"I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must"

Feel free to grab this image and use it 

I don't particularly like Salman Rushdie. I haven't been a fan of crude, crass satire since I outgrew MAD magazine. But there's tremendous danger in keeping silent just because you aren't the immediate target.

Censorship is one of those things that can creep in on little cat feet. The nasty, rude, and badly written stuff on the fringes is easy to object to. It offends just about everybody. So it's easy to tell them to shut up, go away, you're just cluttering up the landscape.

Then the questions start about whether the better written satires are in poor taste. Whether offending anybody, or the chance of offending anybody, is a bad idea. Whether those offended people have guns and might kick in your door.

Jihadists? Maybe. Or maybe it will be governmentally sanctioned door-kickers.

Censorship is alive and well in the United States, of course. I first became aware of it as a comic book fan through the work of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund -- why does such a thing even need to exist? Because the fringe stuff in the comic book world is nasty, rude, badly written, and offends just about everybody.

Does it have a right to exist? Absolutely. Should the creators be called out on their rudeness, use of awful stereotypes, misogyny, and bad writing? Absolutely.

And on a more personal note, I've been mildly censored myself. Self-publishers may remember the purge of incest, under-age, and other fringe pornography from the ebook shelves a year or two ago. In the midst of all that, Kobo.com quietly threw my Disciple, Part II out of their store and blocked it. They never said why. I can guess, but why bother? I took all of Disciple out of Kobo and I won't do any further business with them.

Fortunately, I can do business elsewhere. But as I said, censorship can creep in quietly. It doesn't take masked thugs with guns.

Just some thoughts. What have the Charlie Hebdo shootings made you think about?

ETA: the CBLDF is brave enough to post the images -- bless them.

What the universe gives you, part 2

I've been to Shangri-la and I need to go back.

Sometimes people ask writers/artists "where do you get your ideas?" In my opinion, if you can't see the constant blizzard of ideas around you then you aren't cut out for art. But some places are more conducive to ideas than others, to be honest. It would be easy to say that Bhutan is an interesting place because it's beautiful. It's more complicated than that, though.

I had no explanation at first as to why I got choked up in the airplane and shed tears as we flew out of Paro. The beds were miserably hard, I went to every meal ravenously hungry, and it was easily the most physically draining vacation of my life. I should've been eager to leave.

But...

Well, for the moment I will just post some photos for their visual inspirational value. Why this trip was important to me has a lot of factors, of course, several of which are more personal that I want to get into on this blog. I'll try to talk a little about the people and the culture in a later post.

Lots of clouds? Yes. The average day in Bhutan is "partly cloudy with scattered afternoon showers and rainbows." Yes, rainbows are pretty much a daily sight in Bhutan; it makes the place even more magical.

What the universe gives you, part 1

I like to say that the universe will give you what you need for your art. By which I mean, look at what the universe has brought you and say: this is what I need for my art. The challenge is to figure out how it fits in.

I went on my trip to Bhutan and Nepal looking for these things. Needless to say, ideas and inspiration came in a blizzard.

Bhutan is so beautiful that it defies reality simply by existing. More on that later.

Kathmandu, Nepal, isn't the idyllic little town it used to be, though. Nepal suffered a long civil war in the 90s/00s, and thousands of refugees piled into the city. It feels a lot like an Indian city now: over-crowded, smelling of rotten trash, beggars on every corner.

I saw some things that I thought might be of interest to my fellow writers, though. Let me be the universe that's giving you what you need, for a moment. Take a look at the cremation platforms on the banks of the Bagmati River.

Hindus cremate their dead, usually within a few hours of death. They believe that this frees the soul to re-enter the reincarnation cycle, so it's important to them.

The body's wrapped in a shroud, carried around the pyre three times clockwise by the bearers, and laid down. River water is poured in the mouth. I'm sure that various prayers are said -- I was across the river, so I couldn't hear.

Our tour guide said that no death certificate is issued, but they do keep track. Suspicious deaths get a full investigation before the body is cremated.

The smell? Mostly charcoal, because it takes a lot of wood to burn a body. There's a slight hint of meat, but it's far less than at your average barbecue.

Only those of the untouchable caste can oversee cremations. Castes are built into the Hindu world-view and touch every aspect of life -- the platforms in these photos were for ordinary people. There were platforms for higher caste folks just upriver.

When the pyre has burned down, the platform is cleared straight into the river. 

Our tour guide said that when he was a boy, this river was crystal clear. It's only since the population explosion that it's become filthy. Dumping cremated remains didn't have much impact on the water quality.

On a different note, I also saw bowls made from teak leaves for sale in a local market. They're held together by little bamboo pins, so they are 100% biodegradable and renewable.

Pretty clever, I think.

Seen anything unusual lately?

Seeking new experiences, for a writer

It's been almost a month since I posted, and I apologize. June 2014 has been pretty crazy for me. I've been out experiencing new things, to put it simply.

As a writer, I'm often trying to convey things -- events, situations, emotions -- that I've never experienced personally, and there's nothing unusual about that. I've never had to fight for my life with a sword. I've never stepped outside a spaceship in just a plastic suit. Because human emotions are the same for us all, I believe I can apply the few moments of genuine panic (when I realized I was skidding down an icy mountainside at 50mph) or awe (when I stood inside the gallery of the Great Pyramid) that I actually have experienced to what my characters are experiencing.

The tougher part is knowing which emotions fit the scenario and how they're flavored by the character's exact situation. Also, whether anything I've experienced truly fits.

I've been a shy person all my life. That's not unusual for a writer. I've been a homebody, but not a complete shut-in, who took a pass on having a crazy youth or doing anything too risky. But over the past year, I've been getting out more and putting the shyness, the worries, everything that's kept me from being wilder, aside.

Get out there. It's worth it.

And having been a little wilder, having survived and learned a lot from it, I wish I'd done it sooner. Both personally and as a writer. There really is no substitute for experiencing things yourself.

