So suddenly after 60 chapters with a pretty clear sense of where I was going, I have hit a bit of a hiccup in Blood of Angels. I don’t know if it is just writer’s block or running into the usual “soft middle” of the story or what, but I feel stuck. If you are one of the handful of folks following the story, don’t worry: I am not abandoning it. But it might take a short while for me to find my footing on it again.
Thanks.
The Ring Makers started out as a necessary exercise. I was suffering from some pretty tough writer’s block and imposter syndrome. I had written some game material in the last couple years but had not been consistent with even that, and was totally bouncing off every piece of fiction I tried.
I knew I needed to do something. I had to get my groove back. A therapist told me “It doesn’t matter how much you write, but if it is important to you, write something. Write a hundred words a day if that is all you have in you.” This was in response to my usual caterwauling about the Elger and Moon sequel, of course, but it managed to somehow stick with me this time.
I still was not ready to go back to that work yet, so instead I decided to just engage in an exercise with two foci: to write every day, and to write exactly 100 words. Both are a little harder than it sounds.
Writing every day is tough, even when you are only talking 100 words. First, you have to actually “put ass to chair and fingers to keyboard” as the great JMS once wrote. It sounds easy until that day you realize it is 11 PM, you are more than a little drunk, and you can’t remember your Google Docs password. In the end, I only missed three days: Christmas Day and two days recently while I was away at TotalCon, all due to exhaustion. But, 97% is still an A so I’ll take it.
Writing exactly 100 words is also hard, but in a fun and challenging way. You may not know this, but I tend to go on a bit. Forcing myself to be concise helped me reign in my worst excesses as a writer and made me really examine the words I was using. Also tense: you can eliminate a lot of unnecessary words by avoiding the passive voice, FYI.
Finally, I want to mention this concept of the “micronovel.” I do not remember where I discovered the term, but what I tried to do with the Ring Makers was not write a novella or novelette, but an actual novel in brief. In other words, I wanted the characters, subplots, and complexities of a novel told in brief. But that brevity could not simply be an outline. My 100 word chapters were not intended to serve as a sketch of a 1000 word chapter. Instead, I wanted to tell the story through flashes, moments that told you the overall story without having to tell you everything. I feel like I was generally successful.
So, what is next? I am going to leave The Ring Makers “in the drawer” for a little while while I work on my next daily project (upping my daily word count to see if I can maintain it). When I revisit it, the goal will be to polish it and publish it via Amazon.
Thanks everyone that followed along this process with me. More than once, your readership, likes and comments kept me going when I might have abandoned The Ring Makers. You’re the best.
I have fought with writer’s block and imposter syndrome before, of course. I don’t know a creative person that has not had to deal with some variation of those things. This most recent bout was something new, though. Not entirely, but a new flavor of both, blended together like a soft serve swirl cone of depression and anxiety.
Long story short: the lack of traction that Elger and the Moon has gained hit me hard and threw me for a loop. I know it is silly. I had no logical reason to believe it would do well other than blind hope and the fact that I think it is really good — a belief built not on hubris but on what others have said and how they have rated and reviewed the novel. Anyway, that isn’t really the point of this (admittedly self indulgent) post. The point is that I hoped, and in hoping I set myself up for a fall. All I fell pretty hard.
The knock out blow came on June 1. I put some money into one of those “we’ll list your book in our email out to 80K subscribers” things. I was not really looking for it to explode, with thousands or even hundreds of purchases. And I was not even really worried about the money. What I hoped (and, again, here is where I got myself into trouble) was that it would boost sales enough to result in more good reviews and it would start to snowball.
I made five sales that day. Then, crickets.
Up until that point I was still riding the high from release. People were telling me how much they liked it. They were recommending it to friends and family, even getting it into their school library in one case. And even though I knew, intellectually, to keep my expectations low, I dared to hope. Maybe hoping wasn’t the mistake, but tying those hopes to that $40 promo definitely was. In any case, the high was driving me to work on the follow up novel, chronicling the consequences of Elger’s choices.
Then those five fucking purchases rolled in and I stopped writing. I mean, why bother? Why would you write a sequel to a novel no one but your friends are ever going to read? Why write at all? If the one you thought was really good was invisible, what was the point of bothering at all?
I was, creatively speaking, living in that house at the top of this post. I couldn’t even be bothered to write a goddamn blog post, let alone work on a novel or even a short story.
