An award winning editor I know told me that they ended up buying the stories that they couldn’t stop thinking about. This process takes time. Longer times for longer stories, often. Were they still thinking about the story, days later? Weeks later?
Those were the keepers.
Memory is a Darwinian space. There is a lot that we love that fades as fast as the flavor from a stick of chewing gum. Procedurals that can be binge watched leaving only a handful of images behind. Big Fat Novels that instantly erode into summaries shorter than the blurbs on the back cover.
And so part of my process includes thinking of things and not writing them down. Thinking of things and then seeing if they survive the passage of time. If they don’t drown in the torrent of images that my writer brain coughs up constantly.
What I call the kaleidoscope.
I’ve wondered sometimes if I might be described as ADHD, after having kids with that diagnosis. Our strategies for managing boredom and difficulty with routine are similar.
The kaleidoscope inside my head, bright moments of stories, climaxes and turning points of various sorts, have to be tamed, harnessed… without being broken. Becoming milestones between the dotted lines on a map.
Theres no shortcut, between the milestones. Well I mean there are. Tapping together the Ruby slippers; the deux ex machina, narrative summary, the prose version of the montage. The title card reading Ten Years Later.
But that doesn’t change the fact that you need story in your story, steps between the leaps, rising and falling action. Nobody buys tubes of Oreo frosting middle and eats them. You need the cookie. Single stuff, double, stuff, triple stuff, but still, stuff. Cake and Frosting.
Maybe your final milestone is pure epiphany. Maybe it’s character change we can believe in. Or preservation of character under duress. It could be a plot as intricate as a victorian pocket watch, the case popped open to reveal the perfect gleaning works.
In any case, your plot is a kind of map, and you’re going somewhere. Physically or mentally or emotionally. Maybe all three.
And in life and in story you’ll remember the high points and not the mundane details that link the high points together. That’s the work of life, the job of prose, and the chaff of memory, all the bits that abrade away and drift off, unwanted and unloved and absolutely vital.
Mostly… but sometimes it’s the little details that stick. Odd moments. Nothing plot beats stuck deep in narrative valley that are the parts of the story that remains.
I remember one of those editorial truism, that the beginning of a story hooks the reader, the middle holds the attention and the end sells the thing. Your brain will erase a ton of middle, the middle is thing that got you to the end, that made the beginning and the end make sense; but the middle is more than the means to the end. It has to be.
Otherwise the reader catches a glimpse of a miserable person on deadline filling out a form in a cubicle.
In the end, you do have to give readers something. Something the story has earned, for them. Something of the proper scale. Sometimes it’s mostly the journey. Sometimes it’s the view from the summit of Everest.
Anyone who knows me just did a spit take while reading that headline. Cue laugh track.
Hey. That’s what makes it a challenge.
100 days. Starting now.
Gonna project sunshine and fucking light.
I remember a study… so, toxic masculine stoicism isn’t a good strategy for getting through life, but there is an analogous inverted condition, of seeking solace in re-living trauma that makes some people sicker.
Of course, this is dangerous to generalize. It evokes someone barking ‘get over it!’ at the clinically depressed or shrugging off suicide danger signs.
I’ve wallowed in negativity and spirals into doom since my teen years. I’m probably wired this way. At any rate, there are things I can do to avoid making my negativity worse.
So I just deleted a negative paragraph. Right here, right now.
Hah.
Those old enough to have watched Stuart Smalley, the SNL character remember cringing, because you stared into the eyes of that sad sack and knew nothing that dude told himself in that mirror would do a lick of good.
Welp. That was negative! About Stuart. Who is:
Not me.
A joke. Not about me.
By a dude accused of sexual harassment.
I am one of over nine white males my age who haven’t been accused of sexual harassment!
So. Much. Winning.
Kurt Vonnegut, in one of his novels, wrote about a character that told holocaust stories as if he’d lived through them to anyone he could make listen. Absorbing and re-radiating that trauma at a personal level. The Holocaust was real… but he was lying.