What you notice in the midst of those experiences, what stands out to you, is as individual as your fingerprints and that will only add to your personal voice as a writer when you apply it to a story. As writers, everyone we meet and everything we experience goes into our stories. Shutting ourselves away will limit our supply of those raw ingredients, in the long run.

So, my fellow shy, reclusive writers, I'm going to say get out there and do something this summer that pushes your personal envelope. Something new. Something that leaves you exhilarated, exhausted, and possibly ecstatic.

I experienced all of those on a whole new level when the Mothership 2014 tour came to town. Now, I love electronic music and I've mentioned before how I've been going out to hear it in small clubs. A six-hour dubstep festival on the lawn of a racetrack was something else entirely, of course. I had never been brave enough to go to one of those before, let alone work my way down to front and center in the crowd where it's all drunken college boys, crowd-surfers, and constant bouncing.

Scary? A little. I'm not small or fragile, though. What I took away was a new understanding of exhaustion. Of the role of sensory overload in inducing a trancelike state. Of the dynamics of a close-packed crowd of people jacked up on adrenaline and various intoxicants.

Was I really thinking that clearly at the time? No, but I've put in the analysis time since then. The memories will be useful in a variety of crowd-based situations and individual experiences of transcendence -- exhaustion and extreme situations can give rise to powerful religious experiences and also the sorts of extreme survival stories that come out of war or natural disasters.

I also briefly met a handful of colorful characters, needless to say. It's all good story ingredients, well worth the money, the time, and the emotional risk of going into such a thing trusting the universe to give me what I need. This was an instance of going out to find that, as I talked about in this post.

Get out there. Climb a mountain, take fencing lessons, go skinny dipping at midnight, whatever it is you've always wanted to do. What unusual things have you experienced recently?

If you're curious, I've found some videos from the concert I attended that do a fair job of conveying the experience when the headliner, Skrillex, took the stage five hours into the festival. You do have to imagine the bass pounding on you like you need CPR, though. iPhones completely fail to capture that.

Opening of Skrillex's set. First big drop is 2 minutes in. He gave us that long to catch our breath after Dillon Francis, lol. Another 18 minutes of the set. Jump to 12:15 for an especially potent buildup and explosion.

Eating the elephant update

I compared building a new story universe to eating an elephant, back in October. What I didn't mention, in hindsight, was that I was in fact sitting down to eat a new elephant just then. The muse had inflicted a large-feeling idea on me (the brutal muse) and I was just starting to put my teeth on it.

It's coming up on eight months later. Working on this idea (codename: Bloodmagic) has been squeezed in between other projects and has occasionally busted out and asserted itself. Things are getting to the point where I should start doing the writer's equivalent of 15-second sketches. If I were a mad scientist, I'd be watching the skies for the thunderstorm I'll need to jolt this monster to life.

Research
I love research. Over Thanksgiving, I read a couple strategically chosen books on the cultures that were providing a lot of the visual inspiration -- Aztec and Maya -- and tried to wrap my head around how such a culture becomes "normal" in the minds of the people living inside it. How does it mesh up with the reality around them?

There were also the ecology and technology aspects to work out. This will be a big change from the medieval New England world of Disciple and that's part of the elephant that I haven't chewed on too much yet. More research to do!

Trusting the universe
I've mentioned before that the universe will bring you what you need for your art. Lately, one thing that's been given to me is local music performed in small venues to small audiences. The DJ's know me as a regular, and they've often seen me scribbling down thoughts with pen and paper. For me, music is a shortcut to emotions and I collect those for each WIP.

I maintain playlists for my writing projects and yes, Bloodmagic's playlist did pick up some dark, hard-driving electronic music. It's turning out to be a dark story, so that's easy to understand. There are a few tracks whose reasons for being there isn't obvious, though. There always are a few of those. Keeps things interesting.

The universe also pointed me toward a couple horror influences: one old and familiar, and Hellraiser.

Guided brainstorming
Another way to "trust the universe" is to look at whatever the universe brings you and find a way to incorporate it into your art. So, sometimes I decide that I'm going to watch/read/do something and whatever it is, it will inform my WIP. How? Don't know. I'll roll with it, however irrelevant it seems.

I don't remember exactly why Hellraiser became an influence on Bloodmagic -- aside from being a classic horror franchise. I've watched several of the movies now and its influence has trickled into far more than the obvious blood and gore.

Well, the good movies have. The bad ones were just bad.

Applying craft

Piles of ideas are all well and good but this needs to be a story. Beginning, middle, end, rising tension, climax, character development, the whole nine yards. Unlike real life, fiction is supposed to make sense, as they say.

So I also used some tools in eating this elephant. The outline got built alongside the universe and the core characters. I've got a sense of the character arcs and the central theme. I've installed an engine: that abstract central question that these characters are wrestling with on my behalf. There will be sudden gear changes and a literary flourish or two. It'll be fun.

Don't wait too long
When is it time to start writing? That's always a tough question, but I've found that sooner works out better than later. Writing always clarifies things, and when you start earlier in the process it contributes to the WIP's development rather than potentially conflicting with what's already there.

Have you been working on a new elephant?

Common cause with other artists...

I don't talk to much about my personal life, but a conversation at a club recently brought this up.

Since I've been living on my own -- about six months now -- I've developed a habit of going to clubs. Never did that when I was younger, even though I have always loved live music and the thousand flavors of electronic music in particular. I'm still a shy person, so I go alone. Strictly for the music.

But I've also made a habit of going to shows put on by local deejays. Young guys and ladies who are still building their reputations and a fan base. I can relate to that, as a self-publisher. I know what support from a non-family member means when you're trying to earn money as an artist.

Given that these are small-time deejays, they play in small clubs to small audiences and it makes for an intimate setting. They were quick to start recognizing me and always come over to say hello, which is very sensible from a self-promotion viewpoint. Being shy, I've never been good at that sort of thing.

