Big Ed's Place

Last week, I ended up not writing anything that I really expected to. I revised and released “In the Style of Rodin.” After poking around the markets, I decided to just release it here. I did try an experiment–I only announced it on twitter instead of also in the various yahoo story groups, figuring it was just flash and so of less interest to the story groups. It gave me some statistics of my readers.

I also ended up getting side-tracked into writing a very long post as a follow up to my Rape vs. Ravishment post. As of this moment, that post is nearly 4000 words long, which is stunning. I need to make a few more edit passes before it’s ready to release, so I’ll just put it into the standard Wednesday slot.

Part of what’s stunning to me about it, is that I managed to find the time and passion to write 4000 words on a post, when I’ve struggled to find the time and passion to write that much on my fiction. Why did my productivity suddenly jump? Yes, some of it was having more available time (a business trip gave me ‘hotel’ time to write), but I’ve had that time in the past. I can’t say it was because I was more organized or had a better idea where I was going. While it is true that I get more words written when I’m not figuring out the scene as I go, I had similar problems with the blog post. By the time it’s released, I will basically have rewritten it twice because I was stumbling pretty badly on my first draft.

Instead, what makes sense to me is the difference in passion. I was pissed when I first read the paper that my upcoming blog post critiques. I found the writing, the analysis, and conclusions sloppy and I didn’t like being told that I was wrong based on such sloppiness. Now, as I wrote and rewrote, I realized that much of the ‘sloppiness’ was really sloppiness in my reading, and not in their writing. I also made an effort to calm down because a response to an academic paper needs to be level-headed. Hot-heads don’t win logical arguments. So at some point, when the anger and irritation wore off, I still maintained a fair amount of passion to ‘get my arguments right.’

So the passion shoved me through. It was a short burst, and I’m not sure I could have sustained it for much longer. Besides I now have to address the chores etc. that got pushed to the side and I’ve even more tired than I was before. I’ve got the backlash when the adrenaline wears off at work.

But it did get me wondering–what could I be passionate about in my fiction? What in my queue would inspire me to knock out 4000 words in a few days, because by gawd I need to knock it out or I’m going to go crazy?

I’m finding I don’t have much passion for the top story in my queue–Caught Online. The reason I put it up top is that I thought it might fit with a call for submissions. The problem is, it really doesn’t. The call for submissions wants stories that celebrate female sexuality, even if from a male POV. Well… yeah, I could bend it, but it’s a stretch. The premise is a guy realizes that he’s seen a picture of one of his coworkers on a swinger’s site. So the central conflict should be what he does with that knowledge. I think the story would be stronger if I stick with that as the focus and not bend it for a submissions call.

So next will probably be Unmasked. I’m not finding a lot of passion for it at the moment, but I know that’s because it’s going to be heavy at the beginning. The Holiday Series was light and fun when I started, but when I decided to include some real character development, I had no choice but to introduce some drama. Unmasked will wrap most of it up, but I’m not finding the energy to dive into it.

That said, I have had flashes where I really wanted to work on Deep Dish. Seeing as how I still have some issues resolved on publishing a graphic novel, I’m not sure how much I’ll do. Probably enough to keep the juices flowing at least.

In the meantime, I’ll continue letting thoughts about ‘what would I be passionate about’ simmer on the back burner.

I once heard that Robin would caress his subjects before beginning a sculpture. That idea bounced around in my head for a while. Then a few months ago, I saw a Call for Submissions for artistic flash stories that were designed to accompany erotic paintings.

Well, by the time I finished the story, the Call for Submissions had been changed so it accepted work only from women (more on that here). As a result, I’ve released it here.

Sometimes life throws things at you that just have to be turned into stories.

Babe in the Night was inspired by an actual evening with my son when he was only a few months old. Like the beginning of the story, he was colicky and I was up late trying to comfort him. When I finally got him quieted, I heard my neighbors out in their hot tub. It didn’t take more than a moment to realize I could see them as well.

Now my neighbors were in their suits and nothing sexual happened that evening, at least in the short time I watched, but it got me thinking… what if?

And this story was the result.

(note: This story was originally published at Clean Sheets)

Well, it was a difficult week. I awoke Monday to find that Amazon was using me as a pawn in a fight with my state Government. Of course, they were doing it by screwing me, which I did not appreciate (my rant here). This took a fair amount of my spare time and my emotional energy to deal with, and there’s still work to do.

Then, in my day job–well, let’s just say it’s been a week of picking my words carefully. I am realizing more and more that my career success relies solely on my ability to say “that’s stupid” in a way that results in the audience nodding in agreement rather than protesting. This is, unfortunately, tricky and time consuming. It also takes a lot of emotional energy. As a result, the few lunch hours that weren’t working lunches have been spent rejuvenating rather than writing.

