wendigomountain (Clint Harris) has a post up here describing this nameless DREAD, this underlying tension that haunts him from time to time. It brought back some of the old debates on Broken Circles.

Here is my response:
"...a ways back there was a place called Broken Circles (now defunct) where a lot of writers and critics that wanted to turn things on their heads got together. They were all writing the same sort of fiction in parallel, but without intending to be -- semi-fantasy, semi-horror, semi-literary, dark, surreal. The one thing in common was this all-pervading sense of dread.

I think it ties into what you're talking about here. I know I wake up every day and wish I could pull up roots. My job doesn't pay the bills either. I feel trapped. Disconnected from family, friends. Bored, but a terrifying type of boredom.

I think it's the zeitgeist of modern America, where we've siloed ourselves away from everyone else and doped ourselves numb on television... That we are all empty and hungry for something, but we don't know what, so we buy the next toy or gadget or got out and eat a ton of food or (in my case) start the next hobby but we secretly fear there might not be anything to fill the void. But that's just my theory."

Well, I've been keeping up with the priorities pretty well.

The baby has started playing peek-a-boo and is starting to really love the "Ma" syllable. She's so great.

Taking a break from the running because I just about injured myself last week. Was hobbling for two days and I still have a hitch in the calf. Can't afford a hitch come the half-marathon.

Been playing guitar. Relearning songs that I used to know. Learning some new ones. "The Wabash Cannonball" is surprisingly pretty.

Amtgard was doing pretty good, but we are in the vacation season and I also have to taper the pounding on my legs so I can finish the half-marathon without tearing a muscle or (worse) an achilles tendon.

Been editing the novel. Just over 1/4 of the way through. It actually seems pretty fun. I'm too close to it, though, so my view is no where near 20/20.

The only thing I've been intending to do that I haven't done is go back to Kung Fu. I really should get around to that. I just have to decide which day I can do it, and stick to that. Part of the reason I've been putting it off is I know I'll be under pressure to come every day and teach classes and everything else, and i just don't have time for it. Too many other goals to accomplish.

Well, I was pretty oblivious to the Nebula nomination process up until "Teddy Bears and Tea Parties" ( http://www.chizine.com/teddy.htm ) got struck by lightning and got its vote. I am not a SFWA member of any type and hadn't really considered becoming one, so I don't get a vote. But now I kind of wish I'd joined. Beyond that fact that I might have met a lot of folks and they might have read my story, I was thinking -- there are just so many great stories out there that deserve recognition, I wish I could vote for them all.

I know for sure I'd vote for Paul Jessup's "Open Your Eyes", and I'm pretty sure Cat Valente would get my vote for "Fairyland" for the Andre Norton award, but there are so many other great stories out there by Michelle Muenzler, William Ledbetter, Jonathan Wood, and Amal Mohtar, I don't even know where to begin recommending.

C'mon people, I don't have a vote, but other folks do: What should they be looking at? What should they be reading?

Take the chance. Introduce me (and the other readers) to your best work and the best work of others.

I only have three rules for this:
1) Recommend one (and only one) of your own qualfied works, if you have any.
2) Recommend your absolute favorite work of the last year by someone OTHER than you.
3) Be nice. No cutting down anyone else's work, even sideways.

C'mon folks, this is free publicity for everyone. Hop aboard! Spread it around! Repost it! Pimp your stories! :) I can't promise to read everything, but I'll definitely give it my best shot!

If you are an associate or full SFWA member, you probably know this already, but Nebula Award Nominations are open.

An unforeseen consequence of this is that all 3 of my published stories are eligible for nomination voting --

And from what I hear, "Teddy Bears and Tea Parties" (published by the wonderful folks at ChiZine) may even have distant shot at a nomination!