That got me to thinking about the parallels between how different artists try to earn a living and what I could learn from these kids. I don't know a lot about how it works for new deejays, but I hear mutterings about unreliable bookings and slim pay. The struggle to find the balance between giving away free samples and charging money for your work sounds familiar too.

I also couldn't help recognizing the incestuousness of the scene: most of the people at the shows are either fellow deejays or girlfriends/friends of deejays.

As a follow-up to my post about visual artists, I'd like to expand that to include all fellow artists. Back in the day, I was guilty of using Napster and Limewire to collect mp3s. I limit myself to legit freebies now, and I support musicians by going to clubs, but I still don't pay much for my music.

We all know how hard it is to make a living off of art. I think we owe it to each other to be as supportive as we can.

What do you do to support the arts in your area? Do you find local musicians or bands to support? Dance troupes? Theater groups? Post something and maybe it will inspire another reader.

Be glad, as a writer, that you can get by with pen and paper if you must and don't have to drop hundreds of dollars on a mixing deck like the one in the photo. That's a smallish one, too. Yikes.

On the off chance that you're a fan of techno/house/drum & bass/etc., some links: the GLAS Mix Project crew here in DC. Also, Dancekraft. Specific DJs: Confetti, the house queen of Baltimore, Traxiom, who can put me in a dance-floor trance even when I'm alone, and DJ RND because I loves the deep house.

Indie life: Fell down the rabbit hole? Or crawled?

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

I posted sales numbers last month, so this time I'll talk about more abstract things...

Maybe this falls under "being a moody writer," but I go through phases. Sometimes I wake up wanting to engage the world, to see all that it has to offer, to suck the marrow from life (as Thoreau said...) and sometimes the world is just getting in my freaking way. It's just distracting me from the scenes I need to write and the notes I need to get down.

Sometimes once I manage to get the real world out of the way, my story's world is nowhere to be found.

That illusion of standing beside your characters and writing down what they do can get so fragile. It's especially frustrating when I know I've been deeper in the narrative dream than I am now. Writing Disciple was a breeze, in comparison to my current WIP. Feels like this story's fighting me, wandering off at the least provocation, fading like a dream that made me get out of bed and put my shoes on.

We all fear writer's block. Staring at an electronic sheet of paper with our minds as blank as it is. There are many supposed treatments and cures for writer's block, but I think it comes down to a much older bit of advice:

Know thyself
What gets your brain burbling? What inspires you? Is inspiration even how you power your writing? We all come into the writing world with preconceived notions about how writers (or artists in general) work. Those notions are based on movies, stories, biographies -- but the truth is, art is different for every artist.

You have to find your own way. To do that, you'll have to experiment and explore. Curiosity is a writer's best friend, IMO (and nosiness is a close cousin, lol.) Try new approaches, rearrange your schedule, meet new people. I once spoke briefly to a painter and he said something I've since realized was true: the universe will give you what you need for your art. (more thoughts on that) It may not arrive gift-wrapped, though. Go looking for it.

Some days, you don't fall down the rabbit hole. You have to jump. Or even crawl in on your hands and knees, scuffing your knees and elbows all the way.

And on a related note:

Be patient with yourself
This all takes a lot more time than it seems like it ought to. Ideas need time to develop and solidify, like a butterfly's wings after emerging from the chrysalis. Sometimes an idea will spring from your forehead full-grown like Athena, but more often ideas arrive in a lumpy mass that needs shaping and trimming.

That isn't something you hear professional artists talk about much, but in my experience it's the way ideas usually arrive. What the pros are good at is quickly shaping the raw ideas into a workable form. They can do it on the fly, in just the space between their brain and their hand (paint brush, mouth, feet, whatever their art requires.)

For the rest of us, a stream of misshapen ideas pouring through your head like, dare I say it, diarrhea, can feel a lot like failure. Like you're not producing anything worthwhile. Wasting time, paper, and effort you could be investing in other things.

Cut yourself some slack. And write down all those messy, newly-hatched ideas. Spend your dedicated writing time studying them like random puzzle pieces you found on the sidewalk and see if they fit together, if they're from different puzzles, or if they fit into another puzzle you're already working on.

It's work. There's nothing easy about art. But keep at it.

These are things I've been needing to remind myself of, lately. How about you?

Writing exercise #1: inner peace

I've been writing this blog for over two years now and I find myself short on things to say... partly because I hate repeating myself and I've never liked short blog posts that don't say anything meaningful. So let's try something different this week.

The internet's full of writing prompts and exercises, and I've never used them. It hasn't been how I write: for me, it's a very deliberate process where the spontaneity is limited to the moments that I'm standing beside my characters writing down what they do. I thought I'd try a few in the context of my current (hard sci fi) WIP, which has been giving me some trouble. 

This writing prompt comes to us from Poets & Writers: Fiction writers know that conflict drives plot. Tension and drama imbue life into our characters and propel their stories forward. Human nature, however, craves tranquility and clarity. Write five hundred words describing your protagonist at peace—truly one with the universe, even if only for several seconds. Perhaps your character is sitting on a park bench and staring at a bruised cloud, or on a crowded subway car listening to the rails below, or walking out of a cemetery with a beer in hand. Peace is unique to everyone.

“Hang me, this time,” Shen said as he dropped to his knees. “Like you hang Radovan.”

Jezebel tossed down two of the skeins of rope and unwound the third slowly. She measured out several long loops before answering. “Are you ready for that? I’d have to bind your wrists.”

His nerves skittered under his skin. The snug embrace of rope, though, and the freedom of the air… it had been too long since he’d been in null gravity and felt that. “It’s the closest to zero gee I can get.”

The rope softly hissed, sliding through Jez’s dark hands. She nodded. “We’ll try it, then.”

