Clinton W. Waters's Blog: Writing Sundries, page 3

IG Live Reading

If you're not already, go follow me at @cwwwriting in Instagram! I will be doing a live reading of selections from my poetry collection, Vivisection, today at 6PM CT.

This will be my second live broadcast and I'm still pretty nervous!

I'm attempting to have a theme for each reading, and today's is mental health, as May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

As always, I am dedicated to being candid about the inspirations and themes of my work, but I find the poetry is so personal it makes me even more nervous.

However, I hope to illustrate that mental health issues are nothing to be ashamed of and hope my work can bring anyone out there some comfort.

Hope to see you all there!

Finding Fantasy Part 1: Rules

As I have begun working on my collection of fantasy stories, I am thinking a lot about rules. As I've mentioned before, I had guidelines for myself when writing my SciFi collection and I want those to stay true.

1. I want to depict a different kind of magic or fantasy in each story, as each story in Futures Gleaming Darkly revolved around a different technology.
2. I want them to be rife with representation
3. I want them, as many fantasy stories before mine, to have a point to convey, either as reflections of myself or the world we live in.

However, while scifi comes with the rules of reality, for the most part, fantasy is not narrowed in the same way. The technologies I highlighted in FGD were permutations of technologies we have now. The near future (or retrofuture in the case of Fundamt) provided a large space to explore, but one with definite boundaries.

The beauty (and terror) for me in fantasy is that anything is possible. As previously noted, I struggle with not laying out all of the things at once, as it were. How do I convey the things that are different about the worlds I write about without getting long-winded?

Although I am only two rough drafts deep into the collection, I believe I have found my solution. You guessed it, rules.

Any good magic system has rules, whether it be bending in Avatar, witchcraft and wizardry in Harry Potter, the finger-tutting of The Magicians, or (bear with me here) the mutant powers of the X-Men. While all of these examples have been guilty of "hand-waving" (looking at you, Time Turner in Prisoner of Azkaban), they come to my mind in discussing this subject.

Their rules, namely their weaknesses, define their abilities. The near ubiquitous necessity of a wand and a magical phrase in Harry Potter means that people are limited to those spells they can learn from study. This baseline gives even more magnitude to those witches and wizards who develop their own spells or perform them without a wand or words. You could argue the impossible physics of morphing a rat into a teacup, but Rowling establishing that in order to do so some effort is involved, makes it believable, even if it's not possible.

A perfect example of this is Rainbow Rowell's "Carry On", which I adored. In it, people cast spells with words, but not pseudolatin or gobbledygook. The lyrics of songs, turns of phrase, and nursery rhymes are used to exact magical ends. The protagonist is a magical wuderkind, but at a cost that I'll let you read to find out!

I am finding confidence and footing in writing fantasy with these first couple of stories. This could change, but they have been set in our world to lend some suspension of disbelief and set up some initial guidelines to work by and I've found that helps a lot. As much as I love Tolkien, I can't craft a thousand-years anthropological study into a whole different world. And I'm choosing to accept that as one of my rules.

Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 10 (Finale) - The Future

With the release of Futures Gleaming Darkly (and my subsequent release of Vivisection & Other Poems) I have marked a major milestone off of my personal bucket list. Even if none of my books become best sellers, I wrote them and got them out there into the world, and that fills me with a great sense of accomplishment. And by no means am I done.

After releasing Futures Gleaming Darkly, I told my boyfriend that it felt so good to feel like a writer. I wrote constantly from early grade school up through college. After that I had the amazing opportunity to write for Ionic Comics and found so much confidence and love there. When I got my first business card from Annie, the founder, I remember thinking, “This is it. I'm a writer now.”

The last year or so was rough, though. And life slowly leaked that feeling out of me. I was not in the right place emotionally to write. It just kept getting pushed back and back. What little time I had to myself I wanted to spend with people or dissociating into my phone. I felt that I had lost my connection to the words that once flowed out of me.

But I am no longer there. I am once more swathed in words and it feels like home. My future feels bright.

I have not completely settled on what my next project is going to be, but I’ve resolved to break the habit of starting 18 different projects at once and try and see one through to the end. Or at least to a point that I feel I know I do or don’t want to do it.


I am currently toying with the idea of creating a fantasy anthology as a sibling to Futures Gleaming Darkly (I jokingly refer to it as Dragons Gleaming Darkly). Magic and fantasy have always been fascinating to me and I enjoy the many different styles and flavors it comes in. My previous adventures into fantasy writing have not been very fruitful, as I find I get too caught up in trying to explain everything all at once. I believe it would be a worthwhile challenge to write fantasy short fiction.

