That steady march of time is both reassuring and frustrating, I'd say. Years do, indeed, end and sometimes it's a good riddance. The past two years--since March 2020--have been a pretty low-point for me. There are global reasons for that, which most everyone knows and understands, as well as personal reasons. (If you weren't aware of my wife's battle with cancer, you can read my thoughts on it here.) The ending of 2021 has not been any easier, as familial strife has riven the peace.
Not only that, but my personal goal of writing at least half a million words annually continued its meteoric descent into the ground. With my recent obsession of painting miniatures, making (and playing) board games, and occasionally reading something that I'm supposed to, I have purposefully pulled myself away from writing. For a while there, I would sit in the loft of my kids' parkour gym and write for an hour in one of my notebooks while they learned how to do cartwheels and freak out about doing backflips. Lately, however, the errands and responsibilities of being a chauffer dad eroded those chances. Then there's been sickness in the family that prevented us from going to practice, so that hour of writing time evaporated. Of course, I could have found more times to write. I just…didn't care. I don't know that I'll ever 100% stop writing, but I'm definitely burning out on the desire. It's hard to say this "aloud", since all I've ever wanted to do, for as long as I can remember, is to write books. Like years, dreams eventually end. We have to wake up and face the realities of the day. And so I guess I'm finally waking up to this reality: I don't have it in me to be a writer. My skin's too thin, resolve's too weak, my desire's too tepid…whatever it might be, I guess this is my way of tapping out. I'm hoping that by trying to convince myself that I no longer have a goal of being a writer, of somehow providing for my family's needs via the written word, I will be able to rekindle an interest in writing. This is something that I tried to teach my students when I was a creative writing teacher: You have to understand what your goal really is as a writer. Is it to write? Is it to world build? Is it to edit and tidy up and fix broken parts? Is it to invent something new? Is it to share stories with friends and families and maybe some randos on the internet? Is it to simply say, "I wrote a book"? Is it to get a book out somehow, regardless of how? Is it to have your book sitting on the shelf, surrounded by your alphabetical peers? There are lots of different ways of being a writer, and all of them are equally valid. For me, I wanted that last one: I wanted to be a traditionally published author. That was my goal, that was my plan. And, like it has done for so many millions of others--billions of others, perhaps--COVID has taken that from me. Not only are my chances of finding an agent and getting the book sold diminishing daily (not even counting the fact that I haven't sent out a query in over a year), but the market is getting more crowded while readers are thinner on the ground than ever before. (According to a 2019 finding, almost an entire quarter of the adult population of the United States doesn't even read one book annually.) And while there's plenty of nuance to sus out about that issue, the main point is that the competition for books is harsher than it's ever been. And of all the words I can use to describe myself, "competitive" isn't one of them. I'm not interested in besting others. So there isn't a really strong drive to try to get myself into a position where I could achieve what I'm after. It's been really rough on me as I've been fiddling with this problem. I tried NaNoWriMo this past year and gave up halfway through the month. The vivid colors of writing have faded, as it were, and I couldn't find the emotional and mental energy I needed to put my butt in the chair and fingers on the keyboard for it anymore. Part of that was my own lack of passion. The last time I was really excited by one of my own stories was 2018. That's almost four years in the past now; that's a long time to not be truly motivated by a desire to tell stories. You can't draw from a well that's dry, after all. I've stumbled along for the past few years, hoping that it was just a rough patch or a phase or some other issue. Then COVID hit and my life crumbled at the edges; then the breast cancer arrived and fractured my life at the core. Raising a teenager, trying to convince myself that I still love teaching, battling my own depression, watching my wife struggle in ways that I can't help with…it all took its toll on my creative acuity and the once-sharp blade of storytelling desire dulled. I don't know what could possibly whet it, either. I feel a touch of remorse at this, as if I'm letting someone down by saying, "I'm done." Does it undo all of what I've taught students over the years? Am I now a hypocrite for thinking that I don't want to keep pushing? That I'm tired? I don't know the answers to those questions; as Pi says in Life of Pi, "Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?" I can't answer so many of the questions that I've asked myself that it's more than a little maddening. Since COVID struck, I've had to turn to all of my coping mechanisms so often that they've become my living mechanisms. I don't have a way to find balance since everything I'm doing seems to be utilizing every trick I use just to keep moving forward. As a result, the loss of my writing muse rankles even more. I didn't realize that I could only write if things were stable. I thought that it was a deeper part of myself, rather than a fair-weather friend. Yet here we are. I've unofficially left my writing group--a group that stuck together, in one form or another, for over a decade. Another casualty to the coronavirus. I see their posts on Facebook and I can't do more than read what they're talking about. I don't chime in, I don't assert myself. I don't know what to do about any of it. I don't know how to navigate the difficult world that we now live in, one with political fault-lines embedded in the precautions we take, the decisions we make. Do I say to my group, "Hey, I'd love to get together again, but only if y'all are vaccinated!" If I do, whom does that alienate? Why do I even have to wonder about that? These sorts of tumults are another symptom of my writing sickness: I can't get out of my head long enough to become immersed elsewhere. Too much of my brain is clamoring with chaos and there's just no room for that creative space. That isn't to say that I'm not being creative. Most of my word output this month has been as I've written up the rules for a board game. I'm over 10,000 words into the rulebook (which, for obvious reasons, is not what the final draft of the rules would look like) and still enjoying that process. I paint, drum, guitar, and play games. I still do things that I appreciate and scratch a particular itch. It's just…I don't know if I'm ever going to do that with my words again. I began creating my own tabletop role playing game (TTRPG) back in January. After about five months, I've written well over 35,000 words among the sundry components of the game: A loose outline of the rules for the game, a module that acts as a training manual for how the game begins, and a growing body of lore that fleshes out the world and tries to make a more interconnected, cohesive-feeling experience. I also have started a novel (I guess…I don't know how long it might be) that adds another 10,000 words or so. With all of these and the occasional notes and outlines and miscellanea, I have almost 50,000 words invested in this world.
