Writing Books is Hard!

I know I’ve said it before, but writing a book is pretty easy, really… unless you want to write a good book. Almost anyone can string words together, one after another, and writing a book at its core is basically just doing that for long enough.

But writing a good story, with engaging characters and a coherent plot and, hey, good editing while we’re at it… that’s tricky. Even at the first stage before you sit down to write the story, thinking about what story it is you want to write… even that can be tricky! I say this as somebody who has written at least one novel a year for the last six years… it’s hard!

Upside is that I love doing it. It being difficult is just a statement of fact. Like… if you want to be an Olympic athlete, you can’t approach your sport as “just a game” although, at its core, that’s all it is. That’s just like saying a book is a bunch of words strung together. It’s true but also grossly insufficient.

I guess I’m giving myself a bit of slack for how slowly this current novel is going. It’s partially my fault… cyberpunk isn’t really my genre, it’s just a genre I love and want to do proper credit to. I suspect that there will be people who don’t even think it is cyberpunk when I’m done. It’s more… cyberpunk-inspired?

Which I think will still be really cool. Assuming I can finish the silly thing…

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Good Music

I’m pretty sure I’ve talked before about how I like to listen to music as I write. It helps get my mind in the right headspace, and back when I was “that guy” in a coffee shop working on my novels it also helped me isolate myself from people around me.

Not a complaint about other people of course. But they want to have discussions and talk, and that can be really distracting from the voices I’m trying to listen to in my head that are often whispering where the story will go. It’s much easier to listen to my internal monologue when there’s music I can listen to.

Right now I’m listening to “Through the Fire and the Flame,” which is a thoroughly over-the-top rock piece that I first encountered in one of the later Guitar Hero games… just a lovely game, and the opportunity to play this song (over the final credits, as memory serves) was really cool. It feels appropriately heroic, and it feels kinda fitting.

Added bonus: as a guitar player myself (albeit an amateur one), I can really respect the guitar playing. Just insane level of talent. Ridiculous, really. The fact that anyone’s brain can work at that speed… much less their fingers… anyway. It’s great!

I won’t be able to listen to this while writing the novel, unfortunately. I can’t write in the same language that I’m listening to… the lyrics tend to work their way into my work, and that’s really annoying to catch in editing. I’ll probably switch over to some nice instrumental riffs… I’ve been listening to “tavern music” lists on YouTube, and that seems to be working pretty well.

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Lots of Writing Today!

Last post I talked about the second most important element of being a writer: reading a lot. Specifically reading a lot in your chosen genre, to learn about what the market is providing and to learn about how other authors tackle the same sorts of problems you are going to encounter in your own writing, but also reading lots of other genres to see what they do particularly well (or poorly) and to see what you can incorporate into your own work.

Today is all about the first most important element of being a writer: writing! That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but it is remarkable how many writers I know really struggle to put words onto paper (or digital paper or whatever). And that’s not to say there aren’t tougher times to write… these last few years have been a real strain on every creative I know, trying to balance their mental health with their ability to continue producing quality work. And I don’t think it matters if you produce at Stephen King-like levels (2k words a day every day) or if you only put out a few dozen really good words… what matters is that you do it.

And that’s what I’m going to be doing today! Putting words, one after the other, until I finish a bunch of sentences, and linking those together to finish a bunch of paragraphs, and so on and so forth until, boom, finished first draft.

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Lots of Reading Today

I love reading days. I love them. Part of the best thing about being a writer is “having to” read lots of stuff in order to stay abreast of what everyone else is doing.

Not that I’m trying to match or surpass any of my fellow writers: this isn’t a competition, and a rising tide lifts all boats. Besides, the caliber of writer that I really enjoy reading (Scalzi, Jemisen, Chambers, Leckie) I have no illusions that I write as well as they do. Maybe someday if I can do this gig full time I’ll be close… or at least in the same conversation… but for now, reading their work gives me a lovely sense of what really brilliant sci-fi is like these days.

Today I’m reading a few classics (specifically The Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde) and then maybe tackling The Risen Empire by Westerfeld. After that… gosh, I don’t know! So many choices…

I’m told that there are people out there who re-read books they’ve already read!? Sounds like a luxury, honestly… I look forward to someday having time to even read the majority of the books I already own once!

