Saalon Muyo

Right when I started sliding into writing things I would never show other human beings (2009, if you don’t mind me getting all specific), I hit on a great idea. See, I was ready to write. It was as if I’d gathered a great big bundle of energy like a character in Dragonball Z, and just needed to find a planet to Hadouken! into oblivion.  (Yes, jerks, I know that hadouken is Street Fighter and not DBZ, and if you knew that, too, you have no right to be getting all snippy with me.) Only I kept getting distracted by all the exciting toys in my house, so instead of destroying planets, I destroyed a bag of chips and watched television. Enter the great idea.

I’d go somewhere else.

It was simple. Beautiful. I’d get a hotel room, bring my laptop and a bottle of some kind of alcohol (for the Hemingway flavor, though he probably wouldn’t approve of my coming home with the bottle still 2/3 full), tell everyone they could speak to the voicemail if they called me and just write. It would be a retreat. A little Eric creative retreat. I’d write and write and write and come home with buckets of words. So, I booked a hotel in Virginia, bought (on Brennen’s suggestion) some 15 year old Laphroaig scotch and went to work.

The crazy thing? It totally worked. Like gangbusters. (Confession: I don’t actually know what a gangbuster is, or how well one works.) I spent the first day mostly puttering around the hotel room, sipping scotch and enjoying being free from all the human beings. By the evening, though, I found myself at the computer, working. Working a lot. I brought my laptop into the lobby, into the restaurant, outside. I worked on the bed and at the desk.  My longest break was getting sushi for dinner, and even then I was getting myself ready for another sprint. I came home with a completed novella, just like I’d planned. It was awesome.

I did it again last year, this time in a downtown Pittsburgh hotel. I bought plum wine and sake (having recently read a book that made me obsessed with plum wine, but not so obsessed to make me forget that I would probably puke if I drank nothing but) and settled in. Same as last time: A slow start accelerating into furious planet destroying hadouken. It worked. It really, actually worked. If I was ready before going in, if I had the potential energy, the isolation nudged the boulder down the mountain.

The trick, I decided, was in knowing when what I needed was a total change of environment. At the right moment, the shock of stripping away everything comfortable was focusing. Being in a different chair at a different desk – away from cats and Erin and a Playstation – made it crystal clear I was going to work. Like sending e-mail to my brain in big, bold letters:

Writing time, dummy!

My brain got the message.

Last weekend, I hit a point in planning the novel where there was nothing left to do but write. First chapters are terrifying, though – a topic I’ll save for the first blog post after I finish said chapter – and  I knew I was going to find it dangerously easy to punt on it for days or weeks. In fact, I’m sitting here having punted on it for days, so I think I knew what I was talking about. If I was going to get over the hump, I needed that big, bold lettered e-mail, and I needed it stat.

Tonight, I’ll be checking into a hotel in an undisclosed location and if I don’t have a first chapter on the other side, I’d be very surprised. I won’t be answering my phone or making calls, though don’t be surprised if maybe catch me online; I can occasionally flit – in a masculine way – into and out of a texty chat without losing my focus. It’s hard to say. All I know is that I’m shocking the system into getting over the scariest part of a new story, and I’m doing it by Sunday.

See you on the other side with something to show for it.

It’s past time for me to step up my directing game. Way past time.

I’m with Robert Rodriguez when it comes to being a director.  You need to learn how to do it all. You don’t always need to actually do it all on every movie, but not understanding how to light, or use the camera, or cut your film is opening a weakness someone will later exploit. They might not do it out of malice, but incompetence can ruin your film as quickly and decisively as intent.  Unless you have a budget at your disposal sufficient to hire the best, and the good sense to know what “the best” is supposed to mean, you’re going to be making uncomfortable decisions about who gets to muck with all the work you’re putting in.

At my level – that would be the level where you have no money and are paying people in sandwiches and beer – it’s even more dire.  There’s always someone around saying they know how to do sound, or light a shot, but most of them are affable amateurs at best. Even if you, too, are an amateur, there’s something you need to remember: they’re helping out on set for a few days and you’re sweating blood for something that’s going to bear your name. If you don’t think that makes a difference in how much effort and ability the average person will bring to bear, I understand.  You just haven’t had your sound ruined by someone who put in the time but not the heart.

