E.C. Fuller's Blog, page 2

Story Inspiration: Perceiver

My new book, Perceiver, came out today, August 31st, 2021.

Perceiver is about a young girl, Hattie Flores, whose parents are kidnapped by creatures from an alternate world known as Tsava. Hattie makes a deal with one of the creatures. She would work for him for five years, and in return, she would get her parents back. But she quickly becomes tangled in Tsava’s mysteries and soon discovers she has a greater role to play.

People keep telling me, “Your first book! How exciting!” And I’m like, “Yeah!” Because it is! But I’ve worked on Perceiver and its sequels for so long—a decade, in fact—that I mostly think, finally. Here is this thing I’ve carved from hours, day dreams and words. Whenever I read author acknowledgements in other books I’m always shocked to see how many names appear. The parents, editors, friends, first readers… To list all the people whose lives and stories nourished Perceiver would make the book one hundred times longer. I wouldn’t know many of their names. They would be the people who inspired the authors who inspired me. They would be the parents, the lovers, the rivals, the enemies, the names written in the flyleaves of the family Bible in different inks and hands.

I cannot separate the creation of Perceiver from becoming a writer: of growing aware of my place in the world, discovering what I value and fear, and what I need to write.

❧

I had before been an avid reader and hobby writer. I took up a professional attitude toward writing when I was 16. I spent hours after school typing up my stories on a desktop unconnected to the internet. I wasn’t thinking of writing as a profession then, but I already knew I would write for the rest of my life.

The man who kickstarted my drive to be a professional was Al Young. I met him at the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute; he taught the poetry discipline. One day I asked him, “Do you write every day, even if you’re not inspired?”

His answer stuck in my brain: “Every day.”

Sometime that fall after the arts camp, I discovered and gorged myself on John Steinbeck’s work: Cannery Row, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath. I fancied myself smart and had strong opinions of what great writing should be— full of elaborate description, wisdom, characters real enough to talk to— and Steinbeck’s writing was the very model of Great. From a selection of his diaries, published in the Paris Review, I found this quote:

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.”

John Steinbeck

I thought, psh, I bet I can do two pages.

I bought a knockoff Moleskine notebook (Fauxskine) and tried to write every day. It was the first time I wrote even when I didn’t want to. It was like turning on a rusty faucet. I had to put muscle into it, and sometimes only a trickle came out, and I had to wait for the words to dribble filter down the page before I could let go. But it got easier to turn the faucet on every day.

Then as a junior at the Oklahoma School for Science and Mathematics (OSSM), my workload was immense: microbiology, mechanics, world literature, Japanese II, etc. OSSM has mandatory study time from 8:00pm to 10:00pm. But if you were a really good student, you’d study after lights out. My roommate studied; I wrote. We put construction paper shades over our desk lamps so no excess light would leak under the door, and we turned our pages gingerly so the hall monitors wouldn’t hear them and catch us. Sometimes I wouldn’t finish writing until past midnight, getting so sleepy my words would wander above and below the lines.

On January 1st, 2011, I decided to give my vow an official shine, and made it my New Year’s Resolution. I made the whole year without skipping a single day. On January 1st, 2012, I thought, Okay, encore!

Pictured, over 120 journals, diaries, and notebooks. Funny story: I tried to go up to 3 pages every year afterward, but I just couldn’t stick to it. I tricked myself into writing more by buying larger journals. I was finally able to go up to three pages after graduating from college in 2016.

I began writing Perceiver when I was a senior at OSSM. The story began from a few elements: The nursery rhyme about Jack and Jill, and a picture I found on StumbleUpon of a girl falling from the sky and a long-limbed young man in suspenders running to catch her. Elements from the movie Spirited Away and the Russian fairytale Vasilissa and Baba Yaga found their way into the story. Girls who braved new worlds, made friends and enemies, and who fought for what they believed in. Girls of courage, ingenuity, and compassion, who felt older than they were and angry at the state of the world.

I had no doubt it would be a bestseller. I was special, destined for great things.

The early drafts of Perceiver imitated my favorite books: The Bartimaeus trilogy, The Mysterious Benedict Society trilogy, The Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy, His Dark Materials trilogy. Perceiver is a trilogy because I thought that’s what you had to write! I also thought that books had to be about good and evil.  I imagined battles between good and evil looked like CGI orcs smashing into elves and monologues before battles, after battles, during battles. But I didn’t know what good and evil looked like personally.

I kept writing. I finished the first draft of Perceiver my first year of college, and wrote the sequel and conclusion my second and third year.

After college, I floundered. A close family member had a mental health crisis that lasted over a year. I worked several part-time jobs that led to nothing. I submitted short stories everywhere and got rejected. I revised Perceiver blindly, at a loss for how to make it better. I prized my determination and hard work but berated myself because I felt that I was still smart and didn’t need to, shouldn’t be, struggling. Especially with writing–the one thing I thought I was good at.

