I was reading the latest issue of Warren Ellis’s ORBITAL OPERATIONS newsletter this morning and while I myself didn't expect a Spider Jerusalem rant, this shouldn’t have surprised me:
I’m sure some of you tuned in today expecting a Spider Jerusalem-scale political rant. Some of you may even have been wincing in expectation of it. But I’m not Spider Jerusalem. He was my Id from twenty years ago. Going off here would be empty virtue-signalling from someone with no serious skin in this particular game. Whatever I say next, it’ll be through the work.
And so it immediately brings to mind how I resolve that conflict as I write. How do I make whatever I say come through the work? As always, I've had the answer all along...
What are you dealing with now in terms of plot points, themes, concerns now? The world and everything in it: Hunger, poverty, the anguish of the human race, the desperate sense of self destruction that we entertain all the time, the deep pervading gloom that comes with our inability to cope. Of course, you’re going to over-concern yourself with issues. It’s right that you should do so, and it’s expected… this year. Next year. But not three years from now.
Leave that soapbox behind. Carry with you, at all times, your sense of caring and your concern. But put it into the mouths of flesh and blood people. If not, write tracts.
Now, not to be critical, but I think it’s fair to say there’s a certain privilege in being allowed three years before transforming your soapbox feelings to good fiction writing. But that part of the prescription isn't important, really. And I don’t want to dismiss tract and pamphlet writing, either; lots of folks do both. But the principle is sound.
As for me and my writing though, I have the motive, and now I have the means. And now I have some writing to get back to.
I’m still piecing my mind back together from the two wildest weeks in my writer life, with Viable Paradise three weeks ago followed by World Fantasy the next week (note to self: do that post soon), followed a week back at the dayjob during which I still wasn’t sleeping sensibly. It’s my own fault; it’s been 21 years since my hometown (racist mascot, and all) got to be in the World Series.
This leaves me drinking coffee past when I should on a Saturday night, trying to do a little more catching up since I took most of last night and most of today hibernating and flushing my brain. I finally have a little bit of energy that I don’t immediately have to burn on another commitment, like the dayjob. But it’s a precarious state. The bed, the couch, The Commonwealth are all calling to me. It’s okay, though. If rest is what I need and I can get it while picking away at my to-do lists and maybe a little bit of editing, I’m good.
I haven’t fully processed my experience at the 2016 Viable Paradise Writing Workshop, a.k.a "VP20" or "VPXX" (Like a Chicago album!) as it was the workshop's twentieth year. I traveled to Martha’s Vineyard from my patch of “10 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality”, survived the workshop including The Horror That Is Thursday, traveled back to NY and sat with a thousand-yard-stare on my face for about two days before heading to Columbus, OH (a place of bittersweet memories in my home state) for the World Fantasy Convention.
But I've pieced together some thoughts about my VP experience and here they are, in order of life-changing impact:
CONNECTION. The first face I saw when I disembarked from the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard was that of a VP staffer/alum who I’d met a few years prior at a Readercon and who remembered me. Seeing a familiar face, I thought, was an ideal way to head into the workshop. I'd figured that everyone I was going to meet that week was there for a single purpose so I'd have an instant in, socially. These were all thoughts borne out of anxiety. It was an unnecessary worry. I don’t think there’s another environment where I could’ve played “Thing” with total strangers by incorporating elements of my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone. These people got me, or got me enough that opening up was strangely easy. I can only hope I was the same way for some of them.
CRAFT. By a certain instructor’s own admission, you don’t get anything at Viable Paradise that you couldn’t get elsewhere. Anyone who’s even half-serious about the writing game can find small-scale professional workshops and critique groups just about anywhere, face-to-face and online. But what you get at Viable Paradise is all of that stuff, a lot faster. You know how once in a great while, as you plod along looking for writing wisdom on your own, you randomly come across a piece of advice that surges your writing forward, sort of like finding a needle of gold in a haystack full of bullshit? At VP, (a) there is no bullshit and (b) I personally found no less than three of those needles. I think everyone in my class got something. Some got what they wanted; some got what they needed.
