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I have nothing left to say about writing.

Nah, I’m just messing around. There is always more to say about writing. For instance: Tonight Tobias Buckell is speaking in Seattle. I’m sure it is a paid gig, and even if I am wrong he is building cache towards his job teaching MFAs at the University of Maine. He’s finding a way to generate income with his words. In fact, he’s finding multiple ways to generate income while still managing a life, a wife, a time to write.

I bet he doesn’t play Apex or Minecraft or (especially) Madden.

However, my woes are not the focus of tonight’s words. I want to riff briefly on the writer as a job. There are many ways you can generate enough income as a writer to keep writing. Most of them involve teaching and speaking gigs, but there are others. Writing copy (or any short bursts of text) can bring you a little bit of cash. Doing this a lot can bring you enough cash to call it a career, but you have to make sure to balance how much of the ‘scut’ work you do vs. how much you are chasing your dream of being a writer. My sister is a PR genius, but she will never be as good in PR as she is as an author. Unfortunately, she spends most of her life doing the one thing and the other doesn’t make it as far as it ought to.

We have to choose how to spend our time and energy. We have to be efficient in what we do, because time is never as long as we hope it will be. Do the work you need to do as a writer (or otherwise) to have the space to write the stories you wish to write as a human. Find that balance for yourself.

I grew up writing on busses and trains. I had a decent trek to school from k-12 and never once experienced a school bus where my friends were with me most of the way. Elementary school was the M1 to Harlem. High School was a choose your own adventure of train routes that eventually led to the 4 train dropping me off as close to Bronx Science as a train possibly can. My friends occasionally rode with me on part of these high school adventures, but the bulk of the routes were me alone and in my world of words.

It was wonderful.

I haven’t done that in a long time, but tomorrow I am going to try. I’m going to be in transit a bit throughout the day, so I felt it would be best to prepare to write during these trips. Generally I play Clash Royale or Solitaire for $$. Neither option helps me reach my deadline, so I am going to try to slip back into my world of words and see if I still know the way in. I hope I do.

Some Thoughts:

1. Been pushing my personal deadlines this week. Rough week overall, but it doesn’t help to push. Things tend to pile up on the back end that way.

My partner finished her graduate degree online from a desk in her kitchen while three kids all under the age of 12 ran around acting exactly the way young kids are supposed to act. It didn’t matter. It also didn’t matter that she was on a shoddy internet connection linked to a computer already a decade past its prime. She was locked in. Maybe some of those things even helped. Maybe the noise of children and limited ability to have multiple windows open on screen helped her focus on what was directly ahead of her. She wasn’t trying to do everything in the moment. She was focused on the one thing she needed to get done. She was doing what every writer struggles to do–stay focused and avoid distractions.

Presently I have to grade 23 assignments and write 7 sections of a project alongside two more adventures. Presently there are 17 internet windows open on my laptop to go along with the 9 docs, 2 excel spreadsheets, and 23 pdfs. The majority of these windows and files are divided between three distinct interests. This is to say that I am engaged in a ridiculous level of multi-tasking that means that if anything gets done it will be done eventually. This, of course, is not the way. The way is to be focused as she was. The way is to take one bite at a time, one step at a time, and one task at a time.

We have become so attached to multi-tasking and escapism as a human society that we forget to be where we are and enjoy being in that moment. In that forgetting we lose access to the deeper connections between ourselves and the world around us and, as writers, to the material we create. I write best when I do nothing else but write. I write best when I have the mindset to drown out everything else and let the words guide me for however long that I am able to be in that zone–be it ten minutes or an hour or 4 hours. As I grow older I find that I have less and less time to stay in that zone. That is strange, because as I grow older I have more and more time that does truly belong to me. It comes down to how I choose to assign that time and how much of that time I spend locked in on one thing. Am I trying to squeeze in a game between paragraphs? Am I checking the news as I look up the definition of a word I want to use?

I am learning to be focused on the moment and stay in that moment, because that is how we get back to understanding the meaning of what we are doing and having a real connection with what is happening right in front of us. Equally importantly, that is the way to get stuff done fast and right.

