Something I continue to struggle with is knowing where to apply my energy at any given time. I have so many goals, so many projects, and they all seem like Highest of All Possible Priorities. Even if I manage to get them sorted by priority there is the Inspirato Factor that might keep me working on something lower priority just because I’m in the zone.

That’s what I’m trying to figure out today. I have some specific goals this year, and one of them is time-sensitive: I need a short story that I like enough to use it to apply to Clarion West. That needs to be done by February. I’m under no illusion that the next story I finish is going to be The One — or the second, or possibly even the third. I need to produce a bulk of work over the next few months so that during the first part of 2010 I can select the one I like best and polish it until it shines.

So there’s the priority: short fiction. Lots of it, in completed form. What’s the problem?

The problem is I’ve spent the past couple of weeks with my head in the draft of a novel, and I have What Happens Next pretty well figured out. Novels being the enormous efforts that they are, I am loathe to move on to something else and lose the steam.

I don’t know what the solution is. Right now I’m toying with the idea of applying some techniques from my day job to managing these projects. I have been working on a treatment for the novel, by which I mean something more detailed than an outline but less formal than a synopsis. I have basically the first four chapters planned in a fair amount of detail, both new material that needs to be written and the existing material that needs rework. I could view those four chapters as ‘a project,’ work on it ’til it’s done, and then move on to the first short story, work on that ’til it’s done, plan the next couple of chapters, rinse, repeat.

The only thing I have to lose is time, but time now matters to me in a way that it never has before.

I set myself what was really a pretty impossible goal this weekend: 15,000 words in three days. The reason I can say with some assurance that it was pretty impossible is that I’ve only had one 5,000 word day in my life, and that was during NaNoWriMo of 2006, when I was already in the habit of writing a thousand words on a *bad* day. So to go from essentially 0 to 5k just because I said so was more than a bit of a reach.

Going from zero to 1,800 is nothing to sneeze at, though. That’s what I wrote on Friday evening. Yesterday I cleared 2,000. It was excruciating, and took me most of the day. Today I had a hell of a time trying to unstick a scene I’ve been stuck on, but I did, and the result was another 1200 words.

The purpose behind this exercise was just to do more than I have been doing, to get through the pain of decalcifying my brain so that I can start producing reasonable amounts of work on a regular basis.

I got what out of it what I wanted, even if my total product was only 1/3 of what I had originally aimed for. Progress, not perfection. I’m comfortable with that. Tomorrow life returns to normal, with a day job and an hour or two at night to try and eke out some fiction. It should be a little bit easier after this weekend’s effort. We’ll see.

Cheers.

I don’t know if you’re reading the same blogs I am, but the field is adapting faster than I ever dreamed it would or could. The traditional publishers are jumping on the e-book bandwagon, Amazon is now in the publishing business, the short fiction market is trying hard to rally and I think it may very well do so in a digital form.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll notice that I seem to have rallied a bit as well.

I’ve got a little confidence back. Part of that is reading through some of what I’ve done and thinking “hey that doesn’t suck nearly as badly as I thought it did.” Part of it is that I have enough information now that I feel like I have a pretty clear sense of the playing field. Some of the things that seemed obvious to me as goals once upon a time seem attainable once again. Out of the slough of input and processing of that input a simple truth became blindingly clear:

Getting payment, distribution, and readership is inherently better in every possible way than not getting those things.

So why would I not try?

I went back over my old blog posts to find out. I found it pretty easily. It really jumps right off the screen:

I gave up.

I was tired, and it had become too hard, and I gave up.

Sherry, a Twitter acquaintance and fellow writer, sent me a very thoughtful email after I posted that entry that gently and kindly said that she hoped I would change my mind. I have, largely.

Sherry, you are cordially invited to say “I told you so,” though I suspect that’s not your style.

Not entirely, though. I’m not going to stop putting stories up here, I’m just not going to throw in the towel and never try to sell them first.

So in the post that follows this one you’ll get a story I wrote a few years ago and sent out into the world to gather rejections. Most of them were very nice, personal rejections, but they were… not sales. I’m attached to this one, probably for all the wrong reasons. It’s an early effort and one of the first things I ever workshopped. I’m glad to finally give it a home. I hope you enjoy it.