During this time, fiction, especially YA, especially YA fantasy, failed to sustain me the way it had in middle and high school. When I read stories about chosen ones, I thought, “Well, aren’t you special.” The characters’ bravery pointedly reminded me how I failed to live up to the values I wrote about and read about: those of courage and caring, of making the world a better place, of spunkiness and standing up for what was right. I felt like I was a minor villain in the story of my own life. I wanted to make the world a better place, but in the abstract sense. I was aware of the evils of the world, but it didn’t spur me to take action. I cared about writing and reading more than anything, and didn’t–still don’t–want to do anything else.

I recently read George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Saunders admits that if he knew stories actively made the world a worse place, he would still do it. I thought, Same, dude, same. I no longer feel as if I’ve ever been chosen or called. At least, not in the way that somebody would single you out for greatness. I felt like I was a fraud for writing about good and evil without knowing either.

I thought more, read more, wrote more. More importantly, I lived more. As an Americorp member, I met amazing, ordinary people who tried to change the world. A complete stranger comforted me during one of the worst days of my life and I glimpsed grace, something I’d always believed was hooey. I experienced evil.

Every time I thought I knew something for sure, the world would turn around and say, “Oh, really?” and hit me with a counter argument. I couldn’t always argue back. I realized that my answers to the major questions of human life were at best unexamined and at worst dishonest. More and more, I wrote to find honest answers. My stories stopped rehashing old answers to big questions. Instead, they asked better questions, which the characters would fumble and wrestle to answer.

The first book of the Perceiver trilogy asks, “What does it mean to be chosen?” The protagonist tries desperately to avoid the question. Why? Between the first draft and the final draft, I learned this: the answers to big questions need to be experienced. Those experiences rend your life apart.

The only thing I’ve been chosen to do is write every day, usually from the hours of 8pm-10pm, sometimes until midnight, and to pay attention. The endeavor of writing Perceiver and the friendships, missed connections, and communions with other people helped me become the writer I needed to be. Perceiver is not entirely mine.

I hope it will be something people will slide off the shelf and enjoy centuries later. I hope when I’m dead and famous some kid somewhere will read this blog article and thinks, Two pages? Psh, I can do that.

You can read the summary and the first chapter of Perceiver here and purchase it here.

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2021 Mid-Year Review

It’s time for the mid-year review!

Somebody took this candid video of me when I was a middle aged man in a football stadium and I don’t know how they found me but they did.

Things are happening. I have—

Major Book News

My debut novel, Perceiver, is available for pre-order on Amazon!

You can read the first chapter here. I’ll write about the process of writing Perceiver and the trilogy as a whole as the books are released.

In other publishing news, “Singot” was published in Metaphorosis Magazine, and an upcoming short story, “The Hole in the System”, to be published in Hexagon Speculative Magazine September 1st. You can read “Singot” here. I’ll edit this post when “Hole” drops.

“Singot” is about a kindergarten teacher, Stacey, who has a new student in her class: an alien named Poche. Poche is a Sinmai, who can share their thoughts and experiences perfectly through touching palms with another Sinmai, through a process called singot. While a powerful form of communication, singot has its limits. Singot can only be done in person, and the Sinmai must singot frequently and with a large number of Sinmai to stay healthy. They travel to Earth to learn about verbal and written communication from humanity. Stacey must help Poche learn how to communicate, even while she struggles to articulate what it even means to understand another person.

You can read more about what inspired “Singot” here.

“A Hole in the System” is about an opera singer and her fiance who become infected by holes. When things don’t make sense, the singer tries to make her own, even as her world turns into a sieve.

Hours

In my 2020 Year in Review, I mentioned how I would be tracking my hours by project rather than by writing, editing, etc. Here are my results for my most worked-upon projects so far for 2021.

Reading, as usual, is the tallest bar. This will not change, ever.

The next biggest bar is my diary. I have written three pages every day since 2011. Usually it’s three pages of whatever project I’m working on at the time, but during 2020, I switched to writing in my diary. I will sometimes take snippets from my diary to weave into my writing, but about 99% of what goes in doesn’t go out. I wondered whether to include it here as a project, because it isn’t a project, technically. But it helps me straighten my thoughts before I put them in blog posts, stories, or social media, and it helps keep me sane, so I’m including it. I’m trying to shift the three pages back to fiction, but I’d like to keep writing at least a page or two a day to keep it up.

Perceiver 2 (working title) takes up the next largest bar. It’s my big project this year. I will send chapters to my writing group in August, and it is scheduled to go to my editor in December

The fourth largest bar is “Plague of Doppelgangers”… a short story. It’s driving me crazy. It should not take nearly 60 hours to draft and revise a sub-5,000 word short story! Even 20 hours is pushing it. The graph shows “Singot” (around 6,000 words) at 20 hours, but I did the bulk of the work last fall. “Singot” probably took longer. I’ve worked on it for so long, I’m numb to the pleasures of why I started writing it in the first place. I’ve sent it off to writing group to get fresher eyes.

I’m challenging myself to take a 4,000 word short story from draft to done in 10 hours or less. I’m sure some of you will say even 10 hours is too much. Maybe it is. But it’s an improvement over what I have been doing, and it’s reachable, so I’m going to try it. 

