I will be hosting an Asimov’s authors get together in the bar at Readercon at 3:00 pm on Saturday July 14th. Sheila Williams, Asimov’s award-winning editor will be attending, if everything works out as planned.
Chime in, if you can make it; if you know of Asimovians feel free to invite them; have them RSVP if they want to following up on my public post, or email me at ejayo1963 (at) gmail.com, or just show up!
Let’s try to celebrate the magazine and discuss the work, and not get sucked into a lot of discussion of the current dystopian hellscape!
Let’s enjoy the weekend!
Hope to see as many as can make it there. Feel free to comment here or on my Facebook page!
I want to briefly thank everyone who I have met through the magazine for being awesome to me. Thank you! Thank you. You make this whole thing feel a lot less isolating.
So if you follow me on social media you may remember that I have committed to writing 300,000 words this year.
This isn’t a huge thing, really, by indy standards, though were I to publish them all traditionally, that would be an outlier. If you’re not a writer and you think of writing in pages and not words, here’s a link for the lengths of famous novels.
Oh, all right, I’ll convert that into pages (even though pages vary in lengths for lots of reasons). Call it 3000 paperback tiny print pages.
When J.K. Rowling was constrained by industry standards vis a vis optimal YA novel length, that would be about 3 Harry Potter books like the first two. Of course, she became J.K. Rowling at a certain point, so at 257k, Order of the Phoenix would eat most of my 300k year, with an additional short novel, say, The Great Gatsby, tossed off in the last two months.
So far, this is working well for me. I have hit my target at three months in.
I have finished 2 novellas, 2 novelettes, one short story, and am halfway through another short now. For fun, I will name them.
Indigo
Uncontainable
You Must Remember This
The Keyhole
The Gorgon
Far and Away
If you are considering doing this, setting a writing goal, jigger the rules of your writing game to help you do the thing you need the most. My problem, I think, has been a slow process that doesn’t include proper drafting. I haven’t written bad first drafts; I have agonized, growing stories very slowly, I call it ice-sickling, rereading and rewriting endlessly as I go along. If you are a pantser and want more plot, be sure to count your outlines.
What Not to Count
The one thing I urge you never to count, ever, is your social media and email output. Writers fool themselves into thinking they’re platform building with this kind of thing, when they really need to be writing more books and stories. Mostly what you do in social media is make Mark Zuckerberg, and Google, which people use to find your content, a tiny bit richer. The value that adheres to you is negligible.
There are exceptions to this. John Scalzi and John Green come to mind. But they have written their fiction at a good fast clip and don’t seem to suffer from time in social media. If you aren’t finishing a novel or three a year, I’d look into social media use. It is probably a tail that is wagging your dog.
Twitter might be an exception, tweets are dense and crafted, or should be, and if your content generates a ton of followers…. well. As an editor of an online magazine, I noticed a strong correlation between story reads and Twitter numbers. And a youtube channel actually generates a little revenue. Podcasts consume a different kind of energy and should include human contact, even if it’s a phone conversation or skype call being turned into content, and again, you own that content.
But Facebook is a complete and total disaster. Believe me. Try marketing reprint anthos to your 1000 friends. This gives you a great idea of the monetary value of that relationship as mediated through Facebook. Don’t hate your friends. Hate Facebook. Because you’ll never know, when your stuff doesn’t sell, how much of the failure is genuine ambivalence, and how much is FB gaming the system to sell you ads. Because Facebook is built content they get for free, which they then turn around and charge the content providers to show to people.
Often people who have signed up to get the content!
Facebook sells your own friends back to you.
So, repeat after me, social media is a giant suckhole of time and effort.
That includes stuff like this blog post you’re reading now of course.
Rules of The Game
Pick a number of words for the time period. Figure out how many writing days there are in your time period. Do your math. Give yourself days off. When you miss your goals you can burn them if you have to.
Do not subtract for edits. Throwing words away is important. If you penalize yourself you can’t edit properly. Scrivener has a setting for this; Not sure how you would do it otherwise. A rigorous drafting process would work.
Count your outlines. They’re very dense and time consuming. Don’t worry that you’re counting something twice. Count your story bible, and any idea files you keep.
Don’t count social media writing or blogging or any form of conversational typing.
