Drawing Some Maps

Got a bit stumped with my novel outline over Spring Break, largely because there was no real time or space to think quietly with Lisa and the kids all home, partly because I'm stuck on some point of view issues.*

So I decided to work on setting issues today after running some errands. Wanted to get out of my left brain a bit, so I pulled out some maps I have showing possible configurations of the world's continents 250 million years in the future. Then I started modifying them to create some of the geographic and environmental conditions that I felt would facilitate the formation and style of the civilizations I already had in mind.

Relative success on that front. I have two regions roughly developed.

The one for the Draconic civilization features two large inland seas, a bunch of peninsulas, and a chain of volcanic islands off the coast. Geographically, it's kind of a blend of the Mediterranean with northeast Asia, bleeding into the Central Asian grassland/steppe. This works nicely with some of the imagery and city-state rivalries that I had envisioned. Essentially variants of the Hanseatic League, Peloponnesian League, Venetian maritime empire, and Japanese Shogunate are all in close proximity to each other.


This one for the Serpentine civilization has a huge, Andean or Himalayan-style mountain range with glaciers and a high temperate plateau dominated by a pair of large lakes with no outlets. Then there's a lower mountain range that forms the spine of the rest of the landmass. Within this central mountain range lies another valley with a large, fairly shallow lake.

To the west and south of the central range range are tropical highlands and lowlands that experience coastal monsoons. Several rivers flow into the southern portion. Most of this area is jungle.

To the east is a large, barren patch dominated by rocky hills and flat stretches of sand, broken up only by two long eastward-flowing rivers that are the lifelines of the region. The entire landmass lies at tropical latitude; only the elevation of the plateau region gives it a temperate climate.

The sea to the west is dotted with active volcanic islands formed by the collision of oceanic plates. This configuration puts together the three environs suited to the Aztec/Inca/Maya/Northern India mashup I had been working on.

The next trick is visualizing how these two landmasses connect to each other and then determining the proper scale. I have an idea of what I'm looking for here, but I need to think about the distances involved and the latitude effects a bit more.

Also need a lot of work on the names, but that can be done bit by bit.

Really should work on the city map for Cortado next, as that's more relevant to the actual events of the planned novel.

*My thought right now is to go with a central character POV surrounded by multiple points of view from secondary characters; still trying to balance those out and thinking about whether to switch on a chapter or scene basis within the storyline.

Solitary Endeavors

So, in the interest of being honest with myself, I'd have to say that my difficulties in preparing mentally and emotionally for the inevitable rejections of the story submission/workshop process are closely tied to my current situation.

• I've worked one month in the past six as a freelancer. (Even I didn't realize it was quite that bad until I looked back at it.)
• I don't have a very active social life in Boise outside of my wife and kids. We live on a street where most of my neighbors are considerably older than me. A few have died since we moved in. (One of my friendly neighbors who had a similarly irregular work schedule got foreclosed on and moved out a couple months ago. I was bummed when my favorite checker at the grocery store had to retire for health reasons.) My kids don't attend the local schools because they qualified for a highly gifted program that requires me to drive them all the way across town each day. My kids don't even have a lot of friends, to be honest. My son's Asperger's makes social connections hard for him and my daughter, though happy and friendly, isn't interested in teams or organized activities. So I don't meet other parents with any regularity via the school side of things.
  
• I spend most of my days from 9 am to 3 pm by myself or in the company of people I don't know and don't talk to (such as at the library).
  
• I'm a little bit sick right now, though I don't feel awful (I will spare all but Aaron the details).
• I've had roughly zero success cultivating a sense of membership and camaraderie in a few communities online.

So, already feeling a bit isolated and not feeling like as much of a contributor to the family as I want to be*, my writing assumes a greater significance than it would otherwise.

I find myself feeling that I should be able to fill my downtime with completed stories the way I would be completing freelance assignments. That's not the way it has worked out. When I do finish stories, I'm invested in them as a potential source of external validation and social contact to a greater degree than if I felt a sense of accomplishment in other areas.

So far, that's added up to more pressure than is healthy or enjoyable. Writing becomes unpaid and unrecognized work, work that by its nature is solitary. Making the time for it often leaves me feeling more isolated.

In summary, I currently live about as solitary a life as a married guy with kids living in the suburbs could. The writing process itself is solitary when it comes to creating my own imagined worlds and stories. When my efforts to reach out via my writing in a serious way get rebuffed or ignored, it feels like I wasted my time and it hurts more than it reasonably should.

