IWSG January 2016: New Year's Goals

The Insecure Writers Support Group meets digitally the first day of every month.  This being the first of the new year, I figured I'd discuss goals and how I intend to approach them...

I've pushed myself for so long wanting and expecting and needing a paying future in writing that I've sometimes been hysterical about it.  I couldn't see a future where I'd be happy doing anything else.  Strangely, last year taught me a different way in the most unlikely circumstances possible.  First I thought I might never write again, and then I found a new job, one I'd never thought I was remotely qualified for: helping raise a baby. 

I won't regale you with the wonders I've already experienced in that regard here.  Instead, I'll talk about my new perspective (same as the old one), and what it means about my writing future.

I will try and not push myself so hard, and not be so hard on myself.  I will try to write, and let that be its own reward.

That's the short of it.  The long of it is a series of projects, some old and some new.  One of the old ones is Brute, a story I've talked about here in the past, previously entitled The Pond War.  It's the manuscript I was working on a year ago that I ended up abandoning for a variety of reasons, one of them being guilt (I won't be talking about the reasons for that again).  I always say that when a story has trouble being put into words, it's the story telling you that something is wrong, that if you persist with it as you're currently thinking about it, it's a mistake.  Every story eventually takes on a life of it's own.  I think most of the stories I've read that feel wrong are ones that were written without taking this into consideration.

So I had put it aside, and continued thinking about it, and eventually new thoughts came to me.  Among them is the new narrator, Miss Simon.  This old gal will be narrating a lot of my manuscripts, including About the Moxie Incident..., which concerns an amnesiac president strolling about Washington, D.C.  Miss Simon is intended to help me find a consistent comedic voice.  She made her debut in Mouldwarp Press Presents: Barbarian Translation - The Trojan War, which took care of two birds as a result (I have a jones to write about the Trojan War).  I liked the results, so the idea seems like a go.

I've been thinking about my Space Corps saga lately, thanks to my sister's feedback on the Seven Thunders manuscript I've had sitting around for a few years.  She wanted to know if the main characters were going to pop up in later books.  The more I thought about it (one of them was always going to star in one already, but the main character was only going to make a cameo at best), the more I knew what to do about that. 

So I've become more interested in getting around to writing more Space Corps books.  The only thing I want to do before I get into that (besides, probably, the Brute and About the Moxie Incident... manuscripts) is take one last stab at the Star Trek writing contests I've been entering for fifteen years (with a gap, mind you).  There's another one for this year's fiftieth anniversary of the franchise.  I've got a handful of days to write an entry.  If I win entry into the anthology, there's a publishing deal that comes with it.  I will go ahead with Seven Thunders, which has always been my baby.  If I don't, I will self-publish Seven Thunders, something I've been long reluctant to do.  But things have changed.  I kind of no longer expect big readership.  If I'm going to write this stuff, and be such a coward (and/or completely incompetent) in the submissions process, it might as well be at least available. 

It's not quite the same with my comics goals.  I lost another contest, but I'm sticking around the venue, which is kind of like what I was doing a decade ago.  If someone notices whether or not I have talent and/or potential, so be it.  But I guess I'm no longer absolutely concerned as to whether or not I have a future in comics.  I don't know whether it's because I've written so many novel manuscripts since the last time I pursued this particular goal, and not written nearly as much material in comic script form, but at the moment I'm just wondering if this one's at all reasonable at this point.  The guy who beat me (y'know, relatively speaking), has obviously made a lot more progress, with or without the win.  (His name?  Deniz Camp.  If he turns out like Drew Melbourne, at least I'll get to talk about things like Double Steak Day!)

I haven't talked about comic books nearly as much as I have prose fiction here.  That may change in the coming year, too. 

But I'm officially taking the pressure off myself.  If nothing really happens for me, so be it.  There's an adorable little girl who probably won't really care anyway. 

What did I accomplish in 2015?

I wrote very little in 2015.

This is in large part because of how 2014 ended, and how 2015 began.  I don't want to rehash, as I don't want people caring about me just because they're feeling sympathetic, but here we go in a nutshell:

My mother went into a nursing home last November, and I was almost too busy working on a manuscript to realize how big a moment that was.  Then she died in March, and I've been working my way toward finding it acceptable to write again ever since.

I've put so much pressure on myself to find some measure of success as a writer, so much emphasis on finding someone to help me make it a paying career, that it's really become something of a mania in my life.  But the truth is, some things really are more important.  Life itself, for instance.

