Creative Death

It happened again.  The story I began earlier this month fell apart.  I didn't mean for it to fall apart, you guys, it just happened.

Acorn was a science fiction story about an alien spore germinating in a small town and infecting the townsfolk.  Cool, right?  And it was...for a while.  Inevitably, what happened to all my failed stories is the same thing that happened to Acorn.  I got tired and bored with it.  And I guess I can partly blame the day jobs for it too.  I'm so tired at the end of the day that I pass out rather than write, and I sleep through my writing session the next morning, barely even having time to down a mug of coffee before heading off to work.  When I do get a chance to catch up on my days off, so many days have gone by that I'm struggling to get up to speed on what the hell was going on when I left off.

I'm not making up excuses.  I'm just telling you what went down.  Focus and time management are critical in anything you do.  But there's the fun factor as well, isn't there?

A novel is the longest piece of writing you can do.  Stephen King says it shouldn't take longer than a season, or about three months, and I heartily agree.  But I also agree with him that you have to have fun, otherwise writing becomes a chore you hate and something you feel obligated to do rather than looking forward to.

In that regard, if three months is the time limit to get to the finish line, one should be the limit to telling if there's really any potential in the story.  If you lose interest within the first month, then you should go write something more enjoyable.  Unless you're contact-bound to finish it.  Then you just have to suck it up and write.

This offers no cozy solution, I know.  This is one of those "trust your gut" posts.  As I write this, a friend of mine is telling me, "Sometimes ya gotta push through."  I feel like that's too simple.  I feel like I need a constant kick in the ass.  A writing group.  An accountabilibuddy.  A word pimp.

Or maybe I'm just in the throes of a panic attack.  Probably both.

Writing vs. Research: An Epic Battle to the Death!

For the last two or three weeks, I've set aside time almost daily to do some additional research, mostly in preparation for an ambitious writing project I've got in mind.  I've also gotten a whopping nothing done on the writing project I'm doing now.

Part of the problem, I know, is time management.  I wake up a little too late most mornings to get an hour of writing in before I have to go to my day job, and in the evenings, I feel too exhausted to commit to another two hours.  When I began planning out this week, I allocated my two-hour evening sessions towards research.  Surely, I thought, that's still time used productively, right?

Wrong.  Well, sort of.

On the one hand, this future project does need the research.  I can't deny that I can already tell it's too ambitious to go in blindly.  But I also can't deny that the primary job of a writer is to be a storyteller, not a researcher.  And given, that I have an end of the year deadline on the first draft of this current project, the research, productive though it may be, is also a potential procrastinator.  That's got to stop.

Today, I adjusted my schedule to fill my evening sessions with active writing time come hell or high water, and consolidated my research into a several-hour block on one of my days off.  It's easy to sit down to a documentary, but if I spread more blocks of writing time throughout the week, it should make it easier for me to stay committed towards reaching my deadline.

Or something.

Crazy Random Stuffs

Fact: I suck at blogging lately.  Or rather, I suck at staying committed to it.

Another Fact: There's been a lot going on in my life lately, and I haven't really had time to write a new post until now.  So I don't have commitment issues, just "sit my ass down at my laptop and pump out a post" issues."

In any case, I didn't even realize until now that a month has gone by and I've all but vanished from the Inter-Webs.  So it's time for the usual prescription: a big ol' update...

Personal Life

I moved about a month ago, and I'm still sort of settling in.  Love the new place, especially the home office at my disposal.  It's pretty much the office I've always wanted and never had the guts to ask Santa for.

The Day Job

Anyone who knows me will tell you that 2015 has just plain sucked work-wise.  One company I worked with for a few years let me go without telling me until a month after the fact (nice!).  Temp work was sporadic and short-term.  Great interviews fizzled out into the abyss.  Now, suddenly, I'm working steadily again, hard at it like an animal, and I couldn't be happier.  My two biggest jobs right now are laborious with a gardening center and a moving company, but I think Stephen King will always win the "worst day job" game with New Franklin Laundry.  I've had way, WAY worse jobs than these, so I really have no right to complain.  Additionally, I'm reliance script-reading while taking the advice of many friends from grad school to look for a teaching post with local colleges, which brings us to...

