My least favorite question

I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating, my least favorite question isn't the infamous "Where
do you get your ideas?" I like that question, actually, and cannot understand how anyone could move through this world and not end the day with their pockets stuffed full of stories (whether they have the will or the wherewithal to write them down is another matter).

No, my least favorite question is "Which character is you?"

The thing I like about "Where do you get your ideas?" is that it has as its underlying theme a genuine understanding that this writing thing is something I could do if I could just understand how to get started.  The question of which character is me gets at a fundamental misunderstanding of what fiction is, much less how it is done.

I probably didn't help much by writing in character as Dr Deeds on Twitter. That isn't to say that Howard's mad science teacher doesn't have a lot of me in him, but no more or less than Howard, or Old Suit, or Erica for that matter. But none of them are Scott in disguise.

I can't think why I'd want to put on Groucho glasses and a wig and wander into my story. "Nothing to see here, author coming through, carry on, nothing to see..." what a distraction that would be.

Which isn't to say that authors never inject themselves into their stories. "Never" is a dangerous word and almost always the first word of a lie. Some writers do and I find it deeply annoying in much the same way that I've grown to hate the inevitable Stan Lee cameo in every Marvel movie. Let's step out of the story for a moment while we all acknowledge the creator of this fictional narrative we were enjoying before you interrupted it for an inside joke.

It can be done right, and carefully in the correct circumstances (Kilgore Trout springs to mind). But you don't serve your story or your reader by forcing your story to form around an ego trip.

That's the fundamental conceit of fiction that this questioner doesn't understand and a bridge that far too many have trouble crossing. The purpose of storytelling is to let both the reader and the storyteller live lives we'd never be able to live, to experience things we might never encounter, to feel empathy for people we've never met or never could.

All of these kids and mad scientists and government agents and robots and alien creatures are part of me, but none of them are me. We use stories to inject ourselves into other lives, other times, and other situations. To breathe humanity into dry history and to postulate very ordinary human reactions into extraordinary situations. None of it requires me to inject myself into the story as a thinly-veiled character and nothing would be served except my own ego by doing so.

Which character is me? All of them. And none of them.

---

GETTING BACK IN THE TIME MACHINE:

Next weekend, I will be in Port Townsend, Washington for The Brass Screw Confederacy May 29-31st.  There will be writers panels, radio shows, and other shenanigans.

I hope to see some of my Seattle-area folks there!

My Lovely Blog

The strange thing about writing a book is the number of people MOST OF WHOM I'VE NEVER MET who are reading words that I wrote and hopefully laughing in the right places. My Twitter followers went from 750 to almost 1,000 and quite a few of those new people are actual people. (Which is astonishing if you know anything about Twitter.)

Welcome all of you!

So I feel like I need a "Getting to Know You" post. Handily, I was tagged awhile back by fellow Crooked Cat author Kim Walker for something called the "My Lovely Blog Hop".

The title of which makes me feel like I might need a new author pic...

Why hello, I didn't see you there! Welcome to my lovely blog...

I'm not sure how the thing was named, but who am I to complain about a chance to sit on a park bench under a flowering tree making passers by uncomfortable? Six questions are posed and I shall take them in order and possibly combine a few: First memory, books, libraries/bookshops, what's your passion, learning, writing.

On my first memory...

My first cogent memory is my parents' wedding. It was my mom's second (hence my sister and I) and my dad's first. I was three and being a total squirrel, filling my pockets with cocktail peanuts and those chalky dinner mints that were everywhere back in the 1970's. Dad picked me up and held me on his hip through the ceremony, mostly just to get me to stop screwing around and it cemented in my mind that This Was the Beginning of Something.

On Books, Libraries, and Bookshops...

All my favorite pieces of furniture are all designed for the care and feeding of a book habit.
My dad brought to our family an insatiable love of reading and cars. My sister got the car thing and I started acquiring a library. By this point in my life, "Library" is another word for home.

In 1998 I left my college job with REI for a management gig at Barnes & Noble, followed by a 9+ year stint at Borders before a very weird dinner party where I found myself in a conversation with Mercedes Lackey and Stephen Brust (picks up the dropped names and puts them back in his pockets) convinced me to spend more time writing my own stories even if it meant less time to read other peoples.

I doubt either of them remembers me, but it was the beginning of the end for me at Borders. The company and the store I worked in were changing for the worse and I made my exit. You can read more about that here if you're interested: Beyond Borders -- The Borders bankruptcy as seen by this former bookseller.

I love bookstores but I mostly spend my money at the independents these days, in part because that's all that's left around here. Which is both awesome and strangely sad. Chain or independent, bookstores are the repositories of our cultural aspiration to be well-read and literate. And too many towns lost their independent bookstores in the kerfuffle when Borders and Barnes & Noble were building their megastores in every town on the map at what turned out to be an unsustainable rate. And now the chains are gone and we have... not much really.

Hopefully new stores will arise to take their places.

What's your passion?

You're soaking in it.

On Learning...

I have the peculiar skill set common to writers of absorbing information quickly, retaining it for the duration of a project, and then erasing it to make room for the next thing on my list. Writers are human chalkboards. (Not dry erase boards, mind you, the smell of the markers gives me a headache.)

As I often say: "I can pick a lock or repair a watch. I can conduct surgeries, examine corpses for forensic evidence, bind a book, dress a deer, identify or concoct poisons, and reproduce Lord Nelson's flagship down to the last knot and nail. If necessary, I can also conduct a Latin Mass, reproduce the scripts of Carolingian scribes, shoe a horse, summon Cthulhu, or swear like a WWII soldier. I can walk the streets of forgotten cities in lost kingdoms and navigate the alleys of Calcutta in the year 2010. And I can do it all from the safety and convenience of my writing chair."