Review

Six days into the new year, an insurrection. I got vaccinated, returned to working in the office in April, and nearly got scammed out of my life savings. I started a new exercise routine and lost weight. My left eye started twitching. I got two story acceptances and scheduled Perceiver to drop August 31st. My office lost our email and network drives for two weeks because of the Kaseya attack. Now at the tail end of July, the Delta variant of COVID-19 is picking up steam in my neck of the woods. 

So what happened in the first six months of 2021?

I’ve been trying to get back to normal, but it feels wrong to pretend that normal is here. More and more, I write to find something to believe in. Mostly I believe in friends and family and the people who try to make the world a better place. And I believe in the three pages, thinking, and reading.

Having “Singot” and a “Hole in the System” snatched up by magazines and seeing good reviews for Perceiver 1 heartens me. There’s a place for my weird little fiction out there. And perhaps as the world wobbles on its axis and heatwaves warp the horizon, weird is the necessary shape of the door that leads to a better future.

Things are happening, and so am I.

E. C. Fuller

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Book Announcement: Perceiver has dropped!

There is no non-annoying way to champion your debut novel, so forgive me for believing that it’s DAMN GOOD, that it’s the first book of a trilogy that will GLUT AND GUT you, that if you like ADVENTURE TIME, RUSSIAN FAIRYTALES, and SPIRITED AWAY, you will love it more than all three of those combined, and YOU CAN ORDER IT HERE and READ THE FIRST CHAPTER HERE, and I’m done with capitalization and self-deprecation, forgive me, it’s just that good.

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Book Announcement: Perceiver is available for pre-order!

There is no non-annoying way to champion your debut novel, so forgive me for believing that it’s DAMN GOOD, that it’s the first book of a trilogy that will GLUT AND GUT you, that if you like ADVENTURE TIME, RUSSIAN FAIRYTALES, and SPIRITED AWAY, you will love it more than all three of those combined, and YOU CAN PRE-ORDER IT HERE and READ THE FIRST CHAPTER HERE, and I’m done with capitalization and self-deprecation, forgive me, it’s just that good.

And when it drops August 31st, 2021, the whole world will know.

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Story Inspiration: “Singot”

Before I can understand something, I have to be able to explain it to myself. In the case of love, the explanation had to be a story. That story was “Singot”.

“Singot” was published in Metaphorosis Magazine today, July 2nd, 2021. You can read and listen to it here.

I wrote a short piece on what inspired “Singot” and what I was hoping to solve in Metaphorosis, but there’s so much that went into the story that I want to expand my post.

As I wrote for Metamorphosis, “Singot” was inspired by the episode “High Voltage (Emotions Part Two)” on the Invisibilia podcast on NPR. 

“In 1967, anthropologists Renato Rosaldo and his wife, Shelly, went to live with the llongot, an isolated tribe that lived in the rain forest in the Philippines. It wasn’t exactly an accident that this tribe was unstudied — it was known for beheading people.

[…]

But Renato and Shelly were undeterred. As they immersed themselves in llongot culture, they began to learn the language. Simple words at first, then more nuanced ones that encompassed such things as love and anger. To Renato, all of the words were familiar except one.

Liget.

[…]

[Renato] tried to gain a deeper understanding, but defining liget was like trying to describe the color blue without ever seeing it.”

from the article on NPR.

The idea of discovering a new emotion gripped me. But I didn’t understand why until maybe four drafts into “Singot”. At first, I was just engrossed with the concept. The scenario was inspired by this tumblr screenshot:

Kindergarten teachers and aliens? What could be better?

It’s a more profound post than the poster intended. Like, true: aliens would need to have their hands held to learn about Earth. Who better to hold a hand than a kindergarten teacher? But I think it’s also saying that we aren’t born knowing how to be human. We learn through curiosity and exploration with the guidance of others.

I had also been reading Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, by Douglas Hofstadter, a stair-step thick tome about language and cognition. I have a few themes I like to return to in my stories, those of loneliness, curiosity, decency, shame. And of course, as a writer, language is my playground. Language, the way it works, how it’s used, and how might an alien understand differently… it was like a chain-reaction of cool ideas that themselves caused more cool ideas and I was just like, Oh man, oh man, oh man!

I had great fun scribbling on my whiteboard, researching linguistics, drawing word maps, and just thinking about how it all fits together. While revising and thinking, I often thought, “This is what I like about writing.”

Singot word map

As I worked through the drafts, the story still seemed unfinished. The language research and the scenario overwhelmed the point of the story— which I was missing too. I was avoiding saying something. It wasn’t until I admitted it did the story come together: I was asexual, and I didn’t want to be. I had already felt disconnected from other people. If I can’t feel sexual attraction–this thing that 99% of other people feel–will my stories be complete? Don’t even get me started on romantic attraction. I’ve been alone so long I don’t know if I feel that either.

The story was, at first, the quest to discover a new emotion. Singot. It would parallel the protagonist’s determination to discover her definition of love, one that meshed with her asexuality.

