Travis Heermann's Blog, page 11

We Live in the Gothic Castle – The Dark Brilliance of Shirley Jackson

I was attending an author event at the Tattered Cover bookstore a couple of months ago. Not even really browsing, I had in hand the book I had come for, but nevertheless my gaze wandered across one of the bookseller recommendation shelves. For no discernible reason, one cover caught my eye. It was a pen and ink drawing of an elder sister embracing the younger, and the book was We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

I had not read Shirley Jackson since encountering her story “The Lottery” many years ago in high school English class. This much anthologized story is probably the work through which most people encounter her. And of course The Haunting of Hill House is an icon of the genre. But I had never heard of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her last work, published three years before her death.

I took it home and devoured this short, not-so-sweet, miraculous wonder of a novel. It is the story of two disturbed, house-bound sisters, their strange relationship, the gothic mansion in which they live, and terrible family secrets. This book is, without question, a masterpiece of voice, mood, characterization, and a kind of simmering slow boil. It’s one I’m still thinking about as a perfect example of craft. Told in first person from the perspective of the younger sister, her magical thinking brings it to the verge of, but not crossing into, a supernatural story. The monsters in his book, as in “The Lottery,” are all human. In a genre filled with buckets of gore and lurid plots, this understated little book will get under your skin like spilled viscera will not.

If you’re a horror writer, study Shirley Jackson. After reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I’ll be thinking “how did she do that?” and trying to deconstruct it for a long time. There’s a reason one of horror’s highest awards has her name on it.

This post originally appeared in Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ blog post “Women In Horror Month Getting To Know You: Meet The Sweet Ladies With Terrifying Minds” highlighting Women in Horror Month.

Breaking a Toxic Cycle: A #HoldOnToTheLight Post

In Everytown, USA, some kid gets bullied on the playground or around the schoolyard. Seeking hierarchy, some sense of superiority, assertion of dominance over somebody, the bully picks a target, probably without even knowing why for sure. It could be the victim’s face, gait, clothes, build, voice, anything that gets under the bully’s skin, because by god they need to be higher on the food chain than somebody. They fight, or abuse, or sneer, or dump barrels of toxic waste into the social waters around the victim. The victim is beaten down periodically, until they fight back.

That’s the conventional wisdom. A bully who gets knocked down, who gets his comeuppance, runs off crying and must find another target.

But that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the victim just takes it, suffering in silence, and no one in authority ever knows the poor kid’s plight. We’ve all read stories of how wrong this situation can go, with the victim’s suicide as the only means they can see of escape. But such horrors are still the outliers. The everyday, lower-level incidents can be just as insidious, because they are more likely to pass under the radar. If someone in authority catches a glimpse, they see just boys being boys, not knowing this was a single incident out of dozens.

Bullies are systematic. Hierarchy must be maintained through threats and violence. Sometimes, the bully graduates or moves to another school—or, finally, wrenchingly, gets kicked out of the house—and the victim grows, as kids do.

The victim is bigger than some of the other kids now. He’s learned how the world works. Order must be maintained. Hierarchy must be established. Bullying means fitting in, right? It’s cool to pick on the little ones, right? Hazing is a kind of initiation. Everybody has to go through it. And doesn’t it feel good to get a little payback for the world’s injustices on somebody weaker than you? Making someone fear, obey, or worship you is such a rush.

Sometimes, in that rush, the bully goes too far and stops at the precipice of What-the-hell-did-I-just-do Chasm, toes dangling over the edge. Assertion of hierarchy is firmly established, but something irrevocable has been done.  Someone is hurt, physically or emotionally, in a way that will stay with them until they die. In that moment, in that stepping back from the precipice, the victim-become-bully might recognize the wrong. Will he have strength to make amends? Or at the very least, avert himself from this path? Even if he does, however, the hurt he’s done will cling to him like a bloodstain forever.

Sometimes, the bully recovers and redeems himself, recognizing that he still bears that stain.

But sometimes the bully’s nature metastasizes. He spends his whole life intimidating others, shouting them down, issuing threats, exacting his due, all to maintain that petty hierarchical niche he’s carved out of a world that despises him. A schoolyard bully can go far. He can become a campus bully, a social media bully, a shop bully, a jobsite bully, an office bully, a boardroom bully.

A bully can even run for President of the United States and be applauded for his strength.

And strewn behind him, he leaves an untold wasteland of victims and a fresh crop of nascent bullies.

This is the cycle of life for higher primates on this planet, where the internet connects us all.

Can we stop the cycle? Yes. But it requires vigilance.

And more importantly, it requires kindness.

Bullies are made, not born.

Although female bullies and abusers certainly exist, the pronoun “he” is appropriate here, because this is a predominantly, deeply male problem. Our culture continues to perpetuate generations of young male bullies. And judging by the very existence of Gamergate, the behavior of the far-right and far-left political wings, and Men’s Rights Activists, just to name a few egregious examples, young male bullies have become more toxic than ever.