Whoa, that escalated quickly, but in the current era, with Godwin’s rule on hold, I’ll allow it.
The rational part of my brain, the sadder but wiser part, feels compelled to acknowledge that publishing is hard; finding readership is hard; winning and not winning awards is hard; finding like minded writing friends that don’t tread on your nerves can be hard; writing and finishing and editing and submitting things is hard… but people do it. Saved that paragraph with four words at the end.
Hah.
Unlike dancing or boxing or playing football you can keep at it in your 50s.
You can’t really lose, unless you stop playing. Sure you haven’t won. Yet.
But there are people who break through later in life.
Like me. I broke through. I have published stories in the three SF digests. All three. There are genuine making a living professionals who only publish in one or two. Or in none.
I’ll spare you any more personal affirmations. That’s my one. This whole post is just another overshare but I’ll allow it. Its intentions are good.
Because at the bottom of the well of despair, there is this thing I have experienced a few times in my life, a kind of absolute freedom. Pure perverse joy. When everything feels impossible… you can do anything you want.
It’s sort of like those people with the broken sleep schedules who debase themselves back to normal by marching around the clock the wrong way round.
It’s a kind of grinning, feral glee, a love of life and creation rooted in its absurdity and futility. The terrible beauty in the capricious world all around us. The camaraderie of the foxhole.
I think maybe I’m there again.
The last time I was here I did very well. Not that I recommend it as a strategy?
What the hell. Whatever works.
I turn from the mirror to fix you, yes ,YOU, with a stare that skewers your soul.
Troubled narcissistic oversharing middle-aged white guy with white beard is looking at you.
You can do this. You can figure out what works for you and do it. Ignore people who are doing this in ways that make no sense to you, creating paths that you can’t follow. Find your own path. Be rigorous and ruthless but don’t bang your head bloody against someone else’s wall.
You can do this.
Maybe… not everyone likes you. That’s okay. Gather together the support you can find in your networks. Build those networks with care.
Protect your head.
Buck up. Remember the contestants on Ru Paul’s drag race, who say they didn’t come to the show to make friends… they came to win. Be fierce. Love yourself. Like yourself. Be okay with yourself. Transcend or ignore the self. Something. Figure that shit out.
They have been a part of my creative process… forever. The structure of a workshop, pace-setting by peers, deadlines, feedback, sense of an audience, and face-to-face human time, has been vital to me doing anything. Getting anywhere. Publishing my fifty stories and handful of novellas.
I am a profoundly lazy day-dreamy person. I need an office to make me work, but of course, as a writer you have to build that office from what you have available.
But workshops have shelf-lives; people come and go. There’s drama. Writers are odd, and some of us are toxic and keeping a group workable is a hard and thankless job.
The group I inherited in the 90s broke up after my Clarion, in a mix of personal and professional conflicts. I miss some of those people to this day. And for a time, I was the leader. Writing the most. Talking the most. Hosting the group.
Some of us are no longer on speaking terms. One I still workshop with. Another is a pen pal.
Writing relationships are like this. I guess all human relationships fall into these categories now. Non-people. Facetime people. People as texts, mails, and maybe the occasional voice or video call.
I love the workshop, every workshop I’m in, but as I reach this point in my career, what is the best use of my time? Peer group workshopping? Writing on my own and freelancing in an unrelated field, to make some cash?
Or writing and teaching?
The only professional writers I know have told me this about teaching.
Don’t do it. Full stop. You’ll write much, much less. Your career will be derailed forever and you will be doomed. You do remember how lazy you are, right?
A writer I know, a pro novelist, said this:
There will be one student in every class who will suck the joy from your body the way the salt vampire drained red-shirts on Star Trek. You’ll end up with painful aching extraction rings all over you psych. You will embody, all that is wrong with writing and publishing and teaching and perhaps, all humanity, to this guy–and it will be a guy– who will explain this to everyone trapped in your classroom. This is why he signed up for the course.
A Clarion teacher I chatted with recently mentioned not making a living with their writing / teaching combo career. Top of the field person.
