Year's End: 2017

2017! An unusual year for me. It started off pretty good, got better, got bad for a while, then picked up again. At the moment I’m feeling pretty good. I sure hope that rolls over into 2018. I don’t live a terribly exciting life. One big surprise was being named as an influence by the new mayor of New Orleans. That was nice. I was also featured a couple of times in the local paper and nice things were said about my writing. Overall, though, it wasn’t a big year for sales of my books, although I didn’t do much to push it this year. I also did not submit as much as I usually do.

On the writing front itself, I did finish The Scarred One, a western novella/novel that I started working on a couple of years ago. I also self published a print version of my western collection, Killing Trail, under the pseudonym Tyler Boone. In October, Cold in the Light, my first published novel, went out of print. I went through it and did a fairly minor rewrite, and will be submitting it and The Scarred One for potential publication in 2018. I’ve also got a novella called “The Razored Land” that I want to submit next year. Finally, I wrote a lot of poetry this year, far more than has been typical of me in the past.

This marks the 5^th year that I’ve been keeping a word count on my production. I wrote a little more than 50,000 words of fiction and nonfiction intended for publication. That’s about the same as last year. It’s up from 2015, when I did about 44,000, but down from 2013 and 2014, with 80,000 and over 100,000 respectively. I’d like to shoot for 100,000 next year, but that seems unlikely since in the spring I’m going to be teaching introductory psychology, which I haven’t taught in 20 years. That means quite a bit more work for me.

Word count is actually pretty misleading for me, anyway. For example, I spent a couple of weeks revising Cold in the Light but actually took out words from its original count. How do I figure that into a word count? Also, I don’t count wordage from my blog posts or my journal, since those are not intended for publication. My journal for 2017, which does include my blog posts, is around 40,000 words. That’s down from years past.

Besides writing, everyone here knows I’m also a big reader. I mark my “year in books” from one birthday to the next, but Goodreads, of course, does it by calendar year. According to Goodreads, I read 69 books in 2017, 17,720 pages, at an average of 257 pages per book. The shortest book I read was Goodnight Moon, a kid’s story, at 32 pages. The longest was the SF book, Earth, by David Brin, at 704 pages. My average rating across all those book was 3.5 stars. The most popular book I read was The Girl on the Train, reviewed by over 200,000 people. The least popular was reviewed by 0 folks other than me, and that was Incredible Football Feats, which was published in 1974.

Some of my favorite reads for 2017: My Grandmother Danced, by Eve Brouwer, a wonderful novel told in poetic form. I also loved Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest, a poetry/prose chapbook by Bruce Boston and Robert Frazier. My favorite YA book was The Summer of Moonlight Secrets by Danette Haworth, although I also much enjoyed Lad: A Dog, by Albert Terhune. My favorite writing related book was Bestseller Metrics by Elaine Ash. A really fine, and uniquely written, fantasy novel that I enjoyed was Helen’s Daimones by S. E. Lindberg. A great short horror novel that I read was Dark Hours, by Sidney Williams.

I got back into Dean Koontz in 2017, after a couple of years away, and enjoyed his Frankenstein series. I very much enjoyed Ravenheart and Stormrider by David Gemmell. I loved me some Ed Gorman westerns. Perhaps my least favorite read of the year was Big Lobo, A Nevada Jim Western.

I don’t make resolutions anymore. There are certain things I will try to do. I will try to read and write as much as I can without ignoring my wife and son and other important folks in my world, and without losing my job. I’ll try to eat good food but not quite as much. I’ll try for plenty of naps and walks in nature. I’ll try to be a good person to the best of my abilities. Hope you all have a great 2018.

What I Learned from a Month off Facebook

So, I spent a month off facebook. Here’s what I learned.

1. I didn’t much miss it on an emotional level. Quite a few times in the first few days I automatically reached for FB to post some comment or update. That went away pretty quickly.

2. I generally felt more relaxed and didn’t miss the drama that is often present on FB. A big plus.

3. I got more writing and reading done, and watched more TV. However, the increase in writing and reading wasn’t anything astronomical. It was substantive, though, and was the best part of being off FB.

