Storytellersunplugged

There was almost no essay today. (Stop with the cheering, you lot. You get another thirty days without me now.)

That’s because tomorrow, the calendar starts getting interesting. Come one o’clock, my wife is putting me on a plane for a two week stint at one of our sister studios, there to work with various and sundry fine folks on a project that looks to be challenging and enjoyable. (No, I can’t tell you which one. I mean, I could I’d have to shoot all of you, and I just don’t have that many bullets. Besides, my trigger finger would get tired.)

Friday, she takes off for her summer writing wanderjahr. First it’s two weeks in Prague for a session on magical realism, then six more in Seattle for Clarion West. Do the math and you come up with roughly nine weeks apart, though rumor has it that Clarion West does allow supervised visits from spouses and legal representation. Today would seem to be a day for making big puppy dog eyes at my wife, uttering endearments, and generally acting like I’m not going to see her for a good long while. Instead, I’m sitting in front of the computer, typing out this.

Why?

I have friends who tell me that it’s about time I put the fiction writing on the back burner and really concentrated on the game design work, because I’ve been giving the writing too much play for the last couple of years. I have friends who tell me that I need to make sure that I clear more of my time for my writing, and that work has devoured too much of my writing time with late-night dialogue fixes over the years. And I have friends who think I should be focusing on writing about game writing, and really carving out a niche in a field where I’m, if perhaps not a leading expert – I’ll leave that for others to decide – then at least in possession of what Moe Green would no doubt refer to as my bones.

So where does the time go? Who gets the hours of fingers to keyboard? Or, to open the question wider, when do the fingers hit the keyboard at all? Was the hour I spent today lugging mulch out to the garden in preparation for a multiple week absence a betrayal of my writing time? How about taking twenty minutes to run over and do a friend a favor, returning a lost cell phone?

There’s only so many minutes. Who – or what – gets them, and in what order, is the real conundrum of trying to write while maintaining any other existence or existences. The writing books and magazines and websites (even this one) are full of the stern admonitions about how much you should be writing and when you should be writing and when you should be writing about writing and, well, you get the idea. But generalization is impossible. Circumstances change, rise up, and mutate. The muse is demanding and so is the deadline, but so is the rest of your life. A balance has to be struck, if you want to continue writing, if you want to continue being a writer. But what that balance is, and whom you strike the bargain with, is entirely a function of each individual’s circumstances, will, and desire.

For my part, I haven’t found my balance yet. I’m not sure I ever will, though I’m always going to keep trying. I certainly don’t feel like I’m not a real writer because there are occasional days that other things take precedence and I haven’t chained myself to the chair for a requisite number of hours. There’s a whole other essay in that, something I like to call “geek macho”, but that’s for another time. Right now, the balance is shifting, and no doubt it will shift again tomorrow, and the day after that. The trick is to keep it from sliding too far in one direction or another. Tricky, yes, but worthwhile…if I can pull it off.

And if I ever do, you’ll be the first to know.