A.J. Race's Blog, page 12

Non-Linear

Ever since I began writing I have always written in a linear fashion. Begin at the beginning, and write all the way through to the end. I’ve considered changing it up, even tried writing the end first or cutting across the hard stuff (the part that naturally won’t be as exciting) to the more exciting bits but for one reason or another this way of writing has never quite worked for me. So instead I drive myself crazy trying to write it in some kind of natural order, for reasons I’ve yet to understand.

As often happens when one is forced to stretch their creativity to the limits (between design and writing) I’ve found myself at a bit of a block.

There’s never an easy solution to writers block, no matter what anyone tells you, and for that matter just because something works for some doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for all of us. The reality is, everybody’s different, and the reason for each of our writer’s blocks is different for everyone.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to skip ahead in my current work in progress in the hopes of getting more things written. I may even consider working on hand writing just to see if that helps get anything more out as well. Hopefully this will manage to get some things done.

Design B.S.

In a matter of a few short quarters I will be the mostly proud recipient of a Bachelor’s of Science in Graphic Design. Why not a BA, I’m not entirely sure, but as I understand it, it won’t amount to very much in the grand scheme of things. Why?

No matter how much better the economy is doing, and for whatever reason it didn’t make many waves but hey, we took in more money than we were spending not that long ago, actually like less than a month or something… maybe? Nobody knows? Great. Perfect. Apparently good news is hardly ever newsworthy.

But the reality is, enough people are pumping the whole the economy is still in shambles story, and being that our economy is largely based on our faith in that money, it’s really not where it should be. (Though when is it ever? I mean really? Watch old sit-coms, everybody bitches about the economy. It’s never ending).

Furthermore, because during the worst part of the recession everyone was laid off pretty much universally the people who are now getting jobs are the people who were high up in their field to begin with. Nobody wants a graphic designer just out of college. You need at least two years experience under your belt and how the hell you can even find that is a complete mystery. Moreover, technology changes so rapidly that literally by the time I graduate in roughly 3 quarters, everything I’ve been taught will be obsolete because graphic designers are expected to be more web/mobile centric and that isn’t even what I’m being taught. So what’s a designer to do? Go back to school and learn an entirely new area of design that leans heavily on web and mobile. Get a masters and hope that that will be enough to actually just begin to get my foot in the door, but with still no experience behind me, I suspect even that won’t entirely cut it.

And to make it all just a million times better, I’m way to exhausted for all this ish.

Small Worlds

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. This weekend my mother and I drove out to California to celebrate my aunt’s fiftieth birthday. To meet her you would never believe this of course because no one in our family looks their age, but I digress.

Southern California was where I was born, and I spent most of my life in the Anaheim area, so it’s sort of obligatory for my mother and I that we at least pass by the house where I spent a fairly good portion of my youth.

This time however… something occurred to me, that for whatever reason hadn’t before. At barely eleven my mother and her family moved across the country from Florida to California, my mother had been born in New York but the family had moved from there to Florida when my mother was eight or nine. Shortly thereafter tragedy struck and my grandmother passed. It would be two years before the family moved over to California. Around that time, my grandfather joined a over fifty’s singles group where he met a woman whom he later would marry.

Here’s where it gets a little stranger than fiction, this particular woman in question, lived in Anaheim, on the same street several miles down from my father’s side of the family. She had lived there for quite a few decades by that time, and my father’s side of the family had lived on his street since before he was even born.

It was like something out of a movie… two families had lived only a few miles away for years, and it was only because of my grandfather happening to get a job in California, and happening to meet this woman that mother would move in to that particular house and shortly thereafter meet my father.

The fairytale, as it often does, … ends there. Their marriage was not exactly what I would call a happy one. I struggled with my parents divorce for years, but the more I learned about the tumultuous marriage, the more I realized it was more than necessary, it was long overdue, but the point is… if all of these things hadn’t fallen into place in just such a way, my parents might never have met.

Sometimes life is so much more bizarre than anything a writer could even imagine… and I think if I had seen it in a movie or read it in a book, I probably wouldn’t even have believed it.

I love hearing about family history and really all kinds of history… maybe it’s a writer thing.

Young Adult

Teenage years are a confusing time for all involved. No one is quite sure how to lump you, for adults you can’t drink (legally), and you can’t vote (until the latter end of your teen years) and therefore you aren’t really an adult. For teenagers you don’t want to be seen as a kid anymore and so you rebel. You do everything you can to prove you’re just as much of an adult as anyone else. Add in a mixture of hormones and high expectations from on one side, your parents and family who expect you to get good grades and go to college and on the other your friends and classmates who expect you to be cool and fit in, all of which amount to a recipe for disaster.

This is of course a generalization, but I do so with purpose so bare with me.

I’ve made my opinions on the Casual Vacancy fairly well known, but I think perhaps I’ve judged it a little too harshly. In fact, if you look at the book from a similar perspective as a rebellious teenager you can understand why it’s a little awkward.