So, what changed? Maybe it was just time. Maybe it was some reflection. Maybe I just managed to retroactively lower my expectation so much that it felt like a win since I did not sell zero copies. In the end, though, I think it was the realization at some point that there was a kind of freedom in failure here. I like Elger and his world. I also like experimental writing and different genres and forms. I can write whatever I want, however I want, because there is no pressure to succeed at it for a living, because ultimately there’s no chance of that. I am not going to be able to quit my job and write full time and jet set across the country and world going to signings and conventions. If I want the next story in Elger’s “Awakened World” to be a tabletop role-playing game or a choose you own adventure or an epic Seussian poem, I can do that.
I am going to go ahead and write Elger 2. I am going to hire my cover artist and editor again and I am going to publish ti through Amazon. I am going to finish at least this duology. Not because I need it to sell or because I think the sequel ill be the one that gets the ball rolling. I am going to do it because I want to and, frankly, it isn’t like I can go through my life not writing.
So — thanks for not buying Elger and the Moon, I guess.
This is going to be one of those posts where I just sort of meander on a subject. You’ve been warned.
I have never seen the end Battlestar Galactica (the new one, I mean). I really, really loved that show. It was gritty, well acted, complex and surprising. Plus, it had one of the best starship battle scenes in the history of forever.
The thing is, I have a difficult time letting things go. In the last half season of Galactica, I realized that it was almost over. I knew that soon there would be an honest to goodness End, and I knew that if I watched that End, then it would really be Over. That sort of thing happens a lot. I am about 2/3 of the way through Arkham Knight now, which is a beautiful Batman Simulator. I know the End is coming there too: not just the game or even the franchise, but also Mark Hamill as the Joker. Ever since 1992 Mark Hamill has been the Joker. Heath Ledger was A great Joker, but Hamill was THE Joker. Until the end of Arkham Knight. After that, no more.
It seems that I have a pattern: the more I adore a thing, the less likely I am to actually finish it. There is something in that finality that bothers me in a way I cannot truly articulate. I know only that I freeze up inside a little and start looking for escape routes. And the longer I have been with a thing, the more difficult it is to push through my inherent resistance to finishing it. For example, tonight I finally finished listening to the audiobook of The Stand by Stephen King. It was really, really good. I was enraptured the whole time. At the end there, in say the last 4 or 5 hours of the 47 hour story, I almost stopped listening to it. I was afraid for how it would end, what would happen to characters beloved and reviled. It is not a simple matter of not believing the ending won’t be the one I would prefer or the one I would come up with, but not wanting an ending to it at all.
This issue affects my own writing, too. I have a lot of unfinished manuscripts floating around in hard drives. Some of them are unfinished because they suck, but many are unfinished because I don’t want to see the end of them. I don’t trust myself with the right end, or I do and I still don’t want it to be over and gone. I am in the final act of my current novel now and I feel the anxiety rising the closer I get to the finale — and it is not even the end of the story, since this novel represents just one adventure of the protagonist in a world I explicitly designed to cover centuries of stories. Even so, the ending looms massive and terrible in front of me and I have to force myself to keep driving toward it.
I guess endings are a lot like death, of which I am not a great fan. Or, to put it more honestly, death scares me to my bones and the thought of it, if I linger too long, can actually lead me to panic attacks. Finality is immense, whether it is of a life or of a story — and what is a life but a story?
I don’t know if I will ever watch the end of Battlestar Galactica or if I will ever play the end of Arkham Knight. I do know that I will finish this novel (and the next one, and the next one) because at least in writing I can decide when and how the rebirth happens, where the new story emerges from the end of the last. In fiction one consumes, as in life, you don’t get to pick how it ends and sometimes the ending can be bitter and unsatisfying.
First of all — sorry for the delay of the promised Magical Monday and Wicked Wednesday entries using the random method i outlines last time. I got hung up on the impending announcement of the 32 Round 1 winners of Paizo’s RPG Superstar 2015 contest. I decided to enter this year and was wringing my hands over it. When I did not pass the round, i got hit with the rejection blues, which prompted this post about rejection and my response to it.
I would like to say I am a thick skinned writer, happy to wallpaper my den with rejection letters until I finally sell that story. The truth is I am not. Every rejection letter hurts and takes an axe to my confidence. I have been writing stories in one form or another literally since I learned to write, and before that I was telling those stories. It is something I feel I am good at. It comes naturally and I derive a kind of pleasure from it that is unlike any other I know. When i sit back after having immersed myself in a piece of prose for hours, I feel somehow elevated, exalted even. And because I am an extrovert and an exhibitionist, I want to not only share those things with other people, I want to receive praise for them. In other words, I want people to read what I write, love it and tell me so.
