Friday, May 30, 2025
Writing Requires Discipline— Or at least a solid excuse
Well in today’s world, the paper is most likely a blinking cursor in an empty text file, but the sentiment is the same.
So, how do I deal with this?
Easy.
Like any good writer, I procrastinate.
You see, I’ve been so tied up trying to figure out ways to market my first book, Tears of the Phoenix: Prophecies that I have told myself I didn’t have time to write. But that needed to change.
You see I usually get a majority of my writing done in the summer months, and if I want to even try to get the sequel to “Tears” out anytime soon, I’d better stop procrastinating and get to work.
Since I had the week following Memorial Day off, I figured it would be a perfect time to kick-off my summer writing season. I planned to spend every afternoon writing.
But as poet and fellow writer Robert Burns so eloquently put it, “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
It’s not like people and events were conspiring to keep me away from the keyboard or the pad and paper I often use to write my first-drafts. It’s just that I kept finding excuses and other things I needed to do first:
I needed to create an author’s website. (I did and you can find it here)
I needed to setup an account on Instagram to start promoting my book there. (I did that too and you can follow it
here)
I need to create an AI-prompt to come up with a social-media marketing plan for me, so I know what to post on those sites. Then after that, I needed to create the posts and videos it suggested. (I’m still trying to figure out how to get either ChatGPT and/or Google Gemini to actually generate the complete post including pictures and hashtags then schedule them to go up automatically, but that’s a topic for another blog).
And let’s not forget about taking my daily walk and doing the chores I’ve been putting off for months as well.
Well toward the end of the week, I started to run out of excuses and did actually sit down and began working on my sequel novel again.
But it really was slow going. I spent the better part of three afternoons staring at my first draft and maybe only getting out 1,000 words. And most of that was a re-write of what I had already written.
But at least this new section is beginning to point me in a new direction and connect what until now had been a few scattered scenes into the beginnings of a coherent story.
I know that like anything else, writing is a habit as much as a skill, and the more I do it, the easier it will become. And I’m hoping that by the end of the summer I will at least have half the story done, because it’s really hard to write when all that blood gets in your eyes.
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Starting a new chapter, literally
You’d think that after spending over a decade trying to finish one novel, I’d be anxious to get it edited and published.
And you wouldn’t be wrong.
I am.
It’s just that now that’s its done, I’ve become more intrigued with the idea of finding out what happed to my characters after the story ended then revisiting events I’ve already written about.
When I grew up, most sequels to stories I loved always seemed to begin with the characters “reset” back to a state near to where we first met them. What they’d been through didn’t seem to change them much at all, so they were ready and willing to take on the next great threat or go out on a new set of adventures.
This was especially true of genre TV shows of the time -- “Star Trek,” the original “Battlestar Galactica” and classic “Doctor Who” as well as films featuring characters like Indiana Jones, James Bond or any comic book character.
Sure, sometimes the writers would pay lip service to the things characters went through in previous stories, but more often than not, it was only used as a plot device to propel the characters into the new story, then all but forgotten.
The problem is things don’t work that way in real life. People just don’t “move on” or reset themselves after experiencing life-threatening events. Just ask any military veteran or first-responder who’ve been through a harrowing event.
It changes them, whether they’ll admit it or not, and while my characters may not be real people to you, they are to me. I figured they’d be suffering some sort of PTSD, and what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t help them through it? So, for the last three months, I’ve been taking them to therapy, helping them explore what they must be feeling and trying to help them figure out how to live with what they’ve gone through.
I have no idea where this is going. I just have a couple of vague ideas banging around in my head, and a handful of characters I really enjoy spending time with. Like my first story, I’m just feeling my way through this, with no set plot in mind. I figure I’ll just keep writing and rewriting scenes until hopefully a coherent story emerges.
And if I get stuck -- which I know I inevitably will -- I can always go back to edit the first story until new inspiration hits.
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Never Can Say Goodbye
While the start of a novel of a thousand pages begins with the typing of a single word, it often ends with both a bang and a whimper.