The Writing

Yes, I am finding time to write, just harder to stick to it when you're so exhausted at the day's end you want to (and often do) pass out.  Right now, I'm working on a new science fiction story.  I'm not ready to talk about it, but I plan on having the first draft ready by the the holidays.  I'm also doing research to expand the Document.  This mainly involves screening documentaries, which is time-consuming and I can't wait to be done with it.  A friend of mine in the entertainment industry also suggested I turn my story Unholy Spirits into a short script.  He said it looks promising, but I know better than to get my hopes up on its future.  The Unholy Spirits script is really meant to be part of a portfolio I'm assembling to submit to agencies.

And that's pretty much what I've been up to: working and writing with sleeping and eating mixed in to shake things up.

It's All Been Done

I recently saw the trailer for the film The 5th Wave based on Rick Yancey's 2013 novel.  The story is set during the 5the wave of an alien invasion; subsequent waves have been increasingly devastating.  In the first wave, the invaders (called the Others), shut down our power grid.  In the second wave, they use kinetic bombardment to destroy heavily populated coastal regions with tsunamis.  In the third, they unleash a lethal virus.

I've seen this story before.

In 2011, the Discovery Channel series Curiosity had an episode on alien invasions hosted by Michelle Rodriguez.  It featured interviews with physicists and military analysts.  They believed the first strike would be an EMP to knock out our electronics.  The second would be to bombard the coasts with heavy objects to generate tsunamis...

Yeah, I've seen this story before.  I recognized it the instant I saw The 5th Wave's trailer.  My immediate reaction was to say that Yancey was unoriginal, talentless enough to base his premise on something from TV.  However, I'm not entirely innocent of this myself, something I'll tell you about another time.

I have no real reason to sneer at Yancey's story, especially because I haven't even read it.  And if the premise comes from a documentary series, so what?  The battle plan he follows is sound, but the story is more important.

The Battle of Stalingrad is another example.  Harry Turtledove reimagined it in his World War novels with the Battle of Chicago putting Americans against invading aliens in a house-by-house fight to the death.  It can be said that the opening scenes of the series Falling Skies showing human survivors desperately struggling to survive in post-invasion Boston was inspired by the same event.

My point is this: just because someone discusses a topic in a documentary series, doesn't mean it's untouchable territory.  For the record, Yancey's fourth and fifth waves perpetrated by the Others has brainwashed human children hunting down survivors.  Curiosity didn't have that.  I know I'm starting to nitpick at it like the debate between McDonald's and McDowell's - the Big Mac versus the Big Mic, and the golden arches versus the golden arcs - but the matter comes down to what a writer can do with a particular idea and how they can spin their own blanket out of the same yarn.  If Yancey and I both approach that same Curiosity episode, we'd come up with different stories set in that same predicament.  If we both were asked to write an Apollo 13-like tale, again, we'd have too different stories.  I definitely wouldn't write for the young adult crowd.  I'd want to give the elderly nightmares.

The Hook

I sat down to start reading SM Stirling's The Sky People.  Actually, it was my third reading.  The first time I saw the novel in a bookstore, the title grabbed me.  "Sky People" was a term used by the Na'vi to describe humans in the film Avatar.  The green cover showed two rifle-armed astronauts in a jungle with a triceratops and a saber-toothed tiger on the periphery, and the summary on the back - an alternate history story set during the Cold War in which Venus and Mars are habitable with their own native civilizations - sounded pretty cool.

The furthest I've gotten into The Sky People was about a quarter of the way through the book.  I think I got through the first couple of chapters in the first reading.  But tonight?  I got through chapter one, and put it down.  This is not a condemnation of Stirling's novel, or of Stirling himself as a writer.  I love science fiction.  I love alternate history, and I love stories set in a fictionalized Solar System when many other writers choose planets light-years away.

The Sky People has a lot going for it when it comes to world-building.  It realistically forces the Space Race into overdrive.  Stirling shows us a lush and identifiable Venus; Mars doesn't appear until the sequel In the Courts of the Crimson Kings.  We've got NATO-run Jamestown and Soviet-controlled Cosmograd.  Bronze-age natives clashing with Neanderthals.  Hell, there are even Encyclopedia entries describing this alternate Venus along with initial exploration decades earlier.

What The Sky People lacked - for me, at least - was a strong hook.  World-building is a great creative exercise, but the first job of the writer is to entertain and tell a good story.  A hook is the first step to draw in the reader.  Story world isn't a hook.  It's a stopper, a term I learned during a short stint as a charity fundraiser last month.  Yes, I was one of those guys on the sidewalk raising donations for charity.  People passed by me all day long, and a stopper is designed to do just that: stop potential donors (potential readers in this case).  You next give a quick icebreaker and an introduction to the pitch - remember, folks got places to go and people to see - but then you have to give them a problem or a crisis.