Shen spread his arms and closed his eyes. The first loop of rope settling across the back of his neck released a sigh from him. First time Jez had bound him, she’d put a loop around one wrist and fear had lashed up out of him. Animal fear. Primal need to escape. He’d suffered too much while zip-tied by his wrists.

But the familiar progress of snug coils of rope looping around his chest and knots drawing them snug eased Shen’s mind. The gentle pressure evened out his breath and dropped his heart rate. His skittering nerves, still antsy at the thought of binding his wrists, slowed.

He could trust Jez. She only tied him as he asked. Checked on him to be sure he was comfortable. Freed him before there was any risk of limited circulation. It would be the same with his wrists. He was strong enough to let his hands be tied. Didn’t fear his own helplessness anymore.

Jez had never beaten him, even when she first bought his indenture and he was just “a pile of broken glass and frayed wire,” as Radovan had said. Shen trusted her.

When she reached Shen’s waist, Jez dropped the remaining rope and fetched a set of D-rings. Those had to be worked into the harness, one at the small of his back and one between his shoulder blades. Jez ran the ropes under the crotch of Shen’s shorts and up his back, lacing them into the coils there and anchoring the second ring.

“Let’s try a dragonfly sleeve, rather than Radovan’s arrangement,” Jez murmured. “Arms before you.”

Shen held out his long arms, fists touching. Jezebel began with loops over his shoulders and worked slowly. Fat knots anchored pairs of loops at precise intervals. The loops bound his upper arms together. Then his elbows.

He closed his eyes when a broken-glass blade of fear slid past him. Felt Jezebel hesitate. He held steady, safe in his snug harness, and she continued. Two more knots and loops, one for his forearms and one for his wrists.

Jagged bits of memories rumbled inside him. Pain from kickings, from tasers. The grind of hunger and fear. The rope stifled those bits. Dulled their edges.

Distantly, Shen felt the carabiners click into the two D-rings on his harness. A motor purred and lifted him off his knees. He rocked to horizontal, facing the floor, and swung gently with his bound arms hanging downward.

Zero gee, or close enough. Close enough to free.

Regaining discipline

My writing habit is the best skill I have. I've said that fairly often, and talked about how I have a two-hour block set aside each night for writing or working on projects. There was another two-hour block that I frequently added on, in the afternoon. Last year, I churned out a quarter million words using this system.

Because of publishing Disciple, personal life upheavals, and the reality that most people's free time is in the evening... my writing habit has taken a serious hit since July.

I've found myself falling prey to various forms of cat-vacuuming, aka cat-waxing and other amusing names. These are the semi-pointless things you do to avoid having to sit down at the computer and write. Not entirely pointless, of course, or you couldn't justify doing them at all. But they don't need to be done by any stretch of the imagination.

Checking email boxes. Wandering into Reddit, AW, or PersonalityCafe. Watching the year and a half of Law&Order SVU that I've got piled up in my Hulu queue. (Formulaic, rote, mental potato chips. Somebody stop me. Please.)

It's time to get my discipline back.

Eliminate distractions
Normally, I'd say "Quit out of the browser" but I really do need a Wikipedia page open for quick reference and I keep my photo pin boards at Linoit.com (check them out -- it's a real pin board unlike Pinterest, and it's private so fewer copyright worries.)

I need to toss all the other tabs, though. Log out of email accounts. Close other programs. Ignore the phone and the cats when they pester me for attention.

Focus on the rituals
These are the things I do just before sitting down to write. They tell my brain that we're going to write now. I pour myself a drink, take off my shoes, make a pit stop at the bathroom, and pick the music for today's writing. These have gotten a bit muddied, for various reasons, and I need to start doing them again.

Think outside the box
It may be that I need to move my writing block from after dinner to after lunch. I can write in the afternoon, but it will require juggling the things I've been doing then. It would free me up for social functions in the evening, though, and I'd still have the morning for errands and other daytime chores. Blogging and surfing the web would fill in the evenings that I don't go out (most of them.)

When do I start?
No time like the present. I've already put it off for too long.

How do you juggle your schedule to fit everything in?

Indie Life: Keep writing

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

Moving on 
I don't know about you, but I had Disciple kicking around in my head for years and years before I had it fully figured out and my writing chops were on the level that it needed. I've only self-published the first three parts, so far, but all six have been written. For me, the story is finished.

And to be honest, we were all happy to be done -- the characters and I. But now they're taking a well-deserved break and I'm at loose ends.

Starting over from scratch 
When you had years to nibble at the world-building and character development, it didn't feel so big. You can eat an elephant, after all, if you do it one bite at a time. You had time to learn your characters' life histories, explore all the nooks and crannies of the world, and even develop all the second-tier characters.

But now you've got a few books on Amazon and you know how important backlist is when you're a self-publisher. You don't have five or ten years to write the next one.

That elephant starts looking kinda big.

Recycling
Have you ever groused about how an author's characters are all essentially the same? Ever got tired of every story involving New Orleans somehow? How some writers keep going back to the same characters in the same universe and never let them have a "happily ever after"? (How many times can the same person save the universe, anyway?)

You can do that, of course. And if you love telling a certain kind of story -- traditional romances, for example -- there's no reason you shouldn't and there's even a gigantic market for it.

Personally, I think it's interesting to see patterns in your own writing. Lately, I've been reacquainting myself with one of my science fiction characters and realizing how much he has in common with one of Disciple's characters. They're the same MBTI type, if you've read my posts on that, but they are quite different in their execution.

But I don't want to tell the same thing over and over, with the same or only slightly different characters. I want to challenge myself. I have a writing bucket list. Do you?

Write everything down
You should already be doing this, actually. I use Scrivener (it rocks, buy it) and I have a file called the Brainstorm Zone where I write down all the scraps of ideas that seem substantial enough to work with -- a paragraph or two, at least. When I'm starting from scratch, I go over all those notes and see if anything might fit. Or, might fit after a little mashing up and re-tooling. You never know.