Recognizing all this rationally is not the same as knowing how to cope with it emotionally. So I'm feeling down on writing because as I have currently constructed my view of it, it hasn't been meeting any of my needs. Hence my desire to reexamine and revise what writing means for me and what I want to gain from it. Maybe orienting it more toward being fun for myself isn't the right road. I don't know.

As far as the rest goes, I'm trying to build more connections. I volunteer at school every week. I've started going to the gym and playing pickup basketball a couple times a week. I'm clumsily trying to forge a few more friendships, with limited success. Hopefully the economy and publishing industry will actually improve enough to where I can get work and stop having contracts canceled on me just as I'm ready to begin them (twice in the last six months on that score).

* Yes, I do a lot around the house and with the kids and I still feel a need to at least qualify as a part-time wage earner. I don't know if this stems from having supported myself right out of college and having been the primary wage earner for years, or if it's tied up with being a guy raised in this culture, or both.

Only Connect (?)

In a recent email exchange with my good friend Aaron about the topic of writing, I expressed a loss of joy with the writing process and suggested that I needed to go back to my roots as a writer, the desire to entertain and delight myself (as well as exorcise certain creative impulses that plagued me with daydreams and other distractions until I set them to paper).

Aaron asked, quite reasonably, if the idea of writing for myself wasn't a bit disingenuous. Isn't the goal of writing to communicate?

That got me to thinking. I've always had a knack for communicating factual information and broad ideas. That skill carried me through school and has paid my bills (with varying degrees of success) in various nonfiction writing fields (technical writing, academic writing, educational writing) for many years now. My goal when I write such things is clearly to communicate, as well as earn a paycheck. Moreover, I tend to work fairly well with the restraints imposed upon me by my bosses and clients.

At the same time, in that form of writing I'm almost always one step removed from the actual audience for the writing. I deal with the editors and the clients and their guidelines, but I don't see the end-users or the teachers or the students and their reactions to the documentation, lesson plans, or textbooks. So I communicate, but I don't really concern myself so much with how well I connect, because the potential audience is so vast and diverse that it's inevitable that some will like it and some will not. It's all hypothetical in the end; I'm writing to the best of my ability to get paid. My satisfaction comes from doing the work on time and as well as I can.

There's another kind of writing that I do quite frequently that has no real audience other than myself. I get significant satisfaction out of writing for myself just to develop my thoughts on a given topic with greater clarity. It scratches an itch, so to speak, whether anybody else reads those ideas or not. This essay is an example of that sort of writing, which I don't expect to be read.

Stories are different. They're more personal and subjective. In my case, at least, I can't see writing stories as any sort of practical avenue toward making money. So the motivation for writing them has to come from within, from some desire to express a personal vision.

Because of this personal and somewhat intimate investment, when stories are rejected it is more confusing and painful. What began in my childhood as an effort to shield myself through imagination from a larger world that so often frightened, mocked, or rejected me becomes instead a gateway that so often leads those very same emotions right to my heart. And everything and everyone I consult tells me that the writing world is full of far more rejections than acceptance. I think the idea is that you do care, but you just expect to keep getting beaten up and turned down and learn to accept that as part of the process.

To make that equation work, the value I attach to any appreciation has to outweigh the negatives of confronting regular reminders of the reality that in fact, other people don't understand me, either through my own inability to express myself or through a simple lack of interest or empathy. I think I also have to believe that an audience exists of reasonable size, say a thousand or more people, that will appreciate my efforts. I just have no rational evidence or personal experience to base such a belief on.

The idea of being published just for the sake of being published used to drive me, but over time it has lost appeal. I'm already a published writer, just an obscure one.

Why would publishing a story and not caring deeply about its reception be any different than ghostwriting a chapter of a history book and never knowing what students think of it? The mental and emotional effort required to do the former, at least for me, is much greater than what it takes for the latter.

At this point I need to figure out if I have enough faith in my ability to connect and enough belief that those connections will be worth the effort involved to pursue writing and storytelling for other people.

Write What You Know(?)

Write what you know.

This is a pretty common aphorism among writers, particularly fiction authors and those in genres such as travel writing.

In the contexts where I've encountered it, this maxim seems to be further distilled into the idea that you should write from the perspective of what your personal experience has taught you about people, places, events, and activities.

I struggle with this tenet in all its literal manifestations. I haven't done a lot of things or been a lot of places; more specifically, I haven't done many wild or risky things or traveled to exotic and dangerous places. I'm not inclined by nature to start now. While over the course of my life I've always had a knack for being personable, over the last decade or so I've struggled to connect with other people beyond a very superficial level.