PERSONAL CHALLENGE. There are classes, colloquia, group and one-on-one critiques, and Mandatory Fun. While those things alone are enough to wear anyone out, you can do these bare essentials and not lose a lot of sleep or (more importantly to me) introvert points. I decided, Fuck all that.
It may have been unwise of me to get four hours of sleep the night I got there just to go on the first of Uncle Jim's 6 am walks to watch the sunrise. I went to one of the many off-book lunchtime sessions with a bowl of spaghetti in my hands. I made myself walk to see a harvest moon, luminescent jellyfish, and Methodist Munchkin Land when my mind and body begged me to just take some time and curl up under a blanket. I stayed up too late, and maybe drank more than I do in an average month. In fact, I don't think I got more than 4.5 hours of sleep per night except the night before I left the island. No regrets.
Now, I am not telling anyone to disregard what they need for their mental, emotional, and physical health -- there was even an off-book lecture on writer self-care (which I didn't make). I am saying, with the usual YMMV caveats, that Viable Paradise is an opportunity to stretch yourself a little bit beyond your comfort levels in relative safety, and not just with writing. Taking advantage of as much as I could outside the workshop proper was a life lesson in deciding, in a calculated manner, to push myself just a little bit further. Something at which I've become a little rusty.
The Motto of Room 48
THE HORROR THAT IS THURSDAY. If you’re looking into Viable Paradise, you’ve no doubt come across this phrase by now. The legends are true. It’s a crucible. And when you come out the other side, you’ll sincerely believe you've created an abomination against literature. You’ll want to hide it. You might even consider killing it to spare it the pain of living what's surely to be a short, bleak existence in a cruel, uncaring world.
But those options will be taken out of your hands. And when you and your classmates are forced to reckon with what you (and they) have produced, you’ll feel an odd sense of pride. It won’t make any sense. You won’t care that it doesn’t.
A PERSONAL TRUTH. My classmates will have their own individual takeaways. I speculate that some of those takeaways will be very personal. Mine definitely are. It’s been two weeks now and I’m still unraveling them.
But one thing became abundantly clear to me: My entire Viable Paradise experience -- my one-on-one critiques, my group critique, the Horror That Is Thursday, every lost hour of sleep, every lost introvert point -- and everything I got out of it is perfectly and unironically summed up by the ending of the film CIRCLE OF IRON:
And once I recovered from this realization, I was left with one thing...
A CAREER REBOOTED. I won’t give my litany of excuses for my stalled writing career. And I'm not saying that in a “Boo-hoo, poor me” kind of way. But it’s accurate to say, I lost some things along my path before losing the path altogether.
But after the general lessons I’ve learned about writing, some personal lessons about my writing in particular, and all the people I met (every classmate, every instructor, every staff member, no matter how many or how few words I spoke with each of them), I feel my writing career is back on track. I've looked my core problems in the face as well as some core solutions. From this point forward it’s “Put up or shut up,” with literally nothing standing in my way.
It's Halloween and while I feel dead, I’m not quite there (yet). The past two weeks of “vacation” from the dayjob consisted of the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop (VPXX represent!) followed almost immediately by the World Fantasy Convention, to say nothing about all the requisite travel. So given the holiday and my current state, how about I share an old ghost story...
***
Sitting in the kitchen, staring out the patio door into the darkness past the deck, I’m reminded of the story of my grandmother, one of many things my mother handed down to me:
At midnight, every night for months, my Lola dressed in her finest Spanish gown, went out on to her front porch, and screamed for her husband to come home. No one tried to stop her. See, her generation wasn’t unfamiliar with visits from the dead. A young woman calling out into the humid, Philippine night, was pitiable, but not beyond the bounds of reason. My grandmother’s family and townmates shrugged it off, until the night the screaming stopped after only a few moments. They rushed outside, afraid she’d hurt herself, or worse. Instead, they found her standing on the porch, smiling.
I mentioned this was coming, but now it’s here: THE CLEVELAND NEIGHBORHOOD GUIDEBOOK from Belt Publishing, which has a bit in it by me called “Agony in the Garden.” I got a kick from reading it out of my contributor’s copy. I have to say, these are really nice books!