But as I stare down the barrel of my approaching fifty-seventh birthday, I find myself dreaming about it. Listening and lecturing and moderating. Doing the workshop stuff I do in a slightly different way.
My parents were both college professors. Maybe it’s in my blood.
But… nothing in fiction has come naturally for me. Workshops made my own writing visible. Workshops revealed the beating heart of fiction. Workshops allowed me to see a story and the words on the page in a kind of double vision, as a continuous waking dream and as a series of abstract squiggles, reams of disorderly code designed for a fault tolerant information processing platform made of meat.
Increasingly, as I have struggled to become a more commercial writer, the sacred, holy quality of the work, the meaning of it, and its relationship to the meaning of my own life, has taken center stage in my own creative process.
Fucking me up, big time.
Other than the family which no longer needs my undivided attention, there is nothing else in this world more important to me than stories. Other writers stuff. Established writers. Aspiring struggling writers. My own efforts.
So, one of the many, many weird things about writing is anticipating a audience but never knowing, on any particular story, if have one. Unlike a musician, who generally knows if she is practicing or performing a gig. Or a dancer or actor who can tell if the theater is packed or empty.
Of course in the case of recorded music, TV and film, it’s more like writing. You’re making this thing for this nebulous group of consumers. Never mind about that. There is no performance in writing. One of the reasons the ‘give away the product for free and charge for performance free-content model is so horrific for writers. Some writers can be witty in real time.
Many cant.
All this uncertainty means that in the beginning, as you endure rejection after rejection, it can be hard to know who one is writing for.Salinger’s Christ-like Fat Lady?
Writing workshops and beta readers and classes are a relief because you know you’ll get a few readers, who will talk to you about what you’ve written. Maybe tell you some part of the truth of what reading you was like.
At first, let me tell you, this is a horrible, horrible truth. You push through this. Writing is mostly self taught and thank God bad prose seldom actually kills anyone.
Editors have no time to give you any feedback, and I shouldn’t have to explain why that is (hint: there isn’t any money in most fiction.); if you get back a sentence of critique, you’re special; if you get a few paragraphs, you should be overjoyed. But of course you’re not.
The closer you get, in fact, the more painful rejection can feel.
And then, after that, even if you’re selling, you’re still going to be writing stories nobody buys. For lots of reasons, not always limited to the actual content and quality of the story itself.
Editors have to sell magazines and readers let them know what kind of stories they like, and hate, and over time, an editor gathers an understanding of what her readership likes. So, she may like your story, and it may no be right for her readership.
The toughest thing about short genre fiction is that the brands are the magazines and chances are you will never be a brand. Once one has struck out with a story at the major print and on-line markets, chances are, nobody is ever going to read the work.
Ever.
A breakout novel career will shine a small spotlight on your shorts, (Odd image) for those novel readers who also read short stories. There aren’t many of those! In the writing about writing book Danse Macabre Stephen King explains that he makes so little money on shorts that he feels stupid writing them. He knows he should stick to novels. But he loves himself a good short story, now and then.
So you write at first, for yourself and or the Fat Lady, your idealized reader, and then you write for the editors and agents and their audiences, and then you write for the awards process, if you care about awards, and then you can write for your fans, who might buy a story collection. Or read one you give away free. But frankly probably not. Uncurated short fiction isn’t something anyone wants to read for free.
It’s like finding a nicely wrapped sandwich sitting on a park bench. No thank you.
Another strange thing about most writers is their inability to really understand when something they have loved has gone off the rails; or rather, when they’re written a story that only really works for them.
So there’s this wonderful paradox, and you really have to learn to lean into this. the story you’re writing may only be for you. What does that mean?
Well. Really it means you can write any damn thing you please. See? Glass half full. You’re welcome.
This is the agony and the joy of traditional publication. If your story gets published? It’s not entirely your fault! When a story isn’t published? Could be cosmic injustice, sure, but the editor might be saving you from yourself.
So you’ll never know when you’re dancing alone in the room with the shades drawn. Or when there’s a rapt crowd.