Some of these things I can do because I'm weird that way. For the rest of it, I have reference books and a prodigious memory that's good at making the connections that others miss. (Strangely, this did very little to help me in my school days, but it won me a few awards as a journalist and makes my life easier as an author.)

On Writing...

Writing is work. It's a job. Treat it with the respect that you would any job that you love: Show up for work every day. Put in your time. Do the work. Shake the hands and meet the people and hang out at the watercooler once in awhile, but most of all, you have to write to be a writer. "Writers write" is the dumbest thing in the world, not because it isn't true but because it really should go without saying.

The central thesis of this blog (if it has one) that there's no magical path between 'I want to write' and 'I have written' except to sit down and start putting words on a page. If a writer's to-do list, blog, or writing guide cannot be summed up as "Butt in chair, fingers on keys" then ditch it; it's not worth reading.

And on that lovely note... good night, Internet. And well met.

- Scott

Throwback Thursday: Dropping the dime on Ray Bradbury

The other day, I lost an i. It's a key key as keyboards go and now it is gone. I'm not sure how, but one minute it was an i key and the next moment it was suffering total existence failure.

I suppose that's what I get for writing about pirate robots. I was asking for it, really.  I mean look at that thing! It only had one i to begin with... 

(Yes, I've worn the letters off my keys. It happens quickly in my line of work. If I wasn't a touch typist, I'd need to use disposable keyboards because I'd go through at least one a month.)

Anyway, as I was poking around online trying to find a replacement, it reminded me of the last time a laptop died on me and the story of Ray Bradbury's typewriter. That laptop died shortly after he did, so in honor of Throwback Thursday, here is the piece I wrote on what he taught me about the value of a dime...

----

8 June 2012

Computers. They make our lives easier, except when they don't, and recent computer problems have made me spend some time working on my penmanship and reflecting on the nature of time: I only have so much of it to devote to this endeavor, and doing this thing the old-fashioned way is aggravatingly slow.

Apologies to my readers, but my writing time has been somewhat curtailed of late. When given a choice between writing stories or writing blog posts, I choose the stories every time. And it's been a choice I've had to make with special delicacy lately due to the untimely demise of my laptop. It's hard to upload a page of a legal pad to my blog. It's not impossible, mind you, but the two technologies are not compatible without a special adapter and that special adapter is me.

But I do not alone beweep my outcast state because I am re-learning a valuable lesson about the value of my writing time.

On the day Ray Bradbury died, I was sitting at a computer loaned to me by a college library. This is important because Mr. Bradbury, you see, didn't own a typewriter when he started out. He rented one in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library for $.10 per half hour. Fahrenheit 451 famously cost him $9.80 to write.

A bargain by any measure.

But think about that. If you've never used a typewriter to write anything of length, I invite you to go do so and come back to marvel with me at the economy of this claim. One of the great works of American Letters took less than 49 hours to complete. That's a groundbreaking novel (originally published as a serial in Playboy) written in 6 and a half standard work days. All because its author was counting his dimes.

How many dimes did you spend on your last story?

I understand that there's infinite variety in writing styles and there's no such thing as a correct answer to "How long does it take to write a good book?" As with any art, it takes as long as it takes.

But if your computer charged you a fee for every half hour you spent, how much faster would you write? If you're like me, you would write so much faster it would make your head spin. Because one of the problems with writing on a computer is all the many other things you can do with a computer. 

If you were paying for the time on the computer, how much less time would you spend looking at cute pictures of kittens and poking your friends on Facebook?

How much farther would $9.80 get you on a typewriter versus an internet-enabled laptop?

There's no right answer to this. The internet is blessing and curse. A digital circus that is hard to ignore, but also a bottomless cup of stories from which to drink. I think it boils down to whether you want to write stories or put on digital clown makeup and take the center ring.

As Robert Lynn Aspirin said in the forward to one of his books: "There are fast writers and there are slow writers, I'm a half-fast writer." I, for one, have been on an unintentional journey between the the land of fast and the land of half-fast.

At risk of plundering the pun, I don't want to be a half-fast writer. I don't want to be a half-assed writer either.

In the past couple of months while this blog has been limping along in the shadow of my inattention, I have spent less time writing and written more than I would have otherwise. I have filled several notebooks with story ideas and notes and snippets of text. I've re-edited a book I'd long ago thought worthy of abandoning into something sleeker and more worthy of a reader's time.

The simple fact is that writing is a business, so even though I don't have an hourly wage as a writer, I am very much paying for every minute spent at the keyboard. If you're going to be your own employee, be a productive one. I would never treat my hourly employer this way; why treat myself like that?

Ray Bradbury was infamously curmudgeonly about the internet. He hated it like my cat hates baths. I dis agree with him on that point. I think it's an inexhaustible well of words and enthusiasm. An entire virtual world built entirely out of ideas. But he has a point nonetheless; and though my computer ills are now past, I think I'll remember how good it felt to just sit and put words on a page.

In the end, it's your dime.

Thanks for all your stories, Ray. You left us with a lifetime supply of new worlds to explore. You legitimized the business of writing dreams. And you have left us with some incredibly big shoes to fill. Rest in Peace. We'll take it from here.

---
Note: Adjusted for inflation, $9.80 in 1950 translates to $98.02 in today's money. Still cheap at twice the price. http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%249.80+%281950+dollars%29&x=0&y=0

How to take an author photo

First of all, I am not a photographer, I'm a writer and a graphic designer. I've studied photography in a peripheral way, but not as a professional. So this is a general post about aesthetics more than anything. In that as in all things: To thine own self be true.

