I haven’t been able to finish it, it unsettles me so badly. It’s a vastly important statement of the watershed that the internet established and a good explanation of the generation gap that is forming, and will continue to form, and I think my reaction to it is part of that — I’ve seen this reaction before from my elders, usually accompanied by scorn and denigration (the old pixel-stained technopeasant essay is a particularly good example of the breed; I did an essay in reaction here). I’m not lashing out against it because I think it’s true, and having been on the frontlines during the “internet is evil” bad old days, I can identify that now I’m on the elder side of the equation and need to be the guide, not the bully.

But yeah, it scares me, because it’s too big to be easily identified and too complex to be controlled, and as I said in my essay, well, writers like control.

And it makes me feel old. The older I get the scarier that feeling is. I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately — not contemplating it, thankfully, I think those days are done forever — but just considering what it means, and the reality that it’s going to happen to me. It’s not constant or anything, it’s just something I think about in my spare time (I’m trying to have as little spare time as possible) and I’m hoping it’s just a phase.

I really do not want to die, which is perhaps egotistical, but I’m me, I think I’m allowed to worry about me dying. I think about what it’s going to be like to go to sleep and just not wake up. I mean, hopefully I’ll be a hundred and fifty and go peacefully, but who knows.

I have a vivid imagination and I try not to think about dying because my imagination makes it real enough that just picturing it makes me twitchy and anxious; I’ve had dreams about getting the death penalty and waiting in a cell to die, and they usually stick with me for a day or two before they fade. Most of the time I love my imagination and I love that I can ditch out on reality whenever it gets boring, but this is not the place I want to ditch reality for. There’s a reason I choose my reading material carefully; my imagination makes it very real, and that’s not always something I can pull back from when I want to.

I don’t write my books out of a need for immortality. Don’t get me wrong; I’d love to be immortal, bring it on, but I’m not going to grasp desperately at it. I’ve seen Death Of A Salesman. I write because I love to write and I like sharing it with people; I love it when someone suggests an idea to me and I write it and can delight them with the result. I just like writing. But it also makes me happy that I have three books out there, and hopefully will have more before I’m done, which will probably outlive me. I made my little mark, at least, and it’s the best of what I can do, so I have no reason not to be proud.

Still, I feel weird being thirty-two and thinking about my posthumous legacy.

God, I hope this is a phase. I really don’t want to spend the rest of my life picturing my death, that’s just depressing.

Now, listen this is what I want from you. When your book comes out, I want you to come to Nashville. You can see your friends Jack White and Al Gore, we will have a party for you….we will have the Goat Rodeo guys to play at the store as your warm-up, you’ll sign and you will have such as great time. And then the next week, you will take your Sharpie, you will go to the warehouse at Amazon, they will cut the boxes open for you, and you can sign all day. You see which one you like better.

Hell yes, Ann Patchett. Next time I’m in Nashville, I’m coming to your bookstore.

It’s discouraging sometimes, and sometimes it’s wonderful, and it’s usually exhausting. It wears me out. But…well, I can’t deny it keeps me on top of current events. After all, in order to vet everything I have to read everything and understand it, so I can put it into a three-sentence blurb format to pass on. This has done wonders for my ability to write concisely. I can jam more information into a sentence than most people will provide all day.

Lately I’ve been getting more and more information about copyright legislation, because of SOPA and PIPA and ACTA, because Congress now has the legal right to take works out of public domain, because Marvel Inc. sued Gary Friedrich for more money than he has and got away with it. Because YouTube is continually removing media that corporations claim to own without asking for even the slightest proof.

Artists are getting screwed left-right-and-center while trying to support themselves, and the corporations that license the art are making all the money. And the people who have the power to viciously, paranoidly protect their intellectual property are the ones who’ve already made their pile and are apparently afraid someone else might end up richer than them, while the ones who can’t afford to protect their work get it stolen or find it undervalued by corporations who are willing to pay artists less and publicists more.