So to write what I know leaves me with what I have experienced. And I have some fundamental problems with the most literal and practical applications of that approach:

1. I have been part of a lot of ill-timed, delusional, and broken relationships. I don't feel like writing in a direct way about any of them. Sometimes out of respect for a relationship that survived a rough patch, sometimes out of a respect for the privacy and implicit trust of those I once cared about, and sometimes because it is just too painful. I read authors like Michael Chabon and at the same time that I'm impressed and moved by the personal themes he puts upon the page, I can't imagine subjecting my own relationships to that same surgical scalpel and magnification.
2. It's gotten to the point where I don't trust my memory, at least in terms of the sequencing of events during certain broad periods of my life. There are blocks of years in my twenties and thirties where I'm not certain of the order in which things happened, which plays hell with any pretense of assigning cause and effect. When I try to zoom in on specific events, I have trouble recalling many of the sensory details that seem to be the hallmark of writers who plumb their own lives for material. I become a cinematographer touching up a silent, black and white reel of my own past by dubbing in sound and painting in colors that seem appropriate. To be honest, this confuses me, and I feel like I might be able to improve the clarity of my recollections with some practice.
   
3. It was recently suggested to me that I try writing a story of my own life as both a literary and a psychological exercise, then examine it to see how I would change it as an author. I think this is an interesting idea that has some merit. But after sitting down to give it a try, I realized that at this point I have no interest in the story of my own past. It seems very, very predictable in many ways. It also tends to depress me. Books and films like that don't interest me either, hence my constant love for genre fiction and lifelong disinterest in most "literary" slice of life novels and short stories.

Now, you could say that all fiction writers refine the broad strokes of their personal experience into essential truths that they incorporate into imagined people, place, and events. Yet when I read biographies or biographical essays of many writers, it's shocking how directly they transfer the details of their lives onto the page. And so often it is the details that ring true or false for readers and critics. So the act of distillation is harder to pull off than it seems, and is probably best left to more experienced writers who have already made their bones by pulling them free from their flesh and holding them up to the light.

Perhaps my biggest weaknesses as a writer are an unwillingness to offend or to suffer sufficiently for my art. But I also suspect that there's something more lurking around, a difficulty in translating my view of the world for other people, in my inept efforts to connect and communicate the personal.

Created a New Blog, Played More Basketball

So I jumped back in the saddle and played another full court game down on campus today. Some of the same guys were there. I wasn't great, but this time I made a few plays across the board--tough rebound, defense, shot in traffic, pass in traffic--that got some love from the other members of my team. Still couldn't hit the outside shot. Lifting weights first might have contributed to that, but it also seemed to calm me down a bit at the start. Have to figure it all out slowly. Don't think I can play more than a couple days a week at most. We'll see how much agony I'm in tonight.

Also created a new blog, Sand Dreaming of Stars, just to post my fiction and some of my poems. Becoming an official, paid, published writer is less a part of my dream than just getting my ideas out of my head and into the world. I still plan on submitting things, but I'm also going to put rejected or in progress material here under a Creative Commons 3.0 noncommercial license. If it ever gets to the point where somebody cares about who has first publishing rights to something I've already posted, I'll have made much more progress than I have to date.

Got a Rejection

What a crap day. I played full court basketball for the first time in a year today, didn't play well, got completely exhausted, hurt my leg a bit, and felt quite old.

I noticed that my right front tire is very low on air pressure when I got home (maybe a slow leak, don't know yet) and found that my portable air compressor had a dead battery. Hopefully I can get it recharged in time to pump up the tire to take the kids to school tomorrow.

My neighbors who had asked me to watch/feed their six pets on Friday then revealed that they needed me to be taking care of them Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Then, right as I was getting ready for bed, while doing something else on the computer, two new emails arrived, one of which was a rejection for my flash fiction story "The Cold Portions" from Flash Fiction.

You might recall that my first submission to them got a very positively worded rejection email.

This one was a little simpler and much less helpful. "Unfortunately, I'm going to pass on The Cold Portions."

I felt pretty proud of this story and I have to admit I'm surprised as well as disappointed at the rejection and the utter lack of interest it conveyed.

2010 sucks so far and it's not like 2009 had raised the bar particularly high.

Feeling Blue

Been sort of morose and uninspired lately. Ideas come but I can't seem to motivate myself to pursue them with much enthusiasm. Haven't even been reading as much in the last couple weeks.