It’s not their fault. This isn’t about anger. It’s about admitting that directing isn’t the kind of thing where you get to do one job and leave the rest to everyone else. You’re the center. The locus. The hub of wheel. And when the movie fails, it fails all over you. Even if you could hop into frame mid-film and blame the guy who forgot to turn on the digital recorder for the horrible sound in the scene, people would still wonder why you didn’t notice before you stuck this piece of crap in front of them. The point I’m making is that you feel a little feel better when you’re the guy who forgot to turn on the digital recorder.

True, if your career goes anywhere, you’re going to have to give that job up to someone else. In fact, I dream of the day when I can find someone better at some of these jobs than I am. Having made the mistakes myself, I’m better equipped to know if the person I’m bring on is better, and I’m also less likely to make their jobs more difficult.

So I was talking about stepping up my game. I’m proud of the fact that I can do it all. I can set up my sound. I can point lights. I can swing the camera about and I can hack the footage into something resembling a movie. I can, and have, done that, a couple of times. Now, I want to do it better.

A lot better.

Finding the right books is the trick. I’m not interested in how-to books, especially not ones focused on being a Do It Yourself Filmmaker. I don’t need an instruction manuel and I don’t want to be talked down to. I want theory. I want something I can internalize, something I can turn into a process, so that when I find someone to take a job from me, I still know how to think towards that job. The energy of filmmaking flows from the director to all other jobs and back again.  Knowing how to think about your shots, your setups, your camera moves and your acting directions in terms of those energies means you won’t be begging your editor to make something for which you did not give him the materials. I want something that gives me that. The knowledge of the how and why, the philosophy and the theory. I’ve got Google if I get confused in Final Cut.

I got lucky when someone on my Twitter feed mentioned In the Blink of an Eye. I hadn’t asked, and it wasn’t even directed at me, but as soon as it was mentioned as being one of the seminal works on film editing, I knew this was where to start. Editing is something through which I’ve fumbled; I’d have a sense of not liking the rhythm of a scene, but not a good idea why. That meant a lot of aimless trial and error (which is different from aimed trial and error, I swear), and chunks of scenes I wish I could go back and change.

In the Blink of an Eye is a wonderful read. It’s short (the main text is 70 pages, and the appendix on digital editing is the same), but it speaks eloquently about the way editing should feel, about the mindset of approaching it and of the way the human mind interprets cuts between different spacial points of view. It discusses different film editors not in terms of how to use them, but in how their different approaches change how you think about a film. The KVM, in which you take bits of film and splice, is more like sculpting out of clay, while the Moviola, with which you cut away from long runs of film, is more like carving out of marble. Insights like that speak to the way you should think about a thing, not to which button to flick and when.  If you have any interest in directing, I strongly recommend it.

As for me, it’s time to move on to the next area of pain and suffering: light.

I’ll leave sound for a really masochistic day.

I’ve never been much of a short story guy.  I never read short fiction like I did novels, and even though there are a bunch of shorts I really love, getting an anthology of short stories is a ticket to a half-finished book sitting on my shelf.  For me, the getting into a story part of reading takes up a lot of energy, so a few hundred pages of ten page stories means dozens of times where I have to get oriented, figure out what I’m reading, why I’m reading it, why I should care. Just when I’m into it, the thing is over. Restart. Retry. Have fun.

That isn’t to say I don’t respect short fiction. The canon of modern science fiction is built on it. The best SF writers almost all did their best work writing shorts.  Some of the classic SF novels of the 50′s and 60′s are either a collection of shorter works or evolved out of a short.  In fact, I not only respect short fiction; when I can get myself into reading it, I almost always come away kicking myself for how little of it I do. It’s a deficit. A weakness.

It’s no surprise that, since I wasn’t much of a reader of short fiction, I was an even worse writer of it.  You can’t really write what you don’t read, unless you’re some kind of savant or lucky moron, and I’m neither a savant, nor lucky. Short fiction, outside of a few pathetic attempts, was simply outside of my ken. Until a few years ago, that wasn’t really a problem for me, but it was a deficiency I started to feel. I don’t like having weaknesses.