BUT. That idea didn’t work. I knew intellectually that asexuality merely means that I don’t experience sexual attraction, and that these worries were just insecurity. It also didn’t make sense with the starting inspirations of language and cognition. The moral of that version of the story, You feel love after all! made me rankle. Bitch, I know it.

What I didn’t know was whether I was actually asexual. What if I had experienced sexual attraction, and I just didn’t pay attention to my reaction enough to identify it? What if I was just super picky? But if I didn’t know what it felt like, didn’t that answer the question? I concluded the only real way to know was to compare what I felt to somebody else. Hence, singot. The complete understanding of someone’s entire life.

But even then, “Singot” didn’t have a thruline, a spine. There were too many threads: asexuality, language, loneliness. Until I came across this article on Aeon. 

The Space Between Our Heads

Brain-to-brain interfaces promise to bypass language. But do we really want access to one another’s unmediated thoughts?

https://aeon.co/essays/why-language-r...

This article blew the top of my skull off. It introduced me to ideas I had perceived vaguely and brought them into focus. The concept of plural subjects. The idea that language gives us selection and negotiation. And the Zulu quote that would become the center of not just “Singot”, but of my life: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Or, “We become people through other people.”

To sum, we have a lot to lose if we lose language. Everything that makes us human and what makes life worth living.

The final lines of “Singot” are my answer to the question of how I will live.

You can read it here.

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Writing for Others and the Consequences to Our Humanity

Hello friends, 

I used to believe that writing for an audience betrayed my authentic self (whatever that was). I was lucky, but also just a little screwed, to have wonderful teachers who encouraged me to write however I wanted, instead of reports on books you have to read for English class, with prompts like, “What is the symbolism behind Johnny shooting his dog?”, usually in that god awful five-paragraph style. Writing was the most fun when I didn’t have to worry about what someone else thought about my Goose Game fanfiction. I didn’t have to worry about people rejecting my stories.

But I was an ambitious kid. One who ached to prove that she was as good as she thought she was. I joined workshops and school papers. Sometimes I bombed but kept at it. Writing for other people, I thought, would kill my natural, effervescent, untamed, unique writing style.  

But I still liked writing, even if I liked writing for others a little less. This led me to jobs writing. When you write for your job, you quickly learn that writing is good or bad depending on the needs, wants, and expectations of the audience. Ads are a snap to write when you know what businesses expect an ad to do: Show the consequences of buying and not buying the product. Buy a washing machine that plays a little jingle when it’s done. Or, suffer the lip-curl of the hostess as you strut into a soiree, encrusted in filth.

But what do audiences expect from fiction? The meaning of Johnny blowing the brains out of his Pekinese. Theoretically, homework is meant for kids to prove that they understand what great stories do: they show the consequences to our humanity by choosing one path over the other1. Shoot the scrap of bark and fluff, or let it live to bite you.

But I thought expectations were satisfied by writing mechanics, not story—about the medium, not the content—and focused on writing beautiful, but empty sentences. But as the years passed and rejections filled my inbox, I realized that my writing felt thin and dull. I didn’t like anything I wrote, and I didn’t know how to write stuff that I liked.

So I did what I usually do when I felt like crap. I turned to the books that made me want to be a writer. Ray Bradbury’s short stories, Harry Potter, the many trilogies of Middle Grade fiction. But I also turned to new inspirations, Junot Diaz, Ted Chiang, Ann Carson, Italo Calvino, and in them I felt found, seen, and spoken to. They knew that each sentence changes the perceptions of the ones that came before it and the expectations of the ones that come after. They knew what was going on in the world and responded to it. They knew what readers whisper to themselves when they’re alone and answer them. In other words, they were extremely aware of how readers read and what they expect.

So I wrote a story about what would happen if I controlled everyone whose name was the same as mine. Which you can read here. And I tried to be honest about why I found the idea so appealing. I feel like I spy on life, and I write like I’m talking to myself, hoping to be overheard. (And publishing, I suppose, is talking loudly to yourself near the table where the editors brunch). I guess I was trying to work out what exactly I needed. I talked to myself because I needed someone to talk to me. It led to my first publication in a literary magazine.

It was a year before I had another story accepted. I tell myself that it’s because I mostly write novels, not short fiction. Really, nobody published me again because I still had the problem I had before I was published. When the author doesn’t worry about the audience, reading is less fun for the readers. Readers want to know the things you’re afraid to say aloud, what you’re afraid to admit to yourself, the weird, the whacky, and the wonderful. Writing for others boomerangs back to you. When you learn what readers like to read, how they read, you learn to put names to things that you like when you read, but didn’t know was a thing. You can then consciously work those things into your writing. It’s fun to understand, “Oh, that’s how Great Writer did that.” It’s amazing to get a reader to respond to your work. You learn what matters to you by writing for other people.