The bang, of course, comes from both the climax of a hopefully exciting plot/character arch and the elation of finally finishing a long-awaited masterpiece, while the whimper comes from having to let go of a work you’ve poured so much time and effort into.
I discovered this odd dichotomy earlier this month when I finally finished writing a story I’ve been working on for almost 40 years. It’s taken many forms over the past four decades and while the plot and setting have changed many times, the main characters have mostly remained the same.
They’ve been with me for so long that they feel like real, flesh-and-blood people who have seen me though all the major changes in my life. They were my constant companions, with me day and night, whispering their secrets into my ears and keeping mine. And now that their story has concluded – at least for now – I feel like I’m leaving them behind.
Only I don’t want them to go.
I know. There is still the long and arduous editing process where I’ll need to do some rewrites to trim the bloat, streamline the plot and fix any continuity errors caused by writing the story out of sequence over such a long period of time. And then there are the enviable sequels that are already swirling around in my head. But it’s still kind of strange and sad knowing I’ve finished with them and their main story for now.
At the moment, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to spend my future summer vacations. I used to spend them in the pool, in my floaty-chair, pad of paper and pencil in hand scribbling away to finish this story. It was my way of removing myself from any distractions or temptation to do something else and let me concentrate on just writing. Every year, I’d tell myself, “This is the summer I’m going to finish it!” and inevitably I’d struggle to overcome writer’s block or my imaginary friends would stop whispering in my ears and my progress would slow to a crawl.
That seemed to change last year with the pandemic. Suddenly, they couldn’t shut up and I spent both this and last summer just trying to keep up with them. Not everything they told me turned out to be true, because I needed to rewrite some sections two or three times before they told me I’d gotten it write… er… I mean right. But at least they were filling in the remaining holes in their story. I guess they’d gotten tired of being locked down too.
So again, I spent every hour I could this summer either in my pool or on a hammock swing in my backyard away from all distractions, dutifully recording what my imaginary friends were telling me before they stopped talking again. Then, before I knew, it I was done.
At first, I couldn’t believe it. Part me of never thought I’d actually finish. I was ecstatic!
Then came the letdown, depression and listlessness. For a week or two after that, I didn’t have the motivation to type those last hand-written sections into the computer to complete the initial draft or do anything even remotely creative.
Fortunately, the feeling has faded and last weekend I began typing in those final sections, so that by the end of Labor Day weekend, I’m pretty sure I’ll have that initial draft assembled and truly know if that single word did indeed begin a journey of a thousand pages.
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Poolside writer’s retreat not such a pipe dream after all
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| In my fantasy, I'd be able to spend a year at a place like this finishing my novel. |
Summer is drawing to a close here in the Northeastern United States and while I confess to feeling sad about it, I have to admit it has been an unusually productive one for me.
With the Covid-19 lockdown limiting my usual summertime social activities, I’ve had more time to focus on my writing than I usually do at this time of year. In fact, I spent practically all my free time these past few months in my favorite pool chair floating around the same 15-foot diameter circle working on my book.
It’s something I always wanted to do, but life’s other obligations always seemed to get in the way. I always thought that if I could just lock myself away from all those distractions, I could finally finish the “Great American Sci-Fi novel” I’ve been trying to write for decades now. And since I don’t like the cold weather, I’ve always fantasized about doing this at some small, secluded, four-room house in the tropics.
I’d tell myself I’d get up each morning and go out to the pool (did I mention this place would have an immaculately maintained pool?) and spend all day there on my floaty-chair scribbling away on my pad. At night, I could relax, have a light meal and maybe watch a little TV, before heading off to sleep. I’d leave editing and transcribing what I wrote into the computer for the few rainy days that I’d certainly have or for days I wasn’t feeling all that creative.
Following this schedule, I figured I could complete my book within a year, easy.
The only problem with this little fantasy of mine – aside from being able to afford it – is I never thought I’d be disciplined enough to actually do that. But this summer surprised me and showed me I could.
