Quick Post

Hey everyone out there in internet land, I just wanted to put up a quick post primarily as an apology but also to make a quick update.  I didn't post last Friday because our house was being used as a bed & breakfast by out of town guests.  It was a good time, and I was too busy playing host to do anything like post a blog or work on the novel, so I just let it go... and I really should have posted an away message or something because I've committed to posting every Friday and I like to meet my commitments.  I had a fine time with my guests, so I really don't feel too bad about not posting... but I feel just bad enough to make the apology, so there it is.

My house guests included my long time pal, and all around good egg, Andy Perez and his lovely family.  Andy is a artist of some note, an independent comic book publisher, and one of my closest friends in the entire world (you can check out some of Andy's work here). Andy and his peeps were with us for a few days, and on the day they left my brother, Mikey, and his lovely girlfriend arrived for a stop over at Chez Flores y Garcia on their way back to El Paso.  Any visit from my brother is a cause for celebration, and we did it San Antonio style with an outing to the First Friday celebration in the historic King William district and several pitchers of mighty fine beer at Beethoveen's Maennerchor und Hallen.  Coincidentally, Mikey and Andy are collaborators on two independent comic books: Lonely In Black and The Afterlife Chronicles of a Zombie.  Neither of these visits were about talking shop, they were about having a good time, and that's exactly what we did.

On Saturday afternoon, when all the guests has departed and the house was quiet, I got back to work on the novel and had an excellent bit of output... I guess it was all kind of pent up in there.  Sunday and Monday were low output days (this is normal for Monday nights), and Tuesday I hit the wall...  For some bizarre and unknown reason, I had a big bout of self-doubt on Tuesday... it was just awful.  I reread some to the work I'd produced the preceding days and just felt like it was all crap... this led to me feeling like the whole novel was crap, and I was at a point where I might have scrapped it all and said, "fuck it."  I can't explain what brought on this feeling, it just happened.  I woke up Tuesday morning feeling blue and it just got progressively worse from there.  By the time I made it home from work, I was in no mood to write... so I decided to distract myself.

Something good came out of that black Tuesday: I accidentally stumbled upon the news that Scrivener was now available for Windows... well actually, that it's been available for Windows since late last year.  Never being one to enjoy using buggy, first generation technology/apps, I was a glad as I could be that day to discover that there was a much more stable version available for purchase.  Scrivener is what I wanted to use during NaNoWriMo last year, but it was only available for Mac then and I wasn't about to run out and buy a Macbook just so I could use the program.  It brightened my day at least a little to know that the program I wanted to use was now available to me.  I've been using WriteWay Pro which is a good product (I know I've mentioned it in previous posts), but Scrivener's feature set is considerably more robust, and it's what I would've been using all along had it been available to me before I invested in WriteWay Pro (still, it was money well spent, and I'm happy to support and promote that product).

So, rather than stew in my own feelings of authorial inadequacy, I spent the evening learning to use Scrivener; yesterday, I set up the novel in Scrivener's manuscript template, and I was back to writing.  Now the software didn't cure my self doubt, I did that on my own (well, with a little help from my friends); all it took was a bit of grounding and a change of perspective... stepping away from the novel for a night helped too.  Writing is a hobby for me right now, but it's a hobby I apparently take very seriously and like any creative endeavor there are emotional components you never realize are there until you confront them.  Is my writing good enough?  It's not, and never will be, to me... that just comes with the territory.  I feel like every once in a great while I write something particularly clever or insightful, but for the most part my writing needs work and it always will.  Besides: "good enough" for what?  Publication?  Perhaps... perhaps not; I'll never know until I try, and I have no intention of trying any time soon, so I need not waste energy worrying about that now.

My goal is to get as good as I possibly can at what I love to do without causing myself an aneurysm... but writing a novel is a challenge, an intellectual challenge that no one is really ever prepared for until they undertake it.  At 77,534 words, this novel is the single longest thing I've ever written in my entire life and I still have five chapters to go...  My desire is to have a 105,000 word final manuscript by the time I'm done with edits, revisions, and rewrites.  Why do it in the first place?  Because I'm bat-shit crazy, that's why.  Writing a novel is the intellectual equivalent of climbing a mountain: you do it because it's there and you have the balls to try.

Huge, huge, huge news, (IMHO): one of my favorite authors (if not my absolute favorite), Neil Gaiman, has just signed a five book deal with HarperCollins; but wait, there's more... get a load of this:

A Sandman prequel... my geek heart is going to explode with excitement... but I have to wait until 2013...  Oh what a glorious thing to look forward to.

No new post next Friday; I will be away for a nice little family vacation, and I anticipate not having internet access during that time.