While there are many, many writers who write for themselves alone, and somehow make it, more often than not you become somebody who writes just to hear their own voice. Worse, you get stuck in only writing for yourself. Why? Because nobody wants to talk to you, because they get nothing out of it. Until I realized that writing what I liked AND conveying it in an vivid, intelligent, fun, and most importantly, understandable ways was what readers wanted, I was only ever accidentally good.

Let’s not pretend we do this for others and be honest with ourselves. Of course we write for ourselves.

We need to be understood. We may not care to be understood, or feel that our inner lives are too complex or weird or bad to be conveyed, but we need it. Yet, we don’t do enough of the work of making ourselves clear. The logic of why we are who we are and the importance of our thoughts, emotions, and lives to others is not self-evident or a given.

Let this blog post be the voice in your head that replies when you ask yourself whether you should consider the audience: what are the consequences?

E. C. Fuller

1The Fragility of Goodness, by Martha Nussbaum

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Productivity, the pandemic, and me

Good afternoon friends,

I’m thinking about how I can’t separate doing from being. You are what you do, not what you think. So what have I been doing? I’ve been trying to stick to the productivity routine I had before the pandemic. Writing at least 3 pages a day, plus editing, plus typing up. At least 3 hours of work per day, on top of my day job. I have a writing system that I use to keep me accountable, whose products I’ve reviewed here. What am I supposed to do with myself if I don’t write? I don’t know who I would be without writing.

But wowee, I need some lightness in my life. I couldn’t bear to drop [the 3 pages] while working from home, so the journals I wrote in shrank, from Muji B5 Plantation Paper notebooks to the palm-sized Field Notes. I also largely stopped writing fiction, except in telegraph-like bursts on index cards. Instead I kept a strict diary. I felt like it was necessary, urgent, and important to pay attention to these historic, unprecedented, and interesting times.

Except, I paid attention to myself. My diary whines and wallows about my job, writing, money, thoughts on writing. I berated myself for not being productive and was resentful and suspicious of people who could be. I would set habits and almost immediately break them. I would then beat myself up for not sticking to them. And then, paradoxically, horribly, if I did keep them, I felt constrained. I would roll out of bed into t-shirt and yoga pants into work then out of work to lunch and a brisk walk and then back to work and then out of work to dinner and then slump into recliner to read my old favorites and remember that I had been trying to make something like this. This being that something that gives books the flavor of life. And then I’d sit at my desk and try to scratch out something that had that flavor. But what is that flavor? My writing was rotten, un-imaginative, un-fun. I questioned what I wrote. Was it needed? Was it wanted? I knew the pandemic would end, as all things do, but when? Would I be okay? What about my family, friends? When was the last time I had loved someone? These were the questions pinned to my brain as I fell asleep. Sleep rinsed away the anxious lather of the day. But then I would roll out of bed….

And now here we are at the other end (I hope). People are dying, and I’m still wrestling with writing: writing, the activity that nobody is asking you to do. I could harness every FBI and NSA satellite orbiting the Earth and peep at every living human on the planet and will never find who asked. I’m wondering if my obsession with productivity is designed to give some rigor, some flavor of responsibility, to this thing that I spend my time on Earth doing. When the rental period on my body ends and I’m filling out the customer review sheet in front of the pearly gates, will I write, “I got a lot done”? Will St. Peter’s notes in my file say, “Product not used as intended”?

The paradox of writing productivity is thus: Writing takes you out of life, which you need to stay attentive to and involved in, to have something to write about. But, if you don’t write, when you have something worth writing about, you’re not going to have the chops to pull it off.

Yet I think that if I weren’t disappointed with real life in some way, missing some essential connection from people, I wouldn’t be a writer. I have no choice LOL!

The irony of loneliness is that it is shared. It propagates when people turn inward. They may turn inward because they have no choice. Because being a friend, being a family, being a neighbor and a citizen takes work, and we could all use a nap. We share loneliness now with millions of people around the world, whose loneliness manifests as unanswered texts, seeing the future like an unlit road, hoping someone will welcome us at our destination.

“Lean into loneliness like it is holding you.”

But remember: loneliness thaws when you learn to look others in the ‘I’. To write things that matter to others, I go deeply inward until find something that everyone was thinking, feeling, but didn’t have the words to say. Because writing, luckily, is one way to love people from a distance.

With love,

E. C. Fuller

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Characters to Love: Writing Advice

I often remember how one classmate said to me, ‘Why should I care about the lives of these bitchy queens?’ It angered me, but I had to consider it, and defend my choices, and live them, and ask myself if I had failed my characters if my story hadn’t made them matter even to someone disinclined to like or listen to them.

—Alexander Chee, “My Parade”, Buzzfeed

Hello friends,

I have a bunch of systems I use to shape stories, and recently I realized, shoot, I don’t have one for characters. I’ve always found creating good characters rather easy, but if I can make them consistently great, well, that’s gravy.

So we gotta ask, why do readers love certain characters? What makes readers cosplay them, write their dialogue in sticky notes over their desk, quote them in their email signature?