I have a ton of different interests and hobbies and during the nice weather, I usually split my time between my woodworking shop, tinkering with various technology and the pool. This year though, I decided to forgo everything and just concentrate on the writing.
Starting in July, the temperature where I live rarely dipped below the 90s making it too hot and often too humid to do much of anything other than spend the day in the pool. So between the 20 or so vacation days I had in July and August and the evenings I spent in the pool after work, I managed to close a pretty significant gap in the middle of my novel. I also put a major dent into closing another gap near the end. If the weather holds, I think I can close that gap too by the end of Labor Day weekend.
Unfortunately, on read-back, I discovered some other smaller gaps in my story I thought I’d already filled, so maybe I only need six months at my pool-side hideaway now….
You’d think that after spending all that time in the pool this year, I’d should have finished my story. But the process wasn’t always easy. Somedays the I’d get into the pool by 11 a.m. and wouldn’t stop writing until it started to get dark at 7:30 p.m. Other days, I’d struggle. I’d spend all of the morning and half the afternoon just staring at a blank page or at the lines that I wrote the previous day, trying to pick up the thread of where I left off. Eventually, I’d manage to get started again and by the time I got out of the pool for diner, I’d at least have three-hand written pages completed.
Not that they were always good….
The next day, I’d re-read what I wrote, decide it was no good, rip it up and re-write at least half of it. But at least I was making progress and fulfilling my vow to write something every day.
Now with summer coming to an end, I fear my progress on my book will slow back down to a crawl.
Sitting at my desk in my office just seems to offer too many distractions:
• My dog coming over to me wanting attention, or to be let outside or begging me for a walk.
• Mrs. BlueScream popping in to talk to me or to ask for my help with something (usually tech-related).
• And most of all my computer itself.
While an invaluable tool for writing, my computer is probably the biggest source of distraction. In the middle of writing something, I’ll pop over into my browser to look something up, like the meaning of a word, a synonym or even to fact-check some event, and then get sucked down the wormhole of related links until suddenly half the afternoon is gone.
Ah, the Dark side. It is strong….
Floating in the pool with just my paper and mechanical pencil in hand, I’m free of such distractions. The dog is happily outside with me and while I’m sure he’d prefer me to be paying attention to him, he’s happy lying on the patio or in one of the zillion foxholes he has dug in our backyard watching me.
Mrs. BlueScream will either be inside doing something or floating beside reading or working on her own writing (which by the way you can check out here and the only tech gear in sight is my iPod blasting my eclectic mix of music from across the yard. (It’s across the yard because iPods do NOT like to go swimming, and NO, I won’t tell you how I know that….)
Oh well. I guess there is always next year, when – this time for sure – I’ll be able to finish the story and have it ready for final editing.
That is unless I can convince Mrs. BlueScream to forgo her retirement and fund my little writer’s getaway. But I think that’s a fantasy for another time!
Friday, July 31, 2020
Learning to think like the villain
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| Every villain thinks they are the hero of the story and "Farscape's" Scorpius (left) and the MCU's Thanos are no different. |
A while back a friend and I had a very long conversation about writing and during that three-hour discussion we dissected the flaws in several recent sci-fi/fantasy movies and TV shows we’ve seen.
Being the witty, insightful and supremely intelligent literary critic I am, I declared that the problem with them was that the writers were either so focused on “The Hero’s Journey” or creating a visual spectacle that they gave short-shrift to the villains.
“Every villain thinks they are the hero of the story,” I opined “and writers seem to be forgetting this.”
Even the most successful and popular movie franchise of the last decade, Marvel Comic’s cinematic universe – or the MCU for short– falls victim to this.
Yes, the heroes in all these Marvel films are relatable, the stories are engaging and fun and they are filled with all the visual spectacle you’d want in a movie based on a comic book. But, with the exception of perhaps “Infinity War” and “Endgame,” the villains are kind of bland and don’t really seem worthy of the heroes’ attentions. They are generic bad-guys, whose actions hang on some hastily explained reason for hating the good guys. Worse yet, if you really start to examine the bad-guys schemes to get revenge on the heroes, they often don’t make sense.