Although this is the last part of Themes Gleaming Darkly, it is not the end of the blog! I plan on writing about the poetry collection and compiling my thoughts on the fantasy anthology if that's where the words take me.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. If your futures must be dark, may they gleam.

Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 9 - Selves

A common narrative string throughout several of the stories of Futures Gleaming Darkly (bit.ly/futuresgleamingdarkly) is that of the self. I am no philosopher and many greater minds than mine have dedicated their lives to determining the boundaries of personality and identity. Psychology, Sociology, religion, there are just so many factors. I did not attempt to add to their great legacy.

However, it is a subject that I wanted to showcase and explore. Namely, we have Fundamt, Selves, Selvesquest, Kontroller, and The Doctors Fenster that highlighted this theme. SPOILER WARNING!

In Fundamt, Patience watches different moments in her life on a television screen, as if she’s watching a show. In the story, there is the “Present Patience” and the “Past Patience”. I had fun figuring out a way to distinguish the two. She has memories of these events, but she is watching them from the outside, years in the future. Is she the same person as the one that appears on the screen? Are any of us the same person we were yesterday, last week, last year, etc.?

Selves features a couple using a technology that allows them to manifest a representation of themselves and feel one another’s touch in a virtual reality landscape. However, I have not touched on the fact that one can edit their Self, the avatar that appears in the space. The protagonist notes that the other has changed their physique in slight, but noticeable ways. How are and aren’t we the selves that we present online? Especially in my younger days, in the Wild West of the World Wide Web, I did not always tell the truth about myself. I created and destroyed any number of characters to play, as I saw it.

This leads us into Selvesquest, the MMORPG embodiment of the Selves technology. Building off of the theme of Selves, this story focuses on gaming in particular. Games allow their players to do things and be things that they otherwise couldn’t. For the protagonist of the story, Sylvia, this is to be a baker. In a world of sword slashing and monsters, she just wants to bake. Where is the line between the player and the character and how do they bleed into one another? I’ve experienced this a lot playing D&D. My character may be a half elf bard that can play an autoharp and perform spells (in case you’re wondering, I’m not and can’t do any of these things), but I put a little bit of myself into him. In my everyday life, I try my best to be a social bard and help others, as the in-game character does.

Similarly, Kontroller finds Iris Birch able to jump into another body in the real world. The vast majority of us want to change at least one aspect of our physical forms. If we were able to "rent" another body, one that was stronger by design, would we use it responsibly?

And lastly, we have The Doctors Fenster. In this story, a clone is created from the DNA of a cadaver. This is something that has been explored in science fiction many times, but it has always fascinated me. In the story, the body they use as a template is a person that had a life and family. Their creation is a copy of that person. Obviously, this means they are not the same. I hint at the end that being a reconstruction of the previous person, this new person has at least some of their predecessor’s memories. If I were to go missing and be replaced by a clone, how would anyone know the difference? Even if it behaved differently, would everyone just chalk it up to stress or my time while missing? At what point would the clone be able to inhabit my life and at that point, what is the difference between us, if everyone in my life acknowledges it as me and it goes on as me? It would only matter to the me that the clone was based off of.

I enjoy the mental pretzels that come from these quandaries and they are usually the best part of scifi. I don’t have an answer to any of the questions that I’ve posed, but I enjoy asking them nonetheless. I hope that my stories have given you the fuel for an introspective fireside chat.

Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 8 - Publishing

When I began to collect the stories for Futures Gleaming Darkly and talking about releasing an anthology, many people asked me how it was going to get published. “Self-publishing, probably,” I said, not knowing what that meant as far as commitment or process. Why deal with it if I don’t even finish the book, I thought.

However, let me be the first to tell you: Do not fear self-publishing. There are pros and cons, but I only have real experience with self-publishing through Kindle Direct. I only have good things to say about the process and hopefully this will give you a primer of sorts.
Kindle Direct Publishing is a free to use resource, you just sign in with your Amazon account. In creating your account, you’ll set up how you want to receive your royalties (which may seem premature, but go ahead and get it knocked out).