I think it's a combination of:

• My Job Status, or Lack Thereof. I always get a little anxious when I haven't worked for a bit, but the last year or so the freelance scene has been so unreliable and inconsistent that it's beginning to wear on me. I had thought that my pseudo-career was fairly well insulated against the types of layoffs that have been plaguing people I know in the publishing industry, but that assumption isn't holding up very well at the moment.
• The Economy in General. Hearing depressing economic news week after week is, well, depressing.
• Politics. Ugh. Why is it that when Democrats are down they stay down for 3-4 years at least, while the Republicans just seem to bounce back within a couple years no matter what they were responsible for? Oh, right, it's because the Democrats can never get organized and the Republicans always conveniently forget how they triggered so many of the problems they complain about because they believe in principles, not empirical evidence.
  
• Getting Older. Gotta see the doctor about what may or may not be a prostate issue on Monday. Right wrist always hurts a bit, other parts just gradually breaking down.
• Writer's Block. Somehow it was easier for me to lose myself in reading and writing escapist fiction when the world around me seemed generally okay but just less fulfilling and more brain dead than I wished it would be. The world still seems mostly brain dead, but I have more worries.

Hopefully this is just a phase that I will be able to transition from into something better.

Deciding Whether to Continue the Blog

So, I'm debating whether keeping up with the blogging is worth the time and energy I sporadically invest in it.

In terms of keeping in touch with friends and family, it would probably be more efficient for me to put a profile on something like Facebook.

In terms of reviewing books and such, I'm not sure that the reviews help other people and I'm not entirely clear on what I get out of them. At times it feels like a burden, as though I have to review something I've read if I thought it was particularly good or bad or if it just left me confused.

Writing about my own writing has been somewhat helpful for me. But I think that having a space dedicated solely to that might be more productive than the mishmash I have now. And I'd like to publish some material before going much further down that route.

That leaves the occasional commentary on current events, which certainly gets lost in the big Internet blur.

Perhaps one option is to separate this blog into a few different "channels"--one for reviews and one for posting or discussing my own writing, and then a Facebook page for minor social updates and connections.

Writing Goals and Submitting Stories

At the beginning of December, I went over my list of goals for the year in order to evaluate and revise them.

One of those goals involved writing. I wanted to spend at least X number of hours writing fiction in 2009. I even specified that I shouldn't count the time spent writing about setting material toward achieving that goal. I know my habits in this regard.

Well, I did not meet that goal. I can't say for certain how far short I fell, because very early on I stopped keeping track. I just know that I would have had to write an hour a day every day (and then a little extra) to meet it and I did not do that.

In the past I've had similar goals, all based around writing for a certain amount of time or to produce a certain number of words on a daily basis. Because I've heard lots of advice that you should write every day to develop the work habits and professionalism needed to become a success.

My current approach is different. Now, instead of trying to hit daily writing goals, I'm trying to finish stories. That's pretty much it. My goal is to write roughly one short story of moderate length (say, 5,000 words or so) every month, or a very short story (like a flash fiction piece of under 1,000 words) every couple weeks.

In terms of how much I write on any given day, this goal doesn't necessarily translate into a lot of new words on the page or a lot of time at the keyboard or notepad. But it has occurred to me that those daily writing goals tend to focus upon the peripheral aspects of writing rather than the end result--a story I like well enough to submit to a paying market.

How has this worked out so far? Well, at the moment I'm a bit ahead of schedule. I started writing on December 7th and yesterday I submitted my second complete flash fiction story to a paying market: Flash Fiction online, no less. That tops my entire short story output for the entire year.

I think the pace of a story a week will taper off as I start to work on freelance projects. But I think my initial goals are still achievable. Thirty days to write 5,000 words works out to less than 170 words a day.

The truth is that the writing has come in bursts. I wrote one story in its entirety in a single day and then spent the rest of the week revising it, probably accounting for no more than 150 new words. But they were important words. The other story I wrote in a couple bursts and then rewrote quite heavily in another chunk.

In between working on the stories, I spent time thinking about the stories and what I was trying to achieve with them. I also sent them out for comments by friends and family. Then I spent my writing time each day going over the story in some detail and tweaking it as I thought necessary.

Since my goal is to complete stories and submit them to professional markets, I don't think quite as much about the process as I used to. I'm concentrating more on the stories themselves. As a result, I'm working in more of a natural flow. Some days are just more productive than other days in terms of raw output, but other days that are superficially less productive are just as vital for the flashes of insight into a story that they provide. Focusing on shorter lengths has also helped keep my wandering mind from digressing down too many paths.

What I Want/Don't Want in Science Fiction and Fantasy

I've been thinking about this topic over the past few months as I've read a lot of different books and short stories in the two genres, written by a wide range of authors.