So we must ask the question: how much toxic sludge was heaped upon their heads when they were small to create this? How might kindness have changed their paths? And how can they be reclaimed and shown a brighter path?

Hating is easy. Offering a kind hand to someone who’s behaving despicably is really hard. How can we show them how to hold onto the light, and do the same ourselves?

If you succeed in doing this, please tell me how.

At Dragon Con this year, Gail Z. Martin was kind enough to invite me to take part in the Hold on to the Light Project. She has done an amazing job promoting and coordinating this effort. Many thanks to her for letting me take part. 

About the campaign:

#HoldOnToTheLight is a blog campaign encompassing blog posts by fantasy and science fiction authors around the world in an effort to raise awareness around treatment for depression, suicide prevention, domestic violence intervention, PTSD initiatives, bullying prevention and other mental health-related issues. We believe fandom should be supportive, welcoming and inclusive, in the long tradition of fandom taking care of its own. We encourage readers and fans to seek the help they or their loved ones need without shame or embarrassment.

Please consider donating to or volunteering for organizations dedicated to treatment and prevention such as: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Hope for the Warriors (PTSD), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Canadian Mental Health Association, MIND (UK), SANE (UK), BeyondBlue (Australia), To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

To find out more about #HoldOnToTheLight, find a list of participating authors and blog posts, or reach a media contact, go to http://www.HoldOnToTheLight.com and join us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/WeHoldOnToTheLight

Writing Pulp for the Modern Reader

I love the old pulp masters. I grew up reading Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, E.E. “Doc” Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and those authors made an indelible impression on my creative psyche. I devoured those stories, and they stuck in me down deep in the leaf mold. (See my essay “Cultivating the Fungus”.) The trouble is, if I go back and read those stories, I cannot help but do it with a modern eye, through my modern sensibilities. Unfortunately, as much as I loved it as a kid, a lot of that stuff doesn’t read very well nowadays. One must put on the Nostalgia Glasses to overlook racist and/or sexist passages and themes embedded in the culture of the times.

I used to think that adventure stories filled with barbarians, ape-men, Martian swordsmen, ancient demi-gods, and sloe-eyed femme fatales complete with heaving bosoms were just fun stories. They weren’t trying to make some sort of point.

Except that even the stories of Conan did have something to say. Robert E. Howard did have something to say. Many of the Conan stories were about the triumph of barbarism over civilization. Through his fiction, Howard made the point over and over that human savagery and brutality, barbarism, would not only win out over the forces of civilization, but it would rightfully do so. Barbarism was purer, more honest, more innocent, than the lies and treachery of civilization. Treacherous politicians and vile, self-serving priests schemed and plotted. Enemy warlords lurked at the outskirts, and only a stronger sword-arm and greater cunning could keep them at bay. In Howard’s stories, one is hard-pressed to find an honest, respectable “civilized man,” but if you do, he’s likely being victimized by other “civilized men.” It is only through the brute force and savage cunning of the barbarian that things are put right.

With few exceptions in Conan stories, women are for saving or reward. Nevertheless, Conan had a consistent almost chivalric attitude toward women. He was never a pillager. He never took advantage. It was the civilized men who did such things. But there was no doubt that he stood higher in status than any female. Conan was the Alpha of Alphas.

For modern readers, these attitudes are undeniably sexist, just as some of Lovecraft’s passages regarding foreigners and blacks smacked of profound racism.

I didn’t bother to think about this stuff when I was twelve, or even twenty. I just wanted to enjoy the stories.

A certain segment of the readership yearns for some imagined societal return to those days when women, non-whites, and strange religions knew their place. Things were simpler. We didn’t have to worry about all these weirdos coming into the playground and spoiling all the fun. It is not 1930 anymore, or 1950, or even 1970. Times they are a-changin’, and there ain’t nuthin’ gonna make things “simple” again (even though they were never really as simple as some believe). Those folks can keep reading the same old sexist, racist stuff and be perfectly happy.

All art, including writing, is a product of its time. Those of us who want to write fun, pulpy stories for the modern reader must have a modern sensibility, a sensibility that includes the wider, diverse possibilities of modern life. This modern life includes an equal place for women, for minorities, for non-Western cultures.

“But what about writing stories set in a non-modern world?” you might say. “How do I write stories set in eras where women are still second-class citizens, or in pre-Civil War America, or the Jim Crow South? Won’t they sound racist or sexist or whatever?”

It’s an easy trap to fall into. It all comes down to how you treat those times. Try using different characters than the stalwart white male. Turn the old sexist/racist tropes on their heads. Give agency to characters who traditionally are downtrodden. But most importantly, treat them with respect. That means knowing and internalizing their perspectives, their unique struggles, and avoiding racist/sexist tropes.

This isn’t just fan service. Such efforts not only result in richer stories, a richer literature, they personally enrich the author. No one can write from the perspective of The Other, with truth and honesty, and not be changed by it. We have walked a mile in somebody else’s shoes.

