by Cassie Alexander | May 30, 2013 | Uncategorized
I finally have a scanner now! Which means I can show you this graphic that Jay Lake drew for me on a napkin at a restaurant something like five years ago, and that I’ve kept on my corkboard ever since. This, my friends, is Jay Lake’s tub.
I was reading a post on another forum about someone who felt down in their writing career right now, and goddamn, do I know what that feels like. Five years ago, before I’d even written Nightshifted, but after nine other books and hundreds of short stories and huuuundddreeeds of rejections, I was feeling down and out too. I’d gotten a few short stories sold, but no novels, and I wasn’t selling reliably. But I had the good luck to be out with Jay and he took out a pen and drew this tub for me.
The tub’s the tub, the dashed line across it is the Line of Publication, and the faucet is you — or, me. The faucet’s the only thing you really have control over, how many words you pour into the tub. When you’re just starting out filling up your tub, the publication line is sooo far up, there’s no way you can hit it for awhile. You just have to keep writing.
Once you get a little good, sometimes waves will crest the line — but just as often (or more often!) they won’t. And this is the Most Depressing Time as an author, for some inexplicable reason. There’s something about finally getting one or two acceptances that makes it feel like you’ve made it — like you’ve sprinted across some line, never to return to the other side. But unfortunately a writing career isn’t like that. You cross the line once, and then sometimes it’s silence and rejection for years. This is when you break down, because before that sale, you were simply just Not Good Enough. It sucked, but at least it made sense. Once you’ve made a sale or two and then can’t seem to replicate it again no matter how hard you try — that’s when you start to doubt your sanity. What metric should you be judging yourself by? You’re the same writer who made those sales, aren’t you? Do you suddenly suck now? Were those editors being nice? Was it luck? Are you a flash in the pan? Is your career over already?!!?!?
Of course you want to decode your situation, to try to understand it — when really there’s nothing to understand. Your water line just isn’t high enough yet. But when you’re splashing around in the depths of the tub, sometimes that’s hard to see.
Everyone’s tub is different (and yeah, being self-aware and growing as a writer is important, but that would be/will be a whole other series of posts) but in general, if you pour enough water in, things eventually work out.
Keep pouring, people :D (and I’m super happy to get to share this with y’all after all this time!)
(Tacked on journal progress note ;): 10% done with the 2nd draft for Bloodshifted, and OMG Shapeshifted is out in six days!!!)
by Cassie Alexander | May 24, 2013 | Uncategorized
It’s the XXX part that’s going to get me all the spambots shortly ;).
Bloodshifted is done! This is the fastest I’ve ever written a first draft I think — four months? But there were some serious diversions into other projects there for a bit, which really dipped into writing time. This is also the fewest drafts I’ve ever done of anything ever in my life ever. Usually my books get up to 7-15 revs, which I retitle the word.doc after each major change, but this time there’s only 2. That’s right, just twooooo versions.
How on earth did I do that? Well, I let go of a lot more stuff this time around. I felt much more free to put my place-holder XXX in where ever I knew I’d need to go back and choose a character’s name, fix geography, flesh out a scene, or indeed even put a scene in, there’s a ton of “xxx emotional beat” placeholders in the current text.
There’s 224 of XXX’s to be replaced, in fact. Which is why I’m pretty confident that going into the second draft, and rev 3, will add 15k of text to the book, no problem. And I’m fine with that :D. What counts is that the bones are down right now and the plot flows — the action parts are so actiony, and the emotional stuff is super emotional — I almost wish I could keep rolling on and write the next book!
But I’ve got a long weekend at work coming up (complete with holiday pay, yo) so I’ll be taking a short break, and then restarting in from the beginning, now knowing everything I need to juggle for the end. I was melancholy about finishing this whole evening, but now I’m really excited about going back and starting in again :D.
And oh, yeah, Shapeshifted is coming out less than two weeks from now! *facepalm* I almost forgot, ha! Deep calming breaths, Cassie, it’ll all get done! ;)
by Cassie Alexander | May 15, 2013 | Uncategorized
By now, those of you who are Gordon Ramsey fans like myself have seen the Kitchen Nightmares with the frankly insane woman on it, causing GR, a man known for being willing to throw down, to simply give up and walk away.
Her utter inability to admit that something’s wrong when presented with an internet’s worth of evidence made it the most compelling Kitchen Nightmare in years — no amount of hidden mold in a not-so-cold freezer can compete with epic trainwreck.