In writing this most recent project I find myself overwhelmed with research. My laptop agrees with me. I closed 25 windows this morning and I still have a dozen left open. This is all for a 4000 word section of a larger document. I mean dang, how much is my writing and how much is just me streamlining the research?

I have a problem with word count that is always going to exist. I cannot pull a Steven Erikson and just add 1000 more pages because I want to share more of the story. This doc needs to pull together all the research and concisely spit out useful information on what to do with the information I am sharing. That feels daunting because it is. Beyond which I am highly conscious of how I design language in these situations (specifically the use of and in listing format and compound phrasing) and (yeah, I see it) I want to make sure I do not fall into these language routines.

So, I have a lot going on in this latest bit of work. The key of it is how to utilize the research. What I think I am learning is that research generally points to an idea, theme, or greater understanding, and that is what I need to be unleashing in the text. There is space for lists, but that is not the main point. It is a sidenote and there is space for that too.

Some Thoughts:

1. If I could find a way to directly apply the ten minute rule to a tough HITT-style workout routine conducted up to three times a day, I would unlock the key to physical fitness.
2. Obviously, I haven’t. The facts are out there–I just need to put it together in a way that makes sense, because working out is not just working out. You sweat and your body feels like it caught a beating after those ten minutes, so the time really starts to add up. Suddenly 10 is 30+

I really hoped to go to GenCon this year. The annual event takes place this year from August 4-7 in Indianapolis. I hoped to go in order to get connected to some new publishing houses and really start pushing hard forward in this RPG writing career. I need to do this, because getting locked in on one game is dangerous, especially if that game is potentially going in a direction I am not completely right with. When it goes the other direction the choices are to continue finding your voice in that new place, move on, adapt to be part of the voice of that new direction, or fight hard in the other direction and try to force the ship back towards the course you feel is right. I’m not doing that last one. I think I am moving in the direction of finding my voice in the new, but all of it leaves me feeling like I need to also find my voice somewhere new. Moreover, I need to expand.

I’ve been writing shadowrun for Twenty years. That is a remarkable long time to be doing anything at one level and not truly growing from it. I believe writing is about growth, and while I’ve grown the amount of writing I have done in this genre, I have failed to elevate the genre in any significant way. Still, I’m enjoying putting out really good stuff (when I put out really good stuff) and I find myself feeling grumpy when I skip a book and it changes how things work in the game for a decade.

All of this is to say that I (again) need balance. In this case it means growing outside of the boundaries of the game while learning to cement my own natural voice inside of it. This is key. It is good to have your own projects and I have a bunch of those floating around in my head (and occasionally on paper). It is time to dig some of that out and get to work.

But first: More Shadowrun.

Stray Thought: When you commit to being a writer, designer, musician, actor–heck anyone who creates and puts their creations out there–you’re making a commitment to an audience that includes one often forgotten piece. You are in essence saying: I’m going to keep creating as long as you keep consuming. There are many reasons for this dynamic. We can get into the financial aspects of it in another blog, but I think it all boils down to that balance between consumer and creator. I think we are nourishing ourselves by nourishing the consumer. We get right by making them feel what we feel. We get high off the contact with our creations.

I still go into bookstores looking for that moment of ‘yessir’ when I see my work on the shelves. Honestly, it has nothing to do with them seeing my name (though me seeing my name is pretty fantastic). It is more about knowing that what I made is being consumed and (occasionally) enjoyed and at least talked about. Even as my novel slips into the 7,000s in Amazon Cyberpunk best sellers, even as people drop reviews that are sometimes good and sometimes bad, I know I created content that made people think for just a moment. I suppose youtube creators get this high a lot (though they don’t spend a lot of time creating each individual piece of content).

If writers are vampires it is the readers upon which we feast. We need them to stay alive.