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

In Praise of GOAT CHEESE

It’s a silly trick, and I mentioned it on Monday, but it really works for me. I know I took the words “Goat Cheese” specifically from another writer I follow on Twitter, but I don’t recall who specifically it was.

The idea is simple. Any time something needs to be ignored-for-now and clarified later (or written later) I just put in big bold letters the words “GOAT CHEESE” surrounded by square brackets. That’s it. Skip anything super difficult right now, and come back to it later with a simple Find command in your word processor of choice.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a story with any cheese in it, much less goat cheese, so there’s no worries about that coming up (and even if it did, it would be pretty clear by context whether it’s supposed to be there or not!) and it’s a nice little reminder not to get too hung up on the details, but rather to focus on the big story and then come back for the little details later.

As mentioned, I did that with the chapter I had been really struggling with… and boom, wrote most of the next chapter within a few hours. Progress! It feels nice, not gonna lie.

So just a reminder out there to anyone else who writes and reads this blog… if you’re stuck, just move on to the next thing. But do put in a note or a flag or something, whatever works for you, to make sure you go back and fill in that hole later!

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Getting Stuck

I think I’ve mentioned before (probably many times by now) that I don’t believe in Writers Block. I don’t think it’s “a thing”… there are days writing is easier and days that it is harder, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a time where writing was impossible.

If I can’t make progress on one thing, I just work on a different thing. If I can’t write an important essay, I can work on my latest novel, and if I can’t do that I can write a short story, or just daydream different novels I want to write later and maybe start getting groundwork started for them… and so on, and so forth, etc.

Currently the novel I’m working on has hit a bit of a blockage. The part I need to write next is just… not coming. The flow has stopped, and as a result the novel is doomed… or, you know, I can do what I normally do: write “GOAT CHEESE” in big letters between square brackets, skip this part for now, and then come back to it later to finish up. Why bother getting Writers Block when you can just… write?

So that’s the plan. Leave this chapter I am working on right now which is like pulling teeth, and then come back to it once I have written everything else around it. We’ll see how that goes!

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

I Have Written

On Sunday, I actually got a little writing done. On Monday, I got considerably more writing done. It was a very nice feeling.

Now, granted, I still have a LOT of writing to do. Tens of thousands of words need to be neatly lined up and arranged appropriately before this novel is anywhere near finished. But gosh it felt good to get some of it done again. It’s been far too long.

Anyway, more writing today!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Back at It!

Well, I had my day off. Today I happily return to writing for the first time in almost two months (6 weeks or so, really). Far too long for a writer to be away from their work.

There is a part of me that wants to start over from scratch on a new book. That part of me is always there, though. It’s the little voice in my head that tells me that the next thing I work on will be better than this thing, so why not start it already? The answer is, of course, without practice then nothing will be better… and a thousand half-finished novels are a thousand times worse than one finished one.

Besides, I like this story. I like the characters in this story, and it will be fun to re-read what I’ve written to get myself back up to speed.

So! Without further ado, I head off to do battle with my manuscript once more!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

A Day Off

Well, exams are done and over with for this semester, and that’s nice. It means I actually have a day or so (part of today and most of tomorrow) with no immediate school or work related issues looming. A few small ones, sure, but for the most part this will be the first summer I’ve had without classes since 2018… and if I managed to get both of my remaining required courses in September, I may actually graduate this year. That would be lovely.

But before that, a day of relaxation! I’m going to do some painting, I’m going to finish reading the last of the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, I’m going to bake something tasty… and then I’m going to sleep in tomorrow. Like, really sleep in… if I get out of the bed before noon, something had better be on fire.

So not much to report today, except for a general “Super excited to get back to writing!”, which is 100% true. I’ve missed you, first-draft-of-my-new-novel… I’ve missed you so much.

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Angel Food Cake

My opening moves today were to bake an angel food cake. I forgot how fiddly the process is, but the end result was pretty good… fresh strawberries and whipped cream forgive many sins.

It reminded me a little about writing, actually. Perhaps not a surprise… as I dive full-body into my exams I won’t be able to even think about occupational writing for at least the next few weeks, and so I am focusing on these moments of joy when and where I can. Anyway, writing is a little like baking: it’s less about rigorous precision, and more about knowing what will make a good finished product.