Before we went out on Saturday to chase the will-o-the-wisp that is the perfect authorial photo, I took a look around online to see what other authors did. I was hoping for a to-do list and ended up with a pretty extensive to-don't list to go with it.

Did we find that "perfect" picture? Well, let's say it ended up perfect for me. No matter how you feel about my photo, though, that research helped me make a better author photo, so I thought I'd share it with you.

Do

• Be in focus. This is more your photographer than you, but you get to pick the pic you use so be aware that soft focus just makes you look like you went to Glamor Shots. Also, the best outfit and artistic composition in the world won't help if I can't tell it's you.
• Be well lit. Natural lighting is the way to go if you don't want to invest in studio lighting. A slightly overcast day is awesome; a photographer friend refers to clouds as "God's diffusion filter".  If your face is too shadowed to discern, you'll have to shoot at higher speed (often resulting in a grainy picture) or lighten the photo in Photoshop (same result).
• Look like you wrote the book. The biggest objection my publisher had to my original photo was that I wasn't smiling. I didn't look funny and it's a funny book. If you're a crime novelist, a steely stare is well and good, but don't glower on the back cover of your romance novel.
• Dress comfortably. Author photography isn't usually a formal occasion. Don't look like you just came in from doing the gardening, but a tie or dress aren't necessary either. If you're comfortable, it shows; it's as simple as that.
• Pose comfortably. This goes for any portrait as far as I'm concerned, but that's another blog post. Don't lay down, but don't look like you have a stick up your butt either.
• Look as much like yourself as possible. This goes back to the second point, but deeper. The photo I chose wasn't as much about being a good photo as it was about picking something that looked like me. 
• Get a second opinion. Your publisher, your agent, or even better, a loved one can tell you if you look comfortable, happy, and ready to sell some books. "This is the one that looks the most like you" said my wife, the person who knows and likes me the most. Who can second-guess that kind of input?

Don't

• Blend into your backdrop. Mind what you have behind you, and stand out. If it's not too broad of a brush to paint with, authors tend to be the sort that blend in by preference. There are times when that is cool... this is not one of the times.
• Use a cheap-o camera Unless it's top of the line, skip the cell phone camera. If the images start to look grainy when you blow them up bigger than 5"x7", it's the wrong camera to use. (Or you need to improve your lighting, see above.) Borrow a decent camera or find someone who has a decent camera and get them to take the shot.
• Confuse this with an actor's headshot. Actors are trying to look like they could be anyone, play any role if you'd just ask them to, but especially leading man/lady if you please. An author should look like someone who wrote the book you're holding in your hands.
• Use a photo you don't have reproduction rights to. Here's a difficult thing for people to understand: Just because you're in a photo doesn't mean you have the rights to use that photo however you like. Unless you hire someone specifically to create an image for you (work for hire) and your agreement says the image is for publicity and publication, the rights to a photo belong to the photographer. If you use it in a way that was not intended, you are violating their copyright and could be sued.
• Use a photo where you cannot see your face. We want to get to know the person behind the words. That's hard to do if your face is covered or you're so shadowed or far from the camera that we cannot make out your facial expression.
• Clutter the photo. It's tempting to have a ton of writing paraphernalia or research books or whathaveyou surrounding you. It's okay, you don't need to use your author photo to convince anyone of the depth of your research or how seriously you take being a writer.
• Do the "I am deep in thought" pose. Keep your chin out of your hands, eriously, you're not convincing anyone.

Bonus Tip

• e-Ink is a thing. My publisher rightly pointed out that the image has to work in high contrast black & white, not just color. e-Ink screens cannot display color and there are millions of ereaders like the Kindle Paperwhite still using e-Ink instead of backlight screens.

Composition is key

We've discussed "The rule of thirds" before. As a compositional shorthand for photographers and graphic designers, it's the old standby. But there are other rules of composition that help you align elements in a pleasing manner whether it's photography or a book cover.

Please note: You can skip most of these concerns by hiring a professional. It's not as expensive as you might think and these photos will be seen by everyone who reads your book, visits your blog, follows you on Twitter or Facebook, or just reads your bio on your publisher's website. It's important. As I often say, writing is a business, invest in your business.

That said, if you don't have a publisher doing the cover and have to choose between paying for a decent cover and paying a photographer to take my author photo, I would opt for the graphic designer. Not because I am a graphic designer, but because though my photographer friends might disagree, I think it's easier to accidentally get a great photo than it is to stumble into great graphic design. (If you want to try it, though, I previously wrote about cover design here in this post Judged by its Cover: An introduction to book design. Good luck to you!)

While I was thinking about this today, this lovely video on the basics of photo composition crossed my desk from the folks at National Geographic. It's worth noting that the first thing discussed is the Rule of Thirds, but there are other rules and ways to break them that are worth discussing.

My wife does this instinctively. As I said, she's almost irritatingly talented sometimes. The rest of us have to think about it, but once you start seeing composition you'll start noticing it everywhere.

Howard Carter: Cover reveal, release date, author photos!

If you follow me on social media, you already know this and I apologize for repeating myself. 

Howard Carter Saves the World has a cover and a release date!

The final edits are complete, the cover is locked, and we will finally get Howard's adventures in our hands on April 14th! The release will happen online simultaneously in the US and UK. I'll provide a preorder link as soon as there is one.

An ebook release is the initial plan, followed by a print edition if it sells well, so if you like reading about Howard Carter and his strange adventures, tell your friends because in order to write more, this one needs to do well.

The cover reveal:

Cover images care of Crooked Cat Publishing

The main illustration is one of mine. I might do a 'Cover Story' post about it at some point, but since I was illustrator, not designer on this one, I might not have all that much additional to say about it.

Author Photos, or Scott wasn't made for this modeling thing...

