Why is it so hard to do something you love to do?

February 23, 2014 by admin Leave a comment

So, I’m off the stands again, the new issue of Asimov’s is out, and as always, there’s a sense of sadness there.

The question above haunts me. Seriously. As a younger person, I lived for years, literally years, secure in the knowledge that I was an artist, and then a writer, and that I would make art, or write–tomorrow. I knew that every now and then I made things. Every now and then, the mood struck. Making art, creating something new, seemed to be a now or then kind of thing, and certainly when one has a full-time (or even a part-time) job, that’s the way it almost has to be, because a Job is ab every workday thing and it’s hard to have many parallel every workday things going on without going nuts.

But even in my twenties and thirties, it wore on me, and there were periods of time when I gave up on the idea of being a writer or an artist for years at a time, while I was a entrepreneur. One of the great things about being a self-employed entrepreneur is that there are always things to do, some you enjoy and some you hate, and you try to let the needs of the enterprise inform you on which thing you should be doing. The entrepreneur knows she’s on her own. Entrepeneurs don’t have muses. They have deadlines, payrolls, angry demanding clients, the possibility of great success and the greater likelihood of humiliating defeat.

It gets you going and keeps you going. Until it blows up in your face and it’s over and you wonder if you should do it again, knowing the new things you know.

My entrepreneurial activity of course never made me rich, and since that was what it was supposed to do, it was, in one sense, a failure. It was also a wonderful way to learn about the world. When you have your head down digging a trench, someone else’s trench, you get good at trench digging but you never get a big picture sense of business, of capitalism, of employers and employment. It’s like being an adolescent, being a child, being a student without ever having tried to be a teacher, parent, owner. It’s easy to see how stupid management is. When you don’t do that work, ever.

Step into the role of the other; the employer, the teacher, the job-creator, the parent, and Oh My. The circle becomes complete. The student is now the master. The employee now the employer. The worker now the owner. And you learn something.

You’re lousy at everything! And who do have to blame for that now, eh?

Only you!

You are half-assed. At everything. How in the name of God does one get one’s entire ass in gear?

Optimism, Great Expectations, belief that you can do something, is always the first step, isn’t it? The sense that you can do this thing. That has to be in the mix somewhere. Where does that come from, one wonders? Your parents telling you as a child that you can do anything you set your mind to? Doing well on standardized tests in high-school? Being able to make friends and make money in other contexts? Where does that confidence come from?

That optimism and belief in one’s self runs headlong into one’s critical sensibility early on. That wonderful Ira Glass quote above, about how hard the first five or ten years of creative effort can be, when one’s creator isn’t as powerful as one’s internal critic.

That Ira Glass poster can keep you going for for awhile. Then maybe you find a bit of your voice and have a bit of success and, well, you find yourself at the bottom of a new heap of people. Like that transition from Middle School to high school, when you go from being the biggest kid in the school to the smallest and most insignificant. Then high-school to college. Then college to work.

Every arrival is stunning. Oh. Here again? Wow. I suck. Again? I’m just this guy who made a cut and now it’s time to prove myself, all over again?

I’m 50. I’m 20 years in, though as I’ve mentioned, 20 years of now and then; who knows how many real years that is. Five? Ten? Basically, I need a new Ira Glass quote to keep me going for this bit of the struggle. I’m afraid I’m going to have to write that new inspirational quote myself, this time.

This post is no good for my professional career or persona. But somehow I want to share this part of this process too, for anyone who might care, for anyone it might help. Because you think you might arrive, someday,and it sure looks like some other people arrive, I could name names, but why bother,

But for you? No. You may succeed but you’ll never arrive. Maybe that’s just how it is, doing this thing, what it feels like on the inside.

Enjoy it right now or you never will. Every moment is as good as it gets.

But keep going. There are no more years to waste.

90 days on the stands…

February 16, 2014 by admin Leave a comment

The March Issue of Asimovs in Harvard Square

So the March issue of Asimovs will soon be off the stands, completing the 90 day span in which my stories have been pushed out to 25,000 readers or so, mostly as paper. Newsstand sales make up less than 10% of that number, but they do occur, as this photo conclusivelly proves. Knowing that an issue exists, on the stands, with my name in it, my story in it, has been wonderful.