NOTHING IN THE DARK. Writer George Clayton Johnson (Logan’s Run, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone) passed away the other day. I had the honor of meeting him at my first Rod Serling Conference in 2009, where he gave one of his legendary stream-of-consciousness rants about everything under the sun, much of which was repeated in this interview, which I watched being given.
WRITING. Got the acceptance email for PROJECT RUST last month! I’ll announce the details when the publisher does. Selling some writing always feels good; cracking a market you’ve targeted feels even better. And even as I cross this project off my list, another one comes on board, in addition to PROJECT FLOSS and PROJECT FIELD. Let’s call this… I dunno… PROJECT RICE.
I’ll be out in the 216 until after the holidays. Catch you on the flip!
THE MIND OF A CHEF. Been watching a lot of this show over the past few months, not on Netflix, but on my local PBS station. The thing I like about The Mind of a Chef is how the episodes – mini-documentaries, really – are generally so well done that I find myself investing in the lives of these various chefs, who I might not otherwise care that much about if they weren’t swaggering around the world on semi-drunken, binge-eating travelogue shows.
WRITING. Taking a cue from Warren Ellis’s newsletter, I’m going to talk about my current works in progress by giving them code names. Not because of any contractual obligations about confidentiality, but because I’m superstitious. I’ve always felt that talking too much about what I’m writing takes away some of the urgency to write it. It's just possible that I'm just so lazy that I'll look for any excuse. Either way, I’m going to make more of an effort because I’ve been told lately that people like knowing what writers are working on. And so…
PROJECT RUST: An essay for an anthology series I’m trying to crack into. It's about 800 words about a certain sanctuary in my hometown. Gonna give it another pass or two and send it in.
PROJECT FLOSS: Novel that’s currently in index cards, hidden under a blanket on a table in my lab. The toes, chest, and nose are poking through. Gonna have to suck it up, switch the Jacob's Ladder back on, and make it walk.
PROJECT FIELD: A short story I’m wrestling with from an idea that won’t go away. Just as well because my problem has always been follow-through. It’s been on the back burner, but I just saw a call for a story anthology for which this piece could work.
READING. Just finished Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology from Belt Publishing, because Cleveland Rocks. It's a little frustrating though that I'm going through about 10 books simultaneously, and this one I picked up and devoured this essay collection in three days flat. Will probably read Car Bombs to Cookie Plates: The Youngstown Anthology next because it has pieces from, among others, Ed “Al Bundy” O’Neill and Christopher Barzak. And then I really need to get back to my reading queue before I start Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: the Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, but it’s tempting, since it’s her episodes currently showing on The Mind of a Chef.
So I made it through my second yoga class the other day without stopping (or dying!), and I was warmed up enough that when I walked home, I barely noticed that the temperature had dropped to a balmy 7 degrees.
This time around, I was a touch less focused on just surviving the class, and could pay attention to things like exactly what my limits are right now (more than there used to be), and exactly how my body was having trouble moving (ways that never used to trouble me before). I did do every pose though! The quality sucked near the end, but I pushed myself as far as was reasonable I think. That's what matters.
And yet...
See, what I'm feeling with my return to yoga is almost exactly what I've been feeling like with my writing lately. I can't seem to bring myself to feel good about the rebuilding I'm doing. Oh, I do it. I take a step forward and I'm determined to show up and take the next one; lots of people would pat me on the back for that. Yet, I know how far I've fallen. I don't go, "Yay, me! Let's keep moving forward!" I think, "One step down, 9,995 to go until I'm back to where I was."
It's motivation by self-loathing. It's letting fear and anger fuel me.
It's the Dark Side of the Force.
Probably not a good thing. But what to do about it...?
I woke up yesterday morning and found myself @-bombed on Twitter as I slept. Once I had my coffee and figured out what it was all about, I saw that I was dared to come up with a one-sentence story (the longer, the better) before Wednesday. I was going to wait until Tuesday night since I'm not the biggest taker of writing-challenges. But then the idea struck, so I figured why not take my brain-dump now. :)
Thing was, I jumped the gun a little too fast and wrote a story that was just, IMO, too much the same as someone else's. Kinda really ticked myself off actually, but in the end, I did (despite how often I told myself not to) the only thing I could do.