I experimented. I turned the 36 Questions that Lead to Love into a Google Form. When I need to flesh out a character, I fill it out, pretending to write as that character. Because the questions were meant to be answered with a partner, I pretend the partner is another character, someone who means a lot to the first character. If I don’t have an answer, I throw out something random, no matter how squicky, weird, or traumatic, and then what I have is what I have. Unless I think of something dramatically better, I stick with the form.

I think it’s a fantastic system. The questions were for romantic love, but really, you can use them for most kinds of love. It prompts details that create intimacy.

But it’s not enough. The form needs a counterpoint. 36 Questions that Lead to Hate. The salacious stuff you really want to hear!

What gross thing do you do?What did you get away with?What do you lie about? What’s the biggest thing you’ve lied about?What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?Roast your partner in 3 sentences. Extra points for creativity.Rant about something as much as you can in 4 minutes.What’s your unpopular opinion?Who do you hate and why?Tell each other three things you hate about each other; something you would never normally tell a stranger you just met, or even someone you love.

Et cetera. I’m still fleshing them out. Give me good questions in the comments below.

It’s like adding bitters to a cocktail. Making things bitter sounds terrible on the face of it, but it’s how you get that luxurious depth of flavor. The Love Questions create intimacy between characters; the Hate Questions lead to tension. Put them together and you get that wonderful inner and outer tension. Tension leads to conflict; conflict leads to momentum; and then the characters matter.

With love (no hate),

E. C. Fuller

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Best Apps for Surviving 2021 as a Writer

Having trouble writing while juggling the American pandemic experience? Give yourself up to the higher authority and power of apps. Make it easy to accomplish by setting good habits, and make it hard to fail by automating things that block things for you. 

Focus Keeper iOS

(free, pro version $1.99) | Focus Keeper is a time management app. It sets a timer for 25 minutes. You focus on the task for 25 minutes. Then, when the timer dings, you take a break for 5 minutes. Once you’ve completed 4 focus sessions, you take a longer break of 25 minutes. The app is based on the Pomodoro Method, a time-management technique that claims to avoid burn-out and mental fatigue. The app has rave reviews, and seems to be especially popular with those who have ADD / ADHD. 

Freedom

(monthly $6.99, yearly $29.04, forever $129.00 (on sale for $64.50 December 2020!)) | Freedom is an app that blocks digital distractions. I’ve used it for three years, and it helped me avoid the digital quicksands and doom scrolls of the perilous and untamable internet. You install it on your computer, and the app works on phone and computer to block websites and apps for a set amount of time. You list websites and apps to block (and the app will suggest a few to get you started) and schedule time for when you need to focus. 

A subscription also includes perks, like discounts for Scrivener and Bookflow, and extensions for time tracking and limiting the time you spend on certain websites.  

Handwriting to Text Recognizer

(monthly subscription $1.49, remove ads $2.99, and yearly subscription $11.99) | This app does exactly what it says it does. You snap a picture of your handwriting, and the app turns it into editable text. If you have clear print handwriting, the app is extremely accurate. As someone who has written longhand every day for the last decade, I wish I had it ten years ago.

How much time did it save me? I did the math. It takes me one hour to type 725 words, or four pages. Using the app, it takes one hour to photograph 61 pages, and 2.5 hours to clean up the text (3.5 hours total). I estimated that it would take me 15-16 hours to type up the same amount of text. 

However, Handwriting to Text Recognizer requires some finagling to work with your process. The app doesn’t recognize paragraph indentations, and there’s always space between words and punctuation. Cleaning the text is the most time-consuming part of using the app. I wrote a Word macro to catch common errors.

Headspace

(First two weeks free, $12.99/mo or $69.99/yr) | Headspace is the single most impactful app I’ve ever used. It’s a meditation app which includes daily meditations, courses, animations, videos, and articles. Once racing thoughts now drive the speed limit. I can think clearly without being distracted by daydreams. If I’m distracted, I can bring myself back into focus.

The post Best Apps for Surviving 2021 as a Writer appeared first on EC Fuller's Books.

Year in Review: 2020

“2019 will be my springboard into 2020. I feel it.”

Year in Review: 2019 

via GIPHY

Year Statistics

I don’t want to waste time reminding everyone about how bad this year sucked. Let’s get into it.

As of December 30th, 2020, I spent 1273.75 hours toward writing. This is about 420 hours less than 2019 and about 250 less than 2018. Considering everything that’s happened, I’m surprised and pleased it’s this much.

Where did the hours go? They escaped from writing and reading. The good news is I spent more time editing than previous years, which was a soft goal from 2019. 

While it was not the year I hoped it would be (was it for anyone?), good stuff did happen. 

Year Successes10 Year Anniversary of Writing 3 Pages Every Day!

I started taking a professional attitude toward writing when I was 16. I spent hours after school typing up my stories on a desktop that wasn’t connected to the internet. Writing was pure fun. Hundreds of pages of a novel that would never be finished sleeps in folders deep in my hard drive, transferred from flash drive to hard drive. Like a long daydream conjured into the world. 

I wasn’t thinking of writing as a profession then, not consciously, but I already knew I would write for the rest of my life.

