Happy National Coffee Day!

I am sitting in my usual table at the Board Game Cafe, drinking my first mug of coffee for the day and writing.

Coffee appears to be the favored drink of writers, and I don’t think it’s just because of the caffeine (although I’ll admit it’s part of the draw). Coffee has romance — whether this is because of the hard-boiled detective detective swilling black-as-sin cups, the dark thick cup of coffee with friends in a Turkish coffeehouse, the Parisian espresso or the cup of joe in a dingy city diner.

Coffee drinkers share an image that suits them well as writers. Coffee drinkers are facing their early mornings and lack of sleep with a bracing beverage that bolsters their courage to face the world. Armed with a computer and a cup of coffee, the writer can slay dragons.

I’ve finished my first cup of coffee. Time to write on my latest work, sitting in the Board Game Cafe on a cloudy, rainy early morning. The street sign reads “N. Main”, and the traffic sign says “Walk”, and at the moment, full of coffee, I think anything’s possible.

Happy Coffee Day!

I don’t know what to write!

NaNoWriMo is approaching, (November 1st) and I don’t know what to write.

I’ve been in editing mode — Apocalypse is a good amount of the way done edit-wise, while I just got handed back my first novel, Gaia’s Hands, from the developmental editor. I have enough editing for the next couple months at least.

But NaNo is about writing, not editing.

I haven’t written new for a while because of my editing needs. Although I haven’t finished Whose Hearts are Mountains, there’s not enough material left to make the 50,000 word total for NaNo.

I need an idea for a new novel by November 1.

I have a couple on the back burner: the sequel to Voyageurs, where our two characters time travel to stop the end of the world due to climate change, but that doesn’t appeal to me. In fact, I feel like I’ve backed myself into a corner writing a book that obviously has a sequel. It’s not just the research I would have to do, but the fact that I don’t know if I have enough plot to support the 80,000 word minimum for whatever genre it is.

The other involves an Archetype war with hideous implications for humans. I am so far away from the Archetype universe right now that I don’t know if I can create this.

I need inspiration — help!

Muse, if you’re out there, inspire me!

Writing and the Balance

Yesterday I felt unbalanced.

It’s been a busy work week, just as it promises to be a busy semester. I have three research projects I’ll be working on, plus recreating a new class or two, plus the usual teaching and student work. I spent all of yesterday creating a new syllabus for a class, something that should have taken me a week or so.

(I promise you I’m not hypomanic, just busy.)

In addition, I got three rejections yesterday. That brings me up to 1/4 of my queries coming back as rejections in four days. At least they rejected me quickly.

After it all, I felt unbalanced, like I always do when there’s too much work and not enough pleasurable things in my life. I used to think what I needed was recognition — to get noticed, to get published, to get an award or something. In other words, to get what I would call a “cookie”.

Yesterday I realized that I don’t need cookies. I need, instead, to get rid of feeling bad.

In other words, I need to get back into balance. And I’m coming to realize that writing, in and of itself, helps me feel balanced. (So do good smells, reading, tub soaks, and surprising new discoveries).

So I will persevere and keep writing.

Rethinking why I write

Once upon a time, I wrote because I desperately needed to be heard.

I don’t feel that pressure so much anymore. I think that it took working with a developmental editor to let that go, because I realized that I could act like a professional and take writing seriously without someone bestowing a first-place ribbon on my work. In other words, I don’t need to be published to prove anything.

But now that the immediate, inner child’s need to be heard is no longer applicable, I’m wondering if it’s truly worth it to get published.

I have heard from agents that they’re getting 500 queries a day. This means all they can do is skim them and pick what “jumps out” at them. I could be an excellent writer, but because I’m not prone to sensationalism, what I write may not “jump out”. I think I need to accept that.

I may never get published. I say this dispassionately — the odds are very poor, no matter how good a writer I am, no matter how much I publish. If I get a foot in the door, I may get more published because I will be a recognizable commodity. But right now, Prodigies (my most polished/edited piece) has gotten four rejections and I just sent it out.

I don’t know where that leaves me relative to writing or publishing. I currently have almost no free time because when I’m not working, I’m writing. I’m feeling uninspired.

I may need to rethink whether this is my calling.

Think good thoughts — I’m struggling to write.