So, Anatoly, Alex, Ken, Jake, Carrie, Damien, Tom, Amanda, and whoever else I might have forgotten -- you have no one to blame for this but yourselves... :)
Galen, from the Inkpunks crew, invited me to do a guest post for them. I did a little Sally Fields "You like me! You really like me!!" dance in my head. Little did she know how hard I was banging said head into my desk trying to come up with a worthy post, before she mentioned, "Oh yeah, a bunch of folks are doing posts about workshops." The big ones. The ones all of us genre writers want to go to--Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, Uncle Orson's, &c. The ones that a lot of us can't take six weeks away from life to attend.
I promised weekly writing progress reports, and I've fallen through. On several levels. So, here it is. No excuses, no explanations, other than to say that my personal life has taken quite a few hits and it hasn't stopped.
I didn't get much done last weekend. It was pointed out to me that I do tend to overdo it a bit during the week, and that maybe it's worth taking a night off during the week. I'm starting to agree--better to lose an evening or two rather than two whole fucking weekend days! And I gotta tell you, as evidenced by the fact that I'm not going to be able to check off yesterday and probably not tomorrow, this week isn't looking so good, either.
As I said last time, I've had my head up a project, so this is a day late. I think I've made up for being sick a couple of weeks ago. Just gotta keep the chain going, right? Or at least try to, what with the beginning of the semester at the dayjob.
I've promised that I'd actually go into what it takes for me to put an X through a day. Well, here it is...
Well, thanks to my sick days, the writing chain was broken. As you can see from last week's progress, I'm a couple of days behind. I'm off to a good start this week, though. I've made some major breakthroughs with my seekrit nonfiction project--in fact, that's going to be my main focus this week, and next week as well, more than likely. I don't want to let the progress I've made with my fiction slide, but one deadline is a month before the other.
I have to say that I'm only recently getting over how ticked I am at missing two days of progress, sickness aside. But all I can do is keep calm and carry on, right?
"After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."
I'm doing the same thing, except I'll be using the calendar at the front of my Working Writer's Daily Planner from Small Beer Press (which can currently be had for $7.95). I've decided to use my planner as a log, listing 3-4 tasks minimum for each day (which could be anything: a minimum word count, so many pages of MS edits, a particular research goal, submitting a story, whatever) and then marking off the day Seinfeld-style if and when I complete them..
And I think I'm going to keep posting this, every Monday, for the rest of the year. Here's how I did last week. Tune in next Monday, and we'll see if I did any better.
Lots of stuff actually did go wrong today, but it started off badly from the jump. I get up, get out of the house, and make it to my morning writing spot with a good hour and fifteen minutes before work. And my beloved netbook, which worked fine before I left my place, refused to turn on. I heard the hard drive doing... something... whenever I hit the power button. But it just refused to boot up.
This is the point where, in the past, I would've gone off in a rage. Actually, I'm not sure why I didn't. Still, I had a few options. I had a similar problem sometime last year, which I fixed by flashing the BIOS. I had a "rescue USB" drive with me, but I'd forgotten how to use it. I could've gone back home, gotten online, and looked up how to fix what I thought was the problem--which would've eaten up my writing time--or, I could just take it back old school with an ancient method known as "longhand." And, that's what I did.
Because, that's how writers do it. With a red-eye and no fucking excuses.
I made a small effort toward getting back in the writing saddle after myweekendadventures. I confess, I haven't had much luck. This is how I've been feeling for nigh on two weeks...
Reading between the lines of those blog entries, you can probably detect a tinge of guilt. It was fed, in part, by this quote I'd read (and posted to my tumblr) from filmmaker John Waters in his "10 Best Pieces of Advice for Functional Freaks."
I’m a fascist about my work habits and I expect you to be, too. Never have a spontaneous moment in your life again. If you’re going to have a hangover, it should be scheduled on your calendar months in advance. Rigid enjoyment of planning can get you high. Militant time-management will enable you to ignore how maladjusted you would be if you had the time to notice it in the first place. Discipline is not anal compulsion; it’s a lifestyle that breeds power.
