Tag Archives: Writing

I Think I’ve Figured Things Out

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The Universe has a way of bringing things into balance. During the past month, I have suffered from debilitating self-doubt as to my choice to become a writer. Not much of a choice, really, since writing isn’t something I could ever stop doing.

I’ve also grown angry thinking that I had to write about characters and stories I had no interest in just so I could appease the few regular readers I had.

My head has been in a very weird place.

Now that my illness is abating (both the mental and the damn flu), I’ve taken a closer look at what I have been doing and where I want to go with my writing. Observant readers have noticed that Sinistral Scribblings has undergone a facelift, but have you also noticed that the navigation bar has been reduced to just two items?

I’ve taken down all of my categorized writing: Easy Money, The Linden Tree, Wyld Hunt, Hannah Anne – all of it. Don’t worry! It’s not gone, just hiding. I left “Courage, Woe and Truth” up because that’s not my writing, and it will never change, but it deserves to be read. Please do so.

Here’s the thing. I need to write for me. I get that now. When I do, I can only hope that you’ll come along for the ride. As such, the focus of Sinistral Scribblings has changed.

I find that I have a hard time writing anything of novel length with any consistency. I tend to make a good start and then just sort of fade away and never go back to it. I do better when I serialize things – take a look at Hannah Anne; 8 blog stories that tell so much about Hannah and the world she lives in, all set forth in bite-sized chunks.

My course now seems clear. I’m going to write my stories – my novels – as blog posts. All of them. Over the past few days, I’ve been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes organizing of a number of my larger works to get them ready for being written in a serialized format. Whenever possible, (and I hope it is all the time), each entry will be an answer to a writing prompt. I’m not going to tell you at this time which stories I’ve chosen for this new focus (yes, there are more than one), but I can say that the first will be from the Easy Money universe, written as a response to the current Master Class writing prompt.

“What about the new blog you just launched? In Other Worlds?” you ask. Well, that’s going to sit for a bit. I see it as a place where I can start putting the these books together in a true novel format. Maybe. I’m not so sure anymore. We’ll just have to wait and see.

So, stick around! I think you’ll be pleased to see a few favorites return over the course of the coming weeks. Maybe some characters and stories you didn’t like too much, as well – and maybe something altogether new. In the next few days, look for an intimate story about futuristic hit-man Reggie and his best friend/lover, soldier of fortune, Gris.

 

From the Notebooks – “So Far”

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This is a semi-autobiographical piece I wrote in my early 20′s. I won’t tell you what is fact and what is fiction, but it made me chuckle as to which is which. Maybe you can guess – I promise to answer truthfully.

How many times have you read a story that was about the loss of innocence? How many times, do you think, were those stories based upon the actual life stories of the authors? I’d put my money down on most of them. What is that rule that all good high school English teachers tell their students? Write what you know. Okay. This is what I know.

I grew up in rural upstate New York. Not the upstate generally recognized by people from the Big Apple, which would be the Catskills, but further north. Just about forty miles north of Albany in a little town called Wilton. Wilton isn’t exactly someplace you’ll find on a map, although if you can find Saratoga Springs you’re pretty close. Wilton doesn’t boast much except for corn farmers and Grant’s Cottage.

Well, that’s how I remember it from when I was young. Now, there are at least fifteen different housing developments, all aimed at the upper-middle classed consumer. There’s a country club and a park, two fire stations, and three huge shopping malls. I shop at the malls from time to time, though I never joined and probably never will join the country club. Still, I like to remember Wilton the way it was.

I remember the long walks through the now non-existent woods. I remember playing hide and seek in the corn fields with my friends. I remember fishing for brown trout in the Snook Kill Creek. I remember sitting under the big maple tree in our front yard on breezy summer days reading old, beat up, musty smelling copies of “The Lord of the Rings.” I remember those same types of days, when I would ride my bike five miles to a part of the Snook Kill and sit on a boulder in the middle of the creek and just listen to the birds singing and the sound of the waterfall farther upstream. I remember a lot of things about my childhood, a lot of nice, pleasant memories, but almost all of them are very, very lonely.