4. Sales of my self published items took a nose dive. I sold exactly one thing during the time I was off FB. Generally, I sell more than that. I have no idea about how it might have affected sales of my Wildside and other publisher released books. A big negative.

5. Although I could have called family members and friends, I didn’t make a substantial increase in this. I did some and that was pleasant, and it’s something I hope to continue. However, I still end up wasting plenty of time, just in other ways.

6. I missed talking about books and writing on FB. This was actually most of what I did when I was on it, and I enjoyed it. A negative.

7. I missed some regular interactions with folks that I was used to seeing on FB. A negative.

8. I found that many, many publishers and contests and other writing related projects make FB their main platform and this was a big negative for me. I couldn’t access guidelines and quite a few other sources of writing information that might have been important for me. Most of this is marketing and that in itself can cause problems for production. But still, not having ready access to this material cost me potential markets. One call for submissions that I missed was definitely something I would have submitted to, and a place where I’ve sold stuff before. This was the biggest issue for me.

9. I got back into blogging and did more of that and found that a positive. I did not necessarily have to give up FB to do this, though. I could have simply shifted the time spent on these various activities around.

For these reason, with the negatives outweighing the positives, I’m going to renew my facebook profile. I’ll see if I’ve lost a step there, and let you know. However, I want to spend less time there and try to avoid leaping on and off it a dozen times a day. If I can do that, I can maintain some of the good things of being away from FB while keeping access to other things that I like.

So, see you on facebook within the next few days.

A Problem of Facebooking

So, here’s a thing I’ve discovered. Facebook is too easy. You can jump online, post something, get near immediate feedback from some of your thousand plus friends, and it feels good. You can easily stay in contact with family and close friends and see what they’re up to, although most of the time it isn’t anything exciting. You can share your joys at what you’re reading or watching, or lament your failures with people who have similar interests. But, the ease of Facebook communication is misleading. It would be better for me to call my family members than to just like some picture they post. It would be better to make plans to get together with a friend and have lunch.

As a writer, I’ve also used Facebook as a way to promote my work, but it’s become clear to me that FB is not designed to help you do that unless you pay. A personal post I make gets seen by everyone while any kind of promotion for my work disappears into a black hole. And even though it doesn’t help much with promotion, it has become—for me—a huge time sink. I’m writing less and reading less because of it.  Inevitably in writing a story there comes a pause while you think of what needs to happen next. Too often of late I’ve filled that pause by hopping on Facebook, and then finding half an hour or more gone just like that. A better promotion of my work would be to do more of it rather than talk about it.

For these reasons, I’ve decided to take a big step back from Facebook. I’ll monitor the sales of my books and stories to see if there is any discernable effect, so in that way it’ll be an experiment.  Meanwhile, I hope to see my output of both reading and writing increase, as well as finding time and motivation to do a bit more blogging.

Only Yourself to Blame

Writing is a strange business. I’ve been doing it a long time and really date my life as a writer from the fall of 1988, when I committed myself to getting published. I’ve chocked up some successes, and plenty of failures. I’ve gotten plenty of rejection slips but have had over three hundred pieces published, if you count, books, stories, poems, and nonfiction articles. That’s not counting anything I’ve self published.

There have been years when I’ve done very well—2007, 2009, and plenty of years where I didn’t—2013 through 2015. There was a year, or at least most of a year, when I quit—1997. One thing I’ve realized about writing is that there’s no resting on one’s laurels. You slow down, you lose momentum. You lose momentum, your carefully nurtured career begins to fall apart. In board gaming parlance, you go back a few spaces, even if not quite all the way back to the beginning.

Unfortunately, losses of momentum seem inevitable if you have anything approximating a normal life with spouses and children. People get sick, have crises. Sometimes, one crisis runs into another and another in an almost seamless fashion, leaving little time for the recovering of energies between. And age brings the magic dust of tiredness along with it. Sometimes it gets easier and easier to let the writing slide while you try to keep your head above water against the vagaries of fortune. At least it has been that way for me.

Maybe if I’d had the courage to choose writing as my only career, things might have been different. But I always liked to know where my next meal was coming from. So, I chose an academic career with writing on the side. And when you do have a job that pays the bills, and you come home tired, and the stress of life is beating on you, it becomes a lot easier to say, “screw it, no writing tonight.” You’re still pretty sure you’re not going to starve.  Though maybe you starve in another sense.