I have not talked sports in a long time. It is going to be tough trying to keep 100 days of blogs about writing going while also talking about sports but here’s my angle: Narrative. I’ve been following a lot of the narratives around the NFL trades and watching the story sorcerers do their work. What I find most interesting about these stories is how they coalesce. This is not a collaborative process. Instead various sports writers try to find an angle that works and once it does all the others try to copy that story until it becomes canon. Today the Browns traded Baker Mayfield to the Panthers. It is no coincidence that the Panthers kick off the season playing the Browns. This was clearly scripted once the narrative dropped that they were looking for a trade partner.

So, the story unfolds as it should.

100 days of writing about writing is quite taxing.

The finished project ought to represent the raw material for a book on writing. If that is the case then tonight’s foray into the writerverse borrows from Stephen King’s On Writing in which he waxes philosophically (and quite practically) about his history as a writer and allows we the readers to figure out what applies to us. King is a bad mamajama.

I’m not quite so bad as the man himself. I’m just a guy who used to be a latch key kid who entertained himself by playing with baseball cards and small balled up piece of paper and imagining it was a real game of baseball as the cards were splayed out around me in all of the positions on the field. Imagining was my escape from the world. Sure, I had an Atari for a while, but when my dad died that device managed to disappear along with fishing boat he left me. My mother’s bank account matriculated during that time. Even then I recognized the connection, but I was young and powerless and, besides, there was a lot of joy to be had in a big living room where nine cards were splayed out and a second pile of cards waited to step up to home plate and knock that wadded up bit of napkin over the couch and out of the ballpark.

I started writing because the stories couldn’t fit in that space. I wrote to get them out of my head. I wrote to show them to people and to make people smile. Except nobody really smiled or even cared that I wrote. After a while I stopped sharing and kept the words tucked away behind the stacks of books in my short bookshelf. They were mine, and they were safe with me because they couldn’t be ridiculed or ignored.

Writing is probably the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done. It doesn’t get easier over time. I just have become quite adept at hiding the things I don’t want people to ridicule. I write it in my head where nobody else can get to it. The problem is that is probably my best stuff.

Give me a writer who never got stuck on a singular plot point or cleverly worded line or some other minutiae and I will give you a writer who never wrote anything they gave a damn about. We get stuck. We get stuck because we need to get it right. Unfortunately that can be a mental bomb. I’m talking nuclear reaction here. Scorched earth until we get it exactly the way we want it.

Or maybe we just move on.

Keep it moving. That’s the motto for the day. When you get stuck on a small piece that matters a lot to you, mark it with XXX or highlight the section in another color–I like blue, personally, and keep on keeping on. If you don’t you’re going to die on that sentence. I know this because I’ve done it multiple times. I killed four novels in exactly this fashion. Four. I’d get to a point and I would just get stuck. Then the entire thing would unravel. This is the entire reason I have yet to publish a fantasy novel (three of the four were fantasy). So, please take my advice and move on from the problem. Come back to it later down the road and you may realize that the problem worked itself out in the writing.

As someone who collaborates all the time, it may come as a surprise that I struggle with collaboration. It might be a matter of perspective, selfishness, ego, or any combination of these things that makes the work difficult. The truth is that collaboration is the art of letting go. In order to be successful you must relinquish control of your finished product and recognize that the work means that other people are going to get involved and are going to have opinions that differ from yours. In some cases they either have better ideas, or simply have the level of power to make the final call on a thing. It bugs me, mainly because my name is attached to the project and if it goes south that drags my name based on decisions that were not entirely mine to make. However, for every situation like that which does exist, there is another situation where the call was made not to go my way and it worked out much better for it. Thus is the power of collaboration.

I am thinking about this as I am going through this process on another (cannot disclose) handful of projects in which I don’t have the final say. Most of the ideas and writing coming to the table is excellent. There are spaces where I am like, “no, please” but that again is part of the process. Over the years I’ve grown more welcoming to having new partners–this after I had one writing partner for a while and he was magical.

Another secret to collaboration is having a platform to do your own thing and voice your own point of view and flavor without that collaborative group. This is primarily the blog for me. The fact of writing is you are never the only voice in a writing project unless you are self-publishing and self-editing your work. There are always others who have questions and thoughts. Stephen King can tell his editor ‘No’ but odds are that you will have a much harder time doing that until you reach that level of notoriety.