I’m not someone who makes their living making art, and I publish my own work so I have no official dog in this fight, but it still worries me. I’m an artist, and most of my friends are artists of one kind or another. I worry that I set a bad precedent, making my work free, that I screw up their chances by encouraging people to loan my books and share my digital files and basically pirate me all over the place so that the idea of free art becomes normalised.

The thing is, I believe that artists should receive fair compensation for their work. I absolutely do. It upsets me that nearly nobody gets what their effort is worth these days. But I also believe that the lucky artists who have the means to be generous should be. And a lot of times they can’t because a corporation owns their art. Man, we are a mess.

I believe that because I make a comfortable living and write books on the side, I have a duty to make sure people who can’t afford my books still get to read them, and to encourage other artists to create transformative works if they’re inspired by my work. I learned to write by writing fanfic. I wouldn’t be a writer today if I had been prevented from using someone else’s brilliance as a guiding hand to explore my abilities.

A few years ago, when I was working in an office for the first time, I used to get emails sometimes about “free food in the conference room!” and be angry that I couldn’t leave my desk, that by the time I could the food would be gone. And then one day I thought about this and I realised, Jesus Christ. I make twenty bucks an hour. I can afford to buy my own lunch, and some people here make twenty bucks an hour and have three kids to feed as well. Only once in my life has there been a time where I couldn’t afford to feed myself, and that time is long past. Fate willing, it will never come again.

The lure of something that is free, the lure of something one can just take, is a powerful one, but I’ve worked, consciously, to remind myself that just because I can go take it doesn’t mean I have to. This has led me to the belief that I don’t need to have All Of Anything; I don’t need to vigorously protect my work, because I can afford to share it. When you step back from the worldview of desire, just a little, you come to see that about 99% of the world’s problems boil down to greedy people who don’t even seem to notice their own greed. Greed drives nearly every cruelty I see.

All it took was not eating a free lunch to get me to see this.

I didn’t sell my belongings or leave my home or do without anything I needed or even anything I wanted badly enough. I’m not saying we should renounce worldly pleasures; I love worldly pleasures. I think everyone should have them. I think everyone should have a roof over their head if they want one and food to eat, and more importantly food they like to eat. I think everyone should have access to healthcare, to books, to art, to travel if they want it.

And I think nearly everyone could, if the people who don’t need the free lunch would stop goddamn eating it before the people who do need it can have their chance.

Because I’m pretty sure I can’t. I’ve tried coming up with YA books I could write and they’re either formulaic or boring. I hate being formulaic and boring, but I know when I am being it, so I toss them out. And then I end up with nothing. And I don’t know why, since for a long time I’ve been proud of being able to write inside a genre without having a whole lot of practice at it.

I’m also good at breaking down the essentials to create a framework on which to hang a story; I’ve done that frequently with various historical play structures, like medieval mystery plays and ancient Greek satyr plays. I can identify tropes, work them around, and come up with something that manages to fit the formula without being formulaic. It’s a point of pride.

But I can’t write YA Lit.

For those of you who are wondering, by the way, this is the epitome of why intelligent people in fiction are so often written as short-tempered assholes: when a very smart person comes up against something they can’t immediately conquer, they get all kinds of frustrated. I’m not saying I’m a Sherlock Holmes level genius or anything, but a lot of stuff comes pretty easily to me, so I don’t cope well when it doesn’t. (On the other hand, I don’t verbally abuse relative strangers or close friends, so well done me.)

I want to suspect that I’d be better at it if I’d spent a more normal childhood, but I was a relative outsider and most really good YA novels, not to mention most iconic films of my generation’s teenage years, are about outsiders. So you’d think my experiences there would be pretty helpful, but they’re not, because writing about being an outsider always sounds like self-pity. I didn’t hate high school or anything, I just wouldn’t much care to go back.

I wonder if it’s that I didn’t read much YA lit when I was YA myself, but it’s not like I haven’t read a lot of it in general over the years. I skipped mostly straight from child lit to adult novels, with a brief stopover for Christopher Pike inbetween, but I’ve read His Dark Materials and Harry Potter, the Narnia books and the Dragonsinger trilogy, The Secret Garden and The Catcher In The Rye, at various points in my youth. I used to read one-off YA novels like The Gate In The Wall as comfort reading when I was in college.

