Danab Cycle

Recently I have been having one breakthrough after another with Collider, which is part of what here I’ve been calling the Space Corps books, but perhaps will be known as the Danab Cycle, so I’m transitioning that label with this post.

This is a story, Collider specifically and Danab Cycle in general, that I have been working on for a quarter century. I was a kid spitballing a version of Star Trek when it began, but over the years the idea has grown in sophistication and nowhere was it more necessary than in fleshing out what exactly Collider itself is supposed to be. There was no coherent story originally, but funny enough there was a broad arc that needed to be supported, and as I saw that more and more clearly, I better understood what the book itself should look like.

Writing is a bit like excavation, or even the old anecdote of Michelangelo freeing an existing statue from stone. It’s not always clear what the story is. Sometimes it comes to you in little thunderstrikes. You realize this is exactly what it is. Hopefully on the other end, to the reader, this is how it feels, that this was the best way to do it. (As a reader, too, this is how I approach it, and certainly, there will always be interpretations and opinions, although some are better than others, just as in the storytelling itself.)

So these are the kinds of ideas I’ve had recently; “Why didn’t I see that before???” Characters, sometimes minor ones, sometimes the most important ones, finally hitting their marks. 

And I think it’s getting closer to being ready to be written. 

IWSG: This time it’s kind of permanent...

I’ve been a part of the Insecure Writers Support Group off and on for years. I’ve taken breaks, I got dropped from the rolls, found my way back on. Well, this is where we say goodbye.

Last fall I experienced a dramatic turn in my writing career. I submitted a story to an IWSG contest, and that was literally the last thing I ever did on that computer. I made my peace with losing things, and then moved on.

It’s just, I guess I wasn’t quite done with that process.

I honestly don’t really get how the IWSG is supposed to work. I get that it’s a blogging community like any other I’ve encountered. You theoretically get what you give. And I stopped visiting a lot of blogs a number of years ago. I get that it blogs once a month every month, and the point is to give encouragement to other members. 

I guess I kind of reached the point where it no longer made sense. I am not the kind of reader who will read books because it will make an author feel better. I read books I think will give me a transcendent experience. I read a lot of books, and I don’t always prove my choices right. 

I did find out that books blogging friends write are not necessarily what I want to read. They have different goals. So I stopped pursuing that a number of years ago.

And as far as I can tell, that’s the opposite of what communities like this one are about. I can’t tell for certain, but a lot of the IWSG is people who will read and/or support anything so long as they know the author. I can’t do that. The material always comes first for me. Well, unless I have already read the author and loved, or at least enjoyed, the results.

I may be missing out big time. There may be writers in the IWSG that would absolutely be up my alley. If there are I honestly have no idea. And that’s part of the problem. When everyone gets a glowing endorsement for everything it’s hard to know where the quality really is.

So I don’t see a point to continue on with the group. I’m not really the kind of writer who needs general encouragement. If someone has something specific and useful to say about my writing, that’s something. But I have had no one in the group appear at all interested in my actual writing. 

That’s kind of what I want if I am going to have connections in a writing community, or someone who is willing to work with me, help me specifically find specific resources that would help me. Not have resources available. Someone who took an active interest. In me.

That’s what really makes me insecure as a writer, the crushing loneliness, the isolation I have always experienced, and that the IWSG never really changed.

The impetus for this decision is absolutely petty. I admit that. I lost a contest. Ten writers at least were deemed to be demonstrably better than me. In hindsight I don’t even know why a group about insecurity is actively giving its membership more reasons to be insecure. That’s bush league. Someone somewhere has time to at least give feedback, to at least acknowledge members that contributed, to give them encouragement. Not make them wait months until the file and the cover were already finalized. 

So I will continue my writing journey. Rejection is a part of the job. But it doesn’t need to come from the people who are supposed to be there to give you encouragement.

Goodbye, IWSG.

IWSG January 2021

Hey Insecure Writers Support Group,

It’s always going to be easy to feel insecure when your own group continuously rejects you.

Well, just lost at another of your contests. 

Feeling insecure. 

T-Shirt Guy

That’s a picture from a year and a half ago, or maybe a lifetime ago, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s also a picture of me, and it’s also a picture of my niece (the Burrito). 

It’s also a picture of one of the many t-shirts my sister (the Burrito’s mom) has gotten me for Christmas over the years.

I feel like an idiot for realizing that this has in fact been a tradition of hers, and having only just realized it a few minutes ago. Yesterday I got her somewhat belated Christmas present in the mail. It was of course another t-shirt (Chateau Picard!). And a few minutes ago I think I also finally realized why my sister has had this tradition:

I’m a t-shirt guy. I mean, it’s not unusual to wear t-shirts. It’s not even unusual to have t-shirts with pop culture references. 

It may be unusual to keep restocking the wardrobe with new ones, year after year, decade after decade. And to have a sizable, rotating collection worn daily. Again, I am not wholly unique in this regard. I get that. But I think in my family this is one of the many things I pursue differently than the rest of us.

And my sister noticed.

And so pretty much without fail, she’s been helping me add to the collection at Christmas. Hey, I added to it last year myself, quite happily, with a Buccaneers Tom Brady t-shirt. I sent a picture of it around to the family. We’re New England folk. Everyone else might think the past twenty years were a fluke stoked by cheating, but for us (okay, some of us are traitors) Tom Grady is unquestionably great, and yeah, I was pretty pleased that when he finally left the Patriots, he ended up here in Tampa.

So yeah, I’ve got a lot of t-shirts, celebrating various things. I’ve got one I just wore the other day, from a party I attended in 2007 the same day the last Harry Potter was released, the same day I got copies of my first book. I’ve got a t-shirt celebrating Moxie, which is an old timey soft drink my hometown adopted. I’ve got one featuring Gasparilla, the Tampa pirate festival. Some people wear the same treasured t-shirt memory endlessly. Me, I’ve got dozens of those.

Sometimes, sadly, the collar frays. I have to concede to stop wearing it. I keep those, too, of course, add them to my “archives.”

What can I say? I’m a t-shirt guy. And thank you, Burrito’s mom, for being a part of that.