writing

I have many friends who write novels. I’ve never written one. I’ve started several, but never come close to completing a draft. Today it feels like I’m just not cut out for novel writing. I have a cool character and a cool main idea and a cool setting. I even have some ideas about the main conflict. But when I sat down to write an outline so that I could start drafting it went something like this:
Chapter 1 Cool Character!
Chapter 2 Cool Character arrives in Cool Setting!
Chapter 3 Cool Character meets ancillary Characters!
Chapter 4 – 13 Um… some stuff happens, not sure what, but I have vague ideas.
Chapter 14 Climactic chapter that I’m sure will be Cool! …if only I can figure out what it is for certain.
Chapter 15 Epilogue in which I tie off all those loose ends… once I know what they are.

I wanted to write this now. I wanted to create a book for Link the way I made one for Gleek. But I’m afraid that the ideas won’t connect properly until long after Link ceases to need it.

Sigh. I should probably go back to turning blog entries into essays. At least there my brain seems wired correctly to make useful connections between seemingly unrelated events.

My sister is starting up a really cool business called Anthology Builder. It is still in beta testing, but people can already go there to look around and buy stuff. The idea is to provide a place for people to create an anthology filled with stories that they selected. The authors get paid each time one of their stories is used in an anthology. The stories are all reprints of things that have been published elsewhere. At the moment all the stories are either Science Fiction or Fantasy, but Nancy hopes to get writers from all genres.

Once the site is out of beta, Howard will be blogging about it on the Schlock site. If you go now, you can say you got there first. If you’re a reader you should go build your own anthology. If you’re a writer you should check out the guidelines to see if your work can be sold there.

As yet none of my writing qualifies for submission. I’ve only sold one story and it has yet to see print let alone being ready for reprint. But in the future I’m hoping to participate in this great idea. (Yes I could probably lean on my sister to let me in, but I want to see this work for her. The last thing she needs is some obvious nepotism right from the get-go.)

I have been like a wheel with an off-center axle. The ride has been very bumpy and it is hard to keep moving. The effort has exhausted me. This past week several things happened to lighten the load I have to haul. More important, I identified why my axle was off center.

I have accumulated many friends who are writers. I can not say what their internal goals are for the writing that they do, but the visible goals relate to working hard and getting published. I have been so swept up in the energy and enthusiasm, that I lost track of my core goals for the things that I write. I write to express the thoughts in my head. I write in the hope that my words will be of help to other people. Publishing my writing would assist my goal, but it is not the goal. Traditional publication is not the only path to my goal. Lately I have been pushing my writing, trying to publish it quickly. I was caught up in the idea of having a book to show others, to demonstrate that I really am the kind of writer who can get published. I was focused on the wrong goal.

Something Howard said to me months ago, came back to me this week. The writing will always be there for me. When my life is busy, the writing will lay idle, but it will be there when I have time again. For me and my life writing must take up the spaces around the edges of other things. Some people can give writing a central importance in their lives. I was jealous of that. I wanted to do that. I tried to do it, but it was throwing me out of balance with myself. Making writing central is not right for me at this point in my life. I am a writer, but I am not a writer first. I must be whole. I cannot be whole if writing crowds out the other things that I am.

This fact about me may mean that I never publish a novel. I may never make money from my writing. This is all right, because I believe that if I am inspired in pursuing my writing, then others will be led to the things I write which they need. It has already happened. Every time it does, I am awed to be the means by which some one else is helped. I hope that someday I’ll get to write a novel that someone else needs to read. But I need to be patient until I find the right novel and the right time in my life. When the time is right, then writing a novel will roll smoothly because my axle will be properly centered.

All of these thoughts cascaded into place over several days until Thursday when I could finally see them all. Since Thursday, I have had peace of spirit; the calmness of knowing that I have finally identified what is right for me. Along with peace there has been happiness. I can see the joy in my life rather than the endless row of tasks which I must get done.

The following things have been preventing me from writing. I figure that identifying them is the first step to either removing them or finding a way around them.

The fact that my laptop has become nigh useless. It had a battery that would not hold a charge, so I bought a new battery three weeks ago. The new battery no longer holds a charge. Apparently this laptop eats batteries. Additionally, the power plug only provides power to the laptop if it is positioned exactly correctly. If I jiggle the power cord even slightly, the laptop dies instantly causing me to lose whatever I am working on. I really can’t complain about the laptop. It is an ancient Thinkpad which was given to me for free. It worked well for me for almost 6 months. It even had wireless internet access. Before the laptop, I often wrote stories longhand and transcribed them later. Having it was so wonderful that I’m loath to do without a laptop, but I may be back to longhand for awhile.

