Storytellersunplugged

I imagine most of you will be on holiday today, soaking up the sun if you are in the Southern Hemisphere (like me), or looking out over the snow if you are in the North. So I’ll keep this one pretty short for those stalwarts keen enough to read our blog while teetering on the precipice of the new year.As I’m writing this, I’m looking out at native New Zealand bush, listening to bird song, and sweating through an evening that’s 27 degrees Celsius. It’s t-shirts and camouflage cargo shorts weather all the time at the moment - just to set the scene.

And I have a few writery resolutions to share.

1. This year has been my first year as a professional TV writer, as opposed to all of my previous years of writing which can be collected under the ‘struggling amateur novelist/playwright’ banner. A big year and a huge learning curve. My resolution? Onwards and upwards with writing serial drama. I feel I’ve mastered storyline writing, but I have a lot to learn in the story editing department (like how to effectively structure a week’s worth of hospital drama) and the scriptwriting department (writing dialogue that sounds true and is properly motivated by the character’s emotions). Writing for Shortland Street has been like being paid to go to writing school. This coming year, now that I’m not a scared writing rabbit any longer, I’m resolving to learn as much as I bloody well can while the gravy chain keeps chugging along!

2. In saying that, I can’t write in a vacuum. I’m a self confessed workaholic. I love writing, and writing loves me, so much that it can turn into a nasty, possessive, stalking lover at times. So, I need to get out more. I’ve taken up mountain biking, and I need to get back out to nature and do some walking and exploring. Doing stuff makes me think…good. See, I need to take my dull brain for a walk now, but…

3. …then I wouldn’t be able to resolve to watch all of the new Battlestar Galactica series and read as much George RR Martin as I can find time for. Why? Because they’re awesome.

4. That brings me to my overly fastidious, nay, anally retentive approach to books, TV, films and computer games. I tend to treat entertainment as professional development. I should watch this or I should read that! Screw that to its sticking place! In 2008 I shall read, watch or play whatever I feel like, for fun.

5. Because, as far as my career goes, I should accept that it has a certain pace and that I can’t rush it. I’ve done a 10 year apprenticeship to become a professional writer. I remember Ian Rankin saying in an interview that he also went through a 10 year apprenticeship before he could give up his day job, and I think many a writer is in that boat. So, no point in getting stressed out that I haven’t got time for my own work at the moment. Patience grasshopper.

6. Last, but by no means least – more time with family! I write well when I’m happy. I struggle to write when I’m not. My wife and my daughter make me happier than anything else in my life. They are my emotional powerhouse. The fiction engine don’t run if it ain’t got a tank o’ happy fuel. Cruising with my family is resolution priority number one. Especially since we’re going to have little gatecrasher to our party in June! Live long and multiply, as Spock said to the Tribble.

There, I’m all wresolved out.

Happy New everyone, and see you on the flip side!

 Hello. My name is Alma Alexander, and I’m a writerholic.

This is my first real step on the Storytellersuplugged stage, so I figured I could do worse than start out by giving you this essay below - the essay originally presented as a speech for my first Guest-of-Honor gig at the 2005 Writers Weekend conference in Seattle (I could have fiddled with time references, but on reflection I chose not to - so any references to “recent” in the essay refer back to 2005…)  The essay was important in several ways - it marked a watershed (I was considered to be high enough on the writerly ladder to be considered for a GoH slot); it made me encapsulate some thoughts on what it meant for me, personally, to be who I was and to be doing what I was doing; and (perhaps most apt for its current incarnation, here) it told a few personal stories about my own journey which served as an introduciton to an audience. Those stories step up again, here, today, to serve the same purpose.

Hello, my name is Alma Alexander, and I am a writer.

This is how *I* got here, to my place among the stars.

**************

Wanting, Becoming, Being: A Writer’s Journey: From Chrysalis to Butterfly

Years ago, when I was a pigtailed schoolgirl, my school saw fit to bring in a real live honest-to-goodness writer to talk to us about her life and her work. I was fifteen. I had been scribbling stuff down since I was five (at which age I wrote my earliest preserved piece of writing, a “poem” my father still fondly cherishes the memory of), and I was a voracious reader – but up until this moment that signified nothing. I loved to read books – perhaps somewhat obsessively so, given the pursuits of my peers, but that was it, I just loved reading. I was an experimental scribbler. That was all. And then, the epiphany.

Writing wasn’t what I DID. Writing was who I WAS, and writing was the only thing I wanted to do. No, the visiting writer didn’t hand me a pair of rose-tinted spectacles and tell me fairy stories about her art. On the contrary – she was blunt to the point of  being painful, and told us of the misery as well as the joy. The days and weeks and months and sometimes years of waiting, waiting, waiting. The hurtful things people say. The rejections. The dismissal of your passion as a “hobby” that will never amount to anything. The constant reaching for that brass ring, which some never ever get to touch at all. The sense of a published book being somewhat equivalent to winning the lottery.

But she said all this with the light of angels in her eyes, and it brought home one very important thing to me. A writer is someone who is heartbreakingly, achingly, indelibly and hopelessly in love with language and with words. Writing is something you do not because you are searching for validation or monetary success (although it does come, to some) or a meaning for your life. A writer is someone who is able to transcend all the pain and all the frustration and all the crashing failures that lie strewn beside the path of the writing life – and get up, sometimes broken and bleeding, and cradle the precious Word in a cupped hand like a thirsty man in a desert does water, and go on.

I went on to study science at university, and I even got a master’s degree in molecular biology – but underneath it all, throughout that brief detour that my life took, I knew one thing about myself – I was, I would remain, a writer. I learned that on one rainy evening when I was fifteen years old, in the company of one of the truly Anointed.

You are all here because an epiphany along those lines happened to you. And it is my turn, in my own way, to pass on what was given to me.

