Competition

I entered a small writing contest last month, and didn't win. In a way, I'm glad, because I was able to turn it around into something positive.

When I first got the news, I was really let down. Then, jealous and angry at the people who'd won. Then, angry at myself for being so petty and thin-skinned. As usual, I started questioning my own abilities... am I a good writer? Do I have any talent whatsoever? What the fuck am I doing this for if I can't even win a writing contest?

After a while, I realized that I really hadn't put my best work out there. I had a month, and spent the majority of it dicking around and working on other projects. I wound up typing up the entry over the deadline weekend, with no real time for revision, or to look at it with fresh eyes. Still, in my arrogance, I couldn't see it not winning. Realizing that arrogance touched off another wave of anger and self-doubt.

But then, I remembered reading somewhere that the best thing you can do when you get a rejection letter, or lose a contest, or go through anything that shakes your confidence is to write. Just write. Free write, write a short story, do anything, just write.

So I did. I started with just a stream-of-consciousness freewriting exercise, but quickly moved back to Age of Rust. A really weird thing happened... one that made me realize why writing in times like this is amazing advice. I remembered! I remembered that I could write, and write well. The feeling of "hey, I can do this!" washed over me again and reinvigorated me.

I realize now that writing contests maybe just aren't for me, at least not at this point in my career. I don't need the distractions, and I take it way to hard if things don't go my way. They turn writing into a zero-sum game, and that's not what I am looking to get out of this whole exercise. I'm writing for my own edification, not to be better than anyone else. I get all the competition I need when I look in the mirror.

Would this post be different if I had won? Probably. I'm sure I'd be gushing. But then, I think the realizations that have come out of this are more valuable for me as a person and a writer. As Bug Eyed Earl says, "When life gives you poop, you make poop juice."

Delicious.

Ennui...

...is not conducive to writing.

I give you... The Age of Rust

The Lord of the Rings. A Song of Ice and Fire. The Chronicles of Amber.

Every fantasy setting has a name. Those are some of the greats. The Age of Rust is mine... it's greatness is yet to be determined.

It's not something I planned to do or worry about for a long, long time. Write the fucking book has been my new mantra, and for all intents and purposes, that's what I've been doing. And yet, there it was. Unexpected, unasked for, but there.

Maybe its a working title. Maybe it's the real deal. Maybe its the "marketing" part of my brain putting its two cents into this particular creative endeavour. Whatever it is, I like the way it sounds, and the images it conjures.

I credit my friend Tom Clancy with planting the suggestion that the concept of rust would fit well in a fantasy story with heavy steampunk elements. He just sent me an email one day with the idea that bad guys in a steampunk world should worship something called "rust". He hadn't thought it out any more than that, and it's good, becuase I'm not using that idea exactly. I do thank him from the bottom of my heart though, for dropping that little pearl in my lap.

I love what rust represents, what it stands for. Decay and disuse. Poor maintenance. Slow death for the great works of man. Its very evocative to me. My novel takes place during the twilight years of a great empire. Old and decadent and rotten to the core. It's a world of machines, mages and madmen, and while nobody worships rust, everyone serves it, in their own way.


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Work continues apace. Chapter 3 is put to bed, and chapter 4 is soon to follow. Chapter 3 is very short, which is the sort of thing that used to worry me in my younger days. But, that was before I knew the rules about chapter length. There aren't any, really. A teacher once told me that a chapter is as long as it needs to be. Crazy talk, I thought. There must be some kind of rule, some kind of formula, like x words times y pages = fucking awesome writing.

Turns out its not that simple. I mean its still simple. Just a different kind of simple. I've come to realize each chapter is like a scene in a play, or a movie. Some are long, some are short. If you make a long one short, it will seem rushed. If you stretch a short one out, it will drag. There's no way to know until you're writing the damn thing.

Location, location, location

So, once again, I found myself at the Grey Dog on monday night. I meet my wife there after her pottery class and then we go home together. Usually, I leave work, grab a quick bite, then head down there. This generally leaves me about 2-3 hours to write. I finished up chapter 2, and got midway through chapter 3 this monday.

I don't know why, but I find it really easy to write there. It's usually very crowded, very loud, and they don't even play music I like half the time. Still, something about it is just conducive to a "writing state of mind" for me. I get the same feeling to a lesser extent at most Starbucks, but when I am at a starbucks, I tend to slack off more and just surf the internet instead of working. Ditto for when I try to write in the office on a quiet day, or at home when I have nothing to do.

It's really working for me, so I guess as long as my wife is taking pottery classes downtown, I'll have at least one productive night per week. I'd really love to be able to get into that zone in other places though. Who knows, in time, I might be able to. Perhaps its not so much the place, but what it invokes in me. Would be nice to carry that around with me, though. For now, at least, location plays a big part in whether I write or not, and I'm happy to have a place that works.

It's on.

So, an amazing thing happened earlier tonight.