Pick an easy per day goal; figure out how many days you can work in your year, how many writing days. Do not stretch in this part of the goal. If this is 200 words a day five days a week for fifty weeks with two week vacation, congratulations, you could have written Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in a year.
This is the hard part. Do not let yourself off the hook for the cumulative goal.* What this means is that as you slip and lose days, to slow edits, to life, your new word goal will rise and become more challenging. This is why you picked an easy one.
Study your workflow. Maybe now you have too many shitty first drafts. One of the downsides of nano-wrimo for many are hastily written novels that nobody finishes. Finishing is when you level up. It is when the Dungeon Master hands out experience points.
You have to finish. Some things can be finished in outline only. But you have to finish what you start in some way, or part of your brain will be sucking that lolipop for the rest of your life. That sucking may actually turn into something wonderful, but don’t count on that, ever. You’re better off finishing everything you can.
If you are writing stuff you know you can’t return to, you may want to stop and revise your goal downward. If on the other hand you look at the work and see something you will want to work with, keep going.
Common Observations on Goal Oriented Writing
So many, many pros say this I’m not going to bother to source it. The writing you produce when inspired, and the writing you grind out under your self imposed deadline will read the same. You’ll see no huge dramatic shifts in quality.
You will build a muscle you didn’t know existed.
You will become a better writer.
If you submit what you write, you will start selling eventually.
Risks and Dangers
If you have mental health issues, stress can trigger problems. This is a stressful activity. That’s the point. To use the stress to build a muscle. To use increased workflow to find a better process. I have noticed, for want of a better term, a prose module in my head that heats up and is hard to shut off. Characters will chatter at you. Story details will pop into your head constantly. You’ll itch to get to a keyboard to make sure you don’t lose anything. Why does this happen?
Writing is dissociation. Here’s a definition of that in psychiatric terms:
Dissocation is a separation of normally related mental processes, resulting in one group functioning independently from the rest, leading in extreme cases to disorders such as multiple personality…
Dissociation is any of a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experiences. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality, rather than a loss of reality as in psychosis.
This detachment is your writing trance. It is what makes the solitude endurable and enjoyable. We don’t write alone. We write in the company of our imaginary friends.
If you take from this the idea that I’m saying becoming a good writer means you drive yourself slightly insane then you are reading me correctly. I am saying that.
So don’t break yourself. Adding heavy drug use, even moderate drug use, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, lack of all human contact, to a new writing goal is a recipe for disaster. Don’t try this at home. Take care of yourself.
But when you feel it’s time, do this thing with all your heart, so when you lay down to die, you’ll know, you did it. When the music stops, and you take your seat for the rest of eternity, you want that moment where you say.
This is the link to the ebook preorder page. The book will be discounted in pre-order by a buck, so it’s only 4.99 for a novel length collection of stories from the top magazines in the SF field, Asimov’s, F&SF, Interzone… (my Analog stories are still coming out…)
Here’s the blurb from Amazon:
Con Men. Ex-lovers. Time-line Wizards. Cyborgs. Zen Master Private Detectives. Dead-Enders. Wunderkind, and Fools.
These stories are filled with people you know, living hauntingly familiar lives set fifteen minutes in the future. Stories about people that desperately want things. People on the brink. Every one bewitched, bothered and bewildered by Bad Gurus.
Jay O’Connell re-emerged on the short genre fiction scene in 2013 with a sudden outpouring of short stories and novellas in the SF pro press which transmuted his mis-spent years in east-coast tech-bubble start-up culture into something weird and wonderful. This is also his story, one of those mid-life transformations that gives us hope the future might grant us an unlikely redemption, if we keep our head in the game.
One of the books that inform the flavor of my short story “Grandmaster,” in Analog March / April 2017
I did my research on that time period by reading two books; The Futurians by Damon Knight, and The Way the Future Was, by Fred Pohl, and then I just scrambled and reinvented various anecdotes to create my mythical C.L. Moore / Kuttner Writer Combo. (I’m reminded of the wonderful way Alan Moore creates whole universes of comic book characters you’ve never heard of that evoke ones you have.)