Never throw stuff away
I have dozens of trunked novels and novellas. Many of them have been lost to obsolete file formats and exist only as a tractor-feed, fanfold printout (I kid you not.) They are never going to be seen by anybody in their current state because they're clumsy, poorly written, and sloppy... but there are little interesting bits in there.

Don't throw your crummy old stuff away. Nobody will know you took a half-baked idea, finished baking it and added a few new gadgets.

Don't cut corners
I've built worlds from scratch, and I'll do it again. Just because I need to keep producing, as a self-publisher, does not mean that I should lower my standards or let things slide as "good enough." I am the only person holding me responsible for the quality of my work.

My readers deserve the best I can do. They're hard-won and priceless.

Have you started eating a new elephant recently?

The brutality of a muse

There's been more drama than usual in my personal life since my father had his stroke. He's home and doing well -- back to knitting -- but he's got a noticeable gap in his mid-range memory. He has no trouble with short-term memory tests, as long as he maintains his focus (we're all absent-minded types, in my family,) and his long-term memory is fine, but he honestly forgets things like the trip planned for late next month or that there are no cigarettes in the house for a good reason. The writerly side of my mind has been taking notes, of course.

Another source of drama that's somewhat relevant to my writing life is that I -- acquired? -- a muse. I'm not sure what the right verb is; that's like saying I acquired a bolt of lightning. My muse wasn't so random as lightning, though. Unexpected, but not random.

Classical Greek muse, courtesy of sxc.hu

If you're not familiar with the term, a muse is a person who incites artistic inspiration. The most recent fictive treatment of muses that I recall was a storyline that Neil Gaiman included in the Sandman series. In that story, a man was holding one of the Greek muses captive and using her to fuel his career. Sandman freed her, and punished the man with such a flood of inspiration that it amounted to a curse. It amounted to madness.

My experience with this muse has been closer to Sandman's curse than anything else. I had this idea that drawing inspiration from people would be a happy, exciting process -- rather like the brainstorming I did with fellow writers while at Viable Paradise.

No, this verges on frightening. Obsessive. Every thought, however tangentially related to my muse, throws out tendrils and sprouts into a story idea, like accelerated grapevines intent on choking my mind. Genre doesn't seem to matter: sci-fi, dark fantasy, urban fantasy... dammit, I don't even like urban fantasy*... And while that's difficult enough to wrestle with, I dread its end and the wound my muse will leave.

Dread and crave; what a peculiar masochism creativity entails.

Most of the posts I have seen about inspiration talk about drawing it from other books/films/music, or personal experiences that set off "what if" cascades. I can't remember anything about real-life muses. So if you have any experiences to share, I'd love to hear them.

*I kid you not, a few thoughts about my muse in order to write this and an urban fantasy idea spins out of nowhere. Had to stop and jot it down, since it came with enough details that it might work. Not all of them sprout that far on their own, but they all come with this urgent potential.

Always learning more

It's been at least a year since I looked at my science fiction. When I put it down, I knew it needed work but I was fairly confident in the plot and the action. Well, I'm still confident in the action, but the work it needs is glaringly obvious now.

That's not unusual. If you haven't already heard the advice: you should put a story down for a while and work on something else, then come back to it with fresh eyes.

When I was writing in high school, I did all my revising on paper with a red pen and every single manuscript came away looking like a murder scene. Didn't matter how many drafts there had already been, it seemed. Red ink everywhere, rewriting, adding, deleting useless paragraphs.

My dad said it was because I'd learned so much more about writing since the last revision pass. Which was true.

It's also because when the story is fresh in your mind, you remember exactly what you meant to put on the page. Which isn't necessarily what got onto the page, of course. Things are always lost, in converting vivid hallucinations into little black symbols, but you're always learning new ways to translate.

These days, my revisions aren't so drastic as back in high school. There are a lot of reasons for that: awkward sentences get re-worked in progress, useless paragraphs don't get written in the first place, my outline and scene notes keep me on target, and my awareness of the vocab I'm using is much sharper. When my gut tells me something, it's easier to figure out what it's saying and whether I should trust it. (This has applications outside of writing.) All of that is the result of years of practice, years of writing, and there's no other way to earn those.

And after all these years of writing, I'm still learning the craft. Frankly, I hope I never feel like I've mastered it. If I did, I'd have to assume it would mean I've fallen into a rut or gotten my head stuck up my ass.

So I've been looking at the science fiction I put down a year ago and thinking about how to apply what I learned in the process of writing Disciple to it. I'm thinking this will be a murder-scene-level revision; time to get out that chainsaw.

What's the longest you've put a story down for? How did it look when you came back?

Stories, stories everywhere...

...and never time to write.

My father had a stroke last week. Being the reliable child (a frightening thought), I made the journey to New England to help my mother. I spent about a week chauffeuring her to the regional hospital and watching my father make a recovery so fast that he amazed all his doctors. The brain scan revealed minimal damage, and he's regaining movement on his left side. Within a couple days of his stroke, he was sitting up and alert enough to ask for his knitting.

Not what you expected a 70-year-old man to be asking for? It makes a good segue into what I want to think out loud about here.

It's a hallmark question of people who don't write, or are very new to it: where do you get your ideas? The short answer is: they're everywhere. You're constantly tripping over them.

Hospitals are especially packed with stories. Simply walking through an ICU -- trying not to look into the other rooms, because people have a right to privacy, but incapable of not stealing a glance or two -- threw plenty of ideas at me. 

In one room, a young guy flat on his back, on a ventilator, with an officer standing by his bed. Later, I saw the officer walk by and caught "Correctional Facility" on his shoulder patch.

A kid, under ten, with half his/her head shaved and the other half making a bed-head punk of him/her.

A silver-haired man with a strawberry nose* struggling with big knitting needles and fat yarn -- his left hand can't grip, and the stitches keep slipping away.

