Thought-Drive

I've always found journeys interesting, from those most strictly defined to those unbound by figurative language. I find myself in position these days to stare into the back of many a contractor's vehicle. There's a surprising amount of carpet, and a somewhat unexpected amount or pride, also. What perplexes me more than anything though is how often the painter is surprised at how much space they're missing, that there was no plan to haul away what they just purchased. Staring at the back of their head, or the side of their face, all of their posture begs the question of "how did it get like this?" Much like the carpet, the shelves tell a story, the paint splatters, the piles of equipment, the disparate pieces of various machines, broken poles, ruined brushes, scraps of paper and plastic and plans. Recently, a kind of fog lifted for me. I had a few different things rolling downhill at me, and after dodging a few of them (or, letting a few of them roll over m...

Tis the season. For falling into funks. The writing has been proceeding, albeit at a slow pace. I've been hamstrung by the start and stop pace created by the research required to keep this off the ground. Normally, my chapters hover around 2,500 words. That's been strangely consistent across series, across genres, across years. I theorized early on that a specific amount of detail is required, like the rubber casing surrounding copper wires, to transmit understanding and create immersion for the reader. And it depends a lot on where the author is starting, what needs to be explained for the story elements to make sense, so the narrative can proceed. In more modern settings, I found the chapter word count dropping, because everything was so very similar to our modern world. In fantasy settings, not medieval but different worlds entirely, certain things had to be clarified, but where I didn't explain, the trappings created a safety netting in the medieval understanding. Some...

Been under the weather. Yet another phrase I cannot parse. The sickness delayed some things, but only delayed. However, even healthy I likely would've procrastinated in doing the research needed to get the latest project off the ground. I never did go back to looking into agents or researching publishers. I just don't feel right unless I'm writing. Maybe I should talk to someone about that. So, for a few different reasons, waking up at 5 with a story playing in my head was less than ideal. And for a few different other reasons, I rolled out of bed at 5:30 with my hands out, trying to catch the thoughts tumbling out of my mind. Two thousand words in, chiding the sun about finally getting up, I was happier, in general, and I think I was better, too, having learned some things already about my world and the characters in it. It's going to be a longer prologue, I think, an introduction to the internal logic of the space and some of the major actors moving about. I also...

"I want them to be great writers." I'm not sure why I jumped at that, but I did, as if I didn't need, or want, to hear anything else. Thinking back, there wasn't an ounce of pause in me, not a mote of modesty to wonder at my inability to help with that, or to wonder just how far I had to go to be great myself. Today I start a new job with that as my mission statement. Some years back, a bunch actually, my mentor told me about his lament at discovering the distinction between "a writer who teaches" and a "teacher who writes," and how he had looked up in recent days and discovered that he had become the latter, and the former, his goal, had gotten away from him who knows when. Like a lot of my lessons, I recall thinking to myself, "well, I don't want that to happen to me." So far, it hasn't. Speaking of things that haven't been happening. NaNoSubMo is tanking. I started research only yesterday about publishing and sub...

I think I need to go camping. Let me back up. The submission is done. That one is. Going in, I thought that I would wash my mind of the stress, distract myself after all the triple checking and document attaching with trying to start and then to finish the next story. It is November after all, and I've avoided NaNoWriMo every year someone has asked. I was either in the middle of something, or just finished something else. I finished the submission process November 1, so it only made sense. Except they only allowed one novel per author. I had worked on sharpening three. One fell out because they didn't want that kind of story, and another because, well, there was only one hole and I had two pegs. Instead of feeling like I was ready to move on, I felt like the task wasn't done. I finally looked up the Atlanta Writer's Conference details, and learned how many weeks I was late. They have agents, from publishers most people have heard of. And they have a finite number...

Tomorrow is the first day of the open submission period I've been aiming at with all the recent refinements and edits. Honestly, I finished the last, latest read-through a week early. Early morning head aches and close-faced line reading made for some dizzying moments. I felt better and worse about everything at the same time. I took a couple days off and went back through the submission guidelines again. Last year they got over 1200 entries, and 300 were rejected because the authors failed to follow instructions. Recent events prompted me to go through some extreme measures to ensure I wouldn't be in that unfortunate group. A one-sentence summary and a synopsis no longer than two, double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font pages. At first, I thought I had three books to send, then I read how they don't want young adult. Then I did some heavy deliberation on what young adult fiction is and how the term is defined. What clinched it, I think, is that when I went to write...

I recently posed a question to a creative professional I know. I presented to him this comparison, a created work completed in ones mid to late 20s, which was over time revisited and in some ways reimagined, versus the second or third draft of a piece completed years later, early to mid 30s. The ages are arbitrary. What I was getting at is one piece was done without the benefit of the extra years of wisdom and understanding, but it was edited and retooled, whereas the other was less modified but it benefitted the most from all available years of experience. His first answer was not an answer. He saw what I was getting at, at what I was really trying to investigate, and he said, "some ideas are just better than others." That struck a cord with me, but more on that later. I further clarified that it wasn't about good or bad, it was more about what is more valuable, what should, everything else being equal, be the better work, the one we complete at our most experienced, ...