You meet an artist, someone who works with clay or with pigment on blank canvas or with charcoal on paper, and if the artist is any good at all you immediately know that you are in the presence of something extraordinary, a different way of seeing the world we all inhabit, a talent, a gift, a vocation. An ARTIST. Someone who is doing something that an ordinary common-or-garden Joe Schmoe could never do – transform an idea into an image, or a dream into reality.

 
It’s almost painful how much this dictum doesn’t apply to the writers amongst us.

 
Part of it is that the tools used are the kind where familiarity breeds contempt – we all use language, after all, we’ve all known how to string a sentence together when communicating with our fellow human beings since, well, since we learned to talk. We were BABIES, for crying out loud. We were toddlers, children, many of us learned to lisp words before we were fully potty trained. How hard can it be, to string words together on a page and get a book?

 
A writer is measured by his or her success more than any other kind of artist. Meet a sculptor at a party and your questions will center on how he works, what sort of thing he makes, what inspires him. Tell someone at the same party that you’re a writer, and the response is usually, “Oh, would I have read anything of yours?” (i.e. – “Are you published…?”) And yet, the person who asked that question is just as likely to follow it up with something like, “Oh, I’ve thought about writing a book. Maybe I will, when I have more time/when I retire/when I get around to it.” Implying strongly that this putative masterpiece is easily the equal and possibly even a superior product to the thing that the writer at the party has produced.

 
The truth of it is, writing is HARD. And pursuing a writing life is even harder. It needs perseverance, even stubbornness; an ability to take hard knocks and then pick oneself up off the floor and start again; courage; wisdom; passion; an ability to walk a tightrope between believing in yourself absolutely in the face of whatever anyone else says, and being able to accept others’ suggestions as to where there is room for improvement. A huge dollop of luck. And talent.

 
Note that I leave talent last. Talent in a writer is less easy to perceive on an immediate level than it is in a visual artist. Depending on your taste, you can look at a work of art (or “art”) and be able to judge whether or not it sucks. With writing, one page of writing is much the same as another. It requires a certain amount of application of attention to discover whether an author of a book you’re holding is  an actual storyteller or, well, or not. And publication is no real yardstick, either – there are plenty of books out there for which the only sane response is “what were they thinking?” But I guess tastes differ, at that, and a book that would appall me would be gleefully snapped up by the next reader in line. But the publishing industry is a kind of modern equivalent of that medieval quandary about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin – the more contemporary question being, how many authors can dance in a publisher’s catalogue. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of manuscripts are submitted to publishers’ offices and mailed to overwhelmed literary agents. A bare fraction of them pass muster. A mere handful is published every year.

 
But still, they come.

 
There are three stages to writerhood – to professional writerhood – the Wanting, the Becoming, the Being. And the Wanting is where all of us begin.

 
In a recent issue of  Poets and Writers magazine a newly published debut novelist writes about a life littered with “encouraging rejections” – the kind that tell you, you were THIS close, but sorry, no cigar. The kind that makes you want to scream, “Just what is it that you WANT from me???” It is a measure of the depth of mental exhaustion that this can bring you to that our author, the one in the article, relates of his own success in terms that might appall us, but that all of us who are writers are eminently capable of feeling empathy with. After two disastrous agents, our protagonist hooks up with Agent #3, who is everything that a writer could dream of. The agent says that the author’s novel will sell, and sell well, and sell fast. The agent says, phone me next Tuesday so we can discuss which houses I am going to be submitting this MS to.

 
The author is overjoyed.

 
Next Tuesday happens to be September 11, 2001.

 
In the midst of an appalled sense of watching the world coming to an end, our writer admits to a burning, unworthy thought that comes unbidden and stings like a wasp. If this is what it takes to stop me from publishing a book…

 
He got over it. The world staggered back into some sort of normalcy. The novel got published. All’s well that ends well – but there are days that all of us are watching some sort of end-of-the-world scenario and thinking “Why am I doing this? Why am I putting myself through this? It will never happen. It can never happen. Look what happens when I even try.”

 
But it’s a measure of that Wanting that we struggle through these bitter dregs of what seems to be a poisoned chalice, and soldier on. It’s the Wanting. It’s the words that want out, it’s the stories that need to be told, it’s the voices in our heads telling us to go on, go on, go on. We carry on writing. We submit. We get rejected. We repackage and submit again.

 
At least one writers’ conference has had a presenter who has underlined the hard slog of it all by concrete evidence. One writer said, “These are my credentials for being here” – and unrolled a thick cylinder of paper which turned out to be rejection letters taped end to end. The honour roll ran the length of a hotel conference room.

 
Other writers wallpaper their studies with the stuff.

 
Yet others keep it piled up in boxes under the bed.

 
We’ve all got them. The rejections. The form rejections with a tick in a box which is so meaningless as to signify simply, “we hate you, go away”. The letters that are actually signed by a real person, or have a real handwritten scrawl on it:  not QUITE, but keep trying.

 
I once submitted a story to the venerable London Magazine – a literary mag hoary with credentials and credibility, a stellar market which publishes some huge names in the literary game. I, a newbie, a raw beginner of no standing and no reputation, sent in a story to a place like that – just because. If you don’t stretch, how do you know how far you are from your goal…?

 
The editor of LM, who had been in that position for decades and was a respected figure in literary circles, was prone to responding to submissions on postcards – arbitrary things of sometimes abstract nature on which he would scribble something in his instantly recognizable spidery scawl. In response to my submission, I received a postcard that read, “Not enough background.”

 
I did what you aren’t supposed to do. I wrote back to him. I said, “Well, what kind of background would you like?”

 
Another postcard arrived in reply. “We’ll take it anyway.”