When my publisher was updating their website recently they didn't like how serious the photo I sent them was. It was taken by my wife, Kristin. It was all writerly, I'm sitting at the window of a cafe in Portland and staring out the window with literary gravitas... or so I imagined.

My publisher staged what he called "A social media intervention" and grabbed my profile photo from Twitter to use as a placeholder. It was a still taken from a webcam conversation where I was laughing rather a lot, so it was happy and looked like someone who wrote a sci fi farce you'd actually want to read. But it also pixelated like crazy.

Needless to say, they asked for a new picture. 

I was going to be spending part of Saturday in Tacoma anyway, and you couldn't ask for a better setting for author photos. Brick walls to lean against, walls to perch on, cafes in which to stare portentiously out the windows, staircases, park benches, fountains, sculptures to play with... 

The rules were: you have to be smiling and it has to work in black & white because people have Kindle paperwhites.  The rest was a matter of putzing around downtown Tacoma's cafes and museums with a camera.

My wife is an excellent photographer and I'm a terribly insecure model. I suck at being at ease in front of a lens, but she knows how to get the shot when I think she's pointing at something else. That's a rare talent, but she's a talented woman.

The nice thing about being married to your photographer is you get to keep the outtakes...

This is me remembering not to fall into the fountains behind The Museum of Glass.

This is me deciding Not to Fall Off of a Wall.

Save me!! Don't make me take any more pictures!!

Seriously, Tacoma's a great town, Thanks for playing host this weekend!

The results are in the new header for this blog, or you can see it on my official author's bio at Crooked Cat. 

Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You: Howard Carter Saves the World

BIG NEWS about BIG ROBOTS!

Well, books about big robots, anyway...

This week, I signed a contract with a small UK-based publisher called Crooked Cat Publishing to bring Howard Carter Saves the World to bookstores. The official announcement was made yesterday via social media.

I've been bouncing off the walls ever since.

As you may recall, Howard Carter is the novel that I wrote in public, posting chapter-by-woefully-unedited-chapter live and in front of a studio audience. (No laugh tracks allowed!) The results were somewhere between a coming of age story and a 1950's alien invasion serial. Most of all, it was an ode to all the fun and funny science fiction that I enjoyed as a much younger man and a reaction to how overwhelmingly dour and dark science fiction has become.

Which means that some of you read along as I wrote it, putting that first, imperfect, draft of Howard Carter's adventures up as they unfolded. You've been here for the free short story days and all the posts that have charted the path from idea to publication.  I'm inviting you to come with me on the next step of the journey as we prepare Howard for his debut at Amazon and other online booksellers.

This is the part where I tell you how I need your help.

Crooked Cat press operates on a model that has become popular with many small presses. Howard Carter will debut as an eBook under the Crooked Cat imprint, available from the publisher's site and everywhere that eBooks are sold. If the eBook sells well enough, it will get a print run, and we'll all be able to put a physical book of paper and ink on our shelves.

Which would be lovely, but the real goal is to put out a book that is good enough for you to read and fall in love with, one that you love enough to not only read but to recommend to your friends. I've worked in publishing at enough different levels to know one thing for certain: positive word of mouth is how success happens.

More later.

- Scott

The In-Betweener

I recently had a meme cross my desk that defined a book hangover as the feeling a reader gets when they finish one book but cannot yet start another because they’re still living in the last book’s world.

If readers think they’ve got it bad, they should try writing.

No book is ever finished until someone pries your fingers off the keyboard and forces you to type “The End”, and after you type that terminal sentence, it’s good to take a bit of time to catch your breath. I suppose if you’re writing series characters or a shared world, that’s not as necessary, but when your worlds vary as widely as the madcap flights of Howard Carter’s fancy and the always-grounded and very adult world of AJ MacLeod, it’s enough to give anyone whiplash.

These are the in-between times.

While I’m never writing only one thing at a time, I do tend to pause at the end of a piece and take some time to cleanse my palate, to clear my head of the rules and mores of that world to lay the groundwork for another. Sometimes this means finally taking the time to plunder any lingering ideas that didn’t fit into the completed work as short stories, burning the last stubs of the old candle until there’s nothing left, no dangling threads to call out to me. Sometimes it means a Big Crazy Project, throwing everything I have at teaching myself something like shoemaking.  Sometimes those projects snowball into a Whole Other Thing, and sometimes they’re just fodder for future stories or background for future characters, but mostly they just take my mind out of fantasy world mode and ground me back in the here and now.

Whatever I end up doing to pass the days, be it short stories or shoes, at the end of a writing jag is when I finally have the time to read something unrelated to whatever I’m writing. Sweet release! Research might be my favorite intoxicant, but even so, it is sheer heaven to give myself lease to devour every book I can get my hands on be they drawn from fact or fiction.

Book after book piles up and gets absorbed. News stories too, and conversations, and daily interactions all get thrown into the hopper to be pulped and blended and spat back out as lessons on What Not To Do or notes about roads not taken that give rise to new characters and ideas that will some day carve out stories of their own. Wherever it comes from, it’s all fair game and it’s all fuel for the next fire.

Some writers will tell you that all writing is rewriting, and that may be true for those writers, but for my money, all writing is pre-writing. Even if it’s what happens after you get the ideas down on paper that makes the writing good, it’s what comes before that makes the story good. Because while all the grammar lessons in the world cannot save a bad story, a good enough story is Teflon.