By distant shot, I mean distant -- one vote so far, but it's my first vote and it's on my first paid short story sale, and I never thought I'd get any votes at all -- so: *bouncy bouncy bouncy with joy* :)

Please, I need your help. If you haven't read the story yet, give it a look. If you like it, give it a vote (if you're an SFWA Member), and, if you're not, repost or retweet the link and mention it might be worth a vote ;)

http://www.chizine.com/teddy.htm

I just got back from vacation, and I'm trying to get back into my writing and exercise and everything-else habits. Because that's what writing or exercise or anything you want really want to needs to be: a habit. If your hobbies aren't habits, you won't do them.

Coming back from vacation is a lot like starting all over again from scratch. Setting tiny goals like 250 new words a day or playing the guitar for 15 minutes or keeping to your exercise schedule. Meeting them. Step by step getting the positive habits running again.

It seems that I only have time for about three daily hobbies. I've tried several times working in a fourth or fifth, and things just start spinning out of control pretty quick. Accountability, like this journal, helps, but really I think that there's just so much time to spend when you're working full time.

What I'm working on now is setting up some hobbies on specific days of the week. Amtgard is like this. Running could easily be like this. Following certain TV shows (as much as I hate TV, sometimes shows really are good) can be like this. The trick is to make it repeatable. And to make sure it's fun. And to make sure that there's enough breathing room to see the wife and child.

One of the things I've done to get my novel writing back on track is to start reading my novel at bedtime to my wife to get her feedback. Mostly I can do this because we've already established "Harry Potter Time" where we read to the baby (really to each other), and also the baby is too young to understand my novel (which is very violent). We're about 1/4 of the way in already, and I'v found a lot of things I hadn't found before. The novel will be greatly improved by this.

I have also started working on some of my short stories again and -- every once in a while -- feel the stirrings of new ideas. I know everyone says it, but it's true -- the muse strikes most often when you're already writing. The work of writing, it seems, has a snowball effect on your creativity. Ideas start smashign and crashing around everywhere.

Sure, you have to read to write (as the saying goes), but you have to WRITE to write too.

I've been keeping up with my list pretty well. I failed to play guitar or write last night, but that's the first night since I started. I won't be able to do guitar while I'm on vacation this week, but hopefully I can find some more writing time.

1) Writing - Outlined some ideas for a story. Nothing really clicked, but it was good practices.
2) Guitar - Practiced a few songs.
3) Swords - Nada. Decided to rest (see running)
4) Kung Fu - Did Xingyi 5-element linking form, a little Yang Taiji, a little Sun Taiji.
5) Running - Only made 2.5 out of my scheduled 5 miles. Didn't rest enough Monday night (too much sparring), so my legs gave out.

I don't know about you, but life has been plowing me under. There's never time to send out a story to markets, never time to do that last rewrite, never time to do the other non-writing-related stuff in life.

Part of this is because my wife an I just had a baby (she's 5-months old and a joy, too), part of this is because there's just so much I'm trying to do. WAAAY back in the day, I used to report on if I had worked on Guitar, Kung Fu, and Writing the previous day. In an effort to get my life organized and heading in the direction I want it to go, I am trying something similar, but I'll try to keep it short:

1) Guitar - Played a few songs, rocked out to When the Saints Come Marching in. Practiced my hammer ons and pull offs.
2) Writing - Failed to write anything or work on any outlines or send any stories out.Been waiting for feedback on the novel too long. Been using it as an excuse not to write. Will do better.
3) Swords - Sparring practices with Adam and Mike. Practiced footwork and strikes on Bob.
4) Kung Fu - Nothing. Will do better.
5) Running - Scheduled rest day.

I haven't written for five days.By the "if you've written today, you are a writer" definition that I subscribe to, I am not a writer.

But the good thing is, it's an easy problem to fix. All I have to do is write something -- anything -- and I'm back in the game.

Any other confessions out there?

Day tripped it to Banner Wars 09 on Saturday. The JC pickup team fell thru, so I managed to get onto the Green Dragon team -- and we won! Went out to eat with some great folks (and Tugen), and ditched for a good 5-6 hours, so I fought for about 9-11 hrs straight.