Cheers!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program...

Today is Marisol's birthday and so I'm going to be unavailable for a regular Friday posting. The five years mark is a big and important one for a child, so today I'm 100% dad... "writer me" goes on the shelf for the weekend. See you next Friday. Cheers!

Writer's Sag

"But in a larger sense every novel is a first novel, presenting no end of unique problems, carrying enormous risks, and offering immense excitement and other rewards."

-- Lawrence Block, Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print (1979)

I got a pretty bad case of "writer's sag" this week...  "What's 'writer's sag?'" you ask.  Well, it's not in the official lexicon of aspiring or established writers... at least I don't think it is, but let me start by telling you what it's not: "writer's sag" (as I define it) is not as malicious as "writer's block," which is as horrible a thing as can happen to any writer.  "Writer's sag" is to a cold, as "writer's block" is to the flu (and I'm definitely underestimating "writer's block"... because it can be devastating).  "Writer's sag" is a bumpy road, whereas "writer's block" is a road closed or a bridge out... I think you get the picture, no?  It's a loss of momentum; there, that's probably where I should have started.

It's partly my fault (bullshit, it's all my fault) because I saw that I was running out of space with my original 80.000 word draft goal... it was just becoming increasingly apparent that 80,000 words was not going to be able to contain the story... so I upped that to 105,000 words.  From my reading around the various submission guidelines that publishers post on their websites (Note: not all of them do, some won't even give you guidelines... instead telling you they don't want your manuscript unless you have an agent) I learned that the average manuscript runs between 80,000 to 120,000 words... with fantasy manuscripts tending towards the higher end of that range.  One quick look around my bookshelves indeed confirms that fantasy novels have a tendency to be a bit fatter than sci-fi novels, so okay: that already confirmed that I was shooting too low... or was I?  The part I think I got screwed up in my head is that the 80,000 to 120,000 words  is for a final draft manuscript... not a first or working draft; however, I remedied that initial misinterpretation by adjusting my target word count to 105,000, thus allowing myself a comfortable 15,000 word buffer for my revision/rewriting.

How exactly does this contribute to the aforementioned "writer's sag?"  Well, take a look at the Word-O-Meter to the right (over there, you see it...).  When the target goal was 80,000 the percent complete was 75-76%; now with the goal set to 105,000 the percent complete drops to 62-63% complete... and somehow, my fragile, neophyte writer's ego found that dispiriting... and that right there is exactly what "writer's sag" is all about.  The thing is: you develop (or should develop) a particularly complex and intimate affinity for your story -- it's a part of you, the offspring of your imagination; something that, even though you may only ever show it to your family and friends, contains a part of you regardless about how dispassionate you try to make yourself to the whole process.  Creative work is work... hard work, in spite of what some may think and say.

So check this out: I write primarily for leisure (and I've been told I must be mad to do so); I entertain absolutely no illusions about ever getting rich doing this... I have no professional stake in my writing (if that comes later, that's cool... but telling the stories is the goal), and my family's livelihood is not attached to my ability to complete the novel I'm writing -- I'm not beholden to any contractual obligations... and even then, my emotional and spiritual well-being is at least a little tied up in what is essentially my hobby.  Isn't that odd? Couldn't some psychologist write a really nifty thesis about the egos of creative people?  I have zero real world investment in my writing, and yet I'm still subject to despair when my momentum lags.  How bizarre is that?  I mean I know: if I didn't care, I wouldn't write...  There's an axiom like that somewhere; I think it was in Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing...

In reality, for me anyway, it's more than just a desire to tell a story (although that certainly is the overarching objective); it's a personal challenge, like a marathon runner... it's a test of endurance and discipline (one which I'm apparently better at rising up to, unlike my smoking cessation...)... a test of my will, and, yes, a test of my ego.  It must be, or all you are doing is giving a report: "boy finds magic sword, boy takes magic sword and confronts evil duke, boy slays evil duke and henchmen, boy becomes king, the end."  There's a story in there... not much of one, but it does give a sequence of events that for some people constitutes a story.  The challenge then for the writer of imaginative fiction is to give this sequence of events some emotive and intellectual power; to flesh it out by infusing a logical and mostly believable (it's a fantasy story, so you get some leeway) mix of story elements which then amplifies this sequence of events, and which will in turn make readers want to participate in the co-construction of the fictional reality... the fiction dream... that readers might willingly suspend their disbelief for a little while and believe in your world of magic and wonder.  It's a tall order, and, even if your audience is just your best friend, or your cousin, or your grandma, it's terrifying.