J.K.Rowling spent the better part of seventeen years working on seven books for young adults (which in this case actually translated according to Barnes and Nobles own age ranges to about 8-15). As such these books were not as mature as they otherwise would be were they written for an adult audience. Add to this the high expectations of fans coming off Harry Potter, and the desire to breakaway from the image she had cultivated for herself as a young adult author and what you have is a book that seems to be trying just a little too hard to prove how much of an adult it is. Gratuitous swearing and sex is nothing I’m against by any means, but if it fits. In the case of TCV however it was almost as if these things were there simply to be there, in an effort to prove its adultness by the very nature of its openness to sex and swearing. Like most teenagers however it proves it’s youth by the awkward fumbling’s of the sex scenes and an awkward discomfort for all involved.

The loathsome characters are of course in a breed all their own, and I can’t really explain that away anymore than to say there are many human beings who are despicable and loathsome so perhaps this makes them true to life. Whether or not an author should make the reader fall in love with an otherwise loathsome character is a debate for another day.

Pseudonym

After the Casual Vacancy was released last September, I wondered how long we’d have to wait for another J.K.Rowling novel, as it turns out, not as long as you might think.

Less than seven months after the release of the Casual Vacancy J.K.Rowling quietly released a new novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Calling. So why had almost no one heard about it? It was written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Unfortunately for Rowling while the novel received critical acclaim, after three months on the market the book had sold only 1,500 copies. But what a difference having her real name behind it has made… within a matter of days since it was revealed she was the true author of the novel the books sales have risen 156,000% and it’s now the number one book on Amazon.

In an ironic twist of fate, an editor has come forward to say he actually turned down the novel, making it the second time in a decade that an editor has turned down what turned out to be a major hit by the exact same author. It’s interesting to know and perhaps even comforting for authors like myself that even J.K.Rowling could be rejected again, even if it was under a pseudonym.

In a way I do feel for J.K.Rowling who said:

I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience. It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.

Though I admit I’m amazed she even attempted to write under a pseudonym or for that matter that it took a full three months for anyone to figure it out. It seems like something that would have been discovered much sooner. As it is… I’m extremely excited for this new J.K.Rowling original and I’ll be reading it shortly.

Long Chapters vs. Short Chapters

After much deliberation on the matter I’ve decided that for several reasons, I’m not going to be going the serial novel route (at least for my current work-in-progress). Too many variables that still need to be considered. But I am going to be breaking the novel up into several parts consisting of (at least for now) three chapters each. But I’m curious about something… 

Which is better, long chapters or short chapters? 

Currently my chapters range the mid two thousands in word count, which at this rate to make my final word count goal I’d have to have roughly 45 chapters. Or… I could have 24 chapters at about 5,000 words a pop. For reference, 5,000 words is around 10 pages single spaced which isn’t as much as I would have imagined, but that shrunken down to 6×9 for trade paperback, we’re looking at maybe 15-20 pages per chapter. It isn’t particularly uncommon for well known authors, 11/22/63 (which I’m currently reading) has fairly long chapters, but it’s broken up into scenes which helps break up the chapter more than just one long monotonous chapter. The Casual Vacancy took a similar approach to the way in which the longer chapters were broken up. 

On the flip side however, Holes and the Da Vinci Code were both broken up into multiple short chapters and in some ways I almost think that made these books easier to consume.

What about you? Long chapters or short chapters? 

Fan Mail

It’s not often (make of that what you will) that I get to hear from readers about what they think of what is currently available of my books (before I took them down so I could do a substantial rewrite), but as I still had copies of the paperback of my book and one of my mother’s co-workers wanted to read it I decided what the hell. I had almost completely forgotten about it altogether until I got an email from said co-worker’s husband who had also read the book.

 …At 1st i was a bit sceptical, Honestly I had never read much in the GLBP [LGBT] genre …  I decided what the hell, I havent found a good book in a while.  I got to page 2 wherte you found out chris was gay and thought….. is this going to be a “GAY” book???? but i decided to go on reading.  It turned out to be a really good book.  So I wanted to Thank you…  Im glad I kept reading. TY for a original idea and reminding me LOVE IS LOVE no matter who is sharing it.

You know when I set out to write Bridge of Memories almost two years ago this November, I knew that there might be some resistance, but I sincerely hoped that people who would not normally have given the book a second glance based solely on it being in the LGBT genre would decide to check it out anyway. For me there’s really no better praise because it means that my main goal, making the fact that these characters are gay the least interesting thing about them, worked. I accomplished what I set out too.

I’m still going to do some rewrites an edits because there’s a lot I want to perfect of the trilogy, but it was amazing to hear and it couldn’t have come at a better time. I desperately needed a sign that this was still what I should be doing (because sometimes we all start to doubt ourselves) and this was definitely the jolt in the arm I needed.

What’s in a Sub-Genre?

