Tag: writer

Writing brings out the mental illness in me. My wife can testify to this.

I’m in control of my behavior almost all the time. As Mark Twain said, “For business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity.” If I wake up to find my brain mired like a mammoth in tar, I can trick my brain into sucking itself free and stomping onwards across the plains. I rarely buy extravagant, useless things, because I have a rule. If I want to buy something that costs more than a couple of hundred dollars, I can’t buy it until I think about it for at least six months. I almost always follow that rule. Almost.

Judiciously applied chemicals are my friends. Free range chemicals and alcohol are not welcome in the home of my brain, apart from the occasional tequila shot or pomegranate martini. Come on, I’m not a nun or anything. But my best friend is me acting the way I want to feel, no matter how my brain tells me I feel, or at least doing my best to create the outward signs of sanity.

It works pretty well at this point in my life.

My wife refrains from trying to convince, trick, or bribe me into not behaving like a crazy person. It’s my job to take care of all this. She’s happy to help if I ask, and she demonstrates philosophical acceptance when I suddenly fill up the office closet with 30 gallons of bottled water, or when without warning I decide we need some more cats. Not only is she tolerant, she’s smart. If she tried to manage all this for me, I’d probably explode like a hand grenade.

Writing screws all this up. Well, not all writing causes problems. I can write a thousand words, declare success, and smile as I move on to something else. It’s the big projects that make me crazy. I’ve written three novels in the past three years, and the insanity they create goes like this.

I get an idea for something I want to write. It’s the best idea for a book that anyone’s had in the past 100 years, or maybe ever. I’m so excited that I talk to my wife about it almost every minute we’re together. I lay awake thinking about it and even consider waking my wife up in the middle of the night to talk about the greatness that is my idea. This goes on for about three days.

I begin the planning and research required to bridge the chasm between having an idea and writing words. I realize that my idea is rubbish. It’s less creative than a bucket of vanilla pudding. If brought to reality, it would be less popular than asphalt-flavored baby food. I feel shame. The only reason I keep working is that I talked it up so much to my wife I’d be embarrassed to never write a word of the thing. This goes on for about a month.

I start writing the first draft, expecting that after one chapter I can honorably surrender to the fact that my idea was horrible. After the first thousand words I find that I’m amusing myself, and I start to feel better about the project. I read the first chapter to my wife. She doesn’t say anything bad about it, which confirms my growing suspicion that it’s a work of magnificence. I begin laughing and hooting like a fool as I write, and I find I’d rather write than eat or sleep. This goes on until I finish the first draft, or about two to three months.

I put the manuscript aside to cool, planning to begin editing in about six weeks. Within 24 hours I realize that I was engulfed by irrational euphoria this whole time, and in fact my manuscript isn’t fit to wipe the ass of a sweaty heroin addict living in a ditch in Bangkok. I try to put this debacle behind me and concentrate on ideas for my next project, but I can only generate enough motivation to watch Saving Private Ryan and eat pie. This goes on for about two months.

Some grisly sense of obligation forces me to open the manuscript and pretend I’ll edit it before I trash it and funnel my creative urge into learning the ukulele. After reading three pages I can’t believe I’ve forgotten how brilliant it is. I perform several rounds of edits like one of those yipping dogs that never stops to sleep. I’m afraid that if I take a day off then the magical spell will be broken and I’ll once again see that the manuscript is just a snap-toothed yokel with mismatched shoes. This goes on for about six weeks.

The manuscript is finally as good as it’s going to get without an editor. I begin writing query letters, synopses, overviews, biographies, and the other artifacts that agents and publishers want to see. I become profoundly convinced that any agent would be more impressed if I just sent her an envelope full of fish guts. I grit my teeth and push on. I’ve come too far now. I’ll just send out the queries and then take my beating in cowed embarrassment.

Then it’s time to start a new project. And even though it means starting the cycle of crazy all over again, I don’t mind all that much. Not everybody get to experience three days of knowing that their book idea is absolutely the most perfect and radiant idea of the last century. It feels great. It’s entirely worth the subsequent months of the despair when you understand just how appalling your idea in fact was.

Really. I’m not joking.

Outward signs of sanity, dude.

Photo courtesy of cutedogs.com via wakpaper.com.

It’s not really that I don’t love you. I have reasons for ignoring you and this blog over the past couple of weeks. They are bad reasons, but then people often have bad reasons for not doing things. Bad reasons for not exercising, bad reasons for not saving money, bad reasons for not walking away from the computer before posting that rabid Facebook flame. I’m claiming solidarity with the world’s self-deluded procrastinators.

