Addled Brain, Muttled Ideas

Sometimes I wish writing was just about the ideas.  Those nuggets that you get in your head and make you think, "Hey, that would be a cool story." I feel that happens for me a lot these day.  Like to the point that if I write at my current pace (which is about a novel a year) I'll have work until I'm 124 years old.

Getting to that point, my only goal for my next novel is that I write it faster.  That's it.  No fancy language or character goals.  Just faster.  Although, most publishers think you should write about a novel every two years, but some authors produce as much as two novels within a year.  Different series of course.  Much more than that, and they expect you to use a pen name.  You know, Isaac Asimov wrote or edited something like 500 hundred novels in his lifetime.  It's pretty crazy.

This was going somewhere...started as a rant but it got away from me.

Novel Finished, Still Work To Do

I've been delaying this post for several weeks now in case of fire or flood or aliens or zombies or...apocalypse stuff.  I finished my new novel, the one that I'm tentatively calling Lost Lamb.  Title still isn't finalized.  Anyway, I guess I was expecting more to happen when I finished it.  I mean, not like confetti and sexy parties or anything just, I don't know, a more powerful sense of accomplishment.  I was happy that it got done, it was a personal milestone, but I guess I already knew then that there was still a lot of work to do on it.

Now there's editing and rewriting, which is turning out to be really challenging because my style shifted a lot during the writing process.  Now I'm trying to go back through and make it all sound like me.  Whoever that is.  Maybe the really exciting part will come once I get an agent and then a publisher.  That just might make my ego inflate to the point that it explodes.  In the meantime, I'm still trying to write some shorter works when I can.  One such work, The Admin Level is one that I'm actually considering sending off to a big-boy magazine.  The kind that .10 cents a word.  Much nicer than it sounds.

So, after a long day of wrangling kids at work, here I go to more work.  Edit.  Edit.  Edit.

Fear, Loathing, Fiction.

With every new chapter I start, a creeping fear returns to me like a boomerang that I threw five years and forgot about until it knocked my head off this morning at breakfast.  Even though I've punched this creeping fear in the nose several times already, it still manages to return.  Always with that same question on its floppy, dumb lips: "Is this the chapter that won't get written?"

Even at this stage in my novel, it still manages to return,  That memory that I always seem to give up on writing.  Maybe it was too hard or I didn't know how to fix a problem or whatever.  It's really been a nonfunctional hobby for me until the last couple years.  Whether my work needed the right timing, or maybe its the alignment of the planets or my chi being in the right spot, I'm doing it now like I should have done it before.

But with each success comes another round of fear and apprehension.  Will it be worth it?  Hard to tell.  Even setting my expectations to their lowest possible setting, I still wonder if I should bother.  Just two chapters from the finish line and it seems like I just started.

I try my best to be ready for the next stages, rewriting and editing and all that, followed by the search for an agent and eventually a publisher.  It's a strange new sea of terror and rejection that I'll be taking my little manuscript into this year, and I don't yet feel ready to brave the waters.

[Insert Something Witty Here]

Lately I've noticed that I've been a little reluctant about writing.  Seems odd, given that I'm so close to the end.  Usually vaulting over that three-quarters hump gives me enough momentum to finish a piece, even a longer one.  Today, anything looks more appealing.  Washing dishes sounds like fun.  Scooping dog crap in the front yard?  Sure.  Finally opening the last of my moving boxes no longer sounds like purgatory.

I think it's because somewhere deep in the vault of my subconscious, I'm getting nervous about letting other people see it.  What will they think?  Publishers.  Agents.  Critics.  The more logical side of my brain tells me that rejection is part of this career path--just deal with it.  But the more emotional side wants me to lock the manuscript in my closet before it's too late.

Part of making something--anything really--are the rose-colored glasses we see it through after it's all done.  We see it as perfect.  Beautiful.  A triumph of its form, and we're immediately shocked when the next person says, "I didn't get the part where the goat ate the sandwich." And you try to explain that it's a delicate criticism of the modern legal system, but that theoretical reader never sees it the way you do.  They aren't wearing rose-colored glasses like you.

I have to remember that some people are going to hate it.  And it's going to hurt.  It's only human to fear pain, after all.  But also, some people are going to love it.  Maybe not as much as me, but they'll love it enough to read it.  And that's really what I want.

These Are Meaningless Words In The Subject Line

I've been having a hard time reigning in my nineteenth chapter.  My hero is finally dealing with the thread of conflict I wrote into the first chapter.  It's weird to think that I wrote those original words a full year ago.  It's exciting, but also scary.  Anyway, I discovered just now what the problem was.  I'd been trying not to admit that I was shoving two chapters together and that the information he gathers in chapter nineteen is really the climax.  I really wanted to have him kill some orcs in that chapter and I tried to squish together what should've been squished.

