Month: August 2022

If you’re around writing long enough you’ll hear about a specific concept called Beats. Beats, or Story Beats, are moments in the narrative where you shift the tone intentionally. It’s like in a song where you move through the four count and land on that hard thump and then back to one. Those shifts define the pace of the story and create a sense of what is to come. Now we see this more in script writing because it is more obvious there. Scripts are visual blueprints, and the beats or changes are vivid on screen–especially on network television where the shows hit that cliffhanger moment before every commercial break in order to force you to stay in your seat in anticipation of the moment leading out of the break.

Larger works such as novellas, novels, or particularly long ‘short’ stories have beats. At least they ought to. My last novel struggled with the beats. I had a few things go well but that was not one of them. It is a thing I intend to fix in the sequel. I also expect to write more about this specific idea of beats in the future–perhaps even doing a visual layout of beats here over a ten minute run. Definitely worth the energy.

Seated comfortably in my bat chair I find myself looking around my lovely space and thinking, “Dang, why haven’t I done more to be a better writer here?” The answer is: It isn’t about the space. It is about me putting my but in the chair and walling off the distractions. Today I had to put on an audiobook and distract part of my mind in order to actually focus enough to get any words on paper. Shockingly, it worked. I got a little bit done. I made some progress on a project that is due in 5 days that I absolutely am not close on. Every little bit counts, right?

Some Thoughts:

1. My computer is in terrible shape. It needs love.

School is in session and the sports that go with school are in session. This means it is time for a new schedule! I am presently struggling with the construction of that schedule, because I don’t entirely know what I am teaching. I know what my kids have going on. I know what my partner has going on. I have a vague (yet functional) sense of what I have going on, but there are several holes. Call it a swiss cheese schedule. Like the dairy product it does provide my day with inexplicable gaps. In some of these gaps I intend to place good writing hours. I need them. I am in the midsts of a solid production schedule, though the writing itself is tough going. I am going to need to be able to look at a calendar on a daily basis and say, “This is when I write.” I need that in order to be successful–especially as I ramp up for another novel.

So, what does ‘Writing Time’ need to look like? For me it is a block of time no less than two hours and hopefully pushing 4. I rarely have the luxury of four, so I need to think about how to become more focus in bursts of two. I also need to think about how to balance that with the rest of the important work stuff like being a teacher. There are enough hours in the day. It stands to reason that those hours may need to involve fewer video games.

Some Thoughts:

1. I am going to need to start treating my obsession with youth football like a drug addiction. I cannot go too many days without thinking about it and every time I do think about it and the draw of that life (specifically the competitiveness of the situation and being able to see immediate results based on specific teaching styles and planning) I find myself wondering what it was I left unfinished. I believe that unfinished job is the construction of the perfect system–from top to bottom. What does it look like to craft a system that works? I built a playbook that works but I never built a practice and planning system to teach it and the core fundamentals around it. I left that one behind. So, once again, this addiction is really about accepting the things I cannot accomplish in my life.

As I previously admitted, I have a tendency to watch bad TV. I’m not big on the tik tok, but I will slip into 2-20 minutes of bad youtube because it is small and light and easily digestible. That tendency lessens in terms of reading. I am very hesitant to put up with a bad book because of the time and thus commitment involved in doing so. However, I wake up to a stream of useless articles designed to further my need to read more articles in the same vein. They string me along dropping the barest tid bits of digestible information like ET chasing M&Ms (Reeses were used for the film adaptation).

That stuff is garbage. I have a tendency to absorb garbage–so much so that my tolerance for deep intellectual or thick academic writing is utterly weakened. Unfortunately, it is that deeper intellectual and scientific stuff that I need to be absorbing in order to know what is next. Presently my writing is referential of what other people tell me is next–which is of course referential of something else. My writing feels like literary hearsay or a distant cousin of plagiarism that has me absolutely disappointed with what I am trying to create.

Garbage is coming in and being filtered through my brain like junk food for the brain, and not much good is getting in around it. Therefore, the solution to the problem is to get back to reading and even watching better stuff. A writer needs to have an intimate relationship with their subject–not a referential one. The writer who studies myth and medieval lore will produce a better and more original and insightful product than the writer who read Game of Thrones and decided, “I can do that.” I believe this to be the rule. I believe this to be the way.