I keep coming back to the question: Why, though? I mean, there's always the "safe" answer of "I have an idea and a need to create so I should follow that impulse." And that's true, as far as it goes. After all, I've dumped over one and a half million words into my different novels over the past seventeen or so years (not counting all my before-marriage writing). So I've clearly put a lot of effort into generating new worlds, new stories, new characters, new ideas. This, however, is different. It's not just because it's a game. I've designed games before (though it's not quite what I wanted, I do like the Quidditch-inspired board game I made a year ago), and I've done pure world-building exercises on occasion, too. Really, what I think is perhaps the biggest thing that's fueling this question is one that Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence". He uses his prodigious reading career to try to trace the ways in which certain authors are so heavily influenced by a certain source that it affects how they end up writing. In some cases, there's almost an exorcism of the influence that he can see in some of the works--Shakespeare's exorcism of Spencer and Marlow are, I believe, a couple of his posits (though I haven't read his book on it yet, so I can't say for certain). I bring this up for two reasons: One, because I believe that, were Bloom alive and knew about my using his theory for discussing board- and video games, he would likely be rather put off; and two, because I think it's a salient point. Perhaps his readings aren't entirely accurate, but the theory of an anxious influence on an artist is something that I certainly feel myself. It isn't just about writing in the shadow of Shakespeare (as Mark Edmund--another fantastic writer--asks, why write when Shakespeare already has?), as everyone is writing in his shadow, whether they know it or not. That doesn't bother me so much. It's about knowing what to do about the things that I get involved in. See, this game world, Drimdale, is not simply a TTRPG: It's a response to the fact that I wanted to try playing a hunter from Bloodborne in D&D and was tired of trying to figure out how to tweak the rules enough to make the hunter work inside of that game system. Now, I'm a big fan of D&D, even if I'm not the most knowledgeable about it, and so the idea of having a Bloodborne hunter as a character was really exciting. Despite the versatility and flexibility of D&D, however, I just wasn't getting out of these homebrew solutions what I wanted from a Bloodborne-inspired character. So I just…made up my own version. It isn't particularly good--I think it has potential, but I don't have a lot of playtesting opportunities to refine the ideas--though it certainly has a lot of the Bloodborne vibe. However, after a few pages of work, I realized that I was really making my own thing, my own version of a grimdark, Gothic world filled with monsters and violence. I switched it up, tweaking the terms that are from the video game and generating my world moving forward. I've written tens of thousands of words of lore for Drimdale, and every time I sit down to work on it, I have to ask myself if it's worth it. The influence is so large, the changes feel almost more like an insult than anything else. Why should I bother pursuing something that is so derivative? I recognize that there are no original ideas--everything is based off of something else. Heck, even Bloodborne is indebted to Lovecraft and gothic England for much of its verve, art-style, and concepts. And I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I'm not trying to flatter Hidetaka Miyazaki, though. But I can't really say what it is that I'm trying to do. A couple of years ago, I did an etude of the beginning of Stephen King's It. I practiced it (It) to try to figure out what King does and why it works out so well. I also attempted this etude in order to exorcize the Losers' Club and Pennywise from my mind. To a certain degree, it worked: I didn't feel the need to reread It during the summer of 2020--which was the first time since 2017 that I skipped the book. (That I watched the movies as a stopgap is a fact we shall pass in silence.) To another degree, however, it didn't work at all. I wrote a novella, Mon Ster, in a very Kingesque way. My Pen+ notebook, handwritten novel--a tortured little piece called The Strange Tale of Charles Green--is another attempt at capturing what fascinates me about Derry and its monstrous past. I'm still haunted by King's work; his influence gives me, as it were, anxiety. There's nothing wrong with me continuing to work on Drimdale, of course. There's nothing wrong with my fanfic-as-a-game, of taking another's idea and twisting it into my own version. I know that. What I still struggle with is how much time I'm investing into this project. I'm not a published author, but when I write one of my own stories, there's at least a possibility that I might be able to turn that into something potent enough to sell. The odds are long, but they're there. When it comes to Drimdale and this goofy little TTRPG, this constantly-expanding document of lore, I have to wonder why I always want to write more. I don't know how to find the answer to that. It's time for another bit of writing about my bits of writing.
I've talked a lot about my penchant for recording how many words I write per day/month/year. It's a way for me to see if I'm really doing anything in my chosen craft, and it has been really helpful in showing me where I focus. In fact, one of the reasons that I have fewer posts on this website is because I saw that I was spending a huge amount of my writing time focusing on my non-fiction and I wanted to change that. Today, I started looking at my word count for the year. It isn't where I want it to be: At the end of April, I had written about 150,000 words. These were split between my book about Metal Gear Solid, worldbuilding the place where my TTRPG is set, rules for my TTRPG, and picking at a bizarre retelling/remake of the Little Red Riding Hood story. There are other, miscellaneous additions, but that makes up the bulk of it. The thing that stood out to me, though, was how April 2021 compares to other Aprils. In other words, where do I stand as far as my word count after four months during the past four years? It breaks down like this:
Clearly, I'm doing about as well as I was at the same point during our first month of quarantine. Considering how much has happened to me and my family in the past half year, I think it makes sense that I'm still writing as if the world is on fire. Because it is. So, I'm not publicly flogging myself for having not written more in 2020. I was spending my school days in front of the computer, draining myself into cyberspace. Writing did not come easily then. By the time I became accustomed to the oddness of my school year, my wife was diagnosed with cancer. I even tried to do NaNoWriMo…then I contracted COVID. (I also got three or four rejections on my submissions for War Golem, if we're really adding to the pile, here.) In other words, I wasn't in a particularly creative headspace for a good portion of last year. And it doesn't really surprise me to see that 2021 is following suit. No, what really surprised me the most was the next bit of information that I gleaned. On my spreadsheet, I have a tally of all of my completed novella-length or longer projects. Because I've been doing NaNoWriMo since 2015, I've been finishing a couple of books a year pretty consistently. I mean, I even finished two novellas in 2020, despite everything else that was going on. But when I looked back at 2019--which was not my most productive year--I was surprised to see that it was 2019 where I finished the highest number of projects. How many? Seven. Seven books, totaling almost 300,000 words. Three were part of my novella-world project. Another was finishing up a NaNoWriMo from 2018 that I hadn't completed during the month. The next was a short story that morphed into a novella, one that I had been working on occasionally for a year or so. Novellas aside, I had two novels that I finished, both of them Shakespeare-adjacent: One was my Da Vinci Code but with Shakespeare book, Raleigh House. The other was my NaNoWriMo for 2019, Elsinore Ranch, which is a retelling of Hamlet. It makes me wonder what I did in 2019 that I've clearly forgotten how to do in the two years since. I know that a big portion of it is that my video game obsessions aren't easing up. For some reason, indulging my addictions doesn't satiate them. And I know that my life will not be "normal" again anytime soon--perhaps ever. It's hard to say. Will I ever get back to that level of prolificacy? Will I ever be so excited about my stories that I'd rather write them more than anything else? I mean, it isn't that I wasn't writing at all. It was just that nothing really sang to me. And I know that writers have to write, regardless of if their muse is crooning inspiration to them or not. But I'm not a professional writer. I don't know if I ever will be. I don't have a contract or a deadline to meet. I don't have to hit a quota. Yet I'm not happy that my numbers are trending downwards. I want to improve my output, my editing, my craft. I don't want 2019 to be my bumper crop for finished projects. So I guess I gotta figure out how to get what I'm after, huh? Well, it was nice while it lasted.