Sorry I haven’t been writing lately. I’ve been on the road for a friend’s birthday party, and today I’ve been writing — very slowly. It turns out my “revision” of Mythos/Apocalypse is actually becoming a serious rewrite of the first section of the book. As in starting from scratch, in third person, new information, and cutting back on some of the extraneous storybuilding.

I don’t know what I think about it. This is why writing is going so slowly — two hours later and I’m still on the same page, two paragraphs down. I usually write faster than that. Much faster. I’m hoping that this is just a temporary slowdown and not a serious writer’s block.

Think good thoughts for me.

Settling in

Second day of the semester, and I’m struggling to write.

It may be that I need to put away Whose Hearts are Mountains for another work, perhaps a new work, but I’m not inspired yet.

I’m not panicking yet, because I blame my lack of inspiration on the energy it takes to start a new school year. Once I get settled into the year, I’ll be inspired to do something — hopefully a totally new thing — when I have space in my head.

In the meantime, I’ll give myself time to do the blog almost every day, and sit for an hour with my computer screen,waiting for the ideas to come.

I’ll let you know when something happens.

Getting back into writing

I haven’t written much in the last few weeks, what with working with my dev editor, traveling for New York Hope and training in advanced moulage, prepping for work, and finishing my first semester of grad school. Now it’s two days before the beginning of the semester, I’ve got no prep to do, and no excuses to do nothing. (I don’t watch tv well, and there’s only so much looking at cats on Instagram I can do.)

So I’m taking the advice I’d give someone else — write something every day. This means in my case to get reacquinted with Whose Hearts are Mountains. I don’t know how I feel about that book at the moment. It’s in the Archetype universe, and I’ve had such trouble understanding how to improve the first book(s) in that universe, Mythos and Apocalypse (which I am thinking of putting together). I don’t know if it’s sellable, and I don’t know if I care.

It might be that I keep working on Whose Hearts are Mountains, send Mythos to my dev editor (Hi, Chelsea!) and figure out things from there.

But I need to write. Every day,

Life without writing

About querying time, I wonder what it would be like to quit writing and quit pursuing representation and publication. Querying is brutal — you prepare excerpts of your prized manuscripts to people who will go by their first impressions, and nobody will tell why they rejected you except “It’s not you, it’s me” or “I’m very picky about who I represent”. I would love some real feedback like: “Could you rewrite your query letter and tell me more about x”.

What would my life be like without writing? I think it would feel like having a lobotomy — I would know something important was missing, but have no idea what. It would be like waking up and finding out a loved one was gone — not dead, just gone. In other words, there would be a hole and I can’t imagine filling it up. No other hobbies I’ve had have been this fulfilling, and for my gardening to be close to this fulfilling I would need a working greenhouse with enough room to actually handle my plants. (We do not have the space or money for that.) My moulage (casualty simulation) might become more fulfilling if I could go professional with it, but the outfits that need moulage for training purposes can’t afford a professional.

As for giving up dreams of being published, that’s a little more complex. There are certain things built into my psyche for better or worse. I love to accomplish new things, and everything else in my life lately has been things I’ve done for the last N years, where N is probably around 30. I’ve hit a stagnation point in my job with 8 years until retirement (I’ve tried hard, coworkers, but I’m chronically burnt out and in need of a break). I need challenge, and I need recognition. I need people liking my work, and to do so they have to see it. Esteem and accomplishment are nothing to be afraid of.

What would it feel like to give up trying to get published? I’d be exactly where I am now, except that the challenge would be gone and I would feel like I had given up on an adventure to stay in my stagnation. I don’t know if I can find another opportunity to break the stagnation.

So I do the same thing I’ve been doing every four months for the past two years, wondering if I will ever make escape velocity.

If anyone has ideas of challenges I could try (I’ve already lost 70 lbs, I have some health problems that keep me from running, I don’t want to run for public office, and I have profound hand-eye coordination problems), let me know.

Insecurity as part of life

I am close to the end of Prodigies, so close that I can see — the headlights of an oncoming train.

That’s how writing feels like if you’re insecure — the feeling that you’re going to finish the work only to find it a piece of crap. And realizing you’re the least objective person reading your work, but still accepting your own judgment that it’s a piece of crap. That’s what insecurity is — the lurking voice that whispers “you’re not good enough, you’ll never get published, nobody cares about what you write.”

I’m insecure. Isn’t every writer? Isn’t every creative person out there?