The man who kickstarted my drive to be a professional was Al Young. I met him at a summer arts camp; he taught the poetry discipline. I asked him tons of questions about writing as a pro. I asked, “Do you write every day, even if you’re not inspired?” 

He replied, “Every day.”

Shortly after camp ended, I tried write every day. It was the first time I wrote even when I didn’t want to. It was like turning a rusty faucet. You had to put muscle into it, and sometimes only a trickle came out, and you had to wait for the words to filter down the page before you could let go. But it got easier every day. 

Sometime that fall after the arts camp, I discovered and gorged myself on John Steinbeck’s work: Cannery Row, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath. I fancied myself smart and had strong opinions of what great writing should be— full of elaborate description, wisdom, characters real enough to talk to— and his writing seemed like the very model of Great. How did he become a writer? I found a quote from a selection of his diaries, published in the Paris Review. 

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.”

John Steinbeck

I thought, psh, I bet I can do two pages. If I can’t at least do two pages a day, I thought, then I’d never make it as a writer. 

That was January 1st, 2011. I was a junior at the Oklahoma School for Science and Mathematics (OSSM), and my workload was immense: microbiology, mechanics, world literature, Japanese II, etc. OSSM has mandatory study time from 8:00pm to 10:00pm , or 7:00pm to 10:00pm if you’re on academic probation. But if you were a really good student, you’d study after lights out. My roommate studied; I wrote. We put construction paper shades over our desk lamps so no excess light would leak under the door, and we turned our pages gingerly so the hall monitors wouldn’t catch us. But if I didn’t write when I had no time, I wouldn’t do it when I had all the time in the world. 

I made the whole year without skipping a single day. And I thought, Okay, let’s do it again. And I did it next year, and next….

 In 2020, I struggled to keep up the habit. Anxiety, depression, and fear engulfed me in a swamp–sometimes I’d slip and choke; I focused on keeping a diary. I stayed up late, mind racing down the unlit careening What-if Highway, horrors flashing in my headlights, dragging pen over page. This year, those three pages were devoted to my whining about my job, how badly I want to write full time, how scared I was of getting sick, surviving, and living with severe side effects, and heckled myself for not getting more done during a global pandemic. I wrote in memo books smaller than my hand.

But I wrote. Breaking the habit was spiritually harder than keeping it. Writing longhand anchored me and made me pay attention to the world and what I thought about it. Staying off the computer kept me away from possible distractions, and it satisfied me to see my progress by finishing diary after diary.

 What matters is the habit, of devotion, to sitting down at my desk, every day from 8:00pm to 11:00pm, sometimes to midnight, with the desk lamp craning over the words, as it has every night and day since January 1st 2011 when I worked illegally in the dark.

You may recognize the desk. The talented Sophie Morse illustrated it. Over 50 magazine submissions (overshooting my goal for 2020)!

I decided to do the #100Rejections Challenge, but wanted to start with a smaller goal. I set a goal at 50 rejections with a stretch goal of 75. Then I forgot that I was only doing 50 and nagged myself for being so goddamned far behind. By chance I read last year’s year in review… and realized I had overshot them.

Things I’ve noticed while doing the challenge:

Science fiction and fantasy magazines have fast turnarounds (days to weeks), they tend to pay, don’t charge reading fees, and are more likely to give me personalized feedback. Lit mags take months to get back to me, rarely pay, usually charge reading fees, and have never given me feedback. But I got my first acceptance in a literary magazine.Some places I didn’t think would like my work have given me very kind rejections and personal encouragement. Rejection alone did not make my work better.

Even though short stories aren’t my focus, writing, revising, and polishing them to complete the challenge improved my writing sense. Reading and writing short stories has led me to a better appreciation for the short form, and I’ve sought out and purchased anthologies, collections, and magazines, even bought a few subscriptions.

As a result…

First published piece in a literary magazine!

What would happen if I could control everyone with the same name as me? My thought experiment, Calling All Erins, was published in the April issue of the Tulsa Review. 

Debut novel professionally edited!

The novel which began illegally in the dark in 2011 will be published legally in 2021. Click here to read the first chapter of Perceiver. 

Things I’ll Do Next YearSystem Reboot

Next year, I’m going to change the way I time track. You can read my 2018 Year in Review for more details on my system. Using a Google Workspace plugin called TimeSheet, I time track how much I write, edit, research, read, outline, and other miscellaneous tasks. I glance at the clock when I start to work, and when I’m done, I write #[Action] plus the working title of the project in my paper planner and for how long I had worked. At the end of the month, I put everything into my Google Calendar, and TimeSheets pulls a report for me.

A typical weekday looks like this:

#Reading = 1.0 hr

#Writing = diary = 0.5 hr

#Editing = P2 = 1.5 hr

This system worked well for a few years and helped me find some important insights about my work process. However, I think now that I’ve had my system backwards. Rather than focus on the #[Action], I want to focus on the #[Project].