But because I place so high a premium on that approval I set myself up for disappointment and even pain when I present my work to be judged. I used to want to go the self publishing route (made easy these days with Kindles and the like) in order to bypass the “gatekeepers.” “Why should I get a form letter rejection,” i asked myself and anyone within earshot, “just because the slush reader had a fight with his wife that morning?” The reality is, though, that I toyed with self publishing as a way to avoid rejection at the hands of an editor. Rejection without any context or explanation, such as those form letters, is even worse because my imagination (the same thing that got me into this mess in the first place) runs wild with the worst possible explanations for my failure.
With the RPG Superstar contest, it was an especially difficult rejection because the one kind of writing I have done professionally is writing for role-playing games. I honestly expected to do well, if not take the whole thing, because I know games and gaming and gamers. Or, at least, I thought I did until about 5 PM EST last night when my name was not on the “winners” list. Rejection always undermines my confidence in my writing ability, but this struck even deeper into my identity. What if I was not just a bad writer, but a bad gamer as well?
Intellectually, I get it: even if what I wrote was my best work (and it really wasn’t; I threw it together relatively quickly close to deadline) there were hundreds if not thousands of entries. More to the point, rejection happens. My brain gets that. But my guts and my heart hate that fact and it makes me feel like deleting every manuscript I have and never stringing more than three words together on paper ever again. Usually, it is weeks or even months before I try again after I get two or three stories rejected. And, of course, it is exacerbated when I read some terribly written tripe that some editor bought and published or I see that Moan For Bigfoot made its author thousands of dollars.
Then I remember that the difference between those shit authors finding some success and me, well, not is not based on talent, it is based on perseverance. Bigfoot lady (or fellow) wrote that crap and stood behind it and put it out there. What’s more, she (or he) was not accepted by thousands but rejected by the millions that did not buy it — but found success anyway, despite all that rejection. Those other authors, those ones that could not build a plot with a set of Legos, they sold that story or novel because they stuck with it. Maybe they sent that story to one hundred editors until they caught one off guard and under deadline. Maybe they sent one hundred stories to that one editor who finally bought one out of compassion. In either case, perseverance sold that story.
So, catharsis complete, it is time to get back to work.
Oh, and here is my “losing” RPG Superstar 2015 entry in all its failure-y glory:
[b]Armor, Living Sand[/b]
Aura faint transmutation; CL 9th; Weight 40 lbs.; Price 20,000 gp
DESCRIPTION
When first encountered, this strange “armor” appears as nothing more than a ball of sparkling, wet sand the size of a child’s ball. When touched by a sentient creature it shudders as if alive and if one of its command words (see below) is uttered, it stretches and flows to cover the creature’s torso and limbs.
The “sand” is actually a colony of infinitesimal animated objects. They move freely or lock into place, depending on their need, so that the whole mass or portions can be supple or rigid. In this way, the Living Sand Armor is able to emulate light, medium or heavy armor.
Each armor type of which the living sand can take form requires a separate command word. Speaking the command is a standard action and in no case can the armor change form more than one per round. In each of its forms, the armor has the following statistics:
Light Armor: Armor Bonus+5, Max Dex +4, Check Penalty -1
Medium Armor: Armor Bonus +7, Max Dex+3, Check Penalty -3
Heavy Armor: Armor Bonus+10, Max Dex +1, Check Penalty -5
The wearer’s speed is affected as normal for armor of the given type.
There is a mild psionic component to the living sand, causing the armor to take on a style and shape unique to the wearer. The material originated in Numeria but has long since spread throughout the Inner Sea.
Living Sand Armor is particularly sought after by barbarians and rangers.
CONSTRUCTION REQUIREMENTS
Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Craft Construct, animate object Cost 10,000 gp
For some months, I have been having trouble with Writer’s Block, especially when trying to write fiction. But here’s the thing: as soon as I decided to refocus this blog on 5th Edition D&D, I have written over 8,000 words — I know, that is not a lot compared to many of you, but compared to the 0,000 I was writing before, it sure is. A small portion of that has been my Guardians of the Galaxy review, but the majority has been writing game related articles. At first I was surprised,a nd then I was concerned: am I incapable of writing fiction? Have I exhausted my ability to create stories? Don’t get me wrong: I love game writing. I cut my professional writing teeth on game writing, for White Wolf Publishing’s Exalted and for Sword & Sorcery Studios’ Gamma World d20. But real life intervened and it has been a very long time since I have done any professional game writing. And, if I am being honest, I do not foresee a career in writing game material at $.04 per word.