Could we still write characters like Conan today? Certainly, but he would not be received the way he was in 1935. To connect with a modern readership, you need to balance such a character with a few more spices, like Indian cooking. Characters of color or strong women can balance larger-than-life machismo. Or maybe we can have a Conan-like character who’s black or Lakota or Chinese. Rather than seeing “political correctness is so restrictive!”, recognize that you now have a whole new set of interesting tools for your writer toolkit, even though it might take effort to learn how to use them.

Writers can still write swashbuckling, pulpy fun, but we have to imagine that our audience includes people who are not fifteen-to-thirty-year-old white males (more and more we discover that audiences always included women and minorities, but they never had major characters who represented them). Nowadays, we should give readers of all shades, ethnicities, orientations, and gender variations someone they recognize, someone to root for. Give them a character whose boots they can imagine stepping into, so that their imaginations can fly free on your words.

How Bad Can It Get

If you have a writing career that ultimately spans decades, it will inevitably fluctuate with highs and lows—and so will the exultation and despair that follows such fluctuations. Contracts and literary agents may come and go. Publishing companies can dissolve and your rights lost in a morass of legalese and bankruptcy. The “Mid-List Author Death Spiral,” as it’s called, is a phenomenon well-known to several of my author acquaintances. And this is beyond the usual barrage of rejections we all have to cope with. Unless you’re prepared to go quietly into that good night, you will have to find ways to bounce back from setbacks like these—or else you won’t.

I’ve written extensively about these experiences, and you can find a more detailed story in the Cautionary Tales for Writers Part 1 and Part 2 elsewhere on this blog. I’m approached these from a different direction here.

In the mid-1990s, I was one of those young writers desperate for industry validation, ripening me into the perfect fruit for the illegitimate predators out there. These were the days when the Web was in its infancy. There were no valuable websites like Writer Beware, Preditors and Editors, and the Association of Author Representatives out there waving red flags about snake-oil peddlers and con artists. Of course I was delighted when the Deering Literary Agency agreed to represent me. All they wanted was $800 to do it. I studied the contract closely, consulted a lawyer, but everything seemed legit—except for the fee. Young (erm, naïve is the more proper word) and desperate as I was, despite being broke, despite the warning bells, I went through with it.

A year passed with no word. Eventually the Deerings (an entire family of con artists) came back to me asking for another $500 for another year’s representation. More warning bells, more phone calls, but like I said, they were con artists and knew exactly what to say to get me to fork it over. So I did.

Six months later, they called me with contract offer. Joy! Exultation!

The contract offer was from Commonwealth Publications, of Edmonton, Alberta. Hmm, never heard of them before. The sample covers they sent sucked, comparable to a middle-school art class. I mean, terrible, not even by the talented art students. Warning bells, warning bells. Calls to agent—who are these people?—much reassurance. And what’s this clause they’re calling “joint venture,” wherein they require the author to contribute $3,850 to “share the publishing costs”? Oh, well, that’s a pioneering new publishing model. Authors share the costs but get a much higher royalty percentage.

So, despite the warning bells, I borrowed the money (remember, I was broke) and handed it over. This was about 1995. I was 25 years old.

I’m going to abbreviate this long, wrenching tale and say that my book, an epic fantasy titled The Ivory Star, was published in the spring of 1997, a year behind schedule. Dozens of other Commonwealth authors never even saw their book published.

Three months after publication, Commonwealth Publications evaporated. Their owner/CEO, Donald Phelan, looted the company of millions of dollars and fled to the Bahamas, leaving his company to implode and all the authors to drown in a pile of steaming excrement.

I never saw a dime of royalties.

One silver lining: the authors formed a class-action lawsuit, sued in Canadian court, and received our rights back, plus a judgment of $10 million. None of this judgment was ever paid because Commonwealth possessed no real assets, and Donald Phelan agreed to the settlement only on the condition that he not be named personally as a defendant. He was able to take the money and run, leaving authors holding the empty sack.

And about the time Commonwealth was imploding, the Deerings had decided to launch their own version of the same scam. Dorothy, Charles, and Daniel Deering formed a company called Sovereign Publishing and started bilking more naïve, desperate authors out of “representation fees” and then “selling” those books to Sovereign Publishing, which then garnered another round of “joint venture fees.” Unlike Commonwealth, however, Sovereign never published a single book, because the FBI came sniffing around.

The good news? The Deerings were all convicted of various types of fraud, and spent several years each in federal prison.

The bad news? They’re out of the pen now, and I suspect working on similar schemes, heedless of the dreams they crush.

FBI agent Jim Fischer has written a book about the case called Ten Percent of Nothing. There’s also plenty of information on Commonwealth and the Deerings on the website Writer Beware.

But there’s one more kick to the solar plexus in this Insult to Injury Extravaganza.