So for 2021, the typical day’s entry would look like:

#Reading = book title = 1.0

#Diary = 0.5 hr 

#P2 = editing = 1.5 hr

The reason I’m changing the system is because I’m taking too much time to finish books, short stories, and blog articles— years for books, months for short stories, weeks for articles. I want to be able to see that I’m drifting off a project and reel myself in to finish it fast. I want to self-publish, and to be successful in self-publishing, you need quick turnarounds on long work. At minimum, I would eventually like to publish two book-length projects a year. 

Goals for 2021

I don’t know what next year will look like, so I will keep my goals low. 

#Project focused time tracking, rounding up to the nearest 15 minutes.

3 pages a day.

50 magazine submissions, stretch, 75.

Hire a cover artist for my first book.

Publish my first book.

Find beta readers for second book. H

ire editors for second book.

Stretch goal: publish second book.

Closing Thoughts, or, the Annual Epiphany 

This year, I found a new genre to binge: advice columns. I don’t read advice columns because I have problems (I’ll deny it if you ask). I read them because advice columns are the perfect genre for learning how to write for readers.

Readers who send questions to advice columnists usually write from shame and desperation. The questions are ones they conceal from their closest friends and family (or maybe they didn’t have friends or family). The questions are usually dire. Will anyone ever love me? How do I set goals if I don’t want anything? Why won’t my friend text me back?  

The best columnists tie the asker’s question to the universal human condition. Their answers are compassionate, pragmatic, insightful, sensitive to the individual’s circumstances. An antidote to lonely readers, advice columns are proof you can love your fellow human from afar. I found answers to many questions I didn’t know I needed to ask, answered. Reading advice columns remind me why I read at all. 

But I often ask myself why I bother to write.

The reasons why I write have changed. Rather, now I have more reasons. During 2020, I wrote because I felt all the wrong things. Shame that I wasn’t doing enough to help causes and people who I believed in. Guilt for being comfortable, being able to work from home, for the successes I outlined at the beginning of this post. Depression over being hostage to other people’s bad decisions. The world had been working my heart like a bag. Emotions were a slurry of alienation, disconnection, and loneliness. I wanted to feel something strong, clear, and good, so I wrote stories like I was designing defibulators, hoping to jolt my heart back to life.

A bit of truth slipped into one of them. To my horror, that one got published.

This was my truth: “My stories are me talking to myself, hoping somebody will overhear. I’ve always felt like I spy on life rather than being a part of it. It’s odd. My work can’t be meaningful all on its own; other people have to find it meaningful. I have to know what other people find meaningful to make meaning for them. But if I were good with people, I wouldn’t be turning inward to entertain myself. I probably wouldn’t be a writer.”

This was my truth. Emphasis on was. 

When I read my previous year’s Year in Review Closing Thoughts, it dazes me how unfamiliar the writer is. Her insecurities, her passion, her annual epiphany: she mostly enjoys writing, but she mostly does it because she doesn’t know how to stop or what she would be without it. She expects her writing will be read, but writing for readers and predicting what they might like, feel, want, is about as useful as reading tea leaves. She writes because she’s talking to herself. Being overheard is a bonus. 

Trying to write for others leads to a curious boomerang. Studying what matters to others helps you put into words what matters to you. Your stories contain the family resemblance of the books that made you think: “THIS”. With each year, less and less accidentally and more and more purposefully, you can write the THIS-ness into your own work, until one day you actually believe someone when they say, “This is good.” Because you thought it yourself, but was too embarrassed to say it out loud or even continue thinking it. Despite your efforts to stay humble, the compliment inflates your head. You’re mistaken for a runaway Macy’s Thanksgivings Day parade balloon. You write more stories and articles in that vein until you remember it’s not the content, it’s the THIS-ness, deflate, and return to the pleasurable agony of trying to figure it out. 

Every day is a fight to remember the annual epiphany. Remembering against the opponents of bestseller’s lists implying this is what is good, this is what is wanted, the writer’s advice, which you sometimes disagree with and can give reasons and evidence as to why, but quash your better judgement and take the advice, because what do you know, with your lazy thinking and fuzzy feeling? You’re so lost and alone. You have no-one to talk to but yourself. In the title match of You versus You, the perverse truth is that the weaker You wins. To think and feel, know what you think and feel, and expect people to pay attention— heck, to pay— is ridiculous. 

But it turns out people like ridiculous shit. 

What I’m saying is, you should write the way you want. You should know what you want, too—that’s hard. So is knowing why you want. I forget every day what I think (rather, I forget to think). Fail to notice how I feel. Sometimes I don’t know if I feel, because I tend to think of emotions as sweeping, know-it-when-you-feel-it forces and not the sensitive instruments that hint at what’s important to me. 

To make a big deal of New Year’s Day and re-remember what you’ve been doing every day for the last decade—without missing a single day—reminds you that thinking, feeling, remembering, and paying attention is deliberate. Every day I try to answer a question I can’t articulate. I couldn’t tell you what it is. It depends on the story, the article, the mood. The day, the year. The answer is something like THIS. Answering feels unquestionably right.

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