Not all movies need fully fleshed out or sympathetic villains, I pontificated. But those stories that do have them are much more interesting because, not only do the bad guys test the hero’s mettle, they also challenge the hero’s ideas of right and wrong.
Look, it’s easy to mow down NAZI stand-ins with no thought as to whether it’s the right thing to do or if they deserve it. After all, they are space NAZI’s, and we know NAZIs are evil! So, go ahead, hack away with glee! Empty all your weapon’s clips into them! Hell, even blow up their secret base with no regard for collateral damage, because they deserve everything that’s coming to them!
But when heroes are forced to confront a foe who is doing the wrong thing for what could be seen as a valid reason, it’s harder to justify killing them out-of-hand. Ideally it should make the heroes pause and wonder if they are somehow complicit in the injustice that created their foe.
This is, I declared to my friend, why the “Infinity War” and “Endgame” films were among the best Marvel movies. Yes, Thanos is undoubtedly evil, but his plan to end half of all life in the universe stems from a noble idea. He’s seen how overpopulation will destroy the universe and wants to stop it in a manner that he thinks would be “random, dispassionate, fair to rich and poor alike.”This is a pretty high-minded goal for a villain. Usually they just want to take over the universe with little thought about the lives of the people in it. But Thanos seems to genuinely care about the people in it – or at least half of them anyway – so even through his plan is tragically flawed, the audience understands that he’s trying to save the universe just as much as the heroes are.
A similar thing was true with another of my favorite sci-fi villains: Scorpius from the TV show, “Farscape.” In his first few episodes he’s depicted as psychopath, dressed like some S&M fetishist, and evil with a capital “Muhahaha!” Then, as the show goes on, we are shown why he’s chasing and tormenting the good guy and his companions. He’s just trying to protect the universe from a race of lizard people who are even worse than he is. By the end of the series, not only does the audience actually start to root for him, but our hero actually starts to understand and appreciate his goals – if not his methods.
Well, needless to say, I was felling pretty superior and proud of myself for making all these profound insights until I heard my friend get extremely quiet on the other end of the phone.
Then very gently, and with a very, large sharp needle, he let the hot air out of my ego.
“You’re kinda falling into the same trap with your book,” he reminded me.
Okay, so he didn’t use those exact words, but he might as well have. He’s been reading my book as I write it, making helpful comments and encouraging me to keep going, and reminded me of a comment he made a while back: “We never really see what’s going on with the [bad guys]. You do mention why they’re fighting, but we never get to see things from their point of view.”
Like the Empire and their Stormtroopers in “Star Wars,” my bad guys were just another band of space NAZIs. They were only there to be cannon fodder for the heroes and present some obstacles for them to overcome while the pursued the book’s title Mcguffin.
He was absolutely, 100 percent right!
I was guilty of doing the exact thing I was complaining about.
How’s that for being a hypercritical gas bag?
Well, since I despise hypocrisy, I vowed to correct this obvious flaw and set about trying to add extra dimensions to my villains. I made a dozen half-hearted attempts at it, but nothing clicked. The things I came up with just seemed like more clichés, and didn’t really show why my bad guys thought they were the heroes of the story.
This had me stumped for a long time. I just couldn’t seem to figure out how to think like the villain.
Then, last month, the answer came to me as I started exploring my feelings of standing apart from my friends and family, feeling like the alien outsider.
All I really needed to do was try to see things from villain’s perspective without any baggage or bias from my pre-existing views. So, I just started with the idea that they had a deeply-ingrained distrust of the good guys and filtered all the events in the story though that lens. It didn’t matter whether that distrust was legitimate or not or whether their reasons were flawed or not. All I needed to do was to show them reacting to events based on those fears in predictable or emotional ways that anyone could understand.
Will this add more depth to my villains and make them more compelling?
I hope so.
