Edward Ashton's Blog, page 6
July 27, 2017
Writing in the Interstices
When I was in graduate school, one of my writing professors pulled me aside after class one evening. He wanted to offer some well-intentioned advice.
“Writing a novel,” he said, “is like launching a rocket into orbit. You can sit there and grind away on the launch pad forever, but if you never achieve escape velocity, you’ll only wind up crashing and burning in the end.”
Setting aside his questionable understanding of orbital mechanics, I got the point he was trying to make. He felt I had too many distractions in my life, and that if I didn’t winnow them down, I would never reach my potential as a writer. He wanted me to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Failing that, perhaps I could at least stop spending so much time eating chicken wings, or running around on a basketball court?
I thanked him politely, but I knew even then that a single-minded focus on writing wasn’t going to work for me.
I’ll preface the rest of this post by saying that I’m not in any way suggesting that the approach that I’ve taken to writing is the only one that works, or even the best one—but it was definitely the best one for me. I’ve always had a lot of different things going on in my life. As an undergrad, I had two majors and a raft of extracurriculars. In graduate school, I got into triathlons. Shortly after that discussion with my writing professor, I met someone. We got married. We had a child, and then we had two more. I got a job, then started teaching classes on the side because children, as it turns out, are expensive.
Through it all, I kept writing. I produced dozens of short stories, as well as two published novels. How?
The answer is that I learned not to need unbroken hours of solitude in order to put words on the page.
I have a friend who’s a very talented writer. He’s sold short pieces to multiple professional markets, won awards, gotten solid reviews—but he hasn’t published anything in years now, because he’s got a young family, and he just doesn’t have the time. He does, though. We all do. Contra my professor, writing—even novel writing—doesn’t have to be accomplished during marathon sessions in a garret somewhere. You don’t need to quit your job, or ignore your children, or alienate your spouse to produce a novel in a surprisingly short amount of time. You just need to learn to write in the interstices.
What do I mean by this? Your life’s interstices are those stretches of time between finishing one important thing and starting another. Classic interstice? The end of lunch. My work generally gives me an hour to cram food down my neck in the middle of the day. I eat a lot, but even so, I don’t actually need that much time. In between the time I finish eating and the time I need to get to my next meeting, I could surf the net, or jaw with my coworkers, or just get my nose back to the grindstone. I don’t. Instead, I usually pull out my laptop and bang out somewhere between a hundred and two hundred words. That doesn’t sound like much—but over the course of a year, those words will add up to half a novel or more.
Once you stop thinking of writing as something that has to be done in a specific place and in big chunks of time, opportunities to add to your word count start to appear everywhere. Waiting for your kid to finish soccer practice? That’s a hundred words, easy. Partner insists on binge-watching The Walking Dead? Half a chapter. Stuck in a desolate canyon with your arm pinned under a boulder? You’ll have to type with one hand, but you ought to be able to finish a short story at least before gnawing your way to freedom.
Anyway, the tl;dr is this: we all have time to write. We just need to stop thinking of writing as the bricks in our life, and start thinking of it as the mortar in between.
Also, writing professors know jack-all about how space travel works. Can’t forget that part.
July 19, 2017
ℚ♫ The End of Ordinary - Edward Ashton
An interview, with artwork and playlist
July 17, 2017
Interview with sci-fi author Edward Ashton
First stop on my globe-spanning blog tour. If you’d like to learn my deepest secrets and/or hear me answer the same questions seventeen different ways, please follow along.
July 16, 2017
And then, there were two.
And then, there were two.
July 4, 2017
Shakespeare's Planet: Clifford D. Simak: 9780399117299: Amazon.com: Books
One of my all-time favorite books, from a master of the genre. It’s got a little bit of philosophy, a little bit of adventure, and a lot of quirky humor. It’s also short enough to blow through in a long summer afternoon. Give it a look if you have a chance.
June 20, 2017
The End of Ordinary: A Novel - Kindle edition by Edward Ashton. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
Well, today’s the day. If you’ve pre-ordered The End of Ordinary, it should be on your device and ready to roll. If you haven’t, now is the time to regular order. That’s fun too.
June 18, 2017
An excerpt from THE END OF ORDINARY
“Seriously?” Micah said. “This is the lair?”
“I told you,” Marta said. “It’s not a lair. It’s a juice bar.”
We were on the second floor of her house, at the end of what seemed at the time like miles of corridors and columns and arches and lots and lots of locked doors. The door in front of us, though, was unlocked and slightly ajar.
“You’re sure he’s here?” Micah asked. “I mean, shouldn’t he be in a darkened study or something?”
Marta pressed her fingers to her eyes.
“Right. With his henchmen. Should he be smoking a cigar?”
“Do you have a cat?”
They both turned to look at me.
“A cat?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s better than a cigar. He should be sitting in a big leather easy chair, petting a cat.”
“No,” Marta said. “We do not have a cat. We also don’t have any leather easy chairs, as far as I know. Dad’s probably sitting at the bar, reading some crappy sci-fi novel on his tablet and drinking a smoothie.”
Micah shook his head.
“That’s not gonna work for me.”
Marta turned to look at him.
“Not gonna work for you?”
“Right,” Micah said. “I can’t beat a guy up while he’s drinking a smoothie.”
“No beating,” I said. “I thought we were clear on that.”
“Right. Right.”
“Look,” Marta said. “We’re just …”
“Marta?”
We all turned to look at the door.
“Yes, Daddy?”
“Would you like to introduce me to your friends?”
June 9, 2017
Rick and the Green Gunslinger | Zach Chapman | Persistent Visions
This is a fun little chunk of weirdness…
June 1, 2017
The Overcast : Overcast 56: Tessa by Edward Ashton
Got a story up on The Overcast today. Bonus: if you listen to the end, you get the true story of one of several times that I almost killed myself while trying to impress a girl. Give it a listen if you have a chance.