When I got my Kindle a few years ago, the first thing I did was buy a subscription to Asimov’s. It’s still probably the best thing I’ve done with that Kindle. I don’t read every issue, and I don’t always read everything inside. That doesn’t matter. Just getting myself into the rhythm of it has made reading them easier. I was even enjoying the ones I didn’t really enjoy. Better, I started wanting to give writing them another try.

It was well timed. Last fall, Rachel came to me and asked me to write something for an anthology she was putting together.

Like with reading, my spin up time on writing shorts is almost as bad as for something much longer.  Proportional to the word count, it’s probably worse.  I spent the better part of two months just trying to get the ideas to lock together, to overcome my biggest obstacle in writing short fiction: finding a story that fit. I feel comfortable in long form writing, because my ideas tend towards things that need space to build. In short fiction, I’d always struggled to find a story I could tell in 5,000 words that wasn’t so slight as to not be satisfying (and I hate how many short stories feel like cast-off, underdeveloped novel ideas) or so long as to turn it into a novella.  I’d given up hitting that roadblock in the past. This time, I kept at it. It took me a few months, but slowly, things fell into place.

Last night, I turned in the second draft of “She Says Goodbye Tomorrow” to Rachel.  I couldn’t be more excited about it.  And, yeah, I hate saying that out loud. It feels like asking for trouble when people actually read it. Who knows if the things that make the story work for me will work for anyone else. At present, I haven’t even heard from Rachel if she likes the new draft. But I’m saying it anyway, because I am really happy with it. Whatever comes, I’m proud of where I’ve gotten.

I mean, I wrote a short story I don’t want to burn on completion. That’s some success, right there.

I probably have at least one more draft of it to do, but finishing the second draft of “She Says Goodbye Tomorrow” basically means the last project from 2011, the last project not a part of The Plan, is done. Which isn’t to say that a ship won’t wreck into the plan and sink it tomorrow, but keeping on top of the short – and getting it done without hating it – means I’m at least starting things on track. This is good. This is very good.

As for the anthology, I don’t have a publication date, but when Rachel gets it out, I’ll let you know. Oh, who I am I kidding? I’ll be flogging the hell out of it for weeks before its release.  Until then, wish me happy re-writing.

Despite what some people try to tell me, starting something sucks. I hate it. It’s trench warfare. It’s charging the machine guns through mustard gas. No, that’s a rubbish metaphor. It’s nothing like that.

Starting is not knowing where you’re headed or how to get there. Starting is knowing the only way home is through an impassable forest, only you don’t know where the forest is or if there actually is a forest.

All the energy and excitement I’ve got from feeling really confident about a novel idea? That energy wants somewhere to go. It wants a page and it wants to put words on that page immediately. Which I can’t let it can’t do, because, at that point, I haven’t a clue what I’m writing. If I took all the New Fun Starting energy and turned it loose on the page, I’d wash out after a few moronic, vapid pages and decide I’d been wrong, so wrong, so utterly wrong about the whole idea.

Which is what happened to Mimesis last November, when I wrote a thousand or so words before getting lost and giving up.  At least, by last year, I’d come to know myself well enough to realize it wasn’t the story’s fault, but mine. I didn’t know the story, and I needed to step back and figure out what I was missing. I still had to start. I needed to suss out what I was writing, which meant…

…ahh, see? Meant what? That’s where I am, now. Should I start with character backgrounds? Whose? Or should I start with something else? An outline? Another outline? What?  Starting is working in a vacuum, making guesses and hoping I end up fumbling over something. It’s arbitrary decisions and dead ends.

If I can get past that, there’s momentum. There’s weight behind me. The weight of my choices, of the characters’ decisions, of everything, pushing me to the next step. There’s a gravitational pull given off by the collective mass of what’s come before. A lot of people feel like the middle of things is where the slogging begins. Maybe they’re right, but slogging means I’ve found the forrest. Means there is a forest. Means there is a way home.

First I have to start.

And, no, I don’t like starting things. Not at all.

Whoever set things (i.e. Life, The Universe and Everything) in motion didn’t take that into consideration. So, start I must. Start I will. Starting, I am.

I spent the weekend digging hard into Mimesis. I’d been spinning my wheels for weeks, pecking out paragraphs on thematic intentions and mythological background. Finally, I realized I should just open up a page and start rattling off the backstory for one of my main characters. Frustration over my lack of momentum broke down the fear of making bad decisions, I think. I went into the weekend expecting more wheel spinning, but all at once: wham wham wham!