Presumably, though, you got into dancing because you enjoyed it.
You have been manipulated. By some of the richest people on Earth.
They built a playhouse for you, full of useful toys. Free to use! With calendars and walls to place your posters and shared photo albums and little magical locked drawers so you could collect money for good causes and they managed it all with a little magical creature that took all this info–much more than you could handle, from the hundreds and thousands of friends this system found for you.
The magical creature sorted out how important it thought each scrap of paper on the bulletin board was. And it turned that stuff into a scrolling sheet of paper it typed up—just for you! Your feed! And it watched you laugh or smile or cry, as you read your feed, and it kept track of that, too.
For inside the little creature was an infinitely large storehouse of index cards. It remembered everything! And it had an infinite amount of time to ponder the cards, while it sat and brooded, its pretty sculpted face stripped away to reveal a coldly gleaming clockwork of diamond gears and pistons.
The creature conferred with the billionaire and his army of clerks and bankers and lawyers.
Oh, what nice billionaires we have, to make such a thing for us we all thought.
For a time.
When the fun house seemed to be soaking up all our time, and making us feel weird and somtimes bad we were told, well, use it responsibly!
There are third party tools you can buy!
You could pay for a gnome to haul you out of the fun house, or to guide you away from the funhouse at certain times, but the gnomes sometimes were blocked by new magic created by the funhouse and the problem was, since you hired the gnomes, you could always just stop paying them and wind up back in the funhouse.
Surely, many of us began to think to ourselves, the funhouse isn’t really a drug. It isn’t really addictive, like heroin or anything. That’s just a metaphor. Right? Right?
I’m not sure anymore. Like the AA people sitting around smoking cigarettes, taking one sometimes lethal drug while trying to avoid a more lethal one, I’m sitting round in the abandoned church basement of my blog with a few friends. My actual friends. A handful of people.
Which is maybe as many friends as we need or should ever have.
How Does a Writer Know if they are Processing or Procrastinating?
Well, pretty much they don’t.
Wait! Stop! Don’t leave! Let’s roll around in this and see if there’s anything worth taking away from the question.
Pay by the word, or word count (which I claim to have renounced) as a milestone is one way for a writer to figure out if they’re really actually writing enough or not.
When you’re paid by the word and writing is your job, you have capitalism telling you what to focus on. And Capitalism is loud. Maybe you get a dollar a word writing advertorial content, an hourly rate or salaried rate as a tech writer, or you make one to ten cents a word writing fiction and you do all three.
Check to see if you are still living indoors / have access to healthcare and adjust your focus accordingly. (Don’t go by if you’re starving because it’s hard to starve in the west.)
But what about aspiring writers? First of all there is no such thing—there are writers who aspire to be to be read more widely, or published but all writers who are actually writing are writers.
So what about those people?
Well. How much and how fast do you have to be writing to be really writing.
Hemingway’s rate was around 500 words a day. That’s a novel or so of some length a year depending on how many days you spend dead drunk. Back in the olden times, that more or less meant you were a writer, but you wrote in longhand in mastodon blood or with a coal powered typewriter and the editing process was kinda excruciating and doing research was way hard. So that’s part of the old time slowness.
Stephen King supposedly writes 2k a day which is two big fat novels a year or one superfat one. Again, depending on weekends, vacations, and how much time you spend on social media yelling at the president.
A thousand is given as a kind of average number for Really Being A Writer but the million word a year pulp writer rate is 3000 plus words a day, on average, for 333.3 days or so. (Math!)
But this is complicated when Writers you Like and Respect say things like “I wrote that novel in four days,” or “I had the idea for this story during the Nixon administration and then wrote it off and on for fifty years while I worked as an editor for lug-nut monthly.”
Which brings us back to your process, your subconscious, and the universal human desire to slack off and pretend to do something rather than actually fucking do it.
Your process may well require background work in the subconscious. Time to ruminate. Time to ponder. Time to stare into the sky and think about eating more than you should. Time for inadvisable, elaborately imagined fully-staged sexual yearnings. Time to worry about things you said at parties that you suspect you shouldn’t have. Time to worry if your social media presence is helping you, or if its millstone around your neck.
