I'm in the middle of The Wait right now; I capitalize the first letter of each word of that label so I can give it the due it deserves.  The Wait is when an aspiring author (or an established one) sends in a query/proposal/manuscript to a publisher/agent, and then embarks on a lengthy period of time where they try to not think about what they have done.  I submitted about two and a half weeks ago; therefore, I am once again embroiled in The Wait.

It is what it is.

Incidentally, established authors have this happen to them as well.  While chatting one time with rachelcaine , I was astounded to find out that she had recently sent off a proposal to a publisher, and was now waiting on pins and needles to find out what the verdict was going to be.  I am not trying to sound mean when I say this, so please don't intepret it that way... but in a way it did my soul a tremendous amount of good to know that even somebody who has almost two dozen novels in the bookstore under their belt isn't immune to this sort of literary teeth-grinding.  I told her this, and we laughed about how odd the universe can be.

The process of The Wait is one that on some level, you never get used to.  Take it from me, kids; I've been in this racket for nearly two decades now and I still get the butterflies, inflated hopes and heaviness in the pit of my stomach caused from this process every single time (and not just every time, but every single fucking time!) I do this literary throwing of a dart at the Yellow Pages.  I have tried a multitude of different methods to distract my brain from turning over the possibilities and nothing works.  Like Bill Parcells said, it is what it is.

In order to do this career choice, you have to have to possess the ability of doublethink.  As those of us who read George Orwell's 1984 know, doublethink is the ability to hold two equally opposite views in complete balance, believing them both at the same time.  Now the rest of y'all know it, too.  See, you really do learn something new every day.  In this instance, the process of doublethink allows the nascent author to hold the following viewpoints right up near the front of their gray matter:

1)  I am sending this off and I know it is going to be accepted;

2)  I am sending this off and I know it is going to be rejected.

The sad part is, you need to have both of these philosophies and you need to balance them accordingly.  You have to have both yin and yang.  If you start thinking only that you're going to succeed, every form letter rejection and invitation to find a new career path is going to burn like hydrochloric acid.  On the other hand, calm belief in doom will eventually result in pulling a Sylvia Plath in some way or another.  You may not literally stick your head in the oven, but you'll stop submitting and then possibly writing as well, which pretty much adds up to the same thing when consulting the (not-so) grand scorecard.

It's a tough series of downs, but you have to play the hand you're dealt.

Good thoughts to you and yours.

Well, I've registered for the 2010 San Francisco Writer's Conference.  I perused the list of agents and agencies who will be in attendance and found, much to my mixed delight and discomfiture, there were three agents of the twenty or so in attendance who I had previously contacted and was--of course--rejected by.

At the very least, it settles any lingering doubts I might have had that everybody was going to be a bunch of nobodies.

Still waiting to hear back on a submission of Salvation I tossed out two weeks ago.

Other than that, life is a holding pattern.  Peace.

Here in Sacramento it's currently 103 degrees at 6:55 PM, but I don't care.  See, I'm plotting,

When asked where he got his ideas for writing, Stephen King had a stock answer:  "Utica.  There's a nice little shop there where I go in and browse around until I see something I really like, and then I buy it and go."  It's a great answer because the honest to God truth is that there is no one place where ideas come from.  They can be as fantastic, ordinary or strange as can be, and you'll never know where inspiration will come from.  All you can count on is that when the iron strikes hot, the ideas will flow like water.

I'm a huge fan of CSI, the J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts In Death series, urban fantasy fiction and a classic good versus evil struggle.  Dead of Winter will provide the opportunity to indulge all those joneses, so maybe that's why I'm already outlining the third chapter on yWriter and having a blast doing so.

And really, in the end, it's just good to have the passion bucket overflowing again.

Okay, I bought another sports jersey.  A #21 Asomugha  model, Oakland Raiders, white, retails for about $260.00 and I paid $41.98, so sue me.  The first step in overcoming an addiction is admitting you have a problem.

Phhhhbbbbbttttttttttt.  Savings, my peeps, are savings.  Besides, Asomugha is one of my favorite players and definitely my number one for this year's edition of the Raiders, so what the bleep ever.

I'm also going to be registering for the 2010 San Francisco Writer's Convention, to be held February 12-14 and my wife is not going to let me get out of this.  "It's an investment in your career," she told me sternly.  "Besides, I can write it off on our taxes."

Open mic readings.  Over 100 editorial, agent-y and writer types.  80+ workshops.  Contests.  Agent speed-dating.  Face time, held one-on-one.  Big gala party to close it all out.

I'm doing it.  It'll cost $545.00, but hey... it's an investment in the future.