Generally speaking, all of their work during the time they were married is to a degree a collaboration, though some stories carry their shared pen name and some don’t. Rage, in my story, is an analog to the novel Fury, which Moore has described as being about 70% written by Kuttner.
It’s an awesome book, by the way.
So again, this is fantasy, or SF, and it’s about my fantasy, of this heroic woman and her doomed husband, and a reality underneath, which in this case is a romantic love story, because I’m a sucker for a love story, and the subversive element of the story that muddies its politics is the notion that, for some people, writing is a kind of intimacy with the people you’re writing with, and the readers and editors are a greek chorus.
In her introduction Moore ascribes the bulk of the writing of Fury to her husband, but it was a collaboration, regardless of the byline…
The fact that Moore stops writing, during her second marriage to a man who doesn’t like SF, is I guess, the source of that idea.This thought just occurred to me; it wasn’t conscious…
C.L. Moore’s most collected story, No Woman Born, is about a beautiful dancer / actress whose brain is moved into a robot body after she’s injured in a fire. It’s a wonderful story with a fairly dark ending, this notion that somehow the robotized woman may be losing her humanity. It’s observations on gender, beauty, and femininity are still relevant, according to many female scholars and readers I’ve found on the web. The story makes sense to me, too.
Vintage Season is the story the POV is talking finishing at the end, and it may in fact be pure C.L. Moore, even though it was published under a shared pen name; people disagree. Vintage Season takes place in an unnamed city in a time that feels like the past, and it may be the first ‘time traveler tourist’ story ever written. I make it Boston and Cambridge, in my funhouse mirror universe, because I live in Cambridge and have lived in Boston and I tend to set things here.
OH! Moore would have been the second woman to get the SF grandmaster award, not the first. The first is Andre Norton.
Catherine Lucille Moore, better known as. C.L. Moore who should have been the second female Grandmaster of SF award recipient… but wasn’t.
So the reviews are creeping in for my story Grandmaster in the current March / April issue of Analog, and they fall into two camps.
Pretty good story, moving, not sure who this character is supposed to be.
I found the story effective, but had to ask this old fan who this woman was, and now I’ll tell you.
Backstory. I’m fifty three, which makes me of a generation that read all science fiction. All of it. We read backwards and forwards, because the genre wasn’t that big, and we couldn’t get enough. We weren’t these super powered geek nerd reading machines, (well, we were but…) it’s just that before Star Wars, the world of SF was pretty small.
We couldn’t get enough.
Star Trek was moderately big, at seventy two episodes, three years, it had spawned it’s halo of novelizations, but before next generation there was over a decade of puttering about with a project at Paramount that never turned into a show. (Phase Two, it was called; bits and pieces of it end up in the Star Trek Movie and the TNG, Next generation.) But let’s face it, Star Trek is pretty cerebral. Most people… aren’t. The unbelievable appeal of genre materials wouldn’t be readily apparent until George Lucas was forbidden from remaking Flash Gordon, and so he ended up with something much, much better. Star Wars. Space fantasy, capturing the energy and spirit of the SF pulps of the 20s, 30s and 40s… in the late seventies…
Star Wars was always a kind of Happy Days of movie SF; it was always retro.
Picture Fonzie saying, “Aaaaaayyyyyyyy,” here if you want.
I remember reading after Star Wars, the ceiling was raised, and the bottom fell out. You could make a lot of money with an SF property, so there were many more of them, and you could lose your shirt. Of course, what drove us fans nuts was that so few projects were in any way connected to SF writing or the classics of the genre.
We were bludgeoned by pre-asimovian robots running amuck and giant insects we knew could never actually survive because of the square cube law and Martin Gardner’s wonderful essay ‘on the importance of being the right size.’
Anyway, fans of a certain age ended up reading at the very least representative hunks of stuff from the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, as well as books being written in the now of the sixties and seventies. There wasn’t a huge split, into media related properties, movie tie ins and franchises, and Everything Else. There was just the everything else.
SF author culture of the 40s, 50s, sixties was supposedly oddly welcoming and supportive of new authors. The reasoning went, that most people made modest livings, writing SF, and that real fans bought or read it all, so it wasn’t a zero sum game; SF authors weren’t really competing for fans in a Darwinian show down. There was a cattiness and nastyness in Literature and Bestsellerdom, that SF lacked. Or so they said.