From there, you can create an ebook or a paperback (or both!). For an ebook: You enter the information about your book such as the title, the author name you’re publishing as, a description and picking categories for it to be listed as. One small caveat, to publish an ebook through Amazon, you have to download their program (it’s free!) and format your manuscript in it. This makes sense, as it saves your document as a kindle file to be read by Kindle (Android) and iOS devices. It has the added benefits of auto-detecting your chapter names, giving you templates to make everything uniform, and autofilling a Table of Contents for you. Then, you upload your manuscript and either upload a cover or use their cover creator program to make one.

The process is the exact same for the paperback, except you have to format the manuscript in Microsoft Word based on the size of the book’s pages. But, good news, they have free templates with or without sample text to make it relatively painless.

In both cases, your final step is determining the price for your book. This is a little tricky, but there are good resources online to help determine your book’s price based on other books of a similar genre and pagecount. The price determines the royalties you get, and we’ll get into that in just a moment.

Overall, it’s a pretty easy process that allowed me to finally realize my dream of having a book published...easy enough in fact that I was able to publish another book a month after the first one from writing I had accrued over the years.

Here is a quick list of useful info that I figured out in my use of KDP, and will hopefully answer some top-level questions you may have:

1. KDP does not require any up-front payment or fees. You risk absolutely $0 in getting your book published. You don’t have to buy a minimum number of copies and you are not penalized if you don’t sell a certain number of copies, etc.

2. The royalties are thus: if your book is priced between $2.99 and $9.99, you get 70% of the proceeds. For paperback, your printing costs are removed from your royalties. Therefore, the price of your paperback must be a minimum of 125% of the price of your ebook and enough to cover the printing costs, of course. So if your ebook is $3.99, your paperback has to be at least $4.99, but the printing costs will eat the majority if not all of the money you make on royalties. You can absolutely have a free ebook, as well, and KDP offers a way to track the number of downloads your book has.

3. You are able to get author copies of your book for just the printing cost and shipping. Of course, you don’t make royalties off of yourself, but it’s nice of them to include that feature.

4. In setting up your book, you will find a setting to elect into Kindle Select, which allows Kindle Unlimited users to read your book for free. It is honestly a really good deal unless you plan on publishing your stories digitally elsewhere. Essentially, you agree that Amazon holds the digital publishing rights to your ebook for 3 months at a time. You earn royalties off of the number of pages read over a month’s time. This is based on all the money set aside for Kindle Select authors divied out by the number of pages read. So this number does change. Most the time it is roughly half a cent per page. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s more than the $0 you’d get for giving your book away.

5. The review process is very simple but nerve-wracking. It can take up to 72 hours from the time you submit an ebook or paperback book and the time it appears on Amazon.com. They do notify you when it is approved or denied, and you can go from there. But that didn’t stop me from endlessly refreshing the page to see if it had gone from “In Review” to “Publishing” to “Live”. Any changes you make to your book are also submitted for approval, but this does not stop your book from being sold in either format while they are being approved.

Overall, I would definitely recommend KDP for self-publishing your work. It puts the burden on you to promote and market your books, as you do not have a publisher to do it for you, but it is a really good way to get your pieces out there and available for purchase quickly.

Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 7 - Technology

I’m a little embarrassed that it took me this long to cover this subject, but onward! As you can imagine, given the overall subject matter of Futures Gleaming Darkly, I have a thing or two that I believe when it comes to Technology. I write technology with a capital T here to signify its importance.

Technology has become a cultural term like “the media”. A sort of broad blanket to throw on top of anything with buttons and wires. A term used to sell things and scare old people. Its definition is ambiguous, as tires, for example, are technology with decades of science and innovation, but it is not Technology. For our purposes, capital T technology means the gadgets, gizmos, and machines of the present and future, whatever time you happen to be thinking of.

For example, Fundamt features my idea of a retrofuturistic Technology utilizing a television. At the time period of the story, televisions were becoming more common and I imagine that many people in that time thought it was the future. And they were right, of course.

However, there were plenty of very vocal detractors against the television. It was called “the boob tube”. It rotted your brain. If you sat too close to it, you’d fry your eyes. The Idiot Box, it mesmerized anyone who would chance a glance at it. Even now, people accuse parents of letting the television babysit their children. And by extension, their smartphones, their tablets, and their laptops. Whatever new Technology becomes available, there will always be those shaking an angry fist, babbling about the destruction of some virtue. Pencils were the death of chalkboards, chalkboards were the death of quill and ink, and so on backward through time.