(You can follow Sherry on Twitter at @Sherryk_US or read about her work at her site: http://sherryking-paranormalromance-books.com/publications)

One of the things I’ve really missed out on is the SFF community. Since the rise of the internet I’ve had a one-way peek into it by way of people’s blogs and Twitter. It has reinforced the idea — I’m going to go out on a limb here and just call it a ‘fact’ because I’ve seen it said by so many people, both pro writers and fans — that the heart of the SFF community lies in the cons. The cons which I have never attended.

“Community” in this context is defined this way:

(n.) a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the): the business community; the community of scholars.

The SFF community includes readers, writers, artists, actors, and assorted industry professionals. It’s a big community, and from what I’ve read a very supportive one. It includes people working in and consuming different media, from short fiction to novels to comics to television and film. The coolest part, it seems to me, is that there is no line between the people creating the media and those consuming it. It’s just one big tribe, with people playing different roles. And in a lot of cases, people are playing multiple roles, (see John Scalzi, who is a creator of SF, a consumer of SF, and a contributing fan of SF.) Every creator is also a fan.

The closest I’ve come to being a part of it is in my usual Writers Conference. There is one workshop that tends to be more friendly to the SFF folks because the workshop leader was a horror writer for many years, so he understands our idiom and the level of suspension of disbelief that our work requires. Those of us who attend that workshop regularly feel as if we are a part of something distinct from the Writers Conference over all. We’re a little subculture of people who write “weird stuff.” “Oh,” other attendees will say, “you’re one of Matt’s people.” It felt good.

I feel like I’ve been missing out on experiencing that on a larger scale, getting to know people and making friends of a like mind. I’ve known that for a long time — 2003ish I became aware of the convention-going community, and around 2005 I resolved to find one to attend. But as I wrote yesterday there were always reasons not to go.

Being in a screw-the-obstacles-I’m-living-my-dreams mode lately, I looked up the conventions listed in Locus and elsewhere. The World Fantasy Convention caught my eye. It’s a con geared toward the pros, which let’s face it, I hope to be some day. It’s like being one of Matt’s People on a grand scale. I’ve read about it for years, and it’s within reach, in San Jose. I’m excited about the Guests of Honor: I love Garth Nix’s work, and I collect Lisa Snelling’s art. Why not go?

Gainfully employed – check.
Free that weekend – check.
Really want to go – check.
Adult capable of making my own decisions – check.

Huh. Look at that. No reason at all.

Also on my list are Nebula Awards Weekend, DragonCon, and WorldCon. They will have to wait for other years.

If I really need to justify it to myself, I’ll call it my birthday present to me, because it happens to fall on that weekend. I will spend my 38th birthday driving six hours to my first SFF convention. I am not sure it gets much more awesome than that.

Today’s list of five things includes a couple of surprises:

- Subscribed to Locus for the first time in years
- Booked a room for World Fantasy Convention in October

Locus and WFC were rash decisions. I just leapt without doing anything more than looking at the calendar and making sure I didn’t have anything on it for that weekend. I don’t usually do that sort of thing – big plans like that usually get deliberated over for weeks or months and then I talk myself out of them with a dozen reasons why I shouldn’t do it. I postpone it until next year, or the year after, or when the kids are out of the house. Well, fuck that. I might not be alive next year.

That’s where I’m at right now.

I felt like this in 2005 — like I was in the river, and the current was strong enough to get past anything that might stand in my way, I just had to allow myself to be carried by it. I feel a little like that again. All of the things I wanted to do then I can do now. And I am not at all interested in reasons why not.

In tangentially related news, I asked for a promotion today. My boss doesn’t see any reason I shouldn’t get it. Good thing – I have interests to fund. ;)

So the blog has lain fallow again for a while.  The lapse does not (for once) indicate a total halt in creativity or productivity, I just didn’t feel like I had anything to share. The ‘five things’ approach continues to work well, and while I don’t always reach five there is always something to show for the day.

Recently I bought a netbook. I had been doing a lot of writing and thinking in various Google apps lately, and I thought hey, this thing is ultra-portable and with my stuff stored in the cloud I could work on it anywhere! Yeah, not so much. Open wifi is still scarce around here, so the netbook quickly became a really high-tech paperweight. That had to change, though, because at ten inches and less than three pounds the dang thing really is perfect for carrying around everywhere.