This is an unfortunate truth that we all try to deny, yet there’s no other way to explain the number of mediocre writers that ascend the bestseller lists without devolving into conspiracy theories. The idea that some stories are going to resonate even if they’re handled poorly isn’t a terrible thing because it means that when you do pair a great writer with a great story, it’s unstoppable: Hilary Mantel and Wolf Hall, John Green and The Fault In Our Stars, Carlos Ruiz Zafon and The Shadow of the Wind, JRR Tolkien and The Hobbit, JK Rowling and Harry Potter et al…

Read the stories any of the aforementioned writers tell about how they arrived and those stories and you’ll hear tales of the Between Times, of pieces long held falling into place because of some quirk of fate that happened when they were open to it, whether it’s John Green meeting Esther Earl at a Harry Potter convention or Tolkien finding a blank page in a student thesis he was grading and jotting “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit…” These are stories that were formed in the Between Times, moments when something coalesced that the author had long been thinking about, such as Green’s long-simmering novel about teens in a cancer ward, or Tolkien’s bedtime stories finding purchase in the languages he taught at Oxford and his rose-coloured memories of a more pastoral England.

This most recent in-between has been rather longer than I’d intended, but I think it’s about to end. 

I always think in stories, but there’s a qualitative difference between the stories I’ve been forming recently and the ones that have been coalescing recently around a single idea.   I’ve stopped getting distracted by the trees I’ve already climbed or others have tried to cut down and started seeing the forest.

It is time to come out of the in-betweens and start writing things down again.

Sorry I was gone so long and also that I’ve thrown so many writing metaphors at you in a single post. I had a few pent up, apparently.

Scott

Dumbo's Feather Revisited: Of Rituals and Writers

This is going to be a bit long. I apologize in advance.

I noticed recently that my coffee ritual has become rather sloppy of late. Rather than carefully monitoring the temperature of the water and the exactitude of my scoops of ground coffee, I've been sort of winging it -- phoning it in. Thankfully, the quality of your beans will save you to a point, but only just.

I've essentially perfected the mediocre cup of great coffee.

For those who think I might've sold out with that coffee cup logo, fear not. My favorite cafe has long since closed its doors and faded into local memory.

And whither goes the coffee shop, thither followed my writing ritual...

There just aren't enough writer-friendly coffee shops in the world any more. Speak not to me of the sundrenched sterility of the Starbucks lobby. I seek a dim place of creaky chairs and enthusiastically nerdy conversations. A place of fair-to-middlin' coffee and poor lighting. Lots of places to plug in a laptop are nice, but not required. Sketchy wifi is a plus because I get more done when Facebook's siren song is muted and unreliable.

How did I get so reliant on rituals? When did I teach myself that I can only fly while clutching a feather in my trunk? And why is there a mouse wearing a drum major getup in my hat anyway?

You'll note that this is one of those posts where I laboriously link back to previous posts where I told all of you not to do the very things I'm complaining about. That's because I call out hypocrisy wherever I find it, especially in myself. And I have to remind myself that I should practice as I preach.

And no, for the record, it doesn't help. Not one bit.

Why is my coffee so pathetically mediocre and why am I not writing regularly?

It would be easy to blame my current Big Crazy Project™ which is quite a bit more physical than my usual projects. I'm supposed to be making neat things and writing about them. I've made a lot of sawdust this year, and even knitted a stocking cap, but not much with knitting together the words. I don't really know why.

Speaking of big crazy, I just built a kitchen full of cabinets from scratch. My home is in a bit of an uproar as only a kitchen remodel can make it. Blame that!

It's not the kitchen's fault. It's not because I can't really get in there to make a decent cuppa; done right, all you really need is a clean sock, a kettle and some patience.

Yes, a sock. Not that I regularly use a sock, but you can. (And many aficionados swear by it.)  But you don't find me at the bathroom sink with my socks in the coffee pot any more than you find me at the computer studiously applying words to pages.

I could blame work.

In January, after a lengthy stint of under-employment, I began working full time at the writing center, taking on additional duties of marketing and graphic design atop my usual stints of database management and other jack-of-all-trades job duties.

It's taken some getting used to, this working full-time thing. But I can't really blame that. I work a solid 40 hours a week and then I'm required by union rules and state law to knock it off. I wrote three novels working 50+ hours a week (at all hours of day or night) for Borders.

The truth is, I just haven't felt like it.  It's a stupid and simple as that.

I haven't been feeling like putting that much effort into perfect coffee or perfect prose. Hell, even mediocre prose has been a bit out of reach of late. It's not writer's block -- as you know, I don't actually believe in writer's block.

So what is it? Depression? Lack of ambition? Stress? Too much sleep? Uninspired?

Sometimes in the dark watches of the night as I lay staring at the ceiling I seriously ask myself: Am I out of ideas?  Then I get up and jot ten or eleven ideas in the notebook I keep next to my bed just to prove to myself that I can and go back to sleep.

At the end of the day, I'm stuck with the uncomfortable truth: I've just gotten sloppy. With my coffee, with my writing process. Sloppy. I allowed myself to become over-reliant on a space and defined period of time set aside to do it. Too reliant on ritual and not enough on the simple steps of getting stories from brain to page.

I've long been an advocate of approaching writing from the standpoint that amateurs wait for inspiration while the professional puts their butt in the chair and puts words on the page.

So I'm flipping my advice on rituals on its head a bit. I'm going to have to accept at some point that there's a certain amount of ritual that I require in my life. It starts with coffee this morning. And from there, I opened this blog and actually typed out a blog post. Something I've been regretfully neglecting this year.

This afternoon, over a cold sandwich, I will update the Renaissance Artisan project on my progress in that project.

Later tonight, (after the counter tops are installed and I've put up a few dozen linear feet of bead board) I will sit down to my novel-in- progress and begin the first-half rewrite. Wifi disabled, I will write until my fingers seize up and I realize it's time for bed.