I never really had any friends when I was a kid. Well, there were the kids that lived on my street. They usually beat me up or never picked me for their teams when they played sports. The kid who beat me up the most was the girl who lived next door. She’d punch me in the nose, kick me and pull my hair. When I tried to fight back, that got her even more enraged and she would shout, “You’re not supposed to hit a girl!” and attack me with renewed vigor. All the other kids would cheer her on because I was the one who broke the rules. All I was trying to do was defend myself. I haven’t seen any of them since I was sixteen, but I’m convinced they probably think I’m a wife beater because I would hit a girl in self defense.

So, I spent a lot of time watching the neighborhood kids play football or baseball, or whatever it was they were up to. My brother got picked first all the time. He was the best athlete on the street. I hated him for it. I fought more with him then I did with the girl next door. He hurt me pretty bad sometimes. Once, he even hit me in the head with an aluminum baseball bat. The baseball bat was a gift from my father to him. My brother was on little league teams, the county soccer teams and the football teams. In high school he got a varsity letter for playing soccer. I wasn’t on any of those teams. My parents wouldn’t let my play. I guess they figured that if the neighborhood kids didn’t want me, then I would only embarrass them if I played some organized sports. Truth is, I really wanted to play, I was just never given the chance.

Looking back now, I can see that I wouldn’t be the person that I am today if I hadn’t been beaten up by girls and not allowed to play sports. I guess that my isolated childhood and the feelings of anger and resentment I felt back then have made me the satirist I am today. I learned how to think about things and how I could change them. I spent a lot of time daydreaming about a better world for myself, that now has developed in me a certain empathy for suffering in others around the world. My old anger and resentment has transformed into a dark, satiric humor that seems to weed its way into everything that I write.

Eventually, I stopped watching the kids, and struck out on my own so to speak. I started taking long walks through the woods and riding my bike everywhere. Whether I was walking or riding, I would always find some quiet place to sit down and read or just think. By this time, I was reading quite a lot, usually anything that I could get my hands on. Fantasy, horror, sci-fi and even non-fiction like scientific journals and nature books. My head started to fill up with seemingly trivial information that just couldn’t wait to come pouring out of my mouth to anybody who would listen. As you can imagine, this made me even more unpopular among my peers because they now saw me as a nerd. Not just an average nerd, but an annoying one as well. And all that happened was that my feelings of isolationism grew stronger.

My parents, instead of being proud of me for being smart, were upset because I neglected my schoolwork for my own interests. My grades never suffered for it though, I was maintaining a steady A-, they just wanted a steady A+. I never caved in to them though, I just kept on reading. I would even read my books in class. The teachers didn’t like that either. Many was the time I found myself in the guidance councilor’s office. He would tell me that I was a smart kid, that I was doing well, but that I was setting a bad example for the other kids in my classes. He thought that they would follow my lead and not pay attention in class either. I would tell him that he was full of bunk, nobody was going to follow my lead, I was a nerd. They would just laugh at me after class. I told him that he had nothing to worry about. Still, he insisted, I should stop. Well, I never did. I wound up graduating ranked number sixty-seventh in a class of over five hundred. Not bad for someone who never paid attention in class.

Reading all the time, I eventually got the idea that I would be able to write as well. My first attempts at it were horrible to be honest. I tried to write some fantasy fiction about a ghost who was haunting the forest around a castle. In two words, it sucked. So, I tried sci-fi, mystery and romance and they were all mediocre. I couldn’t write, and that really depressed me. I had thought that because I had read so much, I would be qualified to be a writer. Boy, was I wrong.

Then, I discovered Vivaldi. I had locked myself in my room after a particularly bad day at school and was fooling with the tuner on my radio. I kept turning to the left, left again, and once more, when suddenly, the speakers breathed forth the most beautiful music I had ever heard in my life. It was beautiful, but sad at the same time. It was the second movement of “Spring” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” I sat, entranced by the emanations coming from my radio until the entire “Four Seasons” was over. After that I left the radio on, grabbed a pencil and some paper, and started to write. I stayed up all night, and only stopped for some short breaks because my hand had cramped up. By the time the sun came up, I had finished my first work of short fiction. It was about a boy who discovers that school is nothing but a government program meant to brainwash the citizens. The boy avoided the brainwashing process because he drew pictures during class and didn’t pay attention. You see? Write what you know.