I theorize it’s that I’m still struggling with building good characters, because when I read YA that’s generally what attracts me, the compelling nature of the people involved. The plots are frequently quite similar to each other, but the characters can make or break the story for me. This is really possibly part of it, but I think I could write good YA characters; at least I could write better ones than I sometimes see in YA novels. So that can’t be all of it.

In the end it seems to come down to the fact that I never really much liked kids of that age even when I was that age; most of the time I was either bored with them or scared of them, and not much inbetween. It’s difficult to pretend I know how to write what they want to hear. All the formulas and well-written characters in the world can’t make up for an actual empathetic connection.

Maybe it’s just not time yet. I’m on that leery cusp between still being a young person other people find hilarious and being the other people that find young people hilarious. The relationship between youth and adulthood is a weird and tenuous one, and doesn’t always contain easy transitions.

Maybe I have to be older before I can understand kids.

The thing is, again, I know mine is maybe unusual, but everyone here is so interesting, and everyone has a story. Right now, alone, one of my coworkers is getting divorced, one is out of town at a LARP convention, one is moving in with her boyfriend, and one is the most experimental baker I’ve ever met. Her caramels are…interesting. Then there’s me, secretly lusting after a former coworker on another floor. And of course my Awkward Coworker, who doesn’t even need any other person to make him interesting. One of my coworkers’ wives had a baby this week, about six weeks premature, and he showed up yesterday with photos and a bleary look and a totally new mindset about life. It’s pretty impressive. Cute kid, doing fine, and they very much appreciated the fruit bouquet we sent them.

Most of the time we work, but there are also moments, usually spontaneous, where we sort of gather up and talk. I’ve been more and more interested in watching the others talk, watching how they construct stories about their lives; one of them is a stand-up comedian as a hobby, so he uses a lot of set phrases and expressions designed to amuse. Most of us are researchers, so we tend to cite whatever newspaper or magazine or website we’re talking about. Occasionally we have to break while someone googles to see if something is really true.

We don’t really talk to our coworkers about who we are, in the sense that we don’t just spontaneously share facts about ourselves (someone asked me today if I was a vegetarian, and I laughed). But we do construct our personalities through the stories we share with each other. I think this is maybe a common social thing, and I’m just so normally-unsocial that I don’t realise it, but I really like it.

I’ve always been taught that there’s a correlation between the person I am and the stories I tell; in high school I had an English teacher who worked the correlation backwards, teaching us that as long as we spoke with our own voice, and gave our own unique view of the world, we were being original storytellers. That’s an incomplete idea, because it roots storytelling in narcissism, but as a starting point it’s not actually a bad place to be.

There’s a theory that artists — writers, painters, composers, even performers — create in order to draw the eye away from themselves. Even actors are showing you a performance rather than a person. I think it’s a solid theory; it’s certainly why I create. But to go back to my high school English teacher, you can’t separate your voice from any authentic work, and whether it’s easy or hard, a part of you is always tucked into the work for the reader to see. Sometimes, especially with the young or inexperienced, their desires are writ large; their stories are fantasies about what they want to be, what they want to happen to them. Other times, even the writer doesn’t see themselves in the work until someone astute points it out to them.

But we do communicate ourselves through our stories. And when you have an intimate acquaintance of the structure and purpose of stories, that’s pretty fascinating.

I do a lot of listening.

The Dead Isle is currently in rewrites; it’s one of the earlier novels I wrote, the second or third I put online (even before Nameless, I think, though Nameless was written either before Dead Isle or somewhere during its process) and it was really just a way to get some writing done and have fun with some worldbuilding. It arose out of a single scene and a desire to dig more deeply into Steampunk, a genre/aesthetic that has always appealed to me. It is also, unfortunately, about five hundred pages long, which is about two hundred pages longer than I want to read, let alone publish. It definitely needs the rewrite.