A good chunk of "being a writer" is the ability to catch the little snapshots of stories that are blizzarding around us all the time, every day, and build them into something unique and fascinating. Don't get me wrong: they're tough to catch. It's tough to catch the right one, the interesting one, and ask yourself the right questions.

A prisoner in ICU. A punk-ified child. An old man asking for his knitting. How? Why? What are the consequences of failure? What is failure, in this situation?

Another thing that got my brain burbling was watching the nurses go about their business. How would this be done in another place or time? Such as prepping a wheeled recliner chair for my dad to sit in, and the entire process of sitting him up, getting him on his feet and shuffled around to sit down. How would the process be different in a fantasy world? A science fiction one? During World War II?

So, that's why I didn't post last week: I was called away by a family emergency. Fortunately, my dad has a guardian angel, or a lot of good karma stored up (he doesn't knit for himself, only for others), or whatever form of good fortune you espouse. He was driving behind an ambulance when the stroke happened, and the EMTs had him in the ER lickety-split. The car sat on a side street, unlocked and full of stuff, undisturbed for the two days it took us to find it.

And that's my dose of talking about personal details for the year. :) Be well, everybody...

*Yes, my dad's nose has turned into a strawberry. It's been a strange transformation to watch. I fear for my own.

Tiny Plug: the Blogger Book Fair is going on over at Disciple of the Fount. So is a raffle of Disciple, Part I and Part II! Ends July 26th.

Choices made: sexism, racism, and self-publishers

Arguments about sexism and racism in science fiction (and, by extension, fantasy) have been smoldering along and occasionally breaking out into wildfires for the last couple years. It's not a discussion I've felt like I had much to contribute to, aside from planting my flag firmly on the all-inclusive side of the line.

And these are not issues I've wanted to write about in any sort of activist sense -- but at the same time, when I was writing Disciple it crossed my mind that someday somebody may loudly object to the gender- and race-related choices I made therein. It's not likely, since I'm a self-publisher, but you never know. The advice I got at Viable Paradise -- do nothing accidentally -- is well taken, though, and I'm willing to explain and defend my choices should I ever need to.

These sexism and racism arguments apply to book covers, also. I've followed (with amusement) Jim Hines' attempts to mimic women's poses on various book covers, and the re-drawing of comic book heroines with male characters to point out how ridiculous the poses are. Recently, it was brought up that the publishers of Throne of the Crescent Moon made an explicit commitment to not whitewashing the cover... which is all well and good, but it's frustrating that this needed to be explicitly stated.

Added later -- this is the cover!
More about Disciple, Part III here.

That note about Throne, and all of the racism/sexism posts of late, combined with the weekly discussions of "to self-publish or not to self-publish?" over at Absolute Write, combined with my own discussions with my cover artist about the cover of Disciple, Part III, led me to ponder: 

I'm putting an "Arabic" man on my book cover, and I can do that because I'm self-publishing. 

Arabic is in quotes because there is no Arabia in Disciple's universe. He's ethnically equivalent, though, and yes it was intentional -- I put a brown guy in a position of tremendous power to steer these blonde, white-bread kids through the perils of war. Why? Because he's the one with the intellect, motivation, and experience to do it. And he kicks some ass along the way, which was fun...

(There's a post in here about designing your own cover art. I'll talk about it in the next Indie Life installment)

Would Saint Qadeem have been on a cover, if Disciple's six parts were published by one of the big houses? Would the marketing department have objected to his role in the story? The editor? Would they have also objected to the fact that my main character, Kate, is a 16-year-old girl who is not only deflowered in full view of the reader, but also does it:

• without being married
• without angsting about it
• without being raped
• in fact, let me spoil this for you: Kate isn't raped in any of the six parts of Disciple. 

Would they have put Kate on the cover in a lovely banquet gown, twisted into some pose that can show off her butt and boobs? (eyeroll.) Maybe she can be clinging to Kiefan's arm while he heroically keeps shadowy monsters at bay. (shirtless, of course he'd go into battle shirtless, isn't that as logical as her silly dress...?)

I was the only person pressuring myself, when it came to Disciple's content and packaging. Admittedly, I'm quite capable of pressuring myself -- but I'm also free to avoid sexism and racism both on the book cover and in the story itself.  To the best of my ability, at least.

I decided what the consequences of Kate's sexual experiences were, and nobody pressured me to make them more draconian so as to avoid scandalizing the more prudish side of the audience. I decided the skin color of everyone in the book, and some of the "good guys" are brown, some of the "bad guys" are pasty-white -- and they all have their reasons for being what they are.

In a roundabout way, I'm trying to say this is one advantage of self-publishing: not having to fit into a publisher's preconceived notions about salability or what the audience wants. Yes, it cuts both ways and maybe I will lose readers by putting Saint Qadeem on my book cover, or by not slut-shaming Kate.

It's a risk I'm willing to take. Is there some controversial aspect of your story that you might have to defend, in the future?  

Blogging: a waste of time?

This question has been making its way around the writing blogosphere -- since Google announced it was shutting down Reader, it seems. I've also read about how RSS feeds are, apparently, a service that only we Gen-Xers who got online before the mid 90s care about. (shrugs) I still like my RSS feeds, thank you very much. I moved all of mine over to Feedly with a minimum of fuss and muss.

But the question of whether blogging is useful to writers is a valid one. I've been doing this since... huh, it's been two years now. Shows you how good I am at tracking anniversaries. Jody Hedlund wrote about her thoughts most recently, and she refers to both Jane Friedman's advice to new writers and L.L. Barkat's advice to experienced writers.

By "experienced" I assume they mean "published through traditional channels" (or trade published, or industrial, or whatever we're calling the big conglomerates now.) I am neither a new writer nor traditionally published, so here's a third POV.

In the two years I've been blogging, I've written over 280 posts. I've read hundreds more and commented when I had something to say. Memes, the A-to-Z Challenge, and Rach Writes' Platform-Building Crusade have all appeared here. Here's why I don't think it was wasted time.