An unscrupulous few of Commonwealth’s former employees banded together, cooked up a scheme, and bought up the company’s stock of books for pennies on the dollar when all of the company’s assets were sold at auction to cover some of its debts. With this warehouse full of almost-free books, these people formed another “publishing company” called Picasso Publications, and attempted to present themselves as the publisher of these titles and sell the books on Amazon. Authors were never contacted nor informed of this move. As soon as wind of this spread and Amazon shut them down, Picasso evaporated just like Commonwealth did, and an unknown number of books along with them.

Whew. Long story, wasn’t it?

Try living through it.

But this is just the prelude. I still haven’t reached the point of my essay.

After three years in total of this sort of emotional pummeling, when it finally all unraveled, I had stopped writing. I just couldn’t do it anymore. As far as I was concerned, my career was a smoking wreck with a flaming oil slick trailing behind. The self-flagellation never quite reached the clinical level, but only because I found other outlets for my grief and shame.

I plunged myself into other creative avenues, such as minitature wargames, roleplaying games, video games. The storytelling urge that had turned me into a writer made me a pretty good GM. I painted hundreds of miniatures. Orc armies, dark elf armies, Norman armies, troll armies, samurai armies, Viking armies, space marine armies. I got pretty damn good at it over a couple of years.

For about two years, I didn’t write a word.

But then something happened. Not all at once, but more like someone slowly turning up the volume knob on that voice in my head that had started saying, “You should be writing,” the urge to write again slunk back like a coyote hovering around the campfire of my consciousness. Eventually I decided to feed the damn thing.

So I started on a new project. A samurai novel. I threw myself into research, into nights at the library, into reading history books and encyclopedias, and into watching more samurai films. The story I was writing became Heart of the Ronin, the first book of my Ronin Trilogy.

And over the course of the next decade, this decision—to write again—turned my life around.

With my shiny new chapters in hand, I attended my very first writing conference in 1999. At that conference, I met real agents, real editors. Lo and behold, they were just people! Kind people! Friendly people! People interested in what I was working on! One of the agents took the time to offer me some feedback on my samurai novel project, and even though she ultimately declined to represent me, I still feel very much indebted to her for that guiding hand. For the first time, I had the professional validation I had been lacking.

Writing the story that became the Ronin Trilogy led me to throw my life out the window and start over. I moved to Japan and lived there for three years. During this time, I found representation with a real literary agent, one of the big NYC ones, who sold Heart of the Ronin to Gale-Cengage’s Five Star imprint. After a decade since the Commonwealth/Deering cesspit, my career train was back on the tracks.

I returned to the U.S. then and went to grad school, like I had always wanted to. I started going to conventions and networking with agents, editors, and other writers. I wrote more books and sold them to small presses. I attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2009. My train was starting to roll out of the station. Nowadays I feel like it’s moving at a slow but steady pace, with opportunities to pick up some speed popping up occasionally.

I have more books to write, and I’ll be damned if I ever suffer another setback like what Commonwealth and the Deerings did to me.

What I would like the Conscientious Reader to take away from all this is a number of points.

Lesson 1: Money always flows to the writer, never, ever, ever the other way around. Not to agents, not to publishers, not to anthologies or magazines.

Lesson 2: Trust your instincts. If something stinks, best pay attention and start digging. These days, the internet is a powerful research tool that I didn’t have twenty years ago.

Lesson 3: If you’re a writer whose Muse has scarpered off to grace someone else’s lap, whose desire to write is just gone, the urge to do so will return. Doesn’t matter if you’ve experienced your own train wrecks of whatever scale. The Writer Instinct may be retreat into a dark, little hole, but it’s still there, waiting for the coast-is-clear.  And if it doesn’t?

Your heart would certainly be safer if it stayed away.

But writers don’t believe in playing it safe. We’re already insane, and we embrace it.

If it’s gone for now, trust that it will come back, and it just might change your life.

Mashing Up the Old West

If you’re of a certain age in the U.S., you were raised with Westerns. John Ford and Sergio Leone filled cinemas and TV screens with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, the dust of cattle drives, the thunder of cavalry, guns, and the war whoops of Indians. By the time of my childhood, Western films were in their declining years, covering ground so well-trodden the genre itself had become cliché, a collection of easily recognizable and increasingly tired tropes.

However, the genre never quite made it to the grave. Since the Western film’s heyday, we’ve been graced with some spectacularly good fare: Tombstone, Unforgiven, Tarantino’s Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, the remake of True Grit, the HBO series Deadwood, and Dances with Wolves.

The things that these examples do exceedingly well, and I would submit to you, the reason they’re so damn good, is that they take the tropes and twist them. Unforgiven puts an unforgettable twist on the Hired Gunfighter. Tarantino’s characters are nearly all recognizable archetypes—except they’ve been subverted or twisted in unexpected ways. The Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit takes Charles Portis’ brilliant novel and puts little Maddie Ross squarely back in the protagonist’s seat. Deadwood so brims with fascinating characters, crackling dialogue, and Shakespearean tragedy that its cancellation after only three seasons is one of the great travesties of modern television. Dances with Wolves, with its sweeping grandeur, epic depth, and visionary cinematography, is credited with revitalizing the Western film, and it does so by turning the tables on the Indian Wars. Without this film, none of the others might ever have been made.