So in my last post I was wondering what to do for NaNoWriMo 2009.  I am pleased--bouncing off the walls, actually--to report that problem is solved.

Back in 1993, I started a novel titled Dead of Winter, where a very determined young woman (who may or may not be psychic) is matched up against a serial killer.  She tries to track him through dreams and nightmares, glomming onto the case as her father is one of the detectives assigned to the case, and in the end has a bloody-as-hell showdown with the wicked entity... and discovers she is truly not the equal of the task.  I got the first chapter and a half down, whereupon real life blindsided me and knocked me right off these tracks and onto the ones which led to the novels Diablos, Suspiria and others.

Truth be told, it's probably just as well that I didn't get to see Dead of Winter through; back then my storytelling ability was vastly overrated by myself, and the bottom line is that just as the young woman was not up to the task of taking on the so-named Face Killer, so I was also not well versed enough in the art of writing to pull it all off.  There's actually at least two more novels that I germinated the ideas for during that time period, and I'm now finally at the point where I would be able to make a success of them.

This brings us back to the idea I threw out with the working title of CSI: Hellraiser, which is how I described it to my wife after a very vivid dream where... well, I'm sure you can guess what the content was, given the title, right?  The problem for this was that I didn't have a central crime, I didn't have a central bad guy, and I didn't have outside element to bring the team first together, and then on the path to the heart of darkness.

Now I do.  Seventeen years later, it's time to fly the black flag and make Dead of Winter the 2009 National Novel Writing Month project.

Very simply?  I'm psyched.  Peace.

On my new run I actually get some honest-to-God layover time.  Considering the last six months had been spent running to one bathroom or another (because transportation runs on caffeine and six minutes sort of blows), the ten-twenty-ten minute breaks of the first half and the five fifteen minutes breaks on the second one have given me ample time for navel-gazing.  I regret to report that among the usual subjects for mentasl debate has come the annual Bobsled Run From Hell... yes, I am speaking of course about National Novel Writing Month.

Well, because that's what dorks like me think about.  That's why.

Anyway, I decided to try to figure out what I'll be doing for the 2009 edition and quickly came to the startling conclusion that I have five, count 'em, five contenders for this year's fuckfest.  Since I don't have anything to blog about save the fact that I've once again begun pecking away on Black Sunshine, here are the contestants--

QUICK NOTE:  Oh, and if anybody thinks that I'm being a little premature in this department, that's very possible.  I'm nothing if not an obsessive-compulsive Capricorn.  However, the 2009 contest is going to require more planning than in previous years due to the new Degree Of Difficulty Modifier, which in a nutshell is that it is very likely that on October 30th I will be having a serious amount of oral surgery done... to wit, four wisdom teeth being disposed of and a possible root canal.  What the bloody hell, right?  And in this case, it certainly is bloody.  I need to have the extractions done, and since my dentist has been talking about root-canaling one of my teeth anyway, why not get the whole horrific mess out of the way at once?  Right?

This is, in addition to being a serious bummer to look forward to when I'll be starting my vacation, going to add an extra level to what is already a moderately difficult circus trick.  Doing 50,000 words in 30 days is hard enough without adding anywhere from three to five days of being doped to the gills, so I'm going to need one that's easy to knock out or, failing that, an outline that puts previous years to shame.  Are we clear?

Onward.

( And The Nominess Are... )

I may not have been tremendously creative with the laptop lately, but I have seen a definite upswell in the amount of time I have spent thinking about music.  I'm not going to claim an extraordinary amount of knowledge about scales, modes and lines, but I have a decent basic understanding of the underlying nuts and bolts of music theory... enough so that I am able to sometimes deduce what the next chord or note should be not necessarily by trial and error, but by what relation certain facets of music have to one another.

For example, the piece I was writing on tonight uses a great deal of minor chording and dissonance in the chord relations.  While major steps (a full note difference, or the difference betwee the second and fourth frets on a guitar) are genrally used in sunnier-sounding music, half-steps and tritones (the largest dissonance possible, the distance between a Bb chord and an E, or an F and a B) are the order of the day in most metal, speed metal and thrash compositions.  Yes, there is actually a method to the madness of bands like Slayer.  You learn something new every day.  By using this basic theoretical mechanism, I was able to fill in the last two bars of a nice riff I was working on, and felt pretty damn good in doing so.

In a way, writing functions on the same sort of level.  There are generally accepted conventions and movements within stories that follow the same sorts of rules that are laid down in the music world.  It takes a lot longer to learn them based on how varied the basic palette being used is (250,000 words or so in the English language versus an octave consisting of twelve notes), but while the composition itself may sound much different, in the end for both disciplines, the song remains the same.