Improved my discipline
One argument is that new writers should focus on their craft instead of on blogging. New writers should always focus on their craft -- I think that goes without saying -- but part of that craft is discipline. My butt-in-chair habit is one of the most powerful tools I have. Let me bold that and point neon arrows at it. Blogging contributed to my discipline. It never interfered with my creative writing, but I have more free time than most people do.

Established an identity
I started this blog with zero identity. Do you know what it's like to self-publish with zero identity? I've done it, back when I was involved in tabletop RPGs -- it's a soul-crushing disaster. I'm no big voice in the blogosphere, I know that, but my name is out there and there's a body of work attached to it. Over the two years I've blogged, I built that body up and made sure it was a reasonably accurate portrait of me. (Yes, I really am this boring. :D)

Met friends and crit partners
I started this blog with no writing friends, real or online, and no critique partners. If the value of those needs to be explained... I trust it doesn't.

But: the more I know, the less I have to say
I've heard the blogosphere called the "world's biggest writing convention" -- well, a disorganized, repetitive one, maybe. For new writers, there is value in reading the blogosphere's posts and in wrestling with their own writing challenges through blogging about them. After a while, the new writer is going to notice that a lot of it is the same advice, in slightly different form, over and over. There's nothing wrong with that, but new writers don't stay new.

I came into blogging late in my writing apprenticeship. Maybe I was already over my first million words mark, maybe I wasn't -- I don't know the word counts on the stuff I wrote in high school -- but I'm well into my second million now. One's perspective changes, with time and experience. And I've been finding that the more I know about writing, the less I have to say.

I just want to sit and stare at the unicorn, not try to publicly dissect it. On a related note, I may be moving to blogging once a week...

Anyway
To wrap up: I think blogging has a value for the new and/or self-publishing author. There's a community here, and networking opportunities. Those can be difficult to find, especially for shy writers and those living in small towns. As one progresses in one's writing career, the usefulness of blogging may fade. Maybe it will shift into promotions for one's publications. Maybe one will move into a cave to devote oneself to The Art. But writing is never a waste of time, if you're striving to improve.

What has your experience been?

Three ways to name characters

This is one question that comes up all the time in writing forums... how do you name characters, where do you find names, help me I can't get a name to stick...

Everybody does it differently, so you have to try a bunch of different ways and find what works for you. I do it differently for different characters, even, so I have a few different methods to lay out.

Deliberate choices
When my friend Marcy Hatch interviewed me, she asked about naming and I described how I picked the name "Kate" for the main character of Disciple. It was a very deliberate choice on my part, not because of affection or inspiration.

Deliberation also applies to custom-built names. If you want to convey a certain image or a certain attitude, you might build a specific name from scratch. You want your alien monster to have an unpronounceable name full of harsh noises? A long, flowery name for a girl so that everyone will be surprised when she turns out to be tough as nails?

"Kiefan" was a custom-built name, of sorts. It isn't a "real" name, but it's close to one: Kiefer. It's also close to another name that I like, but wasn't the right ethnicity for this story: Kieran. So, a little cross-pollination and I had something a little different, but easily pronounced and sounding like the right ethnicity.

Know it when I see it
This is a method I use frequently. I know it's not very helpful, but here's how I narrow it down.

I'm a world-builder, as you know. When I'm developing a story, the characters and the world are tightly linked to each other. I have baby name books, online indexes, and random name generators on hand for when I'm brainstorming about these things, and I just peruse them. I usually have a vague feel for what general pattern I want to use -- something Latin/Romantic, or Germanic, what-have-you -- so I search for relevant ethnicities. Or I use a formula-based name generator that will use a specific pattern of syllables.

I knew I would be using Saxon names for one of the two boys in the M/M romance I'm currently developing, so I tracked down some indexes of male Saxon names. Problem is, most of them are horrible. Barely pronounceable at a glance, stupid-looking... so I'm skimming through these lists with increasing dread, hoping to find anything salvageable, maybe for bit-part characters, or something, and my eye lit on: Heathric.

Heathric. Holy crap, it's pronounceable. And he instantly acquired a mop of blond curls (probably because of Heath Ledger in A Knight's Tale) but I can deal with that.

I didn't choose it
Honest, I didn't. If you've never had a character name him/herself, maybe it sounds silly. It's not. It happened to me. Here's the story -- and I bet those who know the character won't be surprised at all:

When I first started playing around with the Saints of War world and characters, this scene I was writing needed a second-string knight to be Kiefan's aide. Given the German basis I was using for names, I found the name "Andreas" and plugged it in. If you read that first scene (you won't, it's long gone) you see the name "Andreas" a few times and then it spontaneously turns into "Anders" -- and that's exactly when he began to make his move into the spotlight. He's been a handful ever since. It's not a name that fits the story well, to be honest -- it's Scandinavian, not German, and it's a Biblical name (a variant of Andrew) which was a problem when I was later deliberately removing all Bible-based names -- but he didn't give me much choice in the matter. Anders he was and Anders he shall ever be.

Sometimes characters arrive fully fledged, even if you usually build them from job descriptions and story functions, spackled together with reasonable assumptions and things that just sound cool. Sometimes you just have to trust your creative gut and run with what it gives you.

Every character's name has a story. What's your most interesting one?

Plotting, scheming and pondering

So I'm a plotter far more than a pantser, I'm sure that's obvious, and I've got something in development. I posted about the moment the idea hit me, and now that things have fleshed out a bit more I thought I'd post some more.

Plotters and pantsers work in very different ways: pantsers dive in and start writing, then figure out the structure of the story later, whereas plotters work out the structure first and then dive in. Either way is perfectly valid. Most people do some combination of both, and a lot of people start out pantsers and work their way toward being plotters. I did. And even though I'm very much a plotter, I still "leave room for pants" as I said in a chat once.