Sure, if I add any fat to the egg whites, they simply won’t whip up, which means they’re wasted. But other than that, everything is carefully variable… more sugar, less sugar. More salt, less vanilla, more lemon extract, swap lemon for orange, fold the flour or whisk… but critically, until you have baked a lot, you’ll never really know what you’re supposed to end up with, and therefore you won’t know exactly what to mess with.

Writing is the same sort of thing. There are expectations for any story when you, as a reader, pick up that book. You may expect the hero will survive, or that the hero has no hope of surviving, or that there is no hero. But all of that is determined very early, and often just by picking your genre. A horror novel that has the monster slain by a group of determined heroes may be a great story, but it’s probably not Horror, which has pretty specific rules. And yes, once you get very good with reader expectations you can start to subvert them… I think one of the many things that made Game of Thrones so appealing for a long time is how many of the genre expectations it subverted, just as a random example. But gosh you gotta bake a lot of cakes before you can expect to do that.

Just idle thoughts. And half-decent angel food cake.

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Fame and Fortune

This time of year is always a little introspective for me… a look at the past year, perhaps the past few years, and a consideration of everything that has or hasn’t happened over that time.

Most of the time it’s pretty depressing. The last couple years in particular have been harder than most, and I think that holds for everyone, but even before this nonsense, my time is usually spent trying to figure out where, exactly, things went wrong.

Now I don’t want to come off as whiny. I have a lot of blessings in my life, and a fair dose of that is due to this work… I love writing. It’s hard, sure, but any day I can spend crafting words into sentences into stories is a good day. Any day that I can’t is a worse day for it.

But a part of me is looking at the successes of others and wondering what they’re doing differently than me. A lot of it is money, I know, because money just makes everything easier. Editing, art, time… all of them cost money, and often a lot of money, and so me scrambling around trying to do whatever I can with the scant resources I have is definitely making the climb more uphill. I get that.

But that can’t be it. And I want to stress that my definition of “success” is very, very modest. I don’t want or need huge buckets of cash, or the adoration of thousands. In order for me to make this writing-thing a success I need about 3-4 thousand people to buy each of my new releases. That’s not nothing, and I’m certainly closer to that number than ever before, but a fraction of what any New York Times Bestseller reaches. And that’s okay! A few hundred copies a week would be plenty.

But that’s still a long, long way off.

Ah well. I’m waxing poetic rather than doing the work, and that’s a big part of the problem… so instead, I’m going to try and finish my exams, so I can get back to writing.

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Exams

There’s a funny thing about exams… well, there are many funny things about exams, honestly, but there’s one in particular about take-home exams, which the majority of my exams have been for the last two years.

There’s this weird sense of stretched-panic. Like, this is a big, heavy, massively important thing, but it’s not due right now. Heck, it’s not due for a week (sometimes two!). But gosh is it important! You really should do it now, don’t you think? But not right now. But probably now.

Both my courses have take-home exams this semester, and today I get the 2nd one (the other I’ve had for a week and isn’t due for another week). Honestly, I will probably start working on them on Wednesday, just to get them finished (and give me time to sit on them and think, rather than rushing through at the last moment). But I used to love exams… the stress was lovely, the pre-exam studying was hell but then, boom, it was done and you could move on with your life (or, more likely, on to studying for the next exam!). But these weird take-home things have all the stress, but almost none of the defined release…

Of course, last time I was doing “proper” exams was almost exactly 20 years ago, and I was a much different person back then. And studying the wrong thing.

Anyway, just a weird thought. Can’t wait to finish these so I can get back to writing the book!

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

The Last Hundred Yards

Getting close to the end of my English degree… two 4th year courses (both seminars), and I’m done. At least theoretically… considering the way the bureaucracy of Laurier has been in the past, I wouldn’t be stunned if things get messed up one last time. We will see.

But for this semester, I am almost done. One term paper and a take-home exam, and then I’m done until September. It’s been… four years?… since I’ve had a summer without classes throughout the majority of it, and gosh am I looking forward to it.

Mostly because I can get back to writing I care about, rather than writing that grades hinge on. Academic writing is a thing, and I’m pretty good at it, but there’s very little joy in it. It’s hard to be joyous about something you have to have three academic sources for, and that is edited to be as boring and with minimal individual input into it.

But that’s fine! It’s fine. I’m almost done, and hopefully I can leverage this degree into a different paying job until I can leverage that job into becoming a full-time writer. I’m gonna get there one way or the other, but it would be nice to shorten the road a lot. And maybe make it a touch less torturous to travel… that might be nice.