In the interest of whining about how busy and hard my life is, I’ll point out that I have a job—for now—and a family life that require me to devote blocks of time if I want to continue having jobs and a family. For example, I’ve been helping my father refinance his house. I love the optimism inherent in securing a loan that won’t be paid off until you’re 105 years old, but it does require time to arrange. Also, I’m happy to spend bonding time with my wife by sitting on the couch watching hour-long crime-solving comedies that always seem to show graphic autopsies and melting flesh just when I’m eating my dinner.

However, I’ve spent time on a few other things in recent weeks, and I can use them as whimpering excuses for my absence from this blog space. Let’s look at my creative endeavors.

For the past few weeks I’ve been in rehearsals for an eight-week show that opens this weekend. I love performing, but it eats time the way my cats eat yogurt, which is to say, voraciously. This is an ideal commitment for me to cite as a bad excuse for ignoring my other commitments. People assume that actors are kind of artistic, irresponsible, flaky types anyway, so that works in my favor.

I also have the opportunity to pitch a book project to agents a month from now, so I’ve been editing and polishing the thing like it was a ’58 T-Bird. I’m obsessing over everything from typos to profound thematic problems, such as, “If the bad guy ambushes the hero and traps him in a church, why doesn’t the hero just slip out the back door and run away instead of standing there to get pummeled? Is he stupid?” I’ve been surprised at how many stupid things my characters do just because I want to get them into a certain situation.

I’ve been using a book called Nail Your Novel to guide me through editing. It’s been terribly helpful, but all this still takes time. In fact, I have a plan for writing so that it doesn’t suck away too much family time. I write as much as I want four weeknights each week, and the fifth weeknight is for my wife and me (and whatever melted-flesh TV programs we’re watching). I don’t write at all on the weekends. If I can average 1,500 words per night, in 14 weeks I have an 80,000 word first draft. I squeeze in other writing (like this blog) at other times, such as early morning or lunch.

It’s structured, and it works. It avoids those situations in which my wife doesn’t see me for three months because I’d rather write than do anything else, including eating, sleeping, and showering. It also serves as another bullshit excuse for not updating this blog in the past couple of weeks.

Yesterday afternoon I found myself off work early. That would have been an ideal time to blog, before evening when I would start editing my book. But instead of blogging with this free time, I chose to replace a florescent light fixture under our kitchen cabinet. A few weeks before, my wife had bought a new fixture to replace the current 40 year-old cracked and sagging fixture, and she laid it on the bench in the kitchen. She told me it was there, I said I’d put it up, and then she didn’t mention it for a week or so. At that point she said she should probably replace the fixture herself sometime. I might have mumbled that I’d get to it soon. Thereafter she ignored the fixture and didn’t mention the fact that it lay on our kitchen bench, and that I stacked stuff on and around it almost every day.

So, yesterday afternoon I resolved to replace the fixture, knowing that I could blog afterwards. I’ve done this sort of repair pretty often in my life, so the old fixture came down, and the new one pretty much flung itself up onto the underside of the cabinet. At that point I was reminded of a fundamental principle of home repair. When attaching something to the bottom of something else, you will have screws that point up.

My hands like to tell me to go to hell sometimes, for technical reasons beyond the scope of the current discussion. When I focus on doing something they will shake. When I really concentrate, they shake even more. When I get frustrated, that’s like permission for them to do The Harlem Shake (you young folks check the link). When I leaned over the counter, under the cabinet, backward and upside down to thread these screws, that’s when the fun began.

About an hour later I passed my wife, who was sitting in the den, and she asked what I’d been laughing about. I told her I’d just taken an hour to do something I used to be able to do in about 30 seconds, and she expressed her sympathy. I didn’t touch on the hour’s worth of events that took place before I laughed. Here’s an excerpt:

I try to thread a screw and drop it.

I try to thread it with the other hand and drop it.

I put it on the end of a screwdriver and drop it, where it falls behind the toaster.

I think bad words and consider smashing the olive oil bottle on the inconceivably hard tile floor.

I drop the screw five more times in a row.

I actually pick up the olive oil bottle but take a deep breath and put it back down.

I drop the screw four more times.

I start to ask my wife for help, but I think ‘What if I was here by myself?’

I drop the screw three more times, until it falls on the floor where it rolls under the refrigerator.

I walk around the kitchen a couple of times thinking that I could take the olive oil bottle out back and down the alley to smash it, where no one would ever need to know.

I move the refrigerator and get the screw.

I fold masking tape on my fingertip and stick the screw to it, then I try to thread it and drop it inside the toaster.