I had a goal of writing every day of 2021--an impossible goal, I knew, but one that did a fair bit of motivating for me even during the first hellish weeks of this new year. The thinking behind the goal was to relieve some of my self-imposed pressure to write a certain amount every day/week/month or whatever (though I've still a goal of drafting 30,000 words minimum each month, if possible). I figured that by simply expecting that I write something not work related, I would be able to keep moving along as a writer, slowly accreting the skills that I need to somehow sell my work. I was generous with my expectations: A couple of hundred words in my reading journal would suffice. Not a particularly lofty goal, to be honest. And it isn't as though I had to strain to do that for most of January. I began writing my own TTRPG during the end of my D&D Winterim, and (as often happens with me) I got caught in a flurry of creativity. I spent hours formulating rules, generating a character sheet, and even drafting an introductory module that acts as the prologue to the type of story I'd want this game to tell. That led to almost 20,000 words of work so far, all done in the space of a three weeks, give or take. What's more, I took a Friday off and headed to the great untamed wilderness known as downtown Provo to have some writing time at an Air BnB. I spent the weekend getting food delivered to my door (we are still in a pandemic, after all) and writing what struck my fancy. I generated a total of just over 20,000 words on those three days. Most of them are in my mashup of Red Riding Hood and Bloodborne, but a handful of them landed in the lore section of my TTRPG, too. It was a very pleasant experience, one that was designed to help my mental health as much as my word count. After all, Gayle is not even halfway through her chemotherapy and each time she has to go in it's a fresh ordeal for me. Despite the familiarity with the process of what's going on, the toll it takes on me is greater with each visit. So the trip last weekend did help recharge me a bit, if only because it allowed me to focus on writing without having other worries encroaching. (Gayle stayed with her mother for some of the time, so I could rest easy, knowing that she was being looked after. She was also feeling a lot better by then, so she even came and spent the night with me on Friday.) Despite all of that, this past week was grueling in all of the nondescript, unimportant ways that life weathers us. I can't point to any specific issue--there isn't, like, a phone call from an upset parent or a distressing bill come in the mail--that really made the week a misery. Certainly part of it comes from my dysthymia kicking in. I'm pretty good about keeping my Patronus pills filled and using the medication daily. It helps most of the time. However, "most of the time" is not "all of the time" and this past week has been pretty bad, emotionally speaking, for me. And that brings us up to my failed goal. I wanted to jot a couple of thoughts about The Hobbit into my reading journal to get my day's writing goal accomplished, but I hit a (potentially very expensive) snag: I couldn't find my Moleskine Pen+. This is the pen that I use with my special Moleskine notebooks that transcribes what I write and puts it into a TXT file so that I can digitally archive (and search through) the things that I write. It's one of those unnecessary-but-still-fun-and-cool bits of tech that tends to catch my attention. I had sent off my first Pen+ to get it repaired, which meant that I was without it for a couple of months. A new one arrived just before Christmas, allowing me to again write the way I wanted to. And when I went looking for it in my computer bag, it was nowhere to be found. This has not helped at all. Because of my mental illness, I have a tendency to fixate on things that go wrong in my life. They all add to a greater narrative of my own inadequacies, my failings for making the false assumption that things go right, and a type of "Well, of course that happened" feeling. This isn't healthy, I know, and I try to not let these sorts of things get me down. But, at the same time…they definitely get me down. Since what I wanted to write last night couldn't happen (how can I write in my special notebook without my special pen?), I simply let my goal go. I didn't write anything, not even a paragraph or two of lore for my TTRPG--perhaps the easiest thing that I could jot down. I blame my depression for that. This ennui continues to linger, though, and I keep cycling over my frustration at not doing what I should have done with my pen. It was an expensive purchase, and I really don't want to spend any money on another one. (Besides, if I do, that'll mean the original shows up, right? Isn't that what always happens?) Yet I'm deeply frustrated that I lost it. I have a system for keeping track of how I use the pen, but I have been lax in doing so with it lately. Now I reap the rewards. This sort of woe-is-me obviously isn't healthy, and it probably comes off as annoying. If you feel that way…um…why are you still reading? That seems strange that you're in control of that and yet you're still here. More than that, though, is a recognition that such trivial things can affect me. What I really think is going on is that there are so many things far beyond my control: The pandemic, chemotherapy, the endless stress of teaching and forcing myself to care when I least want to. The list goes on. Losing a pen is not particularly high on the list, but it was one of the things that I could have controlled. I didn't, and now I'm living with that regret. It's a spiral of frustration. Yes, it's only a pen. However, it's symbolic of a lot more to me than just a writing utensil. Hence why losing it meant--symbolically--that I had lost my ability/desire to write yesterday. And that's how a goal gets undone: Depression + life stress + something insignificant = failure. There's no right way to write.
Or rather, provided one is writing, that is the correct way, inasmuch as there can be a correct way. Hmm. If one must write, that is how one writes. Okay, look, pithy aphorisms aren't as easy to craft as Shakespeare makes it seem, so we'll settle with the more prosaic observation that, as long as words get written down, that's how the writing works. Yeah? Yeah. With 2021 fully upon us, trailing the stench clouds of 2020 behind it, I figured I should do my annual "plan for writing during the upcoming year" essay as a chance to lay out some of my hopes as far as my writing goes. I don't remember (nor do I want to look up) my previous year's goals. They most likely didn't happen, since I only managed to finish a novella or two and that was all, to say nothing of the tens of thousand fewer words I failed to write over the course of a twelvemonth. I still keep borderline-obsessive track of the words I jot down in all but my school capacity (like, I don't word count assignments or emails or whatnot), with a spreadsheet that gets more and more complicated with each successive year, so I have a fairly accurate view of how well I'm doing on the word-count front. Good ol' 2020 saw me crank out 482,881 words (as opposed to 2019's 528,743) a difference of over 45,000 words. That's almost an entire NaNoWriMo project's worth of writing. Since I completely failed at NaNoWriMo 2020, that makes sense. So I'm not saying that I did a bad job of writing in a general sense. I know that a lot of writers would love to produce that much content in a year. And while that's not all fiction writing, a fair chunk of it is. And while I lament that I didn't spend more time honing my craft, I can be somewhat proud of having managed to generate close to half a million words in the midst of a global pandemic, massive civil unrest, and frequent personal trials. What I want to do with 2021--as far as writing goes, of course--is to continue on the strengths of the last year. To that end, I decided to modify my goals. While I usually want to put in a certain amount of time into fiction--increasing the short stories that I sometimes create, or getting another bit of worldbuilding into my notes--I also derive pleasure from the act of writing itself. I love to type. I love to write by hand in my far-too-expensive-but-what-are-you-gonna-do notebooks. I love to brainstorm in my beaten-up-because-they-cost-a-quarter-jeez-Moleskine-could-you-maybe-drop-the-price-a-bit-you're-killing-me notebooks. It's great to have a diversity of ways that I go through the physical actions of writing. And, because 2020 taught me better than Steinbeck's title or Robert Burns' poem ever could, "the best laid schemes o' Mice and Men / Gang aft agley", I selected a daily requirement to write. No minimum requirement. No genre expectation. No expectation save that I grace the page with a squiggle or two. On one level, this feels like a capitulation, a throwing up of my hands in the face of the crushing reality of what I have to deal with and submitting to the unbending tide of responsibilities. On another level, though, it has--thus far, at least--been a gentle enough goal to maintain the pleasure of completing it and a steady enough pressure to ensure its continuation. Thus far, I have written every day. Some of it has been therapeutic and emotionally driven, such as the stuff that I write when discussing my wife's battle with breast cancer. Sometimes it's creating a new TTRPG (I'll essay on that another day). Often it's jotting down a page in my reading journal. (This one is particularly useful, as it means that I need to keep reading so that I have something to write about--double trouble!) Because of all the stress that's been my life recently, I've arranged for a couple days off to do a private writing retreat at an AirBnB. It's a difficult decision--COVID is still real and I live in a high risk area. I did go through a bout with the sickness, as well as getting the first round of the Moderna vaccine, so I feel a bit more comfortable making the trip. I also really need some writing time, not because I have a lot of writing that I feel pressing to get out of me (that sort of thing, the fire of a story that will only be quenched by writing it, hasn't happened to me in many a-year), but because I am pretty close to a breaking point, mentally speaking. Almost all of my wells for well-being have been dipping dry and the strain of knowing that it will continue until long past the seasons' change isn't helping in the least. Since Gayle is on her "good week" with her treatment, she and I both feel confident that she'll be all right without me around for a couple of days. (I'm not far away, in case of emergency, plus her mom is willing to be on-call, as it were.) I'm hoping that this will do a little bit of recharging my spirits and that I'll have a bit more fortitude in confronting the rest of what's troubling me. And if it doesn't? Well, you'll know. I'll probably write an essay about it. You know what I haven't had in a long while? A self-indulgent post wherein I ruminate about how many words I write!