So the current dry spell I am experiencing?  My guess is that it will either be time or "writing theory" that will solve this.  Just a bit of chin-scratching on this side of midnight.

I've been reading apocalypse fiction these days.  I was tempted to go back and dust off my copies of The Stand (Stephen King's tour de force epic of Captain Trips and that last magician of rational thought, the Walkin' Dude) and Robert McCammon's Swan Song (also considered a viable heavyweight contender and a crackerjack story as well), but I nixed them both on the grounds that I want new scorched earth.  I've been working on two books in the last week and a half, being...

1)  World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks.  I love zombies the way baseball fans love hot dogs; just can't get enough of them, and the more slathered with weird shit they come, the better.  However, I absolutely hate it when they are played for laughs and thankfully none of that stupid crap is going down in WWZ.  Brooks did a staggering amount of research dealing with all possible effects of an undead pandemic, from economics to nationalism, medical emergencies to military tactic and everything in between.  Combine this with the interview method of storytelling that made Studs Terkel one of the greatest American writers ever and a very underrated ability to make each of his interview subjects sound like different people, and you get a book that feels very, very plausible... which makes it an unqualified home run.  You want to read this book.  You want to read it very, very badly.

2)  Domain by James Herbert.  I've sung the praises of this British horror author before, and it bears repeating that Herbert is straight-up the most disturbing, violent and downright effective dark fiction writer I've ever had the good fortune to cross literary paths with.  Stephen King is a great talent and is a spellbinding storyteller with a gift of making strange situations feel authentic... but when it comes to finding that squirming, slime-covered button deep in your soul and just hammering the living daylights out of it until you scream uncle, you can't beat his English counterpart.  Two of his previous novels deal with the terrifying giant black rat, and Domain is the final work to feature them.  His ability to imagine horrible scenarios in high-definition for your mental theater makes this book the first one I have described as saying, "Well, it starts with World War Three and then things really go downhill in a big hurry."  If you want your horror fiction to dispense with the foreplay an start serving up slabs of stuff that stays with you long after the final pages are done, to abuse you and then shove more nerve-jangling prose down your throat, nobody even comes close to beating James Herbert and brothers and sisters, I do not exaggerate in the slightest when I mean nobody.

That's my reading list these days.  What's on yours?

Thank you to everyone who sent in good thoughts in the prelude and aftermath of Caesar's passing.  I know he would be surprised to know he had inspired so many good thoughts from people he had never (and probably would never) have met, but that's one of the hidden benefits of the Internet these days.  For all the talk of the vast amounts of porn, horrid fanfic and weird randomness available on the Net these days, the most-overlooked aspect of it is how it can bring people together.

I worked on Living After Midnight this weekend; hopefully by this time next week, it'll be done.

Oh, I also did the label for the newest beer concoction brewed up by myself and Mad Evil Chris.  It's a strawberry blonde ale which uses real strawberries for the flavoring, and we sit down for the bottling on April 25.  This is also the same day as the NFL Draft, the Chicago Cubs vs. the St. Louis Cardinals and most deliciously, the New York Yankees (who had their asses most atrociously kicked on Saturday) vs. the Boston Red Sox.  Matt from my work will be assisting, as will my father and Lady Jade, so this promises to be a very fun afternoon.

The beer itself is one that none of us have heard of being done before.  Brew It Up, where we did the brewing, has a drink called Orange Blossom Blonde that is a blonde ale flavored with oranges, and I've run across several variants of wheat beer involving raspeberries, oranges, and most recently and deliciously blueberries, but not what we are doing here.  Thus, this name and label seems entirely appripriate:



Can't wait for the tasting.

All right, confessional time in the old corral.

I've been shying away from writing Ring Of Fire #5 for a long time, partially because I've been occupied by other projects such as Living After Midnight, the false start but still-simmering Black Sunshine, and learning how to be a better guitar hero with my Ibanez. These things happen; especially when dealing with long-term projects, distractions and side trips can not only be a welcome thing, they can occasionally be quite necessary.

The other part of the equation is a little darker. Truth be told, I'm more than a little frustrated with myself for the glacially long time it took to finish Book #4, aka Underworld. My earliest entry concerning that book dates back to February 23, 2006, but I'm fairly sure I began work on it earlier than that. The date at which I finally ran the flag up the mast and trumpeted that the book was done rang in on January 3, 2008. So give or take a few weeks, that means that Underworld took roughly two years to finish. Although the fabled river of blood was able to wash away most of the sins committed during its writing, the lack of focused plot I was working with was fairly disturbing.

