Month: July 2022

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.

I am having that internal conversation about space and intersectionality again. When do we begin to move outside of our normal orbit and move into a new orbit that encourages fresh thinking and energy? Today I am blogging from the spheres. Yesterday I was in someone’s home that doubles as a private use art space and I was watching musical artists perform. In a few days I plan to make my way to Screwdriver Bar, which doubles as a shrine to the Seattle music scene. I view intersectionality as the connected nature of things as they apply to a single point (be that point a person, group, or otherwise). I view these past experiences as a deepening of my understanding that in order to be a creative you have to live a life that takes you outside of your regularly scheduled course and series of events, less you become locked into the doldrums of daily life and unable to step far enough away to see it.

I’ve stepped far enough away from Arizona to recognize that how I live there is not The Way. I haven’t stepped so far away that I know what to do about it. Here are the facts of my daily existence: I go to campus and teach a few days a week. I go to my office every day in an attempt to escape from the singular reality that is the home environment that my kids have created and thus dominate in and through the reality that they have nothing but free time on their hands and in such live and lean more into the environment than I, a daily visitor does. My other kids are also visitors but they carry with them their own reality, which is centered mainly on my car. I spend no less than 2 hrs a day driving them around (drop off, pick up–sometimes multiple times in one day). This leads to a fragmented daily reality in which the times I feel most whole is when I am escaping either to the office or to the bedroom with my partner.

This is not at all sustainable. A writer needs access to the public and needs to be alongside the public. A writer needs a measured and organized existence to the extent that they can reliably have the opportunity to nourish creativity in the moments they are not writing, as opposed to constantly fleeing one version of reality or another.

I realize this. According to G.I. Joe, that is half the battle.

I was fortunate enough to attend a Sofar show in Seattle tonight. The organization puts on shows in venues throughout the city. The catch is you don’t know where it is until 36 hrs before and you don’t know who is playing until they walk on stage. Sofar doesn’t get the top names, but it does get up and coming young artists. It felt good to be in a space with people listening to music. It was a good vibe. It will be a totally different vibe tomorrow night at the Circle Jerks show, because different music attracts different crowds.

Different music impacts you in different ways, but the common theme is that it does impact. It does make us feel something and encourage us to feel what the artist is going through in that moment. I felt that especially strongly with one of the artists in the show today. She ended her set with an acapella rendition of lift every voice and sing and she killed it. The moment carried through the break between sets and needed to be acknowledged by the next performer, because what she felt touched us all, and what she felt is what a lot of people are feeling right now: despair.

I’m not going to be political tonight. I’m just going to end with this: Use your words. Use them for what you believe.

When I have a project with a deadline I tend to rewrite the deadline to break it down into multiple sections and also to shorten the length of time I have to finish the project in (sad) anticipation of missing the date. What can I say? Writers miss deadlines. So, if I don’t want to be that writer then I use a false deadline in order to ratchet down the pressure. Generally I forget the real deadline entirely and focus on the false one as the legit deadline. Sometimes I miss the false one. That is largely due to how I break down the work and what happens between setting a schedule and life happening.

Life happens. Hard.

On the other hand, having many shorter and more manageable mile-marker deadlines helps. For example, I am working on a 35,000 word project that is due in 30 days. That sounds legitimately rough. However, I have a subsection of just 12oo words due this weekend and several other smaller deadlines numbering close to a total of 8 k due over the course of the next week. Each small section seems doable. If I put in the work I ought to be just fine. If I miss one there will be a chain reaction that pushes everything back. That being said, I’d rather have that smaller mishap then try to tackle 35K all at once. It feels like too much. I’m not the first writer to say it this way.

Take small bites. You’ll get done and it won’t hurt doing it.