 
That is how a short story of mine came to be included in an anthology published to mark the 30^th anniversary of London Magazine.

 
It was the Wanting that made me do it, honest. Break the rules, flout the expectations, talk back to the editor. I am a shrinking violet out in this cruel old world, honest I am – in everything except writing. It’s the Wanting that made me brave.

 
The story in that anthology led me to the publisher of the anthology, who referred me to an agent, who sold my first book of three fantasy short stories to Longman UK in 1995 – a book that has seen six reprintings in its ten years of existence, and which STILL brings me in a dribble of royalties twice a year.

 
Years rolled by, and I found myself in London again, this time with a novel-length manuscript under my arm. The Wanting set up its insistent call once more, and yet again I broke the rules. MS in hand, I marched into the London offices of the agent who I knew represented one of my favourite authors, and asked to speak to that agent.

 
“She’s in conference,” the well-trained receptionist replied.

 
“Fine,” I said, “I’ll wait.”

 
And I proceeded to do just that, parking myself in the waiting area with my box of papers and giving no indication that I would ever move again. The flustered receptionist sat there for a while shooting me occasional disbelieving looks, and them, when she couldn’t take it any longer, suddenly vanished into some guarded fastness behind her desk… to return with a somewhat astonished literary agent who got handed a manuscript box and politely asked to read it.

 
The agent was so blown away by the sheer chutzpah of this, that she did. She spent nearly forty minutes on the phone to me, after, discussing it with me. She tried to sell it. it didn’t quite come off.

 
No matter.

 
Ten years later, with new and potentially wonderful novel in hand, I emailed this agent, and I said, “You probably don’t even remember me, you must have had hundreds of manuscripts on your desk since that time, but this is who I am – and right now, I need an agent. Would you be willing to take me on?”

 
She emailed back that not only did she remember me but that she was thinking of me just the other day – that she thought I had a good story before, and that she was sorry that she couldn’t sell it for me at the time (it did get published in the meantime, by the way, but that’s another story…), but that she was in the process of winding down towards retiring and that she was cutting down on her list rather than taking on more clients. But she gave me the name and address of another agent who might be interested.

 
I sent the MS to the second agent, marking the envelope “by recommendation”. And sent it in. And received a phone call – from a New York literary agent! – not two weeks after I had done so, telling me that she loved it.

 
Less than six months after that, the book that became  “The Secrets of Jin Shei” was sold in seven countries and four languages. To date, that has grown to twelve languages and more than twenty countries.

 
The Wanting had done its job. I was now no longer a chrysalis. I was a cocoon. I was in the process of transformation.

 
I was Becoming.

 
I was suddenly thrust into a world of contracts and deadlines and editors.

 
The galleys of “Jin Shei” turned up in the mail, with a note asking if I could go through it and get back to the editor two days before the parcel got to me. There were consultations, rewrites, times where editorial comments and suggestions were taken and implemented and times where I wrote screeds of emails defending a particular point and making sure it was left untouched. They wanted an entire character axed from the novel and I explained why it couldn’t be done, and they said, oh, okay. Contracts piled up in my filing cabinet – British, American, Italian, Dutch, Turkish, Catalan. I juggled manuscripts and editors and demands and deadlines. This was the BUSINESS end of the deal. The contracts named me “Author”, and there was suddenly a lot to do to live up to that title…

 
…and then the book arrives, after all this, and you aren’t Becoming any more. It’s changed into something different, into Being. You are holding a child of your heart, shaped and forged and formatted and designed and edited and marketed by dozens of other hands and minds but yours, your own, your story, YOUR book. And you know what? No matter how many times you go through this, no matter how many contracts there are in your cabinet, every book’s birth is something special. They smell so delicious. And there’s your name, on the cover. And you open it up and lo! You recognize the words within. They were born in your soul.

 
And you know what? You get to this point, and the fear really sets in. Because now you have to do it again. Before, you were measuring yourself against an outside bar, a set of standards given to you to meet – but from here on, you’ve MET them, and now you have to keep meeting them.

 
And the Wanting comes in again, howling, because there is another story waiting to be written.

 
And it all starts again.

 
This, this is what it is all about. A writer writes. The other aspects of this life are secondary, immaterial – the publishers of “Jin Shei” sent me on a seven-city tour to promote the book and it’s absolutely WONDERFUL to fly into a city knowing that there’s a book shop in it with your book in the window awaiting your presence to bring it to life – but it’s the words that are in your blood, not the chance to smile and sign and do readings at the local Barnes and Noble. You’re already writing the next one – in defiance of your fears, in the glory of your call to arms. You’re a writer, and you write.

 
No, it isn’t romantic. It isn’t glamorous, or glitzy, or high-flying – well, perhaps it is if your name is Stephen King and you’re an icon rather than a man in front of a typewriter. But for most of us, it’s simply this – it’s what we do. We get up in the morning and we do what needs to be done – we do laundry, go buy groceries, set the dinner to simmer, clean out kids’ rooms and cat litter boxes, weed the garden, feed the dog, take the garbage out – and then we sit down, and we open a door in the back of our mind, and we step out of that world and into another.

 
And the journey is worth every painful step of the way.

**********

Nice to be here. Nice to meet you all. See you next year…

I’m up to my neck in revisions for Corambis, my fourth book. In fact, I may be in over my head.

2007 was the year I learned I can’t write a book in a year. Actually, that’s not quite true. I can write a book in a year. What I can’t do is write a good book. The first draft of Corambis was certainly a book. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end; it had characters and plot.

It had cliches.

I talked last month about genre conventions, and that post was a direct result of the thinking I’ve been doing about revising Corambis. Because apparently how my process works is that I write the draft with all the genre conventions in it, and then I write the draft where I take them all out again.