And let that be my new feather and my new mouse-in-a-silly hat.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Writing Time: Ray Bradbury & Writing for Dimes

Computers. They make our lives easier, except when they don't, and recent computer problems have made me spend some time working on my penmanship and reflecting on the nature of time: I only have so much of it to devote to this endeavor, and doing this thing the old-fashioned way is aggravatingly slow.

Apologies to my readers, but my writing time has been somewhat curtailed of late.  When given a choice between writing stories or writing blog posts, I choose the stories every time. And it's been a choice I've had to make with special delicacy lately due to the untimely demise of my laptop.

It's hard to upload a page of a legal pad to my blog.  It's not impossible, mind you, but the two technologies are not compatible without a special adapter and that special adapter is me.

But I do not alone beweep my outcast state because I am re-learning a valuable lesson about the value of my writing time.

On the day Ray Bradbury died, I was sitting at a computer loaned to me by a college library. This is important because Mr. Bradbury, you see, didn't own a typewriter when he started out. He rented one in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library for $.10 per half hour.  Fahrenheit 451 famously cost him $9.80 to write.

A bargain by any measure.

But think about that.  If you've never used a typewriter to write anything of length, I invite you to go do so and come back to marvel with me at the economy of this claim. One of the great works of American Letters took less than 49 hours to complete. That's a groundbreaking novel (originally published as a serial in Playboy) written in 6 and a half standard work days. All because its author was counting his dimes.

How many dimes did you spend on your last story?

I understand that there's infinite variety in writing styles and there's no such thing as a correct answer to "How long does it take to write a good book?"  As with any art, it takes as long as it takes.

But if your computer charged you a fee for every half hour you spent, how much faster would you write?  If you're like me, you would write so much faster it would make your head spin. Because one of the problems with writing on a computer is all the many other things you can do with a computer.  If you were paying for the time on the computer, how much less time would you spend looking at cute pictures of kittens and poking your friends on Facebook?

How much farther would $9.80 get you on a typewriter versus an internet-enabled laptop?

There's no right answer to this. The internet is blessing and curse. A digital circus that is hard to ignore, but also a bottomless cup of stories from which to drink. I think it boils down to whether you want to write stories or put on digital clown makeup and take the center ring.

As Robert Lynn Aspirin said in the forward to one of his books: "There are fast writers and there are slow writers, I'm a half-fast writer."  I, for one, have been on an unintentional journey between the the land of fast and the land of half-fast.

At risk of plundering the pun, I don't want to be a half-fast writer. I don't want to be a half-assed writer either.

In the past couple of months while this blog has been limping along in the shadow of my inattention, I have spent less time writing and written more than I would have otherwise. I have filled several notebooks with story ideas and notes and snippets of text. I've re-edited a book I'd long ago thought worthy of abandoning into something sleeker and more worthy of a reader's time.

The simple fact is that writing is a business, so even though I don't have an hourly wage as a writer, I am very much paying for every minute spent at the keyboard. If you're going to be your own employee, be a productive one.  I would never treat my hourly employer this way; why treat myself like that?

Ray Bradbury was infamously curmudgeonly about the internet. He hated it like my cat hates baths. I dis agree with him on that point. I think it's an inexhaustible well of words and enthusiasm.  An entire virtual world built entirely out of ideas. But he has a point nonetheless; and though my computer ills are now past, I think I'll remember how good it felt to just sit and put words on a page.

In the end, it's your dime.

Thanks for all your stories, Ray. You left us with a lifetime supply of new worlds to explore. You legitimized the business of writing dreams.  And you have left us with some incredibly big shoes to fill. Rest in Peace. We'll take it from here.

---
Note: Adjusted for inflation, $9.80 in 1950 translates to  $93.48 in today's money. Still cheap at twice the price. http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%249.80+%281950+dollars%29&x=0&y=0

Neil Gaiman's Advice for Young Artists, 2012 Commencement Address, University of the Arts in Philadelphia

"If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do. And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again." ~Neil Gaiman

I don't have many heroes, and I get the feeling that Neil would be intensely uncomfortable wearing that hat, so I won't he's one of them. Except that he is. Just don't tell him.


There's a transcript floating around, but it's not 100% accurate and I prefer to let the man's words and delivery stand on its own.


Wiser and more accurate words about a life pursuing the arts, you would be hard-pressed to write or speak.


From his blog: "Trust me, I'm a Doctor * (Honorary, of the Fine Arts)"

Homework

Stories to tell...

Everything is a story. Given sufficient supplies of coffee and time, I will prove it to you.

A psychologist I used to know told me that making stories is a defense mechanism, a game our psyches play to help us make sense of trauma. A story is a box to put things in, a safe place to keep things until we unpack them carefully in front of our loved ones and let them be amused or thrilled.

Then they go back into the box and get put away for a time.

I have a lot of those boxes stored away, my own and some I’m holding for others. The only difference being that I view them all as spare parts boxes, to be opened and plundered as the need presents.

For writers, all boxes are spare parts boxes. We riffle through them for the bits and pieces from which we invent new stories or retell old ones. Thus, we allow of stories out into the breathing world, as Frankenstein's monsters, with bits of this and bits of that, and an aspect which -- if we are good enough -- will inspire our readers to the churchyard to dig up their boxes, to check that everything is still there. And to ponder how the writer knew these things, these secrets we never tell anyone, and to ponder anew a world where stories live in the open air even when we are certain they are nailed into a crate and buried as deep as ever we could dig.

The best stories, of course, are usually made from the parts of our lives that we actively tried to avoid. That's just the nature of the thing.

All stories are reflections of one another because they are all part of the same larger picture, the same overarching story that we call our 'culture' or our 'society' but really mean 'our shared story'.

Stories are going on all around us all the time, and though we may fancy ourselves the hero of our own tale, in reality we are bit players in someone else's story. It's the strange and awesome truth that we are not always in the story we think we are. We are not always playing the role we thing we are playing. And we are not always fully aware of the endings, the beginnings, or who the heroes and villains around us truly are.