Just as exciting as writing my first real story, was how I was able to do it. The music played by the classical station was what got my brain focused enough in order to be able to write. To this day, I still listen to the “Four Seasons” every time I start a new project. My classical music collection now consists of over 500 compact discs; enough for me to be able to choose the right music to set the tone of my work. (By the way, I have 19 versions of the “Four Seasons”). When my wife is home, I have to listen with headphones on because she doesn’t like the music as much as I do. She isn’t able to talk to me, because I can’t hear her, but she says that it’s okay; she’s just happy to see me writing. It is one of our sources of income after all.

After the brainwashing story, I wrote many more short stories; most of which dealt with dark subjects. Suicide, murder, drug use and vampires often dominated my plots. I also wrote poetry about the same types of things; Death and decay. I became morbid. I always dressed in black, never talked to anyone and always had a far off look in my eyes. People became afraid of me. Most of the faceless adults on the street probably thought I was a crook, up to no good. Actually, everywhere I looked I saw death and it horrified me. I remember something now one of my English teachers once said, “Writing is a process of change.” You got that right. I sure had changed.

I started smoking cigarettes about the same time as my physical change was taking place. When I got up the courage to buy my first pack to try them out, the clerk asked me if I was old enough to be smoking. “Sure,” I said, “anybody can smoke. It doesn’t matter how old you are. It’s just that the law says how old we can be when we should start.”

“What do you want to smoke for?” The clerk asked.

“I’m committing suicide,” I replied. “Smoking seems to be the most socially acceptable way of doing it nowadays. Of course, it does take an awfully long time.” The clerk laughed, and sold me the cigarettes even though I was under age. Out of all the old habits I’ve had and broken, I still smoke. I’m still slowly killing myself.

My ninth grade English teacher found out about my writing talents when she assigned the class with a creative writing project. We were told to write about anything. I just turned in a vampire story I had written earlier in the year. My teacher put it in the school literary journal. She came to me about a week later and said that a publisher friend of hers would like to see more of my work. I told her no. I didn’t want to publish anything I had written. She seemed disappointed, but she didn’t push the issue. I have no regrets about not entering the publishing game at such an early age. I probably should have never gotten involved. But, what’s done is done.

After my work appeared in the literary magazine, I got an idea to write a very dark story. Well, very dark according to my parents. It was going to be about Satanism and Witchcraft. I bought a few books about the subject to get myself up to speed. The story was coming along great, but it was too long for me to finish in one night. The next day I went for a walk to figure out how I was going to finish it. When I got home, all of my books were gone as well as everything that I had ever written. I ran outside and saw my father in the back yard tending to a fire. Scattered about him on the ground were books. And in the fire were burning papers. I ran up to him and demanded to know what he was doing.

“Your mother found some stuff you were writing.” That was all that he said. That was all he needed to say. I had suspected my mother was crazy for a long time and this just proved it to me. I pleaded with my father to stop, he wouldn’t but I convinced him to let me keep the books he hadn’t burned yet. I collected my books, fled to my room and cried myself to sleep. It was five years before I wrote anything ever again. When I did, I was scared. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to ever again.

In the interim, my life hit rock bottom. During my remaining years at high school, I used my sob story of a life to get girls. I lost my virginity when I was seventeen and after that, I screwed everything that moved. Well, not everything, it just seemed as I was doing it a lot. I will admit, sex stroked the male ego I didn’t even know I had. I also found out that most of the girls I knew were actually willing to listen to that ever present babble of trivia. They said that I was fascinating. Why hadn’t they ever met me before? I told them I was too busy trying to fit into the walls. Oh, you shouldn’t do that. You have too much to offer the world, they would say. Yeah, okay. I never really listened to them. My belief that I didn’t belong to this society was too strong for me to even entertain the idea that I had something to offer it. I never let them know too much about me. Just enough so they would sleep with me.

After graduating from high school, I tried to attend college. I don’t think I was ready to go to college. I still don’t. When I got there, things went according to plan for about a week. Then I found out how easy it was to get alcohol. I lived the life of a drunk. I was never sober and stopped going to classes. I met a girl there and no matter how many times we told each other how much we wanted to fuck each other, we always got too drunk to actually do it. We hung out together a lot though anyway. I enjoyed her company. I wasn’t ready to abuse substances alone yet. That came later.

As it happened, going to college in Potsdam was the start of the downfall. I was drunk every day and I had stopped going to classes. I joined the Medieval Re-enactment Club where I became an instant member of the family. They loved me there. I was taken on as the clan musician. I would entertain the females while the males practiced at their fighting techniques. I had finally found people who actually accepted me. But, I screwed that up too.