But even it doesn’t, I think the whole exercise of getting into the head of a person whose views you don’t understand or agree with was worth it. Learning to see the world (or universe) through someone else’s eyes without vilifying them or their motivations, can only promote better understanding between different groups and increase one’s capacity for compassion and empathy for others.
And if there is something that is desperately needed in the real world today, it’s a lot more compassion, empathy and the ability to see someone else’s point of view.
Sunday, January 26, 2020
Heee'ssss Ba-ack!
Okay, I know. I’ve been away longer than I said, and while I did not accomplish all the things I wanted to during my extended hiatus from this blog, I didn’t abandon writing entirely during that time.
Quite the contrary.
You see when I took a break last February, it was with the intention of devoting the time I usually spent working on this column to finally finishing the first draft of my “Great American Sci-Fi Epic” which at the time was about 80 percent complete. And for a while, it looked like I just might be able to do it.
But as fellow author John Steinbeck noted way back in 1937, the best-laid plans “Of Mice and Men” often go awry. For after I began my break from this blog, a friend and fellow writer F.P.Spirit hijacked my time, cleverly luring me away from my own efforts to work on a project of his own: an anthology called “Tales from Thac”
And when I say cleverly lured me, I mean it. He asked me really, really, nicely. And how can you say no to puppy-dog eyes like these?
Anyway, he wanted me to expand on a “short” piece I’d written as a gag several years ago for another friend as part of a semi-regular Dungeons and Dragons game we were involved in. The piece was an exercise to see how many swashbuckler clichés and stolen movie lines I could squeeze into what I though would be a five-page background story for my character. But because I subscribe to the George R.R. Martin school of story-telling, that document wound up being about 10 times longer than that.
F.P. hadn’t seen it until last year after the game had ended, and he really liked it. He kept telling me it would be great for an anthology he was planning and kept asking me – the little devil – if I would consider “cleaning it up a little” and giving it a better ending so he could include it.
Well a guy can only take so much flattery so I decided to give in, before my head could no longer fit through the doorway. Thus went a few months while I worked with him and his editor to massage the piece to better fit into his Heroes of Ravenford series, which if you haven’t checked out, you really should.
The process took a great deal longer than I thought, as I had to rework a number of scenes which were blatant rip offs of “The Princess Bride,” “Ladyhawke” and half a dozen Errol Flynn movies. I don’t regret the time I spent doing it. For one thing, it actually made the story slightly better forcing me to come up with more original ways to pay homage to those films than just doing an out-right, almost word-for-word parody of them. It also was a good experience learning how to work with an editor (or editors in this case) on a piece of fiction, something I’ll need to know how to do when I finally complete my book. And lastly, I’ll finally have some of my fiction published, which, after all was the whole point of me taking a hiatus. (It just wasn’t the work I thought it would be!)
By the time I’d finished working with FP and his editor, the weather had finally gotten warmer and I needed to turn my attention to finishing the cabinet build I had started documenting in my Adventures in Woodworking series. Later this year, I’ll write up a wrap-up article on that and share a few pictures of the finished (for now, anyway) project.
All this is not to say that I didn’t work on my novel, “Tears of the Phoenix” at all. I did manage to fill in one of the two remaining major gaps in the story. Hopefully by the time this summer ends, I’ll have filled in the other, hole in the story and be ready for the initial round of editing.
In the meantime though, I’m going to try again to resume my regular blog posts. I hope that in forcing myself to turn out an article every month it will discipline me to sit down and write even when I don’t feel like it. Maybe then I can finally finish a story I’ve been trying to tell now for some 40 years. $(document).ready(function() { $('.image-link').magnificPopup({type:'image'}); });
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Goodbye, Mr. Briggs
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| A STACY BRIGGS III: The guardian of meticulous |
the worlds of science, science fiction and fantasy, and whom many fans of the genre – if not the general public – knew.
This time that’s not the case.
Few people will know who A. Stacy Briggs III was, and why should they?