At the moment I’ve been focusing on making cuts and working with how those cuts affect later events, because while there’s a lot of dead wood in Dead Isle, most of it is difficult to extract from the bits that aren’t dead wood. Initially I thought the rewrite would involve cutting a lot of the worldbuilding stuff — random fairy tales and quotes from fictional philosophers — but in the end those are sort of vital to the way the story plays out, so they might get polished but they mostly stay in.

But I know the cuts that I am making are right, because they’re all about the same thing: one of our heroes meets up with a Famous Person From History. So far I’ve cut PJ Kennedy (ancestor of the Kennedy clan), Sarah Bernhardt, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne had to stay in, but they make more sense than previous.) I get why I put all this in, because one of the joys of writing period lit for me, even in a fantasy alternate universe like The Dead Isle, is introducing historical fact and historical personages.

And that’s fine…in the first draft.

The first draft of a story is a good place to put one’s indulgences, to pet the ego and play around with where you’re going and what you’re doing. The problem, a lot of the time, is that we often think our self-indulgent bits are the best bits, so cutting them out in the next draft is a real wrench. Sometimes they are really good, too, but they don’t always belong in the story even if they are. There’s a moment in The Dead Isle where Sarah Bernhardt reminisces to Clare about Ellis spending his youth in France hanging around with dancing-girls and degenerates, and it’s a great moment in terms of uncovering Ellis’s character. But Sarah is otherwise superfluous to the story, and really we don’t actually need to know that Ellis used to chase cabaret stars. So she has to go.

Most people don’t respond well to too many restrictions placed on them during the initial creative process. That’s why we have drafts, so we can clean up the messes we made while we were figuring out how to make the good bits. A part of learning to be productively creative is learning how to be okay with the mess, especially later when you have to mop it up. Learning not to be too embarrassed by the naked ego that’s just sitting out there for everyone to look at. Learning to cut something because it’s not good for the story, even if you love it.

I didn’t always believe that writing involved talent; I used to think it just involved a shit-ton of practice. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore, but even so, talent is only a small component of the experience of good writing. Much more important is discipline: the discipline to practice, to accept criticism, to know when you’ve done something good, and to know when what you love and what is good are two different things. They aren’t, always. But more often, they are.

There are parts of The Dead Isle that are both vital to the book and satisfying to me; otherwise I wouldn’t have written it. Trimming out the narcissistic, self-indulgent parts will only increase the value of what remains, and I accept that. Learning to differentiate is hard, and actually making the cuts is harder, especially since you won’t feel the satisfaction of the outcome until afterwards, but it’s necessary if this book is going to be the best it can be.

And at least with The Dead Isle, unlike with Nameless, I don’t look at work I did on it and want to strangle my four-years-ago self.

I wasn’t really thinking about a plan for writing, even, at least not until I ran into an article a week or two ago at The 99 Percent. The 99 Percent — unaffiliated with the Occupy movement — is a website for creative professionals, primarily, and though it contains a lot of rather bland corporate-inspirational writing, it does occasionally hit the nail on the head.

Okay, sometimes you have to dig a little for the nail.

The article itself is called Productivity Tie Breaker. It’s about how to balance out the need to focus for significant periods of time on one project with the need to answer emails and phone calls and handle day-to-day business. There’s a lot of “visualise yourself successful” in the article, but some of it pinged me as genuinely helpful, so I turned it into a sort of workbook for writing in the new year.

.

My favourite part is that last bit. I’m going to have so much fun this year imagining alternate-universe me.

I decided I had three major writing goals for the year: rewrite / approve / publish The Dead Isle, choose two stories from my ideas file to “treat” for future work so that I can start on one of them when I’m done with Dead Isle, and make a new list of things to write about here so that I can keep this blog up.

I’ve been working since then to try and choose the two stories I want to work on once Dead Isle is done. One of them will be Valet of Anize, which needs to be ripped apart and done over, and not only because I’ve written myself into a corner. The other one will be drawn from my ideas file, which contains both vague “This would be cool to write someday” concepts and more immediate “Wow, I really want to write this” ideas.