But just how far can you twist the tropes? Can you have a science-fiction Western? A horror Western? A fantasy Western? Absolutely. Mix in any of these ingredients and you have what has come to be called The Weird Western.

The earliest sci-fi western mash-up that comes to mind is Westworld, complete with android gunfighters. Another notable is Back to the Future Part III, which nowadays we might call a little steampunk. The Wild West is a favorite milieu for steampunk authors, forming their own sub-genre of Western mash-up, including the Fictorians’ own Quincy J. Allen. Are there other SF-Western examples? Sure, but we won’t talk about Cowboys and Aliens.

Horror is a spice that mashes up tastily with Western stories. The Old West is replete with ghost tales and Native American mysticism. Murder, injustice, and brutality abound, all fodder for stories of the unquiet dead. Haunted trains, phantom stage coaches, vengeful medicine men, ancient knowledge from the dark depths of human history… are your creative juices flowing yet?

So the first step to a good mash-up is to recognize the tropes. You have to understand the nuts and bolts of a genre and how they fit together into the moving parts of the story. Throw in the things you love, the things you want to write about. A sprinkle of vampire saliva, a touch of decomposing zombie, a love story between a man and his raw meat, an angry deceased mother-in-law.

Twist and subvert the tropes into interesting new shapes. Take the Town Marshal archetype and do something with him you’ve never seen before, something interesting, something fun, something unexpected. In Death Wind, we made the Town Marshall an old man, too stubborn and grumpy to admit he’s forty years past his prime.

This kind of subversion is not new. Even in the 19th Century, the Western genre had become staid and cliché. The profusion of dime novels and penny dreadfuls had already created the tropes and archetypes we know today. In 1898 Stephen Crane, author of the Red Badge of Courage, wrote a brilliant subversion of the Western in his short story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” in which he plays with tropes like the Town Drunk, Town Marshal, and The Shootout with great insight and cleverness. The key to any good mash-up is play. Jam things together to see what works, what sounds fun.

A few years back, my friend Jim Pinto and I decided to collaborate on a screenplay. We wanted to do something neither of us had ever seen before, so we decided to mash up two genres we loved: horror and Westerns. But how to make it different from other notable horror Westerns around, such as The Burrowers and Ravenous? We threw in another ingredient we both loved: the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. And that’s when the fun really began. We were in undiscovered territory. Throwing together a collection of characters under-represented in Western fiction and film, we stirred them together into a juicy stew of crisscrossing conflicts and ended up with Death Wind, a screenplay that placed highly in several screenwriting contests, including Second Place at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival Cthulhu Con in L.A. and Grand Prize at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose in 2012.

After this success, it was a no-brainer to adapt the script into a novel. Death Wind will make its literary debut at Dragon Con 2016, published by WordFire Press.

Wattpad: A New Experiment for an Old Work

If you’ve read my “Cautionary Tales for Writers” over on the left hand page of this blog, you know a bit of history about my early forays into writing and publishing.

The first novel I published was an epic fantasy called The Ivory Star, back in 1997. For almost twenty years, it languished on my hard drive, untouched. Then Wattpad came along, and it seemed like the perfect venue to introduce my early work to a new generation of readers. So I commissioned a snazzy new cover and put the book out there to see what would happen.

Lo and behold, The Ivory Star is featured on Wattpad this week! As hundreds of new readers fly through the chapters, leave comments, and vote on chapters they like, I have found it gratifying in ways I didn’t expect.

You can read the entire book for free right here. Enjoy this bit of fantasy adventure from my distant literary past.

The Eternal Struggle

Writers (and creative people in general) face a unique set of challenges in a society that generally doesn’t value what we do.

A few months back, I was at a party with my wife, hanging out, busily meeting people, chatting, etc. We were about a month into our stay in New Zealand. I happened to meet a woman and soon established that she was from Colorado, married to a New Zealander.

She asked me, “What do you do for work?”

“I’m a writer,” I said, having already established with several people at the party that I have five books in print and have been freelance writing for about sixteen years.

“So you don’t, then,” she said flippantly.

I then excused myself in favor of more intelligent conversation.

This stranger’s attitude is bad enough, but it’s even worse if it comes from a writer’s family, and the closer the family member is, the more painful the attitude. You can put up with Uncle Earl at family reunions asking you when you’re going to get a job, but when it’s your mother asking you when you’re going to stop drawing “those funny books,” or your significant other whining about having so little time to spend with him/her and that you’d rather be alone doing that weird thing you do, that’s when it chafes your skin away and ultimately grinds all the way to the bone.