This is the real hook, a central problem so jarring that readers keep with the story to find the resolution.  Soviets put nukes into Cuba, and we want to know how America will dodge a nuclear war.  Flesh-eating zombies surround a house, and we wonder how the occupants inside will escape.  Claudius takes Hamlet's birthright, and we wonder how the prince will regain what was stolen.  I believe the crisis Stirling is trying to give us is that the Soviets were smuggling guns to Venus that got into the hands of the Neanderthals.  It's a good crisis with echoes of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Prime Directive of Star Trek, but unfortunately it didn't grab me as much as I would have liked.

Audiobooks

For my birthday, a friend of mine gave me an iTunes gift card.  I used it a couple of days ago to get an audio recording of Stephen King's On Writing.  I've listened to audiobooks before, but only a small handful.  The first one was an abridged Seamus Heaney recording of his Beowulf translation.  The small number might stem from me growing up thinking reading is a visual act (looking at words on a page) rather than an auditory one (listening to words on headphones).

Now, for the record, I do have a hard copy of On Writing.  Which writer doesn't?  But I also take daily walks ranging from thirty minutes to an hour or longer.  I usually listen to music, but August has been a very stressful month, and I felt like I needed a different kind of company besides Marilyn Manson.  Audiobooks are great in that they you can multitask to a degree while listening.  Walks and drives are the best time for them, I believe.  I'm also a slow reader, so listening to a book means I can fit more of them in my year.  If this sounds like you, $20-30 downloading recording might be worth your while.

I'm not saying I'm abandoning printed books altogether.  Some of the books on my shelf had personalized messages in them.  Others are just too damn good to part ways with.  If you want my cope of Harry Turtledove's Tosev novels, you'll have to pry all eight of them from my cold, dead Eye-talian hands.

Keeping Your Emails Clear

I'm technologically schizophrenic, guys.  That doesn't mean I'm really schizophrenic, but I do have four email addresses.  Four!  And I sometimes feel like I've got to take on a different persona when I'm using them.

I call these Personal, Jobs, Writing, and Bullshit.  Personal is the one I use the most.  It's the one my friends have to reach out to me.  Jobs is for when I'm hunting for day jobs or registering with online job boards.  Writing is similar but for writing resources and when I'm submitting stories.  And Bullshit, frankly, is for relatives I don't want reaching out to me, but they don't have this since I don't keep in touch with them anyways.  I think I use it for miscellaneous registrations, but I'm not even sure about that.  Give me a break.  This was all set up before I knew about filters.

I think I'm beyond hope in consolidating these different faces out of fear that closing one might lead to unintended consequences like, "Oh, crap!  I forgot to update my info with this site and now I can't log in to do so because that email address is no longer valid!"

I want to express this to writers because if I can make this mistake, others can too.  Case in point: I sent the draft of a script to a friend I'd like to direct.  Because it's a writing project, I used my Writing address.  No worries.  But then I sent the same script to an actress friend to see if she'd be interested.  I sent it to her via the personal one because she has it.

It felt weird.  It felt like sending classified information from your home computer instead of the government-issued one (like that would ever happen).  But the "send" button had been clicked upon and there was no going back, only moving forward.

Another instance occurred when I emailed a freelance proposal to a potential client with the Jobs address.  We tried setting up an initial meeting but not all of my messages got through because I would sometimes switch between Jobs and Writing.  Bad move, Mario.  It's never good looking like a scatterbrain to a client.  At least, it wouldn't look good to me.

I do encourage writers - anyone, really - to have different email addresses depending on different, specific needs.  You can sync them into one mailbox, and forwarding and filtering makes things more organized.  But you have to be clear about the face you're using with each.

After tonight, my new rule goes something like this: the Writing address is for submissions and freelance proposals only.  It's also attached to a Google Voice account that serves as an office number; I don't like just handing out my cell phone number.

I might sound a little anal here micromanaging little things like this, but I also believe it pays off in the long run.  If you're about to hit the pavement for a job and talk to a recruiter, you're likely to hear that you need a professional-sounding email address rather than partydude666@hotmail.com.  The same goes for submissions.  Even if there's a rejection heading my way, it's best to put on as appropriate a face as possible.