I came of age in the 80s, as the culture was wracked by Reagan and Just Say No, Morning in America, the end of the sexual revolution, the beginning of the great divide, the waves or privatization and income inequality that would radiate into cyberpunk and then become so ubiquitous that it wasn’t popular as fiction.
So, for me, that pre-sixties era was a golden dream, a dream of my father’s generation, or half a generation younger; this time of great SF camaraderie; of John W. Campbell at Astounding writing letters or critique back to Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov longer than the stories they’d submitted themselves.
At some point I bumped into the stories of The Futurians, a group of SF writers and editors who emerged from the fractious world of SF club culture to become a powerful force in SF publishing and writing. Yes. There was a SF club culture. Don’t laugh. Hey, think about the monstrous size of something like Comicon. Now stop laughing. That starts here.
While mostly men, there were women in these groups, and these women wrote and edited and dreamed and argued and smoked and slept with and married and divorced and remarried these men. Women were a vital part of it. Mary Shelly birthed the genre with her book Frankestein, and women were always there, always a driving force…
But C.L. Moore used the initials so that her gender wasn’t evident on a byline.
My Dad told me that Moore and her husband, Henry Kutner, whose life would be tragically cut short in the 40s by an abrupt heart attack, tag team wrote under pen names. It was anybodies guess really, who wrote what of the books they wrote together. To a lonely teenager, the idea of a writer wife you wrote with was the most romantic, attractive, and erotic thing imaginable. It haunted me for decades, even as I stopped being lonely.
While looking for more C.L. Moore to read a , beyond a few heavily anthologized classics, I spoke to Michael Morano, a Boston area horror novelist and reviewer, and he told me the story of her uncollected Grandmaster award.
“Her second husband’s family is ashamed of SF. It’s hard to find, her work is out of print but not public domain. Her husband said she was too far gone with Alzheimers to accept the award. So they didn’t give it to her,” Michael said to me.
And something in my heart broke.
So, big reveal, I’m a progressive and a feminist and supporter of GLBTQ rights, with GLBTQ family, but I’m also a pretty regular white-het-cis middle-aged guy, and my resonance with and emotional response to feminist and racial struggles varies. Intellectually, I’m always there, but emotionally, I know, some stories hit me in the gut, and some don’t.
But Catherine Moore I had read, and loved. Kuttner I had read, and loved. I had loved thinking of them writing together. I’d not known about the Grandmaster award. And suddenly the ghost of every unsung woman hero , every forgotten female pioneer, tapped me on the shoulder and when I turned, blinking, she punched me square in the face.
A character from a failed novel leapt in the time machine she was building to give C.L. Moore her award, an asperger-ish nerd girl from the year 2056, who I also love, even if her novel failed. But things with Autumn, that character, never run smoothly. She makes interesting mistakes. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t love her, and Moore, and feminism. But what began as a kind of progressive polemic ran headlong into the tricky business of character and unintended consequences and… well.
Read the story. It’s very short. Hopefully it does something for you.
I’ve been thinking about the singularity, or post-humanism, using any number of historical and personal anecdotes as metaphors to conjecture wildly about a world that many futurists see thirty years in the future.
Of course, this world has been thirty years away for over thirty years, which isn’t to say it isn’t getting closer, but…
From wikipedia:
In 1965, Good wrote his essay postulating an “intelligence explosion” of recursive self-improvement of a machine intelligence. In 1985, in “The Time Scale of Artificial Intelligence”, artificial intelligence researcher Ray Solomonoff articulated mathematically the related notion of what he called an “infinity point”: if a research community of human-level self-improving AIs take four years to double their own speed, then two years, then one year and so on, their capabilities increase infinitely in finite time.[5][53]
In 1983, Vinge greatly popularized Good’s intelligence explosion in a number of writings, first addressing the topic in print in the January 1983 issue of Omni magazine. In this op-ed piece, Vinge seems to have been the first to use the term “singularity” in a way that was specifically tied to the creation of intelligent machines:[54][55] writing
We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between … so that the world remains intelligible.