He wasn’t an actor in some genre TV show or movie – though he was quite the character. Nor was he a creator of a comic book, novel, film, or television series beloved by us geeks. He wasn’t even one the many behind-the-scenes talents who help produce one of those things. In fact, as far as I know, other than a love of reading, Stacy Briggs had nothing to do with the worlds of science fiction and fantasy.
So why, then, am I placing him up there with the likes of Ray Bradbury, Leonard Nimoy and Stephen Hawking and devoting my monthly column to him?
Because, as well as being a friend, colleague and sometimes mentor, Stacy Briggs was a true master of his craft: writing.
You see Stace – as those who knew him often called him – devoted his life to newspaper journalism and the telling of stories. He may not have been known by many outside the newsroom, but for the last 50 years, the citizens of Bucks County, Pa benefited from his work at The (Doylestown) Intelligencer and the Bucks County Courier Times.
As a fellow former colleague of ours said at his recent memorial service, “Stacy was the guardian of meticulous.” Nary was there ever a coma out of place in the stories he edited or the pages he proofed. And forget about a grammar or spelling errors. Nothing got past his infamous red pen.
Lord only knows how many times he used it on me and on the stories and pages we produced together. I always tried to produce clean copy, but no matter how many times I went over my own story or read over copy from another reporter, Stace would always find something I missed.
This could be annoying, especially when we were pushing deadline (or past it), but I always appreciated that desire to get everything right. While he would rib me from time-to-time (okay, it was more like constantly) about my less than perfect spelling, it never came from a mean place nor a desire to prove he was better than me or anyone else. He just wanted everything to be correct, and as Mrs. BlueScream often reminds me, Stacy and I did share one common trait. We were/are both CDO (which is similar to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, only the letters are in the correct order – the way they should be).
In fact, one of my fondest memories of working with him came one summer Saturday evening, when we were putting out the Sunday paper. Mrs. BlueScream had given me a new t-shirt for my birthday, on the front of which was the saying: “Is anal retentive hyphenated?”
I had worn the t-shirt just for him, and as soon as he saw me in it, I remember his brow furrowing and him casting me one of his disapproving looks and saying, “That’s NOT funny.”
But Stacy was more than just the newsroom’s grammar Nazi and punctuation police. He cared just as deeply about getting the facts of a story correct as he did about the way a story was told. Like most decent copy editors, Stacy could take the worst piece of writing and polish it until it shone. Yet unlike some other editors, he took time to coach the writers he worked with to produce better copy so he didn’t have to do that.
At his memorial service, person after person told stories of how Stacy influenced them: from the former sports editor who’d occasionally receive marked up copies of his section with Stacy’s comments on how to make the stories better to a reporter who said that when she first started at the paper, he recommended that she use the same “voice” she used in her columns in her news stories to make them more interesting and compelling.
All these stories started me thinking about all the ways Stacy influenced me and my writing. It took a while, but I suddenly realized that my often obsessive desire to find exactly the right words or phrase to get my point across comes from my time working with him. Yes, it often slows me down as I write and rewrite the same few lines struggling to get them just right. Yet I know in the end the time I take to do that is worth it, because it’s improved my writing ten-fold.
So for his contribution to the craft of story-telling and his influence on me to always strive to get it right (or write?), I think A. Stacy Briggs III does belong enthroned among the superstars of sci-fi/fantasy, that I’ve written about in the past. Because anyone so devoted to his craft and to helping other story-tellers deserves some recognition even if he shunned it during his life.
I just hope that he’d approve of this story and find no reason to red pen it.
Friday, September 29, 2017
When one chapter ends, another begins
One of the side effects of being a story-teller is that you’re constantly looking at life as if it was a novel and trying to arrange the things that happen to you into neat little narrative threads as if you were a character in one of your own stories.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t always cooperate. It’s a messy affair, filled with disjointed and often unrelated scenes, unresolved themes and/or plot threads that wind up going nowhere.
But every once in a while, life seems to imitate art -- or is it art imitating life? -- and things happen in such a way that even the most oblivious English Lit major can’t help but see the theme a heavy-handed author is trying to get across to his or her reader.
