The Breaks

I feel as though I moan a lot on here, so I thought this time I would acknowledge some good fortune.

I’ve mentioned several times that I help with the programming side of Can*Con, our local SFF readers’ and writers’ convention here in Ottawa. It is great fun, it is a lot of work a lot of the time, and it’s a tremendous opportunity to meet other writers and professionals in the field. I also find it a significant responsibility: we’re choosing which discussions get to happen and who gets the biggest platform in them, which is a not insignificant series of decisions in a world and a field where there are lots of voices struggling to be heard. I take it seriously and on the whole I enjoy it very much.

Working for Can*Con has also had a bunch of knock-on benefits. I have been welcomed into a wonderful community of writers and fans of speculative fiction, many of whom have become friends who mean a lot to me. I think I have already become a better writer because of it, and I have contacts that I don’t know that I would have ever made otherwise. So this is all great.

None of it would have happened if I hadn’t been invited to join the team, and I’m still more than a little hazy as to exactly why that happened. I attended Can*Con to pitch King in Darkness, had a good time, and although I don’t remember ever having a recruitment type of conversation, the following winter I got ‘drafted’. It has worked out pretty nice, and I can only look at it as a quite sizeable chunk of good luck.

I’ve heard it said by lots of people that a big part of success is just showing up; just being in the right place to get opportunities. I guess I did that by attending that first Can*Con and getting tapped to be part of the team going forward, so to some extent it’s true. I showed up, I went to the thing and made it possible that I would get selected. A lot of times, staying home is sure as shit a lot easier. So show up to places, is my advice.

At the same time, I still really can’t say that it was anything other than pure good luck that things worked out as they have. Everyone works very hard and most success flows from that, I think, but sometimes you do just get a break, and in my opinion you don’t apologize for it, you take the good luck because of all those times when you did everything you possibly could have done and things just didn’t settle out your way.

But I’m very grateful for getting the opportunity to work for Can*Con, and everything that has come out of it, and so I would like to publicly thank Derek Kunsken for taking what certainly seems as though it was a complete flier on me. It has certainly worked out for me, and I hope it continues to work out from the con’s point of view as well.

That’s it for this week, except to say that you should come join us this fall; we’re still putting the full program together but there’s already lots that I’m very excited about. Check out the Can*Con website here.

Not Insane

From time to time I meet up with some other local authors and we sit in a place (it varies) and do some writing. It’s very slightly social (the idea is not to talk to each other the whole time) but mostly the idea is to be productive. I find doing it in a group useful mostly from an accountability standpoint, i.e. I will feel guilty if the others see me goofing off on Twitter instead of writing the thing I’m meant to be writing. Also, going to a different place to work from time to time (although I deeply value my Writing Deck time) is useful because it stops me wandering off to do laundry or pet the cats instead of staying on task.

So the group writing sessions are very useful. I got refocused and back on track with the first draft of Heretic Blood by going to a bunch of them, and today I got a nice little bit of the new project hammered out by just going to a room with some other writers and sitting there and getting shit done. Well worth getting out of my pjs for.

Today’s session was also useful in a different kind of way: during one of our ‘get more coffee’ intermissions, we got to talking about how we work and I mentioned that thing I do (which I have written about here several times) where I write the first draft of my stories out of order. I think I’ve also mentioned that when I explain this process to other people, I get a strong feeling that it sounds insane.

Today though, one of the people I was writing with, who happens to be a thoroughly legitimate professional (and, in fact, I suspect that after a few more years go by, people won’t believe me if I claim to know him) said that he does the same thing, for many of the same reasons. I don’t mention this to argue that this means I am doing things Right (I still don’t believe that there is a Right way to do things), but because it was really very validating to have another writer say that yes, they do things that way too.

I think it’s very easy to convince ourselves (especially those of us prone to Impostor Syndrome) that however we do things is a massive ongoing disaster and that people will think we’re insane for doing it. So it’s almost a relief to hear that yes, other people use the same methods. I would go so far as to speculate, in fact, that no matter what method any individual writer is using to get the words on the page and their stuff completed, there’s a whole bunch doing the same thing. Because it works for them.

So what I’m doing isn’t insane (or at least no more insane than the endeavour of ‘creative writing’ is as a whole), what any of you reading may be doing also isn’t insane, and what matters is that the shit gets done.

Man, that’s dangerously close to advice again. We’ll call it there.

Thanks for reading.

Lost Stories

A few weeks ago now, I was in York. I had the chance to revisit people and places I have long missed; one of them was the splendid Minster. It is one of those places that has been special to people down through the centuries, and I always feel as though such spaces have an aura to them, the weight of all that accumulated meaning, that you can feel as soon as you enter. When you walk around, all those long-gone people tread silently with you.

And of course, there’s much to see. One thing that caught my eye in particular this visit was this little grave-marker below.

As you can see, it has been there a very long while itself, there on the floor in the east end of the great cathedral, and centuries of feet have worn it away so that I, at least, couldn’t quite make out all the details of the sad little story it has to tell.

I’m sure that somewhere (perhaps no further away than a guide book in the gift shop, or the recesses of my memory) are the details behind the little stone, but standing there this summer I wasn’t able to put the story back together. We can wonder, of course, imagine the parts that aren’t readable, fill in the reasons why this baby was laid to rest where they were, in that spot where light from the great East Window sometimes falls.