The running has been helping. My calves didn't cramp and my hamstrings are great. Only thing sore is my quads, arms, and torso. Wait, that's the rest of my body. Darn ;)

I had a blast and had a good time hanging out with folks. This is really what Amtgard is about :)

Sorry there haven't been any writing theory posts for the last two weeks, but I was still recovering from Florida and the end of the novel. I've been suffering from what I call a "lack of momentum."

You see, once you start writing stories or a novel or poems or even essays, if you write every day you develop a head of steam. Not only does writing become a habit, but you don't feel right if you don't write. You feel off balance, leaning forward, like you're standing atop a racing train and suddenly it's pulled the brakes. You're going to fly off. Get lost in the sky. Crash.

I've been feeling like that. Unfulfilled. Off balance. Uncentered. Because I haven't bee writing and I haven't been submitting short stories.

Well, I've got good news to report -- not only have I started submitting stories again (I was at 0 out-to-market), but I wrote 4,211 words yesterday on a from-scratch rewrite of my WOTF Semifinalist short story "The Eye of God."

It was one of the first things I wrote after I started writing again, and I was never completely happy with it. I tried rewriting it a few times, just a once-over edit, but it never really worked. I always knew it needed a rewrite from scratch and a different voice. Well, yesterday I was finally gripped with a passion to fix the story -- and now there are only two scenes left. Two very difficult scenes. A steep hill for my train. Sure, it's off to a racing start but that hill is still scary.

But I can do it. I can do it. I can get up that hill.

And you know something -- you can too. We're all little-trains-that-could, here. Maybe you're writing something that's beyond your skills and it feels stuffy and stilted, maybe you're plagued by self-doubts about your editing prowess, maybe you're a pro looking for a better writing process because you feel unfulfilled, or maybe you've always wanted to write and you've just never started.

Well, my advice is to just shovel some coal on the fire and get the engine started. Get the wheels turning. They may creak, they may be rusty, but get them turning an the rust will come off and the creaking will get better. Get your train started. It doesn't have to be an Olympic start. Plenty of time my train just starts limping ahead 100 or 200 words at a time. That's fine.

Because momentum BUILDS. As long as you keep the coal shovelled and keep water in the boiler, those wheels will turn -- and that train will MOVE. And if your train is moving, eventually you will get to the destination.

Our very own will_couvillier posts an interview with Darrell Schweitzer.

http://will-couvillier.livejournal.com/55143.html

Gratz, Will!

One thing I've seen endless posts on is "Finding Your Voice", as if there is a magical voice that is yours -- and one day you'll just run into your voice and BOOM you'll be a real writer with a real style.

First I need to be clear here. I'm not sure if this is a revolutionary view, but it is certainly MY view and I haven't seen it anywhere else:

I do NOT believe that if you keep writing you'll just accidentally run into "Your Voice" and then you're done and the quest is over. In fact, I don't believe that a writer has a single voice at all. No, indeed, I believe a writer has as many voices as he/she decides to DEVELOP, and each of those voices will be unique to the writer.

You see, VOICE is a TOOL. Each voice is slightly different, sure, and each one has different strengths. That's why having multiple voices at hand is extremely useful -- each voice can be employed in a different story or even in a different chapter in the same novel in order to heighten certain effects.

Voices can be short. Brutal. Rhythmic. Human skin stretched tight on drums.

Other voices twist and writhe about and keep diving into different holes until you can't see where they're going in the dark tunnels of mind and then in one heartbeat they leap out at you and grab you like you're a rabbit and shake you once, twice, thrice and leave you bleeding and twitching in the mud.

They can be anything you want. Quick, sassy, velvety, violent, whatever.

But all voices have two elements in common:
1) They are composed of words
2) In order to use one, you have to DEVELOP it first

There's that word again. Develop. Why do I keep saying "develop" when everyone else says "find"? Well, first let's discuss how most writers develop a voice.