As awful as she was though (and as cathartic as it was to see Gordon realize what was going on, try to break through, and then finally give up), I do have some small amount of sympathy for her. Because to be successful as a writer you do have to know where the line of denial is and then step widely over it.
When you start out so many people aren’t going to believe in you, it’s not funny. Your spouse, your teachers, your relatives — hell, you won’t even believe in you (if you’re me). The only thing that’ll get you through the doldrums of disbelief is one hell of a crazy case of self-denial.
Not surprisingly, seeing as writers lie for money, we lie to ourselves all the damn time. You start off pretending a project doesn’t mean that much to you, or that you’re writing it to learn, or that you’re writing it for art, or that you need to do something during your lunch break. You tell yourself that your book is genius, that you’re a genius, that if not this book, then the next one. You send stories or novels out and start getting in rejections, and that’s the icing on the lie-cake — maybe my protagonist looked like that editor’s ex-wife, maybe I formatted it wrong, maybe space opera isn’t in (again) this year.
Because on some level the self-denial does protect you, and you need it to survive. You may know you need to get better, and can see yourself getting better, but if you don’t give your self-esteem a space place to grow and experiment, you’ll never achieve better. I know a lot of writers who know what level they feel they ought to be writing to, and because they’re not there yet, they harangue themselves endlessly and don’t accomplish very much. They haven’t learned to lie to protect themselves yet.
At the center of each successful artistic career there has to be a seed-sprout of outrageous sheer belief in who you are and what you’re working on right now.
The secret is to use the moments of willful self-denial to benefit and shield that outrageousness — because honestly, thinking that anyone is ever going to give two fucks about any artistic endeavor in this day and age is, just like JEM, truly outrageous.
But you have to be in control of the self-denial, and know that you’re in control of it, in some deep down way — and not to use the lies to become someone with an inflexible worldview with an “us vs them” mentality.
I feel bad for that lady even though she’s clearly awful, because maybe (as I write here from my penthouse office in Projection Central) she had to tell herself some things to get by in the early days starting out as a baker-artist. But she never had nor gained the introspection to realize that there’s a vast gulf between the lies we tell ourselves to get by and the lies we ought to expect other people to believe, which is a pity because those cakes looked pretty damn good.
by Cassie Alexander | May 8, 2013 | Uncategorized
It’s been a bit since I’ve done one of these, but I’ve been, as always, busy. (This is an extra special one since I’ve already taken ambien, it might devolve into a fist fight at the end, stay tuned.)
However, my friend Ferrett Steinmetz shouted me out on his blog (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer.) for this series because he was ruminating on how you had to structure your life to make a solid amount — a replicable amount of art — happen on the regular, which is something I do. You can click on the “How to write a book in six months” to see more of them, and if you’ve got something you want me to talk about, feel free to email me to request it. I was thinking about this post while my hair-color was setting yesterday, and while I was writing on break at work last night — and then I read this article this morning that made me want to froth. “I didn’t think art could make me rich but I thought it mighy pay some very cheap rent, nope”
Did that girl ever think about her future? There is so little money in publishing. So so little. Even less in poetry. Dreaming big is great, but every artist eventually hits a wall where they realize, “Shit, it’s go time.” And either they lack the passion or the drive or the access to drugs or no longer have good health to keep doing what they’re doing and they fade away with fond memories of that one time they were in a band or have that one magazine that accepted that one story on their bookshelf along with a hundred other strangers.
I really do believe in the ten thousand hours of practice to get good at anything. And I believe in the million words of crap theory too — I know I wasn’t publishable until I’d hurdled them. And it wasn’t so much that all of that old stuff was bad, it was that I wasn’t self aware enough in my craft to make it good enough to sell. The layers of skill you need to make a successful go of your art are like an onion crossed with a maze. (Let’s blame that shitty metaphor on the ambien, shall we?) Getting good, getting realized as good, getting paid as good — each of those stages take So Much Time. Time that doesn’t happen before you’re twenty-five, unless you’ve got a wish-giving pony.
Anyhow, juggling my normal part-time ICU work, a book deadline coming up, trying to scrounge some free time for two one off projects, and a massive move that’s flying down the train tracks at mach speed, here’s the latest ways I’m keeping myself writing lean-times.
I love pandora — but when I find songs I like on there, I just buy them, so that I can play them without the temptation of thumbsing up or down songs. It sounds silly, but that 30 seconds of distraction a few times an hour adds up, if you’re me.