I walk from magazine stand to magazine stand and I look at them, on the rack. I’ve spent at least one day for each issue doing this. I guess this should be embarrassing. But it isn’t.

Small upticks in circulation at Asimovs and Analog, combining paper and digital sales suggest that on the whole that e-readers aren’t simply cannibalizing print sales but are broadening the genre short fiction readership. Good new for those of us writing it! The end of the fiction magazine has been somewhat delayed, which is a good thing.

Still, short fiction nowadays is mostly a training ground, a place to find a voice and learn a craft and find a community. It is also of course a destination, a thing-in-itself, worthy, like poetry or fine art, of serious attention and respect. As with fine art and poetry a handful of rock-stars even make a kind of living mostly doing it.

But writers making a living write at longer lengths. My first novella sale to Asimovs in 2013 represents my first step down that path, away from short fiction, towards the novel. It is time to get cracking. I’m healthy, I have the time and the support, and for the first time in my life, I can safely say, I seem to be able to to this at a professional level. Sheila Williams and Gordon Van Gelder are people I respect. These are magazines I respect.

When I have read them over the years, I’ve never really felt, ever, “why is this in here?” Some stories are more to my tastes than others, but in every story I’ve read, I’ve caught some spark, some flash of quality, some thing that made me think, yeah, OK, I see why they bought this.

Now I have no choice but have a similar feeling about my own work. I’m in this game.

I may not be to everyone’s taste. I’m probably a tiny footnote in the grand history of the genre. But my ticket has been stamped. I am on my way. If I am ever to do this thing the time is now.

I read the magazines and reach out to my fellow writers, my TOC mates (writers who share a table-of-contents) and I walk the icy streets of Boston and Cambridge, looking at my issues on the rack, reminding myself, that my time is now. I’m a late bloomer. Maybe that’s OK. Keep moving. Make your mark.

I invite my fellow writers, young and old, to reach out to each other. Write notes to the writers you have loved your whole life, and tell them so. Write notes to your TOC mates. Do workshops and conventions. Bring yourself to this thing. I left fiction for twenty years and now I’m back and it is still here, still real, still important, as meaningful as you yourself make it.

Nebula Award Nominations End Feb 15; contact me for copies of my stories…

February 7, 2014 by admin 1 Comment

jay-asimovs-covers-2013 — I have stories in both these issues!

My two short stories, “That Universe We Both Dreamed Of,” and “Dignity” are both eligible for Nebula awards for the year 2013. Feel free to contact me at ejayo1963 (at) gmail.com for a copy if you’re a voting SFWA member. 2013 was an amazing year for me, life-changing, and I want to thank everyone who was a part of it, my family and friends and workshoppers at Griffins, B-Spec and Mechanics, the people at LaunchPad 2013, and my Clarion Class of 1994 (!) alums. I could never have gotten here without all of you. I’m an absurdly fortunate man. I’m beginning the career started 20 years ago at Clarion, finally, for real. I literally couldn’t be happier. Unless I was nominated for a Nebula. Then I’d be happier. But other than that. Seriously.

Colorful, Collectible Pain from the Past

January 26, 2014 by admin Leave a comment

A friend told me that the word nostalgia means, literally, pain from the past. For me it is a mixture of pain and pleasure, celebration and regret.

As I raise my children, I find myself mining the library, and the net for the media and culture I experienced at their age. I don’t know why I do this. Why relive my childhood while I’m living through something that is real, here and now? Am I trying to understand them or myself?

Comic books for me were the gateway drug for reading; mainly reading Science fiction and fantasy, which is what most comic books actually are, at their core. I collected comics for a period of a few years, reaching back a few years through the piles of back issues sans covers in the basement of Economy Books, in Syracuse New York.

Syracuse had no comic book store; I knew nothing of comic book conventions, and I never had the gumption to buy the mail order catalogs of back issues advertised in every issue I bought. (I did once order the 1000 roman soldiers advertised in about a billion comics of that era, and was rewarded by the small padded envelope containing ten crude plastic racks of 100 pea-sized plastic figures which arrived a few months later. An early lesson in the cruelty of capitalism: caveat emptor.)