I would like, someday, to be able to skip straight to Step 2, but that hasn’t happened yet.

In my particular case, the genre conventions were there for what is actually, in fairness, a very good reason. They were providing plot structure. One reason to write about a scullery boy who turns out to be king is that that convention comes with a built in plot. You don’t have to worry about how to structure your story; the genre conventions do it for you.

This is very seductive, especially when you have a deadline. Especially when plot and structure are not your strong point and you know it.

But it comes back to bite you on the ass in the end, when you look at the book you’ve written and think, my god, this is cheap and trite and flimsy, and worst of all, it isn’t true.

The purpose of fiction is to tell the truth by lying. And genre conventions are part of the structure of lies, not part of the structure of truth. You need both structures, mind you; you can’t get to the truth unless your lies are strong and brave and beautiful. But genre conventions are lies within lies, lies about lies . . . lies about the way we tell lies in order to tell the truth.

“Beauty without cruelty, ever so much worse than untrue,” Kris Delmhorst says in one of her songs, and that’s my problem with genre conventions. They’re too easy. They say you can have beauty without cruelty; they say you can tell lies without worrying about the truth. And if I believe anything about storytelling, it’s that you have to care about the truth behind your lies.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I have some scullery boys to chase out of my plot. See you next month.

Wayne Allen Sallee
jonalgiers@aol.com

Here I am again. Before I go into my intended topic this go round, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the vagaries of irony. Now, its old news that my tombstone will read “The Computer Remained His Nemesis.” But I continue to find new ways to become an irony magnet when it comes to this thing in front of me, the Monster That Made Ted Kaczynski Insane. (The Unabomber grew up in Evergreen Park, just a few blocks from my old home in Chicago. Different generations, varied levels of insanity at these god-awful monstrosities). A few months back, I discovered a few reprints of YEAR’S BEST HORROR in Dutch, and I had correspondence with Kees Buis, a bookseller in The Netherlands. I now have the Dutch edition of my first paperback appearance. Around this time, I was given a copy of Naturally Speaking, as I had discussed in a previous 28th of the month entry. Well, the only way I could download the program was in Dutch. I do not lie. Cop slang for a suicide is “doing a Dutchie.” I wonder why. I wrote a column on cyanide for Salem Press’ FORENSIC SCIENCE reference book. I start the article, hit Save As, go to the plant for fourteen hours, come home, click on the WordPerfect document, and the screen is blue. White text. INVISIBLE text, if emailed, but for my highlighted in, ah, blue email address. Cyanide. Cyan. Prussian Blue. I’m sure if I “did a Dutchie,” I’d be blue in the face when found. (I’ve told many people that I intend to be stuffed and auctioned off each year at a World Horror Convention to the highest bidder, maybe the bloated face will add to the effect). One would think.

Now, skidding around to a serious topic, as fast as my bipolarity allows, the meaning behind my column’s name. I fell into what could work out as a long term writing assignment, granted the first book sells well. A comic company in New Delhi was accepting 64 page adaptations of fantasy and science-fiction books, and I came very close to not even emailing the publisher. My idea involved handicapped children in a rehabilitation clinic that achieve temporary superpowers. Its been an idea that I’d have always wanted to see as a comic, more so than a novella. Well, I was amazed to find that my proposal was not only the first original work they accepted, but if the book sold well, I’d be under contract to write 24 64 page quarterly books, much like manga in appearance. I had to make the children multi-national, and researched hordes of material mon genetic and neurological diseases. It was easy to come up with “brittle bone syndrome,” such as Sam Jackson had in the film UNBREAKABLE as a way for a child to attain rock hard skin. The same for others to get super speed, electric powers, etc. The burn victims were able to fly, their skin healing faster. But the book(s?) Is/are geared for 5th-7th Graders and needed to be “cheerful.” In fact, I was asked to have a puppy dog as a guardian angel in the book; if I wasn’t in my downbeat mode, I’d give a clear and funny example of exactly what I’d put in the book for what I’m getting paid. But there’s nothing funny about this researching thing. My cerebral palsy is hardly noticeable on the surface, ask Brian Hodge or Beth Massie, two of my heroes. Sure, my head flops around from neck spasms, but it makes for a good show at the cons, a parlor trick. (Brian also will claim that I snore, that’s a lie. He simply dreamt about a person snoring). I’m being glib, avoiding the point. Sure, my whole body is FUBAR, a lot of it is that I’m closing in on being Half-Century Man, but the only other person in my family with C.P. died in June, and she was barely fourteen, blind, retarded, and weighed about forty pounds. Died of liver failure from her meds. Her name was Cortney King, and I made her the hospital administrator in the comic. I continued with my research in my spare time at work, in the late hours here in my laboratory, listening to a Glenn Gray and the Cosa Loma Orchestra play music from nearly a century ago. I read up on ALS, on the Jerry Lewis diseases like Duchennes and I found myself not wanting to read my Act of Contrition but rather drop to my knees, and there is no melodrama here, folks. As messed up as my mind and my body are, at least I can say that I am moving forward in everything I do, in every day in paradise. I hit the C.P. variations. Lesch-Nyhan. I hadn’t read up on that since I put a similar character in THE HOLY TERROR. A self-destructive disease that has the afflicted–a word I despise, by the way, if used in casual conversation–needing to have most of their teeth extracted at an early age because they would otherwise chew their lips off and tear at their chin, cheeks, and tongue. Their wrists are restrained and a pillow placed on their laps in the even they can slam their face forward and downward. Forwards and downward. What I said before, at least I can move forward, without slamming myself downward. (Well, now that I’m on the bipolar meds, at least). I was granted a very strange and intriguing interview by David Bain for DOORWAYS magazine, it appears next month as almost a short piece of fiction in narrative form. Bain asked me about the neighborhood I grew up in, Humboldt Park. I told him the entire area was a regentrified pile of shit, and at least I can bring back the old neighborhood by writing stories set during my childhood. In my novella “Lover Doll,” from Ellen Datlow’s anthology LITTLE DEATHS, I also wrote about crippled kids, pulling at memories from my thirteen years at Illinois Research as a lab rat. I read articles on conjoined and vestigial twins and vomited into my fist. The story takes place between 1962 through 1994, and I had no problem describing fictional, yet horrific, scenes. One, in particular, involving an elite strip parlor in Las Vegas with all the dancer having some sort of disfigurement. Fiction vs. reality. Altered fates. And here I am, moving forward, as I email this to Dave to post on Storytellers Unplugged. I thank you all for putting up with my ravings…Wayne