Writing, for me, used to be play. I worked hard at my play but it was a helluva lot of fun. There was also an element of gambling that went into every story. Maybe this one would take off. Maybe this one would be the one that broke me through to a bigger audience. Maybe this one would get the nod from one of the biggest magazines, or maybe—even—attract the attention of a film group. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

They say that age brings wisdom. Maybe it just brings cynicism. At this stage of my life, the gambling odds get longer and longer against me. And I never quite reckoned with the truth that one often has to run faster and faster just to stay in one place. The death of Robert Reginald, my editor at Borgo Press, a man who loved my Talera series and supported my writing at every turn, showed me that. He’d issued me contracts for a couple of more books that I could have had out while he was alive. But I just kept thinking, “there’s time.” There wasn’t.  And that has led me to a kind of crisis of faith.

I’ve got to find a reason to keep on keeping on. And I understand pretty clearly that the reason can’t be one that comes from outside of me. In the end, there’s only yourself to blame. For the good or the bad.

The All Consuming

I've known people who have told me that they possess a "stillness" of mind. They say they can sit and just "be," without a constant yammering and clamoring from their own thoughts. I'm not such a person, though I envy those who are.

Thoughts surge constantly through my head. They careen this way and that. They roil in eddies and rush in cataracts over tumbling rocks. Many of them are anxious thoughts, worried thoughts. This is one reason I used to drink. Alcohol would shut at least some of the thoughts down.

Don't get me wrong. I like thinking. I just wish many times that I could keep my thoughts on task, that I could wield them like a hammer instead of having them act more like a spill of thumbtacks.

There are times when my thoughts do flow the way I want them. It happens if I'm reading a really good book, or watching a really good movie. I've noticed in the last few years that it happens when I get involved in playing a video game. My mind starts making dozens of decisions a minute but they are all focused, all flowing in the same direction.

It also happens when I'm writing. At least sometimes. I've come to realize that when I say, at the end of the day, "the writing went well," it's because I achieved that flow. My focus had narrowed, had become sharpened onto one primary topic, the creation of a scene. This state of flow is very pleasant to me. The worries go away. The focus becomes purely on the now, the moment of creation or involvement. I call it, "The All Consuming."

I've also realized lately that this has always been a thing with me. There's a story in my Micro Weird collection actually called "Thought Flow." It almost perfectly illustrates my point. And it was one of the first ten stories I ever wrote.

How about you? Do you possess stillness of mind, or do your thoughts run more like mine? And what do you think of "The All Consuming?" Do you experience it? Do you like it?
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Oh the Cruelty, or is that Cruelness?

Well, been almost a week since I posted on the blog. I don’t know how time gets away from me. For one, we had preregistration last week, and I gave a test on Friday and got 30 essays from another class on Friday. Lots of grading over the weekend.

I had also been doing some writing. I finished a short horror story called “Long Dead Woman in a Black Dress,” which I’ll be submitting soon. I’m about halfway done with an SF story that carries the working title “Electric Love in Blue.” And I’ve drafted the first scene of a new Krieg story, which I’m calling “Where All the Souls are Hollow.”

Then came Sunday. On Sunday, all the plumbing in the house seemed to clog up, and it’s gotten worse. Plumber is supposed to come today (Tuesday) and I hope the news won’t be too bad. I don’t know about you, but these kinds of domestic crises take a toll on me. I know I should roll with the flow (or non-flow considering our current issue), but I just find it hard to concentrate when dealing with this kind of stuff. I let it get to me too much.

On the review front, I think the interview over on Prashant’s blog came off well. I sure appreciate him putting it up. On the less positive side, I also noticed a couple of days ago that Bitter Steel has a new review and it is a 1 star stomp. Looks like it went up about a month ago but this is the first I’ve seen it.  I apparently achieved the notable level of “tripe!”  This is actually the first 1 star review I’ve ever gotten for anything so I have to keep it in perspective.