Slowly, I started working on projects again.  Lately I've been reconsidering my potential future in comics (which has been a potential future for about a decade now).  Just before Christmas I found out I'd lost another contest.  I let it bother me until finally, I accepted the idea of perspective again. 

If it's not going to happen, fine.

What's bothered me so much about the writers blogging community is that everyone seems to think success is out there right here and now, and they support each other so blindly they never even stop for a second to think that it really isn't, and if it isn't that it's not the end of the world. 

But in July, I met someone new.  Brand new.  My sister's bouncing new daughter.  Between her birth and my mother's death, my life has been on a completely different roller coaster these past few years.  I returned home to Maine to help my mother, and it became a full witness to the end of her life.  Now I'm living in Virginia, helping my sister raise her daughter.  Three years ago, I would never have imagined any of that.  Three years ago, and two years ago, and a year ago, I still thought of my life in one way.  Now, it's become something else.

Some people shudder at the phrase, "art for art's sake."  And my pursuit of it has made my journey incredibly difficult over the years.  Now it means something else, too.  See you next week to discuss that.

Barbarian Translation - The Trojan War release

Mouldwarp Press Presents #3 Barbarian Translation - The Trojan War has now been released. 

To give you a refresher course on it, this is, as the title suggests, the third volume in my Mouldwarp Press Presents anthology series, and yes, it features variations on the classic tale of the Trojan War.  Featured is my WriteClubCo colleague Christy Wiabel, who also had a story in the first volume, Project Mayhem, and a new story from me.

I'm particularly excited to present this story, because I love the Trojan War (clearly), and I've been wanting to tell a version of the Troilus & Cressida romance for years.  Plus, I recently came up with a shiny new storytelling device, the character of Miss Simon, who will probably be the narrator for a number of novels I will be writing in the future.  This was her pilot episode, so to speak, her secret origin.

My third anthology is being processed...

The third Mouldwarp Press Presents anthology has been submitted to CreateSpace and will be available shortly.  After the relative flood of submissions to the first volume, I haven't had nearly as much luck with subsequent ones.  This will be the second consecutive one to feature two stories, with one of them being mine.  The good news is that both of them featured return contributors from the first volume, and Barbarian Translation - The Trojan War will feature a story from one of my good friends from WriteClubCo, Christy Wiabel, one of those genuinely good people that're so hard to find. 

MPP exists at all because I wanted to make good with my own past experiences with anthology startups.  If there's another volume, I'll attempt to finally publish stories meant for the aborted effort that was the direct genesis for this venture.  If that doesn't happen, I'm more than happy with the results I've had.  Mouldwarp Press is a fake publishing company.  On the surface, it operates much the way indy publishers tend to, existing as a vehicle for the originating writer's own work, plus anthologies that feature more of their work, and a few of their friends as well (and assorted stragglers gullible enough to sign up for such schemes).  (That's been my experience, anyway.)  The truth is, "Mouldwarp Press" is a label I've been slapping on books I publish via CreateSpace and Kindle, and the Mouldwarp Press Presents anthologies have been of the same kind.

I don't know if I originally believed that they might become something more, but the fact is they didn't.  I'm truly sorry if anyone got involved with them believing otherwise.  Being a writer is not an easy calling.  And it is a calling.  The journey is the best part, the process of writing itself.  The destination?  More than in any other activity you might pursue, the destination is an open question all the way to the end.  Because, there is no end.  The history of storytelling is replete with examples.

Somewhere along the course of my journey, I ended up blogging in a community that didn't always seem to share my goals.  My passion?  Sure.  But the expectations were something else.  This post is not an admission of defeat, concession, or apology (except for the one above).  It's an acknowledgment, without judgment (hey, sometimes even I can get around to that), that sometimes all things aren't equal because they aren't.

What this is saying is that for once, I will say something here and feel comfortable knowing that it might be the last thing someone reads about my journey.  I'm switching gears.  I've always got projects in the pipeline, things I want to accomplish, but this is an end to what can sometimes feel like a competition.  I didn't come here, I didn't start this, to convince you to like me.  If you're reading this at all, thank you.

There's always more...

Creative Differences

Something that's long bothered me is the concept of creative differences. 

You hear about it all the time in the entertainment business, between the people making the movie, the TV, the music we love.  But that's not the one I'm going to talk about.  No, what concerns me today is the creative differences of the audience.