When a story is happening, it's just life.  

It's the writer's role to understand that, to recognize it, and to choose the arbitrary points of initiation and conclusion so that the stories we tell reflect the ones that you don't tell. Because when we walk through the world, we're the ones whose eyes are up and looking around, filling their boxes with spare parts.

Ask a writer where they get their ideas and you will get a panoply of answers, most of which are untrue. Because the simple fact is that while appear to be trying to come up with an answer, for the most part we are really trying to imagine how anyone could walk through this world of stories and not trip over at least a few.

Up in the digital tree house: Forming Online Writing Groups

I'll be honest: I've never been a big fan of writing groups. I'm sure they're great for some people, but I've brushed up against too many that are snake pits of negativity and unnecessary competitiveness.

Illustrated by Joel Reid, copyright 2012

The trouble, as they say, is people.  It seems a kind of magic, pulling together a group of people who are of like mind who are willing to set aside ego and meet in civil and constructive conversation about their work. It's even more difficult when you take into account the geography. Finding all those people within driving distance of a central meeting place that serves coffee and/or wine.

I found it once, briefly, and then it slipped my grasp and I haven't been able to pull it off again.  Maybe that makes me a miserable misanthrope, but I think it's just the nature of the beast.

Enter the world of social media and the advent of the online book group...

It's been said that being a successful writer in the modern sense is about 1% talent and 99% being able to ignore the internet (which is a talent of its own). There's certainly some truth to that, but the internet has its uses too, and one of the primary uses seems to be drawing together people of like mind who might otherwise never meet and lending a megaphone to the voiceless.

It's no secret that social media has played a hand to some degree in every popular uprising from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wallstreet. What it is doing to authors is no less revolutionary.  And while it's not all good, and I'm normally not the biggest fan of Facebook as a company, the idea of the thing is wondrous.

Our online group was formed around the time I was writing Howard Carter Saves the World. We supported one another through that stint of NaNoWriMoing and had so much fun that we stuck together. If Facebook has become the virtual neighborhood, we built a tree house in the vacant lot down the block and hung up a sign: Dreamers Only.

It's where I go when I'm having trouble with something I'm writing, but it's also where I go when the real world rises up and wallops me with a mallet. Real friends, digital tree house. In the zany, text-based world of the internet, across thousands of miles, we sit down and share, and kvetch, and dream together.

I hope you find a place, either online or in what we laughingly refer to as 'real life'. Build a tree house, hang up a sign, choose a secret handshake. We'll wave to you from our tree and tip our paper hats across the neighbor's fence.

Just don't touch our Otter Pops... because we've got Howard Carter in our tree house and he's been filling water balloons and cackling maniacally for about a week now. Best not to tempt him.

Write Everywhere & Everywhen: A pocketful of ideas.

Sitting at dinner among other writers, I am often struck by the number of times someone says "I'm going to write about this as soon as I get home!"

I usually hear this as I am tucking a scribble-covered napkin in my pocket and wondering why they're waiting.

I once told someone that I started a new book whenever I didn't have anymore room for my wallet or keys. And it's not far from the truth.

I would imagine that in a world where almost everyone carries a tiny computer in their pockets, we could stop waiting until we get home to write something down. The sad fact is that even with the ubiquity of smart phones and other devices, we still rely on our memories to preserve the ideas that spring fully-formed into our heads at the drop of a word.

There's magic in places where different minds meet. Conversations in real life are fertile ground for ideas.  We're told to keep our eyes open and watch for the stories all around us, but what good does it do us if we don't write it down?

We spend a lot of time on writing blogs and at conferences reminding aspiring writers to keep a notebook on their nightstands for those 3 am epiphanies. (I've moved mine down the hall to the bathroom cabinet because turning on the table lamp wakes up my wife and I got tired of using a headlamp.) But I think we don't spend enough time stressing the need to carry a notebook (or equivalent) at all times where we're out with friends.

Not that I should throw stones; I don't always have a notebook with me either. That's no excuse to let the ideas slip, though. I'll use a napkin or an envelope, or my hand, or a patient passerby if necessary... pretty much anything that will take ink will suffice.

They're not all gold, of course, but they're not all dross either. And the only chance I get to decide which is which is if I stopped for a second to jot a note and shove it in my pocket. Ideas are transitory things. They'll slip away from you if you don't get them down while they're fresh in your mind.

I've never had anyone tell me they find it rude, but I accept that some people might. It's all part and parcel to befriending an author, I'm afraid, occasionally we'll get that far off look in our eyes and start searching our pockets for a pen.

I think that it's a goal we should all have: to come home at the end of the day and find that our pockets are full of ideas.

My Time Machine: Born in the wrong era?

As a writer, I spend a lot of time delving into the past and exploring what life was like at various points in history. I've written about WWII, Prohibition, the Great Library of Alexandria, and Shakespeare. And a question I often hear is "Do you feel like you were born at the wrong point in history?"

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that since I wrote Howard Carter no one has asked whether I was born on the wrong planet.

It annoys me at times, but I suppose it's a fair question.

Let's face it, I have a lot of skills that aren't of much use in the 21st century. And by the metric of the rest of the country, my childhood was more on like my dad's than it was like the rest of my peers. We didn't have a video game system or computer. Dad didn't believe in them. I learned to type on a typewriter (as is right and proper.)

My friends refer to this as a 'sheltered upbringing' but I'm not sure I'd agree.

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' farm where I made a lot of my own toys. I built rafts. I sank them. I swam to shore and built new ones. I played with GI Joe while we listened to Fibber McGee & Molly on the radio. I watched Star Wars like every other kid of my age, but read voraciously from a library that was stocked mostly with books written over a half century before I was born.