Well one of those moments happened to me last week. After almost 21 years, I left -- or was kicked-out of (depending on your point of view) – the company I have spent a good portion of my adult life working for.
Losing a job is a dramatic event in and of itself. And being laid off with half of your colleagues because the company you’ve put so much blood, sweat and tears into was sold only heightens the matter.
But that wasn’t solely the cause of my “living inside my own novel” moment.
My last day happened to coincide with the start of the Jewish high holy days.
For those not in the know, the period between Rosh Hashanah -- the Jewish New Year -- and Yom Kippur -- the day of atonement -- is a time of both endings and beginnings where Jews all over the world reflect back on the year that’s been and prepare for the year ahead. So the fact that I was leaving one job and starting another during this period seemed like a “happy” coincidence.
I put happy here in quotes, because leaving a job I’ve had for so long and having to say goodbye to one of the nicest groups of people I have ever worked with was certainly very sad. And like the closing of the old year we mark on Rosh Hashanah eve, it was certainly a very definite ending. It had me reflecting back on all the good – and sometimes not-so-good – times I had there.
To many, that event would mark the end of the story of their working life. For me however, it only marked the end of one (major) chapter of my life. Like turning the page in a book, a new chapter began for me the following Monday morning.
You see, I was lucky enough to get a three-month warning that the layoff was coming and I was even luckier to find what appears to be a better job before I was let go.
While thanking G-d, the ultimate author of all things, it dawned on me this was the perfect metaphor for Yom Kippur, which began the same week I started my new job. Because on Yom Kippur we Jews not only ask G-d to forgive all our sins, but also ask the Almighty to turn the page on our past and begin a new chapter for us in the Book of Life.
I’d like to believe the timing of this event was no accident. That it is a reminder that the “Great Author in the Sky” has a plan for all of us, even if -- like the characters in some of my stories -- we can’t always see where the plot is taking us from our limited perspective.
So to each and every one of you out there and to all my former colleagues who weren’t as lucky as me to immediately find a new job, may G-d inscribe you for nothing but blessings in the Book of Life for another year.
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Summertime and the writing is easy
I don’t know what it is about the summer that makes me feel more creative than any other time of the year.
Maybe it’s the long and mostly sunny days, the nice hot weather, or the fact that life in general just seems to slow down during the warmer months. Or maybe it’s a combination of all three. But whatever the reason, it seems that my most productive time of year writing-wise always seems to happen between June and the end of August.
I’ve never been a big fan of the cold and often find the winter months depressing. I think bears have the right idea and if I could get away with it, I’d sleep right though December, January and February with them.
But I can hardly wait for the first 90 degree day of the year when I can get in my pool, whip out my clipboard and trusty mechanical pencil and start writing.
And yes, I know, I’m a tech-guy and writing long hand with pencil and paper is pretty much as analogue as you can get.
But just try taking your laptop, tablet or even phone in the pool with you. One wrong move, and you’ve got yourself a very expensive paperweight.
If I get my paper wet, as often happens, it dries out within 15 minutes on the side of the pool, and it’s good to go. Besides, the paper and pencil stuff is only temporary. It’s really a first draft that gets edited and changed when I eventually get around to typing it into my computer.
I try to leave that that part for the colder months, when I feel the least creative, even though writing on the computer make it easy to change and move things around as you write.
Usually by the time my summer vacation rolls around, I feel so burnt out from work, that the last thing I want to do is spend my free time behind another screen. I’d rather be outside enjoying the nice weather while it lasts.
Being in the pool with pencil and paper in hand, lets me do that and still feel like I’m getting my writing done.
In fact, a day writing by hand in the pool leaves me with a better sense of accomplishment than a day spent behind the keyboard. I’m a slow writer, often agonizing over the perfect word or phrase to translate the movie in my head to the paper, so the reader will see it exactly the way I envisioned it. At the end of a typical writing session on the computer I only wind up with two sometimes three pages (single-spaced, using 12 point, Times New Roman font), while after a day in the pool I end up with three to six pages. Sometimes I even break double digits!