I was a reader, not a collector, though I admit to being fooled into buying a few dozen ‘first issue specials’ (there was a series called ‘first issue special’, as I recall, which debuted a series of instantly forgotten characters…) I started out reading a few superhero titles, but was gradually snared into buying pretty much the entire marvel line-up to follow the complex storys which twisted through most of the titles. You’d be reading the Fantastic Four, and all of sudden, BAM, you missed something that it turns out happened in the Agengers. So now you have to get that Avengers. Hm. Now you have to get all the Avengers you can get your hands on, too. And so on.

As a kid you think you’re interesed in the characters, and the writers and artists feel secondary. At some point, though, you realize, that the books are created by the writers and artists, and that a good book could, in a single issue, turn into pure shit, if the creative team was broken up and moved somewhere else, which happened regularly.

So, quality in a comic book is this ephemeral frission of writer, artist, and character, which happens now and again. One long-standing team, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby, of course, created a canon of characters which has grossed untold billions of dollars for the faceless, brutal corporation which held ownership of the intellectual property they created. (Marvel is now part of the Disney Borg Collective. God help it.)

Starting around 1960 (which is around when I started) they forged a mythos out of the end stages of the post war boom, generally radiation power archetypes designed to play against type, reinventions of the superhero as defined by DC, their competitor. Instead of ultra-rich alpha males, Batmen, invulnerable aliens pure of heart and spirit, we had the relunctant superhero, Spiderman, the accidental Jeckle and Hyde, the Hulk, and the dysfunctional family of superheros, the Fantastic Four.

I read and reread the comics. Each comic was too short to contain much of an experience, but I found if I had a dozen or so comics of a given title, I could read them at a single sitting, creating in my mind a damn fine animated feature film.

It took me awhile to realize that some of the multiple titles containing the same characters (there were multiple books featuring Spiderman and the Fanstic Four for example) were reprints of earlier books; references to previous issues as footnotes finally sunk in and I realized that each title was really a single long story, in the mid seventies, somewhere between issue 100 and 200, for most of the characters I was following. It was a sobering realization. How would I ever catch up? I couldn’t afford to buy the back issues. there were no libraries of these things. The experience was fragmentary, exasperating. The objects themslves fragile. and the cost per minute of reading, compared to a novel, astonomical.

I could buy a paperback for 1.25; the price of five comics. I could read the five comics in an hour. The book would take 5-10 hours to read. Used prices for these things scaled similarly. My desire to escape the here and now of adolescence coupled with my financial means drove me away from comics. That, and an experience in middle school which makes me shiver to the present day.

It was the first day of sixth grade, first day of a new school. Our math teacher, a disturbingly pretty and well-built young woman, set aside half of the first day of class for us to ‘get to know’ each other. I was paired with a cute woman of my age, whom I was told to tell something about myself. What I liked to do. What I enjoyed. I was tremulously excited by the whole thing. An ice-breaker! With an actual girl! Hormones had begun to drive me mad at that point. I thought a lot about girls.

I said I liked comic books.

“Comic books??” She made a face as if she had smelled something very bad. I knew instantly I had made a terrible mistake.

“Yeah,” I said. “Comic books.”

So began the most miserable three years of my existence.

I’ve since made friends who were more resourceful that I was, living near bigger cities, who got farther with their collections, who attended conventions, who aquired encylopedic knowlege of the writers, artists, inkers and colorists, who made these books. My comic collecting, and reading was half-assed. (Like a lof of what I do.)

But now…now it is possible to find on-line, in peer to peer shared filess, the entire continuitys of these characters…for free. I bought the first 40 years of the Fantastic four for 40 dollars. The other titles are dribbling into my hard drive as we speak as CBR archives. The final piece of the puzzle is the ipad, whose glowing color screen and perfect touch screen interface makes reading these archives almost as good as fondling the fragile paper products themselves.

Now I can read the whole damn story. Every last bit of it.