If you're going to write a series of books, especially if the story arc is going to be one with a definite beginning and end rather than staying open-ended, a certain amount of planning is essential. In the plainest possible terms, I dropped the ball on that with Underworld. When I finished that book, I resolved that I wasn't going to come back to the series until:

1) I had done what would hopefully be the last round of major surgery to Salvation. Since I was able t cut down from 121,000 to 90,000 words and then finally to 71,000, and to boot some of the Alpha Readers have responded... oh hell, you guys actually finished the story, which means I did something right. It didn't happen before when I sent it out, so barring a few cosmetic fixes, the first Ring Of Fire book is really ready to be run up the flagpole so the publishing industry can take a look-see.

2) I had completed at least most of the pre-plotting on whatever the fifth book was going to be. Having spent the last year sawing off uncessary portions of both Backlash and Underworld taught me (painfully, once again) that if somebody is going to beat their blog drum to the tune of "working things out in advance is a good idea," that blogger would be well-advised to follow their own advice. While I'd been able to pull of a minor miracle by successfully taking some of the overflow from the 140,000 words (yikes!) of Backlash and splicing it into Underworld, something told me that betting on a literary hat trick would be just plain stupid.

So I've been editing, pre-plotting and getting my ducks in a row. After three weeks of typing, here's the results.

18,663 / 80,000 (23.3%)

Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Descent.

Feels fucking great.

Nights when you can't sleep are a bitch.  By all rights, I should be safely in dreamland by now.  It's closing in on 2 AM, I've taken some antihistamines that, when combined with wine, usually produce a very tranquilizing effect and let me fall asleep easily.  Not so tonight.  It happens like that sometimes; the mind is willing, but the flesh is strong.

So since I'm awake, might as well discuss a little music.  I'm about to acquire a piece of software that, should all ducks fall into their preordained rows, will allow me to set myself up to record some of the music I have had bumping around in my head in one form or another since about 1991 or so.  In fact, some of this mental archive was to be used as the backing tracks for a project I pursued in 1994 called Suspiria.  As far as I know nobody has ever come up with a CD-ROM to be combined with a novel, and this project was slated to cover both of those bases.  In addition to being a book about touring musicians trying to make their dreams come true, Suspiria would also feature a full-length album that went along with the book so not only could you read about the band's exploits, when the time came for them to hit the stage you could actually headbang along with them.

This idea never saw full fruition for several reasons, the first of them being that at the time I conceived the project, I was not a good enough musician to be able to carry it off.  Oh sure, I could lay down the basic riffs that would be used and put them together, and I might even be able to fake my way through some drum arrangements and bass work... but without the assistance of some real musicians who made those disciplines their business, what I was going to end up with was going to sound sterile as German techno.  Not everybody can be Joe Satriani; not all can compose, arrange and play all instruments and make them sound awesome.

The second part was there was little doubt in my head about how such a proposal would be greeted by the Publishing Gods That Be.  "Let us make sure we understand completely," they would have said, "so there is no misunderstanding.  You want us to publish a 150,000 word novel about thrash metal musicians from Berkeley by an unknown author, and then shell out to have a CD recorded and included with the book as well?  Why don't you run along and give us a call when the saucer lands, all right?"

Third, at the time no resources existed to even cut a rough demo of what I wanted to do.  While the novel was finished in all of its unrestrained glory and it had been monetarily free to write, the cost of doing even a three song demo tape on the Bataan Death March of budgets I used as my guide while at Chico was frighteningly prohibitive.  When dreams meet reality, dreams usually take it in the teeth.

Finally, once Suspiria was in the can I was moving on to other projects.  I didn't write that novel in order to get published, because even as I was banging away on that keyboard I know nobody would touch this idea with with a ten foot pole.  However, that never got in the way of the book itself.  At that point in my life, not writing on Suspiria simply wasn't an option.  I did it for the pure joy of flying through the story and not once did I delude myself with the idea that perhaps this could be be my own Saturn V rocket to stardom.  It was, quite simply, what it was and did not aspire to be anything else.

The music, however, has remained.  Maybe now I'll be able to put down those tunes I have heard in my head for so many years.  Sometimes, simply finishing a project in and of itself is the real reward, and I beleive this is one whose time is long overdue.

Peace.

A longer schedule of the day means less updating on the old bog.  So it goes.

Right now I'm about halfway through the editing (for the final time, I hope and pray) of Salvation.  I have been living with this story in one incarnation or another for close to ten years now, and would really be happy if this round of red pen and cut-n-paste would be the final time I am required to do this slop.  I say "slop" not because it's a crappy, odious process, but because I would very much like to just have the fucking thing done and  in the books (so to speak) without any further major facelifting.