There’s a moment before the curtain goes up, when the conductor holds the baton like a headsman’s axe and the heat of the lights melts you like wax. It’s the moment when you’re convinced you’ve forgotten all of the words, you don’t remember any of the notes, your Shakespeare has fled and left behind Bugs Bunny, and you’re absolutely certain your fly is unzipped. No amount of reassurance, of practice, of checking to make sure you are in fact appropriately zipped will reassure you. The terror of anticipation – and the dead certainty that the curtain will in fact go up while you’re in mid-zipper verification procedure – is all.

The moment of waiting for your book to come out is something like that.

I should be inured to this. After all, I’ve had four novels published. I’ve had over a hundred roleplaying game supplements hit the shelves. I’ve had video games I’ve worked on cause international incidents. I’ve had projects I eagerly anticipated seeing in stores or in my hands. I’ve had projects where I didn’t realize they’d been released until friends mentioned they’d been playing them for a month. I’ve bought one project I worked on in a back-street market in Shanghai, two weeks before its street date, for twenty-five yuan. Oddly enough, it came with a full manual – written in Chinese.

This one’s different, though.

On January 8^th – roughly two weeks from when I sit down to write this – Firefly Rain will hit the shelves. It is the lead title for Wizards of the Coast’s new imprint, a gorgeous-looking hardcover. Friends who’ve read it have liked it; reviewers who’ve reviewed it thus far (knock on wood) have said nice things about it, the whole thing is out of my hands anyway.

And yet, the nerves, they’re there and set all a-jangle.

Firefly Rain is my first original novel. I’ve published four others, all of which were media tie-ins, but this is the first one that is all mine. All the video games I’ve worked on have been part of a large and intensely collaborative team effort; all of the RPGs I’ve developed and designed and scribbled for have been someone else’s IP. There’s good and there’s bad in that. Good, in that there already was an audience for things I’ve worked on, good in the strength of those collaborations. But it also left a little nagging feeling after each wandered out into the marketplace. None of them were exactly, entirely mine. Any failure I could share the blame, any success was allocated and shared as well. If they did well, it was because of the property or the graphics or the physics engine. If they didn’t, in my darkest hours I could bitch about the too-short schedules or a million other things, which coincidentally let me reassure myself that it was not, in fact, my fault.

Which, I suppose, is another way of saying that if folks don’t like this one, it’s all on me. If it’s not good, then it’s me that’s not good, or at least my writing. And since writing is what I do, and what I want to do, well, then, that way lieth all sorts of emo-kid shoe-gazing behavior. Of course, if folks do like it – and did I mention that it was a BookSense pick for January? – then I get to bask in all that, all by myself, too. I get to confirm for myself that, yeah, something I did was pretty good.

But I’m a depressed writer-type. I generally don’t anticipate basking. It doesn’t go with the image, or with the wardrobe.

Two weeks. Two weeks left to fret.

Originally, it was a 3000 word short story, 2500 words of setup and then a quick, jagged payoff. I wrote it, and thought about it, and realized that most of what was interesting about the setup was unsaid. So, it seemed logical that if the most important stuff was unsaid, I’d better get busy saying it.

When I looked up, the manuscript was at 20K words, and I was doomed.

There was an outline at one point, which the various characters looked at, laughed at, and ran tauntingly away from about 55K words in. There were false starts, and whole sections chopped out or erased, and all of the other vagaries of the writing process that seem so momentous to the person wading through them, and so utterly standard to everyone else.

But it’s done. It’s almost here. And I sat down to read it again the other night, just to get a sense of what I was unleashing on the unsuspecting reading public, to see if it stood up now that I wasn’t neck-deep in it 24/7 and dreaming dreams of glowing fireflies soundtracked by the Drive-By Truckers.

I won’t tell you what I thought of it, reading it instead of writing it. That, hopefully, is for you to discover on your own, and frankly, anything I say at this point is liable to be a little suspect anyway.

I will say, however, that no matter what happens with it, I find I’m satisfied. It’s the best book I could have written, the best way I could have told that story. And while it’s not the story of my life or my relationship with my parents or anything else, it’s my story, and I’m pleased and proud to have written it, pleased and proud that the fine folks at Professional Media Services and Wizards of the Coast thought enough of it to help me share it with the world.

Look around at my fellow Storytellers and you see some impressive resumes. They’ve written award-winning novels. They’ve written international bestsellers. They’ve gone to see the elephant of publishing in all its many terrible and alluring guises, and kept coming back for more. I’ve seen little bits of it, from odd angles. This is the first time I’ve been asked to face it head-on, eyes wide open.

I think I’m ready.

Two weeks.

I know all the words. I can handle the notes. The zipper, I’m not worried about.

I’m ready.

By Janet Berliner

My best student sent me a holiday card and added the words, “Writing is hard.” 

I wrote back, “Who promised easy?”

Then I thought about it. A lot. 

Writing is hard. Being published is almost impossible.  Making a living out of words is about as close as you can get to a fool’s dream.  So, why try?