My remaining computer is the one in my windowless basement office. It is the one I use for all the accounting, shipping, layout, and other business tasks. That psychological space is filled with business. I have a hard time writing there. Also the space is not ergonomic. I’m likely to have to fix that for business reasons. My right hand has begun to ache from improper positioning while mousing for extended periods of time. I’m going to have to spend a lot of time working in that space for the next couple of months. I need to fix this problem.

There hasn’t been space in my head for stories to form.

There hasn’t been time in my schedule where I can sit down and create a good mindset for writing.

Monday is my last session teaching creative writing. I was tentatively committed to teaching again in January. In January I was supposed to have twice as many students and all of them would be 1-3 years younger. Handling them in class would not be such a big deal. But there have been hours of typing and image editing involved in getting the stories ready for print. I can’t afford to give away 10 hours per week right now. In January I’ll be about ready to collapse from the stress of running shipping and layout for a book simultaneously. I need a space of time to stabilize my family after all of that. It is a relief to duck out of this. Being relieved makes me sad, because I did enjoy teaching the class. I loved working with the kids. I love the stories they wrote. But it is a stress I can eliminate, so I am going to eliminate it.

For more than I year I’ve been brainstorming ways to get some of the content from my blog into book form. I don’t just want to dump it straight from livejournal. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it has to do with the fact that some of the cool ideas in the blog are only half realized. The obvious solution is to use the raw material in the blog to create essays. I definitely plan to do that. But crafting essays is a lot of work and I wanted to get things into print faster.

So I tried just grabbing the first 5000 words of my blog and deleting out the entries that seemed boring or irrelevant. Then I put in a few editorial comments which expanded on details that did not actually make it into the blog. The result was about 3600 words long. As an experiment, I submitted that to my writer’s group. The blog entries I left were primarily about parenting or personal growth. My writer’s group contains exactly one other parent. A couple of them are expecting their first baby, another couple are getting married soon, the remaining three are all single and male. I was not sure that some of them would enjoy reading my rambles about my kids.

The good news is that, without exception, they all found my submission interesting. Several of them said that they were worried they would not like it, but by the end they were enjoying the read. This makes me really happy. Somehow I took something outside the range of their usual interests and managed to make it work. This confirms my feeling that there are some really good thoughts in my blog entries, things that are worthy of print.

The discouraging news is that half of the writer’s group said that I should either make it be a book of essays or I should leave the blog completely intact with no editing. I don’t mind the work that creating essays would entail. I like working at writing. But I have only so much time and energy. I would really like to be submitting something to writers group every single week. My blog contains hundreds of thousands of words. I could submit for a long time and not run out. Then as I finished fiction pieces I could submit those.

No one else in the group minds that I submit sporadically. There are several in the group who only submit sometimes. I would just like to submit more. If I were submitting more, that would be because I was writing more. I would like to write more. But I won’t write more at the expense of my family or of the business that pays our bills. And so I will continue to snatch my slivers of writing time and be a little jealous of people who have somehow managed their lives so that they have vast swathes of time for writing.

The greatest honor an author can have is for someone to come up and say “Your work really made a difference for me.”

I don’t get to go to writing group next week because Kiki has a band concert. This makes me sad. It is part of a larger disapointment, not with the writing group, but with myself. The group meets every week. A couple of the writers submit writing for every meeting. I don’t. I wish I could. I would love to submit and get feedback each week. I simply don’t write fast enough for that. I am capable of writing that fast, but I have other priorities. The things I am putting before writing really are more important to me, but I still grieve that I can’t get more writing done. I want to submit and rewrite and then send things off to editors. I want to write a book that other people really believe in, and are dying to see published.

Hmm. I’ve kind of done that. I wrote a picture book and found an amazing illustrator. The project is almost ready to go to press, but we decided to give it a shot at traditional publication before self publishing. The agent said no, and I havent’ heard back from the editor. It is about time to move this project forward. Because it resides in limbo, I keep forgetting that I can count the project as an accomplishment. It doesn’t feel real until I can hold it in my hands. The same can be said of my one short story sale which won’t see print for more than a year from now. I want something I can hold in my hand and be amazed that I actually wrote it and it exists. I think I’ll have a little of that with Tub of Happiness because I made many of the layout decisions. I’ll almost certainly feel that way about The Terraport Wars because I’ll be doing all of the layout work. Why is it so easy for me to mentally discount my own triumphs?

Anyway, I’ll miss writer’s group this week. I’ve already got plans for what to submit for next week. And I need to get to work writing stuff to submit for the weeks after that.