Vinge’s 1993 article “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”,[6] spread widely on the internet and helped to popularize the idea.[56] This article contains the statement, “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” Vinge argues that science-fiction authors cannot write realistic post-singularity characters who surpass the human intellect, as the thoughts of such an intellect would be beyond the ability of humans to express.[6]
Vinge’s essays channelling Good (who I have never heard of until did this cut and paste) hit me hard at the time, and continues to disrupt my ability to write anything but near future SF.
I have loved Asimovian galactic empires, I have loved Niven’s Ringworld and Known Space, but I increasingly struggle with two things. The looming singularity, and the great silence of Fermi’s Paradox.
The looming singularity fractured SF into various sorts of retro-futurisms, cyberpunk being the near future environment leading up to a singularity, giving way to steampunk and various other kinds of punks. Part of punking out is not worrying too much about super intelligence. Humans remain important. Why? Just because.
Making fun of the singularity, and the various failed deadlines for human scale AI since Marvin Minksy’s original optimistic predictions in the sixties, is now a reflex, even among AI researchers as using neural nets and machine learning stand poised to transform the global economy.
Business people generally are incapable of getting it up for any idea that can’t be monetized in the next business quarter or two, and government people think in terms of an election cycle or two, leaving all deep thought on this subject to hobbyists and cranks, (SF writers) and a tiny number of academics and techno-billionaire funded think tanks.
As I struggle to figure out what to do with my fictional voice, and with my general writing and reasoning ability, I find myself drawn to, and repelled by, transhumanism, the way a thoughtful progressive Christian is appalled by the Rapture.
The passage of time is turning me from a SF writer into a futurist and techno-thriller author. My SFnal voice isn’t appropriate for technothriller, so, I will have to learn a new one. My fictive voice isn’t good for business writing either, so, again, more learning.
This is my bifurcated path, my roadmap for the future.
Thanks for listening. I’ll dig into these more as I do my research.
A quick note, some conversational typing, before I go out and do something more substantive, hopefully. I lost a friend, or discovered I’d not had him for years and hadn’t noticed, a few months back, a writer I knew from the nineties, from my first long term workshop, who started flaming me on twitter, saying he couldn’t stand another self-congratulatory post about a magazine sale or some navel-gazing reverie about my process.
“Get your head out of your ass!” he said to me, I thought, with love and affection.
So I chatted with him some, long enough to discover, that any love or affection he’d had for me had long since gone. He blocked me after interacting strangely with a few friends who had attempted to defend me.
I’ve long questioned what the hell I was supposed to be doing with social media, other than screaming about politics, which, as we all know, is mostly useless, but sort of fun and fulfilling in a truly horrible way. I engaged in a conversation on my wall. “I think I need to construct a writer persona, who would be this character, who would write things people would want to read. Reading those posts would make people want to buy my stuff.”
People scoffed. “That’s crazy!” They said. “Be yourself.”
Emboldened by that advice I stuffed my head up my own ass.
A year or two later a successful business person / novelist friend of mine pointed out that he’d never seen so self-sabotaging a social media presence. I was basically furious all the time about stuff. Being myself wasn’t working. At all.
So. What do I talk about?
I can talk about writing and my writing process but with 30 professional short story sales (and two novellas) spread over the last 20 years, who the hell wants to emulate my process? One of the reasons I stuffed my head up my ass was that I felt like I was a second act, an inspirational tale, and I wanted to share that, without realizing that, to the young people coming out of Clarion who I met at conventions, I was more or a cautionary tale. Like Rip Van Winkle waking up after decades of sleep. (I quit writing fiction for eighteen years.)
I guess, what I am doing and what I have been doing is reaching out to a community, to try to conjure one into being, in one of the most indirect methods imaginable, like writing in sharpie on interstate restroom walls to find friends.
I joined three writing workshops and worked with people on their stuff and made a few friends. I’m not completely alone. One of the reasons I fell into the failed start-up trap was because I wanted a roomful of friends to work with.
In a way Facebook is that roomful of friends. But I can’t be there now. I can’t be that person who is screaming and angry. But I’m not great at being alone, either. I need to get back to my word count, my secondary creation, my process, to the people in my head. And pull my head out of my ass… at the same time.
Lectures… civic engagement… interviews as research… these are the next step. Be in the real world. Find contact there.
