A Writer at University

First of, in the meantime, this blog has reached 100 subscribers. Thanks, gals and guys, for pushing me into the three digits, much appreciated. :) (No idea how it happened, but you're all welcome. This is really the place where I very often speak to myself, like the weird pinstripe-wearing dude on the train mumbling to himself...)

ANYWAY. Big(gish) news all round, so that one first:

Riptide Publishing, Rachel's and my brainchild (now, scary thought, so maybe let's move away from that metaphor) has been nominated as best e-Publisher of 2011 by Love Romance Cafe.

Of course, cynical voices will say we only had three months to FUBAR, and that didn't happen. It was a steep learning curve, but Riptide's looking better with every passing month. Sod it, week. e-Publishing is THAT fast-paced. We've been selling books for three months now, and the business is already - very firmly - in the profit zone, vastly over-exceeding our financial expectations. We feel that our mission statement is pretty much 100% correct. There will be a broadening and deepening, staff-wise and genre-wise, but overall, we've had a terrific three months and are very pleased that we're nominated for this.

Also, "Dark Soul 1" has been nominated "Best Book of 2011". Considering that it's the first in a series, the last two installments aren't even out yet, and it made a very late entrance in the year, that's astonishing and I'm beyond flattered. (No pressure on the sequels, right?)

But not only that - a huge amount of "our" authors were nominated with Riptide and non-Riptide releases, and congrats to everybody for their hard work, we're extremely proud to work with some of the absolute top talent in the genre.

And - I've always said I was lucky with my covers. In this case, people can see just how lucky I was with "Lion of Kent", which scored the cover artist, Angela Waters,
I bet I'm forgetting some more nominations, but that's it for the moment on this front. If anything, awards and suchlike always remind me that any book is a team effort, and it's a huge amount of work then to sift through it all and compile a shortlist. I know. I've done it in journalism. Thanks guys and gals, I'm very grateful for the hard work.

I've recently talked to one of my co-writers, and realized that writing is really largely overcoming obstacles. They can take a number of shapes, really, most are probably mental in my case. (They can be physical - I knew a writer once whose arthritis was so bad she could only type for 30 minutes per day, talk about serious limitations!)

Thankfully, my ego is pretty resilient overall. It's probably a layer thing. The outer layer is me going "Yes, I'm FUCKING AWESOME". The next layer down holds my insecurities. It's a big layer, and the inner critic lives there, too. That's the place where reviews hurt, especially when the reviewer says out loud what I was feeling down in my guts but didn't know how to fix. This is the place where I keep half an eye on my Amazon rankings and Goodreads reviews.

But at the core of it, deep, deep, down, there's a place that nothing can touch, and that's what powers the Muse. I'd reasonably confident that I'll always write, because I've always made up stories. It's integral to me like the spine or the skull bone. Nobody can remove it. I don't think it could even be damaged by outside forces. If we use the metaphor of a nuclear reactor (I've recently used that in my writing, so it's a close one), the radiation is always there. Whether I turn it into anything sellable is a different matter - and the plutonium core absolutely does not care. It's happily emitting radiation, whether anybody does anything with it or not, it'll just go on doing that because that's its nature. The best answer to "why do you write?" for me is "because I cannot not." It's my birth defect, or my calling, it is really what it is.

Now, a situation I recall from university becomes truly bizarre. I started university studying German Literature (made kinda sense at the time) in addition to American Studies and my major in History. Still getting my head around how this whole writing and novel thing works, so I figured some help from academia might be nice.

So we're doing the "get to know you" bit at the start of a German Lit course. 99% of the people there said they were studying German literature because they always liked to read (or were good in German at school). I, the dissident, admitted to being a writer and trying to learn some tricks from the pros.

Response from the lecturer running the course: "OH MY GOD! You should immediately drop out, because if you stay, you will realize that every story has already been written, and so much better by the Grand Masters of Literature than you could EVER HOPE TO BEEEEE!"

Let's not even begin to talk about how a man (who's made his life and career in academia by talking about the work of writers to the uninitiated) tells a creator to a) either not get involved in literary criticism as it would surely break the writer's heart; or b) give up writing and despair over his own inadequacy at the very start of his career in the face of the masters.

In other words, why play chess; you'll never beat Deep Blue. Why run; you'll never beat Usain Bolt. Why cook, if that Michelin star is WAY out of your league.

And surely, if all stories in all possible permutations have already been told, surely we've run out of stories way before Shakespeare. Sorry, Faulkner, what you did was a complete waste of your time ever since Ovid.

Also, I hadn't been aware that gay military sci-fi romance was so big in the Middle Ages.

Okay, I mocked the asshole lecturer enough now. I just dread to think how many young writers might have believed him, if only for five minutes, thanks to his Position of Authority. But then, writers do it because they must, so the real writers will have been okay, anyway. I'm just sorry for the moments of doubt this guy has left in his cynical wake.

And every story has a moral. I did exactly what the dude wanted: I dropped out of German Literature (now, having dropped out of the German language too, this has an ironic double edge) and turned towards American Studies, where one of my favourite lecturers ran this course: Creative Writing (my first CW course).