In 1936, the great Oscar Hammerstein II wrote: “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, I gotta love one man till I die.” Somehow I’m sure he won’t roll over in his grave if I paraphrase as follows, “I gotta love those tales till I die,” because either way it’s about love.

And so we write–in closets, in journals, for hire and on spec. Okay you say.  What’s new about that?  What’s new, I think, is that we forget what we could be doing –what most of the world does–working 9 to 5 in a job we detest while praying there won’t be cutbacks.

I’m saying that, in doing what we passionately love, we’ve been given a gift that truly keeps on giving, and too often we forget how damn lucky we are.

Which too-lengthy sentence provides me with a segue for the other thing I want to talk about: The season of gifting.

Realizing, as most of have, that we spend a lot of money at this time of year, not only on presents, but on cards and wrapping, I long ago changed paths. Children and best friends still get gifts from me, but overall I send contributions to Childreach - Plan International, a children’s charity I’ve supported for many years. The money goes directly to the children and the villages in the country of my choice. I have two African foster children whom I’ve supported monthly for fifteen years.  Their letters, photos, and growth have given me far more than I gave them. For $22 a month, I help provide meds and schooling, mosquito nets and toilets. 

At Christmas and other gift-giving times, I send $10 donations for mosquito netting.  $10 protects one family from malaria, the biggest killer along with AIDS. Childreach sends a (pretty) card to the person whose name was put on the donation, and I have a triple winner: I feel good, Childreach can provide more help, the recipient feels good.

My daughter has adopted two glorious Chinese daughters, so I do the same with Half The Sky.  That’s what she wants for birthdays and anniversaries.

Think about it.

I hope you had a happy holiday and that the New Year brings you and yours good health and productivity.

(Everyone out shopping? Yeah, I thought so…)

Ah, the holiday season. What better way to spend the end of the year, than in spiritual reflection, decorating trees, buying perfect presents for loved ones, sending out cheery holiday cards and newsletters, drinking champagne and eating fabulous little cookies, indulging in the free DVDs that the evil corporations continue to send striking screenwriters because force majeure be damned, the Oscars must go on…)

Right?

Um.

Wrong.

This Holiday season, if I don’t do at the very least five pages a day WITHOUT FAIL I will not make the deadline of my next book. Not even Christmas Day off for me.(My boyfriend says – “How long are you going to keep doing this to yourself? “ But how am I doing this to myself? Nobody tells a grocery store clerk or a bank manager or postal worker – “Oh, you don’t have to work today. Why do that to yourself? Let’s go see a movie.” Well, actually, people probably DO say that, but if such advice is actually followed, the result is dismissal and disgrace and homelessness).

Now, in some ways it’s not such a loss, for me. For one thing, I’m not actually a Christian, and I don’t have children that I need to halt everything for, and my family is very laid back about all holidays in general, and I hate malls, and as long as we see Sweeney Todd this week, the boyfriend’s not going to complain too much (mostly because I can keep him quiet with all the free DVDs). I must say it’s annoying to have to do the more obligatory Christmas things without getting the benefit of time off from work like everyone else, but I knew this job was dangerous when I took it.

But there is one part of the holiday season that I can celebrate at the same time that I’m doing my pages, and that doesn’t grate on me because I’m missing out on all the fun. And that’s Winter Solstice.

As we all probably know, technically, the solstice is the beginning of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and summer in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s the longest night and the shortest day of the year. We also all probably have heard that ritual celebrations practiced at Christmas go back to pre-Christian times, and we’ve co-opted many solstice traditions (like Yule logs and Christmas trees and the lighting of candles and the birth of the sun – or son) for Christmas. The celebration of solstice extends across pretty much every culture.

But I particularly like the magic aspect of solstice.

Now, the winter solstice was actually December 22, but its effects last for several days before and after the date. In pagan tradition, the year is divided into quarters, and the two solstices and the two Equinoxes are the most powerful times of the whole year. Whatever you do during these times gets a certain extra push from the universe. I find that invariably to be true. Your dreams are more powerful, money arrives in the mail, you solve that problem in Chapter 10. Seriously. For authors, for example, this is a fabulous time to write - your productivity is through the roof. I didn’t just get some kick-ass pages done on my book in the last few days - I also have been cranking the pages out on the novella I’ve been putting off because of panic about the book. Every research book I’ve picked up has been THE EXACT BOOK with the EXACT information I needed to move to the next chapter of my own. I just feel stronger and more capable about everything.

Running around buying gifts is one thing, fine, but the days just before and just after Solstice will invariably turn up some real gifts, cosmic gifts. Pay attention and see what shows up for you, and if you feel like it, share.

I wish everyone Happy Christmas, and everything else that you celebrate, and all good things in the New Year, but especially this year, an extra Solstice something for all.

Now, back to work.

Or, you know - shopping.

Alex

http://alexandrasokoloff.com

I’m in a bubble-bursting mood today, but I’m not sure that’s really a bad thing.  Some bubbles need bursting.  Most of these little lumps of coal are meant for the newbies in this crazy business, who need every bit of advice they can get, and who also need a good bubble bursting every now and then to keep them honest. 

1. All publicity is not good publicity.  Rampaging across the Internet like a lunatic, making jackass posts on public forums, and starting pissing matches with people well established in the business just so people will see your name will not translate to sales.  People will think you’re a moron, and will stay away in droves. 

2. Sometimes, out of pure goodness, or maybe temporary insanity, a BIG NAME writer, and by BIG NAME I mean someone you’re likely to find on the shelves of any book store you visit, and often in the Best Sellers section, will stick their neck out and offer the accumulated wisdom of their experiences, both good and bad. 