On the second floor platform at Darwin’s near central square. Nice place. Good noise level. Classy music of some sort, blues / jazz, not the usual nostalgia pop.
I’m working at Darwin’s today, a local coffee chain; nice decor, all dark wood and exposed brick, sporting the usual assortment of artisanal ten dollar sandwiches and excellent coffees.
Eighteen years ago I knew the owner’s wife; we both had infant children, and we both had coffee at the 1369 in central square many mornings. I guess she needed a little break from her family coffee shop? I guess that makes sense. I had a little circle of almost friends, for a little while, in central square, while the babies stayed in the carriages.
When you have infant children you suddenly realize that you need to have friends with infant children so you can cultivate friendships and playdates for your kids. As a male primary caregiver, of course, you’re at a disadvantage. Nine out of ten of the people doing the caregiving thing are women, and that ads an alienating layer of complexity. It’s even worse if the woman is ridiculously attractive of course, as this woman was…
I don’t think about that time much. I was giving up on writing, losing myself in the kids in the aftermath of 911 and the collapse of the tech bubble… all those things percolating… Complexities.
I ended up wasting years of my life working for failed start-ups with a series of business partners, making less and less money. Friends wondered why I didn’t start writing again, as I was engaged in pure speculation anyway.
I couldn’t explain why, but mostly, I found it easier to chase someone else’s dream than my own. I made great money in the bubble, and I had that abundance thinking, that anything I gave myself to would eventually work out, as long as it involved the internet and my professional branding and user experience skills.
Heh.
It’s hard to speak of that monstrous optimism without wanting to cry. The Wired magazine cover story titled The Long Boom said it all–the idea was that the internet would fuel a revolutionary change in the economy which would transcend the business cycle, which would become like that Escher print of the staircase that loops endlessly upward.
The tech boom was going to go on forever.
Oh, it was a time of win win. No losers! Can you imagine that? Sure most of the money went to a very few, but during the 90s the rising tide did raise all ships, event the beat up shitty ones, a tiny bit. For awhile. Until we found ourselves somersaulting every downward on that Escher staircase, through the dust and flames of collapsing towers.
Fast forward eighteen years. My kids are teenagers, smiling and waving as they make their way into the world. I’m working on my own dreams this time around, and will own completely any success or failure I find.
I’ve cut myself off of Facebook and twitter and I’m mostly alone. My writing friends scattered over the world. Only a few business relationships survived the collapse of my failed start-ups. Immediate family hundreds or a thousand miles away.
Lise’s baby (was her name Lise?) must be 18 now too—babies age at a uniform rate. Kid time is over. No more kid movies and kid books and going to parks and pools together. No more kid music on the car stereo. No more bathtoys underfoot. No more kraft macaroni and cheese and dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets. No more happy meals and happy meal toys.
No more reading to them at night.
Eighteen years after your last kid is born, you get your life back. It’s like this thing your ordered on Amazon and forgot you wanted, it just shows up on your doorstep and you open it up and say, “Oh!”
Everybody knows what food poisoning feels like. Two exits; no waiting. Retching, dry heaves, misery, which you know will resolve in a day or two most likely.
Since the election, many creative people have been suffering from News poisoning, with mental effect of a similar nature; the problem is the source of the poison isn’t going away anytime soon.
I know some people who have put their creative lives on hold to be more politically active. I know those who have decided to take a step back from current events and continue to work in their creative careers.
And of course, many many people struggling to do both at once, and feeling torn up about it. They aren’t active enough, or their work is suffering, taking a back seat to the burning need of the resistance.
Successful artists can afford to wear their heart on their sleeves. Stephen King is free to speak his mind, but as a fledgling SF author, to speak out on politics costs you some fraction of your audience; adult SF is a small audience to start out with, when compared to many genres (YA, Romance, Mass Market Thrillers) and slicing that readership in half out of the gate feels self-sabotaging.
I’ve worked as an unpaid, Krugman-esque op ed writer in social media for decades now. Inhaling news, and exhaling commentary, building a following of a few thousand, and losing it again as my interest waxed and waned. I’m Krugman, without the Nobel Prize, which is to say, I’m nothing like Krugman.