My childhood was a Mark Twain novel ghostwritten by Ray Bradbury, filtered through an Archie comic.
The world that was shown to me on MTV seemed distant and somewhat surreal, simultaneously more modern and less than the world around me.

I still prefer hand tools to electric, my typewriter to my laptop. It probably also explains why I have no real attachment to those wonders of modern technology that the people around me can't live without. It's not inarguable that I really am a man out of my era and I wouldn't blame you if you thought that if given a time machine and license to use it that I'd be off like a shot.

I certainly used to think so.  Why, I may have been misplaced several centuries! I even said as much to my dad once. Dad looked at me and kind of snorted and said "Take off your glasses."

Touché, Dad. 


I have allergies and poor eyesight and I have an asthma inhaler in my pocket as I type this. Even when I join in a historical reenactment and try to sink into a past age, never far from my mind is the fact that I never would have survived childhood in these past worlds.

Books are my time machine. Then and now, they are my preferred method of time travel. If someone offered me a trip through time I might not take them up on it if I cannot close the cover and return to the modern era any time I wish.

And it's not at all about the asthma inhaler. The women around me are valued as highly as the men. My wife is an engineer. My boss is a woman.  I can see someone passing me on the street and talk to them without see more about them than just the color of their skin. I can say whatever I want here and as long as I don't libel anyone, no one can stop me.

Because honestly... the 'good old days' weren't that good.

So until the man in the Blue Box comes to escort me to the opening night of Hamlet and then safely home again... I like this time period just fine, thanks.

Writing isn't a major, it's a lifestyle choice: Advice for Aspiring Writers

Because I work in a college writing center (and maintain this and other writing-related blogs) a question I get asked a lot is "What do I major in if I want to be a writer?" Because I'm online in several places, those questions now come more often as emails and messages.

Here's an actual message sent to me on Tumblr the other day...

"I'm a freshman in college with an undecided major. What do you think my major should be if I want to be a writer for magazines and websites maybe eventually write a book one day?"

The correct answer is: Whatever you want to major in is fine. Writing isn't a major, it's a lifestyle choice.

I've said it before and will say it again: Unless you want to teach, the schools aren't going to teach you anything you cannot learn much better and at less expense by sitting down and doing it. Major in business; it's more useful to an artist than an art degree, I assure you.

Ignorance of business principles is the number one reason why artists starve.

If I had my way, everyone who wanted to be a writer would get a business degree. In other words, major in something that pays the bills and minor in something that stimulates your soul. Because the 'starving artist' thing is overrated.

No, I'm not kidding.

YA authors, because of the age of their readership, get asked this question constantly. Let's see what New York Times bestselling YA author Maureen Johnson has to say on the topic.

I've heard dozens of bestselling authors give the same advice, MJ was just nice enough to put it on Twitter in her usual charmingly emphatic style.

Does Maureen Johnson saying it make it true? No. Neither does it make it true because Ann Patchett said it. Certainly, majoring in Creative Writing or English isn't going to hurt you. But as Ms. Patchett points out, this isn't medical school we're talking about here; you're not very likely will never recoup the cost of your degree by working in your field.

As I've noted before, I majored in journalism and then left that program to go to art school. Art school taught me nothing about art and a lot about finances, mostly student loan interest and structured payments.

Everything I actually know about art or writing, I taught myself or learned by doing it. Everything.

I think anyone interested in becoming a writer after college should read an essay by Lawrence Block called "Dear Joy" (you can read it for free by following that link). It is written as a letter to a college freshman who wants to become a writer and should be required reading for anyone else who wants to do the same. It's worth noting that he doesn't tell her not to major in a writing-related field. He just tells her the pros and cons.

It really is a great essay and I wish I'd read it as a high school senior.

Which brings me to this: If you're in college right now, majoring in writing or English, I am not advising that you change your major or drop out. For heaven's sake, finish your degree. No one is going to look down on you or refuse to publish you for having completed a college degree. I work in a college writing center; I know how hard it is to get from your admission letter to your diploma.

When you walk down the aisle in your cap and gown, you'll have genuinely accomplished something. You have every right to be proud.

But in all honesty, an arts education isn't something that happens at an institution, it's something that happens in your head. The ivy covered walls, the brick paths, the echoing classrooms... it's all stage dressing for the artist. That what I mean when I say that art and writing aren't majors, they're a lifestyle choice.

When you're majoring in the visual arts, your college admission garners you access to valuable and expensive studio space and things like ceramics kilns that you cannot afford on your own. But for a writer, it's all about what's between your ears. And you don't have to pay for the privilege of using that space, you just have to do it.

Reading is the only education a writer gets. The only thing you need to get access to that education is a library card and those are usually free.

Read. Write. Experiment. Pack your inner art studio with all the supplies you can get your hands on and then sit down at a keyboard and see what you can do. When you type The End on your first novel or short story, that's a graduation of its own. No professor required. The story is your diploma. You have genuinely accomplished something. You have every right to be proud.


That diploma is not what allows you to call yourself a writer or an author. Like Ms. Patchett said: This isn't medical school. You don't need a license to practice (and no one dies if you do it wrong).

The only thing that qualifies you to be a writer is writing something.

Designated Dreamers

Writing is easy (but keep bandages handy)

A gentle reminder to myself and others...

Kinetic Text: Ira Glass on the Creative Process

I meant to post this video when I first found it and then I forgot about it a few times. This is excellent advice from Ira Glass of This American Life fame. It's aimed at the beginner, but just as important for the middler, or or even those of us who've made a living at this and are still assailed by the occasional (or more than occasional) doubt.