Every time I hang out with my old college roommate Matt, he always makes a point of reminding people what a dick I used to be. I know he means it as a joke and not to be hurtful, but it always gets me thinking.
Yes, I was a dick in college. I was such a fucking asshole that even some of my professors talked behind my back about it. It continued a little into grad school where I was so unpleasant that I was nearly expelled. The only reason I can really give for that is that I started college in a community college setting before transferring to a university. My friends from high school - many of which I don't even try to remember anymore - they all left town and went on with their own lives, while my ability to make new friends atrophied tremendously.
In the second half of grad school, I came out of my shell and started making friends again, and it's only gotten better. Still, it's hard for me not to look at the past behind me, and when I do, I wonder, What's the single best piece of advice I could give my younger self?
I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Community.
See, I went to Antioch University, Los Angeles where they make a big deal out of community. Younger Me - Asshole Me - thought, To hell with that. I see these people two weeks every six months, and we're supposed to be friends? No, my strategy used to be to go through the MFA program and then move on, because I already figured that no one would want to keep in touch with me anyways.
You know what I say, Asshole Me? You...*slap*...are...*slap*...a...*slap*...fucking...*slap*...idiot.
A friend of mine, Seth, did a short interview for Antioch. Writing is a solitary act, but a writing career, if you hope to have one, is a group effort. Open opportunities. A place to go for feedback. Reading events. Articles you may have overlooked. Even just an ear to hear you out when you feel like bitching about how hard the work is. And then to turn around and offer that back is just as rewarding. You can't get that stuff working on your own.
And the great thing is you don't even have to go through an MFA program to establish that network. Sure, it's a huge help, but even if you join, say, a writer's group through a networking site like Meetup.com, you're taking a step in the right direction.
If this weekend was a big ol' party, then today was the hangover.
No, no, no. I don't mean that I'm pissed off at anything that happened. I'd love to go back and relive it all. But I guess I wasn't ready for the sudden influx of positive vibes coming my way. I woke up this morning and thought, Whoa! Did all that stuff really even happen?
They did.
So now I'm looking at all the stuff on my plate: No Tomorrow, the next Andrew Ursler story for Arts Collide, my research essay for Spry, getting started at Carpe Nocturne, getting the ball rolling with Kill-ifornia, and writing something for next month's Roar Shack reading because I don't have anything else fresh and ready for the mic.
So that's *counts* six things on my plate. There are twenty-four hours in a day, or thirty-four if you talk to my dad about his younger years, but with sleeping, eating, tutoring, and bitching about reality TV, that really leaves me about ten hours that I can dedicate to writing, or a little over an hour and a half per project, and that I can't do. For example, I can't get 3,500 words down for No Tomorrow in an hour and a half. I'm lucky if I can get even a thousand words down in an hour.
Fortunately, a lot of these projects are fairly light and don't need to be worked on every single day, which translates to: if I can balance my crap, why can't you?
As a writer, this weekend has been just fucking awesome.
I keep a calendar book, and looking back on the last few days, all I can see is a tangled net of ink, so much of it that it spilled over the margins and I had trouble telling what was for Saturday and what was for Sunday.
I'm not just talking about my novel either.
My friend Allie pointed me to two literary journals, and I've already told you about one of them: the research essay for Spry Literary Journal. The first draft is done and going through revisions. Allie also pointed me to Carpe Nocturne, a magazine that caters to dark culture. This came as a surprise to a lot of people I've mentioned it to because I'm not a goth. I don't have the steampunk fashion or the skull makeup.
But still, Carpe Nocturne is expanding their horror section that reviews movies, books, and other things in that genre; a genre that I love. So I got in touch with one of their staff, and they got back to me with submission guidelines, their deadline list, and other paperwork that I have to go over.
The crown jewel of my weekend was attending the Roar Shack Reading Series in Echo Park last night directed by author David Rocklin who's quite simply an awesome dude, a talented writer, and every time I go to these readings, I feel like I'm at a meeting of the Avengers. David offered to write a blurb for No Tomorrow once it was ready. The writing challenge I posted yesterday on Twitter about Lindsay Lohan telling you you've got a problem was selected as the prompt for the Live Write. I volunteered along with a writer named Eric Howard, and we both got such a great response from the audience that we were both invited to come back next month to read. And we got t-shirts too. Awesome t-shirts. Sexy t-shirts. T-shirts that even Ryan Gosling can't get a hold of (because he wasn't there).
To top it off, I had dinner with a bunch of writer friends at this Thai restaurant where I ate...*dramatic pause* shrimp bacon, shrimp wrapped in bacon. Oh, yes, folks. Such things exist!
It was like staring at the sun. This weekend was, in a word, fantastic.
I was looking at my projects list and thought, "Wow. I triple dog dare anyone to accuse me of being lazy." There's such a ton of writing work lined up that it's kind of crazy.
First, I've got my novel No Tomorrow, which I'm happy to say is coming along nice and smoothly. Every time I think about how tough the work is and how many words I have yet to go, I just sit back and think about how much of a pleasure it's been working on it so far. I am sincerely having the time of my life with it.
