Would you look at the time?

Q3 2018 is almost over. In fact, 2018 is almost over. We’re just a couple weeks away from the month of Halloween, then it’s NaNoWriMo, then the holidays, and BAM! We’re in 2019.

It’s bananas!

A few updates:

I was published again! My short story “Mugs” (formerly Tavern 381F) was published in Five on the Fifth this month. They’re an awesome literary magazine and I’m blown away to have been chosen to be published there. Check out my story here, but also check out their other publications. There are some real, heavy hitting pieces in there. Truly honored to be published alongside them.

Episode 6 of The Genre Hustle went live this last Monday, too! We’ve been getting great feedback and we are (slowly) working our way through recording season 2. We’re going to make the episodes a little longer, have a few more than season 1, and have more guests!

Oh, and this week’s highlight? George R. R. Martin and Lev Grossman both liked my tweet about episode 6! We’re basically drinking buddies, now. Nod nod.

So, with updates out of the way, I’d like to talk about two things in this blog post. First, I want to share what my writing process has been like lately with Rat, my novel. Second, I want to talk about NaNoWriMo. Here we go.

Rat. Oh boy. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that writing a book is hard? Like, really hard? You get to the end of your first draft and it’s a huge celebration (or it should be), because you’ve written something. But then you have to edit. And then submit to betas. And then re-edit. And fix the massive plot issues and re-write and revise and… oof.

It’s hard.

So what do you do? You hold on to the victories and let them drive you forward. My first one was getting my first draft finished. My next victory was finishing my second draft and getting it beta read.

It’s been a slog since then, though. Re-write after re-write, trying to get the story where it needs to be. FINALLY, I have done so. After 17 billion outlines and nearly half as many rewrites, I have the structure where it needs to be. I even have act one written in its entirety (mostly).

It’s just hard to see this as a victory. I should be feeling happy that my path is finally clear and laid out before me, and a part of me does, but I’ve put so much work into it that I’m feeling overwhelmed. My writing has dropped down to almost nothing these last two weeks. It’s so hard to get into the habit of daily writing and SO EASY to fall off the wagon.

But the only way to go is forward. The only path is the one I’ve spent the last two years building. I’ve got to take a deep breath and get moving again. And I will. Just know it’s normal (not advisable) to feel down, to feel hopeless, lost, or panicked, and to lose motivation. As bad as it is to fall out of good writing habits, it’s way worse to not try and get back into them. I can do it, and so can you. Let’s get to it.

NaNoWriMo. I’m not going to lie, I’m excited for NaNo. I had a blast winning it last year and I look forward to doing the same this year. Last year I did draft 2 of Rat, this year I am going to write draft 1 of Rat 2. That’s right, the sequel. It’s actually going to be called Crow, if you must know. I even sort of have it outlined. All the hard lessons I learned while writing Rat should make Crow easier, but we’ll see.

The Future. So, Rat finished by November 1, a short story or flash fiction for Murder Park After Dark, Vol II by October 25, and Crow in November. Let’s jump on it!

Act One, I Envy People Who Have Never Met You

What's this? A new blog post? And so soon after your last, A.P.???

Yes, yes, whatever, shut up.

So, first of all, episode 2 of The Genre Hustle is up! We're discussing inciting incidents in this episode, so you should tune in here to listen! For those who don't know, The Genre Hustle is me and four of my writer friends getting together and discussing the craft, our own work, published work, and commiserating with one another as we work towards making it as authors. We are your virtual writing group!

Alright, self promotion done...

Act one! God damn. I've been smashing my head against a particularly sharp stone wall for months now. Rat, my novel, has been this immovable force, this unwieldy behemoth casting me into shadows filled with self doubt and night time panic attacks. Outline after outline, rewrites, revisions, re-imaginings. I think I mentioned this in my last blog post, but I almost walked away from my novel. I mean, fully wanted to drop it and not think, look, or speak about Rat for a couple months.

But I soldiered on.

And guess what? I've been rewarded with FINALLY having an act one that makes sense.

I was overly complicating things. I was trying to do too much. I was trying to bring in too much world-building, too many sub-plots, too many other places. It was unwieldy. It didn't make sense. I was struggling with travel times on horseback vs. walking, distances and geographic locations of events, battle tactics... TOO MUCH!

Cutting away all that work, all those thoughts and research, should have been hard. It wasn't. It was like throwing off a particularly heavy backpack at the end of a long school day. All the confusing weight of places, sub-plots, and whatever just evaporated, leaving behind a clear delineation of act one. The inciting incident. The first plot point. The internal debate of my MC. Rising tension. The stakes.

Good lord do I feel great. I've actually been writing every day again. As I should be, I know, but it's good when it's actually happening.

We've all heard the advice before. Walk away from the piece you're working on. Give it space. Let it breathe. Let it marinade and then come back after a while. Work on something else.

No. I disagree. Shit on that. I've done that and it just made coming back all the worse. That anxiety didn't go anywhere. It was still that looming thing that I knew I had to come back to, except I was even further distanced from it and I didn't know where to jump back in.

Don't do it. Double-down on it. Keep smashing your head against that sharp stone wall. There's a reason the Dark Souls franchise is so popular. Keep at it. You got this. You'll figure it out. Don't give up.

'Cause if you do, it may be for good.