I've noticed some trends in the types of stories that I've been reading. Note that these aren't necessarily trends among authors. A talented or experienced author might try his or her hand at writing in several of the styles noted below, though I think the hackneyed style appeals mainly to people who are writing serial novels for licensed properties or else are content to rest upon their reputation for a bit and crank out some predictable books for the money.

There are two styles that I don't like in fantasy or science fiction novels. I won't bother to finish a book that clearly falls into either one of these categories. I might finish a short story or watch a film that indulges in them.

Hackneyed
These books are distinguished by two main traits: they don't work hard at all to maintain internal consistency and they don't respect the intelligence of the reader.

By internal consistency, I mean that the authors typically posit some form of magic or technology in the setting that would have much, much broader effects on the society than they describe. They simply haven't thought it through or they have but decided that it doesn't matter.

Another problem with internal inconsistency is related to characters. Characters are placed in positions of power or influence and then proceed to act with complete ignorance of a plethora of facts that 99% of the people placed in those positions would know. This reveals itself in spaceship captains ignorant of how their vessels function, villains with no sense of economics or tactics, and characters who exist mainly to be spoon-fed details of the plot.

These factors play into not respecting the intelligence of the reader. Authors often spoon feed the reader the most basic genre concepts or plot points, often repeatedly, via the mechanism of explaining those points to inept characters. Authors also make the assumption that whatever crazy idea they come up with will simply be accepted by the reader without any rationale.

A lot of science fiction and fantasy on television and film falls into this category. This can be palatable if there's enough action or humor or visual style. But I can rarely stretch my attention to two hours of this approach. It breaks novels for me. Mike Resnick's recent Starship novels fall squarely into this category in my view, as do most serialized novels based on popular movies or roleplaying games. There are always exceptions: John M. Ford's The Final Reflection is a very satisfying science fiction novel that happens to be set in the Star Trek universe.

I understand the reasons for this type of sci-fi and fantasy. Done with flair, it can be a good way to draw in new readers. I just don't care for it myself, because I'm not a new reader anymore. And I don't like it when recent works in this style get widely celebrated as masterpieces of the genre, because they aren't.

Literary Experiments
These are novels that tell a story in a style designed to be confusing, to shake up the reader. The most frustrating thing about these types of novels is that you get the sense that the author could write something much more satisfying and comphrehensible if they wanted to, but that they choose to be vague.

One approach is to use indecipherable language. Sometimes an author that I like will produce one of these and leave me scratching my head. Ian M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn was like that. I just couldn't labor through what the narrator was saying.

Another approach is to use a nonlinear narrative or no clear narrative structure at all. A common tactic is to present many different mysteries or paradoxes in the course of the novel and then explain none of them. Often these novels will suck you in with their clever writing, until you realize that they aren't going to provide anything resembling a satisfying conclusion, much less an explanation of what was happening in chapter four. In my view, Michael Swanwick is the master of this style of throwing out events and ideas without a care for explaining or resolving them, though I have to say that I just don't get Gene Wolfe either.

Some writers like to populate an entire novel with unlikable characters or center the novel on a main character with no discernable redeeming qualities (and I count being interesting or clever as a redeeming quality in this case). I can't think of any reason to do this with a work of fiction other than to try to upset reader's expectations and be daring in some way. M. John Harrison has done this, for example. If I get 100 pages into a book and don't care in any way what happens to any of the characters, then why am I reading it? Alistair Reynolds did this with Revelation Space, but I've found several of his other works less troubling in this regard.

As far as I can tell, writers who produce more than one book of the Literary Experiment style tend to stick with it. And it's the style I'm most likely to hate and whose practitioners most consistently leave me completely cold as a reader. They also tend to win awards, like avant garde types in any creative pursuit.

Unlike the Hackneyed style, I really can't see the point of this style of fiction outside of the short story length. If you want to be weird and obtuse for the sake of being weird and obtuse and conveying some sort of feeling, you can do that at the short story length without punishing your readers. I always get a significant whiff of arrogance from the authors who indulge themselves in this fashion.

Essentially, I believe that the point of writing both fiction and nonfiction is to communicate something coherent to the reader, and nearly all literary experiment novels fail badly on that score with me.

There's another style of science fiction and fantasy that sometimes works for me but fails at a fairly high rate due to the many pitfalls it contains.

Big Idea Obsessions
Science fiction is more prone to this than fantasy, as far as I can tell. There are really two different problems here for me.

The first type of Big Idea novel problem revolves around characters, or rather the lack of interesting, believable characters. A science fiction novel based around a big idea doesn't have to be bereft of well-rounded, intriguing, lifelike characters that you can appreciate as a reader. But oh so many of them are. They plod ahead with cardboard characters and plots that exist only to illuminate the central concept that the author is obsessed with.