( How most writers develop a voice. )

( A repeatable process to develop voice and style FASTER. )

Recently Finished:
- "The Aneid" (audiobook) by Virgil
- "The Da Vinci Code" (audiobook) by Dan Brown
- "Doctor Sax and the Great World Serpent" (audioplay) by Jack Kerouac
- "Nowhere, Texas" (audiobook, abridged) by Ralph Compton
- "Red Headed Step-Child" by Jaye Wells (a hardcopy book!)
- "The King in Yellow" by Robert Chambers (daily lit)

Still in Progress:
"Open Your Eyes" by Paul Jessup
"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville
"Father Goirot" by de Balzac
"Ulysses" by James Joyce

Rewriting was the great mystery for me. It took a long time for me to come to grips with it, and only now has it started to feel easy, natural, and enjoyable -- which is to say, only now has it become what it should have been all along. Now I am not one of the world's great writers and I don't pretend to be, but for a while I was looking for help with rewriting, and I could never find the type of information I was looking for.
( A history of me and rewriting )
And now, based on the fact that I don't feel like I'm swimming upstream any more when I rewrite, I am here to share with you the three major techniques I have used in rewriting. The list below does not contain every type of rewriting out there. But these techniques have helped me, and they certainly have value:


Technique #1) Tweaking the words (best if done while READING ALOUD)
- I use this to tighten and clarify things, and I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to read the words ALOUD. It helps me find missing words, missing prhases, and silly mistakes. When I make a change, I re-read it aloud again, and keep making changes until it reads smoothly and falls smoothly from the tongue.

This is the majority of what I did for the current novel, and man it makes the rewriting process easier. It's also easy to see where you need more material needs to be added details or where something just isn't working.

Technique #2) Adding more material
- Also did this for the current novel, where Technique #1 pointed out issues. This is where the scene isn't quite set or the character emotions seem to change too suddenly or an important scene or point goes flying past too quickly. You can also SUBTRACT material in this step, but that happens a lot less frequently for me (everyone is different). Most subtractions for me occur in Technique #1, where I've been too long-winded.

Technique #3) Rewrite from scratch
- I did this TWICE for novel #2. Basically you take the novel scene by scene and completely retype it, usually in a different voice or style or maybe from a different POV.

My advice: Don't do this one unless you absolutely have to. It is the most frustrating, the most tedious, and the most painful way of rewritng. That said, you will learn A LOT by doing it. But most of the energy to finish novels comes from keeping your morale up, and this technique really saps my optimism. Your mileage may vary, but I recommend not getting to the point you need to do this.

The best ways I've found to avoid MANDATORY from-scratch rewrites are:

A) Choose your voice, point of view, and tense carefully beforehand as a need to change any of these will cause a from-scratch rewrite, guaranteed. If you think things through, hopefully you can avoid most of these -- though every once in a while you may find a chapter that needs to be changed around.

B) Rewrite your chapters as you go -- before you start your next chapter/page/whatever, re-read progress from the day before ALOUD, and edit it as you go. This will enable you to complete several of the biggest edits as you go and thus dodge the need for huge fixes later.

Note: DO NOT get too bogged down with this. If you only have an hour to write, make sure you get at least half of that hour in on getting new words down.

C) Have a plan for the book. Even if you write by the seat of your pants like I do, you should stop every once in a while and project what you think is going to happen next. This will prevent you from getting too lost and may save you from going too far down a blind alley. Usually these projections end up being completely wrong, but that's okay. They're just meant to give you the tools to make better decisions in medias res.
( Final thoughts on rewrites )

Well, I'm pretty new to the novel process -- I've only written 3 (2 in serious states of disrepair and 1 just finished, and NONE of them sold) -- but I'd like to express my feelings at this early stage on the primary challenges I faced since I believe these problems are common to most other writers.

Challenge #1: DURATION. Overcoming 300 or 400 empty pages.