Any alpha readers out there want to take a shot when it's all said and done?  I won't bite; all previous sins have been forgiven.  It's a new year.

Now it's shower time, so off I go.  Damn you, eleven hour workday!

Ever since the snowboarding accident I have run the gamut from my ribs feeling pretty much okay, to "Holy crap KILL ME NOW" and today was of the latter variety.  I feel like a horse's ass when I call in sick to work, but if you are lying in bed wondering how much painkiller you can take to be able to soldier your way to work and what the cutoff point is for losing coordination and such, that argument is over before it even starts.  Especially if the workstation you use for your job weighs twenty tons rathe rthan twenty pounds.

The plan today is to move as little as possible to speed up the healing process and watch the three movies I currently have from Netflix (The Happening, The Strangers and Just A Kiss) so they can be returned and we can start on the Blu-Ray portion of our queue.  While doing that, I am going to take an axe to Undertow (formerly titled Salvation, formerly titled Serendipity, etc.) and see what I can do about slimming down and/or fast-tracking certain sections of the book that seem unwieldly.  Actually, there is no "seem" to this at all.  There are parts that are unnecessary and others that can be done in a different way to more immediately engage the reader by showing rather than telling, and it's time for me to toss pride out the window and just do it.

I suppose that in the grand scheme of things, it would be easier to simply retire Undertow and move on to something else for the submission stack, which I am now gearing up for since it is the New Year and time for me to get back in that saddle again.  I guess the easiest route would be to simply toss my Thinking Cap aside, jam my Cliche Hat as tightly onto my head as possible and write something like The Western Widow and send it off to a romance book factory that does over five hundred books a year.  There is a monstrous market for that genre, and it's the easiest one to get your feet wet in.  While urban fantasy is definitely a growth market, it pales in comparison to the good old bodice ripper.

Sure, I could do that.  It would technically fulfill the dream I had, and when you start using the word "technically" in conjunction with "dream," if you have any self-respect at all the mental conversation should end right there.  Dreams are to be chased, not cheesed.  If I wrote something like The Western Widow, it's not something I would point to with pride.  Flaws aside, Undertow is a very good story and it's the start of something that I am fiercely proud of.

That's why I'm putting on my hip waders and making tracks for that River Of Blood called editing.  Good thought to you and yours.

We're coming to the end of the year and, as usual, I feel like I haven't done enough to advance my art.  Oh sure, I've gotten the Ibanez into a fighting shape it hasn't seen since... well, ever... and the sounds that I can wring out of its oh-so-slick neck would make James Hetfield grin in approval, but that's music.  I'm never going to be more than a very dedicated garage musician (or possibly lead guitar for the Rock Bottom Remainders), because I found out a long time ago that I was a much better writer than I am a guitarist.

I have been wincing every time I see a keyboard because I feel like I should be doing more in my chosen discipline.  As usual, I think back to the "glory days" that were anything but glorious back between 1993 and 1998, when I experienced a period of creative energy that makes me smile wistfully every time I think about how much I did.

Lest you think I am beating my own drum, let me run down the list real quick.  During that period of time, I finished the novels Diablos, Suspiria, Violet World, Endspiel and Among The Living.  Additionally, I also wrote the screenplays Looking Glass, The Long Weekend and Passion & Warfare.  On top of all that, I got anywhere from 20,000 to 45,000 words into the novels Lottery Odds, The Light At The End and Change Of Seasons before they were roadblocked for one reason or another.  While all that was going on, I was also a full-time staff writer and editor at a local magazine up in Chico, where I put an additional 100,000 words or so over a period of about three and a half years into its pages.

I think every artist in all disciplines go through these sorts of phantom roll calls sooner or later; we put a premium on production, because for every hard-working grimy heel like myself, I am sure you know at least three people who have been working on the same pretentious Great American Novel for the past five years.  There are, however, a few conditional modifiers that should be noted for the record concerning this slew of words.

1)  My schedule was considerably lighter back then.  Not only did I not have a signifigant other for glacially long periods of time (freeing up oodles of minutes and hurt feelings to be poured verbatim into one work or another), while I had three jobs at one point, all were part time.  Yes, I know that school is considered a job by most people.  Believe me when I say that, if you are taking the right classes, this workload shrinks by a considerable amount.  A lot less than, say, forty hours a week and then some at the bus company.