This problem has plagued science fiction stories from the beginning of the genre, for the simple reason that some science fiction readers don't care about characters. What they want is a kind of speculative, technical nonfiction disguised as fiction. And that's fine by me. I just have no personal interest in that style. Some very popular writers fall into this category for me.

The character issue can manifest in another way that it less prone to criticism but which utterly fails for me as a reader. The author might create a huge tableau of characters, each seen in a brief glimpse before the narrative moves on to other characters. The result is that as a reader I never feel a connection to any of the multitude of characters tossed onto the scene in pursuit of the Epic Narrative, such as the fulfillment of a prophecy, which in these stories is a stand-in for the Big Idea. This is the type of Big Idea Obsession approach that fantasy is most prone to, although I have seen it the science fiction of authors like Stephen Baxter and Kim Stanley Robinson, whose work draws accolades but generally leaves me cold. I like to have anchor characters who persist over the course of the narrative.

The other Big Idea Obsession problem is the Mighty Technological Gimmick that Makes No Sense while dominating the plot. Some authors come up with an idea that sounds cool but which they are either incapable of explaining or which just doesn't hold together when you look at it closely, as one might over the course of a long novel. Tony Daniels' Metaplanetary was one of the most recent such ideas I've encountered.

A related category is the Mighty Technological Obsession That is Boring or Extraordinarily Technical. When boring, the concept might work in a short story, but can't sustain a novel. Nancy Kress's Probability Moon fell into this category for me, as did Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space, ultimately. When the Obsession is Extraordinarily Technical, well, it's just over my head, I guess, because it never makes sense to me yet I suspect that to someone thoroughly versed in an arcane technical or scientific field it holds together.

Big Idea Obsessions can work for me if the idea holds together and the author surrounds it with some interesting characters.

Some writers are mainly Big Idea Obsession types, framing their stories around the exploration of one big esoteric concept. Larry Niven has both hits and misses in this style, as do Greg Egan, Robert J. Sawyer, and Wil McCarthy. Others bounce around, writing a variety of novel styles. An example would be Greg Bear, who has some excellent Big Idea Obsession novels among his output.

What I Like: Well-Crafted Speculative Storytelling
This approach includes stories that have:

• At least one interesting, multi-dimensional fleshed-out character or side that I can care about.
  
• A small group (at most) of point of view characters or a consistent omniscient viewpoint that concentrates on what happens to a fairly small group of characters. Social experiments strongly indicate that people don't make more than four to seven close friends at any point in their lives. Likewise, I don't care about the details of what happens to a dozen or more different characters in a single story or novel.
• Good dialogue.
  
• Interesting technology or magic that doesn't dominate the entire story. That sort of thing works much, much better in short stories than novels. If the concept is rich enough, with enough twists and turns to be worthy of novel-length exploration, then it desperately needs to be tied to the types of characters noted above. I don't care so much about how technology or magic affects civilization in the abstract; I care about how it affects people that I've come to care about in some way.
  
• Narratives that start at Point A and end up at Point B, not Point A or Point A-2. Don't loop. Something needs to change.
  
• Novels that offer some sort of resolution to the major challenges that they present during the novel. There can be dangling issues left unresolved, but if you say in the first few chapters that the immediate goal of the characters is X, then by the end of several hundred pages they had damn well better have achieved or failed to achieve X in a clear fashion.
• Stories that don't invoke something ridiculous from out of the blue to save the characters and the author.
• A sense of wonder and adventure. That's what I read speculative fiction for in the first place.
  

On the bright side, there are MANY novels like this out there. More really good books than I can read in any given year, with more being written all the time.

And I've learned that most of the writers who have produced some of the novels that I cited as examples of styles I can't stand have written other novels that I thought were great. I can't say with much certainty anymore that "I love author X or loathe author Y." This makes the idea of celebrating a particular writer a little less relevant to me. I celebrate particular stories and books and appreciate authors for having written those specific works.

Perhaps the Internet is an apt metaphor for the current state of fantasy and science fiction. Most of what is on the Internet is crap. It's still full of great stuff. Similarly, there is more bad speculative fiction (in my view) being published and celebrated than I would have thought possible. At the same time, the quantity of Really Good Stories is also tremendous.

So it's a great time to be a fan and a reader, but that doesn't make me any less critical.

I Imagine

Imagination became a problem for me
When I started to believe that I had
to do something with it
Other than enjoy the places it took me.

The need to explain my imaginary places,
The need to share them,
The need for them to be understood
and appreciated.

I made these needs up at some point
I don't remember when.