I opened up word and started the new draft. I was at an old coffee shop that I used to work near, called the Grey Dog. I used to write in there sometimes, so maybe the setting had something to do with it. I have been trying to get started for weeks, but I kept finding ways to put it off... eve ndoing the prep work like outlining was a way of delaying the reality of actually having to start writing the fucking thing.

But, once I started writing, it started to flow. I'm still getting to know the characters, but the dialogue is flowing smoothly. I've written about a chapter and a half... one is pretty heavy with action, the other is mostly dialogue so far.

It felt really good to be writing again. I've been under a lot of stress lately, but somehow, like midway through chapter 1, I hit a zone where I was just writing, not worrying about anything going on in my life, not obsessing over details, just writing as it came to me.

It was a good feeling.

Burning Books

I really have to give props to my friend Luke Crane. He designs roleplaying games - the kind you play with pencils, paper, and dice. Luke's most famous game is The Burning Wheel. He's also written Burning Empires, which has a lot in common with BW, but is it own game. I've written short fiction for both, but that's not why I like them.

The great thing about Luke's games is that they are constructed around a single ideal; produce an engaging and interesting story. Playing BW or BE, you wind up feeling really connected to your character, because in the process of character creation, you have given him/her a history, motivations, and even mannerisms. This is in contrast to the RPGs I grew up with; Dungeons & Dragons being the main one. In the RPGs I grew up with, all of the character stuff beyond pure statistics was all in your head. Burning Wheel not only provides all that information, it actually encourages you to play to it. Played well, BW can produce intense, emotional stories that grip you as a participant, and its a hell of a good time.

So, aside from pimping an awesome product, what does this have to do with writing the humungous?

Well, I was working on some character bios the other day. I like to have a lot of information and backstory - even if it doesn't all get used, it helps me form a picture of the character in my head, helps the dialogue flow, gives me a handle on how characters interact.

As I'm writing these bios, I realize that this is pretty much like making up a BW character. Of course, I'm not sticking to a rulebook or anthing like that, but the actual process is pretty similar. It inspired me to crack open the ol' BW books and have a look.

In terms of process, there's not all that much difference between making a character for a game and making one for a novel. It may be that I just have a heavy RPG background, so thats just my approach, but I find that it works really well. There's some differences to be sure. In a novel, the character's success and failure, skill and prowess is not determined by dice, but by my whim, so stats are pretty irrelevant. However, all the rest, the BITs, as Luke terms them (Beliefs, Instincts and Traits... he's very clever), are pretty much all you could ever want to know about a given character when paired up with a personal history.

I don't think BITs are exactly a revolutionary in the process of fiction writing - they're essentially a different way of expressing something that you learn in Creative Writing 101... the basics of building a character. However, I think they're easy to understand and reference, and a great way to organize the information about the character in question. So, in true writerly fashion, I'm stealing Luke's idea and using it for my own purposes. Sorry Luke. You really should have seen this one coming... ;)

In any case, it will make things easier when work begins on the obligatory RPG supplement.

I know, I know, getting ahead of myself. Back to writing.

Fuck You, Brain.

So, my 7 year old nephew is hugely into star wars. For his birthday, we got him this crazy huge popup book about star wars. It's the biggest, most intricate popup book I've ever seen. He loved it.

So anyway, we're looking through this monstrosity and we come to the page about the Rancor. Apparently, it hails from the planet Dathomir. This is, I'm sure an insignificant fact to pretty much everyone in the universe, George Lucas included. It matters to me because its the name of a major location in my book, and now I have to think of a new one.

It's really a minor annoyance, but I have to wonder how many of the other names I've come up with exist somewhere else. I really have no recollection of reading the word "Dathomir" anywhere, ever. It's entirely possible, probable even, that I came across it sometime, because I was a pretty big star wars fan back before the prequels came out. I read alot of star wars stuff, like RPG sourcebooks and shitty novels and stuff like that, so I probably did read it somewhere, file it away in the back of my mind, and promptly forget all about it. Thank you, subconscious.

Well, at least it happened in the glorious age of the word processor, where I can just "replace all" instead of going through a manuscript with a fine toothed comb. I'm also glad it happened at a point where I don't even have an actual manuscript to go through.

Probably he most annoying part of writing fantasy and science fiction is that you have to think of names for everything. Everything. You can base them around real places and things, or mythological ones, or just string syllables together till it sounds right. Unless of course, you're a linguist or something. But I'm not, and I dont have time to learn, really. It's tough to get a name that sounds even remotely cool, and even tougher to have a group of names that is internally consistent enough to sound like part of the same language. I guess that's why a lot of authors just add apostrophes to everything until they have names like Xy'tha'lo'b'ta.

So, I guess I'll think up a name, even if its just a placeholder. Maybe I can get away with just changing a couple of letters. Dathongir. Drathomir. I dunno. Anyway, back to the grind. And fuck George Lucas.