When there are so many out there for whom the above is a daily battle, I know I’m fortunate to have a significant other who loves the fact that I’m a writer. She loves that I can do what I do (and I used that ability shamelessly to woo her). She whole-heartedly believes it to be a worthy endeavor, deserving of the same monetary respect we routinely pay to plumbers, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, etc., even though she cannot fathom how I put up with the rejection, uncertainty, and angst associated with it.

But she has this strange, unfathomable quirk that she likes hanging out with me. And ditto my stepdaughter. It’s like they think I should have meals with them. Or go places with them. Or take them to school. It’s like they can’t tell when I’m in the depths of the Zone, that elusive, mythical place where the magic happens, that place that’s so fragile a simple knock on the door makes it evaporate like the barest morning dew, leaving the writer clenching his fists in frustration.

“What is it?”

“Um…”

“Is there blood?”

“Well, no, but…”

“Is there a fire?”

“No, but…”

“Then why for hast thou knocked upon this portal?”

“There’s a spider.”

Sigh.

This was a constant struggle when the girlfriend became the cohabitating partner a few years back. Writers are a special kind of introvert, in that their very profession demands that they spend great swaths of time alone. These swaths of time are in direct conflict with the time required to maintain the bonds of love. Tons of difficult conversations later, we have reached a détente, and the bottom line, despite endless whinging on my part, is that the problem is not intrusions or distractions or interruptions.

The problem is always me. More on that in a minute.

It’s too easy for that infinitely fragile creative butterfly that we imagine is within us to be crushed or driven away by a knock on the door, a text, a phone call, a clearing of the throat; so even when your significant other is amazing and supportive, wants your to feel fulfilled, wants you to reside forevermore in the afterglow of creation like you’ve just had cosmically awesome sex, you push for more room for our art. It’s art, dammit!

One of the worst feelings in the world is when you’re in the rush of creation, and you know it’s gold, and you can feel your fingers brushing through the river of the divine–and someone comes into your space and requests your attention. A knock. A text. A phone call. A clearing of the throat. Flow: destroyed. Muse: fled.

And they have no idea what they just did to you.

I was in a seminar a couple of years ago listening to a panel discussion on productivity for writers. At the time, the difficult discussions mentioned above were ongoing. One of the panelists was a successful, best-selling novelist who’s been writing fiction full-time for over twenty years. He mentioned that work interruptions were still a point of contention between him and his wife. “Well, surely you have time to run this errand for me. It’s not like you keep set hours or have a boss who’ll fire you.”

Hope that my own struggles would ever be resolved began to evaporate.

After such discussions with my family, there is one thing, however, that I keep coming back to in my own reflections.

Boundaries. Staking out a little patch of creative space, internally or externally. A room. An office. A table at your favorite coffee shop. When you’re in that space, you’re working, the same as if you were on the production line at the factory. And you must defend those boundaries with fire and swords because the biggest enemy who will assail those walls is you.

This can be a difficult thing to do. Who likes telling their children ‘no’? How do you tell your friends that you can’t go out because you’ve got a writing schedule? How do you tell your partner who’s had a rough day that they can’t just barge in and start venting?

Once you’ve established your boundaries, those who truly support you will honor them. Those who don’t honor those boundaries don’t truly support you, a circumstance that might require more drastic measures (but that’s a topic for another time).

But here’s the really hard part. (What, you mean this writing thing isn’t difficult enough?? Screw this! I’m gonna be a janitor! I need a raise!)

The problem, as I said above, is not them. It’s not outsiders horning in on your creative time. A writer’s worst enemy, worst time-destroyer, worst butterfly-slaughterer, is always himself.

Yeah, you can run that errand. Yeah, you can pick the kids up from the pool on that Saturday afternoon. Yeah, you can go to the recital. Yeah, we can see that movie because we haven’t had a night out in weeks. Yeah, you can come and kill that spider. Yeah, you can surf social media, or check email, or obsess about your sales numbers, or spend hours marketing to blogs who have all of twenty regular readers, or braid your beard, or weave pocket lint into a picture frame, or shave the cat, or…

Any of these things is easier that sitting down to write.

So what then is the answer?

There ain’t one, kids.

Except to sit down and write anyway. Find the reason. Find the space. Make your peace with the struggle.

[This article is reprinted from The Fictorians.]

Cultivating the Fungus

“One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.” – J. R. R. Tolkien, on the creation of The Lord of the Rings

Where do your stories come from? Writers are often asked that question.

The short answer: they come from leaf-mold, like Tolkien says.

As Tolkien was a philologist, the leaf-mold of his life was largely the study of languages, linguistics, and their relationship to history, so it’s no wonder why Middle Earth’s races and history are so meticulously constructed.

Let’s deconstruct the above quote and expand its scope.

“One writes … not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed…”

We’ve got to have some experiences, don’t we? Experiences that elicit deep passions, loves in all their forms from crushes to parental bonds, betrayals, butt-kickings, travels, successes, and failures. We need to know what things feel like. We need to have laughed, wept, exulted, raged, and trembled in sufficient quantity to infuse our art with truth. The hearsay of truth, the derivation of truth, and sight of truth on a distant mountaintop is not sufficient fodder for art. Our truth must come from our own experience, not someone else’s.