Whether reviews are good or bad, I always read them to see if I can pick up any insights into what readers like or don’t like. This one was not very helpful, though. Besides the “tripe” label, he adds: “Then I stumbled upon the word 'cruelness', and I knew that it was a lost cause. Out of all the actual words the author could have chosen, he picked 'cruelness'. The word is 'cruelty', Shakespeare.”

Of course, cruelness is a perfectly good word that is found in dictionaries everywhere and is even counted as a word in Scrabble. I remember considering “cruelty” in the context of the story but I felt that ‘cruelness’ had the better sound in that particular situation.  So, if the use of “cruelness” instead of “cruelty” can make such an impact on this particular reader, there was no way I’d ever reach him anyway. Frankly, I’ve been much more troubled by 3 star reviews that took the work seriously and found something lacking.

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Writing, Reading, and Losses

I'm considering this the first day of our Easter vacation. I'm off next week from school. We have a few plans. I'm going up to see my son be honored at his school's honors convocation on Tuesday. Not sure yet if Lana will go with me. I'm sure we'll get out to some local parks quite a bit while I'm off, too.

But mostly I'm hoping to get some writing done. I mentioned Micro Weird and I believe I'll be able to get that finished and published by the end of the week. I'm also rolling pretty well in an exciting section of Wraith of Talera so I hope to keep that momentum up. I have a few school quizzes to grade but they won't take long.

And, hey, I might even get some reading done. I want to read some stuff from Rick Hautala, James Herbert, and David Silva, all excellent horror writers who died just recently. I did not know any of them on a personal level but had corresponded with Rick and David. I have read their work before and have great respect for all three. There is a Kindle collection of Rick Hautala's short stories available for free right now if you'd like to sample his work. It's called Glimpses:


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What Your Writing Says about You, at Novel Spaces

I'm over at Novel Spaces today, talking about "What Your Writing says about You." I hope you'll drop by.

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Doc Savage, Quake 4, Writing

You can download the newest issue of The Illuminata today, with articles and reviews, including an opinion piece by me on “Doc Savage: The Hero Problem.” If you’re a huge fan of Doc, try to remember that I really am a nice guy anyway. :)

The issue is: Vol. 9 Issue #3 July 2011, and you can download it as a PDF or an EPUB HERE.

Looks like a good writing day here. We’ve had four straight days of heavy, heavy rain, and though we definitely needed it we’re starting to experience some localized flooding, including some road closings. I’ve been inside a lot, playing a bit on my new video game, Quake 4, which is brought to you by the same folks who gave you Doom, my favorite video game of all time. Quake is not quite as good but is still fun. Primarily, though, I’ll be sitting high and dry in my house today, writing, writing, writing. Then napping. Wow I’ve got a good life. I hope yours is going as well.
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Winning the Day at Novel Spaces

I'm posting at Novel Spaces today on the subject of "Winning the Day." It's a term I picked up from Drew Brees's book Coming Back Stronger. Brees, of course, is the quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, who on Thursday night beat the Minnesota Vikings in the first game of the 2010 NFL season. I'm enjoying the book quite a bit, and will have a review of it here after I finish it. In the meantime, I'm talking about the book and about writing over on Novel Spaces, so please stop by.


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To A Writer

The other day, someone of my acquaintance asked me a question about how they should go about getting started trying to write. Here was my basic response, with details changed to protect everyone’s identity.

The first thing a writer does is write, and it’s very easy to start. All you need is paper, and a pen or pencil. I use a computer word processor myself but that isn’t necessary. You start out writing about something that engages your emotions. You write what makes you angry, or afraid, or happy. You write about loves won and lost. You write memories that you have; you write about experiences you really, really want to have. And if what you write seems ugly, so be it. You still don’t give up. If it’s on the page, it can be fixed.

The second thing a writer does is read. Not only in the genre the writer wants to work in, but in all kinds of genres. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry. They all feed your head. Besides, if you don’t like to read, why on earth do you want to write? That’s like saying you want to be a master chef but you don’t really like food.

The third thing a writer does is treat writing with respect. That means actively working toward improving your skills. Reading books on writing and grammar, such as William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, is one example of treating the field with respect. Using a dictionary to make sure you get the nuances of words right is another. Becoming your own harshest critic is yet another. Quality control for a writer is in him or herself. You are inspector number 1.