Then, something occurred to me: the little articles I have been writing here for D&D 5E are stories. More specifically, they are made up of many little stories. I am not a game designer — they do math and play test things and generally make games work correctly. I am a game writer — I come up with some wacky stuff that makes for a fun experience around a table with a bunch of your friends. When I write about Fantastic Fountains, Vicious Monster Variants, or Pommel Stones of Power, what I am really doing to creating a handful of small stories in each of those articles and asking you, the reader and game player, to jump into that story. I could limit my Vicious Variants to a couple of sentences adjusting the monsters’ game statistics — after all, the stated goal is simply to provide more utility from those creatures while awaiting the arrival of the official D&D 5E Monster Manual — but instead each one gets a couple hundred words. Why? Because tabletop role playing games like D&D are themselves stories, series of linked tales that comprise one grand epic (which may or may not end with the “heroes” in the stomach of a hungry troll).
Realizing this has been helpful. I know that I am not stuck in the ghetto of game writing instead of writing actual stories. I am writing stories, and it is a short step from here back into the world of prose fiction. And, just as importantly, there’s nothing wrong with being here in the first place: game writing isn’t a lesser form, and even if the pay isn’t as good, well, no one is paying for my fiction at this point either. ;)
Thanks for reading, and if you are enjoying what I do, don’t forget to Share and Like.
There is a tyranny in knowledge, an oppressive regime of awareness. If ignorance is bliss, then knowing is Hell.
For perhaps a month now, I have suffered from Writer’s Block — why did I capitalize “Writer’s Block” I wonder? Is it a Named Thing, an Entity in itself, rather than a state of my own being? — of a depth and intensity I cannot recall having previously suffered. This is not to say that I have never suffered from it before; I have many times stared at a blank page or screen, or sat re-reading the last paragraph I wrote in a story over and over trying to force the next words to come. But at least then I managed to bring myself to the table (or desk, as it were) and lay my fingers upon the keyboard before uncertainty, fear, inattention of simple laziness stopped me. This past month, I have not even managed that. I have gone well past my usual procrastination — using exercise or video games or whatever to push off opening up Google Docs — and moved into active avoidance, fearful skulking as if being hunted, like my Muse had been transformed into a hungry beast.
I realized that the Writer’s Block had taken control yesterday when, between rounds of Blizzard’s new, highly addictive card game Hearthstone, I actually did the dishes, folded the laundry and cleaned up the dog shit just to have something to do besides going downstairs and writing. Upon realizing this, I was forced to ask myself, “Why?” What was so terrible that I could not even bring myself to simply re-read, let alone revise, a story I have been sitting on for ages? It is not as if I am not thinking about stories and writing and game design and all the other things I usually think about while running or driving or reading (I often have difficulty focusing on a well written piece because it will inspire my own imagination and thought processes; oh, the irony).
It hit me while I was procrastinating via the Internet (if some malevolent force wanted life and progress to come to a grinding halt so it could conquer us all, it could have designed no more perfectly insidious a weapon than the World Wide Web). I was reading something linked from SF Signal about writing and selling and publishing, when it all came crashing into my mind at once: the many thousands of books selling single digit copies on Amazon, the millions of blogs and websites (just like this one) with one or two hits per post, the ridiculous success of some very few apparently randomly selected works. For a while now I have been reading blogs and magazines and columns by writers and editors and publishers (self and otherwise) and it all distills to a singular fact: in this noise, whatever words I have, however valid or entertaining or unique, I am but a whisper in the din of a hurricane.
Futility. That is the knowledge I gained, and it crushes me.
For the past few weeks, a combination of day-job stress and personal blahs has given me quite the case of writer’s block. I could go into a long screed on writer’s block — why’s, wherefore’s, theories, strategies — but not only has that stuff been tackled before by far greater writers than I, it’s boring. Suffice it to say that I hereby declare the month of October to be “Bloctober!”
What is “Bloctober?” I don’t know for sure what form it will take, but in the lead up to National Novel Writing Month (that’s November for the uninitiated) the goal is to work out the writer’s block and get in good mental and creative shape to be able to power through a novel come next month. The crux of that simply writing, every day, even when I don’t feel like it or aren’t creatively “there.” It’s like “100 Days, 100K” but without the overinflated sense of self worth.
Here’s to Bloctober! Hope to see you there.
I.E. 