I chose the seven or eight ideas that I liked best and wrote them down on the backs of business cards, because sometimes you do just have to hold things in your hands. Since then I’ve been shuffling them around, sorting them by different categories — stories I like best, stories my readers will probably like best, stories that need the most plot work, stories that need the most research. It’s amazing the number of ways one can catergorise a project like that. And, slowly, I’ve been discarding the ones I’ve decided not to work on just yet.

I’m down to three candidates now. Technically my “deadline” for choosing is the end of February, but I certainly hope it won’t take me that long. One would require a lot of research, but could be the best of the three stories; one is set in parts of Chicago that I know very well, but needs a lot of plot work. The last one would be the most complex to write and in some ways the most satisfying — but it’s at a level of complexity where I wouldn’t be able to post it for Extribulum purposes. At least, not easily. I can’t imagine how I would turn it into an e-book. The quality of the challenge for all three is remarkably difficult, but I guess that’s a good thing.

Who knows if I’ll keep to the schedule I set in my little made-up worksheet. Some writers work great with schedules; I work great with structure, but rarely schedules. Most of the books I’ve written have been things that simply caught fire and demanded I write more. Fortunately I can come back to this at the end of the year and compare notes. $Deity bless the internet.

I said, “Well, it looks spontaneous, but it’s not.” I pointed out that pastel is messy, and to maintain the crisp borders between red and brown, it had to have been done with considerable care and skill. The curator looked surprised; she knew that already, but I don’t think she expected anyone else to.

I’m a little wary of people who “write because they have to”; I believe in control in art as in any other part of life. Not that things should be rigid and regimented — as Joe Orton says, there has to be room for both Apollo and Dionysus in the work — but because if you don’t control your skills, don’t have mastery over your talent, then the work rules you. That rarely means good work.

Associating a creative impulse with the terminology of compulsion implies that control isn’t possible. Slippery slopes.

That said…

I write for a handful of reasons. One of those is to entertain myself, because I bore easily. Another is to communicate beliefs and values that I hold and think other people should hold too. A third is that I get an idea and it sounds like fun. A fourth, and perhaps this should be listed earlier, is that I am challenged by something — a person, a concept — to produce something difficult. And I won’t deny that the challenge is a little compulsive.

As a child, I used to roll my eyes when my teachers said “don’t use the word can’t! You can do anything!” No thanks. Even then, I knew that nobody else but me should be allowed to define my limits, but that it was rude and counterproductive not to respect my limits when I defined them.

Teachers aren’t used to nine-year-olds knowing their own minds, so of course I got in a fair few tussles about it, not all of which went my way. Oddly enough, all this battling about whether I could or could not do something led to a certain “motherfucking watch me” sentiment:

I can’t write a story about LOLcats? Motherfucking watch me.

It’s not precisely the classic response to reverse psychology; tell me I can’t do algebra and I will genially agree with you. But I’ve tried doing algebra, so I’m aware of my inability. Until I write a story that seems unwriteable or challenging, I don’t know if I can do it or not. But if someone says I can’t, well. Watch me try.

I suppose the point is that every artist, no matter how controlled or how much they believe in control, has their compulsions. Mine is the challenge, but as impulses go I guess that one’s not so bad.

(A note on the title of this post: alea iacta est is a quote attributed to Julius Caesar, “the die is cast”, indicating that in a game of chance, you’ve reached the point where it’s too late to change your mind.)

Different generations, of course, have different views of media, particularly such a pervasive, invasive media as television. My mother grew up in the generation that suddenly found itself, around the age of twelve, spending the afternoon inside watching TV instead of outside running around. When I was a little kid she read books like Kill Your Television and articles like When Television Ate My Best Friend, and as a result I watched very little TV as a child. I don’t recommend reading When Television Ate My Best Friend, but the sentiments aren’t uncommon: like many of my parents’ generation, it laments a childhood lost to television. I don’t think a lot of people who feel that way realise that our childhoods would not have been like theirs even if the television hadn’t been invented, but that’s an argument for another time.

The point is that my mother and I come at TV very differently. She doesn’t seem to have any filters in place, perhaps a result of when the TV came into her life. For example, we had a months-long fight about the television show Rome, because she was incapable of filtering.

