Titles, Those Tribulations

I should make a note - assuming I keep this job through another year - that the months of April and May are an absolute bear carrying a number of plagues to get any writing done in. Along with the extra workload that comes with the end of the academic year, I get called in to cover when everyone uses up the last of their vacation days. To be fair, I've taken days of this time period myself, and made constructive use of them, but it's not helping me keep an energy level that's anything above hibernating sloth.

With the complaining out of the way, I am happy to report that the short story is more or less done. Unless my readers come up with any notable errors I'm ready to put it away save ONE problem. I need a better title, and it turns out I'm crap with them. I thought it was just an attribute I was casting onto my villain but it's true for me as well. I'm hoping I can put it into the back of my mind while I'm working my day job, and while the monotony chips at my soul maybe something will come to me. Or I'll trick someone into making it up for me.

With that done, I can devote more time to a couple other things that're coming very close to something interesting.

First is Losing Yourself, the graphic novel script I will not let die. I have an artist that has talent, a sense of professionalism, some interest in the story, and a genuine interest in the medium. Assuming he comes through on this little litmus test I have him on, I can start going over the atrocious details that will eventually become a contract. That would be something very, very exciting, so much so that I'm not letting myself get excited about it.

Speaking of, another project that was almost a joke of mine caught the interest of a friend, so I'm hoping I can steal some time someplace to work on it a little more and have something concrete we can work with. If nothing else, this will be a good exercise at something I haven't done in years, and loved doing anyway, so I can't lose.

It's become a habit of mine to twist situations into a position where I come out ahead in some way. Everyone does this to some degree, but I'm wondering in my case if I'm trying to WIN or simply NOT LOSE. It's a world of difference, and the further I get with things the more I need to know which it is. Trying to win is a scary thing, with a lot more on the line and it calls for a huge investment, but the payoff is bigger, where trying to not lose is generally easier and safer, if not a little more dull. I feel like I've been trying to not lose recently, but the reason for that is that things are happening that feel much better than simply not losing. They're great feelings, but the only way to maintain or improve on them - and really the only thing to do with them - is to switch to a trying to win attitude, and that's more intimidating than I care to admit.

It's been said that the only way to succeed in life is to make everyone believe you've already succeeded and will only continue in the future. It's an art that, if you're either good or lucky enough, life will come to imitate. We'll see, I guess.

Broken Records

I could apologize for the lateness of my post, but I'd sound like... well, my blog entry title.

Last week I submitted a brand new short story in to a new contest. They're both new to me, and the story at least was new to many of the people I told it about. The bad news is that I don't think the story is actually DONE. IT has a beginning, an ending, and characters who - by the time they get to the end - aren't quite who they were at the beginning. Depsite this, I think it could be better. I thought about holding the story back and missing this contest, but I feel like I have to have something out there. I could easily stall forever on the pretense that "my work isn't perfect," so I figure it's worth the attempt at least.

This isn't the only development I've had recently. I'm in talks with an art student about illustrating Losing Yourself, and to date this is the closest I've come to actually locking an artist down! With some helpful albeit grounding advice from the uber-talented Stuart Sayger, this project is starting to look like a concrete book. Getting the material together and trying to be professional about vetting the guy out certainly feels like concrete.

I also had a wonderful surprise concerning a story I came up with at a bar one night in London. I shouldn't say anything about it, more for fear of jinxing it than disclosure liabilities, but it could be an amazing and fun opportunity.

To help fund any or all of these, I have invested in something called Powerball. Just a little investment, and true to the economy they've told me my money's gone. Grand.

Had a Good Day Today

Nearly 1,200 words written. Coraline 3-D witnessed. Credit card bills paid. Fence materials for injured dog moved to back yard. Chicken dinner eaten.

Post-Vacation

Florida was great! The beach was lovely, the water cold but fun to swim in regardless, and there's a decent amount to see and do. After all the greasy spoons I ate at, I feel like I could render paper transparent just by looking at it.

Mike and I did have a chance to go over the stories, and without revealing too much, he's playfully intrigued. This means I'm not catastrophically screwing up, and that if I finish that's another person that would like to read it. I can only hope this is the first of what will be an army.

I also learned just what 12 hours of straight driving will do to a body. It's not great.