Once every Fall, the MRC would hold a gathering. It was then that I found out that every member of the MRC was also part of a world-wide society. The Gathering that I was going to attend would include the MRC as well as the other people in the “Shire.” These other people were members of SCA, the Society for Creative Anachronism, which the MRC was a part of. We all dressed up in period medieval clothes and spent the weekend living in the woods in a very festive atmosphere.

Friday was the Gathering Day. That is the day when all who are invited show up and stories are shared around the campfire. I arrived in the morning. I was too excited about it not to be there. People from the MRC filtered in all day long but it was the newcomers I was more interested in. People came from all over Upstate New York, and a husband and wife from Pennsylvania. I spent all of that day sitting by the fire, meeting people and listing to the tales they had to tell. They often spoke of an event called the Pensic, where people in SCA from all over the country gathered in Pennsylvania for over two weeks to re-enact the medieval period. It was held in the summer, so I had missed it that year, but I vowed to attend next summer. I never did.

Someone finally noticed that I was not participating in the story-telling. I said I had no stories to tell. Come, come now, surely you can contribute something, they said to me, We must all join in. I didn’t know what to do. While I was entertaining thoughts of disappearing into the woods, someone from the MRC suggested that I play a tune on my wooden flute. I replied that I did not bring it with me. A female voice answered that I might borrow hers. I declined, insisting that a musician without his flute is no musician at all and she was surely better than I.

“A contest then,” suggested the man from Pennsylvania. “Your people say you are the best flute player that they have heard in years, but I’ll wager my wife will best you. If you win,” he said to me, “then you may have my wife tonight. If not, than you fight me in the tournament tomorrow!”

There were cheers all around, even from the man’s wife. Obviously, I would be defending my life tomorrow. I stood up.

“Well, it seems I have no choice in the matter. It is a contest you shall have. Madam…” And I turned the attention over to the woman from Pennsylvania.

She played a beautifully haunting Celtic lullaby. As we listened, I couldn’t help feeling that I wouldn’t see the sun set tomorrow. I could tell that her music moved through everyone, they all watched her in rapt silence. When she finished, all heads slowly turned in my direction and all I saw were looks of pity. I new what they knew, I was a living dead man.

The woman from Pennsylvania, Gwen, stood up and walked over to me. She held out the flute and said, “Go ahead, I know you can do it.” She winked and bowed low so I could see down her dress. I took the flute and thanked her. “A very moving piece,” I told her. I raised my voice so all could hear. “It appears that I will be fighting tomorrow.” Laughter all around. Then, very slowly, I started Greensleeves.

I started slowly at first and it may have seemed that I was stumbling over notes, but I wasn’t. The MRC folks had heard me do this hundreds of times. They knew what was next.

I started to speed up the tempo. At the start of the third time through, I was playing up to tempo, and one of the people from the MRC started to beat a drum. Four bars in, a second drum. Then another and another. By the end of the third time, I had four drums beating a medieval rhythm.

The fourth time we had sped up again and the rest of the MRC females were up and dancing around me. We played through three more times, when some of the new comers started dancing as well. Twice more, playing as fast as we could, we stopped. The cheers were deafening. Everyone was clapping and smiling, laughing when the man from Pennsylvania approached me.

“Well done, Master Minstrel! Well done! I think you have won the prize. Have fun!” He brought over his wife, introduced us, and left us.

After some more songs and stories and about five jars of mead later, I found myself with Gwen in her tent. I remember trying to stop her advances, saying something about her being married and she said that she wasn’t married. So, if memory serves, I think we did it. It wasn’t until Sunday night that I found out she wasn’t married, she was the man from Pennsylvania’s daughter and that she was fifteen. I never returned to the MRC. Bunch of sick mother fuckers.

Well, I was asked to leave Potsdam after only being there for two and a half months. I wasn’t attending any of my classes because I was either drunk, high, tripping or hung-over. I came back home and bummed from my parents while I searched for a job. I didn’t find one.

Four months after I came home from collage, my childhood ended. I received a phone call from the local Navy recruiter and I enlisted. In retrospect, joining the Navy was one of the major mistakes I made in my life, however, I am glad I did it. Without enlisting, I don’t think I would have ever grown up. The only thing the Navy did for me was cure me of immaturity. I grew up. I was officially an adult.