2)  Quality was not exactly at a premium.  I feel somewhat lame saying that, but if I didn't, it would be a lie.  Don't get me wrong; at the time I was working on whatever piece that was holding my attention, I did my best to knock that ball out of the park.  I didn't scrimp, I didn't cheat, and I didn't turn away from the effort required to get the work done.  Having said that, I will also hasten to point out that I rarely planned anything out beyond a nebulous idea of where it would all end up.  Every page should have been stamped with THIS IS THE PRODUCT OF A CHEMICALLY ALTERED COLLEGE STUDENT all over it, and none of those works have ever felt the pain of the red pen wielded by an sharp-eyed editor who hated cliches like Arabs hate Jews and vice versa.  It's pretty easy to run and gun like there's no tomorrow, provided you are not too interested in examining the smoking earth left in your wake.

3)  Back then, the Internet was a very new thing.  This is actually a much bigger reason now than I thought it was; I'm guessing most of you don't remember when the majority of web site URL's looked like http://208.34.163.1 and having a "vanity URL" was something for a very select group of people.  Personal web pages were stocked on places like Geocities and Tripod, and the eclectic "link page" was an object of keen interest.  There was no Youtube, no Wikipedia and the best search engine was the AltaVista one.  There was a distinct lack of quality content, to say nothing of quantity.  I didn't even have a home Internet connection until early 1996, and that was--you guessed it--a dial-up one.  There wasn't a tremendous amount of avenues to waste time with, which is basically what the Internet's primary purpose is.  I'm sure some of you can relate.

However, upon further review, the production hasn't really slacked as much as I thought.  For the past five years, from 2003 until 2008, the roll call goes like this:  Salvation, Covenant, Backlash, Underworld, The Phoenix Initiative, The Final Nine and Living After Midnight.  Unlike the previous works, these ones were definitely done with at least one full eye turned toward the concept of quality.  Oh, and the entire, unabridged contents of this blog, of which I am sure you have faithfully read through every sleep-deprived, chemically altered screed contained within.  When you factor in the full-time job and wife as well, that actually holds a pretty decent amount of weight.

So, maybe not a slacker.  Just a change of game plan.

Good thoughts to you and yours.

As you can see, rumors of my Internet demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Not so with Lost Sundays, however.  I managed to get about 20K into it before I discovered what I was actually writing was a doctoral thesis on the nature and fundamentals of my favorite game.  This, unfortunately, does not a novel make.

So in order to conquer NaNoWriMo, I have gone back to Living After Midnight.  So far, things are better than good.  I'm killing it, not to blow my own horn... because as you know, that is not how I do things.  It is my hope to get it done and the required 30K in the bargain to win the annual Literary Bobled Run From Hell Contest.

Other stuff will come once the blood and feathers have settled.  Would anybody be interested in seeing this work serialized when it's done?

As you were, and God bless.

Recently I came across a blog written by a literary agent who gets a whole hell of a lot of submissions.  In the blog, she asked at one point why it was that people had the desire to be published, because it certainly can't be for the money and the odds are abysmally stacked against you.  You've already heard my various riffs on this subject, so I won't go back and rehash them; there were almost as many answers as there were respondents to the question, which I thought was very interesting.  She turned me down twice, and I chalked that up on the metaphysical scoreboard before moving on with life.

However, for even better chin-scratching, I came back next week and encountered the following question, which I will do my best to turn out in my own words:

Let's say that you went to Madame Zorba the gypsy fortune teller, and after gazing into her crystal ball, she said that it wasn't going to happen.  "I am sorry, my child.  I know you have submitted faithfully, and you have stayed the course.  You have researched, worked on your game and done all that you can to swing the odds in your favor.  You have held the throttle until your hand smoked and burned, and I am sorry to say that the fates have determined this is not going to happen for you.  You will never get the convergence of events necessary to make being published a reality.  Five dollars, please."

Now, having been given this soul-crushing piece of news, what would your reaction would be?

I thought about this for about a minute or so, and the more I chewed it over, the more I was forced to admit that my initial response to this scenario was the honest one.  As bizarre as it may sound, if Madame Zorba laid this on me... I would be relieved.

"What the hell?"

I know.  Weird, huh?  It's true, though.  Do not confuse this feeling with that of pleasure; in no way would I be happy about this dire prediction.  What it would do would take the pressure out of the equation, to remove the giant uncertainty principle from the world of writing that in some way or another, has dogged me for a large portion of my life.  When I was quite young, I wanted to be a professional baseball player.  Once I found out that due to simple body physics I was never going to be a big-leaguer, I was able to simply enjoy the game for what it was, without some mental scoreboard in the back of my skull meticulously noting every bad play or lame at-bat for future ass-chewings.  In the same way, writing would be addressed.  I would be back squarely back at the beginning again, doing the craft for the love of the game and not with any sort of reward on the horizon to be thought about besides the joy of telling a story well.