Um.
Time to process.
Before you feel good about this thought, you should know that maybe all you need, really, is to sleep regularly and well.
I knew a writer who asked himself five open ended questions about his work in progress each night before he went to sleep and while he never had any answers in his dreams he noticed that after he had done this his work flowed more easily. So he still does it.
So while you may never know when a lull in output is refilling the tank, and when it is being worthless and weak, I have found you can almost always do one of the following. Or rather, I can.
Write crappy first drafts.
Write to writing prompts and
Work on pure craft without worrying about content or
Edit stuff that you know you need to edit but the thought fills you with dread
Read something you know you should but haven’t had the energy to read. (Something higher up on the literary / intellectual food chain than your output.)
Be doing something super cool so outside your comfort zone that you’d rather be writing
if you think you are procrastinating, you definitely are. If you worry if you might be procrastinating but aren’t sure, do the list above. If you’re pretty sure you’re not procrastinating… try editing less and writing more first draft material until your ‘to be edited’ pile induces nausea. Because if a lull in output comes, you’ll have plenty of number four to do.
If my process ideas seem dumb to you, congratulations, because in the end, you have to do you, and make the process that works for you. This process will ideally be somewhere between:
Smugly knowing that every minute you are not writing was really necessary. So the one book every ten years is awesome.
Hating yourself for every minute you are not spewing one thousand words an hour. Letting that hate make you quit.
As my wife said, moderation in all things, to which I replied, “wait–isn’t that too much moderation?”
She sighs.
“Can one be immoderately moderate?”
“I have to go work now.”
Picture my wife pondering her unpaid emotional labor before leaving for her mile long walk to work.
Picture me bleary eyed staring at my giant imac on my improvised standing desk. That means our dresser. Writing new words or doing 1-4. Trying to avoid the unpleasant extremes I mention.
I’m fifty six with a dozen or so professionally published short stories.
I can sleep when I’m dead. No. I really should sleep regularly and well.
Alpha zero isn’t a stupid brute force engine, either; in fact it looks ahead far fewer moves than its opponents… who are also computer programs. But ones written more directly by humans.
Alpha Zero, more or less, wrote itself.
I had thought that SF writer Vernor Vinge had invented the idea behind this real world realization of a Super intelligence explosion, but it turns out that this idea has been around since the 60s, dreamt up during one of AIs many false dawns.
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. … It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.
I. J. Good
So, this is terrifying, but the worst thing, or best thing, if you get to monetize the product, is that Alpha Zero taught itself Go and Shogi as well, again in a few hours, and now it’s the best at them, too.
These games are similar in many ways, and reassuring articles now abound explaining how far deep learning is still from real intelligence, general intelligence. One has to wonder if one day we get general intelligence, too–without ever understanding what it is. What we are.
Because we don’t understand Alpha Zero. The code just works. It knows more about chess than any human ever will, it plays elegantly, masterfully–at times it seems to toy with its opponent, rubbing their nose in their leaden brute force clunkiness.
The article goes on to talk about other deep learning applications that could soon make a serious impact in medicine–diagnosing brain injury about as good as a human doctor with decades of training and experience… but hundreds of times faster, and, though the article never says it, about a million times more cheaply.
Like many tech articles, even as it lays out a economic apocalypse of white collar work, with all of new revenue presumably flowing to companies like Google, who ‘get there firstest with the mostest’, there’s the presumption that capitalism will deal with this elegantly.
Progress is awesome! Everyone put out of work by this product will be able to afford the products created by their replacement! Somehow!
Even though these products, built on bazillions in public-spending to get the whole computer thing going, will be priced by giant global brutal monopolies.
We appear to be standing on the lip of the abyss.
Just as fisherman gained the ability to catch every fish in the ocean with high tech, the 1% has gained the ability to utterly capture the wealth of the middle class. IE, 90% of the consuming class. They have done this by reaping disproportionality the productivity gains of the information economy.