And it’s not so bad. Really.

Fame

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The problem with being a writer, is that you have to write. Even when you don’t want to. Especially if you don’t want to. Each time you skip a day of writing because you don’t feel like it, it becomes easier to not come back to it, and then you aren’t a writer anymore.

He tossed the book across the room in disgust with a snort. Reading those words again made him want to punch something. Wise words of writing wisdom from a man sitting pretty on the top of the publishing pile with all the luxury in the world to indulge in said wisdom. He took a large swallow of whiskey, emptying the tumbler, ice clinking.

On the other side of the room, his laptop sat, blue light bathing his desk. The screen was blank, cursor blinking. He had grand ideas a year and a half ago, to be sure. Tales of a magic wielding dwarf in a world swiftly accepting technology, a prehistorical herbalist in search of a magic tree, a witch with an obstinate pet goat, a mortician who could talk to the dead, a dark fairy who loved to kill – rattled inside his head with hundreds of smaller stories.

So, he started a blog, put his writing on it and they came. They read his stories. They even liked them. So he wrote more. And even more. He became famous among ten people, and it frightened him to his core.

The ideas came so fast, he couldn’t keep up and he started abandoning projects for newer ones.

And still they came.

And they wanted more.

They wanted more of the things he didn’t want to write.

So he took time off.

When he came back, desperation had given him authority to backhand fame and he took it out on his readers. He felt he had the right to test them. So he wrote dark, dismal suicidal things. And he chuckled while he wrote, at the falseness of it, at the pretentiousness, at how those little mad stories just sounded so ridiculous to him. He imagined himself full of silly teen angst; as some 15-year-old trying hard to write seriously about the pointlessness of life because they just realized how meaningless everything really is and they can’t cope with it.

In a frenzy, he hit the publish button. He wrote more and published again.

They came.

They praised him how superb his writing was.

All he could do was shake his head in wonder at the missed attempt to sucker punch fame. He drank until he could barely walk.

He sat for three days staring at that blinking cursor. The trash can had collected two empty bottles of Captain Morgan, one empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s and one empty bottle of Jose Cuervo. He lost count of how many cigarettes he smoked.

He wrote three sentences in those three days. “The problem with being a writer, is that you have to write what other people want you to write. Even if you don’t want to. Especially if you don’t want to.”

He stumbled over to his desk, reached out and unplugged the laptop. He was watching from his chair across the room, ice still clinking in the tumbler, when, four hours later, the screen blinked off forever.

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Some truth, thinly veiled in third person, for the Master Class prompt, “Desperation had given him authority.” This is a work of (mostly) fiction.

The Shim Sham Man

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It’s a trick, sleight-of-hand, a sham.

At least, that’s what I tell myself it should be.

In truth, it’s two competing realities: one in my head and the other outside of it. A conflict that carries on daily, one that not even the greatest mediator can resolve.

Inside, it’s dark fae, witches, macabre morticians, lost dwarves, trees, dying soldiers, jazz musicians and darkness. They pound the inside of my skull, all shouting at my inner ear their remarkable stories, begging for their tales to be told. Each morning, I pick the one voice that shouts louder than the others and begin transcribing their words. The next day, the lottery renews.

That’s how I would like my mornings to go, but the outer reality can be bigger and louder than the inner, often when I don’t want it to. In many ways, I’m still a child and would do anything to shirk my duties. But, it is an onus I have put upon myself, a mantle of family that is heavier than any mountain.

So it is that I find myself on this morning, having chosen to listen to Athame describe her encounter with the lily-haired fae, that the outer world slammed me like a battering ram, Athame receding into the dark recesses while I sit reeling from it all.

How do I juggle these dimensions when the inner world is more real than the outer? When I grow angry and frustrated at being torn away from my friends, what should I do?

The daily morning ritual is just that, the time when the gates open is small and once they close, they do not open again until the next day. So many untold stories and the roster grows by the hour.

I wish it could be smoke and mirrors, an illusion of productivity, but most days, there are no words at all.

Well, what do you know? I wrote something for Trifecta. This week, we had to use the word “juggle,” the third definition of which is, “to handle or deal with usually several things (as obligations) at one time so as to satisfy often competing requirements.” I hope I got it right.