That was the sound of a bunch of stuff hitting my brain at once.

In case that was unclear.

Had I really convinced myself I was ready to write Mimesis last year? The things I figured out this weekend weren’t just detail. The story was straight up empty without them. Meaningless. That thought planted a little seed of fear: How can I trust myself when I think I’m ready this time?  The answer is: I can’t, and I have to let myself walk into another false start if that’s what I need, but not take a year to figure out why I needed it.

I’ll ride this particular roller coaster a few more times before I get anywhere near writing. The clicking-up-the-hill part never gets less stressful, but thankfully, neither does the race downhill get any less exhilarating. This last weekend was great. If I can keep the great going for a few more, I might be able to start writing and know what it is I’m talking about. Until then, I’d best keep faith that the forest is out there, waiting for me to find it and get lost in its depths.

Here’s all I know about working in sales: Always Be Closing. That might just be something from a movie, come to think of it. Do actual salesmen say that?  It’s good advice, though. Maybe not to salesmen. My advice to salesmen is to Always Be Finding Another Job (For Your Sanity). But for everyone else?

I have a lot of friends who want to get into programming, or write their first novel, or shoot a short film. They’ve come up with an idea and want to know what I think of it. Don’t ask me why people want to know what I think about things. I talk enough without the encouragement. But they ask, and I inevitably say one thing. Well, maybe two, if I think the idea is really cool. Which it is, actually, a lot of the time.  If it’s cool, I tell them so. That’s the first thing. Then I say something else.

Go and finish it.

We all have piles of unfinished projects. Half written stories and chunks of code that don’t run and basements full of boxes we never unpacked in the five years since moving. I don’t know about you, but I know exactly what I’ve learned from all of those incomplete things: absolutely nothing.

No, that’s not true. I did learn something from them. I learned to think less of myself.

The problem with good ideas is that you convince yourself this might be the best one you’ll have for a very long time, so you’d better not screw it up. That kind of thinking is poison, and apart from laziness (another problem in which I am well versed) it’s the single most prolific murderer of projects.  Without a doubt, your idea is going to get away from you. Maybe early on, more likely in the middle, that solid block of gold will turn to sand and slip through your fingers. It’s a given. It’ll happen. If the goal in your head is don’t screw this up and not get this sucker finished, you’ll decide you already failed and give in.

Enough of those and you start to think that you’re the problem.  Your ideas are great, sure, but you can’t make them work. When the next idea comes, you remember the last four unfinished novels, films or websites gathering electrons on a hard drive somewhere and decide there’s no reason even to try.

I’ve never learned much of anything from half finished works of genius (which is what they somehow remain, no matter that you fled when they slipped the leash), but I’ve learned buckets from completed pieces of crap. And, oh boy, have I got them. Some of them are websites still live and in production or scripts floating out in the wired. Some sit here, on my computer, never to be read again. I’ve learned invaluable things from all of them, but none so important as realizing I could make it across the finish line.  That lesson lets me set something aside when I need to and know I can come back and make it work with a clear head. That lesson gets me over mountains and under barbed wire fences. It’s what keeps me strong when I’m lost and spinning out nothing but garbage.

There are other big, important things to learn, but you won’t learn a single one of them from the unfinished or incomplete. Live with a mess of a codebase for a while and you’ll start figuring out how to do the next one better.  Reread that novel you wrote and you’ll see where things got away from you, and maybe you’ll recognize it when it happens again.  Finishing things won’t make you a good programmer or writer on its own, but you won’t get close until you learn how to close.

I had to go back to see when I’d hit my 200th post. It took a while, because it’s been two years. Two years for a hundred posts.  Not an awe inspiring rate. When you consider that almost half of those posts were written in the past three months, it’s downright embarrassing.  Not because I wasn’t blogging, but that it was a reflection of how writing has gone for me over the past two years.

In December of 2009 I started my job at the Cultural Trust.  New jobs are a huge disruption. I lose half of a year, at best, to the pressure of fitting into a new home.  Starting at the Trust was far, far worse. Because of how much I still had to learn about development, the better part of a year slipped into the void.  My job was my life.