The problem is, a lot of this stuff is pretty terrible, dull, repititive, stilted, juvenile. Still, somehow, there is a feeling of accomplishment. The kid who couldn’t afford these things, who could never get enough of them, who gave them up more out of practicality than desire, can now find…closure.

My son, 13, reads Manga. My 11 year old reads other things (though the complete mad spy vs spy entranced him worlessly for a hundred hours)

And I am finishing the collection I began at ten years old, remembering some of what I read, while some of it is new, enjoying the clothes, hairstyles, pop culture references more than the endless punch outs and shattered buildings. Nixon! Hippies! Women’s Lib!

I have no real desire to read beyond my era; I want to read the comics from my birth to about my 15th birthday… the slick, full-colored things that the comics grew into…I don’t know if I’ll be interested in that. And in some wierd way it feels like something is completed as I do it, some forgotten thing found, some missing piece falling into place.

And maybe somehow it helps me figure out what I do next.

PS: This is one of a series of notes I wrote a few years ago before I started writing fiction again; I’d forgotten about them until a new FB friend found and ‘liked’ one. I’d given up on blogging under my own name at that point, as I’d noticed that I got almost no hits on the blog, but my FB stuff was ‘liked’ and commented on by many. So, for the record, the boys are now 15 and 13 and we’re watching stuff from the 60s 70s and 80s that I remember, in and around the new stuff. The project continues, but I can see its end now, in a few years, as my teens become young adults, and I leave my second, and perhaps final, childhood behind.

The 7500 Word Week

January 20, 2014 by admin Leave a comment

So I’ve made my word goals the last three weeks, and find myself falling into a new pattern; writing sessions are longer and more immersive; the hangover, of being in that place, in that world, are longer, too. Editing is a task done to relax; it’s easier than new words and it is like doing the laundry or cleaning or cooking; something that must be done so you take as much joy in the doing of it as you can.

I like having a few days of words in the bank, being a bit ahead; it makes me feel less panicked, that I’ll fall behind and give up.

7500 words is a long shot story per week; which makes my current goal akin to the Kris Rusches 90’s era “dare to be bad” challenge. If you’ll check that link, you’ll see the phrase is properly attributed to Nina Kiriki Hoffman, though Kris and Dean Smith popularized the concept.

Dean explains it better than I will:

The base of the phrase for me is this: It takes a lot more courage to write and mail something than it does to not write, or write and not mail. And by putting out your work to editors, and/or readers, you are risking the chance that readers and editors might not like it, that it might be bad. So you are daring to be bad.

Where I have used this phrase over the years is to try to help writers who are stuck in rewriting whirlpools, never thinking anything was good enough to mail, so thus never making any real progress toward selling their work. At some point, if you write first draft or ten drafts, you have to take a chance and mail your work if you want readers to read it. At that point you must “Dare to be Bad.”

Of course, there are no real repercussions of mailing a story that fails. No editor reads anything that doesn’t work and no editor will remember your name if your story doesn’t work. Most of us (editors) have trouble remembering the names of the authors and the stories we have bought over the years, let alone the stories we glanced at and form rejected.

And there are no real risks in putting a story up on Amazon and Pubit and Smashwords yourself. If the story sucks, if your sample is bad, or your cover sucks, or your blurb wouldn’t draw flys, no one will read it or buy it or remember you. No real risk to you. Sure, no sales, but no real risk either.

But alas, new writers (and I was no exception) are all afraid of mailing our work to editors or putting it out for readers to read. New writers think that some editor with an empty desk like we see in the movies will pull up the manuscript, read every word, realize it sucks, and then put the new writer’s name on a blacklist and send thugs with guns to the new writer’s house to kill their cats. Or worse.

The reality is that no one notices, which I suppose for some people is worse. But there are no real risks.

– See more at: http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=2494#sthash.Scl36HYG.dpuf

Dean is concerned about people endlessly rewriting and not submitting, which is a problem I got over somewhere down the line. Though Bog knows, it took me a decade.

1500 new words a day is the equivalent of making up a 7 or 8 minute kids bedtime story every night from scratch. Put this way, it sounds easy-peasy.