The writer's ego... well, my writer's ego... seems to be beset on all sides and at all times by thoughts of failure and fears of not measuring up to the challenge I've undertaken... this even though I receive some pretty good feedback from my beta readers.  I told you back at the very beginning of this blog (not this post, the blog) that I'd be sharing the ups and downs of this process... and this is definitely a "down."  Thus, I've presented a problem for which I have no solution other than to keep on writing... which is exactly what I intend to do.  It's perfectly natural and okay to have a fear of failure; it's even kind of healthy.  What's not healthy is allowing any kind of fear to prevent you from doing the things you love to do -- I love to write and tell stories so even though my momentum sags and my writer's ego takes a hit, in the choice between continuing to write or giving up, I think I'll just continue writing.

So as it doesn't all read like bad news, something really cool happened last weekend: I got my desk.  No more folding TV tray for me, no more sitting on the edge of the futon and having my limbs fall asleep... I got a desk, I got a chair, I got a place to work:

So this is where the magic happens now: inside my den at my chase desk.  The rest of the den still looks more like a storage closet than on office, but the junk in here is mine so that's on me.

Here's a slightly different view; you can see my HP laptop in this picture, and that's the machine where the story engineering is really taking place.  Yes, that is my black, Epiphone SG off to the right; please feel free to envy...

One last shot to give you a better idea of what the rest of the room looks like... what you don't see in this, or the other photos, is the futon and the bookshelves which are all against the right wall looking into the room from where I took the picture from the doorway.

It is important to have a space in which to ply your craft, regardless of what that craft might be, so that (at least) all of your crap will be out of everyone else's way.  For the longest time, I wrote at the dining table and that meant that my materials (both technological and paper) were all over one quarter of the table surface at all times (and subject to spills and other catastrophes).  When we moved out of the apartment I was relegated to a TV tray on which to place my laptop until such time as a desk could be purchased, and a spot made available for it.  I was so happy, no: ecstatic, about it when it finally happened... and then, prrt! "writer's sag."  So it goes, I suppose... I'll shoot for a much lighter topic next time.

Cheers!

The Three Quarter Mark, New Template, and a Few Thoughts Inspiration...

When I hit Save last night, after falling asleep in front of my laptop in the den and waking reluctantly at 2:00 a.m., my progress meter indicated that I was very, very near the 75% complete mark.  This woke me up fully in an instant; I mean the cobwebs of sleep just flew off my eyes and I sat gaping at the screen.  Not that long ago it felt as if I was spinning my wheels around thirty (or so) percent done going nowhere fast, and the little pie graph displayed on the Dashboard of WriteWay Pro was showing far more red than green.  Now that little pie graph is much more green than red, and the official mark is 74.6%.  I attribute this steady progress to the writing schedule I mentioned in a previous post, and to my (sometimes forced) ability to maintain that schedule.  I set my target complete date for September 30, 2012, but at this rate I'll be done with the rough draft a lot sooner which means I'll be able to start revising, rewriting, and editing a lot early than I anticipated... possibly, I might have a pretty polished draft done before NaNoWriMo in November.  I have the first half of the novel out to some dear friends who are serving as test readers for me, and I provided them with a vehicle by which they could give me some feedback that I'll use during my revision process; they're not doing copy edits for me or anything like that, they're just reading the content and reacting to the story.  Hence, if they come back to me and say, "I like it, but..." it's the "but" I'm after for revision.  I'm not sure if this is the way you do it; I seem to have not received my Official Novelist Handbook from the union, so I'm pretty much inventing this as I go along (Aside: there is, in fact, no such thing as an Official Novelist Handbook, and I don't belong to any unions... I made that shit up... it's what I do).

So to recap: what's worked for me here is setting a schedule and sticking to it... imagine that.  For the next novel I'm even going to go the extra step of creating a formal outline and trying to get myself a bit more organized at the gate before I start running the marathon.  My plan is to then write the bare bones story during NaNoWriMo and then flesh it out to meet my word count goal.  I'm not a big fan of reducing my creative act to something as quotidian as a word count, but it's the only useful measure of progress I've got at my disposal and I'm certainly open suggestions.  There is a page count option in WriteWay Pro, but that's equally absurd in my eyes; it's the reducibility (not a real word kids, but the kind of word created by efficiency experts and quality management consultants) of a creative act that I find absurd, by the way, and I could probably wax philosophical about this topic for hours... but I won't... not this time anyway -- we'll put that in the back pocket for another time.  Anyway...