I was talking with my friend Danielle on Monday, and she asked me a question.  Do I consider myself a writer or a programmer? There were a few ways I could have answered, all technically true.

I’m both.

I’m one now but am trying to transition into the other.

I’m barely a journeyman at both, so who knows?

My answer to her was, I think, more honest than those.  I told her it’s tough to say, because I get paid to do one, but not the other. But I do one without pay, and I don’t know if I’d keep doing the other without it.

I’ve done alright at being a writer.  I have done a miserable job of finding a way to get paid for it.  This isn’t just a problem for my ego.  A paycheck would mean it’s a job, too. It would mean I didn’t have to squeeze out another thousand words after a day spent slamming my head into a website.  Even a small amount of money could be the difference between needing to spend five days programming or four.

So this is where I say enough.

No, not enough writing. Enough wanting. Enough hoping.  I need a plan.

The plan starts today.

I’m going to keep it manageable.  I’m only worried about the next year. Since I know something just north of squat about getting paid for this, I could end up next year with little to show. The plan might need to change midway, anyway, so a year is as far out as I want to think. So, what’s the plan?

Wait, I actually need to come up with one? Um. Hold on a second.

Ok, plan.

First, I have a finished novel. The most important possible thing is for this novel to get into print.  The best case scenario is for publication, even with the tiniest possible press in the world. As much as I would love fame, fortune and the adoration of women for Broken Magic, what I really need are publication credits. I need a resume. I need a book in the wild. I’ll self-publish if that’s what it takes, but I’m not quite there, yet. So here’s step one: If no one has agreed to publish Broken Magic by March, 2012, I’ll publish it myself.

Second, I need another novel. It’s been years since I wrote Broken Magic and it’s embarrassing. More importantly, if I’ve gotten a publication credit on my resume, then I need something that said credit helps me publish. So, step 2: Write the first draft of Mimesis by June 2012. Finish the second draft by November, 2012.  The upside to this is I’ll have a finished novel before the world ends in December.

Third, I’ve been running from film long enough. I’ve been working on a webseries idea with Rachel and it’s weird and interesting and it’s something I can film. I don’t have a lot of hope for anything I film making me money or leading directly to fame and glory, but it’d something with my name people could see. So step 3: Film a short webseries in the summer of 2012. Release it before the end of the year.

Simple, right? 2012 isn’t already making me feel weak and nauseated or anything. No. Not me.

This plan has implications. I’m still going to be working a full time, mind shredding programming job. I’m going to have crises I can’t foresee and vacations and mental breakdowns and any number of other problems. I’m going to hate what I’m writing, have writer’s block, get inspired by something not on the plan. It’s going to be really, really hard. That means I have no idea what my free time is going to look like next year. I’ll do what I can not to vanish. If nothing else, you’ll see me online.

We’ll call this the draft version of the plan. If you have thoughts, suggestions, ideas, hopes or complaints, let me know. But next year, I’m making progress. I’m moving forward.

Or at least, I’m giving it my best possible effort.

Vow made on my 300th post. See you at 400.

Another day month, another tanka.

Your shirt drifts up and
you catch sunset on your skin.
I say something else,
as if I don’t notice this
is a moment that will pass.

You can read Part 1 here.

The first time I saw it, I wasn’t interested.  The cover caught my attention, so I pulled it off the shelf and flipped it over.  Something about the description put me off, though I don’t recall what it was.  I remember thinking, “This could go either way. It’ll probably be pretentious.”  I placed it back on the shelf and moved on.

I came back.  You know how some books just call out to you? How there’s something between the marketing copy and the cover and praising quotes that screams out that this is a book just for you? (Or is that just me?) Speak wanted me to read it. It took me a while to get the message, but before long I was back at the shelf, wondering why I’d put it back the first time. I hadn’t a clue. I took it to the register.

Speak is Laurie Halse Anderson’s first, and best, novel.  It’s not a book I like to describe in any detail, because the plot is so simple that it’s hard not to give the whole thing away in a blurb.  Melinda is starting high school, and something very bad happened over the summer.  She’s been abandoned by her friends, alienated from her family, and can’t find the words to speak about any of it. It’s about how we blame ourselves for terrible things that happened to us, and how shame and fear and loneliness force us into silence.