Here’s why we fought: I was watching Rome because I’m a classical history geek, and early Imperial Rome is my specialty. I didn’t really care for the sex and violence in the show, but I accepted them as part of Roman life of the time and HBO’s marketing, and ignored them in favour of the politics. I was living at home when it began airing, so I was watching Rome on the TV in the living room, which has traditionally been the only television in our house.

My mum could not get past the sex, in particular. It’s not as though the sex was even close to the kinkiest the Romans got, but she saw a sex scene in the show and couldn’t get over it. “Why do you want to watch that? It’s just pornography.” (We were not a pornography-friendly household.) “Why would you expose yourself to that? And all the violence? It’s not educational, it’s just trash.”

Well, yes, actually, I would argue, it is educational, it brings an ancient culture to life with more accuracy than fiction generally manages to do, and I’m not watching for the sex, that’s not the point of the show. HBO includes what I consider to be a gratuitous amount of sex in most of its shows, but they know it sells, so I can’t really blame ‘em and frankly the sex doesn’t bother me. I’ve read Catullus, if sex bothered me I wouldn’t have made it to my second year of Latin class. More importantly, sex didn’t kill the story — it didn’t interfere with the essential tale the show was trying to tell.

She couldn’t let it go. She has a unique inability to link “things she doesn’t like to see” (sex and violence) to “subconscious expressions of human feelings and emotions” (jealousy, greed, hunger, grief). She has no problem understanding the association in real life; she’s actually quite good at it. She gets it in novels, even. It’s just for some reason, when it’s on television, she can’t do it. And so we fought for months about Rome until finally I gave up and stopped watching it, because a television drama wasn’t worth taking a moral stand against the woman who was putting a roof over my head. Plus I was tired of the implication I was a pervert for watching a TV show that had sex in it.

This seems like a story more fitted to my blog than my professional writing website, but it points up, I think, that people package stories differently for different media, and they percieve them differently as well. Some stories are more “fitted” to one medium or another; it’s possible to take a story that should be a movie and write a novel around it, but it takes a lot of skill and usually never makes for as good a novel as it would have a film. And we all know what struggles writers seem to have appropriately adapting books to a visual medium. It’s one more skill in the set: knowing how your story should be told.

And also it’s important not to fight with your mum over HBO television. It’s just not worth it.

I’ve talked before about the energy it takes to write and how to battle The Drain, and because my coherency often far outstrips my short-term memory, I went back to it the other night to see how it could help. I ended up following suggestion number four: Write Something Else.

There’s plenty I could be working on. I’m supposed to be prepping Dead Isle, and I have a half-dozen started stories and ideas. But I just wasn’t writing anything, and all the stories felt tired and worn to me, so I sat down and did something a little different.

I don’t know if most people have a fantasy life as extensive as mine; I kind of hope they do, because it’s awesome, but I suspect they don’t. My daydreams run to full-on worlds, with their own laws and casts of characters. Most of them are self-gratification, stories that don’t necessarily make sense or which are designed to fill some gap in my Id rather than make an important statement to the outside world. They’re what I mess around in while I’m trying to sleep, when I’m bored, when I’m doing the dishes (see: when I’m bored). Some of them become real stories, some definitely never should. I very rarely write them down in their raw form, because I recognise that they don’t have much to offer to anyone else.

But, seeing as I wasn’t writing anything else, I thought I’d try to set down a story that has been playing out in my head a lot lately, just to be writing something. With no expectation that anyone ever would or ever should see it, I just slammed some words down on the page, which I haven’t done in a really long time. It was like a little two-hour NaNo or something. The story was already there — mostly involving a post-disaster community which suddenly experiences a new influx of survivors, and particularly how the children of  the community are fostered and managed (also there are monsters). If I can get a good angle on it, it might become something, but I doubt it.

And anyway the point wasn’t really to turn it into something; it was just to get back in the habit. It didn’t break a floodgate or anything, but I’m a patient man; I can wait for the right moment, and then all will happen as it should. The idea is just to keep trying different things until something works. It’s not a question of block, just of motivation — but then sometimes I suppose it’s hard to separate one from the other.