However we imagine, though, the original story was largely lost to me that day. I’ve written before about how some of the stories we like to tell change over time, as we add and subtract and rewrite to suit our tastes. We also lose stories, the ones that aren’t told and gradually fade into tantalizing fragments of tales. I encounter these sometimes doing research or playfully following rabbit-holes on the internet – I’ll run into a name, with the only information available being that they were ‘a figure in such and such mythology’. Sometimes there’s a little more: they were a king, a hero, a goddess. Perhaps. Nothing more of their stories, the stories of these people, real and imagined, who would have once loomed so large, remains. They are diminished down to a single line in a book or webpage, and many more have vanished entirely.

It’s sad to think of our lost stories, and I think it’s important to remember that this is something that can happen. We need to tell the stories we think are good and important, both by passing on the ones we’ve heard or read and liked, and creating new ones. To read and remember a story is good, but you keep it alive by passing it on to another set of eyes.

We live in a world now where there are, it seems, endless tales being told about every subject imaginable and from every point of view. It is so very easy for any one story to get lost forever. Make sure to tell the stories you love; help keep them above the flood of time a little longer.

Thanks for reading.

Plan?

Revisions are underway for the first draft of Heretic Blood, which I hope will become my third novel. I had one set of notes from an Eager Volunteer already, and have done one editing pass/rewrite based on those, and I’m waiting a bit for others to come in. I will do my own revision as well at some stage but I’m giving myself a little distance from the the thing before I do. Given the mistakes I missed in composing the first draft, I think this is for the best.

While Heretic Blood is on temporary pause, I’ve started the groundwork for what will be the next WIP. Unusually for me, I’ve spent reasonable chunk of time planning without really beginning to write. (Ok, yes, fine, I’ve already written the first and last paragraphs, leaving only all that tricky stuff in between to do.) With the other books, I largely just started writing the bits of the story I had clear in my mind, and worked out how it was all going to fit together, and what the other bits needed to be, as I went along.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m approaching it differently this time. Partly it’s because the story (as I imagine it now) will have a more complex structure than the ones I’ve written before, with flashbacks interwoven with the main narrative. I feel like I need to figure out what all of those are going to be before I start my work.

And that’s really the key thing – I feel like I need to spend some time planning this one. I can’t clearly say why, but it has been very clear to me that I need to hammer some stuff out before I’m ready to write. Perhaps this is because the WIP is a story I began once before, and ditched – I need to understand what I’m changing, and what I’m keeping, and get it relatively straight in my head before I start writing.

The reason I mention it is that, whatever the reason may be why I feel like I need to plan this time before I write, it serves as a really good example of how there is no One True Way to writing a story. I’m doing this one very differently than the last time. I can’t say for sure that it’s going to work equally well (for me), but there’s only one way to find out, and that’s to try it and see. Maybe it’ll be fantastic and I’ll plan from now on. Maybe it somehow is particular to this idea and I’ll never plan again.

The point is you gotta try and see what works for your process. Stuff that works, keep doing. Stuff that doesn’t help you, don’t worry about.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Thanks for reading.

And We’re Back

Last week, for the first time in a very long while, I missed a blog entry. There were reasons.

You may recall from the previous one that I was away on a trip overseas, and last Tuesday was the day I was travelling home. In theory it was all supposed to work perfectly – I would get home in the evening with enough time to sit and write something for this. I even had a good idea of what I would write about.

Didn’t go according to plan. Due to a huge flight delay, my trip home ended up taking just under 23 hours, door to door, and I didn’t arrive home until the early hours of Wednesday. Not a great way to end what had otherwise been a splendid trip, but (as I have reminded myself several times) if my problem is that there were problems with my international travel, I’m really doing pretty well overall.

However, the blog didn’t get written. One might argue – with some fairness – that I should have had lots of time to write something while I was waiting around in the airport, but I was a) jealously conserving my battery power so that I could monitor what was going on and communicate with people; creating a tiny illusion of control or agency in a situation in which I could really do nothing at all. I was also b) grumpy, increasingly tired, and running on bad airport food and thus not in a mood to write anything at all.

So the blog didn’t get written, but what I wanted to do today was not present a bunch of excuses (or at least, not only that) but to use this as yet another example of how sometimes, no matter what our intentions are and what plan we have, the world intervenes on us and things do not get done as we hoped they would. Probably well-meaning writing advice often insists on writing every day, or writing set amounts or at given rates. Sometimes this is very useful advice, but sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes, life is not on your side, and you’ve just gotta let things wash over you, and when it’s done you get back up and you get ’em the next time. A plan is good. Recognizing that sometimes the plan needs to bend, and that that doesn’t mean you’ve failed, is better. Ideas like ‘write every day’ or completion schedules are useful to us only insofar as they help us be productive. If they become a thing that adds to stress or becomes a way for us to beat ourselves up, then they’ve stopped serving any good purpose, and it’s perfectly okay to let them go. It doesn’t mean you quit. It doesn’t mean you failed. It doesn’t mean your work is any less legitimate than anyone else’s. It just means that man, sometimes you have a day, or two, or several.

You get back at it. Writing the blog is something I enjoy and doing it every week is a way to make sure that I don’t find that three months have passed without me doing any entries. However, it wasn’t the end of the planet that I didn’t get an entry done last Tuesday, and doesn’t mean anything other than that it was a really bad day. I’m back at it with this, and back working on revisions for Heretic Blood and planning the new WIP. The work is always there when you’re ready to get back to it.

So, starting a new streak of ‘every Tuesday’s today, and as always, I thank you for reading.