About Fear...

Last month, I wrote about fear.  Fear of embarrassing oneself is often a hitch factor in creativity.  "What if this idea is no good?"  "What if people laugh at this idea?" are pretty common ones, and that sort of fear can be paralyzing. 


But it's also exceedingly common.  It takes a long time to overcome that fear of failure, that fear of not being good enough.  Many people, and I'll add that many successful people retain that crippling fear that what they make is not fit for public consumption, and that makes them hesitate. 


Which is not to say that creation is easy, or that everything that we make is fit for public consumption.  Nickolaus Pacione has taught me that, if nothing else.  But I'll never get anywhere if I don't start.  I'll never develop good ideas if I don't work through the bad ones, and have enough of each to recognize a bad one when it presents itself.  More importantly, if I hadn't cycled through a bunch of ideas, I'll never get comfortable with the concept that ideas are easy to come by.  Ideas are cheap.  Good ideas are plentiful.  Being willing to discard mediocre ideas means that I spend less time wrangling them. Because experience has shown me that if I wait five minutes, a better idea will come up. 


Is also seems that, after five years, I'm going to hit 20,000 views of this blog.  I'm aware that the majority are Google search hits, and that I have yet to break a thousand hits in a single month.  But thank you to everyone who has read this strange personal/writing blog.  

On The Need to Write Quickly (With Name-Dropping)

I've been solving one short story for about two and a half months. It's been a difficult struggle, but I finally put the first draft to bed last week. I have to write faster. Part of the reason I'm updating this blog more regularly (which is to say, regularly) is that I need to write every day, even on the days that I don't peck away at a story.

Because I have changed. I'm not the same person I was in February when I started this story. Allowing the process of the story to drag on so long means that the story will likely be weakened, thematically. I will no longer have the same passion for the plot and the themes that I did when it was fresh in my head. I have stared at it and been sick of it because I've been thinking and reading the same damn thing for the past two months.

Robert Asperin once said "I'm not a slow writer, and I'm not a fast writer. I'm a half-fast writer." And I have to avoid that. I'm not going to support myself with short stories, even if I write one a week. Because even at professional rates, that's (.05 x 5,000=$250 per story x 52 weeks=) $13,000 a year. Which is not liveable. But if I can learn to hammer out the prose with the short stories, I'll be able to sustain my attention for longer when I'm writing a novel. After my current story, "Tribute Band", I'm back to my novel. Which will be finished by NECON so I can ask James Moore (because hey! James Moore!) to read it, and then I'll move on to my next novel as I'm passing the current one around for publication.

A working mid-list novelist needs to sell at least two novels a year. The advance on the average mid-list novel is less than $10,000, so two novels a year is pretty well required unless I'm going to bet that I'm going to be huge. And while I can hope I'm going to be huge, I'm smart enough that I don't think I'm going to bet on it.

I've set the first draft deadline for the latest short story at the 27^th. I need to get faster about my stories, because I need to ace deadlines when I'm asked to write something. Being early, and even better, getting a reputation for being early, can be an enormous asset when editors are thinking about who to invite into their anthology.

Special Thanks to Brian Keene and Walter Jon Williams for some hard truths that made this post possible.

Apologies, people. There was a hurricane, and then a class that is eating my brain. It's a good class, but I'm spending some fifteen hours a week on a three-credit course. It's a good coruse, field expereince an all that, but sometimes I wish that it took up less of my time.

I need to update this blog. Since I last posted, two stories have been published: 'The Masked Messenger" by David Conyers and myself, in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #52. It's a good story of terrorism, violence, hatred, arrogance, and horrible things from outside of time and space. Pretty much everything you've come to expect out of a story I'm part of.

Second, on the 12th, which is to say Saturday, I will be at Anthocon because I placed a story in the New England Horror Writers Association's anthology Epitaphs. "Not an Ulcer" has been around the block a few times, and I will provide a little insight into this story later.

I've also sold a story to Undead and Unbound, a Brian Sammons anthology. I''ve been invited to contribute to a couple other anthologies, also. One story is taking shape nicely. So yeah, I've been busy, and not just with playing Fallout: New Vegas.

Although it was a lot of fun.

Invitations

If there's anything that makes you feel like a part of the writers' community, it's getting an invitation from people whose work you respect. Over the past couple of months, I've received several invitations to submit to projects. It's a warm feeling.