Since writing is a lonely business, you might also want to seek out the company of other writers. Joining a writing group is a way of doing this. Writing groups often form around universities or libraries in big towns and cities. In small towns, you might need to take out an ad in the paper and start your own. There are also many, many writing groups online. I’ve been a member of both online and in person groups, and I’ve gotten a lot out of them.

There’s really nothing magical about the act of writing. It shouldn’t be a scary process, although it often is for people. It can be frustrating, but it can also be immensely rewarding, especially on an emotional level. Besides that, it’s a lot of fun.
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Maps

I’ve been having a lot of fun yesterday and today. Over the years I’ve hand drawn a variety of maps for my fantasy stories set on Talera and Thanos. Many were drawn on the backs of pages torn out of an old biology class workbook from college. Later ones were put down on a sketch pad and I thought I was really moving up in the world. I’ve used those maps a lot over the years, and have added or edited them at times so that they now have various scratch outs and additions on them. They also suffer from my complete lack of artistic talent.

But yesterday a revolution in Gramlich map-making occurred. I asked the Lovely Lana to scan the originals I had and to send them to me as graphic files. I then began using my paint program to clean them up, to redraw faded lines, and to begin to introduce some color and some typed headings instead of the almost impossible to read scrawls that I’d filled them with before. And I’ve loved every minute of it.

Every once in a while I forget why I’m in the writing biz. Sometimes I get too focused on deadlines and trying to make sure I meet certain audience expectations. Sometimes I worry too much about whether something is likely to be published or not. Of course those are important things, and I don’t deny that, but none of those were in my head when I first started writing. I started for the sheer love of creating. And fiddling with these maps is bringing it back home to me. I see those areas of my maps that are yet unfilled and my mind starts churning with possibilities. I see a line I marked as “Trader’s Road” and I want to know where it goes. I see a place I called “Quall Valley” and I wonder what secrets abide there.

One map that has certainly seen its share of use in my stories is the map of the Island Kingdom of Nyshphal, which features prominently in both Wings Over Talera and Witch of Talera. It is mentioned in Swords of Talera but is never seen in that book. I’ve posted two images of one section of this map below for you to see how it looked “before” and “after.” You may have to click on them to enlarge them.

Man, the memories this brought back. Makes me want to go back to those heady days when I was first writing Swords of Talera, when all I cared about was finding out what happened next to Ruenn Maclang and his band of friends. Great days. Great days. As they always are when you are doing something for love.


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Wednesday Bliss

You gotta love a day like today. Although I have one more test to give and grade tomorrow, I finished the grading for my other tests last night and was able to turn in the grades early this morning. That gave me the rest of the day off. And it's amazing how much you can get done with a day off.

After visiting some blogs and handling some of the business elements of writing, I headed out to a new Sushi place that just opened up. This was "Kazoku Sushi" and I will definitely be visiting again. The white tuna wasn't terribly good, but the pepper tuna and California roll were exquisite. It turned out that the waitress remembered me from when she used to work at a different sushi restaurant so I also got very good service. (Hey, being a man with long hair sometimes works in your favor.)

After lunch, I returned home and folded a couple of loads of clothes, then had a most excellent two hour nap. By 3:45, I was ensconced upon my deck with the laptop at hand working on the galleys for a book called Bitter Steel, which I've mentioned here before and which I hope will be published some time this year. It's a collection of my fantasy short stories. It was a beautiful sunny day, about 70 degrees, with lots of birds flitting among the feeders in our yard. I worked pretty much straight through until about 6:45, making very good progress, and am now taking my supper break.

Who knows what I'll do next. Read? Watch a movie? Write some more? That's the beauty of a day off. Time to relax and time to write. Man, I could get used to this kind of schedule.
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A Time to Hang Up Your Guns: Part 1

Ernest Hemingway killed himself when he thought he’d lost it. Robert E. Howard spoke of the same thing in letters before he put a bullet in his brain. Jack London drank himself into oblivion at least in part for the same reason. There are many other examples but these are ones I know something about.