I’m really of two minds on this issue. On the one hand I feel that having a separate genre for gay and lesbian issues, women’s issues and African American issues is makes it easier for persons of that label to find books which feature situations similar to those they have found themselves in. On the other hand I also feel that it perpetuates the dangerous notion of separate but equal. One of the most staggering and common comments I’ve received on the Secrets of Witches trilogy and a piece of my writing when it was available via Authonomy was that it more often than not it was not typically the type of story that reader would read, in no small part because it was an ‘LGBT book’. How many more readers, who would otherwise not be exposed to such literature, are we alienating simply by the nature of calling a book LGBT. Furthermore, simply because a book is written either by a woman/African American/LGBT or about women/African Americans/LGBT is not necessarily indicative that it’s content will reflect issues that all of these groups face. Because everyone has had different experiences in their lives that make them who they are. My life as an LGBT person does not reflect that of other LGBT individuals, solely because we all fit the label of LGBT. Perhaps the larger question at hand is why do we need to call ourselves LGBT at all? Is it more to serve as a beacon for those struggling with their sexuality or gender identity or is it a way for others to make judgements based solely on a label that is thrust upon us?

I think that this, like so many issues is a complex and multifaceted one with no simple answer and perhaps not even just one correct answer. The right answer for you may not be the right answer for someone else… so… here’s how I see it, if you agree with me then fine, if not, find what works for you and go with that.

For me I plan to drop the LGBT title (and hope that if I should decide and be accepted by the traditional publishing world they can respect this wish) for my current and future works, because for me the more people you can expose to gay characters, the more you can get them interested in their lives and realize that we’re just human beings like everyone else, the more allies we have in the LGBT community and hopefully the less prejudiced people will be. More than that, though, true equality comes when we drop the extraneous labels of LGBT American, African American, Hispanic American, etc. And just embrace ourselves as Americans, and beyond that, humans.

Simple Solution

Texas has made quite a name for itself in the last few months for ridiculously hardline party voting in favor of anti-aborition legislation. Legislation that realistically given Roe v. Wade shouldn’t actually have any kind of standing in any state but that’s neither here nor there. But the problem isn’t just in Texas. In fact, more and more in everywhere from Virginia to Ohio these bills are cropping up in record numbers. In spite of the fact that the states really should have better things to be doing right about now. The economy of most states isn’t anywhere near where they should be, and yet we’re really concerning ourselves with this bullshit?

But… since they don’t want to stop, I think I’ve come up with, what I believe to be a fair solution to the problem. The way I see it, if certain politicians in their ‘infinite wisdom’ feel that they have the right to force someone to keep their baby, then those politicians should flip the bill for all medical expenses incurred. Food expenses, educational expenses and help raise the child. And for anyone who wants to say that this is some kind of liberal entitlement understand that if a politician wants to feel that they’re entitled to tell anyone what they can and cannot do then they obviously feel that they are co-parent of said ‘child’ and therefore should have to provide as much assistance as any other parent. Frankly if you believe the government should be smaller, but also believe the government should stop people from getting married and having abortions then you’re not only crazy you’re a hypocrite. More importantly if you want the government to be smaller I suggest you start with quitting your job, because let’s face it folks, state government is government too. Ultimately if Rick Perry and his ilk want to tell women that they should be forced by the state to keep a pregnancy for whatever reason then Mr. Perry and his friends should have to help out. And if you don’t want to help because ‘hey that’s not my responsibility’ then why don’t you shut your mouth and leave politics to the grown ups, because if it’s not your responsibility to raise that child and you certainly don’t want to do anything to fix education or actually do something about child hunger then I guess it’s not your responsibility to be deciding whether or not that fetus is born or not.

21 of the Best Things About Being a Writer

I’m a cynic by a lot of standards, but even the biggest bitch in the world has to laugh and smile and enjoy some parts of life. Here are just a few of the happier points of being a writer.

#1 Getting to create entirely new worlds.

#2 Knowing that you can take people into those worlds and make them feel what you want them too.

#3 The (however fleeting) feeling of accomplishment you get when you finish a novel.

#4 The smell of ink and paper

#5 Seeing your book’s cover for the first time

#6 Seeing your book in print for the first time

#7 Holding your book in your hands and feeling the weight of your imagination in real terms.

#8 Signing your book for people

#9 Getting money for you work after doing it for free for so long.

#10 Good reviews and having people love your book.

#11 Starting a new novel and a new adventure with new people

#12 Talking with fellow writers about writing and books.

i love you guys

#13 Not having to talk about books if you decide.

#14 Hearing from well established writers that they do things you do.

Omg that’s SOOO Raven… wait…

#15 Getting a fan base and knowing all the sleepless crazy nights actually were for a reason.

#16 Being able to enjoy and really love what you’re writing.

I confess I don’t actually watch Dr. Who but this gif said what I needed to so I’m using it.

#17 When someone falls in love with a character and it becomes even more real to them.

#18 Killing that character off.

I’ll take your broken heart now

#19 Because of your job you’re more than just a writer, you are your characters and everything they do.

so you’re also a little crazy

#20 Fan letters

#21 (If your lucky) Knowing that you inspired someone else to write. (Unless you inspired them to write Fifty Shades of Twilight)

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“You write?… good for you.”