Of course, it also helps that I am addressing this possibly not-so-hypothetical question at this point in my life, when I have a great wife, good job and fairly comfortable existence, not to mention a great deal more confidence in my own abilities (if decidedly less good feelings about the other elements that are completely beyond my control).  Had I been posed this scenario back in my early to mid-twenties, I would have probably responded by burning down Madame Zorba's tent--because nothing says Zen like shooting the messenger, after all--and then going home to fashion a noose.  I wish I could say I was kidding on that last part, but a part of me knows that I am not.

With how crappy the economic indicators have been lately, I am going to wait until the news year to start sending things out again.  In the meantime, I will have fun with Lost Sundays and in the process, call some of you out to join in National Novel Writing Month with me.  Join me in Hell, I say.  After all, we've got cookies and punch.

The following people are being drafted.

lesliemoniot , sabrarosa , detonate_for_me , flameamongcoals , the_newbrunette , thesoniashow , mermaidinparis , vg_ford , ammepyre , cxtxc  and hihankara .

Don't fight, don't chicken out and above all, don't cry.  It's just a waste of perfectly good suffering.

Right now I am working on two wildly, polar opposite novels.  One is Black Sunshine, the techno-horror survival guts-n-gore splatterfest which you were all introduced to in this post.  The other is Living After Midnight, a romance story set against the backdrop of a ten-year high school reunion.  Somebody who has known me for quite a long time recently told me that while they could see the zombies, the romance one was a harder image to see.

The question was quite simple:  Eh?  How did this romance come about?

It's an answer in several parts.  The first reason is because as a writer, I believe it's good to have more than one project going at the same time.  There have been very few times in my life when I went on one work from start to finish without any sort of side trips; whether or not this is something that can break up the continuity of a book is something that hopefully you and I will be able to discuss at the local bookstore over a cup of coffee and my newest published work.  I get locked in on what I am working on, sure... but it doesn't mean that my mind's eye doesn't occasionally roam in a different direction.

Many authors do this sort of trick because it helps keep them fresh on the main project.  I feel that's a good reason, but there is also the factor that sometimes, the sort of things I am thinking about and wanting to put on paper wouldn't be appropriate for what I'm working on.  In fact, that's how Black Sunshine was begin.  I had been longing to do a real gut-wrencher of a sequence for a long time, and the story I was in the middle of (Living After Midnight) was completely unsuitable for that jaunt into my imagination.  Ergo, it was time for that back burner project to make an appearance.

The next reason is that for the last few years, I had been doing the Ring Of Fire series and a couple one-offs via National Novel Writing Month, those being The Phoenix Initiative (2006) and The Final Nine (2007).  Both those stories were wildly different from the usual fare I was dealing in at that point, so they were good for stretching my literary legs... but truth be told, I really wanted to do a vanilla romance story again.  An author doesn't really need any more justification than that, so there.

Well, I'll explain a little more.  The Ring Of Fire books all center around the romance between Kyle Risser and Angelique De LaPaz and their struggle against the machinations of The Order to split them apart or make them bow to their black flag.  There are many opportunities for these two to express their love, to take comfort and strength in each other.  They are supported by a colorful cast of characters and there's  ample chances to have fun with things like zombies, magic and demons.  It's a grab bag where I can basically go to the well any time I want and yes, there are supplementary plot lines galore, some of them featuring romances.  It's all well and good, and on some level, I really wanted to get back to basics.  Guy.  Girl.  Meeting cute.  Attraction.  Tentativeness.  Disruption.  Despair.  Happy ending.

Finally, the first novel I ever wrote (and the third) featured this same pair of characters.  Richard Ventura and Stephanie Curtis have been inhabiting space inside my skull for just about nineteen years now.  They appeared in the first novel I ever wrote, an alternate universe version of that same work which was a quantum leap in improvement, an unfinished novel taking place in an alternate-alternate universe, if you can dig that concept.  After I had my experience in working on an independent movie, I wrote a screenplay (once again taking place in a different world, true to type) and threw these two in as part of the rogues' gallery of characters I was working with.  I liked every effort... but they always left me a little wanting.

So in a way, Living After Midnight is my attempt to finally get the script down correctly.  I know these two; I can see them, and I know they fall in love.  They get to have that happy ending that we all want, even if they have to slog through a bit of hell to get there.

Maybe this time I'll get it right.

Today I was in a fine pissed-off mood.  I'm not going to go into the particulars of it, except to say that it was caused by a lack of sleep this week (which since I have gotten a second wind that is now flagging, appears to be at an end) and personal life spilling over into work.  Therefore, I did my usual thing and became an absolute Nazi for enforcing the rules on the bus.  Woe be to those who decided today was the day to leave their discount card at home.