Blogging About Blogs

Reading Patrick Rothfuss' latest blog (found here) reminded me that I had been neglecting my own, too. I empathize, sympathize, and commiserate with that man, and everything he says in that blog post. If you've been following along, I've talked about my own mental health in previous posts. While I'm sad Pat is going through what he is going through, I'm glad he shared it. It affects us all. Let's be supportive.

As for my own blog... Wow! Exactly a month since my last blog post. For shame, A.P., for shame!

The last month has been a whirlwind. Setting aside the vacation I took (much needed), my podcast launched! Four of my friends and fellow authors and I have put out episode one of The Genre Hustle! We discuss the craft and what it's like being authors trying to make it in the literary world, while trying to be a virtual writing group for anyone out there without one. Check us out here and subscribe to get new episodes every Monday.

And with the podcast launched, I've been able to refocus on everything else.

First off, let's talk Rat. I am (slowly and not very surely) making my way through this latest revision. There was a point a week ago where I almost walked away from the whole thing. I toyed with the idea of a prolonged break from it. I didn't, though. I doubled down. Now I'm back at it, even though I know I have a lot of work to do.

In the meantime, I'm also refocusing on my tabletop gaming. I've started playing on forums again and I am working on GMing two smaller games for two groups of friends. We'll see how that goes.

So that's what is up with me, or has been up with me. How have you been? How's your writing progressing? How's your mental health? Consider this me officially checking in on you. I want to know.

Talk soon.

POV, Filtering, and the Evolution of Writing

Alright, fantasy nerds, when was the last time you read Lord of the Rings?

I hadn't read the (holy) trilogy or The Hobbit in, let's say, over a decade. I did, recently, and I was shocked by what I found.

My father first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to me when I was two or three. Over the years, I re-read them many times. I mean, many. I would finish Return of the King and within a few weeks I was starting Fellowship again. My family would listen to the books on tape (back in my day, that's what they were called) on road trips. I was obsessed.

Then life caught up with me. Or adulthood. Or my love of video games. Whatever it was, the amount of time I dedicated to reading plummeted. So when I started reading again, I had to make hard calls. Given the choice between reading Fellowship for the 20th time or reading something new, I forced myself to read new things. I still struggle with that.

A few months back, I needed to do some research for my upcoming novel, Rat. Research on medieval and fantasy battles, to be precise. I immediately thought of the battle of Helm's Deep. As a kid, I thought that battle was awesome. So, I re-downloaded The Two Towers onto my Kindle and started reading.

Wow. What a difference a decade makes.

It blew me away how much harder it was for me to get through those chapters. It felt distant and thin. I wanted more. It was a battle and I felt completely detached from any of the drama going on. It read like a battle summary. I just finished The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie not too long ago, also for research, and the difference was stark. It was like the difference of hearing a debriefing in a command tent of a battle versus being a soldier in the middle of the melee.

And what, in my opinion, was to blame? Point of view and filtering.

Point of view is obvious. We've moved from third person omniscient points of view to close third. No longer do we have this bird's eye camera over the entire book, this distant author who can see all and tells us a story like we're around a campfire. Instead, we want our fiction in close, third person. We want it so much that we've even come up with the term "filtering" and have collectively turned our nose up at it. These older fantasy novels are filtered as hell. We are listening to a narrator telling us a story, so we're experiencing it through the narrator.

And that was okay for the time.

Imagine if we'd gotten close POV on Gimli and Legolas as each racked up their tally of kills? A few paragraphs of Gimli grunting and the numbing sensation in his hands as his ax cleaved another orc head. Then a few paragraphs of Legolas zeroing in on targets, near and far, loosing arrows to hit particular areas, his fingers straining against the bowstring. It would be awesome. Instead, the action is narrated distantly and we get filtered action.

In the end, what I had filled in with my imagination was far more detailed and exciting than the words on the page. Sorry Tolkien, I still love you!

Even now, as I'm listening to Raymond E. Feist's Magician: Apprentice, I notice the same thing. I'm never in one single character's point of view. What worked then, gives me whiplash. Never mind all the "he saw"s. It's disorienting.

And there was a time where I wouldn't even have noticed it.

That is one of the hardest things I've had to learn on my never-ending journey as a writer. I grew up reading filtered, distant narrator novels, but that's not what we do now. We are now in the action, in the heads of a single character, experiencing things as if we were them. Look at George R. R. Martin. He's got a bajillion and one point of view characters, but when you're in their POV, you are in it.

And that's what we want. At least for now.

Quarterly Goals (Q2 2018)

One quarter finishes and another begins.

As you may have guessed, I did not do well this quarter. If you missed my earlier blog post on mental health, go ahead and check it out. It'll show you why Q2 2018 was a weak one for me.

Excuses don't count, though.

Q3 2018 has many of the same goals as Q2. Read more, write more, be healthier... but how can I give myself some easier wins? Goals that are both concrete and achievable? Shoot for the moon so you land among the stars, they say, but I say shoot for that wall right in front of you so that you get a feeling of success and don't just give up.

I've taken that into account for my writing. Smaller word count goals, more often, etc. I've added some broader goals, too, with a 3 month deadline. But what can I come up with that will be manageable and help develop good habits?

So, building on what I've been talking about recently, I'm going to think up a few quarterly goals that are more MMORPG-like in nature. "Easy" wins. Things I can check off to keep my momentum up.

Let's see how it goes.