Technology may be neutral, but new tech is expensive, and when it is instantly weaponized by the shareholding class, we see that inequality is now tracking the curve of the approaching singularity.
Here’s another thing. The consumer economy doesn’t work without consumers. Your iphone factory is worthless when nobody can afford the new iphones.
So the owners of Alpha Zero and its split-second educated and manufactured slave children, will have two choices.
A new feudalism where 99.99 percent of the wealth is held by .01% of the population. Just keep adding nines on the one side and pushing the decimal on the other.
Or the shareholding class will have to manufacture consumers somehow. Whether that’s basic income, or subsidized work, or labor laws that partner human workers with super-smart AI pals, is unclear.
But we are at the point where the owners can, if they want, catch every fish in the sea. And then starve to death. Or rather, starve us to death, presumably hiding in fortified bunkers till we’re gone.
Alpha zero, at this point, is too dumb to care what happens.
In my Zeitgeist stories, general intelligence emerges in the next few decades and then spills into the environment. It takes whacks at these big problems too.
Short answer ? I wrote about 200k words, which is like two good sized novels. Though I didn’t write novels.
I think that’s the most I’ve ever written. My word count system (putting everything in one Scrivener file) stopped working as I cut and paste stuff back and forth to incorporate edits from beta readers, so, I ended up measuring the final products and not counting some words written.
I’ll firm that system up, or rather, replace it, this year.
The bad news, which will surprise exactly no one who knows anything about writing, is that I made less money than I ever have in my life—the year I spent the most time writing, wrote my longest pieces, and finished four of them.
I sold two shorts to Asimov’s, which was cool. The first has been out for a few weeks… no one has spoken to me about it yet, which I guess, is okay, as nobody has told me I’m a bad person for having written it. So. That’s maybe all I should hope for.
Like my previous story. The Best Man, I’m stumbling about in the minefield of identity politics trying to write stuff that feels true to my spirit, that feels like what I think of SF, that thrums with the moral ambiguities that I think fiction is meant to explore, and that incorporates my own journey parenting two GLBTQ kids. I’m living this diversity moment, from the POV of one of the usual suspects, trying to figure out what my contribution should be.
No consensus has pronounced doom on my efforts to date. Though a few sensitivity readers have gently explained to me that my stuff, ‘isn’t written for them.’ Which is of course, a kind of failure…
Still. I have Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF behind me. For now anyway. This keeps me going.
I wrote three SF novellas set in my Zeitgeist universe, a post-singularity near future. The three novella’s required a timeline, which I built and include a snapshot of above.
My third short story published in Asimov’s, Solomon’s Little Sister, is set in the Zeitgeist timeline, more or less (though it may need tweaking as it was the first one I wrote, before I realized I’d need a timeline.)
It remains to be seen if these novella’s will make it to professional publication… which puts me in this awkward position of reconsidering if I want to keep building out this universe at all.
Nobody is clamoring for more stories of course, after the one.
The Zeitgeist universe is sort of about human motivation in a post-scarcity world, the meaning of life, which is of course mostly a first-world kind of problem? Most people are simply surviving; the meaning of life for many is figuring out how to keep living. Once we have a universal base income, or anything like it, What does life mean?
Of course I still manage to find life and death stakes in this universe.
On the brink of a breakthrough I grew fat with despair
Down 200 sticks of butter from Peak Fat. A man as thin as a twenty-nine year old, with a curiously long torso.
A year into the ongoing tragedy of the Trump administration I had packed another fifteen pounds into my fat suit, the one I’d been working on diligently since my twenties. This is the fat suit most Americans don as they age, swapping a pound of muscle for two pounds of fat each and every year.
I felt like shit. I wasn’t sleeping sleep well, I had gastric issues, but eating three to four thousand calories a day helped stave off panic and kept my depressive mood swings barely in check. My mental state induced a suite of symptoms leading to expensive medical tests which showed nothing deeply wrong with me… besides the thing my doctor had begun to mention at my yearly checkups. I was, at 240 pounds and five foot ten and a half inches, clinically obese.