So that's what this is. I have, since 2017, kept a quasi-obsessive (read: completely-obsessive) record of how much I write. I know I've mentioned this before, but I read a couple of books about speeding up the amount of writing I can get done in a single sitting--an important thing to me, as I don't always find myself able to write regularly, so every minute counts. These books (the titles of which elude me right now; I've written about them before, so you can dig through the backlog if it really matters to you) had lots of different ideas that they endorsed, one of which was tracking the numbers. Starting in June 2015, during my first (?) writing retreat, I did exactly that, tracking the amount of words I wrote in each "session". Because of how I think about my stories, I tend to write entire chapters as full, cohesive scenes. I pick one narrator/point of view character and I push through the entire chapter consecutively. I don't much care for page breaks (though I will use them every once in a while) and I don't like head-hopping from one character to another. So for me, a chapter is the same as a scene. I documented when I started the chapter, when I ended it, and how many words I put down in that timeframe. When I'm really clear on what I want to have happen, I can drop an average of about 1,500 to 1,600 words within an hour, sometimes even more. (Personal best: in one hour and fifteen minutes I wrote 3,079 words back in June 2019.) Even these essays, which I aim to hit around 1,000 words or so, often take me about half an hour--sometimes a bit more, depending on how much research I'm doing for the piece--up to perhaps forty-five minutes. My chapters range (as they should) from brief (maybe 600-800 words) to chunky (over 3,000 words), though I've rather given up on the marathon-length chapters as not really being for me. Having documented how I was writing during the writing retreats of 2015 and 2016, I decided to start keeping track back in October 2017 of how I was doing in my day-to-day writings. Back then, I had started writing an essay every day as part of a goal to improve my non-fiction writing. I tracked how I did each month, with a predictable spike in November as I was participating in NaNoWriMo that year. December was lower (pretty normal, too). It established a pattern that I've continued ever since. One of the things this data can provide for me is a look at how much I'm writing. Here's a list of each year's cumulative output:
This shows me a lot, actually. In 2018, I wrote an essay almost every single day (I took a month off in June, I think). In 2019, I spent less time writing non-fiction and also expanded my word count from not only newly written words, but also how much I had done in terms of editing my older work. In 2020, though the year isn't out yet, I will be lucky if I hit 460,000 words. There are a lot of factors that combine in that massive decrease between '19 and '20. The largest, of course, would have to be COVID-19 sweeping the world. My own drive toward writing, my own inspiration for tapping away endlessly at the keyboard was short-circuited. As 2020 was a cavalcade of worldwide disasters and personal implosions (starting with the death of my grandmother in late January and ending now with me having contracted--and survived--COVID along with my wife's battle with breast cancer), I view the maybe-460,000 words I've written as quite the accomplishment, thank you very much. Still, I can't help but feel a little disappointed in myself. Not much--I realize that the context of one's life can have a huge impact on the content of one's fiction--but still some. The fact of the matter is, despite all of my efforts, sacrifices (of both me and my family), and personal goals, I still didn't finish NaNoWriMo this year. I didn't even get 20,000 words before 30 November. And, despite having written a cumulative 1.6 million words over the past three years, I don't really feel like I've accomplished much in writing. The reason? Well, I've always fancied myself as a fiction writer, not an essayist. The vast majority of those words are rough-draft, slap-em-on-the-page-and-post-em essays that, like this one, I forged in a handful of minutes and then sent off to my website. Fiction-wise (not counting edits), I have written probably about 800,000 words in the same amount of time. So, roughly fifty percent of my completed writing is in fiction versus non-fiction. That word completed is, of course, carrying a lot of weight. I have approximately twenty-four different novels that I've worked on, plus a couple of comics that I've picked at. Not all of those novels has been completed, and some of them are actually novellas instead, as they're shorter stories. Even as I write this, though, I remember that I have written quite a few short stories--part of my ArtStories project--wherein I've put together (so far) eight entries. Combined, those probably give me an additional 20,000 words over the past year or so. I also have written, by hand, another 20,000 words (I think?) in a novel called The Strange Tale of Charles Green, which wouldn't show up in the previous calculation. Despite all of that, it seems strange that I consider myself a fiction writer when barely half of my output is in fiction. And, honestly, I feel like I end up at the keyboard to type up these essays more often than otherwise. I mean, I'm planning on finishing Love's Labour's Lost today, which means that I'll have another Shakespeare essay coming soon. But I have basically no plans for when I'll return to my NaNoWriMo project or any of the incomplete short stories. The next of my novellas-leading-into-a-novel is still at the "oh, yeah! I have to write that sometime" stage. All in all, I think the big takeaway is that my output--as far as quantity is concerned--has been on a steady decline since 2018. I'm not quite sure what I can/should/need to do to return to my 2018 numbers. Obviously, I need to spend more time at the keyboard, but aside from that, it's unclear. I mean, I know that one reason--slightly subliminal, I'd daresay--is that I have lost a lot of confidence in my writing now that I have been rebuffed on over a dozen submissions. I'm still trying to attract an agent with War Golem, despite it being years old now. My current stuff doesn't seem as interesting as that story, which can knock the wind out of one's sails. I don't know. I was hoping that by indulging in this sort of self-reflection I could see something more clearly, but I don't think it has. Ah, well. Maybe another essay another day will help clear things up. I've gotten quite prolific at those… I have long struggled with my addiction to Twitter. I gave it up for Lent, then was right back on the thing as soon as it was "allowed" again. I spend approximately two minutes (not exaggerating) a day on Facebook and multiple hours--spread throughout the day--on the bird-platform. I've talked about it before, so I don't need to rehash old statements. The long and the short of it (#shakespeareiseverywhere) is that I prefer that social media to the Book of Faces.