And this brings us to my feelings towards Technology. I am a gleeful, optimistic psychophant of Technology. I will sing its praises until my dying day, especially those of the internet. We are now more connected than ever as a world and as humans. The internet has brought us access to endless heaps of knowledge. It provides us resources to learn languages and skills. Its old name, The World Wide Web, which lingers in our URLs and brings back cringe-worthy memories of 90s interpretations and marketing, was perhaps its best one yet to illustrate its power.

And of course, you can choose to see the bad in it, as any Technology. You could say that social media is a bubbling cesspool of misinformation and toxicity. And you’d be right. But that’s the truth of Technology and most anything, really.

It is only as good as the person using it. However, i believe that the majority of Technology’s good outweighs its bad. For every troll and ne’er-do-well on Facebook spreading hate, there’s someone talking to a long lost relative, a person discovering things about themselves on a video game, and someone else finding the words to help describe themselves. And then again, someone’s just looking at pictures of cats.

That is why I chose to represent Technology in a relatively ambivalent manner in Futures Gleaming Darkly. I want to highlight the wonders and possibilities, while showcasing that its general use can be profound or mundane. Take Selves for example. I have been a big fan of binaural ASMR for years and when I had written that story, I had stumbled across lots of “hypnotism” videos (again, the internet is wonderful and weird). Through sounds and speech, these creators illicit feelings and images. In the couple’s case in Selves, the Technology is this amazing thing that lets you feel the physical touch of someone miles and miles away and the protagonist believes it’s the solution to their problems.

However, we find that the user determines the experience and I believe this to be the case for most all Technology. You can find comfort in your phone but might use it as an unhealthy coping mechanism. An online community can make you feel welcome and not so alone, but that community may not be made of great individuals. You can get online and read the classics, or somebody’s ramblings on their Goodreads blog :P.

Technology may cure a symptom, but not its cause. It’s up to us to use Technology for good, even if it’s not its intended purpose. I trust us and therefore I trust Technology.

Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 6 - Working 9 to 5

A running theme through the majority of my stories is how our jobs effect us. In some stories we read/watch/listen to, someone's profession is a bullet on their character bio. The handsome architect is seen at his drafting table once, but we don't get to see how being an architect changes how he views himself or his world.

In the way that each story in Futures Gleaming Darkly has a little piece of me in them, those that feature the protagonist's job draw from my own experiences.

In Shadow, we see Harvey and his passenger AI Shadow 7 during a shift as a waiter. I'm no stranger to restaurants. My mother owned one when I was growing up and I've worked at others, greeting, cooking, and bussing tables. Shadow is meant to give a glimpse, as many of you have experienced yourself, the ugly side of customer service. The watchful eye of Shadow 7 echoes my time at a call center where every breath was recorded. How does having to smile as people berate you change who you are?

We see hints of this in Selvesquest as well. Sylvia escapes to a world where she can do the job she wants, a baker, instead of the serving job she has in the real world.

In Bubble, I wanted to illustrate how jobs can make you feel like a hostage. I have experienced this at a time that I was working 60-70 hours a week to get by. My body was ragged and my mind was dark. As Adam does in the story, I reached out to one of my employers at the time. I was having suicidal thoughts. The idea of having a smile while I felt that way was unbearable. They wanted me to work my shift that day anyway. Aside from that, I knew I couldn't afford to miss the shift because there were bills to pay.

I am so incredibly lucky that this is not the case anymore. I love my job now and know that it is and will continue to be a career. I am valued and appreciated daily. It makes an entire world of difference when someone says thank you for your hard work and is willing to help you grow and succeed.

It seems impossible to divorce our notion of work and worth. The second thing anyone asks about you is what you do for a living. While we have all worked the jobs that we have had do, and maybe you still are, I hope that my stories give you a sense of empathy and the knowledge that you are not your job.

Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 5 - Inspirations

In this segment, I wanted to talk about the non-literary media that influenced the stories of Futures Gleaming Darkly.

It would be impossible to cover this subject and not discuss the following three: The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, and Flash Forward.

At a very young age, The Twilight Zone built the foundation for my taste in SciFi and horror. The episode "It's a Good Life" effects me to this day. No spoilers! Moral ambiguity, horror via negative space, and expert levels of handwaving away the nitty gritty and getting the audience's suspension of disbelief. The format of Twilight Zone was equally influential. Small, complete stories that often had a message and left a lingering feeling of introspection. My stories Beetle, The Doctors Fenster, and Fundamt were all lovingly written as if it were for TTZ.