I decided to change the template of the blog in favor of one I felt made the site easier on the eyes.  I like the previous template okay, but honestly I selected it because it was black and at the time I felt it gave the site a feel of mild bad-assery... it's all a part of the nerd psychology: you try and find a way to make yourself appear as bad-ass as possible even though in the end you know full well that there's no hope... no hope at all -- you're still at home writing your blog, and the beautiful, popular people are out copulating in night club parking lots.  So then all that's left is for one to embrace their nerd-istic tendencies and make the blog easier to read... yet another tendency of the nerd psychology: I have shitty eyes, and most likely anyone who would be interested in reading the blog probably does too, so you do the considerate thing...  The "black, beat poet uniform" is back hanging in the closet, and now you get the more casual and (hopefully) eye-pleasing minimalist design.

The fact that I'm writing a novel came up in conversation a few days ago.  Yes, I was totally bragging and making statements of unabashed puffery about how arduous the whole experience was, yet also how fun.  The person with whom I was conversing asked me where I got my inspiration for the novel and I froze like a chicken who accidentally waltzed into a Chik-Fil-A.  I know there's authors out there who relish this question, and then there's authors who dread this question... I belong to the latter group.  The little voice inside my head said, "Well, dumb-ass, here's your chance to practice for the day some fool actually decides you're worth interviewing," but I just couldn't seem to think of a good way to answer the question.  Saying, "I totally made the whole shit up," just doesn't sound as dramatic and romantic as many people (I think) believe writing a novel is.  I've got no streets of Paris, or alleyways of London; no great, expansive roads of southwest America, or exotic Caribbean beaches with which to season my creative process.  I sit in my den (which looks a lot like a storage closet) with my laptop on a TV tray, and I unravel my story from my imagination and the things that interest me: a whole bunch of fantasy bullshit.  Panicked, I decided that the best way to answer the question, and still save face, was to make the answer as cryptic as possible.  My answer: "I dreamed the story and started typing when I woke up... I haven't been able to stop typing since, because the story has possessed me."  Start snickering now...  Hey man: I'm a Fantasy writer, what the fuck do you expect?  Best of all, it worked... my answer got me an "Oooo," and what more can you ask for?

In a lot of ways, "What's your inspiration?" is an invasive question, and often the answer is very personal.  In hindsight, I probably could have been a lot more honest and said that mostly it was the stuff I read and watched that inspired me to craft my tale, and probably that would have been a perfectly acceptable answer.  I'll chalk this episode up to proto-authorly anxiety and just move on with life... better luck next time.

Anyhow, off for burgers and ice cream.  Cheers!

Elegy

Ray Bradbury died on June 6, 2012, and I have to admit that I found the news to be quite distressing.  My wife and I went to a place called, Tycoon Flats and I had a few drinks in honor of Mr. Bradbury.  Ray Bradbury is a great inspiration to my imagination and creativity, and though I only knew him through his work I feel like I lost one of my own kin -- my spiritual godfather.  Maurice Sendak died last month and that was a major bummer; but Bradbury... well, his work changed my life... and reading Fahrenheit 451 in high school is what made me want to become a writer and a librarian.  I used a page in my novel notebook the day he died to express some intimate thoughts about the passing of this titan among authors... I don't want to wax too poetic about feeling sorrow for a man I did not know personally, but his stories influenced me on various levels and through various mediums -- I recall watching Ray Bradbury Theater as a kid back in the 80s; reading The Martian Chronicles, and coming to realize the man's influence on damn near everything else I watched and read... on damn near everything I though was cool then... and now.

Ray Bradbury was 91 when he died, so he lived a full life and then some.  I'm tempted to take a break from the novel and write a short story in his honor (his short stories are among the very best I've ever read), but I think I'll honor him by finishing my novel.  Like I said: Bradbury became a spiritual godfather to my creativity, and I have often (way too often) neglected my side of that holistic relationship.  I've wound up dabbling in a variety of creative outlets, rather than commit to one -- mostly out of fear, mostly out of denial and unrealistic expectations I heaped on myself... largely out of fear that I could never match up to what I secretly desired.  Had I devoted myself to writing then, I'm pretty sure I'd be published by now... but I chickened out.  Bradbury was never a coward: he pushed the limits, he forged Fantasy into something marvelous (yes, I said "Fantasy"; he wasn't overly fond of the Science Fiction tag most commonly attached to his work).  I'm writing now because I dismissed (finally) those fears and expectations and just embraced writing because it's fun, because it's something that gives me joy.  Could I have done that without drawing inspiration from Ray Bradbury?  Possibly, but not likely...

So what does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China?  Hell-Kind will be dedicated to Ray Bradbury.  Thanks Ray.

BTW: I know it's not Friday; I'm a day late, but I had a previous engagement last night and had to work on what is my regularly scheduled day off.  We'll get back on schedule next Friday, and keep it that way unless something unforeseen comes up.

Cheers!