I’m more like a sports fan who thinks he could be a radio color commentator, but who has never had that gig a day in his life. My efforts to monetize this work have generated a little money, not much, but then, my fiction writing hasn’t made much either.
One wants to combine all of one’s selves into one unified force and punch through to success, to victory; but one fears that mixing one’s politics with one’s fiction will result in unpublishable message stories, half-assed polemic.
Writing dystopia’s feels a little on the nose; writing rosy futures feels absurd. Secondary creations which sidestep the moment feel irrelevant. Letting the climate kill your creative life feels like giving up.
My only way through it, is to try to do more, and talk less about it. Take the time I used to spend mulling politics, use it to advocate for the things I believe in (science, fairness, equality, the environment) and keep on keeping on.
So far, it’s not working. The world swirls around me. I struggle not to hate the 27% of the country who have plunged the world into chaos, and the 73% who let them, myself included. I struggle to believe in a decent future, as the extrapolation machine in my brain sees untold misery unfolding over the next few decades.
I believe in a 73% solution. That the 73% who didn’t vote for chaos can eventually lead us away from a looming world of environmental disaster and massive human die offs. I give money and time to the 73%.
but talking about it… as I’m doing now? Why don’t I stop doing that and write?
Why?
One thing at a time, maybe. Learn to read like I was fourteen again; then maybe I’ll be able to focus on my creative work like I was twenty five.
I’m two here I think, but you can see I’m planning on becoming a troubled nerd.
I hated middle-school with a burning passion. I have never been, before or since, that unhappy.
That unhappiness had an upside; I could read a book a day. The ability lasted for several years, say, a thousand books. I escaped into books, which were mostly science fiction and fantasy, but also some historical fiction, some literary fiction, some of that stuff blurs categories, and some non-fiction. Before middle-school I’d read comics, but I couldn’t buy them fast enough to keep me distracted from my daily misery as a 6th, 7th and 8th grader.
Forty years later, I find myself wanting to read like that again. And I can’t, or at least, I haven’ figured it out, yet. So I thought I’d list some of the reasons I read like a demone then, and think through some answers.
I had three channels of network TV, and a blurry PBS, on a set I shared with at least two people. (We had two TVs for a family of four.)
We had no video games.
We had no VCR or way to see movies other than going to the theater.
We had no second run theaters; you could only see the movies that were out at that moment.
I hated all sports.
I had yet to become interested in politics or acquired a newspaper habit.
I had a handful of bookish friends who had other sedate pursuits (model building, drawing, role playing gaming). We hung out often, but there was no way to even talk to them after say, ten o’clock.
Because we had one phone till I was in high school.
In short, what the hell else was there for me to do?
Don’t get me wrong, I watched plenty of TV. But there were blocks of time when there was nothing on the three channels I could even pretend to be interested in.
What the hell else was there to do?
Play cards and board games? Did that a little. Smoke pot drink beer and listen to vinyl and cassettes? Wouldn’t do that until I was older.
To summarize: It was easier to read a shitload, back then, because we had very very little else to do.
We roamed freely… through undeveloped land and construction sites and junkyards, climbing hills to hang out near water towers, and we went to lakes and played frisbee, a bit, my only sport, and we swam in pools and lakes, sure, a bit of that, a bit of travel, a bit of mall-wandering.
But books filled endless vistas of unstructured time, like water seeking a level, soaking into every nook and cranny, ever crevice.
To read like I was fourteen again I need to turn away from a world of video, from a new golden age of television, from the unwatched movies of the last century, of which there are literally thousands of classics, and ten thousand guilty pleasures, from gaming both casual and profound, from politics and news and social media and activism and the needs of a body which demands exercise to not hurt.
Tools which help.
Social media blockers like Freedom.
E-readers and e-reading apps on smart phones.
Audiobooks to listen to while walking.
On-line communities to talk about books with.
Finally, and sadly, perhaps the biggest incentive to read again, is this. A world I want to escape from.
A quick note, some conversational typing, before I go out and do something more substantive, hopefully. I lost a friend, or discovered I’d not had him for years and hadn’t noticed, a few months back, a writer I knew from the nineties, from my first long term workshop, who started flaming me on twitter, saying he couldn’t stand another self-congratulatory post about a magazine sale or some navel-gazing reverie about my process.