All three of these men were writers, and all three believed their best years and best work lay behind them. Two of them killed themselves when that happened. The third might as well have. Whatever “it” was, their gift, their muse, their will, they all felt they’d lost it.

I do believe that artists, writers, painters, musicians, etc, can indeed ‘lose’ it. Whatever powered the majesty of their imaginations and creativity can disappear. I certainly don’t suggest that such folks should kill themselves, but I wonder if they should…quit. Should they stop writing, stop painting, hang it up? I wonder, will it happen to me? Will I lose it? Will I know it when it happens? Or has it already happened?

What causes creative people to lose it? I suspect there are many possible reasons. Age is one, and along with age, health issues. I find, myself, that I typically don’t seem able to concentrate for as sustained a period of time now as I did when I was younger. And physically, sitting four hours at a keyboard takes a bigger toll on me now than it used to. Ray Bradbury’s style has changed dramatically since he was younger. Does age have anything to do with it?

“Will” is another factor. Before you’re published, the drive to reach publication is intense. But once you’ve seen your name in print a few times, other motivations have to come to the fore. Those may be to produce bigger, more complex works, to increase your audience, or your markets. But what about Stephen King and Dean Koontz? What makes them keep writing? Both probably have enough money coming in without it, and both have seen their names in print, and on films, numerous times. Some will say that both King and Koontz have lost “it,” at least some quality that their work once possessed but which no longer does. But have they lost it, or merely changed their priorities? I’d love to hear them tell me, honestly, what they think about their own skills as creative writers, both now, and in the past.

I’m going to post a second part to this discussion in a couple of days, but for now I’d love to get your feedback on the topic. What is the “it” that some folks seem to lose? What causes them to lose it? And is it ever possible to get it back?
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Write With Fire

The fried chicken is in the bucket. Now I can talk about it. 2009 marks my 20th year as a writer. During that time I haven’t gotten famous. During that time I haven’t made enough money to quit my day job. But then, none of the working writers I know are famous. And most of them either have a day job or are married to someone who does. What I have been lucky enough to do for those twenty years, though, is weather the changing seasons that have swept over publishing and still sell pretty much everything I’ve written: vampire stories, sword & sorcery, sword & planet, adventure, westerns, children’s tales, humor, and nonfiction of a wide variety. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t pretty. [Especially the splatterpunk stuff ;)]. But it got done.

Over twenty years I’ve done a lot of thinking about writing, about what works and doesn’t work, about what it takes to give a substantial portion of your life over to this rather strange habit. Almost from the beginning I’ve also written articles about writing. I think best on paper, and those articles have helped me crystallize my own thoughts on the craft. Now all those articles are gathered together in Write With Fire: Thoughts on the Craft of Writing, which has just been published. I’m extremely happy about it. And rather proud, I suppose too.

The book is 248 pages, and divided into three parts. The first part is mainly about the practical mechanics of writing. How do you shepherd ideas through the writing and editing process and into the final form needed for publication? It talks more about fiction than nonfiction but a lot of the articles are really about communicating with your writing, which applies to any genre. The second part deals more with theory and philosophy in writing. What kind of characteristics are common to writers? What makes and breaks a “page-turner?” The last and much shorter section consists of articles that are more personal to my life as a writer, such as my experiences after Hurricane Katrina.

Many of the articles have been published before, often in out of the way magazines, but all of them have been updated and expanded for the book. And there is quite a lot of stuff here that has never been seen before by most of those who know about my writing, including ideas I’ve developed in teaching classes in writing and giving presentations on the craft. I’ve posted the cover on the blog, and the Amazon link is Write With Fire.



I haven’t even gotten my copies yet but will blog about it when I do. In the meantime, I’d really appreciate it if my writer friends in the blogosphere would mention the book around so the word gets out. I’ll thank you for it.
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Make Up Time

Well, to make up for the week of torrential downpours, nature treated us Saturday and Sunday to absolutely stunning days. Clear skies of crisp blue. Cool temperatures with almost no humidity and a sweet breeze. I read a lot on the deck while I watched the hungry birds swarm our feeders. (For a couple of days we had been putting food "on" the deck because it required wading to reach the feeders.)