 

No Quarter

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You have entered the winter of your life. Those words, or something very much like them, buzzed around my brain-pan like hornets a week ago. I became forty-two years old last Wednesday and for some inexplicable reason, it bothered me. Until then, my birthdays were just another day in my life and I never gave them a second thought. This year was different. I am feeling my mortality.

I am feeling my uselessness.

I am feeling my failures.

Many years ago, I remember doing an assignment for school which required you to write a letter to your future self. You were to spill out all of your hopes and dreams, all of your teen angst. I saved that letter for many years, but at some point, it vanished, gone away with so many of my other possessions through countless moves about the country. I don’t remember much about what I wrote in that letter, but I do remember one point. One shining gem from that time has stuck with me. In that letter, I assumed I was writing to a forty-year-old version of myself that had become a famous writer.

It was an accepted fact of the letter. Not, “I hope by the time I’m forty I’ve written a book.” No, the entire letter was constructed as if being a published writer was a given, had already happened.

I could not envision my future self any other way.

I have struggled all my life to translate emotion into the written word. I have struggled with plot, theme, genre, character, setting, syntax, grammar – all of it. I have struggled to be good at writing. I have struggled with ideas.

I have struggled with comparisons.

When I submitted my first short story to a magazine almost fifteen years ago, the publishing industry stood as a giant bulwark that waves of hopeful authors crashed against, never breaching those fortifications. There was a process to follow to make it easier for a publishing house to even look at your proposal. You needed an agent and in order to get an agent, you needed to be published. A neat catch-22, but one that wasn’t impossible to surmount. At the time, the internet was in its infancy, but you could self publish, if you were willing to spend thousands of your own dollars through a vanity press. The system was set up to separate the wheat from the chaff, but the big houses still followed sales trends and if you wrote something that was part of the trend, you had a better chance of being successful.

I don’t think much has changed between then and now as far as the big houses go. It’s still very difficult to get published with them, they still follow trends, you still need and agent, etc. What has changed is that the internet has made self publishing an easy reality. So easy, that it has introduced a whole new wall to breach in order to be successful. While the traditional publishing route is a wall of expertise, the self publishing route is one of numbers. Vast numbers.

The self publishing market is saturated with, for lack of a better word, crap. So many people self publish their books just to say, “Hey look! I published a book!” and have paid virtually no attention to proofing, editing or even story or character development. Many of these books are unreadable they are so bad, but the public has been eating them up.

And so have the big houses.

The traditional publishing houses are beginning to look at the self publishing industry and paying attention to sales trends. In some cases, that’s a poor choice. Many self publishers are fiction bloggers (yes, like me) who have built up a big enough following that when they do self publish, they get sales from an already established fan base and it doesn’t matter whether the book has any quality to it at all. This blogger fan base buys the books to “help out.” I have witnessed first hand a fellow blogger self publishing a poorly written book and receiving tons of support for it.

Having any success at self publishing requires you to stand out from the crowd and that has made the whole process a popularity contest. You don’t need to be a good writer to have success self publishing. You have to be a good self promoter. Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites have become the gateway to self publishing and if you can use those to successfully build a following, you’re going to sell books. (I know the percentages are small, but it is a sales tactic being used.) I follow the blogs of some of these writers because I see potential in them. For the most part, I have enjoyed their stories and their creativity. Many of them are lazy writers though; their posts are glaringly full of errors, obviously not having been proofread or edited. And yet, they have large followings and receive regular positive comments on all of their posts.

So what does this all mean for me? It means I haven’t been published yet. I haven’t been able to break the walls of the big houses and I absolutely refuse to play the social media game of self publishing. My writing is also better then most books that get published (or so I like to believe and it has taken me many years to finally believe it) which may also be a hindrance. Apparently, people will pay for poorly written books and big houses will pick them up (I’m looking at you, 50 Shades).

I have too much integrity and pride in my creativity, in my art, to stoop this low.

I will continue to struggle without compromise.

I will refuse to buy books written by lazy writers. I have often complained on my blog about not having enough time to write. Part of the reason is that I do take the time to make sure that my blog posts are as error free as they possibly can be. If I am writing for someone else’s blog, I triple check everything to make sure that it is perfect. It’s called pride in a job well done, and I refuse to do any less.