You may or may not like what they have to say (this depends largely on your ability to accept reality), but calling them out as elitists and pissing on their advice is one of the worst things you could do.  You will look stupid, and the BIG NAME in question will decide trying to help the new generation of writers is not worth the hassle.

People will remember that you are the reason one of their favorite writers no longer posts on that particular forum, and they will hate you for it.  See above – All publicity is not good publicity. 

3. Writers are crazy.  Failed writers are crazy and hostile.  New and inexperienced writers are crazy and desperate.  Handle all the above with care. 

4. Five years is too long to wait for an editor’s yay or nay, but sometimes we still have to wait. 

5. You are not the next Harlan Ellison or Brian Keene.  Pretending you are will only make you look foolish. 

6. You are not the next Stephen King or Peter Straub.  Telling people you are will only make you look foolish. 

7. People love to speculate and gossip.  Writers aspire to speculate and gossip for a living.  Be careful which of your writer acquaintances you confide in, or you may find the most sensitive aspects of your private life made the topic of the day on one or more of your favorite writer’s message boards. 

8. You can’t polish a turd. 

9. If you publish your turd through Lulu.com or Publish America, you will still only have a turd (and a large hole in your bank account that said turd will never be able to fill). 

10. A large percentage of the people who need this advice will call me an elitist snob and ignore it.  To the remaining percentage, who are at least willing to consider this type of advice, good luck to you!  May the coming year be a productive, and instructive, one. 

Brian Knight

by Richard Steinberg

This month’s column is dedicated to the sacrifices of Staff Sgt. Michael J. Gabel, 30, of Crowley, La., Cpl. Joshua C. Blaney, 25, of Matthews, N.C., both of the 173rd Airborne Brigade; Chief Petty Officer Mark T. Carter, 27, of Fallbrook, Calif., a Navy SEAL; Cpl. Tanner J. O’Leary, 23, of Eagle Butte, S.D., Spc. Matthew K. Reece, 24, of Harrison, Ark. Both of the 82nd Airborne Division; Staff Sgt. Gregory L. Elam, 39, of Columbus, Ga. of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault); and Sgt. Steven C. Ganczewski, 22, of Niagara Falls, N.Y. of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

Thank you all.  May flights of angels sing you to you rest.

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.  The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt,” Sylvia Plath

Self-doubt and natural gas ovens in Sylvia’s case.

It’s immaterial if it was a suicidal gesture gone horribly wrong or a deliberate attempt to kill herself. The results were the same.  Dead is dead.

Silence is forever.

Chalk up another victim for the most prolific serial killer in the history of the arts.

Self-doubt.

I know this – without reciting the legions of other familiar names it has claimed – from personal experience.

Hello.  My name is Richard S., I am a New York Times and international best-selling writer, and I am a self-doubter.

I think it’s always been there to some extent; rising and falling like a maleficent tide at hard to time, but regular intervals.  By this I mean there have been times – years sometimes – when the condition lay dormant in me.  Times when my life has been filled with overwhelming successes (both real and perceived) and it seemed that every step I took was strong and true; in the right direction and with a bounce to it.

But there’ve been other times – dark nights of the soul, Ilario the Magnificent calls them – when it has plagued me to the point of paralysis.  When I knew beyond doubt that I had lost the ability to create (if I ever had it) and would never regain that so fragile gift and write productively again.

Glorious Glori (my first and greatest believer, throughout her life and still, in my heart, since her death) never wavered in her belief in me and my talent.  His Sartorial Splendor once answered my call with the words:  “Hello, you wonderful writer,” and has never vacillated in his faith in my gift; in me.  And The Reformed Sexual Rapscallion, at the depths of a particularly nasty bout of doubt, told me: “Some gifts you can’t lose.  Even if you try.  Even you!”

I have been blessed with friends and family that will not believe me when I tell them, very sincerely, that it’s over.  Men and women who just smile (the way you would at an idiot child that you love and want the best for) and sometimes shake their heads or chuckle with gentle amusement at playing the scene out again.  Then, ask me with a profound assurance:  “So, what are you going to work on tonight?”

And they’re always right.  It may not happen that night or the next, but I always return to the work.  It took almost four months the last time it got bad.  But the C.L.A.S.S. (Clear Lights Around Steinberg’s Stupidity) always forces me to rise to the top and set off again.

Some might call it masochism.

I call it love.

But, at least for a time, let me talk to those of you without (or who perceive they are without) those kind of ass-kickers whose belief is sometimes couched in a boot to the butt, sometimes by a smile, sometimes a tone of voice.

There are so many people out there who are struggling to figure it out on their own.  People fighting to find the slightest clue that they may be a writer as opposed to a creative typist.  People who, for whatever reason (true or not) believe they have no one around them who supports, encourages, nurtures, strengthens or gifts them with their belief.

It’s okay.

However large or missing the support system around you, there are actually dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of believers out there.  Each one of them have passed through their own unique version of your Hell.  Passed through . . .

. . . meaning somehow made it to the other side.

Alexandre Dumas, Bram Stoker, Jack Kerouac, Kawabata Yasunari, Anthony Trollope, John Dos Passos, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, Murasaki Shikibu, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austin, and Miguel de Cervantes all went through long periods of judging themselves failures.  Or lived throughout their lives believing they couldn’t cut it and never would.

But if they were right, if any of them were right, how is it that I’ve read ALL OF THEM over the years, decades, or centuries since their deaths?

Writing, almost by definition is the most solitary, most personally unforgiving gig there is.  Trust me on this.  A writer in a big family surrounded by dozens of party-favor friends, all of whom laugh at their efforts, make light of their calling, or worse still . . . ignore their blood-born work feels as alone as can be defined.  Abandoned almost beyond hope.

Ask Sylvia Plath.

Oh, that’s right, you can’t.  She put her young children to bed, placed wet towels under their bedroom door to protect them, and then made love to a gas pipe.