The obvious solution was to dump everything on a thumb drive, but looking at what “everything” consisted of gave me a headache. I had stuff on the netbook, stuff in Google Docs, Google Notepad, Gmail, and in a pretty extensive directory structure on my laptop. This got me started on a massive reorganization of all of my writing files, a project which is now nearly complete.  

Going through those directories was eye-opening. I had forgotten about a lot of the ideas that I had written down and started worksheets — or even drafts — for. You may be familiar with one of the standard Writer’s Pet Peeves: the non-writer says to the writer “I’ll give you the idea, you write the book and we’ll split the profits 50/50.”  Directories like this are why that proposal is greeted with something less than enthusiasm. We don’t need other people to supply ideas. We aren’t likely to get around to writing all of our own ideas. I’ve got years of work sitting there waiting to be written, and I get an idea for a new story or project at least once a week. 

One of the difficult parts of the reorganization project has been seeing the dates on some of the files – like the original notes on the story I just sent out for critique. That first file was dated January 2005.  When I remember the circumstances that triggered the spark that became the story it makes sense that it was that long ago, but it has evolved so much and so many months passed while I did other things that it’s hard to grasp the four years between then and now.  

Seeing all of those short stories, novels, essays, comic book scripts, ‘first line’ exercises and snippets of fiction put me in a place where I’m not sure if I should feel disappointed in myself or proud.  It’s a lot of ideas.  It’s a lot of drafts.  It’s a lot of rich material full of vision and promise.  (There’s a lot of crap, too, of course, but let’s focus on the positive for the moment.)

But it’s a lot of unfinished work, and as we know, we cannot succeed unless we finish.  

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you’re a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable. Good luck.  - Neil Gaiman

Now that the site’s been launched, I have two specific projects on my plate that want my attention.  One is a short story and the other is my 2006 November Novel.  The short story is pretty close to being ready for critique (or it was until I disassembled it last night and discovered some new gaps I need to fill,) but the novel… well, I mean, it’s a novel.  Not even one, really.  It’s the scaffolding around what will some day be a novel.  60k words of scaffolding.  

It’s been sitting in its binder for a while, taunting me.  I gave it a read late last year just to see what was in there, having given it a long cooling-off period.  I’m guessing I need to discard about 20k of those words, replace another 15k, and add 40k new ones, but I hadn’t really got to work on it.

I mentioned it to a friend last week.

“What’s it about?” he asked.

Ugh.

I hate that question. It is a perfectly reasonable question, one that I should be able to answer. I have 60k words of fiction, some fairly fleshed out characters, and a nearly coherent story arc. “What’s it about?” should be an easy question to answer. I told my friend that I’d get back to him.

Last night I was trying to round out my Five Things, completely forgetting that I had in fact read my DailyLit and therefore already had five things for the day.  I had been working on the short story for a while, and had exhausted myself on it for the night.  I looked around my desk, hoping to find one more thing to do, something that wouldn’t take much time.  I grabbed the binder that contains the printed draft of my novel and flipped it open. I had made some notes last week on changes that I need to make, new insight I had gained on a main character and solutions to a few problems that had been bothering me.  Incorporating those changes was too tall an order for 10:00 p.m. on a Monday night.  

In the pocket of the binder’s inside cover there were some hand-outs from a writer’s conference.  I flipped through them idly until something caught my eye.  ”Who, What, Why?” the paper said.  It was about writing a blurb for your book, something I have never really tried to do.  And what is a blurb, if not an answer to the question “What’s it about?”

So I decided I would try to write a blurb.   One paragraph, how hard could it be?

‘Who?’ Well, that was easy.  I like my cast of characters.  I know some of them better than others, and I’m learning more about them all the time.  They all have names, and ages, families, and in some cases, occupations. They have personalities and voices. ‘Who’ is an easy question to answer.

Likewise ‘What?’  I know what they do, where they go, and when.  But when I got to ‘Why?’ I found that my answers were thin, if they were there at all — and if I don’t know why they do what they do, then the reader sure as hell won’t.