I shake the toaster upside down for the screw, and I clean toast crumbs off the counter, wondering why we haven’t died in a fire.

I drop the screw ten more times in a row.

I wring the dish cloth full of toast crumb really hard. I think some of the molecular bonds may have broken.

I drop the screw another ten times in a row.

[Imagine that this goes on for about another 45 minutes]

All the gods from every religion in history guide my hand, and I thread the screw.

I laugh because nothing is broken and everyone is still alive.

Now that I have, in the manner of a neurologically-challenged Prometheus, restored light to our kitchen, I’m pretty much out of bad reasons for not updating this blog. I can’t think of any good ones either, so here we are. All I need are a title and a photo before I post this. What photo should I use? The light fixture conquered and gloriously mounted on my cabinet? Or the cat eating yogurt?

Cats eating yogurt. It never really wa a contest, was it?
Cats eating yogurt. It never really was a contest, was it?

 

Some of my friends tell me I think too much when I write posts for my blog. I can’t say they’re wrong, because I haven’t tried to just whip off a post. So, here goes.

I’ve started working on another novel. Smart writers convinced me that I need to stop editing the two novels I’ve written. I met some unpublished novelists like me a few weeks ago, and they invariably told me one of two stories. A startling number had finished their novel, but they needed another month to “polish” it. That month of polishing had lasted anywhere from several months to several years. The rest had finished polishing their novel, and they had engaged someone to edit it. Now they were fighting with the editor, who clearly didn’t know a god damn thing because he kept making stupid suggestions. Some of these writers had fired their editor and were now working with their second or third editor, who was also a moron.

I heard about a whole lot of novels that were 99% finished. So to hell with that. I’m declaring my novels 100% finished, and I’m moving on. I’m shooting queries to agents all right, but I’m not waiting around for responses. And I’m not spending all of my time on social media to build my “platform.” (A platform is the group of people out on the internet who think that you’re kind of neat and who theoretically might buy a book you wrote.)

One of the coolest things I heard recently is that “books sell books.” You’re a lot more likely to make fans if you have five books on the shelves than if you have one book on the shelves. Plus, you’re likely to become a better writer with every book you write. So, I can’t ignore all that platform stuff, but right now my mission is to write more books, and I’d better not forget it.

I don’t have a working title for my new book yet, but I can tell you about it in one sentence. It’s the story of how Santa Claus went from being a juvenile delinquent to being the world’s best loved jolly old elf. I’ve done a lot of character and plot work, and I started writing last night. Just for fun, here’s the first draft of the first couple of paragraphs. I expect that by the fourth edit these paragraphs will be quite different. I might not even use any of the same words, including “the” and “as.”

*****

Santa Claus is a bastard.

I mean that literally, since his elfin mother once sat under the moon with an earnest fellow just as young and dewy as she was. They had a jolly time, although maybe it was a bit too jolly. Even that would have been fine, except he had the bad manners to walk off into the forest one day and never come back. When she at last found a husband and became Mrs. Kringle, she brought along her son Kris, who was just like that useless bowl you can’t throw away when you move into a new cottage, because it was a gift from a wealthy aunt.

In addition to being a bastard, Kris Kringle can act like a bastard. At least he’s a bastard to me sometimes, and I’m his friend. In fact, the first thing he ever said to me was, “Stop rolling around and whining, everybody will think you’re a baby.” This was out behind the Aething House, where teenage elves learn their trades and bully each other with minor tricks like making someone’s shoes shrink to the size of a goose egg. That’s not as much fun as you’d think when it’s your feet in the goose eggs. On that particular day my feet were the ones being crushed, and I did roll, whine, grunt, claw, and plead in the snowy yard behind the house.

*****

So there you go—a blog post I whipped off in a few minutes. It was kind of liberating, in an “I have no idea whether that sucked” kind of way.

Since this is a kind of random post, I kind of randomly tossed in this photo I took of my wife.

 

 

 

I will infiltrate the DFW Writers Conference this weekend. I hope to make important contacts, find people who tell me how great my work is, learn writing and publishing secrets, and meet a an agent who thinks my novel is so marketable they’ll run over orphans while rushing to get it into print. That’s what I hope. I expect to meet writers who are struggling as much as I am, find people who drop into a coma after the first sentence of my pitch, learn what stupid mistakes I’ve been making, and take a vicious pounding from agents about how much my idea, my writing, and my haircut sucks.

It’ll be fun.