It’s more than just a great story to me. Speak shifted something in my head and in my heart. There was something so raw and personal in the narrative, something utterly immediate about it all.  In most of the young adult fiction I’d read, there were good characters, but they rarely felt like real teenagers.  I love Vicky from A Ring of Endless Light, but she’s a step detached from the way it felt to be that age.  Most of the really good young adult fiction gives its characters the right problems. They feel the right things. They just don’t feel them the way, or with the intensity, that I want. Speak was the real deal. Speak was being in high school again.

One of the reasons I’d jumped from kids’ books to Stephen King was It. Unlike the books written for my age group, It didn’t screw around. The kids’ heads were a bigger mess even than their lives.  Speak felt the same way. Melinda was real.  Not just the pain and loneliness, but her perspective, her wit, her sense of humor.  No one is a simple reflection of the big bad thing happening at that moment in their lives.  The rest is still in there, laughing and snarking and screaming at everything happening around us.

Speak isn’t the only book to strike so personal a tone, or to do it so successfully. But it was the one I read at the right moment, when I was ready to understand it.  The difference between books we love and books that change us can be found there, in the timing of finding them.  For me, Speak was the first time I really understood what being personal meant in a story. It taught me the line between a novel telling a story and being that story.

When things fell into place for my first novel, it was no surprise that it was the story of a teenager I wanted to tell.  I didn’t, and don’t, consider myself a young adult writer. If you backed me into a corner, I’d say I was a fantasy author first and foremost.  But after Speak, I knew I had to find that tone, to find my way that far inside of a story.  Maybe it was because a young adult novel had opened my eyes, or maybe the most raw and turbulent emotions in memory were of my senior year of high school, but a young adult novel was the only possible choice.

It’s odd to think about how those little choices push us into place.  Without the Coming of Age Literature class, there’s no way I end up in the young adult section of Barnes and Noble to see Speak.  Without Speak, I haven’t a clue what I’d have written, or even if it would have been any good.  A few steps taken out of laziness and intuition, and I find myself, years later, with a young adult novel behind me and a second down the road.

Thank God I didn’t take a class in mid-20th century American depresso-lit, right?

Ten years ago, I would have laughed if you’d told me I’d be writing young adult novels.  I barely read young adult novels when I was a young adult. Other than reading seemingly every single Three Investigators book, A Wrinkle in Time, that Tripod trilogy and a few I’m sure I’ve forgotten, I basically skipped from Mouse and the Motorcycle and Ramona books straight into It and The Stand and every single Anne Rice vampire novel in print. One of my friends in junior high had already jumped to cool, edgy adult books, you see, and peer pressure dragged me along.

It took a misunderstanding to change things.  For someone who hated every English and Literature class he took in high school, filling a humanities requirement feels like signing up to fight Tarmon Gai’don. They’re all different flavors of excruciating pain and humiliation, and the best for which you can hope is that you get to read a good book or two (that they’ll ruin with inane analytical essays) and a final grade that won’t kill your GPA. Scanning the list of available classes, one caught my eye as more interesting than the rest. It must have been because it sounded different. Not another review of 18th century European romanticism or examination of mid-20th century American depresso-lit. The subject? Coming of Age Literature.

Hey, I loved Catcher in the Rye. It would be more stuff like that, right?  Vast swaths of fantasy are basically sword-and-sorcery enhanced coming of age tales. This would be cool!

On the first day of class, I got the reading list. It started with The Hobbit. The excitement stopped there. What the hell was this list of books? Catherine Called Birdie? Hatchet? The Chocolate War? These were frakking kids’ books! I didn’t go to college to read kids’ books! This was an offense, a travesty, an insult to every functional brain cell in my noggin. This. Would. Not. Stand.

But if I change classes, I’d have to do…oh…never mind. You know what? Griping will be way easier than taking a stand.

Things did not start well. I loathed Catherine Called Birdie with every fiber of my being. It was every bit the simpering kiddy crap I was certain this class was passing off as real fiction. The next two were better, but still kids’ books.

Something was happening, despite the parade of insults the professor had marching over my refined taste. I was starting to like the stuff. Maybe it was because, unlike so many literature teachers, she didn’t bristle when I wrote scathing essays about the books. Maybe it was because there was a real passion for what she had us reading, a passion that couldn’t be there simply to mask laziness or bad taste. She cared about this stuff.  It took a while, but I started to get why. The books got better, my indignation faded, and I started looking forward to the next book.