Yes, the past week for me has been a roller coaster of emotion centering on my chosen profession. I haven’t written anything in over week as I struggled to figure out my place. Just yesterday, I was going to chuck it all as my mouse cursor hovered over the “delete” button for my blog. I pulled myself from that brink and decided to use this prompt to share what I have been going though even if I piss other writers off. Back near the beginning of this post, I mentioned struggling with comparisons. I’m done with that now. I’m going to stop worrying about why inferior authors are getting published and push on despite that.

I will do this.

I will be successful.

I will do it my way.

I may get angry comments and I may get supportive ones. Bring them both, but do not bring any virtual pats to the back and “Good for you’s.” I stand by my words and will not change them. What is done, is done. The past cannot be cured.

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SAM is running the Master Class now. Go check it out.

 

Shadow People

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They talk to me at night, demanding my attention, longing for escape, denying me sleep. In the back lit darkness, they route through my fingers, clacking buttons, forming the words of their stories.

                                                                                                                                      

Bonus post today for my first ever entry with Trifextra. The prompt was to explain why we write in only 33 words.

 

Wheat from the Chaff

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Writing, and making money doing it, is much easier in the 21st century than in the past, I think, and I blame the internet. It makes sense though, web sites need constant new content to bring in readers (traffic) and there are millions who are willing to provide it. But I also think that it’s still just as hard to “make it” as an author as it’s always been.

I’ve lived to see four decades so far (Nixon was president when I was born) and can easily remember a time before the silicon revolution. My earliest writings were either all done by hand or on a non-electronic ribbon typewriter. My first attempts at publication were done the hard and long way – by mailing my short stories out to magazines, crossing my fingers and hoping someone would publish it. A cold sell, if you will.

The world has changed since computers have become a common household appliance. Anyone can be a writer. There are many websites that offer free services to anyone who wants to create their own website. There are also many digital self-publishing outlets that will allow you to create e-reader friendly versions of your short stories, novels – what have you.

If anyone can do it, has becoming a published author lost it’s prestige?

The short answer is an emphatic, “No.”

Think about it. While the dynamics of publishing have changed, one thing remains the same – there aren’t a whole lot of people that are good at writing. Sure, there are people out there right now, blogging away and working on a book, that may never have done so 20 years ago, but are doing it now because the internet has made it easy. Some of them may be very good writers and an even smaller few will get the recognition they deserve. But it’s a handful.

As an internet writer, I have found myself brought into a community of other internet writers. Some are good, some are not so good. And, as anybody would, I tend to follow and read those people whose writing I like and not those people whose writing I find inferior. There are so many blogs that I visit only once, never to return, because I’ve either found the material or quality of writing just plain offensive. Writers that I read regularly I rarely leave comments for because I tend to get to them late and others have said all I wanted to say in their comments.

What I think I see being a part of the blogging/online writing community is this: All of the people that publishing houses would have rejected make up the bulk of this community. And you know what? I may be one of those people. I don’t know. I do know all of my short stories have been rejected by the magazines I sent them to and I can count on two hands the number of people who actually like my work. (Granted, my blog doesn’t have much exposure so the two hands thing doesn’t really mean that much.)

So, how do we separate the wheat from the chaff? The good from the bad? Judging by the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, I don’t think we can. (Let’s face it - pornography aside, the writing in those books is horrible.)

……………………………………………………………………………

And this post is going absolutely nowhere now. I’ve had iTunes blaring The Hatters and just got lost in the past three songs and my whole train of thought just up and went away.

You probably have the jist of where I was headed with this. ‘Cause, well, I don’t.

[This, by the way, is what happens to me Every. Damn. Day. I love music and as much as it helps my writing, it also hinders it. I'm just not gonna come back to this piece, because, frankly ... Bored now.]

Could I have a Word with you, please?

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Late last week, I made a decision that was very hard to make. My days have been filled with many tasks and I have been finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with them all. It’s strange, but I thought that the kids going back to school would help clear my schedule somewhat. Between the daily household tasks and my various writing projects, my days have been filled to bursting. I came to the conclusion that I need to trim the fat, so to speak. I needed to find somewhere to make a cut and free up some time so that I can work on the Easy Money comic and a novel.

I decided to step down as co-leader of Studio30 Plus.