One of the reasons that I like Twitter so much is that it gives me a chance to read from a lot of unexpected sources and get insights into what a lot of people are talking about. I've purged my follow list a couple of times, trying each time to focus more on what I really want out of the platform: Information regarding agents, writers, and goings-on in the world of my interests (teaching and publication and comic books and video games and Shakespeare and…and…). I do a poor- to fair job parsing down the accounts, then tend to accumulate more and more until I need to winnow again. It seems that time is upon me again. What's happening is kind of inside baseball (to use a phrase I know exists but doesn't make any sense to me), but the basic thrust is this: Comic book and book publishing are getting their turns in the sunlight, and it isn't a pretty sight. I don't buy a lot of comics these days--I don't buy a lot of anything, thanks to Ms. Rona--so I don't know exactly who's doing what and how they're abusing their power. However, this site helps put a finger on the reckoning that's going on. It isn't just comic books, either: The reason that I even found the aforelinked website is because a writer named Myke Cole and his friend (and fellow writer) Sam Sykes both are dealing with allegations of misconduct and abuse. I say allegations, but Myke Cole, during the heat of the #MeToo movement, wrote about it in February 2018--and it seems like he hadn't changed his attitudes or behaviors. I don't know the details of the newest stuff, but both he and Sam Sykes have been called out as perpetrators of sexual harassment. I own one book each from the two men, though I've never read them. (I'm a fan of ebooks in principle, though I tend to prefer non-fiction on my ereader, and since both of the purchases were electronic, well…) Their main interest to me was watching them banter across the internet in some decidedly hilarious interactions. Cole had a lot of worthwhile things to say about the recent protests, about how white supremacy usurps and twists historical concepts to serve their purposes, and the need for police defunding and abolition. Sykes had a number of insightful threads about the creative and writing process, and he was a great amplifier for artists whose work he liked. As far as I knew, they were just normal creatives on Twitter with books for sale. I guess I was right: They were "normal". And that's the problem. It's not hard (like, really not hard at all) to recognize that all people deserve to be treated as human, that their consent and preferences be taken into account when interacting with them, and that they should never be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Women in particular (and by that, of course, I include transwomen--because they're women, obvs--and non-binary people who rely on female designations for whatever reason) are human beings with equal rights, boundaries, and personal agency. Yet women in particular end up becoming targets of sexual harassment (and worse) far too often. Men, too, are put into compromised positions by others in power. It is an abhorrent reality that too many people face. The #MeToo movement helped show us how pervasive sexual misconduct (to put a too-polite word on the behavior) is within American society. Misogyny in any form ought to be anathema to, well, everyone. It has no place in our world. …except that it's here. It doesn't deserve to be here. It's like the divine right of kings: At best a relic of an antiquated age that needs no renaissance, at worst a tool that some may seek to remain in power for whatever personal gain they hope to achieve. (And lest you think that there aren't a lot of people who wish for a king in America, you perhaps haven't been paying attention to the loudest and most ardent followers of President Trump.) Misogyny (and its less-frequently seen sibling, misandry) shouldn't be in the world, yet it is. And we have to do something about it. No cancer is cured without intervention; no malady of humankind will go away without confrontation. There are lots of complexities in this issue, but the part that is most salient, I think, is a recognition of power. As cis-het White males who've been published, both Cole and Sykes are in positions that create a power imbalance. Power imbalances are inherent in our system--parent/child, teacher/student, politician/voter (in theory), employer/employee--and the differences in power positions is the area in which abuses are most likely to occur. The idea that an abuser can do heinous things and get away with it is one of the ways that these power imbalances become more and more entrenched. In the case of two published and visible (comparatively) writers, there's an additional power dynamic that a non-writer may not immediately see: Envy. I can't speak for other creative enterprises (though I imagine it's pretty similar), but in the writing community, aspiring writers are the most vocal and eager component of a fanbase. Book signings are often scenes of long lines of would-be writers hoping to get a bit of the signee's luck to rub off on them. The reason is pretty simple: It is extremely hard to break into writing. It's even harder to make a career out of it. And it's next to impossible to gain a wide readership. The competition is omnipresent and fierce. Going to a writer's conference is going into a place where the air has been replaced with desperation. Aspirants are desperate to learn something that will get them on the other side of the panel--to have "made it" and to be the one dispensing advice rather than writing it down. Published authors are desperate to keep their success going--to shill their books to the attendees and hope that the can earn out sometime in the near future. Editors are desperate to find someone whose work will provide a stable residual income for them; agents are desperate to strike a partnership with someone whose writing they love. Despite the fact that everyone is desperate, there are different degrees here. Power is strongest in the editors. They tend to be the ones acquiring the new talent, going to bat for the new books and new authors. This means that the editors have additional leverage over people who are desperate, and that increased power can far too often translate into heinous abuses. (A non-writing example would have to be Harvey Weinstein, who doesn't need any more thought spared to him.) Though neither Cole nor Sykes is an editor, they're both guys who "made it". They're one step closer to the dream. That means that people who might not normally accept an off-color or sexually suggestive remark will give a partial laugh and half-smile when it comes from an author that they like, or an agent they're thinking of querying. Richard Paul Evens learned the hard way that giving an unsolicited hug to fans can cross a line he didn't realize was there--and he did it, as the article says, probably "thousands of times". Were there thousands of victims? No. But there were some, and they were victimized because of the power imbalance. (Another example of this, though its effects are more diffuse: J.K. Rowling, despite having a lot of progressive concepts and values in her books, is a TERF, and she's recently come under fire for comments that dismiss transwomen. In this case, her power is less personal--she has an immense influence in the writing world, despite the fact that she isn't writing nearly as much as she has in the past--and it has turned into a flashpoint for a number of fans. So while you couldn't say that a specific person is harmed by Rowling's statements in the same way that the victims of Cole's or Sykes' behavior have been, there's still a kind of abuse that's happening here.) The results of these allegations have come rapidly. Cole has removed himself from Twitter for the foreseeable future; Sykes is insisting that victims continue to speak out. Everyone responds to this situation in slightly different ways. In my case, I remain in an uncomfortable crux that I've been in for many years now: What to do with the fact that human beings are behind so many of the things that I love. This isn't to dismiss the negative things that come from the embedded misogyny and racism that has built the world I live in. Being human means making mistakes, of course, but that doesn't mean that success should be deprived you because of those mistakes--but neither does it mean that second (or third or tenth) chances should be afforded, either. In some cases, it's a matter of reception. Milton and Shakespeare are near and dear to my heart and they're also emblematic of the Dead White Male that dominates the English departments. Eve in Paradise Lost moves between shockingly original and disappointingly dismissed. Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is a portrait of Stockholm Syndrome and one of the great tragedies in the canon, despite being a comedy. How can I maintain my feminist credentials, as it were, when embracing these two anti-women writers? Neither Milton nor Shakespeare can be "cancelled"--their presence in the world of letters is settled, at least during my lifetime. Their works are crucial to our modern identities, regardless of whether or not we recognize it. And I can't very well stop buying Milton or Shakespeare--they aren't getting royalties, and voting with my wallet will do nothing to their reputation. If economics is the barometer, the Bard and the prophet-bard are safe from reprisal. But what about Rowling, Cole, Sykes, or any other number of "problematic" authors who've done/said something that shows a sinister side to them that I can't agree with? My dollars will support Orson Scott Card if I buy his book, which means that I continue to empower a known- and proud homophobe. Is buying another round of butterbeer at Universal Studios only prolonging how long Rowling will be visible, pertinent, and capable of spreading her misconceptions about women? Now that I've purchased their books, is my continued non-reading of Cole and Sykes a way of boycotting them? And how is that different than the fact that I haven't gotten around to reading their books in the first place? These kinds of questions have been on my mind, as I said before, for years. And while I may have given examples that don't resonate with you. Maybe there are other views that these people espouse that you fundamentally disagree with--like Cole's calls to abolish the police. So you're okay with seeing his career end (will it, though?) or go on an unexpected and prolonged hiatus. You now will no longer buy books from a guy you weren't planning on buying from anyway. Have you done something to him? A creative's life is one of perpetual rejection (most of it's hidden, as authors don't stalk bookstores and feel personally offended when every patron who walked past her book on the aisle leaves without even picking up the book), so are you doing anything by boycotting his books? People talk about voting with their wallets all of the time--I used the phrase myself in the course of this essay--but I don't think it's quite as clear cut as we'd like to assume. After all, you may be able to buy a book from Rowling or Card or Sykes or Cole, but you could just as easily buy a book from Okorafor or Kuang or Chu or Kowal. All of these authors write in the same science fiction/fantasy genre, so why not pick one of these "less problematic" writers? Except you can't go to Hogwarts with Kuang and Okorfor's version of Ender is a Black girl named Binti, and does Kowal have as much fantasy violence in her books? In other words, you normally can't read one person's book and get the same story from a different author. So if Hogwarts means something important to me, something crucial, then I can't just go anywhere else. See? It's complicated… Or maybe it isn't. What's the difference between writers anyway? If you don't like one person's story, buy someone else's. Write your own books (which only makes sense to anyone who's never tried to write a book before). Don't do research into the humans who make your art. Don't expect them to abide by your own morals. Only buy from those who share your morals. Only retread what you've seen before, keeping your diet safe and vanilla, hypoallergenic and without surprises. Refrain from interpreting, interpolating, or interrogating the books you read--it's just fiction, it's just a story. No need to put anything else into it. I don't know how to square this circle. I bring it up from time to time in an attempt to get my feelings figured out, but it always slips free. I don't want to support people who've done harmful things. I don't want to give a pass to creators whose content I like simply because I like what they've made. I also have to acknowledge that someone has a problem with everything that I like for a whole host of reasons, so I have to understand what my own lines in the sand are…and what that says about me. Lastly, what this whole sordid tale exposes to me is the reality that I, too, have made mistakes. Never have I knowingly acted in a way that was intended to be inappropriate or harassing, sexually or otherwise. But that doesn't mean that I haven't been the reason someone felt unsafe or that I had ulterior motives in what I said or did. I know that there have been times--I can think of a couple--where brave women told me that what I was doing was making them uncomfortable. I immediately apologized and changed my behavior and that was the end of it. How many times have I inadvertently "shot mine arrow o'er the house, / And hurt my brother" (Hamlet 5.2) or sister? Lots of questions, I fear. And, as it happens so often for me, precious few answers. A year ago (exactly), I started the actual writing of a project that I've called Shadowed World (and I don't like the title at all; it's only a placeholder until something else occurs to me). I know I've mentioned it before, but as a refresher (saved you a click), here's the concept: Write five novella-length stories that introduce a particular world and the big problem facing the characters. Each novella would be twelve chapters long with an epilogue, and each novella could--theoretically--be read in any order. Part of this came because I had this random idea about giving readers control of how they read a book. My original concept was that an ebook format of the book could have the first five novellas randomized, thus giving a slightly different reading experience for the readers. Then a short novel--between fifty- and sixty thousand words long--would finish off the story. And, since I was imagining things and who's to put a stop on imagination, I though it would be cool if there were different print editions, again with the randomized order.
The whole idea was pulled off of the emotional fulfillment I got when watching Avengers: Endgame and so many pieces from the previous films came back. (I got this, to a lesser extent, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when things like the deluminator returns.) I mean, it's tearjerking when Tony Stark's kid wants a cheeseburger, because that's one of the first things Tony wanted when he got back from his sojourn in the Middle East. I figured there are a handful of really important components that allows for stories like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Harry Potter series to really succeed on an emotional level: Interesting and enjoyable universe; a blend of humor and seriousness; growth of characters; a mystery to keep things moving; spending time in the story with those characters. The last one is the trickiest one to do. Our hyperactive world struggles with long-form (remember the hullabaloo around Endgame's runtime?) storytelling. And, yes, I recognize that binge-worthy movies are all the rage, but I don't see people talking about wanting to binge One Piece (a six hundred-plus anime) or the different Naruto series (which also clock in around six hundred when all put together). While there are absolutely exceptions to this rule, I think those who are casually interested in a story (rather than hardcore fans who would devote entire days to the fictional world) are sometimes turned off by length. To me, short stories are too short: There's almost no time to develop a connection with the characters, and the plot's intricacies must be reduced. So I saw the problem of "spending time in the story with those characters" as the largest barrier to entry for writing a piece that has emotional connections with the audience. Fans of Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss thrill at the thousand-plus pages of those authors' mainstays. Stephen King can release a fourteen hundred page book (and even call it "horror", though it's almost impossible to maintain horror for that long) and it will go over very well (It will go over very well) because Stephen King has a cachet that assures his fans that the investment will be worthwhile…but I don’t have fans. I don't have that kind of goodwill. If I wanted to have an audience enjoy the stories yet still get some of those pieces, I needed to find a way to abbreviate that time commitment. Thus this project was born. Yes, it came out of my interest in the worldbuilding style of Overwatch and Innistrad, but it took its own form in the telling (as it ought to). I dreamed up a magic system, different races with separate characteristics (though, to be honest, they're pretty standard fantasy fare), and a broad problem that would pull these five characters into the orbit of each other by the end. The hardest part of the entire thing was the connections between the characters. Some of them knew each other from previous experiences, but for the most part, they don't interact during their separate novels. For example, my favorite character of the whole thing is a lynx-human (think Cowardly Lion but smaller and less prone to singing…or being cowardly) named Zelkie. Her story starts off with trying to pickpocket someone. A bit later, she sees a guy who is murdered. Before she can flee the scene, a different guy shows up and distracts the murderers. Well, the woman that Zelkie tried to pickpocket is the main character in a different novella. We read about the attempted robbery from Zelkie's point of view in Book I, then that same moment from the point of view of Kenz'Lor in Book IV. The murder happens in front of Zelkie in her novella, and then we see how Renkryth feels about it in Book V. Because I have five novellas, I outlined them specifically so that each character connects with all of the others at least once. I have no idea how successful this will be: My writer's group is meeting less and less due to COVID-19, and though we still talk about our chapters, it's a very long process to get any sort of reliable feedback. And, since there's so much time between my friends' readings of the first novella, I don't know how much will stand out in their minds and give them the "Oh, I remember this!" feeling that this whole project is supposed to excite. Though I wrote a lot of outlines (a lot of outlines; I've never had a book laid out this carefully before), I didn't get started on the actual drafting until my writing group's summer retreat, 13-15 June 2019. I wrote one entire novella during those three days. During the weeks between that retreat and my own personal retreat in mid-July, I wrote two-thirds of the second novella. With the time given for my personal retreat, I finished the second novella as well as starting the third. I finished that, also whilst at the cabin writing retreat (I get a lot written when I don't have family or the internet to distract me). I picked at the fourth novella throughout the second half of 2019. I knew what was happening in it--outlines help with that sort of thing--but I've struggled to write a lot of my own fiction over the past year and a bit. It seems like the only time I ever really have progress is when I'm on the writing retreats, because I wrote about 13,000 words in the fourth novella during a "winter" writing retreat a couple of weeks before the lockdown showed up. With that much momentum generated, I had finished the fourth novella by the end of March 2020. Since that time, I haven't done much with the story. The fifth one was always going to be the hardest because I had the least flexibility--at least, if I didn't want to have to flip back and forth constantly during editing to try to fix something. Essentially, I didn't want to have my early drafts be too loose; I wanted them to be considered as essentially canonical. The reason for this was simple: If I change one thing in, say, Book II, and that same event happens in Book IV, but from a different point of view, it will be really hard to keep those earlier changes consistent. An edit in one place could actually mean an edit shows up in two (or more) places. To cut down on that, I wanted the fifth story to form to what was already written, rather than the other way around. A day or two before my 2020 writing retreat, I went ahead and refreshed myself on the outlines of all previous novellas, plus the fifth one. I put all that I'd written into a single document to try to make it easier to find details (it helped, that's certain). That document is 240 pages long with over 140,000 words in it--so the CTRL+F function was used a lot. I tweaked some of my outline for Book V while still leaving room for the character to surprise me. At last, I was ready. I arrived at the cabin later than usual (not that it really matters, but my family was going to join me after I'd had four days to myself, so I was slowed down getting myself ready to go to the cabin), and had some of the least productive writing days, from a word count perspective, in years. The reason was that I had to do a lot of reading. I had to CTRL+F a bunch of stuff as I wrote, making sure that I wasn't missing important details. These weren't "I'll fix it in post" kinds of details: If I got them wrong, my entire fifth novella could have shifted off the rails. Nevertheless, I pushed forward. I went through my familiar routine that saw me writing by nine-thirty or ten o'clock, working into the lunch hour, then going for a walk/taking a break at some point in the afternoon before finishing off the last long leg of writing. This worked out well, and by lunchtime on my fourth day, I had finished the fifth novella. This is a major milestone for me: Not only did I finish Book V one year to the day that I started Book I, but I've been waiting to really move forward with the resolution novel (the Endgame component to this, if you will) until Book V was finished. I needed all of my pieces on the board, as it were, before I could strategize how to use each. Not only was it a matter of making sure that I knew the details of their story, I needed to get to know my characters. This might sound strange to non-writers, but coming to know who the characters are is one of the crucial components (and difficulties) of writing a story. Rarely do characters simply march into my head as a fully formed creation. Instead, they're accretions, slowly building up through details that I see in real life and I try onto them. Without that time with the characters, I didn't feel confident in moving into Phase Six (I guess? Or is it Phase Two?) of this project. Now that I've had that time, I think I'm almost ready to move on. I haven't put all of the novellas into one document yet, but it'll about 170,000 words and probably about 300 pages. I'm going to need to reread all of that, making notes (but not edits, because I try not to edit when I do a readthrough) and seeing how I can give each character her or his own unique moment in the team-up book. They'll have five or six chapters each…and how to balance all of that is something that's going to take time. This experience has, for the most part, been really positive. I'm excited to finish it, not because I think it will sell--let's not talk about my odds at getting published in a COVID or even post-COVID world--but because it's so ambitious. I've never tried anything like this, with this much interconnection and deliberate purpose. I've never tried writing in so many different styles, or remained so structured in my storytelling. For lots of reasons, declaring the novellas as being complete is rather overwhelming. And, who knows? Maybe I won't even start the "Big Book" until summer of 2021. It's certainly possible. Still, I feel like the amount of work I've done, the timing of it all (one year exactly!), and the fact that I'm not (yet) sick of the story are all good things worth celebrating. The COVID-19 crisis has sent a lot of people to their homes who would otherwise not spend so much time there. We all know this. But the result of this extended working staycation on me has been different than I anticipated.