Not in the sense of having different tastes, mind you.  When something is very popular, you find out how quickly someone will put their individual preferences aside.  Oh, sure, there are the people who hate the very popular things, because some people thrive on being contrarian.

No, creative differences from the audience in that some people thrive on inserting themselves into the creative process, question the decisions that were (or are being) made.

This concerns me because there's a difference between questioning creative choices and recognizing that the creators in question just aren't very good.  And for whatever reason, more often than not, we seem to demonize those who make different creative choices rather than those who just aren't very good.

In fact, more often than not we actually encourage people who aren't very good, because they reflect our own insecurities, our need to believe in ourselves.  Which is the same reason we feel free to question creative choices, rather than allow ourselves to think about them.

Critical thought is probably the hardest thing to teach.  In school we're constantly taught from books that have already been deemed classics, and teachers painstakingly walk through creative choices as if they are inherently impeccable.  You may remember how you yourself reacted to these classics. 

It would probably be more helpful to start with a book that the whole class, teacher included, has to decide on together.  It would be the first model for what we would hopefully be doing for a lifetime.  Because I think at the moment we're sadly deficient.  We don't know how, we don't try, and we assume that because we have an opinion we're right and cannot be contradicted, just so long as it fits whatever agenda we're peddling.

Far too often we identify the choir first and then begin preaching to it.  But it's not the audience that matters.  You don't need affirmation.  What you need is integrity.  It's not integrity that leads you to tearing apart creative choices. 

When something fails people all of a sudden find it easy to analyze what went wrong.  When something succeeds it's just assumed that everything went right.  Failure is considered an amalgam of terrible choices.  Success and failure are not the arbiters of imagination.  If one element succeeds spectacularly, it can lift otherwise mediocre material.  It equally bothers me when someone says one element did succeed but otherwise couldn't rescue everything around it, because that's the essence of most successes.  People rally around elements far more often than they do for complete mastery.

Because, again, because of the intimidation factor.  To me, it's ridiculous.  I hate the idea of feeling comfortable with mediocrity, especially the kind that has few if any redeeming qualities.  I've been guilty of this in the past.  I know what it's like to want to say something's good just because it's the easy way out, so I conform to the general consensus.

It's an impossible order.  No matter what I write here, you will continue to think the way you always thought.  The thought process is the hardest thing anyone could ever hope to change about themselves.  A lot of the other traits that carry us through life are about impulses that can be rechanneled, whether we're aware of how they work or otherwise, or letting something be nourished that was previously neglected.  But thought is exactly as it developed, sometimes completely out of our control, from early on in our lives.

It's helpful, however, to at least begin to acknowledge failings.  And to try and curb, perhaps, impulses that are not in our best interests.  You think for yourself, but it's useful to remember how your thoughts influence others. 

Anyway, next time you react to a TV show or a movie, try and think about the creative choices as something you don't need to question.  Think about those choices.  They aren't reflections of your own choices.  We tend to gravitate to things that reflect the way we think.  Underlying poor quality shouldn't be among those reflections.  Rather, the things that challenge us, inspire us...

IWSG November 2015

Technically I've more or less completely broken from the blogging community (except pesky Pat Dilloway), so linking this post to the Insecure Writers Support Group might be wrong, even though this is the traditional first Wednesday of the month to check in. Pretty sure even the omnipresent Alex Cavanaugh finally quick checking in on me. 

All the same, I've been getting back into the swing of blogging, whether people are reading me or not, and continue to wonder what it is about me that seems to set me so much apart.  A month or so back, I watched True Grit with my father.  No, not the John Wayne version, but the Coen one.

Both of which are based on a book, by the way.  My dad's a big John Wayne fan.  I thought he'd get a kick out of seeing the new version.  Afterward, I asked him what he thought.  His main reaction was that, all things considered, the story was more or less how he remembered it.

You've got to know, as far as I'm concerned there are huge differences between the two movies.  I grew up watching John Wayne because of my dad, so I'd seen his version as a kid, but that was the last time.  So by the time I saw Jeff Bridges assume the role of Rooster Cogburn, I was seeing the story with fresh eyes.  I was riveted.  I haven't seen all of the Coens' movies, but I've long admired their skill as filmmakers.  They're very much part of the generation that has helped, so far as I'm concerned, make film the truly dynamic art form it has long waited to become.