Oh, Sylvia; how I wish I had known you; could’ve been there for you.  I hope your pain is ended.  For I know that in your silence, ours is increased. 

You are a writer if you are reading this; or you’re at least exploring the possibilities of being a writer.  With extremely rare exceptions, you will ply your trade sitting with your imagination, your dreams, your demons, and your doubts.  That’s the conditions of work.  Get used to it, it never gets better.

But you are NOT alone.

I don’t know every one of my fellow Storytellers, but I know many of them (and most of their work) well enough to tell you this:

You are not alone.

We – all of us – are here with you.

None of us write our monthly entries strictly out of the hope that it will better sell our work, or make us look more erudite.  We’re here because we’ve been there.

Been you.

Our souls are scarred; some with jagged wounds that deform the being beneath, some with slight blemishes that we can ignore most of the time.  Most of the time.  But all of us carry those wounds – not wounds, but badges of survival – brought about by exposing our heart and/or soul to the world.

And we’re still here.

As you will be too, if – big word there – if you have the guts to face the fire, ignore or employ the doubt, move forward or backward or sideways in your literary journey.  Any direction will do.

Any direction but standing still in fear or doubt.

“We {writers} have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies,” Roderick Thorp

False confidence can be as destructive as creative despair.  It can shut you down just as fast, lessen the depth of your work, and lead you to eventual ruin; and it is not what I argue for here today.

And I’m not advocating standing in the middle of the road.  Flattened squirrels and avaricious politicians dwell there.

“First write the words, then add the music,” Ilario the Magnificent once advised me.  “Only after that should you examine the work.  Examine, never judge.”  I can’t begin to recall how many times that advice has saved me from myself.

Please, from my heart and soul, remember that you are not alone.  I am here for you.  Dave Wilson, Janet Berliner, Thomas Sullivan, Elizabeth Massie, Richard Dansky, Stan Ridgley, Elizabeth Bear, and all of us here at SU are here for you.

As I believe that poor lost Sylvia Plath, in her way, is also.

We can not guarantee you will ever see your work in print; or that if you do, it will be appreciated by your readers.  Good, sometimes great, writers often remain unpublished, unknown, unread throughout their lives and beyond.  It’s sad, but it happens.

But we can guarantee you this much:  no one else can write what you have to say; what’s inside you, what reaches you.  The Universe craves your presence because of your uniqueness; so, write on.

If only for that awesome audience.

One last thing:

This begins Year Three of our journey together on the good ship Storytellers.  Junior Year.  “The Charm” year.  A journey which began with these words:

“I’m a fictioneer; sailing the high seas of ignorance, doubt, apostasy, and the occasional salvation (salvaged) moment.  I’m a writer – blessed to be so – and honored by the community of writers (as opposed to creative typists) around me.”

My journey continues.

This year I confront in this more than challenging forum the meat of the thing, the dark side; the often hysterically funny dark side (you’ll understand some of that next month) which makes up the guts of writing.

If, like me, you spend more time wishing yourself back to Oz, then you do trying to understand the stability of, and mechanisms responsible for, the growth of tornado vortices, let’s journey a time in each other’s company.

Until then, in all ways, always:

Believe!

[My apologies for being a bit late with this. Due to WordPress’s scheduling feature, I’ll slip it in behind Richard’s post, and no one will be the wiser. Except those of you who read this confession. D’oh!] 

Last month I wrote about how I needed to spend more time on my own work rather than the tie-in novels, toy development, and computer game work that occupy a good chunk of my time. (Well, the kids take up more than that, but that’s not an area in which I’m willing to trim my involvement.) So, when one of my publishers came calling with an offer for a new novel, I really had to think about it. 

To this point, I’ve agented all my own deals. Mostly this is because I work with publishers I’ve know and trust. But it means that when it comes time to put on a hard nose, it’s my face that wears it.  

The advance wasn’t as good as I’d been hoping for, and given my yearnings to do something else, it seemed like the perfect time to cut myself loose. Still, I’m a lifelong freelancer. Turning down work, smart as it may be, pains me. 

For one, I had to work hard to get my first novels lined up. Five years ago, an offer like this would have sent me bouncing off the walls with glee. Now that I have 11 such books under my belt, I wouldn’t say the thrill is gone, but I’m not the same writer I was five years ago, not even the same person.  

So I asked for more money. I write for money, after all, and more money for my efforts is always good. As the saying goes, “We’ve already established what you are. Now we’re haggling over the price.” 

The counteroffer was “Take it or leave it.” It was mixed with pleasantries and topped with niceties, of course, but that’s was the 150-proof distilled essence of it. 

So I left it. 

Then the new counteroffer arrived. It wasn’t much stronger than the previous offer, but it was better, and a better deal than I’d gotten in the past. As importantly, it showed that the publisher really did want to work with me over the long term, even if there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room on this particular book.   

The kicker, for me, was the deadline, which was a year off. This meant (at least I told myself) that I should still have plenty of time to work on those more personal projects I’d been kicking around in my head, and it gave me the reassurance of future work. If I found extra time on my hands (ha!), I could finish the book early. Or I could push it off while I concentrated on other things. 

So I took it.   

I don’t know if it was the right decision. It lacks the drama of a clean break and an unobstructed view of a new frontier. On the other hand, I’m excited about having a contract for my 12th novel in hand, and I know I’ll enjoy writing this book.  

In my life, I seek balance. Tipping too far in any direction leads to one-sided living (and thinking). This deal gives me a bit of the best of both ends, so I think I’ve found that here. Just watch while I dance more circles around the invisible, constantly moving center of gravity and seek more of the same. Wish me luck.  

Until next time, happy holidays to you all, no matter which ones you celebrate or ignore.