…[N]or by means of botany and soil-science…”

Conscious thought is death to the creative process. It has uses, but only after the story exists in some form. The study of stories will not create a good story–although it could be argued that feeding your compost with the masterworks of your field forms a rich foundation. In the composition process, we must get the hell out of our own way. The subconscious wants to tell the story, but we fill up our awareness with fears and over-thinking, like scum on top of a crystal clear pond.

A quote from one of my favorite Japanese writer/philosophers, Takuan Soho, a 17th-century Zen monk, sheds more light here.

“One may explain water, but the mouth will not become wet. One may expound fully on the nature of fire, but the mouth will not become hot.”

Knowledge of fire and water comes with experience of fire and water, not from talking about fire and water.

We can’t write stories by talking about stories, deconstructing stories, or applying criticism to stories.

“[B]ut it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.”

Good writing comes not out of our immediate experiences today, the things that are immediate in our minds, our current traumas, but from experiences that we have assimilated.

Writing about an ongoing heartbreak might have value in catharsis, but the immediacy of the raw emotions can blind us to deficiencies in the work. Time lends perspective.

But here’s the thing. Our subconscious remembers. Those experiences will always be there. Water in the well. Leaf-mold covering the floor of our subconscious forest.

“No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap….”

And there you have the crux of it. What do you throw into your leaf-mold? Some of it, you get to choose. Education? Choice of field? Work experience? Travel? Military service? Relationships? Long-distance bike trips? Having children? An obsession with cosplay, motorcycles, firearms, history, pro wrestling, forensics, or another wild passion?

Use the good stuff, the kind of stuff that will be nourishing at the next stage. Don’t put Snickers wrappers and pop cans in your leaf-mold. Fill it with the remnants of glorious feasts and breathtaking bouquets.

Things I’ve consciously added to my own leaf-mold include travel to places such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Bali, Cuba, and Costa Rica, plus living internationally first in Japan for three years and now New Zealand, activities such as martial arts training, bicycle trips, motorcycle trips, stock car racing, a Bachelors Degree in Engineering, a Masters Degree in English, learning some chords blues riffs on guitar so I can make a little music when it suits me, studying Texas Hold’em, seeking out music that fuels the creative stardrive, and cultivating awesome friends who feed my writer soul.

We throw the best stuff into that compost pile, rake it around, and boy does it get rich!

And also full of worms, and beetles, and spiders, and grubs. Those things just get in there, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Some of it you don’t get to choose.

An abusive, controlling parent/significant other.
A loved one’s struggle with chronic or deadly illness.
Finances gone horribly awry.
Natural disasters.
The experiences of war.
Accumulated injustices, prejudice, and betrayals.

Unwilling additions to my compost are things like divorce, long-ago injuries resulting now in chronic pain, illness in the family, a lifelong struggle with weight, deaths of loved ones, unrequited love, and a host of trials, failures, successes, and incidents long since receded into the past.

One of the cool things about being a writer is that we get to right a few wrongs, even if only in our own heads and the heads of our readers.

We can get the girl/boy.

We can tar and feather that politician and ride him out of town on a rail.

We can save our parent from cancer.

We can rewrite history.

We can give just desserts.

We can create our own worlds where justice prevails. And those choices we make in our stories bubble forth from our experiences, our desires, our sense of right and wrong, our pain from those who have wronged us.

If people don’t wish us to write about them, they should behave.

Here’s the thing again: it’s all leaf-mould.

Everything we experience, whether accidentally or on purpose, leaves its tracks on our hearts. When those tracks are deep enough, ubiquitous enough, we must write about them. Consciously cultivating a rich leaf-mold will reward the writer with a great life on the front end and better writing on the back end, the kind of writing that makes readers weep and thrill and ponder and exult. The world needs more of that kind of writing.

So you owe it to the rest of us. Live an awesome life, and then imbue your art with that awesomeness.

[This article is a reprint, first appearing over at The Fictorians, on February 25, 2016]

 

 

 

 

 

Pages of Inspiration

The creative well runs dry. The heart is as desiccated and desolate as a dusty Old West street, because you’re certain your Work in Progress is utter cowflop. You shout into the endless black void, listening mournfully for a few spurious, uncertain echoes. Where can writers go when they need to pour some fire back into their souls? The same place that got us into writing in the first place: Books.

At various points in your life, you’ll encounter books that are like a blessed bowl of warm chicken soup on a wintry day when your nose is crammed with snot and you ache in every bone. You’ll encounter books like the smooth, sweet burn of good whiskey that warms you from the inside. You’ll encounter books like a smart kick in the buttocks from that hot personal trainer.

Allow me to be so bold as to suggest some books for writers that have made an impact on me.