I’ve written on Idea Archives at length. The general idea is to have a book in which you write down as many ideas as you can whenever the come to you. I pretend to keep an Idea Archive, but the reality is a mess of books and slips of paper that I don’t ever actually go back to. Which is the subject of this particular blog. I recently decided to return to a past idea for a science fiction story focused in a corporate dystopia. Yeah, I know the concept isn’t new and neither are the characters. The theme is my own and one that clearly charts where we are to where we appear to be heading with an idea of that space as the middle ground and looking backwards and forwards from that moment in time like we are looking backwards and forwards from our moment in time right now.

I’m going to be spending more time on that story over the next year. I might even write it.

The point is that I did go back and look at what I was thinking about in the moment and update it based on my current thinking about the world and the current state of the world. Those factors–especially where I am at emotionally and psychologically–help me to move the idea forward. That is what I think you need to do. I think you need to go back to your old ideas as a moment in time to think about who you were and who you are and where you are with those ideas. That is how you drive your creativity forward.

Some Thoughts:

1. In that odd place with football where I am just ready to get these games going! Usually I have youth ball at this point to occupy my particular fixation. However, I am trying hard not to think about the youth game. Heck, I don’t even want to spend too much energy speculating on the High School game. I just want the games to get going so I may enjoy them.
2. Speaking of things occupying my mind, a conversation with my partner made it clear that I fixate on different stuff when I am home and that stuff, as consuming as it is, is negative and consumes me. Here feels like an impossible situation, which leads instantly to the solution of leaving when I know that leaving absolutely confirms that I am not the person I intended or wanted to be. Nobody seems to understand that but me. Perhaps nobody realizes why that matters. Nobody has to. I accept it. Just as I will accept whomever I am going to be.

Next week I am going back to Freewrite Friday. I’m still in my 100 days of writing about story and writing, but providing examples falls under the purview of this effort. Today I wanted to reflect on why I am doing the 100 day challenge. First of all it isn’t a challenge. I think the entire construct of these social media challenges is silly. Sure, there is good in some of them, but the good gets lost in the volume of bad. But I digress. I decided to spend over a quarter of a year writing about writing to dig deep and think about and understand what I have to say about the art. I read books on writing for years. I took notes. I followed advice. I photocopied pages into a binder so I’d have the ultimate mashup volume of writing on writing. Little of it made me better. While some of what I read sparked ideas and approaches to what I wrote, most of what I read made me second guess my writing. That is dangerous. The inability to freely construct a first draft is the death knell for writers. If you cannot write a first draft that feels like you and feels like the story you want to tell, then you’re sunk. For a while all I could do was construct stories that followed the tightly scripted rules of writing as if I were writing a Shonen manga. It went poorly because I was too busy trying to do it right.

So, why am I here telling you how to do it right? Stephen King.

No, seriously. King made me do it. He didn’t speak to me in real life or come to me in a vision. He wrote a book on writing that is the best thing I’ve read on the subject and it made me think that the best way to impart knowledge is to tell the story of where you went wrong–what worked and what didn’t and how that made you the person you are today. Each writer has that story and I think when you put those all together you see that we all know different things about how to get a writer to where they need to be. I wanted to find out what my thing was–what I have to offer you, dear reader. I am still figuring it out. I am still figuring writing out. My first major market novel only came out a year ago. I’ve got a lot to learn and I think telling that story helps me and helps you along the way. So, 100 days.

I’ll need to do a hard rewind to figure out what day we are on.

Back to being that everyday dad for the next week and a half. That means being that everyday scheduler, because for whatever reason, time falls into a void in AZ. Nothing gets done or even considered to get done. Part of it is mental state while I am here (the idea that there is nothing to do in AZ leads to me not working and then doing nothing in anticipation of having more time later because there is nothing else to do). Part of that is adjusting to the space and demands on my time. Both of those things are key to being productive. In order to be even a little successful I need to have my ducks in a row, and my ducks are falling out of order here.

I gotta find a way to make here work or not be here.