Now when I actually type this in, it still winds up being my usual two or three pages, but I feel like I’ve done more and that helps keeps me motivated to continue writing.
I also like being outside. The sunlight just seems to stimulate my creative juices more than the lamp light I need in my home office in the afternoons. Plus being able to soak up all that sun and fresh air doesn’t make me think I’ve wasted one of my precious days off.
It’s a real shame we only have three months of hot weather here in the Northeast where I live. I’m sure if I had six-month of it (as well as the corresponding vacation time) I could finally finish that “great
American sci-fi novel” I’ve been working on (and off) since high school.
Of course, Mrs. BlueScreamOfJeff wouldn’t be happy with that kind of climate. She’s more of an autumn person, so as I begin my annual two-week August vacation, I just have to be content with spending the next two weeks in the pool (weather permitting), binge-writing in a big push to finally complete my book.
Who knows, stranger things have happened during summer vacations…
Friday, October 26, 2012
The voices in my head
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Photo illustration by Jeff Price
As my wife is fond of saying, "writer's block is when your invisible friends stop talking to you." |
No matter where I go, they are there.
Whispering their secrets in my ear, telling me their stories and filling me in on the intimate details of their lives.
Sometimes I’m shocked by the things they tell me, but I find their constant companionship rather comforting. They make my roughly 45-minute commute to and from work each day pass a little more quickly. They also keep me amused at work when I’m forced to wait for a slow computer or server to boot or to finish running a scan or diagnostic. They also keep me entertained on those now rather rare days when no one is having any computer problems and I’m just sitting around staring at the clock, trying to look busy, waiting for my shift to end.
My friends even keep me company when I’m making “saw dust” in my “workshop” (or as my wife insists on calling it, our garage), though thankfully they know to shut up when I flip on the table saw or other machine with sharp whirling blades.
Usually though, they become the most talkative at night, just as I am going to bed, holding off telling me their most juicy tidbits until I’m about to fall asleep. That’s really annoying, especially on “school nights” when I can’t stay up late, but nowhere as near annoying as those times that they suddenly clam up, refusing to talk to me despite my constant prodding.
Oh and there is something else you should know about these companions of mine.
They are all in my head.
Now I know what you’re probably thinking.
“Jeff, they make drugs for that, and you should probably be on them!”
But I don’t want to stop hearing those voices, ever!
“Jeff, you’re crazy. They lock people like that up. You don’t want us to call those nice young men in their clean white coats do you?”
Relax. The voices aren’t telling me to do anything harmful. They know I’m a writer and all they want me to do is be their biographer.
“Biographer? BIOGRAPHER! You talk like these voices are real people!”
To me they are real people! They are fully formed individuals with their own unique dispositions, hopes and desires, loves and losses. Like us, their personalities were formed by the events of their childhood. Ask me anything about them, from their favorite color or favorite food to the type of person they are attracted to and I can tell you. Sometimes I feel like they are my children, and seem so real to me that if one of them suddenly walked through my door as flesh and blood beings I would not be even a tad bit surprised.
Sometimes I even find myself wishing that the words I write about them could actually bring them to life like in that old “Twilight Zone” episode, “A World of His Own.”
“I don’t know. It still sounds kind of crazy….”
Oh, it probably is. But then again, I think all writers probably are a bit nuts. The only thing that keeps us sane is writing down those things that the voices in our heads tell us.
“Then why do you still sound so nuts?”
Mainly because while my characters are very chatty, they aren’t exactly disciplined. They tell me stuff out of order and often get side tracked and wind up talking about tons of extraneous stuff that’s unrelated to the story I’m writing about them. And because they are characters from science fiction, where alternate timelines are always a possibility, I get told alternate versions of those stories.
Sorting through all this takes a lot of time and can be exhausting and I wish I was able to write at the speed my imaginary friends talk to me. Yet even if I could, I still doubt I’d be able to keep up with them.
And you know what?
That’s okay with me.
As long as they’re willing to keep talking to me, I’m willing to keep listening.