I had simply never written anything long. Up until 2000, the longest short story I had written was maybe 25 pages, and most were around 8. The sheer scope of a novel seemed impossible. How to fill all those words? Of course, this didn't stop me. I tried several times to write a fantasy novel (ages 16, 18, 23) and was stymied by what felt like a LACK OF PLOT. In reality, it was a LACK OF CHARACTER MOTIVATION, but I was too early in the process to figure that out. I kept trying to foist unreasonable demands on my characters and watched them rebel and the whole process fall apart in less than 50 pages.

Suitably deterred by both real failure and by short story burnout (I had just finished my BA in Creative Writing), I stopped writing for several years. During the 2000 downturn I was laid off, however, and my dreams of writing fiction for a living once again (briefly) awakened.

Solution: I decided I had to write something novel-length that held together, to prove that I could.

Process:
1) I picked an idea that I liked a lot and was motivated by but was willing to see fail and be lost forever because I had a good clue that this first novel would suck.
2) I developed characters WITH CONFLICTING DESIRES (I cannot stress this point enough, as these desires make your plot.)
3) I made a list of about a dozen possible conflict points an complications.
4) I started writing. I decided to do "A Book in a Week". I wrote for 18 hours a day for 12 days straight (a lot longer than a week, neh?) and presto!, a 90,000 word novel came out the other end. Only it wasn't presto!, really. The novel was not salvageable -- too preachy, too didactic, too weak -- but I had at last proven that I COULD WRITE SOMETHING THAT LONG and have it HOLD TOGETHER.

Next post:
Challenge #2: REWRITING. Learning how to rewrite and not to fear it.

Sorry for not posting recently. I'm working on a schedule of updates so I keep everything going here, but RL is crazy and then of course there is the novel --

Which is DONE! Beta draft is ready. Finished it on Saturday, September 5, probably somewhere around 10:00am at Starbucks.

Now the big thing is that I'M LOOKING FOR BETA READERS.

So if you're a writer friend of mine or an RL friend and you're interested in the premise and have the time, drop me a PM with your email address and I'll send a copy over. But be warned, I'm hoping for a 3-4 week turn around!

So what's this novel all about anyway? Well, here's a thumbnail from the query letter:
"A dark fantasy set in a fictional county in Texas during the Great Depression. It features Cherokee witches, evil spirits, a romance, and a range war complete with both horses and pistols and Model T's and Tommy guns."

I, of course, feel it is a work of genius -- but I am biased ;)

( And for those of my RL buddies new to beta reading who would like to give it a shot here are 5 rules of etiquette that will guarantee a good crit. )

Well, I'm an odd duck -- most people are -- but I decided to try the 16PF personality test, to see what it would come up with, and it seems pretty accurate to me.

Personally, I wish I had a little less (social) anxiety, and was a little less private/quiet -- but otherwise I'm pretty happy with my personality.

Lit Agent Rachel Gardener has an interesting post today about the subjectivity of the publishing biz, including a list of famous rejections that nowadays seem silly. She talks specifically about how agents and indusrty react, but in the comments there is also discussion about how little of the %age of population you need to have a best seller -- that the vast majority of people can hate your book and you can still have a raging success -- as long as the RIGHT people -- the buying people -- like it.

As my novel isn't *quite* done yet (only 30% of the rewrite is done), I'm not dealing with novel rejection yet. But short story rejection -- yes. Lots and lots of rejections.

Someone in the comments to RG's post says that if you're destroyed by rejection, then you're not yet a mature artist with the confidence to write. I don't think that's necessarily true. Because, reaction to rejection is also subjective. I know, for myself, some days I don't care and other days I am devastated.

So, really, the publishing industry is subjective on the writer's side too. That would make it a triangle of subjectivity. Hmm. Here's hoping it's not a Bermuda Triangle, eh?.

I am in the cleanup phase before people are allowed to see the beta draft.
This is the phase where my last novel died.

Counting revisions by chapter:


And it's pretty fun to read; at least for me.