I'm still finding reading on my Kindle 2 a pleasing experience. It's nice to always have a perfectly flat page, I'm finding. I also discovered earlier in the week that Amazon has quite a number of free Kindle books available for download, including a Robin Hobb fantasy and a Lee Child thriller. However, I must confess that I actually put in an order for printed copies of several of the books I've already read on my Kindle. I just really, really like having printed books around me.

On Saturday, Lana and I went to a few garage sales in Abita Springs. Word had gone out Friday that the town wide garage sale plans had been postponed, but some folks either didn't get the word or decided Saturday was too lovely not to have a sale. Despite having to walk through mud in places, a good time seemed to be had by all. Lana bought quite a few pieces of the colored glass she loves, and I bought........drumroll please.......books! It's hard to pass up any book that you might one day read when you get them for 25 to 50 cents.

I also got in a couple of good walks, and Lana and I went Sunday afternoon to one of the local nature centers. I'm sure she'll have up some pics this week.

And in the evenings, writing was accomplished.
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Starting and Stopping

Three days! After my last round of grading I had three glorious days to work on Wraith of Talera. Since it had been a couple of months since the last time I worked on it, most of those three days was spent in a careful rereading and revision of material already completed. I had to refresh my memory as to where I was in the story. Right about the time I got back to “new” material, mid-terms hit. I managed to get some needed plotting done, but not much in the way of new writing. Since then I’ve been grading. Just grading.

Starting and stopping is one of the hardest things to deal with in on a novel length project. And, unfortunately, that’s the nature of the teaching biz. You have moments of down time, then moments of insanity. And this semester I’m teaching a non-fiction writing class, which means a lot more paper grading than in most semesters. There’s always in academia, in addition, the need to do at least a couple of scholarly type writing projects a year. Those provide more interference with any long-term fiction goal.

But it’s not just the academic job that interferes. I had a couple of really nice opportunities to do some short fiction and nonfiction. They were things I wanted to do and that were good for my career, so the novel went on the back burner. For too long.

I wish I could end this post with a lesson I’ve learned, or a technique for dealing with slow downs. Ain’t gonna happen. I’ve got more grading tomorrow, and on Monday I’ll have a pile of late papers to grade so that I can get midterms turned in by high noon Tuesday. Right now I’m pretty tired and am going to bed. I’ll try to make my blog rounds tomorrow, but Monday and Tuesday are likely to be no shows for me. After that I might get back to a semblance of normalcy for a while. Then it’ll be final exams and all the hassle surrounding graduation.

Just gotta hang on. Gotta hang on.
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Who are you Trying to Impress?

This is the first of a short series of posts concerning the question “Who are You Trying to Impress,” which I’m addressing primarily to writers, although I could see that it might be applicable to other fields of endeavor. I consider this a very important question for writers to consider, because it gets at the heart of why we do what we do.

As far as I can figure, writers write to impress one of four different audiences. These are:
1. Critics.
2. Peers (other writers).
3. Oneself.
4. Readers.

Although the choice you personally make is up to you, there are some points I’d like to make about these choices.

1. Critics, as a group, are notoriously fickle. Although some critics are fine writers themselves, many are more concerned about the theory of writing than the practice. This is not bad in and of itself, but to me many critics focus more on style than substance, and style constantly fluctuates. What’s “in” today is “out” tomorrow.

Writers who target their work at critics strive to stand out from the crowd, and this often translates into breaking “rules” for the sake of breaking them. Such writers try tactics such as leaving out quotation marks from around dialogue, or shoving the dialogue from multiple speakers into the same paragraph. They often use experimental prose, writing in future tense, for example, or all in multiple phrase sentences, or in sentence fragments. They seem, at least, to express the idea that truly fine writing must be difficult to understand.

There’s nothing specifically wrong in writing to impress the critics, but most regular readers find such strategies distracting and irritating. And, naturally, some authors do a far better job of pulling off both style and substance than do others. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t need to leave quotation marks out of his dialogue. It’s an affection, nothing more. But McCarthy still tells powerful stories about wonderful characters. Hubert Selby, Jr, the author of Requiem for a Dream, doesn’t need to cram the dialogue from multiple speakers into the same paragraph, but this could be forgiven if his characters weren’t so lame and his prose so dishwater dull.