People said when I was young,
"You'll be a Writer."
And I write every day
Without the capital.

But it feels like I'm failing
every time I imagine something beautiful and strange
And I can't find a way to express
the wonder of it
the mystery of it
the magic of it
To anyone else.

I'm mocked by my daydreams
Butterflies I cannot catch
without stilling them.

When you chase something, looking back you remember the pursuit
and not the thing itself.
I miss what I experienced when I didn't worry about how to share my personal vistas
with all of you.

Not that you did anything wrong.

I told myself
That I was an insufficient audience.

I told myself to feel lonely
If I couldn't bring the rest of you along.

Giants

Yesterday I saw the world's largest Ponderosa pine
And read an article about the world's tallest man.

Today I learned
They aren't the biggest any more
If they ever were.

(Or maybe they are
I took someone else's word for it.)

I doubt the tree was as lonely as the man.
Trees are used to being big
Every forest has its giants.

And giant trees are old trees, and probably wise.

Giant men die young.

Their hearts are not big enough
To carry the weight of the words and the stares that fall upon them.

Come to think of it,
I suspect that people cut down most giant trees as well.

And some giant men, like trees, are mounted on display,
Sliced open to show the years of their lives
for people to point to and nod, as if they understood.

A lucky giant man is buried young
And in the earth, dreams of becoming a great old tree.

What A Strange Month

I started out this month with a lot of creative energy and several productive pursuits: writing for the novel, the drawing, getting ready for the egg parachute picnic, and so forth. I was also getting back into working out.

I'm ending it with the writing not going well, my drawing practice on hiatus for more than a week, a strained wrist that I'm now wearing a brace on (making it hard to draw and cutting off upper body weights entirely for the time being), and some allergies that have kicked my butt.

Not the arc I had envisioned at all. Frankly depressing if I dwell upon it, so I'm trying to renew my enthusiasm and rebuild my energy to at least get a few things moving again in addition to my involvement with the kids' school and their homework.

It's hard to evaluate at the moment because the last thing experienced tends to leave the strongest impression, but I'm pretty disappointed with the month at this stage.

Writing Log: September 28, 2009

Today I rewrote a fairly recent short story called Faerie Circle. I started from scratch, starting the story in a different place and telling it with much more brevity. Right now it is about 2500 words, whereas my most recent draft was more like 4,250 words. Some polishing and I think I'll share it with others and then send it off.

I've been experiencing pain and some numbness in my right wrist for the past couple weeks. This has made it uncomfortable to type for long periods of time. So today I wrote most of the story out longhand and then transcribed it. Not that this helped a lot, but it was somewhat better.

Writing Log & Weekend Wrap-up, Week 3

So this weekend I wrote down notes and ideas about different elements of the setting in a notebook while at home and at the university library. Wrote about 14 pages longhand. Just putting down key ideas, underlining the different terms or names that popped up, and riffing on whichever of those seemed to spark further ideas. Trying to map out the setting in some more detail. Going to mix in writeups on various characters as well.

From that I'm going to try to extract a story, the way I would search for a historical narrative or biography. Working out the plot first doesn't seem to work for me. Working out the characters first has more promise, but I in a setting like this I need to know enough about where the characters come from and what they are reacting against to make progress.

I'm also thinking of writing little vignettes here and there to try to keep getting my repetitions in on the actual prose front.

As for what I achieved in Week 3, I really have no idea on the time or the word count. Probably 1500 words total of actual story, pretty much none of it usable as such as this point. A lot more of setting. At this stage, just writing for myself and trying to figure out how to make a satisfying experience out of it. Not all that enjoyable.

Writing Log: 9-17-09

Tried again to begin the story at Chapter 1. Wrote for about an hour. 715 words.

Still not working very effectively. Running into a conundrum.

In my nonfiction writing, I have pretty clear goals and rules limiting what I can do. For my fiction writing, when I map things out that carefully, I start to lose interest in writing the story. When I don't map things out carefully, I go off on tangents.

Got to think things through a bit more. Might write out some short character biographies that I should have sketched out before. Look over the current outline a bit more, figure out a few more details about where the story is starting now.

Here's the crux of it: if I'm not getting paid, why write unless I enjoy the process of writing in some fashion? The more I try to professionalize my creative writing, the less enjoyable it becomes. Haven't found a good method yet.

Pulled all the "How to Write" guides off my bookshelf and stuck them out of the way. Going to try to figure out what works for me, if anything.

Writing Log: 9-16-09

Nothing today.