Here's one unexpected thing: I thought I would have more free time to write. Now, it's true that my schedule has opened up in unexpected ways. I no longer have to worry about ward- or neighborhood gatherings, after school activities, or running errands. Because of my son's status as a high-risk person, we're making sure that we do not go anywhere unless it's absolutely necessary. I dropped off some garbage at the dump last week--that was the last time I drove my car. We're taking the "Stay home, stay safe" order really seriously. According to the internet (the most reliable source of information) and social media (the most accurate source of what people are doing), people are learning new skills, finishing projects, and generally improving themselves in the ways most convenient to them. I am saving over an hour a day in commute, to say nothing of the fact that I get my school work done during my work time, which means I should have ample time to write a lot. Yet, as of yesterday, I only had about 21,000 words written this month. Grand total for the year is just over 130,000. That may sound impressive, but it isn't. At least, for me. In comparison, I had over 173,000 words written by the end of March 2018. And March 2019 saw 152,000 words. While I've been on a downhill trend for output over the past long stretch, I was hoping to see a change in my writing life this year. It hasn't happened. At all. Yes, I've managed to log over 30,000 words per month (which is my soft goal for the year), but that's in large part due to LTUE conference (which gives me 17,000 words over three days) and a winter writing retreat in March (which added 13,000 words over a weekend). A couple of unusual experiences are carrying my total word count. That isn't to say I'm writing nothing these days. A lot of words have made it into my reading journal (I'm almost finished with the one I started back in October 2019). I've done a lot of world building and a bit of outlining of different projects, which is good. I've started what I think will be another fantasy novel (its shape in my mind is still vague), with an eye toward a different style of writing. I have a comic I'm working on--I've projects, in other words. This should be what keeps me going… …but I have the same problem now as I did when I felt like a real teacher: By the time I finish with my job, my mental energies are depleted to the point that I just want to read a book, smash the drums, or play a video game. I don't feel like my extra "free" time is going into anything except slightly extended uses of what I previously did with my life. For example, I used to practice drums for half an hour or so when I got home from school. Now, I practice them for almost an hour, sometimes longer. I used to read a little bit; now I get upwards of an hour in a book. I'm not complaining about any of this. These are things that I can do for longer because of the quarantine. It's the writing thing that's really driving me crazy. After four weeks of being at home, shouldn't I have a bit more to show for it? Maybe not. I mean, writing is hard*. It takes a certain amount of mental preparation and willingness, of energy and ability. It used to be that I could go somewhere else and that would help kickstart my brain into writing-readiness. That is no longer an option (for obvious reasons), though maybe if the weather would cooperate, I could start writing in my hammock in the backyard or find a bench at an abandoned park where I could work. Anyway, the point is, just because I'm at home now doesn't mean my brain is ready to write. This has been a wake up call to me. I've always dreamed of supporting my family via my words. (I always expected that to be through writing; instead, it's been my oratory in teaching that has helped provide.) In that dream, I sit at my desk for hours each day, opening the veins of my imagination and letting the words flow forth. But that isn't happening. I should have known that would be the case, though: I have plenty of downtime in the summer, when I'm not expending energy on other projects. What do I do then? Well, historically, summers have yielded a lot (in 2019 I had 134,000 words in June and July; 162,000 in 2018), but those are all thanks to the writing retreats. Day by day, I get about the same, maybe a few hundred more words, than I do during the school year. I know, I know: It's a hobby. It's a passion, yes, but it isn't a job. If my ability to help pay for food were contingent on fingers on the keyboard, then I'd probably do things differently. That's fair: I know that I would think about writing differently if that were the case. The hard part with all of this is that I don't have a way of really knowing how well I could do it, as, in the back of my mind, procrastinating my writing now doesn't make me slightly edgy. Dinner will still be served even if I don't put another word into my current story. There's not much to say else: I write about this often (because it's something that preoccupies me, which I then turn into writing). It's a worry that I have--a useless worry (as most worries are), but a persistent one. Part of what's so silly about these ruminations is that, unless I get an agent and sell a book, it's all entirely moot. I keep gnawing on the bone when the animal itself has yet to even be taken down. Well, perhaps this will be the last confession I need to write. Maybe this will exorcise the demon of "I don't have the mindset to be a full-time writer" and I'll be able to find other ways of wasting my readers' five- to six minutes of reading time. Maybe. --- * If you don't believe me, I encourage you to sit down and write a short story of at least three thousand words, but only after you've done all of your other chores and responsibilities. If it was easy for you…well, I'm kind of jealous, honestly. You should let me read your story. If it was hard, well, yeah, that's my point. I've written precious little this year. We've all just arrived at the beginning of the third month and, though I've written more than 70,000 words for the first two, almost none of it is how I expected (or wanted) it to be. The reason for this is two-fold: I'm out of the writing habit, and I'm doing lots of worldbuilding.
Hardly a Habit The first of these problems is a clear one: I need to carve out more time to write. It's always as simple--and complicated--as that. I live within the perpetual "spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" problem when it comes to my art, and I do really believe that it stems--at least in part--from my own feelings of disappointment, frustration, and disillusionment about a writing career. Wanting to be a writer is a feeling that I'm so familiar with that it's more of a habit than a genuine sentiment. I am fully aware of the need for thick skin, resiliency, and a disconnected-from-reality worldview in order to accomplish this goal. But I've been striving toward the goal for so long that it's almost impossible to think of what it would be like to achieve it. Would I even gain satisfaction if I no longer had to strive for that desire? Of course I would--I'd find new things to write, challenge myself again with my writing. I think. But it's certain that I don't know how I'd feel to be a writer without the addendum, aspiring. Because of this way of thinking, I believe that I'm self-sabotaging my own impulses to write. I've written about how I stopped writing daily essays in part because I was refining my non-fiction chops when I really wanted to be working on my fiction. Unfortunately, the ease of sitting down and simply writing fiction has not come toward me much at all. Yes, I've a handful of short stories. Some of them are even okay. But there's no consistency, and without that consistency, I don't know how I'm supposed to improve. And, since I'm not improving, I'm losing the will to want to pursue it. Vicious cycle, my friends. Having lost the writing habit of any sort, I find myself spending a lot more time doing other pastimes, including playing on my new drum set, watching more TV, playing more videogames, and going to bed later than is healthy. I can't pretend that writing would solve these problems…but at least I'd be adding "writing a lot" in there. There are worse habits to have than writing. New Worlds and New Stories Back when I talked about the death of my grandmother, I mentioned that I was planning on a writing retreat with my writer group when the funeral happened, forcing us to reschedule. This has been a positive thing--the rescheduling, not the death of my grandmother--because I'm not actually ready for a writing retreat. At least, I wasn't. Now, with the reschedule retreat less than a week away, I have to focus on telling the story I most want to tell… …and that's a problem. See, I had a sudden attack of an interesting idea about a witch-based urban fantasy--something that I've been wanting to do for a long time but couldn't figure out a fresh way of doing it. I happened upon a fantastic piece of art from Skiorh. (In fact, I went ahead and did my own version of the drawing, which is the one at the top of the post.) The mixture of skateboarding culture and a witch was exactly what I wanted (without knowing it), so I spent a good chunk of the past week or so throwing together the pieces of the world. In fact, I probably spent a bit too much time thinking about it--hence the reason I spent time drawing a drawing that was already drawn. But, at the same time, I've been thinking up a new story in one of my most frequently-used settings, the world of Taralys. (I have two novels set there--Conduits and Ash and Fire--as well as my NaNoWriMo 2017 novella.) This new one would be using the English Civil Wars as an inspiration point, which means that not only have I been worldbuilding a lot of this new world's history, I'm also doing a lot of research into a time period that I'm interested in but haven't yet done the requisite leg-work to truly know well. I've really enjoyed what I've dipped into so far, and look forward to doing more of it. But, at the same same time, I've been looking over my notes for the huge novella project. Last year, I wrote three of the five novellas in my Shadowed World series--two of them during my two separate retreats, and the third during the remainder of my summer. I wrote just over three chapters of the next one, then haven't been back to it since. However, I have a lot of outlines, notes, and ideas for this story. It would be a perfect project to work on my short writing retreat day. So, in other words, despite having been in a dearth of writing inspiration for quite some time, I'm now suddenly overwhelmed with different options and possibilities for what this next weekend will hold. It's a pleasant problem to have, and it goes a long way to motivating me to regain a new habit of more steady fiction work. With them being broader kinds of potential stories, I may even be able to crack the NaNoWriMo problem--the fact that being with a story every single day makes me not love it very much anymore--and could be the way that I rectify problem number one with problem number two. I'm hopeful that, regardless of if I get a lot of additional writing done in the near-term, the possibility of multiple projects might actually be the thing that I've been looking for, and I can become as prolific a writer as I am a yearner. |
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