I'm a plotter because what I see first, when that idea first hits, are certain emotionally charged scenes. They're often climaxes, or at least points where conflicts turn razor-edged. This happened with Disciple, too -- there were certain scenes haunting me for months before I got to write them. Where my creative gut gets these, I don't know... well, maybe that's not entirely true, but it's too personal to go into. At any given moment, there are scraps of ideas floating around, and sometimes they blossom into scenes.

The challenge is: how do I get the characters to these situations? Why did it have to happen? What will the consequences be?

For example, here's something from the very first notes I wrote for this story:

The shepherd overheard something, out in the woods — bandits? enemy hill tribe? — and they chased him, but he got away. He’s been living in fear ever since. But he has to tend his flocks, they’re his and his parents’ income. He ought to tell the Rangers, but that would out him as the snoop. It’s someone he knows. Blood relation?

I'd had a vague sense of setting: the hill country on the border between two kingdoms. Someplace where there's little border regulation aside from suspicion of outsiders. The moment I saw, specifically, was a young man breathing hard from running, leaning against a tree or maybe a barn doorsill, raking one hand into his hair as he agonized over what the hell am I going to do now?

Conflict. Nice, clear conflict. Why? How? What's the price of him going to the Rangers? Or not? What's the breaking point going to be?

I've got a fairly solid outline, now, but there are still places where I'll have to work things out "in the field" with the characters. Especially around the climax -- I've found it's a good idea to let the details of that figure themselves out along the way. I have an idea what will happen, but if the characters want to surprise me, I'll roll with it.

What sorts of things do you leave room for in your outlines, if you're a plotter?

The writer's weird brain

I finished the prologue to Disciple on the 2nd, which right now is five days ago. Withdrawal is setting in.

LOL, writing withdrawal, how amusing...

Consider:
I'm a night-time writer. I get in my words, post them on Twitter, check an email box or two, and go to bed. The night I finished, it had not been much work to do. That very night, I had a dream. A significant dream? No. But when I'm writing, I don't dream at all -- or, at least, I never remember dreaming.

After a few days (that would be starting last night) I start having trouble falling asleep. My brain sits there babbling at me nonstop, if I haven't tired it out enough. There are options, of course, but writing is my poison of choice.

And then there's... the darkness. The ruminating. Circling around my various websites, desperate for a distraction. Running in circles like a rat in a small cage, feeling the wire mesh against my skin. All the claustrophobic angst of that moment in LOTR when Gandalf reads from the journal in Balin's tomb: We cannot get out. They are coming.

Overly dramatic... yeah, that's why I don't talk about this stuff much. But my blogging tank has been pretty empty lately. Once I can get started on revisions to Part VI, things will settle down. And I have a handful of new characters to work on developing, but not a new world. If my muse wants to insist on foisting an m/m romance on me, I can set it in the Saints of War universe if I want to.

Side note: I'm titling the prologue Fire's First Kiss. It was either that or Vomit's First Heave, which I suspect would not work in its favor. My first impression is that it might be a bit too graphic -- which might sound unlikely to some people, but... well, Kate's in a battlefield surgery, Kiefan's leading a cavalry charge, and Anders is in full bad-boy mode. We'll see how it looks after a few weeks of cooling down.

Creativity and trust

Sometimes, my brain is like a saturated chemical solution. Just a drop of the right chemical will trigger the precipitation of some strange new compound. I never know when these drops will hit me, and they leave me scrambling for something to write the precipitate down on.

I was reading a thread over in the self-publishing forum at Absolute Write and someone said (paraphrasing): So we published Something Serious and promoted it all we could but only sold a dozen copies... and later we published a m/m romance without telling anybody at all. Before we knew it, it was selling a dozen copies a day! how about them apples!

With that certain weary sarcasm, I thought, obviously I should be writing m/m romance.

BLAM. Precipitate tumbling out of solution.

Followed by the thought, oh come on I just finished a huge freaking romance and I want to write something else. I can sit around and wish to write transcendently philosophical science fiction all I like, but that doesn't set off a chain reaction in my head. Or not yet, at least.

I'm not the sort of person who's prone to turning mystical (or transcendently philosophical, for that matter) but of late I have found my way to understanding something that a painter once said to me. I'd sat at a panel he gave, in which he wondered aloud about large sailing ships -- really huge ones, beyond the triremes -- and how little luck he'd had with research. My companion and I went up afterwards to tell him about the Chinese treasure fleet that was sent out just before China destroyed its navy. He thanked us for the information, and we commented on how we'd only just learned about the treasure fleet ourselves, what were the chances we'd be able to answer his question? He said that he had trusted the universe would bring him what he needed for his art, and it had.

Over the years since then, I've come to see that he's right in a certain way. I've gotten the sense that trust is deeply involved in creativity. Trusting my gut. Trusting the universe. Which doesn't come easy, because I'm well aware the universe doesn't give a damn about me.

I've said, here and there, that I've finally given myself over to the muse. To creativity. The universe, perhaps. Ray Bradbury's essay "Run Fast, Stand Still" left me at the bottom of the stairs, thirty years ago, and asked if I would invite the monster down (read it here, to understand) -- and I did. Finally. Accepted its frightening, empowering embrace.

I guess it follows that it would challenge my trust, like this. M/M romance, it wants. Okay, let's develop the idea and see what happens. But if this doesn't work, it's back to science fiction.

Meme: a story I haven't written

Picking this up from a favorite author of mine: Martha Wells. This meme requires audience participation, though, so let's see what happens...

Tell me about a story I haven’t written, and I’ll give you one sentence from that story.

You post the gist of the story in comments, and I'm supposed to come up with something snappy. Looking at other memers (kateelliot, kristine_smith) they sound like catchy first lines. I bet it would be fun if other readers posted their own first lines, too.

Challenging? Fun? I finished Disciple last night, and my head is strangely empty. Random thoughts are banging around loose in there. Anybody want to get some creative exercise with me?