As a brief side note, I have to mention that this happened quite a bit today, which leads me to wonder greatly (and darkly) about just how fit for living in our modern world many people are.  If you make a habit of leaving this item at home, what the hell do you do when it comes time to pay your taxes?  Just wondering.

Anyway, I made it up to the end of the line and decided to unwind a little bit by perusing the magazine rack at the store.  The selection absymally sucked.  Unlike the vapid portion of our population, I don't give a fart in a high wind about if Suri Cruise is having her style gaffled by other celebrity babies, and I equally don't care about what Cosmo says is the seven things in bed guaranteed to drive him wild.  The book rack was also gone, so in sheer desperation, I started reading GQ's article about Seth Rogen... and walked out of there grinning ear to ear.

If you don't know who Seth Rogen is, I was in the same boat until two months ago.  He had a hand in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (which I loathed), co-wrote Superbad (haven't seen it yet but I intend to) and was the doofus with a heart of gold lead in Knocked Up (which I thoroughly enjoyed).  He's 26 years old, red-hot and slightly bewildered by it all.  What had me laughing out loud was something he said about the early days of being in the writing business... so forgive me, Mr. Rogen, while I paraphrase what you said:

"It's just amazing.  Those were some pretty dark times.  I mean, I'm sitting around with my friends and we're writing and turning stuff out and we think it's pretty good.  It seems like it's really funny.  Then you get shot down, and later on you're sitting there saying, 'Okay, you don't think that I'm any good, but you think Entourage is really great stuff?  Am I missing something here?  It's enough to really make you doubt yourself."

Rogen violated a major rule of engagement there: while you may think that something that another person did is nothing more than raw sewage on toast, you are not supposed to call them out by name... especially if that product happens to be popular and the critics seem to enjoy what they do.  If they're considered hacks then everything is fair game, which is why Stephen King gets lambasted all the time and nobody says boo about Tom Robbins, even though he is an absolutely horrible writer.  Plus, I'm not too sure about Entourage.  While many people seem to like it, they are usually also the same people who get a major boner in their sweatpants for The Sopranos and to be honest, I never got that one, either.  In fact, I thought their slavish devotion to bad Italian accents and faux tough-guy rhetoric was a little sad.  Then again, I also think we could have stopped making organized crime films and shows after Miller's Crossing, so I am a wee bit biased.

However, the thing I really enjoyed about what Rogen said was the fact that ,just like me, he'd had that moment of walking in on something absolutely horrible and saying, "You're kidding, right?  Right?  This is what they say you people want?  Seriously?  You want America's Top Dog rammed down your gullet with a cake decorator?  You crave more Danielle Steele?  I'm over here knocking myself out just to get a shot, and you're turning me down for this crap?  That's like saying you don't want to date me, then going out with the president of the local Smelly Cats Of America chapter.  What the fuck ever."

I am now a big Seth Rogan guy.  Thanks to him, the rest of the day was good.  Good thoughts.

One of the working definitions of insanity runs along the lines of "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results."  In a nutshell, this represents my own swimming upstream struggle in the publishing world.  Ergo, it's time for a change in the game plan.

I started doing this "troop down to the book store and sigh deeply into the current copy of the Writer's Market" thing way back in 1991.  As of this posting, to date I have received three semi-personalized rejection letters, one highly personalized rejection letter (which I prize like a gold bar, or a lump of kryptonite, take your pick), two near-hits and a couple dozen highly impersonal "go fuck yourself" letters.  Yeah, they didn't literally say that, but rejection is still rejection and at the very least, you like to be told you were at least an okay kisser.

It's painfully obvious that scanning the publisher index for the appropriate genre, weeding out the ninety-six percent of houses that don't take unsolicited/unpublished/underwhelming authors for the six or so choices left and then sending out the good old "Dear Editor" letter is going to get me nowhere but a step closer every year to the boobyhatch.  Maybe back in 1995 this would have worked, but the world is changing and that hoary old tome hasn't given me anything good since the last time the Oakland Athletics were a threat in the playoffs.

Using my Google-Fu, I have picked out a new agency purely from the online world, and I won't be printing their name here since I don't want to throw a hex on things.  What the hell; can't hurt to change that part of the process too, right?

Tomorrow I hit the post office.  Baby, I'm back.

EDIT:  Not only did I find a likely landing place (he hoped devoutly) for the Ring Of Fire books, I'm also looking very hard at a place to send off The Final Nine.  My Google-Fu is strong.