Which is to say, I believe films as a whole are today better than they have ever been.  Film is that rare art form born in the modern age.  We've seen the whole development unfold before us.  Although there have been artful contributors throughout its history, the whole of it has really come together in recent years.  It's less and less possible to see the seams.

Which is to say, it's always worth retelling a familiar story.  It always was, mind you.  That's how storytelling began, even when it was merely a matter of preserving a memory.  Stories inevitably change in the retelling.  It's more probable than not (sorry, Patriots fans!) that Homer's version of the Trojan War differs wildly from how it originally unfolded.

My greatest sin as a writer is allowing people to say around me, constantly, the fallacy everyone accepts as fact: that Hollywood has nothing new to say, that remakes and sequels dominate the box office because there's no originality.  Every single time I should be vigorously arguing this point.  Because every single time, these movies are saying something new, even when they're hinging on something you already know.

Because the story changes every time, changes in how it's told, in story and in style.  John Wayne's Rooster Cogburn is similar to  Jeff Bridges' mostly in that they both have eye patches.  I know Wayne won an Oscar for his performance, but there's no question who put more work into their version, and who had better filmmakers around them.  Or at least there shouldn't be.

Except there are those who don't see the difference.  I've long had a problem understanding that.  People view things differently.  This is something everyone knows in theory, but in practice very few of us take this into account.  Usually, we take such distinctions only in whether we love it or hate it. 

But that's just not good enough.  Part of what drove me away was getting into a dispute I simply walked away from.  The person in question brought up something that had happened here on this blog, that I had to go back and reference myself just to see if I understood what had happened.  Turns out I might have been misinterpreting something that had been said, but there wasn't any clarification at the time, and really, there's no point.  That's the sort of problem that would lead to someone hating something, and someone else loving it.  The truth is somewhere in-between, as it usually is.

When I blog, I tend to write about the things I love, and often, it seems, I love things that have garnered otherwise poor reactions.  This tends to put me on the defensive.  What people crave, rather, is a certain uniformity, or, certainly, not being contradicted.  That's why most comments on blogs are people agreeing with whatever was originally said.  Well.

I can do nothing for you, son.

Writer-in-the-family

One of the few good things I experienced last March was family coming back together.  Among other things, that meant seeing the full families from the New Jersey/Pennsylvania wing of the family again, which was the first time in about a decade. 

Cousins who were always just a little older than us also started their own families earlier.  It was their weddings and their births that helped mitigate a series of funerals we attended growing up.  These were always our favorite relatives.  Little did I realize that the little girls I was about to meet again held within their number a writer.

It was a subsequent follow-up visit on my part where I was really introduced to the Writer-in-the-Family (we'll call her Wit).  On the previous occasion, Wit's mother had briefly talked about this connection, but it was a different story talking about it in more depth.  Soon I was referring to this as talking shop. 

I didn't realize until Wit how much I'd wanted someone in the family to talk shop with.  My mother, and my older sister, loved to read my stories, but it's different when there's someone else actually writing. 

It's not as if I want to guide Wit's writing future.  Talking with Wit's mother, and then briefly with Wit herself, it felt good to talk about my perspective.  I know I've done it hear, but again, it's different, even in the context of my Colorado writing group, or in school.  Maybe it's just because socially I've always been a reluctant participant, but I've rarely felt comfortable merely expressing myself (again, Internet experience may vary).

The more I've thought about Wit, about the things we could discuss in future conversation, the more I've wondered what kind of writer I really am, forgetting about whatever or however Wit currently considers herself. 

When I was her age, I frittered away a lot of my creative energy.  I didn't start writing seriously until high school, and even then only for school projects.  Someone like Stephen King, who obviously went on to great success, didn't have nearly that kind of hesitation.

I'm thinking of King again, not because of all those coincidental similarities I like to bring up every now and then, which any number of other people share with the Maine native who continues to publish bestseller after bestseller (lately almost as prolifically as James Patterson!), but because I recently read a collection from Spider Robinson, and it reminded me all over again that King came from a specific generation, an identifiable one (Robinson is certainly a part of it), and it makes me wonder if I'm part of one (other than the Indy publishing era), or have I so thoroughly disconnected from any wider community that the very reason I struggle is because of, well, myself.

Robinson made his name as both a writer and as a critic.  His instincts are perfectly obvious in both capacities.  When he wrote to the publisher who would give him his fist assignment as a critic, he outlined the differences between a critic and a reviewer.  (For the record, Robinson would prefer the title of reviewer.)  His response was the classic debate over art versus accessibility. 