Anyway, almost done! Huzzah!

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Painting

It may not come as a surprise, but like many artists I find a lot of different outlets for my artistic passions. I write, sure, and I love writing (so much so that it’s the only occupation I pursue!), but I also love to draw, and I love to paint.

I most paint miniatures (“war dollies,” if you will), and I have no shame in it. Sure, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I really like having little armies of little soldiers that smash into other people’s little armies. I play a lot of varied games, but currently I’m not active in any of them, really.

Thanks COVID.

But joking aside, I enjoy painting because it’s a very different sort of brain activity than writing. Writing is like pushing your arm through a meat grinder sometimes. It’s painful and difficult and it seems to only get moreso as time goes on. But painting… you start off with something plain and boring, and slowly add layers and detail until you end up with something that’s quite pretty.

I’m not a great painter, by any extent, but I’m not awful and I can usually make the miniatures look pretty half-decent.

Anyway, the ones I’m working on right now are for a board game called “Descent Legends of the Dark,” which I am very excited to play at some point. The miniatures are incredibly detailed, and that helps, and there are a few good online tutorials to help with the colour selection (the area of painting I struggle with the most!). I think I’ve been working on the team of heroes for about a month now, and they’re almost done (may actually finish them by the end of March!), and then I’ll start painting all the baddies… there are way more of them, but they’re repeats so I should be able to crunch through them pretty quick.

Just a nice little distraction between writing!

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Black Jelly Beans

As I sit here writing this post, there is a small bowl full of black jelly beans by my left hand.

I do not like black jelly beans. I don’t like them one bit. “So why,” you might ask, “do you have a bowl full of them right beside you?”

Ah, context. The short answer is that when I poured out the last of this bag of jelly beans for a snack (not a healthy snack, but I’m taking my journey towards being healthy one step at a time), I ate all the jelly beans aside from the black ones. Those were then returned to the bowl so that I can throw them into the compost upstairs… I don’t know if jelly beans actually compost (I suspect not, since that would explain their eternal existence despite being almost universally loathed), but I’m going to try.

But to a casual observer, it might very much look like I am planning to eat those hideous little black ‘candies’ at some later point, or perhaps have just shoveled a handful into my mouth and they will never know that I do not, in any way, care for black jelly beans.

Writing is often like that, I think (as I at last approach a point to this ramble). The parts that people see are often the disappointing or unpleasant parts that are sitting there until something happens to them. Because you see me editing my newest novel, you might very well think that all I do is edit my novels. Or because somebody glances at me on Wikipedia, they might think that I do all my research on Wikipedia. Of course that’s not the case, but it isn’t necessarily obvious.

And thus, there sits that bowl… I should probably clean that up.

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

The Obelisk Gate

Part of being a good writer is being a good reader… or at very least a prolific reader. Ideally in my chosen genre, of course, but really anything I read helps me better understand what makes certain stories “work,” and what about them doesn’t work.

With this in mind, I do my best to read every John Scalzi that is released (I haven’t quite managed it… I think I’ve only read 2 of the “Old Man’s War” series, and they were great but I know there are a lot more of them out there), and I recently started reading N.K. Jemisin.

Gosh, she’s amazing. I just finished the second book in the “Broken Earth” trilogy, titled The Obelisk Gate, and wow. Just wow. What a writer! It won the Hugo in 2017 (on the heels of the first novel, The Fifth Season winning in 2016), and yeah. Such a brilliant writer!

It’s amazing to me that such writers exist. She is so talented that I don’t think I’ll ever write anything anywhere near as good. She’s like a Terry Pratchett… talented enough to be fundamentally otherworldly.

Can’t wait to finish the trilogy! I’ve been reading them at my day-job (and encouraged an enormous amount to read that Jemisin herself wrote while also balancing a day-job) over my lunch breaks… reading her novels in 25 minute chunks is challenging, but only because I never want to put the book down!

Anyway. If you have any interest whatsoever in touching, brilliant, and living speculative fiction, I can’t recommend the series highly enough. No idea if it finishes on as high a note as it started and continued on, but I’d be surprised if it isn’t at least good, and possibly sublime.

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

The Drive to Produce

It’s a weird feeling, both needing to and loving to produce something. I am often reminded of that famous quotation “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,” (Thomas Mann).