As a result, I only managed 562 words on Kaiju Irie, bringing me to 4026. I’ve got two weeks until the deadline, and another 2kwords to go, plus editing, plus getting it through my team.

That’s the stress. It’s not impossible to make the deadline. There are certainly short cuts and chances where I might be able to carve out more time in my future (fex: if the flight on next week’s business trip isn’t full, I can write on the plane). It’s just not comfortable.

And then the doubts creep in about the quality of what I’ll be delivering.

Because, for me, there’s usually a moment where I go, “this is as good as it’s going to get.” I realize that I could edit and edit and edit and probably improve the story, but I also recognize that there’s a point where I’m just rearranging words and not actually improving them. It’s like sanding wood–at some point, it’s as smooth as it’s gonna get unless you switch to a smaller grit sandpaper and if you don’t have it, it’s time to quit.

But stopping before that moment, or rushing to get to that moment, can introduce errors and problems as well. Is it “right” because it’s truly right, or is it “right” because I want it to be right? I’m well aware of my own capacity for self-deception and avoiding it takes having the time to step back and sit with decisions.

This is of course on top of the standard doubts that accompany releasing a story. There’s really no way to know how your baby will be received until you let it go, and sometimes it’s not so well received. This is a new audience for me on top of that, so we’ll have to see.

This one (found here) started with the airport scene. Many years ago, the inspiration for “Jennifer” picked me up in the airport, dressed as a sexy chauffeur. I realized I had to fold it into a story someday, appropriately embellished, and it wasn’t too hard to find a business in Denver that actually rents classic cars.

Once I knew the opening scene, I knew that I wanted to focus on the fallout from Fireworks. In my experience, life isn’t like the TV shows, where things wrap up at the end of an episode and everyone’s happy in the next. Issues burble on. They stretch out. People come back and say “yes, but….” I didn’t think there was any way that Will and Jen would be ‘fine’ solely from how Fireworks ended.

That said, I knew they’d talk, so the story that evolved is one that fit the characters well. The only major addition was the character of Austin, who is a shout-out to my logo designer. He and I discussed polyamory a bit, and I realized that his character was the perfect person to introduce the concept to my foursome. What they do with those thoughts will be left to the remaining two stories…

It’s been a busy week, full of scrapping and scrambling to get work done on the website and also sneak in some writing.

The big push in my evenings has been to get the Tip Jar set up (see the tab on the upper right). This is an experiment, honestly. I like giving my stories away for free, and think that it’s essentially necessary in the digital economy, even though I have expenses to cover. I like the Tip Jar approach though, because it keeps the contributions voluntary. It also lets you, the reader, decide the ‘value’ of my work. We’ll see how the experiment goes.

Additionally, I’ve worked on getting Love’s Labor Found and Babe in the Night ready to post. I expect to release Love’s Labor Found early in the week and Babe in the Night two weeks after that. I’m looking forward to finally getting them out the door. Between these and the Tip Jar, it’s been a bit of scrapping with code and other production issues this week.

At the same time, I’ve been scrambling during lunches to write on Kaiju Irie. I managed 784 words, bringing me to 3464. It’s a little frustrating, because I’d hoped to pick up the pace even more (the deadline is looming). But at the same time, the words were flowing when I had the chance to write. So I think I’m in for some more scrambling for time, particularly in the next week because I need to reserve time at the end for my team to review the story before the 31st.

We often think of writing as a solitary enterprise–the author scribbling away hunched over some desk with low light, or holed up in a cabin in the woods barely interacting with the folks in the world around them.

Ummm, yeah.

While there certainly is a solitary aspect to writing, I’ve come to believe more and more that a team makes a better product. Specifically, having a team to back you if you’re an author.

While it’s pretty obvious that it’s a good thing to have a different set of eyes go over your manuscript before submitting it, I’ve found that more eyes are better. In particular, having eyes with different talents helps quite a bit. Some readers are better at plot and consistency checks. Others have a stronger feel for the flow of the words. Finally, there are the proofreaders, who see stuff that slips by my eyes a dozen times. Often, multiple eyes of the same time helps.

So I’ve developed a volunteer team. My first stories were written and released without an editor. Then I asked my wife to do some pre-release editing. Now I send my stories to a few people and, after I’ve incorporated their comments, I send my story to a proofreader/editor. All of these people are volunteers, providing me early feedback for fun and the chance to see my stories early. It works out pretty well with the one major side effect that it slows releases down.

Ya see, it’s not appropriate to push volunteers to work faster. I’m not under deadline myself, after all. I have a saying, “when you pay me, you get to set the schedule. When I’m doing it for free, I set the schedule.” I have to accord my folks the same courtesy.

Well, this time I screwed up and announced that I’d release Love’s Labor Found in February, even though I hadn’t sent it to my team yet. Well, it’s still in the pipeline and it’s taking longer than expected, so LLF is gonna be later than I predicted. It’ll be better than the draft I have right now, I can promise you. It will just have to wait a bit to go up.