I only answer emails once a day, twice at most. Mostly because I’m on mailing lists and I don’t really care what people have to say unless the subject title is within my interests. Getting to delete threads whole — or skimming their entirety if the right wise people have chimed in — is far easier to deal with then deleting or reading peace meal.
I switched to a new little laptop and now I no longer have book marks, nor do I keep any. If — and it has to be a big if, like, so amazing, I will love it for forever — any websites blow me away, I email them to myself with the title of the thing, and then immediately market it read when it comes through. So I know I’ve got it, should I ever need to google search it up.
But I don’t have any feeds, RSS, or any bookmarks at all anymore. And I delete all my cookies all the time. So that if I don’t actually remember that a particular website was cool — whose url I would then have to physically type in — I just don’t go there anymore.
This cuts down on nominal sites that are half cool, because really, why bother, you’re just wasting time you could be writing. If I can’t care enough to type it in — and if I don’t remember it when I’m looking for things to do on the internet while bored — it’s gone. And that’s a good thing. I can’t remember where I used to waste so much of my time online back in the day.
Hope those help some of you get a few more pieces out of your day to write in! (And hooray, this wasn’t that ambieny after all….yet ;))
by Cassie Alexander | Apr 7, 2013 | Uncategorized
It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, but I’m up this morning, and this one is particularly appropriate, seeing as I just turned in edits recently.
I read other people’s stuff on occasion (usually within the context of workshops) and am on a lot of mailing lists and message boards that I dip in and out of as time allows. One of the things that I see a lot and try to call people on is the tendency to save things for later.
The reason I call people on this is because I know exactly how this works. You get a great idea, something that’s really going to blow people’s minds, and you want to sit on it, sometimes for your entire book, and tease people about it along the way.
Most of the time, you shouldn’t — because that’s not how tension works in real life.
You can do the slow-dread thing in movies, because you get the opportunity to show viewers things that happen off screen for the characters in the film. But when you’re writing, readers gain tension from the consequences of things that have already been revealed, since the book only spools out in one direction, you know?
Which isn’t to say that you can’t have surprises, surprises are great! But you can’t withhold a certain level of knowledge without consequences.
I talked about this really briefly once before in the context of a movie review, so let’s go back to that, since that’s safe — there was a part in the film Priest (the not very good yet very pretty vampire western apocalypse film from a few years ago) where it’s revealed that the girl the protagonist is looking for is REALLY HIS DAUGHTER, not his niece, as he’d been previously led to believe.
The filmmakers threw that in because hells yes, family tension, more resonance for his actions, etc etc. But they didn’t reveal it until about 5 minutes before he has the showdown with the bad guys and actually finds her.
If they’d shown us that upfront, how much more meaningful would it have been, and for longer, too? Especially since the implication in the movie was that ‘priests’ were supposed to be celibate, etc etc — he could have been tormented by the knowledge of a child that he left behind, that he’d cuckolded his brother-in-law, that he wasn’t involved in her life, but he (maybe) knows that she’s been better off without him, until she’s kidnapped — when he gets the gut punch of knowing that her being abducted is because the monsters want to personally hurt him? That despite all of his efforts to keep her safely away from Him and His Past, he’s still responsible for her getting hurt?
How much more meaningful is all of that? Layers upon layeeeeersssss more meaningful than what actually happened with the plot as it was shown in the movie.
The consequences of the Cool Thing are what matter, not the revelation of the Cool Thing itself, nine times out of ten, which is why you should put your Cool Thing immediately on the page.
Not doing that is what I see a lot and it frustrates me. What sucks even more is, *drumroll*, when I do it my dang self :P.
My own reason for doing it in Deadshifted was that as I was writing, i didn’t actually know the Cool Thing until I got around to writing it, oh, somewhere near 50k. I just knew that before then I needed reasons for the tension to escalate, and so I created them (because my subconscious knew how the story needed to work, even if I didn’t have great reasons for it yet) — but I wasn’t smart enough to go and backfill my Cool Thing in until my editor pointed it out in her edit letter. And then I was all, “Khhhhhhhaaaaannnnnnnnnnn!” at myself.
Luckily, my editor is wise, and the second I realized I’d done it, I was willing to go in and gut things to make them better.
I’m gonna close this post with a quote from Annie Dillard — I haven’t read the book it came from, The Writing Life, but I’ve had this quote in my notes file for almost ten years, and it so applies —
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.”
Night all! (Or good morning, depending on what it is for you ;))