Black Mirror, the grandchild of The Twilight Zone, forms another third of this delicious pie. Similarly, its stories are condensed, but focused on technology specifically, whereas TTZ was much broader in themes. Black Mirror's dark tone has always been a draw for me, but its ability to craft emotionally ambivalent stories such as the episode "San Junipero" is where it truly shines. Stoplight, The Body Electric, and Selves all draw from this notion of near future social science fiction.

And lastly, we have Flash Forward. A splendid little podcast written and narrated by Rose Eveleth, it marries speculative fiction and hard SciFi. As she says, each episode "we take a field trip to the future", wherein we hear a bit of fiction about the future she's writing about, and then she spends the episode discussing how possible that truly is. Bubble, Delicious, and Bippy all owe Rose and FF their thanks!

If you've never watched or listened to these, please do yourself a favor. If you've got a copy of Futures Gleaming Darkly, take in these inspirations and go back to these stories and see those direct lines of influence.

What shows/podcasts inspire you most? Let me know!

Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 4 - Process

In writing Futures Gleaming Darkly, I feel that I developed a process for myself to help with fighting writer's block and distractions. My writing thesis for FGD was to complete each story in one sitting. Although it took me about a year of writing and revising, sometimes I could get the rough draft of two or three stories in a long weekend.

This may not work for everyone, but maybe you'll find something useful!

1. Go to the bathroom.

Even if you think you don't have to, the moment you get into a groove, nature will call.

2. Get beverages and snacks.

Personally, I would have a coffee and a water at hand, maybe something crunchy. When you find yourself stuck you can take a microbreak, crunch on some chips, take a sip of coffee and feel rejuvenated.

3. Get comfortable

Much like reading, writing in any position will probably get uncomfortable after a few minutes. I like to sit cross-legged with my laptop, but find that if I do it for too long my hips get sore. Pillows and blankets always help any seat be more comfortable.

Under this same thought, what you're wearing can also effect your comfort. I'm a basketball shorts and tank top person because I get hot easily, but if you love fuzzy sweaters or if you even want to write naked, you do you!

This is even to say you feel comfortable writing at home. Maybe you're a coffee shop, B&N kinda writer and that's good to know!

4. Don't look back (yet)

In writing a first draft, just write. You can proofread and edit later. I like to think of it as carving wood or stone. Your blank page is a giant cube of marble. Smash it up and take big chunks to get down to what you want. You can do the fluff and add those great details afterward. But even better than a physical craft, you can always add back some "stone" after the fact.

5. Kick that baby bird out of the nest

It's easy to be self-conscious about your writing. You might think it's dumb or not good at all.

But your readers won't.

When you're done with your rough draft, send it to a trusted friend. Have them give you their opinion. The cement hasn't dried, as it were, so you can always take their suggestions and adjust your work. Or you could find that you disagree with it and you actually cared more about your piece than you thought you did.

Hopefully this helps you get some writing done. And remember, your writing is for you. Write what you want when you want. There's no set schedule and it's not a race. Experiment and find what works for you.

Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 3 - Support

Today I want to write about a pillar of my writing, a cornerstone, a load-bearing beam: the support I receive from friends and family.

I consider myself fortunate to have even one loud voice at my back, but somehow I have more than I could ever imagine. People I have not spoken to in years have parted the distance and liked, shared, commented, and read my work.

With or without the mental illness I wrote about in Part 2, many creative people suffer from Imposter Syndrome, and I am certainly not immune. "So what?" that voice inside me says, "You put some words on paper. It's not that good anyway." Even now, after my work with Ionic Comics and having a book self-published, it is hard for me to call myself "a writer".

But louder than that voice are those that offer their support. And I am so infinitely grateful and humbled by them.

I know that not every creative has such a support network. And I am here to say that if this gives you pause in making whatever art is in you, I will be your support network.

A goal of mine for this year onward is to not only produce my own work, but to support the hell out of anyone, especially artists, who are working on something.

To those struggling with creative blocks or Imposter Syndrome, let me address you directly:
1. Even if your art never sees the light of day (although it should because it's so much more valuable than you give yourself credit for) the act of creating is beautiful and so are you. Make it for yourself and those you love.
2. The only way to hone a skill is to use it. That being said, if it's been a year since you painted or five since you picked up an instrument, don't let that stop you. Your hands and heart will find their way.
3. Yes, there are so many talented people in this world and it's amazing. But that does not discount your abilities. Support those people you admire, learn from them, and create your own masterpieces to go alongside theirs. I guarantee you that they were not born with preternatural skill.

To everyone: thank you as always for taking the time to read my work. I hope it helps, even in the slightest.