That said, I was able to get 756 words written on Keiju Erie this week, bringing me to 2680. That’s a little bit better than last week, but it’s still gonna be a crunch to get it done by the end of March, particularly if I send it through my team as I’d like to.

I’m feeling a bit of deadline pressure these days. I posted the teaser picture for Love’s Labor Found and said it would be available in February 2010. Well, February’s two thirds over, and it’s not through my editing team yet. There’s still time, but I’m now questioning the tease. It’d be much more comfortable without the deadline.

Simultaneously, I’m getting nervous about Kaiju Irie. I managed ~600 words this past week, bringing me to 1924 total for the Crappy First Draft. That puts me at the 40-50% point, with about six weeks to go. At the current rate, I’ll spend another four weeks writing the CFD, leaving me very little time to edit or send it through my team of early readers and my proofreader. I’ll have to pick up the pace and I’m confident I can make it, but again, I’d be more comfortable without the deadline.

That said, deadlines certainly have their place. They have a way of focusing one’s efforts quite well. My day job would fall apart without them, even when they’re missed. I also found when I was writing Friends and Benefits that self-imposed deadlines often helped motivate me to push through the lulls.

So we’ll see how the next month goes. Lots to do. Lots I want to do. The usual lack of time.

Okay, I’m not a Swedish movie star, but that doesn’t prevent the line from being true.

The thing is, writing is not a social hobby. Oh sure, there can be social circles around writing, of various types. But the act of writing itself is a solo enterprise. Even with brainstorming and possible collaboration beforehand, at some point one person has to sit down, by him or herself, and block out the rest of the world so the words can flow.

Now that’s not to say I can’t write around other people. I’ve certainly done it, and even had “writing dates” with a sculptor friend of mine. I’d bring the laptop to his studio and sit at his desk and write while he worked in clay. It was great motivation to create, but it was also more silent than conversational.

But what this build up to is, I just haven’t had enough alone time this past week. Work’s been hell, with our customer in-house all week. As a result, I managed only a single lunch by myself, and lunch is one of my prime writing times. Additionally, my in-laws are visiting. They’re great people, but they’re on the list of folks we don’t tell about this part of my life. I think they’d still love their son-in-law, but why take chances with “I think?” So no writing in the evenings either.

As a result, I barely made progress on anything. I managed one editing pass through Love’s Labor Found, cutting 308 words out, for a nice round 11,000 words. I’ll take another two passes before I send it to my team. Kaiju Irie (formerly Kaiju Cove) is up to 811 words, but I had most of those written before this week.

But there’s hope. Next week promises to be easier, and I’ll actually have some free time alone. Maybe I’ll even have a chance to write.

It’s been a decent week for writing; in large part due to being on semi-vacation and having a lot of the holiday stress behind us. I managed 1108 words on Love’s Labor Found, bringing it to 8766. I’m most of the way through my penultimate scene, so this one will coast in pretty close to 10kwords. I think.

This is often the stage in writing a story when I’ve cleared Mile 22 and the writing pace picks up. Home stretch writing is always faster and in many ways more fun than a lot of the rest of it, particularly if I’m in the middle of the big payoff scene that I’ve had in my mind all along.

Except this time… the characters have hijacked my story again. It’s slowing me down because I’m spending a lot of time going “huh–so what are they going to do now?”

This happens to me sometimes and I know it happens to other authors and creative types all the time. I caught an Oprah interview with Taylor Swift this week (side effect of being home in the afternoon when Wife has the TV on) and Taylor said that she generally felt like she was transcribing her songs rather than truly writing them. I really do get that. There’s a zone when I’m writing sometimes that feels like I’m just an instrument for my muse or some higher power–and the best thing I can do is get my own ego and ideas out of the way.

And there’s also a zone when I’m writing and the characters themselves seem to have free will and decide to go somewhere different than I’d planned all along. The first time this happened was in Dawn on the Third Day. I was writing what I thought was the final scene and looked down and realized that Jennifer had just suggested inviting the other couple into the bedroom. That wasn’t at all how I intended to end the story, but I couldn’t see any reason not to go with it, so I did. It happened again in The Ugly One when Billy hauled John onto the ice skating rink and it’s happened a dozen other times in other stories as well.

So Jennifer–my quiet one, my ‘go along’ one, my ‘make Dave happy’ one–has once again stepped up with some boldness I hadn’t anticipated. So I find myself, like the other characters, trying not to let my chin drop as I wait to see what she’ll do. Note that it’s not like she doesn’t have that streak of boldness in her–just see what she did in A Good Christmas or A Valentine’s Surprise. It just wasn’t a direction I was expecting the story to take.

So it promises to be an interesting wind up for the story. I look forward to seeing how it plays out myself.