If writers who chooses this path get lucky, they can win a lot of awards and occasionally even make huge amounts of money. If they gamble wrong they’ll likely be largely forgotten, although one thing that can save them is the movies. I firmly believe, for example, that the movie Requiem for a Dream rescued the much weaker book.

Next post, we’ll consider writing to impress peers, which I believe is more common than writing for the critics. Stay tuned.

P.S., some of you may have noted that I’ve changed my profile picture. Lana and I took some “in character” pics on Tuesday and I thought I might as well use one for the blog.
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Writing With Class

I’m teaching three classes this semester, Learning, Historical and Applied Perspectives, and Writing in Psychology. I developed that last course with a colleague, Du Bois Williams, a number of years ago, because we saw a big need for better communication skills in our students. I always enjoy teaching it.

Du Bois and I wrote the text that we use in the class, and later a third Colleague, Elliott Hammer, added his efforts to that text. I learn new things every time I teach the course and I hope to have some insights for you here on the blog across the semester. Today is the first class, and I’ll be introducing the format and talking about the resources the students will need.

Writing can take place with very simple tools, a pencil, some paper, and a mind. But it’s good to have some resources to back up what you already know. Besides our text, I tell the students they’ll need:

1. A dictionary. I carry the Oxford American Dictionary around with me, because it’s the biggest paperback dictionary available. I have the Random House Unabridged Dictionary for home.

2. A thesaurus. I use Webster’s New World Thesaurus in dictionary form. I was reading another writing in psychology guidebook the other day and it said, “avoid the thesaurus, use everyday language.” I believe this is absolutely horrible advice. There’s certainly something to be said for everyday language, but the problem is that many students don’t have nearly the vocabulary they need in the first place and a thesaurus is a good way to build one.

3. A book on grammar. I use The Elements of Grammar by Margaret Shertzer.

4. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. You've got to have a style manual specific to your discipline.

5. Although I don’t require them, I suggest students look into getting a dictionary of psychology, and I strongly suggest they have a look at two of the best books on writing well that I’ve ever read, On Writing Well by William Zinsser, and The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

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In other news, poet Greg Schwartz has put up a review of my haiku chapbook, Wanting the Mouth of a Lover, over at his Haiku and Horror Blog. He had some nice words to say and it means a lot coming from another poet, and one whose own work I respect so highly. Check it out if you’ve got a moment.
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A Renewal of the Vows: Sort of

Tomorrow marks a twenty year anniversary of sorts for me. On January 1, 1989, I made a vow in the journal I was starting to keep. On that date, I gave myself five years to get published, and I promised myself that I would work on some writing task, no matter how small, each day. That meant I would read a book about writing, or study a grammar guide, or, mostly, that I would just write. And I added a last promise, that if I’d really tried hard for five years and had nothing to show for it, I’d quit writing and not look back. I’m glad I didn’t have to abandon writing. In fact, I sold several things that first year, and quite a bit since, although at times I wonder if it’s gotten any easier.

Several times over those first five years I had to “rededicate” myself to writing. Life does get in the way. I was also establishing my career in those years, and a marriage that ultimately didn’t survive, and I was raising a son. I don’t regret letting those things get in the way of my writing. They had to. No matter how important writing is, life is more important. Other people are more important. Children are the most important. You can’t write without doing some living yourself.

Eventually, it became sort of routine to “renew” my commitment to writing each New Years, even if I’d written a lot and had good success in the previous year. I’ll do it in my journal again tomorrow. I don’t really make resolutions, per se, but I do take stock, and I believe it’s important at least once a year to verbally acknowledge those things that remain important goals in your life.

Looking back now on that original vow, I think the only thing I might change is the time limit I set for myself. I don’t think the time matters because every writer grows and develops in their own way and at their own pace. It only matters how many words you’ve put on the page, and whether you’ve tried each time to make them better, and if you’ve put in the hard work and study that you must do to improve.

I hope everyone out there has a wonderful New Year’s eve and New Year’s Day. As for me, I’m planning on enjoying the three F’s—food, football, and fine reading.
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