Travelling and Tribulations

If all goes well, I'll be driving to Florida within a couple of hours. This is my first time venturing into the deep South, and while I'm not expecting much in the way of culture shock, I'm sure I'll see a lot of curious stuff. This is also the biggest road trip I've attempted solo, and while I'm not worried per se, some of my family and co-workers are voicing concerns/ fears/ zany schemes that will be rendered useless should I become an impressionist art piece in the medium of fiery twisted metal, and I'm catching a bit of bleed off.

This trip started as going to a European folk music concert, when I was no big fan of European music, and my good friend Mike lives down there and didn't want to see it alone. The concert got canceled. Since I'd already started planning and setting aside dates, it seemed rude to let it all go to waste. Besides, I enjoy seeing places I haven't before, and Mike hasn't moved in the intervening weeks, so why not.

Something I just realized yesterday, and I feel ashamed and penitent in confessing this to you interwebs, is that I haven't done any substantial writing in almost two weeks. Birthdays, family events, work rushes, none of these things by themselves are enough to really distract me, but they haven't hit all at once like this for a long long time. It's depressing.

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, or maybe I was always this way and didn't know about it until adulthood, but I do get noticeably depressed when I haven't written for long periods. We all have something, I suppose, that we do to keep the glooms away, and as odd as it sounds I think we tend to build our lives around those things. Considering how much we each have to go through in our lives, when we find something that gets us to the next day it's worth that bit of effort to make sure we keep access to it.

Anyhoo, I'm hoping that I can at least go over some of my work with Mike, himself not unfamiliar with the intricacies of the writing arts, and get a new perspective. Those are refreshing, much like oceans, which I shall insist on visiting while I'm down there. If I were a kinder blog entity, I might open a twitter account just so I could provide continuous updates to all my concerned readers and regale them with my adventures and escapades. But I'm not.

Adequately Laid Plans

So one of the purposes of this blog was to keep me honest about a writing schedule. I figured if hypothetical people were keeping track of how much I hypothetically wrote, it would motivate me to write more, hypothetically speaking. This is requiring, of course, that I update the blog on a regular basis.

Oops.

The past couple of weeks have been pretty dramatic, both at work and at home, and only some of that drama was useful for the short story I'm writing right now. Pacifying drama is a very necessary skill for a writer to have, but difficult to cultivate.

In real life, you want to calm things down first off, identify the source of the problem, and find a way to correct it that leaves all parties walking away sated, if not happy. In writing, especially fiction, this is exactly the opposite of what you want to do. Action movies would have muscle-bound guys speeding towards grocery stores before the last Cadbury egg was bought, political and medical dramas would be a bunch of smiling people agreeing with each other, and the soap opera genre would be dead. Dead. Without emotionally driven people devoid of empathy to take things out of proportion and mess things up for the maximum number of people involved or not, most fiction would read like a stereo insturction manual. I don't care if it's written in iambic pentameter from the perspective of God-King Xerses and penned in the blood of a dragon, an instruction manual is not the aspiration to shoot for.

It should not be surprising when you read about a writer or any artistically-thinking person acting like a moron and throwing away what appears to be a wonderful career. Odds are it's because of some clusterfuck of a personal situation that probably never would have happened if someone had said, "Well, I can maybe see you point..." six months prior. Drama sells. Drama has a wide audience. People love to see drama if for no other reason that to identify what they have successfully avoided in their lives. And if an artist is able to understand and present drama well enough to sell, the risks that they won't be able to handle real life drama responsibly go higher than Amy Winehouse locked in a hospital pharmacy. (Okay, that was a cheap shot well out of date, but you get the idea, right?)

This is not a confession to some grand error in judgment on my part that is leading me away from writing and to hermitage in Montana, though I understand that's a good place to go for such things. It's as much a reminder to myself as a warning to any hypothetical readers: there's a distinct difference between fiction drama and nonfiction drama, and handling both right is crucial to prosperity and very likely posteriors.

By the way, I'm 4,139 words into the story, and I could easily have enough written by the end of the day to start showing my test people. Occassionally I manage to do what I say.

Humility

The next time you find yourself marveling at the majestic faceted nature of humanity, consider this:

One of our ancestors looked behind him and remarked "Hey, food came out of my butt!"