Writing Log: 9-15-09

Well, if anything, today was worse than yesterday. Wrote for a little over one hour, starting chapter 1 from scratch. Produced a whopping 676 words. Don't feel really great about them, either.

Two things have happened.

First, I decided that the setting that I was using wasn't quite cool or different enough. I've had some interesting concepts worked out for some time now and I thought that if I was going to write a novel, I should put those ideas to use. Who knows when someone else might incorporate really similar ideas into their own novel? (Don't laugh, it has happened to me before.)

This decision caused a ripple effect, distracting my attention from the story and making me uncertain about how to describe certain details of environment and place.

Second, I came to the realization that stuffing the Awakeners and the city-god Okanos into the first three chapters was overkill when they don't resurface in the story at all. At the same time, the Faerie are mentioned only third-hand, yet a Faerie artifact plays a key role in the ongoing story.

So it makes more sense to slot the Faerie into the scenes that once involved the Awakeners, so that the reader only has to grasp one new culture, not one and a half, and will learn something about a civilization and its magic that matter to the later events of the narrative.

Unfortunately, as I noted yesterday, this means blowing up several already completed chapters. That means that thus far this week has shown negative progress: I've actually dumped more words than I've written.

Possibly as fallout from this, my confidence in the story outline and the story itself has taken a hit. Maybe the smart approach is to try and write short stories, but I just don't think much of the short stories I've already written.

It all comes down to a continuing crisis of confidence combined an ability to come up with ideas that I have trouble applying. I want to write something that really interests me, something that I'm impressed I could come up with. And it's damned hard.

Writing Log: 9-14-09

Well, today counts as an epic fail of sorts.

I spent most of the morning, roughly 9:30 to noon, working on a setting document establishing out and clarifying my most recent thoughts on the matter. It amounts to more than 2700 words so far, but it does not count toward my stated goal of writing narrative.

Then I switched over and spent two hours writing bits in chapters 1, 7, and 8, for a whopping total of 850 new words. Yes, even when I started writing the story I moved at the pace of molasses.

I really should have gotten the setting work done over the weekend, but once again the weekend was a forced march with little time or energy for creative pursuits. I've got to say it's an odd sensation to be looking forward to Monday. The fact that I continue to be fighting either a really bad case of allergies or a lingering cold doesn't help matters; my thinking feels fuzzy at the worst times.

I fell into an old trap today by getting caught up in thinking about the setting. The truth is that it is very hard for me to shift mental gears from setting mode to story mode, particularly when the setting ideas are fresh. The two modes play off of each other but often it takes a while for ideas to percolate and take coherent form.

The other big problem that surfaced today is that I think my current outline is simply trying to do TOO MUCH in the opening chapters. I have too many different cultures and elements appearing and having to be reconciled.

So I'm going to simplify and streamline. I'm getting rid of one of the three big cities that appears in the first part of the book, because while I think it is awesome, it adds too much ground to cover. I will think of a way to bring it into play, perhaps in the next novel. In getting rid the city, I'm also getting rid of the culture that spawned it, with the same caveat about hoping to reintroduce it later.

Unfortunately this decision means completely canning one chapter that's already been written and revising a big portion of a second and a little bit of a third. On the other hand, I won't be writing one or two other chapters. Got some outlining to do tonight.

Writing Summary: Week Two

Wrote for total of roughly 16.5 hours in Week 2, writing on five days. Wrote for 15.25 hours in Week 1, writing on all seven days.

My total wordcount at the end of Week 1 was roughly 13,000 words.

My total at the end of Week 2 is roughly 27,000 words, for a net weekly gain of 14,000 words and a similar rate of productivity in terms of words per hour.

Since I've exceeded my targets of writing for 15 hours and producing 10,000 words for the week, I'm going to take the weekend off from writing chapters to recharge my creative batteries. I expect to do some drawing and to probably sketch out some ideas for what I want to start writing on Monday. (Oh, and I'll be reading a friend's manuscript.) Ideally by Monday I'll be itching to get started again.

I've also reorganized all the chapters in Scrivener. Right now it looks like the total will be 20 chapters for Part I. Shorter chapters are coming in at around 3,000 words and longer ones at closer to 5,000 words, for a rough average of 4,000 words per chapter. That puts me at an estimated wordcount for Part I of 80,000 words, give or take, which is significantly more than I first anticipated. Hopefully this is all the result of recognizing how things need to be fleshed out and explored rather than simple writing bloat.

Anyway, at my current pace it's conceivable that I might have Part I done by the original ideal goal of October 9th (50K + words in four weeks!), but I doubt that everything will fall into place to make that happen. I'll just keep plugging away one day and one week at a time and logging my progress.