Part of the reason I decided to write was because I like talking with them. I listened to Tim Powers speak at a book signing, and I knew that I wanted to have conversations with him and people like him. At NECON, I have spent wonderful hours talking about ideas with other writers. It's unimaginable fun to sit in a group of people who are throwing out ideas, with other people knocking them in utterly insane directions.

To my delight, I'm getting there. Hard work pays off, as does having the right phlebotomist.

A Personal First

I wrote the story I'm threatening to send to William Jones's High Seas Cthulhu II anthology in seven days. That's a personal first, especially considering that there were children in the house for the last two days.

So now it goes through the process of critiques, both on-line and individual. I don't think that the local group will get to it this Tuesday; we're preparing for the Sweating Ink-themed reading on the 17th. Most of the group will want to read their stories to the group before we read to the putative audience at the North Bennington Library.

So now, it's time to polish, polish, polish.

The submission backlog continues apace. Today I send a package out to Asmiov's.

Oh the Places I've Been

I see that my last entry was in July. It’s been a busy month and a half. So, what have I been doing instead of posting to my blog?

Let’s start with the first week of August. I took a lovely biplane ride with my in-laws. The Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome remains a great place, and as far as I can tell the only place locally, to get a biplane ride. The modern experience of flight really insulated the flier from the experience: the flier sits in a sealed cabin, and the heights and speeds involved are quickly so out of the normal human range that what you see is fairly abstract. In a biplane, with the wind in your hair, flight is very different. You can reach out and feel the air rushing past you, the overwhelming roar of the engine is less than ten feet in front of you. We couldn’t have been more then fifteen hundred feet in the air, and everything is still quite recognizable–houses, trees, cars, even people. And the Hudson River Valley is beautiful as it spreads out below you like a beautiful tapestry of trees.

This flight was rather different from the one I took two years ago. The pilot did a tight 360 on a wingtip. Last time, we circled rather lazily. The difference might have been that I tipped the pilot in advance this time.

Later, I went to Silent Hill with friends Shinankoku, Mrs. Shinankoku, and the Queen of Science. Oh it wasn’t quite what you’ve seen. But consider this, we went up Mount Equinox, and into the clouds. When we got to the top, it was every bit as foggy as the video games (the pictures are still in the camera), with thick tendrils of mist within ten feet of you, and absolutely no visibility past thirty feet. Seriously—you couldn’t even see across the parking lot. And it was quiet. No sound other than us and the chill, damp wind blowing through the scrubby pines. When we the last time you were somewhere that you were the only noise around? No music, no cars, just your footfalls, the sigh of the wind in the skeletal pines, and anything you say that isn’t immediately swallowed by the omnipresent mist.

Adding to the creepy was the fact that there is an abandoned hotel on the mountaintop. It’s sort of a cheesy 70's place, pre-fab, and clearly has seen better days. But it’s not altogether abandoned, apparently, because there was a light on in back. Sometimes you come across the tiny shards of a story. I always wonder about the rest it—where it started, and how it will change in the future.

Later, we went to a ProjektFest in New Haven. I can safely say that the Gothic Music festival is the loudest thing I have ever been to, and that includes sitting than six feet away from an airplane engine. And I saw perhaps the most exquisitely beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh. No, I don’t’ have any pictures of her. We got to see Voltaire and Niki Jane live (I want to learn to play the musical saw). Niki Jane was awesome, but Voltaire was definitely the highlight of the show, since he was funny, energetic, and with an excellent rapport with the audience. He and all of his band were dressed to the nines in some absolutely beautiful Edwardian outfits.

And really, I would think that was enough.

But it wasn’t. I also finished the first draft of my novel on the 11th.

Let me say that again, I FINISHED THE FIRST DRAFT OF MY FIRST SOLO NOVEL! And I did it because I worked hard for most of August, when I wasn’t flying, or visiting frighteningly quiet mountain tops, or having my ears assaulted by industrial music, and through the beginning of September. And if that weren’t enough, I spread my wings a little and redesigned the main page of qusoor.com.

Before September is over, I will have written an essay on William Peter Blatty’s comedies, and starting in October I’ll be revising the novel, hopefully so I can interest someone in it at World Fantasy Con, which is the first week of November. So the reason I haven’t been posting on my blog is because I’ve been working my frikkin’ tail off.