Of course, I'd been trying to rescue a particular scene that I'd dreamed up when I first put the idea together in my head.  I like the cliffhanger chapter endings and I thought this one was pretty good, but now, because of length, it has to happen in the middle of the next chapter.  Which is okay.  I guess.  *folding arms and pouting*

In her book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott references a writer's practice of "killing your babies" (or something like that, I can't look it up right now because I loaned out my copy of the book) It sounds gruesome, I know, and in a way it is pretty gruesome.  Your absolute favorite scenes, often the ones that convince you a novel is worth writing, are the scenes your try to cling to the most as you proceed to chop through your outline.  Much like a film director, you want to cut scenes that don't show the story as well as they could or maybe take your story in the wrong direction.  At some point you must slay this scene that you love without mercy.  If you restructure your book around it, it will inevitably harm your work as a whole.  It must die.  This doesn't make it any less painful, of course.

The point is this: for some crazy reason I thought I was immune to this.  I thought that I could keep this scene where I wanted it (as a cliffhanger) and people would read it and gasp.  Just not the case any more.  I had to let it go.  Today I cut off chapter nineteen where it needed to end and moved the other stuff to the next chapter where it will receive a stern talking to and I will expect it to think about what it's done.

Writers Don't Like Writing

It's true.  We really don't.  Writing is a pain in the ass.  A very complicated and multifaceted hobby if ever there ever was one.  Give yourself something to write--I dare you.  Say to yourself, "I'm going to write a story about a robot who slowly becomes human." Sounds like fun at first.

Then you sit down at your computer, typewriter or other word-making gizmo and punch out a few lines.  Great.  We got to the third sentence.  Suddenly you have an itch on your back and you can only scratch it by sitting up from your chair.  You do that.  You sit back down.  Then you remember that you have to unload the dishwasher.  You do that.  You sit back down.

Then it suddenly seems really important to clean the gutters.  Another few hours of that goes by.  Then you sit back down.  Tap your finger a few times on the G key.  You always liked G.  Some of your favorite word start with G.  Gorilla.  Grapefruit.  Gratify.  Guarantee.  Gastronomic.  What is a gastronome?  You look it up.  Huh.  Who knew?  You forget what it was you were doing with your word-making gizmo and wander off to explore your attic.  Then, neck deep in a pile of old scarfs your aunt Pauline gave you, you remember.  You run back down stairs and punch out a few more words on your next sentence before you fall asleep on the keys.  It's midnight after all.  The letter G is stuck to your face.

Free Writing: Ryan West Monologue

The following deserves an explanation, I suppose.  A few years back, I'd been experimenting with a few different ideas for an urban fantasy hero.  This is before I created Jaden and the book I'm writing about him now (that was a shameless plug for Lost Lamb--buy it, own it, collect them all, etc.)  But before Jaden, was a guy name Christian--a shaman/investigator who was working out of San Fransisco.  I ultimately chucked out Christian and his world but there were a few dangling threads that didn't get torn out all the way.  This character, is one of them.  The following is a short monologue from a hero who never was, a sort of spinoff from Christian's world, I guess you could say.  Now, with a dark magic I call boredom, he lives again.

The hardest thing about being dead isn't the dying part.  That part's easy.  I did it on accident when I stepped in front of the south bound L train on Thursday night at 8:14 with half a bottle of Jack Daniels in my bloodstream.  Didn't feel a thing and haven't ever since.  The hard part is coming back.  When some bald-headed circus freak covered in tattoos and rosary beads knelt over my body and whispered a blessing to tie my spirit to it, I had little choice but to come back.  I had just discovered the joy of flying across the Border of life and death when a set of ghostly chains snared me and dragged me back into my body.  After that, he took me to a basement and tattooed some Sanskrit on my forehead.  Then he just cut me loose.  No explanation or reason.

I miss food.  Especially pizza.  Goddamn I miss pizza.  Deep dish crust.  Five different kinds of cheese guaranteed to plug your arteries like plumbing snakes.  Layers of thick pepperoni and crumbled sausage.  Chicago's best.  Growing food, as my mom used to call it.  I don't do much growing now, and everything I put in my mouth tastes the same.  Like grave dirt.

There are some perks though.  I got stabbed through the heart by a longsword and didn't so much as sneeze at it.  I've been hit by a couple more cars too, it's a little like skydiving from a low altitude if do it on the freeway.  If I break a bone I can usually set it and it heals again.  Same isn't true for limbs, I found out.  I don't have a left pinky finger any more because I lost a bet.  Figured it was a safe one since I don't bleed.  My bad.  Now there's a hell hound running around in the fifth circle of hell with my finger in its stomach.  Imagine the egg on my face.  I do still have a face--gotta have something for the ladies to look at.

Mostly I pull odd jobs now, the dangerous stuff, since I still haven't figured out how to die.  People pay a lot of money for nigh invulnerability and I'm happy to oblige.  Usually.  Of course, I find that I don't need that much money these days--no shopping bills or rent to pay, since I don't sleep--but it's still fun to collect the stuff.  Way cooler than stamps.

My name's Ryan West--and I'm a zombie.  If you come to town and need a walking pile of bricks to do something for you, look me up.  I've got a lot of time to kill.