I didn’t really feel obese, though, and when I mentioned this people said I wasn’t, meaning, really only that I didn’t look morbidly obese, which is really what we commonly understand that word to mean.
I’d been a skinny kid and an average weight young man…. what happened? Was I cursed with some metabolic slowdown? Bad microbiome? Thyroid condition.
No. I ate too much. I have alcoholism in my family, but have been spared that, but food has always been my weakness. I’m a good cook… and an even better eater. I love food. All food; organic, healthy, vegetarian, vegan… and factory food, fast food, snack food, meaty and fatty food. Ethnic food from every nation. American diner fare. Crappy-crass parodies of ethnic food. Lousy New England Chinese restaurants.
Taco Bell.
Hey what about the writing?
I’d broken into the big SF mags at age 50. Yes, I use this graphic a lot.
I knew another three to seven years of this was going to kill me. I’d also realized, after publishing a dozen stories and novellas in the SF pro-press (Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Interzone, FSi and others), that if I ever wanted to do this writing thing, I had to do it now. Time wasn’t on my side. I could stroke out, become demented, or die, at any minute. Of course anyone can pull a Stuart Sutcliff, but I’d reached an age when, as the late Louis CK put it, there would be no candlelight vigils at my sudden unexpected passing.
Most of the writers, artists, scientists, important people I’d read about had done their best work long before age 55. If I was ever to do anything, I’d be an outlier. Any success was growing more unlikely day by day, week by week, year by year.
The remnant of the energy and excitement at my big magazine breakthrough at age fifty was washed away by the national tragedy, and my work failing to trigger any observable, measurable change in my life. No awards, nominations, TV or movie options, no interest from agents for anthologies… all things happening to friends of mine with similar credits. I’d passed one hurdle but this proved just another milestone in a long slog that again disappeared to the vanishing point on the horizon. Still, I couldn’t stop now. I didn’t want to. I was publishing regularly in the top magazines in the field.
But I was grinding to a halt. Writing wise, I’d picked at a novella for months, while doing my usual freelance design, a little activism, a ton of Facebook Ranting, and nothing else worth mentioning.
But with the support of friends and long-suffering family I began to shakily, fitfully, pull myself out of the mire.
Pysch meds, which I had long avoided, were the first step. While I know from personal experience that pysch medication can save your life I’m agnostic about their ability to fine tune one’s mental state; chemical intervention is always a double-edged sword, and I’d hoped to treat my various borderline clinical issues in other ways.
Trump changed that, in the first months of his ‘presidency,’ while viciously attacking, debasing and insulting almost everyone who wasn’t an aging white ultra-rich guy. Non-aging-white-ultra-rich guys, IE, 99% of my friends, around me were regularly dissolving into tears, fits of screaming rage, or near catatonic despair.
I alternated between these three states myself.
As they say in the airplane safety dance, first put on your own oxygen mask, then help others paralyzed with fear.
I started reading what I have always called ‘self-help crap,’ fitfully, in an annoyed fashion. Reading the blogs, the books. Successful friends recommended to me what had helped them. I held my nose and entertained the notion that I didn’t know everything about how to live my life.
If you speak science-ese you can look at the study here. The TL:DR is this: A bunch of random people were given index cards with a mini-course on mindfulness meditation, and in 8 weeks, they changed the physical size of their amygdalas. In fifteen stinking minutes a day.
Not reduced electrical activity in the region. They shrank the gross physical mass of this nightmare inducing part of their goddamn brains.
They didn’t have to scale mountain tops, or learn how to speak Martian. They read a card and sat in a chair and did a certain special kind of nothing for, and yeah, I’ll say it again, fifteen lousy stinking minutes a day.
So I added meditation to the medication. And one day, while looking at myself in the mirror, I pivoted to that sideways view that is always so, so disturbing and thought to myself, grabbing the thick pad of fat that now filled out my silhouette transforming me into a barrel of man—
Fuck this. Fuck this shit. Seriously. What the fuckity-fuck. Who the fuck is that? Having just meditated, I said all this calmly without throwing things or clawing at my abundant flesh. (have I mentioned the Zen is a work in progress?)