Second, I've still got the Andrew Ursler series that I'm writing for Arts Collide. I've kind of been kicking myself in the ass over that because I keep putting off starting the next installment, but it is coming. I promise. Yesterday, I actually went through the list of installments I got coming up and the summaries for each one. Originally, I had twenty-nine parts to it, but I've trimmed it down and canceled some parts that didn't really advance the series as a whole, ultimately bringing it down to eighteen.
Third, I got the green light to write an essay for Spry Literary Journal. It's a short 1,500-word piece on what I've learned about doing research for a long project like a novel. My friend Allie Batts is a reader for Spry and said that the editors had openings for essays and editorials, so I emailed them a proposal earlier this week and they got back to me that they were very interested. Publication isn't 100% guaranteed, of course, because, as editors, they have the final say, but the enthusiasm on both sides of the table is strong. I want to write this, and they want to at least give it a read. I'm happy with that.
Last but not least, I'm starting a new online series. It's venturing into zombie territory again, but it's something quite different from No Tomorrow simply because I'll be working with a few other writers. I've very excited for that because I've wanted to do a collaboration for, gosh, about two years now.
So that's what's going on right now. That's the giant roast beast that I'm sinking my teeth into, and hopefully I won't get indigestion from it.
I know, I know. I've been dropping the ball on this whole "daily" update thing, but only because I've been hitting the pages like a madman.
I've been tackling No Tomorrow like there's, well, no tomorrow. Five thousand words one day. Six thousand the next. Yesterday, I hit a slight slump and got in only about three thousand words. It's funny to say that it's only three thousand words. I know that a lot of friends, published friends, have sometimes joked that they're jealous of how many words I get through.
It's got its drawbacks though. Even though I say I've got a definitive stopping time, I still end up working for hours and hours through the night, often going to sleep at around four or five in the morning. But that's only because I still haven't received my tutoring hours, so I want to milk the free time I've got left for all it's worth.
I guess you could say it's paid off though since I've written about a quarter of the novel in the last week. Or maybe about twenty percent, depending on whether or not I'm going to extend the size of the novel and by how much.
But anyways, this has been my office for the last few days: working alone in room with the lights out because the electricity burns cash.
Hey, folks.
Been busy working on the book, clicking the wordy words like a crazy mofo. Little by little, I'm getting there. I've written nearly four thousand words so far today, so I've met today's quota. Now, I want to add more to it, maybe a thousand words at a time. Still, I'm twenty thousand words behind.
Not that I want to break my brain over the book, but this is the way I see it: if I get the through my daily quota, every little bit afterwards is a little more power to me. Those bonus words? All I can do is hope that they add and help me catch up. It's like working overtime and hoping your boss takes notice in the long run.
Today is Hump Day. Yes, Hump Day and not on a Wednesday.
In Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein refers to something called The Hump, a psychological obstacle. climbing your way up the hump means that you're struggling to accomplish something, and when you pass it, it's all downhill. You're as good as on Easy Street.
I don't think I've crossed the hump, but definitely a hump. I foresee many humps in the future as I work to make a writing career for myself, times of great challenges and obstacles when the wisest thing to do seems to be to simply give up. That certainly would be the easiest thing, but it's not the wisest.
I knew I crossed this hump today while working on No Tomorrow. Being a Saturday, my word quota was five thousand words. I had just about a third of that done. I still had a lot to do. I began to mentally brace myself for yet another late night. But in spite of it all, I didn't feel angry with the work I was doing.
You've probably felt this way before: you're working on a project (it doesn't have to be writing), and it's giving you such a hard time that you decide it's not worth it, so you quite. Maybe this has happened a few times. It has with me.
I'm about as far into No Tomorrow as I was with Undead and Inhuman when I tried writing that earlier in the summer, but there's a difference between the two. Undead and Inhuman had so many logistical problems underneath it. How do you send thousands of people to the Moon? How do you train an army to fight on the Moon? How do you do this in a believable fashion? These questions were important to the story world, but they were draining my attention from telling the story itself. I stopped being a storyteller and started being a researcher of a hypothetical scenario.
That wasn't fun at all. Writing should be fun, shouldn't it?
Damn right it should! Yes, it's a lot of hard work with many hours dedicated to it, but that's just the nature of it all. Today, and every day since I started writing No Tomorrow, my only problem has been to get the words out onto the page. Sometimes, I can't type fast enough. Sometimes, the words are stuck in traffic somewhere between my brain and my fingertips. But in both cases, I wasn't researching, I was storytelling. It didn't matter if the story was solid gold or solid crap. I knew I could revise it later. I was having fun, and I wasn't researching.
Stephen King is a big advocate of the idea that a writer should have fun while doing it. What does he mean by having fun? Well, I don't think he means that when you sit down every day, the words are just going to come pouring out like someone had pulled back the floodgates. Some days are harder than others, a little or a lottle more sluggish, and there's really nothing to be done about that any more than people have their good days and bad days in whatever line of work they're in.
What struck me about No Tomorrow is that there hasn't been a day yet where I feel pissed off at the idea of working on it. Ask yourself that with your own work. Is it pissing you off, or it just occasionally frustrating? If it's merely frustrating, don't worry about that. That's normal. If, on the other hand, it's pissing you off (and pissing you off on a regular basis), then, friend, you have a bad project on your hands and you need to stop.