Not to worry, though! Studio30 is in very capable hands. Kelly is still in charge and the support staff is still in place. I’m sure we will see some cool things from them in the future. I just couldn’t be a part of it anymore.

I wish the Studio30 staff continued success in the future.

I have also been having a difficult time focusing on one project. I feel that it is time for me to make a serious attempt at writing a novel, but I have too many ideas. I put the question to you last week on Facebook. Today, I announce the results of what you guys have chosen for my novel project.

Here are the results of the poll:

1800′s Novel – 3 votes
Hannah Anne Novel – 5 votes
The Linden Tree Novel – 8 votes

Since half the people who voted chose The Linden Tree, it is obviously the clear winner. There was some confusion during the polling process (when isn’t there? Whatever happened to President Gore?). A few people (parental units from both families) were unfamiliar with Hannah Anne. One even stated that after having read one story, “I thought that it was someone else who wrote it so I didn’t read any of the others.” I should take that as a compliment, because I did write them and if I was able to bust out of my usual style and tell a good and believable story from a woman’s point of view – I call that success! Cameron Garriepy, a wonderful fiction writer said this about what I did, “Really great details to ground the character, Eric, and female without being cliché.”

So, I think Hannah may have lost votes because some people didn’t think I wrote them. I also think that there may have been confusion surrounding The Linden Tree as well. When I listed in the poll, “Linden Tree Novel,” I meant an actual novel, not a continuation of the serial on the blog. So, if you were voting for the serial, that’s not what I was talking about.

What I think I’m going to do is continue The Linden Tree as a serial on the blog. I’m going to try for an episode a week. That should keep you voters satisfied. The reason for this is that the concept of the story was to tell it as a serial and translating it into a novel format might be more work than I can deal with right now (translating it into a comic, well, that could happen!). For the time being, I am going to begin work on a Hannah Anne book while still using Hannah Anne for writing prompt responses when appropriate (look for one for Scriptic.org in a few days! Thanks, SAM!)

So, that’s it, I think. The Linden Tree makes a comeback, Hannah Anne is getting her own book and Studio30 Plus is in better hands.

Onward!

 

I Actually Finished Something!

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This morning brought a great sense of satisfaction to me. I did something that I have only done maybe three times before:

I finished writing something longer than a blog post.

I finished writing something that took longer than one sitting to write.

It was also something I have NEVER done before:

I wrote a script.

Yes, you guessed it. I finished the first draft of the first issue of the upcoming Easy Money comic book.

Screenie of me having just finished the draft.

This is awesome. I feel kinda high right now – all giddy and ‘WHOO!”

I compiled the draft and sent it to Rob, the illustrator, to get his input.

I can’t wait to see this come to life!

scale-octavecode

All you have are 26 letters and 12 notes.

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The other day I was trying to read while listening to JS Bach’s Cello Suites. I say “trying” because the music kept grabbing my attention. Eventually, I closed the book and my eyes, letting the sounds of the cello drift me away.

Usually, closing my eyes while classical music is playing lulls me to sleep, but this day, my mind wandered and I began thinking about why I enjoy doing what I do – reading and writing & playing and listening to music. The answer was so simple, that I have to share.

Music and writing are comprised of simple building blocks.

26 letters and 12 notes.

And look at what those simple blocks have wrought! Everything from the complexity of a Mozart Symphony to simple punk of The Ramones and the heaviness of James Joyce to the children’s stories of Maurice Sendak and everything in between.

I find it amazing that stringing letters together form words, which form sentences, which form paragraphs, which form chapters, which form books. Or song lyrics, poetry, essays, memoirs, novels, short stories, plays – and all the different forms they can take.

12 notes of music can be combined in so many different ways (we’re talking Western music here) – stringing them together one note at a time, or piling one on top of the other to form chords, played at different speeds, different instruments playing different things but combining into a whole. And it gives us music of all different feelings – jazz, blues, rock, reggae, dance, hip-hop, classical.

Human history is full of creative people who have taken these 26 letters and 12 notes and done amazing things with them. Some of them have used those blocks to create something so new, it has never been seen or heard before. Others have taken old ideas and breathed new life into them, creating something that seems new, but it enjoyable just the same.

Think of these blocks as you read the words of Hemingway, Shakespeare or Tolkien – or when you listen to Beethoven, Muddy Waters or Queen. They are using the same simple tools that are available to you.

What will you do with them?