This is basic characterization.  I can’t answer “what’s it about?” until I can answer “what’s she about?”

Fortunately the answers started coming as soon as I asked the right question. Tonight I’m pretty tired, and I don’t know if I’m going to make it to Five, but I’m going to go add to my notes on the novel for a little while. 

What’s it about?

I’ll get back to you.

Well, okay, it's been live for a while, I just didn't tell anyone it was there.

Today my blog and my fiction are moving to a new home, http://inkhaven.net.

The fiction landscape has changed since 2002 when I first set out to 'break in.'  Back then the only way in was through the submission/rejection cycle.  The harrowing tale of Myrtle the Manuscript  was what we had to look forward to in our efforts to get read.  Three cents a word and my name on poor-quality paper was the only way to get a story into the hands and minds of people who like the kinds of things that I like.  The thing is, what 'breaking in' meant to me was restricted by the time.  'Breaking in' wasn't really the goal at all: the real goal was just to write the stories that were in my head, and as with any art, get it out there to see if someone else liked it.  The only way available to me to do that at the time was That Way. 

All of that has changed.  Writers like Mur Lafferty, Scott Sigler, and T.M. Camp are proving that.  Futurismic posts Free Fiction Friday every week.  Quality short stories aren't just available on the bottom shelf of the news stand or in a $30.00 anthology anymore. Entire novels are available for free, just a click away, to read yourself or hear performed by the author. What Patrick refers to as "barrier to entry" is practically gone, for both the reader and the writer.  The reader was barred by cost and availability; the writer was barred by having only one channel with a heavily guarded gate.

I want the same thing today that I wanted then: I just want to write stories, and I hope that over time I will acquire the skills to write good stories, stories that affect people and make them see things slightly differently than they did before.  That's what good stories do for me, and that's what I hope to do for someone else. 

So having abandoned the idea of payment and editorial approval, and of submission/rejection/submission as the only viable path to readership, that left me with this:

What if people don't like it?  Won't they write me off as a hack and never read my work again?

Well, yeah, they might.  But then I heard something that made that not matter so much anymore.

A while back I posted about something Scott Sigler said in an interview with Mur Lafferty, about how he had people listening to his fiction via podcast who didn't like his work the first time they heard it, or the second time they heard it, or the third and fourth times — but they loved the fifth story they heard.  "What on earth is happening," he said, "when someone will 'try me out' five times?"

That snippet of interview was the final thing I needed to just put together Inkhaven and start posting my fiction.  I am posting free stories in PDF and Kindle formats, because I think that maybe people might like the 'fifth story.'  People may like it, they may hate it, but it's there if anyone wants to read it.

I am starting out with two that I like more than most — Office Demons, which is humor, and Habitat, which is decidedly not.  New stories will be added with what I hope will be some regularity, but you know how it is.  It doesn't go up until I think it's ready.

Thanks for everything, LiveJournal.  And to the readers of this blog, sorry to ask you to jump one more time with me.  I deeply appreciate your support.  Hope to see you at my new home! 

It's almost ready.  The site, I mean.  The one I've been talking about for six months.  It needs a couple more tweaks, but I think I'll be ready to announce the move this weekend.

Which means that once again, I'll be abandoning the LiveJournal blog.  I've moved my old posts over to the new WordPress blog on my own domain (to be announced!) and all future blog posts will happen over there.  There is more to this move than just the blog, but I'll talk more about that when it's ready.

Meanwhile, back to that Rule of Five.  Have I diligently done five things toward my writing goals every single day?  No, but I've done at least three on most days, and I'm moving forward.  I'm spending time on the website, time on writing, time on reading, time on critiquing.  I've been motivated to make use of any down time I have — I'm thinking through story problems and new ideas and writing them down every chance I get. 

One of the ways I'm managing to keep up with this is through the application of Anne Lamott's excellent advice: short assignments.  A couple of days ago I added 100 words to a short story.  You and I both know a hundred words is nothing — it's a paragraph.  I still count that as a win.  It was *something.*  I'm also making use of DailyLit, and this time I didn't oversubscribe! (It's so tempting to subscribe to everything that looks interesting.)  So five days a week I'm guaranteed to read some fiction — and *that* counts as a win. Securing a beta-reader for Ill Angels, which I think will finally be readable shortly, counts.  Doing anything at all on the website counts as a win — fixing the template, adding content, making a graphic, doing other… things, which I will tell you about this weekend.  They all count.