That class? It changed my life. I did my final project on Madeleine L’Engle. I read every one of her Kairos books, not like they were an assignment, but like a ravenous fan that couldn’t stop. These weren’t books for children. They were books about growing up.  Sure, like every genre, there’s a pile of pandering garbage, but this wasn’t a lesser genre. God, I had been treating it the way people treated Science Fiction and Fantasy. I was an elitist jerk. And I was wrong.

It depresses me that I can’t remember the name of that professor. She was incredible, and she conned me into see things her way by letting me tell her how silly and wrong her way was without failing me for my effort. I left the class no longer seeing young adult books as something less than other books. They were just stories from a different perspective, that’s all. The name of the class hadn’t been a lie, or a misdirection. Calling it young adult fiction minimized it. This was coming of age literature.

I still wasn’t going to write the stuff, though. That came later, after a book called Speak.

Part 2 is available here.

To everyone who read, commented on, or passed along word of the first two chapters of Broken Magic (which you can find here and here): Thank you. I don’t break out the bold lightly. I’m an italics sort of guy. The bold is for you, to show you how much it meant for you to stop by and participate.  It really and truly helped, and I can’t thank you enough. High fives and cookies for everyone.

Where does that leave me and my novel? Let’s start with the novel.

I have two choices with Broken Magic. I can send it out to more publishers and agents and see where that leads. Broken Magic is, and always has been, a bit of a hard sell. Especially for a first novel, it doesn’t have the kind of showy plot features that make it easy to pitch. It was the book I wanted to write, and I love it dearly, but it’s not doing my any favors with publishers. The other option is that I self-publish. I’ve been circling that idea for the past 6 months, and while I’m not opposed, the idea of marketing my novel makes me want to lie down and sleep. I’m a terrible marketer, and if I go the self-publishing route, I need to stop being terrible. I have absolutely no idea how.

I’m planning on doing both. Or, at least, continuing to query while I look into doing it myself. I hope to have another query or two out this weekend, and while I wait, I’m going to look into my options for self-publishing. Advice on the latter would be appreciated.  The important thing is this: Getting it out in front of people has made dealing with Broken Magic urgent again. A mixture of hopelessness and despair had been sapping my will, and I was starting to hide from it. This has shaken something loose. I’m going to take advantage of it. Like, now.  I’ll keep you all in the loop.

What about me?

Here’s something I never expected to happen after I finished my first novel, especially before it even got published: It really, really psyched me out. Though I’ve written a fair bit since, I’ve made no meaningful progress on a second novel.  Not for lack of trying, either. There are two projects between which I’ve bounced. All I’ve got to show for them are piles of notes. Why? While Broken Magic is by and large a quiet, low key thing, it has a special distinction. It was the first time I wrote something that sounded like me, through and through.

You spend the first million words you write chasing your own voice. You can hear it when you think a story through, but the words that end up on paper, for a very long time, are a corruption.  The voice you hear in your head rings clear as a tuning fork; you know when what’s on paper is off key.  Broken Magic, whatever its other merits or flaws, was when everything fell into harmony, and when I finally saw myself in all the threads of the tapestry.

It scared the ever loving hell out of me. Because what if I couldn’t do that again?

Broken Magic is closer to the bone than I usually write, which probably made it easier to make friends with my prose and get it to play along.  There’s been a voice ever since, asking if the only reason I got this one right was because I’d cannibalized so many of my own neuroses in its construction. Broken Magic isn’t a story about me, but it’s a much less obfuscated look into my head than I normally write. What if that’s the only reason it worked? What if I can’t find myself again when a story requires more smoke and mirrors?

I know that’s nonsense. But it wormed its way in and only time and distance dug it out. For the first time since Broken Magic, the heartbeat of that next novel is loud and clear, and hasn’t slipped away regardless of my other work and writing. That means it’s time to write again. Not something I intend to throw away (and, yes, in the last year I’ve written two novellas I never intended to publish; don’t ask), but something that matters.

That’s where I am, and that’s where Broken Magic is. If I haven’t said it enough, let me say it one more time. Thank you, so much, for the support. I didn’t expect this all to help. It did. Thank you.