This also works out to writing Moby Dick every five months, with a few weeks editing time thrown in for good measure. Obviously, this is impossible.

I sit between those two statements now feeling strange; it’s pretty easy; it’s impossibly hard.

At any rate, it’s time to turn on Self Control, the app I use to block social media, mail and blogging, and make new words.

Wish me luck.

Google Glass piece sells to Asimov’s…

January 17, 2014 by admin 1 Comment

This is me all glassy-eyed. See what I did there?

Ms. Williams confirmed with me today that my piece on Google Glass and wearable computing will be appearing in a future issue of Asimovs. So I am doing the happy dance. Chock full of genre-reference goodness, the piece gives the reader a sense of the Glass experience, at least, how it felt here within the tech friendly radius of MIT.I’m overjoyed to start the new year with another sale to this magazine; appearing in its pages has been a dream come true. I’m going to have to stop gushing over this eventually, my continuous howls of deranged glee are probably not exactly… professional. Eh. So be it.

New Year’s Revolution

January 14, 2014 by admin Leave a comment

che-bart-simpson1 I liked the sound that of that title. Not sure what it means exactly, but I like it. I see Dick Clark in a Che t-shirt. I guess it’s an android Dick Clark. Or maybe it’s the guy above there.

I’ve got four stories out at the moment and another four in the works; I continue to revisit old stories, sometimes throwing them out and starting them over, sometimes editing and rewriting them so extensively they become new. Again, I’ve lived with a lot these things in the back of my mind for a long damn time. As the stories sell there’s a sense of liberation, release, and a sense of urgency, to come up with new things.

My goal is to produce 1500 new words a day, five days a week. I’ll also edit and revise and submit and research, but the 1500 is not negotiable; if I miss my totals I make it up on the weekend. If I go over I can save the words up, too, or buy a day off.

So far so good.

I’m exploring writing in other genre’s under various pen names. Science Fiction, fantasy, genre, whatever you want to call it feels like home to me, but I’ve read extensively in other genres too, so, why not give them a try? Maybe I learn something. Maybe I bring that back to the SF.

The 1500 a day feels like a good number; that’s 2-3 hours on a good day, 4-5 on a bad day. It’s a bit less than the 1600 or so a day of nano-wrimo, the short-novel-in-a-month thing, but I’m taking weekends off; it’s 50% more than Carolyne See’s 1000 word a day goal as detailed in her Making a Literary Life. (Oh, and I’ve given up on her charming notes, short notes written to connect with working writers whose work you admire, for the time being. I’ve made a few contacts but five notes a week seems excessive.)

Writing faster I find that the editing process is longer and more involved. No big surprise. But it all feels doable at the moment.

Non-writers are confused by word counts; they think in pages, though the e-reader is screwing that up, with variable font size. So how long is 1000 words? One way to measure the length of a text is by having your computer read it to you out loud; (it’s also a good way to copy-edit a text.) A recently completed 11,000 word novelette of mine clocks in at seventy four minutes when read out loud by Mac OS. So a 1000 words works out as 6.8 minutes.

At this rate it takes ten weeks to complete a first draft of a short novel. (9.7 to write The Catcher in the Rye, at 73,000 words; It would take 28 weeks to complete Moby Dick at 203k words (writing it, not reading it.) So the industrious soul should be able to crank out two Moby Dick’s per year by working, say, six days a week.

On the one hand it seems like not very much work at all; telling a seven minute hunk of a story per day; on the other hand, writing two Moby Dick’s per year seems absolute ludicrous. Chances are most of the writers you read do not produce final product at anything like this rate.

But some people do.

I’m going to try to be one for awhile.

Wish me luck.

(This was 560 words, and it in no way counts towards my daily goal. So off I go!)

Is Resistance Futile? or How I learned to stop worrying and love Google Glass

December 27, 2013 by admin Leave a comment

I’ve finished the first draft of my Google Glass piece for Asimov’s, twenty two hundred words, just a teaser, really, just a taste. It’s been a strange week, working with these things. Becoming Jaycutus of the Borg. Will I buy a production model of these things, when they go on sale in six months or so?