Scrawling — by unskilled, unpracticed, messy ball-point hand — the first few sentences of a new draft of Chapter One of Found Objects counts as a win.

It's working.  I'm getting more ideas, producing more output, and am happier with the results than I have been in a long time.

Do you get that itch in your brain, too?  There are three pieces of paper sitting on my desk at home right now, all hand-scrawled notes that are waiting to be incorporated into existing works on my computer.  I can see them in my mind, and they make my brain itch. I can't wait to get home to them tonight.

This is going well.  I am satisfied with this.

At SBWC three years ago I heard the creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul franchise * speak.  I can't say that series ever really spoke to me, but no one can deny the man is phenomenally successful.  He talked about one thing in particular that has stayed with me:  the key to success, he said, the trick to really getting your career off the ground or realizing whatever your dream may be is the Rule of Five.  Sounds intimidating and lofty, like he's about the unload The Secret on us, but really the Rule of Five is just this:  do five things in service of your goal every single day.  They can be small things, but as long as you're doing something to reach your goal, eventually you will reach it.

I've been experiencing something that feels a lot like depression for a while now.  Not quite debilitating, but it has definitely impacted my usefulness to virtually everyone around me.  Historically this happens when there is nothing in my life I can point to and say 'that's going well, I am satisfied with that right now.'  I've mentioned before that when there are real-world problems to solve I have a very difficult — nearly impossible really — time creating anything.  I've been pretty convinced of that for a long time now.  In the mire I've been in, output has stalled, and I told myself that one was the cause of the other.  Lately I've been rethinking that, testing it against experience to see if it really holds, and I'm no longer as convinced as I once was. 

I've been thinking about this: I have been happy and satisfied with nearly all aspects of my life in the past.  So what was I doing then that I hadn't been doing lately?  There were a lot of things — not spending enough time with friends and family, not being present for my kids the way I should, not deliberately fostering 'home' and an environment I find comfortable, not having any real commitments outside the home  and work, not making an effort to create memories with the people I love, not working to improve myself in my job , not learning anything new, and not creating.  The important thing here is that these are things I needed to do — they are not circumstances that I am at the mercy of.  Action is what changes and improves things.  (I have recently taken action on almost all of those things.)

All this time I've been thinking that if I'm worried and unhappy about x, y, and z, I can't functionally create anything, and I need to solve those other problems before I can free up my brain.  But what if that's not true, and what I need to do is *act*?  What if my creative output becomes the thing that I can point to and say, 'that's going well, I'm satisfied with that right now?'  

As I was thinking about this question of 'what was I doing then' I remembered the Rule of Five and decided to put it into practice.  I got a planner at the dollar store to document my progress, and have made a commitment to myself to do five things every day toward my writing goals. 

The next series of blog entries will probably be about that.  It has already paid dividends — my brain feels less calcified in just two short weeks.  Here are some examples of what I've done in the past two weeks:

• I volunteered to critique an acquaintance's story (which will be his submission for his Clarion application!  Go, Adam, go!)
• I rejoined Critters. 
• I started doing a simple writing exercise, just coming up with first sentences.  That has already paid off in that I came up with a much more engaging opening for an existing story.
• I've been reading short fiction regularly.
• I went through my old composition books looking for ideas that I hadn't done anything with, and as a result came up with several new ones – I even wrote an outline for one of them today!

Some of my entries are just things like "read notes on Story X," or "added 250 words to Story Y."  I'm counting pretty much anything at all related to writing or fiction as a point.  This entry, for instance, is definitely going in there.  As will the outline I wrote today.  That leaves me with three more things to do today.

It's already helping.  I already feel better, more like myself.  I haven't been perfect — I missed two nights in a row, which is bad, and some nights I haven't made it to five.

What if we all took that challenge and applied the Rule of Five?  Or if that's too daunting (and I'll admit that some nights it is for me,) the Rule of Three?  What if we all just took action?  Where would we be in three months, six months, a year? 

I'll let you know.    :)

* this link is not an endorsement.