decided that maybe someone else’s point of view would be worth investigating.  Instead of the kids in the band talking through their attempts on a comeback album after taking a much-needed hiatus, I realized that it might be a bit more interesting to tell this struggle from their manager’s point of view.

Why?  I felt their story would be more interesting.  The kids in the band have mostly grown up (the youngest is now 16 and the others are in or approaching their 20s), and from their view, they’re just hoping that the Big Comeback will work out.  On the other hand, their manager has the thankless job of Making That Happen.  Once I got started on that, everything was smooth sailing again.

*

Over the years, changing the POV when I’m stuck has definitely helped when I’m stuck.  More often than not a different witness to the story will bring in a fresh take on the situation, maybe even create some needed conflict in the process by going against what the main characters want and expect.  Even if I end up not using it, or rewriting it again from someone else’s point of view, at least I’ve managed to get myself out of that sluggish spot and back on track.

For me, it’s yet another way to work outside expectations.  Forcing myself to think about something from a different angle almost always produces sometimes helpful but always interesting results.

Fan Service

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cat fan
No, not that kind either.

What do we owe our fans, as creators?

In a perfect world, writers, artists and musicians would be thrilled to be able to put their creation out there into the world, and have a positive (or at least constructive) response.  It’s not a perfect world, so we’re reasonably okay with whatever we get, be it a bunch of lukewarm responses, very small but amazingly positive responses, or, if we’re really lucky, a snowball effect of growing positive responses.  So we at least owe them something they’ll enjoy.

Do we owe our fans perfection?  Well, that depends on who’s defining ‘perfection’ here.  In normal situations, the writer defines it as ‘the best damn version of my creation that I can give to you, to the best of my ability.’  In this case, yes: we owe our fans our best work.  Anything less than that, and we’re phoning it in.  And fans can see phoning it in a lot more clearly than we as creators can.  You don’t want to cut corners, say ‘fuck it, it’s done’ or ‘…oh HEY LOOK OVER THERE’ [whoosh of handwavium].  And if our creation is in an extended universe, the last things we want to do is kludge it with a bit of poorly applied spackle or reckless retconning, or worse, not even bother with the continuity.

However, we don’t owe our fans what they would consider a Perfect Story.

We do not owe them their perceived headcanon.  Yes, our fans have invested time and care in our creations, and that’s really cool!  But they’re not the ones driving this bus.  The creator is the one dedicating a hell of a lot of personal and creative time planning how each intricate bit of action is going to unfold.  If the creator decides to do or not do something in the story, I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of the time, the creators have a reason for it.  We especially don’t owe them an explanation when we go against their perceived headcanon.

*

So why do I bring this up?  Well, part of it is due to Sunday’s reaction to the unveiling of the thirteenth Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker — the first female to play the role.  It’s an awesome decision and for the most part everyone is thrilled by it.  It’s the usual small-yet-vocal male contingent that are having issues with it.  How dare they mess with an always-male institution?, they cry.

But it’s also partly due to frequent conversations I see between webcomic artists (frequently female) and their fans, where the reader (frequently male) has ragequit the series or released a Twitter tirade — or worse, harassed the creator through the comments sections of their work — due to their headcanon not actually being canon.  And I’ve also seen it in a lot of anime and manga fandoms; for example, the ending of the Naruto manga series (and in effect its anime) was faced with a bizarrely antagonistic American backlash due to certain characters ending up romantically linked and others not linked.  It was weird, a bit unsettling, and completely uncalled for.

I admit I haven’t had this kind of response to my books as of yet.  That’s partly due to my relative obscurity at this point in my career, but I would not be surprised if it was because I was a male writer, either.  That said, though, I still think about it.  I write knowing that I’m probably going to piss someone off for one reason or another.  I won’t let that stop me writing what I want to write, though.  I can deal with that if need be.  But it still baffles the hell out of me.  It’s fandom expanded to bizarre extremes.  It’s an extreme emotional reaction to something harmless and fictitious.  It’s reactions unchecked.

I don’t owe anything to fans with that kind of reaction.

I just owe them a damn good story that I hope they’ll enjoy reading.  That’s all.

 

Frustrated

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dr tennant annoyed

Feeling frustrated by my less than stellar output lately.  It’s the same damn thing, too…distraction and procrastination.  A tiny bit of it is a not-high-but-consistent volume of work for the Day Job, which I can deal with.  What’s annoying me is that I’ll have few spare moments to breathe and realign myself, and waste those moments my fucking around online.

Even more frustrating is that I’m even doing that off the Day Job clock.  Time for my nightly writing session!  Woohoo!  Let’s go check Twitter first.

NO.  NO NO NO NO.  STOP THAT, DAMMIT.

I swear, if this keeps up I’m going to have to enforce another internet hiatus.  Mind you, I’ll sort of be having one in a few weeks anyway, while we’re on vacation.  It’ll be mostly fly-by blog entries and Instagram posts.  Writing will most likely be a bit of longhand work on the Secret New Project, as I don’t plan on bringing a laptop.  Hopefully I’ll get all this frustration out of my system and start anew upon return.

So!  Let’s just get this all behind us and soldier on, shall we?

On Being a Writer: Document Retention

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cat copier
Thats…not how it works, kitty.

I’ve been meaning to scan my longhand writing for quite some time.  For one reason or another, however, I’ve barely gotten around to it.  The Great Trilogy Revision Project took up a hell of a lot of my time, enough where I couldn’t squeeze any of that in.  Now that my work volume isn’t nearly as large as it once was, I believe I should be able to squeeze a little bit in now and again.

I used to be a pack rat with my writing, to the point where I had multiple copies of the same printed documents.  I also had a lot of spiral notebooks that only contained maybe a few dozen pages’ worth of work.  One of my first projects when we moved out here to San Francisco in late 2005 — mainly to keep myself busy while I waited for job openings — was to go through these countless printouts and shred what wasn’t needed.  I had two large storage tubs, a few milk crates and two wooden boxes full of stuff when I started.  As of today, I have everything in manila folders on two shelves of the bookshelf next to my desk, plus a few straggler folders elsewhere.

Over the years I’ve been meaning to create pdfs or something similar so I at least have a digital image of my work.  The most obvious reasons are the security and the ease of access: I save all my writing-related things on a cloud already, so this would put everything in one place for reference, and so I wouldn’t have to worry about losing it.  And if the apartment went up in smoke, the only thing I’d have to grab is my external drives where my music collection is!

I’ve attempted it a few times in the past, of course.  The only failure those times was due to a low-end scanning device that took one look at the amount I wanted to scan, LOL’d at me, and decided not to work anymore.  I now have a much higher-grade printer/scanner/copier — not to mention a lot more time to work with — so I have no excuse to put it off any longer.

So is any of this writing worth the work?  On a personal note, sure.  I have mostly fond memories of writing most of this stuff, even if I did end up trunking a high percentage of it.  It’s part of what made me the writer I am now.  You can definitely see the evolution of my writing style, the themes I often revisit, the imagery I like to use to tell my stories.  My own writing also shows where my mind and emotions were at the time, and my attempts to make sense of them.  I’ve even come back to a few of these trunked works to steal a scene or two for one of my successful books and stories.

Is any of it worth saving on a ‘donate my papers to a public/college library’ level?  Maybe not, but it’s worth saving for my own reasons.  It’s not just my stories, it’s the story of me as well.