I asked myself, ‘how did I get here?’
Letting the days go by. That’s fucking how. You fuck.
And I remembered a moment as I approached the age of thirty where I thought to myself, “Considering the alternative, I have to turn 30, but do I really need to get heavier than 200?”
I have fat friends, and I have embraced, and still do, the basic tenets of fat acceptance, that shaming and judgement of others based on weight are bullshit. I had unfriended people for preaching the gospel of universal weight-loss to some of the larger bodied friends in my feed.
But the body in the mirror didn’t look like me, to me. Nobody was giving me much shit about it; even my Doctor. The advancing case of Old I could do nothing about. But the fat? Maybe. I could get under 200 pounds again. Maybe it wasn’t going to make me healthier. Maybe it was arbitrary. Maybe it was vanity. A mountain to climb for no reason.
But to tread that lightly on the Earth again. What would that feel like?
The writing thing? Same basic plan. Use a scale. Measurable goals. Read the work habits of Very Successful people. And Try. I had already set a word count goal for the year. Successful pulp writers crank out between 500,000 to a million words a year. (five to ten novels). I’d shoot for 300,000.
The mental health thing? Medication and Meditation baby. And maybe progress on the goals would help, too. My writing program, Scrivener had a word tracking system built into it.
Which was good, because I suck at data entry.
Okay, it’s worse than that. I suck at any and all forms of discipline, any and all regularity of pattern, any and all structure. In short, any time I am compelled to do anything like a metronome I feel the desire to stick it to the man, and not do the thing.
Even if I am the Man!
So I was going to have to build new habits. I’d learned that one recipe for failure is to try to turn your life around all at once. To use force of will to simultaneously tackle many weaknesses. Because you don’t have that much willpower. Trying and failing to adhere to fanciful work plans had proven that already. What I hadn’t known, until I did my reading was that nobody has that much willpower.
What successful people have is habits, cultivated over time, which they added to gradually, habit by habit. Being creatures of habit (supposedly) their ability to become ruthless self-actualizing world-beating success machines grew exponentially, as they built habits inside of habits in nested epicycles, hung habits on top of habits, and habitually kicked the sorry asses of seat-of-the-pants, winging it, late sleeping slackers like me.
Or rather people that acted the way I was acting.
How do you start? How did I start? One habit at a time, dude. With the keystone habit. The first habit. The mother of all habits. Unbeknownst to me, I’d started the work. With a pill. And an index card of meditation instructions handed to me by a scientific study via the NYT. With a selfish grasp of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as illustrated by the Airline Safety Dance.
Put your oxygen mask on first.
Build a better life one habit at a time.
Start at the bottom of the pyramid… and work you way up.
Stay tuned for Part 2: Gamifying Everything: On Becoming a Cyborg and the Quantified Self
Very pleased to announce the sale of my short story, “Not Only Who You Know,” to Asimov’s.
A little near future spec fic, a little romance, a little crime fiction, a little social commentary… I’m happy with how it came out.
I am making my 1k a day goal for 300 days this year, though I don’t write evenly, some days are more productive than others, and some days are lost to the real world.
I’m a bit behind now. I’ll pour it on and make my deadline, I think.
I’ve lost 25 pounds in the last seven weeks or so, on purpose. So, I’m counting calories, and counting words, and counting steps, my Self fully quantified.
I wanna thank my workshops, Neopros, Mechanics, and B-Spec, for all their help over the years, Sheila Williams for helping me fix the broken bits of my stories, my friend Celeste for being Celeste, and my family for giving me the time and space to write a lot. A lot for me anyway.
At the end of the year I expect I will be pushing just as hard, just as frantically, for more clients and more freelance work. But I’m not worried about that now. For now I am doing this. As hard as I can.
Or is it easy? What could be easier than falling into your dreams.
The hard part, really, is leaving them to live in the world.