Blogging first thing in the morning brings me a (albeit brief) sense of accomplishment. It means I got up, did something of value or note, and moving forward I can at least say that I did a thing. Now that last part is the double edge of the sword. I can say I did a thing, but will it be the only thing I did? Occasionally, yes. Not today though, Satan. Well… Maybe today. This waffling conjecture lies at the heart of being productive as a human–let a lone a writer. For me there is often that moment where I don’t want to get up and deal with the routine that has become my life. Largely this is because I don’t like the routine. I live three different lives. I live the one where I am home with two grown kids and a partner, I live the one where I am home with three grown kids and 2 not quite grown kids and a partner, and there is the one where it is my partner and I. The last is more energized and the most loving and by far the most productive. The 5 kid life is the most demanding and yet the most likely to get me out of bed. The 2 kid life is the toughest by far for reasons I won’t get into here.

I’m living that 2 kid life as we speak and I am in that bed of mine and I have the laptop and I am pecking away at these keys in search of ten minutes of accomplishment that can jumpstart my day.

Some Thoughts:

1. If there is life of a sort beyond death, do we carry who we were with us to the next? If so, are we happy with who we are? Are you?
2. Pre emergent is a gift. It keeps the weeds at bay better than anything else I’ve tried. This is most clear when you notice you missed a spot… Or half a yard. And then there was a storm.

Just finished Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society. The afterword ought to be required reading for authors. In it he sums up the entirety of the industry from a writer’s perspective without much trying to do so. He understands. He lives it. He also is honest about his own issues and failures and relationships with editors. All this in under fifteen minutes.

What I’d like to say with the rest of my ten is Write. Write what you want and feel and make sure you give time to that. I sometimes don’t. I all too often get caught up in expectations thrust on me by people who are not me–editors, students, fans, other writers. It sucks to feel like you’re writing what they want and need you to put out but not putting yourself into it. That lack of self shows through the page. It makes all the words feel hollow.

Don’t let your words feel hollow.

Some Thoughts:

1. Arizona sucks for weather several months out of the year, but it sucks for feeling you are part of a diverse community full of interesting and inventive and farflung creative ideas all of the time.
2. Three of the new owners of the Denver Broncos are black. Not only are they black but they are by far the most notably ignored black people in their own ways. Condeleeza Rice is a straight up baller who should be the centerpiece for so many modern black professionals, but she isn’t. Lewis Hamilton has one more F1 races than anyone ever. He’s the GOAT of formula one and most Americans have no idea who he is. Melody Hobson is a 53 year old black woman who just happens to be the CEO of Starbucks. Yep, unnoticed by the general public. Reminds me of a joke Chris Rock used to say…

One last blog before I get on this plane here today. I want to talk about the future. Specifically, I want to talk about the importance of setting goals and recognizing growth potential as a writer. I’ve been writing Shadowrun for better than two decades–probably about half my life in truth. In all of that time I haven’t produced nearly the volume of novels that some of the other writers have put up. The reason here is simple: I did not go get it. I’m getting it now. That leaves me understanding that one difference between writers who are successful and ones that are not is that mindset of “I’m going to make sure they know my name”

There are several ways to go about this. I have this friend in the industry that has produced a ton of books–16 in all including the one children’s book. He went out and got it. He self promoted. He shows up at the cons. He comes to the classroom. He writes his ass off and he makes sure that this is not the end of his engagement. He embedded himself in the industry. I need to do that.

I will miss GenCon this year. I am returning from nearly two months away from my kids and this is the last chance I have to spend time with them before school really gets rolling and my eldest goes away to college. I will not miss GenCon next year. In fact, I will seek out more opportunities to connect with the local community as well as the larger writing community. I have more than enough publications to be part of the SFWA but haven’t done the paperwork. I will do the paperwork. I will put in the work this year to be more like Tom and less like the guy who waits for the opportunities to come to him. This is the way.

Some Thoughts:

1. When I listen to particular audiobook narrators, I start to hear everything I write in their voice. Presently I’m listening to Wil Wheaton tell a story, and this condition is particularly egregious with him. Damn you Wil. Nevertheless, I still want to play D&D with the guy.