And it’s true. I love writing, but it is hard at the best of times (and, as we all know, these last few years have not been the best of times). It’s been a few weeks now since I dedicated any time specifically to working on the novel, and while I have jotted down a few words here or there, that’s simply not enough. My particular writing style needs a “flow”… an opportunity to really focus in on what I want to say and how I want to say it, and then to just let the torrent of words out (so they can be heavily, heavily edited later!).

Ah well. School is a more pressing, immediate priority at the moment. A couple really big term papers are looming in the next few weeks, and after that I think things should settle. And no summer school this year, so hopefully I’ll have a few relaxing months before I jump in for my last semester in September.

Okay, with that I really should get working on those term papers… one of them has a bibliography that’s due next week (to prove that we’re using appropriately academic sources for our papers) which I am… less than thrilled about… but whatever. Whatever! It’ll get done, and then it’ll be done and we can all move on with our lives.

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Imperialism Sucks

As part of my English degree I have to study a lot of British Literature. Almost done now, but the last of these courses is “Later Victorian Literature”, and nothing says Later Victorian Literature quite as much as Imperialist propaganda.

We’ve talked about the almost-unbelievably racist Kipling already, and we are now tackling “She” by H. Rider Haggard, and gosh is it hard to read. Not that it’s intrinsically badly-written… it’s a very old-style of novel, but it’s a legitimately old novel, so it comes by that rightly. But wow is it ever racist and misogynistic. Just casually throwing around shade at everyone who isn’t white, descriptions of “cruel” features, discussions of the frailty of women and their stupidity…

Now, let it be said here that my novels aren’t perfect. There are definitely some questionable decisions I’ve made, and I have certainly written a few sexist characters. I don’t think I’ve ever been Imperialist in any of my novels, since I tend to believe very deeply that Imperialism (and monarchies as a more general rule) are always bad, but I may have had moments of colonialism that sneaked in when I wasn’t paying enough attention… Canada has some very troubling colonial roots, and as a child of this country it has bled into my perspective occasionally.

But I certainly hope nobody will ever look at my work the same way I’m looking at Haggard’s. Wow it’s bad.

Anyway. I have to finish the last half of this awful, brutal novel, and then I get to work on two massive term papers due in a week or so, and after all that… maybe I’ll get to do something remotely fun? Probably not, but a man can hope.

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Put on a Happy Face

Well, things are certainly different than they were a few years ago. By this time in 2020, it was becoming apparent that the pandemic wasn’t just going to go away on its own, and the Canadian government was starting to take its first, hesitant steps towards mandates to protect the population.

By the following week I told my boss I would be self-isolating, since that was recommended. He took it pretty well, all things considered, and there followed the second most productive period of my writing career.

It looks like the provincial government is going to remove the mask mandates in the next couple weeks, and while this fills me with an impending sense of doom (4 of my coworkers have had COVID in the last 3 months, and that’s with the mandates still in place!), there isn’t a lot I can do about it. My editing costs still far outstrip my income from writing (by orders of magnitude, actually), and my university education is still almost entirely self-financed, which means I have to keep working if I want to do the things I love, like write and learn about how to write better.

So why worry? Might as well do my best to embrace this, and hope that we all come out the other side a little kinder and wiser. And who knows, a lot can still change in two weeks… maybe the downwards trend in cases will continue, and things will in fact get far better than things currently suggest they will get. It would be nice to stop worrying all the time (I worry all the time).

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!

Academic Papers

If the last four-and-something years have taught me anything, it’s that I’m really very good at writing academic papers.

I don’t enjoy it, I often don’t see the point of it, but apparently I am very, very good at it.

I am diving into another one this weekend. It’s for a course I have in writing narratives for video games, and I’m pretty excited about it. It is letting me approach a medium I love (games) from a position that I don’t normally care much about (academic analysis). Today is going to be devoted to picking a specific topic and thesis, and starting to lay out the groundwork for finding academic sources to back up whatever it is I’m going to say.

There is a temptation to continue on this track because then someday I might be considered an academic source… but I don’t think I’m wealthy enough or devoted enough to poverty to pursue the years and years of abuse the academic system heaps on people. Besides, all I’ve ever really wanted is a humble life where I can write books in peace… I don’t think the academic path allows that for decades, if ever.

Anyway. Those are my weekend plans.

Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!