Now, I've long been a member of the art school.  Accessibility, to me, is a matter of what the Internet might call tropes, easily identifiable elements and themes that unite for your basic storytelling.  I've been a reader all my life.  Even if my writing doesn't necessarily reflect it, I know storytelling.  That's not what I'm interested in.  I'm the art guy because I like how the story is told.  For instance, when you boil Calvin & Hobbes down to its essence, you have a kid who's constantly misbehaving.  Isn't that basically Dennis the Menace?  Yet no comic strip reader of the past thirty years would ever confuse the two.  Why?  Because of the style.

Literally, Calvin and Hobbes was a comic strip of style, of art, of how.  When I talked to Wit's mother, we discussed Wit's approach to storytelling, and I brought up how knowing the ending is integral to the whole story.  This was something we readily agreed on.  I also mentioned the need for Wit to find her own voice.  Voice is everything.  Again, Calvin's voice is wildly different from Dennis's.

It's the shape of a story that interests me.  If the writer knows what they're doing, it'll show, no matter if there are mistakes made along the way.  Someone like Robinson obsesses over the mistakes.  Everyone does that, to material they hate, or don't trust, or haven't been preconditioned, at any rate, to love.  Robinson grew up reading classic science fiction, in an environment that nurtured his devotion to the form, if not the craft.  To him, the form was all about conforming, adhering to preconceptions, or merely being a writer (Heinlein) that he greatly admired.

And we're all prone to be bias to someone we already love.  The problem is, if you even consider being critical, will you become too critical, or will you simply see the wiggly lines in between the structures the writer has honed over the years?

I constantly think back to Star Trek, because it's the first thing I learned extensively, outside of school, and how little fans tend to be critical of, say, the original series, but couldn't be more critical of the later ones, especially the increasingly less popular later series, Voyager and Enterprise.  Culturally, we assume anything that isn't popular is either totally deserving of its poor reputation, or something we can rally around (hence making a new cult following) and hope its reputation will change in time.  (Conversely, and perhaps increasingly so, we're skeptical of popular things, too.)

The fact that I kept on liking Star Trek while it became easier for others to start, well, hating it, produced an interesting phenomenon.  Eventually I started thinking of Star Trek very much in the terms Robinson did his beloved science fiction.  I began to compare similar stories and weigh their relative worth.

The difference, I hope, is that I didn't let precedence (Robinson placed a premium on Heinlein, at least in part, because he considered Heinlein the father of modern sci-fi) get in the way.  It was the storytelling itself, the how of it, the craft, the voice.

Sometimes it's a matter of being able to handle having multiple voices.  Sometimes people merely choose the one they want to focus on and ignore the rest.  (It's hard to argue this to those people.  They always dispute that.)  And if not ignore, then do the whole hate-watch thing.  Except I've learned there are a lot of great voices out there.  I've found that a lot of them are more or less undiscovered.

But they're out there all the same.  And as a writer, it behooves me to have a voice, too.  Regardless of when the next time I talk shop with Wit happens to be, I'm glad I've imparted that already.  To me, it's easily the most important advice possible.  Yeah, success is great, which is what accessibility makes relatively easy to achieve.  But I don't want success.  Or, just success.  I want my writing to mean something. 

The very fact that Wit is already writing for her own interests, that encourages me.  I originally wanted to, given another conversation, encourage her to start submitting early.  I thought that was the difference I could make, if she wants to be a full-time writer some day.  But that's not really what's most important to me.  That's something I've realized, recently. 

I'm glad Wit has a mother who's interested in her writing, too.  Looking back, that's something I'm incredibly grateful for, something of immeasurable value, regardless of whether my mother was a perfect or ideal audience.  She wanted to read, to understand me.  My writing is my voice.  With a little encouragement, Wit is ahead of me already.  If that's all I'll ever really know about her writing, it's already enough.  It's enough. 

Having a Writer-in-the-Family is a very good thing.  Not because I have a chance to mold her to my interests, but because knowing she's there, and maybe even her knowing I'm here, is its own validation.  Writers are a curious breed.  Getting published, today, is just a part of being a writer.  For me, being a writer doesn't mean anything unless I've got something to say.  Like Robinson, there are plenty of people who disagree, who revel in being a part of something they themselves have admired.  But it's not the form, but the art that interests me.  I think Wit understands that.  And maybe, that's someone else who understands me.

To me, that's writing.