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury is a short, sweet blast of poetic inspiration. Bradbury was a consummate master storyteller, and being able play with techniques he’s used to cultivate the creative soul is incredibly valuable. This book is less a nuts-and-bolts how-to than techniques for cultivating the creative soul.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is a swift little kick in the pants. Each short chapter puts a finger directly onto the throbbing wounds of all the reasons we do not write, all the reasons we hold ourselves back from achieving our potential. The book provides a useful psychological framework for overcoming all of those excuses.

On Writing Horror by the Horror Writers Association is collection of essays from the luminaries of horror fiction. Stephen King, Jack Ketchum, Ramsey Campbell and many others tackle aspects of effective storytelling that go beyond writing horror. Much of this book is simply about writing good fiction, and I still reference various chapters.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a great companion to Stephen King’s book below. Part how-to manual and part memoir, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, every chapter is spot-on. The chapter on first drafts is worth the cover price alone. In fact, I give that chapter to my English composition students as a lesson in how to get past the psychological blocks common to beginning writers.

Few writers can boast the impact that Stephen King has made on American fiction. On Writing is part memoir, part how-to. There are chapters on specific writing and revision techniques, but it’s also a memoir of his writing life. I found great inspiration in his writing life because he talks about the course of his career. Much of it is incredibly familiar, forming parts of every writer’s path. He had the skill, the drive, the support of a partner, caught a couple of lucky breaks, and his career exploded. And if he could do it, so can I. So can you.

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron was a life-changing experience for me. This book is a twelve-week program designed to reignite the sparks of a creative person’s soul, whether the person is a writer, graphic artist, musician, etc. It helps examine and reprogram all the ways our creative impulse is squelched–by our own fears, by our families, by the outside pressure of society. If you work through all twelve weeks of this program faithfully, you will experience a sea change in the way you approach writing, the way you approach life. I had already been writing for two decades when this book was given to me by a friend, and I found it so transformative that a few years later I went through all twelve weeks again. It was fascinating to see how much of it I had internalized. And also how far I still had to go. The Artist’s Way treats a creative life as a spiritual journey, making writing into your art, into a way of life, not something you try to do in between your day job, kids and soccer games, and your next session of World of Warcraft.

I hope someday to discover another gem and be as enlightened, invigorated, and inspired as I was when I discovered these books. Everybody needs a shot in the arm sometimes.

{This post originally appeared on The Fictorians on January 13, 2016.}

A New Paradigm for Old Time Patronage

Something new has appeared in the wondrous–and sometimes helpful–oddities of the internet. A means whereby creative folks like myself can gather their most ardent fans to chip in a few bucks every time the creator does something cool. It’s a new form of crowdfunding called Patreon.

I’ve been hankering for a few months to try it, but first I had to do some soul-searching, get some life-changes squared away, and move to another country two hemispheres away from my old digs in Colorado. I’ll be living in New Zealand until mid-2016.

I’ve done two successful Kickstarters for the last two books in my Ronin Trilogy. Each time, I raised $5700-6000 to fund the publication of those novels. I was incredibly gratified, and the result was the completion of a series of which I’m immensely proud.

Patreon, however, is a whole new ballgame for creative projects. Unlike Kickstarter, where you pledge to support a project before it’s finished, Patreon allows you to give a little tip to the creator after something is created. You get to become a patron of the arts and a supporter of the makers you love.

For you, Patreon represents a chance to be part of something much more personal than just buying a novel when it comes out. You become a trusted patron, in that old sense of the word, part of an elite group of superfans with backstage passes to the creative process.

Becoming a Patreon supporter is a way for you to help our culture move from one that expects its creative people to entertain us for free, to one where we collectively value art and artists. The way that we support the artists, musicians, indie filmmakers, and yes, writers who we love is to cross their palms with silver, as directly as possible.

Here’s a quick video on what Patreon is.

So I’m here right now asking for your support.







Why Patreon?

The bottom line is this. I’m a writer, and like all artists I need to eat, pay rent, and occasionally buy equipment. In my case, I use a laptop with several pricey software packages to produce stories, novels, screenplays, podcasts, book designs – all the creative work I do. Occasionally those tools need to be updated or replaced.

Any creative person’s most valuable asset, however, is TIME. As this campaign grows and reaches toward its goals, I will be able to scale back other demands on my time, such as freelance projects, and devote more time to creating fiction.

What’s in it for you?

For your patronage, you’ll get the stories before anyone else sees them, you’ll get some of my poetry (which no one has really seen), you’ll get to take part in the activity feed, comment on what I’m doing, and in new ways get involved with my creative process.

You’ll also have exclusive access to bits of wackiness as I conceive them, a rogue video or two, who knows? We’re entering an unexplored realm. Anything could happen.

What is good fiction worth?

Is it worth the cost of a latte to read a great short story, to lose yourself for a time in world that’s not your own? What if the cost of one or two lattes a month could help keep me writing stories for years to come?

Please support my campaign. Thank you.