What do I do about it?

At this point, it’s hard, because many of my creative friends say, “Hey, I did a thing! Look at this thing I did!” and post it on Instagram or Facebook. I think that’s why I have a blog here, but I get comments very few and very far between, so I don’t have the response of “Hey, what a cool thing you did!” Come to think of it, my friends who say “Hey, I did a thing!” don’t get responses on Facebook or Instagram either, and they have more friends than I do. I should comment more on their things they did. Maybe it’ll come back to me.

My beta readers (two of them; the third hasn’t gotten back to me) have been complimentary of my work even through pointing out some necessary changes. I actually feel less insecure when people point out errors and problems becausef they care enough to read and it’s only in the worst writings that someone can’t make constructive comments.

Insecure people seek out reassurance, and sometimes it has the opposite effect if they ask for too much. “Look at this thing I did!” seems more positive and effective than wailing “I’ll never be published”. I’ve done both.

I can own it, my entree into the world of creatives — I’m insecure.

Waiting for my new computer

I have a computer — a five-year-old MacBook which has served me well, as long as I didn’t care about having more than 230 MB of storage, a separate video card, and an OS that occasionally forgets to perform the “click” part of “point and click” six times a day and has to be restarted. Obviously I mind, so I’m getting a new computer.

I’m getting a new computer with some interesting specs:

7th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ Quad Core
Windows 10 Home 64-bit English
16GB, 2400MHz, DDR4
128GB Solid State Drive (Boot) + 1TB 5400RPM Hard Drive (Storage)
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050Ti with 4GB GDDR5

I don’t really know what any of this means, except that the hard drive has a separate boot disk and the main drive is over 4x bigger than what I have, and that it’s a gaming computer.

I’m a writer. Why do I need a gaming computer?

The simple explanation is that I’m using a program called Sketchup, available free in its most basic form on the web, to render maps for places I write about. For example, three of my books take place on the ecocollective (a collective, but not communal, living arrangement) called Barn Swallows’ Dance (It doesn’t really exist, but if I did, I’d probably live there). I wanted a map of the place because I have at best shaky visual memory, which I believe I’ve said before. So I put together a layout of a map of Barn Swallows’ Dance on Sketchup using already created components, not realizing they were three-dimensional. They were!

That gave me lots of potential, but lots of frusrtration, because my computer was much too slow to act on the objects in my map. I thought they were at ground level, but in three dimensions, they were floating in the air! And I would adjust them according to what I saw on the screen, but there was a delay, so the objects went from floating in the air to buried in the ground, and my computer wouldn’t let me find the down-to-earth mode. It was like a very slow-motion game of whack-a-mole.

That was two years ago, and I’ve long gone past writing those books, although I am sending Mythos (the first) to my beta-readers soon. (Note: Do you want to be a beta-reader? Please email me at: lleach (it’s a link) if so.) I still would like to fix that project, because what’s there is intensely cool.

I also have a new project that goes along with the book-in-waiting Whose Hearts are Mountains, which is currently last in the writing queue. It also takes place at an ecocollective, one built largely underground in the desert. The housing is based on a conceptual idea (and I will have to find and credit the architect involved.). The tube habitats he drew up have not been created in 3-dimensions, so I would have to do that myself, probably in pieces. No, I’ve never created my own piece before, but it’s another skill to learn just for myself.

I wish all the things I learned were useful to others — teaching, of course, is. Writing — the journey is still out. Disaster mental health — very useful to me and to my college for accreditation, but I would also have to take a master’s in counseling or social work to become certified in disaster mental health. (No, I am not doing that) I might be useful in consulting with the city or county, but I’ve had a history of not being taken seriously by the guys with trucks that do the planning. If I could get the Ministerial Alliance to quit quibbling over butts in pews long enough to see that they need to mobilize so we could certify disaster case managers (which I am qualified to do)… sorry for the divergence. It’s a sore point.

Anyway — odd little hobbies like my gardens (and trying to get rare seeds to grow), fishing, and the Sketchup design are things I do for myself. I push myself to get more competent (I don’t seem to be able to do things without that drive to improve unless I’m super-depressed) Hobbies are flow activities; they’re things I lose myself in and it’s like meditation, only with a satisfying level of challenge. I’m hoping Sketchup rendering becomes another flow activity for me.

And I hope that computer will help.