In addition to taking in all the classes such as “The Wild West of Publishing” and “How to Write for Boys,” I will pitch my humorous adult fantasy novel Six White Horses. I think I’m ready. I’ve practiced my one minute pitch. I’ve practiced my elevator pitch, which is short enough for a ride from the exhibit floor to the floor with the buffet. I have business cards with my name, photo, contact info, and my tag line: “Fantasy so sarcastic it bleeds laughter.” And my pitch is printed on the back of the card.

I’ve prepared a number of flash drives containing important documents, just in case anyone sees the brilliance beneath the blotchy skin of my first novel. They contain a one page query, an overview, a synopsis, a full proposal, and the first three chapters of the book. The conference organizers warned me in authoritarian terms to bring no paper copies of anything, and to bring no full manuscripts whether on paper, flash drives, or burned into the skin of a buffalo. Electronic media it is.

The conference encourages agents and writers to mingle at a reception Saturday evening, on the patio, weather permitting. Barring a tornado or a barrage of hailstones, I hope to chat in a casual yet professional fashion with everyone in sight, if I can do it without looking like a mule’s scabby hind-parts. I may hold a drink, which I think would make me look worldly and literary, especially if it’s not a bottle of Bud Light. I’ll be able to identify the agents by the writers swarming around them like German fighters around an American B-17 bomber. I don’t think I can push my way through them without looking desperate, though. Maybe if I offer them free drinks they’ll go away—at least that’s the way it would work in a bad novel.

Like I said, it’ll be fun. And if it’s not fun, then I bet it’ll be educational.

I couldn’t find any open license photos for the conference, so here’s a photo of Tolstoy and the rest of his Ukranian Oompah band in 1856. If only they could attend this weekend.

When I decided to become a writer, I received a license to whine. More correctly, I gave myself a license to aggravate everyone I know with my whining. They can’t shut me up, unless they want to beat me to death with my laptop and toss my body in a ditch. I think they don’t do that because I threw a great New Year’s party one time, and they’re hoping I’ll throw another one.

I whine about having no ideas, having bad ideas, not enough time to write, how much time writing takes, writing myself into a corner, hating the characters I created, having to kill characters I love, not knowing how to end a story, finishing a story and being depressed about leaving it, and reading books that make me realize everything I’ve ever written sucked. But my most profound whining comes when friends and family fail to show a slavering interest in my work and my writing process.

Perhaps a friend never gives me feedback on the 200,000 word monster I forced on her. Maybe a friend took three months to review my story, when I know that during that time he read someone else’s novel in two days. I may know that a friend read my book until four pages from the end and then let it sit on the desk for a week. Some friend may finish and point out a dozen typos, and when I press for details all she says is, “I really liked it.”

At these times I become dejected, and I whine. The fact that other friends provide me fantastic help doesn’t seem to lift my gloom.

But today I realized something. Writing isn’t an ego-boosting activity. Writing isn’t a holy calling worthy of everyone’s attention. Writing is a job. How many people have jobs about which they expect their friends to get all enthused? Sure, all of my friends read, so I expect them to be interested in my writing. But say I was a plumber. All of my friends use the toilet, but I wouldn’t expect them to get excited about how I replaced a P-trap at work today.

So I’m resolving to whine less and work more. Perhaps my friends will stop pretending they’ve snorted salsa up their nose when I approach them at parties. That would be nice. I just have to keep in mind that when I’m writing, it’s no more than the social equivalent of fixing a toilet.

On September 6, Ace Hardcover will release “Those Across The River”, a horror novel by Christopher Buehlman.  He’s a fantastic wordsmith, and he’s created a highly literate story that’s also thrilling and masterfully paced. It’s available for pre-order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and there will be a release party/signing in New York City, as well as other signings around  the country. Every brain cell in my skull recommends it.

Some helpful links:

Christopher’s website: http://www.christopherbuehlman.com/

Amazon’s pre-order page: http://www.amazon.com/Those-Across-River-Christopher-Buehlman/dp/0441020674

A review by John Michael Decker: http://johnmichaeldecker.blogspot.com/2011/04/john-michael-decker-reviews-those.html

Reviews at Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10772903-those-across-the-river

 

A couple of weeks ago the good folks at Open Heart Publishing called and told me they’ve accepted my story for their upcoming anthology. The anthology is An Honest Lie, Volume 3: Justifiable Hypocrisy. I was thrilled to be accepted, but that thrill doubled when this evening I saw that Open Heart has officially announced the new authors for their volume. There’s something about seeing it spelled out in words. I don’t yet know the exact publication date, but I’m anxious to find out. The announcement is at: http://anhonestlie.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/annoucing-the-winners/